Danny Jones Podcast - #304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris
Aired: 2025-05-22
Duration: 02:53:00


=== Mushrooms and Blame (12:06) ===

[00:00:07]  My neighbor had mushrooms growing out of their wall, and I was being blamed for it.
[00:00:20]  Oh, it's perfect.
[00:00:22]  Yeah.
[00:00:22]  And I thought it was a joke.
[00:00:23]  It was one of these things where the super bursts into my apartment holding this mushroom, and it was like, What did you do?
[00:00:30]  What did you do?
[00:00:33]  And I, of course, have never talked to them about mushrooms.
[00:00:36]  So it was surprising that he would even make the association.
[00:00:41]  And I was like, oh, that's a good one.
[00:00:43]  It's pretty funny.
[00:00:44]  And then I realized that he wasn't joking and that he actually thought that I had infected the building with spores in some way.
[00:00:56]  So they kicked you out?
[00:00:57]  No, no.
[00:00:58]  I mean, of course, the real issue was not.
[00:01:01]  This also obviously wasn't a psychedelic mushroom.
[00:01:03]  It was like some.
[00:01:05]  Some like Comprinellus species actually identified it for him.
[00:01:09]  And, but it was indicative of severe water damage.
[00:01:14]  So, so that, so there's like, okay.
[00:01:16]  That's not good.
[00:01:16]  If you're at the point where there are mushrooms bursting through the drywall, it's like, what else could be going wrong?
[00:01:26]  You might want to check for mold too.
[00:01:28]  Yeah.
[00:01:29]  So that was part of it.
[00:01:30]  And, uh, yeah.
[00:01:34]  Cool.
[00:01:34]  Manhattan, huh?
[00:01:36]  Dude, so obviously I've been a fan of yours and your show for a very, very long time.
[00:01:42]  But it wasn't until a couple years ago that I made the connection between you and your dad because I was also a huge fan of your dad's documentaries.
[00:01:54]  Like, and my mind was blown.
[00:01:57]  I was like, no way.
[00:01:59]  That's incredible.
[00:02:00]  I mean, like, some of those documentaries that he does, like, the way he does documentaries is so unique and so, like, he just has a very, very Cool way of like the cinematography that he does where he has the interviewers talk directly down the barrel of the camera.
[00:02:16]  Sure, sure.
[00:02:17]  You know how he interviews them like right behind the lens sometimes with his older ones?
[00:02:21]  I think Mr. Death, I think he did it during Mr. Death where all of the interviews, like typically people when they're doing interviews, they're looking to the side, right?
[00:02:28]  To like somebody talking to them.
[00:02:30]  But he has this unique way of having people look straight down the barrel of the camera or having multiple like.
[00:02:36]  The Enteratron is what it's called.
[00:02:37]  Oh, the Enteratron.
[00:02:38]  Yes, I forgot.
[00:02:39]  That's what it's called.
[00:02:39]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:02:41]  Yeah.
[00:02:41]  A name coined by my mother.
[00:02:42]  Oh, your mom made that up.
[00:02:43]  Yeah.
[00:02:44]  That's so cool, man.
[00:02:45]  Yeah.
[00:02:46]  Yeah.
[00:02:46]  Some of those stories, like the Mr. Death story is just so f***ing bananas.
[00:02:51]  Yeah.
[00:02:52]  It is really bananas.
[00:02:53]  Yeah.
[00:02:55]  It's a great film, I think.
[00:02:56]  I think so too.
[00:02:57]  I really love that film.
[00:02:58]  Yeah.
[00:02:58]  Yeah.
[00:02:58]  I don't really hear people talk about it very much, but I think it's like no, nobody talks about it.
[00:03:03]  Whenever I bring it up to people, they've never heard of it.
[00:03:04]  It's a bad name.
[00:03:05]  I think that's part of the as a forgettable name.
[00:03:09]  And the original name, it was supposed to be called honeymoon in Auschwitz, but they thought that was too controversial or something.
[00:03:16]  So it was changed to Mr. Death, but that's sort of a forgettable name, but it's an amazing documentary.
[00:03:20]  Yeah.
[00:03:21]  So the guy Fred's hypothesis at the end of it, some guy, the guy who was involved in some trial basically got Fred to testify for him that the gas chambers in Germany couldn't have been gas chambers.
[00:03:34]  And that was used to, I don't know, that ended up being like this weird side road that the whole documentary took at the very end that you weren't expecting.
[00:03:44]  And it seems like your dad had to do a lot of damage control with that when they were promoting the documentary.
[00:03:49]  No, no, no, no.
[00:03:51]  Oh, no.
[00:03:51]  I don't think that's a correct interpretation.
[00:03:54]  I mean, that was the subject of the documentary the association between Lucher's pseudoscientific beliefs and how this fed into his delusions and his self deception.
[00:04:11]  And I think it was a kind of, it wasn't as if like there was some kind of gotcha moment, like he was only interviewing him.
[00:04:18]  I mean, the subject of the documentary is his involvement with Zundel.
[00:04:24]  And there's, you know, an extensive interview with an analytical chemist in the documentary dissecting why his testing of the Auschwitz gas chambers was methodologically flawed.
[00:04:37]  Right.
[00:04:37]  He was just like putting like dust in bags, in like Ziploc bags, and flying across the world to a chemistry lab.
[00:04:45]  Right.
[00:04:46]  Right.
[00:04:46]  And this is, you know, I think it actually is a very important lesson.
[00:04:49]  And I say this just because this wasn't the subject of the documentary.
[00:04:54]  This wasn't some kind of like he was just.
[00:04:55]  Talking to a guy who was doing electric chair repair, and then he may have initially been interested in him for that reason.
[00:05:02]  Although I actually think he probably did know about the association with Zundel originally.
[00:05:06]  Oh, he knew about that in the beginning.
[00:05:08]  I got the impression that he didn't find that out until like after they were in production.
[00:05:11]  I could be that that was a while ago when I watched it.
[00:05:13]  I would expect not, but I don't remember because all this was made when I was a child, right?
[00:05:19]  Um, but yeah, the story for those that aren't aware is that there was this.
[00:05:27]  Untrained, uncredentialed electric chair repairman who had seemingly done a decent job designing electric chairs.
[00:05:40]  There wasn't, as far as I know, any major instances of his designs failing in a way that caused some kind of terrible suffering or something like that, to the best of my knowledge.
[00:05:53]  I don't have an encyclopedic knowledge of the results of Lucher's execution device designs, but.
[00:06:03]  He had gotten embroiled in this quest to demonstrate that the Holocaust didn't really happen.
[00:06:10]  Right.
[00:06:11]  And he was contracted as a sort of scientist, despite having no training in chemistry, to collect samples from the interior of the gas chamber in Auschwitz and have them chemically analyzed.
[00:06:25]  But the issue is that, in addition to these samples being.
[00:06:32]  At that point, probably at least a half century old, one wouldn't expect any of the.
[00:06:42]  For like hydrogen cyanide is very volatile.
[00:06:44]  So that's the first issue is that this is not something that you would expect to remain on the surface for even, I would imagine, months, let alone decades.
[00:06:55]  Well, it's pretty much a gas.
[00:06:56]  Yeah.
[00:06:57]  That was how it was used in the gas chambers.
[00:07:01]  That's why there were gas chambers.
[00:07:03]  Yeah.
[00:07:03]  Right.
[00:07:03]  So.
[00:07:04]  Because it is a volatile substance, it doesn't have a tendency to deposit on surfaces.
[00:07:10]  I think the idea there was that there was like a Prussian blue type cyanide complex that would have been detected.
[00:07:20]  But again, the samples were diluted because you wouldn't expect this to penetrate more than like a fraction of a millimeter into the chamber wall.
[00:07:28]  And he was chiseling off huge pieces of.
[00:07:31]  Yeah.
[00:07:32]  Yeah.
[00:07:32]  So that's.
[00:07:32]  It was very crude the way he was taking the samples.
[00:07:35]  Right.
[00:07:35]  Right.
[00:07:36]  So it's sort of a portrait of.
[00:07:38]  Self deception.
[00:07:39]  Yes.
[00:07:40]  And the danger of pseudoscientific inquiry.
[00:07:46]  Right.
[00:07:46]  Yeah.
[00:07:47]  It was, you know, one of the most profound things about that documentary that I noticed was he was like, he was explaining after the Bureau of Prisons got him to repair the electric chair, then said, hey, maybe you can come up with these other operations or these other ways of executing people with the like lethal injections.
[00:08:06]  And they even did gas chambers, I think, in the U.S. for the Bureau of Prisons and all kinds of other ways of doing it.
[00:08:12]  He was explaining like, it is really difficult to kill people.
[00:08:17]  He's like, it's not that easy.
[00:08:18]  It's not as easy as you would imagine.
[00:08:21]  Because there was a lot of people that weren't dying, that were just getting tortured or like getting, you know, put in a vegetative state or, you know, and that was one of his hardest things is like actually trying to like push somebody over the edge of death is a lot harder than you would imagine.
[00:08:38]  Yeah.
[00:08:39]  Yeah.
[00:08:39]  That is a surprising aspect of all of this.
[00:08:43]  Yeah.
[00:08:44]  Anyways, incredible stuff.
[00:08:45]  I like your dad's new documentary, that chaos documentary, was also.
[00:08:51]  Really good because he's also done the Wormwood stuff about like CIA's MKUltra and all this stuff.
[00:08:59]  Did you like help him at all with any of this stuff?
[00:09:01]  I'm sure like your guys' interests are very much intertwined.
[00:09:05]  Oh, yeah.
[00:09:05]  Yeah.
[00:09:06]  Yeah.
[00:09:06]  I did.
[00:09:07]  I was involved with the Chaos production in various ways from the beginning, and it's an interesting story.
[00:09:17]  It's, you know, I think that the book is very good.
[00:09:21]  I even read a manuscript of it long before it was published.
[00:09:25]  I'm not sure that I am persuaded by the book's thesis, but I still think it's very interesting and provocative.
[00:09:35]  Yeah.
[00:09:35]  Well, he didn't have like a, well, yeah, there was a thesis, but there wasn't like any conclusion, right?
[00:09:40]  He had like, I think he ended it with like three or four different conclusions of like why they were murdered.
[00:09:47]  Right, right.
[00:09:48]  I should maybe be a little bit, I do agree with aspects of, I mean, there's maybe two, two theses in this.
[00:09:54]  One is that the story of the Manson killings as they are.
[00:09:58]  Typically portrayed as flawed and incomplete and has inconsistencies that I would agree with.
[00:10:05]  But the bigger thing that I think most people are actually interested in is the possibility that Charles Manson was some kind of Manchurian candidate who was programmed by the CIA.
[00:10:14]  And that he's not claiming that that is definitively the case, but that is sort of the subject of the book attempting to identify the possibility.
[00:10:28]  Yeah, sure.
[00:10:30]  But he did point out that he found like.
[00:10:33]  Solid evidence that that clinic in Haight Ashbury did have CIA funding and they were doing like crazy testing with, I think it was LSD mixed with amphetamines and seeing how that affected people.
[00:10:46]  And then that guy Jolly West was visiting there all the time.
[00:10:49]  And then the connection with Manson and his followers going there every single week is just, you know, you can't make any draw any like solid conclusions out of that.
[00:10:58]  But the connections are bizarre that the fact that they were doing that stuff and he was there every week.
[00:11:03]  They're.
[00:11:05]  Medium bizarre, I would say.
[00:11:07]  Medium bizarre.
[00:11:09]  Yeah, because I mean, and I say this as someone that, you know, I've interviewed David E. Smith, who was the founder of the Haight Ashberger Group.
[00:11:17]  Oh, really?
[00:11:18]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:11:18]  He was in the PCP episode of my show.
[00:11:20]  Okay.
[00:11:20]  So I've known him and followed his work for most of my adult life.
[00:11:24]  He's a very influential psychedelic researcher.
[00:11:27]  He created what was once called the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, which was the premier peer reviewed scholarly journal dedicated to research on psychedelics.
[00:11:36]  It was later renamed the Journal of.
[00:11:38]  Psychoactive drugs, but it's a big journal, and so it's not surprising to me that one of the preeminent researchers on psychedelics was doing psychedelic research.
[00:11:52]  It's there's nothing, and that he's in Haight Ashbury, which is the center of this entire hippie movement, sure.
[00:11:59]  Um, and that he's providing free medical care to impoverished people in that community.
[00:12:05]  Again, not really surprising to me, he was treating enormous numbers of people, so I do think that.

=== Reagan Administration Astrology (09:14) ===

[00:12:14]  It's very easy, and I fall into these sorts of patterns of thinking myself.
[00:12:17]  I say this, I'm not saying this like you're stupid if you think this way.
[00:12:21]  But it's very easy when you're scrutinizing historical documents to look selectively at what suits the narrative that you're trying to present to the public and to not critically assess alternate possibilities.
[00:12:41]  And I know this very well.
[00:12:43]  I've spent a lot of time looking at.
[00:12:45]  World War II psychedelic research, and wouldn't it be interesting if the Nazis knew about LSD?
[00:12:52]  Like, for example, right?
[00:12:53]  So, I'm already operating from a perspective of wouldn't it be interesting if the Nazis knew about LSD?
[00:13:00]  So, anything I look at, I'm hoping that it will support that.
[00:13:05]  Meanwhile, it's very easy to ignore large amounts of evidence that don't support that.
[00:13:10]  Yeah, and it's just a critical thinking exercise in general.
[00:13:15]  I know it's less fun to talk the way that I'm talking, I'm sympathetic to the.
[00:13:20]  The funness of exploring these ideas.
[00:13:23]  But more and more, as I see our culture fractured by delusions of one kind or another and a lack of critical thinking skills, I feel less sympathetic to the playful, non critical reinterpretation of the world, like using the world as this kind of fanfic canvas to paint whatever narrative that you want.
[00:13:49]  I mean, that's one of the nice things about fiction you can explore these ideas and you don't need to pretend that they are.
[00:13:54]  True.
[00:13:55]  Whereas I feel like there's a tendency where people use these same sorts of ideas, like what a fiction writer might do, but they project it onto reality.
[00:14:06]  Right.
[00:14:07]  And this is like the new way that people tell stories.
[00:14:11]  Yes.
[00:14:12]  Yes.
[00:14:12]  It makes it more fun, I think.
[00:14:15]  And then when you combine it with social media, it's kind of like throwing gasoline on fire.
[00:14:21]  And then when you also combine that with like, you know, these sensational headlines or narratives that you can come up with and post on social media, they.
[00:14:29]  Organically get more eyeballs and more attention because you're attracting more people, right?
[00:14:35]  People that are less, they don't think as critically.
[00:14:38]  And on top of that, then you have people making careers out of this stuff, out of like taking these things and just running with them.
[00:14:45]  Oh, yeah.
[00:14:46]  So it's like a compounding thing that is like, it seems like it's completely gotten out of control.
[00:14:51]  And I don't know how, whatever, you can, I don't think you can put the toothpaste back in the tube.
[00:14:56]  And this is, this kind of goes, you talked about this a little bit with Rick Strassman.
[00:15:01]  On your podcast, when you guys were talking about telepathy and like brain chips, like what if people could communicate just telepathically and there was no filter?
[00:15:13]  You eloquently stated how like that would be terrible because people would not be able to edit what they're thinking.
[00:15:22]  Like typically, when you write, you have to like go through what you're writing and refine it so you can have the most coherent message and communicate authentically what your intentions are.
[00:15:31]  But if you're just having this chaos of thought confusion in your head being transferred into somebody else, then there's going to be like an insane level of miscommunication happening.
[00:15:45]  And that's like what's going on with social media, I feel like.
[00:15:47]  Yeah.
[00:15:47]  And it requires so much work to undo some kind of falsity that's been propagated that you can just totally lose track of reality.
[00:15:56]  And, you know, I think that it is, you said you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube.
[00:16:00]  I think that culturally, We can develop an appreciation for carefully constructed ideas that are responsibly bounded by the limits of evidence.
[00:16:16]  And when you have something like that, then it's all the more interesting because it's real.
[00:16:21]  You're not playing games with imaginary ideas.
[00:16:24]  And again, I say this as someone who is extremely sympathetic to the excitement.
[00:16:30]  I can't tell you how many of these things I've had myself.
[00:16:33]  One that I've been.
[00:16:34]  Looking at it for years, it's very fringe.
[00:16:37]  Is this idea that astrology has been weaponized by the government, right?
[00:16:46]  Hey guys, if you're not already subscribed, please hammer the subscribe button below and hit the like button on the video.
[00:16:51]  Back to the show.
[00:16:51]  And there is some evidence for this, right?
[00:16:53]  And you can even make a case that is evidence based but somewhat tenuous that the entire Reagan administration war on drugs was astrologically mediated.
[00:17:04]  How?
[00:17:05]  Yeah.
[00:17:07]  It's pretty wild to.
[00:17:08]  Where you have Nancy Reagan, who was an actress, was a kind of low level actress, and is sort of like a character who is sort of analogous to Melania Trump in a lot of ways, where she wasn't taken seriously.
[00:17:24]  Everybody's making fun of her.
[00:17:25]  She's not like a Michelle Obama type person who has political ambitions, who is using her role to disseminate ideas that are constructive.
[00:17:36]  She spends something like $40,000 getting a new set of china.
[00:17:40]  For the White House, and everybody makes fun of her ruthlessly, and this is where our taxpayer money is going, and how frivolous and how stupid.
[00:17:47]  And so she's having this PR crisis, and she's also really into astrology.
[00:17:54]  Both her and Ronald Reagan are really into astrology, and they have an astrologer named Joan Quigley.
[00:17:59]  And she, and this is a fact, this is like a 100% established fact.
[00:18:05]  In the midst of this PR crisis, she's consulting with Joan Quigley about what to do.
[00:18:10]  And Joan Quigley tells her, which is probably pretty good PR advice, you need a mission.
[00:18:15]  You need something that you can bring to the American people that will show that you are concerned.
[00:18:22]  And your mission, because Neptune is in the 12th house, will be America's struggle with drugs.
[00:18:31]  Right.
[00:18:32]  So this is like unfathomable human suffering may have come from this borderline.
[00:18:42]  Random astrological whim.
[00:18:44]  And when you add to that, there's some other kind of interesting little bits and pieces of evidence.
[00:18:50]  There's a CIA whistleblower named Miles Copeland who wrote in a book called The Game Player about the CIA using astrology computers that have been compromised by the government to deliver disinformation to foreign heads of state.
[00:19:12]  You give this astrology computer to the president of Ghana and you say, Enjoy.
[00:19:18]  And the output of the computer is aligned with US interests if they want to, for example, organize a coup or something like that.
[00:19:29]  So, there are all these like, and this is again, this is written about by a person who did work in the CIA.
[00:19:35]  It's very difficult to corroborate all of this.
[00:19:36]  Maybe he's making it up, but what a weird thing to make up on top of that.
[00:19:39]  Astrology computer.
[00:19:40]  I've never even heard of that.
[00:19:41]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:19:42]  And there was a bizarrely large amount of resources that were actually invested into astrology computers during that period in the 1970s, including military funding.
[00:19:54]  Again, so, okay, yeah, it's pretty wild.
[00:19:57]  So, I actually have the astrology computer.
[00:20:00]  The DigiComp DR70 astrology mini computer that arguably is responsible for the war on drugs.
[00:20:08]  There it is, right there.
[00:20:09]  It's a beaut.
[00:20:10]  Wow.
[00:20:11]  The one on the left?
[00:20:12]  Yeah, the one on the left.
[00:20:13]  Wow.
[00:20:13]  Blow that thing up.
[00:20:14]  That's crazy.
[00:20:15]  Where did you get that?
[00:20:17]  I got it from Nancy Reagan's astrologer's astrologer.
[00:20:27]  That's the best story I've ever remembered.
[00:20:30]  It's got an ignition, like a car.
[00:20:31]  You put a key.
[00:20:32]  In the computer to turn it on to rev that bad boy.
[00:20:35]  Damn.
[00:20:36]  How many gears is that?
[00:20:39]  That's so crazy, dude.
[00:20:41]  But anyway, so this is an example.
[00:20:43]  I'm very, very interested in this idea.
[00:20:44]  I've probably collected every little bit of evidence.
[00:20:50]  And is it possible?
[00:20:50]  Yeah, it's definitely possible.
[00:20:52]  It's possible it played a role.
[00:20:53]  It's possible there's more to it.
[00:20:56]  You could make an argument that the Reagan administration war on drugs was astrologically mediated, but.
[00:21:03]  At what point is this factual?
[00:21:05]  At what point is this ignoring real factors that were going into this?
[00:21:09]  At what point am I doing it because it's funny and interesting?
[00:21:12]  And so you have to be self aware and you have to be responsible about these things because it's so, so, so easy to manipulate people.
[00:21:20]  And it's something that I've become, I've always been acutely aware of it in the realm of psychedelic journalism.

