The Joe Rogan Experience - #477 - Dennis McKenna & Joshua Wickerham

Episode Date: March 28, 2014

Dennis McKenna is an ethnopharmacologist, author, and brother to well-known psychedelics proponent Terence McKenna. Josh Wickerham is the chief advisor to the ESC, Ethnobotanical Stewardship Council. http://www.ethnobotanicalcouncil.org

and just press the music let's just go right with music we have no uh no commercials today i like it oh that's great we're commercial free ladies and gentlemen we're brought to you by the universe experience train by day joe rogan podcast by night all day ladies and gentlemen a very special episode. Podcast sponsorship free. Dennis McKenna and Josh Wickerham. Josh is from the Ethnobotanical Stewardship Council. You were one of the founders of this?

That's right. And what exactly does that mean for folks who have no idea what ethnobotanical or stewardship means? A lot of people struggle with counsel. Or counsel. Like you're counseling people on ethno-botanical stewardship. Imagine bringing that up at a party. Well, the ESC is dedicated to transforming lives through assuring the safety and sustainability of traditional plants.

So that means transforming people's lives through experiences with plants, but it also means the sustainability of plants and the safety in their use. So we're starting with ayahuasca and iboga. Yeah, you shouldn't start with, like, ferns. People don't get excited about... No.

It's hard to get eucalyptus. People really don't get fired up about that. But ayahuasca, anything involving tryptamines, for folks who've experienced it, it's something worth saving. Exactly. Do you guys find it odd that in this day and age, in 2014, the average person who you would go up to to try to discuss these issues with would have no idea what you were talking about? go up to to try to discuss these issues with would have no idea what you were talking about. Actually, I think over the last few years, that's kind of changed. Ayahuasca is emerging into mass consciousness, and I think that's a good thing.

I would say 10 years ago, 15 years ago, if you approached the average person on the street and you said, ayahuasca, they'd look at you like you had a speech impediment or something. Ayawhat? Yeah. But chances are, people would recognize it now. And not in necessarily know what it's about, not necessarily have a negative or positive view of it, but the meme is out there. And

I think that's a good thing, ultimately. It's most certainly a good thing. I agree with you. The meme, it's certainly out there with young folks. Right. But with folks, I'm 46. With folks my age and older, it gets a little sketch. Yeah. It's like, wait a minute.

What? What are you doing? Folks who already have mortgages and families, those are the ones it's very difficult to get them to even consider what you're talking about. You'd be surprised. The ESC has sent out a call for experts, and we've been infiltrated by the mainstream people that do evaluation work for the World Bank and USAID.

They're interested in ayahuasca. People are going down to South America to have these transformative experiences, to sit in ceremony. There's a lot of underground activity in the U.S. as well and Europe where it's not legal. But in South America, in Peru, ayahuasca is protected as national patrimony. That's awesome. Wow, that's beautiful. Do you ever worry that you're being infiltrated by government agents? We want that. Exactly, right? I'm not doing anything illegal.

We're working in countries where ayahuasca has been used for hundreds of years traditionally. And we're looking at increasing the safety of it so that we're creating a kind of self-regulatory model so that we can take that model to places where it's illegal and say, this is a totally safe medicine if you do it right. People with certain medical conditions shouldn't take ayahuasca. But done with a skilled curandero or shaman in the right setting, it can be helpful for all sorts of psychological issues or PTSD or depression and just give people a new perspective on their lives. Most certainly.

I mean, I'm completely joking around, but what I was saying when I was, it's like, you know, that hasn't happened with marijuana. Marijuana, they're still fighting it tooth and nail, despite all the evidence that it's not just beneficial, but probably prevents a lot of cancers and does a lot of fantastic work with PTSD and with anxiety and, you know, all sorts of issues, medical issues. You know, interocular pressure for people with glaucoma and, you know, on and on and on. People with AIDS that are having a hard time keeping their appetite up. Cancer patients.

I mean, it's still, they fight a tooth and claw. And ayahuasca is a completely different barrel of monkeys. Ayahuasca is coming at this through the back door. I mean, it's interesting that it has gained recognition over time to the extent that it does. And to a certain extent, I would say it's, you know, Josh, people like Josh and me, we say we work for the plants, right? And ayahuasca has got its own agenda, interestingly. And people go down to South America and they have these experiences that are revelatory and self-transforming. But often they come back with an enhanced ecological consciousness,

an enhanced awareness of the, you know, connection between humanity and nature, the idea that nature is threatened. And I think of ayahuasca as sort of a messenger from a community of species that's trying to, you know, tell these monkeys to wake up, you clowns, you know, it's, you know, we're coming down to the wire. We're in a crisis here. you clowns, you know, it's, you know, we're coming down to the wire. We're in a crisis here. You've got to re-understand where you fit into nature and do what can be done in the ever shrinking time that's left. So people come back with this renewed sort of awareness of the interconnectedness of life and that we have a role in this, you know, we primates, and we have to re-understand what our role is as stewards of nature rather than exploiters of nature. And

ayahuasca, you know, that's the message it delivers to many people. And unexpectedly, they may not be going there to, you know, to experience that, but that's what they come away with. From your work and from your brother's work, Terrence McKenna, what I got that I never had considered before was that psychedelics in various forms may very well be responsible for why we are human beings in the first place, and our separation from them might be the whole reason why we're so haywire, why we're missing a crucial ingredient involved in the creation of cognitive thought in the first place, the creation of this ability to look at ourselves

and communicate our ideas and really become a human being. And then we're separated from the mother and left to our own devices, and all of our wild animal instincts sort of take over, and our animal instincts sort of don't coexist peacefully in this weird world that we have created as human beings, and then we create chaos because of it, because we can't see what we're doing. Right, right.

Ayahuasca allows you to see what you're doing. Ayahuasca, yes. Ayahuasca refocuses the whole understanding, I think, of the relationship that we have to nature. And I think that's what, you know, if you believe in plant intelligence, I mean, there are different ways of looking at plant intelligence. But it's interesting how often people, you know, they come out with this renewed understanding. And I think that's, you know, a desperate call on the part of the community of species. And ayahuasca has been delegated to be, to kind of lead that conversation. It's fascinating that ayahuasca is the one that's been, you know, in the forefront.

When mushrooms are so damn easy to grow, you could, I mean, anyone can essentially get a hold of some spores and start cooking them in your basement, like, really quickly. Whereas ayahuasca is probably the most complex, combinatory beverage that we know of, as far as, like, psychedelic brews. It's the one that requires the brews. It's the one that requires the most knowledge. It's the one that requires the most care and creating. And it's easier to extract DMT than it is to create Iowa. I mean, get all the plants and brew it together and know someone who really knows what they're doing,

how to cook up a good batch. It's weird that that's the one. Yeah, it has its, I think it's the one. Yeah, it has. I think it's because it's escaped from its home in the Amazon, and that's the area on the planet with the greatest biodiversity and all that. But it's got all those associations. People regard it. I mean, mushrooms are also important,

but they just don't seem to carry that same, I don't know what it is, emotional kick. Ayahuasca is the one right now that's getting all the attention, you know, and it's quintessentially a plant, right? Mushrooms aren't plants. So maybe that's part of the disconnect. I'm not sure. But, you know, aren't plants. So maybe that's part of the disconnect. I'm not sure. But, you know, all of these things in indigenous cultures are regarded as plant teachers. And as you mentioned, a lot of it comes down to tryptamine chemistry. And, you know, our brains, for some reason, are evolutionarily primed to react to tryptamines. I mean, we have these tryptamine detectors for some reason, and I think it's partly so that we can receive and interpret what they're trying to tell us. And what they're trying to tell us is there's not much time left,

and we have to really re-understand our relationship to nature. We have to realize that we're not separate from nature. Well, you're trying to overcome at least 2,000 years of Judeo-Christian history and those traditions. Their whole agenda in a certain sense is to devalue nature. Nature is something that we own. It's there for us to exploit. It's up there for us to rape. And we're busy doing that because, you know, my problem with those religions is the focus is always on the afterlife. So it tends to make you devalue this life. It makes you, you know, it teaches people to devalue nature, to devalue their bodies, to devalue personal experience, all of these things. And it leads to the very out-of-balance situation that we have going.

And what's disturbing to me is that we're all part of this circle of the converted. I mean we got the memo, you know, and the meme is spreading, the memo is spreading, but I'm not sure it's fast enough, you know. Do you think that it's possible that the human race is essentially cramming? You know how when you're about to do a test and you put it off to the last minute

and then, you know, the day before you're like, holy shit, I've got to deal with this. Right. And then you go bananas. You take an Adderall. You file through books until your head wants to explode. That is a characteristic that's very, very common for people that want to attack a project, especially an important project. Right. especially an important project.

It's almost like we have this thing where it has to be completely overwhelming, where it can't be ignored, and then we go into it full throttle. Is it possible that the human race is cramming and that maybe part of our self-destructive tendencies are actually us recognizing that we're fucking up and going into it more chaotically, more materialistically, more shallow, more nonsense, more Kim Kardashian, more American Idol, more horseshit, just to get you to the point where you get so sick of it, you puke it up and then move on. Yes.

And we're in the middle of an ecological crisis. Yes. And time is running out. We certainly are cramming. We're destroying the Amazon. We're destroying the climate. We're destroying the ocean. We're destroying the air.

We're destroying everything we get our greasy little hands on. And this is the first time in the 500 years of European colonization of the Americas that there's a kind of reverse sort of message coming from the Amazon. People are going there not to convert, but to be converted, to learn, to learn the traditions. And the indigenous people, 95% of their population was wiped out by viruses or wars or plagues. And now we have this opportunity to come back from the brink and work with ayahuasca that grows in the canopy of the rainforest. You can't have ayahuasca without the trees. And so it's an alternative to mining and oil exploitation. And there's money to be made in it. And I think coming back to cannabis, the reason the dialogue is starting

to change is because governments are realizing there's a lot of money to be made. Taxation, it's a solution to budget crises. And the same with ayahuasca tourism. I don't like to say tourism because people are legitimately seeking a spiritual experience. Some people just want to go have an experience. I don't think there's anything wrong with the word tourism, but I know what you're saying, like the frivolous idea. It kind of devalues. I don't think it does.

I think, you know, I think ayahuasca tourism is a beautiful way. Or a pilgrimage, perhaps. I think that tourism is a phase in our relationship to ayahuasca. I think that potentially if we can, you know, what I view is going on now is kind of a rough period, but what is really being played out here is the co-evolutionary relationship with these plants that have gone on, as you say, ever since we became cognitive beings. In fact, it was the plants that triggered that. And now, and that conversation is going on, but now the conversation has gone to a new level

where ayahuasca before was kind of, you know, it was under the stewardship of indigenous people confined to the Amazon. Now it's encircling the globe. And I think this is partly, this is what plants do. They like to spread. And they're spreading out into different cultures. And the plant itself is now, you know, even if the Amazon is destroyed, which it may well be, ayahuasca is not going to be destroyed. It's too late. It's already escaped.

But I think, you know, hopefully we can arrest this process. But what you're seeing is, has always been a co-evolutionary relationship where, you know, at some time, some points it's more quieter, it's underground, but at some points as the crisis deepens, it's becoming more and more public in a sense. And I think that's what you see going on. And potentially, I think that ayahuasca, we're now discovering that it's good for so many things, therapeutically, for addictions, for depression, for PTSD and that sort of thing. And that's all to the good. But we shouldn't make the mistake of thinking ayahuasca is only for sick people. You know, we're all wounded and we all need to understand something about our relationship to nature.

to nature, potentially the paradigms that are emerging in ayahuasca tourism or these ayahuasca-centered spiritual communities in the States, potentially this may transform mental health care in this country. It may transform psychiatry. And from that, it might might transform medicine and it might actually transform all these other institutions that we have to deal with whose values have become twisted over 2,000 years of bullshit and indoctrination you know and these institutions are not going away and they're fine. They just need to rediscover a moral dimension to the consequences of their action, if that makes any sense. Our cleverness far exceeds our wisdom, and that's a problem.

That's the problem. We've got to become wise, and when we couple that with our ingenuity and our cleverness, then we'll be on the way toward saving the planet, saving ourselves. I think there's also this growing understanding of all the factors that encompass a healthy person and how many of them have to do with your conception of reality. How many of them have to do with the way you think? How many have to do with how you view your environment? If you view your environment as this hostile, stressful, antagonizing, angry, negative place, you'll get sicker. And your body doesn't know what to do. It's fighting it constantly. And you're in a battle. And you're all stressed out. And you're susceptible to all sorts of things. And in that sense, there's a direct physical connection between psychedelic experiences and improved health. And that's something that people really need to understand.

And I think once that catches root, once people grasp that concept and understand the incredible pressure alleviating properties. Like I can remember one of the first times I ever did DMT, the day afterwards, like I had this completely different view of the world that I had to sort of apply now all these other and like figure out like do all these these factors that i've considered as being important how many of them am i going to throw out like the way i described it is like my computer rebooted and now only has one folder on the desktop and that folder is labeled my old bullshit and so now i have to open this folder and go, okay, how much of this is valid? Like, Jesus, this is my whole thought process. This is my whole mind.

This is how I interface with reality. Unfortunately, some of it made its way back in, you know, and then, you know, I had to do another trip, you know, a few months later, and then I threw out more of it. And it was a sort of a deliberate process of reevaluation.

You can't reject it all. There's some good stuff in that folder. But I think what the DMT experience, the psychedelic experience does, that's partly what it does. I like your analogy of the folder because now you're looking at the folder from the desktop. You're outside the folder. So it's liberated you. You were imprisoned in the folder before. Now you can look at it from the outside and you can go through and say, oh, you know, delete, delete, delete.

Oh, this is good. Let's keep this. Yeah. You know, let's integrate it. So, you know, ultimately this is a process of, you know, personal cleansing, both physically and emotionally and, you know, psychologically in your encounters with these things, but also cultural cleansing. You know, I mean, there are good memes out there and there are good things going on, but there's, you know, there's so much noise. There's so much bullshit.

It's hard to sort out what's worth preserving and what needs to be dispensed with. I think we're also kind of trapped in this weird world of our creations as far as technology as well. I think that technology, just like corporations, just like anything that sort of becomes a force that's constantly growing, it has a certain self-preservation aspect to it. And I think that we're completely connected to the idea of constant innovation and constantly improving technology. And that also has completely connected us to materialism

because materialism is the real driving force behind constant innovation. If we all just looked at our laptops and said, I'm good. Are you good? There's no need to. We call Apple right now. Hey, these are fucking great. Stop right there. You literally don't need to improve internet speed.

You don't need to improve the laptop. Everything's wonderful. Let's stop all this and let's move on to something else. Well, that's not what everybody wants. Everybody wants the newest, latest, greatest, fastest, dual video processor. I want a screen that rolls and folds. But that's part of the trap.

