The Joe Rogan Experience - #946 - Dennis McKenna

Episode Date: April 17, 2017

Dennis McKenna is an ethnopharmacologist, author, and brother to well-known psychedelics proponent Terence McKenna. http://espd50.com/

It just seems the problem with the marijuana is 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. Dennis McKenna, ladies and gentlemen. Before we were just discussing how I was saying that marijuana can be your friend and it can enhance your life. But if you take too much, it's such a seductive little creature. Because a little bit of it is like, ah, this is nice, this feels good. But if you get too crazy, especially if you get too crazy with edibles, it'll take you and take you away on this wild journey of paranoia. And it'll lock you up. Some people just need to take a couple weeks off.

Just relax. That's always a good idea. It is a good idea, right? Yeah. I think people underestimate cannabis. I think it can be, like you say, it can really sort of knock you off your center, especially if it's edible. And like all these things, you've got to learn how to use it. Yeah. I mean, it's basically, that's what you've got to do.

You'll have to learn how to use it. But, you know, you know that's my rap. Yeah, it is your rap. But it's a great rap. It really is. that's my rap. Yeah, it is your rap. But it's a great rap. It really is. It's so important. I think it's so important for people to realize that. You got to let, like, regular you, like you, like natural, sober you.

It's important to be in touch with that. Like, you don't want to always be high or always be caffeinated or always be anything. Well, exactly. I mean, we're, you know, people get, you know, to these places and they fail to do a reality check on themselves. You know, I mean, I get emails from people all the time. So, well, I'm, you know, life's been pretty weird lately. I took mushrooms five times last week and, you know, I was, and it's like, dude, how about you lay off for a while and give yourself a chance? Because, you know, they tell these stories and it's like

the idea of, okay, let's find your center, go back to baseline, lay off the sauce, whatever it is you're taking and just chill out and try and rediscover your center. It seems like common sense advice, but people don't do that. It does seem like common sense advice, but common sense is not common. I think everybody knows that. Yes. All you have to do is look around to realize that. What is it about people, though, that once they indulge in any sort of, I mean, it doesn't even have to be a substance. It could be an activity like gambling, for instance.

even have to be a substance. It could be an activity, like gambling, for instance. Like, once it gets in your bones, it just seems like you're so compelled to just continue that behavior, and the idea of stopping is almost more painful than the idea of wrecking your life. This is addiction. Basically, these things are reinforcing. This is addiction. Basically, these things are reinforcing.

They activate those pleasure circuits, you know, in the brain, mediated mainly through dopamine. And all of these, I mean, the so-called drugs of abuse, which I think is a terrible word, terrible. But, you know, the reinforcing drugs, the pleasure drugs work directly or indirectly through the dopamine circuits. And the dopamine is like your button for pleasure. You know, in the same way that serotonin is kind of on the opposite side. It's your button for more like euphoria, feeling good, but not the, it doesn't have the punch, I guess. Which is why people can get addicted to gambling. They can get addicted to sex. They can get addicted to television.

All of these things, it doesn't have to be substances because they all hit those same circuits, you know, except the psychedelics, which don't work on that reward circuitry. They work on a different set of circuits. And that rewards circuitry. They work on a different set of circuits. But yet, even with those, your behavior patterns can become addictive. And then you can start just doing psychedelics too much. And it's not even the psychedelics that are doing it. It's just this compulsive need to constantly change your state of mind.

Yeah, that's quite true. And if people, you know, the way to use psychedelics is, there are many ways to use it, but basically use it thoughtfully. You know, I mean, you can, all the question about recreational use versus spiritual use versus therapeutic use. I mean, these are all ways to approach it. And I am not a person who says you must do it this way, you must do it that way. What I do say is do it from an informed place and do approach it thoughtfully, you know, because, I mean, in other words, don't, you know, plan for it. Respect the medicine in a certain way. You know, use it in a circumstance where you can learn from the medicine rather than have the medicine be sort of a, you know, overlay over whatever else you're doing. I mean, this is something that demands attention. And I think that's the best way to use psychedelics.

And for whatever, you know, whatever spin you put on it, is it spiritual? Is it therapeutic? Is it recreational? Is it shamanic? These are all labels. Is it recreational? Is it shamanic? These are all labels. The important thing is that, you know, you approach the medicine itself.

The medicine is the teacher, right? Not the sitter, not the shaman, not the psychotherapist. If they're doing their job correctly, in my opinion, their job is to let you have your encounter with the medicine. And the medicine is what you learn from. They're there to facilitate that. They can intervene if you get anxious or if things go on, make sure, you know teacher, which is the medicine, be it ayahuasca or mushrooms or whatever, can have this intense one-on-one interaction. I feel like with psychedelics as well as with all these other things that we're talking about, any kind of drug, even coffee, alcohol, whatever, behavior patterns, all these different things. I think one of the things that happens with human beings is you get so far along in your life and these behavior patterns become so like tight grooves that are carved into your

psyche. And then as you become an adult, then you start to learn like, oh, there's got to be a better way to handle this. Let me figure out how to do this. And it's almost like getting a car when you're really young and not learning how to drive until you're like in your twenties. And so you're just driving this thing and smashing into trees and grinding the gears. And then somewhere along the line, you're like, oh my God, I'm fucking myself up. I have to figure out a way to do this correctly. And there's two different approaches. There's one, the abstinence approach, which is very popular. People say, well, I'm, I'm straight edge now. I don't do anything and that's it. And I just,

you know, I just do wheatgrass and I run hills and stuff. I'm like, okay, you could do that too. I mean, right. You can do it. You definitely can do that too. But it's, I just don't think that there's anything wrong with any of these things. I think there's something wrong with the way we use them. And I think it's one of the inherent problems with things being illegal is that we can't discuss this. We don't have people like you or centers where people can go, where people can become educated on the proper way to use these drugs or medicines, whatever you want to call them, these compounds, and get something out of them that can really be beneficial. Right. That's exactly right.

I mean, I've said this many, many times that, you know, drug education, what they call drug education in this country, is a joke because the whole emphasis is on don't use them. That's absurd. That's like telling, you know, an 18-year-old guy full of testosterone, don't have sex. You know, come on. It's built into the genetics. They're going to go for that. What you have to do, what they can't bring themselves to acknowledge in the drug education field is it's not about telling people not to use drugs.

It's about teaching people how to use drugs if they choose to, right? I mean, like any other skill, people have to learn to drive. They have to learn to do yoga. They have to learn to do whatever they do. There's an educational process. I tell people many times, you know, my shtick is there is no such thing as a bad drug. And that's another problem with the dialogue. The badness is projected onto the drugs.

Drugs are simply compounds with a certain pharmacology. There's no moral aspect to them. The moral dimension comes in how do people use them. That's where, you know, it's human behavior that's moral or immoral i say you know there's no such thing as a bad drug plenty of bad ways to use drugs you know but that comes from the person not the compound i've been really disturbed lately by these new super potent painkillers oh it's like's... Like fentanyl. Yeah. The stuff that killed Prince and... Carfentanil now is the big menace.

Fentanyl's bad enough. Carfentanil is something like a hundred to a thousand times more potent than fentanyl. Yeah. So a spec, literally a pinhead or less of the carfentanil is a lethal dose. Oh, my God. Yeah. So this is really not good, you know, because I am certainly not an expert on, you know, the sources and all this. But apparently this stuff is being made in China, imported here.

And they use it to cut heroin because it's so strong. But people are dying left and right, you know, because of carfentanil is far more toxic than heroin or even fentanyl. So, you know, we're so, you know, there is so much, I don't know, so much confusing and fuzzy thinking about the whole drug issue. You know, for example, as long as we're talking about opiates for the moment, which is not really what I came here to talk about, but, you know, you've heard of kratom. Yeah. Now the DEA and the FDA, it's a plant. it's used in Thailand. It is an opiate, there's no doubt about it. It hits the opiate receptors and they want to schedule it. But the problem is

that in Thailand, traditional areas, it's often used to get off of heroin. So it's potentially part of the solution not part of the problem it's uh you know it's relatively easy to quit and the big thing about kratom it doesn't cause respiratory depression and respiratory depression is what kills people from narco you know from heroin overdoses it's the alkaloids and mitragynine do not do that. And kratom is currently in a weird semi-legal state, right? It's in a semi-legal state, but the DEA would love to schedule it. But again, they had plans to, and there was some pushback about this. And people were saying things like, I'm saying, wait a minute, let's take a second look at this. This may be part of the solution because it could be a kind of, in a sense, an herbal methadone.

I mean, methadone is not the best way, but something that people could substitute and then gradually taper off. Kranum has some weird sort of property where at low doses is a stimulant. Yes. I've tried it before, but only at low doses. There's a company that sells it. We have it right here. Oh, there are lots of companies that sell it. Yeah.

It's easy. But this company, Urban Ice Organics, that's the name of the company. But I take two or three of those, and it's like a cup of coffee. And it's like no weirdness, no, you don't feel high. At a low dose, it is that. Why is that? It's kind of a stimulant. Who knows?

Just unique pharmacology. How strange, though. At higher doses, it's definitely an opiate. And is it something that impairs motor skills? Well, not so much. I mean, just in the sense that it's like being high on morphine or heroin. So it does. So it really can give you that kind of a feeling.

Absolutely. Wow, that's interesting. You know, it hits the opiate receptors, but then it also hits a few other receptors as well, which is part of the stimulating effect. a few other receptors as well, which is part of the stimulating effect. But, you know, why the pharmaceutical companies are not all over this plan, I don't understand because for a long time the holy grail in drug discovery when it comes to analgesics is find the narcotic that is not toxic, you know, the analgesic that is not toxic, hopefully not addicting, but

that's not going to happen. And is there an LD50 for this stuff? Oh, sure. I mean, there's an LD50 for most things. Which is, for people who don't know, lethal dose at 50%. It would be hard, yeah, the lethal dose for 50% of the sample. But in the herbal form, it would be hard to get anywhere near a lethal dose. You'd have to eat a giant brick of it. Yeah, probably. Probably throw up before you ever got to the lethal. I mean, if you isolated one of the alkaloids, 7-hydroxymitragynine is the strongest one.

That's about 100 times stronger than morphine. Whoa. You know, so definitely effective. So is there any issue with that stuff, though, with people who have had problems with pain pills in the past? Maybe they start indulging this a little bit too much. Well, it's a better alternative than the pain pills. Right.

It's very good for people who want to get off that shit. I'm sorry. Can I say that? Sure. Okay. This is the internet. People who want to get off that shit. I'm sorry, can I say that? Sure. This is the internet. People who want to get off those kind of things, they can't quit cold turkey,

but they could go on kratom and gradually cut down because the withdrawal symptoms for kratom are much less apparently than for heroin and these things. They just don't grab you. So this is a gateway out of the addiction. Or they could even just maintain because it's not particularly dangerous or impairs function or so on. They could maintain.

As you know, lots of people take heroin and manage to maintain. Well, I know a lot of people. It's a trick. Not everyone can do that. They find some really good anti-inflammation properties in this stuff, like people who exercise a lot like kratom. Yeah, yeah. Wouldn't surprise me at all if that's there. You know, most plants have multiple effects.

That's one of the differences between plants and pharmaceuticals. Plants have families of molecules, and they often have, you know, complementary kinds of activities, you know. So kratom is one of these. We've known about it for a while. It needs a lot more work, but potentially it's very interesting, you know. And, of course, the other one in this sort of universe of opiate treatment is ibogaine, which is not a completely different kind of thing. Ibogaine is not itself an opiate, but people use it to get off opiates because the experience is profound.

But then it does something that a lot of psychedelics don't do, which is it interrupts that craving for opiates, depending on how it's structured, anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. And the thing I think that determines the effectiveness of ibogaine as a treatment for opiates is if the person has prepared for what happens afterwards, right? You've got to prepare for what happens after. If you go back to your old neighborhood, your old buddies, your old habits, it's not going to work. You're not making a serious commitment to make it work. But if you have a plan, going to go to this clinic, get this treatment, get cleaned up, then what?

And that's true. I mean, really, I think that's the main factor that determines whether ibogaine is effective or not. And it is for a lot of people. It works. It's a problematic substance. It's a controlled substance in the States, but only in about six countries is it actually prohibited. Most countries, it's either in a gray area. I guess it's a gray area.

It's unregulated is the term. A couple countries have put it on prescription drug status, Brazil and New Zealand. But the framework is there. That doesn't mean there's a rush of people to go to ibogaine clinics in those countries. It really hasn't created a rush. But the framework is there of people who want to do that. So ibogaine is another one of these that needs more investigation and is potentially part of the problem to the opiate epidemic.

There is rumors, well, there are more than rumors, but some ibogaine activists are trying to get certain states to provisionally approve the use of ibogaine, you know, a special waiver from the federal government. Vermont, and I think New York, has now applied for this because their problem is so bad. And it's like basically they're saying to the government, here's something that may work. Just grant permission on a stateside, statewide basis to have this medicine. we'll see where that goes

you know as you i'm sure you i think we're all in this community acutely aware of now the government is again rumbling about how they're gonna revive the war on drugs i mean it was a stupid idea then and it's even more stupid now but hey this hey, this government, you know, stupidity are us is kind of their angle on things. This Jeff Sessions character is real. We'll see how it goes. I'm not too worried because I think there's going to be so much pushback on this. Yeah, and that's the other thing about Trump. He seems to be a populist.

And if there is too much pushback from that direction, I think he's going to try to avoid that as much as possible. When they did a recent survey of the United States of how many people think that marijuana should be legal, like recreationally legal, can, you know, you can't go back to the war on drugs. I mean, it was a miserable failure when it happened. There's, you know, over 40 years, they pounded over a trillion dollars down this rat hole. There are more drugs, more kinds of drugs, easier to get, cheaper than ever. So where's the success? And more people in prison as a result of this. So where's the success? And more people in prison as a result of this. So where's the success of the war on drugs? Peter Robinson There's no success. There's nothing. There's

nothing they can point to. It's not like anyone was saved. There's not like – Richard Wagner Right. The problem is that these people, you know, facts don't carry much weight with them. I mean they're kind of off in their own private ideological fantasies. And the fact that the war on drugs doesn't work doesn't matter to them. It's like, these are bad people who need to be punished. That's their stance on it. It's not about anything other than that. Yeah, I think that's really important, what you just said.

