Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 561: Cole Marta

Episode Date: April 17, 2023

Dr. Cole Marta, co-founder, medical director, and clinician at the California Center for Psychedelic Therapy, re-joins the DTFH! You can learn more about the California Center for Psychedelic Therapy on their website. Thank You Life and New Earth have teamed up with The California Center for Psychedelic Therapy to help members of underserved communities in the Los Angeles area gain access to ketamine-assisted psychotherapy (KAP)! You can learn more about it, and contribute to their fundraiser, here. Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg. This episode is brought to you by: ZipRecruiter - Try for FREE at ZipRecruiter.com/Duncan Lumi Labs - Visit MicroDose.com and use code DUNCAN at checkout for 30% Off and FREE Shipping on your first order! Squarespace - Use offer code: DUNCAN to save 10% on your first site.

Warning warning incoming rant it's like 30 minutes long I just wanted to get my thoughts out of my head regarding AI and my recent obsession with it and why now I think it's kind of not that interesting so if you want to jump right into the podcast go to the 30 minute mark also before you get going once you come see me I'm gonna be at Good Nights Comedy Club in Raleigh April 27th April 28th and April 29th then after that helium and Portland tickets are going very fast for these shows so I encourage you to get them in advance also if you'd like commercial free episodes of the DTFH you can subscribe at patreon.com

forward slash DTFH you can join us every Friday for our morning meditation at 9 a.m. or glorious family gathering at 10 I hope to see you there all right let's dive into this episode greetings to you my beautiful friends it's me Duncan you are listening to the Dunkin Trussell family our podcast that close in my eyes right now I can see you out there on your horse riding through your fields rounding up your cows spinning that lasso spitting tobacco into the grass I can see it I can see the UFO that you're looking at right now zipping by I can see you wave up to

the UFO you're not afraid you're a cowboy you're someone who is connected to the earth and the UFO sees that I can see the beam coming down from the UFO pulling you up into the craft it can see the way the aliens are looking at you how they how they feel laying eyes on your beautiful cowboy body understand and why they decided to come to earth I can see them nodding their heads they were right earth has the most erotic cowboys of any other planet in the Milky Way and I am watching you right now your buds still in listening to me as you fillate those aliens as you just do it you don't know why you don't care

you're realizing this is what you were born for you thought you were born to make cows do things you wanted them to do but now you see no no no no you were born to give blowjobs to aliens and they were born to accept your blowjobs watching that beam flash as you get teleported back down into that field I'm watching the cows yeah they're looking at you weird they have that look in their eye that you've grown to hate that look of suspicion mixed in with a kind of cruel misunderstanding of who you are you want to talk to the cows you don't know how besides you don't care about cows anymore you want to get back on

that ship you want to get back to work bringing pleasure to the galactic Federation soldiers but the UFO has already flown away I'm watching you look up at the sky wondering when will they come back when will they return I'm watching the coyotes approach from behind you you should run but you're not you're kind of frozen in this erotic post alien orgy glow you're so frozen in that glow you don't even think it's weird that I am telling you everything that just happened to you those coyotes they're getting closer and closer so many maybe they were drawn by the vibration of the ship maybe they just

don't like you regardless I'm watching the coyotes snarl and jump up God Jesus they can jump so high I'm watching them knock you off that horse I'm watching them rip you to pieces while the cows make that awful sound you used to hate that scared moo that you first heard when you were a kid when you were getting spanked by your uncle out in the field that mood that made you want to control the cows because you couldn't accept the fact that you couldn't control your uncle I'm watching you it's the last breath leaves your body and I'm watching that ship return I'm watching that ship blast those coyotes I'm watching the

aliens as they teleport down into the field my god they're crying I've never seen aliens cry before as they weep big beautiful alien tears under your horribly wounded body my god they've pulled out some kind of rod I'm watching them resurrect you I'm watching them bring you back to life you're so happy you can't believe it you've been brought back to life but the rod that they used whatever that technology is it's angered the coyotes and I'm watching that coyotes attack the aliens and then attack you again I'm watching you die and I want you to know before you finally die for the second time that I am so grateful to

you for listening to this podcast and I wish I could have saved you for everyone else I hope you're safe watch out for coyotes you know I was so obsessed with AI for a second like really obsessed it was so exciting to me I kept thinking about something I'd heard in a Terence McKenna lecture or read how as we get closer to the singularity the amount of time between what we can imagine and bringing that thing into the world would shrink and AI seems like the technological intermediary that is gonna make that happen but now that I've spent some time with it I was bored with it I don't care and I went deep man I

went deep I was open in Terminal Windows baby on my Mac running shell scripts going on github it was a very painful obsession in the sense that I just couldn't let it go I wanted to know how to create a neural network on my M2 Mac to do text-to-art video generation thinking I could use that to take clips from the podcast replace them with animation and then upload it to my YouTube that way the guests who have come on the show who didn't want there to be video I'd still be able to use their video that was the idea but maybe this is just a passing phase maybe it's gonna get better but having successfully done

this having looked at like you know I turned a small clip you can find it on my YouTube of me and Johnny Pemberton doing the Leather Rose I said make us Vikings basically use a lot of weird shit to do that control net stable diffusion a lot of weird stuff and it's cool it looks cool but who cares it's still not as cool as just me and Johnny yapping in front of a green screen have you ever seen a work of art in real life like a famous work of art I did not to brag I saw Van Gogh that's the one that sticks out of my head and I remember like realizing a holy shit the difference between looking at the thing itself and the picture of it is the

difference between a picture of Hawaii and going to Hawaii that imbued in the art was some kind of energy that's what made Van Gogh great it wasn't just the art it wasn't the painting the painting was a cup the painting was the grail I sound so pretentious right now the grail it's just a cup but the moment it collects the blood of Jesus it becomes the grail similarly art creation the shell that is the end result of some creative process functions as a kind of metaphysical cup it's holding all of the energy of everyone involved in the creative process that made it inside of it so it creates this amazing extra feeling a kind of

artistic gestalt the hole is greater than the sum of the parts now it would be easy to miss that you listen to music you're like I could make this or you see some work of art and you're like I could do that and you probably could but the amount of time it would take you to get to the point where you could make the thing is probably a lot of time even if the work of art you're impressed by is lo-fi that's the in fact the trickiest form of art out there because lo-fi Daniel Johnston for example gives you the impression shit I could make this and you can't you definitely can make Daniel Johnston style music no problem just

get a piano learn to play a few chords sing some simple song but it won't be Daniel Johnston it'll be you before you went through the learning curve before you were driven by your passion to study all forms of music to dive into the most complex music and to become completely obsessed and take a bunch of acid that the butthole servers gave you and go completely insane fly your dad's plane into the ground in a suicide attempt you it'll just be you before all that and even if you did all of that it's still not gonna be Daniel Johnston because what we like about Daniel Johnston's music isn't the skill it's something else

that's in there that makes it special and I think that AI is going to usher in a completely different renaissance than what I expected when I was talking to chat gbt getting it to code video games for me going on the subreddits are based around AI and stable diffusion and text to art AI I had a moment of thinking my god this is gonna be incredible it's going to free us from the learning curve it's going to sever that very human reality of if you want to learn if you want to make something you either hire somebody to make it for you or you learn to do it yourself and learning to do it yourself is gonna take

a long time so you have to roll the dice it's a kind of form of temporal gambling are you sure you want to bet ten years learning how to do comedy learning how to write you sure you want to bet that and if you're not sure that you want to make that bet then that's good because you're probably not a writer or a comic it's not your thing but even if you're like yes I want to spend the next ten years doing open mics learning to stand up or ten years learning how to write there's no guarantee at the end of those ten years that people are going to give a shit about what you create so it's gambling so let's remove that what

happens if instead of having to go through that initiatory process we could just make whatever pops into our head we could just as Terence McKinnon said extend the shade what's in our imagination into time space instantaneously using this technological intermediary and I think that what's going to happen is no one's going to give a shit about what you make that prompt engineering as they call it is not going to capture your soul and put it into the digital image created by the AI which is why when you look at the most advanced incredible beautiful high res 8k incredible AI generated

art it just gives you the same feeling you get when you go to a really nice shopping mall it's like this is cool I love the waterfall I love the fountains it's going to give you the same feeling you get when you go to Vegas wow this is amazing they really did sort of replicate Paris but it's not Paris it's a shitty fucking casino with rotten food and a miniature Eiffel tower in it that no one cares about ultimately other than like a quick selfie who cares so this to me is AI art I'm sorry for my AI art fans out there I acknowledge that at some point maybe I'm wrong maybe my superstitious primitive notion that the the the art is a kind of medium that holds human consciousness within it

is absolutely idiotic but I think it might be the case and I think the renaissance that's coming is not going to be one where inhibited creators and artists and people who didn't have the resources or the time to learn how to do this or that are suddenly able to spit out works of art by telling an AI to make something but rather the tsunami of AI generated digital content movies video games that's about to come our way is only going to amplify the value of human created things that nothing's going to scratch the itch it's the flashlight phenomena my friends if you've ever made love to a flashlight you know what I'm talking about it's a perfect replica of the human vagina it's potentially molded after your favorite porn stars vagina

