TrueLife - Sebastian Marincolo - Altered States 3

Episode Date: January 14, 2024

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/Sebastián Marincoloaka Dr. Sebastian Schulz studied philosophy and linguistics at the University of Tübingen, Germany, and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. He was a student of William Lycan, Simon Blackburn, Gianfranco Soldati, and Manfred Frank, some of the most influential philosophers of consciousness today, and received his magna cum laude Ph.D. with a thesis about a critical analysis of neurophilosophical theories of consciousness.Marincolo has researched the cannabis high and its potential as an altered state of consciousness for more than 25 years, and has published four books and numerous articles on the cannabis high. He was mentored by his late friend Harvard Assoc. Prof. Emer. Lester Grinspoon, one of the most renowned cannabis experts in the world.Marincolo’s expert blog with essays on the cannabis high appeared online in five languages for Sensi Seeds Amsterdam, the largest cannabis seed bank in the world.The highly influential educational platform for cannabis professionals Greenflower Media/Los Angeles produced his online courses on cannabis and the enhancement of creativity and empathic understanding in 2016.As a photographer, he produced the limited-edition macro photo art series The Art of Cannabis,  which helped him to visualize his work for a broader public.His unusual research and work has received positive reviews and attention worldwide, despite the strong taboo surrounding the topic of cannabis use. Marincolo has been featured in international news outlets, and he has appeared as a guest on various international TV and radio shows and podcasts.He worked as a photographer, as a creative director, as well as a communications and marketing consultant for various communication agencies, NGO’s, and other many other clients.In 2017, he took on the position of Director of Communications and Marketing, Germany, for one of the largest cannabis producers in the world. During this time, he helped educate both health professionals and the wider public about medical cannabis.Marincolo currently works as a freelance writer and communications consultant.https://www.sebastianmarincolo.de/en/home/ 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, 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 Kodak Serafini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. We are live, ladies and gentlemen, here with the one and only Sebastian Marancolo. He is a, for those that don't know, just give me a moment to introduce this incredible individual, a true renaissance soul whose journey through the realms of philosophy and linguistics and the intricacies of the mind has illuminated a new path of understanding. I was just telling him how lucky I am to be sitting here with, in my opinion,

one of the foremost intelligent scholars on the world of the cannabinoid system, altered states of consciousness philosophy. I'm so stoked to be here. That's a pretty good intro, man. That's fair enough, right? I am still, I'm still in shock. You know, it's the third time. and every time I sit here like a little animal that's on the street and there's

some bright lights approaching past, like, oh. It's classic, man. Thanks. Well, you know, let me just comment on that. I'm definitely not one of the foremost intelligent people on the cannabinoid system. I mean, I did what I could to wrap my head around it. But I think I have a special angle because on the whole field of altered states of consciousness and the cannabis hive, because I'm coming from a philosophical background, from a neurophilosophical background,

where a traditional analytical tradition and philosophy that looks at integrating neuroscientific knowledge and all kinds of knowledge from the cognitive sciences to the philosophical conceptual analysis and tries to come to a new understanding of certain phenomena. So I think that's what I brought to the table and also my stubbornness that allowed me to do this for more than 20 years now. Yeah. It's um there's something to be said about moving forward in the face of adversity you know and I think that you've done that on on many occasions and it shows I think that I think that I think that there's something to be tied to people that move through life when adversity comes

and thinking through problems that other people won't think through there's there's like a parallel there you know what I mean like some people get to a point with like okay I'm not going to I can't solve this from I'm not going to work on it anymore it's the same type of person that gets to a certain point in life and kind of gives up. But I think you're the complete opposite of that. But I want to introduce this book to the people watching or listening, and maybe you're familiar with it. It's called Altered States of Consciousness by Zinberg.

And it was written like in the 60s. It's mind-blowing, man. And I've written down a few questions in here and just a few little concepts and stuff. And I just want to start off with one and kind of get your point on it and see what you think about it here. the concept of transitions from normalcy to altered states of consciousness. Like for some of us, whether it's through cannabis or psychedelics, there's this transition state. Like what's happening in that state? Are you have any thoughts on that?

I mean, we are very often in transitional states, aren't we? Yeah, we are. Everything is a transition, basically. And I would, you know, I thought about exactly. that normalcy yesterday. And I'm not sure, is it normalcy? Is it normal to be rationally thinking in a logic? I mean, what is actually the normal state?

And I believe, after all those years, that normal is to transition. And normal is to oscillate between various states, consciousness. That is what our brain is built to do. So we're not built to be logical, rational thinking machines in the verbal mode, you know, surfing on concepts and language. We're going back and forth between states that are trans, ecstasy, sexual, sexual ecstasy or other kinds of actually, we are absorbed in the virtual space. We are, we have those states. where we are just amazed by a landscape or we marvel and we're half, we are asleep, we're dreaming, we're going back and forth between various states of consciousness.

And yeah, of course, today in the modern world, we live in, we're trying to be mostly in a state in which we are rationally argumenting and thinking and conscious and awake. So you could characterize that as the normal state, but still even in that state where sometimes we're very much absorbed in an image or looking at something during work, we're going back and forth between various states. So I challenge that idea a little bit because I think we talked about that last time I mentioned that the rational reconstruction error is that we reconstruct our. being and our nature from a standpoint of rational reconstruction, from the rational point. And then we expand that and we say that, that is us. Well, no, that is not us. We are eight hours in the night. We are dreaming, which is a weird state. And of course, we have all kinds of other states. And if you think about it, those, I mean, most of those states are built in.

dreaming doesn't come because we take a substance, usually. It comes because the brain, when the light goes away and it has a natural cycle, circadian cycle, sleep cycle, it falls into that state and it transitions into that state. And of course, we're half asleep and those are different states also in transitional states. And so these are built in. our brain is made to do that. And I think dreaming, for instance, is a really interesting discussion in philosophy. What is dreaming good for?

Does it have an evolutionary advantage? And I'm talking not about the fact that we're sleeping, but the fact that we're dreaming, that we are having experiences during sleep. Is it advantageous? Does it have a function or not? Do we maybe take stock and go look at our experiences and try to reevaluate them? Or are we looking forward? Are we imagining situations to avoid situations of which we are afraid, et cetera?

So those alter states, A, they are built in to certain degree, some of them, and they are there to help us manage to survive in the world and to perceive the world. And that's why I think induced altered states of consciousness, like trans or like an LSD trip or cannabis high, can also be very helpful because they shift our attentional patterns or our perception, et cetera, to places where we can see things that we would usually not see or understand things or generate. or enhance our creativity or enhance our imagination, et cetera. So transition, yeah, transition is a really interesting thing to look at when it comes to those states, when we transition between those states. And I think it's also an interesting concept to look at integration. So you know from ayahuasca retreats or. LSD, that there are people there helping you to integrate your experiences that you had during the trip into your normal life or into the rest of your life.

From the social sciences, I would actually, I would like you to think about the term inclusion, which is more interesting than integration, because integration usually means that, You have something and you want to make that fit what you already have. You know, you have people that come from a different country and you want to integrate them in your system, which means like they speak a different language. They have to now speak your language. They speak or they have different manners. They, you know, they should be integrated. They need to fit the paradigm.

And inclusion means that you understand that the system is bigger than your system in which you want to integrate things. And I think that is very important also when we talk about altered states of consciousness, is that we shouldn't think of we are living a normal life in that normal state of conscience, or in that type of state of consciousness that we choose now to call normal. And then we integrate whatever dreams or our cannabis high or our LSD highs or psilocybin trips, et cetera, with somebody helping us. but I think we should understand that those states are sexual trans or ecstasy or states or LSD trips or dreaming. They belong to our nature.

