Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 299: Adam Strauss

Episode Date: August 3, 2018

Adam used psilocybin to treat his crippling OCD and turned this journey into a wonderful show, "The Mushroom Cure" which is currently running in NYC. He's a brilliant comedian, philosopher and fearless psychonaut.

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is being oppressive or doing things to you that you don't like, if you don't speak up for yourself then they're just gonna keep doing it. But I don't know, I'm gonna have to look deeper into the song to see if that's what it really means. We've got a beautiful podcast for you today. My sweet loves, Adam Strauss is here with us today. We're gonna jump right into that,

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and send explosive blasts of rainbow glory through the mycillial astral network that connects all living things to the part of the grid that Adam Strauss happens to be hanging out in right now. Welcome to the DuncanTrussell Family Hour podcast, Adam Strauss. Surprisingly.

Tonight. Welcome. Look at you sit you are with us shake hands no need to be blue Welcome to DTFH. Adam, welcome back to the DTFH.

Thanks for having me, man. It's good to be here. Do you think of yourself as an advocate for people who have mental illness? No. You know, I thought you were going to ask me because I'm also often asked the question, am I an advocate for psychedelic use? Everyone knows that. Well, no, that is kind of a nuanced answer because I feel like certainly I'm an

advocate in the sense that I feel like you should have the right to, to do what you want to do to yourself, uh, full stop. You know, there shouldn't be as long as it's not fucking with anyone else. Mental illness. Um, first of all, are you okay with the term mental illness? You know, it's, I don't love it, but there's not a better term of convenience that succinct. So I use it myself.

Um, it's always kind of bothered me. The words always kind of bothered me because it, it, it, I don't know, something about it, it just feels like, you know, I think probably folks like us, folks like us. The colorful people. That's not the right word for the neurologically. That's not the right word for, I like the colorful people a lot better than mentally, just cause you know, like when I think of mental illness, when I think

of illness in general, you know, I think of like it in terms of like vomiting, sick, fever, and then like, when I think in terms of what they call mental illness, I just think of people who have picked up patterns of reacting to the universe that don't seem to match the patterns that most people think are good or healthy or normal or societally pleasing patterns. And so sometimes I wonder if the term mental illness is more of a control term, an actual descriptor of the event. I like what you said much more, but it is a lot wordier.

So you have a paragraph there, but it is exactly. Cause I think what you just encompassed there is the idea that first of all, um, these are, I think it's useful to think of these things as patterns, as sort of amalgamations of, of, of, yeah, patterns. I can't do better than that. Things we've developed over time that probably served us in some limited context at some point in our life where we thought served us. Right.

Uh, and now the second part of what you said that it's not even necessarily that they're maladaptive, though, I think generally they are maladaptive. We'd have to kind of unpack that word, but they, they cause suffering. It seems like that may not be necessary in the people who have these patterns, but there is also an element of, um, you know, this interesting work where you look at schizophrenia in countries where it's not pathologized in the same way as a medical problem, but more as, uh, demonic possession, say, or some form of temporary insanity and the sufferers.

And I maybe they're not even sufferers in that context, but the people who have schizophrenia or would be diagnosed with schizophrenia in this country are not given medication instead. They're supported by their tribe, their community. And remarkably, it often seems to be fairly short lived. This is, yeah, this could get into a whole digression, but, you know, I'll throw this out there. I think one of the reasons the term mental illness is in wide currency is

certainly the pharmaceutical industry has a huge investment in us seeing it as an illness like any other. And they've advanced this whole idea of chemical imbalance, which is completely false. Really? Yes. Even educated people who suffer from quote unquote mental illness don't realize this.

There has, I'll state this without any caveats or any, uh, any qualifications. There has never been a correlation found between any neurotransmitter level and any quote unquote mental illness. People with depression do not have lower serotonin than people without depression. Is that this is a hundred? This is a hundred percent. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm not going to do the Google search.

I'm going to trust you here. Yeah. Research is well, then why are they called? So it started as a reasonable hypothesis where the idea was they noted with certain medications that they increase, they seem to increase in animal models and rats, they increased the availability of certain neurotransmitters and that would seem to change the behavior of these rats in a way. I don't remember the original studies, but it was, but, but essentially would

seem to, um, to, to change them in a way that they're, they were more active. They were less quote unquote, you know, sort of depressed acting. And in humans, it also seems like at least with some people giving them these medications can lift some of the symptoms. Right. So a reasonable assumption is, okay, if we're giving you something that seems to increase depression, then probably the problem, the first place was you didn't have enough depression, but that was actually found to be false.

Say that again, if we're giving you something that increases, sorry, serotonin. Okay, gotcha. Right. If we're giving you something that increases serotonin. You need more depression. Right. We have to increase your. That's called poos.

Yeah. Right. So for, if we're increasing your, your serotonin, uh, and you get less depressed, then it seems reasonable to assume, well, you probably didn't have enough serotonin to begin with, but that link in the chain is false. That is not, there are people with, it's very hard to, to measure depression in the brain and live people for obvious reasons, but when you do like metabolites, cerebral spinal fluid, that sort of thing, there are people with, um, who aren't

depressed, who seem to have relatively low serotonin levels, people who are terribly depressed, who have elevated serotonin levels, there's simply no correlation. Oh, and this was discovered decades ago, but the drug companies continue to push this narrative that mental illness is caused by a chemical imbalance because it's good for moving product. You know, no one's going to argue against taking a medication when it's, well, yeah, it's, you know, it's like a diabetic, you know, I'm enough insulin,

you need to take insulin, you don't have serotonin, you need to take serotonin. Well, I mean, but I have met people who are on SSRIs and say that thank God for this. If not for this, I would be dead meat. Like it definitely, I've met people who swear by their SSRIs who are, who are, and not only that, but they feel, um, really like resentful of the idea that it's a crutch. Yeah.

Oh, and I don't think it's a crutch. I don't, but I'm not saying you're saying that at all. Yeah. But, but, you know, like that's, it does get back to the original, my original question to you, which is that we've so stigmatized mental illness in this society that any kind of like, oh, wait, oh, shit, they're on anti-depressants. Oh, shit, they're taking anti-anxiety medication. Oh, fuck, they're on Adderall.

Oh, shit, they're in this. Oh, no, they're not. Oh, no, I hope they're, are you all right? That whole thing happens only with this particular sort of, right. No one's like, oh, you, you, you fractured your vertebrae. You're going to get back surgery. Uh-oh. You're, yeah.

Yeah. Okay. No, no, no, no, I'm so sorry. Oh, you're diabetic. Ooh, you need insulin. Maybe you should try a little harder to, uh, so you got a headache. Metabolize your glucose or whatever. You got a headache.

All right. Well, you're taking Tylenol, huh? Okay. Well, I mean, do what you need to do, but you know what I mean? Like there's, now that's not everybody, but it is such a stigmatized thing that, uh, and maybe hopefully less so these days, um, that people who sometimes will actually hide the fact that they're taking psychiatric medication for fear of persecution by, uh, or judgment.

Yeah. And I, I did, I mean, I was on these medications for 15 years and I do want to make one point clear, though, there is no doubt that there are differences in brain structure between people who suffer for, I guess we'll just keep saying mental illness because we haven't come up with a better term or the colorful people versus those who, who don't. So I'm not saying that there, there are absolutely biological, neuroanatomical correlates to mental illness.

Uh, but the whole idea that it's this simple thing. Oh, you don't have enough serotonin in your, you have too much dopamine in your schizophrenic. That's bullshit. Right. And in fact, the drug companies are actually forbidden by the FDA as of, I think like 2006, more than a decade, they've been forbidden for saying this in advertising and they still do it sometimes because it's worth it to them

to just pay the fines. Uh, it's, it moves product that effect. They don't say it very much now. It used to be widespread in advertising. They don't say what? That, uh, you know, you may suffer from a chemical imbalance. If you have depressure, you may suffer from low serotonin. Isn't it so?

Yeah, exactly. It's like you're a, it's like your car. It's like, Oh fuck, man, it's lowing, it's running low on radiator. And it's comforting for that reason to believe. And again, I was on this stuff to believe, okay, well, I just don't have enough of a certain neurotransmitter. I have too much of another and this, uh, this will top off the radiator. This will even things out.

But I, I, part of why I don't like that whole sort of that way of looking at it is I also think it reduces what I think is a profound existential struggle that I think everyone has to engage in at some level, um, at, at some point, maybe not till the moment you die, but I think, you know, where we're set adrift in this unfathomable universe. And yet we have to somehow live our lives and navigate and make choices in the face of profound uncertainty that exists in every moment. Right.

So I don't want to romanticize it, but I also don't want to reduce it to, oh, yeah, you just, you know, your, your neurotransmitters are a bit off. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's great. That's beautiful. You're right. And, and, and that, that version of that hyper materialistic version,

mechanistic materialistic version of how the human organism works definitely serves pharmaceutical companies in the most extreme way. Yeah. Yeah. And I, I mean, I, there's a great book called anatomy of an epidemic by Robert Whitaker, who actually worked for drug companies for a while. And he makes a pretty persuasive case that I don't want to spend all our time talking about this because I can get pretty indignant and

we have as much time as you have. Well, he makes a pretty strong case that essentially these, and again, I want to make the distinction at the outset, because I'm sure there's people listening who are on these medications. Well, let me say this as clearly as possible. If you're on these medications and they work for you, don't fuck with it. Stay out. They absolutely do help some people.

Yeah, they do. No question. I, unfortunately, was not one who has helped. And I say, unfortunately, because if they help me, I would still be on them. Right. I have no pride or compunction about that, you know. So, um, and if you're on them and they're not helping you, I would still stay on them or get off them very, very slowly because SSRI withdrawal is no joke.

What happened to one of my friends? Yeah. He became, he lost his equilibrium. Yep. He wasn't able to balance you mean like physical. Yeah. Yeah. He couldn't stand up.

He couldn't stand up for a few days. Yeah. Cause he cold turkeyed them and it was not good. I tried that once and it was the worst. I would say the worst drug experience I've ever had was abrupt SSRI withdrawal. What was it like? It was, I thought I was going crazy. Um, not to be fair, I've had that thought numerous other times when I'm not going

through SSRI withdrawal, but it was, so there was a sort of a very unpleasant physical. I mean, this was 11 years ago when I finally got off of them, but a very unpleasant sort of physical activation, a buzzing kind of. Um, what were the other symptoms? Um, my, a very weird physical feeling in my head. Uh, a buzzing, a physical feeling in your head. Do you mean like an auditory hallucination or like your body was like my body was vibrating, like my body was vibrating.

Yeah. There wasn't an auditory component. Um, it felt like sort of like maybe electricity was going through me. Right. Yeah. Again, this was 11 years ago and I, but I remember the first time I tried for a few days cold turkey and I got back on them. The second time I tried, I tapered very, very slowly and got off for about six months.

Uh, and I was passed through a draw and then I got on again for two years. And then the third time when I finally got off of SSRI, and I was on lexapro at 80 milligrams, the standard depression dose is 10, 20 milligrams, I got, I took six months to get off and I did it. I still have this in my, uh, in a notebook somewhere, I mapped out this withdrawal plan where I'd take like, you know, 10% less of my dose for a couple of weeks. I had a pill splitter and I was, I was quite scientific about it. And over six months, I tapered to the point that I wasn't taking anything.

And the reason that I finally got off, uh, was because I wanted to be able to work with psychedelics and this isn't true for everyone on SSRIs, but it was for me. Psychedelics did not work for me on SSRIs. Now, can, what do you know about psychedelics and SSRIs? Because I have heard that there's certain SSRIs that actually are okay with certain psychedelics. What, do you know of any re like actual research on this and not like, not the personal anecdotes are right, but is there any studies, uh, done on this at all?

I remember hearing from, I think the Johns Hopkins people have done a little bit of like collection of data about this, but I don't know. Do you know anything about this? Yeah. I mean, what I know is so generally there's not a safety issue. The, the, the exception there would be stuff that, uh, MAOIs, monamine oxidase inhibitors, cause that can cause, interact and cause what's called serotonin syndrome.

Right. So like, you wouldn't want to do ayahuasca when you're on SSRIs. Right. Having said that off the record, even though we're on the record here, I've heard from some pretty knowledgeable people in this community that those fears may be overstated, that people have successfully used ayahuasca and SSRIs and been fine. But the, the sort of dogma would be, and you know, to play it safe, anything that has, uh, an MAOI, MAOI component, you'd want to be really careful with.

