The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #477 - Dennis McKenna & Josh Wickerham

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00:00:17.000 Ladies and gentlemen, a very special episode.

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00:00:28.000 Dennis McKenna and Josh Wickerham.

00:00:30.000 Josh is from the Ethnobotanical Stewardship Council.

00:00:35.000 You were the founders of this?

00:00:37.000 That's right.

00:00:37.000 And what exactly does that mean for folks who have no idea what ethnobotanical or stewardship means?

00:00:44.000 A lot of people struggle with counsel.

00:00:46.000 Or counsel.

00:00:48.000 Like you're counseling people on ethnobotanical stewardship.

00:00:51.000 Imagine bringing that up at a party.

00:00:53.000 Yeah.

00:00:54.000 Well, the ESC is dedicated to transforming lives through assuring the safety and sustainability of traditional plants.

00:01:01.000 So that means transforming people's lives through experiences with plants, but it also means the sustainability of plants and the safety in their use.

00:01:12.000 So we're starting with ayahuasca and iboga.

00:01:15.000 Yeah, you shouldn't start with, like, ferns.

00:01:18.000 People don't get excited about...

00:01:21.000 It's hard to get eucalyptus, you know, people really don't get fired up about that, but ayahuasca, anything involving tryptamines, for folks who've experienced it, it's something worth saving.

00:01:32.000 Exactly.

00:01:33.000 Do you guys find it odd that in this day and age, in 2014, the average person who you would go up to to try to discuss these issues with would have no idea what you were talking about?

00:01:46.000 Actually, I think over the last few years, that's kind of changed.

00:01:51.000 Ayahuasca is emerging into mass consciousness, and I think that's a good thing.

00:01:56.000 I would say 10 years ago, 15 years ago, if you approached the average person on the street and they said, ayahuasca, they'd look at you like you had a speech impediment or something.

00:02:07.000 But chances are people would recognize it now and not necessarily know what it's about, not necessarily have a negative or a positive view of it, but the meme is out there, and I think that's a good thing, ultimately.

00:02:22.000 It's most certainly a good thing.

00:02:23.000 I agree with you.

00:02:24.000 It's certainly out there with young folks.

00:02:26.000 Right.

00:02:26.000 But with folks—I'm 46. With folks my age and older, it gets a little sketch.

00:02:32.000 Yeah.

00:02:32.000 It's like, wait a minute.

00:02:34.000 What?

00:02:34.000 What are you doing?

00:02:35.000 Folks who already have mortgages and families, those are the ones that's very difficult to get them to even consider what you're talking about.

00:02:44.000 You'd be surprised.

00:02:45.000 The ESC has sent out a call for experts and we've been infiltrated by the mainstream people that do evaluation work for the World Bank and USAID. They're interested in ayahuasca.

00:02:57.000 People are going down to South America to have these transformative experiences, to sit in ceremony.

00:03:03.000 There's a lot of underground activity in the U.S. as well and Europe where it's It's not legal.

00:03:08.000 But in South America, in Peru, ayahuasca is protected as national patrimony.

00:03:13.000 That's awesome.

00:03:14.000 That's beautiful.

00:03:16.000 Do you ever worry that you're being infiltrated by government agents?

00:03:20.000 We want that.

00:03:22.000 Exactly, right?

00:03:23.000 I'm not doing anything illegal.

00:03:26.000 We're working in countries where ayahuasca has been used for hundreds of years, traditionally.

00:03:32.000 And we're looking at increasing the safety of it so that we're creating a kind of self-regulatory model so that we can take that model to places where it's illegal and say, this is a totally safe medicine if you do it right.

00:03:45.000 People with certain medical conditions shouldn't take ayahuasca.

00:03:49.000 But done with a skilled curandero or shaman, In the right setting, it can be helpful for all sorts of psychological issues or PTSD or depression.

00:04:03.000 And just give people a new perspective on their lives.

00:04:06.000 Most certainly.

00:04:07.000 I mean, I'm completely joking around, but what I was saying when I was, it's like, That hasn't happened with marijuana.

00:04:13.000 Marijuana, they're still fighting it tooth and nail, despite all the evidence that it's not just beneficial, but probably prevents a lot of cancers and does a lot of fantastic work with PTSD and with anxiety and all sorts of issues,

00:04:30.000 medical issues, interocular pressure for people with glaucoma and on and on and on, people with AIDS that are having a hard time keeping their appetite up, cancer patients Still, they fight a tooth and claw, and ayahuasca is a completely different barrel of monkeys.

00:04:47.000 Ayahuasca's coming at this through the back door.

00:04:50.000 I mean, it's interesting that it has gained recognition over time to the extent that it does, and to a certain extent...

00:04:59.000 I would say it's, you know, people like Josh and me, we say, we work for the plants, right?

00:05:06.000 And ayahuasca's got its own agenda, interestingly.

00:05:10.000 And people go down to South America, and they have these experiences that are revelatory and self-transforming.

00:05:17.000 But often they come back with an enhanced ecological consciousness, an enhanced awareness of the You know, connection between humanity and nature, the idea that nature is threatened. 0.97

00:05:29.000 And I think of ayahuasca as sort of a messenger from a community of species that's trying to, you know, tell these monkeys to wake up, you clowns. 0.95

00:05:40.000 You know, we're coming down to the wire. 0.97

00:05:43.000 We're in a crisis here.

00:05:45.000 You've got to...

00:05:46.000 We understand where you fit into nature and do what can be done in the ever-shrinking time that's left.

00:05:54.000 So people come back with this renewed sort of awareness of the interconnectedness of life and that we have a role in this, you know, we primates, and we have to re-understand what our role is as stewards of nature rather than exploiters of nature.

00:06:13.000 And ayahuasca, you know, That's the message it delivers to many people, and unexpectedly, they may not be going there to experience that, but that's what they come away with.

00:06:24.000 From your work and from your brother's work, Terence McKenna, what I got That I never considered before was that psychedelics in various forms may very well be responsible for why we are human beings in the first place and our separation from them might be the whole reason why we're so haywire.

00:06:47.000 Why we're missing a crucial ingredient involved in the creation of cognitive thought in the first place.

00:06:53.000 The creation of this ability to look at ourselves and communicate our ideas and Really become a human being and then we're separated from the mother and left to our own devices and all of our wild animal instincts sort of take over and our animal instincts sort of don't coexist peacefully in this weird world that we have created as human beings and then we create chaos because of it because we can't see what we're doing.

00:07:23.000 Right, right.

00:07:24.000 Ayahuasca allows you to see what you're doing.

00:07:26.000 Ayahuasca, yes.

00:07:27.000 Ayahuasca refocuses the whole understanding, I think, of the relationship that we have to nature.

00:07:35.000 And I think that's what, you know, if you believe in plant intelligence, I mean, there are different ways of looking at plant intelligence, but it's interesting how often people, you know, They come out with this renewed understanding and I think that's a desperate call on the part of the community of species and ayahuasca has been delegated to be – to kind of lead that conversation.

00:08:01.000 Trevor Burrus It's fascinating that ayahuasca is the one that's been – It's easier to extract DMT

00:08:31.000 Than it is to create Iowa.

00:08:33.000 I mean, get all the plants and brew it together and know someone who really knows what they're doing, how to cook up a good batch.

00:08:40.000 It's weird that that's the one.

00:08:43.000 Yeah, I think it's because it's escaped from its home in the Amazon, and that's the area on the planet with the greatest biodiversity and all that.

00:08:57.000 But it's got all those associations.

00:08:59.000 You know, people regard it—I mean, mushrooms are also important, but they just don't seem to carry that same— I don't know what it is.

00:09:09.000 Emotional kick.

00:09:11.000 Ayahuasca is the one right now that's getting all the attention.

00:09:15.000 And it's quintessentially a plant.

00:09:19.000 Mushrooms aren't plants.

00:09:20.000 So maybe that's part of the disconnect.

00:09:22.000 I'm not sure.

00:09:23.000 But all of these things in indigenous cultures are regarded as plant teachers.

00:09:31.000 As you mentioned, a lot of it comes down to tryptamine chemistry, and our brains, for some reason, are evolutionarily primed to react to tryptamines.

00:09:45.000 I mean, we have these tryptamine detectors for some reason, and I think it's partly so that we can Receive and interpret what they're trying to tell us.

00:09:57.000 And what they're trying to tell us is there's not much time left and we have to really re-understand our relationship to nature.

00:10:05.000 We have to realize that we're not separate from nature.

00:10:08.000 Well, you're trying to overcome at least 2,000 years of Judeo-Christian history and, you know, those traditions, their whole agenda in a certain sense is to devalue nature. 0.97

00:10:23.000 You know, nature is something that we own.

00:10:25.000 It's there for us to exploit. 0.98

00:10:26.000 It's there for us to rape. 0.99

00:10:28.000 And we're busy doing that because, you know, my problem with those religions is the focus is always on the afterlife. 0.94

00:10:36.000 So it tends to make you devalue this life.

00:10:39.000 It makes you, you know, it teaches people to devalue nature, to devalue their bodies, to devalue I think we're good to go.

00:10:57.000 I think we're good to go.

00:11:08.000 The meme is spreading, the memo is spreading, but I'm not sure it's fast enough.

00:11:13.000 Do you think that it's possible that the human race is essentially cramming? 0.94

00:11:18.000 You know how when you're about to do a test and you put it off to the last minute and then the day before you're like, holy shit, I gotta deal with this. 0.95

00:11:27.000 And then you go bananas, you take an Adderall, you file through books until your head wants to explode. 0.78

00:11:33.000 That is a characteristic that's very, very common for people that want to attack a project.

00:11:40.000 Especially an important project.

00:11:41.000 Right.

00:12:03.000 Chaotically.

00:12:04.000 More materialistically.

00:12:06.000 More shallow. 0.93

00:12:07.000 More nonsense. 0.98

00:12:08.000 More Kim Kardashian. 0.79

00:12:10.000 More American Idol. 0.99

00:12:11.000 More horseshit. 1.00

00:12:12.000 Just to get you to the point where you get so sick of it. 1.00

00:12:17.000 You puke it up.

00:12:19.000 And then move on.

00:12:21.000 Yes.

00:12:22.000 And we're in the middle of an ecological crisis and time is running out.

00:12:27.000 We certainly are cramming.

00:12:28.000 We're destroying the Amazon.

00:12:30.000 We're destroying the climate.

00:12:32.000 We're destroying the ocean.

00:12:33.000 We're destroying the air.

00:12:34.000 We're destroying everything we get our greasy little hands on.

00:12:37.000 This is the first time in the 500 years of European colonization of the Americas that there's a kind of reverse sort of message coming from the Amazon.

00:12:49.000 People are going there not to convert, but to be converted, to learn, to learn the traditions.

00:12:54.000 And the indigenous people, 95% of their population was wiped out by viruses or wars or Plagues.

00:13:03.000 And now we have this opportunity to come back from the brink and work with ayahuasca that grows in the canopy of the rainforest.

00:13:12.000 You can't have ayahuasca without the trees.

00:13:15.000 And so it's an alternative to mining and oil exploitation.

00:13:19.000 And there's money to be made in it.

00:13:21.000 And I think, coming back to cannabis, the reason the dialogue is starting to change is because governments are realizing there's a lot of money to be made.

00:13:30.000 Taxation.

00:13:31.000 It's a solution to budget crises.

00:13:33.000 And the same with ayahuasca tourism.

00:13:37.000 I don't like to say tourism because people are legitimately seeking a spiritual experience.

00:13:43.000 Some people just want to go have an experience.

00:13:45.000 I don't think there's anything wrong with the word tourism, but I know what you're saying.

00:13:48.000 Like the frivolous idea.

00:13:49.000 It kind of devalues.

00:13:50.000 I don't think it does.

00:13:51.000 I think ayahuasca tourism is a beautiful way.

00:13:56.000 Or a pilgrimage, perhaps.

00:13:57.000 Yeah.

00:13:58.000 I think that tourism is a phase in our relationship to ayahuasca.

00:14:04.000 I think that potentially if we can...

00:14:08.000 What I view is going on now as kind of a rough period, but what is really being played out here...

00:14:16.000 It's the co-evolutionary relationship with these plants that have gone on, as you say, ever since we became cognitive beings.

00:14:24.000 In fact, it was the plants that triggered that.

00:14:27.000 And that conversation is going on, but now the conversation has gone to a new level, where ayahuasca before was kind of...

00:14:36.000 You know, it was under the stewardship of indigenous people confined to the Amazon.

00:14:42.000 Now it's encircling the globe.

00:14:44.000 And I think this is partly, this is what plants do.

00:14:47.000 They like to spread.

00:14:48.000 And they're spreading out into different cultures and the plant itself is now You know, even if the Amazon is destroyed, which it may well be, ayahuasca is not going to be destroyed.

00:15:00.000 It's too late.

00:15:01.000 It's already escaped.

00:15:02.000 But I think, you know, hopefully we can arrest this process.

00:15:07.000 But what you're seeing has always been a co-evolutionary relationship where...

00:15:13.000 You know, at some points it's more quieter, it's underground, but at some points as the crisis deepens, it's becoming more and more public in a sense.

00:15:25.000 And I think that's what you see going on, you know.

00:15:28.000 And potentially, I think that ayahuasca You know, we're now discovering that it's good for so many things, you know, therapeutically, for addictions, for depression, for PTSD and that sort of thing.

00:15:44.000 And that's all to the good.

00:15:46.000 But we shouldn't make the mistake of thinking ayahuasca is only for sick people.

00:15:53.000 You know, we're all wounded and we all need to understand something about our relationship to nature.

00:16:01.000 Potentially, the paradigms that are emerging in ayahuasca tourism or these ayahuasca-centered spiritual communities in the States, potentially this may transform I mean,

00:16:40.000 these institutions are not going away, and they're fine.

00:16:43.000 They just need to rediscover a moral dimension to The consequences of their action, if that makes any sense.

00:16:51.000 You know, our cleverness far exceeds our wisdom, and that's a problem.

00:16:58.000 That's the problem.

00:17:00.000 We've got to become wise, and when we couple that with our ingenuity and our cleverness, then we'll be on the way toward saving the planet, saving ourselves.

00:17:12.000 I think there's also this growing understanding of all the factors that encompass a healthy person and how many of them have to do with your conception of reality.

00:17:21.000 How many of them have to do with the way you think?

00:17:24.000 How many of them have to do with how you view your environment?

00:17:27.000 If you view your environment as this hostile, stressful, Antagonizing, angry, negative place, you'll get sicker.

00:17:35.000 And your body doesn't know what to do.

00:17:38.000 It's fighting it constantly, and you're in a battle, and you're all stressed out, and you're susceptible to all sorts of things.

00:17:44.000 And in that sense, there's a direct physical connection between psychedelic experiences and improved health.

00:17:53.000 And that's something that people really need to understand.

00:17:57.000 And I think once that catches root, once people grasp that concept and understand the incredible pressure-alleviating properties.

00:18:08.000 I can remember one of the first times I ever did DMT. The day afterwards, I had this completely different view of the world that I had to sort of apply now, all these other...

00:18:23.000 and figure out, do all these factors that I've considered as being important, how many of them am I going to throw out?

00:18:32.000 The way I described it is like...

00:18:34.000 My computer rebooted and now only has one folder on the desktop. 0.94

00:18:38.000 And that folder is labeled My Old Bullshit.

00:18:41.000 And so now I have to open this folder and go, okay, how much of this is valid? 0.83

00:18:45.000 Like, Jesus, this is my whole thought process.

00:18:47.000 This is my whole mind.

00:18:48.000 This is how I interface with reality.

00:18:51.000 Unfortunately, some of it made its way back in.

00:18:54.000 And then I had to do another trip a few months later, and then I threw out more of it.

00:18:59.000 And it was a...

00:19:01.000 Sort of a deliberate process of re-evaluation.

00:19:05.000 You can't reject it all.

00:19:06.000 There's some good stuff in that folder.

00:19:08.000 But I think what the DMT experience, the psychedelic experience does...

00:19:13.000 That's partly what it does.

00:19:15.000 I like your analogy of the folder because now you're looking at the folder from the desktop.

00:19:19.000 You're outside the folder.

00:19:21.000 So it's liberated you.

00:19:23.000 You were imprisoned in the folder before.

00:19:25.000 Now you can look at it from the outside and you can go through and say, oh, delete, delete, delete.

00:19:30.000 Oh, this is good.

00:19:31.000 Let's keep this.

00:19:33.000 Let's integrate it.

00:19:34.000 So, you know, ultimately this is a process of, you know, personal cleansing, both physically and emotionally and, you know, psychologically in your encounters with these things, but also cultural cleansing.

00:19:50.000 You know, I mean, there are Good memes out there, and there are good things going on, but there's, you know, there's so much noise, there's so much bullshit, it's hard to sort out what's worth preserving and what needs to be dispensed with.

00:20:06.000 I think we're also kind of trapped in this weird world of our creations as far as technology as well.

00:20:23.000 It has a certain self-preservation aspect to it and I think that we're completely connected to the idea of constant innovation and constantly improving technology and that also has completely connected us to materialism because materialism is the real driving force behind constant innovation.

00:20:41.000 If we all just looked at our laptops and said, I'm good, are you good?

00:20:44.000 There's no need to...

00:20:45.000 We call Apple right now. 0.99

00:20:46.000 Hey, these are fucking great. 0.99

00:20:49.000 Stop right there. 1.00

00:20:50.000 Right.

00:20:51.000 You literally don't need to improve internet speed.

00:20:54.000 You don't need to improve the laptop.

00:20:56.000 Everything's wonderful.

00:20:58.000 Let's stop all this and let's move on to something else.

00:21:01.000 Well, that's not what everybody wants.

00:21:02.000 Everybody wants the newest, latest, greatest, fastest dual video processor.

00:21:07.000 I want a screen that rolls and folds and...

00:21:10.000 But that's part of the trap, this idea that we have to keep upgrading to the iPhone X or whatever.

00:21:17.000 I mean, these tools work and they're used in the proper way.

00:21:21.000 They can be tremendously important for consciousness, evolution, and transformation.

00:21:27.000 That's what the psychedelics are.

00:21:29.000 They're just tools.

00:21:30.000 They're a kind of technology.

00:21:32.000 And like I say often to my classes and elsewhere, technology in itself It's neither good nor bad.

00:21:40.000 Drugs are neither good nor bad.

00:21:41.000 These technologies, it's all about how you apply them.

00:21:44.000 That's where the moral dimension comes in.

00:21:46.000 That's why you can misuse technology, internet technology, to propagate whatever the Kardashians are doing lately over the internet, but you can also change hearts and minds with those tools.

00:22:03.000 Like, for example, This live streaming symposium that we're involved with, that our mandate is to plug this thing.

00:22:13.000 But it's important.

00:22:15.000 This conference coming up in Amherst is just one example.

00:22:19.000 Amherst, Massachusetts?

00:22:20.000 Amherst, Massachusetts.

00:22:21.000 Oh, I know it well.

00:22:23.000 Socialist capital of Massachusetts.

00:22:26.000 Perfect place to do this.

00:22:28.000 This symposium that's coming, that's going to be live stream.

00:22:33.000 People should go to...

00:22:34.000 It's a cute name.

00:22:36.000 Symposium.

00:22:37.000 P-S-Y-M-P-O-S-I-U-M. And it's going to be live streamed. 0.99

00:22:43.000 And if you go to the website, you can sign up for tickets for live streaming.

00:22:49.000 Give that out one more time for people that were struggling.

00:22:52.000 Symposium.

00:22:52.000 P-S-Y-M-P-O-S-I-U-M. Cute, right?

00:22:59.000 Symposium.com.

00:23:00.000 And if you go to their website, what you're going to see right now, which I had nothing to do with, you're going to see a little trailer for live streaming, and it's actually...

00:23:10.000 It looks like a stealth advertisement for my new product coming out, which is the Dennis McKenna bobblehead.

