Where would we be if psychedelic research was never halted? We’ll never be able to answer that question, but the exciting thing is that we are currently living through the renaissance of psychedelic science, and today’s podcast is with one of the leading experts of this movement. Dr. Matthew W. Johnson, Ph.D., is a Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Johns Hopkins. He is one of the world’s most published scientists on the human effects of psychedelics, and is on the front line of resurrecting psychedelic research. In today’s episode, we dive into the current state of psychedelic research, and we posit potential upcoming applications for a variety of psychedelic compounds (DMT, Psilocybin, MDMA, Ketamine, etc.). More generally, this discussion was a beautiful merger between my experiential knowledge and Dr. Matthew Johnson’s scientific findings. He is someone who I admire for his curious attitude (true to the original understanding of science) towards topics that most people dismiss.Connect with Matthew Johnson Ph.DTwitter | https://twitter.com/drug_researcher

AUBREY: Matthew, I'm really looking forward to this conversation.

MATTHEW: So am I. Thanks, Aubrey.

AUBREY: Yeah, absolutely. One of the things I want to get into, and of course, we have an audience, for most of the listeners, we've talked about psychedelics for a long time, especially from an experiential standpoint. I remember first getting on Joe Rogan's Podcast in 2010, even before my podcast was really going, telling about my first ayahuasca experiences. I've been just talking openly about my experiences with some of the greatest healers, and then my own personal journeys and vision quests and all of that. The audience should have a fairly good understanding of the psychedelic experience. What I'm curious about and what I really love about getting with a researcher like yourself, is to start to understand the mechanisms a little bit better. One of the things that I'm particularly excited about is the breadth of knowledge that you have about multiple different psychedelic compounds, and try to merge a deeper understanding of what's happening in the brain with what's happening experientially, because it's all too easy to either go one side or the other. To just, "It's all energy medicine. It's not dose dependent. Doesn't matter. Have a thimble of ayahuasca or have two cups." Well, a beautiful sentiment, but I will fucking tell you, a thimble is different than two cups. I don't care what the energy is like. There's certain times where two grams of mushrooms feels like 10 grams and sometimes it feels like, “did I take something?” So there is some truth to all of this. But I think, really the magic is in merging both. It's the handshake of experience and the actual science and mechanisms and also the exciting research that's coming out for treating actual conditions and making a really positive impact on the world.

MATTHEW: Yeah, yeah. I like that way of putting things. It reminds me of Terence McKenna,  one of his quotes, "If you're not seeing the aliens yet, just up the dose." Two cups, that might be some weak tea.

AUBREY:  Right. Right.

MATTHEW: Dose is a real thing. No matter what else is involved, the number of molecules pounding those receptors makes a big difference. 

AUBREY: It's not the only thing but it's a real thing. It's a "Yes, and..." kind of world. I think people get lost in this. Other people, in the same way, say, "Oh, it's just a drug. It's all in your head." Yes, and maybe you're tapped into something that's beyond what's just in your head, or maybe your head is also inextricably part of everything anyway, so you're actually saying the same fucking thing?

MATTHEW: Yeah, everything we know is in our head. 

AUBREY: That's the first hermetic principle from the "Kybalion" and that hermetic wisdom that comes, as the legend says, from Hermes Trismegistus, who's known as Thoth in Egypt, and then all the way through Hermes in Greek and Roman. The first principle is, all is mind, the universe is mental. I think that's an important thing to understand and grapple with and not even talk about the ontological correctness of this because we're all in the realm of linguistics, but to understand everything is the same substrate. Call it mind, fine, whatever you want. But to understand that everything is participatory in the same substrate is pretty important when we're talking about these medicines.

MATTHEW: Yeah, that's a framework I like to have. When you're in the psychedelic realm, one of the cool things is it just bridges everything. Disciplines of science, sociology, the humanities, philosophy, art. And one of the things I like to say is often, you butt up against the supernatural. I think it's important to keep in mind a good amount of what we call the supernatural now, we might be calling natural in 100 years, five years, 5,000 years. It's like what they have called magic, could they only have called magic 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 1,000 years ago, most of the stuff we're doing now. This presumption to keep your boundaries open enough, not infinitely open, but in terms of taking things seriously and evaluating them, don't just dismiss things because you don't have a current mechanistic understanding of it. Maybe that's what we're going to discover.

AUBREY:  Coming up.

MATTHEW: Yeah, maybe next week.

AUBREY: One of the things that Dr. Zack Bush shared recently at ARKADIA in the speech that, right now, there's a categorical and systemic dismissal of magic and miracle, because he's worked in a clinic for a long time. All right, someone has stage four cancer tumors, and all kinds of things. And all of a sudden, something shifts in their mind, some experience happens, some mindset shifts, it all goes away. What you write on the chart, spontaneous remission. This is some statistical anomaly. And he's like, "Yeah, maybe. Or that was a miracle. That was a miracle." But you can't write miracles on the chart, miracle. Even the placebo effect itself. Let's just make this this annoying thing that we have to account for in clinical trials. They're like, "Oh, no, this is the magic of thought changing matter." How about that?

MATTHEW:  Control for it. We're not interested in that.

AUBREY:  Control it out of the way, this annoying thing called the placebo effect. It's proving over and over again that thought changes.

MATTHEW: Another Terence McKenna quote, "Science is big about dismissing miracles, but the prerequisite is that you got to allow us one miracle, if you just go back in time, everything that we know came out of nothing, for no reason, instantly. Out of nothing into everything." It's like the limit of miracles. Can you come up with a bigger miracle than that? That is the definition. 

AUBREY: Yeah, totally.

MATTHEW: Everything, every miracle you can name is within that. 

AUBREY: Right, totally.

MATTHEW: So we got to be humble. Something someone might describe is a miracle. Doesn't mean you should give up looking for observable mechanisms that might mediate that miracle. But it also doesn't mean it's not a miracle. If you had a kid overcome a serious disease or something, Yeah, you might explain the mechanisms. It's still a miracle.

AUBREY:  And sometimes you just might not be able to explain the mechanisms. And at that point, don't just cast it aside. That's the point where I think everybody should look and almost bow, and be like, bow to the mystery. I think that's one thing that psychedelics offer is you have this humbling appreciation for the mystery, where you say, "Whoa, there's something far greater than I could ever even grasp and I'm going to look through my tiny little peephole of a window of my own perception, and just get a glimpse of the mystery."

MATTHEW: It seems like people getting close to that mystery and observing it, no matter what answers they have, no matter what interpretation they take away, doesn't matter. It's just that engagement with the mystery. I think about it in the context of our daily lives, compared to maybe 100 years ago, 1,000 years ago, 10,000, where every night you looked up at the stars, and were like, "What the..." Like now, when was the last time you’ve really done. The miracle is sucked out of the world for us, that exposure to nature. So it’s like, people just being confronted with it. If they come up with a completely naturalistic explanation. Look at the amazing nature of the physical world, even at that level. It's jaw dropping. If it's some religious interpretation, other, spiritual, no matter what it is, it seems like there's something with just grappling with the big questions. No matter what your answer is, if you don't think about the big questions, something's going to go off. We're not designed to be divorced from those big questions, it seems.

AUBREY: I was a philosophy major in college and I loved grappling with the big questions, but you have to weed through a lot of really annoying philosophy to get to the good stuff. Most people were like, "Oh, I fucking hate philosophy class." I get it because they're not actually engaging people. It's more memorizing what some other philosopher said and comparing that with the memorization of what another philosopher said and not actually getting you to philosophize and actually getting you to grapple with the questions until you get to higher-level  courses and better teachers. And then all of a sudden, it's like, "Alright, now let's figure this out together. Here's some theories. What do you think about this? What do you think?" Teaching that early was a major cornerstone of education in ancient Greece for a long time. It was how do you get your mind to grapple with questions, whereas right now, it's about how do you memorize what other people have grappled with.

MATTHEW:  Science seems to be the same way. I don't remember a single time in high school, in chemistry or physics, where it was more than, I mean, I learned a good amount, and I appreciate it. But in chemistry class, it's just like you're following the cookbook. It wasn't really the level of before this was in a cookbook, someone figured out, what do we do to figure something out. How do we figure out how to turn something into something else? Someone had to do that. Science isn't following a recipe. Sure, you need to do that for science. But the most important science is what you did before there was ever a recipe. You came up with the recipe. If it's science, other people should be able to follow that and get roughly the same results. But like you're saying with philosophy, same thing. It's not about memorizing facts. It's about philosophizing.

AUBREY:  Yeah, doing the thing. Same with poetry. You can read a bunch of poetry that you can hardly understand or you can write poetry. One of the greatest poets alive right now, I believe, is a guy named IN-Q, his name's Adam. I've watched him lead poetry workshops, where everybody, like 90% of people would be like, "I can't write poetry." Well, they're thinking they have to write in iambic pentameter, Shakespearean sonnet, or some other form of structures. No, just share the truth of an emotional thing that you feel, and it's fucking poetry. And watching people actually express poetry and be like, "Holy shit, I didn't know I could do this." And over and over and over again, every single person in the workshop being able to access that, all of a sudden, their whole frame of poetry changes. I think there's that invitation for all of the different arts and sciences to be like, "This isn't what you've been told about it." There's a frontier here where you can explore and actually train your brain and also give you access to discovery and awe and wonder.

MATTHEW: That very much reminds me of stuff we deal with every day in society these days. What does trust in science mean? Does it mean trust these conclusions that are, hopefully, informed by science that you've been told science has come up with? No. When you start to question something and think for yourself, and then apply reasoning, apply, "Well, I've seen this, there's some data here, what about this experience," You're doing science. Just believing in what someone tells you is really, in some sense, the antithesis of science, and you should listen but if it doesn't square with your experience or from your own observations of data, then what is science really? It is the process. What is philosophy, really? 

