Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #207 Adam Strauss

Episode Date: July 1, 2021

Comedian, Psychedelic Researcher, News Purveyor, Adam Strauss does it all friends. Settle in and enjoy the wild ride of Adam’s Psychenautic quest to find psilocybin mushrooms, trying just about every synthetic along the way. His news show “The Trip Report” is live now and check that out on his IG, as well as his live performances of “The Mushroom Cure” hopefully coming to a city near you!  Connect with Adam:   Website: themushroomcure.com  Twitter: @atomstrauss  Instagram: @atomstrauss  YouTube: Adam Strauss Podcast: Not Therapy Spotify Apple    Show Notes: The Mushroom Cure - YouTube Vid  The Trip Report - Psychedelic News - Episode 1 YouTube  Instagram  Sponsors:   Bioptimizers To get the ’Magnesium Breakthrough‘ deal exclusively for fans of the podcast, click the link below and use code word “KINGSBU10” for an additional 10% off. magbreakthrough.com/kingsbu Episode #200 - Wade Lightheart, CEO of Bioptimizers Spotify - Apple The Cold Plunge Trade up from your inefficient ice chest to The Cold Plunge by heading to thecoldplunge.com and use codeword “KKP” at checkout for $111 off!  Higher Dose “Get high naturally!” Go over to their site… www.higherdose.com, check out what these rad scientists have cooked up and get their portable Infrared Sauna or PEMF Mat. Use code word “KKP75” to get $75 off your order. Silentmode has coupled a great sensory deprivation mask and high quality on-ear headphones to bring you an incredible medium to deliver both their Breathonics as well as binaural beats technology. Use code KKP for 15% off the product and 6 months of Breathonics for free. Head to www.silentmode.com/KKP for 15% off POWERMASK and 6 months free subscription to Breathonics. This can teach you proper breathwork and get meditation dialed in! Discount code “KKP21”  Connect with Kyle:   Instagram: @livingwiththekingsburys   Youtube: Kyle Kingbury Podcast  Kyles website: www.kingsbu.com    Like and subscribe to the podcast anywhere you can find podcasts. Leave a 5-star review and let me know what resonates or doesn’t.

Welcome back to the show, everybody. We have a very special guest today, not quite in the house, on the interwebs, the interwebs, the interwebs, my dude, Adam Strauss. Adam Strauss is a comedian and a psychedelic advocate, I guess you'd call it that, who changed his life with a number of different plant medicines. Actually, it's pretty cool getting his backstory. He's a very funny dude. I've been tracking for a while. He created, I guess, his story via comedy called The Mushroom Cure, how he cured his OCD with psilocybin mushrooms, amongst other things. And you'll find all that on this podcast and more.

We dive into his personal history, life growing up, his dealing with OCD and how he's been able to overcome that, which is something that still is a lifelong practice, which again, I'm still learning on each one of these things. So really special, the conversation that we had and what we dive into at the end is what he's into now, which is pretty cool because he's doing comedy clips that are basically the news, but done in a funny way. And he's addressing a lot of the issues that we're seeing in the pharmaceutical industry, trying to get a stranglehold on plant medicines. And so he's brought up some pretty cool, interesting things. And of course, we will link in the show notes to one of my favorite videos that he's done

that kicked off all this coming to be with his weekly news reports. So my dude, Adam Strauss, and there's a number of ways that you guys can support this podcast. First and foremost, leave us a five-star rating. That way, other people get to see the show. And of course, check out our wonderful sponsors. We are brought to you by Magnesium Breakthrough from my

buddies at BioOptimizers. There's a whole lot I could say about this, but really, if you want the lowdown on magnesium, just check out the episode that I did with BioOptimizers founder, Wade Lightheart, link to that in the show notes as well. He really breaks down so much about magnesium. It's absolutely phenomenal. But there's been some really cool things that have come to be since I've started using Magnesium Breakthrough. My work schedule has been super hectic and it's been awesome. But combining that with a couple of kids and that's one child under one, I think as this episode releases, she's still not quite one yet. It's a grind. And with that hecticness and everything that's going on in a

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I'm sleeping deeper throughout the night since adding in magnesium breakthrough. And I haven't had a single muscle cramp. Now, one thing that I'm going to talk about here is I have added in quite a bit of sauna therapy and cold plunges. So I'm excreting and squeezing. I'm opening and closing. I'm doing a lot of contrast therapy in addition because that helps me manage stress as well. And magnesium, I feel, has been a big part of that. I'm really excited to share this product, Magnesium Breakthrough, with you guys because it is the single most studied mineral in existence. It powers over 600 critical reactions in our bodies, but it's not just any magnesium. The one I recommend is magnesium breakthrough because it combines all seven essential forms of magnesium

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Again, don't forget promo code KKP at checkout. All this stuff's linked in the show notes. I love you guys without further ado, my man, Adam Strauss. Here we go. First time I've ever used a Zencaster,

and they have these corny-ass little gimmicks up top. I figured I might throw one out. Adam Strauss, thank you for joining the show, brother. Yeah, thanks for having me, Kyle. Where did we meet initially? We meet out in LA at a coffee shop? I think in person. Our first in-person meeting was in LA in a coffee shop, but I think initially, no, that's... Yes, it was, right? And then we met subsequently when I was in Austin. But right, that first meeting was in a coffee shop in LA and that was a few years ago. Yeah. It's interesting how the world has turned since those early conversations. I think I'm pretty sure that this audience is going to know who you are. Certainly, we... They fucking better.

Yeah, they better. Exactly. We certainly follow a lot of... I wouldn't assume they all know who I am or even most of them necessarily, especially after the last year where I've... Not that I was ever a... I would never call myself super high profile,

but I've been largely laying low over the last year as of, of course, live performance has been largely laying low over the last year. As of, you know, of course, live performance has been non-existent, though thankfully that's changing. So, yeah. Yeah, big time. Yeah. Well, let's dive into your background because you have an incredible story. You created a comedy tour around it and I don't want to get too far ahead of ourselves, but what was life like growing up for you? And when did you first notice

some of the things that were going on that made you a little different than others? And what were some of your doorways into the newfound you? Yeah. I mean, I don't want this to be a sob story because I don't see my life story as that at all. In fact, I see myself as incredibly fortunate and almost incomprehensibly lucky in a lot of ways. But my earliest memories from childhood are memories of, yeah, real distress and conflict with my parents. And it's somewhat puzzling to me,

even now as an adult, where my parents, I had and have, thankfully, they're both still with us and they're literally with me. They're not in the room, but I'm actually at their place right now. So yeah, really just remarkable people, people who came from very little in socioeconomically, as well as my father's case, really, you know, pretty neglectful parents, but somehow built this family where there's just a lot of love in our family. We all, my parents, my siblings, nephews and nieces, we all really love each other, really enjoy each other's company. And that love was there from the beginning. You know, I was thinking about this,

something I take for granted that I think so many people can't is I never once doubted that my parents loved me. But there was tremendous conflict from a very early age. And I place, I don't want to say the blame. I was a little kid. But I was, I would say, more of an instigator than a reactor in that dynamic. I just, you know, I think I kind of came out of the womb just very, very intense, very intense and with a great capacity for joy, but also a, yeah, a propensity to go to a pretty dark, inconsolable place from a very early age.

