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Rick Strassman, MD, is a Clinical Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of New Mexico School of Medicine. He is the author of several books, the most recent of which is 2024's "My Altered States: A Doctor's Extraordinary Account of Trauma, Psychedelics, and Spiritual Growth." www.rickstrassman.com
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If life wasn't real it'd be the craziest psychedelic trip ever - Joe Rogan
Updated after each new episode
Joe ''your brain produces DMT during REM sleep'' Rogan
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4 years ago
Joe Rogan the Joe Rogan experience
Good it's great seeing you it's great seeing you too. It's been a long time
Well, you know, we try to keep this like fist from your face. That's probably
the most great. Yeah. Yeah, there we go
Yeah, I think we first met
Some random person sent me an email probably 2005 2006 and he said oh, you know
Joe Rogan is
Talking about your book and I hadn't heard of you. This is before I did a
podcast
I think it was before the podcast. Yeah, I think you were still doing stand-up.
Yeah
Yeah, and he gave me your number I think and I called you and you were at the
airport
And you said hey man, I'm reading your book. I love it
Yeah, the book was fascinating because your book was you need to adjust cameras
good
your book was fascinating to me because it was I
Mean correct me if I'm wrong, but it was the first time that they ever that the
FDA ever allowed
real studies
To be done on schedule one drugs. It was the first new American study in 20
years on
psychedelics. Yeah, yeah, I'm any human psychedelic research and
How did you first of all? Why did you want to do it? And how did you get the
permission to do it?
Well, I wanted to do it because of my interest in chemistry and my interest in
altered states
You know my own altered states like the first time I smoked marijuana
I was 18 years old and it was a fully psychedelic experience
There were purple clouds coming out of the speakers. I was flying over this
You know the college you know town and I was living in at the time and my
friend was - it was a shared hallucination on
very strong hash
So you felt like you were out of body
No, I was
We were on a carpet and you felt like you could you were so you both saw like a
city below you. Yeah, the floor disappeared
Yeah, it was the first time I smoked marijuana
And I thought wow this is interesting and now hash is the way they create hash
is they take the what is it called the crystals off of
THC is that how they do it they
shake out the resin
From the flower just to just shake it. That's how they do it
I'm well if there's different ways to do it like in the old country you get
really sweaty and you
just agitate a lot of pot and it and the resin accumulates on your skin and
You scrape it off really and that's how they make hash well, you know in that's
so funky. You're getting someone's funk along with the hash
Yeah, yeah, that's called pre-industrial hash
I
Was watching or was looking at something online the other day where
They were talking about repurpose. It was in Morocco
They were reaper. It was Steve D'Angelo. He was talking about how they were repurposing
Machines in Morocco to make hash
I'm gonna how they've been doing it this way and making hash in this part of
the world for you know, who knows how many years
Yeah, that's it here. I wonder what the machines are
Yeah, this is Steve D'Angelo Steve D'Angelo is a hemp activist
Cannabis activist so there it looks like some kind of a press or something like
that. I don't know what that thing is
Yeah, interesting. I think it's like it has something to do with automobiles
here. He's gonna say it right here
Things that can't break down things that don't need electricity
Things that can be improvised and it just so much cleverness has been shown
here today so much ingenuity in
Working with what you have. I mean this press is a great example of it and take
a look here
It's just basically an automobile jack that's been put into a frame
Had a couple of springs put on there and then you know these iron casing boxes
made and
It works it works really well
And this is the way that the hash that's smoked by most people around the world
the largest quantity of cannabis
That's made anywhere is made still by this legacy method and the great thing
about it is
this could really be done anywhere and I think about folks in Mexico or
Colombia who could take this method and repurpose it and adapt it and be making
quite a very nice high-quality hash
Just about anywhere. That's a hash salesman. I've ever seen one. Yeah. Yeah,
that dude's pushing hard
He's like let's everybody get in on this. Come on. Make some hash. I'd like to
buy one
Yeah, well, I wonder if that makes hash or hash oil if it's just being
compressed like that squeezing things out
Well, it looked like he was having bricks of hash, right? Yeah. Yeah
interesting
So I think he's using it in that sort of that little frame that little case
Mm-hmm and then they're packing it in there with that car jack, which is pretty
crazy
Yeah clever is it so the difference between hash and regular marijuana smoking
is in general
What is it just that it's much stronger? It's much stronger. So like that kind
of hallucination?
That's super rare with regular marijuana, right? But with hash it can't happen.
Yeah. Yeah
well, I started college as a chemistry major as a kid I made fireworks and
bombs and
Started you know college as a chemistry major. I wanted to be I didn't want to
become a magnate in making fireworks a fireworks magnate
But everybody discouraged me they said, you know, you're a smart guy. You
should be a doctor
And so that's how they tricked you into it
Well, I got the last laugh right because I'm you know giving people of
psychedelics and they have inner fireworks now, right?
So after that experience smoking hash and you know, my chemistry mind got piqued
I thought
You know like a half hour ago. I was totally normal and right now
I'm just having the weirdest experience of my life and I wonder how that works
chemically. Hmm. So I figured there must be some
Chemical changes in the brain and I was interested in learning what those might
be. So what year was this?
70 70 so okay
So this is like right around the time where everything got made illegal, right?
That was the big schedule one act wasn't that in 1970?
They made a lot of the psychedelics illegal their controlled substances act of
1970
Yeah, so it was right at that year when you were just getting involved you're
like damn it
They took the rug out from under me. It didn't make any difference
Yeah, yeah, the school I went to you had a lot of psychedelics really yeah, and
I went crazy for about two years
And then figured out, you know, I think I've had enough I need to transfer so I
transfer schools actually
I've known more than one person that has lost their marbles
From from doing too many psychedelics. I started getting unraveled
It's not uncommon. Yeah, right don't we do you know people that have kind of
like blown fuse? Oh, yeah, yeah
Well, I get the occasional email from people who have really gone around the
bend smoking too much DMT
There's people I think that have a tendency towards a type of paranoid
schizophrenia
That maybe they kind of have it under control or maybe it's mild
You know, they just have some weird paranoias about certain things. I've seen a
few people
Do too many psychedelics and then now they're in fantasy land
Yeah, I kind of wonder about the risk of increased accessibility
I do yeah because
You know you could prepare you can screen and still people have adverse effects
and then in in the wild in the field
I think we're just gonna have a revisiting of the problems in the 60s with all
of those hospitalizations
And things yeah, I don't think there's any doubt the real question is
How many of those people were on that path already? Like what is that whole
process of someone?
Becoming mentally ill because I've seen it happen, but I'm not exactly sure
what's causing it what makes people I've seen people go down and
They just they just become different people
Well, I think it's a case of people being vulnerable, you know, they've got a
susceptibility
Yeah
In their genes and they just may also be susceptible because of their lives.
They may be doing other drugs
You know drinking a lot in really unstable relationships or they you know, and
they also you know might have a
You know tendency genetically
You know, let's say one of their parents was bipolar schizophrenic
You know, so it's a major trauma. I mean, it's a psychological, you know,
trauma to have a huge trip, right?
Yeah, you know good trauma bad trauma, but it's really a shift and if you're
not equipped
I think it could yeah, it could kind of fracture a thin veneer of normality.
Yeah
It's almost like they're interfacing at the wrong
They're not like quite getting like there's a reality port and then there's
like a neighboring port where they're getting it's like they can pay their
taxes
They can drive their cars they can answer emails
but they think that there's some crazy mind control experiment at the head of
you know
It's just one of those weird ones where people just they did just start
believing that the whole world's out to get them and
The government's trying to track them down and you see there's a chip in my
brain like accelerates
Yeah, yeah, it's extreme the chip is the weird one. I've heard multiple people
tell me they have a chip in their brain
Mm-hmm or at least say it to people like that. I'm communicating to them
through a chip in their brain. Mm-hmm
Well, you know schizophrenics are like that. Yeah, you know paranoid
schizophrenics. Yeah, you know back in the day it was
You know radio waves or
X-rays that were you know beaming down from space and affecting people's minds
That was it was a paranoid schizophrenic
Yeah, it was you know their explanation
Of theirs unusual experiences, you know the kinds of stories I've heard with
people doing too much DMT is a kind of mania
They're really grandiose. They think that they've got all the answers who and
nobody is listening to them
and it makes them mad and they end up in prison or in psychiatric hospitals I
Just I'm always fascinated with how other human beings brains work
Mine as well, right? I'm fascinated by the brain about how it's so different
after exercise. It's so different after rest
It's so different when you know you meditate or you do something like yoga some
mindfulness kind of practice
It's a dear it's like what what are most people experiencing and then what does
it feel like to be mentally ill?
Like what is that person experiencing like what what weird shift in the
chemical balance of the mind?
It's causing that and you know how much of it is genetic and how much of it is
life experience and trauma
It's just the the way people think and look about things and look at things has
always been fascinating to me because I
Got to assume that everyone's dealing with different hardware or wetware or
whatever you would call the brain like they work different
They don't work the same
Right well, I mean it depends on the on the mental illness, you know the
disorder
Well, you know one of the reasons I became a psychiatrist and besides my
interest in studying psychedelics was because I was really interested in the
mind
You know schizophrenic patients were just amazing
You know because other than their crazy ideas and experiences they're just
normal people right yeah, which is wild
And and there's got to be levels to it right are there like like there's like
mild or someone just kind of like a touch
Schizophrenic and there's someone who's like full-blown, you know the aliens
are hiding in my walls, and they're out to get me
Well, it depends on the kind of schizophrenia
there's
What's called chronic undifferentiated which is kind of the burned out types
that just don't move don't talk they just veg they just veg and they're the
paranoid
Schizophrenics who are a lot more active and they're hallucinating and they're
in and they're in your face
Yeah, you know, I really found it easy and fun to talk to psychotic patients
I think that was you know one of the things that kind of was part of the mix of
studying psychedelics
Why was it easy?
Well, I think in my own psychedelic experiences. I might have gone crazy for an
hour or two
One one one time in particular. I had to be you know talked back down
You know so I could empathize you've heard Dennis McKenna's story about being
with Terrence
Mm-hmm the experiment at Lacho Rara. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah, if you can
explain what happened because they they too many mushrooms
Apparently yeah, can you explain like pharmacologically? What or
psychologically what could have happened?
Well, I mean it depends on your model, right? Please tell people what happened
like tell people the story
Yeah, I don't know this don't know exactly that well
What I believe is they found a bunch of fresh mushrooms in the Amazon and they
just start chowing and they went crazy
And I think he was gone for about two weeks
Yeah, might have been longer than that might be two months. Do you remember
Jamie?
Because he was on he told the story on the podcast. Yeah, he went into detail
about like what it was like
Mm-hmm the way he was processing were out reality. It was a long stretch. It
was a long time. Yeah, it was gone
Yeah, it wasn't like two hours
No, no, they had to well, you know to the extent that he could communicate he
wanted people to leave him alone
What happens what is going on when when that how like what could cause you is
there something that could be psychoactive for two whole weeks?
That's what's confusing to me like what is going on where this substance it
must be gone from your body
After two weeks, but somehow or another
You're still feeling the effects of it like what happened?
And what does that indicate about like states of mind and how pliable they are?
Well, I mean the I guess the way I would look at it
Which might not be the way everybody would but I think what may have taken
place is that because of all the psilocybin that he took he opened a portal
Into things out there and it just didn't close
You know, so the psilocybin was the trigger
Yeah, but after the portal was open it was open
I'm glad you said it that way because I say it that way too and I know it
sounds ridiculous
It's particularly to people that don't do psychedelics opening a portal, but I've
thought about that a lot
I thought about that a lot about the DMT experience because it seems so insane
and so impossible that I just can't believe that
This isn't just another place. It seems like it's not just a chemical reaction
in my mind
It seems like I'm going to another place
That's how it feels that's how it feels but what does that mean by when I say
that's how it feels because I don't have any
Understanding of what I'm experiencing it what I'm what I'm experiencing rather
so I must put it in some sort of context
Where it makes sense to me as a person who lives on earth, you know sitting
here right now in 2022
You know, there's all those variables that you everything when you look at the
world goes through all the filter of your own personal reality
the thing about a second a full-blown psychedelic experience like the DMT
experiences
It doesn't seem like any of that applies anymore you go over there, and it's
like you're gone
There's no so I I was wondering about myself like maybe I'm trying
To put it into perspective like it's another place
Because places make sense to me and what doesn't make sense to me is just full
nothingness is chaos
Wild imagery and geometry and things that move to music and it's like almost
like it's so hard for me to wrap my head around that I
Convince myself. It's another dimension, but it's not
well, it could be I
Mean it could be another dimension and yeah, I think you need to design
experiments, you know
To test if it is another dimension. How could you do that?
Well, I think I
Well if you you know consider you know the location of the DMT world to be
outside of us
in objective reality you'd need to
You know call upon your physics
Advanced, you know physics dark matter dark energy parallel universes
So I think if you could you get into those spaces
With machines, let's say imaging machines or cameras. How could you do that? I
don't know
Could you get a computer high?
It's one of those ideas. I've had well seen some of the new
There was some new article that was written about
virtual reality
being able to
Give people transcendent experiences that it's similar to the effects achieved
on psychedelics, right?
That's interesting is McKenna talked about that a long time ago
He said he thinks that one day they'll get to a point where they can create
something
Visually, and it'll bring you into that place that they'll be able to recreate
it with sufficient technology
Here's VR is as good as psychic at as psychedelics at helping people reach
transcendence on
Key metrics a VR experience elicited a response indistinguishable from subject
who took medium doses of LSD or magic mushrooms
that's wild yeah, well if they just keep getting better at it, that's like if
you can get someone who's been there and knows what
It looks like and then is a good artist who can recreate it because I've seen
some DMT art before
That's so close. It's like oh wow. That's so close, right?
You know it seems like it. Oh of course Alex gray like Alex gray stuff. It's
like some of it is so
Tryptamine like you know
Um well it's important to note that they talk about medium doses of LSD or psilocybin
Right, so you get a good feeling, but you're not hallucinating
Yeah, you may not really be fully tripping out what do what they're doing what
what kind of
VR experience it would be like what is the images they're showing you what is
the sound they're playing for you?
That's allowing you to get to these states
The guy that made this one did it after he had a near-death experience
Wow here I'm right here. He says he fell off there read that
Okay, he says I knew that the intensity of the light was related to the extent
to which I inhabited my body
He recalls yet watching it dim didn't frighten him from his new vantage point
glow glow walkie glow walkie glow walkie could see that the light wasn't
disappearing
It was transforming leaking out of his body into the environment around him
this realization
Which he took to signify that his awareness could outlast and transcend his
physical form
Block bought brought glow walkie glow walkie a sublime sense of peace
So he approached what he thought was death with curiosity what might come next
so since his accident an artist and
Computational molecular physicist his work to recapture that transcendence,
okay
So he had some wild near-death experience and he's trying to recreate that with
VR
So that's interesting because that's not even a
He's not even talking about a drug experience
I'm so he could be
Yeah, you know we've been studying or there's a group at University of Michigan
that's been looking at endogenous DMT
That's made in the mammalian brain and it increases during death and
Especially it increases in the visual part of the brain
You know so it could you know that for a fact. Yeah, they know that for a fact
It's a 2019 study when I first met you there wasn't nearly as much data and I
remember you were talking about how much anecdotal data
That points to the idea of the pineal gland being the source of DMT, but there
wasn't a mammal model
Yeah, yeah
Yeah, the pineal DMT story it sounds pretty obscure, but it's pretty
controversial. I mean there are
You know some data
You know supporting the view that the pineal makes DMT and other data don't
I think you and I met at Starbucks on Ventura
In I think 2009 I was out there for my high school reunion and
And we met at Starbucks on Ventura. I think it was in Encino and
Yeah, we were talking about DMT. Do you think yeah, I remember that do you
think that?
DMT is produced in like all over the body like they found it in the lungs they
found it in the liver, right?
Do you think it's just something that the body produces everywhere?
You know when they first discovered DMT and mammals it people were focusing on
the lung and
you know, they were also interested in DMT being involved in psychosis and
There is a joke or I don't know if you call it a joke, but an idea that
schizophrenia was a lung disease
Because you were producing you know too much DMT and they were doing studies to
inhibit DMT and schizophrenics or increase it or
Oh, wow, that makes sense. Yeah, it does make sense. That completely makes
sense
Yeah, yeah, that could be what's wrong with them. It could be if you could
block DMT naturally or with a vaccine or something
That completely makes sense because people I've seen people on it that like
fight it and panic and imagine if that was like a constant state
You were involved that would look
totally similar to someone being schizophrenic if
If it was a constant state you'd have to come up with some ideas about what was
going on and I think
That possibly would then you know lead to the delusions the crazy ideas about
what's going on. Yeah, that makes sense
Wow
Well, so we found you know DMT in the rodent pineal in 2013 the group at the
University of Michigan
you know, so it
It proved or established the validity of that idea that the pineal makes DMT
But this study in 2019 that I was mentioning where DMT goes up after death in
the visual cortex
You know, they looked again for pineal DMT and they couldn't find any and
And what they believe is that the original paper described the DMT in the brain
Which was snagged on the way in and out of the pineal gland?
Yeah, but even more interesting I think than the pineal making DMT is the brain
makes DMT in quite high levels
comparable to even serotonin
Wow
And it could be there's a DMT neurotransmitter system in the brain and just
like a serotonin neurotransmitter system
What is the the function of the pineal gland?
Well, it helps regulate circadian rhythms and light sensitivity
It helps and train rhythms it helps keep everything in sync in the body
temperature
urinary function
Blood cell formation all those things
Why do you think ancient cultures were so fascinated by it?
Like why did they have this?
Why did they attribute this?
Sort of
Almost like godlike significance to it, right?
