Brian Normand - Microdosing, Amazonia, Psymposia and Horizons Afterparty

Welcome back to Psychedelics Today. I'm your host, Joe. Today on the show, Kyle and I talk to Brian Norman-Viveros from Symposia, and we get to chat about an upcoming event in Brooklyn, a little neighborhood in Brooklyn, that is part of the Horizons Conference. So not really part, actually, but it is during the weekend of the Horizons Conference in New York. And Kyle and I are going to be there. We're definitely going to join the event. We bought our tickets a few days ago and are really excited. So we actually have a discount code for you. Code is Psychedelics Today. I think you save $5 over at symposia.com if you want to buy your tickets now. I would imagine this event is going to sell out. So if you are planning to go to Horizons, definitely scoop up this as well. Well, Duncan Trussell is going to be there emceeing. Discussion around microdosing with Paul Austin, Sophie Korb, and Catherine McLean. Paul Austin runs the Third Wave. Sophie helps James Fadiman with his research around microdosing. And Catherine McLean does a lot of psychedelic kind of integration work right now in New York City and used to be part of the John Hopkins research team, I think, doing psilocybin research. So I believe she was a research coordinator. Don't quote me on that. Sorry, Catherine. I can't wait to see you in a few weeks at Horizons. So it's going to be a really fun event. There are a lot of things left on the table to discuss around microdosing. So that's what we're going to do. We're going to talk about it. Science is still young there. So plenty left to actually learn, but plenty to debate and in a hilarious way, because Duncan Trussell is a hilarious person. And yeah, I'm just ready to laugh my brains out. So if you hear this before September 30, we are doing a donation. For every sale of our course, all the proceeds go to Hurricane Relief through Shelter Box USA. So from now till September 30, all proceeds of our sales for our course, Navigating Psychedelics, which you've heard about us, heard us talk about quite a bit on the show, kind of a 101/102 of psychedelics. You are going to learn a lot from that class. People love it. But yeah, you can learn about all this stuff and donate to Hurricane Irma, Hurricane Relief. And we're going to talk a little bit more about it in a couple of minutes. People love it. But yeah, you can learn about all this stuff and donate to Hurricane Irma. And yeah, you can learn about all this stuff and donate to Hurricane Relief. And yeah, you can learn about all this stuff and donate to Hurricane Irma, Hurricane Relief. Hurricane Irma Relief in Florida, right away, at the same time. So something to consider. And another thing to check out, we have a new shop, psychedelicstodayshop.com. We've got some shirts, stickers, mugs. There's going to be some more stuff up there soon. I actually bought a mug and love it. It's got the Spaceman logo or Spore print logo on a black background. It's very colorful, very cool. So check that out. Anything you can do to support us would be lovely. Even if it's just an iTunes video. It's just an iTunes review. Anyway, this discussion with Brian Norman-Viveros is awesome. We go all over the map talking about even Brian's trip to the Amazon with Chris Kilhelm, the medicine hunter, and policy. What does policy look like for drugs once we are past prohibition and are prescribing? Like what does the off-label use look like for psychedelics? How available is it? Do you have to go to special clinics? All that kind of stuff. And it's awesome. Really appreciate Brian spending time with us and can't wait to see you. I can't wait to see him in New York City for the microdosing event. Symposia.com for your tickets. Again, coupon code psychedelics today if you want to save five bucks. All right. Talk soon. Thanks for listening. Bye. All right. Welcome back to psychedelics today with Kyle and Joe. We are here at Brian Norman from Symposia. Brian joined us a while ago. If you want to learn more about his work with Symposia and how he got involved and started it up, you can go check it out in our archived episodes. But today, Brian is here to talk about this new Symposia event, the microdosing event at the after party for Horizons Perspectives on Psychedelics. So welcome to the show, Brian. It's great to have you back as always. Hey, guys. How's it going? Fantastic. I think it was actually a year ago. I was just looking at my emails. We're almost a year since I think I was on last. Oh, wow. Anniversary. I could be wrong. I could be totally wrong. I don't know. I did see a year ago. September of last year. That's fantastic. So a lot has happened since then. You have since had a big event kind of in tandem with maps in Oakland, had a whole stage for multiple days in a row, just producing talks. And that was phenomenal. I think there was a cross country tour that happened, the blue dot tour. So Symposia has been all over the US. I think Mike right now is in Europe. Yeah, he's in Budapest right now. That's fantastic. And the ITC conference is starting next week. Yeah. Yeah, that's awesome. So you guys have a real global presence, like actually people on the ground going all over. It's awesome. It's great to see you. But yeah, man. So let's get down to the nitty gritty. There's this awesome event. You guys have this kind of tradition now of hosting after party, after events for Horizons, this kind of regularly post Labor Day conference in New York City. Duncan Trussell is hosting. And it's on micro dosing. So what can you tell us about the event? Yeah, it's our fourth already, our fourth year having the after party there. And every year it's gotten bigger. It's gotten a little more complex. And we're trying to make every year better than the year before. So yeah, last year was really great. Every year has been different. We've had a different venue every year. This year we're having it at the Muse in Bushwick. And if anyone went to the. To the party two years ago, it is literally the right on the side of it. I just went there a couple of weeks ago. I was like, what? Same place. But yeah. For those not in the know, that's a neighborhood in Brooklyn. Yeah, sorry. Yeah, no worries. From Colorado, I'm like, Bushwick, it sounds like a cool place, but. Yeah, it's like a place. It's the place in Brooklyn where people would be, you know, kind of in the know on psychedelics, sort of. Yeah, we're expecting a totally packed house. Ticket sales have been fantastic so far. So it has. It has Duncan. Duncan's going to host it. And we have Hamilton Morris and Catherine McLean and Paul Austin from the Third Wave and Sophia Korb, who works with Jim Fadiman on his microdosing work. So this year we're changing it up. The format, last year we did stories. We've done stories a lot and we're always trying to tweak our model, tweak our programming. So this year we are putting these five people in a circle surrounded by the audience. Kind of like a tough crowd or politically incorrect, something like that. And they're just going to have a really free-flowing conversation about everything that's going on about microdosing. We just want to explore the whole thing. What's the benefits? What are the risks? People on different sides of the aisle with it right now. And that's the whole point of, you know, why we want to do this. Yeah. Where did the idea come from to host a microdosing event? We've been talking about it a little while. And obviously, you know, you guys have been in this a little while and it's only been the last couple of years. Microdosing has just gone crazy. You know, there's that crazy thread that was going on and online that you guys know. And there's been other ones too. And there's been really good debate about it. And there's a lot of unanswered questions about it. And there's a lot of research that needs to be done before people can come to these conclusions. You know, everybody wants to say they got the answer. Everybody's afraid to say they don't know. And, you know, we just want to put everybody together and talk about it. This might be one of the first times that's happened. Just, you know, loose conversation in a public setting with multiple people on stage at the same time. It's not just like Fadiman talking