Psychedelics are all the rage in the investment world, with hundreds of millions of dollars pouring into research-based startups in the hope of finding interventions for addiction, depression, PTSD, end-of-life anxieties, and much more. But is it too much? Are we, as has happened with numerous substances in the past, placing too much faith in plant medicine? Will investors expecting a return on investment skew the research? And, more to the point of this podcast, is the burgeoning crop of yoga instructors turned shamans promising more than they can deliver?With Matthew on a much-deserved vacation this week, Julian interviews Derek about these topics based on Derek’s 2020 book, Hero’s Dose: The Case for Psychedelics in Ritual & Therapy.In the Ticker this week, Julian looks at the growing list of anti-vax, COVID-is-a-hoax conservative radio hosts dying of COVID. We begin with the obvious: Joe Rogan recently contracted COVID, and admitted to undergoing what might be the most insane drug regimen to date.Show NotesRobert David Steele Dies from Covid, While Denying CovidAnti-Vax Conservative Radio Hosts Dying from CovidCaleb Wallace, 30-year-old Freedom Rally Organizer Dies from CovidTexas GOP official who Mocked Covid, dies from itHero’s Dose: The Case for Psychedelics in Ritual & Therapy
-- -- --Support us on PatreonPre-order Conspirituality: How New Age Conspiracy Theories Became a Health Threat: America | Canada Follow us on Instagram | Twitter: Derek | Matthew | JulianOriginal music by EarthRise SoundSystem
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Matthew Remsky is on a much-deserved vacation this week, so you will just be hearing Julian and I have some discussions.
You can stay up to date with us on all of our social media handles, including Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, And at Patreon, we're at patreon.com slash conspirituality.
You can support us for $5 a month.
Help us to keep this show humming along and get access to our Monday bonus episodes.
Conspirituality 67, the promise and peril of psychedelics.
Psychedelics are all the rage in the investment world, with hundreds of millions of dollars pouring into research-based startups in the hope of finding interventions for addiction, depression, PTSD, end-of-life anxieties, and much more.
But is it too much?
Are we, as has happened with numerous instances in the past, placing too much faith in plant medicine?
Will investors expecting a return on investment skew the research?
And more to the point of this podcast, is the burgeoning crop of yoga instructors turned shamans promising more than they can deliver?
With Matthew on a much-deserved vacation this week, I'm going to interview Derek about these topics based on his 2020 book, Hero's Dose, The Case for Psychedelics in Ritual and Therapy.
In the ticker, I'm also going to have a look at the growing list of anti-vax, COVID is a hoax, conservative radio hosts dying of COVID.
We begin with the obvious.
Joe Rogan recently contracted COVID and then, in a message to his millions of Instagram followers, admitted to undergoing what might be the most insane drug regimen to date.
What did he take, Derek?
Well, he took a steroid.
He took antibiotics, which are for bacterial infections.
He took ivermectin, of course, because he had Brett Weinstein on his podcast.
And he took the most effective intervention for COVID-19, which is monoclonal antibodies.
Actually, If you get it and you're unvaccinated, the most effective regimen that is available.
So for some reason he decided that when he found out that he had it that day to begin to pump his body full of every drug imaginable as well as an NAD drip and vitamin drips.
Yeah, so he referred to it on that Instagram post as throwing the kitchen sink at it, right?
And the thing that is that's maddening on sort of both sides, if you will, of this conversation is that all anyone is talking about is the ivermectin.
So all the people who are like, rah, rah, Ivermectin are like, look, Joe Rogan got sick.
He took Ivermectin and he's fine.
Cause by the end he says, you know, I felt really crappy.
I had a hunch.
Maybe I had it.
I was, I was coming back from the shows in Florida.
Um, you know, and, and, and no mention of the people he may have exposed, you know, he's, he's, he's out there in the world.
He's interviewing people on his podcast.
And then he says, you know, after a few days, I feel fantastic.
I feel really good, which, you know, anyone who's ever been, if you ever had a nasty cold or a flu, and you take a bunch of Drugs, you take a bunch of things that might, you know, help your immune system fight back, suppress some of the symptoms.
When you get to the other side of that initial fever or those initial really nasty symptoms, I often am like, yeah, I feel good.
I'm ready to go back to work.
So, I'm really curious to see what happens now.
People on the other side of the conversation who are being justifiably critical of him are also only focusing on the ivermectin.
And also, people know Rogan's history.
Even last week, you had shared on our Instagram page where he had interviewed Dr. Rhonda Patrick, who is fantastic, and he really went at her in the Rogan way.
He wasn't being It's the people who have comorbidities.
In past episodes, he has recommended not getting a vaccine if you're young.
Now, of course, he did walk that back, but it's still got out there.
And he has long promoted the idea that if you are in shape and have a healthy immune system, you should be able to fight COVID off with no problems.
problem, which is really interesting because as soon as he got it, he immediately took everything that was in his shelf.
So it completely contradicts what he says.
We saw this in that video that I cut with Preston Smiles a couple of weeks ago, where he was also lied by saying that he wasn't around people.
When I cut video in that shows him clearly in the middle of people working out, screaming in each other's faces.
And again, you're going to notice where he is promoting ivermectin and yet he pulls out like six or seven supplements that he's also taking during this time.
So, it's kind of incredible that there's a reason for drug specificity that any doctor will tell you that you take targeted interventions.
And they're just, they're so clueless that they just throw everything into their body, not understanding, you know, at least with, I mean, besides the colloidal silver, which can be a nightmare in your body, like taking extra vitamin C or whatever probably isn't going to do a lot of damage.
But if you're taking a prednisone and a Z-Pak and ivermectin, and you're doing monoclonal antibodies, and then you're adding vitamins, like all of those things are drugs.
Yeah.
Every one of them works in the body in a specific way and you don't know how they're going to work together.
So it's really baffling.
It actually reminds me of when I had Lyme disease, probably about 15 years ago.
And I was still very much in the alternative sort of medical world, but I thankfully was mature enough that I went, oh fuck, this is a really bad condition.
It often goes really poorly for people.
Antibiotics are apparently the best way and for the first time in probably Probably 15 years at that point, I said, okay, I'll take some pharmaceutical medicine and I took antibiotics, but I did every other thing you can imagine.
I drank crocodile blood serum from the internet.
I'll just try everything because I want to get better.
I took all kinds of supplements, did all kinds of cleanses, all kinds of supposed antipathogenics that gave me terrible nausea and made my sweat smell awful.
You know, that's, I think, sort of the methodology.
But when you decide that you and your contrarian circle are going to be your own doctors and design your own protocols, who knows what kind of interactions are going to happen, right?
Now, I don't know if you were able to confirm this.
I have not been able yet, unfortunately.
But I'm under the impression he is vaccinated.
Uh, no, not from what I've read.
Uh, I, you know, I don't follow him closely enough, but given the number of memes and the number of articles that came out last night, um, I had read in a few places that he refused to be vaccinated under the idea of, we just don't know yet that sort of vibe.
So again, not a hundred percent confirmation, but people who track him more closely than us have said that he is not vaccinated.
The fact that he's feeling better, of course, is about the ivermectin.
It's not about the monoclonal antibodies, right?
That's just what we're gonna have to deal with moving forward.
I mean, it's the same thing that popped up in, you know, if you watch Preston's video, it's people saying ivermectin.
He, again, listed six or seven things.
Sleep, which is probably the most effective intervention.
Hydration and sleep, which he mentioned.
And then the thermal sauna or whatever he had in his kitchen.
But everyone in the comments clung to ivermectin.
And we should also point out that even though that it has been touted since the beginning, near the beginning of the pandemic, and you've covered Dr. Corey, for example, talking about it a while ago, it was really Rogan's emergency podcast with Brett Weinstein that pushed it into the mainstream more than anything else did.
