Camp Gagnon - Doctor Reveals Secrets of DMT, Magic Mushrooms, & MDMA

Episode Date: June 27, 2023

What up people! Today we're talking to Dr. Rick Barnett. He is an Ivy league educated, licensed Psychologist who founded the Psychedelic Society of Vermont. He specializes in helping people overcome addiction and trauma through guided ketamine therapy. And today he explains how he got arrested at 16 years old and was facing 55 years in federal prison, how psychedelics helped him beat his alcoholism, and he even explains all the things he learned about God and humanity through his research and...

People would ask me, hey Rick, of all the drugs that you did, which one do you think was the most beneficial? I'd always say MDMA. It's a drug that induces a state of compassion, empathy, love. It's known as a love drug. So imagine taking a molecule that floods your system with love. And you were open to the experience. I was sort of awestruck by it.

I just wasn't sure. I was like, this is a new way of thinking. New ways of seeing myself in the world and people. There's something about psychedelics that bring our attention to the fact that everything is connected in some way. way. Have you had people that have had negative experiences or they go, that was the worst thing I've ever done in my life? That's pretty extreme. I've never heard anybody say that. I haven't people feel more depressed. There's rare instances where people go on to commit suit. It does happen where

someone's expectations were such that they thought it would help and it didn't help. I've mostly seen positive responses to it. They're like, I just needed a glimpse of what things could be like. I actually never thought I could ever feel worry free. I never thought I'd ever be not depressed. Just because I had like an hour or two of like actually experiencing that. That gives me hope. That's what I think referred to as like a brain reset, to be reacquainted with what peace feels like, could feel like a reset. This is Dr. Rick Barnett. He's an Ivy League educated licensed psychologist who founded the Psychedelic Society of Vermont. He specializes in helping people overcome addiction through guided ketamine therapy. And today he explains how we got arrested at 16 years old and was facing 55

years in federal prison. I was facing 55 years in jail for the intent to distribute LSD and mushrooms. That was a horrific time of my life. How psychedelics helped him be eat his alcoholism. I would not have been receptive to the message of spirituality and recovery if it wasn't from my psychedelic experiences. And he even explains all the things he's learned about God and humanity through his research and personal experiences with these drugs. Our psychedelics actually helping us connect to some deeper wisdom that is more authentic than

we can even imagine. This was an absolutely amazing conversation. And I'm so honored to have Dr. Barnett in here for the very first episode in our brand new studio. I'm so excited for you guys to see it and enjoy all the. the rest of the episodes that we're going to do in here. So without further ado, enjoy my conversation with Dr. Rick Barnett. Welcome to camp.

Dr. Rick Barnett. Thank you so much for being here, man. I really appreciate it. It's awesome. Yeah, man. This is exciting. I'm really eager and looking forward to kind of breaking down what psychedelics are and how they can be used in a medical capacity, getting into like all the legal issues

with it, how it affects people socially, recreationally, all that stuff. So just to begin, what are. psychedelics. That is a great question because it is actually debated a little bit now. They've thrown a lot of different molecules into the broad category of psychedelics. But classically, there's a few that we all know of LSD, mescaline, psilocybin mushrooms, magic mushrooms. Those are sort of the classic psychedelics. Right. But then there's, you know, a broader range of psychedelics that are being researched now. That includes MDMA. That's ecstasy, Molly, ketamine. There's DMT is actually a classic psychedelic.

Right. Dymethylptomy. That's in ayahuasca. Okay. So there's a lot of different, but basically in a nutshell, it's any compound that will disrupt your consciousness in such a way that you end up basically experiencing an alternate kind of reality that was not available to you before that has a potential to or shift the way you think about yourself, the world, people, nature, even after the effects.

of the molecule wear off. Is it true that weed in high doses can be psychedelic? I think so. I mean, when I was growing up, if you look at the classic drug literature and the government, it would put cannabis in the mild hallucinogenic category. Right. So I would say absolutely. And it is actually used in some of these growing psychedelic therapies.

There's cannabis-assisted psychotherapy that some of my fellow practitioners are incorporating into their practices. Oh, really? Yeah. And in those types of therapies, how is the cannabis ingested? that's a great question actually it came out i was like i was actually asking a friend of mine that question people will use edibles in that in that instance and also uh vape forms so cartridges that have high t hc content in it um typically not necessarily smoked uh in the context of a professional

therapy office perhaps right but maybe in other settings where you know using the smoked form is perfectly fine yeah that's interesting it'd be weird to kind of like do bong rips with your doctor I don't know if I don't want to do that. So I'm curious with psychedelics, is there a different classification when it comes to, like, synthetic versus naturally occurring psychedelics? And do you, on a personal level or even on, like, a clinical level, is there a difference between how those are interacting with people? That's also a very debated topic. I personally think that the difference between synthetic and organic matter when it comes to these psychedelics, let's take, for example, psilocybin, right? So a lot of people, when they talk about magic mushrooms, they think about a mushroom and that they ingest, like, eat an actual mushroom.

And the active ingredient in that mushroom is actually not just psilocybin. That gets converted into psilocin. And so what we see in all this research is coming out on psilocybin is not the organic mushroom that people are eating in therapy, in psychedelic therapy research laboratories, but they're taking a synthetic drug. Oh, really? Yeah. And so there's this debate around like the entourage effect because there's other chemicals in psilocybin mushrooms. There's biosycin. Sure.

Norselis. There's a bunch of different. They might not be psychoactive, but if they're pairing with the psychoactive element, is it going to influence how the chemicals are interacting with your brain? Right. And as far as I can tell, it's really hard to tell the difference between. Some people probably swear that they can tell the difference between synthetic versus organic matter. But the other area of this is prevalent is 5MEO DMT. 5-methoxy dimethyltryptamine, which is a form of dimethyltryptamine.

It's known as the Toad medicine or the Sonoran Desert Toad. Hamilton Morris actually did a great podcast on that particular topic. And, you know, people basically squeeze the glands of this toad to get the toad secretion and they dry it and you can smoke that form of it. But they also make 5MEO DMT in a lab. Is that Cambo? Have you heard of that? Canbo is a different frog.

But it's a different chemical. It's something that gets. ingested subcutaneously, I believe in the arm, you put it inside your arm or something. It's injected or somehow implanted that way. Interesting. But that also comes from like a poison of a frog. Yes. Yeah, that's a different. Interesting. So 5M.E.O. 5T. Yeah. That comes from the Sonoran desert toad. But it's synthetically made. And the difference, I think the, the, the difference is not able to be determined really. I mean, from the subjective effects of it. Right. Yeah. For whatever reason, personally, and I've heard this sentiment said by other people as well, that there is a reservation

for doing some drugs, like some psychedelics, like LSD, for example, but more open to doing mushrooms or just any type of like psilocybin, you know, that's naturally occurring because they feel like there's a little bit more of a natural effect. It's less chemical. It's less harmful to the brain than doing something synthetic. Do you think there's any credibility to that idea? No, I don't. I mean, if you think of all the drugs that people use, the... The cocaine comes from the coca leaf and heroin comes from the opium poppy. Right. And even MDMA, which we think of as very synthetic, comes from sassafras.

Oh, really? Yeah. So you think of all the different synthetic compounds that we could ingest or natural compounds. I mean, everything that we could ingest eventually at some point comes from nature. MDMA comes from sassafras? There's a compound in sassafras that is like a close cousin to MDMA. You can't just eat a bunch of sassafras and, you know, trip on.

Molly. Interesting. But is there, like in the way the like coca leaves, you could like chew on those, like how like, I think people in Peru will chew on them in like high elevations and it helps with like energy and things like that. Yeah. Sassafras is there. There's no way. Oh, that's wild. I didn't realize that though. That's interesting. Yeah. So whether something is naturally occurring or it's synthetic, ultimately it's chemicals interacting with your brain. Correct. And those chemicals, you know, I guess to the effect that like if you're taking a mushroom and separating some of the other organic compounds that created in the way that people will say like juicing fruits. like if you drink a juiced apple versus eating an apple, it'll affect your body in different ways because you're separating the nutrients from like the fibers and things as that so you're digesting it differently.

So it would make sense that perhaps the chemicals are interacting with their brain in a different way if you strip some of the other organic compounds out of the mushroom. Well, such a big part of psychedelic medicine, psychedelic drugs, whatever we want to call them, is really the subjective effects of it. We're not necessarily talking about the full range of biological or neurobiological effects in terms of being able to tell the difference between a synthetic psychedelic and an organic psychedelic. There probably are differences at the sort of broader biological or neurobiological level. But in terms of subjective effects, the actual trip, I'm really not sure that people can honestly decipher the difference between synthetic or organic. Although, like you said, there's definitely people who have ideological preferences around the natural substance versus the synthetic one.

The other example is peyote, right? Paiote is an endangered plant, and it's respectfully part of a specific culture, indigenous culture. So, like, there's a strong argument for those naturalists who prefer mescaline is the active drug in peyote. So a lot of people who are naturalist, purists, and believe in the natural product, and you tell them this is part of an indigenous culture and we shouldn't be harvesting peyote or whatever. And then they seem to be okay with using synthetic mescaline in that case. Or you can use some San Pedro. There's other forms of natural forms of mescaline. Sure.

It's interesting. I mean, I guess the placebo effect of some of these things would have a role in how you interact with it, right? Like if you are told that like this is a natural mushroom or this is a synthetic or synthetic psilocybin versus natural psilocybin, I wonder if the state that your mind is in going into the ingestion can actually affect how you feel on it. Do you think there's any credence to that or do you think the like how much do you think intention and mindset prior to having a psychedelic experience affects the experience itself? It's a huge part of it.

It's a huge part of it. We always, in preparation for a psychedelic journey, there's a lot of it. lot of effort put into setting intentions and cultivating the right mindset, setting the right expectations, having as much information as you can about it. You know, people who have psychedelic experiences in a setting like this, for example, or if you're in a therapist office or out in a field, or if there's certain iconography around, if you're in a, if there's a Buddhist statue, or all of these things will potentially affect the person's experience on that journey. So when it comes to the placebo effect, absolutely. Although I think the, you know, it's pretty clear that if

you're taking a psychedelic drug, it's, yeah, the placebo effect becomes slightly more challenging to argue for it because it's so potent. Right. Yeah, I think it's worth framing this conversation under the pretense that I have not done high doses of psilocybin or really any psychedelic. So for the sake of this conversation, don't hesitate to give a lot of detail or things that would be obvious to like an average drug user that I don't know. I microdose once at six flags. And it was very kind of like, this is unexceptional. I'll be honest. I was like the lights were kind of cool, but like I didn't really have any type of dramatic effect.

And I did do MDMA, which was amazing. So really, really powerful and really cool experience. So we can discuss that as well. So as far as your clinical experience goes, which psychedelic would you say you've had the most experience with? Clinically, in my current practice, the only legal one is ketamine. Oh, ketamine. Yeah. Interesting.

But personally, as a younger person, I have had a lot of experiences with ecstasy, with LSD, with psilocybin, with various psychedelic drugs. Interesting. Yeah. So I guess let's go one by one. So what is the research for psilocybin specifically and how? How is that used medicinally in therapeutic settings to help people, you know, recover from different mental health issues? Yeah.

I mean, it's important to distinguish between therapeutic settings and research settings and other underground settings, ceremonial use or what's called underground practitioners, people who are offering these tools, these medicines to people to have an experience that is intended for their healing. but they're not legal substances, at least in most areas. And we can talk about drug policy at some point, or a little bit later. But yeah, so it's interesting. Cilocybin, actually all psychedelics in some ways have the potential to treat a range of mental health

and physical health conditions. It's really interesting that you can have a transdiagnostic application for these substances. That is, psilocybin has been studied for alcohol. use disorder for nicotine cessation, for depression, for obsessive compulsive disorder, for anxiety, for a host of other conditions. Actually, no, that was MDMA. MDMA was recently approved by the FDA to look at studying schizophrenia using MDMA. So, but one by one, psilocybin, it can be used for so many different conditions. It's been studied for anorexia. it's being studied, I believe now for cognitive impairments, attention deficit disorder.

I mean, you name it. When I say transdiagnostic, I mean, you know, think of a condition that somebody might struggle with. Right. And see if psilocybin can actually help the person with that condition. Right. I've heard military vests describe it being useful for PTSD, which I find very interesting. And this myriad of like symptoms that you're describing, it makes it sound like a panacea.

And I wonder if that makes people skeptical or they're like, it does everything for everyone. So how would you respond to criticism of like, you know, how could one substance help so many different people with so many different varied conditions? I would say, don't believe the hype. I'm in the field. I'm a big enthusiast. I love the potential for these compounds to help people across a variety of conditions. There's a reason for the hype. There hasn't been a major shift in psychiatry or mental health treatment for decades. So there's a lot of good reason for excitement, enthusiasm, of which I share. And I also, also see the hype. And we see the hype in sort of capitalistic markets, right? The pharmaceutical companies and psychedelic companies really trying to cash in on the hype and the research that's being done. And it's a tough market for those folks. And I'm not throwing shade on the industry at all. But, you know, there's a lot of hype and people need to be aware that it is absolutely not a panacea. It does not work for everybody. And, you know, I think it has optimal benefits for people

who take it pretty seriously and study it, do the research, think about why they would want to do it, what's it going to do for them, what are they wanted to do for them, working with the right people, developing the right community. And in that way, we can, for a lot of people, can optimize the positive aspects of it. But it's definitely not for everybody. And some people have really horrific effects. When you said it's kind of interesting that psilocybin would be used for PTSD, I mean, it can be traumatic to have a high-dose psilocybin journey. It can be deeply upsetting. There can be all kinds of images of monsters or death or really difficult personal

autobiographical material that comes up that you feel guilty about or shameful around or remembering details of your past or traumatic experiences that just don't land right. And that can be really difficult, which is why I think it's so important to have the right setting and the right people working with you're working with in order to, again, either optimize the benefits or potentially minimize the harms that could come from it. That's interesting. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm curious, have you seen adverse effects either through other people that are doing research or clinical work or yourself of someone in that case that, you know, went in and then had a negative or a bad trip, as people can say? I think personally, I haven't had a what you would call a bad trip when I was younger. I had a couple of challenging experiences that, and we use that word challenging experiences as if we're trying to like soften the fact that actually people have bad trips

and it can be very, very difficult to recover from. So I actually have known people in my past when I was younger, two people in particular that I can think of that really didn't come back from their experiences with LSD, like developed schizophrenia, lifelong schizophrenia. Wow. And is that from doing it at a young age or were they just happen to be predisposed

to this type of, issue that then this like LSD kicked up? Yeah, I think I think the research is pretty clear that that psychedelics for people who are predisposed to schizophrenia, like for example, psychosis runs in their family that it's a little bit more sketchy

to use high-dose psychedelics. It might trigger a psychotic episode that might be very long-lasting. Right. So I think, think there is a real risk there. Having said that, again, I think that even if somebody has the predisposition, if there's plenty of preparation and knowledge and support going into it, I think a lot of times some of these episodes that people have that are really challenging is

because it's just a shitty situation. Like they, someone dose them like without them knowing or they took four or 10 hits and didn't realize what they were. And they were also hammered and stoned and did a bunch of cocaine and they were left like on 125th Street, you know, two o'clock in the morning and, you know, had to, you know, whatever. It's just like really horrible situation. That's not the case for the people that I was referencing before, actually. But I think a lot can be done to mitigate the risks when it comes to having bad trips. But they do happen.

There's even a condition called a hallucinatory perceptual persistent disorder. So there's a, it's HPPD where a very, very small fraction of people. who use psychedelics will struggle for sometimes years, still seeing like the visual after effects of, so we think of like when we do LSD or psilocybin, there's this phenomenon called trails where like, you know, you'll see something go by and you'll like see the trail behind it, even though there's no trail behind it. And some people can actually have that locked into their visual system for or their consciousness for years. It doesn't go away. Wow. And how do you know if you're predisposed to that before doing it? Is there any

personal diagnostic you could do it to assess yourself? No, I don't think there is, no. Hmm. But again, I think it's like 1% of people. Right, yeah, I guess that's sort of the risk. Yeah. And is there any, like, advice as far as people that are interested in, like, recreational use of psychedelics, whether or not it would be good for them to use or not even at low doses?

Is there some type of personal assessment people should take before trying things like this? I mean, there's so much out there. You and I talked earlier. There's great podcasts out there. about psychedelics and from a from a practical and legitimate scientific or ceremonial or recreational perspective and there's no real like no self-assessment that you could really do to make it make sure that it's going to be safe right so it's a tricky one and I don't think there's anything wrong with I mean I find it odd that

some people throw a lot of shade on recreational use of psychedelics I I I I personally used a shit ton of psychedelics when I was younger. And I can't say, I mean, my brain is certainly fried in some ways. I don't deny that. But I mean, I was able to go on to get a doctorate in psychology and, you know, raise a family and build a career and, you know, be functioning. I'm sitting here with you talking. You seem normal.

I feel normal most of the time as far as whatever you define normal as. And so, like, and I used a lot of psychedelics. So I don't think I'm necessarily an exception. There's a lot of people that you and I both know that used a fair amount of psychedelics when they were younger with their developing brains and stuff. And so to say categorically that no one should ever use psychedelics until they turn 25 and their brain is fully developed or whatever, like, I just don't, I don't buy it. I think it's possible to use psychedelics and safe, fun, meaningful, growth-oriented kinds of ways.

And one way shouldn't be promoted or put forth as being more legitimate than others. Interesting. Yeah, a significant case I can think of Steve Jobs. I read his autobiography by Walter Isaacson. He details a lot of his childhood psychedelic drug use just as a kid out in the fields going and doing LSD with his buddies listening to like Bob Dylan and like the Beatles and stuff like that and how it was really important for him. And I think he would have gone on to do, you know, amazing things and technology and what have you in spite of this. But he says that it was. a major eye-opening experience for him. Yeah. And so I look at that. I'm like, I mean, one of the most successful tech entrepreneurs, designers, minds of the, you know, 20th century, you know, used it at a young age and it seemed like it worked out.

Yeah. There's a lot of famous people who came up with a lot of brilliant ideas because of their psychedelic use when they were younger. Yeah. So in terms of therapeutic and clinical use, can we go through like a case study, just like an example and you kind of tell me what the beats are? So let's say I'm a war veteran. I've served a few years in Afghanistan. I come home and I have PTSD. I saw terrible things while I was at war. And I hear about psilocybin therapy as a way to try to cope with my PTSD. I went to regular therapy, just like behavioral therapy. And it was kind of whatever and didn't really get to the issue. So what happens? How would I get help for this and what would actually happen to me once I'm accepted into a program or something like that? Right. So because there's no, except in Oregon now, where there's what's called licensed facilities, you can get a licensed facilitator to hold space for you for a psilocybin experience. That's legal in Oregon now. There's no other place in the United States that's legal other than in clinical trials. So as a war veteran, you could get hooked up with a major research institution or even a smaller research outfit. And if you qualify for that clinical trial, then you could have a.

psilocybin experience or several for PTSD. Outside of that, one would have to look towards underground operations, underground therapists, underground practitioners, underground shamans, whatever you want to call. There's different people that can do this and arguably can do it safely. And that's widely available to people, but it's illegal. And so you need, people need to know that this isn't something that is, you know, that there's something that's, you know, widely accessible. and usually there's a cost associated with it. So there's, you know, to be able to afford it. But then there's places in the Netherlands where you can have psilocybin treatment that's legal.

In Jamaica, in Costa Rica, in Mexico. There are countries where it is legal and there are retreats set up and experiences that can be held for folks that have clinical conditions or are just curious. But if you're a war veteran and you really have done your research and you've looked into the potential for this and you've done a lot of preparation, and studying and looking around. What happens is, let's say, for example, let's just take the easiest example, if you decide you have the resources and you want to go to Mexico, right?

So you would call the facility. They would do what's called a discovery call and they would find out a little bit about your history and then they would follow up with maybe a screening call over Zoom and they would dig down a little bit deeper, make sure there isn't some outstanding factor that would make this probably maybe a not such a good idea. And so after a couple of those calls, then you would travel down to Mexico.

And you'd probably be there for a week or so, five days, two weeks, something in that duration. And there's preparation that goes into it. So you would be given lots of guidelines prior to coming down, start a meditation practice, journal, change your diet, watch your alcohol and nicotine and cannabis intake, really just dial into different biological psychological psychological. social, emotional factors as you prepare for that. And what is that doing?

What would meditation or journaling or diet do for that experience specifically? Well, I like to, I like people to take it very seriously. So people call me often for consultation. So I don't necessarily promote people to use any illegal drug. But the fact is, is that people are interested in having these experiences. So I help people understand what preparations is all about and how to help them integrate a psychedelic experience. So when it comes to preparation and it comes to like diet,

excuse me, diet, meditation, journaling, it's really about preparing your mind and your body to have an experience that could be very transformative. And for example, meditation itself, even if you don't meditate and you're not a meditator, it can never meditate before. I can't get my mind to calm down, especially people with PTSD or racing thoughts,

whatever, it's very difficult. But if you can practice for a week, taking 10 slow deep breaths in the morning when you wake up at some point during the day at night time, just practicing that breathing exercise. You know, you don't have to even quiet your mind. You can just focus on your breathing for 10 big deep breaths in and out. When you actually go down and have this psychedelic, the psilocybin experience, if you've been practicing that even for a little while,

that's really going to help when you take the drug, you take the mushrooms, and you're trying to calm your body and you're waiting for the mushrooms to take effect. and they start to take effect. And you have this tool that you've practiced for a week to sort of help settle your nervous system to allow the experience to unfold. I think without that sometimes there's a little bit more agitation or anxiety, which happens anyway, but anything we can do to prepare ourselves to sort of quiet that anxiety and work with whatever fear or difficulty might arise as the drug is taking effect.

I see. Okay. So I've done all the preparation. I've been meditating. I changed my diet, stopped alcohol, stopped nicotine. And now at this point, I'm feeling maybe a little anxious because I might have been depending on those chemicals to kind of like chill me out.

And then I fly to Mexico City and then what happens? I show up at like a facility. What does that look like? Well, just to be clear, like if someone's drinking a lot or using nicotine a lot or cannabis a lot and they suddenly stop, they're going to be feeling pretty unsettled. So I think that process has to be taken very seriously and slowly. So hopefully it's not like, okay, I quit for a week.

And now I'm just like shaking like a, whatever. Sure. Yeah. So assuming that their nervous system has calmed down, let's say they haven't even quit drinking altogether. They haven't quit smoking weed altogether. They haven't given up nicotine altogether.

At least they've paid attention to what they're doing a little bit more. So they show up. They get to the retreat center. They get settled in. They're given a schedule. There's usually things like meditation and yoga and healthy foods and out in nature and talking one-on-one with shamans or guides. And you're basically prepared for, you know, what the experience is going to be like.

And so usually there's music. Oftentimes there might be eye shades when you actually have the experience. And I believe for mushrooms, it's probably one, maybe two, depending on how long your retreat is set up for. So probably just one journey, not multiple. With ayahuasca, people will sometimes drink ayahuasca like four out of seven nights. So repeated psychedelic experiences over the course of a week. With psilocybin, maybe two over the course of a week. but or sometimes if it's shorter just one.

So then you will go in, you'll have this experience. There'll be music. There'll be eye shades. There'll be people sitting around. If you need any help with anything, getting up to go to the bathroom, or if you're struggling with some emotion, you're going to have somebody there, a guide or a shaman or somebody to hold space for you, or maybe touch, you know, put a hand on your shoulder to hold your hand.