They are, so this is an inclusive view where you understand that this is not something that needs to be squeezed into something else. And of course it makes, but it makes sense then. And I think that we need to come up with a different concept then. to look at those transitional states and to understand how much can I bring from one state to the other and how much how can I make them work together. And this goes both ways. See, I met like a while ago. I met some younger guys who told me that they're planning their parties when they get high on cannabis.

that they have an exact game plan, what they're doing, you know, they're cooking a meat and they're playing certain games and then they discuss things. So this is how you import from maybe a rational reconstruction from your knowledge about the high. You can actually use that like what I did. The bigger plan was that that's why I was interested, the art of the high in my book. How do you use your knowledge of the high in cannabis and cannabinoids and the endocannabinoid system, et cetera? and my research to get more out of a high. So that's the import from the rational standpoint to maybe to your high state where you say, okay, I'm structured that a little bit to maybe go on a better surfing trip.

And the other way, it could, but it could also go the other way around and to, you know, you try to import from the high or from an LSD trip, something into your normal, life where you one of my basic tips is things that I advise is to just keep a notebook keep a notebook and and change your attitude which is really important because if you change your attitude towards your high or your trip and you value those states as something that could be valuable then and could bring insights creative ideas and real um or and could have a a real impact on your personal development, then, you know, then you're going to do, then you act differently.

And so maybe you just write down a sentence or write down an idea that you have while you're high and later you look at it and you're like, oh, that's bullshit. Or you're like, holy cow, you know, now I found the key to save my marriage. Yep. because I understand now that I'm always acting aggressively when my wife says blah, blah, something, et cetera. You know, you get those ideas during the high, but they go away if you don't have a game plan. So your question really is a great one.

How do we transition between those states and how much do we import from one state to the other? And then that's the central concept to my thinking and to cover. in general, how do we balance those states? Because if you are too rash, if you try to live your life too much in the rational, if you try to push everything out that's that you consider irrational, you know, like sleep or which we're all doing, we're not having enough sleep. Or you don't want to have your ecstasy or your trans states or your other states in which you are just floating with your mind in a state that's not rational structured with logical thinking, it's going to come back at you because that's not what we're built for.

And so you need a balance. And if you're trying to be all the time in an ecstasy state, like I've seen in the club scenes, you know, with people who are taking MdMA all the time, et cetera, that's not going to make you happy in the long run either. So you need a balance there. And that's a very important point about altered states of consciousness. Yeah, you know, I was speaking with someone yesterday, and they were talking about an altered state of,

I think that they were speaking on, like, mystical states. And what they had mentioned to me is that what they had found in their experience is that they're able to be outside themselves. But the way they explained it to me was like they feel as, if they become part of the consciousness outside themselves, thus they can see what's inside themselves. And I've bumped up against that too in my time where, you know, all of a sudden you get this third person perspective about George and you're like, whoa, and that makes it a lot easier. It makes it a lot easier to manage real problems of abuse or, you know, things that may be difficult

in your life that have a lot of weight behind. And when you can see it from that third person perspective, all of a sudden there's none of the guilt, there's none of the shame. It's just this, oh, this happened to George at this time. It's not his fault. He should probably get over that. And it allows you to be outside yourself a little bit. Like, what is that? Are we becoming, are we touching base with a giant container that's outside of ourselves?

Or how would you put that into words in a better way? I believe that is a combination. And by the way, Mark Davis, hello. What's up, Mark? We love you, buddy. He's the unsung hero of cannabis, man. This guy has a connected people for so long. He's basically responsible to get me to you also.

Yeah. Hi, Mark, and happy new year. Great to have you in here. Yeah, so how do we... I mean, I worked on the phenomenon of enhancing. introspection during a high a lot and if you look at so how do you step outside how do you gain introspective knowledge about yourself and how do you step outside yourself and look and see oh yeah and i think as with many other higher cognitive abilities like empathic

understanding and enhanced empathic understanding that we've already touched on Interspection comes probably from a combination of many other enhancements. So cognitive enhancements during a high. So let me just mention a few. A would be an enhancement of episodic memory. So if you, if I give you an example, let's say, let's say a friend comes to you and tells he just broke up with his wife and they had been together for 20 years. Now, your reaction will be dependent on whether you can relate to that experience and understand his pain.

And that is probably also dependent on your own experience of pain in the past, maybe a breakup with your girlfriend or with your wife or with a friend. And if that is like in your case, if a big breakup was 15 years ago, you know, the question is how far, how deep can you get into your state back then? How far can you really? And you're like, and if a high can really take you back and transport you back to that state, you're going to be like, oh, my, okay, I understand what that means to you now. Because for me, it kind of like, it shattered my world. And instantly, you will be able to empathically understand. So in introspection, that is very similar.

If I ask you, George, are you courageous person? You will probably also access distant memories. You know, you will be like, okay, how, you know, how did I act when I was 12, when that guy started to beat up the girl in, you know, in the classroom? Did I actually make a move or did I sit there and was like just afraid that he would beat me too? And you're going through your episodic memory. So it's not like you have a billboard in your brain that says you turn around your eyes. And I ask you, are you courageous?

And you turn around your eyes and you go, yeah, it says courageous, whatever. I'm a 10 when it comes to courageous. How do you actually rate your, how do your introspect? how do you find out about yourself? How do you do that? It certainly has to do with memory, but also it could be what could help is imagination. So if I'm asking you, are you courageous?

You might imagine, you know, seeing somebody hanging from the roof or she's almost falling down and you'd have to help her by whatever. I mean, or would I jump from a bridge, for instance. You imagine would I jump from a bridge if I had to, you know, if I had to save the guy in the river, and you're going to be like, no, sorry, but it's just cold and I'd be afraid.

So that would help you. That would help you to introspectively give me an answer to whether you are courageous or not. So we have imagination in here. We have episodic memory in here. We also have pattern recognition because if you are able to race through your mind, and your memory and look for similar, because here we are looking for similarities, what are courageous actions?

So you're looking for in your episodic memory for situations where you would have to act courageously. And so that needs a certain kind of pattern recognition where you are able to associateively raise through your mind, through your memories, and to find those situations. And so I think in my work I have tried to piece together how various cognitive functions are affected during a high and how they could come together to then actually in combination affect the highest cognitive abilities we know, which are empathic understanding, having insights like creative insights,

creative, creativity, and introspection and pattern recognition. So these are some of the most complicated and they are very core to our human being. You know, what we find that's what we're good at. And all these seem to be enhanced. You know, when we talk about empathy and enhancement and altered states of consciousness, I'm reminded of a book that Chris Ryan wrote when he talks about grasshoppers and locusts. And in this particular passage, he talks about how when the grasshoppers find themselves in a bunch and they reach a certain critical mass, they begin to change forms. And they actually become the locust where they can start swarming.

And they almost, they change their behaviors. I think they may actually even change their form somewhat. And it makes me think, like, is it possible that when we are all together in a group, in an altered state of consciousness, that we change the way we think as a group? Is there something else happening or that can happen in that state? Like if you and I sit down with a certain form of hash

and we get to a certain level, can we communicate at a different level than we could if we weren't using that altered state of consciousness or in that altered state of consciousness? Oh, totally, yeah. Here's an example. Okay. And that's very telling.

I wrote an essay about it in 2006, and I published an essay about a conference. Did we talk about that, Albert Hoffman's conference, when he turned 100 years old? That was in Basel in Switzerland. So Albert Hoffman, I didn't see him, by the way, because I went at a day. It was like three days, a convention in the conference center, and I missed him. I was only there for, I think, the last day. But it was interesting because there was a podium discussion on how LSD and other substances affected the 60s and everything that happened in the 60s with the civil rights movement and the hippies, et cetera. So the question was, was there a development that led to then taking LSD or was LSD and cannabis part of the society or did it help society break up and to break the rules and to turn into something?

transform into something different and to be more peaceful, et cetera, et cetera. And it was a vivid discussion. After that discussion, there was the Akasha project with Christian Reg who sadly died. And it was really interesting because it was a conference center. And I think there were like 800 people in it, a Swiss trade fair conference center. And they were all sitting at, and there was this podium discussion. And afterwards, there was this concert, which was kind of tribal, electronic. And I remember, because the conference was really, there were all kinds of people there.