you can fuck that thing all day long it's not going to say no or yes because it's just a fucking plasticky gooey thing but if you're super horny any port in a storm if you're super horny you will humiliate yourself in private by fucking a flashlight I don't mean to sex shame you there friends I don't think it's really that humiliating I just kind of felt humiliated which I kind of liked kind of added to the experience like look at me look at me some horny ape thrusting against this fucking awful synthetic pussy that kind of turned me on but it just doesn't really scratch the itch if it did then I imagine that all human life on the planet would eventually cease because everybody would be fucking flashlights all the

dudes it's like I'm not going to go through it I'm not going to go through the dating process I'm not going to go through all the fucking things you have to do to finally meet someone you fall in love with or just have sex just order a flashlight my dick doesn't know the difference like if a flashlight gave you that same incredible this is this is amazing you know when you finally meet someone you're into and it's like it doesn't matter if it's the dead of winter it's going to be spring for you your mind is spinning with romantic bliss any song you hear you think about that person that doesn't happen when you fuck a flashlight when you fly when you fuck a flashlight and you're driving down the street and your favorite love song comes on you don't think about your

flashlight probably maybe flashlights have gotten better I don't know my point is it may be that we never crossed the uncanny valley that they talk about you know that feeling of like oh that makes me feel weird when you see bad CGI that's the uncanny valley the idea is that you know if we can create a sufficiently advanced simulation technology we could cross the uncanny valley and on the other side we could enter into a CGI landscape via VR and we wouldn't even know that it wasn't reality that was the dream that's one of the techno utopian dreams you don't need to fly to Hawaii you just put on your neural interface and you're in Hawaii a synthetic replica of Hawaii thus saving all kinds of money and planet because you don't have to get on a fucking plane

but I think this AI is just gonna show us that no in fact no matter how perfect the synthetic replica is it's still just a synthetic replica it's still just a flashlight we're gonna go through an embarrassing period where all of us like a horny dog at a party are gonna be humping the legs of our techno idols whatever it may be all of us are gonna be like fuck it I'm gonna make something incredible AI make something incredible I can't really think of anything AI will you tell me what would be an incredible thing I would want to make and make it we're gonna go through this incredible experience of realizing that the thing is just a cup that cups are great glasses are great chalices are great but it doesn't become a grail until

the blood of Jesus fills it up and in this case the blood of Jesus that's your consciousness your humanity your soul that's the group energy the group of people who collaborated to make a thing all of their energy gets into whatever the final creation is with the midnight gospel people will thank god people really liked it and people will sometimes they'll see me and they'll like thank you for the midnight gospel but it's like shit man I was one tiny piece of that thing now all the artists all of their like not just what they did on the show but everything they did before that all the learning curves they conquered all the risks they took all the all of the putting themselves in situations where there was no guarantee god knows in animation that's the case

but throwing themselves into a very uncertain future like all of that energy it went into the midnight gospel and it goes into any other thing that gets created if I had an AI and I said to it can you make season two of the midnight gospel using these podcast episodes I think in some future it's going to be able to do that but it'll just be dead it would be like a lifeless dead empty pointless thing no one would like it it wouldn't scratch the itch because it wouldn't have within it all of that light from Pendleton and all the artists on the show and all the writers and all the creator just wouldn't have any of that it would just be there some kind of synthetic

things but it would be an idol I guess you could say if you want to get like Old Testament style dramatic I always wondered though like in the bible this thing where god gets so pissed off when people worship idols the golden calf and now I get it it's like there's some recognition from the divine consciousness that humans some humans are easily tricked into humping the legs of idols that it's not that hard to get a person to attach themselves to some synthetic replica of something that just isn't real and that this is what AI is I mean I'm not saying it's bad all the way through I don't think it is I think it's going to do a lot of great things for us but all those great things are going to be the discoveries it makes and curing disease it's going to be the

the equity created by giving people access to like health health advice and life advice but the value of the thing is not going to be in its ability to instantaneously create works of art that are generated from its scan of all their works of art I feel so dumb I mean I really was like so excited about it because you know I love animation and and animation is expensive and animation takes a long time but in my stupid appraisal of like how to make stuff I left out the most important piece of the puzzle which is humanity the humanity humanity the collaboration the struggle the arguments that happen when you collaborate

and the joys that happen when you overcome obstacles that you didn't think you could overcome all of that it gets into the art that's what people like about it now again I'm probably wrong about this but we'll find out over the next few months for sure it's already happening it's just you're going to see just infinite AI generated content you're going to see stuff you're going to see animation that seems visually to be really incredible but it's just not going to make you feel what you feel when you watch something created by humans I could be proven wrong here but I think that's going to be the renaissance it's going to be this contrast that gets created by every single bit of AI generated music AI generated art AI generated

writing there's going to be so much of it that human generated stuff is going to just stand out like a light it's the difference between synthetic rose perfume and smelling rose it's going to be the difference between flesh light and vagina and once everyone realizes that the uncanny valley is insurpassable that there's no way to cross that divide because there's no way to imbue consciousness if you don't have consciousness there's no way to put your soul into something if you don't have a soul and that the AI it's just never going to be able to do that no one's going to care it could be like the next VR thing as far as text to art AI goes

I read some analysis that pointed in that direction it could just be that like you know everyone was excited about VR holy shit I can't wait but the goggles on I can climb a mountain visit Mars and it's freaking cool to put it on and it is fun but ultimately it just it didn't blow up like people thought it would because humans wanted to be in the real world and real 3d space it just doesn't scratch the itch anyway hope I'm hope I'm wrong truly I hope a volcano a volcano a volcano an eruption of incredible art comes exploding out of the motherboards and the servers and the prompts so that suddenly we're just inundated with the most incredible beautiful stuff we've ever seen that would be great but I don't think

it's gonna happen I think what's gonna happen is we're about to get big fat blasts of lifeless robo jizz splattered into our eyes and we're gonna get sick of it we're not gonna fall for it won't seem interesting and then AI is gonna lose this initial glow that it has that no one's gonna care they won't have to regulate it because no one's gonna care oh wow it wrote a book but it's a shitty book oh wow it made some new Picasso but that's not Picasso oh wow it created an entire virtual universe we could explore who cares it's dead empty I mean have you ever gone on world of warcraft in some of the zones no one goes to anymore who gives a fuck there's nothing there

there's no person playing other than you in this vast beautiful glowy dead environment it's boring so who knows I thought that AI would help us discover sentience by being sentient or do you say sentient is sentient like the most pretentious way to say that consciousness by generating consciousness but no that's now it's gonna help us understand consciousness it's gonna help us understand consciousness by creating a contrast between the digital replication of what it thinks humanity is and humanity itself and somewhere in there we're gonna understand the soul whatever you want to call it the ottman what makes humans special in the universe and I think that's gonna be a very good thing I told

you I was gonna rant and this was a rant and now I'm done ranting I so appreciate you listening one person who listened through the whole rant without skipping ahead we have got a tremendous episode for you today friends Cole Marta Dr. Cole Marta my dear friend he works with maps he runs a wonderful ketamine clinic in Los Angeles and he's just an all-around awesome human is returning to the DTFH we're gonna jump right into that but first this if you haven't yet you should definitely check out the metaphysical section of ebay because in that section of ebay people sell haunted items I'm looking at it right now authentic real haunted doll real in case antique haunted extremely active pre-owned of course 600 bucks 600 bucks now I'm a comedian I'm a

podcaster I don't have a lot of time but if I did and I wanted to start a new business it would definitely be a business that sold haunted items not fake haunted items by the way and I don't know maybe these items on ebay are truly haunted but real haunted items actual haunted stuff things that if people ordered them they would unleash in their life swarms of demonic entities because that's what they wanted I was gonna do that I would need a way to hire people who could either haunt items or find haunted items be able to differentiate haunted items from non-haunted items be able to quantify the level of haunted that the item possesses so that I can create some kind of pricing structure based on that you don't want to charge somebody

archaic death spirit prices when all you guys is a basic poltergeist so this is why if I was starting this business the first place I would go would not be a haunted house would not be an in-state sale it would be zip recruiter because whether you're starting a new business or growing one if you want to be successful you need the most talented people on your team and that's where zip recruiter comes in right now you can try for free at ziprecruiter.com slash Duncan you need someone to help you find these people look you don't want to find just some like run of the mill clairvoyant who like isn't good at attaching spirits to items you need the real deal zip recruiters powerful matching technology finds highly qualified candidates for a wide

range of roles they also offer attention grabbing labels that speak to job flexibility like remote training provided urgent and more the hunter the ghost attacher might not even need to live in your city maybe they could do it with their mind mentally regardless you're going to want zip recruiter on your side if you're going to create a business that sells haunted dolls let's zip recruiter fill all your roles with the right candidates four out of five employers who post on zip recruiter get a quality candidate within the first day you see for yourself go to this exclusive web address to try zip recruiter for free ziprecruiter.com slash Duncan again that's ziprecruiter.com slash d-u-n-c-a-n zip recruiter the smartest way to hire

