#304 - DARPA Drug Research, Psychedelic Toad Venom & Why VICE Failed | Hamilton Morris

Watch BONUS episodes on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Hamilton Morris is a journalist, documentarian, and scientific researcher. He is the creator of the VICE television series 'Hamilton's Pharmacopeia', in which he investigated the chemistry, history, and cultural impact of various psychoactive drugs. SPONSORS https://nordvpn.com/dannyjones ⬅ Exclusive Deal: Try risk-free w/ 30-day money back guarantee. https://hims.com/danny ⬅ Start your FREE online visit today. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP ⬅ Use code DJP for 20% off. EPISODE LINKS Hamilton's YouTube - @HamiltonMorris https://www.patreon.com/HamiltonMorris https://www.instagram.com/hamiltonmorris FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - Mr. Death 08:47 - Chaos: Charles Manson & CIA mind control 16:24 - US Military 'astrology computers' 25:21 - Kratom & substance dependency 35:26 - How Hamilton overcomes fear 38:09 - VICE early days & downfall 51:05 - Evolution of anti-drug propaganda 59:38 - What really causes addiction 01:06:22 - Ambien 01:09:05 - Fentanyl contamination in street drugs 01:17:21 - Haiti's zombie drug ritual 01:30:17 - The Sarlo Family Foundation 01:38:40 - Psychedelics in the church 01:44:57 - Ammon Hillman & the chemical muse 01:55:57 - The bicameral mind 02:01:41 - Venom as ancient vaccines 02:06:47 - DARPA psychedelic research 02:16:12 - DMT laser experiment 02:26:26 - Locked out of DMT? 02:32:57 - Doing toad venom DMT 02:34:50 - Nitrous oxide and Kayne West 02:46:04 - Xenon gas & methylene blue Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

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• 0:46Speaker 00

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• 1:04Speaker 01

  My neighbor had mushrooms growing out of their wall. And I was being blamed for it.

• 1:17Danny Jones?

  It's perfect.

• 1:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I thought it was a joke. It was one of these things where the, uh, the super like burst into my apartment holding this mushroom and was like, what did you do? What did, what did you do? And, uh, and I've, of course, have never talked to them about mushrooms. So it was, I was surprised that he would even make the association. And I was like, oh, that's a good one. It's pretty funny. And then I realized that he wasn't joking and that he actually thought that I had, like, infected the building with spores in some way.

• 1:52Danny Jones?

  So they kicked you out?

• 1:53Speaker 01

  No, no. I mean, of course, the real issue was not, it is also obviously wasn't a psychedelic mushroom.

• 2:00Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:00Speaker 01

  It was like some, some like Copernellus species actually identified it for him. And, but it was indicative of severe water damage. So, so that, so there's like, okay.

• 2:12Danny Jones?

  That's not good.

• 2:13Speaker 01

  If you, at the point where there are mushrooms bursting through the drywall, it's like...

• 2:22Danny Jones?

  What else could be going wrong? You might want to check for mold, too.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that that was part of it. And, uh, yeah.

• 2:30Danny Jones?

  Cool, Manhattan, huh? Dude, so, um, obviously I've been a fan of yours and your show for a very, very long time. But it wasn't until a couple of years ago that I made the connection between you and your dad. Because I was also a huge fan of your dad's documentaries. Like, and my mind was blown. I was like, no way. That's incredible. I mean, like, some of those documentaries that he does, like, the way he does documentaries is so unique. And so, like, he just has a very, very cool way of, like, the cinematography that he does, where he has the interviewers talk directly down the barrel of the camera.

• 3:13Speaker 01

  Sure, sure.

• 3:14Danny Jones?

  You know how he interviews them, like, right behind the lens, sometimes with his older ones? I think Mr. Death, I think he did it during Mr. Death, where all of the interviews, like, typically people, when they're doing interviews, they're they're looking to the side, right? To like, uh, somebody talking to them. But he has this unique way of having people look straight down the barrel of the camera, or having and having multiple.

• 3:32Speaker 01

  The interatron is what it's called.

• 3:33Danny Jones?

  Oh, the interatron. Yes, I forgot. That's what it's called. Yeah, yeah.

• 3:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, a name coined by my mother.

• 3:39Danny Jones?

  Oh, your mom made that up?

• 3:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:40Danny Jones?

  That's so cool, man.

• 3:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:42Danny Jones?

  Yeah, some of those stories, like the Mr. Death story, is just so fucking bananas.

• 3:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is really bananas.

• 3:49Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  It's a great, it's a great film, I think.

• 3:52Danny Jones?

  I think so, too.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  I really love that film.

• 3:54Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:55Speaker 01

  I don't really hear people talk about it very much, but I think it's like.

• 3:57Danny Jones?

  No, nobody talks about it.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 3:59Danny Jones?

  Whenever I bring it up to people, they've never heard of it.

• 4:01Speaker 01

  It's a bad name. I think that's part of the, as a forgettable name. And the original name was supposed to be called Honeymoon in Auschwitz, but they thought that was too controversial or something. So it was changed to Mr. Death, but that's sort of a forgettable name, but it's an amazing documentary.

• 4:17Danny Jones?

  Yeah. So the guy Fred's hypothesis at the end of it, some guy, um, the guy who was involved in some trial basically got Fred to testify for him that the gas chambers in Germany, like, couldn't have been gas chambers. And like, that was used, like, to, I don't know, that ended up being like this weird side road that the whole documentary took at the very end that you weren't expecting. And it seems like your dad had to do a lot of damage control with that when they were promoting the documentary.

• 4:46Speaker 01

  No, no, no, no.

• 4:47Danny Jones?

  Oh, no?

• 4:48Speaker 01

  I don't think that's a correct. Interpretation, I mean, that was the subject of the documentary was the association between Lutzer's pseudo-scientific beliefs and how this fed into his delusions and his self-deception. And I think it was a kind of, it wasn't as if like, there was some kind of gotcha moment, like he was only interviewing him. I mean, the subject of the documentary is his involvement with Zundel. And there's, you know, an extensive interview with an analytical chemist in the documentary, dissecting why his testing of the Auschwitz gas chambers was methodologically flawed.

• 5:33Danny Jones?

  Right. They were just like putting like, like dust in bags and like Ziploc bags and flying across the world to a chemistry lab.

• 5:42Speaker 01

  Right, right. And this is, you know, I think it actually is a very important lesson. And I say this just because this wasn't, this was the subject of the documentary. This wasn't some kind of like, he was just talking to a guy who was doing electric chair repair. And then he may have initially been interested in him for that reason, although I actually think he probably did know about the association with Zundel originally.

• 6:03Danny Jones?

  Oh, he knew about that in the, in the beginning. I got the impression that he didn't find that out until like after they were in production. My, it could be, that was a while ago when I watched it.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  I would expect not, but I don't remember because all this was made when I was a child.

• 6:15Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 6:16Speaker 01

  But yeah, the, the story for those that aren't aware is that there was this untrained, uncredited electric chair repairman who had seemingly done a decent job designing electric chairs. There wasn't, as far as I know, any major instances of his designs failing in a way that caused some kind of terrible suffering or something like that, to the best of my knowledge. I'm not, I don't have like an encyclopedic knowledge of the results of

• 6:53Speaker 01

  Lutzer's execution device designs. But he had gotten embroiled in this quest to demonstrate that the Holocaust didn't really happen.

• 7:07Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  And he was Contracted as a sort of scientist despite having no training in chemistry to collect samples from the interior of the gas chamber in Auschwitz.

• 7:20Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 7:20Speaker 01

  And have them chemically analyzed. But the issue is that in addition to these samples being at that point, probably at least a half century old.

• 7:34Speaker 01

  One wouldn't expect any of the, like hydrogen cyanide is very volatile. So that's the first issue is that this is not something that you would expect to remain on the surface for even, I would imagine, months, let alone decades. Well, it's, it's pretty much a gas. Yeah, that was, that was how it was used in the gas chambers.

• 7:57Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  That's why they were gas chambers. Yeah.

• 8:00Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  So because it is a volatile substance, it doesn't have a tendency to deposit on surfaces. I think the idea there was that there was like a Prussian Prussian blue type cyanide complex that would have been detected. But again, the samples were diluted because you wouldn't expect this to penetrate more than like a fraction of a millimeter into the chamber wall. And he was chiseling off huge pieces of.

• 8:28Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 8:28Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that's.

• 8:29Danny Jones?

  It was very crude, the way he was taking the samples.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  Right, right. So it's sort of a portrait of self deception.

• 8:36Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  And.

• 8:37Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 8:37Speaker 01

  The danger of pseudo scientific inquiry.

• 8:42Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:43Danny Jones?

  It was, you know, one of the most profound things about that documentary that I noticed was he was like, he was explaining after the Bureau of Prisons got him to repair the electric chair, then said, hey, maybe you can come up with these other operations or these other ways of executing people with the like lethal injections. And they even did gas chambers, I think, in the US for the Bureau of Prisons and all kinds of other ways of doing it. He was explaining like, it is really difficult to kill people. He's like, it's not that easy. It's not as easy as you would imagine. Because there was a lot of people that weren't that weren't dying that were just getting tortured

• 9:22Danny Jones?

  or like getting, you know, put in a vegetative state or, you know, and that was one of his hardest things is like actually like trying to like push somebody over the edge of death is a lot harder than you would imagine.

• 9:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that is a surprising aspect of all of this.

• 9:39Danny Jones?

  Yeah, anyways, incredible stuff. I like your your your dad's new documentary, that Chaos documentary was also really good because he's also done the Wormwood stuff about like CIA's MKUltra and all this stuff. Did you? Did you like help him at all with any of this stuff? I'm sure like you guys' interests are very much intertwined.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 10:02Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 10:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did. I was involved with the Chaos production in various ways from the beginning, and it's an interesting story. It's, you know, I think that the book is very good. I even read a manuscript of it long before it was published. I'm not sure that I am persuaded by the book's thesis, but I still think it's very interesting and provocative.

• 10:31Danny Jones?

  Yeah, well, he didn't have like a, well, yeah, there was a thesis, but there wasn't like any conclusion, right? He had like, I think he ended it with like three or four different conclusions of like why they were murdered.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  Right, right. I should maybe be a little bit. I do agree with aspects of, I mean, there's maybe two, two theses in this. One is that the story of the Manson killings as they are typically portrayed is flawed and incomplete and has inconsistencies that I would agree with. But the bigger thing that I think most people are actually interested in is the possibility that Charles Manson was some kind of Manchurian candidate who was programmed by the CIA.

• 11:10Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 11:10Speaker 01

  And that. He's not claiming that that is definitively the case, but

• 11:15Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 11:16Speaker 01

  That is sort of the

• 11:19Speaker 01

  subject of the book is

• 11:20Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 11:21Speaker 01

  Attempting to identify that possibility.

• 11:25Danny Jones?

  Yeah, sure. And he but he did like he did point out and he found like solid evidence that that that clinic in Haight Ashbury did have CIA funding and they were doing like crazy testing with I think it was LSD mixed with amphetamines and seeing how that affected people. And then that guy Jolly West was visiting there all the time. And then the connection with Manson and his followers going there every single week. It's just, you know, the you can't make any draw any like solid conclusions out of that, but the the connections are bizarre that the fact that they were doing that stuff and he was there every week.

• 11:59Speaker 01

  They're medium bizarre, I would say.

• 12:03Danny Jones?

  Medium bizarre.

• 12:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, because I mean, and I say this as someone that you know, I've interviewed David E. Smith, who was the founder of the Haight Ashbury

• 12:13Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 12:14Speaker 01

  Yeah, he was in the PCP episode of my show.

• 12:16Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 12:17Speaker 01

  So I've known him and followed his work for most of my adult life. He's very influential psychedelic researcher. He created what was once called the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs, which was the premier peer reviewed scholarly journal dedicated to research on psychedelics. It was later renamed the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs. But it's a big journal. And so it's not surprising to me that one of the preeminent researchers on psychedelics was doing psychedelic research. There's nothing and that he's in Haight Ashbury, which is the center of this entire hippie movement.

• 12:55Danny Jones?

  Sure.

• 12:56Speaker 01

  And that he's providing free medical care to impoverished people in that community. Again, not really surprising to me. He was treating enormous numbers of people. So I do think that it's very easy and I fall into these sorts of patterns of thinking myself. I say this, I'm not saying this like you're stupid if you think this way. It's but it's very easy when you're scrutinizing historical documents to

• 13:25Speaker 01

  Look selectively at what suits the narrative that you're trying to present to the public and to not critically assess alternate possibilities. And you know, I know this very well. I've spent a lot of time looking at World War II psychedelic research and wouldn't it be interesting if the Nazis knew about LSD? Like, for example.

• 13:49Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 13:50Speaker 01

  So I'm already operating from a perspective of wouldn't it be interesting if the Nazis knew about LSD? So anything I look at, I'm hoping that it will support that. Meanwhile, it's very easy to ignore large amounts of evidence that don't support that.

• 14:07Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 14:07Speaker 01

  And it's just a critical thinking exercise.

• 14:10Danny Jones?

  Sure.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  In general, I know it's less fun to talk the way that I'm talking. Like, I'm sympathetic to the the funness of exploring these ideas. But more and more, as I see our culture fractured by delusions of one kind or another and a lack of critical thinking skills. I feel less sympathetic to the playful, non-critical reinterpretation of the world, like using the world as this kind of fanfic canvas to paint whatever narrative that you want. I mean, that's one of the nice things about fiction is you can explore these ideas and you don't need to pretend that they are

• 14:51Speaker 01

  true, whereas I feel like there's a tendency where people use these same sorts of

• 14:58Speaker 01

  idea, like what a fiction writer might do, but they project it onto reality.

• 15:03Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 15:04Speaker 01

  And this is like the new way that people tell stories.

• 15:08Danny Jones?

  Yes, yes. It makes it more fun, I think. And then when you combine, I mean, when you combine it with social media, it's kind of like throwing gasoline on fire. And then people, and then when you also combine that with like, you know, the sensational headlines or narratives that you can come up with and post on social media, they organically get more eyeballs and more attention because you're attracting more people, right? People more, people that are less, they don't think as critically. And on top of that, then you have people making careers out of this stuff, out of like taking these things and just running with them.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 15:42Danny Jones?

  So it's like a compounding thing that is like, it seems like it's completely gotten out of control. And I don't, I don't know how, whatever you can, I don't think you put the toothpaste back in the tube. And this is, this kind of goes, you, you talked about this a little bit with, uh, with Rick Strossman on your podcast, when you, you guys were talking about, um, telepathy and like brain chips, like what if people could communicate just telepathically and there was no filter? And you, you eloquently stated, um, how like that would be terrible because people would not be able to edit what their thing, like typically when you write, you have to like go through what you're writing and refine it. So you can have the most coherent message and communicate

• 16:26Danny Jones?

  authentically what your intentions are. But if you're just having this chaos of thought confusion in your head, being transferred into somebody else, then there's going to be like an insane level of miscommunication happening. And that's like what's going on with social media, I feel like.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it requires so much work to undo some kind of falsity that's been propagated, that you can just totally lose track of reality. And, you know, I think that it is, you said, you can't put the toothpaste back in the tube. I think that culturally, we can develop an appreciation for carefully constructed ideas that are responsibly, uh, bounded by the limits of evidence. And, and when you have something like that, then it's all the more interesting because you, it's because it's real. You're not playing games with imaginary ideas. Like, and again, I say this as someone who is extremely sympathetic to the excitement. Like, I can't tell

• 17:27Speaker 01

  you how many of these things I've had myself. One that I've been looking at for years, it's very fringe, is this idea that astrology has been weaponized by the government, right?

• 17:42Danny Jones?

  Hey guys, if you're not already subscribed, please hammer the subscribe button below and hit the like button on the video. Back to the show.

• 17:48Speaker 01

  And there is some evidence for this, right? And you can even make a case that is evidence based, but somewhat tenuous, that the entire Reagan administration war on drugs was astrologically mediated.

• 18:00Danny Jones?

  How?

• 18:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a, it's pretty wild where you have Nancy Reagan was an actress, was a kind of low level actress and a sort of like a, a character who's sort of analogous to Melania Trump in a lot of ways where she isn't, wasn't taken seriously, everybody's making fun of her, she's not like a Michelle Obama type person who has political ambitions, who, you know, is using her role to disseminate ideas that are constructive, she spends something like $40,000 getting a new set of china for the White House and everybody makes fun of her ruthlessly and this is where our taxpayer money is going and how frivolous and how

• 18:43Speaker 01

  stupid and so she's having this PR crisis and she's also really into astrology, both her and Ronald Reagan are really into astrology and they have an astrologer named Joan Quigley and she, and this is a fact, this is like a 100% established fact, in the midst of this PR crisis, she's consulting with Joan Quigley about what to do and Joan Quigley tells her, which is probably pretty good PR advice, you need a mission, you need something that you can bring to the American people that will show that you are concerned and your mission, because Neptune is in the 12th house, will be America's struggle with drugs.

• 19:27Danny Jones?

  Right?

• 19:28Speaker 01

  So, this is like unfathomable human suffering may have come from this borderline random astrological whim and when you add to that, there's some other kind of interesting little bits and pieces of evidence, there's a CIA whistleblower named Miles Copeland who wrote in a book called The Game Player about the CIA.

• 19:56Speaker 01

  Using astrology computers that have been compromised by the government to deliver disinformation to foreign heads of state. So you give this astrology computer to the president of Ghana and you say, enjoy. And the output of the computer is aligned with US interests if they want to, for example, organize a coup or something like that. So there are all these like, and this is, again, this is written about by a person who did work in the CIA. It's very difficult to corroborate all of this. Maybe he's making it up, but what a weird thing to make up on top of that.

• 20:36Danny Jones?

  Astrology computer? I've never even heard of that.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and there was a bizarrely large amount of resources that were actually invested into astrology computers during that period in the 1970s, including military funding. Again, so, okay, yeah, it's pretty wild. So I actually have the astrology computer, the Digicom DR70 astrology mini computer that arguably is responsible for the war on drugs. There it is right there. It's a butte.

• 21:07Danny Jones?

  Wow. The one on the left?

• 21:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, the one on the left.

• 21:09Danny Jones?

  Wow. Blow that thing up. That's crazy. Where did you get that?

• 21:13Speaker 01

  I got it from Nancy Reagan's astrologers astrologer.

• 21:23Danny Jones?

  That's the best, that's the best story I've ever heard.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  It's got an ignition, like a car. You put a key in the computer to turn it on to rev that bad boy.

• 21:31Danny Jones?

  Damn. How many gears is that?

• 21:36Danny Jones?

  That's so crazy, dude.