So he is the point at which most people found out about it.
And it shouldn't be surprising that he took it.
But again, the fact that that is given as the magic ingredient is just erroneous.
But so has been this whole process.
Yeah.
And so he's the tipping point here.
He's the hundredth monkey.
And last I checked, you know, 11 million listens per podcast episode.
Thankfully, they did put out that Rhonda Patrick, 15 minutes of her, you know, very calmly trying to get at the underlying mistakes in the harmful anti-vax rhetoric.
Well, the difficulty with that is that she's honest with the evidence.
And so you'll see Rogan keep going back, well, I heard this.
What about this?
What about this?
And a good researcher will say, Probably, but we don't have 100% proof, which what I've noticed, if you are someone who is caught up in this conspiritualist world, you kind of see that as a sign of weakness.
Whereas, you know, as we know from long standing studies of autocracy and autocrats is that the strength is what they are addicted to.
And Rogan You know, as much as he'll like to say, I'm just a moron, don't listen to me, his influence is far greater, maybe than he realizes, or definitely more than he takes responsibility for.
But when someone goes and they take the horse dewormer instead of the human grade ivermectin and they get sick or die or something bad happens, none of these people will take responsibility for that.
And that's just really tragic.
This is the Conspirituality Ticker, a weekly bullet point rundown on the ongoing pandemic of messianic influencers who spread medical misinformation and sell disaster spirituality.
We talk on this podcast about influencers in the age of social media, but there's a much longer established politically powerful form of media consumed by tens of millions of Americans each week, and that's conservative talk radio.
Ever since the radio airwaves were deregulated, first with the end of the Fairness Act, In 1987 and then the 1996 Telecommunications Act, massive companies like Clear Channel have been able to buy and own multiple stations with an exclusively conservative ideological slant, usually to the right of Fox News.
Clear Channel is today called I Heart Media and owns 800 American radio stations.
The echo chamber, often referred to that this has created, is a clear precursor to the polarizing algorithms we talk about now on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
No surprise then that COVID denialism and anti-vax attitudes amongst Republicans have been driven not only by huge TV personalities like Tucker Carlson, but also by popular conservative talk radio hosts.
Some of these hosts are now themselves dying from COVID.
So here's a short list.
On August 4th, Florida conservative radio host Dick Farrell died at 65 from COVID-19 complications.
In a Facebook post just a month earlier, he had called Anthony Fauci a power-tripping freak, asking why would you take a vax promoted by people who lied to you all along about masks, where the virus came from, and the death toll.
Politico reports that once infected, he did change his tune and urged a longtime friend to get vaccinated, saying he regretted his own choice not to do so.
Next up, Jimmy DeYoung died on August 15th at 81 years old.
He broadcast his right-wing Christian soap prophecy today from Tennessee and thought COVID was a form of government control and the vaccine was not to be trusted.
Phil Valentine, a conservative radio host also in Tennessee, wrote in a blog post that his chances of dying from COVID were way less than 1%, and then died at 61 on August 21st.
On his show, he had repeatedly downplayed the need for people to get vaccinated.
And again, to his credit, Valentine changed his tune while in the hospital, saying he would more vigorously advocate for vaccination once back on the air.
He died less than a month later.
His brother Mark told CNN that Phil regretted being responsible for other people not getting vaccinated.
On August 28th, Florida conservative radio host Mark Bernier, who had referred to himself as Mr. Antivax, died at 65.
He lost a three-week hospital battle to COVID.
On Twitter, Bernier had compared the government telling people to get vaccinated, you guessed it, to the Nazis.
Now, there are also many other recent COVID deaths amongst anti-vax and COVID denialist figures, including public officials like Commissioner Tommy Peek in Oklahoma, GOP Chair in Greenville, South Carolina, Presley Stutz, who was 64, and from his deathbed said that COVID was a deadly bioweapon deployed on America by enemies foreign and probably domestic.
Stutz remained ardently anti-vaccine and anti-mask until his death.
Councilman H. Scott Apley from Dickinson, Texas, died at just 45 from COVID after mocking it and sharing anti-vax and anti-mask posts.
57-year-old Georgia Police Captain Joe Manning refused the vaccine and took ivermectin instead on social media, urging his followers to stock up on it from the local feed and seed store.
Thank you very much, Brett Weinstein.
We should also mention Caleb Wallace, a young man of just 30 years old from Texas, father of three young children with another baby on the way, who stayed home for four days, self-medicating with vitamin C, zinc, aspirin, and ivermectin, so almost the Rogan protocol, right?
Before being rushed to the emergency room, he had helped organize the Freedom Rally in San Angeleno on July 4th, and then died 55 days later.
Now, that's a long and somewhat laborious list that I wanted to share for the impact of what's really going on here.
That's all just from the month of August.
Conservative radio hosts and public officials and one protest organizer.
I had said last week on social media that we're in an inevitable countdown now toward one of our conspiritualist influencers suffering the same tragic fate.
We're only one degree of separation from that right now.
Frequent Sasha Stone collaborator Robert David Steele just died at 69.
He and Stone organized the 84-stop Arise USA tour.
Which was slated to run from May 24th to August 28th, where they and a cast of speakers urged the crowds, who seem to have averaged out at around an underwhelming 200, and often quite a lot less than that per stop, to fight for their freedoms against vaccines, masks, quarantine measures, and the evil cabal of child-sacrificing pedophile elites who run the world, and who also supposedly rigged the 2020 election.
Now the exact day of Steele's death is not being reported anywhere, but most outlets are saying he died last week.
His death is not mentioned on the Arise USA Tour website, but if you dig around for it, there is a press release saying that the tour's last date was on August 17th, 11 days early and with four stops still remaining.
It also says that he was hospitalized on August 16th and ends by expressing how excited they all are for the Arise USA Tour in 2022.
Now, I for one will be watching Sasha Stone carefully now, as being on a tour bus and sharing a stage with Steele for two months makes his exposure to the virus really likely.
Steele prided himself on being the first to publicly call COVID a hoax.
He was a former CIA agent and a long-time influential far-right and anti-Semitic conspiracy theory who most recently had vocally supported QAnon along with his friend Sasha Stone.
In 2017, he famously told Alex Jones on InfoWars that NASA was running a child slave colony on Mars.
On August 18th, Robert David Steele's last ever blog post, which appears to have since been deleted, featured an image of him hooked up to a hospital ventilator.
He wrote, I will not take the vaccination, though I did test positive for whatever they're calling COVID.
Why did you include the child slave colony on Mars?
That's pretty common knowledge at this point.
Seems like an outlier.
Absolutely.
There are some details there that really get far out.
Further than that, thank you.
We'll do a bonus episode on that.
Actually, that's exactly what I'm doing.
Reading this list along with you as you were going over it, it brought to mind the fact that being in this industry of wellness and yoga, I mean, for so long it's been called preventive medicine.
And, you know, essentially that's also what a vaccine is.
It's preventive medicine that doesn't operate that much differently than a lot of the stuff that has been touted in yoga and wellness circles.
Obviously, yes, vaccination is a different process, but the ideology behind it is exactly the same.
A little bit of something arms you against the real problem, just like, you know, lifting weights, you tear your muscles a little bit so they get stronger.
And, you know, you're doing the same thing with your immune system when you take a vaccination.
Essentially, vaccines do what homeopathy falsely claims to do, in a way.
Yeah, absolutely.
I've said that before.
Samuel Hahnemann was super excited when vaccinations, when Edward Jenner's work and then Pasteur's work came, you know, bore fruit because he saw that as proof that homeopathy worked.
And I've talked to homeopathists who don't know that.
So, but it is, it's the same underlying reasoning behind it.
And again, it's been with us for thousands of years.
At least, you know, the earliest instance from China comes about 1100 years ago, but there is, you know, it probably predates that as well.