You might want to talk a little bit. But it's a lot of internal stuff that comes up. And that process is about five to seven hours depending. Yeah, it's a long process. And how many grams do you think that? dose would be for them. It's really dose. I mean, it really depends on the person. And that's something that's talked about during the whole preparation process. I, you and I talked earlier, I tend to be a little bit more of a risk taker. And I believe if people want to benefit from this,

and please don't take this the wrong way. But I would, if someone is looking to have an experience, I would shy away from being too conservative because there's a lot of work that goes into preparing for this. And we just talked about like all the research and education and preparation. And so to go down somewhere to get ready for that experience and then to be too scared and too conservative and you take a low dose, you might come out of it a little underwhelmed. Right. And I can imagine that'd be frustrating. Like I spent all this time preparing a lot of money. Yeah. And nothing really happened. I didn't really have any experience. Right. Right. But we know from the research and we know from, you know, personal experiences that there's a there's a dose range that is going to produce a pretty powerful

effect that could be and it's hard to get dose equivalence when it comes to research we were talking earlier about the synthetic version of psilocybin in research lab that's 25 milligrams or 30 milligrams of psilocin right which is roughly equivalent to two and a half three grams of dried mushrooms but then again depending on the mushroom strain and the potency of psilocybin in that particular mushroom yeah it's hard to tell a lot of variability A lot of variability. And so, but usually the guide knows what the potency of the medicine is. And they'll advise people and they'll have a good sense based on doing their screening

and getting to know the individual who's seeking the experience. What dose might be the right dose? So anywhere between two and a half and five grams, I think is a robust, potentially a robust experience. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because I have to tell you about an amazing new device called fume. That's right. Fume.

If you haven't heard of it, now you have. Fume is effectively flavored air. It's one of my favorite ways to de-stress. If you know me, you know I don't like to pick up bad habits, and fume takes the bad out of the habit, okay? Instead of electronics, fume is completely natural. Instead of vapor, fume uses flavored air. And instead of harmful chemicals, fume uses all natural delicious flavors.

I love the mint flavor. You take a deep breath, and the fume just feels amazing. It's a great way to de-stress. It makes you feel relaxed. And it's just a great way to even just, just, like, fidget while you're sitting in your chair. It has a cool little bamboo knob. It's awesome. I love the fume. It just looks cool. It's super discreet. It goes in my pocket through my backpack. I can have it at the airport. It's not a problem anywhere I go. And it just looks cool. It's fun to have. So let me just say this. Stopping something is difficult.

It's hard to do. And that's why people put it off for a long time. But switching to fume is easy, enjoyable, and even fun. It really calms my anxiety and is a great way to de-stress. Fume has over 100,000 customers and has thousands of success stories. And there's no reason that you can't be another one. Join Fume and accelerating humanity's breakup from destructive habits by picking up the journey pack. That's right.

This is what I want you to do. You can go to try Fume, that's T-R-Y-F-U-M-com, and use the promo code Gagnon. G-A-G-N-O-N-N-the- promo-com, and you will save 10% off when you get the journey pack. That's tri-fume, tri-fum-com, and use the promo code Gagnan-G-N-O-N-N to save an additional 10% off your order. Kick the bad habits, take the bad out of the habit, take a deep breath of basically flavored air that will make you feel amazing, take out the anxiety in your day, and make you feel more relaxed. Let's get back to the show. Interesting. Now, as far as describing the experience itself, and again, I don't know if you have specific research, in understanding what PTSD is specifically.

But I imagine you have this terrible event that happens. All of a sudden now your neurons are working in a way that is like connecting bad thoughts and bad ideas together. This is like my rudimentary understanding of what could be happening. Like how would you describe what PTSD is and why would psilocybin, why could it have a positive effect for someone? Well, PTSD post-traumatic stress disorder is a condition where, someone has had a series of experiences or a single experience where their worldview, their sense of

themselves, their sense of people, their sense of safety has been totally shattered. I don't know who I am anymore. I don't know what's safe anymore. I don't know if I can trust anybody anymore. I don't know if I can trust the environment anymore with bombs going off, people dying around me, people getting raped, myself getting raped, myself getting injured, car accidents. There's a lot of conditions that can produce a trauma response. Not everybody who has traumatic experiences will develop PTSD, but certainly a number of people will. I don't know what the actual data is on that, which is a good question. But what happens is that your nervous system then has this sort of imprinting that happens where fear and anxiety and dissociation, which is kind of checking out,

like where you just sort of check out from reality. You think of maybe like you've seen in movies when explosion goes off and you look at people with the, you know, there's ringing in their ears and they're standing around. It's almost like a mutedness around them. Yeah.

Yeah. So that's an experience called dissociation where someone can literally have that experience in sort of waking day to day hours. Like I could be on the street and I hear a loud noise and all of a sudden I just check out. And your brain is basically creating

like a haven for you to escape into by disconnecting from the reality that you're presently in. Yeah. So there's this interesting phenomenon of PTSD where there's, we know there's like you were saying, this over heightened sense of arousal.

So easily startled, just a smallest noise or, you know, not feeling safe in a restaurant. You have to sit with your back against the wall. There can't be any windows behind you. You're checking out all the exits. Any noises,

anything that reminds you of that trip. It could be the most random thing that somehow cues you your nerves. smell or something. Smell or something. Anything like that where all of a sudden your nervous system is on overdrive. So it's interesting there's like this parallel kind of or dual experience where you could be a heightened sense of arousal and fear response, trauma response, or there can be this total checkout. Right.

And I guess that just depends on your brain chemistry or maybe a nurture thing from when you were younger. But you're either going to disassociate or it's going to be heightened arousal and that's going to cause anxiety and panic. Or both at different times depending on the context. Right. Also depends on the severity of the trauma. There's something called complex PTSD. which is sort of a more newly identified category of PTSD, much more severe.

That's where a situation where someone has had repeated trauma over a long period of time. That makes sense. And so I think people can sort of alternate between dissociation and heightened fear response. So with psilocybin, it's kind of interesting. A lot of the research on PTSD has been done with MDMA. Ecstasy.

And that's the, we're waiting eagerly for, I think, next week for the second phase three clinical trials for MDMA and PTSD out of maps. MDMA ecstasy will be approved in the treatment of PTSD in late 2024. Oh, wow. So even though it's not legal yet, it's looking very much like it will be approved within about a year, a little over a year. And there's a specific kind of neurobiology behind that particular drug and PTSD. but if we were to talk about psilocybin, similarly in the sense that it's possible that with psilocybin,

if somebody has routine responses to these triggers that we talked about, loud noises, smells, someone has a tendency to dissociate when there's something that reminds them of the trauma. With psilocybin, they can have an experience or if they have repeated psilocybin experiences, they can change their understanding. of their trauma response or the traumatic experiences. In other words, they could think about and maybe even re-experience or feel in their bodies, in their minds under the influence of psychedelics, a different view or a different somatic or different emotional or just cognitive understanding of their trauma.

So when the drug wears off, it's almost as though something about that imprinting on the nervous system has now shifted. So it isn't quite as elevated or you're not quite as likely to dissociate anymore because some new understanding has unfolded in your experience. Again, maybe there's a little bit more sense of safety in the world or maybe your fear of death has seemed to diminish a little bit that you see that everything is connected and everything is there for a reason. And so there's maybe more meaning that's brought to the trauma that you had. There's a lot of different explanations for that with psilocybin. MDMA, like I said, it's a slightly different neural. biological mechanism. Interesting. Could you expand on MDMA and why that would have beneficial

properties for PTSD treatment? Yeah, it's funny because when I, I'm in recovery from addiction for a long time and when people, and you mentioned it actually earlier, when people would ask me, hey, Rick, if I was ever to do a drug just to try it, what drug do you think I should do? Not that I would ever recommend people do drugs, but of all the drugs that you did, which one do you think was the most beneficial or most enjoyable or whatever? I'd always say MDMA. Interesting. And so you've had an experience with MDMA. There's just something about MDMA that produces an effect in your heart, in your mind, in your body.

It's called it. It's an empathogen. It's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a state of compassion, empathy, love. It's known as a love drug. So imagine taking a molecule that floods your system with love and compassion for yourself, for other people. I had an unhealthy relationship with police officers when I was younger because I got into some trouble legally several times. And I can remember on MDMA when I was younger having a totally different view of the police. Like I love the police. I was so grateful for their role in society. And it really changed my perspective on the police and police officers. Interesting.

So the reason why I'm saying all that is because when it comes to PTSD and you have this nervous system that's on high alert and just like, you know, on overdrive and there's fear and there's racing thoughts and there's anxiety and there's like intrusive thoughts of these traumatic events and you're having trouble sleeping and all this stuff. What MDMA does is it actually quiets the part of the brain that is responsible for that fear response and it keeps it down to a level where you can access the trauma and all the memories of the trauma without that nervous system arousal. Oh, wow. So you can actually process the trauma in a different way rather than just being hijacked by it

all the time. You can actually go into it. Interesting. So if I had a PTSD experience and I'm thinking about the event, it's impossible for me to think about it without experiencing the fear and the anxiety and the pain simultaneously that's bound to the memory. And so as a result, I can't think about it. So I'm just going to push it off and disassociate from it and just try to shove it down. And by never interacting with it, I'm not growing. I'm still reacting in ways to situations that is really because of this thing, but I don't even realize it because I'm not interacting with that memory or that event in any capacity. And so that's really interesting.

With MDMA, you're able to disassociate the fear and the pain and the anxiety from the experience itself, almost look at it objectively. And would you say that it gives you a more empathetic and like three-dimensional look at the event itself? Like if someone wronged you hypothetically, or like if you're in a war situation and you feel anger towards, you know, an opposing force. But then all of a sudden you're dissociating. you're more empathetic and you say, oh, those people are just defending their country in the way that I was fighting for my country.

Would you say that is a common occurrence? Yeah. And another way to put it would be that you, I think with one of the things that people say about this psychedelic renaissance that we're in, whether it's MDMA or psilocybin, you often hear this trope that it's like five years of therapy in eight hours, you know, and really that bothers me because therapy still can be a important part of this. Therapy isn't like negligible in terms of effect. So when people talk about PTSD, I work with people with trauma and we try to process their trauma through talk therapy. There's also techniques like eye movement desensitization and reprocessing. That's EMDR and other types of techniques, whether it's tapping or some other somatic kind of techniques, to get people out of their heads and into their bodies to reprocess the trauma

in different ways. And I think that's very valuable. What happens with MDMA, it's not just that. your fear response is quieted and you can process the trauma because people can process trauma in regular talk therapy in certain ways. But what you have is like this chemical flood of like bonding hormones and just loving empathic feeling. So it's like this relational, embodied, full body, full mind, full heart experience, not just like, oh, I can process this trauma now because my fear response is quiet.

It's like I can re-experience myself with compassion and the harms that I went through with a new understanding that's more on the feeling level. That's what I'm trying to get at. More on the feeling level, on the emotional level, because the emotions with PTSD are just sort of hijacked all the time by fear. Of course.

All of a sudden the fear response goes down and the love response takes over and you're able to reprocess some of that trauma with a totally different emotional experience. It's interesting. It's fascinating. Yeah, I never perceived MDMA as a psychedelic because my perception of psychedelics

was that there was some type of like hallucinatory effect as well. Like you do LSD or DMT, you're going to see things potentially. And even maybe high doses of mushrooms, you might see things. So there's a visual distortion. Whereas MDMA, when I did it, there was no visual effect really. I mean, maybe like colors or things like that. But it was not, I was still very much grounded in this. reality. So as far as like classification goes, MDMA would still constitute as a psychedelic despite

they're not being a hallucinogenic effect. Yeah, it goes back to what we said before, because it changes your consciousness in a very, very meaningful kind of way. It sort of quiets the, or changes the normal, you know, everyday functioning of your personality and mind and emotions and thoughts and stuff, and it changes them significantly. So it changes consciousness. But I would say that from my experience, and this is where dose dependence is really important, some of the, sort of unfortunate stigma around MDMA and psychedelics, frankly, but MDMA in particular is, you know, back in the 90s or early 2000s, where people were using MDMA, young people usually, in settings where you didn't know what the quality of the MDMA was, usually in high doses,

usually with a lot of dancing and music and alcohol and cannabis and all kinds of other stuff on board. So these factors are pretty significant when it comes to whether you're going to hallucinate or not, whether or not you're going to have a bad crash afterwards. And I can say that from my experience, just to go back to the, you know, is MDMA a psychedelic? If you do way over the therapeutic dose of MDMA, you will hallucinate. It does act on some of the same receptors as the classic psychedelics. You know, we're talking the therapeutic doses are around 120. up to 180, maybe 200 milligrams. And people, even if you, you know, whether you get pure substance or not, I mean,

hopefully you're going to, what someone would be using pure substance. And definitely people should always test their drugs. This is a harm reduction episode here. Test your drugs before you use it, especially with the era that we're living in with fentanyl. But if you do like 400, 500, 600, 600 milligrams of MDMA, which is way like two, three, four times the therapeutic dose, you're going to have a potentially a challenge. challenging experience or hallucinations, yeah. Yeah, that's interesting.

And I know people always talk about the setting for like mushrooms or psilocybin. They always say, go to the beach, go outside, be in nature, be connected to the earth in some capacity, which I want to know your thoughts on. But that is never brought up when it comes to MDMA. I feel like when people speak about MDMA, they almost encourage it as a rave drug or a party drug. And I'm curious in your experience, either personally or clinically, do you find that MDMA in a non, I guess, like, arousal setting, can it still have the same effects?

Like, if you're just in nature doing MDMA, could it have the same, I guess, like, therapeutic effects if it's just, if you just do it on your own? I think it has the potential to. I always like to try to help people distinguish between the intentional therapeutic or personal growth use of psychedelics versus the casual use. or personal growth, but there's the difference between external and internal. So all the clinical trials with all of these psychedelic compounds typically involve putting eye shades on and headset with specific music, and you go inward.

There's no interaction with nature or people or anything. You're laying on the couch. You're laying on the floor. You're laying in the grass. Interesting. And you've got eye shades on. you've got airphones on and you're totally tuned out from the outside world. Censor deprivation.

Totally censor, except for the hearing, you know, hearing the music. What is the music typically? It's usually some sort of ambient music, not a lot of lyrics, instrumentals, sort of like, you know, almost like not elevator music. But, you know, just like sort of synthy sort of like pads and things like that, just chord progressions. Yeah, yeah. And sometimes it can be elevating. So there could be some psychedelic playlist that, you know, when it's timed right in terms of the peak of the psychedelic experience.

Some of the music is a little bit more energetic. Could you think of almost like spa music? Yeah. Okay. Interesting. So you're listening to that and your eyes are shut. Yeah. And you might be inside a building. You could be inside a teepee.

You could be inside a therapist office. You could be inside a building. But that's the difference between an internal experience where all the material that you're coming up, your mind, your experience is coming up with is totally internally driven. it's emanating from within and the music. Obviously, the music definitely interacts with that.

There's a whole ream of research on how music and psychedelic therapy work together. But that's very different than like literally taking mushrooms or MDMA or LSD out in nature or at a conference or hanging out with your friends around a campfire or listen to the Grateful Dead or some other tunes. And that's fun too. And that can be therapeutic or eye opening or insightful as well. One isn't necessarily better than the other. but damn sure you're going to have a different experience. And for people who really want to see what personal benefits intentionally can come from this, really doing it that way.

It's just hard for people. I have friends now where I tell like I'm into psychedelic research and therapy and learning all about it. And they just look at me like, what? Like we used to do so much acid when we were getting at concerts. Like, how is that therapeutic? And I have to tell them like, no, it's very different than what most. most people think of when they when they think of using psychedelics it's this very curated

internal experience not this outward and again i'm not i love the recreational i love the nature-based psychedelic therapy uh or psychedelic experiences but there is a huge difference what would you say are the biggest categorical differences between an internal and an external psychedelic experience just the the the depth and the breadth of the material of the material that one can experience from like, yeah, autobiographical or cosmological is, I think, going to be much, chances are going to be much greater that those experiences are going to be robust and long lasting from an internal experience where I think of external psychedelic experiences as being pleasant with occasions of deep insight about connecting with nature or the

universe or other people, having really powerful conversations with people or new realizations, but there's lots of distraction. So I don't think it has the same long-lasting benefits because you're just distracted by so many other things. It doesn't have a chance to really sort of solidify in your experience on a long, there's no data to support this necessarily. That's just my opinion. Sure. And in your opinion, if someone was interested or if they were going to anyway have a psychedelic experience on their own without being supervised by, you know, a clinician, which probably they shouldn't do. But if someone did do that, would you recommend that it's an internal experience, whether it's psilocybin or MDMA, like just in their apartment maybe

or in their home with eye shades and ambient music? Yeah, I would definitely not recommend that, certainly for anybody for the first time. If someone is familiar with the effects of these compounds, then certainly doing it by oneself in their own space that they've designed and they've thought about it in advance and they've managed to sort of like control whatever factors they can control. It's funny. Sometimes you just can't control. When you're not in a specifically curated environment by somebody that's taking charge of those things for you, if you're in your own space, you can still get pretty distracted. I don't know if I really answered your question on that one, but like, I think it's possible to have positive solo, what's called solo journeys, whether it's MDMA or

psilocybin. I just don't like, there's cost variables. Like, who would want to? Like, there's something about it that if you know you have somebody there, whether it's your partner, your spouse, a sibling, a good friend, a trust, someone that you trust, just available in case you want to share something, in case you want to hold somebody's hand. Like, when you're alone, it's just, it can be kind of isolating. And if you have a moment where you feel really lonely and there's no one there to really talk to or hold their hand or something, that can be kind of upsetting. Interesting.

So I would always recommend that at least somebody be available or know that someone, know that you're going to do that on your own. So you can call them or text them or something. But yeah, people do have solo journeys all the time and that could be powerful. Yeah, the idea of MDMA in like a solo quiet, like setting seems very strange to me. For context, my personal experience was in a party setting. I was with all my friends at a big party. I took it for the first time.

And I was like pretty specific. I was like, I'm going to dose this much. I had a journal where as the experience was happening, I was kind of like documenting how I felt. And it was amazing. It was extremely euphoric. All the regular symptoms of, you know, doing Molly, quote unquote. My jaw was going crazy. I was just like grinding my teeth.

I felt great, though. And I felt amazing. And I really like using substances to inform my sobriety. I don't really like having external substances as an escape from the reality I'm presently in, but rather to inform the reality that I'm going to be spending the majority of my life in. So after the experience, I was thinking, back and reflecting, and I was like, wow, I was just telling everyone I love them. And it wasn't like I was making it up. I was truly with people that I loved and sharing how I actually felt.

And I was like, wow, that was such a great experience. And I felt so good telling them how I truly felt about them. I should do that more often. I should just kind of share with people that I really care about. Hey, I really care about you. Thank you so much for being a part of my life. I was thinking about my parents. I was like, I should call my mom and tell her how much I love her. I don't know why I don't do that don't do that more often. I'll go, you know, weeks at a time, but just kind of forgetting to be like, hey, I love you. Thank you for everything. And so I just called it my mom. And I was like, thank you so much for being an awesome mom. I love you. And that was a really, really fun and, like, cathartic experience for me. And I haven't done it in a year and a half since then. Like, that was the last time I did it. And I don't really have another, I would do it again,

but I'm not like craving that experience. I felt like I got filled up and I was able to use it to inform my life. And then I was able to sort of espouse some of the lessons that I learned. and that was it. And, but the idea of doing it in a solo private setting seems foreign to me. I don't know if I would have the same effect. I'm curious if you've had personal experience or clinical experience in that regard. I've never had personal experience with solo MDMA journeys. And I understand what you're saying.

There is a, I have, I know people who have done solo journeys, uh, in an intentional way. So lots of preparation, curated playlists, uh, controlled environment in their, home, everything's set up to really, you know, journal if they need to journal. You know, and it's from what I've been told, it can be a very powerful experience, positive. There is actually a, it's like 90 page PDF somewhere out there in the, in the Twitter, or not Twitterverse, the internet world. There's some document out there that somebody produced that is dedicated to how do you

have a solo MDMA journey. The beginning part of it basically throws so much shade on therapy that I could hardly stomach reading it. But from what I've been told by other therapists who actually could stomach reading it, it actually has some pretty good information in there about how to, in a very thoughtful and planned out and safe way, you know, have an MDMA journey solo. There's just no research on that. All the research is actually with two therapists.

That's what all the research is having, usually a male-female diad. therapist in the room for every single MDMA dosing session that's been done in the research trials. So, I mean, that's a whole range, right? You have two therapists for one patient for eight hours versus like solo. And what about like group MDMA? When you did it a year and a half ago, where other people rolling with you. Of course, yeah. So there's a group setting. And what about the clinical potential for group MDMA sessions? We know how important community is to, you know, you know, longevity of life and personal happiness and fulfillment, like, why would that not have an impact on the experience itself? Yeah. Yeah, that's really interesting. And yeah, for that

experience, I was curious, you know, and I was very concerned with like serotonin depletion and things like that. I was like very, like, I was aware of the symptoms and like people talk about the crash the next day or, you know, and I didn't really have that. I didn't have like a major come down. I didn't feel depressed after. I just kind of felt like tired because I was up all night, but I didn't feel bad in any capacity. And I'm curious if there's any physical effect that these substances are having on the brain that could be permanent, both either positive or negative. Is it physically rewiring anything or is it just allowing your mind to process things in a different way? Well, going back to what we were talking about in terms of PTSD, you know, is it actually rewiring the parts of the brain that have been overactive due to trauma or rewiring the parts of the brain that interpret that fear response, you know, the more cognitive or prefrontal cortex?

area, you know, there's some evidence to show that that is actually happening. I think my, my opinion is that it's really much more of an experiential impact. I mean, I guess it's hard to parse out what's happening neurobiologically versus what's happening just your beliefs, you know, like your beliefs about yourself. Is that, is that, is that, is that, is that, is that, is that going to just be, you know, boiled down to neurochemistry or is it more subjective kind of a shift in your beliefs or value? I guess new. neural pathways are probably being built if there's a new sense of identity. Yeah. But yeah, I guess it gets into the technical neurological definition of what is actually happening. There is, I mean,

there is plenty of research. There's this buzzword that's used a lot called neuroplasticity. Yeah. And if you listen to the podcast, a shout out to Andrew Huberman and Robin Carhart-Harris, they had a recent podcast. They talked pretty eloquently about this concept of neuroplasticity. And it's interesting because if you look at the different what's considered psychedelic compounds, and we talked about, you know, what is an actual psychedelic? It's a lot of different chemicals. But you can actually see differentially what kind of impact each molecule has on what's called neuroplasticity, meaning is there some type of flexibility in your thought processes

is based on changes at the neuronal level, at the brain cell level. Like there are changes in the dendrites, which is a part of the nerve cell, the brain nerve cell, or changes in the synapse or changes in the axon, changes in some part of the nerve cell that basically soften our routine habitual ways

of being and thinking and feeling in the world, soften them for a certain period of time. So ketamine will show that the, neuroplastic period is this long after your academy and experience. And MDMA will show neuroplasticity, the period, or also some people call it a critical period where after the psychedelic experience, the neuroplasticity or the flexibility and thought lasts for this long. So there is actually hard data that shows there is something happening at the level of the brain

cell that is responsible for the shifts in thinking and feeling and processing. And could you just give like a fifth grade explanation of what neuroplasticity is? Neuoplasticity, the best I can explain is that is nerve cells that fire together, wire together, right? And if you have a bunch of nerve cells, what I mean by fire together, wire together, and that's a buzzword I think is used by a lot of people, is that basically we need to operate in the world. We have to understand what a curtain is. We have to understand what a light is, what a door does, how to drive a car, how to talk, how to move about time and space. And that's because we have neurons that fire together, that fire around the same time and they wire together so that we can conduct routine operations of our lives. Neuroplasticity refers to softening some of that, not that we need to learn to walk or talk again, but when it comes down to feelings, thought processes, values, beliefs, if we have fixed values, fixed beliefs, fixed emotions, fixed thought processes. Neuoplasticity is a term that refers to softening those neurons that are so used

to firing together and wiring together. People use the term reset it. You know, my brain, I need to reset my brain. I don't like that expression very much. It's more just sort of a softening of another word for it is flexibility and thought. There's a lot of interchangeable terms for neuroplasticity. Just flexibility in processing information. at the level of the brain cells. And typically children are more neuroplastic than adults. Exactly, yeah. Right.

