Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 674: Bruce Damer

Episode Date: March 20, 2025

Dr. Bruce Damer, a genius and contemporary of Terence McKenna, joins the DTFH! You can learn more about Bruce's work with the Center for MINDS at their website, CenterForMINDS.org. Dr. Damer also maintains a Substack! You can follow his writing at DrBruceDamer.Substack.com. This episode is brought to you by: Go to Lucy.co/FAMILYHOUR and use promo code FAMILYHOUR at checkout to get 20% off your first order. Lucy has a 30-day refund policy if you change your mind. Check Out Squarespace.com for a free trial, and when you’re ready to launch, Squarespace.com/DUNCAN to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain.

Greetings, my friends. It's me, D. Trucelle, and this is the Duckertrussle Family Hour podcast. And this episode has everything that you all have been asking for. I have a pretty varied audience at this point, and some people love the comedy episodes, but some people make requests. And one guest that I get requests for a lot is Dr. Bruce Dahmer. And I understand why. Bruce Dahmer was pals with Terrence McKenna. He is a genius who has come up with a theory for the origin of life. He's working on asteroid mining and he has most recently started the Center for Mines,

the multidisciplinary investigation into novel discoveries and solutions. Essentially there is a big invitation out there for intellectuals, scientists, and people who have been hiding in the psychedelic closet to come out and let people know that they have used psychedelics in a positive way that might have actually helped their creativity, their intuition, and like Bruce Dahmer, might have actually allowed them to witness something in the psychedelic realm that they could then bring in to the world. This is incredible. I love maps, but it's nice to hear that psychedelics are beginning to become acknowledged as what

I've always loved them for, incredible tools for creativity and for the exploration of ideas. Dr. Dahmer shares with us today the incredible psychedelic story of how he came up with this theory for the origin of life. A theory that has been published in multiple scientific journals, Scientific American, and a lot of other places. A brilliant theory, and it's so cool.

Not only that, if you're looking for a quick history of psychedelics and their prohibition in the United States, told by, let me reiterate, someone who is pals with Terrence McKenna and who has taken up the McKenna psychedelic banner, then you're about to get that right now. Everybody, please welcome back to the DTFH my friend. Dr. Bruce Dahmer Bruce God bless you Duncan. Thank you. Bless you man Like you just said it's been at least a decade It's been a decade since we've chatted and we last talked at Burning Man 2017. That's right. We did the tax IRS Comedy you remember that I tried to forget it, I don't think it went over as well as I wanted it to

People believed you when you said that We're here to tax the gift economy and agents will be coming into the tent with laptops and to record your received guests You remember that one? Absolutely, I just, it was really I just, it was really, I just, I don't know why, I think it's Burning Man. Your consciousness has expanded,

and you're looking for the antithesis of the vibe, which sometimes produces comedy, and I thought what is the most antithetical thing in the universe compared to this? That we could bring to the playa. That we could bring to the Playa. That we could bring to the Playa. A tax audit. An audit on the burners.

On burners. Who are giving sandwiches to people. Yeah. And we wanted to tax the sandwiches. Yeah. Yeah, it didn't, didn't get a standing ovation. But the fact that it convinced half of the stone burners at the time, or the people plot it was real for a second. Well, I mean, it's sort of like, you know, a lot of people talk about harm reduction with psychedelics.

Mm-hmm. And when I look back and think, like, you know, it would have probably been less disturbing to have like a severed head. Yes. Than to talk about taxes in front of people tripping. So since we've talked, so much has happened in the world. So much has happened. It's strange thinking back. Just 10 years ago, isn't it? The halcyon days in the world. So much has happened. It's strange thinking back just 10 years ago, isn't it? The halcyon days of the teens. Yes. Yes. Innocence, total innocence. Total innocence. That is exactly,

I mean, and of course then we didn't think of it as innocence. We thought it was normal. We thought the odds were innocent. Yes. And the 90s were prehistoric. That's exactly it and and you know all of the things that McKenna Talked about mm-hmm seemed to be manifesting to some degree this acceleration and The quickening I think Art Bell called it remember that the quickening yeah, and We were there in the canoe, floating down the idyllic river of the teens. Maybe you would hear the waterfall somewhere in the distance. You hear the rapids oncoming.

Yeah, and then whoosh! Now here we are. And I am really curious to hear your thoughts on that quickening but also to hear how you've advanced in your incredible work that you're doing right now and So where are we now? Bruce we are we're here in Austin. Yeah, yes Because we're it's South by Southwest 2025 and we just did a major talk was packed on psychedelics research into psychedelics as creative catalysts for insight and breakthroughs and not just in the artistic realm but geeky you know yeah geeks on drugs kind of a thing where they're actually

downloading phenomenal solutions that are inaccessible in any other way and this was going on from Aldous Huxley and Humphrey Osmond's first experience where Osmond brought a bottle of mescaline on his front driver's seat down to LA to give Huxley this really famous you know in English intellectual his first trip. Yes. And then he wrote the Doors of Perception, which has opened the West to psychedelia.

And in their letters from that day forward, they were talking about project outside, which meant that if psychedelics could give you insight into self, into the psyche, if you will. They could also give you outside into the world. And they thought of it as a tool for the intellect. And when Osmond coined the term psychedelic in 1956, it meant mind manifesting. So this was actually the intuitive grasp.

It wasn't necessarily healing, even though Osmond was working with addiction even then in the early 50s with LSD yeah they that's where they thought the push was and then in the mid 60s the first study happened with Willis Harmon and Jim Fadiman you know who's now the father of micro dosing yes on 23 professionals having mind-blowing downloads using mostly mescaline. And it all got shut down. Now why did it get shut down? Criminalization. So literally, Fadiman tells us,

and you can see him all over the internet because they have a new book out called the Microdosing Guide. He talks about they received a letter from the governor of California on a Friday that said cease and desist all Studies with these compounds and they decided to not open it. Well, okay now until they they submit I guess they submitted their publication. I'm curious your thoughts on now and I think we've all heard the Nixon wanted to find a way to criminalize ideology

