April 17, 2017 - The Joe Rogan Experience
02:45:22
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
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| It just seems the problem with the marijuana is five four three two one Dennis McKenna, ladies and gentlemen. | ||
| Before we were just discussing how I was saying that marijuana can be your friend and it can enhance your life. | ||
| But if you take too much, it's such a seductive little creature because a little bit of it is like, ah, this is nice. | ||
| This feels good. | ||
| But if you get too crazy, especially if you get too crazy with edibles, it'll take you and take you away on this wild journey of paranoia and it'll lock you up. | ||
| Some people just need to take a couple weeks off. | ||
| Just relax. | ||
| That's always a good idea. | ||
| It is a good idea, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I think people underestimate cannabis. | ||
| I think it can be, like you say, it can really sort of knock you off your center, especially if it's edible. | ||
| And like all these things, you've got to learn how to use it. | ||
| I mean, it's basically, that's what you've got to do. | ||
| You'll have to learn how to use it. | ||
| But, you know, you know, that's my rap. | ||
| Yeah, it is your rap, but it's a great rap. | ||
| It really is. | ||
| It's so important. | ||
| I think it's so important for people to realize that. | ||
| You've got to let, like, regular you, like you, like natural, sober you, it's important to be in touch with that. | ||
| Like, you don't want to always be high or always be caffeinated or always be anything. | ||
| Well, exactly. | ||
| I mean, we're, you know, people get... | ||
| You know, to these places, and they fail to do a reality check on themselves. | ||
| You know, I mean, I get emails from people all the time that say, well, I'm, you know, life's been pretty weird lately. | ||
| I took mushrooms five times last week. | ||
| And, you know, I was, and it's like, dude, how about you lay off for a while and do it? | ||
| Give yourself a chance because, you know, they tell these stories and it's like the idea of, okay, let's find your center, go back to baseline, lay off the sauce, whatever it is you're taking, and just chill out and try and rediscover your center. | ||
| It seems like common sense advice, but people don't do that. | ||
| It does seem like common sense advice, but common sense is not common. | ||
| I think everybody knows that. | ||
| Yes, all you have to do is look around to realize that. | ||
| What is it about people, though, that once they indulge in any sort of... | ||
| I mean, it doesn't even have to be a substance. | ||
| It could be an activity, like gambling, for instance. | ||
| Like, once it gets in your bones, it just seems like you're so compelled to just continue that behavior. | ||
| And the idea of stopping is almost more painful than the idea of wrecking your life. | ||
| This is addiction. | ||
| Basically, these things are reinforcing. | ||
| They activate those pleasure circuits, you know, in the brain, mediated mainly through dopamine and all of these, I mean, the so-called drugs of abuse, which I think is a terrible word, terrible word. | ||
| But the reinforcing drugs, the pleasure drugs, work directly or indirectly through the dopamine circuits, and the dopamine is like your button for pleasure. | ||
| In the same way that serotonin is kind of on the opposite side. | ||
| It's your button for more like euphoria, feeling good, but it doesn't have the punch, I guess, that the... | ||
| Which is why people can get addicted to gambling. | ||
| They can get addicted to sex. | ||
| They can get addicted to television. | ||
| All of these things. | ||
| It doesn't have to be substances. | ||
| Because they all hit those same circuits. | ||
| Except the psychedelics, which don't work on that reward circuitry. | ||
| They work on a different set of circuits. | ||
| But yet, even with those, your behavior patterns can become addictive. | ||
| And then you can start just doing psychedelics too much. | ||
| And it's not even the psychedelics that are doing it. | ||
| It's just this compulsive need to constantly change your state of mind. | ||
| Yeah, that's quite true. | ||
| And if people... | ||
| You know, the way to use psychedelics is... | ||
| There are many ways to use it, but basically use it thoughtfully. | ||
| You know, I mean, you can... | ||
| All the question about recreational use versus spiritual use versus therapeutic use. | ||
| I mean, these are all ways to approach it. | ||
| And I am not a person who says, you must do it this way, you must do it that way. | ||
| What I do say is, do it from an informed place and approach it thoughtfully. | ||
| Because, I mean, in other words, don't... | ||
| Plan for it. | ||
| Respect the medicine in a certain way. | ||
| Use it in a circumstance where you can learn from the medicine rather than have the medicine be sort of an overlay over whatever else you're doing. | ||
| This is something that demands attention, and I think that's the best way to use psychedelics for whatever The spin you put on it. | ||
| Is it spiritual? | ||
| Is it therapeutic? | ||
| Is it recreational? | ||
| Is it shamanic? | ||
| These are all labels. | ||
| The important thing is that you approach the medicine itself. | ||
| The medicine is the teacher, right? | ||
| Not the sitter, not the shaman, not the psychotherapist. | ||
| If they're doing the right thing, Their job correctly, in my opinion, their job is to let you have your encounter with the medicine. | ||
| And the medicine is what you learn from. | ||
| They're there to facilitate that. | ||
| They can intervene if you get anxious or if things go on, make sure, you know, nobody comes to the door, that kind of thing. | ||
| But basically it's to facilitate a learning opportunity where you and your teacher, which is the medicine, be it ayahuasca or mushrooms or whatever, can have this intense one-on-one interaction, you know? | ||
| Feel like with psychedelics as well as with all these other things we're talking about any kind of drug I mean even coffee Alcohol whatever and behavior patterns all these different things I think one of the things that happens with human beings is you get so far along in your life in these behavior patterns become so like tight grooves that are carved into your psyche and then as you become an adult you Then you start to learn, | ||
| like, oh, there's got to be a better way to handle this. | ||
| Let me figure out how to do this. | ||
| And it's almost like getting a car when you're really young and not learning how to drive until you're, like, in your 20s. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And so you're just driving this thing and smashing into trees and grinding the gears. | ||
| And then somewhere along the line, you're like, oh, my God, I'm fucking myself up. | ||
| I have to figure out a way to do this correctly. | ||
| And there's two different approaches. | ||
| There's one, the abstinence approach, which is very popular. | ||
| People say, well, I'm straight edge now. | ||
| I don't do anything and that's it. | ||
| And I just, you know, I just do wheatgrass and I run hills and stuff. | ||
| I'm like, okay, you could do that too. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You can do it. | ||
| You definitely can do that too. | ||
| But it's... | ||
| I just don't think that there's anything wrong with any of these things. | ||
| I think there's something wrong with the way we use them, and I think it's one of the inherent problems with things being illegal, is that we can't discuss this. | ||
| We don't have people like you or centers where people can go, where people can become educated on the proper way to use these drugs, medicines, whatever you want to call them, these compounds, and get something out of them that can really be beneficial. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's exactly right. | ||
| I mean, I've said this many, many times that, you know, drug education, what they call drug education in this country, is a joke because the whole emphasis is on don't use them. | ||
| That's absurd. | ||
| That's like telling, you know, an 18-year-old guy full of testosterone, don't have sex. | ||
| You know, come on. | ||
| It's built into the genetics. | ||
| They're going to go for that. | ||
| What you have to do... | ||
| What they can't bring themselves to acknowledge in the drug education field is it's not about telling people not to use drugs. | ||
| It's about teaching people how to use drugs if they choose to, right? | ||
| I mean, like any other skill, people have to learn to drive. | ||
| They have to learn to do yoga. | ||
| They have to learn to do whatever they do. | ||
| There's an educational process. | ||
| I tell people many times, you know, my shtick is... | ||
| There is no such thing as a bad drug. | ||
| That's another problem with the dialogue. | ||
| The badness is projected onto the drugs. | ||
| Drugs are simply compounds with a certain pharmacology. | ||
| There's no moral aspect to them. | ||
| The moral dimension comes in how do people use them. | ||
| That's where, you know, it's human behavior that's moral or immoral. | ||
| I say, you know, there's no such thing as a bad drug. | ||
| Plenty of bad ways to use drugs, you know, but that comes from the person, not the compound. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I've been really disturbed lately by these new super potent painkillers. | ||
| Like fentanyl, the stuff that killed Prince and... | ||
| Carfentanil now is the big menace. | ||
| Fentanyl is bad enough. | ||
| Carfentanil is... | ||
| Something like a hundred to a thousand times more potent than fentanyl. | ||
|
unidentified
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What? | |
| Yeah. | ||
| So a spec, literally a pinhead or less of the carfentanil is a lethal dose. | ||
| Oh my God. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So this is really not good, you know, because... | ||
| I'm certainly not an expert on, you know, the sources and all this, but apparently this stuff is being made in China, imported here, and they use it to cut heroin because it's so strong. | ||
| But people are dying left and right, you know, because of carfentanil is far more toxic than heroin or even fentanyl. | ||
| So, you know, we're so, you know, there is so much... | ||
| I don't know, so much confusing and fuzzy thinking about the whole drug issue. | ||
| You know, for example, as long as we're talking about opiates for the moment, which is not really what I came here to talk about, but, you know, you've heard of Kratom, right? | ||
| Now the DEA and the FDA, it's a plant. | ||
| It's used in Thailand. | ||
| It is an opiate. | ||
| There's no doubt about it. | ||
| It hits the opiate receptors. | ||
| And they want to schedule it. | ||
| But the problem is that in Thailand, traditional areas, it's often used to get off of heroin. | ||
| So it's potentially part of the solution, not part of the problem. | ||
| It's relatively easy to quit. | ||
| And the big thing about Kratom, it doesn't cause respiratory depression. | ||
| And respiratory depression is what kills people from heroin overdoses. | ||
| The alkaloids in Mitragyna do not do that. | ||
| And Kratom is currently in those weird semi-legal states, right? | ||
| It's in a semi-legal state, but the DEA would love to schedule it. | ||
| But again, They had plans to and there was some pushback about this. | ||
| And people were saying things like I'm saying, wait a minute, let's take a second look at this. | ||
| This may be part of the solution because it could be a kind of, in a sense, an herbal methadone. | ||
| I mean, methadone is not the best way, but something that people could substitute. | ||
| And then gradually taper off. | ||
| Cronum has some weird sort of property where at low doses is a stimulant. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I've tried it before, but only at low doses. | ||
| I've had... | ||
| There's a company that sells it. | ||
| We have it right here. | ||
| Oh, there are lots of companies that sell it. | ||
| Yeah, it's easy. | ||
| Urban Ice Organics. | ||
| That's the name of the company. | ||
| But I take two or three of those and it's like a cup of coffee. | ||
| And it's like no weirdness, no... | ||
| I don't feel high. | ||
| At a low dose, it is that. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| It's kind of a stimulant. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| Just unique pharmacology. | ||
| How strange, though. | ||
| At higher doses, it's definitely an opiate. | ||
| And is it something that impairs motor skills? | ||
| Well, not so much. | ||
| I mean, just in the sense that it's like being high on morphine or heroin, so it does. | ||
| So it really can give you that kind of a feeling? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Wow, that's interesting. | ||
| You know, it hits the opiate receptors, but then it also hits a few other receptors as well, which is part of the stimulating effect. | ||
| But, you know, why the pharmaceutical companies are not all over this plan, I don't understand. | ||
| Because for a long time, the holy grail in drug discovery when it comes to analgesics is find the narcotic that is not toxic... | ||
| You know, the analgesic that is not toxic, hopefully not addicting, but that's not going to happen. | ||
| And is there an LD50 for this stuff? | ||
| Oh, sure. | ||
| I mean, there's an LD50 for most things. | ||
| Which is, for people who don't know, lethal dose at 50%? | ||
| Yeah, it would be hard, yeah, the lethal dose for 50% of the sample. | ||
| But in the herbal form, it would be hard to get anywhere near a lethal dose. | ||
| You'd have to eat a giant brick of it. | ||
| Yeah, probably. | ||
| Probably you'd throw up before you ever got to the lethal. | ||
| I mean, if you isolated one of the alkaloids, 7-hydroxymitraginine is the strongest one. | ||
| That's about 100 times stronger than morphine. | ||
| Whoa. | ||
| You know, so definitely effective. | ||
| So is there any issue with that stuff, though, with people who have had problems with pain pills in the past? | ||
| Maybe they start indulging this a little bit too much and... | ||
| Well, it's a better alternative than the pain pills. | ||
| It's very good for people who want to get off that shit. | ||
| I'm sorry, can I say that? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| This is the internet. | ||
| People who want to get off those kind of things, they can't quit cold turkey, but they could go on Kratom and gradually cut down because the withdrawal symptoms for Kratom are much less apparently than for heroin and these things. | ||
| They just don't grab you. | ||
| So this is a gateway out of the addiction. | ||
| Or they could even just maintain because it's not particularly dangerous or impairs function or so on. | ||
| They could maintain. | ||
| As you know, lots of people take heroin and manage to maintain. | ||
| Well, I know a lot of people... | ||
| It's a trick, you know. | ||
| Not everyone can do that. | ||
| They find some really good anti-inflammation properties in this stuff, like people who exercise a lot, like Kratom. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Wouldn't surprise me at all if that's there. | ||
| You know, most plants have multiple effects. | ||
| That's one of the differences between plants and pharmaceuticals. | ||
| Plants have families of molecules and they often have You know, complementary kinds of activities, you know. | ||
| So kratom is one of these. | ||
| We've known about it for a while. | ||
| It needs a lot more work, but potentially it's very, very interesting, you know. | ||
| And of course, the other one in this sort of universe of opiate treatment is ibogaine, which is not... | ||
| Completely different kind of thing. | ||
| Ibogaine is not itself an opiate, but people use it to get off opiates because the experience is profound, but then it does something that a lot of psychedelics don't do, which is it interrupts that craving for opiates. | ||
| Depending on how it's structured, anywhere from a few days to a few weeks. | ||
| And the thing I think that determines the effectiveness of Ibogaine as a treatment for opiates is if the person has prepared for what happens afterwards, right? | ||
| You've got to prepare for what happens after. | ||
| If you go back to your old neighborhood, your old buddies, your old habits, it's not going to work. | ||
| You're not making a serious commitment to make it work. | ||
| But if you have a plan, going to go to this clinic, get this treatment, get cleaned up, then what? | ||
| And that's true. | ||
| I mean, really, I think that's the main factor that determines whether ibogaine is effective or not. | ||
| And it is for a lot of people. | ||
| It works. | ||
| It's a problematic substance. | ||
| It's not It's a controlled substance in the States, but only in about six countries is it actually prohibited. | ||
| Most countries, it's either in a gray area. | ||
| I guess it's a gray area. | ||
| It's unregulated is the term. | ||
| A couple countries have put it on prescription drug status, Brazil and New Zealand. | ||
| But the framework is there. | ||
| That doesn't mean there's a rush of people to go to Ibogaine clinics in those countries. | ||
| It really hasn't created a rush. | ||
| But the framework is there of people who want to do that. | ||
| So Ibogaine is another one of these that needs more investigation and is potentially part of the problem to the opiate epidemic. | ||
| There is rumors. | ||
| Well, there are more than rumors, but... | ||
| Some ibogaine activists are trying to get certain states to provisionally approve the use of ibogaine. | ||
| You know, a special waiver from the federal government, Vermont and I think New York has now applied for this because their problem is so bad. | ||
| It's like basically they're saying to the government, Here's something that may work. | ||
| Just grant permission on a statewide basis to have this medicine. | ||
| We'll see where that goes, you know, as I'm sure you... | ||
| I think we're all in this community acutely aware of now the government is again rumbling about how they're gonna revive the war on drugs. | ||
| I mean, it was a stupid idea then and it's even more stupid now. | ||
| But hey, this government, you know, stupidity are us! | ||
| It's kind of their angle on things. | ||
| This Jeff Sessions character is real. | ||
| We'll see how it goes. | ||
| I'm not too worried because I think there's going to be so much pushback on this. | ||
| Yeah, and that's the other thing about Trump. | ||
| He seems to be a populist. | ||
| And if there is too much pushback from that direction, I think he's going to try to avoid that as much as possible. | ||
| When they did a recent survey of the United States of how many people think that marijuana should be legal, like recreationally legal, it's in the 60% now, which is for the first time ever. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And states have done it. | ||
| And I just don't think you can, you know, you can't go back to the war on drugs. | ||
| I mean, it was a miserable failure when it happened. | ||
| There's, you know, over 40 years, they pounded over a trillion dollars down this rat hole. | ||
| There are more drugs, more kinds of drugs, easier to get, cheaper than ever. | ||
| So where's the success? | ||
| And more people in prison as a result of this. | ||
| So where's the success of the war on drugs? | ||
| There's nothing. | ||
| There's nothing they can point to. | ||
| It's not like anyone was saved. | ||
| The problem is that these people, you know, facts don't carry much weight with them. | ||
| I mean, they're kind of off in their own private ideological fantasies. | ||
| And the fact that the war on drugs doesn't work... | ||
| It doesn't matter to them. | ||
| It's like, these are bad people who need to be punished. | ||
| That's their stance on it. | ||
| It's not about anything other than that. | ||
