Hamilton Morris on Psychedelics | Mike Rashid

[Music] [Music] ignition sequence start six five four three two one zero all engines running lift off we have a lift sorry about that all right big fan of your work um a fan of not just you know the show of course but what you do like what you stand for and um i really it really resonates with me um you know but can you give the uh my people a little introduction to who you are of course yeah so i have made a tv show called hamilton's pharmacopoeia for the last decade really and it's used to be an online tv show now it's an actual on television tv show and i finished making the third season early this year and this is likely the end of this particular show because it was extremely difficult to make for a number of reasons but it's available for people in the u.s on amazon and internationally it's a little bit trickier to locate it seems okay so this is about i'm sorry yeah it's about the chemistry of psychoactive drugs and pharmacology and anthropology and kind of the entire surrounding environment regarding drugs okay so um i want to jump around but i want to get into some of the episodes because yo this is i love this show um the ultra lsd is my favorite one the favorite my favorite episode it was so good not just the the the content but the style in which um your your crew films and edits and music and everything the texture everything is just right it just feels right you know what i mean and i i experienced that from season one first show all the way to now so kudos for that for the art of it i appreciate the art as well but um the message so i uh excuse me i personally have um for the first time um experimented with psychedelics last year and um you know i was like everyone else i was like no i would never do that yada yada ya and i grew up i never did i never really did drugs at all except for like you know weed here and there but i didn't really like weed because i never felt it made me feel feel dull and and slow and depressed and paranoid all of the negative side effects i got them all so that wasn't my thing so um as i got older i used to be really close-minded to everything but as i age you know i started exploring more and uh i started meditating about five six years ago and then i think that started opening my mind to like certain possibilities and um i was having a conversation with someone and i was explaining what i felt from meditation when i'm really in that state and they said you know what that sounds like when you when you're on a psychedelic i'm like yeah right can't be real so anyway i did a little research and it was not what i expected to research like the information because the common notion is that you know it's for hippies uh it's gonna be super uncomfortable you'll lose your mind all of this stuff so and my father he he's old school and he was like he used to try to scare me with jokes he he told me he would tell me stories maybe he'd make them up but of people that he knew that the first time they tried something their brains broke and they're just mentally ill now and homeless and stuff like that so i was just always a little uh super paranoid but anyway as i got older and more brave researching psychedelics it makes sense so i was in utah in september and a friend of mine who he's on that level um he just seemed to be glowing like he had this certain coolness about him this day i like what's up man it wasn't he wasn't drunk he wasn't high for me it was just different i was like what's up what are you are you on something and he was like yeah i'm on lsd i like tell me about it because you know i've read about it i've watched videos but never was i around someone on it you know so i'm like now i can really see what it's like and he was explaining it and i like yo i want to try it so then i tried it not that day but a little bit after and i really enjoyed it you know and um you know i did it a few times and then one time i didn't uh i was moving fast and wasn't paying attention to what i was doing and i took like way too much and uh it took me for a while right you know but it was good though i ended i felt like i faced some demons ran to the demons dealt with the demons you know what i assessed from it was it basically was magnifying and intensifying anything on my mind and that was really in my heart at the time so it made it like it gave me a sense of urgency to deal with it you know what i mean so i felt it felt like i had a very like i had some kind of a breakthrough you know and um it was one of the coolest days of my life actually but um but after that yeah i still you know dibble and dabble nothing crazy but yeah yeah i mean i think that people justifiably are often afraid of these things and in some instances it's probably not so bad because i think in order to have a good constructive experience you have to invest time and you have to be in a good place psychologically and ideally you have to really you know do a little bit of research and most people aren't going to want to do all that and so it's a little bit easier to just say don't do it you know because who wants to put in the work but it's like anything else it's like driving a car or a motorcycle or probably martial arts as well you get out what you put in and if you invest in getting the most out of it then it can be tremendously constructive you have to go into it prepared you can't just assume that it's going to be good you have to go into it open to whatever might happen and open to the possibility that it might be challenging in one way or another and in that way um psychedelics are a little bit different from the sorts of drugs people think of when you say the word drugs they usually think of something that just pushes you in one direction or another makes you fall asleep wakes you up if you're tired makes you high causes a pain killing effect or something of that nature but psychedelics are far more unpredictable that's one reason that they've been a little bit tricky to integrate into our modern medical practices because they don't fit into our contemporary medical paradigm they're not reliable in their effect they do different things to different people depending on expectation and environment and psychology and because all that is complicated i get why people are afraid it's much easier to be afraid than to you know spend a couple years reading about it to prepare in order to get the most out of it i totally get it so i got a question for you um well there's some complexity to this question but do you do you see psychedelics as a means for people to explore consciousness is that even a thing yeah it's like it's it's a good question i don't precisely know what it would mean to explore consciousness but i know that they alter consciousness they change it and i think that in and of itself can be very useful just to have a different perspective on your life because we very rapidly get out of the habit of looking at things carefully you walk down the street you just see trees you don't look at each individual tree look at the leaves assess the health of the tree maybe think about what type of tree this is how old this tree is is this a good location for the tree and i think that they force people to carefully examine themselves and their environment and they're not the only way to do that there are other ways to do it i actually think you know i used to draw a lot and i think drawing is also really useful because if you sit down with a pad of paper and a pen and try to do your absolute best to draw your apartment or your house or your garden or something it's going to force you to look at it far more carefully than you otherwise would so i think these are tools strategies for forcing us not to just have this superficial look at ourselves in our environment but to look carefully and in looking carefully you can often recognize things that you otherwise would miss maybe you realize you don't really like where you live you don't like being cold you want to live somewhere warmer maybe you realize that the plants in your apartment are unhealthy and if you wanted them to survive you have to do something whatever just little things that people just don't take the time to notice often or maybe you feel unhealthy maybe you realize like i need to work out more i need to change my diet a lot of people have revelations about their diet when they take psychedelics it's not uncommon for people um to have kind of extreme feelings often someone will go from eating a lot of meat to thinking oh maybe meat is unethical the way i'm eating it i should be a vegetarian and i've also heard people go the opposite way people who had very extreme vegetarian type diets realize like what the hell am i doing i need protein i need power in my body i can't just eat like macrobiotic bread all day yeah i get it um you know everyone i guess develops their own little tactics throughout life and one that i've i found that really helps me uh navigate is pain you know it's suffering and i say that in the means of like you know i write a lot and i write about stress and i think stress is so good because there's not i can't think of a situation in which being placed under stress that is bad you know as long as you deal with it properly i feel like it strengthens you mentally spiritually physically willpower whatever it just it really uh it can break people but it don't have to you know so pain has always been something that i go to and and not like harming myself i mean like pain like in training like running like i hate running so i run you know i hate swimming so i swim you know things i'm not good at and things that are difficult to me so you know i i tend to dive deep into that kind of stuff just like um you know uh this is my birthday weekend i turned in 44. so i used to box all my life and i stopped early early 20s and then um when i was like 39 i was about to turn 40 i was like you know what i got the bright idea to get back into boxing because i'm looking around me and i'm like yo i'm getting so i'm from new york i'm from brooklyn i know you live in brooklyn and um you know i grew up in brooklyn when it was brooklyn like the cocaine 80s you know what i mean so and uh actually my my house kind of corrupted our block like in neighborhood you know my mother was married to like the biggest drug dealer in new york at the time you know what i'm saying so i've seen a lot and been through a lot but i felt that like you know i'm in corporate america i'm in business i'm doing good i'm successful i felt like i'm losing my age i'm getting soft you know what i mean there's no i i don't have no formidable adversaries so i i i gave myself one in the form of like getting back into boxing and it was so hard you know what i mean so but i was doing it getting up running you know prepare for a fight and even the psychological side of it um the night before the night the day of my fight um was a pro fight it was in new jersey atlantic city i'm in the shower going downstairs to the to to get wrapped up and loved up and bro i just started bawling crying i'm like why am i why would i do this like why am i putting myself through this and i'm thinking about the possible human it's not like me getting hurt i don't care about that but the humiliation you know my son is there like what would he think like would he be afraid if i got hurt like why am i doing this to myself but then i remember i'm doing this to myself for a reason you know just just a gut check you know a spiritual gut check not like or mental i don't know you know um not like a physical gut check that's easy physical things are easy but things of the mind that stuff is hard you know like mental emotional pain that stuff is hard breaking the bone is like whatever but you know i try to toughen myself with those kind of things because life is just like psychedelics life is unpredictable you never know we we as humans tend to like put so much into other people for our happiness and expectations and we can get let down like that so i guess you know always trying to you know be in a space to expect anything and be okay with it um as well you know my tactics have been you know put myself through painful situations but even psychedelics to an extent like a lot for me is very uncomfortable but i like dealing with it for some reason i'm just kind of drawn to that yeah no i i agree completely i when i was in high school i was friends with another very charismatic student and he was prescribed benzodiazepines and he was saying to me you know people talk about all these different things that are bad for your health well the worst thing for your health the absolute worst thing is to be stressed and that's the real killer so you know what you should really be doing is just taking benzodiazepines because this will cause you to be relaxed and that's the healthiest thing you could possibly do now when i was in high school that sounded like really good advice and it kind of makes intuitive sense of course stress is the real killer of course that's the real problem and i remember i contacted the psychiatrist and i said yeah i think i've got an anxiety problem i think i'd probably like to take benzodiazepines and he prescribed me colonopin and of course it feels