Zach Leary, Timothy Leary’s son, explores his father’s late-life psychedelic and tech shifts—like VR’s potential to mirror DMT’s ego-dissolving effects—and critiques the "war on consciousness" via drug policies, citing Nixon-funded research and CIA ties to cocaine trafficking. They debate psychedelics’ role in spirituality, from ancient Hindu sacraments to modern K-hole experiences, while questioning if transcendental trips create belief systems like McKenna’s mushroom theory. Leary’s own heroin-to-ketamine journey, fueled by grief after Timothy’s 1996 death, clashes with AA’s rigid sobriety dogma, as he reveals Bill Wilson’s LSD experiments. Now balancing tech consulting and psychedelic advocacy, Leary insists systemic corruption—oligarchy, lobbyists—must be addressed for real change, despite Rogan’s skepticism about removing money from politics. [Automatically generated summary]
You know, the answer to the question kind of, it's changed a lot over the course of time, obviously, you know, because when I was younger, when I was a kid, you know, really up until my mid-20s, even my late 20s, I would say, like, I didn't know how to answer that question.
How could I? It's just all I knew.
It's just life.
You know, it's just my dad.
It's just...
How I grew up.
You know, he would take me to Little League.
He'd make sure I did my homework or didn't do my homework in my case, but whatever it was, you know what I mean?
It just was life.
I didn't have any objectivity to it.
I didn't have any distance from it.
I couldn't be removed from it.
You know, I didn't know, like, that it was perhaps really strange.
I mean, yeah, my relationship with him and my relationship especially with his work was, yeah, I mean, of course the psychedelic part was a core pillar and I understood that's what made him famous.
But I considered him to be—he was a futurist, really.
During my formative years, the psychedelic thing was always there, but he was much more interested in technology and cyberculture and the progressive technology arts and things like that.
You know, in the 80s, he called the PC the LSD of the 80s.
So he was kind of really shifting.
And I kind of considered him somebody who just had, like, the innate ability to constantly reinvent himself.
And, of course, the psychedelics were, you know, were the core, I guess.
So your dad probably would have had an amazing time with what's going on today in terms of virtual reality and the integration of cell phones into our life in an almost inescapable way.
I mean, it's funny, like the VR thing, Jamie and I were just talking about it before we rolled tape.
You know, we were doing VR like...
Yeah, you know, we were at the NASA Ames Research Center.
People were like Jaron Lanier and were like really, you know, Jaron Lanier was kind of the godfather of VR. And he was bringing kind of setups to our house in the early 90s.
And like really early, kind of almost 8-bit rudimentary VR. But it was there.
Yeah, Duncan and I, we went on this show together, this thing called Gunter's Universe, it's a VR chat show, and, you know, this was recent, and, you know, it's still, VR is still kind of in that, you know...
Terrence also had this idea that you would be able to recreate the DMT world in virtual reality and you'd be able to experience what people see when they're on DMT without actually taking the drug.
He believed that there was going to come a time when technology was so good.
And the images that you could create would be so elaborate that you literally could create the DMT images.
I'm kind of leaning there right now myself, you know.
I mean, we kind of, again, Duncan, you know, we kind of had this crackpot idea of taking VR into the floatation tank, into the float tank, with this kind of in mind, that by disassociating the body and kind of getting rid of it, because, you know, what's the big DMT thing is it's the disassociative.
You just leave Joe.
You leave Zach and you become whatever.
So by taking the VR mask and a headset into the tank, maybe combining the two worlds, it could...
Crash has this setup where he has developed this screen that has the lowest amount of light that could be emitted to the point where you don't see the edges of the screen.
Oh.
So you literally, while you're in the tank, it's floating above your head.
It's suspended above your head.
And you see the image as if it's just the video, just floating in the sky.
And he believes that by separating your body from sensory input, like so you're not feeling your feet on the ground, you're not feeling the weight of the world and your shoulders, all that jazz, you're floating.
He thinks you could take in data better.
And so his idea was to show documentaries and You know, and instructionals and things along those lines and that you would learn quicker that way.
Well, the way I always describe it to people that haven't used the tank, I was like, imagine if you were having a conversation, but next to you, people were screaming.
If it was an important conversation, you'd want to get away from those people screaming.
Because even though you think of it as a distraction, it's just input.
You know, you also have to consider your butt on this chair, the room, the dimensions that you're calculating as you're moving your head around, social cues, language, all these different things are all being calculated and they require resources.
And I think, you know, all of those resources that you're speaking of, those are sort of the things that contribute to this idea of what we call the ego.
You know, and the same thing with psychedelics.
You know, they formulate the ego and our body and being separate.
Oh, my God, Joe, you're strong.
I mean, you know, it's all these kind of different things that create this image of who we think we are.
Psychedelics, the tank, meditation, whatever method you want to pick, it gets rid of that.
He's the, for people who don't know, we're talking about the guy who invented the sensory deprivation tank, and he was a pioneer in interspecies communication with dolphins.
Well, it's been a while since I've done it in the tank, and I'm not so sure I'd do it again.
I don't know.
Calling to do it again.
I'm glad I did it.
God, man.
Well, you read that description of what Terrence writes about ketamine, that it's, I'm not sure I'm going to get it exactly right, but ketamine is sort of like you're going inside of an office building, but it's stark and there's nothing in the office building.
Well, Terence believed that when you were experiencing a heavy-duty mushroom trip, you're not just experiencing your trip, but you're experiencing all the different people that have ever done mushrooms together tripping.
Are every single indigenous culture, you know, except for the Eskimos because they couldn't grow shit, but every single indigenous culture until very recently, secularists were a core part of their methodology, of their tribal rituals, you know.
Ketamine in the tank, though, it's quite a journey.
The best way I could explain it is if you could see colors within blackness, if there were shades of black, if that makes any sense.