=== Journalistic Failure Patterns (02:27) ===

[00:21:28]  I mean, this is like one of the areas where journalistic failure is.
[00:21:34]  The norm, right?
[00:21:37]  It is the exception if a journalist isn't failing miserably in their coverage of drugs.
[00:21:42]  We're just used to that.
[00:21:43]  Of anything.
[00:21:44]  Well, maybe if anything.
[00:21:46]  Well, I mean, yeah, that would be maybe a slightly more cynical interpretation.
[00:21:50]  But yeah, journalists often don't do that well.
[00:21:53]  It's a hard job to be sympathetic to a very unsympathetic occupation.
[00:21:59]  It's a hard job.
[00:22:02]  But they've done a really Really bad job with drugs.
[00:22:06]  And they continue to do an unbelievably terrible job.
[00:22:09]  But what's interesting is we tend not to notice the way these manipulations play out until a decade or so has passed.
[00:22:20]  Like you look back at the scare stories of the past and it's literally laughable.
[00:22:25]  It's a joke.
[00:22:25]  Ha ha ha.
[00:22:27]  Your brain on drugs.
[00:22:28]  How stupid was this?
[00:22:30]  Oh, ecstasy makes holes in your brains.
[00:22:31]  How stupid is this?
[00:22:33]  All these things.
[00:22:34]  You know, I had this huge.
[00:22:37]  Archive of news reports on MDMA, and you have like, you know, cops like lecturing other cops about like, this is a pacifier.
[00:22:45]  Like, the MDMA user puts the pacifier in their mouth to enhance the drug pleasures that they experience.
[00:22:53]  It's all just like nuts.
[00:22:56]  But the same thing's happening now.
[00:22:59]  We just are worse at noticing it until a little time has passed.
[00:23:06]  So, whatever the dominant narrative is.
[00:23:09]  And I guess crucially, before I even get into the examples, because the issue is that these narratives are so dominant that people don't even haven't even started to question them yet.
[00:23:20]  And often there is some truth to it, right?
[00:23:22]  This whole drugs cause brain damage narrative that was the sort of scientistic orientation of the 90s, it's potentially true, right?
[00:23:31]  Like, under some, yeah, like drugs can damage your brain under some circumstances, right?
[00:23:36]  For a typical person, holes in their brain is not really the major concern.
[00:23:42]  It's more like disruption of their social and professional and educational existence through dependence on a substance that probably isn't in most instances causing irreversible neurological damage, but it can still.

=== Caffeine Dependence Risks (14:01) ===

[00:23:55]  Yeah.
[00:23:56]  Have very negative manifestations of one kind or another.
[00:23:59]  So now we went through this era of like a hyper reductionist conceptualization of addiction problems in the United States.
[00:24:06]  So the entire opioid problem in the United States can be exclusively tracked to Richard Sackler, right?
[00:24:13]  Yeah.
[00:24:13]  It's just that's it.
[00:24:14]  That's the whole thing.
[00:24:15]  It's like, right.
[00:24:17]  It's very convenient.
[00:24:18]  Wouldn't it be nice?
[00:24:19]  It sure would be nice if it were that simple.
[00:24:21]  If you could blame everything on Richard Sackler.
[00:24:23]  On one billionaire.
[00:24:24]  Yeah.
[00:24:24]  Yeah.
[00:24:25]  That's it.
[00:24:25]  That's the whole thing.
[00:24:26]  That's why, that's why all those people died.
[00:24:28]  Just one guy.
[00:24:29]  Yeah.
[00:24:29]  But it's like, Give me a break.
[00:24:31]  He definitely played a role.
[00:24:32]  I'm not saying it's completely false, but it's such a laughably reductionist understanding of human motivations for drug use that I struggle to understand how any adult who has lived in the real world could think it is truly that simple.
[00:24:49]  Right.
[00:24:50]  It's like the basic idea that I think people struggle with is that they think drugs are responsible for drug problems, which is a very superficial read.
[00:25:02]  Of course, they are, strictly speaking.
[00:25:04]  But the reality is that to even get to a point where you want to hurt yourself with a drug or you want to, you're willing to develop a problematic relationship with a drug, there's usually some kind of social, psychological problem that is putting you in that position to begin with.
[00:25:19]  Yeah.
[00:25:19]  So just merely having, like you offered me Kratom at the beginning of this podcast.
[00:25:25]  Yes.
[00:25:25]  And I declined the Kratom, right?
[00:25:27]  Why did I decline the Kratom?
[00:25:28]  Because you know a lot more about Kratom than I do.
[00:25:31]  Well, I'm not even saying that Kratom is bad.
[00:25:32]  That's not the point.
[00:25:34]  But the point is that I'm aware of it.
[00:25:36]  It's addictive.
[00:25:37]  Yeah.
[00:25:38]  Yeah, people become dependent on it definitely.
[00:25:40]  Yeah.
[00:25:40]  Yeah.
[00:25:41]  Which in and of itself is not necessarily a bad thing.
[00:25:43]  Right.
[00:25:43]  I'm very dependent on caffeine.
[00:25:46]  So, right.
[00:25:47]  Right.
[00:25:47]  So, dependence in and of itself is not necessarily bad, although I would argue it's not.
[00:25:52]  I can't remember a day in the last 10 years that I have.
[00:25:55]  I mean, there's been in the last 10 years, I could probably count on two hands how many days I've gone without a cup of coffee.
[00:26:02]  Not many days.
[00:26:03]  Like, I drink coffee every single day.
[00:26:05]  Is that necessarily a bad thing?
[00:26:06]  Maybe Kratom's not as bad as coffee.
[00:26:08]  Right.
[00:26:09]  You know, I don't know.
[00:26:10]  Right.
[00:26:11]  So I know this shit's amazing.
[00:26:13]  It's so much better than caffeine.
[00:26:15]  Right.
[00:26:16]  And yeah, I mean, as far as what you know about kratom, I know you've done a lot of research on it and you know far more than I do.
[00:26:24]  I watched part of your documentary when you went to, I think, Thailand and you met with some guys who were basically, they had kratom trees.
[00:26:32]  Yeah.
[00:26:34]  How does it work?
[00:26:35]  And other than the amazing euphoric stimulating, Feeling I get when I drink it.
[00:26:43]  What is like, is there any downside or any long term negative effects of it?
[00:26:50]  The long term effects are not all that well studied.
[00:26:55]  It seems reasonably safe with occasional use.
[00:26:58]  I mean, it is an opioid, it's a low potency opioid.
[00:27:02]  So dependence is not uncommon with people that use it regularly.
[00:27:07]  And then you have the sort of withdrawal syndrome that comes with that.
[00:27:11]  Unlike more common opioids that are related to morphine, it doesn't really tend to cause respiratory depression, which is a big thing because the main reason that people don't like opioids or that there's this extreme fear of opioids in the United States is because they kill people.
[00:27:28]  Right.
[00:27:28]  That's like the caffeine example shows that people are somewhat comfortable with dependence.
[00:27:34]  Dependence in and of itself is not usually conceptualized as a big problem.
[00:27:38]  I don't like living in a world where the NSA is constantly snooping and spying on our web searches.
[00:27:43]  We've seen it on this show time and again how your data can be stolen and used against you.
[00:27:48]  And that's the reason why I mask all my information with today's sponsor, NordVPN.
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[00:29:06]  Now back to the show.
[00:29:07]  But as soon as people start dying from using a drug, then that dramatically changes the way it's perceived by the public for obvious reasons.
[00:29:14]  And because Kratom tends not to kill people, relatively speaking, it's extremely.
[00:29:19]  Safe compared to morphine type or fentanyl type compounds, then it doesn't carry those same problems.
[00:29:27]  That's not to say that it's without problems.
[00:29:30]  And, you know, there's a lot of people that are able to transition off of other opioids onto Kratom, and that's probably a better move.
[00:29:38]  It's very complicated.
[00:29:38]  There's not a simple answer to these questions.
[00:29:40]  It's like whenever people say, is this good or bad?
[00:29:43]  There's no answer to it.
[00:29:44]  It's like if you were drinking yourself to death and you're able to transition onto like one can of this per day.
[00:29:51]  I would say that's probably better.
[00:29:52]  Yeah.
[00:29:53]  But if you're just not doing anything and then you become dependent on this, I would assume that that's a step in the wrong direction, probably.
[00:30:00]  Yeah.
[00:30:00]  So, yeah.
[00:30:01]  So it's, it's, it's a good exercise to abstain from things for a period of time.
[00:30:06]  If you, if you tend to enjoy it.
[00:30:08]  Yeah.
[00:30:08]  Yeah.
[00:30:09]  Absolutely.
[00:30:10]  Absolutely.
[00:30:11]  So I noticed myself on the weekends, I don't drink any of it, but I catch myself thinking about it.
[00:30:17]  Like, oh, it's, it's noon.
[00:30:18]  I could go for a kratom.
[00:30:21]  And I'm like, okay.
[00:30:22]  I know I'm thinking about it.
[00:30:23]  So that means I shouldn't have one.
[00:30:25]  I should go a couple more days without having one.
[00:30:28]  And then there's also the obvious issue that if you're taking a drug to address a problem that you are likely to encounter continuously for the rest of your life, then you're setting yourself up to use that drug continuously for the rest of your life.
[00:30:41]  So if the issue, like I do use Kratom occasionally as an alternative to ibuprofen if I've been exercising a lot and I'm in pain.
[00:30:51]  But then you have to ask yourself do I plan to be sore after exercising?
[00:30:58]  A lot in the future because if you will, then the answer is you may be using this all the time.
[00:31:04]  Or, I mean, another example would obviously be using some kind of hypnotic to go to sleep, right?
[00:31:09]  It's like your chances are you're going to be going to sleep quite a few times across your life.
[00:31:14]  So if you don't develop healthy, once or twice, yeah, you develop a healthy technique for falling asleep, then you're setting yourself up for a lifetime of dependence.
[00:31:25]  So why did you decline the kratom?
[00:31:29]  Recently, especially, I've seen a lot of people becoming dependent on it.
[00:31:34]  Again, not really necessarily a big problem, but it's just made me a little bit wary.
[00:31:39]  And I'm not somebody that is immune to.
[00:31:43]  Addiction by any means.
[00:31:44]  Like, I'm looking at your Zen.
[00:31:49]  You want one?
[00:31:49]  No, no, I don't want one.
[00:31:51]  But my podcast is sponsored by Lucy.
[00:31:54]  Lucy.
[00:31:54]  Yeah, yeah.
[00:31:55]  I have those too.
[00:31:55]  I like the Lucy's better.
[00:31:56]  Yeah.
[00:31:57]  And so I'm friends with the guy that owns it.
[00:31:59]  He'll send me a crate of these things and I know how it goes.
[00:32:02]  It's like I'll consume the entirety of it.
[00:32:05]  And then it's not until it's all gone that I have a moment to reflect and think, is it really good that I just consumed?
[00:32:11]  Like, everybody is obsessed with the nicotine pouches.
[00:32:15]  Everybody's on them now.
[00:32:16]  It's crazy how they've just stormed.
[00:32:18]  Society over the last two years.
[00:32:20]  It's crazy.
[00:32:21]  I mean, nicotine is so unbelievably addictive.
[00:32:24]  It is something else.
[00:32:25]  It's also relatively, I don't want to say totally innocuous, but it's not, you can be crazily addicted to it and it's not necessarily a big deal, which is one of the reasons that it's so easy to get miserably addicted to it.
[00:32:38]  It's like if I take that Zen, if I were to consume that Zen, not that I want to, it wouldn't be a big deal.
[00:32:47]  It wouldn't necessarily be a big deal.
[00:32:48]  It would really just be setting myself up.
[00:32:51]  To continue using it.
[00:32:52]  And I'm really good at convincing.
[00:32:54]  If I can convince myself that something is beneficial for me, then I can almost always use it.
[00:33:01]  So, like, I've never been drawn to any kind of self destructive pattern.
[00:33:06]  But if it's like, oh, you're on this podcast, and it would really kind of sharpen your thinking a little bit.
[00:33:11]  And, you know, it would be a little bit better probably if you were to consume that.
[00:33:14]  And then I can justify.
[00:33:15]  Same thing with things like Ambient for sleep, where it's like, oh, well, I'm doing a thing tomorrow.
[00:33:20]  Is everything okay?
[00:33:20]  Yeah.
[00:33:23]  His headphone cables.
[00:33:26]  Oh, oh, oh, oh.
[00:33:26]  I feel like it's overworked, a little overstretched.
[00:33:33]  Ambient?
[00:33:34]  Ambient, yeah.
[00:33:34]  Very easy to, because you always have to do something the next day.
[00:33:39]  And so it's very easy to convince yourself, oh, I should really do some mental gymnastics to prove to yourself that it would be beneficial.
[00:33:45]  It would be very beneficial.
[00:33:47]  It would be productive.
[00:33:48]  It would be damaging not to do this.
[00:33:51]  Yes, absolutely.
[00:33:53]  One of the things I hate about the Zins, though, is it's very vaso restrictive.
[00:33:58]  So, like, if you're doing any sort of activity or exercise, it's counterproductive for that, right?
[00:34:03]  So, for some reason, it's supposed to be a stimulating, mentally stimulating, but how is that?
[00:34:10]  How is it mentally stimulating if it's like cutting, if it's vaso restrictive, right?
[00:34:14]  Don't you want more blood flow to your brain?
[00:34:16]  There's a few stimulating things that seem to reduce blood flow to the brain, paradoxically.
[00:34:22]  Really?
[00:34:22]  I mean, it's not the pharmacology that isn't mediated purely by the vascular effects.
[00:34:30]  Mostly through the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor.
[00:34:33]  But it's hard to know how much of this stuff is self deception.
[00:34:39]  What is the difference between thinking that you're working better and working better?
[00:34:42]  And how would you know?
[00:34:43]  And could something make you feel like you're working worse, but you're actually working better?
[00:34:47]  This is the whole paradox of nootropic drugs.
[00:34:49]  When people say, Oh, how do you know if a nootropic works?
[00:34:51]  And people say, Oh, I think my memory is really improved.
[00:34:55]  Conceivably, something could be damaging your memory, and you would think that your memory is improved by virtue of being unaware of what you've forgotten.
[00:35:02]  It's like a Dunning Kruger type scenario.
[00:35:04]  Right.
[00:35:05]  Yeah.
[00:35:05]  Right.
[00:35:05]  Yeah.
[00:35:05]  I love these ones.
[00:35:06]  I think these are better than the Zens.
[00:35:08]  These are just nootropic pouches with caffeine and nootropic stuff in them.
[00:35:11]  Yeah.
[00:35:12]  They don't have the.
[00:35:13]  If I take too many Zins during the day, I start to feel sick.
[00:35:16]  Yeah.
[00:35:16]  Like nauseous, kind of.
[00:35:17]  Oh, yeah.
[00:35:18]  Like if I take three of them, I can't do three of them in a day.
[00:35:20]  I can do like maybe max two of them.
[00:35:23]  But the other ones, I don't feel that effect at all.
[00:35:25]  Interesting.
[00:35:26]  Yeah, it's weird.
[00:35:26]  I'm a super lightweight, which is why I was super impressed.
[00:35:29]  I'm very impressed with you and I'm kind of envious of you because you are the complete antithesis of a.
[00:35:38]  You're the opposite of a hypochondriac.
[00:35:42]  You're not afraid of anything.
[00:35:44]  You literally will go into the depths of the Peruvian Amazon and lick a fucking venomous toad.
[00:35:49]  And you're like, well, I hope I don't die.
[00:35:52]  No, no, no, no.
[00:35:53]  That's not.
[00:35:54]  I've never licked a toad.
[00:35:55]  Well, you didn't lick it, but they burned you and they rubbed it on you.
[00:35:58]  And you had the guy in Haiti put the powder on you.
[00:36:01]  He's holding this powder.
[00:36:03]  He's like, this will kill 20 people.
[00:36:05]  You're like, okay, put it on me.
[00:36:10]  Yeah.
[00:36:10]  I mean, I would like to think that I'm not reckless.
[00:36:12]  I'm just, I think I'm reasonably.
[00:36:15]  You just know so.
[00:36:17]  You're very educated in this stuff and you understand the pharmacology.
[00:36:20]  So maybe that's the reason that you aren't terrified of it.
[00:36:23]  Yeah.
[00:36:23]  I would, I mean, some degree of fear is warranted.
[00:36:27]  It's just about finding the appropriate balance where you're not so afraid that you're paralyzed and you don't do anything and prevent yourself from having worthwhile experiences, but also having enough fear that you're not taking unnecessary risks and potentially harming yourself.
[00:36:41]  And yeah, I think to some extent, There will always be uncertainty, but you can learn.
[00:36:48]  I was just working on a piece about the chemistry of LSD type compounds and made a new analog of LSD.
[00:36:58]  And me and the chemist that I was working with all tested it on ourselves.
[00:37:03]  And I didn't know with certainty that it would be safe, but we were very cautious and we increased the dose somewhat slowly.
[00:37:11]  And we were able to, or I was able to, Look at the metabolism of related compounds and make an educated guess about how it may be transformed in the body and how it may or may not be risky.
[00:37:23]  And which is not to say that it couldn't have some sort of unanticipated toxicity, it absolutely could.
[00:37:29]  But you can make a foundation of knowledge based on everything that has been published on a compound or related compounds, and you can make an educated guess, and then you can proceed cautiously.
[00:37:41]  And everything was fine.
[00:37:42]  Really?
[00:37:43]  I was fine, yeah.
[00:37:45]  I enjoyed the compound.
[00:37:46]  Really?
[00:37:47]  Yeah.
[00:37:47]  How different was it from traditional LSD?
[00:37:50]  It was a bit less potent, maybe about a quarter to a fifth the potency and much less visual.