AUBREY: It's the discipline of asking questions. The discipline of asking questions. That's it.

MATTHEW: Being curious. 

AUBREY: Trusting a conclusion is not trusting the science. It's trusting a conclusion, which you can? Sure, sure--

MATTHEW:  Then you take the source and do a count. 

AUBREY: Yeah, of course. But actually, science itself is a living, breathing thing. It's almost like biblical thinking as well. Trust the Bible. That book was 2000 years ago, and it's spot on. Well, all right, well, look at it now. Does it make sense? Do we want to stone the person who committed adultery? No, we don't. It needs to evolve. There's ways in which we can understand that all of these conclusions may have been relevant for a certain time or may have been looked through a certain perspective, but continually always questioning and looking and looking for the counter-thesis to the thesis.

MATTHEW:  Yeah, it's all provisional. We're never going to fully capture reality. It's all a model.  So it's all provisional. And, yeah, we need to stay open.

AUBREY:  One of the things that must be exciting for you is it's probably one of the most exciting frontiers to study psychedelic medicine because that was actually stopped for a long period until finally the gates got opened a bit, mostly recently, where now it feels like people can study most of these compounds in a clinical setting and get actual access to the medicines in a standardized way that you can actually conduct these experiments. Which really are the frontier of not only studying the compound, but studying the psyche, studying the body's ability to heal. It's giving us access to so many things so it must be incredibly exciting for you to be doing science in the frontier, where you're really in fresh powder in a lot of these cases. 

MATTHEW:  And to see that transition from 2004 when I first started doing psychedelic science to now, you can't even imagine. Folks, that really cared about my future saying, "Gosh, Matt,  what are you doing? How are you ever going to get any funding in this? What's the future in this? Is this just wishful thinking?" To now, I probably spend most of my time on the other side like it's not a magic pill. Not everyone automatically gets better. There are  risks. Be smart. Now, it's, at least, being taken seriously. I don't know of another case in science where, for decades, things were put on complete deep freeze. Stopping in the late '60s, early '70s, okay. I think we've developed a few things in science since then. Most of our understanding of the brain has evolved dramatically since then, our understanding of pharmacology and behavioral science and everything that's relevant. Where would we be now had those brakes weren't put on early on?

AUBREY:  Where would the world be now? It's a real travesty. If we were going to look from the ultimate bird's eye perspective of everything, this was a catastrophic decision and unfounded too, really, from a scientific perspective as we're seeing the safety data on all of these compounds actually come through. Alright, I understand. Maybe we should put a deep freeze on gain-of-function research for certain viruses? Chill, everybody. Maybe CRISPR technology, I don't know. This is not my fucking field to talk about that but this is risky. We don't want to get strange mutations out from a lab leak in the wild that can kill hundreds of thousands or millions of people. That's not what we're talking about when you're studying MDMA or you're studying psilocybin. It's not the same thing at all.

MATTHEW:  This stuff, I often say, it's treated like nuclear material. Early on, in the Manhattan Project, there was this idea, they weren't 100% sure that this just wouldn't start a catastrophic chain. We were just like, "Whatever, blow up the atmosphere of the planet or something."-- 

AUBREY:  But meanwhile, they were like, "Fuck it. Go for it." And they're like, "But should we study LSD? No." We'll put that on freeze.

MATTHEW: Now you can construct an argument that sounds kind of naive, it's just going to warp the minds of so many young people, it's going to clap society. But gosh. You start talking about pathogens that can cause pandemics and nuclear weapons where the fallout, do we really know? Can we really model what a nuclear winter is going to look like? We know it's going to kill a lot of people, millions or tens of millions or hundreds of millions. There are things that are in that category of, because of the implications on humanity so widely, it's appropriate to put the brakes, to say you can't do this, or if you do this, it has to be highly regulated and certain things you can't do, certain things you can. But this is not in that category. Not to say that there shouldn't be any regulation. There's institutional review boards and the FDA and whatnot. But just this idea that no experimentation can be allowed for decades? The only experimentation was high school kids introducing it to each other and other people but, understandably, that's where things, when you define something as illegal, and not just illegal, but illicit, Sasha Shulgin would point out the difference between these things, just elicit it’s like regardless of the legality, it is societally frowned upon. In some ways, I guess you could say cannabis, regardless of the state, is still illicit in the sense of like it's not looked at like alcohol and tobacco. It's still frowned upon.

AUBREY:  It's interesting how this government, which has a magic wand, which bestows this is legal or not legal, deeply impacts people's understanding of what the actual risk, reward, cost-benefit analysis of this thing is. We've seen that with cannabis where, in a place where it's legal, now people are relaxed about it, whereas before, you were a druggie, and you were a hippie, and you were a pothead. Now you'll get somebody in their 60s or my wife's, I don't want to put my wife's family on blast, but whoever. They'll be just like, "Yeah, I'll have some. Sure." But then something that's about to be legal, but isn't quite legal yet, like psilocybin, like, "Oh, no, it's illegal, it's a drug." Like “What do you mean?” If you really just look at it and think for it, and that's why I'm so grateful for the science that's already happened, even those things that aren't quite legal yet, there's still this foundation of no, this is the actual research. And Johns Hopkins has done such a good job, not only on the clinical side, but also the experiential side. Were you a part of that study that was showing that a certain high percentage, I forget the numbers, used to have them off the cuff, but a certain high percentage said that their psilocybin journey was their top life experience? Can you drop into that study?

MATTHEW: Yeah, yeah. So we did. I arrived when that very first study was wrapping up but then I initiated, drafted, led the second study which is a file looking at different doses. But same thing like not treating a disorder, just saying we’re going to take highly functional adults who are in. And in those studies, they were spiritual seekers broadly defined. And given the claims about religious, spiritual, what have you broadly defined, these kinds of transcendental. Again, there's a million words in different languages you could wrap around at these extraordinary experiences which touch on the big questions. It’s like “okay let’s get some different people that have had some experience in those realms. Like they’ve tried a bunch of meditation and different services, like sweat lodge or whatever their particular tradition is. And the result was extraordinary, about a third and this has been replicated in multiple studies but about a third will say it was the most meaningful and spiritually significant experience of their life. This isn’t like laying on a couch in a hospital in Voltimor. Have people seen the wire? I mean that really says something, like the context. And sometimes people like “Well, yeah. There’s that”. Yeah, my marriage, I don’t want to, God, I feel bad for putting that down to number two. It’s also interesting to say “Okay, within the top 5”. And then you get like ⅔. 

AUBREY: Well, I got kids that were born. I got married.

MATTHEW: My wife and kids are going to kill me.  

AUBREY: I can’t fill out number one. But really, secretly. Off record, number one.

MATTHEW: But if my wife asks. But yeah, like most people. And it’s not random, it’s not just taken a big dose, but it is taking up, it is a big dose. It’s a heroic dose. In that case 30mg body weight adjusted. So if you’re above 70kg, about 150 lbs, a higher dose of whatever, 200+ lbs, you could get up to 50mg. 30 mg would be about what Terence McKenna would call it, the heroic dose. About 5 dried grams of Psilocybe  cubensis. So, this is a high dose. So at that dose, you can get, not everybody but 2/3 of the people will say, this was one of the top most meaningful experiences in my life. And you could schedule that for next Wednesday. And that’s the thing. And research has been done. And we don’t take these kinds of what you call, Quantum Change Experiences, these mystical experiences. And it’s not a popular era of research because it’s so hard, it’s hard to bring it into the lab and really study. And psychologists have been, like myself, obsessed with understanding behavior change for hundreds of years. But we’re used to incremental behavior change. And we forget that the world is filled with these cases where people say “well, there was me before this experience and there was me after this experience.” And the world’s literature and mythology is filled with these.

AUBREY: Initiation rituals.

MATTHEW: Ebenezer Scrooge. Ebenezer rituals, it’s like “now you’re a man”. Bar Mitzvah or man, woman, it’s a traditional quest, like whatever tradition is.

AUBREY: And now all these rituals have gotten pretty hollow and shallow. So we don't have that actually baked in our culture. You think of "300", the wolf in the winter snow. The young king-to-be Leonidas goes out in the cold in the fucking snow, and this is a fictionalized story. He goes out there to confront the wild of the wilderness. This is a traditional vision quest, and come back, he leaves as a boy and comes back as a man. We used to have this baked into our own culture, where things would happen, where you were dramatically different from one place to another. At least for me, that was my initiation. That changed my life forever. I had a vision quest initiation with psilocybin and actually MDMA with a shaman, she was a part of the Stan Grof crew and went underground. She was unbelievably skilled. She took me out to the mountains of New Mexico, I stayed in a yard, and attended my fire. I had the tea, a psilocybin tea and a capsule of probably 100 milligrams of MDMA. I don't know at that point, what it was. But I remember, it was a combination of both. It completely changed my life forever. I was not the same boy that walked into the hut as the one that walked out two days later. It was one of those different things that the Aubrey that everybody knows who's listening would not be the same Aubrey without that initiation. It's not the only way. It's not the only way to do it but it's one of the few ways that we can safely do this now that really could work. And we're seeing it, as you said, on the medical side as well, these initiatory transcendental experiences shifting everything, three sessions of MDMA curing PTSD in a high percentage of people. It's a whole new model.

MATTHEW:  Yeah, and one advantage of these techniques, and I should be clear, everything has risks, and I never encourage any drug use. And by that, I mean, caffeine, you name it. 

AUBREY:  It's a very personal choice. That's important. 

MATTHEW: There are risks.

AUBREY: We should probably say that, at least three times more during this podcast, because it's important.

MATTHEW:  I need to say it every three seconds.

AUBREY:  For sure. 

