Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 298: Eric Osborne

Episode Date: July 24, 2018

Eric Osborne created mycomeditations a psilocybin retreat center in Jamaica. In 2015, as a result of hosting private psilocybin sessions on his farm, he was arrested. This event turned Eric’s life upside down. Following this, he was forced into house arrest and two years of probation. It was however, during this struggle, that the grand vision for MycoMeditations was born. Eric wanted to ensure that people could have legal access to psilocybin, in a place where they could feel safe and not worry about legal repercussions. He had witnessed the healing effects of psilocybin too many times to give up. Regardless of the legal status of psilocybin in the United States and most other parts of the world, Eric knew this was his calling. Having spent many of his younger adult years in Jamaica, one of the few countries where psilocybin remains legal, he knew he’d found the perfect location for the center.

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Just putting my mind to work lifting weights that aren't made of the charred vertebrae of people in other countries who have been exploded in never-ending wars. I'm not saying that we should ignore the suffering of others, but I'm not sure that listening to the people making money off of their screams is necessarily the most direct path to world peace. Today's guest is one of the growing number of people on the planet who are introducing others to psychedelics in the hopes of helping them purge whatever darkness has become lodged in the esophagus of their soul.

Eric Osborne is here with us today. We're going to jump right into that. But first, some quick business. I would rather eat a bowl of shit than fly because I don't have wings. Fly, must I. But thanks to AwayBags, at least I'll have some power. And a locking bag that won't spill my bags of flour. Much thanks to AwayLuggage for supporting this episode of the DTFH.

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Now everyone, please welcome to the Dunkin' Trussell Family Hour podcast, Eric Osborne. It's the Dunkin' Trussell Family Hour podcast. Eric, welcome to the DTFH. Thank you so much for coming out today. Oh, thanks for having me, yeah. So you're in town at a psychedelic conference? Indeed, the LAPS conference. The LAPS conference.

What does that stand for? You're going to put me on the spot and I'm not going to tell you. I know that it's the Los Angeles Plant Society. I don't know what the last S stands for. Man, the psychedelic community loves acronyms. Don't we? Yeah, we do. It's like, because it's too much, it's just big shits going on.

And also like, you know, half the time, it took me probably three years to remember that MAP stands for the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, which I love saying it kind of rolls off the tongue. So are you here just to gather data? Are you presenting? What's going on? Yeah, presenting and networking. Just trying to engage more with the professional community, the conference scene.

The last five years that I've been working with Soul7 and Jamaica have just been putting all my focus there. I didn't really want to expose our work too publicly until I felt really solid about what we were doing and how it would be received. And in Jamaica, the laws are obviously different than here when it comes to psilocybin. Yeah, yeah, it's completely unregulated there. So in, gosh, well, it's kind of long, but in 71, the United Nations banned also

hycoactives, they ultimately left it open to the state or the national governments to decide what they would do with plants. That was nice of them. Yeah, yeah, right. What the fuck is the United Nations? How can they do that? They can't just do that, can they? Well, they did, they did.

So fortunately, though, they left it open, like I said, for the state or the nations to decide what happens with plants. So they did specifically globally outlaw chemicals, but they couldn't do that with plants. So Jamaica just never passed any laws regulating psilocybin. Mushrooms overall in Jamaica are taboo. They're considered tools for what they call OBEA or witchcraft. So there's never been any cultural instance of mushrooms getting out of hand down there. So there was just never a reason to regulate.

Wow. So did, what kind of mushrooms are growing on Jamaica? Or do you have to harvest them yourself? We used to pick wild cubinsis and a pennyolis tropicalis. We do, we cultivate everything now, though. You cultivate it there in Jamaica? So I want to hear about how a person goes from being under house arrest for psilocybin to creating a center in Jamaica where you are using psilocybin as a medicine to help people with

not just depression, but a variety of psychological disorders. How does that happen? Because to me, I think that after two years of looking down, is it orange, the bracelet? It was black. Somehow I always picture them as this fucking safety orange, the color of safety cones. But for me, two years of looking down at a black fucking bracelet, can you go in the bath with it? Yeah, yeah, that's waterproof. A waterproof black fucking bracelet, a reminder to me that

I'm living in a country, not just a country, but a planet where I'm not supposed to eat something that creates an expansive state of consciousness. That when that bracelet came off, my reaction would be, all right, let's go to Jamaica and start giving mushrooms to people. Tell me about that. Tell me about the arrest. How did it happen? Tell me the story from the night you got in trouble

to when you had it over to Jamaica to start the center. Well, so I had a gourmet mushroom farm and was working with psilocybin on the side, kind of for almost 10 years. And then the last five years, I started working pretty directly with small groups on our farm. The incident that led to my arrest, it was just kind of a night like any other. We had four people there, my wife included, and one of the young women who was with us. How old? She was 26 or 27 or so.

Okay. She was having a visibly a rough time and she asked if she could go lay down her tent, which was like 20 feet from the fire. Describe the rough time. She was being very talkative. She couldn't keep it internal. Several of the other participants had asked her to just quiet down. She started pacing and kind of talking to herself.

I can just tell that she was really, really uneasy. What was she saying? Just mumbling under her voice. Yeah, I couldn't get any specifics. But she at one point asked if she could go lay down her tent, which was about 20 feet from the fire. So yeah, of course. And 15 minutes later, maybe the next thing I saw were her tail lights blasting down our driveway

and we're way out in the country surrounded by ominous. There was no, like a third mile driveway. We had her keys. The thing is Duncan, as we had her keys, but she had a key magnetized under the bumper of her car. And she crawled down through the darkness. She wanted to go see her boyfriend apparently. So she, how much did she take in? I wasn't weighing out at that point, but it would have been about two grams.

They were fresh. And she had quite a bit of civil time experience. It had always been in a recreational setting. But this was not recreational. Like this was some intentional thing that you had started doing. Which changes the experience drastically. Okay. So you, at some point, you're in love with mushrooms. Absolutely.

This is your life's work. You love mushrooms. You like gourmet mushrooms. You like, you just love fungus. So at some point it came to you that you could start facilitating groups where you could heal people. So what happened? So even before that experience where she drove off, she got into a small wreck, cops came. The next day they came for me.

Fortunately I was informed they were coming and I got rid of pretty much everything, but not enough. But I had been experimenting with these retreats in Jamaica prior to that. Why didn't you get rid of everything, man? Like, you know the cops are coming. Man, I took a pound of mushrooms back into the forest and put them in a hollow log. And at the end, after they had gone through everything and they were about to leave, one of the cops was like, I bet he's growing weed in the woods. So they took off to the woods and fuck if I know how they didn't have a dog or anything,

but they found my bong and my mushrooms in this hollow log. So I thought it was, I thought I was clean. I was sitting on the porch. Here's how they found out, man. You're a cop, right? You're in, wait, where is this? Virginia? Indiana.

Indiana. You're a cop in Indiana. And anytime you go to a hippies house in the back of your head, you're thinking there's probably a bong in a hollow log or anything. That's no mystery. That we found this log. It's exactly like, if you think about it, like from our perspective, like when I think about it from my perspective,

if I was going to hide drugs from cops in my mind, I'd be like, you know what, there's no fucking way they're going to look in this fucking hollow log. But in their mind, they're like, that's exactly where every hippie in America, since the dawn of, since everyone hides their shit. In fact, if you want to go, here's one thing, if you need a bong and you live near a hippie, just go in the forest and live for a hollow log, it'll just be sitting there. So that's how they did it, man. That's wild.

