#1121 - Michael Pollan

May 24, 2018

Michael Pollan is an author, journalist, activist, and professor of journalism at the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism. His new book "How To Change Your Mind" is available now. "How To Change Your Mind" on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/Change-Your-Mind-Consciousness-Transcendence/dp/1594204225/ref=asap_bc?ie=UTF8

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beautiful people of the world hi how you doing going on a motherfuking tour again I'm all over the place announcing due date soon but the ones that are available now or Tucson Boise Temecula Kansas City St Louis Vancouver and Calgary all that stuff is a Joe Rogan. Com forward slash tour going to announce Toronto soup

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mother fucking place going to visit antler to get our grub on and hopefully get protest it

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Joe Rogan. Com for all that stuff on it is

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shroom Tech who did Richie Incognito NFL player went crazy pull up on its Twitter find out what on it said all all that stuff is is cordyceps mushroom since there's no stimulants in it no one feta means there's nothing that would cause a person to go crazy it's all been certified it's all safe no one goes not it is a really good workout supplement though the truth if you're not scared off by him saying that it made him go crazy

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if you look into on its Twitter it's what's that it's in the replies sorry what it is is a shroom Tech sport is a great supplement for oxygen utilization it is a cordyceps mushrooms B12 and a bunch of adaptogens I'll read it for you right now so you get up

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sense of what it is but I love the stuff I take it before every major work out here it's his hey there shouldn't be scg tested and certified as competition save the STS shroom Tech sport has undergone clinical studies and track for Adverse Events for years not observe such side effects we do not know Richie but we hope he feels better soon and then they have the bicep flexing emoji

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it's it's a simple supplement folks talking to make you go crazy but it does give you a little extra gear when it comes to workouts is designed to help the body with cellular energy and cardiovascular endurance and for me it makes a big difference there's a clinical trial results that are a published showing the benefits of shroom Tech sport over the placebo one of the things that I love about on it

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is that we provide a full 100% money back guarantee on our supplements without returning the product and I like that because we sell really good shit and you shouldn't be worried about buying it and you should be able to try it out and this money back guarantee ensures that what's great about it is I want everybody to just look if you can afford the supplement if you have some discretionary income we want to get you the best shape possible and want to make sure you don't feel ripped off that it's I want to clean smooth exchange where everybody feels good about that and Aubrey and I discussed this in the best way to do that was to have a 100% money back guarantee so you can try shroom Tech I love the stuff I fully believe in it besides that studies and I fully believe in Alpha Brain Alpha Brain is something I fucking take that stuff before I do anything important whether it's UFC commentary wear with her it's a podcast stand up comedy its base

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Erebus greatest they're all really good how to change your mind and how to change your mind is a book on changing Consciousness through psychedelic drugs

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what psychedelics teaches us about Consciousness dying addiction depression and Transcendent really enjoy talking to him I really enjoyed all of his work he's a brilliant man in an amazing journalist in a great guy so please give it up for Michael Pollan

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The Joe Rogan Experience

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Joe Rogan podcast

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all day

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poop and would like to respond how are you be here for a long time and I got really excited when I found out that you were writing a book on psychedelics and I'm just I think it's an amazing subject and I'm I'm glad someone who was respected yourself Crock-Pot subject right it's one of those subjects you like Michael Pollan found drugs you know it was expecting of the book on food or agriculture yeah we're a little surprised but so far I've been following me you know who cared about food and egg and there is more overlap than I ever would have guessed at the perfect wave I think your book is coming out right when John Hopkins Research Center is going to put out these studies on it people are starting to recognize it MDMA has amazing results for

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post-traumatic stress disorder from veterans and marijuana becoming legal and more and more State it's like you're catching its way of how long do you say well I started the research in 2014 for the New Yorker called the trip treatment which is online and it was my first foray into this work I went down to Hopkins it's been a lot of time at NYU and at the time they were doing this really interesting trial where they were giving Scylla syban to people with cancer diagnosis many of them were terminal and that seem like such a weird idea to me that I was curious to explore it and I spent a lot of time talking to patients many of them were dying about how this single so high dose silicide been experienced a guided so 7 experience and we should talk a little bit about how the guy that changes things for you know it's not the end damage people have is popping some mushrooms in your mouth and maybe going to a concert to go to the beach but this is a very

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gold internal experience completely reset these people's attitude toward death and then allow them to die with Equanimity and when these results were published just last year they found that that in 80% of the people who had the session they had statistically significant reductions in standard measures of depression and anxiety it was one of the most effective psychiatric interventions that the psychiatrist that ever seen which is amazing a single experience and then a molecule could change the contents of your head to the to the extent that you would rethink you are mortality and so as I began talking to these people and hearing their stories with many of which were just remarkable I realized you know this is not just an article there's a book here and there's so much that you know either two kinds of Articles you write as a journalist one is you you you're sick of the topic by the time you finish

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can't wait to be done and the other is God I just scratched the surface and this was one of those did you have any experiences personally with psychedelics before you wrote this very limited some peculiar reason never did psychedelics in college they just weren't around I went to Route no I went to the wrong School let's go to college in Vermont in there was LSD there before me and there was LSD after me but I was in this little Wrinkle in Time where there was only alcohol only alcohol in college so I had no experience of psychedelics until I was in my late 20s and then it was pretty mild I had a couple mushroom experiences that would I now described as aesthetic experiences right once they were so I've never had a big trip and

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the reason I was I didn't feel psychologically sturdy enough and I came of age just when the the the scare stories about psychedelics were everywhere in the culture you know they would scramble your chromosomes you stare at the sun till you went blind you know the person who took all the orange sunshine and thought he was an orange for the rest of his life you know the stories were out there and I was afraid to I was just afraid yeah well it's it's it's not an unfounded fear oh no I'm no people can really get into psychological trouble I think it's really important that people understand that it's a it's a profound powerful destabilizing experience and depending on your mindset and your and the situation which you take it set and setting it can be ecstatic or horrific and and you know they're many people who had a series of very good trips and then they have that one bad trip and so yeah

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and I had heard enough stories about that too to stay away so so discovering this kind of later in life you know I was certainly not something I planned on expected it's a great tragedy in my opinion that our culture has demonized these substances and put them in this category of forbidden fruit to the point where you're so nervous about doing them you have to get them from some shady character and you don't know where you're getting you know it in secrecy it to be really careful but we also the same time or where of all these incredibly positive benefits from them and then if we just had professional places where we could go to and then we have these rehab facilities that are available for people trying to kick open people trying to get their life together but if we had something similar like a psychedelic facility with registered professionals who understand this and who could have valuate used cycle

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logically understand if you were perhaps taking medication that would adversely affect your trailer try to find out who you are and where what state you're at in your life have you had any experiences before maybe you should put you on a low dose ACM people like myself or pot smokers are people have done psychedelics I don't think we do it any favors either because we're always trying to pretend that there is no adverse effects and that there's like you know people when they get into something they want everybody to do it and I've been guilty this myself there is a occupational hazard of irrational exuberance Tina this is what happened to Timothy Leary right means first thing they think is everybody's got to do this but it isn't for everybody and I think you're absolutely right I think that look that there are risks but these are not drugs of abuse their non-addictive there anti day