But my understanding and don't, you know, don't make life decisions based on this is, and my own personal experience is that the, the SSRIs that don't have that component and SSRIs themselves don't actually have that component. None of them that I'm aware of inhibit, uh, that, uh, that chemical, they're safe, uh, but many people notice a very diminished effect to psychedelics. Some find it doesn't work at all, which was me. Yeah. Some, a very, very small number apparently, and this is totally anecdotal,

actually find elevated effects to psychedelics. So it certainly modifies the way psychedelics work, which makes sense. Cause the main receptor that these medications work, I think it's the five H two A is also the one that the SS, SSRIs and psychedelics both, um, bind to that receptor. Gotcha. So yeah. So it's, it's kind of, you know, this is the thing, like having a.

Pregnant wife, uh, is really interesting in that you realize like for a pregnant person, if you Google, can I, whatever, while pregnant, you know, like, like, like at one point, you know, poor pregnant people, my God, I had no idea, right? There's so many restrictions. I heard it was bad, you know, uncomfortable. I didn't realize it was like, it's a kind of crazy uncomfortable in the sense that like the, the normal avenues of, uh, using like release, sir.

Yeah. Like some soothing yourself, some bombs. I'm not even talking about things you eat. Like there's certain bombs that you can't topical stuff that you can't put on your skin. You can't put like, it's just like crazy, man, but the general advice is with almost everything is play it safe because it's either they know a little bit or they don't know anything or they know it sucks.

But in all of those, it's like, why risk it? Right. Right. Risk the risk, the lifetime of your offspring for to get a little soothing feeling on your skin for an hour and it's similar with a sweet little baby. You've got growing in your cranium there. It's like, if you, like, do you really want to risk potentially causing some kind of actual damage in the hard wiring of, of your brain by, because I've

heard that's what's it called serotonin, selective serotonin reuptake in him. No, the shock syndrome. Oh, oh, serotonin syndrome. Yeah. That is like, it can, it can be fatal. Yeah. It can be permanent. The, I don't know much about the effects other than death.

I actually, I don't know that much, but yeah. What, tell me what, what have you heard that I can just fuck you up? I, this is the thing I've been saying lately as I get older and become less ashamed of my laws and fallibilities is that I have a PhD in pro science, meaning that like what happens is like, whereas like doctors, like once I did this interview with Dr. Drew and he's got his desk is just stacked with fucking medical journals and he's reading this shit through the lens of someone who went to school for like 18 years or however long you went to school and absorbing it

to learn it because he has to learn it because he has to give prescriptions and work with people and that's how doctors and scientists operate. Whereas me, I will like hear about this thing or that thing. Go to like the front page of a medical journal, read it for approximately three minutes and then move back to Reddit thinking that I have discovered everything there is to know about this thing or that thing. So I hesitate to throw any data out like that, especially this particular topic, which is just like, fuck, man.

I mean, for some reason, I've heard that it's just it's can be so damaging. Yeah, I have like an overload of serotonin in your brain that it it the damage is just it's just not a good thing. Yeah. And if you don't die, you're going to have like the worst fucking headache of your life. That's one of the symptoms, right? Have you read that?

That it's just like migraine level suicide headaches and it's just like, no good. So, you know, I like, that's why when I heard that there are psychedelics that work OK with SSRIs, I was amazed because I had always just assumed. No, never, you get most of them. I mean, my experience from talking to people, it seems like most people, so this is anecdotal on SSRIs, can experience some effects from psychedelics. And yeah, my understanding don't make life or death decisions based on I don't even have a PhD in pro science.

I have I have I have I dropped out of college in that. But I would say I don't I'm not aware of acute dangers of psychedelics that don't involve MAOIs. So the problem is ayahuasca, the actual ayahuasca vine is an MAOI. That's the problem there. So an SSRI combined with a source of DMT that's going to bind tightly to your serotonin receptors that could be toxic is my understanding. Right.

But if you're on Prozac or Paxil or Zoloft or Lexapro, all of which I was on, by the way, is on all of them. I don't think you're risking life or limb by using a psychedelic. But the operative word there is think. Well, you need a good psychiatrist. You need a psychiatrist that you can go to and they're not going to. I don't think they're necessarily going to know. Sorry to cut you off, but I just because I always I feel like that's part of.

And I guess the reason I I unfortunately, I mean, one of the results of the drug war and the ban on the substances is we have a 40 year blackout on doing research. So SSRIs came up when there was a blackout on even looking at psychedelics. We just don't have good answers for a lot of this. But, you know, there's good. If you go to Arrowhead, if you go to Blue Light. I mean, if you're willing to make decisions based on anecdotal reports, but a lot of them, I believe what you'll find on those message boards is there's

plenty of people who have used psychedelics on SSRIs and been OK. And I'm not aware of reports of like toxic reactions for non-MAO inhibiting psychedelics, SSRIs. Well, you know, the problem this is like with psychedelics, it's I think a mirror of what happens to someone who's having a challenging trip. To me, mirrors what happens to somebody who in fact, you could say it's identical to a person who's experiencing a nervous breakdown or some. Moment of crisis, personal crisis or some in that that both of these people

will begin to if they're in the wrong environment, they'll begin to demonstrate a kind of shame based around it. So if somebody begins to. So if you're at a party and you are having a challenging trip, you will begin to feel embarrassed. There's a kind of very sad, almost John Wayne-esque sense of what's wrong. I'm supposed to be having fun with my bros, but I'm thinking about my mom died. I'm thinking about how my heart got broken two years ago.

I'm thinking about how I'm afraid to do anything in the world that's going to hurt anybody's feelings, and it's making me real sad. But everybody around me is dancing and now I'm feeling real bad because I don't want to bring anybody down. And that's like a microcosm of what happens with somebody who has depression or mental illness in the real world is they're looking around and everybody's either happy or pretending to be happy. And they're like, I don't want to.

I don't want to burden you with this thing that's happening to me. And then they also feel like it's their fault. That's the other tragedy is a lot of times people with mental illness, they think they brought it on themselves in this way or that way. They've been taught that, you know, you shouldn't have done that thing or you know your guilt did it or you're too guilty or you blah, blah, blah. Or you can or you can choose not to do it now. Just stop doing it in some way.

Yeah, you can just stop that pattern. Yeah. And dance. You'll be fine. And then we get into that whole fucking unravellable, unravellable yarn ball of, you know, free will versus biological determinism and all that shit. But I mean, certainly as someone who's been on the inside and still is sometimes on the inside of of, yeah, just very trapped in my own suffering and thoughts, you know, I can say probably on behalf of most people

who've been that state, if it was that fucking easy, don't you think I'd do it? Yeah. I mean, yeah, maybe there is an element of choice. Maybe and that and that is that is legitimate. You know, it's I mean, fuck, I mean, being human, there's so many layers and levels and to know like, yeah, there are times where I'm like, maybe part of me likes getting trapped in this cycle sometime because there is something comforting about it. Well, there's something comforting about imagining you have control.

Right. That's a big part of it. Absolutely. Yeah. And I was I was talking to I was I was talking to a woman who she works with psychedelics with a lot of people with PTSD, particularly often trauma from sexual violence. And she said something that never occurred to me. And she herself had had, you know, been blessed at a very young age. And she said, you know, I just thought it was my fault.

And that was easier in a way. It was easier. Always. Yeah. Yeah, that never occurred. That this conversation was actually was on the 4th of July. We had this conversation. Yeah. Always. Yeah, it had never occurred to me. And I kind of then thought about it in my I haven't had horrific trauma. But also, yeah, maybe there's a part of the OCD control thing where it's

yeah, it's comforting to think, OK, well, maybe I'm choosing this. Man, this book, I mentioned it to you before the podcast. How are you anyway by Annie Lamont? It's blowing my fucking mind. And she just she kind of talks about how so you're a kid and you're in a family where there is mental illness, there's addiction, there's abuse, there's some there's an adult who is demonstrating a pattern that isn't based on anything in the real world.

And what that means is that from time to time, mom or dad freaks the fuck out on you or on mom or on dad or on the dogs or on your brother or on your sister. And it's not based on anything that happened that you can see there. You're looking around. There's no cause and effect. You can't say if I don't do this, that won't happen. Right. And so what is because your entire life, you know, your very short life,

this person has been the producer of your fucking reality tunnel. Right. It is easier to imagine that you in some way or another instigated this seizure of whateverness that happened, whether it's like physical abuse, mental abuse, drug abuse, neglect, whatever it may be. It's easier to imagine that this is because of you than it is to realize that this person is not actually a good gauge of the way the universe works. Because up until that point, you've based everything, including your language

and your like movements on the way they are. You've been tuning yourself to a tuning fork that is not necessarily in tune. And so to fix that problem, you self blame and you self blame because you as a defense mechanism and you keep you carry that with you through your whole fucking life. But what I'm just missing one one link there. Why is that a defense mechanism to self blame? How does that serve the person in that situation?

Well, OK, so if I can imagine that daddy is rational and logical and I did something wrong, then that means that I can begin to predict when the next rage is going to happen. Right. And if I can predict when the next rage is going to happen, then I can reduce my anxiety. All I have to do is alter my behavior a little bit. It's like a cargo cult in reverse. It's like, you know, the shit right.

So yeah, so soon. Right. So it's now whatever was happening when the rage happened. And then the person who's got the disorder, whatever it may be, let's say it's alcoholism, they get drunk. And when they get drunk, they get mad. And when they get mad, they they fucking they become really angry at you. And then when they become really fucking angry at you, they sober up. And it's more difficult for them.

They do the exact same thing the kids doing. It's more difficult for them to imagine that they've got a mental illness and that the reason that they did that fucking thing was not because the kid knocked the milk over, but was, in fact, because they've been drinking every day for the last six years and their liver has turned into a fucking pretzel and their brain is all like withered and fucked up. And oh, and the reason they've been doing that

is because they watch their mom get raped, but they forgot about that. So it's easier for them to to to to to be like, well, the fucking kids fucking God, right? If only had done that fucking kids clumsy. Yeah. What the fuck? The kids fucking clumsy. He's got to learn. He's got to learn. He's if he doesn't learn from me, who's he going to fucking learn?

Right. It's for his benefit. Yeah, both both parties in this terrible situation are engaged in a kind of desperate self-deception because it's more difficult to come to terms with the reality that the adult has got a little fucking skip in his record or her record that needs to be repaired. And so now we get this like now we have like the story of so many dysfunctional families.

How will we anyway? Annie Lamont, check it out. She breaks it down in the most compassionate, concise way where you're like, oh, my God, this is what's happening right now in the world. This is what's going on right now. And and and and and it helps you be compassionate. You know, you know, that's the thing. You know, the thing you said earlier, if I could fix this, I would. Right.

That that right there, when you begin to realize that that's most people. Yeah. And like most people, most people, if they could fix it, they would. Yeah, maybe everyone, everyone. I think they're for sure there might be some people outside of that, you know, because we have to like we don't want to just say that everybody is like, you know, without guilt, you know what I mean? Everybody is without like everybody.

Well, you still have responsibility for your choices and the consequences of those choices. I don't know if that's what you mean by guilt, exactly. But I do think, I don't know, maybe this is an naive belief. But I guess I do think people don't want to cause suffering for themselves or others unnecessarily. I believe that too, man. Yeah, I really do believe that. It's one of the real heartbreaking

realizations that you have when you realize that it's not as though the world is teeming with evil men and women. It's that the world is teeming with people who are doing the best they can do right now. And they're trying to avoid their suffering and paradoxically, in most cases, certainly in my case, you know, we could talk about this more in the context of OCD, but to keep it general, in my case, by trying to avoid my pain is the almost the sole cause of suffering in my life because I have a pretty fucking amazing life. Like the universe has been quite merciful to me,

which is a whole big existential question I have. Why am I so fucking lucky? But putting that aside, yeah, most of what I'm hurting is generally because there is some there's some source of pain, some loss that I just want to avoid. And I'm going to run kicking and scream, I'm going to try to crush it. Well, wait, let's reverse three seconds and go back to the thing you said right before that, which is like, I have all these great things in my life.

Yeah. Why am I so lucky? Yeah. Yeah, let's explore that a little bit, you know, I think that that's a really, I think it's funny because the two things that are certainly related and and well, it's sort of you could go back to the title of that book, which I love. Hallelujah. Anyway, yeah, you know, yeah, I suffer sometimes quite a bit. And knowing that it's unnecessary often does not make it easier. Well, you know, a lot of people, but yeah, Hallelujah. Hallelujah. Yeah.

But a lot of people, you know, and I don't know if this was you, but a lot of people when they're growing up because the what they're growing up in is a pretty chaotic situation. I mean, I mean, just like in just just in general, like that beautiful thing you said about we're sailing this boat through this is crazy. You're making it more beautiful. I don't think there was any nautical metaphor. But no, you take no, I want to hear yours now.

