Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 506: Dr. Andrew Weil

Episode Date: May 7, 2022

Andrew Weil, doctor and contemporary of Ram Dass and Timothy Leary at Harvard, joins the DTFH! Please check out Dr. Weil's RiverStyx Foundation and support their charitable works! You can also learn more about Dr. Weil at DrWeil.com. Original music by Aaron Michael Goldberg. This episode is brought to you by: Lumi Labs - Visit MicroDose.com and use code DUNCAN at checkout for 30% Off and FREE Shipping on your first order! ExpressVPN - Visit expressVPN.com/duncan and get an extra 3 months FREE when you buy a 1 year package. Squarespace - Use offer code: DUNCAN to save 10% on your first site.

Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. You can get Dirty Angel anywhere you get your music. Ghost Towns, Dirty Angel, out now. New album and tour date coming this summer. What's up, pals? You're listening to the Duncan Trussell Family Hour podcast. And wow, you know, I know you've probably already listened to this, but I gotta play it

for those of you who might not have heard it. They somehow recorded the sound of a black hole. And it's spooky. This is what it sounds like. Isn't that creepy? Almost sounds like voices. I want to brag, but I'm a pretty sophisticated audio engineer at this point.

I've been doing the podcast for a long time, been to a lot of different audio schools for music and sound. And I realized maybe if I work with a plug-in, I could adjust this so I could bring out that voice in there and hear what it is. So I just started changing the frequencies. And you can see right there, right around there, you can hear that the higher frequencies sound like that.

Voices, listen, right there, do you hear that? Right there. Now if I dial it up weirdly to frequency 666, not frequency, frequency, I get this. And the more I adjusted it, the weirder it got. Now listen to this. You hear that? That sounds like voices to me.

So I dialed in the frequency even harder and harder and harder, and this is what I got. You might have got your questioning not straight. Skater, will you please state your name? I'm Archdemon Slashnort. And what is your address? I live in the citadel of eternal horror by the molting pits in the lava pool.

And how old are you? I just celebrated my 500th molting as did my lava pup who is now celebrating its 73rd molting. And what is your perception? I flay the skin from the unbaptized and puppeteer their skeletons in front of the lava pools for the young demon children.

Now, where are you here? I was in a shitty relationship with Johnny Depp. I normally don't mate with humans, but I'm a big fan of Pirates of the Caribbean. I think he's a wonderful actor. At that point, it just goes back to the fucking boring black hole sounds, but holy shit, if I'm correct in my analysis of that audio,

it appears that Johnny Depp is on trial all across the universe right now. And that freaks me out. We got a great podcast for you today. Dr. Andrew Wilde is here with us. This guy's cool. He opened up about what went down between him and Albert and Tim Leary at Harvard.

The incident that got Richard Albert, who later went on to become Ram Dass, kicked out of Harvard. Not only that, we had a great talk about psychedelics, the benefits of cocoa leaves, and he may have cured my COVID smell. We're gonna jump right into it, but first this. Do you know a long time ago,

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Also, I'd like to invite you to check out the book that our Patreon just wrote, Esoterotica, a collection of short erotic stories with cryptid encounters. It's available at amazon.com. You can get it for Kindle. You can get it paperback, even hardcover if you wanna go nuts.

All of the profits from this book are going to go to various nonprofits. Right now, I think we're trying to figure out a good nonprofit for Ukrainian refugees. Regardless, this book is gonna make you come. Check it out. Links for it are gonna be at DuncanTrussell.com. Join the Patreon.

We're about to collaborate on another book and you can get in on that by going to Patreon.com forward slash DTFH. I think it's safe to say that the psychedelic revolution of the 60s might not have happened had today's guest, Dr. Andrew Weil, not written a series of exposés for the Harvard Press that got Richard Alpert

and Tim Leary out of Harvard. Richard Alpert went on to become Ramdas, one of my teachers. You know what happened with Timothy Leary and who knows what would have happened if they had remained at Harvard as professors and scholars. I don't know.

Dr. Weil completely opened up about his relationship with Ramdas and how it evolved over the years and not only that, we talked about the stigmatization of the cocoa leaf. The plant that cocaine is derived from and now there's actually a lot of benefit to chewing the cocoa leaf and how crazy it is that that along with a lot of other plant medicines

are currently illegal in large parts of the world. It's a really good podcast. I hope you enjoy it. If you wanna find out more about Dr. Andrew Weil or the River Sticks Foundation, you can go to RiverSticksFoundation.org and of course, Dr. Weil has his own website which you can find at DrWil.com.

All the links you need to find them will be at DuncanTrestle.com. All right, let's get going everybody. Welcome to the DTFH, Dr. Andrew Weil. I just wanna call the class of tonight everyone is here to see the new healthy Pokemon's the time that they inspire to feed their ancestors

The President of the United States vis-a-vis-a Real Punch Dr. Weil! Welcome to Kris and Your Video Dr. Will, Welcome toなた Dr. Welcome to the Dunker Trussell family our podcast is so nice to meet you Hello, good to meet you

How are you doing over there? Where are you right now? I'm in Tucson, Arizona Nice, nice It gets pretty hot out there though, huh? If we've had some nice cool weather it's just starting to get hot It's pretty clear what's coming

