Kyle and Joe - Life, Death, and DMTx

Hello and welcome everybody back to psychedelics today. This is Joe. Kyle is also here with me. Today is a episode that it's just us chatting again. Thankfully, how's it going? Kyle? Not too bad. How are you doing, Joe? Great. Beautiful day here in Breckenridge. It's been raining for the past two days, which is wonderful since we were almost on fire. The whole town was on pre-evacuation notice for a bit and it was really creepy, but glad we're back to normal. Yeah, I'm glad your town didn't burn down. Me too. It must have been scary. Yeah, it was a little creepy. I had my laptop and my hard drive, so it's like, I guess I could lose everything. I have most of my pictures on here, so it was good, but still, I would have lost a lot. It would have sucked. A lot of family pictures that I don't have digital yet. All of our work too. Gone books. Oh, no. Ours is all on hard drives. I took primarily all my portable hard drives and a couple laptops and that was it. Not good. But yeah, we would have been slowed down for a bit. Yeah, which would have really sucked. Yeah. So let's dig in, I guess, to what we've been up to. There's been a lot happening lately, including the, I guess, maybe let's first talk about this extended state DMT stuff, DMTX, that we're kind of collaborating with a little bit with Daniel McQueen. We don't necessarily have an official project role yet, but I think we're looking at it to see what's going on there. The idea of extended state DMT is to use high-end medical equipment, doctors, practitioners, and other people. And I think that's a really good idea. I think it's a really good idea. And I think it's a really good idea to have, you know, a professional medical staff like nurses in the room and just make sure that people have the ability to be in these states as safe as possible. And I guess work up to longer and longer DMT states through, I don't really know what to call it, an infusing device, like keeping the nanograms per milliliter consistent in your blood for long periods. Are they using. Are they using some sort of like anesthesia machine or that's the technology that they want to use? Yeah, exactly. So, you know, theoretically, you could do it with an IV drip bag, but it wouldn't be as precise. They want to have it be as precise as possible. So, it's as scientific as possible, which, you know, people don't get any ideas. Like, don't be putting DMT into your IV bags. It's not necessarily the best move. I think it's very dangerous to do it if you're using non-medical drugs. Dr. Andrew Gallimore: Yeah. Dr. Justin Marchegiani: Yeah. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Andrew Gallimore: Dr. Dr. Dr. Yeah. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. Yeah. Dr. Dr. Dr. Dr. I've done a lot of mind exploration and yeah, it's probably good to get in my body and not constantly go out so far. That is one of our regular comments, right? Like overuse is not necessarily the best thing. If you're using once weekly, twice weekly might not be the best. You might be putting yourself at risk. But yeah, back to DMT smoke DMT. I you're effectively freebasing, right? You're freebasing this chemical. It can be a little harsh and what happens it the way it's described often is this rocket ship into hyperspace and that seems to be a consistent kind of report of DMT. It's infinitely complex visuals like about as complex as your brain can generate or you know take in. It's you know far beyond the complexity your eyeballs can can. Grasp from what I understand and fractals just infinitely generating new fractals, potentially entities that want to show you stuff teach you things and yeah, one of the hallmark had features of smoke DMT is that you forget stuff. You don't necessarily come back with it and what we don't know and what this particular project is kind of aiming at is what happens is DMT, X, pro, project what happens when we can remember if we can remember like perhaps there's a type of supplement maybe it's a blend of three amino acids something that's simple that helps you have a memory of this thing we might not get there immediately but maybe after fifteen years doing this research we can get there and what one of the interesting things Daniel brought up so like after Andrew was done talking about all this stuff I was like okay, I'm actually excited about this again and because you know I get a little bothered when people turn anything into a God and people have done that with DMT and it it's troubling to me because people stop thinking clearly they start making assumptions you know and I don't know why it bothers me so much, but it does like I feel like this field has so many super smart people in it and it's it only breaks down when you start saying yes X is a hundred percent. true and you don't necessarily have a good ground to stand on for that argument you know like that you've run into this like malchise deck dude he the flower of life thing I don't think so have you seen that pattern that a lot of hippies have it's like circles and circles and it looks like a big flower it's kind of like an ancient Chinese symbol okay yeah yeah he kind of repurposed it and has this whole sacred geometry thing and I'm like you know cool. cool cool angels told you this great good for you like he's neck so now you want people to not talk to angels and just talk to you and read your books and buy your shit right cool I personally think that there's a better way to go about that having your own personal experiment your own personal spiritual practice as opposed to picking up the book of Mormon and going yep seems legit I'm going to follow this guy's angelically transmitted message instead of trusting myself. cool cool angels told you this great good for you like he's neck so now you want people to not talk to you and read your books and buy your shit right cool I personally think that there's a better way to go about that having your own personal experiment your own spiritual practice as opposed to picking up the book of Mormon and going yep seems legit I'm going to follow this guy's angelically transmitted message instead of trusting myself. cool cool angels told you this great good for you like he's neck so now you want people to not talk to you and buy your shit right cool I personally think that there's a better way to go about that having your own spiritual practice as opposed to picking up the book of Mormon and going yep seems legit I'm going to follow this guy's angelically transmitted message instead of trusting myself. cool angels told you this great good for you like he's neck so now you want people to not talk to you and buy your shit right cool I personally think that there's a better way to go about that having your own spiritual practice as opposed to picking up the book of Mormon and going yep seems legit I'm going to follow this guy's angelically transmitted message instead of trusting myself. has already developed this technique. technology and um we're living in a dmt virtual reality you know i don't know there's a lot of implications man as far as what is free will you know we we already kind of have an understanding in neuroscience that free will is kind of like um a thing that's far beyond us like our body and mind have already reacted to things before we've even made the decision you know so like you know what if we went beyond that there's so much more complexity in neuroscience um that we have left to go for um this book i think i talked about it um sapient homo sapiens and homo deus so it's like a complete history of homo sapiens and then um what's next so the sequel