TrueLife - Zeus Tipado - Funding Our Perception of Psychedelics

Episode Date: June 15, 2023

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/https://psychopharmacologymaastricht.com/https://linktr.ee/tipadoZeus Tipado - A PhD Neuroscience Candidate, Researcher, Investigator, and Lover of Life’s Mysteries.Creator of Stoned Gamer  http://sgl.gg/And middleeasyhttps://t.co/SJ2jgyTDxGReading through his catalogue is sort of like taking a big dose of MDMA. Invigorating, Intoxicating, and inspirational! Trust me….You’ll want to see this!! 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 back to the True Life podcast. We've got a great show for you this evening, this day, this afternoon. Whenever you find the time to listen to this, I'm excited to bring. to you an incredible gentleman coming all the way from the Netherlands. You may have read some of his published papers and psychedelics today.

You may have been a fan of his incredible thread work on Twitter that seems like it reads like the Ariadne thread and a Greek tragedy. He's just connecting all these things. Maybe it's a neuroplasticity thing he's got going on. I don't know. We're going to figure it out, though. He's also a PhD neuroscience candidate, a researcher and investigator, a lover of life's Mysteries, creator of the Stone Gamer and Middle Easy, content creator.

And I recommend that everybody check out his link tree, which is in the links below. If you find yourself perusing through his catalog, I think that much like myself, you will find it like a nice little dose of MDMA because it's intoxicating, it's inspiring, and it leaves you wanting a little bit more. Zeus, I hope that was a good enough intro for you. Thank you for being here today, my friend. Bro, that is an intro of the ages, man. Thank you so much for that talk up, dude.

I feel very honored to have that talk up. Much love. Yeah, well, it's true. It's true. And I can say that because I find myself in this rare position, Zeus, where I'm getting to talk to some of my heroes. I'm getting to talk to people on the front lines that are like the heroes of tomorrow. And I feel like in a way, I'm like an exor, you know what I mean?

So I'm kind of bridging this gap between some of the boomers, some of the millennials, some of the wise. Like it's fascinating to me. And I get to see it like emerging. The same way like a trip emerges. Like you kind of come up a little bit. You catch glimpses of what the peak might be and you come back down. So yeah, I mean it.

And some of the first thread that I read of yours the other day was this new sort of study that's coming out of Helsinki where, hey, all of a sudden we're bypassing that 5H T2A, man. Maybe we could start right there. Yeah, dude. TRKB, shout out to the University of Helsinki and all of those researchers. Actually, last week, this time last week, they dropped a paper that essentially flips the entire script on how we believe psychedelics sort of exerts its, you know, antidepressant effects. For a very long time, we believe that 5HT to A receptors were responsible for the reported effects

of like antidepressants, decreased anxiety, just, you know, overall like happiness and like well-being. And even to the point where we even said that, you know, the intensity of a trip is, you know, correlates with the sort of beneficial properties that you get from a psychedelic because, as you understand, 5HT receptors are responsible for the subjective experience or the actual trip from psychedelic. So that was just a thing that we believed, but this paper that dropped out of Halseynki said, yeah, but there's this other thing happening, this thing that's called TRKB, which is a, I forgot the long name, but you could probably search for it. But when you take psychedelics, yes, it binds to serotonin receptors, but it also binds to this thing called TRKB, which is a receptor in itself. And what binds to it is this thing called BDNF, which is also a thing that happens whenever you take psychedelics.

This protein goes out to your blood. And this protein called BDNF is responsible for, you know, sort of the decreased anxiety and all this sort of great stuff that you, you know, hear with psychedelics. But this paper was like, look, actually what we did is we block the actual activation of 5HT2A. And we just looked at the, you know, TRKB. And we saw that people still, or not people, but rats, mice, still have these antidepressant effects, which is huge, crazy big. So that says that perhaps the antidepressant effect of psychedelics isn't so reliant on 5HT2A, but perhaps it's reliant on this other thing, isn't psychoactive, you don't trip off of TRKB, perhaps it's related to that sort of receptor. So that's groundbreaking, although I do have to say, man, it isn't confirmed yet.

Right. But it's very, very interesting that that would drop. And that's definitely groundbreaking. We're definitely top five research papers of this entire year easily, maybe top three. Yeah, it's a very interesting, interesting paper. First, I thought I might have been sponsored by Pfizer because of the findings. You know what I mean? Like it seems pretty.

Yeah. So, yeah, no, like what you actually said is very interesting because really, if you're some, like, tech, you know, tech bro in San Francisco trying to, you know, create a psychedelic that doesn't have the psychedelic properties of actual psychedelic, then this TRKB. find is really intriguing because you're thinking of yourself, oh my gosh, this could be it. This could be the drug that I'm trying to patent to build a psychedelic without the actual psychedelic component. That's the dream of all of these pharmaceutical companies and everything. But it hasn't been confirmed yet, but it's interesting. It's fascinating to think about it.

And I could think of some great uses for that. If someone has like a neurodegenerative disease, you know, or they're on a machine. or something like that. That could be something that they could use theoretically that may help attenuate, you know, the ability to relearn something or may help that ability to regain function or something like that. But I'm willing to bet that down the line, even if they do find out that this is responsible for some sort of, you know, growth or psychedelic sort of trip, it would be interesting.

to see someone that had a psychedelic trip versus someone that uses other substance, you know, and just compare their subjective stories. Because I guess what I'm trying to get at is a lot of people believe that without the terror before the sacred, without the trip,

there is no real learning, you know, and what do you think about that? So, no, you brought up a very excellent point. And I kind of want to throw the idea of ayahuasca. Oh, let's do it.

So, ayahuasca, as everyone knows, it's the sort of brew that you can get from indigenous cultures. You can get it in Peru, take it, drink it, and you are tripping for a very long time. But to create ayahuasca, it takes two different things, two different components. You know, one sort of interacts with the other component to make this component, you know, interactive for the gut to sort of ingest it. So I kind of look at TRKB and, you know, it's a little bit. And 5-H2 receptors perhaps in the same way in the sense that perhaps what TRKB does is make your,

like, make you sort of prepare your body to have this subjective trip. And since your body is prepared, then that trip has deeper impacts, like deeper impacts and profound impact. So, you know, perhaps if you want to look at it from a, from a sort of, you know, artsy type of way, perhaps TRKB is the clay and 5HT is the person that's like, you know, shaping the vase or whatever. You know, you have to have both. You can't just have a, you know, giant glob of clay and you can't have just the hand. Right. So that could be what's happening with TRKB and 5HT.

It's always important. You know, and I want to say, you know, a lot of people, and this is sort of a thing that, you know, sort of a habit that people have is we always. like to point at a certain thing, one certain thing. And we love to say that is the thing that causes this very complex thing. But in actuality, it's a combination of things that causes a very complex thing because it is a very complex thing. Like, you know, so it's probably a bunch of things. Yeah, we have an incredible pattern of saying things, something definite and having it be in wrong. We're the center of the universe.

Those are glass around those planets. You know, like we always get it wrong. The one thing we always get right is that we always get it wrong. Get it wrong. Yeah. That's a very guaranteed, reliable trait of humans is we just love getting it wrong. Yeah. Yeah.

It's fascinating. It's fun to get to be part of it. And it must be amazing to be the person that has it right for a period of time. You know, we talk a little bit about science in the beginning of this conversation. why there's gatekeepers and once there's a theory that people believe in there's books written about it there's industries built up around it it must be an incredible feeling to be the person that had that theory that everybody believes in so you could see i mean i could see why there's so much hope and promise for these different theories that come out right yeah no i mean like

and there's a bunch of different theories there's tons of theories on how psychedelics exerts is actual effect on the brain when it comes to the, the sort of subjective effects, the actual trip. There's three theories that are probably the top three theories. I'll be introducing a fourth theory that sort of attaches to those theories. But yeah, no, it's really interesting. And also what you like said is that it feels good to be on the top. Just for a fit.

You know, it's like a, you know, it's like a championship of, boxer that is the, I'm champion for just a bit of time. Right. And I'm holding the belt. It feels good. But then something, you know, else comes through that sort of better represents that. So, so yeah, yeah, it's interesting. It's very interesting to be on top for that brief period of time.

Yeah. So it's, you know, I read this theory about language a while back. And I was kind of paraphrasing it. But the theory said something along the lines up. You can't come up with an original idea. But you can change the parts of the words to rearrange the idea. And an example they used is, you know, try to come up. We'll just do it.

I'll try to give it to you and see if this works. Try to give to me an animal that does not, that doesn't exist and explain it to me. Like what, you know, what does it look like? Yeah, no. So, I mean, if you're asking me, I mean, I have a very active imagination. Okay. That's, that's, yeah. So, like, I'm not going to work, but let's try it anyway.

Yeah. Yeah. So I would imagine a animal that exists in about like five or six different dimensions. It's a multi-dimensional animal. And part of it's sort of adaptable or survivable trait is that it has the ability to, you know, go to different dimensions whenever it's threatened. So that's, I mean, that doesn't exist. Okay, you already ruined my example, damn it. I'm a psychedelic researcher, man.

I know. This is what I was trying to go. Let me tell you my story. The strategy I was going for was, you know, most people would say, would give me attributes of animals that already exist, whether it's a crocodile leg with a unicorn horn that can shape shift into the form of a gorilla. But they're giving you attributes of things that already exist. And according to this theory of language, it backs up.

that theory saying you don't come up with something new you come up with parts of other things and mash them together and i think that that is what happens in a lot of theories a lot of the groundbreaking theories we see they're not so much like hey this has never happened before it's not this original idea but it's part of you know um stevens theory messing with marshal mcclumann's theory over here and then they piece them together in a different they put the variables in a different order and they have a different kind of outcome like that. Do you think that that is something we should look forward to in this new fourth theory that you're putting forth?

Yeah. So, no, no, great, great question. So, I mean, the thing about like, so, so, so there's, there's, there's like different types of theories. Right. There's, there's, for example, theories that are unfalsifiable, which means you can't prove if they exist. they don't exist.

Like God. Like Jesus. Like God, for example. Yeah. Yeah. Which is like, okay, that's cool. But then there's other theories that are based around available evidence. And so that seems like it should be a consistent thing.

But evidence in science, data and science is like looking at something in a prism in the sense that if you exist in this bubble, of, you know, psychoparmacology, then you view data in the same perception in the same angle. But this data, if you just, you know, sort of go a different angle, it could look completely different, you know, if you say, oh, well, perhaps we should take out what we put in or, you know, put in what we take out. And then, of course, you get a different sort of angle. That's how we found out that the DMN exists in the brain is that a fantastic researcher found that. So here's a great example. So the D, so wait, this is like 2002, I think. And we, so whenever we do imagings of brains, right, whether it's FMRI, EEG, we always have this, like, resting state.

And there's always these, like, you know, weird sort of fluctuations that happen. But for a long time, we just, you know, sort of peel those. that off. We're like, oh, just, you know, take that away from the sort of things that we're doing, you know, the tasks that we're doing. And that was considered like static, noise, just like whatever. For a very long time, for decades, for decades. And there was this fantastic scientist from, I believe, Washington that said, hold up, maybe we shouldn't take that out. Perhaps whatever we're doing, let's say, for example, they're, you know, looking at a red dot and we, see all these different waves and everything, perhaps we should delete that and focus on this

sort of static that we've been ignoring. And of course, he did that. And he found that our brain is actually operating in this very sort of, you know, relaxed state called the, called the DMN, which is a very sort of state that we go in whenever we're sort of, you know, relaxing, chilling. And so, for example, that's a great example of science looking at something from a different angle. But the theory, as far as psychedelics, so right now there's like three theories. There's Rebus, which is from Robin Carhart-Harris that was formerly at Imperial College London. It's called Relax Beliefs Under Psychedelics. And then there's the cortal, striatal cortical theory.

by Katrin Priller from the University of Zurich. And then there's the cortical claustrum. No, there's the cortical claustrum cortical theory from Minaj Doss at John Hopkins. And all these theories are based on really one thing. It's the fact that two parts of the brain, the top part of the brain, which is, you know, sort of how we experience vision, auditory, all of the sensory information that we see you open your eyes, look at a truck, and it will end up in the back of the head or, you know, wherever, the top part of the brain, that like wrinkly part of the brain that you always see in like Halloween films and stuff,

right? That wrinkly part is the sensory area, right? But then there's a deeper part, the subcortical areas. And that's really where all the information is actually process. You know, that's like the thalamus, the claustrum, where all of the information that we see from our eyes go to the thomas and like other sort of subcortical parts and that's where things are processed so things are processed and they you know go to these top areas right so imagine the sub cortical area as sort of the projector in a theater that's processing this like real just processing it processing and then it gets projected to the actual screen which is the sensory area right so obviously you know things happen things go and when you aren't on psych or when when you know

you're just sort of hanging out that sort of process is perfectly fine but when you're on psychedelics that processing information gets disrupted and the information the visual information that's supposed to you know go to the projector is now all of a sudden going to the left wall of the theater or it's going to chair, you know, or perhaps it's even going back into the projector. So it's this, you know, very disruptive process that happens with psychedelics, which is the reason why we have extreme sensory perception

that is a little bit altered because there's disruption. And so all those theories that I just talked about are based on that subcortical, cortical communication. But the theory that I'm presenting, in this summer, whenever it gets published, is perhaps those two areas aren't the only areas and there's a third area

that doesn't even exist in the brain. That's all I'm going to say. Okay. Man. Man! First, I did great job at explaining that process. That was beautiful. And it was entertaining and it was well done.

