The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #1854 - Rick Strassman

00:00:01.000 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out!

00:00:03.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:00:06.000 Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day!

00:00:11.000 Here we go.

00:00:12.000 Here we go.

00:00:13.000 What's up, Rick?

00:00:13.000 How are you?

00:00:14.000 Uh, good.

00:00:15.000 It's great seeing you.

00:00:16.000 It's great seeing you, too.

00:00:17.000 It's been a long time.

00:00:18.000 Well, you know, we started...

00:00:19.000 Try to keep this, like, fist from your face.

00:00:22.000 That's probably the best way to...

00:00:24.000 Yeah.

00:00:24.000 There we go.

00:00:25.000 Yeah, I think we first met...

00:00:28.000 Some random person sent me an email, probably 2005, 2006. Wow.

00:00:34.000 And he said, oh, you know, Joe Rogan is talking about your book, and I hadn't heard of you.

00:00:41.000 This was before I did a podcast.

00:00:43.000 I think it was before the podcast.

00:00:45.000 Yeah.

00:00:45.000 I think you were still doing stand-up.

00:00:46.000 Yeah.

00:00:48.000 Yeah, and he gave me your number, I think, and I called you and you were at the airport.

00:00:52.000 And you said, hey man, I'm reading your book.

00:00:54.000 I love it.

00:00:57.000 Yeah, the book was fascinating because your book was, you need to adjust cameras.

00:01:03.000 Good.

00:01:04.000 Your book was fascinating to me because it was, I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but it was the first time that the FDA ever allowed real studies to be done on Schedule I drugs.

00:01:18.000 It was the first new American study in 20 years.

00:01:22.000 On psychedelics?

00:01:24.000 Yeah, yeah, on any human psychedelic research.

00:01:29.000 First of all, why did you want to do it?

00:01:32.000 And how did you get the permission to do it?

00:01:36.000 Well, I wanted to do it because of my interest in chemistry and my interest in altered states, you know, my own altered states.

00:01:46.000 Like the first time I smoked marijuana, I was 18 years old, and it was a fully psychedelic experience.

00:01:53.000 There were purple clouds coming out of the speakers.

00:01:56.000 I was flying over this, you know, college town I was living in at the time.

00:02:01.000 And my friend was, too.

00:02:04.000 It was a shared hallucination on very strong hash.

00:02:07.000 So you felt like you were out of body?

00:02:10.000 No.

00:02:13.000 We were on a carpet.

00:02:15.000 So you both saw a city below you?

00:02:19.000 Yeah, the floor disappeared.

00:02:22.000 Yeah, it was the first time I smoked marijuana.

00:02:25.000 And I thought, wow, this is interesting.

00:02:27.000 And now hash is, the way they create hash is they take the, what is it called?

00:02:31.000 The crystals off of THC? Is that how they do it?

00:02:34.000 They shake out the resin from the flour.

00:02:39.000 Just shake it?

00:02:41.000 That's how they do it?

00:02:42.000 Well, there's different ways to do it.

00:02:44.000 Like, in the old country, you get really sweaty, and you just agitate a lot of pot, and the resin accumulates on your skin, and you scrape it off.

00:02:58.000 Really?

00:02:58.000 And that's how they make hash?

00:03:00.000 Well, you know...

00:03:01.000 That's so funky.

00:03:02.000 You're getting someone's funk along with the hash.

00:03:04.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:03:05.000 That's called pre-industrial hash.

00:03:07.000 I was watching or was looking at something online the other day where they were talking about repurposing...

00:03:15.000 It was in Morocco.

00:03:16.000 It was Steve D'Angelo.

00:03:19.000 He was talking about how they were repurposing machines in Morocco to make hash. 0.98

00:03:29.000 How they've been doing it this way and making hash in this part of the world for, you know, who knows how many years.

00:03:35.000 Yeah.

00:03:35.000 Is this it?

00:03:36.000 Here.

00:03:36.000 I wonder what the machines are.

00:03:39.000 Yeah, this is Steve D'Angelo's hemp activist, cannabis activist.

00:03:46.000 So it looks like some kind of a press or something like that.

00:03:49.000 I don't know what that thing is.

00:03:50.000 Yeah, interesting.

00:03:51.000 I think it has something to do with automobiles.

00:03:55.000 He's going to say it right here.

00:03:58.000 Things that can't break down.

00:03:59.000 Things that don't need electricity.

00:04:02.000 Things that can be improvised.

00:04:04.000 And just so much cleverness has been shown here today.

00:04:08.000 So much ingenuity in working with what you have.

00:04:11.000 I mean, this press is a great example of it.

00:04:14.000 Take a look here.

00:04:15.000 It's just basically an automobile jack that's been put into a frame.

00:04:20.000 Had a couple of springs put on there.

00:04:23.000 And then, you know, these iron casing boxes made.

00:04:27.000 And it works.

00:04:28.000 It works really well.

00:04:29.000 And this is the way that the hash that's smoked by most people around the world, the largest quantity of cannabis that's made anywhere, is made still by this legacy method.

00:04:41.000 And the great thing about it is this could really be done anywhere.

00:04:45.000 I think about folks in Mexico or Colombia who could take this method and repurpose it and adapt it and be making quite a very nice high quality hash.

00:04:58.000 That's a hash salesman if I've ever seen one.

00:05:00.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:05:01.000 That dude's pushing hard.

00:05:02.000 He's like, everybody get in on this.

00:05:05.000 Come on, make some hash.

00:05:06.000 I'd like to buy one.

00:05:07.000 Well, I wonder if that makes hash or hash oil, if it's just being compressed like that, squeezing things out.

00:05:14.000 Well, it looked like he was having bricks of hash, right?

00:05:16.000 Yeah, yeah, interesting.

00:05:17.000 So I think he's using it in that sort of that little frame, that little case, and then they're packing it in there with that car jack, which is pretty crazy.

00:05:26.000 Yeah, clever.

00:05:27.000 So the difference between hash and regular marijuana smoking is, in general, what?

00:05:33.000 Is it just that it's much stronger?

00:05:35.000 It's much stronger.

00:05:36.000 So like that kind of hallucination, that's super rare with regular marijuana, right?

00:05:42.000 But with hash, It can happen.

00:05:45.000 Well, I started college as a chemistry major.

00:05:49.000 As a kid, I made fireworks and bombs and started college as a chemistry major.

00:05:57.000 I wanted to become a magnate in making fireworks, a fireworks magnate.

00:06:03.000 But everybody discouraged me.

00:06:05.000 They said, you know, you're a smart guy.

00:06:06.000 You should be a doctor.

00:06:09.000 That's how they tricked you into it?

00:06:11.000 Well, I got the last laugh, right?

00:06:13.000 Because I'm, you know, giving people psychedelics and they have inner fireworks now.

00:06:18.000 Right.

00:06:20.000 Well, so after that experience, smoking hash, and, you know, my chemistry mind got piqued.

00:06:26.000 I thought, you know, like a half hour ago, I was totally normal, and right now I'm just having the weirdest experience of my life, and I wonder how that works chemically.

00:06:36.000 So I figured there must be some...

00:06:39.000 Chemical changes in the brain, and I was interested in learning what those might be.

00:06:44.000 So what year was this?

00:06:46.000 70, 70. So, okay, so this was like right around the time where everything got made illegal, right?

00:06:52.000 That was the big Schedule I Act, wasn't that in 1970?

00:06:56.000 They made a lot of the psychedelics illegal?

00:06:58.000 The Controlled Substances Act of 1970, yeah.

00:07:01.000 So it was right at that year when you were just getting involved. 0.96

00:07:04.000 You're like, damn it, they took the rug out from under me. 0.96

00:07:06.000 It didn't make any difference. 0.99

00:07:08.000 Yeah, the school I went to had a lot of psychedelics.

00:07:11.000 Really?

00:07:11.000 Yeah, and I went crazy for about two years.

00:07:15.000 And then figured, you know, I think I've had enough I need to transfer, so I transferred schools, actually.

00:07:21.000 I've known more than one person that has lost their marbles from doing too many psychedelics.

00:07:28.000 I started getting unraveled.

00:07:30.000 It's not uncommon, right?

00:07:32.000 Do you know people that have kind of like blown fuse?

00:07:35.000 Oh yeah, yeah.

00:07:37.000 Well I get the occasional email from people who have really gone around the bend smoking too much DMT. There's people, I think, that have a tendency towards a type of paranoid schizophrenia that maybe they kind of have it under control or maybe it's mild.

00:07:54.000 You know, they just have some weird paranoias about certain things.

00:07:57.000 I've seen a few people do too many psychedelics and then now they're in fantasy land.

00:08:05.000 Yeah, I kind of wonder about the risk of increased accessibility.

00:08:10.000 I do.

00:08:11.000 Yeah, because, you know, you could prepare, you can screen, and still people have adverse effects.

00:08:18.000 And in the wild, in the field, I think we're just going to have a revisiting of the problems in the 60s with all of those hospitalizations and things.

00:08:29.000 I don't think there's any doubt.

00:08:31.000 The real question is, how many of those people were on that path already?

00:08:36.000 What is that whole process of someone becoming mentally ill?

00:08:40.000 Because I've seen it happen, but I'm not exactly sure what's causing it.

00:08:45.000 I've seen people go down and they just become different people.

00:08:51.000 Well, I think it's a case of people being vulnerable.

00:08:55.000 They've got a susceptibility in their genes, and they just may also be susceptible because of their lives.

00:09:03.000 They may be doing other drugs, drinking a lot in really unstable relationships.

00:09:10.000 And they also might have a tendency genetically.

00:09:15.000 Let's say one of their parents was bipolar or schizophrenic.

00:09:19.000 You know, so it's a major trauma.

00:09:21.000 I mean, it's a psychological trauma to have a huge trip, right?

00:09:25.000 Yeah.

00:09:25.000 You know, good trauma, bad trauma, but it's really a shift.

00:09:28.000 And if you're not equipped, I think it could kind of fracture a thin veneer of normality.

00:09:36.000 Yeah, it's almost like they're interfacing at the wrong... 0.91

00:09:40.000 They're not quite getting...

00:09:42.000 There's a reality port, and then there's a neighboring port where they're getting...

00:09:46.000 It's like they can pay their taxes, they can drive their cars, they can answer emails, but they think that there's some crazy mind control experiment at the head of...

00:09:59.000 You know, it's just one of those weird ones where people just start believing that the whole world's out to get them and the government's trying to track them down and there's a chip in my brain.

00:10:11.000 It, like, accelerates.

00:10:12.000 Yeah, yeah, it's extreme.

00:10:13.000 The chip is the weird one.

00:10:15.000 I've heard multiple people tell me they have a chip in their brain.

00:10:19.000 Mm-hmm.

00:10:19.000 Or at least say it to people, like, that I'm communicating to them through a chip in their brain.

00:10:25.000 Mm-hmm. 0.92

00:10:26.000 Well, you know, schizophrenics are like that. 1.00

00:10:28.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:10:29.000 You know, paranoid schizophrenics.

00:10:31.000 Yeah, you know, back in the day, it was, you know, radio waves or x-rays that were, you know, beaming down from space and affecting people's minds.

00:10:43.000 That was the...

00:10:44.000 That was the paranoid schizophrenics perspective?

00:10:47.000 Yeah, it was, you know, their explanation of their unusual experiences.

00:10:52.000 You know, the kinds of stories I've heard with people doing too much DMT is a kind of mania.

00:10:59.000 They're really grandiose.

00:11:00.000 They think that they've got all the answers and nobody is listening to them and it makes them mad and they end up in prison or in psychiatric hospitals.

00:11:14.000 I'm always fascinated with how other human beings' brains work.

00:11:19.000 Mine as well, right?

00:11:20.000 I'm fascinated by the brain.

00:11:22.000 About how it's so different after exercise.

00:11:24.000 It's so different after rest.

00:11:26.000 It's so different when, you know, you meditate or you do something like yoga, some mindfulness kind of practice.

00:11:32.000 It's like, what are most people experiencing?

00:11:37.000 And then, what does it feel like to be mentally ill?

00:11:40.000 Like, what is that person experiencing?

00:11:41.000 Like, what weird shift in the chemical balance of the mind is causing that?

00:11:48.000 And, you know, how much of it is genetic and how much of it is life experience and trauma?

00:11:53.000 It's just the way people think and look about things and look at things has always been fascinating to me because I've got to assume that everyone's dealing with different hardware or wetware or whatever you would call the brain.

00:12:05.000 Like, they work different.

00:12:07.000 They don't work the same.

00:12:09.000 Right.

00:12:10.000 Well, I mean, it depends on the mental illness, the disorder.

00:12:18.000 Well, one of the reasons I became a psychiatrist, besides my interest in studying psychedelics, was because I was really interested in the mind.

00:12:28.000 Schizophrenic patients were just amazing.

00:12:31.000 Because other than their crazy ideas and experiences, they're just normal people.

00:12:36.000 Right.

00:12:36.000 Which is wild.

00:12:39.000 And there's got to be levels to it, right?

00:12:42.000 Are there?

00:12:42.000 There's like mild, where someone just kind of like a touch schizophrenic, and there's someone who's like full-blown, you know, the aliens are hiding in my walls and they're out to get me?

00:12:52.000 Well, it depends on the kind of schizophrenia.

00:12:55.000 There's...

00:12:56.000 What's called chronic undifferentiated, which is kind of the burned out types that just don't move, don't talk.

00:13:03.000 They just veg?

00:13:04.000 They just veg. 0.95

00:13:04.000 And they're the paranoid schizophrenics who are a lot more active and they're hallucinating and they're in your face. 0.95

00:13:15.000 Yeah, you know, I really found it easy and fun to talk to psychotic patients.

00:13:20.000 I think that was one of the things that kind of was part of the mix of studying psychedelics.

00:13:26.000 Why was it easy?

00:13:28.000 Well, I think in my own psychedelic experiences, I might have gone crazy for an hour or two.

00:13:35.000 One time in particular, I had to be talked back down.

00:13:40.000 You know, so I could empathize.

00:13:41.000 You've heard Dennis McKenna's story about being with Terrence.

00:13:46.000 The experiment at Lacho Herrera.

00:13:48.000 Yeah, yeah, exactly.

00:13:50.000 Can you explain what happened?

00:13:51.000 Because they ate too many mushrooms.

00:13:54.000 Apparently.

00:13:55.000 Yeah.

00:13:56.000 Can you explain, like, pharmacologically what, or psychologically, what could have happened?

00:14:04.000 Well, I mean, it depends on your model, right?

00:14:07.000 Please tell people what happened.

00:14:09.000 Like, tell people the story.

00:14:09.000 Yeah, I don't know the story that well.

00:14:11.000 You don't know it exactly?

00:14:12.000 What I believe is they found a bunch of fresh mushrooms in the Amazon, and they just started chowing, and they went crazy.

00:14:18.000 And I think he was gone for about two weeks.

00:14:22.000 Yeah.

00:14:22.000 Might have been longer than that.

00:14:23.000 Might be two months.

00:14:24.000 Do you remember, Jamie?

00:14:25.000 Yeah.

00:14:25.000 I don't know.

00:14:27.000 I'll check.

00:14:28.000 He told the story on the podcast.

00:14:31.000 He went into detail about what it was like, the way he was processing reality.

00:14:36.000 It was a long stretch.

00:14:38.000 It was a long time when he was gone.

00:14:40.000 It wasn't like two hours.

00:14:42.000 No.

00:14:45.000 To the extent that he could communicate, he wanted people to leave him alone.

00:14:49.000 What happens?

00:14:50.000 What is going on when that happens?

00:14:54.000 Is there something that could be psychoactive for two whole weeks?

00:14:57.000 That's what's confusing to me.

00:14:59.000 What is going on where this substance, it must be gone from your body after two weeks, but somehow or another you're still feeling the effects of it.

00:15:08.000 What happened?

00:15:09.000 And what does that indicate about states of mind and how pliable they are?

00:15:13.000 Well, I mean, I guess the way I would look at it, which might not be the way everybody would, but I think what may have taken place is that because of all the psilocybin that he took, he opened a portal.

00:15:42.000 I'm glad you said it that way, because I say it that way too, and I know it sounds ridiculous.

00:15:47.000 Particularly to people that don't do psychedelics, opening a portal.

00:15:51.000 I've thought about that a lot.

00:15:53.000 I thought about that a lot about the DMT experience because it seems so insane and so impossible that I just can't believe that this isn't just another place.

00:16:01.000 It seems like it's not just a chemical reaction in my mind.

00:16:07.000 It seems like I'm going to another place.

00:16:10.000 That's how it feels.

00:16:12.000 That's how it feels.

00:16:12.000 But what does that mean by when I say that's how it feels?

00:16:14.000 Because I don't have any understanding of what I'm experiencing it, what I'm experiencing rather.

00:16:20.000 So I must put it in some sort of context where it makes sense to me as a person who lives on Earth, you know, sitting here right now in 2022. You know, there's all those variables that you, everything, when you look at the world, goes through all the filter of your own personal reality.

00:16:37.000 The thing about a full-blown psychedelic experience, like the DMT experience, is it doesn't seem like any of that applies anymore.

00:16:44.000 You go over there and it's like you're gone.

00:16:46.000 So I was wondering about myself, like maybe I'm trying to put it into perspective like it's another place, because places make sense to me.

00:16:57.000 And what doesn't make sense to me is just full nothingness, chaos, wild imagery and geometry and things that move to music.

00:17:06.000 It's almost like it's so hard for me to wrap my head around that I convince myself it's another dimension, but it's not.

00:17:15.000 Well, it could be.

00:17:17.000 I mean, it could be another dimension.

00:17:19.000 It could be.

00:17:20.000 Yeah, well, I think you need to design experiments to test if it is another dimension or not.

00:17:26.000 How could you do that?

00:17:32.000 Well, if you consider the location of the DMT world to be outside of us in objective reality, you'd need to call upon physics, advanced physics, 0.99

00:17:48.000 dark matter, dark energy, parallel universes.

00:17:52.000 So I think if you could get into those spaces with machines, let's say imaging machines or cameras.

00:17:58.000 How could you do that?

00:17:59.000 I don't know.

00:18:01.000 Could you get a computer high?

00:18:03.000 It's one of those ideas I've had.

00:18:06.000 Well, have you seen some of the new, there was some new article that was written about virtual reality being able to give people transcendent experiences, that it's similar to the effects achieved on psychedelics.

00:18:23.000 Right.

00:18:23.000 That's interesting, isn't it?

00:18:24.000 McKenna talked about that a long time ago.

00:18:26.000 He said he thinks that one day they'll get to a point where they can create something visually and it'll bring you into that place, that they'll be able to recreate it with sufficient technology.

00:18:36.000 Here's, VR is as good as psychedelics at helping people reach transcendence.

00:18:43.000 On key metrics, a VR experience elicited a response indistinguishable from subject who took medium doses of LSD or magic mushrooms.

00:18:53.000 That's wild.

00:18:54.000 If they just keep getting better at it.

00:18:57.000 If you can get someone who's been there and knows what it looks like and then is a good artist who can recreate it.

00:19:05.000 Because I've seen some DMT art before.

00:19:08.000 That's so close.

00:19:10.000 It's like, oh, wow, that's so close.

00:19:12.000 It seems like it.

00:19:14.000 Of course, Alex Gray.

00:19:15.000 Like, Alex Gray stuff.

00:19:17.000 It's like some of it is so tryptamine-like, you know?

00:19:22.000 Well, it's important to note that they talk about medium doses of LSD or psilocybin.

00:19:28.000 Right, so you get a good feeling, but you're not hallucinating.

00:19:31.000 Yeah, you may not really be fully tripping out.

00:19:33.000 What they're doing, what kind of VR experience it would be.

00:19:37.000 Like, what is the images they're showing you?

00:19:39.000 What is the sound they're playing for you that's allowing you to get to these states?

00:19:44.000 The guy that made this one did it after he had a near-death experience.

00:19:49.000 Wow.

00:19:50.000 Right here, he says he fell off.

00:19:52.000 There, read that.

00:19:53.000 Okay, he says, I knew that the intensity of the light was related to the extent to which I inhabited my body, he recalls, yet watching it dim didn't frighten him.

00:20:03.000 From his new vantage point, Glowacky could see that the light wasn't disappearing, it was transforming, leaking out of his body into the environment around him.

00:20:15.000 This realization which he took to signify That his awareness could outlast and transcend his physical form brought a sublime sense of peace.

00:20:29.000 So he approached what he thought was death with curiosity.

00:20:32.000 What might come next?

00:20:34.000 So since his accident, an artist and computational molecular physicist has worked to recapture that transcendence.

00:20:40.000 Okay.

00:20:41.000 So he had some wild near-death experience and he's trying to recreate that with VR. So that's interesting because he's not even talking about a drug experience.

00:20:53.000 So he could be.

00:20:55.000 Yeah, you know, we've been studying, or there's a group at University of Michigan that's been looking at endogenous DMT that's made in the mammalian brain, and it increases during death, and especially it increases in the visual part of the brain.

00:21:10.000 So they know that for a fact now.

00:21:11.000 Yeah, they know that for a fact.

00:21:13.000 It's a 2019 study.

00:21:14.000 When I first met you, there wasn't nearly as much data, and I remember you were talking about how much anecdotal data that points to the idea of the pineal gland being the source of DMT, but there wasn't a mammal model.

00:21:28.000 Yeah, the Pioneer DMT story, it sounds pretty obscure, but it's pretty controversial.

00:21:34.000 I mean, there are some data supporting the view that the Pioneer makes DMT and other data don't.

00:21:43.000 I think you and I met at Starbucks on Ventura in, I think, 2009. I was out there for my high school reunion, and we met at Starbucks on Ventura.

00:21:56.000 I think it was in Encino.

00:21:58.000 Yeah, we were talking about DMT. Yeah, I remember that.

00:22:03.000 Do you think that DMT is produced all over the body?

00:22:08.000 They found it in the lungs, they found it in the liver, right?

00:22:11.000 Do you think it's just something that the body produces everywhere?

00:22:15.000 You know, when they first discovered DMT in mammals, people were focusing on the lung.

00:22:22.000 And they were also interested in DMT being involved in psychosis.

00:22:27.000 And there was a joke, or I don't know if you call it a joke, but an idea that schizophrenia was a lung disease because you were producing too much DMT. And they were doing studies to inhibit DMT in schizophrenics or increase it.

00:22:43.000 Oh, wow.

00:22:44.000 That makes sense.

00:22:45.000 Yeah, it does make sense.

00:22:47.000 That completely makes sense.

00:22:48.000 Yeah.

00:22:49.000 That could be what's wrong with them.

00:22:51.000 It could be.

00:22:51.000 And if you could block DMT naturally or with a vaccine or something, you might have a...

00:22:56.000 That completely makes sense.

00:22:59.000 Because I've seen people on it that, like, fight it and panic.

00:23:03.000 And imagine if that was, like, a constant state.

00:23:06.000 You were involved.

00:23:07.000 That would look totally similar to someone being schizophrenic.

00:23:11.000 If it was a constant state, you'd have to come up with some ideas about what was going on.

00:23:16.000 And I think that possibly would then lead to the delusions, the crazy ideas about what's going on.

00:23:23.000 Yeah, that makes sense.

00:23:25.000 Wow.

00:23:26.000 Well, so we found DMT in the rodent pineal in 2013, the group at the University of Michigan.

00:23:33.000 So it proved or established the validity of that idea that the pineal makes DMT. But this study in 2019 that I was mentioning where DMT goes up after death in the visual cortex, they looked again for pineal DMT and they couldn't find any.

00:23:51.000 And what they believe is that the original paper described the DMT in the brain, which was snagged on the way in and out of the pineal gland.

00:24:02.000 But even more interesting, I think, than the pineal making DMT is the brain makes DMT in quite high levels, comparable to even serotonin.

00:24:11.000 Wow.

00:24:12.000 And it could be there's a DMT neurotransmitter system in the brain, just like a serotonin neurotransmitter system.

00:24:19.000 What is the function of the pineal gland?

00:24:23.000 Well, it helps regulate circadian rhythms and light sensitivity.

00:24:31.000 It helps entrain rhythms.

00:24:33.000 It helps keep everything in sync in the body.

00:24:35.000 Temperature, urinary function, blood cell formation, all those things.

00:24:42.000 Why do you think ancient cultures were so fascinated by it?

00:24:47.000 Like, why did they have this?

00:24:49.000 Why did they attribute this?

00:24:52.000 Sort of almost like godlike significance to it, right?

00:24:58.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:24:59.000 I mean, there still is a certain pineal kind of reverence out there.

00:25:03.000 If you look at Amazon and enter pineal, there's all kinds of esoteric things that are still being published on the pineal gland.

00:25:10.000 Hmm.

00:25:12.000 Well, it's an unpaired organ.

00:25:14.000 It's the only unpaired organ in the brain.

00:25:17.000 Everything else is paired.

00:25:18.000 You have a left and right hemisphere.

00:25:19.000 But there's just one pineal in the middle of your brain.

00:25:24.000 Its location, I think, has contributed to the reverence.

00:25:29.000 It's just under the fontanelle.

00:25:32.000 And certain kinds of spiritual experiences are also felt there.

00:25:37.000 And so it was the physical corresponding position of the subjective experience.

00:25:47.000 So people thought it must be occurring in the pineal gland.

00:25:50.000 You know, I have a friend who's really into Aztec savagery history, and he told me, this is kind of grim, but he told me that the Aztecs used to burn people when they were alive to really, like,

00:26:06.000 freak them out, and then take their brains out and eat their brains because of all the hormones and all the things that were going on.

00:26:14.000 Whoa! 0.99

00:26:16.000 That is heavy.

00:26:18.000 That's heavy, I know.

00:26:19.000 That is so heavy.

00:26:20.000 Yeah, you know, but they found it gave them, you know, whatever superhuman strength or religious ecstasy. 0.57

00:26:28.000 Isn't it fascinating that that also will kill you?

00:26:31.000 Like, that's where people get prion diseases.

00:26:34.000 They get it from eating brain and spinal tissue, right?

00:26:37.000 Right, right.

00:26:39.000 Like cannibals when they get that Jakob Kreutzfeld. 0.99

00:26:42.000 Jakob Kreutzfeld, yeah.

00:26:44.000 Thank you for pronouncing that better.

00:26:46.000 Well, when I was a medical student, we were always on the hunt for Jakob Kreutzfeld patients because they were rare and very interesting.

00:26:54.000 How many did you discover?

00:26:56.000 Maybe just two or three.

00:26:57.000 And how did they come into contact with it?

00:27:00.000 How did they come into contact with it?

00:27:02.000 I think they were from Africa.

00:27:07.000 And they ate maybe some bush meat or something, or some primate meat?

00:27:11.000 Sheep meat or monkey meat. 0.58

00:27:13.000 Yeah.

00:27:14.000 Oh, sheep meat?

00:27:14.000 You can get it from sheep meat as well?

00:27:17.000 I thought there was a thing with cannibals and there was a thing with mad cow disease, which is another one. 1.00

00:27:27.000 It's another very similar version of it because the cow's reading the cows, right?

00:27:30.000 Right.

