Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 692: Raghu Markus

Episode Date: June 1, 2025

Raghu Markus, member of the Love Serve Remember Foundation, friend of the show, and one of the coolest, sweetest people we know, re-joins the DTFH! Sadly the auction for a custom pair Midnight Gospel sneakers has now ended. You can check out the listing over on Propeller, and keep an eye out for more chances to support Love Serve Remember! This episode is brought to you by: This episode is brought to you by BetterHelp. Give online therapy a try at betterhelp.com/duncan and get on your way to being your best self. Give all the “dads” in your life a unique, heartfelt gift you’ll all cherish for years—StoryWorth! Right now, save $10 on your first purchase when you go to StoryWorth.com/Duncan! Minnesota Nice Ethnobotanicals wants to help you escape the matrix of stress and reconnect with the earth’s ancient wisdom—go to mn-nice-ethnobotanicals.com/duncan and use code DUNCAN20 for 20% off your first order of Amanita Muscaria Capsules!

Hello friends, welcome to the DTFH. I'm glad to see you again. I'm excited about today's episode. It's been too long. If you've been listening to the podcast for a while or watching it, then maybe you've seen an episode or two with Raghu Marcus. He runs Ram Dass's Foundation, the Love Server member foundation. He's one of the coolest, sweetest people I've ever met. And this was one of my favorite conversations I ever had with him. Also, it was a chance to plug something that I haven't had a chance to plug yet. And this is happening next week. So if you're probably listening to this on Sunday, listen, I donated something very special to the Love, Serve, Remember Foundation.

When I made the Midnight Gospel, the shoe surgeon gave me almost a one of a kind pair of shoes based on some shoes the Clancy wore in the Midnight Gospel. Maybe you could put that on the screen now, Josh. I'll send you a picture of it. But I donated that to the Love Server Member Foundation so they could auction it off.

Then it's a nonprofit, that's how they make money. So for any of you who are into the Midnight Gospel and want to get a cool pair of almost one of a kind, I think he made a few other pairs but like not many at all. Then this is your chance. And the link is going to be in the comments section down there or if you're listening to this you can find links to where the auction is and pictures of the shoes if we didn't put them on the screen at dunkatrustle.com. So now everybody welcome host of mind rolling

Dear friend Raghu Marcus Raghu Welcome to the DTFH You are a technical wizard. Thanks for solving my Riverside problems. I don't know what's going on or why we have bad Riverside karma Duncan welcome to mind rolling Thank you. This is a dual podcast, Fred's. I'm honored to be on Raghu's awesome podcast, Mind Rolling. If you haven't heard it, if you're interested in spiritual topics,

he has some of the coolest guests ever. You get some of the best guests, man. You know what? This just reminds me, because just earlier this week, so MAPS is happening. I think you know about that. The Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. That's fantastic that you got that. I can never get that. That's happening on June 16th through 20th and we're going to be presenting there on Thursday. We're presenting Ram Dass's perspective on spirituality and psychedelic insight. We're going to have some incredible guests like Tony Bosses, who is a wonderful scientist, who redid, remember the Friday night experiments that Ram Dass and Leary did with getting different you know, different people from various religious backgrounds,

and they gave them psilocybin. I didn't know that was called the Friday Night Experiments. I'm aware of the Good Friday. Good Friday, you got it. Yeah. I've been doing Friday Night Exper experiments for a long time. Yeah, I know, I know. Anyhow, so that's what we're doing and Tony did this incredible research and got a bunch of different people from different traditions and around, and it was all around the mystical experience. You know, I find it interesting that they chose Good Friday as the day to take psychedelics because of all the days in the Christian holiday, Easter makes sense.

But you know, Good Friday, this is like when they put a shroud over the cross. This is when Jesus died. It's like the saddest day in the Christian calendar, and very solemn, very somber. And so I never knew that until I started going to mass with Aaron and realized how much the Catholics really connect to the story in a visceral way, where, you know, they're, whereas like people who aren't Christians, they think of it in terms of metaphor, they think of it in terms of

some kind of philosophical thing, maybe a seasonal, like, you know the end of winter but yeah, yeah Christians they connect to it as though someone they loved more than anyone in the world had just been Murdered for no reason And so the idea is taking psychedelics on that particular day. It was a really strong choice Yes, I would say. Well, who knows? In a church.

These guys, they had been doing a lot of psychedelics over that period, and who knows how this particular thing came up? You never know. But I want to get to more of the point, because we're talking about podcasts podcasts We were talking about mind-rolling what I do and all of that So because of this maps thing we're helping them out letting everybody know it's happening go to Denver, etc You know you can find the links for all of that maps or dot org

Somehow it's an org. Yeah. Anyhow, as a result, I was introduced to a scientist to do a podcast and her work was all around psychedelics and the brain. You would absolutely, you Duncan would absolutely love to talk to this person. Her name is Gull Dolin and I learned more in that hour that I did that podcast with her than I've learned about anything in a very long time. What's her research specifically? You know it's around neuroscience right and, but the experiments that they were doing, they started experimenting

giving, you know, with MDMA. That was the central psychedelic that, that they used. So they started with mice. And then she decided, I, you know, mice are still social beings, you know? And she said, we wanted to wanted to look for an animal of some sort that was not pro-social. And you know what that animal is? I could name a bunch. The cat. Octopus.

