Rak Razam | This Might Challenge You

Rak Razam's Early Path to Psychedelic Exploration Welcome to the Icall Bullshit podcast where we go a little bit deeper in surface level chats. This one it's a bit different. I sat down with Rack Razam up in Mullen Bimby and we got into some pretty interesting territory. Let's get into it. Thanks for coming on mate, I really appreciate it. Speaker 2 Yeah, I'm really happy to be here. Thanks for inviting me. Speaker 1 How have you been? Speaker 2 I've been good. I've been going through a kind of dark night of the soul, as they call it, which I think kind of mirrors the whole planetary emergency from which an emergence may happen. But yeah, there's things I can say and things like can't at this juncture, but we might get into a few of them in this text. Speaker 1 Where it leads. So first of all, I guess my question for you is how did you get into, you know, the medicines, psychedelic medicines and I guess alternative healing? Speaker 2 Yeah, I guess I was always, you know, in the alternative scenes. I was in the, I lived overseas in the mid 90s and I, I worked in, in London at Waterstones bookshop and I, I founded the counterculture section so I could just read all the beatnik authors and all the hippie authors and stuff. And I got into Terence McKenna around that time and Terence came to, to London at the Camden Centre and did a talk and I was like this wowed by it all. And you know, Terence live and then my two years kind of work exchanging in England ended in 97 and I kind of came back to Australia kicking and screaming, not wanting to come back. And I landed at this outdoor party in the Otways trans elements to that Terence McKenna was in the speaking, you know, gig at and so that kind of brought me into the electronic music scene, but specifically the Duft subculture, which was really rich and juicy back then, really fresh and really, you know, a vibrant kind of subculture that was creating it's music and it's fashion and it's ideals and spirituality. The Global Shamanic Resurgence and Ayahuasca's Rise And, you know, over the years and to backtrack, I'll say that, you know, people might have altered states experiences and for the vast majority of people, they're probably in a recreational setting setting. We've seen the rise of shamanism in the West or the resurgence of what I call the global shamanic resurgence. We've seen the lineages of the indigenous people that are caretakers of the medicines. But for the most part, I think most people, and I was one of them, came into it through, you know, the party scene. But I would say even then it wasn't necessarily just recreational for me. There was definitely a spiritual kind of liberation, a joy. There was kind of a, an ecstasis, which is the old Greek word for ecstasy, which is all good and well, you know. And so that kind of parlayed into I think around 2006 when I was working for Australian Penthouse and I was a gonzo journalist. I did a story on Albert Hoffman, who is the chemist who kind of discovered LSD and he was turning 100 and there was a big symposium in Basel, Switzerland. So I went to that and reported on that for The Age and the Australian and Penthouse and other, you know, magazines. And then my second assignment was going to Peru. When they say assignment, that was all like, you know, on a, on a dole check and a wing and a prayer because you'd only get paid after the fact. But I went to the Amazon and worked with the Sharman's down there and went to the second Amazonian Sharman Conference. It was run by Ellen Shoemaker, who's since deceased, but that was kind of the Segway. I remember in 2006 before going overseas sometime between the Switzerland LSD adventure in the the shamans of the Amazon, drinking Ayahuasca for the first time, you know, here in Australia with an Australian shamanic practitioner and noticing that there are all these people from like the Duft subculture there. So there was this kind of overlap where some people would actually then be prepped and almost formatted and ready for a more, let's say serious container to do more healing and spiritual exploration. And so yeah, I first went to the Amazon 2006. As I said that three months stay turned into what was a 3000 word article turned into a 400 page book called I Awakening. So I Irish shamanic Odyssey was the title originally and then that adaption of that book turned into the documentary I Awakenings, which is still available online now. Understanding the Shaman's Role in Western Healing And that kind of prepped the way for doing what I'm still doing, which is a regular documentary series called Shamans of the Global Village. We went back with my director and Co conspirator, film maker Niles Heckman last November 25 to Peru and worked with Maura Rogati, the famous visionary artist who's also a curandero and took a retreat group back there. And that'll be the third episode coming out in a few months of Shamans, the global village. The first one was on Octavio Reddig and the Sonoran Desert toad. The second one was on Piote with some some indigenous Murakames. One of the little things I took from my book Aya Aya, A Shamanic Odyssey, was this realisation, seeing so many western, western gringos on the kind of shamanic trail in search of healing and enlightenmental connection. Sure. Yeah. A lot of the Kieran Dara's would say, look, some people come down working with ayahuasca and they're in search of healing, like physical or anxiety or mental issues. And the dietas as well as ayahuasca can be really conducive to helping heal. But for the vast majority, they said the Westerners were coming because they just felt this disconnection. They didn't know their place in the web of life. They wanted the elder guidance. They wanted to connect to something which felt more real than Western materialism. And I think that's kind of been the driver for what I call this global shamanic resurgence. And that, you know, 100 people might drink ayahuasca, maybe five will want to serve ayahuasca, you know, but there is this 100 people who do both our various toad, probably 30 want to become like, you know, toad facilitators. Regardless of the statistics, there's an uptake in interest of people who become healed from these experiences who want to help heal others and be in service. And that's essentially what the role of the shaman was in ancient societies. You know, that'd kind of be on the edge of the village and maybe he's involved in the politics, but they'll be looking after and mediating the well being of their community, whether that's in plant medicines or other modalities or, or whatever. And I think that's something that we've been lacking in modern culture and that we eradicated the the archetype of the shaman. So that was kind of all these themes I was looking at in the the book. And from that I realised that there was this uptake of shamanic practitioners being born. And that was 20 years ago now, 2006. So definitely in the last 20 years I've seen and befriended and networked with and even become one myself, you know, in countries where it's legal, a shamanic facilitator working with these medicines. So I think it's, it's kind of supply and demand is that there's been an absence of this shamanic healing archetype in the Western mainframe that is kind of needed. You know, Western pharmaceuticals and the big pharma and all of those things aren't in our best interests. And there's a disenchantment with the kind of medicalised system out there at the same time as medical psychedelics are coming back above ground. This is burgeoning shamanic underground globally that is at least three or 4 generations old now and is efficacious. It works. There's obviously pros and cons and dangers with these substances and with people's ability to integrate them. But in general, what I'm seeing and what I've been documenting for the last 20 years is this return of the sacred through these these medicines. Celebrity Influence and Commodified Psychedelic Experiences So is it becoming more acceptable in sort of normal social structure or? Speaker 2 Like I mean things. Speaker 1 Say, you know, I think there's a couple of Netflix videos on psychedelics and how it helps. Speaker 2 Yeah, definitely. I mean, I was talking with my daughter. She's 23, and she grew up around kind of medicine culture. And she's just pitching to do a GoFundMe to go over to Brazil and work with a Huni Quinn and look at their teachings and messages of these kind of changes of the world age. But we're talking about how basically, you know, in the 60s there was this idea of the counterculture being counted to the mainstream. Nowadays when this kind of interconnected AI algorithmic driven culture, they've kind of mapped out rebellion and they've mapped out everything and they've labelled and pigeonholed the artists and the rebels and the things into this little niche where they just milk it and reinforce it. And so, you know, over the years, like when I started out in 2006, I remember, you know, over the years different media would come and report on ayahuasca, the BBC would or, you know, all these other mainstream periodicals. There was a landmark article in 2006 in National Geographic Adventure, which was a positive story on ayahuasca as division seekers. And that was kind of his watershed. And I remember Lisa Ling from, I