TrueLife - Dr. Rick Strassman - From DMT the Spirit Molecule to The Psychedelic Handbook

Episode Date: September 23, 2022

One on One Video Call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_US🚨🚨Curious about the future of psychedelics? Imagine if Alan Watts started a secret society with Ram Dass and Hunter S. Thompson… now open the door. Use Promocode TRUELIFE for Get 25% off monthly or 30% off the annual plan For the first yearhttps://www.district216.com/What is or who are the beings that one encounters in these realities? Can they reveal information to us?Are they real? What are the long term effects of psychedelics on the brain? Could the Renaissance in Psychedelics be clamped down upon like it was in the sixties? What do you think of Terrance McKennas “Stoned Ape Theory”?All these questions and many more. Thank you Dr. Strassman for all of  your pioneering work in the world of psychedelics, your perseverance, and your guidance! You can contact and purchase all of Dr. Rick Strassmans books here: https://www.rickstrassman.com/ One on One Video call W/George https://tidycal.com/georgepmonty/60-minute-meetingSupport the show:https://www.paypal.me/Truelifepodcast?locale.x=en_USCheck out our YouTube:https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLPzfOaFtA1hF8UhnuvOQnTgKcIYPI9Ni9&si=Jgg9ATGwzhzdmjkg

Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear, Hears through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Serafini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the True Life podcast. We are here with the one and only Dr. Rick Strassman. He's a psychiatrist, a professor, an author, documentary filmmaker, pioneering researcher in the world of psychedelics holds degrees from Stanford University

and Albert Einstein College of Medicine. A gentleman and a scholar, Dr. Rick Strassman, thank you for spending some time with me today. Well, my pleasure. What an exciting time we live in today. And I was hoping we could take a little tour through some of the monumentous books that you've written,

maybe starting with the one you've made a documentary out of DMT, the Spirit Molecule. Well, it's a behind the scenes account of that DMT study. Why I did it, what the study looked like, how I got approval from the government to do the first new study in psychedelics and humans in 20 years. You know, the experiment, what we found, a large part of the, the appeal of the book are the stories, the accounts of the trips of the DMT volunteers. Those take up about a third of the book. And then I speculate a bit about potential roles of DMT, which is the drug we studied,

and talk about the dark side a bit, you know, adverse effects, which are not all that rare when you give a big dose of a psychedelic. And then kind of thoughts about future research. And so that book summarized the work we did between 90 and 95, which is actually a long time ago now. And I finished the research in 95, then spent a couple of years writing the book, came out in early 2001.

And as you mentioned, it was turned into an independent documentary that I helped produce as co-producer called DMT, the Spirit Molecule. as well. For a while, it was the most streamed independent documentary about drugs on Netflix at a particular point in time there. But there is some marketing distributing questions, and it's not on Netflix, but you can watch it for free on YouTube. It has a lot of interviews with the volunteers. It's a fascinating book to read. And the documentary, I haven't seen it, but in my mind, I've got the documentary in my mind from reading the account of them. I'm curious, what was it like to see or hear the accounts of those individuals who were in the study when they come back and they seem so much like prophecy and you're hearing these accounts for the first time?

Where was your faith then? Were you big into the Hebrew Bible then? Or how did you integrate those accounts? Well, it was a very strange time. You know, you give somebody a huge dose of DMT and they're just lying there. you have no idea what's going on you're keeping an eye on their blood pressure and their heart rate if they need anything a hand or a blanket or to be moved around a little but other than that other than watching their blood pressure and heart rate you've got no idea what's happening

yeah you know so i would ask people how it went when they would first open their eyes and lift up their eyes shades yeah and i really didn't know what to expect most people found it to be incredibly intriguing. It's kind of an almost immediate entry into a world of light, which is possessed of intelligence and power. And that intelligence and power sometimes coalesces into recognizable objects. We ended up calling them beings rather than aliens or entities. you know beings seemed to cut to the chase and they existed so yeah it was it was it was it was

was very strange I was giving DMT sometimes seven days a week and we were just out there it was Albuquerque New Mexico University of New Mexico you know nobody knew what we were doing even people at UNM there's me there is a nurse there's a lot of curiosity from the rest of the nurses they wonder what was going on back there yeah the director of the research unit i overheard him once explaining what the study was back there and he said they're smoking mushrooms so i figured i was keeping really well off the radar uh with what we were doing yeah and i wrapped up before really it uh you know caught on uh and it's been gratifying that you know that work is being recognized and utilized again.

Yeah, I didn't know what to make of the accounts. I was expecting the white light, you know, Ken show, Satori, Enlightenment, you know, the mystical unit of state, there was no self, no personality, no time or place. You just merged with the source of all being. I was expecting that kind of experience, as were most of the volunteers, because most of them were practicing some sort of meditation.

And I was coming at it from a several decade-long relationship with the Zen community studying and practicing under their supervision. And so, you know, that was the kind of experience I was hoping and the volunteers were expecting to. Yeah, yeah, but it was completely different. It was just these things interacting with the volunteers whose personalities were maintained. even more so perhaps. Yeah, and there's communication. So I finished the study,

started looking for another model for the psychedelic state other than the white light mystical state. Yeah, and by and by stumbled upon the Hebrew Bible and the prophetic experience. And that's the work involved or discussed, you know, the findings, the ideas in the second book

or the third book actually it's called DMT and the soul of prophecy in between those two was a book called Inner Path to Outer Space which is a collected works

there were four of us and we're talking about the other experience in the psychedelic especially DMT state the sense of the other you know what is it how do you understand it

how do you relate to it yeah And then I kind of took a deep dive into the Hebrew Bible and the prophetic state. And that's the basis of DMT and the Sola Prophecy. Then I got sick, really sick, incredibly sick, almost died twice. And the care I got in this little town was just unbelievably bad. And I was keeping notes because I thought if I lived through it, it would be a really great. great story. And so I lived through it and that was the basis of an autobiographical novel.

Joseph Levy escapes death. That came out in 2019. And just a, and yeah, it's, it's a dark comedy, you know, medical kind of sick, twisted humor, but still, you know, it gets laughs. and that was my intent. And so this book came out just last month, the Psychedelic Handbook. And it's a little textbook of psychedelic drugs, what they are, where they're from, how they work, what the major drugs are. The largest chapter is called How to Trip. So it provides a lot of common sense suggestions. about how to make the most of your psychedelic drug experience.

I talk about adverse effects, what to do, how to recognize them, what kind of helps available. Yeah, the lob, in microdosing about which is all that much isn't known scientifically, although it seems to work. And yeah, a small book is under the text itself is 184 pages. and then there's the footnotes and the references. So it's quite compact. The feedback has been good.

