The Joe Rogan Experience - #470 - Amber Lyon

Episode Date: March 18, 2014

Amber Lyon is an Emmy Award-Winning journalist. She has recently been traveling the world working on Reset.Me, an independent journalism site covering psychedelics, natural medicines, and alternative therapies.

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day! Hey, Amber Lyon. Last time we spoke on a podcast was two months before the world was supposed to end. It was that big December 21st, 2012 scare that everybody was so terrified about. We had people telling us for sure some change was going to happen.

I had Daniel Pinchbeck on the podcast. He told me for sure. I go, for sure something's going to happen December 21st, 2012? It was absolutely without a doubt. All markers point to that. Okay. And here we are.

And here we are. We're still alive. Nothing's changed. Nothing's changed. Have you written him and been like, excuse me? I like that guy. I don't want to be mean.

It's just, you know, it's silly. It's silly to think that you're going to be the first guy ever to figure out what's going to happen. You see it coming. Nobody else does. You see it coming. It's super easy if you're like a Ray Kurzweil guy and you're super scientific and very technologically in tune and you know what the latest technologies are. So if he makes, if Ray Kurzweil makes a prediction about the future, you got to take it into consideration. He's predicted a lot of things, predicted the internet

search engine. I believe he had something to do with speech to text. He, he had a part in creating that. So that guy, I believe, but when you're a hippie writer like Daniel Pinchbeck, and you tell him it's going to be the end of the world, I love your work, man. Don't get me wrong. I love that guy. But I'm going to take it with a grain of salt. I should be really fair here,

because he did not say it was going to be the end of the world. He did not at all. He thought that there was going to be some sort of a paradigm shift. And by the way, he might be right. I'm all just talking shit here. Because, like, who knows? I mean, maybe a shift did take place we're just not quite aware of it yet you know maybe it'll be looked at in history

like the french renaissance like when did you know when did uh the inquisition end exactly you know did they feel it by the day you know when did uh world war ii when it finally did end when it was d-day when did the dust settle when did everybody realize what an incredible, insane, impactful moment they had just lived through? It probably takes a few years. So maybe something happened internet-wise in December 21st, 2012. We're just not aware. Maybe that was when the NSA really kicked it up a notch.

Who knows? I mean, maybe it was something. It's just, it seems like no one ever really predicts the future. Of course not. And I believe that 2012 was symbolic for an evolution of consciousness that we're going through, that we're finally starting to end this madness as a species and evolve to a more conscious species that's more aware. I just know even since the last time I did your podcast, Joe, just how much awakening has happened across the country. I remember when I told you on the podcast about how I suspected that potentially my phone had been tapped or that the government was looking through my phone. Well, at the time, people around me thought I was crazy and paranoid, but now we have the NSA revelations that, wait a minute, this really is happening.

There's a reason why your phone keeps shutting back on. And you may be in some foreign country, but your geo tracker is working perfectly, even though you don't have cell service, which happens to me a lot. It freaks me out. But above all, I think that we are shifting and people are awakening at this point. I think you're right. I think Daniel Pinchbeck's right. And I owe him an apology.

I just was too ignorant to see the shift. No, I think there's most certainly something's going on, and I think a lot of it is that younger kids today, they have not been inundated with the same sort of propaganda that we grew up with, and they're getting the internet from day one. And the exchange of information, the way it's done today, is not just more accurate than ever before. Like, you know,

like someone tells you something stupid and you go, what? Let me Google that. And everyone Googles it and then that ends nonsense. It ends a lot of nonsense conversations between friends that would have gone on for days and days and days

when I was a kid. When I was a kid, you had to go get a fucking encyclopedia if you wanted to figure out whether someone was full of shit. And you had to go through the encyclopedia and then you had to memorize it and quote it. You couldn't just pull your phone up and stick it in their face and go, shut up, dummy. You don't know what you're talking about. I remember that. I had those encyclopedia Britannicas. We'd get like 12 episodes, A

through Z, and just have to pour through those. They would go door to door. Remember they would go door to door and try to sell them to you? Yeah, we were the ones that bought them. I grew up in the middle of the country. We were suckers for all the door to door solicitors. Door to door solicitors are so weird. A charismatic person who's really good at being slick and bullshitting you knocks on your door and sells you some shit and tries to convince you to buy some shit.

Like you don't even, you're not even in the store. They're sending these creepers all around the country just knocking on people's doors and being slick. Selling you vacuums and shit. Or trying to save your soul. Those are the best. Selling you their cult.

Yeah, when you're sitting in the living room just relaxing and then someone knocks on the door telling you everything about your life is wrong and you need instant savings. That only happened once in my whole life. And it was when I was a little kid. And I remember, I think my grandfather was home. I think my grandfather was babysitting me and my sister.

And someone came to the door. God, it was hard to remember. But I remember it was like, nope, sorry, get out. Sorry, thanks, thanks, bye. And they were so insistent, just so foolishly insistent, you know, wanting you to know that if you don't know about this, man, you're going to miss the end of the world. They're predicting the end of the world. It's just another 2012.

It's another, you know, when those crazy people in San Diego all put on the Nikes and killed themselves because they thought the Hale-Bopp comet people, remember that? Yeah, I remember that. Yeah. But that was the leader who had the, he was bald. Yeah, yeah, yeah. He looked very alien-esque. Yes.

I forget Homeboy's name, but. Yeah. He was definitely a creeper. The Hale-Bopp. I can't believe people followed him. Yeah. I mean, just based on his looks, he freaked me out. Well, he was, you know, I mean, look, Ram Dass isn't the most normal looking dude either.

But, you know, you listen to him and you hear him talk and you realize this guy is about as real as it gets. I would love to hear what this Hale-Bopp dude sounded like. Maybe he was slick as fuck. Maybe he was a really good door-to-door salesman. Didn't he get them to castrate themselves? Oh, my gosh. I think they castrated themselves, too. Or at least one of them or a couple

of them did. I think he felt like sexuality was imprisoning. There's probably some gay shit going on. It's scary how quickly people can become sheep and listen to something like that. Like actually castrate yourself? Yes. We say this but maybe he's correct. There he is. There's the heaven's gate.

Maybe he's right. Marshall. Marshall Applewhite was his name. Marshall. Oh, Marshall, you silly man. Yeah. Who knows? Maybe he was right. Maybe they're all on another planet right now. We're the suckers. Maybe they're living in paradise. You know? We don't know.

We just see their shells with their Nikes, symbolic Nikes. And I never believed that we get the true story of what was going on from the government or from authority. So you never know. Maybe there was something more to it. I don't know. I don't think the government knows. Maybe they made up the castration thing. That is possible, right?

They do shit like that? Have you ever been a part of a story where you absolutely know, when you were working for CNN, was there anything where you're like, I know that that's not how it happened. I know it. What they're saying on TV right now is nonsense. Yeah, for sure. It happened a lot of times. I think that especially across the media in general, a lot of stories are just dumbed down to the point that they just you lose the real essence of the story.

And that happened for me in the situation of Bahrain. I talked about thoroughly on your last show. But sometimes I would see them reporting things on air and had watched documentaries that they did. And it was a stark contrast, a complete opposite from what I'd seen on the ground. What did it feel like the first time you ever saw, like, bullshit? The first time you ever knew, like, I'm sure in the beginning when you first started being a reporter, you're probably very excited about the prospect. You're working for CNN.

Oh my goodness. You know, this is going to be amazing. I'm going to do some hardcore investigative journalism in other countries. The first time you saw some bullshit, what was your thought? I just was so let down, Joe, because I was,

it just was like taking your dreams and just crushing them one story at a time. And that's kind of how it happened to me there. It just, it wasn't like one big incident happened, but there was a little bit of censorship with each story over and over and over to the point that I realized that the mainstream media was just misleading the people and I was becoming a cog in the machine. And so I'd gotten into journalism to help people and try to change this world, but instead I was actually helping give the station credibility

and helping spread what I believe to be lies. And that's just a real, just a devastating moment, and it caused me a lot of stress over the years, for sure. I'm sure. Is it a situation where the news just becomes any other business, any other organism, any other thing that wants to grow and stay alive? And the only way to do that is to touch as many bases as you can, spread out as far as you can, and collect as much money as you can. Somewhere along the line, you have to make some deals. Exactly.

I think you hit the nail on the head, Joe. I think what's going on is that a lot of these news outlets are, like you said, corporations. Their main goal is to make money. That's what was happening in the case of CNN. They were taking money from different governments, pro-U.S. governments worldwide in exchange for producing these documentaries that made the governments look good. It was propaganda. And bottom line was to make money. Also, I think there's other forces at play trying to kind of keep a pro-U.S. agenda at many of these outlets as well. Wow. So you leave that. You write your book, which is excellent. We have a copy. It's back there. We had so many books on the desk. You're inundated with the literature. But Molly Crabapple did the cover, right right didn't she have something yeah she did some

art inside the book yeah molly is such a talented amazing artist it was really an honor to be able to have her work yeah we had her on the podcast she was really cool too she's she's free you know like she's just when she talks like she's not in hindered by she's just free she is who she is and what she's really talented really interesting art too, too. She's one of those artists where you see one of her pieces and you almost immediately recognize it's her because she's got that very unusual, distinct style. Those faces that she draws, she has this very unusual and compelling style. And I like that she adds politics into her art.

She's not scared to take that jump. So much art has been music, movies. Everything has just been dumbed down in order to please these corporations. And Molly is really joining, you know, several artists and sticking her neck out there and willing to criticize people through her art and criticize the system. Yeah. And sort of expose things that she doesn't like. Yeah. It's cool it's cool that so you write this book you you put the book out and um you you did our podcast and during the podcast we had a conversation about psychedelics yes and um i mean i've had a lot of conversations with people about psychedelics it's a question that people ask all the time and i'm really fortunate to know a bunch of people know the actual answers to those questions so you and i um have this

conversation and you you say okay let me find out what the fuss is all about and you get on a fucking raft and go down to the jungle like you like dove head in i've literally been tripping around the world for the past year that's so crazy so before the podcast nothing nothing the worst i had done which not even worse because it's medicinal as we know, but it was like smoked a joint of marijuana in college. Because I grew up in the Midwest, Joe, and we were fed talk about propaganda. We were fed propaganda from day one about just say no to drugs. And I even remember my grandmother taped this episode of Oprah where the scientist was on talking about how MDMA eats holes in your brain. It's later been debunked and that was proven that the diagrams the scientists

showed were just showing cerebral blood flow through the brain and the MDMA isn't actually harmful. But I mean, that's the kind of propaganda we were fed constantly. And I remember my grandma would tape all these shows on 2020 and all these new shows and bring them over to the house and force me to sit down and watch all this anti-drug propaganda. So I associated all drugs as being evil and just bad for you and naughty. Yeah. It's funny the way you describe that. That's the way to describe it. The worst I ever did. Yeah. It's the knee-jerk way of describe it. The worst I ever did was smoke a joint.

It's the knee-jerk way of approaching it, the worst I ever did. So now I have to just completely retrain my thought system because I've had 30 years of this propaganda. And I've realized, Joe, that we are horribly mistaken in a lot of situations in this country when it comes to labeling things medicines versus drugs. And a lot of substances and natural plants that natives have used as medicines for thousands of years, extremely effective medicines, are being called drugs and being labeled as Schedule I substances. And it's just really unfortunate. It's unfortunate in a lot of ways. The people that have never

experienced these things, it's impossible to understand without trying it. And I don't blame you for being incredulous. I don't blame you for being skeptical. And you should be. People who are skeptical are really important because it puts out the debate. And whether they're correct or whether they're incorrect, it's always good having a bunch of smart minds looking at it from different directions, trying to dissect it. And a big part of our dissecting when it comes to our culture is our law system, our legal system. What's legal and what's not? What should you be allowed to do? What should you not be allowed to do? And we have to figure out what it is we're going to allow

to influence that legal system because if it's corporations and the people that are trying to protect profit man you're going in a weird fucking direction because guess what there's profit in that other stuff too you just you dummies just haven't tapped into the psychedelic profit there's profit in what's going on in colorado right now is they're starting to realize, oh, shit, there's profit in this. Duh. People love it. You just think that the only way to get money is by selling fucking pills that you make. What you're doing is being a hater and you're trying to hoard the market. You're trying to control all the drugs.

And there's some good drugs out there that are pharmaceutical drugs. There's just fantastic medications that have helped people with all sorts of ailments. medications that have helped people with all sorts of ailments. But that doesn't mean that you, with your fantastic drugs that aid all these people, should be able to stop natural things. Like, that's crazy. And that's where, as a culture, we got to put the brakes. It's not saying that pharmaceutical companies are bad, because they're not. They're great. Pharmaceutical companies have provided people with medications that have vastly improved their lives, like Viagra. There's a lot of people out there that just wouldn't have had sex 20, 30 years ago. It was over.

And then like an old pitcher that somehow or another summons up the courage to get off the game and dust off his jeans, he's back in there. You know, look, there's medication. That's a bad one, too. There's medications for people that have actual real diseases, not just can't get boners. But there's really important medications. But as a culture, if there's one thing that when people take it, it almost universally gives them a new perspective,

almost universally makes them more aware of their actions, more objective, more sensitive, more, it calms them. It gives people a sense of peace about leaving this life. It gives you a sense of, I don't think we know what we're talking about. It gives you a sense of, I think there might be some other shit besides this. And that sounds, that sounds just like the heaven's gate call. That sounds just like anybody else that's telling you that they know something that other people don't know. Most people are immediately skeptical, and they should be. But this isn't nonsense.

This is some medicine that helps human beings evolve. And it's been here for thousands of years. And it's one of the measures as to how weird we are today. weird we are today. One of the reasons why we're so chaotic, why we live on this momentum of this incredibly ignorant past and never stop to analyze it and change it. One reason is the lack of these psychedelics. It's like we're missing vitamin C and we have scurvy. I mean, that's really what our culture is. It's mad and loony because it's not looking at itself. Exactly, Joe. And I think what's going on is that a lot of us have bottled up trauma throughout our lives, through childhood, especially. That's when a lot of people get the

footprints of trauma on their soul. And just through PTSD, car accidents, dangerous situations you're in, and you keep this trauma bottled up inside of your body without releasing it. And it leads to this collective madness. And I think what we're facing as a society is the limbic system of your brain is a part of your brain that deals with emotional processing. And that's what psychedelics are fantastic at actually leading to neurogenesis, restructuring the limbic system, helping people get rid of all of this trauma. And really, I think that the cause of most of this badness is a collective limbic system malfunction in society right now.

And I believe that wars, fighting, all of the environmental destruction is just a symptom of this limbic system malfunction. And I think if we're able to actually get in to the core of our insanity and all these mental health disorders in society, then we'll be able to really evolve as a species. But I think that, like you said, the key to that are these psychedelic medicines because for a lot of people, they're not able to actually overcome that trauma without the help of psychedelics. I think you're absolutely right. of psychedelics. I think you're absolutely right. And I think that this weird world that we live in right now where we make these incredibly beneficial things that don't kill anybody illegal, it's starting to come to light now. And maybe that's what the 2012 thing was. Maybe we just

don't realize it because we're a part of it. But I think that people are so much more aware of how bizarre and finite this experience is and how many people are running around this experience acting as if everything's normal. Well, this is not normal. Nothing's normal. We have madness at every turn. We're still blowing each other up with bullets. We're still shooting missiles at each other. We're fucking crazy. This is a weird species we are a part of.

And I think when you look at the possibilities and the potentials, like, how did we get to where we are? Like, what is, what's missing? What's wrong with us? We need spirituality. That's what everybody always says. We need religion. And they're probably right.