about it, you know, or Paul talking about it. It's like a bunch of people having a debate publicly. That's what we need to do. That's what we want to do. So we want our programs to be like, you know, it's not scripted. There may be like a very loose, a very loose, okay, we want to hit this, we want to hit this, but it's totally unscripted. It's going to go where it goes. I have no idea. And that's, you know, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. It's actually really fun. I don't know. It's like, okay, it's going now. Who knows what's going to happen? I hope everything goes well. Yeah, I'm excited to see how it plays out. And I feel like if anything, Duncan will be there for the comic relief to kind of have a little buffer. Totally. That's why I think he's going to be a perfect person to do this. And the idea of this kind of format, I went to one of his live podcasts with Hamilton. I think that might have been, you know, January, February, March, sometime around there. And it was great. He's been doing live podcasts at the Bell House. And they were really cool. So I went to that one. And in this case, it's two people on a stage. And they had a great conversation. It's not scripted, just goes in whatever direction. So when I was watching it, I was thinking this would be a really cool event. But let's take them off the stage. Let's put them in the crowd. And let's get a couple more people. You know, there's so many issues in the scene that I think need more questions being asked, you know, rather than answers. It's really true. Yeah, there's like an ungodly amount of research that needs to happen before we can actually say things and feel okay about saying them. Yeah, these kind of more informal things are ways to get those opinions aired or concerns aired or whatever, you know, or just come up with totally new stuff just because you have so many minds together. I'm sure there's going to be great stuff happening from the audience. I hope so. Yeah, you know, I think we'll open it up. I want to keep it raw. I want to keep it real, you know, it needs to be. So I think it's gonna be cool so our audience might not know about hamilton can you tell us a little bit about hamilton yeah he's currently doing uh hamilton's uh pharmacopoeia on viceland and we've worked with him actually only only once before in our first conference he came out uh when we did it in amherst i remember that that was on like dissociatives or derivatives of pcp right he was giving a talk yeah he did a talk on pcp at our first psychedelic conference oh my goodness with jason wallach so he was all over oakland too like he was the only guy i think that had a camera on him all the time at the oakland psychedelic science conference yeah i'm sure he's kind of a celebrity in this whole scene right i think we he was was he on our stage there he might have been i think he helped out at least a couple times on stage like maybe not the main speaker yeah i don't know we've done so many things my i forget now there's an incredible amount of people as part of that programming so totally makes sense yeah that was great i think we learned a lot from doing that as well and we tried to contrast them with whatever the event because a lot of time we our events are kind of 50 50 a lot of times they'll be standalone that might just you know a two three hour event at night at its own venue but a lot of times we attach them to a conference that's already going on so that's what we did it's kind of what we did it was really a conference within a conference there though and they were totally great to work with we got to pretty much do our we had like free range to do what we wanted you know we mixed it up we did a couple live podcasts we did a couple conversation panels we did a little bit of stories and we did some talks just you know standard talks yeah but it was great and that portion was open to the public too so anybody could you could walk in from the street and go there and say it which i think was phenomenal that you guys were able to pull that off i i think i've said it publicly before but i spent more time talking about it and i think it's a great way to do that at your stage than at any of the other talks like i i think i only made it to two i heard that a lot i only made it to one and i saw paul stamets give his it was awesome i haven't seen him before but for the stage like lex busted his ass on that he did an incredible amount of work in booking everybody for that i kind of just made sure it looked nice which is what i do we were out at ikea like the night before buying a nice uh stage set last week last minute preps totally last minute nothing like it yeah so let's jump back to this event i'm kind of curious how did you put this panel together and why katherine hamilton paul and sofia and maybe first you know people that are listening i don't know everybody i know katherine paul have been both been on the show but sofia hasn't so why these people was it just random or these people reached out it was kind of a little bit of everything it just kind of came together it really just came together neil had that post and we were all i was just observing it i was watching it i saw the little dots of people other a friend is typing a message i was just watching that unfold and if you take the bullshit out of it there was some there's underlying points there that we've all been thinking of and i think a lot of people who are in this they've kind of been thinking of microdosing maybe in the same way whatever opinions that they have and there was some really like i said it was aside from some of the bullshit there was some really good points that were made on both sides and we thought that this is such a big topic right now and why not harness what's going on here add a couple more people put them in a room together see what happens people who don't even really know about psychedelics too much have like i have heard about microdosing yeah it's amazing like the few people that reached out to me about it and they're just like i'm so interested i'm like i had no idea you would be even be interested in psychedelics like it is it is kind of crazy how much it's spreading and how interested people are and i think maybe it's because they've kind of taken the psychedelic experience out of microdosing and it's kind of maybe viewed as this uh i don't know i guess sometimes the way i see it people are like oh well i can take this like substance at a very sub-threshold dose not feel anything but kind of feel really good in my mind it's almost kind of like taking an antidepressant that's the way it's being kind of marketed yeah and at that same podcast that dunk did with hamilton he said the same thing hamilton said the same thing which is like who would have thought that psychedelics making it this mainstream would be in a way that they're not psychedelic yeah i think it's appealing to some folks that aren't interested in going into the the psyche that way but i think so i mean my personal opinion on the whole thing is if it works for you great that's awesome i think we're seeing a little bit of my dose is better than yours my drug's better than your drug and that shit just they're false choices you know the name of the game to me is is healing or creativity or whatever is like improving the nervous systems of people and if that is if that's what works for you that's awesome i don't care if like you know what i mean yeah like so it's like we have science right we can actually say certain things about psychedelics from not what we're doing right now with science but what we did 50 years ago with psychedelics and we don't have that data yet with microdosing so we can't really say too much we can say some like i think fateman at oakland was pretty much like yeah we have some data and all that it really says is like it's kind of helpful for anxiety it could have been depression or anxiety i forget which one but it wasn't like it's not necessarily like a miracle i don't think psychedelics are miracles at all i think they require a lot of work psychedelics don't make someone like nice afterwards or you know like i don't think psychedelics are miracles at all like not at all charlie manson happened yeah and i think that attitude is dangerous i talk about this with my