Like, because it's pitch black in the tank, and your head is pitch black, but somehow you're getting sacred geometry and sort of kind of visions and kind of downloads that are in the color black, if that makes any sense at all.
Yeah, thank God.
I mean, one of the great moments of my life, actually, was I took ketamine inside the tank, and...
This tank was right outside of my dad's sliding glass window, which went out into the lawn in his bedroom up here in the Hollywood Hills.
I went in and took a little ketamine.
Ram Dass was visiting that day, visiting my dad.
It was the last time they ever saw each other.
My dad died just like a month afterwards.
And I went inside the tank.
The two of them were visiting right outside of the tank hatch.
You know how the hatch comes out.
And they didn't know I was inside.
And I was lost in this K-hole.
Just completely fucked.
Just like, oh my god, what am I going to do?
And the only thing I knew how to do was like, you know...
Right, but I don't think that's really gender fluid.
One of the things about...
It's like, at the end of the day, everyone knows what the fuck that is.
There's this weird sort of suspension of disbelief where we're looking at these water bags that are surgically stuffed under your skin and we're just pretending these are sexual organs.
That are plump and ripe on the vine, but it's not.
It's one of the weirder things about being a tripper and deciding to do that.
It's like, wow, you're violating a lot of bizarre paradigms.
Yeah, but he was also kind of bending the paradigm and kind of bending the idea of you can be anything this time around.
If I want to be half-woman, I can be half-woman.
I can do that.
I'm a doctor, and we're living in this golden age of being able to Mm-hmm morph yourself into whatever the fuck you can imagine kind of thing Yeah, I wonder that was early too with a lot of those guys that trip so much it's like I think at least for practical purposes we would all like to think that you would like to have a Psychedelic experience and then come back down to earth and be able to you know make use of that in the real world like it can kind of benefit you in the real world and That's the idea, right?
And look what we're seeing with microdosing right now in Silicon Valley.
I mean, more and more people are kind of coming out of the closet and, you know, supposedly what the names that are kind of attached to the rumor mill of who's doing microdosing in Silicon Valley.
And I think as marijuana is now legal in the state and it becomes legal in more and more states and hopefully one day it'll be released from the schedule one.
Well, I don't know if it is or it isn't, but the problem is that when you know something, like if you and I know what's dangerous and what's not, like meth is dangerous.
Marijuana is not dangerous.
So when you look at all the facts and then you look at all the absolutely proven medical benefits and then you see that they're denying the existence of these, you go, okay, well, the people that are in control of locking people up and throw them in the jail, they're a bunch of liars because they're just ignoring the science.
They're ignoring the research and the research that's gone back to the 1970s.
That the Nixon administration paid for and then ignored.
So, you know, the only thing I could kind of in this thread is kind of think about and talk about is, okay, well, what is, you know, what's the reason behind this?
I mean, if you kind of isolate big pharma and talk about that, and then, you know, I know the CBD industry, they're, you know, big pharma is the enemy, right?
I also have to just kind of say that Big Pharma's main goal is to make money, to create products that make money.
It doesn't matter what the product is.
If they told you that plastic is going to alleviate cancer, they would make a plastic pill.
So who is the enemy within this that is making things like CBD and marijuana?
Is this just kind of left over from kind of baby boom paranoia, kind of narrow consciousness that we can't possibly allow these substances to fix us, to help us?
Right, but GlaxoSmithKline can put a billion dollars into making the best CBD pill and putting it on the store of every Rite Aid, the shelf of every Rite Aid, and kind of get the propaganda out there about what it can do.
Propaganda being a good thing, getting the marketing out there about all of its benefits.
And when it comes to CBD oil, anyone in this room can grow some marijuana and extract the CBD from it.
It's not incredibly difficult.
It doesn't require massive resources like it would if you were going to make...
Certain types of Alzheimer's medication or Parkinson's medication that would be competing with the CBD oil.
Those are very difficult to get and if you can lock down the doctors and make sure that they only prescribe these pharmaceutical drugs that you guys can profit from and you're the only ones that can make it, then you've got that business locked.
There have been people that have done calculations about all of the different pharmaceutical drugs that would be useless or would be unnecessary, I should say, if marijuana was legal.
And the amount of profit that the people who make those pharmaceutical drugs would lose if marijuana became legal and people just started realizing like, hey, you know, there's and then the other benefits.
Like there's no drugs that are like pharmaceutical drugs that also open you up, make you a nicer person, make you more friendly and make me more contemplative of your existence, sort of give you a different perspective.
It's almost unattainable without those pharmaceutical.
It's not really right.
It's not that they don't have those additional benefits that the pot does.
Yeah, and it's really a war for profit, for controlling the ability to profit off of people altering their consciousness.
Because people have been, like you said, other than people that live in frozen places where nothing grows, they've been trying to alter their consciousness forever.
Okay, but do you believe, you know, I don't know what your conspiracy level kind of meter is, but do you believe that, like, with all of this said, that there is still kind of a secret kind of conspiracy government sanctioned funnel that allows the illegal drug market to still flourish in some way in order to keep certain, you know, Law enforcement and order.
Law enforcement and order.
You know, maybe skimming off the top, off of piles of cocaine that are coming from Bolivia, whatever the case may be.
I mean, I don't know what a case study is, but, you know, I mean, there's still so many coming in.
Are you aware of that CIA drug plane that crashed, the jet that had visited Guantanamo Bay a couple of times, and it crashed in Mexico with tons of cocaine on it?
It crashed in the middle of the jungle in Mexico's Yucatan, carrying four tons of cocaine.
The event and the aftermath changed forever.
An official narrative of the war on drugs has for years been pushing the notion that there is no significant American involvement in the global drug trade and no American drug lords.
