Kyle Kingsbury Podcast - #363 Robert Forte's Surprising Takes On The Psychedelic Revolution(s)

Episode Date: July 17, 2024

We have Robert Forte back on today. Robert is one of the most knowledgeable men I know on the psychedelic movement of the 60’s and has some hot takes on what we all think we know about the movement. He may surprise you with some of the things he says. As always come with an open mind and    Fit For Service Trimester One was the best program I’ve personally put together so far. We had 40 folks come with honesty and commitment. We went through cleanses, workout overhauls, working-in practices, optimized our diets and sleep. Then topped it all off with a gathering at the feet of Montana Mountains. Come join me to get on track to the best shape of your life and kick it out in Sedona this fall for Trimester 2   Connect with Robert: Website: Altered States of America - Altered States of America.Substack   Books: "Entheogens And The Future of Religion" -Robert Forte Facebook: Robert Forte    Show Notes: British Army on LSD "The Most Dangerous Superstition" -Larken Rose    Sponsors: Caldera Lab is the best in men’s skincare. Head over to calderalab.com/KKP to get any/all of their regimen. Use code “KKP” at checkout for 20% off 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  Monetary Metals Start investing in your future with Monetary Metals. Head to  https://bit.ly/3zaKcEJ & monetary-metals.com/kkp Organifi Go to organifi.com/kkp to get my favorite way to easily get the most potent blend of high vibration fruits, veggies and other goodies into your diet! Click that link and use code “KKP” at checkout for 20% off your order! To Work With Kyle Kingsbury Podcast   Connect with Kyle: Twitter: @KINGSBU  Fit For Service Academy App: Fit For Service App  Instagram: @livingwiththekingsburys - @gardenersofeden.earth  Odysee: odysee.com/@KyleKingsburypod  Youtube: Kyle Kingbury Podcast  Kyles website: www.kingsbu.com - Gardeners of Eden site    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.

All right, we've got a fire, fire show today with the return of Robert Forte. If you missed the first episode, that's fine. I bridged the gap for people to get to reiterate just because I think of how important it is. Robert Forte was maybe not a big name during the psychedelic 60s, but certainly was involved with all the big names, the Terrence McKenna's, the Timothy O'Leary's, the Robert Anton Wilson's, and really played an interesting role through it all, but understood things and understood the people and maybe some of the nefarious things that were happening with regard to that, with regards to what Aldous Huxley wrote about. Robert's an excellent writer. And as I mentioned, been on the podcast before,

but we came back onto this one in particular because of a new ruling from the FDA that turned down the use of MDMA for PTSD. Now, I have a lot of friends in the military. I've had quite a few of them on this podcast. I'm one of the first people to tell you how important plant medicines as well as MDMA can be for the healing of PTSD and have had my own bouts of things that needed

healing, big traumas that really I give credit to the right use of these medicines to heal. So I for sure want availability, but Robert had a different take on this. And this goes back to Rick Doblin and the foundation of maps. So you've heard Robert Forte before. He's going to say some shit that most people haven't heard before when it comes to all this, and it can be a little shocking, but I promise you, I've never met somebody who speaks with more integrity and certainly not somebody who has more on-scene knowledge from a time that really stands out to us

as we look back, you know, in the third wave of psychedelics, we start to look back, you know, and glorify much of what was happening then. Robert intelligently paints a much broader picture of what that actually looked like and what's happening now.

I love, love having him on. Share this podcast with friends, anybody you think could find interesting, people that you know that are engaged in this kind of stuff. It's really cool and fascinating. And support our sponsors. They make this show possible. We're brought to you today by Caldera and The Lab,

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You'll meet Aubrey Marcus, Eric Gazi, Caitlin Howe. We've got Matias DiStefano coming out and several other amazing people to support a really beautiful week of transformation in one of the most beautiful places on earth. Check it all out, fitforservice.com and look for the Sedona Summit. And without further ado, my brother, Robert Forte. Robert Forte, this is round 2.2. It's great to see you. And i really appreciate you um having me on uh i just am ecstatic really i mean we're going to talk about mdma i hope a lot and i'm just um if you could

see where i am right now and what i'm looking at um gives the word ecstasy real meaning. I'm out on the tiny Greek island in the Aegean Sea called Danusa which means vibration and the Geology here is absolutely spectacular Crystalline rocks everywhere. And I don't know, can I turn this around just for a second? Yeah, let's see it just for the folks there.

That's just what I'm looking out my window here. Dang, that looks incredible. It's amazing. And my wife and I were just snorkeling in those, just the clearest, bluest waters. Just absolutely fantastic. And it feels like i'm on i didn't sleep last night because i was dreaming like the um like i take an lsd and there's clearing up a bunch of old material from my psyche just vibrating like the island hums

so spectacular yeah yeah that's awesome well i always love getting people fresh out of ceremonies so it's nice that we got you on the back end of this of this up level and uh that's so cool listen we we you know we will recover some of the stuff that we talked about in our first podcast that's natural i don't want to avoid it because there's certain pieces of it that are definitely worth rehashing and And we're going to talk about current events, you know, big ones, FDA, what a lot of people think went wrong, and whether or not the case, but I would love to get, you know, give us your background as if it's your first time on the podcast. You know, what were you doing when the psychedelic 60s hit, when the Timothy Leary's

of the world were becoming famous, and the Terrence McKenna's were giving big speeches. I'd love to know how you fit in all that because you really were a part of the who's who, maybe not as well known as those guys, but you were right in there with them, you know, Sasha Shulgin, all of it. So give us that background and then lead that into MDMA because I think this is just a fantastic, a fantastic origin story. Yeah, well, I mean, the 60s, what was I doing? I was playing Little League Baseball. I was born in 1956. So, you know, mid-60s, I'm just 10, 11 years old. And I'm really fascinated by what's going on.

Like, it happened very quickly, this, you know, the 60s movement and psychedelic drugs. I mean, one minute I'm playing Little League Baseball and hanging out in nature, kind of a natural mystic, you know, I'd have these kind of experiences of oneness being in nature. And then, you know, suddenly these drugs are flooding our community. I grew up in an area in the very northeastern most part of New Jersey, a suburb of New York City. And suddenly there's all these drugs and people in my class are taking LSD and mushrooms. And I was very kind of frightened by it at first. I didn't see any real benefit to it. I saw kids just wandering off and going into

some places I didn't understand. And I vowed I would stay away from these things. I was fascinated by the anti-war movement and some of the spirit of the 60s, a lot of the music, the Beatles, Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young, the earthy, ecological, wholesome sort of stuff that I loved. And then, you know, I got into college and I became, actually, you know, as an athlete and one of my sports is golf, of all things, you know, like it's about the least psychedelic sport that people could imagine but my brother suggested that i learn the practice of meditation that might help my golf game and so i did i got into meditation and it had very um powerful and positive effects on my life and so i became curious like how did um how did ancient people come up with these techniques and these metaphysical systems so long ago?