So because, because you're like, fuck man, I'm growing these things. It's, it, I don't know if you grew it or not. Oh yeah. So I'm growing this. I grew a pound of these things. I, it's, it's, how long did that take? Oh, well, I was growing a lot of mushrooms. So a pound would have been pretty easy for me to pop off again.

It was, it was a foolish thing to do. It was a foolish thing. And I just love, I love mushrooms and there's no reason that anyone should be able to take my mushroom. They're just mushrooms. Yeah. You know, and so like it's, to me, it's, it's such an innocent thing. They've just been a part of my life for so long that I just normalized.

Yeah. It's just something normal. Easy to forget. So easy. And just, it's going to be okay. They're not going to find it, but they did. And so anyway, I was doing the retreats before that, but I could never be public about it because I was producing large amounts of psilocybin here in the U.S.

And I just didn't want to draw that attention to myself, even though I was still very public about psilocybin and the benefits thereof. I didn't advertise that I was leading retreats in Jamaica. It's just kind of a word of mouth thing. So after, in the, in Indiana though. Yeah. No, no, no, I was doing them in Indiana. Just people would ask and I would say yes.

And then I have been traveling to Jamaica for 15 years, got a long relationship with people there and I had this idea of working in the lab one night. You know, I can do this in Jamaica and we can do this up front and it needs to happen. So I was doing that for about six or eight months prior to the arrest. And then when I was arrested, I just doubled down. I said, this is like, this is so fucked up. I mean, I'm in jail with like heroin addicts and fucking violent thieves and just all kinds of stuff. And you're a farmer.

I'm a master's education. I was a middle school teacher. I'm saying I was a farmer then. You're a, you're a, you're a. Mycologist. You're just someone who's growing, you're growing fungus. You're not, it's not a crime. Yeah.

No, it's not. It is a crime, but it should, it is. It's not a crime. Right. That's what, like this whole conversation about any plant being illegal, in my mind is just done. I mean, that, that's, it's a moot point. There is no plan on this planet that is justifiably illegal. Well, I mean, the problem is like them, if you, if you want to start imagining that that's even

possible, then you have to, it's a, it's a bit of a slippery slope, isn't it? Because you have to start thinking like, okay, what, well, if we have psilocybin that's growing in the wild, who is the criminal here? Like you really do have to start thinking like, is it the mushroom that is synthesizing or producing the psilocybin with, within it? Is it the moisture? Is it the shit that it's growing on? Right.

Is it the cow that shit? Is it the sun? Maybe it's the earth. But not only that, it's, so what we're looking at here is something I'm just reading about in this wonderful book by David Graber called Bullshit Jobs. And he talks about the time in human history around the industrial revolution when people started imagining that time was a thing that you could sell. So this thing that formerly was just, it's time.

It's, it's not a, it's not like, you can't sell time time. No one owns time. You can't sell your own time. Thy time is money punching in the time clock, punching in, punching out. So watches, we all wear watches now. It used to be clock towers in town, town squares. And the reason you would want these clock towers is because we need people to get the fucking factories to work.

Right. So something has happened or something happened in humans, in human society where people began to think truly insane things, like truly in like, absolutely as insane as me telling you that I hear Bill O'Reilly's voice coming out of my fan and he's telling me that I should meditate more. Like that's insane. That's, you know, you hear anyone telling you that you're like, okay, man, you're, you're, you are crazy.

Like you're no way around it. You know, if you're not crazy, I'm going to go crazy because what the fuck kind of universe of am I in that that is how Bill O'Reilly is functioning now through fans. But the point is, this is a fundamental insane aspect of our society that has become normalized. So yeah, this is absolutely crazy. You are right. There is no plant on earth that is evil, wrong, or you shouldn't be allowed to carry in your pocket.

Right. Well, look at how many deadly toxic plants are completely unregulated all around us. Nightshade. Nightshades. First one I go to, yeah. Fucking nightshade. You could like, what's that? What's that?

There's some terrible plant that grows in people's backyards that like burns you. If you, oh yeah, yeah, I've read about that. Yeah. Blinds people. Like they go out in their garden, they work and they see this like annoying weed. They cut it, wipe their hands over their face and they go completely blind. And then, you know, not only that, but we're looking at like just like annoying plants, you know, thorns and things that.

Invasive non-natives that come in and wreak havoc. Yeah, yeah. Dry plant. I mean, fuck dry, just dry plants. I mean, surely these things are, if we're legislating nature, I mean the just dry stuff that gets set on fire by lightning, surely that's more. We should regulate it, yeah. Yeah, if we're going to do it.

It's a big, big, fat, stupid, slippery slope that happened a while ago. You know, there's this great irony that I'm witnessing in Kentucky. Excuse me. There's a species of mushroom, salacebiovoideostidiata, which is a potent psychoactive. And it is native to creek beds, but it has naturalized to hardwood mulch. You see like these metro parks, trucks, carrion, dump trucks full of mulch. And I know that they are distributing illegal mushrooms. Unknowingly.

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Just basic flat out, inarguably, completely, stupidly wrong. It's just wrong. Like you can't legislate plants. Like we're not going to make them, we're not going to do it, plants are illegal. And honestly, I don't think you should really legislate. I think if we're going to start making substances illegal, then we need to like do that based on harm. Yeah, toxicity, yeah.

Right. And so you've seen, I'm sure, David Nutt's, Professor David Nutt's harm. They did that wonderful study where they showed that the least harmful of substances is mushrooms. Solicitin, yeah. Yeah. Do you know what the, is there, I've read this before, but I know there's an overdose on psilocybin. It probably varies from mushroom to mushroom.

But roughly, do you know how many mushrooms you'd have to eat to die? Yeah, it varies. I couldn't tell you what, like the milligrams of actual psilocybin would be. The only suspected death of psilocybin was one individual who was eating liberty caps, like all day long, which are extremely potent. He had consumed like roughly 150, I think. It's what they estimated he had consumed over the course of the day. And he, yeah, did cardiac arrest.

I believe that they're ultimately contributing to psilocybin. But that is still not 100% confirmed that psilocybin is immediately the cause. So as far as legitimate overdoses on psilocybin, we don't have any evidence of that. Does anybody know what this guy's name was? I don't know. Isn't there somebody I mentioned last night? It's just, it's a very, it's like a John Smith or something. John Smith.

Not John Smith, but it's like John something, some very common name. What a bummer. Think about that. Like to be the one person in American history to overdose on mushrooms, that is not the death. I'd rather, I'd rather like be one of those people who like puts a Roman candle in their mouth and like blows their, blows the back of their head off than to be the one fucking guy to like ODM. It's as I was having a heart attack.

As I'm laying in the grass of my yard, probably enough surrounded by like liberty caps, cause my, I can imagine his day went like this. It had rained probably the day before he wakes up, opens the drawer where he keeps his weed and his mushrooms and they're gone. He's out and he's about to call to like order some more mushrooms and he looks out the window and it's just flourishing with liberty caps out there. And he probably, I bet you've got a tear rolled down his eyes. He's like, my God, my God.