and we're back now everybody please welcome to the Duncan Dressel Family Hour podcast Cole Marta it's the Duncan Dressel Family Hour podcast Cole welcome back to the DTFH it's so good to see you it's so good to see you too thank you very much for having me back first probably the most important question do you still play World of Warcraft or did you kick that yes so that's been my savior through the pandemic i'm not sure what you've been doing in isolate or for the first few years but World of Warcraft classic came out i remember that did you play World of Warcraft classic yeah yes like two months before the pandemic started or like within months of the pandemic starting which turned out to be the big savior of isolation to me because

like people i played with the game with like 15 years ago all sort of came back at the same time for this big event of World of Warcraft right and i play in this like very specific little community of twinking have you ever heard of twinking in World of Warcraft not in the video game i know you played World of Warcraft yeah yeah there's this like so you played World of Warcraft yes like at the end of the game sort of the game never ends right because you're on this like hedonic treadmill with like gear right and when you finally get like the gear you've been trying to get all month or all year then a new expansion comes out and all that gear is obsolete and so then the game keeps like enticing you with like oh this is an even cooler staff or this is a cooler belt

um with twinking it's a way of waiting real quick for people who don't maybe don't play World of Warcraft like it's not like what are you what are you talking about here is there is a temp there's a temporal you're making a temporal investment into the gear like it's similar to crypto you're you don't just get the gear like most of the gear requires lots and lots of playing and not just you're not guaranteed to get to get the gear as i recall you know you want some staff you have to beat a boss in a dungeon who doesn't drop the same gear every time so you're in a group of people many of them are looking for the same thing you go through this dungeon with them fight the boss the boss drops the item you want it but

somebody else is there once that's that fucking thing you gotta roll you gotta roll yeah for where you're at when it gets bigger and bigger and bigger yeah you're dealing with massive groups and so there's the possibility of obtaining gear that is so fucking rare and not just rare but rare in the sense that most people just they they don't they're not going to spend expecting they're not going to go for it and so you do get this legendary shit that radically changes your experience of the game and so that's that's what's going on here that's what he's talking about so 20 that's like that's the way they're like that's the way the game is designed to be played and that's how people get so uh you know they continue to play for so long um so many hours a day

and new gear comes out in a year or so let's say six months or a year twinking for people who just want to kill each other on a battlefield the that same thing happens with gear if you like to fight against other people but with twinking they they made it so that like people who have top level characters like in classic level 60 was the top they wouldn't be fighting against people who are like level 12 who are also want to just try out the the battlegrounds or something so they made these brackets 10 to 19 20 to 29 30 to 39 of players so when they want to play against each other they are only in a pool of players who are of like a similar level right so twinking is a way around that hedonic treadmill with the gear because they don't keep making new

gear that's meant for leveling through so if you play in the bracket i play in 29s primarily 29s and 39s um there is a final best sword so once you get that sword your character is like done with the sword what's the sword so for like warriors there's this axe that's called the corpse maker um that's the one for like warriors i play primarily priest um so like so this these communities come up that intentionally stop leveling their character they they get their character to the max level for that bracket and then they stop leveling their character and they just get all the gear that they need to be as powerful as you can possibly be at that level and you're done with the hedonic treadmill and you can just play that character forever and be

as powerful as you can be so there's like if you run into people who are not playing the game in the same way you just kill them quickly because your character is so insanely stupidly powerful for the level that you're at but yeah this whole community this sort of unexpected phenomenon happened where a bunch of people enjoyed doing this and found each other like it's this really awesome community and uh has its own like discord channels and stuff and they arrange like there are guilds that fight each other and there are teams that play against each other and very very competitive matches of like capture the flag kind of thing so yes that's yeah that's been my obsession for a lot of the pandemic and it's really it's really come to the rescue you know with world

of warcraft when i was playing it in classic mode you could be more nefarious that's what i liked about it you there was like this ability to like you know you could and i i'm foggy you're remembering all of it i i have memories from world of warcraft that are joyful memories because i played an undead warlock right and you you go into the villages where the characters are lower level than you and you could just fucking kill them i don't think you can do that anymore right like they stopped at you well they made that yeah they call it griefing yeah you could grief and like they could send out an alert to high level characters who would come and kick your ass so you only have a little bit of time in there to like kill these like lower level characters and

then you have to like escape get out of there you could pull it off kill a bunch of of them and then escape it was i was really like my shadow side was like truly and just getting off on i or like i can remember as a warlock you're gathering herbs you know that's one of the skills and i can remember being in some weird zone gathering herbs and these like there's only certain times you gather the herbs getting the zones hard there's some other poor fucker gathering herbs there who's on the it's divided basically good what do they call it odd not good or an alliance hoard an alliance some alliance cheesy alliance character right some do-gooder the hoard hates the alliance even as a player you judge them because you're just like what are you

doing right you're gonna really play a fucking gnome with your cheesy music for the gnome you're gonna run around with it so you're out there gathering herbs you're a skeleton you see some fucking gnome out there gathering herbs too so you just melt them fry them and it's like the warlock is damaged over time right so they don't die all at once they slowly wither and die right i can remember this gnome god knows how much time they spent getting there i don't it was a pain in the ass to get there and i was not allowing them to get their herbs and it was pure sadism and like i can remember this player you you can emote and the player getting on his knee like begging please stop did not stop yeah i just keep frying them and the joy the dark horrible

joy i don't think people who who haven't played this stuff understand just how horribly good it can make you feel and and how bad it is to be on the other side of that because when you're trying to make a new character and you've like okay it's saturday you don't have work or school or whatever and you know maybe you know you're uh you're in a relationship but your partner's out of town so you're like all right this is my time i'm gonna level my low level guy i'm gonna i'm gonna make him a 20 like no the guys that i play being like low level like that's part of the challenge of even getting there like getting your person even though you stop early you know you're like intentionally stopping level at like 29 like you have to wander into some places where that's a part of your

reality for sure is level 60 max level characters can kill you with one one shot they can kill you in one or two hits like you don't stand absolutely no chance so yeah that's like a challenge of getting getting the gear and getting where you want to be but it's just been really beautiful because like the the with this particular community is like the community the ability to like stay in contact like when one wow first came out in like you know 2004 2005 there wasn't you know discord channels and other like just ways of staying in community but this community has sort of like stayed slightly in touch through various ways like certain enclaves of players like went on to play other games together but they all came back and so it was just this like really

just beautiful like it's like got kind of disconnected from my life community through the pandemic but reconnected with this sort of childhood almost childhood i was probably older than the average player even back when it was new yeah but like still just like oh it was really really a savior and it and it got so intense like we had tournaments there was like tournaments for money like we raised money to like fund our own prize pools for tournament teams yeah it was pretty cool it's so fun and it's just such a like it truly is just a drug i mean it's the best it's one of the best drugs i i can't i mean i i'm addicted to hearthstone right now so i'm just gonna say like i don't think people know that about you i don't i don't know if that's like a well-known thing about

Duncan Trussell is that he's like a pro level hearthstone player i'm not pro i can't get the legend in fact it's driving me insane i'm it so like like hearthstone is is ranked i'm definitely not pro level the hearthstone is ranked so like the it's tiered and so eventually you'll get to the diamond level so i'm at this place diamond five if you can win nine games all i have to do is win nine games yeah and i will go to legend you go to legend and you get your own car a special card back showing that you made it that far well it's another form of hadonic tremble but once you hit diamond five you are up against like like you you don't like for those of you don't know what hearthstone is it is such a great card game and it is so addictive

but you know when you're not just normal cards you can count cards you know maybe the odds that the player you're playing against has you know a king or whatever if you're if you're good at any card game you learn how to like do the odds with this you have to learn all the decks that people are playing with all the forms of the decks that they're playing with so that you can strategize otherwise you're just playing turn to turn and once you get to diamond five you can't play turn to turn you have to be thinking ahead you have to like look at the number of cards they understand like with the mana they have what card the odds of the card they're gonna play next turn so you can get ready for that it is so fucking complex it's killing me yeah i gotta quit i gotta

quit like i mean you gotta it's probably beautiful on the road you know i would i would think like when you have to go on the road you know or not have to but when you choose to go on the road like when you do a weekend away from home and you're not with the wife isn't it lovely to have that though like to have that like yeah it is when you're winning when you're just losing like you're just losing and what's awful like a wall right there like those last nine are like notoriously like a real line between the men and the boys everyone stops there that's where you stop like most like if you even get to diamond like it took me forever playing to get to the point where i get good enough to even get there but once you hit that fucking five just forget it

just give up you're not like these are fucking people in e like in in japanese arcades who memorized every card these are mathematicians i knew someone from stanford a mathematician who played fucking hearthstone yeah and yeah that's like you know these are like at the high end you know yeah like you can you can tell even like you know when you're in that like great player pool just like the the names they're choosing for their characters are just like oh that's like an educate that's like a clever person that like yeah their character whatever that is you know like yeah suddenly the character names but fart or whatever yeah like suddenly the names are like okay the names are like like obscure german philosophers you know what i mean the names go

from butt fart to like pedigre right you know so like you're just like what the what how do i beat these people and then you just you you lose and the game's expensive like you have to keep up with the meta you got to get new cards you're so it's just and you know you're you're just like what i didn't know that about hearthstone i didn't know you had to like buy so you buy packs and stuff like so like like a collector card game like magic or something it's like yeah it's like crack magic because magic the games take too fucking long they're annoying they take forever and like with hearthstone the difference between hearthstone i don't know where magic's at now online but with hearthstone they limit your emotes because i think they know that if they let players