=== Vice Media Overvaluation (11:35) ===

[00:37:57]  It was a less dazzling, but still very pleasant and shorter acting effect.
[00:38:03]  Yeah.
[00:38:03]  Okay.
[00:38:04]  Yeah.
[00:38:06]  So, what was it like?
[00:38:08]  I've always been curious.
[00:38:09]  What was it like in the very early days of Vice and producing those shows for Vice?
[00:38:16]  And that goes back like 15, 20 years ago, right?
[00:38:19]  Yeah.
[00:38:20]  So, did you like, first of all, how did you start and how did you get in with Vice in the very beginning?
[00:38:27]  And like, what was the, like, what were the meetings like?
[00:38:31]  Like, how did you guys decide what you were going to go film and all of that?
[00:38:37]  Yeah.
[00:38:37]  I mean, I find it interesting that people always seem sort of amazed by the work that I've done or they treat it as if it's like very unusual when Vice is producing tons of drug related documentaries and continues to.
[00:38:50]  That in and of itself was never a hard sell.
[00:38:52]  Pretty much every mainstream media outlet is continuously producing stuff about drugs.
[00:38:57]  The only difference is I was doing it in a relatively informed way that was pretty well received by people.
[00:39:05]  So, the selling aspect was never difficult with Vice, and it all did very well and was insanely low budget at the beginning.
[00:39:14]  Yeah.
[00:39:14]  So, you know, it was all gradual.
[00:39:16]  I wrote for the magazine, did a column.
[00:39:19]  Then there was this producer named Santiago Stelli, who was really responsible for most of the early Vice video work.
[00:39:28]  Pretty much the entire Vice pivot to video was a product of this one guy, Santiago Stelli.
[00:39:35]  And he was.
[00:39:36]  Brilliant.
[00:39:37]  He's still around.
[00:39:38]  I mean, he left the United States and is long since gone from Vice, but he, I think, was responsible for a lot of that early internationally oriented character, and he would work on crazily low budgets.
[00:39:56]  So, you know, we were going in those early shoots, the total budget of those things would have been effectively nothing.
[00:40:05]  You know, we'd shoot on a What was it like a 5D or something like that?
[00:40:10]  Canon 5D, yeah.
[00:40:12]  Oh, yeah.
[00:40:12]  Um, or even before that, mini DV tapes.
[00:40:14]  I mean, these were really, um, yeah.
[00:40:18]  I remember that.
[00:40:18]  I remember those days, yeah.
[00:40:20]  I remember my friend who I used to film surfing with, Jerry.
[00:40:23]  I remember when he, I, I know, I knew him way before he worked for Vice, and then all of a sudden I saw him traveling all over the world, going to Antarctica and all these crazy places.
[00:40:32]  I think he went to North Korea, but he was one of the big ones.
[00:40:35]  He would, he filmed the Shane, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[00:40:38]  I think Jerry Rick Ricciotti, yeah, Ricky, yeah, Ricciotti, I think is how you say it.
[00:40:43]  Yeah, and that's when I first discovered all that stuff when he started traveling to all these fucking places.
[00:40:48]  I'm like, Jerry, how the fuck did all this happen?
[00:40:51]  It's crazy, man.
[00:40:52]  It was crazy, but the formula was very smart, which is spend no money whatsoever, just crank stuff out.
[00:41:03]  And this is at the beginning of YouTube.
[00:41:04]  And those things, I mean, they were making money off of them.
[00:41:09]  I think it was actually taken off YouTube, I think because of some kind of copyright issue with one of the.
[00:41:14]  Pieces of music in it, but the Crystal Cole LSD underground LSD silo piece that I did had something like 40 million views on YouTube.
[00:41:22]  This was probably made for like $1,100 or something like that.
[00:41:28]  You know, this is just, and then they were making so much of that type of stuff and all these brand deals.
[00:41:35]  They had a good model for a while.
[00:41:39]  I mean, one issue is that you have to pay people at some point.
[00:41:45]  People are willing to work that way when they're.
[00:41:47]  21, but eventually you want a situation where you're actually being compensated for the work.
[00:41:54]  So, yeah, that was one of the big selling points, right?
[00:41:56]  Was like, we're so cool, everyone wants to work for us for free.
[00:41:59]  Right, right, right, right.
[00:42:01]  Yeah, which is a dangerous road to go down.
[00:42:05]  Um, because even if people do want to do that, you can fall into a pattern of exploiting people and creating a lot of bad blood, which absolutely did happen.
[00:42:16]  Oh, yeah, yeah, there was a lot.
[00:42:17]  I mean, It's unusual to find somebody who isn't a vice hater.
[00:42:22]  Yeah.
[00:42:22]  Especially somebody who worked with them for a long time.
[00:42:24]  Yeah.
[00:42:24]  Yeah.
[00:42:25]  I would say it's like pretty much 100% of people.
[00:42:29]  I. Thomas is one of them.
[00:42:32]  Well, yeah.
[00:42:33]  Well, but Thomas is my very close friend, Thomas Morton.
[00:42:36]  Yeah.
[00:42:36]  Yeah.
[00:42:37]  We lived together for years.
[00:42:38]  Oh, really?
[00:42:38]  I didn't know that.
[00:42:39]  I talk to him all the time.
[00:42:40]  Dude, he's so funny.
[00:42:41]  You should have him on.
[00:42:42]  I would love to.
[00:42:43]  I talked to him on the phone once about doing this.
[00:42:45]  And then I think he ghosted me after that.
[00:42:48]  He's like, I'm not fucking going to hang out with this loser.
[00:42:50]  I'll text him.
[00:42:50]  He's, he's, uh, No, he's great.
[00:42:52]  I mean, he's like.
[00:42:53]  I'm a huge fan of his, man.
[00:42:54]  He's brilliant.
[00:42:55]  Yeah.
[00:42:57]  But he was someone who I think worked really well in that environment.
[00:43:02]  There was a certain type of person that maybe had a more impulsive style of creating things that responded very well to the lack of bureaucracy in that environment, which was unusual.
[00:43:15]  Like the typical pattern that you have with journalism is you have tons of middlemen, tons of people micromanaging everything that you do.
[00:43:25]  I mean, I worked for National Geographic for a period and I was shocked.
[00:43:32]  This actually may be the norm.
[00:43:34]  They expected me when.
[00:43:35]  Working on a documentary to write an entire screenplay for the documentary that would then be approved by executives.
[00:43:44]  And then my task as an interviewer wasn't to talk to people, but it was essentially to reverse engineer the scripted statements in question form.
[00:43:55]  Oh, wow.
[00:43:56]  So, like, Jesus, dude.
[00:43:59]  So that you could come as close to an entirely manufactured piece as possible while still.
[00:44:06]  Calling it some kind of documentary work.
[00:44:08]  And that's just stupid.
[00:44:09]  That's the opposite of what the original idea of Vice was, right?
[00:44:12]  It was just like going out into crazy places and turning the camera on and seeing what happens.
[00:44:15]  Yeah.
[00:44:16]  Seeing, you know, seeing the insane shit that's happening in the world.
[00:44:20]  Yeah.
[00:44:20]  That's so fucking crazy, man.
[00:44:22]  Expensive.
[00:44:23]  It produced bad results as well.
[00:44:24]  Yeah.
[00:44:25]  So there were a lot of things about that model that I think were brilliant and ahead of their time and were copied by lots and lots of people.
[00:44:34]  I mean, they were kind of some of the early people to.
[00:44:38]  Sort of professionalized YouTube documentary work.
[00:44:43]  It is also before YouTube, but this kind of no budget, fully independent style, even though it was coming from a media outlet, that was the idea.
[00:44:51]  It's like you don't need this typical professional production apparatus.
[00:44:55]  You can just throw people out and make something.
[00:45:00]  Right.
[00:45:01]  And at what point, what was like the straw that broke the camel's back with Vice?
[00:45:07]  Was it when they like sold out Rupert Murdoch or like what was the.
[00:45:11]  Was there like a specific point where you realized and like Thomas realized, like, it's time to jump ship?
[00:45:18]  Or was it, I know there was a lot of layoffs and stuff like that, but that, but like, in your perspective, like, what was happening internally that caused that?
[00:45:25]  There were a few things.
[00:45:26]  I mean, one was you had overvaluation of Vice in general.
[00:45:32]  So it was kind of coasting on this massive, what was it, like a $6 billion valuation, something nuts that was definitely inflated, not to say that it wasn't worth something.
[00:45:46]  You had an increasingly resentful and tired workforce and an increasingly large number of enemies that had been cultivated by executives at the company.
[00:45:56]  You also had an increasing desire from rival media outlets to discredit them, which gives an incentive to write articles about how they're bad or irresponsible.
[00:46:10]  Yes.
[00:46:10]  You also had a very ill advised.
[00:46:15]  Transition from streaming online video, which they had built their brand on, to cable TV, which was a dying art in like 2016.
[00:46:25]  Yeah.
[00:46:25]  At a time when this made really no sense.
[00:46:29]  It's like, I think it kind of speaks to how ill advised that decision was that I couldn't watch my own show because I don't have a TV.
[00:46:37]  So I remember listening to videos, interviews of Shane explaining how great of an idea it was and like, okay, I think I'm convinced.
[00:46:44]  I'm sold.
[00:46:46]  It was one of these things where I sort of thought, okay, well, if this is what.
[00:46:50]  If this is what is going to bring resources in and allow me to make documentaries, whatever.
[00:46:56]  But in the back of my head, I was always thinking, this seems like a bad idea.
[00:47:00]  And then on top of that, you had this sort of gradual erosion of their identity, which had begun probably because there were different eras, right?
[00:47:13]  You have the kind of Gavin McInnes era, which is oriented entirely around ultra edgy humor.
[00:47:19]  Vice is basically a humor magazine, a humor, art, fashion magazine.
[00:47:25]  Totally, totally different.
[00:47:27]  And then it goes from that to a sort of transitional literary era that doesn't get talked about very much, where there was this.
[00:47:34]  Brilliant guy named Jesse Pearson, who is the editor of the magazine, and he's a sort of intellectual who wanted to use it to publish fiction and art, photography, and things like that.
[00:47:46]  And that was around the time that I started working there, and it was actually like a really cool era to be there.
[00:47:53]  Then it goes from comedy vice to literary vice to news vice.
[00:48:00]  That's around the time that the HBO thing is that when Spike Jonze came along?
[00:48:07]  He came along well, he was always in the background.
[00:48:09]  Oh, was he?
[00:48:10]  Um, but he came along more during the Viceland pivot as someone that was like in the office every day.
[00:48:16]  I don't really think that he had all that much of a okay.
[00:48:20]  I mean, I think he probably got paid well, but I don't know that he uh played all that much of a role other than um, yeah.
[00:48:27]  So, um, so the then there's news, and that's around the time where they start to have mainstream appeal, and everyone's saying like, oh, this is real news, this is the real news network, and then.
[00:48:40]  They get hit hard by culture war, um, propriety concerns because the edginess that they built their brand on suddenly became deeply unfashionable and dangerous reputationally.
[00:48:56]  So they have to pivot to some kind of like social concern.
[00:49:01]  There was actually, I don't know if you, there's a journalist, Michael Moynihan, who, um, wrote a great piece and did an interview with Barry Weiss about this, about this kind of pivotal moment where, uh, young employees' advice.
[00:49:14]  Decided that the old covers of the magazine were too offensive to be displayed.
[00:49:20]  And so they all had to be moved out of the lobby into the private office of Saroosh, who was one of the founders of the company.
[00:49:30]  And I was there while this was happening.

=== DEA Magazine Covers (06:23) ===

[00:49:33]  And I remember seeing it and thinking that it was unsettling, but also just ignoring it.
[00:49:38]  But he was, I think, correct to point out that this was indicative of rot within the company, where you have the employees saying, Your entire company is so offensive that we can't look at what it has created.
[00:49:56]  And, you know, they start making increasingly bad stuff.
[00:49:59]  After I left, it became kind of like one of the premier sources of anti psychedelic journalism.
[00:50:07]  Really?
[00:50:07]  Yeah.
[00:50:08]  Yeah.
[00:50:09]  Wow.
[00:50:10]  Again, anti psychedelic shrouded in sort of social justice type concerns because this is, we were talking about like the scientific orientation of drug.
[00:50:22]  Scares in the 90s that shifted in the 21st century to a moralistic orientation.
[00:50:29]  So now, if you want to scare people away from using MDMA, you don't say, Hey, it's going to make holes in your brain.
[00:50:37]  You say, Hey, this is a tool of capitalist oligarchs who are trying to commodify your spirit and make you a more efficient worker while funding the genocide in Gaza.
[00:50:51]  Right.
[00:50:51]  Right.
[00:50:52]  And creating super soldiers.
[00:50:53]  And this is a tool of the imperialist American war machine.
[00:50:56]  Right.
[00:50:56]  And so, this is the new, and people say, Oh, okay.
[00:51:00]  Oh, you're right then.
[00:51:01]  MDMA is bad.
[00:51:02]  Thank you so much for telling me this important information.
[00:51:06]  So, it's important to recognize that the anti drug messaging evolves with the culture and what the culture wants.
[00:51:14]  In the 90s, they wanted medico scientistic explanations for why not to use drugs.
[00:51:19]  Now it's about moralistic explanations for why drugs are bad.
[00:51:23]  So, why don't you use cocaine?
[00:51:25]  It's not because there was a rat.
[00:51:27]  With a lever, and he pushed that darn lever until he died.
[00:51:30]  And you don't want to end up like that rat.
[00:51:32]  That's what you'd say in the 80s or 90s.
[00:51:33]  Now it's like, so you want to participate in the exploitation of Latin American workers who could be enslaved by the cartel, and you're going to get high off of this blood money, this product.
[00:51:47]  When, of course, all this is a product of prohibition, and this whole idea is one of the issues with moralism and with scientism, they can both obscure the real issues.
[00:51:57]  That's not to say that there aren't actual moral concerns with certain types of drug consumption, but Moralism has been weaponized very effectively by commercial interests and by government interests.
[00:52:08]  Right.
[00:52:09]  Right.
[00:52:09]  You even see this now with like the White House Twitter page, right?
[00:52:12]  And they do that like weird cartoon of the crying woman.
[00:52:14]  And it's like very, you see this?
[00:52:16]  I haven't seen this.
[00:52:17]  It's like kind of, it's like this, there's like an ice, an ice on their Twitter, the White House Twitter page.
[00:52:23]  The White House Twitter page has an image of like an ice person arresting a crying Mexican woman.
[00:52:28]  And it's like, it's like a very superficially inhumane.
[00:52:34]  Creepy image, and you look at it and you think, Ooh, that's kind of an odd look, like arresting a crying woman.
[00:52:41]  What is going on here?
[00:52:42]  But then it's like, Well, this is a fentanyl dealer.
[00:52:45]  And then you say, Oh, okay.
[00:52:47]  Oh, wow.
[00:52:48]  A fentanyl dealer.
[00:52:50]  It's a fentanyl dealer.
[00:52:50]  Okay.
[00:52:51]  It's a fentanyl dealer.
[00:52:52]  Okay.
[00:52:52]  Yes, yes, yes.
[00:52:54]  And again, the point here, I'm not saying is that fentanyl is always good, but by using that, by using the word fentanyl, suddenly you can completely change the interpretation of an image that would immediately be recognized as.
[00:53:07]  Sort of unsettling and inhumane.
[00:53:09]  Right.
[00:53:10]  And these things are weaponized very, very effectively.
[00:53:14]  And it's important to recognize them and see how they have become tools, right?
[00:53:19]  I did this thing for my podcast where I covered a trial in the DEA headquarters, which was oriented around prohibiting two obscure psychedelics.
[00:53:29]  So obscure that they, for one of them, were not able to provide any peer reviewed scientific evidence that a human being had ever consumed it.
[00:53:39]  Right.
[00:53:40]  So we're talking insanely fucking obscure.
[00:53:42]  When was this?
[00:53:43]  This was recently.
[00:53:44]  This was like maybe four or five months ago.
[00:53:46]  Okay.
[00:53:47]  I covered the entire trial.
[00:53:48]  So it was a two week trial and it was like a group of scientists who were petitioning the DEA not to prohibit this extremely obscure scientific research chemical called DOI.
[00:54:01]  Okay.
[00:54:01]  And what I saw going to DEA headquarters every day for this hearing was.
[00:54:10]  Up close and personal, the entire propaganda mechanism at play, right?
[00:54:14]  You walk through this lobby and it's like faces of fentanyl, faces of that.
[00:54:20]  And really, yeah, yeah.
[00:54:21]  And it's all these little photos.
[00:54:23]  And I was looking through them and thinking, huh, this is interesting faces of fentanyl.
[00:54:28]  And then I'm looking and it's like really, really old people.
[00:54:33]  So it'll be like Janice taken by fentanyl, age 87 or something.
[00:54:38]  And I'm thinking, what's the story with Janice?
[00:54:40]  There's no, yeah.
[00:54:42]  How did Janice die of a fentanyl overdose?
[00:54:44]  But there's no context.
[00:54:45]  And I looked at the website and realized that this is like you can just submit random shit.
[00:54:49]  There's no verification of anything.
[00:54:51]  These are just things that have been submitted, and that there was even someone, a mother, whose son was used in this campaign without her understanding.
[00:55:00]  So it's like right off the bat, you're being hit with a literal wall of propaganda that is all oriented.
[00:55:07]  They have a golden fentanyl chandelier in the office.
[00:55:12]  Is this the hallway?
[00:55:13]  Yeah, yeah, that's it.
[00:55:14]  That's it.
[00:55:15]  Jesus, dude.
[00:55:16]  Whoa, look at that.
[00:55:17]  Look at the one on the very left, very bottom left, Steve.
[00:55:20]  Yeah, yeah, that's it.
[00:55:21]  That's bizarre.
[00:55:22]  That's exactly what I'm referring to forever.
[00:55:24]  So then there's like forever two.
[00:55:26]  Forever 88.
[00:55:29]  Anyway, as you can see, this is just very.
[00:55:32]  I'm not saying people don't die from fentanyl.
[00:55:34]  Obviously, they do.
[00:55:35]  But this is also, without question, propaganda that is neglecting to recognize the real reason that people are dying of fentanyl overdoses, which is prohibition and a lack of regulation of the drug market where people are driven to use completely unregulated, uncontrolled black market substances that might be contaminated with fentanyl.
[00:55:53]  And with fentanyl, it's actually like amazing that this is their chosen.

=== Adderall and Ambient Use (12:10) ===

[00:55:56]  Propaganda tool because it's the worst possible example.
[00:55:59]  This is a drug that most people don't even want to do.
[00:56:02]  They've surveyed people and said, Do you want to use fentanyl?
[00:56:05]  The majority of people don't want to use fentanyl.
[00:56:07]  So, how lucky for the government?
[00:56:10]  You have a substance that people don't even want to do, and yet this is a problem.
[00:56:15]  Well, then you have to ask yourself, How did we develop a problem with people using a drug that they don't want to use?
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[00:57:37]  And the answer is prohibition created this.
[00:57:41]  It's their fault that this has happened.
[00:57:43]  Like, if people had access to, I mean, I think Kratom actually represents one example of, you know, it's kind of a gray market, right?
[00:57:51]  Kratom.
[00:57:52]  Yeah.
[00:57:52]  You can't buy it on Amazon or anything like that.
[00:57:55]  Yeah.
[00:57:55]  I mean, conceivably you could, but maybe Bezos doesn't want to dip into it.
[00:58:00]  But yeah, it's, it's, you can buy it in a gas station.
[00:58:02]  Yeah.
[00:58:02]  Yeah.
[00:58:02]  And I, and I think that while there are problems associated with it, I do think that having a semi regulated, Of an opioid relative to just totally untested, totally unregulated powders represents a step in the right direction where people will still get into trouble, but you'll have a much smaller number of overdose deaths.
[00:58:23]  I mean, the bigger issue, of course, is that I alluded to this earlier, and it's maybe a controversial statement to say that drugs aren't the cause of drug problems.
[00:58:33]  But when you look at 2021, a record number of drug overdose deaths in the United States, you have more people dying of.
[00:58:41]  Drug overdose deaths than ever before in history.
[00:58:43]  That was like the height of the pandemic, right?
[00:58:45]  Yeah.
[00:58:46]  And that's, I would say that that's probably not a coincidence.
[00:58:48]  We're going to blame the Sackler family for that.
[00:58:50]  I think that there's, I think you had a very clear indication.
[00:58:54]  Everyone knew that opioids were addictive.
[00:58:58]  There were endless news stories about it.
[00:59:01]  And so if you're going to say, oh, the Sacklers pulled the wool over everybody's eyes and nobody knew that opioids were addictive by 2021, that's not a valid argument.
[00:59:10]  No.
[00:59:10]  Everybody fucking knew.
[00:59:12]  And yet you have record awareness and record overdoses.
[00:59:16]  So what's different?
[00:59:17]  The difference is there's a fucking pandemic and everyone is miserable and unemployed and isolated and.
[00:59:23]  Atomized and sitting in front of their computer feeling lonely and sad, and they are psychologically ultra susceptible to developing drug problems.
[00:59:32]  Wow.
[00:59:34]  Yeah, that's wild, man.
[00:59:36]  That's an interesting way of putting it.
[00:59:39]  I mean, just one quick story, and it actually involves Thomas.
[00:59:41]  I don't think you'd mind me telling the story.
[00:59:43]  I think it's like so, Thomas and I lived together, and Thomas's father died from cancer, and he was in a very Typical scenario that people are in when they have a loved one die of cancer is his father had been prescribed morphine for the cancer pain.
[01:00:01]  And I remember him coming back to the apartment that we were living in.
[01:00:05]  He had this big bottle full of these blue five milligram morphine sulfate tablets.
[01:00:11]  It was just like completely full.
[01:00:12]  And he put it on the counter and he said, Help yourself.
[01:00:15]  You know, you can have as many as you want.
[01:00:17]  And I took one.
[01:00:20]  I thought it was okay.
[01:00:21]  It made me really constipated.
[01:00:23]  I wasn't really into it.
[01:00:24]  And that was it.
[01:00:25]  That was the end of my.
[01:00:27]  Experimentation with morphine sulfate.
[01:00:30]  Thomas, on the other hand, became addicted to morphine.
[01:00:33]  Oh, wow.
[01:00:33]  So we have two people living in the exact same apartment with the exact same access to the exact same drug, yet one of them becomes dependent and the other one doesn't.
[01:00:44]  Wow.
[01:00:44]  Why is that?
[01:00:45]  If it were just the drug, wouldn't we both have become equally dependent on the morphine?
[01:00:49]  We both had access to the same bottle, but it wasn't just the drug.
[01:00:52]  Thomas was going through a lot of emotional pain as a result of losing his father.
[01:00:58]  I was in a relatively emotionally stable situation.
[01:01:02]  Situation and was less susceptible to addiction for that reason.
[01:01:05]  So, if you deny all these psychological, environmental, social aspects of addiction, you're fundamentally misrepresenting the problem and you'll never help anyone.
[01:01:14]  And everyone's different in regards to like their chemical makeup, too, right?
[01:01:19]  Like, depending on like emotions or what their lifestyle is, like, we're like these bags of hormones and different chemicals that is constantly fluctuating.
[01:01:28]  Like, we're never in a solid state.
[01:01:30]  Oh, absolutely.
[01:01:31]  Right, right.
[01:01:31]  So, like, Drugs are going to interact with everybody differently.
[01:01:34]  Right, right.
[01:01:34]  So, like, I experience extremely severe hangovers.
[01:01:37]  Like, I could have three drinks.
[01:01:38]  Same here.
[01:01:39]  And I would, the next day, I would be just off.
[01:01:43]  The next day would be useless.
[01:01:45]  I wouldn't be like vomiting and, you know, have like a splitting headache.
[01:01:49]  I would just feel like shit, kind of.
[01:01:50]  Yeah.
[01:01:51]  Other people can have five drinks with lunch and it's nothing.
[01:01:54]  So, they're fundamentally responding to this in a different way as a result of likely genetic metabolic differences between us.
[01:02:01]  So, the punishing.
[01:02:03]  The effect of the alcohol hangover just doesn't apply to them as much.
[01:02:06]  And those same people are going to be more susceptible to alcoholism.
[01:02:09]  Yeah.
[01:02:10]  So there's a lot of factors.
[01:02:14]  I've always found it so interesting how people I know, I have friends that can function and live their lives and are ultra successful in their lives that can go day to day doing like hard drugs.
[01:02:27]  Like I'm talking about like ambient cocaine.
[01:02:30]  Ambient.
[01:02:31]  Yeah.
[01:02:32]  You call ambient a hard drug?
[01:02:33]  For me, yeah, I would call it a hard drug.
[01:02:36]  I'm super lightweight.
[01:02:38]  I'm a pussy when it comes to drugs.
[01:02:40]  But I have friends that can just function off this stuff and do it every single day.
[01:02:46]  And I'm not talking just ambient.
[01:02:47]  I'm talking like, I'm talking going from ambient to Adderall to cocaine to Vicodins and muscle relaxers, like all in the course of a day.
[01:02:57]  And they're like, arguably, they're more with it than I am.
[01:03:02]  Oh, yeah.
[01:03:02]  Well, you become tolerant as well, right?
[01:03:04]  That's the other thing.
[01:03:05]  But yeah, I mean, the way you describe it, you make it sound crazy.
[01:03:08]  Yeah.
[01:03:08]  To me, it's crazy.
[01:03:09]  Yeah.
[01:03:10]  But, you know, people drink coca tea in a lot of South America, they're consuming cocaine every day.
[01:03:15]  It's not a big deal.
[01:03:16]  It kind of depends on.
[01:03:18]  The culture, how you're doing it, what the dose is.
[01:03:21]  I mean, people take 80 milligrams of Adderall a day.
[01:03:24]  That's so crazy to me, dude.
[01:03:26]  But for those people, it's just normal in the same way that nicotine very rapidly becomes just normal.
[01:03:33]  Right now, if I were to take that Zinn that's staring at you, staring at me intently from over there, it would be wild.
[01:03:44]  It would be really, oh, yeah, it would be wild.
[01:03:47]  Wow, it would be a wild ride that I will not take.
[01:03:51]  Because I have no tolerance.
[01:03:52]  I stopped using nicotine for now.
[01:03:56]  I may be back, but it's been a little while and I'm going to see how far I can go with this.
[01:04:02]  How's it been so far?
[01:04:05]  It's been fine.
[01:04:06]  You can live without it.
[01:04:08]  Did you notice any sort of crash or any sort of withdrawal?
[01:04:13]  A little bit.
[01:04:14]  Yeah.
[01:04:15]  But that's useful as well, I think, is to actually analyze what it is that.
[01:04:24]  You feel that you're missing what it is that it was doing for you because it's not always entirely intuitive.
[01:04:32]  I mean, I felt that way with cannabis, I don't think I would have really known, but for me, and I think for a lot of people, I would use it just to like reduce my annoyance or anger.
[01:04:42]  That became the kind of thing it's like you're annoyed, you're angry, smoke some weed, chill out.
[01:04:46]  Wow, but then again, it's sort of like taking ambient to go to sleep.
[01:04:49]  A typical life involves numerous occasions where you feel annoyance, and if you don't develop a Healthy way of contending with annoying situations, you're just going to be all bent out of shape.
[01:05:03]  Sure.
[01:05:04]  Yeah.
[01:05:04]  Yeah.
[01:05:05]  But what I was like, like when I was explaining my buddies that I know that use Ambient to go to sleep and Adderall to wake up every day, I was like, it feels like to me you're just burning the candle at both ends and it can't be a healthy way to exist.
[01:05:19]  But somehow these people manage to not only exist, but thrive.
[01:05:25]  Yeah.
[01:05:25]  Which is, I don't know.
[01:05:26]  That's just to me, it's just.
[01:05:28]  It's kind of unfathomable.
[01:05:29]  You can do it.
[01:05:30]  I don't know.
[01:05:31]  It's whether or not it's good just depends on so many factors.
[01:05:37]  I would say all else equal, it's probably better not to.
[01:05:39]  But again, you do have people that struggle horribly with insomnia.
[01:05:44]  Maybe if they just take five milligrams of Zolpidem before bed, it's better for them.
[01:05:50]  It just kind of depends.
[01:05:52]  For me, I travel a lot.
[01:05:54]  And when I'm traveling, I'm always working.
[01:05:57]  And so it never feels like, oh, I'm just going to.
[01:06:00]  Tough it out and not sleep before a strictly scheduled chemistry project where every day matters.
[01:06:09]  Like it just feels too, again, but this is my rationalization.
[01:06:13]  There's too much at stake.
[01:06:14]  I can't, like I'm about to go on a big chemistry voyage.
[01:06:18]  And it's like, you better believe.
[01:06:19]  You better put some high octane gas in your body before you do that.
[01:06:22]  Yeah, it makes sense.
[01:06:23]  Yeah.
[01:06:23]  Yeah.
[01:06:24]  My, my, one of my buddies in particular that uses Ambient a lot, he'll explain to me sometimes how he has like, he has security cameras all over his house.
[01:06:32]  So he'll like, Fight the urge to go to sleep after he takes the ambience.
[01:06:35]  And he'll go into one of the rooms in his house where he has a monitor that shows all of his cameras.
[01:06:40]  And he said he'll be staring at his driveway camera and he'll see a unicorn walk across the driveway and he hallucinates on it.
[01:06:49]  Yeah, that can happen.
[01:06:50]  Often.
[01:06:51]  It doesn't tend to, I had a little bit of that when I first used it.
[01:06:56]  Once you become a little bit tolerant to it, the dominant effect is a sort of ultra disinhibited delirium.
[01:07:02]  So that's like the kind of Roseanne Barr type situation where you're tweeting some crazy shit that you don't remember.
[01:07:10]  Like, that's the real thing.
[01:07:12]  So, it's not so much for most people that they start seeing unicorns.
[01:07:15]  It's more like your entire sense of social, professional caution goes out the window because you're just totally disinhibited.
[01:07:28]  You know, you have these examples of people like masturbating on planes or things like that.
[01:07:31]  And it's like they're often on shit like ambience.
[01:07:34]  Yeah.
[01:07:34]  And I could imagine it.
[01:07:36]  I could imagine how, on one hand, you could see someone being a sex criminal and using that as an excuse.
[01:07:42]  On the other hand, I could see it's crazily disinhibiting.
[01:07:46]  It really, yeah, it really does whack you out.
[01:07:49]  What was the story with Tiger Woods taking Ambien?
[01:07:52]  It was like a he used it as like a sexual enhancement or something, right?
[01:07:55]  Yeah, I think one of his mistresses said that he had, quote, crazy Ambien sex.
[01:08:00]  That's a direct, verbatim quote.
[01:08:05]  Oh my god.