is like the next chapter with transhumanist ideals like what happens when we start embedding we're already androids like i need a machine to see properly my eyeglasses and you know i pretty much have a super high-end computer as part of my body all day long right not to mention like where i live is just embedded with computer stuff so like i'm pretty much an android cyborg already what happens when we have you know even closer integration like you know high-end um uh augmented reality um contact lenses or glasses that you know are all the time there or like some sort of inner ear contact or a way to just think and have your you know your google search triggered right by you thinking um this is going to happen whether it's good or not it's up for debate and you know what is it maybe better to just do dmt like i don't know like there's a lot of information that happens okay yeah i think that comes up with the question of like life and death you know and i i know i've mentioned this like a few times on some of the episodes of like having that near-death experience and then having this psilocybin experience where i went to this other world and i like met these things and i said oh my god this is so familiar like i've been here before and like this is kind of like um feels like what it was like when i died that one night or came close to dying and um you know that just like blew my mind that like what if uh like it could have been really big implications on how we view death and how we view life and um you know i think it would maybe change the course of do we want to incorporate technologies or um you know it's i don't know it's it's weird because like in those realms too it's like seems like a machine world where it's just like controlled by technology and like super advanced things um and maybe that is what we're moving towards i i don't know it's just so fascinating i mean this is like really what i think about a lot of the time it's like a more beautiful tech you say technology which makes us think of like computer chips but it's seems substantially more complex and more beautiful than that right like yeah it's a simulation but it's okay um like that kind of thing um another thing i was just out to breakfast with my girlfriend and we talked for a little while we were talking about this project psychedelics today and she goes why why exactly are you so interested in it and i went on for like 15 minutes and one of so the major thing is environmental collapse like it looks like we're on target to make the planet not quite habitable for humans um we're on track for that hopefully there's some techno optimist that's like a camp out there that say through technology alone we're going to be able to improve conditions on the planet where everything's going to be fine and we're going to bring back extinct species um you know appropriately not jurassic park but you know appropriately so you know we're going to be able to do that and that would be great cool like you know let's hope but should we put all our eggs in that basket i think there's a lot of data to suggest psychedelics improve our attitudes towards or heightens our environmental sentiments so we have a more uh stronger inclination to be more environmental and we care about the planet more like how do we fix this problem and you know i know a lot of people out there listening to this understand that and that's something that i got early on from stan groff's books he mentioned that a bunch like this happens kind of spontaneously in psychedelics and with holotropic breath work um also with transpersonal breath work yeah so uh is this perhaps one of the most important things we can be doing is promoting the safe measured use of psychedelics to change the minds of humans to get them to you know not worship the stars on you know whatever tv show is popular but you know worship their friends and family and become more environmentally conscious and do do more good work um i think there's something there and i think there's something right behind the curtain with this dmt stuff that that could inform this what if you know in a in a short 45 minute intravenous dmt session supervised by all these people you were able to become environmental and you know that was an optional upgrade you chose you paid whatever it was 250 to be in the room for a little bit and uh then the doctors and nurses all went to the next room once you're stable and like that was just like a factory floor like enlightenment factory like i don't i don't know what this is gonna we don't know what it's gonna do is the thing it could yeah it's almost like we could we can do like raw shark wandering against this thing because it's kind of like our imagination like what do we imagine psychedelics are and that's that's kind of what this thing is we can project against yeah i think it could have like you know um could be a very dualistic thing where it's like could propel us into the future or could possibly destroy us you know um everybody could have like messiah complexes and like want to do crazy things i think as soon as we figured that out we would stop i hope yeah i mean i i hope like you know who knows yeah i think a lot of people think some of these substances are enlightenment in a pill maybe they are maybe they're not um the one thing that like interests me the most um and like when i think about this project and think about like this future research with dmt is you know i'm thinking back about my experience with death and my experience with psilocybe and stuff like that it's like when i was the farthest out there in these alien realms and i'd look back and just look at my hand and realizing that this is weird like out there it's not that weird and i think like our culture we're trying to search for something in particular and we kind of project things onto this external world of seeking something more novel and finding answers out there um but really i mean what i what i got out of the experience was like this is the magic like that's the cosmic womb that we go back to like as strange as the psychedelic experience is it's very comforting in some regard because it's almost like that's where we come from like those mystical spiritual experiences you know like the weirdest thing about it is realizing that you have a body and that you're alive and you're on this earth like when you're dead and you're in those like realms where it's just spirit consciousness whatever it's safe it's normal because that's just what it is but as soon as like i realized i had a body and i'm living and like my actions can cause consequences that's what freaks me out the most i'm like holy shit like this is magic you know to even just be embodied um and i mean that's definitely makes me a little bit more environment-oriented environmental conscious and think about my actions on what i'm doing in life um because of that so one of the things that made me get a philosophy degree was these weird existential crises that young people get you know um and it's very similar to that it's like what the fuck i'm alive i'm an actual animal crawling around on this planet and is that it am i just a gerbil or is there more than than that like how does one create meaning and uh it's it sounds like with your death experience like meaning was just infused everywhere and it was like a nice comfortable meaningful space um that was safe and then you know being this vulnerable uh mammal on earth you know this this little pebble rocketing through space you know what what like how does that trip it is the trip you know like and then you look at the scope of the universe yeah and