talk to each other it will cause murders so you could only do like five emotes you can you can go like wow everybody knows which ones are insults right like you figure that out oh yeah they're all insults i mean something terrible cool i have become like you start off like someone will say hello to you and you go hello you're like this is nice they're saying hi no one is saying hi in a nice way they're saying hi because they have drawn great cards and they know they're about to crush you so whenever anyone says hi now i just threaten that's the emote i do right away like you don't know my wrath fuck you don't say hi yeah you're gonna fucking beat me this is the five thousandth game in this tier i play fuck you so yeah it's it's it's hurting i need a new game i i gotta switch to a

new game i'm i'm kind of go play world of warcraft come make a twink come come play with us and there you for the voice of satan that's the voice of it come play world of warcraft we can get you into some of the top guilds in the twinking community i'm sure pal or muffin or protect the lumber i'm sick of math i'm sick of math oh come do hair come do heroin oh yeah math i don't blame you heroin right i i you know i would i would love to do that with you col in fact when you're talking about earlier i was like another fun thing about playing online games with your friends is watching their voice come out of their character you know what i mean to me that's the most hilarious thing is like you know you you have to what you're doing yeah exactly you know it's but i i yeah i don't

know i want a new game i i want to play a new game i'm excited about diablo it's gonna make music even making music do you take music on the road with you like things that you can well sometimes on the road i'll like like mess around i just have like you know i think you're an expert on this the adhd brain it latches on to shit but it only seems to latch for a certain amount of time at least for me you know so i got really into music and i i don't think it's a bad latch like it's like because i got so obsessed with ableton because i got so obsessed with like um audio engineering with all the technical stuff it's not like that goes away like i know how to do it now to some degree right but my brain is now become latched more to like or it was latched to ai

in this horrific couple of weeks and now it's sort of a couple of weeks you've been talking to me about it for like eight months oh no philosophically it's been a long time but the last few weeks you've been like deep in there like you know the all this stuff is going to sound arcane but people aren't coders or like deep computer people but they're these things called google collab notebooks do you know what that is no no so essentially like there you can get these things that will run on google meaning that if you don't have a really powerful graphics card and you want to run some some like what's called stable diffusion like uh text to art ai or feeding video into the text to art ai so it replaces every frame with a frame based on your prompt you have to it's

essentially renting a gpu from google okay and so which in it's cheap it's not like really expensive at all but uh i real you know i don't know if you ever do this but like there's certain things that i just decide i can't do coding being one of them you know you just there's no reason that you can't do it but you just think that's not me i took a whole path that you'd have to be dedicated to like getting the sort of destruction right in world of warcraft you have you have to like go through the temporal investment watch youtube videos with people with thick eastern european accents learn how to do this insane shit and so like i i realized like fuck i want to have my own neural network on my computer that isn't online that i could do offline if i wanted to

and so i just went in deep man and i and like figured it out like and it took a lot of time and did it it took forever and finally i did it so that was the worst part of the obsession is like i just couldn't stop it couldn't stop until it finally was working and now that i've got it working i'm like ah i'm over a so you know what's annoying i'll tell you what's annoying psychedelic evangelists who recommend mega doses of psychedelics to people who are interested in exploring their consciousness this is a dangerous way of being some people think that you're supposed to take a quote heroic

dose of some psychedelic for your first time they treat psychedelics the way fraternity brothers treat kegs they want you to do keg stands over a DMT fire i don't think that's the way necessarily to dive in to the world of consciousness shifting substances which is why i absolutely love today's sponsor loomi labs understands the power of the microdose sometimes less actually is more for me there are serious benefits in chomping some of loomi labs delicious microdose gummies the number one benefit is i don't have to worry about suddenly having apocalyptic visions of the end of time because i got the quote shishito pepper effect that's where a gummy has way too much in it the next thing you know you're spiraling no these are the

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go to microdose.com use code Duncan to get free shipping and 30 off your first order links can be found at duncantrustle.com but again it's microdose.com code Duncan thank you loomi labs yeah yeah you got that hyper focus going and then so what's it moving to now if you're nothing over ai nothing yet good good for you right i've been reading from ai taking a breather from like what am i what am i doing like you i've been reading the four if ever the four hour work week uh and i'm familiar with the book but i haven't read it tim ferris right i think it's four hours tim ferris and you know i approach all these books with like just i grabbed the shit that i like and then discard the rest but his idea like the like the philosophy

behind it is sort of like are you overexerting in your own life like are you have you begun to associate pain with success like it's a superstition or something right do you think or are you just so disorganized that your workload ends up being scattered throughout your week instead of compressing everything down so that you get every the idea is like maximum results minimum maximum maximum effort for like four hours right like okay theoretically a four hour work week that's the name of the book but you know uh i i don't know that with all the shit i have to get done but the yeah but really it's more of like a sort of like what is val what is value like right who gives a fuck if you have a million dollars in the bank but you're working 10 hour days every single day

right yeah yeah that's like uh yeah there are certain fields of medicine that are like that you know there are certain fields of medicine where they're the highest paid in the profession but they also work like 14 hours a day so they end up you know when i was training and like sort of rotating as part of the medical training you know we um we get a little flavor of the sort of core kinds of medicine that you can go into as medical students and like some of the fields it's like oh these these are the rich people they're like showing up in you know fancy yeah you know cars and stuff but you realize they just drive them to the hospital and home yes like wow like they have a ton of money but um but what do you do if you just have money and

no time yeah they have a ton of money but people who are making exponentially less than them are enjoying their lives exponentially more that and and that it's you know you so you've fallen into this like awful sand trap when you find yourself doing that you're like you know i was because of my disorganization because of my obsessive mind because of a general sense of like i if i'm not suffering i must not be working hard enough right i i i realized like i've lived in austin almost a year and i've barely done anything around barely seen it i i got just the path between my house and my studio that was my commute and that it was so awful and then i just realized like i i think i could breathe completely restructure the way i do shit and have infinitely more freedom and it's the best

and yeah so now i'm just kind of i guess like my obsessive mind is obsessing on not i'm not doing anything like minimizing trying to clear stuff out yeah like all right what's your workload like cool what's your work my work it's intense oh it's intense work but um you know i think the last time we spoke on the podcast i was just opening this clinic um for those of you don't know it's a it's a what's the name of your clinic call the california center for psychedelic therapy and and even though it's only been a few years it seems like that's kind of like a normal thing people hear about now is a psychedelic clinic or psychedelic place but i remember us talking when we were first opening up and i was like i think this is the first one or like and i know

there are others that would maybe contest that but like certainly the first clinic that's psychedelic in the title of it but now it almost seems like oh everybody's got a you know everybody got a friend that goes to a psychedelic clinic but man when i opened this place three years ago it still felt like you know is this gonna work like is this gonna work out and then the pandemic hit but it's been good it's been good but there's a just because you call the psychedelic clinic right doesn't make it as like i had a friend who on my recommendation went to some fucking shit ketamine clinic and like they just gave him imk and i remember he's texting me from the the room that they gave it to him in and he's like he's like when can i drive

and oh my gosh why are you asking me that like where's the doctor who gave you this shit somebody get the nurse in there like this should be something they told you before you came this should be yeah what is happening because they're right there the problem is because ketamine is you can administer ketamine without being a doctor right so a lot of these pop-ups have appeared where people haven't been trained in this in the the the healing part and the dealing with people tripping out and so people are just driving it's like some psychedelic version of the thing that happened in florida the pain clinics right you could just go to the pain clinics say your toe hurts they're like oh here's i don't care here's your nose yeah yeah it's like that your clinic

which i've been to is this beautiful place on large mom but you like there's therapy involved you're not just yes yes no we take it very very seriously yeah and we and all of our team here has a specific interest in working with people in with psychedelics you know we do psychedelic research here we've been doing the MDMA assisted psychotherapy for PTSD trials like in the same facility since i think it's like seven years now 2016 i think is when i assembled the team in 2017 is when we started the study we've since done like four or five we're on our fourth MDMA trial for PTSD which definitely want to talk about you know the updates on that that's going really great and almost at the finish line i feel like i've been talking to you for like six years about

this project and every time i talk to you i'm like we're like right at the finish line we're right but we are really seriously right at the finish line um and then is there any chance that something could go wrong is there any chance now that it wouldn't happen something could go wrong like you know but it would be a surprise to everyone as far as like a safety thing i think like there could be a real safety issue that could come up you know if but not one that anyone is expecting or anticipating you know right uh one one thing that you know we certainly have on our side is the fact that people have been taking MDMA for 40 years like right in much you know in very unregulated places and stuff so we have a pretty good idea of what the range of

effects on people are so yeah nothing nothing that is anticipated would like just totally put a stop to it in fact we're done gathering the data so like like we've we've for the last four years or so we've been doing the phase three trials so at the phase three trials are the last phase before the FDA um is like presented with the when you present the the FDA with the phase three trial data that's when they make a ruling essentially on whether this is uh a medicine or not and so um when i first started we were still in phase two um we'd completed a phase three trial that was um had a really great outcomes great success you know um and um and then we had a second phase three trial which is you know the same so um it's designed the same it functions the