Yes. This idea that we have to keep upgrading to the iPhone X or whatever. I mean these tools work and they're used in the proper way. They can be tremendously important for consciousness evolution and transformation. That's what the psychedelics are. They're just tools. They're a kind of technology. And like I say often to my classes and elsewhere, technology in itself is neither good nor bad. Drugs are neither good nor bad. These technologies, it's all about how you apply them. That's where the moral dimension comes in. That's why you can misuse technology, internet technology, to propagate whatever the Kardashians are doing lately over the internet.

But you can also change hearts and minds with those tools. Like, for example, you know, this live streaming symposium that we're involved with, that our mandate is to plug this thing. But it's important. You know, this conference coming up in Amherst is just one example. Amherst, Massachusetts? Amherst, Massachusetts. Oh, I know it well. The socialist capital of Massachusetts.

Right. Perfect place to do this. This symposium that's coming, that's going to be live stream. People should go to, it's a cute name, symposium, P-S-Y-M-P-O-S-I-U-M. And it's going to be live streamed. And if you go to the website, you can sign up for tickets for live streaming. Give that out one more time for people that were struggling. Symposium.

P-S-Y-M-P-O-S-I-U-M. Cute, right? Yeah. Symposium.com. And if you go to their website, what you're going to see right now, which I had nothing to do with, you're going to see a little trailer for live streaming. And it's actually, it looks like a stealth advertisement for my new product coming out, which is the Dennis McKenna bobblehead. I'm in this trailer and I look like I have a movement disorder or something.

What is it? Why does it look like you have a movement disorder or something. What is it? Why does it look like you have a movement disorder? Huh? Let's play it. You want me to play it? No, we're playing it right now. Go to full screen. You'll see what I mean. Okay. I just looked at it this morning and I thought actually this bobblehead idea is not bad.

What's going on here? You see I'm just bouncing. You and Hamilton Morris? You're jamming. The idea's not bad. What is? What's going on here? Well, you see, I'm just bouncing around. You and Hamilton Morris? Right. You're jamming. How high was the person who made this? Pretty high. Pretty high.

Yeah. This is... He just made it last night. I looked at it this morning, and I said, seriously? Do you really want this to be on your homepage? Yeah. But there it is. The important thing is get past the trailer and you can sign up for this symposium,

which is these guys, these young fellows out in Amherst are really enthusiastic and good people. They want this conference to have an impact, and I think it will. Amherst is one of the few places in Massachusetts I'd consider living. I'm not familiar with it. It's great. Yeah, I've heard it.

I had an ex-girlfriend who moved out there when I was in high school, and I used to go out there and visit her. And I remember thinking, whoa, this is like a totally different world out here. It's all like Birkenstock wearing, strange, hippie, open-minded. It's this weird sort of strange place in the middle of Western Massachusetts. Western Massachusetts is a strange place in and of itself because you have Boston, which is a very big city, very educated, more colleges per capita than anywhere else. But then as you get out of Massachusetts, you might as well be in Kentucky for about an hour and 20 minutes. And then you get to this weird oasis where like the woods part,

and then you have this strange place. And Amherst was really highly educated and open-minded liberal community. Well, I'm not sure I've ever been there, but I'm looking forward to this conference. You'd enjoy it. It should be a lot of fun. It really is the perfect place. It's very much like a very small Austin in the middle of Massachusetts,

but with no music. Not as much music. The guys organizing the conference really are working with the plants and for the plants. You don't have to go there to participate. The beauty is this live sign up for 10 bucks. You get a screening of Neurons to Nirvana, a great film and access to all the presenters. Yeah. Have you interviewed or shown Neurons to Nirvana on your site? No. I mean,

you know, from a technical point of view, I'm not a filmmaker. You can criticize it from that point of view. But as an educational tool for psychedelics, I think this is really an interesting movie. And it's the kind of thing you can sit down with your parents and watch. And they will come away, maybe some of their assumptions will be shaken, you know. I mean, it's a very good educational tool. The subtitle is Understanding Psychedelic Medicines. And it's entertainingly done and it's a kind of a review of the cutting edge research on about four or five psychedelics, MDMA, LSD, mushrooms, ayahuasca,

and where the state-of-the-art research is on that. And these chemicals, you know, what we need to do, as we were talking about before, we need to change hearts and minds. I know it's a cliche, but these chemicals, the right circumstances are actually a way to do that. And coupled with that is education. Education is so important, and that's kind of the vision of these gentlemen, Brett Green and his colleagues, that symposia like this are an important component of this because it's a way of getting the information out. And the more people it can be gotten out to, the faster the change can be implemented.

Yeah, the change hearts and minds is an interesting cliche because we've heard it so many times. It's almost like we've heard wolf, wolf, wolf. There's wolves. There's wolves. Right. Holy shit, there's a wolf. Right. wolf wolf wolf there's wolves there's wolves right holy shit there's a wolf right like the first time i i did any psychedelics the first major one besides mdma was mushrooms and then

that was the my first experience like oh my god there's a wolf like this is this is a totally different thing this isn't something that you have to believe in this is something that's unavoidable right doesn't matter if you believe in it. Exactly. People should be prepared for it too. Well, you can't be. I really don't think you can be. I think the best you can be prepared for is to give up. Just let it go. Don't fight it.

Be prepared for that. Take a few yoga classes. Know what it's like to be uncomfortable and keep breathing. And then do it. And then listen. Listen to it. Surrender to it. The message just then do it. And then listen. Listen to it. Surrender to it. Yes.

The message is there. Yeah. You said earlier, which is a very controversial but oddly fascinating thing, that plants are the reason why we are human beings today. Why these plant medicines and these psychedelic compounds. Why is that so controversial? these psychedelic compounds. Why is that so controversial? I find that to be incredibly amazing when I talk to really intelligent people and I bring that idea up and they dismiss it like almost instantaneously. And I don't understand why, because I get it that they're connecting the idea of a drug to a bad thing. I get that. But when you want to talk about powerful influences on cognitive thought,

is there any more powerful influences on cognitive thought than a psychedelic drug? I don't think there is. I don't understand why that wouldn't be immediately considered at the top of the list, top of the short list, but it's not. It's heresy. That's the thing. It of the short list. But it's not. It's heresy. That's the thing. It's an unconventional idea. I mean, if you look at, you know, we as a species, we evolved in the rainforest initially.

And, you know, we evolved in an environment of incredible chemical diversity. You know, and it's absurd to assume, you know, and the reason there's such chemical diversity in the plant kingdom is that they're great chemists, you know, and they make all these chemicals for whatever purposes. That's how plants mediate their relationship with their environment, right? They substitute biosynthesis for behavior. This is what I say. This is a cliche. They can't react to their environment through behavior. They can't run away. They can't fight.

They fight through chemistry. And the other side of that coin is we are chemical systems. I mean, I hate to break it to you folks, but we're made of drugs, right? That's why drugs work. We're biochemical engines. Our brains are biochemical engines that run on neurotransmitters these plant compounds are our neurotransmitters essentially i mean you know they were in plants a long time before they were in our brains before there was even

complex brains enough to utilize these things and our you know in the course of evolution we internalize these things and adapted them to our own, like, internal signaling processes. So now we have the, you know, the neurological tools, if you will, to talk to the plants. You know, they've always been talking to us. Now we can actually have a conversation. And you get into the conversation,

and the conversation is, you know, you monkeys need to move to the next level. You need to get more conscious of your place in nature, our place in nature as a species. Realize that we're not separate from it, we're part of it. And if nature goes down, we go down. I mean, there is no escape. There's no ticket out of here. Not yet, anyway. And the plants are the tools to understand this. I mean, there's good scientific studies now that show that psilocybin, which is the one that's been studied can reliably induce a state that you might call a mystical experience. I prefer to call it a transcendent experience. But the nugget of the experience that it can elicit under the right experiences is an understanding

of we are all one. We're not separate. That's the core of, I think, the mystical insight that psychedelics bring about. Why should our brains even have evolved to have that kind of experience if it's not a way of kind of, I don't know, being able to initiate that conversation with the rest of species. I mean, they're counting on us, you know, because never before we've, you know, civilization and humanity has impacted nature in adverse ways. As long as we've been around, as long as we've had fire, you know. I mean, fire back in the Paleolithic and even earlier was a tremendously, not necessarily destructive force, but it was a transformative force on ecosystems. We didn't particularly use it in a conscious way. We used it in a way that served our purposes. But now with 7 billion people on the earth and counting and technologies that

no one ever imagined that we'd have at our fingertips, what we do now really matters, you know, because before that nature, the homeostatic mechanisms that tended to take nature, keep nature in balance, you know, we could cause tremendous ecological destruction and nature would eventually, you know, that would fade away and nature would come back into balance. Now we're actually in danger of permanently screwing up those mechanisms. So we actually have to kind of consciously intervene or be conscious of what we're doing because the consequences of what we do are just so much greater. Does that make any sense? Oh, no, it absolutely does. It absolutely

does. I think there's another thing that we need to put into perspective is the relatively short amount of time that human beings have had access to the information that we have today and the terrible effects of propaganda and how long propaganda can stick. You know, when we're talking about just the just say no era of the 80s, the Nancy Reagan nonsense. I had Dr. Carl Hart on recently, who's a brilliant guy, if you're aware of his work. recently who's a brilliant guy if you're aware of his work amazing uh work on uh addiction and and sort of educating people about the actual real uh reactions that the human body has to drugs but what he's talking about that was really interesting is like there has never been a

drug-free society nor would you want one you know it doesn't exist so this right this idea is so stupid right that it's it's been hammered into us this impossible ideal right and it's it's because of the ability to communicate it's ironic that you know the ability the ability to communicate uh through to mass amounts of people is so recent within the last few hundred years a thousand years whatever it's been, that the impact of these things, although in our incredibly small, finite lives, seems like forever, is a comparatively just a little tiny blip on the radar where we've had this sort of cultural hiccup, where we've lost the script. And the internet seems to be what's resetting the information.

And I think that's one of the reasons why marijuana, besides the financial reason, why marijuana has gained so much steam. Just the sheer overwhelming avalanche of facts. The lack of deaths, the LD50 rate of 1,500 pounds in 15 minutes. Just the sheer absurdity of what it takes to kill you. And then the stats that come in. I mean, how many times can you see someone posted the numbers of people who die by cigarettes,

the numbers of people who die by prescription drugs, the numbers of people who die by alcohol, the numbers of people... And you just start looking at that, and then marijuana gets to the bottom. Zero. Well, what the fuck? It's over and over and over and over again.

It's resetting this strange propaganda. But to people that have been alive through it, it's indoctrination. It's how we've come to understand the world. But the message is penetrating now. Yes, it is now. Even with all that cultural baggage that marijuana has loaded down with, finally the real message is coming through and people are exactly like you say beginning to wake up to it and compared to all the other recreational drugs that we accept

this one is benign and beneficial i've said that i think that in the future when people look back on this age where people were being arrested and imprisoned for marijuana they're going to look back at the same way they used to look at killing witches. Yeah, exactly. It's really that ridiculous. It's such a black mark on our silly society and just an indication of how disconnected we are. This concept of a drug-free society, as you say, is totally absurd because, you know, we're made of drugs. In fact, we are

drugs. And, you know, our brains run on neurotransmitters and whether they're endogenously produced, and we know, for example, that DMT is an endogenous neurotransmitter, and that's a whole fascinating area of neuroscience now, potential functions for DMT, you know, are being found. We know it's been there for a long time. We've known it's endogenous, but it's not been so clear what the hell it's doing in there. Now we're beginning to get some indications that it really does have a function. For example, in places that you wouldn't expect, modulating the immune system, for example, all this stuff is emerging.

So, you know, I mean, by any measure, these internal chemicals are drugs. They just happen to be drugs that we make ourselves. We don't buy them from the local pot dealer or whatever. So, you know, so the perceptions are changing, I think. Yeah, I agree. I think, again, I attribute the internet and some of the work that Rick Strassman has done has been pretty fascinating as well.

And the most recent work showing that DMT is actually produced in the pineal gland of live rats, which was always, for whatever reason, even though everyone knew DMT was an endogenous neurotransmitter and that human beings absolutely produced it in the liver and the lungs and different parts of the body, the pineal gland has always been ultimately incredibly fascinating because it literally is that third eye, the seat of the soul. Right.

And there was so much resistance to that idea that this mystical chemical is actually produced by the third eye. And I saw online like all this battling back and forth of, you know, well, it's only anecdotal evidence that it's produced by. Now there's actual physical evidence that it's produced. Now there's actual evidence. We know it's there. We knew it had to be there. All the enzymes to make it, all the precursors to make it were there, but nobody had to be there all the enzymes to make it all the precursors to make it were there but nobody had actually nailed it down now they've nailed it down so that's that's

progress that's a step but that's the the the resistance to the idea was very fascinating to me like why why would anybody care whether or not it was pretty i mean the body makes it for sure like why is it such an issue that the pineal gland makes it but it is it is because that sort of opens up the door to eastern mysticism to all that traditional religious art that showed the glowing third eye and you know all these peaceful enlightened beings beings with lit third eyes. All of that is like, oh, well, they probably knew something. Like, oh, there's something to it. They did know a thing or two.

Well, they knew quite a bit, right? The other thing is the Egyptian artwork that so clearly resembles the pineal gland and the actual cross-section of the human brain. And there's so much of that in ancient civilizations and ancient cultures. It just makes you really try to piece together, like, when did we lose all this? Like, what, have we figured that out? When did all that sort of slip away? I don't think it's lost.

I mean, obviously it's not lost. Right. Because we're now rediscovering it. It was just, it was esoteric. You know, it was esoteric knowledge for a long time. Now it's becoming less esoteric. More people are becoming aware of what the ancients knew, what the visionaries and the mystics always knew. This is no longer hidden knowledge.

You know, it's becoming more accessible. And that's partly the effect of the internet and partly the effect of a lot of very smart people obsessing over this and sharing what they're finding out. So again, this is, I think, part of the general raising of consciousness in this area that's going on now. Amber Lyon, she was a reporter for CNN and sort of lost her faith in mainstream news when she did a piece on Bahrain and it got redacted and edited and turned into a tourist piece. She left CNN. It was this huge thing. She was really trying to figure out what to do with her life. I suggested psychedelic drugs. So she goes down to Peru, just jumps on a plane, literally grabs what clothes she had in her car, jumps on a plane, goes to Peru, takes

seven long ayahuasca trips, completely changes her life, goes on a year-round journey, year-long journey to discover various psychedelic medicines in different indigenous cultures. Goes to Thailand and does mushrooms, goes to Mexico, does all that. Now she's writing or making this website called Reset.me. She's dedicated her life to psychedelics within one year. One crazy transformative trip. And it's people like her and people like you and people like you that are putting this information out.