MATTHEW:  But when I say it's relatively speaking, and this is what got my colleague, David Nutt removed as the official, essentially, the drug tsar in Great Britain years ago when he said, dirty street ecstasy, which, a lot of times we know, including research I've done is not MDMA, or it's mixed with plenty of impurities, even dirty street ecstasy, no question, far safer than horseback riding. He wrote this tongue in cheek article, he called it "Equasy",  he took the roots for horseback riding, made an ecstasy tie to it, made this very humorous article about there's this new, horrible drug, and he gave the same statistics for horseback riding. You read this thing, you're like, "Oh, my God!" Superman died five years ago, whatever. This is years ago, he wrote this but he's right. All these horrible statistics, who would allow this? I just want to make this point, when we're talking about, compared to traditional cultures, and lots of traditional techniques, go out and don't eat for weeks on end, go out in the desert, where you had to get your own water, you might die. A certain number of people don't make it, encounters with wild animals. In the right setting, these techniques, they have the risks, but they are incredibly safe. Psilocybin is so much safer than going skiing. And again, I'm not encouraging people to do any of this. I'm not encouraging people to go skiing or take psilocybin--

AUBREY: I take psilocybin when I go skiing. I'm really running the risk profile high up, but I swear to you, I'm a way better fucking skier. I become the mountain and the snow as I'm skiing. 

MATTHEW: At what kind of dose? 

AUBREY: Usually between a gramme and a gramme and a half.

MATTHEW: So a standard potency. 

AUBREY: On the lower side.

MATTHEW: Not a microdose. That's a real dose.

AUBREY: Again, we have to be really careful here, because a gramme, gramme and a half of what they call the Penis Envy strain, fuck off, no way! I'm going to melt into the chair and be going up and down, and up and down on the lift, going like, "I'm not getting off. No way I'm getting off. Don't make me get off." For sure. These experiences that I've had, and of course, I have a lot of experience, and this is not a recommendation to do what I do. But it's interesting, all of the biases that we have about like you're not going to be able to function or operate, I'm fucking telling you, I shred when I have a little psilocybin. And I know fighters who might take a little bit more than a microdose before they fight. I know a lot of people who experiment with these different compounds and actually get better, get more aware, and get more tuned into their environment. All of these ideas, hold them lightly. Some of them may be right. There could be psychotic breaks, I've seen that happen. And of course, that's why MAPS the Zendo Project, and why it's important to always be prepared, because this can trigger episodes that are scary and dangerous so to be very mindful, but also let's hold all of this propaganda that we've been told. Let's hold this lightly.

MATTHEW:  Think about things relatively. Think about the risks of swimming pools and all manner of sport.

AUBREY:  And all of the pharmaceutical drugs that exist. All of the other drugs, we're like, "Oh, yeah, whatever." Take benzos, SSRIs, take them. Go for it. Suicidality is a side effect, a known side effect of certain pharmaceutical compounds. Homicidality is a side effect of certain. What was the smoking cessation? 

MATTHEW: Varenicline Chantix was the brand name.

AUBREY: Chantix. Homicidality as a side effect. What the fuck.

MATTHEW: I was hearing anecdotes about that even before the black box warning. These weird stories that you wonder, has that made it into any medical file? A relative's co-worker's sister, this type of thing, killed a son. You just wonder how much of this is actually getting into the analyses. But yeah, this thing has pharmaceuticals. That's a good point, because in the context of medicine, not just having extreme experiences, but it's all risk-benefit ratio. We give drugs that we know cause motor damage like for schizophrenia. But sometimes that's the only thing that stops someone from having an absolutely hellish life with the voices. We do our best. What's the path forward? It's a risk-benefit. It might have risks but--

AUBREY:  That's science, actually, looking at everything without the biases, without the narratives, without all the stories and actually listening to people who have experiences. Recently, I just had Aaron Rodgers on the podcast. He's a quarterback for the Green Bay Packers, won a Super Bowl. Last two seasons, he's been the MVP of the league. A lot of ideas about what would happen if you did psychedelics. And I told this story, and I encouraged people to listen to the podcast with him telling the story, but the first time I met him, he listened to me do a podcast with his girlfriend at the time, Danica Patrick. And finish the podcast, he pulls me aside and he's like, "I want to tell you about one of the best days of my life." I was thinking fucking Super Bowl, I don't know, National Championship, MVP, something. I was figuring some football-related thing. He's like, "I took mushrooms for the first time on the beach and I merged with the ocean. And it was one of the best days of my life." 

MATTHEW: No championship ring?

AUBREY: I was like, "Damn. That's fucking cool." It goes to your same study. A life full of accolades and a life full of accomplishments and amazing things, the draft day, and the Super Bowl and all this and I also wonder for him, it was, “actually, that was the best day. I can't say that.” That started to form this initial friendship and then he did ayahuasca for the first time prior to the 2020 season. People think you can't do that, it'll tell you to stop playing football because football is stupid. It'll tell you all of these things. He goes out and he wins the MVP of the League two years in a row after that. Finally, he's telling the story. I just celebrate him for having the courage to share that story because it's important to change people's perceptions, to say “no, this isn't always going to tell you to stop doing what you're doing and do something different or make you worse at what you do.” It'll tell you that if it needs to tell you that, because it's you telling yourself that. It's some knowing that you have inside that this is unlocking. It's not like it has an agenda for you. It's you telling you what to do. And if you want to play football better, it'll tell you how to do that.

MATTHEW: I've never seen a single person move to a cave in India to meditate the rest of.  I've never seen that. I'm not saying it has never happened but--

AUBREY:  But people are so afraid of that. That's one of these ideas that is permeating culture.

MATTHEW: And spouses, and partners. That’s one of the things that struck me over the years, that oftentimes, a spouse or partner will have this concern of someone going to do a study with psilocybin. And they're like, "I've read about the stuff. It can cause personality change;" which is true, but one could hear that and think all kinds of things; "They're going to divorce me. They're going to move to some cave in India and sell our house and I'll be stuck with the mortgage like that." Never seen that. Not saying that, of course, this is people without tonnes of experience that are having a controlled, prepared integrated experience. You can't say that's never happened but some of the fears, they're out there and we just don't see them. 

AUBREY:  There's a disproportionate amount of actual actual stories versus the narrative story, that it's going to happen. I think that's what it's about. It's not saying this has never happened or it never will or never could but it's just starting to get everything in a more appropriate field of value. So you understand that this is the realm of possibility, this is on the extreme, aberrant outlier case. It is possible, but that would come from, and I think the important thing and I always stress, that would come from you having that truly deep desire.  The reality that you would think about moving to a cave in India if you hadn't already thought about it, and already been drawn about it, and as you close your eyes before you go to bed, you're already thinking, "I really wish I was in a cave in India," to think that that's going to happen, just because psychedelic's going to tell you some message, it doesn't work that way. It's a handshake between your consciousness, and the greater consciousness. Both are communicating to each other. That's why it works. It's not a one-size-fits-all. It's not like you go to the guru, and the guru doesn't listen to you, and just tells you what he wants to tell you. It's not fucking Zoltar. 

MATTHEW: Great reference. 

AUBREY: You know? It’s a different thing.

MATTHEW: I often think that when people get the best results, they have that orientation, there's an agency there. Like when someone says, "Oh, yeah, I did the session and now I know what psilocybin does to you. Now I know what psilocybin is like." Yeah, but no.” The bigger story is, when someone really gets slammed and you get the full monty experience, their whole soul was shattered, they're just like, "Oh, my God," this is what I learned about myself, this is what I learned about the nature of the universe. It's not about, this is what this particular compound does. That's a part of it, but it really fits with the old. It's just the key that unlocks the door. But what's behind that door? That's you. People have different ways to say it, whether it's just the chemical, throwing a monkey wrench into their brain that can allow greater access to their own psyche, whether it's a larger consciousness or what have you. It can be stated in many, many different ways but when it really seems to work, there's some sense of, it's something about you. It's something about you in relationship to the other, in relationship to the universe; if one is religiously inclined, God; language shifts, but you're at the center of it and that's where the learning happens. It's not just about what this drug does. It's about what I am and what am I here to do? Sometimes people just have that context. They're backing up and they're getting that larger and larger frame. It's like they've gone their whole life habituated and narrowed, narrowed, narrowed vision, and they're like, "What do I really want to do? What's really important to me?"

AUBREY: The way that I like to look at it, is the body is like the repository of all kinds of information and data and also possibility and proclivity. People can take it down the astrological route, or you can take it down the DNA route. You can take down all of these. But ultimately, we're a bunch of information that has been stored and we're a bunch of possibilities, our own blueprint of what we could be physically, our blueprint of what we could be mentally. All of the ways, the factors, everything we've learned, has created this kind of body of information and then the brain is more like a receiver that's available to download new information and interact and then also upload and share that information that you experience. It's this kind of two-way receiver and these psychedelics tend to tune the receiver to a different frequency that allows access to more information from the body, so more that you're able to bring into awareness and then more information from that which is outside of the body, that which is in the collective because we're all participating, as we said. All is mind, the universe is mental. Whatever substrate you want to call it, love, God, whatever, as a participatory agent, it's just opening up the brain to receive different information. It's like what Huxley was saying about how the brain is a cognitive filtering device.

MATTHEW: A reducing valve.

AUBREY: A reducing valve. And this opens up the Venetian blinds, and we get a little bit more information both internally and externally.

MATTHEW:  I've always loved that metaphor, because it also demonstrates there are times when you shouldn't use. You're trying to cross the street, you don't want those blinds all the way up so that you can navigate across the road. Someone could be tripping on acid, shrooms and ayahuasca, whatever in a busy city and they just like staring into their hands, like, "My God, that's a miracle. The hand is a miracle." And then that mad truck comes. From a certain perspective, that's a miracle too, but you really die.