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the first thought after having a big psychedelic trip is not when can I do this again how about how we hear try childbirth is he can't imagine doing it again and eventually you do you do do it again so I do think that we have to find the proper context in which to do it and I think your point is really important we need trained guides the experience is completely different when it's guided because you have a sense of safety there's someone looking out for your body while your mind is traveling and this allows you to essentially surrender to the experience and most bad trips in my experience are the result of people resisting what is happening there ego is dissolving and it's scary it feels like a death and they try to stop it and that can make you very anxious and so all the guys I worked with and interviewed they were all like

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relax your mind and Float Downstream you see a door open it if you see staircase go down it I Surrender trust and let go and this kind of advice changes everything and the chances of a bad trip I think in a guided situation are substantially last because they know how to help you deal with it and what to tell you when it's happening so I do think that by by forcing these drugs underground and into this very kind of unregulated use there were not reports of bad trips were much fewer before the moral Panic about LSD in 1965 and when it was still legal you didn't hear about bad trips you started hearing about them in the culture did this 180 and turned against psychedelic so I think you can create situations where that the risks are really mitigated I think also the fear like you were talking about right

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for the podcast of right as we started with some people worried that they were going to turn into an orange I think they're in Orange all those fears if you take something and those things are in the back of your head and your you know literally manifest extreme anxiety that might not have been there if you just relax and just had the experience alone you know on its own without all the cultural hysteria at Ya episodes of paranoia that's that's that's common to sew a good guy can work through this and actually they don't even like the real comes after you cook them can work on later it's like having a nightmare and you know analyzing it with your shrink it actually may be very productive so I was kind of a nervous Nelly going into this and I really looked at the whole risk profile and on the on the physiological side your body the risks are remarkably low and I'm speaking here the classic psychedelic I'm not talking

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MDMA or even pot I'm really I'm talking about LSD psilocybin which is magic mushrooms DMT mescaline they are much less toxic than many of the over the counter drugs you have in your medicine cabinet there is no lethal dose which is remarkable was one elephant that was killed with LSD once they wanted to see what it would take and it was this they gave it a massive dose but to get it to the point where they could administer it they had to give it a massive dose of tranquilizer so it isn't actually clear that the LSD kill that it may have been the benzos or whatever they were give me I know what a horrible thing right go online and look up the elephant who died from LSD crazy idea yeah well animals don't like psychedelics that much we know that if you know that classic set up the drug abuse researchers use where they they put a rat in a cage and they have is a lever and they can administer cocaine or heroin

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or they can have lunch and fill Presta cocaine lover till I die you put LSD in that setup they press it once and never again always screwy right because they did really shouldn't be in that situation it's not a natural set up like that's been criticized that's right and there's somebody in Vancouver to these really cool rat Park experiment you're referencing and basically they thought that this was inevitably what happens but in fact if you give a rat a beautiful cage with some things to play with some other rats to hang out with some nature you know some shrubs and things it will not take the cocaine it it tells us that environment has a lot to do with drug addiction fruitless lives that are very very frustrating about the people that came back from Vietnam I mean

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I don't I don't know if I should say most but a very high percentage of of the troops in Vietnam War on heroin when they were there they were seemingly addicted they were using it all the time and they got back and only 10% had a problem the others were able to kick it really easily it's very contextual it's not all biology it's about environment now when you were researching this book did you did you start doing your own personal experimentation yeah I had a series of trips for the book I had to come for a couple reasons I become very curious about the people I was interviewing trying to make sense of how they can have these transformative trips on a drug which seems impossible to me and I also kind of jealous of the experiences they were having their having these big spiritual experiences and I swear I don't think I've ever had a spiritual experience I'm kind of spiritually retarded actually or what and

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so I I realized it a certain point I had to see the experience from inside to describe it in a book it's also kind of my brand as a writer when I wrote about the cattle industry I bought a steer when I wrote about architecture I built a house I like to get my hands dirty and then see things from inside there's a quality of Wonder you can capture doing something for the first time so it away the fact that was psychedelically naive I saw as a positive cuz people who who really know the territory are not going to have quite the same first experience I was going to have so that was really helpful so I am I did a few things I I went mushroom hunting with Paul stamets who has he been on the show me to tell you his books out there yeah he's very cool guy he's totally crazy and he took me to a spot where you can find the strongest silicide been known to man that's Pacific Northwest of the Columbia River

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people with their mushroom spots yeah so we went hunting it was like this you know the forlorn December weather and he took me to this place and we spend a couple days outside looking for these mushrooms and we found selasa P azurescens switch heat he found for the first time and named after his son is various intern is named after the color of mushrooms when they're bruised as you are so this is kind of an interesting and I found a couple and their hard I mean I would not recommend do do it yourself with Scylla syban just because it's not like looking for chanterelles and morels fine there are mushrooms that look exactly like psilocybin that can give you a just an agonizing death yeah but when you're with Paul stamets you feel pretty confident and so we found these and he said to me after we found them

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sitting around the campfire we were cooking some dinner outside our year and he said yes I was too strong for me so really why he said that they have a side effect of bother some people so what's that temporary paralysis elected to take them but I am I so I did I had my first still typing experience since my twenties was and at the time I was like 60 or approaching 60 actually have to be very vague on where all these things when things happen and I had a a kind of wonder I didn't take a lot of them I made it to you and I had a really powerful experience that was very much about being a nature I was at our house or we have a house in New England that we had for many years and I was in my garden and you know I've learned a lot about plants and everything about plant intelligence and plant Consciousness and things like that and I've

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always believed intellectually that plants domesticated plants are acting on us it's it's not just it's a it's a two-way street we change plans they change yes we have been in the same way that say the apple tree or the flower is manipulating the bee

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making it come pay attention to it offering it nectar and exchange for it taking up falling on its legs and doesn't even realize what it's really doing is being tricked by the plant into pollinating it and caring it's jeans down the street or around the world that's happening to us to and plants work on us and it's a slightly trippy idea but it's just coevolution that's what how cold is Lucien works so enduring this experience I felt that in a way I never had that idea became flesh and I felt that these plants were kind of looking back at me and that they were very benign they had only good intentions but that there were more subjectivities in my garden than I thought you know we go through the world thinking we're the only thinking subject everything else is an object that happens on psychedelics is everything becomes has has life in it has Consciousness in it and that was a powerful and beautiful experience

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so that was my dipping my toes in and then after that I I saw it a guide because I was trying to simulate the experience I was hearing about at Hopkins and NYU where they were doing the studies are not just with a dying they were doing was smokers and alcoholics and meditators all these different groups but I didn't qualify to enter into those so I had to go underground and one of the things I learned is that there is this thriving network of underground guides all over the country I don't know how many there are but they're very professional people they're not drug dealers their therapists and some of them are trained psychologist or MDS in some cases actually and they are so convinced of the healing value of these medicines that they're willing to risk their freedom and their livelihood to work underground so I found my way into this community

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and an end interviewed a bunch of people and some of them are not the kind of people you want to trust your mind to I mean and no doubt there lots of Charlotte into everyone I interview is pretty professional but some of them or just a little too casual about something I I was kind of you know worried about there was one guy remember this Romanian psychonaut therapist in his 70s who I said well what happens if something bad happens you know what if what if somebody dies and it while there with you getting this trip and he said you bury him with all the other people and that that kind of casualness really troubled me so I didn't work with him but eventually I found people that I I trust it and I had a bond with and I had some very powerful experiences with them and that did change me in ways that I'm still kind of few no digestion