00:27:31.000 It's prion disease. 0.93

00:27:33.000 Right.

00:27:33.000 Yeah.

00:27:34.000 So here is Kruxfeldt-Jakob disease and sheep brain.

00:27:41.000 Places in origin seven out of eight patients with CJD coincide with the distribution of sheep rearing in Central and South Italy.

00:27:49.000 Oh, okay.

00:27:50.000 That actually makes sense because my uncle, Vinny, Vinny DiGiolando is about as Italian as you get.

00:27:57.000 That's your uncle?

00:27:58.000 Yes.

00:27:58.000 My uncle Vinny, who's a great guy, used to cook lamb's brains.

00:28:05.000 That was like a traditional Italian meal that you would cook.

00:28:10.000 Like, when we'd get together and have, like, family gatherings, he had, on more than one occasion, cooked lamb's brains, because I remember having it as a child.

00:28:18.000 Yeah, that's interesting.

00:28:20.000 Well...

00:28:22.000 Well, so the medical school that I went to was in the Bronx.

00:28:26.000 And, you know, there were a lot of immigrants in the Bronx.

00:28:30.000 There were quite a few Italians.

00:28:32.000 And, you know, lots of people from the Caribbean and from Africa.

00:28:36.000 You know, so I think it was some African patients.

00:28:41.000 Well, I think it's probably real common over there if it's common in Italy, you know, because eating lamb's brains is a normal thing.

00:28:48.000 I mean, my parents, I mean, they didn't eat like a lot of exotic food.

00:28:52.000 That was like a normal thing.

00:28:54.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:28:55.000 My family never ate brains.

00:28:57.000 I've had sweetbreads before, which is the thalamus gland, right?

00:29:02.000 Oh, really?

00:29:03.000 Isn't that what it is?

00:29:04.000 Sweetbreads.

00:29:05.000 It's a gland.

00:29:06.000 It's one of the glands.

00:29:07.000 Oh, the thymus, maybe.

00:29:08.000 Thymus, that's right.

00:29:09.000 Yeah, it might be the thymus.

00:29:10.000 Yeah, the thymus is kind of like the spleen or like the liver.

00:29:14.000 Is that what it is?

00:29:15.000 It's quite rich in blood vessels.

00:29:18.000 Here it goes.

00:29:19.000 Thymus.

00:29:20.000 Cuts of meat from either the thymus gland located in the throat or the pancreas gland by the stomach.

00:29:27.000 Wow.

00:29:29.000 So sweetbreads could be either one of those things.

00:29:31.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:29:32.000 Interesting.

00:29:32.000 So it's like a generic term.

00:29:34.000 In lamb, veal, pig, or beef, they have a rich, creamy texture and are often served roasted or fried.

00:29:40.000 Yeah, people eating organs, I mean, liver is really, really good for you.

00:29:44.000 Like, it makes sense that you would think brain is really, really good for you, too.

00:29:46.000 And it might be, but maybe, like, nature doesn't want people eating people's brains, so it created these prion diseases. 0.95

00:29:53.000 Well, you'd have to screen their brains before you ate them.

00:29:56.000 Yeah, but even so, is the juice worth the squeeze?

00:30:00.000 I mean, what are you getting out of eating brains?

00:30:02.000 I wonder what it's like.

00:30:04.000 Well, it would depend on whose brain.

00:30:06.000 Right.

00:30:06.000 What if you ate Einstein's brain and you actually got smarter?

00:30:10.000 If he gave you permission.

00:30:11.000 Yeah.

00:30:11.000 I got about a week left.

00:30:13.000 Take my brain.

00:30:15.000 Yeah.

00:30:15.000 Well, you know the frozen brain banks out there?

00:30:20.000 I have heard of that.

00:30:21.000 Yeah.

00:30:22.000 Yeah.

00:30:23.000 They flash freeze your brain right after you die.

00:30:26.000 You have to agree to it beforehand.

00:30:29.000 But imagine... 0.61

00:30:31.000 If you're in transcendence, you've escaped this physical reality and you've gone into the next amazing dimension where there's no deception, it's all love and energy and you're floating together in music and then some dipshit brings you back to life.

00:30:50.000 You get sucked backwards, but now you're stuck in a computer.

00:30:55.000 Can you imagine?

00:30:56.000 If that was your soul, your soul is just sucked back into that brain as soon as it's reanimated.

00:31:03.000 Well, I have thought about it.

00:31:04.000 Have you?

00:31:05.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:31:06.000 What do you think that would be like?

00:31:07.000 Terrifying.

00:31:08.000 You wouldn't want to do it.

00:31:09.000 Well, it'd be terrifying if they couldn't get rid of it.

00:31:12.000 Like, if you couldn't go back.

00:31:14.000 Like, what if there's, like, portals, right?

00:31:16.000 Like you were saying?

00:31:17.000 And what if those portals are activated by normal human neurochemistry?

00:31:22.000 Right.

00:31:22.000 And that it's a part of dying is that these portals are open.

00:31:26.000 Right. 1.00

00:31:26.000 But what if that fucking portal's open, you go, you transcend, and then they bring that goddamn brain back to life because you wanted to live forever. 1.00

00:31:34.000 So they take that thing that they had flask frozen, they kick that sucker back on, and now you're just an embodied brain in a fucking computer attached to a bunch of wires. 0.99

00:31:45.000 Well, I mean, if you're having experience, though. 0.97

00:31:47.000 But what kind of experience would you have?

00:31:49.000 Maybe you'd just be experiencing the fact that you're stuck in a computer.

00:31:54.000 Yeah, I mean, you're kind of describing the Matrix.

00:31:57.000 Yeah, I'm describing hell.

00:31:58.000 It's worse than the Matrix.

00:31:59.000 There's not even a body that you could detach.

00:32:01.000 In the Matrix, they detached their heads, remember?

00:32:04.000 Right.

00:32:04.000 They got out of it.

00:32:05.000 Oh, we got to get out of the Matrix. 0.97

00:32:06.000 You can't get out of the Matrix if you're just a brain.

00:32:11.000 Well, you know, one of the interesting things about endogenous DMT, and especially with its discovery in such high levels in the brain, is that it may be the endomatrix.

00:32:21.000 It could be kind of regulating everything all of the time.

00:32:25.000 What do you mean by that, regulating everything all the time?

00:32:29.000 It could be the way we interact with reality, is through endogenous DMT, which is always at a steady level.

00:32:38.000 Well, the way I began wondering about that is because, you know, what is the purpose of endogenous DMT? You know, why does the brain make DMT? Can you do a DMT test on a person's blood level?

00:32:53.000 It's pretty hard.

00:32:54.000 It's pretty hard.

00:32:55.000 It's really low in the blood.

00:32:57.000 It's like, you know, billionths of a gram per milliliter.

00:33:00.000 Okay, so you'd have to measure it in the actual brain itself?

00:33:03.000 In the brain or spinal fluid, maybe spinal fluid, but most likely brain.

00:33:07.000 When they start doing stuff like Neuralink, where they're going to insert wires into your brain and, you know, you're going to have an app to control your brain, to control your mood.

00:33:18.000 I mean, it seems like that would be one of the ways they would do it, right?

00:33:24.000 Well, you'd need to find, you know, where in the brain the main source of DMT is and then put an electrode there and keep that going.

00:33:33.000 Do you think it's limited to one specific area where it's developed?

00:33:38.000 Oh man, they're just beginning to unravel the whole role and location of endogenous DMT. So when they know that it's in the liver and they know that it's in the lungs, the lungs to me sound interesting because of holotropic breathing.

00:33:55.000 Right.

00:33:55.000 You know, because people have done breathing exercises and achieved states of altered states of consciousness.

00:34:03.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:34:04.000 It kind of makes sense, doesn't it?

00:34:05.000 Well, yeah, but I think it's not working through the lungs because those more recent studies haven't really demonstrated DMT in lung.

00:34:13.000 Oh.

00:34:14.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:34:15.000 I used to say it's made in lung.

00:34:16.000 Everybody used to say it's made in lung, but it seems like it's made in brain.

00:34:19.000 So if it's made in brain, then all the other stuff you're just getting like a trickle-down effect?

00:34:25.000 Well...

00:34:26.000 Does it go through the whole body?

00:34:27.000 Yeah, but it's metabolized so quickly that, you know, by the time it gets into the blood that you're drawing, the concentrations are pretty minuscule.

00:34:35.000 Wow.

00:34:37.000 What a sneaky molecule.

00:34:40.000 Well, you have to wonder what it's doing, right?

00:34:42.000 Right.

00:34:42.000 What is it doing?

00:34:43.000 What is endogenous?

00:34:44.000 What's the function of it?

00:34:45.000 You know, there's the possibility we have a DMT neurotransmitter system like serotonin or dopamine, in which case, you know, what is it doing?

00:34:53.000 Wow.

00:34:54.000 So this is a really wild way to think about it because to this time, I'd never even considered that.

00:35:01.000 I always thought of it as being something that was responsible maybe for very vivid dreams, Right.

00:35:08.000 Right.

00:35:29.000 And you study the function of endogenous neurotransmitters by giving drugs that modify the effect of that endogenous neurotransmitter.

00:35:40.000 So we've got the SSRI antidepressants, and they affect serotonin, although they may not all that much.

00:35:47.000 But still, that's been the working model for decades.

00:35:50.000 And so because SRIs are useful for depression and anxiety, You then can speculate that serotonin is responsible for mood or anxiety.

00:36:02.000 So the hallmark of a DMT effect is it's more real than real.

00:36:06.000 It feels more real than anything else.

00:36:08.000 So it's tempting to speculate.

00:36:11.000 But again, when I go back to that disembodied mind thought process of thinking like, what am I thinking when I'm over there?

00:36:20.000 Since my body doesn't seem to be there and I'm there and it seems more real than real, is that me just tricking myself into thinking that it's a different place?

00:36:31.000 I mean, how could you tell?

00:36:33.000 How could I tell, right?

00:36:34.000 Yeah, I mean, how would you know?

00:36:36.000 I have one way of looking at it that I always describe.

00:36:38.000 This is what I say to people.

00:36:39.000 I say, if there was a thing that you could do, like a door you could go through and that door would take you to another dimension where you would communicate with Some entity beyond your wildest imagination that's constantly visually changing and communicating with you telepathically and knows everything about you, 0.61

00:37:04.000 sees all your bullshit and is trying to impart some ideas that will help you with your life. 0.89

00:37:12.000 Because it's a god-like experience. 0.99

00:37:13.000 You're experiencing some sort of uber-powerful entity, some more uber-intelligent entity, something beyond any...

00:37:21.000 If we just looked at humans and thought of the evolution of human, one day we'll get to this.

00:37:26.000 We're not going to get to that.

00:37:27.000 It seems like it's so beyond the body.

00:37:30.000 It's so beyond the human monkey body.

00:37:32.000 This is what I tell people.

00:37:34.000 I go, if you would open a door and you would go there and you'd have that experience, would you do it?

00:37:41.000 And most people are like, yes, I would do it.

00:37:42.000 If I gave you a drug that gave you that experience.

00:37:46.000 You still have the exact same experience.

00:37:49.000 It's the exact same experience.

00:37:51.000 You've just decided it's not real.

00:37:53.000 And you've decided it's not real because you're putting it in this category of hallucination.

00:37:57.000 What does that even mean?

00:37:59.000 What does that even mean?

00:38:00.000 You're actually having that experience.

00:38:03.000 I don't know what it is.

00:38:05.000 I mean, I like to play devil's advocate and I like to think that maybe I'm messing with my own head and maybe I'm just like...

00:38:13.000 Well, through doing what?

00:38:15.000 Looking at it like maybe it's just my neurochemistry going bonkers and interacting with my visual cortex could produce this hallucinations.

00:38:24.000 But it doesn't feel that way.

00:38:26.000 That's why I'm trying to figure out if you're bullshitting yourself when you're over there or if you really are over there.

00:38:33.000 But what I tell people is it's the same experience.

00:38:35.000 Yeah, what difference does it make?

00:38:37.000 Yeah.

00:38:38.000 It's previously invisible.

00:38:41.000 Yeah.

00:38:42.000 And it contains information.

00:38:44.000 A lot.

00:38:45.000 Yeah, and I think that's all you can say about it.

00:38:47.000 It contains information about you, right?

00:38:51.000 Well, it could only be happening to you.

00:38:54.000 Yeah.

00:38:54.000 Yeah, it's not happening to somebody else.

00:38:56.000 It's like it gives you advice.

00:38:58.000 It can.

00:39:00.000 But you, I mean, how do you judge the value of that advice?

00:39:03.000 Yeah.

00:39:04.000 Well, what is the advice?

00:39:05.000 One of the things that happened to me, I've talked about this ad nauseum, unfortunately, if you've heard this before, folks.

00:39:10.000 But one of my experiences, there was like a bunch of jokers, like jesters, or like jester hats, and they were giving me the finger. 1.00

00:39:20.000 They were going like this, fuck you. 1.00

00:39:23.000 And it made me realize I was taking myself too seriously. 1.00

00:39:27.000 Like instantaneously, I went, oh, I get it.

00:39:29.000 And they went like this.

00:39:30.000 They went like, don't do that.

00:39:32.000 Don't do that. 1.00

00:39:34.000 But, like, saying fuck you to me, it was so clear what they were doing. 1.00

00:39:38.000 It was so clear. 1.00

00:39:39.000 It was like a little lesson.

00:39:40.000 Like, don't do that.

00:39:42.000 Yeah, it's interesting.

00:39:43.000 You know, don't do that.

00:39:45.000 That's like three syllables.

00:39:47.000 And they correspond to a heartbeat.

00:39:49.000 You know, when I tripped on DMT the first time, these beings came out of this waterfall and they said, now do you see, now do you see, now do you see.

00:39:58.000 It was the same three-beat thing.

00:40:00.000 I love you.

00:40:01.000 They say I love you a lot.

00:40:02.000 I love you.

00:40:03.000 And I think it corresponds to the heartbeat because it's in sync.

00:40:07.000 You know, the vocalizations in sync with the heartbeat.

00:40:10.000 I love him.

00:40:11.000 Yeah.

00:40:12.000 The one time I did it and these entities were talking to me and saying, I love you 600 million, 500,000 times.

00:40:21.000 Like the way a child would say I love you with like some crazy number.

00:40:26.000 7 billion zillions.

00:40:28.000 And every time they did that, it would show a more beautiful image.

00:40:33.000 Like every image.

00:40:34.000 Like I love you 600 million, 500,000 times.

00:40:37.000 I love you 700 zillion, 400 zillion.

00:40:41.000 And every time they did it, it was just this bigger and bigger experience visually to the point where I was like crying.

00:40:46.000 I was like openly weeping at the beauty of just what I was seeing.

00:40:50.000 It sounds beautiful.

00:40:50.000 It was wild, but it was that simple sort of there's like they'll say simple things to you in a way that you're not really hearing it, but you know what they're saying.

00:41:02.000 Well, it kind of penetrates you.

00:41:05.000 Yeah.

00:41:05.000 It's very weird.

00:41:09.000 It's very weird.

00:41:10.000 Very weird.

00:41:11.000 You used to not talk about your personal experiences with it.

00:41:15.000 I know.

00:41:16.000 I figured to hell with it.

00:41:17.000 Yeah, I think so.

00:41:19.000 I think it's good that you did that.

00:41:21.000 Because I remember when we first met, you were reluctant to discuss it.

00:41:25.000 I mean, you didn't really want to talk about it publicly or want people to know about it publicly.

00:41:30.000 Yeah, I figured that I had some legitimacy to maintain.

00:41:36.000 A few years back, I had this conversation with Dennis McKenna, you know, like about your reputation and or, you know, one's reputation.

00:41:45.000 He said, I've just given up on my reputation.

00:41:48.000 It just, you know, so.

00:41:50.000 Well, you talk as openly about psychedelics as Dennis.

00:41:54.000 He's the best guy to talk about it, too.

00:41:57.000 Because he's got a really interesting way of discussing things, you know, and he's had so many personal experiences and he's so smart.

00:42:05.000 And he's got this incredible vocabulary to just draw from.

00:42:08.000 And when he describes the actual impact of psilocybin and psychedelic chemicals, particularly in formation of language, He was describing the stoned ape theory.

00:42:18.000 The stoned ape, yeah.

00:42:19.000 It's incredible listening to him say it because the way he describes it, like he actually understands what psilocybin and what all these various molecules are doing to different parts of the brain and why that would facilitate the development of language and compassion and connect the tribe more.

00:42:36.000 Well, I mean, do you think it actually is information coming from the brain?

00:42:43.000 Or do you think, you know, that the portal is being opened up and the information is coming from above?

00:42:48.000 I think that's more likely.

00:42:49.000 I think the more likely is that the brain is an antenna.

00:42:53.000 You know, it's one of the things that creative people always tell you, like someone sits down and writes a song.

00:42:58.000 It just like came from the air.

00:43:00.000 They're getting things from somewhere else almost.

00:43:03.000 It's almost like you just got to get out of your own way.

00:43:05.000 You got to put enough good juice out there in the world and take enough bad out and see the world from a clear perspective, at least in these brief moments of creativity, and then things come to them.

00:43:22.000 They just...

00:43:23.000 Like, they're sitting in front of the computer and bam!

00:43:25.000 They got an idea for a book. 0.99

00:43:25.000 Like, where the fuck is all that coming from? 0.99

00:43:27.000 It seems like people always want to say it's a muse. 0.99

00:43:31.000 Like, that's the Steven Pressfield analogy.

00:43:33.000 He's got a great book about it called The War of Art.

00:43:36.000 All about, like, inviting the muse into your life and being disciplined and sitting there at the computer every day and summoning it and treating it like it's an entity.

00:43:45.000 And if you do that, it works.

00:43:48.000 This is what's crazy.

00:43:49.000 People who are disciplined and also creative, that decide, I'm going to write this book, I'm going to sit down, and I'm going to force myself every day.

00:43:57.000 Ideas come to them. 0.99

00:43:58.000 Where the fuck are they coming from? 1.00

00:44:00.000 Is it possible that the brain really is some sort of an antenna? 1.00

00:44:07.000 And that wisdom and love and all these different things, they're just all around us.

00:44:11.000 We're just confused by our monkey bodies.

00:44:14.000 Well, do you think we're getting that information from God?

00:44:18.000 If that's what you want to call it, you know, the only problem I have with the word God, and it's not really a problem, but it's a recognition, is that it's a loaded word.

00:44:29.000 It's a loaded word, but so is love.

00:44:31.000 Yes.

00:44:32.000 You know, so I think you just got to take the good with the bad.

00:44:35.000 Well, that's Alex Gray's position.

00:44:36.000 Alex Gray says we have to take it back the same way we take back love and say God all the time.

00:44:41.000 And, you know, that's what he does.

00:44:42.000 Yeah, and that's the reason I think it's good to use the word psychedelic instead of hallucinogen or entheogen or anything like that.

00:44:50.000 Entheogen's a cool word.

00:44:51.000 It's cool.

00:44:52.000 It assumes a lot, though.

00:44:53.000 Yeah, it's like people that call weed cannabis.

00:44:57.000 I like to smoke a lot of cannabis.

00:44:59.000 Like, okay, settle down, buddy.

00:45:01.000 Yeah, like the term entheogen, it refers to God, entheos, and it refers to en, which means that God exists within.

00:45:09.000 And it has the word gen in it, which means it's a drug which is generating something like God.

00:45:17.000 You know, so that assumes a lot.

00:45:18.000 And there are people who could benefit from psychedelic experiences who might not caught into those ideas and would avoid entheogen, but might take a psychedelic.

00:45:27.000 Yeah, I think psychedelic sounds manageable, entheogen sounds like you're joining a cult.

00:45:32.000 It's a bit cultish.

00:45:34.000 Well, isn't everything a bit cultish?

00:45:36.000 It seems like whatever anything, you know, really affects people in a lot of ways.

00:45:41.000 There's always someone who looks to sort of take the reins and sort of dictate what the experience is and how to do it and what the ritual should be and how you should, you know, manage it.

00:45:53.000 It gets culty.

00:45:55.000 It gets culty, but I think you could, you know, decultify it to some extent, if you're open-minded.

00:46:03.000 I think it also all practitioners...

00:46:06.000 I mean, there's a problem...

00:46:07.000 Here's a big problem with psychedelics.

00:46:09.000 One of the big problems is that we haven't really had a chance to openly discuss it in terms of, like, the effective and ineffective ways to use it, what's detrimental, what's abusive.

00:46:18.000 You know, treatment centers, like we could have all had this lined up, right?

00:46:23.000 If they didn't pass that sweeping Psychedelics Act, the controlled substances that we, right now, they're still illegal.

00:46:33.000 But they've been a part of human history forever.

00:46:36.000 If they just opened that up, We would have the ability to tell people how to use them and how not to use them.

00:46:44.000 We'd have the ability to monitor them.

00:46:46.000 And you're going to have some strays.

00:46:48.000 You're going to have some things that go wrong.

00:46:49.000 So there's going to have to be some ways to mitigate that, right?

00:46:53.000 And if this theory of people that have these psychedelic breaks, if it's a Imagine if you could find out that it really is like some sort of an overload of DMT. Like they have exogenous levels that are too high.

00:47:08.000 They can't manage it.

00:47:09.000 Reality is too fabricated.

00:47:10.000 Right.

00:47:11.000 Or fragmented rather.

00:47:12.000 Yeah.

00:47:13.000 I think, you know, if we can keep things going with psychedelic research in humans, there's a vast number of options that are going to start opening up.

00:47:20.000 For example, like a vaccine against endogenous DMT. I mean, that might be a great antipsychotic.

00:47:26.000 That is wild.

00:47:27.000 Do you imagine if that's really what it is?

00:47:30.000 They just got to dial it.

00:47:31.000 Or maybe some sort of technological intervention, like a neural link type thing, where I think they're going to be able to dial things in, which is going to be crazy.

00:47:40.000 You're going to be able to dial in horny. 1.00

00:47:42.000 You're going to be able to dial in happy.

00:47:44.000 I mean, 50 years from now, who knows what they're going to be able to do.

00:47:48.000 Well, they're breeding these things called knockout mice, which don't produce the gene, which makes X, Y, or Z. And they've developed knockout mice for the enzyme that makes DMT. Oh, wow.

00:48:00.000 So there are animals that don't produce any DMT. So you might be able at some point to put genes into people, like CRISPR, and have them stop making their own DMT. That would be a good zombie movie.

00:48:14.000 Everybody stops making their own DMT and just...

00:48:16.000 Well, you know, there's a lot of good movies I think could kind of spring from DMT. Yeah.

00:48:20.000 Well, if all animals are producing DMT, that's where things get really fascinating, right?

00:48:25.000 And if many plants produce DMT and at least have some of the compounds of DMT in them, like, what do you think is going on?

00:48:39.000 Well, do you remember that language called Esperanto?

00:48:42.000 Yes.

00:48:43.000 Yeah.

00:48:44.000 I think it's like a spiritual Esperanto.

00:48:49.000 I think that organisms that contain DMT are able to communicate with each other.

00:48:55.000 That's just an idea.

00:48:56.000 But I think you can occupy the same wavelength of communication depending on the configuration of your matter.

00:49:03.000 And it may be that that configuration is common to any organism possessing DMT. Wow.

00:49:09.000 So it might be...

00:49:11.000 Well, you know how you can communicate with trees, let's say, when you're really stoned on psychedelics or otherwise?

00:49:17.000 But that could be how.

00:49:20.000 That could be the empathy existing among organisms.

00:49:24.000 Can we take a break?

00:49:25.000 Yes.

00:49:27.000 Good.

00:49:27.000 We'll take a break right now.

00:49:30.000 And we're back.

00:49:32.000 So what were you saying?

00:49:33.000 Yeah, the first time I smoked pot, I got hooked.

00:49:36.000 It was like, you know, this is the most amazing thing in the world.

00:49:39.000 Did you recreate that?

00:49:41.000 Like, to have an experience like that for your first time with the hash?

00:49:45.000 No.

00:49:46.000 No, I never did.

00:49:47.000 Chase that dragon. 0.99

00:49:48.000 Yeah.

00:49:49.000 Well, you know, it was enough.

00:49:52.000 Like, I was convinced that this was going to be something I wanted to study.

00:49:55.000 And after the first time I smoked DMT, I knew that was what I was going to study.

00:50:01.000 Now, when you had this idea, how did you go about getting approval for a study?

00:50:12.000 Well, it's a very long strategy.

00:50:16.000 I came up with the idea of studying psychedelics when I was 20. I was doing developmental embryology work at Stanford in the summer between my junior and senior years.

00:50:29.000 I was studying the development of the chicken central nervous system.

00:50:33.000 Wow.

00:50:34.000 In petri dishes.

00:50:35.000 It was very high tech.

00:50:37.000 It was fun.

00:50:38.000 We got two papers resulting from the research that I did that year.

00:50:45.000 And I wanted to study psychedelics, but I didn't really know how to do it.

00:50:52.000 I thought, well, maybe I'll just get some lab experience.

00:50:55.000 And I was reading all of the books for the next year's classes, which involved Freud and Buddhism and the new developments in consciousness that were coming out at the time.

00:51:07.000 And I was watching the sunset go down one evening and I flashed, I'm going to study psychedelics and combine Freud, Buddhism and psychopharmacology.

00:51:19.000 Yeah, but I was 20 years old, right?

00:51:22.000 And in the beginning, I didn't get a good reception.

00:51:26.000 Most of the medicals...

00:51:27.000 Well, I applied to 21 medical schools, and the 19 that gave me a chance to tell them why I wanted to be a doctor, they just said, forget it.

00:51:40.000 So you were honest, unfortunately.

00:51:42.000 I was out of my mind.

00:51:44.000 Yeah, so the two schools that did admit me, you know, they were either really short interviews or they steered me away from my obsession.

00:51:57.000 But I got the idea that talking about psychedelics when you're 20 years old in the early 70s was not really going to fly.

00:52:08.000 So I kept my interest to myself, but I wanted to get trained enough to be able to do that kind of work at some point in the future.

00:52:18.000 So I went to medical school and I trained in psychiatry and took a job up in Alaska.

00:52:29.000 Which was around the time that people were thinking and starting to understand winter depression, which then put emphasis on the pineal gland and melatonin.

00:52:40.000 So I thought that was an entryway into studying the pineal gland.

00:52:48.000 And the function of melatonin in humans.

00:52:51.000 So the pineal gland definitely produces melatonin?

00:52:54.000 Yeah, that's been known since the 40s.

00:52:58.000 There wasn't a lot known back then in the early 80s.

00:53:02.000 So I went back and trained some more in clinical psychopharmacology research.

00:53:09.000 To learn how to do drug studies, giving drugs, taking samples, doing questionnaires.

00:53:15.000 And so I moved to UNM, University of New Mexico, and ran that melatonin pineal study.

00:53:21.000 And I got my chops as a clinical researcher.

00:53:26.000 And melatonin was not especially psychoactive, we discovered.

00:53:30.000 It just is kind of sedating.

00:53:32.000 And it helps regulate body temperature in the middle of the night.

00:53:36.000 But it was not psychedelic.