You know, what you get from being a Christian, what you get from, like Christian, what you get from true belief in any god and a true belief in the power of any enlightened, omnipotent being, what you get is this feeling of humility and this feeling of connection to all that is right. That's what you get out of the real religious experience. And that's what you get from psychedelics. And people don't want to hear that. They want to hear that you're just trying to escape reality. You're just weak. You're just scared of reality.

Oh, that's what you want to do, Amber Lion? I see Amber Lion. Oh, you're telling me. So you just fucking dive into your fantasy world of dancing mice and fucking rodeo music. And you think you're so fucking smart now. You're going to tell me how to live my life. It is nearly impossible. It's impossible on psychedelics to escape reality.

Whereas other drugs, and I think that's, once again, part of the propaganda. Whereas other drugs and alcohol make you escape reality, psychedelics actually force you to sit down objectively and analyze your life and solve your problems with a clear, silent mind. And for many people, it's the first time in their lives their mind is actually silent. Their self-critical part of their brain is silent and they can sit back and analyze portions of their life and come up with solutions to just make themselves a better person. Yeah, that sounds ridiculous, doesn't it? Well, I think what's more ridiculous, Joe, is that something that grows on cow poop all over the world and in forests all over the world is illegal.

And something that is manufactured by our own bodies, DMT, is also illegal. So you're saying that my pineal gland should be locked up in a cage, huh? Yeah. It's hilarious. Your brain is a drug factory, a legal drug factory. It's literally like making saliva illegal if saliva was psychoactive. It's so stupid. Terrence McKenna had a great joke about that. He was talking about DMT being processed by the body. So essentially he said, everyone's holding. They you're all, they can arrest you. They can arrest you for the components

of your own being. Wait a minute. What? If they could somehow or another extract your blood and you had like a vial of your blood, you're allowed to walk around

with that, right? I don't think anybody can stop you for that. Angelina Jolie. Yeah. Her and Billy Bob, right? Didn't they cut each other? Yeah.

Crazy assholes. I don't think anybody can stop you, but if you had like a little shot of your own DMT, you would be in possession of a Schedule I illegal drug they could put you in a cage for. Yeah, for sure. It's hilarious. I don't think you can extract it that way, by the way. And I can't thank you enough, Joe, for really sticking your neck out there and really, I know you faced a lot of criticism for your support of psychedelics.

Not really. No, it's been pretty easy. I'm going to be honest with you. Okay. I'm sitting here giving this like heartfelt speech. No, you don't have to. No, but I just appreciate you. Nobody takes me seriously.

It's a great way to, it's a great position to be in. But I did take you seriously that day in the podcast when you told me mushrooms could change the world. And it really planted a seed in my head, which sprouted this journey that I've been doing around the world investigating these medicines. And that never would have happened. My life wouldn't be in such the amazing state I feel like it is in now if it hadn't been for you having the gumption to talk about this and start this dialogue as our country because psychedelics have been so taboo, especially in the mainstream, and I think you're really helping to shift that consciousness nationwide. I honestly don't think I am. I think I'm just a part of the whole thing itself.

I mean, it's very nice to try to give me— I don't deserve any credit, nor do I want any. to give me uh so i don't deserve any credit nor do i want any uh i just um i am uh i'm shocked that more people don't know about the experiences and i feel a duty because i've been there it's just like if you and your friends were starving to death and you found some food in the desert you're like guys come here come here come here i found the food i found the food would you want all this credit for finding that food no you'd want your friends to have the food. That's how I feel. I feel like, you know, what we're all experiencing right now is a wait, what moment?

The whole culture is going, wait, wait, wait, wait, what? Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. The NSA is listening to my fucking emails. They're listening to my voicemails. They're reading my emails. I don't do anything wrong, man. Come on. I'm a fucking insurance salesman. And then people go, wait wait wait wait wait what marijuana makes how much in fucking taxes for colorado they make how much for we you know we're running out of fucking

money for schools and we could pay for that with weed but being people are going to smoke the same amount of weed anyway statistically proven what the fuck is going on when you look at what we're going to go into syria wait whoa whoa whoa whoa whoa what the fuck are going on? We're going to go into Syria? Whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. What the fuck are we doing? This wait what moment is we're all a part of this wait what moment. You're a big part of this wait what moment. You're a big part of it

by sticking your neck out about Bahrain and about CNN and about working for a corporation and being honest about it. You stuck your neck out about it. We're all forced into this reality. You stuck your neck out about it. We're all just, we're all forced into this reality. We didn't ask to be here. We weren't, you know, hey, could you give birth to me so I can grow up in the 21st century? And no, this is what you get. Nobody asked you,

this is what you get. And I think all of us realized that that was the same for our parents. It was the same for our grandparents. It was the same for everybody. And nobody hit the brakes. Nobody had the wait, what moment where they went, wait, wait, wait, wait, what the fuck are we doing? Everybody just kept going and then had heart attacks and died and taught a bunch of nonsense to their kids. And they went and they had heart attacks and died teaching a bunch of nonsense to their kids. And then the internet came along and that's the wait what moment and the wait what moment the real tipping point is people like you people like me people like anybody that's a part of the wait what moment that might be my new t-shirt the way

and we have to be i mean you feel in me peter's just great yeah we had him on the podcast he's fucking crazy he doesn't He's very supercharged. Oh, yeah. He's passionate about what he's doing. He's part of the moment for sure. In some ways, he's part of the problem. I like the guy a lot. I agree with him on a lot of what he says.

But what I don't agree with him about is environmental concerns. He doesn't have very many environmental concerns. As long as people are making money, he's fine with it. Yeah, that's unfortunate. Well, it feels like it's just a few small spots and don't worry about it. So a couple spots get fucked up.

Self-regulation. Yeah. Yeah, we've seen, can you say a BP oil spill? Like that's what happens. Well, it's interesting. Like I said, I really like the guy and I like a lot of his thoughts, but he believed in some things that I agree with, like no banks are too big to fail and they should have let the banks fail.

And that at the end of all that, obviously I'm no economist by any stretch of the imagination, but I agree with his reasoning that any system that doesn't work should be allowed to fail. And there's nothing that's too big to fail. But then we started talking about BP. And there's nothing that's too big to fail. But then we started talking about BP. You know, it's like I think personally, like he was talking about if BP went under, like what that would do to everybody. And I said, well, I think what they did is way worse than a company going under. What they did was they ruined a part of the ocean, a really big part for a long time.

And it might still be ruined. It might be ruined forever. Who knows what kind of devastating effect it had on the marine life, dolphin life. If you had to put all the death that was caused, all the destruction that was caused, all the people that are getting sick trying to clean that place up, if you had to really put a number on it, of course they shouldn't be around anymore. But his argument was that BP was too big to fail. And I found that fascinating. And it was so disgusting, Joe. I was down there covering it for a month in New Orleans for CNN.

And I am a huge fan of the ocean. An avid scuba diver and just witnessing the oil, oil-soaked pelicans diving down into the oil. Actually, having the water be your enemy. We were on the boat and it was like 90 degrees outside. And when the water would splash up on us, instead of it being refreshing, I had to wipe it off my body like it was a poison. And I was so horrific that that month of covering that I've even had to, you know, through my

psychedelic experiences, I've even processed some of that some of those implicit memories, these horrific memories of that spill that were stuck in the back of my subconscious. Yeah, and people could say, oh, she's being melodramatic. I'll Peter Schiff you. Oh, really, you poor baby. Did you have a hard time because of the dirty water? The dirty water made you cry. The dirty water fucked with your brain. But it's got to be a weird moment as a reporter, being one of the first few people that's allowed to sort of go out there in boats and experience it and report on it, that you, you know, you got a pretty big responsibility. You're getting to see some

shit that people, most people, most people are not going to go to it. Most people in this country that are experiencing it are experiencing it through you or through someone like you. That's their reporting on it. That had to be pretty intense. That and also seeing the destruction man can cause on this earth firsthand was just really, it just gives you that kind of feeling because when you look out and as far as you can see, you just see oil and crap and this beautiful ocean just ruined like that. I mean, it just took a matter of days. You just really realize, wow, we really do have the capability to completely destroy this planet. And it gives you,

especially journalistically, an extra sense to make sure to cover more environmental issues and investigate these corporations. Because when left to their own devices, you see what happens. Yeah, you can't allow something that lives off profit to not have oversight. You just can't. You can't. And it'll probably kill the oversight guy. They probably figure it out. I mean, that's what happens. Yeah. You know, it happens in a lot of environments

where there's a lot of money involved. Things get real fucking squirrely. People just disappear. Yeah. Whatever Johnny saw, well, we'll just get rid of Johnny. Oh, yeah. I mean, who knows how many people

have disappeared over the year. Yeah. Through the reasons. I mean, there's probably, well, I don't know. There's a, it's, I don't know if there's a running number. Because there's probably a few of them that just, they got away with. I mean, if they're doing it for this long, getting rid of people to get in the way of profit. Of course people have done that.

If people are willing to, that's the weird thing that people don't want to – a lot of folks, the no-nonsense type folks that I categorize certain types of skeptics and there's some no-nonsense skeptics that they don't even realize that they're sort of almost in a religion and their religion is debunking everything. Their religion is calling bullshit. They love calling bullshit. And even calling bullshit when it doesn't even make any sense. Like when you start talking about false flag attacks, oh, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. They love calling bullshit. And even calling bullshit when it doesn't even make any sense. Like when you start talking about false flag attacks, oh, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit, bullshit. They love calling bullshit. Do you really think that the government would plan an attack and blah, blah, blah, or this or that? And then you start proposing, okay, well, what do you think happened when they did that in the Gulf of Tonkin?

What do you think happened there? Ah! There's nothing. They can't say anything. You know what they did. You know what they did. They lied, and they got people to go to war because of a lie.

It's been done. Human beings. I'm not blaming the current administration for what happened during the Vietnam War. I'm saying human beings have shown time and time again they're willing to do that. They're willing to lie, and who knows how many lives are going to be wasted in this lie, but they're more than willing to, that. They're willing to lie. And who knows how many lives are going to

be wasted in this lie, but they're more than willing to if it profits them. Oh, for sure. You know, and that's even a situation I had when I was at CNN. A lot of people had known that lies were going on air and that this was happening, but they continued to work there for money, you know, and they, I mean, it just, like I said, sometimes money comes first. Yeah, unfortunately. Or fortunately, because the good thing about what's going on in Colorado and Washington

is money. That's the good thing. And if money truly does come first, maybe that will be a big part of the shift. Maybe the people insisting on their freedom are one part of it, but then along the way, the money people get co-opted as well because they become addicted to that marijuana money and they won't let the government shut off the pipe. Exactly. I mean,

it does seem to make sense. And so you have this one experience. You go down there, you take the ayahuasca. How many different trips did you go on? I did seven. So I went down. I was feeling really stressed out in life. I just had a bunch of crazy shit happen to me throughout my career. And it was just one experience after the other. And I just hadn't had time. I had this bottled up trauma, like so many of us are carrying around. I hadn't had time to process it. And so I remember you telling me, I had written you after the podcast about mushrooms, because I looked up psilocybin, and I could not believe all the lies we've been fed about magic mushrooms. I mean, psilocybin is

single-handedly one of the most incredible healing chemicals for the brain. Some people call it 30 years of therapy in one night. And so I looked up psilocybin, and then I'd written you, and you'd recommended trying ayahuasca. And so I kind of kept that in the back of my mind. And then when I got to this point in the spring where I felt like I was having so much anxiety, constant butterflies in my stomach. I couldn't sleep. I couldn't eat. It was like I was in an anxiety purgatory. And something in my brain, I just remembered that even.

I remember reading all this positive research and studies about ayahuasca and other psychedelics helping with anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorders, and I just knew I had to go down to the jungle. And I didn't even prepare. I just bought a ticket and went down two days later because I was so out of it at the time that I didn't even have time to pack. I remember pulling into Los Angeles International Airport at parking lot C, and I don't even know how I found my way to the airport. It was just like this magnet was drawing me to the jungle. And because I was so anxious and had so much adrenaline rushing

and so many flashbacks happening that it was really hard to even drive. And I was sitting in the parking lot C and I'm in the back of my car and I'm packing this backpack I find in my trunk, and I'm finding maybe a dirty sock under the seat, and, oh, wait, I'm headed to the jungle. I think I need a flashlight, so I went into my glove box, and I found this little menu reader that senior citizens get that my grandma ordered for me on QVC,

and threw that in my bag and just grabbed this backpack and was standing there waiting for the bus show. And I remember looking up at the sky thinking, oh my God, if there's a rock bottom in life, I've, I've hit it. And, um, and just thinking that there's, there's no way out. Like I, ayahuasca, I mean, this is my last hope. And, um, and so I get on the plane and I'm heading down there and just, you know, looking over the jungle. I was by myself. I didn't know where the hell I was going. I just found this center online really quickly. And I'm sitting there drinking a glass of wine, looking out at just this vast array of Amazon jungle. I'm completely unprepared. I don't know what the hell I'm doing.

I don't even know what ayahuasca is. I didn't read up on it beforehand. I just felt a calling. It was weird. A lot of people tell me this. You feel a calling to do it. It's like the medicine telling you it can heal you. And then we landed.

And I remember I had my sunglasses on still because I was just a mess. And I remember I had my sunglasses on still because I was just a mess. And I remember seeing this guy sitting behind me. And he kept looking through the airplane seats at me. And I was like, what is this creep doing? Like, I must look like shit because he will not quit looking at me. And right when we get up, he comes up. He's like, are you Amber Lyon?

And I was like, fuck. Like, the only time in my life where I don't want to be recognized, where I want to completely disappear from the world, this guy recognizes me. So we ended up becoming good friends. He's now my business partner. Wow. But, yeah, the whole plane was all headed to the same retreat center, which was about a two-hour ride into the Amazon.

And so it was... Was it like a propeller plane? It was a small jet, but yeah, no propellers. Yeah, propellers freak me out because I'm always worried maybe a bird's going to get caught in there, you know. So it was just a small jet, about 20 seats, and everyone on there were gringos. So whenever you go to Iquitos,

Peru, and you see gringos, you know that they're most likely there for ayahuasca tourism. I mean, why else would they be there? And so we flew into Iquitos, and then it was me and five guys, and they were all going to the same center. So I was really relieved because I was like, okay, at least I know these guys, and they seem fairly trustworthy. And then we got on a boat and traveled two hours up the Amazon and just entered in this area of forest where you just saw this little hut and it was the name of this healing center. And, um, this is it. And yeah, that's it. And that was, um, that was really creepy because I was like, this looks like a place that people don't return from. But at that point, I knew that I had no choice.

I had to try this medicine. And so I went. I just thought this fear was resistance to healing. And so I dealt with the fear and dove in. That's like a scene in a movie. Yeah, it was, it was, um, it was really like the new altered States could be about a woman who goes to the Amazon. That would be you, you know, like you, the whole thing from grabbing like dirty socks and just throwing them in your bag, like whatever you got, just flashlight running,

leaving your car behind. And then I had to, you know, now that a couple of people had recognized me, I had to kind of try to put myself together when I really wanted to just lay back and just, just be. And then at that point I had to, I was like, I can't let these people know like why I'm really here. You know, I'm just here as a journalist. Like I'm just here to write about these medicines. I don't really need them. And really, you know, I was putting on this face that everything was all good and I was here journalistically, but really inside I was just, you know, torn to shreds and really hoping to God that this medicine was going to work. Well, that's where the skeptic would come in and say, well, you have to realize this is a placebo effect. The psychosomatic nature of your incident led you to have a very stressful reaction to what was essentially just hallucinations. And

you've connected all this spiritual mumbo jumbo woo woo bullshit to you tripping your balls off. Well, I'd say the science disagrees with them, and then thousands and thousands of anecdotes. There's not a lot of scientific research, so you have to also go with the anecdotes, which I think are just as powerful. But the science actually shows that when you go to these ayahuasca churches in Brazil, like the UDV or Santo Dome Church,

the members of these churches who drink ayahuasca regularly actually have improved levels of serotonin in their brain. So a lot of these healers believe it actually restructures your serotonergic system, which allows you to part with this depression and anxiety. It's also, some shamans I've dealt with say that what the ayahuasca does is it gets in your soul and gets rid of these dark energies and painful events that have been holding you back and that might manifest themselves in anxiety or depression or in bodily pain. And so if you look at that research, there are thousands of anecdotes of people saying, including myself, saying that this medicine worked for them.