So I became interested in the history of religion. And at the time, I was going to Columbia University in New York City, and I took a course in the kind of late 1970s, 1978, our professor taught us that Indian religion kind of comes out of this body of writing, it's known as the Vedas. And the Rig Veda is mostly about a plant and a drug and a ceremony and a god called Soma. And that Soma produced these, they would have these ceremonies and collect it and prepare it and drink it. And it produced visions. And then that's where all this stuff came from. And so he, I'll never forget this afternoon he said you know scholars have wondered forever what was soma and he said the the leading theory has been put forth by a wall street banker named r gordon watson and he wrote the name on the board and i kept just

looking and it was like a light went off in my head. And R. Gordon Lawson, this Wall Street banker, has come up with a theory that Soma was a species of hallucinogenic mushroom. And I was, wow, really like a light. It was like that was the beginning for me. I call my involvement in this field, really, it was like a calling. At that moment, I realized, I thought, wow, these years, these psychedelic drugs seemed like they were just trivial, distracting, even dangerous things for my friends in school. And now suddenly they're linked with one of the most significant practices in my own life. And so I

left the class when it was over and I went down to the bookstore on Broadway, Strand's bookstore, and picked up a copy of The Joyous Cosmology by Alan Watts with a preface by Timothy Leary. Now, at that point in my life, Timothy Leary was sort of a cartoonish character. You know, he was a Harvard professor who got his brain burned out on LSD and fired, and was kind of a tragic figure to me. So just within that hour, hearing the name Gordon Wasson, Alan Watts, Timothy Leary, little did I know that within the next, you know, three or four years, I would connect with these people in a way. And it really began my inquiry into the subject. You know, this was a period of time.

The 1960s had had this big explosive effect on our society. And then they, you know then the drugs became illegal. They kind of petered out. There was this period, some call it the dark ages of modern psychedelia. Books weren't being published. There wasn't anything in the newspapers. They were forbidden.

There weren't any classes at universities. They were taboo. But I was totally fascinated by it. And I had to kind of create my own curriculum. And sometimes I was Frank Barron. Now, he's not very well known except to real psychedelic scholars, but he's one of the most significant people in the modern psychedelic movement.

He's the one who started the project at Harvard. He turned on Timothy Leary. He became known as one of the most important researchers into the psychology of creativity and personality assessment. He was the most cited professor in the University of California system. And I took a course with him. And he mentioned Timothy Leary a couple times and then told me that he was his best friend. And so we would meet afterwards and this fascination of mine just began to deepen. So, you know, that's kind of the first part. I owe a lot of my interest and the early connections I made to Frank Barron. I had

decided to go to graduate school to study the history of religion with a very prominent scholar, a professor named Mircea Iliade. But before I went to Chicago, Frank suggested that it was time to restart a psychedelic movement. The 60s happened, there were a lot of mistakes made. He thought he was responsible for some of them. Leary was such a character. And it was time now to learn from the mistakes of the 60s and see if we could start this conversation again wiser. And so he asked me if I would organize a conference. And in 1981, the summer that I graduated, I drew together, well, like a thousand people came. Very last minute sort of thing, just fired off letters to Timothy Leary and Stan Groff and Alexander Shulgin and Andrew Weil and pretty much anybody who was anybody in the first wave

came to this conference to um because they loved the idea let's do this again and um and so instead of going to Chicago that year I went Stan Groff who you know you know and I'm sure your listeners know is generally considered the um the foremost um researcher of the effects of lsd and psychotherapy uh who at the time was living at the esalen institute um we connected and stan invited me to come to esalen to be his student and his assistant in his workshops and so that was a you, that was a great gift for me. So I went down to Esalen and, and, uh, became a part of that community.

Then I went to the university of Chicago and, um, and you know, you know, it was 40 something years ago. Now here we are. Did you, when you were with Stan, was that, that I mean LSD had been illegal was that was that after he had um really started to cultivate holotropic breathwork was that some of the the tools that he was working with while you were side by side with him yes um we were we were developing holotropic breathwork in fact I was at the meeting in um the fall of 1981 when we named it. We came up with the name holotropic breathwork. And I would, you know, honestly, to me, it seemed like just a cover.

LSD was illegal. People came from all over the world to learn, work with Stan and learn his model of the psyche and to do LSD which was forbidden so the breath work was just sort of okay let's put this here we're coming to do breath work but in but in actual fact we were we were working directly with LSD and the breath work was you know to me just sort of secondary a cover but yeah I was a big of that. I led the groups for the Esalen community. But yeah, that's when it started. That's super cool. I had figured that being the case, you don't build up that large of a working knowledge base and just discard it because somebody decides one day that it's bad for you when it's clearly not. But holotropic breathwork, shamanic

breathwork has been something that i've really fallen in love with because it is it is legal you can do it anywhere and it takes work and it's kind of like it is a psychedelic experience but your foot's on the gas and you can put your foot on the brake anytime you like so i do have a deep appreciation for that especially as an entryway or a way to ground because so much of it is embodied um when it comes to to the nervous system and grounding everything and moving stuff through the system i think it's a fantastic tool so just one more feather in the cap you know for you guys yeah and i agree with you totally you know and since then the technique has really developed more and we've learned more and more

about we always knew of course that uh the breath is central to um spiritual exercises throughout history since the very beginning and the relationship of the breath to the heart chakra and um so it's very it's i'm i'm it's it kind of blows my mind to see how um how it's spread out all over the world now and people like you and others, you know, really use it as a way to, to, um, deepen our understanding of the mystery of our psyche. Absolutely brother. Yeah. Well, let's, when did you, you know, let's leave, lead us to, you know, Northern California and, uh, and the production time and all those good, those good days.

Yeah. That was a great adventure. So so you know we're having these conversations about um what went wrong in the 60s and how can we learn from these mistakes and then um timothy leary came to santa cruz and i went up to see him and one of his associates gave me a couple of hits of MDMA, which at the time was hardly known at all. It was a very secret substance. We called it Adam. And I took it on Halloween 1981 at Esalen and had a very, very profound and beautiful experience.

I'll never forget my, my partner at the time and I walked into the Halloween party at the big house at Esalen and person greeted us at the door. I mean, you know, it's a costume party and, and she said to us, I don't know what you guys are on,

but whatever it is, I bet it's good. And it was amazing. I mean, MDMA is one of the most wonderful, divine intoxicants, even though it's toxic compared to the other things that you and I are interested in. It was such a heart-opening and beautiful experience and it occurred to me you know immediately that this is going to be the key could be a key to opening up this new discussion of psychedelics because unlike lsd which um you know the mysteries can kind of come on to powerfully in in a frightening way mdma is just very, very gentle. It was like an intermediate

psychedelic drug. So I was fascinated by it. And I told Stan about my experience. And he said, well, if you want to know more about that, who was an exceptional, extraordinary, just dazzling, brilliant, laughing character, like a psychedelic Albert Einstein. That's what I thought of him. And I introduced myself as a student, and I wanted to learn everything about psychedelic drugs. And he said, well, how can I help you? And I told him, I just had this experience with MDMA and I heard that you're the guy and I was kind of hoping I could get some more of that from you. And he laughed and he said, oh no, I couldn't do that. We talked for a little bit longer as the heart broken and he leaned over to me and he said, but I can teach you how to make it. And I thought,

oh, that would be, I could barely cook in those days, but went on my way. Shortly thereafter, I'm hitchhiking and this guy picked me up, chemistry books in his backseat off the campus of the University of California, Santa Cruz. Beatles music is playing. All you need is love. And so I said to him, hey, you want to make some drugs? They're legal.

And we connected. And he said, before long, you know, return to Sasha with two chemists this time. And borrowed 500 bucks from one of my old friends. And Sasha and those guys discussed chemistry and where to get materials, especially this one precursor. That was just a four-step process and for like a 500 investment we had a kilogram of you know pharmaceutically pure mdma produced at state-of-the-art laboratory purity tested by you know 500 000 nuclear magnetic resonance machine and these you know beautiful white crystals in this not illegal, I called it magic dust, and began this project, which was, you know, I called it just a naturalistic observation of the effects of MDMA.