So I'd get into these huge fights with my parents about nothing, essentially. They would tell me to pick up my toys or don't read at the dinner table, and I would just refuse. And well, you're a parent. I'm not a parent. But clearly, as a parent, you need to set some boundaries. You need to set some limits. If you tell your kid to pick up his toys and he doesn't do it, you can't be like, all right, you have to. So they were in a tough position, and they would insist that I do reasonable things they asked me to do and I would refuse and it would explode into these just massive fights. And yeah, I, you know, from this perspective, I see myself as just having perhaps a very, very sensitive nervous system and yeah, being triggered fairly easily. And once I got triggered, it was kind of, you know, I'd kind of go zero to 60 almost

instantaneously. And that persisted as I, as I grew older, I was able to outside of the home, I was fairly normal. I think in a lot of ways, maybe not totally normal, certainly not totally normal, but I wasn't, you know, I wasn't losing my shit in public on a daily basis. But, but that was there, you know, and that dynamic, I think it colored the way I saw myself in the world. I think I had a great deal of shame. I know I had a great deal of shame from an early age because I felt like, wow, I have these great parents and I'm this terrible thorn in their side, which again, they never said that, but it was clear that... I feel like we're getting pretty deep pretty

quickly, but I'll just finish on the top. Let's fucking go right in. I love this. I love this. Yeah. Okay, cool. Cool. Because I have my own podcast called Not Therapy where one of my best friends in the world who's a psychiatrist does sort of quasi-therapy on me. So perhaps that has sort of trained me for this. But also, on stage and in life, one thing I've found, one of the few things I've found

that's just a surefire guideline that helps me live better is real radical honesty and transparency. It's just I feel better when I'm that way. So yeah, I believed that I was the primary source of suffering for my parents and siblings growing up. And even now, I don't think that's entirely wrong. But I also think the other part of that equation is I did bring them a lot of joy because when I wasn't in these extreme states of

distress, I was an incredibly loving kid filled with wonder and curiosity. So yeah, I do view it, you know, I think a lot of people, not to jump the gun, but you know, my Western medical diagnosis would be obsessive compulsive disorder. And I me, it's, I really feel like there was just a very strong biological propensity that I came into this world with. I don't, I mean, I don't think my parents were perfect. I don't think perfect parents exist, but I don't, I don't think there's any, there was any terrible trauma, though. I will say later on when I was, I was hospitalized twice at age 18. And in these mental hospitals, you do group therapy and everyone had a story of some sort of horrific childhood sexual abuse or physical abuse. And it occurred to me, I'm like, did something happen that I just repressed?

And so when I began working with psychedelics many years later, there was this fear that I was going to uncover some deep buried trauma that might be liberating, but also might destroy me. And I had several trips where this was sort of the center of these trips. The nexus of this trip was, oh God, there's some terrible trauma. Do I want to see it? I don't know if I want to see it. I can't see it, but I need to see it. And what happened was on one of these trips, I was just like, all right, fuck it. Show it to me, whatever it is, whatever horrific thing. I know it's there.

Show it to me. And it was like a hand opening and nothing inside. So I either I've repressed it really, really deeply. But after so many journeys, I do feel like, yeah, my own narrative is that, you know, this is more or less the way I was born with this intensity. And it caused a lot of, uh, a lot of stress for me and stress for people around me. And that persisted as I got older. Um, you know, on one hand I was able to function well in the world. I did well academically. Uh was a musician. As I got older and older,

I had more and more fulfilling friendships and relationships, but I could still get to this place of real, you know, almost not, not almost of real, really not functioning where the OCD or initially it wasn't OCD at that point. It was just extreme anxiety and perfectionism and the OCD or initially it wasn't OCD at that point. It was just extreme anxiety and perfectionism and the OCD itself, this sort of anxiety and perfectionism, this more free floating thing. It assumed the form of OCD after I had a very, um, a traumatic, I would say, end to a romantic relationship. The, the love of my life, if you will, at that point. At 29, that relationship ended largely, not largely, I'd say almost entirely because of my anxiety and rigidity and perfectionism. And when that relationship ended very quickly afterwards, I started developing

very specific compulsions and intrusive obsessive thoughts in a way I never had before. And that was a new level of debilitation for me. So that was sort of the origin story. And I don't want to monologue too much. No, this is phenomenal. So you've covered so much. It's amazing amazing me as always, how much of our, our childhoods mirrored one another. You know, I had like a very, uh, violent communication, not violent in the sense of, you know, ass beatings across the board, no domestic violence, but violent communication for sure. A lot of conflict in the house. And, and, but as you were stating it, like, that's something that psychedelics brought me. Like there was never any question in my mind on if I felt loved or not. I always felt loved from both parents,

my sister as well. And that's such a huge piece. I think I've quoted this before a couple of times, but the study where they showed parents who were indifferent, who, you know, and it's not to point out the wealthy, but say there's super rich parents that let a nanny raise their kids and they're always taking trips out of the country and never really

giving two shits about their kids or going to their kids' games or any of that. That type of archetypical non-existent parent versus somebody who beat their kids. And what they found psychologically was that the kids who were beat, and this isn't a, I always have to qualify this or disclaim it. This isn't like a thumbs up for beating your kids, but the kids who had been abused felt that their parents cared more than the parents that weren't around, than the kids that were raised from the parents that weren't around. Because in the act of abuse, they knew their parents cared. And that to me is fucking mind boggling when you think about it, but very, very big, uh, you know, big in that understanding that, that as you propose the

knowing the gnosis of your parents, loving you, that had to have been like a huge foundational piece to hold onto. Um, Interestingly enough, when I went through my own mental, I don't want to call it a breakdown, but just because I don't want to call yours a breakdown, but when I hit the fucking wall, it was right after college. And what really was the spark for that years of undealt with stuff was the ending of a relationship. So it seems like that kind of can be an, an amazing catalyst for a dark turn for the worse, which if handled okay, can be also an amazing catalyst for the most amazing growth possible.

So I'm, as you're telling this story, I'm just seeing so many mirrors and this it's beautiful to hear all this brother. Thank you. Yeah. And I know we had talked a little bit about your upbringing, but I didn't know that that trigger for your own challenge, your own mental challenge was a breakup. And yeah, and I think you said it well, it can be a catalyst for incredible growth and expansion. And unfortunately, it was the opposite

for me, though ultimately it has led me down this whole pathway. Um, and I can honestly say that I, I don't regret anything. Um, I, you know, there are, yeah, if I could have done things differently, I wouldn't be me, uh, which is, you know, kind of a truism and sort of a meaningless statement, but I think it can help, help, help us get through sometimes some dark times where it's like, yeah, the person who reacted differently to that breakup or better yet, perhaps, didn't let those issues cause that breakup, that's not me. I'm not that person. I may be becoming that person, but I certainly wasn't that person then. And the person I was then, so much of this to me,

it becomes more and more clear the older I get and the longer I've worked with psychedelics. It comes down to the body and the mind. And for me, I've always been a very heady person. I've always identified very much with my thinking, with my cognition. And, you know, I appreciate my mind. It's done a lot of good things for me. But, you know, growing up, a child of, you know, my dad was a doctor, my mother was a teacher. Again, they kind of, they were sort of the first generation that had any, I mean, my father's father worked in a hat factory.