Oh yeah, right, yeah We just get rain up here in the mountains which Where are you? Asheville, North Carolina Oh, nice place Yeah, pretty nice, pretty nice I am, you know

not only am I a tremendous I just love Ram Dass and I love psychedelic culture and you I just thought we could start off by chatting a little bit about your time at Harvard because you were at Harvard

at one of the most wild times maybe in the history of that school you were there with Tim Leary as a professor Richard Alpert, aka Ram Dass and I don't know if you were aware of this or not but also the unabomber Yes, I didn't know that till I afterward

Okay, you never crossed paths with him Not as far as I know It's just to me mind-blowing But by the way, one other person I was a student of Richard Evans Shultes who was the director of the Harvard Botanical Museum and he was one of the great pioneers of psychedelic plant research

especially in South America So, you know, he was a major influence on me at that time too Yes, I just can't imagine what it's like to be in the presence of all these people Every single one of you were and are innovators in your field and every single one of you

really shaped not just psychedelic culture but, you know, culture itself I don't know if there's much of a difference So, I have to ask I was watching an interview and you talked about having, in 1961 having a powerful mescaline experience that had you listened to it

you would have dropped out of school but then you didn't talk about what that experience was I was wondering if we could just start off by you if you feel comfortable telling us what experience Yeah, this was synthetic mescaline that I got from a chemical company and, you know, I took a good solid dose of it I had taken it once before and nothing much happened

and I had not used marijuana I had really no other experience of drugs except for alcohol So, I really didn't know what to expect and on that second time that I took it I guess I had what you'd call a mystical experience You know, I was sort of the white light I felt that everything was connected

I felt that what was inside my head was what was outside my head was a reflection of what was inside my head that everything was as it should be and I also, I think, saw that a lot of what I was doing as a student at Harvard was relatively meaningless and that's why I said if I'd followed that vision I don't think I would have stayed in school

Okay, wow, yeah, now I... Because we're so lucky now that we're living in the I don't know which psychedelic revolution they're calling this, but one of them and we do have lots of data out there somewhat of an understanding of a lot of these substances Back then, they were relatively new, right? You didn't know what this was

No, very few people had heard of them I had read Aldous Huxley's book, The Doors of Perception which was about his mescaline experiences that made me really curious and want to try it Nobody I knew really knew anything about it I had heard that there were these two people at Harvard who were interested in studying it, Albert and Leary I went and met them, talked to them

I'll just give you my brief impressions Leary was very charming He was like an Irish leprechaun very twinkly in his eyes and he really thought that these were the most interesting things he'd ever come across and he felt that they were going to completely change society and he was incredibly enthusiastic about them

He did not foresee any opposition to using them really wanted to study their positive potential Albert was a different story He was, I think, uncomfortable in himself There was... I did not feel the same kind of level of comfort talking with him and I had asked if I could be a subject in their research and Leary said no, they were sorry

because they told the university they couldn't use undergraduates but he gave me some leads as to where I could get hold of mescaline and one of those panned out I found this chemical company that was willing to sell it Back then, did you just... you could just write a letter or how did you... I just wrote a letter, said I wanted to study mescaline and it arrived in my doorstep

Wow, that is so cool because, you know, I lived through the U2, all of us anyone around at a certain age lived through what is known as the war on drugs the stigmatization of all consciousness altering substances and the homogenization of them is just one thing called a drug that was bad so can you just talk about what that was like

to take a psychedelic prior to all the conditioning that made us feel like, oh my God, we're taking drugs or we're ruining our minds or we're destroying our lives with this drug Well, let me tell you one story from just a little bit before that there were a group of people that I knew who were dosed without their knowledge with LSD at a party, this was about 1960

and literally no one had ever heard of LSD and when they felt the effects of it they thought they had food poisoning I mean, really interesting they had no way to interpret what was happening to them Wow, they didn't... oh my God, right So there's a strong...

you know, you have to learn to interpret the effects of substances you know why, that's with pot that's why so many people that trying the first time feel nothing you have to learn to get high on it and with psychedelics I think there was something similar

that in a time when nobody knew anything about them we had no expectations you wouldn't know what was happening to you So it was... was it less terrifying for them or less unnerving or some of the stuff that it can appear in a typical bad trip was how... Are you saying some of that is informed

more by the culture than the substance itself? Well, you know, one of the great contributions of Lerian Alpert was their insistence that the effects of substances are due to an interaction of the substance the pharmacological effect and what they called set and setting that is a person's expectations of what's going to happen

and that can be unconscious and then the effects of the environment in which they take it and effects of set and setting combined can completely reverse pharmacological action you can give a stimulant to someone under certain conditions of set and setting and they'll fall asleep

and the opposite with sedatives So, you know, there's enormous room for the shaping of these experiences by what you think is going to happen and where you're taking it and the other people who are around and so forth How old were you? How old were you at this time?

So, I was 20, actually, you know, 1960, I was 18 Wow, you are a hot shot you're 18 years old at Harvard you are so interested in these substances because of one book, you're going to the offices of people who would later be these like No, actually, it goes back further, I'll tell you this is funny in the summer before I entered Harvard

so it was the summer after high school there was an article in the Philadelphia paper where I grew up about a student at a college in California supposedly who died from taking mescaline and it said that he had taken it very unlikely and it said that he had taken it for inspiration in a creative writing course

and it made the mistake of quoting a line from one of his last papers and I just remember the line was galaxies of exploding colors and when I read that, I wanted to take that So, I started asking you know, I just started asking what is this, where can I get it?