think it was CBS, one of the big stations in the US, she reported an ayahuasca, but they wouldn't let her drink ayahuasca, right. And then over the years, it's got kind of saturated in these celebrities. I remember some of the old kind of examples were Lindsay Lohan. You know, a lot of the, you know, fucked up celebrities who are just so, you know, from the pressures and the drugs and the whatever. But you know, when they get to these plant medicines, they've heard of them. She then tweeted to like 6 million of her followers about ayahuasca. So then that trickles down to 6 million people. Speaker 1 Mike Tyson did 5 MEO, DMT didn't. Speaker 2 He that's, that's kind of a perfect example like Mike Tyson, you know, Mr kind of alpha male did, did Buffalo very probably 5-6 years ago now. And it got into this new demographic of kind of the, you know, the alpha male boxing sports kind of enthusiasts where they would hear about, about the plant medicines. So essentially what happens is after the, the peak experience of a shamanic medicine is the integration phase. But often if people have had a positive experience, people want to kind of go out and proselyte and, you know, get all messianic and kind of like spread the word, the good word, yeah, which is all good and well, but they. Speaker 1 May not be doing it in the right. Speaker 2 Way and especially if they're celebrities, it goes in a way which is commodified within the capitalist structure, which is creating a sound bite and used bite, you know, and it definitely creates a lot more interest in the medicines. But then the issue is the supply and demand and the right container of the medicines and the right set and setting in the sacredness. So essentially, you know, back in 2006, I could see that ayahuasca was coming back into the West and there was this generation of Western facilitators that were being trained by indigenous lineages. And we're taking it back to their home countries and spreading the vine and spreading the medicine in the containers. You know, a generation later in 2026, it's still similar, but the vectors have kind of gone off the chart. Instagram shamans everywhere have popularised everything and everything's become algorithmically driven and trendy in a way which detracts from the hard work of core spirituality. Speaker 1 Yeah, yeah. Ayahuasca's Traditional Use vs. Western Demand So on that how, how long do or how old is ayahuasca or is in the tradition of ayahuasca and using it for medicinal reasons? Speaker 2 Well, no one really knows. Some anthropology. I mean, Western use of ayahuasca really originated in like the 1950s William Burroughs was one of the first Westerners to go down in search of what some of the tribes call yahe, which is a form of ayahuasca. But he kind of fled the jungles in, you know, cosmic distress from his experience. And it really wasn't until, you know, 70s, eighties, 90s said the trickle of Western early adopters started to come through on the lodge system grew to accommodate them. But some anthropologists around the Amazon, around the Peru and the Akitas kind of area, which is a focal point for the Shipibo Kenobo tribe of their brand of ayahuasca, they posit that, you know, it could be 1000 years old. It's hard to say because they found relics and artefacts of like cups and things that maybe you've served it. But all through the Pan Amazonian basin, all across, you know, Brazil and Ecuador and Peru and other countries, there's ayahuasca usage. So the vine has spread. It's most likely hundreds if not thousands of years old. Different tribes have different ways of serving it. Most of them work with the Banisteriopsis carpi vine and the admixture plants containing the chacuna, which contains the DMT, the dimethyl tryptamine for the visions. But some of the more recent anthropologists noted that they couldn't actually trace the DMT leaves to ayahuasca usage before about, I don't know, the 1980s. And they're thinking that, you know, ayahuasca in a lot of the indigenous settings. It's a purgative. It cleans out the intestinal bugs. It's really important for the the jungle people who don't didn't have antibiotics or other Western medicines and the kind of psychic visionary component. Even in olden days, some shamans would drink the medicine on behalf of the patient. So the patient never got to drink the ayahuasca or maybe they got the banisteriopsis in the clean out but not the visions. And so it's really you could probably say this supply and demand of Western spiritual chasing that they heard that ayahuasca was a visionary medicine and that's what they wanted. So that's what they got right. And So what we see in more recent times is a lot of the the Kenai, a lot of the Shipibo fabrics, the weavings that you might see is like altars or dresses or different things with the beautiful visionary kind of geometric patterns. They're meant to be what they call the woven songs of the Amazon. They're kind of visual representations of like vibrational sound waves or the, the vibrational codes of the plants themselves, which the curanderos sing as ikaros in ceremony, but can also be visualised in the artefacts and the the fabrics. But those same fabrics have been changing because Westerners are going on. Can you put a photo in there please with some ayahuasca branches? And like, sure, we need the money, we do that as well, you know, So the traditions are elastic and they're really changing as well. And this is what I mean as the old world and the new world merge in a way we've seen since the 80s with globalisation and all the kind of connections, medicines are coming back to the West. But there's, I wouldn't necessarily say a dilution, but there's definitely a shift in where there how they've been, how they've been served, how they've been used. And there's often a kind of more smorgasbord approach in the West of more, more, more and more variety. But like indigenous tribes, they probably only had one medicine. And now a lot of the ayahuasca retreats in South America, they'll serve ayahuasca on one day. Maybe they'll do Cambo the day before to clean out. They'll do Rappe every day to help stabilise. And they'll do a buffet tow at the moment to a San Pedro, you know, and it's like it's too much. It's too much for the nervous system. And there's no lineage attached to that polymedicine usage. But the Western ego's desire for more and more and more is really affecting, you know, global medicine culture. Speaker 1 And does that culture also come from making money as well, potentially like as in the delivery of the service? The Hustle: Traditional Shamanism vs. Instagram Trends Yeah. I mean all of those tribes we mentioned. I mean when I mean. Speaker 1 Doing those all those in what, a week? Speaker 2 Yeah, usually in a week long retreat, yeah, yeah. So when I first went down 2006 and I've got two books, IRA Shamanic Odyssey or and then the Ayahuasca sessions, this the roar interviews with a lot of the shamans and ayahuasca people, everyone kind of said the same message. They basically said that in Peru at least, you know, before the turn of the century, the 2000s, shamanism essentially, or what they call curanderos or curanderismo, and that's from the Spanish to heal the curanderos, like their word for healer or doctor. The art form was dying out or the practise was dying out. Because you know, when we were there in November last year working on episode 3 of Shamans of the Global Village, one of the women, she was only 30 and she was a kurandera and she'd been training. Marrow had been training since his teens. My other ayahuasca maestro, Percy Garcia in Iquitos, he'd been training since he was 10. And when we say training, it means separation from the busyness of the world, going out to the jungle during what they call a dieta, which is kind of fasting or you may be only no sugars, no salts, no oils, no pork, no alcohol, no sex for adults, you know, but there's, it's cleansing the body to come back to its original kind of factory settings. So you're sensitised enough to hear the vibrations and the voices and the sounds of nature. And that's how the that's how the shamans do their work because they're in unison and they're in service to nature and working with nature to connect to the humans. But that that's a hard part. So when we were there last year in November, this woman, she had a son, Frankie, and he's in our doco. He's 7 and he's like a born shaman. She knew in the room, she got instruction from ayahuasca in the womb that he was going to be, you know, one of those guys. And he was there smoking is mapachos. And he's he went to his first ceremony with us. We brought him to his first ceremony, which was kind of ironic because all these Westerners were going full tilt purging. It was really chaotic, you know, but he was such a stabilising force to have there. But what we're saying is it's usually a hereditary route, or it's also a route you can come to from an initiatory sickness when you survive and you kind of go more to the spirit world. But in the West, we're kind of going, oh, I had a good experience. I wanna become a shaman. You know, it's not necessarily coming from the established lineages or the ways they would come because they understood the gravity of that responsibility. Sure. And there was no glamour to it. Yeah. Everyone kind