my favorite kind ladies and gentlemen welcome back to the true life podcast I got my co-host christian gray over here and I want to take a moment to introduce the incredible sean michael ericsgard tonight we stand at the edge of science and story with a guide who has carved paths through rock and reason alike sean michael Eric Skerritt is not just an entrepreneur, he's an architect of possibility, a builder of the fault lines where commerce, culture and consciousness collide. As co-founder of the Entheogenic Medical Research Center, he's pushing psychedelic medicine out of the shadows and into the light of responsible science and policy reform. His fingerprints are on award-winning films, multimillion-dollar infrastructure, and the molecular blueprints of cannabis and psilocybin. From the synthesis of rare cannabinoids to the extraction of sacred fungi, Sean's work is not extraction alone, but translation, turning the language of molecules into grammar of healing, weaving ethical development with sustainable impact across continents from North America to Colombia to South Africa. But behind the lab coat and the podium, you'll find a climber gripping stone and sky, a seeker wandering the boundless landscapes of science fiction, mapping futures that may already be arriving. So tonight, we don't just welcome a researcher, we welcome a visionary spelunker of the mind, a bridge builder between science and myth, a man who sees in molecules the architecture of tomorrow. Welcome to the show, Shawn Michael, Eric Skart. How's everybody doing today out there? Woo! George, I can say I feel fantastic after that introduction. I think you're the only one that should ever introduce me going forward. We need to make this an exclusive situation where every single public speaking opportunity, I'm like, I'd like to beam in my good friend George to tell you all a little bit about me. Flattery will get you everywhere, my friend. Thank you for that eloquent introduction. I feel like I really want to get to know the guy you're talking about. So I think George should be recording those and licensing them back to the guests and speakers, and then they can use them on other shows and live talks and just hit play. Just hit play. It's really simple. Royalty stream, Patreon. yeah I think that's who look I I've been looking at the things you've been doing and I'm I am I'm in awe of it I'm super thankful because I think we need it more than ever right now and I'm so grateful you're here and I'm so grateful to christian gray is here co-hosting the show with me today and let's jump into this guys where do you guys want to start at christian why don't you start us off man what's on your mind Well, the origin story of getting to meet Sean, I think the first time was the magic and mirth thing in El Segundo. Is that around the holidays? Yeah. And that was co-hosted with Jacob Tell from District two sixteen, George Jacob. And I think I just want to underscore the value of human connection and meeting in person. I love that. webinars and podcasts and virtual and slack and fricking, I hate slack actually, but you know, signal and all the things are great. But when you meet someone in person, your body is taking in so much information and you're processing so much about them. It's not just what they say. It's not just how they look. It's like their body language, right? And their sincerity. And I just picked up such a really positive vibe with Sean. I had no idea who he was. I didn't know how he got there. I didn't know if I'd ever see the guy again. And then the conversation started and then they continued. And then I learned about what he's trying to do in South Africa. And I hear about his relationship with the Shulgens. And I'm like, oh, I need to keep track of this one. So that was the start. And I think it's been pretty awesome ever since. John, what comes to mind for you, man? What's what's on your radar right here? What are you thinking? I was doing podcasts last year. I think I interviewed every Monday for like, sixty-three weeks in a row. I got to talk to various different people. That's actually how I met Jacob. So that's how I met Christian. And it's really just such an honor and a privilege to be able to sit and pontificate with like-minded friends inside of this wonderful ecosystem to try to expand our echo chamber or expand our reach because I think that psychedelic gatherings are very, very important. And I want to make sure that the community starts to focus its attention on something a little bit less myopic, a little bit outside of its current scope. So that's, that's what I'm really grateful for is having George having some impact with you that, you know, allowing you to work your magic to get this out and your excitement and your passion. It's just, it's infectious. So yeah, I often find out what I think when it exits my mouth. Yeah. It's really important to have these spaces for discovery, for communication and for building community. Even, you know, like you said, in person is great. But if we can start these conversations online and get a broad impact, then We get to meet so many fun, new, cool people. So that's what I'm excited about for today is just kind of to sit here and talk and figure out what you guys are interested in and how we can work together to create a future that includes everyone in the psychedelic landscape and allows for a expanded vision of what is possible. yeah it's exciting times I know christian you and I were talking a little bit before you had some kind of questions teed up a little bit I figured I'd let you start off the show and uh get them in there you you have so many good questions all the time I'll I'll take a whack yeah let's see what you got sean you know I think a lot of people might meet you and hear about your uh chemist you know chops and the people you run with and your understanding of plant medicine and cannabis but know you're not just some white boy hanging out in oakland so can you talk a little bit about where you grew up and what it was like being in the middle east because I think that that has a lot of framing to your story and your narrative yeah thanks for that christian um So to give a little context, first of all, I'd like to say I consider myself chemist adjacent. I like to be in the room with really, really smart people. And I grew up on a really, really, really small compound called Dahran Aramco in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia. And I was immersed in engineering and scientific thinking. Everyone I knew, both of their parents went to college. Everyone I knew, eighty percent of them, parents were engineers or doctors or scientists. So I was really blessed, not just for the multicultural phenomenon of being best friends with South Africans and Palestinians, as well as Americans and a host of different cultural legacies, I was also, like I said, immersed in this sort of very systems thinking methodology. So even though I have a communications degree, I worked in film for twenty years, I don't have very much formal training in the sciences. I found it to be the all consuming love of my life to be around people who are brilliant psychedelic chemists. So I'll go back to your question a little bit and talk more about Saudi Arabia. What years were you there as a child or a kid? Great question. I'll go back a touch. So my parents lived in the Middle East for around twenty seven years. They lived in Iran before the fall of the Shah. And I was conceived in Tehran. My mother was eight and a half months pregnant when they flew on the last military transport out of Iran and back to America. So I was born in Melbourne, Florida. And then when I was around three and a half months old, my parents moved to Libya. My dad did a transition then. He worked in aerospace first for NASA and JPL and then Hughes. He was working for Hughes in Libya. I'm sorry, in Iran. And then we came back, we spent a couple months in America. And then when I was really young, we moved to Libya, where my dad worked for Oasis Oil and got involved in petroleum. So from that, when I was about three, we moved to Saudi Arabia. And I spent from three till sixteen in Saudi Arabia. living inside of a Western compound. I describe it as like white picket sand dunes. It's this like, nineteen fifties America where everybody's married. Everyone like comes home for dinner and you have an active family life and an active social life. Nobody locked their doors. Nobody, you know, we left our keys in our car. Saudi Arabia is an incredibly safe place. I mean, we can talk more about what the relationship between that safety and punitive forms of punishment are because there is a direct line there. But that cultural impact just really affected my life at a core level. When I lived in Saudi Arabia, I always thought of myself as an American. And then when I moved back to America, moved to a small town in florida called sarasota which is coincidentally also the place where maps was founded yeah I met rick doblin when I was seventeen and I snuck on to uh new college uh to a little First Friday's event at the Banyan Tree Cafe. So Sarasota is its own sort of unique breeding ground. So I just wanna chime in there since you brought up Sarasota and Rick and that school. I was driving to him once from Venice to the airport. I was fanboying and stalking him and I found out he was Southern California. And I think I'd already read Acid Test, right? Which talks a lot. I forget which book, where he kind of narrates his development at the college. And I just remember him talking about nude sunbathing. So I'm wondering, did you get a chance to sunbathe nude with Rick? I'm shy. Coming up with Saudi Arabia, I also, my parents were crazy people. My parents had a clothing optional. We lived in a incredibly repressive Saudi Arabian theocracy and in our backyard, my parents had a clothing not allowed hot tub. So like my parents would take me to nudist camps when I was young and I was always the like shy one wearing clothes and that's retained itself to this day. So, no, I have not, unfortunately, experienced a new sunbathing moment with Rick. Although, it's a great story. I might have to work towards one of those. I know he loves hot tubs. I think just invite him to your folks for the holidays. You're good. All right. Back to the story at hand. Growing up in White Picket Sand Dunes, which I think you should copyright or trademark. Well, it's the potential idea for a documentary about growing up in Saudi Arabia. And really, you know, storytelling has been my first love. And I learned that. through a tradition of Saudi Arabian mystical storytelling. And also my father is an amazing storyteller. Like I feel like the movie Big Fish was made for me. It's one of those things where my whole life I could never believe any of the things my father would say, but I always knew he believed them. um and as you know as he has come to pass and as um I transitioned as sort of knowing him more as an adult the stories just kept bearing out you know and I was like oh my god he is as crazy as I ever thought he was you know uh for instance back to saudi arabia I lived there there are you know maybe two stories I could tell about that before moving on um The first one is directly regarding the Gulf War, but actually both of them are going to be about the Gulf War. Nineteen ninety one. I was eleven years old and I was in. We were on vacation back in Florida and my dad's like here, you know, here's some quarters. Go get the newspaper. And we were by the pool and I got the newspaper for my dad at one of the little, you know, pop out newspaper boxes. And carried it over to him and I looked on the front page and it was, you know, um, Iraq invades Kuwait. And I was like, okay, Kuwait's really close. And, um, I remember seeing my dad's face when I handed him the newspaper and it was this mixture of excitement and, um, more excitement maybe for like, uh, living in Iran during the fall of the Shah, living in Libya during Khomeini, there was, you know, clearly my dad did not shy away from situations that other people could consider dangerous. So, I could feel though, like with my mom's presence, like that there was some concern. And I heard the discussions about like, should we take Aramco's offer to work in Houston for the same pay? Or should we go back to Saudi Arabia and get double overtime? And my dad was like, it can't be worse than Iran. It's not gonna be worse than Libya. Come on, you know, like, and she's like, okay. And I remember flying back and the airplane was like empty. We were like the only ones on the airplane. Yeah, it's kind of like after nine eleven. Right. Yeah. Was your dad a petroleum engineer, Sean? Or what did he do for... He's an electrical engineer. He was. But he transitioned into data warehousing. So his big thing for a long time was SAP BD development. So he would work on like early metadata information systems, you know, things that become now kind of run by AI. He was a big... Um, also my love of sci-fi comes directly from my father. We'll definitely dip into that. So, um, yeah, that, that was sort of like a defining moment for me. And like my, I said, my dad was a, you know, a, uh, adventurous human, a pioneer. Um, for instance, you know, uh, there were dozens of scud attacks, right. While I lived there and very often they would blow out our windows, uh, And we would have to put on like the government issued gas masks and go into our safe room, which was the bathroom. It wasn't particularly safe. We taped off the doors. So you didn't have the basement with the five years worth of food and the flat screen TV. No, we did not have access to any of the prepping materials other than the gas masks, which were the only Israeli things that were allowed in Saudi Arabia. imagine that I bet I bet their gas masks work a hell of a lot better than well I won't say what gas masks I had to use but yeah so I um yeah the respirators the respirators don't work well at all unfortunately I have a lot of experience with those as well christian um fume hoods are really the way to go right right not an rv out in the desert no no no no um So we would go, I would go into the safe room, you know, and very often attacks would happen during the school day when I was alone with my little sister and we would get our dog and, you know, bring us into the safe