=== Fentanyl Adulteration Warnings (15:08) ===

[01:08:07]  How do you chemically and pharmacologically explain that?
[01:08:11]  It's basically binding to the same.
[01:08:16]  Site on the GABA A receptor is a benzodiazepine with maybe a little bit more selectivity.
[01:08:20]  So it's not so different from Xanax or Klonopin.
[01:08:23]  The main difference with Ambien is that it is metabolized very, very, very quickly.
[01:08:30]  So if you take something like Valium before you go to sleep, you'll still be under the influence of it when you wake up in the morning.
[01:08:36]  Whereas Ambien and related Z drugs have been chemically engineered in such a way that they're very rapidly metabolized intentionally, with the idea being that you won't have any morning grogginess because.
[01:08:49]  Two hours after taking it, it's already largely been excreted or metabolized, biotransformed.
[01:08:57]  Okay.
[01:08:57]  Hopefully, not excreted if you're sleeping.
[01:08:59]  Right.
[01:08:59]  Yeah.
[01:09:02]  Going back to the fentanyl thing, there were tons of stories a couple of years ago.
[01:09:09]  Like, I forget where I saw this piece, but I read this really long essay on this fentanyl epidemic that we're seeing people dying from doing coke that's accidentally laced with fentanyl.
[01:09:22]  And there was this.
[01:09:25]  Theory that people had that somehow China was shipping fentanyl and teaching these chemists in Mexico and South American countries to use fentanyl to make their cocaine or mix it in with their cocaine to somehow kill Americans.
[01:09:43]  And then this person did this really long piece that laid out the case where he said that he went and tried cocaine in various cities throughout the United States, right?
[01:09:53]  Like he went to some high level dealers that sold cocaine to like rich people.
[01:09:58]  And well off, you know, white collar folks.
[01:10:00]  And then he went to like some inner cities and bought cocaine from, you know, like street dealers.
[01:10:06]  And he also, I think, tested it.
[01:10:08]  And what he found was that the cocaine that was laced with fentanyl was sold by people who were also selling heroin because I guess you mix fentanyl with, or you mix heroin with fentanyl.
[01:10:22]  So his theory on this was that, like, okay, these very low level dealers are selling heroin, fentanyl, all this other stuff.
[01:10:29]  But the people that are selling Coke to rich people, they're not selling heroin.
[01:10:34]  So, the low level people are like mixing the coke and the heroin on the same table, and there's actually getting a little bit of fentanyl into that cocaine by accident.
[01:10:41]  And that would potentially describe those fentanyl overdoses with people doing coke.
[01:10:45]  Yeah, that would seem like the simplest explanation to me that there's just some cross contamination occurring.
[01:10:50]  Yeah.
[01:10:51]  It's possible that there's some intentional adulteration.
[01:10:56]  The idea of doing something like that has existed for a long time.
[01:10:59]  There was even a cigarette brand that had opium in it at one point.
[01:11:04]  But.
[01:11:05]  After that, then there was a tobacco industry internal letter that was released to the public that was kind of interesting.
[01:11:14]  Where they, it was, I can't remember what tobacco company it was, but they were talking about the concern that competitors would put this drug, etorphine, into cigarettes.
[01:11:25]  So they weren't suggesting doing it themselves.
[01:11:27]  They were saying.
[01:11:27]  What was the drug called?
[01:11:28]  Etorphine.
[01:11:29]  Etorphine?
[01:11:30]  Yeah.
[01:11:31]  Which is like a so called Bentley compound.
[01:11:34]  These are ultra potent.
[01:11:36]  Opioids that are sort of chemically related to morphine.
[01:11:39]  At that time, it was a very fentanyl, not chemically related to fentanyl, but similar in terms of its potency.
[01:11:46]  But so the idea was the same.
[01:11:48]  What if somebody put a essentially microdose of a high potency opioid into cigarettes in order to make them even more addictive?
[01:11:54]  So people have tossed around that idea with fentanyl.
[01:11:57]  I don't actually know that this is really so common.
[01:12:01]  It's talked about all the time, but you have to be very careful with it, and it does occur.
[01:12:06]  I'm not saying it never occurs, but.
[01:12:09]  I'd want to really have a better sense of how prevalent this is because it's the sort of thing that people will talk about and report on because it's sort of sensational and frightening.
[01:12:18]  But is this really a widespread issue?
[01:12:22]  I'm not entirely convinced.
[01:12:24]  Yeah, I heard also what is this, Steve?
[01:12:26]  1977 scientist at BAT Industries PLC explored adding a highly.
[01:12:32]  Oh, this is what Hamilton's talking about.
[01:12:34]  Wow.
[01:12:35]  And I've read the primary document that's referred to.
[01:12:38]  Yeah.
[01:12:38]  Yeah.
[01:12:39]  I saw a story.
[01:12:40]  I forget where I saw it.
[01:12:42]  It might have been from.
[01:12:43]  Luis Chaparro was telling me that there was a story basically of a cartel, like the head of one of the cartels in Mexico, like hung somebody from a street sign and put a message on there, like warning people of mixing their coke with fentanyl, saying, This is what happens if you guys will mix fentanyl with the cocaine, like you're going to hang because it's not good for business.
[01:13:03]  It probably isn't good for business.
[01:13:05]  Right.
[01:13:05]  That's what I would imagine.
[01:13:06]  Like, if you're selling coke to people, you don't want them to be dying.
[01:13:08]  They're not going to be buying any more of your coke.
[01:13:11]  Right.
[01:13:11]  But the other thing is, you get into this weird cycle where a drug like fentanyl.
[01:13:17]  Is associated with fatal overdoses.
[01:13:19]  That's pretty much the only thing people ever say about fentanyl is that it's killing people.
[01:13:23]  And so when somebody dies of a drug overdose, everybody thinks that's fentanyl because fentanyl is the drug that kills people.
[01:13:30]  So you get this self reinforcing cycle.
[01:13:34]  And I've seen this happen personally on a number of occasions where somebody dies of a drug overdose, everyone says that it's fentanyl, and then the toxicology comes back and it was heroin, something like that.
[01:13:44]  So people still die of drug overdoses and it's important.
[01:13:48]  And again, I think people will often misinterpret what I'm saying.
[01:13:51]  They'll say, oh, he's like a fentanyl apologist who's saying nobody dies of fentanyl.
[01:13:54]  They absolutely do.
[01:13:56]  But the point is, if you decide that every drug problem is a product of fentanyl, then you will misconstrue the problem and may fail to recognize that while the problems with fentanyl are real, it has also become a major propaganda tool.
[01:14:15]  I was reading this crazy story in.
[01:14:18]  I forget what magazine it was, but it was a story basically about how one of the head guys of the Rolling Stones was talking about how back in the day they used to get this pharmaceutical grade cocaine from Merck.
[01:14:31]  And he said they would just use it all the time and like they would have like lines of it chalked up behind the speakers and the amplifiers during live shows.
[01:14:38]  And it was incredible because there was no withdrawal afterwards.
[01:14:43]  There was no like you never came down.
[01:14:45]  It was just like you could do this Coke all day long, all the time, you know, feel yourself through these eight hour shows and no downside, absolutely zero downside.
[01:14:55]  And they somehow got like loads of it from Merck, this like pharmaceutical grade.
[01:15:00]  Cocaine that apparently came from the Nazis.
[01:15:03]  Right.
[01:15:03]  I think this also speaks to the way that people project associations onto a drug and that can change the nature of the drug experience.
[01:15:12]  So maybe that's the case that this is.
[01:15:14]  Sure.
[01:15:15]  But also, you could imagine having a bottle of pharmaceutical cocaine and being impressed by it and thinking, oh, this is the real stuff.
[01:15:22]  This is very, very good.
[01:15:24]  And then because of this association with purity and goodness, then you don't have a come down.
[01:15:29]  People do this all the time.
[01:15:30]  Don't feel dirty, right?
[01:15:31]  Because it's pharmaceutical, right?
[01:15:32]  Right.
[01:15:32]  So people do this all the time with alcohol.
[01:15:34]  Where they'll say, oh, that's, you know, the like, of course you get a hangover with the terrible alcohol, but this is some like really nice, this is some nice stuff.
[01:15:42]  What gives you a hangover from alcohol is alcohol.
[01:15:46]  So, so, so, you know, and I'm not saying that there couldn't be some, you know, minor contribution from sugar or whatever, but if it were the sugar, then anyone that ate a piece of candy would have a hangover the next day, which is not typically the case.
[01:16:01]  So, yeah, it's the alcohol.
[01:16:04]  That is responsible, but people will buy into these ideas about how, like, a really high purity alcohol is not going to produce a hangover or whatever.
[01:16:13]  So it's the same people do this all the time.
[01:16:15]  You're talking about basically placebo, right?
[01:16:16]  Yeah.
[01:16:17]  Well, the interesting thing about placebo or expectation is that these factors exist even in the presence of an active substance.
[01:16:26]  So people always talk about placebo as if those factors only exist when you give somebody a sugar pill or something that's pharmacologically inactive, but those same expectation effects.
[01:16:36]  Apply even in the presence of a pharmacologically active substance, which can make it very difficult to interpret clinical trial results.
[01:16:44]  I mean, this is why anytime you're working with the human mind in that way, there's so many complicating factors that have to be taken into consideration.
[01:16:53]  So, is it possible that their pharmaceutical cocaine was vastly superior to whatever street cocaine they were getting at that time, which maybe was methamphetamine?
[01:17:02]  It's possible, or it's possible that the idea of a hyper pure pharmaceutical product allowed them to.
[01:17:10]  Experience it differently.
[01:17:13]  Yeah.
[01:17:14]  How much of an effect do you think that has on psychedelics?
[01:17:18]  A huge, really huge.
[01:17:20]  Yeah.
[01:17:20]  Yeah.
[01:17:21]  Because I noticed that I think one of the most illuminating things about your trip to Haiti when you documented that tribe and the voodoo, I think it was like a voodoo ritual society in Haiti that they were obsessed with this.
[01:17:39]  And this goes back to like that rainbow serpent thing where they had this pufferfish.
[01:17:44]  Venom that is like 160,000 times more potent than a certain alkaloid that is in cocaine or something like that.
[01:17:52]  And it paralyzes you, paralyzes your whole body.
[01:17:54]  And sometimes it's fatal, or a lot of the times it's fatal.
[01:17:57]  But like these people, they have this spiritual, religious belief, right?
[01:18:04]  In voodoo and that these things happen and that they create zombies or whatever.
[01:18:08]  So, so that has a huge, like, that dictates.
[01:18:15]  How they react to these drugs because they're so, their culture goes back, you know, who knows how far it goes back, but they really believe in this stuff and they believe they have extreme expectations to how or what's going to happen once they take these drugs or engage in these rituals.
[01:18:33]  Right.
[01:18:34]  And so the hypothesis that this ethnobotanist, Wade Davis, had was just for those that aren't familiar, that using a combination of this pufferfish toxin, TTX, and scopolamine, you could.
[01:18:47]  Effectively convince somebody that they had died and been revived as a zombie.
[01:18:53]  And people outside of Haiti were very skeptical of this claim because it wouldn't work on you.
[01:19:00]  It wouldn't work on me.
[01:19:01]  Why are we supposed to expect that it's going to work on them?
[01:19:04]  And Wade Davis's counter argument was that the effect of a drug is not just pure pharmacology, but it's dependent on the cultural matrix in which the drug is consumed.
[01:19:15]  And if you administer this drug in a culture where people believe in zombies, And believe in resuscitation and believe in all of these things that you can induce this effect.
[01:19:31]  And I think it's inadequately studied.
[01:19:35]  There really isn't a lot of corroborating evidence.
[01:19:37]  It hasn't been tested.
[01:19:38]  Yeah, how do you study that?
[01:19:41]  You'd have to go back and spend more time with voodoo practitioners and take more samples and really critically evaluate it.
[01:19:51]  It's inadequately documented to say with certainty that this was a widespread phenomenon.
[01:19:56]  I think that fundamentally, Wade Davis' hypothesis is plausible.
[01:20:01]  I wouldn't go so far as to say.
[01:20:02]  What was his hypothesis?
[01:20:04]  That zombification is a ritual in Haiti that involves the administration of pufferfish that contains the toxin TTX that causes a death like paralysis.
[01:20:23]  The.
[01:20:24]  Victim is buried alive and thinks that they have died.
[01:20:30]  They are then exhumed and given scopolamine, where they are kept in a sort of pharmacologically zombified state and enslaved by the voodoo sorcerer, the Bokor.
[01:20:46]  So, this is like this was the idea.
[01:20:49]  And it's pretty outlandish, but it's plausible.
[01:20:52]  I mean, again.
[01:20:52]  So the Bokor has control of them after they become a zombie?
[01:20:56]  Right.
[01:20:57]  It's like a theatrical way of convincing somebody that they are your slave.
[01:21:04]  Wow.
[01:21:04]  And again, people say, oh, that's crazy.
[01:21:06]  I mean, there are cults and religions all around the world that do things that are not that different.
[01:21:12]  So if you create a system of belief that allows somebody to think that this is real and this is what needs to be done, people do all kinds of weird stuff.
[01:21:24]  So I do think that what he was proposing.
[01:21:27]  Is a possibility.
[01:21:28]  How widespread it is, that's another question.
[01:21:32]  Maybe it was a one off thing.
[01:21:33]  Maybe it never happened, but I think that fundamentally what he was describing was possible.
[01:21:39]  Yes.
[01:21:40]  It seems like there wasn't a study that was done.
[01:21:45]  I think it was with John Hopkins where they were trying to give psychedelics to different religious groups or people like leaders of different religions and seeing how the psychedelic affected them or like what their experience was based on their religious worldview.
[01:21:58]  Yeah, there was.
[01:21:59]  This was the famous study that was never released that Travis Kitchens wrote about.
[01:22:02]  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:22:04]  Have you had him on?
[01:22:05]  Yeah, I have.
[01:22:06]  Oh, cool.
[01:22:07]  Oh, yeah, he blew my fucking mind, dude.
[01:22:08]  He's got, I mean, he's got, well, did you talk about, was this recently?
[01:22:13]  Yes, this was like maybe a month ago.
[01:22:14]  Oh, okay.
[01:22:15]  Did you talk about the symposia stuff at all?
[01:22:19]  What's that?
[01:22:20]  The symposia stuff?
[01:22:21]  Because he was one of the.
[01:22:22]  You talked about it.
[01:22:22]  I mean, we talked about everything.
[01:22:23]  There was nothing that I don't think he held back on anything.
[01:22:25]  Oh, man.
[01:22:26]  What's the one against it?
[01:22:27]  Well, if he didn't talk about it, I don't know that I want to.
[01:22:29]  I'm sure he did.
[01:22:29]  Like, I just don't know.
[01:22:31]  Well, there was an activist group.
[01:22:32]  This comes back to what I was saying at the beginning about people being very careful about how they're being manipulated by journalists and these drug issues.
[01:22:40]  So there was this activist group that Travis Kitchens was actually a part of, an anti drug activist group.
[01:22:46]  Uh huh.
[01:22:47]  And they.
[01:22:50]  Had people who were, I think, like entirely cynical in their orientation.
[01:22:54]  And then they had people like Travis Kitchens who were not cynical in their orientation, but were looking for a place, an outlet for a critique of maybe capitalism or for profit motivations in psychedelic research, something like that.
[01:23:09]  Like, you know, I'm not suggesting that there's no valid criticisms of psychedelic research or anything like that.
[01:23:14]  There absolutely are.