of feared the shaman, and the shaman necessarily wasn't making a whole lot of money because the village would look after him. There'd be an energy exchange. You get a chicken, you make you cure me, I don't get sick. He's a chicken, right? Yeah. Yeah. But nowadays it's the hustle. Yeah. It's the Instagram. And it is. Speaker 1 Glorified as well, as you said, with social media and Instagram pushing the narrative. And it's kind of cool. It's kind of hip at the moment, yeah. The Psychedelic Renaissance: Permission and Control You know, I was talking to a friend of mine before earlier today and we were talking about, I guess the rise of awareness across the collective, you know, the energy and, and if I am on vibrating on a higher level at the moment, potentially I am, you know, a fractal of the, the divine. Therefore I am contributing to a higher energy as a whole. And if that's the case with, you know, all the psychedelic medicines and stuff like that, people are wanting to get on board, I guess, and therefore it's becoming trendy. Speaker 2 And it's becoming trendy because it's permissive. It's been permissed by the powers that be. So, you know, when I said I went to the the symposium in 2006 with Albert Hoffman looking at LSDS problem child, that was the turning point where the world's media was focusing on this kind of human interest stories. Like generations later, LSD is no longer causing revolutions. And it's not the Nixon and the War on drugs. And there's no dramas. And, you know, they coined the term the psychedelic Renaissance. It was basically MAPS and a lot of the other therapists about the conference then in 2006. But then they got picked up by the media. And so little sound bites over time start to seed and start to, you know, do their magic. But, you know, we're talking about MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies for about 35 years. They're formed in like about 1990 or so. They were the only psychedelic kind of NGO promoting, doing peer reviewed studies on psychedelic, you know, efficacy, dealing with the FDA in America, doing the hard work as an NGO, getting money from, you know, philanthropy and people who are supporting them. But they kind of laid the framework and they were working with the Pentagon getting, you know, regulations in place so vets could get healing, whether that's from ayahuasca or psilocybin or iboga or bufo. And they were getting amazing results. So the Pentagon got on board, different arms of the government got on board, the corporate structure got on board and the media got on board. And So what that has created over the last 20 years is what they have coined this self fulfilling feeling prophecy. Well, it's kind of a bit deflated because they call it the psychedelic renaissance. But I don't feel like we're in a Da Vinci moment where everything's rosy and golden and everything's like libertarian and open source and free. You know, we, we essentially to, to, to be frank, we live in a surveillance culture out to destroy us. And you know, the powers that be are distracting and taking our attention spans and driven by algorithms to control cultural norms and to shape the culture. Speaker 1 But when the culture is changing and their narrative is at at jeopardy, then the the noise gets louder. They get louder, Yeah, in in effort to control. Speaker 2 Us. Yeah, it's the signal noise ratio. Yeah. DMT, Tryptamines, and Australia's Shamanic Underground But interesting enough in that in that signal is that they, they've along the line. What I'm saying is they've given permission to psychedelics to come back. Yeah, within, within the set and setting of the medical establishment and within that very narrow bandwidth of therapeutic use, which is great. Therapeutic use of psychedelics is really fantastic for people that have trauma. But the problem is that's not the only application of these substances. They can be spiritual. So currently, and this kind of segues a little bit into, I'm working on a new podcast called Implants We Trust. And it's looking at the role of the media. It's Australian centric and it's looking at the underground shamanic medicine community in Australia, which I would posit is at least 27 years old. I mean, Dean Jeffrey is a local filmmaker and activist. He's done a lot of work with Sea Shepherds and saving the whales and marine activism. He did a documentary called Shamans of the Amazon in 99. He did one of the last recorded interviews with Terence McKenna in Hawaii, I think in 2000. And he went over to Peru and did the ayahuasca trip, but Terence sent him cuttings of ayahuasca of I think it was the yellow ayahuasca or yellow ayahuasca. And from those original cuttings that Dean had, I believe, you know, a vast majority of the Australian ayahuasca flora has flourished over the last few generations and cuttings and being sprayed etcetera, etcetera. So you know where we are right now doing this interview in the Northern Rivers, Byron region. Mullumbimby is kind of shamanic central for Australia. It's amazing the southern hemisphere, but I'm getting it's at least one generation, maybe stretch a generation or two old where there's been very limited access, but awareness of these medicines and of what they can do and how they can help. And so there is a medical angle to it. There is a health and well being angle. But when I first went to Peru in 2006, I asked all these questions and they said, look, we have a different paradigm to this. You know, for us, that's interesting. Health is like disease means you're not at your baseline equilibrium. Paraphrasing, right? But it's like they're saying that indigenous people, it's not just they eat organic or they're not on screens all the time. It's like they're in nature, you know, the Biome of nature and your human biomes interacting. It's not hard to be an optimal human if you're in the right condition. But Western civilization ain't the right conditions, no, for a healthy human right. Speaker 1 Even just putting shoes in between our feet and the ground. Speaker 2 Exactly. Little things like that, right? Or getting, you know, vitamin D from the sun on your skin, whether you know, sunscreen, I mean, the cancer causing sunscreens, it's like it's everything's out to kill us in Western civilization. So, you know, this idea of health and well being comes back to the idea of what these medicines are for. So we said ayahuasca. Even with that, the DMT was often a purgative, clean out intestinal things. It's a healthy thing. Yeah. When you add something like the DMT's, there's not necessarily a health benefit from that. Well, actually the tryptamines can be, they're considered to be anti inflammatory. They can reduce inflammation in the body. They're immunomodulated. So they can help that. They can help with neurogenesis to the brain. There's been a lot of recent studies looking at tryptamines when they surge up in the human Organism and they're really hard to detect outside of the body. I've basically been told you need to do a Spinal Tap to get live kind of bone marrow readings and blood readings, not just like an intravenous drip. Yes, you need to be able to get DMT readings because it's almost like the trees. DMT's Role in Birth, Death, and Brain Function Here in Australia we have a plethora of acacias, different kind of trees and shrubs. I think the the yellow waddle here in Australia, the national emblem is a DMT containing plant. Really from from what I hear, the cuminatus, there's so many different trees which contain DMTDMT or dimethyltryptamine. In the tryptamine family, there's lots of tryptamines. There's five methoxy in it and then dimethyltryptamine. There's pineoline, there's bufotamine. Melanin or what produces melatonin is a tryptamine. Nature puts them all through the keep the, you know, flora and fauna of the natural Kingdom, plants, animals and in humans. And so in recent studies I've realised that DMTS can or the belief, and a lot of this comes from Rick Strassman who did some of the Seminole studies on on DMT from 1990 to 1995 and wrote the book DMT, the Spirit Molecule, which Mitch Schultz then made into a documentary which popularised it again, creating that supply and demand of interest. But basically he was saying that, you know, he believes he was a Buddhist, that DMT is secreted in the human Organism at peak experiences like at birth. And we believe, you know, there's different tryptomines. 