room and run the bathtub for a little while. And so those are some defining memories of sort of having to be self-reliant and having to work well under pressure. And I think that those experiences sort of like defined my character to a large degree because going forward, I've done some things which people might consider to be risky, but I look at them, I'm like, this isn't half as risky as anything my dad's ever done. So we're going to be fine, you know? It's really, really interesting to hear you talk about risk though, Sean, because I think, you know, as George has been amplifying and engaging in all these conversations with various people with plant medicine and psychedelics and clearly the underground, right? I'm going to get to the gray market. It's either black or white. The gray thing really confuses me. It's either legal or it's not. You know, attorneys will give you a hundred different answers. But it sounds like your dad took very calculated risk, right? They're taking risk without doing the math. And since he was an electrical engineer and a doer and a baker, it sounds like he did the math. It's like, oh, we can live in the suburbs of Houston or we could live in the downtown part of Dallas, which is sketch, or we could live in the Middle East, which isn't a sketch for reasons like he didn't. He didn't take those risks without considering risk. the possibilities of things. And I feel like you're kind of like that too. You're pushing the edges on a lot of things, but you're doing it very thoughtfully. I would agree with that. I mean, you mentioned I had some experience with large scale engineering projects and the entirety of really any businessman's job to a large degree. If you're an entrepreneur, a large degree of that job is managing risk. So it works both in a professional sense and in a personal sense. And yeah, it's crucial to um navigate waters where you have known unknowns you know to quote the eloquent donald rumsfeld um you know hey wait a minute that sounds a lot of the unknown unknowns exponentially increases, right? I appreciate you quoting Dumsfeld, but I'm pretty sure it was Werner Erhardt and Est that coined that phrase. So let's go to the root source. Get the citation right. Oh, thank you. I was stuck in the Gulf War. Fair enough. Fair enough. I could just hear the sound bite. Yeah. That's a whole nother podcast. So I think this next story, just briefly, I'll try to, it speaks to like the, the next thing, which I think is really important, which is about framing a narrative, right? Because we can tell ourselves a lot of different stories about things that occurred to us. And as I said, like I, a number of times a month, we would be under scud attacks, right? Which basically means that there are these like massive missiles heading towards your house. Because my house was directly on top of the second largest oil well in the world. And right adjacent to us was the US Air Force Base. So like a scud missile basically, they're not like programmed GPS, like guided missiles. You basically get them and you're like, okay, Fire, you know? And they're not incredibly high tech, right? So there was a lot of collateral damage potentiality. And one of the times that a Scud missile was intercepted by a Patriot, because that's the ballistic missile interference system that the US brought to safeguard their assets, right? Luckily, we were part of those assets. So a Scud missile will be coming, the Patriot missile intercepted and exploded, and then it'll crash to the ground with all of the refuse, right? And when a Patriot can make a direct strike on the warhead, it'll explode and the shrapnel will be small, but when it'll hit the tail of the missile, it'll spiral and land and then explode. So in that case, that happened and it exploded around a mile and a half away from our house. and in the middle of the desert and created like almost two hundred foot deep crater. Right. And this is like a place I go to play in the desert. Right. This is not like an unknown space. And that freaked me out. I was handling things pretty well. I was OK. And it was like three weeks before Christmas. And, you know, my mom could tell that I was taking that one hard. And so she got me and my little sister and we drove out to the hole in the ground and we got out of the car and there were other people around taking pictures, other families. And my mom was like, all right, Sean, Tiffany, you're gonna go collect these little pieces of the metal. And my dad was like, all right, so the big chunky ones are the Scud missiles. Those are made with like steel and like iron, and they're not really, you know, like high tech. And then the light, you know, pieces, those are from Patriot missiles. See if you can find both. And so my little sister and I just wandered into the crater and started like picking little pieces. And like, I was scared at first, But then I came back up and my mom's like, all right, we're going to take these home and we're going to make Christmas ornaments out of them. And we got the little scud pieces and we wrapped some little wire about them and we put little like Christmas lights and we hung them on our tree. And I'll tell you, you know, from personal experience, it's really difficult to be scared of something that's a Christmas ornament. So I just want to say like, I have a deep gratitude to both of my parents who are unfortunately both have passed at this point. for teaching me how to think rationally and logically helping me manage risk um my dad brought me into his still because alcohol is illegal in saudi arabia so my dad was like like come on in and help me with the mash tank my still you know like make sure the still isn't running dry you can run the steel one but you can't run the glass or brass ones yet Right. So at eleven years old, I was distilling and moonshining. Right. And to my mother. And so, you know, just going from that to cannabis where there's ethanol, you know, like ethanol extraction as one option and then petrocarb, you know, hydrocarbons as another. I had a little bit of experience with both of them. So fast forward to my cannabis career and you can see why extraction was sort of like an easy adoption for me. and why the companies I founded were really successful at helping people scale and bring cannabis extraction sort of into a modern ethical and medicine-focused space, right? So that's kind of a whole another chapter. Yeah. We'll hit this question from Anil, and then I want to talk about a through line to this arc. I got a couple ideas. Nice. Anil, thank you so much for being here and hanging out with us. Anil got a question for you over here, Sean. He says, question for Sean. Do you envision psychedelic therapy playing a role in Saudi Arabia or other Middle Eastern countries in the near future? If so, how? Fantastic question, Anil. Thank you for joining, by the way. It's great to see you and hear you. So the real quick answer to that is it's already present. You can talk to my friend Haya Alshahani. She runs the Arab Psychedelic Society. She's amazing. She's also a female guitar player in an all-female band in Saudi Arabia that kicks. They're great. So ketamine is already being used in Kuwait, in Saudi Arabia, and in UAE. In most cases, an IV drip with therapeutic components. So there's already a space for limited psychedelic therapeutic use in the Middle East. Chakruna just released a recent article talking about the roots of psychedelic assisted therapy in Egypt going back to the use of LSD for like sixty or so patients that's in in one hospital and potentially a lot more in another so there is a history of these compounds and a current use case what I think there also is is a specific religious component to Islam that prevents the use of intoxicants. So I think that's going to be a further refining conversation that needs to happen culturally, religiously, and scientifically inside the Middle East to allow religious experts to make guidelines regarding the nature of these compounds. So very often hashish is not considered psychedelic or an intoxicant in the Middle Eastern cultures, whereas alcohol is considered an intoxicant. So I think there's a case to be made that certain psychedelics, when used under certain protocols might be beneficial and might also be in alignment with Sharia and with Islamic guidelines. So I foresee that future. And I know there are a number of people within the kingdom and within the greater Gulf States and within the MENA region, Middle East, North Africa region that are quietly making um steps forward so so two two thoughts related to that response and I think you are much closer to the whole conversation than I am so I'm just riffing one is I just finished for a recent book club reading the red tent and that whole story if you're not familiar with it pretty powerful about kind of the female's narrative during kind of biblical times And that story is really powerful. And it just makes me think about history in general and then religious texts, you know, depends on who had the pen last and who edited it. But then you also have interpretation by current religious leaders, whether it's Christianity, Judaism and clearly in the Muslim world. Who's your caliph? Are you Sharia or Shiite? And what's going on in your tribe and what's going on in your greater community? I have a really good friend. I won't name him in Los Angeles. His family's part of what we lovingly call the Persian real estate mafia. And so these are like Persian Jews living in LA. And he would tell me a lot of interesting stories about his dad and their buddies going on camping trips and they'd be out at the tent and they're all smoking opium and it wasn't considered. Yeah. So how you define intoxicants, how you define drug, what the cultural reference point is, right? So, I mean, Persia is a whole nother cultural landscape. And I think, so the Gulf States, Saudi Arabia are heavily influenced by Bedouin culture. And that's a non-cosmopolitan culture very often. Persian culture is perhaps the oldest cosmopolitan culture that we know of. And if you say in the Middle East, definitely. Zoroastrian culture, for instance, which is a bedrock of Persian influence have been using Homa, a sacred sacramental plant that we believe is Syrian rue since antiquity, right? Like this is one of the, you know, Homa and Soma, right? So the Persians and the Hindi, the Hindu people, right? intimately connected people they're cousins or siblings right so these cosmopolitan cultures have been utilizing the top-grade psychedelic and drug technology since time immemorial right opium Homa, Soma, Syrian Roux, potentially mycological components. The pharmacopeia of the ancients is disputed, but coming more deeply into focus. And the Near East was the melting pot of all of these different forms entheogenic psychedelic legacies, right? So the Scythians, who brought cannabis, not just into the Near East, but also into India and also into Europe, used a number of different compounds. In fact, their female Scythians were part of a poison cult. The poison cult mixing with the proto-Greek cultures is very likely what created both the lesser and the greater Eleusinian mysteries, right? So you can go back to Egypt, right? Where we've got some pretty solid evidence from dynastic times, pharaonic times where vessels, where they did add mixtures of drugs that include scopolamines that include actually I'm not going to list them because I'll probably be incorrect about their specific pictures but they include a number of different drugs I call them an ad mixture when you mix a number of things together particularly sometimes in a wine or a beer um they also included you know uh human dna right I you know and potentially these are things like blood or uh various different secretions We can go to more details about what those might be. You can imagine fertility-related secretions very often. I don't think we have to do that this morning. We don't need to talk about those secretions and consumption. No, we're on track. We're on track. Holy Moses. You had a question, I think, from Cesar. Absolutely. I got him right here. Love you, Cesar. Everyone should check out Caesar's channel. He's an incredible individual doing a lot of great work out there. Just coming back fresh from Columbia, I think. Let me get him up on the board over here. There we go. Shout out to Caesar. Everybody check him out. The great Caesar Marin says, Latin America is a huge market. There is a mushroom and Aya culture that is growing. How do we tap into that conversation? I think... The first place to start for me would be engage the lineage holders and approach in a space of respect, reverence, and reciprocity. Can you talk a little bit more about reciprocity? I think that word gets thrown around a lot. And a lot of people share it with good intentions and meaning. But to quote Princess Bride, I don't think they know what that word means. Or I'm paraphrasing. Reciprocity is a deep listening and an intense commitment to building lasting good for the cultures and the people you're working with on both an individual and a community-based level. So reciprocity can mean a lot of things in a lot of different places and it's primarily up to the individuals themselves to guide the conversation around how reciprocity might be best managed um I would not claim to be a expert on this but I I do have a intense commitment uh to supporting indigenous cultures and to strengthening conversations uh and and into deep listening we have two ears and one mouth for a reason so we need to use those ears and then offer our hands because there's monetary donations which are absolutely necessary and that has to be a component of any reciprocity uh the disbursement and ethical disbursement of funds is a part of that. But another part of that is active participatory support. And we can look to former President Jimmy Carter for something like this. Go and build a home with these people. Go and help them put a thatch roof on their hut. Go and help catch some fish with them. If you're living and being with these people, be with them and learn what they need. Because without that listening, without that participatory component, then very often whatever good we think we're doing is short term and potentially hazardous to those people in the long run. And we also have to let go of our cultural