• 21:37Speaker 01

  But anyway, so, so this is an example. Like, I'm very, very interested in this idea. I've probably collected every little bit of evidence and, and is it possible? Yeah, it's definitely possible. It's possible it played a role. It's possible there's more to it. You could make an argument that the Reagan administration war on drugs was astrologically mediated, but.

• 21:59Speaker 01

  At what point is this factual? At what point is this ignoring real factors that were going into this? At what point am I doing it because it's funny and interesting? And so you have to be self-aware and you have to be responsible about these things because it's so, so, so easy to manipulate people.

• 22:16Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 22:16Speaker 01

  And it's something that I've become, well, I've always been acutely aware of it in the realm of psychedelic journalism. I mean, this is like one of the areas where journalistic failure is the norm, right? It is the exception if a journalist isn't failing miserably

• 22:37Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 22:37Speaker 01

  in their coverage of drugs. That's, we're just used to that.

• 22:39Danny Jones?

  Of anything.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  Well, maybe, maybe if any, well, I mean, yeah, you could, that would be maybe a slightly more cynical interpretation, but yeah, journalists often don't do that well. They do, it's a, it's a hard job to be sympathetic to a very unsympathetic occupation. It's a hard job, but, um, but they've done a really, really bad job with drugs. And they continue to do an unbelievably terrible job. But what's interesting is we tend not to notice the way these manipulations play out until a decade or so has passed. Like you look back at the scare stories of the past and it's, it's literally laughable. It's a joke. Ha, ha, ha. The, their, your brain on drugs.

• 23:25Speaker 01

  How stupid is this? Oh, ecstasy makes holes in your brains. How stupid is this? All these things, you know, I, I was, uh, had this huge archive of news reports on MDMA and you have like, you know, cops, like lecturing other cops about like, oh, this is a pacifier. Like the MDMA user puts the pacifier in their mouth to enhance the, the, the, the drug pleasures that they experience. It's all just like nuts. Um, but, uh,

• 23:54Speaker 01

  But the same thing's happening now, we just are worse at noticing it until a little time has passed. So whatever the dominant narrative is, and I guess crucially before I even get into the examples, because the issue is that these narratives are so dominant that people don't even haven't even started to question them yet. And often, there is some truth to it, right? Like this whole drugs caused brain damage narrative that was this sort of scientistic orientation of the 90s. It's potentially true, right? Like under some, yeah, like drugs can damage your brain under some circumstances.

• 24:33Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  For a typical person, holes in their brain is not really the major concern. It's more like disruption of their social and professional and educational existence through dependence on a substance that probably isn't in most instances causing irreversible neurological damage, but it can still

• 24:52Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  have very negative manifestations of one kind or another. So now, we went through this era of like a hyper reductionist conceptualization of addiction problems in the United States. So the entire opioid problem in the United States can be exclusively tracked to Richard Sackler, right?

• 25:09Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 25:10Speaker 01

  It's just, that's it. That's the whole thing. It's like,

• 25:13Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 25:13Speaker 01

  It's very convenient. Wouldn't it be nice? It sure would be nice if it were that simple. If you could blame everything on Richard Sackler.

• 25:20Danny Jones?

  On one billionaire, yeah.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's it. That's the whole thing. That's why, that's why all those people died. Just one guy.

• 25:25Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 25:25Speaker 01

  But it's like, give me a break. He definitely played a role. I'm not saying it's completely false.

• 25:30Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 25:30Speaker 01

  But it's such a laughably reductionist understanding of human motivations for drug use.

• 25:37Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  That I struggle to understand how any adult who has lived in the real world could think it is truly that simple, right? It's like, The the basic idea that I think people struggle with is that they think drugs are responsible for drug problems, which is a very superficial read. Of course, they are, strictly speaking, but the reality is that to even get to a point where you want to hurt yourself with a drug, or you want to, you're willing to develop a problematic relationship with a drug, there's usually some kind of social, psychological problem that is putting you in that position to begin with.

• 26:15Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 26:15Speaker 01

  So just merely having at, like, you offered me kratom at the beginning of this.

• 26:20Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  Podcast, and I declined the kratom, right? Why did I decline the kratom?

• 26:25Danny Jones?

  Because you know a lot more about kratom than I do.

• 26:27Speaker 01

  Well, I'm not even saying that kratom is bad. That's not the point, but the point is that, the point is that I'm aware of it.

• 26:33Danny Jones?

  It's addictive?

• 26:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, people become dependent on it, definitely, yeah.

• 26:37Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 26:37Speaker 01

  Which in and of itself is not necessarily a bad thing.

• 26:40Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 26:40Speaker 01

  I'm very dependent on caffeine, so.

• 26:43Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 26:43Speaker 01

  So dependence in and of itself is not necessarily bad, although I would argue it's not.

• 26:48Danny Jones?

  I can't remember a day in the last 10 years that I have, I mean, there's been, in the last 10 years, I could probably count on two hands how many days I've gone without a cup of coffee. Not many days. Like, I drink coffee every single day. Is that necessarily a bad thing? Maybe kratom's not as bad as ca- as coffee.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:05Danny Jones?

  You know, I don't know.

• 27:06Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:07Danny Jones?

  So I know, I know this shit's amazing, like, I, it's so much better than caffeine.

• 27:12Speaker 01

  Right.

• 27:13Danny Jones?

  And, yeah, I mean, what, as far as what you know about kratom, I know you've done a lot of research on it, and you know far more than I do. I watched part of your documentary when you went to, I think, Thailand, and you met with some guys who were basically, they had kratom trees.

• 27:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 27:30Danny Jones?

  How does it work? And other than the amazing euphoric stimulating feeling I get when I drink it, what, what is like, is there any downside or any long-term negative effects of it?

• 27:46Speaker 01

  The long-term effects are not all that well-studied. It seems reasonably safe with occasional use. I mean, it is an opioid. It's a low potency opioid. So dependence is not uncommon with people that use it regularly. And then you have the withdrawal syndrome that comes with that. Unlike more common opioids that are related to morphine, it doesn't really tend to cause respiratory depression, which is a big thing because the main reason that people don't like opioids or that there's this extreme fear of opioids in the United States is because they kill people. Right. That's like the caffeine example shows that people are somewhat comfortable with dependence.

• 28:30Speaker 01

  Dependence in and of itself is not usually conceptualized as a big problem.

• 28:35Danny Jones?

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• 29:55Danny Jones?

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• 30:03Speaker 01

  But as soon as people start dying from using a drug, then that dramatically changes the way it's perceived by the public for obvious reasons. And because kratom tends not to kill people, relatively speaking, it's extremely safe compared to morphine type or fentanyl type compounds, then it doesn't carry those same problems. That's not to say that it's without problems. And you know, there's a lot of people that are able to transition off of other opioids onto kratom and that's probably a better move. It's, it's very complicated. There's not a simple answer to these questions. It's like whenever people say, is this good or bad? There's no answer to it. It's like if you were drinking yourself to death and you're able to transition onto like one can of this per day.

• 30:47Speaker 01

  I would say that's probably better.

• 30:49Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  But if you're just not doing anything and then you become dependent on this, I would assume that that's a step in the wrong direction, probably. So yeah, so it's, it's.

• 30:59Danny Jones?

  It's a good exercise to abstain from things for a period of time if you, if you tend to enjoy it.

• 31:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely.

• 31:07Danny Jones?

  So I noticed myself on the weekends, I don't drink any of it, but I catch myself thinking about it. Like, oh, it's, it's noon. I could go for a kratom. And I'm like, okay, I know I'm thinking about it. So that means I shouldn't have one. I should, you know, go a couple more days without having one.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  And then there's also the obvious issue that if you're taking a drug to address a problem that you are likely to encounter continuously for the rest of your life. Then you're setting yourself up to use that drug continuously for the rest of your life. So if the issue, like I do use kratom occasionally as an alternative to ibuprofen. If I've been like exercising a lot and I'm in pain.

• 31:46Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 31:47Speaker 01

  But. Then you have to ask yourself, like, do I plan to be sore after exercising a lot?

• 31:54Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 31:55Speaker 01

  In the future, because if you will, then the answer is you may be using this all the time. Or, I mean, another example would obviously be using some kind of hypnotic to go to sleep.

• 32:05Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  It's like, your chances are you're gonna be going to sleep quite a few times across your life. So if you don't develop healthy.

• 32:12Danny Jones?

  Once or twice.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. You develop a healthy technique for falling asleep, then you're setting yourself up for a lifetime of dependence.

• 32:22Danny Jones?

  So why did you decline the kratom?

• 32:25Speaker 01

  Uh, I recently, especially I've seen a lot of people becoming dependent on it. Again, not really necessarily a big problem, but it's just made me a little bit wary. And I, you know, I'm not somebody that is like immune to addiction by any means. Like, like I'm looking at your zen.

• 32:45Danny Jones?

  You want one?

• 32:46Speaker 01

  No, no, I don't want one. But, but my podcast is sponsored by, um.

• 32:50Danny Jones?

  Lucy.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  Lucy.

• 32:51Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah. I have those too. I like the Lucys better.

• 32:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so I'm friends with the guy that owns it. He'll send me a crate of these things. And I know how it goes. It's like, I'll consume the entirety of it. And then it's not until it's all gone that I have a moment to reflect and think, is it really good that I just consumed like?

• 33:08Danny Jones?

  Everybody is, is obsessed with the nicotine pouches. Everybody's on them now. It's crazy how they have just stormed society over the last two years.

• 33:17Speaker 01

  It's crazy. I mean, nicotine is so unbelievably addictive.

• 33:20Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  It is something else. It's also relatively, I don't want to say totally innocuous, but it's not. You can be crazily addicted to it and it's not necessarily a big deal, which is one of the reasons that it's so easy to get miserably addicted to it. It's like, if I take that zen, if I were to, if I were to consume that zen, not that I want to, I, uh,

• 33:41Speaker 01

  I would, uh, it wouldn't be a big deal. It wouldn't necessarily be a big deal. It would really just be setting myself up to continue using it. And I'm really good at convincing, if I can convince myself that something is beneficial for me, then I can almost always use it.

• 33:58Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 33:58Speaker 01

  So it like. I've never been drawn to any kind of self destructive pattern. But if it's, but if it's like, oh, you're on this podcast and it would really kind of sharpen your thinking a little bit and you know, it would be a little bit better probably if you were to consume that. And then I can justify same thing with things like Ambien for sleep. Where it's like, oh, I'm doing a thing tomorrow.

• 34:16Danny Jones?

  So everything okay?

• 34:18Speaker 03

  His headphone cables.

• 34:20Danny Jones?

  Oh, oh, oh, oh. Feel like it's, it's, uh, it's overworked, a little overstretched.

• 34:29Danny Jones?

  Ambien?

• 34:30Speaker 01

  Ambien, yeah, yeah, very easy to, very easy because you always have to do something the next day. And so it's very easy to convince yourself, oh, I should really.

• 34:38Danny Jones?

  Do some mental gymnastics to prove to yourself that it would be beneficial.

• 34:42Speaker 01

  It would be very beneficial.

• 34:43Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 34:43Speaker 01

  It would be.

• 34:44Danny Jones?

  Productive.

• 34:44Speaker 01

  It would be damaging not.

• 34:47Danny Jones?

  Yes, absolutely. One of the things I hate about the zins though is, uh, it's like, it's very vaso restrictive. So like, if you're doing any sort of like activity or exercise, it's counterproductive for that. Right? So like for some, for some reason, it's supposed to be stimulating, mentally stimulating. But how, how is that, how is it mentally stimulating if it's like cutting, if it's vaso restrictive, right? Don't you want more blood flow to your brain?

• 35:13Speaker 01

  There's a few stimulating things that seem to reduce blood flow to the brain paradoxically.

• 35:18Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 35:18Speaker 01

  I mean, it's, it's not, the pharmacology isn't mediated purely by the vascular effects. It's mostly through the nicotine acetylcholine receptor.

• 35:29Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  But, um, it's hard, it's hard to know how much of this stuff is self deception. Are you really, what is the difference between thinking that you're working better and working better? And how would you know? And could something make you feel like you're working worse, but you're actually working better? This is the whole paradox of nootropic drugs. And people say, oh, how do you know if a nootropic works? And people say, oh, I think, I think my memory is really improved. Conceivably, something could be damaging your memory and you would think that your memory is improved by virtue of being unaware of what you've forgotten. It's like a Dunning Kruger type scenario.

• 36:01Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:01Danny Jones?

  Right. Yeah, I love these ones. I think these are better than the zins. These are just nootropic pouches with caffeine and nootropic stuff in them.

• 36:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:08Danny Jones?

  They don't have the uh, if I take too many zins during the day, I start to feel sick.

• 36:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 36:13Danny Jones?

  Like nauseous kinda.

• 36:14Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 36:14Danny Jones?

  Like if I take three of them, I'm, I can't do three of them in a day. I can do like maybe max two of them. But the, the other ones, I don't feel that effect at all.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 36:22Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it's weird. I'm a super lightweight, which is why I was super impressed. I'm very impressed with you and I'm, I'm kind of envious of you. Because you are the complete antithesis of a, you're the opposite of a hypochondriac. You're not afraid of anything. You literally will go into the depths of the Peruvian Amazon and lick a fucking venomous toad. And be like, well, I hope I don't die.

• 36:48Speaker 01

  No, no, no, that's not, that's not, I've, I've never licked a toad.

• 36:52Danny Jones?

  Well, you didn't lick it, but they burned you and they, they rubbed it on you and like, you had the guy in Haiti put the powder on you. He's holding this powder. He's like, he's like, this will kill 20 people. You're like, okay, put it on me.

• 37:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I would like to think that I'm not reckless. I'm just, I think I'm reasonably.

• 37:11Danny Jones?

  You just know so, you, you, you're very, you're very educated in this stuff and you understand the pharmacology. So maybe that's the reason that you aren't terrified of it.

• 37:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, I would, I mean, some degree of fear is warranted. It's just about finding the appropriate balance where you're not so afraid that you're paralyzed and you don't do anything. And prevent yourself from having worthwhile experiences, but also having enough fear that you're not taking unnecessary risks and potentially harming yourself. And yeah, I think to some extent, there will always be uncertainty, but you can learn. I, I was just working on a, um, a, a piece about the chemistry of LSD type compounds and made a, a new analog of LSD. And me and the chemist I was working with all tested it on ourselves and.

• 38:01Speaker 01

  I didn't know with certainty that it would be safe, but we were very cautious and we increased the dose somewhat slowly and we were able to, or I was able to look at the metabolism of related compounds and make an educated guess about how it may be transformed in the body and how it may or may not be risky and, which is not to say that it couldn't have some sort of unanticipated toxicity, it absolutely could, but you can make a foundation of knowledge based on everything that has been published on a compound or related compounds and you can make an educated guess and then you can proceed cautiously and everything was fine.

• 38:39Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 38:40Speaker 01

  I was fine, yeah. I enjoyed the compound.

• 38:43Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 38:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:44Danny Jones?

  How different was it from traditional LSD?

• 38:46Speaker 01

  It was a bit less potent, maybe about a quarter to a fifth the potency and much less visual. It was a less dazzling, but still very pleasant and shorter acting.

• 38:59Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 38:59Speaker 01

  Effect, yeah.

• 39:00Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 39:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:02Danny Jones?

  So what was it like? I've always been curious. What was it like in like the very early days of Vice and producing those shows for Vice? And that goes back like 15, 20 years ago, right?

• 39:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:16Danny Jones?

  So did you like, like, first of all, how did you start and how did you get in with Vice in the very beginning and like what was the, like what were the meetings like? Like how, how did you guys decide what you were gonna go film and all of that?

• 39:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I find it interesting that people always seem sort of amazed by the work that I've done or they, they treat it as if it's like very unusual when Vice is producing tons of drug related documentaries.

• 39:45Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  And continues to. So that in and of itself was never a hard sell. Pretty much every mainstream media outlet is continuously producing stuff about drugs. The only difference is I was doing it in a relatively informed way that was pretty well received by people. So that the selling aspect was never difficult with Vice and it all did very well and it was insanely low budget at the beginning.

• 40:10Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 40:11Speaker 01

  So, you know, it was all gradual. I wrote for the magazine, did a column. Then there was this producer named Santiago Stelli who is really responsible for

• 40:21Speaker 01

  Most of the early Vice video work, pretty much the entire Vice pivot to video was a product of this one guy, Santiago Stelli. And he was brilliant. He's still, he's around. I mean, he left the United States and is long since gone from Vice. But he, I think, had, was responsible for a lot of that early internationally oriented character. And he would work on crazily low budgets. So, you know, we were going in those early shoots, the total budget of those things would have been effectively nothing.

• 41:02Speaker 01

  You know, we shoot on a, what was it, like a 5D or something like that?

• 41:07Danny Jones?

  Canon 5D.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  Canon 5D, yeah.

• 41:08Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 41:09Speaker 01

  Or even before that, mini DV tapes. I mean, these were, these were really.

• 41:14Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I remember that. I remember those days.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:16Danny Jones?

  I remember my, my friend who I used to film surfing with, Jerry. I remember when he, I, I know, I knew him way before he worked for Vice. And then all of a sudden I saw him traveling all over the fucking world, going to Antarctica and all these crazy places. I think he went to North Korea.

• 41:30Speaker 01

  But he was one of the big ones. He would, he filmed with Shane.

• 41:34Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:35Danny Jones?

  I think Richie Yadi.

• 41:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:37Danny Jones?

  Ricky, yeah, Richie Yadi, I think is how you say it. Yeah, and that's when I first discovered all that stuff, when he started traveling to all these fucking places. I'm like, Jerry, how the fuck did, how, how did all this happen? It's crazy, man.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  It was crazy, but the formula was very smart, which is spend no money.

• 41:56Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 41:56Speaker 01

  Whatsoever. Just crank stuff out. And this is at the beginning of YouTube and those things, I mean, they, they were making money off of them. I think it was actually taken off YouTube, I think because of a, some kind of copyright issue with one of the pieces of music in it. But the Crystal Coal LSD Underground LSD Silo piece that I did had something like 40 million views on YouTube. This was probably made for like $1,100 or something like that. You know, this is just.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  And then they were making so much of that type of stuff and doing all these brand deals. They they had a good model for a while. I mean, one issue is that you have to pay people at some point. People are willing to work that way when they're 21. But eventually you want a situation where you're actually being compensated for the work. So that

• 42:51Danny Jones?

  That was one of the big selling points, right? It was like, we're so cool. Everyone wants to work for us for free.

• 42:55Speaker 01

  Right, right, right, right. Yeah, which is a dangerous road to go down. Because even if people do want to do that, you can fall into a pattern of exploiting people and creating a lot of bad blood, which absolutely did happen with Vice. Yeah, there was a lot. I mean, it's unusual to find somebody who isn't a Vice hater.