5 meo is the unity kind of one that's in the buffer of various toad, but it's also in other plants in nature and it's also in us. So they believe that the baby's kind of in this unity state in the womb, it doesn't have an ego formed yet. And we believe that the neurochemical catalyst for that ego dissolution or boring it is the five meo DMT. When the babies are born, it's believed that the tryptamines kind of keep flooding the brain for a couple of weeks or whatever and then slowly as they fade, it's almost like gives a bit of a buffer to cope with the world. You're still in this unity oneness. So that's at birth, at death, it's believed. And they've they've done a recent study looking at near death experiences and written oral reports of people comparing their experiences. And they're very consistent across the board for generations now. People report seeing a white light. They report a feeling of crossing over, being disembodied, maybe meeting up with their loved ones, or more likely just kind of dissipating and being in this kind of unity field, this sense of oneness or unity. So all of those descriptors are potentially exactly what you can experience in Five MEODMT from an external source and what the neuroscience has shown over the decades. And I've worked with a few neuroscientists on some EEG studies on Five MEODMT. Doctor Juana Costa, He did my brain. So when I went to Peru 2006. Speaker 1 EG is a scan on your brain. Speaker 2 Yeah, it's Electro encephalography scan. It's basically they put nodes on the scalp through the hair and a wet gel or a dry, dry application and they're reading surface level electrical activity and inferring from that which regions of the brain are firing on what's happening in the brain. But from all that and, you know, a lot more studies, Doctor Wan published in 2015, he's EG studies he started in 2006 and he's since deceased. But you know, a week into my, you know, three months of ayahuasca in the jungles of 2006, I encountered Dr Juan and Ron Wheelock, the gringo shaman, and he was serving 5 MEODMT. It was a synthetic mixed on a, a chemical, I mean a plant material. But that was yeah, that was definitely the single most intense, beautiful spiritual release of my life. And funnily enough, we recorded what happened on the outside and that became the centrepiece of my documentary I Awakenings, which was on this idea of the mediation of these substances to help awaken humanity. And the interesting thing about the DMTS is my shorthand is, you know, they're all through nature and for, for a long time. You're asking how long have people drink, drinking ayahuasca, we presume thousands of years. It could be hundreds, could be less. But the, the, the, The thing is, what we can say is they're taking it from an external source, but it's only the, the, the fragmented ego that is so separate from nature, which sees nature as separate it from us. So they're taking it from nature to almost like my shorthand is training wheels to heal, to remember, to reconnect. But we have the tryptamines in US. So what I'm getting at is peak experiences like birth, the death, the crossing over, the, the similarities with the five meo experience. What the neuroscience has shown is that 5 meo smoked and inhaled from an external source settles in the frontal and parietal lobes of the brain in the frontal cortex, and it lowers the electrical activity, bringing it into gamma or a hyper coherent state. But essentially it's lowering the ego and allowing the ego to kind of distribute into unity consciousness once again. And so these substances are within us. These substances can be modulated through breath work, through meditation, through darkness retreats, or they can flare up spontaneously and people have these experiences. Speaker 1 I've heard of people doing it through breath work as well. Speaker 2 A DMT. Speaker 1 Experience. Yeah, through breath work. Speaker 2 I hear, I hear from a lot of people that do Wim Hof and it's not the ice baths, it's the, it's the, the, the breath work of the like the fire breath, which kind of brings back on that expanded state. Speaker 1 Yeah. The Bufo Alvarius Toad and 5-MeO-DMT Explained OK. So before you mentioned that when you did your five MEODMT experience, it wasn't from the toad itself? Speaker 2 No, so the toads only really come into popularity since about 2010. Doctor Jerry Sandoval and Doctor Octavio Reading, these two Mexican doctors who are also drug addicts who are also very polarising figures in our community, you know, they discovered the toad. It had been introduced to them by other people. The toad had been known about since about 66 in the scientific literature. It wasn't until the 80s at this Arizona guy under the pseudonym Albert Most. Yeah. So, you know, Octavio and and Doctor Jerry had discovered the toad medicine around 2010. And then Octavio used to be an addict to different substances. I think it was ice. But he he went to work with in the Sonoran Desert with the Serie tribe. It's kind of like, you know, Indigenous Australians here decimated, moved on from the land, that area of Mexico and the north of Mexico over into Arizona's narco drug territory. The whole villages were kind of ice addicted as just part of the cartel kind of, you know, mechanisms. So he worked with the Indigenous elders and then worked with their permission with all the ice addicts of the village and really had great success rates of curing them or alleviating their kind of addictive tendencies. And then from the two years working there, from about 2012 on, started to work globally with the medicine. And it's kind of like a, my shorthand is it's like a Moses old, like Old Testament figures. You know, it's like, not to say that there's big shadows with them, but they almost single handedly brought out the toad medicine into the into the West or into, you know, the awareness. But previous to the toad, you know 5 tryptamines in general DMT and five Vimeo were known by science. The hippies did know about DMT. It wasn't used that much and Grateful Dead mucked around with it a bit. 5 meo was around in the therapeutic settings as a lab based extract like a stand alone chemical. Ralph Metzner who was a contemporary team Leary at Harvard and was a therapist. You know, both above ground and did work underground. He was also since deceased. He wrote a book called The Toad and the Jaguar and he named the synthetic 5 Mio Jaguar as opposed to the book of various toad. And so there's actually a kind of lineage that's at least 25 plus years old from around the turn of the century of underground therapists in the States utilising the Jaguar and working with patients, clients that, you know, in their therapeutic role. And then Ralph had used it since the 80s. So when I discovered the Five Vimeo in 2006, I really didn't know what I was in for. That was a synthetic one. That Five Vimeo was only made illegal in 2011, I believe the late James Oroc, who is a wonderful writer and raconteur and explorer. He wrote the book The Trip to Mean Palace, which was not just about the buffo toad. It's about 5 meo in general, but that was his first experience of five meo from the toad. I see a lot in the media lately, the shorthand from people that just kind of crib notes from other media sources. They usually introduce 5 meo was from the buffo toad, and then they kind of don't differentiate that there's a synthetic version. Yeah. OK. Is there a? Speaker 1 Difference between the two as in the experience? Speaker 2 Yeah, I mean, you know, taste, flavour and kind of earthiness with the toad. My shorthand is it's like Internet Explorer and Safari. They both get to the same Internet. It's just the bufo of various secretions only contain about 30% five meo and you've got the next major ingredients, the bufotonin and then there's about 17 other trace alkaloids. Some people believe there's an entourage effect from that. There's more holistic, it's more healing. But again, there can be a romanticization with the hippie kind of thing where people people do like the organic. It is natural. There is something maybe in that, but good clean synthetic lab based sources can also be very just very clean and very smoother journey perhaps. Speaker 1 And I guess probably more structured in the like the delivery, so you can kind of. Speaker 2 Yeah, the delivery mechanism is another kind of hurdle to get over with all that. Australia's Medical Psychedelic Model and Corporate Interests But, you know, I mean, the thing to take away from all this is, yeah, these medicines have been percolating for decades in public awareness. Yeah. And they come back to where we're talking about with MAPS and with the permission given and the medical model. So currently, you know, in America, they're still lobbying and trying. I think psilocybin and MDMA have been declared. They've been fast tracked with the FDA for kind of doing the stage 3 trials to get the the proof of, you know, the efficaciousness of these substances to help heal to be in the medical kind of model. What really surprised the world in general was about what are we in? It'll be 3 years ago this year I think. I think it was 23 that the Australian TGA kind of upset the applecart in a bit and pre pre empted the American model by by I guess, decriminalising or allowing for the legal use of both psilocybin and MDMA in the medical model under the insurance scheme with trained therapists almost three years ago now. And So what that created was kind of a world's first, you know, Western country, which had a pathway for the legal healing use of psychedelics. And this is building upon this idea of the psychedelic renaissance. What's happened with MAPS in the last, I'd say 5 or 10 years, though, Is there 35 to almost 40 year history of doing all the studies, all the proof, getting all the funding, getting all everything done to prove to lobby the government, they laid the way. And then what happened in the last decade also is venture capitalist came in, capitalism came in and people started to realise, wow, Silicon Valley, you know, which has always been a psychedelic hotbed, But the big kind of convergence with the Bitcoiners and the tech entrepreneurs and everyone, psychedelics became hip and groovy again, but not just for