It's like when someone finds oil in their backyard and he's like, I don't have to go to work today. Know what we're doing. I'm going to fucking, and he just went out there and he just started grazing like a cow. And then at some point he had the thing happen, which does happen on psychedelics, where you think, I think I'm going to die. Yeah. You know, when, and if you, and I wonder if you just missed it. I don't know if he's like, no, this is just another one of those.

I think I'm going to die moments. Yeah. And then he fucking died. Yeah. He did the thing where he's like, no, I'm not really going to die. We've been through this before, John. Yeah. We're not going to die.

And then suddenly he's fucking dying. And I guarantee it flashed through his mind for a second, like, this is embarrassing. This is one of the more embarrassing ways to exit the universe. And it's not very good for the movement, but I don't mean to make fun of his death. I'm sorry. He passed away. It's okay. Yeah.

He, he served some purpose for us in this whole thing. I guess he did in a, in a weird way. So we, you know, we know that it's possible. I just remember reading something that it's like we're, we're talking about an absurd quantity. Like half your body weight incubensis is what the general estimate is. Right. All right. So good luck trying to get there.

Yeah. Good luck. Like by the time you're even, you need someone to like, you would have to have someone scooping them into your mouth. And tamping them down your throat. Oh, and what a fun day that is. What a fun day. So, so bottom line, we are talking about a substance that has a, you can overdose on them,

but it would require a sadistic friend or some kind of just nightmare health scenario to happen. Uh, but, um, undeniably, these substances, uh, can produce states of consciousness that it can be incredibly unpleasant for people to, to put it lightly, incredibly unpleasant. And so this is what to me is very fascinating about what you've done is that you have fearlessly, after going through a rest, continue to champion this medicine and still face some pretty big risks in the work that you do. Yeah. People, people say, oh, you're very evil.

And I just like, it doesn't even register because to me, this is just what I do. This is, this is, this is normal. This is helpful. This is what I do. Uh, so, uh, I'm seeing it more, um, yeah, it did take some, some courage for me to do this. It's almost like I didn't have another, have another choice, you know. Do you feel like you are being, uh, spoken to by the mushroom? Do you feel as though you were being contacted by some force or spirit or God to do this type of work?

Well, that's hard to box in. I, I have tried to distance myself from this work because it is burdensome. And I cannot get away from it. It chases me down. So, you know, I still have quite a bit of trouble trying to quantify my experiences when I do feel that there is some external pressure, right? When is that just my subconscious? Is that the universal mind, um, compelling me to do what I'm supposed to be doing?

And I still don't have a good answer. Uh, so, you know, I just do what I do because I see the benefit, like the benefit that this has for even, even the girl that drove off and got in the wreck, you know, that's one of the problems. I don't, I haven't been able to speak with her. I would estimate that she probably got some benefit from that experience as well. It's extremely rare in my experience to not see people benefit from psilocybin. Well, let's look this square in the eye and then like get into the true benefits of the thing, but let's look this square in the eye right now, which is that you are a, um,

your degree is in education. You're not a physician. You're not credentialed to administer medicine to people. Correct. So, and, and, um, the, the, the reality is when I say risk, I'm saying the risk that you're putting yourself in is the same risk. You know, I just saw, um, God, Jesus, well, there's a great documentary on Netflix right now. And I'm, the only way I'm comparing you to is that, uh, this person was doing like really,

was doing something that society would consider very fringe like. And, um, he ended up, he like did a sweat lodge. And, and, you know, a sweat lodge is way more dangerous than mushrooms, but in the sweat lodge ceremony, somebody died, someone died. And so you are putting yourself in a kind of risk, which is that people are coming out to Jamaica, they're sitting with you, taking mushrooms and there is some possibility. Like, okay, let me put it in perspective. Again, we're, I'm, I'm going to stop being so grim.

I just like to get the rough stuff out of the way. This is real though. It's important to bring up. So if I, if I build something as benign as an amusement park, there is only a matter of time before somebody gets decapitated. This has happened at Disneyland. Oh yeah, it happens. Disneyland is soaked in.

Shit, somebody got by an alligator, some kid got, yeah. Alligators, Uncle Toad's wild ride. And we're talking like roller coaster deaths and those are not pretty deaths. So, you know, in Disneyland, like they have code words for sure. They announce on the speakers something, you know, like something who knows. Like the haunted, haunted man. There's an extra visitor to the haunted mansion, you know, or some weird code, which means we got a fucking problem over, over here.

So what I'm saying is, and this is, I think as people begin to de-stigmatize psychedelics in the globally, scientifically. People like you begin to open up centers with the intention of focused healing because we know that's what this does. And these are, this is going to happen more and more and more and more and more and more. So all I'm saying is, you, what is your plan, man? What is your plan? Someone drove off the fucking road, you couldn't control that?

That was outside of your control and this you're going to like chain their cars down or chain them down or put them in a room where they can't escape. No. Right? No, that's real. So this is what, what is your plan? Like how do, what, how, what is your plan to deal with the thing? Which happens where someone lies on whatever forms they must fill out when they come to you.

They don't tell you they're bipolar. They don't tell you they have a history of suicidal ideations. They don't tell you that they're schizophrenic. They don't tell you there's a history in their family of this thing or that thing. And they get out there to Jamaica and they enter into the mushroom state and they, something goes wrong. What's your plan? Well, it is an enormous responsibility and I recognize that every single time.

And I, I say, I feel that so deeply from just from the moment we have contact and someone agrees that they're going to come to Jamaica with us, then the weight of that responsibility, I feel immediately. And that's, it's extremely important that I meet the individuals at the airport, excuse me, and assess. I'm getting pretty good at doing assessments immediately. As to where we're going to go, where the individual is going to go throughout the week. And we have a, we have way too many sitters.

And I do not, I do not retire for the evening until I am 100% sure that everyone is stable and in their room. And then immediately following morning, we do follow-ups. We check in with everybody. So we, we closely monitor throughout the week. The area that we do our dosing in is actually fenced in. It's a big area. It's a big tightly sealed container.

And, you know, I actually encourage people to get as weird as they need to get with it. It's often, it is the, the resistance to let go into the experience that causes further trauma or problems later on. So the more comfortable people feel being able to really go into the experience and do whatever weird shit they need to do, then the more the higher the likelihood that they're going to have that release. Now, when it comes to someone who's schizophrenic or bipolar and they have maybe misinformed us, well, always reserve the right to refuse psilocybin.

Right. You know, and there have been times when I've had to say, look, you just, another dose is not going to help you. It's not good for you. Right. And there's, you know, resistance to that, but they usually come around to understand. Yeah. Yeah.

You're right. Yeah. And also it's not like these people are coming. They're not knowing what they're doing. It's like they're coming there to take, to take mushrooms. I mean, personal responsibility is a thing. Right. Yeah.

For sure. It's not like they're flying out there to like, you know, to swim with the dolphins. Right. Like you're, this is, so it's not, this is, this is coming to them out of the blue or anything like that. The, um, so do you have on hand any kind of like, uh, benzos or any kind of sedatives or? No, sure. Uh, uh, thus far in my experience, I do not find that to be beneficial. Um, I feel like individual need to complete the process is the most important.