He was, you know, making millions of dollars for the U.S. government selling Coke.
and you know Michael Rupert who was a good friend of mine too who killed himself a few years ago who had also been on the podcast a couple times Michael was the guy that exposed that he was a Los Angeles detective oh wow and he was there's a very famous moment where Michael Rupert is addressing the And he stands up in the middle of all this stuff and says and exposes this whole deal.
He's like, I have personally witnessed the CIA selling drugs in central Los Angeles, in south central Los Angeles.
Specific agency operations known as Amadeus, Pegasus, and Watchtower.
I have Watchtower documents heavily redacted by the agency.
I was personally exposed to CIA operations and recruited by CIA personnel who attempted to recruit me in the late 70s.
To become involved in protecting agency drug operations in this country.
I have been trying to get this out for 18 years and I have the evidence.
My question for you is very specific, sir.
If in the course of the IG's investigations and Fred Hitz's work, you come across evidence of severely criminal activity and it's classified, will you use that classification to hide the criminal activity or will you tell the American people the truth?
And he, you know, he went through a lot with this and with many other things and just decided at one point in time he's suffering too much and took his own life.
I mean, I'm, you know, a pretty open-minded, you know, and hopeful guy.
But with what we're kind of moving in towards with the next administration, I just...
You know about what's going on in the Philippines with, you know, that drug, the crazy drug policy, and what, Trump called him, you know, when he was president-elect?
It's a really good one, and basically it comes up, the final hypothesis is that the war on drugs, it's a class war.
You know, originally we thought it was a race war, and it's still partially true, you know, and what's the guy who the first drug czar from the 40s and 50s, I'm forgetting his name, Adelson or whatever, but who, you know, he turned marijuana hysteria into Yeah.
Into a Mexican hysteria that they were bringing, and this was in the 30s and 40s, and created reefer madness.
Then heroin was kind of pushed into the ghetto, ended up in Rick Ross.
No, I think it's definitely, you could say that the war on drugs is a class war.
But it's also like, where can they extract the money?
Where can they get the money?
Well, the DEA has to, they have to keep people employed.
And the way to keep people employed is to justify their job.
The way to justify their job is to continue making arrests and show that you need to make arrests.
And so you have to have laws in place, which is why.
You know that prison guards will lobby to make sure that marijuana stays illegal and other drugs are strictly enforced, that the policies are strictly enforced, just so they can continue keeping their jobs.
But when we still, like what Obama, during the Obama administration, he took the crack cocaine versus powder cocaine, you know, the discrepancies from, what, 20 to 1, and he got it down to...
It's the same drug, but it's purely based on class and race.
Clearly now, as we've seen it and as the rhetoric that's been going on the last year during the election cycle, It's a much bigger problem than we thought it was.
I mean, I always knew, we always knew that this was a problem, race and class and stuff, but now, straight, you know, out on the table, all the chips on black and, you know, everybody's One of the things that I feel that's troubling about this election is that a lot of racists, like my friend Alonzo Bowden had a great quote.
Some people did it for the economics thing, but the fact that they gave those other people a hall pass to act like that and just wait, you know, troubling, really troubling.
Well, it's going to be interesting to see this Jeff Sessions guy, what he decides to do, because the attorney general-elect, that guy that's coming in, is that what you say about him?
Attorney general-elect, like a president-elect, call him that?
Yeah, but with guys like that, I often wonder, you know, with being a songwriter or like a hit maker, is it Is it better to have had, you know, one hit or a few hits and then completely fade away?
Not that he faded away into obscurity.
Maybe he's not a good example.
Or to not have it at all.
Because I think George did kind of carry with him that, like, he was no longer current sort of thing.
And it kind of really plays into the whole idea of fame and perversion in America and the things that we hold dear, the things that are valuable to us, kind of the disillusion of American values, which I think that's the rise of Trump to me.
I had a guy give me a hard time once about Fear Factor being canceled, and he was a fucking couchier at CVS. He was working at CVS. He's like, what happened to his show?
And I said, it was canceled.
He goes, no more show, huh?
Like, all attitude.
I'm like, dude, shows go away.
Yeah, they go on and they get canceled.
He was shitting on me, but he was being aggressive about it.
It was so weird.
I was like, what a bizarre detachment from reality.
You're working at fucking CVS, dude.
I'm not giving you a hard time about being a CVS guy, but if I was the guy from Fear Factor and then I was a CVS guy, how bad would you shit on me then?
Because I'm just coming in as a guy buying some cough drops.
Like, what a weird thing that we have, this need to, when someone attains a very high status and then falls off of that, what we think, you know, we think they're down.
Yeah, but that whole idea, it's just that destruction of sort of like the things that we have instilled as being an important, like you've got to have a winning temperament.
I'm going to make America win again.
Why is that the most important sort of attribute for someone to attain to?
You know, when you see someone who has a slick back hair and a private jet, and he takes a photo with his expensive Gucci shoes on and his private jet, and it's on his Instagram, and then he's, you know, that all stuff becomes very attractive, and then people aspire to that.
And then, you know, you get that Gordon Gekko, greed is good thing.
Maybe not the last word he said to his wife or something, but it's kind of his last cohesive thought was like, look, many people in the world views me as completely successful and I've achieved so much in business, but my personal life and everything that he was lacking.
The path of the soul, the path of the spirit, because he was essentially, you know, a spiritual guy and, you know, was a meditator, was a practitioner of Zen and into, you know, Neem Karoli Baba and all sorts of things.
But he got just so wrapped up in this vicious sort of cycle of having to produce product, product, product.
And, you know, Apple essentially, in his words, you know, he made it into, it was a product company.
And that's how we defined it.
And not even an idea company.
It was a product company.
And then products are based on having to have the latest version of the product over and over and over again.
And he just got wrapped up and kind of lost his soul.
Isn't it interesting that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were the two competitors that we always thought of, and Bill Gates was thought to be the business guy who's the cold, hard...
But if you look at him, in his older years, he became very charitable, involved in a bunch of humanitarian efforts, and does a lot of amazing work, and is using his substantial wealth...