great it feels fantastic to not experience any sort of social anxiety to go to sleep effortlessly every night and i quickly as many people do became dependent on them right because but the worst thing about it is in becoming dependent i had medicalized anxiety and stress and i decided that these are bad things that must be avoided at all costs and if i experience these things that's a symptom of disease and so it is my responsibility to eliminate them from my life and it wasn't until i recognized how damaging it was to use these substances that i had to completely change my perspective and recognize that anxiety and stress are integral parts of existing they are part of life and if you try to live a life without stress or anxiety that will be a life forgotten you will not remember that life that will be a life that has no challenges no purpose if that's your goal then you're not going to live a good life and if you want to live a good life you actually have to embrace all these things and you have to find strength in them you have to take anxiety and stress as a challenge an opportunity to grow that's the only way and you know there's a musician who i really admire named jonathan richman who's probably the only person in the world who's anti-drug that i agree with and the reason that i agree with him is he's one of very few people that lumps in all sorts of things under the umbrella of drug that most people won't call drugs so he considers air conditioning a drug because that reduces the suffering of the heat in the summertime he considers computers to drug he considers he doesn't use a cell phone he doesn't use email he strives to suffer through all of life's difficulties and not use within reason like i imagine he'll still use medicine if he's sick but he really tries to avoid all those things in order to experience suffering and grow from it as much as possible and i and he's also one of the healthiest smartest best people i've ever known so i looked at him and i think well this guy actually gets it and i do think that if you try to avoid suffering you will end up suffering more and you will not live a meaningful life it is only through embracing it that you can grow and have a meaningful existence listen i i i'm sitting here you know i'm a skeptic right of everything um and i'm trying to like come up with a way to negate this guy's position but i can't right i agree with all it all makes a lot of sense right and um you know i tell people all the time i say look like i look at stress or anything difficult is like a bully right and i got bullied or they attempted to bully me when i was a kid cause i was real thin and didn't look tough but i knew how to box and that wasn't in school and they had no idea that i was a boxer right so i would always beat the bully up so i developed the thing to where like i run into the bully you know but i like i mean that in the sense of my problems and i tell people you know anybody anyone around me people i care about like look run to it because here's the thing once you get there it's never as bad you know what i mean and let's say you get beat up oh well it's a lesson learned you figure out how not to get beat up the next time but nine times out of ten is never as bad it seems bad when you're running from it you know and then they get just like a predator a lion anything if they give chase and you're running they're they're like more turned on by the adrenaline right my dog is like that but if you turn around and run to them they probably think twice you know what i mean and that's just how everything that i've experienced in life any difficult things and i've been through some really difficult things you know but um i run into it i face it i deal with it it's never that bad and maybe i'm just i've made so many mistakes in life that i have to deal with it so often that i'm just used to it you know but that could be a thing but you know i just find that it's never that bad but um but yeah so you you said that this is the third season will most likely be the last for pharmacopoeia yeah i think so yeah it was really making this during the pandemic was really really really hard um and you know like a lot happens behind the scenes that you just could never know unless you worked on the show how difficult it was you know people will say how do you how did you possibly get into this you know lab that's making mdma why did they let you film and the answer on one level is because you you know these people are they're very good and trusting people but they're also very reckless and by entering into my life i become responsible for them in some way so for example this mdma chemist who's making it on camera right such a crazy thing to imagine someone who's manufacturing kilos of mdma inviting a film crew into their home to let them stay for a week and document every step of the process um so what kind of person does that well yeah a very trusting person but also someone who doesn't have a lot of regard for their own safety on another level and i remember telling him you know i really appreciate that you trusted me enough to allow me to film this but i hate to say this you're gonna have to stop for a little while at least while this is appearing on television because i can't promise you that nothing is going to happen and i don't want you to be running an active mdma lab while you know and have something happen because you appeared on television demonstrating this and he just wouldn't listen to me you know he and nothing happened to him thankfully but um but uh and he retired for other purposes and it was okay but things like that are nerve-wracking and there's not a lot i don't have control over other people i don't have control over their choices and i know that i am on one level responsible for their well-being like there's nothing that would cause me more pain than someone you know getting in trouble as a result of one of these stories because i'm really trying to do this to make the world a better place i'm trying to educate people i'm trying to you know take a group that historically has been demonized you know the people that manufacture drugs are considered the worst of the worst it's one thing if you possess them some people kind of think that's okay and dealing them is worse but making them that's the absolute worst thing so i thought okay if i have an opportunity to defend one group this is the most vulnerable group these are the people that actually need someone to understand their motivations but in doing that there's a tremendous amount of risk i can i can totally see that and good good for you good on you for like caring about these people to that extent so i can imagine i can imagine how much stress you carry with you worried about them right so that's a good thing all right so um you know listen i learned about you you know less than a year ago right and i've been diving deep watching a lot of interviews i'm fascinated by your perspective and on these things and also um i'm sure you've heard it a million times you're able to articulate very complex uh situations to where we can understand it like layman's like me so i appreciate that and it's intriguing and um you know the first time the first time after the first couple of times that i experienced lsd um i was just kind of upset right i was upset at like like the government or whomever whoever put these things in our these ideas in our head right that these things are bad and you can't do this this is this is a schedule one there's no benefit what is it no medicinal benefits and it's highly addictive and it's like i enjoy lsd a great deal and i didn't feel the need to do it again the next day or the next day or you know what i mean so i'm like yo who are these people to tell and and if i was to get addicted so what let me you know understand um food is the number one killer in this country people are dropping dead from type 2 diabetes and heart disease that's not illegal you know we could jump out of airplanes but anyway it put a lot of things in perspective and um one of those things um was that nobody really cares about us about any of us right like the government i even had to stop saying the government these are just a bunch of dudes with jobs you know what i mean it's not some big powerful entity yeah well they care in the wrong way i mean one of the the most unfortunate things about drugs is that pretty much everyone is involved with them in some way so by making them illegal they're doing more than just preventing access to medicines that could be beneficial they're also giving themselves an invitation to interfere with the lives of almost anyone they want to i mean this is one reason that there's such powerful tools from a law enforcement perspective because suddenly you have a series of laws that make almost everyone in the country illegal uh or a criminal of one kind or another so you know it could be as simple as you have a a actual prescription for some medicine but you don't have it in the pill bottle all right well that's a crime that's maybe a reason for at least to get you arrested it's tremendous as tools for law enforcement prohibition is tremendously powerful and they've known that from the very beginning that has been openly acknowledged by people from the nixon administration that by making these things illegal that's just a key to every home in the country right and so when people say i don't think drugs should be legal i don't like drugs i hope they recognize that it's not about whether you like drugs or not it's about whether you like freedom or not whether you like privacy or not because in somewhere like new york city the fourth amendment doesn't exist because because it is probable cause to search someone and their apartment if a police officer smells marijuana well the entire city smells like weed every apartment building has somebody smoking weed every park has somebody smoking weed that means that a police officer can legally search anyone in a park if there's a wafting smell of cannabis and they decide that it's emanating from you now you could hate weed more than anyone in the world but i would hope at the very least you don't want to give police officers the right to search you for no reason or to enter your home for no reason and you know it's also not good for police officers either because i think that it fundamentally interferes with their relationship with the community that they're trying to protect like if you're if you're like gonna have the most optimistic positive vision of a police officer like maybe they really got into this because they wanted to help people maybe they really wanted to like you know prevent domestic abuse or prevent child neglect or whatever and then if your job instead is just locking people in cages for having like a little bit of this or that chemical or plant think of how corrupting that would for you psychologically it would twist your entire world view you'd start to like because at least intuitively a crime should have a victim right if you're abusing someone there's someone you can point to and say look what you did you just abused them they're the victim but with drug abuse it's a victimless crime who do you point to who do you say who's if you have a little bit of a plant in your pocket you're the victim and you also go to prison for it while being the victim it doesn't make any sense and and so i think the nonsense confuses their morality like they get twisted by it and it's corrupting in and of itself so i think like it doesn't matter what side you're on pro law enforcement anti-law enforcement pro-drug anti-drug you should recognize that this is just not a good system ah i totally get it um and trust me like i've you know i've been through it all so you know like you don't even have to in my community you don't have to have drugs on you they'll give it to you they'll put it on you i've seen it like i have one of my friends in this room right now it's happened to him you know he had you had a joint he had a joint right and this was like a few years ago and the cops said they said possession would intend to distribute it's like a joint like how can i distribute a joint you know what i mean and that's a whole different sentencing you know so and and you know they slap you with felonies i get it so trust me but is that do you think that like especially around the nixon administration um there were other reasons as well outside of just giving quote-unquote authorities another tool to be able to um do what they want to do with citizens but do you think that there was something something else that they kind of feared about people's access to psychedelics oh yeah there were a lot of reasons and that's why i think people have a tendency to reduce it to one thing you know was it racism yeah racism was explicitly a part of it explicitly in their own words that's not even debate they've acknowledged it themselves so you have racism you have classism right this is also just a way of selectively prosecuting poor people you also have the perhaps valid concern that these substances contribute to counter-cultural anti-war anti-establishment thinking specifically psychedelics now that's up for debate but i think you could make a case for it