It's polished. It's amazing. I was reading through some of your articles on there. And I love the way you described the idea of, I think you had said something along the lines of it being almost like a captcha for consciousness. I thought that was such a brilliant way to put it. Maybe you can break that down. Maybe you could say that little part with the people there.

Yeah, no. So, yeah, I believe that was. when I talked about what are what's a visual trip maybe right and uh yeah so capture for consciousness so so this process that I was talking about the subcortical cortical process the information going you know to the cortical regions with some top regions so actually it's it's a little bit you know the complexity of it is a bit higher so when information goes to our subcortical regions from our eyes or our ears, you know, we sort of capture it like a, like a baseball. So when it goes to these subcortical regions, our thalamus and other subcortical regions do something,

which is pretty bonkers. It's called predictive processing. And what predictive processing is, is that these subcortical regions try to predict what we're seeing before we're we even see it and give our sensory areas a prediction of what we see before we even see it. And the reason why that is, is because if we were to take the raw feed of our reality without any processing, it would just overload our brain. Our brains would just fry. It would just like, nuke up like some, you know, computer that's like overheated, right? So in order to prevent this process of our brains imploding in our head, our brains do a fantastic

job at predicting what we're going to see before we see it. For example, you're looking at your computer right now, right? The edges of your computer monitor, your keyboard, the T, the R, the mouse. You don't have to always verify that it's there. because we understand physics in the sense that that T really isn't going to go anywhere. It's going to stay on your keyboard for a very long time, unless you pick it off. Your computer monitor is going to be the same rectangle shape. It isn't going to change.

It isn't going to shift. So your brain understands this. So it doesn't really have to process, okay, rectangle, 14 inch by whatever, every single time. it just sort of gives our sensory area a prediction of what it is because it really isn't going to change. So sometimes there's feedback. And the feedback is that capture process. The feedback is sometimes the information that goes to our sensory area, which is the projector screen, actually sort of goes back to the projector. And it's like, okay, is this what you're getting?

And it's like, okay, cool. Well, then that's cool, you know. is fine, keep on doing what you're doing. Is this what it is? Okay, cool, cool, cool. Is this an orange truck or is this an orange truck? Okay, cool, cool, cool, cool. So that's the capture process.

But when we're on psychedelics, that capture process, it's not accurate. And perhaps what we think is an orange truck could be an orange car, or perhaps we perceive something that's an orange truck, but it's just some, you know, orange sign. or whatever, you know, or whatever, you know. So that's the capture process, and that capture process gets a little bit, you know, twisted whenever we're on psychedelics.

Yeah. I had this idea, and I'm just throwing this out here. It seems to me, like, it's not uncommon for people to have, like, synesthesia sometimes during a deep trip. And I often wondered, is that, like, the visual information, being processed in like Broca's area or is it the information that should be processed in one area being processed in a different area?

That's a great question. And yeah, synesthesia is the, so if people don't, I really know what that means. That's basically when, let's say, for example, you're like tripping or even happens with people that aren't tripping, you know? So let's say you perhaps, you know, you see a song.

You see colors reverberate. in your field of vision, you know, or perhaps you, you can, you can, like, taste a sound. You know, there's sort of, sort of the sensory areas get a little bit twisted. So your question is, why is that happening? And you're saying that perhaps it's the information going to different areas. Right. So I believe that's the case. And let me just throw a little vision information at you.

So this sort of wrinkly area in our brain, and I keep on. talking about this. It's called the visual cortex, right? And it's in the back of the head. Right here. The back of the head is where we process, or where we, it's the end results of all of our vision. Right here, the back of the head.

And that's like the reason why, for example, in boxing or MMA, you can't hit in the back of the head, because when you get hit in the back of the head, you sort of lose your vision for a bit, you know? Because it's where all vision is

ultimately concluded in the back of the head. So this vision, this, this, this visual cortex is actually a very layered area. There's six. There's visual systems. One, two, three, four, five, all the way to six. Wow. And it's a very, it's, so what does this mean? It's a, consider it like a hierarchy of information.

And visual system one is where we process very basic visual information. We process, for example, colors, sort of the outlines of shapes, you know, globs and blobs and not really defined details, but like globs and blobs and everything and a little bit of color and everything. But as you go down, let's say visual system two, you get. are your visual system layer two you get sort of a final definition you get some details you you get you know and then of course you go to three you go to four you get fine details of the face you you get like um you know sort of how to process where something would be via you know location

or you know somebody's um you know go on left or right so it's it's so as you go deeper you have this sort of defined vision so and there and And there's people that have disorders. For example, there's a disorder called, I believe it's called aphasia, which is, let's say, for example, a person has damage in like visual system four, which is a very deep layer, you know. So they have this thing called face blindness, which is they'll see a person's face. They'll see the shape. They'll see the color.

They'll see the skin. Everything looks fine. but they can't see the eyes or the mouth or the nose because that's the fine detail where that's processed in V4. So they live their entire lives just looking at people with blank faces. Wow. It's pretty well stuff. So going back to psychedelics, yes, I have a paper coming out about this actually. really what's happening, I believe what's happening is that let's go back to the subcorder region.

So the subcord region, the thalamus is where things are processed. So look at that as like a UPS shipping center, all right, a UPS processing plant with people and all the packages are coming in from, you know, wherever. Okay, this one goes to Idaho. Okay, this one goes to Florida. Okay. Boom. Okay. boom, boom.

And those locations are locations in the visual system. You know, okay, this thing goes to visual or two, visual one. But then when you're on anything, LSD, psilocybin, this distribution of information doesn't really go to the right place. Perhaps something that's very basic goes to a very complex area. So all of a sudden, this very complex area is dealing with some basic information. and it's taking this basic information and hyper-complexing it for really no reason at all. Or let's say you have a very complex package or like info package and it goes to a very basic area.

So now you have like a very complex. It's the equivalent of taking a PlayStation 5 game and putting it in a, you know, Xbox 1, you know, like a basic Xbox. It's like, oh, well, this is too complex for this. It's not going to work. And that's the reason why there's some, but going back to what you said is that, yes, in very acute doses, which is very big doses, like big, big doses, this sort of, you know, information distribution goes beyond the visual cortex. And it goes to like auditory cortex where, oh, this is, this. isn't even going to Idaho. This is going to like Alpha Centauri Galaxy.

You know? Yeah, that's why I know exactly. Yeah, so like all of a sudden you're like seeing Led Zeppelin, you know, you're seeing Robert Planner, whoever, you know, like you're you're like seeing these like beautiful guitar riffs and everything. And inversely, you're seeing sound, you know, or you're hearing vision. you know so that that's but that's in extreme extreme doses yeah yeah yeah it's so just thinking about it can lead you to have like if you just took time to really think about

all of that about how the way something very complex could be processed in a basic area or something very basic could be you know processed in a very unique and dissective way Sometimes I think what I say, my wife dissects it in a very dissective way that's very complex when it's supposed to be very simple like that. But you can really get a different perspective about that. But when it happens on a high dose of something, you really are treated to an insight that is unique. Those are rare to have. And there's so much inspiration that can come from having a unique experience. And maybe that's why maybe that is the.

beginning of the mystical experience. Are those things kind of tied together? Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, a great question. And I always have to remind people, you know, like, it isn't just you are tripping. It's every cell in your brain is also tripping. Wow. Great point. Beautifully said. So there's a lot of stuff happening. And the mystical experience, The mystical experience is a very intriguing thing. And I have a few friends, a few scientist friends, particularly. Shout out to my friend and Rotterdam, Yost, who believes, he believes that the idea of even including that in the conversation of psychedelic science is faulty on it's like faulty. He believes that we shouldn't say things like mystical experience because he believes that what happens is science becomes pseudoscience whenever you add spiritualism and mysticism.

And I do get his point. I do get his point. He's a fantastic scientist, one of the top dudes out there. But psychedelics, it resides so heavily in the subjective experience. Agreed. Yeah. And it's something that we can't ignore. Like, let's say, for example, like, irritable bowel syndrome, you know,

it's, it's a science that is a very objective science. Like, you feel it. You can, like, you feel your gut, like, er, you know. But psychedelics, it's, it's almost all perceptual. And whenever we get into the things like perceptions, then you have to get into things like philosophy and things like existentialism and things like mysticism because all of that also resides in a very subjective point. Like you can't prove that a person's mystical, although I can say that there's a guy from Harvard,

Michael Ferguson, shut out to Michael Ferguson, that is trying to find correlations with the brain and spirituality in religion. and he's and I always say that and judging by his research and his data I always say yo bro Ferguson you're you like realize that your data is congruent with psychedelic data you know like you're talking about the same areas of the brain you know but he's like oh no it's different and it could be different but but um miscism is very interesting I think that you know I went to this thing called ICPR, and I listened to Roland Griffiths, who's a genius in the psychedelic space, and he actually said that he, he's the person who brought that term to science, mystical experiences in accordance to psychedelics, and he, the inventor of Mrs.

you know, that term, said that perhaps that was a mistake. Hmm. And I'm not sure if you're familiar with Roland Griffins, but he's a guy that's on, he has a terminal illness. And he announced it when I was in the audience, and it blew everyone's mind. And even after he announced it, he still said that him including the term mysticism in psychedelicism in psychedelic. was perhaps a fault. I would say that, I would say, I don't know, man, it's, it's, it's something that, I don't know, it's, I don't know, it's very, it's a very complex, uh, topic. And I have a degree in religion. Like, I have a bachelor's in religion. I mean, and it's still a complex topic for me to talk about. Because it's so, it's so dense. It's so

dense. And there's so many different angles. There's so many different ways to look at it that. Yeah. I don't know, so your question is, should it be in psychedelics and what is the mystical experience? The mystical experience for some is very real. And if it's a real experience for some, then it's a real experience. You cannot deny a person's perspective. I mean, you know, a person can experience something in a psychedelic state that only they will experience on the entire planet for the rest of time. And it doesn't take away that that experience is real.

It just says that that experience is very unique to that person. So mystical experiences are real to the person experiencing the mystical experience. I'm going to read you this quote. That's really well said. I'm going to need to play that back and write that down. It's pretty awesome, man. One of my favorite philosophers is Alfred North Whitehead. And I'm going to read you this quote and get your opinion on it.

He says, mysticism leads us to try to create out of the mystical experience, something that will save it. Or at least save the memory of it. Mysticism, clarification, action. What do you think about that? So Alpenter Whitehead is a fantastic author. He wrote a brief process in reality. Absolutely. Which is a fantastic book.

Can you repeat the end of that? Yeah. Yeah. Or just the whole thing. The whole thing. Yeah. The end was interesting. Yeah.

Yeah. And it makes sense once you. I've read it a ton of time. So I've been able to pick it apart. But let me give it to you again. Mysticism leads us to try to create out of the mystical experience, something that will save it. Or at least save the memory of it. Mysticism, clarification, action.

Yeah, yeah, I like that. Yeah, and I love that. And I think what he's getting at, me too, man. I think what he's getting at is that the significance of a mystical experience shouldn't be discounted. And it shouldn't be discounted because from that mystical experience can set off a cascade of different. things like a person can change their entire life from a mystical experience i've even witnessed a person have a very intense salvia trip where it was a very mystical experience they saw god in the sky and they saw the world ending and uh and then they sort of left the left their job they're working at

moved halfway across the country and and and change religions that with within like about a month. So, yeah, it was pretty well. So I think that we cannot discount the significance of a mystical experience. And the reason why is because that mystical experience, it's not so much external as it is an internal calculation of the external world that we're in. It's a internal processing, and this internal processing is built from a lot of things. It's built from upbringing, built from environments or built from relationships, built from our

perception on reality, built from things that we've read. And it's a way to process this very outerworldly experience that doesn't really have an explanation. And that's what I'm saying. The psychedelic experience still doesn't really have an explanation. And that's something that I want to say. It isn't, we haven't concluded what a psychedelic experience is. So at this point, using your internal sort of processing capabilities to understand this is valid.

And if that happens to be a, you know, a spiritual or a mystical experience, and so be it. So be it. Yeah. I love it. For me, when I think about it, it's constantly changing. When I read it, you know, it's almost like a psychedelic, it's almost like a magic spell because it's psychedelic in nature. And when I think about it, you know, so much of clarification comes from the ineffable. Like some people have like this big journey where language fails, but you, you know, you try to harness and bring something back from that time. And as you integrated or as you, you know, maybe a month goes by, but you're still thinking about it, all of a sudden there's this moment of clarification.

You know, and so when I see that, that stepping stool of mysticism, clarification, and then action, like it just seems like so much of the work we do to make our lives better happens internally from taking the time to see ourselves in a way in which we've never seen it, which is kind of mystical. You know, and then you can really begin to clarify it by looking at the relationships around you. And then you could take a step, maybe a small step. Maybe it's a big step like your friend. Or maybe it's Carl Jung's Red Book. You know what I mean? Like maybe that's the mysticism or something like that. But it's, and on some level, the reason I love the idea of the mystical experience is that it speaks to the heart of every person.

because every person can have it. And every person can interpret a mystical experience in a way that is profound. And I can understand why people would use it as a pejorative. Like, and it does get in the way. And it clouds research. And it's not measurable. And there's a lot of problems with it. But it's those same problems that make it beautiful.

You know what I mean? It's, it's, I don't know, it's something that people wrestle with, people embrace it. but for me, it's, it's just so beautiful. And I love the idea of it. And I, I could see why your friend, the scientist, would potentially be boggled by it. Like, quit bringing that word in here, man. You're ruining the whole damn thing. You can't measure that.