I was on Joe Rogan on the same day the book was released, and so that got a lot of interest. And, yeah, sales have been good, the reviews have been good, so I'm encouraged. I'm hoping it'll be the textbook for anybody interested. you know, college students, grad students, medical students, psychiatrists. It's a pretty bare bones, common sense, you know, level-headed approach to psychedelics. They're good.

They're bad. You know, it just depends how they're used. And, you know, you should educate yourself before you give them or before you take some. Yeah, I got, I picked up a copy. And I think right now, if people go to your site, you're actually signing copy. copies for people. Is that correct? Yes, I will. Yeah, yeah. If they order through rick straspin.com, yeah, I will inscribe and sign their copy. It's amazing. I think it's an incredibly practical guide for all, not even not, it's not all of them. It's

for psilocybin, LSD, ketamine, MDMA, DMT, Iowaska. And what I liked in there, too, was there's a lot of background. One thing that I really liked in the meat of the book was the you talked about not only medieval metaphysics, but the Buddhist abidharma, and you also incorporate that in the soul of philosophy, how you created the hallucinogenic scale in the prophecies. Can you talk a little bit about that particular Api Dharma Buddhist philosophy and how that influenced you? Yeah, it emerged through my longstanding interest in Buddhism. In college, I learned about Buddhism.

I took a class and learned transcendental meditation and then during a leave of absence for medical school, ended up at a Zen Buddhist monastery. And I started affiliation with them in 74. Yeah, I went back to medical school. And there's an opportunity to take electives at a certain point in your schooling at medical school. And I got an elective to study with a Tibetan Buddhist Lama who was teaching mental health professionals the foundation of, well, what was it actually called? Well, it was intended for mental health professionals, and it was his attempt to introduce Tibetan psychology, Tibetan Buddhist psychology, and the way in which it's empirically based, on specific types of meditation practice. So they've developed these practices that cause certain effects,

and those effects are laid down in their psychology. You know, this is what happens when you do this meditation. This is what happens when you do that meditation. So it was very phenomenological. It was just a fact. If you do this, then this will happen. So in the process of taking that class, he introduced us to the Abidharma, which is the school of Buddhist psychology.

And, you know, it's a huge discipline, volumes upon volumes. But one of their principles is the notion that ongoing experience is possibly is you can break down ongoing experience into what are called scondas or heaps. I have five different mental functions. For example, emotion and thinking and bodily sensation, volition, those kinds of things. So when I was wondering about how to develop a questionnaire that could sub... quantifiably measure subjective experience, you know, giving a number to, you know, visions. So about the intensity.

Yeah, you know, so I developed that questionnaire after interviewing 20 people that had been smoking DMT, beforehand this was like a long time ago, but I just wanted to get a sense of what the experience was going to be like before starting their research. And from those interviews, I started putting together a questionnaire that was scanda-based. You know, what were the visual effects and what were the physical effects and what were the emotional effects? So it worked out great, actually. The first version was pretty lengthy. We cut it down, and it was quite doable. Yeah, and it gave what's called dose response. response data, scores increased the more drug you gave.

So we divided the question, well, it was about 100 questions, you know, 20 for this, 20 for that, 20 for this. And we analyzed the responses for all 100 items. And the Scanda approach to clumping items together was better than one derived from the computer itself, you know, from the statistics or just as good but no worse than we ended up using the abydharma system because it held up better against the facts to the descriptions of people's experiences in addition to its statistical power so that questionnaire is still in use it's called the

hrs the hallucinogen rating scale i haven't touched it for almost 30 years it's getting really rusty and if there's any graduate students out there listening, give me a holler and, you know, I could just set you out to do a good project on, you know, tuning up the HRS modernizing it. That's almost a book in itself, the way you can find a way to quantify subjectivity. It's pretty amazing to think of.

And on top of that, isn't it interesting that you integrate this Eastern idea into the Western so that you can integrate the accounts of these people on DMT. I thought it was also interesting how you introduced relatedness to look at the prophecy side of it. Well, the hallmark of like the mystical unitive state is there's no relationship. It's all one. You are it. It is you.

Yeah, there's no difference. There's no subjectivity or objectivity. But it's a... In the DMT state, it's just the complete opposite. You're in constant contact with this world out there or in here. There's interaction. There's relatedness. And when I was comparing the DMT effect, kind of, you know,

based on the Buddhist scale of perceptual, emotional, so on, the phenomenology of the DMT state compared to the prophetic state, they were like completely identical, you know, phenomenologically, you know, the visions, the voices, the emotions, the somatic effects. But the one thing that was more highly articulated in the prophetic state was the relatedness. It was very well expanded upon, unpacked, all kinds of relationships occurred between someone in a prophetic state of consciousness and the content of that state, be it angels, be it God, be words, dreams. So that's where the two states differed. People could describe their interactions with the contents of the DMT world,

but not that clearly. It was kind of muddled. Communication was kind of muddled. It was kind of haphazard-related. with the state. And there wasn't the, you know, there weren't the tools, the language, as opposed to the Bible, when somebody's in a prophetic state and communicating with God or angels, you know,

there's all kinds of interactions. There's questions and answers and advice and admonitions and directions and inspiration. Yeah, you know, so it's, you know, it was a striking difference between the two. One point maybe to make is when I talk about the prophetic state, it's simply an altered state of consciousness which occurs in any character in the Hebrew Bible. So it could be a dream, it could be courage, it could be the ability to preach or to sing or to teach. It isn't necessarily foretelling or predicting. That might occur in an altered state and a prophetic figure,

but not always and it's hard to know it to make of those predictions. Yeah, so relatedness was what in a way allowed me to make the transition from studying the DMT state to the biblical experience, the biblical narrative, the Bible's version of existence. Yeah, I thought it was, there was so many similarities when you began talking about Moses and then you would cut to an account of one of the volunteers who had a similar experience. One question I've always wanted to ask you, though, is it seems to me that translation equals interpretation. And so when you're studying the Hebrew Bible, how do you know that some of those things they were, like, how do you get past that barrier of translation

and interpretation? You need to learn the original language. Right. Yeah. and fortunately as a kid I went to Hebrew school between the ages of 5 and 13 and I learned some conversational Hebrew. I was a good student, went to camp, you know, summer camp on a scholarship when I was 12 or something. And I was pretty good at conversational Hebrew for a while anyway, and then stopped speaking it maybe when I was 13. You know, so once I kind of twigged to what was happening in the Hebrew Bible, I thought

I'd start studying it again. And yeah, as you say, all translation is interpretation. And so if you really want to know what the text is trying to say, you need to know the original language. So I went back to the drawing board, got a bunch of dictionaries, and just slogged through it. It took me, gosh, 13 years or something from beginning to end. So understanding the language is one step.