especially in the 60s you also have genuine medical concern you have a lot of medical doctors that at that time didn't know they just thought these things might be dangerous there was a lot of bad science being done at that time neuroscience was in its infancy people didn't know very much about it my father had a psychiatrist named doris millman who was a very early researcher on lsd and she scared my father so much that he truly believed that lsd was poisonous and i've seen her scientific papers she had done studies of children who had accidentally consumed their parents lsd typically extremely large doses and it suffered negative psychological consequences as a result which is not entirely surprising you can imagine giving an enormous overdose of lsd to a child could be damaging especially if then the parents freak out and then they take them to an emergency room and everyone's freaking out no one is supportive it could easily be traumatizing so that doesn't surprise me but that of course doesn't mean that lsd is toxic it just means don't give an overdose of lsd to a child in an unsupportive environment probably under any circumstances so there are there are a lot of different factors at play ranging from you know benevolent medical concern to racism and a desire for control and they all blended together along with um journalists who are huge contributors in uncritical reporting on this matter because you know journalists just like a funny story they often i think there's this idea that journalists are like have a motivation like they hate uh some type of person more than anything journalists are driven by novelty they like a crazy story and so they have all these stories about oh my god there's some hippies and they gave lsd to their child oh no it's terrible and and look at this person he stared at the sun until he went blind isn't that terrible and look at this guy he pulled out his eyes isn't that terrible i mean this happens to this day so you have all these different people journalists who are really you know professionally tasked with informing the public sculpting public opinion who are instead serving a prohibitionist agenda unknowingly most of the time because they're just not critically engaged with the impact of their own work you have law enforcement that is now legally required to lock people in cages for these very very widely consumed substances i mean i don't know what it was like in the 60s but now um the drug policy alliance estimates that 10 percent of the american population is trying to psychedelic not including cannabis and ketamine if you include those i think it gets a little bit closer to 50 so this is something that involves a lot of the country this is not some obscure issue uh i totally get it yeah um i want to ask you something about uh certain um drugs in particular let's say well before i get into that i want to bring bring uh some attention to something i i find that oftentimes like about five years ago for three years so two years ago i stopped uh being eating a vegan diet right so five years ago i went three years eating a vegan diet all right so people like social media whatever like a lot of vegan organizations and whatnot they were like oh there's our guy right they thought it was you know it was cute to them that this big buff dude is a vegan but i had to you know i was very honest with people like like nah i just this i got like this eating meat you know what i mean and i lost a lot of weight which i wanted to lose a lot of weight so i was very honest with them about it and also you know it wasn't necessarily for like the ethical reasons i didn't you know i don't have all of that information on you know how they slaughter and things of that nature it was just for my health and i was very honest with them about that so um but i got pulled into a lot of you know a lot of interviews about it and all this stuff now um when i i started mentioning uh my interest in psychedelics i hope it happens again right but these people are a lot different than what i was expecting right so i'm in rooms on clubhouse and uh there's people talking like talking about um cats or interdimensional beings and there's a guy he was talking we recorded it that he was from another planet he was very uh he sounded very confident in everything that he said um he spoke well he seemed to be intelligent but he was what he was saying was just like so i i i like well can you substantiate that somehow like what planet how did you get here what does this mean you know what i mean and they all were like defending him you know so it's like it's a whole you know it's a weird world out there you know and i feel like people want to make things very uh sexy they want to mystify things right and i just look at everything for what it is is just is something that you know i don't i don't have all of the answers i can't properly articulate exactly what these drugs do right but i've you know i've read i've done research and then i can assess from my own experience what i'm experiencing and i can tell people that right whether people have these because the experiences that everyone else talks about i haven't experienced any of those things right especially like with psilocybin and things of that nature um i had a buddy say that he was he was on lsd at a concert sitting in the grass he moved the grass was like a blanket right he moved it off of his legs and it was a whole city down there and i'm like that's not a thing yeah i've taken a lot and i've never experienced nothing like that you know what i mean so do you think that um you think people are being hit differently or people are romanticizing it yeah that's a good question i think part of it is that some people like you're obviously a really big guy um i think some people are sometimes called hard heads it takes a lot more for them to achieve a really high intensity experience some people are almost immune to the visual distortions of psychedelics some people are hyper sensitive to them so there is an issue of individual sensitivity which could be based on your psychology it could be based on your body type it could be based on a number of different factors but that is something i have definitely noticed and i at the beginning almost i i didn't appreciate how much inter-user variability there is you know i have a friend that was prescribed ssris for many years he took a antidepressant called paxil and he truly requires um like three times the dose that a normal person would take in order to achieve a psychedelic effect and even then he barely has any visual distortions he still really likes psychedelics and has uh beneficial experiences but it sounds like to me his experiences tend to be much less reliable and he actually has gotten himself into trouble because he he knows this about himself he knows that he's extremely insensitive to psychedelic so he'll take these incredibly large doses that wouldn't make sense to anyone else and then on one occasion he took such a large dose that he crossed whatever threshold and he ended up you know so afraid that he called the police on himself and um and you know had to be taken away in an ambulance after consuming something like ounces of dried mushrooms so yeah so i mean it's three you might just be a person who is psychologically skeptical and grounded and also physic physically larger than average and those two things could work together to make you a little bit more resistant it also depends on the drug something like dmt is very visual and it's pretty common for people that consume very high doses of dmt to achieve dramatic open eye visual distortions that that are you know of of the type that when people think of a psychedelic they think of extreme generative visual distortions typically it's not like that it's if anything it's like a more subtle enhancement or a subtle alteration but smoke dmt is definitely one that um i think its reputation is somewhat deserved in terms of causing vivid open eye visual distortions and in some instance hallucinations but yeah it just depends like i my father used uh ayahuasca and he's you know he's an older man he's very responsible very grounded in his identity and i can tell that even though he wasn't having a bad experience he was fighting it a little bit he wasn't giving himself away to it he wasn't completely relaxed he kind of wanted to keep one foot on the ground and for that reason i think he was also um less able to achieve kind of visionary effects from the substance so that's i think there's a lot of different factors at play when it comes to people saying that they're from another planet i mean that's that's like you know that's like another thing kind of that's yeah that are yeah i you i i'm gonna send you these clips i never put them on youtube i didn't want to make the guy look bad but when you it in it's three ten 10-minute clips right yeah i wasted 30 minutes of my day but i was just so fascinated that like other people were like yeah i think that's me too i think i experienced that too and i'm like you don't like you you don't it's like why you guys say y'all are normal people like what's happening so i don't know like when it comes to like you know let's say um all right let's say people's mind state when let's say a psychedelic kicks in right and let's think about the power of like suggestive psychology right and that would be a therapist or shaman or whatever you're kind of guiding that person into a certain type of expectation and then when in my assessment psychedelics would it seems like it enhances wherever i'm at when it kicks in right so if you're guiding someone into some a very specific uh uh place and you know you're kind of telling them this is what you're going to experience i think maybe they start really experiencing that is that a thing is does is suggestive psychology and what one expects wouldn't do you think that has a lot to do with their uh experience oh definitely it definitely does yeah and i think that's a lot of what shamanism is historically is helping people reinterpret their psychological and bodily sensations and to try to orient them in a more constructive healing direction so you know in our culture if you're sick and you want to vomit that's that you're sick and you want to vomit that's the end of it there's no more to it you are sick and you want to vomit but i think in a lot of these cultures instead they would say okay there's uh there's something inside of you that you need to purge that there's a poison maybe a psychological poison maybe a trauma maybe a bad memory maybe a curse maybe something and in vomiting you are going to clear that from your body cleanse yourself heal yourself and so you can psychologically redirect a negative sensation and reinterpret it as a healing sensation that will ultimately feel more positive and beneficial for the user and there's a lot of similar examples of that you can take something negative and you can reinterpret it in a positive direction so that people derive more benefit from the experience and i'm fine with that honestly you know i'm see i'm a bottom line type of person like the route doesn't matter as long as you get to the destination and you know i grew up you know i went to catholic school in brooklyn i actually wanted to like be a preacher when i grew up right until i got to college and i took world religion i'm like wait a minute wait a minute right so i really understood things but even growing up like a lot of things just didn't sit right with me right but then i got in it i got to a point where i hated religion but then i got to a point where i accept it i get it you know and where i'm at now is like it doesn't matter you know what anybody believes because you're gonna die one day and that's it lights out and if something's to happen it happens who knows like why stress out now about something we don't know about right so but when it comes to like you know because a lot of people i i notice in the psychedelic world um they have very specific meanings for things and the way you got to do this and do that and i don't really subscribe to any of that right um half the time i'm just a fly on the wall just just seeing what the vibe is is never like your vibe you know what i mean a very uh practical approach it's never that it's always like it's so wow i'll be in these rooms and they they sound like normal people they start talking about this mystical magical ancestral [ __ ] and it's like it's not really okay you know what i mean so but um but i never encounter now once in a blue i i stumbled upon a room or two with um some actual like neural scientists and things of that that nature but it's very rare that i run into that it's always the uh you know what you expect and that's not i don't think that's the best thing because it kind of like feeds into the stereotype that this is what happens when you take these drugs you think you're from another planet yada yada yeah yeah i agree and it's complicated for me because while i of course don't believe those things there is part of me that finds it interesting you know i don't want to spend all my time talking to people like that but i i'm not i'm kind of glad they exist because i think that's just another way the people are