He knew that the hippies were taking psychedelics and he knew that by making those illegal, you could just arrest anybody you wanted to because most people had some kind of drug on them, thus giving you an avenue to put people in jail, the sinners in jail. Do you buy that theory? Because the deeper, darker theory,

which I kick around in anyone who's taken a psychedelic and had the thought, wait, why is this illegal? Has had this sense of something more ominous, a kind of almost gnostic, matrix-like force that wants to repress that flow of data from whatever that phenomenal realm is. And I'm wondering where you land on that. I think we give our government agencies and bureaucrats too much credit there. Oh yeah, right. I think it was just that they were disturbed youth culture, challenging them, but what was it that Timothy Leary had said about the people who most opposed or vehemently opposed to

psychedelics, something like they'd never, until they do them. Right. Right. So the bureaucrats weren't necessarily taking psychedelics. Well, but the CIA was. I mean, this is where the whole thing gets real weird to me, is that, and I don't know, I saw some interview with the Grateful Dead, and I can't remember which band member it was, but he just said simply, they didn't want us to go is that and I don't I saw some interview with the Grateful Dead and I can't remember which band member it was but he just said simply they didn't want us to go in that door and I often think about that and also you're right

the youth culture and the especially in those days what that must have looked like to a pretty square culture must have seemed quite threatening but by driving this underground they really all they succeeded in doing was sort of amplifying the thing that they were resisting but also it's really we'll never know we'll never know but one thing I can tell you for sure, because I have some personal experience, even though I was a little kid in the 60s, I came into the extent archives of Timothy Leary.

So I was the agent for the Futique Trust for several years. And we had like 500 bankers boxes of his artifacts in a storage unit in Scotts Valley. And finally finally the co trustee identified a buyer and it was the New York Public Library which was just absolutely phenomenal through a rare books dealer so in 2011 that collection moved so Big Tractor Trailer came out to take it all to Queens but

they left 200 boxes in the storage. And the trustee called me up and she was practically in tears because she was throwing into a dumpster. And so I said, I'm renting my own box truck and I'm coming up because the archivist, the curators at the New York Public Library decided to discard anything that was printed in a publication because they only wanted the typescript collection. at the New York Public Library decided to discard anything that was printed in a publication because they only wanted the typescript collection. And it was precious. It was like 50,000 newspaper clippings and zines and everything all the way back to the

50s that had been meticulously cut out and stamped and time stamped by clipping services. Now this is pre-internet search, right? And so it was every story, including all the articles in the Harvard Crimson when Alpert and Leary were there. And a number of hand-scribed things, his album collections, his books, including an uncorrected proofs, everything. So I just put it in the truck, and I brought it,

and put it in my barn. and then I started to go through it because I could touch and smell, you know, because you got this funny smell of aging newsprint. I could literally smell off those pages the article starting in the early 60s when it was a wonder drug, right? So you could go through it and get that sense

1963 Boston Herald NASA to use LSD to train lunar astronauts Oh my god, that's what they thought and so then you cruise into the 1963 for Five and it explodes so 65 Acid tests first acid has test happens in in SoCal, California in November But then it goes all throughout the west coast, you know people are dipping cups into giant vats So I heard right was a huge thing and in by 66

So 67 there was a kind of a love idea was the new discovery summer of love human being happened 68 the darkness right the assassinations and that was happening externally in the political world Vietnam was getting ugly Nixon had come in, you know LBJ had resigned basically he had been defeated So then the great society had been defeated by Vietnam And so the country flipped into this darkness. It seemed like a slope that it was pulling everything down. And yet in 69 you had Woodstock, which was a glorious light,

and you had the moon landing. But then you had Altamont at the end of the year, which was absolutely dark. It kind of put the knife in the 60s and the kind of... so this goes into like the Rolling Stones. So the Rolling Stones hadn't been to America since 1967. They came for Altamont and Mick Jagger said, oh my god what has happened to this country? It is so different. And they witnessed the stabbing in front of the stage. Yeah, it's like wow so people don't realize that there are enormous historical forces at work.

Yeah. And and this bloom came off the Rose and the Rose was almost like an illucidian return the rediscovery of air got access to the other realms but happened so fast in 18 months it, it just ripped through American society so fast that it couldn't be absorbed culturally. So generations just reacted instinctively. It's, you know, looking at it holistically. I'm sure you've heard of like this concept, for if anything that is created, its opposite emerges. And if you do have a kind of mini renaissance, then you might expect the opposite to emerge. I'm not saying that it was the psychedelic revolution

of the 60s that brought on that darkness, but any bright light, it's a cliche, has some dark shadow. And especially the light that psychedelics represented, this is unlike anything else. It's just some kind of cosmic transmission that suddenly is like accessible by most people in the it's so beautiful to hear the initial pre propaganda reaction and it was so uninterpretable by the older generation the adult parent generation that's up World War two yeah depression survivors World War two fighters they come home to build a

country so they they built the the literal bones of the United States in the 1950s and they brought a huge middle class into being, they worked damn hard. So this is a really different mindset, but their kids who were raised on sugar pops in the 50s in television and media had the luxury of going and doing this stuff. Going out to Woodstock on a grayhound and living off of you know little

handouts pretty much. Yeah. And no generation previous had had the luxury of just flipping around and exploring. They were all going to work in the mills and the farms. So it's a first generation that could ever do this in the history of the world. Yeah. And so they went on this exploration en masse, and their parents just did not freaking understand this because that's not how you build a world or a family or a society.

And there were huge numbers of casualties in this, huge confusion. So the confusion in the United States was from the government powers that be all the way through the company space, all the to family to family to family yeah that's how rockingly disruptive this thing was so the fact that people by 1969 70 you know you had of course the Democratic the riots at Democratic convention by 1970 71 72 but people just wanted normalcy. Right. Right. And

they had to wait because the 70s hyper, you know, inflation, oil shocks, and then they had water gain. It just never seemed to end. Right. And then infrastructure started to fall apart. Yeah. This episode of the DTFH is brought to you by Lucy Nicotine Pouches. 100% pure nicotine. Always tobacco free. Now, what did Lucy figure out that the other pouch manufacturers did not? Lucy figured out that from time to time, your mouth goes completely dry.

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and every order is age verified. Warning! This product contains nicotine. Nicotine is an addictive chemical. It was a tired country by like 79, but then there was this new flowering of personal computing and stuff was happening, but we got through disco and we survived that. So then the 80s was kind of this re-dawning. And then Psychedelia had so gone underground, the flame was re-lit by Terrence McKenna.