biases right that we think we know what's good for indigenous people um in the middle east um in saudi arabia the king put forth his degree in the nineties and said they they went and kidnapped all these bedouins lived in the desert lived in tents brought them back and gave them nice cars nice homes and ac and jobs right they thought that was going to help uh modernize saudi arabia but what happened was the bedouin people who are indigenous people decided F this. I don't want to be. I forget about your Ferrari. Forget about your AC. I want to go back to the way of life that makes sense to me that my parents and grandparents lived and they walked back and they left their cars and walked back into the middle of the frickin desert. Not all of them, but a significant number. Right. So when we make assumptions about what indigenous people want or need, we are going to get it wrong every time. So to speak, thank you for bringing up the Nagoya Protocols. The Bwiti people have set forth a clear guideline for what reciprocity means in terms of their relationship with ibogotamponath, the tree that is the source of the ibogaine and iboga medicines. And I think that every protocol and every reciprocity initiative is the beginning of a conversation, maybe not the end of a conversation. There can be refinements, there can be renewed commitments, there can be additional support, right? But we have to think about these things. And Cesar, being with people in a heart-based way is my first and only recommendation. listening. I guess I have to. So George, I'm hogging the question stick. Not at all, man. Like, I feel like I'm doing a lot of learning here. So I'm just taking it all in, man. I'm grateful for it. And everybody out in the chat that's out here playing a role. My heart goes out to you. Thank you to everybody being here. I got a bunch of people lining up over here and some questions of my own and the first one the first couple center around psychedelic science and policy the first question coming in for you is you're working at the crossroads of psychedelic science and global innovation if you could rewrite the creation myth of modern psychedelic medicine what story would you tell tell to guide its future uh whoever asked that question um you should answer it too There you go, the individual. Be your own truth. Be the change you want to see in the world. But if I were to be the change I want to see in the world, I would look back to indigenous cultures from all over the world. I would look to communities and cultures that have utilized entheogenic, psychedelic, and tactogenic compounds throughout history. I would do the research and not make the assumptions so that I can actually look at granular details and find causality, not correlation, right? But I would look to indigenous cultures and I would see what potential benefits we have from a cultural adoption of these type of sacred medicines. I would look what these compass have done for us in the past. And then I would dream into the psychedelic-assisted future that I want to live in. A psychedelic-assisted future where these compounds are widely available, non-toxic, regulated, and not pushed on everyone. Because the idea that everyone can benefit from a psychedelic experience I think is erroneous and hyperbolic. we hold these in white relations even in a place like classical greece where thousands and thousands of people every year engaged in the greater mysteries not everyone did and that critical mass of cultural awakening um created a flourishing of culture unlike anything we've seen in the western world philosophy science mathematics democracy culture theater yeah the first long-form poems in the narrative culture right like these are byproducts of psychedelic assisted culture these are byproducts of wide adoption in a safe systematic, controlled setting, right? These are not like dose our children and see what happens. These are repeatable experiences that are navigated with a educated population, a incredibly detailed creation story and creation myth, and a defined cultural impact, right? So esteemed... scholar Carl Ruck, who's an amazing classicist who I have the great honor of getting to sit with on a number of occasions because I right now live a couple hours away from Berkeley. He said something really powerful about the ancient classic Greek people. He says, oh, actually, Mark Hoffman, who's in the lineage, right, of Ruck. He says, the culture with the best drugs wins. And then when Ruck described what that means, he said, it's not about the drugs necessarily, it's about the inflow of cultural expression, right? So you have people coming from Egypt, you have people come to ancient Greece, you have people come from Egypt, from Spain, from Turkey, from all over the world, bringing their commodities, bringing their knowledge, sharing their language and culture. And they're doing this because of drug tourism. They're doing this because greater listening and mystery is a repeatable ecstatic experience that is renowned around the ancient world. So all of the flourishing culturally happened, not just from expanded minds and increased creative human problem solving. It also happened through cultural exchange and interaction. Right. And so. That's what I hope for in our future. I hope that we can engage with the other as self. I hope that we can build bridges. I hope that we can design compounds that are safe for almost everyone to use. I hope that we can share an ancestral indigenous knowledge in a way that predicates our flourishing and encourages the flourishing of all people not just white males who own psychedelic companies. So let me ask you, because you got me really excited about Mark Hoffman. You said the lineage, and then is he a professor today or author? So Mark Hoffman is the lineage holder for the... Carl Ruck lives with him currently. He's not in great health. He's the... Archivist at the Wasson West Archives. He's an amazing psychedelic researcher and archivist. Big contributor to the community just in large. I'm a huge fan of Mark Hoffman's. um he I met him through the you know through the sasha community uh and um through mark martini who's currently the chemist at residence uh living at the farm and kind of shepherding the leg I feel like I might have met mark at one of the farm events does he get out there Mark is frequently at the farm. He lives in Lafayette. When he's here on the West Coast, he lives bi-coastal. He's back and forth from Boston to Lafayette right outside of Berkeley. I think you might have met him. He's a lot, a lot better than bipolar, which is what I feel like I'm living a lot of the time. So you're in good company. Bi-coastal is great. You mentioned Carl. I'll try and pull Mark's info. It's available there. Mark likes to hide. Okay. Well, maybe we'll leave him on. Are you familiar with Betty Kovacs work? yeah so merchants of light speaks deeply to a lot of things that you're talking about and understanding mythologies and where a lot of the world's great religions were sprouted from and then how once again the person with the last last one to hold the pin gets to write the text losing the divine feminine in some of these mythologies and cultural reference points and how that shows up in the world of psychedelics I wonder if that's a point you want to hit on well I if I were to choose a word I wouldn't choose losing obfuscating or hiding or redacting to obliterate right so yeah yeah I was talking about the Near East and spiritual systems in the Near East and how they're deeply intertwined with psychedelic legacy. There is a hierarchical and male-dominated legacy that also stems from these cultures. We in the West uptook that and It's been a couple thousand years that we've been telling stories that don't serve us. And I think agriculture played a really big role here. When you have a pre-agricultural society, you have equality of tasks. So female and male groups and individuals can equally find sustenance based off of the hunter-gatherer model, right? But when we developed the plow, then all of a sudden that model was turned on its head and we see that around the same time as the technology of the plow emerged, we see these two major effects. Number one, the canceling of the sacred feminine And number two, the objectifying of all other animals and the supremacy of humanity, right? So if I'm gonna put a, I'll talk about domestication first. If I'm gonna put a yoke on an animal and beat it all day long in order for it to feed me, I have to believe that animal is of lesser value than I am. I can't do it otherwise. I have no moral capacity to be brutal unless I justify my brutality by saying, I'm superior. God gave me dominion over all of the plants and animals, right? So that's a story we've been telling for a very long time. A lot of the Abrahamic religions are still telling that story and have been enforcing that story ad nauseum. So that's domestication. The second part of that is If I have a stronger upper body strength, typically there's a slight difference in upper body strength between male and female. And if you go back, there might be a stronger case for that. If a woman can no longer say, I don't wanna be with you, man, you're abusive. I'm gonna go and take our children but now I need to find another man to plow for me or we're going to starve because I've given up or I've been forced to give up my ancestral understanding of how to forage and gather in the woods. And the woods have been leveled to make room for more of your fricking plow space, you know, like more fields. So we have this technology driving culture phenomenon, right? And I'm not the first one to talk about this. I'm not coming up with new ideas here. These are like, anthropologically studied and uh fairly strongly supported ideas right um so in my opinion that the if you go back everything was feminine because we understood birth and the and the mystery of childbirth to be the uh one of the defining factors of all culture and culture in and outside of humanity, right? Because the mother feeds all things, right? And at least all things that we could see, right? And when you want to disconnect someone from their heritage, then you can tell them a story that benefits you rather than benefits them. And so I think it's really important to look at the way these stories have come to be, the impetus behind the stories, and potentially that'll give us a better capacity in our own lives to make choices based off of agency rather than choices based off of cultural norms that are not serving us. I can think of a couple fantastic female guests, George, that could go deep on this topic. And we might even be able to get a hold of Betty, which would be pretty awesome. She might join us for a chat. And please move on to something else before I continue to mansplain about femininity. Yeah, good idea. Okay. I got you. Oh, my God. You go, George, and then I'll go. You go. You know, it's so interesting. We talk about different culture, and we talk – That's what's going on. Look at those guys. A bunch of white guys over here. Let me explain the pain of childbirth. Do you know how monthly cycles... Oh, sorry. imperfect human award so we are all just works in progress myself you get them you get them all allowing me to put my foot in my mouth and then chew on it it's awesome man it's no worries you don't you don't need to play golf to get a golf to get a ball again You know, when I think about psychedelics and psychedelic architecture, and there's a lot of talk about psychedelic culture. We brought up the mysteries earlier and the idea of domestication and hierarchy a little bit. But it seems to me, just in my opinion, that psychedelics are a tool for self-discovery. And sometimes we get lost in this idea of building an industry or building things around culture. But isn't the true dimension of culture an individual discovering what their gifts are? And it seems to me like that's the gift of psychedelics. Like each individual gets to develop and see in themselves the beauty that they can contribute. Isn't that where the culture comes from? I mean, I think you hit the nail on the head, right? What is alter other than a group of individuals? Right? So what's a river other than a collection of water drops? Right? So I think the same thing goes for culture in the same way. And the reason I bring up the analogy of the river is because rivers mold their environment, the ways cultures mold their environment, and Once you're going down a certain path that becomes the path of least resistance, it becomes difficult to shift that culture. The way I believe it happens is just like in a river, individual drops of water choose to go that way. Yeah. Choose to go in opposition or in discordance to the cultural flow. And by doing that, once it reaches a critical mass, that creates a new tributary in a river. It creates a new flourishing of the environment that carves out its own path in a new culture then shapes the landscape, right? And this isn't the reason I also love the river analogy is because it's not reductionist. I don't lose the first river. When I change culture, I don't- destroy what comes before me I add to it right well in your your river analogy plays a bunch of interesting ways number one yes raindrops but snow melt and a lot of water sources right so that's interesting to play with because they're all water right they're all h-two-o in some form in transition so that's cool and then to your point There's a lot of inertia, right? It's all about physics at that point. And the river is going to go where the river goes until there's a cultural dissonance, which may be generated by awareness or raising consciousness or plant medicine or breath work or who knows what. Then all of a sudden you get this little tributary and then more people hear about it. And then they get on Georgia's show. And the next thing you know, the mighty Mississippi is like flowing through Arizona or whatever. So what value could a new water source bring to a desert? That's why the tributaries are so important and that's why the non-reductionist thinking when it comes to developing culture and supporting cultures to me seems to be the way to go. So, and I'm not, I would say I'm not the one who came up with this idea again. Like I'm standing on the shoulders of giants, you know, like from the