No, yeah, no. Cats will get together and love each other. I'm joking, cats are sweet. The octopus is as, the octopus, the octopus swims alone. Exactly. So I said, so I said, wow, octopus. You remember that the octopus teacher, whatever that film was, you know, some years back, fantastic film. I loved it. Everybody loved it. Yeah. These wonderful octopus that, you know, relating with- That's the last time I had fucking calamari, I'll tell you that. That did to the calamari

industry. That was an atomic bomb. People who were making a living off of calamari. What is happening? No one's eating calamari anymore. Before that movie even came out, we were in a retreat and you were there with Ram Dass years ago in Maui and Roshi Joan Halifax was part of the presenters. And in the middle of her talk, she talked about experiments that were going on at John Hopkins back East and around octopus and their, uh, their ability to feel, empathize and feel and actually think is astounding.

So she went on and she said, so no calamari. No more calamari. No more calamari. And from that moment on, that was it. Well, you know, there is a video that people can watch. It's on YouTube, but you can see them dream because you could watch this octopus changing its color as it's dreaming about catching food,

and you could see its body camouflaging with the dream environment that it's swimming through. I mean, there's people who think they're basically aliens, that they just came to Earth a long time ago and they're so smart. So they're giving them ecstasy? Yes. Not ecstasy, MDMA, which is... Yes, people call it ecstasy. There's many permutations of that. It just sounds more scientific if you say you're giving it MDMA. Yes, so yes. They're giving octopi molly. Yeah, and maybe they gave too big a dose at

first. She actually said this to me. And so the octopus was flailing and doing weird dances and all kinds of weird shit. So they got it to where they thought they had the right dose. What happened? The octopus, stoned octopus, went over to the other octopus, Pi, and started, oh, hi, how are you? And putting his arms around and became pro-social.

Wow. Okay, so anyhow, this is the kind of stuff that they were doing to really get at what happens to the brain using the substance. And it was fascinating and way more information that I could share with you. But you'll get on with it. I'll introduce you to it. That is so fascinating that there is a way to induce that level of consciousness in temporarily.

Not just in humans, but in sea creatures pointing towards something that is... We've all read about the studies of the Tibetan monks that they put in MRI machines. Mingyur Rinpoche. They have them practice meta. Yep. And the energy firing through their brains is completely different than most people. When I think what they show, they were showing him like, I think not great imagery, right? They were essentially getting into-

I don't remember that detail, but the reality- I mean, it wasn't like the clockwork orange or anything, but I'm trying to remember what it said, but it said the only similarity is the way, what was happening in his brain was similar to what happens in a mother's brain when she hears her baby. But this was happening for, I guess, someone he'd never met. Implying that this compassion thing that they've cultivated

goes way beyond letting people into traffic. And like that sense that you have for your children, these people are having for everybody. Yeah. And what surprised them in that particular experiment, he was, I think the very, well, him and Mathieu Ricard, I think were the very first monks, Tibetan monks to do this. But they experimented with other people, other monks and so on and that didn't have that name recognition. And it took a while, you know, I think what they do, I don't know, yeah maybe they show some pictures and all that. But I think it's part of the Tibetan meditation practice to do meta practice, sending loving kindness out to everybody.

So maybe they just suggest, okay, get into that practice. And these monks would eventually get into it. Mingyur Rinpoche, they said, okay, get into that particular meditative posture around compassion and whatever, boom! He was there, like very, very quickly. Now, also to say his father was one of the greatest meditation teachers the world has seen was the Dalai Lama's meditation teacher. And, you know, all of his children grew up in this way and became great teachers and so on.

By the way you know what we should say about the you know this wonderful experiment with the octopus and and it having that pro-social behavior if you have a cat that is acting a little bit that is acting a little bit off with other cats, don't give him or her, okay? Don't give it to him. No one's gonna give their cat their Molly. Like if it happens to- Yeah, no, it happens all the time. It used to happen all the time with us

back in the late 60s, early 70s. Oh yeah, good. You know, that's a fascinating incarnation to be like Ram Dass's cat. You're definitely guaranteed to be high, no matter what. Exactly. Yeah, you have these relieving stuff laying around left. But you know, I think what's notable in what we're talking about is that when you hear about this Buddhist compassion thing, you can only use your own sort of sense of what compassion is, which might not...