| Yeah, I think that's really important. | ||
| What you just said, these are bad people. | ||
| I mean, they're really talking in these simplistic terms. | ||
| That's one thing that Session said, that marijuana is not something that good people use. | ||
| That's what he said. | ||
| Which is just preposterous. | ||
| How many grandmas are out there that are listening to this going, what the fuck is this guy talking about? | ||
| This is crazy. | ||
| Yeah, it is. | ||
| And it's clear that, you know, not a jot of reflection or, you know, careful thought goes into these kinds of statements. | ||
| This is what bothers me. | ||
| I mean, many, many things bother me about Trump. | ||
| But one of the chief things, one of the major, I guess you could say, flaws in his character among many... | ||
| But you listen to him talk, you listen to his general thing, and you realize this is not a man who's ever had a reflective thought in his life. | ||
| You know, there is no there there. | ||
| There is no inner self. | ||
| You know, people say, just give that man some ayahuasca and that will straighten him out. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| I think there's, you know... | ||
| There has to be something inside to straighten out. | ||
| Don't you think that maybe... | ||
| I would like to speak to him alone and find out who he really is. | ||
| I mean, you think when someone's speaking in front of You know, a big group of press or, you know, any time there's a camera on them, it's really hard to figure out who that person is. | ||
| Yes, that's true. | ||
| I think being alone with someone would be very illuminating. | ||
| I agree. | ||
| Maybe alone he's different, but he is such a creature of media and television. | ||
| This is his whole thing. | ||
| It's inexorable, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So maybe there is a thoughtful person there, but you sure don't see any evidence of that. | ||
| And that's unfortunate. | ||
| I mean, because that's... | ||
| Whatever you can say about Obama, and there's many bad things that he was not a perfect president. | ||
| He was very thoughtful and smart. | ||
| I'm not so sure Trump is smart. | ||
| I mean, he's smart in a certain way, but not the way... | ||
| That we need our leaders to be smart, you know, in this age. | ||
| We need to, you know, anyway, we could go on all day about this, and that's not really what we want to talk about. | ||
| Yeah, we could go on about this all day, and let's definitely not. | ||
| Let's instead, let's shift gears and talk about this celebration of 50 years of psychedelic research and what you're doing now. | ||
| And it's in Birmingham, is that where it is? | ||
| It's in Buckinghamshire. | ||
| It's in England. | ||
| I knew it was a bee. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| One of those places. | ||
| This is something that I've wanted to do for a long time. | ||
| And the backstory is that in 1967, there was a conference that was sponsored, believe it or not, by the Health Education and Welfare, Department of Health Education and Welfare, National Institute of Mental Health, U.S. government paid for this symposium held in San Francisco in 1967 called the Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs. | ||
| And all the biggies were there. | ||
| Shulgin was there. | ||
| Andrew Weil was there. | ||
| Schultes, of course, he was probably the one that, you know, more or less around whom it coalesced. | ||
| But this was a chance for interdisciplinary people to come together in a private conference and share knowledge. | ||
| And that was done. | ||
| And they published this symposium volume called Ethnopharmacologic Search for Psychoactive Drugs. | ||
| Which was U.S. Public Health Service publication. | ||
| You could get it from the U.S. government printing office for a long time. | ||
| But originally the idea was that about every 10 years or so they'd have follow-up conferences, right? | ||
| Well, in 1967, the war on drugs came along. | ||
| The government became embarrassed that they had anything to do with this. | ||
| And there was never any follow-up conference, right? | ||
| So I... That book that came out was very influential to me. | ||
| It was one of the big influences of my life as a 16-year-old when I was just getting interested in psychedelics. | ||
| I've wanted to do a follow-up conference. | ||
| I wanted to do it on the 30th anniversary back in 97, but it never came together to do that. | ||
| So this is the 50th anniversary. | ||
| It's now or never. | ||
| And so it's now, apparently, we are going to do this thing. | ||
| And it's going to be... | ||
| It's kind of much in the spirit of the original conference. | ||
| We're not going to keep it completely closed, you know, because we're not that kind of people. | ||
| There's not a lot of room for people to actually come to the place it's going to be, which is this place called Tiringham Hall. | ||
| It's like, it looks exactly like Downton Abbey. | ||
| I mean, it's an English country house, beautiful place, but not a place set up for a huge conference. | ||
| There'll be maybe 10 guests staying there and a bunch of people staying close by. | ||
| But the point is not so much the people attending. | ||
| It's going to be live streamed on Facebook, which anyone can tune into that. | ||
| And then we're going to publish the symposium volume for 2017 that everyone who presents is going to submit a full paper. | ||
| We're going to publish that as volume two. | ||
| We'll bring them out together as a deluxe edition. | ||
| The first one, which is available for free, it's in the public domain, and then the one from this conference and we'll package them together as a collector's edition and we're pre-selling that now. | ||
| As part of the strategy for getting the money to pay for this thing. | ||
| And we're doing okay, you know. | ||
| So I give you the website. | ||
| It's ESPD50.com. | ||
| What does it stand for? | ||
| Ethnopharmacologic search for psychoactive drugs, 50thanniversary.com. | ||
| And then there's also a Facebook page, which is where the live streaming is going to be. | ||
| So if you go there, you can order the book. | ||
| You can get the whole backstory. | ||
| You can sign up for the Facebook live stream and so on. | ||
| And that's what we're going to do. | ||
| And I've been very lucky. | ||
| You know, some people... | ||
| You know how these conferences are. | ||
| You don't do it on your own. | ||
| When I sort of floated this idea, a lot of people stepped up and said, yeah, I want to be involved. | ||
| I'll be involved. | ||
| Not only people that are helping organizing it, but also people that are providing some funding. | ||
| So now we have the money to pay people, bring them from all over the world. | ||
| There'll be about There's 18 presenters and some really good people, some very high-profile people. | ||
| David Nichols will be there. | ||
| Mark Plotkin, who runs the Amazon conservation team. | ||
| A number of, you know, those are maybe the two highest profile, but people that are known in the field. | ||
| And there's, you know, you can look at the website, ESPD.com, you can look at the program, and if it appeals to you, get on the, you know, get on the live stream. | ||
| So that, you know, those technologies did not exist in 1967, right? | ||
| So... | ||
| They do now, so why not let the world in? | ||
| You know, we can't have everybody come to Buckinghamshire, but we can have them all over the world, so that's the idea. | ||
| Well, I'm sure the response to this is going to be tremendous if you can livestream it, and livestreaming on Facebook is going to be huge. | ||
| I mean, that's a great idea. | ||
| Well... | ||
| I hope so. | ||
| Oh, it is, for sure. | ||
| It's an awesome use of the technology because there really isn't something like that that people can tune into and watch 18 different people speak. | ||
| And of course, it'll all be documented, right? | ||
| So it'll be archived. | ||
| We'll generate a DVD out of it. | ||
| But mainly, it's the books. | ||
| I mean, the idea of actually collecting real physical books might seem like a quite... | ||
| 20th century idea to people, and it is. | ||
| We have to do it while we still can. | ||
| Yeah, I like the idea of having a nice box set, you know, but people don't have to get that. | ||
| They can get the single one. | ||
| They don't have to do anything that I tell them, but if they're interested, they can do it. | ||
| And so, you know, thanks for letting me come on and let people know about this and tweeting it and so on. | ||
| This is all... | ||
| This is all very helpful. | ||
| It looks like there's going to be a lot of response. | ||
| And then, of course, the Psychedelic Science Conference is coming up. | ||
| And we have, you know, the Symposium guys, PSY. They're running the stage at the MAPS conference, the stage in the marketplace. | ||
| So I'm going to be on there. | ||
| And they're collaborating with us on this project. | ||
| So I'm pretty excited about it. | ||
| Now, how do you organize the 18 different people that are talking and the subjects so there's no overlap and so that, you know, the message stays vibrant? | ||
| Well, it hasn't really been a problem. | ||
| I mean, for one thing, you know, I pretty much knew who I wanted to come and I know what their specialty is, so I invited these people and they cover a variety of specialties. | ||
| So, not really too much duplication. | ||
| Everyone brings something Unique their own perspective, you know, so it's pretty easy, really. | ||
| I mean, the idea of the ethno-pharmacologic search for psychoactive drugs is that... | ||
| You know, we wanted to focus on the frontier of this. | ||
| This is still a very active area. | ||
| And we don't want, you know, not another conference about ayahuasca. | ||
| And that's all wonderful, and I'm totally behind it. | ||
| And in fact, truth in advertising, we got four talks on ayahuasca. | ||
| But... | ||
| Different aspects of ayahuasca that haven't really been discussed so much at conferences. | ||
| And then we do have one gentleman talking about Kratom and, you know, a specialist of ethnopharmacologists talking about that. | ||
| We have Ken Alper, who is maybe the world's recognized authority on iboga and ibogaine and from the pharmacology chemical clinical side. | ||
| We've got him. | ||
| We've got Dave Nichols. | ||
| We have another person, another phytochemist talking about salvia divinorum. | ||
| So these are things that were not even on the radar, you know, in 1967. And that's kind of the idea. | ||
| That there's been 50 years more work and a lot of work and never any follow-up conferences. | ||
| So that's the excuse for doing this. | ||
| This will be the follow-up conference. | ||
| And if it gets momentum, then maybe we'll be able to do number three and number four. | ||
| Well, probably by the time number four comes around, I'll be... | ||
| Drooling in my oatmeal, so I may not have much to do with that one. | ||
| Oh, I think there's going to be some new science that's going to kick you right back into gear. | ||
| Let's hope so. | ||
| There's a lot going on right now. | ||
| I'm holding on for it. | ||
| I think you're catching the wave right at the right time, Dennis. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Sometimes I wonder, but yeah. | ||
| I'm super positive for you. | ||
| What is the status of salvia? | ||
| Salvia divinorum. | ||
| What is the legal status? | ||
| Salvia divinorum is more or less legal on the federal level. | ||
| It's still sold. | ||
| I think a few states have banned it. | ||
| I'm not sure which states. | ||
| How funny that it's the opposite way. | ||
| You know, most things are federally illegal, and then the states legalize them, like marijuana at least. | ||
| But salvia is, for people who don't know, super potent psychedelic. | ||
| Super potent and super bizarre. | ||
| Yeah, very weird. | ||
| And I think maybe that's kind of the built-in protection against abuse. | ||
| Because a lot of people don't care for it. | ||
| It's like once is enough, never again. | ||
| This is not something that you're likely to get addicted to, unless you're just a very peculiar kind of person. | ||
| Because it's dysphoric. | ||
| You know, it's not pleasant. | ||
| Most people find it quite unpleasant, even terrifying. | ||
| Well, years back. | ||
| But I think one of the things that protects against it, people smoke it, which is not the traditional way at all. | ||
| But again, it's like it only lasts a few minutes. | ||
| The traditional way is you chew the fresh leaves. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And it's some variation of the sage plant, correct? | ||
| It is a sage or a mint. | ||
| It's in the mint family. | ||
| Yeah, it's called a sage, but it's really a mint. | ||
| I always wondered if there was some sort of correlation between the name sage, meaning wisdom, you know, and then this stuff. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No. | |
| Just total bum luck. | ||
| Some would like you to think so. | ||
| I think Daniel Siebert is one of the specialists. | ||
| He has a website called sagewisdom.org or.com and good stuff. | ||
| He's into Kratom. | ||
| He provides, I mean, Salvia. | ||
| He provides good information on it there. | ||
| Most people, at least my own experience and many people, it's like, well, it's interesting. | ||
| It's profoundly strange. | ||
| And what do you bring back from it? | ||
| You know, that's the question. | ||
| What do you bring back from it? | ||
| I think that's partly why, you know, most people are, they don't seek it out particularly. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| But then I know people that do like it. | ||
| I know a lot of people that do. | ||
| I only did it once and I had this very bizarre out-of-body experience, but I don't think I took enough. | ||
| I had a friend, Ari, who took a lot, who over the course of ten minutes lived, maybe, he believes, in the neighborhood of five to six months. | ||
| In this dimension where he had a life and he had friends and he had a job and relationships and He went through this and came back and you know ten minutes later. | ||
| He's like This is gonna be impossible to describe but I lived a life I had like this alternative reality that I went through for multiple months Those kinds of experiences, believe it or not, are not that uncommon out in Salvia. | ||
| Somebody told me once they had an experience where, you know, they were in a place. | ||
| They were like seven or eight years old. | ||
| It was Christmas morning. | ||
| They were at the Christmas tree celebrating Christmas, opening the presents with a family that this guy had no connection to and had never seen. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And what do you make of that? | ||
| I mean, I think Salvia's interesting in that regard, in that, you know, some of these ones that... | ||
| You know, they're worth exploring, right? | ||
| I mean, if you can distort time or actually go into, you know, parallel dimensions or whatever, that's looking into. | ||
| I think it takes more intrepid psychonauts than I am to look into that, but I would encourage people to carefully explore this, you know. | ||
| Years ago, when I first explored DMT, you could get five MEO DMT online. | ||
| There was a chemical company, you could buy it, and I bought like a jug of it, like a container of it, like the size of this stevia container, which is, for people who don't know, enough to get high for the rest of your life. | ||
| I mean, you can do DMT once a month for the rest, and that's all you want to do, by the way, especially 5-MeO. | ||
| 5-MeO brings you to some place that feels like the ultimate center of the universe, and there's nothing, and you're a part of the whole... | ||
| It's also no visuals, which is really weird, or if it is visuals, it's like these opaque geometric patterns that exist in this bizarre white... | ||
| And you just cease to exist. | ||
| And it feels terrifying and strange. | ||
| You know, again, there's no one counting for taste. | ||
| I mean, I agree. | ||
| It is like that. | ||
| There are no visuals. | ||
| So that's something strange about it. | ||
| But many people feel like it puts you in this void place or the zero energy point. | ||
| I don't know if you've had James Oroch on here. | ||
| No. | ||
| He wrote the book Tryptamine Palace. | ||
| No. | ||
| Which is all about 5-methoxy-DMT. How do you spell his last name? | ||
| Oroch. | ||
| O-R-O-C-K, I think. | ||
| The name of his book is Tryptamine Palace. | ||
| And, you know, his thing is 5-methoxy. | ||
| That's his thing, huh? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's an interesting book. | ||
| And now, you know, I mean, the Sonoran Toad, right? | ||
| You've heard that that's 5-methoxy, basically. | ||
| And so that toad, you excrete something on, like, glass? | ||
| You excrete the venom. | ||
| You actually have to torture the toad a little bit. | ||
| Or squeeze the venom, which is in the parotid glands. | ||
| You squeeze it out on a slide, dry it out, and then you can smoke it. | ||
| And it's about 11 to 15% 5-MeO. | ||
| But it's a heavy... | ||
| Do they know why this toad produces this in venom? | ||
| Is it psychoactive when you eat it? | ||
| Well, who knows? | ||
| Most toads produce bufotinine, which is very close to 5-methoxy. | ||
| In fact, it's named after the toads. | ||
| The genus of toads is Bufo. | ||
| Bufotinine is found in most of these toads. | ||
| But Bufo alvarius is the only species known that contains 5-methoxy-DMT. So it's got this, you know, there's probably a single gene mutation that lets it produce this methoxylated compound, which is much stronger than bufotanine. | ||
| And by the way, just to caution people, sometimes in the media you hear about people are licking toads. | ||
| That's not going to do it. | ||
| No, they're not licking toads. | ||
| They're smoking toads. | ||
| Yeah, isn't that weird that it just gets distorted? | ||
| And don't lick them because there are nasty things in there that will be... | ||
| That will kill you if you lick it. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah, these cardiac glycosides. | ||
| Oh, God. | ||
| But pyrolizing it, burning it, destroys all those things. | ||
| So it's okay to smoke it, but it's definitely dangerous to lick it. | ||
| Most people don't like licking toads anyway. | ||
| It's probably, yeah. | ||
| Who came up with that? | ||
| Right. | ||
| I think various fairy tales, right? | ||
| Isn't that the... | ||
| Does the human body produce 5-MeO DMT as well? | ||
| Oh, yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And is it produced in the same areas like the liver and the lungs and presumably the pineal gland? | ||
| Presumably the pineal gland. | ||
| All of these things, you know. | ||
| Yes, it does. | ||
| There's a lot of controversy about... | ||
| Whether, you know, these endogenous tryptamines, DMT primarily, but 5-MeO is definitely there as well. | ||
| Do they have a function? | ||
| You know, there is a lot of speculation and not a lot of facts about whether they actually have a function. | ||
| I mean, they're made and... | ||
| You know, there's one school of thought that says, yeah, they're sort of like physiological noise. | ||
| You know, they'll never reach a point where you could actually perceive any effect because the enzymes, you know, any kind of cellular enzyme will just chop up DMT very readily. | ||
| It's so close to human metabolism. | ||
| It's going to be very ephemeral in the system, even if it is released. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| But other people maintain that under some circumstances the DMT can be stored in vesicles and neural vesicles and released on demand or when some stimulus leads to its release like stress some stress of some sort. | ||
| Jamie go out and grab that painting that that young guy sent the guy who has a pineal gland tumor who makes this really crazy tryptamine art Yes, I've heard about this guy. | ||