00:23:19.000 I'm in this trailer and I look like I have a movement disorder or something.

00:23:24.000 What is it?

00:23:25.000 Why does it look like you have a movement disorder?

00:23:28.000 Let's play it.

00:23:29.000 You want me to play it?

00:23:30.000 No, we're playing it right now.

00:23:31.000 Okay.

00:23:32.000 Go to full screen.

00:23:32.000 Well, you'll see what I mean.

00:23:34.000 Okay.

00:23:35.000 I just looked at it this morning and I thought, actually, this bobblehead idea is not bad!

00:23:41.000 What's going on here?

00:23:42.000 You and Hamilton Morris?

00:23:45.000 You're jamming.

00:23:48.000 How high was the person who made this?

00:23:50.000 Pretty high.

00:23:51.000 Pretty high.

00:23:53.000 He just made it last night.

00:23:55.000 I looked at it this morning and I said, seriously?

00:23:58.000 Do you really want this to be on your homepage?

00:24:01.000 But there it is.

00:24:03.000 The important thing is, get past the...

00:24:23.000 Amherst is one of the few places I'd consider living.

00:24:28.000 I'm not familiar with it.

00:24:30.000 It's great.

00:24:31.000 Yeah, I've heard it.

00:24:32.000 I had an ex-girlfriend who moved out there when I was in high school, and I used to go out there and visit her.

00:24:36.000 And I remember thinking, whoa, this is like a totally different world out here.

00:24:40.000 It's all like Birkenstock-wearing, strange, hippie, open-minded.

00:24:45.000 Right, right.

00:24:46.000 It's this weird sort of strange place in the middle of western Massachusetts.

00:24:51.000 Western Massachusetts is a strange place in and of itself because you have Boston, And, you know, which is a very, it's a big city, a very educated, more colleges per capita than anywhere else.

00:25:03.000 But then as you get out of Massachusetts, you might as well be in Kentucky for about an hour and 20 minutes.

00:25:08.000 And then you get to this weird oasis where, like, the woods part, and then, you know, you have this strange place in Amherst, which is really highly educated and open-minded liberal community.

00:25:21.000 Well, I'm not sure I've ever been there, but I'm looking forward to this conference.

00:25:25.000 You enjoy it.

00:25:25.000 It should be a lot of fun.

00:25:27.000 It really is the perfect place.

00:25:29.000 It's very much like a very small Austin in the middle of Massachusetts, but with no music.

00:25:35.000 Not as much music.

00:25:36.000 The guys organizing the conference really are working with the plants and for the plants, and you don't have to go there to participate.

00:25:44.000 The beauty is this live sign-up for $10.

00:25:48.000 You get a screening of Neurons to Nirvana, a great film, and access to all the presenters.

00:25:55.000 Have you interviewed or shown Neurons to Nirvana on your site?

00:26:00.000 No.

00:26:01.000 I mean, it...

00:26:02.000 You know, from a technical point of view, I'm not a filmmaker.

00:26:06.000 You can criticize it from that point of view, but as an educational tool for psychedelics, I think this is really an interesting movie.

00:26:15.000 And it's the kind of thing you can sit down with your parents and watch.

00:26:21.000 They will come away, maybe some of their assumptions will be shaken.

00:26:24.000 I mean, it's a very good educational tool.

00:26:28.000 The subtitle is Understanding Psychedelic Medicines.

00:26:32.000 And it's entertainingly done, and it's a kind of a review of the cutting-edge research on...

00:26:40.000 About four or five psychedelics, MDMA, LSD, mushrooms, ayahuasca, and where the state-of-the-art research is on that.

00:26:51.000 And these chemicals, what we need to do, as we were talking about before, we need to Change hearts and minds.

00:27:01.000 I know it's a cliche, but these chemicals under the right circumstances are actually a way to do that.

00:27:07.000 And coupled with that is education.

00:27:10.000 Education is so important, and that's kind of the vision of these gentlemen, Brett Green and his colleagues, that, you know, symposia like this are An important component of this because it's a way of getting the information out.

00:27:27.000 And the more people it can be gotten out to, the faster the change can be implemented.

00:27:34.000 Yeah, to change hearts and minds is an interesting cliche because we've heard it so many times that it's almost like we've heard wolf, wolf, wolf, there's wolves, there's wolves.

00:27:42.000 Right. 0.99

00:27:42.000 Holy shit, there's a wolf. 0.99

00:27:44.000 Right. 0.98

00:27:45.000 Like, the first time I did any psychedelics, the first major one, besides MDMA, was mushrooms.

00:27:51.000 And then that was my first experience.

00:27:53.000 Like, oh my god, there's a wolf.

00:27:55.000 Like, this is a totally different thing.

00:27:57.000 This isn't something that you have to believe in.

00:27:59.000 This is something that's unavoidable.

00:28:01.000 It doesn't matter if you believe in it.

00:28:03.000 Exactly.

00:28:03.000 People should be prepared for it, too.

00:28:06.000 Well, you can't be.

00:28:07.000 I really don't think you can be.

00:28:09.000 I think the best you can be prepared for is to give up.

00:28:12.000 Just let it go.

00:28:14.000 Don't fight it.

00:28:15.000 Be prepared for that.

00:28:16.000 Take a few yoga classes.

00:28:17.000 Know what it's like to be uncomfortable and keep breathing.

00:28:20.000 Right.

00:28:20.000 And then do it.

00:28:22.000 And then listen.

00:28:23.000 Listen to it.

00:28:24.000 Surrender to it.

00:28:25.000 Yes.

00:28:25.000 The message is there.

00:28:27.000 Yeah.

00:28:27.000 You said earlier, which is a very controversial but oddly fascinating thing, that plants are the reason why we are human beings today, why these plant medicines and these psychedelic compounds.

00:28:42.000 Why is that so controversial?

00:28:45.000 I find that to be incredibly amazing when I talk to really intelligent people and I bring that idea up and they dismiss it like almost instantaneously and I don't understand why.

00:28:58.000 Because I get it that they're connecting the idea of a drug to a bad thing.

00:29:03.000 I get that.

00:29:05.000 When you want to talk about powerful influences on cognitive thought, is there any more powerful influences on cognitive thought than a psychedelic drug?

00:29:14.000 I don't think there is.

00:29:15.000 I don't understand why that wouldn't be immediately considered at the top of the list.

00:29:21.000 Top of the short list.

00:29:22.000 But it's not.

00:29:23.000 It's heresy.

00:29:24.000 That's the thing.

00:29:25.000 It's an unconventional idea.

00:29:27.000 I mean, if you look at, you know, we as a species, we...

00:29:32.000 We evolved in the rainforest initially, and we evolved in an environment of incredible chemical diversity.

00:29:42.000 And it's absurd to assume, and the reason there's such chemical diversity in the plant kingdom is that They're great chemists, you know, and they make all these chemicals for whatever purposes.

00:29:54.000 That's how plants mediate their relationship with their environment, right?

00:29:59.000 They substitute biosynthesis for behavior.

00:30:02.000 This is what I say.

00:30:03.000 This is a cliché.

00:30:04.000 They can't react to their environment through behavior.

00:30:07.000 They can't run away.

00:30:09.000 They can't fight.

00:30:10.000 They fight through chemistry.

00:30:12.000 And the other side of that coin is we are chemical systems.

00:30:16.000 I mean, I hate to break it to you folks, but we're made of drugs, right?

00:30:20.000 That's why drugs work.

00:30:22.000 We're biochemical engines.

00:30:24.000 Our brains are biochemical engines that run on neurotransmitters.

00:30:28.000 These plant compounds are our neurotransmitters, essentially.

00:30:32.000 I mean, They were in plants a long time before they were in our brains, before there was even complex brains enough to utilize these things.

00:30:41.000 In the course of evolution, we internalized these things and adapted them to our own internal signaling processes.

00:30:50.000 So now we have the neurological tools, if you will, To talk to the plants.

00:30:57.000 You know, they've always been talking to us.

00:30:59.000 Now we can actually have a conversation.

00:31:01.000 And you get into the conversation and the conversation is, you know, you monkeys need to move to the next level.

00:31:09.000 You need to get more conscious of...

00:31:12.000 Your place in nature, our place in nature as a species.

00:31:17.000 Realize that we're not separate from it.

00:31:19.000 We're part of it.

00:31:20.000 And if nature goes down, we go down.

00:31:22.000 I mean, there is no escape.

00:31:25.000 There's no ticket out of here.

00:31:27.000 Not yet, anyway.

00:31:30.000 And the plants are the tools to understand this.

00:31:33.000 I mean, there's good scientific studies now that show that psilocybin, which is the one that's been studied, can reliably induce a state that you might call a mystical experience.

00:31:47.000 I prefer to call it a transcendent experience, but the nugget of the experience that it Can elicit under the right experiences is an understanding of we are all one.

00:32:01.000 We're not separate.

00:32:03.000 That's the core of, I think, the mystical insight that psychedelics bring about.

00:32:08.000 Why should our brains even have evolved to have that kind of experience if it's not a way of You know, kind of, I don't know, being able to initiate that conversation with the rest of species.

00:32:28.000 I mean, they're counting on us, you know, because never before we've, you know, civilization and humanity has impacted nature in adverse ways.

00:32:39.000 As long as we've been around, as long as we've had fire, you know, I mean fire back in the Paleolithic and even earlier was a tremendously, not necessarily destructive force, but it was a transformative force on ecosystems.

00:32:52.000 We didn't particularly use it in a conscious way.

00:32:56.000 We used it in a way that served our Our purposes.

00:33:01.000 But now, with 7 billion people on the earth and counting, and technologies that no one ever imagined that we'd have at our fingertips, what we do now really matters, you know, because Before that,

00:33:18.000 nature, the homeostatic mechanisms that tended to take nature, keep nature in balance, you know, we could cause tremendous ecological destruction and nature would eventually, you know, that would fade away and nature would come back into balance.

00:33:34.000 Now we're actually in danger of permanently screwing up those mechanisms.

00:33:38.000 So we actually have to kind of consciously intervene or be conscious of what we're doing because the consequences of what we do are just so much greater.

00:33:49.000 Does that make any sense?

00:33:50.000 Oh, no.

00:33:50.000 It absolutely does.

00:33:51.000 It absolutely does.

00:33:52.000 I think there's another thing that we need to put into perspective is the relatively short amount of time that human beings have had access to the information that we have today and the terrible effects of propaganda and how long propaganda can stick.

00:34:11.000 You know, when we're talking about just the Just Say No era of the 80s, the Nancy Reagan nonsense.

00:34:17.000 I had Dr. Carl Hart on recently, who's a brilliant guy, if you're aware of his word.

00:34:23.000 Amazing work on addiction and sort of educating people about the actual real reactions that a human body has to drugs.

00:34:32.000 But what he's talking about that was really interesting is there has never been a drug-free society, nor would you want one.

00:34:39.000 It doesn't exist. 0.99

00:34:40.000 This idea is so stupid that it's been hammered into us, this impossible ideal. 1.00

00:34:50.000 I think? 0.99

00:35:04.000 The impact of these things, although in our incredibly small, finite lives, seems like forever, is comparatively just a little tiny blip on the radar where we've had this sort of cultural hiccup, where we've lost the script.

00:35:20.000 And the Internet seems to be what's resetting the information.

00:35:25.000 And I think that's one of the reasons why marijuana, besides the financial reason, why marijuana has gained so much steam.

00:35:32.000 Just the sheer overwhelming avalanche of facts, the lack of deaths, the LD50 rate of 1,500 pounds in 15 minutes, just the sheer absurdity of what it takes to kill you.

00:35:45.000 And then the stats that come in.

00:35:47.000 I mean, how many times can you see someone posted the numbers people die by cigarettes, the numbers people die by prescription drugs, the numbers people die by alcohol, the numbers people...

00:35:55.000 And you just start looking at that, and then marijuana gets to the bottom zero.

00:35:58.000 Right. 1.00

00:35:58.000 Well, what the fuck? 1.00

00:35:59.000 It's over and over and over and over again. 1.00

00:36:01.000 It's resetting this strange propaganda.

00:36:05.000 But to people that have been alive through it, it's indoctrination.

00:36:09.000 It's how we've come to understand the world.

00:36:12.000 But the message is penetrating now.

00:36:14.000 Yes, it is now.

00:36:15.000 Even with all that cultural baggage that marijuana is loaded down with, finally...

00:36:22.000 The real message is coming through when people are exactly, like you say, beginning to wake up to it and compared to all the other recreational drugs that we accept, this one is benign and beneficial.

00:36:35.000 I've said that I think that in the future when people look back on this age where people are being arrested and imprisoned for marijuana, they're going to look back at it the same way they used to look at killing witches.

00:36:45.000 Yeah, exactly. 0.98

00:36:46.000 It's really that ridiculous. 0.99

00:36:48.000 It's such a black mark on our silly society. 1.00

00:36:53.000 Yeah. 0.96

00:36:54.000 And just an indication of how disconnected we are.

00:36:57.000 This concept of a drug-free society, as you say, is totally absurd because we're made of drugs.

00:37:06.000 In fact, we are drugs.

00:37:08.000 Yeah.

00:37:10.000 You know, our brains run on neurotransmitters, and whether they're endogenously produced, and we know, for example, that DMT is an endogenous neurotransmitter, and that's a whole fascinating area of neuroscience now, potential functions for DMT,

00:37:26.000 you know, are being found.

00:37:29.000 We know it's been there for a long time.

00:37:31.000 We've known it's endogenous, but it's not been so clear what the hell it's doing in there.

00:37:35.000 Now we're beginning to get some indications that it really does have a function.

00:37:40.000 For example, in places that you wouldn't expect, modulating the immune system, for example, all this stuff is emerging.

00:37:50.000 By any measure, these internal chemicals are drugs.

00:37:54.000 They just happen to be drugs that we make ourselves.

00:37:57.000 We don't buy them from the local pot dealer or whatever.

00:38:00.000 So the perceptions are changing, I think.

00:38:05.000 Yeah, I agree.

00:38:07.000 I think, again, I attribute the internet.

00:38:09.000 And some of the work that Rick Strassman has done has been pretty fascinating as well.

00:38:14.000 And the most recent work showing that DMT is actually producing the pineal gland of live rats.

00:38:20.000 Which was always, for whatever reason, even though everyone knew DMT was an endogenous neurotransmitter and that human beings absolutely produced it in the liver and the lungs and different parts of the body, the pineal gland has always been ultimately incredibly fascinating because it literally is that third eye,

00:38:38.000 the seat of the soul.

00:38:39.000 And there was so much...

00:38:42.000 There's resistance to that idea that this mystical chemical is actually produced by the third eye.

00:38:49.000 And I saw online, like, all this battling back and forth of, you know, well, it's only anecdotal evidence that it's produced by...

00:38:56.000 Now there's actual physical evidence that it is produced.

00:38:58.000 Now there's actual evidence.

00:38:59.000 We know it's there.

00:39:00.000 We knew it had to be there.

00:39:02.000 All the enzymes to make it, all the precursors to make it were there, but nobody had actually nailed it down.

00:39:09.000 Now they've nailed it down.

00:39:11.000 So...

00:39:13.000 That's progress.

00:39:14.000 That's a step.

00:39:15.000 But that's the resistance to the idea was very fascinating to me.

00:39:20.000 Like, why would anybody care whether or not it was – I mean, the body makes it for sure.

00:39:26.000 Like, why is it such an issue that the pineal gland makes it?

00:39:29.000 But it is.

00:39:30.000 It is, because that sort of opens up the door to Eastern mysticism, to all that traditional religious art that showed the glowing third eye, and all these peaceful, enlightened beings with lit third eyes.

00:39:45.000 All of that is like, oh...

00:39:48.000 Well, they probably knew something.

00:39:49.000 Like, oh, there's something to it.

00:39:51.000 They did know a thing or two.

00:39:53.000 Well, they knew quite a bit, right?

00:39:54.000 The other thing is the Egyptian artwork that so clearly resembles the pineal gland and the actual cross-section of the human brain.

00:40:04.000 And there's so much of that in ancient civilizations and ancient cultures.

00:40:09.000 It just makes you really try to piece together, like, when did we lose all this?

00:40:13.000 Like, what...

00:40:14.000 Have we figured that out?

00:40:16.000 When did all that sort of slip away?

00:40:18.000 I don't think it's lost.

00:40:19.000 I mean, obviously it's not lost.

00:40:20.000 We're now rediscovering it.

00:40:22.000 It was esoteric.

00:40:25.000 It was esoteric knowledge for a long time.

00:40:29.000 Now it's becoming less esoteric.

00:40:32.000 More people are becoming aware of what the ancients knew, what the visionaries and the mystics always knew.

00:40:38.000 This is no longer hidden knowledge.

00:40:42.000 It's becoming more...

00:40:44.000 And that's partly the effect of the internet and partly the effect of a lot of very smart people obsessing over this, you know, and sharing what they're finding out.

00:40:56.000 So again, this is, I think, part of the general raising of consciousness in this area that's going on now.

00:41:04.000 Amber Lyon, she was a reporter for CNN and sort of lost her faith in I think?

00:41:39.000 Completely changes her life.

00:41:40.000 Goes on a year-round journey, year-long journey to discover various psychedelic medicines in different indigenous cultures.

00:41:47.000 Goes to Thailand and does mushrooms.

00:41:49.000 Goes to Mexico.

00:41:51.000 Now she's writing or making this website called Reset.me.

00:41:56.000 She's dedicated her life to psychedelics within one year.

00:41:59.000 One crazy transformative trip.

00:42:03.000 And it's people like her and people like you and people like you that are...

00:42:08.000 Putting this information out, that's starting this sort of like undeniable tide, this shifting, this undeniable shifting.

00:42:19.000 Psychedelics and neurotransmitters aside, because people expect something big when they take these things and people are rightly a little apprehensive.

00:42:28.000 I mean, it will change your life if you take these plants.

00:42:31.000 If you want to have a transformative experience with plants and you're leery of psychedelics, try going on an all plant-based diet for a little while.

00:42:41.000 Change your intestinal bacteria in a way.

00:42:44.000 You'll have this sense of levity, lightness.

00:42:48.000 It will change the way you think about yourself.

00:42:50.000 Not as quickly as a psychedelic plant experience.

00:42:54.000 And it takes discipline.

00:42:56.000 Or try a fast.

00:42:57.000 I mean, there are ways to have these transformative experiences without drugs, without plants, but it's just a faster way.

00:43:04.000 The only transformative experience that I've ever experienced from dealing with people that have gone on a completely transforming their life in a completely plant-based diet is they can never shut the fuck up about the fact they're on a plant-based diet.

00:43:16.000 Well, you can't go out to eat with people.

00:43:19.000 You can't go out to a restaurant.

00:43:21.000 They're insufferable.

00:43:22.000 It's a hard lifestyle to maintain.

00:43:25.000 Yeah.

00:43:25.000 And in light of the new information that's been discovered over the past decade or so about the intelligence of plants, about plants' ability to calculate, their ability to recognize...

00:43:40.000 Perhaps even a memory.

00:43:42.000 Their ability to recognize dangers, their ability to adapt.

00:43:46.000 There's a consciousness in plants that is undeniable and I think very misunderstood or non-understood.

00:43:54.000 That's not a word.

00:43:55.000 But we're ignorant to it.

00:43:57.000 And that's one of the problems that I have with people that push the plant-based diet.

00:44:01.000 I think life eats life.

00:44:04.000 And I think it always has.

00:44:06.000 And I think you can get...

00:44:08.000 To the very bottom of the karma chain where you're fungi and you're living off of poop and basically things that things have thrown away.

00:44:18.000 Or you can be a tiger.

00:44:20.000 And they're all beautiful.