How do you manage what you don't measure? You know what I mean? Especially in science. Yeah. Yeah. If you can't quantify it, then it doesn't exist, basically. So that's another point. Like, it seems to me that what we're seeing now,

And I bet you'll see this in Denver is this, you know, maybe the reemergence of spirituality into science. What's your take on that? Yeah, man. So let me tell you about my own background. Please, man. I would love that. Yeah, yeah, for sure, man. So as you know, as you said, I'm getting my PhD in Maastricht University, which is in Holland,

where the top three places on the planet for research. I freaking love being here. But going all the way back, man, to like when I was a kid. So a lot of people that are probably watching this, or even perhaps yourself, you probably had a Christian upbringing, you know. And that's fine. That's fine. But my upbringing when I was a kid, I grew up in Louisiana.

So my upbringing was voodoo. It was creole voodoo. Creole voodoo, man. That's how I understood my reality since I was a kid was with creo voodoo. And for example, like when I was a kid, I'm my, yeah, I love it. It's pretty epic, yeah, man. So it, and of course, what that is is that, yeah, you've probably heard of the whole, you know, dolls and everything and sticking. I mean, there's a lot of like conjuring also.

Lots of people that are like town elders coming in because there's some dispute in the community. They like come in and they sit down and they get inhabited by spirits that help solve problems or that help things. So I saw a lot of that. And it's pretty wild, man. It's very interesting. So that was my entire reality. I thought the world operated. through external forces that were beyond our comprehension in the sense of like a spirit like a not even a spiritual world but a world filled with

um like entities that had power over our reality so then i when i was a kid my you know parents got a job and they or my dad got a job we all moved to texas which is a very christian area so all all of the sudden, I went from believing in voodoo gods and queens and deities and, you know, seeing people sacrificing animals and chickens in order to, you know, shape reality to all of a sudden, Jesus, Jesus saves, God's here. I'm like, what is going on? Why is this dude? I was like, what's happening, you know? So I was so bewildered that, you know, graduated high school. And then I went to the University of Arizona and I got two bachelors.

I got one bachelor in psychology and one bachelor in religion because I'm like, man, this is wow. And so and then, you know, so I, then I went to give my master's in, you know, I'm a PhD, but, so I do understand the idea

of spirituality. I've learned a lot about mysticism. I've done, I've taken many courses on mysticism. Some of my favorite courses are on mysticism that I took. But I'm also a scientist, you know? And when you're a scientist, you have to, you have sort of an obligation to look at reality in a very factual sense. And the reason why is you want to, you want to report back factual information about our reality in order for us to understand our reality. That's very

important. So when spirituality, which is something that is like really unfalsifiable, right, when you incorporate spirituality into psychedelics, I mean, I do have to say, I've been at a lot of conferences and I've seen lots of costumes, lots of outfits, lots of people call themselves a shaman that looks like, you know, whatever. I've seen all this stuff. And I've seen a lot of people walking around. And I do want to say that spirituality, and I'm not saying all spirituality, but I'm saying like a hyper spirituality being represented in conferences is almost a direct

response to the idea of science being incorporated. So what does that even mean? Okay. So a lot of people believe that, you know, scientists hold authority over the psychedelic experience. That's a belief that people think. I don't believe that, but that's what a lot of people think, that scientists are the final arbiter of the psychedelic experience. And they're seen as, like, the, you know, authorities. So, okay, spirituality gets included into this in order to combat that idea.

of scientists holding authority over the psychedelic experience. But it's like hyper express. So you have people that, you know, say that they're shaman, say that they're psychedelic, this or that, lots of turquoise jewelry on, you know, whatever it is. And I think it comes off, if it's too extreme, it comes off a bit goofy. You know, it comes off a bit goofy. And I think when it comes to psychedelics, when it comes to like you have to respect the indigenous practices of the people before you that took psychedelics that took ayahuasas that took mushrooms you have to respect that for sure and if you don't then you know that sucks you know and of course that's something that's that we've seen before in history when a certain culture brings forth something interesting like let's say for example um you know a very

Here's a good example. Let's say for example, you know, black, you know, black jazz artists bringing forth jazz and like, and then they're sort of like, you know, pushed away. And then Elvis takes this and makes his own thing. And he blows up, you know. So it's it's like, you have to respect who brought it to the forefront. So I do like that. And I do love how psychedelics tends to do that. But man, you've probably been to the same conference. do where you go and it's like, cheese, like, is this like a cosplay event or is this like, what's happening? There's people, you know, that aren't even indigenous and that's fine. I'm not saying that, you know, but there's people that are just really taking it a step

further and then they're including stuff like tarot and horoscopes and crystal healing, which is just pseudoscience. There's nothing proving that. Just all of this sort of wacky things get thrown into the psychedelic sphere. And I think that's the reason why

my friend from Rotterdam's like, bro, this is what happened whenever you include mysticism in science, is that all these wackadoodle things sort of get thrown in there. And so I see his point. And we have to come to a very sort of fine balance, this sort of each

equilibrium as to include spirituality and science into these events and conferences, and of course the entire field of psychedelics. Yeah, that was really, it was really well said. It's On some level, though, I mean, there's people that make the argument that science is like a religion, right?

Because it seems that there's, there, like, you know, one thing we never measure in science is like what time, what day the study was done? What day was the study done? And what year? Like, where were we at in the universe when that study happened? Were we like, you know, by Alpha Centauri over here or were you in the galactic year? Are there seasons in a galactic year? And I realize that's irrelevant because you can't figure it up. But is it really irrelevant?

Like it might not be. Where were we at? Where's the globe tilted towards? You know what I mean? Where's the magnetic pole that day? Actually, no, listen, listen. No, you brought up a fantastic point. So I believe in the 80s, there was a physicist from, I believe, Connecticut or somewhere in America, the East Coast.

Shout out to Connecticut. And shout out to Connecticut. Yeah. You caught. And so what they were doing was they were testing out this, they had this experiment and they, they were trying to sort of isolate some, you know, complex structure, you know, whatever physicists do, you know, they're isolating something. Right. And they found it and they reported it. And then this other lab tried to try to sort of do that experiment and they couldn't replicate that finding.

And they're like, well, we can't replicate the fighting. You know, we can't, we can't do it. We've, like, tried it. And then those scientists in Connecticut went to the other place, and they're like, they're like, look, this is how you do it, this is how you do it, this, this, this and this. And it didn't work out. And they're like, what? Come to find out the atmospheric conditions of Connecticut compared to, I think, um, sort of, you know, Sweden are completely different. Therefore, the results were completely different because they were

based in part to atmospheric conditions existing for the experiments that sort of come to fruition. So, yes, there are things that we should sort of take note. There are things like that. And I would say when it comes to time duration, when it comes to when studies are done, I would say that we've done so, so when you do a study, for example, like a psychedelic study, you dose a person and then you have them wait and they come back and they get dose again. And it's really irrespect, like it doesn't matter if it's Tuesday or Wednesday or Thursday. They just get dose. So I think if we, if we, if there was a sort of time duration thing in the sense that, oh, on Tuesdays, people trip harder than Wednesdays,

We would have totally saw that for sure by now. But there are things like atmospheric conditions that need to be accounted for in certain studies. Yeah, I've even heard like, you know, obviously, I can't have any research in front of interest like this. And this, I read this somewhere. So take this with a grain of salt. But I even heard that, you know, the speed of light is somewhat in question. Like depending when you do it, where you do it at, like, There's not like a real constant.

It's not always boom. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's in this range somewhere right there. But if you just start thinking about how giant concepts that may be partially 85% true, well, that's a great number, 90% true, it still leaves a lot of room for error. But, you know, you have to, I guess on some level, if you want to navigate reality, you got to get as close as you can with the tools that you have. But yeah, on some level, I do see this, this place that we're going to. through and in psychedelics and the different plant medicines and in theogens and just the way

they change our perceptions have an incredible opportunity for us to change the way we see the world. That's exciting for me, whether it's science, whether it's relationships, whether it's mental illness. And I'm just stoked to be alive at a time like this. You know, as we're talking about this sort of, you know, the way in which the, the brain perceives things and things like that. I have a question that I've always wanted to ask someone that maybe that has the experience that you have.

And it is this idea that Marshall McLuhan gave us about hot mediums and cold media. Hot mediums are like, you know, like television or social media where you're getting the idea prepackaged and boom, put right in your head versus a cold medium like reading or, you know, listening to radio, something where you have to come up with your own mental imagery.

And I'm just wondering, is that process, that's got to be processed different in the brain, right? Like if I'm getting a mental image from television where I'm just eating popcorn and taking in the latest, I don't know, kids movie with my daughter,

versus I'm reading a book intently and trying to imagine the characters in that book. What, how is that information being processed in my, brain differently. Great question. And the answer is wild. I love it, man. So, okay, let's say, for example, you're like reading a book, right? The book's fantastic. And you're watching a TV show and the TV show is fantastic, right? In the brain, right? You watch a TV show and obviously there's visual cortex information activity happening, you know, obviously because you're

looking at something and you're processing and then you're seeing it. So if you had a, you know, fMRI hooked up to your head or EEG or FNIRS, you would see the actual activity in the visual cortex because you're looking at something, right? Right. But here's where it gets well. So without the TV, if you're just in a blank room, you can visualize, imagine what you see. saw on TV, the characters, you know, the features, the eyes, the feet, everything, have this visual picture in your head. You're imagining this. And it shows up in your visual cortex exactly the same. So your brain does a poor job distinguishing from what you see to what you imagine because that activity looks exactly the same in the visual cortex, which is pretty wild.

And that's wild in the sense that just our imagination. Our imagination has physical control over what our brain processes as reality. So your reality is reality, even though it's not reality and actuality. Yeah. And so here's this. So there's a thing called the perky effect, right? Okay. And the perky effect was this very brilliant scientist from like 1910, I believe,

1918, way ahead of her time, actually. It was a woman scientist. And she discovered that. She had this really cool research where she had a group of people and she said, okay, I want you to visualize a purple triangle, right? And she had a sort of white wall or a white board. And she had people, okay, I visualize the angles, visualize the color, visualize everything about the purple triangle.

And then what she would do is she would have an actual purple triangle, but slowly, very faintly, introduces purple triangle in the field of vision that she said imagined it in. And what she found is that people couldn't tell if they were imagining the purple triangle or if it was actually being shown to them. I want to do that experiment. That's amazing. Yeah. And that the perky effect is one of the most interesting. things about perceptual science and it's still applicable. We still have not proven it wrong. Therefore, it shows you that our imagination has a strong, strong physical control over our brain activity, which as well. So do you is, do you think that our imagination is closely tied to the

spoken word versus the written word? So, So yes. And there's research that shows that, yeah, for sure. And I want to say this. The spoken word is a very important thing to say. Because when you speak, you hear yourself speak. So you almost reinforce what's being said. Whereas if you just think something, then you only have one single perception. If you say something, you hear yourself. saying it it reinforces this sort of greater feedback of okay you know I'm a great person I'm a bad person you know where if you think right I'm a good person my good person it's different it's a different thing so spoken word is definitely interesting because yeah it's definitely an interesting thing uh so yes the answer is yes yeah it would be interesting to in some studies with psychedelics you know use the spoken word as a frame of reference versus like like, you know, someone, you can't really read if you're on a high dose or something like that,

but maybe there's an experiment that could be done to understand, maybe with some neural feedback, you could see the parts of the brain light up when you're using the spoken word. Like, I think that would be a cool thing to think about it. That gets me on the idea of, like, all of a sudden we're beginning to see in some of, I know that Nick Murray down in Jamaica is doing some really interesting words. with neurofeedback and traumatic brain injury or PTSD, and it's going a long way and helping people not only understand what's happening to them as they feel it through the experience,

but then getting to match up the imagery with the way they feel. So it sounds like they're getting another layer of understanding, which is always helpful when you're trying to fix a problem. What's your take on the neurofeedback aspect of it? Dude, yeah, man. When it comes to that, I got to give a shout out to one of my colleagues. Daniela, she is really crushing it when it comes to that. She actually works with these patients called Locked Inpatients,

which are people that necessarily can't say things and they have this sort of state in which they're in, and they can't say anything. But she has really done some groundbreaking work in the sense that she through a lot of coding. and through functional infrared spectroscopy, which is a sort of way to image the brain, she has created a brain computer interface

that essentially a person, sorry, sorry, I'll say, for example, you want to say, I have a cat, right? A person will see in a, interface and it'll have like, okay, what's the most common first word said in a sentence? I, you know, question or whatever. And so a person can actually select, okay, through thinking about something. Okay, I.

And then, you know, I have, I give, you know, what's the most common word after that? So through this processing, she can give people the ability to communicate. communicate with a person based on brain computer interface. So when it comes to feedback, and that is a sort of little, you know, a hyper-complex way to sort of show feedback in the brain. But I also want to go back to something that you said. Yeah, very, very interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah, very interesting.