Let's just keep. Yeah. Into this into this world, which is a hurricane of phenomena. And we're standing in the middle of this hurricane of phenomena. And if you sort of look back generationally, I'm I'm saying, let's pop back to like, I did this terribly depressing, horrifying Google search, which was just like how many people own slaves in the 1800s? I think it was 1830. I could be wrong about this.

Might have been a little earlier, but it was something like, and again, bro science friends, I skim, I go back to God of War. And this is my fault. I'm not a doctor. But it was it was definitely more than 100,000 people in the south had slaves in the 1800s. Like my Uber driver picked me up the other day and we're having this conversation. And he's from around where I'm from in the south, except he's black and I'm white.

And we didn't say anything, you know, about how we ended up in the south. But the way I ended up in the south was I, my grandparents from Belgium got on a boat and they they were on top of the boat. Whereas the way he got to the south, I don't know for sure about this, but he was not standing at the time. His ancestors were not standing at the time. They were they were the propulsion system in the in the hold. Yeah, or just chained and right thing and shitting all over each other.

And that's the 18. That's like that's that's what my grandpa. That's when our grandparents were alive. That's 300,000 people, I think was the number, but I could be wrong in the south. And that's just slavery. Yeah, that's not including all the other incredible traumatic shit right happening all over the fucking planet and particularly everywhere. Right. Yeah, that's two generations ago, man. Right.

I think two, maybe three. That's three generations ago. So we're three generations away from that, two generations away from the Holocaust. Yeah, which was my relatives. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. So so so when you begin to like realize like we're born in, we're born into a hurricane, yeah, we're born into an epigenetic hurricane where the people that we that give birth to us, many of them have PTSD. The United States has been at war 93 percent of its time.

There's been 23 years that the United States has not been at war, which means that a great many people are suffering from PTSD and they're self-treating with alcohol. You're born into that kind of world, man. And you've got to think you've got to figure out a way to make it make sense. And the way you make it make sense is you either imitate the person who's crazy or you fight against the person who's crazy. And this produces this horrific kind of wobble, which is there's no middle point here.

You're either like, my fucking dad was a motherfucker who fucking abused me and he was a fucking drunk, or you have a fucking beer in your hand and you're looking at your kid and you're like, he's got the fucking milk in a piece of shit. Yeah, because that's what your dad did. Yeah. And so where is the middle? And it's like, that's the place that's like, we've got to figure out a way to tune ourselves to that, you know. And I think that's what we're kind of looking at in the world right now.

Forgive me for the rant. No, I like the rant. And I mean, yeah, but I would go a step further and say, all right, let's even look at the 23 years without war. Let's look at it on a on a societal level, but also even I'll bring it back to myself, not just because I'm a narcissist, but because that's I do have a PhD in myself, at least, if not in many other things. I my I had a pretty stable family of pretty stable upbringing. Now, if you want to talk about epigenetics, yeah, a lot of my relatives

were in Eastern Europe when World War Two broke out and none of them made it over. So describe I have a feeling you definitely have a more concise and a deeper understanding of epigenetics than I do. And can you describe that a little bit for people listening? I actually I don't know much about it. What I know, I'll give a plug. Joe Tuffer, who I also I think I have an extra copy of this book. Duncan, I'll shoot it over to you, has a book called The Fellowship of the River

where he talks about epigenetics in the context of psychedelics. And so that actually my knowledge comes mostly from him. He's also the one who when I did your podcast last time, the one who who was who was tending to me when I thought I was dying on Iowassica deep in the jungle of Peru. And but but so my understanding is, you know, it was thought until some recent time that, you know, genetics determine certain traits, physical, emotional, mental, etc.,

which is true, but there's also epigenetics, which is basically genes can be turned on or turned off by environmental factors and stressors. And once they're turned on and turned off, that's now part of your genetic makeup and it can be passed on. So if if, you know, if let's say my grandmother had horrific trauma, she was in the States, that's why she made it. But her relatives, her mother, her sisters back in Lithuania or wherever, were all exterminated.

That must have been terribly traumatic for her. She subsequently gave birth to my that that trauma could have activated, almost certainly did activate an expression of certain genes. And then those genes are activated. And I'm I'm going to say I'm 60% confident of what I'm saying. Now, I'm not highly confident, but I but the general idea is that is that once those genes are activated, now she has my mother and those genes can be passed on to my mother

that would have otherwise been dormant. Yeah. So essentially, the really put it in the broadest strokes possible, your environment affects your genes, which then is passed on to future generations. So, you know, the the the son, the grandson, the great grandson of the slaves and the slave owners are both carrying the genetic inheritance of that. In a sense, we're carrying the genetic inheritance of all of our relatives. Yeah, that's right. Or potentially, I mean, it's yeah.

Well, I mean, and I again, like what we've done here in this conversation is to get incredibly mechanistic, you know, something I was railing against earlier, which is to sort of like break down like pathological, anti social behavior patterns to a genetic level. But I think it's good to start where we can start, you know, but I have to jump in because it also pulls it out of the mechanistic thing in a cool way, because if you believe in free will, which is a whole fucking thing, then this also implies

that our choices can change our genes. Right. Let that sink in. Your choice is your choice to whether or not to drink ayahuasca, but also your choice to be compassionate to the woman in front of you at the airport, who's too slow taking her shoes off, which is an experience I had yesterday. Holy shit, dude.

That just is fucking insane. So yeah, so it's like, OK, OK, this is what it's like. It's like, right. So if we go off the premise, which these days seems like it might be a little controversial, which is that people are doing the best they can right now or doing what I would say people are trying to doing the we have to define doing the best they can. I don't think everyone is doing the best they can for the good of humanity.

I know I'm not most of the time, but they're doing the best they can to get by, minimize their own suffering. And I guess this is how I'd look at it for myself. First and foremost, I make choices based on my own selfish interests, not a hundred percent of the time, but I'm going to say mid 90s. OK. Majority of the time. OK.

But then once my own basic choices are my own basic needs are met, or it's not operative, you know, I have enough food in my belly, so I don't have to worry about what I'm going to eat. Then when I can do something that benefits someone else that doesn't have too high of a cost, I deem to myself that I'm going to do that. OK. And I think that's true of, I think everyone at some level, I really do. OK.

Yeah, I think that's that's what I'd say the best we can. And I don't think there's anything to be ashamed about that, by the way, if that's you. And I think instead of thinking like, OK, here's a better way to put it is this. Yeah. Instead of thinking like, let's create a premise. Here's a very fun premise to work with personally, which is you, the listener, and you and me.

Right now, in this moment, you're doing the best you can. You went through some shit, man, and now you're doing the best you can right now. You and you can look at yourself and your brain might tell you or your conditioning might tell you, no, I'm not, man. I should be jogging. I should be less selfish. I should be kinder. And usually people will refer to the past.

So they'll right away be like, no, you know, I fucking introduced my brother to heroin and he died. So no, I'm not doing the best I can now. It's like, no, no, no. Right now, play around with the lens of the concept. With a lens. Look through the window. Even if it's even if you have to do make believe like it, like it's in other words, like right now, I could say to you thought experiment sort of.

Yeah, I could tell. I don't know about you, but many people I could say right now, like right now, you and me, we could do it right now. Yeah, let's pretend that you and I are police officers. Let's just pretend as an acting exercise. Yeah. Like we it's easy to do. We can we can do some really shitty improv.

Dude, you fucking can you? That is too tie dye. You're not allowed to have that much tie dye hanging on the wall, man. That's local regulations. I know. Fuck it, man. I'm going to keep it up there. Sorry, man.

Sorry. We got it. We got to pull you in. Yeah. Reeducation. Reeducation. That's like tapestry. Yeah.

I don't know what you're calling it, but that is clearly forbidden by local regulations. I knew it, dude. It's a purple, purple. You can have purple and you can have pink, but not in the same tapestry. Yeah. This is not the first time we've come by. We've given you multiple warnings. Dude, let go back.

I'm going back for life, man. You are. It's the three strikes rule. So OK. So like so. OK. So easy. That's easy.

It's going to my acting reel. Easy. Easy to do. But if you do try to do the exact same thing with yourself, which is just imagine it right now. You're doing the best that you can right now. And imagine that back there when you did all that shit that you did. That you shouldn't have done. You're right.

That was fucked up, man. It hurt people and we all wish that we hadn't, but we did, right? And you just imagine that, right? But right now, you're doing the best you can. You're doing the best you can right now. And just sit and play around with that idea where it's like, if you're doing it, you're doing it. And now, if we add to what you just said, which is so fucking trippy, which is like, you are holding this kind of clay, which has been being carved upon by your ancestors right now.

And this clay, it's got all these crazy signatures and glyphs. Grews. And this little thing, this clay, man, this is what you're going to pass on. Down the line, right? And during this little brief, it's almost like we're on a conveyor belt, a temporal conveyor belt. And our lives are when this ball of clay, this genetic mass that's been being refined or... Like a relay race kind of maybe, yeah, getting passed down. And we can start refining it right now.

And we are whether or not we're aware of it, I think at some level. I mean, there's another way to look at it, which is the whole idea of Hebb's law, which is essentially the sort of common formulation is neurons that fire together, wire together. So that basically, when you engage in certain behaviors, repetitively, it becomes easier and easier and more and more natural to engage in those behaviors. Like muscle memories. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

And so I think of that often when I find myself in the throes of some sort of obsession that, all right, I want to get free of this, not just because I don't want to suffer necessarily now, but every time I do this, I'm kind of laying down the groove a little bit deeper to go into this. And so if I can break free of this, which is a whole process of not fighting it, but actually surrendering to it, the payoff is A, I'll get free often by surrendering to, we're kind of thinking a little bit of right term, but by surrendering to pain, it may intensify the experience of it in the short term, but the fruits of that are freedom. So I'll get out of whatever obsessive rudiment or depressive rut, you know,

you or someone may be in more quickly, even if it hurts a bit more, kind of ripping off the Band-Aid metaphor. But the other payoff there is I'm starting to lay a different path down. And next time, it's going to be a little bit easier for me to go down this path of choosing surrender and choosing ultimately peace rather than fight and struggle or wallow, whatever the pattern is. Right, I love it, man. And that's kind of self-compassion, you know, where it's like, for me,

what, where it gets really interesting is like, I have noticed that I get way more excited if I start doing stuff that isn't for me than if I'm doing stuff for me, right? It's enlivening in a different way. Yeah, it taps into something different. There's a different feeling. What's your, what's like one of your favorite movies that you've seen recently? I don't really watch movies much. And that's a weird thing to say.

What's the last movie I saw that I really loved? Well, what about like a book or like, what's, what's something you really like or a song, a song? What's like a song? It's like, I hate being asked these questions. Yeah, yeah, I know. It's like a Ryan Spencer movie. Exactly.

What's the right answer here? Give me a moment. What's a, let's see, I, all right. The last book I read, it was the best dollar. It's quite popular. George Saunders is one of my favorite authors. He writes short stories. But he came up with his first novel about a year ago called Lincoln at the Bardo.

And I finished that recently. Did you like it? Yeah, I loved it. It was, I mean, it's, his short stories are, I may prefer them slightly. It was kind of like an elongated short story. But yeah, there were passages of it that were transcendent and kind of, he to me, he sort of taps into, into sort of a psychedelic state of consciousness without, like I can kind of be, he can bring his readers into this state of kind of intimations of oneness, of order,

of, so yeah. Was there a passage that you remember in particular that you get like paraphrase? Yeah, there were, there were, I mean, sometimes the language is just so beautiful. So yeah, there's one passage where he's talking about, it's in the first person and it's this, so Lincoln is, you know, Abraham Lincoln. And so this, this person is living in the whatever 1850s or so. This guy who I think is in his 50s and he's a widower and he marries some 15 year old woman. And he's explaining, he's narrating at this point, the narrator's shift in this book that,

you know, you may think it was kind of like this, I'm going to avail myself of the marital prerogative, an older man taking advantage of this younger woman, but that's not how it was. You know, I didn't lay a finger on her, but it was, he talks about how his life, I'm getting goosebumps, having this younger woman, this very vital force, he says, it's like a, a freshwater river was suddenly routed through my house. And there's an awareness of something, I'm not going to get the language quite right, but something like vital and wild and ravishing, running through my house now. And it just enriches his life in a way that he couldn't have anticipated.

That's fucking cool. Yeah. Now you got goosebumps. Yeah, yeah. And what happened right there is you shared something really beautiful with me and everybody listening, and you got to relive that moment of joy that you had the first time you read that passage. And it became exciting again.