You might think you're a compassionate person. Most people want to be a compassionate person, but what is happening to these people who've cultivated or were lucky enough to be born into a family that is using this technology basically to focus a very specific aspect of their humanity, is that this is not just good feelings. This is a profound experience that usually at the retreats you kind of have to be lured into it by a really clever teacher who you know starts off by saying oh shit what happened This episode of the DTFH has been brought to you by BetterHelp. You know, one of the things that fascinates me in our culture is that you can tell somebody you got to go to the dentist because you got a cavity because you ate like an asshole for

too long and you, you know, had a weird thing but you ignored it and now it feels like Satan is just playing the nerve in your tooth like some kind of horrible one-string pain guitar and they'll be like my god I hope you're okay let me know how it goes why are you asking why do you want me to let you know how it goes? My dental work, I just was complaining. And then they'll be like, I didn't really, I'm just trying to be polite.

But yeah, I hope you're all right. The point is you tell somebody that you need to go to therapy because you are worried you're exhibiting signs of some kind of anxiety disorder, OCD, whatever it may be, and you feel weird about that. It doesn't matter. The brain is as much an organ as your heart, is your kidneys.

Nobody blinks if you go to the doctor to get a checkup, get your heart checked out, find out what's going on with your poop. Nobody blinks. But for some reason we have this bizarre cultural sense of shame when it comes to taking care of the old meat pie up here and the old metaphysical heart down here. And that is absolutely wild to me. I don't know why that happened or how it crept in, but I blame John Wayne. I guess you're just supposed to like lay in sandy places

and smoke and that's gonna fix the problem. You're supposed to take a kid and throw him in a lake to teach him how to swim. This is what our grandparents were doing. You wanted, if you wanted to swim in the 50s, you're probably gonna die. Your grandpa is just gonna throw you in a swamp and go smoke a cigarette in the mud and hope you lived.

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You can switch therapists easily at no additional cost. We're all better with help. Visit betterhelp.com slash Duncan to get 10% off your first month. That's better help. H-E-L-P dot com slash Duncan. Thank you, BetterHelp. Yeah, okay. Sorry, sorry about that. Don't be! But what I'm saying is that the idea that there's a way via some kind of pharmaceutical or actually just some kind of practice to sort of get past that part of us that doesn't even want to feel that and to like

enter into a place where whether you know someone or not, you still have this incredible love for them, a desire to know how they are, to talk to them. That moment where you look across at someone you normally would never even talk to, and they're looking at you because they're high as a kite, and suddenly it's like you're talking to your long lost brother, and they're sharing secrets with you or deep things. It's so fascinating to me that while we all do our day to day living in a

careful defensive posture towards the world, just right around the corner is this other possibility that that that is such an exciting thing to imagine whether or not you wanna get there through Mali or through meditation or whatever, but it's exciting to imagine that this is being studied by- Right. Real scientists.

Real scientists. Yeah. And it's exciting if you're an octopus and you're lucky. Yeah. And it's exciting if you're an octopus. And you're lucky. Yeah. Well, you know, I think it's just really great to get the kind of affirmations that science is giving us. Right. Right?

Doing that FMRI, you know, with the Rinpoches and all of that. Dalai Lama is totally into this for like over 20 years, working with people like Richie Davidson, neuroscientists and so on. So it is great to get that affirmation. But then, you know what's similar actually, is the affirmation that you get from a psychedelic.

Yeah. Right? And the fact, I mean, and this is, this is what we're going to be speaking to actually at MAPS, which is what do you do? You have that, you know, incredible experience. You are, you're completely at one. I mean, not every trip necessarily is going to be like that. But at some point, I think people do get that experience. That's transcendent. Yeah. OK.

You are beyond the little me guy that we talked about in our the movie of me to the movie of we that we did. Have to mention that to that audio book. But the reality is once you have that opening, so that's another affirmation, an opening into, okay, this is real. There is something beyond that little me that wants to protect and defend absolutely everything while we are walking on this planet. Yeah. You know, and that that is a great, great thing for that to happen.

Then it's OK. Now what? You know what she talks about this this woman? What? That she talks about the most important thing. There's a critical period, it's called. So like there's a like you and I were talking about it in that audio book. We were talking, speaking to the things that happened to us

at very, very early age, which created the persona that we have, created that the story that we tell ourselves about who we are and so on and so forth. So there's a critical period as a baby actually that all of that stuff gets formed. And so having awareness about that can really help a human being that comes into this plane of consciousness in terms of helping them remain as open as possible, open as like where they came from. They had just come from somewhere. Now that happens. This is also part of why she's doing this, these experiments, this research is because each and it's funny, each different psychedelic like ketamine, ketamine is like three to five hours or something, right? And it has an associated critical period after you take that drug in which formations can happen to complete a neuroplasticity.

It's real. It can change. You can change and working with the proper with a therapist using the drug and then all the way up to because she went. Yeah, like LSD acid is, you know, you talk maybe 10 hours or something. And it has an associated longer critical period from which this, this, these changes can possibly happen. And then I said to her, Oh yeah, wow. What about STP?