same and so we haven't we've gathered all of the data and we've analyzed the data but we haven't published the data yet but we don't expect that it will be much different from the first one because it's more or less a copycat of the first trial so right um so as long as like uh and the and the first phase three study was consistent with the data we were getting from phase two like it's all kind of gone um how we had expected as far as safety and efficacy and that's what the FDA is going to be reviewing is safety and efficacy and so um so it's you know that that's happening you know that that's where we're at in the process it's like it there aren't additional studies necessarily that are needed at this at this point before we would get a response so

it's possible that we're talking about like the first time in history that a lot of things have happened a lot of historical things have happened first time in history yeah like probably most important uh that something was put on schedule one and potentially put on a different schedule um wow historic um schedule one being a DEA definition of having no medical value and only a potential for harm and abuse so wow for something to be moved off of schedule one that's not happened um and then uh especially for a medical indication but also you know much to maps credit like I don't think anyone's ever put something through the FDA approval process because it's expensive we're talking tens of millions of dollars um put the put a drug

through the rigorous testing on donations from the people who may someday benefit from that treatment like that like I've never heard of a drug being developed that like you know people believed in so much that they were willing to donate their own money to have it tested right there's no like ozempic uh community that thinks oh this has such healing potential I'm gonna give like a thousand bucks to the ozempic research representation right how dare they make that fucking song how dare they they should be arrested for that oh my gosh yeah that song is just a disaster that having to hear that is just the fucking worst no one likes the ozempic song anyone from ozempic listening please for god's sake change that song and they must have so much

money oh they ruin the original song for the original ozempic by bob dylan it's magic ever again bob dylan's ozempic is just my favorite it's the best when he said so what's it feel like to be not just like for everybody who has benefited from MDMA or for anyone who's even intuitive like shit I think this is like more than something that's fun to have sex on right there seems to be some benefit that's happening here that is incredible what what does it feel like to to not just be on the precipice of that being sort of rescheduled and then most importantly being administered to people with trauma what does it feel like to be part of the team that has been sweating bullets to make that happen yeah it's been

it's like it's almost I don't know if it'll ever it's one of those things that like will never sink in they can never fully sink in like I'm sure a lot of things that have happened to you you know like uh like right um it's like but but I but I'm consciously aware of the amazingness of it you know like I'm I I think about like did I really expect this to happen and and my honest answer is I don't think so like I think I believed in it I think I believed that it was certainly worth testing to see but I I really thought that what I was getting into was that I would be able to tell a story to people like you or friends other friends someday about the time we tried really hard and then you know the feds showed up and shut us all down and you know what I mean

like I thought that's what we were kind of getting into I didn't you know like I I kind of thought we were going to get going but some you know evil force was going to just not let us find out the answer to this question but that like to the federal government's credit to the DEA and the FDA's credit it there is a path it's just difficult and expensive um but like that that's surprising to me that that repeatedly is surprising to me actually throughout throughout all these years that uh that that this path existed like it took maps a lot of money and a lot of effort and a lot of time to find the path and figure it out and a lot of advisors and a lot to like figure out how do we get from here to there but but we're doing it and now now we're faced with this issue of

like okay um we and we you know we designed it we designed the the the um the protocol like the way it's administered um I didn't personally design it but it was designed to just like with that kind of in mind like let's just see if this works right right um let's just see if this is going to work and um and now that it seems like it does it's bringing up all of these other things about like oh my gosh like this is going to be if this becomes a medicine next year like how do we do that like how do we how is it going to get to people how are people going to be able to access it how are you know therapists going to be able to provide it what kinds of clinics you know like most clinics are not like mine my clinic was built starting with ketamine but with the idea that if these other

psychedelics become available we would not be in a position where we couldn't accommodate like an eight hour day an eight hour session yeah there's no precedent right like it's like generally you prescribe a medicine to your patient the patient takes the medicine on their own time you're you know you're you're not like no doctors hanging out with you when you take your penicillin and right watching you all day so so there's this added involvement from the professional that's a big time investment too like that's totally you know and it's and it and it's like you know therapy how long does a therapy session last hour two hours maybe if you have like a great therapist but you're talking the session you're talking aftercare you know that's a huge time

investment and that sounds expensive Cole that sounds expensive it is it is and and that's gonna you know I think that's the challenge moving forward like with for there there have been some like ideas but it's it always is compromising the quality of the you know like that I guess that's the trade-off always the other trade-off is like you know they're in the pandemic something that people might not be aware of but like there was a loosening of like telemedicine rules yeah because they were trying to you know protect people who you know were sick you know we're trying to keep people isolated essentially to stop the spread of COVID so so they sort of formally loosened restrictions on what can be done by telemedicine so all these tele mental health and other forms of

telemedicine exploded in the past three years like you know I don't know if this is part of better helps story but like for example there's that service that like almost seems like you know very well known now didn't even exist to my knowledge like prior to the pandemic they're like and and specifically with controlled substances like ketamine or adderall or painkillers like there are stricter rules about telemedicine you know telemedicine is a great and expanding accessibility of treatments yeah generally but something that happened in the pandemic is we we knew that it was not a great idea for certain kinds of compounds like ketamine Xanax Xanax exactly but a but a handful of like clinics popped up and grew quickly that were all telemedicine based

and we're starting to see some of the fallout of that already yeah and and that also will be coming to an end but but you know philosophically you know it's like we want people to be excess be able to access medicine and we want to be able to make it more affordable and telemedicine is one way to make it more affordable but it's seeming like with ketamine and it will definitely for me I would never I won't do that I like I think that's really dangerous to like give people ketamine to use at their homes um for a number of reasons um but yeah I think that's like it's also like now I'm trying to strike yeah the ketamine order from those clinics is ridiculously expensive it's like stupid how much it costs like the amount you're paying for a dose of ketamine it's dumb like it's crazy yeah it's crazy

I mean that's one of the that to me that you know that's the biggest problem but I get here I'm here a doctor I went to one of those things I was like fuck it maybe I'll order some ketamine I'm like I'm not there's no way I'm paying like 50 times the amount that ketamine costs to get like a ketamine gummy from one of these clinics ridiculous exploitive like give me a fucking break I know what you paid for this ketamine yeah yeah yeah and you know like for for a clinic like ours um the like we try and keep the costs as low as possible but of course it's still going to be unaffordable for a lot of people um but primarily what we almost like the ketamine is kind of free like we kind of eat the costs of the ketamine and we we mostly charge for that therapist time

so like that's kind of how we work with it here like and that is going to be a reality when you know if MDMA assisted therapy becomes a treatment you know eight hour a day where the therapist is just therapy therapists are highly trained professionals they're very expensive so you know all that stuff is sort of you know staring us in the face now that it's like oh my gosh we're actually maybe going to this is going to be a reality for us I think the precedent if you're looking for one is more like surgery it's like you know this is more akin to some kind of like pharmacological right word pharmaceutical surgery that you're doing you're essentially extracting trauma from people and it's a procedure it's a procedure this is a procedure this is not

a medication and and then suddenly it will make more sense to people why because it's like you you know you go to the hospital and you get your kidney stone blasted or whatever they do with that now yeah you're not like confused by the price you're expecting the price to suck the insurance companies are expecting that you know that's the main thing I imagine it's like getting connected to the insurance companies setting sure that's a challenge the reason why this therapy is no doubt going to cost more than normal administration of medicine and it should I mean this is what I like about well in my old age yeah yeah and something I think that will make sense to insurance companies and hopefully will make sense to everybody is like you know the the robustness of the like

healing you know that the the insurance companies will will know that like similar to a surgery you know an expensive procedure up front could save a lot of money to the insurance companies on the back end if somebody no longer has PTSD for example you know like last time I heard the numbers it's like a million dollars per person in the VA for a lifetime of treatment for PTSD somewhere around that number and so even if it's you know expensive up front on the whole if the data is like what we've been seeing it hopefully will make sense to the insurance companies will be something that will be covered by insurance I think that will that will expand the accessibility then to like the insured people the insured population

and then you know there's this whole other problem in the medical universe the way the medicine works in the United States where even if you're an insured person for some reason you don't get access to like all of the things that could be most useful for your care because the insurance companies are their own whole other right enigma you know the way that they operate I mean most therapists won't even accept insurance these days like they don't even want to deal with it like they don't want to like fuck with the insurance companies because it's so but I yeah I see what you're saying like you know you're getting an important something when your insurance company is encouraging you or even like rewarding you like a colonoscopy they want you to

get a colonoscopy because if you get a colonoscopy long term it's going to save them so much money so they are dying for you to go and get a fucking colonoscopy which I have to do next week and I'm not looking forward to all right it's like they they delight in that you're getting this awful procedure but yeah it's a system of oppression they're oppressing my colon my polyps they want to just show you who's boss oh I can't well I would like that but they know they put you under you don't even get the like uh that's just boss experience I guess you could ask the doctor does anyone come in here and like not get sedated right he he was like very rare very maybe that's a niche market like maybe that's you know something to explore we could try and find

erotic colonoscopies erotic colonoscopies yeah I'm sure I'm sure that there is a jet set well well funded population of people who will fly to the colonoscopy VR VR you get those goggles on you like suddenly you're in a barn that's the million dollar idea a beautiful horse furry thing that's like you know waving at you an avatar yeah yeah that would that would you know that save a lot of lives that would save a lot of lives in the kink community you know right like countless people would be just lining up to get sodomized by a colonoscopy centaur would be doing a service and then it sends a sample off to a lab and you also find out whether or not you know you're at risk for colon cancer why not

continuing to support the DTFH friends Squarespace is your toolbox if you're interested in creating an online home for whatever it is you may be making you want to see a Squarespace website all you got to do is go to dunkitrussell.com I've been using them for years and I love them they are your one stop shop for building your brand growing your business online you will stand out with a beautiful website you will engage your audience and you can sell anything you want from your amazing woven blankets to just creating members only areas for your fans they do it all and it works that's the most important thing it's simple it works you don't have to know HTML you don't have to hire a web designer you don't have to crack your brain against the dark stone of coding no they did it it's easy

