The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #470 - Amber Lyon

00:00:03.000 Hello, friends and neighbors.

00:00:04.000 That's the nice way of doing it.

00:00:06.000 This episode of The Joe Rogan Experience is brought to you by LegalZoom. 0.93

00:00:11.000 LegalZoom is a way that you can deal with a lot of legal shit online without actually leaving your house. 0.79

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00:00:57.000 Think of that. 1.00

00:01:00.000 And LegalZoom's pretty good that way.

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00:01:05.000 That's pretty sporty.

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00:01:12.000 And, you know, they can set it up so that, like, if you're on the way and you're in the middle of filling all this stuff out and you're like, oh my god, I'm going to jail.

00:01:20.000 LegalZoom will hook you up with a lawyer.

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00:01:26.000 Onnit was incorporated with LegalZoom.

00:01:29.000 Brian formed...

00:01:30.000 Here, I can't breathe so good.

00:01:32.000 My nose is kind of stuffy.

00:01:33.000 I have a tiny bit of a cold today.

00:01:36.000 Just a tiny bit.

00:01:37.000 So if it sounds like I'm breathing weird, that's where that's coming from.

00:01:42.000 LegalZoom is not a law firm, but they can connect you with a third-party attorney and provide you with self-help services.

00:01:49.000 That's like lawyer speak right there.

00:01:51.000 Notice...

00:01:52.000 That part, it's funny.

00:01:53.000 Everything else on the page is like normal print.

00:01:56.000 That part's bold and covered in yellow.

00:01:59.000 Because we live in a strange time, ladies and gentlemen.

00:02:02.000 No one believes anyone.

00:02:04.000 And you get a special discount from listening to this podcast.

00:02:07.000 Make sure you enter Rogan in the referral box at checkout for more savings.

00:02:11.000 In the past 12 years, over 2 million Americans have used LegalZoom and they've saved a ton of money.

00:02:16.000 Go get yourself some LegalZoom, ladies and gentlemen, please, for you and for those around you.

00:02:22.000 We're also brought to you by Lumosity.

00:02:23.000 And Lumosity is one of my favorite of the sponsors because it's games for your brain that actually can sort of stimulate your brain in a way where it'll be more fit.

00:02:34.000 Does that make any sense?

00:02:35.000 You know, they say chess is really good for your mind.

00:02:37.000 It's really good for your thinking.

00:02:38.000 I don't know how they know that, but apparently they do.

00:02:42.000 Well, that thought process behind it has been extended to video games.

00:02:46.000 So if anybody ever starts telling you, hey man, you shouldn't be playing video games.

00:02:49.000 They rot your brain. 1.00

00:02:51.000 Actually, they don't stupid. 1.00

00:02:52.000 They're actually good for your brain. 1.00

00:02:54.000 That sounds ridiculous, but it's not something people want to hear because you look at a kid playing some battlefield, whatever the fuck the name of these games are now. 0.98

00:03:02.000 Titanfall. 0.97

00:03:03.000 That's supposed to be the new one, right?

00:03:04.000 Everybody keeps telling me about that one. 0.99

00:03:06.000 People are saying, if you get back in a video game, it says, stop, stop trying to drag me into the fucking hell of your existence. 0.99

00:03:12.000 But if you're in that hell, you're actually exercising your brain. 0.99

00:03:15.000 Sounds crazy, but it does.

00:03:17.000 But there's a way to do it where it's designed specifically for your brain and for your needs, and that's what Lumosity provides.

00:03:25.000 Lumosity is essentially like a personalized gym for your brain.

00:03:30.000 When you click the Get Started button, They take you through a bunch of different things you're trying to do, like memory, like remembering patterns and locations, associating names with faces, keeping track of multiple pieces of information, things along those lines.

00:03:42.000 You can check them off, and attention is another one, things like ignoring distractions, blah, blah, blah, speed, decision-making in time-sensitive situations, and all these things.

00:03:52.000 You fill them out, and then they...

00:03:54.000 They create a program that's based on the data that you've provided them.

00:03:58.000 It's really kind of cool.

00:03:59.000 It's based on the science of neuroplasticity.

00:04:02.000 What does that mean?

00:04:03.000 Coming out of my mouth.

00:04:04.000 Almost nothing. 0.99

00:04:05.000 I don't know what the fuck neuroplasticity is. 0.93

00:04:07.000 Apparently scientists do, though, and they like it. 0.98

00:04:10.000 They think it's good for you.

00:04:12.000 And the thing about Lumosity that I enjoy is it's fun.

00:04:16.000 They're cool, fun games.

00:04:17.000 They're like, you're working out your brain, but it's actually enjoyable.

00:04:20.000 I would do it if it had nothing to do with my brain.

00:04:23.000 If it didn't help my brain.

00:04:25.000 But I know it does help my brain, so it doesn't make any sense.

00:04:27.000 Would I really? 0.99

00:04:28.000 Am I just talking shit? 0.99

00:04:30.000 I enjoy it, though. 1.00

00:04:31.000 Go to Lumosity.com slash Joe.

00:04:33.000 That's Lumosity.com slash Joe.

00:04:35.000 Click the Start Training button and start playing your first game.

00:04:38.000 That's Lumosity.com slash Joe.

00:04:42.000 It's really interesting, and I'm really excited that someone came up with something like this, because Chris McGuire, a good buddy of mine, used to have a program for his...

00:04:50.000 He had one of those little Nintendo Game Boys or some shit.

00:04:54.000 And it had a program in it that was designed specifically. 0.94

00:04:57.000 One of those little handheld jammies.

00:04:58.000 And it was designed specifically for brain games.

00:05:02.000 And I was always thinking, wow, I need something like that. 1.00

00:05:04.000 But I'm not going to go out and buy one of those stupid little Game Boys just to get your brain games. 1.00

00:05:08.000 So... 1.00

00:05:09.000 I never did, but I do lose your mind.

00:05:11.000 Use?

00:05:12.000 Use Lumosity.

00:05:13.000 And you should too.

00:05:14.000 Lumosity.com slash Joe.

00:05:16.000 We're also brought to you by Onnit.com.

00:05:18.000 That's O-N-N-I-T. A human optimization website.

00:05:24.000 Yeah, man.

00:05:24.000 I have a hard time to breathe out of my nose.

00:05:26.000 No, no, no.

00:05:27.000 I'm okay.

00:05:28.000 I'm just...

00:05:29.000 Right now, I'm not sick, but I could be.

00:05:32.000 You know what I'm saying?

00:05:33.000 Like, I'm battling.

00:05:37.000 Onnit.com is, like I said, a human optimization website.

00:05:41.000 And what Aubrey and myself try to do with Onnit is provide you guys with all the stuff that we found, that we use, that we enjoy.

00:05:48.000 Things like strength and conditioning equipment, like kettlebells and battle ropes.

00:05:52.000 Things that just provide an awesome workout.

00:05:55.000 Steel maces.

00:05:56.000 They look like weapons, but they're not.

00:05:58.000 What they are is this weird offset weight.

00:06:00.000 It's a long metal pole with a big ball on the end of it.

00:06:03.000 It's very difficult and weird to move around.

00:06:06.000 And when you move it around, you develop all these weird muscles, functional muscles, muscles that work in an everyday situation.

00:06:13.000 And also, it helps your balance, it helps your coordination.

00:06:17.000 What I'm interested in when it comes to strength and conditioning things are all things that improve athletic performance.

00:06:23.000 Things that you find when you watch mixed martial arts fighters do their training routines.

00:06:29.000 Like when they do their strength and conditioning routines, they very rarely do traditional weight lifting activities.

00:06:33.000 You'll see a lot of battle ropes.

00:06:35.000 You'll see a lot of kettle bells.

00:06:36.000 You'll see a lot of things along those lines.

00:06:38.000 So that's the kind of stuff that we try to provide.

00:06:40.000 We try to provide things that actually help the body move as a unit.

00:06:44.000 Because as people have gotten a deeper and deeper understanding about strength and fitness, one of the things they realize is things like curls, like bicep curls, they don't make any sense.

00:06:54.000 You don't really do that in the wild.

00:06:56.000 You don't ever just pick something up only with your bicep.

00:06:58.000 You'd use your whole body.

00:06:59.000 And in using your whole body, you make everything strong.

00:07:02.000 And using only an individual muscle, you run the risk of imbalancing yourself.

00:07:08.000 Any of those things that you do do, any kind of training exercise you do, especially lifting weights, please go, if you can, go to a trainer, go to someone who knows what they're doing so you don't get injured.

00:07:18.000 It really sucks getting injured when it's just out of ignorance. 0.99

00:07:21.000 So if you're about to embark in any kind of weight lifting routine, you're like, God damn it, Joe Rogan, I'm tired of being a weak bitch. 1.00

00:07:27.000 I'm about to get it together. 0.99

00:07:28.000 Start out really light. 0.57

00:07:31.000 You can get a lot of shit done if you haven't done any workout at all and you're really serious about it. 0.96

00:07:35.000 Find out if you're serious about it, but don't even go to a gym. 0.99

00:07:38.000 Do body weight squats, push-ups and sit-ups.

00:07:41.000 That's it.

00:07:41.000 Just write down how many you can do.

00:07:43.000 Just do them until you can't do them again and then write it down and try to improve that number and do it for a few weeks.

00:07:49.000 And then blow your money on the gym. 0.85

00:07:51.000 Because you know what sucks? 1.00

00:07:52.000 Signing up for a gym and then not doing shit. 0.99

00:07:54.000 Then that money just gets taken out of your account every month and you're like, I'm weak. 0.99

00:07:58.000 I'm weak and lazy.

00:08:00.000 Anyway, Onnit.com, O-N-N-I-T. We sell all sorts of supplements and foods as well. 0.90

00:08:07.000 And by foods, I don't mean like groceries, but we have thought about doing that too.

00:08:11.000 The idea of combining or working in conjunction with local farmers that farm organically is very exciting to us.

00:08:19.000 We've talked about that several times.

00:08:20.000 We're trying to figure out how we could ever actually do it.

00:08:23.000 But that might be in our future.

00:08:25.000 Just connecting you, maybe, to local farmers, connecting you to farmers that are raising their beef, grass-fed, and in a very ethical way.

00:08:35.000 Farmers who are raising free-range chickens, so you know you're not buying your chickens from prisoners, little prisoner chickens.

00:08:43.000 That's our concern.

00:08:44.000 What we're trying to do at Onnit is just connect you with everything that we find beneficial in our life, hence the term human optimization.

00:08:51.000 Everything that we find that improves cognitive function, that improves mood, things that will improve your immune system, just whatever we find, like what's a good digestible protein.

00:09:02.000 Hemp protein?

00:09:03.000 Great.

00:09:03.000 Where can we get the best hemp protein?

00:09:05.000 Canada.

00:09:05.000 It's the only place.

00:09:06.000 Okay.

00:09:06.000 What's the highest grade?

00:09:08.000 This stuff.

00:09:08.000 Let's buy that.

00:09:09.000 That's our attitude at Onnit.

00:09:10.000 If you use the code name ROGAN, you will save 10% off any of the supplements.

00:09:14.000 The supplements, the weird ones like New Mood.

00:09:17.000 People are like, wait a minute, there's a supplement for your mood?

00:09:18.000 Yes, it's been known for a long time that 5-HTP can actually improve your mood.

00:09:24.000 It actually helps your body produce serotonin.

00:09:26.000 And New Mood contains 5-HTP and also contains L-tryptophan, which also converts to 5-HTP. It's really fascinating stuff.

00:09:37.000 And I might be wrong about those things that I just said.

00:09:39.000 How about that?

00:09:39.000 I mean, I don't really know.

00:09:41.000 The fuck do I know? 0.98

00:09:42.000 I know what I've read, though. 0.99

00:09:43.000 And I know what happens when I take it. 0.99

00:09:45.000 If you're concerned and you're like, what if this is bullshit? 0.99

00:09:48.000 Here's the deal at Onnit. 0.95

00:09:49.000 You have a first 30 pills, you have a 90-day money-back guarantee, 100%.

00:09:54.000 You don't even have to return the pills.

00:09:56.000 Just say, this didn't work, and you get your money back.

00:09:58.000 The last thing anybody wants you to feel is like this is a bad deal.

00:10:02.000 This is a bad situation.

00:10:04.000 Try it once, you don't like it, get your money back, who cares?

00:10:07.000 But if you do like it, we will promise you that we will sell you the best quality ingredients that we can find.

00:10:13.000 And being able to do it and distribute it from one place, like Onnit does, allows us to put together combinations that you're just not going to see the kind of dosages and purity that you're going to get from Onnit products and a lot of other ones, because this is not cost-effective.

00:10:29.000 So we have an advantage in that, that we just sell it online like that.

00:10:32.000 So, if you're interested, check it out.

00:10:35.000 Use the code word ROGAN and you will save 10% off any and all supplements.

00:10:39.000 Okay.

00:10:40.000 Amber Lyon is here.

00:10:42.000 Cue the music!

00:10:46.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:10:51.000 All right!

00:10:52.000 All day!

00:10:53.000 Hey! 0.99

00:10:54.000 Amber the Lion.

00:10:55.000 Last time we spoke on a podcast was two months before the world was supposed to end.

00:11:00.000 It was that big December 21st, 2012 scare that everybody was so terrified about.

00:11:07.000 We had people telling us for sure some change was going to happen.

00:11:11.000 I had Daniel Pinchback on the podcast.

00:11:12.000 He told me for sure.

00:11:14.000 I go, for sure something's going to happen December 21st, 2012?

00:11:18.000 It was absolutely without a doubt.

00:11:19.000 All markers point to that.

00:11:21.000 Okay.

00:11:22.000 And here we are.

00:11:23.000 We're still alive.

00:11:24.000 Nothing's changed.

00:11:26.000 Nothing's changed.

00:11:26.000 Have you written him and been like, um, excuse me?

00:11:28.000 No, I don't want to be mean.

00:11:29.000 I like that guy.

00:11:30.000 I don't want to be mean. 0.61

00:11:34.000 It's silly.

00:11:35.000 It's silly to think that you're going to be the first guy ever to figure out what's going to happen. 0.87

00:11:40.000 You see it coming.

00:11:41.000 Nobody else does.

00:11:41.000 You see it coming.

00:11:42.000 It's super easy if you're like a Ray Kurzweil guy and you're super scientific and very technologically in tune and you know what the latest technologies are.

00:11:53.000 So if Ray Kurzweil makes a prediction about the future, you've got to take it into consideration.

00:11:57.000 He's predicted a lot of things.

00:11:59.000 He predicted the internet search engine.

00:12:01.000 I believe he had something to do with speech to text.

00:12:03.000 He had a part in creating that.

00:12:06.000 So that guy, I believe.

00:12:08.000 But when you're a hippie writer like Daniel Pinchback, can you tell me it's going to be the end of the world?

00:12:13.000 I love your work, man.

00:12:14.000 Don't get me wrong.

00:12:14.000 I love that guy.

00:12:16.000 But I'm going to take it with a grain of salt.

00:12:17.000 I should be really fair here, because he did not say it was going to be the end of the world.

00:12:20.000 He did not at all.

00:12:21.000 He thought that there was going to be some sort of a paradigm shift.

00:12:23.000 And by the way, he might be right. 0.99

00:12:25.000 I'm all just talking shit here. 0.99

00:12:27.000 Because, like, who knows? 0.99

00:12:28.000 I mean, maybe a shift did take place.

00:12:30.000 We're just not quite aware of it yet.

00:12:32.000 Maybe it'll be looked at in history.

00:12:34.000 The French Renaissance.

00:12:35.000 When did the Inquisition end exactly?

00:12:40.000 Do they feel it by the day?

00:12:43.000 When did World War II, when it finally did end, when it was D-Day, when did the dust settle?

00:12:49.000 When did everybody realize what an incredible, insane, impactful moment they had just lived through?

00:12:54.000 It probably takes a few years.

00:12:56.000 You know, so maybe something happened internet-wise in December 21st, 2012. We're just not aware.

00:13:01.000 Maybe that was when the NSA really kicked it up a notch.

00:13:04.000 You know, who knows?

00:13:05.000 I mean, maybe it was something.

00:13:06.000 It's just it seems like no one ever really predicts the future.

00:13:11.000 Of course not.

00:13:12.000 And I believe that 2012 was symbolic for an evolution of consciousness that we're going through, that we're finally starting to end this madness as a species and evolve to a more conscious species that's more aware.

00:13:26.000 I just know, even since the last time I did your podcast, Joe, just how much awakening Yes.

00:13:46.000 Yes.

00:13:48.000 Yes.

00:13:52.000 Yes.

00:13:59.000 But above all, I think that we are shifting and people are awakening at this point.

00:14:05.000 I think you're right and I think Daniel Pinchback's right and I owe him an apology.

00:14:09.000 I just was too ignorant to see the shift.

00:14:12.000 Yeah. 0.64

00:14:12.000 No, I think there's most certainly something's going on. 0.64

00:14:15.000 And I think a lot of it is that younger kids today, they have not been inundated with the same sort of propaganda that we grew up with.

00:14:22.000 And they're getting the internet, you know, from day one.

00:14:25.000 And the exchange of information, the way it's done today...

00:14:29.000 It's not just more accurate than ever before. 1.00

00:14:32.000 Like someone tells you something stupid, and you go, what? 0.99

00:14:35.000 Let me Google that. 0.99

00:14:36.000 And everyone Googles it, and then that ends nonsense.

00:14:39.000 It ends a lot of nonsense conversations between friends that would have gone on for days and days and days when I was a kid. 1.00

00:14:44.000 When I was a kid, you had to go get a fucking encyclopedia if you wanted to figure out whether someone was full of shit. 0.98

00:14:50.000 And you had to go through the encyclopedia, and then you had to memorize it and quote it. 1.00

00:14:53.000 You couldn't just pull your phone up and stick it in their face and go, shut up, dummy. 0.98

00:14:57.000 I remember that. 0.99

00:14:57.000 I had those Encyclopedia Britannicas. 0.99

00:15:00.000 We'd get like 12 episodes, A through Z, and just have to pour through those.

00:15:04.000 They would go door to door.

00:15:05.000 Remember they would go door to door and try to sell them to you?

00:15:07.000 Yeah, we were the ones that bought them.

00:15:10.000 I grew up in the middle of the country. 0.58

00:15:11.000 We were suckers for all the door to door solicitors.

00:15:14.000 Door-to-door solicitors are so weird. 1.00

00:15:16.000 A charismatic person who's really good at being slick and bullshitting you knocks on your door and sells you some shit and tries to convince you to buy some shit. 0.99

00:15:26.000 You're not even in the store. 1.00

00:15:28.000 They're sending these creepers all around the country just knocking on people's doors and being slick and selling you vacuums and shit. 0.99

00:15:36.000 Or trying to save your soul. 0.98

00:15:38.000 Those are the best.

00:15:39.000 Yeah, selling you their cult.

00:15:40.000 Yeah, when you're sitting in the living room, you know, just relaxing and then someone knocks on the door telling you everything about your life is wrong and you need instant savings.

00:15:49.000 That only happened once in my whole life and it was when I was a little kid and I remember, I think my grandfather was home.

00:15:56.000 I think my grandfather was babysitting me and my sister and someone came to the door.

00:16:01.000 God, it was hard to remember.

00:16:02.000 But I remember it was like, nope, sorry, get out.

00:16:04.000 Sorry, thanks, thanks, bye.

00:16:06.000 And they were so insistent, just so foolishly insistent, you know, wanting you to know that if you don't know about this, man, you're going to miss the end of the world.

00:16:15.000 They're predicting the end of the world.

00:16:16.000 It's just another 2012. It's another...

00:16:19.000 You know, when those crazy people in San Diego all put on the Nikes and killed themselves because they thought—the Hale-Bopp comet people, remember that?

00:16:27.000 Yeah, I remember that. 0.52

00:16:28.000 That was the leader who had the—he was bald.

00:16:31.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:16:31.000 He looked very alien-esque.

00:16:34.000 Yes.

00:16:34.000 I forget homeboy's name, but— Yeah.

00:16:37.000 He was definitely a creeper.

00:16:38.000 The Hale-Bopp.

00:16:39.000 I can't believe people followed him.

00:16:41.000 Yeah.

00:16:41.000 I mean, just based on his looks, he freaked me out, you know?

00:16:44.000 Well, he was, you know, I mean, look, if he could, Ram Dass isn't the most normal looking dude either, but, you know, you listen to him and you hear him talk and you realize this guy is about as real as it gets.

00:16:55.000 I would love to hear what this Hale-Bopp dude sounded like. 0.99

00:16:59.000 You know, maybe he was slick as fuck. 0.99

00:17:00.000 Maybe he's a really good door-to-door salesman, you know? 1.00

00:17:03.000 Didn't he get them to castrate themselves?

00:17:05.000 Oh my gosh.

00:17:06.000 I think they castrated themselves too.

00:17:08.000 I Or at least one of them or a couple of them did.

00:17:10.000 I think he felt like sexuality was imprisoning. 1.00

00:17:14.000 There's probably some gay shit going on. 1.00

00:17:16.000 It's scary how quickly people can become sheep and listen to something like that. 1.00

00:17:20.000 Like actually castrate yourself?

00:17:22.000 Yes.

00:17:22.000 We say this, but maybe he's correct.

00:17:24.000 There he is.

00:17:24.000 There's the Heaven's Gate.

00:17:26.000 Maybe he's right.

00:17:26.000 Marshall.

00:17:27.000 Oh, yeah.

00:17:29.000 Marshall. 0.99

00:17:29.000 Oh, Marshall, you silly man. 0.99

00:17:33.000 Who knows? 0.99

00:17:34.000 Maybe he was right. 0.73

00:17:34.000 Maybe they're all on another planet right now. 0.73

00:17:36.000 We're the suckers. 0.98

00:17:37.000 Maybe they're living in paradise. 0.96

00:17:39.000 We don't know.

00:17:39.000 We just see their shells with their Nikes.

00:17:42.000 Symbolic Nikes. 0.61

00:17:44.000 And I never believe that we get the true story of what was going on from the government or from authority, so you never know.

00:17:50.000 Maybe there was something more to it.

00:17:52.000 I don't know.

00:17:53.000 I don't think the government knows.

00:17:53.000 Maybe they made up the castration thing.

00:17:55.000 That is possible, right? 1.00

00:17:57.000 They do shit like that? 0.99

00:17:58.000 Have you ever been a part of a story where you absolutely know, when you were working for CNN, was there anything where you're like, I know that that's not how it happened. 1.00

00:18:06.000 I know it.

00:18:07.000 What they're saying on TV right now is nonsense.

00:18:09.000 Yeah, for sure.

00:18:11.000 It happened a lot of times.

00:18:13.000 I think that, especially across the media in general, a lot of stories are just dumbed down to the point that you lose the real essence of the story.

00:18:23.000 And that happened for me in the situation of Bahrain, I talked about thoroughly on your last show.

00:18:30.000 But sometimes I would see them reporting things on air and had watched documentaries that they did.

00:18:36.000 And it was a stark contrast, a complete opposite from what I'd seen on the ground. 0.99

00:18:41.000 What did it feel like the first time you ever saw, like, bullshit? 0.92

00:18:45.000 The first time you ever knew, like, I'm sure in the beginning, when you first started being a reporter, you're probably very excited about the prospect. 0.96

00:18:51.000 You're working for CNN. Oh my goodness, you know, this is going to be amazing.