It became completely new and almost better than new in a certain way. So if I am with a friend who has never seen, like for example, my wife has never seen Groundhog's Day, the movie with Bill Murray, which I think is one of the most beautiful, perfect depictions. That's one I have seen actually. And it's amazing and more than once appropriately enough. It's so beautiful because it's like, to me, if you want to really see like a great depiction of what happens when like, it's a beautiful metaphor for when your life gets stuck in a pattern or rut.

And yet you can make different choices within that same rut. I never thought of it that way. That's so beautiful. And she's never seen it. I've seen it a bunch of times, but tonight I'm going to fucking barbecue some hamburgers and we're going to watch Groundhog's Day. And I'm excited just like I was seeing it for the first time because I'm getting to share it with somebody who's never seen it.

And that, to me, is if I just was like just like thinking like, you know, tonight I'm just going to sit down and watch Groundhog's Day again. It'll be cool, but it's nowhere near as exciting to me as like, oh fuck, this is awesome. This person has seen this show. So like, to me, it's way more satisfying, way more exciting to do things for other people than for ourselves, not for some kind of pious reason or holier than that reason, but literally because it appears that there's something built into us that makes it feel better to give than to take.

And that makes a lot of sense to me, not just from the perspective of tribalism, but also just from a general hive, any kind of thing trying to function together in a rhythmic patterned way, teamwork, et cetera, it all makes sense. And so this obsession with self-service is like a true brutality to ourselves. And we don't even fucking realize it, man. And so I agree with, I agree that, yeah, it is a form of brutality. I like that towards ourselves, depriving ourselves of sharing and giving. But I'm not sure I fully agree with the idea that it feels better to give than to take.

I think it sort of depends on the context. It depends on what you have, what you need, and also who you're sharing with, right? If I said Duncan, yeah, you have a crazy busy schedule. You only have two hours free tonight. What I want you to do is watch Groundhog Day with this, with the guy who some random guy going to pull up the street or someone who you don't particularly like. Now, you might get satisfaction from sharing it still, but if there's more of a cost, I think it's, and I think this comes back, not to be too contrived in terms of tying it together.

But I think this is part of the reason why it's fucking hard being human, because it's not so simple as it's better to give than receive. It's always these nuanced things that depend on all these different factors in our experience and navigating what's going to, what our own needs, what to give to other people. But I absolutely do agree with the last thing you said, which I think depriving ourselves of giving or sharing, it's a form of violence against ourselves. And one that I think many of us regularly practice because it's not really, you know, there's so much emphasis in society now about efficiency and output and maximizing.

And, you know, people give lip service to helping other people, but it's not valued in the same way as, you know, what did you get done today? What have you accomplished? How's your career going? Yeah, not at all. And in fact, it's the phenomena of the way we treat our caretakers in this society. It's like, if you really want to understand how it is, we brutalize our caretakers. Nannies get treated like fucking shit, man. Nannies, teachers in terms of teachers. Oh my God, you're a maid. What? Oh my God, what? You keep people's houses clean. What do you mean you're marrying a maid? Surely, like, is that's all he or she's doing, right?

You know, like, when you look at that shit, it's like, you can see that our society has a fundamental confusion, it seems, like when it comes to the value of giving to other people or caring for other people to the point where jobs where people care for other people, unless they're like incredibly sophisticated, like a brain surgeon, a brain surgeon walks into a room, right? And everyone's like, Oh my God, it's a fucking brain surgeon. A plumber walks into a room, right? Who like, we have to have plumbers. Yeah. Or there's going to be shit everywhere, right? But a plumber status is going to be less than a brain surgeon and certainly a maid's status and certainly a server's status. Like, you know, someone who's a god forbid, you should

have to like become a waiter. Like there's so many actors and artists who desperately want to avoid making money as a waiter or a server, not because they don't want to do the work or because they're lazy, but because of the shame attached to serving other people and not making money from their art. And it's all related to the stigma against serving other people, which to me is there as a form of like vast misunderstanding. And I think that we could actually tie the capitalist mentality of profit into service as long as we remove ourselves from the idea that money is the only currency, right? Yeah, you know, yeah, that's the move. Yeah. And I think part of it is I mean, a brain surgeon generally gets more respect in society than a maid because it is a

objectively hard, it requires a higher degree, I was gonna say harder and then it's objectively harder is maybe a silly thing to say because it depends what domain you're defining it based on. But certainly there's a lot more training. There are many fewer people who can be a successful brain surgeon than can be a maid. So I think part of it is just the scarcity thing. But I do think part of it is yeah, you know, it's there's look at the way people treat server. Yeah, it's way be. I mean, it's like, it's not just like, and also the other thing is like, man, when you consider like fucking brain surgery, like, holy fucking shit, what a rush, dude, like, I mean, my fucking God, you're opening someone's fucking head. And like, you're like in there like if you I actually

interviewed a brain surgeon once and he started crying because then he had done an operation, he got tears in his eyes because the night before or the day before it went on for hours, he'd done an operation. And he was explaining to me that one, if his hand trembles a little bit, that somebody's memory of their childhood gone, gone, talk about playing God. Yeah, that's scary. It's a scary fucking job. The stakes are really high. And he invested a lot of money to get to that point. But and so yeah, brain surgeons are fucking awesome, man. But also that dude gets applauded. Yeah, saving like that dude's a fucking he's Dr. Strange. He's badass. He's amazing. It's a fucking brain surgeon. A maid, right? Who we love maids, we love them doing

at the hotel. Oh my God, you walk out. That's one of the coolest things about being on the fucking road. Yeah, you're living in some magic. My bed is rent made. Yeah. Yeah, you walk out, you come back, your bed's made, there's mints on it, maybe the fucking shampoo's been refilled, everything's polished down. And it smells good in there. And you're like, this is fucking fantastic. We need it every day. It's a huge industry all over the planet. You can clean your own shit. And there's nothing wrong about it. But if you've got a little bit of extra money, you're going to pay for a maid because it's fucking great. And you're busy or whatever. And they're great. They're fucking great. But so what I'm saying is, yet, yeah, there is somehow a stigma attached to

this, a hierarchy of yeah, it's a hierarchy. Exactly. But it's an icky stigma. Yeah, it is. And it's not just based on skill sets. And it's not just it's not just based on like where we're doing an analysis of skillfulness. When we look at a person or how much work they put into their profession or this profession, it's that we've got a kind of caste system that's based on employment in this country and isn't based on a person's compassion, or love, or generosity, or giving. And that is capitalism. I think that is, I mean, like you said, unless if you decouple capitalism from money, which is certainly possible, it is right. Money doesn't have to be the end point that we're measuring in terms of creating value and in terms of trading for

goods and services. But if it is, then yeah, and I think but you said caste system, I think that's a perfect phrase because the thing to keep in mind is so much of this is not due to talent and ability. That is a factor. But a lot of it, I mean, here, let's bring it back to your experience. Maybe that it's not coincidental that you were the one, you were the passenger in the Uber, and the former, the son of former, or grandson of former slaves was the one driving the Uber. There's wealth concentrates generation to generation in this country. Exactly, dude. That's another thing. Exactly. I forgot to mention that. That's the most fucking awkward point. That is the most awkward point. And that's why the whole reparations

thing, man. I feel like to me, reparations are no brainer. I mean, especially when you look at people who got wealthy, essentially off the free labor of slaves, give that fucking money to the descendants of those slaves. I mean, it's easy to say it's hard to actually implement. But to me, yeah, anything that sort of undercuts this perpetual reinforced class system where the people who have money, their offspring have more opportunities. Therefore, they're making more money. And therefore, their offspring have even more opportunities. Let's face it, man. Reparations are not going to happen in this country without a bloody revolution or without a shift in consciousness. Right. I was going to say, yeah.

That is so profound. And I don't think that's impossible. And if maybe this is, you know, this is where we bring it back to psychedelics, I think. Well, it's not fucking impossible. No. But it is a massive, massive, massive shift from we're at today. Absolutely. No, I think it's like what you were saying. If we decouple money from capitalism, which can be done, and it certainly can be done. And one example of it, for sure. I mean, if you really start thinking about the various, it's really interesting to think about all the all the different forms of currency that exist, that it can be quantified right now. Right. So we have quantification mechanisms in place right now for some very

interesting forms of energy. Specifically, this is what's being called cryptocurrency is one of the examples where we've got this bizarre way of monetizing Bitcoin mining, like energy being spent to crack to like do these like long term encryption or decrypt. Yeah, right. So like, so that's one form of currency. And that's a currency that can be directly converted into the currency of this sort of the same, isn't it? Because it's energy that is then assigned to value, which I'd say energy of the the made or energy of the brain surgeon, which is also assigned to value in the form of pay that then can be redeemed for other goods and services. I don't see cryptocurrency as it's still like money. Oh, it's a but but this is what the I'm trying to like move down the line.

So we have cryptocurrency, which is like some kind of and I won't even fucking pretend. Yeah, cryptocurrency. Anytime anybody starts telling me about fucking cryptocurrency, I like listen as hard as I fucking can. And then there's weird feeling. I get this weird feeling. And I'm just like, well, I'm going to think about it some more. You're telling me at some point fourths are going to be able to pay for themselves through the blockchain. I don't know how that works. But it sounds fucking awesome. And I pray to God that it's real. But like if we if we keep but but we are looking at a way that technology is quantifying a kind of energetic system that can actually be exchanged for real money, right? So in the same way, on a satanic level, we have a long time ago quantified

our life energy in terms of hours and minutes and seconds, which we then sell to this person or that person in the form of activity. And that's like labor, right? So but then if you if you keep following this interesting and relatively according to based on human evolution, new quantification, which is time, right? That's where we had sundials and shit, but the precision of time and everybody being attuned to some clock based on Pacific said based that you know, like, it's wild and it's relatively new, right? But it's a quantification mechanism that allows for a kind of voluntary slavery that we call capitalism, which is is the way things are currently working right now. I mean, it also it also allows for people to come together and creative projects. Also,

it can be used for good or ill. Okay, okay. There you go. There you go. That's exactly right. It's a tool. That's a tool, right? But I think it's a tool that generally causes more harm than good. It is caused a great deal of harm. And but if you keep following this interesting form of quantification, then you start running into like these really new technological quantification mechanisms, which is likes and faves. Yeah. So now we have another form of currency. Now this currency is really interesting in the sense that it cannot be directly converted into money. I cannot directly convert my retweets or or or likes into money. Unfortunately, good, but I can't I can't do it. But you know, weird way, it can be converted into money, but it takes a couple of right,

there's a few steps you have more influence. Therefore, people are advertisers on this on your podcast are going to pay more money. And right, wow, yeah, might start giving you stuff. And right, you get more lucrative gigs. Yeah. And so right here, this is what I've come to lately, Adam, and this is where it gets really fucking trippy, get trippy, man. This is where it gets really fucking trippy. So there's a term that gets thrown around all the time. And the term is fear mongering, right? And so the idea is it's the selling of fear. I saw it right. You had a tweet about this recently. Yeah, yeah. I've had this epiphany book. Yeah, it's all completely related to Paul Simon. Paul Simon has this. There's a song called The Coast and in the song called The Coast,

the lyric is and I'm going to sing it. Yeah, to talk about all drum. I don't have any. Talk about fucking fear mongering, get ready to be afraid when you hear my voice. But the song goes, This is a lonely life, sorrow everywhere you turn. Now that's worth some money. Think about it. That's worth some money. Think about it. That's worth some money. Think about it. That's worth some money. Now, when you think about it, it really is worth money. And we can start at the very top where who does who makes the most money off of this off of spreading fear. Well, it's the it's the military industrial complex. We need people to be afraid so that we can have war. But we are weapons manufacturers and specifically, but people who make guns too, you know, we need that. But

like it doesn't stop with that. It keeps going and it's hitting Twitter now, which is that it because if you and I and this ran is about to end, I swear to God and thank you for enjoying it. I want us pulling it out of me. You and I are walking down a path in the forest, right? And one thing's for sure. If at the beginning of the walk, our guide, let's say we have a guide, if the beginning of the walk, our guide says to us, Hey, listen, I'm going to point out the trees to you as we go on this walk. It's part of the payment that you're paying. But for an extra $10, I'll also point out the poisonous snakes. You're going to pay for them to point out the poisonous snakes. It's like, all right, here you go. I don't want to get

