Dr. Rick Strassman and guests dissect DMT's biological mechanisms, debating whether it acts as a neural filter or a portal to external information like alien encounters and biblical prophecies. The conversation covers MKUltra mind control experiments, endogenous DMT production in dying brains, and CIA-funded telepathy research involving dolphins and psychics. Ultimately, the episode suggests that psychedelic experiences may revitalize religion or reveal latent universal consciousness, while raising concerns about government recruitment of high-psionic individuals for intelligence operations. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: CohereLabs/cohere-transcribe-03-2026, WAV2VEC2_ASR_BASE_960H, sat-12l-sm, script v26.04.01, and large-v3-turbo
Time
Text
Consensus Reality and DMT00:13:13
So, hi, Danny.
Nice to meet you.
Hi, Rick.
Pleasure to meet you too as well.
Before we started rolling, we were talking about the effects of DMT.
I told you I was super afraid to try it again by myself.
Yeah.
And people I've spoken with that know more about this than I do, which isn't saying much, said that there's not really any, there's not any documented cases of people having any like real adverse effects of using DMT or overusing DMT.
Yeah, that's not been my experience.
Every once or twice a year, I get a note from a family member or a friend of somebody who has smoked way too much DMT.
And they develop a certain kind of mental state.
It's kind of messianic that they feel they have the answer.
And if people don't agree with their answer, they get mad.
Yeah, so they're convinced it's kind of messianic in nature.
Have you ever heard of anybody smoking DMT and sort of like not coming back fully, getting like stuck in like this weird, slippery version of reality, like for forever?
Because I have friends that in high school that took a lot of LSD or smoked a lot of weed.
And after a certain point, they were just never the same.
Yeah, that's hard to say.
I mean, you know, personalities, personalities, Get modified, I think, under the influence or can be modified under the influence of a psychedelic, you know.
But, um, it's more, I think, that they made those changes more real in their lives.
Um, and that might be what people are referring to as they've changed.
They maybe took more action on some of the ideas they had than otherwise would have been the case.
Yeah, I think that's how psychedelics work, actually, is they just increase.
They increase the strength and power of things which already exist in the mind.
If you want to be a happier person, you might become happier after taking a psychedelic because it's convinced you that it's good to be happy.
So, you were the first person in the United States to do human research on psychedelics.
You are probably like one of the most legendary people in the psychedelic world.
And one of the things that really blew my mind was that you were explaining on, I think it was Hamilton's podcast.
I could be wrong.
I think it was Hamilton's podcast.
You were explaining how you had the idea to get this funded when you were hanging out with Terrence McKenna and you guys decided that it would be the best way to get it funded through the war on drugs.
Right.
Right.
That's crazy.
Yeah, it was 1988.
And I was kind of at a crossroads of where my career was going.
The melatonin and pineal work hadn't quite panned out the way I wanted it to.
But I was still interested in the pineal gland and in psychedelics mostly.
Yeah.
And I met Terrence a year or two before.
He's the first person to give me DMT, actually.
Oh, really?
Yeah, 1986 or something.
Oh, wow.
And a couple of years later, I was driving down from Canada, stopped at their place, and we spent the day up in his loft library.
Wow.
Yeah.
And, you know, we just, the war on, you know, the war on drugs was in full steam ahead.
There was a lot of money being poured into it.
What a clever idea.
And we came up with the idea of the ultimate study, give DMT to people and see what it does.
You can't really argue with that.
And I described it as an abusable drug.
It's the prototypical classic psychedelic.
And people were still using psychedelics.
And we didn't know how they worked or really what they did in the face of like 20 years of intervening animal research.
So, there are pretty straightforward kinds of arguments that could have been used against studying the drug or for studying the drug.
And I framed it as let's find out more and no value judgment placed on the work, no therapy or religious motivations.
What do you think DMT in a healthy dose does to the human brain?
Not necessarily, I know it's speculative when you're talking about what it's doing to the brain.
When you're taking it, when it's active.
Right.
But, like, kind of like when it subsides, like, what do you think the after effect is?
Well, I think it works on the imagination.
So, if you can, you know, divide the mind into an intellectual part and an imaginative part, it's based on some of the ideas of Aristotle that the imaginative part of the mind holds on to.
you know, perceptions, emotions, the feelings of certainty.
And the intellectual part is ideas, abstract notions.
So I think that, you know, DMT ultimately stimulates the imagination as compared to stimulating the intellect.
It makes things, you know, it appears, but what the appearance actually means is more dependent on the intellect.
Yeah.
One of the things David Nichols was explaining to me was that there was a technical word he used to describe how It actually increases neural density.
And there's this term, the scientific term for these neural branches, like the branches on trees.
Right.
That they grow and they become more connected and more full in the brain.
Yeah, he was probably talking about neurogenesis and neuroplasticity.
Yes, I think that's what it was.
Yeah.
Stem cells converting to neurons is neurogenesis.
You're making new neurons.
Right.
And neuroplasticity is increasing the number and complexity of connections among neurons.
Yeah, because every person I've ever talked to that does DMT, they're all super smart.
Yeah.
I don't know what that is.
Yeah, there are a lot of ways to try and figure out what DMT is and what it's doing.
And also, I think, interesting to consider is why.
You know, why is there DMT in our brains?
Well, it's not just in the brain, right?
It's all throughout the body.
Isn't that true?
Well, mostly it's been found most recently and most objectively in the brain.
Most?
Okay, so it's mostly in the brain.
In the pineal gland or all throughout the brain?
In the cortexes, the visual cortex, parietal cortex, there's a number of cortices on the brain, and each is responsible for certain psychological functions almost.
So do you think that, is the idea that DMT existing in the brain is sort of what's responsible for giving us our perception of the world?
Animates the world around us, gives us this, this depth and color and um, there's this.
There's this other idea called the um, which I think it was Andrew Gallimore who explained this to me the uh, the filter idea of the brain being a filter where it filters out all this other stuff that could exist in reality.
To what?
So we can perceive only what we need to survive.
Yeah I, I think you know it's really hard to say now what the role of naturally occurring Dmt in the brain is but yeah, you can consider it a like, a Way it maintains consensus reality.
You know, too much makes things get really like psychedelic, and not enough might make things seem flat and boring.
Yeah, I always wondered is the DMT in there breaking down some sort of filter in the brain, which is enabling us to see more, or like temporarily making us see, like overloading the brain with information?
And that's maybe explains this stuff that we're seeing or these things that we're experiencing or communicating with.
And, you know, once it fades, fades away, maybe those filters are coming back into into place.
Yeah yeah um well, you know, there's a part of the brain called the reticular activating system uh, which people have considered for a long time to be that filtering mechanism.
Reticular activating system yeah, it's in the, it's in the extremely primitive parts of the brain.
Um, and uh, many people have can have, you know, thought about, you know psychedelics, or The function of that part of the brain as acting as a filter.
Interesting.
And psychedelics affect that part of the brain pretty robustly.
Now, is this where the third ventricle is?
That's probably, let's see.
The water of life is in the third ventricle.
That's what I've heard.
Yeah.
Well, it's the cerebral spinal fluid.
Right, right.
Yeah.
Very interesting.
The pineal gland is right in the middle there.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, it's right dead in the center.
Yeah, the reticular activating system is up on the brain stem.
Yeah, you know, so there are receptors in that part of the brain that psychedelics bind to and change the activity of the neurons there.
Yes, that could be the filter.
Yeah.
What do you make of these new experiments that are going on with the What Andrew Gallimore is doing, they're trying to put people on extended state intravenous DMT to see, to try to map this DMT world.
Yeah, yeah.
Sounds wild.
Yeah, yeah.
What's a continuous infusion of DMT?
Yeah.
I speak about that toward the end of the DMT book, The Spirit Molecule, that maybe we could keep people in that state for longer, an hour to, you know, an extended period of time.
You know, the problem with smoking or giving one injection of DMT is it's over quite quickly.
And a continuous infusion would allow you to be in that space longer.
Yeah.
You know, so there's a couple of, you know, oh, and then a few years later, Andrew approached me and suggested that we write this paper, which describes, you know, the basis anyway for a study like that.
Right.
Yeah.
And Imperial College in London is doing work and there's a group in Switzerland.
I can't imagine how that would look, right?
You have somebody on IV DMT all day long.
Well, yeah, you're laying there.
Hooked up to a crucifix.
Well.
You're laying in bed, but still.
Okay, right.
Still, yeah.
You got your arms out and you fillet open.
And like, what do you do?
Do you have to pull them out to get the data?
Like pull them out like briefly and say, tell me everything.
I think they keep people in the state.
While they're talking to them and getting the data?
Man.
No, it's reported in retrospect.
You know, like you give DMT for a half hour at a prearranged infusion rate.
Right.
Yeah.
And the person comes down and you ask them to describe what it was like.
And then you throw them right back in.
Well, you could go in and out like that.
Um, I don't think anybody is doing that kind of work.
I I think that kind of work would be helpful for psychotherapy.
Uh, you put people really.
Well, I think it would be useful.
You can be in a state for a while dmt state or um very, you know, highly altered state for, let's say, a half hour.
You come down and you talk with your therapist and you decide what to do next.
You know, go deeper, Go back lighter, take some more time off.
Yeah, so I think that holds promise for therapeutic purposes too.
Yeah, but I think characterizing that landscape is also important.
Like the beings, how do you interact with the beings once you've gotten used to their presence?
Right, and what even are the beings?
Because you said that all this stuff is amplification of what's already in your mind.
So, how do you explain people seeing?
Aliens that are talking to them.
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Well, I think, you know, the visions convey information.
And the brain uses what's in its.
Is it like.
Are you talking about like epigenetic information?
Well, you know, that's the question.
Is it information that's coming from us or from an external source?
Right, right.
When is it coming from us or is it coming from our ancient past?
Which could also be.
Argued that's kind of an external source because it's not really us now, maybe us in the past.
Well, I think us from the future.
Or in the future.
Yeah, yeah, kind of pulling us in a direction.
Have you seen the, my buddy Danny Gohler was in here and he has this thing called the DMT laser experiment?
Oh, yeah, yeah.
Have you seen that?
Yeah, I have.
That's crazy.
Well, so have you looked at the red laser?
I did it.
I didn't see the code.
Mm hmm.
But I might not have gone deep enough.
So I saw, I saw kind of like we shine.
I had the laser here actually.
We shined it on the wall and I looked at it and I could see the depth through the wall.
And I saw like at first it was like tiny little particles, like you would see if you just really stared at a laser beam on the wall.
And then those particles turned into gears all spinning, all interconnected.
But I've talked to a few other people that have done it and they, I mean, my friend Neil came here and he did it.
He said he saw like Sanskrit.
Yeah.
Behind the laser or whatever.
I'm going to try it again, but it's interesting because I don't know of anything else.
Maybe you can elaborate on this, but I've never heard of any sort of psychedelic trip where people see something that specific.
All of them.
Well, your friend mentioned it looked like Sanskrit.
Right.
But if he weren't familiar with what Sanskrit looked like in the first place, he wouldn't have identified it that way.
Right.
Do you see?
So that is where I think what's already more or less just rattling around comes to the fore.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's one of the questions I had too, because if you're talking about seeing matrix code and there's like, hey, take this and look at this thing.
Tell me if you can find the matrix code.
Maybe you're kind of like pushing them in that direction already.
But there's an argument to be had that you could tell them that a couple of days before, maybe it wouldn't be at the front of their mind anymore.
But I don't know how that works.
How do you make that like a double blind sort of test to see if there's something there because you can't take a picture of it.
You might be able to record the brain's response at that time.
Is there some particular signature in brain connectivity that is associated with seeing Sanskrit?
Another might be seeing Hebrew, another might be Japanese.
Right.
Yeah.
You could develop some profiles, let's say.
And yeah, you would have to.
give people DMT and have them look at this at the laser to obtain some kind of firm association between brain activity and what they're seeing.
Yeah.
I think he recently took he tried to step it up a notch and he took magnets and he put it behind a wall so people couldn't see where the magnet was and then like move the magnet around and see if people could see if there was some sort of distortion in the code.
Yeah.
And I think there was, he said that there was nothing, nothing significant that they could measure from that.
Yeah.
I wonder what percentage of people who do the experiment actually see code.
Right.
Does Danny have an idea?
You know, I don't think he actually told me the percentage, but he said basically upwards of a few hundred people have written him or messaged him or have called him and told them that they, and he sent them all the stuff.
You know, the laser or whatever.
And they said they saw the same exact thing that he saw.
Yeah.
But that's the same thing that, you know, Gallimore was questioning that, like questioning, you know, how credible that could be, especially if you're telling people what to expect beforehand.
But then, you know, he talked to Gallimore afterward.
And I think Gallimore is going to try to help him with it.
Yeah.
In what, well, in terms of like a objectifiable, right?
You know, replicable study.
Right.
Yeah.
Right.
I don't know how you do that.
Yeah.
I don't know how you do that.
Yeah.
Well, I think if you image, you know, the brain function or, you know, the brain activity, you might be able to discern, you know, some, you know, some similarities among people and some differences.
Right.
You know, my guess is that it would depend on the person.
There are certain kinds of people, you know, let's say, you know, interested in Eastern ideas, Western ideas.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it would manifest in that way.
Yeah, that's interesting.
Because that was part of this famous John Hopkins study on psilocybin with the religious leaders that was, for some reason, published.
And correct me if I'm wrong, but the idea of it was to get religious leaders from different, like Christianity, Judaism, Eastern religions, and see if their religious worldview affected their experience on psychedelics.
Is that what the basic gist of it was?
Okay.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I've heard about that study.
I don't know the details.
I thought that was the famous one that was never published.
I think it is going to be coming out.
Oh, really?
Yeah, I've got some information regarding it.
Yeah, I think it's been accepted finally.
I'm not sure, but it was from a reliable person.
What would you speculate would be the outcome of that?
Well, I think there's another motivation as well, which is to demonstrate that there's a common spiritual experience regardless of your specific faith.
I think that's one of the motivations.
Yeah, they're motivated to prove this idea called perennialism, I think it's called.
Yeah, the mystical experience, which is kind of this unitive, ego dissolved, no time or space kind of experience, which is part of most psychedelic experiences, but I don't think it necessarily precludes differences in religious experience as well, which might even be more important.
I think overall, too, it would make a cleric possibly more dedicated to the clergy and the religion.
Yeah, that's the interesting thing about what that's like.