It was kind of quasi-formal, and I offered it to volunteers, telling them it was a kind of mild psychedelic drug. Take it with somebody you love. Candles help. And above all, keep it secret. Just ask you to write up a report what it did for you. But don't tell anybody. We want this to stay underground.

We want to build a broad base of knowledge and data. We want to learn from the mistakes of the 60s. And one of the big mistakes of the 60s, we thought, was that Timothy Leary had gotten a little carried away, a little too exuberant and antagonized a lot of people, introduced substances to people that maybe weren't prepared for them or reacted negatively and so we wanted to learn from this and you know tim was chastised by frank baron and other people like these psychedelic drugs are sacred

and that means secret it's like there's profane, ordinary reality with all that stuff, but there's a dimension of the sacred where things are different and you don't just, you treat them differently with a kind of respect. And so we were practicing that model, and it was one of the most, it was magical and fantastic time for me. I was, by this time for me I was by this time now I'm kind of going back and forth between Esalen and the University of Chicago I had a I had some connections in Aspen Colorado and for the next few

years I was just sort of moving around with my bag of magic dust and meeting the most you know fantastic um assortment of characters and so in this period of um you know from like 1981 1982 i turned on many hundreds of people some of them really um just my friends and colleagues and professors i was going to very good schools so some of them are like, you know, National Academy of Science professors and leaders in their field. Aspen, Colorado, I, you know, I was just writing this story up a little. I'm writing a memoir where I walked into a bar looking for a friend of mine

who was a writer, and the only person sitting in the bar is Jack Nicholson. And so I sat next to Jack and struck up a conversation. We had some mutual friends, Timothy Leary being one of them, Oscar Janiger, who's another character in the psychedelic movement who turned on a lot of Hollywood celebrities, including Jack in the 1950s, was a teacher and a friend of mine. So Jack and I hit it off. And Jack then introduces me to his friends in Aspen like I'm his old pal, which is, you know, like the key is to the city.

I got to meet a whole range of people there, Hunter Thompson. So it was like that. And this is the thing that now we can get into here that everybody kept the secret everybody was so at such respect for what this experience did and i was i'd collected you know a couple of hundred written reports of these dramatic breakthroughs and self-knowledge, in the healing of trauma, releasing addictions with very little coaching. I mean, the drug had its own intelligence and the fact that it was secret and that people were just, they just loved it.

I was providing therapists and artists and scholars and writers and everybody kept the secret everybody except one person and that one person was uh rick doblan who one of my associates gave it to and rick not only did not keep the secret rick saw an opportunity to make a lot of money. And so he calls the media, calls the newspapers, calls President Reagan's drug czar, Carlton Turner, calls the Partnership for a Drug-Free America to tell them all that there is this not illegal love drug that therapists in northern california are using and he kind of appoints himself the spokesperson for this new secret compound to make a quick buck really is what he did and i want to be careful here that i don't say anything that's too unkind but i'm you know i've been watching this scene for some time uh with rip in particular

and um at the time those of us were involved were furious that he would do this basically snitch us out we had to shut down the project um esalen issued a um a taboo you weren't even allowed to talk about psychedelics at esalen anymore because he named Esalen in the media. And the media lapped it up and suddenly was one of the main reasons that this secret substance suddenly became, of conditions to the most popular recreational drug in the world, which was being used mostly in a completely different context. Instead of, you know, small meetings with people you love and this intimate kind of contact, again, amazing, almost immediately this whole rave scene starts. And at the edge of nearly every major city in the modern world, these warehouses are being turned into dance halls. And MDMA is like flooding these dance halls with this, to me, I'm showing my age, I don't know, mind-numbing music. Instead of intimate conversation and openness, you've got this. And people are having like, you know, sexual encounters and the power, the real power of this medicine was,

that was the beginning of how it's been squandered for the last, you know, 40 years, 35 years. And that was also the beginning of rick's um you know he created this thing called maps and um it's gotten tremendous publicity over the over these decades this hard-working man who's working to make this valuable drug legal for therapy. There's a lot of deception in the way this story has been characterized in the media. So that's a little bit of that. Yeah, that's massive. Rick Dahl has been on this podcast years ago.

We, I'm sure, have mutual friends that are all pretty closely related. MAPS throws the psychedelic conference, or at least sponsored it in the past. And it's been, you know, from the outside looking in, it's been like these guys are like the good guys. These guys are the ones that are spearheading change and trying to make things, you know, that there's a plan to get this legalized and then hopefully from there there's a domino effect and then psilocybin and these other things can become legal but hearing this is it's a it's it's a total mind fuck like holy shit like you guys are at the start of this and and that's a whole different backlog of what history actually is it also changes the shape of what we see as a

positive going forward and so that you know recent news is um they've been you know there's phase three trying to get the phase three trials and fast-tracked MDMA to go through as a medicine for PTSD and I'd love for you to comment on that because all of us have been kind of waiting like yes this is going to be the first one and it didn't go that way and and and perhaps that's a positive you shed some light on that yeah um so you know what kind of detail do i want to get in here um when when i was first working with mdma and when r it, in fact, still, MDMA is what's known as a orphan drug. That means it has no parent. It was originally discovered, invented, back in 1914, I think, by a German pharmaceutical company.

It was tested as an appetite suppressant. It was found to not be particularly useful. They just gave it to animals. They didn't know about its psychoactivity in humans. So they just put it on the shelf. And in the next few years, the patent for that formula became public domain. And they were just sat on the shelves of chemistry libraries, this methylated amphetamine. And I'm pausing for a second. I just want to insert this in because the next investigation of MDMA was in the 1950s in a secret project at the Edgewood Arsenal,

the U.S. Department of Chemical Warfare, where it was explored as Edgewood Arsenal 1475. Now, the papers are hard to find. I used to have them, but it was looked at and nobody really knows exactly what they were looking at. Why MDMA in the Department of Chemical Warfare? OK, that's a whole. Let's just put that there for a second. It starts to appear Alexander Shulgin and a man named Gordon Ales. At the same time, MDA became known as a love drug, and they were researching methylated amphetamines, and they found this, oh, MDMA. And Sasha Shulgin, being an experiencer, took it. Ales took it. And they realized, wow, this had very interesting psychological effects. And so at the same time, these little research groups started happening.

And people began to realize, wow, it has remarkable effectiveness in expediting psychotherapy. But see, the thing was, it was an orphan drug. Now, according to the present body of laws, in order for a drug to be introduced into the market, it has to go through extensive clinical testing. And this testing runs into a lot of money, like $100 million it costs to bring a drug to market. Usually, a pharmaceutical company will make that investment because they own the drug, and they'll get it back in the marketing of it. But MDMA was already in the public domain. So even though it had these dramatic, unique therapeutic virtues, nobody was going to invest the $100 million it took to bring it to market because they couldn't own it.