The other is to find good commentators. It's the interpreters of the text because it's very hard to understand. I would say impossible without interpretation and commentary. So the ones I've relied upon primarily are the medievalists. They wrote between, I don't know, 700 AD and 1600 or so, if you count Spinoza, otherwise about 1,400 maybe. You know, that tradition ended. So those are the commentators.

They'll take you by the hand and explain every verse, every word. If there's any question, they'll just say, you're wondering about this. Well, there are a number of ways to interpret it. There's A, B, and C and D. the in the basis of the interpreters or the priority of the interpreters that I like the most are the ones who attempt to explain the face meaning

of the words. So if it says, you know, so-and-so walked down the road, it means so-and-so walked down the road as opposed to the soul is seeking its home and the everlasting perpetuity. It was simply what the text is trying to say as opposed to an allegorical interpretation. So those are the commentators that I like.

The one I like the most is Abraham Ibn Ezra. He's a Spaniard, quite a character. Let me show you a book of his that I'm reading for the second time, which is a very rare thing. Yeah, it's called the Secret of the Torah. Ah. Asked by Abraham Ibn Ezra. Okay.

Just came out a year or two ago. The translator is Strickman, S-T-R-I-C-M-A-N-Strictman. Yeah. And, you know, this is the way I interpret the text. Secret of the Torah. Yeah, it isn't that long. Maybe 150 pages or so. Yeah, it's a common sense approach that is dependent on understanding Hebrew and Hebrew grammar.

If you have common sense and can understand Hebrew and Hebrew grammar, then that's all you need to understand the Hebrew Bible. It's a radical point of view. The capitalist just hate it. because if you can interpret text by yourself, that makes them dispensable. Even the clergy, but the Kabbalists in particular, the Kabbalists interpret things quite allegorically. Nothing is as it seems. And that's true, but there's a time and place for that.

I don't think studying the text is necessarily most beneficial if it's interpreted as trying to say something else. I think you have to really start with what it's actually saying. Yeah. So, Ebenezra. I like it. Yeah, we're back to interpretation. If you're the Kabbalist and you can interpret things, it gives you a lot of authority over situations that may or may not be beneficial. to you.

The reason I ask it is this was the first time I had heard the idea of behold the dream. And in the biblical standard, you hear this word behold. And this is the first time after reading your book that I realized that that's a stopping point. Behold. And then here is the vision, at least in some cases it seems like. Yeah, yeah. All kinds of things you can discover by, you know, looking very carefully. Yeah.

And, you know, the thing behold, the word behold, he nay, he nay, behold. Yeah, it usually introduces a prophetic experience, a dream, a vision. Yeah, you can establish all kinds of patterns in what the text is trying to say. There are certain, you know, by words or catchwords that indicate. that what's coming up is important or what just was discussed was important or you know this is the case you know this is the case all the time or this is the case just you know some of the time yeah you know so if you're one of these you know guys who lived a thousand years ago and just studied the Torah all day long uh you discover yeah yeah it's there's there's so much out there

I another distinction that I saw you make was the difference between thought process and thought content. I thought that was pretty fascinating. Thought processes is like speed, for example, you know, thinking speed or slow thinking or confused or muddled or sharp and creative. Yeah. So that's the process of thinking. The content of thought of thought is, you know, it's in there. Like, are you thinking about home? You're thinking about dinner? Are you thinking about mathematics? Yep. And then are you, the first time I've ever heard this, this word too, or this kind of process was Tarday Ma. The process of kind of, you spoke about how God speaks to Abraham as someone's about to said. It almost reminds me of

Mercea Eliads, like, you know, the terror before the sacred, but just this, can you explain to people what tardy ma is tar de ma yeah um well nobody's asked me during a podcast to explain tar de ma yeah it's you're pretty deep in the woods but still i think it's a variety of the prophetic state it's a it's a you know flavor on my prophecy and you know the reason that i'm all hung up on the prophetic state is because it provides a moral and an ethical scaffolding to experience very highly altered states in which you communicate with angels and with god and the dm t state you communicate with angels maybe with god there's there's a lot of communication um and i think the the most highly developed um religious tradition uh articulating at

interactive relational spirituality is hebrew bible bible process prophecy. So I think you could interpret the psychedelic state and apply the psychedelic state through the lens of what you learn by reading the Hebrew Bible. The nature of prayer, the nature of repentance, the nature of a vow, all those things I think play a role in more attentively interacting with this world, just doing a better job. I think a lot of psychedelic experience isn't really utilized because it was had and then forgotten. Or it might be impactful, but there's no specific thing they learned and communicated. So a verbal tradition can be quite helpful in that regard.

Yeah, so Tardy Ma was what happened to Abraham. That was a long story with Abraham. you know but you know there is about to be a covenant made between Abraham and God and and Abraham enters into this very deep, thick, altered state, you know, Tardema really means dumbfounded, just completely inert. Yeah, so that's one of the forms of prophecy. You know, that's what people look like in the state that they enter into. Yeah.

You know, but it's of interest that, you know, that experience was the first promise of a covenant with Abraham. And Abraham was the first of the Jews. So it was a very significant, you know, prophetic experience. And, you know, as I'm thinking about it, I don't think there are other cases of Tar Dema in the text. there could be, you know, but it isn't, you know, it isn't commonly described. Yeah. It makes me, it makes me curious about this impact because in your book, you say that that is one of the main differences is that even though the DMT and potentially other psychedelics

open the doorway to these kind of experiences, they lack the morality. and the theology of it. I was wondering if you could unpack that for people a little bit. Well, I think that you get more out of a psychedelic experience if you know what you're looking for. And if you're able to ask the right questions of that state and to understand what the answers are and to be able to remember them

and express them in a way that's most helpful, both for you and outside of you. So that's where education comes in. You would train yourself or, well, you know, somebody asked me once about, you know, how do you have a more spiritual psychedelic experience? And so I said, well, just live a more spiritual life. And, you know, then your psychedelic experience will be taking place in the context of a spiritual life. You know, so if you want to articulate the psychedelic information that you've witnessed, you're apprehended or perceived, yeah, it requires understanding, well, it requires understanding

what you're about to see and also benefits from having some tools. tools to learning how to interact with the spiritual world. So besides, well, there's quite a few different names for God in the Hebrew Bible, and each of them represents a particular attribute of God. And so there's maybe six, which are most common. So if you're in a psychedelic state and you think you're interacting with God, it would be handy to know that there were six aspects to God, and which one are you dealing with? are you dealing with? And if it's one particular one, then you're familiar with the nature or,

you know, with the nature of that perspective on God, that characteristic of God. You know, so you have knowledge which will help you go deeper. Because if it's one aspect of God, for example, you can ask that aspect of God for help or ask a question. in an area that is most apropos. If you're interacting, for example, with an aspect of compassion and of mercy, you would then ask for healing. But if you were interacting with an aspect

that was mostly characterized by strength, you would ask for courage. So those are things which would be helpful to know in advance. And if you have a text, if you have a text and you have a tradition and kind of the unpacking of it by the commentators, you're that much further ahead in knowing what you're going to do and what you're looking for, you know, why you're doing it. You've got some tools at your disposal.

