The Joe Rogan Experience - #1854 - Rick Strassman

Episode Date: August 10, 2022

Rick Strassman is a Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine. He is the author of numerous scientific papers and books, among them "DMT: The Spirit Molecule." His most recent, "The Psychedelic Handbook: A Practical Guide to Psilocybin, LSD, Ketamine, MDMA, and Ayahuasca," is available now. www.rickstrassman.com

The Joe Rogan Experience. Try to keep this fist from your face. That's probably the best way to do it. Yeah. There we go. Yeah. I think we first met. Some random person sent me an email, probably 2005, 2006. Wow. And he said, oh, Joe Rogan is talking about your book. And I hadn't heard of you. This was before I did a podcast.

I think it was before the podcast. I think you were still doing stand-up. podcast. I think it was before the podcast. I think you were still doing stand-up. Yeah. Yeah, and he gave me your number, I think, and I called you, and you were at the airport. And you said, hey, man, I'm reading your book. I love it. Yeah, the book was fascinating because your book was—you need to adjust cameras?

Good. was you need to adjust cameras good your book was fascinating to me because it was I mean correct me if I'm wrong but it was the first time that they ever that the FDA ever allowed real studies to be done on schedule one drugs it was the first new American study in 20 years. On psychedelics? Yeah, yeah, on any human psychedelic research. And how did you, first of all, why did you want to do it? And how did you get the permission to do it? Well, I wanted to do it because of my interest in chemistry and my interest in altered states, of my interest in chemistry and my interest in altered states, you know, my own altered states. Like the first time I smoked marijuana, I was 18 years old, and it was a fully psychedelic experience. There were purple clouds coming out of the speakers. I was flying over this,

you know, the college town I was living in at the time. And my friend was too. It was a shared hallucination on very strong hash. So you felt like you were out of body? No, I was, we were on a carpet. And you felt like you could, you were, so you both saw like a city below you? Yeah, the floor disappeared. Yeah, it was the first time I smoked marijuana. And I thought, wow, this is interesting. And now hash is, the way they create hash is they take the, what is it called, the crystals off of THC? Is that how they do it? They shake out the resin from the flour.

Just shake it? That's how they do it? Well, there's different ways to do it. Like in the old country, you get really sweaty, and you just agitate a lot of pot, and the resin accumulates on your skin, and you scrape it off. Really? And that's how they make hash? Well, you know... That's so funky.

You're getting someone's funk along with the hash. Yeah, yeah, that's's funk along with the hash. Yeah, yeah. That's called pre-industrial hash. I was watching or was looking at something online the other day where they were talking about repurpose. It was in Morocco. It was Steve D'Angelo. He was talking about how they were repurposing machines in Morocco to make hash. How they've been doing it this way and making hash in this part of the world for, you know, who knows how many years.

Yeah. Is this it here? I wonder what the machines are. Yeah, this is Steve D'Angelo's hemp activist, cannabis activist. So it looks like some kind of a press or something like that. I don't know what that thing is. Yeah, interesting. I think it has something to do with automobiles.

He's going to say it right here. Things that can't break down, things that don't need electricity, things that can be improvised. And just so much cleverness has been shown here today, so much ingenuity in working with what you have. I mean, this press is a great example of it. And take a look here. It's just basically an automobile jack that's been put into a frame.

It had a couple of springs put on there, and you know these iron casing boxes made and it works it works really well and this is the way that the hash that's smoked by most people around the world the largest quantity of cannabis that's made anywhere is made still by this legacy method and the great thing about it is this could really be done anywhere right i think about folks in mexico or colombia who could take this method and repurpose it and adapt it and be making quite a very nice high quality hash just about anywhere that's a hash salesman i've ever seen one yeah yeah that dude's pushing hard he like, let's everybody get in on this. Come on, make some hash.

I'd like to buy one. Yeah. Well, I wonder if that makes hash or hash oil, if it's just being compressed like that, squeezing things out. Well, it looked like he was having bricks of hash, right? Yeah. Yeah, interesting. So I think he's using it in that sort of that little frame, that little case. And then they're packing it in there with that car jack, which is pretty crazy. Yeah, clever. So the difference between hash and regular marijuana smoking is,

in general, what? Is it just that it's much stronger? It's much stronger. So like that kind of hallucination, that's super rare with regular marijuana, right? But with hash... rare with regular marijuana, right? But with hash... It can't happen. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I started college as a chemistry major. As a kid, I made fireworks and bombs and started college as a chemistry major. I wanted to become a magnate in making fireworks, a fireworks magnate. But everybody discouraged me. They said, you know, you're a smart guy. You should be a doctor. And so.

That's how they tricked you into it? Well, I got the last laugh, right? Because I'm, you know, giving people psychedelics and they have inner fireworks now. Right. Yeah. So after that experience, smoking hash and, you, and my chemistry mind got peaked. I thought, you know, like a half hour ago I was totally normal, and right now I'm just having the weirdest experience of my life,

and I wonder how that works chemically. So I figured there must be some chemical changes in the brain, and I was interested in learning what those might be. So what year was this? 70. 70. changes in the brain and I was interested in learning what those might be so what year was this uh 70 70. so okay so this was like right around the time where everything got made illegal right that was the big schedule one act wasn't that in 1970. they made a lot of the psychedelics illegal the controlled substances act of 1970. yeah so it was right at that year when you were just getting involved you're like damn it they took the rug out from under me.

It didn't make any difference. Yeah, the school I went to had a lot of psychedelics. Really? Yeah, and I went crazy for about two years. And then figured, you know, I think I've had enough. I need to transfer, so I transferred schools, actually. I've known more than one person that has lost their marbles from from doing too many psychedelics. I started getting unraveled. It's not uncommon. Yeah. Right. Don't we do you

know people that have kind of like blown fuse. Oh yeah. Yeah. Well I get the occasional email from people who have really gone around the bend smoking too much DMT? There's people, I think, that have a tendency towards a type of paranoid schizophrenia that maybe they kind of have it under control or maybe it's mild. You know, they just have some weird paranoias about certain things. I've seen a few people do too many psychedelics and then now they're in fantasy land yeah i kind of wonder about the risk of increased accessibility i do yeah because you know you could prepare you can screen and still people have adverse effects and in in the wild in the field i think we're just going to have a revisiting of the problems in the 60s with all of

those hospitalizations and things. I don't think there's any doubt. The real question is how many of those people were on that path already? Like what is that whole process of someone becoming mentally ill? Because I've seen it happen, but I'm not exactly sure what's causing it, what makes people, I've seen people go down and they just become different people. Well, I think it's a case of people being vulnerable. You know, they've got a susceptibility in their genes and they just may also be susceptible because of their lives. They may be doing other drugs,

you know, drinking a lot in really unstable relationships or they, you know, and they also, you know, might have a, you know, tendency genetically. You know, let's say one of their parents was bipolar or schizophrenic, you know, so it's a major trauma. I mean, it's a psychological, you know, trauma to have a huge trip, right? Yeah. You know, good trauma, bad trauma, so it's a major trauma. I mean, it's a psychological trauma to have a huge trip, right? Yeah. You know, good trauma, bad trauma, but it's really a shift. And if you're not equipped, I think it could kind of fracture a thin veneer of normality. Yeah, it's almost like they're interfacing at the wrong – they're not like quite getting – like there's a reality port and then there's like a neighboring port where they're getting it's like they can pay their taxes they can drive their cars they can answer emails but they think that there's some crazy mind control experiment at the head of

you know it's just one of those weird ones where people just they did just start believing that the whole world's out to get them and the government's trying to track them down and there's a chip in my brain. It, like, accelerates. Yeah, yeah. It's extreme. The chip is the weird one. I've heard multiple people tell me they have a chip in their brain. Mm-hmm.

Or at least say it to people, like, that I'm communicating to them through a chip in their brain? Well, you know, schizophrenics are like that. Yeah. You know, paranoid schizophrenics. Yeah, you know, back in the day, it was, you know, radio waves or X-rays that were beaming down from space and affecting people's minds. That was the... That was a paranoid schizophrenic's perspective? Yeah, it was their explanation

of their unusual experiences. You know, the kinds of stories I've heard with people doing too much DMT is a kind of mania. They're really grandiose. They think that they've got all the answers and nobody's listening to them and it makes them mad and they end up in prison or in psychiatric hospitals i just i'm always fascinated

with how other human beings brains work mine as well right i'm fascinated by the brain about how it's so different after exercise it's so different after exercise it's so different after rest it's so different when you know you meditate or you you do something like yoga some mindfulness kind of practice it's a it's like what what are most people experiencing and then what does it feel like to be mentally ill like what is that person experiencing like what what weird shift in the chemical balance of the mind? It's causing that and you know how much of it is genetic and how much of it is life experience and trauma It's just the the way people think and look about things

and look at things has always been fascinating to me because I Got to assume that everyone's dealing with different hardware or wetware, whatever you would call the brain. Like they work different. They don't work the same. Right. Well, I mean, it depends on the mental illness, you know, the disorder. Well, you know, one of the reasons I became a psychiatrist, you know, besides my interest in studying psychedelics, was because I was really interested in the mind.

Schizophrenic patients were just amazing. Because other than their crazy ideas and experiences, they're just normal people. Right. Which is wild. And there's got to be levels to it, right? Are there? There's like mild, where someone just kind of like a touch schizophrenic and there's someone who's like full blown. You know, the aliens are hiding in my walls and they're out to get me.

Well, it depends on the kind of schizophrenia. There's what's called chronic undifferentiated, which is kind of the burned out types that just don't move, don't talk. They just veg. They just veg. doubt types that just don't move, don't talk. They just veg. They just veg. And they're the paranoid schizophrenics who are a lot more active and they're hallucinating and they're in your face. Yeah, you know, I really found it easy and fun to talk to psychotic patients. I think that was, you know, one of the things that kind of was part of the mix of studying psychedelics. Why was it easy?

Well, I think in my own psychedelic experiences, I might have gone crazy for an hour or two. One time in particular, I had to be, you know, talked back down, you know, so I could empathize. You've heard Dennis McKenna's story about being with Terrence. The experiment at Lancho Rara. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Can you explain what happened? Because they ate too many mushrooms.

Apparently. Yeah. Can you explain, like, pharmacologically what or psychologically what could have happened? Well, I mean, it depends on your model, right? Please tell people what happened. Like, tell people the story. Yeah, I don't know the story that well. What I believe is they found a bunch of fresh mushrooms in the Amazon,

and they just started chowing, and they went crazy. And I think he was gone for about two weeks. Yeah. Might have been longer than that. Might be two months. Do you remember, Jamie? I don't know. I'll check to see what if...

Because he was on... He told the story on the podcast. Yeah. He went into detail about what it was like, the way he was processing reality. It was a long stretch. It was a long time while he was gone. Yeah.

It wasn't like two hours. No. No, they had to... Well, to the extent that he could could communicate he wanted people to leave him alone What happens what is going on when when that how like what could cause you? Is there something that could be psychoactive for two whole weeks? That's what's confusing to me like what is going on where this substance it must be gone from your body after two weeks But somehow or another you're still feeling the effects of it on where this substance it must be gone from your body after two weeks but

somehow or another you're still feeling the effects of it like what happened and what does that indicate about like states of mind and how pliable they are well I mean the I guess the way I would look at it which might not be the way everybody would but I think what may have taken place is that because of all of the psilocybin that he took, he opened a portal into things out there. And it just didn't close. So the psilocybin was the trigger. But after the portal was open, it was open. I'm glad you said it that way because I say it that way too, and I know it sounds

ridiculous. Particularly to people that don't do psychedelics, opening a portal. I've thought about that a lot. I've thought about that a lot about the DMT experience. Because it seems so insane and so impossible that I just can't believe that this isn't just another place. It seems

like it's not just a chemical reaction in my mind. It seems like it's not just a chemical reaction in my mind. It seems like I'm going to another place. That's how it feels. That's how it feels. But what does that mean by when I say that's how it feels? Because I don't have any understanding of what I'm experiencing it, what I'm experiencing rather.

So I must put it in some sort of context where it makes sense to me as a person who lives on earth you know sitting here right now in 2022 you know there's all those variables that you everything when you look at the world goes through all the filter of your own personal reality the thing about a full-blown psychedelic experience like the dmt experience is it doesn't seem like any of that applies anymore you go over there and it's like you're gone there's no so I I was wondering about myself like maybe I'm trying to put it into perspective like it's another place because places make sense to me and what doesn't make sense to me is just full nothingness chaos wild imagery and geometry and things that move to music.

And it's like almost like it's so hard for me to wrap my head around that I convince myself it's another dimension, but it's not. Well, it could be. I mean, it could be another dimension. Could be. Yeah. Well, I think you need to design experiments to test if it is another dimension. How could you do that? Well, I think, well, if you consider the location of the DMT world to be outside of us in objective reality, you'd need to call upon physics, advanced physics, dark matter, dark energy, parallel universes.

So I think if you could get into those spaces with machines, let's say imaging machines or cameras. How could you do that? I don't know. Could you get a computer high? It's one of those ideas I've had. Well, have you seen some of the new – there was some new article that was written about virtual reality being able to give people transcendent experiences, that it's similar to the effects achieved on psychedelics. Right. That's interesting, isn't it?

McKenna talked about that a long time ago. He said he thinks that one day they'll get to a point where they can create something visually and it'll bring you into that place, that they'll be able to recreate it with sufficient technology. Here's, VR is as good as psychedelics at helping people reach transcendence. On key metrics, a VR experience elicited a response indistinguishable from subject who took medium doses of LSD or magic mushrooms. That's wild.

Yeah. If they just keep getting better at it. That's like if you can get someone who's been there and knows what it looks like and then is a good artist who can recreate it because i've seen some dmt art before that's so close it's like oh wow that's so close right you know it seems like it all of course alex gray like alex gray stuff it's like some of it is so tryptamine like you know um well it's important to note that they talk about medium doses of LSD or psilocybin, right? So you get a good feeling, but you're not hallucinating. Yeah, you may not really be fully tripping out

What do what they're doing? What what kind of? VR experience it would be like what is the images they're showing you what is the sound they're playing for you? That's allowing you to get to these states The guy that made this one did it after he had a near-death experience wow uh here right here he says he fell off there read that okay he says uh i knew that the intensity of the light was related to the extent to which i inhabited my body he recalls yet watching it dim didn't frighten him. From his new vantage point, Glowacki could see that the light wasn't disappearing, it was transforming, leaking out of his body into the environment around him.

This realization, which he took to signify that his awareness could outlast and transcend his physical form, brought Glowacki a sublime sense of peace. So he approached what he thought was death with curiosity. What might come next? So since his accident, an artist and computational molecular physicist has worked to recapture that transcendence. Okay. So he had some wild near-death experience, and he's trying to recreate that with VR. So that's interesting because that's not even a, he's not even talking about a drug experience.

So he could be. Right. Yeah, you know, we've been studying or there's a group at University of Michigan that's been looking at endogenous DMT. Yeah. That's made in the mammalian brain, and it increases during death. And especially it increases in the visual part of the brain. So they know that for a fact now. Yeah, they know that for a fact.

It's a 2019 study. When I first met you, there wasn't nearly as much data. And I remember you were talking about how much anecdotal data that points to the idea of the pineal gland being the source of DMT, but there wasn't a mammal model. Yeah, yeah, the pineal DMT story, it sounds pretty obscure, but it's pretty controversial. I mean, there are, you know, some data supporting the view that the pineal makes DMT and other data don't. I think you and I met at Starbucks on Ventura in, in I think 2009. I was out there for my high school reunion and we met at Starbucks on Ventura. I think it was in Encino. And yeah, we were talking about DMT. Do you think, yeah, I remember that. Do you think that DMT is produced in like all over

the body? Like they found it in the lungs, they found it in the liver, right? Do you think it's just something that the body produces everywhere? You know, when they first discovered DMT in mammals, people were focusing on the lung. And, you know, they were also interested in DMT being involved in psychosis. And, you know, there was a joke, or I don't know if you call it a joke, but an idea that schizophrenia was a lung disease because you were producing too much DMT. And they were doing studies to inhibit DMT and schizophrenics or increase it. Oh, wow. That makes sense. Yeah, it does make sense.

That completely makes sense. Yeah. That could be what's wrong with them. It could be. And if you could block DMT naturally or with a vaccine or something, you might have it. That completely makes sense. Because I've seen people on it that fight it and panic. And imagine if that was like a constant state you were involved.

That would look totally similar to someone being schizophrenic. If it was a constant state, you'd have to come up with some ideas about what was going on. And I think that possibly would then lead to the delusions, the crazy ideas about what's going on. Yeah, that makes sense. Wow. Well, so we found, you know, DMT in the rodent pineal in 2013, the group at the University of Michigan. You know, so it proved or established the validity of that idea that the pineal makes DMT. But this study in 2019 that I was mentioning where DMT goes up after death in the visual cortex, they looked again for pineal DMT and they couldn't find any. And what they believe

is that the original paper described the DMT in the brain, which was snagged on the way in and out of the pineal gland. But even more interesting, I think, than the pineal making DMT is the brain makes DMT in quite high levels, comparable to even serotonin. Wow. And it could be there's a DMT neurotransmitter system in the brain, just like a serotonin neurotransmitter system. What is the function of the pineal gland? Well, it helps regulate circadian rhythms and light sensitivity. It helps in train rhythms. It helps keep everything in sync in the body, temperature, urinary function, blood cell formation, all those things. Why do you think ancient cultures were so fascinated by it? Like why did they have this, why did they attribute this sort of almost like godlike significance to it, right?

Yeah, yeah. I mean, there still is a certain pineal kind of reverence out there. If you look at Amazon and enter pineal, there's all kinds of esoteric things that are still being published on the pineal gland. Well, it's an unpaired organ. It's the only unpaired organ in the brain. Everything else is paired. You have a left and right hemisphere. But there's just one pineal in the middle of your brain. but there's just one pineal in the middle of your brain.

Its location, I think, has contributed to the reverence. It's just under the fontanelle, and certain kinds of spiritual experiences are also felt there. And so it was the physical corresponding position of the subjective experience. So people thought it must be occurring in the pineal gland. You know, I have a friend who's really into Aztec savagery history, and he told me, this is kind of grim, but he told me that the Aztecs used to burn people when they were alive to really, like, freak them out and then take their brains out and eat their brains because of all the hormones and all of the things that were going on.