She didn't know what STP was. Fuck that shit, man. I said, I took one time, somebody said, here's some mescaline. I said, okay, great. Okay, three days later, I was sitting at the dinner table with my friend, who both of us did this, and his mother was serving spaghetti,

which came completely alive. And I went, oh my God, this is still going going on. She said I'll have to look into that Longer period of deep 60s hippie stuff there Fred That's like a crap heard such horror stories about STP. It's scary. That's like some Jacobs ladder MK Ultra stuff man. It sounds terrifying. It wasn't scary. It just went on. After you. It goes on and on and on. Nothing scary about that. Dream come true. This is what they, in the psychedelic community, they really lean into this integration concept.

And it sounds like from this perspective, integration means making the most of that moment when the sort of waxy seal of your identity has been heated up a little bit. There's a chance to re-imprint. Tim Leary talked about this, you know, in his Circuits of Consciousness. This was something you would talk about is like this, we all get kind of crystallized, iced down, whatever you want to call it. These are all the habits that make up your personality. The psychedelic serves to melt that down and then there is going to be an inevitable reformation

of something and that reformation is controllable and that's the neuroplasticity. I don't know that he was even talking about neurogenesis or neuroplasticity back then. I don't know if they had the type that they... No, I don't think so. But they were onto that idea. And also, there's a, paradoxically, based on that, there's an explanation within this for why you meet some people in the psychedelic community and they're fucking egomaniacs. And you're like, how is this possible?

Though you are professing the importance of psychedelics, you are so, what's the word for it, seemingly into yourself and the psychedelics have become your identity. In other words, the crystallization... Yeah, right. Just pick that up. Yep. Now you're the psychedelic person, but there doesn't seem to be much of a difference between pre-psychedelic and post-psychedelic other than now you're a psychedelic person. But you're still really thinking about yourself all the time. Right.

Which is why, I mean, integrate, which is what Ram Dass was all about his entire life. How do you integrate the ineffable experience into a day-to-day existence? And what are the outcomes of this? And obviously, the identity issue, and we talked about that too, the identity issue is probably the most powerful issue that we have about that too. The identity issue is probably the most powerful issue that we have to deal with. Because it's okay, you have that wonderful experience

on the psychedelic. And then you come back to being the same asshole that you were before. Yeah. And okay, so if you have mindfulness, you're gonna be aware, okay, I'm just returning to the same proclivities and neurotic tendencies and shitty habits that I had before.

So you know what the first thing is in integration, in my mind? What? The first thing is about compassion. And that is a, you know, that's a word that's poo-pooed big time these days because it maybe is associated with the quote-unquote woke consciousness, woke society, whatever. Yeah, but that's not that that's a whole different thing than what they're pointing towards when they're talking about compassion.

It's a very psychedelic state of consciousness, and it really defies the ability to get on the right team. You know what I mean? No. I think it does. I mean, I think like... I mean, no, I'm not saying no, I'm not understanding. Explain further. I mean, okay. So, you know, Ram Dass famously in one of his talks talked about like, what do you do when you are actually like, you are in love with a cashier? What do you do when you're passing strangers in the street and you love them completely?

It's not bullshit. You feel about them the way you feel about someone you loved, your mother. Or what happens when the boundary of compassion breaks through and there is no longer, this person deserves compassion, this person doesn't, it's like a dam broke. And now talk about being vulnerable from the perspective of not wanting to be a rube, taking advantage of,

not wanting to seem like a weirdo. All of that's out the window now. And so now you can't live in the world that we live in is geared towards defense. This other world, what do you do in that situation? So that compassion is very different from what makes people cringe when they hear compassion these days. That compassion is an incredibly psychedelic state to be in. Okay, I don't know, psychedelic state? Okay, I say psychedelic- Use another word. In other words? Relative to the cultural norms we've been indoctrinated in, it would be an alien experience.

In a transactional, late stage capitalist culture, people don't get love. This person deserves love. That person doesn't deserve love. This person deserves compassion. That person doesn't deserve compassion. This person good. That person bad. Treat good this way, bad that way. This is more like, I mean, we've heard various different versions of this, but what do they say? The sun shines on the good and evil alike. Like if the sun decided to be transactional in its radiance, we'd be fucked. If the sun was only giving sunlight to like Ukraine, Russia would be frozen over. We'd all, you know, if the sun decided to only wanted to give light to good people,

it would be a nightmare. That's obviously never going to happen, but this is more of a kind of effulgent kind of compassion that doesn't differentiate in the way most people do. Ram Dass's great story about, look, you go out in the forest, which is just this enormous array of different trees and plants and so on. Do you look at one and go, yeah, that one's too fat, and you look at another one and go, well, old, old, scary. You don't do that, right? No, you don't. But, I think the bridge for people to understand this, you might think this sounds nuts or you might think this sounds like bullshit, but I've had days where I universally hate

everyone. So if you want to know a way to understand what this is, just reverse that. And I'll tell you, it got a cavity. And let me, that pain, I haven't felt that much pain in a long time. Like finger slammed in the door level pain in my mouth. Trying to go to a thing at my kid's school, trying to be a good dad, riding there. I'm in so much pain. Erin, I passed the school. Erin's worried.