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having this experience with these plants I had a experience once on very high dose of marijuana edibles I went into a grow room that this local dispensary had set up just big room filled with plants and is a first-timer like when I walked into the first time I've ever been around pot plants why I felt like they were aware that I was there is very strange that you had this weird feeling of them having much more sensitivity than you imagined that they're they're aware of you but as you said they're benign and the desert of sitting there but it was almost like they're saying hello to me cuz I was so barbecue that I was just I was on their wavelength when you're out there with those plants and you said that you felt Consciousness from them now as an intelligent rational person did you start pondering whether

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not you were just receiving this out cuz it was convenient and you were hallucinating and adding all this contextual weirdness to the situation I'm sure I was projecting things I wanted them but but I've looked at this question and the science of it pretty close lie and

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how you define consciousness matters here but plants are conscious in the sense of they're aware of their environment they have senses they're not like our senses that they're picking up on chemicals in the air and in the soil and light in very specific ways and they're reacting not just instinctually but appropriately there are experiments to show the plants can learn in some primitive way so we have to understand that we have one kind of Consciousness and other animals and even plants have another kind of Consciousness so it's real it's a real thing the idea that they're looking back at me I'm being metaphorical but that they were aware of me in the way that the plan is aware of that the bees nearby and does certain things sometimes to trap the baby and hold it there for a longer amount of time to talk to me to load it up with pain there are the world as we perceive it is depending on the particular

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senses we have we've got the big five senses that you always hear about and there's some other littler ones you know how we locate herself in space we're pretty good at that too but other creatures have a different set of senses and therefore they live in a different world so the B for example I can see ultraviolet light we can't see so if you could get inside Abby's head the world will look very different and you'd see patterns like Landing markings on flowers in ultraviolet colors that they can see that you've never seen before ditto they also can experience electromagnetic radiation we can't you know it's all around us we don't feel it they feel it and the reason they do is a plant that has a strong electromagnetic field hasn't been visited recently by another be so they know this is a good view going to get a lot of nectar here and whereas if you if you're going by out you know you're flying by a flower and it's got a soft field doesn't have Big Field it's probably just been busy

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by someone else so skip it so they're living in a world where they're perceiving cell phone radiation and all all the kinds of crap or putting into the electromagnetic spectrum so so we have to realize that this is a very specific world that were receiving in our normal Consciousness that is the one that we need to proceed if it's good for us that's it we're design for respecting our bodies in her up right stance everything about us but other creatures are seeing a different world and one of the interesting things about psychedelics is you get some insight into that you sort of feel and it's it's real I think in the sense of sure you're imagining if they're still a leap of imagination to understand be world or octopus world that's a really weird where their brains are distributed over eight arms right and I've seen that recent paper that was just put out so you can find it at the weather there hypothesizing that octopus

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they might have come here from another planet literally rots my dad think of is it if it's possible that the eggs of these things travel and comets and someone how they came here hundreds of millions of years ago and the reason being is that they can alter their RNA and that this is very specific to octopi or octopuses octopuses came to Earth from space strokes and eggs play the years ago to put it that way but it's it's just a theory but it's a theory that's being bandied about by legitimate sign it that's crazy do so many things that no other animal can change their outside referring to headquarters really yeah they have this distributed intelligence wow as well

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something relative about our everyday normal Consciousness it there other ways to experience the world is something that psychedelics put you in touch with this interview with this physicist named a Carlo robelli is a theoretical physicist from Italy he wrote this book couple years ago call Seven brief lessons on physics very prominent guy and he was telling this interview were in the guardian that he got turned on to physics during LSD trip he had when he was 15 and the interviewer asked him why was that and he said well I saw for the first time that there could be another way to think about time and instead of you know past present and future that it might all be simultaneous and that's how it is appeared to him during this LSD trip and he's back to Baseline he said you know I was asking myself why am I so sure this is the real world and that wasn't the real world

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it was just an illusion Asian and he said the world as it presents itself to us right now here actually physics tells us is not the real world that there are you know that space sometime or curved that particles don't exist until their perceived by a Consciousness in all these crazy ideas of theoretical physics seem like worth exploring that that the world as it presents itself to us is not the only world and or or necessarily the accurate world that was very interested that a scientist could develop that idea of a Beyond in the way you would think of a religious person developing the idea of a Beyond but there's a scientific Beyond and there is a religious Beyond and psychedelics at least gives us a hint that that those worlds exist and that was some that was a very powerful powerful idea for me have you looked into any of the connections between ancient religions and psychedelics like any of the gianmarco

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the gross stuff yeah I did I didn't go that deep into it I went in deep enough to know that there are a lot of very serious collars and and he was one and call rock is another and Gordon Wasson the guy who kind of brought silicide been to the west to I write about it some lengthen the book really believe that it was experience of psychedelics which has been in culture for thousands of years we know whether you're talking about the Amazon or Africa or and that these experiences may have nurtured the religious impulse and where do you get the idea of a of a Beyond where do you get the idea of a heaven or hell if not from some altered state of consciousness you don't people talk about visiting the underworld in Homer's time so how did they do that was it dreams dreams don't have the authority that psychedelic experience has there's something about psychedelic experience that

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that has this it's not just an opinion it's just not it's not a fantasy it's something real its objective truth this is William James called the noetic quality of the mystical experience and that's certitude comes from psychedelics and and so it seems totally plausible to me that at the very earliest stages of humanity if if people were indeed taking psychedelics this might explain how they came up with these ideas there other alternative theories and it's not provable I just don't know how we would begin to prove it but it seems possible and you are the ancient Greeks had a psychedelic that they used we think called they called it the Kiki on k y k e o n and they had an annual ritual ceremony and it was the only time of the year where you could use this drug and it was a ritual to for Demeter and Harvester planting time

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and everybody in Greek society did this and people if you had it was secret was called the Mysteries the other Cindy and Mysteries and you weren't supposed to talk about it but there's a few accounts around and people talk about visiting the underworld making contact with the dad and call rock music classes has to be you says that was a that was a psychedelic potion we don't know what they were using with it was mushrooms or something else did the Greek use of drugs is very obscure they only talked about wine but the way they describe what wine did to you there was clearly something added to it I thought they were at another plant drugs to their wine cuz they would have these tiny little glasses and they take these big trips so we don't know what it was ya glasses and they were very careful about when you used it and and you know people would completely lose control and it was just like now this isn't wine besides something else yeah it is some sort of a psychedelic from grapes or add to it

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some people Albert Hoffman who discovered LSD invented LSD he thought it was are got that they figured out a way ergot is it is a fungus that grows on grain and it was the precursor chemicals LSD comes from are God and are God is responsible for episodes of mass delirium in European history get a really wet year of the ergot grows on the Rye people eat bread made from it and they go crazy some people think the Salem Witch Trials was came after a wet year and people had absorbed these women had eaten are gotten we're having visions and things like that which was interpreted as witchcraft which to them was a very thought they were saying that the men had absorbed it and thought they were under spells found maybe maybe that maybe that too I just did everybody trippin so anyway so so they think that someone's going to Sierra got your not going to be you could get gangrene it's at Sam it's not all clean chemical and

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but the thinking of Gordon Wasson and call Rock and they were collaborators on this theory was that the Greeks perhaps it figured out a way to derive a pure chemical from ergot that could be made into something very much like LSD but again nobody has succeeded and then tried for the last 20 or 30 years to take care God and make something you know what true simple processes that the Greeks could have mastered so it may be a mushroom you know there's a lot of psychedelic plants out there it's one of the mysteries of evolution that you know DMT is like coursing through the Plant World thousands plants yeah so that there's some links between psychedelics I think psychedelics have have influenced cultural history at various points along the way and one of those may have been too kind of nurture this religious impulse but again I can't prove it did the Greeks spent some of the great Greek