roommate all the time it's like we have a the person who works at a health food store over here who like we dubbed the aggressive like terence mckenna guy which is like you know aggressive it's like the vegan you know aggressive enlightenment guy yeah i'll make you better it's annoying a lot of people when they get involved they think that oh you know these people don't carry around the baggage of what other people do and that is that's not true at all and you know that it's a tricky conversation right like so microdosing makes you a better capitalist theoretically and you know psychedelics the narrative is that it makes you a better christian or something so i'm like i don't really like i feel like there's more to it than that i don't really buy into that whole narrative of like you know you know capitalism or christianity there's it's a broad spectrum and it's kind of like it's a broad spectrum and i don't know that we have that kind of nuance in the conversation yet i don't think we have a lot of and i mean it depends who you're talking to and you know generally that's what we are trying to do is to deepen the conversations that we're having we don't want to cause fights but we should be able to talk about these things if you disagree with this we should be able to talk about that that's been like my life we go after the person instead of the ideas so often so often people have and every all of us we have a problem separating the idea that the person has from the person themselves and that is a problem that's such a problem it's a problem in politics it's a problem everywhere and we should be able to debate the ideas in a mature intellectual way and that's what we want to do with this it should be lively it should be fun but i think that's what we want to do you know and that's what we want to do with all our platforms and that's what we're going towards however we get there you know we'll see yeah i think it's a really important conversation to have and it's interesting being say in this world and you know a lot of the projection that might happen as you're saying and you know i mean that even happens in therapy the therapy world it's like all this stuff's happening but we're constantly talking about self-development and inner work but it happens but i was just talking with somebody earlier today about sustainability of psychedelics and how like over harvesting iboga or ayahuasca is an issue and it seems like a lot of these people are just like you know they're just like you know these things are coming up and it's almost like this shadow work that is like kind of emerging and things that we need to talk about you know over harvesting things is not great and could be kind of detrimental to the environment or those communities so what are some of the risks and things that are coming up with microdosing as well that we need to talk about and i think this is a really great event to kind of maybe showcase that and and talk about it and yeah hopefully have some fun yeah hopefully this event has the spirit of robert anton wilson like there underneath like just permeating everything you know just question everything you don't have to take a like a side on it question it be open be open-minded about it you guys know there's concerns right now in microdosing and i think those concerns are not being heard i don't study microdosing i'm not a scholar whatsoever on microdosing i've heard the concerns and i think that they should be discussed that's important concerns being like capital gain or people are into the productivity or i think that's a yeah that's a huge one as far as like physiological the whole like cardiac risk that certain people have raised i think dave nichols has raised that and several other people have raised that concern right now and everyone's kind of saying that you know yeah no or no or you know the answer is we don't know and that should be explored but what you said about kind of like the capitalistic angle yeah i think that's a huge one i think that's a huge i think that's a the psychedelic world often comes off as you know everybody's anti-capitalist but i have some issues with that because you know you're really not but they and then they react super hard when someone tries to be a capitalist come on like you have to make a living somehow you have to pay for obamacare it's not free i think it's just kind of the fringe honestly i don't know i think if you dug deeper with those people that wouldn't hold they're talking to you on their macbook or everything in your life is a byproduct pretty much right of universe and if you're going to do it how do you do in a way that's this balance and i yeah i want extreme capitalism is horrifying is absolutely horrifying at another extreme it works well and there's a balance there's a balance there people that work in this field yeah like you said there's some people who are out there who if you even talk money and psychedelics you're this money hungry capitalist like this gross capitalist what about the guy selling you a bag of mushrooms i mean you gotta make it work and i don't know making acid is not cheap making a dmt is kind of cheap but it still costs money and it requires a global infrastructure and yeah there's a lot going on there i think that the organizations who are really well balanced between capitalism and socialism what we're seeing now we're seeing like you know we're seeing this emerging social model that we're going to go into we're in it we're going to go into it even more and i think those businesses in those organizations who try to perfect that hybrid model will win they're going to have the competitive advantage companies who pursue public benefit corporation are going to have the competitive advantage because as someone who's following them or buying their items or whatever you're going to like them they're going to be cool because they're not about just making money capitalism does not have to be about just making money at all right yeah you can make money and do really cool things with it like give it back to your community in different ways and absolutely you know support the community i think you know that's kind of what it comes back to yeah so you'll have the you'll have the guy who just you know sells some bullshit snake oil microdosing thing and builds up a bunch of wealth for himself and you have someone else like that builds a place for the community that other people can go and heal or whatever it's like how are you going to reinvest this you know what are you going to do yeah it's tricky i remember there was like a mayan fire ceremony that was happening vermont a few years ago and they wanted to fly a mayan elder up to facilitate it and they said you know it's 75 dollars for the ceremony like and somebody on the thread just blew up they're like this is bullshit like traditional ceremony you never pay for it like i can't believe you're even charging 75 dollars and the person that put it together was like well like to have this happen we want to have like a traditional elder we need to pay for their plane ticket we need to pay for food and lodging and like traditionally you know the community would come together and provide everything that was needed and support one another they didn't need to pay for it because they were cooking the meals they weren't traveling very far they were all kind of right there working together yeah that person shouldn't go yeah exactly exactly they shouldn't go you know and i've heard accusations about other groups that are doing events that they're charging for we're charging event if you go if you find the promo code it is 30 bucks and if you don't it's 35 and we had preferred seating that runs from 50 to 250 we do a lot of work you know we gotta pay the bills and i'm totally comfortable charging for that because if anyone saw the amount of work that goes into that and the cost that we're putting up front for this they would shut up and on top of that we have a lot of free events because we are also sensitive to not everybody has money not everybody has a ton of money for this so we've put on a lot of free events so it's a balance there you know some of them are going to cost money and some of them we're going to do for free because we're aware of that awesome i don't know this may be off