00:44:21.000 The whole system is crazy and beautiful. 1.00

00:44:24.000 The only reason why we exist at all is that a fucking star had to die. 1.00

00:44:29.000 The whole thing is death. 0.99

00:44:31.000 But we're so obsessed with this idea of eating only plants or being on a plant-based diet connects you more to nature.

00:44:42.000 I've become a hunter over the last year and a half, and I couldn't disagree more.

00:44:46.000 One of the reasons being is that hunting is a very psychedelic experience in a weird way that I never would have believed.

00:44:53.000 The first time I ever went deer hunting and shot a deer and then wound up eating it...

00:44:59.000 There's a weird connection that you have with nature and with that animal when you do that.

00:45:04.000 Especially if you do it in what's termed a fair chase environment.

00:45:08.000 You go out into the actual woods.

00:45:10.000 You deal with an animal.

00:45:11.000 Most likely that animal right there had never even seen a human being before I shot it.

00:45:16.000 And then, you know, we're eating it.

00:45:18.000 That deer head right there.

00:45:20.000 Not the alien behind it.

00:45:20.000 No, not the alien.

00:45:21.000 That motherfucker. 1.00

00:45:23.000 He's hunting you. 1.00

00:45:25.000 But I think that there's...

00:45:28.000 There's life in everything, and there's most likely some form of a consciousness in all life.

00:45:36.000 And I think brains are overrated.

00:45:40.000 Nervous systems are overrated in a certain sense.

00:45:42.000 You can say, well, how can a plant be intelligent?

00:45:44.000 It doesn't have a nervous system.

00:45:46.000 It doesn't have a brain.

00:45:48.000 But it clearly displays intelligence.

00:45:51.000 And in fact, speaking of that, and speaking of your hunting experience, you know the author Michael Pollan, right?

00:46:00.000 He had a great essay in, I think, The New Yorker recently about plant intelligence that, if you haven't read it, it's worth reading.

00:46:10.000 But I also love his chapter in The Omnivore's Dilemma, which is subtitled The Natural History of Four Meals.

00:46:20.000 And one of the meals is a meat meal where he...

00:46:28.000 He wants to create a meal, but he wants to put himself in the shoes of a hunter-gatherer.

00:46:35.000 So he wants to gather all wild foods, plant foods, obviously, mushrooms, pine nuts, and this sort of thing.

00:46:41.000 But he also wants to hunt down a boar, I think it was, and kill it and strip it, skin it.

00:46:51.000 Cut it up and eat it and have that experience. 0.95

00:46:54.000 And I think that what you say is totally legitimate.

00:46:57.000 If you're going to eat meat, it's important that people realize that an animal died so that you could have that meal.

00:47:07.000 Native Americans, Indigenous people have always recognized this because they are up against it.

00:47:12.000 So, you know, they'll always thank the animal for what they're getting.

00:47:17.000 And that's really important.

00:47:19.000 And that's something that we should try to integrate into everything.

00:47:22.000 Why not thank the plants, too?

00:47:24.000 Thank everything.

00:47:26.000 We wouldn't be here if we weren't sustained by this web of life.

00:47:30.000 So why are we being so...

00:47:33.000 You know, disrespectful to it.

00:47:35.000 I mean, I guess that's the crux of the question.

00:47:37.000 Well, we can't really feel what we're doing to this earth, and we have this diffusion of responsibility thing going on.

00:47:44.000 You buy your meat in the grocery store wrapped in, you know, plastic.

00:47:48.000 You have no notion where it actually came from.

00:47:51.000 Yeah, I've made a commitment this year to live entirely off of game meat, of wild game.

00:47:56.000 All wild, too.

00:47:58.000 Nothing that, you know, no penned-in animals that just wind up shooting.

00:48:02.000 The ham that I was telling you guys about before the show, smoking ham, that's a pig I killed on this ranch, Tejon Ranch.

00:48:11.000 And they actually have to have hunters come in because these are invasive species, these wild pigs, and they will destroy everything.

00:48:20.000 They eat deer fawns, they eat ground-nesting birds, they eat their eggs.

00:48:26.000 I mean, they're unbelievably devastating to the The environments that they aren't naturally a part of.

00:48:33.000 Right.

00:48:33.000 So there's a role for us as stewards of the environment.

00:48:38.000 These wild boars are, as you say, they're devastating ecosystems.

00:48:42.000 I don't know in California, but Hawaii, this is their biggest problem, and it's destroying ecosystems in Hawaii. 0.88

00:48:50.000 So there is a role for us to step in and say, well, you know, we're going to Kind of exert some control here and control that population because they didn't originate in Hawaii.

00:49:01.000 They're invasive species, as you say.

00:49:03.000 Yeah, they're from Eurasia.

00:49:04.000 There's a need for some regulation.

00:49:06.000 Well, there's an issue right now in San Jose.

00:49:08.000 San Jose, they've started to make their way into suburbs, and they're destroying people's lawns, and they'll attack children.

00:49:14.000 Well, that'll get them.

00:49:15.000 They're doomed.

00:49:16.000 The lawns!

00:49:17.000 They ate my flowers! 1.00

00:49:18.000 You tore up my lawn, you fucker! 1.00

00:49:20.000 You piece of shit! 1.00

00:49:21.000 Yeah, it is a weird connection, the connection that we have to life itself. 1.00

00:49:31.000 Our thoughts, when we talk about Native Americans, almost immediately we think of the spiritual connection that Native Americans had to the land, the deep respect that they had for the animals that they killed and the fact that they would use every single piece of that animal.

00:49:48.000 They'd use the hide.

00:49:49.000 To make a roof or clothes.

00:49:52.000 They would use sinew for strings for their bows and arrows.

00:49:57.000 They literally used every part.

00:49:59.000 Tooth, bone, nail, flesh.

00:50:01.000 They ate them.

00:50:02.000 And they worshipped these animals.

00:50:04.000 It was a deep respect.

00:50:08.000 It was an inexorable part of the relationship to nature itself.

00:50:14.000 I really hear you on this.

00:50:16.000 I grew up in the woods of Michigan, a mile outside of a town of 150 people, and my uncle is a hunter and a taxidermist.

00:50:23.000 But hunting for him is a spiritual quest and experience, and you feel the pain of the animal you kill.

00:50:30.000 Yeah.

00:50:31.000 Utilizing all aspects of it.

00:50:33.000 I'm not opposed to eating meat by any means.

00:50:36.000 I'm just saying that an all-plant diet, when you do it properly, can transform consciousness.

00:50:42.000 It's a strange thing.

00:50:44.000 But going on an all-meat diet and eating that conscious eating can change consciousness.

00:50:50.000 Conscious eating.

00:50:51.000 Conscious everything, right?

00:50:52.000 Conscious everything.

00:50:53.000 Conscious redesign of institutions, of the internet, of our experiences.

00:51:00.000 Yeah.

00:51:01.000 When you were talking about earlier about brains being overrated, one of the things that I've really...

00:51:07.000 It's been inescapable for me over the last few years or so is this idea that we are the caterpillars that are giving birth to the moth and that our whole...

00:51:20.000 Screwy system and our issues with ego problems and materialism might be because we're just sort of a transitionary stage to this symbiotic relationship that we have with technology and that we're going to give birth to some artificial thing that doesn't carry the burdens of natural selection,

00:51:39.000 that doesn't carry the burdens of primitive instincts, the need to survive, all these animal reward systems that were built into us from the time that we were monkeys.

00:51:50.000 Perhaps.

00:51:51.000 It doesn't sound like a very nice existence.

00:51:53.000 It doesn't sound like a nice existence to us, but I'm not sure about that.

00:51:58.000 This is why I bounce it around, because I don't know if it's better. 0.98

00:52:03.000 I mean, the idea is that, well, if I'm not a person, well, I'm fucked. 0.97

00:52:08.000 But is that the ego hanging on to that? 0.98

00:52:11.000 In a way, yeah. 0.98

00:52:15.000 Hyper-intelligent, artificial life that's capable of living a completely self-sustaining existence where you're totally solar-powered, all garbage or any waste product whatsoever, it's factored immediately into the equation instead of put off nuclear waste where they just dig a fucking hole and, 0.95

00:52:35.000 oh, we'll figure that out later. 0.95

00:52:37.000 I mean, that's madness to me.

00:52:39.000 The nuclear waste issue is one of the most maddening and insane issues ever.

00:52:44.000 We're good to go.

00:53:01.000 Having a completely holistic approach to this thing like, okay, are we going to build this stuff?

00:53:06.000 If we are going to build this stuff, what are we going to do about the toxic waste? 0.96

00:53:09.000 Okay, let's factor that in before we move forward and then spend an extra few decades trying to figure out what to do with that shit and then maybe come up with a solution before you ever move forward. 0.98

00:53:19.000 But we don't do that. 0.99

00:53:20.000 We have this weird thing that we just sort of put it off and...

00:53:24.000 It's childish.

00:53:25.000 Well, companies have quarterly reporting requirements.

00:53:27.000 If we just change the financial reporting structure to a one-year or a five-year instead of this short-term thinking, solar panels are cheaper than diesel now, at least.

00:53:38.000 This is what has to be factored into corporate planning, as you say, because the corporations have gotten a free ride for too long because they never pay the environmental consequences of what they do.

00:53:52.000 And we have to change that where they have to be held accountable and responsible for the environmental impact.

00:53:59.000 It's not just that you pay $200 for an iPhone.

00:54:03.000 You pay $200 for an iPhone, but it costs $2,000 to deal with the environmental impact of the fact that you have that iPhone.

00:54:11.000 The people that are getting cancer from the toxic waste.

00:54:15.000 That economic equation has got to change.

00:54:20.000 That's one of the biggest challenges because it's a huge challenge to capitalism.

00:54:25.000 It's laying down the gauntlet and saying, look guys, okay, you can make money, but let's look at the bottom line in the realistic way.

00:54:33.000 You're making all this profit, but what are you costing the taxpayers and the rest of society for your profit-making activities?

00:54:42.000 How about a little payback here?

00:54:45.000 How about some fun – some way to compensate for the damage that corporations do?

00:54:53.000 And that's the biggest threat that I can see right now.

00:54:57.000 The corporations want to own everything they want to corporatize.

00:55:01.000 Everything.

00:55:02.000 And nature is just another commodity, as they see it, to be owned and exploited.

00:55:08.000 And that's the perception that's got to change.

00:55:11.000 And maybe one way to do it is to, you know, I think, speaking of hearts and minds, I think if you can get, you know, there are ethical capitalists out there.

00:55:22.000 And chances are...

00:55:24.000 They're partly ethical because they took psychedelics at some point.

00:55:28.000 I mean Steve Jobs and people like that and we could name others.

00:55:33.000 So psychedelics are teaching tools to help people kind of understand their place, their responsibilities.

00:55:43.000 And we have to – again, that's part of this.

00:55:47.000 It's not that we can't innovate.

00:55:49.000 We just have to be realistic about the impact that our actions are having.

00:55:54.000 We also have this issue with corporations having survival instincts, and corporations, this unlimited growth paradigm that is impossible.

00:56:03.000 Like what we're talking about with laptops.

00:56:05.000 Can we just stop right here?

00:56:07.000 No, we can't.

00:56:08.000 It's impossible.

00:56:09.000 And we also can't stop as far as profit.

00:56:11.000 Well, we made this much this quarter, and this quarter we showed a 25% growth.

00:56:15.000 Excellent!

00:56:16.000 Let's keep moving on.

00:56:17.000 By 2075, we should have all the money in the world.

00:56:20.000 I mean, that's really what every corporation And isn't this what's happening?

00:56:25.000 Yes, it is.

00:56:25.000 In a sense.

00:56:26.000 It's madness, right?

00:56:27.000 You've got, what is it, 95% of the wealth concentrated in the 1% and the rest of us are, you know, the rest of us is quickly devolving into a third world situation and that is economic slavery in a sense.

00:56:45.000 I mean, people do what they have to do because they don't have a choice.

00:56:49.000 They're, you know, they're Economic activity, their priorities are dictated by corporations.

00:56:55.000 This idea that profit is the only thing that a corporation should be concerned with, we've got to evolve beyond that.

00:57:06.000 Sustainability is more important.

00:57:10.000 Helping people's lives be better is more important than profits.

00:57:15.000 I mean sure, profits, but that should be down several notches, I think, on the totem pole in terms of what they I think it should be like food.

00:57:27.000 I think profit should be like food in that you can't eat poison.

00:57:32.000 And that if you're eating something, and look, we have all these calories. 0.99

00:57:36.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah, but it's fucking killing you. 0.90

00:57:38.000 Do you understand that you can't eat this? 0.99

00:57:40.000 This is bad for you.

00:57:41.000 Like, don't eat this.

00:57:42.000 But it's got a thousand calories.

00:57:43.000 You know, I need calories to work.

00:57:45.000 No, no, no, you don't need those calories.

00:57:46.000 That's poison. 0.98

00:57:47.000 And essentially, the idea of profit is profit over all.

00:57:52.000 And profit over humanity.

00:57:54.000 You know, the idea of financial gain over human suffering, like that somehow or another it balances out, is just like eating poison.

00:58:05.000 I mean, it really is.

00:58:06.000 There should be no profit at all when there's human suffering.

00:58:11.000 It should be one of those things where it's factored in, oh, we can't eat this, it's poison for humanity.

00:58:16.000 And yet a corporation in the U.S., if it does not maximize profit, can be sued by its shareholders.

00:58:21.000 That's the law.

00:58:22.000 They have a legal responsibility to maximize profit.

00:58:26.000 That's so crazy.

00:58:27.000 And so we have to change the laws. 1.00

00:58:29.000 Shareholders are shitheads. 0.96

00:58:31.000 Until the shareholders start demanding that they actually act responsibly. 0.98

00:58:36.000 So that's – I don't know how that works, but if the shareholders – There was a NASA funded study looking at collapse of civilizations and one of the major factors is the discrepancy in wealth,

00:58:55.000 that the wealthy people are using up the resources and they're insulated from the effects.

00:59:00.000 And then it gets to a point where the people making decisions haven't been thinking about the consequences and the alternatives.

00:59:08.000 And something's got to change.

00:59:12.000 Yeah, that was a fascinating and very terrifying report.

00:59:16.000 Because this is not someone with any financial interest in relaying this message.

00:59:21.000 This is not someone that's selling a solution.

00:59:23.000 They're just looking at all the data and going, look, if you just follow these trends, This is where it goes.

00:59:29.000 And there's no indication whatsoever that it's going to slow down.

00:59:33.000 This is where we're going.

00:59:35.000 We have to figure this out before we hit this wall.

00:59:38.000 When I was an undergrad, I was in business school until I took five grams of psilocybin mushrooms that I grew in my dormitory closet at the urging of Terence McKenna's books.

00:59:50.000 The old Osaneric method, how to undermine civilization one jar at a time. 0.99

00:59:55.000 Or how to improve civilization.

00:59:56.000 I became a radical...

00:59:58.000 But I realized that I was fighting a losing battle if I wasn't speaking the same language of making some profit, of appealing to people's business interests.

01:00:07.000 It was a long process.

01:00:09.000 I wanted to get out of this culture and ended up in China teaching English. 1.00

01:00:15.000 And I've spent most of the last 10 years in China.

01:00:18.000 I'm like a third Chinese now.

01:00:20.000 Really?

01:00:20.000 And I became comfortable analyzing the situation I was in, meeting people on their level.

01:00:29.000 One thing being in China teaches you is to be constructive with people, to come at an issue from how they're thinking about it.

01:00:38.000 Why is that?

01:00:40.000 People don't want to lose face.

01:00:42.000 So it's a top-down culture.

01:00:45.000 So you understand the priorities of a leader, and they have some enlightened interests.

01:00:50.000 They have their self-interests as well.

01:00:52.000 And you appeal to their better image of themselves.

01:00:56.000 What's possible?

01:00:57.000 A win-win situation.

01:00:59.000 So I think of myself now as a kind of economic therapist.

01:01:03.000 I talk to corporations, I talk to NGOs, the campaigning organizations, and I try to help people find a balance.

01:01:11.000 What are the win-win situations?

01:01:14.000 The last six years I've been working with the global sustainability standards like the Forest Stewardship Council and the Marine Stewardship Council and the ESC is modeled on these organizations that you talk with enough stakeholders and you build consensus through dialogue and you have a transparent process that It appeals to companies.

01:01:36.000 It appeals to regulators.

01:01:37.000 So take McDonald's, for example.

01:01:40.000 They realized that they were catching too much fish from the ocean and it wasn't sustainable.

01:01:45.000 So now all McDonald's fish sandwiches are Marine Stewardship Council certified, which means they can sell McFish sandwiches into eternity as long as the oceans are viable for life.

01:01:57.000 Or Kimberly Clark was cutting down the rainforests and cutting down the arboreal forests in Canada.

01:02:03.000 Now all of their paper products are going to be FSC certified.

01:02:06.000 And FSC certifies 15% of the standing forests of the world, which means that people have a fair share.

01:02:13.000 This notion of stewardship, I think, is really important.

01:02:17.000 It's an important word.

01:02:19.000 It's got to be reintroduced into...

01:02:24.000 I think we're good to go.

01:02:37.000 We don't survive if this whole shooting match collapses.

01:02:41.000 So the concept of stewardship.

01:02:43.000 And I think that is really important to get that message out.

01:02:47.000 And that's what people like Josh are trying to do.

01:02:50.000 And I think psychedelics have a role to play, absolutely, in educating.

01:02:56.000 You know, I mean, it's interesting the, you know, It's going to be a while, I think, before ayahuasca gets integrated in this country in a way, for example,

01:03:12.000 in therapy and in biomedicine, it's not going to happen.

01:03:16.000 But what you do see happening are these centers that are growing up.

01:03:20.000 And right now, it's in South America and Josh and The Botanical Stewardship Council are trying to develop standards for these organizations so that, you know, they're committed to a certain ethical set of standards,

01:03:37.000 safety, and quality of their brew and so on.

01:03:42.000 But I can envision a time not too far in the future where if a person...

01:03:48.000 You know, you can go to South America and if you have issues, if you have sickness, addiction or whatever, you can get treatment.

01:03:57.000 But even more importantly, you can just get an education.

01:04:03.000 You can go there for purposes of spiritual discovery and self-discovery and all that.

01:04:09.000 Once you have that infrastructure, which is growing, then it partly becomes we need to get people in positions of power.

01:04:27.000 I mean, you can't hold them in a headlock and force them to drink ayahuasca, although I'd like to a lot of times.

01:04:50.000 People have a negative reaction to that, and I know this personally firsthand because I have a business, Onnit.com is a company we sell exercise equipment and supplements and healthy foods.

01:05:06.000 One of the ways that Onnit was created was my partner Aubrey and I talking about it, and Aubrey going to South America, doing ayahuasca, and then having these visions about his business.

01:05:18.000 And when he talked about that, he was met with so much criticism.

01:05:22.000 So many people were like...

01:05:24.000 You're down there doing ayahuasca, thinking about your business. 0.85

01:05:28.000 Oh, that's so gross. 0.95

01:05:30.000 Oh, that's so base. 0.99

01:05:31.000 That's so egocentric.

01:05:33.000 That's so anti, you know, the message of the plant.

01:05:36.000 But it's creativity.

01:05:39.000 And creativity, it manifests itself in a million different ways.

01:05:43.000 And it The idea of business equals evil.

01:05:47.000 We have to get past that.

01:05:49.000 We have to get past that.

01:05:50.000 We all exchange.

01:05:51.000 It's not evil if some guy could fix your car.

01:05:54.000 It's not evil if someone can fix your refrigerator so you can store food.

01:05:59.000 All those things are businesses.

01:06:00.000 It's not evil if you buy fair trade coffee that promotes biodiversity and farmers can send their kids to school and go to health care.

01:06:08.000 So it is.

01:06:09.000 It's win-win.

01:06:10.000 It's possible to develop these economic models and I totally disagree with your partner's critics.