Wiccan chant, we all come from the goddess and to her we shall return like a drop of rain flows into the ocean, right? That's one source of that analogy. And then, you know, Daniel Quinn's phenomenal book, The Story of B, would be another place that I would just... So Daniel Quinn wrote Ishmael, which is great entry point into cultural shift and cultural awakening. But then he wrote another book called The Story of B, which is like a practical how-to book. It's like, you wanna change culture? This is how you do it, right? And it's brilliant. It really, it's... Ishmael came up, there's a movie that sort of takes a little bit of what Ishmael did. It's pretty good, but it's the idea of leavers versus takers, you know, as the framing for indigenous versus non-indigenous peoples and their behavior systems. Got a question from the audience. Yes. Nice. I want to jump real quick before we get to read. I think there's another part of that river analogy. All rivers flow into the ocean, and the ocean is like the lowest spot. So everything's coming back to source on some level. And then if you look at the way we dam things up, look at the way we come in and fundamentally radically change ecosystems so we can dam up the water. of course things aren't gonna flow the way they are. And I don't know, it seems like a pretty good analogy for where we are. But let me jump over here to Reid. Reid, thank you so much for being here. I hope your day is absolutely beautiful. He says, I have a question for Sean. What is the best compound to microdose and why? Thank you, Reid. Okay, great question, Reid. I've been on a kick for a while about microdosing safety. And that comes down to a number of different factors. Some of which are well known, right? So we have factors like contamination. We have factors like shelf life. We have factors like back to Christian's point about the gray market. There is no such thing. There is a black market and there is a white market. So if it is not in the white market, it is in the black market. What sort of actual controls do you have there? But because I'm a scientifically curious human, I dig a little deeper. And I would say this is also because of my love and adoration for the Shulgin legacy. I am going to speak on some things right now that have some anecdotal evidence, but have a little bit less credible double-blind clinical trial evidence than I usually like to speak about. I tend to focus on things that are empirical. And in this case, I'm going to be empirical adjacent. So I want to just make that clear because there are no really strong studies about microdosing that aren't self-reporting. And self-reporting has significant risks and significant challenges to overcome. So there are also... aren't any microdosing studies to date that are a large enough scale to show efficacy along a number of different guidelines, right? So one of the things I concerned about is a kind of relatively under communicated issue, which is the receptor. It's a seratogenic receptor issue, right? When you take a classic psychedelic, as a microdose, and those classic psychedelics could include psilocybin from magic mushrooms, LSD, emerging things that people are microdosing now, things like Ibogaine, they impact a certain series of receptors. And let's talk about psilocybin, for instance, because psilocybin is the most broadly microdosed compound currently. The psilocybin's action is primarily on The five HT to be. OK, I'm not I'm actually I'm not going to dig into that. So it's on a specific serotonin receptor. What happens is when you strike a receptor, very often you have a cascading effect that strikes the receptors nearby as well. the receptor that is specifically responsible for the psychedelic action of the classic psychedelics is adjacent to a receptor that, when stimulated over long periods of time, causes a chronic heart condition that is fatal. And I do not feel like enough research has been done on, for instance, microdosing psilocybin to prove that long-term use is actually safe for humans with heart conditions or with the potential for heart conditions. And I say this because the science points in that direction. And one of my premier mentors that I never met, Alexander Sasha Shulgin, died of a heart condition that is very likely influenced by his consumption of seratogenic drugs that affected the five HDTP receptor, which over long periods of time caused his chronic heart valve thickening caused his death. All right. So, you know, like the Stamets protocol for micro dosing or the Fadiman protocols, right? They suggest days off and they say, well, this is so you don't build up a tolerance. You know, the Stamets protocol puts niacin in there for flushing. they know about the five ht to be action but they can't tell you like I'm selling you these products that could be dangerous to you and we don't know psychedelic drugs are very safe when used inconsistently psychedelic drugs are not proven to be safe when not used consistently so I've been on this sort of quest to find something safe to microdose. I, you know, I like LSD because you're using it like micrograms. So it's hard. And also like Lady Amanda Fielding, rest in power, did not have any heart defect issues. And she took large doses of LSD almost every day for days. ask her when you meet her in the pearly gates. And I think she might say every day. So I think there's a little bit less risk there, but it still has action on the receptor that I'm concerned about. And I came to a rather like counterintuitive discovery, which was that the classic psychedelic with the most overt cardiac risk is the only classic psychedelic that doesn't have action on the chronic heart thickening. And that's Ibogaine. So when taken at high doses, Ibogaine can be toxic for your heart. But when taken at micro doses, particularly of like, I think they called PTA, purified total alkaloids, particularly from that combination of products, I find that science is starting to prove and starting to show that it can be a safe, efficacious microdosing product. So I hold a lot of hope for deeper research. And I also hope that I am proven wrong about the risk associated with psilocybin because I think there's so much value in people microdosing psilocybin bearing mushrooms and having a deep relationship with the fungal structure itself. particularly when they're not taking synthetic versions and they're able to, you know, like actually access the plant medicine itself. Psilocybin is one of the few that I think there is a, you know, despite Maria Sabina's statement to Hoffman that there was no difference between the synthetic psilocybin and the natural mushrooms. I do think there are some qualitative potential differences between the scope of the potential psychedelic Action there with bail system and a number of the other different compounds found in the magic mushroom that aren't present in the synthetic Also, you know of note the synthetic most widely available, you know The four eight ACO DMT is a prodrug of psilocybin, which is a prodrug I'm sorry pro-drug of psilocin. So you're doubling the metabolism in order to contain an effect. And if that's the pharmacology, which I'm starting to doubt because we have these anecdotal people saying, oh, I'm boofing for ACO and we're getting these immediate results. Well, if it has to, that can't work. Yeah, so wait, you're throwing out some amazing terms that I'm or George may be familiar with. um and not everyone in the audience so there's a number of different routes pro drug first what's a pro drug maybe talk about pro drugs and analogs versus traditional okay um thank you christian so a pro drug is a compound that metabolizes into a psychoactive compound so a pro drug very often is not psychoactive itself In fact, that's part of the definition of pro drug. So that's why I'm saying for ACO may not be simply a pro drug. It might be a metabolite in the metabolite chain, but I think there might be some action unique to that, right? Which would differentiate the synthetic psilocybin from the, psilocybin itself. And then you're talking about Bufo and people confuse Bufo with five MEO DM, like let's be careful about delivery methods and transportation of molecules versus the molecule. So I said Bufing. I'm aware. I'm very clear. Thank you. Rick Simpson capsules later. Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. So, um, Cesar's asking for some clarification. Yeah, go for it. Yeah, this is where it gets juicy. On the fun ACTP action. So based on my belief is that because of the microgram, because of this difference, exponential difference in the dosage, right? So if I'm taking milligrams of a psilocybin versus UG or micro of an LSD product, right? there's a massive difference on how much action it could cause, right? So, because the affinity of LSD is specifically for the action is towards the seratogenic receptor that causes the psychedelic effect. If it has impact on the receptors nearby, it's gotta be minimum. And so then minimizing that minimum probably puts you in a safe place. And I'm saying that specifically because as using Lady Amanda Fielding as an example, I would be, uh very surprised if and she's not uh she's not a an n of one she's among you know dozens of people I know who are in their you know who who live to their seventies or eighties um and utilized lsd I mean at huge doses you know all the time daily um for for decades and and didn't uh have any heart valve thickening issues the randalls or another you know group that's you know similar to that um so I think you can you can say the risk is probably a lot lower with lsd um but lsd has its own issues because right now lsd they're like the gray market or black market lsd includes you know up to thirty percent iso lsd which uh even one percent will start degrading the lsd uh and destroying your actives and creating some uh non-desirable effects right so you know for it you know on the black market you know um lsd uh pure lsd crystals you know used to cost twenty five thirty thousand dollars you know and now like I've been told by people like you can find a gram of lsd which is like tens of thousands of hits You can get that for like a thousand or two thousand dollars, but it'll turn black within three weeks. I met those guys at Burning Man. So just you have to be safe. Supply is a real issue. Right. And until we have a safe drug supply with a chain of custody that's monitored by some sort of outside or potentially industry specific regulatory body, you know, we're going to have issues and problems and each molecule is going to have its own issues, right? Again, that's one of the reasons why I think Ibogaine is an ideal medicine to Micronose if you can source it and find it. It's an incredibly easy extraction process that creates a durable and efficacious and dependable product right so uh whereas psilocybin right has an incredibly short shelf life lsd has these like contamination issues because a lot of it's being made in china right now or being sourced versus in china that have problems um so if you're looking actually for a real plant derived medicine which I think a lot of people are when they're microdosing you know, you're going to go to an Ibogaine or a purified total alkaloid source, right? Hopefully you can find that through, you know, the right protocols through like someone who's working directly in reciprocity with the Bwiti people and the Nagoya protocols. But either way, you're going to have a compound that's shelf stable, safe. And when taken at, you know, five, ten, fifteen, twenty milligrams by people who have no existing heart conditions, you know, showing a lot of promise. Also for things like Parkinson's, for things like fibrosis, for things like traumatic brain injury, right? I'm tapping in, because Parkinson's And the last conversation that George and I had on a true life gray matter thing was Dr. Erin Raskin and her personal navigation of a Parkinson's diagnosis in twenty eighteen and a bunch of referrals, introductions that I made and a lot of work she did on her own because she's an amazing researcher and she doesn't stop at the first introduction. She's like ten, twelve steps deep. um now knows probably just about everybody in the ibogaine space that's working legally and some others that are in the underground and she's exploring microdosing protocols and other things we didn't get specifics last time but she's seeing efficacy personally and that's you know uh use case of one but um I think it's not really in her in her particular anecdotal sharing that's yes so what you brought up though I think I attended, and this is all still in the family, one of the warrior side events that Diego Ugalde hosts on it. And there was this brilliant former SEAL, I think he was battalion commander or somebody. You can tell he had the bearing. He was up the food chain a few notches. I mean, all SEALs have a certain, you know, come from. And then there's their, like, officer corps. It's a whole other thing. And he did this amazing job with his through line, which I want to go back to with yours, which is like... the world or your life splits and he talked about the world splitting before and after nine eleven right and the world splits the world that you and I've shared before and after having a child right that's being dads like there's before and there's after and there's a radical demarcation and you don't need to even think about it it's just it's visceral it's intuitive so There's a split, I feel, that's happening in the world around psychedelics and culture. It's like before normalization and post-normalization. I don't even want to talk about legalization or decrim or adoption, whatever. Normalization, right? If we get it normalized and destigmatized, the other things will follow. I don't think legalization is going to happen first and then destigmatized. I think it's got to be normalized first, and then we have a shot at legalization. but there there are definitely camps and I don't want to name names because I don't want to be judging those that judge right like just as an observer there's these camps around d-reg d-crim regulatory at all no regulatory we have to be anarchists right george it's all good everybody can just grow their own and use their own but there's benefits to regulations and it's not always government regulation can be self-regulation