00:18:55.000 I'm going to do some hardcore investigative journalism in other countries. 0.99

00:18:59.000 The first time you saw some bullshit, what was your thought? 0.96

00:19:03.000 I just was so let down, Joe, because it just was like taking your dreams and just crushing them one story at a time. 0.99

00:19:13.000 And that's kind of how it happened to me there.

00:19:15.000 It wasn't like one big incident happened, but there was a little bit of censorship with each story over and over and over to the point that I realized that the mainstream media was just misleading the people and I was becoming a cog in the machine for And so I'd gotten into journalism to help people and try to change this world.

00:19:34.000 But instead, I was actually helping give the station credibility and helping spread what I believe to be lies.

00:19:41.000 And that's just a real, just a devastating moment.

00:19:46.000 And it caused me a lot of stress over the years, for sure.

00:19:51.000 I'm sure.

00:19:53.000 Is it a situation where the news just becomes any other business, any other organism, any other thing that wants to grow and stay alive?

00:20:03.000 And the only way to do that is to touch as many bases as you can, spread out as far as you can, and collect as much money as you can.

00:20:12.000 And somewhere along the line, you have to make some deals.

00:20:16.000 Exactly.

00:20:17.000 And I think you hit the nail on the head, Joe.

00:20:19.000 And I think what's going on is that a lot of these news outlets are, like you said, corporations.

00:20:24.000 And their main goal is to make money.

00:20:27.000 And that's what was happening in the case of CNN. They were taking money from different governments, pro-US governments, worldwide in exchange for producing these documentaries that made the governments look good.

00:20:38.000 It was propaganda.

00:20:39.000 Yeah.

00:20:40.000 And bottom line was to make money.

00:20:43.000 Also, I think there's other forces at play trying to kind of keep a pro-U.S. agenda at many of these outlets as well.

00:20:53.000 Wow.

00:20:54.000 So you leave that.

00:20:56.000 You write your book, which is excellent.

00:20:58.000 We have a copy.

00:21:00.000 It's back there.

00:21:01.000 We had so many books on the desk.

00:21:03.000 You're inundated with the literature.

00:21:05.000 But Molly Crabapple did the cover, right? 0.73

00:21:08.000 Didn't she have something to do with it?

00:21:09.000 Yeah, she did some art inside the book.

00:21:11.000 Yeah, Molly is such a talented, amazing artist.

00:21:14.000 It was really an honor to be able to have her work.

00:21:16.000 Yeah, we had her on the podcast. 0.55

00:21:17.000 She was really cool, too.

00:21:18.000 She's free, you know?

00:21:20.000 Yeah.

00:21:21.000 When she talks, she's not hindered.

00:21:23.000 She's just free.

00:21:24.000 She is who she is.

00:21:25.000 She's really talented.

00:21:27.000 Really interesting art, too.

00:21:28.000 She's one of those artists where you see one of her pieces and you almost immediately recognize it's her.

00:21:34.000 She's got that very unusual, distinct style.

00:21:37.000 Those faces that she draws, she has this very unusual and compelling style.

00:21:43.000 And I like that she adds politics into her art.

00:21:46.000 She's not scared to take that jump.

00:21:47.000 So much art has been, you know, music, movies, everything has just been dumbed down in order to please these corporations.

00:21:53.000 And Molly is really joining, you know, several artists and sticking her neck out there and willing to criticize people through her art and criticize the system. 0.97

00:22:02.000 Yeah, and sort of expose things that she doesn't like.

00:22:06.000 It's cool.

00:22:07.000 So you write this book, you put the book out, and you did our podcast, and during the podcast we had a conversation about psychedelics.

00:22:17.000 I mean, I've had a lot of conversations with people about psychedelics.

00:22:20.000 It's a question that people ask all the time, and I'm really fortunate to know A bunch of people know the actual answers to those questions.

00:22:27.000 So you and I have this conversation, and you say, okay, let me find out what the fuss is all about. 0.99

00:22:34.000 And you get on a fucking raft and go down to the jungle. 0.99

00:22:38.000 You like dove head in. 1.00

00:22:39.000 I've literally been tripping around the world for the past year.

00:22:42.000 That's so crazy.

00:22:44.000 So before the podcast, nothing.

00:22:46.000 Nothing.

00:22:47.000 The worst I had done, which not even worse because it's medicinal as we know, but it was like smoked a joint of marijuana in college.

00:22:54.000 Because I grew up in the Midwest, Joe, and we were fed, talk about propaganda, we were fed propaganda from day one about just say no to drugs.

00:23:02.000 And I even remember my grandmother taped this episode of Oprah.

00:23:06.000 Where this scientist was on talking about how MDMA eats holes in your brain.

00:23:11.000 It's later been debunked and that was proven that the diagrams the scientists showed were just showing cerebral blood flow through the brain and the MDMA isn't actually harmful.

00:23:21.000 But I mean, that's the kind of propaganda we were fed constantly.

00:23:24.000 And I remember my grandma would tape all these shows on 2020 and all these new shows and bring them over to the house and force me to sit down and watch all this anti-drug propaganda.

00:23:34.000 So I associated all drugs as being evil and just bad for you and naughty.

00:23:44.000 Yeah, it's funny the way you describe that.

00:23:46.000 That's the way to describe it.

00:23:47.000 The worst I ever did.

00:23:48.000 Yeah.

00:23:49.000 It's the knee-jerk way of approaching it.

00:23:52.000 The worst I ever did.

00:23:53.000 So now I have to just completely retrain my thought system because I've had 30 years of this propaganda.

00:24:02.000 And I've realized, Joe, that we are horribly mistaken in a lot of situations in this country when it comes to labeling things, medicines, drugs.

00:24:10.000 And a lot of substances and natural plants that natives have used as medicines for thousands of years, extremely effective medicines, are being called drugs and being labeled as Schedule I substances, and it's just really unfortunate.

00:24:26.000 It's unfortunate, and in a lot of ways, the people that have never experienced these things, it's impossible to understand without trying it.

00:24:35.000 And I don't blame you for being incredulous.

00:24:38.000 I don't blame you for being skeptical, and you should be.

00:24:41.000 People who are skeptical are really important because it puts out the debate.

00:24:46.000 And whether they're correct or whether they're incorrect, it's always good having a bunch of smart minds looking at it from different directions trying to dissect it.

00:24:54.000 And a big part of our dissecting when it comes to our culture is our law system, our legal system.

00:25:02.000 What's legal and what's not?

00:25:03.000 What should you be allowed to do?

00:25:04.000 What should you not be allowed to do?

00:25:06.000 And we have to figure out what it is we're going to allow to influence that legal system. 0.96

00:25:11.000 Because if it's corporations and the people that are trying to protect profit... 0.97

00:25:15.000 Man, you're going in a weird fucking direction because guess what? 0.94

00:25:18.000 There's profit in that other stuff too. 0.99

00:25:20.000 You dummies just haven't tapped into the psychedelic profit. 0.99

00:25:24.000 What's going on in Colorado right now is they're starting to realize, oh shit, there's profit in this. 1.00

00:25:29.000 Duh! 1.00

00:25:29.000 People love it. 1.00

00:25:30.000 You just think that the only way to get money is by selling fucking pills that you make? 0.99

00:25:35.000 What you're doing is being a hater and you're trying to hoard the market. 0.99

00:25:38.000 You're trying to control all the drugs.

00:25:40.000 And there's some good drugs out there that are pharmaceutical drugs.

00:25:43.000 There's just fantastic medications that have helped people with all sorts of ailments.

00:25:47.000 But that doesn't mean that you, with your fantastic drugs that aid all these people, should be able to stop natural things.

00:25:55.000 Like, that's crazy.

00:25:56.000 And that's where...

00:25:58.000 As a culture, we've got to put the brakes.

00:26:00.000 It's not saying that pharmaceutical companies are bad, because they're not.

00:26:04.000 They're great.

00:26:05.000 Pharmaceutical companies have provided people with medications that have vastly improved their lives, like Viagra.

00:26:11.000 There's a lot of people out there that just wouldn't have had sex 20, 30 years ago.

00:26:15.000 It was over.

00:26:16.000 And then, like an old pitcher that somehow or another summons up the courage to get off the game and dust off his jeans...

00:26:24.000 He's back in there.

00:26:25.000 You know, look, there's medication.

00:26:27.000 That's a bad one, too.

00:26:28.000 There's medications for people that have actual real diseases, not just can't get boners.

00:26:32.000 But, you know, there's really important medications.

00:26:36.000 As a culture, if there's one thing that when people take it, it almost universally gives them a new perspective.

00:26:44.000 Almost universally makes them more aware of their actions, more objective, more sensitive, more...

00:26:50.000 It calms them.

00:26:52.000 It gives people a sense of peace about leaving this life.

00:26:56.000 It gives you a sense of, I don't think we know what we're talking about. 0.98

00:27:00.000 It gives you a sense of, I think there might be some other shit besides this. 0.97

00:27:03.000 And it sounds... 0.98

00:27:04.000 That sounds just like the Heaven's Gate cult.

00:27:06.000 That sounds just like anybody else that's telling you that they know something that other people don't know.

00:27:11.000 Most people are immediately skeptical.

00:27:12.000 And they should be.

00:27:13.000 But this isn't nonsense.

00:27:15.000 This is some medicine that helps human beings evolve.

00:27:19.000 And it's been here for thousands of years.

00:27:21.000 And it's one of the measures as to how weird we are today.

00:27:25.000 One of the reasons why we're so chaotic, why we live on this momentum of this incredibly ignorant past and never stop to analyze it and change it.

00:27:34.000 One reason is the lack of these psychedelics.

00:27:37.000 It's like we're missing vitamin C and we have scurvy.

00:27:39.000 I mean, that's really what our culture is.

00:27:41.000 It's mad and loony because it's not looking at itself.

00:27:45.000 Exactly, Jo.

00:27:46.000 And I think what's going on is that a lot of us have bottled up trauma throughout our lives, through childhood especially.

00:27:52.000 That's when a lot of people get the footprints of trauma on their soul.

00:27:56.000 And just through PTSD, car accidents, dangerous situations you're in.

00:28:01.000 And you keep this trauma bottled up inside of your body without releasing it.

00:28:05.000 And it leads to this collective madness.

00:28:07.000 And I think what we're facing as a society is the limbic system of your brain is a part of your brain that deals with emotional processing.

00:28:16.000 And that's what psychedelics are fantastic.

00:28:18.000 It's actually leading to neurogenesis.

00:28:22.000 Restructuring the limbic system, helping people get rid of all of this trauma and really I think that the cause of most of this madness is a collective limbic system malfunction in society right now and I believe that wars, fighting, all of the environmental destruction is just a symptom of this limbic system malfunction and I think if we're able to actually get in to the core of our insanity and all these mental health disorders in society then we'll be able to Really evolve as

00:28:53.000 a species.

00:28:54.000 But I think that, like you said, the key to that are these psychedelic medicines.

00:28:58.000 Because for a lot of people, they're not able to actually overcome that trauma without the help of psychedelics.

00:29:05.000 I think you're absolutely right.

00:29:07.000 And I think that this weird world that we live in right now where we make these incredibly beneficial things that don't kill anybody illegal, it's starting to come to light now.

00:29:17.000 And maybe that's what the 2012 thing was.

00:29:20.000 Maybe we just don't realize it because we're a part of it.

00:29:23.000 But I think that people are so much more aware of how bizarre and finite this experience is and how many people are running around this experience acting as if everything's normal.

00:29:36.000 Well, this is not normal.

00:29:37.000 Nothing's normal.

00:29:38.000 We have madness at every turn.

00:29:40.000 We're still blowing each other up with bullets.

00:29:42.000 We're still shooting missiles at each other. 1.00

00:29:45.000 We're fucking crazy. 1.00

00:29:47.000 This is a weird species we are a part of. 1.00

00:29:50.000 And I think...

00:29:51.000 When you look at the possibilities and the potentials, like how did we get to where we are?

00:29:57.000 What's missing?

00:29:58.000 What's wrong with us?

00:29:59.000 We need spirituality.

00:30:00.000 That's what everybody always says.

00:30:01.000 We need religion.

00:30:02.000 And they're probably right.

00:30:04.000 What you get from being a Christian, what you get from true belief in any god, and true belief in the power of any enlightened, omnipotent being, what you get is... 0.86

00:30:20.000 This feeling of humility and this feeling of connection to all that is right.

00:30:25.000 You know, that's what you get out of the real religious experience.

00:30:29.000 And that's what you get from psychedelics.

00:30:31.000 And people don't want to hear that.

00:30:33.000 They want to hear that you're just trying to escape reality. 0.88

00:30:36.000 You're just weak.

00:30:37.000 You're just scared of reality.

00:30:39.000 Oh, that's what you want to do, Amber Lyon?

00:30:41.000 I see Amber Lyon.

00:30:42.000 Oh, you're telling me. 1.00

00:30:44.000 So you just fucking dive into your fantasy world of dancing mice and fucking rodeo music. 1.00

00:30:49.000 And you think you're so fucking smart now. 1.00

00:30:51.000 You're going to tell me how to live my life. 0.99

00:30:54.000 It is nearly impossible.

00:30:55.000 It's impossible in psychedelics to escape reality, whereas other drugs, and I think that's, once again, part of the propaganda, whereas other drugs and alcohol make you escape reality, psychedelics actually force you to sit down objectively.

00:31:10.000 And analyze your life and solve your problems with a clear, silent mind.

00:31:14.000 And for many people, it's the first time in their lives their mind is actually silent, their self-critical part of their brain is silent, and they can sit back and analyze portions of their life and come up with solutions to just make themselves a better person.

00:31:28.000 Yeah, that sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? 0.74

00:31:32.000 Well, I think what's more ridiculous, Joe, is that something that grows on cow poop all over the world and forests all over the world is illegal. 0.96

00:31:41.000 And something that is manufactured by our own bodies, DMT, is also illegal. 0.89

00:31:46.000 So you're saying that my pineal gland should be locked up in a cage, huh?

00:31:50.000 Yeah.

00:31:51.000 It's hilarious. 1.00

00:31:52.000 Your brain is a drug factory, a legal drug factory. 0.94

00:31:54.000 It's literally like making saliva illegal if saliva was psychoactive. 1.00

00:31:58.000 It's so stupid. 1.00

00:31:59.000 Terrence McKenna had a great joke about that. 1.00

00:32:02.000 He was talking about DMT being processed by the body.

00:32:05.000 So essentially he said, everyone's holding.

00:32:08.000 They could arrest you.

00:32:09.000 They could arrest you for the components of your own being.

00:32:13.000 Wait a minute, what?

00:32:14.000 If they could somehow extract your blood and you had a vial of your blood, you're allowed to walk around with that, right?

00:32:21.000 I don't think anybody could stop you for that.

00:32:23.000 Angelina Jolie?

00:32:24.000 Yeah, her and Billy Bob, right?

00:32:26.000 Didn't they cut each other? 1.00

00:32:27.000 You fucking crazy assholes. 1.00

00:32:29.000 I don't think anybody can stop you, but if you had a little shot of your own DMT, you would be in possession of a Schedule 1 illegal drug they could put you in a cage for. 1.00

00:32:39.000 Yeah, for sure.

00:32:40.000 It's hilarious.

00:32:40.000 I don't think you can extract it that way, by the way.

00:32:43.000 And I can't thank you enough, Joe, for really sticking your neck out there.

00:32:48.000 I know you faced a lot of criticism for your support of psychedelics.

00:32:52.000 Not really.

00:32:53.000 No, it's been pretty easy, I'm going to be honest with you.

00:32:56.000 Okay.

00:32:57.000 I'm sitting here giving this heartfelt speech.

00:32:59.000 No, you don't have to.

00:33:00.000 No, but I just appreciate you.

00:33:01.000 Nobody takes me seriously.

00:33:02.000 It's a great position to be in.

00:33:04.000 But I did take you seriously that day in the podcast when you told me mushrooms could change the world and it really planted a seed in my head which sprouted this journey that I've been doing around the world investigating these medicines and that never would have happened.

00:33:18.000 My life wouldn't be in such the amazing state I feel like it is in now if it hadn't been for you having the gumption to talk about this and start this dialogue as our country because psychedelics have been so taboo especially in the mainstream and I And I think you're really helping to shift that consciousness nationwide.

00:33:38.000 I honestly don't think I am.

00:33:40.000 I think I'm just a part of the whole thing itself.

00:33:43.000 I mean, it's very nice to try to give me...

00:33:45.000 I don't deserve any credit, nor do I want any.

00:33:48.000 I just...

00:33:49.000 I'm shocked that more people don't know about the experiences, and I feel a duty, because I've been there.

00:33:58.000 It's just like, if you and your friends were starving to death, and you found some food in the desert, and you're like, Come here, come here, I found the food, I found the food.

00:34:05.000 Would you want all this credit for finding that food?

00:34:07.000 No, you'd want your friends to have the food.

00:34:09.000 That's how I feel.

00:34:10.000 I feel like, you know, what we're all experiencing right now is a wait-what moment.

00:34:16.000 The whole culture is going, wait, wait, wait, wait, what?

00:34:19.000 Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. 1.00

00:34:20.000 The NSA's listening to my fucking emails? 1.00

00:34:23.000 They're listening to my voicemails? 1.00

00:34:25.000 They're reading my emails?

00:34:26.000 I don't do anything wrong, man. 1.00

00:34:28.000 Come on, I'm a fucking insurance salesman. 0.98

00:34:29.000 And then people go, wait, [... 1.00

00:34:32.000 Marijuana makes how much in fucking taxes for Colorado? 0.99

00:34:35.000 They make how much for, you know, we're running out of fucking money for schools and we can pay for that with weed? 0.99

00:34:40.000 And people are going to smoke the same amount of weed anyway, statistically proven? 0.99

00:34:45.000 What the fuck is going on? 0.98

00:34:47.000 We're going to go into Syria? 1.00

00:34:49.000 What the fuck are we doing? 0.99

00:34:52.000 This wait what moment. 1.00

00:34:54.000 We're all a part of this wait what moment.

00:34:55.000 You're a big part of this wait what moment.

00:34:57.000 You're a big part of it by sticking your neck out about Bahrain and about CNN and about working for a corporation and being honest about it. 0.97

00:35:06.000 You stuck your neck out about it.

00:35:07.000 We're all forced.

00:35:11.000 Into this reality.

00:35:12.000 We didn't ask to be here.

00:35:13.000 We weren't, you know, hey, could you give birth to me so I can grow up in the 21st century?

00:35:18.000 No.

00:35:18.000 This is what you get.

00:35:20.000 Nobody asked you.

00:35:22.000 This is what you get.

00:35:23.000 And I think all of us realized that that was the same for our parents.

00:35:26.000 It was the same for our grandparents.

00:35:28.000 It was the same for everybody.

00:35:29.000 And nobody hit the brakes.

00:35:31.000 Nobody had the wait-what moment where they went, wait, wait, wait, wait. 0.99

00:35:34.000 What the fuck are we doing? 0.99

00:35:35.000 Everybody just kept going and then had heart attacks and died. 1.00

00:35:39.000 And taught a bunch of nonsense to their kids. 0.69

00:35:41.000 And they went and they had heart attacks and died teaching a bunch of nonsense to their kids. 0.83

00:35:46.000 And then the internet came along.

00:35:48.000 And that's the wait what moment.

00:35:50.000 And the wait what moment, the real tipping point is people like you, people like me, people like anybody that's a part of the wait what moment.

00:35:56.000 That might be my new t-shirt, the wait what moment.

00:35:59.000 And we have to be.

00:36:01.000 Peter Schiff and me.

00:36:02.000 Peter Schiff's great.

00:36:04.000 Yeah, we had him on the podcast. 1.00

00:36:05.000 He's fucking crazy. 1.00

00:36:07.000 He's very supercharged. 1.00

00:36:09.000 He's passionate about what he's doing.

00:36:11.000 He's part of the moment, for sure.

00:36:13.000 In some ways, he's part of the problem.

00:36:15.000 I like the guy a lot.

00:36:18.000 I agree with him on a lot of what he says, but what I don't agree with him about is environmental concerns.

00:36:25.000 He doesn't have very many environmental concerns.

00:36:27.000 As long as people are making money, he's fine with it.

00:36:31.000 Yeah, that's unfortunate.

00:36:32.000 Well, it feels like it's just a few small spots and don't worry about it. 0.96

00:36:35.000 So a couple spots get fucked up. 0.97

00:36:37.000 Self-regulation. 0.98

00:36:38.000 Yeah.

00:36:39.000 Can you say BP oil spill?

00:36:42.000 That's what happens.

00:36:43.000 Well, it's interesting.

00:36:44.000 Like I said, I really like the guy and I like a lot of his thoughts.

00:36:47.000 But he believed in some things that I agree with.

00:36:50.000 Like no banks are too big to fail.

00:36:52.000 And they should have let the banks fail.

00:36:54.000 And that at the end of all that...

00:36:56.000 Obviously, I'm no economist by any stretch of the imagination, but I agree with his reasoning that any system that doesn't work should be allowed to fail, and there's nothing that's too big to fail.

00:37:06.000 But then when we started talking about BP, I think, personally, he was talking about if BP went under, what that would do to everybody, and I said, well, I think what they did is way worse than a company going under.

00:37:19.000 What they did was they ruined a part of the ocean, a really big part, for a long time.

00:37:25.000 And it might still be ruined.

00:37:27.000 It might be ruined forever.

00:37:28.000 Who knows what kind of devastating effect it had on the marine life, dolphin life.

00:37:33.000 If you had to put all the death that was caused, all the destruction that was caused, all the people that were getting sick trying to clean that place up, if you had to really put a number on it, of course they shouldn't be around anymore.

00:37:43.000 But his argument was that BP was too big to fail.

00:37:46.000 And I found that fascinating. 0.91

00:37:47.000 And it was so disgusting, Joe.

00:37:49.000 I was down there covering it for a month in New Orleans for CNN, and I am a huge fan of the ocean.

00:37:54.000 An avid scuba diver and just witnessing the oil-soaked pelicans diving down into the oil.

00:38:02.000 Actually, having the water be your enemy.

00:38:04.000 We were on the boat, and it was like 90 degrees outside.

00:38:07.000 And when the water would splash up on us, instead of it being refreshing, I had to wipe it off my body like it was a poison.

00:38:13.000 Wow.

00:38:13.000 It was so horrific that month of covering that.

00:38:17.000 I've even had to, you know, through my psychedelic experiences, I've even processed some of those implicit memories, these horrific memories of that spill that were stuck in the back of my subconscious.

00:38:29.000 Yeah, and people could say, oh, she's being melodramatic. 1.00

00:38:31.000 I'll Peter Schiff you.

00:38:32.000 Right.

00:38:33.000 Oh, really, you poor baby.

00:38:35.000 Did you have a hard time because of the dirty water?

00:38:37.000 The dirty water made you cry? 1.00

00:38:38.000 The dirty water fucked with your brain? 0.99

00:38:40.000 But it's got to be a weird moment as a reporter, being one of the first few people that's allowed to sort of go out there in boats and experience it and report on it. 0.99

00:38:49.000 You know, you got a pretty big responsibility. 0.89

00:38:52.000 You're getting to see some shit that people, most people are not going to go to it. 0.98

00:38:57.000 Most people in this country that are experiencing it are experiencing it through you or through someone like you that's there reporting on it. 0.99

00:39:03.000 That had to be pretty intense.

00:39:05.000 That and also seeing the destruction man can cause on this earth firsthand was just really, it just gives you that kind of feeling because when you look out and as far as you can see, you just see oil and crap and this beautiful ocean just ruined like that.

00:39:20.000 I mean, it just took a matter of days.

00:39:23.000 You just really realize, wow.