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car spend a lot of time in Egypt as well don't know anything about me the the Egyptians tuck and then never really figured it out they made some connections to DMT that is sort of loosely connected to their worship of the pineal gland yeah right where we found DMT and rats the Cottonwood Research Foundation yeah so you did that film about DMT right yeah it's really interesting stuff there's been very little follow up on that I mean this idea that there might be an endogenous psychedelic like DMT is far as I know we've only found it in the rat it's hard to look for it and the amounts are really tiny but they haven't found it in the pineal gland songs and that it's being produced there and it's endogenous but they don't know whether or not the pineal gland does represents the Third Eye of Eastern mysticism

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is what also they think what is it is the Eye of Horus that they connected to the pineal gland ever seen those comparison comparison between the Eye of Horus and the pineal gland it's essentially is shaped like a cross section of the pineal gland and in the temple and man see if you look at it up there

► 00:42:11

they think somehow or another that this is that the connection between these two days so a bunch of different things have been written on this this connection because disappears and so many different Egyptian hieroglyphs and they think it might have some sort of a connection between the portal to the afterlife that they think the DMT experience is any idea of the how how would they tell him that they know I mean I didn't know what do they know about brains I mean I don't know how did know how to build pyramids how'd they know a lot of things and it's a pretty incredible shit we don't know you know because of the burning of the Library of Alexandria we lost almost everything we do we don't really know what they knew or how they knew it but we do know that I know that Scholars from around the world would go to Egypt to to learn and well in general you know I have a more open mind about many things since I've had this experience than I did before I was a kind of staunch materialist it's normal mean most people who see silliness and hippies and you know all these people

► 00:43:11

let her out there doing drugs tryna are quote find themselves he just seems like a foolish Venture and then you do it you got okay that's where she's about it's just being done by morons cuz it's hard to describe like like I'm not going to I'll have a glass of whiskey with dinner that's about it and also a you know there's a kind of embarrassment I mean I want is a really striking things that I've I've been on the road now for this is my second week out talking about this book and I have been struck by how many people have had powerful psychedelic experiences they don't talk to anybody about and I come along as a kind of I don't know credible person who's interested and they say this is journalist to they turn off the tape recording to say can I tell you a story and they have something happened to them might have been in their 20s or 30s or earlier that changed the course of their life

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and either because there was a stigma attached to it or it was kind of had the 60s kind of Wu think about it or they were kids around they didn't feel comfortable and they said they kept it in this box labeled weird drug experience but it's not just a drug experience this is your mind least you know that the drug may have started the process but everything you see and in the six. Is this a real psychological facts and it from your unconscious or from your interpretation of your environment and you know that it's not the molecule that that that ordered that for our day in this experience has Stan stanislav grof was one of the pioneering psychedelic psychiatrist in the 60s said that LSD is a nun specific amplifier of mental activity there's nothing package with the drug and that's important understand so you had this big experience and you put it in this box thing where drug experience but when you take it out

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cuz you find that there's there's real gold there for schools go to this it's an interesting quote that quote you just said cuz because in actual studies of the human mind under the influence of silicide been it's been shown to shut off parts of the brain yeah and so the blocking off these constant frequencies that are around us at this experience it's around us it is our own ego or our own mortality or on desire to stay alive and protect ourselves whatever the various Blockheads we put up our those diminished by silicide been that allows this is an ever-present experience to manifest itself it's exactly right the most the most interesting scientific finding of this current generation of research is that when the image the brains of people on Scylla syban or LSD or Ayahuasca they expected to see fireworks right lots of activity cuz the experience has lots of fireworks

► 00:46:11

they found something that they didn't expect which was it diminishment of activity in a very important brain Network called the default mode Network this is in the midline and it connects parts of your cortex which is the evolutionarily most recent part 2 older deeper sources of emotion and memory and it's a hub in the brain and the brain is a hierarchical system in this this this is the Orchestra conductor is one of the neuroscientist put it it's a regulator so what happened to the default mode Network normally well it's very involved in a self-reflection self-criticism worry it's where your mind goes to wander it's involved in time travel thinking about the future or the past it's involved in something scientist called theory of mind the ability to imagine that another person has mental States is not just a rock it is involved in What's called the experiential or autobiographical self the way we kind of take what's happening to us and connect it to the story We Tell ourselves about

► 00:47:11

we are based on the past and the future so it's you know if the ego has an address its in the default mode Network and what is he going to do for you the ego kind of patrols the borders right it's Steve it's what keeps out you know things that are threatening to you it keeps its responsible for the repression of subconscious thought or strong emotion in it in it it's a defense it's a set of defenses and psychedelics appear to turn this off to one degree or another take the default mode Network offline when that happens to go back to your metaphor the whatever is blocking the valve that's blocking lots of information from coming in from outside or Up From Below in your subconscious that's allowed to flow and so you are getting more information then you might otherwise and this is a metaphor that Aldous Huxley used

► 00:48:11

doors of perception that Consciousness is eliminating more than it's creating its it consciousnesses is reducing our experience to that thin trickle of information we need to get ahead to survive and that we you open the doors of perception on these drugs by turning off this network and lots more information comes in which can be overwhelming but also extraordinary I mean there is that's Wonder it's your apprehension in writing a book like this and describing these things like as you're writing it and you thinking about all these other people that are sort of cynical straight-laced non-drug using folks who might admire your previous work on agriculture architecture whatever and you didn't they're going to do I get this through without looking like a guy is losing his fucking mind

► 00:49:11

and maintain your position as a serious journalist I mean I was nervous about this project but I also came to think it was really important and that there was something here and that you know what when I started this process Stand Rock the guy I made reference to earlier he had said in the 60 something I thought was really outrageous he said that the second choice would be for the study of the Mind what the microscope was for biology or the telescope for astronomy this a really outrageous claim to make but as Times Gone on that idea seems less crazy to me that we are learning things about the mind that the end that these drugs are teaching it in a scientific context and in an individual contacts so just because some people think it's embarrassing or who is not a way is not a reason not to do it I have to find a way to describe it and you know I'm being a little speculative with you talking about origins of

► 00:50:11

Legend and stopped at the book stays pretty close to here's what we really know and here's what I experienced I'm a science journalist you know and now I'm speculating and now here's something we really know with some with some certitude but without question I had some misgivings about describing psychedelic experience there legal issues there and that yeah I have a readership I have a big readership that you know is happy if I just keep writing books on food but I had found something to two interesting to pass up and I've been gratified that I've been talking about this book on like network television I didn't think I would be talking to Stephen Colbert about ego dissolution and here we are he actually got the best line off on that Holy. He said I said that

► 00:51:03

he said well maybe the ego should be a controlled substance that was pretty good if I was willing to talk about these issues in my experiences in a matter-of-fact way

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mainstream journalist would respond in kind and so I contact CBS Morning Show and Terry Gross Fresh Air and and we've had a kind of you know conversation we're looking at these as tools what are they good for what are they not good for without getting caught up in the usual craziness that's associated with these with these drugs and so that's what I'm trying to do is take that sixties crust off these things and take a fresh look for someone like me who's been a psychedelic advocate for a long time it was extremely exciting news that a guy like you were stepping into The Fray because you were you're so well-established and well-respected already that I knew your proton it was going to be very clean and that I knew that people going to have to start looking at this like waves Michael Palms looking at this like this might not be completely crazy but the cultural attitudes about psychedelic drugs or drugs in general