And ayahuasca is a medicine. It behaves like a medicine. The more you take of it, the less you need. And it actually behaves like a medicine should and cures whatever's wrong with you. For me, it did. I'm not saying it does it for everyone. Spiritually, in a sense.

Spiritually. So your connections that you've made in your mind, it resets them. And then oftentimes, that is how we react to things is based on our connections. Our past can really completely flavor our future because it changes the way you behave and the way you interact with people.

And when you do that, you change the nature of the interactions that you have with people. You change the directions that things are going to go in. Many people, if you put them in one situation, no fight takes place. But many other people, you put them in the exact same situation and it turns into murder. I mean, that's, it's really, it's a lot of it is our connections to how, what we've made in our life. And we don't realize how much those sort of hold us back until a psychedelic experience.

And to the naysayer people, you're very important. The skeptical people that say, oh, it's just a hallucination, you're attaching all this shit to it. This is what you have to realize, and I've said this so many times, I don't even want to hear myself say it again, but it's really important. Whether or not it's a hallucination, whether or not it's all in your imagination, or whether or not you are really having an experience where you're meeting divine wisdom and it's giving you advice and love and showing you a new way

whichever one of those it is it's the exact same experience you're having the exact same experience so it doesn't matter if you choose to look at it one way that it's a hallucination it's a product of your imagination or if you choose to look at it the other way and say, oh my God, I'm meeting the divine wisdom of the universe, and now I'm humbled by this, and I'm going to be a better person because of it. This experience is exactly the same. It's on how you choose to apply it to your life.

You know, just people don't want the no-nonsense people. They don't want to be fools. They don't want to talk about, they don't want to be the Heaven's Gate people chopping their balls off and wearing the purple Nikes. They don't want to be fools. They don't want to talk about, they don't want to be the Heaven's Gate people chopping their balls off and wearing the purple Nikes. They don't want to be that guy. So because of their limiting, it's almost like an ego thing. They don't want to fall prey to some foolishness and then have other people pick apart what they've done.

Like, look at this dummy. He thought that going and taking ayahuasca is going to connect him to the universe. Yeah, all right, Bob. Way to go pal that's the ego fighting back and resisting entering that dimension whatsoever if you go there and then you think it's nonsense then we should talk because i gotta know what your thought process on it is because everyone that i know that's had especially the dmt experience which have you had have you done that yet um no but I had an ayahuasca experience that was very similar to what people have described having when they smoke DMT. I'd been fasting for five days and had this Cambo frog medicine, which

really detoxifies you. So I was ready just to absorb the DMT. And, and I went where a lot of people have described with, with smoking DMT on the ayahuasca? Well, for folks who don't know, ayahuasca and DMT essentially are the same drug. It's just that DMT is not orally active because your body produces something called monoamine oxidase, which breaks down dimethyltryptamine in an oral form. So they figured out how to do something where they have the plant. One plant has DMT in it and another plant has harmin, which is a natural MAO inhibitor. And they mix the two of them together and break it down. And no one knows how they figured out how to do this either. This has been done for thousands and

thousands of years. The fact that in the hundred plus thousand plants, they chose these two as the most effective. And they use different ones in other cultures too, don't they? Different types of plants that have the same sort of ingredients, like different plants that are very rich in DMT and plants that are very rich in haramine or something similar. Yeah, you can mix different types of leaves as long as they have DMT with the ayahuasca because what the ayahuasca does is just help your body absorb that DMT.

So particularly where I went, they used chacruna leaves and mixed that with the ayahuasca that they had growing on the ground. So we actually got to watch them make it, which was pretty exciting. Knowing that I had no idea what I was in store for. You probably thought it was going to be like a little bit of bullshit, right? I was so desperate at that point that I didn't know what to expect. Like I said, it just was a calling to go down there and do it. Some shamans I've talked to said that the medicine often does that to people who really need it.

They just feel this desire to go down and try it, and they just feel this, they just know that it's going to help them, and that's what I had. It sounds like bullshit. Yeah, I know. Unless you've actually had a real psychedelic experience, and then you know any of them, whether it's a strong mushroom experience or whatever it is, when you realize, like, oh, okay, no one knows what the hell's going on. Like this, this, this shit might very well be calling you. It very well might be. And, and there was a, so when I got there, it's just me and,

and about 12 dudes and that's it. So once again, I wouldn't recommend, uh, for females, I recommend you always go down with a friend. Don't follow my example. This is a very responsible Amber Lion. Giving a disclaimer. I just don't have a high level of fear, so I was able to go down by myself. Did you carry a weapon? Did you have a prison shank? No. Nothing? No, no weapon, no taser.

Could you imagine? The shaman comes up and starts blowing agua florida on you and you just... Get away, creep. Yeah, that's the problem. When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail. Exactly. But I mean, I did have a bad experience with my shaman the first night. And that's why I don't recommend women go down or anyone.

You had a bad experience where your shaman was trying to hook up with you? No, he just inappropriately touched me during the ceremony. Whoa. Yeah, and now at the time, I didn't know that it wasn't okay. What? What are you, like a little kid? Because you're under the influence of the ayahuasca. Oh, so you were in the middle of tripping and he touched you?

Yeah, so to tell you the whole story, so this was our first night really doing the medicine. The night before, they had just given us just a little bit so we could kind of get used to the creepiness because the whole thing is creepy. You're in this yurt in the middle of the jungle laying on these yoga mats. You have this huge bucket next to you just to take out. I mean, imagine that, Joe, going into that each night. Wow. And so the whole thing is super creepy.

So you have to get used to that. And then the next night we actually were able to take our full dose. And, of course, there's the bed that we laid on and our buckets because you just violently vomit. Most people do kind of out of both ends. That's all you get for a bucket? Yeah. I think I would need a bigger bucket. Oh, there I am laying right there.

So I was kind of in the front of the circle. And you see there's about 12 people around this yurt-esque area. And with the bucket and the vomiting, they actually call it getting well because you're pulling out all your toxins and all this negative dark energy that Western medicine tends to ignore. The ayahuasca is actually getting to the bottom of the core of that. ignore, the ayahuasca is actually getting to the bottom of the core of that. So they consider this violent vomiting and some people out the other end to be really healing. I like how you deny diarrhea.

How dare you? How dare you deny diarrhea? I still think it's appropriate for a woman to say that. I don't know. That's ridiculous. Okay. So people were taking massive shits and they were vomiting too. Part of life.

It's part of life. You can't deny it. Happened to you too. Relax. And that night, so I was the first one all day. We'd been sitting around the table at lunch like, how much are you going to take? The most you could take was a cup. And that was like the absolute send you to another universe amount.

And we're all nervously like, okay, well, maybe we'll just take half cup, all of us together. We'll take a fourth cup. And I went up there and I was the first one to go up in this group. And something just told me you need to take the full cup. So I said, I'll take a cup. And I looked around. All the guys in the circle were just like, oh, shit. Because now they had to take a cup too, you know.

They didn't want to seem like wusses. they had to take a cup too, you know, they didn't want to seem like, like wusses. And, uh, and so I drank this mixture and it tasted like coffee mixed with cough syrup to the point where you just like gag right away and then went and sat back on my mat. And then about 20 minutes later, it started taking effect. And it's just the noise of the crickets outside in the jungle got louder and louder and louder um i could hear people all around me just violently getting sick to the depths of their soul like like gut-wrenching throwing up and and i just laid back and and then where are they diarrhea do they use the other bucket um i have a photo of it there's actually a bathroom um so you have to make it to the other bucket? I have a photo of it. There's actually a bathroom.

So you have to make it to the bathroom. It's funny. Like the diarrhea. There it is. And that was when it was clean. I, I gotta be honest with you. Sometimes I've gone in there and it was, the floors were brown. People missed, just slipped or they didn't, didn't care. They were tripping.

They're shitting all over the place. I would just go out into the jungle. A lot of people did. But some people. You don't want to get eaten though. That would suck. Some people just, they were scared too. They had to have armed guards outside and guards watching people because people would go and walk away into the jungle and you don't want to get lost in that state.

So that was something that people were really cognizant of. And so that's why a lot of people went into the bathroom that was there. But, yeah, it was really powerful, Joe. Like I just laid back and next thing I know I just heard, here we go. They actually said here we go? It said here we go. And then, bam, I saw all this sacred geometry, which is potentially the language of communication of the universe.

I saw all these ones and zeros going across the screen. I heard the sound of coins just clinking, clinking, clinking. I flew through a timeline of my life. It was almost like the ayahuasca was trying to get to know who I was. And so I saw pictures of me pop up on this 3D timeline from when I was 12, 10, then when I was born, and then a photo of my parents before they conceived me. And then all of a sudden on this big cement wall, almost like the wall behind you, it spray painted the words anxiety really,

really big. And right then the medicine was telling me that it had figured out what was wrong with me. And it was was literally because I didn't know. I couldn't pinpoint it. I couldn't pinpoint because at the time my thoughts were raising so much I couldn't really figure out what was wrong. And that's often a symptom of people who have post-traumatic stress disorder, post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms. There's just so much going on that you can't even stop to think about,

okay, what could have caused this? What's happening? You just can't even stop to think about, okay, what could have caused this? What's happening? You just can't even stop to think. And the ayahuasca clearly told me your problem is anxiety. And then right then I laid back and I felt it crawling through my veins and up into my head. And it almost felt like a fizzing in my head. And at that point it was telling me, lay back, we're going to take care of this. And at that point, it was telling me, lay back, we're going to take care of this.

And I felt like there were, and this is a common vision, that there were all of these like thousands and thousands of little beings or elves on my body. And they were literally going through my cells one by one and reshaping them and perfecting them. And the medicine above all just told me to just lay back and let it work. And the medicine above all just told me to just lay back and let it work. And then I laid there for probably about an hour and then had a really powerful vision after that of this like being, this like fairy type thing coming up to me and then sucking out this dark energy. out this dark energy. And I saw all of this energy flowing out of my body, these dark, I guess you'd call them spirits, of people who I'd interviewed over the years. And what it was telling me was that as a journalist, I'd been absorbing all of this pain and had it just stored

in my body. And that was one of the things that was manifesting itself in the post-traumatic stress disorder. And so it was literally just sucking out all of this dark energy that was one of the things that was manifesting itself in the post-traumatic stress disorder. And so it was literally just sucking out all of this dark energy that was shaped in the forms of people I'd interviewed and their faces over the years. And and once it finished, I just felt like such a sigh of relief and like a ton of bricks had been taken off off my shoulders. Holy shit. And yeah, it was so powerful. And I realized too, what it had told me is that like journalistically, some journalists, and this is true with doctors and other people who deal with or faced with trauma a lot, is that some journalists are able to put up a brick wall and you kind of do your story and then you move on. But for me to really understand what I was reporting on, I had to almost become the people I was interviewing

to really feel their pain, to understand who was telling the truth, what they were going through. And that happened to me so many times using submersion journalism. But I didn't realize at the same time I was also absorbing a lot of their pain, especially I'd done a lot of stories on sex trafficking, child sex trafficking, a lot of stories on sex trafficking, child sex trafficking, a lot of stories on drug addiction, oxycodone, oxycontin addiction. And when I'd sit with these people and watch them shoot up oxycontin pills, I was absorbing that pain because I would sit and intensely watch them to try to feel why are they doing what they're doing. And so all of this was just stored in my body, and the ayahuasca was taking it out.

Wow, that's intense. That seems like it would be really beneficial for soldiers. Yes, there are soldiers who've gone down. Some scientists have actually followed them down into the jungle, and all 12 of them that went came back reporting improved symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Because what ayahuasca is really good at doing, the way to cure post-traumatic stress disorder is you really need to get into your subconscious where you have these memories locked in there that you don't even remember you remember. And you need to be able to process them with a sound mind to detach the fear that's associated with those memories. So that next time anything that triggers that memory comes up, you're not flooded with fear. So for example, anytime a soldier might

hear a loud noise, it reminds them of the time they were shot at in a tank. And that's why they face this adrenaline rush or a panic attack. Or for me, it became even seeing, I'd had several bad experiences with police officers as I was covering the protests. And so when I would see police or their guns, I'd start to get really anxious. And so for me, it was just a matter of processing those memories. And that's what the ayahuasca is so beautiful at doing. I had stuff come up that I didn't even remember I remembered and that had been trapped in there causing me this anxiety for the majority of my life. And the ayahuasca was key to helping me access those. That's so fascinating.

That's very different than the DMT experience. I really have to do it because the DMT experience is so overwhelmingly alien that what you get out of it is it's really hard to hold on to anything. You don't see anxiety. You don't see, at least for me, for me, there's nothing written. Everything is implied and everything is projected through these things to you. And everything you see is impossible to describe. There's no words written down.

It's just way too big. It's way too crazy. And the DMT flash supposedly is far more intense. But it sounds like the ayahuasca journey is much more introspective. Very much so. Which I find very attractive. And the ayahuasca takes control

and just starts working its magic on you and really getting in there and healing you, whether you like it or not. And for some people, it's terrifying because I've witnessed people screaming and running out into the lawn in a child's pose saying, God, make this stop. Will someone make it stop? some people really getting in there and seeing what they're really about because they've been living this personality, this mask their whole lives. They've not been their true selves as a coping mechanism to deal with society. When they're finally faced with the mirror held up magnifying your true self times 40, they can't handle it. But for me personally, I found it to be extremely therapeutic because I had so much chaos going on in my head that I couldn't figure out what was even at the root of that. And the ayahuasca allowed me to really figure out what was causing my problems. Well, the idea that a drug experience could change based on your intent

going into it seems for a lot of people preposterous. But when you take into account that what these drugs are doing, essentially, like what you're trying to do when you, you know, have an ayahuasca experience, it has a big impact on what kind of experience that you actually have. Because if you try to fight it in any way, if you try to wrestle with it in any way, you try to resist and no, no, that's not what I'm like, I'm like this. If you try to argue with it, it will fuck you up sideways. Mushrooms will, DMT will, marijuana will. If you eat a pot brownie, eat a really strong pot brownie and try to, try to argue with it. Oh my God, you're fucked, man. I mean, that's what a bad trip is really all about. It's about your intent going in. So you

got lucky. You went into it with the perfect intent. I mean, it knew. This crazy bitch just threw her shit into a bag, just jumped. She's got a flashlight to read with. Like, you're in the fucking jungle. You got a little bit. You didn't even get extra batteries for that flashlight, I bet.

No, I didn't. I had to borrow all. I had to go to the guy sleeping next to me and borrow socks from him. That's hilarious. It was so embarrassing. Sunblock. I had no mosquito spray.

I was just eaten alive. I think I brought you a photo of my spider bite I woke up with one day. Wow. It was the size of a quarter when I woke up. Ooh. And then it just started growing throughout the day. Oh, that's scary. To about the size.

There it is. Oh, my God. That's terrifying. And I'm sitting there. I'm like, wait, we're two hours. You're eating up. Look at your legs. I know.

Holy shit. We're two hours away from any bit of medicine. And I'm just watching it grow and grow and grow. Not necessarily, but it did stop growing. Thank goodness. Wow. But yeah, there are definitely some amazing insects there. Yeah, that would scare the fuck out of me.