Of course, nobody knew anything Doctor, did we have a connection here because what got me into LSD was when I was in elementary school and the cops came to do a film strip that's what they did at the time and they were showing all how all the drugs are bad and they got to LSD

and I remember them saying, people see dragons and I as a kid in elementary schools I want to see dragons, what is this? You can see dragons? Exactly, exactly So yeah, that's, you know that got, it piqued my interest that later I followed through

Okay, so just so we could just talk about it You, okay, you're a writer at Harvard and you had your own group of people that were studying masculine because they weren't letting undergraduates get high We weren't studying it, we were just taking it Oh, you know, is there a difference? I don't know, I know you mean scientifically

probably a big difference but so somewhere along the line you start writing these exposés on showing that like this the line between professor and student scientist and experiencer was growing blurry and because of your expose Alpert, not Leary gets fired from Harvard

Can you talk about that? Like what precipitated that? Do you feel bad about it? Because I'm just curious like now with all this water under the bridge what are your feelings about that? I think everything played out the way it was supposed to play out

I was a reporter for the undergraduate newspaper the Harvard Crimson I was also a botany major studying the Schultes I was taking masculine myself So I had a, I'd say a split personality you know, I wore different hats but I was one of the only people on the undergraduate newspaper

with a science background So as this controversy started to develop about these two professors who were using these substances and there was a growing group of students around them I was asked to cover the stories related to that and there was a whole series of stories about faculty, stormy faculty meetings and so forth

So I was reporting on that and I got a lot of points for that from the, you know, being in the undergraduate newspaper and yes, it is true that the stories I wrote that was eventually what led the university to fire Alpert that was front page news in the New York Times So it was a huge coup for the Harvard undergraduate newspaper

but it was also the first time that most people in this country read about psychedelics So that explosion, I mean, that really disseminated knowledge and awareness of all this, I think, for the first time It took several years for me to realize the implications of what, of all that I then went to medical school

and in my senior year at Harvard Medical School I wanted to do human experiments with marijuana They'd never been done, you know once in history people had given pot to human subjects Nothing on it was becoming like such a huge thing in those studies So I tried to devote my senior year research time to doing a human study of pot

just to get basic information That caused, I kind of even begin to tell you how difficult it was to get permission to do that from the Federal Bureau of Narcotics from the Food and Drug Administration from the state of Massachusetts from Harvard University, from Boston University where I was going to conduct the experiments

Eventually, the Harvard gave permission for me to do it and the only reason they did was because I saw minutes of their meetings that I was the one who had blown the whistle on Alpert and here So that got me points within the academic community and I was allowed to do these pot experiments which showed that pot was a relatively mild substance and people didn't want to hear that in those days

Was this post, was that post Nixon when you did the pot? No, not yet, not yet That's coming later Okay, so even then it was stigmatized Even pre-Nixon, it was like, okay, okay, sorry But then I began to realize that I really had to make amends for the whole thing I'd done to Albert and Leary

I did an internship in San Francisco and Leary at that time was living in Berkeley This was 1968, 69 and I called him up and he invited me over to his home very friendly, he had no hard feelings He said, you know, this was exactly what was supposed to happen We had a really good time But then I said, you know, I really would like to talk to Albert

He said he thought that would be more difficult But he gave me, I think he told me how to reach him I had to go back to the East Coast This was now Nixon's first year and to go from San Francisco in that year to Washington, D.C. was horrible and I was serving my military time in the public health service and got a job at the National Institute of Mental Health They hired me to coordinate marijuana research in the country

But before I got there, they decided I was an undesirable person because the research I had published was not what they wanted out there and I had done it without their support and they'd been given, oh, it's a complicated story but the National Institute of Mental Health was a democratic pork barrel and suddenly it found itself under a hostile Republican administration

that was asking them what they had done with their money and they had been given several hundred thousand dollars by Congress years before to study pot and they hadn't done anything they hadn't published a single word and I was the only one who had published research on it not with their money and it also said stuff they didn't want to hear

So they tried to get rid of me and they couldn't and I was given no job I had to report to a windowless closet with a telephone in it and they would tell people I wasn't there when people would call up wanting my opinion on marijuana they said they didn't know where I was opened my mouth, really bad stuff but I thought, okay, I'll stick this out

you know, if it's better than going to Vietnam but it was during that time I got a number for Alper, he was somewhere in New England I called up, a woman answered the phone and I said I'd like to talk to him he got on the phone, I said, this is Andy Weil and he just went shhh

and uh hahahahahaha so I said, you know, that I'd been doing a lot of thinking and it was really important for me to talk about what happened and why and there was just silence and then finally he said that he was flying into Washington I think a couple weeks later and that he had to fly out

and I could pick him up and take him to the airport wow so I went to this hotel in Virginia I did not know he had been giving a talk I think to the American Psychological Association and I was in my car outside and out comes this guy with a beard and white robes uh

you know, this was his first appearance as Ram Dass and I also didn't know the talk he gave that I picked him up from was the basis of his book Be Here Now which shortly afterwards I read and had a huge influence on me I'm pretty sure that when at last we're living in a society that hasn't been completely impaired and set back by the idiot