It's starting this sort of like undeniable tide, this shifting, this undeniable shifting. Right, right. Psychedelics and neurotransmitters aside, because people expect something big when they take these things, and people are rightly a little apprehensive. I mean, it will change your life if you take these plants. But if you want to have a transformative experience with plants and you're leery of psychedelics, try going on an all-plant-based diet for a little while. Change your intestinal bacteria in a way. You'll have this sense of levity and lightness. It will change the way you think about yourself. Not as quickly

as a psychedelic plant experience. And it takes discipline. Or try a fast. I mean, there are ways to have these transformative experiences without drugs, without plants, but it's just a faster way. The only transformative experience that I've ever experienced from dealing with people that have gone on a completely transforming their life in a completely plant-based diet is they can never shut the fuck

up about the fact they're on a plant-based diet. Well, you can't go out to eat with people. You can't go out to a restaurant. They're insufferable. It's a hard lifestyle to maintain. And in light of the new information that's You can't go out to a restaurant. They're insufferable. It's a hard lifestyle to maintain. Yeah. And in light of the new information that's been discovered over the past decade or so about the intelligence of plants, about plants' ability to calculate, their ability to recognize perhaps even a memory, their ability to recognize dangers, their ability to adapt.

There's a consciousness in plants that is undeniable and I think very misunderstood or non-understood. That's not a word. But we're ignorant to it. And that's one of the problems that I have with people that push the plant-based diet. I think't think i think life eats life and i think it always has and i think you know you can get to the very bottom of the karma chain where you're you know you're fungi and you're living off of uh poop and you know basically things that things have thrown away or you can be a tiger you know and they're all beautiful the whole system is crazy and beautiful and the only reason why we exist at all is that a fucking star had to die.

I mean, the whole thing is death. But we're so obsessed with this idea of eating only plants or being on a plant-based diet connects you more to nature. I've become a hunter over the last year and a half, and I couldn't disagree more. And one of the reasons being is that hunting is a very psychedelic experience in a weird way that I never would have believed. The first time I ever went deer hunting and shot a deer and then wound up eating it, there's a weird connection that you have with nature and with that animal when you do that especially if you do it in what's termed a fair chase environment you go out into the actual woods you deal with an animal most likely that animal right there had never even seen a human being before i shot it and then you

know we're eating it that deer head right there not the alien no not the alien behind it. No, not the alien. That motherfucker. He's hunting you. But I think that there's life in everything, and there's most likely some form of a consciousness in all life. And I think brains are overrated. Nervous systems are overrated in a certain sense. You can say, well, how can a plant be intelligent? It doesn't have a nervous system. It doesn't have a brain. But it clearly displays intelligence.

And in fact, speaking of that and speaking of your hunting experience, you know the author Michael Pollan, right? He had a great essay in I think the New Yorker recently about intelligence that, if you haven't read it, it's worth reading. But I also love his chapter in The Omnivore's Dilemma, which is subtitled The Natural History of Four Meals. and one of the meals is a meat meal where he wants to create a meal, but he wants to do it, he wants to put himself in the shoes of a hunter-gatherer. So he wants to gather all wild foods, plant foods, obviously, mushrooms, pine nuts, and this sort of thing. But he also wants to hunt down a boar, I think it was, and kill it and strip it, skin it, cut it up and eat it and have that experience. And I think

that what you say is totally legitimate. If you're going to eat meat, it's important that people realize where that an animal died so that you could have that meal. And Native Americans, indigenous people have always recognized this because they are up against it. So, you know, they'll always thank the animal for what they're getting. And that's really important. And that's something that we should try to integrate into everything. Why not thank the plants too? Yes. You know, into everything. Why not thank the plants too? Yes. Thank everything.

We wouldn't be here if we weren't sustained by this web of life. So why are we being so disrespectful to it? I mean, I guess that's the crux of the question. Well, we can't really feel what we're doing to this earth. And we have this diffusion of responsibility thing going on. You buy your meat in the grocery store wrapped in plastic. You have no notion where it actually came from. Yeah, I've made a commitment this year to live entirely off of game meat,

of wild game, all wild too. Nothing that, you know, no penned-in animals that just wind up shooting. The ham that I was telling you guys about before the show, smoking ham, that's a pig I killed on this ranch, Tohono Ranch. And they actually have to have hunters come in because these are invasive species, these wild pigs, and they will destroy everything. They eat deer fawns. They eat grounding, ground-nesting birds. They eat deer fawns. They eat grounding, ground-nesting birds. They eat their eggs. I mean, they're unbelievably devastating to the environments that they aren't naturally a part of.

Right. So there's a role for us as stewards of the environment. These wild boars are, as you say, they're devastating ecosystems. I don't know in California, but Hawaii, this is their biggest problem, and it's destroying ecosystems in Hawaii. So there is a role for us to step in and say, well, you know, we're going to kind of exert some control here and control that population because they didn't originate in Hawaii. They're invasive species, as you say. Yeah, they're from Eurasia. There's a need for some regulation.

Well, there's an issue right now in San Jose. In San Jose, they've started to make their way into suburbs, and they're destroying people's lawns, and they'll attack children. They're doomed. The lawns! They eat my flowers! You tore up my lawn, you fucker!

You piece of shit! Yeah, it is a weird connection, the connection that we have to life itself. And our thoughts, when we talk about Native Americans, like almost immediately we think of the spiritual connection that Native Americans had to the land, the deep respect that they had for the animals that they killed in the fact that they would use every single piece of that animal. They'd use the hide to make a roof or clothes. They would use sinew for strings for their bows and arrows. They literally used every part, tooth, bone, nail, flesh. They ate them, and they worshipped these animals.

And it was a deep respect. It was an inexorable part of the relationship to nature itself. Yeah. I really hear you on this. I grew up in the woods of Michigan, a mile outside of a town of 150 people. And my uncle is a hunter and a taxidermist, but hunting for him is a spiritual quest and experience and you feel the pain of the animal you kill and utilizing all aspects of it. I'm not opposed to eating meat by any means. I'm just saying that an all plant diet, when you do it properly, can transform consciousness. It's a strange thing. But going on an all-meat diet and eating that conscious, conscious eating can change conscious.

Conscious eating. Conscious everything, right? Conscious everything. Conscious redesign of institutions, of the internet, of our experiences with other people. When you were talking about earlier about brains being overrated, one of the things that I've really... It's been inescapable for me over the last few years or so is this idea that we are the caterpillars that are giving birth to the moth

and that our whole screwy system and our issues with ego problems and materialism might be because we're just sort of a transitionary stage to this symbiotic relationship that we have with technology. And then we're going to give birth to some artificial thing that doesn't carry the burdens of natural selection, that doesn't carry the burdens of primitive instincts, the need to survive, all these animal reward systems that were built into us from the time that we were monkeys. Perhaps.

It doesn't sound like a very nice existence. It doesn't sound like a nice existence to us. I like being an animal. But I'm not sure about that. This is why I bounce it around because I don't know if it's better. I mean, the idea is that, well, if I'm not a person, well, I'm fucked. But is that the ego hanging on to that? In a way, yeah.

I mean, is some sort of hyper-intelligent artificial life that's capable of living a completely self-sustaining existence where you're totally solar powered all garbage or any waste product whatsoever it's factored immediately into the equation instead of put off like nuclear waste where they just dig a fucking hole and oh we'll figure that out later right i mean that's madness to me the the nuclear waste issue is one of the most maddening and insane issues ever where they take these things, they build holes, and then they put it in there, and then they seal it up.

Like, what are you, a little kid? Like, are you fucking crazy? That's like what a little kid would do when they have to clean their room. They lift up the carpet, they sweep it under, they put the carpet down. It's a childish way of approaching an issue. Totally. Instead of having a completely holistic approach to this thing. Like, okay, are we going to build this stuff? If we are approach to this thing like, okay,

are we going to build this stuff? If we are going to build this stuff, what are we going to do about the toxic waste? Okay, let's factor that in before we move forward. And then spend an extra few decades trying to figure out what to do with that shit, and then maybe come up with a solution before you ever move forward. But we don't do that. We have this weird thing that we just sort of put it off,

and it's childish. Companies have quarterly reporting requirements. If we just change the financial reporting structure to a one year or a five year instead of this short term thinking, solar panels are cheaper than diesel now at least. This is what has to be factored into corporate planning, as you say, because the corporations have gotten a free ride for too long because they never pay the environmental consequences of what they do. And we have to change that where they have to be held accountable and responsible for the environmental impact.

It's not just that you pay $200 for an iPhone. that you pay $200 for an iPhone. You know, you pay $200 for an iPhone, but it costs $2,000 to deal with the environmental impact of the fact that you have that iPhone. The people that are getting cancer from the toxic waste. That economic equation has got to change, and that's one of the biggest challenges because it's a huge challenge to capitalism.

It's laying down the gauntlet and saying, look, guys, okay, you can make money, but let's look at the bottom line in the realistic way. You're making all this profit, but what are you costing the taxpayers and the rest of society for your profit-making activities? How about a little payback here? for your profit-making activities? How about a little payback here? How about some way to compensate for the damage that corporations do? And that's the biggest threat that I can see right now. The corporations want to own everything. They want to corporatize everything. And nature is just another commodity, as they see it, to be owned and exploited. And that's the perception that's got to change. And maybe one way to do it is to, you know, I think, speaking of hearts and minds, I think if you can get, you know, there are ethical capitalists out there, you know, and chancesances are they're partly ethical because they took

psychedelics at some point. Steve Jobs and people like that and we could name others. So psychedelics are teaching tools to help people kind of understand their place, their responsibilities and we have to – again, that's part of this. It's not that we can't innovate. We just have to be realistic about the impact that our actions are having. We also have this issue with corporations having survival instincts. And corporations, this unlimited growth paradigm that is impossible. Like what we're talking about with laptops, can we just stop right here?

No, we can't. It's impossible. And we also can't stop as far as profit. Well, we made this much this quarter, and this quarter we showed a 25% growth. Excellent. Let's keep moving on. By 2075, we should have all the money in the world. I mean, that's really what every corporation—

And isn't this what's happening? Yes, it is. In a sense. It's madness, right? You've got, what is it, 95% of the wealth concentrated in the 1% and the rest of us are, you know, the rest of us is quickly devolving into a third world situation. And that is economic slavery in a sense. I mean, people do what they have to do because they don't have a choice. Their economic activity, their priorities are dictated by corporations. This idea that profit is the only thing that a corporation should be concerned with. We've got to evolve beyond that. Sustainability is more important. Helping people's lives be better is more important than profits. I mean, sure, profits, but that should be down several notches, I think, on the totem pole

in terms of what they identify as important. I think it should be like food. I think, on the totem pole in terms of what they identify as important. I think it should be like food. I think profit should be like food in that you can't eat poison and that if you're eating something and look, we have all these calories. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's fucking killing you. Do you understand that you can't eat this? This is bad for you.

Like, don't eat this. But it's got a thousand calories. You know, I need calories to work. No, no, no, you don't need those calories. That's poison. And essentially the idea of profit is profit over all. And profit over humanity, the idea of financial gain over human suffering, like that somehow or another it balances out, is just like eating poison.

I mean, it really is. There should be no profit at all when there's human suffering. It should be one of those things where it's factored in, oh, we can't eat this. It's poison for humanity. And yet a corporation in the U.S., if it does not maximize profit, can be sued by its shareholders. That's the law. They have a legal responsibility to maximize profit. That's so crazy. And so we have to change the laws. Shareholders are shitheads. Until the shareholders start demanding that,

they actually act responsibly. So that's, I don't know how that works, but if the shareholders achieve a higher level of consciousness, maybe they can influence the way the corporations work. There was a NASA-funded study looking at collapse of civilizations. And one of the major factors is the discrepancy in wealth, that the wealthy people are using up the resources and they're insulated from the effects. And then it gets to a point where the people making decisions haven't been thinking about the consequences and the alternatives. And something's got to change.

Yeah, that was a fascinating and very terrifying report. Because this is not someone with any financial interest in relaying this message. This is not someone that's selling a solution. They're just looking at all the data and going, look, if you just follow these trends, this is where it goes. And there's no indication whatsoever that it's going to slow down. This is where we're going. We have to figure this out before we hit this wall. When I was an undergrad, I was in business school until I took five grams of psilocybin mushrooms that I grew in my dormitory closet at the urging of Terence McKenna's books. The old method, how to undermine civilization one jar at a time.

Or how to improve civilization. I became a radical but I realized that I was fighting a losing battle if I wasn't speaking the same language of making some profit, of appealing to people's business interests. It was a long process. I wanted to get out of this culture and ended up in China teaching English. And I've spent most of the last 10 years in China. I'm like a third Chinese now. Really?

And I became comfortable analyzing the situation I was in, meeting people on their level. Because one thing being in China teaches you is to be constructive with people, to come at an issue from how they're thinking about it. Why is that? People don't want to lose face. So it's a top-down culture. So you understand the priorities of a leader, and they have some enlightened interests. They have their self-interests as well. And you appeal to their better image of themselves. What's possible? A win-win situation. So I think of myself now as a kind of economic therapist. I talk to corporations, I talk to NGOs, the campaigning organizations, and I try to help people find a balance. What are the win-win situations? So the last six years I've been working with the global sustainability standards like the Forest Stewardship Council and the Marine Stewardship Council.

Stewardship Council and the Marine Stewardship Council. And the ESC is modeled on these organizations that you talk with enough stakeholders and you build consensus through dialogue. And you have a transparent process that appeals to companies, it appeals to regulators. So take McDonald's, for example. They realized that they were catching too much fish from the ocean and it wasn't sustainable. So now all McDonald's fish sandwiches are Marine Stewardship Council certified, which means they can sell McFish sandwiches into eternity as long as the oceans are viable for life. Or Kimberly-Clark was cutting down the rainforests and cutting down the arboreal forests in Canada. Now all of their paper products are going to be FSC certified. And FSC certifies 15% of the standing forests of the world,

which means the people have a fair share. This notion of stewardship, I think, is really important. It's an important word. It's got to be reintroduced into corporate thinking and corporate planning as opposed to profits. I mean, we all have a stake in survival. Not everybody has a stake in profits. The shareholders have a stake in profits, but there's no profits if we don't survive, if this whole shooting match collapses. So the concept of stewardship, and I think that is really important to get that

message out. And that's what people like Josh are trying to do. And I think psychedelics have a role to play, absolutely, in educating. I mean, it's interesting. It's going to be a while, I think, before ayahuasca gets integrated in this country in a way – for example, in therapy and in biomedicine, it's not going to happen. But what you do see happening are these centers that are growing up. And right now it's in South America and Josh and the Botanical Stewardship Council are trying to develop standards for these organizations so that, you know, they're committed to a certain ethical set of standards, safety and quality of their brew and so on. But I can envision a time not too far in the future where if a person, you know, you can go to South America and if you have issues, if you have sickness, addiction or whatever, you can get treatment. But even more importantly, you can just get an education. You can just get, you can go there for purposes of spiritual discovery and self-discovery and all that. Once you have that infrastructure, which is growing, then it partly becomes – we need to get people in positions of power, corporate CEOs,

other government leaders and so on to go and have these experiences. That's the big one, right? Yeah. I mean you can't hold them in a headlock and force them to drink ayahuasca, although I'd like to a lot of times. They're catalysts for creativity. Take your marketing team to South America and have a ceremony together. Rebrand your company. Exactly.