AUBREY:  This happens. This happens. I took a heroic dose of mushrooms out in California and it's a beautiful setting in the day. And I started looking at the way my skin wrinkled over my knuckles and how it formed this pattern from all of the times that my hand is clasped and unclasped and I was like, "Holy shit, this is the record of everything I grabbed ever in my life." And I was like, "Wow."

MATTHEW: Millions of times. 

AUBREY: And this was 20 minutes of me doing that. Not appropriate for certain situations, to be doing that.

MATTHEW: But when you've carved out the right setting where it's safe to have that deep, deep contemplation...

AUBREY:  And then you'll never look at your hand the same again. You're going to be like,  "Thank you, hand."

MATTHEW: And the ripple effects, maybe that affords a little more empathy when you're passing the construction workers. Man, they're working their asses off and it's 103 degrees here in Austin and they're working with their hands all day. You can spread that empathy. It's like, "And everyone has a hand. And there's billions of hands."

AUBREY: Empathy seems like something that would be so important right now, because we're so polarized, we're so divisive in our culture. And I don't want to say that for everybody because there's a lot of people who are holding a really beautiful unity consciousness as well. So I don't want to also exacerbate the issue by claiming that this is the only thing that's happening, because there's also a counter movement to real inclusiveness. But there is a lot of polarization. Has anybody studied the empathy? This is important. Obviously, treating depression, all of these things, this is what makes a drug legal. And we gotta help ourselves first before we can serve others. I have an organization called Fit For Service, the idea is that in order to be of service, you have to be fit for service. I get all that. But also, we need to be good gardeners and stewards of society as a whole. And empathy for others is pretty fucking important if we're going to make it through this next stretch. And I know that MDMA has been called an empathogen, you prefer entactogen and I like that differentiation. But I wonder if that's been studied? Has anybody run a study on empathy?

MATTHEW:  These are, as you can imagine, hard things to study. What it looks like MDMA does in some sense, and it's been critiqued in terms of whether you can really call it an empathogen for this reason, calling into question whether it has reliable effects on empathy, is it's not like they're more accurate, like when you're looking at photos where the person is like, that's an angry face; the type of thing we have in common with the chimps and whatnot; that's a smile, that's an angry face. And there's tasks where you identify those emotions, and the number of milliseconds that it takes you to recognise that emotion on these photos, and how quickly they can flash, and still allow you to process, that's some measure, it's thought, of empathy. And so with measures like that-- 

AUBREY: Kind of, but it doesn't bring the feeling, it just brings the awareness,

MATTHEW: And how does that relate to if you saw someone really asking you for help on the side of the street in a tough spot, whether you're really going to help them? I'm with you there. But even with that measure, it seems like MDMA, more like giving people rose-coloured glasses. They actually misinterpreted, they interpreted some of the negative emotions as positive emotions.

AUBREY:  He's just going through this process, and it's beautiful.

MATTHEW:  Maybe, in some sense, it's functional and in certain situations, also you don't want to be a sucker and get hoodwinked into something. But, yeah, it may be. Now, of course,  that's MDMA. So there's some question about whether it's, at least, reliably affords. If you define empathy as really honing in, meeting that person where they're at, and understanding their emotion rather than assuming that there's something more positive going on than there really is. Of course, we could get very philosophical, maybe you're seeing a deeper layer, and seeing the positivity underneath. But psilocybin, one of the things that; again, isn't exactly like empathy but it's related. There are these interesting tasks that you do on a computer that simulate this game of just playing ball with three people playing ball. I'm throwing to you and you're throwing to me and there's this other guy, and we're just leaving him out. This is like me, the last person to get picked when I was in grammar school. It’s like a social exclusion task is what it's called. Where you model that, where it's really not other two people, and that's been modeled by the computer, we're just seeing how you respond to being that out person. So it seems like psilocybin allows people to be less likely to be hurt by being the out-person. Doesn't sound that dramatic in the scheme of things. The research is in its infancy--

AUBREY:  What are all the shooters? What's a commonality between all of these, not all, I can't say all, I would be mistaken. 

MATTHEW: You would think.

AUBREY:  But many, it seems like, they were a loner, they were outcasts, they were bullied, they felt separate from, they were playing this big social game of cyber ball in high school, which we've all participated in, to some degree, whether we're conscious of it or not, either as victim or perpetrator, sometimes often both...

MATTHEW: Then the walls go up.

AUBREY: The ability to deal with that, and the ability to understand that, and the ability to understand, on the other side, I think. It just feels, to me, like it's a big area that could, maybe, even just talking to you, nothing has quite nailed it from a scientific standpoint, it seems like if we could really find and drive the right study, to show this, which would have to be some kind of subjective measure of how you feel when you looked at somebody who is experiencing something hard. I remember the first time, of course, my very first psychedelic experience was, as I said, MDMA and psilocybin. It's a blended experience so it was its own thing. But the first time I did MDMA by itself, I was in Australia with my girlfriend at the time. And I remember we walked and my heart just blasted open, and it was like, oh, my God, this is the best feeling I've ever felt in my life, walking down the street, and I watched a girlfriend having a fight with her boyfriend. And boyfriend said something mean, and she just sat down. It wasn't a violent fight or anything but she sat down and started crying. I remember walking by her and I was like, "Oh, my God." I could feel her pain in such a way that it was like, I could just feel every bit of it. Normally, I would just walk by and be like, "Some drama. Poor girl." But I wouldn't let it land. It seems like there's an importance for that. For dealing with people's fear or their pain or their struggle, because we can get all too complacent with this ‘I don't need to feel what everybody else's feeling.’ I think it's important to feel it.

MATTHEW:  Yeah, I agree and it's kind of hard to imagine an issue with the world where that's not at the core, that's, at least, not a part of it, just labeling anybody, someone from another culture, someone from another political team or a different idea on a certain issue, just to throw them away. It seems like it's easy to do that these days. You just trash someone on Twitter, you try to cancel somebody over something minor, just to really go for the jugular. If you had that experience for that lady, if you were feeling that, even if there's some legitimate beef, it's hard to imagine someone going that far in so many cases, if they have some sense of that's a human. To just really contemplate that. I don't know, speaking for myself, a situation like that, oh my God, how many times have I made a partner cry? How many times have I been insensitive? This is the world. And sometimes people with psychedelics do have these profound experiences, where they just feel this universal suffering, and they empathize with it. It's hard to just take that in, the amount of suffering that we cause each other. To move away with that, if one is left with more empathy, what an incredible thing. I have to say, I've seen so many examples where psychedelic fans, psychedelic afficianados,  psychedelic research, you name it, I don't see much evidence that psychedelics, in general, are making people better people or more ethical people, or at least it's so noisy that that's a tough correlation to pick up on if you get what I'm saying. There's so many people where it seems like maybe too many psychedelic experiences or the wrong type of psychedelic experiences have magnified the ego, if you want to put it that way.  That's something I'm really curious about in the future. Can we really use these as technologies, not that it's the only thing, I'm with you. But could it play some role in training people? Tim Leary, back in the day, was interested, can we reform sociopaths, people who have committed murder and whatnot. This is the Concord Prison Experiment, and turns out there were some methodological flaws in that study Rick Doblin has found retrospectively. But nonetheless, this idea of could you really use this as a technology to reform people that are really struggling? What if we catch one of these young people with the signs that would go on to be a shooter, could there be a crash course? And it may not be psychedelics but something, or maybe psychedelics are part of it, but can we really have powerful technology? My gut tells me it's certainly not psychedelics alone, it would have to be a very judicious way of using them?

AUBREY:  Well, psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy like MAPS is doing. It seems like so much of the perpetration of harm on other people comes from trauma, really, where it's like hurt people hurt people. I think that's a truism that's actually true, where there's some deep pain that's in there, and showing the efficacy of MDMA in treating trauma. I think that's one definite way that I think we could reduce a lot of the issues. Then there's also potentially,  that other side of allowing someone to step into empathy. If I was going to study something and I just had a magic wand, what would be interesting to me, would be, let's say, a murderer, and they have to, often in court, they have to listen to the victim's family express what they're going to express but if they created that situation where that murderer was on, I don't know, give him a whack of a dose, maybe 200 milligrammes of MDMA and really had to hear those tears with their heart blasted open, what happens then how is that experience? How does that land and how does that shift when they actually can't block it off from their own pain and their own callus and their own bias and all of this other stuff? Would that land in a different way, where actually you could trust them to be rehabilitated and we'd move from purely a punitive model to actually a rehabilitative model?

MATTHEW:  That's such an interesting question. There are these stories I'm sure you've heard of where; and I'm sure it's the small minority of cases where that person, without the MDMA, the victim's parents or whatever, there's a number of these cases over the years, they visit the person once a month and they become fast friends. These amazing things, my god, on all sides. It's on the victim's family side to have that radical forgiveness and openness, and on the other person's side to really make it,  they can never correct what they've done, but to transform. So if that's one in 1000, because I know these things happen, the accused is probably rarely open enough. They're scared for their life, the natural human defenses, whatever, the situation they felt justified, at the individual level, or society was whatever, mean to them, and they don't give a shit. At whatever level it is, the guards are up. What if you could just knock them down in that one, and you don't have to do it their whole life, but that one moment where then the floodgates come in and it's like, those types of experiences where you can't come back from. It's not like you can forget that. That's an interesting idea. I wouldn't want to force the accused to take some substance. You get to weird places there with civil liberties. 

AUBREY: Of course, they have to give full consent.

MATTHEW: And a lot of people would probably be open to it, just to the level of, "Shit, get me high before. This is hell. I'm about to go to prison. I'll take whatever. Sounds fun."