She thinks I've stroked out or something. I'm like, you just don't understand. This cavity is, I've never felt this much pain in so long. I gotta get this fixed. Thank God that Dennis got me in. But anyone who talked to me in that car, I love these people. My child is my firstborn son. He could say anything to me and in that pain, all I felt was a kind of like snarling anger because

that was in so much pain. So understanding this, all you have to do is reverse what you've probably already done on your worst day, which is had a general dim appraisal of all sentient beings. And know if you can do that, then the opposite might be possible too. And from that, you could just by reversing your own neurosis, come up with a fairly hopeful... This episode of the DTFH has been brought to you by Storyworth. Whoa! This has got to be one of the coolest things out there, especially Father's Day coming up. Listen, as somebody whose both parents have departed to the hyperspace realm, to heaven,

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imagine a day where you walked around and you loved everyone the way on your worst day you've hated everyone. That would be the best day of your life. Look, they're telling us this is possible. It's called ecstasy. I mean I get why they're doing ecstasy because on ecstasy, you know, when you're in the peak of a nice, of good MDMA, you start off loving yourself. Suddenly you're going through the natural steps of Metta. You don't even know you're doing the Tonglin practice

But you are you for me. It's usually like why am I so hard on myself? Why am I so hard on everybody else? Everyone's so great and that is It's exciting to imagine that we don't just have to like take Molly to get there. Exactly. That's the point there is a potential of integration of that Essential

human Experience of goodness who we are there is that Absolutely is a possibility. And the fact that, as we just said before, science is making us aware that that reality can happen. And then psychedelics is giving us a direct experience of that to let us know that can happen. But then it's the day- day drudgery. Oh yeah.

Right? Of practices that need to happen or else these things cannot change. And that practice can include, you know, let's if someone is dealing with horrible depression, If someone is dealing with horrible depression, certainly ketamine with a therapist is definitely going to help transform it, absolutely. Absolutely. So these are tools, so that's a tool. Meditation is a tool, chanting is a tool, community is a tool, there's many, many different tools.

And once you have that experience one way or the other, you're going to be motivated to use these tools to change. Yes, especially if you know it's not drug dependent. That's the other thing that- Yeah, well, that's a problem in itself. The side effect of the prohibition for many of us, like Gen Xers at least, is that we reduce the psychedelic experience to a malfunction of the brain because we are taught you're taking something that's messing up your brain. And so it's easy to, in other words, someone who might, how many times have you heard this?

Well, you know, I should tell you I was on mushrooms. And then they say this profound experience happened to them, but they have to preface it with, but I was on mushrooms, as though that invalidates the experience, as though the experience didn't mean anything because I was on a psychedelic, or it meant something, but you know, it wasn't quite real, like telling you about a dream. And so the work these people are doing, God bless Dublin, and anybody who's in this field of research is there sort of repairing a lot of the damage that complete superstitious bullshit government science

wheat, like superstitious, bullshit government science did by universalizing all drugs. Crack and LSD, same thing. Weed, heroin, same thing, guys. It's all drugs. And so from that, a lot of people got infected with a kind of superstitious, non-scientific, guilty sense of this mode of exploring consciousness is somehow profane. Meditation, great. Psychedelics not so great. If I was meditating at a retreat and I had the exact same experience I might have on

200 micrograms of LSD, from this perspective, the meditation retreat experience has more meaning than the LSD experience. Because you worked for it, baby. You struggled. You climbed up the mountain of pain and you were rewarded for your efforts. You didn't just put a couple of squares of paper in your tongue. And so this is why I love the work that they're doing. But I must say, there's no way around what I have discovered in regards to this compassion

thing, Raghu, which is, and I don't know if you could even relate, but what I have found is that the very thing that I have actively, sometimes consciously, mostly unconsciously, tried to tamp down, numb down, avoid, is like the first layer right above this experience that ecstasy gives you. It's like ecstasy, MDMA, it's like a... It takes you through this layer of sorrow, fundamental or what do they call it? The original heart of sadness in Buddhism. It takes you through the thing that you've trained yourself to avoid because that's right around your heart.

And the thing right around your heart is like a bruise. It's like touching a bruise if you've been avoiding it. It's all the grief. It's all the things you begin to wake up to as a kid. What do you mean my mom's gonna die? What? You didn't tell me that bullshit. What do you mean I'm gonna die?

My dog died. What are you talking about? This is, what? And then you, you know what I mean, you get, you toughen up and you start trying to avoid that incredibly almost unbearable feeling. Yeah, we armor. Right on the other side of that is this,

I don't know how you would describe it. It's very soft, but it's not weak. It's, you know, it's vulnerable, but not vulnerable in like you just broke your legs or something and you're laying on the side of the highway. You're trying to explain the essential experience of the interconnectivity of all. Yeah. But you know, the premises, we. Are separate, we are living premise is we are separate.