00:39:25.000 We really do have the capability to completely destroy this planet and it gives you, especially journalistically, an extra sense to make sure to cover more environmental issues and investigate these corporations because when left to their own devices, you see what happens.

00:39:40.000 Yeah, you can't allow something that lives off profit to not have oversight.

00:39:46.000 You just can't.

00:39:47.000 You can't.

00:39:48.000 And it'll probably kill the oversight guy.

00:39:51.000 I mean, that's what happens.

00:39:54.000 It happens in a lot of environments where there's a lot of money involved. 0.94

00:39:57.000 Things get real fucking squirrely. 0.62

00:39:59.000 People just disappear. 0.98

00:40:01.000 Whatever Johnny saw, well, we'll just get rid of Johnny.

00:40:04.000 Oh, yeah.

00:40:04.000 I mean, who knows how many people have disappeared over the year through the reasons.

00:40:09.000 I mean, there's probably, well, I don't know if there's a running number because there's probably a few of them that just they got away with.

00:40:18.000 I mean, if they're doing it for this long, getting rid of people to get in the way of profit, of course people have done that.

00:40:25.000 That's the weird thing that people don't want to, you know, a lot of folks, the no-nonsense type folks, I categorize certain types of skeptics and there's some no-nonsense skeptics that they don't even realize that they're sort of almost in a religion and their religion is debunking everything. 0.98

00:40:42.000 Their religion is calling bullshit. 0.99

00:40:44.000 They love calling bullshit. 1.00

00:40:45.000 And even calling bullshit when it doesn't even make any sense. 1.00

00:40:48.000 Like when you start talking about false flag attacks, oh bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. 1.00

00:40:52.000 They love calling bullshit. 1.00

00:40:54.000 Do you really think that the government would plan an attack and blah, blah, blah, or this or that? 0.99

00:40:59.000 And then you start proposing, okay, well what do you think happened when they did that in the Gulf of Tonkin?

00:41:05.000 What do you think happened there?

00:41:10.000 There's nothing.

00:41:11.000 They can't say anything.

00:41:11.000 You know what they did.

00:41:12.000 You know what they did.

00:41:13.000 They lied and they got people to go to war because of a lie.

00:41:16.000 It's been done.

00:41:17.000 Human beings.

00:41:18.000 I'm not blaming the current administration for what happened during the Vietnam War.

00:41:21.000 I'm saying human beings have shown time and time again they're willing to do that.

00:41:25.000 They're willing to lie.

00:41:27.000 And who knows how many lives are going to be wasted in this lie.

00:41:31.000 But they're more than willing to if it profits them.

00:41:33.000 Oh, for sure.

00:41:34.000 And that's even a situation I had when I was at CNN. A lot of people had known that lies were going on air and that this was happening, but they continued to work there for money.

00:41:47.000 Like I said, sometimes money comes first.

00:41:52.000 Yeah, unfortunately.

00:41:54.000 Or fortunately, because the good thing about what's going on in Colorado and Washington is money.

00:42:00.000 That's the good thing.

00:42:01.000 And if money truly does come first, maybe that will be a big part of the shift.

00:42:06.000 Maybe the people insisting on their freedom are one part of it, but then along the way, the money people get co-opted as well, because they become addicted to that marijuana money, and they won't let the government shut off the pipe.

00:42:19.000 Exactly.

00:42:19.000 I mean, it does seem to make sense.

00:42:21.000 And so you have this one experience.

00:42:25.000 You go down there.

00:42:26.000 You take the ayahuasca.

00:42:28.000 How many different trips did you go on?

00:42:29.000 I did seven.

00:42:31.000 So I went down.

00:42:34.000 I was feeling really stressed out in life. 0.96

00:42:37.000 I just had a bunch of crazy shit happen to me. 0.84

00:42:42.000 Throughout my career. 0.92

00:42:43.000 And it was just one experience after the other.

00:42:46.000 And I just hadn't had time.

00:42:47.000 I had this bottled up trauma like so many of us are carrying around.

00:42:51.000 I hadn't had time to process it.

00:42:53.000 And so I remember you telling me, I had written you after the podcast about mushrooms because I looked up psilocybin and I could not believe all the lies we've been fed about magic mushrooms.

00:43:04.000 I mean, psilocybin is single-handedly one of the most Incredible healing chemicals for the brain.

00:43:10.000 Some people call it 30 years of therapy in one night.

00:43:13.000 And so I looked up psilocybin and then I'd written you and you'd recommended trying ayahuasca.

00:43:19.000 And so I kind of kept that in the back of my mind.

00:43:21.000 And then when I got to this point in the spring where I felt like I was having so much anxiety, constant butterflies in my stomach, I couldn't sleep, I couldn't eat.

00:43:32.000 It was like I was in an anxiety purgatory.

00:43:36.000 And something in my brain, I just remembered that email.

00:43:39.000 And I remember reading all this positive research and studies about ayahuasca and other psychedelics helping with anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorders.

00:43:49.000 And I just knew I had to go down to the jungle.

00:43:53.000 And I didn't even prepare.

00:43:55.000 I just bought a ticket and went down two days later because I was so out of it at the time that I didn't even have time to pack.

00:44:03.000 I remember pulling into Los Angeles International Airport at parking lot C, and I don't even know how I found my way to the airport.

00:44:10.000 It was just like this magnet was drawing me to the jungle.

00:44:14.000 And because I was so anxious and had so much adrenaline rushing and so many flashbacks happening that it was really hard to even drive.

00:44:24.000 And I was sitting in the parking lot seat and I'm in the back of my car and I'm packing this backpack I find in my trunk and I'm finding maybe a dirty sock under the seat and oh wait I'm headed to the jungle I think I need a flashlight so I went into my glove box and I found this like little menu reader that senior citizens get that my grandma ordered for me on QVC. And threw that in my bag and just grabbed this backpack and was standing there waiting for the bus show.

00:44:50.000 And I remember looking up at this guy thinking, oh my God, if there's a rock bottom in life, I've hit it.

00:44:58.000 And just thinking that there's no way out.

00:45:03.000 Ayahuasca, I mean, this is my last hope.

00:45:06.000 And so I get on the plane and I'm heading down there and just, you know, looking over the jungle.

00:45:15.000 I was by myself.

00:45:16.000 I didn't know where the hell I was going.

00:45:17.000 I just found this center online really quickly.

00:45:20.000 And I'm sitting there drinking a glass of wine, looking out at just this vast array of Amazon jungle.

00:45:27.000 I'm completely unprepared.

00:45:28.000 I don't know what the hell I'm doing.

00:45:30.000 I don't even know what ayahuasca is.

00:45:31.000 I didn't read up on it beforehand.

00:45:33.000 I just felt a calling.

00:45:34.000 It was weird.

00:45:35.000 A lot of people tell me this.

00:45:36.000 You feel a calling to do it.

00:45:37.000 It's like the medicine telling you it can heal you.

00:45:41.000 And then we landed and I remember I had my sunglasses on still because I was just a mess.

00:45:51.000 And I remember seeing this guy sitting behind me and he kept looking through the airplane seats at me and I was like, what is this creep doing? 0.98

00:45:57.000 Like, I must look like shit because he will not quit looking at me. 0.92

00:46:01.000 And right when we get up, he comes up, he's like, are you Amber Lyon? 1.00

00:46:06.000 And I was like, fuck. 0.98

00:46:09.000 Like the only time in my life where I don't want to be recognized, where I want to completely disappear from the world, this guy recognizes me. 0.99

00:46:17.000 So we ended up becoming good friends.

00:46:19.000 He's now my business partner.

00:46:21.000 Wow.

00:46:22.000 But yeah, the whole plane was all headed to the same retreat center, which was about a two-hour ride into the Amazon.

00:46:30.000 And so...

00:46:31.000 Was it like a...

00:46:32.000 Or propeller plane?

00:46:34.000 It was a small jet, but no propellers.

00:46:37.000 Propellers freak me out because I'm always worried maybe a bird's going to get caught in there. 1.00

00:46:42.000 So it was just a small jet, about 20 seats, and everyone on there were gringos. 1.00

00:46:47.000 So whenever you go to Iquitos, Peru, and you see gringos, you know that they're most likely there for ayahuasca tourism.

00:46:53.000 I mean, why else would they be there?

00:46:56.000 And so we flew into Iquitos, and then it was me and five guys, and they were all going to the same center.

00:47:04.000 So I was really relieved because I was like, okay, at least I know these guys, and they seem fairly trustworthy.

00:47:10.000 And then we got on a boat and traveled two hours up the Amazon and just entered in this area of forest where you just saw this little hut, and it was the name of this healing center.

00:47:22.000 This is it?

00:47:24.000 Yeah, that's it.

00:47:25.000 And that was really creepy.

00:47:28.000 Because I was like, this looks like a place that people don't return from.

00:47:31.000 But at that point, I knew that I had no choice.

00:47:36.000 I had to try this medicine.

00:47:38.000 And so I went.

00:47:41.000 I just thought this fear was resistance to healing.

00:47:45.000 And so I dealt with the fear and dove in.

00:47:48.000 That's like a scene in a movie.

00:47:50.000 Yeah, it was.

00:47:51.000 It was really...

00:47:53.000 Like the new Altered States could be about a woman who goes to the Amazon. 0.54

00:47:58.000 That would be you.

00:48:00.000 The whole thing from grabbing dirty socks and just throwing them in your bag, whatever you got, flashlight, running, leaving your car behind.

00:48:09.000 And then I had to, you know, now that a couple people had recognized me, I had to kind of try to put myself together when I really wanted to just lay back and just be.

00:48:18.000 And then at that point I had to, I was like, I can't let these people know, like, why I'm really here.

00:48:24.000 You know, I'm just here as a journalist.

00:48:26.000 I'm just here to write about these medicines.

00:48:28.000 I don't really need them.

00:48:30.000 And really, I was putting on this face that everything was all good and I was here journalistically, but really inside I was just torn to shreds and really hoping to God that this medicine was going to work.

00:48:45.000 Well, that's where the skeptic would come in and say, well, you have to realize this is a placebo effect.

00:48:51.000 The psychosomatic nature of your incident led you to have a very stressful reaction to was essentially just hallucinations. 0.99

00:48:59.000 And you've connected all this spiritual mumbo jumbo woo woo bullshit to you tripping your balls off. 0.97

00:49:06.000 Well, I'd say the science disagrees with them, and then thousands and thousands of anecdotes. 0.98

00:49:10.000 There's not a lot of scientific research, so you have to also go with the anecdotes, which I think are just as powerful.

00:49:15.000 But the science actually shows that when you go to these ayahuasca churches in Brazil, like the UDV or Santo Dame Church, the members of these churches who drink ayahuasca regularly actually have...

00:49:26.000 Improved levels of serotonin in their brain.

00:49:29.000 So a lot of these healers believe it actually restructures your serotonergic system which allows you to part with this depression and anxiety.

00:49:38.000 It's also, some shamans I've dealt with say that what the ayahuasca does is it gets in your soul and gets rid of these dark energies and painful events that have been holding you back and that might manifest themselves in anxiety or depression or in bodily pain.

00:49:55.000 And so if you look at that research, there are thousands of anecdotes of people saying, including myself, saying that this medicine worked for them.

00:50:06.000 And ayahuasca is a medicine.

00:50:09.000 It behaves like a medicine.

00:50:10.000 The more you take of it, the less you need.

00:50:13.000 And it actually behaves like a medicine should and cures whatever's wrong with you.

00:50:20.000 For me, it did.

00:50:21.000 I'm not saying it does it for everything.

00:50:22.000 Spiritually, in a sense.

00:50:23.000 Spiritually.

00:50:24.000 So your connections that you've made in your mind, it resets them.

00:50:28.000 And then oftentimes that is how we react to things is based on our connections.

00:50:31.000 You know, our past can really completely flavor our future because it changes the way you behave and the way you interact with people.

00:50:39.000 And when you do that, you change the nature of the interactions that you have with people.

00:50:43.000 You change the directions that things are going to go in.

00:50:46.000 I mean, many people, if you put them in one situation, no fight takes place.

00:50:51.000 But many other people, you put them in the exact same situation and it turns into murder.

00:50:55.000 I mean, a lot of it is our connections to what we've made in our life.

00:51:03.000 And we don't realize how much those sort of hold us back until a psychedelic experience.

00:51:08.000 And to the naysayer people, like, you're very important. 0.99

00:51:12.000 You know, the skeptical people that say, oh, it's just hallucinations, you're attaching all this shit to it. 0.87

00:51:16.000 This is what you have to realize, and I've said this so many times, I don't even want to hear myself say it again, but it's really important. 0.79

00:51:22.000 Whether or not it's a hallucination, whether or not it's all in your imagination, or whether or not you are really having an experience where you're meeting divine wisdom and it's giving you advice and love and showing you a new way.

00:51:34.000 Whichever one of those it is, it's the exact same experience.

00:51:39.000 You're having the exact same experience.

00:51:41.000 So it doesn't matter if you choose to look at it one way that it's a hallucination, it's a product of your imagination, or if you choose to look at it the other way and say, oh my god, I'm meeting the divine wisdom of the universe, and now I'm humbled by this and I'm going to be a better person because of it.

00:51:56.000 This experience is exactly the same.

00:51:58.000 It's on how you choose to apply it to your life.

00:52:01.000 People don't want the no-nonsense people. 0.97

00:52:03.000 They don't want to be fools. 0.99

00:52:05.000 They don't want to be the Heaven's Gate people chopping their balls off and wearing the purple Nikes. 0.99

00:52:10.000 They don't want to be that guy. 0.73

00:52:14.000 It's almost like an ego thing.

00:52:15.000 They don't want to fall prey to some foolishness and then have other people pick apart.

00:52:21.000 You know, what they've done. 0.99

00:52:22.000 Like, look at this dummy.

00:52:23.000 He thought that going and taking ayahuasca is going to connect him to the universe.

00:52:27.000 Yeah, all right, Bob.

00:52:28.000 Way to go, pal.

00:52:30.000 That's the ego fighting back and resisting entering that dimension whatsoever.

00:52:35.000 If you go there and then you think it's nonsense, then we should talk.

00:52:39.000 Because I've got to know what your thought process on it is.

00:52:42.000 Because everyone that I know that's had, especially the DMT experience, which have you done that yet?

00:52:48.000 No, but I had an ayahuasca experience that was very similar to what people have described having when they smoked DMT. I'd been fasting for five days and had this Cambo frog medicine, which really detoxifies you.

00:53:00.000 So I was ready just to absorb the DMT and I went where a lot of people have described with smoking DMT on the ayahuasca.

00:53:09.000 Well, for folks who don't know, ayahuasca and DMT essentially are the same drug.

00:53:13.000 It's just that DMT is not orally active because your body produces something called monoamine oxidase, which breaks down dimethyltryptamine in an oral form.

00:53:23.000 So they figured out how to do something where they have the plant.

00:53:27.000 One plant has DMT in it, and another plant has harmine, which is a natural MAO inhibitor.

00:53:35.000 And they mix the two of them together and break it down.

00:53:38.000 No one knows how they figured out how to do this either.

00:53:40.000 This has been done for thousands and thousands of years.

00:53:43.000 The fact that in the hundred plus thousand plants, they chose these two as the most effective.

00:53:49.000 And they use different ones in other cultures too, don't they?

00:53:52.000 Different types of plants that have the same sort of ingredients, like different...

00:53:57.000 Plants that are very rich in DMT and plants that are very rich in harmin or something similar.

00:54:03.000 Yeah, you can mix different types of leaves as long as they have DMT with the ayahuasca because what the ayahuasca does is just help your body absorb that DMT. So particularly where I went, they used chacruna leaves and mixed that with the ayahuasca that they had growing on the ground.

00:54:19.000 So we actually got to watch them make it, which was pretty exciting.

00:54:21.000 Wow.

00:54:23.000 Knowing that I had no idea what I was in store for. 1.00

00:54:28.000 You probably thought it was going to be like a little bit of bullshit, right? 0.98

00:54:34.000 I was so desperate at that point that I didn't know what to expect. 0.99

00:54:39.000 Like I said, it just was a calling to go down there and do it.

00:54:43.000 And some shamans I've talked to said that the medicine often does that to people who really need it.

00:54:50.000 They just feel this desire to go down and try it and they just feel this, they just know that it's going to help them.

00:54:56.000 And that's what I had. 0.99

00:54:57.000 It sounds like bullshit. 0.99

00:54:58.000 Yeah, I know. 0.99

00:54:59.000 Unless you've actually had a real psychedelic experience and then you know any of them, whether it's a strong mushroom experience or whatever it is, when you realize, like, oh, okay, no one knows what the hell's going on. 0.99

00:55:10.000 Like, this shit might very well be calling you. 0.98

00:55:13.000 It very well might be. 0.99

00:55:15.000 And there was, so when I got there, it's just me and about 12 dudes, and that's it.

00:55:20.000 Right.

00:55:21.000 Yeah, so once again, I wouldn't recommend for females, I recommend you always go down with a friend, don't follow my example. 1.00

00:55:27.000 This is a very responsible Amber Lyon, giving a disclaimer.

00:55:33.000 I just don't have a high level of fear, so I was able to go down by myself.

00:55:37.000 Did you carry a weapon?

00:55:38.000 Did you have a prison shank?

00:55:39.000 No.

00:55:41.000 Nothing?

00:55:41.000 No, no weapon.

00:55:43.000 No taser.

00:55:43.000 Could you imagine?

00:55:44.000 The shaman comes up and starts blowing agua florida on you and you just...

00:55:48.000 Get away, creep!

00:55:51.000 Yeah, that's the problem.

00:55:52.000 When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

00:55:55.000 I mean, I did have a bad experience with my shaman the first night.

00:56:01.000 And that's why I don't recommend women go down or anyone. 0.99

00:56:04.000 You had a bad experience with your shaman trying to hook up with you?

00:56:06.000 No, he just inappropriately touched me during the ceremony.

00:56:10.000 And now, at the time, I didn't know that it wasn't okay.

00:56:15.000 What?

00:56:16.000 What are you, like a little kid?

00:56:17.000 Because you're under the influence of the ayahuasca.

00:56:21.000 Oh, so you were in the middle of tripping and he touched you?

00:56:24.000 Yeah, so to tell you the whole story, so this was our first night really doing the medicine.

00:56:30.000 The night before, they had just given us just a little bit so we could kind of get used to the creepiness because the whole thing is creepy.

00:56:36.000 You're in this yurt in the middle of the jungle laying on these yoga mats.

00:56:40.000 You have this huge bucket next to you just to take out.

00:56:43.000 I mean, imagine that, Joe, going into that each night.

00:56:46.000 Wow.

00:56:48.000 And so the whole thing is super creepy.

00:56:50.000 So you have to get used to that.

00:56:51.000 And then the next night, we actually were able to take our full dose.

00:56:54.000 And of course, there's the bed that we laid on and our buckets because you just violently vomit.

00:56:59.000 Most people do kind of out of both ends.

00:57:01.000 That's all you get for a bucket?

00:57:03.000 Yeah.

00:57:04.000 I think I would need a bigger bucket.

00:57:05.000 Oh, there I am laying right there.

00:57:06.000 So I was kind of in the front of the circle and you see there's about 12 people around this yurt-esque area.

00:57:13.000 And with the bucket and the vomiting, they actually call it getting well because you're pulling out all your toxins and all this negative dark energy that Western medicine tends to ignore.

00:57:25.000 The ayahuasca is actually getting to the bottom of the core of that.

00:57:28.000 So they consider this violent vomiting and some people out the other end to be really healing.

00:57:35.000 I like how you deny diarrhea.

00:57:36.000 How dare you?

00:57:37.000 How dare you deny diarrhea? 0.98

00:57:39.000 I still think it's appropriate for a woman to say that. 0.98

00:57:41.000 What? 1.00

00:57:42.000 That's ridiculous. 1.00

00:57:43.000 Okay, so people were taking massive shits and they were vomiting dough. 1.00

00:57:47.000 Part of life. 0.99

00:57:48.000 It's part of life.

00:57:48.000 You can't deny it.

00:57:49.000 Happened to you too.

00:57:50.000 Relax.

00:57:51.000 And that night, I was the first one all day.

00:57:54.000 We'd been sitting around the table at lunch like, how much are you going to take?

00:57:58.000 The most you could take was a cup.

00:57:59.000 And that was like the absolute send you to another universe amount.

00:58:03.000 And we're all nervously like, okay, well, maybe we'll just take half cup, all of us together.

00:58:08.000 We'll take a fourth cup.

00:58:10.000 And I went up there, and I was the first one to go up in this group, and something just told me, you need to take the full cup.

00:58:16.000 So I said, I'll take a cup.

00:58:18.000 And I looked around. 1.00

00:58:19.000 All the guys in the circle were just like, oh shit. 0.99

00:58:23.000 Because now they had to take a cup too, you know? 1.00

00:58:25.000 They didn't want to seem like wusses.

00:58:28.000 Wow.

00:58:28.000 And so I drank this mixture and it tasted like coffee mixed with cough syrup to the point where you just gag right away.

00:58:38.000 And then went and sat back on my mat.

00:58:41.000 And then about 20 minutes later it started taking effect.

00:58:46.000 And it just...

00:58:47.000 The noise of the crickets outside in the jungle got louder and louder and louder.

00:58:52.000 I could hear people all around me just violently getting sick to the depths of their soul.

00:58:57.000 Like...

00:58:58.000 Like gut-wrenching, throwing up.

00:59:01.000 And I just laid back and then...

00:59:04.000 Where are they diarrhea?

00:59:05.000 Do they use the other bucket?

00:59:06.000 I have a photo of it.

00:59:07.000 There's actually a bathroom.

00:59:09.000 So you have to make it to the bathroom.

00:59:11.000 It's funny.

00:59:11.000 Like the diarrhea, you have to make it to the bathroom.

00:59:13.000 And that was when it was clean.

00:59:15.000 Oh, God.

00:59:16.000 I've got to be honest with you.

00:59:17.000 Sometimes I've gone in there and the floors were brown.

00:59:20.000 People missed.

00:59:21.000 They just slipped.

00:59:22.000 They didn't care.

00:59:23.000 They were tripping. 1.00

00:59:23.000 They're shitting all over the place. 1.00

00:59:25.000 Yeah, because you... 0.99

00:59:26.000 I would just go out into the jungle.

00:59:28.000 A lot of people did, but some people...

00:59:31.000 You don't want to get eaten, though. 0.50

00:59:31.000 That would suck. 0.50

00:59:32.000 Some people, they were scared, too.

00:59:34.000 They had to have armed guards outside and guards watching people because people would go and walk away into the jungle, and you don't want to get lost in that state.

00:59:42.000 So that was something that people were really cognizant of, and so that's why a lot of people went into the bathroom that was there.

00:59:50.000 But, yeah, it was really powerful, Joe.

00:59:54.000 I just laid back and...

00:59:57.000 Next thing I know, I just heard, here we go!

01:00:00.000 They actually said, here we go?

01:00:02.000 It said, here we go!

01:00:03.000 And then BAM! I saw all this sacred geometry, which is potentially the language of communication of the universe.

01:00:10.000 I saw all these ones and zeros going across the screen.

01:00:14.000 I heard the sound of coins just clinking, clinking, clinking.

01:00:17.000 I flew through a timeline of my life.

01:00:19.000 It was almost like the ayahuasca was trying to get to know who I was.

01:00:23.000 And so I saw pictures of me pop up on this 3D timeline from when I was 12, 10, then when I was born, and then a photo of my parents before they conceived me.