Yeah, yeah, I mean there's still there still is a certain pineal kind of reverence
out there
If you look at amazon and enter pineal there's all kinds of esoteric things
that are still being published on the pineal gland
Well, it's an unpaired organ. It's the only unpaired organ in the brain
Everything else is paired you have a left and right hemisphere
But there's just one pineal on that in the middle of your brain
It's it's it's location I think has a trip or has contributed
You know to the reverence
It's just under the fontanelle
And certain kinds of spiritual experiences are also
felt there
And so it was the you know, the
uh, you know physical
corresponding
Position of the subjective experience so people thought it must be occurring in
the pineal gland
You know, I have a friend who's really into aztec savagery in history and
He told me this is kind of grim, but
He told me that the aztecs used to
burn people
When they're alive to really like freak them out and then take their brains out
And eat their brains because of all the hormones and all the things that were
going on
Whoa
Yeah, so the pineal gland is heavy. That's heavy. I know that is so heavy
Yeah, you know, but they found it gave them, you know, whatever superhuman
strength or religious ecstasy
Isn't it fascinating that that also will kill you?
Like that's that's where people get prion diseases. They get it from eating
brain and spinal tissue, right? Right, right
Like cannibals when they get that jacob cruxfeld
jacob cruxfeld, yeah, yeah, yeah, thank you for pronouncing it better
Well, when I was a medical student, you know
We were always on the hunt for jacob cruxfeld patients because you know, they
were rare and very interesting
How many did you discover maybe just two or three and how did they come into
contact with it?
How did they come into contact with it? I think you know, they were
like from Africa
And they ate maybe some bush meat or something or some primate meat sheep meat
or monkey
Yeah, oh sheep meat you can get it from sheep meat as well
I thought it was a there was a thing that would
with cannibals and there was a thing with
Mad cow disease, which is another one. It's another very similar version of it
because the cows reading the cows, right?
Right, it's it's a it's a prion disease, right? Yeah, so here is
cruxfeld jacob disease and sheep brain
Places in origin seven out of eight patients with cjd coincide with the
distribution of sheep rearing in central and south italy
Oh, okay, that actually makes sense because my uncle
uh, vinnie
Vinnie didgerlando is about as italian as you get that's your uncle. Yes, my
uncle vinnie who's a great guy
um used to cook
lamb's brains
They would that was like a traditional
Italian meal that you would cook like when we'd get together and have like
family gatherings
He had on more than one occasion cooked lamb's brains because I remember having
it as a child. Yeah, that's interesting
well
Well, so the medical school that I went to is in the bronx
And you know, there were a lot of immigrants in the bronx. There were quite a
few italians
and uh
You know lots of people from the caribbean and from africa. Yep. You know, so I
think it was
It was some african patients. Well, I think um, it's probably real common over
there if it's common in italy
You know because uh eating lamb's brains is a normal thing
I mean my parents they they mean they didn't eat like a lot of exotic food
That was like a normal thing. Yeah
Yeah, my family never ate brains
I've had uh sweetbreads before which is the thalamus gland, right?
Oh, really isn't that what it is the sweetbreads it's it's a gland. It's one of
the glands. Oh the thymus maybe thymus
That's right. Yeah, it might be the thymus
Yeah, the thymus is kind of like the uh spleen or like the liver. Is that what
it is?
It's quite rich
In blood vessels. There it goes
Cuts of meat from either the thymus gland located in the throat or the pancreas
gland in this by the stomach wow
So you they could sweetbreads could be either one of those things. Yeah
interesting
So it's like a generic term in lamb veal pig or beef
They have a rich creamy texture and often served roasted or fried
Yeah, people eating organs. I mean liver is really really good for you
Like it makes sense that you would think brain is really really good for you,
too
And it might be but maybe like nature doesn't want people eating people's
brains
So it created these prion diseases
Well, you'd have to screen the brains before you eat them
Yeah, but even so is the juice worth the squeeze
I mean, what are you getting out of eating brains?
Yeah wonder what it's like
Well, it would depend on whose brain right?
What if you ate einstein's brain and you actually got smarter?
Uh, if he gave you permission. Yeah, I got about a week left
Take my brain. Yeah
Well, you know the frozen for the frozen brain banks out there
I have heard of that. Yeah, yeah, they've uh, they
Flash freeze your brain right after you die. You have to agree to it beforehand,
but uh, but imagine
If you're in transcendence, you've escaped this physical reality and you've
gone into the next amazing dimension
Where there's no deception? It's all love and energy and you're floating
together in music and then some
Dipshit brings you back to life
And you you get sucked backwards, but now you're stuck in a computer
Um, can you imagine if that was your soul your soul is just sucked back into
that brain
As soon as it's reanimated
Well, I have thought about it. Have you yeah? Yeah. What do you think that
would be like?
Terrifying you wouldn't want to do it. Well, it'd be terrifying if they couldn't
get rid of it
Like if if you couldn't go back
Like what if there's like portals, right? Like you were saying and what if
those portals are activated by
Normal human neurochemistry
Right and then that and it's a part of dying is that these portals are open
But what if that fucking portals open?
They you go you transcend and then they bring that goddamn brain back to life
because you wanted to live forever
So they take that thing that they had flask frozen
They kick that sucker back on and now you're just an embodied brain
In a fucking computer attached to a bunch of wires
Well, I mean if you're having experience though, but what kind of experience
would you have maybe you just be experiencing the fact that you're stuck in a
computer
Um
Yeah, I mean it you're kind of describing the matrix. Yeah, I'm describing hell.
It's worse than the matrix
There's not even a body that you could detach in the matrix. They detached
their heads remember right they got out of it
Oh, we got to get out of the matrix. You can't get out of the matrix if you're
just a brain
Um
Well, you know one of the interesting things about endogenous dmt
And especially with this discovery and such high levels in the brain
Is that it may be the endo matrix it could be kind of regulating everything all
of the time
What do you mean by that regulating everything all the time? It could be the
way we interact with reality
Is through endogenous dmt, which is always at a steady level
Well, it's the way I began wondering about that is because you know, what is
the purpose of endogenous dmt?
You know, why does the brain make dmt?
Can you do a dmt test on a person's blood level?
It's pretty hard. It's pretty hard. It's really low in the blood. It's like you
know billionths of a gram per milliliter
Okay, so you'd have to measure it in the actual brain itself in the brain or
spinal fluid
Maybe spinal fluid, but most likely brain when they start doing stuff like
neural link where they're going to insert wires into your brain
And you know, you're gonna have an app
To control your brain to control your mood
I mean, it seems like that would be one of the ways they would do it, right?
Well, you'd need to find you know, where in the brain the main
You know source of dmt is and then put an electrode there and keep that going
Do you think it's can it's limited to one specific area where it's developed?
Oh, man, they're just they're just beginning to
unravel the whole
Role and location of endogenous dmt. So when they know that it's in the liver
and they know that it's in the lungs
The lungs to me sound interesting because of holotropic breathing, right?
You know because people have done breathing exercises and achieved states of
altered states of consciousness
Yeah, yeah kind of makes sense doesn't it
Well, yeah, but I think it's not working through the lungs because those more
recent studies haven't really demonstrated dmt in lung
Oh, yeah, yeah, I used to say it's made in lung
Everybody used to say it's made in lung, but it seems like it's made in brain
So if it's made in brain then all the other stuff you're just getting like a
trickle-down effect
Well, does it go through the whole body?
Yeah, but it's metabolized so quickly that you know by the time it gets into
the blood that you're drawing
Most of the concentrations are pretty minuscule. Wow
What a sneaky molecule
Well, you have to wonder what it's doing, right? Right. What is it doing? What
is endogenous? What's the function of it?
You know, there's the possibility we have a dmt neurotransmitter system like
serotonin or dopamine in which case
You know, what is it doing?
Wow, so this is this is a really wild way to think about it because
To this time i'd never even considered that I always thought of it as being
something that was responsible maybe for very vivid dreams
Or something that was responsible for near-death experiences or what happens to
you when you die the idea of a portal
But I never thought about it as being something that is regulating
regular everyday reality
um
Well, you know one of the hallmarks of the dmt effect
Is that it feels more real than real?
Yeah
yeah, and
You study the function of endogenous neurotransmitters by giving you know drugs
that modify the effect of that endogenous neurotransmitter
You know, so we've got the ssr antidepressants and they affect serotonin,
although they may not all that much
But but still that's been the working model for decades
And uh, you know
So, you know because sris are useful for depression and anxiety
You then can speculate that serotonin is responsible for mood or anxiety
You know, so the hallmark of the dmt effect is it's more real than real it
feels more real than anything else
You know, so it's tempting to speculate
But again when I go back to that disembodied
Mind thought process of like thinking like what am I thinking when i'm over
there?
Since my body doesn't seem to be there and i'm there and it's it seems more
real than real is that me
Just tricking myself into thinking that it's a different place
Uh
I mean how could you tell how could i tell right yeah, I mean how would you
know?
I have one way of looking at that. I always describe this is what I say to
people
I say
If there was a thing that you could do like a door you could go through and
that door would take you
To another dimension where you would communicate with
Some entity
Beyond
Your wildest imagination that's constantly visually changing and communicating
with you
Telepathically and knows everything about you sees all your bullshit
And is trying to impart some ideas that will help you with your life
Because it's a god-like experience like you're experiencing like some sort of
uh uber powerful entity some more uber intelligent entity
Something beyond any
If we just looked at humans and thought of the evolution of human one day, we'll
get to this we're not going to get to that
That is a different. It seems like it's so beyond the body. It's so beyond the
human monkey body
This is what I tell people
I go if I could give if you would open a door and you would go there and you'd
have that experience
You would you do it?
And most people like yes, I do it if I gave you a drug that gave you that
experience
You still have the exact same experience. It's the exact same experience
You've just decided it's not real and you've decided it's not real because you're
putting into this category of hallucination
Like what does that even mean?
What does that even mean?
You're actually having that experience. I don't know what it is
I mean, I like to play play devil's advocate and I like to think that maybe I'm
messing with my own head
And maybe I'm just like it's like
Well through doing what looking at it like maybe it's just my
Neurochemistry going bonkers and and you know interacting with my visual cortex
could produces hallucinations
But it doesn't feel that way. That's what i'm that's why i'm trying to figure
out
If you're bullshitting yourself when you're over there or if it's you really
are over there
But what I tell people is it's the same experience. Yeah, what difference does
it make? What? Yeah, yeah
Um, it's you know previously invisible
Yeah, and it contains information a lot. Yeah, and I think that's all you can
say about it
It contains information about you, right?
Well, it could only be happening to you. Yeah, yeah, it's not happening to
somebody else. It's like it gives you advice
it can
But you I mean, how do you judge the value of that advice?
Yeah, well, what is the one one of the things that happened to me?
I've talked about this ad nauseum unfortunately if you've heard this before
folks but uh
one of my experiences there was like
A bunch of jokers like jesters or like jester hats and they were giving me the
finger. They were going like this. Fuck you
And it made me realize I was taking myself too seriously
Like instantaneously. I went oh, I get it and they were like this
They went like like don't do that
don't do that
but like
Saying fuck you to me. It was so clear what they were doing
It was so clear. It was like a little lesson like don't do that
Yeah, it's interesting. You know don't do that
That's like three syllables and they correspond to a heartbeat
You know, when I tripped on dmt the first time
These beings came out of this waterfall and they said now do you see now do you
see now do you see it was the same three beat thing
I love you. They say I love you a lot. I love you and I think it corresponds to
the heartbeat because it's in sync
You know, the vocalizations in sync with the heartbeat
Yeah
The one time I did it and these entities were talking to me and saying I love
you
600 million 500,000 times like the way a child would say I love you with like
some crazy number
7 billion zillions, you know, and every time they did that it would show a more
beautiful image
Like every image like I love you 600 million 500,000 times
I love you 700 zillion 400 and every time they did it was just this bigger and
bigger experience visually
To the point where I was like crying. I was like openly weeping. Oh, yeah, that's
the beauty of just what I was seeing
It sounds beautiful. It was wild, but it was that simple sort of there's like a
like
They'll say simple things to you in a way that you're not really hearing it
But you know what they're saying
Well, it kind of penetrates you. Yeah. Yeah, it's very weird
and
It's very weird very weird. Yeah, you used to not talk about your personal
experiences with it. I know I figured to hell with it
Yeah, I think so
I think it's good that you did that because I remember when we first met you
were reluctant to discuss it
You you I mean you didn't really want to talk about it publicly or want people
to know about it publicly
Yeah, I figured that I had some legitimacy to maintain
A few years back I had this conversation
With Dennis McKenna, you know like about your reputation and or you know one's
reputation
He said I've just given up on my reputation
It's just you know, so well you talk as openly about psychedelics as Dennis
He's the best guy to talk about it, too
Because his he's got a really interesting way of just discussing things
You know and he's had so many personal experiences and he's so smart
And he's got this incredible vocabulary to just draw from and when he describes
The actual impact of psilocybin and psychedelic chemicals particularly in
formation of language
He was describing the stoned ape theory the stone tape. Yeah, it's incredible
listening to him to say it because the way he describes it like he actually
understands
What psilocybin and what all these various molecules are doing to different
parts of the brain and why that would facilitate the development of language
and
Compassion and connect the tribe more and um
Well, I mean you do you think it actually is information coming from the brain
Or do you think you know that the portal is being opened up and the information
is coming from above?
I think that's more likely I think the more likely is that the brain is an
antenna
You know, it's one of the things that
Creative people will always tell you like someone sits down and writes a song
it just like came from the air
They're getting things from somewhere else almost and it's almost like you just
got to get out of your own way
You got to put enough good
juice out there in the world and take enough bad out and like and then just and
see the world from a
Clear perspective in at least in in these brief moments of creativity and then
things come to them. They just
Like they're sitting in front of the computer and bam, they got an idea for a
book
Like where the fuck is all that coming from?
It seems like
People always want to say it's a muse like that's the stephen pressfield
analogy. He's got a great book about it called the war of art
All about like like inviting the muse into your life and being disciplined and
sitting there at the computer every day and summoning it
And treating it like it's an entity and if you do that
It works like this is what's crazy like people who are
Disciplined and also creative like that decide i'm going to write this book
I'm going to sit down and i'm going to force myself every day like ideas come
to them
Like where are they where the fuck are they coming from like is it possible
that the brain really is like some sort of an antenna
And that wisdom and love and all these different things they're just all around
us. We're just confused by our monkey bodies
Well, do you think we're getting that information from god?
If that's what you want to call it
You know the the the only problem I have with the word god and it's not really
a problem
But it's a recognition is that it's a loaded word is a loaded word, but so is
love
Yes, you know
So I think you just got to take the good with the bad. Well, that's alex gray's
position
Alex gray says we have to take it back the same way
We take back love and say god all the time and you know, that's what he does
Yeah, and that's the reason I think it's good to use the word psychedelic
instead of hallucinogen or yeah
I think so too and theogen or anything and theogen is a cool word
It's cool. It assumes a lot though. Yeah, it's like people that call weed
Cannabis yeah, I like to smoke a lot of cannabis like okay, settle down, buddy
Yeah, like the term in theogen it refers to god yeah theos
And it refers to n which means that god exists within
And it has the word gen in it, which means it's a drug which is generating
something like a like god
You know, so that assumes a lot and there are people who could benefit from
psychedelic
Experiences who might not caught into those ideas and would avoid it and theogen
but might take a psychedelic
Yeah, I think psychedelic sounds manageable and theogen sounds like you joining
a cult it's a bit cultish
Well, isn't everything a bit cultish it seems like whatever anything
You know really affects people in a lot of ways
There's always someone who looks to sort of take the reins and sort of dictate
what the experience is and how to do it
And what the ritual should be and how you should you know manage it and it gets
culty
It gets culty um, but I think you could you know decultify it. Yes, you know to
some extent
If if if you're open-minded, I think it also all all practitioners, I mean,
there's a problem
Here's the big problems with psychedelics
One of the big problems is that we haven't really had a chance to openly
discuss it
In terms of like the effective and ineffective ways to use it what's what's
detrimental what's abusive
You know what treatment centers like we could have all this had this lined up,
right?
If they didn't pass that sweeping psychedelics act the control substances that
we
Right now they're still illegal, but they've been a part of human history
forever that if if they just open that up
We would have the ability to
Tell people how to use them and now not to use them
We'd have the ability to monitor them
And you're gonna have some strays you're gonna have some things that go wrong
So there's gonna have to be some ways to mitigate that right and if this theory
of like
People that have these psychedelic breaks if it's a
Imagine if you could find out that it really is
Like some sort of an overload of dmt like they're they have exogenous levels
that are too high
They can't manage it reality is too fabricated right or fragmented rather yeah,
I think you know
If we can keep things going with psychedelic research in humans
There's a vast number of options that are going to start opening up for example
like a vaccine against endogenous dmt
I mean that might be a great antipsychotic
That is wild to imagine if that's really what it is
They just gotta dial it or maybe some sort of technological
Intervention like a neural link type thing where I think they're going to be
able to dial things in which is going to be crazy
You're gonna be able to dial in horny you're gonna be able to dial in happy
I mean 50 years from now who knows what they're going to be able to do
Well, they're breeding these things called knockout mice which don't produce
the gene which makes the x y or z
And they've developed knockout mice for the enzyme that makes dmt. Oh, wow
You know, so there are animals that don't produce any dmt
You know, so you might be able at some point to and put genes into people like
you know crisper
And you have them stop making their own dmt. Maybe that'd be a good zombie
movie every stops making their own dmt
Well, you know, there's a lot of good movies. I think could kind of spring from
dmt
Yeah, well if all animals are producing dmt, that's where things get really
fascinating, right?
and if
many plants produce dmt and at least uh have
some of the compounds of dmt in them
like
What do you think is going on?
Well, um, do you remember that language called esperanto?
Yes, yeah, I think it's like a
Invisible it's like a spiritual esperanto
I think
That organisms that contain dmt are able to communicate with each other
That's you know, just an idea but I think you can occupy the same you know
wavelength of communication
Depending on the configuration of your matter
And it may be that that configuration is common to any organism possessing dmt
You know, so it might be well, you know, how you can communicate with trees.
Let's say when you're really stoned
uh on psychedelics or otherwise, but
uh, you know, that could be how you know, that could be you know, the empathy
existing among organisms
uh, can we take a break? Yes
Good. We'll take a break right now
And we're back
So what are you saying?