So Rick Doblin comes up with this scam. And his scam is that he's going to create a non-profit and he's going to solicit donations from the general public, from the psychedelic community. So this is what he does. He raises if you've been paying attention to maps from the beginning, like every single thing that ever comes out of their headquarters is a request for money. So Rick uses public money to bring this drug almost to completion in the clinical trials. And then what does he do? He switches and he turns MAPS. He develops another thing, a for-profit corporation called Lycos,

which gets a license from MAPS for MDMA, an exclusive license. And in fact, what he's doing now, when the FDA advisory committee just voted his application down, he's now trying to patent MDMA, a slightly different version of it. So it's a scam. He told me this at the very beginning. This is what he was going to do. He was going to raise public money to develop the master file on MDMA that his nonprofit would own and have the exclusive rights to license it the deception that he's going to make it legal, he's never going to make it legal. He was going to control it. You want to take MDMA? If I want to take MDMA,

we have to go through, we have to get him thousands of dollars. We have to pay. If this application that was just voted down goes through, MDMA will be legal for a very small number of people. It will cost you $15,000 for a session. This just is astonishing to me. Here's Rick Doblin and other people associated with him. That this drug is so great to help our veterans. Just give me $15,000 and you can get four sessions. Think about that, $15,000 for four sessions. Rick Doblin got his mdma for free and now he's had this vision that he knew was going to take decades that's what he that's what

he was trying to pull off so um it costs pennies to make mdma pennies so um yeah that is something i wanted to bring up the 500 for a kilogram when 100 milligrams is is you know a point or or one one standard dose uh that five that kilogram 2.2 pounds goes quite a quite a long distance at 500 in production yeah 8,000 doses or something like that wasn't the only it wasn't the only kilogram we made of course yeah of course yeah yeah i of course not we would sell it we i would provide it to therapists i never i never was doing it for money you know i uh i my own little money thing i don't I never got involved in this because I wanted to make any money selling drugs or anything like that. But to me, it was a spiritual mission to help open the heart chakra of America and the world. That's what we were doing this for. So, well, you also have a very detailed knowledge of, of kind of the, the, the dark side of

America's history and, you know, what, what some of our, you know, now more and more every day, people are beginning to wake up to the fuckery that takes place from, you know, the alphabet organizations. And, uh, I would love for you to recap to kind of what, what, what, in your opinion, was this psychedelic sixties about? Because if, if, you know, what drew you into this was discovering the nature of Soma and, and trying to deepen your relationship to spirit through spiritual practices, through uncovering the Rig Veda and studying world religion.

This stuff comes along. It's got to seem like, wow, this is right in line. We're on track. And of course, you know, there's also another version of that story that I don't think many people know. Yeah. So, you know, the history of religion is a big subject. History of religion contains the very best and the very worst of humanity, right? We can see this.

History of religion has, you know, meditation, spiritual traditions teach meditation. They teach ethics. They teach right livelihood. They teach love your neighbor. They teach about immortality and these farthest, most wonderful aspects of being incarnated as a human being. But they also, history of religion, contains the very worst and how religion, religious ideas are used to indoctrinate people and to confuse them and to throw fairy dust in their eyes. And they're used as an excuse for war and genocide and conquest and to throw fairy dust in their eyes and they're used as a excuse for war and genocide and conquest and all of these things and so it's important we want to have a thorough understanding of psychedelic history to see that psychedelic history is really a microcosm of the history of religion the very best and the very worst Now, the 60s was a very complicated period.

And I'm still, you know, I met, I had a, sometimes I'm referred to as an expert on psychedelics. And it's in a way true but I also like to step back from that a little bit and and say that how can you really be an expert in a subject that um the further you go into it the broader it more mysterious it becomes and so I like to just have an open mind and I'm an expert student of psychedelic history and um so I was uh I mentioned Gordon Wasson. Gordon Wasson is in many ways, Terence McKenna used to refer to him as the Moses of the psychedelic movement because it was his discovery, quote unquote, of the magic mushroom in Mexico and the publication of that discovery in Life magazine in 1957, which was like the shot heard around the world.

Suddenly these powerful mushrooms that are known only to a handful of anthropologists and indigenous people are splattered all over the pages of the most popular periodical in America being Life Magazine. Suddenly, everybody knows about these magic mushrooms that cause visions that are discovered by this mycologist banker. Fascinating story. That's what got, it was one of the main things that got this thing underway. So I got to know Gordon Wasson. I was hanging out in Cambridge University, Harvard University in Cambridge for a little while. And I decided to organize a conference

there at the Divinity School in the early 80s. And Richard Schulte is one of the other great scholars and botanists suggested I invite Gordon Wasson next thing I knew I've borrowed a shirt and tie and my father's Lincoln Continental and I drive to Danbury Connecticut to meet Gordon Wasson at his very modest estate and drive him up to Cambridge and get to know him and we developed a relationship and then some years later I received a bunch of money to begin a documentary film about him and so I got access into his voluminous archives at Harvard. I'm poking around these archives and learning all these things about Wasson and um i decided to veer off from his mushroom stuff and go into his personal correspondences and i find out that well you know

gordon wasson wasn't really a banker per se like we think of a banker as a guy who deals with uh money and interest rates and you know he wasn't really a banker like that. He was a PR guy. He was a propagandist, actually, for J.P. Morgan. J.P. Morgan, yeah, that's a bank, but J.P. Morgan is more than a bank. J.P. Morgan is really a major political force, was a big backer of the Third Reich. J.P. Morgan was behind an attempted coup d'etat against FDR

right after the Depression. Not a terrific guy. Wasson was his PR guy. I also find out that Wasson is close friends with people like, one of the first documents was a guy named George Kennan. Now, you have to be a pretty good student of American history to know that George Kennan was considered one of the most important statesmen of the post-war period. But he was also a fascist.

He was a pro-Hitler fascist. He was one of the main operatives in what we now know as Project Paperclip, which was the importing of Nazi war criminals into dulles who is the uh one of the early um directors founders of the cia member of the oss who was also one of these american fascists he helped invest the third reich's money so there's this you know there's this uh fascist movement in America. Wasson is right in the middle of that. That's funny, huh? And I start researching a little bit more, and I find out there's this expedition that Wasson went on to find the mushroom and publish it in Life magazine, was funded by the CIA. There's a story that Wasson tells that makes it look like he didn't know the CIA was funding his study. But after I realized these connections he'd had with these people, it's very implausible that they would do this behind his back. And then, you know, now we know, I say we,

we scholars who are looking deeper into the psychedelic movement, we know that we, many, almost everybody has heard of MKUltra, the CIA project of using psychedelic drugs in these nefarious ways, giving it to, you it to prostitutes, giving it to people unknowingly and watching their effects, or giving it to prisoners and these terrible things that the CIA did with psychedelic drugs in this program called MKUltra. But MKUltra was a lot bigger than that. And there were a lot of sub-pro sub projects that have been not very well known well

it's been learned that the mushroom the wasan expedition to mexico that started the psychedelic movement in america was mk ultra sub project number 58 so we have to ask ourselves what's going on here why why is the cia which is basically the nazi party in america i mean that's that's where the cia comes from why are they starting deliberately blasting through the mainstream media this mushroom and starting this movement? What is that all about? So that's the question. in my estimation and i'm i'm uh hoping to have more and more of these conversations so more and more people can have and look do their own research we can come up with a an explanation aldous huxley and one of the fathers of the modern psychedelic movement he wrote the doors of perception you know about his mescaline experience. Like Wasson's Life magazine article,