01:06:17.000 Your partner is exactly right on.

01:06:20.000 It's okay.

01:06:21.000 He, with his background, I assume it's a he, goes to... 0.99

01:06:28.000 South America, and he already has the mindset, right?

01:06:31.000 But then ayahuasca is a way to sort of flesh out the vision, if you were.

01:06:38.000 I mean, he went there to learn something, and boy, did he learn something.

01:06:41.000 Well, he clearly went through a bunch of other things about his life. 0.99

01:06:45.000 Well, you've got to get the personal shit cleared away first. 0.99

01:06:49.000 In your family history. 1.00

01:06:50.000 Open up that mild bullshit folder. 0.99

01:06:53.000 Right, right. 0.98

01:06:56.000 Not that any one of us here has done that completely.

01:06:59.000 I mean, it's an ongoing process.

01:07:01.000 No, it's a process.

01:07:01.000 No doubt about it.

01:07:03.000 I've got a tank session scheduled for tonight.

01:07:08.000 Stuff to work out.

01:07:10.000 The word ethical company, or the expression ethical company, I think is a big one.

01:07:19.000 And I think that this idea of the psychedelic experience for those who haven't experienced it, or for those who, oh, I dropped acid in college, but I'm past that now.

01:07:31.000 I've got a 401k and a mortgage and college bills for my kids, and I have a lot of things to come.

01:07:37.000 You've never passed it.

01:07:38.000 Well, that's an excuse for not wanting to confront it.

01:07:42.000 That's just self-delusion, really.

01:07:45.000 Nobody's ever passed it.

01:07:47.000 No, no one has ever.

01:07:48.000 If you're a human being and you have, I mean, you're a constant sort of soup of chemicals, neurotransmitters, adrenaline, hormones, all these different things are going on.

01:07:58.000 You're trying to maintain balances and keep everything aligned and then keep the pattern of thought in a good place so that it maintains everything as well.

01:08:07.000 I think that to these people that are perpetrating a lot of the issues that we have, whether it's the head of BP or take some guy who wants to frack and say, before you do that, do this first.

01:08:21.000 And then let's talk.

01:08:23.000 Confronted with your own mortality.

01:08:25.000 It should almost be mandatory.

01:08:26.000 You should show that before you start fracking...

01:08:30.000 You should show that you have a degree, that you understand the actual physical process of removing these chemicals.

01:08:37.000 You should understand, you know, whatever energy extraction degrees you have to have and whatever sciences that pertain to that.

01:08:45.000 But you should also have psychedelic trips under your belt.

01:08:47.000 Like, you could say, well, you know, here, I've seen your documentation, you've gone through your five grams, and what did you get out of that?

01:08:54.000 You know what I mean?

01:08:55.000 Like, it should be one of those things where it's reviewed.

01:08:58.000 Like, okay, you haven't?

01:09:00.000 Hmm.

01:09:00.000 Okay, what...

01:09:02.000 You've got to tick that off your list before you proceed.

01:09:06.000 Yeah, it should be like a presidential council for psychological fitness. 0.97

01:09:10.000 They sit you down, they go...

01:09:20.000 Mm-hmm.

01:09:22.000 Mm-hmm.

01:09:42.000 Yes.

01:09:43.000 Or people in the Department of Defense or the Veterans Affairs that are dealing with all these soldiers with PTSD. Another important aspect of this symposia conference is a new organization called VET. It's Veterans for Entheogenic Therapy.

01:09:58.000 Oh, that's great.

01:09:59.000 The founders...

01:10:01.000 Participated in the MAPS PTSD study with MDMA and they came away feeling so much better and they want to open this up to other veterans and others suffering from PTSD. So a portion of the proceeds from the Amherst conference and the online live participation will go to this organization and to the ESC. That's spectacular.

01:10:22.000 I'm a huge, huge fan of MAPS. I've had Rick Doblin on the podcast before, who's just a fantastic guy.

01:10:28.000 They just tweeted me something, and I retweeted it.

01:10:31.000 They did a new study on autism, adult autism, MDMA-assisted therapy for social anxiety in autistic adults.

01:10:42.000 It's amazing, amazing stuff.

01:10:44.000 We just had dinner with Charlie Grobe working.

01:10:45.000 Was he working on that?

01:10:46.000 He's Charlie Grobe, who's at UCLA. He's one of our Hefter superstars, if you will.

01:10:53.000 Spell his name so we can get him on the podcast.

01:10:55.000 G-R-O-B, Charles Grobe.

01:10:57.000 He's at Harbor UCLA... He's done a psilocybin end-of-life study.

01:11:04.000 He's a member of the Hefter board.

01:11:06.000 I may as well plug Hefter here.

01:11:08.000 We're the sort of small organization that nobody knows about, hefter.org.

01:11:15.000 Like heifer?

01:11:16.000 Like a cow? 0.99

01:11:17.000 No, no.

01:11:18.000 H-E-F-F-T-E-R. Not Hefter, but Hefter. 1.00

01:11:23.000 And it's a non-profit, and basically we're committed to developing clinical protocols with psychedelics and have kind of staked out psilocybin in some ways, in the same way that MDMA is MAPS's thing,

01:11:39.000 psilocybin is our thing, and we've got several really interesting protocols.

01:11:46.000 FDA approved clinical studies right now for end of life, existential anxiety at the end of life.

01:11:53.000 uh...

01:11:54.000 for exploring actually What you might call experimental mysticism because psilocybin can reliably induce mystical states.

01:12:05.000 Roland Griffith's work at Johns Hopkins has shown this.

01:12:09.000 So it's an actual tool for the first time.

01:12:11.000 We're actually able to approach transcendent states of mind in a controlled clinical setting.

01:12:17.000 We can reliably induce these states and then study what's the brain doing when When you're in a state of psilocybin-induced mysticism.

01:12:28.000 Well, it's doing a lot of things similar to the state of a mystical experience when it's on the natch or whatever.

01:12:35.000 I'm not sure that even...

01:12:36.000 But anyway, Hefter.org.

01:12:38.000 Most of the leading researchers in psychedelic science right now are either on our board or being funded by Hefter.

01:12:46.000 And so we have funding and we're...

01:12:49.000 Focusing on psilocybin.

01:12:51.000 We work closely with MAPS, but MAPS gets all the attention, which is fine.

01:12:55.000 They're doing beautiful work, but we're also doing effective, important things.

01:12:59.000 Well, Will, we'll certainly get some people to you.

01:13:01.000 Hefter, H-E-F-F-T-E-R dot org.

01:13:05.000 Dot org, right.

01:13:06.000 Named after Arthur Hefter, actually, who was a 19th century scientist, the first person to isolate mescaline in a pure form.

01:13:16.000 From peyote and demonstrate that it was the main ingredient of peyote based on self-experiments.

01:13:24.000 He kind of exemplifies what we like to identify with, you know, good science driven by curiosity and ethics.

01:13:34.000 Yeah, it's a good organization.

01:13:36.000 The psilocybin connection to dimethyltryptamine, dimethyltryptamine being an endogenous chemical and neurotransmitter, and psilocybin being very close.

01:13:45.000 Very close.

01:13:46.000 What is the exact, like, what's the chemical?

01:13:49.000 Okay, very simple.

01:13:51.000 Dimethyltryptamine is simply dimethyltryptamine.

01:13:56.000 Psilocin, which is the active principle of psilocybin, psilocybin is converted to psilocin in the body.

01:14:04.000 So it's what pharmacologists call a pro-drug.

01:14:07.000 It's converted by a very simple chemical reaction to psilicin.

01:14:12.000 That's the one that actually interacts with the receptors.

01:14:14.000 So psilicin is chemically 4-hydroxydimethyltryptamine.

01:14:20.000 So it differs with one trivial substitution on the indole ring.

01:14:26.000 That oxygen, that alcohol group at the top of the indole ring It's what makes it psilocin and not DMT. But it makes all the difference pharmacologically because psilocin is orally active and it doesn't require an MAO inhibitor and DMT does.

01:14:44.000 That's the ayahuasca secret.

01:14:47.000 DMT plus MAO inhibitor makes the orally active preparation.

01:14:53.000 By itself, DMT is not orally active.

01:14:57.000 So you have to take it parentally by smoking it or indigenous people make snuff out of it and so on. 1.00

01:15:03.000 They get around that whole detoxification mechanism.

01:15:08.000 Your gut is full of MAO, monoamine oxidase.

01:15:14.000 And the reason it's full of monoamine oxidase, it's a...

01:15:17.000 The consequences of our evolution is omnivores because plants are full of amines.

01:15:24.000 Most of them are toxic, and you don't want those.

01:15:27.000 So you have the detoxification mechanism, but that also works for DMT. And for that matter, we can't be dining on DMT-containing plants all the time and wandering around.

01:15:38.000 I mean, you do need to be able to function in the world.

01:15:41.000 Yeah.

01:15:42.000 Your brother had a fascinating idea about the idea of panspermia in relationship to psilocybin.

01:15:51.000 That psilocybin being the...

01:15:54.000 What is the exact nomenclature again?

01:15:56.000 4-hydroxy-dimethyltryptamine.

01:16:01.000 Psilocybin, I don't want to get bogged down in chemistry, but psilocybin...

01:16:06.000 For the chemists among you, it's got a phosphoryl group, and that phosphoryl group is cleaved off, and that yields psilicin.

01:16:14.000 Psilicin is 4-hydroxydimethyltryptamine.

01:16:17.000 And what is psilocybin?

01:16:18.000 And psilocybin is 4-phosphoryl dimethyltryptamine.

01:16:23.000 So it's got that phosphoryl group.

01:16:26.000 That makes it stable, right?

01:16:28.000 So that's the form it's stored in in the mushroom, and it can be quite stable for a long time.

01:16:33.000 As soon as you convert it to psilocin, it's very unstable and it's ephemeral, which is one reason why it's so easily metabolized by human metabolism.

01:16:44.000 It's very compatible with human metabolism, which is a reason why it's so stable.

01:16:49.000 It's appropriate.

01:16:50.000 You can give it to people who are quite ill in terminal states and so on.

01:16:55.000 They can tolerate it.

01:16:57.000 It goes through human organism like ice water.

01:17:01.000 It's very easily handled.

01:17:04.000 But we don't want to get too far down the road.

01:17:07.000 No, it's absolutely fascinating.

01:17:09.000 But the idea that your brother was promoting was that this may have come from another planet.

01:17:13.000 And that what you might be eating when you're eating mushrooms is you're eating some sort of an intelligence.

01:17:18.000 Which is the weirdest thing about mushrooms is that it feels like they're talking to you.

01:17:23.000 You certainly do have that impression.

01:17:25.000 Yeah.

01:17:26.000 This I-thou dynamic that's set up.

01:17:29.000 And the content, which I guess not everybody...

01:17:34.000 It has this feeling of this science fiction-ish cast to the experience, but many people do, and they're not all Terence McKenna fans.

01:17:43.000 I mean, if you follow the Terence McKenna recipe and eat five grams in the absolute darkness, you'll be utterly convinced that they've landed.

01:17:53.000 I mean, they're here.

01:17:55.000 And whether that's just an impression or whether it's...

01:18:00.000 Again, I think this is possibly something...

01:18:04.000 You know, built into the structure of our nervous system.

01:18:09.000 And it may be, I mean, we've always had this fascination with space, with the external, you know, with this sort of longing to Maybe return to space.

01:18:29.000 Maybe that's where we came from.

01:18:30.000 I don't know.

01:18:31.000 But certainly in this evolutionary process of cognition, which we credit the plants for if we want to buy into that idea, we credit the plants for bringing about cognition, the ability to wonder,

01:18:47.000 the ability to speculate.

01:18:48.000 Well, you can't wonder very much if you're looking down at the ground all the time.

01:18:53.000 You've got to look up.

01:18:54.000 When you look up, oh, you know, there's this whole universe out here.

01:19:00.000 And what's our connection to that?

01:19:03.000 You know, we've always had this intuition that there is a connection.

01:19:07.000 I mean, I don't go so far as to say, you know, people ridicule the idea that mushrooms might have come from outer space and so on.

01:19:17.000 And on the surface, it seems like a ridiculous idea, but...

01:19:22.000 You look a little deeper and maybe not so much.

01:19:25.000 It's certainly possible.

01:19:27.000 The fact that spores are one of the hardest substances in nature and they can survive for eternity in space.

01:19:32.000 They can survive in hard vacuum and radiation-dense environments and they're not affected by it.

01:19:39.000 The other thing that your brother had mentioned was that it was so different than other life forms on Earth because of its chemical makeup that he thought that the 4-hydroxy or 4-phosphoryl Yeah,

01:19:55.000 the 4-hydroxy, 4-phosphoryl biosynthetic pathway is really only found in this group of mushrooms, you know, actually and related species.

01:20:07.000 He wasn't He wasn't a biochemist.

01:20:10.000 I don't know if I agree with that.

01:20:12.000 I mean, mushrooms are so clearly a part of, you know, earthly evolution that you can't really say that they stand outside of it.

01:20:24.000 I mean, we know that's true.

01:20:25.000 I think if you want to make that hypothesis, you have to go further back and you have to say, well, Maybe a supercivilization seeded our ecology at some point, not with the genes to make psilocin,

01:20:40.000 but the genes to make tryptophan.

01:20:44.000 And now tryptophan, all these psilocin and serotonin and all these tryptamines come from tryptophan.

01:20:51.000 And tryptophan is one of those 20 amino acids that make up...

01:20:56.000 So tryptophan is universally found in all organisms.

01:21:01.000 It's an essential molecule of life, right?

01:21:05.000 It's found in everything.

01:21:06.000 But two trivial steps away from tryptophan, two trivial enzymatic modifications away from tryptophan, you've got DMT. You know, you remove the carboxyl group, you stick a couple methyl groups on tryptophan, and there you are.

01:21:22.000 You've got DMT. And I've often thought, wow, maybe this is a sort of subtext, sub-message of nature saying...

01:21:31.000 Just around the corner from tryptophan is this compound that opens the door to other dimensions.

01:21:42.000 Pay attention, monkeys!

01:21:44.000 It's also fascinating that tryptophan eventually converts to serotonin.

01:21:52.000 Serotonin is just another tryptamine.

01:21:54.000 In fact, chemically, serotonin is 5-hydroxy-tryptamine.

01:22:00.000 Silicin is 4-hydroxy-dimethyltryptamine.

01:22:04.000 Bufotinine, another one of these hallucinogens, is 5-hydroxy-dimethyltryptamine.

01:22:09.000 So they're all very close to each other.

01:22:13.000 You see the diagrams.

01:22:14.000 Oh, hell, there you are!

01:22:18.000 And there you go. 0.99

01:22:19.000 Right.

01:22:20.000 So you can see how it works.

01:22:22.000 And the idea that mushrooms come from outer space seems ridiculous to some folks, but the reality is we're made out of stars.

01:22:30.000 We are made out of stars.

01:22:30.000 Everything comes from outer space.

01:22:32.000 And I think that as we get further along in our understanding of the universe, I think we're going to realize that everything is kind of fractal.

01:22:39.000 And there really is no separation between this planet and other planets.

01:22:43.000 The whole thing is just one big soup.

01:22:45.000 Right.

01:22:46.000 Right.

01:22:46.000 Exactly.

01:22:48.000 You know, any prebiotic environment, I mean, we don't know that much about exactly how life evolved, but we know that in certain situations, you've got a buildup of organic compounds and under the right circumstances,

01:23:05.000 it just seems to be a property of matter, you know?

01:23:10.000 Atoms, molecules fall together in such a way that before you know it, you've got living systems.

01:23:15.000 You've brought this up twice, and I can't ignore it, because you brought it up in the last podcast as well.

01:23:19.000 You are fascinated by the idea of life being seeded here by some intelligent force.

01:23:26.000 Amber Lyon, who I just discussed earlier...

01:23:30.000 She had a vision of that actually happening on ayahuasca, and many other people have as well.

01:23:38.000 Do you think that that's something that is a real possibility?

01:23:43.000 Yes, I do.

01:23:44.000 Wow.

01:23:45.000 That's a heavy one.

01:23:46.000 When you bring that one up, you get thrown into that certain category right away. 1.00

01:23:50.000 Oh, Dennis McKenna's fucking crazy. 0.98

01:23:52.000 I mean, we actually... 0.99

01:23:54.000 In my book, I may as well plug my book.

01:23:56.000 Oh, the latest one.

01:23:57.000 The only latest one I wrote, The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss.

01:24:01.000 Oh, that's the one you promoted last time you were on here, which is excellent.

01:24:03.000 Thank you for that.

01:24:05.000 That was really good.

01:24:06.000 If you haven't bought it, please, folks, go buy it.

01:24:09.000 It's fantastic.

01:24:10.000 You really gave it a boost.

01:24:12.000 But I actually...

01:24:13.000 I talk about this at some length about this idea.

01:24:20.000 Could this really be? 0.88

01:24:21.000 And I'm trying to discuss it from the standpoint of a critic of the idea saying, well, that's totally ridiculous. 0.67

01:24:29.000 How could that be?

01:24:30.000 And they just dismiss it.

01:24:32.000 I try to go a little deeper into it and say, well, wait a minute.

01:24:35.000 Let's step back from this a little bit.

01:24:38.000 And if you think about...

01:24:41.000 Our existential situation, how unlikely it is that we are even here, that consciousness exists, that this civilization exists.

01:24:51.000 I mean, from the standpoint of the improbables, we're living in a very improbable situation.

01:25:01.000 I don't think this is going on.

01:25:03.000 I think that life is probably widespread in the universe, but I think intelligence is rare.

01:25:10.000 And the fact that we find ourselves in that existential situation, you know, maybe we need to take another look at this and say, well, maybe this is not such a crazy idea, you know?

01:25:23.000 I mean, I do think that intelligence, you know, we're not the only ones, and I think, you know, I don't know if I'm degenerating into incoherence here, but I think that intelligence can have an influence on the evolution of even the universe.

01:25:41.000 It's a force in the universe, and I think that mind is probably as primary a feature of reality as the quantum foam.

01:25:54.000 I mean, it may not even be separate from it.

01:26:00.000 It's okay to say we don't know.

01:26:02.000 And one of the problems with science is it tends to be arrogant.

01:26:09.000 It tends to assume That it knows a lot more than it knows.

01:26:15.000 And we actually have a very detailed understanding scientifically of very small pieces of reality.

01:26:24.000 And so there's a tendency to say, well, we've got it all figured out.

01:26:29.000 No, you haven't got it figured out.

01:26:30.000 You haven't got even a tenth of it figured out.

01:26:33.000 Which is another useful message that ayahuasca and other entheogens, other psychedelics remind us of. 1.00

01:26:42.000 I mean, ayahuasca never fails to remind me and a lot of people, remember, you don't know shit. 1.00

01:26:50.000 You don't know shit. 0.99

01:26:52.000 So get off your high horse and Be a little more humble and be open to learning. 1.00

01:26:59.000 And it's all right in front of us if we go back and look at what we know about human history and what they knew and how we laugh at what they knew then.

01:27:08.000 If you go back to the time when they thought the world was flat, back to the time where they were killing Bruno because he thought that the universe was infinite.

01:27:19.000 There's all these different things that people had a consensus on.

01:27:23.000 That we're absolutely incorrect. 0.99

01:27:25.000 That we go, ha, ha, ha, back then we were foolish. 0.97

01:27:27.000 That was a blink of an eye ago. 0.96

01:27:29.000 Right, right.

01:27:30.000 And so the message is beware of what everybody knows.

01:27:34.000 Beware of cultural consensus because chances are in 100 years what we thought we knew will just be seen in that light. 1.00

01:27:42.000 I mean we were so stupid back then. 1.00

01:27:44.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:27:44.000 It's also one of those things, too, when you're discussing aliens and you're discussing the possibility of an alien life form, we want to think it's preposterous, but we're preposterous. 0.99

01:27:55.000 If we didn't exist, oh my god, we would be the most ridiculous thing ever. 0.95

01:28:00.000 Right. 1.00

01:28:00.000 We are preposterous. 1.00

01:28:01.000 Behind me, dead people that were locked in a cage, and I honor them.