Increase your profits in the process and the benefits to people. Well, that's where the business model comes in. People have a negative reaction to that. And I know this personally firsthand because I have a business, Onnit. Onnit.com is a company we sell exercise equipment and supplements and healthy foods. And one of the ways that Onnit was created was my partner Aubrey and I talking about it. And Aubrey going to South America, doing ayahuasca, and then having these visions about his business. And when he talked about that, he was met with so much criticism. So many people were like, oh, you're down there doing ayahuasca, thinking about your business.

Oh, that's so gross. Oh, that's so base. That's so egocentric. That's so anti the message of the plant. But it's creativity. And creativity manifests itself in a million different ways. And the idea of business equals evil really has to get, we have to get past that.

We have to get past that. We all exchange. It's not evil if some guy could fix your car. It's not evil if someone can fix your refrigerator so you can store food. All those things are businesses. It's not evil if you buy fair trade coffee that promotes biodiversity

and farmers can send their kids to school and go to health care. So it is. It's win evil if you buy fair trade coffee that promotes biodiversity and farmers can send their kids to school and go to healthcare. So it is. It's win-win. It's possible to develop these economic models and I totally disagree with your partner's critics. Your partner is exactly right on. on and it's okay. He, with his background, I assume it's a he, goes to South America and he already has the mindset, right? But then ayahuasca is a way to sort of flesh out the vision, if you were. I mean, he went there to learn something and boy, did he learn something. Well, he clearly, he went through a bunch of other things about his life.

You've got to get the personal shit cleared away first. Your family history. Open up that my old bullshit folder. Right. Get hit over the head. Not that any one of us here has done that completely.

It's a process. No doubt about it. I got a tank session scheduled for tonight. I got some stuff to work out. The word ethical company or the expression ethical company I think is this idea of the psychedelic experience for those who haven't experienced it or for those who, oh, I dropped acid in college, but I'm past that now. I've got a 401K and a mortgage and college bills for my kids and I have a lot of things to consider. You've never passed it. Yeah, but –

Well, that's an excuse for not wanting to confront it. That's just self-delusion, really. Nobody's ever passed it. No, no one ever has ever. If you're a human being and you have, I mean, you're a constant sort of soup of chemicals, neurotransmitters, adrenaline, hormones, all these different things are going on,

and you're trying to maintain balances and keep everything aligned and then keep the pattern of thought in a good place so that it maintains everything as well. I think that to these people that are perpetrating a lot of the issues that we have, whether it's the head of BP or, you know, to take some guy who wants to frack, you know, and say, before you do that, do this first, you know, and then let's talk, you know. Like confronted with your own mortality.

It should almost be mandatory. I mean, you should show that you, before you start fracking, you should show that you have a degree, that you understand the actual physical process of removing these chemicals. You should understand whatever energy extraction degrees you have to have and whatever sciences that pertain to that.

But you should also have psychedelic trips under your belt like you'd say well you know here i seen your documentation you've gone through your five grams and what did you get out of that you know you know what i mean like it should be one of those things where it's reviewed right like okay you haven't hmm and okay what you've gotten you got that off your list before you proceed. Yeah, it should be like a presidential council for psychological fitness. They sit you down, they go, you don't have any psychedelic experiences on your resume. Who can study the brain? Yeah, what are you doing opening up a fucking company that digs holes in the ground?

You don't have any psychedelic experiences. That's a recipe for disaster. So you're missing a key component. You're missing this connection to the Mother Earth via some unfathomable experience that literally is impossible to describe. So you're missing that part. So go get that and then come back, and then we'll talk about your business. Yes.

Or people in the Department of Defense or the Veterans Affairs that are dealing with all these soldiers with PTSD. Another important aspect of the symposia conference is a new organization called VET. It's Veterans for Entheogenic Therapy. Oh, that's great. The founders participated in the MAPS PTSD study with MDMA, and they came away feeling so much better, and they want to open this up to other veterans and others suffering from PTSD. So a portion of the proceeds from the Amherst conference and the online live participation will go to this organization and to the ESC.

That's spectacular. I'm a huge, huge fan of MAPS. I've had Rick Doblin on the podcast before, who's just a fantastic guy. He's an amazing guy. And they just tweeted me something, and I retweeted it about they did a new study on autism, adult autism, MDMA-assisted therapy for social anxiety in autistic adults. It's amazing, amazing stuff. We just had dinner with Charlie Grobe. Was he working on that?

He's Charlie Grobe, who's at UCLA. He's one of our Hefter superstars, if you will. Spell his name so we can get him on the podcast. G-R-O-B, Charles Grobe. He's at Harbor UCLA. He's done a psilocybin end-of-life study. He's a member of the Hefter board. I may as well plug Hefter here.

We're the sort of small organization that nobody knows about, hefter.org. Like heifer, like a cow? No, no, H-E-F-F-T-E-R. Not Hefter, but Hefter. And it's a nonprofit. And basically we're committed to clinical, developing clinical protocols with psychedelics and have kind of staked out psilocybin in some ways, in the same way that MDMA is MAPS's thing, psilocybin is our thing. And we've got several really interesting protocols. FDA-approved clinical studies right now for end-of-life, existential anxiety at the end of life,

for exploring actually what you might call experimental mysticism, because psilocybin can reliably induce mystical states. Roland Griffith's work at Johns Hopkins has shown this. So it's an actual tool for the first time. We're actually able to approach transcendent states of mind in a controlled clinical setting. We can reliably induce these states and then study what's the brain doing when you're in a state of psilocybin-induced mysticism. Well, it's doing a lot of things similar to the state of a mystical experience when it's on the natch or whatever.

I'm not sure that even – but anyway, hefter.org. Most of the leading researchers in psychedelic science right now are either on our board or being funded by Hefter. And so we have funding, and we're focusing on psilocybin. And we work closely with MAPS, but MAPS gets all the attention, which is fine. They're doing beautiful work, but we're also doing effective, important things. Well, Will, we'll certainly get some people to you. Hefter, H-E-F-F-T-e-r.org.org yeah named after arthur hefter actually who's the he was a 19th century scientist the first person to isolate mescaline

in a pure form from peyote and demonstrate that it was the main ingredient of of peyote based on self-experiments. And he was kind of exemplifies what we like to identify with, you know, good science driven by curiosity and ethics. And yeah, it's a good organization. The psilocybin connection to dimethyltryptamine, dimethyltryptamine being an endogenous chemical and neurotransmitter and psilocybin being very close. very close.

Very close. What is the exact – like what's the chemical – Okay. Very simple. Dimethyltryptamine is simply dimethyltryptamine. Psilocin, which is the active principle of psilocybin, psilocybin is converted to psilocin in the body. So it's what pharmacologists call a prodrug. It's converted by a very simple chemical reaction to psilocin.

That's the one that actually interacts with the receptors. So psilocin is chemically 4-hydroxydimethyltryptamine. So it differs with one trivial substitution on the indole ring. That oxygen, that alcohol group at the top of the indole ring is what makes it psilocin and not DMT. But it makes all the difference pharmacologically because psilocin is orally active and it doesn't require an MAO inhibitor. And DMT does if you need. That's the ayahuasca secret, you know. DMT plus MAO inhibitor makes the orally active preparation.

By itself, DMT is not orally active. So you have to take it parentally by smoking it, or indigenous people make snuff out of it and so on. They get around that whole detoxification mechanism. Your gut is full of MAO, monoamine oxidase. And the reason it's full of monoamine oxidase, it's a consequence of our evolution as omnivores because plants are full of amines. Most of them are toxic, and you don't want those. So you have the detoxification mechanism, but that also works for DMT.

And for that matter, we can't be dining on DMT-containing plants all the time and wandering around. I mean, you do need to be able to function in the world. Yeah. function in the world yeah um your brother had a fascinating idea about um you know the idea of panspermia uh in relationship to uh psilocybin that psilocybin being the how did you what is the exact nomenclature again for a high for hydroxy for hydroxyl dimethyltryptamine yeah that psilocybin i don't want to get bogged down in chemistry, but psilocybin, for the chemists among you, it's got a phosphoryl group. And that phosphoryl group is cleaved off and that yields psilocin. Psilocin is for hydroxydimethyltryptamine.

And what is psilocybin? And psilocybin is for phosphoryl dimethyltryptamine. So it's got that phosphoryl group that makes it stable, right? So that's the form it's stored in in the mushroom, and it can be quite stable for a long time. As soon as you convert it to psilocin, it's very unstable and it's ephemeral, which is one reason why it's so easily metabolized by human metabolism. It's very compatible with human metabolism, which is a reason why it's so, you know, it's appropriate.

You can give it to people who are quite ill, you know, in terminal states and so on. They can tolerate it. It's not a, it goes through human organism like ice water. It's very easily handled, you know, but we don't want to get too far down the road. No, it's absolutely fascinating. But the idea that your brother was promoting

was that this may have come from another planet and that what you might be eating when you're eating mushrooms is you're eating some sort of an intelligence, which is the weirdest thing about mushrooms is that it feels like they're talking to you. You certainly do have that impression. Yeah.

This I-thou dynamic that's set up and the content, which I guess not everybody has this, you know, this feeling of this science fiction-ish cast to the experience. But many people do and they're not all Terrence McKenna fans. But many people do, and they're not all Terrence McKenna fans. I mean, if you follow the Terrence McKenna recipe and eat five grams in the absolute darkness, you'll be utterly convinced that they've landed. You know, I mean, they're here. Yeah. And whether that's just an impression or whether it's, you know, again, I think this is possibly something, you know, built into the structure of our nervous system. And it may be. I mean, we've always had this fascination with space, with the external, with this sort of longing to maybe return to space.

Maybe that's where we came from. I don't know. But certainly in this evolutionary process of cognition, which we credit the plants for if we want to buy into that idea, we credit the plants for bringing about cognition, the ability to wonder, the ability to speculate. Well, you can't wonder very much if you're looking down at the ground all the time. You've got to look up. And when you look up, you're like, oh, you know, there's this whole universe out here.

And what's our connection to that? You know, we've always had this intuition that there is a connection. I mean, I don't go so far as to say people ridicule the idea that mushrooms might have come from outer space and so on. And on the surface, it seems like a ridiculous idea. But you look a little deeper and maybe not so much. It's certainly possible. That spores are one of the hardest substances in nature and they can survive for eternity in space. They can survive in hard vacuum and radiation-dense environments and they're not affected by it. The thing that your brother had mentioned was that it was so different than other life forms on Earth because of its chemical makeup that he thought that the 4-hydroxy or 4-phosphoryl. Yeah, the 4-hydroxy, 4-phosphoryl biosynthetic pathway is really only found in this group of mushrooms, you know, actually, and related species.

He wasn't a biochemist. I don't know if I agree with that. I mean, mushrooms are so clearly a part of, you know, earthly evolution that you can't really say that they stand outside of it. I mean, we know that's true. I think if you want to make that hypothesis, you have to go further back and you have to say, well, you know, maybe a super civilization seeded our ecology at some point, not with the genes to make psilocin, but the genes to make tryptophan. And now tryptophan, all these psilocin and serotonin

and all these tryptamines come from tryptophan. And tryptophan is one of those 20 amino acids that make up proteins. So tryptophan is universally found in all organisms. It's an essential in all organisms. It's an essential molecule of life, right? It's found in everything. But two trivial steps away from tryptophan, two trivial enzymatic modifications away from tryptophan, you've got DMT. You remove the carboxyl group, you stick a couple methyl groups on tryptophan, and there you are. You've got DMT. And I've often thought, methyl groups on tryptophan and there you are. You've got DMT. And I've often thought, wow, maybe this is a sort of subtext,

sub-message of nature saying just around the corner, just around the corner from tryptophan is this compound that opens the door to other dimensions. Pay attention, monkeys. Well, it's also fascinating that tryptophan converts to, it eventually converts to serotonin. Serotonin is just another tryptamine. In fact, chemically, serotonin is 5-hydroxytryptamine. Silicin is 4-hydroxydimethyltryptamine. Bufotinine, another one of these hallucinogens, is 5-hydroxydimethyltryptamine.

So they're all, you know, very close to each other. You see the diagrams. Oh, hell, there you are. And there you go. Right. So you can see how it works. And the idea that mushrooms come from outer space seems ridiculous to some folks. But the reality is we're made out of stars.

We are made out of stars. Everything comes from outer space. And I think that as we get further along in our understanding of the universe, I think we're going to realize that everything is kind of fractal. And there really is no separation between this planet and other planets. The whole thing is just one big soup. Right, right, exactly. And, you know, any prebiotic environment, I mean, we don't know that much about exactly how life evolved, but we know that in certain situations, you've got a buildup of organic compounds. And under the right circumstances, it just seems to be a

property of matter. You know, atoms, molecules fall together in such a way that before you know it, you've got living systems. You've brought this up twice and I can't ignore it because you brought it up in the last podcast as well. You are fascinated by the idea of life being seeded here by some intelligent force. Amber Lyon, who I just discussed earlier, she had a vision of that actually happening on ayahuasca. And many other people have as well. Do you think that that's something that is a real possibility? Yes, I do.

Wow. That's a heavy one. When you bring that one up, you get thrown into that certain category right away. Oh, Dennis McKenna's fucking crazy. Well, you've got to read my book. I mean, we actually, in my book, I may as well plug my book.

Oh, the latest one, the only latest one I wrote, The Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss. Oh, that's the one you promoted last time you were on here, which is excellent. Thank you for that. That was really good. If you haven't bought it, please, folks, go buy it. It's fantastic.

You really gave it a boost. But I actually talk about this at some length about this idea. Could this really be? And I'm trying to discuss it from the standpoint of a critic of the idea. Say, well, that's totally ridiculous. You know, how could that be? And they just dismiss it. I try to go a little deeper into it and say, well, wait a minute.

Let's step back from this a little bit. our existential situation, how unlikely it is that we are even here, that consciousness exists, that this civilization exists. I mean, from the standpoint of the improbables, we're living in a very improbable situation. I don't think this is going on. I think that life is probably widespread in the universe, but I think intelligence is rare. And the fact that we find ourselves in that existential situation, you know, maybe we need to take another look at this and say, well, maybe this is not such a crazy idea. You know, that, I mean, I do think that intelligence, you know, is, we're not the only ones. And I think, you know, and I don't know if I'm degenerating into incoherence here, but I think that intelligence can have an influence on the evolution of even the universe, you know, it's a force in the universe. And I think that mind is probably, you know, as primary a feature of reality as the quantum

foam. I mean, it may not even be separate from it, you know. So it's okay to say we don't know. And, you know, one of the problems with science is it tends to be arrogant. It tends to assume that it knows a lot more than it knows. And we actually have a very detailed understanding scientifically of very small pieces of reality, you know. And so there's a tendency to say, well, we've got it all figured out. No, you haven't got it figured out.