I mean, there were artists, scientists, a lot of, all from the psychedelic world, all kinds of groups. A lot of scientists, but also younger people, et cetera. So they were all sitting there. And I remember at some point after like 15 minutes, 20 minutes, a little group of people, just young clubbers started to dance. And I looked around and I thought, oh, yeah, that's nice, but it's kind of, you know, weird. And then 15, I'd say 15 to 20 minutes later or half an hour later,

everybody danced in this room, everybody danced. And it was as if there was a grid, an invisible grid, holding everybody until a certain point. And it started to kind of shake. These young people started, you know, in the grid, something started to shake. And then everything broke up. And it started, there was a completely different level of communication

where people suddenly lost their inhibitions. and they would dance together. And I thought that's such a fascinating thing to observe because we just talked about that happening in the 60s and what affected what. And I think, yes, cannabis, a cannabis high, but also other altered states can totally change the way people think and relate to each other.

because it's not only, it doesn't only affect our cognitive style of thinking, makes us more associative, or imaginative, or creative, but also it affects to a certain degree. I mean, it depends on the dosing, but it can affect your inhibitions. You know, you're losing your inhibitions. Many people are losing their anxiety. I mean, if it gets too high, if you're overdosed, you're two-axis again. But if you know what you're doing, you can completely change how a group acts, and that can be really helpful. And that's why I believe also that psychedelic substances as well as cannabis may play a crucial role in what's coming now.

because the world is on a downward spiral now. And we desperately need impulses that, you know, turn it around. And psychedelic substances could be a part of it, but it's not going to be like Timothy Leary thought. It would be, you know, just drop a million pills on the society and it's going to help. I'm afraid we learned that from the 60s. I mean, it's a bitter lesson to learn because I think many people thought, okay, you just let it just open up the path and legalize those substances or, you know,

drop them on the population. It's all going to be okay. No. So we need an intelligent, we need intelligent regulations around those substances. I mean, I'm totally for legalizing in the sense of regulating those substances and decriminalizing them and ending the prohibition, of course. But we shouldn't just think that ending the prohibition alone would be the path, the best path we can take. It's one measure, but then we need intelligent education and sensible drug policies around those substances. Sometimes I wonder that, you know, when I look at the medical container in which psychedelics find themselves in, I don't know that there's a better one, but it's, it seems, it seems that when the instrument becomes institutionalized, it loses its ability to work effectively.

You know, so when we, when we, when we take psychedelics and we put them into this, okay, you have to have this doctor, you have to have these people around you. And the example that I use is psychedelics for PTSD. It's everywhere. And it's for veterans. It's for this. But it's for way more than that. Oh, yeah. You know what I mean?

And we're just putting it in this. We're just shining this very narrow light on it, probably because that's the only way you can really make money at it from this point of view. But is it going to escape out of there? Or what can we do? Or what are you excited about? Looking forward, what's on the horizon that we can get excited about to kind of break it free from this container? or should we yeah that's a really good question i i believe that it's not only money um it is money

but it's also and it's it's money not only because some people want to make money because those people who are trying very often have good intentions making money is not not a bad thing if you if you help people with it yes uh you you want to be able to live on that otherwise you can't do it. The problem is, of course, that there are incredible, incredibly strong lobbies now. And I always tell people for cannabis and also that that's also holds for the psychedelics.

They are, their problem is that they are so versatile and that they are so useful. Because you think, well, if they would be so useful and versatile and medically, if they would have such a broad application spectrum, and if they would be useful for so many indications that it couldn't be that they would be prohibited. Yes, it can be. We know that now.

And that is also the huge problem because there are so many lobbies that are so many industries that filled the gaps. For instance, if you go back to cannabis and you look for what it was used for oils and fibers and clothing and nutrition and et cetera, et cetera, et cetera, it can go down that road for hours. there are all those industries now which have lobbies and they know they understand that if cannabis comes back they're losing ground so so that's difficult so now what about the psychedelics and and how do we how do we go from where we are i think that we need we need to go a careful path where we allow people to use them and we have to build regulations around them so that

they're not and I believe they shouldn't be only therefore medical use also the psychedelics. Of course they should be people should have access to use them in whatever way they want to. But it's going to take a while until people understand. better until society better sees the benefits coming out of them and and sees I think also the risks and where how to avoid the risks and how to avoid and you know to understand that the harm can be minimized and if you look at the German society for instance I It took me a while to understand also, and I think we need to understand where the fears come from. Okay.

Of those substances, first of all, I think there is a very basic fear, which is our mind and our conscience is the crucial tool we have. So if we, and it's very fine-tuned to help us survive in the world. So if there are substances that change the mind strongly, you know, temporarily, And if we then speculate, oh, could that be a constant change or could that leave damages to our memory, to whatever, to our ability to perceive patterns, et cetera? And of course, that's a huge threat. So it takes a while to understand, or it took us a while to understand which substances are really dangerous and which aren't. I mean, alcohol, for instance, is a lot more dangerous than we is commonly believed and it's a lot more damaging in the long run. So that, but that's going to take a while to seep in and, you know, in the general mind.

But or to, you know, to be understood. So, so there is this strong container, yes. And I believe we have to keep on pushing, but we have to also as an activist or as somebody who wants to convince the public. And I keep on saying that you have to understand that the other side, those who are afraid of those substance, those who want prohibition or stricter regulations, yeah, some of them are a lobbyist, yeah, some of them are irrational, yeah, some of them are cynical politicians, definitely. but many of them are just misinformed or didn't get access to the information that we have. And they're simply afraid. And so you need to convince them with arguments. You need to convince them with, you know, sharing your stories, sharing empirical evidence that we have.

And there's a lot out there. So it's, you know, and I see a lot from the side of, the psychedelic realm, the cannabinoid field, that they're pushing a lot and they become very aggressive against those who want to have more stricter regulations or prohibitions. And I doubt that this is the right thing to do. I think that we need to enter the democratic process and enter into arguments and have good arguments for. it. Of course, with my book, the high book, for instance, I use not only arguments. That's also an insight I had during cannabis high. It was that arguments are not enough. I mean, for instance, you have to change the imagery around the time. Imagery is really important.

And so that's why I came up with a photo series in my book, High, which is also an elevated the image series of cannabis where you see it as a plant and you have a different angle on it. But I think it's important to approach that in a sensitive manner. Because I've also seen in Germany, for instance, politicians were really skeptic because the Canadians, and I was part of that, I work for a Canadian company, were going on the German market and trying to push. That was not my company too much, but they were trying to push behind the scenes too much, you know.

So you can see that there are now financial interests coming in, and they give a shit about whether people are, many of them. I mean, they just want to sell stuff. So the last point here is that I also think that with, and this is one of the crucial points now, that the psychedelic community and the cannabis community, everybody in there should understand. There are a lot of people who until now are still, I think, a little naive, coming from the side of civil rights and coming from the right mindset, they need to understand that in the cannabis business, probably also in the psychedelic business, there are people who give a complete shit.

And they want to push the boundaries. They want to make money. They don't care about patience. They don't care about whatever. And sometimes you see the split in companies. You see a company being founded by the right guys. But then, you know, the financial. Some guys came in and the company just goes in the different directors.

