Duncan Trussell Family Hour - AMBER LYON

Episode Date: March 20, 2014

Emmy award winning journalist Amber Lyon joins the DTFH to talk about her year spent traveling around the planet taking psychedelics.

Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. I'm dirty little angel. You can get Dirty Angel anywhere you get your music. Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. New album and tour date coming this summer. Happy Spring Equinox, everyone. It is I, Duncan Trussell. And you are listening to the Duncan Trussell Family Hour

podcast. And if there ever was a day to contemplate rebirth, this is that day. Spring. I've got this blasted old withered little patch of dead soil behind my house. And the other day I decided, you know what? I'm going to sprinkle some grass seed down

and just see what happens. Spray some water on it and see if I get some grass back there. And you know what's happening? Grass is growing where there was no grass. Just a dark gray post-apocalyptic patch of doom. Now green sprigs of grass are growing. My orange tree seems to be growing oranges. Something's coming off the branches that looks good.

My lemon tree is starting to grow these big fat lemons. Birds are waddling around in the backyard eating my grass seed. That's fine. But spring is the greatest metaphor. It's that place in your life where you've been depressed, where you've been trapped, where you've been stuck, where you've been uninspired, where you've been heartbroken, where everything seems hopeless,

and suddenly this glimmer of life springs up inside of you. You've got to remember what I'm talking about. It's so easy to forget when you're wandering through the bleak darkness, when you're lost, when you're confused, when you're uninspired, when you're lonely, it's so easy to forget that nothing lasts, including those bleak states. And then all of a sudden, out of the blue,

if you're a writer, that great idea will come. And you'll find yourself writing again. Or if you're a comedian, new jokes will start coming. I promise they start coming again. Or if you're somebody who maybe has been alone for a long time, you'll meet someone new and realize that it's possible to fall in love again. That's what spring's all about.

Spring is about grinning from ear to ear as you realize that life happens again, that it can't be pushed back or stopped, and that your idea that everything was going to be awful forever was ridiculous and doesn't follow the pattern of life, of nature. These dark scientists blogging about the collapse of industrial civilization, impending doom,

everything falling apart. They're just focusing on the winter. They don't understand that, yeah, sure, civilizations collapse just like there's winter. But things grow from that collapse. Don't just focus on one part of the cycle. That's the point. If you're trapped in winter, if your brain

is in a permafrost, if you've managed to convince yourself that things don't get better, that you're lost forever, permanently broke, permanently alone, permanently sick, it's not true. You're not going to be permanent anything. Even if you're a dead body listening to this thing right now, even if someone has plugged earbuds into a corpse and is playing my podcast for you,

you are going to experience a rebirth. It's not going to be as a human being, maybe. You're going to gradually disintegrate and turn into soil. Worms are going to crawl through you. But then that rotting, stinking, festering gelatinous glop that used to be your body will gradually convert into the most beautiful thing ever, which is nature, spring, life, plants.

I love spring. I feel quite happy these days. I really do. I went through a pretty bleak period for a couple of months. I didn't feel inspired. I wasn't writing. I wasn't very disciplined. I was addicted to video games.

Just doing all the classic shit that I do when I'm sort of stuck and the wheels are spinning. But lately, I can feel it coming back. It comes back. You meet someone new. The ideas start coming again. Personal rebirth is possible. Not only is it possible, it's inevitable.

You can be reborn before you die. That's the exciting, mystical idea. And that's why I'm really happy to be uploading this podcast with Amber Lyon on the Spring Equinox, because she has experienced a rebirth that is a result of coming into contact with the mind of nature. That's what these plant medicines are, ayahuasca, mushrooms.

They connect us with nature. It's a direct neurological harmonizing with the spirit of the Earth. Now, I'm not going to go on and on about it, because she does a much better job of explaining this than I can. But a few times, when I've done this podcast, one of my favorite things when I do this podcast is I get to meet new people.

And you see people in interviews. I've seen Amber Lyon in interviews. I've listened to her on the Rogan podcast. And Joes has told me how awesome she was. But when you get to meet someone face to face, right away, you can pick up their vibe. And there is a lot of people that I've met who have there is nothing more exciting than when you get around a

person who is promoting some type of lifestyle, for example, Ragu Marcus, who is a devotee of Neem Kerali Baba and runs the Love Server Member Foundation, which is Ram Dass' foundation. I remember when I met him, he had this incredible expansive glow. Amber Lyon is exactly the same way. Judge a tree by its fruit, as they say.

And if somebody is radiating happiness, peacefulness, tranquility, then it speaks for whatever methods they're using. Because a lot of times people will talk about some method they're using, but you get around them and you feel like you're talking to a human icicle. Amber Lyon is fascinating in a lot of ways. She's an Emmy Award-winning journalist.

She was a correspondent for CNN. She's been all over the world in some of the most terrible parts of the world, seeing some of the most horrible things that a person can see. She talked to Rogan on his podcast. He told her that she should go try ayahuasca. She ended up going and drinking ayahuasca, this letter, on a year-long journey, taking medicinal plants all over

the world. And the result was a complete transformation, a rebirth. Amber Lyon is experiencing a type of spring that comes when you are reminded of that secret truth that is inside all things. And that truth is that, well, shit. I don't know what it is. But you know what?

When I meet people who have come in contact with it, they sure seem happy. And it's exciting and inspiring. So I'm thrilled to be putting out this podcast on the spring equinox. We're going to get going. But first, some business. You guys might notice that I have a cold.

Listen to this. Microorganisms are swarming through my body right now. They're experiencing their own kind of goddamn spring. Frolicking in the force of my intestines, dancing through my white blood cells, punching every healthy part of my body with their sticky little diseased fingers. Whatever they have. Tendrils.

I don't know what comes out of them. Why don't you know what it is? Whatever they are, they're swarming and they suck. They're trying to turn my body into a hive of doom. Why do I have these inside of me? Well, it's simple. Somebody sprayed them out of their hole, and it got into one of my holes.

I don't know which hole it got into, but one of my holes got infected by it with somebody's stink. And that's what happens when you go into public, which is why as much as you can, if you go into public, you have to understand that you are risking going to war with some microorganism, with some stinky toddlers sprayed out of their ass, which is why if you go outside, make sure you're going to a good place.

Nature, a nice movie, a symphony. Go to a park, picnic. Go to a museum. Go look at a spring garden. Go enjoy a fountain somewhere. But why would you spend your precious time on planet Earth plodding through the aerosolized filth of some chain store, these targets and Walmart's and CVS's of the

world? Look, I know sometimes you've got to go down there because you need to get some bottled water or condoms. But those are rare exceptions. Usually you know what you need weeks in advance. And thank God for Amazon.com. Because by going to Amazon.com, you can get the exact same stuff you get at any retail place brought to your

house minus the diarrhea attached to it. You've heard me say it before, I'll say it again. These chain stores are hives of deadly viruses, botulism toxin, measles is coming back, incurable gonorrhea. You touch the wrong diaper package at Target and who knows what can happen? I'm not saying you could get incurable gonorrhea from picking up a used bag of tissues that somebody brought back

from one of these stores, but I'm not saying you couldn't. Amazon.com. If you go to dunkintrustle.com, there is a portal. If you click on that portal, you will go into the beautiful land of Amazon.com where you can buy anything, depending on where you live, you can even get groceries right now. As soon as I finish uploading this podcast, I'm going to order my groceries.

They bring them to my house. It's great. And yeah, I'm going to go out today. I'm not a recluse. I'm not a shut-in anymore. I'll admit I got a little depressed. And when you're depressed, Amazon.com is a holy guardian angel that will allow you to stay in the soft, sweet

sanctuary of your house as you huddle in front of your computer screen playing online video role-playing games where you desperately try to forget the fact that you have to address the pain inside your heart or you're going to suffer forever. Yes, Amazon.com will enable that state. But they will also allow you to spend the time that you would have spent plotting through some grocery store

or Target or some Walmart frolicking in nature. Go to a spa. Go to a steam room. Go to one of these Korean spas. If you live in Los Angeles for $20, you can get scrubbed down by a grizzled old man who will wipe away all your dead skin cells and rub lotion on your balls. You can do that instead of going to Amazon or no, go to

Amazon instead of going to Walmart. You know what I'm saying? Go to our portal. Go through our portal. It's a clean portal. It's not like the portals that are attached to the stinky people wandering through these stores. Their portals are covered with mucus and flim and

incurable gonorrhea. And they sneeze and fart and spray their disease in all directions, corrupting everything that they come in contact with. Why do it? Amazon.com. Go through our portal. It's at dougatrussell.com.

It costs you nothing. And they give us a very small percentage of whatever you buy. We're also sponsored by Audible, which has fantastic audiobooks. You can listen to my friend David McClain's audiobook. The answer to the riddle is me. If you go to audibletrial.com forward slash family

hour, sign up for a trial membership, you will get a free audiobook. You can cancel at any time. And of course, as always, we are sponsored by Shirt Design T-shirts. These sweet darlings, they make these shirts that are so incredibly soft. It used to be when I wanted to feel something soft when I

was a kid, I'd have to sneak into my grandmother's bedroom while she was sleeping and gently stroke her hair and cry into her open mouth, my salty tears running down her lips and into the creases of her wrinkles. And then before she would wake up, I would leave and go back into my room. Those were the days, childhood. What a wonderful time.