• 43:18Danny Jones?

  Yeah, especially somebody who worked with them for a long time.

• 43:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I would say it's like pretty much 100% of people.

• 43:25Danny Jones?

  I Thomas is one of them.

• 43:28Speaker 01

  Well, yeah, well, but Thomas is Thomas is my very close friend, Thomas Morton. Yeah, we live together for years.

• 43:34Danny Jones?

  Oh, really? I didn't know that.

• 43:35Speaker 01

  I talk to him all the time.

• 43:36Danny Jones?

  Dude, he's so funny.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  You should have them on.

• 43:38Danny Jones?

  I would love to. I talked to him on the phone once about doing this. And then I think he ghosted me after that. He's like, I'm not fucking gonna hang out with this loser.

• 43:46Speaker 01

  I'll text him. He's he's a no, he's great. I mean, he's like

• 43:50Danny Jones?

  I'm a huge fan of his, man.

• 43:51Speaker 01

  He's brilliant.

• 43:51Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 43:53Speaker 01

  But he was someone who I think worked really well in that environment. There was a certain type of person that maybe had a more impulsive style of creating things that responded very well to the lack of bureaucracy in that environment, which was unusual. Like, the typical pattern that you have with journalism is you have tons of middlemen, tons of people micromanaging everything that you do. I mean, I worked for National Geographic for a period and I was shocked that this actually may be the norm. They expected me, when working on a documentary, to write an entire screenplay for the documentary

• 44:36Speaker 01

  that would then be approved by executives. And then my task as an interviewer wasn't to Talk to people, but it was essentially to reverse engineer the scripted statements in question form.

• 44:52Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 44:52Speaker 01

  So like.

• 44:53Danny Jones?

  Jesus, dude.

• 44:55Speaker 01

  So that you could come as close to a entirely manufactured piece as possible while still calling it some kind of documentary work. And that's just stupid.

• 45:05Danny Jones?

  That's the opposite of what the original idea of Vice was, right? It was just like going out into crazy places and turning the camera on and seeing what happens.

• 45:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:13Danny Jones?

  Seeing, you know, seeing the insane shit that's happening in the world.

• 45:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 45:17Danny Jones?

  That's so fucking crazy, man.

• 45:18Speaker 01

  Expensive, it produced bad results as well.

• 45:21Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 45:21Speaker 01

  So, so there were a lot of things about that model that I think were brilliant and ahead of their time and were copied by lots and lots of people. I mean, they were, they were kind of some of the early people to sort of professionalize YouTube documentary work. It is also before YouTube, but this kind of no budget, fully independent style, even though it was coming from a media outlet.

• 45:46Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 45:46Speaker 01

  That was the idea. It's like, you don't need this typical professional production apparatus. You can just throw people out and make something.

• 45:56Danny Jones?

  Right. And at what point, what was like the straw that broke the camel's back with Vice? Was it when they like sold out Trupert Murdoch? Or like, what was the, was there like a specific point where you realized and like Thomas realized like, like it's time to jump ship? Or was it, I know there was a lot of layoffs and stuff like that, but that, but like in your perspective, like what was happening internally that caused that?

• 46:22Speaker 01

  There were a few things. I mean, one was you had overvaluation of Vice in general. So it was kind of coasting on this massive, what was it? Like a $6 billion valuation, something nuts that was definitely inflated, not to say that it wasn't worth something. You had an increasingly resentful and tired workforce and an increasingly large number of enemies that had been cultivated by executives at the company. You also had increasing desire from rival media outlets to discredit them, which gives an incentive to write articles about how they're bad or irresponsible.

• 47:06Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 47:07Speaker 01

  You also had a very ill-advised.

• 47:12Speaker 01

  Transition from streaming online video, which they had built their brand on to cable TV, which was a dying art.

• 47:20Danny Jones?

  In like 2016, right?

• 47:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, at a time when this made really no sense. It's like, I think it kind of speaks to how ill advised that decision was that I couldn't watch my own show because I don't have a TV.

• 47:33Danny Jones?

  So I remember listening to videos, interviews of Shane explaining how great of an idea it was and like, okay, I think I'm convinced I'm sold.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  It was one of these things where I sort of thought, okay, well, if this is what, if this is what is going to bring resources in and allow me to make documentaries, whatever. But in the back of my head, I was always thinking this seems like a bad idea. And then on top of that, you had this sort of gradual erosion of their identity, which had begun probably because there were different eras, right? You have the kind of Gavin Mcginnis era, which is oriented entirely around ultra edgy humor. Vice is basically a humor magazine, a humor art fashion magazine, totally, totally different.

• 48:23Speaker 01

  And then it goes from that to a sort of transitional literary era that doesn't get talked about very much where there was this brilliant guy named Jesse Pearson, who is the editor of the magazine and he's a sort of intellectual who wanted to use it to publish fiction and art photography and things like that. And that was around the time that I started working there and it was actually like a really cool era to be there. Then it goes from, goes from comedy vice to literary vice to news vice. That's around the time that the HBO thing.

• 49:00Danny Jones?

  Is that when Spike Jonze came along?

• 49:03Speaker 01

  He came along, well, he was always in the background.

• 49:06Danny Jones?

  Oh, was he?

• 49:07Speaker 01

  But he came along more during the Vice land pivot as someone that was like in the office every day. I don't really think that he had. All that much of a, I mean, I think he probably got paid well, but I don't know.

• 49:20Speaker 01

  He played all that much of a role other than, um, yeah. So, um, so the, then there's news and that's around the time where they start to have mainstream appeal and everyone's saying like, oh, this is real news. This is a real news network. And then they get hit hard by culture war, um, propriety concerns because the edginess that they'd built their brand on suddenly became deeply unfashionable and dangerous reputationally. So they have to pivot to some kind of like social concern. There was actually like, I don't know if you, there's journalist Michael Moynihan,

• 50:00Speaker 01

  who, um, wrote a great piece and did an interview with Barry Weiss about this, about this kind of pivotal moment where, uh, young employees at Weiss decided that the old covers of the magazine were too offensive to be displayed. And so they all had to be moved out of the lobby into the private office of Sarouche, who was one of the founders of the company. Right. And, and I was there while this was happening and I remember it, I remember seeing it and thinking that it was unsettling, but also just ignoring it. But he was, I think, correct to point out that this was, uh, indicative of rot within the company. Yeah.

• 50:41Speaker 01

  Where you have, you have the employees saying, um, your entire, this entire company is so offensive that we can't look at what it has created. Um, and you know, they start making increasingly bad stuff. After I left, it became, um, kind of like one of the premier sources of anti psychedelic journalism. Really? Yeah, yeah.

• 51:05Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 51:06Speaker 01

  Again, anti psychedelic shrouded in sort of social justice type concerns. Because this is, we were talking about like the scientistic orientation of drug scares in the nineties that shifted in the 21st century to a moralistic orientation. So now, if you want to scare people away from using MDMA, you don't say, hey, it's gonna make holes in your brain. You say, hey, this is a tool of capitalist oligarchs who are trying to commodify your spirit and make you a more efficient worker while funding the genocide in Gaza.

• 51:47Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 51:48Speaker 01

  Right, and creating super soldiers. And this is a tool of the imperialist American war machine, right? And so, this is the new, and people say, oh, okay. Oh, you're right then, MDMA is bad. Thank you so much for telling me this important information. So, so it's important to recognize that the anti-drug messaging evolves with the culture and what the culture wants. In the nineties, they wanted medicoscientistic explanations for why not to use drugs. Now, it's about moralistic explanations for why drugs are bad. So, why don't you use cocaine? It's not because there was a rat with a lever and he pushed that darn lever until he died and you don't want to end up like that rat. That's what you'd say in the eighties or nineties.

• 52:30Speaker 01

  Now, it's like, so you want to, you want to participate in the exploitation of Latin American workers who could be enslaved by the cartel and you're going to get high off of this, this blood money, this product? But of course, all this is a product of prohibition and this whole idea, this is one of the issues with moralism and with scientism, is that they can both obscure the real issues, right? That's not to say that there aren't actual moral concerns with certain types of drug consumption, but moralism has been weaponized very effectively by commercial interests and by government interests.

• 53:05Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  Right, you even see this now with like the White House Twitter page, right? And they do that like weird cartoon of the crying woman and it's like very, you see this?

• 53:13Danny Jones?

  I haven't seen this.

• 53:13Speaker 01

  It's like, kind of, it's like this, there's like- An ICE, um, an ICE.

• 53:18Danny Jones?

  On their Twitter, the White House Twitter page?

• 53:19Speaker 01

  The White House Twitter page has an image of like an ICE person arresting a crying Mexican woman. And it's like, it's like a very, um, superficially inhumane creepy image. And you look at it and you think, ooh, that's kind of an odd look, like arresting a crying woman.

• 53:37Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 53:37Speaker 01

  What is, what is going on here? But then it's like, well, this is a fentanyl dealer. And then you say, oh, okay.

• 53:43Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow. A fentanyl dealer.

• 53:46Speaker 01

  Fentanyl, okay, it was a fentanyl dealer. Okay, yes, yes, yes. And, and again, the point here, I'm not saying is that fentanyl is always good. But by using that, by using the word fentanyl, suddenly you can completely change the interpretation of an image that would immediately be recognized as, um, sort of unsettling and inhumane.

• 54:06Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  And these, these things are weaponized very, very effectively. And it's important to recognize them and see how they have become tools, right? I, I did this thing for my podcast where I covered a trial in the DEA headquarters, which was oriented around prohibiting too obscure psychedelics. So obscure that they, for one of them, were not able to provide any peer reviewed scientific evidence that a human being had ever consumed it, right? So we're talking insanely fucking obscure.

• 54:38Danny Jones?

  When was this?

• 54:39Speaker 01

  This was recently, this was like maybe four or five months ago.

• 54:43Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 54:43Speaker 01

  I covered the entire trial, so it was, it was a two week trial. And it was like a, a, a group of scientists who were petitioning the DEA not to prohibit this extremely obscure scientific research chemical called DOI.

• 54:57Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 54:58Speaker 01

  And what I saw going to DEA headquarters every day for this hearing was.

• 55:06Speaker 01

  Up close and personal, the entire propaganda mechanism at play, right? You walk through this lobby and it's like faces of fentanyl, faces of that.

• 55:16Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 55:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's all these little, these photos. And, and I was looking through them and thinking, huh, this is interesting. Faces of fentanyl. And then I'm looking and, and it's like really, really old people. So it'll be like Janice taken by fentanyl, age eighty seven or something. I'm thinking like, what's the story with Janice? There's no, how did Janice die of a fentanyl overdose?

• 55:40Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 55:41Speaker 01

  But there's no context. And I looked at the website and realized that this is like, you can just submit random shit. There's no verification of anything. These are just things that have been submitted and that there was even someone, a, a mother whose son was used in this campaign without her understanding. So it's like right off the bat, you're being hit with a literal wall of propaganda. That is all oriented. They have, they have a golden fentanyl chandelier in the office.

• 56:08Danny Jones?

  Is this, is this the hallway?

• 56:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, that's it.

• 56:11Danny Jones?

  Jesus, dude. Whoa, look at that. Look at the one with the, on the very left, very bottom left, Steve.

• 56:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's, that's it.

• 56:18Danny Jones?

  Bizarre.

• 56:18Speaker 01

  That's exactly what I'm referring to. Forever. So then there's like forever two, forever eighty eight. Um, anyway, a, as you can see, this is just very, I'm not saying people don't die from fentanyl, obviously they do, but this is also without question propaganda.

• 56:34Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 56:34Speaker 01

  That is neglecting to recognize the real reason that people are dying of fentanyl overdoses, which is prohibition and a lack of regulation of the drug market where people are driven to use completely unregulated, uncontrolled, black market substances that might be contaminated with fentanyl. And with fentanyl, it's actually like amazing that this is their chosen propaganda tool because it's the worst possible example. This is a drug that most people don't even want to do, right? They've, they've surveyed people and said, do you want to use fentanyl? The majority of people don't want to use fentanyl. So. How lucky for the government. You have a substance that people don't even want to do. And yet this is a problem. Well, then you have to ask yourself, how did we develop a problem with people using a drug that they don't want to use?

• 57:17Danny Jones?

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• 58:34Speaker 01

  And the answer is prohibition created this. It's their fault that this has happened. Like, if people had access to, I mean, I think Kratom actually represents one example of like, you know.

• 58:46Danny Jones?

  It's kind of gray market, right? Kratom?

• 58:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 58:49Danny Jones?

  You can't buy it on Amazon or anything like that.

• 58:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, conceivably you could, but maybe Bezos doesn't want to dip into it. But yeah, it's.

• 58:57Danny Jones?

  You can buy it at any gas station.

• 58:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And I, and I think that while there are problems associated with it, I do think that having a semi-regulated. Supply of an opioid relative to just totally untested, totally unregulated powders represents a step in the right direction where people will still get into trouble, but you'll have a much smaller number of overdose deaths. I mean, the the bigger issue, of course, is that I alluded to this earlier, and it's maybe a controversial statement to say that drugs aren't the cause of drug problems. But when you look at 2021, a record number of drug overdose deaths in the United States, you have more people dying of drug overdose deaths than ever before in history.

• 59:39Danny Jones?

  That was the like the height of the pandemic, right?

• 59:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's I would say that that's probably not a coincidence. We're going to blame the Sackler family for that. I think that there's I think you had a very clear indication. Everyone knew that opioids were addictive. There were endless news stories about it. And so if you're going to say, oh, the the Sacklers pulled a pulled the wool over everybody's eyes and nobody knew that opioids were addictive by 2021, that's not a valid argument anymore. Everybody fucking knew. And yet you have record, you have record awareness and record overdoses. So what's different? The difference is there's a fucking pandemic and everyone is miserable and unemployed and isolated and atomized and sitting in front of their computer, feeling lonely and

• 1:00:22Speaker 01

  sad, and they are psychologically ultra susceptible to developing drug problems.

• 1:00:28Danny Jones?

  Wow. Yeah, that's that's wild, man. That's an interesting, interesting way of putting it.

• 1:00:35Speaker 01

  I mean, just one quick story, and it actually involves Thomas. I don't think he'd mind me telling the story. I think it's it's like so Thomas and I lived together and Thomas, Thomas's father died from cancer and he was in a very typical scenario that people are in when they have a loved one die of cancer is his father had been prescribed morphine for the cancer pain. And I remember him coming back to the apartment that we were living in. He had this big bottle full of these blue five milligram morphine sulfate tablets. It was just like completely full and he put it on the counter and he said, help yourself. You know, you can have as many as you want. And I took one.

• 1:01:16Speaker 01

  I thought it was okay. It made me really constipated. I wasn't really into it. And that was it. That was the end of my experimentation with morphine sulfate. Thomas, on the other hand, became addicted to morphine.

• 1:01:29Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:01:30Speaker 01

  So we have two people living in the exact same apartment.

• 1:01:34Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:01:34Speaker 01

  With the exact same access to the exact same drug. Yet one of them becomes dependent and the other one doesn't.

• 1:01:40Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:01:41Speaker 01

  Why is that?

• 1:01:42Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:01:42Speaker 01

  If it were just the drug, wouldn't we both have become equally dependent on the morphine? We both had access to the same bottle, but it wasn't just the drug. Thomas was going through a lot of emotional pain.

• 1:01:52Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:52Speaker 01

  As a result of losing his father.

• 1:01:54Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:01:54Speaker 01

  I was in a relatively emotionally stable situation and was less susceptible to addiction for that reason. So if you deny all these psychological, environmental, social aspects of addiction, you're fundamentally misrepresenting the problem. You'll never help anyone.

• 1:02:11Danny Jones?

  And everyone's different in regards to like their chemical makeup too, right? Like depending on like emotions or what their lifestyle is, like we're like these bags of hormones and different chemicals that is constantly fluctuating, like we're never in a solid state.

• 1:02:26Speaker 01

  Oh, absolutely. Right, right.

• 1:02:28Danny Jones?

  So like drugs are going to interact with everybody differently.

• 1:02:30Speaker 01

  Right, right. So like I experienced extremely severe hangovers. Like I could have three drinks.

• 1:02:35Danny Jones?

  Same here.

• 1:02:35Speaker 01

  And I would, the next day I would be just off. The next day would be useless. I wouldn't be like vomiting and you know, have like a splitting headache. I would just feel like shit, kind of.

• 1:02:47Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:47Speaker 01

  Other people can have five drinks with lunch and it's nothing. So they're fundamentally responding to this in a different way as a result of likely genetic metabolic differences between us. So the punishing effect of the alcohol hangover just doesn't apply to them as much. And those same people are going to be more susceptible to alcoholism.

• 1:03:06Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:06Speaker 01

  So there's a lot of factors.

• 1:03:08Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:03:10Danny Jones?

  I've always found it so interesting how people, people I know, I have friends that can function and live their lives and are ultra successful in their lives.

• 1:03:21Danny Jones?

  That can go day to day doing like hard drugs. Like I'm talking about like Ambien cocaine.

• 1:03:26Speaker 01

  Ambien.

• 1:03:27Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  You call Ambien a hard drug?

• 1:03:30Danny Jones?

  For me.

• 1:03:32Danny Jones?

  I'm I'm super like lightweight. I'm a I'm a pussy when it comes to drugs. But like I have friends like that that can just function off this stuff and do it every single day. And I'm not talking just Ambien. I'm talking like I'm talking going from Ambien to Adderall to cocaine to Vicodins and and muscle relaxers like all in the course of a day. And they're like, like arguably they're more with it than I am.

• 1:03:58Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. Well, you become tolerant as well. That's the other thing. But yeah, I mean, the way you describe it, you make it sound crazy.

• 1:04:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah, to me, it's crazy.

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, but you know, people drink cocoa tea in a lot of South America. They're consuming cocaine every day. It's not a big deal. It kind of depends on the culture, how you're doing it, what the dose is. I mean, people take 80 milligrams of Adderall a day.

• 1:04:20Danny Jones?

  That's so crazy to me, dude.

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  But but for those people, it's just normal in the same way that nicotine very rapidly becomes just normal. Right now, if I were to take that that zin that's.

• 1:04:33Danny Jones?

  Staring at you.

• 1:04:33Speaker 01

  Staring at me intently from over there. I um, it would be wild. It would be, it would be.

• 1:04:41Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah, it would be wild.

• 1:04:43Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:04:44Speaker 01

  It would be a wild ride that I will not take. And because I have no tolerance, I stopped using nicotine. For now, I may I may be back, but it's been a little while and I'm gonna see how far I can go with this. And.