So they were the first generation that, any, I mean, my father's father worked in a hat factory. So they were the first generation that, that, you know, had any real means and they were, they're, they're, they're intellectuals, they're intellectuals. And so there was never, no one ever even introduced the concept to me that, hey, you have things that are happening in your body too. These emotions that you're experiencing that overtake you, this is largely a physical phenomena. These emotions do not exist in the brain. The brain doesn't interplay with them. The brain can create them. And more often, I think the brain responds to them. But so my parents, they brought me to therapists at a pretty early age, but the therapy it was all about trying to understand. Why are you so angry at your parents?

What are you upset about and I genuinely didn't understand and I know now I don't think there was anything to understand I mean listen there there was probably some stuff to understand I'm, not saying it was random that I had these intense reactions But I really do believe that ultimately it was the way I was wired. And, you know, to have these intense physical reactions, physical sensations, I mean, that's all an emotion is, a sensation in the body that we then apply some sort of label to that is always, you know, sometimes more precise than others, but is always a word,

you know, a finger pointing at the moon. It's not the sensation. So what I believe is these sensations were threatening to me, feeling pain. I didn't want to feel pain. No one wants to feel pain. So I crawled more and more up into my head and tried to figure everything out and think about everything. And that's why I think when my own sort of rigid ways of trying to control were challenged by my parents, I would be furious because I didn't want to feel the emotions that were underneath that. And so getting back to when this relationship ended, what happened, unfortunately, was my heart was broken. And I think more and more there's an understanding in even Western medicine that heartbreak is not a metaphor. It's an actual

phenomena that involves the cardiovascular system. There was a deep, profoundly deep, the deepest I'd ever felt, pain that for me, because now I can tune into this pain very easily, and a lot of that is thanks to psychedelics, a pain in my heart, in the center of my chest, this tremendous loss of this woman I'd loved more than I'd loved anyone, probably, certainly more than anyone outside of my family. And I couldn't feel that. That was horrifically, overwhelmingly threatening to feel that. So what I did is I went completely into my head and tried to figure out how to make everything perfect. That's basically it. I was like, well, I mean, it wasn't, I wasn't conscious of it, but there was this sensation I didn't want to feel. So let me go into my brain and try to

engineer my existence so that everything's perfect. Cause if everything's perfect, then of course I won't feel this pain. And that is an addiction in a nutshell. That is the OCD addiction. One of the many lies OCD tells us is that if we can figure things out in our head, the physical sensations that we don't want, specifically anxiety, will change. And it doesn't work that way. We can't ever make physical sensations change. At least I've never figured out a way to do it. But we can allow them to evolve and change of their own accord by not fighting them, by surrendering to them. But if you try to run away from them, and I know I'm preaching to the choir here on this, Kyle, you're going to perpetuate them and exacerbate them.

And so that's what happened. And my OCD took the form of decision-making, which again, makes a lot of sense because it's like, well, if I can make the right decisions, I'll have the, I'll have, you know, things will be the way I want them to be. And I'd never had a problem with decision-making before. And suddenly, very quickly, every decision I had to make, what shirt to put on the morning, what side of the street to walk down, whether to engage in social plans this weekend, what tasks to complete next at work. I became paralyzed. I had to figure out the perfect decision in everything. And people say life is about decisions, but I'd go a step further. I'd say life is decisions. Every moment is a decision, whether

or not we're conscious of it. So if you're suddenly unable or unwilling to make decisions, you're basically unable and unwilling to live. And my life just ground to an absolute halt and everything fell apart. I mean, the only reason I held down a job is I was actually running my own company then. This was the talent of the dot-com boomer a little bit afterwards. And I'd raised a bunch of money. I was not good at running a company, but I was good at raising money. So I couldn't be fired because I was the CEO. But yeah, I mean, I couldn't work. I was increasingly just isolating myself in my apartment for hours and hours a day and days on end trying to figure out exactly what I should do about every possible decision in my life. And it became suffocating. And I was already on medication. I'd been on medication since I was 18, SSRIs, primarily Paxil. I wasn't diagnosed with OCD until a year or two later. When I was, the medication dosage was upped more because dosages for OCD are typically higher than for depression and general anxiety. It's a very stubborn disease.

And the medications didn't help. And we tried other medications. I mean, I was on, ultimately, over the course of my OCD career, I was on really every possible SSRI. I was on atypical antipsychotics. I was on benzos. And nothing helped. And I was getting sicker and sicker.

And then I stumbled across a study, to date still the only published study that there's a few underway now that will be published soon, but a study of psilocybin for OCD. And it was a small pilot study, only nine subjects, but the results were remarkable. Every subject in this study had a significant remission of OCD symptoms. Some just, you know, for a day or two, but one subject in the study, it actually seemed like he was permanently cured. And I had very little experience with psychedelics at this point. I had tried them in college, but they really didn't work probably because I was on SSRIs. But I read the study and I was like, well, I've got nothing to lose. So let's give this a try. And that was the beginning of this whole

journey for me. It's interesting you bring up the SSRIs with it not working because I've had a friend of mine who was on SSRIs and I obviously, well, not obviously. For people that don't know, if you have SSRIs with ayahuasca, it can be fatal. But for most psychedelics, it's not fatal because there's not an MAO inhibitor. But with psilocybin and my buddy, we were at a bachelor party and we were having a moderate concert dose, probably a gram or two each. You know, most people were playing it pretty light, maybe even a half gram and dude had seven grams. And he's like, I don't feel it. I don't feel it. And he kept saying that. And I'm like, I'm not giving you any more. You're going to eat the whole bag. You're a bottomless pit, man. You know? And of course he didn't want to admit that he was on SSRIs. I found that out after the fact, but interesting how the neurochemistry

can affect those two. So describe your first interaction with it. Did you partake with psilocybin first because that's what the study was about? How did that look? Was there a ceremony container or just by yourself? What did you do to set that up? Yeah. So this, well, it was, and I talk about this. I have a solo show about this called The Mushroom Cure. And I talk about this cruel irony that I finally find this thing that holds promise, psilocybin, or specifically psilocybin-containing mushrooms. And suddenly it was unavailable in New York for whatever reason. I mean, this was over a decade ago. No one in New York had mushrooms. I could mean, this was over a decade ago. No one in New

York had mushrooms. I could get LSD. I could get ketamine. I could get MDMA, but no one had mushrooms. There was someone, one dealer told me, oh man, there's this post-Burning Man mushroom drought happening right now. So I was, yeah, which was, but so I was frustrated. And then, well, here's one of these, depending on your view of the universe, either a great coincidence or something that unfolded precisely the And that was my one salvation. I will say this because no matter how bad the OCD was, when I got on stage, I was in the moment. It, you know, people often would say like, oh, you know, you must be so brave to do standup. But to me, and I've really seen this over the last year, Kyle, as I've not been able to perform, I appreciate it more than ever. There is a great liberation in live performance because OCD, the perfectionism, you always want to do things over, get them right. But with live performance, I'm up there and I can't say to the audience, oh, wait, wait, you know what? I didn't deliver that last joke

exactly the way I want. Hold on. Let me try it again. And so you kind of have to go with the flow, the pressure of 60 or 80 or 200 or sometimes only 10 people, but watching you and having an obligation towards them is, yeah, there's a great freedom in that. That actually, not to cut you off, but I think in your circumstances that actually might work as a joke once or twice to really get them into your mind, you know, to let the audience in on the joke, just to say like, hold on one second.