You haven't got even a tenth of it figured out, which is another useful message that ayahuasca and other entheogens, other psychedelics remind us of. I mean ayahuasca never fails to remind me and a lot of people, remember, you don't know shit, you know, you don't know shit, you know, so get off your high horse and be a little more humble and be open to, to learning. And it's all right in front of us. If we go back and look at what we know about human history and what they knew and how we laugh at what they knew then.

Right. If you go back to the time when they thought the world was flat, back to the time where they were killing Bruno because he thought that the universe was infinite. There's all these different things that people had a consensus on that were absolutely incorrect that we go, ha, ha, ha, back then we were foolish. That was a blink of an eye ago. Right, right. And so the message is beware of what everybody knows. Beware of cultural consensus because chances are in 100 years what we thought we knew will just be seen in that light. I mean we were so stupid back then.

Yeah. new will just be seen in that light. I mean, we were so stupid back then. Yeah. It's also one of those things, too, when you're discussing aliens and you're discussing the possibility of an alien life form. We want to think it's preposterous, but we're preposterous.

If we didn't exist, oh my God, we'd be the most ridiculous thing ever. Right. Behind me. We are preposterous. Behind me. Dead people that were locked in a cage, and I honor them.

We're ridiculous. Look at those photos behind me of Jimi Hendrix. Elvis actually apparently wasn't really a mugshot. He was just a law enforcement nut and wanted to get his picture, which is even more ridiculous. He loved the fact that people got locked into cages so much, he wanted to get a fake picture of him locked into cages. Most likely, he was high as fuck on pills you know and then see nixon to be a drug yes exactly officer and then this woman rosa parks she got arrested because she uh had too much melanin in her skin to sit in a certain spot

on a moving piece of transportation and then she was celebrated as a hero. I mean, we're fucking crazy, right? Yeah, totally. Just the fact that we exist at all, why would we deny the idea that something else far more advanced than us exists somewhere else? No different than us looking at, you know, when we find primates using tools, evidence of using tools without any human intervention, like they just figured out how to do it on their own,

like to get ants out of anthills and things like that. We're fascinated by it. Amazing. Look what we've discovered. Jesus Christ, that's easy shit. You know, like compare us to something else. They would probably look at us the same way. Look at these dummies.

They're, they're worshiping people that were locked in cages. You know, they're. Right, right. You're a hero because you're sitting in a different spot. So that's, that's the thing. We're, yeah, we're an experiment of some sort. And whether we're some civilization, some super civilization has genetically engineered this whole ecosystem and created tryptophan and then seeded it into the ecosystem, knowing that over the course of evolutionary time, it was going to

develop things like psilocybin and serotonin. It's almost as though the civilization, this hypothetical civilization, wanted somebody to talk to. And in order to do that, it had to invent us primates, you know, and it had to get us talking first to our plants. And maybe eventually we'll get a chance to talk to them whoever they are you know or maybe they're already here i mean there are a lot of people who say they're already here you know and i yeah i don't mean who knows the other problem is there's so many people that are full of shit well that's this is the area where flakiness is flourishing. Yeah, hugely. I had this sci-fi show, and we stopped doing it.

And they wanted to keep doing it, but I didn't want to do it anymore because I got tired of talking to liars. I couldn't handle it anymore. We interviewed Bigfoot people and UFO people, and some of them are well-intentioned folks. But there was a lot of liars. There was a lot of people that were just, there was a psychological issue, and I could clearly see it. Because when you have a podcast with someone and you sit down with someone for three hours,

you can bullshit someone for a seven-minute interview on a news show, but you can't bullshit someone for three hours. After three hours, weird things start to show up, like weird patterns. You just can't keep the rhythm up, so to speak. Right. Especially if you could do multiple podcasts. Like, oh, I'll crack you after two or three.

I'll find you. You might be very clever. But after two or three, little things get exposed. You're like, hmm, this guy might be full of shit. We will reveal the basis of your madness. It's just impossible to keep the rhythm going. It's just after a while, if you're full of shit, you're full of shit also to yourself. And that's something that I've found is that people that are constantly deceptive, they're also internally deceptive.

And that manifests itself in weird things that they say that they don't even realize are bizarre. Because they're also easier to trick themselves, I think, because I think they lose their ability to really see things objectively. I like falsifiable facts. Yeah. Things that you can prove that's true or not. Mm-hmm. The scientific method is important. And all this theoretical conversation is nice

about whether we have the imprints of other civilizations in our ecosystem. But the fact is we have an ecosystem and maybe we delude ourselves that we have some control over its evolution or stewardship of it. But we certainly have this opportunity to either destroy the planet or preserve it. Well but we certainly have this opportunity to either destroy the planet or preserve it.

Well, we certainly have an effect, and we're certainly conscious in some way, shape, or form of that effect. And when you extrapolate that to 100,000, a million years from now, if this civilization or something similar survives, well, you've got to think that it's going to be something like an alien invasion. We really will be like that thing's going to be something like an alien invasion that we we we really will be like that thing that wants to see the universe if we recognize yeah yeah especially i mean if you're an intelligent being and you recognize that a star is a finite we a star is

only good to support life for another billion years right that's not a lot of time if you really stop and think about how long time has existed on earth and if you were an an intelligent species that lived 100 million years from now, and you're like, hey, you know, we only have nine more of these to go. We have nine more of these 100 million cycles, and then we're fucked. Then the sun burns out, and there's no life here. We've got to get moving. We are in eternity, and we're stuck here. Yeah, that's very interesting.

I've often thought that, you know, these cosmological models, I think we got more than a billion years. The cosmological models say 10 to 100 billion years, maybe a trillion years. I don't think of life with the sun. Oh, the sun. Oh, yeah. The sun doesn't have soul. Like our planet to support life. It's got maybe 4 billion years.

It's our planet to support life. It's got maybe 4 billion years. But if we haven't figured out how to get out by that time, we're not paying attention. Or get in. Or get in, exactly. Or get in. That's a very important point. I mean, as I've been told on psychedelics many times, the only way out is to go in.

Yeah. You know, but this, you know, these cosmological models, if you look at them, which are kind of dreary and depressing when you think about it, you know, it's just now the current model is just endless expansion and not only expansion, but accelerating expansion. You're talking about the heat death of the universe and, you know, not very much interesting is going to happen. But the key factor that these models do not integrate into their planet is mind and consciousness, you know. And that makes all the difference. That's, you know, if you look far enough ahead, that's going to affect the way the cosmos evolves. that's going to affect the way the cosmos evolves.

And they don't take that into account, and it's impossible to really know what the effects of it is. But I don't buy the fact that it's all going to just kind of peter out and finally the last flicker is going to go out, and it's just darkness and cold. I don't buy that. I mean, surely there's got to be more to it than that. Well, the inward trip might be what we're missing. And the inward trip may be.

Yeah, exactly. I mean, if you look at quantum models, we know there's three dimensions of space and one of time, but then there's the, what is it, the six or eight other dimensions that are all folded in, and you don't see that, but what's in there? Right. What's in there?

Well, that's the feeling that you get on dimethyltryptamine, is that you've entered into a new area, a new space, and that the space is somehow or another inhabited with something that's communicating in some nonverbal form that reaches you as intent. It reaches you like intent. Right. And that that might be where consciousness is headed once we free ourselves from this sort of carbon-based shell that we're clinging to.

Yeah. That we might figure that out. That like, oh, we were at a rest stop. We didn't realize that we could drive just a couple miles down the road and there's the fucking Yellowstone National Park. Like we thought that the rest stop was the universe. That's where we were going.

Yeah. We're just eating shitty food and breathing trucker farts. And we thought that's all there was. Oh my God. We just had to just figure it out. Yeah. I don't dismiss that possibility. I mean, this I-thou relationship that we were talking about.

You say that again, I-thou. I-thou, this thing that mushrooms, other psychedelics, but especially mushrooms, seem to set up this dialogue situation. And you're getting this information, but it's very hard to evaluate whether it's bullshit or whether there's something to it. My brother used to play games with the mushrooms when he would take them at these high doses alone and say, well, how do I know that what you're telling me is real? Tell me something I cannot possibly know. something I cannot possibly know, you know, and they would never, they would never cough it up because it was like, you know, but it was like, all right, I want the blueprints to the starship now, you know, download the blueprints now and I'll believe that you're, you know, that you are what you say you are. And they're very evasive, you know, they never give you that kind of thing. But they – so I don't know.

I have this thought on – for people who have heard this podcast, unfortunately I have to repeat myself. I have this idea that we have this dismissal of psychedelic experience as hallucination and hallucination being frivolous and my thought is that if you absorb some sort of a psychedelic compound and have this intense moment where you do pass into another dimension and you you meet with pure love and the the very wiring of the universe is exposed to you and you get to see the fractal nature of reality in some incredibly profound form, and that is what you're actually experiencing.

Or if it's just your imagination and you go there and it's all in your mind, but you have the exact same experience, it's still the same. Like this idea that everything that's real has to be, you have to be able to take a tape measure and touch it, that you have to be able to put it on a scale, that you have to be able to quantify the ingredients. Oh, well, it's made out of aluminum and this is glass and the keyboard is plastic. Now I know a laptop's real.

But I'm here to tell you, it's all hallucination. Right. Right? I mean, we dwell in a hallucination. That's what the brain does. It creates a model of reality that we live in. We never experience reality. out there, but everything comes to us through the filter and is processed and extruded, if you will, into a more or less comprehensible, most of the time, model of reality. And that's where we live. Reality is out there somewhere. It's unknowable, you know, but we're getting signals through this sensory neural interface. And then the brain is basically a processing device that takes that information, combines it with internal associations and everything, and generates the hallucination that you and I and everybody else are living in at this very moment. We're all part of this constructed reality. So people dismiss it as psychedelic experience as hallucination. I would say no, it is, but it's just another hallucination

and it's all hallucination. It's all. Or at least interpretation of something, personal interpretation. Yeah, personal interpretation. I mean the world, physics, we know enough through physics about this supposedly external reality to know that it doesn't look anything like what we're experiencing. It's all buzzing electrons. Most of it is empty space. This table is not solid. It's mostly empty space. It's all energy and energy fluxes.

We don't experience the world that way most of the time. Sometimes on psychedelics we do. So maybe we're getting an actual peek into the way it's really constructed that, you know, we get to look at the circuit board and turn it over temporarily and look at it. Oh, this is how it's wired, you know. This is the reality generating machine that you get to look at when you strip away, you know, when you take the cover off and look at the way it's, the diagram is wired, then you get some insights into it. So then that's a useful thing because then you can go back and you can say, well, none of this is real. Let's not get carried away that this is any more real than anything else. Yeah, that seems to be like the information that's coming from folks that study subatomic particles.

That information is one of the most undeniable pieces of information that the universe is not what you think it is. It's not what you think it is. It's impossible for it to be what you think it is when you study subatomic particles. When you study things that can exist in two places at the same time, what are you talking about? They blink in and out of existence. What does that mean? Well, they go away.

What do you mean they go away? They go when they come back. What the fuck are you saying? They go away and they come back. Are they here or are they not here? Well, they are and they're not. Will they move? Yes, but they also stand still at the same time. Right. What? come back are they here are they not here right well they are and they're not well they move yes

but they also stand still at the same time right what like superposition like when someone i had dr admit goswami's a theoretical physicist he tried to explain superposition to me and i and i was like wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute it's moving and it's still at the same time right right right what are you talking about? Like, what does that mean? So here you have physics, you know, the absolute sort of cutting-edge science, the one that we've charged with explaining the fundamental nature of reality. And you talk to these people, and it sounds like the ravings of schizophrenics. It sounds like someone who's on drugs.

Yeah, it does indeed. It sounds like someone who's on drugs. Yeah, it does indeed. It sounds like someone who... But they have the mathematics and the measurements and all that to back it up and say, look, I'm sorry. This is how it is. This is what our math and our instruments tell us, if you want to trust that. It's like we sent a scout,

and the scout went over the top of the hill and saw the impossible. Yeah. And came back and went, okay. Yeah. How do I explain this? Yeah. Don't go over there.

It becomes a rainbow that talks to you. Right. Right. Yeah. That is, it's fascinating because the explanations of reality by these physicists are, in fact, more bizarre than the experiences that are relayed by people who take ayahuasca. Absolutely. Those are way more believable. Right. Than particles in superposition or the fact that it's all empty space moving in a vibration.

No, it's wood, man. What are you talking about? This is wood. Hear it? I hit you over the head. That shit's going to hurt. This is real. There's no empty space there, dude.

You're crazy. But no, that is what it is. Well, it's all real. Anything you experience, you can't dismiss it. You can't say it's not real. It's just not necessarily the absolute reality. And I don't know if there is an absolute reality. I agree with you. And I think that's also one of the transformative parts of the

psychedelic experience, that the experience itself is transformative because you're experiencing it. It doesn't matter if it's not real. What does that mean? It means nothing. It means nothing, not real. These are dualistic delusions. None of it's real. It's all real. So established, established fact that when you get to the lowest measurable portion of reality, when you get to subatomic particles, it's fucking magic. Okay? So let's go from there.

And then let's look at, well, it's all in your imagination. Well, let's look at what that means. Because everything you see on this planet that a human being has made has somehow or another popped out of the imagination. The imagination is a factory for televisions and the internet and airplanes and condoms and eyeglasses and laptops. I mean, the imagination is a motherfucker. And we have this idea that the imagination is this frivolous thing.

Oh, Billy just sits in the field and imagines what the world could be. How about you dig a ditch, Billy? How about you go to work, Billy? Hammer some nails and be a man. Pull yourself up by your bootstraps and stop crying because you're freaking out about the fact that everything's air. Everything's particles. No, the whole thing.

Or you sit in a field and you take LSD and you're Steve Jobs and you have all these fantasies except then you actually make it happen. You create the Apple computer or whatever. And that was a psychedelic vision and was at the time and remains so. And, you know, this thing here, I mean, this is the little psychedelic toy of the future. You know, it's in my hand that it exists. When you ask it questions and it goes online and it gives you the answer. So the entire volume of human understanding on that subject, the consensus. This is, you know, like you were just explaining what the chemical definition of silicin is or the description of it.

You can find that out like that. I had to go to you. You're an expert. You came to me with your education. You explained it to me. But anyone can do that with their phone. Yeah. Just tapped into the database. Right. Mm their phone. Yeah. Just tapped into the database.