bitten by a fucking snake, right? So our minds are programmed to not really look at the trees, because we're all the green. You could see all the fucking green, but the fucking snake is going to stand. Regativity bias. Yeah, it's it makes sense to attend to danger better than it makes sense to attend to good things. Exactly. Yeah, absolutely. Meaning that if I tweet, this comes back to mental illness too, but let's go. I want to hear you finish your point. But yeah, the conclusion of it is this. If I tweet anything scary, anything scary, and I do it in a way that's that's like really, really fucking polarizing and like really intense, I am going to get way more retweets and way more likes than I'm going to get if I tweet something that isn't

scary, because the human brain is programmed to fixate on fear. So what we have here is an unintentional monetization in the form of likes and retweets of the spreading of fear and the accidental programming of people by the whoever's on Twitter to like want to tweet scarier things because when they don't tweet scary shit, they get less retweets and likes. So now we have this terrible, what would you call it, a feedback loop where all of a sudden somebody's like, Oh my God, every time I tweet, they don't even think it. They're just like, Whoa, that got 20,000 fucking retweets versus I would say maybe not necessarily scary because I don't see a lot of scary tweets on Twitter because Twitter, I mean, I'd say news is more like that,

right? Where news about threats is going to get more eyeballs Twitter. But I certainly see it with maybe negative or polarizing things. Let's call it negative, maybe as a broader term than scary. Okay, that's a good way to put it. If I tweet something negative, if I tweet something polemic, I'm going to get a fuckload of more retweets and faves that I'm going to get. If I tweet something that is like, like, for example, if you tweet just something basically sweet, well, that's fucking embarrassing. Like if you were to tweet, like just like, you guys, I just want to say, I really love being alive. I want you to test this, this, this, this theory. Oh, I want you to really love being alive. I because I feel like you would get, I mean, it also depends on who you are, what your

persona is in terms of who your followers are. But I feel like if Duncan Trussell tweeted, I really love being alive. I think you'd, I think you'd get some good metrics, bro. That's the horrible sentence, get some good metrics, bro. No, but here's where this is where it gets, it gets back to the idea of, well, if we can decouple capitalism for money, for money, and if we've all been conditioned by being born in this, in a capitalist society, and we've all been programmed to want to have more profit, and there's maybe no way to do that, man, it's just etched into our souls by now, or we were born into it, our parents were born into it, then maybe one of the answers would be

to recouple, to couple, to somehow connect profit to the spreading of love instead of just social good. And I, and there have been attempts to, I don't know much about them, but there have been sort of utopian attempts to, to do something like this, because you could have a metric of compassion. How much love did you give today? I mean, it requires quantifying it in some way. And that's icky for so many people, because they're like, fuck that, I don't want to quantify love, I don't want to do that. But it's also icky quantifying work, you know? I mean, yeah, yeah, saying that, okay, well, you're made, this is worth this much. I mean, it's mostly we do it based on supply and demand, right, rather than the intrinsic value of the work.

The essence of the thing is, if there were a way to just introduce people to a pretty amazing thing, which is that when you give something sweet to another person, whether, and it doesn't have to be some massive thing, but when you offer out into the world, something that's like, truly compassionate, truly loving, not like just, just something, anything at all, anything at all like that, you feel better than when you offer up to the world something that's really scary or dark or like really fucked up, like it's, you just feel a little better, right? And maybe there is a reward mechanism built in, but right now the reward, people are being around because it might feel, it might feel better to do something good in isolation, but the retweets that you get

feel even better that you do from, from spreading something negative is what you're saying. Yeah. Right. Yeah. So we're all, we have this disincentive to, to spread love in some way, but I don't, I mean, maybe this is, go ahead, please. I don't know if I fully agree with that. I think if we're talking about the news, absolutely, absolutely fucking literally, right? I mean, people, it's there because again, we have, we evolved with this propensity to look for danger or threats. So the, you know, the number one forwarded news articles on, you know, nytimes.com are generally going to be something, you know, fucked up, Trump did or something that their readership is going to consider threatening or scary, but social media, I, because I feel like

I feel like there's a growing recognition of the price that we're paying for the world we live in, the world that we've created, which is a world built of technology, which fosters these ephemeral connections, but ultimately limits, you know, when you're in front of a screen, you're not connecting the way, the way you are person to person. So I think the, the fruits of the world that we've created are isolation, isolation, loneliness, fear. And I think as people recognize that more and more, there is this sort of countervailing kind of, well, let's, let's try to change things, let's try to spread love. And I think psychedelics are, I think a tool for that, but also I think the culture around them, that sort of the second generation culture that's

growing up around them now, I think that's, that's part of it is, is wanting to do things differently. And I mean, what I just said is very vague, but I guess the point I'm making is I, I'm not convinced that, and I'm, you know, I've seen some stuff that's gotten a huge amount of retweets or likes that has been positive, generally from celebrities, you know, it's not, but again, like, you know, getting into the positive negative thing, I'm really being like hyper reductive in a kind of annoying way. What I mean is like, another way to put it would be people who have like a really big following on Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, they seem to be somewhat oblivious to the fact that they are tuning forks and that

the vibration that they are, what would you say, the frequency they're resonating at is affecting and directly impacting massive amounts of people who are tuning themselves to that frequency, right? So the, the, the, they don't realize it. It's not like these people aren't nefarious or evil or they're, everyone's doing the best they can. I think I've, you have to bet on the podcast before this, this professor was teaching conditioning. And before he came to class, apparently the students, when I was studying psychology, they told the study before it came to class, the students began to made it like I came with an idea, which was if he's on the left side of the room, we're going to act like we're paying attention.

If he's on the right side of the room, we're going to ignore him. This is great. Yeah. And so by the end of the class, he was only standing on the left side of the room. They'd completely made him move to the left. And he wasn't aware of this consciously. Yeah. Right. He wasn't aware of it. Right. So what I'm saying is these, right, right. People are fucking tuning forks. Right. And so they're radiating out this message or signal. But it's a feedback loop too, because what their audience is retreating is going to cause them to move to good or evil left or right. Exactly. So it can only be polarizing in the sense that if they're allowing themselves in any way, shape, or form to be influenced by the reaction of the people that they are sending the signal to,

then they are going to either very slowly or very quickly be pushed to one side of the room or the other side of the room instead of having like a real balanced output. And so that so, so I think what we're witnessing is one of the many things predicted by folks who talk about the singularity and the impending technological singularity is going to be preceded by many kinds of disruptions. Most of them are, we're fully aware of the unemployment being one of them, the impending awakening in some form of computers. Like intelligent computers and people not having jobs because computers are doing everything. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. One of the things that maybe is a little less as it hasn't been predicted as much or hasn't been talked about as much is the fact that

by becoming connected in a technologically enhanced way to massive amounts of people, we're unintentionally tuning huge populations to some kind of frequency. And if the frequency that you're tuning them to is a frequency that's coming from you accidentally being out of tune, then you're basically detuning shit tons of people. And now we've got all these people who are a little out of tune. And this is called, God forgive me for saying it, the United States of America. It's supposed to be a choir. It's supposed to be a song. It's a song that's made up of lots of different people. And now that was the dream. It obviously hasn't been that way. Maybe the fucking ever. But what a beautiful dream. Yeah. United States, right? A United

State. And I'll tell you, man, if I've got to like unite, or if I want to like tune to some kind of frequency, I don't want to tune to a frequency where of like panic. I don't want to also don't want to tune to a fucking frequency of naive delusion. I don't want to tune to a frequency of somebody who's like, everything's roses, baby. There's fucking tigers, fucking goddamn like, you know, giant eagles flying by a fuck you, bitch. There's fucking death, right? But I'll tell you this, if I've got tigers in my jungle, and I've got giant eagles flying overhead, I for sure, if I'm the leader, and I'm going to do everything I can to calm us down first, like guys, we got some fucking giant eagles, we got some fucking tigers, but we can handle this together. And we

can do it in a way that doesn't have to be scared that does because we're going to function way better if we're not afraid. That's how I see it. Yeah. Like, and so there's actually more of a, I think, I think some people maybe they're not realizing that that they're what they're saying is certainly true, which is like, man, fuck, we've been at war 93% of our fucking history. We're dropping bombs on fucking kids. And we've been doing that for 93% of our goddamn fucking history. We've got these pharmaceutical companies selling poison to people. We have, we have a massive problem with like black people being shot by cops and fucking arrested. And these are people who got dragged here three generations of fucking go and now we're throwing them fucking jail.

Like, it's all true. Yeah. This is all true. But is the way to deal with these problems, to just fucking demonize and polarize and attack and banish and shame and send out that fucking frequency that has been tried for so many generations and has failed every single time where we'd be in a utopia. Yeah, to figure out a new frequency to send out, which has behind it the intention of reducing suffering as much as we can. I think it's the latter if you ask me, right? It's, I agree. I think it's real hard. I think a lot of it comes back to evolution where, you know, threats, we evolved to crush threats or to flee them. Right. And so that's the person doing the bad thing, whatever you perceive as the bad thing is, even if things that everyone would

agree, you know, a black person getting shot or bombs dropped on babies, it's still, it's very hard to, I mean, it's certainly appropriate to, it's appropriate to demonize. It's not inappropriate, but is that actually going to change things? It doesn't work for my poodle. I'll tell you this much, man. My fucking poodle pissed on my goddamn Swiffer today. Now I'll tell you, if screaming at my fucking poodle made my poodle act like a better fucking poodle, I'd have a goddamn circus doc. That son of a bitch would have ridden a bike by you when he came in today. Yeah. I would have been very impressed if that was my greeting. It doesn't work. It doesn't work. It doesn't work. If it worked, it would have worked by now. It

doesn't work. And I think this is the same thing we see on the, the societal level, but also the personal level. Cause what is, I mean, mental illness, again, we keep using that term, but a signature of it, certainly with OCD, but I think in most forms is that also I should be better at beating up on oneself. That ultimately paradoxically just makes the problem worse. Yeah. That's where it starts. Yeah, exactly. And to get back to your psychedelic point, I think that if the idea is like, oh shit, we're all tuning forks and oh shit, we're accidentally tuning way more people to our frequency than we thought we were, every single one of us, then the next logical question would be fuck. If I'm a tuning fork,

what have I been tuning myself with? What am I using to attune myself? And a lot of people have been using randomosity, chaos, social media, news, weird data streams, and not realizing that they're tuning themselves to that. So I think where your point with psychedelics is that perhaps psychedelics used in a intentional way could be a kind of tuning fork, couldn't they? Like maybe the psychedelic state could retune us in a certain way that would then allow us to send a frequency out that wasn't quite so laced with an undercurrent of fear. Maybe. Yeah, maybe. Yeah, I think that is part of it. I think part of it absolutely is that I think these drugs slash medicines, I don't really care what we call them, do have the potential to open us up to a different way of experiencing.

And the fruits of that generally not always, but generally seem to be compassion for self and others, empathy. And then sometimes you get those plus four mystical experiences where holy fuck, it's all one thing and I'm it and it's me. And then from that, that's sort of the max injection of empathy and compassion. If it's all the same thing, how are you going to be shitty to the maid or the server? That's you. Or how are you going to be ashamed of being the maid? Right. Yeah, exactly. You're also the brain surgeon. Yeah. Yeah. And but you've had personal experiences with this tuning fork. I mean,

this is like the entire. And that's why I'm all healed now, Duncan. That's why I am a paragon of mental hygiene and enlightenment. I'm actually, your listeners can't see this, but I'm actually levitating above the chair about it. And the thing that's really annoying, no offense, man. So I really love that you came here. But what's really fucking annoying is that angels keep appearing out of portals and like kissing his face and wiping away he's been crying a little bit. My tears here. He'll cancer. Actually, that's yeah, that's why they're collecting the tears for, yeah. Dude, you should sell that. I'm going to monetize it for likes. It's really what I'm looking for. I have a bigger play here.