01:00:32.000 And then all of a sudden on this big cement wall, almost like the wall behind you, it spray painted the words anxiety really, really big.

01:00:42.000 And right then the medicine was telling me that it had figured out what was wrong with me.

01:00:46.000 Wow!

01:00:48.000 And it was literally because I didn't know.

01:00:50.000 I couldn't pinpoint it.

01:00:51.000 I couldn't pinpoint because at the time my thoughts were raising so much I couldn't really figure out what was wrong.

01:00:56.000 And that's often a symptom of people who have post-traumatic stress disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms.

01:01:02.000 There's just so much going on.

01:01:04.000 That you can't even stop to think about, okay, what could have caused this?

01:01:07.000 What's happening?

01:01:08.000 You just can't even stop to think.

01:01:10.000 And the ayahuasca clearly told me, your problem is anxiety.

01:01:14.000 And then right then, I laid back and I felt it crawling through my veins and up into my head.

01:01:20.000 And it almost felt like a fizzing in my head.

01:01:23.000 And at that point, it was telling me, lay back, we're going to take care of this.

01:01:27.000 And I felt like there were, and this is a common vision, that there were all of these like thousands and thousands of little beings or elves on my body, and they were literally going through my cells one by one and reshaping them and perfecting them.

01:01:43.000 And the medicine, above all, just told me to just lay back and let it work.

01:01:49.000 And then I laid there for probably about an hour and then had a really powerful vision after that of this being, this fairy-type thing coming up to me and then sucking out this dark energy.

01:02:06.000 And I saw all of this energy flowing out of my body, these dark, I guess you'd call them spirits, Of people who I'd interviewed over the years.

01:02:16.000 And what it was telling me was that as a journalist, I'd been absorbing all of this pain and had it just stored in my body.

01:02:24.000 And that was one of the things that was manifesting itself in the post-traumatic stress disorder.

01:02:28.000 And so it was literally just sucking out all of this dark energy that was shaped in the forms of people I'd interviewed and their faces over the years.

01:02:37.000 Wow.

01:02:37.000 And once it finished, I just...

01:02:42.000 Felt like such a sigh of relief and like a ton of bricks had been taken off my shoulders. 0.99

01:02:46.000 Holy shit. 0.99

01:02:47.000 And yeah, it was so powerful. 0.99

01:02:50.000 And I realized too, what it had told me is that like journalistically, some journalists, and this is true with doctors and other people who deal with or are faced with trauma a lot, is that some journalists are able to put up a brick wall and you kind of do your story and then you move on.

01:03:07.000 But for me to really understand what I was reporting on, I had to almost become the people I was interviewing to really feel their pain, to understand who was telling the truth, what they were going through.

01:03:19.000 And that happened to me so many times using submersion journalism.

01:03:22.000 But I didn't realize at the same time I was also absorbing a lot of their pain.

01:03:27.000 Especially I'd done a lot of stories on sex trafficking, child sex trafficking, a lot of stories on drug addiction, oxycodone, oxycontin addiction.

01:03:34.000 And when I'd sit with these people and watch them shoot up oxycontin pills, I was absorbing that pain because I would sit and intensely watch them to try to feel why are they doing what they're doing.

01:03:46.000 And so all of this was just stored in my body and the ayahuasca was taking it out.

01:03:52.000 Wow, that's intense.

01:03:54.000 That seems like it would be really beneficial for soldiers.

01:03:58.000 Yes, there are soldiers who've gone down.

01:04:01.000 Some scientists have actually followed them down into the jungle and all 12 of them that went came back reporting improved symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder.

01:04:11.000 Because what ayahuasca is really good at doing, the way to cure post-traumatic stress disorder is you really need to get into your subconscious where you have these memories locked in there that you don't even remember you remember.

01:04:20.000 And you need to be able to process them with a sound mind To detach the fear that's associated with those memories.

01:04:27.000 So that next time anything that triggers that memory comes up, you're not flooded with fear.

01:04:32.000 So for example, anytime a soldier might hear a loud noise, it reminds them of the time they were shot at in a tank.

01:04:38.000 And that's why they face this adrenaline rush or a panic attack.

01:04:41.000 Or for me, it became even seeing...

01:04:43.000 I'd had several bad experiences with police officers as I was covering the protests.

01:04:48.000 And so when I would see police or their guns, I'd start to...

01:04:52.000 Get really anxious.

01:04:53.000 And so for me it was just a matter of processing those memories and that's what the ayahuasca is so beautiful at doing.

01:05:00.000 I had stuff come up that I didn't even remember I remembered and that had been trapped in there causing me this anxiety for the majority of my life.

01:05:11.000 And the ayahuasca was key to helping me access those.

01:05:17.000 That's so fascinating.

01:05:18.000 That's very different than the DMT experience.

01:05:20.000 I really have to do it.

01:05:22.000 Because the DMT experience is so overwhelmingly alien that what you get out of it is...

01:05:30.000 It's really hard to hold on to anything.

01:05:33.000 You don't see anxiety.

01:05:35.000 At least for me, there's nothing written.

01:05:40.000 Everything is implied and projected through these things to you.

01:05:45.000 And everything you see is impossible to describe.

01:05:48.000 There's no words written down.

01:05:50.000 It's just way too big.

01:05:51.000 It's way too crazy.

01:05:53.000 And the DMT flash...

01:05:55.000 Supposedly it's far more intense, but it sounds like the ayahuasca journey is much more introspective.

01:06:01.000 Very much so.

01:06:02.000 Which I find very attractive.

01:06:04.000 And the ayahuasca takes control and just starts working its magic on you and really getting in there and healing you, whether you like it or not.

01:06:13.000 And for some people, it's terrifying because I've witnessed people screaming and running out into the lawn in a child's pose saying, God, make this stop!

01:06:21.000 Will someone make it stop?

01:06:23.000 Because for some people, really getting in there and seeing what they're really about because they've been living...

01:06:28.000 This personality, this mask their whole lives, they've not been their true selves as a coping mechanism to deal with society.

01:06:34.000 When they're finally faced with the mirror, held up, magnifying your true self, times 40, they can't handle it.

01:06:42.000 But for me personally, I found it to be extremely therapeutic because I had so much chaos going on in my head that I couldn't figure out what was even at the root of that.

01:06:51.000 And the ayahuasca allowed me to really figure out what was causing my problems.

01:06:57.000 Well, the idea that a drug experience could change based on your intent going into it seems for a lot of people preposterous.

01:07:05.000 But when you take into account what these drugs are doing, essentially what you're trying to do when you have an ayahuasca experience, It has a big impact on what kind of experience that you actually have.

01:07:19.000 Because if you try to fight it in any way, if you try to wrestle with it in any way, if you try to resist and, no, no, that's not what I'm like.

01:07:25.000 I'm like this. 0.98

01:07:26.000 If you try to argue with it, it will fuck you up sideways. 0.99

01:07:31.000 Mushrooms will. 1.00

01:07:32.000 DMT will.

01:07:33.000 Marijuana will.

01:07:34.000 If you eat a pot brownie, eat a really strong pot brownie and try to argue with it, oh my God. 1.00

01:07:41.000 You're fucked, man. 1.00

01:07:42.000 I mean, that's what a bad trip is really all about. 1.00

01:07:43.000 It's about your intent going in.

01:07:45.000 So you got lucky.

01:07:47.000 You went into it with the perfect intent.

01:07:49.000 I mean, it knew. 1.00

01:07:50.000 This crazy bitch just threw her shit into a bag. 1.00

01:07:52.000 Just jumped. 1.00

01:07:53.000 She's got a flashlight to read with. 1.00

01:07:55.000 Like, you're in the fucking jungle. 1.00

01:07:56.000 You got a little bit. 1.00

01:07:57.000 You didn't even get extra batteries to that flashlight, I bet.

01:07:59.000 No, I didn't.

01:07:59.000 I had to go to the guy sleeping next to me and borrow socks from him.

01:08:05.000 That's hilarious.

01:08:06.000 It was so embarrassing.

01:08:07.000 Sunblock.

01:08:08.000 I had no mosquito spray.

01:08:09.000 I was just eaten alive.

01:08:11.000 I think I brought you a photo of my spider bite I woke up with one day.

01:08:16.000 It was the size of a quarter when I woke up.

01:08:18.000 And then it just started growing throughout the day.

01:08:20.000 Oh, that's scary.

01:08:21.000 There it is.

01:08:22.000 Oh my God, that's terrifying.

01:08:23.000 And I'm sitting there, I'm like, wait, we're two hours.

01:08:24.000 You're eating up.

01:08:25.000 Look at your legs. 1.00

01:08:26.000 Holy shit. 0.99

01:08:27.000 We're two hours away from any bit of medicine, and I'm just watching it grow and grow and grow. 0.99

01:08:34.000 Not necessarily, but it did stop growing, thank goodness.

01:08:37.000 Wow.

01:08:37.000 But yeah, there are definitely some amazing insects there.

01:08:43.000 Yeah, that would scare the fuck out of me.

01:08:44.000 I'm terrified of spiders.

01:08:45.000 Oh, there you go, Joe.

01:08:47.000 My roommate Jason shot that photo, and those were just some spiders around the house. 0.99

01:08:51.000 Oh, God damn it. 0.97

01:08:53.000 So I go down there, and after you recommended for me to do ayahuasca, I'm sitting at the table one time, Joe, and people are like, well, why are you down here? 0.99

01:09:01.000 I'm like, oh, well, a good friend of mine had suggested to go, and I had mentioned your name, and they're like, but Joe, Joe's never done ayahuasca.

01:09:09.000 Yeah.

01:09:10.000 And this is before my first drink.

01:09:12.000 And I'm thinking, what the hell? 0.55

01:09:14.000 I just took advice.

01:09:15.000 I'm all the way in the Amazon.

01:09:17.000 I'm like, Amber, you should go to Mars.

01:09:19.000 Yeah.

01:09:20.000 Totally go to Mars.

01:09:22.000 How come you haven't tried it?

01:09:24.000 Because I've never gone down to the jungle.

01:09:26.000 I've done DMT seven times.

01:09:29.000 But that's it.

01:09:30.000 As far as the dimethyl tryptamine experience.

01:09:34.000 And I just have never had the time.

01:09:36.000 Never had the time to travel down to the jungle.

01:09:38.000 But I'll definitely do it.

01:09:40.000 And I think, too, it's dependent on if you really need the healing.

01:09:43.000 I mean, the ayahuasca knows who needs healing and who doesn't.

01:09:47.000 It seems like we could all use it.

01:09:48.000 I do think so, very much so.

01:09:51.000 But I do think, too, if you don't actually go down there with an intent for healing, then it may not work, which happened to someone who, one of my roommates in the house, he went down wanting to just see snakes and other things he'd heard about.

01:10:03.000 And I think the ayahuasca knew that.

01:10:06.000 And the entire time he was down there, he didn't see one vision.

01:10:09.000 I mean, he would take his shirt off.

01:10:11.000 He'd be like, okay, let's go.

01:10:12.000 The shaman would bring in his strongest brew, serve him three cups, and still nothing.

01:10:17.000 Maybe the guy was a robot.

01:10:18.000 Yeah.

01:10:19.000 He wasn't even really a person.

01:10:21.000 So you just never know.

01:10:22.000 You never know what you're going to get.

01:10:24.000 But I do believe it will benefit everybody.

01:10:26.000 I'm sorry.

01:10:26.000 They say that about DMT, that it's like one out of every 20 people experiences nothing.

01:10:32.000 Wow.

01:10:32.000 He's smoking, and everybody else gets blown through the center of the universe and sees complex patterns made out of love and understanding that, you know, see through your soul, but they don't experience anything.

01:10:44.000 Wow.

01:10:44.000 It's like one out of 20 people.

01:10:45.000 They have zero effect.

01:10:47.000 Maybe that's what happened to him.

01:10:49.000 I felt so bad because he paid for the trip down to the jungle.

01:10:51.000 Sounds like a tool.

01:10:53.000 Yeah.

01:10:54.000 The universe broed him out.

01:10:55.000 The universe is like, listen, stop.

01:10:57.000 We're not going to give you any visions.

01:10:59.000 I don't know.

01:10:59.000 Maybe the guy was really cool.

01:11:00.000 Oh, yeah.

01:11:01.000 He's super amazing, but it just sucked that he didn't get to see anything.

01:11:04.000 But that's kind of the medicine saying.

01:11:06.000 You need to have an intent.

01:11:08.000 It goes back to set and setting.

01:11:09.000 You need to have that mindset of wanting healing and wanting to accept the medicine.

01:11:13.000 Or like you said, Joe, things can go pretty wrong.

01:11:17.000 I wonder if there's like a pharmacological reason or a biological reason why some people don't, maybe they're missing some sort of expression of a gene or something like that that doesn't allow them to have the experience?

01:11:29.000 Or potentially maybe the calcification of pineal glands.

01:11:33.000 I don't know if that affects it, but that just has been something I've been reading about, you know, the water tends to cause that and other things.

01:11:39.000 Yeah, is that real though?

01:11:40.000 I mean, how much real work has been done on that?

01:11:42.000 The problem is you go to these websites, then you read, you know, Bigfoot read my mind, and you go, oh, okay, Bigfoot read your mind, and the calcification of the pineal gland.

01:11:51.000 For the longest time, it was a massive source of debate, in fact, the debate about whether or not the pineal gland actually even had DMT in it.

01:12:00.000 And Rick Strassman, who's a friend of mine and a really, really interesting, cool guy, who wrote the spirit molecule, DMT, the spirit molecule, he did all those studies at the University of New Mexico, and they had only anecdotal evidence that it was produced by the pineal gland.

01:12:16.000 They knew it was produced by the liver and the lungs, but the actual The third eye of Eastern mysticism, the pineal gland, which in certain reptiles actually has a retina and a lens.

01:12:25.000 It's actually an eyeball in certain reptiles.

01:12:28.000 It's really fucking crazy that this gland, like the third eye, there's a reason why it exists in all these ancient depictions of enlightenment. 0.51

01:12:37.000 That is literally where DMT is processed. 0.98

01:12:39.000 It's where it's made.

01:12:40.000 And so recently, just really recently, Strassman's Cottonwood Research Center...

01:12:46.000 They figured out that they could observe it in live rats.

01:12:51.000 So now they know for a fact that the pineal gland in live rats produces DMT. So it's very, very, very likely that the same thing is going on with human beings.

01:13:01.000 And what happened to you when you smoked DMT? I've mostly stuck to ayahuasca and mushrooms.

01:13:07.000 That's what I've been researching.

01:13:08.000 But what happens when you smoke it?

01:13:12.000 Well, I've smoked a couple different types, too.

01:13:16.000 I've smoked 5-methoxy DMT, which is quite different.

01:13:21.000 The experience is much more of...

01:13:24.000 DMT seems to allow you to keep who you are, and DMT allows you to examine the culture from some sort of a new realm of It doesn't take you away from the very world that you live in.

01:13:41.000 It just shows you another one.

01:13:42.000 It brings you, it would take you, and put you in this place.

01:13:46.000 It doesn't change who you are, though, which is really interesting.

01:13:49.000 When you're drunk, it changes who you are. 0.99

01:13:51.000 You're more loose, you're maybe a little more rowdy, you say sillier shit, whatever it is that your particular reaction is. 1.00

01:13:58.000 But your thinking has changed. 1.00

01:14:00.000 Your thinking has changed when you're on opiates.

01:14:03.000 Your thinking has changed when you're on marijuana.

01:14:05.000 Not when you're on DMT. You're thinking exactly the same.

01:14:08.000 But all of a sudden, this door opens in your mind.

01:14:13.000 You step like on how you step out on the elevator.

01:14:18.000 You make that step over that gap.

01:14:21.000 You see the floor.

01:14:22.000 You see the elevator.

01:14:24.000 And the doors open.

01:14:25.000 And as the doors open, the elevator is rising up.

01:14:27.000 So when you look down, you're forced to look down.

01:14:29.000 There's a little slice of air between that elevator and the hotel. 0.99

01:14:34.000 And then you realize what the fuck you're really doing. 0.98

01:14:36.000 You're really stepping into this box that's hovering... 0.99

01:14:40.000 70, 80 fucking stories over the ground, held up by steel cables, and you're gonna go ride in this box. 0.87

01:14:47.000 And the door shuts, and that's what DMT feels like. 0.98

01:14:51.000 DMT feels like, ready?

01:14:52.000 Come on in!

01:14:53.000 You step over this chasm, the door shuts, and then it opens. 0.99

01:14:59.000 And then you just fucking go. 0.99

01:15:01.000 It's like getting shot through a cannon of geometric patterns. 0.99

01:15:04.000 And what I remember is the beginning of it literally being like the beginning of a ride.

01:15:10.000 Like it slowly exposed itself.

01:15:12.000 Initially you have blinders on and it's colored like a yellow jacket bee.

01:15:17.000 Like yellow and black.

01:15:18.000 That's what I remember.

01:15:19.000 Like intensely strong yellow and black.

01:15:23.000 That's moving, like sort of spiraling, but it's square. 0.98

01:15:27.000 It's very square, and it's essentially giving you a little bit of a slow fucking before it goes after you. 0.99

01:15:34.000 It's like, here, come on, I'm just going to give you a little kiss. 0.99

01:15:38.000 It's like massaging your shoulders, like shooting you down this pipe, this crazy squared off pipe, and then boom!

01:15:48.000 We're good to go. 0.84

01:16:01.000 You think that's as crazy as it gets.

01:16:04.000 And then as you go deeper in, it shows you something crazier.

01:16:07.000 And it shows you that there's no end.

01:16:09.000 And it also connects you to such overwhelming evidence of things being far more fantastic than you could ever be aware.

01:16:19.000 Just overwhelming evidence.

01:16:21.000 Just the fact that you could personally, with your eyes, ever experience what you're seeing.

01:16:25.000 That it could be possible.

01:16:27.000 Even if it's a hallucination, it is still...

01:16:30.000 You're still seeing this.

01:16:32.000 And this very experience should be impossible.

01:16:35.000 It's too alien.

01:16:36.000 It's too beyond the imagination.

01:16:38.000 It's too beyond anything I could have concocted based on the context of the life that I've lived.

01:16:44.000 It's impossible.

01:16:45.000 And then they started singing, I love you six hundred and five hundred thousand times.

01:16:51.000 Look at this. 0.99

01:16:51.000 And they would say, look at this, and show you these fucking things that were impossibly beautiful. 0.99

01:16:57.000 I remember crying. 0.99

01:16:59.000 Because the things they were showing me were so beautiful.

01:17:02.000 And they kept singing like a little child.

01:17:04.000 The way a child would tell you they love you.

01:17:06.000 Like, I love you 600,500,000 times.

01:17:10.000 Look at this!

01:17:11.000 But that childish love to it was a big theme of it.

01:17:17.000 This repeating that, I love you 600,500,000 times.

01:17:21.000 Like, if you tell a kid they love you, they go, I love you a hundred times.

01:17:24.000 And you're like, I love you a million times.

01:17:26.000 I love you 6,500,000 times.

01:17:28.000 They would say something crazy like that.

01:17:29.000 And that's what this thing was saying.

01:17:32.000 And then just showing.

01:17:33.000 And I don't even think it was 6,500,000 times.

01:17:36.000 That's like my interpretation of it, because you're not hearing real words.

01:17:39.000 You're just getting like this really clear intent.

01:17:42.000 That seems to be talking to you, but you don't know how it's talking to you.

01:17:46.000 It's not like you're seeing it on a wall, reading it.

01:17:51.000 It's somehow or another putting those words in your head.

01:17:54.000 So I'm saying 6,500,000 times, but it was really just that sort of an interpretation of a childish, pure love.

01:18:02.000 They're not trying to be your girlfriend. 0.90

01:18:04.000 They're not trying to, you know, get a job.

01:18:06.000 They're not trying to, you know, get you to give them money.

01:18:09.000 They're just, this is pure love.

01:18:11.000 This pure love without any context at all.

01:18:14.000 And just a series of beautiful, fantastic visions that you're trying to grab, you're trying to hold onto, but you can't.

01:18:25.000 The way I describe it is like standing in the middle of a river of fish that are going a thousand miles an hour, and you're just trying to grab them, and there's no way.

01:18:33.000 There's no way.

01:18:34.000 But you recognize what you're seeing when you're seeing it, but you can't even hold onto it because a new one's coming.

01:18:39.000 And a new one is so much more crazy than the one you just saw, and then boom, a new one's there.

01:18:43.000 And they're infinite, and they never end.

01:18:45.000 They keep going until the drug wears off.

01:18:47.000 And as the drug wears off, there was, you know, like, the love you thing was still going on, but there was also, like, a lot of, we'll see you later.

01:18:56.000 Bye!

01:18:57.000 There's, like, a bye-bye.

01:18:59.000 Bye-bye.

01:19:00.000 Like, letting you know they had a good time, and then, you know, we'll see you some other time.

01:19:05.000 When you're ready, we're here.

01:19:07.000 Wow.

01:19:08.000 Wow.

01:19:09.000 How do you go back to reality after?

01:19:11.000 How do you go to fear factor after that?

01:19:13.000 That was my problem.

01:19:15.000 The first time I did it, I was like, holy schnitzel.

01:19:20.000 The first one I did was the 5-methoxy one.

01:19:27.000 And 5-methoxy is much more reality dissolving.

01:19:32.000 It's like you don't see anything.

01:19:34.000 You don't exist anymore.

01:19:37.000 You as you, you're not allowed to keep.

01:19:39.000 You keep it with DMT. You as you, you don't keep with 5-MEO. You as you goes away and you enter to the center of everything. 0.98

01:19:48.000 You become a part of the very fiber of the universe.

01:19:51.000 You look at the universe from a different perspective.

01:19:54.000 The perspective that you're at right now is a multi-celled organism, host to millions and billions, in fact, of other multi-celled organisms.

01:20:02.000 You're just getting through life, getting in your car, driving around.

01:20:06.000 You look at it through the energy of the cell itself.

01:20:12.000 You look at it through...

01:20:15.000 The momentum of biological life and evolution.

01:20:19.000 You look at it through a completely non-society-based concept.

01:20:25.000 Through a completely alien context.

01:20:31.000 Like, you're seeing the world not through the eyes of a mammal, not through the eyes of a fish, not through the eyes of life, not through the eyes of anything with biology, not through the eyes of anything that has any instincts to stay alive, through the eyes of something that realizes it's a part of everything, and that there's no bottom,

01:20:47.000 there's no up, there's all.

01:20:49.000 And it's all around you all the time. 0.79

01:20:51.000 The first time I really came to understand the idea of standing on something is ridiculous.

01:20:59.000 Like, the idea that, like, I'm on the ground.

01:21:01.000 Like, we're standing here in my office. 0.98

01:21:02.000 It's so ridiculous.

01:21:04.000 Because we're not. 0.51

01:21:05.000 We're spinning a thousand miles an hour in a circle.

01:21:07.000 That circle is a part of a greater system called the solar system.

01:21:11.000 That system is a part of a greater system called the galaxy.

01:21:13.000 The whole thing is spinning around a black hole.

01:21:15.000 Like, we're not...

01:21:17.000 There's nothing flat.

01:21:18.000 It's up, it's down, it's left, it's right.

01:21:21.000 And in having that experience, I felt like I was somehow or another just...

01:21:27.000 In there.

01:21:28.000 A part of the mechanism of the very universe itself.

01:21:31.000 But it was very not me.

01:21:33.000 And then when I had to come back, I had to sort of re-put together my personality.

01:21:38.000 Re-put together my position in the world as far as what my responsibilities are, or what is expected of me, or what I'm supposed to be doing on Monday morning.