Right. Yeah. So that's a threshold we've crossed in the last decade or so, where basically the sum total of human knowledge is right here. And that's incredible for transformation, for creative thinking, all of these things. That's something we've never had before. That and the connectivity. The other thing is now there's 7 billion people or something like that on the planet. Well, you know, I don't know what the statistics are,

but 4 billion of them have cell phones. You know, so we've created, I mean, they don't all have smartphones, but they got some kind of a cell phone. And so they are tapped into this database and that's making a big difference in the way that, you know, formerly disenfranchised populations interact. I mean, you know, you're a fish farmer and you have some fish to sell. You can go on your cell phone and say, oh, well, you know, if I go to this village here, I'll get a better price for that. A trivial thing, but in fact, that decision affects commerce on a global scale if enough people are tapped into that.

Anyway. Your brother was obsessed with December 21st, 2012 being some sort of a transformative moment in our history. Yeah. And a lot of people were, me included. I guess we can put that one to rest. I guess we can, but can we? That's one of the things that I've been thinking of. Yes, as a specific day. Right.

But if you really look at the tipping point of technology and our connectivity, and that's kind of where, whether it's 2008 or 2012, when you're looking at it a thousand years from now, when they talk about the Renaissance, when they talk about whatever great periods of human history, very gigantic periods of change, this is going to be one of the biggest ever. And it really will boil down to these decades or at least these few years. So his error, I thought,

I was kind of a critic of the time wave for exactly this. For folks who don't know, explain what that means. Well, his idea that he created a mathematical model based on the I Ching that he claimed described the structure of time. I mean, he postulated that time had a structure and time had an end, or at least history had an end, and that that end was December 21st, 2012. And there's, you know, linkages to the Mayan calendar, which supposedly said similar things. It was a mistake to link it to a particular day, I think. That's not the way that novelty, the idea was that this wave

described the way that novelty ingressed into the continuum. Well, I think that novelty ingresses in the continuum. I mean every day there's something new under the sun. There's something that never happened before in the history of the universe. It happens. But it doesn't explode into the continuum. It more like it seeps into the continuum. But change does happen. And we're

going through a period of tremendous change, but it's not linked to a particular day. So what I say is he was wrong as far as the particulars were concerned. It wasn't December 21st, 2012. But he was totally right in terms of the idea that novelty does increase and it has increased and it's increasing and it's accelerating and all you have to do is look around. And he was clearly right. I mean if you look at where we are now, even from where we were 10 years ago and even 20 years – Can any of us even remember what it was like 20 years ago? I mean the world has completely transformed. Yeah, 20 years ago. He was correct in that sense that things are changing.

Well, maybe in just putting a date to it and giving people something to focus on, he made the idea more tangible for some. It made it more tangible, but I think it was not necessarily a good strategy because people were giving in to the temptation of focusing on that date. And it was either on that date, either everything's going to collapse or, or we'll cross the threshold and everything will be great. And it was kind of a, you know, consciousness will be transformed and we'll be in this golden state. And I, I thought it was kind of a, for many people, it was an excuse for not taking responsibility. I mean, and just all we have to do is wait and it'll all work out.

No, you know, that's not taking responsibility. We've got to get cracking now. We can't wait. We can't wait. So now that it didn't happen. So the message is the same. We've got to get cracking. Yeah.

And we can relax. Yeah. Okay. The aliens didn't land. No wormholes appeared before our eyes. Yeah. None we can relax. Yeah. Okay. The aliens didn't land. No wormholes appeared before our eyes. Yeah. None of that happened. But it doesn't mean that things aren't happening.

And, you know. We need to make haste carefully. Things that make change, I think, happen quietly. You know, they're not noticed. They're not tremendous. You know, with obvious exceptions., you know, global asteroid impact. I mean, hey, that's abrupt and it's transforming, no doubt. But that only happens once every few million years.

Events normally don't explode into history that way. I mean, Terence used to talk about the, you know, the first explosion of the atomic bomb. Well, that was an abrupt event, but not really. I mean, when did the actual novelty take place? Was it when Einstein developed the equations that described nuclear fusion? Or was it the fission, rather? Or was it the point where we achieved the first sustained nuclear reaction? I mean, these were not things that anybody noticed at the time.

But those were the transformative events that made it possible to, a couple decades later, drop the atom bomb on Hiroshima. That's the one that got the headlines. But that wasn't really the roots of the novelty, if you know what I'm saying. No, I totally know what you're saying. And it seems that they all pile on to each other as well. They pile on to each other and they're cumulative. Exactly. And we haven't even started, most likely. No, we haven't started. Which is why the concept of an alien invasion seems so ridiculous to us based on our current capabilities but so inevitable when you think about the fact that we got robots wandering around on mars

right now as we speak i mean what what would we what would we think we're gonna do i mean what we do the most spectacular thing we do we have two things we do we blow shit up and we explore space those are the two things that gather the most attention right you know we can. We blow shit up and we explore space. Those are the two things that gather the most attention. We can blow up a city or we can send a robot to wander around on Mars and send back videos. And you're like, holy shit. Those are the two very distinctly different, but this whole mark- But those exemplify the limits of our power. Yeah. We have the power to completely, you know, disrupt the whole shooting match and just, it all turns into radioactive slag or we escape some way. And I think, you know, I think it's wonderful that we can send robots to Mars and all this, but space is so vast. Mars and all this, but space is so vast, it's never really going to become accessible to us unless we can figure out this hyper light thing. And I don't know if it's traveling hyper, you

know, traveling faster than light or figuring out how to open up a portal. I mean, this idea that, you know, there's Newtonian space separated by this vast distances, I don't buy it. I think there's a way to get from one place to another without going through, you know, hyperspace is a real thing. Well, it might get down to... We need to learn how to navigate it. It might get down to we just have to stop being carbon-based life forms. That might be real space travel. Yeah, right, right. It may end up that way, too. it down to we just have to be stop being carbon-based life forms it might that might be

real space travel yeah right right it may end up that way too when you when you look at the possibility that dimethyltryptamine and similar psychedelics are a gateway to to some other thing whether it's another dimension another state of being, another access to a part of the mind that doesn't exist. Do you think that that, is that something that, I'm trying to figure out how to say this, but is that something that is like, it's going to take a long time before that's something that you could pass off to other folks that haven't experienced that and have them accept it and is there a bridge to sort of uh getting them to consider these ideas well i really i i don't know i mean the bridge that the most convincing thing

is you know here's here's the pipe smoke the. You don't need me to tell you. As you mentioned before, and it's quite true, one of the beautiful things about psychedelics is you don't have to have faith. All you have to have is courage. You know, you have to have enough courage to sit down and put that pipe to your lips. And, you know, we can get beyond this conversation very quickly. Then we can have beyond this conversation very quickly. Yes. Then we can have the real conversation about what does all that mean? What happened and what is the real, what happened? Are we, you know, are you tapping into some external, again, these ridiculous words that are dualistic and hence – but are you tapping into some dimension that is not part of you or is it – or are you looking at a certain neurochemical brain state that has – that doesn't go beyond that?

And then it's like we can fall back on what we were saying. Everything you experience is a neurochemical brain state, right? Right. That's what we are. That's what our brain does. Do you define it? Do you define it yourself? Like when you do it, what do you think is happening?

DMT? Yes. Which is the most profound one? Yes. Which is the most profound one? I think, well, it's, you know, the problem with psychedelics, one of the problems that we experience with psychedelics is they're essentially unlanguageable. They're beyond language. And you take DMT or something like it that has such a profound impact, I mean, you probably noticed it in yourself. You're not even down from the experience before you're trying to box it into some kind of a linguistic box that's, you know, and you're reaching out and

you're babbling and you say, that's it, that's it, or my God, my God, or, you know, but you're trying to put it into some kind of a linguistic box because it's incomprehensible by nature. It's incomprehensible. It's like trying to describe what God looks like. It is by definition indescribable. And so, but our brain wants to conceptualize things. So whatever model you create of what it is, that's not it. That's not the thing. It's not what you experienced. It's a memory of what you experienced. And I don't know how you get around that.

I don't know how you get around that. You know, I think that, well, I don't know. It seems as though even exploring the concept itself is almost impossible without having the experience. It's almost impossible. I mean, so you're asking me to supply a linguistic description. apply a linguistic description. So with the caveat that any linguistic description is going to be inadequate, I would say a lot of what my impressions of DMT are, the most profound experiences are, it strips away, you get to see the raw data of experience in the unprocessed form. You know how we were talking about how the brain takes experience and, you know, puts it all together into some kind of more or less comprehensible model and extrudes it out as, you know, your reality, your movie, the movie that you're producer, director, and star of.

And it does that. DMT gives you a chance to kind of arrest that process. And again, as I said, step back from it and look at the raw data. Look at the circuitry underneath. Free of interpretation and say, oh, okay, this is the machinery. This is the machinery that's generating reality. But again, by even saying that, I don't do it justice. I mean, it's slippery. Obviously, it's a slippery concept. Intensely, intensely. And I've always wondered, like, what is the best, if there is a way to describe it to someone who hasn't experienced it.

I don't think there is. I think there is. And even to those of us who have experienced it, you can't describe it. After my experience, I felt like I'd been tricked. Like, that's not anything like Terrence McKenna or Dennis McKenna described it. What was your experience like? No self-transforming machine elves? Well, I'm thinking of my first mushroom experience.

Oh. No, my first DMT experience was, I mean, it sounds trivial, but it was sort of like some sort of gingerbread or Play-Doh that was alive and talking to me. And just sort of one aspect of the Godhead. Gingerbread or Play-Doh? It was sort of alive and dying. Like self-transforming gingerbread people.

I guess in a way it didn't look like an elf, but it kind of had that aspect. It certainly felt alive, like it had been waiting for me. Yeah, that's the weird one. And it was happy to see me. Yeah, the weird one is the friend was happy to see me. The weird one is the friendliness of it. But I felt dead. That was my overwhelming feeling was, oh no, I've really done

it. But in the back of my mind, I knew that I was coming back. I was still sitting in my chair and before I knew it, it was over. Doug Stanhope, who's a good friend of mine, he's a stand-up comedian, did DMT with me The first time he ever did it

I had him over my house And he went into convulsions Which I've never seen before And it was 5-MeO And he Yeah He started moaning And foaming at the mouth

Like he was like Like drool was coming out of his mouth And he was going And I was thinking Can you die from this shit? I never heard of anybody. Fuck. Did I just kill my friend?

Damn. How am I going to explain this? And, um, I've never, I've never seen anybody have that experience before or since. And, uh,

it was weird. It was, he was moaning. It was a big dose. He took a big dose. And, uh, you know, when he came back, just filled with descriptions that were inadequate, you know, which we all are. Right.

But. Fibethoxy is even trickier than DMT. I don't know. I mean, I've had very limited experience with fibethoxy because it's too much. Yeah. I didn't think I was coming back. That's my thought. Maybe that's exactly the one we should be looking into. But it has more issues with toxicity and all that.

But it's definitely put you in this place. You know James Oroch's book, Tryptamine Palace? No. Oh, you might want to get him on this show. Tryptamine Palace, James Oroch. How do you spell it? O-R-O-C, I believe. Phytophthoxy DMT.

This is all about Phytophthoxy DMT. This is all about Phymethoxy DMT. That's his whole book? Yeah. And he says, you think DMT is something, Phymethoxy is where it's really at.

And I can't dispute that because frankly, it scares the shit out of me. Yeah. It was different for me because it didn't give me the sort of comfort that DMT did, that it was sort of talking to me and communicating with me.

It was completely absent of any context. It was impossible to... Exactly. That's what it was. There were no friendly elf and no gingerbread people, no elf machines, no nothing like that. gingerbread people know elf machines know nothing like that it was like you were you were my apprehension was it was that i was part of this ort cloud of souls i was a part of this somewhere somewhere there's a place where all conscious entities arose from and go back to and i was in the center of this galactic cloud of being, you know.

I mean, I sort of had a dim awareness of my existence as a separate entity, but mostly I was part of this soul cloud and is the best I can describe it. And by the time I came back, that was all completely faded, as it tended to. That was 20 years ago that I had that experience, and it still resonated with me. I haven't done it since. Yeah, I've only had it a few times, and I didn't want to go back again. I was like, I got it. I got that.

Whereas the NN dimethyltryptamine was different every time, and it seemed like it was a communication, like something was talking to me, like there was a lot going on. The visual aspect of it was way more compelling. Yeah. There's very little visual aspect with Vibethoxy. It was just white. Mm-hmm. Yeah. yeah there's very little visual aspect with fibethoxy it was just white yeah

and it was like it felt like I wasn't I didn't have a consciousness anymore it's the only thing that I've ever done that seemed to

eliminate consciousness like it wasn't didn't matter like the vaguely aware the dully aware of the fact that you exist at all was one of the more

terrifying aspects of it it's like oh this is probably what happens when you die when you die. When you die, you probably go into this thing and become whatever. Part of this cloud, part of this community of oversouls, which is every conscious being that ever existed anywhere in the universe. It also gave me the most tangible feeling of there not being an up

and there not being a down. There's no left, there's no left there's no right there's the whole thing you know and then you're part of the whole thing and it just goes everywhere it doesn't you're not in the middle you're not in the center you're not in the left you're not to the right it's just the whole thing you know and yeah it's an illusion and that that was the the weird aspect of the planets were an illusion. Everything's an illusion. Wind, all of it, nonsense.

You're just a part of the whole. When you get down to the lowest thing, you're a part of the whole soup. Yep. Yep. Fuck that drug. He refers to it as the zero energy point field. Oh, yeah. Which, yeah, I mean, that's definitely

worth putting on your map. And if you're brave enough or foolish enough, it's probably worth exploring. But I'm too old for that shit. I can't, not that it's, you know. My friend Duncan took it And he took a huge dose Because he didn't believe it was any He had never done any DMT before

And he had done acid And I had never done acid before And I was telling him about DMT He's like you've never even done acid So he takes DMT in a big dose And he calls me up He's like dude What the fuck man

I'm like I told you No you didn't tell me You kind of told me But I didn't listen. Holy shit. Like, he was convinced that he died. He was a believer at that point. Oh, boy.

Was he ever. Yeah. Yeah, it was, you know, it's very disturbing, but again, impossible to ignore transcendent experience. Yeah, it is. I think Salvia Divinorum can take a person to a similar space. Sort of you feel that you're no longer a point of consciousness,

except it doesn't feel like a cloud. It feels like a Mexican dance party or something. It's like a geometric thing is going on. That's a weird one, isn't it? Because it slipped through. Salvia slipped through, and it took a while before people realized it slipped through. You mean legally speaking?

Yes. It slipped through because it's its own best insurance against abuse. Most people are like, once is enough, never again, dude. It's one of these ones, like by methoxy. I mean, some people do seem to be fascinated by it, and they keep going back to it. But most people find it very disturbing and not particularly enjoyable and actually just bizarro, you know. But again, these are areas of consciousness. But again, these are areas of consciousness.