=== Pharmaceutical Informant Theories (15:25) ===

[01:23:16]  The issue is that a lot of the people who are.
[01:23:20]  Engaged with critical psychedelic thought are fucking nuts and are like ultimately anti drug in their orientation, and so they kind of contaminate the entire movement, right?
[01:23:33]  It's like in the same way that there's like valid objections to almost everything, but it's like there's valid objections to smoking weed.
[01:23:40]  But if somebody's life is oriented around being anti weed, chances are there's something kind of weird about their reasoning there.
[01:23:49]  This, I think, this similar thing happened with psychedelics, so there was this group and they, um.
[01:23:55]  Sort of terrorized the psychedelic community, stalking people essentially.
[01:24:02]  Anytime I gave a talk, one of them would either be there online or in person to harass me.
[01:24:08]  This went on for years.
[01:24:10]  And I was always thinking, like, damn, you know, these psychedelic conferences are very expensive.
[01:24:16]  The tickets cost like hundreds of dollars often.
[01:24:20]  And I'd think, who the fuck are they?
[01:24:23]  I can't even afford to go to these things and I'm being paid to go to them.
[01:24:27]  So, how.
[01:24:28]  Are these people going to these conferences just to harass me?
[01:24:31]  Like, what is going on?
[01:24:33]  Like, wouldn't it be interesting if they were being paid by someone?
[01:24:38]  And this was something that I was an idea that I'd been toying with for a while, but it's a very paranoid idea that I felt uncomfortable talking about publicly because it's just a bad road to go down.
[01:24:50]  The like, your ops are paid.
[01:24:53]  Yeah, Soros.
[01:24:54]  Yeah.
[01:24:54]  Yeah.
[01:24:54]  You just don't want to be that guy.
[01:24:56]  So, but I'd had a number of these things happen that were very, actually, a lot.
[01:25:01]  Of things happen.
[01:25:02]  Like, I another example would be I was giving a talk at this New York City psychedelic conference.
[01:25:10]  Had nothing to do because I was working at this lab in Philadelphia that was receiving funding, research funding from a pharmaceutical company to develop new psychedelic drugs.
[01:25:19]  So the talk had nothing to do with that.
[01:25:21]  It was actually just about how different psychedelic drugs are made.
[01:25:24]  Then afterwards, this woman speaks during the QA and she has a prepared statement.
[01:25:29]  And then she's like, I want you to answer before this audience whether you think.
[01:25:34]  Your pharmaceutical company's polymorph B is truly a novel invention.
[01:25:39]  And if not, what are you giving back to the indigenous people of the world?
[01:25:44]  Oh my God.
[01:25:45]  And like the audience erupts into applause.
[01:25:48]  And I was thinking, oh, wow.
[01:25:51]  Whoa.
[01:25:52]  I mean, this is just nonsense.
[01:25:53]  The work that I was doing had nothing to do with indigenous people or indigenous knowledge.
[01:25:58]  And this patent that she was referring to had nothing to do with any of the work that I was doing.
[01:26:02]  So I was thinking, and the stage lights were in my eyes and I couldn't see.
[01:26:06]  Who the person was, but I was thinking, like, wouldn't it be fucking crazy if she were an employee of a competing pharmaceutical company and they were just weaponizing their employees using moralism to try to interfere with the competitor's drug development?
[01:26:25]  Wow.
[01:26:26]  But it's like, this is the sort of thing you don't even want to say this out loud, right?
[01:26:30]  So I kind of made peace with this.
[01:26:31]  I was like, it would be crazy, but you will never know.
[01:26:36]  You will never know.
[01:26:37]  And it's better to just assume.
[01:26:40]  That isn't the case because you'll go crazy if you even think that thought.
[01:26:45]  But then I found the dissertation, the PhD thesis that was written by the woman who asked this question, which has a transcription of her asking the question and acknowledging that she was the one that did this and she was an employee of the opposing pharmaceutical company.
[01:27:06]  Oh, way.
[01:27:07]  USONA, yes, yes, actually.
[01:27:09]  Yes.
[01:27:09]  And thanks to the CEO, the billionaire CEO of the company, and the Beginning of her PhD dissertation.
[01:27:16]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:27:17]  So it's crazy.
[01:27:18]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:27:18]  This was really crazy.
[01:27:19]  This is one of these like, oh shit, it's real.
[01:27:23]  Like, it's real.
[01:27:24]  It's actually real.
[01:27:26]  And this is the sort of thing that's going on.
[01:27:28]  So, this company, USONA, was very, very good about employing people who would harass business opposition using moralism as their technique.
[01:27:40]  They branched their pharmaceutical company into a for profit company.
[01:27:44]  One of the owners has a for profit called Ceruvia.
[01:27:46]  And then they Have all these nonprofit arms that are oriented toward supposedly preventing the approval of bad patents that just happen to be patents of all of their pharmaceutical competitors.
[01:28:00]  It's really actually kind of amazing.
[01:28:02]  And so they promote the work of any journalist who is writing anything negative about their competitors.
[01:28:10]  Wow.
[01:28:11]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:28:12]  And it turned out that one of the executives at USONA was paying or had paid.
[01:28:19]  One of the members of this group that Travis Kitchens was a member of to again also harass their opposition.
[01:28:29]  It's pretty wild.
[01:28:30]  Oh my God.
[01:28:30]  Yeah.
[01:28:31]  And the same person, I don't know if you follow Michael Pollan, but the same person is Michael Pollan's major informant in all of his psychedelic reporting.
[01:28:37]  And that bias is very much evident in all of Michael Pollan's stuff as well.
[01:28:41]  So there's some wild, yeah, there's some really wild stuff going on.
[01:28:44]  And this is like a real example of this sort of thing happening.
[01:28:51]  That's an example of the YouTube comments becoming true.
[01:28:54]  Because if you read YouTube comments of a lot of podcasts, people always speculate that this person's an op working for this person.
[01:29:02]  That's the number one foundational conspiracy.
[01:29:06]  I feel like that exists in comments of people that say anything intelligent or anything interesting.
[01:29:12]  They always say, okay, this person's working for this person.
[01:29:15]  They're a paid informant for this company or this country or whatever.
[01:29:19]  Yeah, yeah, which is funny.
[01:29:19]  And people do that to me.
[01:29:20]  And it's funny because as an impulse, it's not necessarily a bad thing to do.
[01:29:25]  The issue is that they often get it wrong.
[01:29:27]  So, this USONA thing is a very extreme example, and it's now 100% confirmed that this occurred.
[01:29:39]  And not a single journalist has ever publicly discussed this.
[01:29:43]  The only narrative that has ever been publicly promoted has been USONA's narrative, which they promote through association with the grants that are given to journalists to report on psychedelics.
[01:29:59]  There's actually like a.
[01:30:00]  And again, the way that I'm describing this, I want to be very cautious and not suggest that it's like purely calculated.
[01:30:05]  I do think that there's a complexity in all of this.
[01:30:09]  It's a little bit hard where there's a bit of self deception at play.
[01:30:14]  Maybe they really believe what they're saying, whatever, whatever, whatever.
[01:30:17]  But this is one of the reasons that MDMA was not approved this group that was in part funded by an executive at USONA, but also funded, actually, two executives at USONA, but also funded by.
[01:30:33]  A major anti psychedelic organization called the Sarlo Family Foundation.
[01:30:39]  Sarlo, oh yeah, I've heard of them.
[01:30:40]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[01:30:41]  So they fund like most of the anti psychedelic people at the moment.
[01:30:48]  Yeah, Travis was telling me about that family.
[01:30:50]  Yeah.
[01:30:50]  It's a very interesting story, actually, behind all this shit is fascinating.
[01:30:54]  And it's kind of sad to me that no journalists have covered it.
[01:30:56]  That a lot of people that even dip a toe in the water get sued.
[01:30:59]  I might, I hope, you know, it's like you have to be the people.
[01:31:04]  How could they sue you if you dip your toe?
[01:31:06]  Just people talking about it, or they're saying they're being defamed or something?
[01:31:10]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:31:11]  I mean, you can just legally harass people very easily.
[01:31:15]  Harass people with lawsuits.
[01:31:16]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:31:17]  And they know this.
[01:31:18]  So, yeah.
[01:31:20]  And this is all to say I saw all this play out, and it was one of the most shocking things I've ever seen.
[01:31:28]  It was mind blowing.
[01:31:32]  And you can see some of the stuff on YouTube, right?
[01:31:34]  So if you go to the YouTube.
[01:31:36]  MDMA advisory committee hearing, you can see some of these people who were being paid by the Sarlo family foundation to run an anti MDMA campaign lying to the FDA and getting away with it.
[01:31:55]  Including the main person was this woman, Nishay Devineau, who was sort of the head of the anti MDMA campaign.
[01:32:06]  And she just was.
[01:32:09]  Firing off bullshit at a rate so fast that no one could even contend.
[01:32:15]  She's saying that the MAPS, the company that was developing MDMA as a treatment for PTSD, was a therapy cult.
[01:32:22]  She was saying that one of the therapists had pinned down a patient.
[01:32:29]  Well, the patient screamed, Get your fucking hands off of me.
[01:32:32]  But this was like a completely decontextualized snippet of an account of a ketamine therapy session that had nothing to do with MAPS that was.
[01:32:43]  Not at all what she described.
[01:32:44]  It was like the patient was reliving the trauma of having been abused by their father and was speaking to the memory of their father, saying, Get your fucking hands off of me.
[01:32:53]  Oh, wow.
[01:32:53]  So it's that kind of.
[01:32:54]  Anyway, this stuff is messy.
[01:32:56]  It's a messy, big story.
[01:32:58]  But the reason that I even bring it up.
[01:32:59]  And why are they so anti psychedelics and anti MDMA and all this stuff?
[01:33:05]  Like, why?
[01:33:05]  Like, is it some sort of like personal moral thing that they truly believe or is it something?
[01:33:11]  Is it having anything to do with money?
[01:33:13]  Oh, money is a big.
[01:33:15]  I think it transcends money, but money is a big part of it.
[01:33:20]  Money, I think.
[01:33:20]  Because they can't sell it?
[01:33:22]  They wouldn't be able to make it their own product and commercialize it themselves?
[01:33:28]  No.
[01:33:29]  Okay, there's different.
[01:33:30]  This is kind of a bag of worms.
[01:33:34]  And I could try to breeze through it.
[01:33:37]  It's a lot of names that people won't know.
[01:33:39]  But the basic is that there are two different groups that were primarily responsible.
[01:33:43]  One is the Sarlo Family Foundation.
[01:33:46]  And the story there is really.
[01:33:49]  Convoluted and bizarre, but it was that this millionaire Holocaust survivor had been given MDMA by a MAPS employee and had this cathartic emotional release of the trauma that he experienced during the Holocaust and decided that he wanted to leave a portion of his fortune to MAPS.
[01:34:06]  This enraged his estranged daughter, who stood to inherit that money and also felt hurt that.
[01:34:19]  Her father had had this sort of emotional connection with this other woman.
[01:34:25]  I don't think there's any evidence that it was sexual.
[01:34:27]  And so she then can, and then her father also is very old and in the midst of this controversy develops Alzheimer's disease.
[01:34:40]  So he's effectively taken out of the conversation.
[01:34:43]  So now it's an issue of was this elder abuse and a sort of Anna Nicole Smith type exploitation scenario or.
[01:34:53]  Was this somebody who truly had this healing experience and due to weird internal conflict within his family, this turned into a problem?
[01:35:08]  Right.
[01:35:09]  Anyway, whatever the case may be, and I, of course, lean toward the more likely scenario being that he actually had a cathartic emotional release from using MDMA and that.
[01:35:24]  He genuinely considered this experience valuable and that he was not being manipulated, although I wasn't there, don't I?
[01:35:32]  Whatever the case may be, his foundation then began to fund anti psychedelic reporting.
[01:35:42]  And so that was very odd.
[01:35:49]  Yeah, very, very odd.
[01:35:51]  The other one is a bit more familiar, which is that USONA is developing.
[01:35:57]  Psilocybin.
[01:35:57]  And so, if they can position themselves as morally superior to their competitors by funding opposition or sicking their employees or the people that they're paying onto anybody that is potentially critical of them, then it's good for their business.
[01:36:14]  That's simple.
[01:36:15]  That's, you know, an old story.
[01:36:20]  Yeah.
[01:36:20]  It's just like this crazy sort of political corporation shadow war that's going on where they're manipulating the media and.
[01:36:30]  Doing whatever they can to prop themselves up.
[01:36:32]  Yeah.
[01:36:33]  And I really feel bad for well intentioned people that are stuck in the middle of this because it's really hard.
[01:36:41]  Because I know that many well intentioned people have gotten caught up in it.
[01:36:45]  Like there's an interesting story in the New York Times where they're kind of covering some of these things.
[01:36:51]  And you can tell that the journalist who I've spoken with a tiny bit just bought the story, right?
[01:36:57]  There's like this, they're photographing one of the representatives of the Pharmaceutical company, but they never mentioned that he's even an employee or an executive at the pharmaceutical company.
[01:37:05]  It's pretty weird.
[01:37:06]  How did that happen?
[01:37:08]  I guess they didn't ask or whatever.
[01:37:11]  And then they're very good at creating these fake things that they've done to help people that sound good until you really think about it.
[01:37:19]  Like they'll say, Oh, you know, well, we've done this amazing work.
[01:37:22]  We actually were able to shoot down a patent for Viagra and MDMA as a combination therapy.
[01:37:29]  And you think, Wow.
[01:37:30]  And you think, like, Oh, thank you so much for that.
[01:37:32]  For your what's wrong with Viagra mixed with MDMA?
[01:37:34]  It sounds like an amazing drug.
[01:37:36]  Okay, so you get it.
[01:37:37]  Yeah.
[01:37:38]  I mean, they're saying, oh, it's not a sufficiently novel invention, therefore it shouldn't be patentable.
[01:37:42]  But it's like, well, what have you even achieved here?
[01:37:45]  This is not a thing that exists.
[01:37:46]  You just prevented someone from developing this as a medicine.
[01:37:48]  Nobody has been helped by this in any way.
[01:37:50]  But if you frame it the right way, credulous journalists will say, like, oh, good work, sir, for your advocacy.
[01:37:58]  Sure.
[01:37:58]  Anyway, this is a whole crazy thing.
[01:38:01]  But this has been a big, big story.
[01:38:04]  And it's been disheartening to me to see how hard it has been for the journalists that have even tried to draw attention to any of this.
[01:38:15]  Really, like, there's two journalists, Rachel Neuer and John Semley, who have really.
[01:38:19]  Worked very hard to do this, but the majority of journalists have just uncritically repeated the narrative as it has been presented to the public by many of the people who are responsible for creating this mess to begin with.
[01:38:39]  Yeah.
[01:38:40]  Yeah.