01:21:46.000 I had to re-put that all together because I didn't exist for 15, 20 minutes, whatever it was.

01:21:51.000 Probably 15. And then sort of examine how preposterous I am.

01:21:57.000 You know, examine ego.

01:21:59.000 And I remember saying to my friends after we just got done doing it, like, I can't even... 0.99

01:22:03.000 Even me describing this to you is bullshit. 0.97

01:22:06.000 Because what I'm trying to do is sound clever in the way I'm choosing my words. 0.99

01:22:10.000 I'm allowing my ego to paint...

01:22:13.000 I want you to be entertained by my words.

01:22:17.000 I don't just want...

01:22:18.000 These words to come out in an absolutely perfectly truthful form.

01:22:22.000 I'm also trying to be clever.

01:22:25.000 I like to use words.

01:22:26.000 I like to sing a song with words. 1.00

01:22:28.000 And I'm realizing that as I'm saying this, that it's like, I'm full of shit. 1.00

01:22:32.000 We're all full of shit. 1.00

01:22:34.000 There's a benefit to being full of shit. 1.00

01:22:36.000 The benefit is like, it's not even full of shit. 1.00

01:22:40.000 It's just like my friend Joey Diaz is my favorite human ever. 0.99

01:22:43.000 Like the way he talks.

01:22:44.000 I love being around him.

01:22:45.000 It's just so much fun.

01:22:46.000 And it's the way he talks.

01:22:48.000 He knows that people love the way he talks, so he's really good at singing a song with his words.

01:22:54.000 And to get off that, to try to look at something off that trip, the trip of singing a song with your words, is really hard. 1.00

01:23:04.000 And DMT makes that song look stupid as fuck. 1.00

01:23:08.000 Because DMT lets you know, like, I get it, I get it. 1.00

01:23:11.000 You think that in the context of humanity and civilization and your interpersonal relationships that you have with other beings, that what you're saying is important.

01:23:19.000 But it's not.

01:23:21.000 And here's evidence that it's not.

01:23:23.000 Here's evidence that nothing is important. 0.99

01:23:25.000 And whatever you do that makes this time, this thing that you think is important, whatever you do that makes that fucked up, stop. 0.98

01:23:32.000 Stop all that. 0.99

01:23:34.000 Stop all that craziness.

01:23:35.000 Whatever you're doing that's causing you anxiety, whatever you're doing that's causing you too much objective thinking, too much interviewing yourself and going over the thoughts and like, why am I doing that?

01:23:47.000 Why am I still smoking?

01:23:48.000 Why am I still eating shitty food? 0.97

01:23:50.000 Just stop doing all that because that's a mess. 0.99

01:23:52.000 That's a mess.

01:23:53.000 You don't need that. 1.00

01:23:54.000 It just made me look so foolish. 0.98

01:23:57.000 But it's very different than NN DMT. So those are the two experiences that I had. 0.97

01:24:03.000 Then I had both of them.

01:24:04.000 I only did the 5 MEO three times, but the regular DMT was about five or six more.

01:24:11.000 Because it was just, the regular DMT was more interesting to me.

01:24:15.000 I figured, like, I felt like whatever the 5MEO had to say, I got it.

01:24:20.000 I got it pretty quick.

01:24:21.000 Not that I couldn't benefit from it, but it didn't call me back. 1.00

01:24:25.000 You know, it was like, there it is, bitch. 1.00

01:24:27.000 Take a look. 1.00

01:24:28.000 You got it?

01:24:28.000 Good.

01:24:29.000 Now go about your business.

01:24:31.000 Whereas DMT was...

01:24:34.000 Every time was a new thing.

01:24:36.000 Every time I did it was a new, it was similar, but every time was like, oh, I think I know what this is about.

01:24:41.000 Oh, do you really?

01:24:42.000 Yeah.

01:24:42.000 Come through here, sir.

01:24:43.000 Here we go.

01:24:44.000 You ready?

01:24:45.000 Woo! 0.99

01:24:46.000 And then some new thing that you're like, oh, fucking Christ. 0.99

01:24:50.000 That's how the ayahuasca is. 0.99

01:24:51.000 One of the healers I work with has been using it for 18 years, and he says, still, every time he does it, it's different, and it completely opens his mind to, he still can't figure it out, and it's been 18 years.

01:25:05.000 And I think something else ayahuasca is good for when you look through a therapeutic or medical scope, which is kind of similar to what you had in your DMT experience, is that it does take away a lot of the fear of life and the fear of dying.

01:25:17.000 And I think that's something too that I had, and most people do have, a fear of death.

01:25:22.000 And one time I had ayahuasca and I hadn't eaten in five days, so I was really ready to absorb the medicine.

01:25:30.000 And right after drinking it, Joe, I started feeling like I was dying.

01:25:34.000 And I started thinking, oh my gosh, has anyone died from ayahuasca?

01:25:37.000 Because just in my brain it was telling me, you're dying.

01:25:40.000 And I started having trouble breathing.

01:25:42.000 And I was remembering that if I didn't remember to breathe, I wouldn't breathe.

01:25:46.000 And then the feeling got so intense that I remember looking over at my boyfriend and thinking how sad it was that I'd never see him again.

01:25:54.000 And at that point I started seeing sacred geometry.

01:25:58.000 And then I literally left my body and became this vibration.

01:26:02.000 And I looked back at my body thinking, it's so sad I couldn't hold on to that body.

01:26:07.000 You know, what's wrong with me that everyone in this room is able to stay alive and I had to die?

01:26:11.000 So how many trips had you gone on before this had happened?

01:26:14.000 That was my eighth one.

01:26:16.000 So at this point... 0.99

01:26:17.000 Jesus fucking Christ. 0.99

01:26:18.000 The eighth visit or eighth... 1.00

01:26:20.000 Eighth time drinking ayahuasca.

01:26:23.000 So during the first visit?

01:26:24.000 No, this was a separate time.

01:26:26.000 So I went down to the Amazon, then I've traveled the world the past year researching mushrooms, and then when I was in Indonesia, I was given the opportunity to be included in an ayahuasca experience.

01:26:37.000 This was a couple months ago, and this is when this happened.

01:26:40.000 I wanted to ask you that.

01:26:41.000 I've talked to people that have done ayahuasca with things that have come from the Middle East, different plants that have come from the Middle East.

01:26:50.000 They've mixed it, and they've seen very different imagery than the imagery that people report seeing from the jungles of Peru and Brazil.

01:27:01.000 McKenna's idea was that It might have been someone else's idea that he had talked about in a speech.

01:27:07.000 He believed that when you had a psychedelic experience, you were also participating in all the various trips that everyone else had done with that psychedelic essentially throughout history.

01:27:20.000 Wow.

01:27:20.000 And that was one of the reasons why fairly recent drugs had an empty feeling.

01:27:25.000 He would talk about ketamine, and he said that ketamine would feel like you were in an office building that was new but nobody had moved into yet.

01:27:33.000 And, like, there'd be no one there.

01:27:34.000 You know, it'd be, like, walking around, there's no furniture, like, this is bizarre.

01:27:37.000 He's like, that was the experience that he had had with ketamine, whereas with psilocybin, he would have these experiences that were just intensely rich with all this sacred imagery that has been You know, observed in artwork and at various cultures, like, they have,

01:27:53.000 like, this interchangeable imagery that may have, like, very similar psychedelic consumptions.

01:27:57.000 And that's what you're seeing, you know, when you're seeing jaguars and black people and snakes when you do the ayahuasca and where you do the ayahuasca from the South American ayahuasca. 0.99

01:28:08.000 But when you would do the ayahuasca that was made with similar ingredients on the other parts of the world, you have different visions.

01:28:15.000 Oh, for sure.

01:28:16.000 And this one, I mean, the ones I had in the jungle were, like you said, more jungle-esque.

01:28:20.000 And this one was brewed in an area of Australia.

01:28:25.000 And so for some reason, it was just a completely different experience for me.

01:28:29.000 And it could have also been, there could have been other variables that I didn't need as much personal healing.

01:28:33.000 Instead, I was led to this knowledge.

01:28:35.000 Sometimes ayahuasca is more of a ladder to bring you to this higher intelligence to feed you knowledge.

01:28:42.000 And so I wasn't having any animalistic visions or really sacred geometry.

01:28:48.000 I just became, flew out of my body and became this vibration.

01:28:51.000 And it told me clearly, like you said, I don't know if it was a voice or writing or what, but this huge intense power told me that death doesn't exist.

01:29:02.000 And why do we fear death?

01:29:03.000 Why does man fear death? 0.99

01:29:04.000 It's ridiculous. 0.99

01:29:05.000 And it's just to cause fear. 0.88

01:29:07.000 And really you are this vibration, this soul.

01:29:11.000 And Amber, your body on Earth is just your organic space suit that allows you to survive on Earth.

01:29:17.000 But you really are this soul.

01:29:19.000 And no matter what, you never really die.

01:29:21.000 And it was laughing.

01:29:23.000 Like, how ridiculous it is that man thinks you actually die.

01:29:28.000 And then I was just taken through the universe and I just was flying down this vortex and I saw Earth and I saw all the fighting and wars and all the negativity that I'd focused on for all these years.

01:29:40.000 And I saw how petty that was compared to this huge, massive force that was communicating with me, whether it be God or intelligent beings or just something made up in my head.

01:29:53.000 But it was just so intense.

01:29:56.000 And I compared that to all the fighting and the negativity, and it just left a permanent footprint on my brain that I need to, you know, whatever this force, this message is so much more important than what I've been focusing on on Earth, especially in my career.

01:30:12.000 And it started giving me this message of love and healing, and that we really need to get in We're good to go.

01:30:37.000 Oh, please do tell.

01:30:39.000 It just was, I was shown DNA, and I was shown that it was DNA mixing.

01:30:44.000 And I had not read any theories or anything else on this, but I was shown DNA taken from other areas of the universe mixed with DNA on Earth, and then that's how man was created as part of...

01:30:56.000 Yeah, it was pretty intense.

01:30:58.000 As part of what?

01:30:58.000 As part of this plan.

01:31:01.000 By who?

01:31:02.000 I don't know.

01:31:03.000 That's a good question.

01:31:04.000 I couldn't tell exactly what this force was, but that's what it was showing me, how man was created.

01:31:11.000 So we have this idea, like, oh please, you're saying that aliens made people and came down with different DNA, but...

01:31:18.000 Just life itself on this planet is so strange.

01:31:22.000 It's so bizarre.

01:31:23.000 It's all of it.

01:31:24.000 All of it.

01:31:25.000 Everything from lions eating gazelles to the whole...

01:31:28.000 Everything we do is so strange and bizarre.

01:31:31.000 Colors changing.

01:31:33.000 Animals, chameleons change the color of their skin to try to blend in like octopus do that on the ocean floor.

01:31:40.000 So much of it is so incredibly strange. 0.89

01:31:42.000 The idea that we haven't been influenced, that some of us has not been influenced by similar strangeness from somewhere else is so silly.

01:31:51.000 The idea that pollen and then spores and the things fly through the air and seeds land and then new life comes out of those seeds.

01:31:59.000 The idea that that's not a universal idea.

01:32:02.000 You know, the idea that, you know, asteroids don't carry the building blocks of life.

01:32:06.000 Well, they do.

01:32:07.000 We know they do.

01:32:08.000 So they do.

01:32:09.000 Isn't that sort of a spaceship?

01:32:11.000 I mean, isn't an asteroid a spaceship?

01:32:12.000 It's a spaceship that carries something from, like, if some DNA from something came here on an asteroid and collided with something else and then created a person, why is that so weird?

01:32:23.000 Why is it so weird for us?

01:32:24.000 And that's what this force was showing me, and I'd never really, I never thought about this.

01:32:28.000 I wasn't a very religious person.

01:32:30.000 I am more now, definitely.

01:32:32.000 You're religious now?

01:32:33.000 Not religious, but I believe in a higher being.

01:32:36.000 Right.

01:32:37.000 That something is, there's more to our time on Earth.

01:32:40.000 And I used to just think that you die, you die.

01:32:43.000 And now I'm, it's a recurring theme for me when I do use psychedelics to remind me that life does not end on Earth.

01:32:52.000 Maybe Amber ends. 0.96

01:32:53.000 But the real being me, my soul, will continue on.

01:32:57.000 And that's just been a recurring theme even, especially on the mushrooms.

01:33:01.000 They constantly try to tell me that lesson because I think a lot of my anxiety came from a fear of death.

01:33:07.000 Well, it's kind of weird because in order to do what we do, in order to be a person, in order to have a job, in order to write your name down when you sign, Amber Lyon, this is what represents me.

01:33:18.000 You have to have a pilot.

01:33:20.000 It has to be Amber in there running the show. 1.00

01:33:23.000 And so because of that, Amber running the show becomes Amber. 1.00

01:33:28.000 But when you have the psychedelic experience, Amber running the show really doesn't get a chance to say shit. 1.00

01:33:33.000 And then this other thing gets revealed at the core without a language. 0.99

01:33:39.000 It doesn't have a language.

01:33:41.000 It's not clinging to life experiences.

01:33:44.000 It's not clinging to phobias that you've developed because of negative experiences.

01:33:49.000 It's not clinging to anything.

01:33:50.000 It's just this pure consciousness that's Very, very, very hard to access.

01:33:55.000 That's the real silence.

01:33:56.000 That's the real silence at the end of meditation.

01:33:59.000 There's the real you, which you very rarely even get to see.

01:34:02.000 And it's very, very spiritual.

01:34:05.000 If you look at the John Hopkins studies, they found that 61% of people who were given psilocybin considered it to be the single most spiritual event of their life.

01:34:14.000 Also, you even look at Bill Wilson, who founded Alcoholics Anonymous.

01:34:19.000 He believed that a lot of people don't know this, but he used LSD to cure chronic depression.

01:34:24.000 He believed that LSD could actually, should be one of the 12 steps and could lead people to that spiritual awakening, which would then allow them to acknowledge a greater power and continue in their healing.

01:34:38.000 Don't tell that to Dr. Drew.

01:34:39.000 Yeah.

01:34:40.000 And it's so sad, Joe, because the more I've been researching this, the more I realize how much amazing research is out there showing how effective psychedelics are for curing anxiety, depression, addiction, all these things so many people are suffering from.

01:34:52.000 And we've known since the 1950s that LSD had a 45% success rate at curing alcoholism.

01:34:59.000 I mean, if you look at AA... There's a study showing there are not even any studies to show how effective LSD is.

01:35:06.000 Some people say AA is in curing alcoholism.

01:35:10.000 Some people say it's maybe 5% effective.

01:35:12.000 So you have these substances out there that we've known for decades that are extremely healing.

01:35:19.000 AA is really effective at?

01:35:21.000 What?

01:35:22.000 Getting people to talk about AA. Exactly.

01:35:25.000 I thought you fucks were anonymous. 0.99

01:35:27.000 Yeah. 1.00

01:35:28.000 They bring that shit up constantly, don't they? 1.00

01:35:30.000 Goddamn. 1.00

01:35:30.000 I mean, I'm sure some people are helped. 1.00

01:35:32.000 Yes, they are, definitely.

01:35:33.000 45% success rate with LSD is really an astounding number when it comes to rehab.

01:35:39.000 And we need to start talking about psychedelics more.

01:35:43.000 We need to make them less taboo so people start realizing that there is hope out there when they've lost all other hope.

01:35:49.000 Ibogaine is actually even stronger than that as far as the numbers.

01:35:54.000 The Ibogaine recidivism rate as far as people going back to whatever they were doing that was fucking them up is incredibly low.

01:36:02.000 Incredibly low.

01:36:03.000 And especially with the OxyContin addiction, which is just consuming our nation. 0.98

01:36:09.000 I think one of my last stories I did at CNN are on babies now being born addicted to OxyContin and painkillers, which was really my, holy shit, what has happened to us as a society moment. 0.99

01:36:21.000 So they're sick like right out of the bat? 0.95

01:36:24.000 Yeah, they're going through withdrawal once they're born because the mom can't quit using the oxycodone while she's pregnant because the baby could die in utero from withdrawal.

01:36:33.000 So she's got to continue using it.

01:36:34.000 Then these babies, I was standing in a NICU at East Tennessee Children's Hospital.

01:36:39.000 In a NICU, they've literally, half the babies there are being born addicted to these painkillers.

01:36:44.000 This is something our society is not discussing.

01:36:47.000 And I watched as they brought this baby in, and this poor baby was, its skin was marbled, and it was just shaking and screaming and crying in intense pain, just like a grown-up would, because this baby was going through opioid withdrawal,

01:37:02.000 and they had to instantly give the baby morphine, and it takes sometimes 30 days for them to overcome the painful symptoms.

01:37:09.000 We had a doctor on Dr. Carl Hart yesterday who is a drug and addictions expert, a guy who's worked for over 20 years on various tests and various substance and abuse substances and analyzing what the root of all these experiences are.

01:37:28.000 The way he explained it was really fascinating.

01:37:30.000 He was saying that even when you have a hangover, that what the hangover is, is an alcohol withdrawal.

01:37:36.000 That's what you're going through.

01:37:38.000 It's not just dehydration, not just your body, like, being sick.

01:37:41.000 It's the compensatory mechanisms that are present in your mind to counteract the alcohol.

01:37:46.000 When the alcohol's gone, it's a withdrawal.

01:37:50.000 Like, you go into, like, that's what a hangover is.

01:37:52.000 And that whenever someone has an addiction, whether it's an addiction to opiates or whatever it is, that's what they're experiencing.

01:38:00.000 It's the compensatory mechanisms fire up in order to process the opiates.

01:38:04.000 And then when they're gone, then you're sick.

01:38:08.000 But the way he was describing it was really fascinating. 0.96

01:38:11.000 He was saying that it's really like, I'm sure it's way worse for a fucking baby, obviously, but for a person, it's essentially like having a bad flu. 0.96

01:38:18.000 And if you've gone through the flu, you've gone through what it feels like to have withdrawal to heroin. 0.98

01:38:24.000 Which I thought was really fascinating.

01:38:25.000 It's like a lot of it is misconceptions, misconceptions and disinformation when it comes to withdrawals from drugs and how difficult they are to withdraw from.

01:38:34.000 And a lot of it is psychosomatic.

01:38:36.000 There's a lot of psychological issues involved with people relapsing that don't have anything to do with chemical.

01:38:45.000 Pretty interesting stuff.

01:38:46.000 And I think that's why ibogaine is so effective.

01:38:48.000 I think some people think it's maybe around 90% effective success rate because they don't experience withdrawal symptoms.

01:38:55.000 I think that's why so many people are scared, or addicts I've spoken to, especially who are addicted to these prescription pills, is they're so scared to go through those withdrawal symptoms.

01:39:04.000 And what even the young man who discovered ibogaine, he actually went to try it because he thought he could get stoned.

01:39:12.000 So he was just looking for a high.

01:39:13.000 And he was a heroin addict.

01:39:15.000 And he tried the Ibogaine, and then all of a sudden he realized, oh my gosh, it's been 12 hours.

01:39:21.000 I should be having horrific withdrawal symptoms.

01:39:23.000 Why am I not experiencing these symptoms?

01:39:25.000 And then it was so effective toward the end of the trip after intense introspection.

01:39:30.000 I mean, intense.

01:39:31.000 You're in that trip for about 36 hours for some time.

01:39:34.000 He realized he no longer craved the heroin.

01:39:37.000 So then he went and got all of his other junkie friends and started giving them ibogaine and then it just spread across the world.

01:39:44.000 Now we're seeing centers open up in Mexico and unfortunately it's still illegal in the United States even though we have a horrific pill addiction, but you can access ibogaine centers in Canada and Mexico, even the Bahamas.

01:39:58.000 That's intense.

01:39:59.000 I have a friend who had an addiction to pills, went down, did OBGYN, cured him completely, and then he opened up a center.

01:40:05.000 Wow.

01:40:06.000 Yeah, he's like, this is incredible.

01:40:07.000 It's unbelievable.

01:40:08.000 So now he's got a center in Mexico.

01:40:10.000 And, you know, he was a guy that was like a really healthy guy, and then he got injured.

01:40:14.000 And then the pills just took him over.

01:40:17.000 He just couldn't help it.

01:40:18.000 And he had a really hard time getting rid of them, you know, for whatever reason.

01:40:22.000 But when he went there, boom.

01:40:24.000 Instant.

01:40:25.000 I mean, instant cure.

01:40:27.000 Instant, like, never doing that again. 1.00

01:40:29.000 Holy shit. 1.00

01:40:30.000 Instant, like, recognition of the patterns. 0.99

01:40:33.000 And then an instant calling to be involved in this and to help other people and to find friends that he knew that had similar issues and say, listen, you've got to trust me on this.

01:40:42.000 Come with me.

01:40:44.000 Once you've seen the truth of how powerful psychedelics are, and you're able to dispel all the propaganda with this truth that doesn't have a shelf life that's going to come out, just like, you know, now marijuana, everyone's finally realizing how medicinal it is.

01:40:57.000 Now it's just starting to happen again with psychedelics.

01:41:00.000 And when you've personally realized this truth, and this is something I'm going through now, And you see so many people around the country suffering, whether it be from depression, anxiety, or from post-traumatic stress disorder.

01:41:13.000 22 soldiers a day in the United States kill themselves from it.

01:41:16.000 You just feel a duty.

01:41:18.000 Like, you have to share this truth with others and let people know through your experiences because they are so powerful.

01:41:27.000 Yeah, it is unbelievably powerful.

01:41:30.000 And it's just...

01:41:33.000 One of the things that we were talking about earlier, that we are in some sort of a new era, is that the information is being spread virally on things like this.

01:41:44.000 These discussions are happening right now during lunchtime at schools, during...

01:41:50.000 Coffee breaks at work.

01:41:52.000 People are talking about these sort of things that they're realizing, and they're talking about things that they heard, talking about things that they've read or videos that they've watched or what have you, and it's spreading now, and it's spreading in a way that just really never did before.

01:42:06.000 And they can't hold it back.

01:42:08.000 You can't hold back the truth.

01:42:09.000 And these psychedelics, they're not going to work for everybody.

01:42:13.000 But if you look at the anecdotes and the science, it's really there in favor of using these medicinally.

01:42:21.000 And the more research you read, the more ridiculous it becomes that there's Schedule I, saying that there's no medicinal value.

01:42:29.000 That they're highly addictive.

01:42:31.000 Mushrooms are proven to be non-addictive.

01:42:34.000 And the caffeine in your coffee is more toxic for your body than mushrooms.

01:42:38.000 The deadliest drug on earth is alcohol.

01:42:41.000 And that's legal.

01:42:43.000 So the more information you have access to, for me personally, because I'm just waking up to all of this within the past year or so, the more you realize just how ridiculous the whole system is and it's just not in the favor of healing and the people.

01:42:57.000 Yeah, most people don't realize way more people die from alcohol than do from even prescription drugs.

01:43:02.000 Yeah, 80,000 a year?

01:43:03.000 That's more than car accidents?

01:43:05.000 I think it's more than 100. It's still not as bad as cigarettes.

01:43:09.000 That's the number one.

01:43:10.000 And that one doesn't even get you high.

01:43:11.000 Well, I guess it does get you high a little bit.

01:43:13.000 It gives you a little bit of a psychoactive charge.

01:43:16.000 It gives you a little stimulant charge.

01:43:18.000 A lot of people like it for writing, apparently.

01:43:21.000 Apparently, you smoke cigarettes and write.

01:43:23.000 Your synapses fire really well.