00:53:38.000 Is someone's phone ringing?

00:53:40.000 You hear that?

00:53:44.000 Yeah, I think you accidentally dialed someone.

00:53:47.000 Oh really?

00:53:49.000 Oh yeah, Tristan.

00:53:53.000 That keeps happening.

00:53:54.000 It's just Tristan.

00:53:55.000 Just put the phone on the table.

00:53:58.000 Yeah, sorry.

00:53:59.000 Because I didn't know how you pocket call with a flip phone.

00:54:02.000 Did you know that you could do that, Jamie?

00:54:04.000 It was the way it was ringing.

00:54:06.000 I'm like, that's not his ring.

00:54:07.000 Yeah, I heard a noise, but I didn't know what it was.

00:54:08.000 But it wasn't his ring.

00:54:09.000 You know, your ring is like...

00:54:11.000 Right, right.

00:54:12.000 Yeah, I apologize.

00:54:12.000 That was like an outgoing ring.

00:54:14.000 Yeah.

00:54:15.000 Yeah, I'm sorry.

00:54:15.000 No, no, it's okay.

00:54:16.000 I just didn't want someone else listening to our entire conversation.

00:54:19.000 Yeah, yeah, that's Tristan.

00:54:22.000 But I didn't know that it was a flip phone.

00:54:25.000 You wouldn't even be able to pick up without opening it up.

00:54:27.000 True.

00:54:28.000 That's so old school of you.

00:54:30.000 I love the fact that you have a flip phone.

00:54:31.000 I think we were all happier back then.

00:54:33.000 Well, this flip phone is 4G, and I had to upgrade from my 3G flip phone. 1.00

00:54:38.000 No, they made you these bastards. 0.99

00:54:40.000 They stopped serving. 1.00

00:54:42.000 Yeah, Verizon, they texted me or something and said...

00:54:46.000 Cut you off, son.

00:54:47.000 It's over. 0.56

00:54:47.000 You have to upgrade to 4G, so I got this one. 0.56

00:54:50.000 And now they get the 5G. You've got to get 5. The 6 is going to come out soon.

00:54:55.000 It's never going to end.

00:54:57.000 Meanwhile, you're just rocking a flip phone.

00:54:59.000 There's something about a flip phone.

00:55:00.000 Like, hanging up on someone is much more satisfying.

00:55:04.000 That's all you'd have to carry around.

00:55:05.000 I bet the battery lasts a year.

00:55:07.000 How long does the battery last on this thing?

00:55:09.000 I keep it charged.

00:55:11.000 Two, three days.

00:55:12.000 Not that long.

00:55:13.000 It's got a camera to report crime.

00:55:15.000 It has a camera and it texts.

00:55:18.000 It does text?

00:55:19.000 Does it do voice to text?

00:55:21.000 No.

00:55:22.000 If it does that, if it did that, I'd be really seriously thinking about it.

00:55:26.000 Voice to text is so easy.

00:55:28.000 You could answer text messages while you're in the car.

00:55:31.000 Just say, hey Siri, text Rick Strassman.

00:55:34.000 You could do that with Dragon.

00:55:37.000 Oh, okay.

00:55:38.000 So if you have Dragon, naturally speaking, on your phone?

00:55:41.000 On your phone.

00:55:42.000 Can you get that on that?

00:55:43.000 Yeah, it will, you know, transcribe from the cloud.

00:55:45.000 On a flip phone?

00:55:46.000 Well, not on a flip phone.

00:55:48.000 Well, that's what I'm saying.

00:55:49.000 I'm saying if that had it.

00:55:51.000 Because Siri has it.

00:55:52.000 You know, you do it off, or Android Auto has it, too.

00:55:56.000 I spent so much time in front of a screen that just one more screen would have just driven me around the bend.

00:56:02.000 Well, it's driving people crazy.

00:56:04.000 They're just looking to argue with people all day.

00:56:07.000 It's like everyone's mad at everything and there's so little attention spent to your immediate life and you know what's actually going around you.

00:56:17.000 Everyone's like freaking out about things that are happening nowhere near them most of the time.

00:56:23.000 Yeah well that's one of the things I like about living in Gallup New Mexico is that you watch the wind you know like it's pretty quiet.

00:56:56.000 I've heard that expression but I don't know what that means.

00:56:59.000 Yeah, that's a great story.

00:57:01.000 Is that like from the war?

00:57:02.000 It's from World War II, the Pacific Arena.

00:57:05.000 You know, the Navajo speak a very difficult to learn language. 1.00

00:57:10.000 And they put a Navajo in Japan with the troops and a Navajo stateside. 0.98

00:57:18.000 And they communicated.

00:57:28.000 Wow.

00:57:43.000 Wow!

00:57:45.000 That makes sense.

00:57:47.000 I mean, 1947, how quick is it going to be to learn Navajo?

00:57:53.000 Well, you may want to get one of those Navajo code talkers in here. 1.00

00:57:57.000 They're all in their 90s.

00:57:59.000 And they're these amazing guys.

00:58:01.000 They're incredibly, well, yeah, they're just amazing.

00:58:05.000 How many of them were there?

00:58:06.000 There were quite a few.

00:58:08.000 There were probably hundreds.

00:58:11.000 There's maybe like a dozen, two dozen that are still alive.

00:58:16.000 That seems like a story that needs more attention.

00:58:19.000 It's a really great story.

00:58:20.000 There's a Code Talker Museum that I think just opened in D.C. Oh, really?

00:58:24.000 Yeah, the Navajo Code Talkers. 1.00

00:58:26.000 Check them out.

00:58:29.000 So, yeah, it's a quiet place to live, a good place to read and study and write and walk around.

00:58:34.000 I'm not that current without looking at the news.

00:58:40.000 Good.

00:58:41.000 And I could just turn that off.

00:58:43.000 Yeah.

00:58:44.000 It's just too much for us.

00:58:45.000 I mean, I don't think we should just let corruption, chaos happen.

00:58:50.000 That's not what I'm saying.

00:58:51.000 I'm saying for just healthy human beings, the average healthy human being, it is too much to be tuned into all day long.

00:58:58.000 And it's so damn addictive.

00:59:01.000 Well, and it's not good news.

00:59:03.000 No. 0.83

00:59:03.000 And that's what attracts people, is the shitty news. 0.83

00:59:07.000 The good news gets a quick glance and like, what should I be mad at?

00:59:11.000 What should I be terrified of?

00:59:12.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:59:14.000 What are they taking away next?

00:59:15.000 Well, you know, I kind of don't want to go there, but what do you think of monkeypox?

00:59:23.000 You don't want to go there, but what do you think of monkeypox?

00:59:27.000 Sounds like you definitely wanted to go there. 0.99

00:59:30.000 I think it's a disease that is primarily affecting people who have unprotected, it seems like gay sex, right? 1.00

00:59:40.000 Seems like it. 0.69

00:59:40.000 Seems like it's like 90-something percent of the cases. 0.69

00:59:44.000 You know, there's some sort of a vaccine for it, apparently?

00:59:48.000 Yeah.

00:59:49.000 Is there treatment for it?

00:59:50.000 Like, do they know how to cure it?

00:59:52.000 Supportive treatment.

00:59:53.000 Just supportive treatment?

00:59:55.000 Fluids.

00:59:56.000 So they just wait until it goes away?

00:59:58.000 Yeah.

00:59:58.000 And how long does it usually take to go away?

01:00:00.000 I don't know.

01:00:01.000 Is it killing people?

01:00:02.000 No, it's not killing people, but they're pretty uncomfortable.

01:00:05.000 Those are apparently pretty painful sores.

01:00:07.000 They look gross.

01:00:08.000 Yeah. 0.89

01:00:12.000 I mean, is there a bright side that's not killing people?

01:00:14.000 Yeah, yeah. 0.99

01:00:15.000 It's hard to say when some fucking weird disease spreads. 0.94

01:00:18.000 Yeah, and I don't get weird diseases or I don't even get the news about weird diseases on this phone. 0.97

01:00:23.000 It's made a jump to other people. 0.95

01:00:25.000 It's not just people having unprotected gay sex. 0.98

01:00:28.000 It's people that haven't had any sex at all. 0.99

01:00:30.000 In fact, I think even kids are getting it now.

01:00:32.000 Extended contact, I think, can do it. 0.99

01:00:35.000 It's a fucking creepy disease, though. 0.99

01:00:37.000 Yeah, it's got a horrible name. 1.00

01:00:39.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:00:40.000 They should call it something else.

01:00:42.000 Too late, right?

01:00:43.000 Well, you can call it MPX. Yeah, but why didn't they just come up with a better name before they just busted out with monkeypox?

01:00:49.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:00:50.000 But they do that swine flu, you know, avian virus.

01:00:53.000 It's always a way we connect it to animals.

01:00:57.000 Those zoonotic diseases.

01:00:59.000 Zoonotics, yeah. 0.98

01:01:00.000 It's creepy.

01:01:01.000 It's creepy how many of them there are out there.

01:01:03.000 Yeah, I know.

01:01:06.000 Well, so what keeps you going?

01:01:08.000 With what?

01:01:09.000 Your kids?

01:01:10.000 Do your kids keep you going?

01:01:11.000 What do you mean by keep me going?

01:01:13.000 You know, keep an optimistic look.

01:01:15.000 Well, not necessarily optimistic, but what gives you hope?

01:01:20.000 I think more than I've ever thought before that most people are really good people.

01:01:27.000 Most people try to be really good people.

01:01:29.000 They want to have a good life.

01:01:31.000 Most people.

01:01:32.000 That's most.

01:01:34.000 I think you're always going to deal with certain numbers of people that are trying to make enormous profits and doing so at the expense of either the environment or people's lives and they're going to influence politicians and they're going to make laws that benefit these people and they've done this since the beginning of time.

01:01:55.000 I mean, Eisenhower warned about it when he was leaving office.

01:01:58.000 He warned about the military industrial complex. 1.00

01:02:00.000 He warned about all that shit. 1.00

01:02:01.000 He warned about I mean, they warned about that when they built the fucking Constitution. 1.00

01:02:07.000 But I think overall, most people aren't like that. 0.98

01:02:11.000 Most people aren't trying to control people and ruin the earth for profit.

01:02:17.000 Most people are just trying to live their life.

01:02:20.000 It's a...

01:02:23.000 It's a significant impact, for sure.

01:02:28.000 It's horrible.

01:02:29.000 And it represents us overall.

01:02:31.000 It does.

01:02:32.000 Because what are people capable of at their worst?

01:02:34.000 Well, they're capable of starting unnecessary wars that are going to cost hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of lives for profit.

01:02:42.000 We know that people have done that.

01:02:44.000 But that's not you, and that's not me, and that's not Jamie.

01:02:47.000 That's not most people.

01:02:48.000 Most people are good.

01:02:50.000 That's what I think.

01:02:51.000 So that's what keeps me going.

01:02:52.000 Yeah.

01:02:55.000 I think most people are good, but I think most people are easily swayed.

01:03:00.000 Well, when things go sideways and when people get scared, when people get scared, their anxiety gets ramped up and they look for something to be mad at and it ramps up their anger at that person.

01:03:13.000 Yeah, a few years ago, I was pretty sick for years in that Joseph Levy book.

01:03:18.000 And as I was recuperating, I was reading concentration camp stories, concentration camp literature.

01:03:26.000 Well, I just wanted to see how low you could go and still come out of it.

01:03:31.000 And, you know, the concentration camp culture history is pretty...

01:03:37.000 It's amazing what kind of evil everyday people can lay on other people.

01:03:44.000 It's just remarkable.

01:03:45.000 They just got a new guy, didn't they?

01:03:49.000 Just caught a new guard.

01:03:53.000 Yeah.

01:03:54.000 And convicted him.

01:03:56.000 I mean, he's in his 90s now.

01:03:58.000 Yeah, those guys are really old.

01:04:00.000 Isn't that wild?

01:04:02.000 Oh, man.

01:04:03.000 Yeah.

01:04:04.000 But the people who are alive today participated in genocide in the 40s.

01:04:10.000 Here he is.

01:04:11.000 101-year-old ex-guard of Nazi camp is convicted by German corps.

01:04:17.000 The man identified only as Joseph S. because of Germany privacy laws.

01:04:22.000 Wow, they're even private of Nazis.

01:04:25.000 Was sentenced to five years in prison after being found guilty of being an accessory to more than 3,500 murders.

01:04:33.000 Five years in prison?

01:04:35.000 That's all?

01:04:36.000 Well, he may not live beyond the first couple.

01:04:40.000 That's all they gave him?

01:04:42.000 Yeah, they might beat him to death in there. 0.75

01:04:44.000 Yeah, he doesn't want a Jewish Selma. 1.00

01:04:47.000 He says it's not even clear if he would even serve the time.

01:04:49.000 Yeah, he may not.

01:04:53.000 So what is the solution?

01:04:55.000 Let him go free?

01:04:56.000 He's too old?

01:04:58.000 He's sorry?

01:05:00.000 How do you let that guy go free?

01:05:03.000 Even though he's 101 years old?

01:05:05.000 What is the answer there?

01:05:06.000 I think he would have to repent.

01:05:09.000 How could you repent from that?

01:05:12.000 He would need to make restitution to the extent that he could to people that he's caused suffering to.

01:05:19.000 Oh, man.

01:05:21.000 What kind of restitution could he make?

01:05:23.000 What could he do for 3,500 people?

01:05:26.000 Yeah.

01:05:27.000 Well, maybe he could tell the truth.

01:05:29.000 It just freaks me out that that's inside of the last hundred years.

01:05:34.000 It's so recent.

01:05:36.000 It's really recent, yeah.

01:05:39.000 Civilization is such a new thing.

01:05:43.000 Well, you know, civilization's a new thing.

01:05:48.000 Anti-Semitism isn't.

01:05:50.000 No.

01:05:50.000 Anti-Semitism, boy, goes way back.

01:05:52.000 That's a pretty old one.

01:05:54.000 It's the world's oldest hatred, is the way I've heard it described.

01:06:00.000 You want some coffee?

01:06:01.000 Yeah, some coffee would be great.

01:06:02.000 So we were talking about the difficult road that it took.

01:06:09.000 Cheers, sir.

01:06:09.000 Thanks for being here, man.

01:06:10.000 Cheers, yeah, thanks.

01:06:11.000 It was very fun for me.

01:06:12.000 Very nice.

01:06:14.000 Yeah, you know...

01:06:15.000 We were talking about, like, you had this idea And then the long road to actually getting it passed.

01:06:24.000 We definitely don't want to skip over that.

01:06:27.000 Well, I spent a lot of time training.

01:06:30.000 You know, I went to medical school, my residency, fellowship, and then the two-year melatonin project was also under training fund.

01:06:41.000 So I stopped training officially when I was...

01:06:45.000 35, maybe 36. I was on training funds until that time.

01:06:50.000 Yeah, you know, so we discovered that there wasn't much psychoactivity that was associated with melatonin.

01:06:57.000 And in the meantime, I had learned about DMT, you know, that is made in the body.

01:07:01.000 It's incredibly psychedelic.

01:07:02.000 I smoked DMT. The melatonin work was kind of taking me into places that weren't all that interesting.

01:07:09.000 So I switched fields and figured, well, it's now or never.

01:07:14.000 I'm in my 30s.

01:07:17.000 I've got a good appointment at the university.

01:07:19.000 I've got the support of the research unit.

01:07:23.000 Did you approach them with this idea?

01:07:25.000 I did.

01:07:26.000 I spoke to my two bosses in psychiatry and on the research unit.

01:07:33.000 And they said, you know, get grants and publish and stay out of the newspaper.

01:07:39.000 Those were the three bits of advice I got.

01:07:42.000 They said, you know what you're doing, so just go ahead and do it and see what happens.

01:07:48.000 I got support from the university.

01:07:51.000 Well, this was 1986, 1987, and people really didn't know about psychedelics at that point.

01:08:00.000 They had become forgotten.

01:08:02.000 They weren't being taught in medical school anymore.

01:08:05.000 There was no research going on for 15, 20 years.

01:08:08.000 You know, so even after I began my study, the research unit director used to joke that people in the study room were smoking mushrooms.

01:08:19.000 So he didn't really know what I was doing.

01:08:21.000 He just wanted me to stay out of trouble and succeed.

01:08:24.000 How bizarre is it to you knowing that research on the mind never stopped, but research on one of the weirdest things you could do to the mind stopped?

01:08:36.000 And it didn't just stop for a little bit.

01:08:38.000 It stopped for how long?

01:08:40.000 15, 20 years?

01:08:41.000 20 years.

01:08:42.000 That seems insane, doesn't it?

01:08:44.000 That they wouldn't want to study one of the most profound experiences that's available to human beings.

01:08:50.000 Well, it's important to think of some context, you know, too.

01:08:54.000 Things were just going crazy with kids taking way too much LSD in the wrong set of circumstances without any preparation.

01:09:03.000 And it was a public health emergency.

01:09:06.000 Emergency rooms and psychiatric units were being filled up.

01:09:10.000 You know, so the government had to do something, you know, from the public health point of view at the very least, which was to make it harder for kids to get their hands on psychedelics.

01:09:19.000 I think that notion that there was a desire to quash understanding what the drugs were doing to people, like in a scientific manner, I don't think that was ever the case.

01:09:32.000 I think it was more that nobody really wanted to challenge the government and submit a really good study that you can back up with safety mechanisms built into place.

01:09:47.000 Once I got my funding and my permits, which was a long process, it took two years, You know, the government was super keen on my studies.

01:09:56.000 They were very interested in what we were doing, that we were finding.

01:10:01.000 When you say the government, like what branch of the government?

01:10:04.000 Mostly the National Institute on Drug Abuse, NIDA, one of the divisions of the National Institutes of Health.

01:10:16.000 They were funding me.

01:10:17.000 Oh, this is cool, too.

01:10:19.000 The first grant I got was from the Scottish Rite Foundation for Schizophrenia Research.

01:10:24.000 It was a branch of the Masons.

01:10:26.000 Wow.

01:10:27.000 Very interesting.

01:10:28.000 And the Masons have a lot of iconography with the pineal and pine cones.

01:10:33.000 So, I mean, that was pretty creepy.

01:10:36.000 That is creepy.

01:10:37.000 People get freaked out by Masons. 0.97

01:10:40.000 I mean, without knowing much about it, you hear that someone's a mason, you're like, oh boy.

01:10:46.000 What does that mean?

01:10:47.000 Well, and they were the first funders of my research, which I thought was...

01:10:51.000 See, all the Illuminati people are going to go crazy now.

01:10:54.000 All the real conspiracy theory people.

01:10:56.000 Oh, he's captured by the government.

01:10:58.000 It was a strange coincidence.

01:11:00.000 That doesn't sound like a strange coincidence.

01:11:03.000 Well, there's a more mundane explanation.

01:11:06.000 One of my mentors, well, maybe it doesn't help clarify things.

01:11:11.000 It may make it more complex.

01:11:14.000 One of my mentors was a psychiatrist at UCLA, a fellow named Dr. Friedman.

01:11:21.000 And we got to know each other back in the day.

01:11:25.000 In the 50s, actually, he was giving LSD at the NIH. And I met him, and he supported my work.

01:11:34.000 And he was on a committee, the granting committee for the Scottish Rite Foundation for Schizophrenia Research.

01:11:43.000 And he said, if you could submit a grant to them that focuses on DMT and schizophrenia, you'll most likely get funded.

01:11:52.000 And I did.

01:11:53.000 So it was at least ostensibly from the schizophrenia point of view.

01:11:57.000 But still, the source of the money and the interest came from the Masons.

01:12:04.000 That's wild.

01:12:07.000 That's another subject that I wanted to talk to you about.

01:12:11.000 There's certain religions that had an exemption for using DMT. And there's Christian religions in America, right?

01:12:23.000 There's like two different sects of Christianity that are allowed to take like an ayahuasca drink.

01:12:30.000 How did that happen?

01:12:31.000 There's a group called the UDV. And one called the Santo Dami.

01:12:35.000 They're both based from Brazil.

01:12:36.000 They both originated there.

01:12:38.000 And so these folks, they went and they got religious exemption?

01:12:43.000 How did that go down?

01:12:46.000 Well, let me think this through.

01:12:52.000 Well...

01:12:54.000 In the early 90s, when I just got my DMT study off the ground, I met the leader of the UDV, an Anglo fellow, Jeffrey Bronfman from Santa Fe, was the North American representative of the UDV. And he asked me about what their strategy ought to be to be able to drink ayahuasca.

01:13:22.000 So I advised, you know, taking care of all your permits, you know, kind of the way I did it.

01:13:28.000 Just, you know, fill out the forms and, you know, talk to the regulators.

01:13:31.000 And after a while, you know, if you stick with it, chances are good they'll give you permission.

01:13:37.000 Or you could wait to be caught and then, you know, take it to court, in which case you would at least be, you know, getting the experiences underway.

01:13:46.000 The church would be established.

01:13:48.000 You would have a track record of safety.

01:13:50.000 Yeah, but that sounds like a terrible idea.

01:13:52.000 I would definitely say try to get the opinions in.

01:13:54.000 Right.

01:13:55.000 Or rather, permissions in.

01:13:57.000 Well, so that's what happened.

01:14:02.000 They were discovered importing ayahuasca, which they had been doing for, I don't know, three, four years or so.

01:14:09.000 Yeah, and so they took it to court.

01:14:12.000 So they got caught with it.

01:14:13.000 They got caught with it.

01:14:15.000 You know, you have to think about it, though, because it may have taken them years.

01:14:19.000 Right, I get it.

01:14:20.000 That makes sense.

01:14:20.000 And they may never have gotten approval.

01:14:23.000 So is it possible for them to grow the stuff they need to make ayahuasca here?

01:14:30.000 Do those things have to be grown in other climates, or can they be grown here?

01:14:34.000 You can grow the plants in either Hawaii or Florida.

01:14:40.000 Right.

01:14:40.000 I knew people grew them in Hawaii.

01:14:42.000 I didn't know Florida.

01:14:44.000 Interesting.

01:14:44.000 So if Florida opened it up, they could have ayahuasca plantations.

01:14:51.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:14:53.000 And just, I mean, that tropical environment down there.

01:14:57.000 Well, I mean, you'd have to work out the regulatory and the organizational structure, kind of like they're doing in Oregon, which seems like it's kind of halting.

01:15:06.000 Are you familiar with what they're doing in Oregon?

01:15:09.000 In Oregon, they seem to be decriminalizing basically everything.

01:15:14.000 Right.

01:15:14.000 Well, they've legalized psilocybin, which means that the state's getting involved in a board and certifying locations.

01:15:22.000 So they legalized it for recreational use or medicinal use?

01:15:27.000 Like, do you have to have a prescription?

01:15:29.000 No, no.

01:15:30.000 They're going to be setting up psilocybin centers. 1.00

01:15:34.000 Holy shit. 0.99

01:15:36.000 Dispensers. 1.00

01:15:36.000 Wow. 1.00

01:15:37.000 That's wild.

01:15:39.000 And you could be a certified psilocybin sitter.

01:15:42.000 I wish Portland wasn't such a hot mess.

01:15:47.000 Portland's such a hot mess.

01:15:49.000 The city's such a hot mess.

01:15:51.000 Well, the smaller counties in Oregon have got the right to ban psilocybin, and they're doing it.

01:16:00.000 So fewer and fewer counties seem interested.

01:16:04.000 Interesting.

01:16:04.000 So it's passed statewide.

01:16:06.000 You're going to have to find some county that's going to give you the green light, and that's where people are going to start growing their stuff.

01:16:12.000 It's going to come with a lot of problems.

01:16:14.000 One of the problems that happened with marijuana was the early days, banks didn't want to get involved.

01:16:22.000 They wouldn't allow people to use credit cards, because they didn't want to be connected to that.

01:16:28.000 So people had giant wads of cash, and they were hiring these Special Forces guys to take their cash- Smelling from pot.

01:16:38.000 Yeah, stinking of pot.

01:16:41.000 You know, the whole thing was really sketchy, because everybody knew you're leaving that spot with bags of cash.

01:16:48.000 Like, everyone knew you have cash there, and so you have to really worry about getting robbed and killed.

01:16:54.000 Yeah, it's interesting to follow what's happening in Oregon.

01:16:58.000 It's supposed to all be in place by January 1st.

01:17:01.000 That's gonna be wild.

01:17:02.000 It's gonna be wild.

01:17:03.000 I think there'll be some problems.

01:17:06.000 Yeah, well, for sure.

01:17:08.000 That's the problem if it happens, you know, if it happens federally. 0.99

01:17:13.000 If some wacky president decided to let all the psychedelics free, We're gonna have a lot of people lose their fucking marbles. 0.99

01:17:21.000 The question is, aren't we already? 0.99

01:17:24.000 And how much of a difference would it be?

01:17:26.000 And would it be a difference?

01:17:27.000 Or would those people have already lost their marbles?

01:17:29.000 There's a lot of questions, I guess.

01:17:31.000 Yeah.

01:17:31.000 Well, you have to educate people.

01:17:33.000 Right.

01:17:34.000 In the best way to trip.

01:17:35.000 And they maybe should have some research on how to help people that have had bad trips.

01:17:42.000 Right. 0.98

01:17:43.000 Maybe there's like a good cocktail of medications to fucking bring you back to Earth. 0.98

01:17:49.000 Yeah, yeah, like if it's a bad experience, you know, traumatic. 0.97

01:17:55.000 It's like PTSD in a way.

01:17:56.000 Some people have really bad ones, and they freak out, and they don't know what to do, and then they get elevated anxiety, and it sort of cascades.

01:18:05.000 You've seen that?

01:18:06.000 Yeah.

01:18:07.000 Yeah, I think we're going to be seeing more of that.

01:18:09.000 Yeah, look, I had one DMT trip that was, I think we did it three times in an afternoon, and I had, the last one was really weird.

01:18:19.000 Really, really powerful.

01:18:21.000 And I had like a very slippery grip on reality for like two weeks after that.

01:18:26.000 That can happen.

01:18:27.000 Yeah, that's how I describe it.

01:18:28.000 It's like slippery.

01:18:29.000 Like I was doing everything normal.

01:18:31.000 I was driving to work normal.

01:18:33.000 I was doing it, but everything felt slippery.

01:18:36.000 Like everything can go wrong at any second.

01:18:39.000 Slippery is a good term.

01:18:40.000 Well, you know, that happened to me after my first, you know, 5-methoxy DMT experience for about, you know, three days.

01:18:48.000 I just didn't really feel like I was in my body, that I was really kind of interacting with things in a coherent manner.

01:18:56.000 That stuff is interesting.

01:18:58.000 I really want to know your thoughts on that stuff because that's a weird experience in that it seems like you just go away.

01:19:06.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:19:07.000 You do go away.

01:19:08.000 And even though people seem to be talking it up, I'm not sure if going away is that good a thing.

01:19:14.000 I want to explain that to people who don't know what we're talking about.

01:19:16.000 When I mean go away, I mean it feels like you're dying.

01:19:19.000 And then it also feels like you don't exist anymore, so you don't have any thoughts while you're over there.

01:19:24.000 It's the weirdest experience.