Yeah, the first time I smoked pot I got hooked. It was like, you know, this is
the most amazing thing in the world
Did you recreate that or were you like to have an experience like that for your
first time with the the hash?
No, no, I never did
Uh, chase that dragon. Yeah, well
You know, it was enough like I was convinced that this was going to be
something I wanted to study
And after the first time I smoked dmt, I knew that was what I was going to
study
Now when you
Had this idea, how did you go about?
How did you go about getting approval
for a study?
Um, well, it's a very long strategy
um
I
um
I came up with the idea of studying psychedelics when I was 20.
Um, I was doing developmental embryology work at Stanford
In the summer between my junior and senior years
I was studying the development of the chicken central nervous system
In petri dishes. It was very high tech. It was fun
Wow
Uh, we got two papers resulting from the research that I did that year
um
And uh
I wanted to study psychedelics, but I didn't really know
How to do it? I thought well, maybe I'll just get some lab experience
And I was reading all of the books for the next year's classes
which involved Freud and Buddhism and
The new developments in consciousness that were coming out at the time
And I watched I was watching the sunset go down
One evening and I flashed I'm going to study psychedelics and combine
Freud, Buddhism and psychopharmacology
Yeah, but I was 20 years old, right?
And in the beginning I didn't get a good reception most of the medicals
Yeah, well, I applied to 21 medical schools
And the 19 that gave me a chance to you know, tell them why I wanted to be a
doctor
You know, they just said forget it. So you were honest, unfortunately. I was
out of my mind
Yeah, so
Yeah, yeah
Yeah, so the two schools that did admit me
You know, they were either really short
uh interviews or they steered me away from my obsession
Oh
You know, but I
um
You know, but I
You got the idea that talking about psychedelics when you're 20 years old in
the early 70s was not really gonna fly
So I kept my interest to myself, but I wanted to get trained enough
to be able to do that kind of work at some point in the future
So I went to medical school
And I trained in psychiatry and
uh
You know, took uh
a job up in alaska
Which was around the time that people were thinking and starting to understand
winter depression
Which then put emphasis on the pineal gland and melatonin
So I thought, you know, that was a
You know, that was a entryway into studying the pineal gland
And uh, the function of melatonin in humans
So so the pineal gland definitely produces melatonin that's where yeah, yeah
That's been known since the 40s. Yeah, and uh
There wasn't a lot known back then in the early 80s
So I went back and trained some more in clinical psychopharmacology research
You know to learn how to do you know drug studies, uh, you know giving drugs
taking samples doing questionnaires
And so I moved to UNM university of new mexico and ran that melatonin pineal
study
And I you know got my chops as a clinical researcher
Um, and your melatonin was not especially psychoactive we discovered
It just is kind of sedating and it helps regulate body temperature in the
middle of the night
You know, but it was not psychedelic is someone's phone ringing
You hear that?
Yeah, I think you accidentally dialed someone. Oh, really?
Oh, yeah, tristan
That keeps happening. It's just tristan
Just put the phone put the phone on the table. Yeah, sorry
Because I didn't know how you pocket call with a flip phone. Did you know that
you could do that jamie?
It was the the way it was ringing. I'm like that's not his yeah
I heard a noise, but I didn't know what it was
But it wasn't his ring, you know, your ring is like
Right, right. Yeah, I apologize. That was like an outgoing ring. Yeah, yeah, i'm
sorry. No, no, it's okay
I just didn't want someone else listening to our entire conversation. Yeah,
yeah, that's tristan
But you wouldn't be I didn't know that it was a flip phone you wouldn't even be
able to pick up without opening it up
True, that's so old school of you. I love the fact you have a flip phone. I
think we were all happier back then
Well, this flip phone is you know 4g and I had to upgrade from my 3g flip phone.
No, they made you these bastards. They stopped serving. Yeah
Yeah, you have verizon. They texted me or something and cut you off son
Yeah, you have to upgrade to 4g. Yeah, I got this one and now they get the 5g
you gotta get five
The six is gonna come out soon. Mm-hmm. It's never gonna end meanwhile. You're
just rocking a flip phone
There's something about a flip phone like hanging up on someone. It's much more
satisfying
Look at that thing. That's why you'd have to carry around. I bet the battery
lasts a year
How long does the battery last on this thing? I keep it charged
You know two three days not that long. It's got a camera to like report crime.
It has a camera and it texts
It does text. Yeah, does it do voice to text?
No, if it does that if it did that i'd be really seriously thinking about it
Yeah, that voice to text is so easy like you could answer text messages while
you're in the car
Just say hey, siri text rick strassman, uh, you could do that with dragon
Oh, okay, so if you have dragon naturally speaking on your phone on
Your phone it'll get that on that. Yeah, it will you know transcribe from the
cloud on a flip phone?
Well, not on a flip phone. Well, that's what i'm saying
I'm saying if that had it because siri has it, you know, you do it off or
android
Auto has it too
I spent so much time in front of a screen
That just one more screen would have just driven me around the bend
Well, it's driving people crazy because it's just looking to argue with people
all day
It's like everyone's mad at everything and there's so
Little attention spent to your immediate life
And you know what's actually going around you or everyone's like freaking out
about things that are happening nowhere near them
Most of the time
Yeah, well, that's one of the things I like about living in gallop new mexico
Is that you watch the wind, you know, like it's pretty quiet
And even though people have you know cell phones there
They're mostly interested in other things church
you know, the rodeo
the
Upcoming parades sounds like a good place to live. It's the most patriotic
small town in america. Really? Yeah, it was voted. Wow. Yeah
Well, there's code talkers out there, you know the navajo you know code talkers
I've heard that expression, but I don't know what that means. Yeah. Yeah, that's
a great story
You might want to have like from the war is from world war two the pacific
arena
You know the navajo speak a very difficult to learn language
and they put a navajo
in japan with the troops
and navajo stateside and
Uh, you know, they communicated
Uh using navajo and the japanese could not
Uh figure out the language that was being used. Yeah, and
the code talkers, uh, the
Feeling goes with a lot of pride that you know, they were responsible or played
a major role
in the american victory
wow
That that makes sense like how quick would it how I mean 1947 how quick is it
going to be to learn navajo?
Yeah, well, you know
You may want to get one of those navajo you know code talkers in here that you
know
They're all in their 90s and they're these amazing guys
They're incredibly well. Yeah, they're they're just amazing. How many of them
were there?
There are quite a few there. Yeah, there are probably hundreds
uh, there's maybe
Like a dozen, you know two dozen that are still alive
That seems like a story that needs more attention
It's it's a really great story. There's a code talker museum that I think just
opened in dc. Oh, really?
Yeah, yeah, the navajo code talkers. Yeah, check them out
Uh, you know, so yeah, it's a quiet place to live a good place to read and
study and write and walk around
I'm not that current without you know looking at
uh, the news
Good
And I could just you know turn that off. Yeah, it's just too much for us
I mean, I don't think we should just like let corruption chaos happen. That's
not what i'm saying
I'm saying for just healthy human beings the average healthy human being it is
too much to be tuned into
All day long and it's so damn addictive
Well, it's and it's not good news. No, and that's what the thing that's what
attracts people is the shitty news
The good news like gets a quick glance and like what should I be mad at which I'd
be terrified of yeah
Yeah, what are they taking away next? Well?
You know, I
You kind of don't want to go there, but what do you think of monkeypox?
You don't want to go there?
What do you think of monkeypox?
Sounds like you definitely wanted to go there
um, I think it's uh
a disease that is primarily affecting people who have unprotected uh
It seems like gay sex right seems like it seems like it's like 90 something
percent of the cases
you know, um
There's a some sort of vaccine for it apparently. Yeah, I don't know treatment
for it
Like do what do they know how to cure it supportive treatment that just
supportive treatment fluids?
So they just wait until it goes away? Yeah, and how long does it usually take
to go away? I don't know
Is it killing people? No, it's not killing people, but they're pretty
uncomfortable. Those are apparently pretty painful source
They look gross. Yeah
Um
I mean, is there a bright side that's not killing people?
Yeah, yeah, it's hard to say when some fucking weird disease spreads. Yeah
I don't get weird diseases all right. I don't even get the news about weird
diseases on this phone
It's made a jump to other people. It's not um just people having unprotected
gay sex
It's people that haven't had any sex at all
I think even kids are getting it now extended contact. Yeah, I think can do it
It's it's a fucking creepy disease though
Yeah, yeah, it's got a horrible name. Yeah
Yeah, they should call it something else too late, right? Well, you can call it
mpx
Yeah, but why didn't they just come up with a better name before they just bust
it out with monkeypox?
Yeah, yeah, but they do that swine flu, you know
avian virus
So it's always a way we connect it to animals
Those zoonotic diseases zoonotics. Yeah, it's creepy. It's creepy. How many of
them there are out there?
Yeah, I know
Um, well, so what keeps you going?
With what your kids do your kids keep you going?
What do you mean by keep me going, you know, keep an optimistic look, uh, well
Not necessarily optimistic, but what gives you hope?
um, I think
more
Than i've ever thought before that most people are really good people
Most people try to be really good people they want to have a good life
most people that's most
I think you're always going to deal with certain
numbers of people
That are trying to make enormous profits
and doing so at the expense of either the environment or people's lives
Or and they're going to influence politicians and they're going to make laws
That benefit these people and they've done this since the beginning of time
I mean eisenhower warned about it when he was leaving office
He warned about the military industrial complex. He warned about all that shit.
He warned about
I mean they were they warned about that when they built the fucking
constitution
it's but I think
Most people aren't like that most people aren't trying to control people and
ruin the earth for profit
Most people are just trying to live their life
it's a it's a
It's a significant impact for sure
it's horrible and it represents us overall it does because what are people
capable of at their worst
or they're capable of starting unnecessary wars that are going to cost
Hundreds of thousands if not millions of lives for profit. We know that people
have done that
That's very dis but that's not you and that's not me and that's not jamie as
not most people most people are good
That's what I think so that's what keeps me going. Yeah
Um, I think most people are good, but I think most people are easily swayed
Well, when things go sideways and when people get scared and people get scared
their anxiety gets ramped up and they look for
Something to be mad at and it ramps up their anger at that person
Yeah, a few years ago. I was pretty sick for years in that joseph levy book
And as I was recuperating I was reading concentration camp stories
concentration camp literature
Well, I just wanted to see how low you could go and still and still come out of
it
And you know that the concentration camp culture history is pretty it's pretty
uh
well, it's amazing what kind of evil everyday people can
You know lay on other people. It's uh, it's just remarkable. They re they just
got a new guy didn't they just find just
caught a new guard
Yeah, and convicted him
I mean, he's in his 90s now
Yeah, those guys are really old. Yeah, that's not wild
Oh, man. Yeah, but that people who are alive today
Participated in genocide in the 40s. Here he is 101 year old ex-guard of nazi
camp is convicted by german court
The man identified only as joseph s because of germany privacy laws wow, they're
even private of nazis
Was sentenced to five years in prison after being found guilty of being an
accessory to more than 3500 murders
Five years in prison
That's all well. He may not live beyond that's all they gave the first couple
Yeah, they might beat him to death in there
Yeah, yeah, he he doesn't want a jewish uh, cellmate. He says it's not even
clear if he would even serve the time
Yeah, he may not
Oh
So what is the solution let him go free
It's he's too old. He doesn't he's sorry when he's you know, how do you how do
you let that guy go free?
Even though he's 101 years old like what is the answer there? I I think he
would have to repent
How could you repent from that?
Uh, he would need to make restitution to the extent that he could to people
that he's caused
suffering to oh
Man, I mean what kind of restitution could he make that do for 3500 people?
Yeah, well, maybe he could tell the truth
It just freaks me out that that's inside of the last hundred years. It's so
recent
It's really recent. Yeah, yeah
Civilization is such a new thing
Well, you know, uh
Civilization is a new thing anti-semitism isn't now and anti-semitism boy goes
way back
That's pretty old one. It's the world's oldest hatred is the way I've heard it
Described you want some coffee? Yeah, some coffee would be great kid in there
So we were talking about the difficult rolled road that it took cheers, sir.
Thanks for being here cheers. Yeah, thanks
It's very fun for me. Very nice
Yeah, you know talking about like you um you you had this idea
And then the the long road to actually getting it passed and we definitely don't
want to skip over that
Well, I spent a lot of time training
Um, you know, I went to medical school my residency
on fellowship and then the you know, two-year
Melatonin project was also under training funds, so
I stopped you know training officially when I was
35 maybe 36 I was on training funds until that
Time yeah, you know, so we discovered that there wasn't much
Psycho activity that was associated with melatonin
And in the meantime, I had learned about dmt, you know, that is made in the
body
It's incredibly psychedelic. I smoked dmt
The melatonin work was kind of taking me into places that weren't all that
interesting
So I switched fields um, and figured well, it's you know now or never
I'm in my I'm in my 30s. I've got a good appointment at the university
I've got the support of the research unit and uh
Did you approach them with this idea?
I did I spoke to my you know, two bosses
In psychiatry and on the research unit
And they said, you know get grants and publish and stay out of the newspaper
You know, you know those were the three bits of advice I got
They said you know what you're doing
So just go ahead and do it and you see what happens
Oh, I got support, you know from the university well, you know, this was you
know 1986 1987 and
People really didn't know about psychedelics at that point
They had become forgotten
They weren't being taught in medical school anymore. There was no research
going on for 15 20 years
you know, so
You know, even after I began my study the research unit director used to joke
that people in their study room were smoking mushrooms
So he didn't really know what I was doing
He just wanted me to stay out of trouble and succeed. How bizarre is it to you
knowing that?
Research on the mind never stopped
But researchers research on one of the weirdest things you could do to the mind
stopped
And it didn't just stop for a little bit stuff for how long 15 20 years 20
years 20 years 20 years
That seems insane doesn't it that they wouldn't want to study one of the most
profound experiences that's available to human beings
Well, it's important to think of some context, you know
To you know things were just going crazy with kids taking way too much lsd in
the wrong set of circumstances
Without any preparation
And it was a public health emergency emergency rooms and psychiatric units were
being filled up
You know, so the government had to do something
You know from the public health point of view at the very least which was to
make it harder for kids to get their hands on psychedelics
I think that notion that
There was a desire to quash
Understanding what the drugs were doing to people like in a scientific manner
I don't think you know that was ever the case
I think it was more
That nobody really wanted to
You know challenge you know the government
And submit a really good study that you can back up with safety mechanisms
built into place
You know once I got my funding and my
My permits which was a long process it took two years
You know the government was super keen on my studies. They were very interested
in what we were doing what
That we were finding
When you say the government like what branch of the government
Mostly the national institute on
I'm on drug abuse
Uh, one of the divisions of the national institutes of health
You know they were funding me. Oh, oh, this is cool, too
The first grant I got was from the scottish right foundation for schizophrenia
research
There's a branch of the masons
Very interesting and you know the masons have a lot of
Iconography with the pineal and pine cones
So I mean that was pretty creepy that is creepy people get freaked out by masons
They just the I mean without knowing much about it
You hear that someone's amazing you're like oh boy
What does that mean? Well, and they were the first funders of my research
Which I thought was you see all the illuminati people gonna go crazy now
although the real conspiracy theory people
Oh, it is captured by the government. It is a strange coincidence
That doesn't sound like a strange coincidence
Um, well, there's a more mundane explanation. Yeah, um one of my mentors well,
maybe
It doesn't help clarify things it may make it more complex
One of my mentors was a psychiatrist at ucla a fellow named dr friedman
and uh, we got to know each other uh back in the day in in the 50s actually he
was giving lsd at the nih
and uh
I you met him and he supported my my work and he
uh
Was on a committee the the you know granting committee you know for the scottish
right foundation for schizophrenia research
And he said if you could uh submit a grant to them that focuses on dmt and and
schizophrenia
Uh, you'll most likely get funded and and I did you know
So it was at least ostensibly from the schizophrenia point of view
But still uh, the you know, the source of the money and the interest uh came
from the mason's that's wild
There's that's another subject that I wanted to talk to you about um
There's certain religions that had an exemption
For using uh dmt and there's christian religions in america
Right there's there's like two different
sects of christianity they're allowed to take like an ayahuasca drink yeah,
yeah, there's how did that happen?