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could try it out for free and see if it works for you it will work for you and when you're ready launch these offer code Duncan you'll not only will you get 10% off your website or your domain but you will reward Squarespace for sponsoring the DTFH for so many wonderful years thank you Squarespace okay i'm curious uh the so you know what's cool about the process that you have you and and maps have come up with for administering the medicine the therapy preceding the medicine after the medicine it seems like you've set up like a way of administering psychedelic medicine in general right like this would would this also work for psilocybin i hope so theoretically work

for lsd or is it specific to mdma yeah so like you know i i think um like with ketamine you mentioned there are places where they're just like giving ketamine right yeah like my hope is that the data has universally always said you know medicine combined with therapy even if it's an ssri and cognitive behavioral therapy like very confident fairly accessible forms of treatment are always better than either one of them or both of them you know like there's a you know there's an additive benefit to doing both at the same time and i'm hoping that with that first of all i do think it's with with mdma assisted psychotherapy for or mdma assisted therapy for ptsd specifically the therapy is it it is a must um with the ketamine people can get better without the therapy

but they get i have found that in the research i've done of trials where they'd worked with just ketamine and didn't offer therapy there's like a 63 65 response rate people who have like a 50 reduction in depression scores i think we have a higher success rate at my clinic probably closer to three quarters and i think it's because of the therapy component and i think even if it's like not increasing the number of people who are going to get better like psychedelics are inherently like a profoundly interesting and personal experience so if you're if you like even if that doesn't directly link to you know reduction in your depression symptoms right away it gives you like the the knowledge of self the like sort of more universal personal growth

things that can come from it i think you're like just missing a tremendous opportunity if you don't take that psychedelic experience seriously to process and integrate and yeah yeah why was on a mother ship can you explain to me why i was on a mother ship i seemed to be on an alien craft and i kept going back to the alien do you what was that why did why was i in valhalla well can you explain to me why i was seeing like an anvil with a demonic creature smashing a bloody package over and over like right i forget my depression what the fuck just happened to me man what was that and we've literally gotten patients like we've gotten patients who have like you know set who have gone to a clinic where they um provide like an IV infusion for example and

then just leave the room and then come back you know in an hour and then like make sure you get a ride home or whatever like that that don't put any emphasis on the psychedelic experience we've had patients that come here because they're like you know i had a i was seeing my dead you know like something so obviously like psychologically important material coming from these experiences you know like i was with my children and they were telling me not to go into the cave you know it's like oh my gosh so much to explore here like yes so much like relevant material and like so uh i do think that with i know the intention is with psilocybin it will also be like psilocybin assisted therapy it won't just be like you take the psilocybin

um i think i believe it to be a necessary part of it what what will happen when the free market gets its hands on it i don't know like i said it's already happened with ketamine you know in the pandemic and hopefully some loopholes will get closed where people are just being sent ketamine to their house in like pill form and told you know given some advice that i really don't see any evidence for um some of the time like what where sucks uh like taking it every day like we we we know that could be really dangerous to take it every day um uh there are some um i haven't seen any like data to suggest taking it every day um let me tell you as a former ketamine addict better than taking it yeah that's good news oh you want me to say every day no problem exactly like

and and if somebody is you know if you're telling them that that's okay and then that's legitimate like you know yes they cannot people obviously can become dependent on it and you don't know how they're actually using it when they're using it outside of the clinic they're just a lot of risks you know like i know there are i know like there are gonna be a lot of people hearing this conversation that would be like like i can be responsible and i can do it you know twice a week the way you know for a short period of time like the data would suggest and i can look up what like the appropriate protocols are and i like of course there are people out there who can do that but those aren't the ones we're worried about the ones we're worried about are the people

who who have trouble with that kind of thing or like just have a predisposition to become addicts yeah exactly like they're not bad people it's part of their condition that they learn how to get the things they feel they need you know it's it's it's not even a judgment call it's or you know it's certainly not a like it's not meant to be a judgment on them it's just a reality that like when people have addiction or or even when people are getting better something something that came up in this new york times article that came out about some phenomenon that are happening and in the like send send people can i mean at their homes situation is people are developing side effects that they're not then telling their doctor because

they're afraid it will be taken away because it works well and because it works for them it's like not even people who seem to be displaying like dependency issues their their depression is gone and it's the only thing that's worked for them and so they're not telling their doctor that like they're having these serious side effects and the doctor can't see them or you know um so there there are those reasons that you know it's concerning to think that it is definitely not the plan uh anyone that i'm aware of doing the hard work of getting of of figuring out how these things can be helpful for mental health conditions i've never heard any of them like that thought it was the plan to like get it there and then just send people mdma to

their house or send people psilocybin to their home you know all the substance doesn't sound like a good idea of all the substances that i've grappled with in my life as an addict outside of nicotine i have never encountered a more addictive substance than ketamine something happened with me and it happened the same thing happened with opioids i don't know maybe it's god or jesus protecting me but i just stopped liking it like but when i was addicted to it great it's we it's weird like it just stopped being enjoyable it just felt it didn't make me feel good anymore i i think it's because like something happens with ketamine where your access to the k-hole snorting it uh insulating it uh it just it becomes it's like they're like no you're not coming you

can't come in here anymore like you you're granted the vision that's what happened to me and then it just becomes like what when i was addicted to it people who were not and would do it as a kind of like euphoric you know sometimes an alcohol replacement they would be like i've never what are you talking about i've never been on the mothership i've never encountered aliens i don't understand what is this it's like that became my experience of ketamine is now is it's just like i get it it's kind of euphoric i don't like that i can't walk as well anymore it upsets my stomach a little bit so now i just don't have that addict thing of like fuck man i want to dive back into that alternate reality sure but let me tell you man it crept some people crept up and it creeps up

yeah it's a kind of addiction creeps up on you you know i guess that's most addictions lost to you you're still there call you froze up on me oh there you are okay it's creepy it like it's slowly you slowly it's a slow boil man and then the next thing you know you're just you're addicted i know a lot of people have gotten hooked on it man and it's it's and and it's really dangerous to use so frequently i mean in general i don't recommend using it out you know especially if you have a medical condition if you have depression or PTSD like please don't go to an underground or you know go to a rave and take the drugs and and be under the impression that that's going to help with your depression or PTSD like that i'd like to make that distinction in the first place but i know people

are going to recreationally use all all sorts of drugs so people should know with ketamine that uh you know heavy regular use frequent they are like daily use for example can lead to like this bladder toxicity problem that is is not present or at least we have not seen it in my clinic and it's not something that has been like demonstrated to be an occurrence in a particular range like if we use this particular range a half milligram to one milligram per kilogram body weight and we use it twice a week at a maximum for a short period of time and then as infrequently as possible that's my that's the way i work with it we do it for a short period of time no more than twice a week and that's like for four weeks and then yeah people will come back sort of just as

needed for you know sometimes once every month for a little while sometimes a couple times a year we have not seen the development of these bladder issues but we know for sure they happen in patients who use a high amount every single day and we don't know where in between those two does that stuff start to happen to people is it when you're using it every day that it starts to happen is it when you're using it a really really high dose that it starts to happen is it when you only combine high dose and daily use that it starts to happen like and so is it types is it related to a specific completely harmless or something you know of course you wouldn't all the obvious things like don't drive like all the like any sort of motor function drive completely impaired but on top

of that like obvious stuff there are like things happening on the inside that could be problematic if people are just sort of left to their own decision making about how frequently they're going to use it or you know and it but and also the effect of it it's it can be kind of nullifying like you start ignoring what could be symptoms that this is fucking your body up you could you could be sure you start like not paying attention anymore because it's a disassociative you right you're you're concerned for your physical well-being right and I think this is probably true for lots of you're not anymore you don't care as much you and that's where it's really sinister I mean I don't want to seem like some anti-cademy person I'm not I think I have benefited from it

and I think that there is not just from the angle of treating depression but from the the potential visionary experience you can have with ketamine the cosmology it can introduce you to that all of these like aspects of it are so beautiful it's just god damn it it's too easy to do like little bumps of it throughout the day and again I'm not trying to this is maybe not something to say publicly but there's a few drugs I've encountered that are creativity enhancers weed obviously in ketamine I'm sorry but it is at least for me again this is I'm doing that this is the problem and this I think one of the big problems in the psychedelic universe is that many of us project our personal experience for the substance on everybody it might not work for you in that way but for me