And I guess it just kind of enhances your ability to learn new things. Like, you know, a kid can learn four languages, whereas, you know, a 40-year-old would have a more difficult time learning a new language. And it's just because those neural pathways are not as defined. Right. And it's interesting to think about it in like a non-concrete example. Like typically when I think of neuroplasticity, it's like a new skill.

It's like learning a language, playing an instrument. but it will even create malleability in your beliefs about the universe at large, like more abstract ideas. So like if you were a devout atheist, is it possible that the additional neuroplasticity from psychedelics might make you feel like, oh, perhaps there is a higher power. I'm no longer confined by this idea of atheism or things like that? Yeah, that's what I mean. I appreciate the neuroscience.

I appreciate the neurobiological, neurochemical, chemical pathways and the MRIs and the PET scans and all the different stuff that's happening at that level of research. But when it comes to those sort of philosophical ideas or beliefs, sure, we can boil them down to neuroplasticity. But I don't like to, I don't like to sort of, that sort of biological reductionism doesn't quite capture the whole thing for me. So I don't, I mean, to answer your question, I would say, I don't, I don't know. I, I think that if people have a shift, in personal philosophy, like say, didn't believe in God, now believes in God because of a psychedelic experience, like, sure, that could be a rewiring of the brain in some ways. I'm sure you can

analyze it down to that level. But, you know, I think there's something to be sort of in awe of and maybe it sort of rejects or really challenges the notion of what science can actually prove or not prove. Right. Yeah, it's tricky, I guess, when you're, and we were speaking about this before, like, when you're within a scientific, like, research lab, the lengths that you're able to go and sort of push things and insert your own, like, philosophy or anecdotal evidence is kind of restricted. And there seems like there is sort of like a conflict between, you know, like personal experience and what people personally believe in what they're able to prove scientifically. And especially when it comes to things like this, that seem to be broaching, like, the metaphysical. How do you sort of like bridge that relationship and how do you sort of view those different schools of thought and how they interact? Yeah, I think we would be having this conversation right now if it wasn't, if it weren't for the science. The fact that some real pioneers, not only back in the 50s and 60s, but really in the last 20 years from Johns Hopkins, Roland Griffiths in particular, Johns Hopkins in particular, but other preeminent researchers, Rick Strassman, and just a whole host of other people who, beginning in the late 90s, early 2000s, began to

take a look at psychedelics all over again because there had been a halt on research for a good 40 years or so. You know, we wouldn't be having this conversation right now if it wasn't for that. So I think we owe a huge debt of gratitude to the science. And what the research can offer us is a safe and accessible understanding. of the way in which these molecules can be used to sort of heal people for or for personal growth. But that's, again, that's not to say that there hasn't been several thousands of years where people have used psychedelics in safe and effective ways for recreational, medicinal, ceremonial purposes. And, you know, I think that both what happens in the real world when it

comes to psychedelic use and what happens in the in research studies are both extremely valuable. I that's how I understand it. It's like sort of like a huge nod to science. Right. And say like we wouldn't be here if it wasn't for science and we need science. Right. And also science can't answer all the questions. In fact, the best science is helps us remind us how much, how little we actually know. Right. And keeps us in awe of ourselves, of the world, of the cosmos. Because the more questions we try to answer through research, the more questions arise. Yeah. You know, the only healthy response to that is not to sort of land on like, we definitively know this.

Like this neuron produces this effect. And, you know, in fact, there was a research study that came out. One of the, this is going to get a little technical. But one of the receptors in the brain that people have found is responsible for the psychedelic effect. The action of the psychedelic is. something called the 5HT2A receptor site. That's a serotonin receptor subtype. There's about 14 or 17 of them. But one in particular is where many psychedelic drugs exert their influence on the 5HT2A receptor. And I'm always skeptical of that because we don't even know how many neurotransmitters.

There's probably neurotransmitters that we haven't even discovered yet, let alone receptor types. And serotonin is just one neurotransmitter of many. And the 5HT2A receptor site is one. receptor site of many receptor sites, how can we definitively say that it's because of this particular receptor subtype that all of this amazing stuff is happening is treating all these conditions? And it's like, really? Like that one receptor? And so just last week there's like this new receptor site or new neurotransmitter called TRKB or something that actually is deeply affected by classic psychedelics.

And so they all of a sudden people are now like, oh, wait a minute. it's not just the 5HT2A receptor. There's this other thing. And, you know, like 10 years from now, we might look at the 5HD2A receptor and be like, oh, yeah, that was funny. Yeah. You know, it's actually this other thing or this whole complex system. Yeah, in conjunction with all these other things.

Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I took a lot of philosophy classes in college. And it always seemed that every scientific discovery, there was two philosophy questions that came out of it and that they were always like compounding and just like the nature of questioning things as we have more information. more questions will arise inevitably. Something as far as the receptors go that I've always been curious about, I understand like when someone smokes cannabis or ingest cannabis, basically like the cannabinoid receptors

in our brain are receiving it and then creating this effect. Why do we have these receptors in our brain biologically? And why are they there? And is there a reason that these substances like evolutionarily work together? Like, do they serve other purposes outside of giving us, like, this high? Yeah, I mean, all, I mean, they're for opioids or heroin, there's opioid receptors that exist naturally in the brain. There's cocaine receptors.

There's alcohol or benzodia receptors, you know, the GABA receptors. There's cannabinoid receptors. There's the 5HT2A receptors for, there's glutamate receptors for ketamine. So, I mean, why are they there? I don't understand. They all serve a function. They, you know, the cannabinoid receptors serve the function. serve the function in the absence of cannabis, you know, they serve regulatory functions of the body,

whether it's eating or sleeping or mating or, you know, and you can say the same thing for dopamine. It was motivation and arousal and reward and energy and focus. And then there's serotonin, which is for, you know, other naturally occurring biological, neurobiological function. So every endorphins, you know, when we run, we have naturally occurring, dampening receptors or you know so so all of them serve an innate function in the absence of any external chemical that you put into I understand so even if you've never ingested one of these external chemicals the receptors are still doing their autonomic function whatever that may be that makes sense and then whenever this new chemicals ingested it's then getting attached to that

receptor and then creating this effect exactly what's up guys we're going to take a break really quick because you need an attorney that's right maybe you were in a car accident, maybe you slipped, leaving your apartment, leaving your house, the sidewalk was all wet, who knows? Maybe you need an attorney. And if you do, you've got to check out Morgan and Morgan. That's who I would probably call. If something happened to me, if I was riding my bike and I crashed, if someone crashed into me, the worst thing about an accident is barely even the accident, right? I'll have back pain, you'll have neck pain, who knows? The worst part is trying to find an attorney. It's exhausting. You go online, you search all these websites. You're

going through Google. You're like, who is this guy? If you're young like me, you don't, you've never got an attorney before. It's a really, really challenging thing to do, and it can be super confusing. And that's why you could go to Morgan and Morgan. Morgan is America's largest personal injury law firm. They have over 100 offices nationwide and more than 800 attorneys. That's right. They have recovered over $15 billion for their clients. It's so simple. Eight clicks or less, you go to Morgan and Morgan, you can submit a claim. And now here's what's amazing. They don't charge you a single penny unless they win your case. You got nothing to lose. So if you're ever injured, you could go to for the people.com slash gagnon.

That's correct. For the people, F-O-R-the-people.com slash gagnon. Or dial pound law. That's pound 529 from your cell phone. I'm telling you, Morgan and Morgan, these are great guys. Dan Morgan is an absolute legend. If you don't know Dan Morgan, you know, he's an attorney, but he's even more than that, right? He's a writer.

He's a rapper. One of the greatest rappers of our generation, okay? So if you're ever injured, you could check out Morgan and Morgan. That's for the people.com. F-O-R-the-people.com slash gag-n, G-G-N-O-N-O-N-O-P-P-O-P-N-G-O-P-N-O-P-E-N-O-P-E-N-O-P-E-O-N-E-O-P-E-R-E-O-P-E-E-O-P-E-E-O-E-F-E-E-E-E-E-W-E-E-W-E-E-W. And that helps us that helps us get back to our new studio that we're going to be recording all of our episodes out of. So thank you to all the sponsors. Thank you to Morgan and Morgan for supporting us and supporting the dream of creating the

greatest podcast in the world. Now, let's get back to the show. Now, when it comes to research, something that I also don't understand, why is any drug off limits to, like, trained scientists to research it? That's very strange to me that, you know, a naturally occurring substance like psilocybin that's found in mushrooms would be illegal to do research on. Right. What is that? You know, I think the short answer to that is that the government decided at some point, mostly with the Controlled Substance Act in 1970, that certain drugs have no medicinal or very little medicinal potential and have a high abuse liability or high potential for misuse. And so they're scheduled under the category of Schedule 1.

And whenever a drug is scheduled under the category of Schedule 1, then it makes it very difficult for researchers to pull it off the shelf to study it because, again, because it's been deemed to have no medicinal value and high abuse potential, which is just ridiculous. I mean, it seems absurd. And again, I'm not even like really a huge drug guy. Like, you know, did Molly one time smoke weed every now and again. But like just the idea that a scientist can't get access to mushrooms within a specific closed setting that he's going to report to a university that is then going to be peer-reviewed just seems asinine. Do you think there's a greater situation with like pharmaceutical companies that are trying to hold a lobby on treatment that, you

can't be accessed, you know, cheaply by anyone. Do you think there's other things at play? Yeah, for sure. There's all kinds of political and financial pressures when it comes to this what I call an arbitrary system of scheduling drugs. I think that's unfortunate. I don't want to fan the flames of any conspiracy theories, but it's pretty obvious if you look at lots of research studies and look at where the money flows and between government and pharmaceutical agencies, that there's a whole lot more going on behind the scenes than we like to. admit. I mean, you can, I, this is hearsay, so I don't mean to make allegations that throw shade on any particular companies, but when Oregon was trying to pass a bill, it was a ballot initiative

to allow for non-medical use of psilocybin in facilitated therapy, in facilitated settings through licensed facilitators, not even for, again, non-medical. So you don't have to have a medical diagnosis, a mental health diagnosis. Apparently there was strong lobbying from big companies that have invested a lot of money in developing a pharmaceutical version of psilocybin for the treatment of mental health conditions. So they didn't want, they don't, it makes sense that for profits and for stakeholders and stuff that if all of a sudden psilocybin became legal and commercial and there were licensed practitioners who perfectly capable of holding what's called holding space for people, having ceremonies, that you don't have to have a medical diagnosis or a mental health diagnosis,

that you can just access it. Then a pharmaceutical company who produces a synthetic product that they want to sell through the regular channels of pharmacies and the medical system prescribing practitioners, they wouldn't want this to be widely available to everybody because they can't make a profit. So there's that. But I would say that just on the positive side of things, there has been a recent huge influx of research just expanding tremendously in the area of psychedelics. And the government has actually authorized the, you know, increasing the amount of MDMA and psilocybin and LSD and DMT that they authorized that can be, they have, I guess, a stash of it or they

know where to get it or something. They've authorized so many more hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of pounds of product to be able to conduct these research trials now. So it's really starting to change. And what do you think that is? Why now? Why is the government all of a sudden changes to it from the war on drugs to, yeah, do some research with mushrooms?

Yeah, I mean, the tides are changing. I think, you know, starting with cannabis and see. the folly of, you know, keeping cannabis as a Schedule 1 drug, which it still is, even though we have so many states that have at least medical marijuana and then so many more states that have made cannabis legal, it's still a Schedule 1 drug. It has no medicinal value and high potential for abuse. But I think starting with cannabis, the public opinion has changed. And so now there's tremendous political pressure to change the system and to allow for these compounds to be studied. And I think that, you know, finally, public opinion is starting to influence how these policies

are carried out. So you think just the social temperament has adjusted enough to make way for it. Yeah. I mean, it is crazy. The idea that Schedule 1 is that medical, no medical benefit plus high level of abuse. I mean, I'm sure people have discussed this, but alcohol seems like the highest level of abuse and the least, I mean, maybe there's a medical purpose for alcohol, I don't know, but the idea that that wouldn't be considered Schedule I, but all these other things are, it just seems absurd. Right, and nicotine, yeah. Right, yeah.

I mean, nicotine, I guess, it seems less abusive. And I don't know, maybe there could be, I like nicotine, so I don't know. I mean, I'll justify it. I love nicotine, but I haven't had any for 10 and a half years, but I still love it. Interesting. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, I think just in terms of harm, so nicotine, smoking in particular,

I think right I'm not talking about smoking I'm talking about like doing like a nicotine patch or a gum or something like that yeah yeah not even vape I think I don't like the idea of putting smoke in my lungs or my body like even like weed I don't particularly like smoking it I feel like that's a bad delivery system yeah like why would I want to cough right in order to have like right it seems like not a good trade off yeah but yeah it's just crazy to me that there's this that these things are illegal however the synthetic sort of like fabrication of the chemicals wouldn't be right and I guess it really does go back to, you know, people being able to make a buck in one way and not the other. Yeah. So as far as some of these conditions, and I know you had mentioned a lot when it came to, like, you know, psilocybin research, whether it's anorexia, PTSD, what have you. What other treatments can people do? And do you think that through just regular talk therapy, people could have the same effect that, you know, a psilocybin research could do or a psilocybin clinical trial could do?

I mean, I'm a psychologist, right? So I believe in what I do in terms of talk therapy. I think their research is pretty clear and there's certainly a disproportionate number of people who are on balance helped by psychotherapy versus those who find no effect or worsening symptoms as a result of psychotherapy. I think it's like 70% of people who have ever had psychotherapy will say that it definitely had a positive impact on their life. That's a pretty high number. So throwing shade on therapy doesn't seem to, you know, obviously I'm biased, so I recognize my bias. You know, but it's not for everybody and it's just a tool. And I think that, frankly, psychedelics are not for everybody and they're just a tool. So I think that what's really interesting

is like we've been talking about, that sort of the combination of the two doesn't mean you have to be like classically on the couch for 10 years talking about your dreams and free associating and having your therapist nod their head and say, tell me more about that. And, you know, it doesn't mean you need to do psychedelics every month, you know, but combining the two seems to be pretty powerful. And even when it comes to regular SSRIs, serotonin drugs like fluoxetine or serchraline or lexap or lexia, what the research has shown is that the combination of psychotherapy with these traditional antidepressants seems to produce a more.

robust effect in terms of improvement than either one alone. Interesting. And then you add sort of psychedelics in there. And certainly you can, like we were talking about, you can have a solo MDMA journey. You can do psychedelics on your own. But if you combine it with therapy, that to me is going to show the more robust response. And all the clinical research trials right now that are not all of them. A lot of them, when we talk about psychedelic assisted psychotherapy, involve some form of pretty

robust psychotherapy as part of the psychedelic experience. So I really do think that, you know, people need to understand that, you know, it really depends on the individual, like what is going to provide the most benefit. Yeah. And sometimes we don't know. And all of these things are tools. The other thing that we didn't really talk about yet is that what, you know, what about other ways of changing our consciousness that maybe non-pharmacologically are there ways to achieve altered states of consciousness that can produce profound insights without having to ingest a drug? do that. And there are, you know, there are plenty of there's like Kundalini yoga and breathwork and a series of other things that people can do, sensory deprivation we talked about,

float tanks, things that people can do to alter their consciousness that can produce a pretty profound effect. So therapy, meditation, psychedelics, breath work, I mean, all of these things are tools. And, you know, depending on the person and their circumstances, one might be more powerful than the other. Interesting. Yeah, I spoke with this guy. He's a free diver, William Truebridge. And he sort of explained to me that through his college years, he had done a lot of different psychedelics, and he found free diving, which basically he just swims to the bottom of the ocean, just one breath, no fins, goes all the way down. He holds the world record for the deepest finless free dive, went down 325 feet, I believe, a football field, multiple, and just went down

down and then came back up, one breath. Like, he can hold his breath for 10 minutes. And he basically said, yeah, I've done all these different drugs, psychedelics, things like that. And free diving gives me a greater high, or at least an equal high as all of them, except it's more sustainable because I can do it every day. And there's no chemical effect on my body. So for that reason, he was like, yeah, I prefer to free dive. And I'll meditate and it'll take me 45 minutes to get into a really clear sort of solid meditative space. Or I can free dive for 45 seconds and get into the same space just like that.

And so he sort of recommended, you know, if you're exploring this to try to dabble in meditation or maybe through, you know, yoga or free diving or whatever that thing is for you, could be more sustainable. So I'm curious with that mind frame, you know, does that change psychedelics as far as how people should approach healing? Should they try other things first? Or is it just a tool like any of these other tools in the order doesn't matter? Yeah, I think it's just a tool like any other tool. The order doesn't matter. But when it comes to like non-pharmacological approaches to healing or changing consciousness to develop insights or change your mind, change your perspective. One thing that can't get talked about enough, in my opinion, is

integration. So you can have a powerful psychedelic experience or you can have a powerful out-of-body experience or what's called transpersonal experience or change of consciousness experience through meditation or whatever. But what are we doing in our day-to-day lives that cultivate that sense of awareness or awe or connection. You were saying earlier, like after your MDMA experience, like, yeah, we'll call my mom once in a while and say, hey, mom, I love you. And that, like, the integration piece is so huge. So I think of it, like, if someone chooses to have a psychedelic experience, it's really important to explore all these other non-pharmacological ways that one can tap into that sort of inner wisdom or that higher awareness. And that could be

through meditation on a daily basis, journaling, connecting with naked, nature, doing breath work, free diving, all kinds of ways that one can change their lives after the psychedelic experience that sort of, it suggests to me that, you know, ongoing use of psychedelics isn't necessarily required because you can have one or a series of psychedelic experiences and then go ahead and live your life on a day-to-day basis and still tap into that healing energy. In fact, you know, Michael Pollan's book, How to Change Your Mind, which, you know, some people call the pollen effect, which 2018, it seems like, you know, that's when the hype really started to take off. You know, he said after all of his research for the book and all the different

psychedelic experiences he had, one thing that really changed for him is his daily meditation practice as a result of his psychedelic use. And so he doesn't, I don't think he continues to go back and use psychedelics all the time. He simply appreciates his meditation practice even more. And even Ram Dass, one of the sort of leading figures in the psychedelic movement. movement from the 60s, Richard Alpert changed his name to Ram Dass. He used psychedelics for quite a while, but then in his later years, he's like, I don't, maybe I'll do psychedelics like once a year, if that. Like, I don't, I have so many ways of connecting to people and, you know, higher power and nature. It's like psychedelic drugs are seen kind of secondary. Interesting. And that seems really sustainable.

Very sustainable, yeah. Definitely more so. I mean, again, I know a few people that have gone on SSRIs and things like that, or like antidepressants, and they have to take these medications every week, every day, and that to me seems unsustainable. And I feel bad for them sometimes, but I get maybe these drugs really help certain people, and that's what they need, and that's the thing that works for them, and that's cool. But I do wonder if there's a way to have, like, either infrequent chemical experiences or frequent sort of like non-chemical experiences to try to fix those types of like chronic mental health issues, you know, something like depression, is it possible to do, you know, a few sessions with psilocybin or another, you know, drug like that and get out of that

chronic depressed state without having to go on SSRIs? Have you seen experience with that? And would you encourage people to look into that? Yeah, definitely. I think that, you know, to your point about SSRIs, again, they're selective serotonin re-uptake inhibitors, fluoxetine, which is prozac, sercholene, which is Xoloft, Lexopro, or E. Satalopran. and Selexa, which is Satalopram, those are the major SSRIs that people take on a daily basis to treat anxiety, depression. And I think for about 30% of people, they're lifesavers. They're like vital to their functioning. Their lives turn around dramatically. And they're able to stay on those substances on a daily basis for years. That's great. And their depression is stable,

their anxiety is stable. That's about 30% of people. So it's important that, you know, we don't completely throw shade on these tools that we have that have been used for a while now, are relatively safe for a certain number of people, but they're certainly not a panacea. And, you know, psychedelics are a totally different paradigm where instead of having to take a drug like a pill or like fluoxetine or Zoloft or something every day, you have one, two, three experiences spaced out over the course of several months in the context of therapy. So you don't have to take a drug on a daily basis. And through those singular experiences consecutively, one can develop, like I said, a new understanding

and new tools, whether one continues with therapy or continues with meditation or some other daily practices that help them keep their depression away, you know, or manage their anxiety much, much better. I, yeah, I think that there's lots of debate out. there and I think it's unfortunate that people fight a lot on these subjects. People have had horrible experiences with some of these drugs. SSRIs if you've been on Prozac or Zolaf for 10 or 20 years to come off of them is very difficult and it's not often talked about. The prescribers tend to maybe minimize the impact of what's called

SSRI discontinuation syndrome or it's basically withdrawal. Like when you you discontinue lexapro after being on it for 10 years, it can take you three, four months to sort of readjust your neurochemistry and feel normal again. And then people often, and you've probably heard about this or maybe not, but people often, this is important for your listeners to understand, people will suddenly stop taking their antidepressant in favor of taking psilocybin because they heard all this hype about psilocybin. I need to get off my antidepressant because it hasn't been working and I'm going to take, you know, psilocy. Or they'll take it together, you know, like they'll take, they'll be on Zoloff for 10 years and then they'll take five grams of mushrooms,

not advised. It's not advised to suddenly take yourself off of a medication you've been taking regularly, and it's not advised to combine these drugs together. And, you know, that's what, unfortunately, people are doing. Some people who, in preparation for going on a retreat in Mexico to have a psilocybin experience, they'll be told by the facilitator, We either won't accept you because you're on an SSRI, which is devastating for somebody who's just desperate for help. Like, what do you mean? Like, what do I need to do to, you know, have this experience? I heard so much about it.

I really need help. I was just listening to what my doctor said. My doctor said, take this. So now I'm taking it. And now you're saying, I can't take it. Like, what am I to do? And then the person independently makes a decision to suddenly come off of it. Or they're told by the facilitator.

They're told by their physician like, okay, well, look, you're going to have this experience. But what we need to tape you off of it. So let's just like cut the dose in half for the first two weeks and then, you know, cut the dose a half in half again for the next two weeks. And then you're, you know, after a month, you'll be off of it all together. And you go ahead, go down there and have that experience. You'll be fine. Right.

Like, no. Sometimes it takes three, four, five months. And also, it's not totally clear that it's completely dangerous to actually combine the two. So I just said a second ago, we shouldn't necessarily combine five grams of mushrooms if you've been taking 100 milligrams of certuline every day for 10 years. but it's not quite that clear. Like people actually can take psilocybin and Zoloft at the same time and not have a contraindicated or adverse effect.