So there was a scientist, I believe, from Portugal. Could be wrong. but it was a woman that wrote a fantastic paper, I believe. I think it's called the Entropic Tongue. And I'm pretty sure that's the name. Yeah, the Entropic Tongue. It was published in 2021 by I think it was Camila Sands. And I want to say, I don't know, Portugal or like some like Archeron or maybe like Argentina.

something. Okay. But she looked at the, how people talk and how people arrange words under LSD. And she found that, obviously, when you're on LSD and you're trying to sort of explain something or describe something, things get really like disorganized and not in a bad way, you know, whenever you hear something like disorganization, you always think, oh, the bedrooms disorganized. There's clothes everywhere or whatever. But language is a little bit different in the sense that let's say I'm describing a car and I'm saying, okay, this car, it's gray, it has four wheels, it has four doors. And all of those terms are factually correct because it's just a description of the car. But she found that when we're under LSD,

the organization of how we convey our external reality gets way in traffic in the sense that as opposed to saying that that's a gray car with four wheels. If I wrote an LSD, I would say, you know, the gray on that car reminds me of the gray that I saw when I was a kid. And the gray covers the car and a very illustrious. way hiding the inner interior of the metallic body that controls. So you have all of these very fruitful artsy ways to explain something. And she found that under LSD and perhaps other psychedelics, I would assume other psychedelics, since they sort of have the same property, that it and then it basically helps us or it enables us to describe things or talk about our external reality and very sort of an unorganized way, which also

is an indicator of creativity. And we've done research at our lab on MDMA and creativity. And we found that, actually, I got to give a shout out to Kim Cooper's, who ran some fantastic work along with Natasha Mason. And they brought this term to fruition called, called, I'm going to forget it right on the podcast. Dang. I'm sorry, Kim. Sorry, Natasha.

But essentially, they found that a sort of indicator of creativity is how you can take something that's very structured and rearrange it into something else. For example, like, if you have, a person LSD and you give them a paper clip and then you say okay I want you to find you know every single way you could make this paperclip something then they will find a higher amount of ways to make this paper clip into something different than compared to a person that isn't on LSD so but when it comes to language it's the exact same it increases this disorganized thought

which helps us build something greater so psychedelics creativity thumbs up. Yeah. You know, I'm always reminded of the, I have no idea who did this study, but everybody can look it up. It's when you, they give like the spiders LSD

and you watch the way in which they create their web and you're like, whoa, look at this one. You know, they give them like some sort of amphetamine and it looks like a crackhead web. You know what I mean? But they give them like, it's almost like they're creating these obscure creative patterns when you're giving them these different,

like LSD is the one that comes to mind. And I, you know, when you talk about language in psychedelics, there seems to be a rare affinity for poetry on some level. And maybe that is because we're describing the world in a different way. We're seeing things different. But I've noticed a few people that have been very successful at helping people integrate or in that field of integration or helping people with mental illness when they use poetry. And when I think of poetry, it's almost a better way to communicate.

Like we've all probably had the situation where we said something really clever. Or maybe some of us have written some poems and expressed that to someone we love. And we get to see their face flush and their skin gets filled with goosebumps. Or maybe yours get filled with goosebumps when you read the poem. And like that seems to be like a more rare form or more complete form of communication. And it's interesting that we connect. we've spoken about the spoken word. We've talked about a little bit about poetry.

We've talked about creative language and ideas on these heightened states of awareness. And it just seems like so much good when it comes to the world of creativity is happening in these heightened states of awareness. It's really exciting. I want to talk to everybody that you've mentioned, man. I hope that after we finish this, you can give me a laundered list of all these people that may be honest. Yeah, dude, I could definitely put you in contact with everybody in our lab.

Kim Cooper's Natasha Mason, Pablo. Yeah, I really would love for you to talk to our lab. We're doing some fantastic things, and I like how you sort of convey the conversation and direct conversations. Very nice. You do a very good job, by the way. Thank you for that.

So, yeah, I know. So the term that I wanted to say was divergent thinking is what psychedelic increases. It increases our divergent thinking. Yeah. How did you, did you? So what was the process like to recover that word? Did you have to think about it? No, so, so I, that's a great question.

So, so there's, there's two different types. There's divergent thinking, which is very creative ways. And there's convergent thinking, which is a very sort of descriptive way. You know, when we aren't on psychedelics, we sort of operate on this field of convergent thinking, where it's a very practical, very sort of like applicable to our reality. And divergent thinking is sort of this disorganization. And how I thought of that is I remember a podcast that or a presentation that Kim Cooper's did, I believe, in Belgium. And I brought myself back to that. And I was just looking at that presentation.

I was just, I was like scrolling through that presentation trying to find when she talked about it. And then I found it. And I just sort of pushed play in my head. And I'm like, okay, that virgin thinking. That was it. So for me that, like there's a moment in the podcast to be wanting. it back you're like oh man i'm so sorry kim and for a minute you're like uh she's gonna hate me but now the fact that you just explained to her that you replayed the entire conference in your

head she's gonna be like yeah dude you are awesome yeah totally totally he's gonna like that she's gonna like that uh shout out to kim cooper's natasha mace gunn who's also a guy that we've been working with manesh gurne good guy yeah it's i think there's some fascinating and i'm so excited to see the the new ways in which, you know, these studies are being performed. Is it difficult to find funding to try to explore the different areas that people are excited about? So great question. Fantastic question. So when it comes to funding, so right now in this current point of the psychedelic renaissance,

which people love to call it, is that we're so focused on how psychedelics can help with things like, you know, anxiety, depression, alcoholism, addiction, you know, all the stuff. Right. PTSD, all this stuff. So right now in this point, we're so focused on how these substances can actually help and alleviate that. So and why that, you know, why? Well, because the society that we're in is a very chaotic society and we're trying to find

sort of a quick fix to solve this problem. We're looking at we've tried Prozac. We've tried religion. We've tried philosophy. We've tried strict political regimes. And they've all sort of failed. So now we're like, okay, psychedelics, that has to be. It's the same substance that, you know, politicians were accusing people of being, you know, addicts.

Now we're looking at that for the reason, you know, the sort of fuss. But so what that's, what that entails is that almost all funding, almost all funding goes towards how psychedelics have therapeutic potential and therapeutic benefits, how LSD can help with, you know, depression or how DMT can help with stroke victims or whatever. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's,

it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's so heavily focused on the therapeutic aspects of psychedelics that we aren't focused at least financially. We aren't focused on. the perceptual research of psychedelics. Why do we even trip at all? What's happening in the brain when we're tripping? I mean, almost the entirety of psychedelic funding is not only the beneficial properties of psychics,

but even to take away the perceptual experience of psychedelics, which is like, what? You know, so a lot of the funding that's available, is not perceptual. And of course, it just so happens that I'm a perceptual scientist. I love it. Looking at the perceptual ways in which psychedelics sort of augments this sort of process. And it sucks to try to get funding for research because, you know, if you cannot,

if you bring a research design and you're like, this is going to give us a better understanding of why we trip in the brain, the investor, the sort of, you know, financial backer always says, okay, how can we, you know, how can we make this into a drug to help with depression or help with anxiety? And it's like, no, no, no, we're, I'm just trying to figure out why we're tripping. Perhaps in the future, you know, we could, but let's figure out why we're tripping. And they're like, no, we don't care. We just want to, you know, make this drug, cash out and have a big payout. And it's like, no, no, no, no. So, so. So, so. With that said, I, Zeus, have been looking towards other ways to get funding.

And I've been looking towards things like, you know, virtual reality companies and companies that are focused on gaming, which is heavily into perception. So that's where I'm looking for funding is companies that are outside of the psychedelic space. but are focused on perception, like virtual reality, like gaming. You know, so that's where I'm, that's who I'm talking to. And I got to give a shout out to SubPack, which is a great company. They are also focused on perception. And we've been talking for a couple weeks.

And I think they may get on board with some great psychedelic research. So shout out to SubPak for even considering my research as a topic of their investment. Yeah. Yeah, they sound like an incredible company. And the fact that they are on board with someone who's so forward thinking like yourself makes me want to investigate them even more. It makes me want to tell all my friends to investigate them. So yeah, they're dope, man. They're really cool.

Yeah. What is the relationship? Like, it seems to me that sometimes, you know, if we take Apple's new product where you strap on these goggles, it almost seems like they're trying to simulate. psychedelic trip what is the relationship between psychedelics and gaming that is literally uh what i'm using in my research um so uh let's so virtual reality you always hear about that you know virtual reality VR uh but there is this sort of bigger term called extended reality um or xr um and extended reality is basically just an umbrella term to sort of put in everything like virtual reality, like augmented reality, mixed reality, any other sort of versions of, you know, augmentation

of reality is extended reality. And about a few weeks, maybe three weeks ago, a company called HTC released this fantastic headset. called the HTC XR Elite, which is a fantastic headset that is an extended reality headset. And it is top of the game, wild stuff, even more impressive than Apple's announcement, to be honest with you. And so we just got that headset in our lab about like a week ago. about a couple weeks ago. And it is incredible.

What am I doing with a, you know, VR slash XR headset and DMT? I wish I could tell you. Me too. But I'm under so many NDA agreements that I cannot go into it. But I will say this, that when it comes to psychedelics,

LSD, MDMA, they really augment areas of our reality, you know, like, for example, you know, you take, you drop LSD and all of a sudden, a orange table is purple or it's like rippling like an ocean or whatever, you know, or the walls are drifting, you know, but it's still an augmentation of our existing reality, right? But with DMT, it's wild. Your eyes can be open or closed, and it doesn't sort of take away from this field of vision that's being presented to you. And this field of vision doesn't even take the information from our own reality. It just presents it in front of us, almost.

almost like a pharmacological virtualized reality. That's all I'm going to say. That's all I'm going to say. Oh, man. You know, it reminds me of the long period, the long, I don't know if that's the right word. There was a study a while back. I'm sure you're familiar with it.

Maybe it was at Kings or somewhere, but they were doing the ivy drip of DMT for a prolonged state to become aware of not only the environment, but the entity is there. And then you read Andrew Gilmore's book about mapping the territory of DMT. You know, it makes my imagination run wild about what you guys are doing over there. It makes me really, really jealous. I'm excited for you guys, though, man. Yeah.

Well, I mean, look, it's, it's, it's, I mean, I mean, yeah, it's, it's, it's, honestly, I wake up every day and I'm like, oh my gosh, I can't believe I'm doing this every single day. But yeah, that study was from Imperial College London. And I believe the lead, I believe the, the, the PI of that, I think is Chris Timmerman, which is a fantastic scientist from Imperial College. Shout out to Chris Timmerman. We definitely hung out before. But yeah, he's a great scientist. And yeah, they're looking at this prolonged.

state or they call it extended state dm t and uh thank you thank you i couldn't yeah yeah and uh what i mean i think the most fan the most fantastic thing about that research is the fact that they found that in order for a dm t state to actually be prolonged and extended sort of cross to sort of, you know, cross the threshold or whatever. Right. Okay. You have to give a bolus injection in the beginning and then prolong that. So what's a bolus injection? It's just a big injection of DMT, a big hit.

It's so dependent on a big, huge injection or a big huge hit, which is interesting. In the pharmacological sense, there are substances and pharmaceuticals that also operate on the same principle of in order for this thing to be active, you have to give a big injection first and then sort of prolong it. Whereas, so for example, with something like LSD, you know, you don't have to give a big inject, a big shot, a big sort of hit of LSD to have the effects. You just take a tab and you're filling the effects. But specifically with DMT, you have to give that big bolus injection right in the beginning. And then of course, Terrence McKenna back in the day, he sort of had this figured out. He's like, look, man, in order for you to break through, you have to have three big hits. And by the third hit, the like walls are going to be rippling, but you have to take that third hit.

And Terrence McKenna was right. He's, he's right. You have to have a big hit in the beginning so that you could sort of have that prolonged state or that extended state. Yeah. There's so much fascinating research being done. And it's amazing to think about. I'm curious to think about when I think about gaming and I think about psychedelics. I think about the storyline of games.

And I think a lot of those games are built on. you know, classic ideas like the hero's journey or maybe Nietzsche's the camel to the child, you know, but these these things that are ingrained in us that we understand like the call to adventure refusing the call, the threshold guardian. And those can kind of be experienced in a game and you can get fulfilled in that way. But those seem to be myths that are from the, from the, you know, the Greek and the Western traditions. And I, I've read some interesting mythologies from native communities where they don't really have the same thoughts on trauma or fear or in their mythologies, the person that was the villain becomes a to. or maybe it becomes a monument and they're still revered.

I'm wondering, it's a two-part question. What is mythology in voodoo like? Is there mythology in voodoo? And are you able to use those sort of mythological structures to incorporate in some of the work you're doing now, whether it's gaming or maybe you use that sort of story to move your life forward? Yeah, no, great question. So in voodoo, yeah, there is.

I would say less mythology more, I mean, no, there is mythology in voodoo. You know, there are certain, so I would say the definition of mythology would be a consistent cast of characters that have influence over our reality, right? For example, Roman mythology, you have, you know, the Roman, Greek, you know, the Roman gods, of course, Greek. So, and of course, you know, other mythology. So, yeah, a consistent cast of characters that have influence of our reality. And in Creo Voodoo, there is a consistent cast of characters. But these, this, they don't, they don't interact with our reality in sort of unseen ways. Like how in sort of most mythologies you have.

you know, this crop didn't grow because Demeter was angry or something. You know, whatever. But in Creole Voodoo, these entities, these, you know, deities, they're actually brought forth in our reality through a conjuring of a person. And for example,

so let's say, for example, example, there's a, you know, there's sort of a, you know, domestic dispute that's happening in a community, right? And they're, you know, beef, you know, whatever want to call it. And they call in one of the town elders, right? And usually it's like an older guy or a girl, you know, it doesn't matter. It's sort of ginger doesn't. So in order for this entity to be conjured, you have to have to have. you have to have a setting for this entity to reside in.