it was it was inspirational it was mind-expanding it gave me ideas that turned into something good and and that's another quality of the addiction you don't honestly it would be better for a drug did not do that than for it to do it because now you have this creativity crutch now you feel like you can only be creative if you're oh yeah that happens yeah yeah probably feel like they like they've gotten so used to yeah especially in creative pursuits I've seen that so much yeah and and you're right like that people do project what their experience with the psychedelic has been on to others and man when you when you do it when you are working with psychedelics daily like I am you know several times a day providing it to people first of all like when we're working

with depression and PTSD our patient population isn't a bunch of burners our patient population isn't like people going to you know flaming lips concert our patient population our people with depression who may have no interest in psychedelic experiences you know like right a good a good chunk of our you know pie graph of patients are people who've never had a psychedelic experience prior to this wow and everyone is there like anybody who has a group of friends even will have one or two friends who have a strange reaction compared to the rest of the group to drug like that's that is more like what it's like I would say you know a couple in every 10 will have a very different experience from everybody else and so it is very problematic

especially when people get like talking about policy and talking about like giving advice to other people about using these things is like totally based on what their experience has been with it and right that's like the added responsibility I think with using it medically is you're like by definition we need to know what are like really rare things that are going to come up because if you're using it like I've done over 4,000 sessions now for others not by myself and so there are you know I've seen people get nauseous I've seen people vomit I've seen people feel dizzy for a whole day you know like extremely extremely rare but when it's even if it's something that's one in a thousand I've seen if you know about four times now you know and so like that

concerns me when it comes to people thinking about it's even true about marijuana but like when it comes to people thinking that like psychedelics are going to be go the way that like marijuana did where it's like oh we're gonna get it medically proven first this is so different from that but I think a lot of people think that's what's like what it's going to that's the path or something or that's the future. The Cordova Milk Bar the Cordova Milk Bar and Clockwork Orange I think it was Cordova the milk bar you go there get a little synthomest or whatever you know like that's what they picture they picture that like cafes you go to the cafe and you're like can I get a micro dose of psilocybin and a latte or something like that they don't realize that that

will not probably will not happen. I mean and it and it might but if it does it's not the same thing that we're doing right now like like people with depression people with PTSD like that's a nightmare to me to like think of those people going to a place like that thinking that it's the same thing you know like I think that I think that it's a reasonable different process to pursue like it's not recreational like people use I think I think it's like that that's something society will decide whether it's cool or not and I'm fine if people do decide that because then people know that they're taking that risk for themselves like people know I went to the store I bought mushrooms then I went home and I took those mushrooms and I freaked out and now you know

my girlfriend's mad at me or my boyfriend or you know like I you know called my mom and said some weird thing you know like they know like I took that risk but that's not when someone goes to get medical treatment it is a very different dynamic they're assuming that you are taking care of like you they put on you the power of that responsibility and so like in that way I think like marijuana never did that thing marijuana never went through the process of like you know there were a bunch of small studies that have showed that it can be a value to like people in different with different medical conditions but there's no like FDA trial where it was like one gram treats glaucoma when used in this way at this frequency it's like no no

even if you are using marijuana for a medical thing there's no way that like smoking dabs all day is the appropriate dosage for whatever your medical condition is like that's just recreation that's like you know you're just you know smoking to smoke which is fine but it's not the same thing that we're doing when we're working with something medically and I like with psychedelics I feel like we really need to keep those lanes separated like yeah man I love that you're depressed you have PTSD you need to you know like we need to really honor that we're doing really good science science that was not necessarily done with marijuana for a lot of reasons but we're doing really good science to figure out how to best provide that safely and effectively

and the to me anyway the agenda is not to like then once we get it medically available then we're just gonna like try and change those rules to make it publicly available or something like right there's no sneaky need to prove their safety and yeah like those processes need to be like separated from each other and pursued separately and you know I'm all four people you know trying to make it possible to have those milk bars but not have them be like a place people are going if they are looking for medical care you know no you're going there because you're about to go invade someone's house and beat them to death well at least ultraviolet but you know like therapy therapy my experience with therapy has been it is it

sucks every single at least the great therapist died in North Carolina every single session I almost didn't go to it every single session I almost canceled because I knew when I went in there it's going to be work it's going to hurt it's going to like go into deep or deeper than I want to go and I think you know I think that's you know when people hear psychedelics they they think of all those great moments all those moments where like the you merged at the festival with the festival all those great moments with your friends and that is what beautiful the best but they if they're not familiar with therapy and again I've never done psychedelic therapy so I can only imagine the combination of the the the a trained therapist and the psychedelic

opening you up that does not sound fun to me Cole that sounds fucking brutal that sounds like just like like that's I mean it's not quite a colonoscopy but honestly if I had a choice between the two right now I can't say right away which I would pick you know like one you're putting you to sleep and shoving a thing up your ass the other they're waking you up more and like like going deep in to find where the trauma is that is that does not sound fun at least from the normal way that I define fun well well I'll say about the psychedelic therapy that like in and I've trained in psilocybin I've done the MDMA work I've done the ketamine work like I have seen it so that you things won't come up that you truly can't handle for the most part

you know like there may be stuff in there that you're not ready to handle but we there's a sort of phrase trust the medicine you know like trust trust the process let me cut you off for one second like what yeah what you just said sorry one quick interjection what you just said yeah was literally the least favorite thing that I would hear my therapist say as we were zooming in on something that I had been working my entire life to shove under the rug and she was so good at coaxing it out so good at being like it's better if you go there it's better just you can handle it if it's coming let it come go there and every little bit of you knowing oh fuck I'm going in the room I don't want to go in the room it's the room with all the locks that comes up in my dream you know I hated

when she was saying that because it meant we're almost there and it meant like there was going to be like sobbing there was going to be uh even now I can feel it oh so when you say that I'm like oh god no that room you know what I mean like oh yeah but that that's why we need the therapist because right so I'm sorry for cutting you off that is a superpower no no totally no I'm glad that you said that like that that really is part of you know a lot of the clinicians that work with these feel like that like you you there are some things you literally won't be able to go into an unlock like your your your mind and your body won't let you go there won't especially with trauma you know and yeah that is the beauty of the what we've seen it with ketamine too but certainly with

the mdma that like that visceral inability to approach it is something that that that's part of what the the magic that the medicine brings like and there's a cycle there there's like physiological explanation for that with mdma there's like a decreased activity in the amygdala and the amygdala is the thing that does that it's the thing that clamps down is like we're not it's interesting physically in space the amygdala is close to where memories are also so there's likely a kill switch there on certain memory access you know like and when you feel totally truly safe and connected to your therapist in the room which you can get to after a long time developing that right trust and care and and connection to your therapist you can get there

eventually but but the mdma sort of supercharges that process of the connection and the security and the safety so it's a huge responsibility for the therapist to that hold that that like responsibility of holding it with care and holding it with kindness and holding it with non-judgment um so you know another reason that it should not be just something you can get at the milk bar uh you know so like so with with and with ketamine it's a dissociative anesthetic you know sort of one of the ways it operates is to kind of dissociate so so your tolerance is for a little more depth like kind of naturally the one of the effects of the drugs is you can approach those traumatic things and that's so interesting that you describe it like that because

i've heard you know people you would have never met or talked about unless you guys are reading the same books um right describe you know the box that's not a lot you're not allowed to open that box you know or a closet you know like it's always like a seemed like almost even uh may not be of that much interest but like a rectangular sealed object with with locks on it like there you know something truly uh not accessible um yeah yeah uh so so with uh yeah the mdma and the ketamine it's not that it's like making you go somewhere that's as uncomfortable as it would be without those things it just you're now able to i get it not just break down sobbing or have a full blown panic attack when you start talking about that traumatic thing but yes you're like it's like

big picture thing is yes like when we're doing the work here we are not um it can be fun people can have connections to joy and ecstasy and bliss and when it does when that happens it's beautiful that can be part of somebody's process but when we're working with trauma ultimately a big chunk of it is talking about the worst thing that's ever happened to them it's not a fun experience it isn't yeah a fun thing and it's not something you'd want to be doing at a rave or at a milk bar or something like that it would be you're not getting in the box at edc god help you if you do you know i would before i got into therapy i would circle it though like i would like if i was on enough acid i would start having memories that made no sense and i would think like is it past life stuff what

the fuck is this my abs i wish it was past life stuff but you sort of have these like flickering what the fuck is that why am i seeing that why do i see that when i'm about to fall asleep what the fuck is that and and right you know but just getting getting in there man and it like that's you know that my therapist showed me is it's like it's not like after you remember it you have to like just remembering it can be enough just that alone like having the courage to open the fucking thing and look in and like and the other thing she explained to me which was fascinating is that a lot of these traumatic incidents that happen to kids if they happen to adult they might not be traumatic anymore right but right right when you're in a little body

and you don't understand everything's a threat yeah yeah and so you when everyone's bigger when everyone's five times your size everything you know your body your physiology your nervous system is designed to survive so your body knows you know yeah your body's aware like oh this this is a giant who's like screaming and yelling for example you know like exactly an example of the kind of thing that like as an adult like okay you know and you just feel like you're an asshole day but not your life you know when you're yeah yeah it's like different big big influence yeah she she would is we're doing we were doing edmr i think that's what it's called okay what mdr mdr edmr uh that's the milk bar but the uh i can remember in one of the things that came up realizing oh fuck