As Travis pointed out to me, which blew my mind, is that there are so many different groups with different incentives that are looking into psychedelics and trying to use them to push forward their narrative.
Right, right.
It's a wild moment in time.
It is.
Yeah, a few days ago, I was watching that clip of Alex Jones and Tucker Carlson discussing the demons.
Yes, I saw that.
I saw that.
What was Alex saying?
He was saying that there, first of all, he said he ate some DMT or something.
Can you find that clip?
It'd be great to watch that so we could get a refresh.
Go to YouTube, type in Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, DMT.
It's a short.
Yeah, it's only 58 seconds.
Yeah, it's like less than a minute.
They're in a car.
There it is.
That's it right there.
Yeah, give us some volume on that.
I haven't done DMT.
That's what everybody says.
Click on it.
I haven't done DMT, but I know a lot of famous people that have and others.
And the government since the 70s has been doing intervenience drip with it.
It just didn't become popular the last 20 years by eating it.
I've talked to well-known people off record.
Who have gone to these big DMT rituals at sacred sites because reportedly those are like gates or places where dimensionally they've been doing sacrifices for thousands of years.
So maybe the things hang around there or it's a ley line.
They're not sure.
But if you go there and take DMT, they're having groups of 20, 30, 40 people who are seeing the same hallucination on it at the same time.
They basically say aliens come up the steps of the pyramid or, you know, and everybody's seeing it at the same time.
Maybe it's not a hallucination.
Well, exactly.
This individual was seeing it.
It's one thing.
But then sometimes people in the group even get a.
Attacked by these things.
I would be very afraid that those drugs open up a portal for something to enter me.
What?
Thoughts on that?
Well, I think that they're partly right.
You know, the portal idea, anyway.
You know, I think that's one of the things that psychedelics and DMT do.
They are a portal to previously invisible kinds of information.
Yeah.
You know, so if you open that portal, there is that information conveyed by the visions, which is angelic or demonic.
So if you believe in angels, I always say you believe in demons.
So, you know, to the extent that one believes in angels, then I think by necessity, you need to believe in demons as well.
It's kind of imagery of good versus evil.
I mean, have you ever heard of anybody getting chased by demons the way he explains it?
Chased by demons?
I guess I could imagine ayahuasca ceremonies where there's a whole shamanic communication and information that you would be attacked by demons.
Yeah.
Or it would seem as if you were anyway.
Right.
Yeah.
So this angels and demons worldview, which is very much, I think Tucker Carlson and Alex Jones are like, Very devout Christians.
They talk about it all the time on their programs.
So, if they're trying to fit this DMT experience into their worldview, that would make sense.
And going back to that John Hopkins study where they're trying to prove some sort of common core to all religions, it's trying to basically paint the fact that what would the ultimate goal of that be?
Would the goal of that be to say that?
Psychedelics created all religions?
Well, that certain aspects of the psychedelic experience, which are defined by this rating scale called the Mystical Experience Questionnaire, that if you answer, if all you, if the,
irregardless of your denomination, if your score on the Mystical Experience scale was number one, high enough, and number two, cut across all of the categories. that there was a common mystical experience that all those volunteers had, Jewish, Muslim, or Christian, which would then lead to one being able to propose a universal religion.
Oh, God.
And that universal, like if it's all the same across all of the religions, there must be some universal religion that can be extracted.
But the problem with universal religion is whose universal religion?
And what if you don't agree with it?
Right.
Yeah.
Then you become a heretic.
Yeah.
And how do you push people into a universal religion when people are already in their own unique religions that give them value to their life already?
Like, how do you make, how do you do that?
Well, I don't think you can.
Right.
And one of the even scarier ideas is that if you give the church access to psychedelic drugs or give them the license to bring psychedelic drugs into their, Spiritual practice.
Now you're making these people who are already subscribed to this idea that there's this deacon that has direct communication with God who is giving these people the answers to their life problems.
Now you're putting these already vulnerable people on psychedelics.
I can see where that can lead to problems.
Well, I think, yeah, you're pointing to the issue of how do you propagate a universal religion?
Yeah, which I think.
Yeah, I think the cult of personality would start playing a very big role with the enhanced transference that occurs on psychedelics.
Because people, when they're on psychedelics, I think you've said this before people on psychedelics are way more, not just vulnerable, but they're way more agreeable.
Yeah, more suggestible.
Suggestible, that's what it was.
Risks of HIMS and Cults00:02:35
Yes, right.
And with repeated exposure to the same suggestion over and over on psychedelics.
Yeah.
I think it would get to.
Kind of fanatic in a way.
It could.
Yeah.
Yeah, because even people who are like, you know, huge psychedelic proponents who think that psychedelics are the panacea for everything in culture and society, I mean, even they kind of get pretty fanatical to some extent where psychedelics become their God, you know.
Or they become God somehow or they're God's messenger.
You know, I was talking earlier.
Yeah, the Messiah complex.
Yeah.
You know, there's a lot of messianism in the idea of a universal.
Religion, like who would be the spokesman, for example.
And then you would have a religious figure.
Yeah, it would be a new religion.
And a couple of years ago, I wrote a book review on Bill Richards' book, who was the lead therapist at Johns Hopkins.
And I referred to the idea of a psychedelic universal religion as the psychedelic religion of mystical consciousness.
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Snow White Dwarves Visions00:14:54
And there would be some dogma and some authority and probably a hierarchy at some point.
That would be the new religion, the institute of the new religion with a certain range of ideas.
The problem with a universal religion based on the mystical experience is that the mystical experience in and of itself is free of any content.
There's no words.
There aren't any ideas in that state.
All of those ideas are post hoc, like you come down, if that's the right expression, post hoc.
Yeah, you come down and then you say what it was.
Right.
You try to put it into some sort of verbal context.
Yeah, yeah.
But the interactive relational trip, like where there are visions that you're interacting with, that's full of information, specific information, oftentimes verbal.
So if there's this thing saying to you x, y and z yeah it would be, and you know those are words that you remember, and then you write down and you know, you transmit, talk about yeah, as opposed to just a feeling, which I think is the mystical experience, a very intense feeling, but there's no content, you know, so it's made up after the fact, you know.
So it would be more dependent on the personality, I think, of the person who was in, like you know the authority, right right, that that would have a huge effect on the person's experience, Yeah, and the words they would use in order to describe it.
And you've also talked about it being some sort of like a super placebo.
And is that what you say by that?
You mean, does that have to do with like your intention when you do it?
Well, your intention, which is part of the set.
You know, there's set and there's everything that isn't your set, you know, the setting.
Yeah, so the setting would be supportive and the set would be your intent and your mental and physical state at the time, your spiritual state.
But you would set an intent.
So if it was for scientific purposes or for spiritual purposes or for fun, your intent will direct to a large extent the experience itself.
There's also dealing with the anxiety of the initial experience of DMT.
It's very intense.
It's quite high speed.
So you need to be able to work with anxiety as well.
You know, it's a complex, it's a, you know, to make the most of a psychedelic experience is a fairly complex task.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a lot.
It's a lot of, it feels like you're kind of like drinking from a fire hose of information when it's happening.
And then afterwards, you're like, oh my God, how do I digest all of this stuff?
I know.
I know.
That's the problem is it's a feeling.
You're overwhelmed, let's say, by the intensity of the stream of information.
But what is that information?
Right, yeah.
Oftentimes it's very nebulous and usually quite related to the personality of a person having the experience.
Like your friend who envisioned Sanskrit.
Right.
He wouldn't have called it Sanskrit without some prior knowledge of Sanskrit.
Yes.
At least seeing that.
That's interesting.
Yeah.
He even showed me a bunch of photos afterwards of the Lord of the Rings, the ring, the kind of engraving that's on that ring.
He's like, it looks just like this.
And no one else I've ever heard has said it looked like Sanskrit.
They all said it looks like, I think Gallimore said that that stuff looked like some Japanese text.
Oh, really?
I forget what it was called, but he thought it was like some obscure Japanese type of like subtext that is used in that culture.
But you did the experiment, right?
Yeah.
Yeah, yeah.
And so what happened to you?
Yeah, so I did it and it was my first time doing DMT.
First time, really?
Yeah, it was my first time.
So I kind of like, I did it.
I did like the four or five hits of the pin.
And then I was kind of like on the couch and I kind of closed my eyes for a little bit.
That was.
The most intense part of it.
After the super intense part of it was over, I was like, okay, I think I feel I'm back in my body.
Now I can go check out this laser.
I really wanted to.
Still very stoned though, right?
Yes, still very stoned.
Not anywhere near the peak of the experience though.
Well, you can't move on the peak.
You're a completely different place.
Yes, exactly.
That's the weird thing about it.
It feels like a completely different place.
It couldn't be any more similar to this.
It was crazy.
I was explaining, it felt like it literally, like I've.
I've talked about this ad nauseum, but it was my, the way I am such a lightweight when it comes to drugs.
I was terrified, even when it comes to like smoking pot.
I can easily go over the edge.
So I was super terrified that this was going to like be that times a million.
I don't know anything about this stuff.
What do I know?
But it was like nothing like that.
It was just my soul being ejected out of the top of my head and like leaving behind every attachment I have to.
My mortal being, like my wife, my kids, this podcast, like everything I've ever known, just being completely detached and just my soul being shuttled through like light arteries.
And then, you know, I opened my eyes and depth was crazier.
Like my depth perception was like on steroids and I could see like pockets of space floating around.
Anyways, after that ended, I was like, I want to check out this laser.
So he had it shined on the wall.
I walked over to it and I stared at it for a little bit.
And like I said, I could see these little speckles of light and gears.
Once I focused on these little specks of light, I could see gears connected and rotating together back behind the wall.
So, like, it was like a rip in the wall.
The light was creating a tear in the wall, and I could see this pocket of space back there where these gears were moving around.
Yeah, and what were those gears doing?
Just spinning.
Just spinning.
As far as I can remember, they were just spinning and they were all connected.
I never saw any sort of text or code or anything.
Spinning, like the gears were big, small, very tiny.
Very tiny.
Very tiny gears, millions of them, and they were all connected.
Yeah, the first time I smoked a drug 5-methoxy-DMT, I found myself surrounded by dwarves, like Snow White and the seven dwarves, and they were just countless, countless, just circling a big chamber that I was at the bottom of.
Wow.
Like a catwalk.
Like a silo?
Yeah, like a silo.
Oh, wow.
And an extensive catwalk, and the catwalk was completely filled with dwarves.
Sounds amazing.
It was kind of scary because I wasn't expecting it at all.
And they didn't have the best motivation somehow.
They seemed a little, they seemed kind of sinister.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it was an interesting experience.
I was a lot younger, and I was wrestling at the time with the notion of good and evil.
And with the dwarves, you usually think of dwarves as fun, but these had a malevolent feeling about them.
Did they communicate?
Only by their expression.
They'd look at me through the corner of their eyes.
Oh, God.
That was a little sinister.
It was pretty sinister, yeah.
And so I came out of it and said to my sitter, what should I choose?
Should I choose good or should I choose evil?
And she said, there's no difference.
Oh, wow.
There's no difference.
Helped calm me down.
Wow.
Yeah, the five methoxy DMT seems terrifying.
Is it nothing like NN or is it similar just on steroids?
It's the white light.
You're completely, like in most cases, mine was atypical.
Usually you have no visions on five methoxy.
A more typical experience is it's just the white light, things is just white out.
And it's ecstatic and you're out of body.
No time, no space.
Is that the only time you had visions on the 5-methoxy?
It was the first time I had seen it.
You ever did it?
Yeah.
Oh, wow.
Well, I've only done DMT.
Like, I've only had one big DMT experience, which is a very strange thing.
You would expect that I would have had thousands, but I know mostly about DMT through my volunteers.
I mean, that's the truth.
You've only done it how many times?
Just one time.
What?
One big time, yeah.
For real?
And that was the time you just explained?
That was the time, you know, in the mid 1980s.
Yeah, it convinced me to study DMT.
And why haven't you done it since?
I haven't really felt the urge to or the need to.
It was so intense.
I mean, who needs to?
I mean, you do take a risk entering into such an intense experience.
And I thought I had really done well with the first one and I would just leave it at that.
It's kind of like.
I guess you know, going, you know, attaining the mountaintop the first time, so there didn't seem to be any need to repeat that.
Interesting, I would have imagined you would have done it thousands of times, yeah.
I don't know, because that was the basis of your latest book, right?
We're that was that the latest book that you published was the first time that you talked about all your personal experiences with psychedelics, right?
My altered states, my altered states, right?
That came out in December, yeah.
Um, let me.
Yeah, I just, I don't know.
I can't imagine that somebody like you would have only done it one time.
Just once, 1986 or so.
Yeah, I was at the point of ending my melatonin research and I didn't know what to do.
I was speaking at a conference and was speaking about DMT in the pineal gland.
And that's when Terrence came up and said, Would you like to smoke some DMT?
Yeah, so I said, Sure.
How do you say no to that?
Yeah, went to a room.
I had some good friends around.
What was the.
Background with your melatonin research?
Well, I was looking for an endogenous compound for spiritual experience.
I kind of came up with this fascination in college that believing that there was a part of the brain or a substance the brain made that created spiritual experience, that spiritual experiences which were like the psychedelic drug one and spiritual experiences like those brought about by meditation.
I thought there was some common biological factor that was activated in both those states.
So the pineal gland was the first place I looked.
I was at Stanford at the time.
Jim Fadiman was there as well.
Jim gave me the idea to look into the pineal.
And I found out about melatonin, which nobody knew much about the human physiology back then in the early 1980s.
So there was some evidence that it was a psychedelic that made dreams more intense.
You know, all by itself might be psychedelic.
So we studied melatonin.
The pineal gland was that substance responsible for psychedelic experiences.
Oh, wow.
Spiritual ones which had psychedelic properties.
Yeah, I learned recently that melatonin is created through this thing called melanopsin, which is a chemical or not a chemical, but it's a hormone that is created through your eyes.
So, like when you wake up early and you watch the sunrise, your eyes produce this.
Chemical called melanopsin or a hormone called melanopsin, which is converted to melatonin, which regulates your circadian rhythm.
And I guess the melatonin kicks in really heavy 12 hours after that first light enters your eyes or your retina.
Well, my understanding is that tryptophan is the precursor for melatonin, that it begins with dietary tryptophan.
Oh, interesting.
Dietary tryptophan.
And that gets modified to melatonin ultimately.