what they could do, but for the money they could make sure. And So what happened is it was a virgin playing field. MAPS was a not for profit. They were kind of naive in a way, a lot of goodwill in the community and so different psychedelic corporate companies who were looking for return on investment, stockholder return, shareholder return, all that kind of stuff. They started to look at ways they could monetize or make more money from the psychedelic experience, even though it's still not legal in the states apart from on a regional level, in places like Oregon, Denver, they've passed more statewide laws decriminalising. There's a whole movement called decriminalised nature. But on a federal level, things still aren't. And there's been issues, you know, in the interplay between. But essentially they were looking at ways these corporate companies to like, you know, the the psychedelic model that they used in the medical model with therapists and things like holding a hand or wearing a blindfold or having a room with quiet, quiet lighting and mood. Like they, they want to patent that. And then. Yeah, yeah. Although, you know, looking at the chemicals themselves, because the, the shamanic medicines like the Ayahuasca's and San Pedro's and the organic chemicals, they tried to put a patent on ayahuasca back in about 2005 and it kind of got over its first hurdle. But then it got disbarred because there's previous usage by all these indigenous cultures. And so the patent laws don't work with the shamanic medicines because they have indigenous lineage and they have time wanted usage. But what the the corporations want to do and, and the, the money interests want to do is they want to take the, the raw materials, change a molecule here or there and put a patent on it. So even with, you know, man made chemicals like for instance ketamine, which is legal here in Australia for depression under a certain category, same in America. And then all these ketamine clinics started up and what it's almost like what happened with medical marijuana, marijuana in the States, the industry starts to become just this kind of like streamlined, you know, you go into San Francisco. I used to live in San Francisco before COVID and you'd go into dispensaries and there'd be like Apple Mac shops, there'd be like white streamlined glass counters. Can I help you? You know, it was like, it was all just, it was like living in the future, right? But there's this kind of a romanticization and kind of like Instagram ization of, you know, the, the, these medicines in these capitalist containers. And so, you know, some of these companies, they took something like ketamine, which has all these clinks around. And then they would do mail order and things just got messy, you know, and they pulled back. But they'd take something like ketamine, which costs, let's say something like 8 cents a unit, right? And then they change one molecule and make it esketamine. And they were charging something like $1000 a unit, right? And this is the model of the corporate, the corporate structure in the psychedelic renaissance. Because the Renaissance Renaissance implies some humanitarian utopian idealism, but the reality is the voracious nature of capitalist extraction is going to just suck the medicines dry for everything it can get. And so Australia is currently the world's leading proponent of the medicalization of psychedelics. It is legal. You can, you can do it. You have to have very narrow bandwidth of availability for treatment resistant PTSD and or depression. And I think the psilocybin and the MD may are specific to which condition you have. Speaker 1 So the psilocybin being. Speaker 2 Magic mushrooms. What we call magic mushrooms, Yeah. And currently, you know, under the medical model, it costs somewhere in the vicinity of $20,000 Australian for a session or a series of a few sessions because they work with two therapists, which is kind of a time monitored therapeutic kind of model. It might be those medicines long lasting 6 to 8 hours. So you've got the therapists, you know, time 2 therapists for 6 to 8 hours of their time. You've got the preparation and then you've got the integration. And there might be one or two or three of those sessions. You know, and obviously you know, a lot of the, the data both from the States and overseas and there hasn't been an enormous amount of local Australian data, but they're working on it. I think Melbourne University is doing some studies at the moment, but the data usually comes back very positively that these substances can help alleviate depression, anxiety, the the malaise of the Western ego in this hyper accelerated age. And that's what the Kiranderos of the Amazon told me 20 years ago. Yeah, you're all fucked in the head. Yeah, essentially because you're fucked in the head, right. You said the calm you. Speaker 1 Know you said earlier that we're not in a position to be of health when we're, you know, thrown into Western. Well, these circumstances where they're, you know. Speaker 2 That's a very good point. Psychedelics: A Better Alternative to SSRIs for Trauma? And this is exactly what I'm kind of get to is that the whole psychedelic renaissance is this kind of like, it's like this bubble of what they, you know, within their medical model, within the insurance model for only people that can afford it. They can apply with the right application. So what's happened is in the last three years or so, from what I believe, there's something in the vicinity of 50 or 60 people, Australia, why that have managed to get through the bottleneck, one of the problems. Speaker 1 60 people at 25 grand. Speaker 2 Yeah, 2025 grand the problem there's multiple problems, but they they're kind of boot boot starting an industry from scratch and there's existing therapists who are keen to be psychedelic assisted therapists, but then they have to go through a training, they have to get government kind of, you know, licencing certification. They have to be NGO organisations which are accrediting that, that kind of thing. And what it created was a bottleneck where there weren't enough therapists, right. And so currently under that model and one of the leading proponents is Mind Medicine Australia, which have a very robust course. I do know someone who's done the course. Speaker 1 I've on their email. Speaker 2 Yeah, and I'm Privy to a lot of the intricate he's got and it's really good. It's really good and really robust and gives a really big understanding. But under their model, they have a triad where there will be a therapist in the room, there will be a prescriber who is able to licence the usage of the psilocybin or the MDMA to the therapist, and there can be a third party who might be a breathwork instructor or some other modality. And so the way it's promoted in the, we're talking about the glamorization of psychedelics and the fact, oh, wow, you can become a psychedelic facilitator. Yeah, you can be a breathwork instructor, trip sitter. You know, there's all these online kind of Facebook ads all around saying because it's created this supply and demand. And so everyone's been hearing for the last 20 years how how amazing these substances are. They can help with the exact problems that modern culture is causing in everyone. The anxiety, the depression, the, you know, all that type of stuff. And at the same time, at the same time, the SSRI's, which for the last 20-30 years have been the main port of call to band aid the depressions and anxieties and hyperactivity. And who doesn't have ADHD in this modern culture? Oh my God, don't don't work. Sri were meant to be a short term kind of, you know, band aid. They don't fix the root problem. And what you know I've seen in the shamanic culture globally is that the psychedelic medicines, when they release the ego, part of the healing comes from the ego finally being able to let go. When we're on the rat race of civilization, the stress and the turmoil and the hustle, the endless hustle, it doesn't stop. And the mind is so hyper it's working itself into sickness. Speaker 1 Unpack the word ego because ego I think. Speaker 2 Ego simply means in the Latin the sense of I. It just means the sense of I. So when we're talking before about babies, you know, being flooded with tryptamines and in this ego list state, the ego doesn't form. I don't know when, but in the first couple of months, six months old, it's when you start to realise and you know, if you've ever been in an egoless, you know, tripping state as an adult, you look at the sky, you look at the trees, you look at someone else, but you don't realise that you're not the thing you're looking at. It's kind of like you're not thinking that you're separate from it. You're kind of feeling that unity and that oneness in your exterior surroundings. So the baby's kind of the same. It takes a while for it to kind of come out of the unity into the oneness. Speaker 1 Which would make sense because it would feel still at one with Mum. Speaker 2 Yeah, for, you know, in the womb and then for the short term on the outside, it's got that that buffer zone with the tryptamines to keep it in unity. So, you know, the ego just means the sense of I and there's obviously nothing wrong with the ego. You need it to navigate and survive modern culture. But you know, if you look at the