topic but you're talking about preferred seating is how's the venue set up is it like kind of rows or people standing sitting so the venue is like a circus acrobat school now that's a warehouse you a pretty long it's a big space i think they can actually fit a thousand if people are standing we're not doing standing the way that we're doing it is it's going to kind of be in the middle wait and we get to think about it a little bit more but basically people are going to be seated around that circle and there'll be other places or kind of people to sit in there and there's an outdoor space as well so it should be awesome that's cool and there's kind of an after party if i'm not mistaken like to two in the morning or something yeah after the doors are going to open at eight and from about eight until ten we'll hang and i believe it's going to be and i get to update this but i believe it's going to be 10 about 10 to 11 10 to 11 30 will be that main event that we've been talking about and after that we have the venue until two so people can just hang out meet one another you know all that fun stuff it's not a rave we don't do rave this is not a rave we don't do rave at all it's very important to note no rave equipment but yeah this is the type of place where you go meet the others and hang out and network and people are always asking like oh how do i get involved in this stuff somebody just asked me the other day i'm like you know just go to a conference network go to the after parties like and build relationships and this is a great way to do it yeah and horizons is the best for that you know horizons is kind of non-stop from friday to sunday and it's a great spot that's where we met yeah that's where i met brad and yeah we met a lot of people there i think we met in is it already 2000 and it was 12 or 13 i think it might have been 2013 or 2012 i forget yeah one of those dates yeah it's been a while so far four years or so yeah we've been doing this now for three and three and a half which seems like 10 yeah but i look forward to doing this event every year this is the bigger one that we do you know hopefully going forward we'll be able to do you know events like this all around and do them more frequently we're still totally growing and it's been just consistent just healthy organic growth so our team we got like 17 people on our team now we just started a column with we haven't released anything yet we're in like the or more in the plan we're further along than just the planning phase but we're doing a column with ssdp students so we've been interviewing and so we're going to be rolling that out soon which is awesome and we're hoping to do something with dance safe i don't know where that stands right now but yeah you know we're looking to work with the other groups and it's been awesome horizons really is one of my favorites i have only been once and it was like 2009 maybe it was a year sasha shulgin was there i think he was blind at the time or something and that was pretty amazing and then that was the first time i think i encountered daniel pinchbeck you know he's obviously a controversial figure in psychedelics but you know he's one of the quote-unquote leaders i guess turned elder because he started apologizing for some of his behavior but yeah that stuff really changed me i got to see dimitri there to meet you janice did he present oh nine dimitri did i don't remember exactly what year it was man but it was around there 2009 2010 it was incredible to watch you know dimitri's energy on stage yeah he's great he's like the one of a kind in this whole thing i didn't realize we might actually get to meet him because this is his home turf huh yeah i gotta actually i can invite him out that would be really cool i gotta do he's on our advisory board oh cool i gotta send a message yeah dimitri's great because he will speak his mind and yeah and it's very refreshing it's extremely refreshing to me to see people like that even if i don't agree with everything but they say i want those voices out there because it's too easy to get caught up in your narrative and your social narrative and that echo chamber it's so to get caught up in that whole thing and so he's awesome because you know he's just got the anarchist spirit definitely one of maybe one of our favorite interviews that we've done and probably one of the only other interviews that we had like a little afterthought where like a whole whole podcast on afterthoughts of digesting what we just heard from him and yeah he's he's great i really enjoy listening to him and talking to him so it's 2008 actually well it's been a while since i've been on the show i've been on the show for a long time were they at judson in 2008 yeah yeah okay yeah you were early to the party that was my last time i think in new york so it's about time i've been back yeah yeah they get it at um the cooper union now which is really cool venue too is it a school or what is it cooper union it's like a hall i don't know exactly what they do there but you know they give a lot of speeches there and a lot of big name people i believe speak there i'm not entirely sure what the whole thing behind cooper union is i know they've been around for a long time and if you look up about them you see like abraham lincoln gave a speech there and they still have the same podium wow it's a really nice venue i really liked it yeah it's very cool there's something that i miss about judson too though that was quite the place yeah judson was great you know big stained glass and then in the church and yeah definitely had a tradition there that's for sure yeah judson also had that really nice intimate feel too yeah definitely so i'm curious brian there's this ongoing debate you've been around psychedelics for a while now i'm hearing it more and more so people are questioning the value of like the suffering that people have to go through in ayahuasca you know like the puking and like the sheer horror which i actually think comes along with psychedelics on like the come up sometimes you know relative to like mushroom sessions so you're seeing like we've been talking to a guy and kind of supporting him a little bit eric osborne who does legal mushroom retreats in jamaica and that's kind of like i think one of the things that helps him out a lot is people are just not really interested in ayahuasca because it's like seems so brutal you know theoretically i don't really feel like it's that brutal but others do and instead let's do mushrooms in a similar context have you ever thought about that kind of like dichotomy the people not wanting to do it because you know diarrhea puking being in a jungle surrounded by mosquitoes i don't know it doesn't seem i don't know it seems like people are really eager to go down there and do that they are for sure i don't know i mean i think it's certainly easier for me to hop on the email list that goes like i don't know what to do i don't know what to do i don't know what to do i don't around baltimore openly promoting their ayahuasca thing and go do that i personally don't ever trust those things and if i was going i haven't drank ayahuasca before but if i was going to i would want to go down to a jungle to do it that's just me you know i don't want to be in some guy's basement that's my thing i don't want to be in some guy's basement or a neon lit ymca facility yeah no i don't want i don't want to do that i want to be surrounded by jungle when i do that for sure i have been down to the amazon i haven't drank ayahuasca in the amazon but i would want to be in that setting you know insects like having some penny at night i would like to experience that my time down there was amazing without psychedelics at all i think i would have to go to the amazon first without doing psychedelics and then like see if i can handle it just because i have this like deep-seated fear of not getting enough sleep if i if i only have four hours of sleep i am like totally mortified you know i guarantee i could go days without sleeping well down there just because of the noise yeah it's beautiful man i went down in 2013 and i think about going back all the time i just haven't done it yet were you in the peruvian amazon or amazon brazil i was in a peruvian amazon we flew into a ketos and then we took a river