Melanopsin, gosh, I think that's a protein or an enzyme.
Can you find that, Steve?
Find out the connection between melanopsin and melatonin.
Because I might be getting that wrong, but I could have sworn that was the way Alexis explained it to us.
This might be a good pee break time.
Yeah, yeah, sure.
All right, we're back.
So to clear up the melanopsin thing, it's a photopigment that belongs in the opsin family that basically.
It suppresses melatonin for 12 hours after it's created in the eye.
And I think it has something to do with sunlight.
Oh, blue visible light.
Yeah.
So the short wavelengths of blue light from the sun.
Yeah.
That was discovered in 98.
And I got out of the field in 87, 88 or so.
Yeah.
Yeah.
We found out melatonin was not especially psychoactive.
And so that led me to DMT.
Oh, wow.
So what made you decide to publish this book all about your personal experiences with psychedelics?
Oh, right.
My altered states.
My altered states.
Yeah, that came out in December.
Yeah, it's an illustrated memoir of my altered state experiences in youth.
Yeah, and a number of them are psychedelic experiences.
First time I smoked cannabis was psychedelic.
First time I took LSD.
First time I like dissolved into nothing.
Maybe one half or so of the chapters involve psychedelic experiences.
Oh, wow.
Yeah, and there's some from meditation.
Some from depression, some from actual physical abuse, the altered state that happens then.
Meeting Aliens on Cannabis00:02:31
Yeah.
And a friend of mine illustrated it, a gal from Alabama, Merrily Chalice.
I think the images really are impressive.
They help convey much more of the feeling aspect of the experiences than the written word alone can.
Yeah.
I still find it so interesting that you never pursued DMT more than once because like after I said I did it the first time, I haven't been able to stop thinking about doing it again.
I don't think I went far enough.
I never saw any sort of beings or had any communication like that.
Yeah, like I've never vaped DMT.
Oh, you didn't vape it?
How did you do it?
Yeah, I smoked the free base.
Yeah, yeah.
So what I've heard is that you don't get as high with a vape pen as smoking it.
Okay, that would explain it.
That could be.
Or you didn't take enough hits.
Like, you know, could you still, you know, like when you were smoking from the vape, did you find you couldn't, like, inhale anymore at a certain point and you had to put it down?
No, I never had any sort of issues.
People I was with, my friends that I was with, they were having trouble coughing.
I had no problem holding it in or anything like that or hitting it.
I was, I think it was the fact that I was just scared.
I was, because I did it.
I did, remember I did the first hit.
I felt a little tingly.
He's like, okay, go again.
And I held it in for five seconds and then exhaled.
Second hit, I was like, okay, now I'm feeling loopy.
He's like, do a third.
I did a third.
And I'm like, holy crap, there's no, I can't do anymore.
I'm like, I'm getting, I'm like really tripping now.
I'm seeing the patterns, I'm seeing the fractals, all this stuff, geometry.
He goes, okay, now you have to go again.
I'm like, what?
I'm like, I couldn't even.
Think how to even hold the pen by the time you told me to do it again, let alone take a hit of it.
So I managed to take one more hit, and as soon as I did the inhale, that's when I just ejected out of my body.
Well, that's a pretty intense experience.
Yeah.
You know, so that sounds a lot more like what happens when you smoke the freebase.
But I wanted to meet an alien, and I didn't get to meet an alien.
Oh, well, maybe next time.
But I mean, why?
Because it just sounds fun to meet an alien and communicate with an alien and find some profound.
You know I want to get.
I, i'm interested in the idea of using it as a tool to improve my life, or improve my thinking, or yeah well, you know.
So what would you ask it?
Oh god, I don't know.
That's a good question.
Serotonin and Placebo Effects00:06:54
Yeah, I don't know.
Would I even be able to ask a question in that state if you, if you knew what was going on there?
Yeah, if you were able to cut, you know, keep your focus.
Yeah, that's a good question.
I don't know what I would ask it.
You know, one of the one of the interesting things that i've noticed at least with marijuana, is that whenever I get really high and I always come out with at least one thing that I can use in my life out of that experience.
Because usually it's kind of like, as I told you before we started, it's been, if I go too far, my world kind of caves in on me and I start to focus on all the negative things in my life.
But at the end of it, I always take something positive out of it.
And one of the most recent things I've been taking out of it, one of the messages I've been getting from it is to basically just spend more time with my kids.
Well, that's good advice.
Yeah.
I would guess.
I mean, yeah.
Well, so where'd that advice come from, though?
That's a good question.
I don't know.
Yeah.
Yeah.
My feeling is it comes from yourself.
Yeah.
It might.
It's some sort of deep, deep, untapped something deep in the soul.
It could be that it might uncover what you previously weren't aware of, or it may just strengthen things you had a glimmer of their truth before.
Right.
So it's like a magnifier.
Mm-hmm.
Yeah, Stan Groff, the Czech psychiatrist who worked with LSD when it was legal, and he developed the breathwork technique as well, described them as nonspecific amplifiers of the unconscious.
But they also seemed to me to be nonspecific amplifiers of everything which is in your mind, unconscious, conscious, preconscious.
Like it couldn't act on anything else.
Right.
Yeah, no, that makes perfect.
That does make sense.
Oh, you're asking about the super placebo idea.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, if you, well, you know, back when the interest in psychedelics was really cresting, you could see an article, a scientific paper once a week on the benefits of taking psychedelics that make you more compassionate, more open.
more progressive, more environmentally attuned.
And it seemed like they helped depression, helped alcohol abuse, helped end of life despair.
So they were basically doing everything to everyone for every condition, which made me think about a panacea, which is a cure all.
And panaceas work through placebo or at least are are, you know, kind of related to the placebo response.
So if you're amplifying the placebo response, you're kind of, you know, directing the outcome in the direction that you already want it to be.
Yeah.
You know, so that's why I think of them as super placebos.
They, you know, you can use them.
You can, you know, direct their power and their effect in any in any direction.
It just depends on what's already in your mind.
Wow.
Yeah, I've never heard of it described that way before.
That's super interesting, but it does make a ton of sense.
It's a unifying theory of how psychedelics work.
They are drugs.
They work on receptors and they work on functional connectivity and brain network.
But subjectively or objectively, even within your body, they seem to activate innate mechanisms.
Have you ever heard stories of people describing, because I know you've studied or are currently studying the idea of a tolerance being able to be built with DMT, because there's like a tolerance with LSD.
If you take LSD for X amount of days, it starts to have an effect.
But have you ever heard stories of people all of a sudden not being able to get high on DMT?
Oh, yeah.
I heard from somebody not long ago who described that.
He smoked DMT in the past.
You know, full on experiences.
Yeah.
And then just stop responding.
Yeah.
That's very weird.
I, I, I, well, it's a mutation in their serotonin receptor, I think, but, uh, yeah, how could that come about?
Yeah.
It's a very strange.
Yeah.
This guy I just had on recently, uh, Zoltan Bathory was explaining to me, and he's the guy who I was explaining has done this thousands of times.
Yeah.
And he was saying that he went in thousands.
Or maybe a little, not maybe thousands, maybe a thousand or more is what it was.
Still.
Still, that's a lot.
He was explaining that he went somewhere, he saw some being.
He was in a room with a being, and then, like, the being became aware of him.
He's like, like, noticed him out of the corner of his eyes, like, okay, what do you want to know?
And then his response was, I don't know.
Like, what do you mean?
What do I want to know?
I don't, I have no idea.
He's like, and the being was sort of annoyed by this that he showed up without any sort of intention or wanting to know anything.
Right.
And then all of a sudden he was kicked back into reality.
And then he kept trying to go back for weeks and months afterwards and he couldn't get it to work.
Yeah.
And he thinks he was intentionally kicked out by these beings.
Um, Well, I think you need to know what's going on when you're interacting with the being.
What you were describing reminded me of Zechariah, one of the prophets in the Bible, who was experiencing a vision of horses.
Well, of horses, one time, another time, it was the menorah, the candlestick in the temple, a vision of that.
And he was speaking with an angel.
And the angel said to him, what do you see?
And Zechariah said, I don't know.
That's why I'm asking you.
And the angel says, Well, do you know then?
Don't you know?
Why don't you know?
And he said, I don't know.
That's the reason I'm asking.
And then the angel describes the meaning of the vision.
Oh, wow.
That's interesting.
Yeah, you know, so if you know what to ask or if you know how to ask, I think it makes it more likely you'll get an answer that you.
Angelic Visions and Free Will00:15:05
You know, can use.
But what would be the chemical explanation for why this stuff would all of a sudden stop working?
Has that ever been studied?
Like, do we know for a fact that serotonin receptors can just be turned off?
You can do knockouts, you know, knockout mutations.
You can develop, let's say, a strain of rats that is knocked out, the gene for the expression of a certain protein, like a receptor, is knocked out.
For example, for the serotonin 2A receptor, you can breed animals which, let's see, let me think.
Yeah, there's an enzyme that's involved in the synthesis of DMT.
You can make knockout mice that don't make that enzyme.
So they just don't have it from birth.
They never have the enzyme?
They never have the enzyme.
No, no.
And they still make DMT, which is very interesting.
It's an enzyme called indole-n-methyltransferase.
And that's the way that tryptamine is methylated into DMT.
In making DMT, the body first takes in tryptophan from the diet, which becomes tryptamine, and then two methyl groups are added onto the tryptamine to make antimethyltryptamine.
Yeah, and there's an enzyme, I-N-M-T.
Yeah, which you can knock out the gene that produces it.
But they still produce DMT.
And then it just somehow comes back after it gets knocked out?
No, it just continues.
Yeah, Nick Glenos in Ann Arbor did his doctoral work looking at those knockout animals.
Yeah, and they still make DMT.
Yeah, you were saying that you had Dave Nichols in the other day.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Yeah, you know, so what is endogenous DMT doing?
Which is a, you know, Its own conversation.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, concentrations in the brain actually are rather high.
Nick.
Yeah.
I was asking him about this and Dave was explaining to me that it could have something more to do with endorphins.
Yeah, yeah.
I think I was specifically asking him about dreams and lucid dreams and things like this.
And his idea was that the DMT in the brain is not enough to have any significant effect.
Yeah.
The presence of DMT in the pineal is still equivocal.
It's still not really nailed down.
Why can't we figure it out?
Why is it so difficult?
Why is that so difficult?
Well, there's not much interest in endogenous DMT.
So it's hard to do the studies?
Well, people aren't doing the studies.
People just don't do it.
There's no funding.
Yeah, there's no funding, right.
The woman in Ann Arbor who's overseen a lot of the DMT work there is Jimo Borjigan, who hasn't been able to get funding to look at the role of endogenous DMT.
What is DMT doing in the brain of mammals?
And human brains.
Well, not even just what is it doing, just base level, how much is there?
Like, can't we just cut out some pineal glands and inspect them for, like, measure the DMT?
How hard is it to measure DMT in somebody's pineal gland or even their blood?
Well, it's quite difficult in blood.
Concentrations are in picograms per mil, which is in the range of, you know, billionths of grams per mil.
You can't really depend on, you know, peripheral levels of DMT in the blood.
In the brain, I mean, you've got.
Or in the living brain, the living pineal.
Yeah, you'd have to get fresh frozen brain tissue or something.
And yeah, you take a look.
Yeah, because I guess I wonder if it's like after death, if somehow dissipates, you know, or if you could study people that are like close to death, because people say that there's these near-death experiences people have are very similar to DMT.
And even people that are like, even my grandmother who recently passed away, I know there's.
She was explaining this, how she was seeing visions of like dead relatives, like speaking to her, communicating with her.
And like she had never experienced, done any psychedelics or anything like this.
This was just like these voices and visions she was having like weeks before she passed away.
And I've read lots of other descriptions of this where people kind of have these deathbed visions.
And it is that one of the ideas people speculate is that that might have something to do with.
The DMT.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, the Michigan group demonstrated increases in brain DMT in the dying animal and the dead animal.
Oh, really?
Especially in the visual cortex, that part of the brain mediating vision.
You know, so that could be a way to explain the visual components of the near death experience.
So they somehow were able to measure the brain levels of DMT in dying animals.
Yeah, yeah.
Brain tissue.
Wow.
That's wild.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's pretty interesting.
If, like, you know, one of the interesting elements of DMT is it's neuroprotective in ischemia.
What does that mean?
Well, it means when you expose a neuron to low oxygen levels, it will die.
Okay.
And with DMT, it allows the neuron to live longer.
Oh, interesting.
Yeah, and it also reduces stroke size.
There's a Hungarian group's been working on that.
So it's been starting to be studied anyway in stroke because it's neuroprotective and it is like a classical psychedelic.
It stimulates neurogenesis.
So for people who have suffered strokes.
Yeah, yeah.
There's a group in Canada, Algernon, that I've been consulting with or I have been consulting with that is working on a DMT stroke study.
And how would they administer the DMT to these people?
Yeah, they've worked out the model.
It's six or eight hours of sub psychedelic dose of DMT.
It still will have some biological effects, but it's not especially mind altering.
So it's a low, steady dose.
Oh, interesting.
Yeah.
That's fast.
Are they still doing it?
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, they're moving ahead with, I think, clinical work, although I'm just not sure.
But I think they're thinking about clinical work at least.
Yeah.
One of the most interesting things to me is this.
How people recall this telepathic experiences on DMT.
And not only that, there's telepathic experiences like within near death experiences.
There's stories, I don't know if you've ever heard stories of people who have been in a car accident together explaining they're in this, having this near death dream, hallucinate, whatever you want to call it, with the other person that they were in that accident with.
And in some cases, that person being carried off if they died, them being put back into their body.
And then you have like, like Dennis.
When he talks about what they, you know, him and Terrence and La Churrera, I think Dennis ate mushrooms, like so many mushrooms that he was in this other universe for like 10 days.
Right.
And him and Terrence were communicating telepathically the whole time.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Very interesting.
Well, he, you know, shared or, you know, telepathic experiences.
Like I ought to talk more about the book probably.
Yeah.
Oh, you know, when the opportunity comes up and, This is a good example of the first time I smoke any cannabis product, which is one of the chapters in my book, My Altered States.
Yeah, I had a telepathic experience with my roommate.
Oh, wow.
We were sitting on a Persian carpet on the floor and the floor just gave out from under us.
And we floated over town and we were controlling the movement of the rug as well as comparing what we were seeing down below.
Yeah, oh look at that.