you just your mind is blown and how do you i don't know how do you how do you go from there what what what is there to figure out and i i think we're at this point in cultural evolution in the western world where religion has just about expired like the christian religion as traditionally played out is done um people don't believe these stories the way they are they don't believe the way they are they don't believe the way they are the way that held culture together before like that it was really like a culture anchor like it it helped keep the culture together and that's why it was effective it instilled order you didn't steal and kill from each other and we're what people need to recognize is that this humanitarian ethos that we have right now is Christian it's Christian and we're just not recognizing it as that we have to understand it is a Christian morality and how do you argue it it's really impossible to argue you argue it with Christian logic and you know is that a bad thing not necessarily I don't know what the right thing is but you are doing humanitarian stuff in it you are operating most likely within a human Christian ethos via humanitarianism and how do we get some sort of solid footing I think we need to figure that out I think we need to be on some sort of stable ground that gives us meaning and I think philosophy and psychedelics can help us get there assuming we're in community not getting alienated not turning not getting Messiah complexes and you know all this stuff like how do we do it healthfully and that's kind of what we're trying to help people do in our class but what I found is it's it's being engaged in your process like don't think you're finished don't think you'll never get there stay engaged in your process via journaling breath work whatever kind of regular practice you have like yoga tai chi whatever and being engaged in that process is what generates that feeling of meaning I think that's the best I've got and that's pretty much what my teachers have been our teachers have been saying to me for a long time you know there how do you feel like I don't know do you struggle with that idea of meaning much yeah all the time you know especially after especially after you know I had that accident I mean that was a huge thing I didn't really know how to live you know I couldn't figure out why people were doing the things that they were doing and why people were even believing the things that they were believing because I was just so far removed from it at that point and coming back here just seemed like a strange alien world of yeah then how do you make meaning out of it yeah I still struggle with it definitely after even I you know after doing all this inner work for the past however many years I still struggle with it because I think I think the culture doesn't allow you to actually integrate certain experiences you know because we're so fast-moving and you know if you slow down a bit you kind of get swept swept behind so it's this weird balance where a lot of my experiences tell me to slow down and there's not a lot too figure out in life and just enjoy it just enjoy the ride and learn how to laugh a little bit and not take things so seriously but yet we live in this culture where we have to take things so seriously and if we slow down a bit we get swept away it's like yeah it's oh shit like I'm not hustling to get a job to make money and then you're like in debt and then you're at the bottom of food chain you know it's just like so I mean that's what I struggle with the most is just living in such a fast-paced culture that really all right maybe like the capitalistic society where it's like things you always need to be like exerting energy in some in some sense you know because money is energy and so it's like constantly all right just need to keep exerting it because that's what keeps it going and so back to Messiah complex I'm almost finished this audio book biography of Elon Musk you know he's the guy who is running SpaceX Tesla Motors SolarCity and the boring company some really moonshot ideas kind of literally and his drive personally is to save the human race and he has this capitalist industrialist attitude but it's all with the express purpose of saving the human race and you know number one from fossil fuel dependence and just keep burning shitty stuff into the atmosphere and you know accelerating climate change you know that's kind of eliminated to a degree between solar panels to a degree and solar car electric cars and the boring company is talking about making hyper loops like high-speed transit between I think it's pretty cool like 10 minutes to from Las Vegas to Los Angeles which is typically a four-hour drive and you know it's fascinating and that cuts down a ton of emissions and it's beyond that you know our planet is it extreme risk all the time from asteroid strikes whatever comments and the spacex project is to get us extra solar like we become a multi planetary species and that's something I actually pretty strong believer and a lot of people go up fix this planet first are you gonna screw up other planets like well you know how much value is there in an earth planet when there's zero life like how do we do that's another thing like meaning value life like how do you pin that down I don't know I don't know that the most conserving the most complex things maybe is where the asset is like dna is something that's very rare very complex and maybe it's the thing we do that's why people have kids right to preserve their own dna in in a lot of ways that's the genetic underpinning. but yeah so like maybe that's what us as a species needs to do like how do we preserve this planet as much as possible go beyond the solar system go to other planets so a single asteroid doesn't kill everything and I don't know I think there's something there but you know that's obviously a little bit of a messiah thing that Elon Musk is dealing with but you know is it really that foreign of an idea like is it really that crazy that surviving on the planet has meaning like stuff I struggle with like I go back and forth between this all the time of thinking like are we stewards of the earth and is that like what we're here to do is to store the earth and to just keep this paradise alive or is you know like our future to get off the planet and go explore other like galaxies and dimensions and I think we could do both like and I think like Star Wars is a really great example of that where you have like these advanced cultures just living in harmony with the earth you know and I mean we don't really know that because it's just a story but the way the old ones make it seem it's like you know Luke's out in the desert and they're farming but they have like these spaceships that can go other places and like I think I think it might be a mix eventually and I don't understand why we don't invest more money into space exploration I mean it's just too fascinating to not and people are doing it man people are doing well yeah I look this morning for SpaceX it's like $358 a share which is enormous for SpaceX that's Elon Musk's space company and Jeff Bezos who is the I think majority stakeholder in Amazon put in billions of his own dollars to fund his own space exploration company because these people are looking at you know mining operations like it doesn't just make sense to do stuff that's risky to the planet not on the planet yeah if you're doing heavy industry like does it it seems risky to do it around humans like are we going to really build more nuclear power plants on fault lines like in Fukushima odds are yeah because it's just