Oh, so like, like interrupting, interrupting the process could actually be damaging to the person. I think so. Yeah. Yeah. So you mentioned something, the release. I want to talk about that. So what, what is this release that you're talking about? What, what does that mean?

Uh, I think it's, it's pretty well described to just say, uh, uh, like a weight off the shoulders. You know, you feel lighter after an experience. Yes. You feel, and what's that, what's, what's the cause of that? Is it some memories? Is it some emotion? Is it stored trauma that's been released? That's, you know, it's different for everybody.

But it is the most incredible thing. Duncan, I tell you like when I see people after three doses of psilocybin and they are standing up straight and they're moving lighter. They're smiling. They're just like glowing. Yeah. And this is like, I can feel that for them and like the joy that comes. We have, we have a lady who is at the conference today who joined us there last week or just got

back last week and she still is just like glowing from it. And she's like, when, when does this wear off? Does this wear off? You know? And yeah, of course it does eventually seems to, for most people wears off to some degree. Yeah, it does. You know? But God will like to be able to have that long of a relief and then, you know, three,

six months later to go back and dose again and experience that relief again. How can we deny that to people? It is unbelievable. You know, in my early days when I was taking psychedelics, I can remember having these, you know, brutal trips, brutal trips. And even, you know, going through something, you know, like not, not pleasant at all. Like almost like a war or some kind of like it's deep work that is happening. And then the next day, walking outside and everything is so much more vivid.

My vision seems to have improved a little bit, colors are brighter. And there's not just a sense of like having let go of something, but there's also a weird sense of accomplishment like that. Like I want to, like I wrestled with the angels. When you feel like a badass the day after just one of those peak experiences and you've gone through some really challenging periods and you're just like, yeah, this is the hero's journey. Yeah, it is. And it's a, you know, all of these things I think, I don't know that people really understand

about psychedelics. Many people think in terms of like, it's recreational. And now I like the term recreation in the metaphysical sense of the term, which is recreation. Like we are recreating ourselves. We are in the process of creating the universe with the divine and we're part of the outflow of love into time. But, you know, when most people, when they say recreation, they're talking about like, we're going to fucking take, go mud.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Recreation of RV, man. Recreation of those RVs are mystical. Are you, are you bringing up mudding because I'm from Kentucky? Hell no. I'm from the South too, man.

At PS, that seems, mudding has always seemed fun as fuck to me. And any judgment will come out there. It's like, oh, look at them mudding. Fuck you. You don't want to ride around in a goddamn badass fucking monster truck through mud and just free absolute freedom. Fuck off. What's wrong with you?

So anyway, but, but to get back to the point is like, this is, this is when used, I hate to use this term, but when used responsibly or intentionally, these things are not recreational in the normal sense of the term. No, they can be, but I want to talk with you about that. So what is, walk me through. I just landed in Jamaica to go to a mushroom retreat and you pick me up at the airport. Well, I'm, I'm there with the pickups. We have drivers.

So he's a, I'm a travel agency there that I'm, you know, drops back and forth and big bands. So you pick me. I'm there. I meet everybody at the airport. So I meet you. And then what, what does that first day look like and the next few days look like? Well, the first day is just come in and get some dinner and get some rest.

You know, get acclimated to your surroundings. If we get into the property early enough and we'll, you know, walk people in the area a little bit, just get familiar. And then the following day we immediately start with, you know, ice breakers get to know each other and kind of break the tension. How many people on a typical retreat? 15, we've done to 20, but I really liked 15 to 17 is good numbers. That's the number.

Yeah. It's really good space. And then we just spend a lot of time just getting to know each other and understand them while we're there. I'm educating people about the safety of psilocybin, the history of psilocybin. I'm going to do presentations with the, the artwork from the history, Christian, Buddhist, Hindu iconography. We do cultivate cultivation workshops while we're there. Cool.

But we spend just an enormous amount of time prepping for the experience while you're here, what to expect. You know, that's the first, the first dose is a lot of what to expect from the experience. What do you say? Well, I always start people at a low dose. We do one to three gram range generally. No, I mean, with what to expect, like imagine like I am a complete psilocybin new because I'm, I would imagine some people listening to this right now have never tried mushrooms.

They don't even know what they've read about it. They maybe have some ideas. So I'm that person. Tell me what I'm going to expect, what you would tell me to, what's going to happen. Right. So with that, with that initial dose that one to three gram range to put on the individual, mainly just expecting kind of the body feels and to experience the trajectory of the session. Right.

So you know how mushrooms come and that the waves and then you get that peak and you get the down swing and just kind of helping people understand how it can manifest, whether it's chills or shakes or, you know, just get comfortable with it coming on. It's going to come on. You're going to feel it coming on. So just be prepared for that and it can happen in a multitude of ways. These are some of the ways that many people experience the come on of psilocybin. And then this is kind of like the timeline where you're going to be during the peak,

how far we're going to be into it when the peak occurs. I'm sorry. Let me stop you right before the peak. So this is something McKenna wrote about, which is, you know, he, he, he was very scientific about it and he thought that the come on was always going to be a certain amount of time. Like it's based on body weight, but the come on is like, it's because some people eat mushrooms like me eat mushrooms and the come on is too fast. It's faster than to me than it seems possible that the psilocybin has entered into my system.

Like I've had, in fact, the last mega mushroom experience I had, which has scared me away from all further mushroom experiences like big doses, the come on was, it must have been within 10 minutes. And, and this was not like, man, I am experienced with psychedelics. I, I, I know the placebo effect is incredibly powerful. Forgive me, scientists out there listening are like, you don't know how powerful the placebo effect is, but this was like eating them and then so quickly looking down at my hands are kind of melting into the bed of the hotel that I was at.

And then just that just, it was as though just a tsunami wave was rushing through me. What do you, what is that? Man, it has been so interesting watching this over the duration here. You will, we will have nights where mushrooms just come on like freight trains and it's just like, what, what, what's up? Or sometimes it'll just take forever to come and it, you know, metabolism, obviously in our own body chemistry has to have something to do with it. That, and while I really try to stay away from kind of the flaky woo woo stuff,

I do pretty good job at that. I just put, puts people off and I don't know, have great language for it. And I'm trying to bring more people in to psilocybin than push people away. But there is really noticing how each night, each trip, it is, they're all have their own flavor. They all have their own feel. And you or I, we often can fill the trip before we eat the mushrooms. Have you ever had experience like that?

Ab, so, loosely. Not only have I had experiences like that, not just the mushrooms. I've had it with LSD and not only have I had it with LSD, I've had it to the point where a day before the LSD trip, when I didn't have any LSD or knew anyone who had LSD, I realized, oh, I'm going to take LSD tomorrow. So, you know, what we're talking about here, and this is why it's like, I understand not wanting to put people off. And, and, you know, these days, and especially with the work that you're doing,

it's like, you almost have to, you don't want to. The best psychedelic facilitators that I know, they don't color the trip in advance for the person because it's like, this is, this is your journey. I'm not going to subjectively, I'm not going to project my own subjective experience onto you. I don't want to color your experience by implanting into you an idea of what could happen, which then could produce a sense that, oh, something must be wrong because I'm not experiencing that. So, I think that is the most graceful way to be an administrator. Or what would you call yourself?