AUBREY: It's interesting to explore as we transition into the more beautiful world, where I truly, optimistically, believe we're headed and I believe the psychedelic renaissance is playing a bigger part in that than people understand. The algorithms look bleak. If you don't account for some of these changes that are happening on the fundamental consciousness level, because of the psychedelic renaissance. All the people who are going to be going in to treat their depression, or treat their PTSD, or treat their addiction or treat this thing, and all of a sudden, their heart opens up and they have contact with the divine and see themselves as part of an interconnected web and see everybody as them living a different life. Oh, and by the way, they help their depression or their anxiety. But the side effects are so potent in the positive way, potentially. And is not again, universal, but in the aggregate, I think, we're going to see some big, big shifts that are going to come, that are going to start to change the algorithm quite significantly.

MATTHEW:  I love these stories. I did this line of research, where we use psilocybin to help people quit smoking, just tobacco smoke, which, as many people know, is as serious an addiction as they come, but at another level, it's like, oh, yeah, you're just quitting smoking. You're not doing anything that's going to get you locked up in prison and your spouse probably hasn't left you over it, even though it's a hardcore addiction. Even though we warn people,  this isn't just about quitting smoking. You undergo a high-dose psilocybin session, don't be surprised if you revisit trauma that you had in your past that you wrestle with deep-seated, psychological issues, maybe just existential fear, or anything, that thing deep down in the basement of your mind that you don't want to share with anyone, that you're guilty about, that you're afraid of what have you, that thing's going to get out. It could, not necessarily, but dude, don't count on that thing staying put. We are blasting out the basement.

AUBREY: I can just see them giving their account to you researchers and giving this long report of their mystical experience, Unio Mystico, their apotheosis with the divine and then you being like, "What do you feel about smoking?" They're like, "Oh, yeah, fuck that. That's crazy. I don't want to do that with you guys." Like this thing, they're like, "Oh, yeah, duh. I'm not going to do that anymore but let me tell you more. I was fucking speaking to these beings. I have to tell you about this..."

MATTHEW:  We definitely see that. And even though we try our best, just doing the study, it's like setting yourself up for that. Even though we let people know, still they're like really, as you said it, that could be a quote from somebody. They're like, "Dude, really? You're going to ask me about smoking." But often they're like, "Yeah, oh, yeah, totally. I'm done smoking. Why would I want to smoke with--"

AUBREY:  Life is too magical.

MATTHEW:  At so many levels. Dude, this is so interesting. How can I even be interested in smoking? Life priorities. I don't know, why would I want to do that? It just seems like things solidify. But sometimes you get folks where they still struggle, so they haven't quit smoking. But yet you see these amazing life transformations where they say, "Oh, gosh, I'm getting along with my parents better than I ever have." Man, we got to record this person as a failure. No one's failure, to be clear. As not a success. 

AUBREY:  Sure, because that's the nature of the outcome you're looking for. I want to talk a little bit about the mechanism of action, because I think this is interesting. So there's a lot of compounds, psychedelics and otherwise, that are actually not really so much psychedelics, but a lot of drugs and medicines too, that are interacting on the neurotransmitter level. So MDMA, for example, serotonin system, dominantly, little action with the dopamine system.

MATTHEW: Right. Right. Primarily serotonin.

AUBREY: And cocaine, mostly dopamine?

MATTHEW: Primarily, yeah. Dopamine. No adrenaline but mainly dopamine. Just doing the magic.

AUBREY:  And then alcohol GHB, mostly GABA.

MATTHEW:  Right. Correct. And same thing with all the benzos, ativan, not vicodin, it's an opioid, valium, Librium, et cetera, Xanax.

AUBREY:  The cholinergic-like acetylcholine upregulating that, that was actually our flagship product for Onnit, Alpha BRAIN, was really actually targeting that as a primary neurotransmitter certainly. And we did that with different cholinergic compounds, acetylcholinesterase inhibitors and different things that come from Huperzia Serrata, which is club moss in China and some cool things like Alpha GPC and different ways to upregulate that, help people get sharp. And it's actually very similar to a nicotinic receptor. Acetylcholine and nicotine are kind of similar, just create sharpness and mental acuity.

MATTHEW: Nicotinic is a subtype of acetylcholine receptors, absolutely. That's why nicotine is such a separate, as you've written about, it is separated from tobacco. Especially tobacco-smoking, it's one of the few compounds ever that we're really sure of and probably we know more than any other compound. It's a nootropic, I mean, it really enhances learning, not just combating fatigue like amphetamines, the same ones are great if you're so tired, you're going to fall asleep and you need to study by staying up yet, amphetamines, and all of the stimulants work great for that. Truly, if you control for the time spent on a task, something that truly enhances learning, I don't think there's anything more solid than nicotine. So anyway, acetylcholine is so critical to learning.

AUBREY:  And we ran those two studies with the Boston Centre for Memory and showed executive function, peak alpha state, it's shown some statistically significant improvements, duplicated that study twice. So there's some cool things that happen and then also some very pleasurable things that happened from neurotransmitter modulation. I think this is kind of like one of the first classes of different substances that we're really drawn to. In some way, it's just shifting the composition and availability of our neurotransmitters.

MATTHEW:  Yeah, yeah. So the acetylcholine system is interesting. Some of the drugs called hallucinogens have anticholinergic effects. So there's scopolamine and atropine. This is in Jimsonweed, belladonna and a lot of ancient herbs that have been used since ancient times and modern day, but have never been outlawed, because not too many people use them regularly.

AUBREY: They're a little uncomfortable. A lot of those are actually associated with different forms of what would be called brujeria or sorcery or witchcraft. Maybe just thinking about it, if the acetylcholine system is helping keep you focused, and on task and sharp, if you completely down-regulate that, you're going to be like, what, I'm soup.

MATTHEW: Completely dissociated. Yeah. And in fact, Sacha Shulgin, the famed psychedelic chemist, referred to these as the true hallucinogens. As you know and many people know, the classic psychedelics: psilocybin, LSD, mescaline, they don't cause hallucinations. A key to that definition is that you actually believe the thing is there. You see the pink elephant and you think a pink elephant is there. These anticholinergics, those are true hallucinogens.

AUBREY:  That's the one thing. Actually, as you make that definition, I've had so many visions, from spaceships, to fucking dinosaurs to whatever. I've talked about all my visions, demons and angels, the whole gamut of everything you could possibly imagine but I've never had a hallucination, because I've never believed that they were real, well, real in the spiritual sense. They were real in a non-dimensional way. But not actually real.

MATTHEW: Right, this gets difficult to talk about. You may not have been able to talk at the time, but if we say, "Aubrey, do you really, really think, at least, in this consensus reality, is it really in the room?" You'd  probably say no.

AUBREY:  I didn't nudge my body and be like, "Do you see that spaceship that was beaming that light underneath my tongue?" No. Even though that was real as hell

MATTHEW: I think you're a Ram Dass fan, right?

AUBREY: Yeah.

MATTHEW: He wrote in, was it "Be Here Now"? Might have been "Be Here Now", might have been another one of his books, like "The Only Dance There Is". But he relates a story of, I think he and a buddy, Ralph Metzner from the Harvard group back in the day. And he said they were at a hotel, a meeting, a conference or something, Ralph was in his room. They were on one of these compounds, some experimental, highly potent anticholinergic, hallucinogen. A lady from the hotel itself, somehow came to the room and offered them lemonade. Don't ask me why. Or water, some liquid, and she filled up his glass, and it filled up the glass and then it overflowed to the floor. And he's like, "This water keeps flowing. It keeps flowing." It actually raised up on the floor, raised up all the way in the room, filled up and it went up to him and Ralph's necks and they're like, "Oh, my God," I guess the lady had left. And he was like, "What's happening?" And all of a sudden, then the water started going down, everything went in reverse, and the water came back up into the pitcher. And then he was like, "Oh, my God, Ralph, did you just see that?" And then he realized Ralph had never been there. It was him by himself the whole time. Even these layers of coming back, oh, that person wasn't even there. And I think Sacha Shulgin relayed the story of some of his stuff in his books. You're not sure whether it was him or a buddy of his and he was clever about that. But those drugs, it's like you're driving with someone you thought was in the passenger seat, and you're driving into San Francisco, he lived in the suburbs of San Francisco. And you happened to have this half-hour long conversation with him and then you just realize he was never there. And of course, when kids usually have tried to smoke Jimsonweed or whatever, a very similar different mechanism but similar with Amanita muscaria mushrooms, a typical story and the reason they never need to make these things illegal is that you wake up a day later in the woods having pissed yourself and you have no memory of how you got there and you're like, “I don't want to do that again.

AUBREY:  I heard the whole Christmas myth about Amanita muscaria. For those who don't know, the whole Santa Claus myth, these jolly Siberian hut shamans with the rosy cheeks from taking the Amanita and the reindeers who they would drink the piss, they'd feed the reindeers the Amanita muscaria and it would, somehow take out the toxin that was in there, what was it, mascaror or whatever? I don't know. Whatever. There was a toxin that if you drink the urine. So they were with reindeers all the time. And then it was white and red caps, this whole lineage that was told by Tero Isokauppila who was on my podcast and I looked into it. Rogan loves this story too.

MATTHEW: That it influenced the whole Santa Claus, the red and the white.

AUBREY:  And they would give gifts out of their bag, and they would be jolly because they were high as hell. I think it does involve the GABA system, if I'm correct as well, Amanita does.

MATTHEW: In multiple compounds, I think, ibotenic acid being one, muscimol, but it's this collection of various degrees of toxicity. And that's the thing, most that’s where the classic psychedelics, like DMT and LSD, psilocybin, that's where they really distinguish themselves because most drugs, at a high enough dose are going to cause psychedelic-type effects, where your whole conception of reality in some way, shape or form starts to unravel and radically alter, not just your little speed up or slow down or relax. But the classic psychedelics do that at a dose that is really safe physiologically. You don't have to come too close to death. Tobacco will do that but you almost die. 