They just talk to shareholders and they want to make money. And then they, you know, they set off. And, you know, then they go lobby against home growth. home growth, et cetera, et cetera. So this is, I think, especially in the States, what I can see from outside is a really important point that the industry must understand

that they have a lot of foul apples and a lot of people in there coming from the wrong mindset. And they need to think about regulations and institutional changes that enable them to minimize the impact. of bad thinking and those bad impulses within the industry. Yeah. You know, in your book Elevated, you talk a lot about the cannabinoid system

and how potentially using an elevated state of consciousness to change the environment in which we act. Like if we change the cognitive environment, we come up with different solutions and stuff. And I'm curious, like, let's see if there's a young student watching, what might be an incredible study someone could do that could maybe get people really excited about it? On some level, in my mind, I'm thinking, like, wouldn't it be cool if we could prove that synesthesia is like a language and we could somehow harness it or something like that? But what in your creative mindset, what are some things that students that may be thinking about researching these psychedelics or cannabis? what are some imaginative things that they could begin to do?

Or is there a study that you've ever wanted to do if you had enough money? Oh, yeah. Let's hear about it, man. I'd have a whole series of studies. Well, I think I'm coming from a traditional philosophy that also looks a lot at empirical confirmation. So what I set out there, what I put out there is something that I believe can empirically be, proven or better proven than I, because I had to draw on a field of evidence, or you know, on a lot of studies, but also anecdotal evidence, et cetera, et cetera.

But I think I try to conceptually analyze and evaluate everything I had, but to get it to a point where it's assorted, where I have a hypothesis about various things, about how cannabis affects the mind that can be proven. So, or let's say empirically evaluated. So for instance, when it comes to cannabis and episodic memory, is there, you don't start looking, if you look at brain imaging techniques, you don't start looking at the really complicated stuff like empathic understanding because nobody really knows how all that works in the brain.

I mean, that's a very complex, we have models to a certain degree, but that's a difficult start there. So you'd look, you should, if you want to assess what I've written, for instance, and you would look into how into the, still complicated, but not as far high level states or abilities, cognitive abilities, and how they are affected during the high, which is pattern recognition, for instance. You could set up various,

pattern recognition tasks and see how they are affected during a high. You could set up memory tasks and see how they're affected during a high. You can make people imagine things and see how this is affected during the high. The problem is with this testing, and this is also what I write in my chapter on creativity and elevated, is that Baudelaire put that very nicely, the French poet. cannabis takes with one hand what it gives with the other. I think cannabis gives with the one hand what it takes with the other. And what does he mean by that?

I give you an example. Let's say you're a great painter or you want to be an artist and you start painting and you get high. And then you imagine things and your imagination is enhanced. You have a really great imagination. and you see an image and you come up creatively with an image that would become a great, would be a great foundation for a painting. But because you're,

you used hashish that is maybe a little older or contains too much CBN or whatever, or you're just overdose, you have that imagination and then, you know, you feel like, okay, but I can't get up now, you know, I must stay on my couch. And half an hour later, you fall asleep. And the next day, you don't remember maybe. So what happened? In Baudelaire's terminology, you'd say cannabis gave you with one hand what it took with the other.

Right. And so that happens personally. This is why, by the way, here, again, I'd say if you have a notebook and you write down that image, then the next day, maybe even if you lie down, if you forget about the next day, you read your same. And maybe probably the whole image comes back to you. So now, you know, now you know. With studies, and I see that there are some studies on creativity and cannabis, which have been done methodologically, in my view, in a flawed way, mostly, because they forget about what I call the cancellation effects.

What is a cancellation effects? And I have the example in my book is a basketball player and a scene in the basketball game where basketball player has like 10 seconds down on the clock, 10 seconds on the clock to shoot a three-pointer to win the game. And he's dribbling. He's close and he wants to shoot. But he has a defender who knows him inside out. And he knows that this defender knows him, and he knows probably every movement he's ever done. So now he has to come up with a creative idea.

You know, what do I do? And because of his enhanced, let's say this guy is high, and he has an enhanced ability to retrieve memories. He remembers a Tai Chi master giving him a great trick about, you know, about how to deceive people, you know, with a little slack in the hand. He uses that. He does a weird hand gesture, the basketball player, while he's high. And for a moment, the other guy who knows him inside out,

sees something that he can't, you know, he can't sort it out for a split second. He's just, he's just, you know, distracted. And then he gets up and shoots and hits the clock. But so all that went really well. He had a creative idea. There was an enhancement of maybe pattern recognition. He could pick up the pattern. He transposed the pattern of what the Tai Chi master told him.

He got the distant memory. Came up with a great idea. But the clock had already run down. Why didn't he get it done? Because maybe his sense of time is distorted. So here's what we have. We have a creative idea, which we have a great enhancement, but it doesn't work. here it doesn't

end up in something useful because all that creativity needs to be embedded in a whole or there is a balance cognitive abilities and and of course hand-eye coordination abilities with a player

and he needs to coordinate a lot and maybe one ability is enhanced, namely his ability to remember things or to creatively generate ideas but the other ability to keep the track of time you know is not enhanced in that sense it needs to so what comes out is not not right so the same can happen during a verbal creativity test or something that people might do in a situation where you where you have

an experimental setup and that's what researchers should never forget we are if we are in those tests Yeah, your imagination might be enhanced, but then maybe you don't answer whatever within five seconds, which you would need to because you're not able to put that in the language within three seconds or something. So this is always something that's where studies need to be careful because the high effects many cognitive abilities. And, well, you know, the point is easily made if you look at sleep. I mean, we all know that during sleep and during dreaming, your imagination is enhanced. Wow, yeah, so great. Now, let's test that and put somebody who's dreaming in a lab, and then I show him images or I tell him to come up with an image and ask him and say, can I generate an image of a pink elephant in your mind? And he's not responding. I'm like,

okay, so dreaming doesn't seem to help. Well, that's stupid. That's a stupid setup. But if you look at, I mean, seriously, I have, I remember a talk a long time ago by Tourston Pussy. I think it was in Germany, a German great researcher in Germany, who, who talked. talked about an LSD experiment that they had done with people who had been given a larger dose of LSD. And they had researchers looking at them how they behaved and they knew they wouldn't be looked at. And then they kind of rolled on the ground laughing.

But then in the end, the experiment also said they came up with statistics saying that 12% of them felt uncomfortable and anxious. Hell yeah. You know, I mean, I would feel anxious. I would lose my inhibitions and somebody would watch me and write down my reactions. I mean, but then, you know, you get a percentage. And these are, you know, they looked at whatever, 15 people. And then you have like 17.6% of them felt anxious.

Oh, my God. So LSD makes you make 17.5% of people anxious. And it's, you look at these experiments and how they're devised. And you're like, it can't be that. somebody is so stupid, but then you have like percentages, you know, and you know, with only 17 people or so. And you think, yeah, if, you know, if scientists say that 17.5% or 17.68% of people are becoming anxious from the dose blah, blah, blah of LSD, then, you know, they know what they're doing. They're scientists. No, they don't. So, yeah. So you asked me about,

about scientific experiments. So that would be, I think you should carefully devise some experiments about the basic enhancements that I was talking about in perception and cognition, like memory, episodic memory, pattern recognition, episodeic, sorry, associated mind racing. I think you can carefully make a lot of good experiments there to access a little better what's happening in the brain with brain imaging imaging techniques. But also, I think we talked about that in one of our sessions. I would really love to see somebody take it a little further than I did in my book,

what Hashid did to Walter Benjamin, where I am trying to understand also how people using cannabis, and that also could be extended to other psychoactive substances, influential people like Louis Armstrong, Carl Sagan, Walter Benjamin, the philosopher, or Richard Feynman, or you know, you name it. There's such a long list of people who used cannabis or other substances and that inspired their work, their art, their philosophy, their writing, and how that influenced the world. I mean, I always give the example of the Beatles where Paul McCartney once said that

without LSD or cannabis, they wouldn't have done the music they came up with, or they would have made a completely different, they would have been a completely different band. And how much did Beatles affect the world or their music, affect our lives and affected literature? And with Walter Benjamin and his philosophy and his ideas, I mean, he affected, for instance, with an article, the art world and how we think about art. How did Louis Armstrong, who said that his autobiography could well be entitled Gage,

which was the code word for cannabis, he was a daily smoker. How did he affect the world and his scatting and others or Billy Holiday? So I think I would like to have somebody look into the history of not only of our modern society, but also how did cannabis affect the early Indian society or Chinese society or how was Sufism affected by the use of cannabis or other substances, shamanism, etc. And this is, we have to understand that in this area, a lot of knowledge just got lost and eradicated. I remember I went to an exhibition in Germany about shamanism. That's maybe 15 years ago. It was a great museum in Stuttgart.