In fact, what happens sometimes is people will suddenly come off their SSRI. They didn't realize that it was actually producing a very stabilizing effect. They come off their SSRI. They go have a psilocybin experience. And now they haven't been on their SSRI for two months. They had a profound psilocybin experience, which lasted like a month. And now they're suicidally depressed. Right.

What do you do? You go back on your SSRI because the psilocybin didn't work. Do you go back and have another psilocybin experience for $5,000? Yeah. It's kind of a cluster fuck. Yeah. And it's hard to make that decision to yourself personally because you're already in a compromise mental state. Yeah.

So you definitely need an external physician to be able to evaluate you. A physician, somebody who doesn't even have to, someone who's just knowledgeable about these things. And you don't know. Like a lot of physicians aren't knowledgeable about it or they're very conservative and they just say flat out as contraindicated, don't ever do psilocybin is a dangerous drug. Or they'll say, like, I don't know,

a facilitator who's not a licensed healthcare provider will say, you know, maybe you should come off of it or don't worry about it, it's fine. So it's really difficult to make those decisions, whether it's with a person that you're working with or independently. It's tricky. I know we just mapped out kind of a difficult web there. Yeah.

And I wonder if we're just, an over-corrective time in society in regards to psychedelics and specifically mushrooms in the way that I feel like marijuana or cannabis was a few years ago, maybe, you know, eight, nine years ago. It was restricted for so long and then people were seeing anecdotal and individualized benefits. And then there's research that's showing benefits in different, you know, capacities. And then all of a sudden it's like, oh, weed fixes everything. And it's not addictive and there's no negative side effects and it'll fix your, you know, glycoma, whatever else, you know, chronic pain, whatever your condition is,

weed will fix it. And now we're kind of realizing like, oh, you know, high dose cannabis use from a young age can actually induce schizophrenia in some people. Or, you know, the health benefits might not be as great as we once thought. And it is just like another medicine, like all medicine. And I wonder if we're doing that with mushrooms now a little bit where, or psychedelics where people are like, it's going to fix all our problems. Mushrooms is the key.

They've been trying to keep it from us. They've been pushing it down. And it's like, okay, this is a medicine, just like all of their medicine. It's good for some people and it's going to be nothing or negative for other people. And we need to be sort of thoughtful when it comes to experimenting with these things. Yeah, I really try to have a voice for that nuance in this space because there's people all over the map. They're just anti-farmia, anti-regulation. They're hyper-capitalists.

They're super sensitive around ceremonial indigenous use. Which I get. I completely understand that case. All factions. They all have their position. They're all important. voices. But to have the voice for all of them nuanced in between to sort of recognize the strengths and weaknesses of each position is really, it's a tricky, it's a tricky thing to do.

Yeah. Now, I'm curious with psilocybin specifically and also MDMA, just getting outside of like the very technical, clinical work that you do and more just kind of like entering into like the philosophical lens. People that I know that have done a lot of psilocybin will describe this feeling of oneness. I know a lot of people that were atheists that will do mushrooms and come out of the experience being agnostic or even just fully being a believer in a higher power. I'm curious for you, what do you think is actually happening in those cases? Why does everyone feel the same feeling of on? What is going on with the chemicals in our brain that are connecting us? Do you think it's exposing us to an actual reality that we can't tap into when we're in our sober state? Is it just

showing us an alternate reality that we're getting into through the chemicals? And you're personal opinion, what do you think that is? Yeah, from the, I don't know on the, from the neurochemical side of things. Sure. I don't know if anyone does. Yeah, the biological reduction biomedical side of things. I don't, I mean, I think from my own personal experience, and I'll talk about that for a second. So I had, when I was younger, I used a lot of psychedelics, and I can think of three experiences in particular that stand out for me using LSD. The first time I used LSD, my mentality, my understanding of myself in the world was dramatically different. I can't tell you how it was different. I just knew that I was thinking differently. And I was frankly a little bit

concerned that I was never going to sort of get back to what I thought was normal ways of thinking and being in the world. I was perfectly functional. I was still in school, 15 years old, getting good grades, you know, playing sports, all that kind of stuff. But I knew for a few months, something was very different and slightly off. After the experience. After the experience. And I was like, okay. And eventually, it just, you know, and eventually it just, you know, sort of settled down. I just was like, okay, I just had this experience and it really changed the way I looked at things. And then I, again, I went on to develop a problem with addiction. Can you detail that first experience? The first experience was, it was definitely recreational.

It was not intentional. It wasn't for some spiritual seeking purpose. It was a little odd in the sense that I was born and raised in Stove, Vermont, and that's a very rural area. And I was in New York City because I had some friends from New York City, and I was invited to stay with them in New York. And we went out to what was called the Golden Silver Ball at a place called the Palladium. And I realized we're in Brooklyn here. So that was in the lower east side. It was 14th Street. And I forgot where exactly, but somewhere on 14th Street. And so it was like a debutante ball kind of thing. Or it was 15 years. I don't know what I'm doing there.

I was hanging out with my friends. And somehow we were in the bathroom and someone pulled out LSD. And I was like, sure, I'll try it. So I took a hit of acid, I think probably 100 micrograms, just a standard dose of LSD. And so, you know, this kid from Vermont, rural Vermont in Manhattan at a golden silver debutante ball, probably stoned, drinking a little bit, not totally hammered at that point. And, you know, roaming around New York City on a hit of acid. going into diners and staring at the, you know, danishes underneath the glass and, you know,

looking at the big buildings and things are like wavy and moving. And I was like a total alternate reality. Like what is what is going on here? You know, and being up all night and just, you know, that was, that's how I would detail the experience. It was a very surreal, strange experience from multiple, multiple levels, which is why I think I come back to, come back to Vermont. I'm like, what is going on? Like, what just happened? I was just in this alternate uniform. At that time, was there a lot of media surrounding it? Like, was it popular in culture and in music and things like that? Yeah.

I mean, I think that, you know, that was in the late 80s. And, you know, it's a funny dichotomy at that time. I can remember this very specifically. Like, the East Coast, I think, was known for young people using psychedelics, a lot of cannabis, a lot of drinking, that kind of thing. And the West Coast, there was a lot of cocaine, a lot of meth, a lot of stuff going on. And so when you talk to people on the West Coast at that time and you told them you did acid, they'd be like, oh my God, acid, that's crazy.

That's like, rots your brain. You're just going to go crazy when you do LSD. And we do cocaine. That's like totally normal and hip. And you're like, you do cocaine. Yeah, you do meth. Like that's going to totally get you addicted and crack and like all that kind of stuff. So there was like this dichotomy going on at the time.

So I think there was, it was still in the middle of the just say no campaign. And this is your brain on drugs. and it'll all fry your brain where it's LSD or cocaine or crack or whatever. It was in the height of that time. So yeah, it was definitely in the media. But we didn't care. I mean, I was a, you know, social guy, loved a party, started young. And it just, you know, seemed like a natural progression of things.

And you were open to the experience. So you weren't anxious while you were in the experience at all. You weren't fearful. You were just sort of awestruck by it. Yeah, I was. I was sort of awestruck by it. I didn't, again, I thought maybe I had blew a fuse, so to speak. like there was something did I did I you know screw up my brain so right like did I do some permanent

damage I wasn't sure I wasn't terrified that I had I just wasn't sure I was like this is a this is a new way of thinking in hindsight do you think you did it all is it possible to tell well I mean I credit I credit my psychedelic experiences with two things in my life one is my decision to become a psychologist frankly because of the act yeah my experience of psychedelics opening myself up to new ways of seeing myself in the world and people got me really interested in how people think and behave and how the world behaves. So I credit my psychedelic use with my decision to become a psychologist. And also I credit my psychedelic use at a young age, even though I developed a problem with alcohol, cannabis, LSD, and other drugs. When I got sober at the age of 20, I went to rehab

for six months, basically. Yeah, it's like 42 days in impassee. patient rehab and then four months in a halfway house. But there's a process that happens in recovery where you have to sort of relearn how to live your life. And one of the tools at the time that was, and it's still pretty popular today, which is the 12-step program, which is based in sort of spiritual ideas, I would not have been receptive to the message of spirituality and recovery if it wasn't for my psychedelic experiences because I knew there was a spiritual side of things. Oh, interesting. So going back to what you said about people that you've known who are atheists and then they take a psychedelic and then all of a sudden they're awe inspired and they start to believe there might be something else out there.

Like that was my experience. There is something about psychedelics that put us in touch with, I would say a kind of connection to ourselves, other people and the universe or nature that suggests we, you know, like we are all part of the same stuff. You said earlier, we're all just stardust, right? We're all just passing through. We're all made of the same stuff. And there's something about psychedelics that seem to bring our attention pretty front and center to the fact that we are all, everything is connected in some way. Not sure how, but there's a definite felt sense that is undeniable that we are all connected

somehow. It's a fascinating experience. And I think that's why some of the early research in the early 2000s out of Johns Hopkins was with psilocybin and people with a terminal diagnosis. So they're facing death and taking high doses of psilocybin. And a lot of them will say that they got in touch with something mystical that they had never experienced before and rated the experience of taking psilocybin as one of the top five most meaningful experiences of their whole lives and actually diminished their fear of death.

And maybe better said that they just, could understand that we're all part of a sort of an long, long journey, a long process that far extends our lifetimes. And it sounds like, like you said, you studied philosophy. It sounds metaphysical and stuff. But there's something specific about psychedelics that puts us in touch with that reality or that alternate reality. Yeah. And it doesn't seem crazy to me on a personal level. I was raised very religious. My parents are both devout Catholics. So I grew up in a very religious household and the notion of, you know, eternity, we're here for this little ephemeral period and that there's this greater beyond that we need to be aware of and this higher power and ritualism and how

rituals are actually impacting, you know, our spirit of things like that was not foreign to me. But I do understand people that come from a non-religious, you know, upbringing, the notion of ingesting this chemical and then having a religious or spiritual experience, it might be easy to discredit. it because you could say, okay, well, you know, one time I had a night tear where I woke up and I saw someone in my room, but that wasn't real. So just because these things are happening in our minds, does it mean that it's exposing us to this actual reality that things are connected or is it just giving us this, you know, sort of simulated experience that things are connected? You know, do you have any thoughts to, if something's personal experience, we're feeling like things are connected with someone else's personal experience feeling like things aren't? You know, do you have any thoughts to, if someone has that criticism? Well, I mean, there's a book written about it that I read half of. I haven't finished it yet by Chris Lethaby called The Philosophy of Psychedelics, I think. And there's another philosopher named Peter Sostin Hughes, who you probably, we follow each other on Twitter.

So I often repost some of his material. He talks about these kinds of things. There's a name for it. There's like the false, you know, do psychedelics produce a false sense that we're all connected because of the drug action itself when it doesn't really exist. Like having a night terror, it's just night terror. It's not real. And psychedelics are just an extension of that.

Or are psychedelics actually helping us connect to some deeper wisdom that is more authentic than we can even imagine? And in that book, he chronicles all the different ways in which you can make that argument. You've studied philosophy so you know you can go on all kinds of rabbit holes and trying to make a point. So that's why I think it's taking me a while to finish the book. But he answers that question pretty resoundingly, that it's not some false reality that's being produced, that there is something about, and I can't tell you what the argument is

and how he came to that conclusion, but it was a resounding like this is, there is something here. There's actually a researcher, I don't know if you follow him on Twitter either, Andrew Gallimore. I forgot what universities associated with, but we haven't talked about DMT yet,

dimethyltryptomy. Yeah, I'm curious about that as well. And he's, that's, there's different forms of DMT, but the traditional form, which is called NNDMT, which is the active ingredient in ayahuasca. Some of the early studies in New Mexico with Rick Strassman were with intravenous DMT. So Andrew Gallimore is doing research with his team to basically keep people on a like 45, minute or hour long intravenous DMT drip. And so they stay in that very intense DMT space, which is characterized by entities. People say machine elves. Right. Mandalay. Mondalas, geometric stuff swirling around, snakes, like all kinds of things. And so he's, he's really interested in trying to answer this question too. Is there actually an alternate

reality that we're just in waking life not aware of, but it's just as real. as the reality in which we're living in now. Right. And it's not just the drug that's doing it. It's actually some other, like some actual reality. Right. There's an extension of our present reality. And there's things like this that I think people can point at

where it's even like colors and things like that, right? Like we're experiencing reality. We're both seeing roughly the same colors. Now, that's not all the light that's present. There's UV light that's coming through that certain animals can see. And their perception of the reality that they're living in is different because they're able to see different colors. obviously the colors you're seeing and the actual information going to your eyeballs is going to

change more or less the reality that you're existing in. So, you know, there's things like that that we just don't have the cones to perceive certain things. And other animals do. And there's certain people that are colorblind and their perception of different facets of reality are slightly different. And now those are subtle variations. But certainly those subtle variations, you know, is it possible that there are less subtle

variations where, you know, there's a spiritual realm that truly exists regardless of if we acknowledge it or not. Yeah. And I've been interested in the idea of, you know, people doing DMT together and experiencing the same visual effects despite not communicating it to each other. Have you heard of this before? Well, I think that's what Andrew Gallimore's lab is trying to look at. If there's such consistency across individual subjective experiences,

like everybody is reporting this one type of machine elf, you know, like completely, completely independent of each other. There's no prior discussion to sort of, you know, cue the person to think about some cosmic serpent or something that's going to come into their DMT experience. But like, so I think they're what they're trying to do is chronicle the subjective experiences of each DMT participant and see what commonalities there are.

I'm not sure about in terms of being in a group setting where people, let's say, without being primed with any subjective queuing, you know, like, okay, I want you all to think about, you know, guitars or something like that. And then all of a sudden, you know, people are like, oh, my God, I had this vision of a guitar that was swirling around with the geometric. No, without any kind of priming. I don't know if there are, I haven't heard of that. Have you read stuff about that?

I've just heard anecdotal stories of people that have done DMT in group settings and they sort of will look into the woods where they're doing the DMT and be like, do you see that? And they'll be like the machine elf for like the being that is right there. And they go, yeah, and it's waving to us. and they both are able to communicate the same experience to each other, independent of each other. And it's like, are they priming each other where they're saying something and then planting the thought into their head? I don't know if it's even possible to research that or how you measure that.

But those experiences, I mean, if you had them with someone, I'm certain would change your perspective of what reality truly is. Right. Because the subjective experience is going to be, you know, whatever it is in your mind. But once there's two people having independent subjective experiences that are visualizing the same thing, then to me it gives credence to, you know,

maybe they're just observing beyond a veil, so to speak. Yeah. But I don't know if you can measure that or I don't know if there's a scientific precedent for that. I don't know. That's what I think this guy's lab is trying to figure out. But I wonder also about the research on telepathy, because some of what you're talking about

is some sort of like mental telepathy. Like we're somehow communicating ideas independent of like verbally exchanging ideas that we're somehow having a shared experience, a thought experience or a visual experience, some sort of telepathy. And I think that's not uncommon as a thing that's reported for people having psychedelic experiences,

but I don't know the actual literature on it. What would be like an anecdotal report on that? Like sitting with somebody who's maybe got eyeshades on and listening to music and there's no words exchanged. And one person may be the sitter and the other person is on a psychedelic. And the sitter is sitting there thinking about, you know, the person is

I wonder how they're doing, I wonder what they're thinking of, maybe they're thinking of like dogs or cats or some sort of zoo or something like that and all of a sudden the participant in the clinical trial might take their eyeshades off and it's like, I just had this vision of like dogs and cats and I was like in a zoo or something and like they can be, oh my God, it was so weird,

I was just thinking about the same thing. So there can be... You've heard of this? I've heard of anecdotal reports of that, yeah. Wow. Yeah. That is fascinating. What is going on? I know. I know. That's the thing. The other piece that I think is interesting when it comes to this particular topic is what's called epigenetics or intergenerational trauma. So that's one area that's fascinating. Rachel Yehuda is a researcher at Mount Sinai who's done a lot of work in this area. But, you know, experiences on psychedelics can maybe do something where they unlock genetic codes or de- deeply embedded genetic memories of intergenerational trauma.

So going back, you know, hundreds of years and like somehow in your lineage, there was this event that happened. But under the influence of psychedelics, you have some memory of some thing that happened hundreds of years ago that somehow potentially embedded in your DNA because the psychedelic did something, you know, to activate this, this memory. Wow. And that's a whole other area of research, which is, which is fascinating. Yeah, I mean, just describe, like, describe me.

it sounds very like woo-woo like spiritual kind of mumbo-jumbo but there is actual money and research going into actually finding data on these things yeah i mean as best as i can try to explain it um in a in a more simplified version one of the areas of research that dr yahuda looked at was holocaust survivors and what she found was that she would study the a DNA of holocaust survivors and look at certain genetic patterns in their in their DNA to see what what she could find and then she would also take you know lengthy questionnaires psychometric data on their anxiety their fear response different ways of functioning in the world and what she found was that even the offspring of people who survived the Holocaust. So these are the kids of Holocaust survivors who didn't go through

the Holocaust would somehow show the same genetic coding as their parents. So, you know, what that suggests is if you think of trans or intergenerational trauma, that could span hundreds of years. Sure. If there's somehow something about traumatic experiences that get embedded within the DNA, that then somehow get coded and then passed on from generation. to generation, and then you take a chemical that somehow activates memories of past trauma, I mean, it does, it sounds woo-woo a little bit, but the way she describes it, it actually makes a whole lot of sense. Yeah, I'm curious if there's like a metaphysical explanation that can be ascribed to any of this. Like, I've heard, like, very loose, like, research on, like,

atoms being able to communicate with each other and that by like studies effectively where like you're able to do one thing to one atom and it's able to manipulate the other one. Do you know anything about research in that capacity that even without us thinking or doing anything molecularly are molecules are interacting and interfacing with each other to pass on information? Have you heard about that? Yeah, I have barely enough rudimentary knowledge of that area. But basically what you're talking about is quantum energy or quantum physics. And, And that is actually interesting because it does dovetail with this intergenerational trauma theory.

And what I do know about quantum theory or quantum physics is the notion of time and space are completely obliterated. So if you eliminate time and space and therefore there are just molecules floating around everywhere, interacting with each other without any sense of time and space, then again, it goes back to this idea, we are all connected. and somehow we're communicating with each other and there is no time and there is no space and it gets pretty out there.

That's why it's so hard to understand. But I think there's a lot of research being done on this and it's becoming more accessible to people and actually more plausible as we get to know. Again, I don't know where psychedelics fit into that exactly, but there's a lot of research coming out in that area. Yeah, I'm curious if the like if psychedelic users are experiencing something that will one day be explained with quantum physics.

Yeah, it's possible. And in the way that, you know, I can't think of an exact analog, but, you know, think of like high-level mathematics in the time of, you know, ancient Greece is now like third grade math today, you know, like this Pythagorean theorem or things like that. Like a real genius, Pythagoras had to come up with this method of measuring hypotenuses and things like that. Now kids can do it. And I wonder if in, you know, a couple hundred years our understanding of what psychedelic users now

we're experiencing can then be explained with like oh there are these molecules that are communicating with each other without us really even being aware of it passing information generationally or interpersonally and things that back in the day would be described as woo-woo or like vibes and things that we can't communicate because we don't have the scientific literature will one day be able to be put into data and be like no this is what it's actually happening yeah and how that's an exciting prospect that now all of a sudden our idea of reality is expanded Yeah. Yeah, that's very interesting.

Yeah, and it's also when it, yeah, with the world and we're living in with AI and augmented reality and virtual reality and the technology getting smaller and smaller is almost like we're slowly maybe catching up to that age old wisdom that we don't really have access to now, but we're sort of somehow mechanistically trying to recreate it through our technology. Interesting. Yeah. Can you expand on that idea? Well, I just think of like, you know, artificial artificial intelligence, augmented reality, deep, deep learning, you know, the fact that we are going to be transitioning to wearables, meaning, you know, glasses that we can wear or stuff in our clothing or maybe embedded in our skin, you know, neuralink. is it possible that there are, I would say, technologies, not like physical matter technologies, but sometimes actually psychedelics are referred to as spiritual technologies. That's not an uncommon term.

I don't like the word technology because it just naturally suggests like a mechanical instrument, a technology. But if you think about the direction of how technology, how AI, how all of these systems that we are integrating more and more into our lives, are getting smaller and smaller and more and more integrated, just like we're talking about a second ago, at the level of the atom, that things are communicating with each other completely outside of our awareness. I mean, think about Bluetooth. And, you know, I mean, it's just like magnify that by a million. Right. And we're like slowly mechanistically trying to catch up with what are, what already exists. Oh, interesting.

Yeah. Yeah. I've heard that saying, you know, be, be leery of unearned wisdom. Yeah. Have you heard that before? Yeah, it's attributed to Carl Jung, I think, which is a famous Swiss psychoanalyst, right. Psychiatrist, beware of unearned wisdom. Yeah. I forgot in what context he was writing about that, but I've heard it's been used as a cautionary tale against psychedelics. Right.

Yeah, I've heard that, that, you know, you take psychedelics, and I've heard people even make analogs to, like, the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve. Like, you take this substance that then gives you the knowledge of good and evil. gives you all of this wisdom. Some people have profound experiences, obviously. They see God, and then they go back to reality, and they have this wisdom that they didn't go through the experience in this reality of, you know, ascertaining. So I'm curious if you think that's bogus, if that's misattributed to psychedelics. What are your thoughts? I think it's misattributed to psychedelics, but I see where the application is. I can think of a

personal anecdote. When I got sober in 1992, and I went to rehab, like I told you, and I would say to people, and people ask you when you go to rehab, what's your drug of choice? What's your drug of choice? And I always said my drug of choice was pot, alcohol, and acid. And so I got known in rehab as the guy who did a lot of acid. And one guy came up to me and he said, Rick, Rick, you know, you've done a lot of acid. You know, all this meditation and spirituality stuff that we're learning about here in rehab. Don't you think we could just figure that out with just taking LSD? Like, why don't we just take acid and we'll figure it out? And at the time, I was like, no, dude, I tried that. Like part of my psychedelic use when I was younger was like, I'm on to something here.

I want to learn something from this. And eventually it just turned into a total shit show. So at the time, I was like, no, no. The way you achieve wisdom, serenity, recovery, enlightenment is putting in the work. You know, like staying sober, meditating, being kind, learning about compassion, like all the stuff that you need to do on a regular basis to live a healthy life and recovery. I've since changed my mind on that. I do believe that wisdom can come from various sources. And this idea of unearned wisdom suggests that there has to be something that someone must strive for or work at in order to achieve some sort of higher awareness or level of wisdom.

And there's countless examples of people being struck with enlightenment. And one person that comes to mind is Eckert Tolly. You know, he's a very famous guy, wrote the book The Power of Now and he's been on Oprah hundreds of times. He's very, very wise man and has helped millions of people, I'm sure, with his writings and his talks. But he describes his own personal experience being, like, highly suicidal and like sitting in a park for weeks or months or years or something. And then all of a sudden one day being like, oh, wait a minute, I've been looking at it all wrong. And he sort of reformulated his whole understanding of himself and the world. There are no psychedelics involved.