01:43:25.000 Stephen King actually said that when he quit smoking, it affected that.

01:43:29.000 Yeah, I used to smoke occasionally when I'd write.

01:43:32.000 Does the ayahuasca, when he's blowing the tobacco smoke on you, what is the role that the nicotine and the tobacco smoke has on the ayahuasca trip?

01:43:44.000 For me, it just intensifies it.

01:43:46.000 Sometimes they blow like a sage smoke or a palo santo wood, and that intensifies you feeling nauseous and the trip.

01:43:54.000 Others say that they use it to clear out the bad spirits and blow them away so that bad spirits don't come into the room.

01:44:01.000 They also use this wand called a chacapa, and it's like a leaf wand to blow the spirits out of the room so that bad spirits don't come in.

01:44:11.000 I wonder what that is.

01:44:12.000 I wonder if they're really blowing out bad spirits or they're just tricking you, you know, like tricking your mind to think it's blowing out bad spirits so it eliminates the fear.

01:44:21.000 Yeah.

01:44:21.000 Well, it depends on the shaman you get and it's so vital that you pick the right shaman.

01:44:26.000 You've got to go back to that then.

01:44:27.000 Yeah.

01:44:27.000 So the shaman touched you.

01:44:28.000 Yeah, so I went down, and unfortunately now, new organizations are starting to really help rate ayahuasca centers, and this is why I'm starting the website I'm starting as well, because there's not a lot out there when it comes to advising you where to go as far as picking a center.

01:44:45.000 I think now there's a new site called ayahadvisor.org, like TripAdvisor.

01:44:49.000 So I didn't know.

01:44:51.000 So I went down to this center, and I didn't know that the shaman who I had gone to I had other accusations against him.

01:45:00.000 During the ceremony, while I was deep in this really spiritual, amazing trip, I noticed him coming up to me and blowing the Agua Florida on me, which is normal.

01:45:11.000 It's like the holy water for the shamans.

01:45:13.000 He was putting it on my forehead. 0.60

01:45:16.000 Then he started putting his hands down my body and actually went around my breasts and went down towards my crotch. 0.89

01:45:24.000 Whoa. 0.88

01:45:25.000 And then kept just rubbing back and forth.

01:45:27.000 And I thought that, okay, maybe is that part of healing the bad spirits? 0.90

01:45:32.000 Did he rub your actual breasts or around your breasts? 0.99

01:45:35.000 He rubbed like he was clearly touching.

01:45:38.000 I mean, he made it try to seem like he was going around the outside, but he was clearly pushing down on my breasts to the point I'm in the middle taking the most intense psychedelic on earth, and I kind of was like, whoa!

01:45:48.000 Hold on a minute, Mother Ayahuasca.

01:45:50.000 I need to take care of something in this dimension because something ain't right. 0.94

01:45:53.000 And he also went to the guy who was next to me and rubbed him in the crotch area as well. 0.94

01:46:01.000 How dare he? 0.96

01:46:02.000 Maybe that's a part of it, though. 1.00

01:46:03.000 Maybe they have to rub your dick. 1.00

01:46:05.000 I've talked to every shaman I've talked to after that. 1.00

01:46:07.000 No, and actually when he found out I was a journalist, he fled the next day.

01:46:12.000 He came up with some outlandish excuse of why he needed to be gone until the exact day I left.

01:46:18.000 And I think he thought maybe I was there to investigate other accusations that had been...

01:46:23.000 Made against him.

01:46:24.000 And he left.

01:46:25.000 And then we had the local shaman, who was native to Peru, give us the ceremonies after that.

01:46:30.000 And it was all beautiful from there.

01:46:32.000 And he never touched or anything like that.

01:46:34.000 And it's not part of the ayahuasca experience to have your breasts touch or anything else in your body, just so people know.

01:46:41.000 And that's why it's so vital.

01:46:43.000 That you pick the correct shaman because they're guiding you through this experience.

01:46:48.000 And that's also why I don't recommend people, women, go down alone at this point.

01:46:53.000 Yeah, wow, that's intense.

01:46:55.000 Well, luckily that's all that happened.

01:46:57.000 Nothing escalated from there.

01:47:00.000 Exactly.

01:47:00.000 But do you know if that guy is still doing it?

01:47:03.000 Well, unfortunately he passed away.

01:47:06.000 Oh, you mean fortunately?

01:47:07.000 Well, either way, whatever happened, it's weird because people tend to say that the spirits of the jungle kind of take care of anything that comes in and tries to use the medicine the wrong way.

01:47:17.000 And oddly enough, he died around Christmas time.

01:47:21.000 He fell off the third floor of his home he'd built in the jungle and hit his head and passed away.

01:47:27.000 Whoa. 1.00

01:47:27.000 Goddamn. 1.00

01:47:27.000 And when I heard that, because I had heard other stories of shamans who've misused the medicine and they've kind of had weird fates as well, you know, I wouldn't be surprised if the spirits kind of just... 1.00

01:47:39.000 Or maybe some dude whose dick he grabbed threw him off the fucking window. 0.99

01:47:43.000 Yeah, you never know. 1.00

01:47:45.000 That's just as likely.

01:47:46.000 That's the sad thing with the medicines is they're some of the most profound compounds on earth for healing.

01:47:50.000 But I think something I've noticed too in traveling the world, Joe, is that some people have taken advantage of them and claimed to be healers.

01:47:58.000 And really in the end of the day...

01:48:00.000 The only healer, the main healer, is the actual psychedelic.

01:48:03.000 All you need to do is take that psychedelic, go be with yourself, and it will do the healing.

01:48:08.000 You don't need a healer, per se, and you just have to be very cautious because people coming in with the wrong intentions, maybe just to make money, are opening up centers.

01:48:19.000 Yeah, I've talked to quite a few people that claim to be a healer, and I just think that the idea is so preposterous.

01:48:27.000 A, it's a very preposterous idea that someone was gifted with these magic powers. 0.59

01:48:32.000 And B, thinking that you are is so fucking delusional that it is absolutely contrary to the spirit of psychedelic exploration in the first place. 0.83

01:48:43.000 Thinking you're the one person that has this unique gift and you can heal people... 1.00

01:48:47.000 Get the fuck out of here. 1.00

01:48:49.000 Stop. 0.99

01:48:50.000 I knew this dude who was a chiropractor.

01:48:51.000 He used to crack people's backs and tell them that he's healing foot fungus.

01:48:55.000 He's making you smarter.

01:48:56.000 He's fixing your zones.

01:48:59.000 What are you doing?

01:49:00.000 You're healing?

01:49:00.000 And then in a sort of a discreet conversation, he revealed to me that if he convinces people that they're healing, that that does in fact start the healing.

01:49:09.000 And I'm like, okay, what? 0.98

01:49:12.000 So you're justifying bullshitting by saying that the bullshit works if the people believe it. 0.99

01:49:17.000 It's like a placebo effect. 1.00

01:49:18.000 You're a human placebo effect.

01:49:20.000 Well, it didn't work with me, dude.

01:49:22.000 Okay?

01:49:22.000 At all.

01:49:23.000 Like, this is a really bad conversation we're having. 0.99

01:49:25.000 It sounds like you're a bullshitter. 1.00

01:49:27.000 Like, this is ridiculous. 1.00

01:49:28.000 Like, the idea behind it is ridiculous. 0.91

01:49:30.000 That one person would have some sort of magical power with their hands to heal things. 0.99

01:49:34.000 Like, get the fuck out of here, man. 0.99

01:49:36.000 Stop. 1.00

01:49:37.000 The power is in the psychedelic medicine.

01:49:39.000 And the most amazing healer I met along the way was this man in Oaxaca, Mexico.

01:49:44.000 I went there to investigate how the Mazatecs have been using mushrooms medicinally for thousands of years because it kind of contradicts everything we've been told about magic mushrooms, that they're actually a medicine there.

01:49:54.000 And the healer, actually what he would do, would just bring people in.

01:49:59.000 He would make the tea Give you the mushrooms and then say, okay, here's my property.

01:50:03.000 Go sit wherever you want and be one with the mushrooms and the mushrooms will do the healing.

01:50:07.000 I'm not a healer.

01:50:08.000 I'm just a provider.

01:50:09.000 And to me that was so profound because we had run into on this journey so many phonies who wanted $400 for a ceremony or, you know, their hands are the hands of God with these psychedelics.

01:50:23.000 And it really is just the medicine.

01:50:25.000 That's all you need.

01:50:26.000 You don't need someone else to bring you there.

01:50:29.000 Well, it seems like, and it's becoming more and more popular over the last few years, the demand for it is so high, there's got to be a lot of unscrupulous people that are sort of capitalizing on that demand. 0.95

01:50:39.000 And people who never were shamans, they just figure out the recipe, cook it up, start serving people and squeezing tits. 0.89

01:50:46.000 They're like, this is the best job ever! 1.00

01:50:49.000 These dudes are fucked up. 1.00

01:50:50.000 I'm touching their dicks. 1.00

01:50:51.000 It's awesome. 0.99

01:50:52.000 And they give me 200 bucks a night, which is like a monthly salary in my country.

01:50:56.000 Yeah.

01:50:56.000 I mean, it only makes sense.

01:50:58.000 It seems like they need an accreditation thing.

01:51:01.000 Sort of like, where'd you get your PhD?

01:51:04.000 Columbia.

01:51:04.000 Oh, that guy's legit.

01:51:06.000 Where'd you get your ayahuasca license to practice?

01:51:10.000 What?

01:51:11.000 It doesn't exist.

01:51:13.000 But I mean, it's almost more important than being a PhD.

01:51:17.000 I mean, the ability to accurately describe what happens in those dimensions to someone who has an experience that is impossible.

01:51:26.000 The idea behind what you're experiencing is so fantastic that...

01:51:31.000 Any words to describe it are going to fall short.

01:51:34.000 So the guy who could administer that, the function of that person in your society, in your culture, is uniquely important in a really intense way.

01:51:42.000 Just as important as someone who's a doctor.

01:51:44.000 Just as important as someone who's a teacher.

01:51:47.000 Just as important as any important aspect of our community that we consider to be a cornerstone, whether it's medical or legal or any of those things.

01:51:54.000 Having someone who can give you that experience is a huge, that's a huge role.

01:51:59.000 But, you know, who's doing it? 0.98

01:52:01.000 These fucking weird guys that are touching you while you're passed out, you know? 0.99

01:52:04.000 And not all of them are bad. 0.99

01:52:05.000 There's some really amazing healers.

01:52:07.000 Of course.

01:52:07.000 I had lost faith almost, Joe, and then I met some incredible, real ayahuasqueros, an ayahuasquera, a woman.

01:52:16.000 Who's been doing it for years and they were so profoundly helped me heal and understand the medicine that there is a lot of good but it's a yin and yang and that's why I just warn people because I think oh well this she went down there alone in the jungle and it's like no it wasn't all rainbows and butterflies like I had some things to have to overcome there because I did chose to kind of go down there so quickly.

01:52:41.000 Well, I think it's like everything in life.

01:52:43.000 There's going to be good versions of it and bad versions of it, and we should seek to find the ideal version of it.

01:52:48.000 And I think also that yin and yang balance of the universe seems inescapable.

01:52:55.000 It seems like it's In everything, like really terrible relationships, they make you appreciate really good relationships.

01:53:01.000 Bad friends make you appreciate good friends.

01:53:03.000 Bad jobs make you appreciate good jobs.

01:53:06.000 Traffic makes you appreciate the mountains even more.

01:53:08.000 I mean, all those things factor in together.

01:53:10.000 I don't think they can escape them.

01:53:13.000 I think you need them all.

01:53:14.000 You need the yin and the yang. 0.80

01:53:15.000 You need the shitty ayahuasquero to make you really appreciate the beauty of someone who's absolutely pure in their intent. 0.51

01:53:21.000 I really think that's just the way the world works. 0.99

01:53:25.000 I think you try to get away from that, you're being silly. 0.98

01:53:28.000 You're missing the whole point. 0.97

01:53:30.000 The whole point is just seek the light.

01:53:33.000 Go towards the good.

01:53:34.000 Just find that.

01:53:35.000 You can't fix all the dark. 0.58

01:53:37.000 It's not fixable.

01:53:39.000 People involved in the dark have to recognize they're leaning one way more than they are the other and try to correct.

01:53:45.000 Hopefully, somehow or another, they're going to have an experience that gives them that sort of understanding, but you're not going to fix them. 1.00

01:53:51.000 Concentrate on your own shit. 1.00

01:53:52.000 Move forward. 1.00

01:53:53.000 Go! 0.95

01:53:54.000 Go, go, go.

01:53:55.000 Seek the light.

01:53:56.000 Go the right way.

01:53:57.000 And for some folks, they just never quite get there.

01:54:00.000 And I don't know what their role is, but their role may very well be for someone like you or someone like me to see the error of their ways and learn from it.

01:54:08.000 I mean, that might be their place in this giant machine.

01:54:11.000 Their place might truly be to enlighten the others around them as to the wrong way.

01:54:16.000 And maybe when they come back, they'll come back with the knowledge of whatever they fucked up in the past life in some sort of inherent form, and they'll move incrementally closer and closer to some form of enlightenment.

01:54:28.000 And it really helped me journalistically because I'm not only trying to use these psychedelics for healing, but also to really understand the history. 0.85

01:54:35.000 And for some reason, after that first experience, I just had my bullshit meter on times 4,000. 0.56

01:54:42.000 So right away I could weed through the bullshit and just get to the healers who could teach me the most Yeah. 0.96

01:55:04.000 These mushrooms that I have such a profound love for mushrooms now, Joe. 0.74

01:55:10.000 And I understand why, when I was on your show, you were saying that if everyone could do mushrooms, it would just transform the world.

01:55:16.000 And I'm a firm believer psilocybin is, hands down, the most incredible chemical known to the brain just through my experiences.

01:55:24.000 Well, it's really close to human neurochemistry, too.

01:55:27.000 I mean, it literally has NN-dimethyltryptamine in it, as far as, like, what it is before it is that.

01:55:34.000 It's very closely related.

01:55:39.000 The most profound ones are closely related to human neurochemistry.

01:55:42.000 The idea that you're going to get this DMT trip from all these plants that grow in the jungle.

01:55:47.000 These plants that grow in the jungle literally contain the very chemicals that make your brain work.

01:55:53.000 It's so bizarre.

01:55:54.000 And they're illegal!

01:55:55.000 And they're illegal, yeah.

01:55:57.000 Ignore everything you've been told about them.

01:55:59.000 It's all lies.

01:56:00.000 When I first had my first mushroom experience, I really realized, wow, how deep the propaganda went.

01:56:06.000 And we've just been fed so many lies about these substances, especially psilocybin.

01:56:15.000 The industry has a lot of fear of psilocybin because it can't be patented and it is so effective.

01:56:21.000 One study at the University of Southern Florida found out, scientists believe after the study that it may even lead to neurogenesis, which is a regrowth of brain cells.

01:56:32.000 And in that study they gave rats, they played this loud noise and then they'd shock the hell out of these rats.

01:56:39.000 And then they gave some of the rats psilocybin.

01:56:42.000 And then later on they played that noise again and the rats that had psilocybin were less likely to face the fear of that sound.

01:56:48.000 And they believe that that was because potentially it had led to the regrowth of brain cells and the reparation of the serotonergic system.

01:56:58.000 That's so intense.

01:56:59.000 And this is something that we're saying is illegal.

01:57:01.000 And if it's Schedule 1, so that means it has no medicinal benefits.

01:57:05.000 It's addictive.

01:57:07.000 But they've proven mushrooms aren't addictive.

01:57:09.000 And look at all of these studies coming out showing that psilocybin has potential to cure anxiety and PTSD. And so it's really, it's just really disturbing, but I recommend anyone out there facing, you know, who has a type of illness or PTSD,

01:57:27.000 depression, anxiety, and they haven't found any hope in anything else, and they're feeling hopeless, to just research psilocybin.

01:57:33.000 Because it gives me so much hope, and I think it's one of the greatest human rights tragedies of our generation that this isn't available to everyone who needs it.

01:57:45.000 It is very strange, isn't it?

01:57:46.000 And it's strange that a person like you has to come along and sort of let people know about this.

01:57:52.000 That this isn't common knowledge.

01:57:54.000 This isn't something that's being taught in schools.

01:57:56.000 This isn't something the president's talking about.

01:57:58.000 Like, I found a way to world peace.

01:58:00.000 We all need to do mushrooms.

01:58:04.000 Could you imagine how many people, not everybody, this isn't for everyone.

01:58:08.000 Some people, you know, would potentially have bad trips if you're not ready for it.

01:58:12.000 But the healing potential is so great that it's worth the risk.

01:58:17.000 Yeah, I agree.

01:58:18.000 And I also think that when you go deep into the idea that psilocybin may have been responsible for the very evolution of the human mind itself, it gets really compelling.

01:58:32.000 We had Dennis McKenna on the podcast, and we're doing some emails back and forth right now.

01:58:37.000 I'll have him on hopefully in April again.

01:58:41.000 But he explained in a very scientific manner We're good to go.

01:59:04.000 I think? 0.98

01:59:23.000 And these animals, these monkeys, would come along and flip the shits over and find bugs and mushrooms would grow in the shits. 0.98

01:59:29.000 So they would experiment with these mushrooms.

01:59:31.000 And he had all these direct correlations between experimenting with mushrooms and the improvement of various aspects of life which would make it...

01:59:42.000 It's probable that these people, these animals, these human-like things, experimented with these mushrooms, including eating of psilocybin at low-level doses increases visual acuity.

01:59:56.000 So it actually makes you see better.

01:59:57.000 It makes edge detection better.

01:59:59.000 It would make you a more effective hunter.

02:00:00.000 It makes you more sensitive to your environment. 0.99

02:00:02.000 It would make you hornier, so you would have more sex. 0.91

02:00:05.000 And of course, then at higher doses, you would get this sort of unifying experience that would bond the tribe together. 1.00

02:00:12.000 It would create a tighter group of people, a tighter group of monkey-like people, whatever the fuck they were. 1.00

02:00:18.000 And he used that as a direct reason for one of the biggest reasons Mysteries in the entire fossil record, which is the doubling of the human brain size over a period of two million years. 0.98

02:00:29.000 It's a really fascinating mystery that no one has ever solved.

02:00:32.000 They don't know why.

02:00:33.000 There's a lot of theories, there's a lot of competing theories as to what caused the human brain size to double, but it's an unprecedented event in biology.

02:00:41.000 The way McKenna described it, he's like, if it was like the liver of an otter, it would be a spectacular find that a liver of an otter doubled over a period of two million years.

02:00:50.000 I mean, it would be really perplexing, like, why is this? 0.95

02:00:53.000 When you have the greatest transformation of any known biological creature over a period of two million years like this, and that's the same organ that created the theory of evolution in the first place, that's when shit gets really weird.

02:01:08.000 The human mind is the thing that's figuring this all out, and the human mind is the thing that's doubling over the period of this one period of time.

02:01:15.000 What else is going on?

02:01:17.000 And he pointed to all these factors that pointed To the experimenting with psilocybin.

02:01:23.000 It's really interesting stuff.

02:01:25.000 And then with his brother Dennis, who's like a hardcore scientist, explaining the actual connections between eating psilocybin and the possible creation of language, and of course the exponential effect that creating language would have on these animals, and how it would force their mind to expand.

02:01:41.000 It would force, along with the psychedelic experiences, their boundaries to shift.

02:01:47.000 It's pretty incredible, too, if you think on that theory, to think, now what are we losing?

02:01:51.000 Because we don't have access as species now.

02:01:55.000 We're sick.

02:01:56.000 We don't have our medicine.

02:01:57.000 There's this thing that's created us.

02:01:59.000 And he also, McKenna was really into the, well, he had a couple of freak ideas, too.

02:02:04.000 One of them was this longing for this orgiastic, non-monogamous culture of the past.

02:02:11.000 Yeah, dudes always find a way to work that in. 0.99

02:02:15.000 Even the most spiritual guys find a way to work out this non-monogamous concept.

02:02:20.000 Is this just to make sense to his girlfriends about his behavior?

02:02:24.000 Well, in a sense he's right as far as the male programming, but it's fascinating.

02:02:30.000 It's fascinating, the concept behind it, that these...

02:02:34.000 At one point in time, these cultures supposedly all engaged in this non-miogamous life.

02:02:40.000 And Chris Ryan has very interesting thoughts on that as well.

02:02:42.000 The guy who wrote Sex at Dawn, a brilliant guy who I do a podcast with once a month.

02:02:48.000 Him and Duncan Trussell and I do a podcast.

02:02:51.000 And these ideas were that at one point in time, there was no sense of paternity.

02:02:57.000 That no one knew that Amber Lyon's baby came from Jamie.

02:03:00.000 You know, you guys didn't know because everybody was having sex with everybody and there was no DNA test.

02:03:06.000 So if you were having sex with five different friends at the same time and all of a sudden you got pregnant, everybody would raise the baby together.

02:03:13.000 And that would be the idea is that people would grow accustomed to that sort of a culture.

02:03:17.000 The culture that makes love together and has sex with more than one partner, they like each other more.

02:03:22.000 And one of the things that he uses to sort of highlight that is wife swapping amongst fighter pilots apparently is very high.

02:03:31.000 It's a normal concept.

02:03:36.000 You know that it's very likely you're going to die out there and you love your wife and you don't want your wife to be with someone who doesn't love her.

02:03:42.000 And so by sharing her with all your friends, you leave behind someone who loves your wife as equally as you do.

02:03:50.000 And then it's that intense of a shift in the way you view the world, you know?

02:03:56.000 I think that we're just real stuck in the idea that the way we live right now, this is the pattern that we're all supposed to follow.

02:04:03.000 And this pattern may very well be a pattern that's separate from what created it in the first place, which might be psychedelic drugs.

02:04:12.000 It might be the thing.

02:04:14.000 I mean, even like mainstream Jerusalem scholars now are saying that they believe that Moses finding the Ten Commandments from a burning bush was most likely...

02:04:24.000 Some sort of a description of a psychedelic experience.

02:04:28.000 And that the bush that's burning may very well have been the acacia bush, which is incredibly rich in DMT. It's one of the most DMT-rich plants in the entire region.

02:04:38.000 So if that is the burning bush, if that's the...

02:04:44.000 You know, Moses sees the burning bush.

02:04:46.000 Is that what they're really saying?

02:04:47.000 Because we're getting it from ancient Hebrew, we're getting it from Aramaic, translated to Latin, translated to Greek.

02:04:53.000 Are you sure that's what they're saying? 0.94

02:04:54.000 Because what they might be saying is they smoked some fucking DNP and talked to God, and God gave them some rules that really made sense as to how we should live our life. 0.96

02:05:02.000 And if you look at the Good Friday experiment, I don't know if you're familiar with that, that took place in Harvard when they were studying psilocybin. 0.98

02:05:09.000 They gave theology students high doses of psilocybin, and they all reported having similar religious experiences as to those described in the Bible.

02:05:19.000 And so you kind of have to look back now that I've been investigating psychedelics a lot because I've had my own religious experience where I felt like I've been given messages from God or a higher being and they tend to be similar to those passed down throughout history.

02:05:36.000 So you kind of wonder how much did psychedelics play a role in our creation of religion?

02:05:43.000 Next time you come in, or if you can get it, if you can find it, you've got to pick up John Marco Allegro's The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross.

02:05:52.000 Okay.

02:05:53.000 Next time you come in, if you come in again, remind me and I'll give it to you and you can borrow it.