Yeah, that's really well said. You know, there's something to be said about knowing the environment in which you're going to operate and asking the right questions. And, you know, there's such a rich library of people who have made us somewhat of a spiritual journey. If people are willing to go to the library, if people are willing to do the work, then you can enrich your life in a way that is beyond measure. You know, and I really think if people spent more time in the library or processing what the spiritual relationship can be like, then they would have a more fulfilling spiritual relationship. Yeah, especially if you study the text. I think that's a text is the closest thing we have to God other than nature.

There's nature, which is a demonstration of God's existence. And there's text, which is the verbal representation. So studying nature and studying the text. Yeah, if more people read more, I think we'd be a lot better off. You can lead us into Aristotle, which, I focus on in the prophetic states book. And I also take on a detour into Aristotle in the current book, the psychedelic handbook.

So Aristotle divided on the mind into the imaginative faculty and the rational faculty. The imaginative faculty is aesthetic, its perceptions and its emotions and its bodily sensations, your meaningfulness, you know, that occurs within the imaginative part of the mind. And the rational part of the mind contains everything else. It contains ideas, notions, abstract concepts. So I think with, I think if you want to get the most out of a psychic,

experience or it may be better yet to say if you only want it to be an aesthetic experience you know then it occurs in the imagination if you want to make it both a intellectual verbal source of information well as well as an aesthetic experience you study you have a vocabulary you go to the library this brings up someone else you quote in the same book, the psychedelic handbook is Maimonides, where he talks about the emerging of intellect and imagination, which you say is the highest realm of spirituality. That's a pretty important idea to think about. Yeah. Yeah, Maimonides was a Jewish philosopher and a physician who lived in Egypt in the 1200s. Interestingly, I think that Maimonides lived at the same time that

Dogen lived. You know, Dogen is the founder of you know, Zen in Japan. And, you know, Dogen went to China to study because, you know, Japanese Buddhism wasn't to his liking. And then he studied in China and then came back to Japan, started Zen there. So Dogen is like a huge, you know, character in Zen Buddhism. And, you my monadies, and, you know, Dogen seemed to be living at the same time. In Maimonides was, even though he was born in Spain, ended up living most of his life in Egypt.

So Maimonides, you know, was an Aristotelian, and he divided, you know, the mind into the imagination and the intellect. And in his constructing a model for prophecy using, you know, the science of Aristotle, you know, the psychology of Aristotle, my monadies suggested it is the, end result of perfecting the imagination and of perfecting the intellect.

And you can perfect the intellect through study. But back then, there weren't a lot of, you know, means to stimulate the imagination. The imagination was, you know, felt to be, you know, more material and resided in the brain. and if you were born with a good brain good if you were born with one that that wasn't so healthy your imaginative capacity isn't as great or if you damage your imagination slash your brain through dissipated living so the most you could do with your imagination was to not damage it But I think it's worth considering that psychedelics stimulate the imagination primarily. Their visions and there's voices and there's emotions and whatnot.

But the intellect not so much. So it seems as if we have got at our disposal now a way to stimulate the imagination. with great reliability. Yeah, I often wonder, it seems to me that on higher doses of psilocybin, language fails. Like we don't have the capacity to thoroughly explain what it is we're seeing or we're feeling or we just lose. Language fails there.

But I think that's an opportunity to create new ideas. I think that those are connected somehow. What do you think? Yeah. I think that explaining anything verbally is impossible. You know, so it's, you know, the ideas that you develop. Yeah. So it, you know, could be in a big, you know, psychedelic state that there are no words, you know, for it.

But you can describe it. You can say it was without words. It was white. It was intense. There was no sound. you can describe it. And if enough people describe it, there'll be a consensus. Yeah, it's, it's, it's blurry on the edges, you know, but it's, it's, it's a beautiful thing.

And I think it's a state in which you can learn a lot about yourself and the world around you, because you don't have the right words, it forces you to see the world differently. You think so? I, I, I do. I think that, I think. that it forces you to think deeply about something that you might regularly just use a frivolous word for. And it maybe makes the situation deeper. Well, what do you think that is? What do I think the deeper situation is? Yeah. I think it's a better understanding of self. Okay. Yeah. It's a way to

either understand or experience yourself. Well, I think one of the things which occurred in a really big psychedelic experiences, you do need to let go. Right. Yeah. And the letting go can be a novel experience. And you do learn a lot. You know, I don't think I would be able to relax anywhere, you know, nearly as well as I can now. If it weren't for my experiences with psychedelics, you know, like if you've got pain,

you just let it go. And you lose, yeah, it's much more intense. requires a lot more adopting a passive state willfully. So, you know, letting go, you know, that's where people have a hard time when they trip, is they can't let go. And you fight it, and it just gets worse. It's like, you know, being in a wrestling match with somebody who's 500 pounds, that there's just no way.

it just gets worse the more you resist. So it's a very handy tool to have. You can develop it through meditation and through yoga, prayer, those kinds of things. So that's one of the points I make in the Yadha Trip chapter in the new book, letting go. I think you also make that point in Joseph Levy escapes death. You know, you talk quite a bit about I just want to first start off. The book is awesome.

For those who haven't read it, the book is called Joseph Levy Escapes Death, and it is somewhat autobiographical, I would say. And for me, Dr. Strassman, I was at the dentist the day I got the book working on the crown. That's a bad omen. You can't imagine, Mike. I'm like, you've got to be kidding me.

But I really, I don't want to spoil too much in the end or whatever, but I really like the book. And it did make me mad. I got mad at Joseph Levy sometimes. But then there was times I laughed out loud, which to me is the mark of a good book. And I, what, how did that, how did you go from this deep DMT research and studying the Hebrew Bible? And then all of a sudden, like, I'm going to move my way into fiction. Well, it was kind of, you know, forced upon me.

You know, I completed the prophetic states book in 2014. Oh, you know, one little anecdote. Yeah. You know, the translator of this book, the Ebenezer book, is a rabbi named Strickman. And I was visiting him. You know, we bonded over Ebenezra. And I was in Queens from New Mexico and went to visit him and his wife. And I described what I described, you know, what I was working on, a biology of prophecy.

And she said, be careful, watch yourself. Yeah, so I ought to have you take on her advice. Because I finished the book, and I got really sick. I had a bad tooth. It swelled. I was on steroids. I flew someplace really not thinking to California and picked up a bug because the steroids I was on for my tooth. I had no immunity.