and there's people that have really outlandish beliefs and i do appreciate that and on my show i try to show everything you know there's scientists but then i also talk to a lot of people who are have you know outlandish spiritual beliefs or they're part of indigenous groups that have spiritual traditions that are not aligned with a scientific materialist understanding of the world and sometimes people will criticize me and they'll say like how could you possibly show that guy who smokes the empty and believes in pizzagate how can you possibly show this woman who thinks that drilling a hole in your head is going to have some kind of benefit let's talk about it let's talk about that let's talk about that listen listen you have no idea how many times i've watched that episode right i thoroughly enjoyed that episode i appreciate that episode every friend i have you come to my house you're watching this right that's the go-to now it used to be the dmt episode but until before the third season came out but now is that you gotta sit home sit down watch this i've been i turned a lot of people onto you bro but anyway does that work the boring the the whole into the i would be very surprised if it did i don't want to say with certainty because it's it but then again you know there are there are things that people do that don't make sense pharmacologically medically materialistically but they have a psychological impact and i almost feel like as body modification like in the same way that i don't know maybe getting a tattoo could change you in some way or inspire you or remind you of something that you find symbolically important to yourself um drilling a hole in your head as and just to be clear to anyone that doesn't know about this i'll just give like a very brief this is a process called treponation and it's arguably one of the oldest known surgical procedures so for thousands of years people who didn't have an understanding of medicine if someone has a headache what do you think is going on there's demons in your head you've got bad spirits in your head that's something you've got to get them out how do you get them out you cut a hole in your skull so that the demon can escape or the spirits can escape or this curse can escape or whatever so you see this in many different cultures for thousands of years and then in the 1960s it kind of re-emerged as a idea that you could expand your consciousness and enter a state of permanent basically stonedness by drilling a hole in your head and there were a number of proponents for this in the uk in the 60s most notably this guy bart hughes and amanda fielding and it is not medically verified they don't recommend people do this i don't recommend people do this but they feel that it's had a beneficial effect amanda fielding does and i think maybe maybe it's just the idea of it could be beneficial the idea that you're so dedicated to expanding your own consciousness that you drilled a hole in your head that it becomes a symbolic gesture to show that you care so much that you would do this thing to yourself permanently so that's a you know human psychology is very complicated there's a lot of things that don't make sense that still have an effect of one kind or another for non-uh trivial psychological reasons and if you're the if you're that dedicated to expanding consciousness to drill a hole you're probably doing other things in your life to expand consciousness as well you're probably reading a lot you're probably around other people on that vibe you know just like when um when my son was first born you know i was big on the baby einstein books and dvds and playing the classical music and i was like does this really work or is it the fact that we're trying to do everything we can to make this kid smart you know what i'm saying and other parents are doing the same thing because i i couldn't see when i really thought about it it just didn't make sense that music would make one more intelligent as as a child but maybe who knows but um who knows but let's talk about um some of the mechanisms in particular well before comparison that's a good comparison though yeah i think because there's a lot of these symbolic gestures in our lives and you know would playing classical music make a child more intelligent i i haven't looked it to see if it's been rigorously studied but assuming that it has no documented effect it still has an effect on you symbolically because it's a symbol that you tried that you tried to do something because you cared and it's to your child it's the same thing it's a symbolic gesture at the very least that you tried that you cared that you wanted to introduce something enriching developmentally for them right so all right so let's talk about the how let's say lsd in particular i myself i've only uh experimented with lsd and psilocybin okay and um lsd i found a lot more profound than the psilocybin all right so one night i had a i had a phone call it was a late call i think it was they were in another country so it was a weird time like 9 or 10 and um i was on lsd and uh you know i'm sitting in the dark in my room and i'm having this conversation with my eyes closed and as i'm talking i'm not really thinking about what i'm saying but it's flowing perfectly and it was as if i can visualize like synapses firing and neurons firing in my brain and in my head i understood why how i formulated thoughts right i felt like the lsd was giving me that clarity for that moment you know um why and whenever i take it i do feel a heightened sense of brain activity you know i feel like i'm sharper i you know even like in boxing training i've done it a couple times and i felt like i was in the matrix like i'm cheating you know like you guys are in slow motion so is there is there something to that does it does it enhance the mind um i see there's some some talks about neurogenesis potentially with that or psilocybin what's there like is that a real thing yeah it seems that the neurogenesis is probably a real thing there's a bigger question of whether or not neurogenesis is actually beneficial because there have been other compounds that aren't psychedelic that are that induce neurogenesis specifically one called nsi 189 that showed uh no efficacy in clinical trials and never made it to the market for that reason despite having this potent neurogenesis inducing effect apparently um but you know there's a lot of different things that they do to consciousness they change connectivity of brain regions they enhance connectivity between different regions of the brain they seem to cause increased activity in some regions decreased activity in other regions so there is an alteration of thought that's taking place that can be determined in a number of different ways you know from ekg to different types of neuroimaging so that that is happening but there is also you know an experienced awareness of consciousness that i think is very beneficial you know it's sometimes people call this metacognition you're thinking about thinking and there is i think a gradation of consciousness sometimes you know if you take an antipsychotic drug like seroquel it feels like someone is pulling the power plug on your consciousness it feels like whatever consciousness is you have less of it and in some instances so much less of it that you lose consciousness completely you're unconscious if you take a psychedelic you feel that there is more consciousness whatever that means there's a sense of increased awareness and it alters thoughts i remember the first time i ever took lsd i started to think of all of my communication like a computer and this binary code of ones and zeros but the ones and zeroes were positive and negative ideas and i felt like everyone was just exchanging like positive unit positive unit positive unit negative unit negative unit positive unit everywhere i looked and you know is that the case probably not exactly but it was a deconstruction of thought patterns that was beneficial to me at that time for thinking about the way communication impacts other people and the way our positivity or negativity alters the environment around us so yeah i do think that they at the very least if they don't increase or enhance consciousness they create an awareness of consciousness or an awareness of cognition and thought processes that can be very useful for self-reflection right what is consciousness that's the question i mean i i wonder you know it's it's this is something that there isn't a good answer to and i sometimes wonder you know if it exists because there are a lot of things that seem like they exist that don't exist like like a good example is you know like historically people know that life exists right life of course exists but if you ask a cell biologist to point out where life is in a cell they can't show you where life is because life isn't one thing and if you read a book about the origin of life on earth or there's like an emerging discipline sometimes called astrobiology where repeat where astronomers will study the possibility of life on other planets well the first question you have to ask and the first thing you have to define is what is life but what you'll find in all these books is that they don't have a mutually agreed upon definition of life because it's not one thing it's an emergent property that is a product of many different things that even as components are difficult to define right metabolism reproduction uh organization of information isolation from the external environment all right so let me let me run a notion past you you're a scientist this is your field this is your world right i i'm a fake ass scientist right i don't know i i didn't study this stuff in school but i study a lot like now right and i actually loved i was a good student but i had no dire specific direction and i didn't know what i wanted to do with my life so i just dropped out of college but i loved school right and i love learning even to this day and i spent a lot of time studying things that have nothing to do with my career or you know direct life because it's fascinating but i have this notion right um i read this book called sapiens uh last year and it was so good have you are you familiar with it am familiar with it i actually haven't read it but i've heard it's very good yeah i would recommend it so it's basically a history of evolutionary biology right and this is what i gather from it you know you know at that that time when human beings uh split from the rest of our of the wild because we're animals i tell people this all the time we're just animals but we're weird you know we're weird because of fire you know what i'm saying like we got lucky and figured out how to you know harness fire and deal with it and put it to our food to unlock these nutrients to make our brains grow bigger and think different and you know there's a lot of different other there's a lot of other factors like us not being strong as chimps we couldn't hang out in the trees and we had to figure it out on the savannas you know what i'm saying and be cunning and to not get killed because we were as humans even as there were other human species we were the more inferior physically inferior uh species but we're here you know and i find it like say i put on the music like my dog like my dog i feel like i understand life through my dog sometimes the longer you know the older he gets and i've had him since he was a puppy seven now right so i play music he doesn't even react he doesn't get annoyed he doesn't like it is nothing and i'm like that is so [ __ ] fascinating to me you know what i'm saying like how there's nothing there why is it so important to us whether we like it or not if we don't like it is as important as if we like you know what i'm saying it takes up that kind of uh resources in our brains what is so weird about us to where you know we we these these expensive things that mean nothing right is important to us you know tv you know what i mean uh jewelry nice clothes like none of this stuff has anything to do with survival you know but it's so damn important to us and it's very interesting how what's different about our brains i know we have more neurons right than other than the rest of the animal world yes yeah yeah the the brain is i mean i suppose elephants have larger brains and i think dolphins are about the same there's also you know the cerebral cortex is considered the most important region for cognition and we have a lot more surface area in our cerebral cortex you know the surface of the brain of a human is very coiled and has these gyrian sulci that allow a lot more to be condensed onto the surface whereas if you look at some other species it's much smoother there's less surface area on the cortex so that's like one neuroanatomical reason that our brains are a little bit different we also have you know relatively less brain dedicated to things like olfaction like if you look at you know the brain of a rodent their olfactory bulb is something like 10 or 20 of the entire mass of the brain for us it's like five or maybe even less than that so actually it's probably less than that so um you know we have just different neuroanatomical priorities less emphasis on smell more emphasis on