Yeah, I like administrator facilitator. Yeah, a facilitator. So, but that being said, I'm not a facilitator. I'm a podcaster. I get to talk about this shit. And like, and I get to be as woo woo-y as I want, as long as I stay in advance. I don't know. I don't know.

This is just me thinking. This is bro science, reduce it. This is just some, you know, rambling, like, loon. I don't care that I'm sitting on the fucking wall of a village, talking to crows, which by the way, I'm trying to make friends with the crows in my neighborhood right now. So, it's like, I'm allowed to say this shit. And so, I know what I think is happening is that we're experiencing some kind of

ripple backwards through time that our consciousness seems to be somehow a product of time or there seems to be just some kind of, when we take a psychedelic, there is a ripple. And the ripple doesn't just happen in the moment. It seems to be rippling through time. And this is why we know that the psychedelic is coming on. And what the fuck that is? Who the hell knows? And will we ever even be able to explore it?

Not for a long time. Because if you're a scientist and you're studying psilocybin and neurogenesis, the last thing you want to say in front of your colleagues is like, hey man, I think we're rippling time, baby. But we are. And that thing that you just talked about is one of many shared experiences that in the future, once we get past the problems with legislation and rescheduling of the substance, I think people are going to be able to explore.

Right. And that's one of the reasons that I don't like to talk about the content of people's experiences until after that first experience. Yes, get people prepared for the body stuff, like kind of what can happen and how to feel it. Coloring people's experience is something we really try to stay away from. And then after they have that first experience, and it's usually like after the second experience when we're up into like the five to seven gram range, people come back and they're like, what the fuck is going on over there?

And I'm like, yeah, that's what's going on over there. Over there. Or I don't know what's going on over there, but that's what we experienced over there. Right. So you go over there a lot, huh? I go over there a lot. Yeah, you kind of have a, you have a condo over there by now. Time share.

You've got friends. You probably have friends. I do have friends over there. But you can't, you're being, to me, it feels like you're not wanting to talk about that. Oh no, I mean, I'm fine to talk about it. I just, like you're saying, I don't know. I don't know. We, we had this experience last month where I'm starting to feel very strongly

that this container, which isn't a physical container, it's the energetic container that we all bring to the table, that I'm able to assist people from a distance. And I had like some confirmable experiences where, you know, we were on the beach with this group of nine guests and I think we had like five facilitators that night. And like, I found myself directing the facilitators or my assistants for sitting, I was sitting in the middle of the, of the beach with this woman who was having a massive 10 gram experience. And she and I were, because I was dosed, I dosed with the clients.

She and I were like, just in this energy ball, sending things out to others. And just, again, I don't have the language for it. It's one of the reasons, reasons I struggled to even bring it up. But knowing, confirmably being able to assist people from where I was in the center, even like one instance is my son was there, my 15 year old son comes down. And I just kept like, I knew this guy over in the corner needed my, needed somebody. And I felt like it was my son. And I said, check it out.

I need you to go over. I don't know why I just need you to go. Why, why dad? I don't know why I just need you to go over there, stand beside him, see what happens, come back and report. And he went over and stood beside the guy and the guy, he needed to go to the bathroom and he needed someone to walk him to the bathroom. And my son became, he kept calling him the patron saint of pissers.

But it was just like, and again, I like, I go back. Is this just some coincidence that I felt like he was needed and a sentiment was just the right time for the guy to go to get piss. There are so many recurring instances though that the timing is perfect that I just have to eventually accept that this is what we're dealing with. So here's the thing, man. Like, you know, the, the, and I, so I'm like, let's imagine you and I have decided to become shepherds only we're not shepherds of sheep.

We've decided to become human shepherds, right? We, we need to like figure out a way to control big herds of humans, right? So we know that because you and I have been doing stuff, we're like, we know that there is no doubt some kind of in the same way that there's the mycelial network in the soil. We know there's the that that's just a mirror of another kind of network that connects all people. Not only that, but we figured out how to like communicate through that network. We understand that we can do many, many, many things that a lot of people don't know. It's no different than like if we sort of traveled into the future to some post-apocalyptic

situation and people were seeing all these weird fucking symbols painted on the wall. And they're like, what the fuck does that mean? These symbols, they're all these weird symbols painted everywhere just because they forgot that you could write and we're like, oh, that says Walgreens. You know what I mean? Something as simple as that, right? But my point is, if I was a cunt and I wanted to be a someone who was a part of what Terrence McKenna so aptly described as male dominator culture, then what I would want to do for sure,

if I was going to become a human shepherd in the dark sense in the way like a factory farming sense, I wanted to like, you know, not, you know, shear them to take their fur. Is that what it's called on the sheep to take their wool? Not fur, but I wanted to shear their energy and I wanted to, because I could use their energy. I knew their attention was very powerful. And anyway, the point is the one thing I sure as fuck would want them to believe is that the moment they started realizing that they were capable of also accessing this network of consciousness, that I would want them to kind of instinctually be like, oh, no,

I must be out of my mind. This isn't on cosmos, but no one, no one, no one, no one, no one talks about this surely people, people would talk about this is the kind of, you know, this is Richard Dawkins, Richard Dawkins, you know, he doesn't believe this. It couldn't be real Richard Dawkins, right? So, so, so I would want to like trigger, I would want to have a nice security perimeter set up in the minds of the things I was trying to control, which is why I would want to keep my herd away from psilocybin. And that is why when in Jamaica, they talk about it, they say it's, what do they say it is? It's witchcraft, right? Because the people who want to control, they don't like witches, never have, they call us witches. They say you're a witch, they say you're

a satanist, they say you're under the occult, they say you're a, they give you a lot of bad, bad names, they're scared of you basically. When I was, when I was arrested, they actually set my bond at 60,000 and said I was a cult leader. Yeah, there you go. You're a cult leader. Now, so, so this is like hilarious to me because not only do we have a prohibition on a substance, but we have a prohibition on a conversation. Right. Now, the prohibition on the conversation is obviously not being enforced by law enforcement. It's being enforced by people who consider themselves to be, quote, rational, objective, scientific materialists have produced a intense prohibition on saying something that we know beyond a shadow of- That's, that's really such a good point, man. That really

is like, I guess like one of the metaphors I've been using lately is I'm a bus driver, right? I'm like, it's like a, it's a big bus. It's a big bus that we get on and I fully recognize that I have, maybe not the direction, we all contribute to the direction that the bus is going, but the smoothness of the ride, maybe some of the scenery, maybe I know some back roads that we can take, you know, or maybe let's get the expressway right now and let's just kind of coast for a bit. And I like that metaphor quite a bit. So, but you, it's so, it's so, God, it's so real, which are bringing up and it really strikes me because I do find myself self-censoring these experiences. We all do. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And it's the, it's the culture context that we have

that really limits us. Yeah. Well, I mean, this is why there is an occult as it's called underground because the, you know, the occult as they call it occluded occult, it's just, you know, it's hidden in plain sight, right? So this isn't happening because there's some nefarious group of witch people who are trying to eat the babies of America. It's happening because you can't talk about it or you, in the past, you really couldn't talk about it without being thrown out of town, tarred and feathered, burnt at the stake called, these days, the, now we don't get tarred and feathered. These days we get thorazined and we get, um, uh, thorazined and, and, and basically put in a facility. Same thing. More professionally ostracized. I mean, you mentioned David Nut,