big industry making dumb decisions yeah it's not necessarily about long-term thinking it's all about quarter over quarter profits for large multinational multi-billion dollar companies and I don't know I don't I don't know the best solution but top minds I hope are working on it and I hope psychedelics play part of this like this whole micro to medium dose thing for creativity I think is stuff we should really be really applying to our top engineers for this stuff I'm sure a lot of people at SpaceX and Tesla and SolarCity are working with with psychedelics on the on the down low to come up with great solutions to the problems they're working on and hopefully it helps hopefully it's really a positive solution I don't know I don't personally want to trash the planet like from a greedy perspective I would love it to just stay the way it is right now or even be better than it is right now in terms of biodiversity healthy habitats I want to have I want to ski and snowboard forever I would like to be able to surf and not you know think that the ocean is going to poison me if I go in it yeah and it's rapid fish die off you know it's kind of it's kind of scary and I think like I don't know some of that I don't know my in my opinion it comes back to like wanting to save the world like we create these like really short fixes to save the world instead of like thinking about like long-term like how do we just like invest into these technologies to maybe get off the planet and explore like other possible disabilities. Um, you know, I'm, I'm a Leo. My ego definitely shines sometimes. I'm like, ah, like, and especially after that accident, I'm like, ah, I want to save the world. And one of the best pieces of advice that I got from like one of my teachers was like, you're not going to save the world, you know? And it was so like humbling to be like, yeah, you're right. Like I can only do so much. And, um, you know, I think that's what we all can do. Like just to do little parts in your community. And I think having a big vision, like, Hey, we should probably explore other planets and whatnot. But, um, so I, I think that ties into long-term planning. Like how do we long-term integrate psychedelics into our culture? Um, Neil Goldsmith and our masterclass for navigating psychedelics course mentioned that he doesn't, um, believe in immediate legalization, regulation of everything because, you know, maybe, with a well-reasoned 20 year plan, we can make that work. That was his opinion. But, um, like maybe, maybe it's worth waiting that long. So it's integrated well and skillfully into our culture. Maybe it's just decriminalized. Um, but you know, there's going to need to be a lot of drug education around that still because, um, expanded access leads to, um, shady stuff, shady dealings and chemists are tricky. But, um, you know, meaning you think you buy LSD, but you buy two, five IN bomb instead. So like, how do we, as a cult, as a psychedelic group of people trying to solve these problems, act in a skillful way that has a long-term meaningful impact. I think educating each other, um, opening up to people when it's okay to open up to people about your personal use, or at least your interest in the science. Um, I think that's huge. Uh, I, there's a lot. Um, yeah, it's a big question and really tough to answer. Uh, and I think, I think, you know, it is crappy. I mean, we, we do want some of these medicines to be available ASAP for people that are suffering. Um, but I was thinking about this the other day and, or maybe it was a few weeks ago and maybe people will be upset, but it's okay. Um, this whole, this whole idea about like psychedelics and, oh, I think cause I answered a question on core about like what happens when psychedelics become legal. You did a good job on that. Thanks. And like, I really don't think that psychedelics are going to heal the world in some sense. Like if they became legalized and became mainstream, cause not everybody's going to take them. And, um, you know, if it does become legal, there's for, at least for therapy, it's going to be for people suffering for, for certain disorders. But I think, you know, it comes back to this thing again of projecting this idea out onto the external world. And we're projecting this idea that psychedelics are going to save the world. And really it's just like any other medicine. Sometimes they're like band-aids. There's some real core issues that like we need to work on. And I think this kind of comes back to integration. I mean, yeah, we could legalize psychedelics. People could be going far out and having these extraordinary experiences. But I mean, if we don't make like the, cultural changes, things aren't going to change. It's just a band-aid. Um, like if, if like, we do believe that the world is at risks and that climate change is really happening, then like, we need to start making small changes to make bigger changes. Like we need to get more involved in our community. Maybe it's not like having to commute and fly across the world for certain things and like use up all this fossil fuel and really think about like local action. Um, are we going to do that? Probably not. Um, it would be nice if we did become a little bit more sustainable. But, um, you know, just because psychedelics are legal doesn't mean everybody's just going to turn off and start farming and not drive their car, take flights to Hawaii to vacation. Um, it's still going to happen. And, um, you know, I think there's a lot of like deep rooted traumas in like our ancestral lineages and just stuff that, you know, as a culture, we're not ready to face. Um, but you know, I have hope for the future. I'm pretty optimistic. Yeah, there's, I, it's kind of a choice, right? It's, we have the choice of choosing fear, hope, um, fearful, depressed people with no hope. Don't start businesses. They don't start new projects. They don't, they don't really get out of bed with a smile. You know, the day is not that bright. So kind of, it's, it's a no brainer to, it has a lot greater yield to choose to be optimistic. And that's kind of a Robert Anton Wilson thing. I forget. Have you spent much time checking his workout? Robert Anton Wilson? No. You know who he is? A little bit. So buddies with Tim Leary editor at playboy for a while. He wrote the Illuminatus trilogy, um, Prometheus rising, a number of popular books that covered psychedelics. Um, very powerful mind, very funny writer. Um, check out psychedelics.com. Some of his YouTube sometimes, uh, cool listeners. Um, he's got a few on the psychedelic salon and, I'll try to include one in the show notes if I can remember. Um, but yeah, one of my favorite writers ever and hit, you know, he, he had a daughter die at a young age and he also was a sufferer of polio. Um, so, you know, he had plenty of reasons to be depressed and pessimistic, but he chose optimism. And, um, he had some really interesting psychedelic experiences on mescaline and many other drugs, uh, that he writes about. He writes about quite a bit and talks about, um, so yeah, I, I think there's plenty to be optimistic about and it's, it, especially if you're living in the U S or like a Western nation, like it's pretty easy to develop a life. Um, you know, once you get rid of your traumas and your baggage, um, develop a life, that's pretty fun. It's really not that difficult to develop a fun, enjoyable life. Assuming you can clear some of that trauma either through breath work or psychedelic therapies or, or whatever it is. Maybe there's some, um, legal therapies like EMDR or float tanks available to you. Um, you know, once you get through that