So there's this one entity that you conjure where you have to have a top hat. You have to have a glass of like an alcohol or some type of like spirit, you know, whatever. And you have to put it on a table. You have to have a feather that's on the chair. And if you don't have any of these things, then when the actually actually, elder comes in, that entity won't be conjured into that person. And then let's say you do have all of these elements. You have the top hat. You have the class of like whiskey or whatever. You have the feather. Yeah. In the table, they sit, they sit down

on the feather, you know, whatever. And they sort of, you know, they have this conjuring. And it's a very physically demanding violent thing that you see. You, you like, you know, see a person comport themselves. You're doing, you're doing all this stuff. And then this person who was a seemingly regular person before is talking in a very funny accent, doing weird things, saying wild stuff that's accepted by all, because all people see that that person who walked into the door isn't that person anymore. That person that we saw is gone. And he or she has, been replaced by a entity that only exists in this sort of spiritual world or whatever, but coming down to help us humans with the problem.

So how does that translate to psychedelics? That's the ultimate question. And that's or gaming, you know. So, you know, psychedelics does this thing, and it's a very consistent thing. It allows us to be more susceptible. to things, you know? You know, sort of more, our suggestibility is increased, you know, ideas that were once thought of as, like, ridiculous before,

all of a sudden, they're like, man, I can see that, you know, or whatever, you know. Yeah. So when it comes, so here's the thing. So I envision a future. where gaming gets to the point where we've gone past, you know, the improvement of graphics and, you know, just, you know, the uncanny valley traced and, yeah, we've gone past the uncanny valve. We've gone past that. We've, we have also realistic imagery, whatever engine, Unreal 8 by that time. It's just perfect, right?

but I envision a future of psychedelics in which we get to that point, we cross that uncanny valley, but in order for our brains to fully immerse ourselves in whatever gaming world is being created, whatever virtualized experiences being given, perhaps you have to increase that susceptibility with a pharmacological means, which could be that you have to take a dose of a psychedelic light compound in order to prepare your brain to experience whatever game you're playing. I love it. That sounds like so much fun.

Yeah. I mean, just imagine like playing like whatever on like LSD, you know, like a legend of Zelda on like mushrooms like this. That's amazing. But yeah, I foresee that element being incorporated. it not only gaming, but any immersive experience that we encounter. And also, I want to say that. Wow.

Wow. It's the first time I have, this is the first time that I've put that together. Thank you for explaining it in that way, because I've never been able to see this thing that people talk about, but this is the first time I have. It was really well, really well put. Thank you. I cut you off, though.

I'm sorry. No, no, no. That was it, basically. Yeah. That was it. It's fascinating. to me. I think that seeing it from that angle is almost, I can see the promise of it. I can see the beauty of it. And I couldn't see that before. So this is, this part alone is really wild to me.

It is wild. It is amazing to think about the potential of, of gaming or altered perception or living in another dimension in a weird sort of way is what's allowing you to do. if only every funder and financial investor can have your vision, that epiphany that you just had, yeah, I wish they would have that. So they would say, Zeus, here you go. Here's your funding. Let's make it happen. Let's increase, you know, eight subjects to a hundred subjects.

Here's the money. Let's make it happen. If only they had your vision. Well, it's your, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, Thank you for sharing it. And look, I think that slow at first and then all at once, right? Being able to translate vision into reality is not something a lot of people can do. But if I can get it, I think that it's resonating.

But I don't think I would have got it unless you explain to me the idea of the voodoo mythology. Like, I think that that should be incorporated in the write-up right there. You know what I mean? Yeah. I think it's a big part of it because when you were talking about the voodoo mythology and psychedelics, and all of a sudden I started seeing like somatic therapy. You know, they talk about someone being a container. And that sounds a lot like what the person is that gets that sort of download or something like that.

Like, you know, it's very, you can almost start to change that language around to be synonymous a little bit. And I think it's also important that people who want to see that vision have maybe, had some really either traumatic experiences or some big psychedelic experiences, probably both would be better. But I think in high dose psychedelic experiences, people that have what are termed as breakthroughs or, you know, in my example, I remember, I'll tell you a funny story. At least I think it's funny. I was a UPS driver for a long time. And you have a lot of time, even though you're delivering package, you're talking to tons of people, you're by yourself all day long, so you have time to think about stuff.

And I was, I had left work, I had left my house and I was on my way to work. I went to work. I grabbed my rig and I'm driving to my first stop and my phone starts blowing up. You know, and it's like, I look at it and it's my wife and I'm like, oh, wait until I pull over it. But she calls twice and I'm like, that's the code. Okay, there's a problem. What's up, love?

And she's like, George, is there something you want to tell me? And I'm like, oh, I love you. You know what? I'm like, love you? And she's like, no, is there something you're hiding or something? I'm like, no, gorgeous, I love you. I got nothing to hide. We solved all that.

You know what I mean? I love you. I got nothing to hide. I've been nothing. Why? She's like, well, some people from like the FBI showed up at the door and they were really forceful and they're looking for you and you're in deep shit. And I was like, and I'm thinking,

to myself like, shut up. What the FBI? Get the hell out of here with that. What I did? I'm like, damn truck driver. I started thinking of things.

And I'm like, man, I ordered like six copies of technological slavery from Ted Kaczynski. I wonder if that's what. You know, they don't care about that. Like,

you know, and then I'm like, bought a bunch of weed. No, not that. And as I'm, this is all happening in like a split second. And then my phone blows up

and like it's this other caller. And I'm like, okay and she's like they said that they're going to call you and I was like oh I think they're calling right now so I hang up with my wife and I'm still contemplating stuff phones blowing up right and like I just I just go straight to voicemail blows up straight to voicemail blows up straight to voicemail and I'm like I guess I better answer this and I like I didn't really have anything to hide so I wasn't really afraid to answer out I'm a little nervous to get that call and so I pull over my truck and they're like mr. Monti I'm like yes this is george this is agent so-and-so with FBI I just went to your

house. I really need to talk to you. It's very important. And I'm like, what's this about? He's like, I, I prefer to tell you over the phone. In fact, you know what? I'm like, Jesus Christ. Okay. All right. Yeah, you want to meet me? How about Saturday? He's like, no, no, today. How about I come to your work? And I'm like, that's a horrible idea. Don't come to my work. How about you meet me on my route? And they're like, okay, I'm going to be at this spot at this time. And so, you know, I'm nervous. I'm zooking out thinking like, Okay, I didn't do anything. I got nothing. Let's go talk to these guys.

And so I meet them at the spot. And these two guys show up, you know, and they jump out and they had like this black binder. And they come up to me and they're like, Mr. Monta, I'm all yeah. And they show me this black binder. And we would like you to look at all these pictures here and see if you notice any of these people. So I'm looking through the binder. And I'm like, nope. And I'm becoming painfully aware that they're just staring at me while I'm looking through this binder.

You know what? I'm like, okay, are they just looking at me? Like, you know, I don't know anybody in these binders. And so, you know, I'm, I'm aware, like, really aware that they're just staring at me. So I handed back the binder, I'm like, I don't know any of these people, man. I have no idea what you're talking about. And they're like, well, then maybe you can explain how this guy has your identification card. And I'm like, I started thinking for a minute.

And I go, oh, you know what? I was pickpocketed at the mall like three months ago, man. And like all the air just comes out of these guys. And they're like, are you sure? And I'm like, yeah, I'm sure. I'm like, you know what? You can get that you can get like the cam from Nordstrom's because the guy tried to buy a watch and I figured it out. So they have a cam on there.

And so the reason that the reason that story is important is because that weekend I came home and did like a giant dose of mushrooms. And it was a weird. You know what I mean? And so, but the experience of having like these FBI guys wanting me and thinking that I was like this mastermind criminal, it was something that I stayed on my mind for a few days. And I just, I really played with it. And then during that deep trip, I was like, wow, man, these guys thought that I was like this master criminal or something. But more than that, in their mind, I was.

And then in that trip, I was like, why don't you be? You could be. They thought you were. You know what? They thought you were. Why can't you be? Why is that being George, the UPS driver? why don't you be George the master criminal?

You know, and this whole, yeah, dude, like this whole trip. And it was like a good one, man, like time distorting, seeing myself. And then the idea came, what kind of crime would you do? Well, it wouldn't be something dumb like that guy did. You know what? I'd probably, you'd have to think about this. But it would probably be some sort of white collar crime, some sort of Robin Hood style, you know. And I just went in depth.

And for like a good hour, I was this other person. And when I came out of that trip, like, you know, it changed the way I saw the world. I didn't become a master criminal, but I did bring back this ability to visualize myself. And when you and I spoke about visualizing how your brain can't tell the difference between something that happens and something you vividly imagine. And for me, like, it was one of those ones where you bring something back. And I was like, holy shit, I could be something totally different than I am. And I could do it today. I could start it today. And so I think the reason like I started bringing up that point is that you know,

you can begin to have if once you have that experience of seeing yourself differently, that's the experience that that the game, the thing, the relationship between psychedelics and the game could do for people. But I think it's an experience that someone that wanted to be investor should have knowledge of. Because that's the same time, like what you're doing provides people with that kind of transformative experience that could fundamentally change their life. It could change mental illness. It could change everything and it could gamify it.

Like it's, what you're doing is magical. And that's what I see the vision of it there. But thanks for letting me share that story, man. Great story, man. Great story. That sounds like an amazing experience. I bet you were super relieved too whenever you.

Yeah, yeah. It was a trip, man. It was a trip. It sounds like it. Did your wife believe you when you said that? Like, did she believe you or did she still think that you were up to something? No, she believed me. Like when you said what happened?

Okay. Yeah, because she's like, and then I called her back afterwards. And she's like, dude, what happened? Why is the FBI coming here? Like, you know? And I'm like, dude, they got the wrong guy. and she's like you know there was like this moment of like they got the wrong guy obviously they got the wrong guy but why

how do they know that the wrong guy and so for there was this and that played a part in it too it was like even my wife for a minute thought I was like this different person you know and it and any sort of transform be it a mystical experience be it a psychedelic experience having everyone around you look at you different and sometimes that's the case of paranoia too right Like, hey, everyone thinks on this person, that's why people freak out sometimes.

But those are all connected, I think, right there. There's something to be said about that kind of transformation that happens. And it would be interesting to see what's happening in the brain when that happens. Yeah, I totally agree. And it's something, look, I mean, it's something that I'm actively researching. I'm researching the perception, visual perception, while on DMT. I'm using FNIRS, Functional Neers,

which is you, it's basically using the power of light to look at the brain and brain activity, which is a very clever way of how they do it. It's incredible. And I'm also looking at people that are in VR, and I'm basically giving people DMT and putting them inside VR.

And looking at the brains. Okay, so are there similar parts of the brain that are lighting up in those two experiences? Yeah. So I would say, so I'm focused almost entirely on the visual cortex, you know, like vision, basically. And the reason why is because with DMT and, of course, with VR, the single sort of distinct factor is vision. Like with DMT, you're having a visual trip. Yeah. With, you know, VR experience, obviously, it's very visual.

Yeah, there's some auditory components to it. Yeah. But I also want to say that, like, I also want to throw this too, you know, like, what, okay, so since I'm focused on vision, you know, I have to look at the inverse of that. And for example, a person that's congenitally blind, right, is a person that was born without vision. A person that has gone their entire lives, never experiencing any visual information. And these people exist. They're everywhere. They're fantastic people too.

But what happens when a person that was born blind does psychedelics, like LSD? Do they have a visual experience? And the answer is, They don't. But they have auditory experiences, and they have tactile, which are touching experiences. And there's a great case report of a guy that was born blind. He took a really big hit of LSD at a party. He was with friends.

And you know how when you take LSD, you always, there's this sort of thing that happens where you look at a person's face or you look at your own face and you see your face. and you see your face melt and drip. You're like, oh, my gosh. It's a very common thing, you know. Yeah, yeah. So this person that was blind, born blind, he was on LSD. He was at a party, you know, with his friends.

And he walked up to one of his friends and how blind people sort of discern details is they touch it, right? They touch things like eye, you know, hands. and they see a person who's this size or healthy, whatever. But they also touch faces as well to see the detail, the fine details of a person's face. And this person that was born blind when he touched his friend's face, he felt that his friend's face was melting. Whoa.

He felt that the actual face was like falling down and he was like sort of rearranging the details of the face, the same experience that you would get visually. He had that, but it was tactile. It was through touch. Amazing, right? Unbelievable. Yeah.

Yeah. So what does that say? That says that, that says a lot. That says way too much to even talk about here. But it says that the, it says a lot. But I think particularly it, it, tells us that the LSD experience, at least, well, really all the sort of experiences of all psychedelics, but specifically this LSD experience, there are things that are unifying,

whereas you can have an entire sensory modality removed like vision and still have an LSD experience that has the same properties, the same attributes as a person with vision. So, wow, there's, that's such an amazing field or that's such an amazing area to begin to become curious about is what is that experience like for someone who doesn't have that particular sense, you know, or that or that ability and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, and, maybe you could learn more about the sense of vision from someone who's never seen. Like, boy, you, like, that's crazy, right? Like, it's beautiful in so many ways. Yes. And, and that's what I'm talking about is that, remember that, that, um, sort of, um, example that I gave to you earlier with the person that

was looking at the sort of brain activity and they're like, they just put it away because it's like whatever. We can learn a lot from vision from the lack thereof of vision. And that's something that we should really look at, especially when it comes to psychedelic augmentations of our brain and how people experience a trip. And that's the one great thing about psychedelics is, yeah, it's going to lead to, you know, therapeutic benefits and all this stuff. but it's going to help us understand the brain better based on how sort of chaotic the brain, you know, goes to whenever we're on psychedelics.

What's important? What isn't important? What happens when we do this, when we do that? So we'll, and if we can understand our brain better, then, I mean, I mean, it's the, the potential is unlimited. we can improve how we organize thoughts and memory and and temperability and and extensions of reality and all just stuff that we can't even stuff that we aren't sophisticated enough to even understand will unravel from our understanding of the brain and psychedelics. Yeah. And see, this is like this. I think you and your team and a handful of other people are like 10 steps ahead of the current understanding.