The Doors of Perception was one of the shots heard around the world that informed, you know, people all over the world that these psychedelic drugs, that was mescaline, exist and have these marvelous effects on consciousness. But before Huxley wrote Brave New World, I mean, before he wrote The Doors of Perception, he writes a novel, Brave New World. Brave New World is a dystopian novel in which he locates it 600 years in the future. That society will be a pyramid where all the wealth and power is controlled by a very small number of people at the top, and all the rest of these people down here who live in little tiny rooms and have menial jobs, although they're the vast majority, they never muster the political force to do anything about their predicament. And one of the reasons why, in Huxley's novel, is that they're given this

drug. It's called Soma, different than the vedic soma but huxley calls it soma and soma is a quasi psychedelic drug huxley writes brave new world in 1938 so psychedelics wasn't even a word yet but but he comes up with this drug that makes you feel like everything is okay, no matter what, even when everything is not okay. It's a drug and you're on weekends, if you're in the bottom of the pyramid, you start to get a little restless about, hey, how come I got to work all these hours and they got all the money you're ordered to go on a retreat on a soma holiday and on this soma holiday you're given soma it's like mdma wow everything is amazing you're told to fuck your brains out not form form relationships, just like sex and drug. It's like Burning Man. And then you come back from the weekend and who wants to muster

the political force and organize voters and do all that shit you've got to do to transform society if you've just fucked your brains out and had these ecstatic experiences? That's what Huxley writes in 1938. 1958, Huxley comes up with a nonfiction essay addendum to Brave New World. And I tell everybody to read this that thinks I'm just nuts because Huxley just lays it out there that Brave New World happened much faster than I thought. And now we have these psychedelic drugs. LSD is the new Soma. And this is the tool of the dictators to control society. Just lays it right out there.

Of course, Wasson and Huxley and Albert Hoffman, the discoverer of LSD, are corresponding. And they all have these connections with the global fascist movement. And so, you know, this was a very rude awakening for me, because I entered this field with this great enthusiasm and hope that these psychedelic drugs can indeed help trigger spiritual awakening of interrelatedness. And so ecological practices and anti-war policies would become more generated by these kinds of experiences. Then to learn that actually this movement was in many respects started by these guys for exactly the opposite reason. So that's a lot of material right there. That is a lot of material right there.

Oh, man. Yeah, I'm trying to think of where to take this, you know, because there's so much that you know, too, with the stuff I want to get into that's not necessarily directly related, but we'll see if we get there. I think, you know, it's important, and we talked about this before, and I think it's well understood between us and friends of ours like Paul Cech,

but there is a beauty in the medicine space that is still held. When Wasson discovered the psychedelic mushroom, they went to Mexico where it was held in a sacred container, right? And how that got rolled out is completely different, right? That was one of the missing pieces in the 1960s was the container. as you mentioned before there's a bell curve it's not for everybody there's there's and i mean like there's actually a lot of people that would fall into into a bad space or be left uh worse off than before they started from a deep experience like that um but i still even with all the asterisks some of the best experiences in my life have come from these medicines. And so it's a very,

it's a, it's a weird position to be, you know, to say like, man, well, these have, these do have that kind of power.

They do have that ability when, when in the right container, even MDMA, you know, like especially in MDMA to go from, cause I, mine started in dance halls and shit like that. And then it went to,

now I'm going to be with my loved one. We're going to have some soft music and candles going and like wow that's what this can do you know so like even with that you got both of them yeah so let me say something to that because uh first of all thank you for bringing that up you know i i am because i have to be careful i get reputation for being you know like a curmudgeon or something like being an anti-psychedelic drug and so i want to just um you know i'm not i'm i'm like you i value these substances profoundly the experiences that i've had and shared with hundreds and hundreds of other people have been very very profound and it's like this um lovemaking uh lovemaking is like right up there with psychedelic drugs it's one of the greatest

experiences we can have it's sacred you know to share this space with our you know loved ones but there's also the sex industry now if i'm going to critique the sex industry it doesn't mean that i don't like sex so we can we can we can look at both of these at the same time uh that's one important point and another one is that um this project this mk ultra i mean this mk ultra or brave new world project i call it backfired a bit on the perpetrators of it and that backfire was um very much due to the um timothy leary so uh you know in this new renaissance that's being rolled out for the last whatever 20 or 30 years right we're starting to see this i mean michael pollan wrote this book just uh it's just only six or eight years ago right the far and away the best-selling book

on psychedelic drugs of all time that um was the new kind of shot heard around the world it really just was new york times book of the year and it just like told this whole story but it's actually a script michael pollan there's a narrative the narrative script is that psychedelic drugs were discovered in the 1940s lsd then mescaline and then research was going on and celebrities were using them and becoming more creative, and people were finding that to help these problems. And then, all of a sudden, this Harvard professor, Timothy Leary, gets a hold of them and blows it for everyone.

How many times have you heard this narrative? Pollan repeats it dozens of times in his book. It's going along fine. Then Timothy Leary identified these. I wrote about it in my first book. It was Timothy Leary's fault that these drugs became sensationalized and controversial. And so the government had to act to defend society and make these drugs illegal. And they blame it all on Tim.

That's the story. Now, whatever, you know, 30, 40, 50 years after Leary, these courageous scientists with government permission are coming back and using psychedelic drugs and using them, you know, with the safety of the psychiatrists and recovered from Leary. So it's an appealing story, but it's a false story. And see, Tim, who I knew very, very well, my second book is a book about him, a memorial volume. I don't really get so much into the conspiracy aspects of it because

Tim didn't like to get into it, but he left enough of a written legacy that we can figure out what was going on. See, Tim Leary was one of these people in the 1960s, earlier actually, who was recruited by the CIA. And at the time, being recruited by the CIA was like a badge of honor. Post-war period, we beat the Nazis, and now we got to beat the Russians. And it was an honor. It was a flattering honor to be funded by the CIA. And Tim was one of these guys. And then he figured out that he was being used, that the CIA was actually not such a great

thing. It was a totalitarian institution. They were Nazis. Tim was a veteran of World War II and realized he was being used. He loved the drugs, but he didn't like the political agenda. And so he began his own, he and Frank Barron began their own ministry and popularized psychedelic drugs, but they popularized them with means that would empower the individual against the institutions, against the military-industrial complex. And so that had some effect. These drugs, as you and I and billions of other people know, truly do have these awakening properties. They can turn us against the establishment. But you look at the memes that they're, for the most part, in the mainstream media being

popularized with, it's like, trust your doctor. The government is now approving them. And that's a whole subject there. When I write about this, I just call it, it's about the locus of authority. Where do you put your authority? In your own heart, your own intuition? Or do you not realize you have a heart or an intuition or a mystery inside of you? So you project that power onto the institutions, the fear or the government. And Tim and Frank and a whole slew of other social psychologists and personality psychologists in the 50s and 60s were aware of this. And we're trying to figure out ways that we could detach from those enterprises. And so that's why he's demonized in this new renaissance. But in fact,

I think with a closer examination, we'll discover that he was a hero, a flawed hero, complicated guy, but a hero nonetheless. Yeah, the jury's always out. You know, there's so much back and forth. Depends who you're talking to. And I think people that knew Tim best, such as yourself and guys like Robert Anton Wilson, you know, read his books and how he speaks of Tim. Also, you know, not a fan and then became one. Really cool to see that.

It seems like it's a very honest take on what he was about and what he was doing. But, you know, there's also the, well, what did he do at the end of his life kind of thing, you know? And was it, you know, did he strike a deal? That kind of deal. But I don't know. I don't know how much that impacts or hurts anything. It does make sense with his, because he was a genius. There's no two ways about it.