He lit the pilot light and kept it going. And then we saw the rave scene. We saw MDMA enter the scene in Texas, right here. I had no idea. I thought it was in the UK is where it originated. So the story of the Stark Club, designed by Leo Stark, the great French architect, designed America's most fancy, beautiful,

but private club in downtown Dallas. It housed like 2,000 guests, and it was all the Dallas and Texas socialite scene, oil man, you name it, kind of like we see here in Austin. And guess who the ringleader was? Larry Hagman, star of Dallas. No way. Oh, I've heard about that. Okay, keep going. I'm so sorry. 10 gallon hat. So there was a multi-level marketing company in Texas to manufacture MDMA. You know, it was called Adam at that time and when it hit the streets, they're called XC or Amali. Multi-level, of course, it's Texas like Amway or something. So they're making millions of doses in Texas.

What happens every weekend at the start club is you arrive and you're welcomed and you're prepared, you're a Texas socialite and then somebody comes around with platters and everybody dropped. Now I'm about to open your heart chakra. Oh no, it was coming to Jesus, it was love, it was love that would save the world. And the people that experienced that power, that was a new reemergence of something that isn't quite psychedelic, it was an empathogenic type emergence. And of course, Sasha Shulgin had resynthesized

MDA back in the late 70s and called Leo's F and they decided, oh my God, this going to be huge in marriage and family counseling and people were using it was legal. And the Stark Club was where it hit the intelligentsia. In conservative Republican Catholic, a friend of mine who's a, he walked into the Stark Club one day in 1985 or 84, 85 and he walked in, fundraiser into the start club one day in 1985. And he, or 84, 85, and he was, he walked in, fundraiser for the Republican party, Catholic Christian attorney, and he walked,

super conservative guy, straight up, he walked out, he said, I was, I was still Catholic, and I still have my license to practice law, but I was a different human being Yeah when I walked out of that club and that happened over and over and over again and the Reason why Rick Doblin and maps have been able to cross the line one of the reasons is that the

Conservative right felt deeply offended that this tool was taken from our society. It was so healing. You know, I get emotional when I think about it. They said, God damn it. And so some of the people who had experienced that in that club in Dallas got on board and family wealth was put in and Rick was able to reach the descendants of the people who... Isn't that the most wild story? See, I knew... I was always flabbergasted by stories of Rick Doblin meeting with high-level government officials regarding MDMA. And I was always curious about how he got in the door.

And to hear that it all connects to Larry Hagman. Larry Hagman. Is one of the wildest. In his 10 gallon hat and actually somebody a few years ago was making a documentary and interviewed Lorenzo Haggerty, a friend of mine who started the psychedelic salon podcast which was a huge thing for like your generation too. So that's why he did it. So Lorenzo Haggerty was a dealer.

So they interviewed him, he was a downlink in moving thousands of thousands of doses of MDMA in the network here in Texas. Wow. Yeah. That is such a wild ride when you consider, and this is what I love about psychedelics, is it's not just the obvious manifestations

when you ingest them, it's their manifestation in society. It seems to reflect what they do. And to a great extent, MDMA is Texan. manifestation in society seems to reflect what they do. And to a great extent, MDMA is Texan. Just as in Switzerland, now you see the Swiss supporting tremendous new research into LSD, the Swiss consider LSD to be theirs. It's a cultural commodity of their people.

And it's a wonderful thing because it was born there. of course MDMA was was born in 1913 I think it was Merck or one of the company synthesized it but didn't really find uses for it. When Sasha re-synthesized it in his lab you know up in Lafayette California up on in the Shogun farm and tried it he would do for the listeners he would it would always come down to a little pile of white powder for when Sasha was doing his chemical explorations. I think of Sasha as being the greatest alchemist

who ever lived on the planet. Wow. Because he synthesized thousands of compounds and self-assayed and did his exploration and he would take out the smallest little spoon that you use to put in you know one of those those Weigh scales that sure wind can't get in because wind will change the weight and he would take that That and start a titrated dose on himself

And then he would he would start titrating up after a certain time to get to the critical and he would establish the where it's actually a felt effect and then he would push into effective dose and then he would Then he would explore he would take his notebook out and start writing Amazing. I mean when you think of the courage In what you just described having no certainty About what this might do other than its

chemical composition, how it might relate to other psychedelics. We all know the story of Bicycle Day and Hoffman didn't titrate and maybe that's Shultz. It was an accidental dosing. Exactly, you know and again I don't want to get wooey here, but how accidental is it that post World War two a Perfect way of dealing with trauma is presented to the world by accident we World War two has happened words when we think about the descendants of that generation going off to

when we think about the descendants of that generation going off to, you know, be hippies, we're also talking about people who were raised by people with severe PTSD. Yeah. And what we know about epigenetics right now. Dad would never talk about World War II. There you go. End of story. And then your older brother was never going to tell you what happened in Nam. My dad was two tours in Vietnam. I have the identical experience.

I know exactly what that's like. I know how tortured they are. And also, you know, when you was close to passing, you know, you would share with me a little bit of what it's like to be a veteran suffering from PTSD and the medication that they would give you, which is Benzos, and what they would say is, what he told me is they would say, when it happens, just take these and stay inside. That's the fucking treatment! That was the protocol.

Dude, what the fuck? And so then, so you hear this, and though I, I don't know where you stand on this sort of thing I see a divine hand here and and I see like a Trickster kind of divine hand, but also I do see a kind of miracle which is okay trauma So many wars now now generations of people, you know, if you were raised by someone with PTSD Then the odds are pretty good that you're gonna pick up some parenting styles that maybe aren't the best and you might find those