If we look at the way in which cannabis was rolled out in a way to achieve monetary gains or in a way to privatize profits, if we look at cannabis that way, it had the exact opposite effect. It just drove prices into the ground. And I think you can make the same case for a lot of the psychedelic companies that are coming out now and trying to become, you know, like the the micropreneur, Dennis Walker, does really funny videos too. That's awesome. But he hits it on the head like, okay, you know, if you're using it to try and create profits to see the future, it's probably not going to work. But, you know, I think that what does work and what the next people that want to invest. invest in it are going to do is they are going to see that the way forward is sort of optimization instead of healing. You know, healing is great. And healing is something that, you know, it can be done.

And maybe they're barking up the wrong tree. Maybe if the real fortunes want to be made, they're made in discovering modalities of understanding that we haven't yet figured out. And I don't know why that's so hard for people to invest in. Like, look, here's a field that's not, it's a wide open field, man. It's a blue ocean strategy. You know, yeah, I totally agree. And you have to ask yourself and ask, heck, man, you could ask other people. Yeah.

Why did you take psychedelics, your first ever LSD trip? Was it to help your anxiety or was it to trip out and see some wild stuff? Yeah, yeah. I mean, come on. Like we cannot forget this very, you know, this complete sort of, I don't know what I'm saying. I'm at a loss of words. Origin of psychedelics, this sort of innate origin that we all, almost all of us, begin our pursuit on psychedelics for the perceptual aspects of psychedelics,

not for the therapeutic aspects. The first time I did shrooms, I wasn't thinking, oh, I got to fix my depression. It was Friday night. I'm in my friend's basement. And I'm like, bro, I want to do these shrooms because I want to do some wild stuff. That's how we first began. But somehow we've sort of forgotten or like lost that sort of this, you know, sort of pioneering perceptual spirit that we all had when we first got into psychedelics.

And I am the person that's saying. to the rest of the world, no, bro. Let's remember why we all got into psychedelics for the first time. And that is for the perceptual aspects of the substance. Yeah, I think it's in some ways it's been conditioned out of us. Like, oh, you guys, do you use this stuff? Can you use it for this. You know what I mean?

It almost seems like we're weaponizing fragility in a way. Like, you know what I mean by that? like everybody's got a trauma and everybody's fragile and like, hey, we're going to use this at work for production because you got these problems. And like it's, it's a, it's a, I want to, it's, I would say a symptom of the sickness, but it's probably better to say it's a direct reflection of the people who are trying to privatize it or profitize it, you know, and I, I think it speaks to the larger question of medicine. Like, why are we studying sick people? Like, maybe we should be, be studying what is possible.

Because if you can study the brain that is performing on this level, that is imagining these things, won't the answers to these things down here become obvious? Instead of just, you know, if you focus on, if it's true that you, you, what you focus on, you feel, we're spending a lot of time focusing on problems and not a whole lot of time on solutions, man. Man, and the reason why we are spending so much time scientifically on focusing on problems is because focusing on problems is where the cash is at. That's how you get your funding and that's how you get the financial backing of companies because people have, because it's going to sound crazy to say this, but it's true. yeah the sort of pioneering spirit of psychedelics is very important in science but what's

really what's really backing science it's going to say what's backing psychedelic science at least it's going to sound well i'm going to say this but it's capitalism is the primary driver of psychedelic research. And that means that with capitalism, we do things like build products, things, we sell things

to people to fix other things. That is the sort of basis of capitalism. And that's where the psychedelic renaissance is. It's a very capitalistic lens of these

psychedelics, oh, you use these when you were a kid to trip in your friend's living room. Okay, well, let's just take that aspect out of it. Let's take the trip out of it. And let's just focus on how these psychedelics can help with depression because that is the product that can be sold. And that's going to solve this issue of people being depressed. But that is so unfortunate. And you brought up something that was tremendously.

disturbing in a good way. Awesome. You said that like how people are doing stuff like, you know, doing things like LSD to be more productive

at work. It's so disturbing, right? It's so disturbing. Just imagine like the entire psychedelic experience has been reduced to how these substances can help us be productive

because it's basically, you know, pushed with a capitalistic engine. and that's where we are right now. So I'm so excited we're talking about this because to me, one of the things I really love about this podcast is getting to talk to people

and then having new ideas emerge or getting to see patterns. And as we've been talking, I feel like we've been building to this and this thing just kind of exploded in my mind. And it's this psychedelics is currently backed by capitalism today the way computers were backed by capitalism before Apple came out.

Like there's no visionary yet. There's no one that has, you know, maybe was brought up in voodoo and is now exploding onto the scene. There's no Steve Jobs. There's no real person yet that has said, we're going to create this commercial where all these IBM guys just fall off a cliff

because it's stupid. But I can see this new thing beginning to emerge where I could see a similar commercial and this might be a sick commercial for a new gaming company. is to have all like these old guys just falling off a cliff the way the first Apple commercial came out. You know what I mean? It's like it would be an homage to creation in a weird sort of way.

Just cyclical in a, you know, in a helical moving up model, which is super funny to me. But, you know, and maybe there's another great book that adds to what I'm saying here. And it's called The Fourth Turning. And in that book, they talk about generational trauma. They talk about the way in which different generations move through that. that helical pattern. And it seems to me that the capitalism we are kind of having today is a boomer capitalism. It seems that what we're struggling with in today's world, be it Ukraine or, you know, high priority fossil fuel extraction or it seems that we're struggling under the weight

of antiquated ideas. And that is a direct reflection of the boomer generation dying. And what I mean by that is if you look at the boomers, the Xers, the millennials, if you just look at us all as one body, a giant portion of our body is dying. And it's very difficult when anything in your body begins to die. There's unrealized dreams. There is, you know, body parts that don't work anymore. And I think that as this part of us begins to embrace the mortality experience, this new part of us is beginning to express itself. It's like the torch is being passed. And when I talk to you and you have these ideas about like, hey, wouldn't it be great if we studied medicine this way? Hey, what if we had this spark? Hey, you know why everybody did this in the beginning? It's like this is what is emerging.

You know, there's a great quote that I that I say sometimes and it says, and the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom. And I think that that is what we're beginning to see is that the risk to stay here, the risk to have this form of capitalism, the risk to put all of our money into mental health and just cringe and hope we can patent this thing. Like it doesn't work. And it's becoming too painful where you have to blossom into new areas. And that's the blue ocean strategy.

That's the new field. Like that's what I see after having this conversation with you. After having this talk and going back and remembering your things, threads the same way you remembered your friends conference like i'm seeing these things emerge like and it's just it gets clear and clear it makes me so stoked for the future because i think that if you can speak something into the existence and the conversations you have with your team the other people for some reason it seems that europe the netherlands and the different colleges over there you know you have denver and oregon and canada on just seems to be on another level right now with

psychedelic experience. Jamaica, but there's these really hotbeds that are beginning to reshape the patterns that we have been so accustomed to. I don't know, it's kind of a shot at the backdrop.

What do you think? Yeah, man. So, and yeah, I like love that that sort of breakdown of the body sort of pushing away the old,

the sort of atrophy part and sort of rebut. It's very, very nice. Death and rebirth. Thank you. Yeah. So when it comes to these sort of hotbeds of psychedelic science, I do have to say that when it comes to actual human research of psychedelics, that's very difficult to do in other places of the planet, which is the reason why we have so much research on things like rats and mice. You really don't have a lot of human research. the really the only consistent human research that you have in psychedelics is here,

Master of University in Holland, University of Zurich in Switzerland, and Imperial College in England, London. So, and when it comes to perceptual scientists or perceptual science in psychedelics, there's really only two people that are doing perceptual psychedelic science. It's myself and, um, Katrin Puehler at the University of Zurich. And I've been talking to Katzrin Puehler for years. And she, I believe Katrin Puehler is top 10 scientists on the planet when it comes to psychedelics.

We'll actually be hanging out in Denver. And I'll see if I can get a picture, because, you know, just for the sort of history books, right? Yeah. But, but yeah. So, and why would I, why would a guy from California come all the way out here? That's the ultimate question. Well, in America, as I've said before, the sort of whole, the sort of whole focus on psychedelic research is how psychedelics can be beneficial. Whereas here in Europe, we have a little better, wider latitude to look at things like creativity or look at things like person.

perception, which isn't, these aren't sort of topics in America because America is so focused on the pharmaceutical constructs of how these things can help out. Whereas here in Europe, I mean, perhaps it's because Europe has a sort of longer history and they've sort of figured out a lot of stuff that America hasn't. But they're just like, hey, man, if you want to, you know, give people DMT and put him inside VR, have be my guess. And there's like, it's just being here in Holland, and of course in Switzerland, but, but speaking for a person that's from California coming out here, you can really, really feel this sort of attitude of, of, of like, of like relaxed ideas on life and on like for example, here, you know, like I said, human reasons.

One of, I think only three places on the planet that consistently do human research was secondals. We've been doing it since 1982 with cannabis. Wow. Driving in cannabis, 19802. But just overall, like out here things operate differently. There's like coffee shops everywhere. Right. You can, you know, post up with your laptop, have a joint and do your thing.

There's also, you know, shops where you could buy just shroom. Shrooms. You could just walk into a place, buy truffles, buy shrooms, you know, and just walk out of it without any sort of thing, you know? There's even like delivery services where you can order whatever substance you want, LSD, MDMA, amphetamines, whatever, and it gets sent to you within 24 hours. Deliver to your doorstep. There is, there are things like, you know, you know the red light district um right legalized sex work which is something that's important too you know and and there's even things like assisted deaths like there's only two places on the planet that each that actually have assisted deaths which is the option to in your own life if you've come to the

point in your life in which you wanted to end that only exists here and i believe in belgium or maybe switzerland i think it's here in switzerland actually uh or maybe here's from belgium Anyways, there's few places on the planet that have this. So it's the attitude of life here that push me to relocate myself from Los Angeles to Maastricht in Holland. And I wake up every day and I'm blown away that I even have the opportunity to conduct this research. It's really, really cool stuff. Man, I think you just inspired a thousand people to listen to this to try to get on the, get on the, the train or get on the plane or get on both of them and end up over there.

It's so awesome. I'm glad you found the fortitude and the courage to take that chance to do it. Was there ever a question? I mean, were you ever, like, felt like you were held there? Did you have some ideas? Like, I don't know. It's kind of far away. Or was it just like, this is the one I'm doing it?

I mean, look, man, it's something that wasn't easy to get here. Sure. In the sense that, you know, you first off, in order to get to be a PhD candidate, you know, they get thousands of applications from across the world every single like month or whatever. So you have to stand out. Sure. And you have to show that you're able to do this research. Show that you are, you understand science.

So it was difficult to get to the point to even have a conversation. with like Kim Cooper's Jan Raymakers, which are the top people in psychedelic science. They've been doing it for a very long time. So to even have that conversation was difficult, you know, to get them. And it took a lot of emails, lots of calling this person,

that person, to just this symbol of conversation. But then once you get to the conversation, once you get the actual Zoom call, you have to, you aren't talking to like your friend about psychedelics. You're talking to the top scientists about psychedelics. And you have to show that you belong in the same department as them.

You know? So look, man, it wasn't like I pushed a button and they're like, yes, I did tons of calls. I think I counted like 12 total Zoom conference calls with other scientists, with Kim, with Jan, with Bettina. I even did like presentations about my ideas, about overall science, about imaging, about the brain, about hemodynamics, which is how blood in the brain travels. Like all of this stuff in order for them to say, you know what, Zeus, you belong at our lab. And that was so, but I got to say this, though, to everybody that is trying to, you know, get to that point. I probably get to a point where you want to be a part of the psychedelic scene. I got to say, man, that even though the odds were tremendously against me,

at every single step, I believed almost to a sense of delusion that I was going to get it. And you have to have this belief in yourself that. strong that it's almost to the point of delusion where you have to tell yourself consistently that don't hope to get to the point, but tell yourself you belong there. You are there. You belong there. The only thing that you have to do is show people that you are in fact on par with them and on their level. That's all you have to do. So, but that, belief in yourself for some is so hard because in you know western society in all society you're you're told to be humble like to be humble and yes you have to be humble for sure but if you want

something you have to believe that you're already there you have to have this delusional self sense of yourself and perhaps i acquired that from doing a lot of lsd i have no idea but that is a that's a absolute attribute that you have to have in order to get to the next step and whatever you want to do. That's it. Yeah. Bravo. Well said. It's, you know, if you don't have the belief in yourself, why would anybody believe you?

That's so important. Yeah. And it is. It's hard because you do, you know, an unreal. Realistic belief in yourself is sometimes an incredibly powerful thing regardless and especially when people around you are telling you're not. I agree 100%. It's hard to be humble and you're the best.

I will take that. I will take that. I know. I share, I think I share that with you in a lot of ways. I am. So as we're talking about the way in which science is done, and we're talking about rats and stuff, how accurate. I guess I have a two-part rat question.