01:19:27.000 It's all white.

01:19:28.000 It's just this whiteout.

01:19:30.000 Yeah, it's like this full white out, but it's somehow cleansing.

01:19:35.000 Like you come out of there like lighter.

01:19:37.000 It's like being in the center of the sun.

01:19:40.000 Yeah, there's something about when you come back, you feel like everything's going to be fine.

01:19:47.000 It's so wild in the beginning.

01:19:49.000 It's so terrifying when you first enter into it.

01:19:51.000 But then when you come out of it, you're so happy you did it.

01:19:54.000 Well, I think that's a concern, is that you feel so good after you've come through and you want to replicate that.

01:20:01.000 I've seen people use 5-methoxy addictively, habitually.

01:20:06.000 They just want to get back to that state over and over.

01:20:09.000 And you don't really see that very often with DMT. DMT itself has so much information.

01:20:15.000 There's a dude I knew who he went so many times.

01:20:19.000 He was doing it so often that he said the entity started to tell him to stop coming.

01:20:25.000 He was doing DMT like every day.

01:20:27.000 I'm like, hey man.

01:20:29.000 That seems like a lot.

01:20:32.000 Well, do you think it was the entities telling him to stop it or that it was just his mind saying, you know, you're killing me.

01:20:40.000 I mean, let's take a break.

01:20:41.000 Yeah, I mean, or what are those things?

01:20:44.000 What is your mind, right?

01:20:45.000 Is your mind an individual thing or is it something that constantly changes depending upon what it interacts with?

01:20:53.000 And are those entities that are telling you stop doing it, do they live in your mind?

01:20:57.000 Does your mind live where they live?

01:20:59.000 Yes, I think so.

01:21:00.000 Yes.

01:21:01.000 But either way, this whole thing of he was having a real problem with it.

01:21:08.000 The experience was so profound, he just wanted to recreate it over and over and over and over again.

01:21:15.000 You know, when I get emails from people who start sounding like they're just about ready to, like, lose it because they're smoking so much DMT, and, you know, they want my advice and, you know, support and, you know, confirmation of their funny ideas,

01:21:31.000 and I just say stop smoking DMT. That's what I'd recommend.

01:21:35.000 You don't need to do it that often.

01:21:37.000 Yeah.

01:21:37.000 That's the one slippery one that I've had.

01:21:39.000 I've had it since then.

01:21:40.000 But that one slippery one, that was a little bit of a wake-up call. 0.99

01:21:45.000 Because, like, hey, cocky fuckface, you think you've got a great grip on reality? 0.99

01:21:50.000 Why don't you just, like, enter into other dimensions for a couple hours and then come back and now you feel weird about everything. 0.99

01:21:59.000 Like, for two weeks.

01:22:00.000 It took two weeks to feel normal driving.

01:22:03.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:22:05.000 Well, did you get help?

01:22:07.000 Nope.

01:22:08.000 Nope.

01:22:08.000 Just worked out.

01:22:09.000 Yeah.

01:22:10.000 I worked out.

01:22:11.000 I laid in the float tank quite a bit.

01:22:14.000 I mean, it wasn't scary, but it was next door neighbors to scary.

01:22:18.000 Right.

01:22:19.000 It was like, if I have to go through life with this elevated level of weirdness and anxiety forever, like this is life now, I'm like, ooh, I don't like this.

01:22:28.000 It was almost like being too high.

01:22:31.000 You know that feeling when you, I'm a little too high, I don't like this.

01:22:33.000 Right, yeah.

01:22:35.000 Well, so it was a close call.

01:22:36.000 It was a close call, I think.

01:22:38.000 I think it's a wake-up call.

01:22:39.000 I don't think, I think these, like, you know, Alex Berenson wrote that book, Tell Your Children.

01:22:44.000 Do you know about that book?

01:22:45.000 I don't think so.

01:22:46.000 Alex Berenson used to write for the New York Times.

01:22:49.000 And he wrote a book making a connection between people smoking too much pot and having these psychotic breaks and these schizophrenic breaks.

01:23:01.000 Like, what is going on?

01:23:02.000 What is happening to people?

01:23:03.000 Like, why is that happening?

01:23:04.000 And is it happening proportionate to the population where you would normally get schizophrenics?

01:23:09.000 Or is it elevated?

01:23:11.000 Like, what's happening?

01:23:13.000 Well, if you're kind of prone to schizophrenia, it seems pretty clear the more pot you smoke, the more likely you'll have a full break.

01:23:20.000 Yes.

01:23:20.000 And see, this is something that we should have known, right?

01:23:23.000 This is something that we should – it's just like people who have alcoholism in their family.

01:23:27.000 Maybe they shouldn't drink.

01:23:28.000 Right.

01:23:28.000 You know what I mean?

01:23:29.000 We know people like that, that, you know, dad was an alcoholic.

01:23:32.000 They can't have a drink.

01:23:33.000 This is a thing that really is unfortunate because they could have studied this and had answers and we could be able to tell people how to do these things.

01:23:41.000 Well, I think we should learn from that experience by making sure we're clear about adverse reactions to psychedelics.

01:23:47.000 Yeah.

01:23:48.000 The same way we are about adverse reactions to anything.

01:23:51.000 To anything.

01:23:51.000 Yeah.

01:23:52.000 Well, you're talking about that bad trip that just lingered.

01:23:56.000 I had a bad trip when I was in college, an LSD experience, and I didn't take anything for 12 years after that.

01:24:04.000 Well, mine wasn't a bad trip.

01:24:06.000 That's what was interesting.

01:24:07.000 The trip was magnificent.

01:24:09.000 The trip was spectacular.

01:24:11.000 The trip was incredible.

01:24:13.000 The visuals were beyond my imagination and the way it affected me. 0.97

01:24:19.000 It was like a real, like a peeling of layers of bullshit of who I am.

01:24:25.000 But the experience afterwards, it's like I didn't go back to normal. 0.98

01:24:30.000 It was so wild.

01:24:32.000 Whatever it was was so wild that everyday reality just seemed like, what is this?

01:24:36.000 Is this a trick?

01:24:37.000 Is this a trick?

01:24:38.000 Is reality fake?

01:24:39.000 It seemed real weird.

01:24:42.000 But no one would have noticed.

01:24:43.000 I talked normal.

01:24:44.000 I did normal stuff.

01:24:46.000 I didn't take days off and sit at home and stare at the walls.

01:24:50.000 I just did normal stuff until it all came back to normal.

01:24:52.000 Did you tell your friends or family?

01:24:54.000 I think I told a couple people.

01:24:56.000 I think I told people that do DMT. I definitely know I told Duncan.

01:24:59.000 I definitely know I told Duncan.

01:25:01.000 We talked about it.

01:25:03.000 And, you know, that was the thing.

01:25:06.000 It really wasn't bad, but it wasn't good.

01:25:11.000 And it let me know that, hey, what if it's way worse than that?

01:25:15.000 Well, yeah, you know, what if you're that way for the rest of your life?

01:25:18.000 Yeah, forever.

01:25:18.000 Yeah, what if you, like, we know those stories.

01:25:22.000 The guys who did too much acid never came back.

01:25:24.000 Right.

01:25:24.000 Those are classic stories.

01:25:26.000 And they're true, yeah.

01:25:27.000 Well, you know, that's why it's good to have a therapist, too.

01:25:30.000 Like, I was fortunate in that I was in psychoanalysis at the time.

01:25:34.000 And so I could, you know, talk to my analyst about how horrible that 5-MeO... 0.99

01:25:38.000 Or, you know, it was a bad experience as opposed to yours, but it was quite unsettling.

01:25:44.000 And it really helped to have somebody to get it off my chest with.

01:25:47.000 Did you feel like you were dead?

01:25:49.000 Did you feel like when you did it, like you were gone?

01:25:52.000 No, I was stuck in this evil good loop.

01:25:55.000 You know, like...

01:25:57.000 Good versus evil, and which was I going to choose?

01:26:00.000 Oh boy!

01:26:01.000 Yeah, and I couldn't decide, and I asked the sitter, you know, what should I choose?

01:26:07.000 And they said something like, there's no need to choose, or they're both the same, or...

01:26:12.000 Yeah, something unsatisfactory.

01:26:14.000 Oh, God.

01:26:14.000 And I was pretty rattled for a couple of days after that.

01:26:18.000 So is this when you were coming out of it?

01:26:20.000 Like, did you have a time of the trip where you were just gone?

01:26:24.000 Where it was just white fuzz noise?

01:26:27.000 No.

01:26:27.000 No, actually, no.

01:26:28.000 This was different?

01:26:29.000 Yeah, it was different.

01:26:30.000 It had more content.

01:26:31.000 How many times did you do 5MEO? Oh, gosh.

01:26:36.000 Once pure, the pure drug, and once the toad.

01:26:40.000 Yeah, you know, my experience with the DMT compounds isn't extensive.

01:26:44.000 But the experiences with the fiber, what I was getting at was, are they uniform?

01:26:49.000 They're mostly that white light.

01:26:51.000 Yeah.

01:26:51.000 Yeah, that seems to be consistent.

01:26:53.000 But this was a different one?

01:26:54.000 It was different, yeah.

01:26:55.000 Was this one from the toad?

01:26:56.000 No, no, it was the synthetic.

01:26:58.000 Yeah, I could tell you.

01:27:00.000 I was looking up from the bottom of a silo, and there was a catwalk that went around and around the inside of the silo.

01:27:12.000 And there were all these dwarves, like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves, with the long sleeves and the long noses and the hood. 0.99

01:27:21.000 And there were like countless, just circulating.

01:27:24.000 And they were up to no good.

01:27:31.000 And at the same time, they were beckoning.

01:27:35.000 And I just didn't know what to do.

01:27:37.000 So that's when I opened my eyes and said to my friend, you know, what should I choose?

01:27:42.000 I wonder if they gave you like a mixture.

01:27:46.000 Has anybody given someone a mixture of 5-MEO and NNDMT? Yeah, yeah, that's pretty, well, I wouldn't say common, but I think it's called Jaguar.

01:27:54.000 Oh, I like the name.

01:27:56.000 Yeah, Ralph Metzner used to provide that to people.

01:27:59.000 Because I was thinking, like, you're saying something that sounds awfully like the visual DMT experience.

01:28:06.000 I know, I know.

01:28:07.000 It's interesting.

01:28:08.000 Yeah, because most people have the white light.

01:28:10.000 Yeah, I wonder if you would have gotten like a combo cocktail, like a, you know, what is that?

01:28:16.000 Arnold Palmer.

01:28:17.000 An Arnold Palmer.

01:28:19.000 You know?

01:28:20.000 Shirley Temple.

01:28:21.000 Well, the Arnold Palmer is like a little bit of iced tea and a little bit of lemonade.

01:28:24.000 You know, I think that's what you got.

01:28:26.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:28:27.000 I mean, I don't know.

01:28:28.000 I'm just guessing.

01:28:29.000 I've just never heard of anybody having such very distinct visuals before like that.

01:28:34.000 Yeah, my first entity contact was on 5MEO. Now, when you say entity, what was it, the first one?

01:28:42.000 Well, it was these dwarves, these countless dwarves.

01:28:44.000 Oh, that was them.

01:28:46.000 That was the first entity contact.

01:28:48.000 And what did you think you were seeing when you were seeing them?

01:28:51.000 I had no idea.

01:28:52.000 I figured, you know, I was under the influence and that's what I was seeing.

01:28:57.000 You just were going with it.

01:28:59.000 Yeah.

01:29:00.000 Observing.

01:29:01.000 Well, if you're in it, you can't do anything.

01:29:03.000 I mean, you can only observe, partake.

01:29:10.000 Do you think that when you're tripping like that, are you entering into a world that already exists or are you changing something?

01:29:23.000 Well, I think you're changing your ability to perceive things that are normally invisible.

01:29:28.000 So they're there all the time?

01:29:30.000 They're there all the time, either in your mind, unconscious, or out there in the ether.

01:29:37.000 And that's what we were talking about earlier, that it's really hard to tell.

01:29:41.000 Right.

01:29:42.000 But the important thing, though, I believe, is that it doesn't make a lot of difference, right now anyway, because we can't really design experiments to determine that.

01:29:52.000 The important thing is the information that you're getting out of it.

01:29:55.000 You know, what's it good for?

01:29:57.000 Are you able to extract any valuable information for yourself or for other people?

01:30:05.000 Now, when you first started doing these studies, how did you devise a protocol?

01:30:11.000 How did you figure out what the dosage was going to be for these people?

01:30:16.000 How many times they were going to do it?

01:30:18.000 Did you have, like, test subjects?

01:30:21.000 Or, I mean, pre-test subjects?

01:30:23.000 Like, how did you devise a protocol?

01:30:28.000 Well, the main person who was advising me was a pediatric neuroendocrinologist.

01:30:37.000 Whoa.

01:30:38.000 A pediatric neuroendocrinologist.

01:30:41.000 And the research I had done as a fellow and with the melatonin work was what you would call clinical neuroendocrinology.

01:30:50.000 So, in a way, my study with DMT was using DMT as a neuroendocrinological probe.

01:30:57.000 It was a psychopharmacology study.

01:31:00.000 Oh, wow.

01:31:01.000 Yeah, you know, so it's what's called dose response work.

01:31:06.000 You give small doses, medium doses, and you give big doses.

01:31:10.000 You need to characterize as many of the effects as you can.

01:31:13.000 Now, you did it intravenously, which I thought was really fascinating because it extends the experience, right?

01:31:22.000 Well, the majority of previous studies gave it intramuscularly.

01:31:26.000 Really?

01:31:27.000 Yeah, the Hungarian studies, Budapest, Steven Jara.

01:31:31.000 What is that like?

01:31:32.000 Well, good question.

01:31:33.000 And I did bring in someone to receive a test dose of the intramuscular.

01:31:38.000 Did you have a hard time finding somebody for that?

01:31:40.000 Man, my friends were lining up.

01:31:44.000 Of course.

01:31:46.000 Yeah.

01:31:46.000 Of course.

01:31:47.000 Yeah.

01:31:48.000 Well, so Terrence McKenna and I developed the idea behind the DMT study in the first place, like a couple of years before it actually got approved.

01:31:55.000 I didn't know what approach to take.

01:31:58.000 And I went over to his place one day.

01:32:00.000 This was the summer of 88. And we just, you know, brainstormed the entire afternoon up in his loft.

01:32:06.000 And we decided, or what we concluded was that we would, or, you know, that I would apply for funding from the War on Drugs.

01:32:19.000 That would be the best way to study DMT, is to get money from the war on drugs.

01:32:27.000 How did you phrase it?

01:32:29.000 Well, instead of saying that DMT is an amazingly cool drug...

01:32:36.000 We said DMT is an amazingly weird drug or potentially dangerous, might be involved in psychosis.

01:32:43.000 People are abusing it.

01:32:44.000 So the things that we proposed were coming at it from the perspective of public health.

01:32:56.000 As opposed to spirituality or psychotherapy.

01:32:59.000 The more we understand about DMT, the more we'll understand about LSD, maybe more about psychosis and schizophrenia.

01:33:07.000 So it was phrased or looked at as a series of experiments with public health implications.

01:33:18.000 There's something seriously cool about getting the first psychedelic studies funded by the war on drugs.

01:33:28.000 I mean, it was an amazing stretch there.

01:33:31.000 It must have felt amazing that you pulled it off.

01:33:34.000 Well, my volunteers and I every so often would look at each other and say, this isn't really happening, is it?

01:33:42.000 Yeah, so, yeah, it was unbelievable.

01:33:45.000 That's pretty unbelievable, pretty awesome.

01:33:47.000 It was just occurring in complete isolation, too, at the University Hospital in Albuquerque in the early 90s.

01:33:54.000 I mean, nobody knew what we were doing.

01:33:55.000 So, how did you devise the dosage?

01:33:59.000 Like, when you're doing it intravenously, how did you figure out how much to give people to have the maximum experience?

01:34:07.000 What did you do?

01:34:08.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:34:10.000 Good question.

01:34:11.000 Let me pee again, yeah.

01:34:13.000 We'll be right back, ladies and gentlemen, with the answer to that question.

01:34:18.000 We left off with how you figured out what dose to give people to have this experience.

01:34:27.000 Well, the one person that we gave intramuscular DMT to described it as much slower than the smoked and wasn't as intense.

01:34:37.000 So because we wanted to replicate the smoked experience, we then switched to IV. So the standard intramuscular dose is a milligram per kilogram.

01:34:49.000 Was there a reason why you didn't just have the people smoke it?

01:34:59.000 Smoking would have been complicated.

01:35:02.000 It is hard to get as much DMT into your lungs as you need for a breakthrough through smoking.

01:35:07.000 Right.

01:35:07.000 From coughing or the room starts breaking up and you're kind of losing your orientation.

01:35:13.000 There'd be combustion products that would be, you know, not DMT, that people were smoking.

01:35:19.000 And we didn't really want to expose people's lungs to chemicals unless we needed to.

01:35:25.000 So we switched to the IV. You know, the IV method of giving any drug is the fastest, even faster than smoking or snorting.

01:35:38.000 Smoking?

01:35:38.000 Oh, I didn't know you can snort it.

01:35:40.000 Do people snort it?

01:35:41.000 People, well, I mean...

01:35:43.000 Of course they do.

01:35:43.000 Why would I even ask that?

01:35:44.000 Yeah, and you can snort other drugs, you know, like any kind of drug, for example.

01:35:48.000 I've never just never thought anybody would snort DMT. Well, if you make a water-soluble salt of DMT, you can snort it.

01:35:59.000 Oh, okay.

01:36:00.000 Yeah, you smoke the freebase.

01:36:02.000 But you can't crush the freebase up and snort that, could you?

01:36:07.000 I don't think it would work.

01:36:08.000 It might.

01:36:10.000 But when people do snort it, it's the water-soluble form.

01:36:16.000 What is that stuff that they do where it's like a snuff that they blow up each other's noses and it does have psychedelic chemicals in it?

01:36:23.000 They think it might even have DMT in it, right?

01:36:25.000 Right.

01:36:26.000 Yeah, the Amazonian psychedelic snuffs.

01:36:29.000 Yeah.

01:36:30.000 Yeah, they contain DMT, 5-methoxy, DMT, bufotanine, and some obscure tryptamines.

01:36:38.000 And it's supposed to be horrendous, right?

01:36:40.000 You shoot it up the nose and it's just disgusting.

01:36:43.000 Yeah, you've seen those black and white pictures that they took in the Amazon in the 40s and 50s.

01:36:48.000 Could you imagine getting a blast that stuff up your nose?

01:36:52.000 Not really.

01:36:53.000 But if that was the only way you could get to reach the spirit realm, you'd do it.

01:36:57.000 Right, right.

01:36:58.000 I mean, people do a lot of extreme things to attain spiritual experience.

01:37:03.000 How much have you paid attention to Graham Hancock's work on the Amazon, how they're rediscovering these civilizations, and also the use of, there's a bunch of different researchers using LIDAR down there.

01:37:18.000 Right.

01:37:19.000 We're going over the jungle and they're finding grids and the cities that used to exist down there.

01:37:25.000 And Graham thinks that there might have been cities with like millions of people in them that existed before the Europeans came through and gave them all smallpox.

01:37:35.000 Well, yeah, you know, Graham's been really important in making people aware of the role of psychedelics, you know, across all cultures, across time.

01:37:46.000 I got Graham on the podcast.

01:37:47.000 I got him high.

01:37:48.000 He hadn't been high in like two years.

01:37:49.000 Yeah, he told me that.

01:37:52.000 He, you know, blames you now.

01:37:54.000 I would go, just don't go so hard.

01:37:56.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:37:57.000 He's going too hard.

01:37:59.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:38:00.000 He was really proud of himself and then he got stoned in your show.

01:38:03.000 But then he got stoned and he was just on fire.

01:38:05.000 The moment he got stoned, just breaking down how...

01:38:09.000 I think essentially we were talking about the dating of civilizations, about how arrogant people are with their initial assertions of what the origins or the timeline of civilization is.

01:38:22.000 He's like, the timeline of civilization is still a mystery.

01:38:26.000 And they're pushing it further and further back with every discovery.

01:38:30.000 And they keep finding stuff that pushes it further back, further back, further back.

01:38:35.000 They're finding complex stone structures that are 14,000 years old.

01:38:39.000 12,000 years old.

01:38:40.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:38:41.000 Like Gobekli Tepe, 12,000 years old. 0.92

01:38:43.000 That's a long fucking time ago. 0.87

01:38:44.000 And they keep finding all this evidence of human beings being older than we thought they were. 0.95

01:38:52.000 You know, I think that this Younger Dryas impact theory is probably the best theory when it comes to explaining why we're so wacky.

01:39:01.000 I think we had once achieved some very high level of sophistication.

01:39:06.000 You know, I think that's what explains ancient Egypt.

01:39:08.000 That's what explains some spectacular construction methods that were from thousands and thousands of years ago. 0.97

01:39:14.000 And then we got wiped out almost to the point of extinction and then we rebuilt back again with a bunch of shit that we didn't understand and a bunch of people that came from really smart people but had been living like fucking barbarians for the last couple hundred years. 0.98

01:39:26.000 That's what I think happened. 0.99

01:39:27.000 Yeah.

01:39:28.000 I wonder, well, are you familiar with Julian James and the Bicameral Mind? 1.00

01:39:34.000 I've heard that name and I've heard of that book.

01:39:39.000 Yeah.

01:39:39.000 So, you know, James believed that up until a certain point that it was a common phenomenon for people to hear a spoken voice.

01:39:50.000 That's right.

01:39:51.000 And that's where people got their information was from the spoken voice.

01:39:54.000 Could you imagine if that's really how people used to interact with God?

01:40:00.000 That God used to just talk to you?

01:40:03.000 Well, yeah, yeah.

01:40:04.000 His theory proposes that the prophets were the transition between the bicameral mind being common and it kind of dying off.

01:40:15.000 There's no hard evidence of the brain communicating differently back then because it disappears quickly, soft tissue.

01:40:28.000 What do you think of Terence McKenna and Dennis McKenna's theory about monkeys eating psilocybin?

01:40:36.000 Does that make sense to you?

01:40:38.000 It makes sense, yeah.

01:40:40.000 If you don't, tell people what the idea is that we The grasslands, the rainforest receded into grasslands, and the monkeys came down.

01:40:52.000 They started experimenting with new food, and they found psilocybin, right?

01:40:56.000 Right.

01:40:57.000 Yeah, but, well, you know, these compounds, you know, psychedelics stimulate the growth of new neurons, neurogenesis, and also stimulate the complexity and number of connections among neurons.

01:41:12.000 That's called neuroplasticity.

01:41:14.000 So it could be that there were neuroplastic effects in the monkeys that were using psilocybin.

01:41:21.000 That would be an explanation of how there would be an evolution of consciousness which would be passed on and continue.

01:41:35.000 You know, one of the big fun theories that people like to talk about when it comes to human beings, people that are like alien enthusiasts, they like to say, well, human beings are the product.

01:41:56.000 Yeah, we can get some of that.

01:42:00.000 But the question is...

01:42:03.000 Maybe that's what mushrooms are. 0.82

01:42:05.000 Maybe that's what that means.

01:42:07.000 You're consuming something that gives you this entirely early experience.

01:42:11.000 It's causing neuroplasticity.

01:42:13.000 It's causing neurogenesis.

01:42:15.000 It's making you more creative.

01:42:17.000 It makes you have a better ability to see motion, right?

01:42:24.000 Doesn't it aid in visual acuity?

01:42:26.000 Acuity, it does.

01:42:28.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:42:28.000 And your sensitivity.

01:42:30.000 And the ability to detect parallel lines moving.

01:42:32.000 There was someone who did that study.

01:42:34.000 There was a straight scientist who did this study where they gave people psilocybin and they showed them parallel lines as they were moving off parallel, that the people on psilocybin could see it way quicker.

01:42:48.000 Yeah.

01:42:49.000 Well, the question is whether those traits can be passed on to the next generation.

01:42:56.000 That's what's called Lamarckian transmission.

01:43:00.000 It's called epigenetics now.

01:43:03.000 Activation of certain genes can be passed on hereditarily.

01:43:10.000 So it could be that the increase in neuroplasticity and neurogenesis is passed on.

01:43:21.000 Well, something happened to people, right?

01:43:24.000 I mean, we'll keep you off camera.

01:43:27.000 Yeah, keep me off camera.

01:43:28.000 Keep them off camera, Jamie.

01:43:30.000 Something happened to people because the human brain doubled over a period of a couple million years, which coincides with the timeline that McKenna proposed that these rainforests were starting to recede during that same time period,

01:43:50.000 right?

01:43:52.000 Yeah, you kind of have to wonder what the DMT system in the brain was doing at that time, too.

01:43:58.000 I wonder if that was a time of rapid growth of the DMT neurotransmitter system.

01:44:04.000 Yeah, and what was the natural state of DMT back then, too?

01:44:10.000 I mean, one of the things that I would imagine is that people who have to live like a very You know, you're out there in tents.

01:44:25.000 You're trying to protect your children from predators.

01:44:27.000 You're living this, like, very tuned in to everything around your life.

01:44:34.000 It's probably a very, very different experience in terms of just how they perceive the world itself, how they perceive reality.

01:44:42.000 Because one of the things that kind of has to happen as things get safer and easier, you get less of a concern and a fear of danger.

01:44:54.000 And so your ability to detect danger kind of atrophies.

01:44:59.000 Whereas someone who lived at the beginning of human civilization would have been like just a super intelligent animal almost.

01:45:08.000 Right.

01:45:09.000 You know, like just tuned into everything. 0.99

01:45:11.000 Just like animals, like if you snap a twig near a deer and their heads spin around, you know, bear smells you from fucking three football fields away. 0.98

01:45:21.000 That's normal for them. 0.96

01:45:23.000 We maybe had like a better sense of the world around us.

01:45:28.000 I mean, think about how bad our senses are.

01:45:30.000 Our noses are terrible.

01:45:31.000 They barely do anything.

01:45:33.000 Like maybe they were like really good at one point in time and we just didn't need them anymore and it atrophied.

01:45:38.000 You know, if you had a wolf that was near you and you could smell it, You know, that would be a very good thing to stay alive.

01:45:44.000 Well, they can smell you.

01:45:46.000 I bet you used to be able to smell them, but we've been living in houses for so long.

01:45:51.000 Uh-huh.

01:45:51.000 Well, the brain, the olfactory centers in the brain are the oldest.

01:45:55.000 You know, perceptual centers in the brain.

01:45:58.000 Really?

01:45:58.000 Yeah, so obviously...

01:45:59.000 They can smell before they can see?

01:46:04.000 Uh...

01:46:04.000 If they're the oldest?

01:46:05.000 Well, if you smell things, it'll stimulate memories.

01:46:10.000 Yeah.

01:46:10.000 You know, so that's not the case with other senses.

01:46:14.000 There's a connection between the olfactory sense and memory, which is the strongest among the senses, which indicates that our sense of smell once was much more important.

01:46:25.000 Well, it had to be.

01:46:26.000 If we didn't have doors...

01:46:28.000 It would have to be.