I'm terrified of spiders. Oh, there you go, Joe. My roommate Jason shot that photo. And those were just some spiders around the house. Oh, God damn it. So I go down there, and after you recommended for me to do ayahuasca, I'm sitting at the table one time, Joe, and people are like, well, why are you down here? I'm like, oh, well, a good friend of mine had suggested to go, and I had mentioned your name, and they're like, but Joe, Joe's never done ayahuasca.

And this is before my first drink and I'm thinking, what the hell? I just took advice. I'm all the way in the Amazon. I'm like, Amber, you should go to Mars.

Yeah. You should totally go to Mars. How come you haven't, how come you haven't tried it? Because I have never gone down to the jungle. I've only done, I've done DMT seven times.

And that's it. As far as the dimethyltryptamine experience. And I just, I've never had the time. Never had the time to travel down to the jungle. But I'll definitely do it. And I think, too, it's dependent on if you really need the healing. You know, I mean, the ayahuasca knows who needs healing and who doesn't. It seems like we could all use it.

I do think so, very much so. But I do think, too, if you don't actually go down there with an intent for healing, then it may not work, which happened to someone who, one of my roommates in the house, he went down wanting to just see snakes and other things he'd heard about. And I think the ayahuasca knew that. And the entire time he was down there, he didn't see one vision. And, I mean, he would take his shirt off. He'd be like, okay, let's go.

The shaman would bring in his strongest brew, serve him three cups, and still nothing. Maybe that guy was a robot. Yeah. Maybe he wasn't even really a person. So you just never know. You never know what you're going to get. But I do believe it will benefit everybody. I'm sorry.

They say that about DMT that it's like one out of every 20 people experiences nothing wow he's smoking and everybody else gets blown through the center of the universe and sees complex patterns made out of love and understanding that you know see through your soul but they don't experience anything it's like one out of 20 people they have zero effect maybe that's what happened to him. I felt so bad because he paid for the trip down to the jungle. Sounds like a tool. The universe broed him out. The universe is like, listen, stop. We're not going to give you any visions.

I don't know. Maybe the guy was really cool. Oh, yeah. He's super amazing, but it just sucked that he didn't get to see anything. But that's kind of the medicine saying you need to have an intent. It goes back to set and setting. You need to have that mindset of wanting healing and wanting to accept the medicine. Or like you said, Joe, things can go pretty wrong. I wonder if there's like a pharmacological reason or a biological reason why some people don't, maybe they don't have a,

they're missing some sort of expression of a gene or something like that that doesn't allow them to have the experience? Or potentially maybe the calcification of pineal glands. I don't know if that affects it, but that just has been something I've been reading about. You know, water tends to cause that and other things. Yeah, is that real, though? I mean, how much real work has been done on that?

The problem is you go to these websites, then you read, you know, Bigfoot read my mind. You go, oh, okay. Bigfoot read your mind and the calcification of the pineal gland. For the longest time, it was a massive source of debate. In fact, the debate about whether or not the pineal gland actually even had DMT in it. And Rick Strassman, who's a friend of mine and a really, really interesting, cool guy who wrote the spirit molecule, DMT, the spirit molecule.

He did all those studies at a university of new mexico and uh they had only anecdotal evidence that it was produced by the pineal gland they knew it was produced by the liver and the lungs but the actual the the third eye of eastern mysticism the the pineal gland which in certain reptiles actually has a retina and a lens and it's actually an eyeball in certain reptiles. I mean, it's really fucking crazy that this gland, like the third eye, there's a reason why it exists in all these ancient depictions of enlightenment. That is literally where DMT is processed. It's where it's made. And so recently, just really recently, Strassman's Cottonwood Research Center,

they figured out that they could observe it in live rats. So now they know for a fact that the pineal gland in live rats produces DMT. So it's very, very, very likely that the same thing is going on with human beings. And what happened to you when you smoked DMT? I haven't, I've mostly stuck to ayahuasca and mushrooms. That's what I've been researching. But what happens when you smoke it? Well, I've smoked a couple different types too. I've smoked 5-methoxy DMT, which is quite different. The experience is much more of there's like DMT seems to allow you to keep who you are and DMT allows you to examine the

culture from some sort of a new realm that it doesn't take you away from the very world that you live in. It just shows you another one. It brings you, it would take you and put you in this place. It doesn't change who you are though, which is really interesting. Like when you're drunk, it changes who you are. You know, you, you, you're more loose and you're maybe a little more rowdy. You say silly or shit, whatever it is that your particular reaction is, but your thinking has changed. Your thinking has changed when you're on, you know, opiates, your thinking has changed when you're on marijuana, not when you're on DMT, you're thinking exactly the same, but all of a sudden, this door opens in your mind. You step like on how you step out on the elevator.

You make that step over that gap. You see the floor. You see the elevator. And the doors open. And as the doors open, the elevator is rising up. So when you look down, you're forced to look down. There's a little slice of air between that elevator and the hotel. And then you realize what the fuck you're really doing.

You're really stepping into this box that's hovering 70, 80 fucking stories over the ground, held up by steel cables, and you're going to go ride in this box. And the door shuts, and that's what DMT feels like. DMT feels like, ready? Come on in. You step over this chasm. The door shuts, and then it opens. And then you just fucking go. It's like getting shot through a cannon of geometric patterns.

And what I remember is the beginning of it literally being like the beginning of a ride like it slowly exposed itself initially you have blinders on and it's it's colored like a yellow jacket be like yellow and black that's what I remember like intensely strong yellow and black that's moving like sort of spiraling but it's square and it's it's very square and it's essentially like giving you like a little bit of a a slow fucking before it goes after you it's like here come on i'm just gonna give you a little kiss it's like massaging your shoulders like shooting you down this pipe this crazy squared off pipe and then boom into the big thing and the beginning of it was so like holy shit like what am i looking at that you think there couldn't be anything stranger in the world until it lets you out at

the bottom until boom and you think that's as crazy as it gets and then as you go deeper in it shows you something crazier and it shows you that there's no end. And it also connects you to such overwhelming evidence of things being far more fantastic than you could ever be aware. Just overwhelming evidence. Just the fact that you could personally, with your eyes, ever experience what you're seeing. That it could be possible. Even if it's a hallucination, it is still happening. You're still seeing this. And this very experience should be impossible. It's too alien.

It's too beyond the imagination. It's too beyond anything I've could have concocted based on the context of the life that I've lived. It's impossible. And then they started singing, I love you six hundred five hundred thousand times look at this and they would say like look at this and show you these fucking things that were impossibly beautiful like i remember crying because there was the things they were showing me were so beautiful and they kept singing like like a little child like the way a child would tell you they love you. Like, I love you 600 million, 500,000 times. Look at this. And just, but that, that childish love to it, like was a big theme of it. This,

this repeating that I love you 600 million, 500,000 times. Like if you tell a kid, they love you, they go, I love you a hundred times. And you're like, I love you a million times. I love you 6,500,000 times. They would say something crazy like that and that's what this thing was was was saying and then just showing and i don't even think it was six million five hundred thousand times that's like my interpretation of it because you're not hearing real words you're just getting like this really clear intent that seems to be talking to you but you don't know how it's talking to you you're not it's not like you're seeing it like on a wall like and you're know how it's talking to you. It's not like you're seeing it on a wall and you're reading it. It's somehow or another putting those words in your head.

So I'm saying 6,500,000 times, but it was really just that sort of an interpretation of a childish, pure love. They're not trying to be your girlfriend. They're not trying to get a job. They're not trying to get you to give them money. There's this pure love, this pure love without any context at all. And just a series of beautiful, fantastic visions that you're trying to grab.

You're trying to hold on to, but you can't. The way I describe it is like standing in the middle of a river of fish that are going a thousand miles an hour and you're just trying to grab them there's no way there's no way and but you recognize what you're seeing when you're seeing it but you can't even hold on to it because then a new one's coming and a new one is so much more crazy than the one you just saw and then boom a new one's there and they're infinite and they never end they keep going until the drug wears off and as the drug wears off, you know, like, the love you thing was still going on. But there was also, like, a lot of, we'll see you later.

Bye. There's, like, a bye-bye. Bye-bye. Like, letting you know they had a good time. And then, you know, we'll see you some other time. When you're ready, we're here. Wow. Wow.

Yeah. How do you go back to reality after? How do you go to fear factor after that? That was my problem. The first time I did it, it was. You're like, wait, what am I doing here? I was like, holy schnitzel. This is, it was the first one.

The first one I did was the five methoxy one. And five methoxy is much more reality dissolving. It's like you don't see anything. You don't exist anymore. You as you, you're not allowed to keep. You keep it with DMT. You as you, you don't keep with 5-MeO. You as you goes away and you enter to the center of everything.

You become a part of the very fiber of the universe. You look at the universe from a different perspective. The perspective that you're at right now is a multi-celled organism host to millions and billions, in fact, of other multi-celled organisms. And you're, you know, you're at it through the energy of the cell itself like you look at it through the the momentum of biological life and evolution you look at it through a completely non-society based concept through a completely context rather through a completely alien context. You're seeing the world not through the eyes of a mammal, not through the eyes of a fish, not through the eyes of life, not through the eyes of anything with biology, not through the eyes of anything that has any instincts

to stay alive, through the eyes of something that realizes it's a part of everything. There's no bottom, there's no up. There's all. And it's all around you all the time. And the first time I really came to understand the idea of standing on something is ridiculous. Like the idea that I'm on the ground. Like we're standing here in my office. It's so ridiculous. Because we're not.

We're spinning 1,000 miles an hour in a circle. That circle is a part of a greater system called the solar system. That circle is a part of a greater system called the solar system. That system is a part of a greater system called the galaxy. The whole thing is spinning around a black hole. Like, we're not, there's nothing flat. It's up, it's down, it's left, it's right. And in having that experience, I felt like I was somehow or another just in there. A part of the mechanism of the very universe itself.

But it was very not me. And then when I had to come back, I had to sort of re-put together my personality, re-put together my position in the world as far as like what my responsibilities are, what is expected of me or what I'm supposed to be doing on Monday morning. I had to re-put that all together because I didn't exist for 15, 20 minutes, whatever it was, probably 15. Um, and then,

um, sort of examine how preposterous I am, you know, examine ego exam. I remember saying to my friends after we had just got done doing it, like, I can't even, even me describing this to you is bullshit because what I'm trying to do is sound clever in the way I'm choosing my words. I'm allowing my ego to paint. I want you to be entertained by my words. I don't just want these words to come out in an absolutely perfectly truthful form. I'm also trying to, I'm trying to be clever. I like to use words. I like to sing a song with words, you know, and I'm realizing that as I'm saying this, that it's like I'm full of shit.

We're all full of shit. There's a benefit to being full of shit. The benefit is like, it's not even full of shit. It's just like my friend Joey Diaz, my favorite human ever, like the way he talks. I love being around him. He's just so much fun. And it's the way he talks.

He knows that people love the way he talks, so he's really good at singing a song with his words You know and to get to get off that to try to look at something off that trip the trip of singing a song with your words is really hard and DMT makes that song look stupid as fuck because DMT lets you know, like, I get it, I get it. You think that in the context of humanity and civilization and your interpersonal relationships that you have with other beings

that what you're saying is important, but it's not. And here's evidence that it's not. Here's evidence that nothing is important. And whatever you do that makes this time, this thing that you think is important, whatever you do that makes that time, this thing that you think is important, whatever you do that makes that fucked up, stop, stop all that, stop all that craziness, whatever you're doing, that's causing anxiety, whatever you're doing, that's causing you, uh,

too much, uh, objective thinking too much, uh, you know, uh, interact interviewing yourself and going over the thoughts. I'm like, why am I doing that? Why am I still smoking? Why am I, why am I still eating shitty food? Why am I just stop doing all that? Cause that's a mess. That's a mess. You don't need that. And it just made you look,

it made me look so foolish, but it's very different than NN DMT. Just, so those are the two experiences that I had. Then I had both of them. I only did the five MEO three times, but the regular DMT was about five or six more. Because it was just, the regular DMT was more interesting to me.

I figured, like, I felt like whatever the 5-MeO had to say, I got it. I got it pretty quick. Not that I couldn't benefit from it, but it didn't call me back. You know, it was like, there it is, bitch. Take a look. You got it? Good. Now go about your business. didn't call me back you know it was like there it is bitch take a look you got it good now go

about your business whereas dmt was um every time was a new thing every time i did it was a new it was similar but every time was like oh i think i know what this is about oh do you really yeah come through here sir here we go you ready whoa And then some new thing that you're like, Oh fucking Christ. That's how the ayahuasca is. I, uh, one of the healers I work with has been using it for 18 years and he says still every time he does it, it's different. And it completely opens his mind to, he still can't figure it out. And it's been, it's been 18 years. And, uh, and I think something else ayahuasca is good for when you look at through a therapeutic or medical scope, which is kind of similar to what you had in your DMT experience, is that it does take away a lot of the fear of life and the fear of dying. And I think that's something too that

I had, and most people do have a fear of death. And one time I had ayahuasca and I hadn't eaten in five days. So I was really ready to absorb the medicine and right after drinking it Joe I started feeling like I was dying and I started thinking oh my gosh has anyone died from ayahuasca because I I just in my brain it was telling me you're you're dying and I started having trouble breathing and I I was remembering that if I didn't remember to breathe I wouldn't breathe and then it got the feeling got so intense that I remember looking over at my boyfriend and thinking how sad it was that I'd never see him again. And at that point, I started seeing sacred geometry.

And then I literally left my body and became this vibration. And I looked back at my body thinking, it's so sad I couldn't hold on to that body. You know, what's wrong with me that everyone in this room is able to stay alive and I had to die? So how many trips had you gone on before this had happened? That was my eighth one. So at this point... Jesus fucking Christ. The eighth visit or eighth...

Eighth time drinking ayahuasca. So during the first visit? No, this was a separate time. So I went down to the Amazon. Then I've traveled the world the past year researching mushrooms. And then when I was in Indonesia, I was given the opportunity to be included in an ayahuasca experience. This was a couple months ago, and this is when this happened. I wanted to ask you that. I've talked to people that have done ayahuasca with

things that have come from the Middle East, different plants that have come from the Middle East. They've mixed it and they've seen very different imagery than the imagery that people report seeing from the jungles of Peru and Brazil. Apparently, McKenna's idea was that, and it might've been someone else's idea that he had talked about in a speech. He believed that when you had a psychedelic experience, you were also participating in all the various trips that everyone else had done with that psychedelic, like essentially throughout history. Wow. And that was one of the reasons why fairly recent drugs had an empty feeling.

Like he would talk about ketamine, and he said that ketamine would feel like you were in an office building that was new, but nobody had moved into yet. And like, there'd be no one there and I'd be like walking around, there's no furniture. Like, this is bizarre. He's like, that was the experience that he had had with ketamine. Whereas with psilocybin, he would have these experiences that were just intensely rich with all this sacred imagery that has been, you know, observed in artwork and various cultures, like they have like this interchangeable imagery that may have like

very similar psychedelic consumptions. And that that's what you're seeing, you know, when you're seeing jaguars and black people and snakes, when you do the ayahuasca and where you do the ayahuasca from the South American ayahuasca. But when you would do the ayahuasca that was made with similar ingredients on the other parts of the world, you have different visions. Oh, for sure. And this one, I mean, the ones I had in the jungle were, like you said, more jungle-esque. And this one was brewed in an area of Australia. And so for some reason, it was just a completely different experience for me. And it could have also been, there could have been other variables that I didn't need as much personal healing. Instead, I was led to this knowledge. Sometimes ayahuasca is more of a ladder to bring

you to this higher intelligence to feed you knowledge. And so I wasn't having any animalistic visions or really sacred geometry. I just became, flew out of my body and became this vibration. And it told me clearly, like you said, I don't know if it was a voice or writing or what, but this huge, intense power told me that death doesn't exist. And why do we fear death? Why does man fear death? It's ridiculous. And it's just to cause fear.