These are bad people. I mean, they're really talking in these simplistic terms. That's one thing that Sessions said, that marijuana is not something that good people use. That's what he said. Which is just preposterous. How many grandmas are out there that are listening to this going, what the fuck is this guy talking about? This is crazy. Well, yeah, it is.

And it's clear that, you know, not a jot of reflection or, you know, careful thought goes into these kinds of statements. This is what bothers me. I mean, many, many things bother me about Trump. But one of the chief things, one of the major, I guess you could say, flaws in his character among many. But you listen to him talk. You listen to his general thing. And you realize this is not a man who's ever had a reflective thought in his life.

You know, there is no there there. There is no inner self. You know, people say, well, just give that man some ayahuasca and that will straighten him out. I don't think so. I think there's, you know, there has to be something inside to straighten out. Don't you think that maybe I would like to speak to him alone and find out who he really is? I mean, you think when someone's speaking in front of, you know, a big group of press or, you know, any time there's a camera on them, it's really hard to figure out who that person is.

Yes, that's true. I think being alone with someone would be very illuminating. I agree. Maybe alone he's different, but he is such a creature of media and television. This is his whole thing. It's inexorable, right? Yeah. So maybe there is a thoughtful person there, but you sure don't see any evidence of that. And that's unfortunate. I mean, because that's, you know, whatever you could say about Obama, and there's many bad things that, you know, he was not a perfect president. He was very thoughtful, you know, and smart. You know, I'm not so sure Trump is smart. I mean, he's smart in a certain way, but not the way that we need our leaders to be smart, you know, in

this age. We need to, you know, anyway, we could go on all day about this and that's not really what we want to talk about. We could go on about this all day and let's definitely not. Let's instead, let's shift gears and talk about this celebration of 50 years of psychedelic research and what you're doing now. And it's in Birmingham. Is that where it is?

It's in Buckinghamshire. It's in England. I knew it was a B. Yeah. One of those places. It's not. This is something that I've wanted to do for a long time. And the back story is that in 1967, there was a conference that was sponsored, believe it or not, by the Health Education and Welfare, Department of Health Education and Welfare, National Institute of Mental Health.

U.S. government paid for this symposium held in San Francisco in 1967 called the Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs. And all the biggies were there. You know, Shulgin was there. Andrew Weil was there. Schultes, of course, he was probably the one that, you know, more or less around whom it coalesced. But this was a chance for interdisciplinary people to come together in a private conference and share knowledge, and that was done. And they published this symposium volume

called Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs, which was a U.S. public health service publication. You could get it from the U.S. government printing office for a long time. it from the U.S. government printing office for a long time. But originally, the idea was that about every 10 years or so, they'd have follow-up conferences, right? Well, 67, the war on drugs came along. The government became embarrassed that they had anything to do with this. And there was never any follow-up conference, right? So that book that came out was very influential to me. It was one of the big influences of my life as a 16-year-old when I was just getting interested in psychedelics. So for many years,

I've wanted to do a follow-up conference. I wanted to do it on the 30th anniversary back in 97, but it never came together to do that. So this is the 50th anniversary. It's now or never. And so it's now. Apparently, we are going to do this thing. And it's going to be kind of much in the spirit of the original conference. We're not going to keep it completely closed, you know, because we're not that kind of people. There's not much, not a lot of room for people to actually come to the place it's going to be, which is this place called Tiringham Hall.

It's like, it looks exactly like Downton Abbey. I mean, it's an English country house, beautiful place, but not a place set up for a huge conference. There'll be maybe 10 guests staying there and a bunch of people staying close by. But the point is not so much the people attending. It's going to be live streamed on Facebook, which anyone can tune into that. And then we're going to publish the symposium volume for 2017 that everyone who presents is going to submit a full paper. We're going to publish that as volume two. We'll bring them out together as a deluxe edition. The first one, which is available for free, it's in the public domain, and then the one from this conference, and we'll package them together as a collector's edition,

and we're pre-selling that now as part of the strategy for getting the money to pay for this thing. And we're doing okay. So I give you the website. It's ESPD50.com. What is it done for? Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs 50, 50thanniversary.com. And then there's also a Facebook page, which is where the live streaming is going to be.

So if you go there, you can order the book, you can get the whole backstory, you can sign up for the Facebook live stream and so on. And that's what we're going to do. And I've been very lucky, you know, some people, you know how these conferences are, you don't do it on your own when i sort of floated this idea a lot of people stepped up and said yeah i want to be involved i'll be involved not only people that are helping organizing it but also people that are providing some funding so now we have the money to pay people bring them from all over the world. There'll be about 18 presenters and some really good people, some very high profile people. David Nichols will be there,

Mark Plotkin, who runs the Amazon conservation team. A number of, you know, those are maybe the two highest profile, but people that are known in the field. And there's, you know, you can look at the website, ESPD.com. You can look at the program, and if it appeals to you, get on the, you know, get on the live stream. So that, you know, those technologies did not exist in 1967, right? So they do now. So why not let the world in?

You know, we can't have everybody come to Buckinghamshire, but we can have them all over the world. So that's the idea. Well, I'm sure the response to this is going to be tremendous if you can live stream it. And live streaming on Facebook is going to be huge. I mean's a that's a great idea well i hope so oh it is for sure it's an awesome use of the technology because there really isn't something like that that people can tune into and right watch 18 different people speak and of course it'll all be documented right so it'll be archived we'll generate a dvd out of it but mainly it's the ball

it's the books i mean the idea of actually collecting real physical books might like seem like a quite 20th century idea to people and it is we have to do it while we still can yeah i like the idea of having a nice box set yeah but But people don't have to get that. They can get the single one. They don't have to do anything that I tell them. But if they're interested, they can do it. And so, you know, thanks for letting me come on and let people know about this and tweeting it and so on.

This is all very helpful. And it looks like there's going to be a lot of response. And then, of course, the Psychedelic Science Conference is coming up. And we have, you know, the Symposium guys, PSY. They're running the stage at the MAPS conference, the stage in the marketplace. So I'm going to be on there. And they're collaborating with us on this project. So I'm pretty excited about it.

Now, how do you organize the 18 different people that are talking and the subject so there's no overlap and so that, you know, the message stays vibrant? Well, it hasn't really been a problem. I mean, for one thing, you know, I pretty much knew who I wanted to come and I know what their specialty is. So I invited these people and they cover a variety of specialties. So not really too much duplication. Everyone brings something unique, their own perspective. You know, so it's pretty easy, really. I mean, the idea of the ethnopharmacologic search for psychoactive drugs is that, you know, we wanted to focus on the frontier of this. This is still a very active area. And we don't want, you know, not another conference about ayahuasca, not, you know, and that's all wonderful and I'm totally behind it.

And in fact, truth in advertising, we got four talks on ayahuasca, but different aspects of ayahuasca that haven't really been discussed so much at conferences. And then we do have one gentleman talking about Kratom and, you know, a specialist of ethnopharmacologists talking about that. We have Ken Alper, who is maybe the world's recognized authority on iboga and ibogaine from the pharmacology clinical side. We've got him. We've got Dave Nichols, we have another person, another phytochemist talking about salvia, divinorum. So these are things that were not even on the radar, you know, in 1967. And that's kind of the idea that there's been 50 years more work and a lot of work and never any follow-up conferences. So that's the excuse for doing this. This will be the follow-up conference. And if it gets momentum, then maybe we'll be able to do number three and number four well probably by the time number four comes around i'll be drooling in my oatmeal so i may not have much to do with that one oh i think there's going

to be some new science it's going to kick you right back into gear let's hope so there's a lot going on right now i'm holding on for it i think you're catching the wave right at the right time dennis right sometimes i wonder but yeah yeah. I'm super positive for you. What is the status of salvia? Salvia divinorum. What is the legal status? Salvia divinorum is more or less legal on the federal level. It's still sold. I think a few states have banned it. I'm not sure which states. How funny that it's the opposite way. You know, most things are federally legal, and then the states legalize them, like marijuana at least.

But salvia is, for people who don't know, super potent, psychedelic. Super potent and super bizarre. Yeah, very weird. And I think maybe that's kind of the built-in protection against abuse because a lot of people don't care for it. It's like once is enough, never again. I mean this is not something that you're likely to get addicted to unless you're just a very peculiar kind of person because it's dysphoric. It's not pleasant. Most people find it quite unpleasant, even terrifying.

Well, years back. But I think one of the things that protects against it, people smoke it, which is not the traditional way at all. But again, it's like it only lasts a few minutes. The traditional way is you chew the fresh leaves. And it's the sage. It's some variation of the sage plant, correct? It is a sage or a mint. It's in the mint family.

Yeah, it's called a sage, but it's really a mint. I always wondered if there was some sort of correlation between the name sage, meaning wisdom, you know, and then this stuff. No. Just total bum luck. Some would like you to think so. Yeah. I think Daniel Siebert, who's one of the specialists, he has a website called sagewisdom.org or.com and good stuff. He's into kratom.

He provides, I mean, salvia. He provides good information on it there most people at least my own experience and many people it's like well it's interesting it's profoundly strange and what do you bring back from it you know that's the question. What do you bring back from it? I think that's partly why, you know, most people are, they don't seek it out particularly. My friend Ari took it. But then I know people that do like it. Yeah. I know a lot of people that do.

Yeah. I only did it once and I had this very bizarre out-of-body experience. But I don't think I took enough. our out of body experience, but I don't think I took enough. I had a friend Ari who took a lot, who over the course of 10 minutes lived, maybe he, he believes in the neighborhood of five to six months in, in this dimension where he had a life and he had friends and he had a job and relationships and, and he went through this and came back and, you know, 10 minutes later, he's like, this is going to be impossible to describe. But I lived a life. I had like this alternative reality that I went through for multiple months.

Those kinds of experiences, believe it or not, are not that uncommon on Salvia. believe it or not, are not that uncommon on Salvia. Somebody told me once they had an experience where, you know, they were in a place, they were like seven or eight years old. It was Christmas morning. They were at the Christmas tree celebrating Christmas, opening the presents with a family that this guy had no connection to and had never seen. And what do you make of that?

I mean, I think Salvia is interesting in that regard in that, you know, some of these ones that, you know, they're worth exploring, right? I mean, if you can distort time or actually go into, you know, parallel dimensions or whatever, that's looking into. Yeah. I think it takes more intrepid psychonauts than I am to look into that, but I would encourage people to carefully explore this. Years ago, when I first explored DMT, you could get 5-MeO DMT online. There was a chemical company. You could buy it, and I bought like a jug of it, like a

container of it, like the size of this Stevia container, which is, for people who don't know, enough to get high for the rest of your life. You could do DMT once a month for the rest. And that's all you want to do, by the way, especially 5-MeO. 5 5meo brings you to some place that feels like the ultimate center of the universe and there's nothing and it's you you're a part of the whole it's it's also no visuals which is really weird or if it is visuals it's like these uh opaque geometric patterns that exist in this bizarre white and you just cease to exist and it feels terrifying and strange and you know again there's no one counting for taste i mean i agree it is like that there are no visuals so that's something strange about it uh but many people feel like

if it puts you in this void place or the zero energy point, I don't know if you've had James Oroch on here. No. He wrote the book Tryptamine Palace. No. Which is all about 5-methoxy-DMT. How do you spell his last name? Oroch, O-R-O-C-K, I think. The name of his book is Tryptamine Palace.

And, you know, his thing is 5-methoxy. That's his thing, huh? Yeah. And it's an interesting book. And now, you know, I mean, the Sonoran toad, right? You've heard that. That's 5-methoxy, basically. And so that toad, you excrete something on a glass?

You excrete the venom. You actually have to torture the toad a little bit or squeeze the venom, which is in the parotid glands. You squeeze it out on a slide, dry it out, and then you can smoke it. And it's about 11% to 15% 5-MeO. Wow. But it's a heavy hit. Do they know why this toad produces this in venom? I mean, is it psychoactive when you eat it?

Well, who knows? Yeah, who knows? Most toads produce bufotinine, right? Right. Which is very close to 5-methoxy. And, in fact, it's named after the toads. The genus of toads is bufo, right? Right. Which is very close to 5-methoxy. And, in fact, it's named after the toads. The genus of toads is bufo, right? Bufotenin is found in most of these toads.

But bufo alvarius is the only species known that contains 5-methoxy DMT. it's got this – there's probably a single gene mutation that lets it produce this methoxylated compound, which is much stronger than bufotinine. And by the way, just to caution people, sometimes in the media you hear about people are licking toads. That's not going to do it. No, they're not licking toads. They're smoking toads. Yeah, isn't that weird that it just gets distorted? And don't lick them because there are nasty things in there that will kill you if you lick it.

Really? They pyrolyze these cardiac glycosides. Oh, God. But pyrolyzing it, burning it, destroys all those things. So it's okay to smoke it, but it's definitely dangerous to lick it. Most people don't like licking toads anyway. It's probably, yeah. Who came up with that?

Right. I think various fairy tales, right? Isn't that the... Does the human body produce 5-MeO-DMT as well? Oh, yes. Yeah. And is it produced in the same areas like the liver and the lungs and presumably the pineal gland? Presumably the pineal gland.

Yeah. All of these things, you know. Yes, it does. There's a lot of controversy about whether, you know, these endogenous tryptamines, DMT primarily, but 5-MeO is definitely there as well. Do they have a function? There is a lot of speculation and not a lot of facts about whether they actually have a function. I mean, they're made and there's one school of thought that says, yeah, they're sort of like physiological noise,

you know, they'll never reach a point where you could actually perceive any effect because the enzymes, you know, any kind of cellular enzyme will just chop up DMT very readily. It's so close to human metabolism. It's not going to, it's going to be very ephemeral in the system, even if it is released. But other people maintain that under some circumstances, the DMT can be stored in vesicles and neural vesicles and released on demand or when some stimulus leads to its release, like stress, some stress of some sort. Jamie, go out and grab that painting that that young guy sent. The guy who has a pineal gland tumor, who makes this really crazy tryptamine art.