cortical processing but um but i mean i think it's really weird as well because i like it makes sense to me why intelligence is evolutionarily adaptive and why it would be better to be smart than be stupid but it's pretty clear if you look at our planet that you can do just fine without intelligence it's not required at all to survive and why we are so different from even our closest ancestors is mind-boggling i mean this is one reason when people are so confident about the existence of extraterrestrial intelligence i think like what why are you so confident about that because because think about it on our planet which as far as we know is we're the weirdest ones we're the only ones we're so uncomfortable yeah yeah they'll only have so much life such a tremendous abundance of life you are the first person to say this before i said it but that's i always say like yo why do you think they think that they're smarter like why like they would be if they're out there why wouldn't they be insects or rodents or some kind of primitive life because that's all we're the only one i feel like it's possible that we're the the origins of quote-unquote intelligent life you know and if we are to expand into other star systems which i i can't see how but if it happens if life ends up other places because of us i think you know what i mean or we're just in a computer or just a simulation which we kind of are like you know i i sit and ponder about some of these things sometimes and and i'll listen to like i'll listen to these astrophysicists as long as i can understand it and i'm like and i just started going off onto my own thought and i'm like first of all nothing it doesn't matter if we are or not in a simulation right because we we're in it i have a hard time thinking that um the simulated would figure out there in the simulation like i wouldn't design anything like that right they'd never figure it out but um i guess it just don't matter because just like when you're dreaming that [ __ ] is real when you're dreaming you know what i mean and life right now is real so it is what it is you know like we got this right here and that's it yeah it's really interesting the way different people respond to the concept of life being a simulation because for many people i think they find this idea extremely depressing they think oh if life were a simulation then there would be no point i for whatever reason don't feel that way i think if likewise simulation yeah i agree so what and if anything cool then all the more reason to live experimentally and playfully all the more reason to explore the possibilities of this simulation because if nothing's real then why not enjoy it even more do you ever do you i agree i understand that totally but do you ever think about um i don't even know what the word is but the the vastness of of of nothing like once once we're dead and that's it do you ever think about that like that's it i do i mean i think that's i think again it's you know for some people it's a very disturbing idea for other people it's a very motivating idea and i try to think about it in a motivating way like yes i am going to die and after i die i believe that the only thing close to an afterlife that i can possibly experience would be the decomposition of my body and my amino acids feeding other life which is actually like one i once had a psychedelic experience and i came out of it thinking the only real tragedy in death would be if i don't have my corpse fed to dogs because i really like dogs and so what better thing to do than nourish a dog with my corpse that would at least i would re-enter the circle of life constructively with my flesh as opposed to just eyeing and rotting in some hermetically sealed box in the earth where i can't be reintroduced to the life cycle but i'm with you on that but i want to i want to i want to stop you real quick on the dog thing all right so i love dogs too my dog his name is pretty boy floyd he's a good boy he's a good boy and he's a fat boy so i'm looking at him one day uh a friend of mine amir he and he and i were talking and we're trying to figure out we're on like mushrooms or something we're trying to we're we're that night we were like destined to figure out society's problem we were going to fix it that night you know we came close but anyway i started thinking about my dog right we was at a dog beach um a couple days before that and i'm like damn we were talking about like issues of race and all the things that we're dealing with in this country right we think we're so [ __ ] smart right all of this [ __ ] intelligence here it is this dog right he's not loyal to his species he's loyal to the people that provide for him that show him love that give him food and shelter and cuddles you know what i'm saying we can walk past other dogs he doesn't run off and like no i'm gonna be with my people you know but here it is we're so smart right we hate other people for silly things you know what i mean when here is a dog doesn't even he doesn't even care about species you know he's like i'm with whoever gives me love and i thought i was like that was very interesting and we're so but we're so smart right you learn a lot you learn a lot from dogs it's absolutely true and you know our our awareness of our own mortality which is maybe the sort of quintessentially human aspect of cognition it seems to be the one thing that most people will agree that is not present in other animals uh is a source of tremendous existential despair for some people but i also think it can serve as a motivator you recognize that your time on earth is finite so don't fritter it away insulting strangers on youtube and twitter and try to create something good that will make the world a better place after you're gone because you only have one chance to live i love that concept i i agree with a name a million percent but speaking of death and afterlife it makes me think about the um ancient egyptians right and um i'm working on a actual thing right now docuseries and it's about it's called erased e-r-a-c-e-d you probably get it so it's about initially it was about stories that seemed to not show up in school books right in history especially like black history uh because my son i got the idea he bought his he dropped his uh history book on my desk one day and was like this is stupid i'm like why you say that they try to teach that we started at slavery you know i said come on son you already know what that's about but it made me really think like yo let's tell some stories that are not told right anyway so we did haiti about the haitian revolution i just filmed the episode in atlanta but we're going to egypt right so as i'm researching egypt and the fact that i'm you know i'm not researching drugs or anything like that i'm researching certain things about egypt and i guess the fact that i'm uh now psychedelics are on my radar i'm seeing things like what is this what is that what is this and then i started seeing like oh they were you know i'm seeing it look like a weed plant over their heads a lot of them on on the hieroglyphs but it was like some kind of uh blue flower blue lotus flower or something and it would and apparently it was a psychedelic and they would always put it over the head but they would use it in different situations like sex like all kind of things but i noticed it was placed over the head a lot to i guess to show an enhancement of thinking and things that nature they had a lot of uh um mushroom depicted in a lot of the hieroglyphs as well which i never even noticed before you know i'm like how did i not see that but it wasn't it just wasn't on my radar but anyway it made me start thinking like okay what they did was incredible hasn't been done again all right i think about mesoamerica um the incans the mayans like when the spaniards came over they were like yo what the [ __ ] is this like we they've never seen such beauty with the the the development and architecture of the cities right ancient quote-unquote primitive people right um you know and i think about like even modern day like let's say steve jobs you know as well documented that he he's taken many journeys on lsd right since college so it seemed like to me that the people that really advance society or civilization seem to have been enhanced by you know some kind of psychedelic dating back to like i don't know egyptian times do you know anything about that i certainly know that many people have speculated about it and that there are a lot of hypotheses balancing around and yeah blue lotus seems to contain um some beta-carboline alkaloids i think hormone and harmaline are possibly present which do have a kind of psychedelic type effect um and i've heard many people talk about the possibility of mushroom use of one kind or another when it comes to ancient use of psychedelics i am kind of i try to just be as careful as possible because i get so many emails from people saying i figured it out i figured out that the soma described in the bible was actually psilocybin containing mushrooms i figured it out soma described in the rig veda is actually uh cannabis or salvia or whatever i i figured it out i know that the pykeon of the eleusinian mysteries is this or that and you can kind of go on and on whereas you think about like we barely even know how pcp was introduced to los angeles in the 60s and 70s in the united states like there's a lot of 20th century drug history that is not understood so when people are talking about what happened thousands of years ago i'm always very careful and and i try to you know be open-minded but also recognize that with that tremendous passage of time and it's very hard to say anything with certainty but what i do know is that virtually every culture that has had access to these sorts of things has used them right these are tools that people recognize the value of i don't think maybe our culture is one of the only ones that has you know gone so far out of the way to try to prohibit the use but historically the regions that have had these things have prized them because they're extremely useful i mean when you think about all the things that we have iphones the internet podcasts movies endless streaming entertainment music everything and the psychedelic experience is still one of the most amazing things a human being can be a part of then think about what that would have been like thousands of years ago i mean it's not hard to imagine that that would be the big of a religion nah i get it listen um i'm not religious at all by any means but i found i felt like on one of my journeys that i've i found a religion that i i i'm okay with and it was love like i i i felt like i sat deep in the saddle of like my truth i felt like it's all about truth and love right loving all of the characteristics of love and attributes of love compassion honesty you know all of the things the tenets of love and i'm like that's it that's i'm holding on to that and that's it you know and because nothing else matters and nothing else is strong as love and i look at like the events of uh of our history and everything seems to work out um it doesn't look like it sometimes that it's gonna work out but even like if you look at the history of this country um from the 1700s to now i mean things are a lot better for a lot of people you know still a lot of work to do still a lot of work to do but i feel like even if people the people that we look at is bad they want to be good they want to do everybody wants to be a better person that's everyone's desire right everybody want no one wants to harm people to advance but they do it because it's easy or whatever whatever reason they do it but they don't want to i don't think that's the vibe just like blacks not like getting out of the condition of slavery it wasn't because we just wanted to not be slaves anymore there had to be people that had slaves they needed to be like i don't know about this you know what i'm saying it had you know i feel like love and the tenets of love always perseveres it may take a long time but it always end up being the last man standing or women stan whatever standing you know what i'm saying so yeah it's interesting and i and i found that maybe if i never experienced with uh psychedelics i would have got it in meditation at some time right but i felt i felt like psychedelics brought me right to that you know what i mean in a in a rapid way because meditation is really hard for me right that's why i do it and um i feel like i get that i don't know i like to call it like the center of the universe when i'm tapped in it you know i get it maybe 30 seconds 45 seconds of an if i'm really trying hard right but psychedelics like it'll take me there for hours you know and i'll just be alone deep in thought and i'm just enjoying myself and thinking you know what i mean and in in a good space and i feel like i don't know maybe like you working out all your life you've maxed it out but it's nothing like now you take some supplements and some steroids or something and you're able to really do it faster or get there in a more profound way right more than something you can do naturally so that's what i kind of looked at the meditation was it was like you got to do this for me at