Whoa. So the pineal gland is heavy. That's heavy. I know. That is so heavy. Yeah. But they found it gave them whatever you know, whatever superhuman strength or religious ecstasy. Isn't it fascinating that that also will kill you? Like that's where people get

prion diseases. They get it from eating brain and spinal tissue, right? Right, right. Like cannibals when they get that Jakob Kreutzfeld. Jakob Kreutzfeld, yeah. Yeah, thank you for pronouncing it better. Well, when I was a medical student, we were always on the hunt for Jakob Kreutzfeld patients because they were rare and very interesting. How many did you discover? Maybe just two or three. And how did they come into contact with it?

How did they come into contact with it? I think they were like from africa and they ate maybe some bush meat or something or some primate meat sheep meat or monkey meat yeah oh sheep meat you can get it from sheep meat as well i thought it was a there was a thing that would with cannibals and there was was a thing with mad cow disease, which is another one. It's another very similar version of it because the cow's reading the cows, right? Right.

It's prion disease. Right. Yeah. So here is Cruxfeldt-Jakob disease and sheep brain. Places in origin seven out of eight patients with CJD coincide with the distribution of sheep rearing in central and south Italy. Oh, okay. That actually makes sense because my uncle, Vinny, Vinny DiGiulando is about as Italian as you get. That's your uncle?

Yes. My uncle Vinny, who's a great guy, used to cook lamb's brains. used to cook lamb's brains. That was like a traditional Italian meal that you would cook. Like when we'd get together and have like family gatherings, he had on more than one occasion cooked lamb's brains because I remember having it as a child. Yeah, that's interesting. Well, so the medical school that I went to was in the Bronx.

And there were a lot of immigrants in the Bronx. There were quite a few Italians and lots of people from the Caribbean and from Africa. Yep. So I think it was some African patients. Well, I think it's probably real common over there if it's common in Italy. Because eating lamb's brains is a normal thing. I mean, my parents, I mean, they didn't eat like a lot of exotic food. That was like a normal thing.

Yeah. Yeah. My family never ate brains. I've had sweetbreads before, which is the thalamus gland, right? Oh, really? Isn't that what it is? The sweetbreads. It's a gland. It's one of the glands. Oh, the thymus maybe. right? Oh, really? Isn't that what it is? The sweetbreads. It's a gland.

It's one of the glands. Oh, the thymus maybe. Thymus, that's right. Yeah, it might be the thymus. Yeah, the thymus is kind of like the spleen or like the liver. Is that what it is? It's quite rich in blood vessels. Here it goes.

Thymus. Cuts of meat from either the thymus gland located in the throat or the pancreas gland by the stomach. Wow. So sweetbreads could be either one of those things. Yeah, yeah. Interesting. So it's like a generic term.

In lamb, veal, pig, or beef, they have a rich, creamy texture and are often served roasted or fried. Yeah, people eating organs, I mean, liver is really, really good for you. It makes sense that you would think brain is is really really good for you like it makes sense that you would think brain is really really good for you too and it might be but maybe like nature doesn't want people eating people's brains so it created these prion diseases um well you'd have to screen their brains before you ate them yeah but even so is the juice worth the squeeze i mean what are you getting out of eating brains yeah wonder what I wonder what it's like. Well, it would depend on whose brain. Right.

What if you ate Einstein's brain and you actually got smarter? If he gave you permission. Yeah. I got about a week left. Take my brain. Yeah. Well, you know the frozen brain banks out there? I have heard of that.

Yeah. Yeah. They flash freeze your brain right after you die. You have to agree to it beforehand. But imagine if you're in transcendence. You've escaped this physical reality and you've gone into the next amazing dimension where there's no deception. It's all love and energy and you're floating together in music. And then some dipshit brings you back to life.

And you get sucked backwards, but now you're stuck in a computer. Can you imagine? If that was your soul? Your soul is just sucked back into that brain as soon as it's reanimated. Well, I have thought about it. Have you? Yeah. What do you think that would be like terrifying you wouldn't want to do it well it'd be terrifying if they couldn't get rid of it like if if you couldn't go back like what if there's like portals right like you were saying and what if those portals are activated by normal human neurochemistry

right and then that and it's a part of dying is that these portals are open. But what if that fucking portal's open? You go, you transcend, and then they bring that goddamn brain back to life because you wanted to live forever. So they take that thing that they had flask frozen, they kick that sucker back on, and now you're just an embodied brain

in a fucking computer attached to a bunch of wires. Well, I mean, if you were having experience, though. But what kind of experience would you have? Maybe you'd just be experiencing the fact that you're stuck in a computer. Yeah. I mean, you're kind of describing the matrix. Yeah, I'm describing hell. It's worse than the matrix.

There's not even a body that you could detach. In the matrix, they detached our heads, remember? Right. They got out of it. Oh, we got to get out of the matrix. You can't get out of the matrix if you're just a brain. Well, you know, one of the interesting things about endogenous DMT, and especially with his discovery in such high levels in the brain, is that it may be the endomatrix.

It could be kind of regulating everything all of the time. What do you mean by that? Regulating everything all the time? It could be the way we interact with reality is through endogenous DMT, which is always at a steady level. Well, the way I began wondering about that is because, you know, what is the purpose of endogenous DMT? You know, why does the brain make DMT? Can you do a DMT test on a person's blood level? It's pretty hard. It's pretty hard.

It's really low in the blood. It's like, you know, billionths of a gram per milliliter. Okay. So you'd have to measure it in the actual brain itself? In the brain or spinal fluid maybe spinal fluid but most likely brain when they start doing stuff like neural link where they're going to insert wires into your brain and you know you're going to have an app to control your brain to control control your mood i mean it seems like that would be one of the ways they would do it, right? Well, you'd need to find where in the brain the main source of DMT is

and then put an electrode there and keep that going. Do you think it's limited to one specific area where it's developed? Oh, man, they're just beginning to unravel the whole role and location of endogenous DMT. So when they know that it's in the liver and they know that it's in the lungs, the lungs to me sound interesting because of holotropic breathing. Right. You know, because people have done breathing exercises and achieved states of altered states of consciousness. Yeah, yeah.

It kind of makes sense, doesn't it? Well, yeah, but I think it's not working through the lungs because those more recent studies haven't really demonstrated DMT in lung. Oh. Yeah, yeah. I used to say it's made in lung. Everybody used to say it's made in lung, but it seems like it's made in brain. So if it's made in brain, then all the other stuff, you're just getting like a trickle-down effect? Well... Does it go through the whole body? Yeah, but it's made in brain, then all the other stuff, you're just getting like a trickle-down effect? Well— Does it go through the whole body? Yeah, but it's metabolized so quickly that, you know, by the time it gets into the blood that you're drawing, the concentrations are pretty minuscule.

Wow. What a sneaky molecule. Well, you have to wonder what it's doing, right? Right. What is it doing? What is endogenous? What's the function of it? You know, there's the possibility we have a DMT neurotransmitter system like serotonin or dopamine, in which case, you know, what is it doing? Wow. So this is a really wild way to think about it because to this time, I'd never even considered that. I always thought of it as being something that was responsible maybe for very vivid dreams or something that was responsible for near-death experiences or what happens to you when you die, the idea of a portal. But I never thought about it as being something that is regulating regular everyday reality.

Well, you know, one of the hallmarks of the DMT effect is that it feels more real than real. Yeah. And you study the function of endogenous neurotransmitters by giving drugs that modify the effect of that endogenous neurotransmitter. So we've got the SSR antidepressants, and they affect serotonin, although they may not all that much. But still, that's been the working model for decades. And so because SRIs are useful for depression and anxiety, you then can speculate that serotonin is responsible for mood or anxiety. So the hallmark of a DMT effect is it's more real than real. It feels more real than anything else.

So it's tempting to speculate. Again, when I go back to that disembodied mind thought process of thinking, what am I thinking when I'm over there? Since my body doesn't seem to be there and I'm there and it seems more real than real, is that me just tricking myself into thinking that it's a different place uh I mean how could you tell how could I tell right yeah I mean how would you know I have one way of looking at that I always describe this is what I say to people I say if there was a thing that you could do like a door you could go, and that door would take you to another dimension where you would communicate with some entity beyond your wildest imagination that's constantly visually changing and communicating with you telepathically and knows everything about you, sees all your bullshit, and is

trying to impart some ideas that will help you with your life because it's a godlike experience. You're experiencing some sort of uber-powerful entity, some uber-intelligent entity, something beyond any... If we just looked at humans and thought of the evolution of human, one day we'll get to this. We're not going to get to that. That is a different, it seems like it's so beyond the body. It's so beyond the human monkey body.

This is what I tell people. I go, if I could give, if you would open a door and you would go there and you'd have that experience, would you do it? And most people are like, yes, I would do it. If I gave you a drug that gave you that experience You still have the exact same experience. It's the exact same experience You've just decided it's not real and you've decided it's not real because you're putting into this category of hallucination Like what does that even mean? What does that even mean? You're actually having that experience. I don't know what it is.

I mean, I like to play devil's advocate, and I like to think that maybe I'm messing with my own head, and maybe I'm just like, it's like. Well, through doing what? Looking at it like maybe it's just my neurochemistry going bonkers and interacting with my visual cortex produces hallucinations. But it doesn't feel that way. That's why I'm trying to figure out if you're bullshitting yourself when you're over there or if you really are over there. But what I tell people is it's the same experience. Yeah, what difference does it make? Yeah.

Yeah. It's previously invisible. Yeah. And it contains information. A lot. Yeah, and I think that's all you can say about it. Previously invisible. Yeah. And it contains information. A lot. Yeah. And I think that's all you can say about it.

It contains information about you, right? Well, it could only be happening to you. Yeah. Yeah. It's not happening to somebody else. It's like it gives you advice. It can. But you, I mean, how do you judge the value of that advice?

Yeah. Well, what is the advice? One, one of the things that happened to me, I've talked about this ad nauseum, unfortunately, if you've heard this before folks, but, uh, one of my experiences, there was like a bunch of jokers, like jesters or like jester hats. And they were giving me the finger. They were going like this, fuck you. And it made me realize i was taking myself too seriously like instantaneously i went oh i get it and they were like this they went like like don't do that

don't do that but like saying fuck you to me it was so clear what they were doing it was so clear it was like a little lesson like don't do that yeah it's interesting you, don't do that. Yeah. It's interesting. You know, don't do that. That's like three syllables and they correspond to a heartbeat. You know, when I tripped on DMT the first time, these beings came out of this waterfall and they said, now do you see? Now do you see? Now do you see? It was the same three beat thing. I love you. They say, I love you a lot. I love you. And I think it corresponds to the heartbeat because it's in sync You know the realizations and sync with a heartbeat Yeah The one time I did it and these entities were talking to me and saying I love you

600 million five hundred thousand times like the way a child would say I love you with like some crazy number Seven billion zillions, you know, and every time they did that it would show a more beautiful image Like every image like I love you six hundred million five hundred thousand times I love you seven hundred zillion four hundred and every time they did it was just as bigger and bigger Experience visually the poor I was like crying. I was like openly weeping. Oh, yeah,000, 400,000, and every time they did it, it was just this bigger and bigger experience visually to the point where I was like crying. I was like openly weeping at the beauty of just what I was seeing. It sounds beautiful.

It was wild, but it was that simple sort of, there's just like a, they'll say simple things to you in a way that you're not really hearing it, but you know what they're saying. Well, it kind of penetrates you. Yeah. Yeah. It's very weird.

Mm-hmm. And it's very weird. Very weird. Yeah. You used to not talk about your personal experiences with it. I know. I figured to hell with it. Yeah, I think so.

I think it's good that you did that because I remember when we first met, you were reluctant to discuss it. I mean, you didn't really want to talk about it publicly or want people to know about it publicly. Yeah. I figured that I had some legitimacy to maintain. A few years back, I had this conversation with Dennis McKenna, you know, like about your reputation. Or, you know, one's reputation. He said, I've just given up on my reputation.

Well, you talk as openly about psychedelics as Dennis. He's the best guy to talk about it too. Because he's got a really interesting way of discussing things. And he's had so many personal experiences, and he's so smart and he's got this incredible vocabulary to just draw from. And when he describes the actual impact of psilocybin and psychedelic chemicals, particularly in formation of language,

he was describing the stoned ape theory. It's incredible listening to him say it because the way he describes it, like he actually understands what psilocybin and what all these various molecules are doing to different parts of the brain and why that would facilitate the development of language and compassion and connect the tribe more. Well, I mean, do you think it actually is information coming from the brain or do you think that the portal is being opened up and the information is coming from above? I think that's more likely.

I think more likely is that the brain is an antenna. It's one of the things that creative people always tell you. Like someone sits down and writes a song. It just like came from the air. They're getting things from somewhere else almost. And it's almost like you just got to get out of your own way you got to put enough good juice out there in the world and take enough bad out and like and then just and see the world from a a clear perspective in at least in in these brief moments of creativity and then things come to them they just like they're sitting in front of

the computer and bam they got an idea for a book. Like where the fuck is all that coming from? It seems like people always wanna say it's a muse, like that's the Steven Pressfield analogy. He's got a great book about it called The War of Art, all about like inviting the muse into your life and being disciplined and sitting there at a computer every day and summoning it and treating it

like it's an entity and if you do that it works like this is what's crazy like people who are disciplined and also creative like that decide i'm gonna write this book i'm gonna sit down and i'm gonna force myself every day like ideas come to them like where are they where the fuck are they coming from like is it possible that the brain really is like some sort of an antenna and that wisdom and love and all these different things they're just all around us we're just confused by our monkey bodies well do you think we're getting that information from god if that's what you want to call it you know the the the only problem I have with the word God, and it's not really a problem, but it's a recognition, is that it's a loaded word.

It's a loaded word, but so is love. Yes. You know, so I think you just got to take the good with the bad. Well, that's Alex Gray's position. Alex Gray says we have to take it back the same way we take back love and say God all the time. And, you know, that's what he does. Yeah, and that's the reason I think it's good to use the word psychedelic instead of hallucinogen or entheogen or anything like that. Entheogen is a cool word. It's cool. It assumes a lot though. Yeah. It's like people that call

weed cannabis. I like to smoke a lot of cannabis. Like, okay, settle down, buddy. Yeah. Like the term entheogen, it refers to God, entheos, and it refers to N, which means that God exists within. And it has the word gen in it, which means it's a drug which is generating something like God. So that assumes a lot. And there are people who could benefit from psychedelic experiences who might not cotton to those ideas and would avoid it and theogen but might take a psychedelic. Yeah, I think psychedelic sounds manageable and theogen sounds like you're joining a cult. It's a bit cultish. Well, isn't everything a bit cultish?

It seems like whatever anything really affects people in a lot of ways, there's always someone who looks to sort of take the reins and sort of dictate what the experience is and how to do it and what the ritual should be and how you should, you know, manage it. And it gets culty. It gets culty. But I think you could, you know, decultify it. Yes. You know, to some extent, if if if you're open minded. I think it also – all practitioners – I mean there's a problem. Here's the big problem with psychedelics. One of the big problems is that we haven't really had a chance to openly discuss it in terms of like the effective and ineffective ways to use it, what's detrimental, what's abusive. Treatment centers – we could have all this – had this lined up, right?

treatment centers like we could have all this had this lined up right if they didn't pass that sweeping psychedelics act the controlled substances that we right now they're still illegal but they've been a part of human history forever that if they just open that up we would have the ability to tell people how to use them and now not to use them we'd have the ability to monitor them and you're going to have some strays you're going to have some things that go wrong so there's going to have to be some ways to mitigate that right and if this theory of like people that have these psychedelic breaks if it's a imagine if you could find out that it really is like some sort of an overload of DMT. Like they have exogenous levels that are too high. They can't manage it. Reality is too fabricated.

Right. Or fragmented, rather. Yeah. I think, you know, if we can keep things going with psychedelic research in humans, there's a vast number of options that are going to start opening up. For example, like a vaccine against endogenous DMT. I mean, that might be a great antipsychotic. That is wild. To imagine if that's really what it is, they just got to dial it, or maybe some sort of technological intervention, like a Neuralink type thing, where I think they're going to be able to dial things in, which is going to be crazy. You're going to be able to dial in

horny. You're going to be able to dial in happy. I mean, 50 years from now, who knows what they're going to be able to do. Well, they're breeding these things called knockout mice, which don't produce the gene, which makes X, Y, or Z. And they've developed knockout mice for the enzyme that makes DMT. Oh, wow. You know, so there are animals that don't produce any DMT. Wow. So there are animals that don't produce any DMT. So you might be able at some point to put genes into people like CRISPR and have them stop making their own DMT.

That would be a good zombie movie. Everybody stops making their own DMT. Well, there's a lot of good movies I think could kind of spring from DMT. Yeah. Well, if all animals are producing DMT, that's where things get really fascinating, right? And if many plants produce DMT and at least have some of the compounds of DMT in them, like, what do you think is going on? Do you remember that language called Esperanto? Yes. Yeah. I think it's like a spiritual Esperanto. I think that organisms that contain DMT are able to communicate with each other. That's just an idea. But I think you can occupy the same wavelength of communication depending on the configuration of your matter.

And it may be that that configuration is common to any organism possessing DMT. Wow. So it might be, well, you know how you can communicate with trees, let's say, when you're really stoned on psychedelics or otherwise. But, you know, that could be how. That could be the empathy existing among organisms. Can we take a break? Yes. organisms. Can we take a break? Yes.

Good. We'll take a break right now. And we're back. So what were you saying? Yeah, the first time I smoked pot, I got hooked. It was like, you know, this is the most amazing thing in the world. Did you recreate that? Or were you, like, to have an experience like that for your first time with the hash?

No, no, I never did. Chase that dragon. Yeah. Well, you know, it was enough. Like I was convinced that this was going to be something I wanted to study. And after the first time I smoked DMT, I knew that was what I was going to study. Now, when you had this idea, how did you go about getting approval for a study? Well, it was a very long strategy. I came up with the idea of studying psychedelics when I was 20. I was doing developmental embryology work at Stanford in the summer between my junior and senior years. I was studying the development of the chicken

central nervous system in petri dishes. It was very high tech. It was fun. We got two papers resulting from the research that I did that year. two papers resulting from the research that I did that year. And I wanted to study psychedelics, but I didn't really know how to do it. I thought, well, maybe I'll just get some lab experience. And I was reading all of the books for the next year's classes, which involved Freud and Buddhism and the new developments in consciousness that were coming out at the time. And I was watching the sunset go down one evening, and I flashed, I'm going to study psychedelics and combine Freud, Buddhism, and psychopharmacology. But I was 20 years old, right?