| This guy sent me one of his pieces, and he has a tumor. | ||
| Do you know his name, Jamie? | ||
| We'll find his name. | ||
| I'll give this guy some love. | ||
| But you look at his artwork and you go, oh yeah, that's what that is. | ||
| Almost like Alex Gray's stuff, but Alex Gray's stuff is art. | ||
| I mean, it's definitely representative of the tryptamine world. | ||
| It's beautiful and fantastic and amazing, but it's art. | ||
| This guy's stuff seems like a trip. | ||
| The chaos of the tryptamine experience is sort of replicated in his artwork. | ||
| Yeah, that's it. | ||
| And so this young guy, we'll find out his name, he sent this. | ||
| I first heard of this gentleman from... | ||
| Thanks, brother. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Holy moly. | ||
| Take a look at this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I first heard of this guy from John Ohia, who organizes Alex's events. | ||
| I don't even know which way is up. | ||
| I don't think there is an up, Joe. | ||
| I think this is a zero-gravity environment. | ||
| Up is any way that you want it to be. | ||
| This is pretty amazing. | ||
| Yeah, it's amazing. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, well, I'm waiting for the... | ||
| We're building a new studio, and when that's done, we'll have this up prominently featured, but this kid's work is just incredible. | ||
| Jamie, see if you can find it, who he is, but... | ||
| He should be... | ||
| Is he... | ||
| I hope he's healthy. | ||
| Letting himself be looked at by medical people? | ||
| I think he's just happy to be tripping all the time. | ||
| He's just going to leave it alone. | ||
| What about science? | ||
| Sean Thornton is his name. | ||
| Sean Thornton? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, I got an article here. | |
| Shout out to Sean Thornton. | ||
| Yeah, there's his work. | ||
| There it is. | ||
| Artists got cancer of the pineal gland. | ||
| His paintings will leave you speechless. | ||
| Yes, they will. | ||
| Yes, they will. | ||
| Sean Thornton. | ||
| Sean Thornton. | ||
| Amazing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| His stuff is incredible. | ||
| And apparently, well, he's, at least in some sort of way, anecdotal evidence that it's produced in the pineal gland. | ||
| Of course, the Cottonwood Research Foundation that Dr. Rick Strassman is a part of in his amazing work from DMT, the spirit molecule, of course, the documentary that you and I were in. | ||
| His work has shown that it is produced by the pineal gland in live rats. | ||
| So we know now for a fact that at least in that mammal, it's produced in the pineal gland. | ||
| But that's always been for people that... | ||
| I went to the Vatican last summer, and one of the really cool things was the giant pine cone that they have in the center of one of the... | ||
| The outer areas. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I was really lucky to have a very good guide who was a professor. | ||
| And he was explaining to me that that was representative of the pineal gland. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| It was really fascinating because there's this enormous pine cone and it's surrounded by these two peacocks or two peacocks on the side. | ||
| They're supposed to represent immortality in some sort of strange way. | ||
| So I don't know what that whole vision was supposed to mean But he was very adamant that that pinecone there you see it up there on the screen that that is representative of the pineal gland and also in ancient Egypt and a lot of the hieroglyphs you see that as well, right? | ||
| Well, yeah, pineal itself means because it is shaped like a pine cone. | ||
| That's why it's named that. | ||
| But I had no idea. | ||
| That is very interesting. | ||
| Yeah, it was pretty fascinating. | ||
| What was also fascinating was this guy, although he knew that that was representative of the pineal gland, he did not know that the pineal gland produced DMT. He wasn't even aware of what DMT was. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So he and I had this really cool conversation about it where he was like, what? | ||
| You know, this crazy Italian accent? | ||
| This is amazing. | ||
| And he's writing things down and I'm, you know, writing, telling him about Strassman's work and you and your brother and all these different things to look into. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know. | ||
|
unidentified
|
While my wife was rolling her eyes, like, oh Jesus, not this shit again. | |
| You just can't be taken out in public, Joe. | ||
| You always embarrass me. | ||
| Well, she knew as soon as the guy said pineal gland, and my eyes lit up, and I'm like, here we go. | ||
| Let's talk about drugs. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, there is a guy, a couple of interesting people to mention in this context. | ||
| One of them is a researcher, a guy named E.D. Frexka. | ||
| How do you spell that? | ||
| Good question. | ||
| E-D-F-R-E... C-K-S-K-A, I think. | ||
| I may have to correct myself on that. | ||
| He's a pharmacologist and a neurochemist and psychiatrist, but he is the one that's really kind of leading the charge for endogenous functions of DMT and has good evidence, which has been... | ||
| You know, disputed by some. | ||
| I mean, Dave Nichols is kind of on the other side of it. | ||
| He's like, ah, DMT doesn't have any internal function. | ||
| All these people are deluded, you know. | ||
| That seems to me to be really cocky. | ||
| Well, I think that it's surprising that Dave, who's a very careful scientist, would have such, you know, such pre-formed ideas. | ||
| Very rigid ideas, right. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| There's a conference in the UK at the end of June called Breaking Convention, which you may have heard of. | ||
| It's like a psychedelic conference. | ||
| Dave and Edie are going to be there. | ||
| I'm going to be there, hopefully keeping them up. | ||
| I don't want any fistfights or anything. | ||
| They're going to be talking about this and doing a debate on it. | ||
| Breaking convention. | ||
| You might tell people to Google that. | ||
| That's a very interesting conference. | ||
| For sure. | ||
| What makes Dave so confident? | ||
| I mean, when you consider the potency of it and the knowledge that's produced in the body and then also the knowledge of the effects of it, which are just astounding. | ||
| Right. | ||
| How could anyone say that you know for sure, has he done it? | ||
| Has Dave done it? | ||
| Well, of course he's done it. | ||
| Of course he's done it. | ||
| So how the fuck could he do it and not go, okay, what is this? | ||
| Well, I think he does, but then there's also this very reductionist side to him. | ||
| Basically, just as a pharmacologist, he says, it's never going to reach. | ||
| You know, sufficient concentration in the plasma to have an effect. | ||
| However, I think he's wrong. | ||
| And I told him, I mean, I was teasing him, I was saying, you know, I wrote back, you know, that famous phrase Arthur C. Clarke once said, you know, when a distinguished but elderly scientist says that something is possible, he's very likely correct. | ||
| When he says it's impossible, he's almost certainly wrong. | ||
| Well, when you're talking about the just general biodiversity of human beings and how some people... | ||
| Let's talk about other human neurochemistry, like depression. | ||
| Like, some people are super happy and have no problem with their dopamine or serotonin levels. | ||
| And there's other people that have, like, real issues. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, there is that. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| So if you just look at that, the variability of that, and then also how that can be manipulated with exercise and all these other different things that can raise those levels up. | ||
| What about the other thing, like, in terms of, like, holotropic breathing or all these different shamanic breathing and yogic exercises, kundalini yoga, which... | ||
| I haven't experienced it in Kundalini Yonah, but I did have a very bizarre experience fairly recently on yoga where I went into class on a pretty high dose of cannabis, and I started tripping in the middle of one of the more intense poses. | ||
| It was just something akin to the very beginnings of a DMT trip where I started seeing patterns and seeing things moving and some sort of a... | ||
| It didn't go anywhere, but I don't pursue it in terms of, like, attempting to make that happen. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But I would imagine that if it's made in the body, and the effects of it are reproducible when you take it, I mean, taking DMT, there's a very few people, there's a very small percentage that don't have an experience when they take it, right? | ||
| Very small percentage. | ||
| Do we know what that number is? | ||
| Probably something like, I mean, I would say a wild guess, but a 2% or something. | ||
| That's actually pretty high. | ||
| Which is again, anomalous. | ||
| Why should there be people who don't have any effect? | ||
| I mean, that's a whole other question about what's strange about their metabolism. | ||
| But it's interesting that you raise this because a lot of these yogic techniques, especially kundalini, is probably about inducing DMT synthesis in the pineal or wherever it occurs. | ||
| There's also a very interesting technology that has come to light, I just found out about it last summer, called the Ajna light. | ||
| Have you heard of this? | ||
| No. | ||
| A-J-N-A, so write down ajnalight.com. | ||
| This guy who's developed this is a very interesting fellow. | ||
| He's named Guy Harriman, and he used to work for Apple. | ||
| He actually worked very closely with Steve Jobs when Steve Jobs had Next Computing, so he's basically a computer programmer and engineer. | ||
| Worked with Steve Jobs, but then he, for some reason, he decided he had to move to Thailand and become a Zen monk, which he did, but he continued to work with technology, and he developed this thing called the Ajna Light, which he claims induces DMT synthesis in the pineal. | ||
| And I was at a conference last summer, actually, at Tiringham, at this place where this one is going to be, and he was there. | ||
| I tried it a couple of times and by golly, it's a lot like DMT. Really? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Explain that. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| It looks like a floor lamp. | ||
| It's nothing. | ||
| It's got this array of LEDs on a holder. | ||
| You lie under it. | ||
| programs it from his iPad, I guess, in different sequences. | ||
| But you lie under this thing for a few minutes, and pretty soon you get into the zone. | ||
| You know, these visuals begin to manifest, and it looks a great deal like DMT. | ||
| So then, and he claims, you know, it's synthesizing DMT in the pineal, and it is very much like DMT would be if it's released at the site of action. | ||
| Because, you know, DMT, when you smoke it, it brings a big body load with it. | ||
| Do you have to wear that goofy outfit? | ||
| What's with the orange outfit, seriously? | ||
| What is this? | ||
| Well, they're in Thailand. | ||
| I understand, but the expression of monkness, the pious outfit. | ||
| Let it go, folks. | ||
| Just wear a t-shirt. | ||
| Wear whatever. | ||
| I didn't have to get into any costume to do it, but I did do it a couple times. | ||
| How many times did you do it? | ||
| Well, I was not there long enough to do it. | ||
| I did it a couple times. | ||
| And this woman's sitting. | ||
| Is it just effective sitting as it is lying down? | ||
| I couldn't tell you, but I expect so. | ||
| You lie down? | ||
| I lay down, yeah. | ||
| And you close your eyes? | ||
| No, well, yeah, you close your eyes, doesn't matter, because it's, you know, you don't have eye shades on. | ||
| And usually he's playing some music. | ||
| But then, you know, in me, like, the reductionist, you know, kicks in and says, well, guy, this is interesting. | ||
| How do you know it's really DMT that you're stimulating? | ||
| And we've been going back and forth on that, and how can you test that? | ||
| And there are ways to do it, but most of them involve some fairly drastic procedures that you wouldn't want to do on people because they wouldn't give you permission if they had any sense, but you could do it to rats. | ||
| You could do something called microdialysis. | ||
| You can put a Essentially a microscopic tube that's absorptive next to the pineal and you can collect samples that you can detect. | ||
| This is not something that people would volunteer for. | ||
| How about just take your word for it? | ||
| Well, I just want to know, does it really induce it or not? | ||
| I am not saying it does, but it's a lot like DMT. What about hovering something like that over a sensory deprivation tank, like being inside of it and having it hover over your head so you have the added experience of outer body with that? | ||
| I would think that would be pretty intense and not hard to recreate. | ||
| Probably not. | ||
| What you'd probably want to do with that is to have some kind of goggles, essentially. | ||
| That could be connected to his program by Bluetooth or something. | ||
| So then you're wearing the goggles, you're in the isolation tank. | ||
| But if you just hover it over your head, if you just have an arm, like a computer monitor arm, and just swing it over the head... | ||
| And so you turn it on, close the door of the tank, close your eyes, lay back, and maybe it has like a 30-second window where it lets you settle in and then begins the program. | ||
| Lots of ways you could approach it. | ||
| That just seems to me to really ramp it up. | ||
| Now, here's the question. | ||
| It's interesting, though. | ||
| This is just one of an array of, you know, what you might call neurotechnologies, you know, or even spiritual technologies. | ||
| Maybe this will make psychedelics obsolete. | ||
| Well, this is a great way that you could do it without actually having to hold on to an illegal drug. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Because you're carrying your illegal drug with you. | ||
| So far, they can't arrest you for that, although I'm sure they're trying to figure out a way. | ||
| That was your brother's classic line, everyone's holding. | ||
| Everyone's holding. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Now, with this stuff, did you experience the communication that you get with DMT? Because that, to me, has always been the most profound aspect of it, is this feeling that I'm in the presence of something, and then this sort of telekinetic, understanding the words but not hearing the words. | ||
| Honestly, I didn't get that because I think I was not under long enough. | ||
| I didn't have much time, so I was only under... | ||
| Each time I was under maybe 20 minutes, which isn't... | ||
| I think if I'd stayed in that place, if I could settle into it for an hour, I think that probably would manifest, you know? | ||
| And you think this why? | ||
| Why do you think this? | ||
| Why do you think it would change? | ||
| I think it takes a while for the thing to fully... | ||
| Whatever the term is. | ||
| If it is DMT, for the DMT to reach a critical level where you're seeing that kind of stuff. | ||
| Do you feel this because it was ramping up during your experience? | ||
| I felt like it was. | ||
| But if I had stuck around, I thought it would develop. | ||
| And we've talked about, too, we've talked about thinking about how to... | ||
| Establish that this really is DMT. Another approach that we've tried is to take a... | ||
| or the guys tried. | ||
| I don't have access to the light. | ||
| I can't afford it, but... | ||
| How much does it cost? | ||
| It costs about $3,300, you know, which is not bad. | ||
| But beyond my pay grade right now. | ||
| I'm going to buy it for you for a present. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| You should buy it and keep it yourself. | ||
| I'm going to buy two of them. | ||
| I'll buy one for you and one for me. | ||
| We'll correspond. | ||
| All right. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Well, as long as you're going to do that, I might mention that that guy is offering a conference special here. | ||
| Do I have to wear the outfit? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, you don't. | ||
| You don't. | ||
| I'm not wearing orange. | ||
| But if you buy it, you'll get a discount on it if you go through the Facebook site, which I'm about to put his stuff up there. | ||
|
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Okay. | |
| Beautiful. | ||
| We can talk about this offline, but if you go through Facebook, some portion of it will go toward supporting this conference. | ||
| Well, I would love that. | ||
| I'm very curious about this, because I know that I have a good buddy of mine, my friend Danny, who's done Kundalini for quite a long time, and he can reproduce DMT states. | ||
| He's actually had DMT experiences independently of the Kundalini, and he says it's the same thing. | ||
| He says he can get there, and I believe him. | ||
| I'm just too lazy or something. | ||
| I don't know what it is. | ||
| I'm not inclined. | ||
| Well, I think there's a genetic component, you know? | ||
| I mean, like this gentleman, although he has a tumor, I'm not sure why... | ||
| I mean, he doesn't want medical people poking and prodding him, but he would be a perfect subject to settle a lot of issues if he was willing to... | ||
| You know, cooperate. | ||
| I mean, just having a look at his cerebral spinal fluid, which would be the obvious, you know, fluid to sample for this, would be very interesting. | ||
| Yeah, but I can understand his reluctance if he has reluctance. | ||
| Yeah, of course. | ||
| People drilling into your dome, trying to suck out brain juice. | ||
| Doesn't sound fun. | ||
| But it is interesting, though, that these compounds are, in some way, a part of normal human neurochemistry. | ||
| And why? | ||
| Right? | ||
| And Dave Nichols, what does he believe? | ||
| Well, I don't know if he believes anything. | ||
| He just, you know, he just is skeptical that in normal physiological processes, DMT has much of a function. | ||
| What about dreams? | ||
| Dreams are a possibility. | ||
| Yeah, that's always been the big one, right? | ||
| That's always been the big one. | ||
| And it's totally plausible. | ||
| You'll have to get him on here and let him explain himself. | ||
| I would love to. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, you know, I'm not sure. | ||
| He just has this idea that I think for one thing, I think, you know, he's kind of a reductionist guy. | ||
| I think all the new age stuff, the new excitement about DMT, the pineal and all that, it kind of puts him off. | ||
| But on the other hand, don't assume that we know everything because, in fact, we know nothing. | ||
| And if it's there, I think it probably does have a function. | ||
| It's not surprising that it's there. | ||
| It's everywhere. | ||
| I mean, DMT is an interesting molecule because it's two steps from tryptophan, right? | ||
| Tryptophan is an amino acid, an essential amino acid, one of the 20 that goes into proteins. | ||
| So tryptophan is in every living thing on this planet. | ||
| And there are two enzymes that are also pretty much universal in cells that can convert DMT or tryptophan to DMT in two simple steps. | ||
| You know, I don't want to get too into the chemistry, but basically you remove... | ||
| The acid portion of the amino acid, you get tryptamine, and from there you add the methyl groups, and there you are. | ||
| Which is why DMT is very, very common in plants, for example, and animals. | ||
| I tell people nature is drenched in DMT. Drenched is a great way to describe it. | ||
| Drenched in DMT. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of species of plants that contain DMT, for sure. | ||