These pharmacological tools are exploratory probes into these realms of consciousness. And just because you're familiar with the psychedelic experience, which is mainly the tryptamine-mediated serotonin dimension, there, all those other dimensions out there, and there are aspects of consciousness too. Salvia divinorum happens to be the kappa opiate, you know, it's a kappa opiate-like end. It's very selective for, you know, we don't think of opiates as going to those places, you know, heroin, morphine, those sorts of things. They're euphoric, gentle, you know, almost sedated states of mind. Kappa opiate, which out, you know, certainly not addictive. But so that realm of consciousness is mediated by that whole network. If you look at the detourers, the nightshades, the anticholinergics, that's working on acetylcholine. They're acetylcholine blockers. So that's a whole other neurotransmitter system.

And if you look into, you know, they have a long history of use, obviously, and they seem to be, if you look into the use of Toei in South America, Toei, Brick Bansia, or you look at Datura and other nightshades in Europe, this is the realm of wraiths and ghosts and that sort of thing. Mm-hmm. Datura is a very interesting one too, because of the, uh, the reality dissolving properties of it,

where people think that they're somewhere that they're not, and they have huge issues with memory. Do you think that's the disruption of acetylcholine? Dr. Well, yeah, it does disrupt memory. We know that acetylcholine has a lot to do with the entrainment of memory and Datura disrupts that. So it's hard to remember the state, which is probably a good thing because the states are really bizarre.

I tell people Datura, you know, Nightshade, Datura is not a psychedelic, but it's a true hallucinogen in the sense that it's not a psychedelic state, but you have hallucinations. The problem is you can't tell if they're real or not. Usually a psychedelic hallucination, you know it's not real. You may be seeing something that's not there, but there's a part of your mind that's saying, this is a hallucination. It's not there. You see things on Datura. You don't know if they're there if I could, I could have a hallucination, I'm sitting across from you talking and you seem as real and solid as you do now, you know, but you're

not there. I'm having a conversation with you. And then you sort of just fade away like kind of a wraith, you know, you sort of, and I'm like, what the fuck? Where did you go? Is that what has happened to you? Yeah, that's what happens to people on Datura.

What happened to you when you did it? That's what happened. You were talking to someone, they literally didn't exist. Yeah, yeah. Well, I took Datura, I describe this in my book, actually, I have a whole chapter of it. A friend of mine and I took Datura when we were 16, not even knowing what it was. I mean, this is how clueless we were at the time. I actually thought it was a kind of morning glory. I had had LSD once in my life and we took these Datura and I thought it was a different species of morning glory. So all this stuff began to happen and I thought, oh, this is what a bad acid trip is like. And no, it's not what a bad acid trip is like. It's what a totally typical

detour trip is like. And it's characteristic that you see entities, you see things that aren't there. And I was, and it was quite anxiety provoking. And my friend, I was in my bedroom. I managed to, you know, you have to read the chapter, but I finally got to my bedroom. I barricaded myself in my bedroom. My mother was completely freaked out, you know, as to what was going on. I just said, mom.

How old are you? You know, I'll be out in 12 hours. It's okay. Don't worry. How old were you? 16. Oh, that's awesome. And so I'm in the bedroom, and one of the weird things,

I guess people who take Teterra should be forewarned, one of the things it does is dilate your eyes, right? I mean, it's used medically to dilate your eyes. Atropine is what they put in your eyes to do an eye exam. What that means is your eyes are dilated so you can't see very well. And so any mottled surface, anything with a texture like a tablecloth or wallpaper, anything you look at starts to swarm. And the next thing you know, there are bugs everywhere. For me, so it was like the bug experience.

There were insects. All surfaces were like covered with these swarming, you know, things, which were the visual distortions of not being able to focus on anything. But I was totally freaked out by this. And so my friends or images of my friends kept appearing at the edge of my bed, at the end of my bed. And they would appear and I would say, help me, help me, get me out of here. I need, you know, and they would sort of just look at me and like, you know, you poor sap, you know, shake their head and then just fade away.

That's awesome. It's fascinating that it has something to do with acetylcholine. Yes. Have you ever experimented with taking acetylcholine before you go to bed? I haven't. It gives you the most amazing lucid dreams.

Amazing dreams. I'm not surprised. Yeah. Fascinating, what I call durable lucid dreams. Right. Because I'm not a lucid dream, like I'm not disciplined in it. I've never studied it. I don't practice it. Apparently there's techniques that you can learn how to like successfully luc dream on the natch, as it were. But if you take acetylcholine before you go to bed, like a couple hours before you go to bed, you have lucid dreams whether you like it or not. It seems like your dreams are more durable when you're aware. It means to me personally, when I'm aware of my dreams normally,

they'd fade away. Like, oh, I'm dreaming, and then it's gone. I wake up. Right. So you're just boosting what's a natural process. Because when you go to sleep, your brain becomes flooded with acetylcholine. Yes. Right?

And these detours, these tropane alkaloids, what they do is block acetylcholine. They block the receptors. So their acetylcholine, they're called, the technical term is anticholinergic. They block acetylcholine, the technical term is anticholinergic. They block acetylcholine from binding to its receptor. So that's the basis of the altered state of consciousness. And interestingly enough, the detourist state of mind resembles profound sleep deprivation. If you keep yourself awake for five days, you will have experiences and hallucinations that are almost indistinguishable from a state of detour intoxication. That's bizarre.

I don't recommend it, by the way. I mean, don't do Datura. Or if you do Datura, have somebody there who's looking after you because you really can't distinguish reality and you do silly things. You know, I had a friend who took Datura one time and he spent the whole time dismantling his motorcycle engine on the floor, on his kitchen floor, taking it apart and cleaning it and putting it back together. He didn't own a motorcycle. So what was that about? Oh my God. What if he learned how to do it though?

What if he gave him a motorcycle engine and he's like, oh, I've done this. And then he starts doing it all together correctly. He told him to be able to do it. Wow. Bizarre. Uber bizarre. What is that? There's that drug that they use for air sickness.

Same one, scopolamine. Yes. That's the one. That's the same thing as Datura. That's the main psychoactive alkaloid in Datura and Belladonna. And this is the one that does it. There are other alkaloids, but it's primarily scopolamine. Wow.

And they used to use, medically, they used to use scopolamine because it's for childbirth. Back in the days of barbarism, when they thought women, in order to give birth, had to be put in a, had to be drugged. They used copolymine to put them in a twilight state, like a hypnotic state of semi-consciousness. And then they could have the, of course, they didn't remember any of that experience, which was sort of the point, I guess. How does nicotine fit in? Because one of my most intense lucid dreaming experiences was with a nicotine patch. Nicotine has the opposite effect to the tropanes. The tropanes are what's called acetylcholine antagonists. Nicotine is an agonist, so it has an acetylcholine-like effect,

which is why when you smoke, you get this sort of cognitive activation. It's great to settle down and focus your attention on a task. It activates cognition. Wow. A lot of the research now on Alzheimer's and other dementias are finding things that either have this cholinergic agonist effect, like nicotine, or they block acetylcholine from being broken down. There are acetylcholine esterase inhibitors. Acetylcholine esterase is the enzyme that breaks down acetylcholine esterase inhibitors. Acetylcholine esterase is the enzyme that breaks down acetylcholine. I don't smoke cigarettes, but I found it absolutely

fascinating in reading Stephen King's book on writing, where he talked about when he stopped smoking cigarettes, it really affected his writing process. Absolutely. I'm not surprised at all. Couldn't, didn't really fire up the way it used to. That's right. Yeah. So now we've again, got off the track and we're off in the jungles of pharmacology. Well, it's fascinating. No, I mean, it's not off track at all. I mean, it's all interesting because it's all in relationship to what we understand currently about compounds that affect the human body. And what you're doing with the Ethnobotanical Stewardship Council

is to try to educate people on these things, try to expand consciousness and awareness of these things, and really just promote it and put energy behind it. Mm-hmm. Part of it is education. It's developing a model of self-regulation that can improve the safety of people that want to use these traditional plants.

But one thing I want to be clear about is that we're ourselves not setting a standard, per se. We're engaging people in dialogue. We're kind of setting the table for indigenous groups and people that run retreat centers, people that are selling ayahuasca online, etc. All the people that are involved in the kind of value chain of ayahuasca to come together and determine, well, what does sustainability at the site level look like?

Like ecotourism? How are you giving back to the community, to the biodiversity of the place where you have your site? How are you making sure the people in the ceremony are safe, that they're screened psychologically or for heart conditions? They're not taking antidepressants. They have people babysitting or watching so people don't wander off into the jungle. The antidepressants one is an interesting one. What's the issue with that? Well, the issue with antidepressants and ayahuasca is because ayahuasca involves MAO inhibitors, right? And so it prevents the breakdown of DMT, right?

And so there's a lot of DMT in your – it's a serotonergic agonist, right? And so are the antidepressants. So you are essentially piling on one serotonergic agonist on another because you're inhibiting the breakdown process. MAO is involved in breaking down both DMT and serotonin. So safety-wise, the issue is that it could lead to what's called a serotonin syndrome. And the serotonin syndrome is something that happens when you've got too much serotonin, too much pushing the serotonin button a little bit too hard. And it could lead to hyperthermia and cardiac irregularities and ultimately death if it's really bad. You want to avoid the serotonin syndrome if possible.

That's fascinating because that's also an issue that people have if they take SSRIs and they want to consume tryptophan or 5-HTP. Exactly. Exactly. That's also one way to do it. And in some ways, the psychedelic experience itself is kind of skirting this. I mean, you're pushing the serotonin button, right? Right. But in most cases with psychedelics, you haven't inactivated the enzymatic breaks that are metabolizing this stuff. So it's not an issue. With ayahuasca, it's really only an issue if you're taking SSRIs or if you're taking MAO inhibitors, which most people, they're not used clinically anymore. There's a whole older

generation of antidepressants that are MAO inhibitors. You shouldn't combine those with ayahuasca and you shouldn't combine SSRIs with ayahuasca. I mean, that may be a theoretical hazard. I haven't seen a lot of reports of serotonin syndrome happening with ayahuasca. So it's a theoretical hazard. I'm sure there are people taking serotonin uptake inhibitors that are taking ayahuasca, and there's no problem, but they're probably taking lower doses. It's just a good idea to get off those things before you take ayahuasca.

Is it a good idea to get off those things, period? Yeah. It is if you can. Not for everybody. They really help some people. But a lot of times antidepressants are overprescribed and overused for too many things. They don't really help people get to the root of their problems. They just kind of band-aid it over and you feel sort of normal, you know, and you can be a

productive citizen and you don't really think about things too much. They're prescribed for PTSD, you know, but they don't cure PTSD. They just kind of dampen it down and bury it. They don't give you an opportunity to really look at issues and work them through. This is why psychedelics are not a good model for big pharma. Big pharma wants things like SSRIs, which you take every day for the rest of your life. That's the business model. Psychedelics are things that you might take a few times and work through your issues, and you don't need antidepressants after that. I've talked to many, many people who said, you know, who have been on antidepressants. They go to South America.

They take a few ayahuasca sessions. They never have to go back to antidepressants. Again, I mean, they can get off it for good. Many people have that experience. That's a huge problem financially for pharmaceutical companies. Well, you don't see them piling on. Yeah, exactly. Well, then you start selling ayahuasca.

Yeah. It's not going to work that way because Big Pharma, they want drugs that people consume. I think the way that – I think where the business model – you can't use these drugs in therapy, in a therapeutic session without intense psychotherapy. without intense psychotherapy, whether that's actual psychotherapy or shamanism or some combination of those things. These are drugs that have to be used in context. The take two and call me in the morning model doesn't work for these. These have to be used in a very highly controlled set and setting. So I think where the business model comes in is you have places where people can go and get this kind of therapy. So it shifts from the drug itself, the emphasis is on, you know, our whole biomedical industrial complex is set up to encourage band-aid solutions. You

know, you have a problem. You go see your psychiatrist. He has seven minutes, if he's lucky, to talk to you. Here's a prescription. Get out of here. You know, that's the way it works. With psychedelics, you actually have to have a therapist who will sit down and talk with you. This is a whole novel concept.

And, you know, so I think where the business potential comes in is that to have centers of therapy where you can go and get psychedelic therapy. The emphasis is more on the setting and the services provided than the actual chemicals. Yeah, the setting and the, this is possible in other countries where it's legal. In America right now – So are they happening? Yes. In America right now, it's a huge issue.

But Josh was talking about selling ayahuasca online. I mean how many people do that and what's the legality when it comes to – the plants themselves are not necessarily illegal. Right, right. DMT is illegal. DMT is illegal, but DMT is found in so many plants that, you know, they can't really make all those plants illegal because, you know, I mean they can, but they're not going to be able to enforce it. You're not going to be able to have salad. Literally, you're not going to be

able to have salad. I mean, I'm, you know, harkening back to what we were saying about how close DMT is to tryptophan, two steps away. I'll bet you, I mean, I wish somebody would do this. There's no funding for this, but I'll bet you if you had sufficiently sensitive instruments, you could find DMT in all plants. You could just start randomly selecting them out of your backyard and run them through the mass spec or whatever. You could pick up DMT, not in usable amounts, but it's universally just nature you know, nature is drenched in DMT. Why do you think that is? Because it's so close to tryptophan, you know, and it's just the compound, the tryptophan is universally distributed. The enzymes that transform it to DMT have other cellular functions.

So they're found in all cells. They're just part of metabolism. And so it's just an accident of nature. You know, it's just the way it is. What a fascinating accident. Or it's actually maybe nature's trying to send us a little message if you want to interpret it that way. But it's just the way it is.

Or it's just a part of the building blocks of the universe itself. Yeah, it's just part of the building blocks of... Exactly. And that chemical doorway to another dimension exists in virtually everything that's alive. What a mindfuck that is. Selling ayahuasca online, I don't know if people are selling ayahuasca prepared ayahuasca brews online. They are. They are?

That seems to be the case. In the States? In a legal gray area. Yeah. I think that's irresponsible. To sell it online. Well, because it's a drug that needs to be taken in an appropriate set and setting. It needs guidance.

Right. So to sell it online is to be guilty of that whole thing. Take two and call me in the morning. Go off and do this with your friends. Well, that's what – without any preparation and any real knowledge, that's not ethical in my opinion. That's how 5-MeO was acquired until fairly recently. When I bought 5-MeO, I just bought it online. It just delivered me enough to get the world high.