And in the beginning, I didn't get a good reception. Most of the medicals. Yeah, well, I applied to 21 medical schools. And the 19 that gave me a chance to tell them why I wanted to be a doctor, you know, they just said, forget it. So you were honest, unfortunately. I was out of my mind. Yeah. So yeah, yeah. So the two schools that did admit me, you know, they were either really short interviews, or they steered me away from my obsession. Oh, you know, but I, you know, but I got the idea that talking about psychedelics when you're 20 years old in the early 70s was not really going to fly. So I kept my interest to myself, but I wanted to get trained enough to be able to do that kind of work at some point in the future.

school and I trained in psychiatry and you know took a job up in Alaska which was around the time that people were thinking and starting to understand winter depression which then put emphasis on the pineal gland and melatonin so I thought you know that was a you know that was an entryway into studying the pineal gland and the function of melatonin in humans. So the pineal gland definitely produces melatonin? Yeah, that's been known since the 40s. And there wasn't a lot known back then in the early 80s. So I went back and trained some more in clinical psychopharmacology research, you know, to learn how to do, you know, drug studies, you know, giving drugs, taking samples, doing questionnaires. And so I moved to UNM, University of New Mexico,

and ran that melatonin pineal study. And I got my chops as a clinical researcher. And your melatonin was not especially psychoactive, we discovered it just is kind of sedating. And it helps regulate body temperature in the middle of the night. You know, but it was not psychedelic. Is someone's phone ringing? You hear that? Yeah, I think you accidentally dialed someone. Oh, really? Oh, yeah, Tristan. That keeps happening.

It's just Tristan. Just put the phone on the table. Yeah, sorry. Because I didn't know how you pocket call with a flip phone. Did you know that you could do that, Jamie? It was the way it was ringing. I'm like, that's not his ring. Yeah, I heard a noise, but I didn't know what it was.

But it wasn't his ring. You know, your ring is like... Right, right. Yeah, I apologize. That was like an outgoing ring. Yeah. Yeah, I'm sorry. No, no, it's okay.

I just didn't want someone else listening to our entire conversation. Yeah, yeah, that's Tristan. But you wouldn't be... I didn't know that it was a flip phone. You wouldn't even be able to pick up without opening it up. True. That's so old school of you. I love the fact that you have a flip phone.

I think we were all happier back then. Well, this flip phone is 4G, and I had to upgrade from my 3G flip phone. No, they made you. These bastards. They stopped serving. Yeah, Verizon, they texted me or something and said... Cut you off, son. It's over. You have to upgrade to 4G, so I got this one.

And now they get the 5G. You've got to get 5. 6 is going to come out soon. It's never going to end. Meanwhile, you're just rocking a flip phone. There's something about a flip phone. Like, hanging up on someone is much more satisfying. Look at that thing.

That's all you'd have to carry around. I bet the the battery lasts a year how long does the battery last on this thing all right i keep it charged you know two three days not that long it's got a camera to like report crime it has a camera and it texts it does text yeah does it do voice to text uh no if it does that if it did that i'd be really seriously thinking about it. Yeah. Because that voice-to-text is so easy. Like, you could answer text messages while you're in the car. Just say, hey, Siri, text Rick Strassman.

You could do that with Dragon. Oh, okay. So if you have Dragon, naturally speaking, on your phone? On your phone. Can you get that on that? Yeah, it will transcribe from the cloud. On a flip phone? Well, not on a flip phone.

Well, that's what I'm saying. I'm saying if that had it. Because Siri has it. You can do it off, or Android Auto has it too. I spent so much time in front of a screen that just one more screen would have just driven me around the bend. Well, it's driving people crazy because they're just looking to argue with people all day it's like everyone's mad at everything and there's so

little attention spent to your immediate life and you know what's actually going around you everyone's like freaking out about things that are happening nowhere near them most of the time yeah well that's one of the things I like about living in Gallup, New Mexico, is that you watch the wind, you know, like it's pretty quiet. And even though people have cell phones there, they're mostly interested in other things, church, you know, the rodeo, the upcoming parades. Sounds like a good place to live. It's the most patriotic small town in America. Really?

Yeah, it was voted. Wow. Yeah. Well, there's code talkers out there. You know, the Navajo code talkers. I've heard that expression, but I don't know what that means. Yeah, that's a great story. Is that like from the war?

It's from World War II, the Pacific Arena. You know, the Navajo speak a very difficult-to-learn language. And they put a Navajo in Japan with the troops and a Navajo stateside. And they communicated using Navajo. And the Japanese could not figure out the language that was being used. Yeah, and the Kotakers, the feeling goes with a lot of pride that they were responsible or played a major role in the American victory. Wow. That makes sense.

Like how quick would, I mean, 1947, how quick is it going to be to learn Navajo? Yeah. Well, you know, you may want to get one of those Navajo, you know, co-talkers in here. You know, they're all in their 90s and they're these amazing guys. They're incredibly, well, yeah, they're just amazing. How many of them were there? There were quite a few. There were probably hundreds.

There's maybe like a dozen, you know, two dozen that are still alive. That seems like a story that needs more attention. It's a really great story. There's a Code Talker Museum that I think just opened in D.C. Oh, really? Yeah, yeah, the Navajo Code Talkers. Check them out. You know, so, yeah, it's a quiet place to live, a good place to read and study and write and walk around. I'm not that current without, you know, looking at the news. Good. And I could just turn that off. Yeah. It's just too much for us. I mean, I don't think we should just like let corruption, chaos happen.

That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying for just healthy human beings, the average healthy human being, it is too much to be tuned into all day long. And it's so damn addictive. Well, and it's not good news. No. And that's what attracts it's not good news. No. And that's what the thing, that's what attracts people is the shitty news. The good news, like gets a quick glance and like, what should I be mad at? Which I'd be terrified of. Yeah. Yeah. What are they taking away next? Well, you know, I,

you kind of don't want to go there, but what do you think of monkey pox? You don't want to go there. Sounds like you definitely wanted to go there but what do you think of monkey pox you don't want to go there but what do you think of monkey pox it sounds like you definitely wanted to go there um i think it's um a disease that is uh primarily affecting people who have uh unprotected uh it seems like gay sex right seems like it seems like it's like 90 somethingsomething percent of the cases. You know, there's some sort of vaccine for it, apparently. Yeah. Is there treatment for it? Do they know how to cure it?

Supportive treatment. Just supportive treatment? Fluids. So they just wait until it goes away? Yeah. And how long does it usually take to go away? I don't know. Is it killing people?

No, it's not killing people, but they're pretty uncomfortable. Those are apparently pretty painful sores. They look gross. Yeah. I mean, is there a bright side that's not killing people? Yeah, yeah. It's hard to say when some fucking weird disease spreads. Yeah, and I don't get weird diseases,

or I don't even get the news about weird diseases on this phone. It's made a jump to other people. It's not just people having unprotected gay sex. It's people that haven't had any sex at all. In fact, I think even kids are getting it now. Extended contact, I think, can do it. It's a fucking creepy disease, though. Yeah, it's got a horrible name.

Yeah, yeah. They should call it something else. Too late, right? You can call it MPX. But why didn't they just come up with a better name before they just busted out with monkeypox? Yeah, yeah. But they do that swine flu, you know, avian virus. It's always a way we connect it to animals, those zoonotic diseases.

Zoonotics, yeah. It's creepy. It's creepy how many of them there are out there. Yeah, I know. Well, so what keeps you going? With what? Your kids. Do your kids keep you going?

What do you mean by keep me going? You know, keep an optimistic look. Well, not necessarily optimistic, but what gives you hope? I think more than I've ever thought before that most people are really good people. Most people try to be really good people. They want to have a good life. Most people. That's most.

I think you're always going to deal with certain numbers of people that are trying to make enormous profits and doing so at the expense of either the environment or people's lives or and they're going to influence politicians and they're going to make laws that benefit these people and they've done this since the beginning of time i mean eisenhower warned about it when he was leaving office he warned about the military industrial complex he warned about all that shit he warned about i mean they warned about that when they built the fucking constitution it's but i think overall most people aren't like that most people aren't trying to control people and ruin the earth for profit most people are just trying it's a it's a it's a significant impact for sure it's horrible and it represents us overall it

does because what are people capable of at their worst well they're capable of starting unnecessary wars that are going to cost hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives for profit we know that people have done that that's very just but that's not, and that's not me, and that's not Jamie. That's not most people. Most people are good. That's what I think. So that's what keeps me going. Yeah.

I think most people are good, but I think most people are easily swayed. Well, when things go sideways and when people get scared, when people get scared, their anxiety gets ramped up and they look for something to be mad at. And it ramps up their anger at that person. Yeah. A few years ago, I was pretty sick for years in that Joseph Levy book. And as I was recuperating, I was reading concentration camp stories, concentration camp literature. Well, I just wanted to see how low you could go and still come out of it.

And, you know, the concentration camp culture, history is pretty, it's pretty, well, it's amazing what kind of evil everyday people can, you know, lay on other people. It's just remarkable. They just got a new guy, didn't they? Just caught a new guard. Yeah. And convicted him. I mean, he's in his 90s now. Yeah, those guys are really old.

Isn't that wild? Oh, man. It's not wild. Oh, man. But the people who are alive today participated in genocide in the 40s. Here he is. 101-year-old ex-guard of Nazi camp is convicted by German court. The man identified only as Joseph S. because of Germany privacy laws.

Wow, they're even private of Nazis. Was sentenced to five years in prison after being found guilty of being an accessory to more than 3,500 murders. Ooh. Five years in prison? That's all? Well, he may not live beyond the first couple. Yeah, they might beat him to death in there.

Yeah, he doesn't want a jewish uh cellmate he says it's not even clear if he would even serve the time yeah he may not oh so what is the solution let him go free he's too old he doesn't he's sorry what do you you know how do you how do you let that guy go free? Even though he's 101 years old, like what is the answer there? I think he would have to repent. How could you repent from that? He would need to make restitution to the extent that he could to people that he's caused suffering to. Oh, man.

I mean, what kind of restitution could he make that? What could he do for 3,500 people? Yeah. Well, maybe he could tell the truth. It just freaks me out that that's inside of the last hundred years. It's so recent. It's really recent. Yeah.

Yeah. Civilization is such a new thing. Well, you know, civilization's a new thing. Anti-Semitism isn't. No. Anti-Semitism, boy, goes way back. That's a pretty old one. It's the world's oldest hatred is the way I've heard it described.

You want some coffee? Yeah, some coffee would be great. So we were talking about the difficult road that it took. Cheers, sir. Thanks for being here. Cheers, yeah, thanks. It was very fun for me. Very nice.

Yeah. We were talking about you had this idea, and then the long road to actually getting it passed. We definitely don't want to skip over that. Well, I spent a lot of time training. I went to medical school, my residency, fellowship, and then the two-year melatonin project was also under training funds. So I stopped training officially when I was 35, maybe 36. I was on

training funds until that time. Yeah, you know, so we discovered that there wasn't much psychoactivity that was associated with melatonin. And in the meantime, I had learned about DMT, you know, that is made in the body. It's incredibly psychedelic. I smoked DMT. The melatonin work was kind of taking me into places that weren't all that interesting. So I switched fields and figured, well, it's, you know, now or never. I'm in my 30s. I've got a good appointment at the university. I've got the support of the research unit. And did you approach them with this idea? I did.

I spoke to my two bosses in psychiatry and on the research unit. And they said, you know, get grants and publish and stay out of the newspaper. You know, those were the three bits of advice I got. They said, you know what you're doing, so just go ahead and do it and see what happens. I got support from the university. Well, this was 1986, 1987, and people really didn't know about psychedelics at that point. They had become forgotten. They weren't being taught in medical school anymore. There was no research going on for 15, 20 years.

So even after I began my study, the research unit director used to joke that people in the study room were smoking mushrooms. So he didn't really know what I was doing. He just wanted me to stay out of trouble and succeed. How bizarre is it to you knowing that research on the mind never stopped, but research on one of the weirdest things you could do to the mind stopped? And it didn't just stop for a little bit. It stopped for how long, 15, 20 years? 20 years pretty much. That seems insane, doesn't it?

That they wouldn't want to study one of the most profound experiences that's available to human beings. Well, it's important to think of some context, too. Things were just going crazy with kids taking way too much LSD in the wrong set of circumstances without any preparation. And it was a public health emergency. Emergency rooms and psychiatric units were being filled up. You know, so the government had to do something, you know, from the public health point of view at the very least, which was to make it harder for kids to get their hands on psychedelics. I think that notion that there was a desire to quash understanding what the drugs were doing to people, like in a scientific manner, I don't think that was ever the case. I think it was more that nobody really wanted to challenge the government and submit a really good study that you can back up with safety mechanisms built into place.

You know, once I got my funding and my permits, which was a long process, it took two years, you know, the government was super keen on my studies. They were very interested in what we were doing, that we were finding. When you say the government, like what branch of the government? that we were finding. When you say the government, like what branch of the government? Mostly the National Institute on, I'm on drug abuse, NIDA,

one of the divisions of the National Institutes of Health. You know, they were funding me. Oh, oh, this is cool too. The first grant I got was from the Scottish Rite Foundation for Schizophrenia Research. It was a branch of the Masons. Wow. Very interesting. And the Masons have a lot of iconography with the pineal and pine cones. So, I mean, that was pretty creepy. That is creepy. People get freaked out by Masons.

I mean, without knowing much about it, you hear that someone's a Mason, you're like, oh, boy. What does that mean? Well, and they were the first funders of my research, which I thought was. You see all the Illuminati people are going to go crazy now. All the real conspiracy theory people. Oh, he's captured by the government. It was a strange coincidence.

That doesn't sound like a strange coincidence. Well, there's a more mundane explanation. Yeah. One of my mentors, well, maybe it doesn't help clarify things. It may make it more complex. But one of my mentors was a psychiatrist at UCLA, a fellow named Dr. Friedman. And we got to know each other back in the day. In the 50s, actually, he was giving LSD at the NIH. And I met him, and he supported my work. And he was on a committee, the granting

committee for the Scottish Rite Foundation for Schizophrenia Research. And he said, if you could submit a grant to them that focuses on DMT and schizophrenia, you'll most likely get funded. And I did. So it was at least ostensibly from the schizophrenia point of view. But still, the source of the money and the interest came from the Masons. That's wild. That's another subject that I wanted to talk to you about. There's certain religions that had an exemption for using DMT.

And there's Christian religions in America, right? There's like two different sects of Christianity that are allowed to take like an ayahuasca drink. Oh, yeah, yeah. How did that happen? There's a group called the UDV and one called the Santo Adame. They're both based from Brazil. They both originated there. And so these folks, they went and they got religious exemption? How did that go down? Well, let me think this through. Well, in the early 90s, when I just got my DMT study off the ground, I met the leader of the UDV, an Anglo fellow,rey Bronfman from Santa Fe, was the North American representative of the UDV. And he asked me about what their strategy ought to be to be able to drink ayahuasca. So I advised, you know, taking care of all your permits, you know, kind of

the way I did it. Just, you know, fill out the forms and, you know, talk to the regulators and after a while, you know, if you stick with it, chances are good they'll give you permission. Or you could wait to be caught and then, you know, take it to court, in which case you would at least be, you know, getting the experiences underway. The church would be established. You would have a track record of safety. Yeah, but that sounds like a terrible idea. I would definitely say try to get the opinions in. Right. Or rather permissions in. Well, and well, so that's what happened is, you know, they got, you know, they were discovered importing ayahuasca, which they had been doing for, I don't know, three, four years or so. Yeah. And so they took it to court.

So they got caught with it. They got caught with it. You know, you have to think about it, though, because it may have taken them years. Right. I get it. That makes sense. And they may never have gotten approval. So is it possible for them to grow the stuff they need to make ayahuasca here? Do those things have to be grown in other climates or can they be grown here? You can grow the plants in either Hawaii or Florida.

Right. I knew people grew them in Hawaii. I didn't know Florida. Interesting. Right. I knew people grew them in Hawaii. I didn't know Florida. Interesting. So if Florida opened it up, they could have ayahuasca plantations. Yeah, yeah. And just, I mean, that tropical environment down there. Well, I mean, you'd have to work out the regulatory and the organizational structure, kind of like they're doing in Oregon, which seems like it's kind of halting.

Are you familiar with what they're doing in Oregon? In Oregon, they seem to be decriminalizing basically everything. Right. Well, they've legalized psilocybin, which means that the state's getting involved in a board and certifying locations. So they legalized it for recreational use or medicinal use? Like, do you have to have a prescription? No, no. They're going to be setting up psilocybin centers.

Holy shit. Dispensers. Wow. That's wild. And you could be a certified psilocybin sitter. I wish Portland wasn't such a hot mess. Portland's such a hot mess. That city's such a hot mess. Well, the smaller counties in Oregon have got the right to ban psilocybin,

and they're doing it. So fewer and fewer counties seem interested. Interesting. So it's passed statewide. You're going to have to find some county that's going to give you the green light, and that's where people are going to start growing their stuff. It's going to come with a lot of problems. One of the problems that happened with marijuana was the early days,

banks didn't want to get involved. They wouldn't allow people to use credit cards because they didn't want to get involved they wouldn't allow people to use credit cards because they would they didn't want to be connected to that so the people who had giant wads of cash and they were hiring these special forces guys to like take their cash smelling from pot yeah stinking of pot you know and they're though the whole thing was really sketchy because everybody knew you're leaving that spot with bags of cash. Like everyone knew you have cash there. And so you have to really worry about getting robbed and killed. Yeah. It's interesting to follow what's

happening in Oregon. It's supposed to all be in place by January 1st. That's going to be wild. It's going to gonna be wild I think there'll be some problems yeah well for sure that's the problem if it happens you know if it happens federally if some some wacky president decided to let all the psychedelics free we're gonna have a lot of people lose their fucking marbles the question is aren't we already and how much of a difference would it be and would it be a difference or would those people have already lost their marbles there's a lot of questions i guess yeah well you have to educate people right and the best way to

trip and they maybe should have some research and how to help people that have had bad trips right maybe there's like a good cocktail of medications to fucking bring you back to earth yeah yeah like if it's a bad if it's a bad experience you know traumatic it's like ptsd in a way some people have really bad ones and they freak out and they they don't know what to do and then they get elevated anxiety and it sort of cascades you've seen that yeah yeah yeah i think we're gonna just be seeing more of that yeah look i had one dmt trip that was it was i think we did three times in an afternoon and i had uh the last one was really really really powerful and i had like a very slippery grip on reality for like two weeks after that that can happen yeah that's how i describe it as like slippery like uh i was doing everything

normal i was driving to work normal i was doing it but everything felt slippery like everything can go wrong at any second slippery is a good term well you, that happened to me after my first, you know, five methoxy DMT experience for about, you know, three days. I just didn't really feel like I was in my body, that I was really kind of interacting with things in a coherent manner. That stuff is interesting. I really want to know your thoughts on that stuff, because that's a weird experience in that it seems like you just go away yeah yeah you do go away and even though people seem to be talking it up i'm not sure if going away is that good a thing i want to explain that to people that don't know what we're talking about when i mean go away i mean it feels like you're dying and then it also feels like you don't exist

anymore so you don't have any thoughts while you're over there it's we it's the weirdest experience it's all white it's like just this white out yeah it's like this full white out but it's somehow cleansing like you come out of there like lighter it's like being in the center of the sun yeah there's something about when you come back you feel like everything's going to be fine. You know, like it's so wild in the beginning. It's so terrifying when you first enter into it. But then when you come out of it, you're so happy you did it. Well, I think that's a concern is that you feel so good after you've come through and you want to replicate that. Right.