We are living as if we are separate, which is why obviously MDMA is is is something that opens the door to you to realize you are not separate. All of all psychedelics do that, but particularly MDMA, which is so so much about the expansion of heart into all inanimate and animate things. Yeah. So, again, I go back to, okay, you have, once you realize that, it's a matter of what are the things that you're saying that

horror, that sorrow, that separation, as I'm calling it, the feeling like I am alone. And look what happened over the pandemic that just pronounced it. Yeah. In a big, big way. That's just the other side of the coin to complete understanding, experiential understanding of the way that we are connected. And as His Holiness, the Dalai Lama says, we all want to be happy. There are so many, you know, that's the biggest idea behind who we are together as individuals, individuals that are together. Yeah. And these properties really announced that to us. And then what do we do about it? Which is, you talked about, I don't know if this part got recorded, but me doing what I do for

Loveserver Member Foundation. And yeah, you know, and you were saying, God, I guess there's a but me doing what I do for Love Server member foundation. Yeah. And yeah, you know, and you were saying, God, I guess there's a lot of stuff there that, whoa, you know, I wouldn't want to be doing- She seems like a complex job. Yeah, it is in some sense, but in the sense that what we're speaking to right now, to me, the way in which we can go to the other side of the coin, just like that. You've been at these retreats, that happens at the, this communal experience, you know, at its most gross level of us coming together in a heart space, which is again more new

agey kind of blah, blah, but it is real in the way that that happens if you are sincere. So it's a matter of, you know, you talk about people, I know people you said, who take psychedelics and they, their identity becomes I'm a psychedelic person now, psychedelic business, et cetera, et cetera. The reality is that once you have that experience, psychedelic experience, a level of sincerity can creep in so that you're not fooling yourself the way you did before that experience. And that to me is so, so very important. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I mean, look, the... Mindfulness is what that's about. I think there's like cultural myths, I guess you could call them. And I don't mean cultural myths like the Garden of Eden. One of the cultural myths is the myth of childhood innocence. In other words, the way this myth works is there was a time, of course, when you were a child and yeah, you were open-hearted or whatever and you loved the animals and hugged the trees or whatever and you believe that the world was good and

You believed that people were good Because you didn't know about the IRS You didn't know about Like all the things that we call IRS You didn't know about adulting. And so you get this bullshit, I'm saying this is the myth. So you get this little bullshit oasis, hopefully a lot of kids didn't, don't sadly,

but you get this, if you're lucky, you get this little oasis, a kind of curated experience where the rough stuff is kept away so you can frolic around, have some fun. You don't know about shingles, kid. You don't know about all the hemorrhoids. You don't know what it's like to get your first lawsuit, buddy. So we're going to...

You don't know about hemorrhoids? That's the worst of all things. Hopefully your kids don't know about hemorrhoids. Hopefully your kids don't know about hemorrhoids. But the point is, this is the myth teaches that goes away. That's gone. You become an adult. You harden up. You fucking get hard, man. Not the good kind of hard. You get hard. And you actually get soft

Sadly, but you get hard, you know and so this celebration of the of the defense mechanisms is the fundamental thing that like has produced the culture that we're in. But what you're talking about, what Ram Dass was talking about, Neem Kurali Baba obviously was talking about, Jesus was talking about, all the teachers are talking about is in fact that is not a myth. That thing you thought went away with your childhood,

that thing you thought went away after your parents got divorced, after you got your heart broken, that thing is actually right here, exactly now. You want to, people say, I want to be young again. They get creams. They start applying expensive creams to their face. That's their skincare ritual. They get their lips puffed, whatever. But they don't care about that.

The sad thing to me is the reason they're doing that is because they... I don't think they realize it, but they think that if they got their skin right, they'd feel like a kid again. If they got the body right, they'd feel that feeling again. That's what everyone wants, that when people say they want the fountain of youth, that's what they mean. Who wants to fucking live forever with some cynical crust, some angry, cynical, pissed off crust, off crust, shaking your tremors as you read the New York Times and drink too much coffee. You know what I mean? You got me. Me too!

But this, I can confirm what you're saying about the retreats. And in fact, that was one of the more unnerving psychedelic, non-psychedelic experiences I had at one of those retreats is before I could catch myself, I thought, man, this is good ecstasy. This was on Sunday. I wasn't on ecstasy. I wasn't on anything. But, but my brain, familiar with that state, referred to that first before I realized,

Jesus Christ, dude, I haven't taken any drugs. And then my next thought was like, what's the timeline on this? When am I coming down? When this reminds me, okay, everybody out there, when Duncan came to the first retreat with Ram Dass in Maui, this is a long time ago. I don't even know. It's over 12 years, 30 something. He was, we were walking on this beautiful beach, this resort where we do it. We still do it.

It's happening again in the end of the year. And we're walking together. Duncan turns to me and he says, you know, this is terrible. This is fucked. I said, what? He said, we're supposed to be at a retreat. And, you know, deep meditation and rituals and to pause, you know. Yeah.