boat to the north at the mouth of the napo river where it links up and we went up the napo a bit and we stayed at a lodge out in the absolute middle of nowhere for i don't know it was like maybe 10 days there and then we stayed at two other lodges for a night or two that were a little more like accommodating cool but at first place it's you know it's diesel lamps and no cold water bats flying out of the toilet and tarantulas and cockroaches in my pocket and really hot and just wonderful so i'm like that weirdo who's gone down the road and i'm like oh my god i'm down there and hasn't done drugs down there and but i tell people like you don't need to take it alex to like you're in like the most dense biodiverse place in the known universe that should be cool enough you know i think that's cool enough i think it's beautiful enough so yeah i support you and going down go down there first and there's no shortage of places to go once you are down there and there's no shortage of ayahuasca in america either so it's really yeah it's yeah i would want to do it in like i love ethnobotany so i would want to do it in his traditional a space that i could be in like really out there up river yeah super off grid i hear that yeah yeah i want to experience it and if you want to say the most authentic way i don't think everybody that's required of everybody at all whatsoever i know people who've gone in guys garage and they've had an amazing time that's just my opinion i remember i don't have a really good citation other than talking about doing ayahuasca with some people in the colombian mountains so i guess it bulges into colombia a little bit and there's some tribes up there that have a tradition of it and yeah that sounded more interesting to me because i could avoid the mosquitoes you know after leaving the northeast i think i just became a sissy with mosquitoes and anything with bad weather that's valid i mean mosquitoes are the worst thing ever i had to come just before this getting so pissed by sitting outside i was just getting eaten alive when i was down there we were there during the dry season and a lot of the kind of little pools and stagnant water and a ton of the streams just go away so the mosquitoes weren't too bad i didn't really get bit much at all i do know that one person who was on this trip was destroyed yeah destroyed i had like hundreds of bites so so some people are more prone to it that it's like some people have more delicious blood i guess i don't know don't let that discourage you from going down there no i think it's more yeah falling off like your boat or then you know drowning or something like that you know yeah yeah no like i i like adventure stuff so i definitely want to go someday it's just a matter of like putting it all together that was by far the coolest adventure it was like going back my initial impression was like okay i'm going back millions of years into like deep deep history and also going back you know 100 years and change to the rubber boom you know when all westerners go into akitos and and just pillage it and you know because a lot of kitos has the infrastructure still there from the rubber boom so it kind of had both those elements like it looked like a dinosaur could just walk out of the forest but yet there's this 19th century 20 early 20th century architecture there too it's interesting kind of like that clash and once right when you get out of akitos you're you're just in the open and all the rivers are just dotted with small huts and you're just in the middle of nowhere and you can kind of imagine this is what it's like you know in america one after you get into the frontier it's entirely different and so that was really refreshing like just experiencing a totally different universe and you went down there for school right it was like a school trip yeah that was a class though we went down there for it and you know it was just like an amazon immersion type thing you know it was tied into plants there were plant classes learning some traditional plants trying some things and but it was really a good time there wasn't any testing right yeah that's interesting i think chris kilham medicine hunter dude he does yeah that's why i went down with oh really yeah cool so you were at umass amherst then uh pulling it all together finally now it all makes sense yeah absolutely we just actually had his wife zoe on the show two three weeks ago or something it's pretty fun yeah she's doing some interesting and i think kind of important work bringing uh i was just gonna say ladies out to the jungle yeah so i mean my takeaways are that the people who have been working on this for so long for decades right now are seeing the fruits of their labor come to mature right now and i think that the next several years right now are super crucial and i'm really excited about where it's heading within several years that you could have both psilocybin mdma descheduled and available for people that is going to unlock a lot of interesting things i think it's going to unlock tremendous amount of things so everyone's talking how is that going to change medicine how is that going to mental health how is going to change how people think i there's kind of this change in the associations surrounding psychedelics they're not going to be as fringe eventually and you're seeing that whole thing change now so i'm fascinated about where it's going i think it's the most fascinating thing yeah yeah it is interesting hearing some of these like say psychedelic elders or these teachers of ours talk about how like when they were into it they never thought we'd be here you know our breathwork teacher lenny is like i don't know i don't know i don't know i never thought like i would see this happen so quickly and it's just been like accelerating exponentially like didn't think we would be this far say like 10 years ago that's a really exciting time the whole thing is transforming i can see the change and i've only been doing this for three like three and a half years now and i can see it change pretty rapidly with the latest from maps with their whole breakthrough therapy news and all that aside from i guess just this unannounced fall it seems like that's going to happen and psilocybin is like right on its ass right now so i want to know what happens i want to what things are going to look like once that those events occur let's fast forward and it's 2021 right now it's not 2017 and we know that like okay next week this is going to be whatever prescribable where are they going to go how is that going to change what are the issues surrounding the accessibility of it are you going to pay for it i'm like where's it going to be where's it going to start and is there going to be one in every state what are the states what's the policy going to be how can we use what's gone on with marijuana to inform some of our decisions yeah i think we might be looking at a lot of the marijuana laws and like a system on how to really maybe shape some of this you know i would like to start hearing more about people asking questions about the policy yeah because i think that's something that really hasn't been done much right now because it's still kind of that people in a weird gray area yeah i don't hear too much about policy i know that was in california now they get the ballot yeah or going to be on a ballot i have no idea where that's going to go but even if that goes nowhere it's still a sign of things to come after all the work to get it through fda is the state just going to come out now and say yeah we're going to make it legal in our state we're going to decriminalize it in our state after you know so who's the first that's going to do that what does that look like right that brings up an interesting point like fda grants it therapeutic then yeah how do the states take hold of that are you allowed to just set up a center or is maps just going to have to do that it's going to have to go through like their protocol yeah those are some really interesting questions to think about yeah you should get him on here and ask him those things i'm curious can anybody go to a certain doctor and i'm really interested in the whole concept of off labeling too right for sure i'm ignorant of the whole process but from what i have gathered that'll be