Yeah. and then ended up in the hospital, not treated that great, and then developed a superbug, this unbelievable diarrhea. I lost a lot of weight. It was a close call, too. Nobody really knew what to do about it here. So it was, you know, the prediction, or not the prediction, you know, the advice not well taken from the rabbi's wife to be more careful.

So everything which occurred to the protagonist occurred to me and everything that went through his mind went through my mind. It's pretty dark. He's, you know, like the character is pretty pissed off and he's got a good reason to be pissed off. People are really being mean to. And so, yeah, you know, but like people used to ask Philip Roth if he's Alexander Portnoy and he said, I'm not Alexander Portnoy. You know, so it's a caricature. You're only selecting certain things from the full experience that are consistent with, you know, the personality of that character. Yeah.

I think, I think you could do a series. I think you could have, you know, in my mind, I was waiting for him to wake up from an acid trip or wake up in the New Mexico hospital from his DMT trip or something like that, you know. Yeah, it's just impossible. It's hard to believe. So Graham Hancock is a friend And yeah, Graham wrote a review or like a blurb on the back of the book And he said this this is a really strange character And he couldn't really wait to find out what was going to happen next.

Yeah, so Yeah, I really liked it. And then from there you move into this new handbook, which is it's a very practical guide. And I think it gets to the. crux, it gives a good view of each individual psychedelic in the mainstream. If someone was new to it, they could pick it up and be like, okay, here's something I can follow. If somebody has seen their way through it, not only is a good review, but it's packed full of other information that you may

not know. Yeah. Well, thanks very much. Yeah, yeah. I'm pretty happy with the way the book turned out. It's quite short. I mean, it's amazing I could pack so much in there. You know, the subtitle refers to psilocybin LSD, ketamine, MDMA, and DMT, Iawaska. Yeah, but I also include five methoxy DMT, which is the toad. And I include ibegain, which is an African plant, or it's a compound in an African plant, which seems to be quite helpful for addictions. And salvia, you know, Salvia divinorm, which is, you.

kind of a weird obscure exotic psychedelic. But we couldn't include all those on the front cover. Yeah. Just the most popular ones. Yeah, it seems as if there's a lot of interest in psychedelics now. I think especially after Michael Pollan's book came out, there's just a lot of interest academically, the media, business, you know, pharma,

on everybody. And it's a little starry-eyed, at least to my tastes. And I also feel some responsibility to keep the movement within some boundaries. Because if it weren't from my study, I mean, none of this would be happening. Or if it were happening, we wouldn't be, at this point, it would be five, ten years before or five or ten years ahead. You know, like our work began it and I feel some responsibility to, you know, kind of give my opinion. You know, what I think is going right, what I think could use some work. So it's a bit more, you know, level-headed.

It's written by, you know, somebody that's done their research. I'm a clinician. I've given psychedelics. I've taken them. I've been in the field a long time. I understand how they work. close to as well as anyone. So I just want to kind of bring things a bit back to earth.

Yeah, I think you did a good job at putting in like risk factors. And, you know, it's not all sunshine and rainbows. Like there's real possibilities of finding yourself in dangerous situations. And I think you make that clear in the book. Yeah, you can find yourself in a dangerous situation. you could also be just feeling terrible you could just be paranoid and depressed and anxious and suicidal and confused Yeah, I think as more people take more Psychedelics there's a I don't think it can be any other you know way than

you know more adverse effects are reported and you know the medical psychiatric literature in the field retreat centers You know I think you know I was thinking about this the other day you know within you know my study you know 53 volunteers you know there were you know five maybe who didn't do that well a couple got depressed you know they responded to either therapy or getting back on medication you know quite quickly when you know one guy's blood pressure went sky high it was close to dangerous you know somebody developed panic attacks

you know somebody had a horrible horrible trip just terrifying. You know, so it's around 10% in our study and you know these are normal volunteers and we really screen them carefully and even with them being normal volunteers you know with your previous experience you're taking psychedelics it was still you know 10% or so you know so if 10% in our study I think the adverse effects are not being reported all that accurately in the research world and the farmer world. So, you know, it could be 10%. And I think it may be even greater with, you know, the lax regulations involved in some of these movements to decriminalize

and legalize. Yeah. You know, as someone who has pioneered the, first of all, let me just say thank you for the people on the forums like schroomery or longusory or long jessity. or the people that are out on the networks or EeroWid, there's a lot of people that probably wish they were here talking to you and they would want me to say thank you for them as well as myself. So thank you for what you've done with your research and for those people as well. Well, you're welcome. I'm glad to be of help.

Yeah. Do you see that, do you see, because you've done it for so long and you began the pioneering process, do you see a potential possibility for a clampdown like happened in the pre-exam? like happen in the previous way? I do think that's possible. You know, there are certain things I hope we will have, I hope we learned from the 60s with, you know, the end of research and the clamping down on the field.

You know, one is, you know, to avoid pied pipers. Like, you know, somebody like, you know, Tim Leary standing in front of 100,000 screaming, stoned hippies saying, you know, tear down the system. Yeah. Yeah, that's a bad idea. Right. Hopefully, that won't occur this time around.

It's quite tempting. You know, there are people, it seems to me, who are struggling to not be pipe pipers. But I think they are, you know, that they know, that they know what kind of problems that could lead to. I think the researchers ought, well, both the researchers and, you know, the pharmaceutical, commercial communities, you shouldn't overpromise. I think that can't help but be the case, but still, you know, they should know that they're overpromising and, you know, be prepared, you know, for the backlash, you know, minimize the overpromising, I guess. you know to be transparent about adverse effects i think that's going to be important because there are going to be them uh and uh you know that's important to be straightforward um and you keep in mind there could be some new charles manson out there uh who's just saying

oh i can hardly wait for legalization you know so i can get my hands on you know a lot of mushrooms and get these girls stoned. And yeah, so I think we ought not to pretend that's never going to happen again. Right. There's a lot of people making Kool-Aid that want to move to South America or maybe get into the minds of people that may need help or promise help. If knowing what you know now, would you have changed anything in your initial research with that study?

If you had all the knowledge you had today, would you have changed anything? That's a good question. my first answer is I don't think so I don't think I would yeah you know we thought a lot about it yeah Terence McKenna I spent an afternoon strategizing about the DMT study you know so it had his stamp of approval as well yeah it was give DMT to people that you know and you have them you know characterize it psychologically with your help and describe the biological effects.

Yeah, very straightforward. There was no therapy involved. There were no hypotheses other than, let's see if we can do this. And if we do, let's see if we can do it safely and generate data. I got a lot of grant money first time around from the National Institutes of Health.