heavy baggage stuff gets way better, way better. Um, I think that's why a lot of people come to psychedelics are kind of like not psych with their life and they think, Oh, look at this super alien thing that all these fun looking people at burning man apparently are on. I want to be like one of those fun looking people with a crazy art car and funny costume. Um, I want to be like that. And how do I be like that? Is it psychedelics? You know, maybe, but you know, realize that there's a lot of ways through psychedelics. Um, I hope that doesn't sound too ranty, but I think there's something there. It's like there is a way to have a great life. Psychedelics may or may not play a part in that for you. Um, and for people who are suffering from really serious trauma, um, psychedelics might be one of the best, quickest options to, to resolve that. Like, uh, you know, in, in three visits to an MDMA therapist, maybe you're done. Yeah. Yeah, definitely. I mean, I didn't like mean that whole rant about like, they're not helpful. They're definitely helpful. Obviously we wouldn't be doing this show if we didn't believe in that. Um, I just like to try and remain a little skeptical about the fantasy of like, if it became legal, it'd be like a wonderful world and everybody would be happy. I mean, I think human, human suffering, human suffering is going to continue and, um, you know, we just need to realize that there's a lot there. I'm actually going to pull up your, um, the, the question you answered. Uh, let's see. The guy was pretty convinced that, um, the whole world was going to change immediately. Right. Yeah. And, and it was all because of psychedelics and the transcendent things that it revealed. Well, I mean, if you think about it, they've been, they've been around for awhile and you know, indigenous cultures have been using them. I mean, obviously maybe not as, you know, I mean, I guess it's still new, but they've been around for thousands of years. And if that was the case, if cultures have been using plants for thousands of years, wouldn't we be enlightened? You know, wouldn't we not be where we're at right now? Um, I don't know. I think if people have been using them then, and we're still suffering, then, you know, I don't think too much is going to change, but they are helpful. You know, obviously we wouldn't be talking about it. If we didn't feel that way. Yeah, we wouldn't have the show if otherwise it's just not that everybody's going to use it. Yeah. So the headline here is like what will happen when society, when psychedelics become used for therapy, um, uh, he's core is being shitty. It's not showing the full answer, but it pretty much implied that, um, Oh no, here it is. The psychedelic experience leads to a paradigm shift paradigm shift. People will have a transcendental awareness. He's kind of hinting that it'll be, it's going to be permanent. The authority of government will be thwarted by the authority of the absolute. Yeah. So obviously it sounds really inflated. Like there is not a permanent paradigm shift for people. People can do heavy doses of LSD and continue being a hardcore executive at Exxon mobile. I'm not saying that Rex, it's done LSD a lot, but you know, theoretically you could do a bunch of psychedelics and still be a very powerful executive. Um, and be doing a massive harm to the planet. You know, perhaps um there's often the, line that if you're a sociopath lsd makes you a more skillful sociopath um charles manson is an example of that we have to understand there are these dark sides to this stuff we there is a shadow side to psychedelics yeah and plus a lot of spiritual bypassing too i mean people have experiences and they think like they've worked through their shit and they just spiritual bypass everything and they go on doing the same things i mean i saw some really dark shit in the boston burning man world really dark shit and it was you know they were you know theoretically psychedelically informed folks but you know executing some really bad behavior on each other and it was not great and you know to me that's exactly it like oh yeah we're so enlightened now because we've you know danced with the elves or whatever and no you're still being a super asshole sexual predator person and it doesn't matter that you drank ayahuasca 35 times you you're still an asshole you still did really not great things to people and so what that you bought that mansion and let young girls move in nope because you're a predator it makes you an asshole um and yeah his last line the authority of the government will be thwarted by the authority of the absolute it's just like yeah man i don't know you're coming you have this afterglow from your psychedelic session and you're not going to actually just got on quora and started asking questions that didn't necessarily have a good grounding i mean sometimes i like to think that you know if you abide by astrology or maybe the yoga traditions that were moving was it past the kali yuga so like the darkness will be overthrown by love and light i mean it's a nice nice idea maybe it will happen maybe we will become more loving to each other um that would be sweet i like this kind of idea that there's these natural laws i don't know what they are but there's these natural laws and the more in harmony you operate with these natural laws the more effortless and effective your life becomes happier it becomes and that's it seems to be like a little shift like a slight shift from what he's talking about it's like yeah you you follow these rules that are good for humans and good for the planet and you have a better life and uh you know figuring out what those rules are is the trick there you know the hindu traditions have their version the mystical um christian traditions have their version but you know maybe there's some similarities that's kind of the project of the uh theosophical society from helena plovatsky and i don't know did we ever talk about this on the show the christian christian murty um i don't think so so christian murty is the spiritual teacher that you guys might want to check out he was kind of like this um world late 1800s project to develop the new messiah they wanted to kind of manufacture him the same way they pick the dalai lama they wanted to make their own and they found this kid in india and schooled him and you know brought him up in all their own traditions spent a ton of money developing him and he eventually said no you guys are crazy like i i don't want to be part of your project but because you've educated me so well i am able to um rap poetic on or wax poetic on all philosophical subjects from enlightenment to day-to-day suffering to whatever in a really skillful kind of non-dogmatic way and that's why he's so popular now judo krishna murty and there's a lot of stuff that he's written that's you know pretty valuable to us in the psychedelic world um i'm trying to pull up a quick quote just to kind of give a quick example i never heard of him he's amazing um it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society you know not that one in the park the constant assertion of belief is an indication of fear yeah tradition becomes our security and when the mind is secure it is in delay decay so like yeah that that kind of comes back to that whole whitehead concept of process like we should always be in process and engaged in our own process um and how do we do that coming back the constant return yeah this practice that is critical it's not very dogmatic it's all about you working on you and being the expert on you and not putting your faith in something external it's so