I've seen people use 5-methoxy addictively, habitually. They just want to get back to that state over and over. And you don't really see that very often with DMT. DMT itself has so much information. There's a dude I knew who he went so many times, he was doing it

so often, that he said the entity started to tell him to stop coming. He was doing DMT like every day. I'm like, hey man. so often that he said the entity started to tell him to stop coming. Yeah. He was doing DMT like every day. Yeah. I'm like, hey, man, that seems like a lot. Well, do you think it was the entities telling him to stop it or that it was just his mind saying, you know, you're killing me.

I mean, let's take a break. Yeah. I mean, or what are those things? What is your mind, right? Is your mind an individual thing, or is it something that constantly changes depending upon what it interacts with? And are those entities that are telling you stop doing it,

do they live in your mind? Does your mind live where they live? Yes, I think so. Yes. But either way, this whole thing of he was having a real problem with it like he the experience was so profound he just wanted to recreate it over and over and over and over again um you know when i get emails from people who start sounding like they're just about ready to like lose it because they're smoking so much dT. And, you know, they want my advice and, you know, support and, you know, confirmation of their funny ideas.

And I just say stop smoking DMT. That's what I'd recommend. You don't need to do it that often. Yeah. That's the one slippery one that I had. I've had it since then. But that one slippery one was a little bit of a wake-up call. Because they're like, hey, cocky fuckface.

You think you've got a great grip on reality? Why don't you just enter into other dimensions for a couple hours and then come back. And now you feel weird about everything. Like for two weeks. It took two weeks to feel normal driving. Yeah, yeah. Well, did you get help no no just worked out yeah i worked out i laid in the float tank quite a bit i mean it wasn't scary but it was next door neighbors to scary right it was it was like if i have to go through life with this

elevated level of weirdness and anxiety forever, like this is life now. I'm like, oh, I don't like this. It was almost like being too high. You know that feeling when I'm a little too high. I don't like this. Right. Yeah. Well, so it was a close call.

It was a close call, I think. I think it's a wake up call. I don't think these, like, you know, Alex Berenson wrote that book, Tell Your Children. Do you know about that book? I um that book tell your children do you know you know about that book i don't think so alex berenson used to write for the new york times and uh he wrote a book making a connection between people smoking too much pot and having um these uh psychotic breaks and these schizophrenic breaks like what is going on what is happening to people like why is that happening and is it happening proportionate to the population where you would normally get

schizophrenics? Or is it elevated? Like what's happening? Well, if you're kind of prone to schizophrenia, it seems pretty clear the more pot you smoke, the more likely you'll have a full break. Yes. And see, this is something that we should have known, right? This is something that we should, it's just like people who have alcoholism in their family. Maybe they shouldn't drink. Right. You know what I mean? We know people like that, that, you know, dad was an alcoholic, they can't have a drink. This is a thing that really is unfortunate because they could have studied this and had answers and we could be able to tell people how to do these things. Well, I think we should learn from that experience by making sure we're clear about adverse reactions to psychedelics. Yeah. The same way we are about adverse reactions

to anything. To anything. Yeah. Well, you're talking about that bad trip that just lingered. I had a bad trip when I was in college, an LSD experience, and I didn't take anything for 12 years after that. Well, mine wasn't a bad trip. That's what was interesting. The trip was magnificent. The trip was spectacular. The trip was incredible. The visuals were beyond my imagination.

The way it affected me, it was like a real, like a peeling of layers of bullshit of who I am. But the experience afterwards, it's like I didn't go back to normal. It was so wild, like whatever it was, it was so wild that every day reality just seemed like, what is this? Is this a trick? Is this a trick? Yeah. Like is reality fake? It seemed like real weird. But no one would have noticed. I talked normal. I did normal stuff. I didn't take days off and sit at home and stare at the walls.

I just did normal stuff until it all came back to normal. Did you tell your friends or family? I think I told a couple people. I think I told people that do DMT. I definitely know I told Duncan. I definitely know I told Duncan. We talked about it. And, you know, that was the thing.

It was really, it wasn't bad, but it wasn't good. And it let me know that, hey, what if it's way worse than that? Well, yeah. You know, what if you're that way for the rest of your life? Forever. Yeah. What if you, like, we know those stories of the guys who did too much acid, never came back. Right.

Those are classic stories. And they're true, yeah. Well, you know, that's why it's good to have a therapist, too. Like, I was fortunate in that I was in psychoanalysis at the time. And so I could, you know, talk to my analyst about how horrible that 5-MeO. Or, you know, it was a bad experience as opposed to yours. But it was quite unsettling. And it really helped to

have somebody to get it off my chest with did you feel like you were dead did you feel like when you did it like you were gone uh no i was stuck in this evil good loop you know like good versus evil and which was i going to choose oh boy yeah yeah and i couldn't decide and I asked the sitter you know what should I choose and they said something like there's no need to choose or they're both the same or you know something unsatisfactory and I was pretty rattled for a couple of days after that so is this when you were coming out of it like did you have an a time of the trip where you were just gone, where it was just white fuzz noise? No, actually, no. This was different?

Yeah, it was different. It had more content. How many times did you do 5-MeO? Oh, gosh. Once pure, the pure drug, and once the toad. Yeah, you know, my experience with the DMT compounds isn't extensive. But the experiences with the 5-MeO, what I was getting at was, are they uniform? They're mostly that white light.

Yeah. Yeah, that seems to be consensual. But this was a different one. It was different, yeah. Was this one from the toad? No, no, it was the synthetic. I was looking up from the bottom of a silo, and there was a catwalk that went around and around the inside of the silo. And there were all these dwarves, like Snow White and the Seven Dwarves with the long sleeves and the long noses and the hood. And there were countless just circulating.

And they were up to no good and at the same time you know they were beckoning and i just didn't know what to do so that's when i opened my eyes and said to my friend you know what should i choose i wonder if they gave you like a mixture. Has anybody given someone a mixture of 5-MeO and NN DMT? Yeah, yeah, that's pretty, well, I wouldn't say common, but I think it's called Jaguar. Oh, I like the name. Yeah, Ralph Metzner used to provide that to people. Because I was thinking like your sound, you're saying something that sounds awfully like the visual DMT experience. I know.

Like the NN. I know. It's interesting. Yeah, because most people have the white light. Yeah, I wonder if you would have gotten a combo cocktail, like a, what is that, Arnold Palmer? An Arnold Palmer. Yeah. You know?

Shirley Temple. Well, the Arnold Palmer is like a little bit of iced tea and a little bit of lemonade. I think that's what you got. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I don't know. I'm just guessing. I've just never heard of anybody having such very distinct visuals before like that. Yeah.

My first entity contact was on 5MEO. Now, when you say entity, what was it, the first one? Well, it was these dwarves, these Catlin dwarves. Oh, that was them. Yeah. That was the first one well it was these dwarves these cows that was them yeah that was the first entity contact and what did you think you were seeing when you were when you're seeing them i had no idea i figured you know i was under the influence and that's what i was seeing you just were going with it yeah yeah observing well if you're in it, you can't do anything. I mean, you can only, you can only, I mean, observe, partake. Do you think that when you're tripping like that, are you entering into a world that already exists or are you changing something?

Well, I think you're changing your ability to perceive things that are normally invisible. So they're there all the time. They're there all the time, either in your mind, unconscious, or out there in the ether. And that's what we were talking about earlier, that it's really hard to tell. Right. it's really hard to tell. Right. But the important thing, though, I believe is that it doesn't make a lot of difference right now anyway, because we can't really design experiments to determine that. The important thing is the information that you're getting out of it. You know, what's it good for? Are you able to extract any valuable information for yourself or for other people?

valuable information for yourself or for other people. Now, when you first started doing these studies, how did you devise a protocol? How did you figure out what the dosage was going to be for these people? How many times they were going to do it? Did you have like test subjects? Like how did you, or I mean, pre-test subjects? Like how did you devise a protocol? Well, the main person who was advising me was a pediatric neuroendocrinologist. Whoa. A pediatric neuroendocrinologist. And the research I had done as a fellow and with the melatonin work was what you would call clinical neuroendocrinologist. And the research I had done as a fellow and with the melatonin work was what you would call clinical neuroendocrinology. So in a way, my study with DMT was using DMT as a

neuroendocrinological probe. It was a psychopharmacology study. Oh, wow. Yeah. So it's what's called dose response work. You give small doses, medium doses, and you give big doses. You need to characterize as many of the effects as you can. Now, you did it intravenously, which I thought was really fascinating because it extends the experience, right? Well, the majority of previous studies gave it intramuscularly. Really? Yeah. Yeah. The Hungarian studies, Budapest, Steven Zara.

What is that like? Well, good question. And I did bring in someone to receive a test dose of the intramuscular. Did you have a hard time finding somebody for that? Man, my friends were lining up. find somebody for that? Man, my friends were lining up. Of course. Yeah. Of course. Yeah. Well, so Terrence McKenna and I developed the idea behind the DMT study in the first place, like a couple of years before it actually got approved. I didn't know what approach to take. And I went over to his place one day. This was the summer of 88, and we just brainstormed the entire afternoon up in his loft. And we decided, or what we concluded was that we would, or that I would apply for funding from the war on drugs. That would be the best way to study DMT, is to get money from the war on drugs.

How did you phrase it? Well, instead of saying that DMT is an amazingly cool drug, we said DMT is an amazingly weird drug or potentially dangerous, might be involved in psychosis. People are abusing it. You know, so, you know, the things that we proposed were coming at it from the perspective of public health as opposed to spirituality or psychotherapy. The more we understand about DMT, the more we'll understand about LSD, maybe more about psychosis and schizophrenia. So it was phrased or looked at as a series of experiments with public health implications. There's something seriously cool about getting the first psychedelic studies funded by the war on drugs.

I mean, it was an amazing stretch there. It must have felt amazing that you pulled it off. Well, my volunteers and I every so often would look at each other and say, this isn't really happening, is it? Yeah. So yeah, it was unbelievable. That's pretty unbelievable. Pretty awesome. It was just occurring in complete isolation too at the University Hospital in Albuquerque in the early 90s. I mean, nobody knew what we were doing. So how did you devise the dosage? Like when you're

doing it intravenously, how did you figure out how much to give people to have the maximum experience or the what did you do yeah yeah um good question let me pee okay again yeah we'll be right back ladies and gentlemen with the answer to that question so we left off with how you figured out what dose to give people to have this experience. It was a convert. Well, the one person that we gave intramuscular DMT to described it as much slower than the smoked and wasn't as intense. So because we wanted to replicate the smoked experience, we then switched to IV. So the standard intramuscular dose is a milligram per kilogram. Was there a reason why you didn't just have the people smoke it? Smoking would have been complicated. It is hard to get as much DMT into your lungs as you need for a breakthrough

through smoking from coughing or the room starts breaking up and you're kind of losing your orientation. There'd be combustion products that would be, you know, not DMT that people were smoking. And we didn't really want to expose people's lungs to chemicals unless we needed to. And we didn't really want to expose people's lungs to chemicals unless we needed to. So we switched to the IV. You know, the IV method of giving any drug is the fastest, even faster than smoking or snorting. Smoking? Oh, I didn't know you can snort it.

Do people snort it? People, well, I mean. Of course they do. Why would I even ask that? Yeah. And you can snort other drugs, you drugs, like any kind of drug, for example. I've just never thought anybody would snort DMT. Well, if you make a water-soluble salt of DMT, you can snort it. Oh, okay. Yeah, you smoke the freebase.

But you can't crush the freebase up and snort that, could you? I don't think it would work. It might. But when people do snort it, it's the water-soluble form. What is that stuff that they do where it's like a snuff that they blow up each other's noses and it does have psychedelic chemicals in it? You think it might even have DMT in it, right? Right.

Yeah, the Amazonian psychedelic snuffs. Yeah. Yeah, they contain DMT, 5-methoxy, DMT, bufotinine, and some obscure tryptamines. And it's supposed to be horrendous, right? You shoot it up the nose and it's just disgusting. Yeah, you've seen those black and white pictures that they took in the Amazon in the 40s and 50s. Could you imagine getting a blast of that stuff up your nose? Not really.

But if that was the only way you could get to reach the spirit realm, you'd do it. Right, right. I mean, people do a lot of extreme things to attain spiritual experience. How much have you paid attention to Graham Hancock's work on the Amazon, how they're rediscovering these civilizations and also the use of, there's a bunch of different researchers using a LIDAR down there. Right. Where they're going over the jungle and they're finding grids and the cities that used to

exist down there. And Graham thinks that there might've been cities with like millions of people in them. going over the jungle and they're finding grids and the cities that used to exist down there and and graham thinks that there might have been cities with like millions of people in them that existed before these europeans came through and gave them all smallpox well yeah you know graham's been really important in making people aware of the role of you know psychedelics you know across all cultures, across time. I got Graham on the podcast. I got him high.

He hadn't been high in like two years. Yeah, he told me that. He blames you now. I would go, just don't go so hard. Yeah, yeah. He said that. He's going too hard. Yeah, yeah.

He was really proud of himself, and then he got stoned in your show. Then he got stoned, and he was just on fire. The moment he got stoned, just breaking down how, I think, essentially we were talking about the dating of civilizations, about how arrogant people are with their initial assertions of what the origins or the timeline of civilization is. It's like the timeline of civilization is still a mystery and they're pushing pushing it further and further back with every discovery and they keep finding stuff that pushes it further back further back further back they're finding complex stone structures that are 14 000 years old 12 000 years old yeah yeah gobeckley tepe 12 000

years old that's a long fucking time ago. And they keep finding all this evidence of human beings being older than we thought they were. I think that this Younger Dryas Impact Theory is probably the best theory when it comes to explaining why we're so wacky. I think we had once achieved some very high level of sophistication. I think that's what explains ancient Egypt. That's what explains some spectacular construction methods that were from thousands and thousands of years ago. And then we got wiped out almost to the point of extinction,

and then we rebuilt back again with a bunch of shit that we didn't understand and a bunch of people that came from really smart people but had been living like fucking barbarians for the last couple hundred years. That's what I think happened. Yeah. I wonder, well, are you familiar with Julian James and the bicameral mind? I've heard that name and I've heard of that book. Yeah.

So, you know, James believed that up until a certain point that it was a common phenomenon for people to hear a spoken voice. That's right. And that's where people got their information was from the spoken voice. Could you imagine if that's really how people used to interact with God, that God used to just talk to you? Well, yeah, yeah. His theory proposes that the prophets were the transition between the bicameral mind being common and it kind of dying off.

Yeah, there's no, you know, there's no hard, you know, there's no hard evidence of the brain communicating differently back then because it disappears quickly, soft tissue. What do you think of Terence McKenna and Dennis McKenna's theory about monkeys eating psilocybin? Does that make sense to you? It makes sense. Yeah. If you don't – tell people what the idea is that we – the grasslands, that the rainforest receded into grasslands and the monkeys came down. They started experimenting with new food and they found psilocybin, right?

Right. You know, these compounds, you know, psychedelics stimulate the growth of new neurons, neurogenesis, and also stimulate the complexity and number of connections among neurons. That's called neuroplasticity. You know, so it could be that there were neuroplastic effects in the monkeys that were using psilocybin. You know, that would be an explanation of how there would be an evolution of consciousness, which would be passed on and continue. You know, one of the big fun theories that people like to talk about when it comes to human beings, people that are like alien enthusiasts, they like comes to human beings, people that are like alien enthusiasts. They like to say, well, human beings are the product of some sort of accelerated evolution. So the aliens came down here and they ran experiments with these primal people and converted them into modern people.

Yeah, we can get some of that. Yeah. But the question is, maybe that's what mushrooms are. Like maybe that's what that means. You're consuming something that gives you this entirely alien experience. It's causing neuroplasticity. It's causing neurogenesis. It's making you more creative.

It makes you have a better ability to see motion, right? Doesn't it aid in visual acuity? Acuity, it does, yeah, yeah, and your sensitivity too. And the ability to detect parallel lines moving. There was someone who did that study. There was like a straight scientist who did this study where they gave people psilocybin and they showed them parallel lines as they were moving off parallel,

that the people on psilocybin could see it way quicker? Yeah. Well, the question is whether those traits can be passed on to the next generation. That's what's called Lamarckian transmission. It's called epigenetics now. Activation of certain genes can be passed on hereditarily. So it could be that the increase in neuroplasticity and neurogenesis is passed on. Well, something happened to people, right?

I mean, we'll keep you off camera. Yeah, keep me off camera. Keep him off camera, Jamie. Something happened to people because the human brain doubled over a period of, like, what was it? Just a couple million years, which coincides with the timeline that McKenna proposed, that these rainforests were starting to recede during that same time period, right? Yeah, you kind of have to wonder what the DMT system in the brain was doing at that

time, too. I wonder if that was a time of rapid growth of the DMT neurotransmitter system. rapid growth of the DMT neurotransmitter system. Yeah, and what was the natural state of DMT back then too? I mean one of the things that I would imagine is that people who have to live like a very hardscrabble hunter-gatherer life, you know, you're out there in tents you're trying to protect your children from predators you're living this like very tuned in to everything around you life it's probably a very very different experience in terms of just how they perceive this the world itself how they perceive reality because one of the things that has to kind of, it seems like it kind of has to happen

as things get safer and easier, you get less of a concern and a fear of danger. And so your ability to detect danger kind of atrophies, whereas someone who lived at the beginning of human civilization would have been just a super intelligent animal almost. Right. Just tuned into everything. Just like animals, if you snap a twig near a deer and their heads spin around, bear smells you from fucking three football fields away.