I'm going to, I'm actually going to run that back. I didn't quite nail the punchline the way that I wanted it to. And I see clearly over here on the left, it didn't really hit home the way that I hoped it would. So let me just re-deliver this. That actually might work. I'm glad you mentioned that. And you are 100% right. And I, because I don't, I'm trying to limit my monologues here. I have done that and it has worked. But check this out. The reason I realized it worked is there have been a few times... All right, so stand-up is...

Stand-up, you can talk to the crowd, right? You break the fourth wall all the time. You do crowd work. But The Mushroom Cure, it's a pretty intense theatrical monologue. So it is comedic, absolutely. But it's 90 minutes of me really baring my soul. And there's a script. And I can't just break the fourth wall and talk to the

audience. So with stand-up, if sometimes I'm really distracted by something, a couple is talking too loud in the front row, I can talk about it and I can kind of joke about it. But with The Mushroom Cure, it's like I'm'm locked in the lights come up, the curtain opens up and it's like, I got to stay in this role for the next 90 minutes. But there have been some performances where I've just fucking lost it because like one where some guy in the front row was just shuffling his feet. I mean, on the stone floor, but it was this grating sound. So there've been a few performances where I've snapped in, in some ways I've been like, can you stop doing that? Or the lighting was wrong. So I've just broken character and been like, Hey, you know, the lights, it's the light's not

bright enough. And whenever I've done that after the show, people invariably have come up to me and been like, that was part of the show, right? Like that guy in the front row, he was a plant, right? Like the, the tech operator, you told her to, you know, the light was low on purpose. Because it so fits in with the character, so. That's phenomenal. But yeah. And, you know, and it speaks to a bigger point,

which is the, I think people appreciate imperfection very much in live performance and in everything. So being a perfectionist and an obsessive perfectionist, it's counterproductive, one, in the sense that you make yourself miserable and you really constrain your creative output because nothing's ever good enough. But two, people like to see some cracks. They like to see some rough edges. So it's not always optimal to do it that way. But yeah, it's been... Oh yeah, back to mushrooms. So I was doing standup and I was performing at a club in Times Square where most of the audience is... They're tourists. And this woman came to the club and we started chatting afterwards and we wound up hooking up and formed a relationship. And it turned out she was a clinical psychologist. She was in grad school getting her PhD. And I didn't that visit to the first time we didn't talk about psychedelics,

but I was having trouble finding mushrooms. I'm like, well, she, you know, she lives in a college town in Kansas. Like maybe she knows people who can get mushrooms. So I actually asked her, I was like, is there any way you can get mushrooms and mail them to me? And this, uh, this started off this conversation between us where it turned out she had cured her suicidal depression years earlier with mescaline-containing cacti unintentionally. She was a 15-year-old girl growing up in Kansas who was taking cacti just recreationally and had always been horrifically depressed and had really one trip where her depression lifted. And it came back to some extent, but never the way it had been there.

So it felt like this sort of sign from the universe of this person I met in the most random place in the universe, Times fucking Square, had actually had the experience of psychedelic healing I wanted to have. And this was 2007. So the conversation around psychedelics at this point was dramatically different. I mean, when I would, when I started telling people, yeah, I'm trying to treat my OCD with, with psychedelics, they couldn't wrap their head around it. They're like, wait, wait, no psychedelics. That's going to give you mental illness. Why would you use psychedelics? It just, it didn't make sense to people. So to find someone

who had had this experience at a time when these experiences were not talked about and were rare, really seemed like, you know, like I was on the right path. And so she introduced me to the world of mescaline-containing cacti. And now those were my first psychedelic experiences were on San Pedro, Peruvian Torch, for DCI, for listeners who may not be fully familiar. I mean, peyote is, of course, the best known cacti that contains mescaline, but peyote is very rare and quite endangered. But there's a lot of species of cacti that are widely distributed naturally throughout the southwestern US and all over the world that also contain mescaline.

And so that's what, those were my first journeys. And they're pretty, you know, speaking to somebody who has quite a bit of experience right now with many different forms of psychedelics. In my opinion, in my experience, what Chuma or San Pedro is of all the plant medicines, of all the master teacher plants, it's very light. It's a very bodily felt experience. It's lifting and energetic. And it's not, I mean, if I, not that I don't use psychedelics to be in control of anything, but if I wanted to be in control in any particular ceremony, I would probably select something like Guachuma or San Pedro Cactus for the fact that it's not overwhelmingly there in

the visual space. I don't feel like I need to buckle up and hold on tight, not like with ayahuasca or high-dose psilocybin and things of that nature. Yeah, absolutely. And I agree with that. And so at that point, I had no other experience, but that may explain what my experience was, which is it didn't really help that much. Yeah, I did not have... Part of it also is I had a pretty massive psychedelic tolerance and I still do have it. So I got off of the first...

Actually, the first cacti experience I had didn't work because I was still on SSRIs. So then I was like, all right, got to get off the SSRIs. So I did get off of them. But even months later, I still required very elevated doses, I think because there was this residual SSRI tolerance. And even now, 14 on ayahuasca. And yeah, my experiences, I don't want to say they're milder because I can certainly go far down the rabbit hole on a high enough dose, but I don't get the visual content that a lot of people get. And so, particularly with cacti, when I'd just been off SSRIs for a few months, yeah, I had these very mild experiences, but I'm grateful for them because it was kind of like, I remember one experience. I'm in my

apartment with this woman and I'm looking up at just a bare light bulb in my ceiling. I'm literally in my parents' attic right now. And this light bulb turned into in the way that you get these visuals where I was aware it was a light bulb, but it somehow became a finger and it was beckoning me in a very welcoming way. And that's what cacti was for me, is it was this very, like you said, gentle, soft, kind of like welcome, like, hey, it's safe here, Adam, come on in. And I think it was useful for someone who did and does tend towards wanting to control things, making me feel safe. But yes, it was ultimately not very healing experiences with those. And then I moved on to the world of, I still couldn't find mushrooms. I moved on to the world of research

chemicals, stuff, you know, by Sasha Shulgin, 2CE, 2CT7, a lot of the four substituted tryptamines, 4-ACODMT, 4-HODIPT, a whole range of that. I've tried 2C-B and maybe a couple others, but I have no experience with the different DMT analogs. What were your thoughts on those? I don't mean to derail you from where you're taking the conversation, but I'm fascinated and super curious about some of the stuff that Shulgin got into because in large part, it's almost like Rogan talked about why he never took acid is because there's always some weird hippie guy who hadn't showered being like, hey man, you want some acid? Anybody that has had some of the Shulgin analogs, it's generally not somebody that I'm like, yeah man, let me try this brand new thing I've never fucking heard of before.