AUBREY: You're not anywhere near the LD50. 

MATTHEW: And so some of these compounds like that are a little bit further along that continuum.

AUBREY:  It's a little sketchier. 

MATTHEW: Yeah, yeah. 

AUBREY: I had a bunch of buddies, we were all in this psychedelic. It was like 2006 to 2010 kind of era, where we were really just exploring, trying to figure it out. I read a bunch about Amanita muscaria, so I had one of my braver buddies try it. You could buy them, one for free. He took it and he was going through this experience and he was convinced that the Battletoads were here. And the Battletoads was an old Nintendo game, I think, or like an arcade game. He's like, "The Battletoads. What are we going to do about the Battletoads?" I'm like, "There's no Battletoads, man." And he was convinced. After that Battletoads incident, I was like, "Nope." That was too real for me. You know what I mean? It crossed the line from vision. It wasn't like the Battletoads appeared and they told me that I need to love myself more. There was no message. It was like the Battletoads are here and we got to deal with it. And I was like, okay, I'm out. Also, I've talked to people who, and I want to talk to you about this one as well, like Salvia has created intense hallucinations for the people who I've talked to. 

MATTHEW:  I actually did the first blinded study showing any psychoactive effects of salvinorin A, the active principle of salvia divinorum. We basically had them smoke it out of a meth pipe, and went up to doses that were around two milligrammes, which is a really high dose, 2,000 micrograms, it's normally measured in micrograms. People at the higher doses, in our study, were routinely saying that they were communicating with entities. Very, very different, but very DMT-like, in terms of the intensity, and the dissociative nature of it. There are people where it seems like it could be therapeutic, and it has been therapeutic, and that there are profound insights to be garnered from it. I think those are harder to capture, at least for your average person if one is philosophically inclined. If one is a psychonaut that is used to these waters, they're probably. This is just my personal assessment, there's no good data in any way shape or form on this but my impression is that one can get, much like a smoked DMT experience, or 5-methoxy DMT experience, one can get those deeper kind of insights from it of various types, but it's just a little harder for your average person to get because the main response is, "What the fuck?" It's so overwhelming.

AUBREY: If people want to just take my own personal feelings. I've been on psychedelic medicine for the past 23 years, and still, I look at those things and go, "Hmm, not today." I never have. And probably there's a deeper trust of myself in those, I just have so much trust with the classic psychedelics that I don't have after listening to the experiences and being there for the Battletoad incident with my buddy. I don't really see a purpose for it other than to say, well, maybe I'll trust myself to go into a place where things that aren't real could appear real, and see how I navigate that experience. If I did that, I would want all of my best allies to be there,my wife, who's an amazing medicine woman, my brother Kyle, who's a deeply veteran psychonaut who's had incredibly intense encounters with what he calls Wetiko which is the confusing distorting darkness of the universe, that has really had him pump his brakes significantly on any medicine because he's got stuck in different. So there's caveats everywhere. Kyle was the bravest of the brave. He did a 30-gram mushroom dose which kicked off this whole thing. He's told his own story about this and there's more story to tell. It's been two years, and he's still unwinding some of these challenges. But for this experience, I'd want him there. I'd want to call the Avengers, I'd want to call the Avengers and maybe it would just be hilarious and we'd all just be laughing together. But if I got twisted, I would want Kyle who's also a giant UFC fighter black belt, like one of my best friends in the universe, I'd want him to be able to just hold me. I'd want all bases covered if I was going to do this. Just allow that to be a lesson for everybody is, even me, with all of these experiences, there's still things that there's no fucking chance I would do them unless I had the very best of the very best there with me to cover my bases.

MATTHEW:  I always want to be cautious. I don't like being critical of folks, but what I will say is that some folks might be looking at the other folks that take everything and they've done all of the alphabet compounds, they've taken 2C-B-FLY, and they've taken 5-methoxy DMT, 4-hydroxy-DiPT.

AUBREY: People are taking notes, looking shit up as you say all these things.

MATTHEW: Those are the interesting ones.

AUBREY: Here's my audience pulling over in their car hitting rewind 30 seconds and being like, "I'm getting tips here."

MATTHEW: These are the interesting ones. To those people who haven't done it, you don't need to be those people. And those people, I'm glad there's all types of people in the world. There's the extreme explorer. I'm glad there are people that do the wingsuits, they jump off. I don't want to do it. 

AUBREY: Yeah, me neither. 

MATTHEW: I'm not even sure if I'd want to skydive. I might be open to that. You see what I mean? Not everyone should be like that. And the other question is so have you conquered  and explored that whole range of experience that psilocybin can offer? And anyone that really has any idea.

AUBREY: Sure. And the thing is, it's an endless lesson. Even Don Howard, one of my great teachers, 50 years of serving medicine, particularly as a Wachumero he's like, "There's always a deeper layer. It always gets deeper." He still showed up to every one of his ceremonies, thousands upon thousands of ceremonies with Wachuma as a student, ready to learn, and he was the greatest Wachumero that I think, our contemporary era has ever known. He unbelievably revived the ancient Chauvin tradition and was really like a torchbearer for the really old way of the huachuma masada ceremony. Absolutely just stunning grandfather maestro. But he showed up every time as a student ready to learn, ready to learn something new. He'd had his experience with these different compounds and different things, of course, just peeking his head into it. But he was able to continue his path of learning and growth, just sticking with one, and getting deeper and deeper and deeper and deeper. Because there's so much there. It's an infinite amount. That's why it's funny to me when people are like, "You're still doing psychedelics, bro? You haven't learned everything you need to learn?" I'm like, "No,  there's a whole universe to explore inside and outside."

MATTHEW: Especially if you take the orientation, it's more about you than it is about the other compound. I always think of it as this interaction between two entities. One is this molecule and one is relatively simple. Molecules are simple little things. You could build Tinker Toys to represent their shape. And the other thing is like the most complex thing we know of in the universe, the human brain and the associated human mind. So if that is an interaction between those two things, what is the heavy hitter? Well, the heavy hitter in that interaction is not the simple little Molly. In terms of creating that particular experience, it was a part of it. But it's more about what was in here, in here, than it was about what was in that compound. All that said, I'm glad that people have created, like Sasha Shulgin, I mentioned, and great chemist Dave Nichols, people have created all of these compounds. And then people like Sasha Shulgin have taken them and described what these are. I think that's important. But not everyone needs to be taking every compound. Terence McKenna wasn't a fan of taking all of these. Yeah, these things, you don't know, some of them, they're brand new. What's it going to do in 20 years? At least I know something about psilocybin. You could think about it also, like “Am I going to get in trouble with this analogy,” ladies or potential partners, there's different models, there's the quantity model but that's also, the quality--

AUBREY: Can you go deep with one person versus just experiencing a new person shallowly.

MATTHEW: Yes, you know what it's like to be deeply in love with someone for years and years. They're different. You can't say that there aren't benefits. 

AUBREY: Or there's polyamory where you go deep with a couple different people. I'd say I'm a psychedelic polyamorous. There's a few things that I'm really deepening my relationship with and it'll evolve, it'll go through seasons. There's seasons where it's like, okay, and I'll get really clear guidance internally. This is the season where you're here to explore this thing. And then eventually–

MATTHEW: So like topics? Different compounds? Or you mean like--

AUBREY: Compounds. Compounds were giving me access to a body of knowledge internally, that it was like this is your study. This is your course of study with this particular one for this period. For me personally, LSD doesn't agree with me, not in a micro dose, not in a macro dose. I've tried it multiple times and it feels slippery, feels like I'm on one of those INDO BOARDS where I'm all balanced and all of a sudden, I just go “whoop”, and then I'm smacked on my back and like, how did I get here?

MATTHEW: I love the analogy.

AUBREY: It felt really slippery, whereas psilocybin feels like a steady driving.

MATTHEW: Interesting. Some people have said, LSDs, they'll describe it as too forceful. Does that kind of fit with your, or not quite?

AUBREY: It is strong. I think the nonspecific amplifier is also good, it just feels like it's adding a lot of energy to my own psychology, which is a little slippery in its nature. 

MATTHEW: And you might have enough of your own--

AUBREY: Of course, I come very watery, very fluid, and very captured by the story innately. I think LSD amplifies me, in that deeper way. It's not that LSD is slippery, it's that I'm slippery. It's making that inherent quality of me more active. It's like when people say that cannabis makes you anxious. No, it doesn't. You're anxious. It just amplifying your anxiety. I think it's pointing to an inherent slipperiness that I have with thought patterns and stories and things like that whereas I feel like some of the other medicines are, I feel like I got an older brother or a father or grandfather or grandmother that's helping guide my experience and keeping me in bumpers, like I'm in a bowling alley and I got bumpers, and I'm moving around, but I'm heading towards the pins of the insights that I'm looking for.

MATTHEW:  Right, right. Someone's keeping you from going off that cliff, if you were to veer towards it.

AUBREY: And if I do go into some crazy, dark gutter ball scenario, there's always a purpose for it. I can always come out of it, whereas with LSD, I've come out of something and been like, "I gained nothing from that, other than I survived it." I didn't get shit out of that, whereas on ayahuasca or whatever, I've encountered the World Crusher, it was negotiating for the soul of my father, and all of these crazy fucking horrific things, stole my heart and gave me a fake one in return, and then I was bargaining with him, and then the angels came and said, "You can't get your heart stolen." I was the whole drama but I finished that and I was like, "Wow, that was a hell of a journey. I learned a lot from that." Whereas with LSD, for me, personally, it's just been like, "Why did we even do that? Where did we go? What was going on there, mind? What did I learn?" This is just my one story, my own personal psyche, and that doesn't disclaim the incredible benefit that so many other people have gotten from it, but it's about knowing thyself. Know thyself and know how these things interact.