I mean, you realize how potent it is and what a small dose you need, and if they're sending you some giant supply of it. Well, that's an issue with all of these things And if they're sending you some giant supply of it – Well, that's an issue with all of these things and the whole designer drug thing. There are hundreds and hundreds of these things. So I sort of say, well, we should stick with the plants. At least we know what the identity of. But I mean I think that – I mean synthetic drugs are out there. People

are going to use them. It comes back to education. Teach people how to use drugs basically. You have to teach people how to use drugs. This is what so-called drug education hasn't quite grok to, hasn't quite admitted. But that is, in fact, that's real drug education. Not, you know, all drugs are bad, never take it. I mean, that's absurd. That's ridiculous. Now, you've lived through several eras of psychedelic awareness. You lived through the 60s. You lived through all that craziness. You lived through the 70s. You lived through several eras of psychedelic awareness. You lived through the 60s. You lived through all that craziness. You lived through the 70s. You lived through the clampdown.

And now you're here, which is, I think it's safe to call this the psychedelic renaissance. I think this is a new time. Well, we'd like to think so. I'm pretty positive. Yeah. At least it is in my reality, the reality that I experience. Right. I mean, I've never in my time seen psychedelics more referenced than I see them today.

And part of it's because of the company I keep. Part of it is because of the message that I put out and the people that I interact with because of that. But I think also it's just a matter of the cat got out of the bag. Yeah. The stigma is fading away. So it's just a matter of the cat got out of the bag. Yeah, the stigma is fading away. The whole 60s baggage that psychedelics have been marginalized with for so long, that's going away and a new, more positive perception is appearing

as some of these therapeutic uses are becoming more aware in general consciousness. Oh, PTSD can be treated with MDMA. We've got veterans out there who need that. That's a hugely powerful message. And if the Department of Defense is behind it, it can't be bad, right? Yeah, I mean, isn't that kind of ironic that the need for psychedelics has arisen from the war culture that we've seen? Yeah, it's totally ironic. So strange.

There it is. And so these positive messages are being heard more and more and there's less and less sort of, you know, partly because a lot of people from the 60s are dying off or whatever they don't remember. But the knee-jerk negative message about psychedelics is not happening as much. Yeah, they're much harder to distinguish now, the folks who use them, than the hippies with the beads and the look, which was so stereotypical of what the Goldwater Republicans found reprehensible about that generation. Right. They were lazy, shiftless, do-for-nothing people that just wanted to get high and escape reality. And that paradigm.

That perception is passing. Yeah. And it's all to the good. What has it been like for you to experience these different waves? And it's all to the good. What has it been like for you to experience these different waves? Well, I don't know. I haven't really been personally impacted by this thing. I mean, I've been where I've been all the way through.

And not particularly public. I'm much more public now about it than I have been. So maybe that's a difference. But I don't feel that I have to be careful about talking about it in public. I mean, I consider myself an advocate for responsible use, you know, and good science. And I'm not even saying people should even take these things. What I'm saying is if you decide to take it, go into it with open eyes, do some preparation, pay attention to set and setting, do it in a way that, you know, if there are benefits to be had, maximize the benefits. So approach it as a conscious, uh, conscious exercise and, uh,

you know, um, and, and, and approach them with respect and intention. These are serious things. What do you say to someone who has zero experience in these things? I'm guarantee you right now, this podcast is reaching people that have no psychedelic experience whatsoever. They don't know anyone who has had any psychedelic experience. They don't know where to turn or where to start, but they're very intrigued and the door has been opened to them. Okay. Well, the first thing to do is get yourself educated about it. You know, like sign up for this symposium, right? I mean, watch the online thing. But there are many other tools. Another group that I love to plug, and I think they're doing a marvelous work, is Arrowood.

Arrowood.org is online. It's the best online source of information about psychoactive drugs of all kinds, not just psychedelics. It's the go-to place on the web if you want real, solid information, not bullshit, not put out by the propagandists, put out by people whose commitment is to accurate information. Start there. It's a fantastic website. Read about it. There are trip reports. There are safety reports, the chemistry, the entheobotany, the part of it, the shamanic traditions. It's all represented there. That's the place to start. And spell it out too for people.

E-R-O-W-I-D, arrowwood.org. Go there and read up about it. Educate yourself before you take the substance so that you can make an informed decision. What's an appropriate method of use? What are the right circumstances? What are the hazards? What do you not want to do? I think that's the first thing.

And I think, again, I think this symposium conference is going to be great, but it's also exemplary of what needs to happen. And I'm really impressed that young people like the folks that are organizing this conference are stepping up to the plate and saying, we want to make this a part of education, you know, an educational dialogue. We want to have this happen on lots of university campuses, lots of places. That's the thing. We have better tools now than we've ever had for sharing information. Take advantage of those tools. You know, before, back in the 60s, 70s, you might not have had no experience with psychedelics and no real, you know, no way to know, how am I going to find out about these things? You know, now it's a click of a mouse and you're there. There's no excuse for not educating yourself. There's no excuse for not educating yourself. Another very good site is iSEERS.org, I-C-E-E-R-S. It's the International Center for Ethnobotanical Education, Research, and Service based in Europe.

They have a ton of information about ayahuasca and iboga, the plant-based psychedelics. They're also a sort of incubation partner for the ESC, helping ESC get started. Yeah, Ibogaine is another fantastic drug for dealing with addiction. I have a good friend who had a back injury and got hooked on pain pills and had a real problem and really couldn't kick it. Went to Mexico, did Ibogaine, became completely fascinated,

cured and absolutely fascinated by Ibogaine, became completely fascinated, cured, and absolutely fascinated by Ibogaine, and how is this possible that this has escaped Western medicine, started his own Ibogaine Center down there, and now, you know, regular. I mean, he's just a different human being. When I talk to him, he's just like so at peace and just a different guy. He knows himself in a different way. It breaks that physical addiction to opiates instantly. The ESC is signing a memorandum of understanding with the Global Ibogaine Therapist Alliance to work on the safety and the sustainability

of that traditional plant. It's under extreme pressure from the growing global demand. It's traditionally from Africa, and it takes seven years for a mature plant to be grown, and then you have to take the root out and kill the plant. So there's a lot of work to be done. There's a Global Ibogaine Therapist Alliance conference in Durban this May as well. We're hoping to have some big announcements come out of that on the sustainability front. So many things came out.

Ibogaine never – I mean it was – it never went away. It was always there but it was suppressed essentially in Western medicine. I mean they had a perception that it had no place. There were almost clinical studies approved by the FDA, and then they stepped back from it because of some supposed neurotoxicity, which I don't think they ever satisfactorily demonstrated. But that's a good example. The therapeutic community was saying, well, ibogaine is so useful for this addiction therapy that we're just not going to put up with this. And, ibogaine is so useful for this addiction therapy that we're just not going to put up with this. And so ibogaine is not illegal. It's illegal in the States, but it's not

illegal in most of the world. So these addiction treatment centers have blossomed all over the world. There's Mexico, South America, even Canada. There are treatment centers that use ibogaine to treat addiction. And they've just said, well, you know, fuck the FDA. We're going to step outside that framework and do it because it's important to get this therapy to people. And that's all to the good, I think. That's a model maybe for what's going to happen with ayahuasca. Yeah, I would hope so. And I would like to see what's going on right now with marijuana in this country slowly start happening with ayahuasca, ibogaine, psilocybin, all these various things. Yeah.

Do you have hope for that? Totally. I do. History is on our side. The first thing I'd tell people that are considering psychedelics is put your preconceptions aside and just look at the facts. What would you say to someone? Say, like, we're talking about young people. What if a guy's 50 and, you know, maybe he's going through a rough divorce and, uh, you know, it's like, man, this fucking, I need to reset my brain. I need to figure this out, but I don't

know anybody. Nobody at the office knows anything about this stuff. Right. Well, smoked a joint in college. That's about it. Right. I would say take it in a traditional context that you feel comfortable with. If you're looking for psychological help, maybe take it at a center that focuses on that. You take it at a center that focuses on that. If you've always been attracted to shamanic experiences,

then suss out which centers might be best for you and read reviews of them. And in two to three years, the ESC will have a rating system or a kind of star rating system for sites based on how sustainable they are, how good they're safety. Like a Yelp for psychedelics? Not so much a Yelp. I mean, a deeper level than a Yelp. Yelp's pretty deep. You can't fake it though. Right, you can't fake it. But it's hard for somebody going in to see what kind of an impact a center has on the local community or where they're sourcing the ayahuasca comes from. And that's where the ESC is bringing

that professional expertise to supplement what the community is doing. And certainly we will rely on feedback from visitors. That will be part of the credibility and the transparency that we're building into the way of assuring the sites are sustainable and safe. There will be grievance mechanisms if you have a bad experience. Hopefully in five years, that's probably optimistic time frame, but hopefully in 10 years, there'll be places you can go and have these experiences

where you don't have to leave the country. I mean, you can already find them outside the country, but it would be nice if there were places in the States where you could get this. And it would transform psychiatric medicine if there was, which is, again, threatening to many people with a stake in how it's done now. But I talked to so many psychiatrists and other professionals that are involved in the mental health

world. They're very frustrated. They're like saying, these people are hurting. And the way that we're handling them is not solving the problem. It's only making it worse. So, you know, there needs to be a wholesale, I wouldn't say overturning, but transformation of the model. I think that we're on the right track. I really do. I mean, there's a lot of people that are cynical today and they look at today's culture and they look at the toxification of our environment

and the materialism and the nonsense on television. They see it as a bad sign. But I really feel like civilization's cramming. I really do. I really think we're just scrambling to try and maybe we need something like all this nonsense that we experience on a daily basis to sort of really motivate this global awakening. We have to consume it to the extent that we're sick of it, that it makes us sick. And then we purge. And that's the ayahuasca model. We, you know, you consume so much of it

that eventually you just regurgitate it all and you feel much better afterwards, you know? I mean, that's, that's, I think that's partly what we're doing to ourselves. I think the most exciting thing too, is that we have a way out or we have a way up. Whereas like, it's not like we're in this pit and there's no ladder. It's like, there not like we're in this pit and there's no ladder

it's like there's a fucking hey guys yeah we have the tools i mean and they're incredibly profound and real you know these aren't theoretical things like you know we have a lot of these theoretical concepts about like uh fixing the plastic in the ocean well you know some 19 year old kid figured out a way that there's a machine, it scoops it up, and then it converts it into something usable, and then we could use that for energy. And the same thing is true with, like, nuclear waste. There's some theories about how to – but those are all – those are theoretical.

They may or may not be effective. They may or may not ever get built. They may not be in your life either. Yeah. The latter's right there. But, you know, I mean, in respect to that, we look at this dire existential situation, the environmental crisis and all that. And I take heart in the notion of never underestimate human ingenuity. You know, there are a lot of really smart people working on all these problems.

And that's my hope, you know, for our survival. Yeah. I think that the ingenuity will prevail. I hope so because otherwise we're in, I mean, we're already in deep shit. The question is how do we, how do we dig out of it? And, uh, it, it, it, you know, that's why we have these smart brains.

We're not going to get there by being stupid. We've had enough of that and there's still plenty of it to go around. But we need to move beyond that and stop listening to a lot of people like our politicians, for example, who seem to make a profession of stupidity. And they're actually proud of their stupidity. And that's distressing. In what way? In what way do you feel like – I mean like Sarah Palin, is that what you mean? Well, yeah, people like that.

The science deniers, the people that – well, I don't – don't bother me with your fucking facts. My mind is made up and God told me this. And this is horseshit. I mean, come on. Clear thinking at least should be a criterion if you want to be a politician, not somebody who's buying into some myth from the 14th century. I don't necessarily even think most of them are buying into it. I think what they've done is realize that there is a market for that.

There's just a gigantic chunk of the population that's terrified of change, terrified of the possibilities, the unknown, the intangibles, and they would like something Norman Rockwell. They would like you to paint some really clear and easy to recognize pattern that

they could say, Jesus! Thank you, Jesus. You know, the Lord has blessed me in so many ways, and they just fucking lock themselves in this box of perception. And then politicians come along and they go, oh, that guy, I know how to fucking play his heartstrings. Right, exactly. Well, then you're part of the problem. You're not really helping solve the problem.

You're taking advantage of what these people, what I think even Karl Rove called useful idiots. People that want simple answers. I call them simple answers for simple people. Hey, get over it. There are no simple answers. And what we need to be doing is looking for the real answers, asking the hard questions, realizing that it's all very complicated there are answers but we're not going to get there through delusions and fairy tales we've got to actually acknowledge

and start thinking about this and start talking about it to other people in a real way so Sarah Palin these people she needs mushrooms they're idiots she needs ayahuasca she needs a DMT trip she needs a head transplant So Sarah Palin, these people, I mean, they're idiots. She needs mushrooms.

She needs ayahuasca. She needs a DMT trip. She needs a head transplant is what she needs. Yeah, fuck yeah she would. She would realize that she's right and wrong at the same time. Right, right. Mind blown. Okay, so the website for the Ethnobotanical Stewardship Council.

It's ethnobotanicalcouncil.org. And the symposium is spelled sim like as in psychedelic, P-S-Y. Symposium 2014 is April 12th and 13th in Amherst, Massachusetts. Right. Listen, folks, if you can make it there. The website is symposium.org or symposia, symposia, plural. Symposia. .org, yeah.

Yeah, and if you can make it there, beautiful. Can you pay to go there? $30 at the door, $20 in advance tickets, $30 at the door if you actually want to go, but you can also watch it live for $10 online. It's a good deal. Such a deal. It's a great deal and you are contributing to something that is hugely important. You are part of this whole movement. There's

something going on, folks. Dennis, you're a huge part of it. Josh, you're a huge part of it. The people listening to this podcast are a huge part of it. It's all out there and it's moving. It's moving in, I think, a good direction. I really do. One last plug, if I may. There's a Congress that I'm going to next weekend in Mexico, Toluca, bringing together indigenous leaders with iboga, peyote, mushroom, ayahuasca experience, and they need funding to attend to bring more of the traditional healers

to that conference. It's called the Second International Congress on Traditional Medicine and Public Health, Sacred Plants, Culture, and Human Rights. And is this information all available on ethnobotanicalcouncil.org? Can they find it there? No, but I'll change that.

Put that shit up, son! Put that in the news section. Put it up! What the hell? that. Put that shit up, son. Yeah, put that in the news section. Put it up. What the hell? What the fuck? Come on, man. We're all working together on this. Can't just say it. Well, I'd like to say, Joe, also, thank you for having us on. And you, you, my friend, are one of the change makers. That's for sure. Don't underestimate that. I mean, you're a hero of mine. Oh, that's a huge honor. I'm a useful idiot.

What I am is a... You're useful. You ain't no idiot. I'm a repeater of things that are fascinating. But I appreciate that very much. And I feel as compelled as all of you to try to broadcast as much of what I've stumbled upon and talk about it as much as possible. And it's impossible without guys like you. So thank you all.

Thank you very much. Thank you for having us. Thank you everybody listening too. Thank you for having us. Thank you to the listeners. We're all in this shit together, people. So please go to ethnobotanicalcouncil.org. Go to symposia.org.

And that's it. We'll be back next week with much more love. Big kiss till then. Mwah!