• 1:05:00Danny Jones?

  How's it been so far?

• 1:05:02Speaker 01

  It's been fine. You can live without it.

• 1:05:04Danny Jones?

  Have you did you notice any any sort of crash or any sort of like withdrawal?

• 1:05:09Speaker 01

  A little, a little bit, yeah. But that's useful as well, I think, is to to actually.

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  Analyze what it is that you feel that you're missing, what it is that it was doing for you. Cause it's not always entirely intuitive. I mean, I felt that way with cannabis. I don't think I would have really known, but for me, and I think for a lot of people, I would use it just to like reduce my annoyance or anger. That became the kind of thing is like, you're annoyed, you're angry, smoke some weed, chill out. But then again, it's sort of like taking Ambien to go to sleep. A typical life involves numerous occasions where you feel annoyance. And if you don't develop a healthy way of contending with annoying situations, you're just gonna be all bent out of shape.

• 1:06:00Danny Jones?

  Sure, yeah. But what I was like, like when I was explaining my buddies that I know that use Ambien to go to sleep and Adderall to wake up every day. I was like, it feels like to me, you're just burning the candle at both ends and it can't be, it can't be a healthy way to exist. But somehow these people manage to not only to exist, but thrive.

• 1:06:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:06:21Danny Jones?

  Which is, I don't know, that's just to me, it's just, it's kind of unfathomable.

• 1:06:26Speaker 01

  You can do it. I don't, it's whether or not it's good, just depends on so many factors. I would say all else equal, it's probably better not to. But again, you do have people that struggle horribly with insomnia. Maybe if they just take five milligrams of Zolpidem before bed, it's better for them. It just kind of depends. For me is I travel a lot and when I'm traveling, I'm always working. And so it never feels like, oh, I'm just gonna tough it out and not sleep before a strictly scheduled chemistry project where every day matters. Like it just feels too, again, but this is my rationalization. There's too much at stake.

• 1:07:10Speaker 01

  I can't, like I'm about to go on a big chemistry voyage and it's like, you better believe.

• 1:07:16Danny Jones?

  Put some high octane gas in your body before you do that. Yeah, it makes sense. Yeah, my, my, one of my buddies in particular that uses Ambien a lot, he'll explain to me sometimes how he has like, he's, he has the security cameras all over his house. So he'll like fight the urge to go to sleep after he takes the Ambien. And he'll go into one of the rooms in his house where he has a monitor that shows all of his cameras. And he said, he'll be staring at like his driveway camera. And he'll see like a unicorn walk across the driveway and he like hallucinates on it.

• 1:07:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, that can happen. It doesn't tend to, I had a little bit of that when I first used it. Once you become a little bit tolerant to it, the dominant effect is a sort of ultra disinhibited delirium. So that's like the kind of Roseanne Barr type situation where you're like tweeting some crazy shit that you don't remember. Like, that's the real, so it's not so much for most people that they start seeing unicorns. It's more like your entire sense of social, professional caution goes out the window because you're just totally disinhibited. You know, you have these examples of people like masturbating on planes or things like that, and it's like.

• 1:08:28Danny Jones?

  They're often on shit like Ambien.

• 1:08:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I could imagine it. I could imagine how, like, on one hand, you could see someone being a sex criminal and using that as an excuse. On the other hand, I could, it's crazily disinhibiting. It really, it really does whack you out.

• 1:08:46Danny Jones?

  What was the story with Tiger Woods taking Ambien? It was like, he used it as like a sexual enhancement or something?

• 1:08:51Speaker 01

  Right, yeah, I think one of his mistresses said that he had, quote, "crazy Ambien sex." That's a direct verbatim quote.

• 1:09:01Danny Jones?

  Oh, my God. How do you chemically and pharmacologically explain that?

• 1:09:08Speaker 01

  It's, basically, it's binding to the same site on the GABA receptor as a benzodiazepine with maybe a little bit more selectivity. So it's not so different from Xanax or Klonopin. The main difference with Ambien is that it is metabolized very, very, very quickly. So if you take something like Valium before you go to sleep, you'll still be under the influence of it when you wake up in the morning, whereas Ambien and related Z drugs have been chemically engineered in such a way that they're very rapidly metabolized with the, intentionally, with the idea being that you won't have any morning grogginess because two hours after taking it, it's already largely been excreted or metabolized, biotransformed.

• 1:09:53Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:09:54Speaker 01

  Hopefully not excreted if you're sleeping.

• 1:09:56Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:09:58Danny Jones?

  Going back to the fentanyl thing.

• 1:10:00Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:01Danny Jones?

  There was tons of stories a couple of years ago of like, I forget where I saw this piece, but I read this, this really long essay on this fentanyl epidemic that we're seeing people dying from doing coke that's accidentally laced with fentanyl. And there was this um, theory that people had that somehow China was shipping fentanyl and teaching these chemists in Mexico and South American countries to use fentanyl to make their coke or mix it in with their cocaine to somehow kill Americans. And then this person did this really long piece that laid out the case where he, he

• 1:10:43Danny Jones?

  said that he went and tried cocaine in various cities throughout the United States, right? Like he went to, he got, went to some high level dealers that sold cocaine to like rich people and well off, you know, white collar folks. And then he went to like some inner cities and bought cocaine from, you know, like street dealers. And he also, I think, tested it. And what he found was that the cocaine that was laced with fentanyl was sold by people who were also selling heroin, because I guess you mix fentanyl with, or you mix heroin with fentanyl. So his, I, his theory on this was that like, okay, these very low level dealers are selling heroin, fentanyl, all this other stuff.

• 1:11:26Danny Jones?

  But that, like, the people that are selling coke to, like, rich people, they're not selling heroin. So the low level people are like mixing the coke and the heroin on the same table and there's accidentally getting a little bit of fentanyl into that cocaine by accident. And that would potentially describe those fentanyl overdoses with people doing coke.

• 1:11:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, that would seem like the simplest explanation to me, that there's just some cross contamination occurring.

• 1:11:46Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:48Speaker 01

  It's possible that there's some intentional adulteration. The idea of doing something like that has existed for a long time. There was even a cigarette brand that had opium in it at one point. But after that, then there was a tobacco industry internal letter that was released to the public that was kind of interesting where they, it was, I can't remember what tobacco company it was, but they were talking about. The concern that competitors would put this drug etorphan in to cigarettes. So they weren't suggesting doing it themselves. They were saying.

• 1:12:24Danny Jones?

  What was the drug called?

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  Etorphan.

• 1:12:26Danny Jones?

  Etorphan?

• 1:12:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, which is like a so-called Bentley compound. These are ultra potent opioids that are sort of chemically related to morphine. At that time, it was a very, a fentanyl, not chemically related to fentanyl, but similar in terms of its potency. But so the idea was the same. What if somebody put essentially a microdose of a high potency opioid into cigarettes in order to make them even more addictive? So people have tossed around that idea with fentanyl. I don't actually know that this is really so common. It's talked about all the time, but you have to be very careful with, and it does occur. I'm not saying it never occurs, but I'd want to really have a better sense of how prevalent this is.

• 1:13:11Speaker 01

  Cause it's the sort of thing that people will talk about and report on because it's sort of sensational and frightening. But is this really a widespread issue?

• 1:13:18Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:13:19Speaker 01

  I'm not entirely convinced.

• 1:13:20Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I heard also, what is this, Steve? 1977 scientist at BAT Industries PLC explored adding a highly, oh, this is what Hamilton's talking about. Wow.

• 1:13:32Speaker 01

  And I've read the primary document.

• 1:13:33Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 1:13:34Speaker 01

  Referring to, yeah, yeah.

• 1:13:35Danny Jones?

  I saw a story, I forget where I saw it. It might've been from Luis Chaparro was telling me that there was a story basically of a cartel, like the head of the car, one of the cartels in Mexico, like hung somebody from a street sign and put a message on there, like warning people of mixing their coke with fentanyl. Saying this is what happens if you guys will mix fentanyl with the cocaine, like you're going to hang because it's not good for business.

• 1:14:00Speaker 01

  It probably isn't good for business.

• 1:14:01Danny Jones?

  Right. That's what I would imagine. Like if you're selling coke to people, you don't want them to be dying. They're not going to be buying any more of your coke.

• 1:14:07Speaker 01

  Right. But the other thing is. You get into this weird cycle where a drug like fentanyl is associated with fatal overdoses. That's pretty much the only thing people ever say about fentanyl is that it's killing people. And so when somebody dies of a drug overdose, everybody thinks that's fentanyl because fentanyl is the drug that kills people. So you get this self reinforcing cycle. And I've seen this happen personally on a number of occasions where somebody dies of a drug overdose. Everyone says that it's fentanyl and then the toxicology comes back and it was heroin, something like that. So people still die of drug overdoses and it's important again. I think people will often misinterpret what I'm saying and they'll say, oh, he's like a fentanyl apologist who's saying nobody dies of fentanyl. They absolutely do.

• 1:14:52Speaker 01

  But the point is if you decide that every drug problem is a product of fentanyl, then you will misconstrue the problem and may fail to recognize that while the problems with fentanyl are real, it has also become a major propaganda tool.

• 1:15:12Danny Jones?

  I was reading this crazy story in, I forget what magazine it was, but it was a story basically about how one of the head guys of the Rolling Stones was talking about how back in the day they used to get this pharmaceutical grade cocaine from Merck. And he said they would just use it all the time and like they would have like lines of it chalked up behind the speakers and amplifiers during live shows. And it was incredible because there was no withdrawal afterwards. There was no like, you never came down. It was just like, you could do this coke all day long, all the time, you know, feel yourself through these eight hour shows and, and no downside, absolutely zero downside.

• 1:15:52Danny Jones?

  And they somehow got like loads of it from Merck, this like pharmaceutical grade cocaine that apparently came from the Nazis.

• 1:15:59Speaker 01

  Right. I think this also speaks to the, the way that people project associations onto a drug. And that can change the nature of the drug experience. So maybe that's the case that this is.

• 1:16:11Danny Jones?

  Sure.

• 1:16:11Speaker 01

  But also you could imagine having a bottle of pharmaceutical cocaine and being impressed by it and thinking, oh, this is the real stuff.

• 1:16:19Danny Jones?

  Oh.

• 1:16:19Speaker 01

  Very, very good.

• 1:16:20Danny Jones?

  Yes, for sure.

• 1:16:21Speaker 01

  And then because of this association with purity and goodness, then you don't have a come down. People do this all the time.

• 1:16:26Danny Jones?

  Don't feel dirty, right? Cause it's pharmaceutical grade.

• 1:16:28Speaker 01

  Right, right. So people do this all the time with alcohol where they'll, they'll say, oh, that's, you know, the like, of course you get a hangover with the terrible alcohol, but this is some like really nice, this is some nice stuff. What gives you a hangover from alcohol is alcohol. So, so, so, you know, and I'm not saying that there couldn't be some, you know, minor contribution from sugar or whatever, but if it were the sugar, then anyone that ate a piece of candy would have a hangover the next day, which is not typically the case. So, um, yeah, it's the alcohol that is responsible, but people will buy into these ideas about how like a really high purity alcohol is not going to produce a hangover or whatever. So it's the same, people do this all the time.

• 1:17:11Danny Jones?

  You're talking about basically placebo, right?

• 1:17:13Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, the interesting thing about placebo or expectation is that these factors exist even in the presence of an active substance. So people always talk about placebo as if those factors only exist when you give somebody a sugar pill or something that's pharmacologically inactive, but those same expectation effects apply even in the presence of a pharmacologically active substance, which can make it very difficult to interpret clinical trial results. I mean, this is why anytime you're working with the human mind in that way, um, there's so many complicating factors that have to be taken into consideration.

• 1:17:49Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:49Speaker 01

  Um, so is it possible that their pharmaceutical cocaine, um, was vastly superior to whatever street cocaine they were getting at that time, which maybe was methamphetamine or it's possible. Or it's possible that the idea of a hyper pure pharmaceutical product allowed them to experience it differently.

• 1:18:08Danny Jones?

  Hmm. Yeah. How much, how much of an effect do you think that has on psychedelics?

• 1:18:15Speaker 01

  A huge.

• 1:18:15Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:18:16Speaker 01

  Huge, yeah.

• 1:18:17Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Because I noticed that, I think one of the... Most illuminating things about your um your trip to Haiti. When you when you documented that tribe and the voodoo, I think it was like a voodoo ritual society in Haiti that they were obsessed with this. And this goes back to like that rainbow serpent thing where they they had this pufferfish venom that is like one hundred and sixty thousand times more potent in a certain alkaloid that has is in cocaine or something like that. And it paralyzes you, paralyzes your whole body and sometimes is fatal or a lot of the times is fatal. But like these people, they have this spiritual religious belief, right, in voodoo and that

• 1:19:02Danny Jones?

  these things happen and that they create zombies or whatever. So so that has a huge of like that dictates how they react to these drugs because they're so their culture goes back, you know, who who knows how far it goes back, but um they really believe in this stuff and they believe they and they they have extreme expectations to how or what's going to happen once they take these drugs or engage in these rituals.

• 1:19:29Speaker 01

  Right. And so the hypothesis that this ethnobotanist Wade Davis had was, just for those that aren't familiar, that using a combination of this pufferfish toxin, TTX and scopolamine, you could effectively convince somebody that they had died and been revived as a zombie. And people outside of Haiti were very skeptical of this claim because it wouldn't work on you, it wouldn't work on me. Why are we supposed to expect that it's going to work on them? And Wade Davis's counterargument was that the effect of a drug is not just pure pharmacology, but it's dependent on the cultural matrix in which the drug is consumed.

• 1:20:11Speaker 01

  And if you administer this drug in a culture where people believe in zombies and believe in resuscitation and believe in all of these things. That you can induce this effect. And I think it's inadequately studied. There really isn't a lot of corroborating evidence. It hasn't been tested.

• 1:20:35Danny Jones?

  Yeah, how do you study that?

• 1:20:36Speaker 01

  You know, you'd have to go back and spend more time with voodoo practitioners and take more samples and really critically evaluate it. But I I think that. It's inadequately documented to say with certainty that this was a widespread phenomenon. I think that fundamentally Wade Davis's hypothesis is plausible. I wouldn't go so far as to say.

• 1:20:58Danny Jones?

  What was his hypothesis?

• 1:21:00Speaker 01

  That zombification is a

• 1:21:06Speaker 01

  ritual in Haiti that involves the administration of puffer fish that contains a toxin TTX that causes a death-like paralysis. The victim is buried alive and thinks that they have died. They are then exhumed and given scopolamine where they are kept in a sort of pharmacologically zombified state and enslaved by the voodoo sorcerer, the Bokor. So this is like, this was the idea. And it's pretty outlandish, but it's plausible. I mean, again.

• 1:21:49Danny Jones?

  So the Bokor has control of them after they become a zombie?

• 1:21:52Speaker 01

  Right. It's like, it's like a theatrical way of convincing somebody that they are your slave. And again, people say, oh, that's crazy. I mean, there's cults and religions all around the world that do things that are not that different. So if you create a system of belief that allows somebody to think that this is real and this is what needs to be done, people do all kinds of weird stuff. So I do think that what he was proposing is a possibility. How widespread it is, that's another question. Maybe it was a one-off thing, maybe it never happened, but I think that fundamentally what he was describing was possible.

• 1:22:36Danny Jones?

  Yes. It seems like there, wasn't there a study that was done? I think it was with John Hopkins where they were trying to give psychedelics to different religious groups or people like leaders of different religions and seeing how the psychedelic affected them or like what their experiences was, what their experience was based on their religious worldview.

• 1:22:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, there was.

• 1:22:55Danny Jones?

  This was the famous study that was never released that Travis Kitchens wrote about.

• 1:22:59Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Have you had him on?

• 1:23:02Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I have.

• 1:23:03Speaker 01

  Oh, cool.

• 1:23:03Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah. He blew my fucking mind, dude.

• 1:23:05Speaker 01

  He's got, I mean, he's got, well, did you talk about, was this recently?

• 1:23:09Danny Jones?

  Yes, this was like maybe a month ago.

• 1:23:11Speaker 01

  Oh, okay. Did you talk about the? The symposia stuff at all?

• 1:23:16Danny Jones?

  What's that, the symposia stuff?

• 1:23:17Speaker 01

  Cause he was one of the-

• 1:23:18Danny Jones?

  He talked about it. I mean, we talked about everything. There was nothing that I don't think he held back on anything.

• 1:23:22Speaker 01

  Oh, man.

• 1:23:23Danny Jones?

  What's the symposia-

• 1:23:24Speaker 01

  Well, if he didn't talk about it, I don't know that I wanna-

• 1:23:25Danny Jones?

  I'm sure he did. Like, I just don't know.

• 1:23:27Speaker 01

  Well, there was an activist group. This comes back to what I was saying at the beginning about people being very careful about how they're being manipulated by journalists and these drug issues. So there was this activist group that Travis Kitchens was actually a part of, an anti-drug activist group.

• 1:23:42Danny Jones?

  Uh huh.

• 1:23:43Speaker 01

  Um, and they had people who were, I think, like entirely cynical in their orientation. And then they had people like Travis Kitchens, who were not cynical in their orientation, but were looking for a place, an outlet for a critique of maybe capitalism or for-profit motivations in psychedelic research, something like that. Like, you know, the, uh, I'm not suggesting that there's no valid criticisms of psychedelic research or anything like that. There absolutely are.

• 1:24:12Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:12Speaker 01

  The issue is that a lot of the people who are engaged with critical psychedelic thought are fucking nuts. And are like ultimately anti-drug in their orientation. And so they kind of contaminate the entire movement, right? It's like, in the same way that there's like valid objections to almost everything, but it's like, there's valid objections to smoking weed. But if somebody's like, life is oriented around being anti-weed, chances are there's something kind of weird about their reasoning there. This, I think this similar thing happened with psychedelics. So there was this group and they, um, sort of terrorized the psychedelic community.

• 1:24:55Speaker 01

  Stalking people, essentially. Anytime I gave a talk, one of them would either be there online or in person to harass me. This went on for years. And I was, um, always thinking like, damn, you know, these psychedelic conferences are very expensive. The tickets cost like hundreds of dollars often. And I think, who the, how the fuck are they? I can't even afford to go to these things. I'm being paid to go to them. So, so how are these people going to these conferences just to harass me? Like, what is going on? Like, wouldn't it be interesting if they were being- Paid by someone and this was something that I was an idea that I'd been

• 1:25:37Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:38Speaker 01

  Toying with for a while, but it's a very paranoid idea that I felt uncomfortable talking about publicly because it's just a bad road to go down the the like your your ops are paid.