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thank you so much my dear friends at loomy labs music so he got in the car he didn't say much, you know I said that I had gotten into a position similar to what he'd been in at Harvard where I was in an institution that was very hostile and that I was leading this kind of double life

sort of like, you know, looking like a straight doctor but I was, you know, increasingly using substances and seeing the world in a different way he mostly just listened and but, you know, he just listened anyway, I shortly afterwards listened to the tape of the talk that he'd given and as I say that was very influential it got me into starting to meditate and doing yoga

and being interested in the Eastern religion and I really felt he was a teacher of mine even though it was, you know, in an odd sort of way anyway, over the years we kept in contact when he had his stroke, I did a fundraiser for him in Santa Fe I gave a talk but finally, I guess a few years before he died a mutual friend was very insistent that we get together and spend time

and, you know, clear all this karma up so I went to Maui and I had dinner with him I spent a little time with him and then we had a very intense morning together just one on one and in the midst of it, he said, you know, you did me a blessing and he said, you know, that I would not have been Ram Dass if I had not been forced out of Harvard

and in fact, I think if he'd stay there it would have killed him spiritually and in lots of other ways so, you know, it just felt like a closure of something and I think we reached some point of common ground there and I do, you know, I have great respect for him and he has been a teacher of mine I've learned even though not in a formal way that I've, you know, a lot of inspiration for what I did really came from him

Thank you for that, thank you for that and yeah, I think that I often think what if you had not written those exposés not only would there be a Ram Dass sometimes I wonder would there be the psychedelic revolution what if they had, you know, gone out of the orbit of what a normal academic does but then just gone back in at some point

and then just stayed as like professors or writers or serious scientists what do you think, what do you think would have happened in an alternate timeline? Gosh, I think it could have been very different from what we've seen today but, you know, also there was such positive interest in psychedelics early on you know, great stuff with terminal cancer patients, with prisoners and then, you know, it all got just clamped down I don't know whether you've seen my, you know, one of my early books called From Chocolate to Morphine

Oh yeah, it got banned in Florida, they tried to, did they ban it? They wanted to burn your book That came out right as the war on drugs began it was like just the beginning of that and yes, the book, there was attempts to ban the book Florida Florida, yeah So I had, I was on the other end of that kind of stuff for a long time

and it's wonderful to see what's happening today, you know It's taken a very long time, but I think this is unstoppable now, this momentum I cannot believe the mainstreaming of some of this stuff you know, like a few months ago Vogue magazine had a cover story on psilocybin and more recently Town and Country magazine, I mean of all things Town and Country magazine had a feature article called Why is Everyone Smoking Toad Venom? Town and Country? What the fuck?

Well, that this is this is because of And by the way, something that I, it annoys me a little bit I was, and you know who Wade Davis is, so he and I wrote the first scientific paper on Toad Venom and nobody ever, we don't get credit for that, it was like is the first, yeah Wait, you wrote the, are you talking about a bufatin, or? Yeah, yeah, bufo alvarius, the Sonoran desert toad in my backyard where I live and you know, this was long ago in the, I think it was in the 80s or right around 1990 that I heard about people smoking toad venom and I was living in a ranch fairly far out from Tucson

and the toads were all over the place, they'd hop in my house at night, you know, they're gigantic and so I tried milking the venom and Wade and I smoked it, amazing, you know, it was like an amazing experience and we wrote a scientific paper about this, it was the first documented use of a psychedelic from an animal source, you know, that was a really important discovery and we speculated about whether indigenous people could have used it, I don't know if there's any real evidence for that, but you know, it's amazing to see what's happened with that. Yeah, well I'll tell you, I'm sorry for the toads, people should be using synthetic methoxy DMT. I don't think people understand like how they're harvesting the venom from the toads

is really horrible, I've seen videos of it. It doesn't harm the toad but people are taking the toads and keeping them in captivity and the habitat is disappearing and they're becoming very scarce and it's an endangered resource. I mean, from the toad's perspective, here you have over millions of years evolved a poison that's supposed to keep things from eating you and then these monkey descendants realize it gets you high, it's just rotten luck. I know. But can you talk a little bit about 5MEO DMT? I have smoked synthetic 5MEO DMT and it was, I just wasn't prepared for it, it was. Yeah, you know, people describe it as a rocket ship into the void. Have you ever done a regular DMT? Love regular DMT. Okay, so that's, you know,

amazing quick trip into this visual, you know, mostly paradise and interesting stuff. Yeah. But 5MEO DMT, it's just you're not there, you dissolve and when you come back, most people find that rather pleasant. But if, you know, the going out can be scary if you're not prepared for that. Yes, I'm curious, do you have any idea why adding, what is it, you add an oxygen molecule to DMT and it turns it into this like impersonal evaporation? Well, you know, in South America, there are a number of plant derived snuffs that indigenous people use that are psychedelic and that contain both. So usually plants produce both 5MEO and regular DMT together and that combination is probably, you know, pleasant.