MATTHEW: And maybe one day, through brain scanning, through personality questionnaires, and maybe a triangulation of all of these things, we could say oh no, psilocybin is the compound for you, we know that because of the ratio of serotonin, dopamine and this area of the brain, whatever it is. And moreover, you need this, you need 23 milligrammes not 25, not 20; 23. Maybe we'll figure out and I think there's a good chance because man, people who have strong opinions. You name the compound, they're like, well, like I said, "Some people say LSD is too pushy. Other people will say, "No, it's the exact opposite. Psilocybin is too pushy. And LSD is more relaxed." I don't think anyone really calls these things relaxed. Probably haven't done a high enough dose. But nonetheless, people say the opposite things and it's probably all true. Now, some of that might be driven by placebo effect, which is, as we talked about, this miraculous response, so that's not to be dismissed, but some of it might be very real differences, very real biologically observable differences in their brain, you respond better to this compound. Just like for some people, aspirin works better than ibuprofen or vice versa for a headache

AUBREY:  Everybody in their uniqueness. What is the mechanism of action for salvia divinorum?

MATTHEW:  So it's a kappa-opioid agonist, meaning it activates a certain type of opioid receptor. For folks who are thinking oh my god, sounds horribly addictive, we know about opioids. Well, those are all the opioids that we normally think of: heroin, morphine, oxycodone, which is Oxycontin, Percocet, hydro, codeine, Vicodin and, of course, fentanyl, those are all new opioid agonists. That's a primary receptor. So there's different types of opioid receptors just like the classic psychedelics activate the serotonin subtype 2A receptor, well, there's subtypes of opioid receptors. Salvia divinorum, the main principle active compound in it, salvinorin A, activates the kappa-opioid receptor. The Kappa-opioid receptor is interesting, because it seems to lead to a similar sort of analgesia, but it does not lead to the euphoric effects. People have and companies have developed in the past compounds that are hoping to develop as analgesics as new pain relievers that were less addictive, that have relied more on the kappa-opioid system, but those have been thrown out in clinical trials, because you're doing this clinical trial, and this person's like, "Dude, I'm starting to grow wings here and fly away." Literally, there's a paper that wrote that. I'm not making that up. One of these exotic kappa-opioid agonists was being developed. So they cut the trial, or they reduced the dose, I think, in that case. We don't really know why activating the kappa-opioid receptor leads to these sorts of extraordinary changes. A backdrop is when we say what's the mechanism of action of this compound or that compound, there's so many met, it's so complex. We can talk what's the receptor that's hit in the brain. That's just the first domino in this... One of the scenes where the whole room is filled with all those dominoes then goes up a bridge and it will knock each other over and it does a spinny thing and does this. The brain receptor, that's just the first domino, which is a big deal. And there's questions about what are the signaling cascades within that cell, within that neuron, that it makes to have this effect or that effect. Once the ligand, the drug, has attached to that receptor, is it going to make it less active, more active? But then there's its effects on other neurons and then we're talking about, ultimately, the system, more of a system's level. So it may be that a key common action to many of these broadly defined psychedelics or hallucinogens are their effects on brain network dynamics, which is a fancy way of saying the communication or synchronization of different brain areas with each other. So one of the things that's been observed with psilocybin and LSD and also with salvia divinorum or salvinorin A the main agent in salvia divinorum is that there's these massive differences in these communication patterns across the brain. It's less about this one particular area is more active or less active. It's more about, oh, if you measure that activity, or inactivity across the whole brain, then, all of a sudden, there's patterns emerge that weren't there before. There's communication, and that fits with, now jumping to the phenomenological, the subjective experiential level, where it's like it seems like these things are boundary-dissolving. I normally do this in my everyday life but I don't realize how that's so disconnected with my life priority that I have, or this emotional aspect of my being or this relationship. We put things into compartments, and we get through life doing that. And even at the perceptual level, this may be consistent with synesthesia, hearing colors, for example, this boundary breaking, the brain communicating more with itself. And then you have certain networks that are typically more active that are engaged with interpreting consensus reality and then there are others that drive you to pay attention or active when you're paying attention to something and then there are other networks that are dissolved. So it's just a massive change, whether it's decoupling certain networks, making certain networks more active, but it seems like there's this radical change in the communication across the brain.

AUBREY: Basically, to summarize, the reductionist approach to understanding these things ultimately fails; well, not fails but it actually--

MATTHEW: It's only a small piece.

AUBREY: It's a small piece of a more holistic approach, because psilocybin is interacting with the 5-HT2A receptors but it's also shifting the blood flow in the brain away from the default mode network and into other areas of the brain, to a certain degree. So it's shifting the communication and also the energetic concentration in different aspects, in different parts of the brain. 

MATTHEW: And that might be similar to other compounds, or others and we don't know yet. It may be that if you do some super intense nondrug altered state, maybe that's the same thing that's happening with Holotropic breathwork when it is really working well. We don't know yet. We haven't done the study.

AUBREY: And the thing is, the reason why those studies, studies cost money, studies are expensive. And I think one of the best philanthropic causes out there is funding studies that are studying these things, like what is happening during a holotropic breathwork experience or deep Wim Hof breathing, there's lots of different practitioners. This is a big part of my own personal practice, and that hyper-oxygenation. Okay, hyper-oxygenation, you get that but what is happening that's causing you to have that deep cathartic experience. Where's it going? Is it your brainwave state because that's another measure that's worth taking a look at, that's really interesting, I know. And Joe Dispenza's done some work where his most advanced meditators when they're experiencing contact with angelic beings and angelic realms, they're in super high gamma, super, super high gamma. And then one of the medicines that I've gotten the most value out of is ketamine in the last few years, learning a lot from utilizing that medicine, which is actually dropping your brainwave into, as far as I understand, more of a waking delta, you're getting more activity in the waking delta state. So it's like all the way at that frequency, there's some interesting information available and all the way at the super high frequency, there's interesting information available. On ayahuasca, it felt like a few times, and also N,N-DMT smoked in a different way. I felt like my head peeled off in an interesting way, like my whole head peeled off. My radio frequency was just open to a whole other dimension. I wish I had some kind of hook up on my brain that was measuring what was my brainwave state doing. And why was that different than the other 25 times I did ayahuasca,  you know what I mean? What happened? What happened? What switch went on in my brain with roughly the same compound that made this big difference? Intuitively, I think, brainwave patterns also have something, a big piece of this puzzle to describe.

MATTHEW: And I think in the big picture, that's a huge point, like in moving forward with the science. It's another form of reductionism. It's like something I said earlier, it's not about what psilocybin does. That's one way to put it. You could say the brain or what is the person, how does their behavior change after the psilocybin? What does the brain do after an experience on psilocybin when they're seeing angels, or they're having a bad trip, or they're dissolved into the nameless form, you name it, we can go on forever, different psychedelic experiences, those probably all look very different. We're not there yet, in terms of really, and it may be that there's more relationship on certain biological measures. In terms of therapeutic outcomes, between say, a psilocybin experience of a certain type, and an MDMA experience of a certain type and just a life experience of a certain type or a course of psychotherapy or meditation, or you name it, holotropic, breathwork, Wim Hof breathing, whatever. A reductionist thinking thinks, the compound, that's the commonality. Clearly, that's part of it and that's kind of opening up a wider range of very extraordinary experiences. But there's probably something very different going on with these very different experiences. Sometimes people are like blood pressure, it's going up and the person's, they're freaking out. They're in a safe environment in the study, but nonetheless, it's one of those cases where you thinking “oh, I'm glad they're here with me” rather than when they're walking around Downtown Austin, where they really, this is putting them in a very vulnerable place. And then other times, people are like, "Oh, God, I'm at the most peace," and their blood pressure's as cool as a cucumber. Same compound. The psychology is different.

AUBREY: And measures like the HeartMath Institute is doing about the electromagnetic field of the heart and heart-brain coherence. There's so many different interesting things that would actually need to all be in play for us to really understand what's happening here. 

MATTHEW:The full system.

AUBREY: And still, even still, there's going to be something that's part of the mystery. The mystery does not always let us look up her skirt. Sometimes she's just like, "No. Get your hand out of my pants. I'm the mystery. You just behold. Be grateful for what you got.

MATTHEW: I think that's just a humbling and realistic perspective in science in general. The menu is never the meal. These are all descriptions, we just try to come as close as we can. And whenever you think you figure it out, 99% of reality and working on that last 1%, it's like, yeah, that's what they thought 1000 years ago. 

AUBREY: Yeah, we always think that. We always think that.

MATTHEW: A little something left to the imagination is not a bad thing. I mean it's job security, if you're a scientist or a philosopher.

AUBREY: How boring would it be if we got to the answer of all things.

MATTHEW: Figured it all out.

AUBREY: He really wanted me to come out there. He wanted me to be one of the trial participants since they got. And I was like, "I would, but it's kind of a long way to go just to do DMT."

MATTHEW: Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

AUBREY: If he came here, sure. Let's go. But it's like a hike to get all the way to the UK. I'm interested to see his results. To me, it's not as interesting, personally, just because I don't feel a compulsion to prove whether they are or they aren't.

MATTHEW: I mean, how could you ever prove?

AUBREY: I think it's more like I want to show that they're real. Well, they're real to me.

MATTHEW: I'm more attracted to a Jungian analysis, where it's like he said, about UFOs. Well, the interesting thing is that it's not really whether they're real or not. The fact that a lot of people in the world are reporting these things, that's a real thing. These experiences are real and what's that about? So at a certain level, I don't know. Like you were saying, the brainwaves of someone having an angel encounter experience, that's a real experience, no matter what the reality of the angel is or not. And certain phenomena like speaking in tongues, regardless of what you think on the theological aspect of that, that's a distinct state, something is very interesting going on.