And really, you are this vibration, this soul. And Amber, your body on earth is just your organic spacesuit that allows you to survive on earth. But you really are this soul. And no matter what, you never really die. And it was laughing. Like how ridiculous it is that man thinks you actually die. And then I was just taken through the universe and I just was flying down this vortex and I saw earth and I saw all the fighting and wars and all the negativity that I'd focused on for all these years. And I saw how petty that was compared to this huge, massive force that was communicating with me, whether it be God or intelligent beings or just something made up in my head. But it was just so intense. And I compared that to all the

fighting and the negativity. And it just left a permanent footprint on my brain that I need to, you know, whatever this force, this message is so much more important than what I've been focusing on, on earth, especially in my career. And it started giving me this message of love and healing, and that we really need to get in and fix the core problem, which is this mental disorder facing our species, versus just focusing on the symptoms for me journalistically, which was wars and fighting. And then after that, I was shown how man was created according to this. Oh, please do tell. It just was, I was shown DNA and I was shown that it was a DNA mixing. And I had not read any theories or anything else on this, but I was shown DNA taken from other areas of the universe mixed with DNA on Earth.

And then that's how man was created as part of. Yeah, it was pretty intense. As part of this plan. By who? I don't know. That's a good question. I couldn't tell exactly what this force was, but that's what it was showing me, how man was created. of it, all of it, everything from lions eating gazelles to the whole, everything we do is so strange and bizarre.

Colors changing, animals, chameleons change the color of their skin to try to blend in like octopus do that in the ocean floor. So much of it is so incredibly strange. The idea that we haven't been influenced, that some of this has not been influenced by similar strangeness from somewhere else, is so silly. The idea that pollen and then spores and then things fly through the air and seeds land and then new life comes out of those seeds, the idea that that's not a universal idea.

The idea that asteroids don't carry the building blocks of life. Well, they do. We know they do. So they do. Isn't that sort of a spaceship? I mean, isn't an asteroid a spaceship? It's a spaceship that carries something from it. Like if some DNA from something came here on an asteroid and collided with something else and then created a person, why is that so weird? Why is it so weird for us? And that's what this force was showing me, and I'd never really – I never thought about this.

I wasn't a very religious person. I am more now, definitely. You're religious now? Not religious, but I believe in a higher being, that something is, there's more to our time on earth. And I used to just think that you die, you die. And now I'm, it's a recurring theme for me when I do use psychedelics to remind me that life does not end on earth. Maybe Amber ends, but the real being me, my soul, will continue on. And that's just been a recurring theme even, especially on the mushrooms. They constantly try to tell me that lesson because I think a lot of my anxiety came from a fear of death. anxiety came from a fear of death? Well, it's kind of weird because we, in order to do what we do, in order to be a person, in order to have a job, in order to, you know, write your name down when you sign the Amber line, this is my, this is what represents me. You have to have a pilot, you know,

it has to be Amber in there running the show. And so because of that, Amber running the show becomes Amber. But when you have the psychedelic experience, Amber running the show becomes Amber. But when you have the psychedelic experience, Amber running the show really doesn't get a chance to say shit. And then this other thing gets revealed at the core, you know, without a language. It doesn't have a language. It doesn't have, it's not clinging to life experiences. It's not clinging to, you know,

phobias that you've developed because of negative experiences. It's not clinging to phobias that you've developed because of negative experiences. It's not clinging to anything. It's just this pure consciousness that's very, very, very hard to access. That's the real silence. That's the real silence at the end of meditation. There's the real you, which you very rarely even get to see. And it's very, very spiritual. If you look at the John Hopkins studies, they found that 61% of people who were given psilocybin considered it to be the single most

spiritual event of their life. Also you even look at Bill Wilson who founded Alcoholics Anonymous. He believed that a lot of people don't know this but he used LSD to cure chronic depression. He believed that LSD could actually, should be one of the 12 steps and could lead people to that spiritual awakening, which would then allow them to acknowledge a greater power and continue in their healing. Don't tell that to Dr. Drew. Yeah. And it's so sad, Joe, because as the more I've been researching this, the more I realize how much amazing research is out there showing how effective psychedelics are for curing anxiety,

depression, addiction, all of these things so many people are suffering from. And we've known since the 1950s that LSD had a 45% success rate at curing alcoholism. I mean, if you look at AA, there's a study showing there are not even any studies to show how effective LSD is. Some people say it's, or AA is in curing alcoholism. Some people say it's, or AA is, in curing alcoholism, some people say it's maybe 5% effective. So you have these substances out there that are, we've known for decades that are extremely healing. You know what AA is really effective at? What?

Getting people to talk about AA. Exactly. I thought you fucks were anonymous. Yeah. They bring that shit up constantly, don't they? God damn. I mean, I'm sure some people are helped. Yes, they are, definitely.

45% success rate with LSD is really an astounding number when it comes to rehab. And we need to start talking about psychedelics more. We need to make them less taboo so people start realizing that there is hope out there when they've lost all other hope ibogaine is actually even stronger than that as far as uh the numbers uh the the ibogaine recidivism rate as far as people going back to uh whatever they were doing that was fucking them up is incredibly low incredibly low and especially with uh the oxycontin addiction which is just consuming our nation i think one of my last stories stories I did at CNN are on babies now being born addicted to OxyContin and painkillers, which was really my holy shit, what has happened to us as a society moment. So they're sick like right out of the bat? Yeah, they're going through withdrawal once they're born because the mom can't quit using the oxycodone while she's pregnant because the baby could die in utero from withdrawal.

So she's got to continue using it. Then these babies, I was standing in a NICU at East Tennessee Children's Hospital. In a NICU, they've literally, half the babies there are being born addicted to these painkillers. This is something our society is not discussing. painkillers. This is something our society is not discussing. And I watched as they brought this baby in and this poor baby was, its skin was marbled and it was just shaking and screaming and crying in intense pain, just like a grownup would because this baby was going through an opioid withdrawal and they had to instantly give the baby morphine. And it takes sometimes 30 days for them to overcome the painful symptoms.

We had a doctor on Dr. Carl Hart yesterday who is a drug and addictions expert. The guy has worked for over 20 years on various tests and various substance and abuse substances and analyzing what the root of all these experiences are. And the way he explained it was really fascinating. He was saying that even when you have a hangover, that what the hangover is, is an alcohol withdrawal. That's what you're going through. It's not just dehydration, not just your body like being sick. It's the compensatory mechanisms that are present in your mind to counteract the alcohol.

When the alcohol is gone gone it's a withdrawal like you go into like that's what a hangover is and that whenever someone has an addiction whether it's an addiction to opiates or whatever it is that's what they're experiencing it's the compensatory mechanisms fire up in order to process the opiates and then when they're gone then you're sick and you know but the way he was describing it was really fascinating. He was saying that it's really like, I'm sure it's way worse for a fucking baby, obviously, but for a person, it's essentially like having a bad flu.

And then if you've gone through the flu, you've gone through what it feels like to have withdrawal of heroin, which I thought was really fascinating. It's like a lot of it is misconceptions. Misconceptions and disinformation when it comes to withdrawals from drugs and how difficult they are to withdraw from. And a lot of it is psychosomatic. There's a lot of psychological issues involved with people relapsing

that don't have anything to do with chemical. Pretty interesting stuff. And I think that's why Ibogaine is so effective. I think some people think it's maybe around 90 effective success rate um because they don't experience withdrawal symptoms i think that's why so many people are scared or addicts i've spoken to especially who are addicted to these prescription pills as they're so scared to go through those withdrawal symptoms and um what even the young man who discovered ibogaine, he actually went to try it because he thought he could get stoned.

So he was just looking for a high. And he was a heroin addict. And he tried the Ibogaine. And then all of a sudden he realized, oh, my gosh, it's been 12 hours. I should be having horrific withdrawal symptoms. Why am I not experiencing these symptoms? And then it was so effective toward the end of the trip after intense introspection. I mean, intense. You're in that trip for about 36 hours for some. He realized he no longer craved the heroin. So then he went and got all of his other junkie

friends and started giving them ibogaine. And then it just spread across the world. Now we're seeing centers open up in Mexico. And unfortunately, it's still illegal in the United States, even though we have a horrific pill addiction. But you can access Ibogaine centers in Canada and Mexico, even the Bahamas. That's intense. I have a friend who had an addiction to pills, went down, did Ibogaine, cured him completely, and then he opened up a center. Wow. Yeah, he's like, this is incredible. This is unbelievable.

So now he's got a center in Mexico. And, you know, he was a guy that was, like, a really healthy guy, and then he got injured, and then the pills just took him over. He just couldn't help it. And he had a really hard time getting rid of them, you know, for whatever reason. But when he went there, boom, instant. I mean, instant cure, instant, instant like never doing that again holy shit instant like recognition of the patterns and then an instant calling to to to be involved in this

and to help other people and to find friends that he knew that had similar issues and say listen you gotta trust me on this come with me once you've seen the truth that how powerful psychedelics are and you're able to dispel all the propaganda with this truth that doesn't have a shelf life that's going to come out. Just like, you know, now marijuana, everyone's finally realizing how medicinal it is. Now it's just starting to happen again with psychedelics. And when you've personally realized this truth, and this is something I'm going through now, and you see so many people around the country suffering, whether it be from depression, anxiety, or from post-traumatic stress disorder. 22 soldiers a day in the United States kill themselves from it. You just feel a duty. Like you have to share this truth with others

and let people know through your experiences because they are so powerful. because they are so powerful. Yeah, it is unbelievably powerful. And it's sort of like one of the things that we were talking about earlier, that we are in some sort of a new era, is that the information is being spread virally on things like this. These discussions are happening right now during lunchtime, at schools, during coffee breaks at work. People are talking about these sort of things that they're realizing, and they're talking about things that they heard, talking about things that they've read or videos

they've watched or what have you. And it's spreading now. And it's spreading in a way that just really never did before. And they can't hold it back. You can't hold back the truth and these psychedelics. They're not going to work for everybody. But if you look at the anecdotes and the science, it's really there in favor of using these medicinally. And the more research you read, the more ridiculous it becomes that they're Schedule I, saying that there's no medicinal value,

that they're highly addictive. Mushrooms are proven to be non-addictive. ridiculous it becomes that there's schedule one saying that there's no medicinal value, that they're highly addictive. Mushrooms are proven to be non-addictive and the caffeine in your coffee is more toxic for your body than mushrooms. The deadliest drug on earth is alcohol and that's legal. And the more, so the more information you have access to, for me personally, because I'm just waking up to all of this within the past year or so, the more you realize just how ridiculous the whole system is and it's just not in the favor of healing and the people. Yeah, most people don't realize way more people die from alcohol than do from even prescription drugs.

Yeah, 80,000 a year? That's more than car accidents? I think it's more than 100. More than 100? Yeah. It's still not as bad as cigarettes. That's the number one. And that one doesn't even get you high. Well, I guess it does get you high a little bit.

It gives you a little bit of a psychoactive charge. It gives you a little stimulant charge. A lot of people like it for writing, apparently. Apparently, you'd smoke cigarettes and write. Your synapses fire really well. Stephen King actually said that when he quit smoking, it affected that. Yeah, I used to smoke occasionally when I'd write. Does the ayahuasca arrow, when he's blowing the tobacco smoke on you,

what is the role that the nicotine and the tobacco smoke has on the ayahuasca trip? For me, it just intensifies it. Sometimes they blow like a sage smoke or a palo santo wood, and that intensifies you feeling nauseous and the trip. Others say that they use it to clear out the bad spirits and blow them away so that bad spirits don't come into the room. They also use this wand called a chacapa, and it's like a leaf wand to blow the spirits out of the room so that bad spirits don't come in. I wonder what that is. I wonder if they're really blowing out bad spirits or are they just tricking you, you know, like tricking your mind to think it's blowing out bad spirits so it eliminates the fear. Yeah.

Well, it depends on the shaman you get, and it's so vital that you pick the right shaman. You've got to go back to that then. Yeah. So the shaman touched you. Yeah. that you picked the right shaman. You've got to go back to that then. So the shaman touched you. Yeah, so I went down, and unfortunately now, new organizations are starting to really help rate ayahuasca centers, and this is why I'm starting the website I'm starting as well, because there's not a lot out there when it comes to advising you where to go

as far as picking a center. I think now there's a new site called ayahadvisor.org, like TripAdvisor. So I didn't know. So I went down to this center, and I didn't know that the shaman who I had gone to had other accusations against him. And so during the ceremony, while I was deep in this really spiritual, amazing trip,

I noticed him coming up to me and blowing the agua florida on me which is normal it's the like the holy water for the shamans and he was you know putting putting it on my forehead and then he started putting his hands down my body and actually went around my breasts and went down towards um towards my crotch whoa and and then kept just rubbing back and forth and and i thought that, maybe is that part of healing the bad spirits? Did he rub your actual breasts or around your breasts? He rubbed like it was, he was clearly touching. I mean, he made it try to seem like he was going around the outside, but he was clearly pushing down on my breasts to the point I'm in the middle

taking the most intense psychedelic on earth. And I kind of was like, whoa, hold on a minute, Mother Ayahuasca. I need to take care of something in this dimension because something ain't right. And he also went to the guy who was next to me and rubbed him in the crotch area as well. How dare he? Yeah. Maybe that's a part of it, though. Maybe they have to rub your dick.

I've talked to every shaman I've talked to after that. No, and actually when he found out I was a journalist he fled um the next day he came up with some outlandish excuse why he needed to be gone until the exact day i left and um and i think he thought maybe i was there to investigate other accusations that had been made against him and he left and then we had the local shaman uh who was native to per to Peru give us the ceremonies after that. And it was all beautiful from there. And he never touched or anything like that. And it's not part of the ayahuasca experience to have your breasts touch or anything else on your body, just so people know. And that's why it's so vital that you pick the correct shaman because they're guiding you through this experience.

And that's also why I don't recommend people, um, women go down alone at this point. Yeah. Wow. That's intense. Well, luckily that's all that happened. Nothing, you know, escalated from there, but does that guy, do you know if that guy's still, well, um, unfortunately he passed away. Oh, you mean fortunately? Uh, well, either way, whatever, whatever happened, it's weird because people tend to say that the spirits of the jungle kind of take care of anything that comes in and tries to use the medicine the wrong way. And oddly enough, he died around Christmastime. He fell off the third floor of his home. He'd built in the jungle and hit his head and passed away. Whoa. Goddamn. And when I heard that, because I had heard other stories of shamans who've misused the medicine

and they've kind of had weird fates as well, I wouldn't be surprised if the spirits kind of just... Or maybe some dude whose dick he grabbed threw him off the fucking window. Yeah, you never know. That's just as likely. That's the sad thing with the medicines is they're some of the most profound compounds on earth for healing. But I think something I've noticed too in traveling the world, Joe, is that some people have taken advantage of them and claim to be healers. And really in the end of the day, the only healer, the main healer is the actual psychedelic. All you

need to do is take that psychedelic, go be with yourself and it will do the healing. You don't need a healer per se. And you just have to be very cautious because people coming in with the wrong intentions, maybe just to make money, are opening up centers. Yeah, I've talked to quite a few people that claim to be a healer. And I just think that the idea is so preposterous, A, it's a very preposterous idea that someone was gifted with these magic powers. And B, thinking that you are is so fucking delusional that it is absolutely contrary to the spirit of psychedelic exploration in the first place. Thinking you're the one person that has this unique gift and you can heal people. Get the fuck out of here.

Stop. the one person that has this unique gift and you can heal people get the fuck out of here stop i knew this dude who was a chiropractor used to crack people's backs and tell them that you're you know he's healing foot fungus he's making you smarter he's you know fixing your zones and like what are you doing you're healing and then in a sort of a discrete conversation he revealed to me that if he convinces people that they're healing, that that does in fact start the healing. And I'm like, okay, what? So you're justifying bullshitting by saying that the bullshit works if the people believe it.