So it's just odd that this toad produces only one of them and it's the only toad that has this and it's probably some random mutation that turned Pufatenin, which is a pure poison into this 5MEO DMT. Wow. That is why I did not know that you wrote the first paper on that. That is incredible because it is everywhere now and a lot of people, you know, use it, if, you know, or using it ritualistically and it's becoming like woven into. Yeah, I would never predicted that. I think it was just amazing to see that. Over the course of your lifetime, after all the drama and Harvard and everything, you have been one of the leaders in what's known as integrative medicine. Can you talk a little bit about what the model of like human physiology

and healing was prior to the work you have innovated in that field? Well, you know, I trained doctors at the University of Arizona and the trainings that we give are designed to teach people all the things they should have learned in medical school, but are left out like nutrition, which is completely neglected. And one of the even bigger omissions is about the healing potential of the human organism. You know, I don't think I heard the word healing used in my years at medical school, except in the phrase wound healing in my first year histology course. I mean, that should be like the study of medicine should begin with the fact that that bodies heal themselves. Right. You know, this is like amazing that we have this potential to,

you know, know that something's wrong, to heal, to regenerate, to adapt injury and loss. And, you know, the body has a healing system and has internal mechanisms of healing, and that's what medicine should focus on. Right. And also, most diseases end by themselves. And they end by themselves because the body takes care of them. There's an adage in medicine, probably hundreds of years old that I love that the business of the doctor is to distract the patient while time heals the disease. And I really believe that that's the fact. But most doctors and most patients are very pessimistic about their body's abilities to deal with things. And when I'm with a patient, I'm always thinking, why is healing not happening here? What can I do from outside

that might facilitate that? So, integrative medicine, that's where it starts on that premise that healing is possible and that you need to understand the nature of it. And then we look at people as whole organisms. You know, it's not just a physical body, we're also mental emotional beings and spiritual entities. You know, that principle I talked about, about how set and setting can reverse the pharmacological action of a drug, the mind can do unbelievable things. And that's completely omitted from conventional medicine. You know, we only look at the physical body. Why? Why is it omitted? It's part of the materialistic paradigm that dominates Western science. It's that, you know,

scientists only believe in that which they can see, touch, measure, remove. If you observe a change in a physical system, the cause has to be physical. You know, non-physical causation of physical events is not allowed for in materialistic philosophy. So, that's why we've never been able to take placebo responses seriously or understand how warts fall off by suggestion. And it's also why we don't take advantage of all of the mind methods of using, taking advantage of the mind to influence the body. I mean, there are these wonderful therapies like hypnosis and visualization and guided imagery, incredibly effective, cost effective and very underutilized, because people don't believe in them. They don't think they're, you know, they're real.

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witnessed? I've reported a lot of cases in my writings over the years. Some that I've experienced, personally some that I've seen in patients. I'll just tell you one quick story. I was traveling, this must be in the 1980s, I was traveling from the Pacific Northwest back to Arizona. I stopped off to see my friend Paul Stamets near Olympia, Washington, and I got into a hot tub that he had and it looked a little sketchy to me. I mean, I'm very careful about hot tubs. What do you mean, dirty? It didn't look like it should have. The next day when I got out, I started getting these, I thought it was a rash at first, but then it was like pustules on my arm that were sore and

they began spreading. I got them on my legs and it seemed like they had puss in them, but if I'd squeezed them, nothing came out and they were painful. This is hot tub folliculitis and it's caused by pseudomonas, which is a nasty bacteria and it's generally resistant to antibiotics. I didn't want to take antibiotics and I couldn't do anything. I was on my way home, so I was soaking them with hot compresses. By the time I got home, I had some peering on my face. I didn't like this at all, so I was freaked out. I had a wife of a friend of mine in Washington State who had become certified in this technique called guided imagery. My wife then had had a very positive experience with guided imagery and she said, why don't you call her and maybe

she can do a session with you over the phone. I said, that's ridiculous. This is a bacterial infection. What possibly could that do for it? She said, well, why don't you try because she'd had a dramatic experience with it. I called my friend Marilyn and she said she'd never done a session over the phone, but she was willing to try. I remember sitting in my living room, I had the phone receiver cradled in my shoulder and she said, she put me in a relaxed state and then she said, go to one of these that's causing you the most discomfort. It was one on my cheek and she said, what do you see there? I said, well, I see a mass of swirling, angry energy and she says, and what is it trying to tell you? I listened and I said,

well, it's saying it can't come out that it can only be absorbed inward and she said, so what does that mean? I said, well, I've been trying to force this out and I was soaking it, squeezing it and she said, so what should you be doing? I said, well, I guess I should be resting more and I think taking vitamin C, something else I got or I got sort of eating, eating chili peppers. So when I hung up, my wife said she could see a change in the way these looked. I couldn't, but the next morning when I woke up, it receded and over the next 24 hours, it disappeared. I mean, I could give you story after story of this kind of thing, but it is so distressing to me that doctors do not use these methods. They never think to use

them. No, is this because, okay, is this because I don't think it's necessarily because doctors are sinister? Isn't it more that the entire system, they'll get a lawsuit, they'll get sued. They didn't learn it and it doesn't fit in with their preconceptions of know how the body works. Yeah. This is, okay, the other thing, because I have a friend, my friend Mitch Horowitz writes a lot about the ESP research and how there is data showing that there's clearly some kind of possibility of what we call extrasensory perception, but that data gets left out. It gets actively, not accidentally, actively suppressed. Right, actively. It doesn't fit with the preconceptions of materialistic science. Also, I think this is one of the ways that psychedelics

can change the world, because I have experienced so clearly when I've been in psychedelic states that everything is conscious, that my consciousness is continuous with the consciousness of animals, of plants, of even things that we say are inanimate, that I just think consciousness is basic and I know so many people who have had that realization in psychedelic states and you can't explain that to a materialist who has not had such an experience, but I think that's where I see the real potential of psychedelics to change everything. The world is in such desperate shape right now and that's one of the only things I see that has the potential to change consciousness which could lead to changes in behavior. When you were talking about consciousness as this

continuous thing running through everything, do you mean it's sort of a field or something? Yeah, I mean, personally, my belief, and just a belief, it's a belief based on my experience, is that consciousness is primary and that consciousness organizes matter into more and more elaborate forms. But the materialist version of it is that consciousness is something that is created by the brain that rises out of electrical and chemical activity in the brain and that when the brain dies, that's the end of consciousness. It's not what I think. Right, it's like consciousness is almost, I mean, I've read theories of consciousness that make it seem almost like a mistake or like a heat coming off an engine or something like that.