• 1:25:49Danny Jones?

  George Soros, yeah.

• 1:25:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, you just don't want to be that guy. So but I'd had a number of these things happen that were very, actually a lot of things happen. Like I another example would be I was giving a talk at this New York City psychedelic conference had nothing to do because I was working at this lab in Philadelphia that was receiving funding, research funding from a pharmaceutical company to develop new psychedelic drugs. So the talk had nothing to do with that. It was actually just about how different psychedelic drugs are made. Then afterwards, this woman speaks during the Q and A she has a prepared statement and and she's like, I want you to answer before this audience

• 1:26:30Speaker 01

  whether you think your pharmaceutical company's polymorph B is truly a novel invention and if not, what are you giving back to the indigenous people of the world?

• 1:26:40Danny Jones?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:26:41Speaker 01

  And and like the audience erupts into applause. And I was thinking like, oh, wow. Whoa. I mean, this is just nonsense. The work that I was doing had nothing to do with indigenous people or indigenous knowledge and this patent that she was referring to had nothing to do with any of the work that I was doing. So I was thinking in the stage lights were in my eyes and I couldn't I couldn't see who the person was, but I was thinking like, wouldn't it be fucking crazy if she were an employee of a competing pharmaceutical company and they were just weaponizing their employees using moralism to try to interfere with the competitors drug development?

• 1:27:22Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:27:23Speaker 01

  But it's like, this is the sort of thing you don't even want to say this out loud, right?

• 1:27:25Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:26Speaker 01

  So so I kind of made peace with this. I was like, it would be crazy, but you will never know.

• 1:27:32Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:27:32Speaker 01

  You will never know. And it's better to just assume that that isn't the case because you'll go crazy if you even think that thought.

• 1:27:41Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 1:27:42Speaker 01

  But then. I found the dissertation, the PhD thesis that was written by the woman who asked this question, which has a transcription of her asking the question and acknowledging that she was the one that did this and she was an employee of the opposing pharmaceutical company. No way. USONA, yes, yes, actually, yes. And thanks to the CEO, the billionaire CEO of the company in the beginning of her PhD dissertation. Wow. Yeah, so. Dude, that's crazy. Yeah, this was really crazy. This was one of these like, oh shit, it's real. Like, it's real. It's actually real and this is the sort of thing that's going on.

• 1:28:25Speaker 01

  So this company, USONA, was very, very good about employing people who would harass business opposition using moralism as their technique. They branched their pharmaceutical company into, there's a for-profit, one of the owners has a for-profit called Ceruvia, and then they have all these nonprofit arms that are oriented toward supposedly preventing the approval of bad patents that just happen to be patents of all of their pharmaceutical competitors, right? It's really actually kind of amazing. And so they promote the work of any journalist who is writing anything negative about their competitors. Wow. Yeah, yeah.

• 1:29:09Speaker 01

  And it turned out that one of the executives at USONA was paying or had paid one of the members of this group, the Travis Kitchens, was a member of to, again, also harass their opposition. It's pretty wild. Oh my god. Yeah. And the same person, I don't know if you follow Michael Pollan, but the same person is Michael Pollan's major informant in all of his psychedelic reporting and that bias is very much evident in all of Michael Pollan's stuff as well. So there's some wild, yeah, there's some really wild stuff going on and this is, this is like a real example of this sort of thing happening. That's an example of the YouTube comments becoming true.

• 1:29:51Danny Jones?

  Because if you read YouTube comments of a lot of podcasts, people always speculate that this person's an op working for this person. Like, that's like the number one foundational conspiracy.

• 1:30:02Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:30:03Danny Jones?

  I feel like that exists in comments of people that say anything intelligent or anything interesting. Like, you always, they always say, okay, this person's, you know, working for this person. They're a paid informant for this company or this country or whatever.

• 1:30:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Which is funny. And people do that to me. And it's funny because as an impulse, it's not necessarily a bad thing to do. The issue is that they often get it wrong. So this USona thing is a very extreme example, and it's now 100% confirmed that this occurred. And not a single journalist has ever publicly discussed this. The only narrative that has ever been publicly promoted has been USona's narrative, which they promote through association with the grants that are given to journalists to report on psychedelics, right? There's actually like, and again, the way that I'm describing this, I want to

• 1:30:59Speaker 01

  be very cautious and not suggest that it's like purely calculated. I do think that there's a complexity in all of this. It's a little bit hard where there's a bit of self deception at play. Maybe they really believe what they're saying, whatever, whatever, whatever. But this is one of the reasons that MDMA was not approved.

• 1:31:17Speaker 04

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• 1:31:47Speaker 01

  Was this group that was in part funded by an executive at USona, but also funded, actually two executives at USona, but also funded by a major anti psychedelic organization called the Sarlo Family Foundation.

• 1:32:06Danny Jones?

  Sarlo, oh yeah, I've heard of that.

• 1:32:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. So they, they fund like most of the anti psychedelic.

• 1:32:13Speaker 01

  People at the moment.

• 1:32:14Danny Jones?

  Yeah, Travis was telling me about that family.

• 1:32:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a very interesting story, actually, behind all this shit is fascinating. And it's kind of sad to me that no journalists have covered it. That a lot of people that even dip a toe in the water gets sued. I might, I hope, you know, it's, it's like, you have to be the people that.

• 1:32:31Danny Jones?

  How could they sue you if you dip your toe like to just to talk, just people talking about it? Or like they're, they're saying they're being defamed or something?

• 1:32:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you can just legally harass people very easily.

• 1:32:42Danny Jones?

  harass people with lawsuits.

• 1:32:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, and they know this, so, um, yeah. And this is all to say, I saw all this play out and it was one of the most shocking things I've ever seen. It was mind blowing. And you can see some of the stuff on YouTube, right? So if you go to the YouTube MDMA Advisory Committee Hearing, you can see some of these people who were being paid by the Sarlo Family Foundation to run an anti MDMA campaign, lying to the FDA and getting away with it.

• 1:33:22Speaker 01

  Including the, the main person was this woman, Nishay Devano, um, who had, was sort of the head of the anti MDMA campaign. And she just was firing off bullshit at a rate so fast that no one could even contend. She's saying that the MAPS, the company that was developing MDMA as a treatment for PTSD, was a therapy cult. She was saying that one of the therapists had pinned down a patient. Well, the patient screamed, get your fucking hands off of me. But this was like a completely decontextualized snippet of a account of a ketamine therapy session

• 1:34:07Speaker 01

  that had nothing to do with MAPS, that was not at all what she described. It was like, the patient was reliving the trauma of having been abused by their father and was speaking to the memory of their father, saying, get your fucking hands off of me. So it's that kind of, anyway, this stuff is messy. It's a messy, big story, but the reason that I even bring it up.

• 1:34:26Danny Jones?

  And why are they so anti? Anti psychedelics and anti MDMA and all this stuff like why like is it is it some sort of like personal moral thing that they truly believe or is it something is it having anything to do with money?

• 1:34:40Speaker 01

  Oh, money is a big, a big, I think it transcends money, but money is a big part of it. Money, I think.

• 1:34:47Danny Jones?

  Because they can't sell it, they can't, they, they, they wouldn't be able to make it their own product and, and commercialize it themselves?

• 1:34:55Speaker 01

  No, okay, there's, there's different, this is kind of a, a bag of, a can of worms. And I could like try to breeze through it. It's a lot of names that people won't know. But the basic is that there's, there's two different groups that were primarily responsible. One is the Sarlo Family Foundation and the story there is really convoluted and bizarre, but it was that this millionaire Holocaust survivor had been given MDMA by a MAPS employee and had this cathartic emotional release of the trauma that he experienced during the Holocaust and decided that he wanted to leave a portion of his fortune to MAPS.

• 1:35:32Speaker 01

  And this enraged his estranged daughter who stood to inherit that money and also felt hurt that her father had had this sort of emotional connection with this other woman. I don't think there's any evidence that it was sexual. And so

• 1:35:58Speaker 01

  she then can, and then her father also is very old and in the midst of this controversy develops Alzheimer's disease. So he's effectively taken out of the conversation. So now it's an issue of was this elder abuse and a sort of Anna Nicole Smith type exploitation scenario? Or was this somebody who truly had this healing experience and?

• 1:36:27Speaker 01

  Due to weird internal conflict within his family. This turned into a problem, right? Anyway, the whatever the case may be, and I of course lean toward the more likely scenario being that he actually had a cathartic emotional release from using MDMA and that he genuinely considered this experience valuable and that he was not being manipulated. Although I wasn't there, don't worry. Whatever the case may be, his foundation then began to fund anti psychedelic reporting and and so that was a

• 1:37:14Danny Jones?

  Very odd.

• 1:37:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, very, very odd. The other one is a bit more familiar and it's which is that USONA is developing

• 1:37:24Speaker 01

  psilocybin. And so if they can position themselves as morally superior to their competitors by funding opposition or sicking their employees or the people that they're paying on to anybody that is potentially critical of them, then it's good for their business. That's simple. That's, you know.

• 1:37:43Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:37:44Speaker 01

  An old story.

• 1:37:47Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it's just like this crazy sort of political corporation shadow war that's going on where they're manipulating the media and doing whatever they can to prop themselves up.

• 1:37:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, and I really

• 1:38:02Speaker 01

  feel bad for well intentioned people that are stuck in the middle of this because it's really hard. Because I know that many well intentioned people have gotten caught up in it. Like there's an interesting story in the New York Times where they're kind of covering some of these things and you can tell that the journalist who I've spoken with a tiny bit just bought the the story, right? There's like this, you know, they they're photographing one of the representatives of the pharmaceutical company, but they never mentioned that he's even an employee or an executive at the pharmaceutical company. It's pretty weird. How did that happen? I guess they didn't ask or whatever. And then they and they're they're very good at creating these fake. Things that they've done to help people that sound good until you really think about it.

• 1:38:46Speaker 01

  Like they'll say, oh, you know, well, we've done this amazing work. We actually were able to shoot down a patent for Viagra and MDMA as a combination therapy. And you think, wow, and you think like, oh, thank you so much for your.

• 1:38:59Danny Jones?

  What's wrong with Viagra mixed with MDMA? It sounds like an amazing drug.

• 1:39:02Speaker 01

  Okay, so you get it.

• 1:39:05Speaker 01

  I mean, they're saying, oh, it's not a sufficiently novel invention. Therefore, it shouldn't be patentable. But it's like, what have you even achieved here? This is not a thing that exists. You just prevented someone from developing this as a medicine. Nobody has been helped by this in any way. But you, if you frame it the right way, credulous journalists will say like, oh, good work, sir. For your advocacy.

• 1:39:25Danny Jones?

  Sure.

• 1:39:25Speaker 01

  Anyway, this is a whole crazy thing, but this has been a big, big story. And it's been disheartening to me to see how hard it has been for the journalists that have even tried to draw attention to any of this. Really, like, there's two journalists, Rachel Newer and John Semley, who've really worked very hard to do this. But the majority of journalists have just uncritically repeated the narrative as it has been presented to the public by many of the people who are responsible for creating this mess to begin with. Yeah.

• 1:40:07Danny Jones?

  Yeah, one of the other, one of the main things that Travis was explaining to me when he was on here was the, he was explaining how there are all these different groups that are trying to use psychedelics to their advantage. And the one that he was pointing out was the Catholic Church. And how there are certain people that want to sort of use psychedelics to revive Christianity or revive the church and to.

• 1:40:42Danny Jones?

  Give these church fathers the power to give the churchgoers psychedelics to because they would it would be able to make people more enthusiastic about God or about religion, which in their estimation would make be good for the country, would make people more in line with one's spiritual belief. But like what Travis was pointing out is how fucking dangerous that is when you give these people who are believed to be the connection to God,

• 1:41:21Danny Jones?

  the power of giving these people psychedelics where they're probably already, these people are probably, you know, already vulnerable. And now you're giving them psychedelics and you have the and you have a direct connection to God and you can tell them whatever you want. Like, that seems like a very dangerous slippery idea. And I think one of the people, one of the people that he talks about is Brian Marrescu in that immortality key book. And Travis interviewed Amen Hillman and Carl Ruck, who are both sources for that immortality key book that Brian Marrescu did.

• 1:42:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:02Danny Jones?

  And he allegedly, Brian didn't tell either of them his ultimate aim of that book, which according to Travis was that it would be a great idea to infuse psychedelics into the church.

• 1:42:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:15Danny Jones?

  And then Carl was very upset about this. From what I hear, like, I don't, I haven't talked to him or Brian about this. This is just what I'm learning from Travis and from Amen, is that, you know, he wasn't happy about that. And there's also pictures of Brian that was in Travis's article, giving the Pope a copy of his book.

• 1:42:37Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I read and I really enjoyed Travis's article and I hung out with Brian and like him as well.

• 1:42:45Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:45Speaker 01

  So.

• 1:42:46Danny Jones?

  Yeah, he seems like a very nice guy.

• 1:42:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I'm sort of sympathetic to both sides of that. I would say, maybe there's a less nefarious implementation of psychedelics in the church. Maybe it could revitalize Christianity in a way that wouldn't necessarily be bad. It's obviously not my thing.

• 1:43:08Speaker 01

  I have complicated feelings about religion because, you know, I'm a pretty, I think socially a lot of harms have come from religious thought and generally it's not really my vibe. But at the same time, I do think that our culture is atomized and lacking any kind of, any kind of unified goals and having a sort of culture system that, and a value system that people can connect with one another through can be beneficial. You know, I think about like my, my grandmothers or things like that and how socially beneficial religion

• 1:43:49Speaker 01

  was for them in their old age and it provides a community that's really missing from a lot of people's lives. So there's, there's good things. There's also countless examples of exactly this sort of problem that Travis is describing existing where psychedelics are used as tools of manipulation. I'm actually pretty close friends of the guy that was in a psychedelic cult and it really fucked him up. And it fucked him up in complicated ways. Like it's, it's not really the story that you typically hear about things like this where, and, and some of it I think is so sensitive to him that he's never even

• 1:44:29Speaker 01

  fully told me. So I have to sort of fill in the blanks a little bit, but I think part of it was that he got involved in this group when he was very young. I think he was maybe like 13, something like that. And he loved psychedelics and they love psychedelics. So right off the bat, you have this thing. Everyone is enjoying this thing that is transformative and transcendent and amazing and interesting. So that part is good. That part is connection. But then the leader of the group is also espousing other values that at least superficially seem good because the psychedelic stuff is good. So he's saying, oh, you know, it's bad to eat meat or whatever. Okay. Fair enough. Bad to eat meat. Okay. Psychedelics are good.

• 1:45:10Speaker 01

  Eating meat is bad. It's bad to be violent. Okay. Also, fair enough. Nothing wrong with not being violent. That's good. And on top of that, you have to believe in God and, and the Christian Bible. All right. Okay. Maybe. And, and also being gay is bad because it's

• 1:45:31Speaker 01

  Not, it's not what the Lord wants. So then, then you know, you start to see how this kind of like, and I suspect that this person was gay. And I think that the, the homophobic orientation of this particular group may have

• 1:45:48Danny Jones?

  Broken him out?

• 1:45:49Speaker 01

  May have really had a detrimental effect on, on him.

• 1:45:52Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:45:53Speaker 01

  Psychologically, because, I mean, and the same thing can happen without psychedelics, right? That can happen to people just with normal Christianity.

• 1:46:01Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:01Speaker 01

  But I think that this exacerbated it. And there, there's even more to it. I don't know that I, how much detail I should go into, but there, there was more to it that

• 1:46:12Speaker 01

  that taught me a lot of the complexities associated with these things. And this is just part of the difficulty of religion. Like, I don't know that it's necessarily a bad thing. In fact, I think it could be good, but these things are complicated.

• 1:46:23Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Amen Hillman, how did you discover him?

• 1:46:28Speaker 01

  I'd been familiar with him for a while because

• 1:46:30Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:46:30Speaker 01

  He wrote this book, The Chemical Muse.

• 1:46:31Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:32Speaker 01

  It's quite a while ago, actually. So I'd read The Chemical Muse and I felt that most of the ideas that were being articulated in that book were totally believable, not particularly controversial. This idea that there is ancient Greek use of psychoactive substances of one kind or another seemed totally plausible to me. Why wouldn't there be?

• 1:46:55Danny Jones?

  Right. I loved the way he articulated how the, the ancient medicine and the ancient drugs, uh, which is like the, the, the work of Galen, the Galen literature is like 10% of all literature from antiquity, which is crazy that it's medical, like, literature. He, he explained that stuff as a guide rope that leads you through the dark cave of fairy tales.

• 1:47:25Danny Jones?

  Because he he uses the drug, the the ancient Greek drug stuff that Galen wrote as context to everything else, all the religious stuff that was written about through antiquity, which I thought was super interesting.

• 1:47:39Speaker 01

  It's very interesting. Yeah. And Hillman is in an interesting position. It's sort of analogous to someone like John Allegro where or Brian Moroscu, where you have texts that the majority of readers cannot access or translate.

• 1:48:01Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:48:02Speaker 01

  And so you are essentially blindly basing your interpretation on the authority of someone who you don't know and don't know what their intentions are. And this is the case for a lot of things.

• 1:48:17Danny Jones?

  Sure.

• 1:48:17Speaker 01

  It's probably the case for science for most people. I'm lucky in that there is a domain where I'm able to critically assess things and look at the primary evidence and make some kind of a balanced assessment of how likely something is to be true or false. But when it comes to reading Allegro or something like that, I don't know. I just don't know. And when you think about how complicated drugs are in our current society, as we've discussed, and how you could even look at our entire published record about drugs, and so much of it would have additional complexity that wouldn't even be evident to some one thousand years from now, maybe, right?

• 1:49:01Speaker 01

  Would they would they know that there are additional layers to fentanyl as a tool of propaganda? Or would they just look at the superficial take on this that fentanyl was a problem?

• 1:49:12Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:12Speaker 01

  Would they understand all of the legal pharmacological complexity involved in all of this? Maybe not. And so it's I always have avoided these debates about ancient practices because I feel that it is so hard to understand what is going on right now.

• 1:49:36Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:36Speaker 01

  That what hope could I possibly have of understanding what was happening thousands of years ago?

• 1:49:43Danny Jones?

  I don't think you could possibly ever know what was happening thousands of years ago. It's just that he has the most entertaining. Speculations and translations of what was going on thousands. It's the most fun. And I have to give him credit because, I mean, first of all, I gotta give you credit because I didn't know about him until I listened to your podcast with him. And I had him on after that. And it was like wildly popular episode. And, um, and that like got me really interested in the ancient Greek stuff. And I led me on to read a lot more books and stuff on that, on that topic. So like at the very least, whether like people want to argue whether he's mistranslating things.