an option to off label so is that really what you know okay we can have it for ptsd we can have mdma for ptsd but can i have it just for if i'm just like mild depression like you know i'm just blase and and all that can my doctor off label it for that for at-home consumption it'd be interesting no not necessarily for at-home consumption but can you go to the place where people would be where it's administered for ptsd right if i get it off labeled can i still go there if the doctor gave me that prescription because that doctor knows yeah this works for ptsd but this also works maybe to keep your marriage together or if i don't have ptsd because you know everyone no one wants to see it just stay for people with ptsd right that's not enough for sure it's not enough so yeah what's that gonna look like and how's that gonna happen and i don't know if anyone has these answers yeah i wonder if it would kind of look like you know i don't know if it would look like i don't know if it would look like you know ketamines is definitely used off-label so i wonder if it would kind of go along with that and ketamine is i don't know too much about how some of the therapy works i've researched some centers some centers seem to have like counseling afterwards and i think another center i looked up they didn't have any counselors on staff and i'm just wondering like oh you just go there and get an injection and then maybe you just go back to your counselor and do it so yeah the off-label question is really hard to answer i don't know if it would go along with that and i'm just wondering if it would be really interesting can anyone go in for ketamine now they're using it for depression but i think they describe it as an off-label use so i think you could go in and take care of maybe other symptoms where it could be beneficial i don't know joe and i've been talking about getting some folks on to talk about ketamine actually because yeah so there's centers all over there's fda approved centers all over the country you can go get an injection or an infusion i think it might last a while like they i don't know how long it lasts i don't know how long it lasts i don't know an hour 30 minutes or something like a famous person that's used it and successfully is neil brennan he's like the co-writer of chapelle show he talks about it pretty publicly and he doesn't necessarily talk about the experience but he talks about how it just lifts his crippling depression and yeah you don't have to be admitted to a research program you just kind of i think have to just say yes you have depression come on into the clinic when we can schedule you and i think it's more like that that's what i thought it was like i'm not certain though yeah i'd love to know more and we have a few of those people lined up there's a researcher in fort collins who's setting up the maps phase three mdma stuff in fort collins colorado he spent a lot of time working at a ketamine clinic in colorado so we're going to talk to him soon we've talked to the two guys who put together the ketamine papers or at least i've had phone calls with them to try to get them on the show so hopefully we'll get all that stuff squared away because yeah it's kind of unfortunate there is this legal psychedelic therapy out there and we don't know necessarily know much about it as people that should be in the know i guess right yeah so sorry listeners i promise i'm working on it yeah that'd be good to have i just think any conversations that are talking about the policy side of things yeah that's important that's important right now because these things are they're going to happen and i want to start thinking about it because i'm just very curious of what the models are going to look like do you have an opinion on decrim on decrim or like moving towards a recreational status for drugs like do you have a position on that that you've kind of worked out no i mean i think i should be able to use them if i want right okay so the kind of a normal cognitive liberty thing i think the system should be there for people who need those places to be there and i think it's incredibly important service to have it's not one or the other it's never one or the other so i any law that says that i can't go in in my back yard or in the forest and and have some mushrooms i'm not going to support you know i'll be i'll always be pragmatic you know and you take what you can get right but in the back of my mind it's the real answer is that legalization of marijuana is total fucking bullshit if i can't grow plants in my garden yeah it's the word legalization is being destroyed the definition for what is legal is being destroyed right now it's changing it's only like i used to grow weed in massachusetts and the amount that i grew even though it's legal now marijuana is legal in massachusetts i would still be a felon can you grow with their new law that passed no you can have i believe a few listeners should check this out but i believe you can have six plants for one person and i think it's 12 plants totally total no matter how many people live there that's what i thought that's what my guess was because i was with somebody that had some and i was curious about the growing laws there and they're like they told me six as well so i'm guessing that's it probably it yeah i mean why can't you have 30 it's not like that's a ton it sounds like a lot to people who've never done it right but that's not a lot i don't think that that's a crazy amount at all like i'm gonna grow potatoes i'm gonna have 30 potato plants okay wonderful that's great i know i was thinking the same thing you know grew a little garden this summer and it's like oh yeah if i restricted myself to only two tomato plants like wow yeah what if one crop dies you know then i got nothing yeah you should i should be able to grow marijuana i should be able to take that and i should be able to sell that and i shouldn't necessarily have to have permits maybe i think i don't have a position on the regulation of a plant because i don't know how regulations are they are required and the reason why they're required is because there's a lot of idiots out there there's a lot of shady people and there's a lot of people who are going to lie cheat and steal out there and you know i understand the need for regulations i also want to be able to do it and i want to be able to do it just like i was doing it i was selling it to my friends there was a good community there's a good group of people there was absolutely nothing that was wrong with any of it and it's concerning that people are if you don't have the tokens to play the game you don't get it you know and that's real that's real i mean even my father pointed out the the nonsense about when it was legalized like he messaged me of all people he messaged me and he was just like laughing about it like okay i have it but how does it move around yeah i i can't buy it it's illegal to buy it donation based you gotta buy a sticker yeah it's state-sponsored sharing that's what it is you know it's a sharing thing i can share it with someone i really appreciate the permission thanks guys yeah wonderful you know if you sell it that's the criminal act that's not a criminal act the law is which criminal there that's what's criminal i don't know there's that part of me that's i think that the progress is awesome but i also think that it's still bullshit underneath it that i'm a part of me just can't get behind because it's not a criminal act it's a part of me that's a part of me that's a part of me that's just playing a game it's just playing the big game and there's there's a lot of bullshit bureaucracy and and all that regulation that surrounds it and it's unfortunate and i think it keeps a lot of people out and it makes criminals of good people yeah i remember there was initiative in ohio a few years ago to legalize but i think written in they were only going to give control like a few companies to sell and grow marijuana so it was taking like all the small businesses away from the small businesses so it was taking all the small businesses away from the small businesses so it was taking all the small businesses away from the small businesses and it was taking all the small businesses away from the small businesses and it was taking all the