That's normal for them. We maybe had a better sense of the world around us. I mean, think about how bad our senses are. Our noses are terrible. They barely do anything. Like maybe they were like really good at one point in time and we just didn't need them anymore and it atrophied. You know, if you had a wolf that was near you and you could smell it, you know, that would be a very good thing to stay alive. Well, they could smell you. I bet you used to be able to smell them, but we've been living in houses for

so long. The olfactory centers in the brain are the oldest. Perceptual centers in the brain. Really? They could smell before they could see? They're the oldest? Well, if you smell things, it'll stimulate memories.

Yeah. You know, so that's not the case with other senses. There's a connection between the olfactory sense and memory, which is the strongest among the senses. Wow. Which indicates that our sense of smell once was much more important. Wow. Well, What had to be. We didn't have doors.

It would have to be. It'd have to be. Right. You have to be able to smell things, hear things. You have to be able to feel the vibrations on the ground of something running at you so you can get a jump at it. That environment, if you introduced psilocybin to that environment, and that's what created human beings, that is a fascinating theory. And the thing is we know psilocybin is real, and we know its effects are profound.

And so to dismiss it as being what happened, I don't think that's wise. I think there's a problem with what mushrooms are. It's like people think they're so silly. I'm tripping on mushrooms. You're doing something you shouldn't be doing. Like, oh, look at Todd. He's over there on mushrooms. But what it probably is is some kind of a chemical gateway to some either state of mind or some other dimension.

gateway to some either state of mind or some other dimension. And if you gave that to some savage proto-hominid that was just living naked, running away from jaguars all the time, and this thing starts tripping and starts figuring out tools and starts figuring out how to make sounds to indicate different animals. how to make sounds to indicate different animals. Well, you know, it's in a direction. The effect of the psilocybin is in a direction. So that's an interesting thing to consider. In a direction? In what way? What do you mean by that?

Well, towards increasing civilization, towards language, towards love as opposed to hatred, let's say. Yeah, it would help them form tribes, especially if they were all doing it together. Well, so you'd then argue for an evolutionary advantage for hominids that were taking psilocybin. It gave them an advantage. At what point in time do you think people forgot that psilocybin was beneficial like

and what were the steps to get people to not have access to that information anymore not not be aware of how long for what an enormous history people were consuming them? How long? Well, I mean, there's turf, you know, so look at the major religious institutions and they're stamping out psychedelic use in the indigenous world. in the indigenous world. If you could stamp out the states, then you kind of have the hegemony over those states or you can promise them if you pray or if you're good or if you do various things. So there's politics involved competing groups,

those that used mushrooms probably and those who didn't. There would probably be some climactic and environmental ones too that the range of the mushrooms was shrinking right like some sort of climate change and they forced out of areas that used to grow them all the time so they stopped using them and they started taking alcohol and other things it's just since we know so much about them today, in comparison to what people knew in the 50s and the 60s, publicly we know so much more about them. So there's so much real scientific data out there. There's so many real intelligent people who are enthusiasts of them that can kind of explain

the benefits of it it's just amazing that it's taken so long to just get one state to make it legal well you know what would you like you to see the future of psychedelic use would you want everybody to be tripping and the best of all possible words like Tim Leary Ken Kesey just everybody everybody. Those guys went too hard. I think they scared a lot of people. I think those guys, they were so tune out or drop out. They were so culty, and they had a wild bus, and they threw wild parties. I think a lot of people got freaked out by civilization eroding before their eyes and their kids turning into useless hippies.

Like there was a lot of fear that was attached to that. I think it would be different today if you talked about psychedelics because way more people have had psychedelic experiences, I think, per capita. I know of many, many people who are very happy micro-dosing psilocybin. They just take a little bit. Take a little bit here and there. And they really enjoy doing it that way. You know, I wonder, I mean, is there some yearning for utopia? There is always going to be that, right?

But there's also going to be an understanding that whatever that stuff does it seems to encourage you to behave and think in a way that's better for everybody it seems to want to encourage you to think kindly to be nicer to people to to like connect more with the earth and it's like it tunes you into a very for lack of a better term, positive frequency. But then again, the Vikings took them and they slaughtered people. Yeah, yeah. I think it's, you know, I think they. There's that too.

Yeah, yeah. You don't want to gild a lily. You don't want to gild a lily? What does that mean? Gild a lily. Make something beautiful even more beautiful. Oh, yeah. beautiful. Oh. Yeah.

Yeah. I don't think they should be illegal, for sure. I do think that to just randomly give them out to everybody is irresponsible. I think there are a lot of people out there that are having a really hard time with regular reality and that something as profound as a psychedelic experience could fucking blow a fuse. But I don't want to be the person that can tell a person what they can and can't do. And I think that's part of the problem with it all is that they can tell you, you can't try something or me. I can't try something. And they're just like us. They're just a person. They're just a person of similar age. And they're going to tell you, you can't do something. I'm like, you don't even know. You've never even done it. This is a dumb conversation we're having. And you're going to

make it so that I can get locked in a cage because I want to do something that you haven't done. Well, the chairman of our ethics board at the university, when I presented these studies to him university, when I presented these studies to him for the informed consent and what you would be doing with people, you know, I bumped into him one day and said, man, I'm so grateful for how open-minded you are about this. And he said, I'm not God. We're not playing God. I thought that was a great line. He was a libertarian, actually. And he figured people should do what they want to do and Just give informed consent educate people let them know what they're getting into and let them decide I think it's way more dangerous to have people uneducated about the risks of certain drugs and the importance of understanding the dosage and the purity

Then it is to tell people not to do drugs. I think that telling people to not do drugs and you're going to arrest them if they do drugs, that's unrealistic. People have done drugs since the beginning of time. I think the realistic approach is to fucking educate people and to stop all this nonsense about what is and isn't allowed that a grown adult, a person who has never done it, can tell you, don't do that. I don't want you to do something that's been around for thousands and thousands of years and has a rich human history of usage, like psilocybin. That's not the good guy.

The guy telling you he's going to put you in a cage for mushrooms is never the good guy. Well, I think there need to be places where people can trip who want to trip for any number of reasons. Yeah. I don't know what you'd call them. They might be churches. They might be retreat centers. There might be. I don't think the government should be involved in this is what my point is.

I don't think they should have any say. I don't think this has anything to do with you. Just stay out of the way you don't even know what it is and if you want to do it it will make you a better person but don't tell people that you're going to arrest them there's some people that are still pushing back against

the idea of there being recreational use of psilocybin meanwhile it's helping so many soldiers so many soldiers that have come back with PTSD psilocybin research is very promising i know it's impressive it's very impressive uh mdma as well yeah mdma as well the guy who drove me over this morning is a vet was talking about some of his friends who have done psychedelic therapy and they're like back to normal yeah and more more than one different type of psychedelic. I've also heard people, guys doing Ibogaine and then 5-MeO.

I've heard that there's some real success in doing that. But I've talked to people personally that have had psychedelic experiences that have just freed them of so much that they had from combat duty. Well, I mean, we need to do more research, right? Right. Because once we have more research data, we can say this helps and it'll really spread out to, you know, the rest of the country

as opposed to just within the research communities. My friend Neil Brennan is a very funny stand-up comedian and he lives in LA and he's always had like real problems with depression. And he tried a bunch of different stuff he tried ketamine therapy magnet therapy tried a bunch of stuff and then he went and he did ayahuasca and he did ayahuasca a bunch of times and the just the difference in his personality it's like it like immediately had abandoned 80 of his anxiety and

tension and whatever he had that might have been weighing him down. And he was like, he's permanently happier. This is a crazy thing for someone to say. I took psychedelic drugs and they made me permanently happier. What do you think about how psychedelics seem to be panaceas? They seem to do everything. Well, do they, though? Because if they make you schizophrenic, that's not good.

You know, I mean, they— Well, I mean— They could, for some people. I don't know what they're doing. I do think they could be panaceas. Like, what you're saying is right. They could be panaceas for a lot of people. If you look at the literature, I mean, eating disorders, anxiety, depression, OCD, alcohol, cigarettes. Oh, yeah, in that way.

Yeah. For everything. Improve metaphysical views, make your meditation better. physical views, make your meditation better. You know, so in the proper set and the proper setting, you know, they do seem to be like panaceas. They, you know, they heal all. Doesn't it seem like with every medication,

and even if you look at psychedelics as being a medication, every medication is going to have side effects. It seems like there's no one thing that, I mean, people die from aspirin every year. Well, the stronger the effects, the more side effects there are going to be. You can't have one without the other, really. And that's just because of biological diversity, just because people are different and their bodies react differently to things?

Well, the intensity of the pharmacological effect, if it's really like chemotherapy, I mean it can end the cancer, but it's just rife with toxicity too. I'm not sure why that would be the case. I think that's kind of just how things are in pharmacology. When you think about psilocybin as like a panacea to all these psychological disorders, what do you think is happening? Why do you think it's helping people quit drinking, quit smoking cigarettes, quit doing gambling? There's a lot of different things it seems to be helping people with. Well, one possibility is that suggestibility increases on psychedelics. You're more hypnotizable. Oh, so someone can program you like a Manchurian candidate.

Or a researcher or a therapist who says get better. Right. So hopefully you've got a good person programming you. Could you imagine if that's how we can create? Well, the Manchurian candidate story is interesting because the belief was you could just, you know, turn an everyday individual into an assassin, you know, but you had to have those tendencies in the first place, either conscious or unconscious. If you were a peacenik, like a really peace-loving person, no matter how much LSD they gave you, it's unlikely that you would become an assassin. Yeah, they had to figure

that out, though, and the way they did is just experiment on people. Experiment on people, right. Just the actual real history of MKUltra and all the different things they've done, that's 100% not conspiracy theory, actual real history. It's true. That stuff is bonkers. Yeah, I've looked into that a bit.

I even tracked down the old MKUltra files. They're quite heavily redacted. You must read Tom O'Neill's Chaos. It is all about MKUltra and Charles Manson. And it is fucking wild. It's a guy who studied this case, the Manson family case for 20 years. he started off writing an article about it but as he dove deep into the case it was so nuts that he just it was so many layers to it that he refused to stop and he kept going deeper and deeper and he'd missed his deadline then like he had a book deal and they had to give the money back like Chaos. 20 fucking years of this.

And at the end of it, he's got very convincing arguments that Charles Manson was a part of MKUltra. That Charles Manson, that they gave him acid when he was in prison. And that they supplied him with acid when he was out there teaching hippies to be fucking hit people. Well, I think the case of Charles Manson is an important one. It's a case that I try to bring up in every podcast, which is don't forget Charles Manson. When it comes to acid. When it comes to psychedelics. Yeah.

Because the drugs increase suggestibility, and depending on your environment, you'll be more suggestible to what's around you right and if you've got someone who's already a charismatic con man and you catch him in prison and dose him up with acid and you run a i mean what better person to run a study on than a charismatic lifelong criminal you know and just dose him up with acid and give him a sense of delusions of grandeur and then also every time he gets arrested get him out with acid and give him a sense of delusions of grandeur. And then also, every time he gets arrested, get him out of jail. And that's what the book is about. It's a very strange story.

The book is wild because Tom is very thoroughly researched. Everything lines up. And so he's taking the angle from the MKUltra connection. Yeah, he thinks that that was a part of the project and that where he used to get his acid from was the same place where the CIA was running the health clinic. There's a Haight-Ashbury clinic. The Haight-Ashbury clinic was being run by the fucking CIA.

They were doing Operation Midnight Climax there too where they had brothels and they would secretly dose the Johns up with LSD and study them. They were doing Operation Midnight Climax there, too, where they had brothels. Right. And they would secretly dose the Johns up with LSD and study them. I mean, they were doing wild shit. And they were also visiting people like Charles Manson in prison. And this is the thing that he makes this argument, that they got to Manson in prison and most likely were dosing him up with acid and teaching him how to turn people into your minions. We're dosing him up with acid and teaching him how to turn people into your minions.

Yeah. The last Manson book I have been reading is The Family. Oh. Yeah. What's that about? It's about his group. It's about Manson and his group. He goes into a lot of details of Manson's growing up.

And there is talk of LSD, obviously, with his group and beforehand some. But I don't remember him mentioning the MKUltra connection. That must be pretty recent. Well, this was also their argument for how is he getting all this acid? How's he getting all that acid? How's he getting all that acid? And also, how come he keeps getting arrested and let out? And how come the sheriffs who arrest him say that it's above their pay grade and they were told it's above their pay grade. Yeah. And they have to let out this fucking psychopath who's supposed to be, you're supposed to be in fucking jail.

You know, he broke his parole. Yeah. That's quite a CD chapter in psychedelic work. It is a really wild book because it's so thoughtfully and thoroughly done. I mean, it took 20 years for him to do it. But that was an absolute part of the history of this country is that they performed tests on unwilling subjects. They just dosed people up and studied them. Yeah.

Well, that's the reason now you need what's like an airtight informed consent. You know, they did that with Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber. He was a part of the Harvard studies. But they're giving him LSD. Yeah. You know, so it isn't that you just take LSD and you're cool. No, not at all. Not at all. I mean, I think we can't stress that enough, right? That's the point I make in my book, actually, over and over is, you know, you should know what you're getting into and prepare yourself. And this is the second book, not Joseph Levy Escapes Death. No, not that one. But the Psychedelic Handbook.

Yeah, yeah. Just released today. Yeah. The longest chapter in there is How to Trip. It says a practical guide to psilocybin, LSD, ketamine, MDMA, and DMT, ayahuasca. Rick Strassman, MD, available now. Available now. Did you do the audio for this? Not yet. Are you going to do it? You should do it.

Your own voice. Come on, man. Yeah. It just came out today. I think people would like to hear it in your own voice if you're willing to do it. It's a lot of time, though. You know, quite a few authors do that. Yes.

I like it when they do it. I don't like it when someone reads somebody else's stuff. Especially if someone is good at talking. Yeah, I've never considered it. Well, that's not true. I've considered it but quickly dismissed it. But I will think about it some more. Yeah, you should because I think people would enjoy it if it was like in your words with your voice.

It was a fun book to write. I mean I had to really bone up on the latest research. I mean I thought I was current. But, man, the last couple of years, it's really hard to keep up. When you did your very first patients, did anything surprise you? When you put the very first people under, had any of them had any psychedelic experience? Yeah, the group had to be psychedelic experienced. I only studied psychedelic experience people.

That's good risk. Yeah, it was for a couple of reasons. One was the risk that if they had a hard time, they would know how to get back. And also, I figured they would be giving better descriptions of the experience. Right, they wouldn't be so blown away. Right. And the third reason was that if they started abusing psychedelics, they couldn't blame me

because they had already been dating them. Oh, that's very clever. Yeah. Yeah, you have to do it that way, though. Yeah, yeah, it was a real straight-on study. I mean, we really made sure to anticipate any objections. Did anything surprise you about the first batch of test subjects and their experiences?

Yeah. The first intravenous studies we did, we overdosed two people. What? Yeah, we gave them too much DMT. Oh, no. Yeah. Well, we started off at this dose and that dose and I called FDA and said, we're not quite there. And they said, well, you can go up, you know, two or three times.

And I figured, well, you know, things are pretty easy so far. Let's go up three times. And it was way too much. Both people just couldn't remember anything. Really? Yeah. So we figured, okay, let's... How long did it last? You know, you know half hour 20 minutes and what did they say it was like one guy thought one guy described as being thrown off a boat in the middle of a storm and ending up in the water and just being thrashed about completely helpless and terrified and you know the other guy he just like retched And the other guy, he just like retched. And he didn't remember much, so we figured that was too much.

So then we settled on a pretty stiff dose. It's the biggest dose still in use, or smaller doses are being used now currently. So far, nobody has gotten up to the high doses of DMT that we gave. And what you were giving them, was the experience uniform as they described? Mostly. Really? Yeah, mostly. One person was completely unresponsive to it.

Well, like your story of THC? Can I ask you one more question? Were they doing it simultaneously? No, everybody was just like more question before we did were they doing it simultaneously no everybody was just like did you do any where they did it simultaneously no i would be really interested in that why because of the telepathy thing with when they before they figured out telepathy was harming they were kind of call it telepathy because they had shared group telepathic experiences yeah well do you know david luke in london in berm uh well you know someplace in england you know david luke is a parapsychologist who's very interested in Yeah, and he's finding some promising data that ESP, telepathy, is enhanced when both people are stoned. Because I've heard of people having conjoined

experiences on ayahuasca before I've heard of people having experiences like they they independently verify with other people that they were kind of in the same place well that's as far as like what they saw that description of my first experience smoking hash was a it was a shared hallucination yeah we both were seeing the same thing. Oh, do you see that? Yeah, yeah. We'd expand on it. Yeah. It's just, what is it? What is that? What are those group minds? Those weird sinking of minds? Like, what does that mean? What's happening there? Well, it seems that everything is contained in a field. And you can tap into that field in certain circumstances.

So including your thoughts and my thoughts and that we're all just, we can link up. Yeah. My favorite science fiction writer is an Englishman. His name is Stapleton. And he wrote a book about 19 species of humans that evolved over 2 billion years. And the final species is able to experience population-wide telepathy. Oh, wow. Every 500 years or so when things are just dialed in

and it would be what people would be looking for, these people would live 35,000 years because that was the necessary time to attain all of the knowledge that was out there. And they would spend all their time otherwise trying to connect

on a worldwide level. And it was every 500 years, every 1,000 years. It was a rare event. uh everyone would sing and dance in that space what do you think about the the possibility of some sort of a technologically uh inspired or driven uh group telepathy like what i would worry about with stuff like that is it being co-opted and someone being able to control it. But if somehow or another they released one of these things that you put on your head that allowed everybody to communicate in a universal language with everybody.

Like a language that everybody picks up pretty easily. Because you're getting downloaded information much quicker. Because you actually have some sort of a weird implant in your brain. I think we would need to be wiser for it not to go south. I think it's going south. And I think that's where people are going. I think we are sliding down the mountaintop, holding on to our ass. And I think we're going to go right off.

I think we're going right into cyborg land. Right. And, you know, because people are the way they are, there's no guarantee that it'll be for the good. Yeah. Once you can read minds, it's going to be way harder to control people. It's going to be way harder to get people to buy into bullshit. You can't have propaganda anymore. There's like so many positives to it that a lot of people are just going to dive right in. But you're also never going to have privacy. You're going to live in this weird world of communication where people communicate with you non-locally with your mind. So what are you going to get? Spam?