There's no like hard work. He wasn't sitting there on purpose to try to figure out the, you know, nature of the universe. It just happened upon him. And that can happen in a lot of ways. People with near-death experiences, traumatic experiences, people in deep meditation practices, on certain adventures, traveling, meeting people that somehow strike in them a sense of awe and wonder. So I'm not sure, like this idea of honor and wisdom, taking a psychedelic can be a profound

experience that can produce a fair amount of insight that can change someone's life. Right. And it's interesting that some things will be considered work and not others. Like if you journal every day about how you feel, that would be considered work and reflection and introspection. But if you were to journal every day while on psilocybin on low doses or you, you know, journal once a week on psilocybin, something like that, why wouldn't that still be considered work? Right. Like there's still self-reflection happening. Right. It's just sort of magnified by this chemical. And, you know, if you're staying up to journal and you use caffeine, does that make it less difficult?

Does it change the work? Right. Right. It just seems like it's aiding the work in some capacity. Right. So, yeah, I don't think it's necessarily a fair judgment. This is also coming from someone that does not really done psychedelics in any great capacity. Right.

What's up, guys? We've got to take a break really quick because I need to tell you about some of the greatest vases in the game. Yeah. I'm sure you're wondering, what? Vases? Yeah. That's right. We are sponsored by vases.

and this vase comes from freeze pipe. The freeze pipe vase might be the greatest vase ever invented, okay? Because with a normal vase, you're going to breathe in, and you're going to be breathing in all that hot smoke. You've got a flower in the vase. You're going to be breathing in, and it's just going to be hot air going into your lungs. You're going to cough.

You feel terrible. This is what the vase looks like. It's one of the greatest vases I've ever used in my life. This vase, it has a glycerin chamber. If you put in the freezer for one hour, it'll decrease the temperature of the air coming out of the vase. by 300 degrees. You know what that means? Cold air. It feels amazing. Fills up your lungs. You feel so good when you breathe in

air from this vase. You don't cough. You don't feel bad anymore. You can just take all the breasts of flour if you put that in the vase as you want. And you'll feel amazing. So if you're interested in checking out this vase or any of the other vases that they have on their website, you could go to the freezepipe.com and use the promo code Gagnon. That's right, Gagnon, G-A-G-N-O-N-N, and you will receive 10% off your entire order. This is one of the greatest vase websites I've ever been to. That's TheFreasePipe.com and use the promo code Gagnon for 10% off your entire order. Shop today and say goodbye to those gross old vases that make your lungs and throat hurt, all right?

And get a vase that cares about you. Now let's get back to the show. And we're back. So I'm curious about other psychedelic experiences that you've had and other ones that you've observed. So we talked obviously a lot about psilocybin, a little bit about MDMA. I'm curious about DMT. So dimethylethyptamine, which a lot of people know. I've heard it. It's like the death chemical. So this is what's released when you die. Is that true? Is there any credence to that? I don't know. Actually, that's interesting. I'm not sure if that's the case or not. I haven't heard that

often. Really? I mean, I think that where that comes from is that there was a theory not that long ago that DMT existed in large quantities in the penial gland. And the penial gland is somehow some gland like deep, deep, deep inside the brain that is something that gets activated when you're, when you die or something along those lines. So, but I don't typically hear that. What I've heard often is that DMT is referred to as the spirit molecule. And then that chemical that we talked about earlier, five methoxy dimethylethyptamine is, called the God molecule.

So you have a spirit molecule, which theoretically, again, we talked about earlier, puts you in contact with geometric patterns, a new multidimensional world filled with alien creatures and, you know, like machine elves and different things going on there

that communicate with you, laugh at you, that you interact with or don't. You're just observing four, five minutes. 10 minutes, 15 minutes, and it seems like lifetimes have gone by. Like we talked about quantum physics earlier, you know, like time and space completely distorted. Right. And so you come out of it after five minutes or 10 minutes and you're like, what happened? Where was I?

What, you know, and it's like, it's only been like 10 minutes, dude, and you're, you're all right. Wow. Really? And 5 methoxy dimethylethyptamine is something that has very, very loose, subject. similarities to regular DMT. And for someone to have a breakthrough experience, which is hard to describe, I'll just use that term right now anyway, a breakthrough experience on 5MEO DMT, 5 methoxy DMT, it's very difficult for people to describe, but basically they have an experience where

there's no separation between themselves and the ultimate nature of reality or God or unity or pure consciousness or light or energy. It's as though a lot of people try to put words to what is described as, again, it's called the God molecule, that you merge your entire being, whatever you think of yourself to be, it completely disappears and you just unite with ultimate source and you like hang out there for a little while. And then you slowly come back and you're like, oh my God. Like I just, I just was, you know, one with God. I was just, I just was, everything was gone. And everything was nothing and nothing was everything. And there was no here or there up or down. me or them or this or that. It was just pure non-dual, like, unity consciousness experienced

for real. So that's different than regular DMT because regular DMT has got like, you know, entities and geometric shapes and stuff, whereas five methoxy DMT, like there's none of that. Interesting. It's gone. It's all gone. Everything is gone. Interesting. Okay. So, yeah, I talked to this guy, Mike Corey. He's like a tribal adventurer. that has lived with different people around the world, the Hads of Tribe and hunted baboons, he's got all these really cool stories. He has an awesome YouTube channel, it's great.

And he described doing ayahuasca, which is the active ingredient in ayahuasca? TMT, yeah. But five-M-O-D. Not five-M-O-D. Oh, really? Yeah. Interesting, because he said that he tried,

I think it was ayahuasca, and had that type of experience where he was like, I went outside to go through up, and then instead of throwing up, I laid down on the leaves, and then everything was gone. And just how you described, he was like, I became in pure communion with a higher being. And I was kind of afraid, but then it made me feel like I shouldn't be afraid.

And in that moment, I was willing to give my life to what this thing was. I was willing to sacrifice my life if that's what it was required of me. Fortunately, it wasn't required of me. But if that's what it needed, I would have been happy, more than happy to do it. And he was in Central America at the time and sort of came out of it, like having this interesting historical perspective on like ritual sacrifice and people you know wanting to be sacrificed to this higher being because there was such a purity and a sort of like admiration for this higher power and that was through ayahuasca I guess and that

hearing that story really was profound to me I was like what is going on what is that I'm curious what in your experience have you had an experience like that personally no I can't say that I have. But I have been with people who have had those experiences and have described them. It's interesting what you're describing. Again, words fail miserably to try to capture what some of these experiences are like, especially the much more profound ones and ones that seem to be a whole lot less autobiographical and more just like out there. And so when you're described, what your friend went through with regular DMT.

Ayahuasca, by the way, for anyone who's listening, ayahuasca is a combination of two different substances. One is a root bark that has the active chemical DMT in it. And DMT is a molecule that gets quickly broken down into our system, in our system. So if you ingest DMT, pure DMT, not in the ayahuasca form, it'll be about five minutes long.

It'll come into your system. It'll do its thing and then your body will discharge it, break it down very quickly. Iowaska has the chakruna root in it, which is a type of harmoline or a type of substance that basically inhibits the breakdown of DMT. So the DMT and the chakruna mixed together into ayahuasca brew and the DMT ends up staying active in your system much longer because the chakruna, the harmeline is interfering with its discharge. or its breakdown. Interesting. And, you know, I think what your friend was experiencing, sounds like what I would consider a breakthrough experience on regular DMT. It's interesting the way you described it. Again, words fail miserably. He had an experience where he laid down and it was like a communion with God, I think you said, a communion with a higher power that he

was willing to sacrifice his life for if that was required. And it's, Again, the language may be not accurate, but it suggests there's still a sense of like there is a higher power that it feels like I may need to sacrifice myself to as if there's an I that would be sacrificed. And that to me suggests the difference between NMDMT, regular DMT or Iahuasca and 5MEO DMT because there is no, in the breakthrough experience of 5. MEO, Vythoxy DMT, there is no, there's no I that would be sacrificed. It's like there's a light on the table here. Like that's, you've become that. There's no you that actually became that. It's just what is.

Interesting. Right. Your entire awareness, if you could even call it that, has just been turned into light. Right. There is your sense of self has completely dissolved. There's no sense of self. It no longer exists. Yeah, that is a kind of scary notion.

Yeah, I think that, and that's in the book, Michael Pollan's book, How to Change Your Mind, he had a very unpleasant experience, I think, on five methoxy DMT. He said it was like a rocket ship and, you know, I didn't know if you'd ever come back and it was just terrifying. And it definitely is terrifying. It's totally terrifying experience. Yeah. And I'm actually in a training program right now,

uh, trauma informed facilitator training program, with five methoxy DMT. So even though it's not a legal substance, there are places where it's legal and where people are having these experiences in Mexico to name one place where it's legal. And I'm in a cohort of about 12 other, 13 other people who are studying and training to become facilitators

of five methoxy DMT. Wow. And that is culminating into an experience that I will have in Mexico at the end of the year. Oh, wow. Yeah. And how are you feeling about the prospect of that experience?

Are you excited? Are you nervous? I'm nervous, but I'm a thrill seeker, and I'm a little bit of a person who likes to take risks. And so I think my excitement and my fear system is a bit different in some ways because I think my system interprets fear sometimes is, excitement. Sure. And so I think I'm, I'm in a healthy way. I'm, I think I'm nervous about it, but I'm also excited. Right. Yeah. That's going to be very interesting. And do you, so are you going to

do ayahuasca or do you think it'll be? It's just five methoxy dimethylopamine. Interesting. It's synthetic, not from the toad. Interesting. Yeah. And do you find that people that have research backgrounds or academic backgrounds with psychedelics have different experiences? Or are they able to understand what's happening? Or is it less scary? Do you find that? Do you find that? that there's any difference versus just a lay person doing DMT? I don't think there's a difference. I mean, these compounds are powerful and they disable egos and senses of identity. So I think that if you're a researcher and you've studied it,

are you going to have a different experience than a lay person? I think that, I don't know, the compound will make that decision because it's out of our hands at that point. Yeah, I guess I just wonder if, you know, a regular person would be like, oh, is this going to be forever? Is this, you know, could I die? A researcher might be able to say, like, I cannot die from this. It's, no one has ever died from this chemical being ingested. I don't know what time is anymore. And my sense of self is eroded, but also, like, I will come back from this.

Is it easier to reinforce those messages if you have a research background or anything like that? Or is it just so powerful, so potent. It's just. Well, I think it goes, it goes, yeah, I see what you're saying. And in a sense, like, someone who knows. knows more about these compounds, either from personal experience or having done a lot of research on it? Are they somehow more confident or in a different mindset or position to have an experience that they feel less scared about or is just going to somehow impact their experience

differentially than from somebody who's never had the experience before, hasn't done a whole lot of research? I don't know. I mean, people have died from these experiences. I don't think that people have died necessarily directly from five mythocry. DMT or ayahuasca, some people have died from choking on their own vomit. People have died from using some of these substances in unsafe ways, say for example in a hot tub or near a pool, where because you become completely disabled when you're on these substances, you lose all sense of your body and stuff that you, if you're using it in a way where you're near water, it's quite possible you could drown.

Right. So there's ways in which people have died, but not as a direct result of the chemical. Unless, I suppose, if it generated such a fear response and you had a heart condition and you had a massive increase in heart rate or blood pressure as a result of some sort of fear response as the drug was coming on,

that could be a dangerous situation where someone could have cardiac arrest. Right. But, I mean, I think those are exceptionally rare. There's one compound we haven't talked about, which I have very little experience with, which is Iboga or Ibogaine. What's that? I've never even heard of that. Never heard of Ibogaine? Ibegain is definitely a psychedelic. It's definitely within the realm of the category of psychedelic drugs. It's from a West African root bark, and it has been shown to be

exceptionally effective, according to some research, in treating opioid use disorder. So people who are addicted to heroin or fentanyl or any opioid, if they go in and they have an ibogaine experience, hopefully facilitated, somehow it's a very long experience can be up to, you know, 18, 24 hours plus with lots of monitoring, hopefully. And there are some cardiac conditions where it makes it a little bit more risky, but it basically does something to the opioid receptors in your brain where it not only causes psychedelic experiences, deep, profound visions and, you know, changes in consciousness, but also doing something at their opioid receptors that people come out of it and they don't have withdrawal symptoms, which is highly unusual because opioids cause, you know, significant

withdrawal when you stop using them. Right. It's a chemical dependence. It's a literal physiological chemical dependence on on opioids and somehow ibegain does something at their level of the opioid receptor that after 36 to 48 hours someone doesn't actually have any withdrawal symptoms at least that's what's been reported wow on many occasions so that's one we haven't really talked about but that is a that's a significant one that people should know about i mean that's an amazing i mean if that's possible for some people i mean the idea of being a heroin addict a lifelong heroin addict i mean there's so many people especially in the U.S., I mean, the opioid epidemic is insane, to do one treatment and then to no longer be addicted to heroin seems like massive breakthrough.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And again, it's when you hear something like, when we hear something like that and you're looking at me like, really? Like, holy shit, dude. Is that for real? It's crazy.

And, you know, it's, again, it's not a panacea. It's not a cure all. It doesn't happen for everybody. But, you know, when you hear enough reports of it, you're like, it works for some people. Like, let's take a look at this. If it happens to someone's brother, someone's mom, someone's dad, I mean, that's multiple lives that are changed from one experience. Yeah, yeah, and there are people who go and use aboga or Ibegain and have an experience

and they go back to using heroin. And that's fine. That can happen. Yeah, but that just seems very dramatic. I mean, the idea that, yeah, you could just be so, I mean, I don't even understand how that's possible, like a chemical addiction. Your body needs these chemicals or else it will start to have withdrawals. Yeah.

And you're able to trick your body into not needing it. Yeah. Wild. Yeah. It was actually featured in a movie that came out a few years ago, a few years ago called Dost. Have you heard of that? Maybe.

I'm not sure. It was on Netflix. I was probably on Netflix called DOS. It's a woman who had an opioid use disorder. She tried mushrooms. It didn't work. And she couldn't get off of opioids. She got on methadone.

And she ended up going to Mexico to have an I-Begaine experience. And that basically put her into remission from her opioid use disorder, even though she almost died from it because she didn't tell the people how much methadone she was actually on when they gave her. the Ibegang. Wow. So it was a little tricky. Do you find that there's a cultural difference in how different people interact with psychedelics?

Like, obviously, our knowledge and the way we communicate knowledge is sort of impinged by the language that we use. And the way the different cultures use language will sort of change the way they think about certain ideas depending on the way the structure of the language literally works. So I'm curious, with psychedelics, does it have the same effect where different cultures will see different things or they will experience different types of hallucinations or feelings depending on the culture that they were raised in. Or have you seen any research on that? Yeah, I mean, I think that that's something that comes to mind anyway is from the indigenous cultures that, say, for example,

the Native American communities that use peyote. There's a way in which peyote ceremonies are integrated into their rituals, into their lives that is very different than any one of us could really understand because we didn't come from that sort of culture. We can be exposed to it. We can be invited into one of those experiences. But the way in which that culture embraces or uses that sacred sacrament, that they, that's very different. I think that more generally, when you talk about people of different ethnicities, races, cultural upbringings, Catholic, Jewish, African-American, Latin, all these different races and cultures. cultures, I think that there are, we need to develop cultural competencies to understand how

the subjective experiences of psychedelics might different cultures. So I don't know the research on it very well, but that is something that is, you know, cultural competence is something that any healthcare practitioner has, I think in a lot of disciplines, we are required to take cultural competency education credits on a regular basis to be aware of how cultures respond differentially to psychotherapy, for example, or healthcare practices. Right. And psychedelics are no different, you know. And in fact, the subjective effects of psychedelics as profound as they are definitely are going to, I think, you know, evoke different experiences

based on culture or ethnicity or language. And then, you know, bring in the, again, the epigenetic intergenerational trauma stuff. We know that certain races and ethnicity, have far more intergenerational trauma than others. Right. And that's going to be a factor as well. Interesting. Yeah, I wonder like, because obviously if you're raised atheist and you have this experience and all of a sudden you're like, wow, maybe I believe in God.

I wonder if that's equally as profound as someone that maybe believes in multiple gods and comes from a culture where there's polytheism. And it has this experience and they're like, oh, there is only one higher power or however that manifests for them. Like, I wonder if you have had experience with people relaying information to you or explaining things to you in ways that we're surprising based off of their cultural upbringing. Like, in the way that they describe their experiences, have you found the things that are different or similarities across different stories and accounts based off of someone's religion or where they grew up?

Yeah, I mean, I think that some people might be more prone to describe their experiences with psychedelics from, like you grew up Catholic, for example. fact in this conversation you reference the Garden of Eden and the fruit from the tree of knowledge good and evil yeah stuff of that i don't i wasn't raised with any kind of religion and that sort of rolls off your tongue very very quickly so you might have a psychedelic experience in which you're trying to describe what's happening either while the psychedelic experience is happening or afterwards try to understand or journal about tried to help you understand what happened and you might you might use language that's just familiar to you. And, you know, if that's, if you're working with a

therapist for that, and that therapist is so far removed from whatever the heck you're talking about, that can be a mismatch in terms of therapeutic benefit. Right. So I don't know if that really answers your question. It's a tough one, but it's a huge topic. It's a huge topic for sure. Yeah, that would be my fear of doing like high doses of psilocybin. That's kind of like been my reservation is that I grew up very religious. And I think with that there comes like a bit of like guilt and kind of like paranoia and like fear. And you know, there's acknowledgement of the spiritual realm. But, you know, despite God's omniscient goodness and mercy, there also is like demons and things like that. So my fear would be like, okay, I have this psychedelic experience. I'm out in the

woods. Maybe I'm with a friend or I wouldn't do it alone probably. But my fear would be that, you know, I would start to see things or I would start letting my mind to kind of freak itself out. You know, that's happened to me like where I've smoked weed before. And I've been like, okay, don't think of anything weird. Because if you think of weird things, then all of a sudden you're going to feel anxious. And then inevitably, I'll start feeling anxious because then I'm like, well, what's the weirdest thing I shouldn't think about? And then I'm like, well, what if we all explode? You know what I mean? And then my mind just starts racing. So my fear with psilocybin is that that would happen as well. Is there a way to prevent that? And is that a common

thing that I should be concerned of? I think that's a very common thing. I think that it's any good preparation will include realistic and blunt conversations about the difficult visions or things that could occur during the psychedelic experiences. Not to plant the seed that it's going to be a shit show and you're going to see demons and you know, encounter all kinds of things that are to be deeply upsetting. But knowing that that could happen is part of good, healthy psychedelic therapy and preparation for those experiences. So what is what we're taught, because I went through.

a year-long psychedelic training program prior to the one that I'm doing now, because I love to learn, they taught us very explicitly. Like, if what you tell people is like, you're going to have, you're going to have an experience here. And a lot of stuff is going to come up. There could be all kinds of demons and snakes and monsters that might arise. And what I want you to do is I want you to think about those experiences because they're not real, but they're coming up. and they're coming up for a reason.

So confront that monster. Ask it what it wants. If you see a snake that pops up, this is Bill Richards. He's one of the preeminent researchers, amazing man. He says if a snake rears its ugly head and opens his mouth, like dive into his mouth and stare out its eyes, you know, he really wants you to sort of like just go into that experience. Nothing's going to hurt you.

You're fine. You're in a safe environment. We're going to be with you the whole time. Stuff might come up. And your goal is to be curious. Your goal is to dive into the experience. Often the phrase that's used, and I use people who do ketamine in my office, is trust, let go, be open. And you try to prime people with, talk about priming.

I think there's good ways to prime people. You know, trust the process, let go of any preconception you have about what's happening, and be open to whatever emerges. So trust the process, let go of anything that might be, you know, coming up that's getting in your way. and be open to whatever's emerging in the process. So trust, let go, be open. That's such an important part of helping coach people into having hopefully an optimal experience, even if really difficult stuff comes up.

So if you do decide to do a high dose psilocybin experience, it's fine. It's going to be okay. Even if you have images of, you know, Jesus on the cross and, you know, blood and demons and all that kind of stuff, it's fine. You know, if you do it in a safe place and your coach to be like, it's okay, you're safe here, just dive into its mouth, stare out its eyes,

figure out why it's there, what is it trying to offer you, it will pass. You know, it's just there's an arc to the experience. What's up, guys? We're going to take a break really quick because I have to tell you about one of the greatest outdoor companies to ever exist,

and that is the company that made the very tent that I'm sitting in right now. Take a look around. This is a beautiful canvas tent that is also the greatest studio on podcasting, maybe. I mean, this place is just absolutely, phenomenal. And it came from White Duck Outdoors. That's right. I went all through the internet. I was trying to build this brand new space where I'm going to have the most interesting

conversations in the world. And I was like, you know what? I need a tent that's going to be beautiful. It's going to last. It's going to be big enough. It's got to be able to hold all this equipment. I can hang stuff on the walls. And that's how I found White Duck Outdoors. They're the best. They're great people and they make amazing products. This is straight from their website. Their products are inclusive. They're for anyone in any activity. It could be camping, glamping, hunting in your backyard, a podcast studio. There's so many uses for these amazing tents. Me and White Duck Outdoors have a great relationship,

and that's because we agree on a few major points, all right? At the core, we both want to disconnect from the grind and stresses and repetition of day-to-day life and reconnect with friends, family, loved ones, interesting people, doctors, psychologists. That's why I want to have all of my conversations inside a White Duck Outdoors tent. This is what I love about White Duck Outdoors, okay? their mission has and always will be to give outdoor lovers

a way to reconnect with loved ones, friends, and themselves through a sustainably manufactured durable product that are designed to last a lifetime. And that's what this is. This is the place, this is my home, this is where I'm talking to the greatest people in the world inside of White Duck Outdoor tent.

So if you're interested in checking this out, if you're camping, you just want to set up something in your back yard, take a nap, who knows? You could go to whetuckoutdoors.com. They have a bunch of different types of tents, obviously, right? They make tents. That's kind of their thing. But a ton of other products, they even have clothes and gear and all sorts of stuff.

I'm going to link the tent that I'm in right now in the description of this episode. So if you want to check it out, you can go there. Or you can just go to white duck outdoors.com. Check them out. And thank you so much for sponsoring the show and making all of this possible. Now let's get back to it. And I know we actually started the combo talking about challenging trips and things like that. I've heard people say there's no such thing as a bad trip.

Like people that say that they have bad trips are. are just realizing that they're living their life in a selfish or unempathetic way and they're being confronted with it and they don't like that. And it was an interesting thought to me because I was like, oh, well, a bad trip is that your brain is taken over and then this person was like, no, a bad, this person, someone that had a bad trip is just being confronted with the ugliness of their life and they are ascribing it to the drug instead of really being reflective. I'm curious of your thoughts to, you know, is it possible to have a bad trip or is it just a

challenging trip that you need to learn from. I mean, it's, it's an attractive idea. I think that's one that people have latched onto, that this idea that there's no such thing as a bad trip, they're only challenging experiences. So when something difficult comes up, that's really upsetting, that, you know, maybe even sticks with you for a little while. That's just some lesson that you need to learn and you just need to sit with it for a little while and try to study it and understand why did it come up. And there's, there's, you know, deep healing that can come from that. And that's, that is something that, like I said, is an attractive idea. And I think for a number of people that works really well, and that is true, that even if something difficult

comes up that they're really struggling with, it feels traumatic, it feels deeply upsetting, it causes a lot of tears and confusion, and that can last for days, maybe weeks. A lot of people with the right support, the right community, the right therapist or guide, and the right way to process, not right, but a healthy way to process, can actually learn a lot from that experience. So that's true. But we can't invalidate. and dismiss the fact that some people really struggle and they really have a hard time. And to be told, you're just having a challenge,

it's just a lesson that you need to learn, you know? Like, it's all right, you know, what is that all about? You'll be okay, it's fine, it's like, no, something, this was upsetting, you know, and that needs to be heard and processed. And especially if there was something about the experience that was unethical, abusive, just poorly, handled by the therapist. The setting wasn't right. The guide said something or did something. There was another participant that was around at the time. There was some maybe controllable or

uncontrollable factor that was woven into the experience that added to their difficult bad trip, their challenging experience. Like, we need to learn from these experiences. What was it that caused the bad experience? Is it a preventable thing? So if we don't acknowledge bad trips and we just say it's just some lesson that you need to learn, then we might be missing something. that can greatly enhance the overall process of having psychedelic experience. Right, and helping other people to avoid those or to not have them to the same degree, things like that. Yeah.