right? I'm a cognitive libertarian. Doesn't mean everybody should be using psychedelics. It also doesn't mean we want a supply chain that isn't clean. It also doesn't mean we don't want dosing protocols that are meaningful and safe. And I don't even like, I kind of want to get away from the harm reduction thing, just health and wellness dosage. Let's talk about that. So let's talk, talk about how you think about regulatory and then maybe riff a little bit on citizen science. Cause you're definitely one of those. Well, You know, I have such a deep respect for people who are in the regulatory space, um, twenty-four seven, you know, like my friend Nuria over at Kaikian analytics, which is based out of Spain. She's really working with, um, some cutting edge conversations with politicians on how to reduce exposure to, uh, to harm and increase potential for, uh, for positive efficacy. And I think the Iberian Peninsula, Spain and Portugal are doing some really interesting and exciting things that we should look at in terms of decriminalization, in terms of really not blaming the end user of a quote unquote drug or medical compound and looking more to the supply chain and ensuring that supply chains are not criminal organizations and enterprises. So I think that's a good general direction to go. I also think that in limited small jurisdictions that legalization is actually the most viable path forward. So that if you have small jurisdictions around the world legalizing specific compounds that resonate with their cultural legacy, then you're going to create a international chorus of pushing back against the drug war. And really that's what we're talking about, right? There's this narrative that the drug war has, all drugs are bad. There's no differentiation between heroin and fentanyl on one hand and the psychedelics on the other hand. It's just, they're all evil, right? I think that part of shifting that narrative to create more broad adoption is to create jurisdictional locations where adoption can be more broad. And we're already experiencing that, right? If you want to experience AYA or you can go to places where that's legally available to use right whether that's um in a gray space like costa rica or whether that's like peru where it's like indigenous if you're using it under indigenous protocols you are fully legal right yeah yeah there was a there was a great panel at psychedelic science and because uh espanol poco like you know being in the audience and paying attention to when it's half english and half spanish but the it was all women on stage from what I remember they were all working in different latin american or central americans so I think it's ecuador I think it was Peru. There was a Latina Latinx attorney from the US that was working on regs down there. From what I remember, George, and we should probably get all three or four of those ladies on the show and recreate that panel because it was so powerful. I think Ecuador was the winner where they basically got everything approved as long as it was being used in indigenous settings and thresholds and like the way it has been. So it didn't matter if it was a tincture or it didn't matter if it was a plant that was being smoked. It didn't like method and delivery. It's all good. And I think Ecuador is the only country where the local psychedelic society actually was recognized by the federal government, which blew my brains out. I'm like, how is that? That's the process I'm talking about. Right. Um, you know, Jamaica with, with psilocybin bearing mushrooms, Holland with psilocybin bearing mushrooms, you know, um, Now we've got Oregon and Colorado coming on board with some access to these compounds as well, although there's a lot of conversations to be had about how on paper it may be one thing and in practice it may be another and that there's a lot of work to still be done and that maybe the state route for psychedelics isn't as viable as the state route was for cannabis. I think, you know, changing the federal status of psychedelic compounds specifically, maybe one at a time, but also, you know, structurally saying all phenethylamines are now schedule two or schedule three, right? All lysergemides are now schedule two. All tryptamines are now schedule three, right? So like, I think if you do that on a federal level, you have a... a synthesis that occurs. If you do it on a state by state level or a regional level within a cited country, then you really don't have that happening. And I could go sort of in depth about why I believe that, but I think specific federal legalization for scientific use that includes prescription to healthy normals is essential. Um, that's the license that we currently hold in Southern Africa and a small kingdom called the suit too. And, um, Oh, let's talk about that. Yeah. Uh, so, uh, All right. That's I mean, that's a real. Well, let's wait, wait, wait, wait, wait. I got you. No, I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. I know. So live real time with George here. Sean, do you think you could come back on the show like in three or six weeks, maybe a month or two and tell us a little bit about some country round to Africa where you may or may not be doing a project? I would be an honor to come on the show again. Let's save that. Let's look to some future dates where I can speak a little bit more openly. Suffice to say, as a preview, there's a mountainous kingdom in southern Africa called Lesotho. L-E-S-O-T-H-O. I think that's how that's spelled. It's coincidentally the inspiration behind the fictional kingdom of Wakanda. in the black panther series it's um wait a minute are you working on psychedelic research I can neither confirm nor deny you heard it here first the marvel universe is going to be very interested so yeah um The group that I'm one of the co-founders of has a just phenomenal and amazing license granted to us by the Ministry of Health in Lesotho to manage the entire ecosystem of psychedelic compounds from import and export to local manufacturing and prescription to healthy normals. So we can, and over the last three years since I've received this license, we've been through a really intense vetting process of speaking with the psychedelic community and other co-founders and principals in the space to see how we can be a cooperative and beneficial ally to the entire space rather than being in some sort of weird competition, right? So, I'm really, really, really excited. Like Christian said, hopefully in the next four to eight weeks, I'll be able to announce some actionable dates for our first events, to speak a little bit more saliently about what we're doing, who we're bringing together, the compounds we're choosing to use, and the amazing relationships that we have with some of the most... cutting edge companies in the psychedelic space with the most amazing molecules so I'm a firm believer in better living through chemistry and I think that it's almost impossible to improve upon certain happy accidents such as lsd yeah however there are things that we can do to uh increase availability, to create increased levels of safety and efficacy, and to broaden the range of people who would benefit from having an altered state experience. Can you clarify availability? Because some people will interpret that as like supply chain and packaged consumer goods. And I'm guessing you're talking about bioavailability? maybe um I think you know availability is an incredibly broad term uh okay it's gonna it's gonna span from bioavailability where we have um that's something we are increasing magnificently right like when you can take even just the alteration of a different salt right like so say I have a ketamine molecule and I add a different salt to it uh and instead of hydrochloride and Or instead of, you know, for instance, let's say I use Spravato as an example. It has a specific salt attached, right? But then on the street, someone says like, oh, everyone, you know, snorts up their nose. So let's put, you know, a chlorine salt on there, which makes it more bioavailable through that specific function, right? So this whole scourge of DCK dichloro ketamine, which is pretty significantly available on the market and broadly distributed in the black market. It was a chemist looking to increase bioavailability because they understood the route of administration was encephalation rather than intermuscular. So even just changing the salt attached to a molecule can increase bioavailability specific to the route of administration. But I also mean availability when it comes to who has the time and the energy and the resources to be able to engage in a psychedelic therapy, right? So LSD is a prime example. I think therapeutic use of LSD is incredibly valuable. But when you have a compound that could have a twelve hour time span and you have to have a therapist or two therapists pay for that entire twelve hours, plus the EUGMP or CGMP quality molecule to ensure the supply chain is there, which makes these compounds go from incredibly inexpensive to really incredibly expensive. Like, for instance, MDMA, like an eighty milligram tablet of pure CGMP MDMA costs around three hundred and eighty dollars. in bulk through a CGMP manufacturer where you can find it on the black market for ten dollars, twenty dollars, you know, right? I'll call you after the show. So you can see, right, that there are these limitations and these financial contributions that cause issues, right? So one of the things like a company like Gilgamesh is doing really successfully with Beres Lawson, was taking psilocybin, which has a really dependable and predictable, efficacious outcomes that are durable and long-lasting, and they're improving patient access by shortening the duration, right? Hey, Sean, I want to bookmark a future conversation, not the one about... something that might have vowels like E and consonants like M and R and C, but let's, let's have a conversation about clinical trials and clinical trials, like three data or clinical trials, AI enhanced or clinical trials, citizen science. Right. Because I think to your point about the micro dosing and having controlled trials and be able to like, what if we had, you know, two thousand people around the world taking biometric data or, you know, self-reporting, however we capture that and get to a place where we can actually have real, you know where I'm going. Okay. So that would be an interesting conversation. I agree. Just to speak really briefly to your point as maybe a preview to that conversation. So we have these challenges in our current FDA approved trial system, right? Functional unblinding for psychedelics has obviously been identified as a potential problem. I don't see it as being as big a problem as they say. Nobody had a problem with functional unblinding for ketamine. No one had a problem with functional unblinding for lithium. It's crazy to me that it's like, oh... Functional and blinding, you could tell if you're on MDMA. Yeah, yes, you could. And you could tell that eighty six percent of the people got better. So if you're going to tell me that's a functional and blinding related issue, I'm sorry. I'm going to push back against that and say that's not scientifically rigorous. Right. That's a cultural bias you're bringing to the table. And I will point the finger at certain organizations like Symposia for cultivating a narrative that was based on lies, manipulations. Oh, George, you're getting near the third rail. I don't, you know, and I will, I will say, you know, like, listen to Hamilton, you know, like go in and see, you know, like the great research that's been done to track the money. Cause it's always about the money, right? If you've got a group where all of a sudden these scientific advocates are at war with other scientific advocates and you have to question like, wow, is this maybe a rich family that has a bone to grind with Rick? Not to mention the family, right? But this is a personality dispute that's derailed one of the most efficacious medicines possible and is creating a situation where our veterans are still suffering and dying every single day. This is a situation where now this medication mdma specifically for ptsd is going to cost exponentially more than it would have cost before because to date most of the funds that came to the lycos were based off of research that was funded through a non-profit arm of maps right which would have enabled lycos to keep their pricing low now they have to put hundreds millions more into more clinical trials on a drug that is the most effective drug that we have for ptsd by milestones right like it is like it's criminal like I I wait wait wait don't make claims it may or may not be criminal we'll see It depends who's in office and who's on the judge's seat. But I feel emotionally from an emotional space. I'm with you. I'm saying that this is impacting me to a point where I am now using terms that are not clear and not easily defined or well-defined. Thank you for calling me on that, Christian. Well, I'm saying it with love and being a little cheeky because you're... Please. No, please do. Emotion and your perspective on it from my perspective is on point, right? There's definitely other perspectives and you've got this whole spectrum. But, you know, you brought up the river prior. I'll just say after spending, oh, twenty eighteen to seven plus years in the cannabis and hemp genetic space. seeing everybody run around like a chicken with their head cut off that oh my god it's about the tax code and it's about this and that and you know the cannabis industry the legal cannabis industry in the united states and in many areas where it's been happening for a while it's kind of a dumpster fire and we have a whole nother show about that and everyone's like well it's the dispensaries no it's the labs it's the payola on the co you know it's fucking bullshit and Just look around big pharma, big tobacco, big alcohol does not want cannabis to succeed for a CPG or for medical reasons, unless they have the biggest piece of it. Right. So it's not about whether the plants efficacious or whether plant medicine should happen or regs or the Republicans or the dams, like whatever. it's back to the money. Like you can always follow the money and unearth who's pulling the strings if you look close enough and hard enough. And most people don't