It's like a placebo effect. You're a human placebo effect. Well, it didn't work with me, dude. Okay. At all. Like, this is a really bad conversation we're having. It sounds like you're a bullshitter. Like, this is ridiculous.

Like, the idea behind it is ridiculous that one person would have some sort of magical power with their hands to heal things. Like, get the fuck out of here, man. Stop. The power is in the psychedelic medicine. And the most amazing healer I met along the way was this man in Oaxaca, Mexico. I went there to investigate how the Mazatecs have been using mushrooms medicinally for thousands of years, because it kind of contradicts everything we've been told about magic mushrooms, that they're actually a medicine there. And the healer, actually what he would do would just bring people in. He would make the tea, give you the mushrooms, and then say, okay, here's my property. Go sit wherever you want and be one with the mushrooms, and the mushrooms will do the healing.

I'm not a healer. I'm just a provider. And to me, that was so profound because we had run into on this journey, so many phonies who wanted $400 for a ceremony or, you know, their hands are the hands of God with these psychedelics. And it really is just the medicine. That's all you need. You don't need someone else to bring you there. Well, it seems like in it becoming more and more popular over the last few years, the demand for it is so high. There's got to be a lot of unscrupulous people that are sort of capitalizing on that demand.

And people who never were shamans that just figure out the recipe, cook it up, start serving people and squeezing tits. They're like, this is the best job ever. These dudes are fucked up. I'm touching their dicks. It's awesome. And they give me $200 a night, which is like a monthly salary in my country.

Yeah. I mean, it only makes sense. It seems like they need an accreditation thing, sort of like, where'd you get your PhD? Columbia. Oh, that guy's legit. Where'd you get your Ayahuasquero license to practice? What?

It doesn't exist. But I mean, it's almost more important than being a PhD. I mean, the ability to accurately describe what happens in those dimensions to someone who has an experience that is impossible. The idea behind what you're experiencing is so fantastic that any words to describe it are going to fall short. So the guy who could administer that, the function of that person in your society, in your culture, is uniquely important in a really intense way. Just as important as someone who's a doctor. Just as important as someone who's a

teacher. Just as important as any important aspect of our community that we consider to be a cornerstone, whether it's medical or legal or any of those things. Having someone who can give you that experience is a huge, that's a huge role. But, you know, who's doing it? These fucking weird guys that are touching you while you're passed out, you know? And not all of them are bad. There's some really amazing healers.

I had lost faith almost, Joe, and then I met some incredible, real ayahuasqueros. An ayahuasquera, a woman who's been doing it for years. And they were so profoundly helped me heal and understand the medicine that there is a lot of good, but it's a yin and yang. And that's why I just warn people because I think, oh, well, she went down there alone in the jungle. And it's like, no, it wasn't all rainbows and butterflies. I had some things to have to overcome there because I did choose to kind of go down there so quickly. Well, I think it's like everything in life. There's going to be good versions of it and bad versions of it. And we should seek to find the ideal version of it. And I think also that that yin and yang balance of the universe seems inescapable.

It seems like it's in everything, like really terrible relationships. They make you appreciate really good relationships. Bad friends make you appreciate good friends. Bad jobs make you appreciate good jobs. Traffic makes you appreciate the mountains even more. I mean, all those things factor in together. I don't think you can escape them. I think you need them

all. You need the yin and the yang. You need the shitty ayahuasca to make you really appreciate the beauty of someone who's absolutely pure in their intent. I really think that this is the way the world works. You know, and I think you try to get away from that, you're being silly. You're missing the whole

point the whole point is just seek the light go towards the good just find that you can't fix all the dark it's not fixable like people involved in the dark have to recognize they're leaning one way more than they are the other and try to correct hopefully somehow or another they're going to have an experience that comes that gives them that sort of understanding, but you're not going to fix them. Concentrate on your own shit. Move forward. Go, go, go, go. Seek the light. Go the right way. And for some folks, they just never quite get there. And I don't know what their role is, but their role may very well be for someone like you or someone like me to see the error of their ways and learn from it. I mean, that might be their place in this giant machine. Their place might truly be to enlighten the others around them as to the wrong way. And maybe when they come back, they'll come

back with the knowledge of whatever they fucked up in the past life in some sort of inherent form, and they'll move incrementally closer and closer to some form of enlightenment. And it really helped me journalistically because I'm not only trying to use these psychedelics for healing, but also to really understand the history. And for some reason, after that first experience, I just had my bullshit meter on times 4,000. So right away, I could weed through the bullshit and just get to the healers who could teach me the most journalistically, especially when I was traveling through Mexico. Cause that, I mean, already it's some areas of there are a little sketchy.

And so it really helped me to find the real native Coranderas and, and have just an amazing, beautiful experience with these mushrooms that I have such a profound love for mushrooms now, Joe. And I understand why when I was on your show you were saying that if everyone could do mushrooms, it would just transform the world. And I'm a firm believer psilocybin is, hands down, the most incredible chemical known to the brain, just through my experiences.

Well, it's really close to human neurochemistry, too. I mean, it literally has N-N-dimethyltryptamine in it as far as like what it is before it is that. It's very closely related. And the most profound ones are closely related to human neurochemistry. I mean, the idea that you're going to get this DMT trip from all these plants that grow in the jungle. These plants that grow in the jungle literally contain the very chemicals that make your brain work. It's so bizarre. And they're illegal.

And they're illegal. Yeah. Incredible. Ignore everything you've been told about them. It's all lies. When I first had my first mushroom experience, I really realized, wow, how deep the propaganda went. And we've just been fed so many lies about these substances, especially psilocybin.

I feel like the industry has a lot of fear of psilocybin because it can't be patented and it is so effective. One study at the University of Southern Florida found out, scientists believe after the study that it may even lead to neurogenesis, which is a regrowth of brain cells. And in that study, they gave rats, they played this loud noise and then they'd shock the hell out of these rats. And then they gave some of the rats psilocybin. And then later on, they played that noise again and the rats that had psilocybin were less likely to face the fear of that sound. And they believe that that was because potentially it had led to the regrowth of brain cells

and the reparation of the serotonergic system. That's so intense. And this is something that we're saying is illegal. And if it's Schedule I, so that means it has no medicinal benefits. It's addictive, but they've proven mushrooms aren't addictive. And look at all of these studies coming out showing that psilocybin has potential to cure anxiety and PTSD. And so it's just really disturbing. But I recommend anyone out there facing, you know, who has a type of illness or PTSD, depression, anxiety, and they haven't found any hope in anything

else and they they're feeling hopeless to just research psilocybin because it gives me so much hope and I think it's one of the greatest human rights tragedies of our generation that this isn't available to everyone who who needs it uh it is very strange isn't it and it's strange that a person like you has to come along and and sort of like let people know about this, like that this isn't common knowledge. This isn't something that's being taught in schools. This isn't something the president's talking about. Like I found a way to world peace. We all need to do mushrooms.

But it's I mean, could you imagine how many people not everybody? This isn't for everyone. Some people, you know, would potentially have bad trips if you're not ready for it. But the healing potential is so great that it's worth the risk. Yeah, I agree. And I also think that when you go deep into the idea that psilocybin may have been responsible for the very evolution of the human mind itself, it gets really compelling. We had Dennis McKenna on the podcast, and we're doing some emails back and forth right now.

I'll have him on hopefully in April again. But he explained in a very scientific manner the actual correlation between use of psilocybin and development of language, why there's a connection and why it makes sense. And based on the reaction to psilocybin by the human brain and the connections that it makes. And I can't do it justice to try to repeat what he said, but it's incredibly compelling. And his brother had, Terrence McKenna, had this idea that was really intoxicating. And that was really intoxicating, and that was the idea of the stoned ape.

The stoned ape theory being that when climate change occurred and the rainforest started receding into grasslands, that these undulate cows, these wild cattle, would leave these shits, and these animals, these monkeys, would come along and flip the shits over and find bugs, and mushrooms would grow on the shits. So they would experiment with these mushrooms. And he had all these direct correlations between experimenting with mushrooms and the improvement of various aspects of life, which would make it probable that these people, these animals,

these human-like things, experimented with these mushrooms, including eating of psilocybin at low-level doses increases visual acuity. So it actually makes you see better. It makes edge detection better. It would make you a more effective hunter. It makes you more sensitive to your environment. It would make you hornier, so you would have more sex. And, of course, then at higher doses, you would get this sort of unifying experience

that would bond the tribe together. It would create a tighter group of people, a tighter group of monkey-like people, whatever the fuck they were. And he used that as a direct reason for one of the biggest mysteries in the entire fossil record, which is the doubling of the human brain size over a period of 2 million years.

It's a really fascinating mystery that no one has ever solved. They don't know why. There's a lot of theories. There's a lot of competing theories as to what caused the human brain size to double. But it's an unprecedented event in biology. The way McKenna described it, he's like, if it was like the liver of an otter,

it would be a spectacular find that a liver of an otter doubled over a period of two million years. I mean, it would be really perplexing. Like, why is this? When you have the greatest transformation of any known biological creature over a period of two million years like this,

and that's the same organ that created the theory of evolution in the first place. That's when shit gets really weird. The human mind is the thing that's figuring this all out, and the human mind is the thing that's doubling over the period of this one period of time. Well, what else is going on?

And he pointed to all these factors that pointed to the experimenting with psilocybin. It's really interesting stuff. And then with his brother Dennis, who's like a hardcore scientist, explaining the actual connections between eating psilocybin and the possible creation of language. And of course, the exponential effect that creating language would have on these animals and how it would

force their mind to expand. It would force, along with the psychedelic experiences, their boundaries to shift. It's pretty incredible, too, if you think on that theory, to think now what are we losing because we don't have access as species now. We're sick. We don't have our medicine. There's this thing that's created us. And he also, McKenna, was really into the idea. Well, he had a couple of freak ideas, too. One of them was this longing for this orgiastic, non-monogamous culture of the past.

Yeah, dudes always find a way to work that in. Even the most spiritual guys find a way to work out this non-monogamous concept. Is this just to make sense to his girlfriends about his behavior? Well, in a sense, he's right, as far as the male programming, but it's fascinating. It's fascinating the concept behind it that at one point in time, these cultures supposedly all engaged in this non-monogamous life. And Chris Ryan has very interesting thoughts on that as well. The guy who wrote Sex at Dawn, a brilliant guy who I do a podcast with once a month. Him and Duncan Trussell and I do a podcast. And these ideas were that at one point in time there was no sense of paternity,

that no one knew that Amber Lyon's baby came from Jamie. You guys didn't know because everybody was having sex with everybody and there was no DNA test. So if you were having sex with five different friends at the same time and all of a sudden you got pregnant, everybody would raise the baby together. And that would be the idea is that people would grow accustomed to that sort of a culture and that the culture that makes love together and has sex with more than one partner, they like each other more.

And one of the things that he uses to sort of highlight that is wife swapping amongst fighter pilots apparently is very high. It's a normal concept. And the idea being that you know that it's very likely you're going to die out there and you love your wife and you don't want your wife to be with someone who doesn't love her. And so by sharing her with all your friends, you leave behind someone who loves your wife as equally as you do. And then it's that intense of a shift in the way you view the world. You know, I think that we just real stuck in the idea that the way we live right now,

this is the pattern that we're all supposed to follow. And this pattern may very well be a pattern that's separate from what created it in the first place, which might be psychedelic drugs. It might be the thing. I mean, even like mainstream Jerusalem scholars now are saying that they believe that Moses finding the Ten Commandments from a burning bush was most likely some sort of a description of a psychedelic experience. some sort of a description of a psychedelic experience and that the bush that's burning may very well have been the acacia bush, which is incredibly rich in DMT. It's one of the most DMT rich plants in the entire region. So if that is the burning bush, if that's the, the analogy that they're making, you know, Moses sees the burning bush. Is that what they're really saying? Because we're getting it from ancient Hebrew.

We're getting it from Aramaic, translated to Latin, translated to Greek. Is that, are you sure that's what they're saying? Because what they might be saying is they smoked some fucking DNP and talked to God. And God gave them some rules that really made sense as to how we should live our life. And if you look at the Good Friday experiment, I don't know if you're familiar with that, that took place in Harvard when they were studying psilocybin. They gave theology students high doses of psilocybin, and they all reported having similar religious experiences as to those described in the Bible. And so you kind of have to look back now that I've been investigating psychedelics a lot

because I've had my own religious experience where I felt like I've been given messages from God or a higher being and they tend to be similar to those passed down throughout history. So you kind of wonder how much did psychedelics play a role in our creation of religion? Next time you come in or if you can get it, if you can find it, you've got to pick up John Marco Allegro's The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross. Okay. Next time you come in, if you come in again, remind me, and I'll give it to you, and you can borrow it. It's hard to get because it's out of print

because the Catholic Church bought up the rights for the book and scooped it up and stopped it. But there is one that you still can get that's in print. It's called The Dead Sea Scrolls and the Christian Myth. Oh, you know what? Wait a minute. I should change that. Jan Ervin started republishing The Saken Mushroom and the Cross. So you can still get it. And that's really awesome of him that he did that. I don't know how he went about getting the rights to that, but it used to be that it was a very

difficult book to get. But it's basically by a guy who, this guy deciphered the Dead Sea Scrolls for over 14 years, this guy, John Marco Allegro, and wrote a book on his interpretations of what the language that he had read. And he said that he was the only one that was an ordained minister, but he was also agnostic. He was the only one in the Dead Sea Scrolls that was an agnostic that was in the committee for deciphering it. And his interpretation of the Bible after 14 years of studying the Dead Sea Scrolls was that the entire religion was a massive misunderstanding. And what it was really originally about was fertility rituals and the consumption of psychedelic mushrooms. And that these allegories and these stories and all these different parables,

they were designed to hide the true nature of the knowledge that they didn't want passed on to the Romans when they were conquered. They didn't want it passed on. They wanted to hide it in stories and that this is what the apple of Adam and Eve was about and this was this rebirth of the understanding of the universe that would exist if you had taken mushrooms, if you had taken psychedelic mushrooms, was what they were describing. And all these various stories and all these different events,

they were essentially trying to document the knowledge that they had received from having these psychedelic trips. And it's unbelievably intense when you read that and then put it into play and then start thinking like, oh, wait a minute i get it these fucking ancient people who knew nothing just stumbled upon this shit that made literally made them who they were created them and then all of a sudden they realized it was going away whether it was going away because of additional climate change which they started

losing mushrooms and they started preserving them in honey and preserving them in honey also started creating fermented honey, which became mead, which is alcohol, which led to more alcohol based society. And as they move slowly away from mushrooms and slowly away from psychedelic drugs, they move to like almost an anti-psychedelic in alcohol. And that's when shit went haywire. This disconnect from psychedelics was what caused all these cultures to go haywire. It's really fascinating. And they, religions have a way of prosecuting psychedelic losers, losers, users throughout history. I'm a psychedelic loser. But they would call it the work of the devil, and that's what I ran into with the Mazatecs

who I was working with up in Oaxaca, is that they had to, when the Spaniards came, they had to flee into the hills to continue the mushroom tradition. Wow. And now you'll actually see, I went to San Jose del Pacifico, one town where the mushrooms are readily accessible,

and this other town, Huatla de Jimenez. And you'll see on the churches they have Jesus and Mary, and then on the other side they have a mushroom. So they actually worship the mushrooms. They've kind of mixed, I guess to survive, they mixed Catholicism in with their worship of these mushrooms. And it's pretty trippy, per se, to see it painted on these churches. That's actually a big part of really ancient religious artwork, period. You know, a lot of, if you look in, look up, do some research on

the connection between mushrooms and even the Catholic church, there's mushroom iconography all over the place. And really ancient descriptions, like one of the earliest depictions of Adam and Eve on some ancient fresco is Adam and Eve with a mushroom tree in between them. Have you ever seen that image? No. See if you can pull that up, Jamie. Adam and Eve mushroom picture. And we'll find the description of it.