You're not hanging out with the right people, my friend. Because there is a pretty, I don't know what it's like now, but yeah, there was then, and actually there is still now, I wouldn't say I'm tapped into it, this sort of drug nerd community where Hamilton Morris is one of the, who I'm not going to

implicate him in anything, not that I'm saying there's anything to implicate him in, but we were, we became good friends at this point in time. Um, we, we met fairly randomly and, and hit it off and, uh, you know, but he talks a lot in his show about this stuff. So there is, yeah, man, I could, the Shulkin stuff. So there's these four substituted tryptamines, which is a class of medication. I'm laughing because now there's this thing in the psychedelic movement where everything is medicine. People get upset if you refer to it as a drug. And to me, it's fucking sick. Not to derail you again, but Hamilton Morris pointed that out on one of his shows. He's like, these are all drugs. And I love that because if

we have a base common commonality and what's something I've, I've mentioned in this podcast before, because it's how do you tell the difference? Well, a good drug will leave you feeling more whole than when you started for days after the experience, a bad drug,

you're going to have, you're going to, you're basically paying for a good time on credit. You know, bad drugs will, we'll, we'll take something from you rather than give more to you. So that's,

that's, but they are drugs. They're all fucking psychoactive chemicals. Breathwork is a drug. Coffee is a drug. Sugar is a drug. If we can all call them drugs, then we can decide which ones are good for us and which ones are not good for us. I think it's fine to have a common nomenclature that we all use for mind-enhancing or mind-changing substances. Hell yeah. No, I couldn't agree more. And I like what you said about you paying for it with credit.

I've actually thought about it sometimes where like, you know, with bad drugs, drugs that are bad for me, you know, alcohol, not that I've ever had a problem with it, but I just hate hangovers, cocaine, which I haven't touched in a long time because that was just a waste of time for me. But I did do it fairly extensively for a couple of years in my 20s. Those drugs, it's like, yeah, you feel good now. You're going to pay for it later. With psychedelics, I thought about it

recently. It's sort of the opposite where, because for me, the most uncomfortable, unpleasant part of the psychedelic experience is the first part, is the come up, especially with mushrooms and ayahuasca. And so I kind of look at it like, all right, well, I'm paying the price in advance and then I'll get the good stuff. I like that. I don't totally buy into that though, because I think there's value in the come up too. But yeah, yeah, drugs, no. These are molecules that interact with the human nervous system in different ways. And, and, uh, but yeah, the, the research chemicals, Shulgin's chemicals. So there's the, the, the stuff that's based on basically the psilocybin molecule, these four substituted tryptamines.

So Shulgin essentially took psilocybin and started tweaking that molecule and came up with this class of tryptamines. Um, this, you know, a few dozen of them, I think. At least I probably tried eight or nine of them. And then phenethylamines, which was taking the mescaline molecule and tweaking that. And the tryptamine substitutes, I like them. And you always have to be leery of expectation effects, meaning even for someone like myself, who I do feel like I'm able to largely put aside this sort of what I see as a not especially useful dichotomy between quote-unquote natural things and quote-unquote synthetic things. I put it in quotes because,

you know, you can argue that anything synthetic, well, humans are natural. We're part of evolution. We've developed this and we've developed it based on other natural compounds. So I don't think it's a particularly meaningful distinction. But even though I look at it that way, I sometimes wonder if I'm ingesting a capsule of white powder, you know, say 4-ACO-DMT versus chewing mushroom bodies, is that suddenly going to affect my expectations and my experience? And it may. Having said that, what I would say is my experience is that, yeah, it seems like there's a little bit less spiritual heft and chaos with the four substituted tryptamines than with actual mushrooms. It's a little easier to manage.

And yeah, it doesn't take you as deep in my experience. But the phenethylamines, man, some of those 2CE in particular, I mean, I haven't done that in many years, but that is one I would do again, though with trepidation because I actually had a very, very challenging experience once on 2CE. But yeah, I think 2CE of all the stuff I tried, I would say I have a fraction of the experience with it that I have with LSD or with mushrooms. But based on my limited experience, yeah, I'm not convinced it has any less to offer than mushrooms or LSD. It goes deep. Wow. So those are the two compounds you'd compare it to. I mean, I know that

Shulgin had said in the past that if the pharmaceutical industry was ever going to create an aphrodisiac, they would take in whole or in part 2C-B and that's what it would look like. So, but I have, and I have experience with that. And I think it's phenomenal. If I was going to describe that, I mean, some people say it's like a micro dose of candy flipping MDMA and LSD because it's energetic and it's, you know, rainbow color-ish, almost electronic, like you're out at Burning Man. But you can still get hard and finish the job in a sexual situation. And, you know, it encourages you to climax rather than hinders you to climax and many other properties beyond that. It's not just about physical touch

or sensuality, but there's a felt sense of warmth and care, like a loving energy behind it. I've never even heard of 2CE. So you describe that similar to LSD and psilocybin? Not, yes. I would describe it more similar to the classical psychedelics. And 2C-B, yeah. I mean, I think the reason you haven't heard of 2C and you have heard of 2C-B is exactly that. 2C-B, I think Shulgin even talks about it as an intactogen more than a psychedelic in some ways where it enhances physical sensation. Whereas 2CE is, yeah, you go down that rabbit hole and what can I say about it? It's much, much longer lasting. It doesn't have the stimulant or intactogenic effects of 2C-B.

Again, the caveat being that I didn't do, I probably had four 2CE journeys. There's a sense though, I guess the way I would liken it to LSD and mushrooms is there's a sense of some vast intelligence at work in this molecule or that this molecule is helping you tap into, which I certainly didn't get on 2C-B and I didn't get on the four substitute tryptamine mushroom analogs. But with 2C-E, there's a sense of like there is something profound and deep and infinite in this molecule, or again, that this molecule connects you to.

Words are kind of inadequate to describe this. And I certainly get that on mushrooms and I get that on LSD as well. And ayahuasca for that matter. Yeah. I like that. And that's something I've thought of too, in the past, I'm not sure if it was a ketamine journey. I think it was a ketamine journey. Um, in just, in just thinking to, and also, you know, the trip reports from John Lilly on ketamine are fucking incredible, you know, it's as good as any good as any trip reported on any other substance. But I've just thought like if we are inherently not separate from anything, including nature, and we are a part of nature with a capital N, then of course these are natural substances

from that understanding. And then I had the vision of, you know, on a different planet or a different realm or a different dimension, it's quite likely that there are plants that produce ketamine or plants that produce 2CE. These things likely exist in nature somewhere else within the infinite unfolding from infinite possibility and infinite probability. It's quite likely these are showing up in nature. I love that. I never thought of that, but 100%, I believe that.

Absolutely. These are molecules. These are ways that the laws of physics and chemistry allows certain atoms to combine. And yeah, yeah. Why wouldn't they be naturally generated in all the infinite possibility of the universe? So you started off with the mescaline-based compounds and had it pretty easy.

And then obviously you were searching for more. At this point, you started to cut back on SSRIs. Were you off benzos and some of the other things that are, I mean, perhaps not harder or at least equally hard from what I've come to understand? I was never on SSRIs. My sister was, and that was really hard for I've come to understand. I was never on SSRIs. My sister was, and that was really hard for her to come off of. For myself, I was on benzos. I went cold turkey, but apparently that's a big no-no in Western medicine to cut that shit cold turkey.

Yeah. There is a deep risk in going. Going mean, going cold turkey on benzos is more dangerous physically than going cold turkey on heroin. You're not going to die from going cold turkey on heroin. You actually can die from going cold turkey on benzos. Well, I lucked out, or unless I'm just dreaming up the rest of my life right now. But- Right.