And they had, it was really a lovely exhibition. but they took the whole subject of psychoactive substances out of shamanism, which is ridiculous. Why? Because they wanted to have kids in the exhibition. So, you know, there was a little bit about drumming and drumming for trans states. And so you could touch the drums and drum a little bit. But that was, that's how you can see how society buried all.

that knowledge and that it, you know, it censored everything out and we don't understand it. And a lot of that hasn't been done in, and we would now have the tools to do that. I mean, if we look at, if we look at our history, for instance, they found, you know this from the Edgstall, the corpse they found, the 4,000-year-old. a modified corpse, the Uzi in Austria, in the, they called him Uzi, I think. That was a shaman. And he carried

substances that were psychedelic that were from plants that have an LSD-Lite alkaloid in them. So he's one of the biggest findings in archaeology showing that even very early shamans and humans were affected by psychoactive substances to a certain degree. And I think I would like to see more from anthropologists and from archaeologists,

et cetera, from archaeology on that side studies. And there's so much more. I mean, in philosophy, and I think to end this point, because we could talk a long time about that, But in philosophy, I think that there are some people now doing that, Peter Susset and others, who are looking into the philosophy of altered states of consciousness and of those psychoactive substances like the Mind Foundation in Germany, but also from a philosophical angle. Because I think philosophers can find a whole lot,

this is a treasure trove for philosophers to look into, to understand human nature, the nature of consciousness. And that is basically what I try to start also to get philosophers interested in the whole scenery more. Because I come from a long tradition of analytic philosophy of mind, the philosophy of mind that takes into account neuroscience and all the cognitive science, etc. but I don't see much of an import from the psychedelic research there or from the cannabinoid research or other types of research.

It took a long time. There's still an arena. I wondered after 10 years, I was like, why didn't? I heard of Sartre taking various substances to write his books, et cetera, and his experiments with psychoactive substances. But that was just like a side note somewhere. And I think we really need to have that in the philosophy of mind realm. Yeah.

Yeah. I often think of a study that I would like to see is, is there an effect on Broca's area or Vernica's area? Or there's a clear correlation between heightened sense of linguistics and psychedelic substances. At least for me, there is. That's just my opinion of it. But it seems to me that I'm much more able to explain complex situations after a high dose of psilocybin. And that's just anecdotal for me.

But I really feel like there's a real sort of, there's something there that allows you to communicate more effectively. And I don't know if it's because you are processing different information in different parts of the brain. but what do you think about that? What do you think is the relationship between psychedelics and linguistics? Well, that's a, that's a, well, I haven't done much work on that, actually, when it comes to cannabis and let's get back first to cannabis, because that's my special field. but I've written parts on how cannabis can affect, for instance, language understanding or production.

And if you look into anecdotal reports, there's many people have observed that they understand. I have experienced that myself that they understand the different language better when they are high. There's a really beautiful story collected by Lester Greenspoon on his website. Marijuana Uses.com where I think it's called Lady Chatterley stoned or something, where a guy in the 70s who was, who couldn't read or write and just had just started, finds shelter in an empty house somewhere. He lives on the street. And then he finds Lady Chatterley, the book.

And then for the first time, because he's high, he is able to read whole sentences and puts it together. And suddenly the whole world of reading and understanding opens up for him as in an image that you see that has been 2D and now it's 3D. And many other people report that when they're reading while they're high, they are able to. deeper understand the meaning of what's written there. They understand better a different language. They get better into it. Well, there are certain effects that are general effects that could help that. So, for instance, what I wrote about a lot is the hyper focus of attention.

So if you are more hyper focused on whatever kind of cognitive ability or whatever comes into your focus is, of course, you have more. you process that better, you see more details, you have more acuity and perception. So that could also affect language. So if you, for instance, if you have attention deficit problems, then you're reading,

then you won't pick up a deeper meaning or you won't be able to get that much absorbed in attacks as you usually do. So this could be general effects that help you to get more into understanding language, or producing language or be more verbal in various tasks. But there could be also some, like you said, it could be that there is a special enhancement

of the parts in your brain also where language is processed. And I can't, right now, I haven't looked into, and I'm not aware of a body of studies or so, that looks into that. But I think there is something going on there too because language is something that is especially affected also during high and also in psychedelic states. But I also believe it's interesting because it's, of course,

also dose dependent because in some states where you have a higher dose of LSD, psilocybin, you. You move away from the barrier, or you get out of your conceptual cage, so to say. And, you know, so you're losing the grip. And you're losing that, that you're really open the doors to the cage and you are immersed and more imaginative in imagery, imagery. And which, of course, makes it then later harder for you to get that. to understand and to remember what that was,

what that feeling was, or whatever that state was, because it's hard to describe. Language is usually the tool for us to integrate or to get to understand what's happening in there. So I'd be interested in that too, what you said, to look more closely at not only how the general effects that I have described like a better,

a hyper focus of attention, how that could help you to, you know, be better immersed and understand sentences and, you know, but also how, or imagination, for instance, you can, you can see that happening. And that's something in that Lady Chatterley story also that I think is described as when you, when you read a book, you might be in the mode that you understand when somebody's talking about a beautiful landscape and he's like he describes the smells of an apple tree and the wind in your hair, et cetera. And you're like, you read that and you understand

basically all of it what he's saying, but you don't feel it. You're not in the scenery. And that is, of course, something that cannabis or psychedelic can do for you because of your enhanced imagination. We always think of, we tend to think of imagination because of the word as imagery, but it's not only imagery. It's, of course, taste and tactile experience and olfactory,

like smell experiences. So this enhanced imagination can take you in the scene you're reading. So suddenly you smell the apple tree because you retrieve distant memories from smelling an apple tree when you were on the field. You retrieve distant memories from the, wind in your hair from the feeling of sitting on warm or on grass, from the freshness of grass, et cetera, from everything that's described in the book.

And you were able to synthesize that into an experience. So that happens definitely too. And this is also something that helps us reading a book and understanding it better because suddenly the understanding is something completely different because you're imagination is enhanced. But I also think that you, there are various other effects, like for instance, language is very often opaque in a certain sense. I remember, and that you read a lot if you look at anecdotal reports. Yeah, Lyons Partei. is a case from that's difficult to explain in English.

But here's Wienerwald. You know the chain Vienervalde, which would be translated as Vienna's Woods, which is in Austria, which is like the Kentucky fried chicken of Europe or Germany or Austria. So that was around forever, that fast food chain restaurant,

Venervault. And I remember as a student, somebody told me that he went to Vienna because it's Vienna's forest, basically. That's the name. And he said, yeah, I went to Vienna to the Venerwald. And I'm like, oh, they have a Wienerwald there too. And he's like, it says the name of the restaurant is Vienna's forest.

So yes, it comes from there. I'm like, oh, I never thought about that. So that's what I mean by opaque. We don't look into. We use the notion a lot and we use the name a lot and we understand that it's a wrestling, blah, blah, blah, but we never, I never thought about Vienna in that word as the meaning of hope. Vienna, the city of Vienna, because it's been around forever. And other, and so during a high or during a psychedelic trip, sometimes the metaphorical content of a notion opens up. or the imaginary content opens up to you and you start to understand the meaning, the deeper meaning of a word or of a slogan or of a sentence much better because you understand it in a different way.