Coming I have children now and you know, I have to be very careful because a lot of these dads with PTSD What did they use as a methodology for raising their children? They used what they learned in the Navy. They learned what they used about discipline and harshness and harsh realities. And so suddenly we've got this echo, a karmic echo, you could almost say,

of radiating out into the world and then boom this miracle drug appears. And Duncan when you look back so I asked I'm a geeky scientist so I'm always on inquiry and I was down in Peru with Dennis McKenna who you've you've interviewed and we love him dearly. Love him. He's the psychedelic teddy bears as far as I'm concerned. I was standing next to the lacuma tree which is this ancient tree in a place that he and I have done medicine. They've just done a cocoa summit there and I was connected to the medicine and to the full moon and the spectacularness of the Peruvian Andes and I asked the Lekuma, that's what you do, you give yourself permission to do these things, I asked it can you muster the forces of the plant kingdom to help us,

to infuse us, and the Lekuma answered, you know, through these portals that Lekuma trees have, they're almost like breathing portals, said, I've always been there. And then went through and as the delivered history came, it was, we're at 25,000 BC and the plants are putting the astringent into our minds and they're putting the concoctions, the first ferments, and it's growing our guts and our minds in our serotonin and then you roll forward and the first distilled, not distilled but just regular alcohol and the nine-to-one admixtures of the ancient wines which were included pennyroyal and things like that and then the Cichon at Ellusis which was the first hint of an LSD

ergot. Yeah. Incredible thing at the edge of neurotoxicity that was mastered for 1,600 years to turn on civilization and then it rolls forward even even further and suddenly we get massive carbohydrates which change us again and then we get into the the really interesting territory we get caffeine showing up. So caffeine turned on the creative mind. It turned on all those people in those coffee shops in Amsterdam creating financial instruments and yeah and Pope Pius the third calling it the elixir of the devil.

And he did and so then someone brought him a coffee service in the Vatican. I forget what year this was. He pronounced it mana from heaven. And then it became, because he got turned on and he was like aware and awake and feeling good. And so then all of Catholic Europe started to open cafes, right? In places, yeah, so that literally was a moment in which a plant drug found its way.

And then we built skyscrapers and railroads and everything on the back of caffeine. Wow. And of course the Incans were building Machu Picchu on the back of coca and cocaine in the correct doses plus a lot of other things in the leaf. And so then it just kept accelerating. Then the real demon arrived, distilled alcohol. Almost killed Western civilizations,

the big problem of the 1820s, right and then strong opiates Yes, almost destroyed the East Right. Yes, so and then nitrous, you know came into Victorian England Hilarious, right? Yeah, and then we're rolling into the 20th century now. We have synthetic chemists Yeah, so all kinds of things show up, but they're all they all have roots in in the plant kingdom or of course in the fungal kingdom. Yes. And then psychedelics, you know, which had been buried in Mesoamerica, the psychedelic tryptamines and psilocybin and then even deeply more deeply

buried, you know, the MAOI plus DMT combination. Right. Probably concocted in the Andes according to Manuel Torres The Andean civilization, let's just won't know this, but this is emerging archaeology. It's like Psychopharmacological Kinetics it turns out that the Andeans were absolute genius and admixtures So the North North Incan civilization was doing snuffs that consisted of all kinds of things like mescaline sources from a cactus and a nut that had both NN and 5-MeO DMT in it. And this is a real thing.

It's plant-based 5-MeO DMT. And in the southern part of the Incan, so pre-Incan empire, they were doing brews. And they've actually found the vessels and they've done the archaeochemistry. And these ferments were sophisticated as heck. And so the other thing about the Incan civilization, it was cradle to grave psychoactive compounds available to infants and all the way to the end of life. And it wasn't mediated by priests, it was literally cooked in the village.

So it was a top to down, top to bottom psychedelic and theogenic medicine civilization. You know what that makes me think of? One of my favorite things about Burning Man, just for just a pause on what this beautiful description of the history of psychedelics leading to where we are now. One of my favorite things about Burning Man I just think about these Incan villages that you're describing that I had no idea and I'm imagining the smells. I'm imagining the smell of whatever these brewing psychedelics are blowing through

the wind. And that's what I love about Burning Man is like, you know, a lot of festivals, you're gonna smell weed, whatever. Burning Man, you get many, many wafts of DMT drifting on the wind. And the effect of that is magical It's you really do feel like you've shifted in some kind of parallel reality It's not like you're getting high off some secondhand DMT But just if you smoke DMT, and then you're smelling it again and again and again this reminder of What's out there? It has a very powerful effect and And so when you think of olfactory, the olfactory facet of living in a place where psychedelics were not prohibited, but were accepted as a normal part

of humanity. They were in the ether, they were the energetic. And here's a related story to that little the listeners will love so if you all know who Carolyn Garcia is Mountain girl so oh yeah, okay the first partner wife of Jerry Garcia and she ran the board and everything for a Grateful Dead is a paragon of stories and humor and wisdom about Psychedelia from the 60s, 70s and on. Like she was touring when they had to move their freaking stages and they're almost bankrupt because they're trying to move.

They spent more on gas than they ever took. I can't imagine. I can't imagine. So she can tell you all the stories, but one of the stories I got out of her was we were camped together at Burning Man. And I was sort of in awe of Mountain Girl because I was sort of new to the the scene and this is a person

who's who's an elder who carries something really important and so I was actually I have to admit to the audience I was coming up pretty hard on something and I was in my wildest Burning Man gear but sitting right in front of her as a supplicant of Mountain Girl and she's just sitting in a comfy chair and I turned up to her and I said MG tell me something if I was a like lily white teenager this was the summer of love and you're about to dose me and send me out into the summer of love or if I'm here now at burning mess so so that that teenager instead of getting dose would go through a time portal instead of going out in the summer of

love and family dog and everything would go and be dropped into 2013 at night on the playa and stand up without being dosed. Which would the more impactful experience be? And she thought just for like a fraction of a second Burning Man 2013. We know how to do this. And that really meant that we built a psychedelic environment That was consistent that could open the mind in a collective in a community Yeah in a safe container with all the smells the pounding of you know The EDM and the vibratory the cleanliness of the desert and for her. This is a superior Construction and a simple acid trip in Golden Gate Park.

So that was her measure of, of, he said we have come a long way. Well and you know that there's a, oh god I don't even share this with people, it's so depressing. You know this I'm sure. Strawberries. You see mold on the strawberry. Now if you're a fool, You see mold on the strawberry. Now if you're a fool, you eat another strawberry that doesn't have the mold. But apparently, the mycelium has worked its way through the entire damn straw, the whole thing's filled with mold, so it won't taste as good. But in the positive, when we look back at this beautiful history that you've articulated, including the many times psychedelics are driven underground.