East, all of their meditation techniques are to reduce the ego, not to kill the ego, which is what a lot of the gung ho alpha male psychedelic culture promotes, ego death or whatever, whatever. It's bullshit because the ego doesn't die, it just quietens. The poet Rumi has the best quote that I like. He says you are not the drop, you are the ocean in the drop. When you individuate and separate from being oceanic, you just become the drop. But actually you're always connected to the fullness of the ocean, you just don't realise it. Right so you know, psychedelics have been called ego dissolvers since the 60s, but what they really do is they modulate the ego. They don't necessarily fully dissolve it unless you're on a very high dose of any psychedelic, like you're high enough dose of acid short, you're going to go to the white light just like you do on five meo. It's all vibrational, right? So what we're getting at to come full circle here is that the culture that is promoting the use of psychedelics to essentially replace SSRIs. And that's what MAPS has been kind of positioning itself in the States and talking to the Pentagon and the the vets and, you know, the insurance companies, they're realising they don't work. You know, the SSRI's have such terrible flow through effects. They just suppress, they neutralise, they make everything neutral. They might not get super depressed, but you don't get super happy either. Ruins your libido. It kind of ruins your quality of life. And they fuck people up essentially. So, you know, they're trying to pigeonhole psychedelics to be the replacement. Releasing Trauma: The Shamanic Model of Healing But the problem is, and this is what you know, the shamans of the Amazon told me, our conception of health and well being isn't theirs, right? Their conception of health and well being means being in relationship with nature. Nature. And what we want to do is harvest nature to create a product, to pop a pill, to get to work on the 9:00 to 5:00, the magic pill, right? And so our whole paradigm is misaligned with what health and well being really is. And So what I'm seeing now in global psychedelic culture and the medical model is a very well intentioned effort which has been going on for 40 years to bring these substances back into the medical model, which is all good and well. What that's done in the last 20 years is create a supply and demand from the general populace who have heard these things work, but they don't have access above ground. In Australia, we've had three years of incredibly limited access, which is hopefully going to get better as a bottleneck subsides. But there's also an upsell where a lot of the people doing the courses believe that they're going to be accredited to hit the ground running and be a psychedelic assisted therapist. If they look in the small print, that's actually not what happens. You have to work with an accredited therapist and a prescriber in a container and the whole system is sluggish and bottlenecked and it's going to be a very long time before it gets its feet. And even then, it's in the medical model, the insurance model, you need all that money. So, but what's happening is that's creating an overflow from a lot of the trainings above ground into the underground. And so yet again, the underground is kind of absorbing the expectations of the above ground. And there's always been this interplay. We tried to get on this point a while back with my daughter talking about the counterculture and the mainstream culture. So the mainstream culture is allowing psychedelics back in into the medical model. They're going to make money off it. They're going to milk them. They're going to you know what I'll just Huxley feared what they'll become somer for the masses like a mind control pill that pop your pop your MDMA every day and be happy, you know, and be good workers and don't question the authorities, right? Speaker 1 That actually brings me to a question I was going to ask. You were suggesting as a as a an alternative to the SRIS, but that's an ongoing treatment. Is this so let's say the psychedelics yes. Is there a one off and it reprograms the? Speaker 2 Mind, that's what and that's what made for the day. That's what the corporations and the insurance models actually gave some feedback on that were worried because people can have in one session or two or three sessions, a complete cessation of their issues, their depression, their anxiety, their whatevers can be alleviated or cured. Well, you know, in the shamanic model, essentially you have more than the physical body, you have the emotional body and we trap a lot of unprocessed emotions. Chinese medicine understands it a bit more. You can do lymphatic drainage and things which can help block up the fascia where we store the micro traumas in the body as well as the emotional kind of stuff that's unprocessed. Everyone's kind of like subliminally or awarely got trauma, right? And most people don't realise it. Yeah. Most people just call it personality. And so it comes up, but there's a reason why you're in your head so much. There's a reason why you can't stop thinking so much. There's a reason why you're so hyper, right? And it's everything we're carrying. So these substances, especially things like for instance, 5 MEO DMT, which is an ego dissolver, it allows the ego to fully let go if you allow it too, because the ego can resist. And in doing so, it's like, you know, clearing the old Etcher sketch or emptying the cache. It's like what we've been holding on to finally has a chance to be released because the ego is not holding it in like a coconut bottle. And so the medical model hasn't really understood that somehow they have measured that these substances, the tryptamine specifically, can be anti inflammatory. I believe that's because the body attacks the areas in the body where they're stored. Traumas. Speaker 1 So they're producing as pain. Speaker 2 Yeah. So if you're storing trauma in your neck or your shoulder, whatever, and it's happened from something that happened, the body is trying to get to that pain and it's creating inflammation around it. And so when the trauma is released energetically, the inflammation cannot have to be created by the body. Yeah. So I think there's a deeper aspects to that than just this physicality. But in the medical model, they're looking at the physicalities as well. Media Demonisation and the Psychedelic Underground But what they're trying to do, to reiterate, is to pigeonhole the psychedelics into to replicable products, which can be used in the same model of healing as SSRI's have been. But they're not really, And they don't like it because then they're like, well, they get cured in one or three sessions. Where's our return client base, right. And so Australia's kind of leading the way with the above ground medicalization of psychedelics. But as I said, Australia's also, I mean, apart from like, you know, the hippies in the 60s and through the 70s and 80s and 90s and California was definitely a hotbed. Australia's had one of the oldest demographics here of shamanic community here in this Northern Northern Rivers region. And from it, a lot of the other medicine cultures have spread around Australia. And it's obviously a lot smaller than the states or maybe Europe or whatever. But in the old days it used to be like a big family where everyone did know each other. And, you know, people who would serve medicines didn't do it for fame and glory. It's was illegal under the eyes of the Lord, not under the lives of law, the eyes of God, which is where law originally originated. Maritime law, national law, there's arguments to be made around that. But essentially, you know, communities in Australia who've been working with the medicines and finding their own healing from them have followed the indigenous models. People would go over to Peru or South America, they would train with Indigenous curanderos or they're off their own bat, and they would work with the medicines locally. And as more people became familiar with more medicines, there's the San Pedro's, the ibogas, the buffo, more recently on Lilacoi Morning, glorious seeds, the psilocybin. The media has been relentlessly, and we always thought it was a good thing. They've been very usually quite positive on the psychedelics, but the agenda behind it is to push collectively has to make a medicalization soma model for the establishment to make money. And what the media have also been doing at the same time is demonising the underground. So just a tidbit about this upcoming podcast series that I'm doing. It's looking at the ways when in Australia, when the medicine culture does hit the mainstream news, the ways that it's been framed. And that is such a perfect word for it because the narrative framing is usually things like cult leader, right? Or guru, you know, talked to Pete Evans and you know, around Covad time when he was doing some alternative Wellness stuff and pizza plant medicine guy himself, you know, because he was like, you know, my kitchen rules in middle Australia's lounge rooms, loved by Australian. He had to be soured. He had to be turned in the eyes of Australian public because what he was starting to promote was alternative health regiments, whether that's paleo diet or ayahuasca, right? I remember 1 new idea