For a lot of good and doesn't work anymore.
He's done with all that.
He's all just doing humanitarian work and helping people, which is kind of beautiful.
And he became this different guy as he got older.
He became wiser and became much more involved in doing good and trying to help and trying to use that immense amount of money that he acquired by being a ruthless sort of business gangster.
But doing it for good, which is kind of really fascinating that he decided, hey, I'm going to step back here.
I'm going to set back and think about what I'm doing and what's really important to me in this last stage of life.
You know, kind of historically and traditionally, the sadhu grows up, is born in India, and is raised into education, then to become a householder.
Householder meaning getting married and has kids, works, has career, provides for the kids, and then in the last third of his life becomes a sadhu, drops all of it, walks away.
Kids are grown up, out of the house, kind of leaves of his wife, which is kind of a Bummer for her.
It is amazing how when people discuss religion, if they discuss Hinduism or the Sikhs or any of the various strains of religion, Of religions that are inexorably connected to psychedelics, those psychedelics are rarely discussed.
I mean, if you go and you read the Vimanas or read any of the ancient Hindu texts, there's so many references to Soma and so many references to what is obviously some sort of a psychoactive substance.
But when people talk about Hinduism, it hardly ever comes up.
When you talk about yogis and sadhus, it hardly ever comes up.
It's, um, you take like the leaves and you grind up the leaves into like a fine powder and then there's some kind of cooking process.
And then, but within just the leaves, like the shake, all the scraps is enough and you can extract the THC. In some kind of cooking process and you make it into a fine powder and just...
Well, I know that they're also into the crystals and they take the crystals and mash them up and sort of make like kind of a hash out of the scrape from the THC crystals.
If they found these substances, there was no science back then.
There was no real understanding of what's going on in the world.
No real understanding of your body.
But there was this access to this stuff.
Hey, man.
See those things that are growing on that cow shit?
If you take that, you will meet God.
And then people did it and did meet God.
And they're like, holy shit, you're telling the truth.
Like, everybody wants...
Like, if you think about religions, if you think about the stories that people tell of the wise men and they experience the burning bush and God gives them the Ten Commandments and all these different things that happen, they're all sort of beautiful stories.
But your everyday life experience is so flat and fucking boring.
And then you do take these things.
You go, well, this is just going to be just like everything else.
Just flat and boring and bullshit.
And you take those mushrooms that you pluck off that cow shit and all of a sudden...
It's exposed to you in some grand way.
And then your whole life becomes about worshipping that.
I mean, that's...
McKenna always argued that all the ancient cattle-worshipping religions and cattle-worshipping civilizations and all these really old, old cultures, that that's what it was all about.
That these people had found out that cows grow mushrooms on their shit.
And that they weren't able to differentiate between...
They thought it was coming out of the cow's body.
The cow would shit it out and they didn't understand spores so they thought it was inside the cow and it would grow in the shed and that was your portal to God.
And you know, that just makes me think, it goes back to that, you know, and I'm somewhat of a very spiritual person and have a practice and all that kind of stuff.
But like, that just brings up the question to me is like, did we invent God as a result of those experiences?
Kind of like, this is a good Chris Ryan thing, if he was here, you know, kind of like in the hunter-gatherer kind of tribal...
You know, when we were just starting to learn to depict our experiences and talk about our experiences and creating like an oral history and sort of like the first kind of existential dilemmas and which many say came from, you know, psychedelic awareness from back in those days.
So is that what led to the creation of God?
To me, it doesn't make a difference being a believer of God.
But Sam is a perfect guy to be that baked with, because all you have to do is just wind him up and say something, and he's so eloquent that he can just continue to go on these amazing, as long as you can just keep up with what he's saying, so you have good questions.
But I, and that's all due respect to Sam, and I do think he is smarter than me in terms of IQ, but I do think he uses that intelligence to kind of shuck and jive you a little bit.
I think it invites the consciousness into the atmosphere and it creates the energetic cycle of having to use that.
And then Sam kind of throws out those statistics that, well...
It's about the same odds as having a car crash as you are going to experience some kind of act of violence in your life where you will need to learn how to, I don't know, do something, self-defend yourself.
And I just, I don't...
Maybe you can throw out that math to me, and I think it depends on certain socioeconomic conditions, but I just don't think that's true.
I just don't want that consciousness in my life, and I don't think we need to dissolve that consciousness.
Well, I certainly think you're free to not have those thoughts in your head and to choose to take the path of love and acceptance and just passivity and move through this life, but...
The reality of human beings is, like, I've been, unfortunately, watching some videos online.
I watched this video today of a guy kicking some lady down the stairs for no reason.
He was behind her, and then they're looking out for her.
They're trying to find him in the UK. They've got photos of him.
But he just, she was walking in front of him, don't go on the stairs, and he walked up behind her, and just a random person kicked her down this flight of stairs, and she's horribly injured.
And I've seen a bunch of those and things do happen.
You know, we are, and yes, those things happen and look around the world today and flip on the news and it's highly disturbing, but we are living in the most It was a peaceful time of our existence.
If you were a 30-year-old man in the year 1500, the highest cause of death was not disease or infection.
It was an act of violence.
You were going to be raping and pillaging, and you just had to defend your food supply for crying out loud.
And we have come to some kind of understanding, some kind of collective consciousness that has morphed itself together in the form of cooperation.
We have to share, and there's so many of us now, and it's getting more of us, the pen is getting smaller, we have to cooperate.
Um, you, I mean, I guess there is some sort of form of, um, you know, I guess punishment and we do have a, we live in a society where law and order is maybe a necessary evil.
And I, I, you know, and I've, Sure, there's some kind of, like, incarceration, but ultimately, you know, you gotta love them.
You gotta have compassion for them, and you gotta just teach them with compassion that their action was wrong.