Absolutely. Now, I'm curious also about ketamine. Yeah. Ketamine is legal. Yes. To do clinical trials and things like that. Yeah. So in your experience and with the clients and patients you have, how is ketamine used and

why is it different than the other psychedelics? So ketamine is different in a lot of ways. Interestingly, all of these compounds affect people differently. Each person that takes MDMA will roughly describe a similar kind of experience. Everyone that takes psilocybin will roughly describe a similar experience, which won't be the same as MDMA. And everyone that takes ketamine will roughly describe the same experience, but it won't be anything like psilocybin or MDMA. So it's hard to compare one psychedelic drug or experience to another psychedelic drug. and that consequent experience.

But ketamine is different on so many levels. It's shorter acting. It plays nice with other drugs. So if you are taking an SSRI or other medications, either psychiatric medications or health-related medications, it generally plays nice with those. So you don't have to come off or you don't need to taper or do anything that they can work together.

In other words, it's not contraindicated in a lot of cases. Shorter acting, it works on, entirely different receptor sites. It has a somatic quality. What I mean by that is that it's a dissociative anesthetic. So unlike psilocybin and MDMA, ketamine basically disembodies you. So as an anesthetic, you don't feel your body anymore. Ketamine has been used in trauma medicine, in veterinary medicine for surgical procedures as an anesthetic for decades, at high doses, it just knocks people out.

Interesting. Completely knocks them out. They have no pain, no feeling in their body at all. They can, you know, let's say you're in a car accident and you have to have the jaws of life come out. In some cases, they'll inject high doses of ketamine and so they can move your body more easily. But carefully, obviously, if there's damage and stuff.

Interesting. But at lower doses, it's a psychedelic, It's a psychedelic drug. And so having that disembodied experience, dissociated, not dissociated. We're talking before about trauma and how someone can have a traumatic experience and they develop a coping mechanism where they dissociate from that memory or from that experience and just sort of space out. Dissociate in this sense is like literally your mind is decoupled from your body.

your body not only completely relaxes, becomes numb. Numb, like we've all had novocaine for dental procedures or whatever, but not like numb like that where you can't feel your liver. You land your arm and your arm is static. Yeah, not like that. You're literally your body is completely gone. Right.

And what you're left with is there's sort of this mental experience where you don't feel your body at all, which is weird. and you often will, people often have a feeling of floating, of traveling through a dark landscape, being in a dark movie theater with filmy images. Sometimes there'll be robust memories of childhood that they will experience a sense of peace that they've never experienced before, a complete relief of any anxiety. or depression. So it was FDA approved, Food and Drug Administration approved it in nasal form. So you sprayed up your nose in a compound called spravato. It's a pharmaceutical drug. So that's the

only FDA approved version of it. It's a type of ketamine called S-ketamine. And it's available, again, through nasal spray format. But there's a generic form of ketamine, racemic ketamine, which is used in lozenges, meaning you dissolve the lozenge under your tongue. You can get an intravenous, so IV ketamine, also intramuscular ketamine, so a shot in the arm. So there's different roots of administration. And ketamine has been technically approved for major depressive disorder and also sometimes set up in next to emergency room. So if someone comes in who is acutely suicidal and you have ketamine available on site that you can administer ketamine with, hopefully with a therapist there, but not always,

that that ketamine experience can disrupt the acute suicidal ideation. Like the strong desire to kill oneself can be absolutely disrupted from a single ketamine administration. Interesting. But it's being used for depression, off label, for anxiety, for trauma, for alcohol use disorder. There's actually some really promising studies coming out of England looking at ketamine for alcohol use disorder, which is a huge.

huge problem. Alcohol is a serious, serious issue in American society, but also globally. And to have a new treatment for alcohol use disorder that's promising, like the studies with ketamine are showing, is profound. And I think it's similar to the stuff we've been talking about. Psychedelics are disruptors, right? So it takes you offline. Your normal way of thinking and seeing and being in the world is completely disrupted. And ketamine does the same thing. If you ruminate, if you have OCD, if you have anxiety and worry, if you have trauma memories that are intrusive on a daily basis, if you're drinking and you can't stop, and you take a drug that basically disrupts all of that, like the compulsion to act on the obsessive-compulsive behavior, the compulsion to drink, the compulsion

to worry, the compulsion to want to kill yourself, or to, you know, be depressed and ruminate on, you know, the darkness and negativity of life. And you take something that basically disrupts that, which ketamine does, it can give you a break. It can give you a break. It can give you a break. at least for the duration of the ketamine experience, which is short. It's either an hour, maybe up to three hours at the most. You know, MDMA is more like five hours. Cilocybin's like five, six, seven hours.

LSD's like eight, nine, ten hours. So ketamine's short. It plays nice with other. To me, I think ketamine is helpful in the short term. A little bit of a quick fix. It doesn't have to be administered on a daily basis so you can go in once or twice a week, maybe once or twice a month

and have a ketamine experience versus taking a drug every day. it's gentler on the system. You were talking about being afraid of demons and whatever on psilocybin, but ketamine is just mellow. Interesting. It just disrupts,

it just puts you at ease for a while. It can be a few hours, a couple days. Is it guided? Do you speak with your clients that are taking it? It's administered in so many different ways. There's a lot of IV clinics

that you just go in, pay like $500 cash. They hook you up to an IV, have experience for an hour and you walk out. Oh, so there's no one really with you. No, they're just like maybe they'll

monitor your heart rate for a minute or something, but you just go in, pay the money, have a ketamine experience, and leave. Really? And, you know, there's a place for that. I'm not trying to throw shade on that. Yeah. But that's certainly one way to administer it. And people also take ketamine at home.

So there's companies that will mail you copious amounts of ketamine through telehealth. So teleprescribing, you talk to somebody who prescribes and they do a quick assessment and, you know, they prescribe ketamine. They get sent home. And you can be assigned to a guide or not. not and you can take the ketamine at home by yourself and you're instructed on how to do that safely. Wow.

So even without a therapist, the way I practice in my office is that people self-administer the lozenges in my office. And at the beginning, we talk about intention setting. You know, why are we doing this? Why are you here? What do you hope to get out of it? What's your mantra? Do you have any other things that have been coming up for you lately that you hope to sort

of get some insight into? They put the eye shades on. We have a special curated playlist for headphones or speakers. in the room. And there's usually not a whole lot of talking for about 90 minutes to two hours. They're just quiet. And I sit there in case they need anything. Sometimes someone might need a hand on the shoulder just to get grounded. Again, you don't feel your body. So it can be weird. So some people might be scared about that. But most people are pretty mellow. And then after about two hours, it wears off. And they take the eyeshades off and the music. And they start to try to

piece together some understanding of what the fuck just happened. And, you know, people say, I've never felt that relaxed my whole life. Oh my God. Someone said recently, I feel like I was just bathed in goodness. You know, this feeling that, you know,

whatever was troubling you, whether it's anxiety around the climate or the sort of the inner critic that is sort of constantly berating you with like you should be doing more, low self-esteem, some memory that you can't seem to shake because it's just so deeply upsetting for,

you know, two hours to be completely removed from any of that and just be at peace and have some of that last for a day, two days, three days. It's great. It's just an amazing tool. But it's, to me, it's short lived. It's short lived. Meaning I've seen people use it. It's definitely help them. But it's not about the drug, you know? It's about what are you doing with that experience? So you're bathed in goodness. Okay, good. Now, how can you live your life in such a way that you're continuing to release yourself from these inner critical thoughts or how can you live your life in such a way that the worry isn't kicking your ass anymore. What else are you doing to cultivate a sense of peace and presence in your life? That that's where the rubber meets the road. And if the

ketamine can be a catalyst for that, then awesome. But if someone doesn't change and they just want their ketamine to reset their brain and fix them, then that's not, it's not going to be sustainable. Right. I see how it could be helpful that if someone gets to see how good things could be and how free and liberated they could feel from their anxiety and their trauma and their stress. And then they have to do the work in order to get to that place on their own volition. But they know where they're going.

They know what the map is. It kind of can give like a little bit of a trail or a roadmap to get healing and find peace. Otherwise, you're just sort of spinning your wheels. Maybe you're someone that gets discouraged and you're like, you know, four sessions of talk therapy. This isn't working.

Whereas if you can have the experience through ketamine and say, hey, this is how good things could be. You go, oh, wow, this is worth it. This is worth spending the time to really work on myself and get over some of my traumas and work through them because that feeling of bliss and being bathed in goodness is worth it. Have you had people that have had negative experiences where they take the eye shades off and they go, that was the worst thing I've ever done in my life? No, never had that. That's pretty extreme. I've never heard anybody say that. That was the worst experience in my whole life. I haven't people feel more depressed. Really? A certain number of people, they feel maybe so beat down by life and so negative and so discouraged that really nothing could help.

And they come out the other end and you're like, that was nice, but I still feel like shit. And, you know, there's rare instances where people go on to commit suicide. I don't think that's something to be shocked about because people sometimes turn to this medicine because they're suicidal. So it's hard. You can't really blame the ketamine for contributing to their suicide if they were already. suicidal before. But it does happen where someone's expectations were such that they thought it would help and it didn't help after one or two or four sessions. Some people feel pretty nauseous and really just don't like the feeling of nausea after the experience and so they don't want to do it

again. It might have been a reasonable experience, but the net effect wasn't necessarily positive. So I've mostly seen lukewarm responses to it or positive responses to it. I haven't seen negative responses to it. And rarely have I seen sort of neutral responses to it. It's usually like, I think it's helping. And then sometimes people saying, oh, yes, it really helped me a lot. Like you were saying a second ago, like, they're like,

I just needed a glimpse of what things could be like because I kind of lost sight of that. I actually never thought I could ever feel worry free. I never thought I'd ever be not depressed. And just because I had like an hour or two of like actually experiencing that, it's like, that gives me hope. Like I know what that's like. That's what I think people refer to as like a brain reset. They didn't reset their brain, but to be reacquainted with what peace feels like could feel like a reset.

Yeah. I mean, yeah, if you feel like life is completely hopeless and there's no point in living and then all of a sudden you can taste how great life can be, you go, oh, no, there is a point. Right. I want to get to that space and it's worth it. Right. And I felt, you know, connected to my family or my wife. my children, whatever it is, and I need to get back to that spot. Have you ever had a personal experience with a high-dose ketamine?

Yeah, I've had lozenges and I am intramuscular. I have two experiences. And how are those experiences for you? So I'm in recovery from addiction. Alcohol and cannabis were my drugs of choice as well as LSD. And when I did ketamine intramuscularly, because my brain wasn't used to being altered, basically my experience was overwhelming and intense where I think I yelled holy fuck to the top of my lungs for about 15 minutes

Holy fuck holy like I was like holy shit like I was like catapult I don't know it was like Khole or whatever I was just like completely like just blasted off into somewhere and I was like well it wasn't bad like I wasn't yelling like holy fuck I'm scared it was just like whoa like my brain hasn't been altered like this in a long time Oh, wow. And this is an alternate reality that I have never experienced before. This is wild. Like, I was on a roller coaster ride.

Like, that kind of, holy fuck. And how many years sober were you when you had that experience? 27 years sober. Wow. Yeah. And then I also felt like during that same experience, I was hammered. Shitface drunk, sitting around a campfire with my 19-year-old friends, back at that age again, back in college, back in high school, wasted off my ass, slurring my words, like, really, like,

like physically embodied who I was at that age. And I was like, I left you a long time ago. I set you down a long time ago. Like, why are you? Like, I don't, that's not, no. Ugh. You know? So it kind of turned me off from it because I literally felt drunk again.

And I have no interest in using alcohol. I haven't really felt that way for a long time. So to be reacquainted with that person that I was so vividly, 27 years later, I was like, fuck that. I do not want that experience again. Now, lo and behold, about a year later, I did lozenges. And lozenges are much more mild experience, but no less profound. And I didn't have any of that kind of intense visual or somatic or experiential, that level of

intensity. I wasn't yelling, holy fuck, at the top of my lungs. I didn't feel drunk. It was a very mellow, philosophical, curious, spiritual, mystical space that I entered for about an hour and a half and felt like that was really valuable. And I could see how that would be valuable for people. So one of the reasons why I wanted to have these experiences, because if I was interested in providing ketamine therapy to folks, I really wanted to know what that experience was like myself. And I do think that's important. You know, I think that's a

debate in the psychedelic world right now is like, do psychedelic practitioners need to have experiences with psychedelics more than once in order to be someone who you can trust to hold space for you to walk you through that psychedelic experience. And, you know, I don't, I don't necessarily agree with that. I think that on some level, absolutely, my answer to that question would be a resounding yes. Like, if you're going to do mushrooms at, let's say, four grams, and you know you're scared of like seeing demons and stuff, do you want to do that with me because I've had all this training and I've had all this experience with psychedelics when I was younger and I know what that experience is like that I can be there with you or do you want

somebody who you know took a you know 12 hour certificate course and you know they tripped once when they were you know 15 and of course yeah I mean to be honest with you I haven't been completely truthful because I also have done cadamied one time and it was kind of in a recreational setting but the reason that I was comfortable doing it was a nasal spray it was a nasal spray And the reason I was comfortable doing it is because I was with a pharmacist, but not like someone that works like a pharmaceutical researcher, I guess. And she concocted it herself effectively. And so you knew the drug was safe and you knew that you know somebody who knows and I was with someone that knows about the drug. And even just, you know, and obviously she was using it as well,

but just the comfort of being like, okay, I'm with someone that is a professional that has something to lose in life. You know what I mean? I don't want to be doing drugs as someone that has no, has nothing to lose. They're like, you know what I mean? Like, I want someone that's like research studied. Yeah. And I think it makes a big difference. Absolutely. I also think the level of care you probably get is better. Yeah. I think like my wife is a midwife. I mentioned that. And there's a thing within midwifery that, you know, my wife and I don't have kids yet. But a lot of mothers would like to have a midwife that has had children because that experience is so profound. And I mean, the chemical release, like my wife describes seeing these women basically like on drugs. She says,

is an extremely powerful chemical experience that's happening when you're giving birth, that women that have given birth before are able to offer better advice and better encouragement through the process than women that haven't. So just the nature of going through it, I think gives better care. And I think this is probably the same case. Yeah, in some cases, yeah, I think so. So that's what I was saying. Like, for me, I wanted to do it because if I was going to offer it to people, I wanted to know

what this drug did. And yet, because I'm somebody who identifies as a, being in recovery from addiction, I have no interest personally in doing ketamine again because I, as somebody who, like, is attuned to euphoria and positive feelings and wants to have that experience over and over and over again to the detriment of my physical and other areas of my life health, I just, I just don't want to do it. I think ketamine for some people has a little it more of a, you know, a potential to develop an unhealthy relationship with it. And, yeah, also, you know, I don't think categorically somebody needs to have experiences

with psychedelics in order to be a good psychedelic guide. And what I mean by that is what about people who have experienced often altered states of consciousness through breathwork, through yoga, through meditation, that they are naturally attuned to ways of seeing and being in the world that seem pretty mystical. And yet they haven't had any psychedelic experiences, but you know they know something that you don't know. Right.

And those are the kind of people you might trust to hold space for you because you know they live in a kind of reality where they've walked that path. Yeah. And you can trust that they will help you walk that path too, even if they haven't had psychedelic experiences. So that's why I say sort of cautionary. I like nuance.

You don't have to have specifically multiple psychedelic experiences in order to be a good guide. But if you haven't had enough experiences in altered states of consciousness through whatever means, then probably not a good candidate to be a guide. Right. Now, are there any other chemicals or compounds that we haven't discussed that you think people just in society

should be aware of as far as like potential treatment down the line or current treatment that is emerging? Let's see, there's so many of them. We didn't talk about 2CB. That's a special analog that's hard to describe. There's a lot of 2C, 2CE, 2CB, 2CD compounds. And what is that? It's another psychedelic drug.

It was developed by Alexander Shulgin, Sasha Shulgin, who's a legendary, he's passed away, legendary pharmacologist, a researcher chemist who developed like 200 plus analog. of different psychedelic drugs and tried them all himself and with his friends. And 2CB is one of his drugs. And it's been described as somewhat of a combination of like LSD and MDMA. And there's a little bit of research being done on 2CB. We talked about Ibogaine. We didn't talk about mescaline too much.

But mescaline is definitely being studied, the synthetic version of it, not derived from peyote necessarily. there are also there's a lot of energy and movement and discussion around we haven't talked about this at all removing the subjective mystical psychedelic experience out of psychedelics so in other words is there a way to modify the molecule let's say LSD such that it doesn't hit the receptors in the brain in the way that that caused the mystical experience and simply provide some sort of neuroplasticity or changes of the brain that could be therapeutic, but you don't have to trip your balls off to have the therapeutic benefit.

Interesting. Or like DMT, but it doesn't give you the visual hallucinations or things like that. Interesting. There's modifying the actual chemicals to sort of play with what the effect is. Oh, that's quite interesting. So there's companies that are looking at that. Because like you were saying, some people don't want to trip, they're scared. I get it. But if there's some, the disliked, benefit to, you know, also like scalability. Obviously, pharmaceutical companies would like to scale these drugs. And if there was some compound derived from a psychedelic drug that doesn't cause a psychedelic trip, but needs to be taken every day for its antidepressant effects, like a new generation of SSRIs, then why wouldn't they want to look at that, especially if it helps people? Right.

So there's a lot of energy going into that. And the other thing that we haven't talked about is mixing psychedelic drugs. Yeah. There was a study that came out, this week or last week that looked at the combination of LSD and MDMA in the same compound. So a combo product. It's called candy flipping in the sort of layperson world, the recreational world. I see it.

Hippie flipping is mixing psilocybin with MDMA. Kitty flipping is mixing ketamine with MDMA. So there's different ways in which you can combine these drugs, which, you know, it sounds funny and playful and stuff and dangerous to some people. Yeah, I assume you would think it's a bad idea. No, no. I mean, I think about what pharmaceutical companies do.

You've got people that combine an antipsychotic with an antidepressant. There's a combo product that has fluoxetine Prozac and xiprexylalancipine. Right. So they combine an antipsychotic with an antidepressant. There's Contrave for weight loss where they combine buproprion, wellbutrin, which is used for so many different things. Sure. With naltrexone, which is an opioid blocker.

So there's combo products in the pharmaceutical world already. So why wouldn't we look at combo products for psychedelics? Right. So there's a pharmaceutical precedent for mixing these chemicals in order to achieve a different or a better effect. Yeah. Interesting. And also, think about it.

In the natural world, I mean, I understand it my perspective might be skewed because I lived a lifestyle when I was a kid where we did all kinds of crazy shit and that was normalized. So mixing drugs was common practice. Right. So the idea that mixing drugs in research trials is somehow a bad idea. isn't like it's intuitively what people do anyway. Right. Better living through chemistry.

Like speedballing is, you know, mixing cocaine with heroin. And, you know, sometimes people take, I mean, think about people who take ADD medications. Some people take Adderall to help them focus and stay alert. And then they take benzos like clonopin at night to help them calm. It's happening already. Right. So to throw shade or to like throw up all these scare tactics, like this is horrible. It's going to kill people.

At the same time, I'm somebody that tweets a lot about Polly, that people are prescribed way too many medications. And if you look at the drug deaths in the United States, it's not just fentanyl that's killing people. It's fentanyl and people taking like four other different medications combined with alcohol and all kinds. It's not one drug that's killing people. It's the combination of drugs.

So when we talk about combo products, I'm thinking intentional, thoughtful, careful, not the recreational or, you know, and I think that's a problem. problem in modern mental health care that people have a lackluster response to their antidepressant. And so, oh, look, an antipsychotic can be shown to augment, you know, increase the effects of their antidepressants. So we're going to prescribe an antipsychotic.

Right. But you have sexual side effects from your antidepressants. So we're going to prescribe you this. Right. And, oh, I didn't realize you were drinking a fifth of Jack every day. And you know what? your anxiety seems to be through the roof. So we know that Valium will help calm that down. And that's not uncommon. And what's the research on putting that five, you know, those five

drugs together? Is it's difficult probably to get research on any mixture of drugs in any sort of combination. Right. So almost certainly if someone's getting five different drugs all prescribed to them at the same time, five different pharmaceuticals, there's probably very little research as to whether or not that's good for them. Like, how are you, yeah, it just seems absurd. It's more of an art than a science at that point. But, I mean, I think there are for some people that maybe that cocktail of prescribed medications actually helps them.

Sure, maybe that works, but maybe for other people. It's devastating. It's a killer. Yeah, absolutely. And it's, yeah, and I don't know how you test work. Because every new drug you introduce, it's a new factorial of variability. Like, once you're getting into, like, I mean, there's so many drugs that if you combine all them, it's infinite amount of combinations and you can never test for it.

Yeah. So in terms of actually testing, I guess the physicianist has to like be really keyed in as to what they think will work. Yeah, exactly. Their experience within their knowledge of the pharmacotherapy and the pharmacodynamics, so how the different drugs interact with different organ systems with the liver, how different drugs interact with each other and really being thoughtful about the potential interactions with, with organs, with, you know, body systems and with other drugs in the system.

I mean, it can be done thoughtfully, but still, like you said, there's, it's, it's It's really hard to research like, oh, this combination of five different medications really helps this subset of people. Yeah. Like, there's no way to study that. Exactly. So it's all just like, you know, hopefully the expertise of a really good psychopharmacologist or a really good psychiatrist.

But a lot of times that's not what's done. And they can take labs. They can look at blood levels of different medications to see how much of it's in their system. Some of these medications need to be monitored medically with blood levels routinely. So hopefully those practices. are put in place for those people that are on polypharmacy. Right. And how aware are you of the historical precedent for all these different types of drugs?

Right. Like I know that mushrooms, like I heard the story, apparently. The reason why mushrooms are so common in the West and throughout America is because there was like one guy that found out about the practice through like one woman in Mexico that like preserved the science and like the ritualism of magic mushrooms. And then he introduced it to everyone. and now it's this big ubiquitous thing. I don't know if that's true or not.

That's what I heard. So I'm curious with each different type of drug, do you think there needs to be a historical respect for how it's used and should we be looking at the historical precedent of how it was used in order to inform how we use it now? To me, the answer to that question, like many questions, both and we both need to honor

and respect and study and understand indigenous use. And to the extent that those practices can be preserved, respected, honored, reciprocally recognized, is super important. And also, I don't think that it's the intention is to not use those drugs simply because somebody else, in terms of a longstanding lineage, had some sort of dominion or authority or cultural, this idea of cultural appropriation is a very sensitive issue.

And I don't think that it's the intention of indigenous cultures to suggest that nobody should use these drugs other than them. I don't think that's their intention. Right. I think they, I think because of sort of a historical precedent of appropriation and colonization and people commodifying sacred land, sacred, sacred substances, we need to be sensitive to that. And we can be sensitive to that in ways that we can still find ways to utilize these medicines, these molecules embedded within a modern culture.