| You know, I mean, there hasn't been any survey or anything like that, but if you look at the genera that have a lot of DMT, like acacia is a good example, the Australian acacias are some of the strongest sources of DMT. There are 1,700 species of acacia. | ||
| Probably 75% of them contain DMT. And I'm sure you're aware of the Israeli scientists that believe that the story of Moses and the burning bush was the acacia tree. | ||
| And they think that that was the confusion of all the translations and, of course, the oral history past It's down over many, many years, then finally written down. | ||
| But this idea of the burning bush delivering the Word of God was most likely in some way a psychedelic trip induced by DMT, and most likely because of the acacia tree. | ||
| Most likely the acacia tree, because that was in the area. | ||
| You know, I mean, it's an interesting idea, and it's interesting that the, you know, sort of the way that the burning bush presented itself was like DMT presents itself. | ||
| You cannot take your eyes away from it, but at the same time, you cannot look at it. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| But pharmacologically, was this something he smoked? | ||
| Was it an incense? | ||
| How was he exposed to this? | ||
| And... | ||
| You know, because that will make a difference because you can't eat DMT because it's destroyed by monoamine oxidase, right? | ||
| That's the whole basis of ayahuasca. | ||
| In terms of these acacias... | ||
| You know, the question comes up also, well, okay, most of them are native to Australia. | ||
| So did the Aborigines know about this? | ||
| And if you look at their art, it's like, looks like DMT. It's very psychedelic art. | ||
| I haven't really looked at very much Aboriginal. | ||
| All of these pointillist kind of designs in Aboriginal art. | ||
| I mean, they're extremely psychedelic. | ||
| See if you can find some of that. | ||
| But they, the Aborigines, I think they had to know about it. | ||
| They're just not talking about it. | ||
| But one possible way that they could have used it, because the DMT in the acacias is so high, the leaves, some of these acacias, they're 2% DMT. Wow! | ||
| So if you were to take leaves and throw them on a fire in an enclosed space, like a sweat lodge type space, you could potentially get quite loaded on DMT. There's no indication that they smoked stuff, but they may have fumigated themselves with DMT. Oh, that completely makes sense, if you're talking about a burning bush. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| How does that make its way to Israel, though? | ||
| Well, maybe the— Who knows? | ||
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Who knows? | |
| Who knows how anything makes its way anywhere, right? | ||
| I mean, these folk technologies, it's interesting. | ||
| If you look at the New World, you know, in the historical sense— People have remarked, why are there so many more psychedelic plants in the new world than the old world, right? | ||
| It's something about people's relationship to plants in this very high biodiversity environment. | ||
| People are mucking around with plants, right? | ||
| Like a perpetual question that comes up. | ||
| Is how did they figure out how to combine banisteriopsis and psychotria to get the activity of ayahuasca? | ||
| How out of 80,000 species in the Amazon do they figure out combine these two? | ||
| To the uninitiated why that's important with the monoamine oxidase? | ||
| Yeah, well it's important because banisteriopsis contains these alkaloids called beta-carmelines that are monoamine oxidase inhibitors and monoamine oxidase It's the enzyme in the gut that breaks down DMT. So you can drink tea with DMT in it. | ||
| You can eat it all day. | ||
| Nothing's going to happen because this enzyme will inactivate it. | ||
| And that's probably a reflection of an evolutionary process. | ||
| You know, we've adapted to toxins in our environment, basically. | ||
| If you inhibit that with the alkaloids from the banisteriopsis, they're very potent, very selective MAO inhibitors that protects it from degradation in the gut. | ||
| It can cross into the blood and into the blood-brain barrier. | ||
| So that's the basis of the oral activity. | ||
| And people make much about how they sort of stumbled on this combination, right? | ||
| And in fact, one of our presenters at this conference, Manuel Torres, who's an archaeologist, has been looking at this for quite a while. | ||
| And this is... | ||
| This is one of the sort of gee whiz things. | ||
| How did these primitive people figure out how to combine these plants, right? | ||
| I agree it's remarkable. | ||
| If you talk to the shaman, they'll say, well, the plants told us. | ||
| But what does that mean, you know? | ||
| But what is interesting to me, in a way, or what I've been thinking about lately, if you look at the archaeology of these things, the snuffs that... | ||
| There are two or three different kinds of snuffs that are used in South America that contain DMT. The Anadenanthera snuffs and the Varola snuffs. | ||
| The Anadenanthera snuffs are ancient. | ||
| We have archaeological evidence that puts that back to 10, 11,000 years. | ||
| They are By far, the most ancient psychedelics used in the New World are these snuffs that contain DMT. Nobody is asking the question, what possessed these people to take the seeds, grind them up, and shove them up their nose? | ||
| I mean, this is not... | ||
|
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Something that intuitively you would do. | |
| And yet that seems to me as easily as puzzling as how did they find the combination for ayahuasca. | ||
| Nobody's really addressed that. | ||
| My first impulse when I find a new plant is not necessarily to snort it. | ||
| But isn't that the place of the pharmacological daredevil? | ||
| I mean, there's always this one person who's out there, dude, check what I found. | ||
| And that curiosity, that need to explore things. | ||
| Yeah, that's exactly right. | ||
| Somebody stumbled on this. | ||
| And I think the same is true of ayahuasca, you know, because in fact, DMT is not that uncommon. | ||
| Truth to tell, beta-carbolines are not that uncommon. | ||
| So sooner or later, people are going to stumble on this combination. | ||
| Once they did, then, you know, they share the knowledge. | ||
| It just took time. | ||
| Yeah, it takes time. | ||
| Well, do you think it is possible? | ||
| I mean, obviously it's possible, but is there any evidence that points to the idea that primitive... | ||
| Primates maybe didn't have this monoamine oxidase in their system? | ||
| Or if they did, they had it in lower amounts and it allowed more dimethyltryptamine to enter into the body from consuming plants? | ||
| Is there a potential link between consuming various plants? | ||
| We're talking about thousands of different... | ||
| You could eat a salad. | ||
| If you didn't have monoamine oxidase in your gut, you could eat a salad and potentially trip. | ||
| Yes, if you didn't have it. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| And when you see jaguars that do trip, there's all this footage of jaguars in the jungle eating these plants. | ||
| What are they doing? | ||
| Do we know? | ||
| We don't know, and I'm not sure how much credence I put into that footage. | ||
| Could it be like catnip? | ||
| It looks like catnip, but they're eating Banisteriopsis, apparently, which doesn't have DMT. It's got the beta-carboletes. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But carmine alone contains some psychoactive compounds. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| And there are three main beta-carmelines in banisteriopsis. | ||
| In fact, this is what I'm talking about at the conference. | ||
| My talk is about beta-carmelines. | ||
| The idea that they're not psychoactive, that they're just MAO inhibitors is not really true. | ||
| It's an incomplete picture. | ||
| There are a lot of other activities with beta-carbolines and a lot of attention recently refocused on harmine, which is the main beta-carboline in banisteriopsis. | ||
| Turns out it has all kinds of activities that... | ||
| Have been sort of overlooked until now. | ||
| Not least of all, it stimulates neurogenesis. | ||
| It stimulates nerve cell growth. | ||
| This is big news because... | ||
| That's huge. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And potentially, it inhibits a kinase, which has to do with... | ||
| Kinase is a protein that phosphorylates things, right? | ||
| Very common, all kinds of kinases around the body. | ||
| But it inhibits this one particular kinase called DYRK1, whatever that means. | ||
| But it is associated with the stimulation of nerve growth from neural stem cells. | ||
| This is all petri plate test tube stuff. | ||
| But it's not unreasonable to think that this is going on in the body. | ||
| So if that plays a part in neurogenesis, that could potentially have some real benefits to people that have things like Parkinson's or nerve disorders or... | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Maybe PTSD or CTE, rather. | ||
| Mm-hmm. | ||
| It could. | ||
| Or, you know, especially dementias like cognitive... | ||
| Alzheimer's. | ||
| Alzheimer's or other types of dementia that are not strictly Alzheimer's that are just kind of senile dementias. | ||
| Well, I hope it's true because this is my... | ||
| That's going to kick you right back in. | ||
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Sure. | |
| This is my main prophylactic against senility. | ||
| I figure if I take ayahuasca regularly, I'm probably gonna be okay. | ||
| Yeah, right back in the game. | ||
| Imagine if that's the case. | ||
| One of the talks that I listened to of your brothers from way back in the day, he was talking about Scientific nomenclature related to harming and that before they when one of the Recent or one of the early explorers to South America when they found this stuff they were calling it telepathine Yes, they were calling it telepathine. | ||
| Because it induced these group states of telepathy. | ||
| Because it was rumored to induce them. | ||
| I mean, if you want to get into what you could call the sordid history of the chemistry investigations of ayahuasca, because harming... | ||
| And harmoline and tetrahydroharmoline, these were originally found in Paganum harmola, which is where they got their names, which is Syrian rue, right? | ||
| And a lot of people use that as an alternative MAO when they're making ayahuasca analogs. | ||
| So that's how those alkaloids got their names. | ||
| And then when chemists came along, kind of all through the 19th century, they started looking at banisteriopsis, and they would isolate things, and they didn't know what to call them. | ||
| Sometimes they called them telepathine because of the rumors. | ||
| Sometimes they were called banisterine and yahaine because they didn't really know what the compound was, right? | ||
| And then it turned out, well, it's actually harming, and harming was isolated earlier, so then they got their nomenclature right. | ||
| There was a long period where they never collected voucher specimens, so a lot of this work was in some ways useless because they forgot to collect the actual plants that they did the isolation from. | ||
| It got a little more rigorous. | ||
| There was a group, a couple of investigators that actually thought to collect the plants that they did the isolation with. | ||
| So then they could document the source, right? | ||
| I mean, people think this is not important, but in ethnopharmacology, it's quite important. | ||
| You know, for example, for a long time, just a side thing, you know, for a long time, there was a plant called Prestonia Amazonica. | ||
| That was reputed to be one of the sources of these alkaloids and one of the components used to make ayahuasca. | ||
| That got loose in the literature and it took years to straighten this out because it's not true. | ||
| And there was no doubt, there was no voucher specimen to show that this was, you know, it was not Prestonia amazonica. | ||
| It got so bad... | ||
| The Schultes actually had to publish a paper that said Prestonia Amazonica, Amazonian hallucinogen or not. | ||
| Turns out, not. | ||
| You know? | ||
| So you have to be aware of bad documentation. | ||
| If you're going to collect plants, know what you're collecting so the chemists that might come along and work with that can refer back to it. | ||
| Otherwise, it's just good science. | ||
| Chemists don't think in terms of the botany. | ||
| They just have something. | ||
| They're trying to isolate something from it. | ||
| But it helps to know what the identity of it is. | ||
| It seems to me that that part of the world, the Amazon jungle, and our really troubling relationship with it currently, is so analogous to the way human beings are kind of interfacing with the world. | ||
| Like, that's a good way to look at it there, because there's so many different powerful things that they're learning about this one area while people are chopping it down left and right and slashing and burning and making room for cattle grazing and all this other crazy shit that's going on down there. | ||
| Well, yeah, and there is, and this is a good illustration of, you know, our sort of penny-wiseness and pound-foolishness about these things. | ||
| There are literally trillions of dollars, if you just want to look at it in terms of Dollars and cents, which is not the best way to look at it, because after all, this ecosystem is, you know, the burning of the rainforest is about 30% of human global greenhouse gas emissions, if you could just stop burning down the damn forest. | ||
| 30%? | ||
| 30%. | ||
| They figure. | ||
| But then on the other side of economics, and there have been assessments, what use do you make of the Amazonian biome to maximize its value, right? | ||
| If you do cattle, it's worth so much per hectare. | ||
| If you do... | ||
| Hardwoods? | ||
| Well, yeah. | ||
| That's the big issue, right? | ||
| But the thing is, in terms of undiscovered, potentially undiscovered blockbuster drugs, there's probably at least a trillion dollars worth of undiscovered drugs in the Amazon, which will, of course, never be discovered because we're going to wreck it. | ||
| We're already busy wrecking it. | ||
| Insane amounts of species of plants. | ||
| Well, in the Amazon, it's 80,000 species, yeah. | ||
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Wow. | |
| I mean, there's about 250,000 species of plants overall, always revising this number, and they always seem to revise it up. | ||
| But between 250,000 to 300,000 species of so-called higher plants. | ||
| And in the Amazon, it's one of the most biodiverse regions, about 80,000 species. | ||
|
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Wow. | |
| Wow. | ||
| And all of this, less than 10% of this, not even close to 10% of this incredible molecular and biological diversity has been looked at as potential sources of new medicines. | ||
| You know, I mean, there's a whole area of folk medicine and folk knowledge. | ||
| But to systematically look through these species and isolate things of interest hasn't been done. | ||
| You know, a very, I mean, it's been going on for years. | ||
| There's been a lot of work, but it's not really touching a big proportion of it. | ||
| Pharmaceutical companies are not interested in this, you know, interestingly enough. | ||
| They want to... | ||
| They're corporations. | ||
| They tell you they're finding new medicines that will cure people and help people. | ||
| To a certain extent, that's true. | ||
| But remember, the bottom line is profit. | ||
| They want to own everything. | ||
| They don't want to share intellectual property with these savages down there that are the stewards of this knowledge. | ||
| Why should we let these people have any part of it? | ||
| So they want to make everything synthetically. | ||
| They want it all to come out of vats in their laboratories. | ||
| But it's the totally wrong approach because the frequency – Of compounds that make it from discovery to the clinic is very low. | ||
| And when they abandoned natural products about 25 years ago, the frequency of drug discovery, the pharmaceutical discovery pipeline, as they call it, dried up. | ||
| And it took a long time for the pharmaceutical industry to realize, you know, essentially we threw the baby out with the bathwater. | ||
| We need to go back to natural products. | ||
| Because that's where you find the molecular diversity, the scaffolds on which we can build these drugs. | ||
| Think of the complex molecules that you find in nature. | ||
| That may not be what makes it to the clinic. | ||
| It may be a derivative of that or an analog of that, but it's still the plants that give you the ideas for the structure, if you can follow me. | ||
| It's not that you're going to grow this rainforest tree in plantations, but you can go and isolate a compound, determine the structure, and then you can probably synthesize an analog. | ||
| But the idea comes from nature. | ||
| And isn't part of the problem in that isolating one individual compound from a plant that might have multiple compounds that work synergistically? | ||
| Well, that's another difference. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Again, the FDA and just the whole drug discovery process, they like single compounds, you know, magic bullets. | ||
| They like the synthetic compound that is completely defined molecularly, and they don't like all these other compounds. | ||
| Related compounds like Marinol, for instance, right? | ||
| Synthetic THC, which is not nearly as pleasant for people who have cancer or glaucoma or any host of different... | ||
| Very good example. | ||
| Marinol, it does what it does, but the multi-component preparations of cannabis are much more effective. | ||
| That's true of almost all herbal medicines. | ||
| Now when they isolate THC, it's one of how many different cannabinoids? | ||
| I think there's about 400 different kinds of cannabinoids in cannabis. | ||
| So when you're getting THC, you're getting... | ||
| 400. A lot of other things in cannabis as well, but I believe I remember reading there were about 400 kinds of cannabinols in cannabis. | ||
| So good example, incredibly complex plant chemically, you know, and as they all are, but that's a good example. | ||
| I've never taken Marinol, but everyone that I know that has has said it's just a pale imitation of what cannabis gives you. | ||
| Yeah, well, it's for one particular use, which is what? | ||
| I guess it's pain, right? | ||
| Is that what it's used for? | ||
| But even then, the people that take it for that have said that it's not nearly as effective as just... | ||
| This is a good example of the sort of cognitive dissonance of the FDA and the whole regulatory thing, because for years the FDA has been saying, well, cannabis has no medical use. | ||
| There's no recognized medical use. | ||
| Oh, but there is this one drug that the FDA has approved, Marinol, which has some small amount of the therapeutic use that cannabis does. | ||
| But it's just so incredible with so much information available today that they're making such poor choices in that regard that someone can't step up and logically address this thing and say, look, you're getting a fraction of the benefits of this just because of this bizarre need that human beings have to patent things and to own things. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it's not that plants can't be patented. | ||
| They can be. | ||
| Formulations can. | ||
| I think GW Pharmaceuticals, which has brought out Sativex, it's a standardized cannabis preparation that you take orally as a mouth spray. | ||
| So it's a natural product. | ||
| It's patented. | ||
| It has all the cannabinoids are well characterized. | ||
| It's essentially a standardized extract. | ||
| So that sort of represents where this is going. | ||