And it's, this is, this is not right. I wanted to hurt. He wanted to hurt. I said, I'm so sorry to have brought you to this place. I'll never do it again. He's been there ever since. Ever since. But that was my mindset. And I think that is a, that's, you know, again, this is the, a lot of this stuff doesn't fit in to the zeitgeist.

If the zeitgeist believes pain, pain is just weakness leaving your body. If we live in a world that we're living in a... And I hate, again, all these words have been co-opted and they suck now, but we're living in a traumatized world. The United States has been at war for 93% of its history. We have generation upon generation, we have layers of PTSD. We have World War II PSD, Vietnam PSD, Afghanistan PSD, September 11th PTSD. What do I say?

Racial PTSD. I mean, we could go on and on and on. It's layer upon layer upon layer of maladaptive behavior designed to not feel the horror of what humanity sadly in mass has resorted to over and over and over again. And this poisons generations. You get PTSD and you numb down, you booze it down, you shut down, you just want to survive, you don't want to hurt your kids, you're not intending to be a monster, but you know the wrong environmental trigger and you're gone with a fucking win.

And you know that, not to scare, anybody who knows anyone bipolar knows what a scary way that mental illness that is because one of my friends who has bipolar told me, you know what sucks is that now if I start, if I get, if I'm happy, I'm worried. Cause I'm afraid it's, I'm about to have a manic episode. And that's so fucked up.

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You know what I'm saying. I'm a dad. Be careful, guys. Minnesota Nice Ethnobotanicals wants to help you rediscover the magic of the world's most iconic mushroom. Go to mn-nice-ethnobotanicals.com. Christian, we gotta come up with a different website here. Mn-nice-ethnobotanicals.com. Christian, we got to come up with a different website here. MN-Nice-Ethnobotanicals.com.

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It's like, are you fucking kidding? Alcohol is our number one consciousness shifting substance completely embraced by the culture. This is initiation, this is our sacrament. This is our ayahuasca. How did we get here? Well, we got here from hangovers. We got here from hungover slave human traffickers, hungover people, hauling people to work for, or they would get murdered, and then in that hungover state, because God knows how much these people were drinking, man. In that hungover state, of course war made sense.

War makes sense to me. When I have a hangover, a nuclear strike makes sense. When the neighbors starts leaf blowing Yeah Fucking give you is there any no mini nuke? So we need we need to turn this okay. Wait. I'm so sorry. Yeah, but so anyway my point is yeah probably if You were me years ago, and I'm at this retreat And I've heard the stories that Ram Dass has told and I've

read Be Here Now and I've had some sense I think there could be something here. You know what I don't want? I don't want my heart broken again, Raghu. I don't want this to be wrong. If this is not true, if these people are just selling a bunch of fucking hippie smoke, then that's it, man. And that I think is there, when many people hear this, me especially, you just can't, you don't wanna open your heart

to even the possibility. Of being hurt. Of this stuff is real. That there is some. Yeah, well you already, yeah, well I'm not gonna take that from you. You already know, okay? No, I know. You're just saying this shit. No, I do know it's real now. I'm not for sure. I could say it's real,

but who's going to believe me? It's like, I don't know. You have a lot of people listening. Yeah, I know. But just because I'm. Yeah, but I'm, but yeah, I'm sorry for going on and on like that, but it's, I do think that your work and the work that Doblin is doing is exactly the antidote to generations of hungover people with profound PTSD just trying to survive day to day. Yeah, yeah, absolutely true. You know, the, the most pertinent thing that, that I heard in us doing this podcast for the last hour was when you said,

and you kept emphasizing, you know, the, there's this, one side of the coin is this tremendous effort that we go through to defend ourselves from anything coming in. of the coin is this tremendous effort that we go through to defend ourselves from anything coming in that is unpleasant, that is painful, et cetera, et cetera. That's one side. So we remain in this separate place. We are completely, absolutely in belief that we are a separate unit, that that's the way it is, that's the way you come up in the world.

And then you said, and on the other side of the coin, you can totally let go into a place that doesn't have this overwhelming fear, doesn't have this, this lack of any wise hope, as Roshi Halifax would call it, for us in terms of our humanity, in terms of what's going on on the planet and what we have created in every way, all of us, for the situation that we are in now. It's just right there. It's just here now. You said it's here now. And I think that's a fantastic reality.

It goes back to somebody wrote, be here now. And the reality is you can be here now, you know, and that's what all of this stuff around psychedelics, around scientists proving out that, you know, there is plasticity, you can change, you do not have to be stuck and it's real and how that's being shown by psychedelics, which doesn't mean anybody here, you or I or anybody should be, we're not advocating psychedelics, but that experience, if done in the right way through set and setting as, you know, Leary and Alpert put out in Metzner, put out a long time ago, That is something that needs to be shared because there is healing in it.