They were very interested in this work. this work. It was like the first, you know, rigorous psychopharmacology study of, you know, psychedelics that had, you know, across their desk. You know, so they were eager to, you know, see the study take place. Yeah. It's, it's fascinating me to think about all the work it has happened and it's going to continue to happen down the line because of the pioneering research that you started there. Speaking of Terrence McKenna, what do you think about his stoned ape theory? It makes sense. Yeah, I mean, I can't argue with it.

If you're really stoned and you make sounds, you can see them. Right. And then you can manipulate how they look by the change in what you're saying. Yeah. So maybe you could somehow get a theory of, language development from that phenomenon. What an incredible set of brothers to have that much intelligence between them. You know what I mean?

Like, we're their parents feeding those kids, man. Yeah. Ceyonia, Colorado. It's in the middle of nowhere. They brought about two giants. Terrence and Dennis, they're giants. You know, they're amazing to me. Yeah.

You know, I, in preparation for our event, I put up some stuff out. on schroomery, which is an awesome form that I like to go to sometimes. And I had a few people ask some questions. Is it okay if I ask you some of them? This one says, Mr. Strassman, what did you find the single largest obstacle to overcome in your research? The single biggest obstacle. In the beginning, it was the permits.

It was really difficult to get those permits. But I was persistent. I guess, you know, with things. in the study itself, the biggest obstacle, this is just off the top of my head, it may have been that I had to accept the volunteers' reports at face value. I couldn't interpret them as their brain on drugs or psychoanalytic impulses and conflicts being played out or some archetype being displayed. I really needed to do a thought experiment that entailed taking at face value what they were saying. It's kind of like Ebenezra.

in a way you take the text at face value. It isn't anything other than what it's trying to tell you. So once I, I think early on, I was skeptical. I mean, the stories were just, or the reports were just incredibly outlandish. And I couldn't quite accept the fact that the drug I was giving them

that they were in for a while and then would come back to, and described to me was, you know, taking them to where they told me it was taking them this completely independent freestanding universe made of light with these beings that communicated with them. And I thought, well, that's a dream or that's, you know, their feelings about their third grade school teacher or something like that. Yeah, or it's like some archetype. Yeah. And I was skeptical. You know, I did try to keep it to myself but I couldn't yeah you know so at a certain point I said okay

you know I'm just going to you know go in there you know with them and assume that it's real and if it is real then where does that belief then lead so it was much easier to communicate with the subjects once I made the decision to be more plain meaning. Had you done DMT prior to doing that experiment? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, so my DMT experience, I kind of sneak it in at the very end of that book. I feel a bit guilty now. But still, it's the contents of the epilogue, a psychologist.

I just kind of disguised myself, you know, laying down and smoked the DMT, and this huge, you know, blazing waterfall appeared, just flaming, flaming colors, this waterfall. And so out of, you know, this flaming waterfall emerged like, you know, four to six of these beings, about, you know, three to four feet tall. and they just kept on saying over and over to me, now do you see, now do you see, now do you see just over and over? And I was pretty blown away and came down. Yeah, and I decided that was going to be

and what I was going to be studying next. That's amazing because that, this idea of now do you see is like an Ariotony thread that runs through the prophecy as well as the trips. There's always people like, do you see now? Yeah, yeah. I think it's, yeah, it was a specific message to me, I think because of just my curiosity, or, you know, my innate curiosity, but at the same time, it's a generic admonition. kind of like, you know, do you know what you're seeing? Do you see it? Yeah.

So it's a pretty, it's a pretty handy, you know, meme, I guess. Yeah, it is. And it kind of lends credence to the idea of, I remember reading, it might have been in the Brotherhood of the Screaming Abyss, the McKenna's book, where they talk about in some indigenous tribes, the shaman would take the hallucinogen or he would take the drug and then diagnose the people. And in some ways, I feel like it's important for the individual, be it a therapist or someone who is administering health to understand the state in which someone else might find themselves in.

Have you found that to be true? Well, it's intuitively true. I mean, it makes a lot of sense. You know, scientifically, I don't think there's really been a study yet, you know, comparing, you know, let's say antidepressant efficacy. of psilocybin assisted psychotherapy if the therapist has tripped or not. You know, that study has never been done. You would think, though, that if you're familiar with the territory, you'd be able to help people negotiate it.

So, you know, but that's never been studied. It would be a very easy study to do. But I think, you know, my own, for example, DMT experience, you know, made it easier to empathetic. and to understand and accept at least, you know, after a month or two, you know, the nature of, you know, the other volunteers' experiences. One of the little affirmations I wrote down in your book was research is me search. You know, I never heard that before, but it's a great little limerick.

Yeah, research is me search. Yeah. Well, so the first time I ever smoked any cannabis, it was extremely psychedelic, you know, fully psychedelic there were purple clouds coming out of my speakers and the floor gave way and my roommate and I were on a carpet and we were flying over you know claremont california yeah you know like a shared hallucination yeah um i started um i i began your college as a chemistry uh and i thought to myself you know this is chemistry like a half hour ago everything was just the same and then i smoked this whatever and in a half hour you you know there's you know, purple clouds and a flying carpet.

You know, so I was bit. It was like, okay, you know, what's the chemistry of this? I'd like to understand. And the states themselves were extremely interesting. You know, so, yeah, it was a case of research as me search. I was interested in, you know, pursuing, you know, both those avenues, the experiences themselves and understanding how they worked. I think that that is a shared thread with so many people in the community that

psychedelic people or people in general sometimes find, it's so liberating to see this world that exists around you all the time, but you're not a part of all the time. And sometimes psychedelics allow you just to peer into it via a window or an open door. And then once you do, you're almost hooked. It's like, look at this beautiful world all around me. Yeah, yeah. Well, if it goes well.

If it goes well, thank you. Yeah. Yeah. If it goes bad, then I guess it's the opposite. Slam the door. Yeah. Yeah. Well, of course, you know, these are the most interesting, you know, drugs and all of medicine.

Yeah. I'm not sure that once you open that door, you can, you can shut that door again. Sometimes I think in when reading the accounts in your book or reading some of the the literature on PubMed and stuff, it seems that a lot of the difficult times people have in their trips are things that they need to get over in their life. And it keeps coming up and it's just a way of manifesting itself. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, there's all kinds of reasons for bad experience. Yeah. Set in setting are key. you need to be prepared and you need to make certain that everything I'm around you is supportive and safe. You know, so it can turn out to, yeah, you know, plus if you do, you know, find yourself in a tight corner, you know, there's letting go. Can't do that. Then ask for help. If you can't do that, then kind of a stepwise progression.