small businesses away from the small businesses and it was taking all the small businesses away from the small businesses yeah they totally did i i think that they stayed silent on that one because they didn't want to come out against them a legalization effort and i think that people should come out against that like you're not going to undo that once you put it in place so the company can do it but i can't do it no yeah that doesn't work that way it's kind of crazy i don't know i don't know i don't know i don't joe what are your thoughts about that living in a state where it's regulated and you got a lot of testing for the products well as of right now i prefer to buy from like a couple different vendors right because like i know some of the backstory because i had some involvement like you know inside baseball stuff and you know i know that some people are being gross with pesticides and shit and others aren't and you know molds are not great to smoke same with pesticides are not great to smoke so you got to find the people who have like the highest growth and the highest grade organic stuff and you go for it there hopefully i would prefer to buy it tested i'm a little too sensitive to pot so like if i get too high it's not fun so especially if i'm you know and not in the right scenario too yeah i really prefer having a label on stuff and knowing that at least the state tested for pesticides and banned substances being used and stuff and you know there's once in a while you run into a grower who's like a black market grower and they're you know decent like great person they're making a living they're doing just fine it's hard work and you kind of have to trust them they don't have a regulatory body watching them say okay how much of this you know weird pesticide do you put on your plants and how often and you know whatever else like that that is a question you can't answer unless you really trust the person so that's kind of a really complex thing so this actually raises a sub robert forte i was watching some one of his youtubes last week he had this whole thing about how drugs shouldn't necessarily be legalized and like popularized because he would prefer to buy them on like a like a farmer's market style like farm to table psychedelics he wants his friend in humboldt county making his acid he doesn't want it at a nice pure pharmaceutical facility where you actually have numbers on stuff and i it just blew my mind like that's great but i have one model the problem is trying to find one model for millions of people yeah man you can't that's the problem a farm to table doesn't work for everybody yes it should be all of these yeah absolutely you can have that dude but you can't take it away from everybody else like don't make it inaccessible as a result like there's this balance we have to strike yeah and i like you were saying earlier and it's it's hard math it's definitely not an easy problem to solve but we need to you know continue talking about it i would prefer to see a lot less laws on pot in colorado like i don't like that growers are now in a more illegal state if they have more plants i think they decrease the total number you can grow at home and they're not going to be able to grow home now so that's kind of a bummer to see that happen i don't think that's great overregulation is still here like california is like the capital of regulation if you want to see more laws than anywhere else on the planet it's probably california and massachusetts so like you know just strap in if you're if you're going to those places and trying to get involved in these fields there's going to be a crazy amount of regulation i don't know that's kind of a weird rant for us to go on but i hope there was some value there yeah i think there totally is value there there's multiple conversations that people have to have about this and what's going to happen this is going to happen i'm sure it's already already happening is that the pro people become the regulators the regulators become the prohibition 2.0 agents that's just the trajectory of i think people in general you know you don't have the power you got the power you know you push that onto everybody else i think it's kind of the way that it works right i think that that is just always how it's going to work so yeah how do we avoid how do we avoid those things the rallying cry at first is let's regulate marijuana like alcohol and then you start regulating marijuana like alcohol and you say oh shit we don't want to do this and you gotta go you know yeah you know it's a starting point right like i think a lot of this is just going to be incremental movement like hopefully once in a while there's a revolutionary state or country or something that you know totally blows the other ones out of the water and go oh good look how much safer this one is or how much more tax a new rhode island's getting or whatever right person you know i personally can't wait till you could go to the pot shop or booze store and buy you know mdma from behind the counter why not don't know if that's happening in your lifetime don't know about that one yeah i'm gonna shoot for it yeah i don't know if that store is ever that option if the state prohibits things and it'll business as usual will continue where you just you know your friend grows mushrooms or your friend got mdma for you or something like that yeah i don't know if that's happening in your lifetime or not i don't know but i don't know if that's happening in your lifetime but i don't know if that's happening in your lifetime but i don't know if that's happening in your lifetime or not and i'll just continue obviously regulation laws don't prevent any of that anyways so you will have access to it but you know you could commit a criminal act to do it right so that's one of our big projects over here is like there is this social justice aspect where you know obviously there's a race disparity and drug crime jail time but i just don't want to see anybody going to jail for any of this stuff and that's kind of like part of our conversation regularly like why are you putting another huge amount of money into jail and then you're like okay i'm just going to go to jail and i'm like okay i'm just going to go to jail and i'm just going to go to jail and i'm just going to go to jail and i'm just going to go to jail and i'm just going to lock them in a cage for many years at times like it's insane to me that humans are okay putting other humans in cages for years decades for the rest of their lives sometimes yeah especially for drugs yeah yeah it's not like you killed a family with a handgun you i don't know it's a substance that could be used safely you know and potentially brought a lot of joy to someone's life even if and they do they carry a risk that's also a risk that you are willing to take living in a free society just because you're a human being you're a human being you're a human being you're a human just like cars and smoking cigarettes and me walking out on the street those are risks that you are willing to take they're reasonable you don't ban skiing or snowboarding or jumping out of a plane and going parachuting or flying on a plane or going in a car which is like the most dangerous thing you can do we live with that there are things that we have to just live with in you want to just remove all risk from your environment i don't want to live in that world nobody wants to live in that world i think people like are unconsciously moving in that direction though anything that sounds risky like okay let's make some laws all right yeah let's take everything away yeah that happens as we get older naturally because we want to protect everything that we have and you know we get more scared of dying as you get older and now you have kids and now you have a house and now you have everything you want to protect and you've made it and so now you just naturally become more conservative because you want to preserve those things i think that's standard yeah yeah robert anton wilson again has that quote which is awesome that i have burned into my psyche which is you know it only takes 20 years for a liberal to become a conservative without changing a single life what is this one's rude but i'll say it anyway he had one the real ultimate secret of power