=== Church Psychedelic Revival (14:36) ===

[01:38:41]  One of the main things that Travis was explaining to me when he was on here was he was explaining how.
[01:38:50]  There are all these different groups that are trying to use psychedelics to their advantage.
[01:38:57]  And the one that he was pointing out was the Catholic Church and how there are certain people that want to sort of use psychedelics to revive Christianity or revive the church and to give these church fathers the power.
[01:39:21]  To give the churchgoers psychedelics to because they would it would be able to make people more enthusiastic about God or about religion, which in their estimation would make be good for the country, would make people more in line with one's spiritual belief.
[01:39:43]  But like what Travis was pointing out is how fucking dangerous that is when you give these people who are believed to be.
[01:39:52]  The connection to God, the power of giving these people psychedelics, where they're probably already, these people are probably, you know, already vulnerable.
[01:40:05]  And now you're giving them psychedelics and you have the, and you have a direct connection to God and you can tell them whatever you want.
[01:40:12]  Like that seems like a very dangerous, slippery idea.
[01:40:18]  And I think one of the people, one of the people that he talks about is Brian Mararescu in the Immortality Key book.
[01:40:24]  And, um, Travis interviewed Amon Hillman and Carl Ruck, who are both sources for that immortality key book that Brian Marescu did.
[01:40:34]  Yeah.
[01:40:34]  Yeah.
[01:40:35]  And he, allegedly, Brian didn't tell either of them his ultimate aim of that book, which according to Travis was that it would be a great idea to infuse psychedelics into the church.
[01:40:48]  Yeah.
[01:40:48]  And then Carl was very upset about this.
[01:40:52]  From what I hear, like, I don't, I haven't talked to him or Brian about this.
[01:40:55]  This is just what I'm learning from Travis and from Amon is that, um, You know, he wasn't happy about that.
[01:41:02]  And there's also pictures of Brian that was in Travis's article giving the Pope a copy of his book.
[01:41:10]  Yes.
[01:41:10]  Yeah.
[01:41:12]  I read and I really enjoyed Travis's article.
[01:41:14]  And I hung out with Brian and liked him as well.
[01:41:18]  Yeah.
[01:41:18]  So, yeah, he seems like a very nice guy.
[01:41:20]  Yeah.
[01:41:20]  So, I'm sort of sympathetic to both sides of that.
[01:41:25]  I would say maybe there's a less nefarious implementation of.
[01:41:31]  Psychedelics in the church.
[01:41:33]  Maybe it could revitalize Christianity in a way that wouldn't necessarily be bad.
[01:41:37]  It's obviously not my thing.
[01:41:41]  I have complicated feelings about religion because I'm a pretty, I think socially a lot of harms have come from religious thought and generally it's not really my vibe.
[01:41:55]  But at the same time, I do think that our culture is atomized and lacking any kind of unified goals and having a sort of culture system and a value system that People can connect with one another through it can be beneficial.
[01:42:16]  You know, I think about like my grandmothers or things like that, and how socially beneficial religion was for them in their old age.
[01:42:24]  And it provides a community that's really missing from a lot of people's lives.
[01:42:28]  So there's good things.
[01:42:31]  There's also countless examples of exactly this sort of problem that Travis is describing existing where psychedelics are used as tools of manipulation.
[01:42:42]  I'm actually pretty close friends with a guy that was in a psychedelic cult, and it really fucked him up.
[01:42:49]  And it fucked him up in complicated ways.
[01:42:53]  Like, it's not really the story that you typically hear about things like this, where, and some of it I think is so sensitive to him that he's never even fully told me.
[01:43:03]  So I have to sort of fill in the blanks a little bit.
[01:43:07]  But I think part of it was that he got involved in this group when he was very young.
[01:43:12]  I think he was maybe like 13, something like that.
[01:43:15]  And he loved psychedelics and they love psychedelics.
[01:43:17]  So, right off the bat, you have this thing.
[01:43:19]  Everyone is enjoying this thing that is.
[01:43:21]  Transformative and transcendent and amazing and interesting.
[01:43:24]  So that part is good.
[01:43:27]  That part is connection.
[01:43:28]  But then the leader of the group is also espousing other values that, at least superficially, seem good because the psychedelic stuff is good.
[01:43:37]  So he's saying, oh, you know, it's bad to eat meat or whatever.
[01:43:40]  Okay, fair enough.
[01:43:41]  Bad to eat meat.
[01:43:42]  Okay, psychedelics are good.
[01:43:44]  Eating meat is bad.
[01:43:45]  It's bad to be violent.
[01:43:45]  Okay, also fair enough.
[01:43:47]  Nothing wrong with not being violent.
[01:43:49]  That's good.
[01:43:50]  And on top of that, You have to believe in God and the Christian Bible.
[01:43:56]  All right.
[01:43:57]  Okay.
[01:43:58]  Maybe.
[01:43:59]  And also, being gay is bad because it's not what the Lord wants.
[01:44:06]  So then, you know, you start to see how this kind of like, and I suspect that this person was gay.
[01:44:13]  And I think that the homophobic orientation of this particular group may have broken him out, may have really had a detrimental effect on him.
[01:44:25]  Oh, wow.
[01:44:26]  Psychologically, because, I mean, and the same thing can happen without psychedelics, right?
[01:44:30]  That can happen to people just with normal Christianity.
[01:44:34]  Yeah.
[01:44:34]  But I think that this exacerbated it, and there was even more to it.
[01:44:38]  I don't know how much detail I should go into, but there was more to it that taught me a lot of the complexities associated with these things.
[01:44:48]  And this is just part of the difficulty of religion.
[01:44:51]  Like, I don't know that it's necessarily a bad thing.
[01:44:53]  In fact, I think it could be good, but these things are complicated.
[01:44:56]  Yeah.
[01:44:58]  Amon Hillman, how did you discover him?
[01:45:01]  I'd been familiar with him for a while because he wrote this book, The Chemical Muse.
[01:45:04]  Yeah, it's quite a while ago, actually.
[01:45:06]  So I'd read The Chemical Muse and I felt that most of the ideas that were being articulated in that book were totally believable, not particularly controversial.
[01:45:19]  This idea that there was ancient Greek use of psychoactive substances of one kind or another seemed totally plausible to me.
[01:45:27]  Why wouldn't there be?
[01:45:28]  Right.
[01:45:30]  I loved the way he articulated how the ancient medicine and the ancient drugs, which is like the work of Galen, the Galen literature is like 10% of all literature from antiquity, which is crazy that it's medical literature.
[01:45:49]  He explained that stuff as a guide rope that leads you through the dark cave of fairy tales because he uses the drug, the ancient Greek.
[01:46:02]  Drug stuff that Galen wrote as context to everything else, all the religious stuff that was written about through antiquity, which I thought was super interesting.
[01:46:12]  It's very interesting.
[01:46:13]  Yeah.
[01:46:14]  And Hillman is in an interesting position that's sort of analogous to someone like John Allegro, where, or Brian Murascu, where you have texts that the majority of readers cannot access or translate.
[01:46:34]  Right.
[01:46:35]  And so you are.
[01:46:37]  Essentially, blindly basing your interpretation on the authority of someone who you don't know and don't know what their intentions are.
[01:46:47]  And this is the case for a lot of things.
[01:46:50]  Sure.
[01:46:51]  It's probably the case for science for most people.
[01:46:52]  I'm lucky in that there is a domain where I'm able to critically assess things and look at the primary evidence and make some kind of a balanced assessment of how likely something is to be true or false.
[01:47:06]  But when it comes to Reading Allegro or something like that, I don't know.
[01:47:11]  I just don't know.
[01:47:12]  And when you think about how complicated drugs are in our current society, as we've discussed, and how you could even look at our entire published record about drugs, and so much of it would have additional complexity that wouldn't even be evident to some one a thousand years from now, maybe, right?
[01:47:35]  Would they know that there are additional layers to fentanyl as a tool of propaganda, or would they just?
[01:47:41]  Look at the superficial take on this that fentanyl was a problem.
[01:47:45]  Yeah.
[01:47:45]  Would they understand all of the legal, pharmacological complexity involved in all of this?
[01:47:53]  Maybe not.
[01:47:54]  And so it's, I always have avoided these debates about ancient practices because I feel that it is so hard to understand what is going on right now.
[01:48:09]  Yeah.
[01:48:09]  That what hope could I?
[01:48:11]  Possibly have of understanding what was happening thousands of years ago.
[01:48:16]  I don't think you could possibly ever know what was happening thousands of years ago.
[01:48:20]  It's just that he has the most entertaining speculations and translations of what was going on thousands.
[01:48:28]  It's the most fun.
[01:48:30]  And I have to give him credit because, I mean, first of all, I got to give you credit because I didn't know about him until I listened to your podcast with him.
[01:48:37]  And I had him on after that.
[01:48:38]  And it was like a wildly popular episode.
[01:48:43]  And that.
[01:48:43]  Like, got me really interested in the ancient Greek stuff, and I led me on to read a lot more books and stuff on that topic.
[01:48:52]  So, at the very least, whether people want to argue whether he's mistranslating things or he has his own agenda, I mean, he very obviously self admittedly has a bias because his dissertation they told him he had to take all references to recreational drugs out of his PhD dissertation, right?
[01:49:13]  So, he went on and did that, and then after he got his PhD, he was like, This, I'm gonna turn that whole thing.
[01:49:17]  Part into a book about all the recreational drugs that were happening or that was going on.
[01:49:21]  And then he wrote that other book about ritual child, which got him in big trouble.
[01:49:27]  And then he got kicked out of the university.
[01:49:29]  So he was like, he's like the anti.
[01:49:32]  I think he, and he was at a religious university.
[01:49:35]  I think it was Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin.
[01:49:38]  So like he became like an anti Christian classicist.
[01:49:44]  So he wants, like, he has a built in bias in his brain that wants to just utterly appall any Christian person.
[01:49:56]  Which is arguably exactly what happened to Allegro as well.
[01:49:59]  Right, right.
[01:50:01]  But, like, potentially a lot of the stuff he's saying is pretty spot on.
[01:50:06]  Like, a lot of the stuff that he talks about with Galen using this theriac concoction of like seven different viper venoms combined with flesh of vipers and opium in there.
[01:50:24]  Like, and, you know, like, first of all, how did he come up with the idea to combine all these venoms?
[01:50:34]  And who did they test them on?
[01:50:37]  He's like, who's going to be the first test subject to try this theriac concoction?
[01:50:43]  And where did you even come up with the idea in the first place?
[01:50:45]  So it's like, I haven't heard, I haven't, like, again, I have no way of telling it, like, knowing if he just pulled that out of his ass or if he really translated it.
[01:50:52]  But it's definitely super interesting.
[01:50:56]  It's extremely interesting.
[01:50:57]  And it also speaks to a sort of tension that's become prevalent in our culture, which is I like to talk to people.
[01:51:07]  Even if they have really weird beliefs that I don't agree with or whatever, I just think it's interesting to talk to somebody and hear their perspective.
[01:51:14]  And it can be an exercise in critical thinking.
[01:51:17]  It can be an encouragement to evaluate the evidence on your own and try to understand why he believes this and why it may be true or may not be true.
[01:51:26]  And I think that's all good.
[01:51:28]  But we, in general, have this idea of platforming.
[01:51:33]  Like, by even speaking to somebody, this is a tacit endorsement of their character and all of their beliefs.
[01:51:39]  Yeah.
[01:51:39]  And so, you should only speak to good people who you agree with, and any deviation from that represents some kind of danger to a free society.
[01:51:48]  That's a bad road to go down.
[01:51:51]  And I think, yeah, I think in general, even if somebody has beliefs that are wrong, there's a lot that can be learned from it that's interesting.
[01:51:59]  I don't know.
[01:52:00]  Again, with Hillman, I think he's so fascinating.
[01:52:04]  I just don't have the time to even attempt to fact check.
[01:52:11]  Most of the claims that he's making.
[01:52:13]  I did a little bit and it seemed like, what is this word?
[01:52:18]  Laystase.
[01:52:19]  Laystase was a trafficker or a pirate, I think.
[01:52:22]  Yeah.
[01:52:22]  And then Jesus was in the public park and he's like, I'm not a laystase.
[01:52:25]  Right.
[01:52:26]  So it seems that that translation of the word is child trafficker is at the very least non standard.
[01:52:34]  Right.
[01:52:35]  Right.
[01:52:35]  Then you have to think like, is it non standard?
[01:52:38]  It's non standard depending on who you talk to as well.
[01:52:41]  Like a lot of people have, a lot of, And here's the thing about Bible scholars, too the majority of Bible scholars ascribe to Christianity or whatever religion that is.
[01:52:54]  So, like, you're dedicating your life to the science of the history of the Bible, and you also believe in the Bible as your faith, which is weird.
[01:53:07]  And these people don't want to hear anything that goes against what the conventional explanation of Jesus was, especially if you're labeling him as like a.

=== Bible Scholar Beliefs (02:22) ===

[01:53:17]  Jeffrey Epstein type character.
[01:53:20]  Right, right, right.
[01:53:20]  And then, of course, the opposite is also true, where you have one group of scholars that believe in Christianity and will have a bias in that direction.
[01:53:28]  And then you have Hillman, who's the opposite of that.
[01:53:31]  Who's, I believe, satanic.
[01:53:34]  Right?
[01:53:34]  Well, he doesn't believe Satan was a fairy tale.
[01:53:40]  He says, Hail Satan.
[01:53:41]  Yeah, he says, That's what I was saying.
[01:53:42]  He says, Hail Satan.
[01:53:43]  He says, Hail Satan, but he calls that, he got that from Socrates.
[01:53:46]  He calls it the gadfly.
[01:53:48]  He thinks, he says, Hail Satan because it's like a throat punch to people.
[01:53:52]  Because the people hear it and they're like, whoa, it like blows them off of their mind.
[01:53:56]  You know, it gets them like out of their normal frame of thinking, like, what the fuck?
[01:54:00]  And it gets them to pay attention.
[01:54:02]  Right.
[01:54:02]  So he thinks it's like provocative and it's, you know, it's interesting.
[01:54:06]  It's fun for him.
[01:54:07]  It's not like he literally is a Satanist.
[01:54:10]  Wouldn't mind if he was.
[01:54:11]  Right.
[01:54:11]  No, neither would I.
[01:54:12]  But it's super interesting that he, you know, he thinks it's all a fairy tale.
[01:54:16]  He thinks it all, you know, and, you know, he, and he credits a lot of authors.
[01:54:22]  Like I've talked to him, I talked to him all the time.
[01:54:24]  I call him up and talk to him, asking questions all the fucking time.
[01:54:27]  That's awesome.
[01:54:28]  I love him.
[01:54:28]  He's a super nice guy.
[01:54:30]  Yeah, yeah.
[01:54:30]  And, you know, and he teaches me a lot of stuff.
[01:54:33]  And, like, I ask other people that I know who are, like, super knowledgeable and study this stuff for their entire lives, like the Bible and Greek myths and Greek literature and stuff like that.
[01:54:47]  And I often get a lot of corroboration on the things that he says.
[01:54:50]  For example, like, this ancient writer, Nonus, who wrote in, like, the second or third century, talks about.
[01:54:58]  Um, how the sponge that was offered to Jesus was an antidote to the snake venom, and there was like a literal Greek passage that was translated.
[01:55:10]  He used the words antidote that was on the sponge that was given to him.
[01:55:15]  He was, according to multiple authors, on the cross and he was in it like dying of thirst, like he was extremely thirsty, which was.
[01:55:28]  Apparently, that's a side effect of a certain viper venom.
[01:55:34]  I think even you said in the pufferfish documentary that that was one of the side effects of the pufferfish venom.

=== Bicameralism Hypothesis (05:24) ===

[01:55:40]  But again, who knows what the fuck was going on 2000 years ago?
[01:55:45]  But it's like there's a lot of corroboration here, and it's a decent hypothesis at the very least.
[01:55:52]  It's interesting.
[01:55:53]  Yeah.
[01:55:53]  I don't know enough about this to say, but I could see.
[01:55:58]  I mean, are you familiar with.
[01:56:00]  The origin of consciousness and the breakdown of the bicameral mind.
[01:56:04]  Do you know about this?
[01:56:06]  Not deeply, no.
[01:56:07]  I've heard of it.
[01:56:08]  I'm not like super into it.
[01:56:10]  I mean, it's an interesting idea exclusively from this perspective of thinking about it, it's interesting in general, but this perspective of thinking that even the way that we conceptualize something like our own consciousness or sense of self or internal monologue could be totally different, that every aspect of our consciousness could have been so different from the way it currently exists on the basis of different.
[01:56:35]  Religious beliefs.
[01:56:36]  And I think that this kind of bicameralism or whatever it's called.
[01:56:43]  What does that mean, bicameral?
[01:56:45]  It's been so long.
[01:56:46]  I think the idea is that you see your consciousness as like a projection of God into your mind as opposed to a sense of individuality and a personal agency.
[01:57:01]  Okay.
[01:57:02]  And so.
[01:57:06]  You know, you think about something like this, or you know, there's another kind of vaguely analogous idea the Sapir Wharf hypothesis.
[01:57:15]  I don't know if you know about it.
[01:57:16]  No.
[01:57:17]  Where it's like also called linguistic determinism, but the idea is that just the language that a person speaks can change their interpretation of reality.
[01:57:27]  And this is by contemporary linguists considered not evidence based, but it's an interesting idea.
[01:57:35]  Like if you didn't have a word for orange, might orange cease to exist?
[01:57:40]  Or would orange be lumped in with red if you only had red?
[01:57:43]  Right.
[01:57:44]  Oh, interesting.
[01:57:49]  Like, to what extent is our reality defined by the language that we use to conceptualize and categorize things?
[01:57:57]  That's so interesting, too, because ancient Greek had like over a million unique words and like so many different variations of words.
[01:58:07]  And I think, even, I don't think there's even close to that.
[01:58:10]  I think, what is, how many words does modern English have?
[01:58:16]  I'd be curious if you could find that, Steve.
[01:58:19]  But, like, the fact that, and, you know, even going back to his book, how he explains, which is, I mean, the book is not sensational at all.
[01:58:28]  I mean, it makes sense that in the time of the Romans, like, there was plague and famine and hand to hand combat all the time.
[01:58:36]  It would make sense that people were using drugs to get through the day.
[01:58:40]  And that, you know, with infant mortality being like 50%, you know, people would be taking drugs all the time.
[01:58:48]  So, 200,000, is this what it is?
[01:58:50]  The yeah, that's what it seems to say.
[01:58:52]  It seems kind of low to me, but I mean, I guess I mean, I don't know 200,000 words.
[01:58:57]  So, like, 200,000 words in our language, they had over a million words in it 2,500 years ago, you know, and just like the thing, the concepts they were able to come up with, and like the philosophy that you know they were come up with, democracy and the scientific method, and all that, all that crazy stuff that they were doing.
[01:59:20]  Like, it's like.
[01:59:22]  It's just super interesting.
[01:59:23]  I wish I could take a time machine back to that point in history and see what the fuck was going on, but we'll never know.
[01:59:30]  It's also funny how people like to bicker about it online.
[01:59:32]  What difference does it fucking make?
[01:59:37]  You see the people like debating it.
[01:59:39]  I even asked a couple people to debate Amon, like some serious academic people, and they said, I don't want to give him the credibility of being on the same platform as me, or I don't want to give him that.
[01:59:53]  That stage, right?
[01:59:55]  Or like give him that credibility was the general response that I got from people.
[01:59:59]  Yeah.
[02:00:00]  Which is, on one hand, disappointing.
[02:00:04]  You think, well, why wouldn't you do it?
[02:00:06]  But, you know, he's hard to swallow.
[02:00:09]  He's a jagged pill to swallow.
[02:00:11]  And I think that he's actually operating in what I imagine is good faith.
[02:00:16]  But there's a lot of, like, there's a YouTube channel, Professor Dave explains.
[02:00:20]  It's pretty great, I think.
[02:00:22]  And he's constantly debating.
[02:00:26]  Flat earthers and things like that.
[02:00:27]  And it's exhausting.
[02:00:28]  Like, you kind of, I know this is like a big thing with Graham Hancock, for example, where he's like getting angry at Egyptologists that don't want to debate him.
[02:00:37]  But it's exhausting.
[02:00:39]  I'm not talking about Graham Hancock specifically, but I understand generally why experts in a certain field may be reluctant to debate people that they conceptualize as having fringe beliefs because in some instances it's like extremely.
[02:00:57]  Difficult and does cause problems, and you can see the Professor Dave stuff.
[02:01:02]  I mean, he's like.
[02:01:03]  He's called Professor Dave on YouTube.

=== Human Body Drug Factory (04:35) ===

[02:01:05]  Yeah, yeah.
[02:01:05]  He's pretty great, but he's, you know, he's like a real warrior when it comes to this sort of stuff.
[02:01:11]  But he goes after people in these debates about abiogenesis, flat Earth, lots of different scientific topics.
[02:01:22]  Yeah.
[02:01:23]  And it's hard.
[02:01:25]  It's like, it's not, it's a skill in and of itself that I don't think you would necessarily expect a typical expert to have because, It involves this sort of flair as a debater and performance that are not typically part of their profession.
[02:01:41]  What do you make of the idea of using human, like using the bot, like his idea of using, I don't even know if that's his idea.
[02:01:51]  I think it comes from somewhere else, but he basically talks about it a lot.
[02:01:54]  But the idea of using the human body as like a drug factory or like as a, I think the way he describes it is like using venoms, like a small amount of like snake venom.
[02:02:06]  On a young person to where they don't die from it, but they build up the antibodies to the snake venom, and how they could use this young person's bodily fluids as an antidote to snake bites.
[02:02:19]  That seems like an ancient vaccine or something.
[02:02:23]  Yeah, it seems very, very, very roughly speaking plausible, maybe.
[02:02:31]  Do we have any evidence that they, outside of shit like Galen, that they were doing that stuff back then?
[02:02:38]  Do you know that you know?
[02:02:38]  They were creating vaccines in humans.
[02:02:41]  I don't know.
[02:02:42]  Or using humans as antibody factories or anything like this.
[02:02:48]  I don't believe so.
[02:02:49]  No.
[02:02:50]  But the idea of harnessing human metabolism as a mode of effecting chemical transformations, I think, is broadly represented.
[02:03:05]  I mean, the alchemists were very, very interested in urine, without question.
[02:03:08]  The element phosphorus was discovered.
[02:03:11]  In urine from urine analysis, I think the ancient Romans were drinking piss in some of their initiations.
[02:03:18]  I don't know about that, but it seems possible.
[02:03:20]  I mean, but the idea there is that, yeah, there's clearly some kind of transformation of foods that's occurring.
[02:03:28]  One issue is that many, not all, but many metabolic changes are oxidative in their character and increase the polarity of a drug in order to facilitate its excretion in urine.
[02:03:44]  This is kind of like if you were to.
[02:03:46]  There's a lot of things that can happen in the body, but if you were to broadly talk about what phase one metabolism is, it often involves oxidation that increases the polarity of a drug.
[02:03:59]  And one problem with that, in terms of harnessing it for drug manufacturing, is that the reason the body does this is specifically because it facilitates excretion and typically, but not always, deactivates a drug.
[02:04:12]  So this is like our evolved process.
[02:04:16]  For reducing the activity of drugs, there are active metabolites.
[02:04:21]  There are instances of drugs that become more active through biotransformation, but they're often intentionally engineered that way, not always.
[02:04:35]  And what do you think would be, or do you think there would be any effect of combining venoms and consuming them?
[02:04:46]  Oh, I have no idea.
[02:04:47]  There certainly could be.
[02:04:48]  I mean, yeah.
[02:04:50]  Without question.
[02:04:54]  Like a compound, like an ancient compounding pharmacy of venoms, like where they're just creating their own new compound.
[02:05:03]  I mean, look at the ingredients in most products today.
[02:05:05]  They have an insane number of different things.
[02:05:08]  They're each intended to alter the activity in its own little way, changing the taste, changing the color, modifying the pharmacology in various ways.
[02:05:17]  We do that all the time.
[02:05:19]  So I see no reason that people wouldn't be aware of the, at the very least, additive, if not synergistic effects that come from the.
[02:05:29]  Concoction with you know, yeah, many different ingredients, yeah, and I'm sure it also had a lot to do with like the beliefs and the culture that was around back then, too.