easy to find a cult leader yeah don't do it here i recently just watched a documentary about that like how smart intelligent people get caught up in cults i forget where it was did you see that headline um that uh katherine mclean was posting and a few others were posting about uh enlightened next it was the uh the cohen the group that was kind of aligned with ken wilbur that's that's what i think i saw it was um up in foxborough up in massachusetts yeah it was a mass um yeah that's the little documentary that i watched so it was this whole integral movement that i was kind of when i was doing my stuff in boulder with evolver i kept rubbing up against these um people who are aligned with ken wilbur ken wilbur for those who don't know is this integral theorist he kind of made this pseudo-religious concept of um stages of development for humans and for cultures and stuff and uh he he tried to map every philosopher and and religious thinker out there onto the same grid said nobody's wrong they're just at different levels of development they're at their own level so like he was this upward spiral of development so that was his kind of theory and um he was really into zen meditation and uh this guy andrew cohen i think his name was kind of developed a whole religion right next to it um regarding zazen and all these different um diamond path zen meditation so zen is just brutal awareness so like sitting on the mat for 12 hours a day and washing the dishes the rest of the day like there's no flourishes it's just being there and you know that's great if you want to do that it's cool um but it's not for all of us but they were convinced it was the only path forward they said holotropic breath work is not effective because it's regressive look at you you're there crying and sucking on your thumb what therapeutic value is there and that that's regressive that's not working you towards enlightenment was kind of their thing it wasn't really necessarily about mental health it was about enlightenment for them um and yeah to me that showed kind of an immaturity and and they wouldn't really act like stan groff was really interested in this guy's theories um ken wilbur but ken wilbur would never actually engage with him in debate interesting yeah you should ask lenny about that sometime there was some really interesting discussions like ken wilbur's um refutation of um groff was something super obscure like you know this guy was really interested in this guy's theories and he was the third axiom of cant or something stupid like that it's like i don't think groff has it because of his you know issue technical error regarding cant and it was totally you know tertiary like not even related to the discussion yeah i think i heard uh lenny talk one time uh about like maybe groff's stance on on wilbur and he said you know he's really smart it's philosopher but he lacks clinical experience and yeah yeah it's super brain but get you know got caught up he's not even really engaging in community he's um effectively a monk so his whole history is just reading a shitload of books he was kind of like a sponsored reader for a while i think his wife died or committed suicide and he just became a dishwasher had a small apartment and just started getting all the books from shambhala press reading them writing essays and you know just crushing out books and crushing out papers and essays and stuff and getting published you know it's um the buddhist world is small enough where if you are smart and can write you're probably going to get published and interesting yeah like that tricycle magazine i think was something that he was publishing in a lot but yeah very interesting stuff and i i doubt he's had much psychedelic experience too like it's it's very unlikely can wilbur smoke dmt in my opinion i heard him give a talk one time about somebody asked him about like ayahuasca um i forget the name of the book but it's a book about like ayahuasca he said you know i think he said it could be healing but it's obviously not like a full path towards enlightenment right and i saw an article yesterday i think on that tricycle magazine saying uh by long um like a 20-year meditator saying psychedelics and meditation are synergistic so you know yeah like that's kind of the point that we've been trying to make for a while like yes all these things are synergistic you have to have the right program though it's not synergistic if you trip in the morning and meditate in the afternoon every day right it's a problem and uh you know you're gonna get sick but if you schedule it out you're probably gonna have uh something that works out for you yeah definitely yeah so this dmt talk really took us on a rant and crazy down a down an interesting road and um you know we're doing this episode just as like a catch-up we've been spending a lot of time working on this integration course and we've been lining a bunch of interviews up for the master courses and we just launched it uh yesterday which was monday august 7th and so you know we figured we just kind of get on and just chat and uh catch up and let you know what we've been up to and obviously this dm thing dmt topic just took its uh own little course if you want to learn more about it dmtx.org there's a way to donate there and there's a way to get involved you can get up on the email list and and keep up with developments and we will keep you uh informed through this show as well um but you know check it out dmtx.org stay tuned to that but i know there was something else that we just wanted to check in and i know we're probably like hitting an hour or so um and it was about that lsd overdose um acute lsd toxicity at lightning in the bottle um and dan safe just put out a little uh press release about that possibly thinking that it was a two five i overdose two five i bomb um so yeah i don't know do we want to talk a little bit about that before yeah let's try to blast through it then i want to let people know about um who's joining us for the master class but yeah so this um lady was at lightning in a bottle 20 year 20 years old memorial day weekend lightning a bottle in bradley california um first ever fatality for lightning in a bottle so kind of a big deal um they are a leader um in the world of medicine and medicine and medicine in the world of harm reduction for festivals and uh so yeah long story short coroner ruled it a acute lsd toxicity death um there is no known limit there is like so typically there's this thing called ld 50 50 percent of people would expect be expected to die at this dose and they get that i believe through mouse and rat tests um and kind of just extrapolate to humans and uh it's not you know a great it's not perfect but it helps us figure out where we shouldn't go with certain molecules um they have science was unable to really pin that down with rats you know they they were able to speculate about upper limits but it's not really a reasonable thing like nobody in their right mind would would eat like i don't even know like hundreds of grand like a kilogram of lsd you're not going to eat a kilogram of lsd tastes gross i don't even get that i don't really know uh i'm sure nick sand he's dead now but uh maybe he'll send you one post from the grave uh like i and and we still don't even know if that's toxic like it's gonna really be a tough ride but um maybe you'll come through on the other side mentally but yeah there's there's no known toxic dose for lsd there's a few questionable things ruled lsd toxicity in the past um but it's likely county coroners aren't up to speed on this stuff like they don't actually know that it's kind