Yeah. And and that that's really what, you know, you and I talk about and have worked together on for many, many, many years along, you know, and your friendship with David Nicktern and mine is also part of that. And the collection of heart wisdom that comes through the surety that you have about there is a possibility for us to be compassionate to ourselves, stop talking to ourselves the way that we do.

Yeah. How about, you know, do you know, the epithets that I have, you know, like something happens and I just, I forgot to turn on the record button. Oh, you fucking idiot. You know, that kind of stuff is what we all do on a day to day basis. So self compassion is real. It allows us to be human and not judge. And then that's the only way once you have that, you have a platform to be able to interact

with people on that same basis. Absolutely. Yeah. And that to me, that's the boots on the ground that everybody's looking for. It's easy to flail these days. You know, I love the general spirit of resistance. That's cool. I get that. You know me, but these days like, well, what am I? I don't even know. It's this,

so you end up resisting some, something, you're not quite sure what it is. And this is sort of the opposite, interestingly enough. It isn't resistance, in fact. It's a the teaching of the culture, which is saying to close yourself off. And that is scary. It's resisting that part of yourself that when you get the twinge, that fucking feeling, man, it happened to me. Lilo and Stitch took the kids to see Lilo and Stitch.

These Disney, you know, Disney will snipe your ass as a parent. You're just like, yeah, what, the kids watch a movie? They didn't even cry and Lilo and Stitch in your three glasses, hoping your boys don't see tears rolling down your face. That feeling, that's it. Stop resisting that. I'm not saying go crying in movie theaters. Don't do that as a dad.

You can't cry. I'm just kidding. No, but you know what I'm saying. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Stop resisting that because that leads to the place that you're talking about. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Stop resisting that because that leads to the place that you're talking about. Yeah, absolutely. Resisting is, I think the word you got to put in there with that in terms of going like this, enough, enough is, okay, you're back to, do you how do you move towards that

without resistance? And I think the byword there is courage. There's got to be some courage inside yourself. You don't want to continue to act the way that you have been acting. And you don't want to present yourself to people in that way. However, which way it works for you because for many people you know you have a public platform, I have a public platform and we want the best but we get caught up in our own resistance you know so it takes a certain amount of courage.

You do have to... Oh God, Trudy, I saw one of the trees, she said something talking about this, she said, it's almost unbearable. This thing we're talking about is almost unbearable. The feeling, and I'm saying the feeling of like really coming to terms with the situation as it is in the moment, and any parents out there, you know what I'm talking about? It's almost unbearable. It's 6 a.m. to have three children of various ages swarming you at the refrigerator as you're just trying to get some coffee. And they've perfected various forms of shrieks.

They're like, dad, I think there's gummy bears in the pantry. Dad, you know, you're just waking up from some horrible dream where you're like wrestling Leonardo DiCaprio or something. You're trying to, almost unbearable. By the way, the biggest gum, I just got to say the biggest gummy company in the world, in Europe, in Amsterdam maybe, somehow THC got into the formula and they had to recall a billion packages Company and you never did

Shut up when people found that out We're out of time my car is gonna get towed Your car is gonna get get towed. Your car is going to get towed. Okay, wait. Maps. Maps is the 16th through the 20th, everybody. Go online. You'll find a way to link into it. And here's a big announcement. The shoes? The shoes. Duncan lovingly. All right. Here's the big announcement. I'm going to say this upfront too. Friends, when I made the Midnight Gospel, the shoe surgeon handmade a pair of shoes

that was based on one of the shoes Clancy wore in the Midnight Gospel. He wore different shoes in each episode. These are not one of a kind. I think he made three pairs. Could be wrong about that, but there's not many of them out there. Pendleton got some, I got some, maybe somebody else got some, I'm not sure. But there's hardly any out there. I donated these to the Love Serve Remember Foundation to auction, to raise some money for this wonderful foundation.

And so these are going on auction next week. They're going on auction June 7th when we do this big benefit with Krishna Das in New York and we show this new film on K.K. Shah, who you also met. Yeah, this is not the maps thing. This is a different thing. This is this is yeah This is next week. The auction is associated with This beautiful day-long experience on juice June 7th. So and yeah You tune in to Ram Dass org and you'll see a pop-up about the auction and you'll be able to post something on my gram So you guys can have like if you don't remember that

or whatever. So yeah, if you're interested in getting one-of-a-kind Midnight Gospel- Clancy shoes. Clancy shoes. These are super cool. I do have like profound, almost La Prodic athlete's foot and I did put them on so you probably should see. Okay you just got it. I have shingles! Oh you're the best Raghu. Thank you. We'll catch up offline and I will plug this at the beginning. Mind rolling folks that are

bearing with me. I know usually y'all are talking to the llamas and swamis and scientists. Then my ass comes on and ruins the vibe. But thank you, mind-rolling people. And thank you, I love you. Love you, bye. That was Ragoo Marcus, everybody. All the links you need to find Ragoo or to potentially bid on these one-of-a-kind Clancy shoes are

gonna be at tug-of-trustle.com or in the description below. Bye!