| Well, that's a positive branch of it, right? | ||
| Yeah, that's a good thing. | ||
| That more reflects what cannabis should be as a medicine. | ||
| And so it's essentially all the properties of cannabis and what they've patented is the formulization? | ||
| Is that what it is? | ||
| They've patented the formulation. | ||
| Yeah, and probably the use as well. | ||
| That's another way you can get patents. | ||
| How is their formulation unique, you know? | ||
| That I couldn't tell you. | ||
| It's an oral aerosol spray, so there's issues that come up with... | ||
| Is that it? | ||
| That's a company called Jombo makes a spray. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Yeah, it's awesome. | ||
| Yeah, it's similar to that. | ||
| It's... | ||
| Yeah, it's an oral aerosol and I'm sure it's well standardized in terms of what cannabinoids are in there. | ||
| I think they brought it out initially for multiple sclerosis. | ||
| That was the treatment. | ||
| And then for seizures and they're gradually expanding, you know. | ||
| I mean, it's interesting how marijuana has gone from, you know, this sort of reviled drug of abuse to now it's the medicine of the future. | ||
| And that's a good thing. | ||
| I mean, I think it does have a lot of applications. | ||
| And why it should be illegal, there's no reason for this. | ||
| You know, but obviously there is. | ||
| It's in someone's interest to keep it illegal. | ||
| Well, that would be my only concern with this patented formula that they've sort of figured out is that other people can't make a formula as well. | ||
| It's like in patenting, do they own the process? | ||
| Like, what if it's a very obvious process? | ||
| Like, you know, like the ayahuasca process. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's a very obvious process. | ||
| The monoamine oxidase inhibitor along with the Plant that contains a DMT, boil it down, everybody knows how to do it. | ||
| If somebody figures out a way how to patent that, does that become a real problem in that they own the rights to something that's been around forever? | ||
| It does become a problem. | ||
| And with, as you say, with something like that where... | ||
| It's pretty obvious how you do it. | ||
| It's not that complicated. | ||
| There's no innovative technology there. | ||
| There's no art. | ||
| There's no art of innovation, which is what would make it patentable. | ||
| There were attempts to patent ayahuasca a few years ago, and it got... | ||
| You know, it actually was patented, and a delegation of indigenous healers from Ecuador, Colombia, and Peru came to the U.S. Patent Office and petitioned against this and said, we've been using this medicine for thousands of years. | ||
| Who patented it? | ||
| Oh, it was a guy named Loren Miller who really didn't know what he was doing. | ||
| I forget what his company was. | ||
| This was when I was still doing my postdoc at NIH, so this was like... | ||
| Mid-80s, he tried to patent it, and what it turned out was it was a completely specious patent. | ||
| It was a patent on a particular strain of Banisteriopsis that he collected that had an anomalous flower color, I think, and that was the basis of the patent. | ||
| Well, that's absurd because flower color is Highly variable. | ||
| It was a useless patent in every respect. | ||
| So was it rescinded? | ||
| Yeah, the patent office overturned the patent, as they well should have. | ||
| And then I believe it was reinstated for some reason. | ||
| I haven't really followed this up, but I think by that time everyone kind of came to the conclusion that It was absurd. | ||
| There was no reason to do it. | ||
| And he didn't really have the resources to develop it. | ||
| And he lost a lot of respect. | ||
| Because it's not so much that you can't... | ||
| I mean, the intellectual property thing is the real issue. | ||
| And that's why the pharmaceutical companies want to stay away from traditional medicines, by and large. | ||
| Because it's like... | ||
| You know, the indigenous people are the stewards of the knowledge. | ||
| They know how to use the plant. | ||
| They maintain the plant. | ||
| Their habitat, you know, is where the plant is found. | ||
| So they rightly should have a place at the table. | ||
| You know, if you're going to commercialize this traditional medicine, they should get something back. | ||
| Because traditionally, we've been ripping things off from indigenous people for a long time. | ||
| It's called biopiracy, right? | ||
| And that's how they operate generally. | ||
| So that's an issue. | ||
| But there are ways to address that issue. | ||
| Just basically, you know, come to terms with it and acknowledge that their knowledge does count for something. | ||
| And they should have a part of the proceeds. | ||
| If you make a billion-dollar drug out of this, you should be able to give something back to Indigenous people. | ||
| So it's complicated. | ||
| It does seem complicated. | ||
| It also seems like when everything becomes commercial, it becomes... | ||
| When you look at the idea that pharmaceutical drug companies at all, when you look at a corporation and you think of this idea of infinite growth and this is what they're subscribing to and they're constantly trying to make more and more money, and then you think about compounds and compounds being legal and them trying to figure out a way to market these things, it seems to become... | ||
| It seems to be a big issue that we're relying on that at all. | ||
| It's almost like that tale of the scorpion and the frog, where the frog tells the scorpion, hey, I'll give you a ride across the river, but do me a favor and don't sting me, because if you do, we'll both drown. | ||
| And then halfway through, the scorpion stings him, and the frog goes, what the fuck? | ||
| And the scorpion goes, hey man, it's my nature. | ||
| It seems like right the nature of these corporations is just to make money so relying on them to bring these intense Psychedelic compounds to the market or to even saying the markets terrible word to just bring them to daily use or bring them to making them free to use I think that corporations You know, | ||
| as you say, their main job, as they see it, though they don't say so in public, is basically to make money, you know, to patent these compounds and make money. | ||
| And make more money every year. | ||
| And the best way to do that... | ||
| There's no revenue model in psychedelics. | ||
| There's no way for them to make money according to that model. | ||
| Here's a way to not make money. | ||
| Don't give that guy who's got a leaf over his dick a billion dollars. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| That guy, he's been happy shooting arrows at monkeys for 10,000 years. | ||
| That's kind of it. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| They're not going to do that if they don't have to. | ||
| Well, they won't. | ||
| And, you know, they want these psychedelics, if you use them therapeutically, these are things you might take... | ||
| A few times in your life. | ||
| They want drugs you take four times a day for the rest of your life. | ||
| That's the revenue model. | ||
| And the revenue model, if there is one with psychedelics, is not that, because they have to be used in a context, you know, set and setting, right? | ||
| The revenue model, if there is one, is to have centers, to have places you can go and take psychedelics in a controlled setting. | ||
| They won't look like clinics. | ||
| They'll look like spas. | ||
| Take the family for a weekend and have a nice... | ||
| You know, psilocybin vacation while you're busy getting your massages and doing yoga and whatever. | ||
| That's how it's going to work, I think, if it's allowed to go forward. | ||
| That's the model. | ||
| Yeah, well, we'll see. | ||
| I mean, I've often said the very idea that you could patent or prohibit A plant is absurd. | ||
| It is absurd. | ||
| Especially when it's non-toxic. | ||
| What is not patented is prohibited. | ||
| That's the way they approach it. | ||
| In most circumstances. | ||
| What's real weird is that we give these caveats to religions. | ||
| Like, that's what's going on now with ayahuasca, is that there are some companies that have had an exemption through the Supreme Court, right? | ||
| I shouldn't say companies, but basically that's what they are. | ||
| They're churches, right? | ||
| They're churches. | ||
| Which is really just another way of saying a company. | ||
| You know, they got there. | ||
| They're institutionalized. | ||
| They're institutions. | ||
| So the question is, and now people are beginning to sort of recognize this or ask the question. | ||
| So you've got the UDV, which is one of these Brazilian churches that's – they're the ones that took their case all the way to the Supreme Court and got approved unanimously under – it was actually the first case that John Roberts decided after he became which is one of these Brazilian churches that's – they're the ones So very conservative court. | ||
| They unanimously ruled that, yes, the UDV is a real religion. | ||
| Trevor Burrus: Which is fascinating. | ||
| They have the right to use it. | ||
| Well, it clearly is a real religion. | ||
| It is a real religion. | ||
| It's just fascinating that a conservative court would almost be boxed into doing that because of their views on Christianity. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| They couldn't not do it. | ||
| And then the Santo Daime, same thing. | ||
| They didn't have to go all the way, but essentially they have the same approval. | ||
| And they're piggybacking on this, and they're Christian-based religions as well. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, they're Christian-based religions. | ||
| So now the question is, when you go to Peru, there's ayahuasca. | ||
| It's not as institutionalized. | ||
| It's kind of... | ||
| It's idiosyncratic. | ||
| You've got these practitioners. | ||
| The tradition is called vegetalismo. | ||
| There's no institution. | ||
| There's no doctrine. | ||
| There's no hierarchy. | ||
| There's just freelance practitioners. | ||
| The question is, is that a religious activity? | ||
| And should it be protected? | ||
| And this is what some smart lawyers are now addressing with the use of ayahuasca in the more traditional way. | ||
| The churches have essentially taken that, they've appropriated that tradition, and they say, well, we want nothing to do with these indigenous people. | ||
| This is our religion, you know, it's our sacrament. | ||
| They don't even, they get upset if you even call it a drug or a medicine. | ||
| To them, it's a sacrament. | ||
| Well, that's fine. | ||
| But elsewhere, it is a medicine. | ||
| But it is also, you know, a religious activity. | ||
| Vegetalismo has a spiritual aspect. | ||
| It should be regarded as a religion. | ||
| We'll see where that goes. | ||
| It's almost like with the UDV and these other churches that what they've done is they've used this scaffolding of Christianity as a Trojan horse. | ||
| That's allowing this ayahuasca to get through. | ||
| Strassman was telling me his experience with them, where they were all wearing golf shirts, and they have uniforms, and they're taking these insane doses of super potent ayahuasca. | ||
| And then they're all singing and singing songs about Jesus. | ||
| You know, Strassman is like a really, like, very mellow and easygoing guy, really pleasant guy. | ||
| He was explaining how he sat down with these people in the morning after all this was over. | ||
| He's like, what the fuck are you people doing? | ||
| And his eyebrows are raised. | ||
| And he's thinking about his trip from the night before. | ||
| He's like, these people are taking super potent doses of ayahuasca, and they're singing about Jesus with golf shirts on. | ||
| And they have plastic folding chairs and shit, and lawn furniture, and it's like, what the fuck is this? | ||
| What it is, is it's a religion. | ||
| You know, it's a religion. | ||
| That's what it is, you know. | ||
| But I think it's okay. | ||
| Spread it away. | ||
| Spread it on. | ||
| Yeah, spread it on. | ||
| I mean, the thing is, I haven't had much to do with Santa Dime. | ||
| Not that... | ||
| I just haven't had the opportunity, nor am I particularly interested in going to ceremonies where I am told that I have to dance the whole time. | ||
| It's not my thing. | ||
| But I know the UDV well, you know, because we did the biomedical study with them in the 90s. | ||
| So they're wonderful people. | ||
| They're very kind people. | ||
| You know, their families are good. | ||
| They're very nice people. | ||
| But I would never join. | ||
| They asked me to join. | ||
| I said, look, I don't do cults. | ||
| I'd be happy to come drink with you anytime. | ||
| I'm not joining the religion. | ||
| What is it that Groucho Marx once said? | ||
| I think, to paraphrase him, I would never be a member of any group that would have me. | ||
| Yeah, that's pretty much what I told them. | ||
| You know, you don't want me. | ||
| I'm a heretic by nature, but I'm happy to... | ||
| You know, share your brew, and they do make fine, fine brew, no doubt about that. | ||
| I'll tweet your organization. | ||
| I'll tweet it out for you, but I'm not showing up at the stockholders meeting. | ||
| I'm not going to join. | ||
| But it seems to me, with my experience with DMT, that it's so powerful and so profound that I wonder if that's a way that Christianity works. | ||
| You know, like this idea of Jesus and the saints and heaven and God and all these different manifested deities. | ||
| Like, people thumb their nose at it and say it's ridiculous and preposterous, but everything on DMT is ridiculous and preposterous. | ||
| And I wonder if under the guise of the UDV and their singing and their dancing, If Jesus is real, in a sense that you can actually communicate with a thing that takes the form of Jesus, in that sense, I wonder what they're seeing. | ||
| I mean, I really wonder if they're going... | ||
| The whole idea of psychedelics for the non-initiated is... | ||
| A big part of it is how you're going into the experience. | ||
| Set and setting and also your mindset. | ||
| Also, you know, the state of mind that you approach these things can greatly I think we're good to go. | ||
| I think we're good to go. | ||
| Is actually an effective approach. | ||
| Well, I think what you experience You know, is not confined to Christianity. | ||
| What you articulated is just basically kind of the characteristics of a religious experience or spiritual experience without necessarily tying it to Christianity. | ||
| I mean, love, compassion, respect for each other. | ||
| You know, I mean, these are elements of a kind of the... | ||
| I don't know what you call it. | ||
| Generic religion. | ||
| These are elements of the religious experience. | ||
| The interesting thing about the UDV and these other churches is that they have actually created a structure where this can happen, whereas most religions, the last thing they want you to do is have an actual religious experience. | ||
| I mean, it's all set up to make sure that doesn't happen, because religious experiences... | ||
| Are dangerous. | ||
| That's a very profound thing you just said. | ||
| That most religions, the last thing they want is for you to have a real religious experience. | ||
|
unidentified
|
No, no. | |
| It's all set up to make sure that doesn't happen. | ||
| Only the priests get to have it. | ||
| Or that was the original thing. | ||
| And then, and of course, they don't have it either because they're, you know, I mean, it's gotten away from that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, how significant is that, that the original idea of the rules of Christianity might have come from that? | ||
| The Moses and the burning bush. | ||
| These ideas that are passed on, love thy neighbor, all that stuff, might have been from that very experience. | ||
| It might have been from that experience. | ||
| But the thing is, and this happens, it's not just Christianity, it's like It's like any powerful spiritual technology, anything that is numinous, right? | ||
| I talk a lot about the mysterium tremendum, right? | ||
| The DMT, the psychedelic experience is a mysterium tremendum. | ||
| Something that is mysterious, tremendous, terrifying, spiritually powerful, and must be controlled, right? | ||
| I mean, it is all those things. | ||
| It's too powerful. | ||
| So in these power structure, there's always someone who says, you know, who wants to sort of put a collar around that, put a lasso around that, to seize the reins, if you will. | ||
| There's a temptation to grab it and use it for your own purposes, which is, you know, usually a man. | ||
| Usually, I don't know if any women, women don't seem to be, you know, it's not inbuilt to do the dominance thing, but there's very often a male figure who can take any spiritual technology, co-opt it to their purposes. | ||
| You know, which is often sex or money or power or all of those things. | ||
| Yeah, it's always a man. | ||
| You know, of course it's a man. | ||
| God damn it. | ||
| Why do we suck? | ||
| We just do, you know? | ||
| That's why there's seven billion people. | ||
| Because we're sneaky and we get you pregnant. | ||
| Okay? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Sorry. | ||
| That's pretty much it. | ||
| We don't want to be like this, ladies. | ||
| It's not our fault. | ||
| God. | ||
| But it's always a man. | ||
| It really is always a man. | ||
| There's no arguing with it, you know? | ||
| So you get this all the time, you know, in any kind of quote-unquote spiritual tradition. | ||
| It happens in the ayahuasca thing, as we know. | ||
| You know, it's not uncommon to have... | ||
| Sexual abuse and that sort of very common lately lately more and more so you hear these stories of these guys My friend Amber Lyon had it happen to her like on one of her first experiences I was groping her and where she was under and she's realizing what's going on and just realized like this is Probably how some of these people sort of like they found this technology and you can call it technology if you want But this this pathway to this incredible experience they provided to people But they're not really much into taking | ||
| that journey themselves. | ||
| They're really into exploiting this thing for financial gain and for power and influence. | ||
| That is what it's morphed into now that there's the tourism phenomenon and all that stuff. | ||
| So, yes, they see it as a way to exactly that, to power, influence, and money. | ||
| Which just illustrates, again, it's all about... | ||
| There's nothing inherently good or bad about these technologies. | ||
| Ayahuasca can be a wonderful thing if it's used properly, and it can be a really terrible thing. | ||
| It's all about the use you make of it, the moral dimension that comes with how you use it. | ||
| I mean, there are ayahuasqueros that have... | ||
| I say they don't listen to their medicine in a sense. | ||
| They do these things. | ||
| They're not really absorbing the lessons that they should be getting from the medicine. | ||
| Others do listen to their medicine and it's not so easy to sort out who's the good ones and who's the bad ones. | ||
| Sort of like what you were talking about, these people that have the simplistic idea that all you have to do is get Donald Trump high on DMT and he's going to see the light. | ||
| That's not necessarily the case. | ||
| Not necessarily the case. | ||
| I think it would be wasted on him. | ||
| I think we would have to do at least an indwelling catheter, maybe two or three hours of continuous DMT infusion methods. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Well, sorry, wrong term. | |
| Intravenous? | ||
|
unidentified
|
But it's very Freudian. | |
| You decided to go through his dick. | ||
| That is hilarious. | ||
| Not that. | ||
| Not that. | ||
| We'll go through the vein. | ||
| I don't know, man. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I think you might have nailed it the first time. | |