The mycelium, that's what the Grateful Dead was doing. Yeah. And Burning Man is this, what would, what is? Burning Man is a huge fruiting body that came up. Fruiting body. And so this, these fruiting bodies, they don't just manifest as fun, incredible, enlightening festivals. The fruiting bodies, and I think this gets to the work you're doing right now, are every time you hear somebody like Steve Jobs, someone who has had a massive impact on Western society and not just Western society, unlike the acceleration

towards what I think McKenna called the singularity, they inevitably cite psychedelics as having some impact on their inventions. The very least opening themselves up to like here And in the case of Steve Jobs to the certainty the certain to that he had the permission and the power and the capability in the design sense and in a business leadership sense To do things and really create new things in the world and he wasn't even sure what they were Right going to be. But certainly, because he's already at Homestead High,

they're already going to the Home Group Computer Club, and that was what he was really focused on. He knew there was something there. And he did it, and he had the courage and the gumption, and to literally have the perspective to say no, like we don't do focus groups. We know what people are going to want. We don't do the whole corporate indirection thing and make a mess. We drive toward this beautiful light

of this design thing and we ship it. We put it in people's hands in those powerful way and it can be an ugly and messy kind of personal process Anyone who's worked with Steve especially in the 70s into the 80s knew you know But if you talk to Andy Hertzfeld, so they were trying to finish the Mac OS for its launch and Steve came in. This is a good story about Steve's absolute Focus on this perfection of the beauty of the vision of the Macintosh introduction January 1984 and Andy told me because I'm a big collector of image computing and he said Steve came in and it's like

two months to launch and Andy was writing the operating system he says he system. He said, I want the Mac to write out and say its own name. Right? And all they have is this tiny little speaker. It's not a real speaker. And what Andy does is he says, okay. You know, instead of blowing up and saying no and Steve firing people and all the whole thing. He went to like Safeway and he found on sale this enormous tub of chocolate covered espresso beans. He bought like a couple of massive tubs of chocolate covered espresso beans and he went back to Apple and that's all they ate for like three or four days. That's all they were eating. And they got so on to it, right? But they got the clarity, they used drugs to help them and they actually hand coded a file

that where the Macintosh said, hello, I am Macintosh, right? Which is the great moment. And it is audible, but it's handwritten waveforms in a file that is sucking off of a floppy drive out of memory to say I am Macintosh. And so it's that type of people rose to the occasion from the brilliance of this man who was unleashed by LSD. Yep. Yeah and gave us our modern world and we won't know All of the people who are unleashed by LSD or some psychedelic means the coffee I guess you know like the story you just told but we won't know all the people who are influenced by it because of the prohibition and

because just the articulation of someone who takes psychedelics as a business person or a Scientist designer you're gonna lose funding. well and so this comes back to my story Which is I? Was certainly under the pall of prohibition I was sort of halfway out the door as many of you know who might have seen my talks on Psychedelics and I had sort of been gatewayed into hyperspace by Terrence McKenna And then I introduced Terrence to cyberspace and we had this partnership

And then I just took it up at one point Terrence said to return to me and said we knew he was ill And he said Bruce Keep telling the story But make it your own story very very clearly and telling the story, but make it your own story. Wow. Very, very clearly. And so I took that up in 2003. So I described, but I didn't mention the word mushroom.

I described my visionary experience of going to the origin of the cosmos, like the literal ignition of the cosmos. And it was on a solid, enormous 15 gram bag of mushrooms at Terrence. Peanut ceremonies? cosmos and it was on a solid enormous 15 gram bag of Terrence, mushrooms at Terrence. Peanut semis? It was just kubensi, it was kubensi's but I found out later they were from the spore

prints from La Charrera. So that was my first trip. That was your first trip? That was my first trip. Wait, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. You have to help me understand. Why did you take 15 grams of Terrence McKenna's mushrooms? Because it was later on, of course, if all your listeners know, listening to Terrence, he would admonish people and say, get a scale, get a scale. Of course there's-

Any of us, I'm sorry, any of us having a weird mushroom trip, hear him saying that in our heads. It's like, get a scaler. I didn't get a scale. And wow, so please continue. Well actually the reason that I took the whole bag, so I'm in the Southern,

and Terrence was waiting for me to report in So I would go to his house in Hawaii In 99 and we would compare notes Was the virtual worlds that I could open up? in psilocybin in hyperspace How do they compare to the ones in cyberspace and yeah, he switched roles and he became an avatar of and paired with the ones in cyberspace. And then he switched roles and he became an avatar

of cyberspace and met his whole, in a tryptamine-inflected world called Paulin. Yes. Before Michael Paulin. And it's all on video. You can actually find it on YouTube. It's called Terrence McKenna on the Natch. Oh, wow.

And we recorded it in high eight at his house in Hawaii. Wow. We made a chopped up video It's really fun to watch so So I go into the wilderness and I I take these things and I take the first few and I wait and I have my campfire and my friend my buddies in a hot spring Like a few hundred yards away can't see me or hear me and it in a hot spring, like a few hundred yards away, can't see me or hear me.

And it creates what I now call an endo trip, a trip that I could naturally do on my own. Yes. Where I started with hypnagogic visions with closed eyes when I was nine, learned how to dial my mind to turn them into full color kind of TV. Yeah.

Drew them, drew these landscapes. And then I kept that system going and To become my profession so I could visualize Pull and ride whole computer code for world spacecraft for NASA and now origin of life so you're seeing sort of all of these potential like Inventions that you've yet to bring into time space in your mind and you're sort of product testing them.

Wow. And so I had that skill set and I think teenagers lose it because they get distracted and they get focused on other things. Yeah. But super nerdy autistic type spectrumy teenagers, they still live in those worlds and they come through it. And so I learned how to, I built a re-sophisticated machinery around observing trips, but they were trips that would take me over. They were called endotrips or endogenous trips. They were with no exogenous substance and I avoided coffee. I

never took an aspirin. I never smoked cannabis. And I'm in my 30s and I finally meet Terrence. And I feel the wiggle, the draw, like now is the time. It won't destroy my machinery. So I literally had a discipline of shutting down access to my endotripping machinery while I was taking a psychedelic. Turning that system that's always running off. Why?