But now if you want to revisit what it felt like to stroke your soft Grammy's hair, all you have to do is go to ShirtDesignT-shirts.com, order one of their amazing shirts. They've got some incredible designs. Just check them out. They've supported this podcast forever. And they print all of our shirts. Go to ShirtDesignT-shirts.com, put my name in.

You'll get 10% off these wonderful, lovely shirts. And finally, thanks to all of you who have been donating to the podcast. And thanks to all of you who have been buying T-shirts from our shop. We've got new shirts there. We're about to get some new posters, new stickers. Lots of new stuff is coming in, but we have

replenished the stock. So if you went there to try to buy a shirt and couldn't find it, it is now there. So go to DuncanTrustle.com and please pick up one of these shirts. Why not? Connect with other people who listen to this podcast. And maybe you can make little spring babies.

And if not little spring babies, why not have some spring orgasms, people? Come on. Get in the rhythm of nature. Nature is humping right now. That's what this is. Let's just face it. Nature is exploding, pollinating, spraying out its

opulent life jizz on all things. And everything's turning green and yellow and red and colorful and beautiful. As nature has this mega-orgasm, which we call spring. Dive into the mega-orgasm. And why not dive into the mega-orgasm, which is the DuncanTrustle Family Hour Forum? Join our forum.

Sign up. Get in on the conversation. I want some smarties in there. We need some scientists. No more anti-semitic conspiracy theorists. Come on. I want some goddamn Neil deGrasse Tyson's in there. Some Dawkins in there.

Are you smart? Are you a professor? Are you in college? Are you a genius? Go join my forum, please. And even if you're not a genius, but you're somebody who doesn't believe in chemtrails, I'd love you to go there and join the forum.

And if you're someone who does believe in chemtrails and has proof, join the forum. But try to write about chemtrails without talking about the Jewish conspiracy. Please. If you could do that, it would really make me happy. And also, please don't use the term no homo ever again. Everyone on Earth.

Please don't use that term anymore. If you follow, you could write the new Walden. And if you ended it with the term no homo, everything that came before it would automatically seem irrelevant and stupid. Go join the forum. We need to spice it up in there. I need fresh blood in there, people.

Come on. Sign up at dunkintrustle.com. Join the forum. There's a Minecraft server and lots of really cool people there who I have grown to love. So thank you guys for tuning into the Dunkin' Trussell Family Hour podcast. And now, please welcome the great Psychonaut and Psychedelic

Advocate, Amber Lyon. You can find links to her website, her Twitter, and various social media stuff at dunkintrustle.com. Hare Krishna. I'm here with Amber Lyon. And hello, Amber. Hey, Dunkin. Thanks for having me.

It's an honor to be here. I love the podcast. Thank you. I've been looking forward to this conversation for months now, because we started talking several months ago. And you were traveling at the time. What were you doing? What were you doing on your journeys over the last year?

I was tripping around the world, literally. I spent the past year investigating psychedelic medicines and how native cultures have been using them for thousands of years. And I traveled to Peru. I went to Thailand, Indonesia, southern Mexico, where they use medicinal psilocybin mushrooms. And then I think when we last spoke, I was in Indonesia

just about to finally wrap up my trip and come back to the US. I've been living out of a backpack for a year now. An entire year. An entire year. I just was so enamored after I tried ayahuasca, and I saw so much potential in ayahuasca to help cure all these mental disorders we're facing in the West. And so once I returned, I put all my stuff in storage or sold it,

grabbed a backpack, and then I've been traveling ever since. Before this journey, what were you doing? I was working on an investigative news website and also finishing up a book, Peace, Love, and Pepper Spray, which covered photographic essays of protest across the United States. Right. And that was your job.

You've been a journalist for how long have you been a journalist? For 10 years. 10 years you've been a journalist. And you've worked for CNN. You've been a correspondent on CNN. You have been in the front lines of some of the most terrible places on Earth. Is that fair to say?

Yeah, it is. I covered conflict. I covered protest. I also covered some of the most disgusting topics on Earth. I spent a lot of time covering child sex trafficking and sex slavery, as well as drug addiction epidemics with opioid prescription pain pills. And so I spent a fair amount of the past 10 years

looking at the most disgusting underbelly of society. What drew you into that? What made you want to report that kind of stuff to the rest of the world? I just felt such empathy for all of these victims, especially when I'd meet them. I noticed that a lot of society kind of discounted their stories and wasn't paying attention to them.

And I knew through my light and through my reach that I could help amplify their stories so hopefully they would get more help, which actually ended up happening for some of my stories, especially when it came to online child sex trafficking. I did one story. And the result of that craigslist shut down their worldwide adult services section where these children were being trafficked.

So the stories were having an effect. But I definitely focused on the worst of the worst. And how much of it? So it was a sort of altruism that was drawing you and into that trade and to getting that stuff out there. It wasn't the desire to just be in the presence of darkness. It was because you wanted to help. I wanted to help.

But now that I've done a lot of research and personal experimentation with the medicines, I do believe it was a little bit of my pain body. Can you just find pain body? It's the part of your soul that just seeks negativity to try to keep you from being the person you could be, from reaching your full potential. It's almost like a resistance if you're

a fan of Stephen Pressfield and the War of Art. It's your resistance to reaching your full potential so you constantly surround yourself with negativity because you have a fear of being happy. And that was happening to you as a journalist. Over the 10 years that you're covering these types of things, you think that this was a defense mechanism against being happy, disguised as altruism,

or just a little of both? I think it was a little bit of both, because I'm a very empathetic person, so I felt very strongly for these individuals. But I also do think it was a part of my soul that only wanted to look at the dark and shine light on the dark instead of shining light on the light, which I now know is a lot more effective journalistically.

And that's the path I'm taking now. I realized I was doing it all wrong, Duncan. I spent 10 years just doing it wrong on the wrong path. And the medicines have really shown me that if I really want to make a difference, I need to start highlighting solutions and highlighting ways that we can help cure this mental disorder and insanity facing our culture,

which leads to all the symptoms that I was covering before, which would be the wars, the child sex trafficking, and the slavery. These are all just kind of fruits on this gigantic tree. And when I watch the news, generally, it doesn't make me feel empowered. When I watch the news, and I also like to watch the news and watch dark things.

And since I've been practicing mindfulness, I'm fully aware of the fact that when I go to watch the news, it's for nothing more than to activate the pain body or the fear body. It's just I'm getting off on it. Like, there's something that I'll actually go through different news sources. I'll go from the least scary to the most scary.

So maybe I'll start it like having to post. And then if that doesn't give me enough of a fear rush, I'll head to Drudge Report. And then just find the most awful thing ever for no reason other than it gives me this strange feeling of getting high in a really dark way. Kind of reminds me of the same impulse that leads me to smoke.

Or it's that same weird like, let's find something shitty to do. Yeah, it's resistance to reaching your full potential and being happy, Duncan, which you deserve to be. And so many people around the country deserve as well. And I think this is an illness that so many of us are facing. People spend all day long on the internet crawling down

that rabbit hole, researching crimes by the US government from 1907. And really just absorbing their lives in all this negativity and hate when there's so much beauty in this world. And if we can focus on that in solutions and curing all of this insanity, and really getting at the core of that, then I

think we'll be on a better path. I want to play you this clip from this is one of my favorite Bill Hicks jokes. And can I just play it for you? It's about three minutes. Yes, of course. I'm a huge fan of his. I just don't fit in, man.

I don't fit in anywhere. That's my problem. You know my problem? I watch too much news. I don't know if you've ever, ever, ever sat and watched CNN longer than, say, 20 hours in one day. I've got to cut that out. You ever watched CNN headline news

for any length of time? It's the most depressing fucking thing you will ever do. War, famine, death, AIDS, homeless, recession, depression, war, famine, death, aid. Then you look out your window. It's just, peep, peep, peep, peep, peep, peep, peep, peep. Where is all this shit happening, man? Ted Turner is making this shit up.

Shane Fonda won't sleep with him. He runs to a typewriter. By 1992, we will all die of AIDS. Read that on the air. I don't get laid. Nobody gets laid. I mean, I'm writing, Shane Fonda. Will you fuck this guy so we can get some good news, please?

I want to see a well-laid Ted Turner newscast. Hey, it's all going to work out. Here's sports. That big stupid grin. I'm getting laid right now. Fuck it. Hey. I love that bit and that idea that it's all going to work out.

That idea is a revolutionary idea. And it's an idea that, for some reason, people reject. We don't want to accept that idea. We want to imagine that maybe it's not going to work out. And if you believe it's not going to work out, then that disempowers you. It makes you feel incredibly helpless in the world. And that feeling of helplessness, I think,

is more towards the root system of this tree that grows all these other horrible things. And I think what's really fascinating about what's happening to you is that you have gone from being a person who is drawing the attention of the planet in the direction of this darkness that's always been here. I think it's always been here. To a person who now, because of your encounter

with these plant medicines, is in the beginning phases of trying to turn people's attention towards something else. And can you talk a little bit about what this something else is? Yeah, for sure. It all came from a really profound ayahuasca experience I had.