So the fancy word for mistake in science is epiphenomenon. That's what the materialists say. Consciousness is an epiphenomenon. It's an incidental thing that just arises out of the chemistry and electrical activity of the brain. Just something in why even bother with it. But I get it because how to quantify consciousness, how to measure it, how to, you know, have a sample of consciousness that you can look at with a microscope, it's, you can't. And so it has to, maybe they just have to ignore it until we get better scopes or something to pick it up. What a shame. But it's changing. And I think a major reason why it's changing is because more and more people have had this vision that has come to most people, I think, through psychedelic experience.

Do you feel that social media and like the current like, I don't know, systems that people are using to interact with are, you know, part of the reason that there's so much confusion in the world right now? Yeah, I do. I mean, it's got such potential, but I think a lot of it is just toxic out there at the moment and the effects it's having on people. Not great. So do you recommend, when you are working with people, do you recommend a psychedelic regimen or do you have any suggestions for, I mean, right now everyone is, I think it's so destigmatized, you're allowed to talk about it now, but what sorts of psychoactive substances do you think are best for healing? Well, let me first say, you know, in the pre-pandemic days, which is hard to

remember now, when I was doing a lot of traveling and speaking, you know, all over the country and in other places, for the past few years, no matter what I was talking about, whether it was healthy aging, anti-inflammatory diet, integrative medicine, I would get questions from the audience about psychedelics. Sure. People wanting to know how you can get them, how you can use them, how they can find a psychedelic guide, and that has only increased. So I think there's tremendous interest in and desire for people to try these things. In our doctor trainings, we have been, our main thing is a two-year fellowship for physicians, and we have classes of about 80 each. We've graduated like 2,500 physicians in all specialties from that

now, and there's tremendous demand from them to learn about psychedelics and their potential in medicine and how to use them in therapy and how to get trained to use them. So clearly, this is happening. And I do add, I think for many, many people, this can be very valuable, but it's important that the experience be structured in the right way. If you want to get the best bang for your buck out of them. And I think, I don't know how this is all going to play out as this becomes more and more available and more legalized. I think there's a lot of questions there. Big corporations are going to try to get in on it. People are going to try to patent these things. How are they going to be used? I don't know, but I'm sure some people will just use them

recreationally, but I think there is a tremendous potential. And also, I am a little disappointed that people always focus on emotional mental illness, and I see huge potential in physical illness. I've seen such dramatic changes, cures, remissions of autoimmune diseases, of chronic pain syndromes, of all sorts of things, that people get a break from their usual way of interpreting what's happening in their body, and they see the possibility that they can live without the discomfort they've been having. One term that gets thrown around a lot is neurogenesis, the idea that you can rewire your brain via psychedelics. Do you have any theories regarding neurogenesis, or is the reason that chronic pain is just your brain is finding new pathways?

Well, I think one of the most interesting things about pain, there are two aspects of it. There's the primary reception of it from nerves in the body, and then there's the secondary interpretation of it, which is something happening in the brain. And it is possible to interpret pain in a different way. Actually, that's how opioids work. Often, if you give somebody not so much of an opioid that they're doped up, and they can say what they're feeling, a lot of people say, well, the pain is still there, but it doesn't bother me anymore. So that's an effect in the brain. And in hypnosis, I've seen very dramatic cures of pain with hypnosis, and often the suggestion to people is the hurt is going out of

the pain. And that's the same thing, you're working on the brain. And whether I don't know that this is rewiring, maybe it is, or it's like, you know, the bed, I think the brain is very plastic. It has incredible capacity to, you know, to change, and you can learn to interpret signals differently. Can you talk a little bit about your breathing technique? I, you know, I think, you know, one of the, one, I'm not going to speak for myself, but I, because often I'll say people when I mean me. I'm stressed out, man. I got kids, you know. Join the club. There's the World War Three seems to just around the corner, you know, it's just so much is going on. And I, you know, I'm addictive, so there's a lot. I'm down to weed, man. I can't do benzos. I get addicted to them,

so I can't have them around. But I sure would love a method to relax that didn't involve taking some hyper addictive, potentially neurologically destructive substance. Well, there's a technique I call the 478 breath that I've been teaching for a long time. It's a yoga technique. I learned it from an old osteopath who was one of my mentors. Very simple. It's, it's, you know, breathing in through your nose quietly to account of four, holding your breath for account of seven, blowing air out through your mouth forcibly for account of eight, and doing four breath cycles at a time can work up to eight. But you have to do this regularly. And it changes the tone of the involuntary nervous system. It is, it is the, of all the