least my route you know and when people ask me like that when they haven't done it i'm like yo start meditating first because it you can you can be very uncomfortable on psychedelics if you're not ready for it you know and um that one time i took like way too much by accident i i happen to be ready for it because i i do so much work on myself already uh with meditation and meditating is very stressful you know what i'm saying it's hard to do like i have a busy life so for me to sit still for five minutes is hard you know what i'm saying but not just sit still but also try to block out my thoughts extremely hard that's why i do it i try to get better at it you know but um and i respect the psychedelics because they're powerful to keep meditating i don't just feel like i got it all figured out you know because i do see the potential um uh negatives you know that that extreme level of discomfort or one feeling like their brains broke you know what i mean because i felt like i've so once i shut up my boy my voice he's in here he uh he loves wheat so years ago he was meeting up in vegas rendezvous for his birthday and i went and got him a um a pop brownie and like i ounced it like some kush this is when kush was the [ __ ] before everything was legal now everything's [ __ ] kush you know that so i'm looking at this brownie i'm like i don't even smoke we keep mine i'm like let me try one of those give me one of those and the dude was a [ __ ] he didn't even warm me like oh here gave me a whole brownie i ate it it's delicious i feel nothing 10 minutes late i feel nothing so by the time i leave bro i felt everything it was the most uncomfortable [ __ ] i have experienced in my life you know what i mean i was so paranoid i'm driving like literally like this like i feel like i'm gonna die i feel like i felt vulnerable you know what i'm saying and i felt like i was gonna get pulled over get a dwi my life's gonna be ruined and i'm gonna get i'm gonna get in a car accident like all of these thoughts um i call my girl and i'm literally bawling crying like boo hoo like not just tears but like like a child crying you know what i'm saying because i started thinking that yo because my father told me before his college he said look some of them kids they they do drugs for the first time and they're stuck their brain never escapes that so i thought like yo i'm in hell like this is hell i can't i'm going to feel this forever i started thinking that while i was high so i threw that [ __ ] out the window got home i don't even know how i got home and just curled up in a ball and just went to sleep excuse me that was very uncomfortable for me um learned my lesson weed is not for me it just don't work well with me you know um but the psychedelics it works with me but i do see how it can be uncomfortable you know when i took that deep dive i seen how it can be because i'm like your father i try to control it you know matter of fact i was seeing like a distortion like the camera was on the floor and it was melting and i said to myself i'm not going to say anything because they're gonna take him crazy but it was so real that it was happening i couldn't help but say it but i was like look y'all i'm very conscious i know what's going on i took too much lsd today i know this isn't happening but the [ __ ] camera's melting it's melting into the floor you know i'm saying so and then i'm trying to type uh text and then the letters are just like moving away from me i couldn't do it you know what i'm saying so i i kept fighting it though and then uh my assistant she drove me home and i just sat back in the car and some said knock it off just just submit and then i submit it and i did and that then i went you know and i i enjoyed it you know and i felt like a lot of work was done on me do you ever feel like you're getting work done i mean you you are very pragmatic with this you have a different approach and you're a scientist you understand the pharmacology of these compounds which none of us do does it work on you do you get work done oh absolutely yeah yeah i mean and you know i was in central west africa in around christmas 2019 in these uh there's a religion there boiti that worships a plant called iboga and for me that was not only did i feel like work was being done i felt like that was you know the most work that has ever been done on the period it was like this tremendous uncoiling of all of these different delusions that i had i was thinking about all of my relationships and the way that i distort things to make things psychologically easier for myself how the people that i think that i dislike i don't actually dislike them i'm just pretending that i dislike them because it i think it's easier to think that i dislike them but i the real problem is that i actually like them but because something went wrong i assume that i don't like them because it's harder for me to recognize that something went wrong than it is to just pretend that i just like you know all this kind of all these layers of weird delusions that people have like you know a lot of times you think you don't like someone or you don't like something but what you really feel is that you're afraid that person rejected you or something like that and you say oh i hate that thing so there's all these layers of delusion that get integrated into our psychology that confuse us and and i think causes us a lot of unnecessary pain and again the way you can have this sort of psychological uncoiling of all of the weird ways you think about people in your relationships it can be tremendously beneficial that and even just the the sense of gratitude for being alive because you know life is difficult and it's really easy to get caught up in the responsibilities and stresses of quotidian existence the emails you have to write the texts that you have to respond to whatever all of your little responsibilities that you forget what a gift it is to be alive and something that can cause you to stop for a moment and realize how insanely lucky you are to be alive and have this very short period to enjoy this experience of life and consciousness it's one of the greatest gifts a person can get so it definitely works on me i get it i get it we were in haiti in december right and um i didn't have any expectations i didn't know what to expect but um we were all throughout the city you know we seen seen it for what it is but then um for the next the last three nights of the trip we had an island we had access to a private island so we get there by boat at night so you can't see anything but the stars right so um one of the night we had a good time but one of the nights um you know we had a big dinner and everything that we ate was what we caught you know which was cool so we had a big dinner and um everybody did mushrooms like and i'm with a group of young professionals like you know what i'm saying it wasn't like just the homies it was a dope group of of young entrepreneurs people that's really advanced society some of my friends in fintech you know it was like just a dope squad right and everybody nobody talked about business or money and none of that [ __ ] because that dominates the conversation it seems like about you know in my normal life but it was just it was just a uh i felt like i don't know whatever spiritual is it felt spiritual because we were all just like enjoying each other's company having a genuine good time and then everybody was like one of the night at least one of the nights everybody was on on the same level like we all had mushrooms at night i had lsdn mushrooms but i might have been a little bit more but you know i i laid i lay down on the beach and i'm looking up at the um up at the stars and i'm like this is [ __ ] crazy like i felt so special in a way but also so insecure because i'm like yo we are we're spinning through space right now there's nothing holding us in together right a cosmic event is is the slightest adjustment and we're done it's a wrap you know the slightest thing can happen right now and it's arrived but luckily we live such short lives it probably won't happen in our lifetime you know but cosmically that's not a long time whenever these events happen these catastrophic events or extinction level events right but i felt special because i was here and i'm here and i'm able to we're in a time to where you know we are the lucky ones we're the human beings that can like talk about this [ __ ] you know what i'm saying and recognize that yo life is good or whatever you know what i'm saying and these are my buddies and all of this stuff you know and i started thinking like [ __ ] oh it's like we're in an accident that happened like all of this [ __ ] is an accident right i mean from what i gather from the big bang and everything proceeding after that seemed like everything is an accident it just happened to cosmically fit together and the right all the ingredients are everywhere but the right recipe just happened to be right here for this to happen you know what i'm saying how [ __ ] lucky but are we lucky you know what i'm saying like i don't know like i don't know i mean it's funny yeah because i think a lot of people have this idea that if it was an accident that would make it less meaningful i have the opposite perspective i think that that's where the meeting is is that this is so unlikely that this just could have happened this way could have happened a million other ways we see it on all these different planets oh the ocean is ammonia the atmosphere is methane right no life is going to exist there it could have been that way it could have been it could have been dinosaurs it could have been a million different ways but this way this is the way that happened and it turns out to be extremely interesting and we're very very lucky that is what is lucky exactly that it had to be this way i feel like that diminishes the luckiness of it to say that oh something made it this way i don't think so i think we just got extremely extremely lucky the the made it this way thing is just it's it's not a thing like who wouldn't do that like you know what i mean like i had a conversation unfortunately sometimes i have these conversations i never try to engage with people with this kind of stuff but they they want to keep going and i had a friend of mine you know she has a special needs daughter and beautiful little girl and she kept pressing me about i need to go to church and i'm like look listen i said i gotta be honest with you i don't want the god that would have your beautiful little girl come you know come into this world as a specialty child you know what i'm saying i want the perfect god give me that guy you know what i mean i don't want the god that fights with the devil like i don't even understand why he has to fight like just wipe them out you know what i'm saying it's very silly things but i'm just like i feel like that's the logic it's silly you know what i'm saying but i don't i never go there with people because i respect people's beliefs and beliefs unfortunately are a lot stronger than facts and truth you know but i don't ever want to make someone feel like you know i've been believing this for 30 years you mean to tell me like not i'm not saying anything you know what i'm saying i'm not going to be the guy to say try to overbear somebody with this common sense or whatever to make their belief system seem like a fallacy i'm not gonna be that guy but sometimes i'm putting the corner to where i have to like defend myself like this is why i don't want to do that because of this you know what i'm saying so yeah yeah i think a lot of the the function that religion serves in other cultures just isn't really present for a lot of people in our culture it depends on where but i think about my own experience that my family's jewish i was bar mitzvahed i had to learn hebrew it wasn't spiritual it wasn't enlightening there was no philosophically valuable information in my torah portion no part of it made me feel like i was really part of anything other than like a somewhat tedious tradition and the same was true with my on my mother's side it's christian same thing when i go to mass i think is this spiritually moving i like i understand the community aspect of it but is this actually spiritual for anyone here it wasn't clear to me but then sometimes i'll go to other cultures like uh in haiti or in west africa or in parts of mexico and i think like okay this is serving a different a genuinely spiritual purpose here and i think a lot of it has to do with the sacramental use of of psychedelics right because people really are having transcendent experiences and it's bringing communities together and in a lot of these areas where they don't have access to uh you know western medicine this is how they've decided is best to diagnose and treat both psychological and physical diseases so um yeah i think it kind of depends on where you are what culture you're in and also it's you know for people that don't have a lot of resources it can be tremendously uplifting to have this sense of like a higher power that cares for you like there is something in that that is valuable for some people which is why i also don't try to diminish it for the people that find value in it but