You know, but the idea that once you've had a big psychedelic experience that you're changed forever, I think that's true. And a lot of our volunteers spoke about feeling, you know, marked once they went through a big experience with DMT. You know, it was the benchmark. It was a fundamental experience in their lives and it would always be. Yeah, it's interesting to me this, this pattern. You know, if at least I have seen it, but this just could be my subjective ideas. But it seems to me a lot of people that have gone through psychedelics and been helped by them then want to go out and in a way evangelize.

Like they want to help other people get through things. Have you found that in some of the work that you do? Yeah, yeah. It's a common theme, actually. It can be messianic. And, you know, then they could be kind of crazy. you know if you know if if you become if you become messianic and you're rebuffed you just might take more you know whatever more psilocybin let's say or you know more DMT and become even more messianic

and then start you know getting in trouble with you know the authorities but yeah you know there's this evangelical you know fervor which i think is easy to fall prey to you know I don't think it's a good idea I think you should retain healthy skepticism about anything that promises to be a panacea and I think that's how psychedelics are being presented and I mean who doesn't want to be behind the panacea you know behind right you know something which cures all it's a messianic era you know I gave a talk when was it I think it was maybe a couple of months ago you know for you

CSD and it was called mushroom messianism and it was about fervor of like Donald Trump ought to take acid I mean can imagine Donald Trump taking acid I would not want to be within a mile of that I've never thought about imagining that

but now I kind of can't stop oh it's so funny all right Let me ask you this one here. Do you consider, what do you consider your greatest contribution to the field? Well, I think that I started it again. You know, I jump started it. I think that was a major contribution.

And the study itself was a major contribution. We generated a lot of really cool data, which is still being used, actually. there's a group in Canada which is called Algernon looking at DMT for stroke, acute stroke and stroke recovery. And they're building on the data that we generated of sub-psychedelic doses of DMT, which do not raise blood pressure or raise heart rate, but still induce the neurogenesis and the neuroplasticity, even though there's no subjective effect or no blood pressure effect. So they're developing that treatment in the future on any way. They're just getting off the ground.

But the idea is to treat stroke. So we generated a lot of really good data. And I think we also demonstrated how to get a study like this off the ground. It was a couple of years of hard work. I submitted things in September 88 and I got approval just before Thanksgiving of 90. And the first article that I wrote about the DMT study was an article about how I was able to get the study approved. You know, like a menu of, you know, like a handbook. Like if you want to do Schedule I studies in humans in, you know, the U.S.

under the Control Substances Act, here's how you do it. And it was before, like I think the paper came out, just a few months after I had actually begun the study. I used to call that article, the article that I wanted to get out if I were hit by a bus, because it would still explain to others how I got the study up and running. That's a huge achievement and leaving a pathway for someone else to follow to continue is a huge way to go.

Speaking of studies, I think I had read somewhere and correct me if I'm wrong, but perhaps in the future there's a stable, a stable DMT. I'm not saying that accurate, but a long form DMT study where they continue to administer DMT. Is that something you're working on? Well, I've been consulting. I'm at Imperial College. I'm in London. Well, let me give you some background on it. You know, DMT is unique because it doesn't produce tolerance.

Like if you take LSD every day for a few days, you'll become tolerant of the subjective effects. So that was never demonstrated. I'm either in animals or humans in previous studies regarding DMT. You know, so we were thinking, you know, maybe, you know, that you really need to, you know, space, you know, the doses, you know, extremely, extremely, you know, closely together. Well, so we gave a big dose of DMT every half hour, you know, four times over the course of the morning. And, you know, there wasn't any tolerance. The state was as intense after dose number four as it was after dose number one. So that theoretically meant to continue to expose somebody to DMT and they would be as intoxicated as the blood level would cause.

And if you increase the level or you decrease the level, the state of intoxication would accordingly vary. So I suggested a continuous infusion of DMT at the end of the DMT book in 2001. Andrew Gallimore is a Brit lives in Japan. Cognitive neuroscientist contacted me a number of years ago. I'm about that idea, and we put together a theoretical paper, which came out, I think, in 2016. Yeah, and the group at Imperial College. you picked up on the idea and they just published a poster on the experiment they gave 12 or 14

people a continuous infusion over a half hour at four different levels I mean it I worked you were in a DMT state for a half hour I spoke with one of the volunteers who described it you know kind of like ayahuasca but you know clear there you know there weren't you know the physical side effects which occur with ayahuasca you know which is a combination of your two plants you know one of which will stop the breakdown of DMT in the gut but I'm also you know some nausea some diarrhea some vomiting you know so it was like a you know clear DMT experience you know so ultimately well well yeah you know you know

ultimately you could prolong the infusion it could be an hour to be a couple hours a number of years ago when the study was just off the ground I wrote to NASA and I said you're going to need to keep astronauts occupied for the three years and three months on way to Mars you know what about just infusing them with you know DMT you know regularly of course I never heard back but still you know it's an idea whose time is yet to come. I think you could benefit from a prolonged infusion even for just a few hours. Number one, you'd be able to characterize the state more carefully. You would be able to establish clearer channels of communication with the beings, for example. You could

examine those, you know, morphing figures more carefully. And I think, also if you were doing therapy you could increase the level of intoxication if you wanted to go there you could lower it but still you would be in your contact you with your therapist and you would be in deciding upon the intensity of effect you know based on what you're you're talking about in therapy you could stop the infusion and just your process you know what just happened So there would be a lot of flexibility with respect to a unique psychotherapeutic protocol. Yeah, that reminds me in your first book, DMT, the spirit molecule, you'll talk about how people would go through some of their doses and then they would come out. Some of them would come out and have a really rewarding experience.

It would be interesting if you could see as a therapist, if you could see what they went through and then you could put them back there and then you know, you could work the therapy that way. way where and then if someone had a bad experience obviously you might not put them right back in there but something that maybe could add on to the initial initial research yeah yeah i think so um yeah i'm you're collaborating with a group at i'm a UCLA that's interested in you know the repeated dosing of DMT like we did in you know veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder and they would be doing psychotherapy in between doses have healing effects on the body? Were you able to document any sort of that? Like as far as maybe we're not sure of what it does in the brain, but does it have healing effects on the body as

far as reparative? Yeah. Yeah. It is, it's extremely good for the brain. If you're exposing, if you're exposing your neurons in a test tube to conditions of low oxygen, you know, which is toxic. If you add some DMT, it reduces the toxicity. So in other words, it reduces the toxicity of low oxygen levels in neurons. It also reduces acute stroke size in experimental stroke in rodents and speeds up recovery after stroke in I'm in rodents on as well. It stimulates what's called neurogenesis, which is the formation of new nerve cells in the brain from stem cells.