techniques and remedies I've studied in my many years. This is the one I've gotten the most positive feedback about. I mean, incredible what this can do. It slows heart rate, lowers blood pressure, improves digestion. It's by far the most effective anti anxiety measure I've ever discovered. It makes benzos look pathetically weak by comparison. And it gets better the more you do it. And, and I teach it to everybody. I mean, you can, if you just Google 478 breath in my name on YouTube, you'll find me teaching you the method. And I've had great fun teaching this to groups of people. At least I'll tell you a funny story. A few years ago, I was contacted by the NSA out of the blue and they asked me to meet with some of their top people and they,

they had read my stuff and they wanted me to come in to their headquarters in Maryland and give a talk on dealing with stress. This was around the time of Snowden and they said it was like people were really stressed. Sonya, I went there. It was quite a trip. And I, I gave a talk to, I think they, there were a thousand people in the, in an auditorium and then it was closed circuit televised around the world. So I don't know how many people did it. And in the course of this, I had everybody doing that 478 breath, which was really powerful. And so I think I've done this with large groups of people. And as I said, I've gotten great, great feedback on it. This is one of the most fascinating, on top of the, what was it, the Better Homes and Gardens,

what was the one talking about? Yeah, no, it's your town and country. Okay, town and country. To me, this is one of the other things where, you know, if we, if you cut back a few decades and like, we're shown visions of this, how the, you know, spiritual, new age, psychedelic culture and luminaries, weirdly were like, are beginning to have this kind of healing relationship with the very systems that, you know, have done a lot of harm to the psychedelic movement. It's, it's wild, isn't it? I mean, did you, was there a moment where you're like, no way, I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to teach these people to relax. I want them all to, I jumped at the chance to do that. That'd be great. Yeah, cool. Cause they want to

know that. Absolutely. Also, they probably know everything on you, right? They've been reading your emails for a long time. See if they can do what they want because they got everything on you, man, everything. They got us. Okay. Now forgive me for this. This is truly self, self-interest playing through my podcast. I got COVID and my smell is messed up. I'm sorry. It's not often that you get a chance to have a one-on-one with a world famous doctor. My smell is messed up. My pee, my poop, my bio, all smell like oatmeal. Coffee smells like oatmeal and it's crazy. How long ago did you have COVID? This was probably, I don't know, nine months or something like that. Has it changed any in that time? Has it improved some? Yes. It went through no smell to all of a

sudden, you know, in the middle of like, in the evenings, I would start smelling this rancid hell smell and then now it's all kind of leveled out to, I guess where my brain is like, yeah, we don't know what this is, so we're going to make it smell like that. So time is on your side. You know, the chances are this will come back. They don't know exactly why this happens, but one theory is that it's due to inflammation in areas of the nerves that mediate smell. So anti-inflammatory things may help like turmeric, which is a very powerful natural anti-inflammatory agent, and it's easy to get turmeric supplements. Sure. Get ones that have black pepper in them as well, because it's for facilitate absorption. Okay. But that's something that might help.

Thank you very much. I'm going to try. It's the most, it's the weirdest thing that ever happened to me. Yeah. It's cool though. I mean, I like it because it shows you, you know, it teaches me a lot like about how the brain works and how or what, you know, it's a fascinating thing that just my brain is returning a signal for, you know, that's unified across a lot of different things. Most of them gross, but it is very weird to pee oatmeal. I got to tell you. I have never heard that one. That's fascinating. It's so weird. It's so cool. I just want it to stop. I want to fix it. It'll get better. You could also try taking some zinc as a supplement, because that's something I found has helped people who've lost smell as a result, usually have a viral infection.

Thank you. I would love to know about your work with River Styx Foundation. First of all, I just love that name. Can you talk a little bit about what it is and why they named it that? This is a foundation that's whose main purpose is to protect indigenous uses of substances. And they have a project with Peyote Conservation. It was started. There's a man named Cody Swift, who has headed it. His father gave the name, and I think he was very interested in Greek mythology, why he chose that particular name. I don't know, but it's an arresting name. And I've been working with him because one of the plants that I have been interested in for a long time is coca leaf. And that is such a persecuted substance. It is so different from cocaine. It has many health

benefits, and it's been not only maligned and neglected. So we have a project trying to stimulate research on coca, on seeing if we can get legal supplies of it here. And he's also very interested in other plants that have been maligned, neglected, suppressed. So there's a whole list of ones that I'd like to look at. Aphedra is a good one. That's a Chinese herb that has been used for thousands of years as a treatment for asthma and other conditions. And it is a source of a drug called ephedrine, which can be used as a starting material for meth. But the plant itself is, as with coca, the plant itself is benign and has beneficial uses. Another one similar to that is cotton. You may remember that this is one from Yemen and Ethiopia. That's also a natural

stimulant, got very bad press during the Iraq war, because GIs were using it. I remember hearing about it and wanting to try it. But is it illegal in the West? It was made illegal. Whoa. Okay, if we could just jump back, because we can't skip over coca leaf. I mean, if you think about this, this plant. This is the sacred plant of indigenous peoples in the Andes. I've studied it for many, many years in South America and in the Amazon. It's a major healing plant, especially for GI disorders. It stabilizes blood sugar. It may help prevent diabetes. Lots of potential. And we can't use it. We can't get it, because it has been blamed for all of our problems with cocaine. The problems come from isolating cocaine from