The idea that a little bit of something, you know, the first instance was, To cure rabies, to take a little bit of the dog's brain that infected you and put that on your skin.
So it's been around for a very long time and it's really, I'm at a point now where, especially with, you see the cognitive dissonance that's coming out of Rogan's.
Where, you know, a lot of his accolades are like, anti-Big Pharma, and then here your God is saying, I took everything that Big Pharma had, and I put it in my body, except for the vaccine.
But all of these other things, which are indicative of the pharmaceutical industry, I'm fine taking as long as I'm okay.
And I don't know how long this dissonance can last, how long you can continue making excuses which essentially contradict what you've been espousing for years or decades.
It's just that you're not getting it packaged at Whole Foods or your Air One, your local holistic store.
Yeah, I mean, with all of these conservative radio hosts, especially the ones who sort of recanted, right?
Who had those deathbed conversions around their attitudes toward the existence of COVID and the necessity of the vaccine.
It's really easy to step back and go, wow, as much as I am mad at them for their influence in spreading misinformation, I also see them as victims of that misinformation because they believed what they were saying.
They believed what they were told and ended up dying, you know, in some cases quite a bit younger than would otherwise have been expected.
Derek, I think you're going to be I thoroughly enjoyed reading your book, Hero's Dose, The Case for Psychedelics in Ritual Therapy.
What you've done is actually so much more than this title reveals at first glance.
So let me know what you think about this 30,000 foot view.
I think you've really written a book that weaves together four things.
The first is that you're indeed making a case for why psychedelic therapy might be a very promising missing piece, especially for people with depression, anxiety and PTSD.
But you've also written a book that examines the history of the relationship between pharmaceutical companies and psychiatry.
You've also woven into that book an examination of mental suffering from an evolutionary standpoint that is informed by religion and psychology.
You return to these thoughts repeatedly as a way to make sense of what ails us in a place that is deeper and perhaps more holistic than just explaining psychiatric symptoms as a chemical imbalance.
And then lastly, you've devoted a significant amount of digital ink to blowing the reader's mind, and I will include myself in that category, with extremely descriptive accounts of your youthful and heroic experimentations.
Now, I thought I had journeyed pretty far down that rabbit hole.
Not even close, not even close.
Your youthful and heroic experimentations with altered states of consciousness.
A lot of that is wondrous and mind-expanding, it's inspiring and beautiful.
A lot of it is also really harrowing and terrifying, which is appropriate given those substances.
The extreme edges that you and your college buddies pushed with alchemical combinations of all kinds is somewhat legendary in my mind at this point.
Yeah, I do make a disclaimer in the book that I'm definitely not advising people try some of the combinations, but it's just part of the environment I was in and I'm grateful to have survived with really no damage physically and maybe just minor damage emotionally.
Yeah, I often say exactly the same thing, but mine is really lowercase now in comparison to yours.
How does that sound, though, in terms of a sort of summary of the layers that you have, the facets of the book?
It's always interesting, and thank you, Julian, for reading it, first of all, because as you know, just as a writer, when someone can read and take seriously your work, it's meaningful, so I appreciate that.
It sounds very good, and it's more than I actually thought about when I was originally crafting it.
I realized if I wanted to write about psychedelics, I've always been averse to memoirs, although the funny thing is I love reading memoirs, but I never thought about writing one.
And then I read Mary Carr's book, The Art of Memoir, and I was like, she makes a very strong case of how you can write a good memoir.
So I started with that.
But as I started writing the book, I realized just with my way that I approach things and the style that I write.
A straight memoir wouldn't do justice, because for me, if your memoir is going to be meaningful, it has to address larger issues.
Or else it's just talking about yourself the whole time, and that's not really interesting to me.
So then I thought about what psychedelics have meant, which then made me think about what they represented culturally, socially, psychologically to America.
And that led me down the history of pharmaceuticals, because As I mentioned earlier in the previous segment, any substance we put in our body can effectively be considered a drug.
So, if we're going to be talking about right now psychedelics as potential therapeutics for mental health issues, which I had suffered anxiety disorder and dealt with while on psychedelics at certain times, then I wanted to know How we got to a place where we have so many pharmacological interventions for depression and anxiety, when for most of history, you had communities to do that.
And I write a bit about moral therapy, for example, in the 19th century, which was a much better model than, you can argue, benzodiazepines and SSRIs.
So I wanted to take a more holistic view of not only my mental health dealing with psychedelics, but a broader cultural swath, you know, test case, especially as we're moving into the monetization of psychedelics, which is a whole other layer we can talk about briefly at the end, but that's a whole other thing that's coming.
Yeah, well hopefully we can touch on each of these facets.
I wanted to start with regard to the psychedelic adventuring because there is, as you just said, something very deeply personal that you're sharing here about your own history with panic attacks, anxiety, some family trauma that you touch upon, being bullied as a kid, you referenced a few times.
And how these drug experiences gave you a new perspective on your own inner world, your emotions, your sense of self, as well as inevitably, right, the metaphysical questions that psychedelics tend to evoke about the nature of consciousness, how to live an authentic life, our place in the natural world and in relationship to one another.
What's interesting to me is that you weren't at first engaging in these experiences in an organized ritual or therapeutic setting, right, as your title says you're making a case for, but rather out of what we might characterize as an abundance of reckless curiosity, fueled, it sounds like, to some extent, by your, at that time, new interest in religious texts and practices, and I really relate to all of that.
So I wanted to ask, how did the study of religion and the immersions in psychedelic states intersect for you in your college years?
And what were you seeking at that time?
I think a little foundation.
Just imagine growing up in an all-white suburb.
You know, when you went to high school, 600 people, one black kid.
And you remember that because there was one.
And that's the environment I grew up in.
And my life was sports and comic books, I would say.
And comic books actually make a really good primer for religious studies, mythology at least.
And so when I got to college, I lived on one of the most racially diverse campuses in the country, which is called Livingston College at Rutgers University.
It was created in the late 60s.
It was specifically designed to house minority students because they knew that was where they were going to put most of the non-white students that were coming into the state university.
And it was designed by a prison architect because they wanted to create it Riot proof in case there were any problems with the minority population.
So that was the environment I was moving into.
And so moving from that environment, my my roommate was a six foot seven, 400 pound black kid who loved comic books and reading.
He didn't play any sports.
And just as it happens in college, we befriended two commuters, one who was Puerto Rican and the other one who was half black, half Puerto Rican.
So you can imagine how small college dorm rooms are.
I'm 6'3", my roommate was 6'7", and then two other guys living in one room.
And it just so happened that one of them was super into Eastern philosophies.
And so my very first week of college, he gave me a copy of the Bhagavad Gita and the Dhammapada.
I said, read these.
And at the same time, I had met someone who was a computer hacker.
Who was also a marijuana fanatic, so I began smoking marijuana at that point.
And so my very introduction to college was like, here you go, this is it.
So, you know, I originally went to school to be an accounting major and very soon I switched my degree to religion.
Because I grew up agnostic at best and I just grew fascinated by storytelling more than anything.
I was a voracious reader even entering college and I just really wanted to learn.
And I think that there's something really cool about not having any predispositions to religion at all, so that if you start with ones that you're not brought up in your environment with, you don't approach it as, well, this is cool, but you know, mine's still the right one.
And that allowed me, I didn't even get to Christianity and Judaism until my second year.
I just went right in for Eastern.
And that became my focus.
I felt fortunate for that reason.
And so by my second year when I started psychedelics, because they were in my circles, and you think my adventures are a lot, the people I was with had already been doing hundreds of experiences in high school by the time I met them.
So yeah, there was no organized setting per se, but I was with some very experienced people, even at age 18, 19, who had been doing them for years.
And I felt Very fortunate that I had guides who were looking out for my best interest, who were only sharing.
They didn't want anything from me.