► 00:52:21

so childlike and I have you on drugs I mean I have a friend's wonderful person talks all kinds of crazy shit about people smoking pot and take Xanax everyday is like do you like people don't all I just need a glass of wine and Xanax and I'm good I don't know why you people need drugs like wow like you're fucking crazy but our cultural attitudes on the substances that are prohibited and that are that are accepted there so strange and they they because of our social standing because we don't want to be perceived as foolish or Reckless or in some sort of a midlife crisis or what-have-you we were looking journalist that are shutting the microphones off and want to talk to you about these profound experiences that they had it they should be chatting about from the rooftops I agree it look it's really too normalizes people have to come out of the closet and some dude I was talking to a journalist in Boston who was the local NPR host and heat the heat on air live talked about his experiences and how important they were in shaping his idea

► 00:53:20

the experiences you have in college so I think we're going to see more people come out of the closet and and have this kind of conversation will it be when we can actually look at this experience in the same way now yes it's still illegal but the fact that there is all this legal research going on has created a space where you can talk about it and I I'm interviewing all these people and they're describing their trips and there you know they're very straight people and they've had profound experience is so I think the cultures changing I really do miss that I had this Authority that I turned in talking about food and nutrition and I'm going to fly at now to drugs I I don't think that way I was just like I'm starting from scratch but I do realize that and people scare me a little when they say you know psychedelic people say you know you're going to do for 4 sillas Ivan what you did for food that's really different you know I mean or this woman I was speaking to Google and see

► 00:54:20

Seattle and this this woman stands up and she says well after I read your book I had a I had to slaughter a pig I had to learn how to slaughter a pig you made me want to do that and when I was driving to work today I didn't think I'd ever take LSD but now or so side of a now I feel like I need to I don't want to do that to people I don't want them to feel they have to have this experience you can learn a lot about the mind this book is as much about the mind as it is about psychedelics this is a book that uses psychedelics to explore this really interesting mystery call Consciousness and it it's also exploring the nature of addiction the nature of depression all the all the illnesses that psychedelics turns out to be very helpful in you know but I'm not holding a brief that people should do this I'm not an addict I'm not an advocate for psychedelics I'm an advocate for the research at this point I don't know enough to say yeah everybody should do this this is what our culture needs you know I don't I'm not in that Timothy Leary had

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you know I think I think we have a powerful agent that that there's good data now that this can help heal people who are really suffering and their other reason for the openness that's going on right now that surprised me because I expected to get a lot of pushback from the SEC yatrik establishment and I and I looked for it I I called around you know I want to hear the critical voice on the Hopkins work in the NYU work and when I kept hearing blew my mind it was like I'm never calling the head of the National Institute of Mental Health to get what I thought would be really negative quote about suicide and research and he was like we have to look at this this is really interesting research former heads of the American Psychiatric association and the reason they're so open to it is that mental health treatment in this country is just a mess I mean we only reach half of the people who are struggling with mental illness at all have any exposure to the system if you compare mental health treatment to any other branch of Medicine

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oncology Cardiology infectious disease is accomplished very little it has him for a long life span it's not saving lives and yet we have you know soaring rates of depression depression is now though the leading cause of disability worldwide there 300 million people with major depression or treatment-resistant depression in the world right now and suicide rates are partly it's the Vets but in general the taboo is coming off is come off suicide the suicide is climbing rapidly in addiction as we know is ramping so they need some new tools there hasn't really been innovation in mental health treatment since the early 90s late 80s with the introduction of the SSRI antidepressants drugs like you know facts on Prozac they need some new tools and that's why they're open to this and that's why I think it will be embraced eventually by by the medical world on the ballot in 2018

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in California they haven't quite got another doing their position drive right now and in Oregon too and so I don't know that we'll get through this time it's a weird item to put on the ballot is actually a small minority people know what Scylla syban is when I on the show you're the first person who said the ingredient in that didn't say the ingredient in magic mushrooms you have some confidence to your audience knows it's all Simoniz but it's an unfamiliar word to most people so I don't know how people vote on that right yeah I think people understand what like the John Hopkins research or just the anecdotal research that some of these people have had these incredibly life-changing experiences but I think one of the things that you're saying is I think it's very important is that this isn't for everybody and that if you have problems with normal Consciousness this is likely not for you if you want those people that has schizophrenia in your

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family perhaps we don't end in fact those people are screened out of this research very carefully it's a real issue with people with psilocybin inmate many psychedelics right yeah what happens with schizophrenia is if you are at risk for it either for because of inheritance a psychedelic trip can set you off can be the trigger for a life of it and other things can to a divorce your parents getting divorced sets people off going to graduate school sets people up if you're someone who's probably going to get schizophrenia any kind of mental trauma if it happens at that window which is in your early twenties in your late twenties I think and that's that's why we did see some cases cuz that's the age people were using psychedelics in the 60s I'm having their first psychotic break so yeah so if you're at risk for that or or bipolar that's right

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numbers that are near the numbers in standard populations in the terms of I think it's 1 out of 10 like 1 out of 10 people have the some form of schizophrenia and that's mirrored in marijuana use and I didn't know that that's really interesting I think the problem is exacerbated or it can trigger it or you know it depending upon mean everyone's biologies different and everyone's the with the way they absorb these these chemicals is different if you are at risk something's going to do it eventually so you know we we don't have any evidence of someone thrown into a situation of schizophrenia or other serious mental illness as a result of strictly because of a psychedelic experience it may have been the trigger but there might have been it was going to happen anyway we just don't know but in general if you've got serious if you have personality disorder if you have bipolar if you are at risk for

► 01:00:21

they will not accept you into these trials and you should stay away from these trucks that is a real problem with it being prohibited the prohibition is really setback research and understanding decades when we should have been studying this stuff since the 6th we have 30 years of Hiatus in the research I don't know if another time where you had a promising line of scientific inquiry all through the 50s and early 60s that's just choked off and for 30 years nothing happened at me think of what we would know if we had 30 more years of research with his drugs to Verizon so now we're picking up the thread and all that research is being resumed but you were with your point about Prohibition is really important when you have prohibition you can't regulate something it's a free-for-all whereas if you did legalize Scylla syban let's take as an example you could set rules you could say that it can only be administered by license guides or in a medical context or that no one under a certain

► 01:01:21

age can have it I mean it gives you a chance to regulate and that's why it's saner to to legalize not in a free-for-all kind of way but you're not in a very considered way then to have the system we have now people are going to take the drug whether they should or not without any kind of clearance and by the way who knows what you're getting you know you can also regulates the strength in the NBA in the case of LSD you know in the 60s there was a. Where there was a lot of pure LSD around and then the mob got an interested in it and they started cutting it was speeding all sorts of things and people got into a lot of trouble it's also the issue with scheduling like schedule ones for things that have zero medical value and that's where a lot of these drugs found themselves schedule one with the old Terence McKenna line everyone's holding we all have DMT in our bodies we always schedule 1 substance flowing through

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which is the most asinine thing in the world to make your body is schedule 1 substance yeah it is which isn't really true with psychedelics cuz they're not addictive and that they have no accepted medical use which is now no longer true either because these Studies have shown that they do have medical use so you know what I hope happens and what and what we're on track to see happen is that these these trials he's drug trials will expand they will be now phase 3 drug trials which is the last step before FDA approval