David Nut, like he lost his job basically for proving how safe psilocybin is. That's right. Yeah. Yeah. You get professionally ostracized. You get kicked out of, uh, you lose money, especially you lose money that you need to continue the research. And so the, the, what we're dealing with here, which to me is just, uh, one of the most, one of the many noble things that the, our psychedelic advocates in the scientific community are doing, uh, is that they have had access to these realms of consciousness where many of them, I suspect have been given very specific marching orders and they can't talk about it. And they're fucking scientists and they, and they're, they're, they're unable to report data sets because if they do, they are going to be

ostracized. They're going to lose their grant and they're not going to be able to continue their good work. So I can remember when I was at the, uh, MAPS psychedelic conference, um, in Oakland, it was wonderful. And, and so many wonderful people there, but this scientist, I can't recall his name. He'd set up a quantification system for mystical experiences and he was giving this lecture and it was one of the funniest fucking things ever because, you know, he had, he's having to produce a grid upon which you can hang the infinite and the transcendent. And this is a translation problem, right? Because this man has got to figure out a way to, to this, this place that you're talking about, that you have become quite familiar with and that you drive your bus

through is a wonderful kingdom, but they speak a different language over there. And so when you come back here, you have to become a translator to the powers and principalities that are here. And they speak the language of matter. Here we speak the language of matter and science, and that is the language that is the language of the realm. And if you don't speak that fucking language, then they're, you're not going to, no one's going to pay attention. So even though over there, you may have enjoyed being a swimming pool through which hyperdimensional entities, for a playful reason, decided to take a bath or swim or just show you like, look, I can swim through you. You can't say that at a fucking scientific conference. Hey, we're swimming pools. You know

that our energetic forms are actually potentially ecosystems in the same way our bodies are ecosystems for a variety of parasites. And yeah, man, you said something. I was listening to an episode where you're talking about, like the spirits of things like brands, you mentioned brands and, and like that brand brands, like you're using like somebody has the Coke spirit or the Coca-Cola demon or whatever it was, you know, kind of referring to how we assimilate all these products or experiences. Sure, sure, sure. And what we are so like unaware of is that it's all energy, like it, it's all, whatever everything around us, it's all energy. And so like that's where I found myself more fluent is in the world of energy these days. Yes. And that's why I love working in that

space so much because words don't really work that well there. That's right. Yeah, it's just, it's a really nice place to quiet and experience and engage. And also let's face it, we, in this culture, we don't have the experience. Like at some point, words might work better there. At some point, we might have a new language that we create for hyperspace or whatever you want to call it. At some point, there might be a technological, something that technologically could facilitate these experiences. I mean, this is our culture that's having this problem. It is not in other cultures, this problem does not exist. In other cultures, they've been developing technologies to work in that space for a very, very, very long time. But over here, we're like just figuring it

out. Yeah. And I think it's a problem when we try to take the technologies from those other cultures and apply them within our culture. And a lot of this cultural appropriation and shamanic techniques that are being brought in by Westerners who don't really know what the fuck they're doing or why they're doing it. They're just, they're doing it because that's what somebody else did. And so like for me, the work is so personal that basically the only thing I bring into a session that I must have is tobacco. I haven't just natural tobacco that they grow in Jamaica. And that is kind of my only other tool within the space. And then I just do whatever I'm told and do whatever I'm instructed to do. And then it can be a variety of things. Right. Now, this is to me,

this cultural appropriation thing you mentioned. So I think what is happening is that people are seeing, not to get all woke and shit, but this is one place where I was like, fuck, man, I am like, I guess I am like, you know, this is like a racism in me that I didn't even like a cultural racism was in me, which is that because people in Peru were doing shamanic healing rituals, I was completely discounting that at one point in my life, just thinking like, that's a bunch of bullshit. They ain't healing nobody only in the West. You wear the blue thing and the mask and you get out the fucking scissors and you do you cut a person open and you cut the thing out and you sew them back up and you give them painkillers. This is the only way to heal.

This is the only way to heal. And this is crazy because we have these cultures who have discovered many other ways to heal many other ways to work with people that isn't like sitting in a fucking on a couch across from a person who's been trained to listen to you and diagnose you with some disorder, not even because you have the fucking disorder, because if they don't, the insurance company isn't going to give them money to talk to you. So they've got to sit across from you and be like, all right, you're a you're a blah, blah, blah in a section nine and a four, three, eight and then that and now we can talk and I'll get money. Right. You know, so this is this is it's amazing, isn't it? It's fucking great. It's crazy, right? It really is. So now now we you know, you go out in

the streets of America or wherever in the West and you're surrounded by people who have a diagnosis. They go around with a diagnosis that was given to them by somebody who needed to get money to listen to them talk. And so they go around and oh, yeah, I'm a blah, I got, I got, you know, a little bit of like beep, I've got BPD or I've got button out bipolar, of course, is like or borderline personality disorder is actually a pretty rare event, but they're, you know, I'm depressed. I've been diagnosed with depression. I've been diagnosed with this thing or that thing, mania, I've been diagnosed, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever it is. Right. And that's a burden. And that's why one of the reasons why when people apply and they have been diagnosed by

polar for instance, unless it's bipolar one, you know, and it's then I'm going to have a conversation with them. I'm not, I'm still not going to turn anybody away because well, not say I won't turn anyone away because they have turned people away, but I'm going to have that conversation because there are so many times that people are just given these blanket diagnosis so that they can be provided with some kind of pharmaceutical. So that just as you're saying the insurance comes so the machine can keep turning, you know. Yeah, but watch out, baby, because I'll tell you that that's the one thing that I've noticed with like in my experience with this podcast and having been a psychedelic advocate and a public psychedelic advocate for

a long time. I've had a few run-ins now in my life with people who have gone to people who are calling themselves shamans. It doesn't seem to me that that's what you're doing. You're a facilitator, you're a bus driver. It doesn't seem to me that you are someone whose ego has experienced the ego inflation that can come from psychedelics. This is fascinating to me. One of the byproducts of psychedelic use is that it can actually, it's very similar to magic. Like when people start learning how to do magic in the real sense of the word, then their egos get inflated and they become incredibly narcissistic or self-centered or they just, you can go into a pretty rough spot for a little bit as part of the process.