Yes, I've heard about this guy. You know this guy? This guy sent me one of his pieces. Yeah. And he has a tumor. Do you know his name, Jamie? We'll find his name. I'll give this guy some love.

But you look at his artwork and you go, oh, yeah, that's what that is. Almost like Alex Gray's stuff, but Alex Gray's stuff, it's art. I mean, it's definitely representative of the tryptamine world. It's beautiful and it's fantastic and amazing, but it's art. This guy's stuff seems like a trip. Like it's the chaos of the tryptamine experience is sort of replicated in his artwork. Yeah, that's it.

And so this young guy, we'll find out his name. He sent this. I first heard of this gentleman from... Thanks, brother. Thank you. Holy moly. Take a look at this. Yeah.

I first heard of this guy from John Ohia, This gentleman from, holy moly. Take a look at this. Yeah. I first heard of this guy from John Ohia, who organizes Alex's events. I don't even know which way is up. I don't think there is an up. Joe, I think this is a zero gravity environment up as any way that you want it to be. This is pretty amazing. Yeah, it's amazing. Wow. Yeah. Well, it's amazing. Wow.

Yeah, well, I'm waiting for the, we're building a new studio. And when that's done, we'll have this up prominently featured. But this kid's work is just incredible. Jamie, see if you can find it, who he is. He should be, is he? I hope he's healthy. Letting himself be looked at by medical people? I think he's just happy to be tripping all the time. He's just going to leave tripping all the time.

He's just going to leave it alone. What about science, man? Sean Thornton is his name. Sean Thornton? Yeah, I got an article here. Shout out to Sean Thornton. Yeah, there's his work. There it is. Artists got cancer of the pineal gland.

His paintings will leave you speechless. Yes, they will. Yes, they will. Sean Thornton. Sean Thornton. Amazing. Yeah. His stuff is incredible. And apparently, well, he's in at least in some sort of way anecdotal evidence that it's produced in the pineal gland. Of course, the Cottonwood Research Foundation that Dr. Rick Strassman is part of and his amazing work from DMT to spirit molecule. Of course, the documentary that you and i were in um his uh his work has shown that it's

it is produced by the pineal gland in live rats so we know now for a fact that at least in that mammal it's uh it's produced in the pineal gland but that's always been for people that uh you know i went to the vatican last summer and um one of the really cool things was the giant pine cone that they have in the center of like one of the outer areas. Yeah. And I was really lucky to have a very good guide who is a professor. And he was explaining to me that that was representative of the pineal gland. Really? Yeah.

Wow. It was really fascinating because there's this enormous pine cone and it's surrounded by these two peacocks or, you know, two peacocks on the side where they're supposed to represent immortality in some sort of strange way. So I don't know what that whole vision was supposed to mean, but he was very adamant that that pine cone there, you see it up there on the screen, that that is representative of the pineal gland. And also in ancient Egypt and a lot of the hieroglyphs, you see that as well. Right, right. Well, yeah, pineal itself means because it is shaped like a pine cone. That's why it's named that. But I had no idea.

That is very interesting. Yeah, it was pretty fascinating. What was also fascinating was this guy, although he knew that that was representative of the pineal gland, he did not know that the pineal gland produced DMT. He wasn't even aware of what DMT was. Right. So he and I had this really cool conversation about it where he was like, what? You know, this crazy Italian accent. This is amazing.

And he's writing things down and I'm, you know, writing, telling him about Strassman's work and you and your brother and all these different things to look into. Right. You know. There is a. While my wife was rolling her eyes like, oh, Jesus, not this shit again. Tell him about Strassman's work and you and your brother and all these different things to look into. Right. You know. There is a. While my wife was rolling her eyes like, oh, Jesus, not this shit again. You just can't be taken out in public, Joe. You always embarrass me.

Well, she just, she knew as soon as the guy said pineal gland and my eyes lit up and I'm like, here we go. Let's talk about drugs. Well, there is a guy, a couple of interesting people to mention in this context. One of them is a researcher, a guy named E.D. Frexka. Frexka. How do you spell that? Good question. E-D-F-R-E-C-K-S-K-A, I think. I may have to correct myself on that. He's a pharmacologist and a neurochemist and psychiatrist. But he is the one that's really kind of leading the charge for endogenous functions of DMT and has good evidence, which has been, you know, disputed by some. I mean, Dave Nichols is kind of on the other side of it. He's like, ah, DMT doesn't have any internal function.

All these people are deluded. You know, that seems to me to be really cocky. Well, I think that it's surprising that Dave, who's a very careful scientist, would have such, you know, such pre-formed ideas. Very rigid ideas. Yeah. Right. There's a conference in the UK at the end of June called Breaking Convention, which you may have heard of. It's a big it's like a psychedelic conference. Dave and Edie are going to be there. I'm going to be there, hopefully keeping them up. I don't

want any fistfights. They're going to be talking about this and doing a debate on it. Breaking convention, you might tell people to Google that. That's a very interesting conference. For sure. What makes Dave so confident? I mean, when you consider the potency of it and the knowledge that's produced in the body and then also the knowledge of the effects of it, which are just astounding. Right. How could anyone say that you know for sure, has he done it? Has Dave done it? Well, of course he's done it.

Of course he's done it. How could he do it and not go, okay, what is this? Well, I think he does, but then there's also this very reductionist side to him. And basically, just as a pharmacologist, he says, it's never going to reach sufficient concentration in the plasma to have an effect. However, I think he's wrong. And I told him, I mean, I was teasing him. I was saying, you know, I wrote back, you know, that famous phrase Arthur C. Clarke once said, you know, when a distinguished but elderly scientist says that something is possible, he's very likely correct. When he says it's impossible, he's almost certainly wrong.

says it's impossible, he's almost certainly wrong. Well, when you're talking about the just general biodiversity of human beings and how some people, let's talk about other human neurochemistry, like depression. Like some people are super happy and have no problem with their dopamine or serotonin levels. And there's other people that have like real issues. Yeah, well, there is that. Right, so if you just look at that, the variability of that, And there's other people that have like real issues. Yeah. Well, there is that. Right. So if you just look at that, the variability of that, and then also how that can be manipulated with exercise and all these other different things that can raise those levels up.

What about the other thing, like in terms of like holotropic breathing or all these different shamanic breathing and yogic exercises, Kundalini yoga, which I haven't experienced it in Kundalini yoga, but I did have a very bizarre experience fairly recently on yoga where I went in a class on a pretty high dose of cannabis and I started tripping in the middle of one of the more intense poses. It was just something akin to the very beginnings of a DMT trip where I started seeing patterns and seeing things moving and some sort of a – it didn't go anywhere. But I don't pursue it in terms of like attempting to make that happen. Right. But I would imagine that if it's made in the body and the effects of it are reproducible when you take it. I mean, taking DMT – there's a very few people, there's a very small percentage that don't have an experience when they take it, right?

Very small percentage. Do we know what that number is? Probably something like, I mean, I would say a wild guess, but a 2% or something. That's actually pretty high. Again, anomalous. Why should there be people who don't have any effect? I mean, that's a whole other question about what's strange about their metabolism. But it's interesting that you raise this because a lot of these yogic techniques,

especially kundalini, is probably about inducing DMT synthesis in the pineal or wherever it occurs. There's also a very interesting technology that has come to light. I just found out about it last summer called the Ajna Light. Have you heard of this? No. A-J-N-A. So write down ajnalight.com. This guy who's developed this is a very interesting fellow. He's named

Guy Harriman, and he used to work for Apple. He actually worked very closely with Steve Jobs when Steve Jobs had Next Computing. So he's basically a computer programmer and engineer, worked with Steve Jobs. But then he, for some reason, he decided he had to move to Thailand and become a Zen monk, which he did. But he continued to work with technology and he developed this thing called the Ajna Light, which he claims induces DMT synthesis in the pineal. And I was at a conference last summer, actually, at Tiringham, at this place where this one is going to be, and he was there. I tried it a couple of times, and by golly, it's a lot like DMT.

Really? Yeah. So explain it. What is it? Well, it's just, it looks like a floor lamp. It's, you know, nothing. It's got this array of LEDs on a holder. You lie under it.

And they're just white LEDs. And he programs it from his iPad, I guess, in different sequences. But you lie under this thing for a few minutes. And pretty soon, you get into the zone. You know, these visuals begin to manifest and it looks a great deal like DMT. So then, and he claims, you know, it's synthesizing DMT in the pineal and it is very much like DMT would be if it's released at the site of action because, you know, DMT, when you smoke it, it brings a big body load. Do you have to wear that goofy outfit?

What's with the orange outfit, seriously? What is it? Well, they're in Thailand. I understand, but the expression of monkness, the pious outfit. Let it go, folks. Just wear a T-shirt. Wear whatever. I would just think I have to get into a

You know into any costume to do it, but I would think do it a couple times How many times did you do it? Well? I was not there long enough to do I did a couple times and this woman's setting is it is a just effective sitting as it is lying down I Couldn't tell you, but I expect so. You lie down? I lay down, yeah. And you close your eyes? No.

Well, yeah, you close your eyes. It doesn't matter because you don't have eye shades on. Right. And usually he's playing some music. But then, you know, in me, like the reductionist, you know, kicks in and says, well, guy, this is interesting. How do you know it's really DMT that you're stimulating? And we've been going back and forth on that and how can you test that.

And there are ways to do it. involves some fairly drastic procedures like you can do – that you wouldn't want to do on people because they wouldn't give you permission if they had any sense. But you could do it to rats. You could do something called microdialysis. You can put essentially a microscopic tube that's absorbed next to the pineal and you can collect samples that you can detect. This is not something that people would volunteer for. How about just take your word for it?

I just want to know, does it really induce it or not? I am not saying it does, but it's a lot like DMT. What about hovering something like that over a sensory deprivation tank, like being inside of it and having it hover over your head so you have the added experience of out-of-body with that? I would think that would be pretty intense and not hard to recreate. Probably not.

What you'd probably want to do with that is to have some kind of goggles, essentially, that could be connected to his program by Bluetooth or something. So then you're wearing the goggles, you're in the isolation tank. But if you just hover it over your head, if you just have an arm, like a computer monitor arm, and just swing it over the head, and so you turn it on, close the door of the tank, close your eyes, lay back, and maybe it has like a a 30 second window where it lets you settle in and then begins the program lots of ways you could approach it that just seems to me to really ramp it up now here's the question it's interesting though this is just one of an array of you know what you might call neural technologies you know or even spiritual technologies maybe this will

make psychedelics obsolete. Well, this is a great way that you could do it without actually having to hold on to an illegal drug. Exactly. Because you're carrying your illegal drug with you. Right. So far, they can't arrest you for that, although I'm sure they're trying to figure out a way.

That was your brother's classic line, everyone's holding. Everyone's holding. That's right. That was your brother's classic line, everyone's holding. Everyone's holding. That's right. Now, with this stuff, did you experience the communication that you get with DMT? Because that, to me, has always been the most profound aspect of it, is this feeling that I'm in the presence of something. And then this sort of telekinetic, understanding the words but not hearing the words?

Honestly, I didn't get that because I think I was not under long enough. I didn't have much time. So I was only under – each time I was under maybe 20 minutes, which isn't – I think if I'd stayed in that place, if I could settle into it for an hour, I think that probably would manifest you know and and you think this why why do you think this why do you think it would change it takes a while for the for the thing to fully you know uh what whatever the term is for if it is dmt for the dmt to reach a critical level where you're seeing that kind of stuff.

Do you feel this because it was ramping up during your experience? I felt like it was. But if I had stuck around, I thought it would develop. And we've talked about, too, we've talked about thinking about how to establish that this really is DMT. Another approach that we've tried is to take a, or the guys tried. I don't have access to the light. I can't afford it. But guys tried.

It cost about $3,300, you know, which is not bad, but beyond my pay grade right now. I'm going to buy it for you for a present. How about that? You should buy it and keep it yourself. I'm going to buy two of them. I'll buy one for you and one for me. We'll correspond. All right.

All right. Well, as long as you're going to do that, I might mention that Guy is offering a conference special here. Do I have to wear the outfit? Yeah. No, you don't. You don't. I'm not wearing orange. If you buy it, you'll get a

discount on it if you go through the Facebook site, which I'm about to put his stuff up there. Okay. Beautiful. We can talk about this offline, but if you go through Facebook, some portion of it will go toward supporting this conference. Well, I would love that. I'm very curious about this because

I know that I have a good buddy of mine, my friend Danny, who's done Kundalini for quite a long time, and he can reproduce DMT states. He's actually had DMT experiences independently of the Kundalini, and he says it's the same thing. He says he can get there, and I believe him. I'm just too lazy or something. I don't know what it is. I'm not inclined. Well, I think there's a genetic component.

I'm not inclined. Well, I think there's a genetic component, you know. I mean, like this gentleman, although he has a tumor, I'm not sure why. I mean, he doesn't want medical people poking and prodding him, but he would be a perfect subject to settle a lot of issues if he was willing to, you know, cooperate. I mean, just having a look at his cerebral spinal fluid, which would be the obvious, you know, fluid to sample for this would be very interesting. Yeah. But I can understand his reluctance if he has reluctance. Yeah. People drilling into your dome, trying to suck out brain juice. It doesn't sound fun, but it is interesting though, that these compounds are in some way a part of normal human neurochemistry. And why? Right?

And Dave Nichols, what does he believe? Well, I don't know if he believes anything. He just, you know, he just, you know, he just is skeptical that in normal physiological processes, DMT has much of a function. What about dreams? Dreams are a possibility. Yeah, that's always been the big one, right? That's always been the big one. And it's totally plausible.

You'll have to get him on here and let him explain himself. I would love to. Yeah. I mean, you know, I'm not sure. You know, I'm not sure. He just has this idea that I think for one thing, I think, you know, he's kind of a reductionist guy. I think all the new age stuff, the new excitement about DMT, the pineal and all that, it kind of puts him off. But on the other hand, don't assume that we know everything.