You could turn it into Bitcoin. I could turn my tears into Bitcoin. But so so yeah, man, but you are an example of somebody who has had like your frequency. And again, when we like, I think everybody knows by now, there's no one cure and there's no permanent cure, but certainly you experienced some remission, some profound remission of symptoms that had were basically destroying your life. Yeah, I did. And I say it in that tone, because you know, it's so easy for me to forget it. It's so easy for me. I was reflecting on this earlier today when I was, I don't even know yesterday, I was stressed about something where it's so easy. It's kind of like the studies, you know, were lottery winners. Six months later,

they're no happier than they were before they won the lottery. Right. There's always the new, the new normal that we acclimate to. So like I kind of take for granted, how much better I am now than I was, you know, a decade ago, and then I was five years ago, because my experience is still very often, well, shit, this could be better, you know, and that I still, but yeah, psychedelics. That's growth. Yeah, yeah, it is growth. And I say it again, I say it in that tone, because I think there's a part of me that has trouble giving myself credit or giving the universe credit. You think? Yeah. I mean, we didn't get to explore that, did we? Because like you did say that you look at your life and you think, man, I really have a lucky life. Yeah. But then without even

going into that, we jumped into the next topic and and and we are fear and negativity. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But again, like, yeah, you landed back there again just now with, you know, and I think that's something that I'm working with now because I mean, the short version of my story was the OCD was just yeah, life destroying is a good adjective for it. Psychedelics. So I mean, my show is a long show and I'm not going to tell the whole story here, but the short version is psychedelics helped me find a lot of relief, not in the way I expected. I thought it was going to be this silver bullet cure. It absolutely was not. But it helped me learn to have a different relationship to my obsessions and to the universe, frankly, God, I mean, whatever you want to call it,

there is some connection to a greater reality that together that helped me find a very significant relief. But and maybe I instead of but I really should just say and because of course, and I still suffer sometimes a lot with rumination with obsessive worry. So I don't have the overt rituals that I had and that's huge, you know, I don't spend hours or days or sometimes fucking weeks it was Duncan locked literally locked in my apartment just doing dumb fucking rituals that I don't do anymore. But I still yeah, I can still get caught in my own head in a way that makes me not really available to what's going on out here. Yeah, yeah, I can get trapped there. Yeah. So yeah, I'd say now the feature often will take the form of rumination,

worry, regret, I should have done this, you know, in the past or future, you know, well, how will this go? And and so yeah, so the reason it's an end versus a but is because I think what you said is true that yeah, there is no ultimate cure, you know, no, well, there's it but and it's also but it's a process. It's and yeah, and and I and thank God for that process and maybe literally thank God for that process because I mean, I don't know that's it seems like that's part of part of I want to say why I'm here that assumes a certain cosmology I'm not necessarily comfortable ascribing it to but but fuck it. I think I do think there's meaning. I don't think I don't think we live in a random universe. I think there's an order in intelligence. I will pretend to have

a rational grasp of that by any means. But I don't think to me, I mean, I think religion, it organized religion is insane. But I think atheism, the idea that there's nothing is even more insane. Listen, man, what this brings me to like, I'm sorry if I said this story before, this is one of my favorite moments that happened at Burning Man. And like, it was so profound, man, because I just been talking to one of my friends and like I was high and I'm sitting there with like my community and my friends and people I really love. And I was thinking like, I don't deserve this. Like this is just too much. It's just beautiful. I don't deserve this. These people are so sweet. And this event is so incredible. And like, this planet seems so incredible that it

could produce communities like this, who even if they could only do this thing temporarily, my God, my God, the potential, the potential, I don't deserve this. I don't deserve this. I was talking to my friend who is a has is a really smart person. And he was just like, I'm like, you know, do you think it's better to think we deserve or to think we don't deserve? Is it like, is it is it is it puffed up and inflated to think I deserve this, you know, or is it better to like, I don't deserve this. If we receive a gift, is it better to think we deserve the gift? Or is it better to think I don't deserve this gift? And my friend was like, well, if you want to get depressed, you know, the cause of depression, one of the causes there's many is that feeling of,

I don't deserve, I'm not good enough. I'm not good enough. I don't deserve this. Oh, no, not me. I can't. You it's better to think we deserve it. Now, this made me start crying because I was I was like, because you were high. Yeah. And then he was he went right to a deep, deep wound. And he was like, just just healing. And it was like, I said, I'm, I'm like crying at Burning Man in front of my friends. I'll start crying now thinking about it. And like, so then we're walking. And there's a phone booth talk to God, right? And it's one of the many art experiments at Burning Man. I'm not sure what it what it is exactly, but it's fucking brilliant. It's a beautiful phone booth says talk to God. And I get in that fucking phone booth, and I pick up the phone. And like, there's other

people walking by, we're just, I'm I didn't think, you know, just improvising like, Hey, God, what the fuck, man? Why did you make my dick bigger? You know, what's going on? Like, you know, just stupid, like dumb, I just having fun with the phone booth, just improvising. Then all of a sudden, the phone starts ringing. And a woman answers and goes, Hello. And I'm, I'm like, Oh, I didn't know somebody was on the other line. And she goes, Oh, I'm always here. And I'm like, stunned, you know, I've just been doing really garish, dumb, vulgar, bad comedy, like, like my life. God's like, Kevin listening to do this shit for 44 years, motherfucker. And I'm stunned. And then I'm like, um, and then I'm like, uh, well, uh, I just want to say thank

you, you know, this is really beautiful. And she said, Well, you're being too hard on yourself, you deserve this. You're being so hard on yourself. This is all for you. My brain exploded. And I hung up on God. Yeah, I was like, I gotta go. Shit, it's too much. It was too much. Yeah. And that's so man, but it is all for us at some level. I believe that I think, you know, we have these experiences. I mean, one of the big, well, sorry, I don't say this, you're not lucky. Yeah. To say you're lucky is to is to say I don't deserve. Yeah, I never thought of that. To say I haven't worked my fucking ass off for this. To say you're lucky is to say like you, Adam didn't take the fucking time to do the work and do the

self care and do the therapy and do the acting classes and do take all the risks and do all the stuff that got you to the point where you could produce and act in a brilliant piece of theater. And you know what I mean? That ain't fucking luck. And I end, I'm trying to say end instead of but. What my mind wants to come in and I will is my parents are happily married. I was born white and tall and physically healthy in a society that values all those things. Okay. There's never been a moment in my life, literally never a moment where I'm like, shit, I may not be able to, I may go hungry because I can't afford food or my parents can't afford food. So you never had anything rough happen to you, huh? It's all about downhill.

Like you're basically just like riding like a really slow Russian at 100%. No, no, my point is that things that are out of my control seem to be have aligned quite in my favor, like even just the circumstances of my birth, you know, and your birth, you're the one in the Uber, not driving the Uber. Well, that's true. That's true, man. But I've got like, I'm actually, I should never do this in a podcast because it's so dumb, but I've actually just like kicking around ideas for a new joke. Yeah. Yeah. And like, because I was realizing like, Oh my God, you know, I don't basically like, so my guru, Neem Krili Baba, and my teachers, over and over and over again have been teaching me this very simple idea, which is everything's perfect. And, and, man, you know, you say that

in the wrong company and people, you're right. So, so, so, so, um, fuck it, man. See, this is again, this is like capitalism in my brain where I'm like, Oh, do you want to save it for this day so I can make money off of it? That's bad. So, so here's the, here's the essence of the thing, man. It's like, in it, I'm like, I know, I know what you're thinking. Just another white, 44 year old cancer survivor with one ball whose mom died of breast cancer saying everything's perfect. He's got it all going for him. I think that the idea that because we are, we are white. Yeah. The idea that because we are men and that we are white, that we are not allowed to say things along the lines of, I know what my dying mom's urine looks

like in a tube coming out of her body that can't come out of a coma because she's dying in front of me and she died for four years fucking straight. I know what it's like to look down at my balls and see them, one of them, gigantically swollen because there's death living inside of them. And I know what it's like every time I get a cold to have a slight feeling that maybe I'm dying because maybe it came back. So to say, because of my gender or my fucking, as Terrence McKinnick's, Terrence McKinnick so beautifully put it, the way photons reflect off of my skin that I have in some way shape or form and there's a prohibition or a stigma or even it's, I don't think, but I'm not saying that. I don't think, so I think I'm saying that. I don't think you're saying that some people

are. But I think, but I do think, I don't think it's black or white, no pun intended, right? I do think though that my circumstances seem to me, the circumstances of my birth, just my parents being happily married, that's a huge thing that most people don't have. That's beautiful. Having that model of love. Now, I also had an incredibly contentious relationship with my mother and huge fights from a very, very ageing. So there's other sides to that story, but still just the basic biographical facts of my existence, I think are more favorable than most people's. Well, I mean, except for the fact that you, again, by the way, what's really brutal here is that we end up getting in a kind of, and this is not my point at all. No, no. So, which is that we don't

need one thing, I think, and who am I to say what anybody needs in any way, shape or form. But one thing I feel that we don't need right now in this world is to get into a suffering competition with each other, right? I don't think we need to do that. I think maybe this is the answer, is maybe if I replace lucky with grateful because that's more of an active thing. Oh, I love it. God, let's replace lucky with grateful. But it's not, but it actually does, it is a real choice, right? Because lucky implies sort of a passive thing like, why was I given all this? Where grateful says, I'm going to choose to express appreciation for what I've been given, and everything I've been given, the OCD, the good, the bad, I mean, it's the oldest cliché in the

world, but it is all fucking wondrous and terrifying. It depends on how you look at it. But I mean, we exist. That's the most unfathomable fact of all. Here's the thing, man, we've all figured out how to mine the terrifying part of it out of the caverns of fear, and we've been doing it for a long time. I say we become miners of gratitude and wonder. And I say we do that no matter what is happening or has no matter what's happened in the past to us personally, it's not my job to tell anybody else. I shouldn't say we should have hallelujah anyway. I shouldn't say yeah, that's right. Yeah, it's not my job. And I do it so many and I'm so I'm sorry because sometimes it comes across in the most sanctimonious way. And it's and it's it's unintentional. It's just I'm a little

out of tune all the time. And I'm trying to tune myself and I'm trying to tune myself to something that is based on wonder and gratitude like what you're talking about. And and and and I'm not ashamed of the fact that there have been times in my life when I've been really out of tune and I do and I'm not mad at my parents anymore because they were out of tune. And I'm not mad at my grandparents because of whatever they may have done. And I'm not and as much as possible. I'm trying not to be mad. And I'm trying not to hate. Yeah. And I'm trying not to hate because I'll tell you this man, I don't care what fucking shape the ice cube tray is that you put the fucking cyanide water in. That's still cyanide water. And the same is true for hate. And there is not a place

where it's okay to direct hate. Let's stop directing hate. Let's stop it. What didn't work. If if if hating things made the world more peaceful, we would be living in fucking Narnia right now. It didn't work. Why are we running this experiment over and over and over again, putting different targets in front of our laser beams of hate? It isn't so hard, but it's so hard to change because I'm going to bring it back to evolution that negativity bias that crushed the threat. And yeah, I agree completely. It doesn't hate does not build things. Hate is not a creative emotion. That's not a creative force. And if we're talking about making things better, really what we're talking about is creating a different world, a new world. And yeah, and hate is not going to

create that because hate destroys it doesn't create. It didn't work. Yeah. But it's so but I think also having compassion on on people who do hate, which includes myself sometimes because it's so it's so ingrained, man. It's so ingrained. You know, we evolved, you know, in the savannah, when a lion came out, it was not adaptive to be like, wow, it's main is so beautiful. Its teeth are so white. It's perfect. I mean, there probably were some of us who did that and they got eaten. So we're the ones, the ones who are still around, we're the product of, you know, millions of years of breeding that out and breeding in the kill that fucking beast. I don't care. I don't even if it's the last one left. If there's any chance or you know what, we don't even know if that line

is in the bushes. We're going to napalm that whole fucking forest because there's one goddamn line in there and it eats my kid better safe than sorry. That is the that is evolution's motto, I think is better safe than sorry. And that is also I'd say OCD's motto. And maybe depressions too is, you know, protect and fascism's motto. Yeah. And this is why, I mean, why did why did why did George Bush get reelected? I would say Osama bin Laden, you know, fear causes people to all right, well, let's let's stick with the known, you know, let's it's there's there's big money in fear, man. Yeah, big money in fear. So I'm with you, man. This is I think this is how we change things. But I think we also have to acknowledge how hard it is to go against millions of years of

evolutionary programming that's enacted not just out there out here in society, but inside of ourselves. I try to crush my my my own internal threats, my emotions that I don't want the sadness, the loss. And to me, in my case, that produced this horrific I mean, the OCD, it started when I had a particularly significant romantic relationship that quote unquote love of my life that ended 15 fucking years ago. I had a lot of anxiety before then I've been hospitalized twice at 18 for kind of just couldn't keep my shit together. But you've had it easy, man. I've had it easy. You've had it easy except for the getting hospitalized twice when you were I'm the distinction I'm making though. And I think is is I do feel like the yeah, no, I mean, maybe it's a maybe it's an immaterial distinction. I do feel

like I guess this is what I'd say. I think on the balance, I would rather be born with two loving parents than with, you know, an alcoholic violent father who beats the mother. So in some ways, so right, I guess it's maybe I'm oversimplifying to say I'm lucky. But there have been I know many people. Yeah. Many people who've had alcoholic violent fathers. And they haven't been to a mental hospital yet. Yeah. So I'm not sure that like using your parents stable marriage is some kind of example of how you've had it easy. Not not easy. I don't think I've had it easier than some. Well, I mean, shit circumstance, I think circumstances have been kind to me. I just know that whenever I get caught up in this kind of helpful that I get caught up in suffering Olympics. You know what