And I've seen this happen with psychedelics where a person is going over there. We don't have the name for the place yet, which is so fucking funny because in the old days, if you found a new continent, you got to name it. It's just over there right now. We don't even get to name the place. We have to say, oh, you know, it's a hyperspace or it's a realm or it's a dream state or it's the astral plane or whatever. We don't even get to name the place yet. So over there, but sometimes people go over there and in the same way over here, you might get some bad friends and over there, they get some bad friends and the bad friends start telling them, you know, you're our chosen way to spread our message to the place that you come from. And we are going to give you so many powers

and we're going to show you all these things and it's true. And they do get these little shockties. They do, they get these little, little bits of abilities and stuff and their ego gets fucking inflated and they come over here and they start doing some kind of healing work and it's all with great intention, but it's like it's, it's also mixed in with their desire for power. And then the next thing you know, something happens. And so this, this, you know, I had a conversation with a mother and a father whose son listened to my podcast and went to South America, I don't know where and took ayahuasca for a few days, five, six days, four days. I don't know how many and had bipolar. And then after that experience went somewhere where he wasn't able

to integrate the experience and then after that experience came home and committed suicide. And, and, and I, you know, I don't consider myself in, in any way responsible for that, but I did think in my mind, I need to be a lot more fucking careful when I'm talking about psychedelics, particularly for people with bipolar, because, and you know, to me, it's a tragedy to imagine that anyone on planet earth couldn't enjoy these states of consciousness and wouldn't have access to the over there. Because the over there, if you ask me, that's where we come from. That's going home, if you ask me. So, you know, anyway, my point is, with a bipolar, be careful. Oh, yeah, you're not. I mean, I don't, I know that I say that it makes come off lightly.

You know, I have extensive conversations with people who are of any concern before agreeing to have them down. And again, they know that, you know, I can stop not the bus, but I can stop administering at any time during the week. And just it's, it is a an enormous, enormous responsibility. It does, it weighs on me. I think about, you know, we've already had a couple of hundred people come through in the last couple of years. And I think about these people all the time, because I can't personally be there for everybody afterwards. We do offer an one integration session afterwards included. And then if they want more, then we have a network that we connect people with, or there are certain people that our facilitators connect with really well. And

those relationships are maintained. But man, what you're saying, oh, that's like, that's my biggest concern, because I've seen so many times people take a couple of doses, and they're like, well, I'm ready to start dishing out mushrooms. Like, no, no fucking way. No, no, no, no, no. I mean, you know, I've eaten mushrooms dunking at least 500 times. Sure. And I still am just getting a handle on what's going on over there. Right. You know. Yeah, right. I mean, we're, I mean, this is, so this is, this is one of the, you know, I guess you could call it in some way, it's kind of a champagne problem in the sense that because we're looking at a destigmatization of psychedelics and a recognition from the scientific community

and the government, government organizations that there does appear to be some kind of medicinal use from a scientific perspective for many of these substances. What, what is happening is that we're, we're going to see a, we don't have a, we don't have a way to really like license this kind of work. And you know, having read David Graber, maybe too much and the idea of licensing itself in some ways can be just another way the government intrudes into our lives. In some ways it's a, it's a good thing. Right. And, and this is like the, the, to me, what it would, if I am watching a surgery, for example, right. So I let go and I watch a surgery. Here's how you do an appendectomy or something like that. Right. I've watched the

surgery. Maybe I have internet. So now I've seen how to do an appendectomy. And also I can go on the internet and you can look at appendectomies happening on the internet. Right. I have not been to medical school for the, you know, 15 years. I've not been in a hospital following someone around for that amount of time. And so probably if like my friend is like, dude, I think I got to get my appendix removed. And I'm like, Oh dude, I saw it once. And also I, you know, I've accessed the internet. Why don't you let me take out your fucking appendix. He's like, you know, thanks, that's cool, man. I know I'll save some money, but I think I'm going to go to the hospital. So in the same way what happens is people go to, and I don't, again, I'm not saying,

this isn't you. Right, right. I'm generally, I'm thinking more in terms of like, ayahuasca, but people go to. So what's happening as well? So what's happening cannot be underestimated. You're right. You're right. And people go and they see a shot, an actual shaman who has been trained for years, apprenticed to a shaman has been trained for years. Like you still don't know what the fuck he's doing over there. You can go sit with these people who are working in this other realm. Yeah. And you don't have a clue what he's doing over there. Yeah. So it's even more risky. Like if with this operation, like we can see physically, okay, well, there's the rib cage, there's, you know, cut the, you know, with this, when you're watching somebody work, most of the

work that I'm doing with people is I'm sitting silently beside them. And they don't, they don't have a clue what I'm, what I'm doing really. Right. You know, right. That's it. And so training for that. Yeah. We're not there. I mean, this is, and here's what's really hilarious about all of this is that this mirrors the early days of medicine, of surgery, like people, doctors were having to be grave robbers because there was a prohibition on cutting bodies open. So doctors would have to dig up a fucking fresh corpse just to look at like what the hell's going on in there. That was the, you know, the over there used to be inside our bodies. Right. And, and, and, you know, we kind of like, if you look at early, you don't see something terrifying,

look up early drawings of how people thought shit looked like in the body. I can only imagine. And imagine that dude is operating on you. And you look at these, like, it looks like an eight year old just drew like a bowl of fucking like a chicken and grits and some peas in there, you know, and like a weird concept of how it worked. And on top of that, if you were to go to go to a doctor and tell them back then that, you know, there's tiny little beings living on the skin of every living thing, they would be like, you're out of your fucking gourd. There's no tiny little being. Oh yeah, Galileo. Yeah, you think that you really think that to the point where like there was a, there was a, um, I don't remember the doctor's name,

but there was a doctor who, uh, at one point started telling other doctors that, you know, maybe before we do surgeries, we should wash our hands. Hold on, let me just, wasn't that the whole like a infant mortality wasn't hand washing huge? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you'd be doing a surgery, you know, you'd be working on a patient, a patient's like just your fucking slicing him open and like he's like shitting himself out of pain or you're just like getting some blood and shit on your hands and you like wipe your hands off on your fucking apron and then you're like, all right, let me go deliver this fucking baby. And so you're delivering a baby with the blood and shit of some kind of like infected patient all over your hands. And like, of course, the baby's

dead in like six minutes. The mother gets some kind of rotten vaginal disease and just like, just, just her insides collapse and she hemorrhages blood. And like this was what medicine used to be, you know, because they didn't know, they didn't know. And the reason they didn't know was because there were like cultural prohibition, there were cultural prohibitions on things that now we consider normal, like washing your hands, which is, they said to this fucking doctor, which I wish I could remember his name, a gentleman does not wash his hands. That was considered to be, what? Yeah, yeah, it was considered to be somehow a degraded thing to wash your hands because it meant you were dirty. I mean, so like, so, I mean, so, so that's how fucking nuts people

were back then, right? And this, I wish I could remember this doctor's name. He ended up going insane because he knew he was right. Really? And he couldn't, he could not get people to listen to him. And he knew that if doctors would just start washing their hands, then their infant mortality rates would drop. So he ends up getting committed to a loony bin, right? He gets, so, so this, we're witnessing the identical phenomena happening now. Only instead of it happening with a physical form, it's happening with the energetic form, which is we are now starting to realize like, oh, right, there's an energy, it's not, we're starting to realize we're remembering, remembering, yeah, this, right? Energy body, yeah. So in a really kind of sad way, we, we, oh, I'm so sorry for

this round. In a very sad, gross, fucked up way, we owe a debt of gratitude to every single surgeon who went against the laws of the land and, and, and tried to do surgeries to save people's lives and dug up graves to look inside of bodies to try to save people's lives. And weirdly, the kind of work you're doing right now is, is similar in the sense that you are a pioneer. You're doing a thing which is working with energy and working with a kind of geography that is not quantifiable yet and is also considered quackery, right? So, so like in, in some beautiful utopian future, people are going to look back at you and they might think, well, he was a fucking grave robber. He was going into hydrazia. He was taking, you know,