I didn't want it to be disrupted. Okay. It could have been. It took 10 years for me to turn that system back on and have a sort of an exo and endo trip running simultaneously. Huh. What was that like? It led to this insight, both of my own healing

of being given up at birth and re-experiencing my conception in birth, which untied a hard knot in my belly, and then opened me up to such a flow state and such a more completed human being that I could turn with my buddy Mama Aya and we could head back to the birth of us all back four billion years because the science that Dave Diemer and I were doing had reached a point of hairy complexity that we couldn't see beyond what happens when these little protocells you form in the laboratory out of self assembling RNA and lipid compartments where do you go from there right we were doing it what happened in that four billion years ago in those hot spring pools and you

saw this I went into the pool and became the protocell that was attempting its first division so it was an advanced protocell and David Luke calls this psychedelic perspectivism huh When somebody becomes the object. Yeah, now tell me... This episode of the DTFH is brought to you by my beloved sponsor, Squarespace. Squarespace has made it easy to build a website, to build your brand, to send out a mailing list, and most importantly, to extantiate your soul onto the interwebs. You got to do it, friends.

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And when you're ready to launch, use offer code Duncan to get 10% off your first order of a website or a domain. Again, it's squarespace.com forward slash Duncan, use offer code Duncan to get 10% off your first order of a website or a domain. What it felt like to be a protocell, I mean did you have human awareness there, your human awareness field is there or was it a completely alien experience?

Absolutely alien and I had to die to be reborn because I started to black out in the pool and asked into the ether what is happening and voice came back, you asked to be born. How can you be here? You know, so I blacked out, I was gone and I came back to awareness with a scream, which is happens when little babies come out of the, if they don't scream, they're not here and it's an emergency and you have to get them breathing. And the scream was in parallel with the tearing off of another compartment, a vacuole, and my body was the lipid compartment. Whoa, was there pain, physical pain?

It was shock. So the scream was happening and the tearing off was happening and inside the vacuole was darkness. It was shock. So the scream was happening and the tearing off was happening and inside the vacuole was darkness. It was dead. It was a stillbirth. And when I swung my observer camera back into my remaining body, I could see glowing polymers and all kinds of crazy activity going on and reading and writing was going on. And it came to me. You mean reading and writing was going on and it came to me you mean reading and writing like computer like a like a code but it was a

code in molecules and that was that was the vision that led that and asked more questions and it presented answers and I worked that for two and a half months. And then at the end of 2013, it all came in a massive download, you know, an endotrip rather than an exo-endotrip. So that was sort of like the integration of the experience. It left, it was a cliffhanger. It was a cliffhanger and then when the whole thing came, and this is what happens with endotrip delivery, is it needs incubation time and you have to be patient and and

then the endo trip downloads and it was so clear it was so comprehensive it was about a 45 minute you know takeover kind of like one of Albert Einstein's thought experiments when you describe all these worlds that would take him over yeah like the man falling in the elevator racing alongside a beam of Albert Einstein's thought experiments when he described all these worlds that would take him over. Yeah. Like the man falling in the elevator or racing alongside a beam of light. Right. And so it was so coherent and it answered the questions that were answered in the Aya experience.

And it was the full reification of the full cycle of all the origin of all the biological functions and the communal Uplift of life as a single body in effect rather than individuals in competition, which is another Implication for philosophy and even even our thought about ourselves Well, I mean this goes back again to this horrific event that happened that we call World War II. This something so horrific, it's still incomprehensible and it's absurdity. It's almost absurdity what What do you get out of that? You get a culture of competition. You get an amplification of just what you're saying, and of course that would work its way into the science, wouldn't it? It would work its way in.

You want a way to rationalize what just happened. You want a way to make sense of this madness firebombing cities, children incinerated. How do we make sense that we as a species just did this to each other? Well. And we keep going back and doing it again on a smaller scale. That's right.

And it's a great way, let me tell you, if you are looking for a way to turn off whatever the compassion thing is, that's how you do it. Survival of the fittest, baby. You know, this is just the way it works. Only the strong survive. By being selfish, not only am I serving myself,

but in some weird way, I'm serving evolution as a whole because I am the conquering victor. And yeah, I'm gonna leave some corpses behind me, but come on, don't we wanna get stronger as a a species and what you're proposing flies in the face of that Completely flies in the face of that. In fact, you could almost argue it's some kind of biological communism or something and and what it is and The great thing about this vision it's downloaded into science. A year and a half later, it went into publication. Dave and I put out the first article,

and then it started rolling through the field. It rolled into a dozen groups that started reproducing it. Then we went out to actual hot springs. I said, Dave, it's time to go to hot springs and do the chemistry right in the place that we're proposing and it worked. So I remember flying down to New Zealand in 2018 going to going to Mordor basically going to Hell's Gate in Rotorua with a beautiful team

supporting us from University of Auckland and I had my suitcase of chemicals and vials and my pipetrs and everything and I wet dry cycled 96 experiments leaning over a boiling pool With a guy that you know saved my life a couple of times because I was gonna pass out I actually should have been wearing oxygen dear God Yeah, terrible way to go terrible way to, falling face first into a hot spring. That you experienced the origination of humanity yet. I mean, not that that was the exact hot spring, but that is a perfect circle. Yeah, it's, and yet that's where the chemistry

of the self-assembly of RNA into vesicular compartments actually could work and work fast. Can I just emphasize something here, in case people are missing what's going on here, so many of us during a psychedelic moment have had some kind of epiphany, witnessed something, some idea that seems insane. And because of the propaganda against psychedelics, many of us disregard that. I was just, hi man.