And they weren't trying to push any sort of religious or spiritual messaging.
They were just like, hey, let's see what we can find out about ourselves here.
And so by the first time that I had a bad trip, five trips in, I already had a foundation and people around me that I felt comfortable with so that I felt good about continuing to explore without any sort of investments in any particular ideologies at that time.
Amazing to think of those, of those kids already being so experienced.
At 19, some of them were already like, ah, I've done, I've done too much already.
It's just starting.
Incredible.
Well, you talk about this concept and this, it's a really interesting and I think layered concept that, that can be understood from different angles and sort of contested in certain ways.
But it's this idea that psychedelics are filter removers.
Like, what do you want to say about that?
First time was psilocybin, second time was LSD.
And the very first time there was the, what's called the Gardner Sage Library on the main campus at Rutgers.
And my friend brought me there and you had to actually, it was closed at night, but you can crawl down like a service ladder to get to the courtyard.
And I remember going down there and my friend and I, my good college, high school friend who was also at college, we did our first experiences together and there was just all brick.
And we were just sitting there, looking at the brick wall, watching movies.
Now, there was no video camera.
We were just watching the sort of visuals that happen with psychedelics.
Yeah.
And really, that's a visual phenomenon.
But It just reminded me very quickly, or taught me very quickly I should say, that a lot of what I had assumed to be reality wasn't necessarily the case.
Or, as I would learn I believe as I continued to study religion and talk to religious scholars and people all around campus for the school newspaper, I was a religion writer for years as well, When you're so invested in one sort of belief system, you start to think that that is the only one.
And I think having these early experiences with psychedelics being like, that's a story, but there are other stories.
And that was the filter that really got removed is that as invested as we are in our own story, there are seven plus billion other stories happening right now.
And it's important to keep that into perspective.
Anytime you say this, it must be this way, Well, there are going to be other people who are not going to agree with you.
So you can fight about it or you can try to understand it from their perspective and have dialogues.
And I think that was really important for me.
Probably the most important thing I learned in college more than anything that I learned in classes necessarily.
Yeah, I mean, I think of psychedelics as having this sort of radical de-centering effect, right, where the stance from which you sort of usually unquestioningly experience everything gets dissolved or gets shifted or gets opened up in a way that I think it's real.
I think for most people, especially if they haven't experienced it or if they've only had one or two experiences, the overwhelming initial focus is on sensory experience, right?
That like, wow, the colors, the shapes, the sounds, the synesthesia, the sense of my body, you know, seeming like it's radically transformed into something else or just being experienced in such a different way.
And yet the filters that get lifted seem to me also to have to do with your emotional life, right?
With your shadow, whatever it is that you've been repressing, whatever it is that you don't normally see about yourself and about other people, some of which can be really dark and some of which can be profoundly beautiful.
So there's this interesting sort of both sensory and In our life sort of opening that I feel happens and yet here we are you know these two guys on this very skeptical podcast who are super critical about certain aspects of spirituality and are basically atheists who think that there's value in spiritual experience and practice.
And a lot of people who are in our demographic would say, yes, psychedelics remove the filters so that you can see the spirit world so that you can understand that everything is synchronistically connected so you can see that everything is just a projection of your mind and truly you are, you know, something else.
So how do you parse that stuff out?
Interestingly, Lisa, one of our listeners who I chat with sometimes on Twitter, just sent me yesterday a study that I had not come across, which was fascinating, which was talking about that exact topic, which was Is there damage by making psychedelics religious?
And the writer also brought in, like, 12 steps, right?
Because some people don't resonate with the faith-based language, and is that a barrier?
And I'll admit, again, I say I grew up agnostic just because my parents didn't care about religion.
It was not a part of my upbringing at all.
I truly had no idea who Jesus was until college.
I heard the name, I'd been in church a couple times for different things, but I paid no attention to it.
Psychedelics are content-free.
Really, it's whatever you're bringing to it and whatever your guide, hopefully you have a guide.
I would definitely not suggest doing them if you haven't without some sort of person who has some experience with them around you because you can really suffer if you don't.
The emotionality that you talked about is really, and I say this towards the end of the book, is really the reason that I still do them.
Not nearly as much, and it's been a few years now because of the pandemic, I haven't felt the need to.
But especially with ayahuasca, because every time I've done it, I've heard about people in my same circle who were with me at those ceremonies.
Seeing all of these beings in the room.
And for me, I was just sitting there dealing with my shit with like my second time after shortly after I got divorced.
It was like the entire trip for me was thinking about, man, how did I mess up in this relationship?
And how can I not do that again?
And being now in a successful marriage, we've been together seven years yesterday actually.
Oh, congratulations.
Thank you.
I'm reminded of those times, that time at that, like looking back, I always remember that experience of that ayahuasca ceremony because it was like, hey, Whatever happened happened, but you can be better this way.
And it's kind of served as a landmark for me, because the real work of psychedelics happens when you're sober.
It's not the trip just says, Hey, look, you've been looking at this, but look at this over here.
And then there are some steps you can take if you want to get over here, but you're going to have to do it later.
We're just right now just you're kind of seeing other possibilities.
You and I share a love of Joseph Campbell and it's hard to sort of talk about any of this stuff without thinking of the hero's journey in terms of the intersection of mythology and psychology and altered states.
How was that, like at what point did that start factoring in for you?
Pretty early.
I mean, Joseph Campbell, while I have a degree in religion, it was mythology that drew me to it.
And the Hero with a Thousand Faces, I remember reading it on the bus and just being blown.
And that's not an easy book, to be honest.
He's mostly known for Power of Myth, but his four series Masks of God, his Hero with a Thousand Faces, his earlier work is very academic.
But at the time, that's all I was reading was religious academic texts.
And he sometimes criticizes a popularizer, which is fine, but I think he did a lot of amazing work.
And laying out, yes, you're going to sacrifice some subtleties when you create very broad Landscapes like he did, but the hero's journey, just the idea of initiation, the journey, the return, and then integration, the ability to take that information that you've learned on the journey and then apply it moving forward, or else you will have to journey again, was super meaningful.
And I think it has a lot of lessons To teach people who, for example, I've heard this for decades, people be like, I keep dating the same person.
I keep coming across this.
And it's like, well, let's think about the patterns and then think about the lessons you can learn and then how they change.
Because a mythology is useless if there's not transformation.
And at its best, In one condensed period, a psychedelic experience gives you an entire hero's journey in a night that you can go through, but then again, you have to take that information, that discovery, that transformation, and then make it a habit.
Make it a part of your life or else you're not really gonna, you might have a fine memory, but you're not gonna advance after that.
I have this memory, and I haven't looked it up recently or read anything about it recently, but maybe you're more familiar of the mysteries at Eleusis in ancient Greece that supposedly went on for over 2,000 years, that there was this sort of secret society that all of the poets and the academics and the people who were in the know within that society
would go and experience this initiation and that apparently it involved going underground and participating in this reenactment of the story of Persephone and Demeter and Hercules is in there somewhere I seem to think and that they were drinking Kykeon which apparently had fermented ergot in it and so would have had you know basically LSD like properties and it just it's it seems like the perfect it seems like a literal It's a depiction of what you just said, right?
That you're going to engage in this psychedelic sacrament and then you're going to go on this mythic journey.
And it's also an agricultural ritual where she returns to Hades every winter and then re-emerges, so it's people paying attention to their environment.
Brian Murarescu, who we had on the pod like a year ago, wrote an entire book on this, so I'll reference Listeners to look for that episode as well as read his book, The Immortality Key, because it's fascinating.
But him along with others bring across pretty strong evidence that you went to Eleusis to have this ritual and to experience the underworld in an evening or maybe in a couple of days and then come back emerged and they show a lot of
Written proof that people had been transformed by going through that experience, and I don't really know what else you can experience that that's powerful in a matter of days that would do that to you than some sort of psychedelic substance.