And some of these compounds don't have a lineage. Right, I mean, LSD, right? Like that was made a lab in the 60s or something? It was made, it was discovered in 1943. Right. I mean, so... Is that story true? Have you heard that the guy that did it, the, like, rode home on his bicycle?

Yeah. Like, can you explain that story? Is it... Albert Hoffman, yeah. The story is that he... This compound was discovered, like, years before, and it just sat on a shelf. And then it was... The substances called ergot.

Remember earlier we were talking about, like, all drugs come from natural substances? So LSD, we think of as, like, this lab chemical or whatever. But it came from a mold. Ergot amin is a naturally occurring mold. And they were looking at the chemical properties of that. and they extracted this LSD 25, which was the 25th version of some extraction or something like that. And no one could figure out what to do with it. And then Albert Hoffman pulled it off the shelf one day.

And he got some on his fingers or something. It somehow, by mistake, ingested it. And he went home and he had strange dreams. And he's like, what could have caused that? Like, I don't know what's going on. And he was recalling what had happened. He said, oh, I got some of that LSD 25. on my skin. So he intentionally dosed himself again after that at a very, very low dose.

And he, yeah, he wrote, he got on his bike and rode around, I think it was Vienna or Zurich or someplace in Austria or Switzerland. I forgot what town. And so there's a national bicycle day now, April 19th. Oh, really? It's bicycle day where it's a psychedelic holiday, like 420 for cannabis. Oh, interesting. You have 419 bicycle day for a psychedelic. Oh, I didn't know that. That's based on Albert Hoff. Hoffman's discovery of LSD. Oh, that's interesting.

Yeah. So there's, yeah, there's no lineage for LSD and also five methoxy DMT. We talked about the Sonoran Desert Toad, where this gland secretion from this toad is psychoactive beyond any other psychedelic than anyone's ever experienced. There's no real lineage for that. So who's to say that there's any kind of cultural appropriation for that? Paiote and psilocybin and, you know, there are other substances that we need to be respectful about.

Ibogaine from the Buiti tribe. in West Africa. So there are ways in which we need to honor indigenous use and the cultural heritage from which some of these compounds come from. That doesn't mean we shouldn't explore them ourselves. Do you think it could give a look into like the historical nature of these cultures?

Like if there is, I mean like magic mushroom use in specific parts of Mexico, could it give us an insight as to like the cultural heritage of like, you know, specific indigenous people there or I guess any of these other historical ritual uses. Can it expose us to like, oh, this is what their religion was predicated on? This is, you know, like, this informed the way that they lived their lives and set up their societies. Like, have you heard examples of that? Yeah, I mean, there's great, there's great wisdom to be had and

looking at that kind of stuff. The two things that come to mind when you ask that question. One is the book that came out a few years ago called The Immortality Key. And I forgot what the subtitle of that. The Immortality Key was written by Brian Murrow Rescue. And, he discovered that back in ancient Greece, there's evidence of psychedelic beer, that there's some sort of psychedelic ergotamine, ergot, which is where LSD came from, found in the residue of these vessels, these containers in ancient Greece. And, you know, basically presented the theory that psychedelic drugs have been used for millennia in religious contexts.

And I think there's a lot to be learned about how other cultures have used psychedelic drugs to commune with God or divination ceremonies. And the other thing that makes me think of is ayahuasca, which we've talked about, like how the hell did the Amazonian tribes figure out that taking this root over here and mixing it with this root over here and combining them together and boiling them and and then drinking, like, how did they figure that out? Like, was there some communication with the plant spirits, or somehow they were guided to be like, hey, guys, you need to put these two things together and start developing rituals so we can,

you know, live a healthy society and learn about the magic of the natural world and these other realities, like, how did they figure that out? So studying that is so, so valuable. And it probably relates to what we were talking about before with this epigenetics and intergenerational trauma and stuff that's encoded in our DNA. Like our psychedelics like encoded in our DNA from going way back in history. Right. And I mean, do you think of all like the personal advantages psychedelics have afforded you and the people you've worked with, you know, a lot of, everyone I know that has done it in a thoughtful, careful ways, had really, really positive benefits.

So I'm like, what if you're the leader of a tribe or the leader of like a small community, you know, an ancient back in the day community? And instead of going to war, over lost territory, you're able to negotiate and discuss things because there was a higher consciousness you were able to tap into. How much of psychedelic use can we attribute the growth of like humankind and society in general? Do you have like research on that or things you've read relating to that? Yeah, there's a lot of theories on that being a thing, meaning that psychedelics have been embedded within societies across millennia that have helped, uh, the human species evolve in ways that would be otherwise impossible if it weren't for psychedelics.

There's a stoned ape theory that I think goes way back where people say that we evolved from apes because some subspecies of homo sapiens or whatever had ingested a shit ton of psilocybin and it developed their prefrontal cortex in such a way that allowed us to think differently about ourselves and using our hands and building fires and all that kind of stuff. You know, the extension of that would be that there are a subset of psychedelic enthusiasts who believe that, you know, psychedelics will save the, will heal the planet, you know, save the world. That it's going to be, it's our only hope to, you know, deal with climate change and the increased polarization and, you know, political parties and wars and stuff. There's even, I think, research being proposed or conducted in the conflict between the Palestinians and Israelis. in the Palestinian-Israeli conflict?

Is there a way that psychedelics can play a role in improved diplomacy and ending the conflict that's been going on for so long there? So there is a role there and there's stuff, there's people doing work in that area and a lot of people have written about it. I'm not an expert in that area for sure, but that's definitely a theme.

Yeah, I mean, it seems like it would definitely track if people are having these experiences where they feel more connected, Will it make you more passive? Will it make you more agreeable and willing to negotiate and find deals? I mean, I don't know how you can structure it, right? Like to create a system and a framework

that two opposing groups would then agree to do this experience together. It seems like very idealistic and kind of like hippie-dippy, but at the same time, like, maybe it could work. Yeah. I'm curious if everyone in the world, like in the way that there's a required military service

in certain countries, if ever in the world when they turned like 25 had to do a sort of like clinical psilocybin experience, do you think the world would be different? Probably. In what ways? I mean, I think that because of for the most part, for most people, it seems like it does create a shift in their consciousness that is otherwise inaccessible unless they intentionally seek it out or there's some traumatic or out of body near-death experience that happens naturally.

So to have a tool that could actually create that at will, potentially, for large numbers of people fairly reliably, I mean, the only caveat I would say the way you phrased the question, which was like if everybody had to at age 25. I think if everybody had the option at age 25 to have a high dose psychedelic experience, should they choose in a way that they choose that is safe and held and respectful and all that kind of stuff, I think that the net impact of that with the wide numbers of people having that experience, I think would be ultimately positive for the human race. But I'm not, I'm not the kind of person that would say, like, everyone needs to use psychedelics because it'll save the world. I'm not, I think they're, they're still just tools. Yeah. And what somebody does with that experience at age 25, if it actually does help them change their own worldview for the positive and therefore be more of service to other people and, and help society and help themselves, that's still just a tool. need to put that into practice.

They could you just be like, oh, I tripped really hard at 25 and saw the light and wanted to save the world. And then I had to get a job and. Yeah, I got crushed by rehab. Yeah. Now, we talked a lot about people using psychedelics to get out of bad situations and as therapy. What about people that just want to use it to enhance creativity or just have a good time or, you know, want to be more productive?

How would you sort of categorize those use cases? Yeah. I mean, there is research on that. And I think that that's a widely overlooked area, that in fact, most people don't have mental illness issues, the vast majority of people. I mean, at some point in in a lot of people's lives, if you look at the numbers of people that struggle with depression, alcohol use disorder, anxiety, those are the three major ones, right? Let's just say a broad brush stroke, on average, one in four people, maybe one in three people at some point in their lives will struggle clinically with significant amount of depression or anxiety or an addictive disorder.

That's a pretty broad swath of people, but it's by far not the majority of people, one and four. That means like 75% of the adult population doesn't struggle with these issues. They're just healthy normals walking around. They might have ups and downs. They might have anxiety. Sure. You know, run into problems with using substances in an addictive way for a little while, but it's not like dominating their lives.

It's not causing major impairment. So what about those people? You know, can they use, should they use psychedelics safely? What value do they have for that? I mean, that's the vast majority of people we're talking about. Right. So even as a psychologist, the licensed healthcare practitioner who's, you know, been conditioned into the Western medical model and believes in it, I'm also somebody that believes that

model has its role and it isn't the dominant role. So when people are thinking about using psychedelics or we're talking about decriminalizing or legalizing psychedelics, to think about it only. in terms of the medical use case scenarios is really limiting. Right. Really limited. I guess that's, I understand why we start there. But I'm trying to think what is beyond that.

Yeah, exactly. So there's research on people. I think James Fateman is famous for the Fateman LSD microdosing protocol. He wrote a book called The Psychedelic Explorers Guide. And in that book, he talked about his research using LSD for creativity. So taking a bunch of people from various disciplines, from architects to engineers to artists to mathematicians and looking at sort of problems that they were struggling with and then administering LSD and seeing if that helped their creativity.

And that research was shown to be promising that it actually did help unblock some creative blocks that they were having and help them think more flexibly and creatively about problems they were having. So, you know, expounding upon or just sort of scaling that out to more broadly to the public, absolutely. I mean, again, we're talking about these compounds as having mystical or spiritual or consciousness changing effects. So if you're an artist or you're somebody who, you know, might be struggling in your relationship with your wife and, you know, you're having arguments and you'd like to sort of figure that out differently because you seem to be locked into some fixed way of, you know,

I'm right, you're wrong, that kind of stuff. Or, you know, you're struggling at work with trying to figure out how to overcome some obstacle. Or you're just simply interested in building your spiritual life. These are tools that can and ought to be considered anyway to help somebody, you know, think more creatively to change problematic thought processes, difficult situations. So yeah, I mean, that's what's interesting about the Oregon model is that it's not, it's intentionally not a medical model. You do not have to have a medical, a mental health diagnosis in order to access psilocybin facilitated. I don't, they don't call it therapy. I I don't think they call it therapy, guided sessions or whatever.

In fact, I think if you come in and you say you have a diagnosed mental health disorder, you may not be allowed to access that. Oh, interesting. I'm not really sure about that either. But their model is intentionally not to be an extension of the medical model. They're not licensed health care practitioners regulated by the state. They're licensed facilitators that go through psychedelic training that are then given a certificate that shows that they have competence to be able to hold space for.

people to have a psychedelic experience in a safe way, but it's not a medical model. So that's one example. And I think that's kind of like what we were going for in Vermont. I was trying to help the legislators. We worked on a bill to basically remove all criminal penalties for psilocybin. So the possession, the growing, the use, the sharing of psilocybin mushrooms, completely removed from the list of illegal drugs. Are there people in jail right now just for selling or doing psilocybin mushrooms? There are. Really? There are. Not many. Very, very few, in fact. And that's all they did? Because you'll hear stories where it's like, oh, he's in jail for psilocybin. It's like, well, he's also selling crack. Right. Yeah, probably, there's probably

other extenuating. Or there was a laundry list of other prior, you know, prior offenses. Yeah. But there are people who, you know, maybe had a pretty substantial operation where they were selling psilocybin. You know, they were, you know, distributing, you know, pounds of it to people in their community or their state or across state lines. Right. I mean, even I was arrested when I was 16 years old for intent to distribute psychedelic drugs. Really? Through the mail.

So it was a federal offense. Oh, wow. And at 16, I was facing 55 years in jail for the intent to distribute LSD and mushrooms. That was a horrific time of my life. And luckily, that charge was reduced to possession of cannabis. I was treated as a minor because I was 16 going on 17 and there was a gray area. So I was very lucky. Also, I think white privilege and the fact that my father was a former district attorney helped my case. But being 16 years old and facing 55 years in jail in prison, federal prison, was deeply, deeply upsetting. And so, I mean, I'm potentially a casualty of that crime. So it's personal. When I'm working on policy to remove criminal penalties for psilocybin, it's personal. I'll take 55 years at 16. That's crazy.

You went to court and everything? Yeah. Wow. You got to take some mushrooms to get over that, bro. That's wild. Yeah. I mean, that's like really an intimidating thing. Yeah.

It didn't stop me from using drugs or alcohol, but it did for like two weeks. And then I went right back to it. Really? And who were you trying to send the drugs to? Or the mushrooms? A friend of mine from my hometown was sending it to me. I was away at boarding school. So he shipped it in the mail and it was discovered at the post office.

Oh, wow. And why was it discovered? Just lucky? someone looked at it? The person he gave it to, to bring to the post office to mail it was a postal employee and it was a relative of his. And that relative was curious about what was in the package that was being sent to me. And so when they got to work, they opened it up and discovered it and they reported it to

the police. Wow. What a snitch, bro. That sucks, dude. And it was just like caps and stems, just like dried mushrooms? Yeah, it was an ounce of mushrooms and I think a half a sheet of acid. Wow. And I mean, that's what, like the early 80s?

That was 1987. Wow. 88, sorry, it's 1988. And I feel, I mean, just the idea of, like, those drugs now seem pretty taboo in that time. I couldn't imagine how foreign that must be, especially in your town, it was pretty small. What did people think when they found out about that you were doing this? What was your perception to the people that live there? It was pretty brutal.

Yeah. I didn't give a shit, though. I mean, I was a bit off, you know, I was partying a lot at the time and had adopted an identity where I was sort of like, didn't care about much except partying and, you know, having a good time and basically very rebellious. And so, you know, I think it was devastating to my family, embarrassing for them, certainly reputation damaging in some ways. But I was a kid, you know, I think people understood that too, that people get in trouble, do dumb shit. Yeah. And I was certainly one of those people. Did you serve a deal with that? No. So it was reduced to possession of cannabis.

And as a result of that charge, I had to take a tour of the correctional facility that was about an hour away from my home. And I did that. I had to be assessed by an alcohol and drug counselor at my school to see if I had a problem. I had to do some form of counseling for a little while. And I was put on probation for a year and a half where I couldn't have any charges against me. And it was interesting because when I took a tour of the correctional facility, which was designed to scare me, and it did, and I've never been to jail before. And this is like, yeah, you know, kid, if you keep doing what you're doing, this is where you're going to wind up. And I was like, holy shit, this is crazy. I don't want to end up here. Sure enough, when I was 18 years old,

I got arrested again for, of all things, possession of a malt beverage. I was hammered. And I had alcohol in my stomach. And I showed up the police station at like one o'clock in the morning, looking for a friend of mine and they could tell I was drunk and I blew in a breathalyzer, blue numbers underage and they said we can take you home or we can take you to jail.

Home sounds nice. And I said, you know what? My mom said I couldn't come home anymore if I was drunk and I'm hammered and screw her. I'll go to jail. Wow. So there I was a year and a half later

after that arrest for what was ended up being possession of cannabis so it was the psychedelic charge. There I was in the drunk tank at the same prison jail an hour, an hour away in the next town over, overnight. It was just 24 hours in the drunk tank. And I was like, holy shit. Like, this is actually happening.

Like, this is the way my life is going. Wow. Like, they took me here a year and a half ago. And they said, if you keep doing this, you're going to end up here. And then sure enough, there I was. And it wasn't lost on me. I didn't give a shit still at that time. It still took me two years to get sober after that.

But it wasn't lost on me. What do you feel like you were running from in that time? I don't know. I was running from anything. You know, I don't have, I'm not somebody who has a lot of trauma in his history. I'm not somebody who has a lot of addiction that runs in the family. I'm just somebody who found that altering my consciousness was fun, exciting, curious, and I guess I have an addictive, you know, I have addictive tendencies. I don't believe in an addictive personality, but I definitely have addictive tendencies, at least when it comes to chemicals. Doesn't seem to be with gambling,

doesn't seem to be with porn and sex, doesn't seem to be with food, but for some reason, chemicals that alter my consciousness, I can gravitate towards an unhealthy way and they can ruin my life. So I think I just adopted an identity at a young age that said, this is who I am, this is what I love to do, this is fun, fuck society, fuck what my parents think, I don't give a shit, this is who I am, this is what I do, this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to do it as hard, I'm going to do it as hard as I can, as long as I can until I, you know, until I was just crushing me. Was there a media influence that got you into it that you thought was cool? No. I mean, yes, there was that piece of it. I think it was the youngest of five kids.

And I felt different than my older siblings. None of them who partied. They were all kind of like academic, smart people. And I felt different from them. I had a big social group. Socializing was really important. Being popular was really important. And I was in that group.

And that was really important to me because I didn't feel like I, you know, belonged to my family in a way, but I belonged in such a way that I could be somebody who was seen as that guy, you know, that party, party guy, risk taker, that kind of thing. And I still have some of those tendencies to be like a risk taker and stuff. But I just grabbed onto that hard and that's who I wanted to be. It felt like it was reinforcing socially, personally, it felt like that's who I was meant to be. Right. And then you started when you were young. You were like 10 or 11 when you had alcohol for the first time? Yeah, nicotine when I was 10, alcohol when I was 11, cannabis when I was 12. Yeah. And then psychedelics when you're like 15? Yeah, psychedelics,

MDMA, cocaine, and LSD when I was 15, and mushrooms. I mean, that's pretty significant at a young age. I mean, that's wild. Yeah. And what was the catalyst for you to say, I'm finally going to get sober? A number of things sort of were accumulating. So I told you I was in jail. So that wasn't lost on me. More counseling, more probation, multiple car accidents, being kicked out of my house, my parents' house. My mom didn't want me living there anymore. Being kicked out of apartments because of noise violations and the landlords being sick of destroying their property.

I went on academic and disciplinary probation at school. So I flamed out of my first attempt at college. And there was just an increasing number of consequences from repeated debauchery, so to speak. And it culminated into acute pancreatitis. So at the age of 20, I'd been drinking quite a lot for a number of years. And eventually my pancreas at that young age said no more. And I know a lot of people who develop pancreatitis from drinking, and they continue to drink.

But for whatever reason, at the end of all of these consequences, being stopped in my tracks with acute pancreatitis at the hospital, being told that if I keep drinking, I'm going to develop diabetes. And if I keep drinking after that, it could die from, you know, destroying my pancreatitis. I was fortunate enough to be willing to and have the opportunity to go to rehab. And I've stayed sober. Wow. I mean, it's interesting that you didn't have like a major traumatic event or relationship that you were trying to escape.

That it's just the thrill of chemicals just kind of kept you going. Yeah. That's really interesting. Yeah, I mean, other things that happened, I think I lived in France when I was 10. Oh, cool. So my first exposure to nicotine when I was in France. Of course. They all smoke over there.

Where'd you live in Paris? No, we were in this town in the foothills of the Alps called Ansi. Okay. That's about 45 minutes from Chamonix. Oh, interesting. A beautiful place. But I was 10, and I was pulled away from my friend group. Remember I was saying how important friends were to me from a young age?

And then my family decided to move to France for a year. And I didn't really have any say in that. I'm 10 years old. Don't speak a lick of French. And I was thrown into a French-speaking school, not in English-speaking school. So I couldn't communicate with anybody at school. I was completely isolated and devastated being away from my friends and not being able to connect with new friends because I couldn't speak the language. And that was upsetting.

And I connected through smoking. So I hooked up with a couple of guys that, you know, we'd be digging around in trash cans and pulling out old cigarette butts. And, you know, we couldn't communicate with each other, but we could get into all kinds of nonsense together. Oh, that's so interesting. So I think that started some sort of like connection in my brain between like, okay, social connection, feeling safe, feeling comfortable, using substances, got it. Yep. And then you move back after a year. Yeah.

And then I'm sure you come back and all of a sudden you have this experience that all your classmates are like, wait a second. Yeah. He knows how to smoke cigarettes. Like he knows how to roll sigs. Like, oh, that's kind of cool. And then it's easy to see that that could be a part of your identity. Right.

And then once nicotine is, you know, boring. How do you raise the stakes? Alcohol? You know, Ray the parents liquor cabinet. Yeah. I mean, it is a very like linear progression in terms of, I feel like social acceptance. Yeah. You know, it's like nicotine, legal, alcohol, legal.

Right. And then cannabis. kind of legal in some places, but not really. And then psychedelics and taking it all the way up. Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. And then 27 years, totally sober.

Well, totally sober. Kedamine and stuff. I don't count that as breaking my superiority. Right. Were you concerned at all about doing that in terms of relapsing? I mean, it seems like a big risk. I've heard stories of like Stivo from Jackass, who went into surgery and was like, no anesthetic.

I'm not doing any of the opiates afterwards because I can't risk relapsing. Yeah. And even Russell Brandt. He did an episode talking about psychedelics, because, you know, he did a lot of drugs. He's in recovery. He's very outspoken. He wrote a whole book, paraphrasing the 12 steps.

Great advocate for recovery. Amazing person. And he's talked about psychedelics on his podcast. And he's like, I have, I know what altering my conscience. I did plenty of psychedelics. And sure, it might be spiritual and connecting and all that kind of stuff. But I don't need to go there. I can meditate.

I can do all these things. You know, I don't need to take psychedelics to do that. No, thank you. He was concerned, too, that that would. Yeah. You know, and so I felt like it was worth a risk. I'm a risk taker. And it, luckily.

it paid off. Maybe it doesn't work that way for everybody. But after 27 years of stable recovery, I still have, you know, connections in my life that helped support my recovery process. So feeling like I have the right community around me and have the right mindset, you know, to be able to use ketamine and not go off the deep end with it. It seemed like it was safe. It turned out okay. And not to make you relapse, but I'm just so curious. Like in that time when you were younger, like doing a lot of substances, was it so fun? Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, I always say that. Like some of those cocaine nights, like listen to music, going to concerts. I wouldn't change that for the world.

I mean, I had a blast. Yeah. People don't, people don't, I mean, typically whether you're running from something or self-medicating some pain that you have or some trauma or you just like to have a fucking good time, like it works. Yeah. It does something. So I don't throw shade on that at all.

I had great times. I have memorable. Like I said, my use of psychedelics would, I would not be a psychologist today and I would not be in recovery today if it wasn't for my drug use. Right. Had you just been abusing alcohol, you might have continued us down that road. Absolutely. Because your consciousness didn't.

get raised through psychedelics. Exactly. Yeah, that's interesting. Yeah, and it was fun. I mean, I like drinking and partying and smoking weed. And I love all that stuff. And I have friends who still drink a lot and smoke a lot of weed and, you know, do drugs, whether they're addicted or not,

I don't judge. Like it's just part of what people do. And I did it too. And part of it's fun and part of it is devastating. It kills people. It's not an either or kind of scenario. Right. Now, as far as people like coming up with brilliant ideas and stuff,

I know we talked about like the creativity, but in terms of like art and things like that, do you know specific stories of people that have done you know, LSD or things like that and created art that is significant that we know today that we might not realize was induced by psychedelics? Oh gosh, I think a lot of it is. Really? I was telling you I was up at Storm King yesterday.

I swear some of that was induced by psychedelics, but maybe not. I mean, you must see things and be like, oh, this guy was tripping for sure. Like movies and things. You're like, this is cool when you're sober, but it's amazing when you're rolling. Yeah. And also the Chapel of Sacred. mirrors. Alex and Alison Gray's place up in Wapinger Falls. Their artwork is totally psychedelic inspired on purpose. The other thing that comes to mind, there's a lot of examples. You said Steve Jobs.

There's a lot of examples of scientists or creatives or other people that have figured shit out because of their use of psychedelics. And I think it was the double helix in terms of DNA sequencing. Is that Juan Watson and Crick or something? Yeah, one of those guys was he had a dream of some sort of like spiraling snake kind of thing that was related to some psychedelic experience that he had or something that that was responsible for the discovery of the DNA sequencing process or something like that. So there's, I think there's, I wish I could list them off the top of my head and there are more qualified people than me that I'm sure they can just, you know, list a lot of those, whether it's artwork or inventions like you said, Steve Jobs.