And in that experience, my old self actually died. I had fasted for five days, and I took this cambo frog medicine, which really releases the toxins out of your body. So my body was prepared to actively absorb this ayahuasca, like I'd never absorbed it before. And at this point, the ayahuasca wasn't just acting as a psychoactive medicine. It was also acting as a ladder to reach me

to a higher intelligence that was giving me a download of information. And right after I drank the ayahuasca, I started feeling like I was dying. And I literally was having trouble breathing. I was thinking, has anyone died from ayahuasca before? How do I call 911? I'm in Indonesia.

What are the numbers to dial? And I really started freaking out. And 100%, I just knew I was dying. And I remember looking over at my boyfriend, thinking how sad it was. I wasn't going to see him again. And then next thing I know, I just shot out of my body and looked back at my body and felt guilty too,

that I couldn't. Why could everyone else in the room hold onto their body and stay alive? And I couldn't. And at that point, this higher presence came down and told me, you guys think death exists? It's so silly. You're not really amber.

You're this vibration which I had become, this vibration floating through the universe, this soul. And amber is just your organic spacesuit that allows you to survive on Earth. Really, you'll never die. You're always this soul. Maybe just put in different spacesuits each time you come back.

And it was so profound because before I wasn't very spiritual. I didn't really believe in life after death. And now I am a firm believer because it was such an intense message. And right after that, this presence brought me through the universe it felt like. I was just shooting down this vortex.

And I saw all the fighting happening on Earth. And all the wars and then black and red were flashing and all the negativity. And I saw that. And then right away, I was drugged to this. My attention was shined on this huge presence and force. And I don't know, call it God or just something my brain was making up.

But it was so intense and it shined this intense, intense energy and light on me that really showed me at that point how trivial all the fighting was compared to this force and that I needed to focus on this force. And in that message, the force gave me a message of love, focusing on love and focusing on healing our sickness, our mental sickness. And it's almost like explaining a dream, Duncan.

It's hard to put ayahuasca experiences in words. But I was so profoundly changed by the comparison of those forces of the negativity versus focusing on healing that it's permanently cemented in my brain. I can't even go back to focus on that stuff anymore. And it means it's so trivial. It seems so trivial because now I

do know, and this force has shown me, the core of all of our problems is from our mental health disorder. And we really need to focus on ways to try to cure that. And these plant medicines are often ways to do so. What is this mental health disorder? Can you specifically define it? What is it?

Yeah, it's a disorder of the limbic system. So that's the area of the brain that focuses on emotion and mental processing, processing trauma. And what's happened is because we've removed these native plants and just our connection with nature in many ways, we've lost our ability to really process trauma.

And so so many of us are walking around each day, which is trauma bottled up inside of us, about to explode. And that manifests itself in bodily pain, or anxiety, or depression. And it's really harming. It's often at the root of all the negativity that we're seeing around the world.

So if we're able to get in and reprocess this trauma, like native cultures do, then we can really lose a lot of this negativity. So do you think psychedelics, plant medicines, are the only way to process this trauma? Or did this force show you other ways that people can use to deal with this bottled up darkness? I think love, love, and spirituality,

and connecting with people around you as well. I think for some people, psychedelics, like for me at the time I went down to try ayahuasca, it really was, I could never in the mental state I was in, have sat down and meditated, or sat down with a therapist. For me, I knew it was my only option. But I still think there are other ways people can process this trauma through psychotherapy,

through antidepressants, which work for some people. Also through floating, meditation, yoga. There's many other ways. But I think when those ways have run out and you've kind of hit a brick wall, psychedelics are the next best answer. And for me, it was really like 30 years of therapy in one night. And it was a very rapid treatment.

When I, I remember the first time that I met Ragu Marcus, who runs the Love Server Member Foundation for Ram Dass, and he was on the podcast. And I'd been reading Ram Dass forever, but I was kind of nervous about meeting somebody from that organization. Because I thought, oh, what if he's like, slimy or weird, or you know, just like it's all bullshit.

And then I have to kind of, it's gonna speak, it's gonna point in the direction of, my bullshit meter is gonna go off, and then I'm gonna maybe not trust this Ram Dass story or teachings as much, if this is a person who is also a disciple of his guru. And I remember meeting him, and his vibe was so incredible. He was, you know, just a normal person,

but this thing coming out of him was instantly transformative for me. And that's what I get from you. It's the same kind of thing. You've got this glow, this focus, and this glow. And your boyfriend who's here too has the same thing. And other people that I've met, like Aubrey Marcus, who've encountered Ayahuasca,

it's all a very similar, I don't know what to call it, a kind of like loving tranquility or something that's billowing out of you guys. And it really speaks for the potency of this medicine. So it's amazing, it's just a little frustrating because I don't wanna die or throw up. I don't wanna throw up. And not only do I not wanna throw up, I don't wanna die.

I'm terrified of the snakes. I don't wanna get bitten by spiders. I'm afraid of the heat. I don't wanna, there's so many things that like, you know, that scare me about it, because with meditation, I can sit and meditate two, two 15 minute periods a day, maybe if I'm being disciplined, I'm not gonna die.

I'm gonna relax. Well, I think it's part of the experience too, is facing your fears, I mean, I was in a shower and I'd turn around and there'd be cockroaches the size of rolls of quarters running behind my head. And eventually- That's in my shower. At first I got scared of them, but after a while, you just get used to them.

And you face, you really do face your fears, especially when you go down to the jungle and try the ayahuasca. And after you've survived that experience, not only the first dimension part of that experience, but also the other dimensional part, you just feel like such a transformed person, like you can take on anything.

And your worries that you had before seems so trivial. And for me, one of my worries, a big fear of mine was the fear of death, because I'd seen so many of my colleagues or human rights activists or people I'd interviewed along the way either jailed or passed away. And so that became a fear. And the psychedelics have shown me over and over and over

almost every time that I take them, I end up dying in some way. And they've shown me that it doesn't really exist. We don't really die. Your soul will always continue on. Your space suit on this earth, your body may malfunction. But when that happens, your soul leaves, enters the universe. And then, I don't know exactly what happens after that,

but I've been told many times that death doesn't exist. Dying is safe. That's what Ram Dass says. Yeah. Dying is safe. And he also says that the death experience is like taking off a shoe that's too tight on your foot. And it's funny to think that the roots of this tree

that we're talking about, probably are just the fear of death that people are just so, so scared that they're gonna lose everything and that there won't be anything after that. And the modern world, it teaches us this. Science hasn't found a soul. Science hasn't found an afterlife.

Science hasn't found anything more than matter. And so there's this sense of like, when I die, it's over, everything gone. No more experience, just nil, zero on the number line. And that is absolutely terrifying. And I think most of us spend a lot of energy turning our backs to that, you know? So it's exciting to think that psychedelics

are a kind of death simulator. Oh, for sure. And they've done studies just right around the corner here at UCLA Harbor Medical Center and they gave patients who had end-of-life cancer. So they had terminal cancer diagnosis. They knew they were going to die within months or within a year.

And these patients were so anxious, their last weeks on this earth, that they couldn't enjoy their time with their family. They couldn't enjoy their last breath. And so the scientists gave these patients psilocybin in high doses. And they all reported having religious experiences that made them more comfortable with dying

that then proceeded to reduce their anxiety levels. And that experiment has been repeated with similar results. And so that's what to me is so profound about the psychedelic experience, especially with ayahuasca, because it definitely lets you know your place in the universe. And we'll even answer specific questions if you ask.

This is, it's funny because you have to say force. What does Aubrey Marcus say? Everyone's had come up with creative ways to not say God. Like no one wants to say it because that word itself has become so tainted by the bigots and racists and fear mongers who use that as a term to have power over other people. But I like that word and it's a term of convenience I use it.

And I know you have to be careful because you say God and suddenly everyone's like, all right, I'm not listening anymore. But it's, these things are outside of language. We're forced to categorize this whatever it is, this feeling of connection with a much bigger, bigger way beyond anything we can understand a field of intelligence.

And a funny thing about that field of intelligence is it seems to be the most polite thing ever because it doesn't come, it doesn't, it doesn't have a stalker mentality. It's not gonna show up at your house if you don't invite it. You know, it's not gonna do any surprise visits usually. Usually you have to invite it in in some way through some ritual or ceremony.

And then when you realize it's out there, wow, wow, what a beautiful feeling that is. What we're talking about here is going from living in a cell, a tiny little cubicle of understanding of the universe, this place that's so easy to get bored in if you live in this paradigm where it's just, it's all matter, there's nothing else except work, get a good job, work, retire,

play some golf and die. That's boring and hopeless and terrible. But what psychedelics seem to teach, and they're definitely teaching you this and through you, lots of other people, they seem to teach that we have within us the potential to save the world. Whoa, wow, that's crazy to think that.

That's crazy to think that. We feel so disempowered. We feel so hopeless, pathetic and useless that the notion that you can actually save the world, the planet, you could save the world, you could save the world. People don't realize that. 500 years ago, could you save the world?

I don't know, probably not, but now one person with a great idea of this 80,000 people who are gonna listen to this podcast, one of those 80,000 people might not believe they could save the world, even though in their mind, they keep getting these impulses, go do this, go do ayahuasca, go do this volunteer here,

go do this thing, they ignore it, because they think, oh, that's fucking narcissism. Yeah, right, what could I fucking do? That could be Tesla, you know, that could be, what I'm saying is in whatever innovation that person comes up with, whatever idea or philosophy or whatever that is, instead of having to write it down and get it printed out in a printing press,

they could get it to the entire planet in a millisecond. Bam, all over the planet in a fucking second. To me, that is just so profound and exciting, and it's something you won't hear on the news, how incredibly fortunate we are to be born today and how much responsibility we have in this growing age of connectivity and technologically enhanced empathy.