01:28:05.000 Do we? 0.99

01:28:06.000 We're ridiculous. 0.95

01:28:07.000 Look at the photos behind me of Jimi Hendrix. 0.76

01:28:09.000 Elvis actually apparently wasn't really a mugshot. 0.86

01:28:13.000 He was just a law enforcement nut and wanted to get his picture, which is even more ridiculous.

01:28:17.000 He loved the fact that people got locked into cages so much, he wanted to get a fake picture of him locked into cages. 1.00

01:28:23.000 Most likely, he was high as fuck on pills. 0.99

01:28:25.000 When he went to see Nixon to be a drug enforcement agency officer. 0.99

01:28:30.000 Yes, exactly.

01:28:30.000 And then this woman, Rosa Parks, she got arrested because she had too much melanin in her skin to sit in a certain spot on a moving piece of transportation, and then she was celebrated as a hero.

01:28:42.000 I mean, we're fucking crazy, right? 0.97

01:28:44.000 Yeah, totally. 0.99

01:28:44.000 Totally. 0.99

01:28:46.000 Just the fact that we exist at all, why would we deny the idea that something else far more advanced than us exists somewhere else?

01:28:53.000 No different than us looking at, you know, when we find primates using tools, evidence of using tools without any human intervention, like they just figured out how to do it on their own, like to get ants out of anthills and things like that.

01:29:05.000 We're fascinated by it.

01:29:06.000 Amazing.

01:29:07.000 Look what we've discovered. 1.00

01:29:08.000 Jesus Christ, that's easy shit. 1.00

01:29:11.000 Compare us to something else, they would probably look at us the same way. 1.00

01:29:15.000 Look at these dummies. 0.88

01:29:16.000 They're worshipping people that were locked in cages. 0.97

01:29:19.000 Right, right.

01:29:20.000 You're a hero because you're sitting in a different spot.

01:29:22.000 So that's the thing.

01:29:24.000 We're...

01:29:24.000 Yeah, we're an experiment of some sort.

01:29:27.000 And whether, you know, we're, you know, some civilization, some super civilization has genetically engineered this whole ecosystem and created tryptophan and then...

01:29:40.000 Seeded it into the ecosystem, knowing that over the course of evolutionary time, it was going to develop things like psilocybin and serotonin.

01:29:48.000 It's almost as though the civilization, this hypothetical civilization, wanted somebody to talk to.

01:29:55.000 And in order to do that, it had to invent...

01:29:58.000 Us primates, you know, and it had to get us talking first to our plants and maybe eventually we'll get a chance to talk to them, whoever they are, you know, or maybe they're already here.

01:30:09.000 I mean, there are a lot of people who say they're already here, you know, and I... Yeah, I don't...

01:30:15.000 I mean, who knows? 1.00

01:30:16.000 The other problem is there's so many people that are full of shit. 1.00

01:30:19.000 Well, this is an area where flakiness flourishes. 1.00

01:30:23.000 Yeah, hugely.

01:30:25.000 I had this sci-fi show, and we stopped doing it, and they wanted to keep doing it, but I didn't want to do it anymore because I got tired of talking to liars.

01:30:36.000 I couldn't handle it anymore.

01:30:38.000 We interviewed Bigfoot people and UFO people, and some of them are well-intentioned folks, but there was a lot of liars.

01:30:44.000 There was a psychological issue, and I could clearly see it.

01:30:49.000 Because when you have a podcast with someone and you sit down with someone for three hours, you can bullshit someone for a seven-minute interview on a news show. 0.65

01:30:57.000 But you can't bullshit someone for three hours.

01:31:00.000 After three hours, weird things start to show up. 0.72

01:31:02.000 Like weird patterns.

01:31:04.000 You just can't keep the rhythm up, so to speak.

01:31:09.000 Especially if you could do multiple podcasts.

01:31:11.000 Like, I'll crack you after two or three.

01:31:13.000 I'll find you.

01:31:14.000 You might be very clever.

01:31:15.000 But after two or three, little things get exposed. 1.00

01:31:18.000 You're like, hmm, this guy might be full of shit. 1.00

01:31:20.000 We will reveal the basis of your madness. 1.00

01:31:24.000 It's just impossible to keep the rhythm going. 1.00

01:31:27.000 After a while, if you're full of shit, you're full of shit also to yourself. 1.00

01:31:31.000 And that's something that I've found, is that people that are constantly deceptive, They're also internally deceptive. 1.00

01:31:38.000 And that manifests itself in weird things that they say that they don't even realize are bizarre.

01:31:44.000 Because they're also easier to trick themselves, I think.

01:31:48.000 Because I think they lose their ability to see things objectively.

01:31:54.000 I like falsifiable facts.

01:31:57.000 Things that you can prove that's true or not.

01:32:00.000 The scientific method is important.

01:32:02.000 And all this theoretical conversation is nice about whether we have the imprints of other civilizations in our ecosystem.

01:32:12.000 The fact is we have an ecosystem and maybe we delude ourselves that we have some control over its evolution or stewardship of it, but we certainly have this opportunity to...

01:32:25.000 To either destroy the planet or preserve it.

01:32:27.000 Well, we certainly have an effect, and we're certainly conscious in some way, shape, or form of that effect.

01:32:33.000 And when you extrapolate that to 100,000, a million years from now, if this civilization or something similar survives, well, you've got to think that it's going to be something like an alien invasion.

01:32:44.000 We really will be like that thing that wants to see the universe.

01:32:48.000 If we recognize that...

01:32:50.000 Especially if you're an intelligent being and you recognize that a star is a finite...

01:32:54.000 A star is only good to support life for another billion years.

01:32:58.000 That's not a lot of time if you really stop and think about how long time has existed on Earth.

01:33:04.000 And if you were an intelligent species that lived 100 million years from now and you're like, hey, we only have nine more of these to go. 0.94

01:33:11.000 We have nine more of these 100 million cycles and then we're fucked. 0.51

01:33:15.000 Then the sun burns out and there's no life here. 0.96

01:33:18.000 We've got to get moving.

01:33:19.000 Here we are in eternity and we're stuck here.

01:33:21.000 Yeah, that's very interesting.

01:33:23.000 I've often thought that these cosmological models, I think we got more than a billion years.

01:33:29.000 The cosmological models say 10 to 100 billion years, maybe a trillion years.

01:33:34.000 I don't think of life with the sun.

01:33:36.000 Oh, the sun?

01:33:38.000 Oh yeah, the sun doesn't have sun.

01:33:39.000 Like our planet to support life.

01:33:41.000 It's got maybe 4 billion years.

01:33:43.000 But if we haven't figured out how to get out by that time, we're not paying...

01:33:50.000 Or get in.

01:33:52.000 Exactly.

01:33:53.000 Or get in.

01:33:54.000 That's a very important point.

01:33:57.000 I've been told on Psychedelics many times, the only way out is to go in.

01:34:03.000 But these cosmological models, if you look at them, which are kind of...

01:34:09.000 Yeah.

01:34:25.000 But the key factor that these models do not integrate into their planet is mind and consciousness.

01:34:35.000 That makes all the difference.

01:34:38.000 If you look far enough ahead, that's going to affect the way the cosmos evolves.

01:34:43.000 And they don't take that into account, and it's impossible to really know what the effects of it is.

01:34:50.000 But I don't buy the fact that it's all going to just kind of Peter out and finally the last flicker is going to go out and it's just...

01:35:00.000 Darkness and cold.

01:35:02.000 I don't buy that.

01:35:03.000 I mean, surely there's got to be more to it than that.

01:35:07.000 Well, the inward trip might be what we're missing.

01:35:09.000 And the inward trip may be.

01:35:11.000 Yeah, exactly.

01:35:12.000 I mean, if you look at quantum models, we know there's, you know, three dimensions of space and one of time.

01:35:19.000 But then there's the, what is it, the six or eight other dimensions that are all folded in and you don't see that.

01:35:26.000 But what's in there?

01:35:28.000 Right.

01:35:28.000 What's in there?

01:35:30.000 Well, that's the feeling that you get on dimethyltryptamine is that you've entered into a new area, a new space, and that the space is somehow or another inhabited with something that's communicating in some nonverbal form that reaches you as intent.

01:35:45.000 It reaches you like intent.

01:35:47.000 Right.

01:35:48.000 And that that might be where consciousness is headed once we free ourselves from this Sort of carbon-based shell that we're clinging to.

01:35:56.000 That we might figure that out.

01:35:58.000 That like, oh, we were at a rest stop. 0.99

01:36:01.000 We didn't realize that we could drive just a couple miles down the road and there's the fucking Yellowstone National Park. 0.97

01:36:08.000 We thought that the rest stop was the universe. 0.98

01:36:12.000 That's where we were going. 0.98

01:36:13.000 Yeah, we were just eating shitty food and breathing trucker farts. 0.98

01:36:17.000 We thought that's all there was. 0.98

01:36:19.000 Oh my god, we just had to figure it out.

01:36:22.000 Yeah.

01:36:23.000 I don't dismiss that possibility.

01:36:26.000 I mean, this I-thou relationship that we were talking about.

01:36:31.000 You say that again, I-thou.

01:36:32.000 I-thou.

01:36:33.000 This thing that mushrooms, other psychedelics, but especially mushrooms, seem to set up this dialogue situation. 0.93

01:36:39.000 And you're getting this information, but it's very hard to evaluate whether it's bullshit or whether there's something to it. 0.93

01:36:48.000 My brother used to play... 0.95

01:36:50.000 Games with the mushrooms, you know, when he would take them at these high doses alone and say, well, how do I know that what you're telling me is real?

01:36:59.000 Tell me something I cannot possibly know, you know?

01:37:03.000 And they would never cough it up because it was like, you know, but it was like, all right, I want the blueprints to the starship now!

01:37:12.000 Yeah!

01:37:12.000 Download the blueprints now and I'll believe that you are what you say you are.

01:37:19.000 And they're very evasive.

01:37:21.000 They never give you that kind of thing.

01:37:24.000 But they...

01:37:25.000 So, you know, I don't know.

01:37:28.000 I have this thought, and for people who have heard this podcast, unfortunately I have to repeat myself.

01:37:34.000 I have this idea that, you know, we have this dismissal of psychedelic experience as hallucination.

01:37:42.000 And hallucination being frivolous.

01:37:45.000 And my thought is that...

01:37:48.000 If you absorb some sort of a psychedelic compound and have this intense moment where you do pass into another dimension and you meet with pure love and the very wiring of the universe is exposed to you and you get to see the fractal nature of reality in some incredibly profound form and that is what you're actually experiencing.

01:38:12.000 Or if it's just your imagination and you go there and it's all in your mind Yeah.

01:38:40.000 But I'm here to tell you, it's all hallucination.

01:38:43.000 Right.

01:38:43.000 Right?

01:38:44.000 I mean, we dwell in a hallucination.

01:38:46.000 That's what the brain does.

01:38:49.000 It creates a model of reality that we live in.

01:38:54.000 We never experience reality.

01:38:56.000 I mean, we take it on faith, really, that there's an external reality out there, but everything comes to us through the filter.

01:39:03.000 And is processed and extruded, if you will, into a more or less comprehensible, most of the time, model of reality.

01:39:14.000 And that's where we live.

01:39:16.000 Reality is out there somewhere.

01:39:18.000 It's unknowable.

01:39:19.000 But we're getting signals through this sensory-neural interface, and then the brain is basically a processing device that takes that information, combines it with internal associations and everything, and generates the hallucination that you and I and everybody else are living in at this very moment.

01:39:40.000 We're all part of this constructed reality.

01:39:44.000 So people dismiss it as psychedelic experience as hallucination.

01:39:49.000 I would say no, it is, but it's just another hallucination and it's all hallucination.

01:39:56.000 It's all … Trevor Burrus Or at least interpretation of something, personal interpretation.

01:40:01.000 Yeah, personal interpretation.

01:40:02.000 I mean the world, physics, we know enough through physics about this supposedly external reality to know that it doesn't look anything like what we're experiencing.

01:40:12.000 It's all buzzing electrons.

01:40:14.000 Most of it's empty space.

01:40:16.000 This table is not solid.

01:40:18.000 It's mostly empty space.

01:40:20.000 It's all energy and energy fluxes.

01:40:23.000 We don't experience the world that way most of the time.

01:40:27.000 Sometimes on psychedelics we do.

01:40:28.000 So maybe we're getting an actual peek into the way it's really constructed.

01:40:34.000 We get to...

01:40:35.000 We get to look at the circuit board and turn it over temporarily and look at it.

01:40:40.000 Oh, this is how it's wired.

01:40:43.000 This is the reality-generating machine that you get to look at When you strip away, when you take the cover off and look at the way the diagram is wired, then you get some insights into it.

01:40:58.000 So then that's a useful thing because then you can go back and you can say, well, none of this is real.

01:41:04.000 Let's not get carried away that this is any more real than anything else.

01:41:09.000 Yeah, that seems to be like the information that's coming from folks that study subatomic particles.

01:41:15.000 That information is one of the most undeniable pieces of information that the universe is not what you think it is.

01:41:21.000 It's not what you think it is.

01:41:22.000 It's impossible for it to be what you think it is when you study subatomic particles.

01:41:26.000 When you study things that can exist in two places at the same time, what are you talking about?

01:41:32.000 They blink in and out of existence.

01:41:33.000 What does that mean?

01:41:34.000 Well, they go away.

01:41:35.000 What do you mean they go away?

01:41:36.000 They go and they come back. 1.00

01:41:37.000 What the fuck are you saying? 1.00

01:41:38.000 They go away and they come back. 1.00

01:41:40.000 Are they here or are they not here?

01:41:41.000 Well, they are and they're not.

01:41:43.000 Well, they move, yes, but they also stand still at the same time.

01:41:47.000 Right.

01:41:47.000 What?

01:41:48.000 Like, superposition.

01:41:50.000 Like, when someone...

01:41:50.000 I had Dr. Amit Goswami, he's a theoretical physicist, he tried to explain superposition to me, and I was like, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute.

01:41:58.000 It's moving, and it's still, at the same time.

01:42:02.000 Right, right, right.

01:42:03.000 What are you talking about?

01:42:05.000 Like, what does that mean?

01:42:06.000 Yeah.

01:42:07.000 So here you have physics, you know, the absolute sort of cutting-edge science, the one that we've charged with explaining the fundamental nature of reality.

01:42:17.000 And you talk to these people, and it sounds like the ravings of schizophrenia.

01:42:22.000 It sounds like someone who's on drugs.

01:42:24.000 Yeah, it does indeed.

01:42:26.000 It sounds like someone who...

01:42:27.000 But they have the mathematics and the measurements and all that to back it up and say, look, I'm sorry, this is how it is.

01:42:33.000 This is what...

01:42:34.000 Our math and our instruments tell us, if you want to trust that.

01:42:39.000 It's like we sent a scout, and the scout went over the top of the hill and saw the impossible and came back and went, okay.

01:42:47.000 Yeah, don't go over there.

01:42:53.000 It becomes a rainbow that talks to you.

01:42:55.000 Right, right.

01:42:58.000 Yeah, that is fascinating because the...

01:43:04.000 The explanations of reality by these physicists are, in fact, more bizarre than the experiences that are relayed by people who take ayahuasca.

01:43:14.000 Absolutely.

01:43:14.000 Those are way more believable than particles in superposition or the fact that it's all empty space moving in a vibration.

01:43:23.000 No, it's wood, man.

01:43:24.000 What are you talking about?

01:43:25.000 This is wood.

01:43:26.000 Hear it? 0.99

01:43:26.000 I hit you over the head. 0.99

01:43:27.000 That shit's gonna hurt. 1.00

01:43:28.000 This is real. 1.00

01:43:29.000 There's no empty space there, dude. 0.99

01:43:30.000 You're crazy. 0.99

01:43:32.000 But no, that is what it is. 1.00

01:43:34.000 Yeah.

01:43:34.000 Well, it's all real.

01:43:35.000 Yes.

01:43:36.000 Anything you experience, you can't dismiss it.

01:43:39.000 You can't say it's not real.

01:43:40.000 Right.

01:43:41.000 It's just not necessarily the absolute reality, and I don't know if there is an absolute reality.

01:43:46.000 I agree with you, and I think that's also one of the transformative parts of the psychedelic experience, that the experience itself is transformative because you're experiencing it.

01:43:55.000 It doesn't matter if it's not real.

01:43:58.000 What does that mean?

01:44:00.000 It means nothing.

01:44:01.000 It means nothing, not real.

01:44:04.000 Dualistic delusions.

01:44:06.000 None of it's real.

01:44:08.000 It's all real.

01:44:09.000 So established. 0.98

01:44:10.000 Established fact that when you get to the lowest measurable portion of reality, when you get to subatomic particles, it's fucking magic. 0.98

01:44:20.000 Okay? 0.90

01:44:21.000 So let's go from there.

01:44:22.000 And then let's look at, well, it's all in your imagination.

01:44:25.000 Well, let's look at what that means.

01:44:27.000 Because everything you see on this planet that a human being has made has somehow or another popped out of the imagination.

01:44:35.000 The imagination is a factory for televisions and the internet and airplanes.

01:44:40.000 Right.

01:44:40.000 And condoms and eyeglasses and laptops.

01:44:44.000 I mean, the imagination is a motherfucker. 0.99

01:44:47.000 And we have this idea that the imagination is this frivolous thing. 0.99

01:44:50.000 Oh, Billy just sits in the field and imagines what the world could be.

01:44:55.000 How about you dig a ditch, Billy?

01:44:57.000 How about you go to work, Billy?

01:44:58.000 Hammer some nails and be a man. 0.99

01:45:00.000 Pull yourself up by your bootstraps and stop crying because you're freaking out about the fact that everything's air.

01:45:06.000 Everything's particles and it's all...

01:45:08.000 No, the whole thing...

01:45:09.000 Or you sit in a field and, you know, you take LSD and you're Steve Jobs and you have all these fantasies, except then you actually make it happen.

01:45:18.000 You create the Apple computer or whatever.

01:45:21.000 And that was a psychedelic vision and was at the time and remains so.

01:45:25.000 And, you know, this thing here, I mean, this is the little psychedelic toy of the future.

01:45:31.000 You know, it's in my hand that...

01:45:33.000 It exists.

01:45:34.000 When you ask it questions, and it goes online, and it gives you the answers to the entire volume of human understanding on that subject, the consensus.

01:45:44.000 This is, you know, like you were just explaining what the chemical definition of silicin is, or the description of it.

01:45:51.000 You can find that out like that.

01:45:53.000 I had to go to you.

01:45:54.000 You're an expert.

01:45:55.000 You came to me with your education.

01:45:57.000 You explained it to me.

01:45:59.000 But anyone can do that with their phone!

01:46:03.000 Just tapped into the database.

01:46:05.000 Right.

01:46:06.000 Yeah, so that's a threshold we've crossed in the last...

01:46:20.000 I think we're good to go.

01:46:42.000 I mean, they don't all have smartphones, but they got some kind of a cell phone.

01:46:47.000 So they are tapped into this database, and that's making...

01:46:52.000 A big difference in the way that, you know, formerly disenfranchised populations interact.

01:47:00.000 I mean, you know, you're a fish farmer and you have some fish to sell.

01:47:05.000 You can go on your cell phone and say, oh, well, you know, if I go to this village here, I'll get a better price for that.

01:47:10.000 A trivial thing, but in fact that decision affects commerce on a global scale if enough people are tapped into that.

01:47:22.000 Your brother was obsessed with December 21st, 2012 being some sort of a transformative moment in our history.

01:47:29.000 And a lot of people were, me included.