he was bringing people into Nornog in the fourth zone of the aether of Lenar and, and didn't know that before going there, you shouldn't tell him the one Zandadon. He called himself a fucking bus driver. Very, very possibly, that will be true. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I wonder how that's going to play out though with all the legalization, you know, like we're going, the MDMA is the first thing that's coming and as I was informed last night that Iboga or Ibogaine will be the next thing. If psilocybin gets there and particularly with the mushrooms and not the synthetics, like the learning curve that's going to have to occur for so many clinicians and rationalists who will be the ones that are allowed to administer these plants or these

medicines. Yeah. What kind of damage is going to happen there? So I do hope that we are doing work and I do feel confident that we are doing work that is going to contribute to the body of knowledge as this field expands within our culture. Absolutely. And it's in, in, in what, now what, what's having to happen right now is the same goddamn thing that's happening science over and over and over again, which is that groups of scientists are having to communicate secretly in the shadows about things that they, they know seem to be real, but they can't at this point publicly come out and say it. They're having to come out and do like, they're having to take little baby steps. But yeah, man, I think that to me, this is the, the beauty of what we're on the

precipice of is essentially it's like what has happened to our entire species is no different than what happens to a garden hose is that, you know, does your kid ever do the thing where you're, I don't know if you water grass, but when I was a kid, if my dad was watering the grass, I thought it was fucking hilarious to bend the water hose. So the water shut off, like if he'd gone around the side of the house, I just bend the water hose and like he thinks, you know, he's, you could hear him, God damn it. And then he would come and have to unbend the water hose so the water could come out and he could water the lawn. So in the same way, our governments have put a bend in a water type of water hose. Only it's not water. It's, it's a,

the healing that comes from having contact with the psychedelic states. Another way to put it would be we are amphibious creatures that have been told that it's illegal to come up for air. And when we start coming up for air, those of us who are brave enough to do it are in risk, arrest and all the varieties of things that come from doing a prohibited thing. And we come back down, we're like, fuck, there's a whole thing up there. And you want to tell, but then you're like, I can't tell, who can I tell? Yeah, and not only that, not only that, but we're feeling better. We're down there with all these like oxygen deprived, you know, dolphins who are like, and so now people are coming on, they're like, holy camoli, it appears that psychedelics treat depression. It's like

saying french fries treat hunger. You know what I mean? Like no shit. Yeah, yeah, I know. This is all stuff that we've known we've been experimenting with and not even like the 40s. They're like, just reversing massive autism and children. Like these are all things that we've known. Oh, yeah, just remembering. That's right. That's right, man. And it's a beautiful time. And I'm glad you're doing the work you're doing. And if during our conversation I came across as a little severe, no, it is like it's really important that we directly address this because there are far too many people out there who are administering medicines without the experience. And for anybody that's listening, you know, if you're thinking of going towards an experience like this, then

I suggest you research the fuck out of where you're going and who you're going to. Because there are nefarious, even in the traditions out in South America, there are people that know how to suck your energy. There are people that know how to drain you. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah, man. And they don't feel bad about it because they kind of feel like, listen, if you want to walk around with your fucking wallet hanging out of your back fucking pocket, that's not my problem, man. Listen, if you want to play the game of being like the spiritually illiterate tourist who's coming to a village, all right, man, but that's not my problem. Now, that's obviously, I think that if you do research, there are true healers out there.

Absolutely. And also, the other thing to think about is like, you know, you see those videos online, it's kind of disturbing where like a seal comes up out of a, to get air, you know, a seal's been swimming around, it comes up and a fucking polar bear just grabs it. Yeah. Like you need to know if you're going to go into this place, you need a bus driver who's not going to like drive you into a bad neighborhood. Absolutely. Or if he does, if you do end up in a rough neighborhood, he knows how to talk to the locals. If people want to ride the bus, how do they get in touch with you, man? Just go to mycommeditations.com and you can contact through there.

Yeah, that's the easiest way right now. We're getting overwhelmed. I used to give out my personal email and now I have an assistant that's doing handling all that stuff. It is really exciting because the interest is, uh, is really up there right now, special pollens book, you know, but it can't even pollens book. It's, it's just coming in from this materialistic sense. Like this is a healing medicine. This is why we can quantify it in a laboratory and people have even since that book, people have come down and after the experience, they're like, wait a second. He didn't talk about this. Yeah. Yeah. So that could be the name of your book. He didn't talk about this. Paulin didn't say this. Yeah. Yeah. Not just Paulin, but all of them. And that's not their fault.

I get it. Right. Right. Right. Absolutely. Yeah. I get it. But yeah, man. I like, yeah, we'll start talking about it soon. I mean, we just kind of did. Yeah. Well, you've been doing, comedians are like so important in this, right? It's weird. It's so fuck. Well, it's, it is weird, but it's not. I was listening to, if I can just elaborate on this. I can't, I'm not gonna be able to remember the podcast I was listening to or who, but it was a, uh, in the Bolshevik Revolution, it was the comedians that set that thing off because they could get out there and talk about the taboo subjects and broach it with the general populace. And like you, Shane, Joe have had so much of a role to play in this movement in the last five years. You know, man, it, yeah. And to me,

that's like one of the great honors that I can't even, like any, my opinion here is that, you know, this is a very important movement slash revolution. And, uh, finally, you know, it's time is the thing I dreamed about when I was a kid and realizing like, Oh, wow, this is so sad. This substance LSD is like beautiful. It's like expanding my consciousness. It's helping me, you know, it's helping me find truth in a, in a, in a place where there wasn't a lot of truth in my family and, and, and, and this education system I was in. So yeah, to me, it's like, we're all, we're all part of this. And, and I, I put a lot of faith and, and respect in the scientists and, and, and, and, and Rick Doblin and maps and all the people who were doing the heavy lifting

and, and we, you know, we get to like sit here and fucking ramble about goddamn entities and time ripples. And while these people are like putting their ass on the line, but we're all part of this, you know, if, if you have taken a psychedelic and experienced any kind of shift in your consciousness in the positive, then in a weird way, you, you need to just consider coming out of a closet, coming out of a psychedelic closet. You don't have to, but, but, and you, you have good reasons not to. So many of many people do, they do have jobs. Some of them are in the, or in law enforcement. Some of them are in the DEA. Some of them are in upper echelons of the, you know, these people, like they, they, I understand, don't feel guilty about it, you know,

but if you can start the conversation, start it, you know, because the more people who start having the conversation, the closer we get to a time period where movies and music get a lot better. Yeah. Yeah. They'll have an impact on everything. Everything, everything, everything. And it's already shifting. It's been a great pleasure chatting with you today. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you. Thanks for listening, everybody. If you want to get in touch with Eric, all you got to do is go to mycomeditations.com. Much thanks to our sponsors and friends. If you are sick of commercials and you don't want them, head over to patreon.com forward slash DTFH for commercial free episodes. We'll be back later this week. Until then, I love

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