i think it's it's our culture for a lot of people it doesn't quite make sense and if it were to be revitalized it would have to be something closer to what exists in a lot of these other regions where you have like a psychedelic experience that brings the community together and is a point of celebration and connection you know i'm i'm not a scholar by any means in religion um but i did dive deep in because i i was so interested in it um when i was younger and it do seem like these religions all right so you have like thank you sir appreciate you you're a gentleman and a scholar it does seem like um the religions of the west are more uh obedience authority authoritative you know let's say judaism christianity and islam and everything else is more you know transformative you know more philosophies not just this is the rule and you know we live in fear right and um look i grew up fearing everything like i i believed everything to be literal like the bible was literal i used to be as a kid i had anxiety like yo it's impossible to go to heaven you don't say i had to pray nonstop i prayed at all times you know what i mean lord please forgive me for my sins but please forgive me for my sins you know what i'm saying so it was like it's like why why this is so hard like why is it like this you know but you know it is a safety blanket for a lot of people and i get that unfortunately the way it is taught is not okay you know what i mean and initially from what i've studied it wasn't like that before you know that's not these religions were not taught the way that they taught now you know and um and furthermore when you know a leader is giving his sermon you know it's just his breakdowns his interpretation and nobody i was at a church not long ago just went with some friends and it was a really nice church out here in uh uh it was in newport beach and like like a concert it was like dope it was fly i'm like oh this is cool so i'm just ready to see what the guy had to say you know i can get some wisdom out of this take some notes and what he was saying was just it was like it's not cool right and i'm looking at the people around me like i'm not saying i'm like y'all it's soaking this up like y'all are too smart for this these are smart educated people who have good careers you know but i guess it's something maybe i'm the we're the weird ones like you know what i'm saying like and i always felt like i ruined things with my imagination with thought as i was a kid you know what i'm saying like nothing was ever that great to me because i would think too much about it before it even happened or before i experienced it so i don't know maybe we think too much about this [ __ ] i wish that i had that certain people have this this certain joy that i don't have you know what i'm saying this this this this free this freedom this free joy you know i never get that i can sit through the funniest stand up and i get it but it's not funny you know what i'm saying but sometime it is the funny thing is like with me and my friends silly [ __ ] you know what i'm saying but but i get a lot of things but it just don't move me like a lot of people and i wish i had that and i think maybe in that is where people the types of people that are more prone to be just feel that full whatever you feel from religion maybe they have that access to that joy that somebody like me may not have right and then also you know there's so much predatory religion or what people would call religion but it has no religious value whatsoever televangelists that are enriching themselves off of lies to milk their followers to you know serve whatever purpose to buy private jets and you have you know people that are preaching ideas that are hateful and destructive there's a lot out there that's called religion and i suppose technically is religion but it's not really a benefit it's like a form of control and manipulation doesn't promote love and understanding and ultimately disempowers people and takes from them so it's it's hard because so many different cultures and even within our own culture there's such diversity of what we would call religion and religious experience no i get it man even in like say social media right like it's a whole new thing now right and it's a thing where millions and millions of dollars are being made right so i see it all the time like i look at myself or whomever whatever influencer as that's the little microcosm of the world or or the country and they're the president you know and the reality of it is people are sometimes very easily guided and they don't people i ask a lot of questions i always have and i think that's the best thing to do so i can thoroughly understand but a lot of people don't they just take what you say and that's okay because i feel like you know when you're just being a trustworthy trusting loving person you believe what people tell you because you wouldn't say a lie to someone you would like i know me personally i would never stand up in front of all of my people and just lie to them you know what i'm saying so when somebody else does it you know it's easier to get bamboozled because you're not expecting that right right but it's unfortunate that these people take advantage of that i see it all the time i see it all the time you know especially in not just my industry in the industry when you have you know this you know uh this access to so many people they manipulate it and use it in very nefarious ways and it's so disheartening but that's human nature though it's human nature and it's easy to convince yourself like i'm sure you have had experiences i've certainly had experiences where someone comes up to you and say i'm selling a supplement i'm selling a product and you know i'll give you this much money if you endorse this or that thing and you know maybe part of you thinks uh maybe it's not the best but maybe it's not bad and depending on who you are and how desperate you are and what you you're getting out of it it's very easy to convince yourself and why not it's not hurting anyone maybe it's okay maybe it's actually good and i think that's what happens to a lot of these people is they think you know this televangelist they like obviously what they're doing is predatory and unethical but probably they are thinking well i'm providing all these people with a message that they they wouldn't be giving me money if they didn't feel that what i'm doing is beneficial so ultimately i'm just giving them what they want what they're paying for so how am i a bad person and there's a thing to that there's a thing to that so um my great grandmother she used to uh follow some guy back in the day that turned out to be a scam a fraud right so he got out ousted whatever but then he he made his comeback you know i'm sorry whatever and then she kept giving donating money and my father was like yo why are you doing that you know that he's dead and he said she just stopped and like just shut up i i like what i get from this guy you know what i'm saying and whatever that is it works for her so it's like excuse me we we look at everything from our perspective you know what i'm saying uh access to information and things and people and a lot of people don't have [ __ ] you know what i'm saying and and imagine an old person who everybody's dead already like i kind of experience it with my father now because my father's in his 70s he's outlived all of his homies all of his friends right so it's just me and him now and it's a lot on me right but i i see how like lonely that can be and he's he's married he has his wife but he needs that outlet right so imagine someone who don't even have a spouse a significant or a son or some kid they can lean on so i get it you know what i mean i get it like it's it's because i look at i look down on a lot of these people like how could you you're not about that but if it is making somebody feel good there's people that i have a i hate this there's people i see that their business is teaching people how to run a successful business yet the only business they've ever had is teaching people how to run a business is wild to me but a friend of mine is making good money from a course that she took from one of those people so what can i say you know what i'm saying whatever it's all everything works it's all good it's true just like i was saying earlier about um how the like say clubhouse or whatever the psychedelic uh rooms that i i find myself in is nothing like you is more like you know the different dimensional whatever and but who cares they're getting to where they want to go you know what i'm saying everybody have their route so you know why am i even why am i judging that you know what i mean but i just can't not ask questions you know it's important because if you're not skeptical you can get yourself into trouble and this actually has happened with psychedelics you know in the when i first started getting really into this there was a guy named daniel pixback do you know about this guy i heard you mention him yeah he wrote a book called breaking open the head that was like a very popular book when it came out and he was kind of the first person to to really have some mainstream success saying you know these shamanic traditions are like the best way to use psychedelics and i'll cut you off real quick i didn't hear you talk about him i was thinking of someone else i'm sorry go for it i don't know anything about this guy okay well i mean it's not that i'm not recommending his work or saying that it's bad he was just historically someone that played a role in popularizing the idea that if you want to have an authentic psychedelic experience you need to go to south america and you need to have a shamanic ayahuasca ceremony and it caught on like wildfire because now everybody talks about the psychedelic experience in a medical context they say oh it's a treatment for ptsd it's a treatment for anxiety it's a treatment for neurodegenerative disease it's a treatment for that it's a treatment for that but at that time this is before the medicalization had really taken hold so everyone's talking about it through a shamanic framework because that was the the popular justification that people had for psychedelic experiences so everyone that wanted to have a valid authentic psychedelic experience felt that they had to go to some south american country and use ayahuasca and because all these people were you know like white people from the us who didn't know anything about these cultures they didn't want to be offensive they didn't want to scrutinize another person's culture because they're the outsiders so they would go to these ceremonies and a lot of them got taken advantage of because they totally abandoned any kind of critical interpretation of what was occurring so the shaman would say oh you know part of the healing is i have to have sex with you but they'd think oh well i'm you know i'm from the united states what do i know i can't go to this guy's culture and not have sex with him this is uh that's a good learning experience god i mean it's not yeah it's horrible it's [ __ ] i'm sorry to that but that's kind of funny it's kind of funny to me it's it's you know i i've talked to people and i who've been through things like this and part of me thinks how could you possibly have fallen for this but then that's what happened this is what happens when people don't take their own intuition seriously and yeah and you know there were other instances where people were robbed there was a teenager named kyle nolan who was killed and you know and it wasn't until all these bad things started to make it into the media that suddenly people started to say oh wait wait a second you know i actually went to one of these ceremonies with that guy that killed someone he told me he was a martian but i didn't know that that was i was too afraid of being offensive so i didn't want to question it and i just said oh yeah yes you are a martian of course so you know that's that's what happened and uh and that's why that was so dangerous yeah i see it man like you know i legalization of everything like letting everything be be out there and some proper education on everything um would be the best case scenario because you know you can't the war on drugs drugs win they won you can't stop it right like you're not going to stop people from finding things to give them an escape or knock the edge off you're not going to do it sorry it's not happening no drugs drugs one so they need to you know i wish the process was expedited because what you're talking about is so real and people are so easily guided you know i can i can tell somebody yeah you need to take 12 grams of psilocybin and you know saying come with me and give me a bank card you know anything right and people do it because they're so impressionable and they want these experiences and people are so they're very charismatic with you know even when i'm explaining my experience to people they're in awe like because you know it sounds like wow i need i want to experience something like that you want that you know so so it's like you you start creating a scenario for yourself and making it pleasurable and pleasant and like you're becoming open to it but i could be making