Because in fact, we know nothing, you know. And if it's there, I think it probably does have a function, you know. It's not surprising that it's there. It's everywhere. I mean, DMT is an interesting molecule because it's two steps from tryptophan, right? Tryptophan is an amino acid, an essential amino acid, one of the 20 that goes into proteins. So tryptophan is in every living thing on this planet. And there are two enzymes that are also pretty much universal in cells that can convert DMT or tryptophan to DMT in two simple steps.

You know, I don't want to get too into the chemistry, but basically you remove the acid portion of the amino acid, you get tryptamine, and from there you add the methyl groups, and there you are. Which is why DMT is very, very common in plants, for example, and animals. I mean, I tell people nature is drenched in DMT. Drenched is a great way to describe it. Drenched in DMT.

There are thousands and thousands and thousands of species of plants that contain DMT, for sure. You know, I mean, there hasn't been any survey or anything like that. But if you look at the genera that have a lot of DMT, like acacia is a good example. The Australian acacias are some of the strongest sources of DMT. There are 1,700 species of acacia. Probably 75% of them contain DMT. And I'm sure you're aware of the Israeli scientists that believe that the story of Noah it's not Moses rather and the

burning bush was the acacia tree and they think that that was the confusion of all the translations and of course the oral history passed down over many many years then finally written down but this idea of the burning bush delivering the word of God was most likely in some way

a psychedelic trip induced by DMT and most likely because of the acacia tree. Most likely the acacia tree because that was in the area. The, you know, I mean, it's an interesting idea and it's interesting that the, you know, And it's interesting that the way that the burning bush presented itself was like DMT presents itself. You cannot take your eyes away from it, but at the same time, you cannot look at it. Right, right, right. But pharmacologically, was this something he smoked? Was it an incense?

How was he exposed to this? And, you know, because that will make a difference because you can't eat DMT because it's destroyed by monoamine oxidase, right? That's the whole basis of ayahuasca. In terms of these acacias, you know, the question comes up also, well, okay, most of them are native to Australia. So did the Aborigines know about this? And if you look at their art, it looks like DMT. It's very psychedelic art. I haven't really looked at very much Aboriginal. All of these pointillist kind of designs in Aboriginal art. I mean, they're extremely psychedelic.

See if you can find some of that. But the Aborigines, I think they had to know about it. They were just not talking about it. But one possible way that they could have used it, because the DMT in the acacias is so high, the leaves, some of these acacias, they're 2% DMT. So if you were to take leaves and throw them on a fire in an enclosed space, like a sweat lodge type space, you could potentially get quite loaded on DMT. There's no indication that they smoked stuff, but they may have fumigated themselves with DMT. Oh, that completely makes sense.

You're talking about a burning bush. Yeah. Wow. Exactly. How does that make its way to Israel, though? Well, maybe the— Who knows? Who knows?

Who knows? Anything makes its way anywhere, right? I mean, these folk technologies, it's interesting. world, you know, in the historical sense, people have remarked, why are there so many more psychedelic plants in the new world than the old world, right? It's something about people's relationship to plants in this very high biodiversity environment. People are mucking around with plants, right? environment. People are mucking around with plants, right? Like a perpetual question that comes up is how did they figure out how to combine Banisteriopsis and Psychotria to get the activity of ayahuasca? How out of 80,000 species in the Amazon did they figure out?

If you could explain to the uninitiated why that's important with the monoamine oxidase. Yeah, well, it's important because Banisteriopsis contains these alkaloids called beta carmelines that are monoamine oxidase inhibitors. And monoamine oxidase is the enzyme in the gut that breaks down DMT. So you can drink tea with DMT in it. You can eat it all day. Nothing's going to happen because this enzyme will inactivate it. And that's probably a reflection of an evolutionary process. You know, we've adapted to toxins in our environment, basically. But if you inhibit that with the alkaloids from the Banisteriopsis, they're very potent, very selective MAO inhibitors that protects it from degradation in the gut. It can cross into the blood and into the blood-brain barrier.

So that's the basis of the oral activity. And people make much about how they sort of stumbled on this combination, right? And in fact, one of our presenters at this conference, Manuel Torres, is an archaeologist, has been looking at this for quite a while. And this is, you know, this is one of the sort of gee whiz things. How did these primitive people figure out how to combine these plants, right? I agree it's remarkable. If you talk to the shaman, they'll say, well, the plants told us. But what does that mean, you know?

But what is interesting to me in a way or what I've been thinking about lately, if you look at the archaeology of these things, the snuffs that... There are two or three different kinds of snuffs that are used in South America that contain DMT. The anadenanthra snuffs and the varrola snuffs. The anadenanthra snuffs are ancient. We have archaeological evidence that puts that back to 10,000, 11,000 years. They are by far the most ancient psychedelics used in the New World

are these snuffs that contain DMT. Nobody is asking the question, what possessed these people to take the seeds, grind them up, and shove them up their nose? I mean, this is not something that intuitively you would do. And yet that seems to me as easily as puzzling as how did they find the combination for ayahuasca. Nobody's really addressed that. My first impulse when I find a new plant is not necessarily to snort it.

But isn't that the place of the pharmacological daredevil? I mean, there's always this one person who's out there, dude, check what I found. Yes. You know, and that curiosity and that need to explore things. Yeah, that's exactly right. Somebody stumbled on this. And I think the same is true of ayahuasca, you know, because in fact, DMT is not that uncommon.

Truth to tell, beta carbolines are not that uncommon. So sooner or later, people are going to stumble on this combination. Once they did, then, you know, they share the knowledge. It just took time. Yeah. It takes time. Well, do you think it is possible? I mean, obviously it's possible but is there any evidence that points to the idea that primitive primates maybe didn't have this monoamine oxidase in their system

and that or if they did they had it in lower amounts and it allowed more dimethyltryptamine to enter into the body from consuming plants like is is there a potential link between consuming various plants? We're talking about thousands of different... You could eat a salad. If you didn't have monoamine oxidase in your gut, you could eat a salad and potentially trip. Yes, if you didn't have it. That's right.

And when you see jaguars that do trip, there's all this footage of jaguars in the jungle eating these plants. What are they doing? Well. Do we know or is it? We don't know. And I'm not sure how much credence I put into that footage.

Could it be like catnip? It looks like catnip. Right. You know, but they're eating Banisteriopsis apparently, which doesn't have DMT. It's got the beta carbolates. Right. But harming alone contains some psychoactive compounds. Yeah, absolutely.

And there are three main beta-carbolines in Banisteriopsis. In fact, this is what I'm talking about at the conference. My talk is about beta-carbolines. A lot of activity, the idea that they're not psychoactive,

that they're just MAO inhibitors is not really true. It's an incomplete picture. There are a lot of other activities with beta-carbolines and a lot of attention recently refocused on harmin, which is the main beta-carboline in Banisteriopsis. It turns out it has all kinds of activities that have been sort of overlooked until now. Not least of all, it stimulates neurogenesis. It stimulates nerve cell growth. This is big news because… That's huge. And potentially it inhibits a kinase, which has to do with—kinase is a protein that phosphorylates things, right?

Very common, all kinds of kinases around the body. But it inhibits this one particular kinase called DYRK1, whatever that means. particular kinase called DYRK1, whatever that means. But it is associated with the stimulation of nerve growth from neural stem cells. This is all Petri plate test tube stuff, but it's not unreasonable to think that this is going on in the body. So if that plays a part in neurogenesis, that could potentially have some real benefits to people that have things like Parkinson's or nerve disorders or maybe PTSD or CTE rather. It could, or, you know, especially dementias like cognitive, Alzheimer's or other types of dementia that are not, not strictly Alzheimer's that are just kind of senile dementias.

Well, I hope it's true because this is my— That's going to kick you right back in. This is my main prophylactic against senility. I figure if I take ayahuasca regularly, I'm probably going to be okay. Yeah, right back in the game. Imagine if that's the case what one of the um talks that i listened to of your brothers from way back in the day he was talking about uh scientific nomenclature related to harmeen and that before they uh when one of the recent or one of the early explorers to South America, when they found this stuff, they were calling it telepathy.

Yes, they were calling it telepathy. Because it induced these group states of telepathy. Because it was rumored to induce that. Oh, okay. what you could call the sordid history of the chemistry investigations of ayahuasca. Because harming and harmaline and tetrahydroharmin, these were originally found in Paganum harmala, which is where they got their names, which is Syrian rue, right? And a lot of people use that as an alternative MAO when they're making ayahuasca analogs.

So that's how those alkaloids got their names. And then when chemists came along, kind of all through the 19th century, they started looking at banisteriopsis and they would isolate things and they didn't know what to call them. Sometimes they called them telepathy because of the rumors. Sometimes they called them telepathy because of the rumors. Sometimes they were called benisterine and yahain because they didn't really know what the compound was, right? And then it turned out, well, it's actually haramine and haramine was isolated earlier. So then they got their nomenclature right. There was a long period where they never collected voucher specimens. So a lot of this work

was in some ways useless because they forgot to collect the actual plants that they did the isolation from. It got a little more rigorous. There was a group, a couple of investigators that actually thought to collect the plants that they did the isolation with. So then they could document the source, right? I mean, people think this is not important, but in ethnopharmacology, it's quite important. For example, for a long time, just a side thing, for a long time, there was a plant called Prestonia amazonica. That was reputed to be one of the sources of these alkaloids and one of the components used to make ayahuasca. That got loose in the literature, and it took years to straighten this out because it's not true. And there was no doubt, there was no voucher specimen to show that this was, you know, it was not Prestonia

amazonica. It got so bad that Schultes actually had to publish a paper that said Prestonia amazonica, Amazonian hallucinogen or not. Turns out not, you know. So you have to beware of bad documentation. If you're going to collect plants, know what you're collecting. So the chemists that might come along and work with that can refer back to it. You know, otherwise, it's just good science.

And chemists don't think in terms of the botany. They just have something. They're trying to isolate something from it. But you've got to be, it helps to know what the identity of it is, you know, so. It seems to me that that part of the world, the Amazon jungle, and our really troubling relationship with it currently, it's so analogous to the way human beings are kind of interfacing with the world. Like, that's a good way to look at it there because there's so many different powerful things that they're learning about this one area while people are chopping it down left and right and slashing and burning and making room for cattle grazing and all this other crazy shit that's going on down there while, you know, there's so much to be learned still.

while, you know, there's so much to be learned still. Well, yeah, and there is, and this is a good illustration of, you know, our sort of penny-wiseness and pound-foolishness about these things. There are literally trillions of dollars. If you just want to look at it in terms of dollars and cents, which is not the best way to look at it because, after all, this ecosystem is, you know, the burning of the rainforest is about 30% of human global greenhouse gas emissions. If you could just stop burning down the damn forest. Is it really? Yeah.

30%? 30%, they figure. Wow. But then on the other side of economics, and there have been assessments, what use do you make of the Amazonian biome to maximize its value, right? If you do cattle, it's worth so much per hectare. If you do— Hardwoods? Well, yeah. That's a big issue, right?

That's the big issue. That's the big issue. But the thing is, in terms of undiscovered, potentially undiscovered blockbuster drugs, there's probably at least a trillion dollars worth of undiscovered drugs in the Amazon, which will, of course, never be discovered because we're going to wreck it. We're already busy wrecking it. Insane amounts of species of plants. In the Amazon, it's 80,000 species. Wow. I mean, there's about 250,000 species of plants overall,

always revising this number, and they always seem to revise it up. But between 250,000 to 300,000 species of so-called higher plants. And in the Amazon, it's one of the most biodiverse region, about 80,000 species. Wow. And all of this, less than 10% of this, not even close to 10% of this incredible molecular and biological diversity has been looked at as potential sources of new medicines. You know, I mean, there's a whole area of folk medicine and folk knowledge, but to systematically look through these species and isolate things of interest hasn't been done. You know, a very, I mean, it's been going on for years.

There's been a lot of work, but it's not really touching a big proportion of it. So pharmaceutical companies are not interested in this. You know, interestingly enough, they want to, you know, their corporations, enough. They want to, you know, they're corporations and despite, you know, they tell you they're finding new medicines that will cure people and help people to a certain extent. That's true. But remember, the bottom line is profit. They want to own everything. You know, they don't want to share intellectual property with the savages down there that are the stewards of this knowledge. Why should we let these people have any part of it? So they want to make everything synthetically.

They want it all to come out of vats in their laboratories. But it's the totally wrong approach because the frequency of compounds that make it from discovery to the clinic is very low. And when they abandoned natural products about 25 years ago, the frequency of drug discovery, the pharmaceutical discovery pipeline, as they call it, dried up. And it took a long time for the pharmaceutical industry to realize, you know, essentially we threw the baby out with the bathwater. We need to go back to natural products because that's where you find the molecular diversity, the scaffolds on which we can build these drugs, right? I mean, you think of the complex molecules that you find in nature.

That may not be what makes it to the clinic, right? It may be a derivative of that or an analog of that. But it's still the plants that give you the ideas for the structure, if you can follow me. It's not that you're going to grow this rainforest tree in plantations, but you can go and isolate a compound, determine the structure, and then you can probably synthesize an analog. But the idea comes from nature. And isn't part of the problem in that isolating one individual compound from a plant that might have multiple compounds that work synergistically?

Well, that's another difference. Right, right. Again, the FDA and just the whole drug discovery process, they like single compounds, you know, magic bullets. They like the synthetic compound that is completely defined molecularly, and they don't like all these other related compounds. Like Marinol, for instance, right? Synthetic THC, which is not nearly as pleasant for people who have cancer or glaucoma or any host of different— Very good example.

Marinol, it does what it does. But the multi-component preparations of cannabis are much more effective. And that's true for almost all herbal medicines. Now, when they isolate THC, it's one of how many different cannabinoids? I think there's about 400 different kinds of cannabinoids in cannabis. So when you're getting THC, you're getting one. One four hundredth of it. One four hundredth in Marinol.

A lot of other things in cannabis as well. But I believe I remember reading there were about 400 kinds of cannabinols in cannabis. So good example. Incredibly complex plant chemically, you know, and as they all are. But that's a good example. I've never taken Marinol, but everyone that I know that has has said it's just a pale imitation of what cannabis gives you. Yeah, well, it's for one particular use, which is what? I guess it's pain, right?