There's a group called the udv
And one called the santo dame they're both based from brazil. They both
originated there
And so these folks they went and they got religious exemption. How did how did
that go down?
um
well the
well, let me let me think this through
um
well
In the early 90s when I just got my dmt study off the ground I met the leader
of the udv
uh, an anglo fellow jeffrey
uh
bronfman from santa fe was uh the
north american
representative of the udv and he asked me
about
what their strategy ought to be
to be able to drink ayahuasca
so I advised
you know taking care of all your permits
you know kind of the way I did it just you fill out the forms and you know talk
to the regulators and
after a while
you know if you stick with it chances are good they'll give you permission
or you could wait to be caught and then you know take it to court
in which case you would at least be you know getting the experiences underway
the church would be established you would have a track record of safety
yeah
but that sounds like a terrible idea I would definitely say try to get the
opinions in
right or rather permissions in
well and well so that's what happened is you know they got
uh
you know they were discovered importing ayahuasca which they had been you know
doing for I don't know three four years or so
yeah and
so they took it to court
so they got caught with it
that they got caught with it
you know you have to you know think about it though because it may have taken
them years
right I get it that makes sense
and they may never have gotten approval
so is it possible for them to grow
the stuff they need to make ayahuasca here
do those things have to be grown in other climates or can they be grown here
you can grow the plants in either hawaii or florida
right I knew people grew them in hawaii I didn't know florida interesting so
if florida opened it up they could have ayahuasca plantations
yeah yeah
and just I mean that tropical environment down there
well I mean you'd have to work out you know the regulatory and the
organizational structure
kind of like they're doing in Oregon which it seems like it's kind of halting
are you familiar with what's what they're doing in Oregon
in Oregon they seem to be decriminalizing basically everything
right well they've legalized uh you know psilocybin which means that the state's
getting involved in
a board and you certifying really so they legalized it for recreational use
or medicinal use like do you have to have a prescription
or no no they're going to be setting up psilocybin
you know centers holy dispensers wow and that's wild and you could be a
certified
you know psilocybin sitter I wish Portland wasn't such a hot mess
Portland's such a hot mess that's it he's such a hot mess well the smaller
counties in Oregon
have got the right uh you know to ban uh psilocybin and uh they're doing it you
know so fewer and fewer
counties seem interested interesting yeah so it's passed statewide you're going
to have to find
some county that's going to give you the green light and that's where people
are going to start growing
their stuff it's going to come with a lot of problems you know like one of the
problems that happened with uh
marijuana was the early days banks didn't want to get involved they wouldn't uh
allow people to use
credit cards because they they didn't want to be connected to that so the
people who had giant wads of
cash and they were hiring these uh special forces guys to like take their cash
smelling from pot
yeah stinking of pot you know and they're the the whole thing was really sketchy
because everybody
knew you're leaving that spot with bags of cash like everyone knew you have
cash there and so
you have to really worry about getting robbed and killed yeah it's interesting
to you know follow
what's happening in oregon it's supposed to all be in place by january 1st that's
going to be wild
it's going to be wild i think there'll be some problems yeah well for sure that's
the problem if it
happens um you know if it happens federally if if some some wacky president
decided to let all the
psychedelics free we're going to have a lot of people lose their fucking marbles
the question is aren't we
already and how much of a difference would it be and would it be a difference
or would those people
have already lost their marbles there's a lot of questions i guess yeah well
you have to educate
people right in the best way to trip and they maybe should have some research
and how to help people
that have had bad trips right maybe there's like a good cocktail of medications
to bring you back to
yeah yeah like if it's a bad if it's a bad experience you know traumatic it's
like ptsd in a way some
people have really bad ones and they freak out and they they don't know what to
do and then they get
elevated anxiety and it sort of cascades you've seen that yeah yeah yeah i
think we're going to be
seeing more of that yeah look i had one dmt trip that was it was i think we did
three times in an in an
afternoon and i had uh the last one was really really really powerful and i had
like a very slippery
grip on reality for like two weeks after that that can happen yeah that's how i
describe it as like
slippery like uh i was doing everything normal i was driving to work normal i
was doing it but everything
felt slippery like everything can go wrong at any second slippery is a good
term well you know that
happened to me after my first you know five methoxy dmt experience for about
you know three days i just
didn't really feel like i was in my body that i was really kind of interacting
with things in a
coherent manner that stuff is interesting i mean i really want to know your
thoughts on that stuff
because that's a weird um experience in that it seems like you just go away
yeah yeah you do go away and even though people seem to be talking it up i'm
not sure if going away
is that good a thing i want to explain that to people who don't know what we're
talking about when
i mean go away i mean it feels like you're dying and then it also feels like
you don't exist anymore
so you don't have any thoughts while you're over there it's we it's the
weirdest experience it's all
white it's not just this white out yeah it's like this full white out but it's
somehow cleansing like
you come out of there like lighter oh it's like being in the center of the sun
yeah there's something
about when you come back you feel like everything's going to be fine you know
like it's so wild in the
beginning it's so terrifying when you first enter into it but then when you
come out of it you're so happy
you did it well i think that's a concern is that you feel so good after you've
come through and you
want to replicate that right i've seen people use five methoxy addictively you
know habitually they
just want to get back to that state over and over and you don't really see that
very often with dmt
dmt itself has so much information dude i knew who uh he went so many times he
was doing it so often
that he said the entity started to tell him to stop coming yeah he's doing dmt
like every day
yeah i'm like hey man that seems like that seems like a lot well do you think
it was the entities
telling him to stop it or that it was you know just his mind saying you know
you're you're you're you're
killing me i mean let's take a break yeah i mean with it or what are those
things what is your mind
right what your mind is is your mind an individual thing or is it something
that constantly changes
depending upon what it interacts with and are those entities that are telling
you stop doing it
did they live in your mind does your mind live where they live yes i think so
yes but either way this
this whole uh thing of he he was having a real problem with it like he the
experience was so profound he just
wanted to recreate it over and over and over and over and over again um you
know when i get emails from
people who start sounding like they're just about ready to like lose it because
they're smoking so
much dmt and you know they want my advice and you know support and you know
confirmation of their funny
ideas and i just say stop smoking dmt that's what i'd recommend you don't need
to do it that often yeah
that's the one slippery one that i had i've had it since then but that one
slippery one was a that was
a little bit of a wake-up call because like hey cocky face you think you've got
a great grip on reality
why don't you just like enter into other dimensions for a couple hours and then
come back
and now you feel weird about everything like for two weeks took two weeks to
feel normal driving yeah
yeah well did you get help nope nope just worked out yeah i worked out i laid
in the float tank quite a
bit i mean it wasn't scary but it was next door neighbors to scary right it was
it was like if i
have to go through life with this elevated level of weirdness and anxiety
forever like this is life now
i'm like oh i don't like this it was almost like being too high you know that
feeling when you i'm a
little too high i don't like this right yeah well so it was a close call it was
a close call i think
i think it's a wake-up call i don't i don't think um i think these like you
know alex berenson wrote um
that book tell your children do you know you know about that book i don't think
so alex berenson used to
write for the new york times and uh he wrote a book making a connection between
people smoking too much pot and
having um these uh psychotic breaks and these schizophrenic breaks like what is
going on what
is happening to people like why is that happening and is it happening
proportionate to the population
where you would normally get schizophrenics or is it elevated like what's
happening well if you're if
you're kind of prone to schizophrenia it seems pretty clear the more pot you
smoke the more likely you'll
have a full break yes and see this is something that we should have known right
this is something that
we should it's just like people who have alcoholism in their family maybe they
shouldn't drink right
you know i mean we know people like that that you know dad was an alcoholic
they can't have a drink
this is a thing that really is unfortunate because they could have studied this
and had answers
and we would we could be able to tell people how to do these things well i
think we should learn from
that experience by making sure we're clear about adverse reactions to psychedelics
yeah uh the same
way we are about adverse reactions to anything to anything yeah well you're
talking about that bad
trip that just lingered um i had a bad trip when i was in college an lsd
experience and i didn't take
anything for 12 years after that well mine wasn't a bad trip that's what was
interesting the trip was
magnificent the trip trip was spectacular the trip was incredible the the
visuals were beyond my
imagination and the way it affected me it was like a real like a peeling of
layers of of who i am
but the experience afterwards it's like i didn't go back to normal it was so
wild like whatever it was
was so wild that everyday reality just seemed like what is this is this trick
is this a trick yeah like
is reality fake it seemed like real weird but no one would have noticed i
talked normal i act you
know i did normal stuff i didn't didn't take days off and sit at home stare at
the walls i just did
normal stuff until it all came back to normal uh did you tell your friends or
family i think i told a
couple people i think i told people that do dmt i definitely know i told duncan
i never definitely know
i told duncan we talked about it and you know that was the thing it was it's
really it wasn't bad
but it wasn't good and it let me know that hey what if it's way worse than that
well yeah you know
what if you're that way for the rest of your life forever yeah yeah what if you
like we've know those
stories of the guys who did too much acid never came back right those are
classic stories they're and
they're true yeah yeah well you know that's why it's good to have a therapist
too like i was fortunate
in that i was in psychoanalysis at the time and so i could you know talk to my
analyst about how
horrible that 5 me or you know it was a bad experience as opposed to yours but
it was it was quite
unsettling and it really helped to have somebody to get it off my chest with
did you feel like you were
dead did you feel like when you did it like you were gone uh no i was stuck in
this evil good loop
you know like good versus evil and which was i going to choose oh boy yeah yeah
and i couldn't
decide and i asked the sitter you know what should i choose and they said
something like there's no need
to choose or they're both the same or yeah something unsatisfactory oh god and
uh i was pretty rattled
for a couple of days after that so is this when you were coming out of it like
did you have a time
of the trip where you were just gone where it was just white fuzz noise no no
actually no this was
different yeah it was different it had more content how many times did you do 5
meo oh gosh
once pure the pure drug and once the toad yeah you know my experience with the
dmt compounds isn't
extensive but the experiences with the five what i was getting at was are they
uniform they're mostly
that white light yeah yeah that seems to be but this was a different one it was
different yeah was this
one from the toad no no it was the synthetic yeah i could tell you um i was you
know looking up at
you know from the bottom of like a silo and there was a catwalk that went
around and around you know
the inside of the silo and there were all these dwarves like snow white and the
seven dwarves
with the long sleeves and the long noses and the hood and that there are like
countless just you know
circulating and they were up to no good
and at the same time you know they were beckoning
and i just didn't know what to do so that's when i opened my eyes and said to
my friend you know what
should i choose i wonder if they gave you like a mixture has anybody given
someone a mixture of 5 meo and
nndmt yeah yeah that's pretty well i wouldn't say common but i i think it's
called jaguar oh i like
the name yeah ralph metzner used to provide that to people because i was
thinking like your sound
you're saying something that sounds awfully like the visual dmt experience i
know and then i know
it's interesting yeah because most people have the white light yeah i wonder if
you would have gotten
like a a combo cocktail like a you know what is that arnold palmer and arnold
palmer yeah you know
shirley temple the well the arnold palmer is like a little bit of iced tea and
a little bit of lemonade
you know i think that's what you got yeah yeah i mean i don't know i'm just
guessing i've just never
heard of anybody having such very um distinct visuals before like that yeah my
first entity contact was on
5 meo now when you say entity what what was it the first one well it was these
dwarves these countless
that's what that was them yeah that was the first entity contact and what did
you think you were
seeing when you were when you're seeing them i had no idea i figured you know i
was under the influence
and that's what i was seeing you just were going with it yeah yeah observing
well if you're in it you
can't do anything i mean you can only you can only i mean observe partake do
you think that when
you're tripping like that are you entering into a world that already exists or
are you changing something
well i think you're changing your ability to perceive things that are normally
invisible
so they're there all the time they're there all the time either in your mind
unconscious or out there in
the ether and you know that's what we were talking about earlier that it's
really hard to tell right
but the important thing though i believe is that it doesn't make a lot of
difference right now anyway
because we can't really design experiments to determine that the important
thing is the information
that you're getting out of it you know what's it good for are you able to
extract any valuable information
for yourself or for other people hmm now when you first started doing these
studies how did you devise
a protocol how did you figure out what the dosage was going to be for these
people how many times they
were going to do it did you have like test subjects like how did you or i mean
pre-test subjects like
how did you devise a protocol um well the main person who was advising me was
um was a pediatric
neuroendocrinologist uh whoa a pediatric neuroendocrinologist and the research
i had done as a fellow
and with the melatonin work was what you would call you know clinical neuroendocrinology
so in a way my
study with dmt was using dmt as a uh neuroendocrinological probe it was a psychopharmacology
study um wow yeah you know so uh it's what's called dose response work you give
small doses medium doses and
you give big doses you need to characterize as many of the effects as you can
now you did it intravenously
yeah which i thought was really fascinating because it extends the experience
right well the majority
of previous studies gave it intramuscularly uh really yeah yeah the hungarian
studies budapest
steven jarrah what is that like well good question and i did bring in someone
to receive a test you
know dose of the intramuscular did you have a hard time finding somebody for
that man my friends were
lining up of course yeah of course yeah well so terence mckenna and i developed
the idea behind the dmt
study study in the first place like a couple of years before it actually got
approved i didn't
know what approach to take and i went over to his place one day this was the
summer of 88 and we just
you know brainstormed the entire afternoon up in his loft and we decided or
what we concluded was that we
would or you know that i would uh apply for funding for from the war on drugs
that you know that would
be the best way to study dmt is getting money is to get money from the war on
drugs
how did you phrase it well instead of you know saying that you know dmt is an
amazingly cool drug
we said dmt is an amazingly weird drug or potentially dangerous might be
involved in psychosis people are
abusing it you know so you know the things that we uh proposed were coming at
it from the perspective
of public health uh as opposed to spirituality or psychotherapy the more we
understand about dmt the
more we'll understand about lsd maybe more about psychosis and schizophrenia
you know so it was
phrased or looked at as an experiment a series of experiments with um you know
public with you know
public health implications there's something seriously cool about getting the
first psychedelic studies
funded by the war on drugs i mean it was an amazing stretch there it must have
felt amazing that you
pulled it off well my volunteers and i every so often would look at each other
and say this isn't really
happening is it yeah so yeah it was unbelievable that's uh that's pretty
unbelievable pretty awesome
it was just occurring in complete isolation too at the university hospital in
albuquerque in the early 90s i
mean nobody knew what we were doing so how did you devise the dosage like when
you're doing it
intravenously how did you figure out how much to give people to have the
maximum experience or the
what did you do yeah yeah um good question let me pee again yeah we'll be right
back ladies and
gentlemen with the answer to that question so uh we left off with uh how you
figured out what dose to give
people to have this experience um it was a convert well the one person that we
gave intramuscular dmt to
described it as much slower than the smoked and wasn't as intense uh so because
we wanted to replicate
the smoked experience we then switched to iv uh you know so the standard intramuscular
you know dose
is a milligram per kilogram was there um a reason why you didn't just have the
people smoke it
uh smoking would have been complicated um it is hard to get as much dmt into
your lungs as you need
for a breakthrough through smoking right from coughing or the room starts
breaking up and you're kind of
losing your orientation um there'd be combustion products uh that would be you
know not dmt that
people were smoking and we didn't really want to expose people's lungs to
chemicals unless we needed to
so we uh we switched to the iv you know the iv method of giving any drug is the
fastest even faster than
smoking or snorting smoking oh i didn't know you can snort it people snort it
people well of course they
do why did they even ask that yeah and you can start other drugs you know like
any kind of drug for
example right i've never just never thought anybody would snort dmt well if if
you make a waters uh if
you make on a water soluble you know salt of dmt you can snort it oh okay yeah
you smoke the freebase
but you can't crush the freebase up and snort that you know i i don't i don't
think it would work it it
it might uh but the way people do uh snorted it's the you know water soluble
form what is that stuff that
they do where it's like a snuff that they blow up each other's noses and it
does have psychedelic
chemicals in it they think it might even have dmt in it right right um yeah the
amazonian psychedelic
snuffs yeah um yeah they contain dmt 5-methoxy dmt bufotanine uh and some you
know obscure tryptamines
and it's supposed to be horrendous right you shoot it up up the nose and it's
just disgusting yeah you've
seen those black and white pictures that they took in the amazon in the 40s and
50s yeah could you
imagine getting a blast that stuff up your nose not really but if that was the
only way you could get
to reach the spirit realm you'd do it uh right right i mean people do a lot of
extreme things to
attain spiritual experience how much uh have you paid attention to uh graham
hancock's work on the amazon
how they're rediscovering these civilizations and and also the use of uh there's
a bunch of different
researchers using lidar down there right where they're going over the jungle
and they're finding
grids and the cities that used to exist down there and and graham thinks that
there might have been
cities with like millions of people in them that existed before these the
europeans came through and
gave them all smallpox well yeah you know graham's been really important in
making people aware of
the role of you know psychedelics you know across all cultures yeah across time
i got graham on the
podcast i got him high hadn't been high in like two years yeah he he you told
me that he you know blames
you now i would go just don't go so hard yeah yeah he said he's going too hard
yeah yeah he was really
proud of himself and then he got stoned in your show but then he got stoned and
he was just on fire
the moment he got stoned just breaking down how i think essentially we were
talking about the the dating
of civilizations about how arrogant people are with the their initial assertions
of what the origins or the
timeline of civilization is he's like the timeline of civilization is still a
mystery and they're
pushing pushing it further and further back with every discovery and they keep
finding stuff that
pushes it further back further back further back they're finding complex stone
structures that are
14 000 years old 12 000 years old yeah yeah gobekli tepi 12 000 years old that's
a long time ago
and they keep finding all this uh evidence of human beings being older than we
thought they were
you know i think i think that this younger dryness impact theory is probably
the best theory when it
comes to explaining why we're so wacky i think we had once achieved some very
high level of sophistication
you know i think that's what explains ancient egypt that's what explains some
spectacular construction
methods that were from thousands and thousands of years ago and then we got
wiped out almost to the
point of extinction and then we rebuilt back again with a bunch of that we didn't
understand
and a bunch of people that came from really smart people but had been living
like
barbarians for the last couple hundred years that's what i think happened yeah
i wonder well are you
familiar with uh julian james and the bicameral mind i've heard uh that name
and i've heard of that book
yeah so you know james believed that up until a certain point that that it was
a common phenomenon
for people to hear a spoken voice that's right and that's where people got
their information was from
the spoken voice could you imagine if that's really how people used to interact
with god that god used