Yeah, my recollections of reading about it is that it was secret, but you can find all these references, and of course people would speak about it frankly in private writings, but in their public writings they would make reference from time to time to
The incredible initiation that changed their lives, and you know, when you have those first experiences, if they're handled well, and they're contained well for you, and you're guided well, I think it really is, you know, when you, a few minutes ago, when you started to describe your first experience, that to me is one of the sort of undeniably One of the most characteristic things of psychedelics is that everyone who's taken them could tell you in detail about their first experience.
It's like it's seared into your soul.
I can remember the couch I was on in the living room and Bill Withers was playing.
It was a 70s party in 1994.
It was sweltering hot even though it was coming into late fall in New Jersey.
Yeah, I remember the smells.
I remember everything about that.
You don't forget.
It is important to know, and again, why I really expressed, I got lucky that I had a good guide.
Really, there was no other, he was a friend and he said, you want to try this out?
And we did.
But anyone, most people I've talked to who don't.
Like psychedelics who've tried them had a bad first experience.
And that's unfortunate because if your first one's bad, that's imprinted in your mind.
And moving forward, it's going to be really difficult to open up to it.
People I'm sure can, but that is my observation from people who've had bad trips.
Yeah, and usually those quote-unquote bad trips, it seems to me, are in situations where they're not contained, they're thinking they're just going to have a party, they're not in a space where they feel safe, they don't have the kind of connection or guidance or empathy or, you know, someone keeping an eye on them and it's just completely overwhelming.
My last ayahuasca experience, somebody came, was a friend of a friend, and the facilitator usually vets more thoroughly, but the other person had been there the previous night and thought his friend would have a good experience from it, so he didn't do as much vetting as he should have, and that person ended up running out and running and finding Police actually because there was an event next door and fortunately my friend had the wherewithal and was able to keep everyone away from where we were.
But it's it was he ended up in the hospital that night because he thought that he was going to do a party drug, which ayahuasca is not.
Yeah, so kids listening at home, don't do that.
Don't do that.
Take this very seriously and approach it as a, if you like, a sacred ritual that requires qualified guidance.
Derek, one huge theme in your book is anxiety.
I really appreciated that and how it's a key piece of our human predicament.
That learning how to embrace and work with anxiety is kind of a central, meaningful task.
Tell us about that.
Why anxiety?
It's part of my DNA.
I come from an anxious family.
I suffered hundreds of panic attacks in my life, two of which hospitalized me.
I've written about this elsewhere, that the thing that got me to stop having panic attacks was when I went from a 20-year vegetarian diet to Eating meat again and less carbs.
I'm not promoting any diet.
I don't do that, but that is what happened to me.
And I haven't had one now in many years, but I still have anxiety.
It's just that I don't have those full-on panic attacks anymore, which I'm very grateful about.
But anxiety, some people argue, is the human condition.
It's very important.
It's part of us, that rush of of chemicals that keep us on guard.
People like Kelly McGonagall have written exceptionally well about how to use anxiety because all it is is chemistry.
And if you can frame it properly, you can actually use it for intense focus.
Joseph Ledoux has written an entire book about the physiology of anxiety, which I found very useful to tell you exactly what's going on in your body to try to create interventions.
But with psychedelics, one of the experiences you're probably referencing earlier was my, I haven't, a hero's dose or a hero dose, as McKenna called it, was five grams of psilocybin.
The most I ever did was four grams.
That was enough.
I don't think I'll ever be journeying beyond that.
I just don't see any reason to.
I stake with two grams now, which is something I can manage and handle.
But the four gram night was harrowing and it was definitely the second to worst experience I had ever had or had had at that time.
The worst was to come.
But I ended up that that was a Friday night and the following Friday I ended up by myself taking two grams and going to a place where I've always had good experiences by myself and sitting under a tree for hours with it.
And I bring that up specifically because I realized that if I let that bad experience dictate what psychedelics were, that I would then stop learning from them.
And so, I wanted to be able to deal with my anxiety around it immediately.
And so, I went and I had a wonderful night by myself the following week.
And I felt good enough at that time that I didn't need a guide.
I felt, you know, you can take off the training wheels if you've done them enough.
It really helped me to recognize my patterns, because anxiety is a pattern, and to be able to sit with it, and instead of letting it overwhelm me, to be able to manage it.
Physiology is important, there are breathing techniques, there's cardiovascular exercise was always helpful, but it can really boil down to a mental repetition, which is also a habit.
And there are certain triggers, and unless you create better habits to deal with those triggers, you will deal with anxiety for your entire life.
I'm at the point where I've recognized it'll always be part of me, but I can mitigate it by certain techniques.
And psychedelics played a big role in understanding that.
Yeah, and then from one of the other angles that your text sort of weaves through, it seemed to me that you were talking about perhaps other neuroses as well, but anxiety specifically as, in a way, the price we pay for a certain amount of cognitive evolution.
You think about evolution in general, anxiety, the role that it plays is that it keeps you awake to potential dangers in your environment.
So, you know, there have been studies done that have measured the cortisol levels in ancient skeletons.
And certain markers have shown that it's likely that our ancestors had quick bouts of anxiety and then they were let go of, whereas In the modern times, we have chronic anxiety that we're always anxious because we don't have a good relationship with our environment.
You know, technology can play into that, but not necessarily.
Even things like the effects of climate control on your immune system, being indoors all the time, can have an effect on that.
If you're not used to certain temperatures because you've trained yourself to only be comfortable in certain ways, that can induce anxiety.
So, anxiety, we've sort of thwarted the mechanisms that evolution has given us by creating very comfortable environments for ourselves.
And that can be to our detriment, as great as it is to not have to worry about being rained on when I sleep.
There are other trade-offs that come with it.
So, anxiety did serve an important purpose for a long time and now that long-standing chronic anxiety is really, you know, affects 19% of adults every year in the United States.
There's a very short sentence that I wanted to quote back to you in terms of this theme of anxiety, but also the theme of What therapeutic or meaningful, substantive ritual work really entails?
And it's a very simple sentence.
Obstacles are unavoidable because change is hard.
One of the interventions that has shown the most success so far, it's one of the more long-standing, is with MDMA and PTSD specifically.
And to be clear, MDMA is not a psychedelic.
It affects It affects the same serotonin receptors as psychedelics classically, but it also affects other receptors, so it's not actually in that category.
Just as ketamine isn't a psychedelic, it's a disassociate, but these drugs tend to get lumped together.
I actually make that disclaimer early in the book that I will be talking about ketamine and MDMA even though they're not classically psychedelics.
That's a preface to this study, which is done with people coming back from the Iraq War and PTSD.
What happened was, you're around a bomb, a bomb goes off, something, your friend gets killed, like some tragic event happens and you have PTSD.
And again, it's a repetition, it's a mental repetition.
So if you hear a book slam onto the ground, you think it's a gunshot, you jump.
I can't imagine living with that and how hard that must be.
And what happens in the therapy, and there are a few different ones, some are done in VR, for example, and some have been done just with cognitive behavioral therapy, but where you introduce the triggers while someone's on MDMA, and they are able to experience triggers that would normally Trip them and send them off.
But since the MDMA is in their system, they don't get triggered.
Because honestly, it's really hard to have a bad time on MDMA.
Your brain is not allowing it.
And that's been very valuable so far.
But again, it's indicative of the fact that The intervention is helping you for a moment see something to change a pattern, but then further therapy is going to be needed.
But you can then recognize, oh, hey, remember that time when the book slamming on the ground didn't trip me off?
That is possible.
And that psychological change is so valuable and I really think lies at the heart of a lot of these psychedelic therapy interventions that are coming right now.
Yeah, you take great pains to underline that real change requires more than just taking a pill, right?