Is that what it's used for? But even then, the people that take it for that have said that it's used for? But even then, the people that take it for that have said that it's not nearly as effective. It's just... This is a good example of the sort of cognitive dissonance of the FDA and the whole regulatory thing. Because for years, the FDA has been saying, well, cannabis has no medical use. There's no recognized medical use. Oh, but there is this one drug that the FDA has approved, Marinol, which has some small amount of the therapeutic use that cannabis does. But it's just so incredible with so much information available today that they're

making such poor choices in that regard that someone can't step up and logically address this thing and say, look, you're getting a fraction of the benefits of this just because of this bizarre need that human beings have to patent things and to own things. Right. And it's not that plants can't be patented. They can be, formulations can. I think GW Pharmaceuticals, which has brought out Sativex, GW Pharmaceuticals, which has brought out Sativex. It's a standardized cannabis preparation that you take orally as a mouth spray. So it's a natural product.

It's patented. It has all the cannabinoids are well characterized. It's essentially a standardized extract. So that sort of represents where this is going. Well, that's a positive branch of it, right? Yeah, that's a good thing. That more reflects what cannabis should be as a medicine. And so it's essentially all the properties of cannabis,

and what they've patented is the formulization? Is that what it is? They've patented the formulation, yeah, and probably the use as well. That's another way you can get patents. How is their formulation unique? Do you know? That I couldn't tell you. It's just an oral aerosol spray, so there's issues that come up with the—is that it?

That's a company called Jombo makes a spray. Okay. Yeah. It's awesome. Yeah. It's awesome. Yeah. It's similar. It's similar to that. It's an oral aerosol.

My own concern. It's well standardized in terms of what cannabinoids are in there. I think they brought it out initially for multiple sclerosis. That was the treatment. And then for seizures, and they're gradually expanding, you know. I mean, it's interesting how marijuana has gone from, you know, this sort of reviled drug of abuse to now it's the medicine of the future. Right. And that's a good thing.

I mean, I think it does have a lot of applications. And why it should be illegal, there's no reason for this. You know, but obviously there is. It's in someone's interest to keep it illegal. only concern with this patented formula that they've sort of figured out is that other people can't make a formula as well. It's like in patenting, do they own the process? Like what if it's a very obvious process? Like, you know, like the ayahuasca process, it's a very obvious process. The monoamine oxidase inhibitor, along with the plant that contains the DMT, boil it down, everybody knows how to do it. If somebody figures out a way how to patent that, does that become a real problem in that they own the rights to something that's been around forever?

It does become a problem. And with, as you say, with something like that where, you know, it's pretty obvious how you do it. It's not that complicated. There's no innovative technology there. There's no, there's no art, right? There's no art of innovation, which is what would make it patentable. There were attempts to patent ayahuasca a few years ago and it got, uh, you know, it actually was patented and a delegation of indigenous healers from Ecuador, Colombia and Peru came to the U.S. Patent Office and petitioned against this

and said, we've been using this medicine for thousands of years. How is it that, oh, it was a guy named Lauren Miller who really didn't know what he was doing. I forget what his company was. This was when I was still doing my postdoc at NIH. So this was like mid-'80s. He tried to patent it. And what it turned out was it was a completely specious patent. patent. It was a patent on a particular strain of Banisteriopsis that he collected that had an anomalous flower color, I think, and that was the basis of the patent. Well, that's absurd because

flower color is highly variable. It was a useless patent in every respect. So was it rescinded? Yeah, the patent office overturned the patent, as they well should have. And then I believe it was reinstated for some reason. I haven't really followed this up. But I think by that time, everyone kind of came to the conclusion that it was absurd. There was no reason to do it. And he didn't really have the resources to develop it.

So, and he was not, you know, he lost a lot of respect because it's not so much that you can't, I mean, the intellectual property thing is the real issue. You know, if you, and that's why the pharmaceutical companies want to stay away from traditional medicines by and large because it's like you know the indigenous people are the are the stewards of the knowledge they know how to use the plant they maintain the plant their habitat you know it's where the plant is found um so they rightly should have a place at the table.

You know, if you're going to commercialize this traditional medicine, they should get something back. Because traditionally, we've been ripping things off from indigenous people for a long time. It's called biopiracy, right? And that's how they operate generally. So that's an issue. But there are ways to address that issue. Just basically, you know, come to terms with it and acknowledge that their knowledge does count for something and they should have a part of the proceeds. If you build a, if you

make a billion dollar drug out of this, you should be able to give something back to indigenous people. So it's complicated. It does seem complicated. It also seems like when everything becomes commercial, it becomes... When you look at the idea that pharmaceutical drug companies at all, when you look at a corporation and you think of this idea of infinite growth and this is what they're subscribing to and they're constantly trying to make more and more money. And then you think about compounds and compounds being legal and them trying to figure out a way to market these things. It seems to be a big issue that we're relying on that at all. It's almost like that tale of the scorpion and the frog, where the frog tells the scorpion,

hey, I'll give you a ride across the river, but do me a favor and don't sting me, because if you do, we'll both drown. And then halfway through, the scorpion stings him and the frog goes, what the fuck? And the scorpion goes, hey man, it's my nature. It seems like, right? The nature of these corporations is just to make money. So relying on them to bring these intense psychedelic compounds to the market or to even saying the market, it's a terrible word, to just bring them to daily use or bring them to making them free to use. I think that corporations, as you say, their main job as they see it, though they don't say so in public, is basically to make money, to patent these compounds and make money.

And make more money every year. And the best way to do that – There's no revenue model in psychedelics. There's no way for them to make money according to that model. Here's a way to know there's no revenue model in psychedelics there's no way for them to make money according to that model here's a way to not make money don't give that guy who's got a leaf over his dick a billion dollars that guy he's been happy shooting arrows at monkeys for 10 000 years that's kind of it yeah yeah it's just not so they're not going to do that if they don't have to well they won't and uh and No. And, you know, these psychedelics, if you use them therapeutically, these are things you might take a few times in your life.

They want drugs you take four times a day for the rest of your life. Sure. That's the revenue model. And the revenue model, if there is one with psychedelics, is not that because they have to be used in a context, you know, set and setting, right? The revenue model, if there is one, is to have centers, to have places you can go and take psychedelics in a controlled setting. They won't look like clinics. They'll look like spas. like clinics. They'll look like spas.

You know, I mean, take the family for a weekend and have a nice, you know, psilocybin vacation while you're busy getting your massages and doing yoga and whatever. That's how it's going to work. I think, if it does, if it's allowed to go forward.

That's the model. Yeah, well, we'll see. I mean, I've often said the very idea that you could patent or prohibit a plant is absurd. It is absurd. Especially when it's non-toxic. What is not patented is prohibited. That's the way they approach in most circumstances what's real weird is that we give these caveats to religions like that's what's

going on now with ayahuasca is that there are some companies that have had an exemption through the supreme court right i shouldn't say companies but basically that's what they are. They're churches, right? They're churches. Which is really just another way of saying a company. Well, they're institutionalized. They're institutions. Right. Yeah.

So the question is, and now people are beginning to sort of recognize this or ask the question. So you've got the UDV, which is one of these Brazilian churches that's, they're the ones that took their case all the way to the Supreme Court and got approved unanimously under, it's actually the first case that John Roberts decided after he became chief justice. So very conservative court. They unanimously ruled that, yes, the UDV is a real religion. Which is fascinating. They have the right to use it. Well, it clearly is a real religion.

It is a real religion. It's just fascinating that a conservative court would almost be boxed into doing that because of their views on Christianity. Exactly. Exactly. They couldn't not do it. And then the Santo Daime, same thing. They didn't have to go all the way, but essentially they have the same approval. And they're piggybacking on this and it's,

there are Christian based religions as well. Yeah. Well, they're Christian based religions. So now the question is, when you go to Peru, there's ayahuasca, it's used, it's not as institutionalized. It's kind of idiosyncratic. You've got these practitioners. The tradition is called vegetalismo. There's no institution. There's no doctrine. There's no hierarchy.

There's just freelance practitioners. The question is, is that a religious activity and should it be protected? And this is what some smart lawyers are now addressing with the use of ayahuasca in the more traditional way. It sounds like they have to. The churches have essentially taken that. They've appropriated that tradition and they say, well, we want nothing to do with these indigenous people. This is our religion. It's our sacrament.

They don't even get upset if you even call it a drug or a medicine. To them, it's a sacrament. Well, that's fine. But elsewhere, it is a medicine, but it is also a religious activity. Vegetalismo has a spiritual aspect. It should be regarded as a religion. We'll see where that goes. It's almost like with the UDV and these other churches

that what they've done is they've used this scaffolding of Christianity as a Trojan horse that's allowing this ayahuasca to get through. Strassman was telling me his experience with them where they were all wearing like golf shirts and they have uniforms and they're taking these insane doses of super potent ayahuasca. Right. And then they're all singing and singing songs about Jesus. And Strassman is like a really like very mellow and easygoing guy a really

pleasant guy he was explaining how he sat down with these people in the morning after all this is over he's like what the fuck are you people doing and his eyebrows are raised and he's thinking about his trip from the night before he's like these people are taking like super potent doses of ayahuasca and they're singing about Jesus with golf shirts on. It's like, what? And they, you know, they have like plastic folding chairs and shit and like lawn furniture. And it's like, what the fuck is this? What it is, is it's a religion.

You know, it's a religion. That's what it is. You know, but I think it's okay. Yeah. Spread it away. Spread it on. Yeah. Spread it on. Yeah, spread it on.

I mean, the thing is I haven't had much to do with Santo Taimi. Not that I just haven't had the opportunity, nor am I particularly interested in going to ceremonies where I am told that I have to dance the whole time. It's not my thing. But I know the UDV well, you know, because we did the biomedical study with them in the 90s. So they're wonderful people. They're very kind. You know, their families are good. They're very nice people. But I would never join. They asked me to join. I said, look, I don't do cults. I'd be happy to come drink with you anytime. I'm not joining the religion. What is it that Groucho Marx once said? I think to paraphrase him, I would never be a member of any group that would have me.

Yeah, that's pretty much what I told them. You know, you don't want me. I'm a heretic by nature, but I'm happy to, you know, share your brew. And they do make fine, fine brew. I'll tweet your your organization I'll tweet it out for you but I'm not showing up at the stockholders meeting I'm not gonna join but it seems to me with my experience with DMT that it's so powerful and so profound that I wonder if that's a way that Christianity works you know like this idea of Jesus and the Saints and heaven and God and all these different manifested deities. Like people thumb their nose at it and say it's ridiculous and preposterous.

But everything on DMT is ridiculous and preposterous. And I wonder if under the guise of the UDV and their singing and their dancing, if Jesus is real in a sense that you can actually communicate with a thing that takes the form of Jesus. In that sense, I wonder what they're seeing. I mean, I really wonder if they're going, the whole idea of psychedelics for the non-initiated is a big part of it is how you're going into the experience, set and setting, and also your mindset. Also, you know, the state of mind that you approach these things can greatly affect your experience, hence bad trips for people that have an unstable psychological state of mind,

and they try to fight the experience. I really wonder if these people are embracing all the beautiful concepts of Christianity, the love, the family idea, the brotherhood, the idea of brothers and sisters together and the sense of unity and love of the creator, if this idea of Christianity is actually an effective approach? Well, I think what you experience is not confined to Christianity. you know, is not confined to Christianity. What you articulated is just basically kind of the characteristics of a religious experience or spiritual experience without necessarily tying it to Christianity. I mean, love, compassion, respect for each other, you know.

I mean, these are elements of a kind of the, I don't know what you call it, generic religion. These are elements of the religious experience. The interesting thing about the UDV and these other churches is that they have actually created a structure where this can happen, whereas most religions, the last thing they want you to do is have an actual religious experience. I mean, it's all set up to make sure that doesn't happen because religious experiences are dangerous. That's a very profound thing you just said. Most religions, the last thing they want is for you to have a real religious experience. No, no. It's all set up to make sure that doesn't happen.

Only the priests get to have it. Or that was the original thing. And then, and of course, they don't have it either because they're, you know, I mean, it's gotten away from that. I mean, how significant is that, that the original idea of the rules of Christianity might have come from that. The Moses and the burning bush. These ideas that are passed on, love thy neighbor, all that stuff, might have been from that very experience. It might have been from that experience.

But the thing is, and this happens, it's not just Christianity. It's like any powerful spiritual technology, anything that is numinous, right? I talk a lot about the mysterium tremendum, right? The DMT, the psychedelic experience is a mysterium tremendum, something that is mysterious, tremendous, terrifying, spiritually powerful, and must be controlled, right? I mean, it is all those things. It's too powerful.

So in these power structure, there's always someone who says, you know, who wants to sort of put a collar around that, put a lasso around that to seize the reins, if you will. a lasso around that to seize the reins, if you will, there's a temptation to grab it and use it for your own purposes, which is usually a man. Usually, I don't know if any women don't seem to be, you know, it's not inbuilt to do the dominance thing, but there's very often a male figure who can take any spiritual technology, co-opt it to their purpose, which is often sex or money or power or all of those things.

Yeah, it's always a man. Of course it's a man. God damn it. Why do we suck? We just do. That's why there's 7 billion people, because we're sneaky and we get you pregnant okay right sorry that's pretty much it we're not we don't want to be like this ladies it's not our fault god yeah but it's always a man it really is always a man there's no arguing with it you know so you get this all the time in any kind of quote unquote spiritual tradition.

It happens in the ayahuasca thing. As we know, it's not uncommon to have sexual abuse and that sort of thing. It's very common lately. Lately, yeah. More and more so. You hear these stories of these guys. My friend Amber Lyon had it happen to her, like, on one of her first experiences. This guy was groping her where she was under, and she's realizing what's going on and just realized, like, this is probably how some of these people sort of, like, they found this technology.