to just talk to you well yeah yeah his theory proposes that the prophets were
the you know transition
oh wow uh between the bicameral mind being common and it kind of dying off
yeah there's no you know there's no you know hard you know there's no hard
evidence of the brain
communicating differently back then because it you know it uh it disappears
quickly soft tissue
what do you think of uh terence mckenna and dennis mckenna's theory about
monkeys eating psilocybin
does that make sense to you it makes sense yeah uh if you don't tell it tell
people what the uh the idea is that
we we the grasslands uh they that the rainforest receded into grasslands and
the monkeys came down
they started experimenting with new food and they found psilocybin right mm-hmm
right yeah but
well you know these compounds you know psychedelics stimulate the growth of new
neurons
right neurogenesis and also stimulate the complexity and number of connections
among neurons that's called
neuroplasticity you know so it you know could be that there were neuroplastic
effects in the monkeys
that were using psilocybin you know that would be an explanation of how there
would be
there would be an evolution of consciousness which would be you know passed on
and continue
you know one of the the big fun theories that people like to talk about when it
comes to
human beings people that are like alien enthusiasts they like to say well human
beings are the product
of some sort of accelerated evolution so the aliens came down here and they ran
experiments
with these primal people and and converted them into modern people yeah we can
get some of that yeah
um but the question is maybe that's what mushrooms are like maybe that's what
that means you're consuming
something that gives you this entirely early experience it's causing neuroplasticity
it's causing neurogenesis
it's making you more creative it makes you you have a better able ability to uh
see motion
right it doesn't it aid in visual acuity acuity it does yeah yeah and your
sensitivity
and the ability to detect parallel lines moving who there was someone who did
that study there's a
like a straight scientist who did this study where they gave people psilocybin
and they showed them
parallel lines and as they're moving off parallel that the people on psilocybin
could see it way quicker
um yeah well the the you know question is whether those traits can be passed on
to the next generation
you know you know that's what's called lamarckian you know transmission uh it's
called epigenetics now
uh activation of certain genes uh can be passed on hereditarily you know so it
could be that the
increase in neuroplasticity and neurogenesis is um you know passed on well
something happened to
people right i mean they had we'll keep you off camera yeah keep me off camera
keep them off camera
jamie something happened to people because the human brain doubled over a
period of like was a just a
couple million years which which coincides with the timeline that mckenna
proposed that these
rainforests were starting to recede during that same time period right
yeah you kind of have to wonder what the dmt system and the brain was doing at
that time too i
wonder if that was a time of rapid growth of the dmt neurotransmitter system
yeah and what um what was the natural state of dmt back then too i mean i would
have one of the
things that i would imagine is that people who have to live like a very um hard
scrabble
hunter-gatherer life you know you're out there in tents you're trying to
protect your children from
predators you're living this like very tuned in to everything around your life
it's probably a very very different experience in terms of just how they
perceive this the world
itself how they perceive reality because one of the things that has to kind of
it seems like it kind
of has to happen as um things get safer and easier you get less of a concern
and a fear of danger and so your
ability to detect danger kind of atrophies whereas someone who lived at the
beginning of human
civilization would have been like just a super intelligent animal almost right
you know like
just tuned into everything just like animals like if you go snap a twig near a
deer and their heads spin
around you know bear smells you from three football fields away that's normal
for them
we maybe had like a better sense of the world around us i mean think about how
bad our senses are
our noses are terrible they barely do anything like maybe they were like really
good at one point in
time and we just didn't need them anymore and atrophied you know if you if you
had a wolf that was near
you and you could smell it you know that would be a very good thing to stay
alive well they could smell
you i bet you used to be able to smell them but we've been living in houses for
so long uh-huh well
the brain the olfactory centers in the brain are the oldest you know perceptual
centers in the brain
really yes obviously they could smell before they could see uh uh if they're
the oldest well if you
smell things it'll it'll stimulate memories yeah you know so that's not the
case with other senses
there's a connection between the olfactory sense and memory uh which is the
strongest among the senses
wow which indicates that our sense of smell once was much more important
wow what had to be if we didn't have doors it would have to be it have to be
right you have to be able
to smell things hear things you have to be able to feel the vibrations on the
ground of something
running at you so you get a jump at it i mean that that environment if you
introduced psilocybin to
that environment and that's what created human beings that is a fascinating
theory and the thing is we know
psilocybin is real and we know its effects are profound and so to dismiss it as
being what happened
i i don't think that's wise i think there's a problem with what it what
mushrooms are it's like
people think they're so silly i'm tripping on mushrooms it's a you know you're
doing something
you shouldn't be doing like oh look at todd is over there on mushrooms but what
it probably is is some
kind of a chemical gateway to some either state of mind or some other dimension
and if you gave that to
some savage proto hominid that was just living naked running away from jaguars
all the time
and this thing starts tripping and starts figuring out tools and starts
figuring out how to make sounds
to indicate different animals oh well you well you know it's in a direction
yeah the effect of the
psilocybin is in a direction you know so that's an interesting thing to
consider in a direction in
what way what do you mean by that well towards increasing civilization towards
towards towards language you
towards you know love as opposed to hatred let's say yeah it would help them
form tribes
especially if they were all doing it together well you know so you then argue
for an evolutionary
advantage for hominids that were taking psilocybin it gave them an advantage at
what point in time do you
think people forgot that psilocybin was beneficial like and what were the steps
to get people to
not have access to that information anymore not not be aware of how long for
what an enormous history
people were consuming them
how long i well i mean there's uh turf you know so look at the the major
um religious institutions and they're stamping out psychedelic use in the in in
the indigenous
world uh if you could stamp out the estates then you kind of have the hegemony
over those states or
you can you know promise them if you pray or if you're good or if you do
various things
you know so there's politics involved competing groups those that used
mushrooms probably and those who
didn't uh there there would probably be some climactic and environmental ones
too that the range of the mushrooms was shrinking
right like some sort of climate change and they forced out of areas that used
to grow them all the
time so they stopped using them and they started taking alcohol and other
things
it's just since we know so much about them today in you know like in comparison
to what people knew in
the 50s and 60s like publicly we know so much more about them so there's so
much real scientific data out
there there's so many real real intelligent people who are enthusiasts of them
that can kind of explain
the benefits of it it's just amazing that it's taken so long to just get one
state to make it legal
well you know what would you like to see uh the future of psychedelic use would
you want everybody
to be tripping in the best of all possible worlds like tim leary ken kesey just
everybody those guys
went too hard i think they scared a lot of people i think those guys they were
so tuned you know tune out
or drop out they were so uh culty you know and they had a wild bus and they
threw wild parties i think
a lot of people got freaked out by civilization eroding before their eyes and
their kids turning into
useless hippies like there was a lot of fear that was attached to that i think
it would be different
today if you talked about psychedelics because way more people have had
psychedelic experiences i think
per capita i know of many many people who are um very happy micro dosing micro
dosing psilocybin
just take a little bit take a little bit here and there and they really enjoy
doing it that way
you know i wonder i mean is there some yearning for utopia there is always
going to be that right
but there's also going to be an understanding that whatever that stuff does it
seems to encourage
you to behave and think in a way that's better for everybody it seems to want
to encourage you to
think kindly to be nicer to people to to like connect more with the earth and
it's like it tunes you
into a very for lack of a better term positive frequency but then again the vikings
took them and they
slaughtered people yeah yeah i think it's yeah i think they that too yeah yeah
uh you don't want
to gild the lily i you don't want to gild the lily what does that mean gild the
lily uh make something
beautiful even more beautiful oh yeah yeah um i don't i don't think they should
be illegal for sure
i do think that to just randomly give them out to everybody is irresponsible i
think there are a lot
of people out there that are having a really hard time with regular reality and
that something as
profound as a psychedelic experience could blow a fuse but i don't want to be
the person that can tell
a person what they can and can't do and i think that's part of the problem with
it all is that they
could tell you you can't try something or me i can't try something and they're
just like us they're
just a person they're just a person of similar age and they're going to tell
you you can't do
something i'm like you don't even know you've never even done it this is a dumb
conversation we're
having and you're going to make it you're going to make it so that i can get
locked in a cage
because i want to do something that you haven't done well the chairman of our
ethics board at the university
uh when i presented these studies to him uh for the informed consent and what
you would be doing with
people you know i bumped into him one day and said man i'm so grateful for how
open-minded you are
about this and he said i'm not god we're not playing god i thought that was a
great line he was a libertarian
actually and uh he figured people should do what they want to do and uh just
give informed consent
educate people let them know what they're getting into and let let them decide
i think it's way more
dangerous to have people uneducated about the risks of certain drugs and the
importance of understanding
the dosage and the purity than it is to tell people not to do drugs i think
that telling people that not
do drugs and you're going to arrest them if they do drugs that's unrealistic
people have done drugs
since the beginning of time i think the realistic approach is to educate people
and to stop all this
nonsense about what is and isn't allowed that a grown adult you a person who
has never done it can tell
you don't do that i don't want you to do something that's been around for
thousands and thousands of
years has a rich human history of usage like psilocybin like that that's not
the good guy the guy telling
you he's going to put you in a cage for mushrooms is never the good guy well i
think there needs to be
you know places where people can trip who want to trip for any number of
reasons yeah i don't know what
you call them they might be churches they might be retreat centers there might
be i don't think the
government should be involved in this is what my point is i don't think they
should have any say
i don't think this has anything to do with you just stay out of the way you don't
even know what it is
and if you want to do it it'll make you a better person but don't don't tell
people that you're going
to arrest them there's some people that are still like pushing back against the
idea of there being
recreational use of psilocybin meanwhile it's helping so many soldiers so many
soldiers that have come back
with ptsd psilocybin research is very promising i know it's impressive it's
very impressive uh mdma as
well yeah mdma as well the guy who drove me over this morning is a vet was
talking about some of
his friends who have done psychedelic therapy and they're like back to normal
yeah and more more than
one different type of psychedelic i've also heard people got guys doing uh ibogaine
and then 5-meo
i've heard that that there's some real success in doing that but i've talked to
people personally
that have had psychedelic experiences that have just freed them of so much that
they had from combat
duty well i mean we need to do more research right right because once we have
more research data we can
say this helps and it'll really spread out to you know the rest of the country
as opposed to just within
the research communities my friend neil brennan is a very funny stand-up
comedian and he lives in la
and he's always had like real problems with depression and he tried a bunch of
different
stuff he tried ketamine therapy magnet therapy tried a bunch of stuff and then
he went and he did ayahuasca
and he did ayahuasca a bunch of times and the just the difference in his
personality it's like it like
immediately had abandoned eighty percent of his anxiety and
fucking tension and whatever he had that might have been weighing him down and
he was like
he's permanently happier this is a crazy thing for someone to say i took
psychedelic drugs they made
me permanently happier um what do you think about how psychedelics seem to be
panaceas you know they
they seem to do everything well do they though because if they make a
schizophrenic that's not good you
know i mean they well i mean you know that's good for some people it's like i
don't know what they're
doing i do i do think they can be panaceas like what you're saying is right it
can they can be
panaceas for a lot of people if you look at the um at the literature i mean
eating disorders anxiety
depression ocd alcohol cigarettes oh yeah in that way yeah um for everything in
improved metaphysical views
uh make your meditation better you know you know so in the proper set in the
proper setting
you know they do seem to be like panaceas they you know they heal all doesn't
it seem like with every
medication and even if you look at psychedelics as being a medication every
medication is going to
have side effects it seems like there's no one thing that i mean people die
from aspirin every year
you know well the stronger the effects the more side effects they're going to
be yes right you can't
have one without the other really and that's just because of biological
diversity just because people are
different and their bodies react differently to things um well the intensity of
the pharmacological effect
if it's really like you know chemotherapy i mean it can end the cancer but it
but it's just you know
rife um with you know toxicity too i'm not sure why that would be the case i
think that's that's kind of
just how how things are in pharmacology when you think about uh psilocybin as
like a panacea to all these
psychological disorders what do you think is happening why do you think it's
helping people quit drinking
quit smoking cigarettes quit doing you know gambling there's a lot of different
things it seems to be
helping people with uh-huh well one possibility is that suggestibility
increases on psychedelics you're
more hypnotizable oh so someone can program you like a manchurian candidate or
a researcher or a therapist
who says get better right so hopefully you got a good person programming you
could you imagine if that's
how we can create well the manchurian candidate story is interesting you know
because the belief was you
could just you know turn an everyday individual into an assassin you know but
you had to have those
tendencies in the first place either conscious or unconscious if you were a
peacenik like a really
peace-loving person no matter no matter how much lsd they gave you it's
unlikely that you would become
an assassin yeah they had to figure that out though and the way they did is
just experiment on people
experiment on people right the the just the actual real history of mk ultra and
all the different
things they've done that's 100 not conspiracy theory actual real history it's
true that stuff is bonkers
yeah yeah i've looked into that a bit i even you know tracked down the you know
the old mk ultra files
they're quite heavily redacted you must read tom o'neill's chaos it is all
about mk ultra and
charles manson and it is wild it's a guy who studied this case the manson
family case for 20 years
he started off writing an article about it but as he dove deep into the case it
was so nuts
that he just it was so many layers to it that he refused to stop and he kept
going deeper and deeper
and he missed his deadline then like he had a book deal and they had to give
the money back like a chaos
20 years of this and at the end of it he's got like very convincing arguments
that charles manson was a
part of mk ultra that charles manson that they gave him acid when he was in
prison and that they supplied
him with acid when he was out there teaching hippies to be hit people well i
think the case of charles
manson is an important one it's it's like it's a case that i you know try to
bring up in every podcast which is
don't forget charles manson when it comes to acid when it comes to psychedelics
yeah because the drugs
increase suggestibility and depending on your environment you'll be more
suggestible to what's
around you right and if you've got someone who's already a charismatic con man
and you catch him
in prison and dose him up with acid and you run i mean what better person to
run a study on than a
charismatic lifelong criminal you know and just dose him up with acid and give
him a sense of delusions
of grandeur and then also every time he gets arrested get him out of jail and
that's what the book is
about it's a very strange story the book is wild because tom is like it's very
thoroughly researched
everything lines up and so he's taking the angle from the mk ultra connection
yeah he thinks that
that was a part of uh the project and that where he used to get his acid from
was um the same place
where the cia was running the um the the health clinic there's a haight ashbury
clinic the haight ashbury
clinic was being run by the cia they were doing operation midnight climax there
too where they they had
brothels right and they would secretly dose the johns up with lst and study
them i mean they were doing
wild and they were also visiting people like charles manson in prison and this
is the thing that he
makes this argument that they got to manson in prison and most likely were dosing
him up with acid and
teaching him how to turn people into your minions yeah the last manson book i
uh have been reading is the
family oh yeah uh it's about his group it's about manson and his and his group
he goes into a lot of
details of manson's growing up and there is talk of lsd obviously with his
group and beforehand some
but i don't remember him mentioning the mk ultra connection that must be pretty
recent well this was
also their argument for how is he getting all this acid how's he getting all
that acid how's he getting all
that acid and also how come he keeps getting arrested and let out and how come
the sheriffs who arrest him
say that it's above their pay grade and they were told it's above their pay
grade yeah yeah they have
to let out this psychopath who's supposed to be you're supposed to be in jail
you know he broke his parole
yeah that's that's quite a cd chapter in psychedelic work it is a really wild
book because it's so
thoughtfully and thoroughly done i mean it took 20 years for him to do it but
that that was a
absolute part of the history of this country is that they performed tests on
unwilling subjects they just
dose people up and studied them yeah well that's the reason now you need what's
like an airtight
uh informed consent you know they did that with ted kaczynski the unibomber he
was a part of the
harvard studies but they're giving him lsd mm-hmm yeah you know so it it isn't
that you just take lsd and
you're cool no not at all not at all i mean i think we can't stress that enough
right uh that's the
point i'm making my book actually over and over is you know you should know
what you're getting into
and prepare yourself and this is the second book not joseph levy escapes death
no not that one but uh
the psychedelic handbook yeah yeah just released today yeah uh the longest
chapter in there is how to
trip it says a practical guide to psilocybin lsd ketamine mdma and dmt ayahuasca
rick strassman md
available now did you do the uh audio for this uh not yet are you going to do
it you should do it
your own voice um come on man yeah it just came out like uh you know today so i
think people would like
to hear it in your own voice if you're willing to do it that's a lot of time
though well you know
quite a few authors do that yes yeah i like it when they do it yeah i don't
like it when someone reads
somebody else's stuff you know especially if someone is like good at talking
yeah i've never considered
it well that's not true i've considered it but quickly dismissed it uh yeah but
i will think about
it somewhere yeah you should because i think people would enjoy it if it was
like in your words with your
with your voice it was a fun book to write i mean i had to really bone up on
the latest research i mean
uh i i you know thought i was current but man the last couple years it's really
hard to keep up
when you did your very first patients did anything surprise you like when when
you
put the very first people under had any of them had any psychedelic experience
yeah the group had to be
psychedelic experience i only studied psychedelic experience people that's good
risk yeah it was for
a couple of reasons you know one was the risk that if they had a hard time they
would know how to
get back right um and also um i figured they would be giving better
descriptions of the experience
right they wouldn't be so blown away right and the third reason was that if
they started abusing
psychedelics they couldn't blame me because they had already been taking them
oh that's very clever yeah yeah you have to do it that way though yeah yeah it
was a real straight
on study i mean we really uh made sure to anticipate any objections did
anything surprise you about the the
first batch of test subjects in their experiences um yeah
the first intravenous studies we did we overdosed two people what yeah we gave
them too much dmt oh no
yeah well we started off at this dose and that dose and i called fda and said
we're not quite there
and they said well you can go up you know two or three times and i figured well
you know things are
pretty easy so far let's go up three times and it was way too much both people
just couldn't remember
anything really yeah so we figured okay let's how long did it last you know
half hour 20 minutes and
and what did they say it was like one guy thought one guy described as being
thrown off a boat in
the middle of a storm and ending up in the water and just being thrashed about
completely helpless and
terrified and you know the other guy he just like retched
and yeah and he didn't remember much so we figured that was too much
yeah yeah so then we settled on a pretty stiff dose it's it's the biggest dose
still in use or
uh smaller doses are being used now currently um you know so far nobody has