With his level of genius and his experiences that opened him up to such higher and higher levels of awareness, it makes perfect sense that he would be able to see clearly what the hell's happening here. These aren't good guys. I don't want to fall in line with them and and just to prove you know i think we can segue into this other piece you know where we talk about uh bobby kennedy you know there's a strong point to be made because now he said this openly and it shows we are in a different world where rfk jr can talk about these things publicly and not get killed for it yet um but the cia's involvement with the killing of his father and his and his uncle so if there was any doubt about the shadiness of these guys through mk ultra some people are like

ah you know that was a long time ago and it's like it doesn't matter how fucking long ago it was you know the tuskegee experiments if they happen at at any point in time, and to let it go for that long, what are we talking about here? These are not good guys. This is not a good deal here. And to bring that in, the fact that they're a part of assassinating our own president and next in line, next in line would have been maybe not perhaps next in line, but a good a good shot and next in line and running for president. And that gets killed magically beforehand as well. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, I am mostly known for my work with psychedelics and helping start this renaissance and these things but um i also um virtually have a phd in um the kennedy administration and in the assassination of john

and um robert kennedy and um this is a big subject uh where where to start i'm glad to get into it with you let me just think of how i want to um one time uh when timothy leary and i were talking about this and he said uh he said you know robert um you have to understand that back in those days the cia was not all bad. And I want to put forth that that's still the case. That the CIA is not a monolithic, I refer to it as the, you know, the home of the Third Reich, and that's not untrue. But I want to believe that there are a great many members or employees of the CIA who do value and embody these kinds of humanistic values that I'm sure you and I share, and that Bobby Kennedy shares. So we have to be careful when we talk about this and not to just use these broad strokes.

Now, I'm just going to tell a story because, so I got to meet Bobby Kennedy a few years ago before he announced his candidacy when he was, I was invited to a small dinner party in the Bay Area. And it was about COVID and the vaccines. And I was invited because i have a strong background in social psychology and how psychology has been weaponized in and um and used in propaganda to mind control society and we could see a lot of that in in the covid vaccine deployment shortly after our meeting he uh came out with his book on Fauci, where he mentioned some of this, that the CIA's funded experimentation on individuals to find out just how obedient they could be, how subservient they could be to authorities. But when I met at this dinner party,

and Bobby came up to me, we shook hands and he said, so you're Robert Forte, the expert on psychedelics. And I said, well, I guess so. And he said, I just want you to know that I really honor what you do. And we're from a generation that really values these substances very profoundly and really appreciate what you're doing we had took me aside and we had this little intense little interaction downloaded some brief but important points about psychedelic drugs and i should really finish writing this piece on psychedelic drugs in the kennedy administration because in his uncle's presidential administration and assassination and cover-up of the assassination,

we see the best and the worst of the potentialities of psychedelic drugs. So, and Bobby's mother, Ethel, was treated with LSD for her alcoholism. I'm not sure how well known that is, but that was, um, but John Kennedy was elected to the presidency on the same sort of cold war, we got to beat the Russians means that Nixon, you know, that was, that was the thing of that time but after he became president he started to make these radical shifts in his um perspective you know there was the bay of pigs and um and the cuban missile crisis kennedy began to realize that he was being misled by his CIA advisors, starting to question things. And then I think one of the most important stories in psychedelic history is that he was initiated, John Kennedy was given psilocybin by his lover, Mary Meyer. Are you up on this story? Briefly, but please,

I've never talked about this before. I've never had anyone talk about this, so lay it out, brother. Okay, so I first learned this story reading Timothy Leary's autobiography, Flashbacks, where he says that when he's still at Harvard, before he got too sensational, a woman approached him, shows up at his office one day, a very beautiful Washington, D.C. socialite named Mary Pinchot Meyer. And she says, Dr. Leary, we have some friends in Washington and we've been watching you. And we've heard you say that if only Chris Jeff and Kennedy would take psilocybin, there could be world peace. And she says, so I'm here to learn to get some of that psilocybin from you and to learn how to run a session. And Tim says, well, you know, running a session is a tricky business. Why don't you send these men, friends of yours, to here?

And she says, out of the question. These are very powerful and very visible men. If want to do this you work through me and so tim starts hanging out with her she makes a few trips up teaches her gives her psilocybin and this is in april of 1963 she's turning on her lover the the president, John Kennedy. Shortly thereafter this initiation, John Kennedy gives what to me and many people is considered one of the most important speeches of his administration or of any president. It's called the Peace Speech. Bobby, you know, just a couple years ago gave a memorial version of the Peace Speech in New Hampshire. I was there.

But in this speech on June 11, 1963, anybody that listens to this, I say, listen to that. Listen to that speech. It was given to the graduating class at American University. It was not vetted by the CIA. Kennedy wrote his own speeches. And in it, he announces, basically announces the end of the Cold War. He announces that we're going to withdraw from Vietnam. He announces that he and Khrushchev have been meeting secretly, that Khrushchev has been

misled by his advisors in the KGB. Kennedy was being misled by his advisors in the kgb kennedy was being misled by his advisors in the cia they had come together in secret and they were going to begin this whole new age they're going to start the peace corps listen to that speech and it's like the guy is still on psilocybin it makes i get chills up spine. Often I'll cry when I listen to this speech. And, you know, the suggestion is that it was the psilocybin that inspired this. Bobby, to be honest, didn't quite agree with that. He said that his uncle was well on his way, but that it had some influence. Okay. So the most brilliant, inspired, passionate speech that could have been the beginning of a whole new world was actually what expedited his assassination.

And so, you know, that speech is in June 63, November 63, he is assassinated. And then in January 64 is when the psychedelic operation begins, when psychedelics start, the Beatles come in that there's this somber mood in the United States when this most beloved president is shot and it's shocking and then suddenly 1964 rolls around and there's this whole new vibe that's introduced like you know music and the Beatles and bopping around and positivity Johnson of course starts the Vietnam War again, but there's this distraction. Now, one of the other myths in modern psychedelic movement is that psychedelic drugs influenced the anti-war movement.

That's not really true either. An anti-war movement was already underway in the United States. An anti-war civil rights, free speech movement was underway in the United States before the psychedelic drugs entered the scene. In fact, the psychedelic drugs entered the scene to sort of distract the anti-war movement. It sort of debilitated the anti-war movement. We had groups like the Students for a Democratic Society, really smart kids at the best universities, realizing that we needed voter registration, we needed new policy, we needed discipline, and they were becoming effective. A few years later, with psychedelics in the scene,

we have things like the Weather Underground, which a cia operation and and the anti-war movement goes from things like registering voters in this kind of discipline to holding hands and levitating the pentagon okay so that's a nice you know playful idea that's not how you do an anti-war movement or you've seen maybe and if you if you haven't check it out it's kind of a hilarious um video called lsd being tested on british troops have you ever seen this take a new google it and it's a it's a grainy black and white i think it's a real film from um lsd testing and you see these army guys you know they're given lsd first they're what they're marching straight lines and they're doing their war game kind of things but then the lsd affects them

and then pretty soon you know they can't walk in straight lines anymore. They're climbing trees. They can't read the maps. They're laughing hysterically. And when I first saw this, I thought, oh, that's a great example of why LSD is good for an anti-war society. But looking at it this way, that's what happened to the anti-war movement. You take a lot of psychedelic drugs, you're not very good at organizing shit. You're sort of creative, you kind of let things flow, but you need a kind of political savvy and organization and intelligence in order to conduct the kind of changes that you need in a society that we need to go against the military-industrial complex. Well, that's what I'm saying.