| That might be the way to get it. | ||
| Maybe the way to get it to him is some perfect Russian robot fuck doll who just locks him up right when he gets inside of her. | ||
| She gets them in full guard, locks them in place, and catheter-like delivery. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Yeah, maybe they can program it like DMT, like little nanobots that go right through the penis hole, right into the system. | ||
| They just run out of her, right in there, and he just takes off. | ||
| But again, there has to be something there for it to have an effect. | ||
| Please, somebody animate that. | ||
| I know there's somebody out there that wants to. | ||
| Do it. | ||
| That's the way to do it. | ||
| Just some perfect, super hot 10 Russian hooker looking chick. | ||
| No offense to Russian hookers. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Or Donald Trump. | ||
| Or Donald Trump even. | ||
| Look, Donald Trump was a baby at one point in time. | ||
| You know, and you and I, we both have children. | ||
| We know. | ||
| It's a delicate process of turning an adult, making an adult out of a child. | ||
| And a lot of factors come into play. | ||
| But almost all babies are born, well, they certainly have their own personality. | ||
| They're in many ways a blank slate. | ||
| And so they're in a lot of ways a victim of the environment they're raised in. | ||
| That's one of the weird things that I've developed in my own self over the last few years is just thinking about people as babies. | ||
| I think of everyone as a baby now. | ||
| Since I've had kids, I don't... | ||
| I mean, obviously I think of them as being adults, but I think of them as an adult that used to be a baby. | ||
| And I never used to do that. | ||
| Before I had children, I used to think of people as being in a static state. | ||
| I meet you and I go, well, this is Dennis McKenna. | ||
| This is how Dennis McKenna has always been. | ||
| And now I go, oh, Dennis used to be a little boy. | ||
| You know, Dennis was a baby. | ||
| He used to, you know, and then he saw a lot of things and he learned a lot of things. | ||
| But you know what I mean? | ||
| Yeah, I know. | ||
| That's Trump. | ||
| He's almost as much of a victim as he is a perpetrator. | ||
| In a way, he is. | ||
| And Trump's a good example of somebody... | ||
| I mean, in some ways, he's still a child. | ||
| You know, he never really grew up. | ||
| I mean, that's part of the problem. | ||
| And everyone, because he has so much power and money, everyone kowtows to his impulses. | ||
| But, you know, I mean, in some ways, like Jared and Ivanka are maybe a stabilizing influence on him. | ||
| Although, you know, I'm sure their agenda is totally evil as well. | ||
| Well, confused. | ||
| They definitely don't deserve the amount of power that they're wielding, nor does anybody. | ||
| What's more fascinating about him than anything is that what he holds up to the golden standard is success, right? | ||
| I mean, this is the guy that, you know, everything has to have his name on it. | ||
| It's all Trump this and Trump that. | ||
| And if you... | ||
| Looked at, like, the great American vision of success. | ||
| It's to become some sort of super rich ultra billionaire. | ||
| But even though everybody knows he's a super rich ultra billionaire, he still is deceptive about his own success. | ||
| He still has to lie about it. | ||
| He still has to distort it far past, whether it's the numbers that came to the inauguration, whether it's the numbers that he won the electoral college by. | ||
| He lies about all these different things, and it's inherent. | ||
| It's a part of him, this intense lack of satisfaction with any result. | ||
| Any result, even if it's winning by a mile, he must win by a hundred miles. | ||
| That's childish. | ||
| But it's that same intense dissatisfaction that's inherently very dangerous in a leader. | ||
| Because it's leading him to make these critical judgments that aren't based entirely on reality, but rather what he wants people to perceive. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's quite right. | ||
| I think that's dangerous. | ||
| That's what we were saying before. | ||
| No thoughtfulness. | ||
| There's no thoughtfulness in the man. | ||
| There's no reflection. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Reflection and lack of humility. | ||
| Not what you want in your leaders because, you know, we see what's happening. | ||
| Like, you know, he's going back and forth with the Soviets. | ||
| He's going back and forth with North Korea. | ||
| And it's like a schoolyard spat, you know. | ||
| But these people have nuclear weapons to throw. | ||
| So we need to back off from that, Donald. | ||
| You know, it's just... | ||
| But he can't do that because he has to respond. | ||
| He has this impulse to respond. | ||
| I mean, I think that, you know, I don't know. | ||
| I mean, he's not going to be exposed to ayahuasca, I'm pretty sure. | ||
| Unfortunately, because it would help him. | ||
| And, you know, what is disturbing to me in many things about Donald and this sort of reality distortion he's created is people... | ||
| You know, they take it seriously. | ||
| I mean, they're sort of like intimidated by it. | ||
| Not enough people are standing up and saying, well, this is not true. | ||
| This is not true. | ||
| You're completely deluded about this. | ||
| You know, I mean, there's some sort of impulse to show some respect. | ||
| When no respect is due, you know? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| Respect for the office, or respect for the position. | ||
| Yeah, respect for the office, for whatever some... | ||
| But then when he comes out with these things that are obviously not true, I'm sorry, there are no alternative facts. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Alternative facts are lies. | ||
| Yeah, those are such a bizarre candy coating of bullshit. | ||
| Alternative facts is the most hilarious candy coating of bullshit ever. | ||
| My hope is that we get through this without nuclear war, and then we realize that we can't have a fucking president. | ||
| And the idea of having one alpha chimp run the entire group of 300-plus million people is insane. | ||
| And it doesn't work when you have technology, when you have this ability to communicate instantaneously, globally, with everybody, constantly. | ||
| It's just an archaic idea that served its time, but needs to be revamped. | ||
| How would you do that? | ||
| That's a really good question. | ||
| I'm not the guy to be the architect of the future civilization, but I would think that putting as much power as we put into one individual is insanely problematic. | ||
| It's just you're dealing with all these ego issues, decision-making issues, and also the camps, the two separate camps, the right-left camp. | ||
| That's crazy, too. | ||
| That's crazy, too. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| No, I mean, I think one way to approach it wouldn't have to be such a tremendous shift from what we've got. | ||
| It would be to go to a parliamentary system, like Canada has, for example, where... | ||
| You represent your party and if the other party gets enough, you know, they can vote you out without going through the whole impeachment process. | ||
| There is no impeachment process. | ||
| The parties can form a coalition and I think there's also an issue with dealing with the real problems of the world in a In a time where the realities of, | ||
| say, Syria and what's going on over there are so horrific and they're so far removed from the realities that we deal with here, you almost need to have someone who has some sort of experience with those people in those lands to understand and put it into perspective. | ||
| And I think we're entirely lacking of that perspective in terms of our culture. | ||
| I don't think we understand what a brutal military dictatorship is like. | ||
| I think we see it on television, and it seems almost too abstract. | ||
| But the president has to deal with that in a very real way. | ||
| And no one person can – but that's what advisors are for. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| But if you don't have good advisors or if you choose to ignore them, then you're in deep shit. | ||
| I mean, Donald appoints advisors who already share his delusions. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| So there's nobody there to say, wait a minute, you're wrong. | ||
| And based on experience and expertise and all this, you're wrong. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You need to rethink it. | ||
| That's what bothers me about one among many things about the way that he proceeds. | ||
| I mean, you know, the thing that bothers me most about the change in administrations is that they have basically looked at climate change. | ||
| They said, we don't believe it. | ||
| It's not happening. | ||
| It's not even on the table. | ||
| And actually, that needs to be the thing on the table. | ||
| That should be the primary thing we're talking about. | ||
| All this other stuff is important, but we're talking about... | ||
| The accelerating changes that are essentially undermining the mechanisms that keep the earth habitable by life. | ||
| This is a pretty important issue. | ||
| And to have people that say, well, we don't believe in climate change. | ||
| Well, I'm sorry, climate change is real. | ||
| I don't care what the fuck you believe. | ||
| It is real. | ||
| And for this administration to not only ignore it, but then roll back all these other measures that were put into place is... | ||
| You know, it's just the stupidest idea I can imagine. | ||
| Not just roll back, but removing the funding from monitoring it. | ||
| Yeah, removing the funding. | ||
| Which is really scary. | ||
| Suppressing the information and all this. | ||
| So, you know, if you look at the people in the Trump administration, they're either from the energy industry, Rex Tillerson, you know. | ||
| I think the government has become essentially a subsidiary of ExxonMobil. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| You know, and not the other way around. | ||
| And so, you know, that's what they're doing. | ||
| That's terrifying. | ||
| You know, it's Goldman Sachs or Exxon Mobil. | ||
| I mean, corporations run the world. | ||
| We've known this for a long time. | ||
| Governments are just puppets. | ||
| In some ways, it's just too eerily parallel to what we're talking about with the rainforest. | ||
| Like, with all this potential in the rainforest, and almost this race. | ||
| The race to see, like, can we get to these incredible new plants that we haven't discovered before we fuck it up by cutting down all the hardwoods and burning all the forests? | ||
| Can we get to this potential... | ||
| Future, utopia of people being able to read each other's minds, being able to communicate simultaneously all throughout the world, understanding each other regardless of language. | ||
| Can we get to that before we blow ourselves up? | ||
| Before we get into a nuclear war with fucking North Korea or any of this crazy shit with this insane administration that's existing in this sort of chaotic manner alongside Some of the brightest minds and most innovative people that have ever walked the face of the planet that are influencing things in a way today that it's really unparalleled in terms of human history. | ||
| The potential that any new invention or innovation can enact, whether it's understanding new compounds that we discovered in the rainforest or some new technology that's made in Silicon Valley. | ||
| I mean, this is an amazing, amazing parallel. | ||
| Yeah, no, I agree. | ||
| It does seem like a race, in some ways, between idiocy and genius. | ||
| They're incredibly... | ||
| Brilliant people, and they're developing, and there are solutions to the problems that face us, right? | ||
| But then on the other side, you have the know-nothings, you know, who are marching into the future, eyes firmly fixed on the rearview mirror. | ||
| It's like, oh yeah, coal technology, that's the greatest thing. | ||
| Let's go back to that. | ||
| I mean, is that stupid or what? | ||
| You know, coal technology is obsolete. | ||
| It's definitely stupid. | ||
| You know, there are better solutions, you know, or the whole attitude toward drugs. | ||
| Oh, the war on drugs. | ||
| The war on drugs was great. | ||
| Let's go back to that. | ||
| I mean, these are people who are not living in the present, for one thing, not planning for the future, and they don't really want to know. | ||
| It's like our minds are made up. | ||
| We know drug abuse has got to be bad, so let's prohibit it. | ||
| Let's go back to the old model. | ||
| They're not capable of entertaining new ideas, and that's a problem, you know. | ||
| What do you think about the idea, and I've heard this brought up and I've entertained it my own self, that maybe we need some sort of enemy or some sort of thing to resist in order to rise to the full potential of innovation, of ideas, that we almost need some sort of mountain to conquer. | ||
| We need some sort of a force to be aware of that really makes people rise up. | ||
| I've seen more More people politically active and politically engaged now, post-election, than I ever did before the election, because they didn't expect Trump to win. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And now that he did, it's like it's raised up this resistance to this insane level that I've never experienced before in my life. | ||
| I mean, it feels to me like Kent stayed all over again. | ||
| Yeah, no, it was a real shock that he won. | ||
| And I agree, it's been a wake-up call. | ||
| So now there is this strong resistance movement, and that's a good thing that that's happening. | ||
| Also, journalism has suddenly found itself again. | ||
| You know, some journalists, some sectors of it are beginning to... | ||
| You know, for so long they were essentially stenographers. | ||
| They would repeat whatever the mouthpieces of the government. | ||
| Now the journalists are questioning everything and asking, you know, tough questions of these clowns and expecting answers. | ||
| And it's kind of like, you know, when I was young, I wanted to be a journalist, right? | ||
| I thought Walter Cronkite was the cat's pajamas. | ||
| I wanted to be like him. | ||
| Or I wanted to be a foreign correspondent, you know, I just admire journalism. | ||
| And for a long time, I have not found anything to admire in it. | ||
| It's like they've all been lobotomized or something. | ||
| But they're rediscovering it. | ||
| You know, the good ones are rediscovering it and the re-emergence of investigative journalism. | ||
| And right now I think that's our best hope because I think that these guys, they'll just keep digging. | ||
| There's going to be so much bad stuff come up about Trump and all this collusion with the Russians and, you know, potentially enough to impeach him. | ||
| The question is, will the Republicans find enough spine to, you know, to do that? | ||
| But they did with Nixon. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And Nixon, I mean, what he did was not nearly as bad as what Trump is doing. | ||
| So we'll see where it goes. | ||
| But Trump's shameless in a way that Nixon never was. | ||
| Shameless. | ||
| And, you know, I take a certain comfort In the thought that, you know, they have all these draconian things they want to do. | ||
| Roll back all the environmental regulations, the whole immigration thing, you know, war on drugs. | ||
| But none of it is going to happen. | ||
| None of it actually will happen. | ||
| Well, the immigration stuff is pretty real here in California. | ||
| I mean, ICE is showing up at Home Depot's. | ||
| They showed up at Home Depot's. | ||
| I have a friend who was born in America. | ||
| He's Mexican. | ||
| And they asked him where he was born. | ||
| He's a veteran. | ||
| And he knew how to deal with this. | ||
| And he knew what's legal and what's not. | ||
| And he's a grown man. | ||
| He's in his 50s. | ||
| And a citizen, right? | ||
| And a citizen, yeah. | ||
| And a veteran. | ||
| I mean, he served the country in Iraq. | ||
| And so they're coming up to him and asking him, you know, where are you born? | ||
| And he's like, you can't ask me that. | ||
| I was like, you're not allowed to ask me where I'm born. | ||
| And then he says, who are you? | ||
| And we're immigration and whatever the ICE stands for. | ||
| And he goes, let me see some documentation. | ||
| The guy shows him his badge and his gun. | ||
| He goes, that's not your fucking documentation. | ||
| Pull out your goddamn documentation. | ||
| And he pulls out his military ID. He's like, look, here's my documentation. | ||
| This is me. | ||
| Who the fuck are you? | ||
| Why are you asking people where they're born? | ||
| I was born in California, okay? | ||
| You're not allowed to just go up to people and ask them where they're born. | ||
| But people that don't know that, they're getting arrested, they're getting taken, they're getting deported. | ||
| They're taking people that are dropping off their children at school. | ||
| They're grabbing people. | ||
| And there's a bunch of cases of this. | ||
| And you're just hearing about the cases that get to the press. | ||
| Right. | ||
| There's so many of them that you're never going to hear about. | ||
| And this is just rampant. | ||
| And this never existed before. | ||
| Not in the Bush administration. | ||
| No. | ||
| I mean, not in Bush senior. | ||
| I mean, it just didn't happen before in any conservative administration. | ||
| They didn't treat it like this. | ||
| This is a weird time. | ||
| Yeah, it is a very weird time. | ||
| But I think it's temporary. | ||
| Well, I hope so. | ||
| But what you said about journalism, I think it's important to point out that they fucked up just as hard with the left as they did with the right. | ||
| I mean, they let the Clintons get away with a lot of horse shit. | ||
| They let Obama get away with a lot of horse shit. | ||
| They said talking points. | ||
| They were given talking points. | ||
| And they ran with those talking points so that they would get access to the president. | ||
| And they would get access to congressmen, the senators, and they did it forever. | ||
| And it wasn't journalism. | ||
| And you're right. | ||
| And the reason why this guy got into place in this situation right now, it's just as much of a fault of them of not holding the left to the fire as it is to, you know, what's going on right now. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, journalism has a lot to answer for. | ||
| There's no doubt about it. | ||
| I just have a... | ||
| You know, maybe it's a delusion. | ||
| I would like to think that journalism is finding its voice and finding its function. | ||
| Again, its function is to, you know, as somebody said, I think it was I have stone, you know, the function is to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable, right? | ||
| And that's essentially the journalistic mandate. | ||
| Or express the truth. | ||
| And seek the truth. | ||
| Seek the truth in form. | ||
| And don't assume, you know, play the propaganda game, be able to look beyond it. | ||
| And they have to be in this environment where people keep calling fake news. | ||
| They have to be undeniable. | ||
| And I think in that sense, they are reinvigorated. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, that's one of the things that... | ||
| You know, you're seeing – that's one of the things that The Times talked about, like, after it was over, after the election was over. | ||
| They're like, we are – we're going to reinvigorate, refocus our dedication on journalism. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think that's a good sign. | ||