Whether it's an antidepressant or Xanax or an LSD tab, real change is probably going to require talk therapy.
Community ritual is something that is really sort of overlooked and left out often and just the sense of doing the work.
And I think you're speaking to something that's pervasive, not only in the sort of medicalized model of mental health, but also within more holistic spiritual circles, right?
Where there's the sense that there's going to be some kind of magical intervention, some kind of potion or pill or ritual that you can do that then, you know, automatically just makes everything okay.
And in the pharmaceutical world, it feels like it's about like, this will correct your chemical imbalance and then everything will be fine.
And leave out all of the other pieces.
And in the spiritual world, I think it often tends to be like, once you have this experience of ultimate transcendence or something, or you realize that you're always being guided by the universe, then, for example, your anxiety will just go away because you'll see that it's an illusion.
But I feel like you're pushing in this other direction that's saying, you know what, it's gritty, it takes work, it's hard, you're confronting yourself, it doesn't happen overnight.
Am I right about that?
Absolutely.
The change is the hardest thing.
We get into our patterns.
I think of Charles Duhigg's book, The Power of Habit, where he talks about what it takes to overcome OCD, for example, and how your brain in your prefrontal cortex has this region that he calls the gating system, which just effectively when you get in OCD, you get caught on a pattern like washing your hands.
And the only way to stop that is to create a different habit.
Now you can extrapolate from that and say that that's pretty much the case for most people.
If you want to change a habit, if you want to exercise, put a pair of running sneakers next to your bed.
So as you get out of bed every morning, they're right there and you see them, right?
And that creates that habit.
There are many different triggers that we can use.
But yeah, this idea that you're just going to magically be fixed, it's so pervasive.
It just reminds me of the, we're chanting for world peace.
You know what, if chanting makes you a better person and then you go out into the world and become a better person, that's awesome.
But if you think that sitting in a room is going to change conditions around the world, then you're only setting yourself up for suffering.
You have, in this book, a very unflattering analysis of the pharmaceutical industry's involvement in psychiatry.
and the medicalization of mental health.
You specifically point out the shaky ground of the supposed chemical imbalance explanation for depression and anxiety, as well as the often poor research methodology employed in developing antidepressants.
And this, of course, led me to think, well, you know, listeners of the podcast will be deeply familiar at this point with our critique of conspiracy theorist claims that are similar, right?
That the vaccine safety and efficacy data is corrupt and whenever someone comes on our feeds, they'll accuse you, you know, someone who has that point of view of being a shill for big pharma.
And you tend to then say, hold on a second, you know, like I spent half of my last book talking about all the problems with this industry.
Let's clarify, what's the difference between what you're saying and what the anti-vaxxers we debunk are saying?
And then second, tell us more about this ill-fated marriage between psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry.
I want to point you to the studies that I cite in the book, and they're publicly available, and the biggest one is the study that made Xanax become approved by the FDA.
Basically, what happened was the trials were four weeks, eight weeks, and 14 weeks where Xanax was put up against a placebo for dealing with depression.
Now, after four weeks, Xanax was outperforming the placebo.
After eight weeks, they were even.
And after 14 weeks, the placebo was outperforming Xanax.
You can find this online very quickly, so there's no conspiracy there.
You can actually read it.
But what happened was Janssen Pharmaceuticals decided to only publish the four-week data.
They did not publish the 14-week data, and that was part of what the FDA used to ...to allow Xanax to be used.
And this follows on a long history dating back to the 1880s of when pharmaceuticals first started being used because textile workers in the mills, people would notice that they would have very calming effects on the workers, some of the chemicals that were being used.
And that is the origins of the pharmaceutical industry.
And I go from that point onward and show decade by decade, not as in-depth in every decade, but by the time you get to the 1950s, You have the first billion dollar drug which was called Milltown.
Milltown was named after the very town I grew up in and lived in for the first 18 years of my life because the makers thought that the town that I lived in gave you a very calming feeling.
It was a very small suburb.
Clearly not.
Yeah, exactly.
Well, that's the funny thing.
On the face of it, it looks like it.
You know, there was a mill, an old Goodyear Tire mill in the middle of the town with a pond, and it looks very calming, but then the white anxiety that exists in that town.
So it actually, in many ways, was about the one black person.
Yeah, and everyone knew where that family lived.
That is not a joke.
It's very true.
So at that time in the 1950s, you had predominantly a lot of housewives, but also people, men coming back from the war.
You could go to the doctor and say, I got the nerves and the doctor could prescribe you Miltown or another equal tranquilizer.
You can go through for quaaludes after that.
You get it to SSRIs, you get to Xanax, you get to Prozac, obviously, which was the, you know, that changed the game.
But what you see is a very concerted effort between advertising industry and pharmaceutical makers and the doctors to push for these drugs.
And study after study has shown that When compared to talk therapy, talk therapy works at least as well as pharmaceuticals, and you will also find study after study that if you are on a pharmaceutical, that talk therapy with the pharmaceutical outperforms the pharmaceutical alone, and you will also find that study after study shows that pharmaceuticals should be used for short-term use only.
And yet you have people who have been on them for decades, and they can't get off because they have become chemically dependent.
And that is something when I was starting to write about this that some people in advocacy groups reached out to me because I had used the word, the term addicted.
And they were like, you know, we don't use that term because It really is a dependency that's been put on us by our practitioners.
And so I started changing because I understand what they mean by that.
Your brain becomes dependent on these drugs and getting off of them becomes impossible.
And then so then you find people who are then on a cocktail of drugs, including one woman who I interviewed, who was on 17 drugs at once for her PTSD.
And she had to, she had to come off one by one and she's off.
She's clean now.
But the last, the hardest one was Xanax coming off of that at the very end.
Wow.
18 drugs.
And is this the sort of, uh, you know, this one mellows you out, but then you want to fall asleep.
So this one will keep you awake, but then you can't pee.
So this one will help you pee.
And then you can't shit.
Exactly.
Yep.
Wow.
Yeah, I mean, this is that whole area where I feel like we both probably have a lot of sympathy for the holistic critique that says, look, we're more than just something that can be addressed at a very basic chemical level.
Even though we are neurobiological creatures, even though chemistry is a very humbling and very powerful thing, What allows us to transform the functioning of our brains and thereby our sense of self and our emotional regulation and all of these sorts of things has a lot of complex inputs, right?
So there's social inputs, there's relational inputs, there's experiential inputs, and it seems that the people that I've known and the research that I've read about antidepressants seems to suggest that if you can use an antidepressant to get yourself to a place where you have a better floor, like your floor is higher and your ability to actually function and be present and be self-aware like your floor is higher and your ability to actually function and be present and be self-aware is improved, that
That the therapy is going to, you're going to do better in therapy.
And then after a time of combining the two, maybe tapering off of the antidepressants is the way to go.
Does that sound about right?
Absolutely.
The problem is there is no tapering protocol.
I mean, Matthew's brought this up with his work with Kelly Brogan, who's created her own, but there's no accepted and just think about that.
Like these pharmaceutical companies make billions of dollars off of these drugs, but they've never figured out how to get people off of them safely.
There are protocols, but a lot of times, and people I've interviewed, had to figure out their own tapering protocols and how dangerous is that.
I do also want to add, though, because a number of people, I've written about this for years, and people have written to me saying, you know what, I was like this and this drug has made me feel better.
So, I want to get across that.
If it works for you, wonderful, but there are a lot of side effects and the fact that We incentivize doctors to write scripts, but not to engage in talk therapy at a broad level.
Because again, you're getting into a class issue here where people who are wealthier can afford the time and the money for talk therapy, whereas people who don't have those resources can't.
So they're only able to get the pharmaceuticals.
And that disparity is a problem in itself.
But if it's working, great.