And Eve mushroom. Yeah. We just lost track of all this stuff. It's also one of the reasons, yeah, it's right away you can pull up that image. It's pretty intense that's uh that's an ancient image of adam and eve i mean look at that that's crazy by the mushroom that's fucking crazy it was really strange for me when i was in mexico

to see them blessing the mushrooms on the altar uh instead of the communion holy water they give you mushrooms and that's your sacrament that's what you eat there's another one Jamie pull up there's another one that's a different image but a very very similar image see that one on the far left far left

yeah right there click up that one look at that isn't that trippy that's from 1147 they call it CE now they don't call it AD anymore for whatever reason

but that's from 1147 so they knew even back then about psychedelic plants having some sort of a connection to Christianity and these were from churches so it's really fascinating that that's just something that went away

it was something that was a part the doorways, the shape of the doorway being very mushroom-like. A lot of these, they look like a mushroom cap. They didn't choose that. It wasn't an accident. There was a guy, Jack Herrer, and before he had a stroke and then he eventually had a heart attack and wound up dying. He was a very important part of the hemp movement in letting people know he was a Goldwater Republican. And he wrote a book called The Emperor Has No Clothes about marijuana and the real root of the propaganda

that allowed marijuana to become an illegal drug. And his thing that he was working on before he got sick was all on the connections between psilocybin and religious uh religious uh thought religious period the creation of religions and he had some really amazing old paintings i wish i knew where he had collected these these images but of people lost in like a dance of ecstasy like they they were naked, and they were covered by this translucent mushroom. And it was like a reoccurring theme in really ancient artwork that was religious artwork, that these people were engaging in ritualistic behavior with psychedelics, and it was a part of the church,

where there was something that was originally for everybody, and then when it became more scarce, was just controlled by the upper crust of the religious organization. Or, you know, what happened over how many periods of hundreds if not thousands of years, which is hard for us to kind of let it sink in how much of a shift 100 years can be. Think about it this way. 200 years ago, if you wanted a picture of something, you had to draw it. And if you wanted to get around on something, you had to ride an animal. That's just 200 years ago. You know, 200 years ago, slavery was legal and all those things. So just wrap your head around that and

then try to move forward to thinking 200 years before that, 200 years before that. And just thinking if at any point in time during that period, the pipeline gets cut off to the most influential connection to spirituality known to mankind. And then people are left to, boom, fend for themselves and figure things out. And then the stories are, they go from these things, which you have this repeatable connection through ceremony to the Mother Earth, to the universe, to God, to love, and then no connection. The connection is completely severed.

All you have is words describing no connection. The connection is completely severed. All you have is words describing this connection. Boy, it would take on a hollow tone and then all of our primate behavior and instincts and all the shitty aspects of human beings, control and ego would flourish and rise to the top and even be fed by alcohol, which is the anti-psychedelic. And then culture is left with these words, these hollow words written on animal skins from back when people were, even then when they wrote these things down,

probably grasping to the last remaining fibers of this former existence that they had in symbiosis with the plant knowledge. Isn't that the irony and humor in the universe that so many people spend their entire lives searching for this religious experience, thousands and thousands of dollars, and you can get it for free growing on cow shit?

And isn't it funny that when someone wants to call you on your nonsense, they call you on your bullshit? Yeah. Oh, that is such bullshit. It's like there's nothing that's going to let you see what's bullshit and not bullshit like mushrooms. Exactly. And I think we've had the push towards legalization of marijuana. And I think the next big movement should be to legalize mushrooms.

I mean, they grow everywhere. They're a natural product. They've been proven, as I said before, not to be addictive. They're not neurotoxic. Your caffeine in your coffee is more toxic on your body and your system. So why not develop that next push for mushroom legalization? I couldn't agree more. And I think what we need to do is it needs to be done in a professional setting, like hire people. They have really acclaimed ayahuasqueros that everybody loves and goes to. Figure out a way to hire someone and have someone run a mushroom

center like that. A person who is an experienced voyager, a person who's pure in their intent, and they can help people. And what an unbelievably rewarding life that would be for someone who instead would be worrying about their physical safety in performing these things. They'd have to do that under, you know, secret conditions to hide from people and someone have to look out the window to make sure the jackbooted thugs don't kick down the door and stop them when they're in the middle of enlightenment, you know, and arrest them and go throw them in some rat infested fucking cage somewhere. To not have to worry about that and to be able to actually give people this experience in a in a real pure setting would be pretty nice and this is where people go fuck it's so tired rogan is

fucking psychedelic talk i get it i'm tired of me too man i'm tired of me too trust me it's so profound and what the mushrooms did for me and what they do i think they're they could be so effective especially for women and traditionally psychedelics have been more of a male discussion topic. But I think women, I will admit, I think they may even need them more. Why more? We tend to be more self-critical than men are. And so that's a prefrontal cortex being overactive. And so that leads to depression and anxiety. And what the psilocybin does, they've actually done scans of brains when people are on psilocybin is it decreases the blood flow to that area of your brain so that for once, and this is what happened for me, is finally everything just went

silent. And it was so profound. I just burst into tears and I just could not stop crying because I hadn't had silence for so long. And at that point, because I had that silence, I was able to go back and rewatch my life like a movie and see all these things that had happened over just the span of two years and then slowly realized, okay, that's why I was in the position I was in. And I was able to reprocess all of these stored memories. And if you look at women, what is it, one fourth of women in their 40s and 50s are on some kind of antidepressant that's just a bandaid on the bullet wound. And I felt like the mushrooms actually got in to my soul and cured and helped perfect my limbic system, which is what Western medicine is ignoring.

That is a really strange number, isn't it? One quarter of people are on antidepressants over X amount of age. I've always wondered why it is women are uniquely drawn to those things after they get to be a certain age. Like, what is it? What is it about antidepressants? It's just a quick fix, maybe. Is that what it is? Is it a biological issue that comes with their body slowing down and they become less and less happy? And, you know, maybe that could be something that could be altered by exercise or by, you know, like a man can stimulate his testosterone with squats and, you know, there's various, you know, hormonal ways they could do that. But do women, do they have anything

out there that expands your natural female sexual hormones? Is there anything that does do that? I think there are hormone replacements people can take, but I don't know of any natural I'm just not to that age yet. Yeah, but I would wonder that at a certain point if their body just slows down so much that they just feel shitty.

They're just not producing hormones correctly anymore and that's what leads them to try to find happiness in a pill. They need something that gives them a little serotonin boost, you know? And what's so sad is that a lot of times with these medicines, not all of them, but it's actually permanently changing your serotonin levels and depleting them. So you are dependent on these medicine just to get back to where you were when you started taking it. I think those medicines are really important for some people though. That's where it gets real sketchy because I don't want to write off antidepressants because I know people that

have benefited from them. The question is, would they have benefited equally well from something else? Some people, maybe. I know some dudes that have actually gotten on them and then to help their life and then they slowly wean themselves off. And then I know also people that they benefit from the natural way of doing it by taking 5-HTP and finding that that gave them an elevated mood. And then exercise is a big one. They've also done studies that show

that exercise, rigorous exercise, is equally effective for increasing happiness as antidepressants are in some people. So it's like, how do you know? I know personally guys who benefited from antidepressants. So you can't say this guy shouldn't take it because I don't know what's going on in his head, you know? And I don't understand the actual science behind it all. I can parrot it, but I don't really understand what the fuck is going on, like comprehensively. And I think that you would have to really study it for a long time to really understand it comprehensively. But I think there should be more than one option. That's my point. My point is it's real problematic when you got

something like Partnership for a Drug-Free America, and they get money from pharmaceutical companies to go after other drugs. I mean, it's one of the most hilarious aspects of our culture. I mean, it's one of the most hilarious aspects of our culture. But the fact is that alcohol companies paid for ads against marijuana. That's a fact. That's what a partnership for a drug-free America entails. Prescription drug companies, alcohol companies, all paid part of that. Just ridiculous.

So there should be a bunch of different options available. That's why I'm trying to talk about my story with psychedelic use and how much it helped me, just so people know when the other options haven't worked. Like you said, Joe, I'm not discounting. I'm sure a lot of people have been helped from pharmaceuticals. But I think some people have tried them. And because it is the only option, they feel like, oh, my gosh, this is it. And that's why so many of these soldiers who have post-traumatic stress disorder end up taking their own lives.

And I interviewed one soldier who was at that point. He had been on antidepressants and nothing was working. He had a panic attack that sent him to the emergency room and almost killed him because his heart rate was so quick. sent him to the emergency room and almost killed him because his heart rate was so quick. And luckily he heard about MDMA and psilocybin and went to a concert and got some. Wow. And that had profound effects. He wasn't able to be in crowds, and then within weeks he was able to go back out into society. And now he actually takes the mushrooms and travels. It's like an underground railroad of psychedelics between

soldiers. And he travels around the country dosing his buddies so that they can kind of get out of this rut, those that haven't been helped by antidepressants. And the MDMA shows, I know you talk with Rick Doblin a lot, it just shows such profound promise that in one study they had people who had treatment resistant PTSD. So nothing was working. And 83% of the people in this study who were given MDMA combined with psychotherapy no longer had the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. Whereas 25% of people who just were given psychotherapy were healed. So, I mean, that's pretty profound numbers there. Monster numbers.

Could you imagine if that number was any other sort of medication? Exactly. Every doctor would be prescribing it to you. It would be a no-brainer. You would go to the doctor and they would immediately prescribe it to you. And we have 22 soldiers a day killing themselves needlessly, Joe. And that weighs on my shoulders now because I was never officially diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. But I do know, especially after talking with a lot of these soldiers, I was having symptoms of it.

And knowing how profoundly effective the psychedelics were on helping me and curing my anxiety and letting me process those traumatic memories, it's so sad to know that there's so many people out there that haven't been connected with this medicine yet or are being misled. And the United States government knows that MDMA, they've been told many times, they've been shown the results of this study. The Pentagon knows that it's effective. Why hasn't it been legalized?

Well, because someone can profit from it not being legalized. That's the only reason. And it's too easy to grow. That's the problem. These drugs that are really beneficial, boy, does nature make them readily available. Because nature wants us to take them. Nature knows we're insane. You could drive, especially if you live in a nice place like Seattle where it rains a lot, you could drive down the street, throw pot seeds out the window. Just throw them as you drive,

and then come back a couple months later and pot be growing everywhere. It would be unavoidable. It's that easy. It's like, we're all right, dude. Hey, you need fertilizer? Nope, nope, nope, nope. Don't need anything. Don't worry about me. I'll just grow right here. The best things in life are free. It's for sure. And I'm a firm believer that nature has created. I used to be a skeptic, but now I am a believer that nature has created something to heal all of our ailments. And we just need to be connected with that. And we need to realize that sometimes it's the more natural route that's more effective versus going the pharmaceutical route. And oftentimes the pharmaceutical route is sort of based on something that came from the natural route in the first place. I mean,

the lessons learned from using natural materials sometimes, I mean Sometimes one thing that they want to do so much in the jungle, they want to extract pharmaceutical drugs out of these jungle plants. That's a big reason why there's so much exploration in the jungle. Besides using all the wood, they're clear-cutting giant chunks of that forest. One of the things that the medical community is really concerned about when they're doing that is that when they're clear- is that when they're clear cutting, I mean, they're destroying ecosystems. And when they're destroying ecosystems, we know there are hundreds of thousands of different types of plants down there. And we have no idea if the cure to cancer is not locked up in some weird fucking

berry that no one has ever discovered. We just don't know. And it might be. It really might be. They found this fucking spider. The Brazilian wandering spider. And they're trying to use it for a better Viagra. Because this spider is the most poisonous spider they've ever found. Kills you. And when it kills you, one of the ways it kills you is with an erection that is unbelievably

painful. Literally breaks the skin on your penis. So even if you get through it, which many people don't. It bites you and then you get this erection. You get it. It affects somehow or another the nitric oxide production of your body and it injects you with something that does something to the whole mechanism. And your whole body becomes unbelievably painful and rigid and you get an erection. And the erection is like,

have you ever thrown a hot dog on a grill, and it plumps and then it pops? Yeah, that's your penis. It plumps, and apparently it breaks it. If you live, even if you live, your sexuality's ruined. You're never having, your dick is broken. It doesn't work anymore.

Like, it redlines that thing until pistons start firing out of the sides of it. So even if you do survive, you're broken. And so they found this fucking creepy spider and they're trying to figure out how to make like the best hard on pill ever with this. Like forget about Viagra. Like we're talking, you just need like a molecule of this shit. Whomp. Throw it in your system and you have erections on demand. It's like I was saying, nature has a cure for everything.

Even there's this one shaman in the Amazon and his entire village was sick and he couldn't cure them. And so he thought his entire tribe was going to be wiped out. So legend has it he drank ayahuasca and walked into the jungle and these hands came out and showed him this frog, which is the cambo frog. It's the most poisonous frog in the jungle. And showed him how to kind of milk the frog and then apply the poison to the people in the village to cure what was ailing them. And he was able to, as legend has it, cure his whole village. Well, now this cambo frog venom is used as a vaccination. So instead of the traditional vaccinations we give here in the U.S., they use this frog venom to vaccinate the children

and also to make the men stronger as they hunt. And I actually got it. And what they do is they just kind of cauterize your arm and put a little on you, and right away you feel like you're being poisoned. So your whole body reacts to produce all of these antibodies in an emergency effort to try to save your life and you just feel the blood pounding through your head and it's almost it's so intense it's like going you feel like it will shoot through your fingertips and and like all

these frogs are running through you and your your lips start to swell and you're sitting there thinking am i really gonna die like what the hell did i just take that's what i was thinking at the time and then um you just violently vomit after, like from the depths of your soul and all of these toxins leave your body. And after going through this for about an hour, you just feel miraculous. Like, like all of the toxins have been pulled out of you and you feel energy for months to come because your body's produced all these antibodies to fight infection. And I got it done about three months ago, and I feel great. Whether I'd recommend it to everybody, but that's just frog venom,

a natural substance in the environment. And they say it potentially has promise for HIV patients because of the flood of antibodies and other people facing autoimmune disorders, which I believe it could potentially have that effect. It seems like it if it doesn't really poison you, but it fires all your systems on go, like red alert, you know, we're being poisoned and it produces all these, like Dr. Carl Hart was saying, compensatory mechanisms that that might be beneficial to increasing your health.

That totally kind of makes sense. And I, like I said, I feel great. I felt like I've had more energy since I've done it. It might just be a placebo once again. But placebo works. That's the problem. Yeah, I feel great. In some ways, this guy that was telling, the healing guy that was pressing on your back,

when I was like, how is this working? Explain it. When he was explaining that it's a placebo, part of me was like, bitch, shut the fuck up. But then the other part of me was like, wait a minute placebo effects do work so you almost have to be dumb enough to believe this guy for his stuff to work but what is it that's working like how is it that's working and when you talk to the shamans that were legit like you know you had the one guy that likes to grab you but then you pass that, and there's this other guy who's totally legit. Did you ever ask him how they figured this stuff out?