And you can call it technology if you want, but this pathway to this incredible experience they provided to people. But they're not really much in into taking that journey themselves they're really into exploiting this thing for financial gain and for power and influence that is what it's morphed into now that there's the tourism phenomena and all that stuff so yes they see it as a way to exactly that, to power, influence, and money, which just illustrates, again, it's all about there's nothing inherently good or bad about these technologies. Ayahuasca can be a wonderful thing if it's used properly, and it can be a really terrible thing it's all about the use you make of it you know the moral dimension that comes with with how you use it you know I mean there are ayahuasqueros that have you know I say they don't listen to their medicine in a sense they they do these things they're

not really absorbing the lessons that they should be getting from the medicine. Others do listen to their medicine. And it's not so easy to sort out who's the good ones and who's the bad ones. Sort of like what you were talking about, these people that have the simplistic idea that all you have to do is get Donald Trump high on DMT and he's going to see the light. That's not necessarily the case. Not necessarily the case. I think it would be wasted on him. I think we would have to do at least an indwelling catheter, maybe two or three hours of continuous DMT infusion.

Why a catheter? Well, sorry, sorry. Wrong term. Intravenous? But it's very Freudian that you decided to go through his dick. Right. That is hilarious. Not that.

Not that. We'll go through the vein. I don't know, man. I think you might have nailed it the first time. That might be the way to get it. Maybe the way to get it to him is some perfect Russian robot fuck doll who just locks him up and, you know, right when he gets inside of her. There you go. She gets him in full guard,

locks him in place, and catheter-like delivery. Wow. Yeah, maybe they can program it like DMT, like little nanobots that go right through the penis hole. Right into the system.

They just run out of her. Right in there. And he just takes off. But again, there has to be something there for it to have an effect. Please, somebody animate that. I know there's somebody out there that wants to. Do it. That's the way to do it.

Just some perfect, super hot, 10 Russian hooker looking chick. No offense to Russian hookers. Right. Or Donald Trump. Or Donald Trump, even. Look, Donald Trump was a baby at one point in time, you know, and you and I, we both have children. We know there's, it's a delicate process of turning an adult, making an adult out of a child.

And a lot of factors come into play. But almost all babies are born, well, they certainly have their own personality. They're in many ways a blank slate. And so they're in a lot of ways a victim of the environment they're raised in. That's one of the weird things that I've developed in my own self over the last few years is just thinking about people as babies. I think of everyone as a baby now. Since I've had kids, I don't, I mean, obviously I think of them as being adults, but I think of them as an adult that used to be a baby. And I never used to do that.

Before I had children, I used to think of people as being in a static state. I meet you and I go, well, this is Dennis McKenna. This is how Dennis McKenna has always been. And now I go, oh, Dennis used to be a little boy. You know, Dennis was a baby. He used to, you know, and then he saw a lot of things and learned a lot of things. But you know what I mean? Yeah.

Like that's Trump. He's almost as much of a victim as he is of a perpetrator. In a way, he is. And Trump's a good example of somebody. I mean, in some ways, he's a perpetrator. I mean, in some ways, like, Jared and Ivanka are maybe a stabilizing influence on him. Although, you know, I'm sure their agenda is totally evil as well. Well, confused. They definitely don't deserve the amount of power that they're wielding, nor does anybody. What's more fascinating about him than anything is that what he holds up to the golden standard is success, right?

I mean, this is the guy that, you know, everything has to have his name on it. It's all Trump this and Trump that. And if you looked at like the great American vision of success, it's to become some sort of super rich ultra billionaire. But even though everybody knows he's a super rich ultra billionaire, he still is deceptive about his own success. He still has to lie about it he still has to distort it far past whether it's the numbers that came to the inauguration whether it's the numbers that he won the Electoral College by he lies about all these different things and it's in its inherent it's a part of him this intense lack of satisfaction with any result any any result even if it's winning by a

mile he must win by a hundred miles. Right. You know, and that's childish. That's like an intense, but it's that same intense dissatisfaction that's inherently very dangerous in a leader because it's leading him to make these critical judgments that aren't based entirely on reality, but rather what he wants people to perceive. Right. That's quite right. I think that's dangerous. That's what we were saying before. No thoughtfulness. There's no thoughtfulness in the man. There's no reflection.

Right. Reflection and lack of humility. So this is not what you want in your leaders because, you know, we see what's happening. Like, you know, he's going back and forth with the Soviets. He's going back and forth with North Korea. And it's like a schoolyard spat, you know. But these people have nuclear weapons to throw. So we need to back off from that, Donald, you know. It's just – but he can't do that because he has to respond. He has

this impulse to respond. I mean, I think that, you know, I don't know. I mean, he's not going to be exposed to ayahuasca, I'm pretty sure, unfortunately, because it would help him. And, you know, what is disturbing to me in many things about Donald and this sort of reality distortion he's created is people, you know, they take it seriously. I mean, they're sort of like intimidated by it. Not enough people are standing up and saying, well, this is not true. This is not true. You're completely deluded about this. You're, you know, I mean, there's some sort of impulse to show some respect when no respect is due,

you know? Right. Respect for the office. Yeah. Respect for the position. Respect for the office, for whatever. But then when he comes out with these things that are obviously not true, I'm sorry, there are no alternative facts.

Right. Alternative facts are lies. yeah there's only such a bizarre candy coating of bullshit alternative facts is the most hilarious candy coating of bullshit ever my my hope is that we get through this without nuclear war and then we realize that we can't have a fucking president and the idea of having one alpha chimp run the entire group of 300 plus million people is insane and it doesn't work when you have technology when you have this ability to communicate instantaneously globally with everybody constantly it's just it's an archaic idea that served its time but needs to be revamped how would you do that that's a really good question i'm not the guy to be revamped. How would you do that? That's a really good question. I'm not the guy to be the architect of the future civilization, but I would think that

putting as much power as we put into one individual is insanely problematic. It's just you're dealing with all these ego issues, decision-making issues. Right. And also the camps, the two separate camps, the right-left camp, that's crazy too. That's crazy too. Right, right. No, I mean, I think one way to approach it wouldn't have to be such a tremendous shift from what we've got. It would be to go to a parliamentary system like Canada has, for example, where you represent your party and if the other party gets enough, you know, they can vote you out without going through the whole impeachment

process. There is no impeachment process. The parties can form a coalition and vote the prime minister out, you know, and it's much easier to topple a government. And in some ways, that's a good thing. You know, it's more resilient. And Canada's a good, you know, there are many parliamentary democracies, but that's the one that's closest. I think there's also an issue with dealing with the real problems of the world in a time where the realities of, say, Syria and what's going on over there are so horrific and they're so far removed from the realities that we

deal with here, you almost need to have someone who has some sort of experience with those people in those lands to understand and put it into perspective. Yeah. with those people in those lands to understand and put it into perspective. And I think we're entirely lacking of that perspective in terms of our culture. I don't think we understand what a brutal military dictatorship is like. I think we see it on television, and it seems almost too abstract. But the president has to deal with that you know in a very real way and no one person can but that's what advisors are right exactly but if you don't have good advisors or if you choose to ignore them then you're

in deep shit right or that's I mean I mean Donald appoints advisors who already share his delusions of course so there's nobody there to say, wait a minute, you're wrong. You know, and based on experience and expertise and all this, you're wrong and you need to rethink it. That's what bothers me about one among many things about the way that he proceeds. I mean, you know, the thing that bothers me most about the change in administrations is that they have basically looked at climate change. They said, we don't believe it. It's not happening.

It's not even on the table. And actually, that needs to be the thing on the table. That should be the primary thing we're talking about. All this other stuff is important, but we're talking about the accelerating changes that are essentially undermining the mechanisms that keep the earth habitable by life. This is a pretty important issue. And to have people that say, well, we don't believe in climate change. Well, I'm sorry, climate change is real. I don't care what the fuck you believe. It is real. And for this administration to not only ignore it, but then roll back all these other measures that were put into place is, you know, it's just the stupidest idea I can imagine. Not just rollback, but removing the funding from monitoring it. Yeah, removing the funding.

Which is really scary. Suppressing the information and all this. So, you know, if you look at the people in the Trump administration, they're either from the energy industry, Rex Tillerson, you know, I think the government has become essentially a subsidiary of ExxonMobil, you know, and not the other way around. And so, you know, that's what they're doing. That's terrifying. You know, it's Goldman Sachs or ExxonMobil. I mean, corporations run the world. We've

known this for a long time. Governments are just puppets. Does this, in some ways, it's just too eerily parallel to what we're talking about with the rainforest. Like with all these, all this potential in the rainforest and almost this race. The race to see, like, can we get to these incredible new plants that we haven't discovered before we fuck it up by cutting down all the hardwoods and burning all the forests can we get to this potential future utopia of people being able to read each other's minds being able to communicate simultaneously all throughout the world understanding each other regardless of language can we get to that before we blow ourselves up before we get into a nuclear war with fucking North Korea? And it is crazy shit, right this insane administration. That's existing in this sort of chaotic manner

alongside some of the brightest minds and most innovative people that have ever walked the face of the planet that are influencing things in a way Today that it's really unparalleled in terms of human history. The potential that any new invention or innovation can enact, whether it's understanding new compounds that we discovered in the rainforest or some new technology that's made in Silicon Valley. I mean, it's an amazing, amazing parallel. Yeah, no, I agree. It does seem like a race in some ways between idiocy and genius. They're incredibly brilliant people and they're developing.

And there are solutions to the problems that face us, right? But then on the other side, you have the know-nothings, you know, who are marching into the future, eyes firmly fixed on the rearview mirror. It's like, oh, yeah, coal technology. That's the greatest mirror. It's like, oh yeah, coal technology. That's the greatest thing. Let's go back to that. I mean, is that stupid or what? You know, coal technology is obsolete. It's definitely stupid.

Why even, you know, there are better solutions, you know, or the whole attitude toward drugs. Oh, the war on drugs. The war on drugs was great. Let's go back to that. I mean, these are people who are not living in the present, for one thing, not planning for the future. And they don't really want to know. It's like our minds are made up. We know drug abuse has got to be bad. So let's prohibit it. Let's go back to the old model. They're not capable of entertaining new ideas. And that's a problem. They're not capable of entertaining new ideas, and that's a problem. What do you think about the idea, and I've heard this brought up and I've entertained it my own self, that maybe we need some sort of enemy or some sort of thing to resist in order to rise to the full potential of innovation, of ideas, that we almost need some sort of mountain to conquer.

We need some sort of a force to be aware of. It really makes people rise up. I've seen more people politically active and politically engaged now post-election than I ever did before the election because I didn't expect Trump to win. Right. And now that he did, it's like it's raised up this resistance to this insane level that I've never experienced before in my life. I mean, it feels to me like Kent stayed all over again. It feels to me. No, it was a real shock that he won.

And I agree, it's been a wake-up call. So now there is this strong resistance movement, and that's a good thing that that's happening also journalism has suddenly found itself again you know some journalists some sectors of it are beginning to you know for so long they were essentially stenographers they would repeat whatever the mouthpieces of the government now the journalists are questioning everything and asking tough questions of these clowns and expecting answers. And it's kind of like when I was young, I wanted to be a journalist. I thought Walter Cronkite was the cat's pajamas. I wanted to be like him, or I wanted to be a foreign correspondent.

I just admire journalism. And for a long time, I have not found anything to admire in it. It's like they've all been lobotomized or something. But they're rediscovering it. You know, the good ones are rediscovering it. And the re-emergence of investigative journalism. And right now, I think that's the, you know, that's our best hope, because I think that these guys, they'll just keep digging. There's going to be so much bad stuff come up about Trump and all this collusion with the Russians and, you know, potentially enough to impeach him.

The question is, will the Republicans find enough spying to do that? But they did with Nixon. And Nixon, I mean, what he did was not nearly as bad as what Trump is doing. And so we'll see where it goes. But Trump's shameless in a way that Nixon never was. Shameless. And, you know, I take a certain comfort in the thought that, you know, they have all these draconian things they want to do. Roll back all the environmental regulations, whole immigration thing, you know, war on drugs. But none of it is going to happen. None of it actually will happen. Well, the immigration stuff is pretty real here in California. on drugs, but none of it is going to happen. None of it actually will happen.

Well, the immigration stuff is pretty real here in California. I mean, ICE is showing up at Home Depots. They showed up at Home Depots. I have a friend who was born in America. He's Mexican. And they asked him where he was born. They told me he's a veteran and he knew how to deal with this and he knew what's legal and what's not. And he's a grown man. He's in his fifties. And a citizen. And a citizen citizen and a citizen yeah and a veteran i mean he served the country in in iraq and so they're coming up to him and and ask him you know where are you born and he's like you can't ask me that he was like you don't you're not allowed to ask me where i'm born right and then you know he says who are you and like you know we're immigration and whatever the ic stands for.

And he goes, let me see some documentation. The guy shows him his badge and his gun. He goes, that's not your fucking documentation. Pull out your goddamn documentation. And he pulls out his military ID. He's like, look, here's my documentation. This is me. Who the fuck are you?

And why are you asking people where they're born? I was born in California. Okay. You're not allowed to just go up to people and ask them where they're born. But people that don't know that, they're getting arrested, they're getting taken, they're getting deported. They're taking people that are dropping off their children at school.

They're grabbing people. And there's a bunch of cases of this. And you're just hearing about the cases that get to the press. There's so many of them that you're never going to hear about. And this is just rampant. And this never existed before. Not in the Bush administration. Not, I mean, not in Bush senior. I mean, it just didn't happen before in any conservative administration. They didn't treat it like this. This is a weird time.

Yeah, it is a very weird time, but I think it's temporary. Well, I hope so. But what you said about journalism, I think it's important to point out that they're just as, they fucked up just as hard with the left as they did with the right. I mean, they let the Clintons get away with a lot of horse shit. They let Obama get away with a lot of horse shit. They said talking points. They were given talking points, and they ran with those talking points so that they would get access to the president, and they would get access to congressmen, the senators, and they did it forever.

And it wasn't journalism, and you're right. And the reason why this guy got into place and that's in this situation right now, it's just as much of a fault of them of not holding the left to the fire as it is to, you know, what's going on right now. Yeah. I mean, journalism has a lot to answer for. There's no doubt about it. I just have a, you know, maybe it's a delusion.