Oh look and we were you seeing it together and we were you know steering it higher and lower Wow And we both are you sure this this weed wasn't laced with well, it was it was hash.
Oh, it was hash.
Yeah, it's a funny story like it's a Friday night in November and yeah, there was a knock on the door and The senior resident advisor came by and he said I hear you haven't gotten stoned yet which was true and would you like to smoke some blonde Lebanese hash?
So, yeah, he came in and we smoked, and some friends came in, and the flying carpet experience took place.
Oh, wow.
That's wild.
Yeah, the telepathy thing, how do you explain that?
Well, I think it would be just sort of a step up from shared feelings or shared thoughts.
Why not have shared perceptions too?
I think if you're close enough, Vibrationally, and if DMT, let's say, were involved, which would be mediating the visions, then you might be able to share an experience like that.
Have you ever heard anybody ever engaging in any kind of trip, like how Dennis describes what they did in La Charrera, where he's basically gone for 10 days and he explained that, like, he had to eat the mushrooms that was just like their calories for the day.
And he couldn't even, he couldn't even like shit on his own.
He explained, he literally explained, like, how he had to take a shit.
He had to, like, ask somebody to take a shit for him.
Oh, really?
He was just like, Completely out of his body for 10 days communicating with Terrence.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And like, I don't know if there's ever been anything like that done before.
And I'd be curious, like, how many of those experiences where people are sharing an experience like that and communicating telepathically, how many times has that been done or recorded?
Yeah.
I've got a colleague in Bastille University up in Seattle who's interested in actually, you know, doing.
you know, brain scans on people in distant rooms and seeing if they can be telepathic.
And if so, would their brain function, their EEG be similar?
Yeah.
That would be fascinating.
Yeah, that's a very cool study.
I don't know if it's been finished or published or whatnot, but I think that that's one of the ways that you could start to study telepathy.
I always wonder if these experiences that we have are like something that we were more attuned to.
Centuries ago, or even hundreds of thousands of years ago, if we had these abilities to communicate telepathically or to even be in more of an altered state or have just more of an experience of reality in real life,
similar to how people experience, how did people describe their experiences like when they go to the Amazon for the first time, how they explain like all these dormant senses just wake up being in the jungle, being disconnected from technology.
And all this and all these things, you know, yeah.
And that's one of the ways in which they become more telepathic, right?
Like, I wonder if, like, like this telepathic, if just ancient humans were more, our bodies were more technologically advanced and we had ways to communicate without verbal, right?
And just because we're so, because we had our antennas were more in tune to something else, yeah, that now our antennas are kind of just.
They've gone dormant because of the evolution of technology and phones and the internet and all these things.
Yeah.
Are you familiar with Julian Jaynes and the bicameral mind?
I've heard of it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I've heard of the bicameral mind.
Yeah.
Yes.
So, you know, Jaynes taught that, you know, there was the spoken voice, which occurred all of the time in everyone.
And then at some point, biologically, that just, or at some point, there were changes in brain.
Structure and function that made the spoken voice go away.
You know, it's interesting within the tradition of Hebrew Bible prophecy, you know, there's an end of prophecy that occurred at a certain point.
You know, so, you know, that would not have taken place as far back as James is suggesting.
So she's saying the human mind operated in a non conscious state until about 3,000 years ago.
Where individuals experienced auditory hallucinations as commands from God guiding their actions.
Whoa.
Yeah, so it places the self on the side of the body.
And yeah, there was no self.
There was no personal self.
You were just kind of responding to this thing.
The right hemisphere of the brain interpreted sensory data, judged and decided, and formed language, while the left hemisphere acted on these commands without being aware of the decision making process.
No free will.
Oh, wow.
Or it was experienced anyway as no free will.
And then the authority became interjected for some reason, which may have come about because of volcanic activity, earthquakes, those kinds of things, some natural catastrophes.
Hmm.
3,000 years ago.
Prophets and Ancient Religions00:06:42
Yeah, the end of the prophetic stream was about, you know, I don't know, 2,500 years ago or so.
The end of the prophetic stream.
Yeah.
So, this is your so you wrote the whole book on the Hebrew Bible and prophets.
And the idea is like the idea of prophets and psychedelic hallucinations.
Like, there's a connection there.
Well, I think there's a lot of similarities phenomenologically.
You know, the visions are the same type.
Like Ezekiel?
Ezekiel's vision is very psychedelic, very much like DMT.
You know, there's beings with wings and eyes on the wings, and there's lightning, and there's frozen ice, and there's wheels, and there's circles and flashes of lightning.
It's quite psychedelic.
Yeah.
And, you know, those are what are called the canonical prophets, the ones who have books written about them or by them.
And the canonical prophets ended at a certain point in history, you know, maybe halfway through the second temple.
You know, so maybe, I don't know.
When was the Hebrew Bible written?
Like a thousand AD?
It was written, you know, before the Common Era.
It was closed at about 150.
I thought it was written in a thousand AD.
Maybe I'm, what am I thinking of?
It was written in Hebrew.
Tenths of the Hebrew Bible is quite old.
It's, you know, the basis of Christianity and is mentioned, you know, regularly by the Quran.
So.
10th century.
What?
It's like 10,000 years?
That's not true.
There's no way.
Because the Septuagint was.
When was the Septuagint written?
Around the turn of the era, maybe 100 years before.
So the Septuagint was Hellenistic, I thought.
It was Greek, yeah.
Right.
10,000 BC.
Okay, so this one is saying 12,000 to 100.
That's more like it.
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, that sounds about right.
It's the crazy thing about the prophets.
The crazy thing to me about the Bible is that all these prophets that are written about that were like Moses, Ezekiel, all these people, they're only written about in the Bible and there's no other historical writing about it.
You know, like even like Moses, I think, I think he existed like a thousand years before the first time, allegedly, when the Bible says he existed, was a thousand years before he was ever even written about.
Yeah.
Well, you have to go even further back than that to Abraham.
Even Abraham.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like Abraham preceded Moses by many generations.
Yeah.
So it's like to me, like it's so fascinating how like you have in antiquity, all this stuff that's going on.
You have, you have all this philosophy, all the science, all the medical literature.
I think Galen wrote like 10% of the classical literature that exists today in Greek.
You have comedy.
You have legal documents that are written in antiquity.
But then you have this.
narrow lane of the Bible where you have all these other stories, but none of those people are corroborated anywhere out of the Bible, right?
Like there's no, like none of these people in the Bible, Ezekiel, Muhammad, like none of them.
Is there any historical text about them?
Is there any medical text about them?
Did any of these guys have physicians?
Because that's usually how you corroborate things when you're studying classical history, right?
You look at like when, even quoting people like Julius Caesar.
When he quotes a historian, that's how you validate that historian and the things that he writes about.
Well, and you're wondering then if the stories in the Bible and the figures are real.
Right.
Well, I mean, I don't think, I think they're all fairy tales.
But like, that's just one of the most obvious things to me.
It's like the way I love to look at it, which is a way a friend of mine who's a classical philologist explained this to me.
It's like imagine in 2,000 years from now.
There's people that are saying Gandalf is real.
And how do they know Gandalf is real?
It's because there's this divine trilogy that was written about Gandalf and how he lives in the middle of the earth.
And it's called The Lord of the Rings.
But there's no one else writing about Gandalf except for in this trilogy.
It's like it's the same thing almost.
Well, it's been a couple of thousand years and the Bible hasn't been replaced yet, which I think is an interesting aspect that characterizes it as.
Possibly unique.
Yeah, you know, it's been very influential.
You know, our kids are named after figures in the Bible, our law, our theology, architecture, art, poetry, wisdom literature.
You know, it's all contained in the Bible.
It's influenced governments, the church, Christianity is founded on the texts.
You know, so it's been quite enduring and quite influential.
Yeah, I agree.
Which I think makes it a unique book.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Compared to Gandalf, which has influenced people, but there's not churches and that there's not a clerical establishment.
Yeah, it's more of a recreational at this point, probably, compared to the influence of the Hebrew Bible.
Yeah.
No, it's been a huge influence, but times are different right now, right?
With technology and everything else.
Back then, people were so different.
Well, you think so?
You're not sure.
In certain ways.
In certain ways.
Yeah.
Well, it's strange.
It's like, you know, one half of the world's population is either Christian or Muslim.
That's crazy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So, yeah, but it's not, is it the same way?
Is it like the way people are Christian and Muslim and Jewish today?
Is that the same way that people thought about religions in antiquity?
Greek as a Mind Expander00:14:57
Like, did they live and die by their religions back then?
Or were like, for example, like think about pagan religions.
People would just, they just use religions.
They could swap religions.
They could have five different religions they ascribe to, or they could believe in five different gods, ten different gods.
Sure.
Now it's like the way it's fused into culture and how it's so black and white, you know, and how people, and then when you add the internet into that and the way people communicate now, you know, it's become this just confusing cauldron of ideas and ways for people to argue.
And it's become, I think, more divisive than ever.
Yeah.
Well, do you think that's because of the invasion of demonic forces?
Speaking of, I don't know.
What do you call a demon?
How do you define a demon?
Well, you know it when you see it.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, it's the effect on you as well.
Are you a better person or not?
Yes.
Like, are you prone to destruction versus building things up?
Right.
Yeah.
Do you thrive on chaos or not?
Well, I think also, do you tell the truth?
A few months back, I read a book on the Antichrist, which was called The Antichrist.
And the Antichrist is characterized by the big lie, by the lie.
The Antichrist is a liar.
And that's the way he's been defined or has been defined over the millennia.
Huh.
Where did the Antichrist first come from?
Who was the first Antichrist?
The first Antichrist.
Probably people who didn't believe in Christ as the Messiah.
Is Satan the first Antichrist?
Well, you say.
Was that a word?
Yeah.
Was it a term?
It was a term that only appears twice in the Hebrew Bible.
And at both times it means accuser.
Yeah.
Like a prosecutor.
Or opponent.
Or opponent.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's the story of the pagan prophet who, oh my God, my train of thought.
Balaam had, yeah, well, he was a false prophet.
As a pagan prophet, but was quite potent in his predictions and his poetry.
Yeah, when I get to that point, I'll remember.
Yeah, there's an idea that.
Oh, the Antichrist, the Satan.
Yeah, yeah.
So he's beating his animal to get off the road because there's an angel placed on the road that is threatening him.
And the threatening part is the Hebrew root is.
The formation or the basis of Satan or Satan.
Have you ever heard of the idea of Christ being a drug term?
You know, John Allegro.
Oh, yes.
John Allegro.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Ruck actually endorsed his book, Sacred Mushroom in the Cross.
Sacred Mushroom in the Cross.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's a classic.
I've never read it.
Yeah.
No, his is different.
I think there's a lot of gaping holes in his idea because he traces the Hebrew.
I guess he was a scholar of the Dead Sea Scrolls, right?
He studied the Dead Sea Scrolls for a long time.
For a long time, yeah.
He was one of the initial investigators.
He translated the Hebrew, and one of his, he was making a lot of connections in that book to Sumerian roots.
And I don't think Hebrew has any shared commonality or roots with Sumerian.
As far as I know, no.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's Akkadian influences and Hittite, Assyrian.
Right.
And Arabic as well.
Right.
So his idea of like the, I mean, the main connection I think he made was that like a mushroom isn't fertilized.
It just comes from, like, the rain is the semen of God, and then it hits the earth, and then the mushroom is divine.
Well, I think you need to be careful in analogizing or allegorizing the text.
Yes.
You can really take it too far from the basis of the text, which is what it's intended to communicate.
But no, the idea I was talking about was there's the word Christ in antiquity in Greek.
Means to apply drugs to somebody, to give somebody drugs.
And there's multiple different definitions of the word Christ.
And that's the hard part about trying to define what this meant.
But according to a classical philologist that I talked to and a bunch of other people that study this stuff, the ancient Greek, his name's Amon.
He's a guy who lives in Taos, Dr. Amon Hillman.
He's a classical philologist.
There's different meanings to Christ.
To put roofs on houses, that's called Christing.
But basically, the idea, his idea of what Christing was during Jesus' time was somebody who just did drugs and gave people drugs.
It was kind of like a prophet in a drug sense.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's taking great liberty with the word meaning.
Yeah.
The.
We've looked it up on the Greek.
There's a website where you can translate Greek, and it was one of the many definitions that are there.
Yeah, it is the basis of the idea of christening.
And oftentimes there's an anointing involved an anointing by oil.
Right, correct.
So the Hebrew root has to do with anointing.
And Christos, you anoint, you christen by oil.
And Mashach, or the Hebrew root, is the root of Messiah as well.
So that's where you get the anointing and the Messiah in the name of Christ from christening.
Right.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah, it isn't related to drugs, as far as I know from the Hebrew Bible.
It might have been a.
Well, it's an interpretation of Allegro, then.
He's like.
back engineering almost?
Yeah, no, this is, I don't think it has anything to do with Allegro because this guy doesn't, he only translates Greek.
So he reads all the ancient Greek.
So what he does is he takes, he reads all the Greek from classical antiquity and tries to figure out what words meant in certain time periods.
Like between, like the word Christ had different meanings from 1000 BC than it did at 100 BC.
So he reads like the medical stuff.
He mainly read, he mainly focused on the medical text.
Yeah, yeah.
Like Galen and other things.
But he also read like comedies, philosophy, all kinds of different, because there was so much Greek literature on Christ.
It was unbelievable.
No, no, no, not just on Christ, but everywhere.
But lots of people were using the word Christ in random areas throughout all the literature, right?
A lot of it was in medical literature.
So he's like, okay, let's take the.
The consensus on what people were, what the context was for the word Christ during this time from Julius Caesar to, you know, a couple hundred years AD.
And his idea is that overwhelmingly it's used as a drug term to apply drugs.
Yeah, could it just be applying oil for therapeutic reasons?
Like some kind of oil?
I don't know, maybe.
Maybe.
Some kind of medical oil.
It would be, yeah, I think it would be anointing.
Yeah, but his dissertation was on Galen, who's Marcus Aurelius' physician, which also happens to be like 10% of the literature we have from antiquity.
Right.
And Galen just talks about all the drugs being used and everything he's.
Prescribing Marcus Aurelius and Marcus Aurelius gets hooked on opium and he's writing in his journals all about all the opium he has to keep giving Marcus Aurelius.
He's like, he keeps having to increase the dose and he's getting annoyed by how much more opium he has to give him.
And, you know, they're using viper venoms.