And I think that is, we'd also have to look into how various substances shift our, thinking from the from language driven to more metaphor or mental imagery driven. Yeah. And I think that is a very interesting, if we talk about transitional states, by the way, like you asked before, that I think is a really interesting task because, again, the notion balance plays a big role. Because if you're too far out, sometimes you're not able to put things together. If you're too far, if you stick to language too much in the logical sense and without that deeper understanding, you may not understand the metaphorical or the ironic parts of it,

but you need to be somewhere in the middle to pick up metaphorical understanding or to pick up the ironical meaning of a certain sentence. And then also to become creative maybe with language and to use it in a different way. It's so mind-blowing to me. This may be the next evolution of language. You know, you start looking back to what Philo-Judeas said about the logos will be of language to be beheld. You listen to Einstein talking about imagination is more important than anything. Maybe that's what's happening in these psychedelic states is that we are beginning to unlock the imagination as a language.

in my whole life, I've never thought, I've never put image and imagination together. But it makes so much more sense, especially in like a really deep psychedelic trip where you're just 3D images blasting out at you and you can't talk and you're just stuttering words, you know? But like you can see the imagery. Like maybe that is you beginning to use your imagination as a means of communication. And like that would explain on some level the. idea of telepathy. That would, on some level, explain the idea of maybe symbolic resonance with other people. Like, I know it's kind of out there, but like, it seems plausible to me. Like, it's such a richer form of understanding. And it does bring up the metaphor. I had a whole

list of things I'm going to write down and start thinking about image and imagery now. Man, thank you for that. Yeah. Sure. Excellent. Yeah, because I, um, I keep on repeating that, but in my books, it's a, it's a theme really that if I talk to people about their experiences with cannabis, and I ask them, do you, were you able to imagine things better during a high? Most of them are, yeah, of course, you know, I could imagine certain images, etc. But if you, we all tend to underestimate how important imagination is in our lives. Because we usually, A, we believe that imagination is something that is restricted more to imagery, like visual imagery. And B, we believe that it's something, yeah, it's useful for artists or, you know, but it's not in our everyday lives. it's not that, you know, you're a dream, don't be a dreamer, you know, it's not that's important.

Now, now A is, again, it's not only imagery of images. It's look at a chef who says she may become high and think of a new great meal, have great ideas about, and that is imagination. If I tell you, George, think of a chili chocolate with mango sauce and a little bit of strawberry in it. You'd be like, I don't know. I don't know, man. Maybe, or maybe you're like, hell yeah. Yeah, that sounds delicious. And, yeah, maybe.

Actually, I come to a point where I'm like, I'm not sure with a strawberry, but just try the mango. Just for color. Maybe it's too rich, but it depends on the ratio. But then this is what you do if you want to be creative in cooking. You have a certain archive of experiences with cinnamon and spices and with other ingredients that you could use. And then you're trying your imagination. You think of how maybe this type of spaghetti goes with that kind of tomato. plus something unusual made apple juice, blah, blah, you know?

And which actually works. I heard somebody that the towns are using a little bit of apple juice in their sauces. So this is imagination. A, so a big point, imagination is not only imagery, but it could be about all kinds of experience, tactile experiences, or and then be imagination is everywhere in our lives. You know, it's basically what is crucial importance for our decision making. So if you ask me, and I think we touched on that subject,

if you ask me, do you want to take that job in Barcelona, blah, blah, blah. And I think that's one of the examples that I have in the Art of the High. And I imagine, okay, I'd be sitting from 9 to 5 in an office in the 10th floor of that building, looking down on and in Spain. So I use my imagination to simulate the environment that I'd be in and the task that I would have and then I would be like, yeah, that sounds like something I would like to do. or you want to get married and you are confronted with the question, do you want to marry me? And you're like, do I want to be with that person for the rest of my life? You're trying to, you know, imagine things or situations or how would that be, you know?

And you extrapolate from a situation that you had before. We're like, oh, yeah, that would be kind of ally. Maybe yes, but then when we talk. after half an hour we never know what to say how's that going to be in 10 years so so so we use our imagination a lot and if you understand that how crucially important imagination is for decision-making in our lives then you understand how crucially important it could be if you have an enhancement during a high or during a psychedelic trip using your enhanced imagination and then maybe a

And again, we have that re-import from rational, from our understanding of those states where you maybe think, okay, now tonight I'm going to sit down, I'm going to get high or take an LSD or solosybin, and think about this decision about marrying a certain, you know, marrying this lady. And then maybe you come up with, you come back and you're like, this is exactly what I ever wanted. I really thought it through. You know, I had a very vivid imagination of how our life, how our and my life could be. And I'm fully forward. So imagination is, the enhancement of imagination is something really crucial and something really important that comes out of our, of the high or of a psychedelic trip.

And we usually don't understand how important that could be because we don't, we understand. underestimate how important imagination in general is for us. It's interesting. You know, I'm getting ready to talk to Susan Brown tomorrow, who is doing a lot of work on the flow state. And I can't help but begin to think about some of the parallels about measuring flow state and using some of the ideas that you've been talking about to measure creativity and how those two ideas kind of overlap a little bit.

What do you think about the flow state and altered states of consciousness? And how might these two things be tied together? Oh, very closely. Yeah, very closely. I got to put you guys in contact, man. You guys probably have a phenomenal conversation. Yeah, I mean, I have, of course, looked at the work of Mihaili Chichengen, Mihaili, the guy who talked about flow or who came up with the whole theory of flow.

And the flow status characterized, of course, by, which was also the connection for him was important to happiness, you know, which is if you are very, if you have a task, that's a big task for you, but you are working on it and you're very concentrated, you're focused,

you're really absorbed and your mind is working on high speed with a lot of passion on that thing and you're barely able to, you barely manage to solve, or to live up to the challenge and you actually manage to do that. That is what is really creating happiness because our brain basically rewards us for that, for that. And the flow state is one in which you are working on your best abilities,

where you're at your best solving a problem or confronting a challenge. And if you look at what I said before about cancellation effects during a high, you could rephrase that as the high could also could take you into a flow state because you are extremely focused on something. You are able to retrieve distant memories maybe better. you are maybe better at imagining things. And all these enhancements could help you to get in the flow state, but they could also take you,

some of them could also take you out of the flow state. Because if your flow state consists of doing a lot of tasks where you have to go back and forth with your attention, maybe you get too focused on something and it takes you out of the flow of whatever task it is as I don't know in a job or something. So this is the art of the high, I guess, is to learn how to use a certain dose of whatever substance you're using. In my case, it would be cannabis to keep you and to keep you in a flow state or to get you in a flow state or enhance your flow state where you are incredibly focused.

and able to, with your mental abilities that you have then enhanced, maybe to get better at whatever you're doing. And we need to understand that, especially when it comes to creativity, if you don't understand, if you don't know the art of the high, if you don't know yourself, then cannabis is a great tool like a surfboard, but if I don't know how to use that surfboard, I can go out in the waves and have the perfect conditions like in Hawaii, but I, you know, and I have the perfect tool,

maybe I have the best board ever built, but I will just get, you know, the waves will just hit me because I'm not able to keep my balance on the board because I don't understand when I have to dive or when I have to take and I don't have the timing, I don't have, et cetera, et cetera. I need a lot of knowledge to get on, to ride that, wave. And so the best, even the best tool won't help me if I don't have that knowledge,

especially also in relation to myself. So if I, if I stand on the beach and I see the waves rolling in high and other surfers go out and they're like, they go and they have really fun in the waves, I need to be able to say, hell yeah, have fun, not for me today, because I'm not, last year I would have been in a condition to do that this year I'm not because I'm not physically trained enough exactly for that in two hours yeah maybe because then I know that the wind is going to get less so with with cannabis this is also really important because I might be you know going to conference or to a place where I meet people and they're like hey you're the guy who wrote the high book. Here's a 25% THC, whatever. And I need to know whether, you know, I'm

like, yeah, but I, you know, guys, I have kids and I haven't smoked for or I haven't inhaled, because I'm using, if I'm using a vaporizer, so I haven't had anything in a year or so, not in a year, but in a few months or so. So my tolerance is like insane. So if I take one draw, I'm going to be really funny. Yeah. That's very productive anymore. So I need to understand where I am and how I react and how I can handle a certain kind of high in what kind of situation. And that is really important. And of course, the flow notion is crucially important for that. Yeah.