I would just, I would just, I like, I would like to think that journalism is finding its voice and finding its function. Again, its function is to, you know, as somebody said, I think it was I.F. Stone, you know, the function is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, right? And that's essentially the journalistic mandate. Or express the truth. And seek the truth. Seek the truth in form. And don't assume, you know, play the propaganda game. Be able to look beyond it. And they have to be in this environment where people keep calling fake news. They have to be undeniable. And I think in that sense

they are reinvigorated. Yeah. I mean, that's one of the things that, you know, you're seeing. That's one of the things that The Times talked about, like, after it was over, after the election was over. They're like, we are, we're going to reinvigorate, refocus our dedication on journalism. Yeah. And I think that's a good sign.

Yeah. And then the other side of it is that we can just, you know, the way the Trump administration proceeds with all these things they want to do, they inevitably just get bogged down in litigation, protest. You know, at some point they do have to answer to Congress. So I think, you know, I mean, the wheels were already coming off before he even took the oath of office. They've continued to come off and it's just going to get – it's going to just sort of degenerate into litigation, acrimony, inability to get anything passed, you know, which is all good. I mean, essentially, in this case, chaos is our friend because they won't be able to advance this draconian agenda, thank God.

And, you know, hopefully circumstances will enable us to get rid of them quickly. I don't know. You know, I'm not entirely confident in that. I just, the whole thing to me, when I'm looking at these protests, like what was going on yesterday where people are just beating the shit out of each other in the streets is people with red hats like the red hats are the bad people it's so strange like it's so strange seeing people these make America great again hats fighting with people that are wearing masks and motorcycle helmets

and their sticks and people are throwing you know smoke, smoke bombs. I'm like, this is crazy. And I really never thought we'd see such a clear right versus left civil war, in fact, like these little battles. And it seems to be ramping up and becoming more and more common and becoming more and more violent. Yeah, it seems that it is, you know. But so what can we do? You know, we're not out on the streets protesting on one side or another. I mean, I, you know, and then basically I think for me, I continue doing what I'm doing.

Because I think these plant medicines are the single most important catalyst for changing consciousness on a global level. And that's what has to happen. So I'm not saying I have nothing messianic about it. I tell people I work for the plants, but I think it's valuable to bring people to that experience in a place that is safe. They don't have to worry about those issues. They can have this direct download with the Mysterium Tremendum, if you want to call it that.

That can change hearts and minds. I think that globally, I think that ayahuasca is a catalyst for that. Why has it suddenly gone global in the last 20 years? I think that it's a sign that Gaia, if you believe in that concept, that the earth itself is an intelligent entity, is getting a little bit hysterical and is trying to get our attention. Wake up the monkeys.

And this is the way it's... So ayahuasca is an ambassador from the community of species to what I call the problematic primates, you know, this out-of-control species that needs a good talking to in a certain sense. Wake up, you're wrecking this place, you know, and you don't have to. Well, it seems like systems always try to balance themselves out, you know, whether it's through warfare or disease or some new government usurping the old power or whether it's through predators and prey. And there's always some weird sort of reaction to something gaining too much power. And whether it's ideas or ideologies or patterns, they gain too much power and then something shows up that sort of tends to diminish that and erode the very foundation of it. That's what I feel about psychedelics, that in many ways what they're doing and even the sneaky door, like the people that talk about cannabis being some sort of a gateway drug. It's not a gateway drug to the bad ones.

I think, if anything, it's a gateway drug to the ones that are going to change the world. Yeah. If it doesn't do it on its own. Yeah. I mean, this concept of a gateway drug is, you know, it's just stupid. In a sense, this is something that the drug warriors have come up with you know particularly so i mean i'm here to tell you coffee is a gateway drug alcohol chocolate ice cream is a gateway drug we've all taken these things and you know look where we are

now right we you know so gateway drug it's just the concept is absurd. What's it if it was not sold in a in a environment where there were a choice to have all sorts of other illegal drugs? It wouldn't be a gateway drug, would it? No. Well, the alcohol one is the most ridiculous one because it's everywhere. And it's the one that inhibits your or loosens your inhibitions more than any other drug. It's responsible for the most foolish behavior. It's everywhere. You can get it at every restaurant.

You can get it almost everywhere you go. Even to the point where it's not even recognized as a drug. Yeah, exactly. That's the cognitive dissonance for years. You know, the FDA could not classify tobacco as a drug because it was a different regulatory framework. Well, of course it's a drug, you know. And somebody said, yeah, it's the only drug you can use when used as instructed will kill you. That's hilarious.

Isn't it funny that the word drug, I'm not funny, but isn't it problematic at the very least that the word drug is sort of this gigantic blanket that we throw over all these things that perturb consciousness? Right. And that's good and bad. Yeah. Positive and negative. No beneficial effects whatsoever. And a massive one.

This is another reason. This is another example of why this conversation about drugs is so shallow because we're talking about drugs. It's completely scary, as you say. Good people don't use drugs. What about which drugs? Why don't we talk about which drugs? Because there's thousands of drugs. So which one are we talking about?

Or we just ban all drugs. I feel like just calling them drugs is a problem. Yeah. I mean, how could you call DMT the same thing that you call alcohol? It seems to me to be so crazy. It's just not a useful term. Right. And then also, I mean, the problem that they're facing and that we have to acknowledge, which I've been saying a lot lately, is, you know, we're made

of drugs, right? That's why drugs work. We are made of drugs, right? We're biochemical engines that run on drugs, which are neurotransmitters and hormones and enzymes and all of these things in biochemical system. They're involved with signal transduction, with, you know, organisms or networks of communication. They're mediated by neurotransmitters. Neurotransmitters, if you isolated them from the brain, put them into a bottle and sold them, that would be a drug. Well, it is a drug. So this idea that, you know, we are inherently biochemical systems, you know, and people don't want to acknowledge that, but that's the truth. You know, we're made of drugs. So the

people that want to have the drug-free America, I'm sorry, you know, we're made out of drugs. Drugs are built into who we are. That's why drugs taken from plants or from the outside have the effects that they have, you know, because they affect these systems that, you know, our big brains, this is kind of a consequence of evolution. You know, we have these enormous brains, you know, that evolve very quickly. And we like novelty, you know, we have all of these brain receptors, we like to, we like to stimulate those receptors, because it makes us feel good, or it's interesting, or for all sorts of reasons, we like to tweak our states of consciousness. It's just built into who we are, you know, and it's not a bad thing. Well, this is a problem with the way you're thinking. You have too many facts and use too

much science, and you don't have enough Jesus. You don't have enough Jesus in your life. If you had Jesus, you wouldn't need all this nonsense. And then that Jeff Sessions would make sense to you. Right. That may be true. But unfortunately, I don't. So, yeah, I'll just continue to be deluded and believe in science and facts and things like that. It's so important that you embrace Jesus and you just won't. I don't know what's wrong with you. I can't do it. I mean, I did it. I'm a recovering Catholic.

I've been there. I know the drill. I know the territory. But it's just so – No thanks. In all honesty, though, it's so important that you are saying these things so people can change their perspective when they realize that oh yeah we are really just water balloons of drugs we're just filled up with it i mean we're that's that's what operates the whole thing that essentially is what we are that's what

adrenaline is it's what all these different things are. I didn't say it first. Do you know who said it? It was Salvador Dali who said it. They said, so how do you come up with your ideas for all this crazy art you do? You must be on drugs, right? He said, no, I am drugs, which I guess that put the conversation to an end. So if you think about it, it's quite true. Yes, that's put the conversation to an end.

So if you think about it, it's quite true. Speaking of our drugs. And a lot of, you know, without, I don't want to get too far down this, but a lot of the problem with organized religion, I think, is that it denies biology, right? Right. Abstinence. Yeah. Somehow being in a body, being this chemical system and enjoying what it is to be that is forbidden somehow. And this is partly a reflection of our devaluation of nature, you know, which is that includes our own nature as well as nature out there. Psychedelics are the antidote to this, right?

They make you re-appreciate your relationship with nature. And so they can catalyze changes in consciousness. That's why I say the most effective thing that I can do as somebody who's concerned with the planet is bring people to situations where they can encounter the medicine and make of it what they will. I'm not there to tell them what to make of it. I'm there to tell them this will be the most intense personal experience that you'll ever have. It's up to you how you evaluate it. And you can't tell them because, in all honesty, you're still working it out yourself.

Right. And certainly I don't want to tell them. I'm a big believer in use your own mind, use your own brain to work this out. And that's why we have it, you know. That's one of the most important things about recognizing someone who's, you know, a quote unquote fake shaman or someone who's using it wrong. Someone who's telling you exactly what it is and what you're going to experience. One of the most beautiful things that psychedelic drugs do is they dissolve any notion that you might have that anyone has a hold of this thing. Yes. Very much so.

That is exactly right. If somebody tells me, I'm a great shaman. I'm going to lead you through this. I'm out of there. Because they obviously have not understood what it is. If somebody says, I'm not a shaman, I just help. I just help. I just want to facilitate.

You know, it's the medicine that's in the shaman. A shaman will say, I'm not a shaman. I just know a few tricks. That guy is the guy I want to drink with. Yeah, I just know a few tricks. I just know a few tricks. I just know a few tricks. If you get in trouble, I can help you. Otherwise, I'll just step back and let you do it.

And that's the essential thing because the medicine itself is the shaman. While I have you here, I have to ask you two questions because I keep forgetting to do this. First of all, cannabinoid receptors. What is the relationship between cannabinoid receptors in human beings and the actual use of cannabis or the evolutionary use of cannabis, like over the course of human development? Are cannabinoid receptors in place because people have consumed cannabis throughout history or they're just a natural function of biology? No, they're a natural function of biology, like a lot of these things, like opiate receptors, the same thing. Cannabinoid receptors, there are many kinds, and they're all over the body. They're not just in the brain.

They do all sorts of things. They're involved with immune functions and inflammation, and it's quite complicated. Which is why CBD oil works, and it's not psychoactive. It's not psychoactive. It works on different receptors. There's at least three kinds of cannabinoid receptors. And evolutionarily, they're not cannabinoid receptors. There's the endocannabinoid system. They're not cannabinoid receptors.

There's the endocannabinoid system. They are responsive to things that we make in the body like anandamide. And there's another one which I always forget. But these are endogenous compounds that bind to cannabinoid receptors. So just like there are endogenous compounds that bind to opiate receptors, these are peptides like endorphins, enkephalins, and those sorts of things. But the receptors just happen to bind these plant alkaloids. But that's not why they evolved. They have functions in the body related to analgesia and sleep and that sort of thing. Same with the cannabinoid receptors.

They evolved not because there were cannabis plants out there, but because the body made these endocannabinoids and they mediated all kinds of functions, like anandamide. These things, you know, cannabinoids are a little different than something like DMT or psilocybin, which work kind of very specifically on the serotonin receptors. And that's how they mediate their effects. The effects of cannabinoids are more widespread, you could say. More multivalent is maybe a good word.

But it's not because the plants were there that we evolved these things. We had this. We were neurologically modern humans, you might say, and curious, right? Sampling everything we could get our hands on in the environment, whether stuffing it up our nose or usually drinking it or whatever, naturally you're going to stumble over these compounds because, you know, the biome is, these are just abundant in the biome. So it's not really a chicken or the egg sort of situation, like what came first, the cannabinoid receptor or the consumption of cannabis?

The receptors were there first. How do we know that? How do we know that? Because we can actually trace the phylogeny of these things. We have molecular methods now where we can actually trace the ancestry of receptors. For example, we have ways to measure this. So, you know, cannabinoid receptors, you can look at the phylogeny and, you know, they were present in mammals long before we were around, you know. And tryptophan is the same thing.

Tryptophan, which is the amino acid we were talking about, precursor to many of these psychedelics, right? So how old is tryptophan as an amino acid? You can look back at the phylogeny, turns out damn old, you know, possibly 3.8 billion years old. The genes for tryptophan have been found in phylogenetic groups that go back that far, the so-called trypoperon. So, you know, so these things have been around for a long time. And, you know, in the most primitive organisms, you know, serotonin is another good example. Serotonin is, which most of the psychedelics work on, serotonin is another good example. Serotonin is, which most of the psychedelics work on, serotonin is thought to be the oldest neurotransmitter phylogenetically, older than dopamine and norepinephrine, some of these other things.

Serotonin is, receptors are very old phylogenetically, evolutionarily. Receptors are very old phylogenetically, evolutionarily. So how does that correlate with runner's high? When people have this runner's high and apparently it has some sort of an effect on cannabinoid receptors, what is going on there? And does it actually mimic the high that someone gets from consuming cannabis? Yeah. I've heard runner's high discussed in terms of the opiate receptors, the endorphin and so on, maybe cannabis too. What we do know is that in states of high stress, you can boost the production of these endogenous compounds,

which is why high stress is one way to induce altered states of consciousness on the natch, right? Oh, I don't need drugs because I can run and get high or I can do meditation and get high. I'm sorry, dude. You're still on drugs because we're made of drugs. And you've just figured out a way to boost your endogenous DMT, cannabinoid, opiates, or whatever. They're all there. So when people are lifting weights and getting crazy, they're actually, in some way, doing some sort of a natural drug trip. Yeah, essentially, because we are drugs.

There is no state you can experience, including the state that we're in right now, that is not a reflection of our neurochemistry. We're in a hallucination right now. This is a reality that our brains take information in from the environment through our sensory neural interface. They combine it with what we know from memories and associations in the cortex, and they essentially create a model of reality. And that's the reality we're inhabiting, you know. And a lot of what the brain does, it receives information, but a lot of the brain's function is to filter stuff out. You know,

if we received everything from the environment all the time, we'd be nuts. We wouldn't be able to take it. So there are these gating mechanisms. It's called neural gating. And we are genetically programmed to, and through experience as well, to, you know, to have these gating mechanisms that filters a lot of stuff out so that we can function. Otherwise, reality would be a blooming, buzzing confusion all the time.

We wouldn't be able to focus on anything. So, for example, gating is malleable. It can change depending on the input. So you're in a crowded restaurant, for example, and it's hard to hear. There's a lot of noise in the background. You adapt to that by filtering out most of what's there, right? You can suppress it to some degree so you can talk to the person across from you, right? You're not paying attention. But at the next table, you hear somebody say your name. Suddenly, your gating mechanism, you know, you get that. That gets through the filtering mechanism. Oh, somebody's talking to me. I wonder what they're saying about me over there. You know, that kind of thing. So

it relates. But a lot of what the brain does when you essentially create this hallucination, if you want to call it that, of the reality that we inhabit. You can call it a model of reality. It's not reality itself. It's a reasonable facsimile of reality that we inhabit. And everybody's is different, hence different views. Everyone is different but close enough that we can talk to each other and all that. It's, you know, but it's not the pure objective reality, you know, which doesn't really exist. Well, it exists out there, but we don't know what it looks like.