=== Non-Psychedelic Compounds (15:13) ===

[02:05:40]  I'm sure that had a lot to do with this stuff.
[02:05:42]  If people believed that this theriac combo was making them younger, maybe that was what he reported to his physician and he wrote about it that way, right?
[02:05:53]  Right, but but I'm not the person for the especially when it comes to these very broad.
[02:06:00]  Discussions like I could investigate the influence of a specific plant or a specific thing, but most of the practices that he was describing were so complicated, yeah, that they don't really lend themselves to any kind of casual critical analysis.
[02:06:17]  It's not the kind of thing like I could, you know, you could design experiments, you could dedicate yourself to it, but it's not something that you could just, you know, on a podcast say, like, yeah, right, yep, it works.
[02:06:32]  It would be amazing to see somebody try to engineer.
[02:06:35]  Uh, the all the ingredients of that and then analyze it and see what the fuck it was, what the fuck it actually did.
[02:06:42]  Yeah.
[02:06:43]  Um, I'm gonna take a pee break real quick.
[02:06:44]  Okay.
[02:06:45]  We'll jump back in.
[02:06:45]  Okay.
[02:06:47]  We're talking about David Nichols.
[02:06:48]  He got what Travis told me about this.
[02:06:51]  He was saying that, um, David got some crazy DARPA grant to work on psychedelics, uh, the use of, um, what was the psychedelic?
[02:07:04]  Some sort of psychedelic for soldiers.
[02:07:07]  And we actually looked it up, and it wasn't David Nichols.
[02:07:09]  It was somebody I think the head of his department.
[02:07:12]  It's Brian Ross.
[02:07:12]  Brian.
[02:07:13]  Okay.
[02:07:13]  Yes.
[02:07:13]  That's right.
[02:07:14]  Yeah.
[02:07:15]  And allegedly, I mean, who knows what the fuck DARPA is doing?
[02:07:23]  Spending all, I mean, allegedly, according to the grant, like according to all the published research on it, is that they're trying to take the psychedelic trip out of these drugs so that they can get the benefit.
[02:07:37]  Of the therapy for use as a PTSD or battle fatigue, things like this.
[02:07:43]  But according to Travis, there's this dude named Dana Beal who is trafficking Ibogaine to the front lines of the Ukraine to give the Ukrainian soldiers so that they can enhance their edge detection and their aim on the battlefield.
[02:08:01]  And also to combat battle fatigue so they can get right back out there and continue fighting.
[02:08:07]  Oh, yeah.
[02:08:07]  I mean, well, I'm friends with Dana Beale.
[02:08:09]  Are you really?
[02:08:10]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[02:08:12]  He's a character.
[02:08:14]  Wild dude.
[02:08:15]  Yeah, he's one of the original New York City psychedelic weirdos.
[02:08:21]  Oh, okay.
[02:08:22]  Everybody knows Dana Beale.
[02:08:24]  Yeah.
[02:08:24]  I don't doubt that he's doing that.
[02:08:26]  I would say that's a very separate thing from Brian Roth's work, which is funded by DARPA and is published and publicly available and brilliant and beneficial to all of humanity.
[02:08:38]  It's not.
[02:08:39]  It's actually not clinical work.
[02:08:41]  It's basic scientific research that has been the most important work ever published on the structure of the serotonin 2A and 2B receptor.
[02:08:53]  And he very recently published a new paper that goes even further in elucidating how different psychedelics interact with the protein and how these different types of interactions produce either psychedelic or non psychedelic effects.
[02:09:10]  So there's nothing even remotely nefarious about any of the work that Brian Roth is doing.
[02:09:15]  Some of the most important cutting edge pharmacology on serotonin 2a agonists that exists and the idea, if i'm correct, is they is taking the trip out of the psychedelics so that people can get it without the sort of uh hallucinate, hallucination or uh, that's part of it.
[02:09:41]  Yeah yeah, it's part of it, definitely like.
[02:09:42]  The question is like, do you get that same benefit from these drugs without the psychedelic effect?
[02:09:48]  It depends on what benefit you're describing and what you're looking for, and who the patient is, and what the disorder is, and exactly because you conceivably have a full spectrum of psychedelic to not psychedelic.
[02:10:04]  And maybe at one point on the spectrum for a certain type of person, you're getting the benefit and maybe not.
[02:10:10]  And what about the duration and what about the environment and what about a million and the frequency of dosing and a million things?
[02:10:15]  It's very hard to say what is optimal.
[02:10:18]  I try to keep an open mind because I think people can be very.
[02:10:21]  Moralistic about things like this, or they'll say, like, oh, you're just commodifying this and destroying the spirituality and destroying the whole thing that makes this valuable and making it into the next Prozac.
[02:10:32]  Yeah, okay, I understand the argument, but we should explore everything and see what's out there because Brian Roth's work you could look at this two ways you could say, oh, he's studying non psychedelic psychedelics, but part of studying non psychedelic psychedelics is also recognizing what.
[02:10:55]  Creates a psychedelic.
[02:10:56]  You can kind of move in both directions.
[02:10:58]  So, one of the big subjects of this work has been biased signaling at the serotonin 2A receptor and whether a receptor interaction that is associated with something called beta arrestin or GQ is responsible for the psychedelic effect.
[02:11:19]  And this work has allowed us to better understand what makes psychedelics psychedelic in terms of their molecular neuropharmacology.
[02:11:27]  It's been very important.
[02:11:28]  So, I don't see these things as like.
[02:11:29]  Two things that exist in opposition to one another.
[02:11:33]  You could argue in the same direction and say that studying psychedelics shows you what you need for maybe, in this instance, a GQ biased path that would be more likely to be psychedelic.
[02:11:45]  But I think the basic thing is the psychedelic experience is incredibly powerful and is maybe unsuitable for certain types of people.
[02:12:00]  And maybe not beneficial.
[02:12:01]  And if you had a way of dialing it down a little bit, that could allow certain benefits of psychedelics, which may have little to do with what we typically associate with the psychedelic experience, right?
[02:12:14]  There's a neuroscientist, pharmacologist named Chuck Nichols, and he did a lot of work on the anti inflammatory effects of different psychedelic compounds.
[02:12:27]  So he's showing that there could be a therapeutic effect from psychedelics that's completely separate from.
[02:12:33]  What we typically conceptualize as the therapeutic effect of psychedelics, right?
[02:12:37]  Same thing goes for treatment of addiction, treatment of cluster headaches, right?
[02:12:41]  Thinking that the point of a psychedelic experience is to have this religious, transcendent, hypervisual experience, I think is somewhat reductive because who's to say what they can or can't do or should or shouldn't do?
[02:12:54]  So I'm in support of people that are exploring every avenue of what can happen at serotonin receptors.
[02:13:05]  Yes.
[02:13:06]  And so the serotonin 2A receptor is what's Primarily responsible for the psychedelic experience that you receive.
[02:13:15]  With the classical psychedelics.
[02:13:17]  And humans have had this receptor forever, as far as we know.
[02:13:23]  Seems like it, yeah.
[02:13:25]  I mean, even non humans have it.
[02:13:28]  Even non humans have it?
[02:13:29]  Even non humans have it.
[02:13:31]  Rodents have it.
[02:13:32]  Rodents have a 2A receptor.
[02:13:33]  So do we know, or do we have, there's no way to know if they can experience anything similar to what we experience when you give them these drugs.
[02:13:43]  There's no way to know whether another human being is experiencing anything similar to what you're experiencing.
[02:13:48]  That's a really good point.
[02:13:49]  There's a lot of unknown when it comes to the internal experience of another organism.
[02:13:57]  But what we do know, and it sounds incredibly abstract, but it's actually a robust predictor, is that when you give a rodent a 5HG2A agonist that has GQ bias signaling and even balanced, it seems to cause their heads to twitch.
[02:14:16]  And that.
[02:14:17]  Head twitch is strongly associated with psychedelic effects in humans.
[02:14:22]  There are exceptions, but it's a for something as abstract as this sort of wet dog shake head twitch thing.
[02:14:29]  Yeah, it's pretty good.
[02:14:32]  It's better than you would think.
[02:14:33]  It's the sort of thing where if you're looking at a scientific paper, you could laugh at it and say, Oh, they're saying this mouse twitching its head predicts psychedelic activity in humans.
[02:14:42]  These silly scientists, they're so they don't get it at all.
[02:14:47]  Turns out it's actually pretty damn predictive.
[02:14:50]  Wow, yeah.
[02:14:52]  What are the performance enhancing effects of psychedelics?
[02:14:58]  And, like, is there an optimal dose for cognitive enhancement?
[02:15:03]  Because I know there's a correlation with psychedelics and growth of new neurons in the brain.
[02:15:10]  Is this right?
[02:15:11]  Under some experimental conditions, yeah.
[02:15:14]  Okay.
[02:15:14]  Yeah.
[02:15:16]  Yes.
[02:15:17]  It's so hard to say because what constitutes performance enhancement could be radically different between people.
[02:15:23]  Sure, what's the goal?
[02:15:25]  Performance enhancement for a guitarist might be totally different for an air traffic controller.
[02:15:31]  Sure.
[02:15:33]  Yeah, I don't know.
[02:15:33]  I just always thought that this stuff made people smarter because the smartest people I know are like, take a lot of psychedelics.
[02:15:39]  Yeah, I mean, it's definitely a psychologically interesting experience that maybe certain types of people are drawn to, are interested in consciousness.
[02:15:50]  And yeah, I would hesitate to say that it can make you smarter, but I think it.
[02:15:56]  Can make you more aware of certain things and it can be very inspiring for some people.
[02:16:02]  And for someone like me that's not religiously inclined, it can give you a taste of what I imagine religious experience is like for people that are.
[02:16:12]  Have you ever seen that DMT experiment where they shine the laser on the wall?
[02:16:17]  Yeah.
[02:16:18]  What did you make of that?
[02:16:23]  I think it's interesting.
[02:16:24]  I think it is.
[02:16:28]  I'm not persuaded that the code of the simulation is being revealed through this process.
[02:16:36]  I mean, I appreciate the attempt to assess something like that.
[02:16:42]  I think it's an idea.
[02:16:43]  I think it's very cool.
[02:16:45]  I've gone to the website of the guy who's at the forefront of this DMT laser examination technique, he has some weird stuff like eating chocolate and viewing it through a glass of water.
[02:16:57]  Oh, really?
[02:16:57]  I haven't seen that one.
[02:16:58]  The obvious issue is that if you're taking a drug that causes visual hallucinations in order to see this otherwise invisible phenomenon, that It could very well be a product of hallucinations, right?
[02:17:15]  Yeah, right.
[02:17:16]  But the fact is, like, the interesting thing is, you're giving so he says that I think hundreds of people have done it and reported to him seeing the same exact code that he describes, which is this like Sanskrit looking Japanese katakana style matrix dripping code that exists behind this laser beam when it's projected on a wall.
[02:17:44]  Like, I don't know if there's, I know, like, I haven't done a lot of DMT, but I know people explain that DMT is a lot of people see very similar things when they're on DMT, like similar patterns.
[02:17:59]  Some people see these elf things, but there's nothing else that I've ever heard of that is consistent across a lot of experiences similar to this code that people are explaining they're seeing.
[02:18:11]  And I mean, one of my questions when I asked him, I was like, I was like, Is it an issue that they're watching your documentary and seeing this code on the wall and then they're trying to do it themselves and they're kind of confirming what they already were expecting to see?
[02:18:26]  Is that a problem?
[02:18:27]  I don't know.
[02:18:28]  I would say it is a problem.
[02:18:29]  Yeah.
[02:18:31]  But it's a common problem.
[02:18:32]  I mean, same thing with the machine elves, as you said.
[02:18:35]  And this has been studied from pretty much the beginning of psychedelic research.
[02:18:40]  Heinrich Kluver coined this term form constants and he was very interested in this.
[02:18:47]  Idea that people's visual distortions or hallucinations under the influence of mescaline appear to have certain themes, like a honeycomb pattern or a spiderweb type pattern or like a sort of tube type pattern or whatever.
[02:19:04]  And now you hear people describing often seeing Alex Gray type imagery.
[02:19:09]  Is that because many people who are interested in psychedelics have been exposed to Alex Gray imagery?
[02:19:14]  Is it because Alex Gray was able to capture some kind of.
[02:19:21]  Some kind of characteristic that is maybe just present in the psychedelic experience because we have similar central nervous systems and other visionary people.
[02:19:31]  I mean, one thing about Alex Gray is that he's using a lot of motifs that have also been explored in religious artwork as well.
[02:19:39]  So it's not as if he's the only person to ever explore these types of images.
[02:19:49]  They do obviously have a.
[02:19:51]  A particular resonance with people that use psychedelics, but I think that there's this interplay between human biology and psychology and art where it's all interwoven.
[02:20:02]  Yeah.
[02:20:04]  Yeah.
[02:20:04]  Gallimore was explaining how throughout history there have been multiple documents of people taking different psychedelics and explaining how they saw code on different psychedelics throughout history.
[02:20:22]  in various studies.
[02:20:23]  But I don't know if any of them were as similar as this DMT thing.
[02:20:30]  You know, it's interesting to me that, like, if this DMT is actually stripping away this sort of brain filter, this brain filter hypothesis, how you have like these filters that filter reality and the DMT kind of like breaks the filters away.
[02:20:49]  So you're sort of seeing the brain is exposed to more sensory input.

=== Matrix Visual Hallucinations (04:45) ===

[02:20:54]  And, uh, If something like that is actually happening, and then you're bringing like a laser into it, like that's a super interesting experiment.
[02:21:08]  And if it's like if the laser is acting like a microscope in the visual field or in the brain, it would just be, you know, what does that even mean?
[02:21:20]  You know, if people are all seeing this, is this some sort of like epigenetic thing in the human brain that is happening because we're combining these chemicals?
[02:21:31]  Taking in these chemicals and exposing ourselves to a certain light frequency, or like, are we seeing the actual matrix?
[02:21:40]  Are we living in the fucking matrix?
[02:21:42]  I would definitely bet against that.
[02:21:46]  That would be, you know, that would be the last explanation that I would go for, which is not to say that it's impossible.
[02:21:54]  Right.
[02:21:55]  But when you're kind of creating the flowchart of possibility, It's usually good to start at the most likely scenario.
[02:22:04]  And then, if you can't explain something with the most likely scenario, you then go to the next most likely scenario.
[02:22:12]  So, the most likely scenario in this situation is that a combination of suggestion, expectation, and the visual hallucinations that are produced by DMT are causing people to see characters that they are interpreting as being similar, but they can't really say that with certainty because nobody's able to take a snapshot of whatever it is that they're seeing.
[02:22:35]  And it's obviously a better story, and it would feel better if you saw the same thing as someone else than something that was subtly different or totally different.
[02:22:45]  And what even are these characters?
[02:22:46]  If you draw them, are we really totally sure?
[02:22:49]  The very fact that they're unrecognizable and not in a language that we speak gives them a lot of latitude to be different.
[02:22:56]  And then there's also just the kind of language that we use to describe things that are unfamiliar.
[02:23:03]  You know, if you see something that is weird.
[02:23:06]  What do you say about it?
[02:23:08]  If you see lights in the sky, do you say that's a UFO?
[02:23:10]  Do you say that it's gods?
[02:23:12]  Do you say that they try to fit it into a box that it's witches?
[02:23:15]  Yeah, it's dependent on your culture and what language you use to describe the unfamiliar and the inexplicable.
[02:23:25]  Yeah.
[02:23:25]  So when you look at earlier psychedelic experiences, I don't think I'm aware of the word alien being used very frequently.
[02:23:35]  People saying this seems alien.
[02:23:38]  Often.
[02:23:39]  I do see descriptions of things being like Egyptian or associated with other cultures.
[02:23:46]  But I don't think alien in the early 1960s type stuff.
[02:23:53]  Now you'd see that more frequently because aliens have become a much bigger part of our culture subsequently.
[02:24:01]  And the same thing goes for the way different indigenous groups conceptualize these things, which are very much based on their.
[02:24:08]  Like, I would imagine that if you were to go to. Peru and do this experiment, the Matrix line thing might be less frequently encountered as an explanation because the Matrix, I mean, it kind of depends on who you talk to.
[02:24:27]  I'm sure there's people, indigenous cactus users who have also seen The Matrix.
[02:24:33]  It's a pretty popular movie, pretty good movie.
[02:24:38]  Yeah.
[02:24:39]  But assuming that they haven't seen The Matrix, I have a feeling that that.
[02:24:43]  And the current popularity of simulation hypothesis thinking wouldn't be the first explanation that they go to.
[02:24:55]  Hold on, let me crack open this fresh can of.
[02:24:59]  But I don't mean to be a hater on this kind of thing.
[02:25:01]  I do find all that stuff very interesting.
[02:25:08]  And careful observation of the world is how you discover things.
[02:25:11]  So it's like, I understand how you could look at.
[02:25:14]  You know, someone looking at a laser through a water glass or whatever and say, like, this is fucking ridiculous.
[02:25:24]  But it's like, you probably could have, I'm sure there were people that would have said the same thing about early microscopists, like looking into a droplet of water and saying, like, what are they doing?
[02:25:33]  Like, oh, they think they see little like organisms in this droplet of pond water.
[02:25:37]  Like, it's crazy.

=== DMT Tolerance Questions (04:10) ===

[02:25:39]  Well, I did it.
[02:25:40]  I tried the experiment and it was also the first time I ever tried DMT and I didn't see the code.
[02:25:48]  Oh.
[02:25:49]  I saw millions and millions of little gears rotating and connected, just all spinning like behind the wall.
[02:25:58]  No code at all.
[02:25:59]  Oh.
[02:25:59]  Interesting.
[02:26:00]  And I watched the documentary like the day before, or not the teaser for the documentary the day before I did that.
[02:26:08]  And so I was like looking for the code, but I couldn't find it.
[02:26:11]  All I could see was these gears spinning.
[02:26:14]  But maybe I didn't get high enough.
[02:26:18]  Maybe I needed to do more DMT to see it.
[02:26:20]  I don't know.
[02:26:21]  It was my first time ever doing it.
[02:26:23]  Right.
[02:26:25]  Have you ever heard of people that take a lot of DMT all of a sudden not being able to get high on it anymore or experience the psychedelic effect anymore?
[02:26:40]  I have heard of that, yeah.
[02:26:41]  What do you think is going on there when that happens?
[02:26:44]  Again, it's so hard with these sorts of things where there's a term for it, like being locked out or something.
[02:26:50]  Yeah.
[02:26:50]  Something like that.
[02:26:51]  Yeah.
[02:26:52]  It's so hard to do these things where once you create the idea, it becomes sort of a meme that is spread.
[02:26:59]  And I've had the same experience before I thought, where I remember smoking not DMT, but DPT many years ago.
[02:27:10]  And I was using a candle to smoke it and just wasn't getting it.
[02:27:14]  DPT.
[02:27:15]  DPT.
[02:27:16]  Yeah.
[02:27:17]  And just wasn't getting an effect from it and had that thought of like, oh, interesting.
[02:27:22]  Maybe I'm tolerant.
[02:27:23]  Maybe I can no longer experience the effect of DPT.
[02:27:26]  And then I moved the bowl a little bit deeper into the flame so that it was really touching the wick and the change in temperature was sufficient to vaporize the DPT.
[02:27:40]  And then I got an insane, insane experience.
[02:27:43]  But if I just stopped there, I might have said, oh, maybe something is preventing me when the real issue is just insufficiently heated.
[02:27:51]  So, you know, it's actually people love to talk about DMT because it's so visual and fascinating, but there's all these.
[02:28:00]  Aspects of it that don't get talked about as much, like how hard it is to smoke and how harsh the smoke is.
[02:28:04]  Yeah.
[02:28:05]  And these vapes that are now much more common make it easier.
[02:28:09]  Yeah.
[02:28:09]  If you're smoking DMT crystal from like a meth pipe, yeah.
[02:28:14]  It can be pretty hard.
[02:28:16]  It's much harder.
[02:28:17]  It's like not the story that people like, oh, my friend, he tried to smoke DMT and the smoke was really harsh.
[02:28:22]  Yeah.
[02:28:24]  Like that's not the story that gets shared.
[02:28:26]  I could barely handle the vape.
[02:28:28]  Yeah.
[02:28:29]  I could barely, I was coughing like a maniac trying to inhale that.
[02:28:32]  Right.
[02:28:32]  So I think that would be my first guess would be.
[02:28:37]  You know, is this really somebody that's locked out, or maybe they are just not really smoking it and getting the hits, or for whatever reason?
[02:28:46]  And, you know, to even begin to assess that, I would want to do something like give them an IV bolus dose of DMT, see if they're truly unresponsive.
[02:28:57]  I sort of suspect because even in these DMT X experiments where they give people DMT repeatedly over long periods of time, the accumulation of tolerance is very.
[02:29:08]  Minimal, it does occur, but it's very minor, right?
[02:29:10]  So, the idea that somebody would have some kind of total tolerance outside of an extreme situation, like they were smoking it all day, every day for like three months or something, it just seems unlikely.
[02:29:23]  Yeah, you would think it would be gradually onset, not just out of nowhere, yeah, just not work.
[02:29:28]  It seems like the more likely explanation is that they're just not smoking it right.
[02:29:33]  But again, this speaks to the mythology and the mysticism surrounding a lot of these substances.
[02:29:39]  Like, I'm sympathetic to that, there's something.
[02:29:42]  Kind of strange about them, and it's they don't always lend themselves to the most analytical interpretations.