Yeah, it's interesting to see. Do you think that if we look at psychedelics or if we look at psychedelics or if we look at you know, training, be it exercise or however people find themselves in a flow state or in an altered state of consciousness. Can it become second nature? Do you think it can be something that we train ourselves to do where we can just put ourselves in that state? I guess meditation is another way to do it and people can get in that state. But maybe do you think that maybe the psychedelics can be a tool for you to begin to build a environment or a pathway to that environment that you can again traverse when. Would you figure it out?

Yeah, yeah. Yes, absolutely. That's well put. And there are different flow states, of course. Right. I think it's important also when you think about flow states and creativity to look at at least two different situations where one is that you are. trying to solve a certain problem where you're really goal directed. You're like, okay, I want to think about a certain theory and I need a creative breakthrough

or I'm thinking about my novel and I need to generate an idea about my main character. Or I want to paint a certain, I want to generate a great painting of that mountain. So you're very goal directed. Or you are just freely associated. You can just sit down and say, I just let it lose. You know, I go in a flow state where I'm all over the place. And maybe I take a deep dive, which is to just lie down and have an LSD trip or even on cannabis, you know, take a larger dose. And sometimes maybe also because of the nature of those substances, they take you to places where you would never go if you were to go directed.

Right. And so this is a different kind of flow because I also believe that flow states, as Chick-Chank-Meh highly describes them, are very often like you are, it's a high-energy state to be in our process. and it can be really demanding to keep up that state for a long time. So I very often thought about the kind of, I talk about a cognitive hangover that you have sometimes after a high or you know exactly what I'm talking about. I do. Many people with or a psilocybin trip.

And many people would think of it as a toxic side effect. Like, you know, you have the next day your hangover, you're tired or you're, you know, spaced out or something. I think of it more of, I think more of it as a cognitive hangover in the sense of, like, if I ask you today, or if I give you like three math exams for two hours each, then you might be hung over the next day or so because you had to really work on hard cognitive tasks and you're like, okay, I need some relaxation after that because it's work, it's mental work.

And with those substances, I think, and even if you are in the flow state, it can be really demanding. And it's both cognitive, demanding just in the mere sense of takes a lot of effort you know but also it can be demanding in terms of oh I had so many insights about myself I remember I took um is it Hawaiian woodrow it's in German Hawaii maybe Woodrose yeah woodrose and it was not even a large dose but I remember after after one and a half hours or so I said okay I had so many I had so many insights about myself

that I need a break now. Okay, that was enough. Thank you. I need to think about that. Yeah. And I really felt exhausted. You know what I'm, I think you're sure, surely know what I'm talking about because not only is it exhausting to have to go through all those mental processes or to raise through your memory or your mind, but also to to then face all the insights you have. and how much that would matter for your life or, you know, and then your brain starts to even go faster at, you know, trying to sort out those insights. You know, just think about what happens to you if you have one insight,

not being high or anything today that, oh, you're, you cannot be a person in a relationship, but you have been in a relationship and struggling. So now your mind starts going like, oh, shit, you know. Yeah. What do I do with that? Do I have to go to therapy or blah, blah, blah, et cetera? So you're trying to understand what happened just now. Is that a real insight? Was that a deception?

And if you have insights, various insights during a high or doing a psychedelic trip, what follows is your mind trying to, you know, really understand the relevance to that or should it act on that? Because some of them might be bigger insights. So where were you? flow states. So I think there are various flow states. Some of them can be really exhausting. Some of them can be more like floating when you're not trying to be so goal directed and you that you're just freely floating, so to say, or freely flowing. Maybe still exhausting, but it may be

be different. But I think it's interesting to think about how you get into a flow state and how you want to direct it during an altered state of consciousness. And sometimes you do not want to direct it. Yeah. I think it speaks volumes of experience to first off get in the flow state and then to be able to direct it. Like that's a lot of time inside your own head. figuring things out, man. And I love the idea that if we just backtrack for a moment on this idea of the cognitive hangover and the insights. Like I think that that could explain a lot into the ideas of quote-unquote bad trips.

Like maybe bad trips are having these incredible insights. You don't know what to do with them because they're happening so fast. You're like, boom, you're like just processing it. You know, he's like, ah, neural plasticity in real time. Absolutely. And that's why some people say there's no bad trip there. difficult trips. Right, I agree.

Depending on who you are. I mean, I could see how it could be a bad trip. Like, I mean, it's all language. But if you can't come to grips with that thing in a minute, you know, you haven't been in that environment. Right. It can be, man. You freak out.

Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And I think there can be bad trips. Sure. In the sense that happened for me, I overdosed. Amsterdam on Salosybin. And I thought I had a good trip sitter, but he didn't know what he was doing. And I think it kept me from using Silasim for a long time.

And in that sense, it was a bad trip because it was uncontrolled. And it became interesting. It's not like nothing good came out of it. And that's the problem with calling something just bad because you want to, you know, push it away and just categorize it as something that needs to go away or, you know, you don't want that anymore, but of course, if you look at it more closely, very often the bad trips are probably the ones that give you the most, or not the most, but also give you great insights or also give you interesting things if you are more open to assess them.

But yeah, it's an interesting question to think about how you can direct your your trips or your high for instance I came up with the method of clapping in my hand and just shouting go away bad thought and then laughing because I very often you go down the rabbit hole

of an idea or a bad thought and you are so hyper-focused and you are not aware of what you're thinking of that you stick to it. And this is something that I think I take out of Buddhism sometimes. You just need to let something go and let a bad thought or something float away. But to do that, you need a kind of mindfulness.

And mindfulness, my book, I remember discussions with my publisher back then when I wrote the art of the high, it could have also been the mindful high. Because I think that is a very, if you have that mindful high, if you train yourself to be mindful in your life, but then also be mindful in your high, then you can generate maybe the ability to not control it, but to influence it to a certain point and to write it better to places where you want to go.

And so, like, I remember I watched television. I got high. I watched television, and then I watched a documentary on Eichmann, the German Nazi who was responsible for Auschwitz, who was then sentenced to death. I think the Mossad got him in 1959 or something. They found him in Argentina, as far as I remember, brought him to Israel. And then he was sentenced to death.

And it was a documentary on him and how he defended himself. And he was always like, I was a bureaucrat and I just followed orders, etc. And I really watched him for a longer time. and it was just, and then with your enhanced empathy, to get into the mindset of such a, let's say, impoverished and poor personality and really sinister personality, that was really taking me down. At a certain point, I was just like, hey, just switch channels, you know?

Yeah, yeah. And I think that can be really helpful to train your mindfulness. and to be able to then, you know, not going down rabbit holes. Sometimes it might be helpful to go down the rabbit holes. And psychedelic or the cannabis high might help you to approach distant memories with less anxiety, which might be extremely helpful for a therapeutic process. But also I see a danger in there that you might be retron. or you go back into a trauma maybe too early.