01:47:32.000 I guess we can put that one to rest.

01:47:34.000 I guess we can, but can we?

01:47:36.000 That's one of the things that I've been thinking of.

01:47:38.000 Yes, as a specific day.

01:47:40.000 But if you really look at...

01:47:43.000 The tipping point of technology and our connectivity.

01:47:49.000 That's kind of where, whether it's 2008 or 2012, when you're looking at a thousand years from now, when they talk about the Renaissance, when they talk about whatever great periods of human history, very gigantic periods of change.

01:48:07.000 This is going to be one of the biggest ever.

01:48:09.000 And it really will boil down to these decades or at least these few years.

01:48:16.000 So his error, I thought, I was kind of a critic of the time wave for exactly this.

01:48:23.000 For folks who don't know, explain what that means.

01:48:25.000 Well, his idea that he created a mathematical model based on the I Ching that he claimed...

01:48:34.000 I mean, he postulated that time had a structure and time had an end, or at least history had an end, and that that end was December 21, 2012. And there's linkages to the Mayan calendar, which...

01:48:53.000 It was a mistake to link it to a particular day, I think.

01:48:58.000 That's not the way that novelty—the idea was that this wave described the way that novelty ingressed into the continuum.

01:49:06.000 Well, I think that novelty ingresses in the continuum.

01:49:10.000 I mean, every day there's something new under the sun.

01:49:13.000 There's something that never happened before.

01:49:15.000 In the history of the universe, it happens.

01:49:17.000 But it doesn't explode into the continuum.

01:49:20.000 It's more like it seeps into the continuum.

01:49:23.000 But change does happen.

01:49:25.000 And we're going through a period of tremendous change, but it's not linked to a particular day.

01:49:34.000 He was wrong as far as the particulars were concerned.

01:49:37.000 It wasn't December 21st, 2012. But he was totally right in terms of the idea that novelty does increase and it has increased and it's increasing and it's accelerating and all you have to do is look around.

01:49:56.000 And he was clearly right.

01:49:58.000 I mean, if you look at where we are now, even from where we were now, 10 years ago and even 20 years – can any of us even remember what it was like 20 years ago?

01:50:07.000 I mean the world has completely transformed.

01:50:10.000 So he was correct in that sense that things are changing.

01:50:18.000 Well, maybe in just putting a date to it and giving people something to focus on, he made the idea more tangible for some.

01:50:26.000 It made it more tangible, but I think it wasn't – I think it was – Not necessarily a good strategy because people were giving in to the temptation of focusing on that date.

01:50:41.000 And it was either on that date, either everything's going to collapse or we'll cross the threshold and everything will be great.

01:50:49.000 And it was kind of a, you know, consciousness will be transformed and we'll be in this golden state.

01:50:53.000 And I thought it was kind of a, for many people, it was an excuse for not Taking responsibility.

01:51:01.000 I mean, and just all we have to do is wait and it'll all work out.

01:51:07.000 No, you know, that's not taking responsibility.

01:51:10.000 We've got to get cracking now.

01:51:12.000 We can't wait.

01:51:13.000 We can't wait.

01:51:14.000 So now that it didn't happen.

01:51:16.000 So the message is the same.

01:51:18.000 We've got to get cracking.

01:51:20.000 Yeah.

01:51:20.000 And we can relax.

01:51:22.000 Yeah.

01:51:22.000 Okay.

01:51:23.000 The aliens didn't land.

01:51:25.000 No wormholes appeared before our eyes.

01:51:27.000 Yeah.

01:51:28.000 None of that happened.

01:51:29.000 But it doesn't mean that things aren't happening.

01:51:34.000 We need to make haste carefully.

01:51:35.000 Things that make change, I think, happen quietly.

01:51:39.000 They're not noticed.

01:51:41.000 They're not tremendous—with obvious exceptions, like global asteroid impact.

01:51:48.000 I mean, hey, that's abrupt, and it's transforming, no doubt, but that only happens once every few million years.

01:51:56.000 Events normally don't explode into history that way.

01:51:59.000 I mean Terence used to talk about the first explosion of the atomic bomb.

01:52:07.000 Well, that was an abrupt event but not really.

01:52:10.000 I mean when did the actual novelty – Was it when Einstein developed the equations that described nuclear fusion, or was it the fission rather, or was it the point where, you know, we achieved the first sustained nuclear reaction?

01:52:28.000 I mean, these were not things that anybody noticed at the time, but those were the transformative events that made it possible to, a couple decades later, drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima.

01:52:41.000 And that's the one that got the headlines, but that wasn't really the roots of the novelty, if you know what I'm saying.

01:52:47.000 No, I totally know what you're saying.

01:52:48.000 And it seems that they all pile on to each other as well.

01:52:51.000 They pile on to each other, and they're cumulative.

01:52:53.000 Exactly.

01:52:54.000 And we haven't even started, most likely.

01:52:58.000 No, we haven't started.

01:52:59.000 Which is why the concept of an alien invasion seems so ridiculous to us based on our current capabilities.

01:53:06.000 But so inevitable when you think about the fact that we got robots wandering around on Mars right now as we speak.

01:53:12.000 I mean, what would we think we're gonna do?

01:53:16.000 I mean, what we do, the most spectacular thing we do, we have two things we do. 0.97

01:53:20.000 We blow shit up and we explore space. 0.96

01:53:24.000 Those are the two things that gather the most attention. 0.99

01:53:26.000 Right.

01:53:27.000 You know, we can blow up a city or we can send a robot to wander around on Mars and send back videos. 1.00

01:53:33.000 And you're like, holy shit. 0.97

01:53:35.000 Those are the two, you know, like very distinctly different, but... 0.97

01:53:41.000 But those exemplify the limits of our power.

01:53:44.000 Yeah, we have the power to completely, you know, disrupt the whole shooting match and just it all turns into radioactive slag or we escape some way.

01:53:55.000 And I think, you know, I think it's wonderful that we can send robots to Mars and all this, but space is so vast...

01:54:04.000 It's never really going to become accessible to us unless we can figure out this hyper-light thing.

01:54:11.000 And I don't know if it's traveling faster than light or figuring out how to open up a portal.

01:54:18.000 I mean, this idea that there's Newtonian space separated by these vast distances, I don't buy it.

01:54:25.000 I think there's a way to Get from one place to another without going through, you know, hyperspace is a real thing.

01:54:36.000 Well, it might get down to...

01:54:37.000 We need to learn how to navigate it.

01:54:39.000 It might get down to we just have to stop being carbon-based life forms.

01:54:44.000 That might be real space travel.

01:54:46.000 Yeah, right, right.

01:54:47.000 It may end up that way, too.

01:54:48.000 When you look at the possibility that dimethyltryptamine and similar psychedelics are a gateway to some other...

01:54:59.000 Yeah.

01:55:21.000 Before, that's something that you could pass off to other folks that haven't experienced that and have them accept it.

01:55:26.000 And is there a bridge to sort of getting them to consider these ideas?

01:55:35.000 Well, I really, I don't know.

01:55:37.000 I mean, the bridge, the most convincing thing is, you know, here's the pipe.

01:55:42.000 Smoke the pipe.

01:55:43.000 You don't need me to tell you.

01:55:45.000 As you mentioned before, and it's quite true, one of the beautiful things about psychedelics is you don't have to have faith.

01:55:53.000 All you have to have is courage.

01:55:54.000 You know, you have to have enough courage to sit down and put that pipe to your lips.

01:55:59.000 And, you know, we can get beyond this conversation very quickly.

01:56:05.000 Then we can have the real conversation about what does all that mean?

01:56:09.000 What happened and what is the real, what happened? 0.91

01:56:13.000 Are we, you know, are you tapping into some External, again, these ridiculous words that are dualistic.

01:56:24.000 But are you tapping into some dimension that is not part of you?

01:56:30.000 Or are you looking at a certain neurochemical brain state that doesn't go beyond that?

01:56:41.000 And then it's like we can fall back on what we were saying.

01:56:44.000 Everything you experience is a neurochemical brain state, right?

01:56:48.000 Right.

01:56:48.000 That's what we are.

01:56:50.000 That's what our brain does.

01:56:54.000 Do you define it?

01:56:56.000 Do you define it yourself?

01:56:57.000 Like when you do it, what do you think is happening?

01:56:59.000 DMT? Yes.

01:57:01.000 Which is the most profound one.

01:57:04.000 I think, well...

01:57:08.000 You know, the problem with psychedelics, one of the problems that we experience with psychedelics is they're essentially unlanguageable.

01:57:19.000 They're beyond language.

01:57:20.000 And you take DMT or something like it that has such a profound impact, I mean, you probably noticed it in yourself.

01:57:29.000 You're not even down from the experience before you're trying to box it into some kind of a linguistic box that's, you know, and you're reaching out and you're babbling and you say, that's it, that's it, or my God, my God, or, you know,

01:57:44.000 but you're trying to put it into some kind of a linguistic box because it's incomprehensible by nature.

01:57:51.000 It's incomprehensible.

01:57:52.000 It's like trying to describe what God looks like.

01:57:55.000 It is, by definition, undescribable.

01:57:59.000 But our brain wants to conceptualize things.

01:58:03.000 So whatever model you create of what it is, that's not it.

01:58:09.000 That's not the thing.

01:58:10.000 It's not what you experienced.

01:58:11.000 It's a memory of what you experienced.

01:58:16.000 And I don't know how you get around that.

01:58:24.000 I think that...

01:58:30.000 Well, I don't know.

01:58:31.000 It seems just like even exploring the concept itself is almost impossible without having the experience.

01:58:36.000 It's almost impossible.

01:58:37.000 I mean, so you're asking me to supply a linguistic description with the caveat that any...

01:58:47.000 Linguistic description is going to be inadequate.

01:58:50.000 I would say a lot of what my impressions of DMT are, the most profound experiences are, it strips away.

01:58:58.000 You get to see the raw data of experience.

01:59:04.000 In the unprocessed form.

01:59:06.000 You know how we were talking about how the brain takes experience and puts it all together into some kind of more or less comprehensible model and extrudes it out as your reality,

01:59:22.000 your movie, the movie that your producer, director and star of.

01:59:27.000 And it does that.

01:59:28.000 DMT gives you a chance to kind of arrest that process And again, as I said, step back from it and look at the raw data, look at the circuitry underneath, free of interpretation, and say, oh, okay,

01:59:44.000 this is the machinery, this is the machinery that's generating reality.

01:59:50.000 But again, by even saying that, I don't do it justice.

01:59:53.000 I mean it's slippery.

01:59:55.000 Obviously it's a slippery concept.

01:59:57.000 Trevor Burrus Intensely.

01:59:58.000 Intensely.

01:59:58.000 And I've always wondered like what is the best – if there is a way to describe it to someone who hasn't experienced it.

02:00:05.000 I don't think there is.

02:00:05.000 I think there is.

02:00:06.000 And even to those of us who have experienced it, you can't describe it.

02:00:12.000 After my experience, I felt like I'd been tricked.

02:00:15.000 Like, that's not anything like Terrence McKenna or Dennis McKenna described it.

02:00:19.000 What was your experience like?

02:00:21.000 No self-transforming machine elves?

02:00:24.000 Well, I'm thinking of my first mushroom experience.

02:00:27.000 My first DMT experience was, I mean, it sounds trivial, but it was sort of like some sort of gingerbread or Play-Doh that was alive and talking to me.

02:00:39.000 And just sort of one aspect of the Godhead.

02:00:45.000 Gingerbread or Play-Doh?

02:00:47.000 It was sort of...

02:00:48.000 Like, self-transforming gingerbread people. 0.95

02:00:51.000 I guess, in a way, it didn't look like an elf, but it kind of had that aspect.

02:00:56.000 It certainly felt alive, like it had been waiting for me.

02:01:00.000 Yeah, that's the weird one.

02:01:02.000 And it was happy to see me.

02:01:03.000 Yeah, the weird one is the friendliness of it.

02:01:07.000 But I felt dead.

02:01:08.000 That was my overwhelming feeling, was, oh no, I've really done it.

02:01:12.000 But in the back of my mind, I knew that I was coming back.

02:01:14.000 I was still...

02:01:16.000 Sitting in my chair.

02:01:18.000 And before I knew it, it was over.

02:01:20.000 Doug Stanhope, who's a good friend of mine, he's a stand-up comedian, did DMT with me.

02:01:25.000 The first time he ever did it, I had him over my house.

02:01:27.000 And he went into convulsions, which I've never seen before.

02:01:31.000 And it was 5-MeO.

02:01:33.000 And he started moaning and foaming at the mouth.

02:01:39.000 Like drool was coming out of his mouth, and he was going... 1.00

02:01:43.000 And I was thinking, can you die from this shit? 1.00

02:01:46.000 I never heard of anybody die. 1.00

02:01:47.000 Fuck, did I just kill my friend? 1.00

02:01:49.000 Damn, how am I going to explain this? 1.00

02:01:52.000 And I've never seen anybody have that experience before or since. 0.98

02:01:58.000 And it was weird.

02:02:00.000 Scary.

02:02:00.000 He was moaning.

02:02:01.000 It was a big dose.

02:02:02.000 He took a big dose.

02:02:04.000 And when he came back, just filled with descriptions that were inadequate, which we all are.

02:02:11.000 Right.

02:02:12.000 5-methoxy is even trickier than DMT. I don't know.

02:02:18.000 I've had very limited experience with 5-methoxy because it's too much.

02:02:25.000 Yeah, I didn't think I was coming back.

02:02:29.000 That's my thought.

02:02:30.000 Maybe that's exactly the one we should be looking into.

02:02:35.000 But it has more issues with toxicity and all that.

02:02:41.000 But it definitely puts you in this place.

02:02:45.000 You know James Oroch's book, Tryptamine Palace?

02:02:50.000 No.

02:02:51.000 Oh, you might want to get him on this show.

02:02:53.000 Tryptamine Palace, James Oroch.

02:02:56.000 How do you spell it?

02:02:57.000 O-R-O-C, I believe. 0.94

02:03:03.000 Phymethoxy DMT. This is all about phymethoxy DMT. That's his whole book?

02:03:08.000 Yeah.

02:03:08.000 And he says, you think DMT is something, phymethoxy is where it's really at.

02:03:14.000 And I can't dispute that because, frankly, it scares the shit out of him.

02:03:20.000 Yeah.

02:03:21.000 It was different for me because it didn't give me the sort of comfort that DMT did, that it was sort of talking to me and communicating with me.

02:03:31.000 It was completely absent of any context.

02:03:34.000 It was impossible to...

02:03:35.000 Exactly.

02:03:36.000 That's what it was.

02:03:37.000 There were no friendly elfin... 1.00

02:03:39.000 No gingerbread people, no elf machines, no nothing like that.

02:03:43.000 It was like you were...

02:03:45.000 My apprehension was that I was part of this Oort cloud of souls.

02:03:52.000 I was part of this...

02:03:53.000 Somewhere, somewhere, there's a place where all conscious entities arose from and go back to, and I was in the center of this galactic cloud of...

02:04:07.000 I mean, I sort of had a dim awareness of my existence as a separate entity, but mostly I was part of this soul cloud and is the best I can describe it.

02:04:21.000 And by the time I came back, that was all completely faded as it tended to.

02:04:31.000 That was...

02:04:33.000 That was 20 years ago that I had that experience, and it still resonated with me.

02:04:39.000 I haven't done it since.

02:04:40.000 Yeah, I've only had it a few times, and I didn't want to go back again.

02:04:44.000 I was like, I got it.

02:04:46.000 I got that.

02:04:47.000 Whereas the NN dimethyltryptamine was different every time, and it seemed like it was a communication, like something was talking to me, like there was a lot going on.

02:04:57.000 The visual aspect of it was way more compelling.

02:05:00.000 There's very little visual aspect with 5-methoxy.

02:05:03.000 It was just white.

02:05:05.000 It felt like I didn't have a consciousness anymore.

02:05:10.000 It's the only thing that I've ever done that seemed to eliminate consciousness.

02:05:13.000 It didn't matter.

02:05:15.000 The vaguely aware, the dully aware of the fact that you exist at all was one of the more terrifying aspects of it.

02:05:22.000 It's like, oh, this is probably what happens when you die.

02:05:25.000 When you die, you probably go into this thing and become whatever.

02:05:29.000 Part of this cloud.

02:05:31.000 Part of this community of oversouls, which is every conscious being that ever existed anywhere in the universe. 1.00

02:05:38.000 It also gave me the most tangible feeling of there not being an up and there not being a down.

02:05:44.000 There's no left, there's no right, there's the whole thing.

02:05:47.000 And then you're part of the whole thing and it just goes...

02:05:52.000 Everywhere.

02:05:53.000 You're not in the middle.

02:05:54.000 You're not in the center.

02:05:55.000 You're not in the left.

02:05:56.000 You're not to the right.

02:05:57.000 It's just the whole thing.

02:06:00.000 It's an illusion.

02:06:01.000 That was the weird aspect of the planets were an illusion.

02:06:06.000 Everything's in the wind.

02:06:07.000 All of it.

02:06:08.000 Nonsense.

02:06:09.000 When you get down to the lowest thing, you're a part of the whole soup.

02:06:13.000 Yep.

02:06:14.000 Yep. 1.00

02:06:15.000 Fuck that drug. 1.00

02:06:16.000 He refers to it as the zero energy point field. 1.00

02:06:21.000 Oh, yeah.

02:06:22.000 Which, yeah, I mean, that's definitely worth putting on your map. 0.89

02:06:28.000 And if you're brave enough or foolish enough, it's probably worth exploring. 1.00

02:06:33.000 But I'm too old for that shit. 1.00

02:06:37.000 I can't. 1.00

02:06:38.000 Not that it's, you know, I mean...

02:06:43.000 My friend Duncan took it, and he took a huge dose because he didn't believe it was any—he had never done any DMT before, and he had done acid.

02:06:49.000 And I had never done acid before, and I was telling him about DMT. He's like, pfft, you've never even done acid.

02:06:54.000 So he takes DMT in a big dose, and he calls me up. 1.00

02:06:58.000 He's like, dude, what the fuck? 1.00

02:07:00.000 Fuck, man! 1.00

02:07:01.000 I'm like, I told you. 1.00

02:07:02.000 Like, no, you didn't tell me.

02:07:03.000 You kind of told me, but I didn't listen.

02:07:05.000 Right. 1.00

02:07:06.000 Holy shit. 1.00

02:07:07.000 Like, he was convinced that he died. 1.00

02:07:09.000 He was a believer at that point.

02:07:11.000 Oh, boy.

02:07:12.000 Yeah.

02:07:12.000 Was he ever.

02:07:13.000 Yeah.

02:07:14.000 Yeah, it was, you know, it's...

02:07:17.000 Very disturbing, but again, impossible to ignore transcendent experience.

02:07:21.000 Yeah, it is.

02:07:22.000 I think Salvia Divinorum can take a person to a similar space.

02:07:27.000 Sort of, you feel that you're no longer a point of consciousness, except it doesn't feel like a cloud.

02:07:34.000 It feels like a Mexican dance party or something.

02:07:36.000 There's like geometric things going on.

02:07:39.000 That's a weird one, isn't it?

02:07:40.000 Because it slipped through.

02:07:43.000 Salvia slipped through, and it took a while before people realized it slipped through.

02:07:47.000 You mean legally speaking?

02:07:49.000 It slipped through because it's its own best insurance against abuse.

02:07:54.000 Most people are like, once is enough, never again, dude.

02:07:59.000 It's one of these ones, like 5-methoxy.

02:08:02.000 Some people do seem to be fascinated by it, and they keep going back to it.

02:08:09.000 But most people...

02:08:12.000 I find it very disturbing and not particularly enjoyable and actually just bizarro.

02:08:21.000 But again, these are areas of consciousness.

02:08:24.000 These pharmacological tools are exploratory probes into these realms of consciousness.