They're trying to create antidotes to viper venoms by, like, using the human immune system.
So they're impregnating bandages with viper venoms, North African viper venoms, basically, you know.
Putting a little bit of viper venom on the bandage, cutting children, wrapping their cut in viper venom so that because they have the most robust immune systems, they're going to develop more antibodies so they can use the children's blood or their bodily fluids as an antidote to snake bites.
Really?
Like all kinds of crazy stuff.
He has this thing called the Theriac, where they mix this concoction of like 12 different North African snakes into the flesh and the viper and all this other crazy stuff.
And they explained that as like a panacea.
And he was giving it to Marcus Aurelius and he's like, in his notes, he's like, He's like, uh, the king is starting to look better, yeah, you know, after taking the theriac.
But you know, this could be just you know, looking through the lens of somebody who was focused on ancient drugs.
Well, and so he's you know, primarily focusing on the Sumerian, no, he's focusing on the Greek, on the ancient Greek, the ancient Greek.
Okay, okay, that's which was he explains is it was everywhere, yeah.
You know, the library of Alexandria had over 150,000 copies in it in its height, yeah, it was burned down, and it was all Greek, yeah, all Greek.
No Hebrew, no Latin, nothing else.
Yeah.
Was this fellow talking about the psychedelic experience at all?
No, he was never into psychedelics, really, himself, I don't think.
Yeah.
Sometimes people report mastery of a foreign language that they didn't have before.
They were studying it, but then they became expert in it.
Like modern-day people?
Yeah, yeah.
I know a woman who's a member of one of the ayahuasca churches in new Mexico, who was struggling with learning Portuguese and then on ayahuasca was able to just really hone in on it and become quite fluent.
Really?
Yeah, very quickly.
Oh, wow.
I got to tell him about this.
Maybe it'll help him.
No, he spent his whole life, he has a PhD in Greek, in classical philology, which is the translation of ancient Greek.
Yeah, philology is interesting, the meaning of words.
Yeah, when I was beginning my study of the Hebrew Bible, I had two huge dictionaries next to me and just oh, wow.
I just spend all my time going back and forth.
Wow.
Yeah.
Isn't it interesting that there's nothing in ancient Hebrew outside of the Bible?
It's all canonical.
Yeah.
There's no, like, ancient medical texts in Hebrew.
There's no ancient philosophical texts in Hebrew.
Yeah.
And it's 7,000 words, right?
Not from from ancient Greek.
Yeah.
Are you talking I'm sorry, ancient Hebrew.
Ancient Hebrew.
Ancient Hebrew, yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, you know, it's an old text, so not much has survived.
Right.
You know, the Palestinian Talmud and the Jerusalem Talmud are rather old, but they were written like after the turn of the Common Era.
Yeah, they're written in Hebrew, but there isn't anything contemporaneous with the Hebrew Bible that has been discovered, like philosophy, medicine.
I wonder if those texts are found in the Dead Sea Scrolls.
I'm not that familiar with them.
So, the Dead Sea Scrolls, as far as I understand, they're all religious texts.
There's no medical text.
There's no medical text.
There might have been, you know what, I think there were a few receipts or something, like from people, you know.
Borrowing a cow or buying a cow in exchange for something else or whatever.
Yeah.
But they were all religious texts.
And there was Greek in there too.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And those were discovered when?
1947.
1940s.
And they dated them to what?
They dated them to like 200 BC or something like that, 150 BC?
Not that far back, but pretty far back.
Right.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I had a Dead Sea Scroll scholar in here.
Yeah.
He was explaining to me all the crazy stuff.
Like he was explaining to me how there's like all these.
There's this huge market of people peddling fake tech, fake scrolls, like fake fragments of scrolls, selling them for hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Have most of them been discovered?
Most of the Dead Sea Scrolls are that they still think they're, you know, that's amazing.
Yeah.
I don't know.
I mean, they found them in some cave in the middle of the desert, some random caves.
Some cave and a number of caves.
Yeah.
After they discovered that first one in Qumran.
Qumran.
Yeah.
You know, some people think, you know, that's the origin of early Christianity.
It occurred within that community.
Dead Sea Scrolls, right.
Found it.
Does it say the date?
Some remain.
It was early.
I think it was like 1 to 150 they tried to date them to.
Yeah, the Second Temple, which was destroyed in 70 CE, but stood for almost, I don't know, 400 or 500 years.
Yeah.
It's at least, you know, they're at least 200 years BCE.
Right.
Yeah, probably not much further back.
Yeah, but this guy, this classical philologist, Amon, he was explaining to me like reading Greek, reading ancient Greek is almost like a mind expanding drug in itself.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
If you really study those ancient religious languages, they put you in an altered state.
Yeah, that's what he was explaining to me.
Yeah, I think it's like reading sutras in Pali, let's say, Buddhist sutras in their original language.
Yeah, it produces a meditative state.
I think the more you understand the language, the more it affects you mentally.
MKUltra and LSD History00:05:29
Yeah.
Yeah, I spend about an hour every day studying the Hebrew Bible.
Oh, wow.
Really?
Yeah.
And it's the English and the Hebrews side by side.
That was the basis ultimately of that prophetic states book.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
Ancient Greek has like over a million unique words.
It's crazy.
Yeah, there's like, well, unique words.
Is it?
Well, you know, the Hebrew language is based on three letter roots.
And there aren't that many, under a thousand.
Yeah, you know, but the whole language is built upon words that are built upon these three letter roots.
Do you think that, do you believe that people in that time period around the time of Christ were experiencing mind altering drugs?
Probably, but I don't think it's, oh, right.
Yeah, I don't think it was that widespread.
It might have been under, yeah, I don't think it was that common.
Yeah, I just don't know that.
I'm not a historian of drug use.
Right.
Yeah, because like from one of his books was called The Chemical Muse.
He was talking about how like in antiquity, people were dying all the time from everything.
And the infant mortality rate was like 50%.
There was always combat going on.
There was always plague, famine.
People dying in the worst ways all the time.
And people were, one of the things he explained was people would walk through the town and basically fumigate the town with cannabis.
Yeah.
And people were just always trying to get high just to get through the day.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
According to his book.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But, you know, it's interesting.
Yeah.
And then you have the Eleusinian mysteries.
What was going on there?
That's crazy, too.
Yeah.
Well, you know, that Urgot Containing.
Mixture, what was it called?
The Kaikion Kukion Kaikion yeah yeah, your car ruck and all that.
Yeah, the Road To Elusis yeah, with Wasson AND Hoffman.
Yeah um, you know, the whole relationship between you know, drugs and early Christianity very interesting.
Yeah yeah, that one of the things um Dave Nichols was explaining to me was that, or we were talking about there's a was actually an Ergot museum.
Oh really, in the Us, and this was tied to One of the guys, his name's escaping me right now, who was trying to synthesize a lot of LSD.
And he got arrested.
Yeah.
I brought him up.
I brought him up to David and he kind of rolled his eyes at me.
Yeah.
But this was like right before, or no, I think he got money for MKUltra.
He got some sort of a grant as a part of MKUltra for like a couple hundred thousand dollars.
Yeah.
So how long ago was this to synthesize DMT?
Oh, God.
I want to say it was in the late 60s, early 70s.
Oh, okay.
Yeah.
Long time ago.
Yeah.
Yeah.
There's all kinds of monkey business going on back then.
Yeah.
Yeah.
No, it makes me wonder what's going on now.
Like, you know, I mean, because this is, you know, another thing I was explaining today.
I'm like, every single.
That gets them every single technology or every single bit of research that gets the most amount of funding gets it from the United States military industrial complex.
Yeah, they have the most money to throw it just blue sky anything just like the throw throw a billion and see what happens like I think that's the case.
Yeah, like like even with the remote viewing program that we had in the 70s like they threw millions and millions of dollars at that and I think the excuse for that was We have no, we have, we can't prove this is real with a scientific method.
We can't measure this in a lab.
But if there's even a 1% chance that this works and we can spy on the Soviet Union using this remote viewing stuff, all right.
Then it's worth, it's worth $10 million.
Yeah.
Small price to pay, really.
Yeah.
And if we're doing it, then other people are doing it.
Right.
Right.
And that was the whole story behind the whole MKUltra thing and trying to use LSD for mind control.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, you know, they, well, you know, the CIA established, you know, these.
These houses where people would be lured in by prostitutes.
Oh, yeah.
and the prostitutes were front folks, you know, gave people LSD without them knowing about it.
Yeah.
That was pretty, pretty crazy time in history.
That was a weird time in history, that Cold War history.
And, you know, Charles Manson.
Yeah.
Like, you know, he was the end result.
What do you think happened to him?
Do you think he was, do you think they were like, because he was obviously, I think Tom O'Neill proved beyond a shadow of a doubt, like with, he has brought, brings receipts in his book that that, that Hate Ashbury clinic was funded by a CIA cutout.
Religious Implications of Research00:14:49
And they were doing experiments with LSD and amphetamines on people that were going there.
And he was going there.
Him and his people, him and his girls were documented being there.
Even his probation officer admitted he was there.
Yeah.
Well, have you seen Chaos, that new documentary about Manson by Errol Morris?
It's out?
Yeah.
What?
Yeah.
I heard about them working on that.
I had no idea it was out.
That's what I understand.
You know, Steve.
Can you see if it's out?
Oh, I had no fucking clue this was out.
When did this come out?
March.
It just came out.
Holy crap.
That's crazy.
I got to watch it.
What's it on Netflix?
Errol Morris is one of my favorite filmmakers ever.
Yeah.
And I had never, I didn't even, I didn't even make the connection to him and Hamilton until like a couple years ago.
Yeah.
I was like, my mind was exploded when I figured that out.
Well, do you know Hamilton?
Have you had him on your show?
No, but he's coming.
He's coming next month.
Yeah, great.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I was on a show just a couple months ago.
I just listened to it.
Yeah.
Yeah, he's a fascinating guy.
Super deep into this stuff, the chemistry of psychedelics.
He's like a legendary.
I mean, he's kind of like a legend in this field.
Yeah, did you know that Errol Morris, he like invented this special camera where so he can do because he kind of pioneered this way of interviewing people where they talk directly into the camera, right?
So when you watch a lot of his old films, when the interview subject is talking, they're looking straight down the barrel of the lens.
And it's hard to do when you're conducting an interview.
Usually the interviewer sits next to the camera and they're kind of looking off camera when they're talking.
So he created this like a mirror contraption where it reflects his face up through like a tube and then reflects his face, projects his face like on a mirror in front of the camera so that the person is looking directly down the barrel of the lens and seeing his face.
So they're talking, that's it right there.
So they're talking directly to his face and they're talking right into the camera.
It's fascinating.
Super interesting guy.
Yeah.
Oh, you know, I could use a bathroom break.
Yeah, yeah.
Let's do it.
Okay, cool.
We're back.
We're back from our P break.
Okay.
We were talking about you said, so you didn't do your first interview with Rogan until 2022, but you knew him for years before that.
Like he was even a part of that documentary.
Yeah, I met him on my 50th high school reunion weekend.
Yeah, which would have been 2000.
2019.
No.
Oh, you met him in, oh, you met him that late?
No, I met him before that.
Oh, okay.
Oh, my, let's see, 40th.
It was the 40th reunion.
So it was 2009.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
That's what I thought.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I heard about Joe from a person who just contacted me who said, have you ever heard of Joe Rogan?
He's just talking about your book.
And so he said, I hadn't heard of Joe at that time.
And I got his number and I called him.
I said, hey, thanks for putting the word out about the book.
He said, hey, man, cool.
I've got the book.
I'm at the airport.
I'm reading it right now.
He's been really a very strong supporter.
Isn't it crazy how he's been hugely responsible for catapulting this stuff into the mainstream in the last 10 years?
Yeah, it's interesting.
He's created the whole meme.
There's a whole meme about him talking about DMT because that was his first podcast.
It's like asking every guest.
Yeah, I think it blew his mind.
Yeah, most of the people he was interviewing, he would ask if they had smoked DMT.
Yeah, and that's like the ongoing meme.
Have you smoked DMT?
And then he would just talk about it on every single podcast.
How could that not blow your mind?
Yeah, he's really helped bring it to a larger audience.
What the hell was I going to ask you about before we stopped?
I think I lost my mind.
That's somewhere.
Let's see.
It's somewhere around here.
Oh, God.
We have just watched the trailer.
Oh, yes.
We were watching the trailer for Chaos.
Right.
For that new, on Tom O'Neill's book.
Yeah, that, the Cold War, the Cold War was so crazy.
Jolly West, he gave an elephant a huge dose of LSD.
Uh huh.
Tusco.
Yeah.
That was the elephant's name.
It was at the St. Louis Zoo.
And I think the elephant died.
Well, it went into convulsions.
And then he gave it a big dose of Thorazine.
And then it died.
So, a combination of.
What is Thorazine?
Thorazine.
It's an antipsychotic.
Oh, it's an antipsychotic.
So, it's supposed to be an antidote to the LSD?
Theoretically.
But they gave him an elephant sized dose, I guess.
God.
Lord.
And he was like, Tom was explaining how Jolly West, when he wrote about that, he was so proud of it.
Yeah.
It was a strange time in psychedelic research.
What do you think about it?
the current interest in psychedelics?
Do you think it's a good thing, a bad thing?
I mean, what's motivating it?
Yeah, right now, you mean?
Yeah, yeah, right now.
Yeah, as compared to back then.
Yeah, I mean, like I said, I'm like kind of new into this world and I probably am not the best person to ask to get some sort of grounded vision on or idea on where it's going.
It seems to me, though, like it's going in many different directions.
I think, like I said, when Travis Kitchens came on here, he elucidated it to me in a way that made the most sense.
It just seems like there's so many different groups, whether it be commercial groups, like people trying to use it to monetize it in a commercial way.
It seems like there's people that are trying to take it and use it in a religious way to revive Christianity.
There's that one idea with Marescu's book.
And then there, you know, obviously it seems like there's a huge interest in the government and DARPA with that $27 million fund to take the trip out of psychedelics for soldiers.
So it seems like it's all over the place.
But like, I don't know.
What do you think?
I can't help but wonder if there's some undercurrent, some underlying methodology, you know, behind or, you know, belief system behind all the research.
You know, all that's out there, I think.
You know, has kind of, oh, it's beginning to focus on the religious implications of psychedelic research.
You know, because people describe religious experiences on psychedelics.
Is there a way to harness that with either new traditions or older traditions?