You're going to get spam texts in your brain. I get like four or five spam text messages a day. Like, do you need cash? Like, question, fill us out now. I get four or five of those a day. You're probably going to get those from the whole world. You're going to have a hard time avoiding them if we're all like hyper-connected. People are going to take advantage of it and try to sell Bitcoin and push NFTs. It's going to be.

Well, I think you need to stay out of cell range if you can there's gonna be a way it's gonna be a way probably for people to opt out during the day like shut off so you can work well do you like philip k dick i um i really like that there was one that they turned into a film um what was it what was the philip k dick book that they turn into a film well there's total recall i think this just popped up oh total recall he did that too there's blade runner scanner darkly scanner dark scanner dark that's it scanner darkly Darkly's wild. Yeah, that's a great movie. Yeah, Scanner Darkly.

That is a really fucking cool movie. Yeah, I like that. Yeah, it's like a wild semi-animated movie. Yeah, it's called a rotoscope. Yeah, that was fun. That was a cool fucking movie. Well, so Philip K. Dick has written a short novel. It's called The Three Stigmata of

Palmer Eldridge. And it's about the competition between two psychedelic drugs. One's from Earth and one's from another star system. And the one from Earth,

they're both these huge corporations that are making millions of tons of this psychedelic. The one that was created on Earth just puts people into the perky pat world where things are really fun. There's this little figure, Perky Pat,

and you go into her house and you wash dishes and you have parties. You know, weird Philip K. Dick stuff. And there's another psychedelic that comes from outer space, and it's really bad. You never really stop tripping, even though you think you have. Oh, my God. That sounds terrible. Oh, it's a horror story. It's scarier than anything I've ever read.

So I think there's going to be this competition. What's the most popular soft drink or the most popular music? I think a state of consciousness is going to be kind of the turf that huge interests are battling over. Yeah. It's going to be interesting to see whether or not they can control it and whether or not the technologists will allow it. Ultimately, it's like the people that put it out, whatever it is. They have the ability to control it or not control it,

depending upon what stage it's at. But I feel like if it keeps going in the same general direction, the general direction is about access to information. It's more instantaneous. It's more accessible. There's only so much you could do to put a cork on that if it really gets out, if it really gets to a universal language thing. The only way they're going to get people

is if they figure out some sort of a digital currency, force people into a centralized digital currency, and then attach it to a social credit score system. And then, bam, you're living in China. Yeah. They could do that. They could trick people into doing that. But the other option is psychedelics. And I think if more people had positive, well-guided experiences and not people with slippery grips on reality as it is. that a percentage of the population is moving to a better state of mind, a better way of coexisting with other humans, not so angry,

like more in awe and wonder about this whole thing, and with like a general attempt to be kinder because of it? Well, I think that the outcome think, you know, that the outcome of any individual psychedelic experience, I mean, is obviously the set and the setting, you know, who you are and what you want to get out of it and your environment. You know, so the most, I think, you know, you really need to work on the set and the setting for positive outcomes. So I think that's kind of the task now is to work out the best sets and settings. We think about how good people always feel in nature.

Nature is almost like the ultimate set and setting. I know. It's great. It's kind of like biologically enriching or something like you lay down in a beautiful hill and you look out at all the trees and the mountains. It's like, oh, this is so beautiful just by itself. Yeah. And then if you add psilocybin to those experiences, it's generally it's like. It's generally it's like, I mean, the ones I've had have been like extra, like filled with awe, like extra. You feel connected to all the trees and the grass and the dirt seems alive. I think that also, though, you know, sometimes you'll need to be indoors.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Like if you're smoking DMT, let's say. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You should be on the couch. Yeah. Yeah. As opposed be on a couch. Yeah. Yeah. As opposed to the field or something.

Have you seen anybody fall, like black out and fall down on it? Yeah. I was at a conference, oh, not a conference, but an event in Dallas a long time ago. And I was being hosted by a couple of kids. And they took me over to their house. And everybody's smoking DMT. They're ordering pizza and there's music and everybody's smoking DMT.

Oh, no. What a disaster. Yeah, and this one guy had never smoked DMT before they gave him a huge amount. And he started screaming and falling down. That's the worst setting ever. Yeah, they wanted me to see what they were doing. I was like, man, this is kind of, you know, high risk.

Oh, that's so dumb. I did it with Doug Stanhope once, and he almost had a seizure. I was worried we were going to lose him. He, like, was making crazy noises. It was very strange. I've never seen anybody respond to DMT that way. It was like moaning, like, ah! Oh, really? Well, does he remember it? Oh, yeah. Never seen anybody respond to DMT that way. It's like moaning. Like, argh, argh.

Oh, really? Well, does he remember it? Oh, yeah. It was a positive experience overall. I just think that he was, like, hanging on in the beginning of it, maybe a little too much. You know, if you try, like, it was a 5-MEO DMT experience. If you try to hang on, like, you're not hanging on to that.

It's going to take you with it. Just relax just relax yeah and maybe that's what was going on maybe he was uh hanging on but he came out of it it was a positive experience well there's a well he um you can see videos of you know people flopping around on your five methoxy dmt that see this is the problem with legalization, right? I think it would be irresponsible to just give it away to everybody. But I do think that it would be very beneficial to have it in places that are like a really well-established, well-set-up center where people can do these things

under professional supervision by people with experience in them, people that know the purity of the stuff, the right dose, the right thing, and it can be a business, and it can make sense as a business, and then also give people the ability to do it on their own afterwards. Okay, now you know what it is. Now you know how to get it. This is the right dosage. Don't fuck around, and enjoy yourself.

You get to learn. You get certified in proper use. know to get it this is the right dosage don't fuck around and enjoy yourself like you could learn like you get certified in in proper use it's not a bad idea if you give people a license to drive a car give them a license to do dmt like hey todd like how do you feel about reality like todd you know what shape do you think the earth is you know ask, ask him pretty simple questions. Yeah. Well, I mean, the future of psychedelics, I mean, it looks pretty bright. What do you think is pushing it the most? Do you think it's these studies they do with PTSD in soldiers? I mean, there are just so many influences out there that want to see psychedelics or, you know, so many interests that want to see more people take more psychedelics. You know, there's commercial ones and there's therapeutic ones and there's spiritual ones and there's brain science ones.

You know, the great thing about psychedelics is they extend their reach into everything that's distinctly human. they extend their reach into everything that's distinctly human. And they affect all aspects of human consciousness, I mean, across the board too. So, yeah, they're kind of like mirrors in a way. But they're strange drugs. I mean, I always encourage students to get as much school as they can and to study psychedelics in a real rigorous manner if they can. they can and to study psychedelics in a real in a rigorous manner if they can if you had the ability if you if they came to you if uh president biden came to you and said uh dr strassman could you uh tell me should i legalize everything or not would you just if you could hit the switch

if you were the guy they came to. That's a trick question. Are all the good questions trick questions? Or I should ask you, is that a trick question? No. What would you do? Well, I'd say it's complicated. That's a typical response from a psychiatrist. Yeah, you sound like a real scientist.

It's complicated, yeah. Right. And so would you have to develop some sort of an assessment of the pros and cons and what the negatives could be and how to mitigate some of the negatives, like the people that are losing their mind and overdosing and access to people that are too young? Like, there's a lot of factors in there that you'd have to consider upon legalization. Right, right. Like there's a lot of factors in there that you'd have to consider upon legalization. Right, right.

Gosh, you know, it's like a multi-pronged approach. I mean education and organizations and have to get the church on board. Yeah. Or at least, you know, you're not against what's happening. So your experience with, you've had some experience with one of those churches, because I remember you telling this story about what it was like to go visit them, and they're wearing, like, golf shirts and doing ayahuasca. Well, you know, the UDV is pretty straight. The ceremonies take place under lights, you know, like in a big room and you

sit in a chair and, uh, there's, you know, somebody leading the ceremony. It's like a church, you know, ceremony. So when you say straight, you mean like, like a regular church, but they also do psychedelics. Like it does, they don't seem to be hippies at all. They seem, uh, I I mean they really emphasize being a good family member and a good contributor to society you know so it's like a Christian Church and in that way and how often are they having these psychedelic experiences you generally twice a month usually a little wow they

would be a fascinating people study well, they're being studied. Oh, are they? Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of information about the effects of participation in the churches in Brazil. And some in the U.S., but especially Brazil because that's where they both— Netflix should get on board with that. You know, because that could be like a whole series. Yeah.

You could study these people and study the effect. That actually is a fascinating idea for a series because what they're doing is really profound if it's working. Someone should find out, is this really a harmonious society? Are they really happier? Yeah, they've been studying members of these ayahuasca using churches for a long time, for decades now. And what is their conclusion?

The kids are healthier and less drug abuse, less alcoholism, less depression, better quality of life. It's quite impressive. It makes sense. It makes sense if you've had experiences yourself and you understand the impact that it could have if you attached it to a structure like religion. It's quite structured, yeah. They're into God. They're into Jesus. they're into the Bible, they're into Solomon. So the ethical teachings, which are part of the Bible, part of a spiritual system.

Do they have certain passages that they recite while they trip or before they trip? Not that I remember. Do they come back with, like, some sort of an experience that seems like biblical experiences? Their story of the beginning of the church relates to King Solomon. So there's references to King Solomon. They do refer to the Bible, I'm thinking about it, as most Christians do. Protestants anyway are pretty familiar with the Bible. So they know text.

But did they come back? What are they experiencing? Are they experiencing like a standard ayahuasca, you know, seeing vines and snakes and jaguars and UFOs? Or are they seeing things that are Christian in nature? They're mostly seeing things which relate to them on how to be better people. So there's a real emphasis on personal growth and evolution. on how to be better people. So there's a real emphasis on personal growth and evolution and bringing society to a higher level. It's quite altruistic, and it's like, as you note, if you have a structure that is essentially good,

that you're kind of giving the psychedelics within, the outcomes can be really positive. Yeah, I think the structure of, you know, if you look at the best aspects of almost all religions, they're all about trying to unite society in some sort of a way. The best aspects, you know. Mm-hmm. If you attach that to a psychedelic, then it becomes a bimonthly ritual. That's pretty wild.

Yeah, you know, being charitable, doing good, things like that. Yeah. Oh, you said biweekly, right? Every two weeks or so. That's so much. That's so much. Those people are on cloud nine all the time. They're just recovering from the last one and bang, they're right back in again.

Yeah. Well, I spent about three months associated with them. I like how you say it that way. Yeah. Three months associated with them. Well, yeah, that's what it's called. You become an associate. Oh.

Yeah. Yeah. That's the terminology. Oh, interesting. That's the religious terminology? Yeah. I like that. Yeah.

Yeah. I like that. And I was an associate for maybe three or four months. Yeah. And I was drinking a lot of ayahuasca and I felt pretty darn good. So when you were doing it, what was the experience like? Like how would a ceremony go down? Everybody would do it together? Yeah. Well, what was interesting is you would eat beforehand. Most of the time they say have an empty stomach and so on. But their opinion is if you are throwing up, it's better to have something in your stomach than just throwing up the – Ayahuasca itself? Well, the ayahuasca itself or your stomach acids.

If you have some food, it will kind of buffer things. That actually makes sense. Would it slow the absorption, though? It can. So that would be the negative, right? You would want to get the full dose? Well, they spend about an hour in preliminaries, socializing. Oh, okay, so you do digest it somewhat.

Yeah, yeah, and then everybody gets in line, and the master of ceremonies that night will look at you, look at the brood, decide how much to give you. Interesting. They'll look at you. Yeah. And go, this motherfucker can't handle this. Yeah. How do they just decide?

Right. I've wondered. I've asked them, and they said it's intuitive. Oh, God. That's so weird. That's a lot of power he who controls the ayahuasca controls man uh yeah i think i've gotten you know yeah it's it's an interesting process like you are thinking i hope they don't give me too much and but also

you know i hope he gives me a lot because i'm like macho or whatever right yeah i can take it bro yeah if we did have legitimate psychedelic psychedelic centers in america i mean there would have to be some real thought beforehand as to uh what's the best way to uh approach it from an education perspective explaining things to people what to expect you know like there's a lot to that but i don't want to like be the person that tells a person they can or can't do it either like i would say we should have some sort of screening process but then i'm entirely against screening processes well i i mean screening is really helpful. Sure. Yeah. But I don't like the idea that someone can, like, say, someone can control whether or not people do or don't do it.

Because it could get slippery. That could get weird. Someone could, like, come up with more and more reasons to not give, like, maybe you have the wrong political persuasion. Or they've labeled you a terrorist because you don't believe in taxes or whatever. Okay. Now you can't do it anymore. Yeah. The screening idea I was thinking of was screening research people. Oh, right.

And even then, when you're screening people who participate in research studies, there's no guarantee they won't have problems. Oh, for sure. I meant for the general public, screening people in terms of being able to not give it to people with legitimate mental illness. Yeah. How would you stop that if someone's, you know? It would be like any other drug, I think.

Like if you've got an allergy to a medication, you're screened out of getting that medication. Right, but we'd have to alert people to it and then tell them tell them not to do it well yeah it's like a huge multi-level process of organization it's almost like a you know the NIH ought to start a division maybe of psychedelic medicine yeah well it's not a bad idea I think think over time we're going to find more and more people are interested in it because it's not as stigmatized as it was. It was such a there was such a stigma attached to psychedelics when I was in high school. Psychedelics were for idiots. If you're doing psychedelics, you're trying to blow your brains out like that guy from The Who. Yeah. Well, so when was that? That you're in high blow your brains out like that guy from the who yeah well so when was

that that year in high school pink floyd right uh pink floyd yeah yeah the crazy diamond yeah um this was um 1981 it was my first year in high school oh really so that was you know like the the peak of the dare stuff exactly Exactly. That was the Reagan years. It was just say no, all that stuff. I mean, if you go back to the 1960s, the Ken Kesey, Tim Leary stuff, and then you shoot just 20 years ahead, like it's gone. Like there's nothing. In high schools and in colleges, people were more turned on to some of those things. But it wasn't like overwhelmingly popular like it was just 20 years before.

Yeah, even 10 years before. I mean there were a lot of psychedelics on campus in the early 70s, mid-70s. So how did they put a fucking fire hose on all that? They didn't. Underground use stayed pretty much constant even during the war on drugs. Really? Yeah, yeah, like for LSD.

Well, what about for other things like psilocybin? Ayahuasca was not very popular back then, nor was DMT. You'd have to look at the specific survey, but they ask certain questions about certain drugs. And I think they probably had an LSD category and maybe psychedelics in general. Back then, they really weren't looking at psilocybin. That's probably changed the last five or ten years, though. Hmm. What do you think is going to happen in terms of the way the country opens up in terms of being able to do therapy on people with PTSD? And then ultimately, do you think we're going to see like some sort of a recreational usage in our lifetime, like federally?

Hold that thought. And we're back again. A few moments, ladies and gentlemen. But my question was, in our lifetime, do you think that we're ever going to see legalized psychedelics where people of consenting age? Well, I think there'll be models that'll be recreational and also medical.

So do you think it'll be like state to state? Probably state to state. Or do you think federally? I think it would be like liquor. It would be like alcohol. Recreationally, there'd be dispensaries. Right, but alcohol is legal nationwide, federally. That's the big

problem with cannabis and psilocybin. No matter what happens, if these towns make them legal, it's still federally illegal, particularly like hard drugs, right? Yeah. Well, there would need to be some regulation across the country, which would require rescheduling. Yeah. Yeah. You know, it's interesting that there's no scheduling of alcohol, for example. I mean, that should be scheduled. 100%.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's a tricky drug. Right. But you know, but what's the expression? The horse is out of the barn at this point when it comes to alcohol. It is. And it's also socially people's favorite drug. It's like so accepted, so recreational.

And, you know, everywhere you go where people are eating dinner, they're drinking alcohol. Everywhere. It's happening all over the place. They're drinking beers with their burgers and they're drinking wine with their steak. And people are always drinking. Well, if there are going to be dispensaries, yeah, there'd need to. Well, yeah, I think state to state would be how it goes, kind of like what they're doing in Oregon.

I mean, it is legalized, even though it's a Schedule I drug. I know, but Oregon is like the worst. Oh, right. They're always lighting their courthouse on fire. I mean, that place is fucking wild. Yeah, they're stressed. Yeah, they're very lighting their courthouse on fire and yeah i mean that place is fucking wild yeah they're stressed um yeah they're very high strung yeah and portland and i think also you know prescribing you know so you could prescribe right but you could also deny a prescription and that's what it gets to me it's like i i don't like the idea of the government being involved in psychedelics.

I don't think it should be like a prescription. I think there should be some educators that put forth some sort of reasonable recommendations, and then society adopts them. People who really understand what the dosage should be, what's the most important part about set and setting, and having well-educated, experienced travelers who are also counselors. But getting the government involved, get the fuck out of here. If they regulate it, they're just going to tax the shit out of it and ruin it.

They'll just water down the dose or figure out a way to make too much money from it. There'll still be underground use, though. Of course. You know, an underground culture, which could maintain the integrity. Yeah, but why bring the government into ayahuasca? Get out of here. They should just stop with all these stupid schedule, you know, when it comes to something that has like a history of use. Like stop. You can't make that a Schedule I drug. That's ridiculous. Gordon Wasson was writing about it in the 1950s. Like what are you talking about? You made that a Schedule I drug? This drug with like a mountain of positive experience stories? This drug with like a mountain of positive experience stories.

I know. Schedule 1. You know, when my study started giving DMT, I mean DMT Schedule 1, but I was thinking about the scheduling of psychedelics into Schedule 1, which means there's no known medical use. They can't be given safely under medical supervision, and they're highly abusable. So this was in the early 90s. I began the study, and I wrote to Janet Reno, who was the attorney general under Bill Clinton at the time. And I said, these drugs shouldn't be in Schedule I, and I could say, why not?

Because I'm doing research which indicates they can be given safely under medical use. doing research, which indicates they can be given safely under medical use. And we're gathering important data, which means they have utility under medical supervision. So, you know, one of her assistants wrote back and said, very complicated, changing drug laws. Yeah, so didn't get much further beyond that. Isn't that fun? They could just say, it's very complicated, changing drug laws. Sorry, can't do it.

Can't do it. Impossible. Right. Impossible. If the grid goes down, we'll get that back up. But it is impossible to change this piece of paper where it says that you can't do that. It's not. I just, I can't. I'd like to help.