headline that I showed a picture of him on the front cover. He's on holiday somewhere and he's reading a book on magic mushrooms by the pool. And they're like Oh my God, Pete Evans the red magic mushroom book. It's like but but what you see over time is the media construct A narrative which controls opinion and and so the above ground and. Speaker 1 They also control the Pharmaceutical industry. Speaker 2 Well, this is what Pete was getting on about, is that the Pharmaceutical industry and the money behind it and the advertising on TV and all their stuff, it's all floated by these money vested interests. And then when you get into medicine culture, as we said, these things can't be patented. These things are outside the system. But what's been happening over the last few years, you know, sadly and regretfully, there have been some incidents in Australia where people have been harmed or died. Legal Battles, Media Bias, and the Psychedelic Underground There's been a few cambo deaths. One happened I think in 2019 here in Mullumbimby. Natasha Lechner was in a cambo ceremony. She was, she'd been studying to be a cambo practitioner. She was being administered, Cambo was legal at the time, and she had fatal complications from from that ceremony. She'd worked with her many times before. Maybe she'd done underlying heart condition. The coroner never came to conclusive proof of actually what happened, but SBS did a good story in 2019 showing her her brother had worked with her. He'd done Cambo after her death. But you know, sadly, when things like that happened, the language then turns to originally in the years before Cambo, for instance, which is an Amazonian medicine from the bicolor Medusa frog. It's not necessarily a psychedelic. It involves a lot of peptides. It's technically a poison. It helps boost the immune system. The Matzis tribe in the jungles use it when they're hunting. And you know, there's been a bit of criticism about colonialisation and extracting an indigenous medicine used for a specific purpose and now becoming a kind of hip and groovy shamanic Wellness thing. And there's a little bit of truth to that. But, you know, Cambo was around for a good decade or so, and there were conscientious people serving it, working with it. People were getting amazing healings from it. And it was all underground, right? But then things started to get above ground. There was a couple of stories here or there where they would say alternative Wellness. But then as soon as stuff started to go wrong and there was a, you know, a death and you can understand, rightly so people want to have both, both points of view. Speaker 1 But also like the the medical malpractice numbers in Australia is huge. We're talking thousands. And I think in America, it's up to nearly 400,000 a year, yeah. Speaker 2 Just we're not gonna demonise random hospital procedures. No. But what this brings up is the disparity between the above grand medical model, the safety cheques, yeah, right. And the ethics and the best practises and the fact that the underground doesn't necessarily have those, although majority of people that I've known over the last two decades have lineage and have been trained with indigenous cultures that have their own internalised versions of best practises and ethics. But the reinforcement from the media is that it shifts this narrative and it starts to use words like like with Pete cult leader or Paleo cult leader. And they just start to insinuate little things to let people guide them that this is kooky, freaky and you don't want to be involved. And this is demonised. There's been, you know, another IN2021A death in an ayahuasca ceremony with a guy, a really respected practitioner of ayahuasca law, Solaris, who's a friend. Someone died in one of his ceremonies in 2021, but the person died from a ruptured oesophagus who was administered cambo earlier in the day. The guy had refused medical attention. There's a lot of compounding issues. But when the media kind of, you know, dissect it and flay it and kind of they, they kind of just blow it up out of proportion and certain details and certain narratives. And again, overall what I'm getting at is no one wants anyone to die. Everyone wants everyone to be safe in a shamanic ceremony and container. I do think that the underground in general in definitely in Australia, I know there's been basically with different medicines, there's different kind of, I know for instance, with five Meo, there's an organisation in the States called the conclave.info. They have best practises and ethics documents for facilitators to kind of adhere to and give frameworks of entrainment. There's some Cambo organisations which train people. Cambo only became illegal I think in 2021 or 22 after some of the deaths. But what had started to happen is a lot of the Cambo practitioners locally, because it wasn't illegal, were able to advertise on things like Facebook. The ones who were public were actually headhunted. And this is one of the really concerning things for me. There's a NSW non was a governmental agency, but it's not democratically elected. It has nothing to to do with, you know, it's not even judicially kind of connected. It's the Healthcare Complaints Commission you've just set up a few years ago. Right? Yeah. And so they're kind of like this extra, you know, outside the system, yet they're in the system. And then they regulate healthcare. And what they have is a whole label that they have created for everyone that's not in the system, whether you're a Reiki practitioner or a breathwork practitioner or an ayahuasca practitioner or a Cambo practitioner. And even if you're underground or not, now you exist in the category which they're going to define you as. And then they have laws and legalities and prohibitions around that. So the NSW Healthcare Complaints Commission came to law and basically prohibited him from serving ayahuasca once he became known in the system. And I've talked to a couple of other Cambo practitioners in the Victorian sister organisation Health Healthcare Commission went after a lot of the Camber people. One of the guys I'm interviewing for the podcast and there wasn't necessarily any deaths or any issues happening. They just said you're a practitioner of a medicine that's unregulated. Therefore we're going to prohibit you because we can see that you exist. There's a beautiful couple in in Adelaide, South Australia, Carly and Brad, Brad Williams, Carly Angel. They were, I guess, high profile or visible cambo practitioners in a really ethical safe containers doing a lot of good work with people because they were visible. They were shut down by the South Australian version of the healthcare. Speaker 1 Commission. Speaker 2 Right. But what I started to see is this pattern where Cambo, because it was not illegal and people were visible, were basically attacked, isolated and disempowered and in a legal framework threatened with, you know, fines and gaol if they would continue to work with this medicine that was not not made not illegal at the time. Then the medicine was made illegal when other medicines like ayahuasca or five meo or magic mushrooms, which have been under the eyes of the law illegal. And they're only illegal in Australia under the United Nations Psychotropic Drug Convention 1971 instigated by Richard Nixon. And, you know, there's a lot of dubiousness on so many levels because these substances are usually kept illegal because they have no medical value. And yet at the same time, the above ground establishment has proven the medical value, but not for the underground, only for the above ground. So there's discrepancies. There's, you know, two stories for two different things. But what I'm saying is the above ground has created this demand for these substances which it can't fulfil. So the underground is taking the brunt of that. There's always, as I've said it, with the global shamanic resurgence, new generations of facilitators out there. It used to be, you know, most were aligned for the right reasons and with the right trainings and lineage. Now there's it's getting more murky waters as more and more people pile in. It seems to be there's a critical mass happening where the underground needs some kind of representation and it needs some kind of spokespeople. There's different organisations like, you know, EGA Australia, Prism, Mind Medicine Australia, There's the Psychedelic Aware Therapy Change Hub Patch led by Pixie Miller, who's done a lot of media liaison and outreach. But essentially, we're not represented. And the reinforcement of the mainstream media with the negative languaging and the tropes and the way they present it keeps it underground. But it's very kind of unfair because the underground is holding the brunt of the capitalist structure above ground, which has created a demand. Yeah, that's right. Which you can't fulfil. Yeah, right. And so it's kind of a no win situation. Yeah. And there needs to be some release valve for this, I think. So that's kind of what my new podcast is looking at and the dynamics and the interplay between that and you know, it's it's really sad when the media do demean and attack these practises. You could be a a reputable practitioner for many years. You know, I've worked with these medicines overseas in countries with their legal here in