Whatever that thing was, it could be some philosophy, it could be science, who knows? We've all had various visions. And instead of doing what you did, trusting it, experimenting with it, we throw it in the garbage pail of high ideas, maybe we make a cool t-shirt or something at the best. And so I just want to point out how remarkable

what you're saying is, which is here is direct proof, if you've ever wondered if maybe the thing that you are thinking while you're high is actually real or could be extantiated into the world. Here's the evidence. It's one example and the caveat is that it's not for everyone. So for example, the only reason I was able to do that

is I had years of training. Right. And the mentorship of Dave Diemer read all the articles. I had my initial vague notions turned into real places, real geochemistry. And so I was prepped. I had set and setting working for me, but I had setup. And then I had a way to bring it down and get it validated, tested, due diligence by colleagues, turn it into the correct language of science and propose ways to test it and then go out and test it

and then invite other teams to test or falsify it. So because it's in the discipline of science or engineering or design field, we can land these things. So it's Terrence McKenna's shiny objects that he wanted the L's to give him so he could bring them back. Yeah, it's an example of one. That's right. But it it takes a ton of preparation and a ton of personal discipline. Sure. And commitment over over years to do that. But then you do that. And a reason I came out of the closet with Dennis

McKenna in 2022 was I felt it was time to stand up and this is what Rick Doblin says so Rick Doblin says stand up and be counted and tell your story that's how gay marriage got into the culture and this is actually how cannabis came into the culture parents stood stood up and said, this has helped my child with their seizures. Various people stood up. So I'm standing up to say it is possible to use these tools to make incredible breakthroughs and insights for humanity in areas we never expected. And there's a lot of it going on under

the table. And we need to do the science. we need to study how the brain works in in in these states and what what minds the center for minds which we established here in Austin 18 months ago name of it again the center for my multi disciplinary investigation into novel discoveries and solutions and land those things yes were based. We're based on maps, which of course people know that it brought the therapeutic research back online all the way up to the door of the FDA. We're hoping that we can get through that. But we raise money to give to top level university research teams to look at how psychedelics can catalyze creativity.

And the first study has been announced, yeah, after 55 years. What's the study? It's amazing. So it's Greg Fonzo's team at UT Austin right here. Minoz Das is the principal investigator. And what they're gonna do just, I'm not a neuroscientist and I don't play one on podcasts. I do. You do. What do you need to know?

I'll tell you anything I don't know. I don't know the difference between the amygdala and the pawn structure. I don't either, but I act like I do. Yeah, so what they're gonna do is, can you imagine this there? You'll be in the fMRI scanner, you'll be on a dose

of psilocybin you know laboratory cells psilocybin and you'll record a memory will be presented something to remember and there's different ways to record memories in different complexity and they'll watch the little lights that light up to show where it went in your brain. Whoa. Isn't that cool? Like did it go into the cortical region? Did it go that cool? Like, did it go into the cortical region? Did it go somewhere else? Yeah. Did it go to the hard drive or the floppy drive?

Yeah. That kind of thing. And then recovering that memory, they'll also be in the scanner and they'll watch where it comes out. Because the flux theory that Monos has devised predicts that you have higher fluency with psychedelics depending on where the memory gets stored, more familiarity and more color and shape to a memory, more access to it, and therefore more

acuity to be able to run with it, less effort that's tagged with psilocybin. Isn't that amazing? First of his kind in the world. And we're now planning and proposing to support teams that are doing extended state intravenous DMT infusion. And Imperial College London under Chris Timmerman has been doing this.

They've got those studies done and several groups have gone through. And you're literally getting DMT through a saline pump. Yeah. And so they can keep it going an hour hour plus through boluses through these doses so that you can explore that space directly so the DMT isn't broken down in the gut because it's going right into your bloodstream. Yeah. And it's a natural thing that our brains create. So I think that the safety and efficacy is pretty pretty high. So we're really excited about those studies sometimes called DMTX. I mean look this to translate what you just said into my own

dumb language. The first thing that pops into my head, the Spicer Guild in Doom. This is, you know, they're using melange to bend time-space. Yeah. And it's like Herbert, we all know by now, or most people know, is a mycologist. We know potentially the inspiration for the blue. The blue honey. Yeah. Yeah. But, but, and it's, and you know, to go back to McKenna's Idea that maybe he could bring an object in From this realm which is a wild idea But then to look at maybe Herbert and McKenna and look at these intuitive

Notions, which is there's something That we can access here. It is more than just a dream state. There's something here that will change everything. And it's not bullshit in the way that many people sadly think. And I think that's very sad when people add to whatever great moment they had, but I was high. I think that's a very sad, oh, I guess you were high,

therefore invalidated. I hate that, it's so sad. That's a product of the prohibition, but what you're talking about here Specifically with it. I'm sorry. I don't want to go on a tube when I'm on mushrooms But that's that's a courageous thing people are gonna be doing but what you're talking about here with DMT specifically if you ask me is More than just an exploration of the mind. I think you're talking about one of maybe the very first I don't know how to put it some kind of telescope into a parallel universe And that that's what you would call the strong hypothesis they put forward by Andrew Gallimore So you might have had him on the show. I love him So the strong hypothesis is that there's a parallel other realm.

Yeah. And has certain, you've seen his book. Yes. On his very illustrated, beautiful illustrated. So that's the strong hypothesis and that leans a little too far for science. I mean you can't necessarily get an IRB approval for that investigation. All my IRB approvals are getting rejected. They're all getting rejected.

But Insight, so in working with wonderful supporters like Anton Vilton and others, John Chavez of DMT Quest, John Dean of the sentient other? Yes, but people who have insight Often even if they're not taking a substance they feel the presence of an other so Descartes felt that a angel had given him the dictum or formulation for measuring nature through number and you know Newton was extremely he was a sort of spiritist. Oh my god a wild man mercury in his hair temple of Solomon obsessed with the Kabbalistic stuff yes I mean this, these are just like what you're doing, which is incredibly courageous by the way,

and I hope people follow, which is, I mean, for me, I have a podcast. If I don't say I've done psychedelics, I lose funding. But if you're a serious scientist and you utter anything remotely close to it, even if you like or maybe psychedelic positive This can impact your life and and then back in 2016 and a well-known national magazine Contacted me to do a profile Because they were starting to cover ayahuasca, and I was recommended and about two hours into the interview

I realized oh my god if my name I could see my name in print in this magazine it will it will take me off NASA review panels it will remove us from funding consideration and create that sort of back chatter and back of the hallway conference chatter about you know Damer's at Draghi kind of things Keri Mellis experienced. Or Musk, Musk smokes weed on Rogan. Right. And like there were.