gotten up you know to our
you know uh you know to the high doses of dmt that we gave and what you were
giving them was the
experience uniform as they described mostly really yeah mostly one person was
completely unresponsive to
it well like your story of thc can i ask you one more question before we did
were they doing it
simultaneously no everybody was just like did you do any where they did it
simultaneously no i would be
really interested in that why because of the telepathine thing with when they
uh before they figured out
telepathine was harming they were kind of call it telepathine because they had
shared group telepathic
experiences yeah well you know david luke in london uh well you know someplace
in england you know david luke
is a parapsychologist who's very interested in psychedelics and he's done esp
studies um
um with uh uh uh psychedelics yeah and he's finding some promising data uh that
esp telepathy is enhanced
when both people are stoned because i've heard of people having conjoined
experiences on ayahuasca
before i've heard of people having experiences like they they independently
verify with other people that
they were kind of in the same place well as far as like what they saw that
description of my first
experience smoking hash was a it was a you know shared hallucination yeah we
both were seeing the
same thing oh do you see that yeah yeah that would expand on it yeah it's just
what is it what is that
what are those group minds those those weird sinking of minds like what does
that mean what's happening
there well it seems that everything is contained in a field and you can tap
into that field uh in
certain circumstances so including your thoughts and my thoughts and then we're
all just we can link up
yeah my favorite science fiction writer is an englishman whose name is stapleton
um and he wrote a book
about uh 19 species of humans that uh evolved over two billion years and the
final species is able to
experience uh population-wide telepathy oh wow um every 500 years or so when
things are just you know dialed in
and it would be what people would be looking for these these people would live
you know 35 000 years
because that was the necessary time to attain all of the knowledge that was out
there and they would
spend all their time otherwise uh you know trying to connect on a worldwide
level wow and it was every 500
years every thousand years it was a rare event but uh everyone would sing and
dance in that space what do you
think about the the possibility of some sort of a technologically uh inspired
or driven uh group
telepathy like what i would worry about with stuff like that is it being co-opted
and someone being
able to control it but if somehow or another they released one of these things
that you put on your head
that allowed everybody to communicate in a universal language with everybody
like a language that everybody picks up pretty easily because you're getting
downloaded information
much quicker because you actually have some sort of a weird implant in your
brain
i think we would need to be wiser you know for it not to go south i think it's
going south and i think
that's where people are going i think uh we are sliding down the mountaintop
holding onto our ass
and i think i think we're going to go right off i think we're going right into
cyborg land
right and you know because people are the way they are there's there's no
guarantee that it'll be for
the good yeah that that well it's once you can read minds it's going to be way
harder to control people
it's going to be way harder to get people to buy into you can't have propaganda
anymore there's like so many
positives to it that a lot of people are just going to dive right in but you're
also never going to
have privacy you're going to live in this weird world of communication where
people communicate with
you non-locally with with your mind so what are you going to get spam you're
going to get spam texts
in your brain i get like four or five spam text messages a day like do you need
cash like question
you fill us out now i get four or five of those a day you're probably going to
get those from the
whole world you're going to have a hard time avoiding them if we're all like
hyper connected
people are going to take advantage of it to try to sell bitcoin and push nfts
it's going to be
well i think you need to stay out of cell range if you can there's going to be
a way it's going to be
a way probably for people to opt out during the day like shut off so you can
work well do you like
philip k dick i um i really like that there was one that they turned into a
film um
what was it
what was the philip k dick book that they turned into a film well there's total
recall
i think it's just popped up oh total recall he did that too there's blade
runner scanner darkly
scanner darkland darkly that's it scanner darkly's wild yeah that's a great
that's a great movie yeah
scanner darkly that is a really cool movie yeah i like that yeah it's like a
wild semi-animated
movie yeah it's called a rotoscope yeah yeah that was fun that was a cool movie
well so philip k
dick uh has written a short novel it's called the three stigmata of palmer eldridge
and it's about
the competition between uh between you know two psychedelic drugs you know one's
from earth
and once you know from an uh and uh you know one is from another star system
and the one from earth you know they're both you know of these huge
corporations that are making
you know millions of tons of this psychedelic the one that was created on earth
just puts
people into the perky pat world where things are really fun like there's this
little figure
perky pat and you go into their into her house and you know you wash your
dishes and you have parties
it's you know weird philip k dick stuff and you know there's another you know
psychedelic that
you know comes from outer space and uh it's really bad you never really stop
tripping even though you
think you have you know so oh my god that sounds terrible oh it's it's a it's a
horror story scarier
than anything i've ever read um you know so i think there's going to be this
you know competition
you know there's going to you know like what's the most popular soft drink you
know what or the most
popular music i think a state of consciousness is going to be you know kind of
the you know turf
that huge uh interests are you know battling over yeah it's going to be
interesting to see whether
or not they can control it and whether or not the technologists will allow it
ultimately it's like
the people that put it out whatever it is like it it has they have the ability
to control it or not
control it depending upon like what stage it's at but i feel like if it keeps
going in the same
general direction the general direction is like about access to information it's
like more instantaneous
it's more accessible like there's only so much you could do to put a cork on
that if it really gets
out if it really gets to a universal language thing the only way they're going
to get people
is if they figure out some sort of a digital currency force people into a
centralized digital currency
and then attach it to a social credit score system and then bam you're living
in china
yeah they could do that they could trick people into doing that but the other
option is psychedelics and i
think if more people had positive well-guided experiences and not people with
you know slippery grabs
rips on reality as it is but i think you're at least going to get a sense that
a percentage of the population
is moving to a better state of mind a better way of coexisting with other
humans
not so angry like more more in awe and wonder about this whole thing and and
with a like a general
attempt to be kinder because of it um well i think any i i think you know that
the outcome
of any individual psychedelic experience i mean it's obviously the set and the
setting
you know who you are and what you want to get out of it and your environment
you know so the most
i i think you know you really need to work on the set and the setting for
positive outcomes you
know so i think that's kind of the you know task now is to work out the best
sets and you know
settings to think about how good people always feel in nature like nature is
all almost like the
ultimate set and setting i know it's great it's so it's it's kind of like biologically
enriching or
something like you you lay down in a beautiful hill and you look out at all the
trees and the mountains
it's like god this is so beautiful just by itself yeah and then if you add psilocybin
to those experiences
it's generally it's like i mean the ones i've had have been like extra like
filled with awe like extra
you feel connected to all the trees and the grass and the dirt seems alive and
i think that also
though you know sometimes you'll need to be indoors oh yeah yeah like if you're
smoking dmt let's say
oh yeah yeah yeah you should be on the couch yeah yeah as opposed to the field
or something have you
seen anybody fall like black out and fall down on it um yeah i was at a
conference oh not a conference
you know but an event in dallas a long time ago and uh i was being hosted by a
couple of kids uh
and they you know took me over to their house and and everybody's smoking dmt
they're ordering pizza
and there's music and everybody's smoking dmt oh no what a disaster yeah and
this one guy had never
smoked dmt before they gave him a huge amount and yeah he started screaming and
falling down and that's
the worst set in setting ever yeah yeah they wanted me to see what they were
doing like man this is
kind of you know high risk oh that's so dumb i did it with uh doug stanhope
once and he almost had a seizure
i was worried we're gonna lose him he like was making crazy noises it's very
strange never seen anybody respond to dmt that way
he's like like moaning like oh really well does he remember it oh yeah it was a
positive experience
overall i just think that he was like hanging on in the beginning of it maybe a
little too much
you know if you try it like it was a five meo dmt experience if you try to hang
on like you're not you're
not hanging on to that it's good it's gonna take you with it just relax yeah
and maybe that's what was
going on maybe he was uh hanging on but he came out of it it was a positive
experience well there's a
well um you can see videos of you know people flopping around on your five methoxy
dmt that see this is
the problem with legalization right it's i think it would be irresponsible to
just give it away to
everybody but i do think that it would be very beneficial to have it in places
that are like
a really well established well set up center where people can do these things
under professional
supervision by people with experience in them people that know the purity of
the stuff the right dose
the right thing and it could be a business and it can make sense as a business
and then also give
people the ability to do it on their own afterwards okay now you know what it
is now you know to get it
this is the right dosage don't around and enjoy yourself you could learn like
you get certified in
in proper use it's not a bad idea if you give people a license to drive a car
give them a license to do
dmt like hey todd like how do you feel about reality like todd you know what
shape do you think the earth
is you know ask them pretty simple questions yeah well i mean the future of you
know psychedelics
i mean it looks pretty bright what do you think is pushing it the most you
think it's these studies
they do with uh um ptsd and soldiers um i mean there are just you know so many
influences out there
that want to see psychedelics or you know so many interests that want to see
more people take more
psychedelics you know there's commercial ones and there's therapeutic ones and
there's spiritual ones
and there's brain science ones you know so i you know the the great thing about
psychedelics is they
extend their reach into everything that's distinctly human um and they affect
all aspects of human
consciousness i mean across the board too so yeah they're kind of like mirrors
in a way but they're
strange drugs i mean i always encourage students to get as much school as they
can and to study
psychedelics in a real in a rigorous manner if they can if you had the ability
if you if they came to you
if uh president biden came to you and said uh dr strassman could you uh tell me
should i legalize
everything or not would you just if you could hit the switch if you were the
guy they came to that's a trick
question
all the good questions trick questions or i should ask you is that a trick
question no
uh what would you do well i'd say it's complicated you know that's the typical
you know response from a
psychiatrist yeah you sound like a real scientist it's complicated yeah right
and so would you have to
develop some sort of an assessment of the pros and cons and what the negatives
could be and how to mitigate
some of the negatives like the people that are losing their mind and overdosing
and have access to
people that are too young like there's a lot of factors in there that you'd
have to consider upon
legalization right right um gosh i you know it's like a multi-pronged approach
i mean education
and organizations and have to get the church on board yeah or or at least you
know you're not against uh
what's what's happening so your experience with uh you've had you had some
experience with one of
those churches because i remember you telling this story about what it was like
to go visit them and
they're wearing like golf shirts and doing ayahuasca well you know the udv is
pretty straight uh uh the
on the ceremonies take place under lights you know like in a big room and you
sit in a chair
and uh there's you know somebody leading the ceremony it's like a church you
know ceremony so when you say
straight you mean like like a regular church but they also do psychedelics it
does they don't seem to
be hippies at all they seem uh i mean they really emphasize being a good family
member and a good
contributor to society you know so it's like a you know christian church in in
that way and how often
are they having these uh psychedelic experiences you know generally twice a
month usually a little wow
they would be fascinating people to study yeah well they're being studied uh
yeah yeah there's a lot
of information about the effects of participation in the churches in brazil and
some in the u.s but
especially brazil because that's where they both uh netflix should get on board
with that you know
because that could be like a whole series yeah study these people and study the
effect that would that
that actually is a fascinating idea for a series because what they're doing is
really profound if it's
working like if they like someone should find out like is this really a harmonious
society are they
really happier yeah yeah they've been studying members of these ayahuasca using
churches for a long
time you know for decades and what is their conclusion the kids are healthier
and the less drug abuse less
alcoholism less depression better quality of life it's quite impressive it
makes sense it makes sense if you've
had experiences yourself and you understand the the impact that it could have
if you attached it to
a structure like religion it's quite structured yeah uh they're in you know
they're into god they're
into jesus they're into the bible they're into solomon you know so the ethical
you know teachings which
which are uh you know part of the bible you're part of a you know um a
spiritual system
did did do they have like certain passages that they recite while they trip or
before they trip
uh not that i remember do they come back with like some sort of an experience
it seems like biblical
experiences um their story of the beginning of the church relates to king solomon
uh so there's you know references to king solomon uh they do refer to the bible
i'm thinking about as
most you know christians do you know protestants anyway are pretty familiar
with the bible you know so
they know text do they but did they come back like what are they experiencing
are they experiencing
like a standard ayahuasca you know seeing vines and snakes and jaguars and ufos
or are they seeing
things that are christian in nature they're mostly seeing things which relate
to them i mean how to be
you know uh better people oh you know so there's a real emphasis on personal
growth and evolution
and you know bringing society to a higher level it's quite altruistic and it's
uh you know like as you
note uh if you have a structure uh that is essentially good that you're kind of
giving the psychedelics within
you know the outcomes can be really positive yeah i think the structure of uh
you know if you look at
the best aspects of almost all religions they're all about trying to unite
society in some sort of a
way the best aspects you know if you attach that to a psychedelic then it
becomes a bi-monthly ritual
that's pretty wild yeah you know uh being charitable doing good things like
that yeah oh you said
bi-weekly right uh every two weeks or so yeah that's so much that's so much
those people are on cloud
nine all the time they're just recovering from the last one and bang they're
right back in again
yeah well i spent about three months associated with them i like how you say it
that way yeah three
months associated with them well well yeah that's what it's called you you
become an associate oh yeah
yeah that's the terminology oh interesting that's the religious terminology
yeah i like that yeah yeah i like
that and i was an associate for maybe three or four months yeah and i was
drinking a lot of ayahuasca
and i felt pretty darn good so when you were doing it what was the experience
like like how would a
ceremony go down everybody would do it together yeah well what was interesting
is you would eat
beforehand most of the time they say have an empty stomach and so on but you
know their opinion is if
you are throwing up it's better to have you know something in your stomach than
just you know throwing up
you know the you know the ayahuasca itself well the ayahuasca itself or your
stomach acids that you have
some food it will kind of buffer things that's actually that actually makes
sense would it slow the
absorption though it can so that would be the negative right you would want to
get the full dose
um well they spend about an hour in you know preliminaries you know socializing
okay so you do digest it
somewhat yeah yeah and then everybody gets in line and the master of ceremonies
that night will look at
you look at the brood decide how much to give you and interesting the look at
you yeah you know this
motherfucker can't handle this yeah yeah how do they just decide right i've
wondered i've asked them and
they you know said it's intuitive or oh god that's so weird that's a lot of
power he who controls the
ayahuasca controls man uh yeah i think i've gotten you know yeah it's it's an
interesting process like you
are thinking i hope they don't give me too much and but also you know i hope he
gives me a lot because i'm
like macho or whatever right yeah i can take it bro yeah if we did have
legitimate psycho um psychedelic
centers in america i mean there would have to be some real thought beforehand
as to uh what's the
best way to uh approach it from an education perspective explaining things to
people what to expect
you know like there's a lot to that but i don't want to like be the person that
tells a person they
can or can't do it either like i would say we should have some sort of
screening process but then i'm
entirely against screening processes well i i mean screening is really helpful
sure yeah yeah but i i don't
like the idea that someone can like say someone can control whether or not
people do or do don't do it
because it could get slippery that that could get weird someone could like come
up with more and more
reasons to not give like maybe you have the wrong political persuasion or they've
labeled you a
terrorist because you don't believe in taxes or whatever okay you can't do it
anymore yeah the screening idea
i was thinking of was you know screening research people oh yeah yeah right you
have to screen
and and even then when you're screening people who participate in research
studies there's no guarantee
they won't have problems oh for sure i meant for the general public screening
people in terms of like
being able to not give it to people with like legitimate mental illness yeah
how would you stop that if
someone's you know um it would be like any other you know drug i think you know
like if you've got an
allergy to a medication you're screened out of getting that you're screened out
of getting that medication right
but we'd have to alert people to it and then tell them tell them not to do it
well yeah like a huge multi
level process of organization it's almost like a you know the nih ought to
start a division maybe of
psychedelic medicine yeah well it's not a bad idea i think um over time we're
going to find more and more
people are interested in it because it's not as stigmatized as it was it was
such a there was such
a stigma attached to psychedelics when i was in high school only psychedelics
were for idiots if you're
doing psychedelics you're trying to blow your brains out like that guy from the
who yeah well so when was
that that you're in high school pink floyd right uh pink floyd yeah yeah the
crazy diamond yeah um this was um 1981
it was my first year in high school oh really so that was you know like the the
peak of the dare stuff
exactly yeah that was uh the reagan years you know it was just say no all that
stuff and for what i mean
if you go back to the 1960s the ken kesey tim tim leary stuff and then you
shoot just 20 years ahead
like it's gone like there's nothing in high schools and then like in the and
colleges people were more
turned on to some of those things but it wasn't like overwhelmingly popular
like it was just 20 years
before yeah even 10 years before i mean there were a lot of psychedelics on
campus in the early 70s
so how did they put a fire hose on all that uh they didn't you know underground
use stayed pretty much
constant even during the war on drugs really yeah yeah like for lsd well what
about for other things
like psilocybin ayahuasca was not very popular back then nor was dmt i you um
you'd have to look at the
specific you know survey but you know they asked certain questions about
certain drugs and i think
they probably had an lsd category and maybe psychedelics in general you know
back then they really weren't
looking at psilocybin you know that's probably changed the last five or ten
years though hmm what do
you think is going to happen in terms of uh the way um the country opens up in
terms of uh being able to
do therapy on people with ptsd and then ultimately do you think we're going to
see like some sort of
a recreational usage in our lifetime like federally um hold that thought and we're
back again a few
moments ladies and gentlemen but my question was um in our lifetime do you
think that you're we're ever
going to see legalized psychedelics where people of consenting age well i think
they'll be you know
models that'll be you know recreational and also medical so do you think it'll
be like state to state
um probably state early i think it would be like liquor or it would be like
alcohol you know
recreationally there'd be dispensaries right but alcohol is legal nationwide
federally that's that's the
big problem with with uh cannabis and psilocybin no matter what happens if
these uh towns make them
legal it's still federally illegal particularly like hard drugs right yeah well
there would need to be
some regulation across the country which would require rescheduling yeah yeah
you know it's interesting
that there's no scheduling of alcohol for example i mean that should be
scheduled 100 yeah yeah yeah i
mean that's a tricky drug right you know but what's the expression you know the
horse is out of the barn
at this point when it comes to alcohol it is and it's also socially people's
favorite drug it's like so
accepted so recreational and you know everywhere you go where people are eating
dinner they're drinking alcohol
everywhere it's happening all over the place they're drinking beers with their
burgers and they're
drinking wine with their steak and people are always drinking well if there are
going to be dispensaries
yeah they need to well i yeah i think state to state would be how it goes you