want to look because they don't want to know that their favorite beer brand is, you know, cannibalizing cannabis or that big pharma doesn't want you to get a plant that can actually make you healthy for less than twelve hundred dollars a month. Thank you, Medicare. So, you know, I have no problem calling truth to power and saying, you know, Constellation beverages does have a role to play. uh in sure distribution of plant medicines from broader adoption uh primarily because they found after spending billions of dollars that hey you can't mix oil and water oh my goodness you know like it doesn't matter how much money you throw at it I'm going to have to leave in a few minutes. I'll just say if anybody listening or watching wants to do a little research, there was some publicly funded research, I think it was during the Biden administration, about the implications or cause and effect tying cancer to alcohol. And apparently that report is not going to get released. Ding, ding, ding. And, you know, there's, I think, someone in Washington that claims to have never drank alcohol. And he makes a point of that. And there's somebody else in Washington. that you know is very concerned about toxicity and things in our environment or things that we might be taking that could cause us harm and they're not talking about alcohol and I'm not a hypocrite like I like my glass of wine I like my beers and I might have drank a little too much in college in the military but um when we don't talk about the truth around these substances regulated or unregulated in this case right this is a regulated substance we can't make informed decisions, right? If we don't have the information as an adult human who wants to make choices about risk. Particularly when we as a US citizens paid for that study and now we're having it completely not allowed to see, right? I think that was a great question from clint george it is yeah yeah if you don't mind bringing that one back of course and maybe we don't end on his question because it is uh maybe uh um shout out to the great clint kyle's if you guys are new check out clint kyle's uh podcast amazing individual he says there is currently a boom of interest in psychedelics within modern developed and prosperous societies and appears to have some very promising applications What do you believe to be the most potentially negative outcomes of this surge of interest in such societies? Are we mature and responsible enough for widespread psychedelic use? Great question, Clint. Thank you for being here. Hey, guys. I'm going to politely peace out. I left my answer to that question in the chat so you can share it. And I've got a family member waiting for me. Otherwise, I'd hang with you guys longer. Thank you so much, Christian. Appreciate it. Bye, guys. um so clint thank you for this question and I think that so often um in psychedelics we can be preaching to the choir um so often in psychedelics we can be overly enthusiastic about things uh and not managing or recognizing real the potential for real life harm And I think that we in general in the West and prosperous and developed nations are incredibly privileged. And that's not necessarily a good thing. So you asked a couple questions here that I think all bear sensitive and focused responses that I don't know if we have the time or I have the expertise to give but I can give you my perspectives um and my opinions so I come from a long line of alcoholics particularly on my father's side I will be the first male in five generations to not die of an alcohol-related disease um So when it comes to compound use and the question of our Western prosperous societies responsible enough to safely utilize psychedelics, I can say that my answer is, I don't think so. We haven't proven that we are safely able to navigate compounds with incredibly lower levels of altered state generation, right? We struggle with tobacco, which is an amazing plant healer when used appropriately, right? But it's all about route of administration. The same coca leaf that you chew is not the same as the cocaine you snort or the crack cocaine that you smoke. so we have a society I feel that's really focused on immediate gratification and very um commonly falls into traps uh that manipulate our ego or our self-aggrandization opportunities and I think psychedelics they're not ego-destroying compounds in my experience they stimulate what's there. So, great speaker Wayne Dyer says, you know, what happens when you get squeezed, when someone puts the squeeze on you, right? People like to say, oh, I got angry because someone was treating me this way. I got upset because I was being forced. These outside impacts, these outside circumstances were shifting. Well, Wayne Dyer's response to that is no. When you get squeezed, you know what happens? What's inside comes out. So if you've got some anger, And you get squeezed, guess what's going to come out? That anger, right? If you've got some ego and you get a radical life-changing experience that happens, well, sometimes that ego is going to get expanded, right? And I think maybe, you know, we might have all been in this industry long enough to meet a shaman bro or a pharma bro. Or, you know, someone who shows up on the playa in their private jet and has all the greatest RCs available to man. But they're still not a great person. Right? I don't know. Those are my experiences. So I think this idea that psychedelics are a panacea to all modern problems, I think, is just foolhardy. And that comes from drinking the Kool-Aid and feeling like you have to present such an incredible story to change the narrative from being one of demonization to being one of aggrandization, right? And maybe these compounds don't deserve aggrandization. Maybe they deserve a sober and honest look to see where There is efficacious use possible where, you know, another inspiration of mine, Wayne, excuse me, Bruce, Dr. Bruce Dahmer is fond of saying the following. He says, when you work with plant medicine, you have two experiences. First, the healing. Then comes the revealing. And not to put a hierarchical difference between healing and revealing because both I think are necessary and essential. But if you don't heal and balance yourself and you venture into the unknown through your consistent use of psychedelic or altered state expanding consciousness protocols, then I don't necessarily know that that's a good thing. It is about set and setting. It is about appropriate cultural use. It is about a certain level of maturity, not just in terms of age, but also in terms of why are we going to these medicines? Why are we going to them so often? I believe that altered states in general, right? are incredibly beneficial and valuable to every human being. And I recognize that all over the world, there are practices generated particularly and often through indigenous communities that produce repeatable altered states that have nothing to do with compound use, right? Meditation, breath work, walkabouts, sun dances, You know, these are things that, and that's just to name a few, right? We have access to altered states. I mean, that time when you were young and you spun around in a circle or held your breath for a long time or just, like, looked up into the sky and saw something that brought awe to your heart, right? Like, these are common experiences. They're not... handed out just to the few and just to those of us that have access to the best drugs. These are humanity's birthright. And I do not say that psychedelic compounds are humanity's birthright. What I say is the access to altered states. Imagining. I mean, I'm a big fan of reading books. I grew up in a place where we didn't have other media sources. So I was like almost addicted to reading books, right? And I can't think of a more psychedelic experience than being transported to a completely different world by the magic of some sheets of processed trees with magical symbols written on them. All of a sudden I'm in Narnia, I'm in Dune, right? All of a sudden I'm transported from being my single individual self to seeing things from another perspective, right? So we are already as a community, as a culture, commonly accessing altered states. We just don't think of it as a sacred thing. We don't think of it as a expansive thing. And so I would say we need to respect the tools we have and use them and be in right relation with those before we make really fast steps. And we need to balance that against the existential crises that we face. Because broad adoption of psychedelic compounds could be something that helps ameliorate climate change. Could be something that allows us to radically alter the course of our cultural perspective to understand and to live in harmony with ourselves and with nature. These are real. These are real opportunities and real possible futures, right? That we have to sort of like hitch our star to and like draw ourselves forward into that potential future. Because if we don't, we're really facing some challenges, right? Look at the world around us. We have politically motivated assassinations. We haven't had that for a long time, right? We have wars being fought all over the world. We have strikes against sovereign nations happening with impunity, right? It doesn't seem to be a very... It seems to be a landscape that's changing and evolving quickly. It seems to be a landscape where these existential threats and these wicked problems become either overwhelming or they are the impetus that push us to an evolutionary trajectory that's... inclusive and beautiful and powerful right and so it's really it's really those two concerns right are we mature enough are we going to mature fast enough to survive right and these compounds could be part of that or they could be the reason we don't right and it's up to us as individuals to shepherd and to tell better stories because that's what moves culture culture isn't affected and changed by the latest clinical data, right? Culture isn't effective and moved by one guy at the top making a selection and a choice and saying, we're going that way, right? That's not how it actually works. How it works is that each of us individually have agency and choice and we get to decide what we put our time, our energy and our money into. So think about it, right? Think about what you're putting your time and energy and money into. Think about how much you're, how often you're curious versus how often you're bored. I think boredom sometimes can be a powerful thing because it then will all of a sudden push you into finding a route to access your own imagination because none of us have ever been bored growing up without an iPhone. None of us who are my age or your age ever were bored playing with ourselves. Yeah, that's the balance. That's the tightrope we're walking. Can we mature fast enough to be good stewards? Can we mature fast enough to be in right relations with these strong and powerful psychedelic substances that we could culturally inhabit a broader and more enriched tapestry? Or are we going to... throw up our hands and say, it's too much. We're all gonna die. Let's just have a good time on the way as it burns. I don't know, man. But I know that places like this, we can start telling stories that have potentially greater outcomes. And we can acknowledge there is a dark side. We can acknowledge there is a shadow work that needs to be done in our culture, inside ourselves individually. Um, and, uh, you know, honesty is the path forward. Yeah. I couldn't agree more. Yeah. And George, can you ask a question too? I've been talking so much and it's awesome. Um, I want to thank you for the, uh, for the vehicle. I want to thank you for the passion and the excitement. You know, it's infectious. And when that can be shared broadly, I think, you know, like I've said, we can tell better stories and we can ask better questions, which prompts the telling of better stories. So thank you for being part of this process. Man, I'm so stoked to be here and just to learn. I feel like an eternal student. I get to do this all the time. For me, I guess one of the questions that comes to mind for me is that maybe there are no answers. There's just better questions, like you said, and whether through sci-fi, but it seems to me The older I get, the more I realize I don't know anything, but I do have better questions. And I think it is that broadening of questions that allows you to be a responsible user of whatever altered state you're doing, whether it's imagination, whether it's boredom, whether it's psychedelics. And I just go down these rabbit holes sometimes, Shauna, like maybe what we're seeing is the Is the devastation of a system desperately trying to cling on to power and all these people coming up and I go back to the individual like the individuals we're going to was where the change is going to be. And if I use like mycelium as sort of the the. the way forward it's always in the underground it spends all of its time in the underground and only when the time is right does a mushroom come up and then people start putting they start putting their shops up and selling access to it you know what I mean like so for me like and maybe this is doom for everybody but like I don't see it like I just don't see the centralization I just don't see the the money families with a big interest allowing this thing to happen. But that's where the beauty is. Like I said before, it's each individual understanding that they are the light. They are the ones that are gonna move it forward. The system is not there to help you. The system is there to like placate you. But once you take psychedelics or maybe you go through breath work, but once you go to these altered states, you realize how powerful you are. And that makes me think that we are responsible enough. And it may take some time to get around those areas. But guess what? You spend enough time in those environments and watch how beautiful you begin to see yourself. Like that is the answer. And each one of us becomes the catalyst for change. And that's a wave that no one can stop. What are your thoughts? I can't wait. It's here. Because when I say we're not mature enough, man, I'm talking about right now, today. The average American, the average Westerner probably needs a little work, right? Probably needs a little reminder, probably needs to get off their