here it is this is the thing and but knowing it was gonna happen like the the box is opening and getting really scared and she's like it's it might not be what you think because you know when you go in these sessions you know what you're thinking you're like was i sexually abused was there something like that she's like yeah it it a lot it just it seems something and then the what i would i remember which i won't share it was awful but nothing yeah yeah but still awful and stuck in me what yeah speak it was speakable very right like it's felt unspeakable before but yeah now that's when you bring it out of the box you're like you can say it and when you can talk about it you know like this is not i don't this is an example of what we were talking about

before we're like don't project what worked for you on everybody but one way i have seen people healing is just being able to open that box now because there there there's a there's a really great um therapy model called internal family systems that we that is that works very well with these and like in that model the idea is that like you know there are different parts of ourselves the language like our inner child and stuff like that it lends to this model if not even came from this model um that we have different parts of ourselves and they show up in different ways in different settings and under different circumstances and like there's a whole classification of parts of self that are like guardians and they guard that box and they guard those rooms inside

and they guard them with um things that guards would use they guard them with violent language they guard them with violence they guard them with uh self-destruction they guard you know what i mean and so like this kind of work can allow those guards to relax or can you know sometimes away towards healing can be exploring what those parts are that are in the individual and then opening dialogue between the different parts as odd as that might sound but opening dialogue between the part of you that wants to heal and the part of you that is like no one's allowed in this box though and negotiating a like what if we open you know like literally you know that that's something that we can it would be not uncommon to see in a in a therapy room is let's negotiate a deal

like is is there even room to negotiate period like if the guardian is like look if you even suggest we even have this conversation about this box i am going to be suicidal for the next two weeks that's the punishment for you to suggest you know what i mean like uh that's but it could also often be you know that you know a really beautiful thing to see that i've seen in some examples um is those guards are tired of guarding the box well the guard doesn't like having to you know be suicidal every time the box comes up but it needs to protect that like the box must stay closed and that's that you know those are some of the like beautiful negotiations and work that we can see is things along those lines you know just you know giving giving examples of the

kinds of stuff that can come up but um but yeah it's interesting that you have a box and most oh i got more than one i got john one case is fucking basement but you know what's what's what's cool is you know every time i didn't open all my boxes we left ashville before i finished the therapy but like sure the yeah what's fascinating for me you know i used to like you you get your childhood back like you remember huge chunks like it's not like releases that's the yeah that's the pay off you know like the payoff is like in that if people can you know kind of conceptualize that example that i was just giving like that could be like the experience of ptsd the experience of ptsd is anything that alludes to that box is met with this response of i'm

suicidal or i'm not talking to you anymore i'm not you know i'm not leaving my apartment ever again because yes things when i leave this apartment suggest i look in this box and i'm not doing that if it's you know in the horrific example of like a sexual assault you know like it could be an entire gender that makes you feel like that box is being you know like it could be going to a club with loud music and alcohol being served is like whoa too many things reminding me of the box you know like so just social isolation whereas when oftentimes if people can get to a place where they feel safe enough and you definitely do not want to open that box prematurely and you don't want to go there if you're not actually ready because those guardians

will do their thing um yeah if you can negotiate an opening of it a lot of times it's like you said it's like it's not as unspeakable as you may have thought sometimes that's what happens or sometimes it's just something that needs to be witnessed you know and that can be in that example could be a role of the therapist is to just bear witness that this truly horrific thing happened and it really did happen and yeah and and whatever happens once you you know do or do not open the box you know whatever happens um being able to talk about it it's not like the healing comes from talking about it it's just that when you don't have a box to guard anymore like those guards can kind of calm down like it's now a part of a story you can tell of your life

even to yourself you know like it's not something you necessarily have to share with somebody else but it can again be a whole part of yourself that what we call like reintegration like it can it can return to give you a more full picture of who you are rather than I'm this person except for the things related to this box than I'm this other thing then yeah my personhood and my my own autobiographical story of who I am completely makes sense as long as we aren't talking about that thing that's in the box right but now we can integrate that into our full you know like a more full understanding of ourselves so those are the kinds of things too to go back to like the like you know the value of the ketamine experiences even you know that I've been mostly talking about

phenomenon observed primarily in the mgma work but it can be observed in the ketamine work too like those are the kinds of things that I am like those things are happening to people and if we are making room and we aren't providing an environment where we can immediately talk to them about those experiences and integrate those experiences those are the kinds of opportunities that can be completely missed you know like if somebody's just getting an infusion out of place which again people get better that way I don't want to like if that's the only way it's available in your town or you know I don't want to discourage people from getting whatever treatment is available to them but the reason we do it the way we do it is because we know those experiences are

happening to people from taking the antidepressant dose of this medicine and what an opportunity to be lost if we aren't there to just bear witness to it. Dr. Cole Marta for the first time in our friendship I've wished we weren't friends because I'm like fuck I wish you were my therapist you're amazing that is a curse that is a curse I see in your face how much you love your job I see you're glowing when you're talking about this you are in love with this work and it shows and it's a beautiful thing that you're doing and all my friends yeah well Cole um what's the name of your clinic again I'm what kind of friend does it remember the name is friends academy that's okay the california center for psychedelic

therapy and we have a website the it's psychedelictherapyca.com psychedelic therapy ca is in california.com and we yeah currently offer ketamine assisted therapy and we also do integration services we have a tremendous team I really think we have the best clinicians in this field in this region not you know there are great clinicians everywhere but I our team is particularly good and they're particularly mastered at working with psychedelic experiences people we also do general talk therapy people who may have had experiences outside of a context of medicine that are troubling or not even necessarily troubling but just had they want to talk about psychedelics with somebody who understands those and respects those experiences that's cool we we

have those and yeah we also do the research here and we're you know it we talked a bit about like the financial stressors I do want to mention real quick the um that one of the programs that we recently have started that we're excited about because it is expensive we try to keep the price as low as we can we really do but it is going to be out of price range for a lot of people and so one solution we've come up with that we're like kind of launching right now is Brooke and Joseph from our clinic met up with Kevin and Ronnie from Thank You Life which is a nonprofit organization actually I think in Texas and they their goal is to actually raise funds for this exact problem like we know that psychedelic treatments may be expensive

and we also want that not to be the only reason like we don't want it to only be available to people who can afford out of pocket and so yeah one solution to come up with is Thank You Life they are a fundraising organization that is focused on providing psychedelic treatment specifically to people who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford it and they've partnered with a local group here called New Earth that offers like all kinds of services to like young adults who um like educational services wrap around services that include mental health services and so it would be like a one-of-a-kind thing to be able to work with people in that population who otherwise would never be able to have access to this like it even if they get set up with for

example a county program they wouldn't be able to access psychedelic therapy through a county program so there's there's sort of a team effort to pilot a program where we actually will start to have a certain number of our cases that we can see our people who otherwise wouldn't be able to have access to it. Do you guys take donations? Yes we take donations please donate. What's the website? Please donate to anybody who finds that to be something that is worth their their time and money and effort. It really is a I'm you know it's really worthwhile cost if you ask me and I'll give you the link because it's like a okay it's sort of like a you got a hashtag. Yeah yeah it's not like it's not just like a simple word at whatever.com it's

friends the link will be at ducatrussell.com and the comment section do donate that sounds incredible and Cole thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you for having me. My favorite podcast in a long time thank you. A good time starts with a great wardrobe next stop JC Penney family get-togethers to fancy occasions wedding season two we do it all in style dresses suiting and plenty of color to play with get fixed up with brands like Liz Claiborne Worthington Stafford and Jay Farrar oh and thereabouts for kids super cute and extra affordable check out the latest in store and we're never short on options at jcp.com all dressed up everywhere to go JC Penney. It's Macy's friends and family get an extra 30% off great gifts for her

just in time for Mother's Day when you use your coupon or Macy's card and take 15% off beauty essentials or shop specials she'll love while supplies last plus star rewards members earn on every purchase except gift card services and fees at Macy's sign up today at Macy's.com slash star rewards savings off regular sale and clearance prices exclusions apply. That was Cole Marta everybody all the links you need to find Cole Cole's clinic etc will be at dougatrustle.com do come and see me at Good Nights in Raleigh and Helium in Portland and get those tickets in advance they are moving pretty fast that's exciting I love you guys thank you so much for listening if you want commercial free episodes remember it's patreon.com forward slash d tfh i'll see you next week

a good time starts with a great wardrobe next stop JC Penney family get-togethers to fancy occasions wedding season two we do it all in style dresses suiting and plenty of color to play with get fixed up with brands like Liz Claiborne Worthington Stafford and Jay Farrar oh and thereabouts for kids super cute man extra affordable check out the latest in store and we're never short on options at jcp.com all dressed up everywhere to go JC Penney a good time starts with a great wardrobe next stop JC Penney family get-togethers to fancy occasions wedding season two we do it all in style dresses suiting and plenty of color to play with get fixed up with brands like Liz Claiborne Worthington Stafford and Jay Farrar oh and thereabouts for kids super

cute man extra affordable check out the latest in store and we're never short on options at jcp.com all dressed up everywhere to go JC Penney