02:05:57.000 It's hard to get because it's out of print because the Catholic Church bought up the rights for the book and scooped it up and stopped it.

02:06:03.000 But there is one that you still can get that's in print.

02:06:06.000 It's called The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth.

02:06:08.000 Oh, you know what?

02:06:09.000 Wait a minute.

02:06:09.000 I should change that.

02:06:11.000 Jan Irvin started republishing The Saken Mushroom and the Cross.

02:06:14.000 So you can still get it.

02:06:15.000 And that's really awesome of him that he did that.

02:06:18.000 I don't know how he went about getting the rights to that.

02:06:20.000 But it used to be that it was a very difficult book to get.

02:06:24.000 But it's basically by a guy who...

02:06:27.000 This guy deciphered The Dead Sea Scrolls for over 14 years.

02:06:30.000 This guy, John Marco Allegro, and wrote a book.

02:06:33.000 On his interpretations of what the language that he had read, and he said that he was the only one that was an ordained minister, but he was also agnostic.

02:06:42.000 He was the only one on the Dead Sea Scrolls that was an agnostic, that was in the committee for deciphering it.

02:06:46.000 And his interpretation of the Bible, after 14 years of studying the Dead Sea Scrolls, was that the entire religion was a massive misunderstanding.

02:06:54.000 And what it was really originally about was fertility rituals and the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms and that these allegories and these stories and all these different parables, they were designed to hide The true nature of the knowledge that they didn't want passed on to the Romans when they were conquered.

02:07:15.000 They didn't want passed on.

02:07:16.000 They wanted to hide it in stories.

02:07:18.000 And that this is what the apple of Adam and Eve was about.

02:07:21.000 And this was this rebirth of the understanding of the universe that would exist if you had taken mushrooms, if you had taken psychedelic mushrooms, was what they were describing in all these various stories and all these different events.

02:07:35.000 They were essentially trying to document the knowledge that they had received from having these psychedelic trips.

02:07:42.000 And it's unbelievably intense when you read that and then put it into play and then start thinking, like, oh, wait a minute, I get it. 0.96

02:07:51.000 These fucking ancient people who knew nothing just stumbled upon this shit that literally made them who they were, created them, and then all of a sudden they realized it was going away. 0.97

02:08:02.000 Whether it was going away because of additional climate change, which they started losing mushrooms and they started preserving them in honey. 0.99

02:08:11.000 And preserving them in honey also started creating fermented honey, which became mead, which is alcohol, which led to a more alcohol-based society.

02:08:19.000 And as they move slowly away from mushrooms and slowly away from psychedelic drugs, they move to like almost an anti-psychedelic in alcohol. 0.98

02:08:28.000 And that's when shit went haywire. 0.97

02:08:31.000 This disconnect from psychedelics was what caused all these cultures to go haywire. 0.99

02:08:37.000 It's really fascinating.

02:08:39.000 And they, religions have a way of prosecuting psychedelic losers, losers, users throughout history. 0.98

02:08:47.000 That is what they said. 0.99

02:08:47.000 I'm a psychedelic loser. 0.99

02:08:48.000 But they would call it the work of the devil, and that's what I ran into with the Mazatecs who I was working with up in Oaxaca, is that they had to, when the Spaniards came, they had to flee... 0.95

02:09:00.000 Wow.

02:09:15.000 So they actually worship the mushrooms.

02:09:17.000 They've kind of mixed, I guess to survive, they mixed Catholicism in with their worship of these mushrooms.

02:09:22.000 And it's pretty trippy, per se, to see it painted on these churches.

02:09:27.000 That's actually a big part of really ancient religious artwork, period.

02:09:30.000 If you look up, do some research on the connection between mushrooms and even the Catholic Church, there's mushroom iconography all over the place.

02:09:40.000 And really ancient descriptions, like one of the earliest depictions of Adam and Eve on some ancient fresco is Adam and Eve with a mushroom tree in between them.

02:09:49.000 Have you ever seen that image?

02:09:50.000 No.

02:09:51.000 See if you can pull that up, Jamie.

02:09:52.000 Adam and Eve mushroom picture.

02:09:54.000 And we'll find the description of it.

02:09:58.000 And Eve mushroom.

02:10:00.000 Yeah.

02:10:00.000 We just lost track of all this stuff.

02:10:03.000 It's also one of the reasons, yeah, this is, it's right away you can pull up that image.

02:10:08.000 It's pretty intense.

02:10:09.000 That's an ancient image of Adam and Eve.

02:10:13.000 I mean, look at that.

02:10:16.000 That's crazy.

02:10:17.000 United by the mushroom. 1.00

02:10:17.000 That's fucking crazy. 1.00

02:10:19.000 It was really strange for me when I was in Mexico to see them blessing the mushrooms on the altar. 0.99

02:10:24.000 Instead of the communion holy water, they give you mushrooms.

02:10:27.000 And that's your sacrament.

02:10:29.000 That's what you eat.

02:10:30.000 There's another one, Jamie.

02:10:31.000 Pull up.

02:10:31.000 There's another one that's a different image, but a very, very similar image.

02:10:35.000 See that one on the far left?

02:10:37.000 Yeah, right there.

02:10:38.000 Click up that one.

02:10:40.000 Look at that.

02:10:41.000 Isn't that trippy?

02:10:42.000 That's from 1147. Wow.

02:10:46.000 They call it CE now.

02:10:48.000 They don't call it AD anymore, for whatever reason.

02:10:50.000 But that's from 1147. So they knew, even back then, about psychedelic plants having some sort of a connection to Christianity.

02:11:00.000 And these were from churches.

02:11:03.000 So it's really fascinating that that's just something that went away.

02:11:07.000 It was something that was a part of the doorways, the shape of the doorway being very mushroom-like, and a lot of these, they look like a mushroom cap.

02:11:15.000 You know, that's like, they didn't choose that for, you know, it wasn't an accident.

02:11:20.000 There was a guy, Jack Herrer, and before he had a stroke, and then he eventually had a heart attack and wound up dying, and he was a very important part of the hemp movement.

02:11:30.000 In letting people know he was a Goldwater Republican, and he wrote a book called The Emperor Has No Clothes about marijuana and the real root of the propaganda that allowed marijuana to become an illegal drug.

02:11:43.000 And his thing that he was working on before he got sick was all on the connections between psilocybin and religiousness.

02:11:49.000 Religious thought, religion's period, the creation of religions, and he had some really amazing old paintings.

02:11:57.000 I wish I knew where he had collected these images, but of people lost in like a dance of ecstasy like they were naked.

02:12:06.000 And they were covered by this translucent mushroom and it was like a reoccurring theme in like really ancient artwork that was religious artwork that these people were engaging in ritualistic behavior with psychedelics and it was a part of the church.

02:12:23.000 Whether it was something that was originally for everybody, and then when it became more scarce, was just controlled by the upper crust of the religious organization, or what happened over how many periods of hundreds, if not thousands of years, which is hard for us to kind of...

02:12:40.000 Let it sink in.

02:12:41.000 How much of a shift 100 years can be?

02:12:43.000 Think about it this way.

02:12:44.000 200 years ago, if you wanted to picture something, you had to draw it.

02:12:47.000 And if you wanted to get around on something, you had to ride an animal.

02:12:49.000 That's just 200 years ago.

02:12:51.000 200 years ago, slavery was legal and all those things.

02:12:54.000 So just wrap your head around that and then try to move forward to thinking 200 years before that, 200 years before that, and just thinking if at any point in time during that period We're good to go.

02:13:27.000 The connection is completely severed.

02:13:28.000 All you have is words describing this connection.

02:13:31.000 Boy, it would take on a hollow tone, and then all of our primate behavior and instincts and all the shitty aspects of human beings' control and ego would flourish and rise to the top and even be fed by alcohol, which is the anti-psychedelic And then culture is left with these words,

02:13:49.000 these hollow words written on animal skins from back when people were, even then when they wrote these things down, probably grasping to the last remaining fibers of this former existence that they had in symbiosis with the plant knowledge. 0.99

02:14:06.000 Isn't that the irony and humor in the universe that so many people spend their entire lives searching for this religious experience, thousands and thousands of dollars, and you can get it for free growing on cow shit? 1.00

02:14:22.000 And isn't it funny that when someone wants to call you on your nonsense, they call you on your bullshit? 1.00

02:14:28.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:14:29.000 Oh, that is such bullshit. 1.00

02:14:31.000 It's like there's nothing that's going to let you see what's bullshit and not bullshit like mushrooms. 1.00

02:14:36.000 Exactly. 0.99

02:14:37.000 And I think we've had the push towards legalization of marijuana, and I think the next big movement should be to legalize mushrooms.

02:14:43.000 I mean, they grow everywhere.

02:14:45.000 They're a natural product.

02:14:46.000 They've been proven, as I said before, not to be addictive.

02:14:49.000 They're not neurotoxic.

02:14:50.000 Your caffeine in your coffee is more toxic on your body and your system.

02:14:54.000 So why not develop that next push for mushroom legalization?

02:15:00.000 I couldn't agree more and I think what we need to do is it needs to be done in like a professional setting.

02:15:06.000 Like hire people like they have really acclaimed ayahuasqueros that everybody loves and goes to.

02:15:12.000 Figure out a way to hire someone and have someone run a mushroom center like that. 0.95

02:15:17.000 A person who is an experienced voyager.

02:15:19.000 A person who's pure in their intent.

02:15:21.000 And they can help people.

02:15:23.000 And what an unbelievably rewarding life that would be for someone who instead would be worrying about their physical safety in performing these things.

02:15:30.000 They'd have to do that under, you know, secret conditions to hide from people.

02:15:34.000 And someone would have to look out the window to make sure the jackbooted thugs don't kick down the door and stop them when they're in the middle of enlightenment. 1.00

02:15:40.000 You know, and arrest them and go throw them in some rat-infested fucking cage somewhere. 0.98

02:15:44.000 To not have to worry about that and to be able to To actually give people this experience in a real pure setting would be pretty nice. 1.00

02:15:52.000 And this is where people go, I get it.

02:15:57.000 I'm tired of me too, man.

02:15:58.000 I'm tired of me too.

02:15:59.000 Trust me.

02:16:00.000 It's so profound.

02:16:01.000 And what the mushrooms did for me and what they do, I think they could be so effective, especially for women.

02:16:06.000 And traditionally, psychedelics have been more of a male discussion topic.

02:16:09.000 But I think women, I will admit, I think they may even need them more. 0.65

02:16:13.000 Why more?

02:16:13.000 We tend to be more self-critical than men are, and so that's the prefrontal cortex being overactive, and so that leads to depression and anxiety.

02:16:22.000 And what the psilocybin does, they've actually done scans of brains when people are on psilocybin, is it decreases the blood flow to that area of your brain so that for once, and this is what happened for me, is finally everything just went silent.

02:16:35.000 And it was so profound, I just burst into tears, and I just could not stop crying because I hadn't had Silence for so long.

02:16:42.000 And at that point, because I had that silence, I was able to go back and rewatch my life like a movie and see all these things that had happened over just the span of two years and then slowly realized, okay, that's why I was in the position I was in.

02:16:55.000 And I was able to reprocess all of these stored memories.

02:16:59.000 And if you look at women, what is it? 0.96

02:17:03.000 One fourth of women in their forties and fifties are on some kind of antidepressant that's just a bandaid on the bullet wound.

02:17:09.000 And I felt like the mushrooms actually got into my soul and cured and helped perfect my limbic system, which is what Western medicine is ignoring.

02:17:20.000 That is a really strange number, isn't it?

02:17:23.000 One quarter of people are on antidepressants over X amount of age.

02:17:27.000 I've always wondered why it is women are uniquely drawn to those things after they get to be a certain age.

02:17:33.000 Like, what is it?

02:17:34.000 What is it about antidepressants?

02:17:36.000 It's just a quick fix, maybe.

02:17:38.000 Is that what it is?

02:17:39.000 Is it a biological issue that comes with their body slowing down and they become less and less happy?

02:17:45.000 And maybe that could be something that could be altered by exercise or by...

02:17:52.000 Like a man can stimulate his testosterone with squats and there's various hormonal ways they can do that.

02:17:59.000 But do women... 1.00

02:18:00.000 Do they have anything out there that expands your natural female sexual hormones? 1.00

02:18:05.000 Is there anything that does do that?

02:18:07.000 I think there are hormone replacements.

02:18:09.000 Right.

02:18:10.000 But I don't know of any natural...

02:18:12.000 Maybe yoga?

02:18:13.000 I'm just not to that age yet.

02:18:15.000 Yeah, but I would wonder that at a certain point, if their body just slows down so much that they just feel shitty.

02:18:22.000 You know, they're just not producing hormones correctly anymore.

02:18:24.000 And that's what leads them to try to find happiness in a pill.

02:18:28.000 That they need something that gives them like a little serotonin boost.

02:18:33.000 You know?

02:18:34.000 And what's so sad is that a lot of times with these medicines, not all of them, but it's actually permanently changing your serotonin levels and depleting them.

02:18:43.000 So you are dependent on these medicines just to get back to where you were when you started taking it.

02:18:48.000 I think those medicines are really important for some people, though.

02:18:51.000 That's where it gets real sketchy because I don't want to write off antidepressants because I know people that have benefited from them.

02:18:57.000 The question is, would they have benefited equally well from something else?

02:19:01.000 Some people may be.

02:19:03.000 I know some dudes that have actually gotten on them and then helped their life and then they slowly wean themselves off.

02:19:09.000 And then I know also people that they benefit from the natural way of doing it by taking 5-HTP and finding that that gave them an elevated mood.

02:19:18.000 And then exercise is a big one.

02:19:20.000 They've also done studies that show that exercise, rigorous exercise, is equally effective for increasing happiness as antidepressants are in some people.

02:19:28.000 So it's like, how do you know?

02:19:30.000 I know personally guys who benefited from antidepressants.

02:19:33.000 So you can't say, this guy shouldn't take it, because I don't know what's going on in his head, you know?

02:19:37.000 And I don't understand the actual science behind it all. 0.97

02:19:42.000 I can parrot it, but I don't really understand what the fuck is going on, like, comprehensively.

02:19:47.000 And I think that you would have to really study it for a long time to really understand it comprehensively. 0.64

02:19:52.000 But I think there should be more than one option.

02:19:54.000 That's my point.

02:19:55.000 My point is, it's real problematic when you've got something like, We're good to go.

02:20:03.000 We're good to go.

02:20:21.000 All paid part of that. 0.92

02:20:22.000 Just ridiculous.

02:20:24.000 So there should be a bunch of different options available.

02:20:28.000 Exactly.

02:20:28.000 That's why I'm trying to talk about my story with psychedelic use and how much it helped me, just so people know when the other options haven't worked.

02:20:36.000 Like you said, Joe, I'm not discounting.

02:20:38.000 I'm sure a lot of people have been helped from pharmaceuticals.

02:20:41.000 But I think some people have tried them, and because it is the only option, they feel like, oh my gosh, this is it.

02:20:49.000 And that's why so many of these soldiers who have post-traumatic stress disorder end up taking their own lives.

02:20:55.000 And I interviewed one soldier who was at that point.

02:21:01.000 He had a panic attack that sent him to the emergency room and almost killed him because his heart rate was so quick.

02:21:09.000 And luckily he heard about MDMA and psilocybin and went to a concert and got some and that had profound effects.

02:21:18.000 He wasn't able to be in crowds and then within weeks he was able to go back out into society and now he actually takes It's like an underground railroad of psychedelics between soldiers, and he travels around the country dosing his buddies so that they can kind of get out of this rut,

02:21:36.000 those that haven't been helped by antidepressants.

02:21:39.000 Wow.

02:21:40.000 And the MDMA shows, I know you talk with Rick Doblin a lot, it just shows such profound promise that in one study they had people who had treatment-resistant PTSD, so nothing was working.

02:21:52.000 And 83% of the people in this study who were given MDMA combined with psychotherapy no longer had the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder, whereas 25% of people who just were given psychotherapy were healed.

02:22:05.000 So, I mean, that's a pretty...

02:22:06.000 Profound numbers there.

02:22:07.000 Monster numbers.

02:22:08.000 Could you imagine if that number was any other sort of medication?

02:22:12.000 Exactly.

02:22:12.000 Every doctor would be prescribing it to you.

02:22:14.000 It would be a no-brainer.

02:22:15.000 You would go to the doctor and they would immediately prescribe it to you.

02:22:17.000 And we have 22 soldiers a day killing themselves needlessly, Jo.

02:22:21.000 And that weighs on my shoulders now because I was never officially diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, but I do know, especially after talking with a lot of these soldiers, I was having symptoms of it.

02:22:31.000 And knowing how profoundly effective the psychedelics were on helping me and curing my anxiety and letting me process those traumatic memories, It's so sad to know that there's so many people out there that haven't been connected with this medicine yet or are being misled.

02:22:48.000 And the United States government knows that MDMA, they've been told many times, they've been shown the results of this study, the Pentagon knows that it's effective.

02:22:57.000 Why hasn't it been legalized?

02:23:00.000 Well, because someone can profit from it not being legalized.

02:23:03.000 That's the only reason.

02:23:03.000 And it's too easy to grow.

02:23:05.000 That's the problem.

02:23:06.000 These drugs that are really beneficial, boy, does nature make them readily available.

02:23:11.000 Because nature wants us to take them.

02:23:12.000 Nature knows we're insane.

02:23:14.000 You could drive, especially if you lived in a nice place like Seattle where it rains a lot.

02:23:18.000 You could drive down the street.

02:23:19.000 Throw pot seeds out the window.

02:23:21.000 Just throw them as you drive and then come back a couple months later and pot be growing everywhere. 0.96

02:23:26.000 It would be unavoidable.

02:23:28.000 It's that easy.

02:23:29.000 It's like, we're all right, dude.

02:23:31.000 Hey, you need fertilizer?

02:23:32.000 Nope, nope, nope, nope.

02:23:33.000 Don't need anything.

02:23:34.000 Don't worry about me.

02:23:35.000 I'll just grow right here.

02:23:36.000 The best things in life are free.

02:23:38.000 It's for sure.

02:23:39.000 And I'm a firm believer that nature has created...

02:23:42.000 I used to be a skeptic, but now I am a believer that nature has created something to heal all of our ailments.

02:23:48.000 And we just need to be connected with that.

02:23:50.000 And we need to realize that sometimes it's the more natural route that's more effective versus going the pharmaceutical route.

02:23:57.000 And oftentimes the pharmaceutical route is sort of based on something that came from the natural route in the first place.

02:24:03.000 I mean, the lessons learned from using natural materials.

02:24:07.000 Sometimes, I mean, one thing that they want to do so much in the jungle, they want to extract pharmaceutical drugs out of these jungle plants.

02:24:14.000 I mean, that's a big reason why there's so much exploration in the jungle.

02:24:18.000 Besides using all the wood, you know, that they're...

02:24:22.000 Clear-cutting giant chunks of that forest.

02:24:24.000 One of the things that the medical community is really concerned about when they're doing that is that when they're clear-cutting, I mean, they're destroying ecosystems.

02:24:32.000 And when they're destroying ecosystems, we know there are hundreds of thousands of different types of plants down there. 0.89

02:24:40.000 And we have no idea if the cure to cancer is not locked up in some weird fucking berry that no one has ever discovered. 0.95

02:24:46.000 We just don't know. 0.94

02:24:47.000 And it might be.

02:24:48.000 It really might be. 1.00

02:24:49.000 They found this fucking spider, the Brazilian wandering spider. 1.00

02:24:53.000 And they're trying to use it for a better Viagra. 1.00

02:24:55.000 Because this spider is the most poisonous spider they've ever found. 0.99

02:24:59.000 Kills you. 0.99

02:25:00.000 And when it kills you, one of the ways it kills you is with an erection that is unbelievably painful. 1.00

02:25:04.000 Literally breaks the skin on your penis. 1.00

02:25:07.000 So even if you get through it, which many people don't... 1.00

02:25:09.000 So it bites you and then you get this erection. 0.79

02:25:12.000 It affects somehow or another...

02:25:15.000 The nitric oxide production of your body, it injects you with something that does something to the whole mechanism.

02:25:23.000 And your whole body becomes unbelievably painful and rigid and you get an erection. 0.56

02:25:29.000 And the erection is like, have you ever thrown a hot dog on a grill and it plumps and then it pops? 1.00

02:25:34.000 Yeah, that's your penis. 1.00

02:25:36.000 It plumps and apparently it breaks it. 1.00

02:25:39.000 If you live, even if you live, your sexuality is ruined. 1.00

02:25:43.000 Your dick is broken. 1.00

02:25:44.000 It doesn't work anymore. 1.00

02:25:45.000 Like, it redlines that thing until pistons start firing out of the sides of it.

02:25:49.000 So even if you do survive, you're broken. 0.96

02:25:52.000 And so they found this fucking creepy spider, and they're trying to figure out how to make, like, the best hard-on pill ever with this. 0.99

02:25:59.000 Like, forget about Viagra. 0.99

02:26:00.000 Like, we're talking... 1.00

02:26:01.000 You just need, like, a molecule of this shit. 1.00

02:26:03.000 What?! 1.00

02:26:04.000 Throw it in your system and you have erections on demand. 0.97

02:26:08.000 It's like I was saying, nature has a cure for everything. 0.89

02:26:11.000 Even there's this one shaman in the Amazon and his entire village was sick and he couldn't cure them.

02:26:17.000 And so he thought his entire tribe was going to be wiped out.

02:26:20.000 So legend has it, he drank ayahuasca and walked into the jungle and these hands came out and showed him this frog, which is the Cambo frog.

02:26:27.000 It's the most poisonous frog in the jungle.

02:26:30.000 And showed him how to kind of milk the frog and then apply the poison to the people in the village to cure what was ailing them.

02:26:38.000 And he was able to, as legend has it, cure his whole village.

02:26:42.000 Well, now this cambo frog venom is used as a vaccination.

02:26:46.000 So instead of the traditional vaccinations we give here in the U.S., they use this frog venom to vaccinate the children.

02:26:53.000 And also to make the men stronger as they hunt.

02:26:56.000 And I actually got it and what they do is they just kind of cauterize your arm and put a little on you and right away you feel like you're being poisoned.

02:27:04.000 So your whole body reacts to produce all of these antibodies in an emergency effort to try to save your life and you just feel the blood It's pounding through your head, and it's so intense.

02:27:15.000 You feel like it will shoot through your fingertips, and all these frogs are running through you, and your lips start to swell, and you're sitting there thinking, am I really going to die?

02:27:25.000 What the hell did I just take?

02:27:26.000 That's what I was thinking at the time.

02:27:28.000 And then you just violently vomit after that from the depths of your soul, and all of these toxins leave your body.

02:27:35.000 And after going through this for about an hour, you just feel miraculous, like all the toxins have been pulled out of you, and you feel energy for months to come because your body's produced all these antibodies to fight infection.

02:27:47.000 And I got it done about three months ago, and I feel great.

02:27:52.000 Whether I'd recommend it to everybody, but that's just frog venom, a natural substance in the environment.

02:27:58.000 And they say it potentially has promise for HIV patients because of the flood of antibodies and other people facing autoimmune disorders, which I believe it could potentially have that effect.

02:28:11.000 It seems like it if it doesn't really poison you, but it fires all your systems on go, like red alert, you know, we're being poisoned.

02:28:19.000 And it produces all these, like Dr. Karl Hart was saying, compensatory mechanisms that that might be beneficial to increasing your health.

02:28:27.000 That totally kind of makes sense.

02:28:28.000 And like I said, I feel great.

02:28:30.000 I felt like I've had more energy since I've done it.