01:46:29.000 It'd have to be.

01:46:30.000 Right.

01:46:30.000 You'd have to be able to smell things, hear things.

01:46:33.000 You'd have to be able to feel the vibrations on the ground of something running at you so you can get a jump at it.

01:46:39.000 I mean, that environment, if you introduced psilocybin to that environment, And that's what created human beings.

01:46:47.000 That is a fascinating theory.

01:46:49.000 And the thing is, we know psilocybin is real, and we know its effects are profound.

01:46:56.000 And so to dismiss it as being what happened, I don't think that's wise.

01:47:02.000 I think there's a problem with what mushrooms are. 0.98

01:47:04.000 It's like people think they're so silly. 0.97

01:47:07.000 I'm tripping on mushrooms. 0.99

01:47:09.000 You're doing something you shouldn't be doing.

01:47:11.000 Like, oh, look at Todd.

01:47:12.000 He's over there on mushrooms.

01:47:14.000 But what it probably is is some kind of a chemical gateway to some either state of mind or some other dimension.

01:47:24.000 And if you gave that to some savage proto-hominid that was just living naked, running away from jaguars all the time, and this thing starts tripping and starts figuring out tools and starts figuring out how to make sounds to indicate different animals.

01:47:44.000 Well, you know, it's in a direction.

01:47:48.000 The effect of the psilocybin is in a direction.

01:47:52.000 So that's an interesting thing to consider.

01:47:55.000 In a direction?

01:47:55.000 In what way?

01:47:56.000 What do you mean by that?

01:47:57.000 Well, towards increasing civilization, towards language, towards love as opposed to hatred, let's say.

01:48:04.000 Yeah, it would help them form tribes, especially if they were all doing it together.

01:48:10.000 Well, so you'd then argue for an evolutionary advantage for hominids that were taking psilocybin.

01:48:18.000 It gave them an advantage.

01:48:21.000 At what point in time do you think people forgot that psilocybin was beneficial?

01:48:27.000 And what were the steps to get people to not have access to that information anymore?

01:48:34.000 Not be aware of how long, for an enormous history, people were consuming them.

01:48:42.000 How long?

01:48:44.000 Well, I mean, there's turf.

01:48:48.000 You know, so look at the major religious institutions, and they're stamping out psychedelic use in the indigenous world.

01:49:03.000 If you could stamp out the estates, then you kind of have the hegemony over those states or you can promise them if you pray or if you're good or if you do various things.

01:49:16.000 You know, so there's politics involved competing groups, those that used mushrooms probably and those who didn't.

01:49:23.000 There would probably be some climactic and environmental ones too that the range of the mushrooms was shrinking.

01:49:30.000 Hmm, right like some sort of climate change and they forced out of areas that used to grow them all the time So they stopped using them and they start taking alcohol and other things It's just since we know so much about them today in You know like in comparison to what people knew in the 50s and 60s like publicly know so much more about them So there's so much real scientific data out there.

01:49:55.000 There's so many real Real intelligent people who are enthusiasts of them that can kind of explain the benefits of it.

01:50:04.000 It's just amazing that it's taken so long to just get one state to make it legal.

01:50:11.000 Well, you know, what would you like to see the future of psychedelic use?

01:50:17.000 Would you want everybody to be tripping in the best of all possible worlds like Tim Leary, Ken Kesey, just everybody?

01:50:24.000 Those guys went too hard.

01:50:26.000 I think they scared a lot of people.

01:50:28.000 I think those guys, they were so tuned, you know, tune out or drop out.

01:50:34.000 They were so culty, you know, and they had a wild bus and they threw wild parties. 0.84

01:50:39.000 I think a lot of people got freaked out by civilization eroding before their eyes and their kids turning into useless hippies.

01:50:48.000 Like, there was a lot of fear that was attached to that.

01:50:51.000 I think it would be different today if you talked about psychedelics because way more people have had psychedelic experiences, I think, per capita.

01:50:59.000 I know of many, many people who are very happy microdosing psilocybin.

01:51:08.000 They just take a little bit, take a little bit here and there, and they really enjoy doing it that way.

01:51:13.000 You know, I wonder, I mean, is there some yearning for utopia?

01:51:18.000 There is always going to be that, right?

01:51:21.000 But there's also going to be an understanding that whatever that stuff does, it seems to encourage you to behave and think in a way that's better for everybody.

01:51:31.000 It seems to want to encourage you to think kindly, to be nicer to people, to connect more with the earth.

01:51:40.000 It tunes you into a very, for lack of a better term, positive frequency.

01:51:48.000 But then again, the Vikings took them and they slaughtered people. 0.59

01:51:50.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:51:51.000 I think it's, you know, I think they...

01:51:54.000 There's that too.

01:51:54.000 Yeah, yeah.

01:51:55.000 You don't want to gild the lily.

01:51:58.000 You don't want to gild the lily?

01:52:00.000 What does that mean?

01:52:00.000 Gild the lily.

01:52:01.000 Make something beautiful even more beautiful.

01:52:03.000 Oh.

01:52:04.000 Yeah.

01:52:09.000 Yeah, I don't think they should be illegal, for sure.

01:52:15.000 I do think that to just randomly give them out to everybody is irresponsible.

01:52:21.000 I think there are a lot of people out there that are having a really hard time with regular reality and that something as profound as a psychedelic experience could fucking blow a fuse.

01:52:31.000 But I don't want to be the person that can tell a person what they can and can't do.

01:52:35.000 I think that's part of the problem with it all.

01:52:37.000 Is that they can tell you, you can't try something.

01:52:39.000 Or me, I can't try something.

01:52:41.000 And they're just like us.

01:52:42.000 They're just a person.

01:52:43.000 They're just a person of similar age.

01:52:45.000 And they're going to tell you, you can't do something.

01:52:46.000 I'm like, you don't even know.

01:52:48.000 You've never even done it. 0.99

01:52:49.000 This is a dumb conversation we're having.

01:52:51.000 And you're going to make it so that I can get locked in a cage because I want to do something that you haven't done. 0.96

01:52:57.000 Well, the chairman of our ethics board at the university, when I presented these studies to him for the informed consent and what you would be doing with people, you know, I bumped into him one day and said, man, I'm so grateful for how open-minded you are about this.

01:53:14.000 And he said, I'm not God.

01:53:16.000 We're not playing God.

01:53:17.000 I thought that was a great line.

01:53:19.000 He was a libertarian, actually.

01:53:21.000 And he figured people should do what they want to do and just give informed consent, educate people, let them know what they're getting into and let them decide.

01:53:33.000 I think it's way more dangerous to have people uneducated about the risks of certain drugs and the importance of understanding the dosage and the purity than it is to tell people not to do drugs.

01:53:46.000 I think that telling people to not do drugs and you're gonna arrest them if they do drugs, that's unrealistic.

01:53:51.000 People have done drugs since the beginning of time.

01:53:53.000 I think the realistic approach is to fucking educate people and to stop all this nonsense about what is and isn't allowed that a grown adult, a person who has never done it, can tell you, don't do that. 0.74

01:54:06.000 I don't want you to do something that's been around for thousands and thousands of years and has a rich human history of usage, like psilocybin. 0.97

01:54:17.000 That's not the good guy.

01:54:19.000 The guy telling you he's going to put you in a cage for mushrooms is never the good guy.

01:54:24.000 Well, I think there need to be places where people can trip who want to trip for any number of reasons.

01:54:31.000 Yeah.

01:54:31.000 I don't know what you'd call them.

01:54:33.000 They might be churches.

01:54:34.000 They might be retreat centers.

01:54:36.000 There might be...

01:54:37.000 I don't think the government should be involved in this, is what my point is.

01:54:40.000 I don't think they should have any say.

01:54:42.000 I don't think this has anything to do with you.

01:54:44.000 Just stay out of the way.

01:54:46.000 You don't even know what it is.

01:54:47.000 And if you want to do it, it'll make you a better person.

01:54:50.000 But don't tell people that you're going to arrest them.

01:54:53.000 There's some people that are still pushing back against...

01:54:56.000 The idea of there being recreational use of psilocybin.

01:54:59.000 Meanwhile, it's helping so many soldiers.

01:55:00.000 So many soldiers that have come back with PTSD. Psilocybin research is very promising.

01:55:05.000 I know.

01:55:06.000 It's impressive.

01:55:06.000 It's very impressive.

01:55:08.000 MDMA as well.

01:55:09.000 Yeah, MDMA as well.

01:55:10.000 The guy who drove me over this morning as a vet was talking about some of his friends who have done psychedelic therapy and they're like back to normal.

01:55:21.000 Yeah, and more than one different type of psychedelic.

01:55:24.000 I've also heard guys doing Ibogaine and then 5-MeO.

01:55:29.000 I've heard that there's some real success in doing that, but I've talked to people personally that have had psychedelic experiences that have just freed them of so much that they had from combat duty.

01:55:44.000 Well, I mean, we need to do more research, right?

01:55:46.000 Right.

01:55:46.000 Because once we have more research data, we can say, this helps, and it'll really spread out to, you know, the rest of the country as opposed to just within the research communities.

01:55:57.000 My friend Neil Brennan is a very funny stand-up comedian, and he lives in LA, and he's always had real problems with depression.

01:56:04.000 And he tried a bunch of different stuff.

01:56:06.000 He tried ketamine therapy, magnet therapy, tried a bunch of stuff.

01:56:09.000 And then he went and he did ayahuasca, and he did ayahuasca a bunch of times.

01:56:15.000 Difference in his personality. 0.93

01:56:17.000 It's like immediately he had abandoned 80% of his anxiety and fucking tension and whatever he had that might have been weighing him down. 0.68

01:56:27.000 And he was like, he's permanently happier. 0.88

01:56:31.000 This is a crazy thing for someone to say.

01:56:34.000 I took psychedelic drugs and they made me permanently happier.

01:56:38.000 What do you think about how psychedelics seem to be panaceas?

01:56:43.000 They seem to do everything.

01:56:45.000 Well, do they though?

01:56:47.000 Because if they make you schizophrenic, that's not good.

01:56:51.000 Well, I mean...

01:56:53.000 They could for some people.

01:56:56.000 I don't know what they're doing.

01:56:59.000 I do think they could be panaceas.

01:57:01.000 What you're saying is right.

01:57:02.000 They could be panaceas for a lot of people.

01:57:04.000 If you look at the literature, I mean, eating disorders, anxiety, depression, OCD, alcohol, cigarettes.

01:57:14.000 Oh, yeah, in that way.

01:57:15.000 Yeah.

01:57:16.000 For everything.

01:57:18.000 Improved metaphysical views, make your meditation better.

01:57:23.000 So in the proper set and the proper setting, they do seem to be like panaceas.

01:57:30.000 They heal all.

01:57:32.000 Doesn't it seem like with every medication, and even if you look at psychedelics as being a medication, every medication is going to have side effects?

01:57:40.000 It seems like there's no one thing that, I mean, people die from aspirin every year, you know?

01:57:47.000 Well, the stronger the effects, the more side effects there are going to be.

01:57:51.000 You can't have one without the other, really.

01:57:53.000 And that's just because of biological diversity, just because people are different and their bodies react differently to things?

01:58:01.000 Well, the intensity of the pharmacological effect If it's really like, you know, chemotherapy.

01:58:06.000 I mean, it can end the cancer, but it's just, you know, rife with, you know, toxicity, too.

01:58:14.000 I'm not sure why that would be the case.

01:58:16.000 I think that's kind of just how things are in pharmacology.

01:58:20.000 When you think about psilocybin as like a panacea to all these psychological disorders, what do you think is happening?

01:58:26.000 Why do you think it's helping people quit drinking, quit smoking cigarettes, quit doing, you know, gambling?

01:58:32.000 There's a lot of different things it seems to be helping people with.

01:58:36.000 Well, one possibility is that suggestibility increases on psychedelics.

01:58:42.000 You're more hypnotizable.

01:58:43.000 Oh, so someone can program you like a Manchurian candidate.

01:58:47.000 Or a researcher or a therapist who says get better.

01:58:51.000 Right.

01:58:52.000 So hopefully you got a good person programming you.

01:58:54.000 Could you imagine if that's how we can create...

01:58:57.000 Well, the Manchurian Candidate story is interesting.

01:59:01.000 Because the belief was you could just turn an everyday individual into an assassin.

01:59:08.000 But you had to have those tendencies in the first place, either conscious or unconscious.

01:59:12.000 If you were a peacenik, like a really peace-loving person, no matter how much LSD they gave you, it's unlikely that you would become an assassin.

01:59:22.000 Yeah, they had to figure that out, though.

01:59:23.000 And the way they did is just experiment on people.

01:59:25.000 Experiment on people.

01:59:27.000 Right.

01:59:27.000 Just the actual real history of MKUltra and all the different things they've done, that's 100% not conspiracy theory, actual real history.

01:59:38.000 It's true.

01:59:39.000 That stuff is bonkers.

01:59:41.000 Yeah, I've looked into that a bit.

01:59:42.000 I even tracked down the old MKUltra files.

01:59:47.000 They're quite heavily redacted.

01:59:49.000 You must read Tom O'Neil's Chaos. 0.95

01:59:51.000 It is all about MKUltra and Charles Manson, and it is fucking wild.

01:59:59.000 It's a guy who studied this case, the Manson family case, for 20 years. 0.58

02:00:04.000 He started off writing an article about it, but as he dove deep into the case, it was so nuts that he just, it was so many layers to it that he refused to stop, and he kept going deeper and deeper, and he'd missed his deadline, and,

02:00:20.000 like, he had a book deal, and he had to give the money back, like, chaos. 0.96

02:00:24.000 Twenty fucking years of this! 0.95

02:00:25.000 And at the end of it, he's got, like, very convincing arguments that Charles Manson was a part of MKUltra. 0.99

02:00:34.000 Charles Manson, that they gave him acid when he was in prison and that they supplied him with acid when he was out there teaching hippies to be fucking hit people. 0.78

02:00:44.000 Well, I think the case of Charles Manson is an important one. 0.84

02:00:47.000 It's a case that I try to bring up in every podcast, which is don't forget Charles Manson.

02:00:54.000 When it comes to acid.

02:00:55.000 When it comes to psychedelics.

02:00:57.000 Yeah.

02:00:57.000 Because the drugs increase suggestibility, and depending on your environment, you'll be more suggestible to what's around you.

02:01:05.000 Right, and if you've got someone who's already a charismatic con man, and you catch him in prison and dose him up with acid, and you run a study, I mean, what better person to run a study on than a charismatic, lifelong criminal, you know, and just dose him up with acid and give him a sense of delusions of grandeur,

02:01:24.000 and then also, every time he gets arrested, get him out of jail.

02:01:27.000 And that's what the book is about.

02:01:28.000 It's a very strange story.

02:01:30.000 The book is wild, because Tom is, like, it's very thoroughly researched.

02:01:35.000 Everything lines up.

02:01:37.000 And so he's taking the angle from the MKUltra connection.

02:01:42.000 Yeah, he thinks that that was a part of the project, and that where he used to get his acid from was the same place where the CIA was running the health clinic.

02:01:55.000 There's a Haight-Ashbury clinic. 0.98

02:01:57.000 The Haight-Ashbury clinic was being run by the fucking CIA. They were doing Operation Midnight Climax there, too, where they had brothels, and they would secretly dose the Johns up at the LSD and study them. 0.98

02:02:08.000 I mean, they were doing wild shit. 0.98

02:02:10.000 And they were also visiting people like Charles Manson in prison. 0.99

02:02:14.000 And this is the thing that he makes this argument that they got to Manson in prison and most likely were dosing him up with acid and teaching him how to turn people into your minions.

02:02:26.000 Yeah.

02:02:26.000 The last Manson book I have been reading is The Family.

02:02:31.000 Oh.

02:02:32.000 What's that about?

02:02:33.000 It's about his group.

02:02:34.000 It's about Manson and his group.

02:02:37.000 He goes into a lot of details of Manson's growing up.

02:02:41.000 And there is talk of LSD, obviously, with his group and beforehand some.

02:02:48.000 But I don't remember him mentioning the MKUltra connection.

02:02:51.000 That must be pretty recent.

02:02:53.000 Well, this was also their argument.

02:02:54.000 How's he getting all this acid?

02:02:56.000 How's he getting all that acid?

02:02:57.000 How's he getting all that acid?

02:02:58.000 And also, how come he keeps getting arrested and let out?

02:03:01.000 And how come the sheriffs who arrest him say that it's above their pay grade?

02:03:05.000 And they were told it's above their pay grade.

02:03:07.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:03:07.000 And they have to let out this fucking psychopath who's supposed to be in fucking jail. 1.00

02:03:12.000 You know, he broke his parole. 1.00

02:03:14.000 Yeah.

02:03:15.000 That's quite a seedy chapter in psychedelic work.

02:03:20.000 It is a really wild book because it's so thoughtfully and thoroughly done.

02:03:26.000 I mean, it took 20 years for him to do it.

02:03:28.000 But that was an absolute part of the history of this country, is that they performed tests on unwilling subjects.

02:03:38.000 They just dosed people up and studied them.

02:03:41.000 Yeah.

02:03:42.000 Well, that's the reason now you need what's like an airtight informed consent.

02:03:47.000 You know, they did that with Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. 0.85

02:03:50.000 He was a part of the Harvard studies.

02:03:53.000 They're giving him LSD. Yeah, you know, so it isn't that you just take LSD and you're cool?

02:04:00.000 No, not at all.

02:04:01.000 Not at all.

02:04:02.000 I mean, I think we can't stress that enough, right?

02:04:05.000 That's the point I make in my book, actually, over and over, is, you know, you should know what you're getting into and prepare yourself.

02:04:11.000 And this is the second book, not Joseph Levy Escapes Death.

02:04:14.000 No, not that one.

02:04:15.000 But the psychedelic handbook.

02:04:17.000 Yeah, yeah, just released today.

02:04:19.000 Yeah, the longest chapter in there is How to Trip.

02:04:21.000 It says, A Practical Guide to Psilocybin, LSD, Ketamine, MDMA, and DMT, Ayahuasca, Rick Strassman, MD, available now.

02:04:30.000 Available now.

02:04:31.000 Did you do the audio for this?

02:04:33.000 Not yet.

02:04:35.000 Are you going to do it?

02:04:35.000 You should do it in your own voice.

02:04:37.000 Come on, man.

02:04:38.000 Yeah, it just came out today.

02:04:43.000 I think people would like to hear it in your own voice if you're willing to do it.

02:04:48.000 It's a lot of time, though.

02:04:50.000 You know, quite a few authors do that.

02:04:52.000 Yes.

02:04:52.000 I like it when they do it.

02:04:54.000 I don't like it when someone reads somebody else's stuff.

02:04:57.000 Especially if someone is good at talking.

02:04:59.000 Yeah, I've never considered it.

02:05:01.000 Well, that's not true.

02:05:02.000 I've considered it, but quickly dismissed it.

02:05:06.000 But I will think about it some more.

02:05:07.000 Yeah, you should, because I think people would enjoy it if it was in your words, with your voice.

02:05:14.000 It was a fun book to write.

02:05:16.000 I mean, I had to really bone up on the latest research.

02:05:19.000 I mean, I thought I was current, but man, the last couple of years, it's really hard to keep up.

02:05:27.000 When you did your very first patients, did anything surprise you?

02:05:34.000 Like when you put the very first people under, had any of them had any psychedelic experience?

02:05:40.000 Yeah, the group had to be psychedelic-experienced.

02:05:43.000 I only studied psychedelic-experienced people.

02:05:45.000 That's good risk.

02:05:47.000 Yeah, it was for a couple of reasons.

02:05:49.000 One was the risk that if they had a hard time, they would know how to get back.

02:05:56.000 And also, I figured they would be giving better descriptions.

02:06:00.000 Of the experience.

02:06:02.000 Right.

02:06:03.000 They wouldn't be so blown away.

02:06:04.000 Right.

02:06:05.000 And the third reason was that if they started abusing psychedelics, they couldn't blame me because they had already been dating them.

02:06:13.000 Oh, that's very clever.

02:06:14.000 Yeah.

02:06:15.000 Yeah, you have to do it that way, though.

02:06:16.000 Yeah, it was a real straight-on study.

02:06:19.000 I mean, we really made sure to anticipate any objections.

02:06:23.000 Did anything surprise you about the first batch of test subjects and their experiences?

02:06:30.000 Yeah.

02:06:33.000 The first intravenous studies we did, we overdosed two people.

02:06:38.000 What?

02:06:38.000 Yeah, we gave them too much DMT. Oh, no.

02:06:41.000 Yeah.

02:06:42.000 Well, we started off at this dose and that dose, and I called FDA and said we're not quite there.

02:06:47.000 And they said, well, you can go up, you know, two or three times.

02:06:50.000 And I figured, well, you know, things are pretty easy so far.

02:06:53.000 Let's go up three times.

02:06:54.000 And it was way too much.

02:06:56.000 Both people just couldn't remember anything.

02:06:58.000 Really?

02:06:59.000 Yeah, so we figured, okay, let's...

02:07:01.000 How long did it last?

02:07:02.000 You know, half hour, 20 minutes.

02:07:04.000 And what did they say it was like?

02:07:06.000 One guy described it as being thrown off a boat in the middle of a storm and ending up in the water and just being thrashed about, completely helpless and terrified.

02:07:19.000 And the other guy, he just, like, retched.

02:07:27.000 Yeah, and he didn't remember much, so we figured that was too much.

02:07:31.000 Yeah, so then we settled on a pretty stiff dose.

02:07:34.000 It's the biggest dose still in use, or smaller doses are being used now currently.

02:07:42.000 So far, nobody has gotten up to the high doses of DMT that we gave.

02:07:48.000 And what you were giving them, was the experience uniform that they described?

02:07:52.000 Mostly.

02:07:53.000 Really?

02:07:54.000 Yeah, mostly.

02:07:55.000 One person was completely unresponsive to it.

02:07:58.000 Well, like your story of THC. Can I ask you one more question?

02:08:04.000 Were they doing it simultaneously?

02:08:06.000 No, everybody was just like...

02:08:08.000 Did you do any where they did it simultaneously?

02:08:10.000 No.

02:08:11.000 I would be really interested in that.

02:08:13.000 Why?

02:08:14.000 Because of the telepathine thing.

02:08:18.000 Before they figured out telepathine was harming, they would kind of call it telepathine because they had shared group telepathic experiences.

02:08:27.000 Yeah.

02:08:28.000 Well, do you know David Luke in Birmingham?

02:08:31.000 Well, someplace in England.

02:08:33.000 David Luke is a parapsychologist who's very interested in psychedelics, and he's done ESP studies with psychedelics.

02:08:47.000 Yeah, and he's finding some promising data that ESP telepathy is enhanced when both people are stoned.

02:08:59.000 Because I've heard of people having conjoined experiences on ayahuasca before.

02:09:04.000 I've heard of people having experiences like they independently verify with other people that they were kind of in the same place.

02:09:11.000 As far as what they saw.

02:09:13.000 That description of my first experience smoking hash, it was a shared hallucination.

02:09:21.000 Yeah, we both were seeing the same thing.

02:09:23.000 Oh, do you see that?

02:09:24.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:09:25.000 We'd expand on it.

02:09:27.000 Yeah.

02:09:28.000 It's just, what is it?

02:09:30.000 What is that?

02:09:31.000 What are those group minds, those weird sinking of minds?

02:09:35.000 Like, what does that mean?

02:09:35.000 What's happening there?

02:09:37.000 Well, it seems that everything is contained in a field, and you can tap into that field in certain circumstances.

02:09:46.000 So including your thoughts and my thoughts, and then we're all just, we can link up.

02:09:51.000 Yeah.

02:09:52.000 My favorite science fiction writer is an Englishman whose name is Stapleton.

02:09:58.000 And he wrote a book about 19 species of humans that evolved over 2 billion years.

02:10:08.000 And the final species is able to experience population-wide telepathy.

02:10:15.000 Oh, wow.

02:10:16.000 Every 500 years or so, when things are just dialed in, and it would be what people would be looking for, these people would live 35,000 years because that was the necessary time to attain all of the knowledge that was out there.

02:10:33.000 And they would spend all their time otherwise trying to connect on a worldwide level.

02:10:41.000 And it was every 500 years, every 1000 years.

02:10:43.000 It was a rare event, but everyone would sing and dance in that space.

02:10:47.000 What do you think about the possibility of some sort of a technologically inspired or driven Group telepathy like what I would worry about with stuff like that is it being co-opted and someone being able to control it but if somehow or another they released one of these things that you put on your head that allowed everybody to communicate in a universal language with everybody like a language that everybody

02:11:18.000 picks up pretty easily because you're getting downloaded information much quicker because you actually have some sort of a weird implant in your brain and I think we would need to be wiser, you know, for it not to go south.

02:11:30.000 I think it's going south.

02:11:32.000 And I think that's where people are going. 1.00

02:11:33.000 I think we are sliding down the mountaintop, holding onto our ass. 0.99

02:11:38.000 And I think we're going to go right off. 0.99

02:11:40.000 I think we're going right into cyborg land.

02:11:44.000 Right.

02:11:44.000 And, you know, because people are the way they are, there's no guarantee that it'll be for the good.

02:11:51.000 Yeah.

02:11:53.000 Once you can read minds, it's going to be way harder to control people. 0.99

02:11:57.000 It's going to be way harder to get people to buy into bullshit. 0.98

02:12:00.000 You can't have propaganda anymore. 0.98

02:12:02.000 There's like so many positives to it that a lot of people are just going to dive right in.

02:12:06.000 But you're also never going to have privacy.

02:12:10.000 You're going to live in this weird world of communication where people communicate with you non-locally with your mind.

02:12:19.000 So what are you gonna get spam?

02:12:21.000 You're gonna get spam texts in your brain?

02:12:23.000 I get like four or five spam text messages a day.

02:12:27.000 Like, do you need cash?

02:12:28.000 Like, question is, fill us out now.

02:12:30.000 I get four or five of those a day.

02:12:32.000 You're probably gonna get those from the whole world.

02:12:35.000 You're gonna have a hard time avoiding them if we're all, like, hyper-connected.

02:12:39.000 People are gonna take advantage of it and try to sell Bitcoin and push NFTs.

02:12:43.000 It's gonna be...

02:12:44.000 Well, I think you need to stay out of sell range if you can.

02:12:49.000 There's going to be a way probably for people to opt out during the day.

02:12:53.000 Like, shut off so he can work.

02:12:56.000 Well, do you like Philip K. Dick?

02:12:58.000 I really like that.

02:13:00.000 There was one that they turned into a film.

02:13:06.000 What was it?

02:13:10.000 What was the Philip K. Dick book that they turned into a film?

02:13:15.000 Well, there's Total Recall.

02:13:17.000 A lot of things just popped up.

02:13:18.000 Oh, Total Recall.

02:13:18.000 You did that, too?

02:13:19.000 There's Blade Runner.

02:13:20.000 Scanner Darkly.

02:13:21.000 Scanner Darkly.

02:13:22.000 Scanner Darkly.

02:13:23.000 That's it.

02:13:23.000 Scanner Darkly's Wild.