You know, I also talked to someone like Lauren Slater I interviewed who's been on Prozac since the 80s and she wants to try.
She wrote a chapter on psychedelics and she can't try them because it contraindicates for the drug she's on and she's like, I would love to try these but I have no way of getting off of it right now and she really wants to.
So it's a case-by-case basis but I've come across too many people who either have had terrible experiences coming off or want to get off and just are stuck.
Yeah, that whole thing of we're going to slant the research to try and get people on them and then, you know, in this country at least, we're going to market the drugs to you saying if you experience these symptoms then you should take this thing and then at the end we'll have a very quick blurb about how, you know, If your eyes fall out and your nose starts bleeding, you should probably stop taking it, right?
But I think what's so fascinating about this and the distinction between say vaccine research and distribution and antidepressants, we are in this territory where we're talking about a scientific and a medical examination of something that is so intensely subjective so that the outcomes are hard to measure in a scientific way, right?
And so they can sort of get away with creating the markers that they want to create.
And maybe some people really are helped, but it's just such an interesting overlap between a more experiential, subjective kind of consciousness-based thing and scientific method.
I think that's one of the things that makes it really complicated.
Whereas with vaccines, it's like, you know, here's this drug.
It's...
It does the specific thing.
We can measure the outcomes.
All of it is trackable in empirical terms, right?
Absolutely.
And also, with psychedelics, it is also very subjective.
We don't have measuring systems for that yet.
We now have more insights into what it does to the brain, which is great, but even fMRI imagery is still very rudimentary.
There are going to be much better ways of measuring if this planet survives in a few decades of really understanding what brain regions do.
Right now, all we can do is track blood flow and then make guesses on those regions, which has afforded us a lot.
But there are still much better measuring instruments that remain to be discovered or invented.
Yeah, and I want to say as we talk about this topic, because it is kind of a loaded topic, that I definitely respect anyone whom antidepressants have radically changed their lives and helped them for the better.
I know several people like that.
That's great.
And I definitely have known people.
I definitely have known people for whom medical prescriptive interventions for things like bipolar disorder and schizophrenia have been absolutely life-changing and are essential to them being able to function in the world.
So it's a very complex topic.
Yeah, but even then you're talking about lithium, which is shown to have a much higher efficacy than a lot of the other drugs we've been talking about.
And so therefore, it's not as profitable and so is sometimes not used when it could actually be used.
Oh boy.
It doesn't get any better.
Talk to me a little bit about how the war on drugs factors into all of this.
The war on drugs has for 80 plus years been a war on predominantly minorities and free thinkers, starting with the marijuana and the anti-Mexican movement in the 1930s.
Up until the Nixon administration, which was the rehashing of the war on drugs when specifically black and Latino populations were targeted.
And that is why psychedelics were caught up with heroin and scheduled in the same classification system, even though they're worlds apart.
And that, you know, even opioids, obviously, because heroin is the basis, comes from the same place that, you know, Oxycontin does.
But it has been a war on minority populations.
And then the Reagan era, when ecstasy got caught up in that wave of the war on drugs in 1984, when it shouldn't have been, it should have been classified schedule, probably three.
Instead it was schedule one.
And it wasn't until people realized you can monetize these substances that, um, that, uh, that it became mainstream acceptable.
That's what happened with cannabis.
And that's what's happening with psychedelics right now.
But historically, it has always been used to try to outlaw whatever the predominant Administration wanted to be the mainstreaming of America, whatever thought that was, which was predominantly white.
And they have found ways of making certain substances illegal that would then benefit them.
And if you look at the number of people who've been incarcerated because of it, it bears out.
Just yesterday, I saw someone on Facebook who, since he posts his published, Oshan is his name, he posts publicly about it, but he was incarcerated for I think seven and a half or eight years for LSD and he gets out and now on his Facebook feed is microdosing advertisements for all of these forthcoming.
So imagine that.
And it's really tragic.
I couldn't imagine going through that.
I've had friends who've been arrested in my circles.
I've just been lucky to be straight up.
Yeah, I remember going to see the Grateful Dead in Las Vegas and having someone say to me, listen, in the state of Nevada, they have carrier weight laws.
And if you have one or two paper-thin hits of acid that you've wrapped up in a piece of paper or that you have in a matchbox or something, if you get arrested with it, they will count the entire weight of whatever you have wraps around it as meaning that you had, you know, 20 hits of acid.
And so therefore you're a dealer and that there are kids from those Grateful Dead shows in Vegas that ended up doing 20 years in prison or being sentenced to that long.
I haven't checked back up on them.
That happened to someone in my circle in college who's Pakistani.
And it was amazing in the 90s, he got in trouble with school, but he, you know, he didn't get arrested.
They let him go.
But then over a decade later, during the Bush administration's, like, we're going to get all of the immigrants out, He was a little bit of a He was almost, by this time he was married with three children who are all US citizens, and he almost got deported from that instance 15 years earlier, even though he didn't really get in trouble back then.
Let's talk about MDMA.
That's a nicer topic.
Unfortunately, he got a good attorney and was able to stay, but people got swept up and stuff like that.
Imagine that.
You have two hits of acid on you, and 15 years later, you're threatened to get kicked out of the country.
Let's talk about MDMA.
That's a nicer topic.
Here's a quote from you again.
You say, MDMA, even if for a few hours, made me feel whole, sad.
Serotonin is called the molecule of contentment for a reason.
Self-criticism faded as an appreciation of everything around me took hold.
By ramping up the volume on my serotonin system, I experienced a foreign sensation in a world that constantly tells me that I'm not enough.
I felt complete.
What would you say is the sort of signature difference between MDMA and other drugs that are more classified as psychedelics in terms of your experience and what the research shows?
As I mentioned, you can't have a bad feeling.
I mean, your brain is being flooded with serotonin and it's really difficult to I don't experience anything negative.
And interestingly, it affects men and women differently in my experiences.
In general, even thinking about going to clubs with it, the guys would be up dancing the whole time and the women would just go off onto the rafters and sit and cuddle.
So it has a very different effect on gender from my experiences.
That's anecdote.
The psychedelics, you know, my ritual now in these last few years have been with one particular friend where we'll do a protocol of like two grams of psilocybin and then MDMA and we'll listen to music, we'll play Frisbee, we'll just have fun for the day.
Which is why I'm an advocate for, if you feel good with these things, I don't have a problem with so-called recreational usage.
It's a binding experience regardless of the environment to me now.
Yeah, Frisbee becomes the ritual.
Yeah, ping pong, hacky sack, the things that we do at that time.
It's part of the bonding.
But those experiences with the MDMA and us, it really is that.
It's a bonding of our friendship.
I've done it with other close friends.
It's that.
But one time in those last couple years with that particular friend, we decided to do some LSD instead.
And at some point we were sitting and talking for a while about like deep family issues that we had never even brought up as our friends.
And he looked at me and he said, Oh yeah, I forgot this is LSD.
It's not the same thing.
And, and, and, and you're, you're, you know, one thing that has, I've noticed with particularly LSD, but I would argue psilocybin, it can happen as well.
If you're in the same environment for too long, it can feel suffocating.
A couple of my bad trips, I've only had a couple, but the ones I remember I was usually in the same place for too long.
Something as simple as going outside and walking around and getting fresh air would have taken care of that, but I didn't do it.
But with MDMA, it doesn't particularly matter where you are.
Environment is a little less a little less important.
In fact, as you know, that quote you took was my experience.
I was not a fraternity person, but the person that I was doing it with was was a male friend of mine.
And we ended up in the basement of a Jewish fraternity.
And I'm a wallflower at parties in general.
And we were in the middle of the floor dancing while everyone watched us.
And that's the part about not feeling so, you know, that foreign sensation.
It was like, I didn't care what I looked like at that time.
And the amazing thing was that energy was infectious because everyone was just joining in with us, having a great time.