So I think it might help people to really train mindfulness techniques, meditation and other techniques and be aware of what they're doing them to make a better use of their altered states of consciousness and to avoid maybe going down rabbit holes too fast. Yeah. There's a, I spoke with a Kelly Addison, who's out of Canada,

and she, she helps a lot of people that find themselves using cannabis. And she calls it this term greening out. Like when you're, right? And you just start freaking out, like,

I get all paranoid or something like that. But as we, as she was telling me about this term, and she sees it as a positive thing. She goes, look, these are things that are going on in your mind. Like,

you need to sit with them. Like, that's why they're coming up now. And if you can sit with them, all of a sudden, you're not going to green out next time. So, you know, she really helps people find a way to become comfortable in that environment, which for people that have been there, it's like you can get, you can really green out and start tripping out on things, you know, but the way she was able to walk people through it,

and she shared some stories about her own personal experience and people she's worked with. And, you know, there's these patterns that happen in people's mind, and whether it's a rabbit hole or paranoia or there are these techniques that you can use, and those particular states you can look back on it. It's very beneficial of like, hey, now I know how to sit with something that's very uncomfortable. I know it's not going to stay with me.

I know it's going to pass where, you know, it's, it is. I think it's a very great tool of an elevated state that's, you know, maybe it's trying to teach you something. It's fascinating. But Sebastian, I love our conversations, man,

and I feel like they're getting better and better and more fun. And this is so awesome. Well, yeah, it's amazing to talk to you. Let me just make one more comment to the last question. I think as you're getting better in directing your high or understanding that mental state, like I explored in the elevated and the art of the high, you're able to avoid or to understand better situation

because your mind works differently. So if you're getting really, really high and you know that it's not going to affect your breathing or your heart rate, or you're not going to die from it, except then you know, okay, I'm not in danger because I know that I shouldn't drive a car now. I should just lay down and in two hours it's going to be better and then I can do this and that. That will also take a lot of pressure from your mind because you and you will not get too paranoid because the paranoia comes from a very, it's a very natural impulse.

It's your brain or your mind saying, hey, I can't control the situation anymore. And my control of the situation is usually what helps me to survive and what helps me to, you know, get around in the world. If you control the situation in a sense that you know that you know you are in a safe environment beforehand and that you know, okay, I'm maybe too high to drive a car now. So I just, you know, I ask your friend to drive me, et cetera, et cetera. If you have all those experiences and if you have that knowledge and if you have those abilities, then you can have more interest. ways to maybe then you can approach different kinds of fears or traumatic

experiences, etc. Because then that whole weight is away. But I think that's also part of the process of understanding your mind going through an altered state of consciousness. And that takes a lot of pressure from you. So that was my last comment on that.

Yeah. Maybe you can take a few minutes just to go through your books. I know you've written some awesome ones, and I think people that are listening to this are going to want to know what those books are. So if you just take a few minutes, maybe go through each one and kind of give a little bit of background

about which one is, Ben. Yeah. So my first book was high insights on marijuana. That was, it's basically like a PhD thesis, but it's written for a larger audience. And this is where I export a lot of the theory that I'm later, I later try to expand about the cannabis hype. I was interested in the phenomenon of insights during the high.

And then I found, oh, to understand that better, I need to know more about what are insights. And when I say insights, I mean those, ha, you know, creative thoughts that you have and you don't really know where they're coming from and how these may be enhanced during the high. And I thought, okay, I need to look at how the cannabis high affects cognition, all kinds of cognitive abilities like remembering and like pattern recognition

and how it leads to synesthesia, etc. And so that was my first focus and that led me to explore all those other cognitive effects. That is not available anymore as far as I know. Then I wrote essays and I tried to reach a bigger audience because I thought the first book was maybe a bit too academic still. And I wrote in Germany, I published my book, High, the positive potential of marijuana, which contains seven essays in my art series. And that made a big media splash here in Germany that also explores those states, but also is about the prohibition. And then I wrote The Art of the High, which is a book that's more really a minimalist guide for people. And this is also in German and English, a minimalist guide for people who really want to use the high for creativity,

for their, for introspection and all the other abilities that I have talked about here. But it's really something you can read in three, four hours, and it's based on a book by Teach, Not Han, on the structure that gives you some exercise, some knowledge, and it's very, yeah, it's easy to read. And then elevated is the new edition of Haida's Positivé potential. This is a much deeper 2003 edition of my work and represents my work, elevated cannabis as a tool for mind enhancement for those who are more interested in psychology and philosophy. This is a deep dive into how cannabis affects creativity, imagination, empathy, introspection, and it also contains a chapter on on the prohibition and the history of prohibitions.

And so it has three new chapters in it, and it's much more scientific also. But it's a popular science style. So I think it's accessible for a lot of people. Everybody's watching, here's a copy right here. Here's what it looks like. I highly recommend you go and check them out. And I don't think you're really proud to,

sorry, I'm really proud that it appeared in the States and that Hilaris Press, the publishing house of Robert Anton Wilson's daughter published it because to be published alongside with Robert Anton Wilson, of course, is a great honor. I'm just only now getting more into his work, and I'm always amazed by every sentence I read. And so I'm really glad they found me through a reader,

through Michael R. Johnson. And sorry, R. Michael Johnson, that's my agent now. And who read my earlier book. Oh, I forgot my book. I forgot what Hashes did to Older. That's the one I was going to say. In 2015, sorry, yeah. And shortly in 2015, what Hashes did to Walter Benjamin is a book,

also a collection of essays in which I also am trying to explore how cannabis affected society through luminaries like, Walter Benjamin, Carl Sagan, and others. Fascinating. And where can people find you? I mean, maybe you can give out the name of your website. My website is Sebastianmarinkalo.de. And Marinkalo with a C.

And you get, there's a blog. And a lot of my essays and one chapter of my new book about creativity is on there. and you find all the podcasts and media stuff on there. So I think that's a good entry point for my work. I've also written a blog for Saincy Seeds, Amsterdam. So some of my work has been or essays have been translated to five languages, I think. So some of them are still on there. So you may want to take a look there, but it's also my blog.

But if you're a Spanish reader, you can read some of my stuff on the census seatblanc. What if there's a grad student or something that's working on a paper and they want to reach out to you? Are you taking calls from grad students these days? Of course. I mean, reach out to me. I'm happy to help. I don't have, sadly, I'd love to be more in a position to help more right now because it's really tough. to work in that spot because it's what I'm doing, I consider that as basic science.

And of course, I've never received scholarship from anywhere, despite my academic credentials, which should be enough to get some money. But of course, in that field, there's not a lot out there. So now I've started my own hemp business and I'm really busy to, you know, keep my family here well-fed. Yeah. So I can't extensively talk to people, but

I'm really happy to help with giving direction if people want to call me or reach out to me. I'm always happy and always happy to get feedback. I've gotten so incredible feedback on my work from all over the world, which is always amazing to hear. And people underestimate how important it is for an

author to just, you know, give some feedback, whatever critical it may be, because it's just I want to understand what people think about it. And this is what keeps me going. Very often people come back to me and say, hey, this really changed the way I think about this or how I did that. And that's really important because it's not for the money. Money doesn't come from publishing books in that realm. right right but it's it's very meaningful and it's purposeful and I think that you're going to start seeing more and more people reaching out to you because you've written some incredible books and you have more than that like your knowledge on how to set up experiments that can measure like

real tactical and real you can get real data in there I think you're going to start seeing especially as we begin to see it liberalize the states we're seeing the decrim of it and I can see tons of new people coming up that would really benefit from a conversation with you. So I hope if you're listening in, you're a grad student or a field you're thinking about doing, Sebastian is the guy to talk to. He's incredible. And I really appreciate your time today. Go check out his books and the show notes, ladies and gentlemen. And that's all we got for today.

Hang on briefly afterwards. I'll talk to you shortly afterwards. But ladies and gentlemen, thank you for everything today. I hope you have a wonderful day. That's all we got. Aloha. Same from here. Thank you.