There's so much of that. I think that I wish, maybe there's a book on it or something. There must be. Yeah. I mean, I'm just so curious. And I guess I want to even expand this even farther beyond like the scientific research and the things that you've done, scientifically speaking, just in terms of like all of your life experience, you've done a lot of drugs, especially in your younger years. And then you've seen people and you've researched and you just know so much. I'm curious, how has that influenced your framework for what all of this is anyway? You know what I mean? Like in terms of like a very grand abstract philosophy as to like what the purpose of life is, does God exist?

Why are we here? How did we get here? How much of your experiences have informed those answers to those questions? I think it's a constant work in progress. It's a constantly evolving and expanding understanding of those bigger questions. That's a huge question mark. I sort of naturally see people in a spirit of benevolence that there's inherent goodness. or at least inherent sort of neutrality. There's no need to judge oneself or others or the weather or, you know, criminals or whatever. And it's very difficult to say that because there's been so many human atrocities and cataclysmic events from nature like volcanoes and, you know, deaths from earthquakes and stuff. And so it's hard to say that those aren't like deeply upsetting and that there's just somehow,

in the spirit of benevolence. And, you know, it almost sounds like you're bypassing some essential truths that there is suffering and pain and sorrow and everything in the world. But I do, I am somebody who I think through my work as a psychologist, through my own personal experiences with my own recovery, my own life, my family, that, you know, in general, you know, the trajectory is a good one that we are all on this journey together. and it's okay. You know, everything is going to be okay.

Even if it isn't okay, it's going to be okay. And I think the more zoomed out we can look when we talk about some of these metaphysical things, the more easy it is to sort of truly inhabit a sense of peace knowing that there is going to be heartache and pain and suffering. We don't need to heap that upon each other through our words, through our Twitter spats, through violent crimes or judging things to be apocalyptic in a way.

And even if they are, it's okay. We zoom way out. You know, how many times has the earth been totally decimated and recreated itself? How many worlds have ended? How many worlds have ended and stuff? So if we have an ability to cultivate some sort of awareness or some attunement to that largest scale, I don't know if it really gives us meaning and purpose. it just there's there's a possibility of achieving some level of peace in the meantime on the granular level

of just being humans you know if we can be kind to each other if we can pay attention to our words and how we treat one another i mean i am somebody that you follow me on twitter i i'd really try my hardest to not get sucked into some of the shit that goes on there and when somebody throw shade on something that i've written i used to get really fired up i've gotten in some serious bats with people. I was accused of murdering someone's son once because of a tweet. I tweeted something about 12 steps and the value of being abstinent from drugs as a, being drug-free as a pathway to a recovery process. And unfortunately, there is a mentality in 12-step programs where people feel is that if you're on an antidepressant or you take any mind-altering drug that

you're not really sober. Interesting. And someone's a mental thing. son went to a 12-step meeting and was on a methadone or Suboxone or some opioid replacement drug. And someone said, you're not really sober if you're on that. And so he tried to come off of Suboxone or methadone on his own. And he ended up being off of it and then relapsed on heroin and died. And so I think the parent was like, because these 12-step programs fill people with information about, you know, they're not really being sober that my son died. So I can understand how she arrived at that, but to attack me for that, it seemed a bit excessive. Right.

And it really hurt. It really hurt. And to get into some of these Twitter spat. So I've learned over time that when people attack, someone, I posted something about my son recently and someone said, basically, your son's a douchebag. And I was like, I direct message them. I was like, wow, insulting my kid. That's classy.

You know, and he said, he responded and was like, look, I was just pointing. out that, you know, the books that he was reading are books that only douchebags read or something or something. I was like, I get it. You know what? And douchebags a funny word. I like to use the word douchebag. And you know what? It's also a funny word. So it was asshat. And so was dinglebutt, you know? And so, you know what? Actually, I might be a shitty parent and my son might have a shitty life ahead of him. But I appreciate your concern or something like that. So I just kind of try to make light of it. Sure. Or at least not feed into it publicly. Right. Because there's... Dushbags don't read books. Right.

Like, that's not, like, quality of a douchebag. He's a nerd. He's a nerd. Yeah, I don't know he's a douchebag. That seems wild. Yeah. What book was he reading? Do you know?

He had all the books, like, not all the books, but he had like, the 48 laws of power. Oh, no, he's a douchebag. Yeah, no, unfortunately. David Goggins's book, you know, can't hurt me. Yeah, of course. No, all these sort of like current, current day, you know, the seven habits of highly effective people. Sure. It's like a way back.

Popular self-help stuff. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Total doucheback. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, trying to improve himself. Yeah, what the hell? Do you encourage your children to try psychedelics at all? Have they had conversations like that with you?

One of my sons asked me about microdosing. Yeah. And I was like, yeah, I mean, I don't, I think if you want to try that, that's fine, as long as you know what the sources and, you know, I, you know, for some people it can be helpful. It's certainly not dangerous, you know, like, if that's something you want to try. He hasn't tried it as far as I know, but he was asking about it. Interesting. Not my other son.

But you're, you would be fine with it. I think, yeah. I mean, if he wanted to try it, if it was done safely. Yeah. You know? Not the way you did. No, no. And both my sons, fortunately, have not yet turned out to be the way I was at the age.

Yeah, thank God, right? They love to go to the gym. They've got me going to the gym. We talked about going to the gym. Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, working out, which is not something I ever did. I've been doing that for the last three, four years. Yeah.

They go to the gym all the time. So just being healthy and we inspire each other, I think. And you grew up not believing in a higher power or God. No, none of that. And now do you have space for that? Oh, yeah, absolutely. For sure, there is some type of higher power. Yeah.

No doubt. Some sort of creative force, some sort of energy, some unknowable, something or other that's, you know, has our best interest at heart, even if it doesn't seem like it does. Have you found a specific religion that you enjoy? Do you find that all religions are one? What are your thoughts on religion? Well, going back to your bigger question about. the meaning of life and whatever. Like what I have found through my process of recovery and

studying psychology and psychedelics and philosophy is that it's all the same shit. It's all speaking to some universal truths. And so I don't like there are aspects of Catholicism, of Protestantism, of Christianity, of Judaism, of Judaism, of Judaism, of Islam, of all the major religions, of all the major philosophies, of all the major psychologies, of all those things that we can think of, that we can read about, that we can understand that there's so many commonalities. is if we really look deeply enough, that it's hard to really subscribe to one thing. I love aspects of Buddhism.

I learned about spirituality through the 12 steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, and that's predicated on a lineage of first century Christianity. And there's aspects of the Bhagavagata and Hinduism that's deeply relevant to, what it means to be human spiritual beings. And, you know, same thing with Islam and Taoism. And, you know, if you think about psychoanalysis and the collective unconscious or subconscious mind or cognitive behavioral therapy and the practical tools that are used there that can help bring people

peace and happiness and you name it, like across all of these different ideologies or philosophies or approaches to human life and improvement, they all carry some similarities. And I think the more we can tune into, you know, what they say in recovery and 12-step programs is identify the similarities, not the differences. So when you sort of orient your thoughts and you're, you attune yourself to, well, of course, everybody's different. And everybody's differences need to be respected. And that's awesome. We all have differences of opinion. That helps us grow, challenge each other.

But not to the exclusion of recognizing some sort of basic awareness that we are all the same. We all have like very similar longings and very similar understandings and we want peace and we want pleasure and we want to avoid pain and we want to conserve energy and we want to be nice to each other. I think for the most part deep down inside everybody wants that. And I think that is what sort of why I believe in some sort of higher power because fundamentally at our core we all share some sort of like connection to that force. Right. Yeah, those like basic Maslowian hierarchical needs. It's very like accepted community, love, things like that are just fundamental to all people. Yes.

And no matter where you go on the planet, it is at the core of what all people desire. Yeah. And then, you know, the specific things are, you know, cultural or personal or whatever that may be. Yeah. But the core of it is that. Yeah. And as far as your world view when it comes to like afterlife, things like that, like if you had to bet, no one knows. If you had to put money on it, do you think there's some place, a big tent in the sky we go to?

What do you think? I think we, I think my understanding up until maybe four or five years ago, and I don't know why it changed, was that we just died. That was just dead. We no longer exist. There's nothing after that. Like where we were before we were born. Yeah. Not even.

There's no, there's just death. That's the end of life. There's no reincarnation, nothing. But that feeling of where we were before we were born, like. that we don't know anything, like that experience of non-existence. Right. We were already in that space. Right.

We will just return to that space of non-existence. Right. And that only has been developed recently where I was like, oh, that, you know, expanding on that idea. It's not that we just, we're just dead. It's that something about our energy. Let's just say our decomposed body produces atoms that float out into the universe. and that somehow is consistent with everything that's floating around in the universe.

So we just return to that, Stardust, as you said earlier. But that isn't as meaningless as I once thought it was. I think it has more meaning. I think there probably is a way in which those atoms are recycled. So if I die, when I die, my energy will disappear, not disappear, my energy will transmute itself, float around somewhere. meaning little atoms or something or other, and that maybe that floats around

and reconstitutes itself somehow as a star or as a speck of sand on the beach or a tree or something. I don't, I mean, I kind of believe that's possible. Sure. I mean, that makes like material sense. If you're made of carbon and like the rest of the universe is made of carbon and you die, you know, it's all just carbon in, you know,

a big pile somewhere. But I'm curious as far as your consciousness, does that you that we're talking about, about the present you that we believe that we are yeah uh which may be contrary to what is actually happening where there is no you it's just a being right uh is that potentially where we go i would like to believe that i don't know if i do yeah but i would like to believe that there's some kind of consciousness you know that that sort of five mEO five methoxy dmpt experience of total unity with consciousness, that pure light, energy, oneness. There is no before, after. There's no,

you know, me, you, there's no nothing. There's just pure energy like that we return to that or we become that and that, I don't know, I do believe that. There was one physicist that I listened to at a psychedelic conference last September, Bernard Castro, Leonardo Castrap. I can't remember his name exactly. But he talked about how it's possible that we are all like dissociated cells from a larger source, that every living being or every living thing on the planet is simply a little cell that is that is parsed parceled off of some greater cell and that it's just for its own, for its own benefit to just go out into the world. And we're going to put you out into the world as a little cell that's going to go have your little experience, whether you're a tree or a dog or a human.

and you're just part of me. And when you die or when your time is open, you just return to me. And then I'll dissociate you again. And then I'll come back to me. And this is a constant game of going back and forth from a dissociated, like, separate cell, back to the source and then back out again.

And constant recycling of that. Whoa. It was pretty cool. Yeah. What's going on out here, dude? Right? You get to the end of the thought experiment, you're like, well, we still don't know.

Yeah. Yeah. We're just walking each other home. as Ram Dass used to say. We're just here for a little bit of time and why not be kind to each other? Why not just try to help each other out and try not to cause too much pain

and, you know, do the best we can. Absolutely. Well, in the short amount of time I have on Earth, I'm grateful that I got to spend some of it with you. Thank you so much for sharing your ideas with me and explaining the mystical world of psychedelics, psychedelics. Let's keep learning about it. Yeah, absolutely.

I think I'm going to try to have an experience on a low dose in the near future. That's the goal. Go upstate, set an attention, maybe meditate a little bit. Not too low. I'm thinking a gram.

Come on. I don't want to be too weird, dude. I don't want to get scared. Is it a bad idea if I do it with someone else and we're both doing it for the first time? It's okay. It's better to have somebody there. Not better, but it's fine.

It's fun. It could be fun to have somebody else who's there sharing on the same wavelength as you. It's good. I think at a low dose like that, that's fine. I think if you want to have a higher dose experience, you want to have maybe somebody who's had some experience with it and it's quiet and contained.

And you want somebody there who's with it and can troubleshoot anything needs to be troubleshooting. It's pretty mellow experience. Again, this idea of being scared of what could come up, it's totally navigable. It's totally manageable. I think if you get up around like four or five grams, it starts to get a little weird.

But if you get up to two grams, three grams, it could be a little intense. But you always got to remember there's a beginning, there's a middle, and an end. And you never lose a sense of beginning, middle, and end when you're taking psilocybin, unless you're at really, really high doses where you really start to transcend a lot of stuff. But at those doses, like you can still access the fact that you are here and you are you, and things are going to be okay. And didn't they say there was a beginning, middle, and an end? well, I don't like this right now, and this is really difficult.

But they said there's a beginning, middle, and an end. So I must be in the middle part, and there's going to be an end, you know, and you have access to all that. You know, it's not like that disappears. Right. Especially if you have somebody who's like, remember, there's a beginning, middle, and end, you're like, you're going to be okay. And you're like, no, I'm not going to be okay.

Like, there are demons like swirling around us right now. It's like, it's not even that. That wouldn't even, it's not even going to happen. Yeah. I've had bad experiences with weed before. Yeah. Where I was in a setting with people I didn't really know. and it was a high potency weed, like all the weed is now, which is so stupid.

And I smoked it and I was just like, oh, I'm like, what's going on? I can't control my thoughts. All the thoughts are happening at once. I'm seeing them all. I'm trying to like organize them, but that's freaking me out. And then I'm thinking about the world. And I'm like, is the world even real? And I'm just too high.

And then I had to go home and call my wife. And she, like, patted my head. And I was like, every breath I'm breathing, it felt like water. Like, it was like, and it felt so good. And I was like, but if I stop breathing, I'm going to die. So I have to keep on. And it was just awful. Then I went to sleep and woke up and I was like, well, my, that sucks.

I don't want to do that again. I don't want to do that again, but I'm afraid, like, his mushroom is going to be a heightened version of that. Like, if I had a adverse experience, I've also had great experiences with weed where I'm, like, in my apartment, safe with my wife watching the funniest, having a great time. Is there an analog if one experience is bad, that it would be bad on psychedelics or anything like that? No, I don't think so. I mean, you said it perfectly. You were in a setting where you didn't really know the people and it was high potency, and it was just kind of a shit show. And it speaks to the importance of set and setting and intentionality.

and curating your experience in such a way that, you know, you don't have those variables that make you feel out of sorts, you know, uncertain, insecure, you know, having someone that you know and trust with you and having a lot of preparation and, you know, setting your intention and having mantras and having mementos that you can hold that remind you of your, you know, the favorite pet when you were younger or something,

you know, like there's things that really can optimize that experience that really mitigate anything difficult or if something difficult comes up, there's so many tools available to you to just be like, oh, it's going to be okay. Interesting. Can I ask you a wild question? I don't know if anyone knows the answer to this.

Actually, there's two. One is my personal experience when trying psilocybin. Does it matter if I do just dried mushrooms? Does mixing it in like a chocolate form affect it at all because cocoa as a chemical could interact with the psilocybin? Like, how should I dose it for myself? The only thing about the chocolate is that there could be sugar and if you're sensitive to sugar, it could be sort of this added variable.

But I don't think so. I don't think that's, I think one of the softer ways to ingest psilocybin, if you wanted to have the raw mushrooms, would be to have it in a tea. So have it boiled and strained in a tea. And if you feel like you could stomach it, eat the dregs of it, swallow the dregs of it, and just to make sure you get the full effect. but there's a way to and also there's something called lemon tecking where you can soak the the mushrooms in lemon juice and it extracts some of the psilocybin out of the the mushroom and it can be a faster onset, faster offset and it's just drinking lemon juice. And also people will grind up mushrooms and put them in capsules.

Right. So that way you're not chewing on something that may be taste. Some people like the taste of mushrooms, psilocybin mushrooms. To me, I'm like, I'll just eat a mushroom. I don't really care. Yeah. I would do that. Yeah. Chocolate's fine. I mean, there's plenty of chocolate versions that are widely available. Not that I'm promoting it, but...

Right. Now, have you ever seen effects of psychoactive chemicals on people with, like, autism or Down syndrome? Like, does that help in any capacity? Like, again, I know obviously people that are autistic. I think it's, like, pretty prevalent now with more diagnosability. But, like, if someone has a difficult time understanding, you know, facial cues or social interactions or anxiety in groups or things like that or even tapping into their own emotional capacity, does doing psychedelics unlock anything for people that are on the spectrum or anything like that?

Yeah, there's a friend of mine called Aaron Orsini, and if you have a chance to reach out to him, he wrote a book called Autism on Acid. Well, this is what I'm talking about, dude. What's up with that? That is an awesome book. Pretty cool. Pretty cool. Autism on acid.

So he did a lot of his own research on looking at the potential benefits of psychedelics for people with autistic spectrum disorders, some on some level of spectrum of autism. Of course, there's different, I'm not a specialist in this particular area when it comes to autism, like neurodevelopmental conditions, that's not my specialty. But for, I would say, more than likely than not, people with milder forms of autism, according to his book and my conversations with him absolutely helps them tune into

themselves, their emotions, their thoughts, social cues differently, so that they can understand the world in an improved kind of way to relate to other people more effectively. And there is actually, he's actually working on a research project out of Imperial College, London, or somewhere in the UK, intentionally looking at, not just like anecdotal reports, but, and he started the Autistic Psychedelic Society, and he's just an amazing dude. And so you mentioned Down syndrome. That's a totally different condition. I have no idea if it has any effect on down.

Yeah, that's probably a sketchy test. I don't know if it's ethical to do that. It would be interesting. Talk about consent. Yeah, I don't know what the border is for that. That's fascinating. But there's no research you're aware of that explores that. I mean, that is interesting.

Especially for autism and being just having a, being on the spectrum like that. Having a greater capacity for human kind, I just couldn't imagine wouldn't be helpful for someone that might have a difficult time understanding social cues and being in social settings like that. Yeah, and MDMA too, like to have that because it's such a, it's called an empathogen. It has such empathic interpersonal quality. So if somebody who has a real deficit in connecting, you know, emotionally or picking up on emotional or social cues and you take a drug that basically enhances that significantly, that might help people with autism. Wow. There's a book that just came out that talks about that a little bit, MDMA and autism.

That's fascinating. That would, I mean, that just seems like, yeah, an angle of research I never really thought about before that I wonder if that would really help. Yeah. That is so interesting. Yeah, I mean, we talked earlier, transdiagnostic, man. I mean, you name it, whether it's Parkinson's disease, Alzheimer's dementia, fibromyalgia, chronic pain conditions, across the spectrum of mental health conditions, neurodevelopmental conditions. I mean, it's being looked at potentially to be helpful in all of these different things, which, again, sounds wacky. Yeah.

But, like, why not? I mean, if we're just talking about how deep down inside each and every one of us, we're all connected in some way, and there's a chemical that actually evokes aspects of that. Of course it's going to be transdiagnostic. Yeah, absolutely. It's like intrinsic to the thing itself. Yeah. Is there a strain that's good to start with for your first time? Cilocybin?

Yeah. Well, the only thing I can recommend is that if you know somebody that has used the same problem, and you know it's the same one and they've had an experience with it at like a microdose and they felt something or bigger than a microdose and they felt something. And so they know and of course every individual is different, but if they know the potency of the product for themselves, even though it might be very different for you because you're hypersensitive to these experiences, at least you have two things. You have a safe product because your friend or somebody you know took it.

They can say, didn't kill me, you know. And they will give you their interpretation. of how potent it is. And then you'll have to decide based on that, which is a very loose way to gauge how much you should take. Sure. But at least you know that it has some potency

because it affected your friend and it's not contaminated with something else. But different strains wouldn't affect you in drastically different ways. No. I mean, each psilocybin experience is going to be different. And there are psilocybin, there are psilocybin mushroom strains

that have different potencies. So, again, you just have to know, you could have, You could have a strain that is weak. And your friend took a gram and barely felt a thing. You know, so are you going to say, I'm just going to take a gram? You're probably not. Right.

You might be like, well, you took a gram and didn't feel a thing. And you have some experience of psychedelics. I have very little experience of psychedelics, and I'm very conservative, and I feel like I'm really sensitive. So you might take a gram, knowing that your friend barely felt a thing. And you might be pretty underwhelmed by that. But you might be like, you know what? I want to have some more potent experience.

And if a gram didn't really do anything to you, maybe I'll take a gram and a half. Yeah. So it's really, I mean, there are like different strains that have different potencies, but it really depends on the strain that you have available to you. Right. And having somebody you know who has tried it that can attest to its potency. Right.

Even if every individual is pharmacologic, you know, they're different physiologically. And if I start getting anxious during the experience, what do I tell myself? There's a beginning, middle, and end. Trust, let go. be open. Trust, let go, be open. Yeah. That's it.

Yeah. And have the right playlist with you and the right person with you. How do you discern the right playlist? You just Google, he put on Spotify, like psilocybin playlist. Really? Yeah, there's a bunch of things will pop up. Like, are the classic things like Grateful Dead fish? Like, I'm sure you could type in like classic rock psychedelic playlist and you could do that if you wanted to or Grateful Dead psychedelic playlist.

But you don't know what you're going to get. if you wanted to have a more true sort of psychedelic psychotherapy playlist, then you would just put in psychedelic playlist. And I would, you would go through and just listen to some of them and look at how long they are. So you want to have something that's maybe five or six hours long. Look at the titles of them. Look at the artists. Get a sense of the genre that's being put there. Listen to some of the songs, at least the beginning of each one of them. but there's a lot of and you could you could there are probably reviews on the best psyched dog playlist yeah i know for ketamine there's a ton of them for ketamine they're all like ambient trance like kind of music and that's fine for silocybin i think for silozybin you want to have

something that has a little bit more umph to it you know a little bit more you know some sort of vibe to it where it could have some specific kind of percussion or some sort of chance or some sort of sounds that really sort of get in there a little bit more yeah yeah amazing Well, I'll let you know how it goes. Yeah, definitely. Thank you so much, brother. I really appreciate this. Thank you for your time.

When is the next retreat, by the way? I know you were talking about doing retreats with the Vermont Psychedelic Society. Psychedelic Society of Vermont, is that what's called? The Psychedelic Society of Vermont is putting on its second annual conference called Solquinox, which is on the fall equinox during foliage season in Stowe, Vermont. That's September 21st, 22nd, and 23rd, with a lot of amazing speakers. there's going to be a sacred sound healing ceremony.

But it's not a retreat. There isn't going to be like psychedelic drugs being used there. It's just it's more for health care professionals for continuing education. So that's not a really retreat. The Psychedelic Society of Vermont meets monthly just for healthcare professionals over Zoom. But we don't formally like arrange psychedelic retreats with each other. It's just a group of health care professionals who really just want to stay abreast of the research and connect. with what's going on, who's who, what's what, you know, going to conferences, talking about research,

talking about clinical scenarios where people are coming into our offices saying, I had this horrible psychedelic or this awesome psychedelic experiences. I don't know who to talk to about it. You know, you know something about it. So having healthcare practitioners be able to talk to people who are actually using these substances in greater and greater numbers. So there's a real value to having a group of people like this together. But we don't typically do retreats. I'm going on a retreat in Mexico with a group of, They're not all healthcare practitioners. There's just a group in this training cohort through Tandava retreats in Mexico.

And they're awesome people, Joel Breyer and Victoria. So that's going to be wild. You should have me on the podcast again after that experience. Yeah, let's do that. I'll do one gram of mushrooms. Okay. And then you can. I'll be five and O'DM.

Yeah. And then we'll meet up and we'll talk about it. Okay. And we'll see where we're at. Sounds good. Can't wait. Thank you, brother. Yeah, thank you.