Don't kick the lady down the stairs, man.
Here's why you shouldn't do that, and I love you, and it's gonna be okay.
But the hundreds of others that go along that are just somehow there's so many loopholes in the system of crazy people who get guns and go to Sandy Hook.
I know it's highly unpopular and people will get pissed at me, but we stop the sale of all unless you have very specific kind of UK style hunting exceptions.
In a mass consumption environment, like 7 million people living in Manhattan.
Good luck getting cruelty-free meat to all 7 million people inside that area.
You have to bring it.
What we've done...
Over the last 150 years is move completely away from agriculture in these cities and drive things in in trucks.
Have you ever seen some of the old models of the way when they were planting cities like in the early 1800s when they were designing New York and a couple other cities?
They had set up areas for agriculture, areas for livestock, and they had them in cities.
And so they didn't have this notion that we have now that everything would be driven in in trucks because they didn't have trucks.
So when they had cities in the 1700s and later, there was no way to get all that food to millions and millions of people.
So they literally had to grow stuff in cities, which is a way better way to do it.
But, yeah, I mean, his whole kind of, you know, in The Omnivore's Dilemma and some of those other books, like the biggest problem with our food supply is that we have lost our connection to how food got there up until 100, maybe 120, at the turn of the century, the 19th and the 20th century.
Everybody had a relationship with their food.
They knew you went to the produce person.
It didn't come on a shelf in a box.
You knew where it was sourced.
And if you ate meat, you saw the bloodiness and you just saw, even if you didn't kill it and slaughter it and butcher it, you knew.
You know, it wasn't this pre-packaged thing that just comes from magic, the bacon fairy, you know?
The problem is, like, it used to be that a few people were disconnected and most people were connected.
And now it's completely turned on its head.
And when you have 20 million people in Los Angeles, and what percentage of the 20 million people in Los Angeles acquire their own food from either growing plants or hunting their food?
It's kind of crazy when you consider that it's an essential part of being a person is consuming food.
There's also this beautiful feeling that you get, and vegans have this feeling as well, when you grow your own food.
And you grow food in a garden, and you pick your salad, and you cut up your cucumbers.
This all came from the ground right out there.
Really interesting article that was written by a vegan that was essentially saying there are no vegetarians and that the only way is like it is actually impossible to be a vegetarian.
Not meaning that it's impossible for you to live and eat vegetables, but those vegetables need dead animals in order to be alive and that animals are consumed by plants and that is what fertilizer is all about and whether or not it's...
But essentially he was saying that there's this massive cycle of life and even pointed to Michael Pollan's work because Pollan has written about the emerging science of sentient plant life.
And that he believes that what's going on with plants is very similar to what's going on with, like, maybe our understanding of a lot of different things.
It's like as our understanding expands, we have to sort of reclassify what we think those things are.
Like, for the longest time, they thought that fish couldn't feel pain.
And that was, oh, don't worry about it.
Fish can't feel pain.
And now they're saying, well...
We're pretty sure they can.
We have a different understanding of what pain is to them.
It might be a different sensation, but there's very clearly some alarms that are going off.
There's very clearly some sort of a reaction.
That same can be pointed out for plants.
Like plants, not only do they have a reaction, but plants, when you play the sound of caterpillars chewing leaves, certain plants, like the acacia tree, has the ability, when it hears Leaves being chewed.
It changes the taste of the leaves.
It extracts some sort of a chemical.
And that chemical does something to the taste of the plants that makes them so inedible that some animals have starved to death because upwind, There were animals that were chewing plants.
That sound came downwind through either smell or some sort of a communication thing that's going on with the mycelium and with the root structure.
And the plants downwind had changed their taste and the animals wouldn't eat them anymore and they were starving.
That just kind of makes me think like what's going to be the next sort of like We have to make peace with that everything needs everything else in order to make it.
Well, I think it's like a suffering and a respect thing, right?
Yes.
And then you also have to consider if plants are sentient life forms, how fucked up is it to have these gigantic, large-scale agricultural setups where you are completely unnaturally changing the landscape in order to grow corn or in order to grow...
Lettuce or strawberries like that is not normal like it's not normal to have 7,000 acres of corn right like in just corn all in a neat row that you could see from space and it's and it's destroying the soil too yeah it's completely destroying the soil but like with this idea of like having you said respect And pain,
kind of getting into that idea, like, do you think, and my opinion is results may vary and I'm not so sure, but if everybody had the data and saw the data about factory farming, for instance, that they would change and thus act accordingly and not eat that shit anymore?
There's just something about plausible deniability that's kind of hardwired into us in all aspects of our life, not just food, but war and politics and money and greed and oil and everything that's what it takes to get oil to this damn country and everything that goes on to fill up our car.
And outside of food, just what, you know, the economic factors for how convenience equals pleasure equals, like, an economic value that is usually low, how that has all sort of worked together to kind of create this system that we're living in now.
Again, this plausible deniability kind of hardwired thing to ignore it.
Walmart's a great example.
I mean, you know, there's sort of this disenfranchised middle of the country, you know, and they did lose their jobs, and that area of the country is decimated.
And even more recent, I mean, yes, it all can be traced back to post-industrial revolution stuff, but even just like the massive hyper-consumerism, that's only really taken off since the mid-90s.
There's a cool little movie out called The Minimalists.
I mean, after a while, I kind of, you know, I got it and I didn't finish the whole thing.
But the first hour is fascinating.
It's about these guys.
They wrote a book called The Minimalists and about, you know, they were all kind of corporate ladder kind of American successful guys and just consuming, consuming, buying shit, buying shit, buying shit.
And all of a sudden, they just kind of had the kind of big kind of cliched awakening, like, oh, my God, maybe I don't need all this shit.
But the data that they present from what's happened in the mid-90s on, sort of as a result of the internet boom with instant gratification, one-click shopping, and disassociation of just the accumulation of stuff.