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if the results of those trials are anywhere near as good as the phase 2 trials the FDA will then approve so I've been as a medicine and MDMA which there which probably happened first in looking at that to a free Houston treating people with trauma and then we will be in a world where they will have to reschedule it to two or three you know the opiates are too I'm actually visited the drug causing most suffering in our country right now and death is not a schedule 1 and schedule 2 I think it's too much T3

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and so that we may see this in the next 5 years or so which is kind of amazing well we got to get someone like Jeff sessions out of there that early archaic ideas about marijuana you know I thought that okay in this Administration we're going to have another backlash but one of the things that surprised me is that their voice is on the right supporting This research Rebecca Mercer has given money to maps The multidisciplinary Association of psychedelic studies for their work on MDMA and Steve Bannon and approval of This research so and Peter teal is you know is investing in a psychedelic pharmaceutical company that's getting started in England so I don't think it's it may not break down in the usual right left way that we're so accustomed to and that may give it some protection I think one of the things that will help is anyone who has a loved one that's going through a terminal illness and experiences

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who sings and sees the profound alleviation of anxiety and this lessening of the worry of passing on and Larry Hagman was once on like a real straight television Chalik CBS or Fox News or something like that and they asked him about his life in like what what makes him so happy and said he had a profound acid trip and you see the host I took a a really powerful dose of LSD and it completely alleviated my worries about dying and you know I remember seeing him on television they didn't know this was coming straight over there but he was so warm and smiling and I believe it was a piece on his house cuz he had some crazy Off the Grid sort of life and some eco-friendly house and all solar power

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used well and I was different things and you know they were asking what made him so happy and I'll never forget that it was just saying I did acid wants a really powerful experience Cary Grant also had 60 guided LSD trips in the late 50s and he gave an interview in 1959 to a gospel fairy Fame Joseph hyams who was the gossip columnist of that time saying the city changed his life he was using a low-dose they were there a lot of psychiatrist in La who were giving low dose LSD to people in their normal talk therapy sessions to essentially was called Cycle lytic Therapy cuz it was mine loosening therapy and then it would give you more access to your unconscious and and make you be able to talk about things that you might otherwise feel very defensive over and hit 60 of these sessions and he said he was born again and he said that it made him a much better actor because he no longer had an ego he wasn't crippled by zika but then he also said and it made me

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resistible do women have no that's hilarious are you aware of any of the research of doing now with ketamine and depression and they're there there's a lot of people that are getting administered pretty high doses of intravenous an intramuscular ketamine for depression include one of my good friends Neal Brennan he's gone through it several times and talked about on the podcast and said it was a real game-changer for that there's a lot of excitement in Psychiatry about ketamine ketamine is an anesthetic it's a dissociative and it makes you feel separated from your body and that helps with pain so it's I don't know if it's strictly speaking the Psychedelic it's really not a classic psychedelic it doesn't work on those brain networks but it is legal cuz it's been used as an anesthetic for years and it's relatively safe as an anesthetic compared to some of the others that are used it's the one they use if if

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you know you coming to the trauma center and you've been shot or saying you need surgery and I don't have time to check with your allergic to any other drugs that's the safe one to give you in a crowd around the right on yeah they all yeah and this they don't really understand how it works but they give people what is kind of a psychedelic dose they go way out there it's fairly brief I believe and many people with depression have found relief it it's not permanent they need to it looks like they need to do it again every 6 months or something like that but it seems to kind of reset the brain in a way that many people are finding helpful and this is all legal I mean you can there are ketamine clinics where you can go and psychiatrist who are ministering to people so for people who are struggling with depression and can't wait for psilocybin therapy to be approved for depression which is still several

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the way ketamine is is worth exploring what about ibogaine did you look into that all a little bit I became is a psychedelic from a root of a tree that grows in Africa and it has been used specifically to treat opiate addiction and that's God if we need something now or too old to deal with opiate addiction there clinics in Mexico where they they really and you opened it after he had his own personal problems of pills he had a back injury got hooked on pills was really struggling to get off from went to Mexico to do ibogaine car completely off of it felt amazing realize like oh my God I have to help people and then open up his own Clinic that's amazing I mean there's a bunch of Guadalajara I don't know where he is but there is some there is that mean people doing it I don't know exactly what the legal statuses in Mexico whether it's legal or just tolerated most drugs have been decriminalized in Mexico including LSD and mushrooms and a lot of other things to try to do something to curb the violence know they're experiencing from the drug cartel

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at least keep it non-local for a lot of the violence is coming from the drug cartels getting money to ship everything to the United States we are driving there in 5 minutes with our use of insistence on probation is actually finding one of the largest drug and violence epidemics we ever seen in terms of like what's happening South of the Border Orange County was founded by our cars a nard cocaine interest so I became is a very intense drug it is for though I didn't and I wouldn't do it I don't think because it has big implications for your heart and yeah and in fact when you so it is more toxic to the body than this so-called classic psychedelics and it can last like 36 hours it's a very long trip it's really intense in these clinics they say you have to be on a heart monitor while they're it while you're doing it and that was like I had a I had a I have a minor

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tissue that that made me stay away from MDMA which is an amphetamine and you know I mean I'm the kind of guy who goes to his cardiologist before he has 6 second Ella trips to check it all out which you can manage with with medicine or there's a procedure can get it just to kind of regular yeah it just happens sometimes but my cardiologist warn me off of MDMA because I can raise your heart rate now though I've subsequently learn if you take a beta blocker it's okay so anyway I've never experimented with that but anyway in light of that I would stay away from my beginning but I'm really curious about it just cuz of that we have such a crisis for the action but suicide band is is being used successfully for addiction I talk to smoking fat people lifelong smokers who broke their addiction with a single

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or two suicide band Journey's and they had extraordinary stories to tell I didn't understand how you could to have one trip and then give up a lifelong habit and I've asked people about this and I talk to this woman she's about 60 and she was an Irish book editor and she she said honors I said so what happened how do you how do you stop should I well I first I grew wings and I flew through European history and I visited you know the side of the Shakespeare's Globe Theatre and I saw the Salem witch trials and and I I died 3 times and I saw my body rising from a funeral pyre on the Ganges and I realize the universe was so amazing and there were so many incredible things to do that kill yourself a cigarette seem kind of stupid

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like I kind of told you that wow but she goes back to that that noetic quality that the she had a perspective on her life she never had or on the universe and that she believed that smoking was stupid in a way she knew before but it didn't have that conviction that rock hard in a revealed truth conviction and I heard that from many people and I ask the doctor about it as a psychologist who is running the study says yeah everybody has these duh moments are psychedelic trip then end up being transformed did you have a dull moment

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I had a lot of insights I don't know if I yeah I did actually a different trips did you have 6 or 7i a couple to silicide been trips oneguide not an LSD trip guided a couple Ayahuasca circles and then I had a really weird psychedelic all 5 Meo DMT which is the smoked Venom of the Sonoran Desert toad who figured that out you know if she gets some kind of prize but that's a pretty pretty very potent and thank God short-acting short-lived it was it was actually a horrible experience everything that was my worst yeah yeah so before you exhale I was in this a synthetic version to write I was taking the Venom your shot out of a cannon there's no lead up it's no warm-up is like and I felt like I was

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actually like strapped to the outside of a rocket you know going through space and through clouds in like the g-force is pulling down my cheeks and it was just this mental storm without any nothing Orient myself there was no space there was no time there was no self and it was just an adorable this punishing Roar in my ears and someone who done it said eventually it's like a take off and you get into orbit and it and it's it's very nice that point but what happened with me is I had the