Yeah, like infuse Christianity with a psychedelic boost.
To try to revive it.
Yeah, I'm just not sure.
Well, I think that idea is predicated on the role of the psychedelic experience in the creation of Christianity.
I guess.
I just don't know if there's enough support.
And if it's a good thing, you'd have to be.
developed enough to partake.
I think just totally.
Yeah, you have to have the right intent, the right set, and the right setting.
One of my lately favorite authors is Leo Perutz.
He was an Austrian writer and also a statistician.
What is his last name?
Perutz, P-E-R-U-T-Z.
Okay.
And in the 30s, before the discovery of LSD, he wrote a book called St. Peter's Snow.
Travis actually was the first person to tell me about that book.
And it's about a chemist developing an ergot alkaloid to give to the masses to bring about a religious revolution.
Really?
Very interesting.
And this was like 10 years before the discovery of LSD in Switzerland.
In the early 1900s.
Yeah, there may have been some ergot chemistry going on way before Hoffman discovered LSD.
Wow.
But we've never been able to prove, right?
We've never been able to actually prove that there was any sort of ergot in any of those vases that we found in Athens.
Yeah, I'm just not sure.
I'm not current on that.
So the idea is that if you look at the, if you take Ruck's book with Gordon Wasson and Albert Hoffman, right, they're looking at the Eleusinian mysteries and the experiences people are having.
With this wine that they were drinking that was infused with something barley?
Well, with some kind of ergot alkaloid.
Do we know for a fact that they was is there any literature that says anything about ergot being in that in that wine?
That you know of?
Yeah, that's medicinal chemistry.
I don't know.
Yeah, Dave Nichols would be the guy to ask.
So like the idea is that if they were doing that.
800 BC is that are these psychedelic experiences?
What created religion in the first place?
Is that where they got the idea to create these religions or even have the idea of God and the idea of you know even these prophets or these crazy mystical experiences?
And if that is the ultimate creation state of religion and that you know say like You know, even if back then in antiquity there was all these, you know, these pagan gods and all these different religions that people described to, eventually it got bottlenecked.
Right.
And then we get kind of like lost control of it.
Well, I think what you're talking about is, you know, the source of the visions.
You know, was it just coming from them or was it just an amplification of what was in their minds?
Right.
Or was it coming from above like a objective, freestanding source of information?
Yeah.
Yeah.
So that's, you know, the difference, I think, between an, uh, top-down model where the divine communicates us through the visions or a bottom-up one, in which case it's just amplification of what's already there and uncovering.
Yes, yes, which makes a lot of sense.
But one of the huge motivations behind, like we said, there's multiple people with multiple groups with multiple motivations to study psychedelics.
But one of the big groups is the church, right?
That goes behind the Immortality Key book where he studies this stuff and he's trying to, I guess, in the beginning of it, he kind of describes. everything about the Eleusinian mysteries, talking to Karl Ruck and all this stuff.
And it's sort of the end of it.
It's kind of like, could this be something that could revive Christianity, right?
Or is this like, is there this common core of religion that can bring about a new spiritual renaissance or a new religious renaissance?
Well, you'd have to go into more detail.
I think if you're going to talk about revitalizing any religion, what exactly would that mean?
Would it mean more art coming out of the sect?
Would it mean more literature or more involvement in the political system?
Yeah, I think reviving any religion, I mean, what are you going to focus on?
Yeah, and Ruck's big thing is, I mean, so out of, from my understanding, Which take it with a grain of salt.
There's a lot of people who study classical times and they study ancient religions and study all this stuff.
But Ruck's view, which I've heard through the telephone game and from reading his books, I would estimate his view to be that Christianity and religion in general is the source of just an unmeasured, more suffering and more human, some more human suffering and death than anything else in the history of humanity, right?
So he's not a huge proponent. of the idea of reviving any sort of world religion or any sort of Christianity.
It seems like his view is more anti-Christian than most.
I don't know this for a fact.
This is me speculating.
Yeah.
Well, I think it has to do with the source of the information.
Is it just from the people themselves or from God?
And like you're talking about the lack of a need for any new religion, I think it has to do with the unity.
Of a teaching with God.
So you'd have to focus on the notion of God, which is a very controversial notion.
Yeah.
Yeah, I've heard Buber describe it as the most maligned of all words, and therefore Martin Buber, he was a German Jewish theologian.
Yeah, that it was the most overused or abused word in the language.
God?
God, the word God, yeah, with a capital G.
And, you know, therefore worthy of the most study and discussion.
Yeah, rather than avoiding it.
Yeah.
And, yeah, also the Jesuits are like the most interesting sect of Christianity.
There seems to be more Jesuits in like the top levels of society than anywhere else.
Well, if you look at the first DMT book, you know, there's a molecular drawing of the DMT molecule and that was written by a former Jesuit.
Oh, really?
Yeah, yeah.
Ibogaine for PTSD Soldiers00:09:07
Oh, wow.
Yeah, turn to chemist.
And the Jesuits are like, from what I understand, they're like anti-war.
They want to like make a, they want to make, they want world peace.
And, you know, they seem to like the idea of there being like some sort of like harmonious one world society that everyone gets along.
Well, they're studious and more philosophical, I think.
Yeah, definitely.
But one of the most interesting things to me is what the hell is the government doing right now in their research into this stuff that we don't even know about?
Because we didn't know about MKUltra until the church hearing, the stuff came out in 1975.
The church commission, yeah.
Yeah.
So like, and that stuff was buried, you know, with Charles Manson and all that.
No one knew about any of that until way later.
I wonder, like, what could they be doing now that we won't find out until 15, 20 years from now?
Yeah.
If we even ever find out, right?
Well, as you mentioned, you know, the budget that, you know, the government has got for, you know, research grants is immeasurable.
$27 million to the University of North Carolina to study how to take the trip out of psychedelics to heal soldiers from PTSD and combat fatigue.
Non-psychedelic psychedelics.
Yeah.
Yeah.
They are supposed to stimulate neuroplasticity and neurogenesis without the trip.
Yeah.
There's one which is a compound similar to ibogaine called TBG.
Tabernacle Log and I think that's being uh, studied in humans now.
Yeah finally, it's one of these non-psychedelic psychedelics.
Do you think that you can get like okay, it's a super placebo, it it could be and it might be as effective as you know like, for example, Prozac.
But do you think you can still get the effect that you get from psychedelics without?
Because I feel like the, I feel like the trip yeah is is like the major component of it that gives you that effect Right.
Well, you can't have the psychedelic without the trip.
Well, I know.
And that's still a point of raging controversy, actually, even within the academic community.
Is the subjective experience necessary?
You know, my feeling is that the non-psychedelic ones will be like super Prozacs and very helpful in most people who don't want to have a trip.
And the drugs that continue causing trips will be used for the more difficult cases.
So you have a higher chance of responding, but also a higher chance of adverse effects.
And that's the reason, you know, that you'd only use it in cases that don't respond to non psychoactive ones.
Have you ever heard of any sort of use of psychedelics on the battlefield and not being used sort of post combat PTSD, like as far as like enhancing people with like visual acuity, edge detection, and more accuracy and stuff like this?
Yeah, I've read accounts.
Yeah.
But I don't know if they're really.
you know, based on objective data, but it may be those are the kind of studies that are occurring behind the scenes.
Travis sent me an article about this guy named Dana Beale.
Yeah, I know Dana.
Very nice.
Oh, really?
Yeah, quite a character.
And I think in this article, it's explained how he was trying to take Iboga from Africa to and fly it to Ukraine to use with soldiers fighting in the Ukrainian-Russian war to give to these Russian soldiers, but they weren't just using, they were using it as like a way to.
Get people back out there, right?
Like with their if they're experiencing combat fatigue or PTSD, they can get them on this eboga or ibogaine and then like turn and burn, like get them right back out into the battlefield.
Yeah.
Or even enhance their combat skills.
Yeah, I think smaller doses would be like a microdose.
Like a microdose.
Yes, exactly.
Right.
And it could theoretically enhance fighting ability.
At the same time, though, it might also affect somebody's desire to fight.
Oh, is this from the article?
Cannabis activist and advocate for Ibogaine traveled to Ukraine to promote the use of Ibogaine for treating war veterans.
Right.
This is all about the PTSD.
You can turn soldier.
Oh, he believes, Beale believes that you can.
Use Ibogaine to turn soldiers into super soldiers and has been actively campaigning for its use in Ukraine despite facing legal challenges in the United States.
And then he was arrested.
Yeah, he's been in and out of jail.
Currently on bail.
So if I was the military industrial complex, I would be trying to figure out how to, I would be throwing the most money on how to weaponize psychedelics.
And they've been doing it.
I mean, we know they did it all throughout the Cold War because they used Manson, right, to, to, Basically, stain the psychedelic movement, right?
They tried to, yeah.
Did you see the movie Jacob's Ladder?
No, it's about uh bz, uh, which was used on soldiers in Vietnam.
Bz, bz something, yeah, huh, yeah.
Look at Jacob's Ladder, see if you can find that, Steve.
Jacob's Ladder, yeah, Tim Roth, I think.
I'm not even gonna try to say that, yeah, quinsilate, uh, benzolate, a glycosate.
Antichlorinogenic clinoger anticholinergic cholinergic that causes powerful hallucinations and altered behavior portrayed as chemical warfare agent that leads soldiers to experience nightmarish visions and lose control of their actions This is this was like a a nonfiction?
No, no, it's oh, this was a okay.
Yeah live action, I guess.
Well, yeah, you know, so I think you know giving soldiers you know psychedelics is fraught.
I mean, what's the guarantee?
Yeah, what's the guarantee they're not just gonna all like drop their weapons and give each other hugs?
Right, right.
But what you don't you know, so it's with microdoses You don't experience a psychedelic effect, but I've never really microdosed I've done it a couple times, but From what I hear from people who microdose all the time is that it's it's a stimulant, right?
Yeah, which is why I think a microdose of Ibogaine might make your soldiers more alert and able to endure more discomfort It would be far better than using methamphetamines, which is I which is The Russian soldiers are taking.
They're taking Captagon.
Captagon, a very interesting compound, yeah.
Yeah.
Which is basically just a, it's like a, it's not a methamphetamine, but it's a strong amphetamine, I think.
Yeah.
It's a stimulant, that's for sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Super stimulant.
Yeah.
Well, wasn't that like really an important source of income, you know, for one of the countries there?
Yeah.
Captagon exports.
I think it was coming from Syria, right?
Oh, okay, right.
And Syria and Russia were close allies.
So I think.
Think they're somehow exporting that, or Russia was buying the Captagon from Syria.
Isn't that what Norman Oler was explaining to us?
Oh, well, you know, this reminds me of I've been wanting to mention that the book by Philip K. Dick, The Stigmata of Palmer Eldridge, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldridge is a book by Philip K. Dick.
Yeah, are you familiar with that?
I'm familiar with P. K. Dick, but I'm not familiar with that book.
Yeah, it's a competition.
What's the name of it again?
Sorry.
The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch.
It's a novel that describes, you know, like a war for dominion of the psychedelic market on planet Earth between a Terran psychedelic and one from an interest, an intrastellar location.
Yeah.
You know, so the one that's made on Earth puts people into like the world of Perky Pat.
Who's in a dollhouse and you interact with the figures in the dollhouse?
And a lot of people spend time in that space, you know, with the compound that's made on Earth.
And, you know, the one that comes in from interstellar space is totally weird.
You take it once and you never come down.
Oh, wow.
You come down, but that's just part of the trip.
Yeah, it just goes on and on.
It's really just this nightmarish, you know, limbo state.
Captagon, methamphetamine, you know, there's all this competition for what's the, you know, what's going to be, you know, the drug that everyone is taking along the lines of like Brave New World even.
John Lilly and Merck Experiments00:11:06
Right, right.
And so much.
The amphetamines, I mean, basically the Nazis proved that the amphetamines didn't work, right, because they wanted to do this blitz.
They thought that they could put their soldiers on, which they did.
They put them all on these like super strong Pervatin methamphetamine pillars.
Pervatin, yeah, yeah.
And then they were awake for 20 days straight and then they were just burned out at the end of it.
Well, they're just burned out.
Yeah.
It might help for a short period of time.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, one of the towns in New Mexico I worked in has a big oil and gas industry.
And I worked at one of the clinics in that town.
Yeah.
And I saw a number of the workers.
And, you know, when they started work, they were given a lunchbox.
With an apple and a sandwich and methamphetamine.
What?
In order to help them get through 18 hour shifts, you know, like on a regular basis.
When was this?
This was, you know, 2004, 2006.
Wow.
Is that legal?
I don't think so.
No, no.
It's bizarre how many people take methamphetamines, or not methamphetamines, but amphetamines around.
Like how many people are prescribed amphetamines for just, things that could, it seems like could be fixed with other like more healthy alternatives, right?
Because like every, so many writers, so many researchers and so many like, especially kids in college are just like, they've been on, I know people like friends who have been prescribed these amphetamines since they were, you know, in their early teens in school.
And they're like, now they're in their late 20s, early 30s.
Some of them got pregnant, like, oh my God, I have to stop taking this Adderall now.
I've been taking it since I was fucking 12.
Yeah.
And they have this just insane withdrawal because they've been taking it their whole entire life.
They've been prescribed it since the beginning of their lives.
Yeah.
Well, you know, in some of the clinical situations I've worked with, I would prescribe Adderall.
Yeah.
And it would be helpful when it was helpful.
You know, this was in the early 2000s, though.
I think people are more liberal.
With diagnosing people with ADHD.
But if you have bad ADHD, stimulants can be like a miracle cure almost.
Really?
Yeah.
Is it the idea of it that it basically just like stimulates dopamine release?
It stimulates the release of dopamine.
I think it also directly stimulates dopamine receptors.
Yeah, because I think I have some level of ADD or ADHD, but like whenever I take Adderall, I've taken it in the past, I hate the way I feel.
And I hate the way I feel, especially the next day.
The next day.
Yeah.
Yeah.
One of my friends once.
One of my friends once gave me a, I think, five milligram dose of Adderall.
And I went home and I wrote after I took it.
And it's like 20 pages.
It really was effortless.
Really?
Yeah.
But the following day, I read what I wrote.
No good.
It just was terrible.
Yeah.
Wasn't Stephen King doing just heaps of cocaine when he was writing Cujo and some of his other books?
I think he writes, there's stories about how Stephen King was just drinking tons of alcohol and doing tons of Coke.