these things up you know what i'm saying and i've you know i'm listening to people a lot of times i feel like they're making things up you know and people love talking especially in certain formats other people are just giving them a little praise and i'll like go and look at these people's instagram and there'll be no followers not many followers and it matters first for certain things so and i say okay this is why he's getting a little life over here so he can't stop you know he's feeling good and um they're just they're creating as we speak they're creating this whole new persona that somebody might uh subscribe to and just do whatever they say i feel like if it was just legal if it was normalized you know it would be a lot safer you know um we can weed out you know where was it somewhere i think in europe they have places where you can test like uh drugs that you get to make sure it's pure like mdma or whatever and it'll give you a readout you know within minutes or something like that are you familiar with that you heard that yeah yeah there's a lot of testing organizations in europe like dance safe that provide those services and um it's tremendously valuable because a lot of the harms that people associate with drugs are just harms associated with ignorance but not knowing what you're taking if you don't know the dose or identity of the drug that you're taking you're setting yourself up to have a bad experience and that's the way most people go into a drug experience that's true and i mean my guy that i've gotten stuff from before i trust him but why why do i trust him how did i initially get that trust i didn't test this stuff you know what i'm saying it could have been anything but but yeah it's real i feel like um it seems like we're moving towards legalization of everything but i don't know are we what do you think i certainly i mean it's happening slowly with psychedelics you know you have decriminalization in somerville massachusetts in cambridge massachusetts and in oregon you have statewide decriminalization of psychedelics and uh a provision for medical use i think there's somewhere oakland as well in california it's decriminalized all over california is decriminalized and that's that's something i mean it's it's not enough but it's a step in the right direction and what we really need is just you know i think what the part that everyone can play in this is just having these sorts of conversations and trying to talk to people that you disagree with and listen to what they think and try to gently inform them because you know the more people that support this the easier it will be to stop all these problems of people being locked in cages of people consuming contaminated drugs that potentially are responsible for their death i mean there's so much harm that we blame on drugs that is actually a product of prohibition and i think once we get rid of all this stupidity then we can actually start to seriously talk about what potential these things have as medicines one thing i really like about your show is that i'm when i'm i'm showing someone this like certain episodes i'm like you never thought like such nice people would be you know the guys creating these compound these drugs right they're like nah you know like like my favorite episode is the ultra lsd episode like the guy in the beginning i didn't i don't know anybody's name the very first guy with the 3d goggles yes him um amanda i love her her name's amanda right yeah i love that lady i love the the story about her her pigeon i got it i get it it makes so much sense you know what i'm saying such a dope story and the other guy like the the first the only guy for i guess for a while he was the only one that was allowed to synthesize lsd it's like these are not which i think are the people creating these drugs these are nice people these are smart people these are ethical people and these people have good intentions for doing it you know what i'm saying i love that you show that and you're not even trying you're just exposing it for what it is but it's really nice people behind this stuff you know what i'm saying and people need to see that oh absolutely because i years ago i worked on a national geographic show called drugs inc it's kind of like a garbage typical television show and you know i saw the way typical television about drugs is made and they don't care about showing things in a positive light you know they want it to look bad they they think that's unbiased journalism is you have to make it look kind of bad so they'll take some nice guy who's delivering weed in new york city lives in brooklyn just paying the bills like whatever it's not a bad thing but then they're like he's a kingpin dealer selling selling five thousand dollars [Laughter] but see here's the thing are people getting smart enough to see it for what it is though like i was showing somebody something about cops right like cops was just it was a marketing campaign to make black men look like criminals right i'm like look these guys are running he's what he got some weed in his pocket or he's a shoplifter like is that a real crime is that like does that warrant being on tv you know what i'm saying when people really do you think that i i want to say that people like people's consciousness is rising collectively but i don't know after this last election cycle i've seen so much silly stuff on social media i don't know i feel like people really regress fast you know what i'm saying when i feel like all right people are getting smart people are they're seeing things for what they are and then i'll just see bam a tank however i find myself in hostile territory all the time because i'm not an echo chamber guy i'm like hey so what why do you think that so i start i start dialogue and when i give real rational normal breakdowns of certain things they're usually like ah yeah yeah that's real okay you know what i mean when people let go of their feelings about certain things that they don't even know why they're so stuck on you know but i wish that people didn't need that like i wish that people just got it on their own and you know collectively people were just starting to wake up you know i wish that that was happening i like to think that that's happening but i'm not i'm not super optimistic about it but i'm not pessimistic about it either yeah i mean i think that culturally you know this is such an amazing time to be alive in terms of the internet is the greatest educational tool that has ever been devised and there's so much potential for people to educate themselves like for the first time in history you truly can get like a world-class education just sitting in your apartment for free if you want to the only limitation is your own drive for knowledge and it's when people get lazy in one direction or another and they decide oh this is the way vaccinations are this is the way politics are and it's like no put in the work like put in the works this is an amazing amazing time to read you can download 10 000 textbooks you can read 5 000 textbooks on vaccines if you want you can become an expert on vaccines and you have access to the best information if you wanted it it's just your responsibility to have that curiosity so i think you know people just need to embrace the responsibility of learning i agree with you but but we still are looking at it from our lens right and the reality of a lot of most people is they don't even have time to think about that [ __ ] you know what i'm saying so they need somebody to feed it to them because they're working overtime they got to travel to work the commute sucks to get back weather whatever dealing with the bad ass kids you know what i'm saying like oh man i don't get no time for me i got a good life and i feel like i don't get time for me you know what i'm saying so i i can see how um look i'm over here like my problems is trying to figure out when i can take keyboard lessons you know what i'm saying so it's like um you know it's people that's you know that's not reality for most people to educate themselves to that extent so they they just feed it someone feed it to them and they're just receptive to it which is it you know to me or you it may be like how could you just believe that but people are just kind of wired like that they're hardwired like that you know i mean he's more uh sheep than shepherds right right well then i guess then you're right of course that is a limitation and i guess the next best thing is if you can't invest in learning about these things then you have to become comfortable with the limitations of your own knowledge and not be certain about things that you don't know about right that's okay as well yeah you don't need to pretend to be an expert on something you don't know about you know like take climate change for example like i am not an expert on climate science but i see that there is a scientific consensus that climate change is real would i i would be lying if i told you that i have gone through thousands of studies on climate change and that i can stay with perfect certainty that everything that you hear is true because most people just don't have the time like you said to go that deep into it or if you have the time you can only do it on a certain number of things you know for me maybe it's psychedelics for someone else maybe it's nutrition or something else right but then then you have to become comfortable with your own uncertainty and not claim to be knowledgeable about things you don't know about because that's another big problem is you have people that don't know anything about anything that are spouting certain information it's so weird it's so weird that's so weird yeah but listen it's a lot easier to not know because there's a lot that i do not know and i'm very honest about it and i get to have conversations with gentlemen like yourself and i learn a lot you know um i have many a science uh friends in the scientific community you know um high level academia and i'm not there you know what i mean but we have good talks because i'm i'm honest about it and i want to learn you know and i'm fascinated and also you know i do my little research on my own and i offer sometimes a different perspective that maybe they're not thinking about you know so but um it's all fascinating life is fascinating it's all fascinating it all matters and it don't matter you know i'm saying it's all good and it's not whatever whatever whatever on anything um i uh some of your episode is playing right here in the background but some of the episodes of pharmacopoeia i'd be trying to like gauge to see if some of these uh shamans or whatever are legit like if they care about you you know what i'm saying like is this [ __ ] real or are you just trying to get get over you know what i'm saying i've actually tried to assess that and it seemed like um i i don't know you know just my own imagination of you know what it is but um it's very interesting you the show is so is is though um i'm kind of sad that it's over i was sad that i'm kind of glad that i found it so late because i got to like binge watch you know what i mean um but i'm i'm sad that it's over you know yeah it's over but i'm still making things you know and a lot of people have been writing to me saying like don't stop i'm not going to stop i'm going to be you know doing chemistry work full-time i'm going to be doing the same stuff that i've always done but i have a podcast you know at patreon.comoris i have i'll continue writing i'll continue creating stuff and i'll be able to focus more on science and then you know i'll still do stuff in the future as well this is just what i'm going to do for a little while because i have a lot of opportunities right now to focus on science and it just makes sense for me right no doubt listen um all right i'm gonna cut it because we got so much to do and i don't want to take too much of your time you you're very kind for giving me your time today and i know you're just being nice you probably want to have left like an hour ago i don't want to know your job yeah no it's good i could do this all day but um i listen i'm a a fan i'm an admirer of you're a man of great intellect you know your [ __ ] and i like that and you can tell people get a real sense that you really give a [ __ ] that you really care you know and that's what i think that's what the your magnetic attraction is that that you're a good dude you're powerful in the sense that you know so much in your field and um man it's like like i'm as fascinated by intellectuals as i am watching like mike tyson's greatest hits you know what i'm saying like it's that fascinating to me like i love that [ __ ] so um yeah full support however i can help with anything i'm all there for it well thank you for that i really appreciate it and it was a pleasure talking to you likewise likewise all right sir and that's it we'll talk to you next [Music] time

Channel: Mike Rashid

Views: 131,632

Rating: 4.979176 out of 5

Keywords: Mike Rashid, mike Rashid king, mike Rashid boxing, workouts, Hamilton Morris, Joe Rogan, Psilocybin, Magic mushrooms, LSD, Chemistry, Legalization

Id: tXsbn2xBUpo

Length: 115min 30sec (6930 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 18 2021