Australia, Ioffer psychedelic integration support. But you know, I've heard I've heard wind that there's a journalist after me to do a hit piece. You know, I'm going to name her Elise Worthington with the ABC. How are you going? Elise? Please return my calls. I mean, you know, in journalistic integrity, there's two sides to every story. But they throw the rules out the window. They get what they want. They have the story that they want to set up. They have the thing. He's a cult leader. He's someone who's praying on women or whatever their their line is. And they don't want to have two sides to the story. They don't want to have a balanced, you know, narrative. They want to incite and they want to reinforce this dangerous underground and these dangerous people because then they'll herd you to the above ground, which can't actually help you. So it's interesting times we're in, I guess we could say. Speaker 1 It is an interesting, I mean, I'm sorry that you, you know, it's being made that way. And I, it doesn't surprise me at all with the way that the narratives are and, you know, capitalism, as you said before, it's all about money and it's all about control as well. If it doesn't fit the narrative or it doesn't fit the, you know, the system, of course they want to crush it, stop it so they can, you know, alcohol, taxes, whatever it is that they're trying to do to make the money on. Navigating Psychedelic Healing: Advice and Personal Reflections But look, I really appreciate you coming in mate. It's been such an interesting chat. Yeah, that's one thing I would ask you before you go is, you know, if I was looking to jump into like a a treatment, what you know, what would my experience be like? Let's say 5 MEODMT. What am I going to experience and what am I going to benefit from it? Just in a quick. Speaker 2 Well, as I said, you know, just in the Australian, it's the same globally in at least in the Western countries is that it's no longer about fringe, you know, lone wolf males experimenting with psychedelics because they're on the edge of the culture. It's mums and pops, you know, it's like everyday people that have trauma. It's older generation demographics that are exploring their spirituality before they die and end of, you know, life kind of anxieties. It's people with cancers or or you know, physical ailments. It's all shapes of society, men, women, age groups, socio economic backgrounds. What I think we need to understand is when we start to move into medicine culture and when we say medicine, we're talking shamanic medicines, psychedelic medicines versus mainstream idea of what medicine is. You become part of a community which is underground and has connections all over the world and has representation in some degree in a lot of the kind of Facebook groups and the little micro communities that are out there. But you know, in this kind of post woke culture that we're in, I believe we need to identify as a marginalised subgroup because that way we have a cohesion and a coherence which maybe the mainstream can start to see, oh, these aren't just random drug taking people. Sure. This is a movement, yeah, in Australia and worldwide of people that are in search of not just healing but connection. That's the thing which the shamans have said, it's that we're so disconnected, we no longer feel our place in the web of life and that's where our disease comes from. And so that's a preface to say if you're feeling that and you feel these substances may be of help, you kind of need to do your own research. They aren't necessarily for everyone. If you have underlying mental issues, bipolar, schizophrenia, they're not going to be a good match. Certain medicines aren't a good match of people have heart conditions, things like that. So you need to do your own research and all the different kind of psychological medicines. My shorthand is it's like being, I always think of MASH and the old, you know that, you know, yeah, you know, the morning like 50s Korean War, they'd be in the surgery, you know, every day. And they go nurse suction sutra scissors, you know, that's what the medicines are like. Ayahuasca's maybe more like the, the, the scalpel. Because your egos present for 6 to 8 hours, you're getting a lot of information from your unconscious. You're purging and cleaning, but you're getting visions, you're getting downloads from the universe. Magic mushrooms, the same the egos present. The bullfover is toad is kind of like the, the chloroform, right? It's kind of like smothering the ego. It's dissolving the ego. And there's the gods factory reset that comes from that. They all do slightly different things. They work on what they call the default mode network, look at the brain usually and drop that. So your sense of I can go journeying into the wider spectrum, but the five MBO kind of works in the prefrontal cortex and lowers the ego. There's different, I guess, I guess different kind of shamanic medicines for the different needs. So there's that. Speaker 1 Someone that's never experienced any psychedelics is not going to jump straight into booth. Or they might. Speaker 2 You know, what I hear anecdotally is I reckon about 1/3 of the new wave of people coming into psychedelics, which are mainstream people, they're doctors, they're lawyers, they're judges, they're teachers. Yeah, right. Yep. They're people that are, like, interested and their friends have done it or they know someone. They want healing, they're coming into it and a lot of people have no experience in psychologics before because Bufo is more prominent in the last decade. In the last few years especially, a lot of people are coming into it. It's a short 15 minute experience because the body metabolises it, because it recognises 5 MEO, because we produce it. And so in that sense, it can be a lot easier for people as a starting experience. Yeah, OK. And it's also not a lot about the content. It's about the white light or it's about the letting go. So, and that's not to say you should do it. It's up to the individual. Ayahuasca circles are still very popular. The psilocybin circles have been growing in popularity again. Psilocybin can be a very good one energetically to clear the densities in the body. Yep. Right. All the stuff we're holding onto to clean you out. Sure. And. But those experiences are, you know, 4 to 6 to 8 hours in a longer. Yeah, all of these things, you know, I would, I'll caution to be done in the right container, which means you're set in setting and after and with the right facilitator or guide, you know, you can go out and find your own magic mushrooms in a paddock and and do whatever if you don't get shot by the farmer and that's great. But you know, if you're doing it and you want support because it's your first time or you got an intention and you got healing that you need. Speaker 1 Potentially go deeper as well because you. Speaker 2 Can't go deeper because you looked after. Yeah. Things that can happen is people can, like, have a medical complication. They can choke on their vomit. They can go wandering off. Their ideation, their sense of reality is obviously altered. Yeah. And you know, what I say is what came out from the jungles of Peru two or three generations ago wasn't just ayahuasca, it was lineage. It was the sense of ceremony that you do these substances in a safe, sound and sacred ceremony. And that way you can be contained and looked after. And then a good facilitator will also offer integration support because the big work happens after the peak experience. It's about what do you do with that? What do you make sense of that? Yeah. You know, how did that go? It doesn't all necessarily work in one session, but it's it's like a relationship both with yourself, with the medicines and with the shamanic practitioners of the underground that exists to this day. Speaker 1 It's fantastic and fascinating stuff. Where can we find this new podcast? You'll. Speaker 2 You'll you'll probably find it on my my website requisam.com. I'm still kind of in development of it and hopefully it'll be coming out in a few months, probably probably straight after the ABC do their hit piece on me. I'll I'll probably be an episode myself and I'll get to dissect what the media say about me. But you know, I just hope I can continue, continue to contribute some wisdom to the collective voice. Speaker 1 I really appreciate your time. You're a beautiful human mate. And yeah, it's been amazing. Thank you. Look forward to catching up again. Speaker 2 All right. Sounds good. Thanks, mate. Be beautiful out there. Speaker 1 What an amazing guy, what an amazing life he's lived. I had the experience myself of the Bufo Alvarius toad journey and it was one that I struggled to explain or describe actually. It was just so profound and I found extremely beneficial for myself. I've never kind of recommended it to anyone. I think that everyone needs to find their own path towards healing, whether it be through kinesiology, meditation, psychedelics, that's all up to you and how it comes down. And for me, I, yeah, I truly am blessed to have been down the exciting path of that journey. And I definitely don't regret it. It was amazing. And I feel it's a really grounding and beautiful experience that yeah, I feel has definitely benefited me. But thanks for tuning in and hope you enjoy.