• 1:50:27Danny Jones?

  Or he has his own agenda. I mean, he very obviously self admittedly has a bias. Because his dissertation, they told him he had to take all references to recreational drugs out of his PhD dissertation.

• 1:50:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:50:39Danny Jones?

  Right. So he went on and did that. And then after he got his PhD, he was like, fuck this. I'm going to turn that whole part into a book about all the recreational drugs that were happening. Or that was going on. And then he wrote that, um, that other book about ritual child. Which got him in big trouble. And then he got kicked out of the university. So he was like, he's like the anti. I think he, and he was at a religious university. I think it was Wisconsin, University of Wisconsin. So like, he became like an, like an anti-Christian classicist. So he wants like his, he has a built in bias in his brain that wants to just

• 1:51:20Danny Jones?

  utterly appall any Christian person.

• 1:51:23Speaker 01

  Which is arguably exactly what happened to Allegro as well.

• 1:51:26Danny Jones?

  Right, right. But like a potentially a lot of the stuff he's saying is, is pretty spot on. Like a lot of the stuff that he talks about with, um, with Galen. Using these, um, this theriak concoction of like seven different viper venoms combined with flesh of vipers and opium in there, like.

• 1:51:53Danny Jones?

  And, you know, like, first of all, how did they, how did he come up with the idea to combine all these venoms? And, and who did they test them on? Like, dude, he's like, like, are you, who's gonna be the first test subject to try this theriak concoction? And then where did you even come up with the idea in the first place? So it's like, I haven't heard, I haven't, like, again, I have no way of telling, like, knowing if he just pulled that out of his ass, or if he really translated it, but it's definitely super interesting.

• 1:52:23Speaker 01

  It's extremely interesting, and it also speaks to a sort of tension that's become prevalent in our culture, which is, I like to talk to people, even if they have really weird beliefs that I don't agree with, or whatever, I just think it's interesting to talk to somebody and hear their perspective, and it can be an exercise in critical thinking, it can be an encouragement to evaluate the evidence on your own, and try to understand why he believes this, and why it may be true or may not be true. And I think that's all good, but we, in general, have this, like, there's this idea of platforming, like, you, by even speaking to somebody, this is a tacit endorsement of their character and all of their beliefs.

• 1:53:06Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:53:06Speaker 01

  And so you should only speak to good people who you agree with, and any deviation from that represents some kind of danger to a free society. It's a bad road to go down.

• 1:53:16Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:53:18Speaker 01

  And I think, yeah, I think in general, even if somebody has beliefs that are wrong, there's a lot that can be learned from it that's interesting. I don't know, again, with Hillman, I think he's so fascinating, I just don't have the time to even attempt to fact check most of the claims that he's making. I did a little bit, and it seemed like, what is this word, laystase?

• 1:53:46Danny Jones?

  Laystase was a trafficker or a pirate, I think.

• 1:53:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there was.

• 1:53:50Danny Jones?

  And then Jesus was in the public park, and he's like, I'm not a laystase.

• 1:53:52Speaker 01

  Right, so it seems that that... Translation of the word is child traffickers, at the very least, non-standard.

• 1:54:00Danny Jones?

  Right, right. Then you have to think like, is it non-standard? It's non-standard depending on who you talk to as well. Like, a lot of people have, a lot of, um, this, this, here's the, and here's the thing about Bible scholars, too, is the majority of Bible scholars ascribe to the, ascribe to Christianity or whatever religion that is. So like, you're, you're dedicating your life to the science of the history of the Bible, and you also believe in the Bible as your faith, which is weird. And these people don't want to hear anything that goes against what the conventional explanation of Jesus was,

• 1:54:42Danny Jones?

  especially if you're labeling him as like a Jeffrey Epstein-type character.

• 1:54:46Speaker 01

  Right, right, right. And then, of course, the opposite is also true, where you have one group of scholars that believe in Christianity and will have a bias in that direction, and then you have Hillman and

• 1:54:57Danny Jones?

  Who's the opposite.

• 1:54:58Speaker 01

  Who's, I believe, satanic, right?

• 1:55:01Danny Jones?

  Well, he doesn't, he doesn't believe Satan was a, he thinks Satan's a fairy tale. He says, hail Satan.

• 1:55:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, he says, that's what I was saying. He says hail Satan.

• 1:55:10Danny Jones?

  He says hail Satan, but he calls that, he got that from Socrates. He calls it the gadfly. He thinks, he says hail Satan because it's like a throat punch to people. Because the people, people hear it, and they're like, whoa, it like blows them, like, off of their mind. You know, it gets them like out of their normal frame of thinking, like, what the fuck? And it gets them to pay attention.

• 1:55:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:55:29Danny Jones?

  So he thinks it's like provocative and it's, uh,

• 1:55:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:32Danny Jones?

  You know, it's interesting. It's fun for him. It's not like he literally is a Satanist.

• 1:55:37Speaker 01

  Wouldn't mind if he was.

• 1:55:38Danny Jones?

  Right, no, neither would I. But it's, but it's super interesting that he, you know, he thinks it's all a fairy tale. He thinks it all, you know, and, you know, he, and he credits a lot of authors. Like, I've, I've talked to him, I talk to him all the time. I call him up and talk to, ask him questions all the fucking time.

• 1:55:54Speaker 01

  That's awesome.

• 1:55:55Danny Jones?

  I love him. He's a super nice guy.

• 1:55:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:55:57Danny Jones?

  And, um, you know, and he teaches me a lot of stuff. And like, I've, I ask other people that I know who are like, super Like knowledgeable and study this stuff for their like their entire lives like the Bible and Greek myths and Greek literature and stuff like that. And I often get a lot of corroboration on the things that he says, for example, like this ancient writer Nonus, who wrote in like the second or third century, talks about how the sponge that was offered to Jesus was an antidote to the snake venom. And there was like a literal Greek passage that was translated and he used the words antidote.

• 1:56:40Danny Jones?

  That was on the sponge that was given to him and he was, um, according to multiple authors, he was on the cross and he was in like dying of thirst, like he was extremely thirsty, which was apparently that's a side effect of a certain viper venom. Um, I think even you said in the pufferfish documentary that that was one of the side effects of the pufferfish venom. But, um,

• 1:57:10Danny Jones?

  again, who knows what the fuck was going on 2000 years ago, but it's like, there's a lot of corroboration here and it's a, it's a decent hypothesis at the very least.

• 1:57:19Speaker 01

  It's interesting. Yeah. I don't know enough about this to say, but I could see, I mean, are you, are you familiar with the origin of consciousness and the breakdown of the bicameral mind? Do you know about this?

• 1:57:32Danny Jones?

  Um, not, not deeply. No, I've heard of it. I'm, I'm not like super into it.

• 1:57:36Speaker 01

  I mean, it's an interesting idea exclusively from this perspective of thinking about, it's interesting in general, but this perspective of thinking that even the way that we conceptualize something like our own consciousness or sense of self or internal monologue could be totally different. That every aspect of our consciousness could have been so different from the way it currently exists on the basis of different religious beliefs. And I think that this kind of, um,

• 1:58:07Speaker 01

  bicameralism or whatever it's called.

• 1:58:10Danny Jones?

  What does that mean bicameral?

• 1:58:11Speaker 01

  It's been so long. I think the idea is that you see your consciousness as like a projection of God into your mind as opposed to a sense of, uh, individuality and a personal agency.

• 1:58:28Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 1:58:29Speaker 01

  And so.

• 1:58:33Speaker 01

  You know, you think about something like this, or you know, there's another kind of vaguely analogous idea, the Sapir-Worf hypothesis. I don't know if you know about

• 1:58:43Danny Jones?

  No.

• 1:58:44Speaker 01

  Where it's like, also called linguistic determinism, but the idea is that just the language that a person speaks can change their interpretation of reality. And this is by contemporary linguists, considered not evidence-based. But it's an interesting idea. Like, if you didn't have a word for orange, might orange cease to exist? Or would orange be lumped in with red? If you only had red?

• 1:59:10Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:59:12Speaker 01

  Or?

• 1:59:12Danny Jones?

  Oh, interesting.

• 1:59:16Speaker 01

  Like, to what extent is our reality defined by

• 1:59:19Danny Jones?

  By the language we use.

• 1:59:21Speaker 01

  That we use

• 1:59:21Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:59:22Speaker 01

  To conceptualize and categorize things.

• 1:59:24Danny Jones?

  That's so interesting, too, because ancient Greek had like, over a million unique words, and like, so many different variations of words. And, and I think even, I don't think there's even close to that. I think, what is, how many words does modern English have? I'd be curious if you could find that, Steve. But like, the fact that, and, and, you know, even going back to his, like, his book, how he explains, which is, I mean, the book is not sensational at all. I mean, it's, it makes sense that in the time of the Romans, like, there was plague and famine and hand-to-hand combat all the time. It would make sense that people were using drugs to get through the day. And that, you know,

• 2:00:10Danny Jones?

  with infant mortality being like 50%, you know, people would be taking drugs all the time. So, 200,000, is this what it, the?

• 2:00:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's what it seems to say. It seems kind of low to me, but I, I mean, I guess, I mean, I don't know 200,000 words.

• 2:00:24Speaker 01

  So like, 200,000 words in our language, they had over a million words in it 2,000, 2,500 years ago.

• 2:00:35Danny Jones?

  You know, and just like the thing, the, the concepts they were able to come up with and like the philosophy that, you know, they were come up with democracy and the scientific method and all that, all that crazy stuff that they were doing. Like, it's like, you know, it's just super interesting. I wish I could take a time machine back to that point in history and see what the fuck was going on, but we'll never know. It's also funny how people like to bicker about it online. What difference does it fucking make, you know?

• 2:01:04Danny Jones?

  You see the people like debating it. You know, I even asked a couple of people to debate Amon, um, like some serious academic people and they, uh, they had, they, they said, I don't want to give him the, uh, the credibility of being on like the same platform as me, or I don't want to give him that, that stage, right? Or like give him that credibility was the general responses that I got from people.

• 2:01:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. Which is on one hand disappointing. You think, well, why wouldn't you do it? But you know.

• 2:01:35Danny Jones?

  He's hard to swallow. He's a, he's a jagged pill to swallow.

• 2:01:37Speaker 01

  And I think that he's actually operating in what I imagine is good faith, but there's a lot of like, there's a YouTube channel, Professor Dave Explains. It's pretty great, I think. And it's, he's constantly debating, um, flat earthers and things like that. And it's exhausting. Like you kind of, I know this is like a big thing with Graham Hancock, for example, where he's, he's like getting angry at Egyptologists that don't want to debate him, but it's exhausting. I don't, I'm not talking about Graham Hancock specifically, but I understand generally why experts in a certain field may be reluctant to debate people that they conceptualize as having fringe beliefs, because in some instances,

• 2:02:21Speaker 01

  it's like extremely difficult and does cause problems. And you can see the Professor Dave stuff. I mean, he, he's like.

• 2:02:30Danny Jones?

  He's called Professor Dave on YouTube?

• 2:02:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. He's pretty great, but he's, you know, he's like a real, um, Warrior when it comes to this sort of stuff like but he he goes after people in these debates about a biogenesis, flat earth, lots of different scientific topics. Yeah, and it's it's hard. It's like it's not it's a skill in and of itself that I don't think you would necessarily expect a typical expert to have because it involves this sort of flair as a debater and performance that are not typically part of their profession.

• 2:03:08Danny Jones?

  What do you make of the idea of using human like using the bot like his idea of using? I don't even know if that's his idea. I think it comes from somewhere else, but he basically talks about it a lot. But the idea of using the human body as like a drug factory or like as a, I think the way he describes it as like using venoms, like a small amount of like snake venom on a young person to where they don't die from it, but they build up the antibodies to the snake venom and how they could use this young person's bodily fluids as an antidote to snake bites.

• 2:03:46Speaker 01

  That seems

• 2:03:48Danny Jones?

  Like an ancient vaccine or something.

• 2:03:50Speaker 01

  Like, yeah, it seems very, very, very roughly speaking plausible, maybe.

• 2:03:58Danny Jones?

  Do we have any evidence that other that they outside of shit like Galen that they were doing that stuff back then? Do you know that you know?

• 2:04:05Speaker 01

  That they were creating vaccines in humans?

• 2:04:08Danny Jones?

  No, I don't. Or using using human, human, humans as like antibody factories or anything like this.

• 2:04:15Speaker 01

  I don't believe so.

• 2:04:15Danny Jones?

  No.

• 2:04:16Speaker 01

  No, and and but but the idea of harnessing human metabolism as a mode of affecting chemical transformations, I think is.

• 2:04:30Speaker 01

  Broadly represented, I mean, the alchemists were very, very interested in urine, without question. The element phosphorus was discovered in urine from urine analysis.

• 2:04:41Danny Jones?

  I think the ancient Romans were drinking piss in some of their initiations.

• 2:04:45Speaker 01

  I don't know about that, but it seems possible. I mean, but the idea there is that, yeah, there's clearly some kind of transformation of foods that's occurring. One issue is that many, not all, but many metabolic changes are oxidative in their character and increase the polarity of a drug in order to facilitate its excretion in urine. This is kind of like, if you were to, there's a lot of things that can happen in the body, but if you were to broadly talk about what like phase one metabolism is, it often involves oxidation that increases polarity of a drug.

• 2:05:26Speaker 01

  And one problem with that in terms of harnessing it for drug manufacturing is that the reason the body does this is specifically because it facilitates excretion and typically, but not always, deactivates a drug. So this is, this is like our evolved process for reducing the activity of drugs. There are active metabolites, there are instances of drugs that become more active through biotransformation, but they're often intentionally engineered that way, not always.

• 2:06:02Danny Jones?

  And what do you think would be, or do you think there would be any effect of combining venoms and consuming them?

• 2:06:13Speaker 01

  I have no idea. There certainly could be. I mean, yeah, without question.

• 2:06:19Danny Jones?

  Like a, like a, like a compound, like an ancient compounding pharmacy of venoms, like where they're just creating their own new compound?

• 2:06:30Speaker 01

  I mean, look at the ingredients in most products today. They have an insane number of different things that are each intended to alter the activity in its own little way, changing the taste, changing the color, modifying the pharmacology in various ways. We do that all the time. So I see no reason that people wouldn't be aware of the, at the very least additive, if not synergistic effects that come from the.

• 2:06:56Speaker 01

  Concoction with, you know,

• 2:06:58Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:58Speaker 01

  many different ingredients.

• 2:07:00Danny Jones?

  Yeah. And I'm sure it also had a lot to do with like the beliefs and the, the culture that was around back then too. I'm sure that had a lot to do with this stuff. That people believed that this theriak combo was making them younger. Maybe that was, that was what he reported to his physician and he wrote about it that way.

• 2:07:19Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 2:07:22Danny Jones?

  But.

• 2:07:23Speaker 01

  But I'm not the person for the, especially when it comes to these very broad discussions. Like I could investigate the influence of a specific plant or a specific thing. But most of the practices that he was describing were so complicated.

• 2:07:36Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:36Speaker 01

  That they don't really lend themselves to any kind of casual, critical analysis. It's not the kind of thing, like I could, you know, you could design experiments. You could dedicate yourself to it, but it's not something that you could just, you know, on a podcast say like, yeah.

• 2:07:54Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:07:55Speaker 01

  It works.

• 2:07:58Danny Jones?

  It would be amazing to see somebody try to engineer the, all the ingredients of that and analyze it and see what the fuck it was, what the fuck it actually did.

• 2:08:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:10Danny Jones?

  Um, I'm gonna take a pee break real quick.

• 2:08:11Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:08:12Danny Jones?

  We'll jump back in.

• 2:08:12Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 2:08:14Danny Jones?

  We're talking about David Nichols. He got, Travis told me about this. He was saying that, um, David got some crazy DARPA grant to work on psychedelics. The use of, um, what was the psychedelic? Some sort of psychedelic for soldiers. And I actually, we actually looked it up and it wasn't David Nichols. It was somebody, I was, I think the head of his department.

• 2:08:39Speaker 01

  It's Brian Roth.

• 2:08:39Danny Jones?

  Brian, okay. Yes, that's right. Yeah.

• 2:08:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:08:42Danny Jones?

  And, um,

• 2:08:45Danny Jones?

  allegedly, I mean, who knows what the fuck DARPA is doing, spending all, I mean, allegedly, according to the grant, like according to all the published research on it is that they're trying to take the psychedelic trip out of these drugs so that they can, um, get the benefit of the therapy for use as a PTSD or battle fatigue, things like this. But according to Travis.

• 2:09:13Danny Jones?

  There's this dude named Dana Beal, who is trafficking Ibogaine to the front lines of the Ukraine to give the Ukrainian soldiers so that they can enhance their edge detection and their aim on the battlefield. And also to combat battle fatigue so they can get right back out there and continue fighting.

• 2:09:34Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, I mean, I'm friends with Dana Beal.

• 2:09:36Danny Jones?

  Are you really?

• 2:09:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, he's a character.

• 2:09:41Danny Jones?

  Wild dude.

• 2:09:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's one of the original New York City psychedelic weirdos. And everybody knows Dana Beal. I don't doubt that he's doing that. I would say that's a very separate thing from Brian Roth's work, which is funded by DARPA and is published and publicly available and brilliant and beneficial to all of humanity. It's not, it's actually not clinical work. It's basic scientific research that has been the most important work ever published on the structure of the serotonin 2A and 2B receptor. And he very recently published a new paper that goes even further in elucidating

• 2:10:27Speaker 01

  how different psychedelics interact with the protein and how these different types of interactions produce either psychedelic or non-psychedelic effects. So there's nothing even remotely nefarious about any of the work that Brian Roth is doing. It's some of the most important, cutting-edge pharmacology on serotonin 2A agonists that exists.

• 2:10:51Danny Jones?

  And the idea, if I'm correct, is that is taking the trip out of the psychedelics so that people can get it without the sort of hallucination or

• 2:11:07Speaker 01

  That's part of it. Yeah, it's part of it.

• 2:11:09Danny Jones?

  But like, the question is like, do you get that same benefit from these drugs without the psychedelic effect?

• 2:11:15Speaker 01

  It depends on what benefit you're describing and what you're looking for and who the patient is and what the disorder is. Exactly, because you conceivably have a full spectrum of psychedelic to not psychedelic. And maybe at one point on the spectrum for a certain type of person, you're getting the benefit. It may be not. And what about the duration? And what about the environment? And what about a million and the frequency of dosing and a million things? It's very hard to say what is optimal. I try to keep an open mind. Because I think people can be very moralistic about things like this. Or they'll say like, oh, you're just commodifying this and destroying the spirituality and destroying the, the whole thing that makes this valuable and making it into the next Prozac.