| Then the other side of it is that we can just – You know, the way the Trump administration proceeds with all these things they want to do, they inevitably just get bogged down in litigation, protest, you know, at some point they do have to answer to Congress. | ||
| So I think, you know, I mean, the wheels were already coming off before he even took the oath of office. | ||
| They've continued to come off, and it's just going to get, it's going to just sort of degenerate into litigation, acrimony, inability to get anything passed. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| You know, which is all good. | ||
| I mean, essentially, in this case, chaos is our friend because they won't be able to advance this draconian agenda, thank God. | ||
| And, you know, hopefully circumstances will enable us to get rid of them quickly. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| You know, I'm not entirely confident in that. | ||
| The whole thing to me, when I'm looking at these protests, like what was going on yesterday, where people are just beating the shit out of each other in the streets. | ||
| People with red hats. | ||
| Like, the red hats are the bad people. | ||
| It's so strange. | ||
| Like, it's so strange seeing people with these Make America Great Again hats. | ||
| Fighting with people that are wearing masks and motorcycle helmets and their sticks and people are throwing, you know, smoke bombs. | ||
| I'm like, this is crazy. | ||
| I really never thought we'd see such a clear right versus left civil war, in fact, like these little battles. | ||
| And it seems to be ramping up and becoming more and more common and becoming more and more violent. | ||
| Yeah, it seems that it is, you know. | ||
| But so what can we do? | ||
| You know, we're not out on the streets protesting on one side or another. | ||
| I mean, I, you know, and basically I think for me, I continue doing what I'm doing because I think these plant medicines are the single most important catalyst for changing consciousness on a global level. | ||
| And that's what has to happen. | ||
| So I'm not saying I have nothing messianic about it. | ||
| I tell people I work for the plants, but I think it's valuable to bring people... | ||
| To that experience in a place that is safe. | ||
| They don't have to worry about those issues. | ||
| They can have this direct download with the Mysterium Tremendum, if you want to call it that. | ||
| That can change hearts and minds. | ||
| I think that globally, I think that ayahuasca is a catalyst for that. | ||
| You know, why has it suddenly gone global in the last 20 years? | ||
| I think, you know, I think that it's a sign that Gaia, if you believe in that concept, that the Earth itself is an intelligent entity, is getting a little bit hysterical and is trying to get our attention. | ||
| You know, wake up the monkeys. | ||
| And this is the way it's, you know, so ayahuasca is an ambassador from the community of species to what I call the problematic primates, you know, this out-of-control species that needs protection. | ||
| A good talking to, in a certain sense. | ||
| Wake up! | ||
| You're wrecking this place, you know, and you don't have to. | ||
| Well, it seems like systems always try to balance themselves out, you know, whether it's through warfare or disease or some new government usurping the old power, or whether it's through predators and prey, and there's always some weird sort of reaction to something gaining too much power. | ||
| Whether it's ideas or ideologies or patterns, they gain too much power and then something shows up that sort of tends to diminish that and erode the very foundation of it. | ||
| That's what I feel about psychedelics, that in many ways what they're doing, and even the sneaky door, like the people that talk about cannabis being some sort of a gateway drug. | ||
| It's not a gateway drug to the bad ones. | ||
| I think, if anything, it's a gateway drug to the ones that are going to change the world. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| If it doesn't do it on its own. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, this concept of a gateway drug is, you know, it's just stupid in a sense. | ||
| This is something that the drug warriors have come up with. | ||
| Particularly so. | ||
| I mean, I'm here to tell you coffee is a gateway drug. | ||
| Alcohol is the biggest one. | ||
| Probably chocolate ice cream is a gateway drug. | ||
| We've all taken these things and, you know, look where we are now. | ||
| So gateway drug, it's just the concept is absurd. | ||
| If it was not sold in an environment where there were a choice to have all sorts of other illegal drugs, it wouldn't be a gateway drug, would it? | ||
| No. | ||
| Well, the alcohol one is the most ridiculous one because it's everywhere. | ||
| And it's the one that inhibits your, or loosens your inhibitions more than any other drug. | ||
| It's responsible for the most foolish behavior. | ||
| It's everywhere. | ||
| You can get it at every restaurant. | ||
| You can get it almost everywhere you go. | ||
| Even to the point where it's not even recognized as a drug. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| cognitive dissonance for years. | ||
| You know, the FDA could not classify tobacco as a drug because it was a different regulatory framework. | ||
| Well, of course it's a drug. | ||
| drug, you know? | ||
| And somebody said, "Yeah, it's the only drug you can use when used as instructed will kill you." That's hilarious. | ||
| Isn't it funny that the word drug, I'm not funny, but isn't it problematic at the very least, the word drug is sort of this gigantic blanket that we throw over all these things that perturb consciousness? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, drug, yeah. | ||
| And that good and bad, positive and negative, no beneficial effects whatsoever, and a massive one. | ||
| This is another reason, this is another example of why... | ||
| This conversation about drugs is so shallow because we're talking about drugs, you know, this completely scary, as you say. | ||
| Good people don't use drugs. | ||
| What about which drugs? | ||
| Why don't we talk about which drugs? | ||
| Because there's thousands of drugs. | ||
| So which one are we talking about? | ||
| Or we just ban all drugs, you know? | ||
| I feel like just calling them drugs is a problem. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, how could you call DMT the same thing that you call alcohol? | ||
| That seems to me to be so crazy. | ||
| It's just not a useful term. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| You know, and then also, I mean, the problem that they're facing and that we have to acknowledge, which I've been saying a lot lately, is, you know, we're made of drugs. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's why drugs work. | ||
| We are made of drugs. | ||
| Right. | ||
| We're biochemical engines that run on drugs, which are neurotransmitters and hormones and enzymes and all of these things in biochemical system. | ||
| They're involved with signal transduction. | ||
| Organisms are networks of communication. | ||
| They're mediated by neurotransmitters. | ||
| Neurotransmitters, if you isolated them from the brain, Put them into a bottle and sold them, that would be a drug. | ||
| Well, it is a drug. | ||
| So this idea that, you know, we are inherently biochemical systems, you know, and people don't want to acknowledge that, but that's the truth. | ||
| You know, we're made of drugs. | ||
| So the people that want to have the drug-free America, I'm sorry, you know. | ||
| We're made out of drugs. | ||
| Drugs are built into who we are. | ||
| That's why drugs taken from plants or from the outside have the effects that they have, you know, because they affect these systems that, you know, are big brains. | ||
| This is kind of a consequence of evolution. | ||
| You know, we have these enormous brains, you know, that evolve very quickly. | ||
| And we like novelty. | ||
| We have all of these brain receptors. | ||
| We like to stimulate those receptors because it makes us feel good or it's interesting or for all sorts of reasons. | ||
| We like to tweak our states of consciousness. | ||
| It's just built into who we are. | ||
| And it's not a bad thing. | ||
| Well, this is a problem with the way you're thinking. | ||
| You have too many facts and use too much science. | ||
| And you don't have enough Jesus. | ||
| Sorry, excuse me. | ||
| You don't have enough Jesus in your life. | ||
| If you had Jesus, you wouldn't need all this nonsense. | ||
| And then Jeff Sessions would make sense to you. | ||
| Right. | ||
| That may be true. | ||
| But unfortunately, I don't. | ||
| I won't. | ||
| So, yeah, I'll just continue to be deluded and believe in science and facts and things like that. | ||
| It's so important that you embrace Jesus and you just won't. | ||
| I can't do it. | ||
| I mean, I did it. | ||
| I'm a recovering Catholic. | ||
| I've been there. | ||
| I know the drill. | ||
| I know the territory. | ||
| In all honesty, though, it's so important that you are saying these things so people can change their perspective when they realize that, oh, yeah, we are really just water balloons of drugs. | ||
| We're just filled up with it. | ||
| I mean, that's what operates the whole thing. | ||
| That essentially is what we are. | ||
| That's what adrenaline is. | ||
| It's what all these different things are. | ||
| I didn't say it first. | ||
| Do you know who said it? | ||
| It was Salvador Dali who said it. | ||
| So how do you come up with your ideas for all this crazy art you do? | ||
| You must be on drugs, right? | ||
| He said, no, I am drugs. | ||
| Which I guess that put the conversation to an end. | ||
| So if you think about it, it's quite true. | ||
| Speaking of our drugs... | ||
| And a lot of, you know, without... | ||
| I don't want to get too far down this, but a lot of the problem with organized religion, I think, is that it denies biology, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Abstinence. | ||
| Yeah, somehow being in a body, being this chemical system and enjoying what it is to be that is forbidden somehow. | ||
| And this is partly a reflection of our devaluation of nature, which includes our own nature as well as nature out there. | ||
| Psychedelics are the antidote to this, right? | ||
| They make you re-appreciate your relationship with nature. | ||
| So they can catalyze changes in consciousness. | ||
| That's why I say the most effective thing that I can do as somebody who's concerned with the planet is bring people to situations where they can encounter the medicine and make of it what they will. | ||
| I'm not there to tell them what to make of it. | ||
| I'm there to tell them this will be the most intense personal experience that you'll ever have. | ||
| It's up to you how you evaluate it. | ||
| And you can tell them, because in all honesty, you're still working it out yourself. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And certainly I don't want to tell them. | ||
| I'm a big believer in, use your own mind, use your own brain to work this out. | ||
| That's why we have it, you know? | ||
| That's one of the most important things about recognizing someone who's a quote-unquote fake shaman or someone who's using it wrong. | ||
| Someone who's telling you exactly what it is and what you're going to experience. | ||
| One of the most beautiful things that psychedelic drugs do is they dissolve any notion that you might have that anyone has a hold of this thing. | ||
| Yes, very much so. | ||
| That is exactly right. | ||
| If somebody tells me, I'm a great shaman, I'm going to lead you through this, I'm out of there. | ||
| Because they obviously have not understood what it is. | ||
| If somebody says, I'm not a shaman... | ||
| I just help. | ||
| I just help. | ||
| I just want to facilitate. | ||
| You know, it's the medicine that is the shaman. | ||
| A shaman will say, I'm not a shaman. | ||
| I just know a few tricks. | ||
| That guy is the guy I want to drink with. | ||
| Yeah, I just know a few tricks. | ||
| I just know a few tricks. | ||
| If you get in trouble, I can help you. | ||
| Otherwise, I'll just step back and let you do it, you know? | ||
| And that's... | ||
| That's the essential thing because the medicine itself is the shaman. | ||
| While I have you here, I have to ask you two questions because I keep forgetting to do this. | ||
| First of all, cannabinoid receptors. | ||
| What is the relationship between cannabinoid receptors in human beings and the actual use of cannabis or the evolutionary use of cannabis? | ||
| Like, over the course of human development. | ||
| Are cannabinoid receptors in place because people have consumed cannabis throughout history, or are they just a natural function of biology? | ||
| No, they're a natural function of biology, like a lot of these things, you know, like opiate receptors, the same thing. | ||
| Cannabinoid receptors... | ||
| There are many kinds, and they're all over the body. | ||
| They're not just in the brain. | ||
| They do all sorts of things. | ||
| They're involved with immune functions and inflammation, and it's quite complicated. | ||
| Which is why CBD oil works, and it's not psychoactive. | ||
| It's not psychoactive. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| It works on different receptors. | ||
| There's at least three kinds of cannabinoid receptors. | ||
| And evolutionarily... | ||
| You know, they're not cannabinoid receptors. | ||
| There's the endocannabinoid system. | ||
| They are responsive to things that we make in the body, like anandamide, and there's another one which I always forget. | ||
| But these are endogenous compounds that bind to cannabinoid receptors. | ||
| So just like they're endogenous compounds that bind to opiate receptors, these are peptides like endorphins, enkephalins, and those sorts of things. | ||
| But the receptors just happen to bind these plant alkaloids, but that's not why they evolved. | ||
| You know, they have functions in the body related to analgesia and sleep and that sort of thing. | ||
| Same with the cannabinoid receptors. | ||
| They evolved not because there were cannabis plants out there, but because the body made these endocannabinoids and they mediated all kinds of functions, like anandamide. | ||
| These things... | ||
| You know, cannabinoids are a little different than something like DMT or psilocybin, which work kind of very specifically on the serotonin receptors. | ||
| And that's how they mediate their effects. | ||
| The effects of cannabinoids are more widespread, you could say. | ||
| More multivalent is maybe a good word. | ||
| But... | ||
| It's not because the plants were there that we evolved these things. | ||
| We had this. | ||
| We were neurologically modern humans, you might say, and curious, right? | ||
| Sampling everything we could get our hands on in the environment, whether stuffing it up our nose or usually drinking it or whatever. | ||
| Naturally, you're going to stumble over these compounds because the biome... | ||
| These are just abundant in the bile. | ||
| So it's not really a chicken or the egg sort of situation, like what came first, the cannabinoid receptor or the consumption of cannabis? | ||
| Yeah, the receptors were there first. | ||
| How do we know that? | ||
| How do we know that? | ||
| Because we can actually trace the phylogeny of these things. | ||
| We have molecular methods now where we can actually trace the ancestry of receptors. | ||
| For example, we have ways to measure this. | ||
| You know, cannabinoid receptors, you can look at the phylogeny and, you know, they were present in mammals long before we were around, you know, and tryptophan is the same thing. | ||
| Tryptophan, which is the amino acid we were talking about, precursor to many of these psychedelics, right? | ||
| So how old is tryptophan as an amino acid? | ||
| You can look back at the phylogeny. | ||
| Turns out Damn old. | ||
| Possibly 3.8 billion years old. | ||
| The genes for tryptophan have been found in phylogenetic groups that go back that far, the so-called trip operon. | ||
| So... | ||
| You know, so these things have been around for a long time. | ||
| And, you know, in the most primitive organisms, you know, serotonin is another good example. | ||
| Serotonin is, which most of the psychedelics work on, serotonin is thought to be the oldest neurotransmitter, phylogenetically older than dopamine and norepinephrine. | ||
| Tryptophan, serotonin is, receptors are very old phylogenetically, evolutionarily. | ||
| So how does that correlate with runner's high? | ||
| When people have this runner's high and apparently it has some sort of an effect on cannabinoid receptors, what is going on there? | ||
| And does it actually mimic the high that someone gets from consuming cannabis? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I've heard runner's high discussed in terms of the opiate receptors, the endorphin and so on. | ||
| Maybe cannabis too. | ||
| What we do know is that in states of high stress, you can boost the production of these endogenous compounds, which is why high stress is one way to induce altered states of consciousness on the natch, right? | ||
| Oh, I don't need drugs because I can run and get high, or I can do meditation and get high. | ||
| I'm sorry, dude, you're still on drugs. | ||
| Because we're made of drugs, and you've just figured out a way to boost your endogenous DMT, cannabinoid, opiates, or whatever. | ||
| So when people are lifting weights and getting crazy, they're actually, in some way, doing some sort of a natural drug trip. | ||
| Yeah, essentially, because we are drugs, remember. | ||
| There is no state you can experience, including the state that we're in right now, that is not a reflection of our neurochemistry. | ||
| industry. | ||
| We're in a hallucination right now. | ||
| This is a reality that our brains take information in from the environment through our sensory neural interface. | ||
| They combine it with what we know from memories and associations in the cortex, and they essentially create a model of reality. | ||
| And that's the reality we're inhabiting. | ||
| And a lot of what the brain does, it receives information, but a lot of the brain's function is to filter stuff out. | ||
| If we received everything from the environment all the time, we'd be nuts. | ||
| We wouldn't be able to take it. | ||
| So there are these gating mechanisms that's called neural gating. | ||
| And we are genetically programmed to, and through experience as well, to have these gating mechanisms that filters a lot of stuff out so that we can function. | ||
| Otherwise, reality would be a blooming, buzzing confusion all the time. | ||
| We wouldn't be able to focus on anything. | ||
| So, for example, gating is malleable. | ||
| It can change depending on the input. | ||
| So you're in a crowded restaurant, for example, and it's hard to hear. | ||
| There's a lot of noise in the background. | ||
| You adapt to that by filtering out most of what's there. | ||
| You can suppress it to some degree, so you can talk to the person across from you. | ||
| You're not paying attention. | ||
| but at the next table you hear somebody say your name suddenly your gating mechanism you know you get that that gets through the filtering mechanism so somebody's talking to me i wonder what they're saying about me over there right you know that kind of thing so it relates but a lot of what the brain does when you Essentially create this hallucination, if you want to call it that, of the reality that we inhabit. | ||
| You can call it a model of reality. | ||
| It's not reality itself. | ||
| It's a reasonable facsimile of reality that we inhabit. | ||
| And everybody's is different, hence different views. | ||
| Everyone is different, but close enough that we can talk to each other and all that. | ||
| But it's not the pure objective reality. | ||
| It doesn't really exist. | ||
| Well, it exists out there, but we don't know what it looks like. | ||
| But it doesn't exist to humans. | ||
| It doesn't exist to us. | ||
| We don't perceive it. | ||