And for someone who deals with anxiety, that was really enlightening to me because I was like, oh yeah, you know, what you bring is usually, you can change environments by what you bring to it.
And that was a very important lesson.
And I feel that MDMA has that potential to show people that.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that's really interesting, right?
In terms of, it makes me think about people.
People in your presence watching and feeling you dancing while you were in that state, they're having a kind of mirror neuron response where they go, wow, I have permission to be that free as well.
And it strikes me as really interesting because one of the terms you used was intactogen, and I'd heard the term many years ago empathogen, maybe they're related, but the idea that MDMA is working on the network that has to do with relational empathy in a way.
Is that right?
Yes.
Yeah, absolutely.
And it does.
Empathy is the great term for it.
In fact, the original word for MDMA that was being used was ADAM.
Because the idea in the 1970s, when it was used in marriage counseling predominantly, was that it was like awakening for the first time, the first man idea.
And then when it actually started hitting the streets, they tried to put forward the name Empathy, but street dealers thought that that would not sell.
Because why would you pay for a drug that just shows you what other people feel?
So they went with ecstasy instead.
But I would argue that empathy is actually... Well, ecstasy is good if you think about Ananda.
It has that term, that connotation that works.
But empathy is also very... Because when you're with other people, you just want to hold space with them.
So it has that quality too.
It does it for octopuses as well, apparently, right?
That was one of the most fascinating pieces of research where the octopi, octopuses I think is the actual plural, are generally solitary beings that don't interact socially except during mating.
And when they gave octopuses ecstasy, they started being very social animals, which is not part of their usual patterns.
All right.
You know, I have to say before this was this was kind of a cool overlap before you settled on the episode title.
I had written the term in my notes, promises and perils, as part of a question on this new fertile period that we're apparently in, you know, which has lots of layers to it as well, for psychedelic research and therapeutic applications.
As we're wrapping up here, do you have like one or two examples of each of the areas where there's promise and there's peril?
Well, yeah.
Well, the promise is addiction research End-of-life anxiety, hospice care, which Michael Pollan's 2015 article, Trip Treatment, which is really what helped mainstream psychedelics, that article in The New Yorker, and PTSD are the most promising areas.
As we've mentioned, anxiety and depression are so subjective, and that actually leads to apparel.
But so far with addiction research, it does seem very promising there.
I feel good about that.
But being a long time writer in this space, I just received so many press releases about it being used in so many ways at this point and I won't get into all those because my feeling is that if something works and it doesn't have, if the benefits outweigh the side effects, awesome, great.
Again, if Xanax is working for you and the side effects are not that bad, that's wonderful.
Use it.
Same with psychedelics.
But the perils are really where a lot of my attention is right now because it's hard to avoid.
If you are investing tens of millions of dollars into a substance, You already have Compass Pathways, which is bankrolled by Peter Thiel, who is not exactly known as a benevolent person.
He's actually a horrible person.
And you have him backing this company that is trying to patent psilocybin.
No, this is something that has been used for millennia, most likely.
And now you're trying to patent that molecule.
It's disgusting.
And I've talked to some of the players in the space, like from Fieldtrip Health, the founders there, and their argument is that if you change the molecule slightly and then patent it, Then it's a different drug.
And you know what, that's how the pharmaceutical industry has existed for a long time, actually.
You have companies like MindMed who are taking Ibogaine and Iboga and they're changing it so that you get the addiction busting effects of it without the psychedelic experience.
And I feel like if that's dialed in, wonderful, then you should get a return on your investment because you're giving people something that is Potentially really helpful to them.
I'm not against that.
My fears are twofold right now.
One is the patents that are coming forward, specifically trying to patent the original drugs with minor tweaks maybe, but it's just disgusting.
It's capitalism unhinged and it's really troublesome to me.
And the second is This microdosing phenomenon, which again, if taking 0.1 gram of psilocybin or LSD help you to mitigate anxiety or depression, I'm all for it.
No research has backed that up now.
The largest study was done recently in London.
Because it's illegal, everyone supplied their own drugs, so you didn't have a strong data set to work from.
If someone's getting LSD from here and someone else from here, you're not going to get good results in terms of what you can trust.
But it did show actually that Microdosing LSD and placebo were basically the same thing.
So just thinking you're microdosing proved to be as powerful as depression relief as actually taking some LSD.
What that leads me to is that you are going to find this whole microdosing for productivity or mental health phenomenon that is going to match what CBD did, and that's going to be happening soon.
CBD, of course, is one of 113, I think, identified cannabinoids.
It does really good things, but we know that it does it mostly in conjunction with THC.
And the levels that it's used for in the coffee tincture that you're drinking at Erewhon is not even close to what studies have shown.
You're talking about the difference between 5mg and 400mg, which is usually what the research is looking at.
So, it's just another grift.
It's another grift that's entering the space, the microdosing for productivity.
And as we mentioned in the intro, the yoga instructor turned shaman who is now going to change your life with an ayahuasca ceremony.
All of those things are going to be big business in the coming years as they become decriminalized and then probably legalized, I would guess, in the next two years, at least the first wave of it.
I have to say, as someone who's been consuming marijuana since 1993 and psychedelics since 1994, and knowing the risks that I took to secure those substances, might have sold some of those back in the day as well, and everything that went around that, and to see people who have no real skin in the game but just see an investment opportunity come in
And try to make money off these substances which have been deeply meaningful to people for a very long time and have been ritualistically used for cultures for a very long time and are very important to them.
It's just gross.
I really can't think of another word for it.
And again, this is separate from these substances helping people.
on any level, that's awesome.
If they've shown you something, if they helped you, if they've uplifted you, if you had a wonderful ceremony with your yoga instructor, who's not really a shaman, but you got something from it.
Okay.
That's great.
But I do think that I don't know what's going to happen when that first wave of sanctioned yoga instructor turned shamans have someone die under their care and how they're going to deal with it, because that will happen, um, when you don't have proper protocols in place, uh, And those those are the top of mind dangers that we're facing.
Yeah, I mean, it also makes me think of some of these big It's happening.
There's no doubt that that's going to happen.
these sort of lifestyle brand influencer types who have their own supplement label and they start putting out, like what's the next alpha brain fuel, right?
What's it gonna have in it? - It's happening.
There's no doubt that that's going to happen.
You know, I specifically with that company, I've heard that they're too into macro dosing, but well, they're sold to Unilever now, so they'll take any sort of money that they can get. - Yeah. - But when money's on the table and people can exploit products like this, it's inevitable.
And I just hope that as many people get as much benefit from them and that the damage that is potentially forthcoming is as small as possible.
So that will remain to see what happens.
One of the things that you do a great job of in the book that we haven't really touched on yet is you really refer to the main sort of players in the research space.
And one of the people you talk about fairly often is Charles Grobe, all of the great work that he's done with MDMA and with ayahuasca.
So I really encourage people to read the book and to learn about some of these figures and look into their research.
You know, Charlie Grobe is at this point, you know, he's been doing this for two or three decades and he's leading the charge in terms of a really legitimate Absolutely, and you know MAPS is obviously, they've been around, they were at the criminalization hearings in 1984 when it was first criminalized and scheduled.
So these are people who have been in it for a long time and are really trying to do good work.
I'll also reference the documentary DMT The Spirit Molecule.
I worked on that film for four years as the music supervisor, wrote the theme song, co-wrote the theme song, and all of the music in it was part of what I did in that.
And Charlie Grob is in that, interviewed, as well as a number Number of other figures.
And, you know, it definitely gets a little spiritual woo-woo for me at times.
I remember watching the original four and a half hour cut with the rest of the crew in Austin and people, we'd get way out there with the machine elves.
But they, I think Mitch and his crew did a good job at making it just under two hours and really getting the pertinent information across from Rick Straussman's work.