of fucked up that the county coroner would say that without doing appropriate research like is lsd toxic like no like about as toxic as apples like um like i don't i don't know how to say it other other than that like and yeah two five in bomb is something being sold quite regularly at festivals as acid people all over uh have been buying stuff you know yeah oh you're selling acid great let me buy that acid from you and they don't know what that acid is and the only way to really know what it is is to send it in for a mass spectrometry reading or like uh there's some cheaper spectrometry um being done nowadays uh that you might have access to that's how you could tell what's in the full composition of the thing and more accessible is reagent testing which is something we've been kind of promoting a bunch so you can actually do that and you can actually do that and you can actually do that and you can test your substance to find out if it actually does contain lsd or does contain mdma and there's all sorts of stuff you can actually test to see if it does contain two five in bomb from what i understand two five in bomb is a um what do we call it vasoconstrictor um so it could cause heart issues so your heart could just stop at a certain point perhaps and uh what it appears to seizures to at high doses some people use it for a lot of reasons but i don't know if it's because i don't use it for a lot of reasons but i don't know if it's recreationally and they're fine um other people a single like one or two doses total could kill you like you're dead before you get to the hospital before the ambulance arrives well there was a story i you know i'm doing some research on that um and they're like a bunch of kids that bought a strip and they cut it up into like four or whatever and each took one and three of the kids were fine and the one ended up in the hospital because of it exactly so yeah it really depends on um your body makeup and also i think the toxicity is kind of like exponentially just goes up at some certain dose um so it's like really tricky to figure that out you know um maybe you take you normally take two hits of acid and you take two hits of two five i and i mean how much is on there first of all and yeah it's it's kind of scary so it's a little um that the county coroner reported it this way uh what this does say though is that there is two five i am i'm out there still it's not going away it's all over the dark web still um and it looks like lsd on paper it's also being sold in gel tabs um and be really careful like plan ahead if you're going to be doing drugs at a festival or something plan ahead don't just buy it in the parking lot don't just buy it in the parking lot don't just buy it in the parking lot where you can't test if you do test at a festival hopefully you can find somebody with a test kit like maybe dance safe is doing some work there some other organization like the loop if you're in the uk is doing on-site testing and go get some testing done find out what you're putting in your body um anything else on this one yeah i mean it's just it's it's kind of it's kind of scary to think about um you know you think you're getting something and there's a lot of research chemicals floating around and um you know and i think that's why it's really important to to think about why you want to be doing things and why you want to engage in the psychedelic process and also be safe and test it because i mean not to spread like fear or anything but i mean you know research chemicals are going around and it could just take one hit and land you in the hospital or or worse um so it's as what mitchell gomez said in our master class is like a new era of drug use because things are just showing up like fentanyl showing up in drugs that it doesn't even make any sense you know and you're getting like all these other uh research chemicals for uh you know say acid or whatever and um yeah so it is it is a concern um a brave new world yeah this is no longer the 60s and yeah and like oh no i was just gonna say i saw this article today about somebody od'ing up in cape cod on fentanyl laced marijuana um you know we don't know how true that is uh could could happen um could have been intentional uh but you know what why is that happening i think it's a great reason to legalize and start regulating the things i mean if fentanyl showing up in marijuana that's yeah like you know so i don't i don't think drug dealers want their customers to be legalized they don't want their customers to be legalized they don't want their some people think drug dealers are dumb and don't do math right and you know could make errors i don't necessarily think that's true i think if you're a drug dealer and you've been in business for longer than a year you're probably not dumb uh especially if i haven't gone to jail yet and you could probably do a little bit of math so you know maybe somebody you know theoretically maybe somebody bought shitty weed it was their first drug deal they bought some fentanyl off the dark web and you know made some sort of liquid solution sprayed it all over the place a little bit weed and you know just hope for the best and maybe somebody od you know it could be that simple but we don't know um so be careful out there like hey know your grower or buy from a state that's regulated because you really don't know um or test your stuff maybe just test a little leaf for fentanyl i don't really know the best way to do that but you know figure it out there's fentanyl test strips now from dance safe um so they're cheaper than going to the hospital so buy one well mitchell was saying in our master class that like if you had a powder or something you really need to test the whole thing right he was saying that was the best way to do it so yeah you would you know for for example if you had a powder you could turn it into a liquid solution and then do the test strip in that and it would show up at the nanogram per milliliter level um you know just a couple nanograms per milliliter it would show so even if it was like a super trace trace amount it's way sublethal way sublethal it would still show up so then you would have to make the decision like what do i do with this illegal thing i had purchased to now own uh i don't know act carefully you know very carefully with it um hopefully you throw it out but you know if not be smart be very smart be careful um but yeah that's the best way to do it if you have a larger quantity of anything and there's there's techniques all over the internet for that kind of thing. method i don't really know the way to do it but you can find that out yeah cool cool cool to talk about the master class briefly yeah let's let's jump in so navigating psychedelics lessons on integration and self-care is something kyle and i've been working really hard on and we really hope you check it out if you have the time or inclination uh you can get a little peek at what we've got over at psychedelics today.teachable.com and we've got a whole bunch of stuff that's going to be really good for you how to be safe on the internet um you know the differences between tryptamines fenethylamines delirians some stuff on the mechanisms of action of psychedelics all sorts of stuff we go a lot deeper than just that and we even worked with people to get master classes exclusive master class interviews with people here's kind of the list of folks that contributed anywhere from 20 minutes to over an hour of master class content lenny gibson our breathwork teacher elizabeth gibson also our breathwork teacher larry norris from eerie i think he was even on the show