And on that note too, psychedelics also show that the news, they've showed me for sure that the news is trying to divide us and cause all this fear of our neighbors and our community and scared of the guy who's going to rob us or murder us, and they constantly try to divide, divide, divide, divide. And this is something psychedelics have shown me over and over, is how much we are definitely

all in this together on some vibrational way, and everyone is really united. And to really, humans, overall, and I've even noticed this in my career, even when I was covering the worst of the worst, is that overall, people are really amazing and they're good and they've got big hearts and it's time to unite with your neighbors

and get to know your community and form community governments and community actions instead of being so fearful. And that's something that if you sit and watch the news all day long, you're gonna be scared of everybody around you. Because that's what it also is there to do, is make us feel like you said earlier, Duncan,

like we're powerless, and then also everyone around us is some jackass who's trying to kill us. Murderous, kid-ass. You drive through a neighborhood today and you see all these beautiful green lawns. No one's in them. No one's going outside, man. It's a ghost town everywhere.

No kids are playing. If you see a kid outside playing, it's like, oh shit, I hope he's okay. That kid's gonna be carried away by a pedophile in like 10 minutes, he's gone, dead. That's what we learn. I go outside sometimes, like if I end up in nature, because I've watched so many of those,

I shouldn't be alive. I start hearing the- You're a pain buddy. Yes, I start hearing the beginning of that, like Duncan Trussell, when he went out to the LA River to walk his dog, didn't know that he would spend five terrifying days. It's like, you know, that's the story

that we are being told. That's the narrative, is that we are always on the precipice of catastrophe. And the catastrophe is death, death. So that's the great, in horror movies, what's the worst thing that happens to you? Death, what's the worst thing that happens to you in any movie?

Death, that's it, game over. So the idea that that isn't game over, that shifts everything, that changes everything. Because now we would, if people really just knew that, what a different world it would be. The people who have power would have so much less power, it seems like. It's like, what the fuck are you gonna do to us, man?

We're just bubbles, we're gonna pop this bubble, I'll come back as another bubble. You can't do anything to stop it, you know? And these people who have managed to amplify their ego to the point that they become Putin's, and Obama's, and all the various leaders out there, they can't accept the fact that they're us. They don't wanna think like that.

If you think like that, the whole thing gets fucking thrown out. They would love to sit down with all of Congress and every politician worldwide, and just have a nice mushroom circle ceremony. Because not ayahuasca, because ayahuasca would ruin some of them. But just with some mushrooms,

and sit down and see what happens. Or MDMA, better that. MDMA is great at, people will take it who are arrogant or kind of angry, and it will make you love your neighbor. Could you imagine if we took all the world leaders and put them in an MDMA circle? This is the dream.

Yeah, it's a dream of mine now that I've seen how powerful these are. I think it really could make a big difference. But I think everything starts on the grassroots level. And once we start getting over the mainstream news, getting over that fear, getting over our loss of community, then we take our power back.

And above all, like you mentioned, Duncan getting over our fear of death. The, I'm sure you're aware of this NASA just released this frightening thing that people have been tweeting again and again and again. Which is that we are on the precipice of the collapse of industrial civilization. Can I read a little bit of it too?

Yeah, of course. This is from the Daily Mail. Industrial civilization may be heading towards collapse within decades because of its strain on the planet's resources. NASA reports fine. Collapsed civilization may be linked to increased strain on planet's resources.

Studies say rich elites may be responsible for both problems. In both doomsday scenarios predicted by study, poor quote commoners collapse first, later followed by the elites. To avoid collapse inequality must be reduced and population growth must be strictly controlled according to this study. And that is a very dire study.

And what's really particularly spooky about it is it's not coming from somebody staring into their crystals in Pasadena. It's coming from NASA, which gives it this element of credibility. When I hear about ayahuasca, it seems like this is a way that the earth communicates with people.

Do you think that the sudden explosion of ayahuasca or the sudden popularity of ayahuasca is because the planet is aware of the fact that we are sort of moving in the wrong direction and is trying to present us with another path that we can take? I do think ayahuasca is cleaning our souls and cleaning this madness out of humanity,

one body at a time. And it's spreading very rapidly and a lot of shamans have spoken to agree with that philosophy too. And because what ayahuasca is so effective in doing is clearing out the trauma, actually science shows that it repairs your limbic system, it repairs your serotonergic system,

and long-term ayahuasca users have more serotonin, higher serotonin levels, so they're happier and they're more loving. And that's a message I get repeatedly with the ayahuasca is just to be more loving, to love humanity. And for me personally, it has physically cleared away my trauma and any of this anger and dark energy

I was holding in my body. And even one time I had, when I was on the ayahuasca, this fairy type being came in front of my body and started pulling out this dark energy one person at a time and the energy was shaped in faces of people who I'd interviewed over the years. Whoa.

And I, because what I had been doing as a Submersion journalist is really absorbing their pain when I'd watched someone sex trafficked, when I'd see someone shoot up drugs, when I'd see someone killed, that pain, I was so empathetic and I would absorb it because I felt like I had to absorb it to understand the story.

I felt like I needed to understand why is that addict shooting up? I needed to feel their pain to try to get the story. And so I had all of these people's negative energy stored in me and the ayahuasca pulled it out one person at a time. And I really felt like the ayahuasca was going in and just repairing all my cells and repairing my DNA.

And some shamans I've talked to also believe that ayahuasca is really curing our problem with epigenetics. And epigenetics is the science saying that if you face trauma, your DNA actually changes and you become more likely to be, your future generations become more likely to be mad.

And so what the ayahuasca is doing is actually getting in our bodies and restructuring that DNA to get rid of the bad epigenetics and then to kind of perfect the DNA. So future generations maybe hundreds of years from now don't have all of this trauma and all of this madness. Right, hundreds of years from now.

It feels, doesn't it feel like whatever is happening is moving much quicker than worrying about a hundred years from now? But doesn't it feel like this is, that there is, you know, Terrence McKenna, he was obviously one of the most renowned psychedelic advocates and psychonauts ever. And he emphasized again and again how important this is.

I want to just want to read a quote from McKenna if I could. Here's the deal. We have the science, the technology, the money, the infrastructure to do almost anything that we want to do. The problem is changing our minds. We have a hell of a time changing our minds and yet we must, there's no choice about it.

The reason I'm a psychedelic advocate is not because I think it's easy or because I think it's a sure thing. I don't think it's easy or a sure thing. It's simply that it's the only game in town. Nothing else can change your mind on a dime like we are going to have to change our minds on a dime. If we had 500 years to sort this out,

we could maybe have a fighting chance without radical pharmacological intervention. As it is, if we don't awaken, we are going to let it slip through our fingers. And if hortatory preaching could do it, I don't know what that means, then the Sermon on the Mount would have turned the trick. It didn't and it won't.

You have to somehow give people an experience, an experience that is not somebody else's experience. Their experience, their experience that radically recrystallizes their understanding of the world and these shamanic plants that have been quietly growing and maintaining themselves from millennia are in fact. And for what reason, it's beyond me.

For some reason, these are pipelines into a kind of planetary mind. The big bugaboo of Western civilization is that we deny the existence of spirit. It's been a thousand year project to eliminate the spirit from all explanations of how reality works or the personality works or anything works.

The absence of spirit permits the murder of the planet, but the cost of the denial of spirit is life empty of meaning, which doesn't mean we have to return to the world of beady-eyed priestcraft and its slimy minions, but it does mean that we have to recover an authentic experience of the transcendental. And apparently what this means then

is fusion with nature and the psychedelics do this. They dissolve boundaries, they open the way to the guy in mind. Wow, that's somewhat a beautiful way to describe it. Yeah, isn't that great? And these shamans are some, what is a shaman? How do you define a shaman? I'd say they're experts who've been working

with the medicine for some of them their entire lives and they're really able to use, in the case of ayahuasca, they're really able to use ayahuasca to heal. Some shamans are able to actually help physically heal people while they're on the ayahuasca. Others are able to see visions of the future to potentially protect their tribe. And others are just experts in the medicine

and able to serve it up and keep the good spirits in and the bad spirits out. Is there a name for their religion that uses ayahuasca, whatever that is in South America, what do they call that? Well, there are a couple of churches that actually mix Catholicism with the ayahuasca. One is the Santo Daimei Church and the other one is the UDV or United Vegetal Church.

And they actually sit in a church setting and drink the ayahuasca. But this is a new branch on this tree. What, prior to that, is there a name for the religion that these people follow? Is it called a religion? How, what I mean is how old is this, this thing that the shamans are doing?