Or today you know, oh ketamine has addled his brain or something. Oh yeah, it's a horse strike with us. Right. Yeah, absolutely man, I mean it's still, we're dealing with, like we're not out of the woods yeah the woods so what I decided to do was I waited about 10 years 9 10 years too so it was on the cover of signing American in 2017 I think I was holding that up when we were are showing that to you in the tea house at Burning Man that cover story called a new origin of Life. Yep. And that was the public and then it

was on the cover of Astrobiology Journal in 2020 which is like the top journal for our field. And then it was in Nature in major controversy major stories in Nature magazine where clearly a paradigm shift had happened out of Origin of Life deep in the Oceans and hydrothermal vents and it was now in the hot spring setting where Darwin thought warm little ponds and all our colleagues were weighing in and then by 2022 the articles have been cited, they're cited every day or two, three times a day in major journals. They're just cited by everyone, like hundreds of citations and that are just cited by everyone. Hundreds of citations. And so then I felt

it's time, and I checked this with Dave. I literally checked this with my mentor, with my colleague who is my co-author. And he just supported me to do this. And I said, Dave, the reason I'm doing this is to stand up and be counted and tell a sane

and measured protocol story, like a detailed story of how I use these extraordinary tools, these extraordinary mind states to do a piece of work for all of human knowledge and that I could encourage new post-docs or young people, hopefully not. No teenager should be doing psychedelics it's just it's too soon and they need you know you need set and setting frankly i'm glad i didn't do psychedelics till my 30s because i i had a formed mature uh container so you know i wouldn't advise anyone who wants to solve some mystery in science to anyway to do so i I'm glad you're saying that. I mean it is very it would be easy for someone to hear what you're saying who hasn't ever opened a book on physics, biology, had all the

data. You know it's sort of like training in AI. You've got to give it the data set to train on, you know, and then you ask it. And in my case, just so the listeners know, I didn't work I worked on my healing for the first 12 or 13 years I worked on insight into self before I took on outside into this world you know four billion year history and and only when I had done that work that personal work uh, was I permitted myself because that personal work took priority. Gosh darn it, it took priority. And it's funny because when I got to the Amazon, I think in 2011, the first time, when I was trying

to go to sleep the night before we did our first brew, there was this raging torrent, like an endotrip of creatures and forces and everything that sometimes take over my brain and I told all of them see those that corral down there on the bottom of the valley you're all going in there and I'm closing the gate go to your room because that's too important for all of this to crowd my brain I didn't know you could tell to go to the room because that's too important for all of this to crowd my brain. I didn't know you could tell them to go to the room. Yeah. I might actually revisit mushrooms again because I had no idea. Like go to your room. They swarmed

through my body. They torment me. I didn't know you. Excuse me. I need to do science. No, I need pure energy. I don't need all the, the way I thought of it, because I'd had experiences with mushrooms and everything before, and all the geometry that shows up, for me it was like, oh, this is sort of cobwebs, or is the result of resistance or discomfort. Even though it's incredible, it just goes on and on, and it blocks vision, it occludes vision. Yeah. And so when I started with the tea

with Aya, I didn't want any of that. I said, there's a pure form of this. There's a pure truth to this. I don't know what it is yet. And actually, a butterfly arrived about that time and sat outside of my little Maloka building and opened its wings and it was pure blue. It was actually a blue morpho. Wow. And I sat with it for about five minutes and I took a video of it. I asked it permission. So anyone who thinks it's woo, I can actually send you the video of this opening its wings and I put my nose right up to it because I figured,

you know, the things happen, right that this is potentially a teaching coming from the complexity of nature about the nature of the eye experience and what it was was the morpho would turn to the side I took a flash picture to see the detail on the wings and it was all forms and shapes and stuff and then it turned back and it opened the wings to pure effervescent blue and It was telling me there are two kinds of experience here one is form jaguars All this stuff and the other is just pure energy and presence and it choices yours and

It I came into the pure blue. I mean for four hours later I was in that blue energy Emptiness emptiness and all the dudes the noisy characters were in the corral still in their room And so that was a good start But it was sort of a and that's after you know 1213 years of psychedelic exploration finally hitting that medicine Which was for me that the best route to healing and then revealing my god. This is why in

full respect to maps and Doblin as someone who's like has PTSD in their family and recognizes how important that work is but as a in their family and recognizes how important that work is. But as a creative person and as someone who is, you know, I wish I could say I come up with the origin of life on psychedelics, but I've definitely come up with some good jokes. And you know, but as someone, as a creative, it's so exciting to hear

that we maybe are moving past the model of psychedelics as medicine into the model of psychedelics as what we've all always understood them to be. And here's a fun expression for you. And I added this to the end of my talk in the UK with the Dennis McHenness conference where I had a talk called It's High Time for Science. At the end it said, could it be that the medicines of our healing can also become the elixirs for discovery? That is beautiful and I listen anyway and I mean what can any way I could participate I would love to other than getting high and going into a machine. I just I'm not ready, but man

I got her I have a panel I got to get to and I want to talk to you forever So I feel like I'm getting ripped in half right now, but we got caught up Duncan It's so good because I want to keep the conversation going with you. I Come back to Austin. You can be coming be coming here a lot? I'm sorry. Yes, because the Center for Minds is based here. I'm so happy. And the reason I want to keep this conversation going with you is because you have the magic superpower that Sasha Shulgin taught us about. What's that? Levity. Ah! Well. He looked at me one day with his blue eyes that didn't have sight anymore and he said something like, you know the world has a lot of novelty. There's a lot going

on but perhaps it needs some more levity. Ah, listen I'm happy to add whatever I can to what you're up to. And it's, I've got goosebumps. I can't believe I got to have this conversation with you. And I feel like people watching or listening, maybe they're going to want to reach out. And I don't know if you've gotten to that point. Yeah, they can go to centerforminds.org and just actually they can fill out a survey that they can share their experience. Cool. Their creative experience and if they want to reach me

directly it's just bruce at center for minds.org and I'm I'm I'm waiting to hear from all those beings that are using these tools and these amazing ways tell us your protocols tell what you downloaded tell how you landed in the world and you know we need more people to stand up and tell the story Bruce. God bless you. You're doing the Lord's work Thank you so much for coming back on the show. My pleasure Duncan. Thank you That was dr Bruce Dahmer all the links you need to find him are gonna be in the comment section at Dougatrussell.com Or down here if you're watching

YouTube don't forget to like, subscribe, and if you want to go deep, become a member of the DTFH at patreon.com forward slash DTFH or right here on YouTube. Thank you all for watching and listening. I'll see you next week. Until then, Hare Krishna.