| We perceive our own model, essentially, of reality. | ||
| Different experiences create literally drug trips. | ||
| Also can explain love affairs where people become incredibly addicted to each other and addicted to the experience of being around the person and what that does to you. | ||
| And that literally you are on drugs when you're with someone. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| And, you know, that's been studied, right? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| I mean, oxytocin and probably opiates. | ||
| Dopamine and serotonin. | ||
| All of these things are part of what mediates that relationship. | ||
| Including sex hormones. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| All of those things. | ||
| All of those things. | ||
| Sex hormones, too, are psychoactive drugs in a certain sense. | ||
| Which is not to say, I mean, this is not saying that these experiences aren't genuine or valuable or anything. | ||
| They are, obviously, you know. | ||
| Personal relationships are important. | ||
| To my mind, it's not a devaluation to say, well, it's chemically mediated. | ||
| Okay, great, it's chemically mediated. | ||
| That doesn't make it invalid. | ||
| In fact, it means that, wow, these molecules are pretty amazing that they can do this. | ||
| Well, the feeling is fantastic. | ||
| Like, why would that invalidate it? | ||
| It's still real. | ||
| It's still awesome, right? | ||
| Well, but people, you know, again, they have these artificial distinctions about, well, you know, my mystical experience is more valuable than yours because you had to have psilocybin and I got there on the natch. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But it wasn't on the natch, you know? | ||
| You're still a prisoner of your neurochemistry, no matter what. | ||
| It just so happens that psilocybin is a drug. | ||
| Taken in the right circumstances in the right amount will reliably induce a mystical experience. | ||
| Nothing wrong with that. | ||
| You know, you can even study it. | ||
| Suddenly science can study mystical experiences because we have a reliable trigger that will, nine times out of ten, induce a mystical experience in the right circumstances. | ||
| So then we can take somebody, you know, maybe somebody's meditated for 20 years or done yoga or done other things, hoping that they might have a mystical experience. | ||
| Good for them. | ||
| But then, you know, you can take me, an ordinary schmuck or somebody like me who hasn't particularly, not particularly spiritually evolved, but I can take psilocybin and yeah, it works. | ||
| That reminds me of a great story that your brother told once. | ||
| About a monk who studied a city of levitation and he did it for like 30 years and then met the Buddha and said, look, I can walk on water. | ||
| I've studied this city of levitation for 30 years and now I can walk across the river. | ||
| And the Buddha said, yeah, but the ferry's only a nickel. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| One choice, 30 years, man. | ||
| You could have just taken mushrooms. | ||
| Speaking of mushrooms, this is something that I get wrong all the time. | ||
| This is one of the other things I wanted to ask you. | ||
| There's some very close relationship that mushrooms have and the absorption of mushrooms have to DMT. What is the chemical differentiation? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Very slight, actually. | ||
| The temptation to start drawing structures is almost irresistible. | ||
| You want to write some stuff down? | ||
| Go ahead. | ||
| Draw it down. | ||
| It would be awesome. | ||
| Here. | ||
| Here's a pen. | ||
| Do we have a visual component? | ||
| No, we don't, but I'll save that piece of paper. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, I don't want to get too far into it, but basically, okay, so you've had organic chemistry, yeah? | ||
| No. | ||
| No? | ||
|
unidentified
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Okay. | |
| Okay. | ||
| I am organic chemistry. | ||
| You are organic chemistry. | ||
| Well, this may be a useless thing, but it's definitely not useless. | ||
| We can see it up on the wall here. | ||
| We've got it up on the screen. | ||
| Oh, there you go. | ||
| Okay, well, there you go. | ||
| Yeah, we don't have to draw a stroke. | ||
| You can look at it right here so you don't have to turn around. | ||
| Look to your right. | ||
| Dennis, turn. | ||
| It's on this one as well. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So, right. | ||
| So you can see. | ||
| So there's serotonin, psilicin, and dimethyltryptamine. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| You can see that psilicin and dimethyltryptamine are very close in structure. | ||
| The only difference is that hydroxy group. | ||
| That OH group. | ||
| That's the only difference. | ||
| So with that removed, silicin is exactly the same thing as NN-dimethyltryptamine. | ||
| That's correct. | ||
| Wow. | ||
| But that single trivial difference is what makes silicin orally active and dimethyltryptamine is not. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| Wow. | ||
| Because what's going on with that, this static diagram, a different molecular model would show, but what's going on is that that nitrogen there, when silicon's in physiological solution, The nitrogen is charged, has a positive charge. | ||
| The oxygen doesn't have the H there. | ||
| It has a negative charge. | ||
| So the nitrogen curls back and is in close association with the oxygen. | ||
| If this makes any sense. | ||
| So the enzyme can't get to it. | ||
| That's why it's orally active, because essentially it can't get to that nitrogen. | ||
| What that enzyme does is cleave off that nitrogen, monoamine oxidase. | ||
| It takes away that nitrogen. | ||
| And it can't do it with psilocin. | ||
| So that's why psilocin is orally active. | ||
| It doesn't require an MAO inhibitor. | ||
| It's just, in some ways, it's the perfect psychedelic because, you know, no preparation needed. | ||
| You just bend over and pick the mushroom. | ||
| No preparation is required, which is probably why very ancient man knew about psilocybin. | ||
| They couldn't not have if they were living in an environment where it was found. | ||
| That's amazing. | ||
| You know, what's really incredible is that people are using psilocybin these days in what they call microdosing, taking very small doses and seeing these profound benefits. | ||
| And one of the things that I'm aware of is kickboxers are using it. | ||
| And kickboxers are using it and a good buddy of mine is using it. | ||
| He says that he can see things happen before they happen. | ||
| It's almost like he's reading people's minds before they're about to do something. | ||
| Even on microtosis. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's very interesting. | ||
| In the intense environment of sparring and the intense physical kinetic interaction of kickboxing. | ||
| He's seeing what people are going to do before they do it in a way that he's never able to do, quote-unquote, on the natch. | ||
| Right. | ||
| No, I'm not surprised at all. | ||
| Why aren't you surprised? | ||
| What do you think is happening? | ||
| Because I think that these things let you step out of your box a little bit. | ||
| They let you step out of your usual reference frame and notice things going on in the environment that, again, this gating mechanism we were talking about, we're programmed to filter stuff out. | ||
| Psychedelics temporarily disrupt that. | ||
| They let the background come forward. | ||
| And you notice things about the environment that normally you would suppress because they're not relevant to immediate survival. | ||
| I don't know if you've read some of the work by Simon Powell. | ||
| He wrote The Psilocybin Solution. | ||
| He writes very intelligently about psilocybin. | ||
| In his latest book, The Magic Mushroom Explorer, he talks about how psilocybin is a lens, essentially. | ||
| You can think of it as a lens. | ||
| You can look at the world. | ||
| You can look at natural phenomena, and you will notice things about that, those phenomena, that you normally would overlook because we're programmed to do it. | ||
| So in a sense, he talks about how psilocybin is a scientific instrument. | ||
| You know, it's a lens through which you can look at the world and see aspects of it that are always there, but you've never noticed them before because we're programmed not to. | ||
| For example, you know, Carey Mullis is famous because his discoveries in molecular biology, he attributes to his insights about molecular processes that he got from LSD. That he could get down with the molecules, as he put it, and see how all this is working. | ||
| And obviously he invented polymerase chain reaction, which he got the Nobel Prize for. | ||
| So it's not like this is a delusion. | ||
| It's a real thing that he was able to notice that no one else... | ||
| You know what I'm saying? | ||
| He was able to put himself in a place where he could notice these phenomena. | ||
| And I think that's really true. | ||
| If you go to... | ||
| Take a walk in the forest with an indigenous person, you know, who in some ways is in this less of this sensory gating in a more open place all the time. | ||
| They will notice things about the environment, you know, that you are completely oblivious to until they point it out, you know, and then they'll say, oh, yes, I never noticed the leafcutter ants are behaving this way or these different things. | ||
| Their sensory sort of experience of an environment like the forest is very different than ours. | ||
| You know, because we're used to, we're just not out in nature the same way. | ||
| And I dare say, I think one of the things that in some ways inserts a barrier between us is literacy. | ||
| You know, we're all literate, right? | ||
| And we like being literate. | ||
| It's good that we're literate. | ||
| But in order to be literate, you have to have this separation between the self and the external environments. | ||
| You have to pick up a book and read it. | ||
| I am here. | ||
| I'm the point of view. | ||
| Here's the book. | ||
| So that creates that relationship. | ||
| And you sacrifice, you focus on one particular sensory modality, and you sacrifice all the other input that is coming in. | ||
| I don't know if I'm making sense. | ||
|
unidentified
|
You absolutely are. | |
| You absolutely are. | ||
| But that's what these substances can do. | ||
| They can essentially reverse this background-foreground relationship that we're so used to. | ||
| Suddenly, what's right in front of you is not so important. | ||
| And you can pay attention to the things in the background that you're normally programmed to suppress and ignore. | ||
| Because you have to be ready for the saber-toothed tiger to come across over the mountain or whatever. | ||
| You know what I'm saying. | ||
| But it's good in that sense. | ||
| They teach different ways of perception. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And I think that's a very useful thing to learn. | ||
| Indigenous people call these psychedelics plant teachers, and they call them teachers for a reason. | ||
| Much of what you experience comes directly from the experience, but much of it also comes from your changed perception, and suddenly you realize there's a different way to be in the world. | ||
| There's a different way to perceive... | ||
| What you experience that normally you don't, you know, we're programmed to filter out. | ||
| I don't know if you've ever read or had Stephen Buhner on your show. | ||
| He writes very intelligently about this stuff. | ||
| He's written a book called Plant Intelligence and the Imaginal Realm. | ||
| And it's all about this, you know, this... | ||
| Essentially, what his rap is, you can learn this, you know, you can learn this way of perceiving. | ||
| Whether you do it with psychedelics or not, you can actually learn it. | ||
| And it's an interesting, it's a better way to relate to nature, or more, an alternative way to relate to nature in any way. | ||
| I feel like we have these pre-assumed definitions of things that we rely upon instead of seeing things for what they really are. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| Yeah, you box them up and you package them and you go, oh, well there's a car. | ||
| And then one day you look at the car and you go, That's a box that has a controlled explosion encased in iron and it rolls on rubber tires. | ||
| That's exactly what I'm talking about. | ||
| There's a different way to look at things if you step out of the box. | ||
| And yes, it is all those things. | ||
| And it's also a car. | ||
| But if you did that all the time, you'd never get anything done. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| But, I mean, it's interesting in that respect, you know, with psychedelics, because we're verbal people and, you know, we inhabit a world of language as much as the physical world. | ||
| And we're almost compelled to try to put some kind of a linguistic wrapper over everything, which is one reason why. | ||
| If you smoke DMT, right, you have a complete revelation. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| It's all of these things. | ||
| But... | ||
| In most cases, you aren't even down yet before you're trying to explain it to yourself. | ||
| You're trying to stuff this thing in a box because it was so impactful. | ||
| It's inherently ineffable. | ||
| You can't really describe it in language, but boy... | ||
| Is there a desire to somehow tame this thing, which is incomprehensible, totally transcendent, but that doesn't stop you from rapping about it immediately, to try to stuff it into a box because it's too impactful. | ||
| And so on the individual level, this is what people do. | ||
| That's what religions do, too, right? | ||
| They try to take something like this and stuff it into a box, because in and of itself, without that wrapping or that linguistic, you know, filter to somehow tame it and, you know, nullify, neutralize its power, these things are very dangerous. | ||
| There also seems to be some sort of a physiological component to the DMT trip, where once it's over, you have a very limited amount of time to hang on to those memories. | ||
| Yes, well, exactly. | ||
| And so this is an attempt to entrain that, to grab it, and I think put a linguistic... | ||
| You know, tag on it in a certain way so that as a way to not forget it or try and, you know, both reduce its power but give you something to hang on because, right, the memory of what it actually is is going to fade very rapidly. | ||
| Why is that? | ||
| What's the physiological... | ||
| I don't know what the physiological... | ||
| But it's a lot like dreams. | ||
| It's a lot like dreams. | ||
| It's a lot like dreams. | ||
| I think that it's just... | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| It's something like that. | ||
| You could probably train yourself to remember it better, just like people can train themselves to remember their dreams. | ||
| But it's ephemeral. | ||
| It does tend to evaporate, which is why it's important to Go to the well once in a while and take a drink, right? | ||
| I am not one of these people that says, once you get the message, hang up the phone. | ||
| That's a model that doesn't work for me, actually. | ||
| It might work for some people, but I feel like this is not an answering machine. | ||
| This is a teacher. | ||
| This is something that is intelligent that you have a dialogue with. | ||
| You know, and you don't, you know, teacher teaches a lesson. | ||
| You don't say, thanks very much. | ||
| We're done now. | ||
| It's an ongoing process. | ||
| I've been taking psychedelics for most of my life, a good part of my life. | ||
| I feel like I've only learned a fraction of what they have to teach me. | ||
| You know, and maybe I'm just dumb. | ||
| Maybe I don't get the message as well as other people, but I don't think so. | ||
| I think there's a lot... | ||
| They're full of surprises. | ||
| You know, I've taken ayahuasca lost track a long time ago, but probably 500 times or more. | ||
| And people say, well, you know, surely you've learned everything there is to learn. | ||
| Actually, no. | ||
| You know, I always learn something new. | ||
| And I learn certain basic things, too, that it always reminds me about. | ||
| Remember that you don't know anything. | ||
| That's the chief thing. | ||
| And you're also acquiring new data constantly in the natural world that needs to be processed. | ||
| And sometimes you process it with the tools of civilization versus the psychedelics. | ||
| Well, you know, it's just interesting. | ||
| It keeps me off the streets so far. | ||
| Are you going to join a gang, Dennis? | ||
| A lot of people can be grateful for that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I'm grateful. | ||
| I'm grateful. | ||
| Listen, I think I've taken up plenty of your time here, and this is an amazing conversation. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| I appreciate it. | ||
| I'm always happy when we can do this. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wish we could do it more often. | ||
| We should do it more often. | ||
| We definitely should. | ||
| Let's do it. | ||
| I can come. | ||
| There are many people I can recommend. | ||
| I'm sure you get hundreds of requests, but certain people you ought to be talking to. | ||
| Let's do it. | ||
| Let's do it. | ||
| So please, one more time, tell people about this conference and when they can watch it on Facebook. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, it's the ESPD50.com. | ||
| That's the key thing, ESPD50. The conference will be June 6th, 7th, and 8th in the UK. You can go there if you want to attend it. | ||
| The cost is high to actually go there and do it. | ||
| But people can access it on Facebook. | ||
| And if you go to that website, then there's a link through to the Facebook page. | ||
| And we'll be live streaming it, you know, on the 6th, 7th, and 8th of June. | ||
| And it'll be archived, so I don't expect people in the States to get up at 3 in the morning, you know, to watch it, although they could if they want to watch it live. | ||
| But it'll all be, you know... | ||
| And will you transfer it over to other more accessible, like people who don't have Facebook, maybe on YouTube or something along those lines, Vimeo? | ||
| We haven't made plans to livestream it on Vimeo. | ||
| I don't know how you do that. | ||
| I don't think you can livestream it, but you could definitely take the video recording, perhaps, if you have a physical recording. | ||
| It'll all be up there eventually, but just livestream, real-time. | ||
| Facebook will be where we do it, mostly because everyone has told me, this is how you do it. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| Well, I will definitely tweet that out to everybody, and I'll let everybody know, and I'll put it on all the available social media. | ||
| Fantastic. | ||
| And order the book. | ||
| You can go to the website and order the book, and the book will come out probably the end of November. | ||
| It's going to take a few months for everybody to get there. | ||
| They have to not only make a presentation, they have to submit a paper for this book. | ||
| And I'm dangling certain rewards out to them to make sure that they do, in fact, submit a full paper in the spirit of the first conference. | ||
| But... | ||
| It's going to be an amazing book, and it's something I've wanted to do for a long time. | ||
| And I can check this off the list now and go on to something else. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| Beautiful. | ||
| And hopefully do it more often. | ||
| Thanks, Joe. | ||
| Thank you, Dennis. | ||
| I appreciate you very, very much. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Thanks, folks. | ||
| See you soon. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Bye. |
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