02:13:24.000 Yeah, that's a great movie.

02:13:26.000 Yeah, Scanner Darkly. 0.97

02:13:27.000 That is a really fucking cool movie. 0.94

02:13:30.000 Yeah, I like that. 0.97

02:13:31.000 Yeah, it's like a wild, semi-animated movie.

02:13:34.000 Yeah, it's called a rotoscope.

02:13:36.000 Yeah, that was fun. 0.99

02:13:39.000 That was a cool fucking movie. 0.99

02:13:40.000 Well, so Philip K. Dick has written a short novel. 0.99

02:13:44.000 It's called The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldridge.

02:13:47.000 And it's about the competition between two psychedelic drugs.

02:13:55.000 One's from Earth, and one is from another star system.

02:14:02.000 And the one from Earth, you know, they're both, you know, these huge corporations that are making, you know, millions of tons of this psychedelic.

02:14:10.000 The one that was created on Earth just puts people into the Perky Pat world where things are really fun. 0.70

02:14:17.000 Like there's this little figure, Perky Pat, and you go into her house and, you know, you wash dishes and you have parties.

02:14:25.000 You know, weird Philip K. Dick stuff.

02:14:27.000 And there's another psychedelic that comes from outer space, and it's really bad.

02:14:35.000 You never really stop tripping, even though you think you have.

02:14:40.000 Oh my god, that sounds terrible.

02:14:42.000 Oh, it's a horror story.

02:14:44.000 It's scarier than anything I've ever read.

02:14:47.000 So I think there's going to be this competition.

02:14:52.000 What's the most popular soft drink?

02:14:55.000 Or the most popular music?

02:14:57.000 I think a state of consciousness is going to be the turf that huge interests are battling over.

02:15:08.000 Yeah.

02:15:09.000 It's going to be interesting to see whether or not they can control it and whether or not the technologists will allow it.

02:15:17.000 Ultimately, it's like the people that put it out, whatever it is, they have the ability to control it or not control it, depending upon what stage it's at.

02:15:27.000 But I feel like if it keeps going in the same general direction, the general direction is about access to information.

02:15:32.000 It's more instantaneous.

02:15:33.000 It's more accessible.

02:15:35.000 There's only so much you can do to put a cork on that if it really gets out.

02:15:39.000 If it really gets to a universal language thing, the only way they're going to get people It's if they figure out some sort of a digital currency.

02:15:47.000 Force people into a centralized digital currency and then attach it to a social credit score system.

02:15:52.000 And then, bam, you're living in China. 0.99

02:15:55.000 Yeah.

02:15:56.000 They could do that.

02:15:58.000 They could trick people into doing that.

02:16:00.000 But the other option is psychedelics.

02:16:03.000 And I think if more people had positive, well-guided experiences, and not people with slippery grips on reality as it is, I think you're at least gonna get a sense that a percentage of the population is moving to a better state of mind,

02:16:27.000 a better way of coexisting with other humans, not so angry, more in awe and wonder about this whole thing, and with a general attempt to be kinder because of it.

02:16:44.000 Well, I think that the outcome of any individual psychedelic experience is obviously the set and the setting.

02:16:52.000 Who you are and what you want to get out of it and your environment.

02:16:59.000 I think you really need to work on the set and the setting for positive outcomes.

02:17:05.000 So I think that's kind of the task now is to work out the best sets and settings.

02:17:14.000 You think about how good people always feel in nature.

02:17:17.000 Nature is almost like the ultimate set and setting.

02:17:20.000 I know.

02:17:20.000 It's great.

02:17:23.000 It's kind of like biologically enriching or something.

02:17:26.000 Like you lay down in a beautiful hill and you look out at all the trees and the mountains.

02:17:32.000 It's like, God, this is so beautiful.

02:17:34.000 Just by itself.

02:17:35.000 Yeah.

02:17:53.000 I think that also, though, you know, sometimes you'll need to be indoors.

02:17:57.000 Oh, yeah.

02:17:58.000 Yeah, like if you're smoking DMT, let's say.

02:18:00.000 Oh, yeah.

02:18:01.000 You should be on the couch.

02:18:03.000 Yeah, as opposed to the field or something.

02:18:05.000 Have you seen anybody fall, like, black out and fall down on it?

02:18:10.000 Yeah, I was at a conference.

02:18:12.000 Oh, not a conference, but an event in Dallas.

02:18:15.000 A long time ago.

02:18:17.000 And I was being hosted by a couple of kids.

02:18:23.000 And they took me over to their house.

02:18:26.000 And everybody's smoking DMT. They're ordering pizza, and there's music, and everybody's smoking DMT. Oh, no.

02:18:32.000 What a disaster.

02:18:34.000 Yeah, and this one guy had never smoked DMT before.

02:18:37.000 They gave him a huge amount, and he started screaming and falling down.

02:18:41.000 That's the worst setting ever.

02:18:42.000 Yeah, they wanted me to see what they were doing.

02:18:45.000 I was like, man, this is kind of high risk. 1.00

02:18:48.000 Oh, that's so dumb. 0.99

02:18:50.000 I did it with Doug Stanhope once, and he almost had a seizure. 0.99

02:18:54.000 I was worried we were going to lose him.

02:18:56.000 He, like, was making crazy noises.

02:18:58.000 It was very strange.

02:19:00.000 I've never seen anybody respond to DMT that way.

02:19:02.000 He's, like, moaning, like...

02:19:04.000 Oh, really?

02:19:06.000 Well, does he remember it?

02:19:08.000 Oh, yeah.

02:19:08.000 It was a positive experience overall.

02:19:10.000 I just think that he was, like, hanging on.

02:19:14.000 In the beginning of it, maybe a little too much.

02:19:17.000 It was a 5-MeO DMT experience.

02:19:20.000 If you try to hang on, you're not hanging on to that.

02:19:25.000 It's going to take you with it.

02:19:27.000 Just relax.

02:19:28.000 And maybe that's what was going on.

02:19:29.000 Maybe he was hanging on.

02:19:31.000 But he came out of it.

02:19:32.000 It was a positive experience.

02:19:34.000 Well, you can see videos of people flopping around on 5-methoxy DMT. See, this is the problem with legalization, right?

02:19:45.000 I think it would be irresponsible to just give it away to everybody.

02:19:49.000 But I do think that it would be very beneficial to have it in places that are like a really well-established, well-set-up center where people can do these things under professional supervision, by people with experience in them,

02:20:06.000 people that know the The purity of the stuff, the right dose, the right thing, and it can be a business.

02:20:11.000 And it can make sense as a business.

02:20:13.000 And then also give people the ability to do it on their own afterwards.

02:20:17.000 Okay, now you know what it is.

02:20:19.000 Now you know how to get it.

02:20:20.000 This is the right dose. 1.00

02:20:21.000 Just don't fuck around. 1.00

02:20:22.000 And enjoy yourself. 1.00

02:20:24.000 You get to learn.

02:20:25.000 You get certified in proper use.

02:20:28.000 It's not a bad idea.

02:20:30.000 If you give people a license to drive a car, Give them a license to do DMT. Like, hey, Todd, like, how do you feel about reality?

02:20:37.000 Like, Todd, you know, what shape do you think the Earth is?

02:20:41.000 You know, ask them pretty simple questions.

02:20:44.000 Yeah, well, I mean, the future of psychedelics, I mean, it looks pretty bright.

02:20:51.000 What do you think is pushing it the most?

02:20:53.000 Do you think it's these studies they do with PTSD in soldiers?

02:20:58.000 I mean, there are just, you know, so many influences out there that want to see psychedelics or, you know, so many interests that want to see more people take more psychedelics.

02:21:07.000 You know, there's commercial ones, and there's therapeutic ones, and there's spiritual ones, and there's brain science ones.

02:21:14.000 You know, so...

02:21:16.000 You know, the great thing about psychedelics is they extend their reach into everything that's distinctly human.

02:21:25.000 And they affect all aspects of human consciousness, I mean, across the board, too.

02:21:30.000 So, yeah, they're kind of like mirrors in a way.

02:21:33.000 They're strange drugs.

02:21:34.000 I mean, I always encourage students to get as much school as they can and to study psychedelics in a rigorous manner if they can.

02:21:45.000 If you had the ability, if they came to you, if President Biden came to you and said, Dr. Strassman, could you...

02:21:56.000 Tell me, should I legalize everything or not?

02:21:59.000 Would you just, if you could hit the switch, if you were the guy they came to?

02:22:04.000 That's a trick question.

02:22:07.000 Are all the good questions trick questions?

02:22:09.000 Or I should ask you, is that a trick question?

02:22:11.000 No.

02:22:14.000 What would you do?

02:22:15.000 Well, I'd say it's complicated.

02:22:19.000 That's the typical response from a psychiatrist.

02:22:22.000 Yeah, you sound like a real scientist.

02:22:23.000 It's complicated, yeah.

02:22:25.000 Right.

02:22:25.000 And so would you have to develop some sort of an assessment of the pros and cons and what the negatives could be and how to mitigate some of the negatives, like the people that are losing their mind and overdosing and have access to people that are too young?

02:22:40.000 Like, there's a lot of factors in there that you'd have to consider upon legalization.

02:22:43.000 Right, right.

02:22:46.000 Gosh, you know, it's like a multi-pronged approach.

02:22:51.000 I mean, education and organizations and have to get the church on board.

02:22:56.000 Yeah.

02:22:57.000 Or at least, you know, you're not against what's happening.

02:23:02.000 Yeah.

02:23:02.000 So your experience with...

02:23:04.000 You had some experience with one of those churches, because I remember you telling this story about what it was like to go visit them, and they were wearing golf shirts and doing ayahuasca.

02:23:14.000 Well, the UDV is pretty straight.

02:23:20.000 The...

02:23:22.000 The ceremonies take place under lights, like in a big room, and you sit in a chair, and there's somebody leading the ceremony.

02:23:32.000 It's like a church ceremony.

02:23:33.000 So when you say straight, you mean like a regular church, but they also do psychedelics?

02:23:39.000 They don't seem to be hippies at all?

02:23:41.000 I mean, they really emphasize being a good family member and a good contributor to society.

02:23:49.000 So it's like a Christian church in that way.

02:23:52.000 And how often are they having these psychedelic experiences?

02:23:57.000 Generally twice a month, usually a little more.

02:24:00.000 Wow.

02:24:01.000 They would be fascinating people to study.

02:24:03.000 Yeah, well, they're being studied.

02:24:05.000 Oh, are they?

02:24:06.000 Yeah, there's a lot of information about the effects of participation in the churches in Brazil, and some in the U.S., but especially Brazil, because that's where they both...

02:24:15.000 Netflix should get on board with that, you know, because that could be like a whole series.

02:24:20.000 Yeah.

02:24:20.000 Study these people and study the effect.

02:24:23.000 That actually is a fascinating idea for a series.

02:24:26.000 Because what they're doing is really profound if it's working.

02:24:30.000 Someone should find out, is this really a harmonious society?

02:24:34.000 Are they really happier?

02:24:35.000 Oh, yeah.

02:24:35.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:24:36.000 They've been studying members of these ayahuasca using churches for a long time, for decades now.

02:24:43.000 And what is their conclusion?

02:24:44.000 The kids are healthier and less drug abuse, less alcoholism, less depression, better quality of life.

02:24:51.000 It's quite impressive.

02:24:53.000 It makes sense.

02:24:54.000 It makes sense if you've had experiences yourself and you understand the impact that it could have if you attached it to a structure like religion.

02:25:02.000 It's quite structured, yeah.

02:25:04.000 They're into God, they're into Jesus, they're into the Bible, they're into Solomon. 0.61

02:25:10.000 So the ethical teachings, which are part of the Bible, part of a spiritual system.

02:25:22.000 Do they have certain passages that they recite while they trip or before they trip?

02:25:29.000 Not that I remember.

02:25:31.000 Do they come back with like some sort of an experience?

02:25:34.000 It seems like biblical experiences?

02:25:38.000 Their story of the beginning of the church relates to King Solomon.

02:25:44.000 So there's, you know, references to King Solomon.

02:25:50.000 They do refer to the Bible, I'm thinking about it, as most, you know, Christians do, you know, Protestants anyway are pretty familiar with the Bible.

02:25:58.000 You know, so they know text.

02:26:00.000 But did they come back, like, what are they experiencing?

02:26:04.000 Are they experiencing, like, a standard ayahuasca, you know, seeing vines and snakes and jaguars and UFOs?

02:26:13.000 Or are they seeing things that are Christian in nature?

02:26:17.000 They're mostly seeing things which relate to them, how to be better people.

02:26:25.000 So there's a real emphasis on personal growth and evolution and bringing society to a higher level.

02:26:33.000 It's quite altruistic, and it's, you know, like as you note, if you have a structure that is essentially good, that you're kind of giving the psychedelics within, you know, the outcomes can be really positive.

02:26:47.000 Yeah, I think the structure of, you know, if you look at the best aspects of almost all religions, they're all about trying to unite society in some sort of a way.

02:26:57.000 The best aspects, you know.

02:27:00.000 Mm-hmm.

02:27:01.000 If you attach that to a psychedelic, then it becomes a bi-monthly ritual.

02:27:06.000 That's pretty wild.

02:27:07.000 Yeah, you know, being charitable, doing good things.

02:27:13.000 Things like that.

02:27:14.000 Yeah.

02:27:14.000 Oh, you said bi-weekly, right?

02:27:16.000 Every two weeks or so.

02:27:18.000 That's so much.

02:27:20.000 That's so much.

02:27:21.000 Those people are on cloud nine all the time.

02:27:23.000 They're just recovering from the last one and bang, they're right back in again.

02:27:27.000 Yeah.

02:27:27.000 Well, I spent about three months associated with them.

02:27:30.000 I like how you say it that way.

02:27:32.000 Yeah.

02:27:32.000 Three months associated with them.

02:27:34.000 Well, yeah, that's what it's called.

02:27:36.000 You become an associate.

02:27:38.000 Yeah.

02:27:38.000 Oh!

02:27:39.000 Yeah, that's the terminology.

02:27:41.000 Oh, interesting.

02:27:41.000 That's the religious terminology?

02:27:42.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:27:43.000 I like that.

02:27:43.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:27:44.000 I like that.

02:27:45.000 And I was an associate for maybe three or four months.

02:27:48.000 Yeah, and I was drinking a lot of ayahuasca, and I felt pretty darn good.

02:27:52.000 So when you were doing it, what was the experience like?

02:27:55.000 Like, how would a ceremony go down?

02:27:57.000 Everybody would do it together?

02:27:59.000 Yeah.

02:27:59.000 Well, what was interesting is you would eat beforehand.

02:28:03.000 Most of the time they say have an empty stomach and so on.

02:28:05.000 But their opinion is if you are throwing up, it's better to have something in your stomach than just throwing up the… Ayahuasca itself?

02:28:16.000 Well, the ayahuasca itself or your stomach acids.

02:28:19.000 If you have some food, it will kind of buffer things.

02:28:21.000 That actually makes sense.

02:28:24.000 Would it slow the absorption, though?

02:28:26.000 It can.

02:28:27.000 So that would be the negative, right?

02:28:29.000 You would want to get the full dose?

02:28:32.000 Well, they spend about an hour in preliminaries, socializing.

02:28:38.000 Okay, so you do digest it somewhat.

02:28:39.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:28:40.000 And then everybody gets in line.

02:28:42.000 And the master of ceremonies that night will look at you, look at the brood, decide how much to give you.

02:28:49.000 Interesting.

02:28:50.000 The look at you.

02:28:51.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:28:52.000 This motherfucker can't handle this. 1.00

02:28:54.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:28:55.000 Yeah.

02:28:57.000 How do they just decide?

02:28:58.000 Right.

02:28:58.000 I've wondered.

02:28:59.000 I've asked them.

02:29:00.000 And they, you know, said it's intuitive.

02:29:02.000 Oh, God.

02:29:03.000 That's so weird.

02:29:04.000 That's a lot of power.

02:29:05.000 He who controls the ayahuasca controls man.

02:29:09.000 Yeah.

02:29:09.000 I think I've gotten, you know, yeah.

02:29:11.000 It's an interesting process.

02:29:13.000 Like you are thinking, I hope they don't give me too much.

02:29:16.000 But also, you know, I hope he gives me a lot because I'm like macho or whatever.

02:29:21.000 Right.

02:29:22.000 I can take it, bro.

02:29:23.000 Yeah.

02:29:24.000 If we did have legitimate psychedelic centers in America, there would have to be some real thought beforehand as to what's the best way to approach it from an education perspective,

02:29:40.000 explaining things to people, what to expect.

02:29:44.000 There's a lot to that.

02:29:48.000 But I don't want to be the person that tells a person they can or can't do it either.

02:29:53.000 I would say we should have some sort of a screening process, but then I'm entirely against screening processes.

02:30:01.000 Screening is really helpful.

02:30:03.000 Sure.

02:30:04.000 But I don't like the idea that someone can control whether or not people do or don't do it.

02:30:12.000 Because it could get slippery.

02:30:14.000 That could get weird.

02:30:15.000 Someone could, like, come up with more and more reasons to not give, like, maybe you have the wrong political persuasion, or they've labeled you a terrorist because you don't believe in taxes or whatever.

02:30:24.000 Oh, okay.

02:30:24.000 Now you can't do it anymore.

02:30:26.000 Yeah, the screening idea I was thinking of was, you know, screening research people.

02:30:30.000 Oh, right.

02:30:32.000 And even then, when you're screening people who participate in research studies, there's no guarantee they won't have problems.

02:30:38.000 Oh, for sure.

02:30:39.000 I meant for the general public, screening people in terms of being able to not give it to people with legitimate mental illness.

02:30:47.000 Yeah.

02:30:48.000 How would you stop that?

02:30:52.000 It would be like any other drug, I think.

02:30:55.000 You know, like if you've got an allergy to a medication, you're screened out of getting that medication.

02:31:03.000 Right, but we'd have to alert people to it and then tell them not to do it.

02:31:09.000 Well, yeah, like a huge multi-level process of organization.

02:31:14.000 It's almost like the NIH ought to start a division, maybe, of psychedelic medicine.

02:31:20.000 Yeah, well, it's not a bad idea.

02:31:24.000 I think over time, we're going to find more and more people are interested in it because it's not as stigmatized as it was.

02:31:33.000 There was such a stigma attached to psychedelics when I was in high school. 1.00

02:31:37.000 Psychedelics were for idiots. 1.00

02:31:39.000 If you're doing psychedelics, you're trying to blow your brains out like that guy from The Who. 1.00

02:31:44.000 Yeah.

02:31:44.000 Well, so when was that, that year in high school?

02:31:47.000 Or Pink Floyd, right?

02:31:49.000 Pink Floyd, yeah.

02:31:50.000 The crazy diamond.

02:31:52.000 Yeah.

02:31:52.000 This was 1981. It was my first year in high school.

02:31:57.000 Oh, really?

02:31:58.000 So that was, you know, like the peak of the dare stuff?

02:32:02.000 Exactly.

02:32:02.000 That was the Reagan years.

02:32:06.000 It was Just Say No, all that stuff.

02:32:09.000 If you go back to the 1960s, the Ken Kesey, Tim Leary stuff, and then you shoot just 20 years ahead, it's gone.

02:32:21.000 There's nothing.

02:32:22.000 In high schools and in colleges, people were more turned on to some of those things, but it wasn't overwhelmingly popular like it was just 20 years before.

02:32:35.000 Yeah, even 10 years before.

02:32:37.000 I mean, there were a lot of psychedelics on campus in the early 70s, mid-70s. 0.98

02:32:42.000 So how did they put a fucking fire hose on all that? 0.99

02:32:44.000 They didn't. 0.99

02:32:46.000 Underground use stayed pretty much constant, even during the war on drugs.

02:32:50.000 Really?

02:32:51.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:32:52.000 Like for LSD. Well, what about for other things, like psilocybin?

02:32:57.000 Ayahuasca was not very popular back then, nor was DMT. Oh.

02:33:02.000 You'd have to look at the specific survey, but, you know, they ask certain questions about certain drugs.

02:33:09.000 And I think they probably had an LSD category and maybe psychedelics in general.

02:33:14.000 You know, back then they really weren't looking at psilocybin.

02:33:17.000 That's probably changed the last five or ten years, though.

02:33:20.000 Hmm.

02:33:22.000 What do you think is going to happen in terms of the way the country opens up, in terms of being able to do therapy on people with PTSD, and then ultimately do you think we're going to see some sort of a recreational usage in our lifetime,

02:33:40.000 like federally?

02:33:43.000 Hold that thought.

02:33:46.000 And we're back again in a few moments, ladies and gentlemen.

02:33:50.000 But my question was, in our lifetime, do you think that we're ever going to see legalized psychedelics?

02:33:58.000 Where people of consenting age...

02:34:02.000 Well, I think there'll be models that'll be recreational and also medical.

02:34:10.000 So do you think it'll be like state-to-state?

02:34:13.000 Probably state-to-state.

02:34:14.000 I think it would be like liquor.

02:34:17.000 It would be like alcohol.

02:34:19.000 Recreationally, there'd be dispensaries.

02:34:21.000 Right, but alcohol is legal nationwide, federally.

02:34:24.000 That's the big problem with cannabis and psilocybin.

02:34:28.000 No matter what happens, if these towns make them legal, it's still federally illegal, particularly like hard drugs, right?

02:34:38.000 Yeah.

02:34:38.000 Well, there would need to be some regulation across the country, which would require rescheduling.

02:34:47.000 Yeah.

02:34:48.000 Yeah.

02:34:48.000 You know, it's interesting that there's no scheduling of alcohol, for example.

02:34:52.000 I mean, that should be scheduled.

02:34:54.000 100%.

02:34:55.000 Yeah.

02:34:56.000 I mean, that's a tricky drug.

02:34:58.000 Right.

02:34:59.000 You know, but what's the expression?

02:35:01.000 You know, the horse is out of the barn at this point when it comes to alcohol.

02:35:04.000 It is, and it's also socially people's favorite drug.

02:35:06.000 It's so accepted, so recreational, and everywhere you go where people are eating dinner, they're drinking alcohol.

02:35:15.000 Everywhere.

02:35:16.000 It's happening all over the place.

02:35:17.000 They're drinking beers with their burgers, and they're drinking wine with their steak, and people are always drinking.

02:35:24.000 Well, if there were going to be dispensaries, yeah, there'd need to—well, yeah, I think state to state would be how it goes, you know, kind of like what they're doing in Oregon.

02:35:34.000 I mean, it is legalized even though it's a Schedule I drug.

02:35:38.000 I know, but Oregon is like the worst.

02:35:39.000 Oh, right.

02:35:42.000 They're always lighting their courthouse on fire. 0.99

02:35:44.000 I mean, that place is fucking wild. 0.98

02:35:47.000 Yeah, they're stressed out. 0.99

02:35:48.000 Yeah, they're very high strung in Portland.

02:35:51.000 And I think also prescribing.

02:35:53.000 So you could prescribe.

02:35:55.000 But you could also deny a prescription.

02:35:57.000 And that's what it gets to me.

02:35:59.000 It's like, I don't like the idea of the government being involved in psychedelics.

02:36:06.000 I don't think it should be like a prescription.

02:36:08.000 I think there should be some educators that put forth some sort of reasonable recommendations and then society adopts them.

02:36:18.000 People really understand what the dosage should be, what's the most important part about setting, and having well-educated, experienced travelers who are also counselors. 0.96

02:36:32.000 But getting the government involved, get the fuck out of here. 0.95

02:36:36.000 If they regulate it, they're just going to tax the shit out of it and ruin it. 0.95

02:36:40.000 They'll just water down the dose or figure out a way to make too much money from it. 1.00

02:36:48.000 There'll still be underground use though.

02:36:50.000 Of course.

02:36:51.000 You know, an underground culture which could maintain the integrity.

02:36:57.000 Yeah, but why bring the government into ayahuasca?

02:37:00.000 Get out of here. 0.99

02:37:01.000 They should just stop with all these stupid schedule, you know, when it comes to something that has like a history of use, like stop. 0.99

02:37:09.000 You can't make that a schedule one drug. 1.00

02:37:11.000 That's ridiculous. 0.59

02:37:13.000 Gordon Wasson was writing about it in the 1950s. 0.95

02:37:16.000 What are you talking about?

02:37:17.000 You made that a Schedule I drug?

02:37:19.000 This drug with a mountain of positive experience stories?

02:37:24.000 I know.

02:37:25.000 Schedule 1, you know, when my study started giving DMT, I mean DMT Schedule 1, but I was thinking about the scheduling of psychedelics into Schedule 1, which means, you know, there's no known medical use.

02:37:42.000 They can't be given safely under medical supervision, and they're highly abusable.

02:37:46.000 You know, so this was in the early 90s.

02:37:49.000 I began the study, and I wrote to Janet Reno, who was the Attorney General under Bill Clinton at the time.

02:37:55.000 And I said, these drugs shouldn't be in Schedule I. And I could say, why not?

02:37:59.000 Because I'm doing research, which indicates they can be given safely under medical use.

02:38:05.000 And we're gathering important data, which means they have utility under medical supervision.

02:38:12.000 So, you know, one of her assistants wrote back and said, very complicated, changing drug laws.

02:38:19.000 Yeah, so didn't get much further beyond that.

02:38:23.000 Isn't that fun?

02:38:23.000 They could just say, it's very complicated, changing drug laws.

02:38:26.000 Sorry, can't do it.

02:38:27.000 Can't do it.

02:38:28.000 Impossible.

02:38:28.000 Right.

02:38:29.000 Impossible.

02:38:29.000 If the grid goes down, we'll get that back up.

02:38:31.000 But it is impossible to change this piece of paper where it says that you can't do that.

02:38:37.000 It's not.

02:38:38.000 I just, I can't.

02:38:40.000 I'd like to help.

02:38:42.000 Well, you know, at the time I had more important matters at hand, like, you know, running my study, but I think at a certain point it would be worth, you know, a while to reconsider the scheduling of, you know, Schedule I. Well,

02:38:58.000 what is ketamine?

02:38:59.000 Three, I think.

02:39:01.000 That's interesting.

02:39:01.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:39:02.000 Because they're doing a lot of that.

02:39:04.000 They're doing a lot of these guided ketamine sessions.

02:39:08.000 Yeah, ketamine's huge.

02:39:10.000 Yeah.

02:39:11.000 But it's a real psychedelic.

02:39:14.000 I don't have an experience with ketamine, but my friend Neil that I talked about earlier, one of the things that he had did prior to ayahuasca, he did ketamine in a medical setting.

02:39:24.000 And he was like, I can't believe how high I was, like how strong it is.

02:39:30.000 I was like, you're really tripping.

02:39:31.000 It's not like some sort of little sort of baby ketamine thing, like feel better about yourself thing.

02:39:38.000 Well, it sounds like he's describing the K-hole. 1.00

02:39:41.000 Are you familiar with the K-hole? 1.00

02:39:43.000 I thought the K-hole was negative, because I don't think he was saying this was negative.

02:39:48.000 Is the K-hole when you can't move, like you're stuck in a hole?

02:39:51.000 You can't move.