Because ayahuasca, God knows how old it is. There's no way to tell, but how long have they been practicing this? Some shamans tell me for hundreds of years. I think it varies, but I think for them too, it's not necessarily a religion, it's more just a lifestyle. They constantly would be drinking ayahuasca

to find out how to heal people, to figure out what the weather is going to be like, to see the future, to try to make sure that the village stays safe. And so I think that these shamans, for them, it's more a daily thing versus a religion. So you're saying it's only a few hundred years old? For them, they think that the use of this

only goes back for a few hundred years? A couple shamans that I've spoke to, but other people say that the ayahuasca has been around for thousands of years. So I don't know the exact timeline on it. It's just, it's curious to me, because here in the West, everything's, we have such a, we're really into time and history,

and we could say, with any religion, how old it is, with some degree of accuracy, but something about out there, it feels like there's just things kind of vanished into the green, and you don't know, you just don't know where it's coming from. And my shaman would say, oh, my grandfather, I'd say, how long are you doing this?

How long have you guys been working with the ayahuasca in your culture? And he'd say, oh, well, my father did it, and my grandfather, and my grandfather's father, and then he would just go back on his line, his lineage, and his entire family was devoted to the medicine, but they don't have exact dates.

They, not that I'm aware of. I mean, someone could Google this, and maybe some scientist has figured it out, but anything from hundreds to thousands of years. Do you know, when did ayahuasca start making its way into the West? Are there any first reports of people using it? I think in the 1950s, when Shultes was down there

investigating ayahuasca, some reports of it came into the US, then the 70s, you'd have scientists and explorers going down to the Amazon to sample it, and then I think it really has exploded with just within the past five years. I mean, before that, people would hear about it, think of it as being some kind of jungle brew,

and it mostly stayed down in the Amazon. Now, ayahuasca is being shipped all over the world from the Amazon, so it's like this mother ayahuasca is spreading her tentacles of healing from anywhere to Brooklyn, to the Hamptons, to Panga Canyon, here in California, to areas of Indonesia, where ayahuasca doesn't even grow, to London, it's just spreading all over the world right now,

and people can pretty much access it, and most cities. Do you think it matters where you do it? I think it has, the set and setting is so vital, so I think as long as you're in a good setting that's natural, then, and that's the only way you can access the medicine and you feel a calling to take it, then you should do it there,

but I do think the best setting is definitely down in the Amazon, because you have the spirit of the forest and the energy of all the plants around you, and I think it makes for a more spiritual and profound experience. So this is fascinating to imagine that right now there is an underground, a shamanic underground, where people are gathering together everywhere

and taking ayahuasca in secret, in secret, and that to me is really curious to imagine that we exist in a society where it's drinking this substance that points you in the direction of love, takes the darkness out of you, is illegal. That is maddening to think about that. And most of the people going to these underground, I've been to several of them,

to these underground healing sessions are seeking desperate healing, and whether they have post-traumatic stress disorder, chronic back pain, or they're manic depressive, they're really seeking out this substance as a medicine, not as a Schedule I drug. And I've seen and talked to many people who've had miracles, not to say it works for everyone,

but who've had experienced miracles on this medicine, and it's really sad that it is illegal, but the ayahuasca brew itself hasn't been deemed illegal. It's the DMT that's inside the brew that's illegal. And both churches, the Santo Dome and the UDV Church, the courts in the United States have ruled that it is legal under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act for them to continue to do the medicine.

So that's pretty, that's exciting. I'm just wondering when anyone's going to bring a mushroom religion to the United States. Because it could, because the Mazatecs down in Oaxaca, who I spent some time with, are using the mushrooms medicinally as part of their religion. So when is someone going to bring that up up to the US?

And the Mazatecs, these were the people that Timothy Leary contacted, right? When Huxley and Timothy Leary and that crew came in contact with it, it was through them, right? That's where they found the mushroom. Correct, this banker, R. Gordon Wasson, went down to Wautla de Jimenez, which was a town in Oaxaca, Mexico that I went to as well.

I kind of followed in their footsteps. And he wrote this article about the psilocybin mushrooms, the magic mushrooms of Mexico, and it was published on the cover of Life Magazine. And then that piqued everybody's curiosity, and that's when Leary went down there and rummed us as well and experienced these mushrooms. And then towards the 70s,

you had the Beatles going down there, Jim Morrison, all of these celebrities literally flocking to this area of Mexico to experience the medicinal healing of these mushrooms. And even when you go around some of these small towns, you'll see these people painted, you'll see the Beatles in the cafe painted on the wall. And it's really fascinating,

but we've known since that time, since the 1950s, the power, the magnificent power of psilocybin to heal the human brain. And it's unfortunate that a lot of that research has just been sidelined by the Schedule I classification. Yeah, well, and it's been, I mean, this tendency of power to try to obscure love, it just always happens.

It just seems to be built into the machine that we're existing inside of. All the way back to Christianity, early Christians had to draw fish in the sand. They had to disguise that they were Christians because they were throwing those assholes to lions, man. And for what? Because they just loved,

because they were saying the most important thing is love. Love is more important than power. Love is more important than money. Love is more important than your job. Love is more important than food. Love is the only thing that matters. What is love? Love is the highest tech, it's high tech.

It's the, it seems to be the way that whatever this transcendent force is, contacts this dimension is just purely through love, through whatever that is, that fractal. So when you come in contact with love, it doesn't matter what it is. Love for your dog, love for someone you're falling in love with,

love for anything, love for yourself. You can like meditate just on that feeling and within that feeling is every scripture, every poem, every work of art, every great thing. It's in that experience. And for whatever reason, these people running the show don't want us to come in contact with that library

or whatever you wanna call it. Because if we all loved and we all felt a sense of community and love for everyone, like this genuine pure love, like I felt from that presence or God who I felt when I was on psychedelics, if everyone was able to feel that, then they wouldn't be able to treat us as slaves anymore

and they wouldn't be able to have the power that they have. Who are they? I know, that's a damn good question, Duncan. I've been spending years trying to figure that out. I don't think there's one or two people pulling the strings. I think it's just a system that's gotten out of control. And now we're being,

the show's being run by corporations, not even by governments and people. And the bottom line for these corporations and these banks is to make a profit at any cost, whether that be human life, environmental destruction or just this insanity and all these wars that they're starting. And so I think that's the problem.

The system itself is flawed. And so we need to get in and start fixing the system from the ground up. Earlier you were talking about organizing. Can you go into some more detail about that? What's something someone listening to this could do? Even if they don't have ayahuasca or mushrooms. I think what's really effective now

is if people use social media and share information, share information that, not just information that's going to scare everyone, make them think they're going to die or the world's going to end, but share positive information, share news articles that focus on solutions, that focus on natural medicines and plants

and just share those within their networks and really just be their own advocate amongst their friends. And I think that's an easy way that people can get involved. Even if you only have 10 Twitter followers, that's still 10 people receiving that message who wouldn't have received it had you not shared it. Right, yeah, right, exactly. That's a really easy thing.

Like the next time you're about to tweet that fucking NASA, goddamn NASA report, which I've gotten at, replied maybe 700 times by now, the world's ending. And I only bring it up because, I only bring up the NASA report about the collapse of industrial civilization, not because I want to spread darkness, but only because I want to point out

that there is an imperative to act, like to stop putting off saving the world. I had this fantasy, you know, that like, what if that's when you die, what happens is, you know, you come out of whatever virtual reality simulator, holodeck, super advanced machine, you come down from the wonderful psychedelic that was given to you by whatever alien

that's your father, mother, whatever. And the alien says, oh, no, no, no. See, you were supposed to save the world. So we're going to send you back in. And then you go back in again and again and again and again and again and you do this thing over and over and over and over again. And that funny moment when you come out

of this limited conception of yourself as an amber or a Duncan or whatever your name is, and you realize like, oh, shit. Wait, you mean I, I didn't just have to be a tax attorney? You mean I literally could have saved the entire planet? I could have been part of this wave of love that swept around this planet and created this transformation that we all know is possible.

We can all feel it. That's the frustrating thing. I think anyone who's got half awake feels the potential, not just for the flash of the fucking nuclear lights, but for this, I don't know what it is. We can't even imagine what it is, but this wave of perfection growing out of the planet.

And it's really intense when you start feeling that that could happen because you start feeling like, well, maybe I'm going crazy. And you're not because we're all involved collectively and shifting the direction that the human species is about to, or the cliff we're about to jump off of. And it's so important for people to, like you were saying, Duncan, to follow their passions.

And if they don't want to be a tax attorney, start working now to find your way out of it. And when you follow your passion, success almost always follows. That's what you did. Yes. This is an important thing to realize. Because you were, I mean, you're working for CNN. You're a hardcore journalist.

So, I mean, you're going to like, by suddenly diving into the world of psychedelics, that has to shut some doors for you. That's not just a, that's a big decision to make that leap, right? And I made it because I know I'm following my passion. I'm so passionate about these medicines now. And I've done that throughout my career.

Whenever I know I'm really passionate about something, I always know that I'm going to be able to give it more energy. And it won't be a nine to five job for me. It will be a lifetime experience. And so I'll always do better, or at least be able to succeed because people will feel that passion. And when you follow your passion,

most likely you're not going to be able to fail. And I've done that my entire career. It's terrifying. Yeah, it is. But it always works out in the end. It's always, it's weird the way the universe works. When you're following your true self, things always just kind of magically

or mysteriously fall in place. And almost to the point, you have to like pinch yourself sometimes and say, was this all planned beforehand? I want to tell you though, once I got on the phone with someone who listens to the podcast, a friend of mine, I met him because he listens to the podcast,

but he emailed me and wanted to talk. And I thought, all right, well, I want to talk to him because he's cool. So I called him out, we're talking. And he said, you know, you and Joe talk about just like getting out of whatever the thing is that you're doing and following your dream. But he's like, that doesn't always work.