And my two-part rat question is, how reliable is a rat head twitch, you know, number one. And number two, I was talking to a young woman from, I was talking to this young woman, and she had mentioned to me that prior to her deciding to do. change the area she was studying, she was working in a lab where she was trying to change the conditioning of rats to PTSD. And she explained the experiment this way. The experiment was, first off, you breed a certain set of mice. And if they don't, the ones that fit the parameters, certain age, certain weight, use those. The other ones, you kill them. And once you have the rats that you need, you're going to shock them and electrocute

them, play a tone, almost like a Pavlovian conditioning. And you shock them tone, shock them tone, until you no longer need to shock them, you just play the tone and they cringe up that way. Once you've done that, now you can begin to try and disassociate the tone from the shocking behavior. And she said that it was such a, you know, incredibly horrific experience to do science that way

that she decided to change. Like, what am I doing? And the question, the question, I bring that up. So the second question is, can we really get good, reliable science that can change things in a positive way by building a foundation of horrific science like that. So the first question is rathead twitch.

The second is, are immoral experiments giving us immoral answers like SSRIs and stuff like that? Yeah, no, I mean, those are definitely, that's definitely a concerning thing. And it's something that I think about. And just for everybody out there, I'm actually vegan. I've been vegan for about 10 years. And I also have conducted animal research. And I remember one time I was a, this is a very traumatic time in my. So when I was an undergrad, I think I was a junior.

And we had this really cool study where we were looking at rats and their spatial perception whenever a part of their brain gets like, you know, taken out. not taken out, but sort of reduced. And in order to make this happen, you have to, in order to give the injections to the rats, you have to put them under with lytocaine, basically. Which is, you know, and of course, you do that,

you have to take the rat, you take them from their little cage or their little sort of box, put them down, and you put the lydicane inside this, like, little table. You put a orb on top of them, and then this light,

or, um, thorazine, sorry, this um, thorazine, sort of goes out and it sort of, you know, makes them fall asleep. And then you inject laticane in the left or the right cheek, and then that sort of dulls their perception. And you put him from the middle.

But one time I gave a rat too much thorazine. And I'm not even making this up, man. I was so concerned about this rat's, like, safety and this rat's life that he wouldn't wake up. So I was giving the rat CPR with my two fingers, giving this rat CPR. And I was panicking, bro. I was panicking.

Not that like, because rats die all the time, you know. Right. That just happens. Every single animal study that uses psychedelics and rats. After the study, all the rats are killed. Right. That's just a fact. But in this incident, I was so concerned about a mistake that I made that caused a death.

But I was giving the rat CPR and then, you know, the rat comes back to life. and a whew, you know. But this one thing that is concerning, yeah, animals. And also, you know, this is sort of a sort of secret that you don't really hear about in science

is that in every university, every single one, across the entire planet where you do animal research, the animal laboratory is always hidden. Always. Every single university, it's always hidden. The actual building is hidden.

And not only hidden, but if you do get access to it, it's hard to get inside of the building. You have to have an access code. You have to have type of thing. You have to do all this stuff. But the buildings are always hidden. And the reason why they're hidden is because, yeah, it is a sort of dark mark on science that we're breeding very specific rats to put. them into rigorous experiments and ultimately kill them. But how is that any different from a person

eating a burger at Burger King or a person eating chicken at Chick-fil-A? I mean, really, you would think that actually having a rat go through an experiment and for science to understand something that we didn't do it, or that we didn't understand is actually better than a cow dying because somebody wanted to have a late night snack because they were too stone. Like, it's almost better to have their deaths go towards science than their deaths goes towards, you know, somebody's plate of food. So I'm going to get back to the animal research. How can that translate to psychedelic science?

And so you brought up a head twitch. Now, for people that don't understand what it is, the head twitch is how scientists, assess the sort of subjective or the trip of a substance when a animal takes it, when a rat or a, you know,

a rodent takes it. We see this head twitch that happens. It's like, and it's like, okay, the rat's tripping, you know, now it's time to do whatever. But the question is, do we have, do, you know, so if rats head twitch do humans head twitch,

and it's a question that I was talking to Rob McCarhard Harris a few months ago about it and he's like he brought that back question he's like do we have evidence that humans have head twitches and right now we don't which doesn't say that that isn't that human you know that rats but it's just that we don't have that evidence that humans do a head twitch but going a little bit deeper into psychedelics we the reason why we use rats and like rodents it's because we can do things to them that we can't do to humans we could right sort of block entire systems and entire parts of the brain and have their you know block you know serotonin receptors and all these other receptors that we can't do it because we can't get the

ethical approval to you know turn up a person's dorsal medial hypothyroidalness or whatever that's ridiculous but we can do it with animals but the re the here's the weird thing This is where I think it gets really weird. So we do things. We don't even have to give rats placebo. Really. I mean, we really don't. Because the rat or the rodent doesn't really have an expectation.

It's just there. It's doing something. It's just like finding food. It has a purpose. It has a task. It's doing something. And we're recording the data. And we're seeing the rat or the rodent go to this point,

go to that point, and we just take that science for what it is. But, and we say that by doing so, we sort of take out this thing called expectancy effect, which with humans, if you give a person LSD, they expect that something's going to happen. It's hard to have a double, you know, a double blind study because it's like, it's difficult. You know, what are you going to do? But with rats is different, right? with rodents is different because they're just trying to get the piece of cheese or the street or whatever, you know, or not get shocked. Yeah.

But how do we perhaps, and this is a very hypothetical thing, what if rodents have a culture in which they understand that they are going to be augmented with psychedelics? And what if they have an expectancy effect? We don't really know that. So we believe that rodents are born. We, like, breathe them, and there is very specific genotype and this and that. And it's like, okay, this is the type 465 rat, right? But what if, and we keep the rats in this huge sort of area with other rats and everything and rodents and everything. But what if, and this is hypothetical, what if these like rodents are talking to each other, communicating, saying, hey, you know, I'd had this one study and I was tripping out, but I got cheese at the end or I had this or have that.

What if there's some type of like rodent communication happening while where we store all these rodents that they're just talking to each other through ways that we aren't sophisticated enough to understand? and they're just sharing data, which is increasing in expectancy effect. Or they're saying, hey, you know, when you get out there, you have to take a right and then a left or else you get shot. So remember that.

And then we take this and we're like, oh, well, the rat took a right and the left. So that means that this, this and that. What if they're just talking to each other? What if there's an actual communication happening with these rodents? We do not know that. We don't have no idea. So I think that's something that we should really look at

if we knew how to look at. at it. Yeah, I think that there's some kind of evidence for that. Like if you look at the person who, like no one could run a four minute mile and then one guy does it and then everybody else can. You know, I think there was a study done. This could be a story that I read, but there was this story that and I don't know if this is true. I think this is true, but it might not be. So I think I already know what you're going to say, but go on. It's this, these anthropologists were on on these islands and then there was this monkey that was cracking a coconut or something on one that they went to all these islands and they all had these behaviors and they documented each

island for a month and by the time they got to the third island they noticed some abnormal behavior by one monkey by the time they got back to the first island everybody on the first island was doing it and they came to this idea or this theory that like hey there's a form of communication happening between the species that we don't understand and it sounds similar to what could be happening theoretically between the mice and the lab. Is that the one you were thinking of? Yeah, yeah. Is that a real study?

So I'm not sure if that's a real study. Okay. But the theory, but no, it could be there. It could be though. But the theory from that, from that possible study is from this guy named Rupert Sheldrick. Okay. Morphic Fields. Morphic Residence.

Yeah, and he, so this research, and I had the opportunity to actually talk with him. It was fantastic. Oh, man. His kid's got in his book out. Oh, nice. Oh, nice. Very cool. But he believes that, let's say, for example, there's a brand new crossword puzzle that drops.

And it just in the thousands of people have it. And there's like one section that somebody can't figure, like, we all can't figure it out, you know. Like, what's this 14-letter word for whatever, you know? And then one person figures it out. And then everyone else figures it out after that person figures it out. He believed, Rupert Sheldrake, believe that that is because there's some globular or globular is what he said. Consciousness is what spiritual consciousness is a global consciousness that we're all connected to. and that when one person finds something out, then it spreads like wildfire and then everybody figures

this out. We do not have evidence that that is the case. And I'm not saying that we won't have evidence in the future, but from the research that we've done that approaches this topic, we do not have data that shows that that is a thing. But it's a, fantastic theory. And he's, he's a very interesting guy that's Rupert Sheldrae. Is that the same as like the non-locality for mind? Like there's an aspect of mind that's like, is that similar to that? Yeah. So that's, that is also very similar to that. Very, very similar. I think the most, and that's a cool sort of consciousness thing. but I would say the most fascinating theory about consciousness that if one percent of it were true,

it would change how we perceive reality for the rest of time. Only one percent. And the theory is called orc or theory. O-R-C-H-space-O-R-R-O-C-O-R-T-E. And right now, it's at a point where we cannot falsify it, only because we don't have the instrumentation to get that precise into the brain to discover if it's true or not. And it's a very complex theory.

But I'm going to, I'll give you a very sort of, please do. Okay. So there's like, so just overall, right? There's about three different theories of consciousness, right? There's one theory that says that consciousness is something. And you got to follow me on this because this is very well stuff. The first theory is that the element of being, of conscious, of experiencing reality was from an incident that happened long ago in time.

If time were sort of this line, it happened a long time ago, and that our current consciousness is a reverberation of that incident, of that particular event. some people would say it's the big bang you know that's that incident other people would say it's other things but it's something that happened in the long time ago there's this other theory that says consciousness is a a it's it's it's a sort of um dimensional thing it's a it's it's a it's a dimensional thing where um our consciousness is dependent on the current dimension that we're in And we perceive things because we're sort of locked into this dimension.

But if you go to other dimensions, then you will see a clearer picture of whatever this thing is called consciousness is. But that's something that are you going to do. How are you going to figure it out? There's a third theory that states, biologically, consciousness is not necessarily unique, but it's being orchestrated through our biology from something else, almost like how you can have a remote control and use this remote control to control the car or whatever. But how do you you find that out? So the idea or theory is orchestrated, um, uh, orchestrated, uh, reality basically. It's, it's, it's, and what does that mean? It means that deep in our brain,

deep, deep, deep beyond receptors, beyond, you know, brain cells. There's these little things, microtubles. And there are plenty of them. I think trillions. of them. Microtubles. We just found out that these things exist, right? But they exist

in a very binary state on off, on off, on off, on off. And they go on and off billions of times over the course of a person's like day, basically.

And this binary state operates how the binary state, of a computer operates. And the belief is that the reason why humans are able to give birth to things like a computer is because we're really replicating our own biology. we're actually serving as the creator of our own creation. And it's called Orc Or Theory.

And that is just the top of the surface. I can't even get too deep into it. But if anyone watches this, check out Orc Theory. Some people say it's BS. Some people say that we can't prove it's BS. Other people are like, this is wild. So I'm in the camp of like, this is wild stuff. This is an end.

So it's interesting. And psychedelics, yeah, and psychedelics obviously does that process. I'm not going to get into it, but check it out. Yeah, it's, I think Marshall McLuhan would say that human beings are the sex organs of the machines, right? Hmm. Kind of backs it up right there. I like that. I like that.

Yeah. Yeah, it's fascinating. This is fascinating, man. This conversation coming into this, we kind of set it up quickly, but, man two and a half hours just flew by like that i i feel like we could talk even longer man i this is really really fun and i really enjoyed the way in which you told stories you explain some very complicated stuff you made it fun and beyond that like i i think i learned a lot man thank you hey man thank you for having me on uh yeah and yeah i i really don't do a lot of podcasts

and the reason why I don't do a lot of podcasts is because the podcast presenter or host really doesn't do their research or they really don't. But you do your research. So it's fantastic. I looked at all of your other stuff and I'm like, okay, this dude, I'm definitely going to get on this podcast because it seems like a good conversation. And it was a good conversation. So you did a fantastic job. I got to give you props as well. And for everybody watching this, if you are entertained, it's because of this guy right there.

Yeah, man, it's it's really fun. And I think that any time two people sit down and are fascinated by a topic, they can really provide a lot of value for people. But more than that, they can inspire someone like a young Zeus or a young George may latch on to one of the things we said. And if we accomplish that, that's a home run right there. That's like the first guy playing baseball that does LSD. What was that guy's name again? Doc Ellis

1970, June 12th, Pittsburgh Pirates versus the San Diego Padres. That's a fascinating. Fascinating story, man. I wrote a story about that on Double Blind.

The 53rd anniversary happened three days ago. You got time to tell that story? What's that sorry? Do you have time to tell that story? Yeah, of course. Yeah, so Doc Ellis was a fantastic baseball player. Even beyond

just his fantastic story, he's a great guy when it comes to like sort of bucking the system of corporate baseball, you know, civil rights activism, this really great just guy, you know? Also a very sort of stylish guy. Like he, he was friends with

like Muhammad Ali. He was friends with like Bruce Lee, like all these like crazy figures around the 70s. But in June 12, 1970, he was with the Pittsburgh Pirates, he was the pitcher for the Pittsburgh Pirates, and he flew in from Pittsburgh to San Diego to play a game at the very next day. But he had friends in Los Angeles, so he flew

into San Diego. He was like, you know what I'm going to do? I'm going to go to L.A. and just sort of hang out. So he drove from San Diego to L.A. to hang out with his friends. And his friends, obviously, are dudes. It was the 70s. So like, he was like, yo, let's do all these drugs. have fun. So he was doing LSD, barbiturates. He was doing benzos, amphetamines, all this stuff. And so he had an epic day. And when he got to LA, an epic day, took all this LSD.