know kind of like what
they're doing in oregon i mean it is legalized even though it's a schedule one
drug i know but oregon
is like the worst all right they're always lighting their courthouse on fire
and yeah i mean that place
is wild yeah they're stressed um yeah they're very high strung yeah and portland
and i think also
you know prescribing you know so you could prescribe right but you could also
deny a prescription and
and that's where it gets to me it's like i i don't like the idea of the
government being involved in
psychedelics i don't think it should be something like a prescription i think
there should be some
educators that put forth some sort of reasonable recommendations and then
society adopts them
people who really understand what the dosage should be what's the most
important part about set and
setting and you know having well well educated experienced travelers who are
also counselors
but but getting the government involved get the out of here they'll if they
regulate it they're just
going to tax the out of it and ruin it they'll just water down the dose or you
know figure out a way to
make too much money from it there'll still be underground use though of course
you know an underground
culture which yeah of course which could uh maintain the integrity yeah but why
bring the government into
ayahuasca get out of here they should just stop with all these stupid schedule
you know when when it
comes to something that has like a history of use like stop you can't make that
a schedule one drug that's
ridiculous you're talking gordon wasson was writing about in the 1950s like
what are you what are you talking
about you you made that a schedule one drug this drug with like a mountain of
positive experience stories
hmm i know schedule one you know when my studies started uh giving dmt i mean dmt
schedule one
but i was thinking about the scheduling of you know psychedelics into schedule
one which means
you know there's there's no known medical use they can't be given safely under
medical supervision and
they're highly abusable you know so this was in the early 90s i began the study
and i wrote to janet reno
who was the attorney general under bill clinton at the time and i said these
drugs shouldn't be in
schedule one and i could say why not because i'm doing your research which
indicates they can be given
safely under medical use and we're gathering important you know data which
means they have utility under
medical supervision so you know one of her assistants wrote back and said very
complicated changing drug
laws um yeah so didn't get much further beyond that isn't that fun they could
just say it's very
complicated changing drug laws sorry can't do it can't do it impossible right
impossible if the grid goes
down we'll get that back up but it is impossible to change this piece of paper
where it says that you
can't do that it's not i just i can't i'd like to help well you know at the
time i had more important
matters at hand like you know running my study but right i think at a certain
point it would be worth
you know while to reconsider for sure the scheduling of you know schedule one
well what is uh ketamine
three i think that's interesting yeah yeah because they're doing a lot of that
they're doing a lot
of these uh guided ketamine sessions yeah yeah ketamine's huge yeah but uh it's
it's a real
psychedelic i don't have an experience with ketamine but my friend neil that i
talked about earlier one of
the things that he had did prior to ayahuasca he did ketamine in a like a
medical setting and he was like
i can't believe how high i was like how strong it is it's like you're really
tripping it's not like
some sort of like you know like little sort of baby ketamine thing like feel
better about yourself thing
well well it sounds like he's describing the k-hole are you familiar with the k-hole
i thought the k-hole
was negative because i don't think he was saying this was negative is the k-hole
when you can't move
like you're stuck in a hole you can't move yeah you're under general anesthesia
but you're still
conscious
and some people like that i'm sure yeah especially if your life sucks right
right you just want to zone
out yeah and for some people it's terrifying some people get addicted to that
stuff too right yeah
you know somebody i heard describe it as you know psychedelic heroin
ooh i've heard of people getting addicted to snorting it snorting it yeah yeah
uh and injecting it
injecting it intramuscular yeah that's what uh timothy leary used to do right
no john lilly john lilly
that's what john lilly used to do when he got into his float tank he would intramuscularly
jab himself
and then bronc well you know i knew john lilly or we spent a little time
together yeah yeah i mean he
was pretty old at that point and uh i was at a conference with him and uh you
know he was i don't
know 70s 80s and he he loved ketamine he still got after it yeah so some people
but why not why not i mean
you only live once right well he is the creator of the the in my opinion one of
the greatest tools for
exploring your mind ever the tank the float tank yeah that thing's amazing
marijuana plus float tank
is the wildest ride oh my god sometimes i get out of there i'm like what the
well you know i've never
been in a float tank really yeah yeah never i don't think ever no i have
friends who own float
tanks or float tank companies like in albuquerque you should definitely try it
and i think you'd enjoy
it i've been invited yeah it's very relaxing too that's the thing about it is
like it's not
just that when you do the float thing you have these wild visions and this
weird way of like seeing
reality because you're sort of detached from everything else just you alone
with your thoughts
because the water is the same temperature as the surface of your skin so you're
just floating there
and you can't distinguish between the air and the water it just you feel
completely weightless but
beside the visuals it's also like really good for your muscles like everything
just sort of relaxes
and softens yeah i'd like that it's nice yeah because it's epsom salts it's the
same as like it's like a
thousand pounds of epsom salts in that tank well so i you know once to ask you
rupert sheldrick if
you know there was a specific you know passage in his book that you seemed like
he was stoned when
he wrote it yeah and i said did you write that when you were stoned he said i
write everything when i'm
stoned yeah i pretty much do too i write a lot of things not stoned but they're
not good
i mean i write some i've written some bits definitely sober like i came up with
an idea sober and i wrote it
down it became a bit but there's a thing that happens when i sit down in front
of a keyboard when i'm high
it's like it almost like it opens up like a channel that i can't reach and like
i can tune into it like
hey here we are so here's the ideas and then like in it's bizarre yeah it's
weird but it's true well
it's some it's a strange form of creative enhancement that as we're saying
before why we're allegedly
smoking marijuana well well so i get stoned and i take you a pen in hand on a
pad of paper and and uh
um well so the ideas just come yeah you know i you really can't do editing stoned
yeah that seems
like a sober task yeah it's kind of you know yeah you have to think you have to
be critical you just
can't let stuff kind of flow you know george carlin had the opposite way of
writing he would write sober
and then edit stoned he would write his bit sober and then punch him up stoned
make him funnier stoned
yeah well do you think you're funny or stoned i don't know when it comes to
doing stand up it really
is about your mood you know i don't think you necessarily are funny or stoned
it's really about
your mood it's about the material but like the being funny or is really about
like how you feeling if you
feel funny yeah you feel well you feel good too you're having fun like that is
funnier it's so that's
like a state of mind and then it's the material and how you deliver it and you
should you know that's
part of being uh quote unquote professional right right you're not really funny
or stoned when you're
doing it that way but there's things that happen when you're stoned that wouldn't
have happened when
you're sober that's the dilemma because sometimes like when you're stoned you
are on a subject and then
a new path appears like oh why don't i go down there and you just start talking
about something
that you never talked about before and it turns out to be hilarious right right
i think it really
you know loosens up um you know suppression or resistance you can well i i
think it has an effect
like you know clearly on on short-term memory oh for sure and a detrimental
effect that's what's dangerous about it
yeah yeah you need to be in the right place when you're that stone to be that
creative
yeah are you recording this yeah we're good or do you want to not uh you know
this is interesting
yeah we're recording all of it yeah okay good yeah yeah we were going to come
back to
what was the rupert sheldrake oh okay fine we're going to start yeah yeah that's
good yeah
yeah well you know the first time i smoked hash one of the things that really
struck me was how
i lost all self-criticism ooh you know i was able to think things and feel
things without any
restrictions at all and i think that's part of what occurs when you can't write
or if you have writer's
block is you're kind of criticizing yourself like you're no good or you can't
write it or you can't
have any good ideas and for me anyway that uh part of my inner dialogue goes
away on pot that's interesting
that's interesting that that's what writer's block is in your eyes too i wonder
if that is it like the
self-criticism the like a lot of people have a hard time enjoying themselves
right they think of
themselves in a bad light they don't like themselves you know they want to like
get drunk or do something
to escape yeah well i think people take you know drugs a lot of time to escape
yeah yeah when i was
working in this little town between taos and santa fe called espanola really
serious drug problems
and i would ask people at least early on to distinguish among the effects of
the different
drugs that they were on like heroin or methamphetamine or paint or you know
whatever and uh they
mostly said uh it just makes us not feel you know all the drugs each of the
drugs would have the same
effect even though they're quite distinct pharmacologically but they just
wanted to stop feeling
one thing that psychedelics make you think is whenever there's some sort of a
problem in this world in
terms of like a poor neighborhood with another shooting like chicago like south
side of chicago or
you know baltimore when you when you hear about these crazy things like
how much money would it cost to fix that and how much money do we just send
over to other countries when
when we're finagling deals and hooking people up and fixing things and i'm not
talking even just about
ukraine i'm talking about like how much do we spend period how much would it
cost to fix that it doesn't
seem like it would cost as much as like arming other countries it seems like
like if they had money for
that and they didn't anticipate that and then they had money for that why didn't
you fix that other stuff
why didn't you fix if you guys are really competent and you really wanted a
better country
wouldn't you want to fix all the places that are up like that there's been zero
effort
well do you ever think about going into politics no no never nonsense oh why
not same reason i don't
want to go into pro wrestling you get up you can you can change things from the
inside oh can you
yeah you can also find yourself hanging from an extension cord yeah it's a it's
a dirty business
with a lot of money involved in it i don't i'm not interested i have the best
jobs talk and tell
jokes that's the best and occasionally call ufc fights it's great yeah and you're
making a critique
of society through what you're doing well i'm just saying what i'm seeing and i'm
having people on that
have all kinds of different perspectives i want to hear how they're looking at
it i'm constantly amazed
by how many intelligent people there are to talk to you know there's so many
cool people that you can
just have conversations with about everything and anything whether it's you
about all the above about
psychedelics about your research about your you know having the mind and the
courage like it's so you're
such an important part of the psychedelic history of this country because what
you did is you legitimized
like a very important thing that everybody had already kind of heard about and
some people had
experienced it and you legitimized it by doing it in like a real clinical
setting with the government's
permission and funded funded funded by the war on drugs i mean it's amazing and
it's like
you know you know it's it's really important because it opened people's eyes
that this is repeatable
that this is this is understand understood rather to be something that has been
used by human beings for a
long time and just recently we probably have been detached from that yeah well
i wanted to demonstrate
you could do it yeah safely uh and you could generate valuable information you
know that was you know
the goals were modest but the goals were modest because i wanted them to
succeed right yeah so that
was a good strategy you know when they try to find the history of dmt use they
what is the current
understanding as far as like how long back they know people were either taking
the snuff or doing an
ayahuasca or or or some form of it um so have you talked um with dennis mckenna
about his uh his thoughts
about the evolution of dmt how far back it goes in the family tree of life i
don't remember if i did but
please yeah like i haven't looked carefully into his thinking but as i
understand it he points to it being
very old compound a very ancient compound that had occurred you know very early
on in evolution
but when do they think humans started ingesting it yeah well the historical
record i mean there's
ayahuasca right and that might go back 5 000 years but you know probably before
i mean why not
this is my question before smallpox ravaged the amazon before all those people
died and there's still
doing research on this right they're not they don't exactly know what these
cities were because that
lidar stuff when it lays out this grid they understand that there were
structures there but
they don't know what it was but yeah the the big the big crazy story is that
there was millions of
people there if that was real if that's that's the the craziest possibility
that's the one that graham
subscribes to that there was millions of people there do you think that that
society perhaps was a
psychedelic society and that's why they had that knowledge of how to make that
stuff and then the people
who survived were the people that were removed from the inner city areas of
people that lived
and these tribal areas were the ones that lived and they had the knowledge that
these people had
run their society with using that stuff if they're able to have these like
insane structures like
the whole lost city of z you know you know that that it was a feature film but
it was also a book
and it's based on a real explorer who went down there and they were looking for
this lost golden city that
had been talked about before but most likely what they're what they think
happened was those people
that went whether it was a hundred years ago or whatever it was they killed
everybody they gave them
diseases and it just ravaged everybody in the jungle just consumed everything
so when they went back to
look for it they couldn't find anything mm-hmm well your question about whether
it was a a psychedelic
society like that far advanced right yeah i mean it could be i mean in the
right circumstances
psychedelics enhance sociability right and empathy and right uh compassion and
those kinds of uh
virtuous you know characteristics yeah you know so it may have been a part of
their society i'm not that
familiar it's a mayan phenomenon it's definitely in the mayans right yeah yeah
so the mayans used
mushrooms and other psychedelics so yeah i mean i don't know how extensive the
use pervaded down among
the lower strata of uh society but you would think that the clergy would be
taking them regularly
well you had to be on mushrooms to build those fucking pyramids yeah yeah so
the scientists also were
taking mushrooms i mean what how did you figure this out when you go to chichen
itza like i don't think
they let people walk up it now i think too many tiktokers that up did they ruin
that is that true
they don't let you walk up the pyramid of chichen itza i feel like something
happened there there was
some like event some some sort of a news story and then they said you can't
walk up it anymore yeah but
uh i got to walk up it i think i went in 2003 or four or something like that
and it was wild
just to be around those things i want to take you're not allowed to anymore you're
not allowed somebody
it up yeah yeah it's probably tiktokers it's always shaking their ass up there
you got rumors about
illegal climbing illegal climbing yeah well luckily i got to do it and i want
to do the other places i want
to do um the ones the other ones in mexico i want to do uh i eventually want to
see someone fell and died
oh whoops so ouch no more imagine watching someone slip and go down that thing
but the point is like these people however long ago it was that they they built
these things like
these are incredible structures incredible like the way they're they're set up
they're so
symmetrical and beautiful and and they have uh at the top of it like a a place
where they were put human
bodies when they do sacrifices on them so you've got this like kind of creature
it has its legs bent and
yeah uh well you wonder if they came up with the architecture based on their
visions
of the you know geometric fractal like visions how they may have you know
modeled their buildings
on some of those that's entirely possible right what do you think led to them
going why did they all
go to sacrifices what happened what's that all about so many of these like
ancient cultures they're like
sacrifice they kill people right on purpose well it's the rep you know it it's
you it uh you know represents a certain system of belief that if you you
sacrifice
then you'll have a benefit yeah and it could be rain could be crops the wildest
one i ever heard of
was the acts the aztec one was it montezuma that did it someone sacrificed oh i
want to say it was
something crazy like 80 000 slaves over a period of just a couple of weeks yeah
they i think they
finished building a pyramid and then after they built the pyramid they
sacrificed all the slaves like
some insane number yeah it might not have been 80 000 something something but
it was something really
crazy like that what is it the name of the pyramid it's teotua khan i don't
know how to say how to
pronounce it here it is yeah yeah people come up with crazy ideas some conquistadors
wrote about
some pan to some panthly and its towers estimating that the rack alone
contained
a hundred and thirty thousand skulls but historians and archaeologists knew
that the conquistadors were
prone to exaggerating the horrors of human sacrifice to demonize the mexico
culture as the centuries
passed scholars began to wonder whether i don't know how to say that word zom zom
panthly had ever
existed yeah so what is that saying it was i thought it was actually talking
about these things but i read it
too fast this is all about the same place you just mentioned a skull rack i don't
want to say it either
oh no no no it's not the same that's not the same oh okay it's uh fuck um
it's like t-e-o-t-o-khan it's a very complex word i'm gonna it up not that
that's it tenochitlan right is that it is that no that's a city no that's not
the name um google uh
just google aztec pyramids aztec pyramid um 80 000 that's how i got to this it
talks about
one thousands performed sacrifices were performed there but i don't know about
that one time maybe
that is it is that a is that a pyramid the pyramid of tenochitlan
yes it's or it's a city i don't that's okay yeah well i should have had that
story at my
fingertips but the point being they did sacrifice some insane number of people
upon completion
like why do these cultures believe in these mass sacrifices like that like what
do you think
caused that kind of horrific thinking
i just don't know you know it's incomprehensible especially if they were a
psychedelic culture
well i mean you have to wonder if the psychedelics strengthened their belief
that what they were
doing was the right thing to do right because if you have pre-existing beliefs
they're often magnified
by psychedelics right that's a good point especially if you're living in a
really rough
part of the world in a really rough time in history well you interviewed that
guy uh you know brian uh
who's got the book out on early christianity and psychedelics brian mara rescue
yeah it's called
the immortality key what do you think of that theory it's fascinating well they
have real physical
evidence because of the vessels they have real physical evidence that the uh
sorry here
sorry that there's um some lysergic acid and some various ergots like uh there's
uh some forms of
ergot that they can find residue of inside the wine vessels so these wine
vessels weren't just wine it
was they were throwing in a bunch of psychedelic compounds into the wine and
that's what they did with
all wine and now that they have like physical evidence of these these vessels
that has trace elements
of this psychedelic compound they can be sure that this is what was going on
and this is why when they
would talk about drinking wine and having these visions and i mean this is
where democracy came from
these invented democracy doing this and they were probably all tripping balls
yeah so what do you think
the you know that the relationship is between you know the kikeon for example
and early christianity that's
the part i i didn't quite understand in what way didn't you understand well you
know were the thoughts
new that were induced by the kikeon or were they already there and the kikeon
just magnified them and
made them more devoted to those ideas that's interesting yeah i don't know i
mean we'd have to like find the
origin of all of their ideas because it was such a incredible time period for
people thinking things through
and communicating and devising ways to live and and and saying things that to
this day people quote as
wise words oh yeah yeah well you know our sacred literature is pretty old yeah
there's not much
new there's the bible there's the greek philosophers what did you think of
those scholars from israel
that were connecting moses's burning bush to dmt yeah that's an interesting
idea yeah so psychologist uh
benisha known um yeah so he uh proposed that the burning bush was an acacia and
it was emitting fumes
of dmt and that's how moses experienced you know the vision of the angel
speaking to him
uh i mean it could be true but it doesn't necessarily explain the broader
phenomenon
of the prophetic state because it was only moses that one time um it doesn't
really explain isaiah or
ezekiel or you know other prophets other prophets having experiences other you
know prophets actually
being exposed or taking uh an exogenous uh you know psychedelic agent so that's
not talked about at all
no no the only one well let's see you know there are certain things that
stimulate your prophecy
you know like a good meal and being happy and good music um you know the mana
may be you know some
people have suggested the mana has got a lysergic acid ingredient and that's
why the hebrews were
experiencing their visions in the desert you know but the only like you know
clear-cut
you know plant and you know person epiphany is moses at the bush you know some
people believe
that the incense and the tabernacle or in the altar had cannabis in it so but
there's not yeah i've
heard that before yeah yeah um you know but the whole presence of endogenous dmt
kind of makes it moot
whether or not people took you know plants or substances in the bible or any of
this old spiritual
literature because you have endogenous dmt you've you've got the means to
experience visions uh