How they figured out ayahuasca? Ayahuasca. What is the explanation? How do they figure out how to add all these thousands of plants, brew these two together, and do a really complicated process that takes a long time to get this one thing, and it tastes like shit, and yet they drank it anyway and then had these experiences like how the fuck did they ever figure that out it's not like they had microscopes it's not like they were botanists um apparently it was brought to them by by the

spirits that's the universal story i've heard from from every shaman is that somehow they are visited by um spirits or beings that then showed them to combine these two, the ayahuasca vine and the chacruna leaves out of thousands and thousands of species. Other people say that it's Mother Nature's way of fighting back against the insanity of mankind, that ayahuasca actually was made by the plants and somehow that plant spirit was given to the people to show them how to make it and by some beliefs the ayahuasca I don't know if you're familiar with epigenetics but when you have a lot of trauma it actually changes your DNA and it makes you more prone to be depressed or or

insane and so by some shamans beliefs the ayahuasca is actually getting in one man at a time and restructuring our DNA and getting rid of all of this negative epigenetics. And it's just Mother Nature's way of fighting back against the insanity. So I get different stories from every shaman, but the epigenetics one tends to be the more common denominator that I've heard from several of them. more common denominator that I've heard from several of them, that they believe it is actually Mother Nature fighting back and trying to heal us, heal our limbic systems, so we don't have this collective madness anymore, one person at a time. Who knows how long that's going to take?

They're on a different time schedule. Maybe it's a thousand years, but it is working one person at a time. I've met people who've had profound miracles on these substances. I've also met people who haven't. But it's not for schizophrenics. It's not for people using antidepressants. You have to make sure you're off the medicines or it could kill you. Whoa.

That's an important point. Yeah. What do they do when people go down there if they're on antidepressants? Do people ask? They do. They make it go down there if they're on antidepressants? Do people, like, do they ask? They do. They make it really clear, and then they ask. How long do you have to get off of it for? I don't know the exact.

That's something that would be worth Googling, but you can't be on antidepressants. Ayahuasca does not like antidepressants. That's very important there, folks. Yeah, very important. And also, people who are prone to have schizophrenia, the ayahuasca and psychedelics in general, tend to allow that to come on earlier. It doesn't mean it wouldn't have already happened. It doesn't cause schizophrenia. You are already going to get it, but because the psychedelic might actually make it come on a couple days earlier or a couple days, a couple years earlier.

And I was even next to one woman in a ceremony who was having a schizophrenic episode while on the medicine. And it was pretty terrifying. And so reaffirmed my belief to make sure to mention to people, you know, certain people the medicines aren't made for. Terrence McKenna had another interesting way of looking at the development of these things, the development of things like ayahuasca, that these people that lived in these indigenous cultures, they didn't have metallurgy and they did have an advanced social system. So as they went through hundreds and then thousands of years of the same culture evolving, the way they spread out in their knowledge base, it didn't go to architecture, it didn't go to the construction of large buildings

or airplanes or machines or engines. It went instead to plants and that their knowledge base and the information that they passed down from generations to generations and they're expanding on the ideas that they currently were aware of all involve nature. It was really kind of a fascinating way to look at it. It's just when, you know, Europeans were going this way, they were going a different way, but the same process seems to exist in every human culture that people start at one point wherever they're at, and then they start advancing. They start advancing, figuring things out, adding to their knowledge base. But these people people they did it all entirely

in a natural setting they never changed the setting the setting was always like huts and things and living amongst the animals and being a part of this whole nature thing and then in doing so communicating in some way shape or form with this spirit world whether it's through eating mushrooms and tripping and then taking back some of that information and applying it, whatever it was that the plants talked to them and gave them this information. And then they figured out how to pass it on through generation to generation and explain, this is what you use when you get burnt. This is what you use when that, this can send you to Jupiter. But you know this but i i agree that nature has something for every single ailment that we face and and what's so sad too mentioning that about the

indigenous cultures living close to nature actually connecting with this healing energy is how much we've come apart from that especially here in in los angeles you know you think um there's this website i was looking on a couple weeks ago, like earthing.com, where people are actually so disconnected from nature that they're buying earthing mats that have like a wire connected out to the backyard and putting it under their beds. Wow. And if you think about it too, like some people,

something I've been trying to do is just go around barefoot, walk through the grass, really try to connect with the earth you know to allow that energy and knowledge to go through you but some people might spend years without their feet actually touching their earth and it's just so crazy to think how far we've become removed from nature that we have to buy earthing mats to put in our beds or put under your chair while you're at your computer. Yeah, it's pretty stupid. I mean, we've just lost this connection. And I think in the process, we've lost our sanity.

And we need to get that back. And that's why we need to start reevaluating these plants and start integrating them into our culture. And start really waking up to how ridiculous these laws are, that you're making Mother Nature illegal. You're telling me a mushroom that grows on cow shit all across the world is illegal. Yeah, it's dangerous. It just is. It's insane.

There's also the feeling that you get when you're in the woods that's a palpable, real feeling of being connected to nature. There's a calming effect of walking through the woods. Like you go on a hike through the woods, you're walking, there's all these beautiful trees and you see everything. It's like you feel different. You feel different because you're in the vibe of nature.

You're like immersed in this world that really doesn't give a shit about you. I mean, you're there or you're not there. If this is the world, I mean, it is what it is. It's not dependent on you to hit the light switch. It just is, you know, it will be here before you, it will be here after you. It just is what it is. It's trees and animals are running by and we sort of affected by our presence, but we're a part of it when we're in it. And when you're in it, you feel it. And we kind of, we've removed all that. We put up buildings and a fence and a fucking highway and made everything hard. And we kind of, we've removed all that. We put up buildings and a fence and a fucking

highway and made everything hard. And we've sort of separated ourselves from this really intense connection to nature. And I think that we could never really understand what it's like to have an unbroken, you know, maybe thousand, maybe 2000 year connection and the culture that you're immersed in, the culture that you live in, to that world. And that's what those people are experiencing that live in the jungle that created ayahuasca. They're experiencing this long, unbroken connection to the actual mother itself. And it could be that's why we have so many mental health issues. Which don't exist in these indigenous cultures.

Exactly. And even in the areas, the towns we went to that rely on medicinal mushrooms, they don't use antidepressants instead when they're having grief or they're having a traumatic event in their life. They eat some mushrooms and go into the mountains or visit one of these healers. And so you look at the rates of happiness in these villages and these areas compared to what we're experiencing here in the United States. And you have to think to yourself, they must be doing something right. We should at least examine what they're using over our system that's not working. Yeah, no kidding. I'm really very hopeful, sometimes ridiculously so, about the human race. And part of it comes from my own personal experiences. Like, I really enjoy life. I really do.

I really enjoy my friends. I really enjoy what I'm doing. So I'm very positive in that way. I'm not ignorant to the ways of the world. I'm not ignorant to the news. But I also am not ignorant to the perspective of 7 billion people being alien to one individual. 7 billion people's problems all lumped up into your fucking head because you went online and stayed on too many websites and read too much shit, watched too many videos. That's not how you're supposed to

experience the world. Like we're not designed for that interface. The interface we're designed for is the interface you experience when you go on a hike through the woods. What you encounter is what is real in your own perceptions. These are the things that you can affect. These are the things that you can change. But that's all changed itself by having the ability to communicate and influence all these different people with your story, like what you're telling right here, what you told in your book, what you told when you first came on the podcast, but your experience working for a news organization that it seems, at least during the time that you were there, to have lost its way. And where this created turmoil and your own personal experience. And by expressing those things, you're literally changing everything around you.

You're literally affecting everything around you with the experiences that you've had and forcing change. And you're forcing it even more right now, whether you realize it or not, probably more so even tenfold than the last time you were on, because you're saying some crazy shit. You're a mainstream CNN reporter, and now you're some crazy tripper who travels the globe eating mushrooms and doing peyote buttons and fucking freaking out. I just feel like such a duty to deliver this message. And I know I'm taking a risk, and I know there will be some people who will criticize me. They can't, though. Carl Hart had a great point yesterday.

I keep bringing him up just because he's awesome. But one of the things he said, he said, if I have the data, I'll debate anyone. I have the data. And if I don't have the data, you're not going to hear me talking about it. But if I have the data, the data's on my side, I'm very confident. And the data, clearly, your personal data is undeniable. And just my own story from where I was then, pre-psychedelic to where I am now, I feel like I've had a complete rebirth. That's your data. Yeah. That's my data. I feel like it's near, I literally feel like my serotonergic system has been restructured and I find it nearly

impossible to get anxiety. And this is coming from someone who used to have constant butterflies in my stomach, have near panic attacks. And I just don't feel that anymore. And so you have to say, okay, what did I change in my life? Well, that was the psychedelic use. That was the main treatment I used to overcome this. And I just feel like it could help so many women, especially because, like I was saying earlier about them being so self-critical and really just so many people who just haven't taken the time

to stand outside of their life and analyze it objectively and make decisions not based on emotion or being self-critical. You know, it's kind of amazing. If this was like a product that we were trying to sell, you'd be like the best celebrity spokesperson ever. That's why I feel like I'm going to get, I feel like I just feel like whoever doesn't like my message is going to come try to just like smear my credibility and everything. They can't.

They can't. They can't. They can't. Until they experience it themselves, they can't. And once they do, they wouldn't. People who don't know, people who really have no idea, if they did mushrooms and they had that experience, they would go, oh, wow. I didn't even know. Yeah.

How could you know? I don't even blame them. I don't blame them for being skeptical. I think it's important. But I almost feel bad if they don't know. And I think you kind of must feel the same way because I can tell that you're very compelled to talk about this. And you took a long time to decide to kind of go public about this. You know, we had conversations about this quite a long

time ago. Yeah, a year ago. That's when I was coming back from Ayahuasca and I wrote you and just thank you for introducing me and told you how transformative it was. And I was reading that email going, check out this crazy bitch. She listened to me. Who the hell listens to me? She she's nuts yeah but i turns out i actually i was right and then and then after then i had after the ayahuasca i went to thailand where i was able to access um psilocybin mushrooms that grow on elephant and um buffalo poop and they're just so amazingly healing and and so i wrote you after that, but I took time to actually discuss

it because I really needed to try to absorb as much knowledge as I could from the plants and really figure them out journalistically. Like I was on one path of healing and also another path as a journalist. And I just wanted to experience the good trips and experience the bad trips and really figure out what these medicines are about before I came forward with my story, because I know some people may hear this and then decide to try psychedelics. And so I needed to be 100% sure I was on the right path, which I know now. Now you not only are on the right path, you feel, but you also are putting other people

on this path. You created this crazy website. So explain your website. Yeah. Explain what you're doing now. What happened was when I started researching about ayahuasca and stuff, like I said, I went to a center that I wasn't, I couldn't really trust. I noticed there wasn't a lot of websites out there that could connect people with knowledge about these psychedelics. Also, I noticed there wasn't a lot of psychedelic journalism because there's not a lot of experienced journalists, or it's just not being funded, or I mean, a various amount of factors. Well, Erowid is pretty awesome. Erowid is amazing,

yeah. Yeah, one of the most important resources for anybody that is interested in any of the effects of any of these psychedelic experiences, drugs, medicines, whatever you want to call them, compounds, Earwood is one of the best. Earwood.org, right? Earwood.org and also maps.org. They're both fantastic to go and find out about research studies and just read other people's trip reports and experiences. And what I'm doing with this site is creating like the Huffington Post of psychedelic news so we're just going to be focusing on the war on drugs accurate reporting independent reporting on these topics also we we're building the foundation right now so we have like we want to make it like a virtual city where people can come and sit down and have a cup of coffee and chat with

others who've done it to reduce harm harm reduction also so people can find accurate information and reviews of different centers and just find, we're going to take all these studies that have been around since the 1950s and send them back out to the public so they can get this information. And I just think it's really vital right now because when you Google news alert, which I often do with all these substances, I'll Google news alert like ketamine, which has profound effects on depression and psilocybin. And the stories that always come up are the ones of the guy getting busted for selling it or the rare festival death. Rarely do you actually get news on how these substances are being used medicinally. So that's what we're trying to

create with this new site. Reset.me. Reset.me. What is me? Instead of.com, what is me? Where does it come from? It's another country. For this purposes, it's me as in resetting yourself. It's a great way to remember it, reset.me. I mean, it's a really perfect name. But what country is it? That's a good question. We might want to look that up. I should know that, but I use it more in the – I remember listening to a talk of Terrence McKenna's,

and he said that using DMT and different psychedelics can be like hitting the reset button on your brain, clearing your hard drive of all the trauma. And I believe that's what psychedelics did for me. I've heard you describe them that way as well. And so for people who really need to hit that reset button in life and they've tried other therapies and it hasn't worked, we're going to be providing journalism on these psychedelic therapies and also alternative non-prescription therapies.

It's Montenegro? Is that what it was? Montenegro. Montenegro. The government of Montenegro. Okay. Well, we're not It's Montenegro? Is that what it was? Montenegro. Montenegro. The government of Montenegro. Okay. Well, we're not based in Montenegro, but... Well, they sold their domain name rights, a lot of countries did, for sale and like biz, like, you know, like there's a bunch of them that they sold..us, you can get a.us, you know. It's interesting. So that's awesome, reset.me. And has it launched yet? It hasn't launched yet.

It's still being built, so it should launch within a month. But once again, things change sometimes if it takes a little longer. Well, you've got to come on again when it launches and let us know. We'll tweet about it, and we'll let people know, and we just talk for three hours. Yeah, for sure. And if anyone wants to go to reset.me, you can follow all of our social media accounts we're really

looking for people who are experienced users kind of the teachers who can come and and be there be waiting for the students and and just people who support our message and who are interested in writing for us or sharing their own stories of healing and how are you avoiding trolls you know, prepare. You just announced yourself to the world. Look, people that listen to this podcast are not universally cool. There's a certain percentage of them that are fucking trolls. And they will launch themselves upon you in search of humor with some really fake, profound tales

of things happening to them in the jungle. And I guarantee you now it's going to be about titty-grabbing while you're out cold. There's going to be several stories of what the bad Iowa scarrow did to me. I know, I was debating telling that story. Too late. It's out there. I think we're hoping the community will self-regulate. There's already people out there who I'm sure you've interacted with, Joe, who have reputable Twitter accounts, who've been really passionate about

psychedelics, who we've recruited to help us in our forums and just help us. We also have a section on the site where you can post links to different news stories and stuff that you find interesting. So we have these people on board to help us kind of regulate. That being said, you can't fight everything. So we're expecting it to come. But the team behind this, we all met doing ayahuasca. And we've all been so profoundly affected that we want to bring this new creation forward to try to help others.

That's the new Amber Lion. There you go, folks. Tripping around the world. Wow. Amber Lion version 2.0 reset. Wow. Well, congratulations on everything, on your journey, on this website, and the whole thing. I think you're a very brave person.

And I thought you were a very brave person when you were talking about your experiences at CNN. And you stick your neck out. You really do. And so it's cool to be your friend. It's cool to watch all this happen. And it's cool to have you on the show. Thank you very much. Thank you, Joe.

It's such an honor. It's been a lot of fun. Amber Lyon, ladies and gentlemen, please follow Amber on Twitter. Amber Lyon on Twitter, L-Y-O-N. And go to the website, reset.me. It's reset.me. And within a month or so, there will be some shit up there. And I'm sure Amber will keep you posted on Twitter and will keep you posted on Twitter, too. It's reset.me. And within a month or so, there'll be some shit up there.

And I'm sure Amber will keep you posted on Twitter and will keep you posted on Twitter too. So thank you. Thank you. Thank everybody. Thanks to our sponsors. Thanks to Lumosity. Go to lumosity.com slash joe. Click the start training button.

Start playing your first game at lumosity.com slash joe. Click the start Training button. And thanks also to Onnit.com. Go to O-N-N-I-T. Use the code word ROGAN and save 10% off any and all supplements. Thanks also to LegalZoom. LegalZoom. Go to LegalZoom.com and enter ROGAN in the referral box at checkout for more savings. We'll be back in a little bit with Matt

the Terra, the Terra Sarah. And then Thursday, Shane Smith from Vice.com will be here as well. We're going to have a fucking great time. We'll probably get drunk. See you soon. Much love.