I think it was like six tabs, passed out, woke up, and he's like, man, that was a crazy day. But the guy's girlfriend that he was with, the girlfriend basically said, that no, no, no, no, no, it's not today. It's tomorrow. You're pitching in the next three hours. You have to get to San Diego right now. He's like, no, no, no, no, no. It's just, it's Thursday. She's like, no, it's Friday. It's Friday. You have to go to San Diego. So still on this very psychedelic state, you know, he's like, okay, I got to go to L.A. So he, his, you know, his team

books a ticket for him. Of course, his team's like, Doc, where are you? You have to pitch. You have to pitch in three hours. Where are you? are you, where are you? So his team gets him a plane, the guy's girlfriend, you know, arranges his stuff to get in a car to go to the airport. And but right before he leaves, he does two tabs of LSD right before he gets on the plane. So right when he gets to San Diego, I mean, about an hour and a half, he is peaking on LSD. He's feeling it, but that wasn't enough. in San Diego, there was this very famous person in the crowd, and she had a bag of benzos, of amphetamines,

of all these different pills. So he basically put his hand in the bag, grabbed about 12, and just popped him in his mouth, just threw him all in his mouth while he was on LSD. So of course, you know, his team's like, oh, it's Doc Ellis, you know, as he's doing his thing. So the game begins. He's right there basically peaking on LSD.

He still has all the LSD and the drugs from his system the day before. And he just popped 12 benzos right there. So he's like feeling it, right? So the rarest. So, so, you know, he's a pitcher, right? So he's pushing the ball. He's throwing the ball. And the rarest achievement in all of sports is a no-hitter.

where you throw the ball so precisely that the other team, they can't score anything. They can't score anything because they can't hit the ball. They can't even get on base. They can't score anything. So Doc Ellis, peak of his LSD, bends us. He's throwing the ball. He's throwing the ball. He's, boom, strike, strike.

Strike. and in the beginning of the game, people saw that Doc was on a drug, but they didn't know which drug he was on. And Doc talks about this incident. He's like, okay, what do he actually saw? He said that he saw, he couldn't even see the actual catcher or the batter. All he saw was F the person was on the left side of the base or the right side of the base.

and the catcher, which is the guy on his team that catches the ball, you know how a person, the catcher sends signals to the pitcher. It's like, okay, throw a fastball, throw up, and they do this with their fingers. But this guy had to wrap fluorescent tape around his fingers so that Doc can see. So all Doc said that he saw was if the batter was on the left side of the right side and the actual tape on the fingers of the catcher telling him what to throw. and he said that it was an absolutely chaotic game. He was throwing the ball, like left and right,

but which was throwing everybody off, was throwing off the entire team in the third ending, no hitter, fourth inning, no hitter, fifth inning, no hitter, sixth inning, no hitter. At that time, his team was like, yo, Doc Ellis is about to throw a no hitter. and it's a sort of superstitious thing where you don't talk to the pitcher.

You leave him be. You do not interact with him at all because you want him to stay in the zone. And of course, Doc Ellis's zone was a zone fueled by strategic agonists, by dope mean agonists, all this stuff.

But that was his zone. And he threw a no-hitter, which is the rarest achievement in all of sports. And guess what? We do not have video of that game because the MLB, for some ridiculous reason, wasn't filming that game that day. So all we have is a radio broadcast and the story of Doc Ellis and his teammates talking about this team,

this time in this game. Also, I want to say dot Ellis, the very next season, became a world champion. Man, that's so awesome. Such an incredible story, man. It's so meta, too. Because, like, you know,

on a really deep trip, it's really difficult to bring back the gold, man. So in some ways, I could see why it wasn't recorded. Like, it was almost meant to be not recorded. You know what I mean? I know. It's crazy.

You just ask. sort of legendary aspect of Doc Ellis, too. Yeah. Is it, if you were to leave some of the listeners or the viewers with maybe a couple of books that you have read that you would, do you have a few books that you would, that you could recommend for people? Yeah. Yeah. So the first book, if I could recommend any book to just one book, just one single book,

it would be a book called The Demon Haunted World, Science as a Candle in the Dark, by Carl Sagan, A Demon Haunted World. It's a pretty wild title, but it has, it's one of the greatest books about science that's ever been written. And it's easy to understand. Carl Sagan, for everybody that's out there, Carl Sagan was a brilliant astrophysicist. And he was brilliant because he took very complex things like astrophysics and brought them to a very poetic way of conveying the information,

which is completely my inspiration. He's the guy inspired me ever since I was a kid. But please read that book, A Demon Hunted World and also the second book, book is called Rocks of Ages by Stephen J. Gould. And it's a book, and he's also a fantastic scientist, by the way, but it's a book that talks about spirituality and science and how these two entities or two magistrariums is what he calls it. They don't have to conflict. In fact, in its pure essence, science and spirituality don't conflict because they operate on their own realms.

And the problems that have arose in history is when these two magisturians try to prove the other one incorrect. For example, if religion tries to prove that science is incorrect, like Galileo, for example. how the church was like, no, you know, the sun is operates, you know, we are the center of the universe. No, no, no, magistrariums. Or when science tries to prove religion is incorrect or doesn't exist or spirituality doesn't exist. So it's a fantastic book and it really breaks down how we should perceive science and spirituality in the wholeness of life. Wow. I love it, man.

It's really well said. And, man, if I, if, if, if it wasn't midnight here, I would, I would have talking for the two hours, man. This is really fun, man. It's so refreshing to me to get to be able to ask questions that have been on my mind for some time to someone who is doing not only what you do, but is excited to do what you do. But what's up with psychedelic science, man? Are you going there with your team? Do you have something you're planning on there? Yeah.

Paper. What's going on there? So, yeah. Fantastic. So, yeah, we are going pretty deep, man. We are going with the crew of a belief seven people. So myself, Jan Raymakers, Mara Kavara, Pablo Malaroni, Johannes Rechnivik, Elaine Hagen and Natasha Mason, seven people. So a lot of people, it's the first time in America. Yeah. Which is going to be a great experience. Sure. So, yeah, we're going, and so we are all presenting something. I'm presenting functional near infrared spectroscopy, which is the imaging tech that I used to look at the brain while the person's on DMT. I'm going to be talking about that. Really cool, you know,

stuff about that. Maro, which is a guy in our lab from Italy, fantastic scientists. He's going to be talking about the therapeutic benefits of psychedelics. Natasha Mason is a fan fantastic doctor. She's going to be talking about her own research. Jan Reimek, who is a legend. He's been doing psychedelic. He's been doing research into all psychoactive since like 1982. What? You know? Yeah. So he's been doing it for a very long time. He just celebrated his birthday. I'm not going to say what age it was. It just happened. But then, you know, Johannes is a guy that conducted a five-meo DMT study where he looked at the inhalation. or like a spray of 5-Meo DMT,

and he found that every person that was on the study reported back that, like their, you know, depression was basically gone, which is fantastic. It was an amazing study. And Pablo, who's also going to be there, he's the first person to ever research 2CB in a clinical setting, which is a fantastic psychedelic synthesized by Alexander Shulgin. He's the first person to ever look at that.

and who else? And I think that's everybody. Oh, in Elaine Haysian, which is a fantastic scientist from the Netherlands. She published a fantastic study about ADHD and LSD. And so to the point where, like, her paper is the most popular, most downloaded paper with the European Research Council.

It's a fantastic study. So, yeah, we're all going to be there, man. We're all going to be there. We're going to be rolling deep. And I'll take some pictures and I'll put it on Twitter for all you guys to see. Are you guys going to, is there like going to be seven pills and two of them are placebos and five of them are high doses of LSD when you present? You know what?

I only wish we can give people psychedelics. I would love to give people like a doses of psychedelics before I present. That would be great. But no, man. I mean, but honestly, I don't know. So the whole conference is a pretty wild one. It's MAPS, which is the biggest nonprofit organization, which you already know. But it's sort of being told or marketed as the biggest psychedelic science conference in the world, which is a pretty big, hefty claim.

So that's the reason why we're going out there. We're going to see what it's about. And we're taking our lab going deep. and we're going to experience for a lot of people, their first taste of American culture, which is going to be pretty wild experience. Yeah, it is going to be. You know, I heard there was an article that came out in Spanner Magazine,

which is Cody Shirk's magazine, and it's an online magazine, and they spoke about an experience that was, I don't know if it was a document. I don't think it was an actual study. It was more of just like an anecdotal, study of this guy whose father had dementia and he was using a five m eOT five mio dmt nasal spray and they really saw like a lot of benefits from neurodeginative diseases have you have you seen some of that research where they're using the five miodmt to to spray to help combat some neurodeginatory

diseases yeah no so um i i we have and one of the guys that's in our lap johannis he's focusing on that topic. And yeah, it's pretty interesting to see that 5Mio DMT, which it's sort of unfortunate that it even has DMT in its title because really they operate completely differently. But when it comes to the therapeutic potential of 5MIA DMT, yeah, it's something that has very long-lasting ramifications for things like, like, you know, spytogenesis or neurogenesis, which is the rebuilding and re-sort of structuralization of brain cells, basically, which is a very important thing when it comes to repairing, you know, parts of the brain that perhaps have atrophied with things like, you know, depression or very sort of neurodigeniture of diseases, which is

a sort of way to atrophy the brain. So also, I want to say this, depression is also resides in that territory of neurodegenerative diseases because it atrophies the brain. Like the more stressed out you are, you can actually see your brain cells and your prefrontal cortex atrophy. You can see them sort of lose integrity and lose strength. And once that happens, it's reported that people start to get depressed, start to get sort of like, you know, maladaptive behaviors.

But functionally, it's because of this atrophying of the prefrontal cortex. And the reason why we have that evidence is because in 2021, a fantastic scientist from Yale named Ling Zing Shao wrote or discovered that that process happens. And that also, the thing is, if you introduce psilocybin in this, in this one she looked at psilocybin, if you introduce psilocybin to this astrophied area, like the brain cells are like sort of decreased and weakened, if you introduce psilocybin, brain cells get stronger and restructuralize within seconds. Wow. And seconds. Seconds. Not hours, not days.

Seconds. That's so crazy. And it's also persistent in that if you do like a actual dose of shrooms, then this restruct, this sort of strengthening of these brain cells in the prefrontal cortex persists for days, weeks, months after the actual that's pretty well stuff yeah it's it's mind-blowing to think about i i was hearing some chatter too about the state of neuroplasticity that happens after a certain psychedelics and they say on on some level i think you know for some level the neuroplasticity stays around for a month on certain psychedelics it's two months on like a high dose of five amio-tem is like a year or something like

I don't know what those dates are, but is there some research that backs up that that particular state of cognitive awareness stays with you for longer periods of time? The more you use it or how does that match? Yeah. So neuroplasticity is so interesting because, you know, we have, we sort of see this very good correlation between psychedelics, neuropasticity and like, you know, healing, basically, right? But methamphetamines also have neuroplasticity. Crystal meth has neuroplasticity. So either there's different types of neuroplasticity that we haven't really discerned yet. We just sort of group everything in neuroplasticity. Or that pharmacological bros should have perhaps should open up meth

labs as opposed to psychedelic retreat centers. Maybe that's the, maybe that's what we should do. Yeah, I think we kind of already have them. Like, if you look at some of the Fortune 500 companies, like an Amazon workplace is almost like a meth lab. Not that they're producing meth there, but like you kind of have to be on meth to do it, man.

Like, at least it was, but I worked at some places like that. I thought I was on all the time. But, you know, all right, man. I'll just keep talking to you. It won't stop. It won't stop, man. But it's a real pleasure. I got the link tree down and the show notes down there.

But where can people find you if link tree seems to be a good one? But you're everywhere. You're on Twitter. You're on Instagram. Where would you prefer to send people to? Yeah, man. So follow me on Twitter at Tapado. At T-I-P-A-D-O.

Tapato. You can follow me on Twitter. I tweet pretty actively. you could follow me on Instagram at Zeus, Z-E-U-S-T-I-A-D-O. You can follow me on that. You can also follow me on Twitch, which is, once again, at Zeus-Tepado.

You can follow me there, talk about a lot of science, whenever I'm on Twitch, follow me there. And you could just, what else? I think that's all the socials. I'm not on Facebook. I'm not on TikTok. I'm not on LinkedIn. So, yeah, Twitter, Instagram,

and Twitch is where I reside. Or just Google me, Zeus to Pado. Yeah. You can find me there. And we didn't even get into all the gaming you do. What are the name of your gaming companies? Stone Gamer, yeah. Stone Gamer is a company that I started in Los Angeles before I came here.

And we are the first company to integrate cannabis and gaming. We have an e-sports section where people get high on cannabis and then they play games. and it's called Stone Gamer we even have different tiers of people getting stone like how boxers have like heavyweight, featherweight, lightweight, we have the heavyweight people where they have like maybe two bong hits of cannabis

that sort of measured out and we have the sort of featherweight which is like a half a bung hit. And we see that people really enjoy gaming while on cannabis and before I came here we also did a study where we had people that played call of duty, which is a very popular first person game where you shoot people and stuff,

very intense. We had a study where we had people play call of duty, and then we had them take LSD, we had them wait for a day, and then we had them play call of duty again to see if their performance of call of duty changed before and after the LSD. and the results of that study will be replicated in our lab in the next two years. Man, it's, you know, the more that I think about the gaming aspect, it seems like there's some foreshadowing in what you've already done to maybe what's coming on the horizon.

Listen, man, it's like, yeah, it's all connected. It's all connected. I know it is, man. It's all connected. All right. You have to come back, man, because we're just touching base with this. and uh damn it i wish it wasn't so late i really love it man it was really fun i hope you have a tremendous rest of your day get packed get out to denver yes crush it out there with your

whole team to your whole team i said what's up and uh yes i'll talk to you soon man but i'm going to hang up with the audience but i want to talk to you real briefly after this so yeah sure yeah yeah see you later guys much love yeah aloha everybody thanks for hanging out we'll talk to you guys soon Hello.