He's like, you can't just quit your job. He's like, I'm poor. I can't find a job now. I don't, you know, like you're telling people to just jump, jump, jump. But isn't that irresponsible Amber? Isn't it, are we Pied Pipers? Are we being the Pied Piper?

Making people think that they can do this? Or do you really believe that it's gonna work out? Cause sometimes I'll get an unnerving email from someone who's like, you know, I listened to your podcast and I just want you to know I just quit my job of five years as a secretary and I'm going to pursue my dream. And I love it, but simultaneously I'm like, oh fuck.

What have I just done? Yes. Well, I believe in the long term it will work out because you're doing what you love. And I often say what's worse, being a slave to something you hate for the rest of your life until all of a sudden you wake up and say, I should have done what I love, but now it's too late

because I only have a certain amount of time left on earth. Life is so short. Do what makes you happy. And that doesn't mean you have the capability. And I understand a lot of people don't have the capability to just quit their job and then start something new. But that doesn't mean at night when you come home

from the nine to five slave job that's just paying your bills that you don't then start working on your next project and building those two up simultaneously. I've done that many times. And then when my next project is ready for me to take over where I can rely on it financially, then I leave the slave project.

And so many people, it's so sad. So many people are just kind of getting by with no stimulation, not following their passion and their true love. And life is so short. And they're doing that because they're addicted to comfort because they've confused comfort with being alive. And that's really bad.

Cause I know when I think about going to do ayahuasca, the thing that's keeping me away from doing it is it's not comfortable. It's not comfortable. It's gonna be, it's gonna hurt. I know it's gonna hurt. And I know it's gonna be brutal. And I know it's gonna be like, it's gonna suck.

And I think this is a funny thing people seem to forget. They forget that healing doesn't feel good usually. Usually whatever the thing is. You know, when you get a cold, you're not sick. You're getting better. You're experiencing your immune system, responding to whatever's gotten into your body that doesn't need to be there.

You know, when you're getting, when you're, it's like what you were telling me when people are throwing up on ayahuasca. What do they call that? Getting well. Yes. Yes. And that's a problem.

We have such a confusion. And I think this is just, that's a symptom of the confusion right now in Western society about what's a medicine and what's a drug. And we have a lot of drugs being disguised as medicines that just temporarily make you feel better. Yes, they do.

Yes. And I love many of them. And they never really get to the core problem. And so it's just putting a band-aid on a bullet wound. And what a medicine is supposed to do and what I've learned from these plant medicines is kind of make it a little bit of hell while you're on them.

Which sometimes is only a matter of hours. And then you go through absolute hell. You're purging your body of all these toxins, this negative energy, this trauma, this pain. And then you wake up feeling great and feeling like you had years of therapy in one night. So it's a bit of suffering while you're on these medicines. But once you're done, they often prove to be quite healing.

Well, it's death. I mean, you are inviting people to die. You're saying just, it's time to die. You gotta die. You've gotta, you've gotta, I mean, I bet when snakes shed, it doesn't feel that great. And I bet when the caterpillar is turning

into the butterfly, I bet it doesn't feel that great. If it, I don't know what caterpillars feel. I like to imagine that they're really smart and professorial and read and stuff. And it's like, what's happening to my body? I'm melting, this sucks. And then they become this brand new thing. But when Jesus Christ in the Bible says,

you must die to this world to come to know me. Or when Buddha says, wait, I woke up. Both of these things are different ways of saying, I dropped what I was and I permanently, I permanently dropped what I was. And that's what you're saying. You're saying that this thing, your fear body, pain body, it's gone from you now.

It's completely gone. I feel like I've been reborn on many occasions. And it's just, I can't even take it seriously when I watch all the wars and the fighting and the madness because I know to focus my attention on that is such a waste of time. And this force showed me that and said, I need to focus more on love and healing

because until we're able to heal, we'll never get rid of the symptoms, which is all the madness you're seeing on the news. And so as a society, we need to shift our focus to healing this insanity and all of this trauma. And then we'll be able to cure the symptom. And I do feel like it's really strange, but I do feel like I've been reborn.

And a lot of people, if you're gonna do psychedelics, you gotta be prepared for that, especially if you've developed a personality throughout life as kind of a coping mechanism that isn't really you. So many of us are carrying those personalities, whether we needed to develop it to survive as a child or what happened throughout life that causes us to develop it.

And sometimes if you're carrying a personality that isn't you, the psychedelic's going to show you the real you. And for some people that can either be an extremely beautiful experience or it can be really traumatic. Traumatic, because we put a lot of work into these egos, polishing them, looking, get it, man,

I mean, some of us have gotten so good at being cool. And we've really perfected, like being the smartest or the most beautiful or the most articulate or whatever the fucking thing is that we think is so great about us, we've just gotten so good at it. An idea of demolishing all that work and just throwing it back into the abyss,

it is scary, it's a lot of investment into this costume. And for many people, when they go down, I mean, I don't know if I'd say many, but for myself and others I've talked to, you shouldn't make life big plans before you go, because sometimes you do come back, not completely different, but a different person and what interested you before, like for me,

which was all the fighting and the wars and the negativity, doesn't interest you anymore. And that's what happened to me. I was starting an investigative news website, which was very much muckraking darkness, let's get the bad guys type site. And suddenly after one or two ayahuasca experiences, I realized I was heading down the completely wrong direction.

And that wasn't the real me. And so I had to go back to my crew and let them know that I had to change, completely change. I bet when I come back, I become a tax attorney. I just dropped the whole podcast hippie thing. And I'm like, I just want to get in the tax world, work on that. I think that's the best life for me.

I just, that's what the ayahuasca told me. I bet when you come back, you're going to feel calling to go to India and you'll become like a Ram Dass for sure. Well, that's, you know, a lot of comedians, you know, when we start talking about spiritual stuff or the idea of love or the idea of the awakening, they'll say, yeah, but I won't be funny anymore.

What's going to happen to my job? Like if I do this, it's, I'm not gonna, my life is gone. Like if my income will go away. The way that I, you know, my, I'm not gonna, revenue streams will be cut off. Like, you know, sometimes comedians, if they're really fat, they get in this terrible trap because all their jokes are rubbing fat.

They have to acknowledge it. And a lot of them just talk about fat, fat, fat, fat, fat. So now their disease and their lack of health and their, you know, something that's probably gonna make them die young is tied in with their way to live. It's so, so that's just an extreme example of this thing. And I think so many other people just think, well, I don't want to give it up, Amber.

I don't want to give up my life. I don't, I don't want to, I don't want to lose this, this tiny little acreage of the universe that I've cultivated with fear seeds. And I don't want to stop growing my terror corn. You know? Yeah. And I think when the fear is just resistance,

it's resistance to change. And if you're happy, then by all means, don't do psychedelics, you don't need them. If you feel healed and you feel genuinely happy and feel loved and everyday life, then you don't need psychedelics. But more for the people who aren't happy, what's the worst that could happen?

You're already not happy. Life is so short. So why not take the risk? What if you do lose the comedian job, but then gain a job as a famous spiritual healer and you're really following your true passion and you're happy and glowing with happiness every day, then what's worse?

I mean, what's on the other side? I think instead of looking at the glass half empty, we should look at it half full and say what awaits us if we're actually following our true calling in life. And that, I think that you're underplaying a little bit your courageousness because not everybody can take that dive. You know, when I was a kid,

I was always the last one to jump off the high dive. Like I was like, fuck you guys. I know it's safe. Everyone's like swimming around down there, having fun, waving at you, making fun of you, like John Buzzy, you can do it, just fucking jump. What's wrong with you? When you're looking down, your heart's pounding

and your hands are shaking. You know, like I've got to take this fucking jump. If I climb back down that ladder, they will never, ever stop making fun of me. I've got to dive in. And you seem to be the kid who was always the first one doing like barrel rolls off the thing or like doing cartwheels off the thing.

Not all of us can do that, Amber. Yeah, I know and I have an abnormal amount of fear, but I hope through showing people my own story that maybe it will give them a little bit of inspiration because things haven't gone to hell for me. You know, I am not currently working on that other project anymore, but I've planted the seeds to a new project.

Reset.me. Reset.me, so when you need to hit the reset button in life, that's who we hope to head to our website. And Terence McKenna describes psychedelics as kind of hitting the reset button on your brain, clearing your hard drive of all this trauma and just starting over mentally as a pure soul. And I believe psychedelics have the power to do that.

So we're going to be covering psychedelic journalism on this site and there's just not enough journalism out there. Most of the news reports on all these amazing substances are reports on people getting arrested or a rare festival death. Rarely do you actually hear that, wait a minute, psilocybin has magic mushrooms, could actually cure your anxiety and depression and PTSD

or MDMA could cure your PTSD or LSD could cure alcoholism. So many people don't have access to this journalism, so we're hoping to create kind of the Huffington Post of psychedelic news to get the positive story out there to really connect those who need healing, who need to hit the reset button with other cures. If they feel like there's no help, we want to definitely be the place they can go

to find potentially other ways they could see healing. That is amazing that you're doing that. It is just amazing to think about that. And I like, the more I've been thinking about getting a chance to sit down and talk with you, the more it's been dawning on me just how incredible what you're doing is just because you're actually, you are, you didn't just,

you know, it's like the Alan Watts quote. Once you get the message, hang up the phone. And a lot of times people take these psychedelics and they get the message, they hear it loud and clear. And they do hang up the phone and then they forget about the message. You're just like, well, fuck that. I just can't deal with that shit, man.