Well, you know, at the time I had more important matters at hand, like, you know, running my study. But I think at a certain point it would be worth a while to reconsider the scheduling of Schedule 1. Well, what is ketamine? Three, I think. That's interesting. Yeah, yeah. Because they're doing a lot of that. They're doing a lot of these

guided ketamine sessions Yeah, yeah ketamine is huge. Yeah, but it's it's a real psychedelic. I don't have an experience with ketamine But mm-hmm my friend Neil that I talked about earlier one of the things that he had did prior to ayahuasca he did ketamine in a like a medical setting and He was like I can't believe how high I was, like how strong it is. I was like, you're really tripping. It's not like some sort of little sort of baby ketamine thing, like feel better about yourself thing.

Well, it sounds like he's describing the K-hole. Are you familiar with the K-hole? I thought the K-hole was negative because I don't think he was saying this was negative. Is the K-hole when you can't move, like you're stuck in a hole? You can't move. Yeah. You're under general anesthesia, but you're still conscious. And some people like that. I'm sure. Yeah. Especially if your life sucks. Right. Right. You just want to zone out. Yeah. And for some people it's terrifying. Some people get addicted to that stuff too, right?

Yeah. You know, somebody I heard describe it as, you know, psychedelic heroin. I've heard of people getting addicted to snorting it. Snorting it. Yeah. Yeah. And injecting it. Injecting it. Intramuscular. Yeah. Yeah. And injecting it. Injecting it. Intramuscular. Yeah, that's what Timothy Leary used to do, right? No. John Lilly. John Lilly.

That's what John Lilly used to do when he got into his float tank. He would intramuscularly jab himself and then vronk. Well, you know, I knew John Lilly. We spent a little time together. Yeah? Yeah. I mean, he was pretty old at that point. And I was at a conference with him.

And, you know, he was, I don't know, 70s, 80s. And he loved ketamine. He still got after it? Mm-hmm. Yeah. So some people. Why not? Why not?

I mean, you only live once, right? Well, he is the creator of the, in my opinion, one of the greatest tools for exploring your mind ever. The tank. The float tank. Yeah. That thing's amazing. Marijuana plus float tank is the wildest ride. Oh, my God.

Sometimes I get out of there. I'm like, what the fuck? Well, you know, I've never been in a float tank. Really? Yeah, yeah. Never? I don't think ever. No, I have friends who own float tanks or float tank companies like in Albuquerque.

You should definitely try it. I think you'd enjoy it. I've been invited, yeah. It's very relaxing too. That's the thing about it. It's not just that when you do the float thing you have these wild visions and this weird way of

seeing reality because you're sort of detached from everything else. Just you alone with your thoughts. Because the water is the same temperature as the surface of your skin. So you're just floating there and you can't distinguish between the air and the water. You feel completely weightless. But besides the visuals, it's also really good for your muscles.

Everything just sort of relaxes and softens. Yeah, I like that. It's nice because it's Epsom salts. It's the same as like 1,000 pounds of Epsom salts in that tank. Well, so I wanted to ask you, Rupert Sheldrake, if there is a specific passage in his book that seemed like he was stoned when he wrote it. Yeah. And I said, did you write that when you were stoned? He said, I write everything when I'm stoned.

Yeah, I pretty much do, too. I write a lot of things not stoned, but they're not good. I mean, I write some I've written do too. I write a lot of things, not stoned, but they're not good. I mean, I've written some bits definitely sober. Like I came up with an idea sober and I wrote it down and it became a bit. But there's a thing that happens when I sit down in front of a keyboard when I'm high. It's like it almost like it opens up like a channel that I can't reach. Like I can tune into it. Like, hey, here we are.

So here's the ideas. And then I can... It's bizarre. Yeah, it's weird. But it's true. It's a strange form of creative enhancement. As we were saying before, why we're allegedly smoking marijuana.

Well, so I get stoned and I take a pen in hand on a pad of paper. And, well, so the ideas just come. Yeah. You know, you really can't do editing stoned. Yeah, that seems like a sober task. Yeah, it's kind of, you know, you have to think. You have to be critical. You just can't let stuff kind of flow.

You know, George Carlin had the opposite way of writing. He would write sober and then edit stoned. He would write his bit sober and then punch him up stoned make him funnier stoned yeah well do you think you're funnier stoned i don't know when it comes to doing stand-up it really is about your mood you know i don't think you necessarily are funnier stoned it's really about your mood it's about the material but like the being funny or is really about like how you feeling if you feel funny yeah you feel well you feel good too you're having fun like that is funnier it's so that's like a state of mind and then it's the material and how you deliver it and you should

you know that's part of being a quote-unquote professional right right you're not really funny or stone when you're doing it that way but there's things that happen when you're stoned that wouldn't have happened when you're sober that's the dilemma because sometimes like when you're stoned you are on a subject and then a new path appears like oh I go down there and you just start talking about something that you never talked about before and it turns out to be hilarious. Right, right. I think it really loosens up suppression or resistance.

Well, I think it has an effect clearly on short-term memory. Oh, for sure. Yeah, in a detrimental effect. That's what's dangerous about it. Yeah, yeah. You need to be in the right place when you're that stoned to be that creative. Yeah. Are you recording this?

Yeah, we're good? Or do you want to not? You know, this is interesting. Yeah, we're recording all of it. Yeah, okay, good. Yeah, we were going to come back to, what was it? Rupert Sheldrake. Oh, okay, fine.

We're going to start right there. That's good. Yeah, well, you know, the first time I smoked hash, one of the things that really struck me was how I lost all self-criticism. You know, I was able to think things and feel things without any restrictions at all. And I think that's part of what occurs when you can't write or if you have writer's block is you're kind of criticizing yourself. Like you're no good or you can't write it or you can't have any good ideas. And for me anyway, that part of my inner dialogue goes away on pot.

That's interesting. That's interesting. That's interesting that that's what writer's block is in your eyes too. I wonder if that is it, like the self-criticism. Like a lot of people have a hard time enjoying themselves, right? They think of themselves in a bad light. They don't like themselves. They want to get drunk or do something to escape yeah well i think people take you know drugs a lot of time to escape yeah yeah when i was working

in this little town between taos and santa fe called espanola really serious drug problems and i would ask people at least early, to distinguish among the effects of the different drugs that they were on, like heroin or methamphetamine or paint or whatever. And they mostly said, it just makes us not feel. You know, all the drugs, each of the drugs would have the same effect, even though they're quite distinct pharmacologically, but they just wanted to stop feeling. One thing that psychedelics make you think is whenever there's some sort of a problem in this world in terms of like a poor neighborhood with another shooting, like Chicago, like south side of Chicago or Baltimore, when you hear about these crazy

things like, how much money would it cost to fix that? And how much money do we just send over to other countries when we're finagling deals and hooking people up and fixing things? And I'm not talking even just about Ukraine. I'm talking about how much do we spend, period. How much would it cost to fix that? It doesn't seem like it would cost as much as arming other countries. It seems like if they had money for that and they didn't anticipate that and then they had money for that, why didn't you fix that other stuff?

Why didn't you fix if you guys are really competent and you really wanted a better country? Wouldn't you want to fix all the places that are fucked up like that? There's been zero effort. Well, do you ever think about going into politics? No. No? Never. Nonsense. Oh, why not? Same reason

I don't want to go into pro wrestling. You get fucked up. You can change things from the inside. Oh, can you? Yeah. You can also things from the inside. Oh, can you? Yeah. You can also find yourself hanging from an extension cord. Yeah. It's a dirty business with a lot of money involved in it.

I'm not interested. I have the best jobs. Talk shit and tell jokes. That's the best. And occasionally call UFC fights. It's great. Yeah, and you're making a critique of society through what you're doing. Well, I'm just saying what I'm seeing and having people on that have all kinds of different perspectives.

I want to hear how they're looking at it. I'm constantly amazed by how many intelligent people there are to talk to. There's so many cool people that you can just have conversations with about everything and anything. Whether it's you, about all the above, about psychedelics, about your research, about your, you know, having the mind and the courage, like it's so, you're such an important part

of the psychedelic history of this country. Because what you did is you legitimized like a very important thing that everybody had already kind of heard about and some people had experienced it and you legitimized it by doing it in like a real clinical setting with the government's permission and funded funded funded by the war on drugs I mean it's amazing and it's like you know you know it's it's really important because it opened people's eyes that this is repeatable that this is this is

understand understood rather to be something that has been used by human beings for a long time and just recently we probably have been detached from that yeah well i wanted to demonstrate you could do it yeah safely uh and you could generate valuable information you know that was you know the goals were modest but the goals were modest because I wanted them to succeed. Yeah. So that was a good strategy. You know, when they try to find the history of DMT use, what is the current understanding as far as like how long back they know people were either taking the snuff or doing an ayahuasca or some form of it. So have you talked with Dennis McKenna about his thoughts about the evolution of DMT, how far back it goes in the family tree of life? I don't remember if I did, but please.

Yeah, like I haven't looked carefully into his thinking, but as I understand it, he points to it being a very old compound, a very ancient compound that had occurred, you know, very early on in evolution. But when do they think humans started ingesting it? Yeah, well, the historical record, I mean, there's ayahuasca, right? And that might go back 5,000 years. But, you know, probably before. I mean, why not? This is my question. Before smallpox ravaged the Amazon, before all those people died, and they're still doing research on this, right? They don't exactly know what these cities were because that LIDAR stuff,

when it lays out this grid, they understand that there were structures there, but they don't exactly know what these cities were because that lidar stuff when it lays out this grid they understand that there were structures there but they don't know what it was but yeah the the big the big crazy story is that there was millions of people there if that was real if that's that's the the craziest possibility and that's the one that graham subscribes to that there was millions of people there do you think that that society perhaps was a psychedelic society and that's why they had that knowledge of how to make that stuff and then the people who survived were the people that were removed from the inner city areas of people that lived in these tribal areas were the ones that lived and they had the knowledge that these people had run their society with using that stuff if they're able to have these like

insane structures like the whole lost city of z you know you know that that it was a feature film but it was also a book and it's based on a real explorer who went down there and they were looking for this lost golden city that had been talked about before but most likely what they're what they think happened was those people that went whether it was a hundred years ago or whatever it was, they killed everybody. They gave them diseases and it just ravaged everybody in the jungle, just consumed everything. So when they went back to look for it, they couldn't find anything. Mm hmm. Well, your question about whether it was a psychedelic society, psychedelic society far advanced. Right. Yeah. I mean, it could be. I mean,

in the right circumstances, psychedelics enhance sociability, right? And empathy and compassion and those kinds of virtuous characteristics. Yeah, you know, so it may have been a part of their society. I'm not that familiar. It's a Mayan phenomenon. It's definitely in the Mayans, right? Yeah, yeah. So the Mayans used mushrooms and other psychedelics. So, yeah, I mean, I don't know how extensive the use pervaded down among the lower strata of society, but you would think that the clergy would be taking them regularly. Well, you had to be on mushrooms to build those fucking pyramids. Yeah, so the scientists also were taking mushrooms. I mean, what? How did you figure this out?

When you go to Chichen Itza, I don't think they let people walk up it now. I think too many TikTokers fucked that up. Did they ruin that? Is that true? They don't let you walk up the pyramid of Chichen Itza? I feel like something happened there. There was some event, some sort of a news story,

and then they said you can't walk up it anymore. But I got to walk up it. I think I went in 2003 or 2004 or something like that, and it was wild just to be around those things. I want to take. You're not allowed to anymore. You're not allowed to anymore. I don't know why.

Somebody fucked it up. Yeah. yeah yeah it's probably tiktokers it's always shaking their ass up there we got rumors about illegal climbing illegal climbing yeah well luckily i got to do it and i want to do the other places i want to do um the ones the other ones in mexico I want to do, I eventually want to see. Someone fell and died. Oh, shit. Whoops. So, no more. Imagine watching someone slip and go down that thing. But the point is, like, these people, however long ago it was that they built these things,

like, these are incredible structures. Incredible. Like the way they're set up, they're so symmetrical and beautiful. And they have at the top of it like a place where they would put human bodies when they would do sacrifices on them. So you've got this like kind of creature. Yeah. It has its legs bent. Yeah. creature that has its legs bent. Yeah. Well, you wonder if they came up with the architecture based on their visions of the geometric fractal-like visions. They may have modeled their

buildings on some of those. That's entirely possible, right? What do you think led to them going, why did they all go to sacrifices? What's that all about? So many of these ancient cultures, they're like, we want to sacrifice. They kill people. Right. On purpose. Well, it represents a certain system of belief that if you sacrifice, then you'll have a benefit. Yeah, and it could be rain, it could be crops. The wildest one I ever heard of was the Aztec one.

Was it Montezuma that did it? Someone sacrificed, I want to say it was something crazy, like 80,000 slaves over a period of just a couple of weeks. I think they finished building a pyramid, and then after they built the pyramid, they sacrificed all the slaves, like some insane number. Yeah. It might not have been 80,000,

but it was something really crazy like that. What is the name of the pyramid? It's Teotihuacan. I don't know how to pronounce it. Here it is. Yeah, people come up with crazy ideas. Some conquistadors wrote about Sompantli and its towers, estimating that the rack alone contained 130,000 skulls.

But historians and archaeologists knew that the conquistadors were prone to exaggerating the horrors of human sacrifice to demonize the Mexico culture. As the centuries passed, scholars began to wonder whether, I don't know how to say that word, zompantli had ever existed. So what is that saying? I thought it was actually talking about things, but I read it too fast. This is about the same place you just mentioned. A skull rack.

I don't want to say it either. Oh, no, no, no. It's not the same. That's not the same word. Oh, okay. It's, fuck. It's like T-E-O, T-O-Con. It's a very complex word.

I'm going to fuck it up. Not that? That's it. Tenochtitlan, right? Is that it? not that that's it to note to blonde right is that it is that no that's a city no that's not the name Google just Google Aztec pyramids Aztec pyramid 80,000 that's how I got to this it sucks by her month thousands performed sacrifices were performed there but maybe that one time. Maybe that is it.

Is that a pyramid, the Pyramid of Tenochtitlan? Yes, or it's a city. I don't know. Okay. Yeah. Well, I should have had that story at my fingertips. But the point being, they did sacrifice some fucking insane number of people upon

completion like why do these cultures believe in these mass sacrifices like that like what do you think caused that kind of horrific thinking i just don't know know, it's incomprehensible. Especially if they were a psychedelic culture. Well, I mean, you have to wonder if the psychedelics strengthened their belief that what they were doing was the right thing to do. Right. Because if you have preexisting beliefs, they're often magnified by psychedelics. Right. That's a good point. Especially if you're living in a really rough

part of the world and a really rough time in history. Well, you interviewed that guy, Brian, who's got the book out on early Christianity and psychedelics. Brian Murarrescu. Yeah. It's called The Immortality Key. What do you think of that theory? It's fascinating. Well, they have real physical evidence because of the vessels. They have real physical evidence that there's some lysergic acid and some various ergot. Like there's some forms of ergot that they can find residue of inside the wine vessels. So these wine vessels weren't just wine. They were throwing in a bunch of psychedelic compounds into the wine, and that's what they did with all wine.

And now that they have, like, physical evidence of these vessels that has trace elements of this psychedelic compound, they can be sure that this is what was going on. And this is why when they would talk about drinking wine and having these visions and this is where democracy came from. These fucks invented democracy doing this. And they were probably all tripping balls. Yeah. So what do you think that the relationship is between the Kikian, for example, and earlyianity that's the part i i didn't quite understand in what way didn't you understand well you know were the thoughts new that were induced by the kikion or were they already there and the kikion just magnified them

and made them more devoted to those ideas that's interesting yeah i know. I mean, we'd have to like find the origin of all of their ideas because it was such a incredible time period for people thinking things through and communicating and devising ways to live and saying things that to this day people quote as wise words. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, you know, our sacred literature is pretty old. Yeah. There's not much new. There's the Bible. There's the Greek philosophers. What did you think of those scholars from Israel that were connecting Moses's burning bush to DMT? Yeah, that's an interesting idea. Yeah. So psychologist Benny Chanone. Yeah, so he proposed that the burning bush was an acacia, and it was emitting fumes of DMT, and that's how Moses experienced the vision of the angel speaking to him. I mean, it could be true,

but it doesn't necessarily explain the broader phenomenon of the prophetic state, because it was only Moses that one time. It doesn't really explain Isaiah or Ezekiel or, you know, other prophets. Other prophets having experiences? Other, you know, prophets actually being exposed or taking an exogenous, you know, psychedelic agent. So that's not talked about at all? No, no. The only one, well, let's see. There are certain things that stimulate your prophecy, like a good meal and being happy and good music. The manna may be, some people have suggested

the manna has got a lysergic acid ingredient, and that's why the Hebrews were experiencing their visions in the desert you know but the only like you know clear-cut you know plant and you know person epiphany is Moses at the bush you know some people believe that the incense in the tabernacle or in the altar had cannabis in it. So, but there's not. Yeah, I've heard that before. Yeah, yeah.

You know, but the whole presence of endogenous DMT kind of makes it moot whether or not people took, you know, plants or substances in the Bible or any of this old spiritual literature because you have endogenous DMT. You've got the means to experience visions without because you have endogenous DMT. You've got the means to experience visions without taking anything in. Have you ever attempted to achieve visions without the use of the chemical? Like, have you ever attempted to do it through kundalini yoga? Because that's one way that I have talked to people that have had these experiences. They

said you can get pretty damn close with yoga. Well, and with holotropic breathing too. Have you done either one of those? I've done holotropic breathing. Could you explain how that works? Yeah, the first time was very psychedelic. Well, you hyperventilate deep and long for as long as you can. It might be five minutes, it might be 10 minutes, it might be 15. When you say hyperventilating, what's the schedule

in it? How do you do it? No, it's very deep and very fast. Very deep and very fast. Okay. Yeah. And you do it and your hands kind of spasm up from the changes in the acid-base balance. Really?

Oh, yeah. Your hands spasm? Yeah, your feet, your lips begin tingling. She'd be sitting down when you're doing this? Oh yeah. You need to be screened. Really? I mean, you need to make certain that your heart's in good shape and you're not on any medications that might interact badly with being that out of it. Yeah. It's a whole system. It's like tripping without drugs and they've got drugs. How long do you do it for before you start to? Five minutes, ten minutes, or a half hour. Wow.

It just depends. You can snap into it real quickly or it might take a long time. I wonder how much of that is what runner's high is. It could be. We studied runner's high for melatonin levels. Back in the 1980s and 1990s, you know, there was a marathon in the winter on Sandia Crest, which is like 10,000 feet to 10,000 feet. And these guys run a marathon along Sandia Crest. And I was, you know, looking for some way to stimulate melatonin. And so I looked at the stress level of those guys and figured if anybody is inducing enough stress in themselves to raise melatonin naturally, it would be them.