without you know taking anything in have you ever attempted to achieve visions
without the use of the
chemical like have you ever attempted to do it through kundalini yoga or
because that's one way that
i have talked to people that have had these experiences they said you can get
pretty damn
close with yoga well and with holotropic breathing too yeah have you done
either one of those i've
i've done holotropic breathing yeah could you explain how that works yeah the
first time was very
psychedelic um well you hyperventilate deep and long for as long as you can uh
might be five minutes
might be 10 minutes might be 15. when you say hyperventilating like what's the
scheduling internet
like how are you doing you know what are you doing very deep and very fast very
deep and very fast okay
yeah uh and you do it and your hands kind of spasm up from the changes in the
acid base balance
really oh yeah your hands spasm yeah your feet uh your lips begin tingling
should be sitting down
when you're doing this oh yeah you need to be screened really i mean you need
to make certain
that your heart's in good shape and you're not on any medications that might
interact badly with being
you know that out of it yeah it's a whole you know system it's it's like you
know tripping without
drugs and they've got a how long do you do it for before you start to uh you
know five minutes ten
minutes or half hour i mean wow it just depends you can snap into it real
quickly or it might take a
long time i wonder how much of that is what runner's high is it could be well
so we studied you know
runner's high you know for melatonin levels uh back in the 1980s and 1990s you
know there was a marathon
yeah in the winter on sandia crest which is like you know 10 000 feet to 10 000
feet and these you know
guys are on a marathon along sandia crest and i was you know looking for some
way to stimulate melatonin
and so i looked at the stress level of those guys and figured if anybody's inducing
enough stress on
themselves to raise melatonin naturally it would be them yeah you know so we
did that and we found some
increases uh we tried you know blocking it with naloxone and you know those
were the kind of studies that i
was doing um yeah and uh after a certain point you just switch and you're in
this very you know highly
altered state and how long does it last uh well you stop uh you stop doing the
breathing once that happens
um i don't know maybe 10 15 minutes and so what would be akin to it like what
is it like uh mushrooms is
it like eating edible marijuana what is it the experience that i had as i
remember i've only done it once
like really breakthrough is it was like mdma really yeah this great clarity ooh
really yeah but uh you
know i think you know people have a range of experiences what do you think is
happening like
what what is causing that euphoric sort of sensation like pharmacologically
well it does you know it
isn't always euphoric some people it's really very difficult there's throwing
up and there's oh
really vomiting and yeah you know people can get pretty you know it's a it's a
very powerful technique
yeah and i'm not you know recommending that anybody start doing it can people
overdose can they over
breathe uh not that i've heard of that's good news well that's you know i'm
familiar with their
network and they're pretty well trained people wow so there's a whole uh place
you could go and you can
be guided through these sort of breathing sessions is that what they do yeah
well stan groff have you
heard of stan yes yeah you know stan was that czech psychiatrist who did a lot
of lsd research
uh and stan was at the university of maryland for a while working with bill
richards and those guys
um and once they uh stopped were you know once the compounds uh once you know
psychedelics were
scheduled and all human research ended uh you know stan moved on and in the
meantime developed this you
know holotropic breathwork wow technique and he's trained hundreds of
therapists in the technique did he
get it from any sort of indigenous ritual or some ancient civilization ritual
yeah i'm trying to remember
where he got it from i think there was some uh school of psychotherapy you know
kind of obscure and uh
i think i'm just not sure you know it was going around all right and he picked
it up all and he ran
what i was getting at is like is there a culture that exists anywhere that also
knew about this
that was doing this a long time ago i'm sure but i don't know nothing we know
yeah i'm just oh i'm just
real curious like what was the they say like ayahuasca is one of the first um dmt
experiences that people
have had but i wonder like how how did they figure out how to put those two
things together so you could
just eat it well if you ask them they will you know tell you the plant stole
them yeah yeah but but how
that works but how did they know they weren't alive back then yeah thousands
years old that's nonsense
well it could be king solomon it could be yeah uh or yeah i mean uh it seems so
wild that someone
figured out how to combine one thing that has dmt in it and another thing that's
an mao inhibitor so
that your body will just absorb it like that they figured that out in the
jungle you know one thing
that they may have been uh you know doing is the you know the vine you know the
banisteriopsis has
has got the beta carbolines in it the harmine harmoline mao inhibitors and they
use that as a
as like a screening tool if they're on the banisteriopsis you know they can
taste um other plants and you know
the essence of what's in that other plant comes through in a way that isn't
normally the case oh wow yeah
so they may have you know had their antennas up you know so to speak uh by you
know being on the mao
inhibitor beta carbolines all the while and experimenting with what plants do
what wow
so just by using that as you say as like a regulator well like like radar or
something you know they can
pick stuff up that otherwise is invisible you know within the plants we gotta i
mean animals must have
something similar too right i mean there's got to be a reason why they only eat
specific types of grasses
and avoid other ones is it just taste like uh because i know that certain
grasses and certain plants will
actually change their flavor profile if they think like cows are eating them or
if deers are eating
them oh really that's interesting yeah they said that about acacia yeah the acacia
tree um there was a
thing they were reading about giraffes who wouldn't eat the leaves of these
trees and it turns out they
they were downwind from trees that these giraffes were eating so these giraffes
were eating the wind goes
down it changes the flavor profile of all these other these other plants so
whether it's uh through the
the mycelium and the ground whether however they're communicating but they've
even done it to the point
where they played sounds of like caterpillars chewing on leaves and that causes
the change in the flavor
profile to the leaves they're they have senses some weird senses well and there
are stories of animals
getting intoxicated uh oh yeah you know right uh alcohol you know fermented
fruit other things don't
elephants love that yeah and you know catnip and you know cot they discovered
you know cot from goats
eating the leaves and they would get frisky have you ever tried cot i was
growing some cot in my
greenhouse back in the day is that legal uh you know in new mexico probably and
that stuff is like
an amphetamine right yeah it's a stimulant did you enjoy it it was okay it was
okay did you want to
take over a boat no it was a small plant i only got a couple of leaves it it
seems like the the
preferred drug of uh pirates right right they love that stuff they always scare
people with oh they're
on the cat oh jesus i just wanted to know what the actual was it like it's like
caffeine pretty much
yeah yeah well um in the middle east in more uh you know traditional societies
that are really into cut
you know they chew cot and the you know city council or the village council
gets together they chew cot and
they make their decisions wow it i guess it would be like you know chewing you
know coca leaves right
the chewing coca leaves is fascinating too because so many people think that
there's actually like a
health benefit to chewing coca leaves it's actually probably good for you it's
just cocaine because how
they they get it is from coca leaves you can't have coca leaves well it's like
cot they extract your
cathinone from cot what's cathinone it's the active ingredient in cot like you
know cocaine is in coca
and you know then you start manipulating you know the cathinone molecule and
you you come up with
your bath salts more or less oh boy yeah yeah you know so it's a good oh my god
it's a good drug gone bad
well that was a weird time in history right where people would go to like drug
stores or gas stations
rather and buy what they would call bath salts and says not for human
consumption right and people would
buy it and just kill each other on it that was a wild time where people found
out that you get that
yeah well it's you know it's kind of like that uh that kind of you thc cbd you
were talking about
before the show yes yeah so that you can buy it over delta nine delta nine it's
legal and it's very
powerful you say yes it's it's it's legitimate they have it a lot around here
too like they have stores
that they sell it and there was like some sort of uh an amendment to get rid of
it and i think it got
knocked down i'm pretty sure that was a story behind it but they they have like
a fake version of marijuana
here that's legal yeah okay well you know they're designing new drugs every day
yeah yeah um they're
coming up with new versions of drugs that are illegal well and these you know
these you know psychedelic
startups are you know designing new drugs as well that's wild yeah like if
someone figures out a better
acid i'm a better acid a longer dmt yeah you know something that lasted maybe
an hour instead of just
a half hour well the what you guys were doing with ivs how long was the drip
and could you have
prolonged that experience by like what was the longest one you did with people
well you know we just gave
it as a push like as a as a bolus uh like i would uh inject the drug over 30
seconds and then clear
the line for 15 more seconds with salt water and so is it from an iv bag or is
it just straight into
the tube that's attached to the it was you know from a syringe okay so it's not
going oh okay i was
under the impression it was an iv drip i thought it was like that's interesting
like how would you regulate
um well once one study that we did was an attempt to cause tolerance to closely
spaced repeated dosing of
dmt you know like if you take lsd every day for a few days you stop responding
right and there were some
studies giving uh you know dmt to see if you could develop tolerance uh but you
couldn't so i thought
maybe if you spaced the injections close enough together that was a issue
regarding half-life that's
interesting to hear you say that because i had always heard for some reason
that if you do tmt next to
like a recent dmt trip like 10 minutes ago do it again in 10 minutes like you
won't you won't be able
to do it but it's not true at all i've had that experience i've done it
multiple times in a day and
is the most potent one was the last one exactly that's more or less what we
found is that you know
we gave it uh we spaced injections every half hour and there'd be a real
progression of the effects over
the course of the morning and as a result of those data a group in at imperial
college i'm in london
is you know developing an infusion an infusion model to you maintain the state
for at least a half hour
so when you're doing it you're injecting and then in 30 minutes you're injecting
again yeah yeah they'd
come down right and we would spend maybe 10 15 minutes you know processing and
then they'd get ready for
the second dose so when you say processing like explaining what you saw talking
about it yeah
yeah like i would ask them how it was and what was you know what you know what
came up it was a pretty
packed 10 to 15 minutes too i'll tell you dude you're you're like cleaning them
up and sending them right
back into space it was a lot of fun people really got a lot of good work done
during that you know in the
course of that morning usually you know they'd be exhausted after the third
dose like i can't do
anymore and you know we would give them the fourth dose and they would
experience this great resolution
really of whatever you know troubles came up over the course of the morning wow
yeah i'm collaborating
with a group at uh ucla that's going to use uh you probably you know repeated
dosing of dmt and
post-traumatic stress disorder that's amazing and it'll be good because we'll
be able to you know
to do therapy uh in between the individual injections wow and so if what if you
come across an issue
that's going to take more time to resolve like you're saying be able to do
therapy like when you postpone
the next treatment uh i mean if you gave four doses over the course of a
morning um you know stuff will
will come up and you'll resolve it more or less by the fourth dose but it's you
know it it isn't the
end of treatment i mean you would be in treatment already in some form or
another and with the stuff
that you know came up you know during the you know dmt sessions you would have
that as christopher
the mill and your future work what i was getting at was that like say if
someone is having a bad
experience and say if they're they're doing this four dose thing but they have
a really bad experience
around dose number three would you allow them to do dose four or would you have
to have a conversation
with them yeah you'd have to ask them and you would just do it based on their
word or is there like a
protocol for when you you pull a person a patient well the study is still being
designed but you know
the standard of care would be if you know somebody says no i mean that means no
right right and if
someone says yes that means go ahead even if you might think they might be a
little slightly unhinged
at this point well you know stressed or uncertain as what's next like in our
study after the third dose
a lot of people felt up against their ropes and they'd say you know has anybody
ever dropped out
and i would say not yet and everybody went ahead and they were glad they did
they could kind of
metabolize the stuff that had been stirred up yeah that's uh the fine line
between whether you push
someone to keep going or whether you'd say well let's take a break yeah yeah uh
yeah i mean safety first
yeah for sure um could you imagine a world where there are places that would
take care of people
the way your studies were run that would do it that way i mean is that achievable
in our lifetime
where there could be a place where people that know what they're doing
certified have everything
locked down doing it the right way do it exactly the way you did to those
patients
well it wouldn't be exactly the same i mean i had my own style but i'm sure you
would it wouldn't be as
fun it might not be as fun but uh yeah yeah i mean uh you know why not yeah
well why not i mean
i think one of the really nice things is that there's a lot of support for it
on the right now because
they realize the effect that it has on soldiers vets yeah vet care vet care
yeah that's a big one
because everyone's always looking for give some relief to heroes that come back
with ptsd and this
is the way to do it it's the best way to do it i think that's going to get the
most funding the most uh support
people got to realize that this is not a like a left or right issue this is a
human issue i mean we should
treat our veterans really carefully lovingly absolutely yeah 100 and for all
human beings not
just ptsd from that but ptsd from being attacked car accidents like people have
all sorts of like
traumatic memories from their youth that this is not just for for that it's for
anybody with like these horrific
patterns in their head that are caused by trauma well you were talking about
being uploaded to a
computer and how horrible it would you know that would be yeah but i mean worst
case scenario worst
case scenario well i was just trying to look at the worst possible version
would be you stuck in a
computer box like looking at the world but not able to move or act but there
might not be any trauma
you know beyond that anyway maybe it's pretty i just would think that like a
disassociated brain
imagine if you found out that like your thinking wasn't just your brain that
your heart was actually
involved and that all the neurons that are around the heart actually work in
conjunction with the brain
but that a brain disassociated from the heart is always a psycho like so if
everybody who did get
their brain uploaded somewhere they just popped out in the other end like a
three-quarter human psycho
yeah well so you're using the biology to support like this you know
philosophical idea sort of yeah
the philosophical idea is the most interesting because i think if people really
do
freeze their brain and they really do boot that sucker back up and you get
drawn from heaven
back into this like earthly realm inside of a fish tank with a bunch of wires
attached to you
you're floating in some super serum like yeah well i mean it could be great
maybe maybe yeah if you got a good handler someone gives you the right juice
does that stimulate different parts of the brain they give you orgasm fix your
memory
well you know set and setting yeah yeah you need the technologist to be a nice
guy you have to trust
people to with your brain for the right why would they have any incentive to
help hold the end of the
bargain maybe they fold like some of those online bitcoin places maybe they
fold up shop
well you've read that uh what's it called uh this this the story that is the
basis for total recall
we can get it for you we can buy it for you wholesale it's by pk dick and these
people enter into this
implant kind of state and they have adventures and whatnot yeah but i think we
are 100 on our way to that
i think we're 100 i don't think they're stopping us i think it is all they're
gonna have to do is
continue with the just a general like virtual reality was non-existent 20 years
ago nobody gave a
about virtual reality because the technology wasn't up to date it wasn't
something that got discussed
you know every now and then you hear about somebody who was you know had a
headset and oh it's crazy
we tried it out and i remember doing it i forget what year it was but duncan trussell
had one at his
house it was very very pixelated i think it was the oculus very very pixelated
and we put this thing on
and we're moving around with it no it wasn't the oculus it was the other one
what's that
vive the vive htc vive right that's what it was and so we're moving around with
this thing and i remember
thinking wow this is just the beginning this thing's going to get really
bizarre and then a couple of
years later duncan had one and he said this one's so much better and he gave me
this one and you have
this experience where you're in the ocean and a whale swims by you it's wild
yeah you're like underwater
with this thing i'm like whoa and that was quite a while ago we are whatever it
is if it's 10 years
or if it's 20 years because 20 years ago again nobody cared about vr if it's 20
years from now
whatever it's going to be whatever year it is they're going to have something
that replicates reality
like down to every moment down to touch there'll be haptic feedback there'll be
something that
like hijacks your nervous system and think your feet are on the ground you're
going to replic replicate
the feel of gravity yeah well you know if it's i think it's going to kind of
detach you from reality
won't it a hundred percent yeah yeah so what's the point of that well i don't
think it's good for us
but i just think it's inevitable i think there's if if we really do come up
with a way to live in like
avatar land and fly around on dragons and and and live in some bizarre fake
universe
we're going to do it i guess some people will well you know some people will i
think a lot of people
mill man i think it's going to be a lot of people's number one pastime because
if it's what it's why
would you live regular life stupid why would you live regular life when it's
indistinguishable from
regular life and and you could be on a pirate ship yeah i kind of wonder how
you know much it would be
adopted you know by the indian reservations that i live within oh for sure that
would be probably
the first place they implement it yeah you know because they're pretty much
living in nature but
they're not very happy a lot of them you know they drink and there's
unemployment and feuds and
things which never really get very far you know so you might think the more
traditionalists
wouldn't go for it but the kids you know the kids because life is rather bleak
well those reservations
were the places where mixed martial arts first thrived in california it was
illegal in the state
of california but they would hold their own they have their own laws they have
their own rules
so they would hold these events at these uh native american reservations and we
would go to there
that was where they that kind of like saved a lot of those promotions so early
mma promotions
is the fact they could put on some fights and it also gave these guys a chance
to develop
in a state where mma was completely illegal so native american reservations
have a history of like doing
things you know the before anybody else was allowed to do them because they can
write their own laws if
they decided imagine that they decided to make their own psychedelic therapy at
all these native american
casinos well you know there's that long history of the native american church
has been using mescaline
containing peyote forever that's a pretty small you know segment of the native
population but still it's
established and protected you know that's the reason for the religious freedom
restoration act was
you know peyote use that was the primary driver so that was the first one
before they got to the
ayahuasca church yeah yeah the ayahuasca church relied on that ruling as
support both ayahuasca churches
two different ones right do both of them have similar rituals no they're they're
different you know the udv like
i mentioned is you know kind of straight laced uh you're in chairs you have
lights you have a leader
um you that on the other group is called on the santo daime and it's a bit more
you know free form
there's singing and there's dancing and um sounds like more fun it's it's more
fun you know fun capital
f fun and are they doing that under the influence all the singing and dancing
oh yeah yeah wow yeah yeah they
drink tea all night they drink ayahuasca oh boy yeah it's all the ceremonies
tend to involve more
ingestion now has anybody studied those folks because that sounds like they'd
be even happier than the
other ones you talked about yeah i'm not familiar you know i'm not super
familiar with that literature
what i've read mostly is the udv has been studied and it's because of their
interest in establishing that
the use is safe and effective and helpful well it'd be really interesting to
see the two of them studied
you know see the contrast between the singing and dancing and the way the way
the other one people
would do it like they're in sort of a mainstream christian church mm-hmm yes a
side to side comparison
you know those uh i would think those data would be out there but maybe not you
know separated in
that exact same manner i think we've been doing this for almost four hours four
hours can you imagine
that time flew time flew time flew right yeah thank you man thanks for coming
on yeah your book uh the
psychedelic handbook is available right now there it is and this is the novel
that you wrote joseph levy
escapes death that is uh available as well well you could read the comment by
you know grandma disturbing
and you know something or another's tale you know graham likes the joseph levy
book well if graham
likes it i'm sure i'll like it too yeah it's entertaining i enjoyed talking to
you man it was a lot of fun
it really was uh it's great i'm glad we finally did it yeah finally let's do it
again you do it again
yeah yeah it was fun right i would like to do it again you're up for it let's
go yeah all right thank you bye
everybody
you