We're in the Bardo, my friend. Yeah. Well, just keep that narrative going. Keep describing it. When did you get to, obviously, it's not the benzo cure or the mescaline cure. It's the mushroom cure. So let's continue on that path and where you find yourself with psilocybin. Yeah.

So, right. And it's not the benzo cure or the SSRI cure because that stuff, frankly, really did not help me. And SSRIs, they do help some people. And if they do, that's great. Benzos help some people. But for me, so it wasn't that hard for me to get... Let me take that back. It was hard to get off SSRIs. I had bad withdrawal effects. I had to taper them dramatically. At that time, I was already off benzos. So I was only taking Lexapro, but I was taking a massive dose. I was taking 80 milligrams of Lexapro. And I titrated down over a period of months. And I should say I'd been on SSRIs at that

point for 15 years, but I'd already gotten off a couple of times and gotten back on. So I knew how to do it. It took several months. I had a couple of trips in that period. And I could see that, like, yeah, as I worked my way down the benzos, I was getting a little bit more psychedelic activity, but it was still very muted until I finally got off. And I think the first trip I really experienced any significant effects was maybe a couple of months after being off benzos. And that was on 4-ACODMT, this mushroom analog. And it wasn't a profound experience, but it was an eye-opening experience because it was, yeah, just, it felt like,

it felt like this experience of recognition. It was my first time in a psychedelic state, really. And it felt like this experience of, oh yeah, of course I knew this existed. This, and what is this? I suppose it's this state of presence, this state of okayness, this state of, it was a beautiful experience. It felt like I was really being gifted this beauty and seeing this, this, uh, this beauty that was always there. And this piece that's to me is one of the wonderful things about psychedelics is the high from psychedelics. I mean, I've had, as I mentioned, I went through a little coke phase in my early 20s. The high from psychedelics is infinitely superior because it's not this high of like, oh, I feel amazing now because of the specific neurochemical state I'm

in, but it's because I'm realizing things that I'm pretty confident are going to feel equally true to me in six or eight hours when I come down. And usually they do. Of course, the challenge is, you know, then maintaining that awareness of those truths. So I had a taste of that.

But yeah, the OCD, it wasn't, it didn't, you know, do anything profound with the OCD. And I kept working. Then I got my hands on some LSD, still confined mushrooms. That was the first experience I had that really made a dent in the OCD actually was on LSD. It was my first LSD experience. I'd taken four pretty strong tabs, which with the SSRI tolerance, post-SSRI, but still have some tolerance, wasn't overpowering, but it was pretty strong. And I was lying in bed.

It was daytime. I was at a friend's place. And this woman was with me. My friend was away for the weekend. And I was really tuning into this sort of intense body buzz energy from the LSD. And then suddenly there were these very loud noises intruding on this piece I was feeling. And it turned out someone was moving into the apartment downstairs. And I felt my whole body just go rigid with tension, with fight. Like, I don't want these people, I don't want this noise

intruding on this experience I'm having right now. And because I was already so tapped into my body, thanks to this LSD body buzz, I was suddenly aware of this physical sensation changing when I started to fight reality essentially. And I could see how unpleasant it was, that fight. Like, yeah, I didn't want the sounds to be there, but much worse than the sound was this sudden shift in my physical experience from feeling this sort of flowing energetic peace to feeling this real rigidity. And so I chose to consciously relax my body in a way I'd never done before. And the sounds were still there, and I still didn't like them, but I wasn't fighting them. And that gave me the first sort of taste of what ultimately has proven to be the path

to my current imperfect, but my current freedom, which is really tuning into the body, tuning into physical experience, not trying to figure it out in my head, but instead coming back to my body. And on subsequent experiences with mushrooms, once I did find mushrooms, that connection was strengthened. And so I can certainly talk more about specific experiences

and ayahuasca has played a big role in it, but to give you sort of the succinct version, my overall experience with psychedelics was, you know, I thought psychedelics were going to, I was going to figure out the OCD. In a sense, I thought I was going to OCD the OCD. And it was, because that's what OCD is. I mean, everyone with OCD I've ever met has tried to OCD their OCD because that's, that's, you know, the way our minds work. But it actually, it was kind of like the arena changed.

Like psychedelics said, oh no, no, no, no. You're, you're playing the wrong game, my friend. This isn't about figuring this out in your head. This is about surrendering to what's happening in your body, allowing these sensations, allowing these sensations that you've tried so hard to keep out. And, you know, the cornerstone of traditional treatment for OCD, even before medication, is cognitive behavioral therapy. And the idea behind cognitive behavioral therapy is essentially that with OCD, we have these unwanted thoughts, intrusive thoughts, the stove

is on, I'm making the wrong decision, or some, you know, you may get taboo sexual or violent thoughts. And then there's a physical sensation as well, fear, some form of fear in the body. And so we try to control those thoughts and sensations by doing, by with obsessive thinking and compulsive behavior. And it may work for a little bit. Like if someone has a thought, oh, maybe I left the stove on and they feel fear and they check the stove, the thought may go away for a little bit. The fear may go down for a little bit, but then it comes back. It's this sort of broken circuit in the brain. It doesn't stay quiet. Yeah, sure. You check the stove, but you know, did you check closely enough or maybe you should check one more time just to be safe. And so to get freedom from OCD, if you see a good

cognitive behavioral therapist, they'll say, don't try to get rid of those thoughts. Don't try to get rid of that fear. If you accept it, then it may or may not go away, but you'll be freed from the obligation to engage in compulsive thinking and obsessive thinking and compulsive behavior, because you've already accepted the thing that that thinking and behavior is designed to neutralize. So I understood this, but acceptance, it's not something that you can understand. It's a physical, for me, it's a physical practice, perhaps even a spiritual practice, but to keep it a little more pragmatic, at least for now, it's a physical practice. There are things in my body that I have to tune into in order to accept them. And I simply did not have access to my

physical experience before psychedelics because I had cut myself off from it so completely. So on many journeys, and I would say mushrooms and ayahuasca were probably the most helpful, but LSD was as well. And some of these research chemicals were too. I continually repeatedly had this experience of connecting to my body, feeling what was going on in my body and allowing it and finding that once I allowed it, I then had a certain amount of freedom that even if I was feeling fear in my body, if I wasn't, if my existence was not focused on getting rid of that fear, well, then I could do something else. I could listen to music. I could do a social activity. I could go on a hike instead of being so, or even if I'm sitting still meditating, I could focus on other things. But as long as you're trying to get rid of

something that takes up your focus. And that of, just makes it bigger. And so that was the sort of capsule version of how psychedelics were and are transformative for me by enabling me to be in my body where I now have the option to accept what's going on there. And I say option because there are times where I still don't want to accept and there are times where I still try to avoid and control. But at least I have the ability to do that now. And I will say to finish off that gradually that ability generalized to when I'm not on psychedelics, I just in a in a in a backwards way or maybe not even a backwards way but in a direct way psychedelics have the ability to allow us to embody a felt experience of spiritual teachings you know when somebody lives with guilt or shame rather Rather than reading about Christ's forgiveness, we experience forgiveness by first forgiving ourselves. And then we experience compassion for self.