phone. Of course. Probably needs to get out in nature a little bit more. Yes. And, you know, what's one of the things I think microdosing is really good at is building a platform for people to then have these deeper experiences realizations and experiences inside of a safe and in a trajectory of positivity and love, right? Yeah. And the truth is millions of people every year take MDMA. The truth is, millions of people every year reach altered states through the opportunities presented them through pharmacology. So that's not going to stop. And that's the, in some ways, that stream diverging. And so it's not, like I said, it's It's bringing something new to the table, not obliterating the old. The old will die off eventually, right? That other half, when it doesn't have enough water, it's, you know? It dries up. Natural. It's just this thing, like, when I caution people to have patience, right, with themselves, with our culture, with our communities, with science, right? um because we're all catching up we're all yes we're in progress and so if we expect tomorrow the world's gonna be a better place because two more people did mushrooms then I'm sorry you're probably gonna be you know a little bit disappointed right you know yes um but if your idea is tomorrow the two right people did mushrooms to start a conversation about how more people have access to truth and justice and agency then you're probably gonna be pretty excited about the future, right? And I think people like yourself, people like myself, we're working on ways to create incubation centers, to create networks, to create the infrastructure which girds this new reality, right? Because there was a administrative class involved in the mysteries. They were there, they had a job, they understood what their role was to support the greater unfolding of their culture, right? And it's time for some more people to step up and recognize that about ourselves and say, you know what my job is? My job is for the continued flourishing of this culture, for the continued flourishing of us as a society and humanity in general, because I think humans are a bridge, not a destination. And I think the tools we use along this journey are going to predicate the direction we head and have always been part of our lives since the beginning of Dawn of Humanity. Whether you want to listen to the stone day theory or not, psychedelic altered states have been a crucial component for consciousness development. And we can see this directly in the difference between the Iliad and the Odyssey. If you look at Julian Jayne's Origin of Bicameral Mind, it's a really heady book with an incredibly long title, but just read the prologue. That is a pretty good place to start. Read some philosophy, listen to an indigenous elder speak about truth and reciprocity, listen to their right relations with all the other beings of earth, and then try to integrate that right into your own lived experience how does that ring true and how can that then be expressed through self to reach the other because I believe it's all about like you said earlier george it's all about like the work is done inside, the work is done underground. Michael Meade is talking about all of the action occurs in the mystery, in the darkness. It's just the explosion into the scene world, that's all we can experience. But we get twisted, right? We forget that it's incubated in this empty space, in this unknowable space, in this archetypal space. And that as, shamans or you know indigenous healers or as modern psychonauts you know part of our shared responsibility is to navigate the unknown and then to come back and tell beautiful stories about that beautiful stories that are honest right so that's what I try to do and I try to create safe spaces for people to do that and for that to be a way that we can show up in the world and a way that we can show because having a safe legal space to have these experiences is crucial because that was the difference in cannabis between like it's it's a it's a you know hands-off I can't talk about this drug but everyone smokes it to I'm a lawyer and I stepped up and said hey guess what I'm a better person and I handle my adhd utilizing you know suicide but usually utilizing cannabis right I'm a judge. I'm a doctor. I'm, you know, once that seed change happened where people could be a little bit more honest about their personal experiences thing, the conversation could exit that people smoking our stoners and everyone's dumb. Cause the only one who admits that they're smoking is somebody who's in a not particularly high place on our society. Right. You know, but being honest, right. We could say, Oh, wow. You know, And the thing is about psychedelics is it's already happened. We're just not looking, right? Like, you know, the birth of the double helix, you know, process very likely happened when Watson and Crick had an LSD experience, right? Yeah. Like Fadiman and Hardiman in their nineteen sixty seven trial to on mescaline and LSD capacity to improve human creative problem solving resulted in the mouse. We wouldn't have had the mouse. We wouldn't have had a graphic interface that allows us to do something other than type unless someone visionary came up with it. And we all know the stories about Apple. We all know the stories about Silicon Valley's adoption of these compounds because they make us smarter. If those weren't real, then why are they there? So we need to start looking at these cases. We need to start being more honest and open where we are safe enough to do so. That's one of the reasons I love this. I mean, and I will speak openly. I have the privilege of being a white American man where I can openly say I have used psychedelic compounds in my life and they have brought me great benefit. I am a professional who wears a suit and goes to work and lives in society and has a son who goes to college, I'm a part of this tapestry. And I can stand up and say, I have enough privilege to risk standing up and saying, I use psychedelic compounds. I love them. I've never had a teacher that was as powerful and as amazing as some of these compounds. Yeah. So that's where I see, you know, this next stage of evolution coming. Right. It's in the unmasking. It's in the revealing. It's in the bringing forward of the mystery. Right. And for everything that I've said that is inaccurate, for everything I've said that's, you know, misguided, you know, like I'm still learning. And please, you know, like whoever's listening or listens to this, if I've said something wrong, reach out to me and tell me. You know what? You were saying five H's to you, B. It's actually, you know, like really, we've got to be held accountable. And myself included, right? As a culture, as a society, as individuals. So call me to task, right? That's how, you know, iron sharpens iron and we will only be stronger with mutually beneficial criticisms. And that's delineated from personal attacks. Because if we continue to fight amongst ourselves, if we continue to say, you know, Big Pharma's this, and Gilgamesh is wrong, and Lycos, I don't like Antonio Gracias. And so I'm gonna shame Lycos. Well, David Holm's a pretty good guy too. McDonald's a pretty good guy. So like, yeah, oh, you've got one questionable guy. And yeah, he owns fifty-one percent of the company. And yes, FDA, it's fucking your fault. And yes, Symposia, it's fucking your fault. And yes, That's it, right? Hold some accountability. Be honest and say like, well, nobody's threatening you, Ne'Shea. Nobody's, you're a cool person. You know, like, what's wrong? Please come back. We miss you. You're awesome. You're so fucking smart. Come back to us. Please start telling the truth. Please stop taking money from people who are dirtbags with agendas, you know? There's other money out there. Help create it, right? Yeah. So that's the next. And if I could say one final point. Of course. I'm really excited for the future where the psychedelic industry includes some people other than privileged people who can afford to do this as our hobbies. And it's sad. there needs to be a space where people, that's what's missing in the pharma rollout of these compounds is a place where for the average person to have a financial remuneration from being part of this community. And if this community continues to just be privileged white, Western, then that stamp is gonna be stuck and it's gonna impact the future development of this culture in a way. So we have to, as a culture, as an industry, provide and create methodologies for people to be able to join and be part of this and not lose their jobs and have jobs in the industry. And until we do that, then it's just kind of like preaching to the choir. It's just going to MAPS in Denver where if you can afford to spend three thousand dollars, sure, come and join the conversation. And no disrespect towards MAPS, no disrespect towards Simeon or to Rick or any of the other people who organized this last year of MAPS. I know you've lost money on psychedelic science every year and I know why you did the things you did. And thank you for giving out so many scholarships. You guys are awesome. And so I hold it as my responsibility. I hold it as my responsibility to talk about this and say, we got to bring more people in. We got to make it a place where more people can afford to be part of this conversation. I love it. Me too. That's what I want to do. Yeah. I think we're doing it. I think we're doing it here. And, um, Sean, I'm absolutely grateful to get to know you a little bit more and to see what you're doing. And I can't wait for a few weeks when we may or may not have another show coming up over here. Like, let's say people are listening to this right now. And they're like, I want to reach out to Sean. How do I get ahold of this guy? Where can people find you? What do you got coming up? What are you excited about? Okay. Um, the best. Okay. The best. I have socials, but I'm never on them. They're not healthy for me, man. For anybody, really. When I go, I have an Instagram page for EMRC Lesotho. You can find me there. But I haven't checked in in like a year. I'm sorry, you know, so email. I'm old. I'm forty six. I was born in seventy nine. I'm a little bit old school, old fashioned, you know, so you can find me at my name, Sean Skerritt, S-E-A-N-S-C-A-R-R-I-T-T at gmail.com. I'm old. I got my own name, you know, and you can also find me on my work email, which is Sean S-E-A-N at E-M-R-C-L-E-S-O-T-H-O.com. Reach out to me. I'd love to be part of the conversations. And in terms of things I'm doing... man, I'm keeping my head to the grindstone and envisioning an amazing psychedelic future where all of you can be involved in some legal and safe events and can come do some next generation psychedelic compounds that have been proved for optimum human capacity and to join me in Southern Africa. Because I think that having a space in the global South, having a small jurisdictional space where we can be the first of many dominoes. And we can join people like, you know, Michael Brotherton, you know, he's got a project in the Bahamas working on similar things, right? So, you know, we're part of a chorus, right? You know, Kristen mentioned, you know, some countries in South America. I'll mention Uruguay. I want to give them a shout out because they have a law in... in the Senate right now that's to legalize all plant medicine based psychedelics and included on that list is MDMA. So I think that's incredibly forward thinking. And I love this breaking down the barriers between synthetics and natural based compounds because it's actually nothing is a synthetic, right? Every single synthetic compound we use is based off of an aromatic indole or amide chain. So LSD, that comes from ergot, my friends. That's a natural mold. So what's not natural about LSD? MDMA comes from the sassafras oil. What's not natural about that? Because we've altered it slightly to have optimal pharmacological impact? No, sorry, man. This is that conversation that we take ourselves as humans outside of the natural world. It's silly. If I made it, I'm natural. So guess what that is? That's natural. And so any delineation outside of that, it's just like this hierarchical thinking, this distancing ourselves from truth And so I don't buy it. We're all part of a web of love and beauty and connectivity. And that connectivity includes things we're not particularly in love with, like fentanyl. That's part of our lives, part of our cultures. If we don't look at the negative and the positive, then we're hopeless romantics. Yeah. there's a beautiful place for hopeless romantics if you're an artist but if you're a cultural leader man that can lead to some bad you know bad outcomes we've seen those right yeah without a doubt you can't have the you can't have the In an evolution of awareness, you're treated to both the depths of despair and the heights of ecstasy, right? Like you don't get one without the other. And the depths of despair are tough, man. That's that dark area where you really got to look for that inner light to guide your way. But yeah, it's all part of that web. Like you said, that was beautifully described. The Khalil Gibran might say something to the effect, the self-same well that holds your joy was dug with your tears. Right. So there's this, you know, we have this thing in empirical Western culture, you know, the separation of opposites, right? Right. Diametrically opposed into things that like cancel each other out, like anti-matter and matter, they destroy each other. Like, man, come on. Right. There's an enlightened perspective that's a little bit more broad than that, I think. And so, you know, even if you use the Hegelian systemology of saying, like, you know, we have this thesis, then we have an antithesis. It's diametrically opposed opposite. And then we have the combination of two, which is synthesis. Yeah. We got we can't forget that synthesis component and we can't forget the other and even especially the other that we don't like. Yeah, of course. That's the one you should look at most. Right. Yeah. Can you hang on briefly? I got to check something real fast. Are you okay for a second? Yeah, sure. Okay. No, no, thank you. Okay. I'll be right back. One second. Uh, since I abhor, um, uh, a dead mic, uh, I have a communications background. Uh, I'll, I'll share a poem with you