But it doesn't exist to humans. Doesn't exist to us. We don't perceive it. We perceive our own, you know, our own model, essentially, of reality. And I think you explaining that different experiences create literally drug trips also can explain love affairs where people become incredibly addicted to each other. Right. Addicted to the experience of being around the person and what that does to you. And that literally you are on drugs when you're with someone.

Of course. And, you know, that's been studied, right? Yeah. I mean, oxytocin and probably opiates. Dopamine. These and serotonin. All of these things are part of what mediates that relationship. Including sex hormones.

Absolutely. All of those things. All of those things. Sex hormones, too, are psychoactive drugs in a certain sense, which is not to say, I mean, this is not saying that these experiences aren't genuine or valuable or anything. They are, obviously. You know, personal relationships are important.

It is not a, to my mind, it's not a devaluation to say, well, it's chemically mediated. Okay, great. It's chemically mediated. That doesn't make it invalid. In fact, it means that, wow, these molecules are pretty amazing. They can do this. Well, the feeling is fantastic. Like, why would that invalidate it?

It's still real. It's still awesome. Well, but people, you know, again, they have these artificial distinctions about, well, you know, my mystical experience is more valuable than yours because you had to have psilocybin and I got there on the natch. But it wasn't on the natch, you know, you're still a prisoner of your neurochemistry, no matter what. It just so happens that psilocybin is a drug taken in the right circumstances, in the right amount, will reliably induce a mystical experience. Nothing wrong with that. You know, you can even study it.

You know, you can even study it. Suddenly science can study mystical experiences because we have a reliable trigger that will nine times out of ten induce a mystical experience in the right circumstances. So then we can take somebody, you know, maybe somebody's meditated for 20 years or done yoga or done other things, hoping that they might have a mystical experience. they might have a mystical experience. Good for them. But then, you know, you can take me, an ordinary schmuck or somebody like me who hasn't particularly, not particularly spiritually evolved, but I can take psilocybin and yeah, it works. That reminds me of a great story that your brother told once about a monk who studied a city of levitation. And he did it for like 30 years and then met the Buddha and said, look, I can walk on water.

I've studied this city of levitation for 30 years, and now I can walk across the river. And the Buddha said, yeah, but the ferry's only a nickel. Exactly. Right. What? He's 30 years, man. He could have just taken mushrooms.

Speaking of mushrooms, this is something that I get wrong all the time. This is one of the other things I wanted to ask you. There's some very close relationship that mushrooms have and the absorption of mushrooms have to DMT. What is the chemical differentiation? Okay, very, very slight, actually. The temptation to start drawing structures is almost irresistible. You want to write some stuff down? Go ahead. Draw it down.

It would be awesome. Here, here's a pen. Do we have a visual component? No, we don't, but I'll save that piece of paper. Okay. Well, I don't want to get too far into it, but basically, okay, so you've had organic chemistry, yeah? No. No?

Okay. Well, then this may be it. I am organic chemistry. You are organic chemistry. Well, this may be a useless thing, but it's definitely not useless. Here we go. We can see it up on the wall here. We've got it up on the screen.

Oh. There you go. Okay. Well, there you go. Yeah, we don't have to draw a structure. You can look at it right here, so you don't have to turn around. Look to your right. Dennis, turn and look.

It's on this one as well. Okay. So, right. So, you can see. So, there's serotonin, psilocin, and dimethyltryptamine. Wow. You can see that psilocin and dimethyltryptamine are very close in structure. The only difference is that hydroxy group, that OH group.

That's the only difference. So with that removed, psilocin is exactly the same thing as N and dimethyltryptamine. That's correct. Wow. But that single trivial difference is what makes psilocin orally active and dimethyltryptamine is not. Wow. Wow.

Because what's going on with that, this static diagram, a different molecular model would show, but what's going on is that that nitrogen there, when psilocin's in physiological solution, the nitrogen is charged, has a positive charge. The oxygen doesn't have the H there. It has a negative charge. So the nitrogen curls back and is in close association with the oxygen, if this makes any sense. So the enzyme can't get to it.

That's why it's orally active because essentially it can't get to that nitrogen. What that enzyme does is cleave off that nitrogen, monoamine oxidase. It takes away that nitrogen. And it can't do it with psilocin. So that's why psilocin's orally active. It doesn't require an MAO inhibitor. It's just, in some ways, it's the perfect psychedelic because, you know, no preparation needed. You just bend over and pick the mushroom. No preparation is required, which is probably why very ancient man knew about psilocybin. They couldn't not have if they were living in an environment where it was found.

That's amazing. You know, what's really incredible is that people are using psilocybin these days in what they call microdosing, taking very small doses and seeing these profound benefits. And one of the things that I'm aware of is kickboxers are using it. And kickboxers are using it and a good buddy of mine is using it. He says that he can see things happen before they happen. It's almost like he's reading people's minds before they're about to do something. Even on microdoses. Yeah.

That's very interesting. In the intense environment of sparring and the intense physical kinetic interaction of kickboxing. So he's seeing what people are going to do before they do it in a way that he's never able to do, quote unquote, on the natch. Right. No, I'm not surprised at all. I mean, and why aren't you surprised? Like, what do you think is happening? Because I think that these things let you step out of your box a little bit. They let you step out of your usual reference frame and notice things going on in the environment that, again, this gating mechanism we were talking about, we're programmed to filter stuff out.

Psychedelics temporarily disrupt that. They let the background come forward. And you notice things about the environment that normally you would suppress because they're not relevant to immediate survival. I don't know if you've read some of the work by Simon Powell. He wrote The Psilocybin Solution. He writes very intelligently about psilocybin. In his latest book, The Magic Mushroom Explorer, he talks about how psilocybin is a lens, essentially. You can think of it as a lens through which you can look at the world.

You can look at natural phenomena, and you will notice things about that, those phenomena that you normally would overlook because we're programmed to do it. So in a sense, he talks about how psilocybin is a scientific instrument. It's a lens through which you can look at the world and see aspects of it that are always there, but you've never noticed them before because we're programmed not to. For example, you know, Cary Mullis is famous because his discoveries in molecular biology, he attributes to his insights about molecular processes that he got from LSD, Insights about molecular processes that he got from LSD. That he could get down with the molecules, as he put it, and see how all this is working.

And obviously he invented polymerase chain reaction, which he got the Nobel Prize for. So it's not like this is a delusion. It's a real thing that he was able to notice that no one else, you know what I'm saying? He was able to put himself in a place where he could notice these phenomena. And I think that's really true. If you go to take a walk in the forest with an indigenous person, you know, who in some ways is in this less of this sensory gating in a more open place all the time, they will notice things about the environment, you know, that you are completely oblivious to until they point it out, you know, and then they'll say, oh, yes, I never noticed the leafcutter ants

are behaving this way or these different things. cutter ants are behaving this way or these different things, their sensory sort of experience of a environment like the forest is very different than ours, you know, because we're used to, we're just not out in nature the same way. And I dare say, I think one of the things that in some ways inserts a barrier between us is literacy. You know, we're all literate, right? And we like being literate. It's good that we're literate. But in order to be literate, you have to have this separation between the self and the external environments, you know. You have to pick up a book and read it.

I am here. I'm the point of view. Here's the book, you know. So that creates that relationship. And you sacrifice, you focus on one particular sensory modality and you sacrifice all the other input that is coming in. I don't know if I'm making sense. No, you absolutely are.

You absolutely are. But that's what these substances can do. They can essentially reverse this background-foreground relationship that we're so used to. Suddenly, what's right in front of you is not so important, and you can pay attention to the things in the background that you're normally you're programmed to suppress and ignore because you know you have to be ready for the saber-toothed tiger to come across you know over the the mountain or whatever you know what i'm saying but uh it's good in that sense they They teach different ways of perception, you know,

and I think that's a very useful thing to learn. You know, indigenous people call these psychedelics plant teachers, and they call them teachers for a reason. You know, much of what you experience comes directly from the experience, but much of it also comes from your changed perception and suddenly you realize there's a different way to be in the world. There's a different way to perceive what you experience that normally you don't, you know, we're programmed to filter out.

I don't know if you've ever read or had Stephen Buhner on your show. He writes very intelligently about this stuff. He's written a book called Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm. And it's all about this, you know, this essentially what his rap is. You can learn this. You know, you can learn this way of perceiving. Whether you do it with psychedelics or not, you can actually learn it.

And it's an interesting, it's a better way to relate to nature or more an alternative way to relate to nature in any way. I feel like we have these pre-assumed definitions of things that we rely upon instead of seeing things for what they really are. And you kind of box them up and you package them and you go, oh, well, there's a car. And then one day you look at the car and you go, that's a box that has a controlled explosion encased in iron and it rolls on rubber tires.

That's exactly what I'm talking about. There's a different way to look at things if you step out of the box. And yes, it is all those things. And it's also a car. And it's, yeah. But if you did that all the time, you'd never get anything done. That's right. That's right. almost compelled to try to put some kind of a linguistic wrapper over everything, which

is one reason why, if you smoke DMT, right, you have a complete revelation, it's amazing, it's all of these things, but it's, in most cases, you aren't even down yet before you're trying to explain it to yourself. You're trying to stuff this thing in a box because it was so impactful. It's inherently ineffable. You can't really describe it in language. But boy, is there a desire to somehow tame this thing, which is incomprehensible, totally transcendent, but that doesn't stop you from rapping about it immediately to try to stuff it into a box because it's too impactful.

And so on the individual level, this is what people do. Well, that's what religions do too, right? is what people do well that's what religions do too right they try to take something like this and stuff it into a box because in and of itself without that wrapping or that linguistic you know filter to somehow tame it and you know nullify neutralize its power these things are very dangerous there there also seems to be some sort of a physiological component to the DMT trip where once it's over, you have a very limited amount of time to hang on to those memories. Yes, well, exactly. And so this is an attempt to entrain that, to grab it,

and I think put a linguistic tag on it in a certain way so that as a way to not forget it or try and both reduce its power but give you something to hang on because, right, the memory of what it actually is is going to fade very rapidly. Why is that? What's the physiological? I don't know what the physiological mechanism is. But it's going to fade very rapidly. Why is that? What is, what's the physiological? I don't know what the physiological. But it's like a lot like dreams. It's a lot like dreams.

It's a lot like dreams. I think that it's just, I don't know. It's, it's something like that. You could probably train yourself to remember it better, just like people can train themselves to remember their dreams. But it's ephemeral. It does tend to evaporate, which is why it's important to go to the well once in a while and take a drink.

I am not one of these people that says, once you get the message, hang up the phone. That's a model that doesn't work for me, actually. It might work for some people, but I feel like this is not an answering machine. This is a teacher. This is something that is intelligent that you have a dialogue with. You know, and you don't, you know, teacher teaches a lesson. You don't say, thanks very much.

We're done now. It's an ongoing process. I've been taking psychedelics for most of my life, a good part of my life. I feel like I've only learned a fraction of what they have to teach me. You know, and maybe I'm just dumb. Maybe I don't get the message as well as other people, but I don't think so. I think there's a lot. They're full of surprises. You know, I've taken ayahuasca, lost track a long time ago, but probably

500 times or more. And people say, well, you know, surely you've learned everything there is to learn. Actually, no. You know, I always learn something new and i learn certain basic things too that it always reminds me about well also you're always remember that you don't know anything that's the chief thing and you're also acquiring new data constantly in the natural world that needs to be processed and sometimes you process it with the tools of civilization versus the psychedelics. It's, well, you know, it's just interesting. It keeps me off the streets so far. You're going to join a gang, Dennis?

A lot of people can be grateful for that. Yeah. No, I'm grateful. I'm grateful. Listen, I think I've taken up plenty of your time here, and this is an amazing conversation. I really appreciate it. I appreciate it. I'm always happy when we can do this.

Yeah. I wish we could do it more often. We should do it more often. We definitely should. Let's do it. Let's do it. I can come. There are many people I can recommend.

I'm sure you get hundreds of requests, but certain people you ought to be talking to. Let's do it. Let's do it. So please, one more time, tell people about this conference and when they can watch it on Facebook. Okay. Well, it's the ESPD50.com. That's the key thing, ESPD50. The conference will be June 6th, 7th, and 8th in the UK. You can

go there if you want to attend it. The cost is high to actually go there and do it. But people can access it on Facebook. And if you go to that website, then there's a link through to the Facebook page. And we'll be live streaming it on the 6th, 7th, and 8th of June. And it'll be archived, so I don't expect people in the States to get up at 3 in the morning, you know, to watch it, although they could if they want to watch it live. But it'll all be, you know, archived so they can look at it any time. And will you transfer it over to other more accessible, like people that don't have Facebook, maybe on YouTube or something along those lines, Vimeo?

We haven't made plans to live stream it on Vimeo. I don't know how you do that. I don't think you can live stream it, but you could definitely take the video recording, perhaps, if you have a physical recording. It'll all be up there eventually. But just live stream, real time, Facebook will be where we do it. Mostly because everyone has told me this is how you do it. Okay. Well, I will definitely tweet that out to everybody and I'll let everybody know. Please.

I'll put it on all the available social media pages. Fantastic. And order the book. You can go to the website and order the book. And the book will come out probably the end of November. It's going to take a few months for everybody to get there. You know, they have to not only make a presentation, they have to submit a paper for this book. And I'm, you know, I'm dangling certain rewards out

to them to make sure that they do, in fact, submit a full paper in the spirit of the first conference. But it's going to be an amazing book, and it's something I've wanted to do for a long time. And I can check this off the list now and go on to something else. Beautiful. Beautiful. And hopefully do it more often. Thanks, Joe. Thank you, Dennis.

I appreciate you very, very much. All right. Thanks, folks. See you soon. Bye. Bye-bye.