But it's a felt experience. It's like a gnosis that can happen. Not guaranteed, right? And it feels like, it sounds like you are embodied with the Buddhist teachings. Where you know the suffering is caused from aversion to the thing you don't want or clinging to the thing you do want. And it seems like without, you know, having grappled with that, or maybe you had already started to dive into some of those teachings, but that felt experience of I'm going to recognize this first in my body

and I can accept it. I don't have to have aversion to the thing. And with that, you disempower the very thing from haunting you at infinitum within the mind. Yeah. No, you put it perfectly. And I did have some experience with Buddhism. I'd gone through an obsessive meditation phase for five years where... Meditated so hard. It became an obsessive thing. And to the credit of... I can't remember the name of the master I was studying under, meaning it's not sense, whatever it is. She identified it where it was like basically meditation. Well, I have a line in The Mushroom Cure where I say, I was meditating for, it was basically, you know, two hours every day for like five years. Because if I could just

attain enlightenment, everything would be perfect. If I could just attain enlightenment, everything would be perfect. If I could just attain enlightenment, everything would be perfect. Technically, that's not a mantra. But that really was my mantra. I was looking at meditation exactly the opposite way that one should. As you know, the idea is, of course, to be present in the moment. To me, it was a means to an end. It was like, if I can just achieve enlightenment, if I can reach this perfect state, then all my problems will be solved.

And that I should mention is also how I looked at psychedelics for a long time. If I can have this perfect ego death plus four mystical experience, then all of my problems will be solved. And without getting into too much detail here, that is a big part of the mushroom cure. And needless to say, that came back and bit me in the ass hard where I pushed things too hard, too fast with psychedelics, looking for this perfect experience to fix me. And I had some pretty terrifying experiences. Yeah. I've overreached myself on a couple of journeys. There's no doubt. And it's funny, the recognition of that in hindsight is perfect. It's like, oh yeah, I was trying to figure out the nature of consciousness and got fucking whacked. Yeah. Those could be great lessons too. So look so look, I want to, I want to talk. I want to be mindful of our time here. I've got Paul, you know, Paul Levy is who that name sounds. He wrote the quantum revelation and, uh, dispelling with Tico. He's actually written another one too. He's a fantastic guy. Uh, anyways, I first heard him on,

on checks podcast. He's coming up here at the top of the hour, running these back to back today, unfortunately. But with us with about 20 minutes left, I want to dive into the current state of psychedelics. You sent me this fantastic video. I'd love to share with my audience too, if that's available for people. I absolutely love it.

Oh yeah, for sure. Okay, we'll link to that in the show notes. This is incredible. And it really gives people a, um, a visceral experience of your comedy, which is flawless. You do just like the, you know, the old Eddie Murphy movies where you're each character within the film and you absolutely crush it. But, uh, let's, let's talk about, you know, and I've had this conversation with Paul check before either on his podcast or mine or both where, you know, there I've had this conversation with Paul Cech before, either on his podcast or mine or both, where there's a lot of hope with the psychedelic renaissance and with all the big players in the game wanting to study and the new science that's coming out that verifies

what the ancients knew for thousands of years. And I think that that can be a good thing, but as you and I have talked about, there's some question marks that remain with the nature of the corporate world, with the nature of how big business works, where you cannot patent nature itself. So they like to take things and tinker a little bit. And similar to those question marks that you had around synthetics versus non-synthetics, I often have a lot of time, people will ask me, I mean, even my wife for a long time was like, Hey, I'm cool with psilocybin and ayahuasca, but I'm not cool with LSD and I'm not cool with ketamine, you know, and it was almost a bias towards synthetics until having some beautiful experiences, microdosing LSD.

And she's still not a fan of ketamine, but you know, maybe one day I'll get her to swing, swing that direction. But the point is, you know, you know, aside from the conversation on synthetic versus natural, because I think we have covered that. What are some of the issues, the core issues that you see right now with, you know, everybody supposedly being on board with this? On this meaning psychedelics in general? Yes, psychedelics in general. The corporate world. You've spoken about a couple of novel things

that are being created right now. And I think it's important to track. Until you brought it up in your video, I didn't even realize that there was a stop the psychedelic trip shot that people could take. You know, dive into that. Well, they're working on it. Yeah.

Yeah. It's, well, yeah. So this video, it's the trip report. It's going to be, this is the first episode. It's an episodic show. I'm hoping to knock them out every few weeks. Sort of a comedic psychedelic news show, but I make points that I feel passionately about. And the first one is about this, yeah,

precisely this. We're seeing this massive mobilization of corporations and startups trying to really, for a lot of them, it is a cynical cash grab, no question. But for some of them, I think there are people who really truly believe in the power of psychedelics and want to make them more accessible, want to offer them in novel contexts. But yeah, the overall... So specifically in this first episode, I talk about these attempts that some of these companies are making to essentially take the, you know, take the hallucinations out of hallucinogens, take the psychedelic experience out of psychedelics,

and instead have this idea that you can just have the benefits of a trip without actually tripping. And on one hand, you know, I love science. So I'm cool with anyone doing any sort of research that may advance human knowledge, especially knowledge related to psychedelics. On the other hand, I feel like I have a few pretty serious concerns. One concern is that, well, first of all, we have compounds that we know work. We have an increasingly robust body of data showing the efficacy of MDMA for PTSD, showing the efficacy of psilocybin for smoking cessation and major depressive disorder, showing the efficacy of the classical psychedelics for very widespread, very debilitating conditions. So is it really a good use of resources to say,

okay, well, yeah, but can we make psilocybin that doesn't make you, or something like psilocybin doesn't make you trip? I mean, so to me, it's almost beside the point if you could, because I'd rather see that resource going into making psilocybin therapy that we know works more readily available. That's one concern. Another concern though is, well, in my more paranoid moments, I can envision a scenario and I haven't heard anyone else talk about this and maybe I am just being paranoid, but let's say someone comes up with something that has psilocybin like effects on, let's say, depression. So it produces benefits, maybe not as strong benefits, but it produces some benefits for depression without actually making people trip.

Now, in theory, that could be a good thing because there are going to be people who just aren't going to be down with a psychedelic trip. But one concern I have is we see the drug pharma industry is they spend more money lobbying than any other industry in the U.S. They spend more on natural resource extraction. They spend more than transportation. They are extraordinarily aggressive in protecting their interests. So it's not hard for me to imagine a scenario where pharma companies show up to the FDA with a bunch of studies showing that this trip-free psilocybin clone helps with depression and say, yeah, we want approval for this. And also, since we have this now,

really, there's no reason to allow people to use psilocybin, right? I mean, that's just why we want people to have these potentially dangerous destabilizing experiences where they can get the benefits without it. So my concern is that some of these pharma companies may not be content to just offer trip-free alternatives to classic psychedelics. They may try to constrain the ability for other clinicians and researchers and patients to access classical psychedelics. Yeah, that's not being paranoid. I mean, that's just looking at our history, right? Right.

That's par for the course, you know? Yeah, I mean, the alcohol industry being a major opponent of marijuana legalization, but not exactly the same. But someone saying, hey, we have something that does this already. Yeah, you get it. Yeah, absolutely. And I guess- You brought up, sorry, go ahead and I'll bring it back.