• 2:11:59Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:12:00Speaker 01

  Okay, I, I understand the argument, but we should explore everything and see what's out there. Because Brian Roth's work, you, you could, you could look at this two ways. You could say, oh, he's studying non psychedelic psychedelics. But part of studying non psychedelic psychedelics is also recognizing what creates a psychedelic. You can kind of move in both directions. So one of the big subjects of this work has been biased signaling at the serotonin 2A receptor. And whether, whether a receptor interaction that is associated with something called beta-erastin or GQ is responsible for the psychedelic effect.

• 2:12:46Speaker 01

  And this work has allowed us to better understand what makes psychedelic psychedelic in terms of their molecular neuro pharmacology. It's been very important. So I don't see these things as like two things that exist in opposition to one another. You could argue in the same direction and say that studying psychedelics shows you what you need for maybe like a, in this instance, GQ biased path that would be more likely to be psychedelic. But I think the, the basic thing is like, the psychedelic experience is incredibly powerful. And is.

• 2:13:24Speaker 01

  Maybe unsuitable for certain types of people and maybe not beneficial. And if you had a way of dialing it down a little bit, that could allow certain benefits of psychedelics, which may have little to do with what we typically associate with a psychedelic experience. Right? There's a, there's a neuroscientist pharmacologist named Chuck Nichols, and he did a lot of work on the anti-inflammatory effects of different psychedelic compounds. So he's showing that there could be a therapeutic effect from psychedelics. It's completely separate from what we typically conceptualize as the therapeutic effect of psychedelics. Right? Same thing goes for treatment of addiction, treatment of cluster headaches.

• 2:14:08Speaker 01

  Right? Thinking that the point of a psychedelic experience is have this religious, transcendent, hyper visual experience, I think is somewhat reductive, because who's to say what they can or can't do, or should or shouldn't do? So I'm in support of people that are exploring every avenue of what can happen at serotonin receptors.

• 2:14:32Danny Jones?

  Yes. And the, so the serotonin 2A receptor is what's primarily responsible for the psychedelic experience that you receive.

• 2:14:42Speaker 01

  With the classical psychedelics.

• 2:14:43Danny Jones?

  And we, and humans have had this receptor forever, like as far as we know?

• 2:14:50Speaker 01

  Seems like it, yeah.

• 2:14:51Danny Jones?

  So, so.

• 2:14:52Speaker 01

  I mean, even non-humans have it.

• 2:14:55Danny Jones?

  Even non-humans have it?

• 2:14:56Speaker 01

  Even non-humans have it.

• 2:14:58Danny Jones?

  Like?

• 2:14:58Speaker 01

  Rodents have it.

• 2:14:59Danny Jones?

  Rodents have a 2A receptor? So do we know, or do we have, there's no way to know if they can experience anything similar to what we experience when you give them these drugs?

• 2:15:10Speaker 01

  There's no way to know whether another human being is experiencing anything similar to what you're experiencing. There's a lot of unknown when it comes to the internal experience of another organism. But, but what we do know.

• 2:15:27Speaker 01

  And it sounds incredibly abstract, but it's actually a robust predictor is that when you give a rodent a 5H2A agonist that has GQ bias signaling and even balanced, it seems to cause their heads to twitch and that head twitch is strongly associated with psychedelic effects in humans. There are exceptions, but it's a for something as abstract as this sort of wet dog shake head twitch thing.

• 2:15:56Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:56Speaker 01

  It's pretty good. It's better than you would think. It's the sort of thing where if you're looking at a scientific paper, you could laugh at it and say, oh, they're saying this mouse switching its head predicts psychedelic activity in humans. These silly scientists, they're, they're so, they don't get it at all. Turns out it's actually pretty damn predictive.

• 2:16:17Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:16:18Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:16:19Danny Jones?

  What are the performance enhancing effects of psychedelics? Like, is there like an optimal dose for like, like cognitive enhancement? Because I know there's like a correlation with psychedelics and like growth of, of new neurons in the brain. Is this right?

• 2:16:38Speaker 01

  Under some experimental conditions. Yeah.

• 2:16:41Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:16:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yes, it's so hard to say because what constitutes performance enhancement could be radically different between people.

• 2:16:50Danny Jones?

  Sure. And what's the goal?

• 2:16:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. Performance enhancement for a guitarist might be totally different for an air traffic controller.

• 2:16:58Danny Jones?

  Sure. Yeah, I don't know. I just always thought that this stuff made people smarter because the smartest people I know are like, take a lot of psychedelics.

• 2:17:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, it's definitely a psychologically interesting experience that maybe certain types of people are drawn to, are interested in consciousness. And yeah, I would, I would hesitate to say that it can make you smarter, but I think it can make you more aware of certain things and it can be very inspiring for some people. And for someone like me that's not religiously inclined, it can give you a taste of what I imagine religious experience is like for people that are.

• 2:17:39Danny Jones?

  Have you ever seen that DMT experiment where they shine the laser on the wall?

• 2:17:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:17:45Danny Jones?

  What did you make of that?

• 2:17:49Speaker 01

  Uh, I think it's interesting. I think it is.

• 2:17:54Speaker 01

  I I'm not persuaded that

• 2:17:57Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:57Speaker 01

  the code of the simulation is being revealed through this process. I mean, I'm I appreciate the attempt

• 2:18:08Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:18:08Speaker 01

  to assess something like that. I think it is an idea. I think it's very cool. I've gone to the website of the guy who's at the forefront of this laser, DMT laser examination technique, has some weird stuff like eating chocolate and viewing it through a glass of water.

• 2:18:23Danny Jones?

  I mean, oh, really? I haven't seen that one.

• 2:18:25Speaker 01

  The obvious issue is that

• 2:18:29Speaker 01

  if you're taking a drug that causes visual hallucinations in order to see this otherwise invisible phenomenon, that it could very well be a product of hallucinations.

• 2:18:41Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:18:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:18:42Danny Jones?

  Right. But the fact is like, like, the interesting thing is you're giving, so he he says that I think hundreds of people have done it and reported to him seeing the same exact code that he describes, which is this like Sanskrit looking Japanese katakana style matrix dripping code that exists behind this laser beam when it's projected on a wall. And like,

• 2:19:13Danny Jones?

  I don't know if there's, I know, like, I haven't done a lot of DMT, but I know people explain that DMT is a a lot of people see very similar things when they're on DMT, like different, like similar patterns. Some people see these elf things. But there's nothing else that I've ever heard of that is consistent across a lot of experiences

• 2:19:36Danny Jones?

  similar to this code that people are explaining they're seeing. And I mean, one of my questions, when I asked him, I was like, I was like, is it an issue that they're watching your documentary and seeing this code on the wall? And then they're trying to do it themselves and they're kind of confirming what they already were expecting to see? Is that a problem? I don't know.

• 2:19:55Speaker 01

  I would say it is a problem.

• 2:19:56Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:57Speaker 01

  It's, but it's a common problem. I mean, same thing with the machine elves, as you said. And this has been studied from pretty much the beginning of psychedelic research. Heinrich Klüver coined this term form constants, and he was very interested in this.

• 2:20:14Speaker 01

  Idea that people's visual distortions or hallucinations under the influence of mescaline appear to have certain themes like a honeycomb pattern or a spider web type pattern or like a sort of tube type pattern or whatever. And now you hear people describing often seeing Alex Gray type imagery. Is that because many people who are interested in psychedelics have been exposed to Alex Gray imagery? Is it because Alex Gray was able to capture some kind of some kind of characteristic that is maybe just present in the psychedelic experience? Because we have similar central nervous systems and and other visionary people.

• 2:20:58Speaker 01

  I mean, one thing about Alex Gray is that he's using a lot of motifs that have also been explored in religious artwork as well. So it's not as if he's the the only person to ever explore these types of images. They do obviously have a a particular resonance with people that use psychedelics. But I think that there's this interplay between human biology and psychology and art where it's all.

• 2:21:27Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it's all yeah, it's all interwoven.

• 2:21:29Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:21:31Danny Jones?

  Yeah, Gallimore was explaining how throughout history, there has been multiple documented documents of people taking different psychedelics and explaining how they saw code code on different psychedelics throughout history in various studies. So but I don't know if any of them were were as similar as this DMT thing. You know, it's interesting to me that like if the if this DMT is actually stripping away this sort of brain filter, this brain filter hypothesis, how you have like these filters that filter reality and the DMT kind of like breaks the filters away.

• 2:22:16Danny Jones?

  So you're sort of seeing the brain is exposed to more sensory input and.

• 2:22:24Danny Jones?

  If if that's really if something like that is actually happening and then you're bringing like a laser into it. Like that's that's a super interesting experiment. And if it's like if the laser is acting like a microscope in the visual field or in the brain. It would be it would just be, you know, what what does that even mean? You know, if people are all seeing this, is this some sort of like epigenetic thing in the human brain? That is happening because we're combining these chemical where we're taking in these chemicals and exposing ourselves to a certain light frequency? Or like? Are we seeing the actual matrix? Are we living in the fucking matrix?

• 2:23:08Speaker 01

  I would definitely bet against that. That would be, you know, that would be the last explanation that I would go for, which is not to say that it's impossible.

• 2:23:21Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:23:21Speaker 01

  But when you're kind of creating the flow chart of possibility, it's usually good to start at the most likely scenario. And then if you can't explain something with the most likely scenario, you then go to the next most likely scenario.

• 2:23:39Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:39Speaker 01

  So the most likely scenario in this situation is that a combination of suggestion, expectation.

• 2:23:45Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:46Speaker 01

  And the visual hallucinations that are produced by DMT are causing people to see characters that they are interpreting as being similar, but they can't really say that with certainty because nobody's able to.

• 2:23:59Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:23:59Speaker 01

  Take a snapshot.

• 2:24:00Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:00Speaker 01

  Whatever it is that they're seeing.

• 2:24:01Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:24:02Speaker 01

  And it's obviously a better story and it would feel better if you saw the same thing as someone else than something that was subtly different or totally different. And what even are these characters? If you draw them, are we really totally sure the very fact that they're unrecognizable and not in a language that we speak gives them a lot of latitude to be different? And then there's also just the kind of language that we use to describe things that are unfamiliar.

• 2:24:30Speaker 01

  You know, if you see something that is weird, what do you say about it? If you see lights in the sky, do you say that's a UFO? Do you say that it's gods? Do you say that-

• 2:24:40Danny Jones?

  They've tried to fit it into a box that you already know.

• 2:24:42Speaker 01

  That it's witches? Yeah, it's dependent on your culture and what language you use to describe the unfamiliar and the inexplicable.

• 2:24:52Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:24:52Speaker 01

  So when you look at earlier psychedelic experiences, I don't think I'm aware of the word alien being used very frequently. People saying this seems alien. Often, I do see descriptions of things being like Egyptian or associated with other cultures.

• 2:25:13Speaker 01

  But I don't think alien in the like 19, early 1960s type stuff. Now you'd see that more frequently because aliens have become a much bigger part of our culture subsequently. And the same thing goes for the way different indigenous groups conceptualize these things, which are very much based on their, like, I would imagine that if you were to go to Peru and do this experiment, the Matrix line thing might be less,

• 2:25:48Speaker 01

  less frequently encountered as an explanation. Because the Matrix, I mean, it kind of depends on who you talk to. I'm sure there's people, indigenous cactus users who have also seen The Matrix. It's a pretty popular movie, a pretty good movie.

• 2:26:03Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:05Speaker 01

  But, but assuming that they haven't seen The Matrix, I have a feeling that that and the current popularity of simulation hypothesis thinking-

• 2:26:15Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:15Speaker 01

  Wouldn't be, wouldn't be the first explanation that they go to.

• 2:26:22Danny Jones?

  Hold on, let me crack open this fresh can of, uh-

• 2:26:26Speaker 01

  But I don't mean to be a hater on this kind of thing. Like, I do-

• 2:26:29Danny Jones?

  Yeah, no, I know.

• 2:26:29Speaker 01

  I find all that stuff very interesting and-

• 2:26:34Speaker 01

  And careful observation of the world is how you discover things. So it's like, I understand how you could look at, you know, someone, you know, looking at a laser through a water glass or whatever and say like, this is fucking, this is like, this is ridiculous. But it's like, you probably could have, I'm sure there were people that would have said the same thing about early microscopists, like, looking into a droplet of water and saying like, what are they doing? Like, oh, they think they see little like organisms in this droplet of pond water. Like, it's crazy.

• 2:27:06Danny Jones?

  Well, I did it. I tried the experiment. And it was also the first time I ever tried DMT. And I didn't see the code.

• 2:27:14Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 2:27:15Danny Jones?

  I saw, I saw millions and millions of, of little gears rotating and connected, just all spinning, like behind the wall. No code at all.

• 2:27:26Speaker 01

  Interesting.

• 2:27:27Danny Jones?

  And I was expect, I watched the documentary, like, like the day before, or not the doc, the teaser for the documentary, the day before I did that. And so I was like, looking for the code, but I couldn't find it. All I could see was these gears spinning. But maybe, um, maybe I didn't get high enough. Maybe I needed to do more DMT to see it. I don't know. It was my first time ever doing it.

• 2:27:50Speaker 01

  Brilliant.

• 2:27:52Danny Jones?

  Have you ever heard of people that take a lot of DMT, all of a sudden not being able to get high on it anymore, or experience the psychedelic effect anymore?

• 2:28:07Speaker 01

  I have heard of that, yeah.

• 2:28:08Danny Jones?

  What, what do you think is going on there when that happens?

• 2:28:11Speaker 01

  Again, it's so hard with these sorts of things where, what is a term for it, like being locked out or something, right? Something like that. It's so hard with these things where, once you create the idea, it becomes sort of meme that is spread. And I've had the same experience before I thought.

• 2:28:30Speaker 01

  Where I remember smoking not DMT but DPT many years ago. And I was using a candle to smoke it and just wasn't getting.

• 2:28:41Danny Jones?

  DPT.

• 2:28:42Speaker 01

  DPT, yeah. And just wasn't getting an effect from it and had that thought of like, oh, interesting. Maybe, um, maybe I'm tolerant. Maybe I can no longer experience the effect of DPT. And then I moved the bowl a little bit deeper into the flames so that it was really touching the wick. And the change in temperature was sufficient to vaporize the DPT. And then I got an insane, insane experience. But if I just stopped there, I might've said, oh, maybe something is preventing me when the real issue is just was insufficiently heated. So, uh, you know, it's actually, people love to talk about DMT because it's so visual

• 2:29:23Speaker 01

  and fascinating, but there's all these aspects of it that don't get talked about as much, like how hard it is to smoke and how harsh the smoke is.

• 2:29:31Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:31Speaker 01

  And these vapes that are now much more common make it easier. But if you're smoking DMT crystal from like a meth pipe.

• 2:29:40Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:41Speaker 01

  It can be pretty hard. It's much harder. It's a, it's like not the story that people like, oh, my friend, he tried to smoke DMT and the smoke was really harsh.

• 2:29:49Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:29:51Speaker 01

  Like, that's not the story that gets shared.

• 2:29:53Danny Jones?

  I could barely handle the vape.

• 2:29:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:29:56Danny Jones?

  I could barely, I was coughing like a maniac trying to inhale that.

• 2:29:59Speaker 01

  Right, so I think that would be my first guess would be, you know, is this really somebody that's locked out? Or maybe they are just not really smoking it and getting the hits or for whatever reason. And, you know, to even begin to assess that, I would, you'd want to do something like give them a, you know, IV bolus dose of DMT and see if they're truly unresponsive. I sort of suspect because even in these DMTX experiments where they give people DMT repeatedly over long periods of time, the accumulation of tolerance is very minimal. It does occur, but it's very minor.

• 2:30:37Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:30:37Speaker 01

  So the idea that somebody would have some kind of total.

• 2:30:43Speaker 01

  Tolerance outside of an extreme situation like they were smoking it all day, every day for like three months or something. It just seems unlikely.

• 2:30:50Danny Jones?

  Yeah, you think it would be gradually onset, not just out of nowhere, just not work.

• 2:30:55Speaker 01

  It seems like the more likely explanation is that they're just not smoking it right. But again, this speaks to the mythology and the mysticism surrounding a lot of these substances. Like I'm sympathetic to that. There's something kind of strange about them and it's they don't always lend themselves to the most analytical interpretations.

• 2:31:16Danny Jones?

  Wasn't DMT first discovered in a lab before it was ever found in nature?

• 2:31:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:31:24Danny Jones?

  It was like first discovered synthetically.

• 2:31:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it was Mansky did the first synthesis

• 2:31:33Speaker 01

  in Canada as a potential reference for a like strawberry plant alkaloid before it had been found in nature. Yeah.

• 2:31:43Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:31:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:31:45Danny Jones?

  That's interesting.

• 2:31:46Speaker 01

  It is.

• 2:31:46Danny Jones?

  I think the way that you describe, you know, you explained that there's kind of like this this polarization between people who like plant-based drugs that come from nature versus synthetically in a lab. And I think you described it very well, like it's the same thing, like we are, we are nature. We are part of this earth and we are creating things the same way things are created. You know, chemically in the soil or out in the rainforest, like we are just a product

• 2:32:23Danny Jones?

  of this earth and we are using chemicals that are made on this earth to compound new chemical structures, like it's all, it's all natural, right? I thought, I thought that was a, an interesting way of putting it.

• 2:32:40Speaker 01

  And I do believe that, but the paradox is that it's simultaneously

• 2:32:46Speaker 01

  all natural and all synthetic, depending on how you want to think about it. Everything is simultaneously.

• 2:32:50Danny Jones?

  But they're both the same.

• 2:32:51Speaker 01

  They're both the same.

• 2:32:53Speaker 01

  And.

• 2:32:55Speaker 01

  Somebody will say, oh, but there's a difference between, for example, toad derived 5M O D M T and synthetic 5M O D M T. And I've often said, well, okay, if there's no chemical difference, then there can't be a difference. But this does neglect the psychological contribution of the user. This is again, comes back to the, the

• 2:33:16Danny Jones?

  Your beliefs.

• 2:33:16Speaker 01

  Expectation, beliefs, what you project onto the experience. So then if the case is that there is a difference and that difference does not derive from the chemistry of the substance, but from the psychological expectation of the user, then why can't you reformulate your expectation accordingly? So that you have these same associations with the synthetic substance. You could change that. So if the idea is, and it typically is that the natural is better, natural is good, synthetic is worse, you can totally change that bias if you want to, if you want to. You can make a very persuasive case that the synthetic is better because it's better for the environment. And so you are not harming toads in the process of acquiring the substance.