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I have the storm I'm going to feel like it was like the metaphor using the book is like I said I can't explain that you can't tell a story without Place time and character right or had none of those it was just the same Kuwait energy and I said it was it was like that before the Big Bang you remember that well obviously nobody does but but there was pure energy and no matter yet I know time yet and that's where I was and it was horrible it was terrifying and I thought I was dying but then you you come down as kind of a suborbital flight and and then I started coming down and something I could feel all I got a body you know it's touching my legs I have a body in like there's a there's a floor there's their space and then there's time and the end the universe kind of reconsolidated and I had this feeling of incredible gratitude for being alive

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which all of us have had at one point or another but that anything existed I was I was grateful for the fact that there is something and not nothing cuz I seen what nothing was like and so in that sense it ended up kind of positive but you wouldn't want to go there to have that experience so subsequently somebody said to me a very experienced psycho not who I was telling the story to he said you don't have enough that's why I was just going to tell you cuz you only took one hit usually take three you take three and the rocket by the Rocket Ride leads you somewhere it takes you to see you take out around the same time blow it out take a big one blow it out take a big one and as you're taking the third one you already seen the world crystallize in front of you it already starts turning into geometric patterns he put the pipe down lay back in the chair and you just shoot off to the center of the universe that the terrifying thing is you cease to exist like it's the one drug that I've ever taken where you don't you're not there anymore

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even n n dimethyltryptamine which is the difference between 5 methoxy dimethyltryptamine is just an oxygen oxygen molecule out of it but n n dimethyltryptamine is incredibly visually stimulating the five methoxy is not it's just white it was white it was definitely I don't know how I could have taken 3 it's because I had an Excel the first one when I was gone I wish they only did the synthetic version of that you're doing this for the person I know who did the synthetic version had a very different experience and they felt like they were installed in the firmament as this happy star but I didn't get there so who knows I did something wrong okay I don't think you did I just think you had a different experience and I mean I was obviously there's got to be some sort of chemical different me you probably getting other things in that frog Venom as well as pure DM that's right that maybe I don't know the answer to that

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it's excrete on the outside of your rub them on a glass and then let it dry off and then you scrape it that's right I heard you trying to squeeze them again and it sprays the glass and overnight it turns into it looks like brown sugar 2011 jug of this shit my God offline I bought it from some company American Chemical Company or something and they send it to you and I had enough to get the entire State of California high for several days does it take my it doesn't but it's not something you want to do very often that's why I don't think it has the same kind of healing properties cuz you're not bringing back information that's usable back a lot I brought back a lot about myself and one of the things that I realize like as always I recorded what I would do is post trip I'd hit a tape recorder right when I became conscious again and start talking about this.

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and what I remember saying about the five methoxy DMT experience is like as I'm trying to recount what happened I feel my ego trying to retake hold the situation and even use words and a way that might impress you with my ability to describe things or is it as a professional comedian to I was aware that like a lot of what you're doing you're saying things away that's pleasing to people so that they get excited about hearing that talk and I was very aware of that while doing that I'm saying I'm saying I'm trying to explain things that are not possible to explain because the words that were using were all invented for a world that doesn't exist in the DMT Dimension is once once you break through it is so profoundly alien that anywhere liberating well in a way I mean it may be really truly realize that we are in a soup of of atoms and that it's not yet

► 01:19:28

Michael Paul and Joe Rogan and Jamie Vernon in a room here's a wood table there's oxygen and Universal Studio of particles particles down or at least it gives you a view into that and you cease to exist which is the most bizarre thing because it's so similar to end end dimethyltryptamine chemically but so different experience. That you're not there while you're doing regular do you like n n dimethyltryptamine which is the active ingredient Ayahuasca if you done that the pure version of it is like a very short much more intense Ayahuasca experience I've never done orwosky I've only done the DMT version but the injection or what you get out of it is you're there while this is happening and you're just present your present

► 01:20:28

take it in the hell down settle that they're all trying to calm you down and and NFL 50 it's weird you know any other also fucking with you later to give you the finger that got a bunch of jokers that were like dancing around me giving me the finger if you have machine elves to I don't believe in that thing I don't know what that is like McKenna had those experiences of machine elves I never thought what I described is complex geometric patterns that are made out of love and understanding they seem to me to be like the building blocks of the Soul all around you all the time some just gigantic impossibly large infinite Well of Souls is these things dancing around you and they were there whenever one thing they would be one thing for a second and they change into something else and they change it to something different and the more profound the experience is God the more profound the next one would be and they kept saying like look at this look at this

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I can put the words weren't real words at the other things like I'm saying the words look at this and I'd have that in my head but I never heard anybody say it was almost like it was triggering those that the concept of those words in my mind is it is pre or post linguistic some of these experiences moments though but had this like cascading since the flood of Love Tour everything about my family asking about my son on my wife and my parents and and you know it sounds like so open up and one of the things that happens is that these platitudes that love is the most important thing there is okay take that for a Hallmark card but suddenly it's infused with like yes that is so profound here you know what it is profound but we have these defenses against seeing it that way because we've heard it so many times you know a sense of finality is just for

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repetition but your put back in touch with you know a platitude is a truth that's been drained of all emotion and the emotion comes back and it becomes really powerful in the book about platitudes in life we have to rethink these platitude I can't make you sound like an idiot but is that right or is that right now actually experience is more truthful then the ironic cynical perspective that we bring to an our everyday lives which is a defense against powerful emotion and being overwhelmed Everyday by wow love you know whatever it is so yeah you end up revaluing those kind of things and that what they said I was a really important take away from me the other was having an experience of ego dissolution

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that which can be scary can also be very Blissful if it's Then followed by a merging with nature other people and I do think that is the therapeutic agent in these in the people who are healed that our ego does keep us from receiving certain things and it enforces really destructive Stories We Tell ourselves like I can't get through this day without a drink I'm Unworthy of love you know the voice of self-criticism and we get trapped in these loops and special as we get older and that's one of the reasons I think psychedelic actually more valuable the older you get because we are creatures of habit and by now we have these mental algorithms that organize our our our response to everything sure that's very efficient but it blinds you to experience it blinds you to the everyday wonders and psychedelics you know softens those habits and end in helps you get out of those grooves

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and for me that was really useful and it's only I think it's the experience of ego dissolution that allows you to cuz your ego enforces those habits and you get a little break there's a beautiful metaphor one of the scientist say interview in the book of Dutchman working in an Imperial College in London he said they get your mind is a hill covered in snow and your thoughts are sleds going down that hill and after while after a lot of thoughts of going to hell will be these grooves and they didn't get deeper and deeper into certain point you can't go down the hill without slipping into those grooves that's who we are as we're like you know at this age and what psychedelics do he said is is flat in the snow lots of fresh powder and you can then take the sled anyway you want to go that's a great way I've always talked about predetermined patterns and grooves that people fall into so it's amazing hearing him say it that way but that's a much better way of describing it like snow the sliding these thoughts down

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already existing patterns that's amazing that's what you said about love and being cynical that's so important to because there's something that's

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something that people are they avoid sincerity like there's something about it that it makes you too vulnerable or to open to criticism or to open to ridicule and we're worried about being sincere and I do think that that's one of the primary benefits of psychedelic yeah we live in an ironic culture we defend ourselves against experience or self exposure by adopting the stamps that's ironic and cool and psychedelics is not a cool experience the opposite it's serious stuff and how much did you pay attention to McKenna's theory about the evolution of the human brain of the stoned ape theory that I looked at it but I I found I didn't find a persuasive and in fact if you press Terence McKenna he didn't find it entirely persuasive is very interesting speculation it's kind of a mind game I don't see