When he was writing some of his novels, his stories are pretty dark.
Yeah.
My stepkids used to buy Stephen King novels for Christmas for me.
Oh, read this, Rick.
It'll cheer you up.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And PK Dick, too.
What was he?
Wasn't he taking stimulants when he was writing?
Yeah.
Stimulants, methamphetamine.
He was taking meth.
No, no, he wasn't taking meth.
I think it was amphetamine primarily.
Just amphetamine.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Poor guy.
God, he really burned bright while he burned.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's interesting.
Some of the most prolific writers were just on heaps of drugs.
And one of the other things that was interesting when we were learning about this stuff from Norman Oler the other day, he's the guy who wrote the history of drugs in the Third Reich.
This company called Merck.
Merck, yeah.
The pharmaceutical company that was alive and well in Nazi Germany.
They were developing, I guess cocaine was developed in the 80s.
And they had a cocaine or Merck had developed a cocaine that didn't have any sort of negative withdrawal effects to it.
And there was actually an article I read, which was fascinating about one of the guys from the Rolling Stones was talking about how they would just have, you know, heaps of cocaine behind the speakers and the amplifiers on stage, and they would be able to do it all day.
They had to do shows, do cocaine, and they would never have any withdrawal symptoms.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Because it was Merck cocaine.
They were doing the actual pharmaceutical grade Merck.
Yeah.
Well, you can still, you know, find pharmaceutical, you know, cocaine out there.
It's, it's, it's, it is still used in medicine.
Right, like for brain surgeries and things like this, I think?
I think, you know, mostly for things that have to do with the eye.
Oh, really?
It makes the cornea numb.
Huh.
You know, so it is still in use.
It's schedule two, actually.
It's not even schedule one.
So like for cataract surgeries and things like this?
Yeah, I think that's what they put into my eyes.
Eye cataract surgery.
Oh, really?
Yeah.
Okay, particularly for ear, nose, and throat procedures because it numbs it.
And it comes in dark, dark colored glass bottles.
Yeah.
Wasn't Merck making MDMA too?
Weren't they the ones?
I think they were.
I think they were the first to synthesize it.
When was MDMA first synthesized?
1914, I think.
1914.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, and it really wasn't, you know, explored very far for application in, you know, clinical medicine.
Yeah.
It wasn't until like MDMA psychotherapy. became a thing back in the 80s.
Yeah, MDMA is another one that I've never tried, but I've heard lots of great stories.
Yeah.
And David made a bunch of MDMA.
Yeah, yeah.
I think that MDMA that David Nichols made for MAPS is still being used.
I mean, it was a huge amount.
Yeah, he said he made a ton of it.
Yeah.
So how did you guys first meet and when he developed all the DMT for you?
Yeah, yeah.
So David Nichols made our DMT.
I met him at the Esalen Institute for a conference that was organized in 85, I think.
Rick Doblin organized it.
And it was a collection of people interested in doing psychedelic drug studies.
Dave was there.
That's where I met him.
I met Shulgin.
I met Stan Groff, John Lilly.
Yeah.
So it was a place to convene.
Yeah.
The history of maps is very interesting.
Yeah.
Rick's history.
I've known Rick since 85, 84.
Yeah.
Oh, wow.
The interesting thing about that.
Article that Travis did, which was um, that trial that never got the published thing, the one that never got released the findings, the religious one with the psilocybin yeah yeah, um was, I guess, a lot of the.
The big pushback to that stuff was a lot of the people that were doing these experiments were also engaging in using the drugs themselves.
Right, and that's frowned upon well, especially for any kind of substance, any kind of uh you know drug with a lot of mind-altering characteristics.
Yeah if, If the research team has been indoctrinated, let's say, in a particular model and through the influence of psychedelics, that's going to affect their treatment of a person in a psychedelic state.
So would the ideal situation have somebody conducting the study who had never done psychedelics?
Is that the argument?
Well, I think it would be interesting to compare.
And that comparison has never been done.
It wouldn't be that hard a study to do.
Well, my thing is, like, How do you even have somebody interested in doing that study in the first place if they haven't experienced psychedelics?
Right?
Like, I can't conceive how somebody would dedicate so much of their life to studying these things unless they had experienced them themselves.
It's like that with any discipline, I would think.
Yeah.
But I think as a result of your experiences, you would be coming in with a mindset based on your own experiences.
And if you hadn't experienced it, then you would just be coming in clinically, let's say.
Right.
Yeah.
It would be more of a blank slate.
You wouldn't have as many preconceptions about what was going to happen to the person and how to interpret it.
Right.
And you knew John Lilly?
I met John Lilly.
Really?
Yeah.
He was doing, I had a guy in here, Richard O'Berry, who was a dolphin trainer for Flipper.
Oh, really?
And he made that documentary, The Cove, which won one of the top awards for documentaries.
I forget what the awards are called, but they documented the slaughter of all the dolphins in uh in Japan and um, he said that he befriended John Lilly in Florida and John Lilly and this was in what year would that have been?
That would have been what?
In the 60s?
The 60s?
That would have been in the 60s.
Yeah, in Miami, when uh Rico Berry was working for the UH THE SEA Aquarium there, John Lilly had some crazy funding from NASA to do studies on dolphins with psychedelics and he was like Doing shit to their brains and putting them on LSD and things like this.
Well, I think he was very interested in human animal communication.
Oh, yeah, absolutely.
Yeah, and he thought LSD might enhance that.
Yeah, between humans on dolphins, both on acid.
They would be telepathic, like we were talking about earlier.
Right.
And I don't think he ever came up with anything.
But the fact that NASA, why the hell was NASA funding that?
Yeah.
Well, I suppose if your astronauts are in suspended animation, you can keep them on DMT for three years and they'd still be able to communicate with each other.
Really?
When I was doing my DMT studies, I wrote to NASA.
Mars Colonization and Evolution00:02:24
And I said, if you want to go to Mars, this can be a long time.
What are people going to do?
I thought, well, if they were just given DMT for three years or for extensive periods of time, that would make the time go by pretty fast.
While they're in space.
Yeah.
I never heard back.
I think.
Oh, God.
Yeah.
Because I don't know how long it would take to get to Mars.
About three years.
Three years.
So is the idea that when we do Mars time travel, the astronauts would go to sleep for a A large portion of that time?
I think a large portion of that time.
And so if you put the astronauts to sleep, you could give them DMT infusions and they would somehow be able to telepathically communicate in these states.
Exactly.
In these states.
Oh my God.
Yeah.
That's crazy.
That's crazy.
We haven't been able to get back to the moon since the moon landing.
Even, you know, Elon wants to take us to Mars.
Yeah, but it'll be the same human problems, don't you think?
I mean, you know, greed, hate, delusion.
You know, we'll do that on Mars.
Yeah.
Are you familiar with a science fiction writer from England named Olaf Stapleton?
No.
Yeah.
You know, fascinating guy.
He wrote a book in the 40s on 19 species of humans.
You know, in order to perfect the species, make the species.
Oh, I have heard of this.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's like, you know, 2 billion years of human evolution.
Yes.
You know, Yeah, so telepathy is the final stage in human evolution, everybody experiencing the same thing at one time.
So like in far, far in the future, like hundreds of thousands of years from now, we would be able to develop the ability through normal evolution or would this be some sort of no, it's all genetically engineered.
Genetically engineered.
Yeah, yeah, you know, so one species or, you know, one variant develops a new species.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
And that's because he accelerates it into this with some sort of AI or pharmacological stuff.
Yeah.
What do you think of telepathy?
I mean, do you think it's a good thing?
You know, Joe Rogan and I were discussing this about the chips, you know, the neural link stuff.
Oh, my God.
It's terrifying to me, man.
Yeah.
Telepathy and Neural Chips00:15:34
And everybody has the same thoughts.
And he wondered, he was, I think he was saying that's a good thing.
And I was not so sure.
He seems to be.
One of the themes, what I've noticed about Joe is that he seems to be fascinated of this idea of humans integrating with machines and people being able to communicate telepathically, being able to read each other's incentives, motives, being able to detect lies and just know people's automatic intentions, right?
Well, there'd be no privacy.
There'd be no privacy, exactly.
So where's that going to lead?
Yeah, and most people want to keep things private.
Most of the time.
I mean, do you think that he thinks that's a good thing if people were able to just read each other's minds and be able to detect lies if people are being deceitful or dishonest?
Yeah, it would force people to get that way.
You know, that I think is the belief under it would force people to get that way.
Yeah.
Or at least the people that decided to integrate.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You would be shamed otherwise or ostracized.
I think for most people, though, like going back to the writing process, when you, when you try to formulate ideas, it's not instantaneous, right?
Like when they're during the writing process, you have to like sit and just have this flow of consciousness through your pen and paper and from your pen to your paper.
And it's like through the process of editing, are you able to refine your ideas, right?
Into something that people can digest and understand.
And in the mind, it's typically just like this chaotic nest, or it's this chaotic hornets' nest of ideas happening all the time.
And if people are able to see that, it seems like it's just going to be miscommunication.
You know, sometimes, and sometimes, like, I don't think it would be a good idea to have, say, for some reason, somebody has some dark thoughts going through their mind.
Yeah.
That's not their intent, right?
Yeah, I know.
There would be a lot of self incriminating evidence involved.
Yeah.
It would just be.
Not necessarily.
I mean, also, yeah, self incriminating, absolutely.
But also, just because somebody has a million different ideas rattling around in their mind at one time.
At one time, right.
That doesn't necessarily mean that that's what they're.
You can't convey their intention or what their ultimate ideas are based on that soup of.
Chaos in their head.
Yeah, it's rife for misinterpretation.
Totally rife with misinterpretation.
And if you compare, like, if you look at just the evolution of social media over the past decade and you look at how divisive that has been on our society, and that's sort of broken down a barrier of communication at some level to where now people can just spew out some sort of random thought that they had on Twitter and people can argue about it all the time.
So if you just take that, like, I feel like the next.
Technological level of that would be this Neuralink idea of telepathic communication.
Where I don't know, I can't imagine it being a good thing.
Well, there would have to be a new species of human to be able to tolerate that and to be able to use it and that it would allow the preservation of the species.
Otherwise, it would just be chaos, just a lot of destruction.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, humans can get along, but oftentimes they don't, right?
So it's those times that they don't that.
can be difficult.
And it almost goes against human nature to want to do that too.
Right.
To want to integrate with a machine.
It's almost like you'd have to be forced to for that to become something that's ubiquitous.
I guess the trade-off would be eternal life.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And that can be a good thing or not.
Yeah.
The final species in Stapleton's book and First and Last Men, they live 35,000 years each.
because that's how it is how long it takes to acquire all of knowledge that's accessible.
Very interesting.
30,000 years.
Yeah, yeah.
30, 35,000 years.
Have you ever studied John Mack's work?
Yeah.
Well, you know, John wrote a blurb for the first DMT book.
Oh, really?
Yeah, yeah.
Yeah, John came by our place one afternoon a long time ago.
What do you make of the experiences that he documented with all of his patients?
Because a lot of those experiences of those abductions, they seem to be also super similar.
Compared to DMT, too, if you look at the phenomenological descriptions, the shaking and the white light and the transport and the beings interacting with you.
Telepathic communication.
Telepathic communication.
Well, I think there's a spectrum of contact experiences.
One is just consciousness to consciousness.
There's no stigma.
There's no movement.
It's just your mind to the mind of the alien.
And there's physical examples, physical part of the spectrum where people move and they've got stigmata and there's more physical evidence.
So the similarity between the DMT state and the consciousness to consciousness.
Contact experience is very interesting.
Yeah.
And a lot of, according to a lot of his people that he interviewed, and I think, I don't know if he hypnotized people when he kind of documented their experiences.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Kind of got them to regress.
Yeah.
He put them in some sort of regression.
A lot of them, so there's a chunk of them who explained these beings being from like another star system.
I think Betty and Barney Hill said it was from like Zeta Reticulus.
or something.
Yeah.
And then there was also a vast majority of them that explained these beings communicating to them saying that they were from the future, that they were us from the future.
Yeah.
Yeah.
That's just hard to say.
You know, there is like speculation anyway in Stapleton's book, you know, that it is a history being told to present day humans to prepare them, to help them accept the development of the species.
You know, so it's a message coming from the future.
You know, so, you know, it's impossible to predict or to experience influence of the future on the present.
It's, you know, cause and effect.
Yeah.
Just a different type of cause and effect.
There's one interesting story that stands out to me where there was these children that saw the, I don't know if John Mack interviewed these people.
I think this might have been earlier than John Mack.
But there was this document of these two, this two brothers that experienced seeing these beings that were outside of like some sort of craft or whatever.
And they brought them into the craft and they were asking them all these questions and they were, these beings were answering all these questions that they had.
Like, what does this do?
What does that do?
How does this thing fly?
Where are you from?
They said they were from the future.
And there was only one question allegedly that these beings wouldn't answer.
And they asked, what is God?
Or they asked them something about religion and they wouldn't answer that.
Yeah.
Yeah, I think people put a lot of stock in being saved by aliens or them helping us out of our jam.
And the description of the aliens, I think, is the most compelling.
You mean the physical description of them?
Yeah.
And their presence.
What is their intent?
What's the information?
And from a religious point of view, it'd be who do they pray to?
So it isn't like they're angelic.
They're being kind of influenced, supervised.
By something higher.
They were created.
They were created.
Yeah.
And they have a mission of some sort.
Yeah.
One of the fascinating ideas to me is that, because a lot of those experiences also, according to John Mack, is that a lot of them had eggs and semen extracted from them during their experiences.
Very weird.
I know.
Very weird.
I don't know what to.
One of the most interesting theories I've heard about this is that if these are future humans and there was some sort of hypothetical, so like, Just indulge me in the mind experiment that there was like some sort of cataclysm or bottlenecking event in humanity far in the future.
And they needed to, in order to reproduce and not stagnate, they would have to go into the past to diversify the human genetic gene pool in the future.
So that's why they would be coming back to our time to get our DNA to repopulate themselves in the future.
If there was some sort of like, I don't know, global thermonuclear war or something like this.
I know.
We should be able to look into the future.
I think we can get an idea generally, but specifically, I don't see how that would.
Take place.
Yeah.
No, neither do I.
But, you know, those are all I've always been super curious to like what, like, how much does, does, like, the endogenous DMT have to do?
Like, what does that have to do with some of these experiences?