02:28:34.000 It might just be a placebo once again.

02:28:36.000 But placebo works.

02:28:37.000 That's the problem.

02:28:38.000 It works.

02:28:38.000 Yeah.

02:28:38.000 In some ways.

02:28:38.000 I feel great.

02:28:39.000 This guy that was telling, the healing guy that was pressing on your back, when I was like, how is this working?

02:28:44.000 Explain it.

02:28:44.000 When he was explaining that it's a placebo.

02:28:46.000 Part of me was like, bitch, shut the fuck up. 1.00

02:28:48.000 But then the other part of me was like, but wait a minute, placebo effects do work. 1.00

02:28:52.000 So you almost have to be dumb enough to believe this guy for his stuff to work.

02:28:56.000 But what is it that's working? 0.95

02:28:57.000 Like, how is it that's working?

02:28:59.000 And when you talk to the shamans that were legit, like, you know, you had the one guy that likes to grab you, but then you pass that guy and there's this other guy who's like totally legit.

02:29:11.000 Did you ever ask him how they figure this stuff out?

02:29:14.000 How they figured out ayahuasca.

02:29:15.000 Ayahuasca.

02:29:15.000 What is the explanation?

02:29:17.000 How do they figure out how to, out of all these thousands of plants, brew these two together, and do a really complicated process that takes a long time to get this one thing, and it tastes like shit, and yet they drank it anyway, and then had these experiences. 0.98

02:29:31.000 How the fuck did they ever figure that out? 0.98

02:29:33.000 It's not like they had microscopes. 0.99

02:29:34.000 It's not like they were botanists.

02:29:35.000 Apparently it was brought to them by the spirits.

02:29:38.000 That's the universal story I've heard from every shaman is that somehow they are visited by spirits or beings that then showed them to combine these two, the ayahuasca vine and the chacruna leaves out of I think?

02:30:13.000 The ayahuasca, I don't know if you're familiar with epigenetics, but when you have a lot of trauma, it actually changes your DNA and makes you more prone to be depressed or insane.

02:30:23.000 And so by some shaman's beliefs, the ayahuasca is actually getting in one man at a time and restructuring our DNA and getting rid of all of this negative epigenetics.

02:30:34.000 And it's just Mother Nature's way of fighting back against the insanity.

02:30:38.000 So I get different stories from every shaman, but the epigenetics one tends to be the more common denominator that I've heard from several of them, that they believe it is actually Mother Nature fighting back and trying to heal us, heal our limbic systems,

02:30:54.000 so we don't have this collective madness anymore, one person at a time.

02:30:58.000 Who knows how long that's going to take?

02:31:00.000 They're on a different time schedule.

02:31:01.000 Maybe it's a thousand years, but it is working one person at a time.

02:31:06.000 You know, I've met people who've had profound miracles on these substances.

02:31:11.000 I've also met people who haven't, you know?

02:31:13.000 But it's not for schizophrenics. 0.97

02:31:15.000 It's not for people using antidepressants.

02:31:17.000 You have to make sure you're off the medicines or it could kill you.

02:31:20.000 Whoa.

02:31:22.000 That's an important point.

02:31:23.000 Yeah.

02:31:23.000 What do they do when people go down there if they're on antidepressants?

02:31:27.000 Do people, like, do they ask?

02:31:29.000 They do.

02:31:30.000 They make it really clear, and then they ask.

02:31:32.000 How long do you have to get off of it for?

02:31:34.000 I don't know the exact—that's something that would be worth Googling, but you can't be on antidepressants.

02:31:39.000 Ayahuasca does not like antidepressants.

02:31:41.000 That's very important there, folks.

02:31:43.000 Yeah, very important.

02:31:44.000 And also, people who are prone to have schizophrenia.

02:31:47.000 The ayahuasca and psychedelics in general tend to allow that to come on earlier.

02:31:53.000 It doesn't mean it wouldn't have already happened.

02:31:54.000 It doesn't cause schizophrenia.

02:31:55.000 You are already going to get it, but because the psychedelic might actually make it come on a couple days earlier, or a couple days, a couple years earlier.

02:32:03.000 And I was even next to one woman in a ceremony who was having a schizophrenic episode while on the medicine and it was pretty terrifying.

02:32:12.000 And so reaffirmed my belief to make sure to mention to people, you know, certain people the medicines aren't made for.

02:32:19.000 McKenna had, Terence McKenna had another interesting way of looking at the development of these things, the development of things like ayahuasca, that these people that lived in these indigenous cultures, they didn't have metallurgy, and they did have an advanced social system.

02:32:36.000 As they went through hundreds and thousands of years of the same culture evolving, the way they spread out and their knowledge base, it didn't go to architecture.

02:32:46.000 It didn't go to the construction of large buildings or airplanes or machines or engines.

02:32:52.000 It went instead to plants and their knowledge base and the information they passed down from generations to generations.

02:33:00.000 And they're expanding on the ideas that they currently were aware of All involved nature.

02:33:06.000 It was really kind of a fascinating way to look at it.

02:33:09.000 It's just when, you know, Europeans were going this way, they were going a different way. 1.00

02:33:14.000 But the same process seems to exist in every human culture.

02:33:18.000 That people start at one point, wherever they're at, and then they start advancing.

02:33:23.000 They start advancing, figuring things out, adding to their knowledge base.

02:33:27.000 But these people, they did it all entirely in a natural setting.

02:33:31.000 They never changed the setting.

02:33:33.000 The setting was always like huts and things and living amongst the animals and being a part of this whole nature thing.

02:33:39.000 And then in doing so, communicating in some way, shape, or form with this spirit world.

02:33:45.000 Whether it's through eating mushrooms and tripping and then taking back some of that information and applying it.

02:33:51.000 Whatever it was that the plants talked to them.

02:33:54.000 And gave them this information.

02:33:56.000 And they figured out how to pass it on through generation to generation.

02:34:00.000 Explain this is what you use when you get burnt.

02:34:03.000 This is what you use when that.

02:34:05.000 This can send you to Jupiter.

02:34:08.000 But I agree that nature has something For every single ailment that we face.

02:34:14.000 And what's so sad, too, mentioning that about the indigenous cultures living close to nature, actually connecting with this healing energy, is how much we've come apart from that, especially here in Los Angeles.

02:34:27.000 There's this website I was looking on a couple weeks ago, like earthing.com, where people are actually so disconnected from nature that they're buying earthing mats that have a wire connected out to the backyard.

02:34:40.000 And putting it under their beds.

02:34:42.000 Wow.

02:34:43.000 And if you think about it too, like some people, something I've been trying to do is just go around barefoot, walk through the grass, really try to connect with the earth, you know, to allow that energy and knowledge to go through you.

02:34:53.000 But some people might spend years without their feet actually touching the earth.

02:34:59.000 And it's just so crazy to think how far we've become removed from nature that we have to buy earthing mats To put in our beds or put under your chair while you're at your computer. 1.00

02:35:11.000 Yeah, it's pretty stupid. 0.98

02:35:12.000 I mean, we've just lost this connection. 1.00

02:35:17.000 And I think in the process, we've lost our sanity.

02:35:19.000 And we need to get that back.

02:35:20.000 And that's why we need to start reevaluating these plants and start integrating them into our culture.

02:35:25.000 And start really waking up to how ridiculous these laws are.

02:35:29.000 That you're making Mother Nature illegal. 1.00

02:35:31.000 You're telling me a mushroom that grows on cow shit all across the world is illegal. 0.99

02:35:36.000 Yeah, it's dangerous. 1.00

02:35:37.000 It just is, it's insane.

02:35:42.000 There's also the feeling that you get when you're in the woods that's a palpable, real feeling of being connected to nature.

02:35:48.000 There's a calming effect of walking through the woods.

02:35:51.000 Like, you go on a hike through the woods, you're walking, there's all these beautiful trees, and you see everything, and it's like, you feel different.

02:35:57.000 You feel different because you're in the vibe of nature. 0.93

02:36:00.000 You're, like, immersed in this world that really doesn't give a shit about you. 0.96

02:36:05.000 I mean, you're there or you're not there. 0.98

02:36:07.000 This is the world.

02:36:08.000 I mean, it is what it is.

02:36:09.000 It's not dependent on you to hit the light switch.

02:36:11.000 It just is.

02:36:13.000 You know, it will be here before you.

02:36:15.000 It will be here after you.

02:36:16.000 It just is what it is.

02:36:17.000 It's trees and animals are running by and we're sort of affected by our presence, but we're a part of it when we're in it.

02:36:23.000 I think?

02:36:44.000 And the culture that you're immersed in, the culture that you live in, to that world.

02:36:48.000 And that's what those people are experiencing that live in the jungle that created ayahuasca. 0.95

02:36:53.000 They're experiencing this long, unbroken connection to the actual mother itself.

02:37:00.000 And it could be.

02:37:00.000 That's why we have so many mental health issues.

02:37:03.000 Which don't exist in these indigenous cultures.

02:37:05.000 Exactly.

02:37:05.000 And even in the areas, the towns we went to that rely on medicinal mushrooms, they don't use antidepressants instead when they're having grief or they're having a traumatic event in their life.

02:37:15.000 They eat some mushrooms and go into the mountains.

02:37:17.000 Or visit one of these healers.

02:37:19.000 And so you look at the rates of happiness in these villages, in these areas, compared to what we're experiencing here in the United States.

02:37:29.000 And you have to think to yourself, they must be doing something right.

02:37:32.000 We should at least examine what they're using over our system that's not working.

02:37:38.000 Yeah, no kidding.

02:37:40.000 I'm really very hopeful, sometimes ridiculously so, about the human race.

02:37:47.000 And part of it comes from my own personal experiences.

02:37:51.000 Like, I really enjoy life.

02:37:53.000 I really do.

02:37:53.000 I really enjoy my friends.

02:37:55.000 I really enjoy what I'm doing.

02:37:56.000 So I'm very positive in that way.

02:37:58.000 I'm not ignorant to the ways of the world.

02:38:01.000 I'm not ignorant to the news.

02:38:02.000 But I also am not ignorant to the perspective of seven billion people being alien to one individual. 1.00

02:38:09.000 Seven billion people's problems all lumped up into your fucking head because you went online and stayed on too many websites and read too much shit and watched too many videos. 0.99

02:38:18.000 That's not how you're supposed to experience the world. 1.00

02:38:20.000 We're not designed for that interface.

02:38:22.000 The interface we're designed for is the interface you experience when you go on a hike through the woods.

02:38:26.000 What you encounter is what is real in your own perceptions.

02:38:30.000 These are the things that you can affect.

02:38:33.000 These are the things that you can change.

02:38:34.000 But that's all changed itself by having The ability to communicate and influence all these different people with your story, like what you're telling right here, what you told in your book, what you told when you first came on the podcast about your experience working for a news organization that it seems,

02:38:52.000 at least during the time that you were there, to have lost its way.

02:38:56.000 And where this created turmoil and your own personal experience.

02:39:00.000 By expressing those things, you're literally changing everything around you.

02:39:05.000 You're literally affecting everything around you with the experiences that you've had and forcing change.

02:39:14.000 And you're forcing it even more right now, whether you realize it or not.

02:39:17.000 Probably more so, even tenfold, than the last time you were on. 1.00

02:39:21.000 Because you're saying some crazy shit. 1.00

02:39:23.000 You're a mainstream CNN reporter, and now you're some crazy tripper who travels the globe eating mushrooms and... 1.00

02:39:31.000 Doing peyote buttons and fucking freaking out. 0.99

02:39:35.000 I just feel like such a duty to deliver this message and I know I'm taking a risk and I know there will be some people who criticize me. 0.98

02:39:41.000 They can't though.

02:39:42.000 Karl Hart had a great point yesterday.

02:39:45.000 I keep bringing him up just because he's awesome.

02:39:48.000 But one of the things he said, he said, if I have the data I'll debate anyone.

02:39:53.000 I have the data, and if I don't have the data, you're not going to hear me talking about it.

02:39:56.000 But if I have the data, the data's on my side, I'm very confident.

02:40:00.000 And the data, clearly, your personal data is undeniable.

02:40:06.000 And just my own story from where I was then pre-psychedelic to where I am now, I feel like I've had a complete rebirth.

02:40:13.000 That's your data, yeah.

02:40:14.000 That's my data.

02:40:15.000 I literally feel like my serotonergic system has been restructured, and I find it nearly impossible to get anxiety.

02:40:22.000 And this is coming from someone who used to have constant butterflies in my stomach, have near panic attacks.

02:40:28.000 And I just don't feel that anymore.

02:40:30.000 And so you have to say, okay, what did I change in my life?

02:40:33.000 Well, that was the psychedelic use.

02:40:35.000 That was the main treatment I used to overcome this.

02:40:40.000 And I just feel like it could help so many women, especially because, like I was saying earlier about them being so self-critical and really just so many people who just haven't taken the time to stand outside of their life And analyze it objectively and make decisions not based on emotion or being self-critical.

02:40:59.000 You know, it's kind of amazing.

02:41:00.000 If this was like a product that we were trying to sell, you'd be like the best celebrity spokesperson ever!

02:41:06.000 That's why I feel like I'm going to get...

02:41:08.000 I feel like I just feel like whoever doesn't like my message is going to come try to just like smear my credibility and everything.

02:41:14.000 They can't.

02:41:15.000 They can't.

02:41:16.000 They can't.

02:41:16.000 Until they experience it themselves, they can't.

02:41:18.000 And once they do, they wouldn't.

02:41:20.000 People who don't know, people who really have no idea, if they did mushrooms and they had that experience, they would go...

02:41:29.000 Oh, wow.

02:41:30.000 I didn't even know.

02:41:31.000 Yeah, how could you know?

02:41:33.000 I don't even blame them.

02:41:34.000 I don't blame them for being skeptical.

02:41:36.000 I think it's important.

02:41:37.000 But I almost feel bad if they don't know.

02:41:41.000 And I think you kind of must feel the same way.

02:41:43.000 Because I can tell that you're very compelled to talk about this.

02:41:46.000 And you took a long time to decide to kind of go public about this.

02:41:51.000 We had conversations about this quite a long time ago.

02:41:54.000 Yeah, a year ago.

02:41:55.000 That's when I was coming back from ayahuasca and I wrote you and just thanked you for introducing me and told you how transformative it was. 0.98

02:42:02.000 And I was reading that email and going, check out this crazy bitch. 1.00

02:42:04.000 She listened to me. 1.00

02:42:06.000 Who the hell listens to me? 0.92

02:42:08.000 She did. 1.00

02:42:09.000 She's nuts. 0.99

02:42:09.000 Yeah, but it turns out I actually was right. 0.99

02:42:12.000 And then after the ayahuasca, I went to Thailand where I was able to access psilocybin mushrooms that grow on elephant and buffalo poop.

02:42:23.000 And they're just so amazingly healing.

02:42:25.000 And so I wrote you after that, but I took time to actually discuss it because I really needed to try to absorb as much knowledge as I could from the plants and really figure them out journalistically.

02:42:37.000 I was on one path of healing and also another path as a journalist.

02:42:41.000 And I just wanted to experience the good trips and experience the bad trips and really figure out what these medicines are about before I came forward with my story because I know some people may hear this and then decide to try psychedelics.

02:42:56.000 And so I needed to be 100% sure I was on the right path.

02:43:00.000 Which I know now.

02:43:01.000 Now you not only are on the right path, you feel, but you also are putting other people on this path.

02:43:07.000 You created this crazy website.

02:43:09.000 So explain your website.

02:43:10.000 Explain what you're doing now.

02:43:12.000 What happened was when I started researching about ayahuasca and stuff, like I said, I went to a center that I couldn't really trust.

02:43:19.000 I noticed there wasn't a lot of websites out there that could connect people with knowledge about these psychedelics.

02:43:26.000 Also, I noticed there wasn't a lot of psychedelic journalism because there's not a lot of experienced journalists.

02:43:31.000 Or it's just not being funded.

02:43:33.000 Or, I mean, a various amount of factors are going into that.

02:43:36.000 Well, Arrowhead is pretty awesome.

02:43:37.000 Arrowhead is amazing, yeah.

02:43:39.000 Yeah, one of the most important resources for anybody that is interested in any of the effects of any of these psychedelic experiences, drugs, medicines, whatever you want to call them, compounds.

02:43:50.000 Arrowhead is one of the best.

02:43:51.000 Arrowhead.org, right?

02:43:52.000 Earwood.org and also maps.org.

02:43:54.000 They're both fantastic to go and find out about research studies and just read other people's trip reports and experiences.

02:44:04.000 And what I'm doing with this site is creating like the Huffington Post of Psychedelic News.

02:44:09.000 So we're just going to be focusing on the war on drugs, accurate reporting, independent reporting on these topics.

02:44:17.000 We're building the foundation right now, so we want to make it like a virtual city where people can come and sit down and have a cup of coffee and chat with others who've done it to reduce harm reduction, also so people can find accurate information and reviews of different centers and just find we're going to take all these studies that have been around since the 1950s and send them back out to the public so they can get this information.

02:44:42.000 And I just think it's really vital right now because when you Google News Alert, which I often do with all these substances, I'll Google News Alert, like ketamine, which has profound effects on depression and psilocybin.

02:44:55.000 And the stories that always come up are the ones of the guy getting busted for selling it or the rare festival death.

02:45:02.000 Rarely do you actually get news on how these substances are being used medicinally.

02:45:08.000 So that's what we're trying to create with this new site.

02:45:12.000 Reset.me.

02:45:14.000 Reset.me.

02:45:15.000 What is me?

02:45:16.000 Instead of.com, what is ME? Where does it come from?

02:45:20.000 It's another country.

02:45:22.000 For this purposes, it's me as in resetting yourself.

02:45:26.000 It's a great way to remember it.

02:45:27.000 Reset.me.

02:45:28.000 I mean, it's really a perfect name.

02:45:29.000 But what country is it?

02:45:31.000 It's, um, that's a good question.

02:45:33.000 We might want to look that up.

02:45:34.000 I should know that, but I use it more in the, I remember listening to a talk of Terence McKenna's and he said that using DMT and different psychedelics can be like hitting the reset button on your brain, clearing your hard drive of all the trauma.

02:45:48.000 And I believe that's what psychedelics did for me.

02:45:51.000 I've heard you describe them that way as well.

02:45:53.000 And so for people who really need to hit that reset button in life and they've tried other therapies and it hasn't worked, we're going to be providing journalism on these psychedelic therapies and also alternative non-prescription therapies.

02:46:06.000 It's Montenegro?

02:46:07.000 Is that what it was?

02:46:08.000 Montenegro.

02:46:09.000 The government of Montenegro.

02:46:11.000 Okay.

02:46:11.000 Well, we're not based in Montenegro, but...

02:46:14.000 Well, they sold their domain name rights, a lot of countries did, for sale, like Biz.

02:46:21.000 There's a bunch of them that they sold.

02:46:24.000 .us.

02:46:25.000 You can get a.us.

02:46:27.000 It's interesting.

02:46:28.000 So that's awesome.

02:46:29.000 Reset.me.

02:46:30.000 And has it launched yet?

02:46:31.000 It hasn't launched yet.

02:46:32.000 It's still being built, so it should launch within a month.

02:46:36.000 But once again, things change sometimes if it takes a little longer.

02:46:39.000 Well, you've got to come on again when it launches and let us know.

02:46:42.000 We'll tweet about it and we'll let people know.

02:46:44.000 And we just talk for three hours.

02:46:46.000 Yeah, for sure.

02:46:46.000 And if anyone wants to go to reset.me, you can follow all of our social media accounts.

02:46:50.000 We're really looking for people who are experienced users, kind of the teachers who can come and be there, be waiting for the students.

02:46:59.000 And just people who support our message and who are interested in writing for us or sharing their own stories of healing.

02:47:05.000 And how are you avoiding trolls?

02:47:07.000 You know, prepare.

02:47:09.000 You just announced yourself to the world.

02:47:12.000 Look, people that listen to this podcast are not universally cool. 1.00

02:47:16.000 There's a certain percentage of them that are fucking trolls. 0.98

02:47:19.000 And they will launch themselves upon you in search of humor with some really fake, profound tales of things happening to them in the jungle. 1.00

02:47:30.000 And I guarantee you now it's going to be about titty grabbing while you're out cold.

02:47:34.000 There's going to be several stories of what the bad ayahuasca did to me.

02:47:40.000 Too late.

02:47:41.000 It's out there.

02:47:42.000 I think we're hoping the community will self-regulate.

02:47:44.000 We'll give various people who...

02:47:46.000 There's already people out there who I'm sure you've interacted with, Joe, who have reputable Twitter accounts who've been really passionate about psychedelics who we've recruited to help us in our forums and just help us.

02:47:57.000 We also have a section on the site where you can post links to different news stories and stuff that you find interesting.

02:48:01.000 So we have these people on board to help us kind of regulate, that being said.

02:48:05.000 You can't fight everything.

02:48:08.000 So we're expecting it to come, but the team behind this, we all met doing Ayahuasca.

02:48:14.000 And we've all been so profoundly affected that we want to bring this new creation forward to try to help others.

02:48:21.000 That's the new Amber Lion.

02:48:22.000 There you go, folks.

02:48:24.000 Tripping around the world.

02:48:26.000 Wow.

02:48:26.000 Amber Lyon version 2.0.

02:48:29.000 Reset.

02:48:29.000 Wow.

02:48:30.000 Well, congratulations on everything.

02:48:33.000 On your journey, on this website, and the whole thing.

02:48:36.000 I think you're a very brave person.

02:48:38.000 And I thought you were a very brave person when you were talking about your experiences at CNN. And you stick your neck out.

02:48:45.000 You really do.

02:48:46.000 And so it's cool to be your friend.

02:48:48.000 It's cool to watch all this happen.

02:48:49.000 And it's cool to have you on the show.

02:48:51.000 Thank you very much.

02:48:52.000 Thank you, Joe.

02:48:53.000 It's such an honor.

02:48:54.000 It's been a lot of fun.

02:48:55.000 Amber Lyon, ladies and gentlemen, please follow Amber on Twitter.

02:48:58.000 Amber Lyon on Twitter, L-Y-O-N. And go to the website, reset.me.

02:49:04.000 It's reset.me.

02:49:06.000 And within a month or so... 0.86

02:49:07.000 There'll be some shit up there, and I'm sure Amber will keep you posted on Twitter, and will keep you posted on Twitter, too. 0.93

02:49:13.000 So thank you. 0.93

02:49:14.000 Thank you.

02:49:15.000 Thank everybody.

02:49:16.000 Thanks to our sponsors.

02:49:18.000 Thanks to Lumosity.

02:49:19.000 Go to lumosity.com slash joe.

02:49:21.000 Click the start training button.

02:49:23.000 Go to onnit.com.

02:49:34.000 Go to onnit.com.

02:49:36.000 Use the code word ROGAN and save 10% off any and all supplements.

02:49:40.000 Thanks also to LegalZoom.

02:49:43.000 LegalZoom.

02:49:44.000 Go to LegalZoom.com and enter ROGAN in the referral box at checkout for more savings.

02:49:48.000 We'll be back in a little bit with Matt Deterra, Deterra Sarah.

02:49:52.000 And then Thursday, Shane Smith from Vice.com will be here as well. 0.98

02:49:57.000 We're going to have a fucking great time. 0.98

02:49:58.000 We'll probably get drunk. 0.98

02:49:59.000 See you soon.

02:50:00.000 Much love.

The Joe Rogan Experience - March 18, 2014

Joe Rogan Experience #470 - Amber Lyon

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Summary

Transcript