I'm not gonna believe that I exist in some kind of universal extra dimensional entity that's decided to inhabit this little meat bubble of a body where I've gotten confused, there are confused matter as being the source of happiness. Well, people don't wanna accept that, but you're doing that and I think that you, I think that that is incredibly inspirational

to all of us who are still sitting up on that diving board and the effect that that can have on the world, like you just don't know, you just don't know. I wanna ask you something, Amber. Sometimes I get emails from kids and some high school kids listen to this and maybe even younger than that and I'll get emails from them saying,

listen to you talk about psychedelics, I'm gonna take psychedelics, what should I do? And that, whoa, that always gives me the heebie-jeebies because even though when I was in high school, I was always on acid. I would take LSD and go to school every day. It was not every day, but it's like, wow. As often as I possibly could.

If it was around, the best way to take it was definitely take it at school because it's so weird to be in a high school when you're tripping. And I've talked about that, but then the idea of telling kids to do that, now I don't feel like necessarily that is the right thing to do.

I wish that I'd, well, I don't wish that I'd wait it, to be honest, but I don't know. What do you say to the kids? It's tough because in these native cultures, they serve ayahuasca to pregnant women and children. So children and their teens, especially when they're going through those emotional issues and in balanced brain chemistry,

they actually give them ayahuasca to try to help them through that situation. So I don't recommend either way, but what I do say is if you are planning to do it, just to make sure that you follow safety and you also really pay attention to the set and setting. And those are two things that experts can't stress enough throughout history

that when you're going to take psychedelics, if you don't have the set and setting right. It's just defined set, because I think sometimes people don't know what that means. It's your mindset. So what you're seeing, what type of healing you want. And also you just need to make sure you're not in a bad place

when you're actually ingesting the psychedelic. You don't want to be in a bad mindset or just had some trauma happen to you and then you take it and you end up having a really bad trip or if you're really scared. I like, I don't remember where, by the way, I'm not a Christian, but I do talk about the Bible a lot.

There's a, I can't remember, before you take communion, the idea is like before you pray, before you take communion, you have to have forgiven people in your life. That's the advice is like before you come for forgiveness, make sure you've forgiven other people. And I think that's talking about mindset, the set before you,

because I think it is a form of communion when you take a psychedelic. You're communing with something and if you haven't, as much as you can, you can't forgive everybody. It's really hard, but as much as you can, just like try to be in a place where you have let go as much as possible.

And this is why purification, right before you take ayahuasca, isn't there like a very strict purification ritual? You have a very strict diet and then you are purified with water and various herbs. Your body's actually rubbed down to kind of clean this dirt away from you and prepare you for the journey.

And especially with the diet, you have to be extremely strict. And another thing when you take ayahuasca as another part of the purification, also for your safety, you can't be on any prescription antidepressants. So you're not only cleaning your physical body, but you're cleaning the chemicals out of your mind.

What did the herbs smell like they put on your body? Sage and I don't remember exactly what the, it was just a bunch of leaf, like a leaf mixture. So when you're taking ayahuasca, it's not like you're popping some hits of acid and going to the shopping mall to watch people go up the escalator. You're putting a lot of,

there's a lot that goes into it before the experience. For sure. It's a complete ceremony and it prepares you mentally and physically. And ayahuasca is sacred. Ayahuasca shouldn't be taken at a party or just with a bunch of friends. I mean, it's very important to do it ritually

because that way you're really able to get the full experience and it can really come in and do the most healing, which is not going to take place in a club in Brooklyn. That's why it's so wonderful that it makes you throw up. Yes, you can't, you can't move. You're violently vomiting. People are going out both ends.

You just, it's not something you could take and then go dancing, spraying diarrhea all over the strobe lights. You would probably like people literally have violent projectile diarrhea and vomiting and sometimes at the same time. So you, by all means, take ayahuasca and go to a club, but you're going to evacuate.

The whole club's going to have to be evacuated. The floor of the dance floor is just covered in vomit and shit, the hipsters having sobbing seizures in the middle of their own mess. So that's setting. Setting is not a dance club. Setting is, for you, it was being in the jungle, but hopefully wherever you're going to do it,

it's in a place where you feel safe. And see, that's the thing. People have told me when I've talked about wanting to take ayahuasca, they've said, well, you can go up to, go to Malibu. There's people who do it there, but it's just like something about being in a house. It's not the same.

You, if you can, if you have the means to go, now if it's your only resource, then by all means do it in the house. But if you do have the resources, I find it to be much more intense and healing when you're actually in the jungle where the ayahuasca came from with the spirits of the forest,

because they do guide your learning session. Right, the spirits of the forest. That's what people say again and again, is that when you take ayahuasca, people tend to see the same things. Can you talk a little bit about those things people see? Yeah, a lot of people have visions of snakes, and I've never had snake visions,

but you also see a lot of sacred geometry, and I saw a lot of amazing colors. Something else that I tend to be visited by a force a lot, so it's not very animalistic. It's more God-like when I use ayahuasca, but other people tend to see jaguars and really just the spirits of the jungle. Mine have always kind of been out of this world.

I don't know quite what that means yet, but I'm sure I'll find out one day. This is, the snake thing is something that I think is fascinating, because in the Garden of Eden, the snake is the being that encouraged us to eat of this fruit, of the knowledge of good and evil, and people always say,

well, that snake was Satan, because the snake was telling us to wake up, or was going against this command of this whack job who threw these poor, evolved monkeys in some jungle and told them to name everything, and the snake is like, don't listen to that guys, out of this fucking mind, eat this fruit, wake up. Do you think that fruit that they're talking about

was psychedelics, is that psychedelics, or do you ever think about that at all? I know, I haven't thought about that, but I think people will report having positive experiences with the snakes for the most part. I don't know, you may have interviewed people who've seen, who've had devilish or... Never heard of that,

just people seeing this enormous serpent-like being, but people are terrified of snakes. Of course, and so it once again, tests your courage, and you leave the next day after you face the snake that size, you definitely leave a more courageous person. Right, I wanted to ask you about one more thing that I thought was interesting,

when we had coffee, you were talking to someone who just started talking to you, because now you've got this incredible magnetic, ROM-DOS thing that you're... Oh, that was the woman with the cat? Yeah, a woman with a cat and a papoose. I saw her purse moving, and I was like, what the hell,

what are purses moving? And then this cat pokes its head out. Yeah, she was going for it. Like when you're like, you know what, I'm putting my cat, my papoose, and going down to get some coffee, that's, you're going for it. You do not have a worry about

what anyone else thinks about you at that point. Yeah, yeah, but she was talking about, you were telling her that with ayahuasca, you actually begin to have the effects of the experience prior to ingesting the ayahuasca. Can you talk about that a little bit? Some shaman say that it happens three days before, you'll start to feel the medicine,

and then it lasts for three days after, or sometimes even as much as two weeks before and two weeks after, because once again, the medicine's not on our time schedule. And so I... How's this possible? That's a good question, I don't know. And it did happen to me when I first got my calling

to go down and use ayahuasca. It really was like a calling almost. And it really drove me to go down there, and it was almost like the medicine was already starting to work on me as I was heading into the airport, as I was heading onto the plane. You were feeling the love coming into you.

Yeah, I just felt it's okay, everything's going to be all right. You're going to be healed, just get down there. And so I started feeling less anxious and more, even though I was flying over the jungle by myself, which I don't recommend for women. I recommend always to maybe go with a friend. But I just felt a sense of, okay, everything's going to be all right,

even if this seems insane, it will be okay. And is that what you fear? Why do you still fear going down there? What do you think is your biggest obstacle to trying the medicine, or do you feel a calling? I think I'm going to think about my mom dying, and I think it's going to hurt really bad. And I think I'm going to think about a lot of stuff

that's happened to me recently. And I think it's going to, it's like what you're saying. Like I know I still have these traumas inside of me that I want to get out. But I mean, like I have my mom's laptop here. I can't even open it. I can't open it without crying. Like I can't even look at it, it's too much.

So I know, but I know that this is the same thing when I drink too much, and I'm lying in bed, and I'm like feeling like I got to throw up. You got to get this tequila out of your body, man. You just have to, you're going to end up, this other part of you is like, no, just fall asleep. Just fall asleep, you don't have to go throw up. Hold it in, hold it back.

You know, that's, I think that's a pretty big part of it is I feel guilty. I feel guilty that I didn't, that I wasn't there for her enough when she, in her last few years. And so I just know, I feel like I've got like a, I've got to face that head on and I'm terrified to do that. And you do because otherwise,

and this is what happens to so many people, is a lot of times physical illness is a sign of mental trauma, limbic system trauma, manifesting itself in physical illness. So for instance, my father is very anxious, and now he has a horrific backache, and they can't figure out where it's coming from, and it's left him immobilized for a couple years.