I mean? Where where when I know generally, there's from and I really man, again, like I gotta keep just keep fucking hammering this home, man. I'm so sorry if when I seem sanctimonious or preachy. I'm so sorry. No, I'm open. I'm open to I'm yeah, I'm talking to a lot of it is like this is my own shit. Yeah, I look at it and I try to sing to myself to calm myself down a little bit and like we all have the same shit. I really believe that at a lot of levels. So yeah, I want to hear it. I just know that if I find myself generally contemplating the fact that my suffering is exceeded by other people's suffering, then usually the thing that the situation that I'm in is not a great situation, right? I'm truce trying to figure out a way to reduce the power of the situation

by thinking, well, you know, probably in some part of the world right now, someone's giving birth to a baby right into a hyena's mouth. So you know, at least at least that wasn't a baby that got born into a hyena's mouth. That would have sucked, you know. So but I think and again, what we're doing here just to draw it all back in is comparison. So now what's happening is I'm going to compare myself to you. You're going to compare yourself to somebody else and somewhere in the midst of all that comparison, we can see some of the byproducts of comparison what happens. Here's what you get from comparison. Here's what you get. You get fucking Miss America. You get American Idol Hitler and you get fucking right. Yeah, you get fucking people walking around

burning crosses and fucking KKK hats who are saying that there is a genetic difference between people with black skin and white skin. And because of this, we should do this thing, that thing, that thing or another fucking thing. And it's not a good look to put it offensively lightly. Yes, it's not a good look for our species, right? That's all. So with you on that. So like one thing I try to do is like instead of doing my tendency, which is to want to tell other people how to fucking live because it's way easier to tell other people how to live than to tell myself how to live is I try to draw it back to me, which is like, I'm telling Adam, maybe he shouldn't compare himself to other people and get into a suffering Olympics. Well, maybe I'm going to try to do

that myself. I'm going to see if I can do that a little bit more is like stop comparing myself to other people either in one way, which is like, man, fuck, other people have it worse than me. So, you know, the way I feel is okay. Or in the other way, which is other people have it worse than me. So I should feel guilty. Right. Why the fuck can I get my shit together? Or I should feel guilty. I wasn't born into an high in his mouth. Right. Yeah. Yeah. No. And it definitely can't have that effect. And I like the idea of substituting gratitude. And yeah, it's cheesy. But I mean, my phone every, every three hours, my little gratitude alarm goes off. And you know, I ignored it for a while. And then I hit this rough patch about a week and a half ago, which is really

kind of just dark obsessing. And I'm like, all right, I can't afford to ignore this thing, because that's one way to connect to something beyond myself. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, gratitude is just kind of a quick little, okay, oh yeah, there's, God, it's brilliant. There's this, that's it. There's this and I'm pointing to my head, there's this, but then there's this. And but I do think my point being to make this change, the shift away from hate is challenging because that impulse to crush threats, I see it out there, people with the crosses and I see it in here in my own heart where, oh, there's this feeling of loss because this relationship ended. Well, I'm not going to feel that I'm going to get rid of that feeling

by engaging in these crazy rituals or by masturbating or smoking weed or whatever it is, the impulse, the drive to avoid suffering is so profound. And what is hate? Hate is a form of, I'm going to crush this threat, but it doesn't fucking work. It just make, it just energizes the threat, whether it's internal or external. Sure does. Yeah. I mean, you see it happening now with Trump is all the people who hate and that is the word. Trump are energizing the people who support Trump and I can understand the supporter's point of view is they're like, yeah, fuck you, you're just going to hate on our guy for anything he does. Isn't that scary? I mean, it's like the worst case scenario would be that we get some version of Elon Musk,

but it's not for solar energy. It's for hate. The worst case scenario for our species would be that somebody figures out a way to come up with a solar panel that turns hate into money and holy fucking shit, man. People are figuring that out right now and they're figuring it out on both sides of the fence. And they saw a lot of them don't even know that they're doing it. And it's like, in terms of the social media thing in terms of, yeah, tuning to, oh, yeah, I get this many retreats when I, when I say something nasty about Trump or about Obama or about Jay-Z or whoever, Khan. Yeah. Or myself. Yeah. So it's like, so the, again, man, it's like, what you're saying is like, yep, it's true. And it's, and it's right. The polemics and the

polarization is not going to, I don't think it's not going to really work if your idea is you want to see a president that isn't Donald Trump. I don't know for sure. And maybe if I'm wrong, well, I was fucking wrong. I was a little pacifist, naive pussy. And I was fucking wrong, fucking hate me till the end of fucking time. I'm just saying is we're looking back in history at strategy. I agree with you here. Yeah. Yeah. Work and don't work. I've noticed that hate-based strategy strategies tend to, in the short term, produce a lot of violent results. And in the long term, lead to nothing good, except people not wanting to have facial hair like yours for the rest of reported history. That mustache is gone forever. Yeah. So, so, but yeah, it doesn't

work. We try. Right. So, we know, so we know, well, that's how we say we know what works. We don't know what works, but I think you and I are both saying, yeah, compassion and love, not novel ideas, but ones that haven't been put into practice on a widespread basis. Well, they tried to put it into practice. I mean, the compassion and love stuff, they did try to get put into practice, but it happened before the internet. And so it ended in crucifixion and generally assassination. Right. When we think of the three people that popped in my mind are Martin Luther King, Gandhi and Jesus, right? Didn't really work out for them because they weren't tweeting. Yeah. So, and I mean that they weren't protected by some kind of bubble. And also,

they weren't able to like harmonize. And if those people were alive today and could turn their charisma, could use technology to amplify their charisma and their message of love, non-violence, tolerance, kindness. The Bible went viral. The Bible went viral. The Bible went viral. That was the Bible. But the Bible is not necessarily Jesus. There's very little Jesus in the Bible. And also, the Bible got filtered through a lot of different filters, right? And it's been over a lot. I'm saying like right now, the actual truth, the gospel, literally gospel truth coming down directly to the masses through the good news, the good news. We've got to start spreading the good news. And I'll tell you, that's not Fox News and that's not CNN and that's not

Drudge Report and that's not Huffington Post. In fact, if anybody called Fox News or CNN or any of the main or not so main news outlets, good news, they'd be out of their fucking mind. So, if you want to really get tripped out, if you really want to talk about the anti-Christ, if the gospel is the good news, then you could even say that the news comes from the anti-Christ in the sense that it is spreading a message of bad news. And I think it all comes down to asking ourselves, are we telling ourselves good news or bad news on a daily basis? Am I telling myself when I wake up in the morning, this is a beautiful fucking universe. I'm lucky to be alive. I can't believe I got to be born in this body that can walk and talk and smell flowers and have friends. Holy

fucking shit, I did it. Or am I waking up in the morning and I'm looking at myself and thinking, man, I fucking suck. I had it easy. I fucking suck. I can't believe all the fucking bad decisions I made. I'm a dirty fucking piece of shit, man. I really fucking suck. Look how fat I'm getting. Look at my receding hairline. Look at, oh fuck, my breath smells weird. I need to get my fucking gums, whatever it's called, denatured or drilled into, man. And fuck, I hope I'm not drinking too much. I hope I'm not talking too much. Hope I'm not too this. Hope I'm not too that. Why didn't I learn to play guitar? And then the next thing you know, I have become the anti-Christ in the sense that everything I'm doing is not the good news. And then I start spreading bad. You're

vibrating at that frequency. Yeah, now I'm spreading bad news. And I think, though, we also have to acknowledge that this kind of circles back to, well, then just fucking stop doing it, man. And it's not that easy. So I think we have these tendencies. I think evolution has bequeathed us these tendencies to see negativity, to see fear that we're very adaptive for most of our history as a species. But now, at least in this country where there's not mortal threats around every corner, there aren't giant eagles circling overhead and tigers in the jungle. That impulse, we now turn it towards things. We basically find threats. And autoimmune disorder. Right. And within ourselves too. And so I think it's acknowledging that that is there. But also I do believe in

free will. And it is an absolute leap of faith. There's who fucking knows. But I choose to believe in free will just because the whole giving everything kind of unravels. If you don't, and it feels to me like I have free will. So I believe that even with those tendencies and those impulses and predilections, we can make a different choice. And it doesn't have to be lying to ourselves. Yeah. African Americans are getting shot by cops. Bombs are being dropped on babies that is part of the story that's going on right now. But part of the story is also, we're fucking breathing in molecules of a certain type of molecule that our lungs instantaneously are extracting certain things circulating through our blood vessels.

Then we're exhaling other things in this environment. And this whole thing, by the way, is possible because out there streaming through your curtains is this giant flaming ball. Yeah. I mean, that constant nuclear reactions. It's all one. So you guys know you can't see it, but I've just built a nuclear reactor outside my window. It's annoying. I should have told you in advance. We're getting. Well, the angels are getting singed, unfortunately, by the sad to watch and catch on fire. Yeah. But that's what the thing's there for. It's basically when it's like one of those fucking bug zappers for angels. But yeah, man, I love what you're saying because like what I tend to do is like I veer on more towards

an unrealistic kind of like quick answer to things. We need to kind of live ourselves. But I think you're right, man. Because then it becomes starting to drop in because I think if you do that, then it becomes another form of turning it around yourself. Well, why can I love myself? Why can't we just turn choose compassion? You're working against this. There's a huge load of evolutionary legacy that's on all of our backs. Right. We do have free will. I really believe that. But we are carrying 50 million years of evolution with us. But we can start taking baby steps, right? And even big steps because that's one of the amazing things about humans. I mean, look at fucking Gandhi. Look how much. Yeah, he paid for Martin Luther King Jesus paid

for. But look how much these individual humans. I mean, Martin Luther King, I'm pretty sure he's younger than both of us when he was assassinated. I'm almost certain. Guarantee. Yeah. And actually, when you say that, you realize something incredibly depressing, which is that most great people who have been assassinated were younger. And now we can use that to feel bad about ourselves. Yeah. He was younger than us. Was he? I think he's around our age. I think he's around our age. There's still hope. Yeah, there's still hope. There's still hope. But and you let the beard grow a little bit longer, man. I feel like you're going to be following in his footsteps. Oh my God. You know what? I don't want, you know. No, but just to finish the point, though, I think

individuals can absolutely affect massive, massive change. And I think this sounds like just a fucking hallmark. I think all of us have that potential. I mean, that to me is one of the amazing things when I read that or mangled that George Saunders passage earlier in the podcast 7000 years ago before we solved other words problems. Part of why I got goosebumps is because Saunders and great artists, great comics, Richard Pryor, great movies, music, part of the wonder I get from that is, holy shit, a human being did this. And I'm a human being. Yeah, like this is latent within all of us. And I think this is part of the struggle and the beautiful struggle and the gift of existence is figuring out what can I bring forth and how do I bring it forth? Yeah. And so

baby steps, yes, but also giant steps. I think it can, you know, I do think, I think everyone kind of has always thought they're living at end times, but it really does kind of feel like we're getting close. It feels like just environmental catastrophe over population. It feels like, yeah, we can't just keep, you know, this ride can't go on the way it's been going on forever. Oh, I mean, let me tell you, man, the reason everybody feels like it's the end of the world, because it is the end of the world for you. I'll tell you this, man, I mean, I don't want to make doomsday predictions, but, oh, listener, if you're, I would say if you're over 20 listening to this, the world's gonna end in between 50 and 80 years for you, because you're gonna fucking die.