02:39:52.000 Yeah, you're under general anesthesia, but you're still cautious.

02:39:58.000 And some people like that.

02:40:01.000 I'm sure.

02:40:02.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:40:02.000 Especially if your life sucks. 1.00

02:40:03.000 Right. 1.00

02:40:04.000 Right?

02:40:04.000 You just want to zone out.

02:40:06.000 Yeah.

02:40:06.000 And for some people, it's terrifying.

02:40:08.000 Some people get addicted to that stuff too, right?

02:40:10.000 Yeah.

02:40:11.000 Somebody I heard describe it as psychedelic heroin.

02:40:15.000 Ooh.

02:40:16.000 Ooh.

02:40:18.000 I've heard of people getting addicted to snorting it.

02:40:20.000 Snorting it?

02:40:21.000 Yeah.

02:40:22.000 Yeah.

02:40:23.000 And injecting it.

02:40:24.000 Injecting it.

02:40:26.000 Intramuscular.

02:40:27.000 Yeah, that's what Timothy Leary used to do, right?

02:40:30.000 No.

02:40:30.000 John Lilly.

02:40:31.000 John Lilly.

02:40:31.000 That's what John Lilly used to do when he got into his float tank.

02:40:34.000 He would intramuscularly jab himself and then...

02:40:38.000 Well, you know, I knew John Lilly.

02:40:42.000 We spent a little time together.

02:40:43.000 Yeah?

02:40:44.000 Yeah.

02:40:44.000 I mean, he was pretty old at that point.

02:40:46.000 And I was at a conference with him.

02:40:50.000 And, you know, he was, I don't know, 70s, 80s, and he loved ketamine.

02:40:56.000 He still got after it?

02:40:59.000 Yeah, so some people, but...

02:41:01.000 Why not?

02:41:02.000 Why not?

02:41:03.000 I mean, you only live once, right?

02:41:06.000 Well, he is the creator of the, in my opinion, one of the greatest tools for...

02:41:16.000 Exploring your mind ever.

02:41:18.000 The tank.

02:41:18.000 The float tank.

02:41:19.000 Yeah.

02:41:20.000 That thing's amazing.

02:41:21.000 Marijuana plus float tank is the wildest ride.

02:41:25.000 Oh my god. 1.00

02:41:27.000 Sometimes I get out of there, I'm like, what the fuck? 0.98

02:41:30.000 Well, you know, I've never been in a float tank. 0.99

02:41:32.000 Really?

02:41:33.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:41:34.000 Never?

02:41:34.000 I don't think ever, no.

02:41:36.000 I have friends who own float tanks or float tank companies like in Albuquerque.

02:41:40.000 You should definitely try it.

02:41:41.000 I think you'd enjoy it.

02:41:43.000 I've been invited, yeah.

02:41:44.000 It's very relaxing, too.

02:41:45.000 That's the thing about it.

02:41:46.000 It's not just that when you do the float thing, you have these wild visions and this weird way of seeing reality because you're sort of detached from everything else.

02:41:57.000 Just you alone with your thoughts.

02:41:59.000 Because the water is the same temperature as the surface of your skin.

02:42:02.000 So you're just floating there and you can't distinguish between the air and the water.

02:42:07.000 You feel completely weightless.

02:42:09.000 But besides the visuals, it's also really good for your muscles.

02:42:13.000 Everything just sort of relaxes and softens.

02:42:16.000 Yeah, I'd like that.

02:42:17.000 It's nice.

02:42:18.000 Yeah.

02:42:18.000 Because it's Epsom salts.

02:42:20.000 It's like a thousand pounds of Epsom salts in that tank.

02:42:25.000 Well, so I wanted to ask Rupert Sheldrick if there was a specific passage in his book that seemed like he was stoned when he wrote it.

02:42:33.000 Yeah.

02:42:33.000 And I said, did you write that when you were stoned?

02:42:35.000 He said, I write everything when I'm stoned.

02:42:39.000 Yeah.

02:42:40.000 I pretty much do, too.

02:42:41.000 I write a lot of things not stoned, but they're not good.

02:42:45.000 I mean, I've written some bits definitely sober.

02:42:50.000 Like, I came up with an idea sober, and I wrote it down and it became a bit.

02:42:54.000 But there's a thing that happens when I sit down in front of a keyboard when I'm high.

02:43:03.000 It's almost like it opens up like a channel that I can't reach, like I can tune into it.

02:43:10.000 Like, hey, here we are.

02:43:14.000 So here's the ideas.

02:43:16.000 It's bizarre.

02:43:17.000 Yeah, it's weird.

02:43:18.000 But it's true.

02:43:20.000 It's a strange form of creative enhancement, as we were saying before, where we're allegedly smoking marijuana.

02:43:30.000 Well, so I get stoned and I take a pen in hand on a pad of paper.

02:43:37.000 Well, so the ideas just come.

02:43:44.000 You know, you really can't do editing.

02:43:48.000 Stoned?

02:43:48.000 Yeah, that seems like a sober task, right?

02:43:50.000 Yeah, it's kind of, you know, you have to think.

02:43:53.000 You have to be critical.

02:43:53.000 You just can't let stuff kind of flow.

02:43:56.000 You know, George Carlin had the opposite way of writing.

02:43:58.000 He would write sober and then edit stoned.

02:44:02.000 He would write his bit sober and then punch him up stoned.

02:44:05.000 Make him funnier stoned. 0.89

02:44:06.000 Yeah.

02:44:07.000 Well, do you think you're funnier stoned?

02:44:09.000 I don't know.

02:44:10.000 When it comes to doing stand-up, it really is about your mood, you know?

02:44:16.000 I don't think you necessarily are funny or stoned.

02:44:19.000 It's really about your mood.

02:44:20.000 It's about the material.

02:44:22.000 But, like, being funny-er is really about, like, how you feeling.

02:44:27.000 If you feel funny.

02:44:28.000 Yeah, well, you feel good, too.

02:44:30.000 You're having fun.

02:44:31.000 Like, that is funnier.

02:44:34.000 It's so that's like a state of mind and then it's the material and how you deliver it and you know That's part of being quote-unquote professional, right?

02:44:43.000 Right.

02:44:43.000 You don't really find your stone when you're doing it that way But there's things that happen when you're stoned that wouldn't have happened when you're sober That's the dilemma because sometimes like when you're stoned you are on a subject and then a new path appears like oh Why don't I go down there?

02:45:01.000 And you just start talking about something that you never talked about before, and it turns out to be hilarious.

02:45:06.000 Right, right.

02:45:07.000 I think it really, you know, loosens up, you know, suppression or resistance.

02:45:13.000 You can...

02:45:14.000 Well, I think it has an effect, you know, clearly on short-term memory.

02:45:18.000 Oh, for sure.

02:45:20.000 Yeah, in a detrimental effect.

02:45:21.000 That's what's dangerous about it.

02:45:23.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:45:24.000 You need to be in the right place when you're that stoned to be that creative.

02:45:28.000 Yeah.

02:45:29.000 Are you recording this?

02:45:31.000 Yeah, we're good?

02:45:32.000 Or do you want to not?

02:45:34.000 You know, this is interesting.

02:45:36.000 Yeah, we're recording all of it.

02:45:37.000 Yeah, okay, good.

02:45:38.000 Yeah, we were going to come back to...

02:45:40.000 What was the...

02:45:41.000 Rupert Sheldrake.

02:45:43.000 Oh, okay, fine.

02:45:44.000 We're going to start right there.

02:45:45.000 Yeah, that's good.

02:45:47.000 Yeah, well, you know, the first time I smoked hash, one of the things that really struck me was how I lost all self-criticism.

02:45:59.000 You know, I was able to think things and feel things without any restrictions at all.

02:46:04.000 And I think that's part of what occurs when you can't write, or if you have writer's block, is you're kind of criticizing yourself.

02:46:12.000 Like, you're no good or you can't write it or you can't have any good ideas.

02:46:16.000 And for me, anyway, that part of my inner dialogue goes away on pot.

02:46:24.000 That's interesting.

02:46:26.000 That's interesting that that's what writer's block is in your eyes, too.

02:46:30.000 I wonder if that is it.

02:46:32.000 Like, the self-criticism.

02:46:34.000 Like, a lot of people have a hard time enjoying themselves, right?

02:46:37.000 They think of themselves in a bad light.

02:46:40.000 They don't like themselves, you know?

02:46:43.000 They want to, like, get drunk or do something to escape.

02:46:48.000 Yeah.

02:46:49.000 Well, I think people take drugs a lot of time to escape.

02:46:53.000 When I was working in this little town between Taos and Santa Fe called Española, really serious drug problems.

02:47:01.000 And I would ask people, at least early on...

02:47:04.000 To distinguish among the effects of the different drugs that they were on, like heroin or methamphetamine or paint or, you know, whatever.

02:47:14.000 And they mostly said, it just makes us not feel.

02:47:20.000 You know, all the drugs, each of the drugs would have the same effect, even though they're quite distinct pharmacologically, but they just wanted to stop feeling.

02:47:28.000 One thing that psychedelics make you think, Is whenever there's some sort of a problem in this world in terms of like a poor neighborhood with another shooting, like Chicago, like South Side of Chicago or Baltimore,

02:47:44.000 when you hear about these crazy things like How much money would it cost to fix that?

02:47:50.000 And how much money do we just send over to other countries when we're finagling deals and hooking people up and fixing things?

02:48:00.000 And I'm not talking even just about Ukraine.

02:48:02.000 I'm talking about how much do we spend, period.

02:48:06.000 How much would it cost to fix that?

02:48:08.000 It doesn't seem like it would cost as much as arming other countries.

02:48:12.000 It seems like if they had money for that, and they didn't anticipate that, and then they had money for that, why didn't you fix that other stuff? 0.82

02:48:19.000 Why didn't you fix, if you guys are really competent and you really wanted a better country, wouldn't you want to fix all the places that are fucked up like that? 0.66

02:48:27.000 There's been zero effort.

02:48:30.000 Well, do you ever think about going into politics?

02:48:33.000 No.

02:48:34.000 No?

02:48:34.000 Never.

02:48:35.000 Nonsense.

02:48:36.000 Oh, why not?

02:48:37.000 Same reason I don't want to go into pro wrestling. 1.00

02:48:39.000 You get fucked up. 0.99

02:48:41.000 You can change things from the inside. 1.00

02:48:44.000 Oh, can you?

02:48:46.000 Yeah.

02:48:46.000 You can also find yourself hanging from an extension cord.

02:48:49.000 Yeah.

02:48:51.000 It's a dirty business with a lot of money involved in it.

02:48:54.000 I'm not interested.

02:48:55.000 I have the best jobs. 1.00

02:48:57.000 Talk shit and tell jokes. 0.99

02:48:59.000 And occasionally call UFC fights. 1.00

02:49:01.000 It's great.

02:49:02.000 Yeah, and you're making a critique of society through what you're doing.

02:49:07.000 Well, I'm just saying what I'm seeing and having people on that have all kinds of different perspectives.

02:49:14.000 I want to hear how they're looking at it.

02:49:17.000 I'm constantly amazed by how many intelligent people there are to talk to.

02:49:22.000 There's so many cool people that you can just have conversations with about everything and anything, whether it's you, about All the above about psychedelics, about your research, about having the mind and the courage.

02:49:36.000 You're such an important part of the psychedelic history of this country.

02:49:40.000 Because what you did is you legitimized a very important thing.

02:49:45.000 That everybody had already kind of heard about and some people had experienced it and you legitimized it by doing it in like a real clinical setting with the government's permission.

02:49:58.000 And funded.

02:50:00.000 Funded by the war on drugs.

02:50:01.000 I mean it's amazing.

02:50:05.000 You know, it's really important because it opened people's eyes that this is repeatable, that this is understood to be something that has been used by human beings for a long time.

02:50:20.000 And just recently we probably have been detached from that.

02:50:26.000 Yeah.

02:50:27.000 Well, I wanted to demonstrate you could do it.

02:50:31.000 Yeah.

02:50:32.000 Safely.

02:50:34.000 And you could generate valuable information.

02:50:37.000 You know, the goals were modest, but the goals were modest because I wanted them to succeed.

02:50:44.000 Right.

02:50:44.000 Yeah.

02:50:45.000 So that was a good strategy.

02:50:47.000 You know, when they try to find the history of DMT use, what is the current understanding as far as like how long back they know people were either taking the snuff or doing an ayahuasca or some form of it?

02:51:09.000 So have you talked with Dennis McKenna about his thoughts about the evolution of DMT, how far back it goes in the family tree of life?

02:51:20.000 I don't remember if I did, but please...

02:51:22.000 I haven't looked carefully into his thinking, but as I understand it, he points to it being a very old compound, a very ancient compound that had occurred very early on in evolution.

02:51:36.000 But when do they think humans started ingesting it?

02:51:40.000 Yeah.

02:51:40.000 Well, the historical record, I mean, there's ayahuasca, right?

02:51:44.000 And that might go back 5,000 years.

02:51:48.000 But, you know, probably before.

02:51:50.000 I mean, why not?

02:51:52.000 This is my question.

02:51:53.000 Before smallpox ravaged the Amazon, Before all those people died, and they're still doing research on this, right?

02:52:00.000 They don't exactly know what these cities were because that LIDAR stuff, when it lays out this grid, they understand that there were structures there, but they don't know what it was.

02:52:07.000 But the big crazy story is that there was millions of people there.

02:52:12.000 That's the craziest possibility, and that's the one that Graham subscribes to.

02:52:17.000 There was millions of people there.

02:52:18.000 Do you think that that society perhaps was a psychedelic society and that's why they had that knowledge of how to make that stuff?

02:52:26.000 And then the people who survived were the people that were removed from the inner city areas, the people that lived in these tribal areas were the ones that lived and they had the knowledge that these people had run their society with using that stuff.

02:52:40.000 If they're able to have these insane structures, like the whole lost city of Z, you know, that it was a feature film, but it was also a book, and it's based on a real explorer who went down there and they were looking for this lost golden city that had been talked about before,

02:52:56.000 but most likely what they think happened was those people that went, whether it was 100 years ago or whatever it was, they killed everybody.

02:53:06.000 They gave them diseases, and it just ravaged everybody, and the jungle just consumed everything.

02:53:10.000 So when they went back to look for it, they couldn't find anything.

02:53:14.000 Well, your question about whether it was a...

02:53:16.000 A psychedelic society.

02:53:17.000 If they were that far advanced.

02:53:20.000 Right.

02:53:21.000 Yeah, I mean, it could be.

02:53:22.000 I mean, in the right circumstances, psychedelics enhance sociability, right?

02:53:27.000 And empathy, and compassion, and those kinds of virtuous characteristics.

02:53:35.000 Yeah, you know, so it may have been a part of their society.

02:53:38.000 I'm not that familiar.

02:53:39.000 It's a Mayan phenomenon.

02:53:42.000 It's definitely in the Mayans, right? 0.58

02:53:44.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:53:44.000 So the Mayans used mushrooms and other psychedelics.

02:53:47.000 So, yeah, I mean, I don't know how extensive the use pervaded down among the lower strata of society, but you would think that the clergy would be taking them regularly. 0.99

02:53:59.000 Well, you had to be on mushrooms to build those fucking pyramids. 0.92

02:54:03.000 Yeah, so the scientists also were taking mushrooms. 0.99

02:54:06.000 I mean, what?

02:54:07.000 How did you figure this out?

02:54:08.000 When you go to Chichen Itza?

02:54:10.000 Like, I don't think they let people walk up it now.

02:54:13.000 I think too many TikTokers fucked that up. 1.00

02:54:15.000 Did they ruin that?

02:54:16.000 Is that true?

02:54:17.000 They don't let you walk up the pyramid of Chichen Itza?

02:54:20.000 I feel like something happened there.

02:54:22.000 There was some, like, event.

02:54:24.000 Some sort of a news story.

02:54:26.000 And then they said you can't walk up it anymore.

02:54:28.000 But I got to walk up it.

02:54:30.000 I think I went in 2003 or 2004 or something like that.

02:54:35.000 And it was wild.

02:54:38.000 Just to be around those things.

02:54:40.000 I want to take...

02:54:41.000 You're not allowed to anymore.

02:54:43.000 You're not allowed to anymore. 0.96

02:54:44.000 Somebody fucked it up. 0.90

02:54:46.000 Yeah. 0.63

02:54:47.000 Yeah, it's probably TikTokers. 0.99

02:54:48.000 It's always shaking their ass up there. 0.98

02:54:50.000 We got rumors about illegal climbing. 0.99

02:54:52.000 Illegal climbing.

02:54:54.000 Yeah.

02:54:54.000 Well, luckily, I got to do it.

02:54:56.000 And I want to do the other places.

02:54:58.000 I want to do the other ones in Mexico.

02:55:02.000 I want to do...

02:55:03.000 I eventually want to see...

02:55:04.000 Someone fell and died. 1.00

02:55:06.000 Oh, shit. 1.00

02:55:07.000 Whoops. 1.00

02:55:08.000 Ouch.

02:55:09.000 No more.

02:55:10.000 Imagine watching someone slip and go down that thing.

02:55:13.000 Oof.

02:55:14.000 But the point is, like, these people, however long ago it was that they built these things, like, these are incredible structures.

02:55:23.000 Incredible.

02:55:24.000 Like, the way they're set up, they're so symmetrical and beautiful, and they have, at the top of it, like, a place where they would put human bodies when they would do sacrifices on them.

02:55:37.000 So you've got this, like, kind of creature that has its legs bent and...

02:55:43.000 Yeah.

02:55:44.000 Well, you wonder if they came up with the architecture based on their visions, of the geometric, fractal-like visions, how they may have modeled their buildings on some of those.

02:55:55.000 That's entirely possible, right?

02:55:57.000 What do you think led to them going—why did they all go to sacrifices?

02:56:02.000 What's that all about?

02:56:03.000 So many of these, like, ancient cultures, they're like, we want to sacrifice—they kill people on purpose. 1.00

02:56:09.000 Well, it's the – you know, it represents a certain system of belief that if you sacrifice, then you'll have a benefit.

02:56:23.000 Yeah, and it could be rain.

02:56:25.000 It could be crops.

02:56:27.000 The wildest one I ever heard of was the Aztec one. 1.00

02:56:30.000 Was it Montezuma that did it?

02:56:32.000 Someone sacrificed – I want to say it was something crazy, like 80,000 slaves over a period of just a couple of weeks.

02:56:43.000 I think they finished building a pyramid, and then after they built the pyramid, they sacrificed all the slaves, like some insane number.

02:56:55.000 It might not have been 80,000, but it was something really crazy like that.

02:57:01.000 What is the name of the pyramid?

02:57:03.000 It's Teotihuacan.

02:57:05.000 I don't know how to pronounce it.

02:57:08.000 Here it is.

02:57:09.000 Yeah, people come up with crazy ideas.

02:57:11.000 Some conquistadors wrote about Sompantli and its towers, estimating that the rack alone contained 130,000 skulls, but historians and archaeologists knew that the conquistadors were prone to exaggerating the horrors of human sacrifice to demonize the Mexico culture.

02:57:31.000 As the centuries passed, scholars began to wonder whether, I don't know how to say that word, Zompantli had ever existed.

02:57:39.000 So what is that saying?

02:57:41.000 I thought it was actually talking about things, but I read it too fast.

02:57:44.000 This is about the same place you just mentioned.

02:57:46.000 I don't want to say it either.

02:57:49.000 Oh, no, no, no, it's not the same, that's not the same word.

02:57:51.000 Oh, okay. 1.00

02:57:52.000 It's, uh, fuck. 1.00

02:57:54.000 Um, it's like T-E-O, T-O-K-O-N. It's a very complex word. 1.00

02:58:01.000 I'm gonna fuck it up. 0.95

02:58:02.000 Not, not that? 0.99

02:58:04.000 That's it.

02:58:05.000 T-O-T-O-N, right?

02:58:06.000 Is that it?

02:58:07.000 Is that, no.

02:58:09.000 That's a city.

02:58:10.000 No, that's not the name.

02:58:12.000 Google, just Google Aztec Pyramids, Aztec Pyramid 80,000 sacrifices.

02:58:19.000 That's how I got to this.

02:58:20.000 It sucks, but I heard 1,000s performed sacrifices were performed there, but I don't know about that one time. 0.92

02:58:26.000 Maybe that is it. 0.98

02:58:27.000 Is that a pyramid?

02:58:29.000 The Pyramid of Tenochtitlan?

02:58:34.000 Yes, or it's a city.

02:58:36.000 Well, I should have had that story at my fingertips. 0.98

02:58:40.000 But the point being, they did sacrifice some fucking insane number of people upon completion. 0.95

02:58:46.000 Like, why do these cultures believe in these mass sacrifices like that? 0.96

02:58:51.000 Like, what do you think caused that kind of horrific thinking?

02:59:01.000 I just don't know.

02:59:02.000 You know, it's incomprehensible.

02:59:04.000 Especially if they were a psychedelic culture.

02:59:07.000 Well, I mean you have to wonder if the psychedelics strengthened their belief that what they were doing was the right thing to do.

02:59:16.000 Right.

02:59:16.000 Because if you have pre-existing beliefs, they're often magnified by psychedelics.

02:59:21.000 Right.

02:59:21.000 That's a good point.

02:59:23.000 Especially if you're living in a really rough part of the world and a really rough time in history.

02:59:30.000 Well, you interviewed that guy, Brian, who's got the book out on early Christianity and psychedelics.

02:59:37.000 Brian Moralescu.

02:59:38.000 Yeah.

02:59:38.000 It's called The Immortality Key.

02:59:39.000 What do you think of that theory?

02:59:41.000 It's fascinating.

02:59:42.000 Well, they have real physical evidence because of the vessels.

02:59:46.000 They have real physical evidence that there's some lysergic acid and some various ergots, like there's some forms of ergot that they can find residue of inside the wine vessels.

03:00:05.000 So these wine vessels weren't just wine, they were throwing in a bunch of psychedelic compounds into the wine, and that's what they did with all wine.

03:00:14.000 And now that they have, like, physical evidence of these vessels that has trace elements of this psychedelic compound, they can be sure that this is what was going on.

03:00:24.000 And this is why when they would talk about drinking wine and having these visions and...

03:00:28.000 I mean, this is where...

03:00:29.000 Democracy came from. 1.00

03:00:31.000 These fucks invented democracy doing this. 1.00

03:00:34.000 And they were probably all tripping balls. 0.99

03:00:37.000 Yeah, so what do you think that the relationship is between, you know, the Kaikion, for example, and early Christianity? 0.97

03:00:44.000 That's the part I didn't quite understand.

03:00:47.000 In what way didn't you understand?

03:00:49.000 Well, you know, were the thoughts new that were induced by the Kaikion, or were they already there, and the Kaikion just magnified them and made them more devoted to those ideas?

03:00:59.000 That's interesting.

03:01:01.000 Yeah.

03:01:01.000 I don't know.

03:01:03.000 I mean, we'd have to find the origin of all of their ideas because it was such an incredible time period for people thinking things through and communicating and devising ways to live and saying things that to this day people quote as wise words.

03:01:20.000 Oh, yeah.

03:01:21.000 Yeah.

03:01:21.000 Well, you know, our sacred literature is pretty old.

03:01:24.000 Yeah.

03:01:25.000 There's not much new.

03:01:26.000 There's the Bible.

03:01:26.000 There's the Greek philosophers.

03:01:28.000 What did you think of those scholars from Israel that were connecting Moses' burning bush to DMT? Yeah, that's an interesting idea. 0.98

03:01:39.000 Yeah, it's a psychologist, Benny Shanon.

03:01:43.000 Yeah, so he proposed that the burning bush was an acacia, and it was emitting fumes of DMT, and that's how Moses experienced, you know, the vision of the angel speaking to him.

03:01:58.000 I mean, it could be true, but it doesn't necessarily explain the broader phenomenon of the prophetic state because it was only Moses that one time.

03:02:08.000 It doesn't really explain Isaiah or Ezekiel or other prophets.

03:02:14.000 Other prophets having experiences?

03:02:17.000 Other prophets actually being exposed or taking an exogenous psychedelic agent.

03:02:24.000 So that's not talked about at all?

03:02:27.000 No.

03:02:27.000 Well, let's see.

03:02:29.000 There are certain things that stimulate your prophecy, like a good meal and being happy and good music.

03:02:37.000 You know, the mana may be, you know, some people have suggested the mana has got a lysergic acid ingredient, and that's why the Hebrews were experiencing their visions in the desert.

03:02:49.000 You know, but the only, like, you know, clear-cut, you know, plant and, you know, person epiphany is Moses at the bush.

03:02:57.000 Some people believe that the incense in the tabernacle or in the altar had cannabis in it.

03:03:05.000 So, but there's not...

03:03:07.000 Yeah, I've heard that before.

03:03:08.000 Yeah, yeah.

03:03:10.000 You know, but the whole presence of endogenous DMT kind of makes it moot whether or not people took, you know, plants or substances in the Bible or any of this old spiritual literature because you have endogenous DMT. You've got the means to experience visions without taking anything in.

03:03:29.000 Have you ever attempted to achieve visions without the use of the chemical?

03:03:34.000 Like, have you ever attempted to do it through kundalini yoga?

03:03:37.000 Because that's one way that I have talked to people that have had these experiences.

03:03:41.000 They said you can get pretty damn close with yoga.

03:03:45.000 Well, and with holotropic breathing, too.

03:03:48.000 Have you done either one of those?

03:03:50.000 I've done holotropic breathing.

03:03:52.000 Could you explain how that works?

03:03:54.000 Yeah, the first time was very psychedelic.

03:03:56.000 Well, you hyperventilate deep and long for as long as you can.

03:04:00.000 It might be 5 minutes, might be 10 minutes, might be 15. When you say hyperventilating, like, what's the schedule on the internet?

03:04:06.000 Like, how are you doing?

03:04:07.000 No, it's very deep and very fast.

03:04:11.000 Very deep and very fast.

03:04:12.000 Okay.

03:04:13.000 Yeah.

03:04:15.000 And you do it and your hands kind of spasm up from the changes in the astid base balance.

03:04:20.000 Really?

03:04:21.000 Oh, yeah.

03:04:22.000 Your hands spasm?

03:04:23.000 Yeah, your feet.

03:04:24.000 Your lips begin tingling.

03:04:27.000 She'd be sitting down when you're doing this? 0.83

03:04:29.000 Oh yeah, you need to be screened.

03:04:31.000 Really?

03:04:31.000 I mean, you need to make certain that your heart's in good shape and you're not on any medications that might interact badly with being that out of it.

03:04:39.000 Yeah, it's a whole system.

03:04:41.000 It's like tripping without drugs and they've got a...

03:04:44.000 How long do you do it for?

03:04:46.000 Before you start the...

03:04:47.000 You know, five minutes, ten minutes, or half hour.

03:04:51.000 I mean, it just depends.

03:04:52.000 You can snap into it real quickly or it might take a long time.

03:04:56.000 I wonder how much of that is what runner's high is.

03:04:59.000 It could be.

03:05:01.000 Well, so we studied runner's high for melatonin levels back in the 1980s and 1990s.