And it also increases neuroplasticity, which is the complexity of interactions among nerve cells. It has immune function. It has anti-inflammatory effects, you know, through the Sigma site. You know, so I think it's kind of a, handy-dandy all-purpose naturally occurring psychedelic. You know, it's extremely interesting, you know, to realize, you know, that the brain makes DMT and the concentration are quite high,

you know, comparable to serotonin, let's say. One more piece of evidence regarding the possibility of DMT being a neurotransmitter. And you kind of wonder what the responsibility or, you know, the role of naturally occurring DMT, neurotransmitter. system would be. You could go down some deep rapid holes there. Yeah. Is it secreted by the pituitary gland?

Well, the pineal gland. Pineal gland. Yeah. Like, you know, once upon a time, I was convinced the pineal made DMT, and it still may make DMT. You know, the jury is still out. I, you know, marshalled a lot of circumstantial evidence in the DMT book for, you know, for the pineal gland making.

DMT it contains the ingredients it contains the enzymes which convert the ingredients into DMT in a study in 2013 from the University of Michigan I you know demonstrated DMT in the fluid you know surrounding the pineal gland you know but the group which a few years back 2019 it demonstrated the high levels. They couldn't find pineal gland, you know, DMT this time around. And they think what may have happened is that is in the first study that they snagged some brain tissue as, you know, they were going in and out of the pineal gland. And, you know, they were measuring DMT in the brain as opposed to the pineal. You know, but still, you know, the pineal contains the ingredients to make

DMT. It's got the enzymes. You know, so it may just make DMT on a specific drug. You know, but still, you know, times as opposed to routinely. Yeah, it blows my mind to think about. And so you have to forgive my knowledge about the way the brain works. However, I'm curious if you have any thoughts on the idea that, you know, it appears psilocybin is almost like a neurotransmitter as well. And it adapts to the 5-2A, I think. And so what, isn't it almost like, and this is where I'm probably going to sound silly,

but who cares? Because there's no such thing as a dumb question. This is almost like the mushroom talking to us. If it can fire a neuron through the synaptic gap, isn't that the mushroom communicating with us for lack of a better description? Well, I don't think that, you know, the mushroom is speaking to us. I think, you know, that the mushroom allows communication. Okay.

with parts of with parts of reality that we normally aren't aware of you know so it's a tool in a way it's providing access it's opening a portal

but I don't think it's you know telling anything to us that already isn't within us in the first place yeah it's I saw a video I think there's a really good documentary called fungi out right now

And I've read some research. It seems fascinating to me the way that mycelium moves nutrients around a root structure. And then if you look at the fMRIs of the brain, you can see the way someone who's under a large dose of psilocybin gets the enzymes and the information moved around their brain. And while there's correlation, probably not causation, it's an interesting correlation. Yeah. Yeah, it's important to keep in mind the significance or the legitimacy, the validity of the brain scan information. Because it simply confirms our subjective experience. And if it didn't, then you wouldn't be paying attention to those brain scan data.

In other words, if you feel your sense of self-rength, becoming looser, you know, not quite as tightly, you know, bound together. If you're remembering things from the past you forgot about, if you're recalling emotions or you're feeling emotions that you've never felt before. You know, that's your subjective experience as confirmed through the brain imaging, you know, data. You know, the default mode, you know, network, you know, connectivity is reduced within itself. Your communication from lower brain centers, you know, preside compared to, you know, information, you know, going downhill, you know, from higher to lower centers with, you know, psilocybin, you know, lower to higher centers is, you know,

the direction. Yeah, but we know that, you know, based on our subjective experience. So I think it's just explaining, you know, what we already know. Do you think that like when we when we when we get the sensation of synesthesia, is that like visual information being processed in like Broca's area or hearing information being processed the visual cortex? Yeah, I just don't know. You know, because I haven't really, you know, kept up on the synesthesia literature. You know, synesthesia is, you know, seeing sound. it's a intermixing of sensory modalities.

I think it's an effect of the, like in the brain, you know, someplace or another. Yeah. There's a cross talk that normally doesn't happen. It's fascinating, too. Just to be able to perceive reality in a way that you normally don't make you understand what you're truly capable of. It's a really liberating thing. Yeah, they're very interesting drugs.

There's just no doubt about it. You know, they affect every aspect of our minds. They provide a window into consciousness, into the self, those kinds of things. Nice. I got a few more questions and then I'll let you go. I know you probably press for time here. And so let's, yeah, let me find one good one for the last part here. If you look at this decade in the development of psychedelics, what milestones do you see in the immediate future in both research and in the advances of least.

legal and subcultural arenas. Milestones, you think. Well, we need to understand how psychedelics work. You know, how can one class of drugs do so many things? It's just enormous the number of things you read about or you hear about that. Psychedelics help. You know, so I think that they can be panacea-like. And I think that works around the mechanism of the placebo response.

The placebo response is a biological response. It's biological. You do psychotherapy and the brain changes. You tell somebody that they're not going to be feeling pain. Just give them salt water and there's anesthesia. And it's reversed by opiate blocking drugs. So the placebo response is a real biological thing. There's immune components.

There's inflammatory components. So I think that panacea has worked through placebo effects. And I think the neuroplasticity and the neurogenesis ties into the placebo response, which I think is reflected subjectively in the intensity of the experience, the subjective experience. So I think if we can, if we understand the way that your psychedelics work, you know, then we can apply them, you know, to conditions or to situations in which there's a problem in that specific mechanism. You know, so if the placebo response can be steered in an immune direction using psychedelics, then maybe immune disorders, you know, can be treated with, you know, psychedelics. So I think I'm understanding the mechanism and I think it'll help us understand the placebo response, which is an extremely useful part of medicine. So that's the main research milestone is kind of tying in the placebo effect with psychedelics.

What was the other format that he was wondering about or if she was wondering about, the research world and? And the advances in legal and subcultural arenas. Yeah. Well, there needs to be some kind of model for society incorporate psychedelic drugs. Is it going to, you know, is it only going to be the clinic? Is it going to be spas? Is it going to be just in a casual, your backyard

with your hot dogs, hamburgers, and your psilocybin? Yeah, I think some structures in the plural need to be worked out depending on the risk benefit ratio if you're going to treat schizophrenia with IV DMT it has to be

in a research unit if you're going to take a stroll in the woods with the garden society you know it would be a low dose of psilocybin everything would be fine so there's going to be a spectrum of use and

accessibility Dr. Strassman, you've been incredibly kind with your time, and this interview has exceeded my imagination and my intellect, my subjective, and my objective goals. I want to say thank you to from everybody out there, from myself, thank you very much for the work you've pioneered, the work you're doing, and the work you'll probably end up doing. Well, thanks, George. It was a fun interview. It was really fun for me as well. And that's what we got for today. Ladies and gentlemen, Thank you very much. Aloha.