• 2:34:00Speaker 01

  And you're not contributing to the potential exploitation of an endangered organism that only exists in a small part of the world or something like that. And so this is like a better experience because you're doing it more conscientiously. Like you could formulate that exact same expectation and projection onto the experience if you wanted to. I have.

• 2:34:23Danny Jones?

  Right, yeah, I think the way you did it was great. Also, like, so that, that toad that you guys captured in the Amazon rainforest and that, and that you strung, strung up and got it to secrete its venom.

• 2:34:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:34:34Danny Jones?

  Was that, when you took that, was it the, were you expecting the effect that you got from it when they burned your skin and rubbed it on your skin? Or was that like, it seemed like you were just nauseated from it.

• 2:34:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, I was, um, I was aware of the pharmacology of the peptides that were present in the venom of the phala medusa by color. And so I wasn't expecting to have, you know, an LSD type psychedelic experience or anything like that. At the same time, when I made that many, many, many years ago, there was relatively little information. Um, there was like a Peter Gorman article that had been written about it. He was, I think, the first outsider to document that process for high times. And there was maybe a couple scholarly publications, but there really wasn't all that much out there on it. A little bit was

• 2:35:30Speaker 01

  there, definitely. And so I kind of knew what I was getting into. I knew that it wasn't exactly the sort of altered state that I'm typically drawn to, which is a more classically psychedelic state. This was maybe something closer to, um, I mean, because in a lot of cultures, you have also these, um, ordeals of one kind or another that are also done to produce an altered state. It could be fasting. It could be rites of endurance, where you go on a very long hike, something like that with the intention is to create an altered state through suffering. Um, and so it was a bit more in that direction, I'd say.

• 2:36:13Danny Jones?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:36:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:36:15Danny Jones?

  That makes sense. Um, another thing I wanted to ask you was about nitrous.

• 2:36:19Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 2:36:20Danny Jones?

  What, uh, what are the, um, like, effects of nitrous on the human body? And like, what is the, how would you describe? Have you done it?

• 2:36:31Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:36:32Danny Jones?

  What is like the therapeutic benefit of it?

• 2:36:36Speaker 01

  I mean, the therapeutic benefit is...

• 2:36:41Speaker 01

  Typically, if you're talking about like a sort of FDA approved conventional therapeutic benefit, it's preventing pain during surgical procedures typically in the context of dentistry. Or it's sometimes used by EMTs or things like that in emergency medicine because it's rapid acting. So that's the benefit is that it kills pain. It may also have some confined psychotherapeutic benefit, maybe in treatment of PTSD or things like that. It's been investigated. But for the most part, the benefit, and this is actually one interesting historical quirk of nitrous oxide,

• 2:37:23Speaker 01

  is that it was originally a recreational drug and then became a medicine. Often it goes the other way around where you have something like ketamine that's a medicine. And then people realize that it has a really interesting effect outside of a medical context. With nitrous oxide, it was used for fun exclusively at first. There were nitrous parties and-

• 2:37:44Danny Jones?

  Whipits?

• 2:37:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:37:47Danny Jones?

  I remember.

• 2:37:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, like from a silk, from a silk bag, they would inhale it.

• 2:37:51Danny Jones?

  Oh, a silk bag?

• 2:37:52Speaker 01

  This is like, I guess, pre, pre balloon era, you'd maybe have like a waxed silk-

• 2:37:56Danny Jones?

  I knew this guy when I, when I was younger, I used to work at a pizza place and there was this old guy who had a band called The Speed Wobbles. And he would always go to his van on his, on his brakes and he would go into his van and do whipits. And he had these little canisters of nitrous oxide that he would do. I never tried it, but he would always came in super happy after he did it.

• 2:38:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's, it's not, again, I would say it's not the most psychologically interesting effect. It's more like pure, hyper intense euphoria, which is one reason that people become addicted to it.

• 2:38:30Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:38:31Speaker 01

  Like miserably, especially during the pandemic, actually, it seemed like a lot of people started ordering it. And, and also there was the, all these giant cans of nitrous you can order. A lot of people developed issues with it. Now they're trying to prohibit it. I don't think that's the path, obviously, but-

• 2:38:48Danny Jones?

  Isn't, uh, wasn't Kayne West addicted to it?

• 2:38:51Speaker 01

  Horrendously, probably still is from everything I can tell. Horrendously addicted, yeah. I think it may-

• 2:38:58Danny Jones?

  Do you think that has anything to do with his psychological?

• 2:39:02Speaker 01

  I do.

• 2:39:03Danny Jones?

  How, what do you think happened there? If you were, I know this is like super speculative, but like- Do you think that, like, how would nitrous or any other sort of drugs that he could be on? Because, you know, I know he went to like a mental hospital and they probably gave him a lot of different drugs. I don't know if they were SSRIs or what they were, but like, how would that explain his current state?

• 2:39:31Speaker 01

  And I wouldn't go so far as to say that it completely explains it. I think it may be a contributor. I mean, I know people that know him. I know a little bit of the backstory, but a lot of it's publicly known. But when somebody is a celebrity and they're a billionaire and they're very, very powerful, they end up in an interesting power dynamic with medical doctors, which is that if they, they can find a doctor to give them whatever the fuck they want. And the doctor is in a weird position where they want to please their billionaire client. And they also don't want to kill them or hurt them because it could result in the revocation of their license and the loss of

• 2:40:15Speaker 01

  the billionaire client.

• 2:40:17Danny Jones?

  That's a line you gotta dance.

• 2:40:18Speaker 01

  So how do you please this person, give them what they want and not hurt them? And then if you decide, okay, this is getting a little nuts, we gotta pump the brakes on this, you know, and the billionaire knows that they can just find someone to replace you instantaneously. So you can engage in a cycle of self deception where you say, well, it's better me than somebody else because I really care about yay. And I'm gonna be the one that's gonna give him this and I'll be a little bit more cautious or whatever. This is what happened with Michael Jackson as well. So I try to be a little bit sympathetic to the doctors who will face criminal charges for doing this because they are, like, no one wants to be sympathetic to those

• 2:41:00Speaker 01

  doctors. They're in a difficult position. Like, imagine you're Michael Jackson's doctor and he's asking you for propofol and you think, no, I shouldn't do that. But you also know that if you say no, they're just gonna find someone else to give them the propofol. So what do you do? You give them a little bit and you try to monitor and you hope for the best and they end up. In a really complicated situation. There's also, of course, that's a sympathetic analysis of what's going on. There's also, of course, the very real possibility of exploitation and predation from people that are just using them for money. And there's probably plenty of that as well. So there's a dentist that I think he like lives in the same building as Kanye and is

• 2:41:44Speaker 01

  enabling him with huge amounts of nitrous oxide. That's like it, I think.

• 2:41:52Speaker 01

  And, you know, this isn't, I'm sure that dentist is in a complicated position because Kanye is definitely capable of getting nitrous elsewhere. So what does he do? I don't know. But, but when you use nitrous continuously, it can result in all kinds of negative effects. Like when I was in high school, the thing that people would always say, that say, oh, you do a whip it, don't you know you lose 10,000 brain cells or something like that. That was kind of the, the little like prohibitionist narrative. That is not the case, assuming that you're co-administering oxygen, but it does result in

• 2:42:30Speaker 01

  the destruction of B12. So it can cause a B12 deficiency, which then results in demyelination of neurons and creates a multiple sclerosis type syndrome where people start to lose sensation in their extremities and eventually lose the ability to walk. That's Oh, wow. Pretty extreme, which is reversible in most instances with B12 administration, but you don't want to get to the position of being in a wheelchair, even if it's potentially reversible. This is like representative of a really severe degree of neurological damage. So that's one of the things that can happen with continuous use. And there's different people that have,

• 2:43:11Speaker 01

  again, this comes back to individual genetics as well, because the way that you metabolize the

• 2:43:19Speaker 01

  The way that your body metabolizes homocysteine and some other things related to B12 metabolism also play a role in all this. It's a little bit complicated. So some people are more susceptible. Also, even your diet and your age, like vegans would be more susceptible because they have a reduced B12 intake, which is primarily from animal products. Anyway, like, there's a lot of things that that go into this. But then you also have the reality that you're just continuously entering this dissociated state and it's gonna make you all whacked out and could, he could be doing that instead of taking treatments for bipolar disorder and becoming manic and deranged and maybe surrounded by people that don't have the desire or power to try to rein him in. It

• 2:44:03Speaker 01

  seems like it's probably very difficult based on everything that I've seen. And somebody can, I mean, it is amazing. I don't know if you know people with bipolar, but I feel like it's, it's something that is often talked about as if it's not really that big of a deal. It's kind of like, like schizophrenia is really, really bad, but like bipolar, you just take like a pill and whatever. But it is amazing how much damage somebody can do to their life when they're manic in like two days. Like I have a close friend of mine, like if you are fully manic, you can just destroy everything in a couple of days. So you are dependent on people reining you in, which is also complicated because when somebody's in that state, they don't want help, they will

• 2:44:47Speaker 01

  perceive any intervention as somebody attempting to silence them or oppress them in a paranoid delusion. So it's, it's not easy.

• 2:44:55Danny Jones?

  Right. Yeah, I just wondered like what else, what other kind of drugs he's been given that are being combined with that. That's just like sending him into just a fucking never ending spiral, you know? There's so many like weird, weird, like you would never think, I never would have a suspected nitrous of all the things, but then you, you know, maybe he's just getting a lot of, uh, you know, new grills being made or something like that. And that has something to do with it. Like when you're getting that work done and getting gold teeth. Maybe that just comes with the territory. I don't know.

• 2:45:30Speaker 01

  And the insane stress of being publicly scrutinized the way that he is.

• 2:45:34Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:45:35Speaker 01

  It's all, it's all like very unrelatable, I would say to the typical person.

• 2:45:40Danny Jones?

  Totally.

• 2:45:40Speaker 01

  This is just like a life that is so abstract, so different from anything that a typical person would ever encounter. And it, although you could say that it touches on issues that are relatable, which is like, what to do with people who need help, but don't want to accept it. And is it, you know, humane to allow somebody to behave in a self-destructive manner? And what is the line between personal autonomy and the need for a society to step in and prevent somebody from harming themselves?

• 2:46:17Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:46:18Speaker 01

  Where do you find that? These are complicated issues.

• 2:46:20Danny Jones?

  And when you're people like, when you're a person like, like Kanye, like a, like a public figure who has like an exorbitant amount of money and like you described having just like, unlimited access to doctors who could get you anything you want. Like, yeah, nobody knows what the fuck that's like. Or like, you know, even like Jordan Peterson, who's another great example, who, you know, went through, I think he was a, he had to go somewhere like out of the country to do some sort of, uh, therapy. I forget what kind of therapy he was doing, but he was getting some.

• 2:46:50Speaker 01

  Xenon, among other things.

• 2:46:51Danny Jones?

  What was it?

• 2:46:52Speaker 01

  Xenon.

• 2:46:52Danny Jones?

  Xenon.

• 2:46:53Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:46:55Danny Jones?

  And, you know, that's, he's another person who was like super polarizing and went from being like a, a professor at a university to being arguably like one of the most popular people on the face of the earth. Who, you know, half the people loved him and then half the people absolutely despised him for the stuff that he was saying. And how, you know, how that plays a role. In in someone's psychology and the way and the way that people like normal people will perceive them.

• 2:47:29Danny Jones?

  What what is xenon?

• 2:47:32Speaker 01

  The in the third season of my show, there's a whole episode dedicated to it. It's worth checking out. It's a good.

• 2:47:36Danny Jones?

  Is this is this um post vice?

• 2:47:39Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:47:40Danny Jones?

  Oh, okay.

• 2:47:40Speaker 01

  This is a this is in the final.

• 2:47:42Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:47:42Speaker 01

  Season.

• 2:47:43Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:47:43Speaker 01

  Um, and it is an element. It's a.

• 2:47:47Danny Jones?

  Oh, yes, I remember this. Yes.

• 2:47:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, it has a nitrous oxide like effect. So this is one of and it's always being explored as a healthier alternative to nitrous oxide because it doesn't induce this

• 2:48:03Speaker 01

  damaging effect on B 12 and myelin biосynthesis. So it's a little bit safer arguably, but it has all the same psychological risks.

• 2:48:11Danny Jones?

  Do we use that in the US?

• 2:48:14Speaker 01

  Only experimentally. It hasn't been approved by the FDA for anything.

• 2:48:17Danny Jones?

  Okay. Do you know anything about methylene blue?

• 2:48:20Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:48:21Danny Jones?

  That's becoming very popular right now. And it's like a fish tank cleaner and like a fabric dye that people are using that a lot of people I had a guy on here who was explaining to me all this. He was a brain surgeon who was explaining to me how he gives his patients when he's performing craniotomies on folks, he gives them an IV of methylene blue while he's performing brain surgery.

• 2:48:43Speaker 01

  As a neuroprotective agent or?

• 2:48:45Danny Jones?

  Something like that. I don't know all the scientific reasons he does it, but yeah, it's mainly because it helps them heal a lot fest a lot faster and it's a neuroprotective agent. And another thing he does he does is when his patients are recovering from like super invasive brain or spinal surgery, he wheels them outside into the courtyard and lets them recover outside in the natural sunlight. He claims that they recover a lot faster because allegedly this or I don't know if it's alleged. I think it might be proven that this methylene blue is like super beneficial for the mitochondria or something like this.

• 2:49:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the idea. I've taken it a bunch.

• 2:49:23Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:49:24Speaker 01

  It was pretty much the original synthetic drug. I mean, it was, you know, it was used as a treatment for malaria for a long time. It's still used in medicine.

• 2:49:32Danny Jones?

  From malaria?

• 2:49:33Speaker 01

  From malaria.

• 2:49:33Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow.

• 2:49:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, there was like a.

• 2:49:35Danny Jones?

  Can you get prescribed it?

• 2:49:37Speaker 01

  You can. Yeah. You can. I mean, it's mostly used in hospitals for treatment of, I believe it's used for.

• 2:49:47Danny Jones?

  Cyanide poisoning under some sort of methimoglobinemia, I think, is one of the reasons that they use it.

• 2:49:55Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 2:49:56Danny Jones?

  But I think I've heard that it's been effective for, um, for illnesses similar to COVID. Like respiratory illnesses.

• 2:50:04Speaker 01

  This is the thing where you, you have a pharmacologically active substance that does have very real effects. Like the anti-malarial effect is established. It was also, it is an MAOI. There's sort of like real effects of this drug, but then

• 2:50:23Speaker 01

  the overlay comes where it's like also the mitochondrial rejuvenator, maybe for some people it might be. Or treatment for COVID. But I'd like to see some, some strong evidence for that. Maybe it doesn't hurt, I don't know. Or depression or whatever. And, you know, it, it becomes this kind of, um, placebo, potential placebo panacea that worries me a little bit. It also seems pretty innocuous at the doses that most people use it of like two or three milligrams. So, um, if people were routinely taking hundreds of milligrams, I might be more concerned, but I've, I've taken it many, many times. I'm not certain that it has an effect.

• 2:51:07Danny Jones?

  It seems to be a little bit of a stimulant.

• 2:51:09Speaker 01

  That's what I thought at first, but then it didn't seem dose dependent to me, which made me feel like it wasn't. Like this is, you know, this is one of the kind of best ways to assess whether something is a placebo effect is if the effect isn't dose dependent. It still could be pharmacologically active, but that's definitely like a tick of the potentially placebo box. Like if, if 10 milligrams doesn't do twice as much as five milligrams, there's a, that I think is moving in the, this might be placebo direction.

• 2:51:41Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 2:51:41Speaker 01

  Because it's like with most things, you have a dose dependent effect. You can create a dose response curve. There are things that might be exceptions, like certain enzyme inhibitors where if at one dose, you have total inhibition of the enzyme going beyond that, assuming there is an off target activity, may not confer additional pharmacological activity.

• 2:51:59Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:52:00Speaker 01

  So yeah, methylene blue, I'm, it's definitely active for some things. It's definitely a actual drug. It is useful for some applications. I've used it myself many, many times. I'm not totally sure I understand what its benefits for a healthy person are.

• 2:52:15Danny Jones?

  Right. Dude, thank you for doing this. This has been incredible.

• 2:52:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, no, thank you. It's fun.

• 2:52:23Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I learned a lot. So are you mainly now focusing on your podcast? Or are you working on any other kind of documentary projects?

• 2:52:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I make a podcast on Patreon and I did this for a long time while I was focusing on chemistry, partially because it allowed me to continue making stuff, but also because it has historically been very hard for me to get funding to do any kind of research. And so I recently have started just filming completely independent documentaries, trying that out to see if I can do that because it has been so hard for me to get any sort of like media outlet to simultaneously allow me to do this work and not interfere with it in a way that makes it purposeless for me. So I filmed a bunch of these weird chemistry documentaries that I'm currently editing and I'll post them on the Patreon.

• 2:53:17Speaker 01

  One about this exploration of tellurium chemistry, one about this creation of a new LSD analog, another about Shulgin's research on Parkinson's treatments, all these kinds of weird little science mini documentaries. So I've been making those independently and it's been a lot of fun.

• 2:53:35Danny Jones?

  This is Hamilton's Patreon. What is that iguana on the top photo?

• 2:53:40Speaker 01

  It's just a, it's a chameleon.

• 2:53:41Danny Jones?

  Oh, it's a chameleon?

• 2:53:42Speaker 01

  It's a panther chameleon.

• 2:53:43Danny Jones?

  A panther chameleon?

• 2:53:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love chameleons.

• 2:53:46Danny Jones?

  Wow. Do they secrete any sort of drug-like fluids or are they just cool looking?

• 2:53:52Speaker 01

  I actually think there might be something that is active in their saliva, but I'm not sure about that. It may just be a glue, but I thought that there might be some kind of like something in their saliva.

• 2:54:03Danny Jones?

  Oh, really? Where is that one from?

• 2:54:07Speaker 01

  Madagascar.

• 2:54:08Danny Jones?

  Madagascar?

• 2:54:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:54:09Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 2:54:12Danny Jones?

  That's amazing.

• 2:54:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:54:13Danny Jones?

  Well, cool. I'll link your Patreon and then you also have a YouTube channel, right?

• 2:54:17Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah.

• 2:54:17Danny Jones?

  You post stuff on YouTube as well.

• 2:54:19Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:54:20Danny Jones?

  Cool, man. Thanks again. I really enjoyed this podcast, dude.

• 2:54:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Cool. It's fun.

• 2:54:25Danny Jones?

  All right. It's all linked below. Good night, everybody.

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