He's thinking of going down and doing ayahuasca. So when you carry all this trauma through your mother's death and sad experiences that have happened, and you don't let it go, you're going to get most likely physically sick. So it's almost physically necessary to go down and process this, as well as, have you ever thought of how amazing it would be

to just be able to let those bricks on your shoulders just go and be just free? And I think that's what I can't guarantee, but for many people who are facing grief, they do go down and try the ayahuasca, and it will allow you to part with those memories and maybe finally say goodbye to your mother. And some people are visited by relatives

who've recently passed away, and they feel like they get closure, and I think that would be so healing for you to be able to do that. And that's a fear I had too, Duncan, when I went down there, I said, what the hell's gonna come up? Because I had memories, I didn't even remember,

I remembered, of really traumatic situations, and I've always felt better the next day. I'll just put it that way. I'm a million times better. And so even though you're going through suffering maybe for those six hours to process those memories and learn from them, you're going to feel better when it's done.

So it's just like, bite your lip, give it hell, go through it. Dive off, then fucking pull off that high dive. And then go in, because you can't physically carry around that kind of trauma before it manifests itself in something else, which could potentially be a physical illness, and for me, I had so much trauma, it came out as anxiety.

And that's where my anxiety got so bad. I was having trouble even writing, and I'm a journalist, and I couldn't even sit down to write. Maybe if I do it and get rid of this sadness, my hair will start growing back. You never know. It can cure autoimmune diseases. A lot of these diseases, MS, sometimes they even say,

I've talked to a couple of shamans who say they are able to cure erectile dysfunction, not to say that you have that, but also that could be... That's something the trauma hasn't messed up, thank God. But you never know, a lot of guys don't know that too, is that there's a potential medicinal value in that area from these medicines too,

because that dark energy just manifests itself in other ways, and you need to get that out of your body. And that's where Western medicine has failed, because they just address the symptom, which is the back pain, but not really what's at the core of that. And that's not to say if you're in a violent car accident and you have back pain,

that Western medicine can't heal you, but if you're having unexplained illnesses, then, and you can't, Western medicine hasn't worked to treat them, you may wanna start looking toward the route towards psychedelics and ayahuasca. Well, I can speak for that, because the one time I did DMT,

I had this chest pain that I'd had for 11 years, gone to the doctor for it. I'd had x-rays, chiropractors, nothing would get rid of it. And so I just sort of dealt with it. Like there's always this constant weird pain in this one part of my chest. And I did DMT, smoked DMT,

and these tubes came out of nowhere into that exact place, that presence that you're talking about. There's this sense of like, just accept this, accept it, accept the love. Now, it doesn't talk, but that was the sense of like, just for once, just take it. And then gone, it was gone, still gone, hasn't come back,

gone, we're talking a decade of this thing that had been bothering me. Now, what the fuck is that? What is that? I have to report on that because it definitely happened to me. So I know when you say healing, you don't mean like, I don't know,

you're gonna feel like better. You mean literally, well, feeling better is part of feeling, but you mean you're going to change in the direction of not being sick anymore. It's not a temporary, it's not like taking Vicodin or snorting Adderall or something, or you get a few hours.

We're talking a lifetime transformation. That's what's happened for me. I felt a lifetime transformation by far. I feel great. I feel like the bricks of life have been lifted off my shoulder and I can finally be free and be my true self. And that's what psychedelics have given me

and it's such a beautiful gift. But I mean, not to say I didn't suffer through my experiences. I had some pretty intense experiences, but at the end of the day, it was worth it. And psychedelics don't work for everybody, but the majority of people I've talked to on my journey and I think the majority of users of ayahuasca

come out of it a better person. And even if you look, the science is there. They studied long-time ayahuasca drinkers in these churches in Brazil and they found that they really did have elevated serotonin levels. And that every one who had come into the church addicted to cigarettes or alcohol or drugs

had quit after regular ayahuasca use. And there was no drug use in the church because they were using this medicine that we actually call a drug, but it's really, really a medicine. Isn't that profound? It is profound and it is mind-blowing to think. And it is, you know, if you wanna do us,

it's like, I think we have this impulse to serve. People wanna serve other people. They wanna help the world, but they don't know where to start. And it seems like the place to start is you in this body that you inhabit. Start there. This is the closest you have to the earth, is the thing that you are.

So start healing that and then maybe through that, you'll start affecting change in the people around you and you're the environment around you will start changing. But if you aren't feeling that first and you're trying to go out there, what is that? What do they say? God damn it, I'm quoting Jesus again. Don't take, don't remove the twig.

I don't know, what is it? Like don't remove the twig from your neighbor's eye when you have a log in yours, you know? When you gotta don't worry about what's going on with your friends or your neighbors when you haven't dealt with your own thing yet. But if you can deal with your own thing, whatever it is, you're probably gonna be far more effective

in this serving the world. For sure, and then people will pick up on that vibration and you'll send that vibration of love to others and you'll inspire them to connect with their true selves. And when you can perfect yourself and follow your passion, you're going to be able to enact tremendous change, especially if now you're living as a slave, you're unhappy, you're mean to everyone you meet,

you cuss people out and flick them off like someone did to me in the car on the way here. Then you're harming, you're actually harming the world. So you might as well start dealing with yourself because oftentimes if you can do it through meditation and other means, that's beautiful. And even with psychedelics, it's just easy, relatively cheap ways

to start perfecting your soul. I mean, if you look at mushrooms or some of the most profound chemical on earth, it grows on cow shit. Like, isn't that the humor of the universe? People spend thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars on therapy and they might get it for free off a mushroom one night.

It does seem like this force has a really great sense of humor to put the most potent medicine on cow shit. It's pretty funny. And a pretty good way to hide something, actually. You know what? If you want to like keep something kind of secret or make it so that people have to take a little bit of an extra effort to find it, then put it on shit.

Yeah, that's a really good, I never thought of that, but that's, it's true. Well, that's just something Grammy Hancock was telling me is it's just like, you've got to work for this. And I think that's what you're talking about too. It's like, and we were talking earlier about, you know, and then in the evening after your job, you can start working on your next project.

And it's like, this isn't easy. Like, don't think it's easy. If you think it's going to be easy, that's what they teach you here. Comfort, comfort, convenience, easy, easy, easy. Easy way to get food, easy way to get water, easy way to get clothes, everything's easy. This isn't like that.

This, you have to want it. You have to work for it. Just like any great thing. Like that's what Graham Hancock was saying, is if you want ayahuasca, you'll find ayahuasca. But you got to find it. It's, you have to look for it. It's not going to come to you.

No one gives it to you at a club in Brooklyn. You know, no one, it's like an actual, it takes effort. And people, they do call it work too, when you're on it. That's what some of these religions call it. Like we're doing, we're doing work today. And that's what it feels like. You're literally going through the path of your life, revisiting all your trauma and working through it.

And, and it's hard. And, but it's beautiful because unlike alcohol, which is the most deadly drug on earth and causes you to completely ignore your life, you're actually going through and doing something productive while you're on this medicine or drug, as some people will call it, and repairing your soul. And you'll be a better person for it.

And you'll have a lot more energy just for life in general. And to lead a happier life. So inspiring. You're going to get me eaten by a snake, Amber Lyon. I'm going out there. I feel like, I mean, I don't recommend everyone do it, but I feel like maybe you've had a calling in particular, Duncan.

I'm going down. I'm doing it. And you never know. There may be things that want to communicate to you and they can do that through the use of the medicine. What if they're just like, you're a dick. Like you're expecting this big mystical experience and they just are like, I just wanted you to know

I'm not a big fan of your podcast. We just wanted to tell you, Duncan, you can go back now. Wait, no, really? Yeah, your voice, it's really annoying. All right, you're sober now. See you later. Well, I'm going to go down there. And thank you so much for coming on this show.

And will you please tell everyone how they can get in touch with you and about anything they need to know about Reset Me, your Twitter, how do we find you and connect with you? All right, well, my Twitter is at amberlion, amberlyon. And then the new site is reset.me. And the best way you can really help us out now is to go through on the first page.

You'll see all links to our social media accounts. If you can follow us for updates on our launch and we're set to launch mid to end of April. Beautiful. And I'll have all those links on my website. So please go there and connect with reset.me. Thank you so much. What a pleasure.

That was Amber Lyon. All the information to connect with her will be at dunkintrussell.com in the comments section of this podcast. Thanks for listening, you guys. Don't forget to go through Amazon. And if you like this podcast, give us a nice rating on iTunes.

Won't you? Hare Krishna. Now, here is a song from Daniel Johnston from the album, The Early Recordings. This is called Pow. Perfect song for spring. Knowing the prophetic warning that they were... It's an odd and awful way to be.

It's a happy laughter of the free. It's a truth and it's a dare. It's a feeling in the air. It's a mother's love for a child. It's a burst from someone else's universe. It's something you carry with you like a curse. It's a smile or a tear. It's a treasured souvenir.

It's a cue that makes the heart sing. And an argument has nowhere to go. And you'll grow old before you know. And the memories shine clear like looking in a mirror. And you'll remember all the times you were sincere. And the mood will hit you. You'll be a baby again. It'll take and embrace you like an old friend.

Adventure in your eyes. Romanic surprise. Like the sun shining through the clouds. Thank you for watching.