=== Nitrous Oxide History (06:29) ===

[02:29:49]  Wasn't DMT first discovered in a lab before it was ever found in nature?
[02:29:57]  Yes, it was like first discovered synthetically.
[02:30:00]  Yeah, yeah, it was Mansky did the first synthesis in Canada as a potential reference for a like strawberry plant alkaloid before it had been found in nature.
[02:30:15]  Yeah.
[02:30:16]  Wow.
[02:30:16]  Yeah.
[02:30:18]  That's interesting.
[02:30:19]  It is.
[02:30:19]  I think the way that you describe, you know, you explained that there's kind of like this polarization between people who like plant based drugs that come from nature versus synthetically in a lab.
[02:30:34]  And I think you described it very well.
[02:30:37]  Like it's the same thing.
[02:30:39]  Like we are nature, we are part of this earth, and we are creating things the same way things are created.
[02:30:49]  You know, chemically in the soil or out in the rainforest.
[02:30:54]  Like, we are just a product of this earth and we are using chemicals that are made on this earth to compound new chemical structures.
[02:31:06]  Like, it's all natural, right?
[02:31:10]  I thought that was an interesting way of putting it.
[02:31:13]  And I do believe that, but the paradox is that it's simultaneously.
[02:31:19]  All natural and all synthetic, depending on how you want to think about it.
[02:31:22]  Everything is simultaneously.
[02:31:23]  They're both the same.
[02:31:24]  They're both the same.
[02:31:26]  And somebody will say, oh, but there's a difference between, for example, toad derived 5-MeO-DMT and synthetic 5-MeO-DMT.
[02:31:37]  And I've often said, well, okay, if there's no chemical difference, then there can't be a difference.
[02:31:42]  But this does neglect the psychological contribution of the user.
[02:31:46]  This is, again, comes back to the, Your beliefs, expectation, beliefs, what you project onto the experience.
[02:31:53]  So, then if the case is that there is a difference and that difference is not derived from the chemistry of the substance but from the psychological expectation of the user, then why can't you reformulate your expectation accordingly so that you have these same associations with the synthetic substance?
[02:32:11]  You could change that.
[02:32:12]  So, if the idea is and it typically is that the natural is better, natural is good, synthetic is worse, you can totally change that bias if you want to.
[02:32:23]  If you want to, you can make a very persuasive case.
[02:32:26]  That the synthetic is better because it's better for the environment.
[02:32:28]  And so you are not harming toads in the process of acquiring the substance and you're not contributing to the potential exploitation of an endangered organism that only exists in a small part of the world or something like that.
[02:32:44]  And so this is like a better experience because you're doing it more conscientiously.
[02:32:48]  Like you could formulate that exact same expectation and projection onto the experience if you wanted to.
[02:32:55]  I have.
[02:32:56]  Right.
[02:32:57]  Yeah.
[02:32:57]  I think the way you did it was great.
[02:32:58]  Also, like, so that toad that you guys captured in the Amazon rainforest and that you strung up and got it to secrete its venom.
[02:33:07]  Yeah.
[02:33:07]  Was that, when you took that, were you expecting the effect that you got from it when they burned your skin and rubbed it on your skin?
[02:33:18]  Or was that like, it seemed like you were just nauseated from it?
[02:33:23]  Yeah.
[02:33:24]  Yeah.
[02:33:26]  I was aware of the pharmacology of the peptides that were present in the, Venom of the Phyllomedusa by color.
[02:33:34]  And so I wasn't expecting to have an LSD type psychedelic experience or anything like that.
[02:33:38]  At the same time, when I made that many, many, many years ago, there was relatively little information.
[02:33:45]  There was like a Peter Gorman article that had been written about it.
[02:33:50]  He was, I think, the first outsider to document that process for High Times.
[02:33:55]  And there was maybe a couple scholarly publications, but there really wasn't all that much out there on it.
[02:34:02]  A little bit was there, definitely.
[02:34:05]  And so I kind of knew what I was getting into.
[02:34:08]  I knew that it wasn't exactly the sort of altered state that I'm typically drawn to, which is a more classically psychedelic state.
[02:34:17]  This was maybe something closer to.
[02:34:22]  I mean, because in a lot of cultures, you have also these ordeals of one kind or another that are also done to produce an altered state.
[02:34:31]  It could be fasting, it could be rites of endurance where you go on a very long hike.
[02:34:38]  Something like that with the intention is to create an altered state through suffering.
[02:34:43]  And so it was a bit more in that direction, I would say.
[02:34:46]  Oh, okay.
[02:34:47]  Yeah.
[02:34:48]  That makes sense.
[02:34:49]  Another thing I wanted to ask you was about nitrous.
[02:34:55]  What are the effects of nitrous on the human body?
[02:35:01]  And what is the, how would you describe it?
[02:35:03]  Have you done it?
[02:35:04]  Oh, yeah.
[02:35:06]  What is the therapeutic benefit of it?
[02:35:10]  I mean, the therapeutic benefit.
[02:35:12]  Is typically, if you're talking about like a sort of FDA approved conventional therapeutic benefit, it's preventing pain during surgical procedures, typically in the context of dentistry.
[02:35:26]  Or it's sometimes used by EMTs or things like that in emergency medicine because it's rapid acting.
[02:35:35]  So that's the benefit is that it kills pain.
[02:35:38]  It may also have some confined psychotherapeutic benefit, maybe in treatment of PTSD or things like that.
[02:35:46]  It's been investigated.
[02:35:48]  But for the most part, the benefit, and this is actually one interesting historical quirk of nitrous oxide, is that it was originally a recreational drug and then became a medicine.
[02:36:00]  Often it goes the other way around, where you have something like ketamine that's a medicine, and then people realize that it has a really interesting effect outside of a medical context.
[02:36:10]  With nitrous oxide, it was used for fun exclusively at first.
[02:36:15]  There were nitrous parties and people.

=== Ketamine Medical Context (04:19) ===

[02:36:18]  Yeah.
[02:36:19]  Yeah.
[02:36:20]  I remember.
[02:36:21]  Yeah, like from a silk bag.
[02:36:23]  They would inhale it.
[02:36:24]  Oh, a silk bag.
[02:36:25]  This is like, I guess, pre balloon era.
[02:36:28]  You'd maybe have like a waxed silk.
[02:36:29]  I knew this guy when I was younger.
[02:36:32]  I used to work at a pizza place, and there was this old guy who had a band called the Speed Wobbles.
[02:36:38]  And he would always go to his van on his brakes, and he would go into his van and do whippets.
[02:36:44]  And he had these little canisters of nitrous oxide that he would do.
[02:36:46]  I never tried it, but he always came in super happy after he did it.
[02:36:52]  Yeah, it's not.
[02:36:54]  Again, I would say it's not the most psychologically interesting effect.
[02:36:57]  It's more like pure hyper intense euphoria, which is one reason that people become addicted to it miserably, especially during the pandemic.
[02:37:06]  Actually, it seemed like a lot of people started ordering it.
[02:37:09]  And also, there was all these giant cans of nitrous you can order.
[02:37:14]  A lot of people developed issues with it.
[02:37:17]  Now they're trying to prohibit it.
[02:37:18]  I don't think that's the path, obviously.
[02:37:21]  Wasn't Kanye West addicted to it?
[02:37:24]  Horrendously.
[02:37:25]  Probably still is, from everything I can tell.
[02:37:28]  Horrendously addicted?
[02:37:29]  Yeah, I think it may.
[02:37:31]  Do you think that has anything to do with his psychological?
[02:37:35]  I do.
[02:37:35]  How, what do you think happened there?
[02:37:37]  How, if you were I know this is like super speculative, but like, do you think that?
[02:37:45]  Like like, how would nitrous or any other sort of drugs that he could be on?
[02:37:50]  Because you know, I know he went to like a mental hospital and they probably gave him a lot of different drugs I don't know if they were ssris or what they were, but like, How would that explain his current state?
[02:38:05]  And I wouldn't go so far as to say that it completely explains it.
[02:38:08]  I think it may be a contributor.
[02:38:10]  I mean, I know people that know him, I know a little bit of the backstory, a lot of it's publicly known.
[02:38:15]  But when somebody is a celebrity and they're a billionaire and they're very, very powerful, they end up in an interesting power dynamic with medical doctors, which is that if they can find a doctor to give them whatever the fuck they want.
[02:38:32]  And the doctor is in a weird position where they want to please their billionaire client.
[02:38:40]  And they also don't want to kill them or hurt them because it could result in the revocation of their license and the loss of the billionaire client.
[02:38:50]  It's a line you got to dance.
[02:38:52]  So, how do you please this person, give them what they want and not hurt them?
[02:38:57]  And then if you decide, okay, this is getting a little nuts, we've got to pump the brakes on this, you know.
[02:39:04]  And the billionaire knows that they can just find someone to replace you instantaneously.
[02:39:09]  So you can engage in a cycle of self deception where you say, well, it's better me than somebody else because I really care about Yay.
[02:39:17]  And I'm going to be the one that's going to give him this and I'll be a little bit more cautious or whatever.
[02:39:23]  This is what happened with Michael Jackson as well.
[02:39:25]  So I try to be a little bit sympathetic to the doctors who will face criminal charges for doing this because they are like, no one wants to be sympathetic to those doctors.
[02:39:34]  Difficult position.
[02:39:36]  Like imagine you're Michael Jackson's doctor and he's asking you for propofol, and you think, no, I shouldn't do that.
[02:39:42]  But you also know that if you say no, they're just going to find someone else to give them the propofol.
[02:39:47]  So, what do you do?
[02:39:48]  You give them a little bit and you try to monitor and you hope for the best, and they end up in a really complicated situation.
[02:39:55]  There's also, of course, that's a sympathetic analysis of what's going on.
[02:39:59]  There's also, of course, the very real possibility of exploitation and predation from people that are just using them for money.
[02:40:06]  And there's probably plenty of that as well.
[02:40:09]  So, there's a dentist that I think he likes to live in the same building as Kanye and is.
[02:40:17]  Enabling him with huge amounts of nitrous oxide.
[02:40:19]  That's like it, I think.
[02:40:25]  And, you know, this isn't, I'm sure that dentist is in a complicated position because Kanye is definitely capable of getting nitrous elsewhere.
[02:40:34]  So what does he do?
[02:40:35]  I don't know.

=== Kanye Manic Episodes (04:12) ===

[02:40:38]  But when you use nitrous continuously, it can result in all kinds of negative effects.
[02:40:45]  Like when I was in high school, the thing that people would always say, oh, you do a whippet, you don't even know you lose.
[02:40:49]  10,000 brain cells, or something like that.
[02:40:51]  That was kind of the little prohibitionist narrative.
[02:40:56]  That is not the case, assuming that you're co administering oxygen, but it does result in the destruction of B12.
[02:41:04]  So it can cause a B12 deficiency, which then results in demyelination of neurons and creates a multiple sclerosis type syndrome where people start to lose sensation in their extremities and eventually lose the ability to walk.
[02:41:17]  That's pretty extreme, which is reversible in most instances.
[02:41:23]  B12 administration, but you don't want to get to the position of being in a wheelchair, even if it's potentially reversible.
[02:41:29]  This is like representative of a really severe degree of neurological damage.
[02:41:36]  So that's one of the things that can happen with continuous use.
[02:41:42]  And there's different people that have, again, this comes back to individual genetics as well, because the way that you metabolize the way that your body metabolizes homocysteine and some other.
[02:41:55]  Things related to B12 metabolism also play a role in all this.
[02:41:58]  It's a little bit complicated.
[02:41:59]  So, some people are more susceptible.
[02:42:01]  Also, even your diet and your age, like vegans would be more susceptible because they have a reduced B12 intake, which is primarily from animal products.
[02:42:09]  Anyway, like there's a lot of things that go into this.
[02:42:14]  But then you also have the reality that you're just continuously entering this dissociated state and it's going to make you all whacked out.
[02:42:23]  And he could be doing that.
[02:42:26]  Instead of taking treatments for bipolar disorder and becoming manic and deranged and maybe surrounded by people that don't have the desire or power to try to rein them in, it seems like it's probably very difficult based on everything that I've seen.
[02:42:39]  And somebody can, I mean, it is amazing.
[02:42:41]  I don't know if you know people with bipolar, but I feel like it's something that is often talked about as if it's not really that big of a deal.
[02:42:50]  It's kind of like schizophrenia is really, really bad, but like bipolar, you just take like a pill and whatever.
[02:42:57]  It is amazing how much damage somebody can do to their life when they're manic in like two days.
[02:43:03]  Like, I have a close friend of mine.
[02:43:04]  Like, if you are fully manic, you can just destroy everything in a couple days.
[02:43:11]  So, you are dependent on people reining you in, which is also complicated because when somebody is in that state, they don't want help.
[02:43:20]  They will perceive any intervention as somebody attempting to silence them or oppress them in a paranoid delusion.
[02:43:26]  So, it's not easy.
[02:43:28]  Right.
[02:43:30]  Yeah.
[02:43:30]  I just wonder, like, what else, what other kind of drugs he's been given that are being combined with that.
[02:43:36]  That's just like sending him into just a fucking never ending spiral, you know?
[02:43:43]  There's so many, like, weird, weird, like, he would never think.
[02:43:46]  I never would have suspected nitrous of all the things, but then you, you know, maybe he's just getting a lot of, you know, new grills being made or something like that.
[02:43:54]  And that has something to do with it.
[02:43:56]  Like, when you're getting that work done and getting, Gold teeth, maybe that just comes with the territory.
[02:44:02]  I don't know.
[02:44:03]  And the insane stress of being publicly scrutinized the way that he is.
[02:44:07]  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
[02:44:08]  It's all, for sure.
[02:44:09]  It's all like very unrelatable, I would say, to the typical person.
[02:44:13]  Like, it's just like a life that is so abstract, so different from anything that a typical person would ever encounter.
[02:44:21]  And it, although you could say that it touches on issues that are relatable, which is like what to do with people who need help but don't want to accept it.
[02:44:32]  And, Is it, you know, humane to allow somebody to behave in a self destructive manner?
[02:44:41]  And what is the line between personal autonomy and the need for a society to step in and prevent somebody from harming themselves?

=== Methylene Blue Dosage (06:04) ===

[02:44:50]  Right.
[02:44:51]  Where do you find that?
[02:44:52]  These are complicated issues.
[02:44:53]  And when you're people like, when you're a person like Kanye, like a public figure who has like an exorbitant amount of money and like you described having just like unlimited access to doctors who could get you anything you want, like, Yeah, Nobody knows what the fuck that's like or like you know, even like Jordan Peterson, who's another great example who you know went through.
[02:45:14]  He, I think he was.
[02:45:16]  He had to go somewhere, like out of the country to do some sort of therapy.
[02:45:21]  I forget what kind of therapy he was doing, but he was getting xenon, among other things.
[02:45:24]  What was it?
[02:45:25]  Xenon xenon yeah, and You know that's.
[02:45:31]  He's another person who was like super polarizing and you went from being like a professor At a university, to being arguably like one of the most popular people on the face of the earth, who you know, half the people loved him and then half the people absolutely despised him for the stuff that he was saying.
[02:45:50]  Um, and how you know, how that plays a role in someone's psychology and the way that people like normal people will perceive them.
[02:46:01]  Um, what is Xenon?
[02:46:05]  The in the third season of my show, there's a whole episode dedicated to it, it's worth checking out.
[02:46:09]  It's a good, it's worth checking out.
[02:46:10]  Is this post vice?
[02:46:13]  No.
[02:46:13]  Oh, okay.
[02:46:14]  This is in the final season.
[02:46:16]  Okay.
[02:46:17]  And it is an element.
[02:46:19]  It's a noble gas.
[02:46:21]  Oh, yes.
[02:46:21]  I remember this.
[02:46:22]  Yes.
[02:46:23]  Okay.
[02:46:24]  It has a nitrous oxide like effect.
[02:46:25]  So this is one of, and it's always being explored as a healthier alternative to nitrous oxide because it doesn't induce this damaging effect on B12 and myelin biosynthesis.
[02:46:40]  So it's a little bit.
[02:46:41]  Safer arguably, but it has all the same psychological risks.
[02:46:45]  Do we use that in the US?
[02:46:47]  Only experimentally, it hasn't been approved by the FDA for anything.
[02:46:50]  Okay.
[02:46:51]  Do you know anything about methylene blue?
[02:46:53]  Oh, yeah.
[02:46:54]  That's becoming very popular right now.
[02:46:56]  And it's like a fish tank cleaner and like a fabric dye that people are using.
[02:47:01]  That a lot of people, I had a guy on here who was explaining to me all this.
[02:47:04]  He was a brain surgeon who was explaining to me how he gives his patients, when he's performing craniotomies on folks, an IV of methylene blue.
[02:47:14]  While he's performing brain surgery.
[02:47:16]  As a neuroprotective agent or what would you say?
[02:47:18]  Something like that.
[02:47:19]  I don't know all the scientific reasons he does it, but yeah, it's mainly because it helps them heal a lot faster and it's a neuroprotective agent.
[02:47:30]  And another thing he does is when his patients are recovering from like super invasive brain or spinal surgery, he wheels them outside into the courtyard and lets them recover outside in the natural sunlight.
[02:47:43]  And he claims that they recover a lot faster because allegedly this, or I don't know if it's alleged, I think it's.
[02:47:49]  Might be proven that this methylene blue is like super beneficial for the mitochondria or something like this.
[02:47:54]  Yeah, that's the idea.
[02:47:55]  I've taken it a bunch.
[02:47:56]  Yeah.
[02:47:57]  It was pretty much the original synthetic drug.
[02:48:00]  I mean, it was, you know, it was used as a treatment for malaria for a long time.
[02:48:03]  It's still used in medicine.
[02:48:05]  For malaria?
[02:48:06]  For malaria.
[02:48:06]  Oh, wow.
[02:48:07]  Yeah.
[02:48:07]  There was like a.
[02:48:08]  Can you get prescribed it?
[02:48:10]  You can, yeah.
[02:48:11]  Oh, wow.
[02:48:11]  You can.
[02:48:12]  I mean, it's mostly used in hospitals for treatment of.
[02:48:18]  I believe it's used for.
[02:48:20]  Cyanide poisoning under some sort of methemoglobinemia, I think, is one of the reasons that they use it.
[02:48:29]  I think I've heard that it's been effective for illnesses similar to COVID, like respiratory illnesses.
[02:48:37]  This is the thing where you have a pharmacologically active substance that does have very real effects.
[02:48:43]  Like the anti malarial effect is established.
[02:48:46]  It was also an MAOI.
[02:48:49]  These are like real effects.
[02:48:52]  Effects of this drug, but then the overlay comes where it's like also the mitochondrial rejuvenator, maybe for some people it might be, or treatment for COVID.
[02:49:07]  I'd like to see some strong evidence for that.
[02:49:09]  Maybe it doesn't hurt.
[02:49:10]  I don't know.
[02:49:11]  Or depression or whatever.
[02:49:13]  And, you know, it becomes this kind of placebo, potential placebo panacea that.
[02:49:22]  Worries me a little bit.
[02:49:23]  It also seems pretty innocuous at the doses that most people use it, of like two or three milligrams.
[02:49:28]  So, if people were routinely taking hundreds of milligrams, I might be more concerned.
[02:49:35]  But I've taken it many, many times.
[02:49:37]  I'm not certain that it has an effect.
[02:49:40]  It seems to be a little bit of a stimulant.
[02:49:43]  That's what I thought at first.
[02:49:44]  But then it didn't seem dose dependent to me, which made me feel like it wasn't.
[02:49:47]  Like, this is one of the kind of best ways to assess whether something is a placebo effect, is if the effect isn't.
[02:49:54]  Dose dependent, it still could be pharmacologically active, but that's definitely like a tick of the potentially placebo box.
[02:50:01]  Like, if 10 milligrams doesn't do twice as much as five milligrams, there's a that I think is moving in the this might be placebo direction.
[02:50:14]  Interesting because it's like with most things, you have a dose dependent effect, you can create a dose response curve.
[02:50:19]  There are things that might be exceptions, like certain enzyme inhibitors, where if at one dose you have total inhibition of the enzyme going beyond that.
[02:50:27]  Assuming there is an off target activity, may not confer additional pharmacological activity.
[02:50:32]  Right.
[02:50:33]  So, yeah, Methylene Blue, it's definitely active for some things.
[02:50:37]  It's definitely an actual drug.
[02:50:39]  It is useful for some applications.
[02:50:41]  I've used it myself many, many times.
[02:50:43]  I'm not totally sure I understand what its benefits for a healthy person are.
[02:50:48]  Right.
[02:50:50]  Dude, thank you for doing this.
[02:50:52]  This has been incredible.

=== Chameleon Saliva Secrets (02:04) ===

[02:50:55]  Yeah.
[02:50:55]  Yeah.
[02:50:56]  No, thank you.
[02:50:56]  It's fun.
[02:50:56]  Yeah.
[02:50:57]  I learned a lot.
[02:50:58]  So, are you mainly now focusing on your podcast or are you working on any other kind of documentary projects?
[02:51:06]  Yeah.
[02:51:06]  So, I make a podcast on Patreon, and I did this for a long time while I was focusing on chemistry, partially because it allowed me to continue making stuff, but also because it has historically been very hard for me to get funding to do any kind of research.
[02:51:22]  And so, I recently have started just filming completely independent documentaries, trying that out to see if I can do that, because it has been so hard for me to get any sort of like media outlet to simultaneously allow me to do this work and not interfere with it in a way that.
[02:51:41]  Makes it purposeless for me.
[02:51:43]  So I filmed a bunch of these weird chemistry documentaries that I'm currently editing, and I'll post them on the Patreon.
[02:51:50]  One about this exploration of tellurium chemistry, one about this creation of a new LSD analog, another about Shulgin's research on Parkinson's treatments, all these kinds of weird little science mini documentaries.
[02:52:05]  So I've been making those independently, and it's been a lot of fun.
[02:52:08]  This is Hamilton's Patreon.
[02:52:10]  What is that iguana on the top photo?
[02:52:13]  It's just a chameleon.
[02:52:14]  Oh, it's a chameleon.
[02:52:15]  It's a panther chameleon.
[02:52:16]  A panther chameleon.
[02:52:17]  Yeah, I love chameleons.
[02:52:19]  Wow.
[02:52:20]  Do they secrete any sort of drug like fluids or are they just cool looking?
[02:52:25]  I actually think there might be something that is active in their saliva, but I'm not sure about that.
[02:52:30]  It may just be a glue, but I thought that there might be some kind of like something in their saliva.
[02:52:36]  Oh, really?
[02:52:37]  Where is that one from?
[02:52:40]  Madagascar.
[02:52:41]  Madagascar.
[02:52:42]  Yeah.
[02:52:42]  Wow.
[02:52:43]  Yeah.
[02:52:45]  That's amazing.
[02:52:45]  Yeah.
[02:52:46]  Well, cool.
[02:52:46]  I'll link your Patreon and then you also have a YouTube channel, right?
[02:52:50]  Yes.
[02:52:50]  Yeah.
[02:52:50]  You post stuff on YouTube as well.
[02:52:52]  Yep.
[02:52:53]  Cool, man.
[02:52:54]  Thanks again.
[02:52:55]  I really enjoyed this podcast, dude.
[02:52:56]  Yeah.
[02:52:57]  Yeah.
[02:52:57]  Cool.
[02:52:57]  It's fun.
[02:52:58]  All right.
[02:52:58]  It's all linked below.
[02:52:59]  Good night, everybody.