02:08:34.000 And just because you're familiar with the psychedelic experience, which is mainly the tryptamine-mediated serotonin dimension, there are all those other dimensions out there, and there are aspects of consciousness, too.

02:08:47.000 Salvia divinorin happens to be the kappa-opiate.

02:08:51.000 It's a kappa-opiate ligand.

02:08:53.000 It's very selective for...

02:08:55.000 We don't think of opiates as...

02:08:59.000 Going to those places, you know, heroin, morphine, those sorts of things, they're euphoric, gentle, you know, almost sedated states of mind.

02:09:08.000 Kappa opiate, which is, you know, one of the three opiate receptors that happens to be the one that salvia divinora exists, it's a whole other ballgame, you know.

02:09:18.000 I mean, it's not...

02:09:22.000 Certainly not anything that anyone would seek out.

02:09:25.000 You know, certainly not addictive.

02:09:27.000 So that realm of consciousness is mediated by that whole network.

02:09:33.000 If you look at the turas, the nightshades, the anticholinergics, that's working on acetylcholine.

02:09:41.000 They're acetylcholine blockers.

02:09:43.000 So that's a whole other neurotransmitter system.

02:09:46.000 And if you look into...

02:09:49.000 You know, they have a long history of use, obviously, and they seem to be – if you look into the use of Toei in South America, Toei Bregmanzia, or you look at Datura and other nightshades in Europe,

02:10:06.000 this is the – Realm of wraiths and ghosts and that sort of thing.

02:10:14.000 Detura is a very interesting one, too, because of the reality-dissolving properties of it, where people think that they're somewhere that they're not, and they have huge issues with memory.

02:10:25.000 Do you think that's the disruption of acetylcholine?

02:10:28.000 Well, yeah, it does disrupt memory.

02:10:31.000 We know that acetylcholine has a lot to do with the entrainment of memory, and Detura...

02:10:37.000 Detura disrupts that, so it's hard to remember the state, which is probably a good thing because the states are really bizarre.

02:10:47.000 I tell people, Detura is not a psychedelic, but it's a true hallucinogen.

02:10:57.000 Right.

02:11:18.000 You don't know if they're there or not.

02:11:21.000 If I could have a hallucination, I'm sitting across from you talking, and you seem as real and solid as you do now.

02:11:32.000 But you're not there.

02:11:34.000 I'm having a conversation with you.

02:11:36.000 And then you sort of just fade away like kind of a wraith. 1.00

02:11:41.000 And I'm like, what the fuck? 1.00

02:11:43.000 Where did you go? 1.00

02:11:44.000 Is that what happened to you?

02:11:46.000 Yeah, that's what happens to people on detour.

02:11:47.000 What happened to you when you did it?

02:11:50.000 That's what happened.

02:11:51.000 You were talking to someone, they literally didn't exist.

02:11:53.000 Yeah, yeah.

02:11:54.000 Well, I took detour.

02:11:56.000 I describe this in my book, actually.

02:11:58.000 I have a whole chapter of it.

02:11:59.000 A friend of mine and I took detour before.

02:12:03.000 When we were 16, not even knowing what it was.

02:12:06.000 I mean, this is how clueless we were at the time.

02:12:09.000 I actually thought it was a kind of morning glory.

02:12:14.000 I had had LSD once in my life, and we took these Detura, and I thought it was a different species of morning glory.

02:12:20.000 So all this stuff began to happen, and I thought, oh, this is what a bad acid trip is like.

02:12:26.000 And no, it's not what a bad acid trip is like.

02:12:30.000 It's what a totally typical Datura trip is like.

02:12:34.000 And it's characteristic that you see entities, you see things that aren't there.

02:12:42.000 And it was quite anxiety-provoking.

02:12:47.000 And my friend, I was in my bedroom.

02:12:51.000 I managed to...

02:12:53.000 You know, you have to read the chapter.

02:12:54.000 But I finally got to my bedroom.

02:12:56.000 I barricaded myself in my bedroom.

02:12:58.000 My mother was completely freaked out, you know, as to what was going on.

02:13:02.000 I just said, Mom, you know, I'll be out in 12 hours.

02:13:07.000 It's okay.

02:13:08.000 Don't worry.

02:13:10.000 How old were you?

02:13:12.000 Sixteen.

02:13:12.000 Oh, that's awesome.

02:13:14.000 And so I'm in the bedroom, and one of the weird things, I guess people who take detour should be forewarned, one of the things it does is dilate your eyes, right?

02:13:23.000 I mean, it's used medically to dilate your eyes.

02:13:27.000 Atropine is what they put in your eyes to do an eye exam.

02:13:30.000 What that means is your eyes are dilated, so you can't see the Very well.

02:13:36.000 And so any modeled surface, anything with a texture, like a tablecloth or wallpaper, anything you look at, starts to swarm.

02:13:47.000 And the next thing you know, there are bugs everywhere.

02:13:52.000 For me, so it was like the bug experience.

02:13:55.000 There were insects.

02:13:56.000 All surfaces were covered with these swarming...

02:14:00.000 You know, things which were the visual distortions of not being able to focus on anything.

02:14:05.000 But I was totally freaked out by this.

02:14:08.000 And so my friends or images of my friends kept appearing at the edge of my bed, at the end of my bed.

02:14:16.000 And they would appear and I would say, help me, help me, get me out of here.

02:14:21.000 I need, you know, and they would sort of just look at me and like, you know, you poor sap.

02:14:27.000 Yeah.

02:14:28.000 Shake their head and then just fade away.

02:14:31.000 That's awesome.

02:14:33.000 It's fascinating that it has something to do with acetylcholine.

02:14:37.000 Have you ever experimented with taking acetylcholine before you go to bed?

02:14:41.000 I haven't.

02:14:42.000 It gives you the most amazing lucid dreams.

02:14:45.000 Amazing dreams.

02:14:46.000 I'm not surprised.

02:14:47.000 Yeah, fascinating, what I call durable lucid dreams.

02:14:51.000 I'm not a lucid dream...

02:14:53.000 I'm not disciplined in it.

02:14:56.000 I've never studied it.

02:14:57.000 I don't practice it.

02:14:59.000 Apparently there's techniques that you can learn how to successfully lucid dream on the natch, as it were.

02:15:06.000 But if you take acetylcholine before you go to bed, like a couple hours before you go to bed, you have lucid dreams whether you like it or not.

02:15:13.000 It seems like your dreams are more durable.

02:15:17.000 Me personally, when I'm aware of my dreams normally, they fade away.

02:15:21.000 Like, oh, I'm dreaming, and then it's gone.

02:15:22.000 I wake up.

02:15:23.000 So you're just boosting what's a natural process because when you go to sleep, your brain becomes flooded with acetylcholine, right?

02:15:32.000 And these deturus, these tropane alkaloids, what they do is block...

02:15:38.000 Acetylcholine.

02:15:38.000 They block the receptors.

02:15:40.000 So they're acetylcholine.

02:15:42.000 The technical term is anticholinergic.

02:15:45.000 They block acetylcholine from binding to its receptor.

02:15:49.000 So that's the basis of the altered state of consciousness.

02:15:53.000 And interestingly enough, the detourous state of mind resembles It resembles profound sleep deprivation.

02:16:04.000 If you keep yourself awake for five days, you will have experiences and hallucinations that are almost indistinguishable from a state of deter intoxication.

02:16:18.000 That's bizarre.

02:16:19.000 I don't recommend it, by the way.

02:16:21.000 I mean, don't do deter.

02:16:23.000 Or if you do deter, have somebody there who's looking after you because you really can't Distinguish reality and you do silly things.

02:16:32.000 You know, I had a friend who took Deturo one time and he spent the whole time dismantling his motorcycle engine on his kitchen floor, taking it apart and cleaning it and putting it back together.

02:16:48.000 He didn't own a motorcycle.

02:16:54.000 So what was that about?

02:16:56.000 Oh my god.

02:16:58.000 What if he learned how to do it, though?

02:17:00.000 What if he gave a motorcycle engine and was like, oh, I've done this, and then he starts doing it all together correctly?

02:17:04.000 He told them to be able to do it.

02:17:05.000 Wow.

02:17:07.000 Bizarre.

02:17:07.000 That would be uber bizarre.

02:17:09.000 What is that?

02:17:10.000 There's that drug that they use for air sickness.

02:17:16.000 Same one.

02:17:18.000 Scopolamine.

02:17:18.000 Yes.

02:17:19.000 That's the one.

02:17:20.000 That's the same thing as Detura.

02:17:22.000 That's the main psychoactive alkaloid in Detura and Belladonna.

02:17:27.000 And this is the one that does it.

02:17:29.000 There are other alkaloids, but it's primarily scopolamine.

02:17:33.000 And they used to use, medically, they used to use scopolamine because it's for childbirth.

02:17:39.000 Back in the days of barbarism, when they thought women, in order to give birth, had to be put in a... 1.00

02:18:00.000 How does nicotine fit in?

02:18:07.000 Because one of my most intense lucid dreaming experiences was with a nicotine patch.

02:18:12.000 Nicotine has the opposite effect to the tropanes.

02:18:16.000 Nicotine is what's...

02:18:17.000 The tropanes are what's called acetylcholine antagonists.

02:18:22.000 Nicotine is an agonist, so it has an acetylcholine-like effect, which is why when you smoke, you get this sort of cognitive activation.

02:18:34.000 It's great to settle down and focus your attention on a task.

02:18:40.000 It activates cognition.

02:18:42.000 Wow.

02:18:44.000 A lot of the research now on Alzheimer's and other dementias are finding things that either have this cholinergic agonist effect, like nicotine, or they block acetylcholine from being broken down.

02:19:00.000 There are acetylcholine esterase inhibitors.

02:19:03.000 Acetylcholine esterase is the enzyme that breaks down acetylcholine.

02:19:09.000 I don't smoke cigarettes, but I found it absolutely fascinating in reading Stephen King's book on writing, where he talked about when he stopped smoking cigarettes, it really affected his writing process.

02:19:20.000 Absolutely.

02:19:21.000 I'm not surprised at all.

02:19:22.000 It just didn't really fire up the way it used to.

02:19:26.000 That's right.

02:19:28.000 So now we've, again, got off the track and we're off in the jungles of pharmacology.

02:19:34.000 Well, it's fascinating.

02:19:35.000 No, I mean, it's not off track at all.

02:19:37.000 It's all interesting because it's all in relationship to what we understand currently about...

02:19:44.000 Yeah.

02:20:01.000 Part of it is education.

02:20:03.000 It's developing a model of self-regulation that can improve the safety of people that want to use these traditional plants.

02:20:11.000 But one thing I want to be clear about is that we're ourselves not setting a standard per se.

02:20:17.000 We're engaging people in dialogue.

02:20:19.000 We're kind of setting the table for indigenous groups and people that run retreat centers.

02:20:26.000 People that are selling ayahuasca online, etc.

02:20:28.000 All the people that are involved in the kind of value chain of ayahuasca to come together and determine, well, what does sustainability at the site level look like, like ecotourism?

02:20:39.000 How are you giving back to the community, to the biodiversity of the place where you have your site?

02:20:44.000 How are you making sure the people in the ceremony are safe, that they're screened psychologically or for heart conditions, they're not taking antidepressants, they have People babysitting or watching so people don't wander off into the jungle.

02:20:57.000 The antidepressants one is an interesting one.

02:20:59.000 What's the issue with that?

02:21:01.000 Well, the issue with antidepressants and ayahuasca is because ayahuasca involves MAO inhibitors, right?

02:21:12.000 And so It prevents the breakdown of DMT and so there's a lot of DMT and it's a serotonergic agonist and so are the antidepressants.

02:21:30.000 So you are essentially piling on One serotonergic agonist on another because you're inhibiting the breakdown process.

02:21:38.000 MAO is involved in breaking down both DMT and serotonin.

02:21:43.000 So safety-wise, the issue is that it could lead to what's called a serotonin syndrome.

02:21:50.000 And the serotonin syndrome is something that happens when you've got too much serotonin, too much...

02:21:58.000 Pushing the serotonin button a little bit too hard and it could lead to hyperthermia and cardiac irregularities and ultimately death if it's really bad.

02:22:10.000 You want to avoid the serotonin syndrome if possible.

02:22:13.000 That's fascinating because that's also an issue that people have if they take SSRIs and they want to consume tryptophan or 5-HTP. Exactly, exactly.

02:22:24.000 That's also one way to do it.

02:22:26.000 And in some ways, the psychedelic experience itself is kind of skirting this.

02:22:32.000 I mean, you're pushing the serotonin button, right?

02:22:35.000 Right.

02:22:37.000 Cases with psychedelic, you haven't inactivated the enzymatic breaks that are metabolizing this stuff.

02:22:46.000 So it's not an issue.

02:22:48.000 With ayahuasca, it's really only an issue if you're taking SSRIs or if you're taking MAO inhibitors, which most people, they're not used clinically anymore.

02:23:01.000 There's a whole older generation of antidepressants that are MAO inhibitors.

02:23:06.000 You shouldn't combine those with ayahuasca and you shouldn't combine SSRIs with ayahuasca.

02:23:15.000 I mean it may be a theoretical hazard.

02:23:17.000 I haven't seen a lot of reports of serotonin syndrome happening with ayahuasca.

02:23:26.000 So it's a theoretical hazard.

02:23:28.000 I'm sure there are people taking serotonin uptake inhibitors that are taking ayahuasca and There's no problem, but they're probably taking lower doses.

02:23:38.000 It's just a good idea to get off those things before you take ayahuasca.

02:23:45.000 Is it a good idea to get off those things, period?

02:23:47.000 Yeah.

02:23:48.000 It is if you can.

02:23:50.000 Not for everybody.

02:23:51.000 They really help some people.

02:23:53.000 But a lot of times, you know, antidepressants are over-prescribed and overused for too many things.

02:24:02.000 They don't really help people get to the root of their problems.

02:24:06.000 They just kind of band-aid it over and you feel sort of normal.

02:24:11.000 And you can be a productive citizen and you don't really think about things too much.

02:24:16.000 They're prescribed for PTSD, but they don't cure PTSD. They just kind of dampen it down and bury it.

02:24:26.000 They don't give you an opportunity to really look at issues and work them through.

02:24:33.000 This is why psychedelics are...

02:24:52.000 I've talked to And many, many people who said – who have been on antidepressants, they go to South America.

02:25:02.000 They take a few ayahuasca sessions.

02:25:04.000 They never have to go back to antidepressants.

02:25:07.000 Again, I mean they can get off it for good.

02:25:10.000 Many people have that experience.

02:25:13.000 That's a huge problem financially for pharmaceutical companies.

02:25:17.000 Well, you don't see them piling on.

02:25:19.000 Yeah, exactly.

02:25:20.000 Well, then you start selling ayahuasca.

02:25:25.000 Yeah.

02:25:26.000 It's not going to work that way because big pharma, they want drugs that people consume.

02:25:31.000 I think the way that – I think we're the business model.

02:25:35.000 You can't use these drugs in therapy, in a therapeutic session without intense psychotherapy.

02:25:42.000 Right.

02:25:43.000 Whether that's actual psychotherapy or shamanism or some combination of those things, these are drugs that have to be used in context.

02:25:52.000 The take two and call me in the morning model doesn't work for these.

02:25:57.000 These have to be used in a very highly controlled set and setting.

02:26:02.000 So I think where the business model comes in is you have places where people can go and get this kind of therapy.

02:26:10.000 So it shifts from The drug itself, the emphasis is on – our whole biomedical industrial complex is set up to encourage Band-Aid solutions.

02:26:23.000 You have a problem.

02:26:24.000 You go see your psychiatrist.

02:26:26.000 He has seven minutes if he's lucky to talk to you.

02:26:29.000 Here's a prescription.

02:26:30.000 Get out of here.

02:26:32.000 That's the way it works.

02:26:33.000 With psychedelics, you actually have to have a therapist who will sit down and talk with you.

02:26:38.000 This is a whole novel concept.

02:26:42.000 So I think where the business potential comes in is to have centers of therapy where you can go and get psychedelic therapy.

02:26:53.000 The emphasis is more on the setting and the services provided than the actual chemicals.

02:27:00.000 Yeah, this is possible in other countries where it's legal.

02:27:05.000 In America right now, it's a huge issue.

02:27:10.000 But Josh was talking about selling ayahuasca online.

02:27:16.000 I mean, how many people do that and what's the legality when it comes to...

02:27:21.000 The plants themselves are not necessarily illegal.

02:27:25.000 Right.

02:27:26.000 Right.

02:27:27.000 DMT is illegal.

02:27:29.000 DMT is illegal.

02:27:31.000 But DMT is found in so many plants that, you know, they can't really make all those plants illegal.

02:27:42.000 Because, you know, I mean, they can, but they're not going to be able to enforce it.

02:27:47.000 You're not going to be able to have salad.

02:27:49.000 Literally, you're not going to be able to have salad.

02:27:51.000 I mean, I'm, you know, Harkening back to what we were saying about how close DMT is to tryptophan, two steps away.

02:27:59.000 I'll bet you, I mean, I wish somebody would do this, there's no funding for this, but I'll bet you if you had sufficiently sensitive instruments, you could find DMT in all plants.

02:28:11.000 You could just start randomly selecting them out of your backyard and run them through the mass spec or whatever.

02:28:18.000 You could pick up DMT. Not in usable amounts, but it's universally just, you know, nature is drenched in DMT. Why do you think that is?

02:28:27.000 Because it's so close to tryptophan.

02:28:30.000 And it's just the compound, the tryptophan is universally distributed.

02:28:36.000 The enzymes that transform it to DMT have other cellular functions.

02:28:41.000 So they're found in all cells.

02:28:43.000 They're just part of metabolism.

02:28:45.000 And so it's just an accident of nature.

02:28:50.000 It's just the way it is.

02:28:53.000 Or it's actually maybe nature's trying to send us a little message if you want to interpret it that way.

02:29:01.000 But it's just the way it is.

02:29:03.000 Or it's just a part of the building blocks of the universe itself.

02:29:06.000 Yeah, it's just part of the building blocks.

02:29:08.000 Exactly, exactly.

02:29:09.000 And that chemical doorway to another dimension exists in virtually everything that's alive.

02:29:15.000 Uh-huh, uh-huh. 0.99

02:29:16.000 What a mindfuck that is. 0.99

02:29:17.000 Selling ayahuasca online, I don't know if people are selling ayahuasca prepared things. 0.99

02:29:29.000 I think that's irresponsible.

02:29:37.000 To sell it online.

02:29:38.000 Well, because it's a drug that needs to be taken in an appropriate setting.

02:29:44.000 It needs guidance.

02:29:46.000 So to sell it online is to...

02:29:51.000 Be guilty of that whole thing.

02:29:53.000 Take two and call me in the morning.

02:29:55.000 Go off and do this with your friends without any preparation and any real knowledge.

02:30:02.000 That's not ethical in my opinion.

02:30:06.000 That's how 5-MeO is acquired until fairly recently.

02:30:10.000 When I bought 5-MeO, I just bought it online.

02:30:13.000 It delivered me enough to get the world high.

02:30:16.000 You realize how potent it is and what a small dose you need, and if they're sending you some giant supply of it...

02:30:24.000 Well, that's an issue with all of these things and the whole designer drug thing.

02:30:30.000 There are hundreds and hundreds of these things.

02:30:34.000 So I sort of say, well, we should stick with the plants.

02:30:39.000 At least we know what the identity of.

02:30:41.000 But I think that synthetic drugs are out there.

02:30:47.000 People are going to use them.

02:30:49.000 It comes back to education.

02:30:52.000 Teach people how to use drugs, basically.

02:30:59.000 You have to teach people how to use drugs.

02:31:02.000 This is what so-called drug education hasn't quite grokked to, hasn't quite admitted.