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how I can see how psychedelics would influence the mind and end in and create new ideas new memes and might contribute to language but how does he get into the jeans that's what I am at the genetic level I see psychedelics is having had a profound effect at the level of cultural Evolution that there lots of interesting innovations that people who had psychedelic experience introduced to our culture and we talked about religion earlier that could be one I had a wonderful interview with Stewart brand the founder of the whole earth catalog and he is inside he had this profound inside during a psychedelic trip on the roof of his house in North Beach and he saw the curvature of the earth and we had before and he said that if we could have a fuck this in 1966 we had never seen a picture of the Earth from space yet and he said if we had a picture of the Earth from space and we could see it as of this round spaceship

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that would change everything because if you think of the Earth is flat as most of us instinctively do its endless there is endless resources you don't have to worry about limits in anyway but if we had that image in you realize I have to start a campaign to get NASA to turn the cameras around they're on their way to the moon show us the Earth from space and he said I'm going to make a campaign I know it's not a mistake I'll make a button very important meeting of the 1966 I'll make a button and what should the button say it should be a little paranoid to get people's attention why haven't they shown us an image of the Earth from space your knee started a campaign to start selling these buttons and the campaign got in the newspapers and it goes viral as you know as far as you could get in 1966

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and two years later at Nasa produce that image and he put it on the whole earth catalog in that image galvanized environmental movement so it's those kind of memes that psychedelics introduces into culture and that changes culture culture and I think their hundreds of them I'm Steve Jobs talked about he know his use of LSD is very important to his formative experience in fact is a whole tradition of computer Engineers going back to the 50s using LSD that I thought I wrote about in the book so but I don't see how we were selected genetically because of their there was an advantage the people who were taking a lot of psychedelics that's where he lives maybe I'm just representing his theory is that it coincides with climate change and the lower hominids experiencing experimenting with different food sources so as the rainforest received in the grasslands right they started experimenting by flipping over Cow Patties and finding grubs in end

► 01:29:13

cops even mushrooms that were growing on his Cow Patties and his theory was that there's a bunch of different benefits one low doses of suicide would have been shown to increase visual Acuity I'm certain cultures make you a better Hunter make you more in tune with what you're doing that it would make you more it would central nervous system arousal including sexual arousal make you more focused more often and that the the very unusual effect the Scylla syban has on the mind could have lied to language and could have also led to the expansion of neurons the part of cultural Evolution Shore the doubling of the human brain size though it was a particular thing I disagree with him but his brother makes a very compelling case for his brother Dennis is still alive he he talked about it on this podcast he talked about his take on the stone

► 01:30:13

stoned ape Theory scientifically why he believes it's that's what really what happened but that it does coincide with the change in climate of these people trying out different things and at the doubling of the human brain size over a. Of 2 million years is like one of the greatest mysteries in the entire fossil rubber there alternate theories I'm I wrote about one of my last week in the brain size because you get more nutritional value from cooked food the wrong all the different ways to do that and communication and cooperation and a bunch of coinciding fat people eating everything right our ancestors is amazing with a 8 and I no doubt they psychedelic mushrooms and no doubt I mean he also believed that language was a form of synesthesia you know in the way that synesthesia you can smell a musical note or something like that that you're taking that a sound of meaningless sound

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you know and and you're attaching it to a concept that maybe that happened on so so I've been putting out a bunch of ideas never panned out ridiculous ideas creative person and yeah and I get a really interesting facts about some of them I think you could probably discredit based on what we understand about genes and evolution but others have just really provocative that's where his brother comes in his brother yeah I mean loved his brother but it's doing psychedelics Andy Williams have a podcast now right

► 01:32:13

what there's a podcast called the Psychedelic Salon that my friend Lorenzo hosts that has pretty much every Terence McKenna lecture and speeches ever done available for free download it and Lorenzo is taking these and digitally remastered them to the sound is better and it's really awesome that did that he's got this resource but did the idea that these lower hominids experienced ancient hominids experience experiment to browser with silicide been in this was what Advanced culture Advanced language Advanced their understanding of each other it's a very very compelling idea yeah it is and I I think I mean the way I think about drugs like psychedelics in evolution in the same way like in genetic Evolution radiation causes mutations and some of those mutations turn out to be really valuable in a purely by accident some great new trait is introduced to the species in it

► 01:33:08

increases Fitness in that person or that individual lives on in the cultural realm psychedelics are like radiation there mutagens they create change variation and that advanced is cultural Evolution all that variation all those wild ideas 99% of them are stupid and useless out bad but that 1% can change the world let's let you go cuz I know you got to get out of here but I wish I had more time cuz we got a lot more to talk anytime come back in town please do please do and the name of book once again how to change your mind what the new science of psychedelics is teaching us about Consciousness dying addiction depression in Transcendence and is it available in audio form as well like I hate it when other people reading people's books I did to end them and they told me my first couple bucks now you got to have an actor do it and people complain they said yes I you so now I insist on to it takes a week out of my life each time

► 01:34:08

it's not easy but I'm very proud of this audio books I hope you will check that's awesome thank you very much Michael thank you Jesus was a pleasure thank you to join honey.com you can click on it with just two clicks install you will always make sure you get the lowest prices on anything you buying from Amazon add honey to browser for free right now at joinhoney.com Rogan that's joinhoney.com Ford Rogan we are also brought to you by the cash app make sure when you download cash out at the Google Play store or the Apple Store Apple store called App Store why did I forget that forget that

► 01:34:55

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► 01:35:55

used to be here this week he's going to be here next week Robert schoch the geologist who studied the Sphinx and determined that the water fissures on the erosions on the Sphinx indicate that's far older than mainstream geologist archaeologists believe it's fucking fascinating subject I'm super excited talk to him Candace Candace Owens

► 01:36:21

she's a shit to Star right people I don't have her on shut up when I have all kinds of people on I'm thinking to have a Ted Nugent on how do you like them apples oh yes cat zingano is going to be here my friend cat I love her she's a beast

► 01:36:40

and that's a good thing to say about a woman whose MMA fighter it's a it's a bad thing to say about any other woman but she is an awesome beautiful beast and Donnie Vincent who is an outdoor filmmaker really interesting guys well switch out of stock lineup next week as well so that's it that's it for today preciate the fuck out of all you people thank you so much I'm glad you're enjoying the show and you know I did all the positive messages that I get from people that are really enjoying these programs I'm enjoying him to man I really am I feel so lucky so fortunate privilege to be able to sit down with people like Michael Pollan Howard Bloom and George St-Pierre and just fill in the blank so many interesting people I've had a chance to talk to it's deeply enriched my life and the way I think about things and sometimes it's

► 01:37:34

sometimes it's overwhelming you know sometimes I've taken in so much information that I forget it all and then someone has to remind me never that podcast yeah forgot about that one it's almost like I have a well in terms of conversations to the point where it's just too much but I love it I love it it's made me I think it's made me smarter person tomorrow where person the better person think I'm better at having conversations because this podcast I'm better at listening to people better understand how people perceive me and you know how you can improve so it's all about right so thank you thank you everybody to Dan and thank you everybody that's been a guest just thank you both thank you love you guys thank you and girls and non-binary quotes that's for you