is you know how dumb the average person is now imagine that half of them are dumber than that all right and i almost died but you know that's what we're dealing with here we're not necessarily everybody in america is intelligent no unfortunately it's not the case i wish it was you know i think people could perform better than they are even with sub-average intelligence but we have to somehow engage that population and get them you know saying do you want to go to jail for all that cocaine you did last week no okay so let's kind of think about lsd and mushrooms and mdma as well i've had this idea the people who are it's just not as popular i don't know if it's as popular of a thing so a lot of people don't even know about it they don't even know how to say the word they don't know what mdma is they don't know what a psychedelic is they have no idea what lsd is they don't know about any of this and so it's education this is all this whole thing that's why we're doing what we're doing absolutely it's all education and this should start at an early age it should start in teaching kids about plants and gardens and okay what's that spell that that this lemon bomb makes oh that's a terpene okay that's a chemical in a plant and plants make chemicals for all these different reasons some do this and some do that and some do that and some do that and some do that and it's just another thing it's a part of nature that's all this is yeah and it's drugs are this dirty word and if you're a plant person it's another plant compound and it serves a biological and an ecological function and there's taboos in a christian society or whatever society it's not just christians that have these taboos it's a lot of a lot of societies that have these taboos so it's about education and it's about teaching people early on about these so if they're going to learn how to use them responsibly and they don't just have to when they're 21 years old they don't have to just get fucking just crazy drunk and learn for themselves about how to control their drinking you know what i mean there's like there's no education there's no such thing as drug education doesn't even exist it only exists in the families where the parents were cool enough to talk to their kids about it i didn't ever have one conversation about drugs ever i think that's how we that's ultimately done i agree education is definitely important to go back to the people don't know what mdma is it's true i was talking to somebody explaining mdma assisted psychotherapy and you know i just got back from part of the maps training and talking about you know what i learned there and they're like wow that's so fantastic like why is this not a therapy and i'm it's like well because it's illegal they're like what this is bullshit like it shouldn't be illegal and they're like wait a minute oh well it's ecstasy and they're like oh come on kyle like you gotta be kidding me total shift as soon as i said the magic word they're just like nope out the window but before they knew what it was they were so on board that's really weird yeah that's so weird it's probably more common than we understand too yeah i think it's the prevailing attitude or lack thereof i think that's standard maybe we should just start changing the names for to everything i was just saying this the other day that even if i was completely against drugs and i didn't think that anyone should use them at all any of the drugs that we consider drugs right even if i thought that no one should be using i still wouldn't go go towards it because that's not a good public policy even if i think drugs are this horrendous moral failure of people for purely policy-based a public policy it's still terrible i don't get it at all i really just don't get it I think that most people that you talk to if you know how to talk to them and disarm them, I think you can get them to come around to your side. Have you read Chasing the Scream? No, I haven't. It is pretty amazing. It's about the origins of the drug war in the States, kind of starting early with pot and alcohol. It chases this guy, Anslinger. It just tells all his background and does a play-by-play of his history and then mixes it in with, I don't really want to call it post-prohibition states, but kind of reformed countries like Switzerland, Portugal, like this is what heroin treatment looks like over there versus what does it look like in the States or in the UK. And it's pretty incredible. It talks a lot about stigma and shame kind of perpetuating addiction. So the fact that it's shameful to do heroin makes you shoot more heroin. If it was less shameful, you'd probably shoot less heroin. I read Dreamland by Sam Canones, I think it's his last name, which was an awesome book. And he made a point in that book about there was just all these overdoses happening in Ohio and all throughout there and none of the parents talked about it. So it was something that was happening to a lot of young people and the parents were so ashamed about all of it that they couldn't tell anybody. And so it took a long time for that to kind of finally come to the surface where people kind of came out that, yeah, my son overdosed and died. You know, my daughter died. And yeah, it's amazing. It's amazing just the dehumanization that goes on if someone uses heroin. Oh man, yeah, it's terrible. You know, it's crazy. Yeah, it's almost like they're not a person. No, they're not, they're an addict. Yeah. You know, people are talking about it now. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. It's coming, it's coming. We just have to keep pushing it, you know, making our message more accessible and onboarding more and more folks. And I think, you know, I think it's going to happen. You know, you guys are doing excellent stuff. Like, you know, you guys see it all the time, right? Like drug users, you know, psychedelic people, they come out to an event and they go, I had no idea this many people were talking about acid or mushrooms or whatever, you know. Right, they can't even believe that there's anybody who's talking about it. Yeah. That's common. You know, we get a little blinded by being in this that we think that everybody kind of knows about it. And it's really, really not the case at all. And on top of that, so many young people now who they're teenagers and they're just getting interested in this for whatever reason and they're learning as well. We're always learning, you know, when you're interested in something like that. Say, you know, you just do whatever psychedelic for the first time or whatever drug for the first time. After you, part of the process of integrating afterwards, that experience was just so different. You're going to go start looking for places to learn about it more, whether it's books or whatever, you know, for me, it was books and music. So there's more people every day that are just doing something for the first time and they're just getting into it and starting to Google stuff and, you know, finding some books and kind of learning about a new world, you know? Absolutely. Cool, man. So what about time? Do you want to throw anything in? Reminder about the event, maybe? Yeah, sure. So it's October 7th. It's a Saturday night. It's after day one of Horizons Perspectives on Psychedelics. In New York. And you can get tickets at symposia.com. They're up there. I'm going to give you guys a promo code after this. So whoever's listening, maybe you guys can plug it in the intro so you get a few bucks off for that. Yeah, come out, especially if you haven't been out to something before. Our events are very welcoming to everybody. It's not a rave. It's going to be a place that you can come out, meet people, meet different groups, make some new friends, and talk about it in a way that's, I don't know, it's accessible. People are going to be able to come out. It's going to be really great. There's going to be a lot of awesome people there. I'm really looking forward to it. Yeah, same here. Kyle and I will both be there. So we're very excited. Great. Well, thanks again, Brian. Really appreciate your time. And check out the website, symposia.com. Yeah, thank you guys for having me here. I appreciate it. No problem. We'll talk again soon. All right. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.