And we live in bigger houses now than we've ever lived, square footage-wise.
They've never been so big before.
And yet, you know, they've put all these heat maps on.
They did the study where they put heat maps on these homes to see where people were living in the homes, hanging out.
And like the average family in like their huge kind of McMansion or something only uses like 40% of the house.
Yeah, it wasn't like a hoarder like some poor person that was going to yard sales and buying used clothes and then putting them in bags in their house and stacking them up to the ceiling with newspapers and stuff.
This was a guy who had all these collectibles, and he was a neurosurgeon, which is really, really interesting.
Interesting.
Yeah, and he lives in Vegas, and he wanted to be known for his collection.
What do you think is so compelling to us about the constant accumulation of material possessions?
This whole greed is good sort of mentality and moving up the corporate ladder without any sort of appreciation or acceptance in the fact that we're these finite life forms clinging to a spinning orb hurling through infinity.
All those inevitable and inescapable realities I mean, we look at them every day.
We look up.
I mean, that is undeniable that you are looking up as you leave your house and get to your car.
From four to 18, you're going to go into this big cement building to be taught these certain subjects in this certain order, and then you're going to leave that cement building and go into another one that's even more expensive.
And then you're going to leave that and you're going to get some kind of employment thing, which exists pretty much from nine to five for most people, unless you're fortunate or clever enough to kind of exist outside of that framework and create your own reality.
But most people are going to work some kind of structured life.
Yes, but you know why I think it is, in some aspects, it's harder?
Because, well, yeah, I don't know if that's true, because back in the olden times, you did have to, you know, kind of compete against each other for survival.
But I think it could be argued that it's harder because this constant sort of, you know, onslaught of media and comparing ourselves to each other and to feel insecure if you don't look like that, if you don't look like this, if you don't have that, something's wrong with you if you can't afford to buy that.
You're not doing well.
You're fucking up, man, if you can't afford to buy that.
Or if you don't look like that, oh my God, I'm sorry.
Well, I have children and I kind of get it now in a sense that before I had children, I used to think of people as being sort of static.
Obviously, I was younger.
Especially when you're really young, when you're like 20 or something like that, you don't really...
Take into consideration that the people around you used to be your age.
You kind of know it in an abstract sort of a sense.
But once you actually have a baby, and then like five years later the baby's talking to you and you're having conversations, you're like, oh, you're fucking learning shit now.
And then ten years later the baby's in high school and you're like, oh, Jesus Christ, you're almost a man.
And then you realize that, oh, we're all babies who had babies.
And you raise those babies and then they become adults and have babies of their own.
But there are no grown-ups.
It's bullshit.
It doesn't exist.
Like when you're a kid and you're sad, you go, oh, one day I'm going to be a grown-up and all this is going to make sense.
But that day never comes.
You get older, but you're a baby still.
You're just an old baby.
You're an old baby with a car and fucking credit card debt.
And then you have a baby, and then that baby grows up.
I definitely don't get into those kind of tweet battles on the internet, but I just think...
As I've gotten older and had some good experiences and bad experiences online Yeah, I've realized that you can like you were talking about like you go out and you seek Bad things if you have this in your mind that you're gonna go out and you're gonna be attacked So I'm gonna wear a gun I'm gonna have a knife and I'm gonna wear a bulletproof vest all these different things.
Yep You can also Seek negative interaction online you can go look for it when you find it you could react to it and that begets more of it and I think that you're far better off just Choosing the people that you interact with in actual real life and then when I look at things online I'm just observing I very rarely interact if I do it's a very friendly and I limit myself almost entirely to friendly interactions cool and anything that's negative I just You stay
I mean, over the election cycle and I'm, you know, a little quick on the trigger to like, because, you know, with online and social media, it's just like you push a button and like, you know, calling people morons and stuff, although just far too quickly before taking a breath, stepping back and going, Maybe I shouldn't call you a moron.
When you get into conflicts with people, negative conflicts create These centers of attention and those conflicts become these centers of attention and ultimately nothing happens in them.
They just sort of distract you like a little vortex of bullshit.
And I think and as I've gone older and started analyzing my own life and happiness and productivity and when I'm at my most creative, Is when I'm not engaging in any of that.
Like the least I am involved in the negativity and conflicts and debates and going back and forth and trying to make people feel bad and all that stupid shit that people get wrapped up in, you fucking idiot, you know, all that kind of stupid stuff.
The more, the least I do that, the more it frees up my resources and it frees up my mind.
And I don't have this like, I think anytime you get in conflict, Conflict with someone it creates like this negative center there's like like this this Vortex it's like weird area in your mind in your consciousness where that conflict exists It's on a shelf just stinking up the joint and I think the least amount of those that you have in your consciousness in your library of Memories the better off you are Yeah,
I tend to agree with that, and I tend to feel that, like, you know, especially, and it's for somebody of kind of my cloth, it's hyper hypocritical to, you know, attack somebody online, you know, over their political beliefs, for sure, you know, being a spiritual person.
But, you know, at the same time, like, especially now within the last year, this is a highly charged debate cycle, and I was, you know, convinced that, you know, how...
How could a cognitively adept human being justify voting for Donald Trump?
So he must know about housing and urban development.
So it's just complete insanity to me.
And it is taking two, three steps backwards.
The only silver lining that you can weave from it.
And it is...
You know, it's a good thing to weave is that there is kind of a collective consolidation of solidarity, kind of like, hey, you know, we need to rise up, get our shit together, figure out how to articulate the opposite vision, and perhaps defeat this later on down the line.
And that's cool.
People are waking up and there's great conversations happening.
Well, I think there's an ebb and flow that always exists in cultures.
You know, there's a push left and a push right, and we try this for eight years, and then we go that way for eight years, and some of it's productive and some of it's very negative.
But even the negative, ultimately, it fosters resistance, and that resistance is oftentimes positive.