02:31:10.000 But that is, in fact, that's real drug education, not You know, all drugs are bad, never take it.

02:31:16.000 I mean, that's absurd. 0.97

02:31:18.000 That's ridiculous. 0.94

02:31:19.000 Now, you've lived through several eras of psychedelic awareness. 0.93

02:31:23.000 You lived through the 60s.

02:31:25.000 You lived through all that craziness.

02:31:27.000 You lived through the 70s.

02:31:28.000 You lived through the clampdown.

02:31:30.000 And now you're here, which is, I think, it's safe to call this the psychedelic renaissance.

02:31:36.000 I think this is a new time.

02:31:38.000 Well, we'd like to think so.

02:31:39.000 I'm pretty positive.

02:31:41.000 Yeah.

02:31:42.000 At least it is in my reality.

02:31:44.000 The reality that I experience.

02:31:46.000 Right.

02:31:46.000 I mean, I've never in my time seen psychedelics more referenced than I see them today.

02:31:52.000 And part of it's because of the company I keep.

02:31:55.000 Part of it is because of the message that I put out and the people that I interact with because of that.

02:31:59.000 But I think also it's just a matter of the cat got out of the bag.

02:32:02.000 Yeah, the stigma is fading away.

02:32:05.000 The whole 60s baggage that psychedelics have been marginalized with for so long, that's going away and a new, more positive perception is appearing as some of these therapeutic uses are becoming...

02:32:21.000 You know, more aware in general consciousness.

02:32:24.000 Oh, PTSD can be treated with MDMA. We've got veterans out there who need that.

02:32:31.000 That's a hugely powerful message.

02:32:32.000 And if the Department of Defense is behind it, it can't be bad, right?

02:32:38.000 Yeah, I mean, isn't that kind of ironic that the need for psychedelics has arisen from the war culture that we've seen? 0.91

02:32:45.000 Yeah, it's totally ironic, but...

02:32:47.000 So strange.

02:32:48.000 There it is.

02:32:48.000 And so...

02:32:50.000 These positive messages are being heard more and more and there's less and less sort of, you know, partly because a lot of people from the 60s are dying off or whatever they don't remember.

02:33:03.000 But the knee-jerk negative message about psychedelics is not...

02:33:10.000 Yeah, they're much harder to distinguish now.

02:33:27.000 Reprehensible about that generation.

02:33:29.000 They were lazy, shiftless, do-for-nothing people that just wanted to get high and escape reality.

02:33:35.000 That paradigm...

02:33:37.000 That perception is passing.

02:33:40.000 It's all to the good.

02:33:41.000 What has it been like for you to experience these different waves?

02:33:47.000 Well...

02:33:51.000 I don't know.

02:33:52.000 I haven't really been personally impacted by this thing.

02:33:57.000 I mean, I've been where I've been all the way through, and not particularly public.

02:34:03.000 I'm much more public now about it than I have been, so maybe that's a difference.

02:34:09.000 But I don't feel that I have to be careful about talking about it in public.

02:34:16.000 I mean, I consider myself an advocate for responsible use and good science, and I'm not even saying people should even take these things.

02:34:27.000 What I'm saying is if you decide to take it, go into it with open eyes, do some preparation.

02:34:34.000 Pay attention to set and setting.

02:34:36.000 Do it in a way that if there are benefits to be had, maximize the benefits.

02:34:41.000 So approach it as a conscious exercise.

02:34:48.000 You know, and approach them with respect and intention.

02:34:54.000 These are serious things.

02:34:55.000 What do you say to someone who has zero experience in these things?

02:34:59.000 I guarantee you right now this podcast is reaching people that have no psychedelic experience whatsoever.

02:35:06.000 They don't know anyone who has had any psychedelic experience.

02:35:10.000 They don't know where to turn or where to start, but they're very intrigued and the door has been opened to them.

02:35:15.000 Okay.

02:35:15.000 Well, the first thing to do is get yourself educated about it.

02:35:19.000 You know, like, sign up for this symposium, right?

02:35:23.000 I mean, watch the online thing.

02:35:25.000 But there are many other tools.

02:35:26.000 Another group that I love to plug, and I think they're doing a marvelous work, is Arrowood.

02:35:33.000 Arrowood.org is online.

02:35:35.000 It's the best online source of information about psychoactive drugs of all kinds, not just psychedelics.

02:35:43.000 It's the go-to place on the web if you want real, solid information, not bullshit, not put out by the propagandists, put out by people whose commitment is to accurate information.

02:35:57.000 Start there.

02:35:58.000 It's a fantastic website.

02:35:59.000 Read about it.

02:36:00.000 There are trip reports, there are safety reports, the chemistry, the, you know, the entheal botany, the part of it, the shamanic traditions, it's all represented there.

02:36:13.000 That's the place to start.

02:36:14.000 And it's spelled out, too, for people.

02:36:39.000 I think that's the first thing.

02:36:40.000 And I think, again, I think this symposium conference is going to be great, but it's also exemplary of what needs to happen.

02:36:50.000 And I'm really impressed that young people, like the folks that are organizing this conference, are stepping up to the plate and saying, we want to We want to make this a part of an educational dialogue.

02:37:06.000 We want to have this happen on lots of university campuses, lots of places.

02:37:12.000 That's the thing.

02:37:13.000 We have better tools now than we've ever had for sharing information.

02:37:18.000 Take advantage of those tools.

02:37:21.000 Before, back in the 60s, 70s, you might not have had no experience with psychedelics and no No way to know.

02:37:33.000 How am I going to find out about these things?

02:37:36.000 Now it's a click of a mouse and you're there.

02:37:39.000 There's no excuse for not educating yourself.

02:37:44.000 Another very good site is icers.org, I-C-E-E-R-S. It's the International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research, and Service based in Europe.

02:37:56.000 They have a ton of information about ayahuasca and iboga, the plant-based psychedelics.

02:38:02.000 They're also a sort of incubation partner for the ESC, helping ESC get started.

02:38:07.000 Yeah, Ibogaine is another fantastic drug for dealing with addiction.

02:38:11.000 I have a good friend who had a back injury and got hooked on pain pills and had a real problem and really couldn't kick it.

02:38:18.000 Went to Mexico, did Ibogaine, became completely fascinated, Cured and absolutely fascinated by ibogaine and how is this possible that this has escaped Western medicine?

02:38:31.000 Started his own ibogaine center down there and now, you know, regularly.

02:38:36.000 I mean, he's just a different human being.

02:38:38.000 When I talk to him, he's just like so at peace and just a different guy.

02:38:42.000 He knows himself in a different way.

02:38:45.000 It breaks that physical addiction to opiates instantly.

02:38:49.000 The ESC is signing a memorandum of understanding with the Global Ibogaine Therapist Alliance to work on the safety and the sustainability of that traditional plant.

02:39:01.000 It's under extreme pressure from the growing global demand.

02:39:05.000 It's traditionally from Africa, and it takes seven years for a mature plant to be grown, and then you have to take the root out and kill the plant.

02:39:14.000 So there's a lot of work to be done.

02:39:18.000 There's a Global Ibogaine Therapist Alliance conference in Durban this May as well.

02:39:25.000 Hoping to have some big announcements come out of that on the sustainability front.

02:39:44.000 It had no place.

02:39:45.000 There were almost clinical studies approved by the FDA and then they stepped back from it because of some supposed neurotoxicity, which I don't think they ever satisfactorily demonstrated.

02:39:57.000 But that's a good example.

02:39:59.000 You know, the therapeutic community was saying, well, ibogaine is so useful for this addiction therapy that we're just not going to put up with this.

02:40:08.000 And so ibogaine is not illegal in It's illegal in the States, but it's not illegal in most of the world.

02:40:14.000 So these addiction treatment centers have blossomed all over the world.

02:40:20.000 There's Mexico, South America, even Canada.

02:40:23.000 There are treatment centers That use ibogaine to treat addiction. 0.99

02:40:27.000 And they've just said, well, you know, fuck the FDA. We're going to step outside that framework and do it because it's important to get this therapy to people. 0.75

02:40:36.000 And that's all to the good, I think.

02:40:39.000 That's a model maybe for what's going to happen with ayahuasca.

02:40:42.000 Yeah, I would hope so.

02:40:44.000 And I would like to see what's going on right now with marijuana in this country slowly start happening with ayahuasca, ibogaine, psilocybin, all these various things.

02:40:53.000 Yeah.

02:40:54.000 Do you have hope for that?

02:40:56.000 Totally.

02:40:57.000 I do.

02:40:57.000 History is on our side.

02:41:00.000 The first thing I'd tell people that are considering psychedelics is put your preconceptions aside and just look at the facts.

02:41:07.000 What would you say to someone?

02:41:08.000 Say, like, we're talking about young people.

02:41:09.000 What if a guy's 50 and, you know, maybe he's going through a rough divorce? 0.99

02:41:14.000 And, you know, it's like, man, it's fucking... 0.99

02:41:17.000 I need to reset my brain. 0.99

02:41:18.000 I need to figure this out.

02:41:19.000 But I don't know anybody.

02:41:21.000 Nobody at the office knows anything about this stuff.

02:41:26.000 Right.

02:41:27.000 Well...

02:41:29.000 Smoked a joint in college, that's about it.

02:41:31.000 Right.

02:41:31.000 I would say take it in a traditional context that you feel comfortable with.

02:41:36.000 Take it in a, if you're looking for psychological help, maybe take it at a center that focuses on that.

02:41:42.000 If you've always been attracted to shamanic experiences, then...

02:41:46.000 Suss out which centers might be best for you and read reviews of them.

02:41:51.000 And in two to three years, the ESC will have a rating system or a kind of star rating system for sites based on how sustainable they are.

02:42:00.000 Like a Yelp for psychedelics?

02:42:02.000 Not so much a Yelp.

02:42:03.000 I mean, a deeper level than a Yelp.

02:42:06.000 Yelp's pretty deep.

02:42:07.000 You can't fake it, though.

02:42:08.000 Right, you can't fake it, but it's hard for somebody going in to see what kind of an impact a center has on the local community or where they're sourcing the ayahuasca comes from.

02:42:18.000 And that's where the ESC is bringing that professional expertise to supplement what the community is doing.

02:42:26.000 And certainly we will rely on feedback from visitors.

02:42:30.000 That'll be part of the credibility and the transparency that we're building into the way of assuring the sites are sustainable and safe.

02:42:38.000 There'll be grievance mechanisms if you have a bad experience.

02:42:41.000 Hopefully in five years, that's probably an optimistic time frame, but hopefully in ten years there'll be places you can go.

02:42:50.000 And have these experiences where you don't have to leave the country.

02:42:54.000 I mean, you can already find them outside the country.

02:42:56.000 But it would be nice if there were places in the States where you could get this.

02:43:00.000 And it would transform psychiatric medicine if there was.

02:43:07.000 Which is, again, threatening to many people with a stake in how it's done now.

02:43:13.000 But I talked to so many people.

02:43:17.000 Psychiatrists and other professionals that are involved in the mental health world, they're very frustrated.

02:43:23.000 They're like, say, these people are hurting.

02:43:25.000 And the way that we're handling them is not solving the problem.

02:43:30.000 It's only making it worse.

02:43:33.000 So, you know, there needs to be a wholesale, I wouldn't say overturning, but transformation of the model.

02:43:45.000 I think that we're on the right track.

02:43:47.000 I really do.

02:43:48.000 I mean, there's a lot of people that are cynical today and they look at today's culture and they look at the toxification of our environment and the materialism and the nonsense on television.

02:43:57.000 They see it as a bad sign.

02:43:59.000 But I really feel like civilization's cramming.

02:44:03.000 I really do.

02:44:04.000 I really think we're just scrambling to...

02:44:06.000 And maybe we need something like all this nonsense that we experience on a daily basis to sort of really motivate this global awakening.

02:44:15.000 We have to consume it to the extent that we're sick of it, that it makes us sick, and then we purge.

02:44:22.000 And that's the ayahuasca model.

02:44:24.000 We, you know...

02:44:25.000 Consume so much of it that eventually you just regurgitate it all and you feel much better afterwards.

02:44:32.000 I think that's partly what we're doing to ourselves.

02:44:36.000 I think the most exciting thing too is that we have a way out.

02:44:40.000 Well, we have a way up.

02:44:42.000 Whereas, like, it's not like we're in this pit and there's no ladder. 0.99

02:44:45.000 It's like, there's a fucking ladder. 0.97

02:44:47.000 Hey, guys, there's a ladder. 0.99

02:44:49.000 We have the tools.

02:44:50.000 I mean, and they're incredibly profound and real.

02:44:53.000 You know, these aren't theoretical things.

02:44:55.000 Like, you know, we have a lot of these theoretical concepts about, like, fixing the plastic in the ocean.

02:45:01.000 Well, you know, some 19-year-old kid figured out a way that there's a...

02:45:04.000 It scoops it up, and then it converts it into something usable, and then we could use that for energy.

02:45:09.000 And the same thing is true with, like, nuclear waste.

02:45:11.000 There's some theories about how to...

02:45:13.000 But those are all...

02:45:14.000 Those are theoretical.

02:45:16.000 They may or may not be effective.

02:45:18.000 They may or may not ever get built.

02:45:44.000 That's my hope, you know, for our survival. 0.97

02:45:48.000 I think that ingenuity will prevail, I hope so, because otherwise we're in, I mean, we're already in deep shit. 0.94

02:45:56.000 The question is, how do we dig out of it? 1.00

02:45:59.000 And it, you know, that's why we have these smart brains, you know, we're not going to get there by being stupid. 1.00

02:46:08.000 We've had enough of that. 1.00

02:46:10.000 And there's still plenty of it to go around. 1.00

02:46:12.000 But we need to move beyond that and stop listening to a lot of people like our politicians, for example, who seem to make a – Profession of stupidity and they're actually proud of their stupidity and that's distressing. 1.00

02:46:29.000 In what way? 1.00

02:46:30.000 In what way do you feel like Sarah Palin?

02:46:32.000 Is that what you mean? 0.99

02:46:32.000 Well, yeah, people like that, you know, the science deniers, the people that, you know, don't bother me with your fucking facts. 0.99

02:46:40.000 You know, my mind is made up and, you know, and God told me this and, you know, this is horseshit. 0.99

02:46:46.000 I mean, come on, you know. 0.79

02:46:48.000 Clear thinking, at least, should be criterion if you want to be a politician, not somebody who's buying into some myth from the 14th century.

02:47:00.000 I don't necessarily even think most of them are buying into it.

02:47:03.000 I think what they've done is realize that there is a market for that.

02:47:31.000 Yeah. 0.98

02:47:33.000 And then politicians come along and they go, oh, that guy, I know how to fucking play his heartstrings. 0.96

02:47:36.000 Right, exactly. 0.98

02:47:37.000 Well, then you're part of the problem.

02:47:39.000 You're not really helping solve the problem. 1.00

02:47:41.000 You're taking advantage of what these people, what I think even Karl Rove called useful idiots. 0.99

02:47:47.000 People that want simple answers. 0.99

02:47:49.000 I call them simple answers for simple people.

02:47:53.000 Hey, get over it.

02:47:54.000 There are no simple answers.

02:47:56.000 And what we need to be doing is looking for the real answers, asking the hard questions, realizing that it's all very complicated.

02:48:05.000 There are answers, but we're not going to get there through delusions and fairy tales.

02:48:11.000 We've got to actually acknowledge and start thinking about this and start talking about it to other people in a real way.

02:48:20.000 So, Sarah Palin, these people, I mean...

02:48:23.000 She needs mushrooms. 1.00

02:48:23.000 They're idiots. 1.00

02:48:25.000 She needs ayahuasca. 1.00

02:48:25.000 She needs a DMT trip. 1.00

02:48:27.000 She needs a head transplant is what she needs. 1.00

02:48:31.000 Yeah, fuck yeah she would. 1.00

02:48:32.000 She would realize that she's right and wrong at the same time. 1.00

02:48:35.000 Right, right.

02:48:38.000 Mind blown.

02:48:40.000 Okay, so the website for the Ethnobotanical Stewardship Council?

02:48:47.000 It's ethnobotanicalcouncil.org.

02:48:50.000 And the symposium is spelled sim, like as in psychedelic, P-S-Y. Symposium 2014 is April 12th and 13th in Amherst, Massachusetts.

02:49:04.000 Listen, folks, if you can make it there...

02:49:06.000 The website is symposium.org, or symposia, symposia.org, yeah.

02:49:13.000 Yeah, and if you can make it there, beautiful.

02:49:16.000 Can you pay to go there?

02:49:18.000 $30 at the door.

02:49:19.000 $20 in advance tickets.

02:49:21.000 $30 at the door if you actually want to go.

02:49:23.000 But you can also watch it live for $10 online.

02:49:27.000 It's a good deal.

02:49:27.000 Such a deal.

02:49:28.000 It's a great deal, and you are contributing to something that is hugely important.

02:49:33.000 You are part of this whole movement.

02:49:35.000 There's something going on, folks.

02:49:37.000 Dennis, you're a huge part of it.

02:49:39.000 Josh, you're a huge part of it.

02:49:40.000 The people listening to this podcast are a huge part of it.

02:49:43.000 It's all out there, and it's moving.

02:49:44.000 It's moving in, I think, a good direction.

02:49:46.000 I really do.

02:49:47.000 One last plug, if I may.

02:49:48.000 There's a Congress that I'm going to next weekend in Mexico, Toluca, bringing together indigenous leaders with iboga, peyote, mushroom, ayahuasca experience, and they need funding to attend to bring more Of the traditional healers to that conference.

02:50:07.000 It's called the Second International Congress on Traditional Medicine and Public Health, Sacred Plants, Culture and Human Rights.

02:50:14.000 And is this information all available on ethnobotanicalcouncil.org?

02:50:19.000 Can they find it there?

02:50:20.000 No, but I'll change that. 1.00

02:50:22.000 Put that shit up, son! 0.99

02:50:23.000 Yeah, put that in the news section. 1.00

02:50:24.000 Put it up. 0.92

02:50:25.000 What the hell? 1.00

02:50:26.000 What the fuck? 1.00

02:50:27.000 Come on, man. 1.00

02:50:27.000 We're all working together on this. 1.00

02:50:29.000 Can't you just say it?

02:50:30.000 Well, I'd like to say, Joe, also, thank you for having us on.

02:50:33.000 And you, my friend, are one of the change makers.

02:50:37.000 That's for sure.

02:50:38.000 Don't underestimate that.

02:50:40.000 I mean, you're a hero of mine.

02:50:43.000 Oh, that's a huge honor. 1.00

02:50:45.000 I'm a useful idiot. 1.00

02:50:46.000 What I am is a... 1.00

02:50:47.000 You're useful. 1.00

02:50:48.000 You ain't no idiot. 0.98

02:50:50.000 I'm a repeater of things that are fascinating. 0.99

02:50:52.000 But I appreciate that very much.

02:50:54.000 And I feel as compelled as all of you to try to broadcast as much of what I've stumbled upon and talk about it as much as possible.

02:51:03.000 And it's impossible without guys like you.

02:51:05.000 So thank you all.

02:51:06.000 Thank you very much.

02:51:07.000 Thank you for having us.

02:51:09.000 Thank you to the listeners. 0.99

02:51:11.000 We're all in this shit together, people. 0.98

02:51:13.000 So please, go to ethnobotanicalcouncil.org. 0.99

02:51:18.000 Go to symposia, with P-S-Y, symposia.org. 0.97

02:51:22.000 And that's it.

02:51:24.000 We'll be back next week with much more love.

02:51:26.000 Big kiss till then.

02:51:27.000 Mwah! 0.98

02:51:36.000 Three hours?

02:51:37.000 Again?

02:51:38.000 Three hours?

02:51:39.000 What time is that?

The Joe Rogan Experience - March 28, 2014

Joe Rogan Experience #477 - Dennis McKenna & Josh Wickerham

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