in the past and we had a great interview with him he directs eerie in the bay area doing a lot of harm reduction services and integration circles psychedelic haven't had them on the show we haven't yeah yeah no we just had him in the master class and for some reason we think we we interviewed julie though julie was on our show maybe maybe it's that we met him in oakland i got to spend some time with him in oakland yeah didn't yeah yeah we spent a lot of time with them in oakland you'll hear him on the show soon enough people and he is great super smart very helpful um and then paul austin the third wave who you guys all know helps us out with some information on microdosing and and um implications around it probably a little bit on how to do it uh why to do it and shannon claire carlin she just recently changed her name yeah that's right she's come here congratulations shannon he she uh was helping working with kyle and the maps integration list for a bit helping coordinate the work there and is the mdma therapy training program manager for for maps so helping quite a bit with the mdma research and it looks like yeah talking about maps and integration finding a therapist and harm reduction services and so on and so on with the mdma therapy training program reduction services and and uh spreading integration catherine mclean who um we've had on the show i think yeah yeah and uh she was involved with the hopkin john hopkins and uh psilocybin research facilitating a lot of sessions and um this got really popular with a ted talk about um working with dying patients and then having to work with her sister who was dying she didn't do it psychotherapy she didn't do it psychotherapy with her sister but she was able to be there in a different way after doing all that work with um patients who are dying um she has a lot to share yeah she also included i went to the integration circle um at the center for optimal living and we record in new york yeah and we recorded uh a little meditation that she came up with i think she calls it raft the raft meditation um so it's a cool little meditation to get back into your psychedelic experience and to have a and just meditate on it so that's included in the course cool well we have a lot i'll just blast through the rest of these people sorry for not giving you guys enough length but uh ashley booth founder of the aware project co-founder of interspace integration we have a long awesome conversation with her about 5meo dmt neil marshall goldsmith phd who um you guys probably know from past interviews here and elsewhere he is helping coordinate the horizons nyc conference he talks about a lot of great stuff about microdosing small behavioral changes um integration and prep work and we go all over the map with him mitchell gomez the executive director of dance safe we talked to him about drug testing harm reduction safety julie megler who is also with eerie she's fantastic we talked to her about ayahuasca prepping for ayahuasca sessions intention setting um spiritual emergency and much more phil marie narlock sai d she is the training manager with um students for sensible drug policy we talked to her about identifying drug emergencies and you know some interventions you can do some some really helpful stuff around fentanyl and um narcan uh naloxone is another term for that i think and um michelle hobart who we haven't had on the show yet but she's going to be a star we talked to her about or kyle gets to talk to her about spiritual emergence and self-care um and she's going to be a star and she's going to be a star and she's going to be a star um hopefully we get to add an additional um q a webinar with her there and we have others as well we're hoping i'm still holding out hope that we get dennis mckenna on i'm going to work really hard to make that happen uh he has a lot to share about ayahuasca and i think there's plenty that others can share too we're working to get um what's this gentleman's name grossman grossman that's it mr uh richard grossman from uh what's his organization called healing feather healing ceremonies um yeah so he he leads a lot of retreats to peru and i think he does some really um great education harm reduction facilitation with ayahuasca so um can't wait to have him share his experience he's definitely an elder in the in the california world so plenty of stuff there um and i think he's going to be a star in the future and i think he's going to be a star in the future um and we really hope it's worth your time and you take the time to get more educated on psychedelics these are some of the most powerful things known to interact with the human mind which is the most complex thing we know about in the universe so be careful get prepared do your homework keep you and your friends safe anything you want to add in no i think you got it i'm also excited too i'm trying to get my buddy to come on uh and do a master class on cacao ceremonies yes because we're going to be doing a master class on cacao ceremonies and we're going to we used to run them um together up in vermont and i think cacao is a really great medicine to work with um as part of the integration phase but also you know just it's a nice nice heart medicine to work with so you know hopefully he can his schedule line up and we'll get an interview with him and see what that's all about yeah cacao being the precursor to chocolate so check that out it's a really complex uh plant pharmacologically and very uh helpful it's you know um there's a lot of data out there so it's a really complex uh plant pharmacologically and very uh helpful it's about chocolate being healthy and there's certain reasons for that and what if you could amplify the benefits in your home safely and uh you know use it as a pre-post psychedelic session i don't even know what to call that preparation i don't know medicine call it a medicine it's not psychedelic but it's close yeah and well yeah the the one person um that he learned from said cacao like psychedelics will push you through the door but then it's your option if you want to walk through it um we would pair it up with breathwork and shamanic drumming and stuff like that and you know definitely had some powerful experiences but you know regarding the course it's a great way to support the show um so yeah we hope you you check it out and you know we're gonna have you know we have 10 master classes up there right now um or i mean we've been slowly releasing some but you know we're hoping to add more in there so if anything you'll get a bunch of exclusive interviews that we're not featuring on the show here um yeah and it's the best way probably to get up to speed on this stuff to be as safe as possible as soon as possible and we are here to support you guys as students and you know as listeners just feel free to reach out if you have questions psychedelics today email at gmail.com and we one final announcement we are looking at a three-day retreat in denver uh in december the weekend we're going to be 15 16 17 so please hit us up if you're interested in that it's weekend before christmas uh well i guess really two weekends before christmas but you know 15 16 17 check it out and see if you're free let us know if you're interested in coming we're going to do breath work we might do some cacao we're going to do a lot of the content from our class there and we're going to you know really just get into it and see what you guys want and it's going to be a really amazing weekend so i think that's it for now thank you all for tuning in and we will catch you in our class on the next episode you you Thank you. Thank you.