And even in resistance, there's a lot of understanding the consequences of negativity that maybe wasn't really Yes it was.
And then, of course, he's been one of the worst people in terms of freedom of press, in terms of whistleblowers.
The lack of perspective that I think we have collectively as a culture, what you were talking about, about these people living their lives solely intent on acquiring material possessions and status and all the nonsense that goes with it.
How much of that can be attributed to the relative lack of exposure to psychedelics collectively that we have?
If you looked at If you looked at the entire 300 million people, you know how they do that red map and you see how many people are Republicans and how many people are Democrats, and it looks like one of the Avatar people got hit by a train.
That's what it looks like, right?
They got splattered.
But when you look at that, if you had a similar map, In terms of like how many people have had what I would consider a breakthrough psychedelic experience.
I know some people that have done mushrooms and they did a little bit and they felt good and no big deal.
And I had done quite a few things before my first real DMT trip.
And the first real DMT trip was like, okay, everything else is bullshit.
Like, this is so awesome and so mind-blowing, and just knowing that that's a real place that anyone can get to, relatively easy.
Not only that, this is not a precious material.
This is a material that exists in thousands of different plants all over you, everywhere you go.
Drive down the street, you'll find a fucking hundred different kinds of plants that have DMT in it.
So, the DMT experience, to me, was a I would say, like, I'm really like two different people.
I'm the pre-DMT person and the post-DMT person.
I mean, I'm real similar.
I talk the same.
But the person, the experiences, they're so vastly different that I was exposed to a whole new, infinite Area of the spectrum that I didn't know existed before.
I existed in this very small area.
I thought there was birth and death and love and sex and beer and fucking movies and all the other things you enjoyed.
I didn't even know that was real.
How many people out there are like that?
I mean, is there a million of us?
I mean, is there even...
Is there even 2 million?
I mean, how many people out of the 300 and whatever million people in this country have had breakthrough psychedelic experiences?
It was, yeah, and this is, to me, this is a fascinating case study for us to look at, is, you know, in the 60s, you know, millions and millions and millions of people did some kind of psychedelic, right?
And if they didn't do a psychedelic, at least they, you know, smoked grass and put on certain peppers, at the very least.
And, yeah, great things were born out of that.
I mean, an argument could be made that if the 60s didn't happen and flourish and become what it became, that you and I wouldn't be sitting here right now being able to talk about what we're talking about.
I mean, the 50s were just, you know, very lock and step and white picket fence, 2.5 children, car, you know, soon tie, hair short, like there's no variation.
And we burst that bubble.
But, you know, the integration level, it just wasn't, it wasn't meaty enough.
You know, we still, we elected Richard Nixon in 1968. I mean, granted, Robert Kennedy was shot, but still, you know, and here we are 50 years later, and look what we're doing.
So, you know, it is great to turn on, and I love people turning on, and I think it's fantastic, and it's a great thing to talk about, like you are, and it's, you know, you have a huge megaphone in getting people to do that, but what are they going to do different?
They're going to consider their life in a different way.
And I think that in many people, maybe not in all of us, but in many people, that changes the direction of The path that you're on, it changes the way you communicate with people, changes your understanding of each other and your understanding of the connections that we have with each other.
These influencers that live in this very flat plane of existence of acquiring material possessions, getting your dick sucked, doing a line of coke, driving in your limo, all the different shit that a lot of people look forward to that ultimately might not really be important.
Or important, it might feel important in the moment, you know, in this ego gratification sort of a way, but without that ego obliterating experience to put it all into perspective, you might not understand that that state of mind is even achievable.
The undeniable ego-shattering experience of a severe mushroom trip or a DMT trip or anything along those lines is so beneficial in that it gives you that momentary break from the ego and from the momentum of the race that you might not really want to be in.
There's a lot of people that are doing things they fucking hate.
They hate all day long just in order to acquire shit that they don't really need.
And that's the point I was trying to make earlier is this hand that you're dealt is bunk because so many people are trapped in that thing of doing something they hate.
If you offer them some really convenient, stupid job that is absolutely going to stay there for them, or, hey man, take a chance to open a pottery studio.
Yeah, I mean, I think you're right, but I also think there's a level of that that's also kind of like graduate school in the sense that maybe a lot of people are just addicted to being pacified.
That, like, you know, I get my three hours of television at night, and I get my, you know, and just even considering that notion of what you're talking about is beyond the realm.
When you say that, it just immediately triggered my own life and all the failures I've had, all the fuck-ups falling flat on my face many, many, many times.
But the getting back up, it's like that's where the work is.
That's where the awakening is.
I mean, it wasn't like, hey, everything's just...
Going perfectly and, oh wow, this is all my life, this is rolling out on a red carpet and I turned on or something happened and I, you know, touched the face of enlightenment.
No, it's because I fell in the dirt and you take those risks and shit happens.
And you, the grist for the mill, as Ram Dass would say, you know, you have that grist for the mill that makes it so much juicier and falling flat on your face, it's essential.
And I think you can apply that same sort of thinking to our entire civilization.
And I think right now, we might have skinned our knees.
We might have fallen on our face.
We might have gone face down in the mud and like, oh, fuck.
And I think we've got to get up and realize that we fucked it up.
And we'll see how bad we fucked it up.
And who knows?
Because one of the things about having an outsider in this, what I think is an impossibly corrupt society, It's an unfixable foundation filled with bullshit, which is what I think our society's built on, whether it's special interest groups or corporate greed or lobbyists or all the chaos, private prisons and fucking the war on drugs, all the chaos that I think any rational person that's not connected to it in any sort of a way where you're making profit off it would agree.
Like, this is an insane way for an enlightened society to behave and act.
The awareness of that is more and more exposed today, online and in conversations, and people are more aware of that than any other time in human history.
But I feel like we're like a giant battleship.