I'll just really briefly, the third concern I have is, all right, so first of all, putting my cards on the table, I don't think it's going to work. I don't think you're going to come up with something that takes away the trip and is as effective. It may have some benefits, but I think it's going to be radically less effective. But even if it does work, and this is how I conclude this video, I don't want to give it all away. I think what we need, we don't just need individual healing at this point in human history. We really need collective salvation. And I believe, and of course, this is not a novel view to me, Terrence McKenna and many other people have propagated this view, that humans co-evolved with psychedelics.

And that's not coincidental. That these experiences are integral to the development of humanity and are integral to having a functional, healthy human species. And that we try to exist without them at our peril and that the increasing just chaos and agony of history that we're seeing, I believe a lot of that can be traced to the divorce from psychedelic experience in the Western world. So I feel like we actually need these experiences, not just to make us better as individuals, but to make us better collectively. We need the experience of empathy, of altruism, of deep connection to the universe. So that's my third and I'd say my deepest concern about

this movement, about the movement to strip out the psychedelic experience. Yeah, I couldn't agree more. Even taking it a step further, the divide from nature's kitchen can be thought of in all ways. We have frankenfoods and diet Cokes and chemicals added to all sorts of shit, sprayed on the ground, added to our soft drinks, added to our tap water. And so the closer we get back to, and this isn't to fantasize about the past or tribal living or any of that, it's just to say like, can we entertain the best of both worlds? Can we live in a technological world that is advancing and, you know, but still be able to connect back to our roots, to still be able to hold the container of ceremony around these experiences

rather than medicalizing the experience. I mean, so many people that have had ketamine, I have many friends that have had pretty good results with ketamine in a clinical setting. I asked them about their experience and they're like, oh, they put on classical music, give me a shot and then walk out of the room and come back 45 minutes later. I'm like, no one's there holding space for you. That isn't the move. I'm not saying every single substance that needs to be taken has to have Icaro sung to you live. That, that, that, that'd be a stretch, right? And there's certainly not enough people in the world who are qualified to provide that type of guidance. But at the same time, there is something to be

said for doing ayahuasca with a corandero who sings Icarus to you live versus listening to an iPod. They're two different experiences. There's no doubt. So, yeah, we have some gaps that we need to bridge for sure. And that's definitely something that's been on my mind. Also, you know, one of the things that we talked about with this, you know, the end of the trip shot, you know, and taking the psychedelic experience out of psychedelics, really they're one and the same thing. It is going through the challenging experience

that makes it worthwhile. It's really, it's facing your deepest, darkest fears that allow you to surrender to them and offer you a new lens in which to see the world, a shift in perspective that takes place only by doing the firewalk. You don't get there. It's not gifted to you. You know what I'm saying? It's the equivalent of somebody reading about forgiveness in a Bible versus me understanding how I must forgive myself through my own understanding on a plant medicine journey.

They're two solid to completely different experiences. And if we rob somebody of the initiation that takes place through facing those fears and really out of desperation, surrendering and accepting and seeing outside the box, if we don't get that, then we're really taking the beauty away from it. You know, it's like, again, it kind of reminds me of even on a lesser level, what they did with cannabis when they're like, oh yeah, THC is the one. So they strip out all other alkaloids in favor of THC. And all of a sudden there's no CBD left in the plant. And they're like, oh, wait a minute. CBD is awesome.

Let's do that. And now you've got 0% THC CBDs that are out. And it's like, all right, but nature did this a little differently. They were inclusive of all these things, right? In the cannabis plant. And I think it's cool to see which alkaloids do what on a scientific level. And maybe we can produce some different... I have buddies that are doing some pretty novel stuff at University of Colorado in the mycology department, and they're figuring out what does what. And if they can crossbreed one strain with another strain, then they can enhance some of the effects of some of the different alkaloids.

That's all good science. But don't delete out some of these more profound ones, especially just with the knowledge and know-how that we have around tryptamines themselves. You know, DMT, ayahuasca that contains NNDMT, 5-MeO-DMT, psilocybin or psilocin, and LSD, all are hitting these similar receptor sites, all of which are improving the hardware and software of the brain.

So where's the workaround from those particular molecules? We don't need to reinvent the wheel here. These work and they work for a very good reason. Yeah. And I don't think we're going to get a wheel. I think we're going to get some weird dodecahedron lumpy thing that limps along. And yeah, I mean, I think it's telling that the people who are leading these charges to develop these trip-free treatments are, are not people who, who have psychedelic experience themselves so far as, as, as I know. I, yeah, I think it is, I think it is misguided. So, but yeah, it's, you know, the general trend though to corporatization, I think it's inevitable. And I think it's inevitable. I don't think it necessarily was inevitable, but I think at this point it is. And I, it's, who knows, it causes a lot of concerns, especially when you see some companies like Compass Pathways, you know, patenting, they were granted a patent for psilocybin. Now, not all psilocybin, the specific synthesis of it, but it was a patent that almost certainly should not have been granted based on the fact that it used prior art from going back to Albert

Hoffman, his synthesis of psilocybin. So what we're seeing is what we should have expected to see, that psychedelic corporations are, they're corporations first, the psychedelic part is second, and maybe not all of them, but certainly the biggest players in the space, companies like Compass and MindMed, are using incredibly aggressive IP strategies, in an atmosphere of cooperation and good faith for decades because no one wanted in on this from a money perspective. No corporations were going to touch this. So of course, they shared all their research freely. Of course, they didn't develop a patent strategy. But that's not entirely fair. And we don't have time to get into that. But I'm not saying they did anything wrong. I'm saying that we're entering a new chapter now corporations are making money off something, it's a lot less likely to be banned. I mean, from guns to prescription medication, if you have something that is, you know, that's listed on the New York Stock Exchange,

you're a lot less likely to, the government is a lot less likely to, you know, to move in prohibition strategies. So it could, in a sense, protect psychedelics to some extent. But yeah, it's a different world. And I would be arrogant to pretend to have any real idea of how it's going to play out at this stage. But I am concerned. Well, yeah, I'm concerned as well.

But we can sit in the uncertainty as most of the plants remind us of the importance of, we'll sit in the uncertainty of it. Brother, it's been so fantastic having you on the podcast. I definitely want to do it with you again. Where can people find you online and what do you have coming up in the works? So, yeah. So, The Trip Report is my psychedelic news show. So, I'm focusing on that. But the wonderful thing is live performance is coming back. And man, I'm so eager to get back on stage.

So I'll be doing stand-up in New York starting in June. I will likely be doing a run of The Mushroom Cure. Hopefully in July, we're trying to line that up and beyond. So yeah, socials are Adam Strauss, Adam, A-T-O-M, like atomic. That's not how I refer to myself. Just someone else already had the A-T-O-M, like atomic. That's not how I refer to myself. Just someone else already had the A-D-A-M. So A-T-O-M, S-T-R-A-U-S-S is the social handles. And then themushroomcure.com.

I'll have tour dates up there as well. And yeah, look forward to connecting again, Kyle. It's been great catching up. Yeah, absolutely, brother. Thank you so much. We'll link to everything in the show notes. Just fantastic. Have a beautiful day, my friend. Wonderful. You too. Thanks. Thank you.