coca leaf. It's not coca. Coca has a lot of other things in it that modify the effects of cocaine. Cocaine is there in very small amounts. It's an amazing plant that has such a history. The way that that plant has been suppressed and maligned and persecuted, I think it's it's everything that's wrong with the way that we've approached these natural substances. What is the indigenous method of absorbing coca leaf? How do they take it? They chew dried leaves with a bit of some alkaline substance, which can be roasted seashells or ashes of plants that facilitate absorption of the substances in coca. And they hold it in their mouth and swallow the juices and do this, you know, a number of times a day. And it kind of combines the uses of

coffee and chewing gum in our culture. Have you tried that? Have you chewed? Oh, yeah. I've used it many, many. What's the effect? You get a pleasant numbness in your mouth and then a warm glow in your stomach. It takes away hunger and you get energy from it. But it's it's a it's not a kind of jangling energy that you get from coffee. It's a I think a more useful kind of energy. Sure. It just seems to me so silly that we don't have access to this. Well, you know, who does have access? Coca-Cola. I read that Coca-Cola, right? They have a deal. They get tons of this stuff shipped in, right? They're the only that's the only legal export of coca is to a chemical company in New Jersey that extracts the cocaine, sells that to a pharmaceutical company, and then they

make a flavoring extract from the rest of the stuff that they give to Coca-Cola. So early when they say that cocaine used to be in Coca-Cola, it's not that it was cocoa leaf, the psychoactive substance was in Coca-Cola. So right. And then they removed that the psychoactive substance, but they kept the cocaine, I guess to conserve the name because there were, you know, hundreds of cocoa products on the market in the late 1800s. And now there's only one Coca-Cola. So I think they put it in mostly to just keep the rights to the name. And Columbia recently, an entrepreneur was, has been selling a coca beer. I mean, technically illegal, but and also a coca soft drink and Coca-Cola is suing him for infringement on their trademark. And he's counter

suing on behalf of Columbia, saying that the name belongs to Columbia and the indigenous population of Columbia. So it's going to be interesting that Coca-Cola is doing it illegally. So we'll see what happens. I hate cocaine, dog. I hate cocaine. I crash like I do cocaine at the time. Well, it's the, it is the, it is the perfect illustration of how to go wrong in dealing with what nature produces, you know, to take that one element out of the leaf and then represent that as being, you know, the only thing of interest and disseminating it to the world. And then when you get into a lot of trouble, you blame the leaf for all of that and try to stamp it out. Right. Wow. That is amazing. Amazing story. Whenever I've heard the stories of the old days,

Coca-Cola, having cocaine in it, or a more Libertine approach to these substances, it's always seemed incredible to me. And I hope that that's where we're headed now. Or is, do you, what are you currently engaged in? What are you working on right now? And how can we tune into that? Well, I have a website, drwile.com, d-r-w-e-i-l.com has a lot of my health information and medical stuff. There's the website of the Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona, which is integrativemedicine.arizona.edu. You can see about all of our activities and their programs for the public there. I have written a lot of books, all of which are in print that you can get from Arizona. So, you know, the River Sticks Foundation, you can check on

their projects. And, you know, we've started a Coca project with them, which I'm very excited about. So my hand's in a lot of pies. You're busy. And also, this is the, you are proof of everything you're teaching, because I have to tell you, you seem like young, young, like you seem, you know, like when we think of age, like, I'm sorry if this is something everyone says to you or you hear this a lot, but wow, I, it's, you know, I remember as I'm research getting ready for this. And then I looked at your birthday and that's when it was like, wow, holy shit, it works. I'm gonna be 80 on June 8th. I can't believe it. How did that happen? Yeah, but you, you're, you're not, you know, you're not 80. Like

our understanding of 80 is, I guess an 80, a person who has not taken time to do the breathing and to eat the right stuff. That's just a sick person who happens to be 80. But do you have, last thoughts, do you have any predictions as far as aging, aging technology? And can you let people know what your skincare regimen is? I have, first of all, I have a book called Healthy Aging that I recommend, you know, you look at. I'm not very interested in life extension. I think that's a waste of time. I think what we should be concerned with is how to stay healthy as you age and be able to enjoy life and delay the onset, reduce the risk of age related diseases. And I think you do that by, you know, doing all the things under your control that we know that influence, you know, general

health, starting with, you know, eating right. And the first step of that is avoiding refined process and manufactured foods, getting regular physical activity, good rest and sleep, doing that breathing technique, which is, you know, really effective way of neutralizing stress, laughing, having fun. I tell people not to listen to the news. I've long ago was recommending what I called news fast. And I think that's even more important today because the news is just dreadful and it's a major source of anxiety. And I have to say that I think my uses of substances over the years has strongly contributed to my physical health and emotional health. You are an amazing human. I am just so lucky. I got to spend time with you.

Thank you so much for coming on the show. And Duncan, I hope you get to see dragons. Don't worry. I know how now. All right. Thank you very much. I really appreciate it. Good. Much thanks to Dr. Wild for coming on the show. A big thank you to our sponsors. We'll be back next week with a live DTFH with the genius Dan Harmon. Thank you for listening. Hope you have a great weekend. Hare Krishna. Stafford and Jay Farrar. Oh, and thereabouts for kids. Super cute and extra affordable. Check out the latest in store and we're never short on options at jcp.com. All dressed up everywhere to go. JCPenney. With one of the best savings rates in America,

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