It takes a lot to turn that fucker.
It takes a lot of Thinking and action, it takes a long time for that thing to actually spin around.
And the first, you know, the first step in that is like the acknowledgement that, hey, we skinned our knees or maybe fell flat face down into the mud or something.
And it's the acknowledgement that that is the case.
That's the scenario we're in.
And which is why I'm always so frustrated in that, like, you know, the general narrative or the general rhetoric, especially in politics.
Is, you know, the wrong conversations always being had.
Nobody's talking about the right shit.
We're treating the symptom.
We never treat the disease.
We're just treating the flu, you know, blowing our nose constantly and never ever acknowledging the disease.
You know, Bernie Sanders touched on acknowledging the disease.
He was the first guy, but really in a long time to make it that far.
Yeah, but I mean, I think in older times, you know, in the 19th century, there was kind of, you know, hints that, you know, this could happen and kind of people insinuating, hey, the Industrial Revolution and Carnegie's and the Melons and the Rockefeller's like, watch out, this could get dangerous.
Eisenhower warned of the military industrial complex and he was a Republican.
Well, someone like Trump is actually working to do that, whereas someone like Hillary is not.
Like, he's already put in a bunch of regulations to make sure that people cannot become lobbyists within a certain amount of time after leaving office.
I mean, I'm not a Trump supporter, but I'm not a...
I'm not...
I'm not convinced that having this complete outsider who's also a guy who's been feeding this machine with money and making these massive political contributions so he understands the system and how it works, I'm not completely I'm not completely denying the possibility that he might present some good...
And you've got to watch this Lawrence Lesser talk.
It's a few years old now, but it really just...
It kind of rips apart and puts everything out on the whiteboard and into a keynote presentation about even the most well-intentioned politicians who are great.
Mr. Smith goes to Washington kind of shit.
Just great people who go in there with the best of intentions.
You know, at some point, you know, then they end up spending 25% of their time inside of the phone bank, the Democrat, the DNC phone bank, begging people for money.
And you know they do that.
And it's across the street from the Capitol, so it's not too far.
And it just escalates, and it's a snowball just going more and more and more.
But if you take money out of politics, then you have only people with money who get into politics, because they have so much money, they don't need anybody else's money.
But, I mean, if you did it like, you know, first of all, if you did it like the UK does it and shorten the election season, you know, that's a great first step.
In the world where we're used to place, you know, your typical high school graduate in the year like 1960, you know, it's like went to college and ranked number one in global math, science, you know.
I'm a pessimist in some forms, but I'm an optimist in others.
And what I'm optimistic about is that People care, and that this world that we live in, that this is a...
When everybody was crying after Trump got elected, and part of me was like, well, this is so preposterous.
Why are these people crying?
But the other part of me was like, that is when things get done, is when you have this outpouring of emotion, and then people...
Remember when those people were marching down Wilshire, and it was just fucking A huge line of people, like hundreds of thousands of people that shut down Wilshire and these people were filming it with drones from overhead.
I was like, wow, that's a crazy response to this guy winning the presidency.
And people were like hoping the electors, you know, the electoral college people wouldn't elect him and they would act on their, oh, fuck you, it's not going to happen.
Like, you're playing a game.
He won the game.
You can't take it away from him after he won the game.
Like, he didn't cheat, he won the game.
So this is the game, and this is how the game works.
B-B-B-Russia!
Listen, this is the game.
This is how the game works.
Now you've got to figure out why is this game in place?
Why do you have this fucking goofy game?
Why do you have this representative government?
Why do we continue this?
And if we can slowly move that battleship towards a more rational place.
At that time, that stage in my life, no, it was a disaster.
It was a fucking disaster.
I try to do that now, though, on occasion.
Oh, but no, I had a good story, man.
This is really funny.
You were talking about soliciting the government for money for being an acid casualty, which is a good idea.
But I was really high on crack once and just kind of on a bender, just losing my mind on crack.
And I thought in the middle of the night it'd be a really good idea to join the CIA. And that they would want me, me specifically, being like Tim Leary's kid, they'd want me because I have access to shit that they want access to.
You know, I'm kind of, in a way, as a card-carrying member, as it were, I'm kind of not the best card-carrying member of it, and I break from tradition in a little bit, in that, like, I don't know, I'm not a zealot.
Sure, maybe.
Yeah, maybe you do, but for me, I just happen to like it.
I just enjoy it.
Whether or not I have to go and, oh my God, I'm going to die if I don't, and I'm going to end up back in the gutter if I don't.
And his thoughts and ideas about that, completely ignored by people in recovery because they think that, no, no, no, no, you don't get clean by taking something else.
And before this sort of got popular, before the documentaries came out and all that about exposing Bill Wilson, I used to just blow AA members' minds with that.
I was like, did you not?
He did.
And he had correspondence with my dad when he was at Harvard.
I have seen people's lives who you just, you know, the doldrums, the, you know, the disenfranchised, I mean, left for dead get their lives saved and have really great, productive, amazing lives today.
So Maps is starting, and I'm going to help them get it off the ground and host it and start that.
So, you know, I kind of do that.
I can speak, you know, at festivals and kind of teach, you know, some spiritual stuff and kind of do that, write.
I've been working on a book.
But the other half of my life, kind of before I had my own little spiritual awakening, I was a technology consultant and a branding consultant and worked in digital marketing and had a lot of ad agencies and stuff and led kind of a 9 to 5 corporate life, which I've ditched, but I still keep some clients.
That's kind of a day job sort of thing, which is kind of fun.
Anything that is, you know, a brand or an entity or a film or a music client, anybody wants to come to me and sort of define their internet strategy, how they want to behave online.
You know, whether that's just something as mundane as having a new website to coming up with a complete communication message about how they want to market their...
They're a thing.
So I kind of do that too.
So I divide my time sort of 50-50 between my stuff and then other people's stuff.