guys. I'm a big lover of, uh, Persian poetry, ecstatic poetry. Um, And I love this one. So this is often attributed to Rumi, but I believe it's initially written by Hafez. And it says, these words are just a front. What I really want is to chain you to my body and sing for days and days and days about God. Thank you for carrying that right there. I got to have to go back and watch that. I had to, I had one quick little thing I had to run over there, but I, um, I, I love it, Sean. And I have like a million more questions, but I'm running up. Yeah, we do have an opportunity for the next, uh, okay. Okay. Yes. Yes. Would you mind maybe, um, yeah. Closing that with one. Oh, yeah. Is that okay? Okay. So let me look through, I got a few in here. Then I have a few on my mind. Let's go with... Do you think psychedelics will help us evolve into a species that collaborates better, not just with each other, but with the planet itself? Undeniably. No question. We have categorical scientific evidence that shows that psychedelics are often considered some of the top five most meaningful experiences of your entire life. And this comes from the... Hopkins studies and the look at ecstatic and awe, which I just love. People often forget and they say, oh, well, we've gotten so far along in the science, we've forgotten everything that's real about psychedelics. And I say, oh, contrary, my friend. The psychedelic renaissance was rebooted in a large part specifically to study the ontological experience of awe and the ability for a psychedelics to engender a spiritual state, right? Yeah. So we're all here at the, all of the scientists in the space are all, owe a great debt of gratitude. So, It's also been empirically proven that psychedelics, psilocybin specifically, have been shown to improve the connections and affiliations with nature, right? For us to have a deeper and more personal relationship with nature, right? And so these things can oftentimes come with non-scientific thinking, and that's part and parcel of the package. So... man, when you combine those, a spiritual sense of awe, a deep and lasting, durable relationship with nature, it starts to sound like we're on the road to interacting with the world in a way that we currently couldn't even perceive or understand. And I'll give you an example about culture. historical uh legacy and cultural um um cultural prejudice and bias right so my son uh who's now in his second year at college when he was in high school he was doing this um report on on um black studies and african american studies and uh the bad guy for him was Dubois, right? And he said, oh, well, you know, Dubois was, you know, like judging Africans by Western standard and saying, you have to be excellent, more excellent than a white person in order to make them judge you as simply human, right? And so with our modern perspective, we were looking at that as horrible, you know? And I said, well, maybe you need to go dig a little deeper. He's like, well, I'll use Thomas Jefferson, that he had slaves. And I was like, yes, yes, he absolutely did. And that is abhorrent based off of our modern understanding of right and wrong. However, at the time, he was at the cutting edge of moral decency. And so we have to sort of have this cultural relativism, moral historical relativism to understand that no matter how environmentally sensitive we may be or how environmentally sensitive we may act, how much of a advocate we are, It's entirely possible that Gerda Thunberg will be considered a planet destroyer in the future because she did the unthinkable. She rode in an airplane. It's what's, oh my God, how could you do that? No one in our current society a hundred years from now could ever imagine flying in an airplane because it's so horribly destructive to the environment. well, we can't judge ourselves or the past by our current truth, just like we will not ask to be judged by the future in that way, right? So... Um, I hope that, um, my son and his compatriots and my, my grandchildren and any future. And my son, by the way, is not my biological son. He's the son of my heart and the son of my brain, not the son of my loins. Right. He's been in my life for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, for, So we just broaden, we broaden that scope of openness. Who's in my family? A little broader, right? Who's a member of my core group of people I respect and trust? If we can make that a little broader, right? And altered states and psychedelics can very often engender those realities that allow us to think more broadly and to understand ourselves as something more than the product of our culture and society. So I'm so excited about the future, man. I'm terrified because I look at the world around me and I say, no point since the World War II have we been closer to global conflagration. But at the same time, we've never had tools as powerful as the ones we have access to now. We've never had a cultural landscape as open for change as we have now. And yes, this is incredibly divisive, but we're all talking about Nobody likes the fact that they can't talk to their cousins anymore, that they can't have a conversation with their uncle at Thanksgiving without yelling. Nobody likes it, man. And it doesn't matter whether you identify as a liberal, as a conservative, we have common shared human decency. And it's really important to start remembering that and start resisting the narratives that say, oh, those Democrats are pedophiles. Oh, I can never trust them because they're in Pizzagate. Oh, those Republicans, they're all on the Epstein list, right? Because the fastest way to stop caring or loving about your fellow citizen is is to think they're a pedophile, to think they're a terrorist, right? So as soon as you start labeling people, it's really easy to dehumanize. And so while I am terrified of that, I am really impressed that as a society, I recognize none of my conservative friends like this, none of my liberal friends like this. We all want this to change. So please start talking to your uncle. Start telling him you love him and say, hey, guess what? It seems like psychedelics is the only thing we have in common now. I mean, RFK, we can't talk about vaccines, but we can talk about psychedelics, right? We can't talk about Black Lives Matter, but we can talk about Ibogaine therapy. So, oh my God. How beautiful is that crack? How amazing is that? Like, is that Moses parting the Red Seas for us? I don't know, but it kind of feels like it is, right? And I mean, I'm inspired to see, okay, if the Republicans have adopted psychedelics to the level they've adopted it, maybe not the psychedelics I wanna see, maybe not the way that I wanna see them engaged in, right? what is the democratic response gonna be? Because there has to be one. Democrats can't be sitting over there in the Newsom camp saying, oh, well, we just have to veto any psychedelic legislation that comes in our state. Because you know what? Y'all are gonna be outcasts. Newsom, I got rules for you, baby. You're not gonna be president. I'm sorry. And no pandering to the center is gonna create a pathway forward for you. The cat's out of the bag. Psychedelics are in the mainstream. Now let's tell better stories about them. Now let's unite with people that don't look and sound like us to tell better stories. Now let's open our hearts and be honest. Let's realize that the people running these psychedelic drug design and drug development companies that are selling out to big pharma, they're my friends. there's some really decent and awesome people. They've got good heart-centered interests. By and large, right? I don't know everybody. I don't know, you know, I don't know everybody. But from the people I do know, man, they're good people. They're trying to help. And so maybe don't, you know, cast shade on, you know, everyone, right? Maybe work together inside to make a big tent because right now we've got a bunch of different little yurts. The yurt over there for, you know, decrim. The yurt over there for scientific drug design and development. The yurt over there, you know, for white privileged Westerners, you know? And, you know, I do think it's crucial and essential and... absolutely necessary um for us to include everyone you know I've called out symposia a number of times but I also said I love you come on back babe like you're cool you're so smart you know like I've I've got time for you and rick doblin's the first one to say that the reason I can forgive her is because he already did he never he never hated her I don't know but he's a like and you want to say he's a cult leader you want to say he's this he's that he's an imperfect human just like the rest of us. But I've never met someone so willing to give you an extra chance. I've never met anyone so willing to turn the cheek. Man, Rick Doblin's a saint. That might be his problem. He's too nice. He's too giving and too loving and too forgiving. You can forgive, but you don't have to forget. So come together, love each other, You know, I get so passionate, you know, I'll leave with this, right? Very often we have this dislike of people being citizen scientists, dislike of people being amateurs, right? Well, the word amateur comes from the root word amor, which is to love. Yeah. So you know what an amateur means? Someone who's learning is based off of love. That's what an amateur means. So I'm an amateur. I embrace that. And guess what? Like, you know, all of this, I'm not a scientist. I'm not a chemist. I try to stay in rooms where people who are smarter than me so I can learn something, right? And I just, you know, I listen to people who I trust, who have a deep understanding of these things. And then I do my best to tell stories that include that information, right? Because at the root of things, I'm a storyteller. At the root of things, I hope one day to be a visionary, which is I think a storyteller that has cultural impact. That's the difference, right? Yeah. A visionary is somebody whose stories actually did something. A storyteller is somebody who sits around a campfire and talks to his friends. Right. So I'd love one day to be a visionary. I'm putting you in that camp already, man. I'm grateful for your time and thank you for, for hanging out with us. And this is just, we didn't even get into the ideas that science fiction may be remembering the future and all these other things over there. So we're coming back. That's one baby. Oh yeah. I love that one. This isn't sci-fi, right? Right. We have actual clinical data that's showing our neurons are responding before the stimuli. I know. I want to dig in. How is that possible? We look at cognitive science and what our brains have learned about neuropharmacology, right? Or even neuropsychiatric pharmacology or psychiatric neuropharmacology, right? Or psychedelic neuroscience, right? These things are amazing. But one of the things we're learning from the confluence of all of these is that Our brains are predictive machines. We used to think the senses gave us information and then our brain decided. No, no, no, my friend. Our brain is deciding and then it's vetoing certain decisions based off our senses. That's it. So what does the psychedelic do? It disrupts our default mode, right? It disrupts that top-down predictive model and it potentially... takes us into a quantum space because our brains are made of quantum material. Like this is again, not science fiction, science fact. The quantum tubes in our brains potentially are what allow us to not, our brains aren't making consciousness. Very probably our brains are tuning into the frequency of consciousness more like a radio tower. And then allowing consciousness to then engage in enlightenment right yeah yeah like this and so this isn't hermetic philosophy this isn't this isn't you know um spiritualism or pseudoscience anymore this is the amazing thing like things this is the amazing thing about science right like albert einstein Guess what? Well, he researched a lot. He came from a deep tradition of Sephardic knowledge, right? Deep tradition of underground knowledge. And so when you start talking about traveling the speed of light, these are thought experiments that are thousands of years old, right? Because he didn't come up with these. He just brought them into scientific awareness the same way that, like, our ideas of consciousness are now coming from the fringe to like, oh wow, well, the science is pointing towards something different, something predictive, something complex and unique, right? And we know that it's a story when it's simple. Well, DNA is a double helix, my friend. They wind around each other and that's the whole story. There are only four choices. Just a combination of those four choices. You know, if you're reducing something to a map, to a protocol, to a, you know, it's reductionist inherently, right? Language itself is reductionist. When I learned the word tree, I stopped looking at that thing behind me for all its unique individual beauty. So that's, that right there, that's a plant. Do I need to even learn more? Do I say, oh, it's of a specific species of Scarlet begonia and it came through the farm and through Sasha Shulgin and Ann Shulgin and Tim Scully. Do I know the story of this plant? Do I want to look at it intimately in detail and knew it as an individual? Or do I want to say language? That's a tree because I have to use a lot less mental architecture, a lot less mental space in order with language than I do with pre-language. So Man, there's so much to go into with the science of that, with precognition, right? That's fun, right? I know. I love it. I love it. We're going to get into it. Looks like we've got all sorts of upcoming dates. Yes. And based off of your own weird proclivities, you know, we will have a buffet of options. Yeah. for my friends. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for being here. Everybody that joined in the chat out there. Polar Knights, I missed you over there. I'll reach out to you personally. Thank you so much for being here. Everybody, thank you so much. Sean, absolutely amazing. The first of many. Everybody go down to the show notes. Check out Sean. Reach out to him. I hope everyone's having a beautiful day. And that's all we got. Hang on briefly afterwards, Sean. Everybody else within the sound of my voice, we love you. Aloha. Aloha.