Because also, you have a lot of the people that experience this stuff that seem to have had lots of trauma in their lives.
Like, people that have had lots of childhood trauma report having these experiences.
Yeah, well, you know, there is so much research that needs to be done.
Yeah.
Yeah.
You know, there's a lot of information out there.
You know, the, yeah, I think when you're talking about the beings, you still need to speculate, you know, where they come from.
Are they just, you know, figments of our imagination?
Are they, you know, the brain on drugs?
Or they really come from someplace else.
Right.
Yeah.
And why do they look so much like us?
Like, why, like, like anthropomorphic.
What's that word?
Anthropomorphologically.
Yeah.
How do they have, how are they bipedal, upright hominids that look just like us?
Because they're being viewed by us.
Yeah.
And that's all we know.
Are they making themselves look like that?
Or are they really from some other star system?
Like, how do they happen to evolve just like us?
Yeah.
I think it might be just our imagination, which gives them human form.
Or they might have human form wherever they come from.
Or we can only see them with human form.
Right.
Yeah, when we view them.
Yeah.
This idea of the portal, of this opening some sort of portal to something, a portal in the brain or a portal into the past, seems like the most, or like a magnifier, like you explained it to be, like a magnifier of something that's already deep buried inside the brain.
Or it might be from some other place.
Right.
You know, which is the notion of religion, at least ones with an orientation towards an external God.
Didn't you?
Talk about having an experience of like a previous life.
Like having previous lives.
Oh, yeah.
That's the first chapter in My Altered States.
In your new book, right?
Yeah.
It's a couple of, you know, a couple of your previous lives.
And one was from the early 1900s.
And how, so, so how did this come about?
What, what were you on?
Yeah.
I was on some variant of psilocybin that had been taken by very few people.
It seemed safe in animals.
A variant?
Yeah.
Like a, yeah.
You know, like a, Molecular modification of psilocybin.
Okay.
So, like a synthetically created modified version.
Yeah, it was a lab product.
Yeah.
Anything you had ever heard of before?
No, this was rather experimental.
It seemed to be safe in humans.
I mean, in lower animals.
So, there was a handful of people interested in seeing what its effects were like in humans.
Okay.
Yeah, yeah.
So, the experience on that was the content of the first chapter in the book.
Yeah, I'm in the Ukraine actually in the early 1900s with my grandfather.
Yeah, and they're frightened because of what's coming upon them.
The other is a concentration camp past life, being at the bottom of a heap of, you know, corpses or almost corpses, and then being born into this life.
Yeah, very powerful experience.
How long did these experiences last for, do you know?
It was just one afternoon.
Just one afternoon?
Yeah, yeah, with this new guy.
Both of those experiences were in one afternoon.
Yeah, yeah.
It was rough, but it was very useful, actually.
It gave me empathy for my ancestors in a way I hadn't had before.
So do you think that this can happen?
Is there any documented accounts of this happening to other people where it somehow connects them to their ancestry or where they came from or anything like this?
I think so.
Yeah.
But I haven't come across anything.
It would seem like a natural reaction you would.
You know, experience past lives, or at least you would read history books maybe in a different, you know, light after a big trip like that.
Are you focused on just writing more stuff now, or are you focused?
Do you think that you'll ever participate in any more or get involved in any more of these experiments or studies on humans?
Yeah, I'm not sure.
Like, I still, you know, consult and mentor, you know, other researchers.
You know, I gave a lot of DMT back then, so I'm not all that much keen on, you know, giving people big psychedelic trips.
I mean, it's really very hard work, especially back then.
It was just on my own.
Yeah, I've been mostly working on a version of Genesis, a translation and commentary in the book of Genesis.
Oh, really?
Well, it's been like an almost 20-year project now.
And it's beginning to take form in a publishable manner.
Yeah.
It's now 1,200 pages, so I need to break it.
How many?
1,200.
1,200.
I need to shrink it down to 200 to make it readable.
Oh, my gosh.
Yeah, but it'll be a readable translation and commentary in Genesis, which is a really important book.
I think you can understand the whole Hebrew Bible just through Genesis.
So that's what I've, I'll start with that.
That's the first book of the five books of Moses.
It was the result of this new book as a result of all the notes I scribbled in the margins of my translation of Genesis.
And after a certain point, I just had too many and there was no room to write anymore.
So I put them into a Word file, which was just huge.
All the notes were from reading other commentaries over the years and the derivation of the words.
Buddhist Centers and Intelligence00:06:17
How do you think these people that wrote this stuff came up with these ideas of these people?
Well, that's just it.
They say it's the word of God.
Yeah, so there's just no question about it.
Even the idea of Ezekiel and the wheel and all this stuff.
The wheel.
Like you're writing about something that happened a thousand years ago.
And where, and even like during that time, there's no record of even anybody being named Ezekiel.
Yeah.
Well, where is it coming from?
I think it's a freestanding kind of level of existence that gradually merged into ours.
You know, the world of the Bible, like Adam and Eve and the Tower of Babel and Noah's Ark.
You know, it took place, but on a different plane and then, you know, gradually, you know, kind of interjected itself onto ours.
And there's more historical evidence, like of David, let's say, first temple, those kinds of phenomena.
Yeah, it's super interesting, man.
I don't know what to make of it.
I don't know what to make of it, but there's lots of interesting theories on the Bible and what was going on and how did these people, these prophets, come about and relay these experiences over centuries.
Well, and they're very influential.
I mean, it's affected all aspects.
Well, in a lot of ways, the foundation of the West.
It's a Bible-oriented West.
Christianity, Judaism, the Muslims refer to the text.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And it's, you know, the oldest one.
Yeah.
I just love it.
I just love the language.
Yeah.
And, you know, the ideas are really the Hebrew language.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Biblical Hebrew.
Yeah.
I wonder, I sometimes think about, like, what would society look like right now if they had never burned down the Temple of Eleusis?
And if we still would have lived in this world of, you know, all these, you know, monotheistic religions with multiple gods and not just been stuck to one?
It may be that the one God idea came about because of the loss of the bicameral mind.
There was no longer a spoken voice, which they may have thought was an angel, for example.
And then when all the angels disappeared, they had to make up like a larger God to pray to and ask for advice from.
Or to thank.
Right.
The three kinds of prayer, actually.
Thanking, praising, and pleading.
Yeah.
Which I think can also have some sort of a placebo effect.
Well, if you enter into a state, you know, as a result of doing that, yeah, then I think you're more open to, you know, the placebo or a panacea response.
Have you ever studied Eastern religions?
Zen.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I've practiced and studied under the supervision of a monastery for quite a long time in my 20s.
I never became a monk, but I was ordained as a layman.
It was involved in a local organization.
Yeah yeah, Zen Buddhism, the um during the Vietnam War when uh, that that monk lit himself on fire.
Yeah, the burning monk yeah, that was, I think at one point, one of the most, uh like famous images on planet Earth.
That was like the most shared.
More people saw that and that was um.
From what I understand, recently Zoltan was explaining to me that that a lot of people think that that was like a political thing that he did.
But according to him, and according to other Buddhists, is that monks absolutely wanted nothing to do with any sort of political ideas or movements at all.
Like they were almost like the idea of their practice was the actual opposite of politics.
So what he believes that Burning Monk was, it was a call, like a recruiting call.
Because from what I understand is more people got interested in Buddhism and meditation after that.
Yeah.
Than ever in history.
Yeah.
Well, you know, speaking of the Defense Department and, you know, DARPA, when I was at Stanford, I took a class on Indian Buddhism by a freshly minted PhD from the University of Wisconsin, who told us that these departments around the country were established by the Defense Department to understand Buddhism because they were thinking, Who are these monks that set themselves on fire?
Yeah.
And so they established centers of Buddhist studies at a number of American universities.
Yeah.
And she was one of the grad students.
Right after this happened?
Yeah.
Whoa.
Yeah, yeah, holy great story, huh?
That's bizarre.
Oh my god, I don't even know what to think about that.
Yeah, it was a national security kind of issue, which I can understand, but it, you know, they wanted to understand how you can attain that level of self control or enlightenment to where you can light yourself on fire and not even blink an eye.
Yeah, yeah, I think it was of interest to understand what is Buddhism, what do they teach, you know, how do they do it.
God, that's crazy.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's a well, you know, it established a number of centers of Buddhist studies around the country.
And so, you know, there was a positive outcome.
Yeah.
The motivation was kind of mixed.
I've heard lots of stories of not that it really relates to Buddhism in particular, but lots of people like high up in the Defense Department and like intelligence agencies and even like people that are involved in.
Like rocket launches, like for with NASA and formerly, or formerly for NASA and now for Spacex that are really into this idea of Rosicrucianism.
Tapping into Ancient Information00:04:13
Oh really yeah, I don't know anything about that.
Yeah, I don't know much about it either but, like the, the basic idea of it is um, you can sort of follow these specific protocols to be more tapped into.
This is like a kind of a Jungian idea, but that you can.
You can tap yourself into this like universal consciousness And sharpen your antenna or increase the signal of your antenna to some other consciousness and kind of like, where you can download information.
Yeah.
So, how did they do that?
One of these guys who's described in a book by Diana Pasolka, it's called American Cosmic.
And he was, I think, a mission controller for NASA.
And he explained it by like he would go outside and get out in the sun first thing in the morning.
Spend a lot of time out in nature, not drink caffeine, drink lots of water.
And somehow, like the idea of having lots of water in your system and no like caffeine or stimulants somehow tuned his antenna.
And this guy claims to be able to download.
Now, this guy has like patents to all kinds of like crazy medical breakthrough patents where he's like made a lot of money doing it.
And he claims that he gets this information from these downloads that just like come into his mind.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, you wonder where that information comes from.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Like, is that just, you know, like a latent bit of information or associations that he hadn't made before?
Or, yeah.
Or, you know, some kind of download from above.
Yeah.
Well, do you think it, like, I've always wondered whether it's all that important, at least from a psychological point of view, because it's the message, you know, the information.
It's, you know, the message, you know, the information that's, you know, contained.
In that state, that's more important than what the state actually looks like.
Yeah.
What stood out to me about that is like it seems like the more you get away from technology, if this is true, if you can tap into something by doing the by following these protocols, it seems like the general consensus of it is the farther away you get from technology and the diet, the like the processed foods or energy drinks that we drink all the time,
or the fucking uh, what are those things, those caffeine pouches or nicotine pouches and all this stuff, and the.
The more you can tap into like this ancient antenna that we have buried in us to get information.
Yeah.
Well, due to those, I was wondering if those ketone bars contribute.
Yeah.
I'm sure they do.
You might get more fine tuned.
Yeah.
The ketone stuff's interesting.
Yeah.
There's also this crazy, crazy story I heard of this guy who was like a whistleblower who was talking about how he worked for some like secret.
Aerospace, this private aerospace company, where they went to, they were trying to recruit people for some sort of psychic program, where they were trying to basically get psychics into the military and into intelligence to sort of control aircraft or to spy or whatever.
And they found that the people with the most psychic abilities were people that were in third world countries that weren't connected to Western civilization at all.
And also young people.
So, like, there was a story that this guy told, and he was a whistleblower, and it was an account of like two people that corroborated it.
That they went to Indonesia after there was like an earthquake, and they went there to rescue a bunch of people.
And they were trying to find young people who were left-handed and homosexual.
And those were the people with those traits that specifically had the highest psychic or they called it psionic abilities.
Right.
Psychic Abilities in Isolation00:03:30
Well, you know, the one thing, like I just moved to Albuquerque last year.
I was living in a town called Gallup, New Mexico.
Well, in the county, actually, outside of town.
And it was really quiet.
Like it just was really quiet.
You could hear yourself walk, you know, there'd be a ringing in your ears.
Yeah.
Yeah.
It was just really quiet.
In Albuquerque, the main thing that I've had a problem with is the sound.
Like it's really noisy in a city.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
And it's more difficult to think.
Like I would just be alone for days and days at my place in Gallup and this, you know, and I could be a lot more creative.
Yeah, for sure.
Yeah, productive too.
Yeah, with fewer distractions.
Fewer distractions.
Yeah.
And, you know, the quiet was like it would produce a spiritual kind of effect at a low level.
Yeah.
Yeah, just just being still because there's nothing to react to.
Yeah, I think there's definitely something to that.
But Rick, man, thank you for doing this.
Yeah.
This has been a fascinating conversation.
Yeah, it's great.
Yeah, thanks.
I appreciate it.
I'm glad we met.
And also, for people that are listening, they can find your books on your website.
Is that right?
Yeah, yeah.
And they can order through me.
I'll inscribe and sign books.
rickstrossman.com.
Rickstrossman.com.
Oh, and I just joined.
Oh, that's Amazon, Steve.
Yeah.
And I just joined X, you know, so I'm on Amazon now.
Oh, did you?
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
At rick underscore Strossman.
What a great cover.
Yeah, I apparently did that.
Well, you know, it's got quite a few Easter eggs.
You know, like there's a cat in the corner licking up some vomit.
Yeah.
A Cheshire cat?
It was a real cat.
Oh, a real cat.
Yeah.
And cactuses?
Yeah, a lot of cactus and crystals and looking at the back of your hand to determine the level of your altered state.
That's amazing.
Yeah, and the birds up above, some friends and I were seeing birds coming off of the wall, and that was kind of scary.
And your next one is going to be about Genesis.
Yeah, that's my hope, is a book of Genesis.
You know, I was debating whether or not to do a volume.
you know, two of my altered states because I have a lot of notes.
Right.
Yeah.
You know, so I was kind of waiting to see how things went with volume one.
Yeah.
It's been slower than my purely psychedelic work.
What is the, uh, what is the best like protocol for you to write?
Is there a state you have to be in a certain time of day, certain drugs you like to mix in with it?
Um, usually after Torah study, like I'll spend about an hour reading the Bible.
And then, you know, like if I have a big stretch of time and I'm working under contract, yeah, I'll smoke in the late morning.
In the late morning.
Yeah, then work.
You know, that's for the more creative stuff.
Yeah.
And once I start editing, I have to be pretty straight.
Pretty straight, pretty sober when you're editing stuff.
Yeah.
It helps to talk out loud, too.
That's one of the other things.
Oh, really?
While you're writing?
Yeah.
Interesting.
Yeah, it kind of helps you only think one thought at a time.
When you write, do you use a computer or do you write with pen and paper?
I have a big old Mont Blanc fountain pen from the 1970s.