I mean, right, right. Statistically. So, so, so the apocalypse is coming for all of us. Yeah, it's in and it or the ice caps gonna melt and are sea levels gonna rise and is the environment gonna collapse and is it gonna get so fucking hot outside that people start dying? And is there the potential that fascism and tyranny begin appearing around the planet and could evil cobbles of dark people begin to intentionally distort reality to try to make money? Absolutely. But are we gonna deal with that? Yeah, we're gonna deal with that. And you know what we're gonna do? We're gonna harmonize it and we're gonna make it better. And we're gonna use technology to do it. And we're gonna enter into one of the most beautiful ends of the world that ever happened. And we're gonna,

and we're gonna do it without hate. And we're gonna do it with love. And if we can't do it without hate, we're at least gonna try. And when the hate comes, we're not gonna beat up on ourselves because we started hating ourselves or other people as soon as we can, we're gonna get right back to the marching orders, which I think are coming from up top, which is like, Hey guys, let's try it without hate this time and see what happens. I think it can be done. And I think that every single one of us knows that and feels it. And every single one of us gets to forgive ourselves right now for whatever it was we did that had hate inside of it. And we get to forgive ourselves that the hate comes back, because we're gonna do it. This time we're gonna do it. It's gonna

happen. And if you look underneath all that fear, I think there's some a really crazy sense of like, Oh my God, something beautiful is about to happen. Even though it seems so scary, this is the part of the movie where the hero gets backed into the corner and does something, something new, something unexpected. It is happening, I think. But and I think part of it, though, is why are we in this predicament now? I think a lot of it does have to do with just being cut off from from nature, being cut off from from the natural world, being cut off from from ourselves. I mean, the environments I told you earlier, I'm done with New York, man, I've been there 21 years and that is no longer going to be my home. It's and that's just I can't live in that that disconnected from nature. I

realized what a high price I see I've been out in the Bayer doing the doing the solo show since late March and whatever else is going on in my life, whatever internal drama, whatever external stressors, things are better when I can see the ocean regularly, when I can see mountains regularly, when I see trees all around me that and I think that's true of everyone. Yeah. Yeah, I think getting getting some nature, getting some some dirt on your feet, that's always because it connects us to who we are. I don't think it's like a secondary thing. I think it's a primary thing that we that we need. And just going outside. I mean, yeah, the thing is like some people maybe they can't get out of the city. Maybe they know. But I'll tell you, man, one thing

I know I can do is I can walk outside. I could still walk outside. And no matter how hot it is, I've noticed that I feel better than I do. If I don't get outside for a little bit every day and get some of that fucking sweet ass angel incinerating radiation on my face, I could definitely do that, man. And I think that that, you know, learning how to do that, because it's like, man, that we've like turned our eyes away from the sun, we've turned our bodies away from the sun, and we were like staring at these glowing fucking rectangles and pretending that these rectangles are the North Star. And it's like, that shit is not the North Star. It's just it's just a tuning fork, you know, we need something like what you're saying, transcendental.

And I think psychedelics come into the picture too. I do feel like we co-evolved with these plants and funguses. I don't think it's coincidental. I don't think it's coincidental that there are hundreds of naturally occurring compounds that are highly psychoactive in our environment. I think you can draw a really compelling case, and certainly McKenna has and other people have, Jonathan Ott, that we, Paul Stamets, that that we co-evolved with with this stuff and that part of this sort of fall from grace that we're experiencing on an accelerating basis now is due to our loss of that connection. And I think that is, I don't want to be too, you know, starry eyed evangelistic, but I think that is part of the path forward has to be bringing these

plants back into our lives that they, they made us who we are. I mean, whether or not you subscribe to sort of the stone dave theory or, you know, the McKenna stuff, I think it's, to me, it seems strongly, strongly probable or strongly improbable that it's purely coincidental that say these mushrooms grow all over the fucking place. In fact, the greater where humans are, the mushrooms follow. And these mushrooms catalyze a certain changing consciousness that has certain long term evolutionary value, community, connection. And, and I think, yeah, I think part of, you know, this was the sacrament that I think religions were based on originally. And I think that's why religions have become so corrupt. I think, again, there's no silver bullet. This isn't

the one size fits all solution. But I do think this is an essential part of the equation that's been missing for in Western society for, you know, probably, you know, the Lucidian mysteries for a long, long time. We surfaced here in the 60s, unfortunately, exploded too quickly. We didn't have the containers for it. We lost it. And now we're recovering it again. And yeah, and it's really interesting too, because like, if you look at our government studying Pythagoras, and if you look at like Pythagoras and his recovery of the Lucidian mysteries, I didn't know he had any, I don't know much about this. Yeah. Yeah, check it out. It's pretty mind blowing. He had a cult, man. The guy had a commune and like, another fucking math guy with a cult back in the oh my

God, he's amazing. But you know, the apparently and again, you know, if I read again, friends, friends, friends, it's me. I'm not a history professor. I don't know fucking I looked up Pythagoras because I was trying to figure out how to make my modular sense like do a cord, you know, and I got curious about triads. But the the my point is like Pythagoras apparently like kind of balanced what was happening like the Lucidian mysteries for those of you don't know, there was something going on in ancient Greece where people were drinking a thing called Kaikion, which is producing some kind of altered state of consciousness that was producing a kind of like permanent initiatory shift for the better. But apparently there was also attached to that a lot

of hedonism. And like Pythagoras kind of balanced that out a little bit with a admonition, which is like one of the worst things right that can happen to a person is excess. Let's hone it down in comedy. It's certainly true in writing. It's certainly true. Definitely true with fat cells, certainly true with cancer 100% true with populations and pretty much too much anything is generally a bad thing. And I could even say that's true for money. But you know, our personal wealth, who knows, I don't know. So he kind of came in and like was like a beautiful kind of tuning fork that took all of that like data and converted it or into a language that we call math. So which then shaped our entire society. So that's what we need. We need another Pythagoras.

We need another like person to emerge from the beautiful smoldering tie dyed rubble of the explosion of psychedelic information into American, the global consciousness via the 60s, and like convert that in some way that is understandable, pragmatic, usable. And you know, I'll tell you, man, I think one of those people is Rick Doblin. Yeah, Rick is doing phenomenal work. Sorry, Rick, I'm not saying you're Pythagoras, but I clearly really like you. Yeah, Rick. I'm a huge Rick Doblin fan. I told him this was after the you were you were there. We did the the psychedelic science conference. And remember that after party that Sunday after party where I was coming out? I wasn't even high. I'd smoked some weed. But I think I said to Rick, I was like,

there's no one I admire more in the world than you. Yeah, just he radiates this sort of at me. He's I mean, he's a human. I'm sure he has flaws and fallibilities, but he's but but yeah, Rick is and but that what I was going to say is there's multiple people. I think that's the nice thing now is it's sort of a distributed thing. It's not a Timothy Leary or you know, or a McKenna, but there's there's you know, there's there's all these notes. There's the Hopkins researchers, the NYU researchers, there's Paul Stamets, there's there's Bob Jesse, there's a community, there's I heard of a guy. Yeah, he's like this incredibly courageous guy who has like a brutalizing you should check him out. He's pretty awesome. He's got this really rough

kind of like mental illness that almost destroyed his life, but he was strong enough to overcome it with psychedelics. He's been doing like I've heard about this guy. He's really well hung. I've heard yeah, he's got a giant dick. You got a giant dick. So on top of the fact that he's making mentally ill people not feel ashamed and like also helping in some small way to destigmatize psychedelics, he's also super funny and like he's doing a lot of good work, man. You should check him out. He's got a show. What's it called? I think it's a great setup. I was trying to think of someone else's show that I could shout out here like a really bad show. You know, I think you know this guy. I think you actually have jerked him off many times.

Doesn't really narrow it down, Tonkin. Shane Moss? We're talking about Shane Moss here. It was only once. It was only once. He told me he wouldn't put me on his podcast unless I jerked him off. You can't do that to me, too. I don't think I've been on his podcast. If you want Shane, what the fuck? He did just realize that, man. I'm gonna jerk you off, man. Adam, you've got this lovely show. Where can people see it, man? Where is it?

Are you performing it right now? I am. This literally right now, this is the show. In fact, this is weird meta thing of me going on podcasts. This is the show. Yeah, so the show is called The Mushroom Cure and it's the true story of how I tried to cure my OCD with psychedelics and I'm proud to say it's sponsored by MAPS and Rick Doblin. They've been really helpful getting the word out. I didn't know that. Yeah. They're great because some of the, there are only a few psychedelic research organizations out there and they're all a huge admirer of all of them, Beckley, Hefter, Usona. But the others tend to be sometimes a little bit more circumspect about lending their name

to things where it's not sort of strict scientific research. They gotta be careful. Yeah. Whereas Rick Doblin, he's very open about, well, his own agenda here is the medicalization of psychedelics is a bit of a Trojan horse that this is the way to get the door open, but ultimately this stuff should be a tool for anyone of age who wants to use it. But anyway, so MAPS is, they are comfortable supporting my tale of, as I like to call it, vigilante psychopharmacology because I was not in any official studies. So yeah, so the show we just wrapped up, we were in the Bay Area for about three and a half months and Saturday was our last show. But now we're going to New York. We're going to be playing there

July 20th through September 6 or 7th. So, so there for, I don't know, six or seven weeks. And, and then I may be done with the show. I've been telling this story for a while and it kind of kicks my ass. It's a hard show to do. Yeah, I gotta go back to the, the darkness. And what I've found, if I kind of just act it out, people enjoy the show, they laugh, they, you know, maybe not everyone enjoys it, but you know, most people seem to respond well to it. But if I really don't just reenact, but actually re-experience the horror, the just complete desperation I felt for so many years, the feeling of I am trapped and I don't think there's a way out. If I can go back to that feeling, the more I can go back to that feeling,

the more, this sounds a little bit grandiose, but I'll say it, the more I think it heals people on two levels. I think one is the sort of, like you said, destigmatizing because most people have not seen someone be so open about their suffering. No. But two, I think, particularly related to mental illness, man, particularly related to colorfulness, colorfulness, colorfulness, chromatic diversion. Yeah, sure. Yeah. Yeah, it's beautiful what you're doing, man. And I think it is, I've thought that a little bit about that show when I've been thinking about it. It's like, man, I think he's kind of, I bet that every time he does it, man, in a non-cliché way, I bet that really hurts. And it's a lot of energy to put out. And I think that that is a beautiful,

beautiful way of kind of alchemy. Yeah. Well, it's healing for that reason too. Yeah, alchemy's the perfect word. Yeah. And I think it's amazing. I hope while it's still playing, you all get a chance to see it. Adam, where can people, first of all, thank you so much. Thanks for having me on. This is one of my favorite conversations in a really long time. Thank you so much. Cool. Me too, man. You're awesome. Where can people find you? I did Shane's podcast. And I mean, the jerking off was fun, but the actual podcast was not. It was, that was fun too. Yeah, but I mean, it's like you just jerked him on. It's just like, yeah. Is he genuinely interested in me for me, or does he just want me to do it with the other hand? Everybody wonders that about Shane. Yeah.

And I wasn't on his show. Shane Moss. Shane Moss. What the heck, man? Yeah. You know what? I'll be honest. I didn't mind. It's cool. But yeah, people can, oh, and I am going to be doing my own podcast, of course. You have to now. It's mandatory. I'd love to. Yeah. I'm going to be doing a, it's the tentative title. This is good because I'll know when you're coming out with this and I'll have to get the first one up before then. It's going to be called Adam's Dress is Obsessed. And it's basically aimed to having more conversations like this where it's just like, hey, I don't know what the fuck is going on and I'm a struggling human being, but there's wonder and beauty in the world. And I want to share both those perspectives because I think

we often only get one of those or we get the purely negative. Love it. Also, I will throw this out there. So the Mushroom Cure, we have a Facebook page. What I've realized doing the show is there's a community that kind of organically comes together around the show. Like after the show, people don't want to leave. They're asking me questions. They're talking with each other. And I don't think it's because the show is so amazing. I think it's because seeing someone share like that, being so open about their suffering, it inspires people to, they want to share themselves suddenly. It feels like a safe space to do that. And so we just started a Facebook community where people can post their own fucked up,

transcendent, beautiful, terrifying, shameful, whatever stories. Love it. It's called the Mushroom Cure colon stories of vulnerability and healing. You need to build a Discord server too, man. Oh, really? I'm going to teach you how to do that. Let's talk about this. But yeah, if you go to themushroomcure.com, that'll link to all of this stuff hopefully by the time this gets up. Yeah, we're playing in New York. And then I'll be back with a new show that I haven't started writing yet. That's the only way I can get shit done because the perfection of the OCD, that'll be in October in the Bay Area. So yeah, so themushroomcure.com, Adamstrous.com, and yeah, man, always great connecting. Great connecting with you. Thank you so much.

Thanks for having me. Thank you. That was Adam Strouse, everybody. If you want to find Adam, all the links you need will be at DuncanTrussell.com or go to adamstrous.com. Much thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring this episode of the DTFH. And much thanks to you for continuing to listen to this podcast. I love you guys. And I hope that you have the most spectacular weekend and week that any human being on any planet in any part of this multiverse or any multiverses that have existed or will exist in the future has ever had. Even if that means it's just a normal kind of weekend. I'll see you guys soon. Until then, Hare Krishna. Stafford and Jay Farrar. Oh, and thereabouts for kids. Super cute and extra affordable.

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