03:05:09.000 There was a marathon in the winter on Sandia Crest, which is like 10,000 feet to 10,000 feet.

03:05:16.000 And these guys run a marathon along Zendia Crest.

03:05:20.000 And I was looking for some way to stimulate melatonin.

03:05:24.000 And so I looked at the stress level of those guys and figured if anybody is inducing enough stress on themselves to raise melatonin, naturally it would be them.

03:05:34.000 So we did that and we found some increases.

03:05:38.000 We tried blocking it with naloxone and those were the kind of studies that I was doing.

03:05:45.000 Yeah, and after a certain point, you just switch and you're in this very highly altered state.

03:05:52.000 And how long does it last?

03:05:56.000 Well, you stop doing the breathing once that happens.

03:06:02.000 I don't know, maybe 10-15 minutes?

03:06:06.000 And so what would be akin to it?

03:06:08.000 Is it like mushrooms?

03:06:10.000 Is it like eating edible marijuana?

03:06:14.000 What is it?

03:06:15.000 The experience that I had, as I remember, I've only done it once, like really breakthrough.

03:06:19.000 It was like MDMA. Really?

03:06:22.000 Yeah.

03:06:22.000 This great clarity.

03:06:24.000 Ooh.

03:06:25.000 Really?

03:06:27.000 Yeah, but I think people have a range of experiences.

03:06:31.000 What do you think is happening?

03:06:32.000 Like, what is causing that euphoric sort of sensation, like, pharmacologically?

03:06:38.000 Well, you know, it isn't always euphoric.

03:06:41.000 For some people it's really very difficult.

03:06:43.000 There's throwing up and there's...

03:06:44.000 Oh, really?

03:06:45.000 ...vomiting.

03:06:46.000 And, yeah, you know, people can get pretty...

03:06:48.000 You know, it's a very powerful technique.

03:06:51.000 Yeah, and I'm not, you know, recommending that anybody start doing it.

03:06:55.000 Can people overdose?

03:06:56.000 Can they over-breathe?

03:06:58.000 Not that I've heard of.

03:06:59.000 That's good news.

03:07:01.000 Well, you know, I'm familiar with their network and they're pretty well trained people.

03:07:06.000 Wow.

03:07:07.000 So there's a whole place you could go and you can be guided through these sort of breathing sessions.

03:07:13.000 Is that what they do?

03:07:14.000 Yeah.

03:07:15.000 Well, Stan Groff, have you heard of Stan?

03:07:17.000 Yes.

03:07:17.000 Yeah.

03:07:18.000 You know, Stan was that Czech psychiatrist who did a lot of LSD research.

03:07:22.000 And Stan was at the University of Maryland for a while, working with Bill Richards and those guys.

03:07:28.000 And once they stopped, you know, once the compounds, once psychedelics were scheduled and all human research ended, you know, Stan moved on and in the meantime developed this, you know, holotropic breathwork.

03:07:43.000 Wow.

03:07:43.000 And he's trained hundreds of therapists in the technique.

03:07:48.000 Did he get it from any sort of indigenous ritual or some ancient civilization ritual?

03:07:54.000 I'm trying to remember where he got it from.

03:07:57.000 I think there was some school of psychotherapy, kind of obscure, and I think.

03:08:06.000 I'm just not sure.

03:08:07.000 You know, it was going around, and he picked it up, and he ran.

03:08:12.000 What I was getting at is, like, is there a culture that exists anywhere that also knew about this that was doing this a long time ago?

03:08:18.000 I'm sure, but I don't know.

03:08:20.000 Nothing we know of?

03:08:21.000 Yeah.

03:08:22.000 I'm just real curious.

03:08:25.000 They say ayahuasca is one of the first DMT experiences that people have had.

03:08:32.000 But I wonder how did they figure out how to put those two things together so you could just eat it?

03:08:40.000 Well, if you ask them, they will tell you the plant stole them.

03:08:45.000 Yeah.

03:08:46.000 Yeah, but how that works...

03:08:48.000 But how do they know?

03:08:48.000 They weren't alive back then.

03:08:50.000 That's thousands of years old.

03:08:51.000 That's nonsense.

03:08:52.000 Well, it could be King Solomon.

03:08:54.000 It could be.

03:08:55.000 Yeah.

03:08:56.000 Or, yeah, I mean...

03:08:59.000 It seems so wild that someone figured out how to combine one thing that has DMT in it and another thing that's an MAO inhibitor so that your body will just absorb it.

03:09:09.000 Like, that they figured that out in the jungle.

03:09:13.000 One thing that they may have been doing is the vine, the banisteriopsis, has got the beta-carbolines in it, the harmine, harmoline, MAO inhibitors.

03:09:25.000 And they use that as like a screening tool.

03:09:31.000 If they're on the banisteriopsis, they can taste it.

03:09:36.000 Other plants and the essence of what's in that other plant comes through in a way that isn't normally the case.

03:09:43.000 Oh, wow.

03:09:44.000 So they may have their antennas up, so to speak, by being on the MAO inhibitor beta-carbolines all the while and experimenting with what plants do what.

03:09:57.000 Wow.

03:09:58.000 So just by using that as, did you say, as like a regulator?

03:10:02.000 Well, like radar or something.

03:10:04.000 You know, they can pick stuff up that otherwise is invisible.

03:10:08.000 You know, within the plant.

03:10:10.000 We've got to, I mean, animals must have something similar too, right?

03:10:14.000 I mean, there's got to be a reason why they only eat specific types of grasses and avoid other ones.

03:10:19.000 Does it just taste?

03:10:22.000 Because I know that certain grasses and certain plants will actually change their flavor profile if they think cows are eating them or if deers are eating them.

03:10:30.000 Oh, really?

03:10:30.000 That's interesting.

03:10:31.000 They said that about acacia.

03:10:33.000 The acacia tree, there was a thing they were reading about giraffes who wouldn't eat the leaves. 0.92

03:10:40.000 Of these trees, and it turns out they were downwind from trees that these giraffes were eating. 0.99

03:10:47.000 So these giraffes were eating, the wind goes down, it changes the flavor profile of all these other plants.

03:10:55.000 So whether it's through the mycelium in the ground, however they're communicating.

03:11:00.000 But they've even done it to the point where they've played sounds of like caterpillars chewing on leaves, and that causes the change in the flavor profile to the leaves.

03:11:12.000 They have senses, some weird senses.

03:11:16.000 Well, and there are stories of animals getting intoxicated.

03:11:20.000 Oh, yeah.

03:11:21.000 For sure, right?

03:11:22.000 Alcohol, you know, fermented fruit, other things.

03:11:25.000 Don't elephants love that? 0.99

03:11:26.000 Yeah.

03:11:27.000 And, you know, catnip and, you know, cot.

03:11:29.000 They discovered, you know, cot from goats eating the leaves and they would get frisky.

03:11:34.000 Have you ever tried cotton?

03:11:36.000 I was growing some cotton in my greenhouse back in the day.

03:11:38.000 Is that legal?

03:11:41.000 You know, in New Mexico, probably.

03:11:43.000 And that stuff is like an amphetamine, right?

03:11:46.000 Yeah, it's a stimulant.

03:11:47.000 Did you enjoy it?

03:11:48.000 It was okay.

03:11:49.000 It was okay.

03:11:50.000 Did you want to take over a boat?

03:11:52.000 No, it's a small plant.

03:11:54.000 I only got a couple of leaves.

03:11:55.000 It seems like the preferred drug of pirates, right?

03:11:59.000 Right.

03:12:00.000 They love that stuff.

03:12:01.000 They always scare people with, oh, they're on the cot.

03:12:03.000 Oh, Jesus.

03:12:04.000 I just wanted to know what the actual, was it like?

03:12:08.000 It's like caffeine, pretty much.

03:12:10.000 Really?

03:12:11.000 Yeah, yeah.

03:12:11.000 Well, in the Middle East, in more traditional societies that are really into cot, they chew cot and the city council or the village council gets together, they chew cot and they make their decisions.

03:12:25.000 Wow.

03:12:27.000 I guess it would be like, you know, chewing coca leaves.

03:12:31.000 Right.

03:12:32.000 The chewing coca leaves is fascinating, too, because so many people think that there's actually like a health benefit to chewing coca leaves.

03:12:38.000 It's actually probably good for you.

03:12:40.000 It's just cocaine.

03:12:42.000 How they get it is from coca leaves, so you can't have coca leaves.

03:12:45.000 Well, it's like cot.

03:12:46.000 They extract, you know, cathinone from cot.

03:12:49.000 What's cathinone?

03:12:50.000 It's the active ingredient in cot, like cocaine is in coca.

03:12:53.000 And then you start manipulating the cathinone molecule, and you come up with bath salts, more or less.

03:13:00.000 Oh, boy.

03:13:02.000 Yeah, yeah.

03:13:03.000 Oh, my God.

03:13:06.000 It's a good drug gone bad.

03:13:09.000 Well, that was a weird time in history, right, where people would go to, like, drugstores or gas stations, rather, and buy what they would call bath salts.

03:13:19.000 It says, not for human consumption.

03:13:22.000 And people would buy it and just kill each other on it.

03:13:27.000 That was a wild time where people found out that you could get that.

03:13:31.000 Yeah.

03:13:32.000 Well, it's kind of like that kind of THC, CBD you were talking about before the show.

03:13:41.000 Yes.

03:13:42.000 Delta 9. Delta 9. It's legal.

03:13:45.000 And it's very powerful, you say, huh?

03:13:46.000 Yes.

03:13:48.000 It's legitimate.

03:13:49.000 Yeah.

03:13:49.000 They have it a lot around here, too.

03:13:51.000 Like, they have stores that they sell it.

03:13:53.000 And there was, like, some sort of an amendment to get rid of it.

03:13:56.000 And I think it got knocked down.

03:13:58.000 I'm pretty sure that was the story behind it.

03:14:00.000 But they have, like, a fake version of marijuana here that's legal.

03:14:04.000 Yeah.

03:14:05.000 It's like, okay.

03:14:06.000 Well, you know, they're designing new drugs every day.

03:14:09.000 Yeah.

03:14:10.000 They're coming up with new versions of drugs that are illegal.

03:14:14.000 Yeah.

03:14:15.000 Well, and these psychedelic startups are designing new drugs as well.

03:14:20.000 That's wild.

03:14:21.000 Yeah.

03:14:22.000 Like, if someone figures out a better acid.

03:14:24.000 A better acid, a longer DMT. Yeah.

03:14:27.000 You know, something that lasted maybe an hour instead of just a half hour.

03:14:31.000 Well, what you guys were doing with IVs, how long was the drip?

03:14:34.000 And could you have prolonged that experience?

03:14:38.000 Like, what was the longest one you did with people?

03:14:40.000 Well, you know, we just gave it as a push, like as a bolus.

03:14:46.000 Like I would inject the drug over 30 seconds and then clear the line for 15 more seconds with salt water.

03:14:52.000 And so is it from an IV bag or is it just straight into the tube that's attached to the...

03:14:57.000 It was, you know, from a syringe.

03:14:58.000 Okay, so it's not going...

03:15:00.000 Oh, okay.

03:15:00.000 I was under the impression it was an IV drip.

03:15:02.000 I thought it was like, that's interesting.

03:15:04.000 Like, how would you regulate...

03:15:06.000 Well, one study that we did was an attempt to cause tolerance to a closely spaced repeated dosing of DMT. You know, like if you take LSD every day for a few days, you stop responding.

03:15:18.000 Right.

03:15:19.000 And there were some studies giving DMT to see if you could develop tolerance, but you couldn't.

03:15:27.000 So I thought maybe if you spaced the injections close enough together, that was an issue regarding half-life.

03:15:33.000 That's interesting to hear you say that because I had always heard for some reason that if you do TMT next to like a recent TMT trip like 10 minutes ago, do it again in 10 minutes, like you won't be able to do it.

03:15:46.000 But it's not true at all.

03:15:47.000 I've had that experience.

03:15:48.000 I've done it multiple times in a day and the most potent one was the last one.

03:15:53.000 Exactly.

03:15:54.000 That's more or less what we found, is that we spaced injections every half hour.

03:16:01.000 And there'd be a real progression of the effects over the course of the morning.

03:16:07.000 And as a result of those data, a group at Imperial College in London is developing an infusion model to maintain the state for at least a half hour.

03:16:20.000 So when you're doing it, you're injecting, and then in 30 minutes you're injecting again?

03:16:26.000 Yeah, they'd come down, and we would spend maybe 10-15 minutes processing, and then they'd get ready for the second dose.

03:16:34.000 So when you say processing, like explaining what you saw, talking about it?

03:16:38.000 Yeah, I would ask them how it was and what came up.

03:16:45.000 It was a pretty packed 10-15 minutes too, I'll tell you.

03:16:48.000 Dude, you're like cleaning them up and sending them right back into space.

03:16:51.000 It was a lot of fun.

03:16:54.000 People really got a lot of good work done during that, you know, in the course of that morning.

03:16:59.000 I'm sure.

03:17:00.000 Usually, you know, they'd be exhausted after the third dose like I can't do anymore.

03:17:03.000 And, you know, we would give them the fourth dose and they would experience this great resolution.

03:17:09.000 Really?

03:17:09.000 Of whatever, you know, troubles came up over the course of the morning.

03:17:13.000 Wow.

03:17:14.000 Yeah, I'm collaborating with a group at UCLA that's going to use probably repeated dosing of DMT in post-traumatic stress disorder.

03:17:25.000 That's amazing.

03:17:27.000 And it'll be good because we'll be able to do therapy in between the individual injections.

03:17:36.000 Wow.

03:17:37.000 And so what if you come across an issue that's going to take more time to resolve, like you're saying, be able to do therapy?

03:17:46.000 Will you postpone the next treatment?

03:17:49.000 I mean, if you gave four doses over the course of a morning, You know, stuff will come up, and you'll resolve it more or less by the fourth dose, but it isn't the end of treatment.

03:18:01.000 I mean, you would be in treatment already in some form or another, and with the stuff that came up during the DMT sessions, you would have that as Christopher the Mill in your future work.

03:18:12.000 What I was getting at was that, like, say if someone is having a bad experience, and say if they're doing this four-dose thing, but they have a really bad experience around dose number three, would you allow them to do dose four, or would you have to have a conversation with them?

03:18:29.000 Yeah, you'd have to ask them.

03:18:30.000 And you would just do it based on their word, or is there like a protocol for when you pull a patient?

03:18:37.000 Well, the study is still being designed, but, you know, the standard of care would be if somebody says no, I mean, that means no.

03:18:46.000 Right, right.

03:18:48.000 And if someone says yes, that means go ahead, even if you might think they might be a little slightly unhinged at this point?

03:18:55.000 Well, you know, stressed or uncertain as what's next.

03:18:59.000 Like in our study, after the third dose, a lot of people felt up against their ropes and they'd say no.

03:19:04.000 Has anybody ever dropped out?

03:19:06.000 And I would say, not yet.

03:19:10.000 And everybody went ahead.

03:19:12.000 And they were glad they did.

03:19:13.000 They could kind of metabolize the stuff that had been stirred up.

03:19:17.000 Yeah, that's the fine line between whether you push someone to keep going or whether you'd say, let's take a break.

03:19:25.000 Yeah, yeah.

03:19:27.000 Yeah, I mean, safety first.

03:19:30.000 Yeah, for sure.

03:19:32.000 Could you imagine a world where there are places that would take care of people the way your studies were run?

03:19:40.000 That would do it that way?

03:19:42.000 I mean, is that achievable in our lifetime?

03:19:45.000 There could be a place where...

03:19:47.000 People that know what they're doing, certified, have everything locked down, doing it the right way, do it exactly the way you did to those patients.

03:19:56.000 Well, it wouldn't be exactly the same.

03:19:58.000 I mean, I had my own style.

03:20:02.000 I'm sure you would.

03:20:03.000 It wouldn't be as fun.

03:20:04.000 It might not be as fun.

03:20:06.000 But, yeah, yeah, I mean, you know, why not?

03:20:11.000 Yeah, well, why not?

03:20:12.000 I mean, I think one of the really nice things is that there's a lot of support for it on the right now because they realize the effect that it has on soldiers.

03:20:20.000 Vets.

03:20:21.000 Yeah, vet care.

03:20:22.000 Vet care.

03:20:23.000 Yeah.

03:20:24.000 That's a big one because everyone's always looking to give some relief to heroes that come back with PTSD and this is the way to do it.

03:20:31.000 It's the best way to do it.

03:20:32.000 I think that's going to get the most funding, the most support.

03:20:37.000 People got to realize that this is not a left or right issue.

03:20:40.000 This is a human issue.

03:20:42.000 I mean, we should treat our veterans really carefully, lovingly.

03:20:46.000 Yeah, 100%.

03:20:48.000 And for all human beings, not just PTSD from that, but PTSD from being attacked, car accidents.

03:20:54.000 People have all sorts of traumatic memories from their youth.

03:20:59.000 This is not just for that.

03:21:01.000 It's for anybody with these horrific patterns in their head that are caused by trauma.

03:21:07.000 Well, you were talking about being uploaded to a computer and how horrible that would be.

03:21:13.000 Yeah.

03:21:14.000 Worst case scenario.

03:21:15.000 Worst case scenario.

03:21:16.000 I was just trying to look at the worst possible version would be you stuck in a computer box, like looking at the world but not able to move or act.

03:21:24.000 But there might not be any trauma.

03:21:25.000 Beyond that, anyway.

03:21:27.000 Maybe.

03:21:28.000 I just would think that a disassociated brain...

03:21:32.000 Imagine if you found out that your thinking wasn't just your brain, that your heart was actually involved, and that all the neurons that are around the heart actually work in conjunction with the brain, but that a brain disassociated from the heart is always a psycho.

03:21:49.000 Like so if everybody who did get their brain uploaded somewhere, they just popped out on the other end like a three-quarter human psycho.

03:21:57.000 Yeah, well, so you're using the biology to support like this philosophical idea.

03:22:03.000 Sort of.

03:22:04.000 The philosophical idea is the most interesting because I think if people really do freeze their brain and they really do boot that sucker back up and you get drawn from heaven, Back into this, like, earthly realm inside of a fish tank with a bunch of wires attached to you.

03:22:22.000 You're floating in some super serum. 1.00

03:22:24.000 Like, fuck. 1.00

03:22:26.000 Yeah, well, I mean, it could be great. 1.00

03:22:29.000 Maybe.

03:22:30.000 Maybe.

03:22:30.000 Yeah, if you've got a good handler.

03:22:31.000 Somebody gives you the right juice.

03:22:32.000 Those that stimulate different parts of the brain.

03:22:35.000 They give you orgasm, fix your memory. 0.97

03:22:38.000 Well, you know, set and setting.

03:22:40.000 Yeah, you need the technologist to be a nice guy. 1.00

03:22:42.000 You have to trust people to fuck with your brain. 0.99

03:22:44.000 Why would they have any incentive to help hold the end of the bargain? 1.00

03:22:48.000 Maybe they fold some of those online Bitcoin places.

03:22:53.000 Maybe they fold up shop.

03:22:55.000 Well, you've read that, what's it called?

03:22:58.000 It's the story that is the basis for Total Recall.

03:23:02.000 We can get it for you.

03:23:03.000 We can buy it for you wholesale.

03:23:06.000 It's by PK Dick.

03:23:08.000 And these people enter into this implant kind of state and they have adventures and whatnot.

03:23:14.000 I think we are 100% on our way to that.

03:23:18.000 I think we're 100%.

03:23:20.000 I don't think they're stopping us.

03:23:23.000 I think all they're going to have to do is continue with just a general...

03:23:28.000 Virtual reality was non-existent 20 years ago. 0.64

03:23:31.000 Nobody gave a shit about virtual reality because the technology wasn't up to date. 0.71

03:23:34.000 It wasn't something that got discussed. 0.98

03:23:36.000 Every now and then you hear about somebody who had a headset and, oh, it's crazy.

03:23:42.000 We tried it out.

03:23:43.000 And I remember doing it, I forget what year it was, but Duncan Trussell had one at his house.

03:23:47.000 It was very, very pixelated.

03:23:49.000 I think it was the Oculus.

03:23:50.000 Very, very pixelated.

03:23:52.000 And we put this thing on and we're moving around with it.

03:23:55.000 No, it wasn't the Oculus.

03:23:56.000 It was the other one.

03:23:57.000 What's that?

03:23:59.000 Vive.

03:23:59.000 The Vive.

03:24:00.000 HTC Vive, right?

03:24:01.000 That's what it was.

03:24:02.000 And so we're moving around with this thing, and I remember thinking, wow, this is just the beginning.

03:24:07.000 This thing's going to get really bizarre.

03:24:09.000 And then a couple of years later, Duncan had one, and he said, this one's so much better.

03:24:14.000 And he gave me this one, and you have this experience where you're in the ocean, and a whale swims by you.

03:24:20.000 It's wild.

03:24:22.000 You're like underwater with this thing, and I'm like, whoa.

03:24:25.000 And that was quite a while ago.

03:24:28.000 We are, whatever it is, if it's 10 years or if it's 20 years, because 20 years ago, again, nobody cared about VR. If it's 20 years from now, whatever it's going to be, whatever year it is, they're going to have something that replicates reality, like, down to every moment.

03:24:43.000 Down to touch, there'll be haptic feedback, there'll be something that, like, hijacks your nervous system and thinks your feet are on the ground.

03:24:51.000 You're going to replicate the feel of gravity.

03:24:55.000 Yeah, well, you know, I think it's going to kind of detach you from reality, won't it?

03:25:02.000 100%.

03:25:02.000 Yeah, so what's the point of that?

03:25:04.000 Well, I don't think it's good for us, but I just think it's inevitable.

03:25:07.000 I think if we really do come up with a way to live in, like, Avatar land and fly around on dragons and live in some bizarre fake universe...

03:25:22.000 We're going to do it.

03:25:24.000 I guess some people will.

03:25:26.000 Well, yeah, some people will.

03:25:28.000 I think a lot of people will, man.

03:25:30.000 I think it's going to be a lot of people's number one pastime. 1.00

03:25:34.000 Why would you live regular life, stupid? 1.00

03:25:38.000 Why would you live regular life when it's indistinguishable from regular life and you could be on a pirate ship? 1.00

03:25:45.000 Yeah, I kind of wonder how much it would be adopted by the Indian reservations that I live within.

03:25:53.000 Oh, for sure.

03:25:54.000 That would be probably the first place they implement it.

03:25:56.000 Yeah, you know, because they're pretty much living in nature, but they're not very happy, a lot of them.

03:26:02.000 You know, they drink and there's unemployment and feuds and things, which never really get very far.

03:26:09.000 So you might think the more traditionalists wouldn't go for it, but the kids, you know, the kids, because life is rather bleak.

03:26:17.000 Well, those reservations were the places where mixed martial arts first thrived in California.

03:26:23.000 It was illegal in the state of California, but they would hold their own, they have their own laws, they have their own rules.

03:26:29.000 So they would hold these events at these Native American reservations, and we would go to there.

03:26:36.000 That was where that kind of saved a lot of those promotions, the early MMA promotions.

03:26:42.000 The fact they could put on some fights and it also gave these guys a chance to develop in a state where MMA was completely illegal.

03:26:50.000 So Native American reservations have a history of doing things before anybody else was allowed to do them because they can write their own laws.

03:27:00.000 If they decided, imagine that.

03:27:02.000 They decided to make their own psychedelic therapy at all these Native American casinos. 0.97

03:27:08.000 Well, you know, there's that long history of the Native American church that's been using mescaline-containing peyote forever.

03:27:16.000 That's a pretty small segment of the Native population, but still it's established and protected.

03:27:24.000 That's the reason for the Religious Freedom Restoration Act was You know, peyote use, that was the primary driver. 0.76

03:27:31.000 So that was the first one before they got to the ayahuasca church?

03:27:35.000 Yeah.

03:27:36.000 Yeah, the ayahuasca church relied on that ruling as support.

03:27:40.000 Both ayahuasca churches, there's two different ones, right?

03:27:42.000 Do both of them have similar rituals?

03:27:44.000 No, they're different.

03:27:47.000 The UDV, like I mentioned, is kind of straight-laced.

03:27:51.000 You're in chairs, you have lights, you have a leader.

03:27:56.000 The other group is called the Santo Daime, and it's a bit more free-form.

03:28:02.000 There's singing and there's dancing.

03:28:05.000 Sounds like more fun.

03:28:06.000 It's more fun, you know, fun, capital F, fun.

03:28:10.000 And are they doing that under the influence, all the singing and dancing?

03:28:13.000 Oh, yeah.

03:28:14.000 Wow.

03:28:15.000 Yeah, they drink tea all night.

03:28:17.000 They drink ayahuasca.

03:28:18.000 Oh, boy.

03:28:18.000 Yeah, the ceremonies tend to involve more ingestion.

03:28:22.000 Now, has anybody studied those folks?

03:28:24.000 Because that sounds like they'd be even happier than the other ones you talked about.

03:28:27.000 Yeah, I'm not familiar.

03:28:28.000 You know, I'm not super familiar with that literature.

03:28:31.000 What I've read mostly is the UDV has been studied.

03:28:34.000 And it's because of their interest in establishing that the use is safe and effective and helpful.

03:28:41.000 Well, it'd be really interesting to see the two of them studied, you know, see the contrast between the singing and dancing and the way the other people would do it like they're in sort of a mainstream Christian church.

03:28:54.000 Yeah, a side-to-side comparison.

03:28:58.000 You know, I would think those data would be out there, but maybe not separated in that exact same manner.

03:29:06.000 I think we've been doing this for almost four hours.

03:29:10.000 Four hours.

03:29:11.000 Can you imagine that?

03:29:13.000 Time flew.

03:29:14.000 Time flew.

03:29:15.000 Time flew, Rick.

03:29:16.000 Thank you, man.

03:29:16.000 Thanks for coming on.

03:29:17.000 Your book, The Psychedelic Handbook, is available right now.

03:29:21.000 There it is.

03:29:22.000 And this is the novel that you wrote, Joseph Levy Escapes Death.

03:29:26.000 That is available as well.

03:29:30.000 Well, you could read the comment by, you know, Graham, a disturbing and, you know, something or another's tale.

03:29:35.000 You know, Graham likes the Joseph Levy book.

03:29:37.000 Well, if Graham likes it, I'm sure I'll like it too.

03:29:39.000 Yeah, it's entertaining.

03:29:40.000 I enjoyed talking to you, man.

03:29:42.000 It was a lot of fun.

03:29:42.000 It really was.

03:29:43.000 It was great.

03:29:44.000 I'm glad we finally did it.

03:29:44.000 Yeah, finally.

03:29:45.000 Let's do it again.

03:29:46.000 We do it again?

03:29:47.000 Yeah, yeah.

03:29:48.000 It was fun, right?

03:29:48.000 I would like to do it again.

03:29:50.000 You're up for it.

03:29:50.000 Let's go!

03:29:51.000 Yeah.

03:29:52.000 All right.

03:29:52.000 Thank you.

03:29:53.000 Bye, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - August 10, 2022

Joe Rogan Experience #1854 - Rick Strassman

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