See how the Kennedy administration, we see both the awakening power of psychedelics, but we also see the distracting, trivializing profaning that kind of that kind of thing is what happened so um yeah i am after three or four years of very intense involvement with psychedelics i was um became very interested in the kennedy assassinations like mid-1980s, sort of later part of the 1980s where somebody showed me a copy of the Zubruder film so it's 22 or 3 years after the assassination

and when you see the Zubruder film, it's obvious that Lee Harvey Oswald didn't shoot him from behind he was shot from the front. His head explodes backwards. And I was shocked by how did we let them get away with this? Why aren't people more concerned about this? So I kind of stopped my psychedelic stuff for a little while and became more interested in political psychology. And again, this question of the locus of authority you believe the authorities because they tell you this or do you trust your own senses and see that that episode on november 22nd 1963 was a coup d'etat and what is this widespread apathy in our society that we just

kind of we've had a succession of presidents ever since then that have just been puppets of this military industrial regime nobody nobody cares they care more about you know the collective unconscious or where what they're i was very very and i remain very disappointed in the kind of general sense, the general political sophistication of people who are regular users of psychedelic drugs. They've lost their sense of political responsibility. And without that, a democracy crumbles. And that's what's happened to ours. Yeah, it's brutal to think that the last the last real president was around you know long before i was born and you can say yeah there's pros and cons and if i talked to depending on

who you talk to you know reagan did x y and z that was great and it's like yeah he signed the dole act in 1986 too that did a lot of harm to fucking millions of people and allowed pharmaceutical companies to run wild, uh, amongst other things, you know, dare, uh, how did, how did the dare program work out for people? You know, and it's not to say that we shouldn't have, you know, Jamie will perhaps is, is done the best of painting a picture of why we, we make containers. Why do we have boundaries where, you know, this, you know, one side of the thinking is expansive and progressive and let's fucking, you know, fuck tradition. Let's do it this way. We can, we can write our own course. And then the other side that's conservative, that builds the boxes and puts the rails up. There's some good reason for that. You know, even, even just an analogy,

since Paulin likes to use the snow analogy, one of my good buddies, you know, I I've been on black diamonds and stuff. I'm not a great snowboarder, but he got helicoptered in, um, you know i've been on black diamonds and stuff i'm not a great snowboarder but he got helicoptered in um you know to fresh powder on the backside of some mountain that no one goes and the helicopter was going to pick him up and he was going down a fresh area had never been on and he fell 30 feet and landed back first on a rock and just absolutely snapped his spine and his buddy made his way down the mountain so he had to squat on his board somehow with barely any use of his legs to make his way down the mountain so like there there are decent rule reasons why we create paths to go down there's decent reasons why we create boundaries for ourselves um for protection you know and no no doubt we should have those uh as far psychedelics are concerned, mind-altering substances for sure.

Who's in charge of that's a different story, right? And I think that's part of the big point behind what you're making with MAPS. It's part of the big point on where do I give my authority? Am I my ultimate authority? There's a fantastic book. I'm sure you've read it. I'm trying to see where it is here uh it's called the most dangerous superstition by by larkin rose have you heard that the most dangerous superstition no oh it's great the whole thing's on authority you would love it you would

love it it's a little repetitive but i mean he hammers a point that most people don't think about, right? Which ultimately resides in authority. And in so many ways, that's the thing that's just constantly teased away. You know, like there's a kid that's pulling a loose string on her sweater and they've just been doing it slowly our entire lives, right? And it's just a string. It's just one thread, but they've been doing it slowly your whole fucking life and pretty soon you've got no sweater left right and they're wearing your sweater right and so i think of it that way um even bruce lipton first thing he says you know we're in a tribal setting there might have been doulas and birthing guides there to help your mother deliver but either your father or your mother would have been doulas and birthing guides there to help your mother deliver, but either your father

or your mother would have been one of the first people to hold you, right? And there might have been someone in close, you know, that was going to help and clean and all that. That's family. They don't hand you to the guy in the white lab coat. When you got sick, you'd go see the medicine man, but that's only if your mom didn't know in her library of medicines, which plants to give you that we're going to help you right now. Anytime I got sick when I was a kid, I'd go to the doctor, I'd get some pills and I'd come home from it. Right. And so this, this right from the jump, uh, without our awareness,

we've already given off our authority of what our health means. Right. That's right. And so we've seen in birth, uh, you know, there's been a reclaiming of birth over the you know over my lifetime you know i was also one of those babies that was born and uh you know wasn't breastfed and it was a whole generation of us but then there's been this movement of natural birth and there's a recovery there of that and that's one of the really positive developments of our society and that's something that i would love to see in this uh psychedelic movement you know like instead of these government approved appointed guides let's have a let's have another thing like you know one of the things that

that i figured it was tim or oscar janiger that noticed uh in the early days that the highest incidence of bad trips were doctors, psychiatrists, and theologians. That's kind of ironic. Here are these two professions that we would think should be the custodians of these. But actually, the people that work best with them are artists and nurses and you know ordinary people that creative artists with this you know other kind of sense of themselves that um you know work with them in a more in a softer more kind of feminine way this medicalization of psychedelic drugs or this the johns hopkins project is kind of a hybrid of that where they, where they say they're using a religious model, but they're administering these drugs in these kind of sterile rooms, by my estimation, and trying to institutionalize them. And that's why Tim was such a hero.

The dominant meme throughout his whole life was question authority and think for yourself. And that's the movement that I'd like to see us kind of regenerate here. You know, and I want to make another point. People want to understand what I'm saying. There are certain myths that need to be, you know, myth is a word that has different meanings like on one hand a myth is like a collective dream and it has positive impact and but there's another sense of the word myth is like it's false so i'm using it in that way now like one of the myths pollen puts this out one of the myths and you mentioned jamie wheel and that's why i thinking about it. I listened to a podcast of him the other day.

I'd love to have a conversation with that guy because very bright, but I found something. I would love that. I'll just be the flat on the wall and you guys can do it right here. It'd be incredible. One of the myths is that governments make drug laws to stop people from using them. That's not true. The government didn't make LSD or heroin or cannabis or cocaine illegal to stop people from using them.

Actually, the opposite. The government makes drugs illegal so that the commerce of these drugs is controlled by criminal agencies that are beholden to the government. So it's very clear in the case of heroin in a classic, very important book by Alfred McCoy, The Politics of Heroin in Southeast Asia, shows that this is the case. Gary Webb wrote another one about the cocaine business and the

crack cocaine epidemic being a CIA operation. That book hasn't been written about psychedelic drugs yet um gary webb was um that book which was an award-winning book ended his career got um committed suicide allegedly by shooting himself in the head twice so um it's a i'm not sure i'm going to write this book, but I, I do want to put it out there. Um, cause you know, I've had many, many connections. I've been involved in this field on every aspect being underground distributor and provider, uh, a university professor, uh, independent research, um, you know, recreational use um you know recreational use you know i've gotten to know

like such a white and many of my contacts have been um some of them anyway in what's known as the brotherhood of eternal love which was the first big hippie mafia so to speak that popularized distributed psychedelic drugs throughout the world. They were infiltrated, maybe even started by the government. MDMA is the same kind of thing. As I said before, once MDMA became illegal, it became the most popular recreational drug in the world. Making it illegal didn't stop anybody from using it. It was made illegal in a conspiracy by the United States, by agents of the United States government. I know this because I was involved. I knew the guys who admitted to me that the government told him to falsify data, to come up with a reason to make MDMA illegal. And they launched this serotonergic nerve disorder.