Yeah. You know, so we did that and we found some increases. We tried, you know, blocking it with naloxone. And, you know, those were the kind of studies that I was doing. Yeah. And after a certain point, you just switch and you're in this very highly altered state. And how long does it last? Well, you stop doing the breathing once that happens. I don't know, maybe 10, 15 minutes. happens um i don't know maybe 10 15 minutes and so what would be akin to it like what is it like mushrooms is it like eating edible marijuana what is it the experience that i had as i remember i've only done it once like really breakthrough is it was like md. Really? Yeah. This great clarity. Ooh.

Really? Yeah, but I think people have a range of experiences. What do you think is happening? What is causing that euphoric sort of sensation, like pharmacologically? Well, it doesn't always euphoric. For some people, it's really very difficult. There's throwing up and there's vomiting. And, yeah, you know, people can get pretty, you know, it's a very powerful technique. Yeah, and I'm not recommending that anybody start doing it.

Can people overdose? Can they over-breathe? Not that I've heard of. That's good news. Well, you know, I'm familiar with their network, and they're pretty well-trained people. Wow. So there's a whole place you could go, and you can be guided through these sort of breathing sessions. Is that what they do?

Yeah. Well, Stan Groff, have you heard of Stan? Yes. Yeah. You know, Stan was that Czech psychiatrist who did a lot of LSD research. And Stan was at the University of Maryland for a while, working with Bill Richards and those guys. And once they stopped, you know, once the compounds,

once psychedelics were scheduled and all human research ended, you know, Stan moved on and in the meantime developed this, you know, holotropic breathwork technique. And he's trained hundreds of therapists in the technique. Did he get it from any sort of indigenous ritual or some ancient civilization ritual? I'm trying to remember where he got it from. I think there was some school of psychotherapy, kind of obscure. And I think, I'm just not sure.

You know, it was going around. Right. And he picked it up and he ran. What I was getting at is, like, is there a culture that exists anywhere that also knew about this that was doing this a long time ago? I'm sure, but I don't know. Nothing we know of? Yeah.

I'm just real curious. but i don't know nothing we know yeah i'm just oh i'm just real curious like what was the they say like ayahuasca is one of the first um dmt experiences that people have had but i wonder like how how did they figure out how to put those two things together so you could just eat it well if you ask them they will you will tell you the plant stole them. Yeah. Yeah, but how that works. But how do they know? They weren't alive back then.

Yeah. It's thousands of years old. That's nonsense. Well, it could be King Solomon. It could be. Yeah. Or, yeah, I mean. It seems so wild that someone figured out how to combine one thing that has DMT in it and another thing that's an MAO inhibitor so that your body will just absorb it.

Like that they figured that out in the jungle. You know, one thing that they may have been doing is the vine, you know, the Banisteriopsis has got the beta carbolines in it, the harmin, harmaline, MAO inhibitors. And they use that as like a screening tool. If they're on the Banisteriopsis, they can taste other plants and the essence of what's in that other plant comes through in a way that isn't normally the case. Oh, wow. other plant comes through in a way that isn't normally the case. Oh, wow. Yeah, so they may have had their antennas up, so to speak, by being on the MAO inhibitor, beta-carbolines all the while, and experimenting with what plants do what.

Wow. So just by using that, did you say as like a regulator? Well, like radar or something. They can pick stuff up that otherwise is invisible you know within the plant we've got it I mean animals must have something similar to right I mean it's got to be a reason why they only eat specific types of grasses and avoid other ones mm-hmm does it just taste like because I know they that certain grasses and certain plants will actually change their flavor profile if they think cows are eating them or if deers are eating them. Oh, really? That's interesting.

They said that about acacia. Yeah. The acacia tree, there was a thing they were reading about giraffes who wouldn't eat the leaves of these trees. And it turns out they were downwind from trees that these giraffes were eating so these giraffes were eating the wind goes down it changes the flavor profile of all these other these other plants so whether it's through the the mycelium in the ground whether however they're communicating but they've even done it to the point where they played sounds of like caterpillars chewing on leaves and that causes the change in the flavor profile to the leaves

they're they have senses some weird senses well and there are stories of animals getting intoxicated uh oh yeah you know right? Alcohol, fermented fruit, other things. Don't elephants love that? Yeah, and catnip and cot. They discovered cot from goats eating the leaves, and they would get frisky. Have you ever tried cot? I was growing some cot in my greenhouse back in the day. Is that legal?

You know, in New Mexico, probably. And that stuff is like an amphetamine, right? Yeah, it's a stimulant. Did you enjoy it? It was okay. It was okay. Did you want to take over a boat? No, it was a small plant.

I only got a couple of leaves at a time. It seems like the preferred drug of pirates, right? Right. They love that stuff. They always scare people with, oh, they're on the cat. Oh, Jesus. I just wanted to know what the actual, what is it like? It's like caffeine pretty much.

Really? Yeah, yeah. Well, in the Middle East, in more traditional societies that are really into cot, they chew cot and the city council or the village council gets together, they chew cot and they make their decisions. Wow. I guess it would be like chewing coca leaves. Right.

The chewing coca leaves is fascinating, too, because so many people think that there's actually a health benefit to chewing coca leaves. It's actually probably good for you. It's just cocaine. How they get it is from coca leaves. You can't have coca leaves. Well, it's like cot. They extract cathinone from cot. What's just cocaine, how they get it is from coca leaves. You can't have coca leaves. Well, it's like cot. They extract cathinone from cot. What's cathinone? It's the active ingredient in cot, like cocaine is in coca. And then you start manipulating the

cathinone molecule and you come up with bath salts, more or less. Oh, boy. Yeah, yeah. So it's a good drug gone bad. Well, that was a weird time in history, right, where people would go to, like, drug stores or gas stations, rather, and buy what they would call bath salts. It says, not for human consumption. Wink, wink. Right.

And people would buy it and just kill each other on it. That was a wild time where people found out that you could get that. Yeah. Well, it's kind of like that kind of THC, CBD you were talking about before the show. Yes. Yeah. You can buy it over the counter. Delta 9.

Delta 9. It's legal. And it's very powerful, you say. Yes. Yeah, so you can buy it over the counter. Delta 9. Delta 9. It's legal. And it's very powerful, you say, huh? Yes. It's legitimate. They have it a lot around here, too. Like, they have stores that they sell it. And there was, like, some sort of an amendment to get rid of it.

And I think it got knocked down. I'm pretty sure that was the story behind it. But they have, like, a fake version of marijuana here that's legal. Yeah. It's like, okay. Well, you know know they're designing new drugs every day yeah yeah um they're coming up with new versions of drugs that are illegal well and these you know these psychedelic startups are you know designing new drugs as well that's wild yeah like if someone figures out a better acid. A better acid, a longer DMT. Yeah. You know, something that lasted maybe an hour instead of just a half hour. Well, what

you guys were doing with IVs, how long was the drip and could you have prolonged that experience by like, what was the longest one you did with people? Well, you know, we just gave it as a push, like as a bolus. Like I would inject the drug over 30 seconds and then clear the line for 15 more seconds with salt water. And so is it from an IV bag or is it just straight into the tube that's attached to the... It was, you know, from a syringe. Okay, so it's not going... Oh, okay. I was under the impression it was an IV drip. I thought it was like, that's interesting. Like, how would you regulate? Well, one study that we did was an attempt to cause tolerance to a closely spaced repeated dosing of DMT. You know, like if you take LSD every day for a few days, you stop responding.

Right. And there were some studies giving DMT to see if you could develop tolerance, but you couldn't. So I thought maybe if you spaced the injections close enough together, that was an issue regarding half-life. That's interesting to hear you say that because I had always heard for some reason that if you do TMT next to a recent TMT trip, like 10 minutes ago, do it again in 10 minutes, you won't be able to do it. But it's not true at all. I've had that experience. I've done it multiple times in a day and it's the most potent one was the last one. Exactly. That's more or less what we found is that,

you know, we spaced injections every half hour and there'd be a real progression of the effects over the course of the morning. And as a result of those data, a group at Imperial College in London is developing an infusion model to maintain the state for at least a half hour. So when you're doing it, you're injecting and then in 30 minutes you're injecting again? Yeah, yeah, they'd come down. Right. And we would spend maybe 10, 15 minutes, you know, processing. And then they'd get ready for the second dose.

So when you say processing, like explaining what you saw, talking about it? Yeah, yeah. Like I would ask them how it was and what was, you know, what came up. It was a pretty packed 10 to 15 minutes, too, I'll tell you. Dude, you're like cleaning them up and sending them right back into space. It was a lot of fun. People really got a lot of good work done in the course of that morning. I'm sure.

Usually they'd be exhausted after the third dose, like I can't do anymore, and we would give after the third dose, like I can't do anymore. And, you know, we would give them the fourth dose and they would experience this great resolution. Really? Of whatever troubles came up over the course of the morning. Wow. Yeah, I'm collaborating with a group at UCLA that's going to use probably repeated dosing of DMT and post-traumatic stress disorder. That's amazing. And it'll be good because we'll be able to do therapy in between the individual injections.

Wow. And so what if you come across an issue that's going to take more time to resolve, like you're saying, be able to do therapy? Like, will you postpone the next treatment? I mean, if you gave four doses over the course of a morning, you know, stuff will come up and you'll resolve it more or less by the fourth dose. But it's, you know, it isn't the end of treatment. I mean, you would be in treatment already in some form or another. And with the stuff that, you know, came up, you know, during the, you know, DMT sessions, you would have that as Christopher the mill in your future work. What I was getting at was that, like, say if someone is having a bad experience and say if they're doing this four dose thing, but they have a really bad experience around dose number three,

would you allow them to do dose four? Or would you have to have a conversation with them? Yeah, you'd have to ask them. And you would just do it based on their word? Yeah. Is there like a protocol for when you pull a patient? Well, the study is still being designed, but, you know, the standard of care would be if somebody says no, I mean, that means no. Right, right. And if someone says yes, that means go ahead, even if you might think they might be a little slightly unhinged at this point.

Well, you know, stressed or uncertain as what's next. Like in our study, after the third dose, a lot of people felt up against the ropes and they'd say, you know, has anybody ever dropped out? And I would say, not yet. And everybody went ahead. And they were glad they did. They could kind of metabolize the stuff that had been stirred up. Yeah. That's the fine line between whether you push someone to keep going or whether you'd say, well, let's take a break.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. line between whether you push someone to keep going or whether you'd say let's take a break yeah yeah uh yeah i mean safety first yeah for sure um could you imagine a world where there are places that would take care of people the way your studies were run that would do it that way i mean is that achievable in our lifetime? There could be a place where people that know what they're doing, certified, have everything locked down, doing it the right way, do it exactly the way you did to those patients. Well, it wouldn't be exactly the same. I mean, I had my own style, but... I'm sure you would. It wouldn't be as fun. It might not be as fun.

But yeah. Yeah. I mean, you know, why not? Yeah. Well, why not? I mean, I think one of the really nice things is there's a lot of support for it on the right now because they realize the effect that it has on soldiers. Vets. Yeah.

Vet care. Vet care. Yeah. That's a big one because everyone's always looking for give some relief to heroes that come back with PTSD. on soldiers. Vets. Yeah, vet care. Vet care. Yeah. That's a big one because everyone's always looking for, give some relief to heroes that come back with PTSD and this is the way to do it. It's the best way to do it. I think that's going to get the most funding, the most support.

People got to realize that this is not a left or right issue. This is a human issue. I mean, we should treat our veterans really carefully, lovingly. Yeah, 100%. And for all human beings, not just PTSD from that, but PTSD from being attacked, car accidents, like people have all sorts of like traumatic memories from their youth. This is not just for that. It's for anybody with like these horrific patterns in their head that are caused by trauma. Well, you were talking about being uploaded to a computer and how horrible that would be. Yeah. But I mean.

Worst case scenario. Worst case scenario. I was just trying to look at the worst possible version would be you stuck in a computer box, like looking at the world but not able to move or act. But there might not be any trauma beyond that anyway. Maybe. That's pretty. I just would think that like a disassociated brain. Imagine if you found out that like your thinking

wasn't just your brain, that your heart was actually involved and that all the neurons that are around the heart actually work in conjunction with the brain, but that a brain disassociated from the heart is always a psycho. Like so if everybody who did get their brain uploaded somewhere, they just popped out on the other end like a three-quarter human psycho. Yeah, well, so you're using the biology to support this philosophical idea.

Sort of. Yeah. The philosophical idea is the most interesting because I think if people really do freeze their brain and they really do boot that sucker back up and you get drawn from heaven back into this earthly realm inside of a fish tank with a bunch of wires attached to you,

you're floating in some super serum. Like, fuck. Yeah, well, I mean, it could be great. Maybe. Maybe. Yeah, if you got a good handler. Someone who gives you the right juice. If you've got-

Stimulate different parts of the brain. They give you orgasm, fix your memory. Well, you know, set in setting. Yeah. Yeah, you need the technologist to be a nice guy. You'd have to trust people to fuck with your brain for the right. Why would they have any incentive to uphold the end of the bargain? Maybe they fold like some of those online Bitcoin places. Maybe they fold up shop.

Well, you've read that, what's it called? It's the story that is the basis for Total Recall. We can get it for you. We can buy it for you wholesale. It's by PK Dick. And these people enter into this implant kind of state, and they have adventures and whatnot. I think we are 100% on our way to that. I think we're 100%.

I don't think they're stopping us. I don't think they're stopping us. I think all they're going to have to do is continue with just a general – like virtual reality was nonexistent 20 years ago. Nobody gave a shit about virtual reality because the technology wasn't up to date. It wasn't something that got discussed. Every now and then you'd hear about somebody who had a headset and, oh, it's crazy. We tried it out. And I remember doing it.

I forget what year it was but duncan trussell had one at his house it was very very pixelated i think it was the oculus very very pixelated and we put this thing on and we're moving around with it no it wasn't the oculus it was the other one what's that live the vive htc vive right that's what it was and so we're moving around with this thing and i remember wow, this is just the beginning. This thing's going to get really bizarre. And then a couple of years later, Duncan had one, and he said, this one's so much better. And he gave me this one.

And you have this experience where you're in the ocean, and a whale swims by you. It's wild. Yeah. You're like underwater with this thing thing and I'm like, whoa. And that was quite a while ago. We are, whatever it is, if it's 10 years or if it's 20 years, because 20 years ago again, nobody cared about VR. If it's

20 years from now, whatever it's going to be, whatever year it is, they're going to have something that replicates reality. Down to every moment. Down to touch. There'll be haptic feedback there'll be something that like hijacks your nervous system i think your feet are on the ground you're gonna replicate replicate the feel of gravity yeah well you know if it's i think it's gonna kind of

detach you from reality won't it a hundred percent yeah yeah so what's the point of that well i don't think it's good for us but i just think it's inevitable i think there's if if we really do come up with a way to live in like avatar land and fly around on dragons and and live in some bizarre fake universe we're gonna do it i it. I guess some people will. Well, some people will. I think a lot of people will, man. I think it's going to be a lot of people's number one pastime. Because if it's, why would you live regular life, stupid?

Why would you live regular life when it's indistinguishable from regular life and you could be on a pirate ship? It's indistinguishable from regular life, and you could be on a pirate ship. Yeah, I kind of wonder how much of it would be adopted by the Indian reservations that I live within. Oh, for sure. That would be probably the first place they implement it. Yeah, because they're pretty much living in nature, but they're not very happy, a lot of them. They drink, and there's unemployment and feuds and things which never really get very far. So you might think the more traditionalists wouldn't go for it, but the kids, because life is rather bleak.

Well, those reservations were the places where mixed martial arts first thrived in California. It was illegal in the state of California, but they would hold their own, they have their own laws, they have their own rules. So they would hold these events at these Native American reservations, and we would go to there. That was where they kind of like saved a lot of those promotions, the early MMA promotions. The fact they could put on some fights, and it also gave these guys a chance to develop in a state where MMA was completely illegal.

So Native American reservations have a history of, like, doing things, you know, before anybody else was allowed to do them because they can write their own laws. If they decided, imagine that, they decided to make their own psychedelic therapy at all these Native American casinos. Well, you know, there's that long history of the Native American church has been using mescaline-containing peyote forever. That's a pretty small segment of the

Native population, but still it's established and protected. That's the reason for the religious Freedom Restoration Act was peyote use. That was the primary driver. So that was the first one before they got to the Ayahuasca church? Yeah. Yeah, the Ayahuasca church relied on that ruling as support. Both Ayahuasca churches, two different ones, right? Do both of them have similar rituals? Both ayahuasca churches are two different ones, right? Do both of them have similar rituals? No, they're different.

The UDV, like I mentioned, is kind of straight-laced. You're in chairs, you have lights, you have a leader. The other group is called the Santo Daime, and it's a bit more free-form. There's singing and there's dancing. Sounds like more fun. It's more fun, you know, fun, capital F fun. And are they doing that under the influence, all the singing and dancing? Oh, yeah.

Wow. Yeah, they drink tea all night. They drink ayahuasca. Oh, boy. Yeah, the ceremonies tend to involve more ingestion. Now, has anybody studied those folks? Because that sounds like they'd be even happier than the other ones you talked about. Yeah, I'm not familiar.

You know, I'm not super familiar with that literature. What I've read mostly is the UDV has been studied. And it's because of their interest in establishing that the use is safe and effective and helpful. Well, it'd be really interesting to see the two of them studied, you know, see the contrast between the singing and dancing and the way the other one, people who do it like they're in sort of a mainstream Christian church. Yes, a side-to-side comparison. You know, those, I would think those data would be out there, but maybe not separated in that exact same manner. I think we've been doing this for almost four hours.

Four hours. Can you imagine that? Time flew. Time flew. Time flew, right? Yeah. Thank you, man. Thanks for coming on.

Your book, The Psychedelic Handbook, is available right now. There it is. And this is the novel that you wrote, Joseph Levy Escapes Death. That is available as well. Well, you could read the comment by Graham, a disturbing and something or another tale. Graham likes the Joseph Levy book. Well, if Graham likes it, I'm sure I'll like it too. Yeah, it's entertaining.

I enjoyed talking to you, man. It was a lot of fun. It really was. It was great. I'm glad we finally did it. Yeah, finally. Let's do it again. Can we do it again? Yeah. It was fun, right? I would talking to you, man. It was a lot of fun. It really was. It was great. My pleasure. I'm glad we finally did it. Yeah, finally. Let's do it again. We do it again?

Yeah. Yeah. It was fun, right? I would like to do it again. You're up for it. Let's go. Yeah. All right.

Thank you. Bye, everybody.