They said that MDMA caused a depletion of the serotonergic nerves in the brain, caused brain damage. Completely false. But that's what was put forth to justify the ban. And the guy who came up with that information was someone who I had initiated at the University of Chicago into the drug. And he told me, he said, I'm sorry, Robert, I know you're disappointed, but the government gives us a lot of money and I have to do what they say. And this guy, his name is Charles Schuster, was then given the job of the head

of the National Institute of Drug Abuse. So the point I'm making is that as soon as MDMA was made illegal, it became a multi-billion dollar business for decades, the most popular recreational drug in the world. And who made all that money? It wasn't like independent labs like mine. This was a centralized major project that was kind of set up beforehand. Deforested regions of Southeast Asia, getting the materials from Safral or some, you know. And it's important to look at that, that the government is not our friend. And another thing that has to be looked at if we're

going to really conduct this study into the deep state of modern psychedelia is that this notion of conspiracy theory. You know, there are a lot of people who I like to say are allergic to conspiracies, this phrase conspiracy theory in the way to denigrate what you're saying. That's one of the most effective acts of mind control in the last, you know, 60 years. And I get this line from Robert Anton Wilson, who was a friend of mine. I used to hang out with him a lot in Santa Cruz in his last years. He's just so right. And he said, you know, before 1964, a conspiracy theorist was also known as an attorney because conspiracy is one of the most frequent charges in American jurisprudence. Conspiracy is just people, you know, working

together secretly to commit a crime. Like practically all crimes are conspiracies. And that somehow this is just sheer genius, how the CIA was able to pull this off. When people began to question the Warren Commission, what do we do? There's a memo, you can find this memo. He said, well, make fun of them, call them conspiracy theorists. Psychologists already knew that ridiculing someone was one of the most effective ways to control them. So this use of the word conspiracy theorist as a means of ridicule is a linguistic weapon. The fact is that if you really want to understand history or sociology, this is how you do it. You come up with conspiracies and you prove them with data and evidence. Now, don't get me wrong.

There are good conspiracy theories and there are some really wacky conspiracy theories. But you never hear someone who believes that 19 arabs blew up the world trade center you never hear them called conspiracy theorists right i mean that's a conspiracy theory that would be shown in a court of law so these 19 arabs got together this guy was directing them from a cave in afghanistan and they did these miraculous things. It's a theory. Tower 7 implodes on its own. Yeah. I love having you on.

Is there anything else that you want to cover that we didn't cover today? What do you think? Side note here, since you've met and love Bobby theby the way that i do we had we had a really cool event here we did a fundraiser for bobby kennedy jr um on our farm here where i got to actually sit in a sweat lodge with him and uh a lakota elder named chase who's chase ironside who's been on aubrey marcus's podcast his uncle was the medicine man uh for john and robert back in the day and and john and they had done some work for them uh ecological work on behalf of the lakota going to bat for them and winning in court to protect them and so they started working with uh jace's uncle so it was really cool to see that lineage and then brought to the farm. And, you know, he ran such a beautiful sweat along with a couple other incredible brothers, Ken Conte.

So I feel like a very, I got to, that's a ceremony, you know, in and of itself. It's nothing short of it. And it really was a beautiful ceremony. I've learned so much. To me, he's the only guy that's telling the truth. He's the only one that's telling the truth. And, you know, you read, you've read the real Anthony Fauci. I know a lot of people, you talk about being allergic to conspiracy theories.

Some people are allergic to the truth, and they're allergic to, I don't want to pick that book up because of what it might mean for me, what it might mean for the decisions that I made. And I understand that. At the same time, I want to know the truth at all costs you know and one of the things that i love is that he's literally putting his life on the line to bring the truth forward and even though i you know i i have my opinion on which one of the other two is the lesser of two evils especially looking the last eight years um nothing really changes with either one of them it's more the same unfortunately

well you know i couldn't agree with you more when i um when i met bobby um it was um amazing to me i mean when he walked into the room i i felt like i could see the spirit of his father and his uncle with him and And this was an inspired man, an avatar, a man here. I mean, if you look at the two Kennedys before him, John and Bobby, they tried to change the course of civilization and they were stopped. And Bobby knows that. And he knows that it's his duty i mean he he suffered a great deal come on the young man his father and uncle are shot down he had his own problems with uh

substance abuse and other kinds of addictions and for him to like pull it all together and become the kind of environmental attorney that he was and then to finally realize that he needed to run for president because he had a very unique opportunity to right the ship and it was um and i just you know i just love the guy and um you listen to his speeches and i said at the time like why aren't you running for office and at that meeting we talked about whether he would challenge newsom there's a recall election whether he would throw his hat into the gubernatorial race of california um and then when he announced his candidacy i i said at the time if he can get his presence to the american people unfiltered by the hostile media that's threatened by what he says he's going to win in a landslide.

And you can see those numbers starting to happen. You know, he does podcasts and he's so brilliant and he's so courageous. I don't really like where he went with Israel, but I understand that politics is like a multi-level chessboard. And that I'm just going to trust him and love him. But you listen to his speeches and they're not just history lessons. They're Dharma lessons. And the same thing, if you listen to the peace speech of JFK, it's spiritual teaching.

He's saying that instead of projecting your darkness onto the enemies out there take responsibility for yourself i mean this is the very essence of how psychological healing happens just to circle back to mdma for a minute this was the research that i was doing i never published it but this is why it is so valuable as a therapeutic aid is that one of the most difficult things to overcome for a psychotherapist, we've known this forever, is a person's own defensiveness and unwillingness to see how they hold these patterns in their own being. And MDMA just dissolves that. People just suddenly realize like, oh my God, I've been carrying this stuff around with me. It's not my mother. It's not my father.

It's my own relationship to my stuff. It's self-empowering. And that's the kind of message that you see Bobby giving. He didn't quite give it in the Israel-Gaza thing, but, again, that's another conversation. But in every other way, it's just, you know, so, you know, all the other presidents before him, including Obama, including Jimmy Carter, these guys are just pawns of this military industrial thing. And Bobby Kennedy's campaign is not just a presidential campaign. It's a civil response to a coup d'etat that happened in the United States in 1963. And this is one of the best and most hopeful opportunities we have.

And I was delighted to watch a little bit of this debate and see these guys, they just look like complete and total fools. And so, I mean, I've left the country. I'm an expatriate. I'm Greek now. I'm living in the, you know, in the home of democracy and pursuing my own esoteric studies here. But I'm Boston born and I'm in there for Kennedy as much as I can be. Well, that's awesome, brother. I always appreciate, you know, your thoughtfulness, your wisdom.

We were on this back as many times as you like. So anything comes up for you, just shoot me a text and I'm happy to bring you back on, brother. You've always just a delight and a wealth of knowledge and a wealth of really the important understanding and ways of shifting our perspective in a way that's productive for us as we re-engage as whatever the third wave is

and things like that. I think it's super important that we frame that in a careful way. on i'll just let me just say this let me just say this one thing because there is a topic i don't want to get into it now because i got to get back in that blue ocean that blew a g and c um is a topic of psychedelic drugs and the origin of religion and and what that means for modern drug policy and maybe we'll return to that so beautiful i love it give us a cliffhanger awesome all right thank you so much brother yeah you're fantastic thanks so much see you next time all right bye Thank you.