AUBREY: Well, let's talk about this. So we just took a bathroom break, we may roll in with some of our commentary, we were just talking about entities and my feeling of being like, doesn't really stress me out whether you want to think of them as real or not real, I know what those encounters feel like and I know what the value of them are. I just have a feeling for it. I don't feel compelled to try and prove that they're real or not real, because I think you're in a paradoxical bind. You have to expand your whole paradigm in your dimensional understanding of the universe and reality itself in an interesting way, which is a more complex kind of conversation. But the experience of contact with energies or aspects of self that are beyond what the normal is, I've had this with many of, particularly, my female friends and my partner, who can, I will watch her access a being or an aspect of her or an energy where she can sing in a language that's a beautiful, impeccable language or transmit in a language where my body, the cells of my body will understand it, in a way. My best friend Caitlyn will drop into this. For her, the story is more of a Mother Mary type of energy and it sounds like an Aramaic language, but even more ancient, and she'll be transmitting something and feeling this emotion and I feel like she's talking to me about my pain and feeling my pain, and I just start, fully sober. If she gets into this and her hand will be moving in this sign language and she'll be weeping and I'll start weeping. That experience is fucking real to me. And whether that's an aspect of her that's latent, and part connected to another aspect of her that's in another dimensional reality of the unborn and undying part of her, you really have to carve out a whole understanding of the universe to really even make sense of that. But for me, it's like, what did you feel? What was there for you? What happened? And when that happens, for her or my wife, it's medicine. I just know it. And I know that that medicine is real. So to me, it's like, yeah, it was real. But the question of was it like language? Is it a real language? Is it not a real language? Is it the expression of a frequency? Who cares?

MATTHEW:And I think we do a disservice in science, when we do a lot of this. We dismiss entire areas because of that, at least, at that outer layer. If you just think it's implausible, and it's not even worth your time to study an experience like that, because clearly, like, whatever she's not channeling some Aramaic speaker from like, whatever one's interpretation might be. If you don't buy into that. The idea that there's nothing interesting going on there, nothing therapeutic going. And gosh, this is in part why psychedelics were dismissed for so long and why a general interest in things that are considered broadly speaking, religious and spiritual aren't taken as seriously because we get hung up on that ontological reality. And as you're aware, something interesting is going on here, no matter what your, whether it's glossolalia, speaking in tongues, it sounds like speaking in tongues, the same phenomenon, maybe of a different variety. What's happening in her brain? Is there a genuineness that's pouring through somehow that you're getting from her in this maybe more unfiltered expression, again, regardless of any overlay of any other story around it. It sounds like something very interesting is happening there.

AUBREY: And the communication that's happening between my psyche and the other person's psyche, it's happening in a magical way. I would be gaslighting myself if I dismissed the magic of the experience. For example, I'll give a very, very recent example. So in my own explorations, and again, I don't recommend this, but I'm prescribed ketamine. I've also justifiably had my own battles with depression and battles with anxiety. Ketamine's shown some benefit of that. Wonder Science has gone through the whole programme and has my lozenges and et cetera. But I also use them for my own exploration, as I mentioned, and sometimes pairing with cannabis and I've talked a bit about that, it's been a really instructive thing. And I got a clear message on, in a ketamine journey, I was like, okay, now explore this in combination with DMT. It was the first time after a couple years of deepening my relationship with ketamine. And I had never done this before, even though I have access to DMT. So I got access to DMT and I went into it, and my wife was totally sober. The experience got kind of heavy, it got heavy. 

MATTHEW: You don't say. Ketamine plus DMT.

AUBREY: It got heavy. And she was in the bathroom, and she was just rummaging around, I don't know, getting ready for something. I just had my mind fold on my and my headphones on. I was like, "Vylana!" And she comes right over. And, intuitively, she knew and she put her hand on my heart and she started singing this Ikaro and she's never sung an Ikaro, doesn't Ikaros or whatever but she tapped into this frequency of what was the perfect thing and I just pulled my headphones off and she's just singing this thing in this other language, I'm getting chills now thinking about it, in this other language but in this tonality that was familiar from all the great shamans I've worked with, Maestro Orlando Chujandama, the Quechua tradition, Don Robere, Maestro Roberto and Maestro Hamud,  all of these different egos from the traditional, which, of course, DMT is the main psychoactive component in ayahuasca, but she just dropped into this frequency and offered this thing for me. And all of that density started to open up into and the light started to pour through the whole experience. What is that other than magic? Whatever it was, it was magic.

MATTHEW: If your brain was being scanned, it probably would lead to an instant and radical change in your brain function, And who knows what level, probably many different levels. So yeah, is that not real? There's so many pieces to that.

AUBREY: You'll never be able to tell me. You could line up all of the scientists in the world and they could try to tell me that there's some logical, materialist, reductionist explanation for it and I'll be like, "Uh-huh. Interesting. It was magic because I was there." Everything you're saying may be true. And what I'm saying may also be true, that this is inexplicable. Something happened in the mystery. And maybe, like you said, maybe in 100 years, we would be able to explain it because we would understand the resonance field that can be created and the ability for someone to actually step into the energetics and actually transmute something through the energetics of a listening that happens to something beyond words and beyond just the obvious facial recognition of an emotion like you're mentioning, like something deeper, a deeper listening, an older, deeper, more ancient and more futuristic understanding of what's happening.

MATTHEW: Is there some sort of sensitivity at a layer that we don't understand yet? We shouldn't just dismiss whole areas of inquiry, all of the PSI phenomena, whether it's telekinesis and remote viewing and all of this telepathy. What if it's possible that there is some truth to some of this at least, and that doesn't discount the idea that, yeah, 99.9% of fortune tellers are just whatever, they're good at whatever, reading faces. If there's a reality there, one could speculate, but it's not hard to speculate on mechanisms of the physicists that talk about these multiple dimensions that we're not sensitive to, and the idea that space, and time itself might just be our GUI of interfacing with whatever reality really, really is. I don't know. Scientifically, we shouldn't put a label on something and just basically, call it magic and then allow that to be the explanation that ends our inquiry. In terms of science, that just creates a dead end. One could still view it as miraculous and great and say, I'm never going to figure it out but I'm just going to work on figuring out what I can figure out. But that's more of what I think more of what we should. Was she perceiving something that, I don't know, I don't even want to put the word because I don't want to pretend to know the mechanism, but something that is inexplicable to our modern mechanistic understanding in terms of knowing exactly. Maybe through the traditions that have used these things or that somehow spoke to you in a way that was going to be helpful to you? I don't know.

AUBREY: And one of the ideas that I think has some resonance with me is, so one of the people who I've had on the podcast many times, and I always approach all people who claim to have any access to some PSI phenomena whether it's channeling or whether it's in this case, I'm speaking about Matias de Stefano who remembers his past lives. I approach that with like, “alright, bro, whatever,” like, I'm not going to believe but then when he starts saying things that resonate as true, things that I've found in my own journeys, things that I'm like, "Fuck, you just described exactly an experience that I had," you just put a framework on it that makes sense, and then also hearing him sing bedtime songs that he sung when he was a mother in ancient Khem, which was, in his recollection, a civilization that existed right after the flood that destroyed Atlantis. And he was singing in Atlantean to his child as a mother. And he sings that song to me, and it's like how is this not real in this kind of experience. So I've come to trust him, I've come to trust it, always still with like a little bit of, and he'll even say it himself, this is just one way to understand the truth. When he talks about some of the, because he was there, when some of these monoliths were being built and stones, that we're still trying to figure out how the fuck did they get this stone, that was this many tonnes up this hill, from this quarry across this river, it doesn't make sense. And he'll have explanations of how they used songs and this ability for people to actually merge their consciousness with the stones, and then raise the frequency of themselves, thus raising the stones and then actually create levity in a material object, things that we can't do now. And I'll talk to him about it and I'll be like, "Well, why can't we do it now?" And ultimately, the understanding is that the field of belief, just like the placebo effect internally, our own field of belief impacts the matter that's within our body. The collective field of belief impacts our ability to affect matter collectively. So when you try to study something like this and you have all the skeptics who are trying to prove that it's wrong, it doesn't surprise me that we can't prove it in that circumstance. And then it requires actually a field of belief that makes it possible. Now, of course, that's an easy excuse for everybody who say, "Oh, well, fuck it. It's not real, unless you can prove it in the face of it." But if you actually adopt this other principle, that the field of belief actually opens the possibility for something to happen, just like the field of your belief opens the placebo effect to change the matter in your body, it starts to allow some opening to make sense for what could be possible in these particular instances.

MATTHEW:  And then if you want to test it, it points you in a direction like, okay, placebo. Well, we can do something not to dismiss the placebo effect but we can, at least say, oh, how much of it is pure pharmacology versus your intentions and whatnot. I think what you're describing in the area of PSI research has been referred to as two effects, I think the sheep and the goat effect. One, it's like certain people, they're just sheep, they're going to believe whatever. But then there's goats. I hope I'm not messing this up. No matter what proof you might put on the table, they say “Is that what a goat does?” That's sheep. Forget my animal impressions. My five-year-old is going to be disappointed in me like, "Dad, that's not a goat." 

AUBREY: He's just going to force you to sing "Old MacDonald Had a Farm" over and over again. 

MATTHEW:  Let's go do this again, dad.

AUBREY: Dad, you got to get this right next time.

MATTHEW: Certain people will dismiss it, no matter what, the whole idea. And there is this idea that, like you were saying, whether it's a field or whatever, that if the person doesn't believe it's going to happen, that it won't happen. Now, that's really interesting. And if you are a person who's nerdy, and into experimental design and analysis, it's actually really interesting challenge because if you look at some of that science on the PSI phenomena, these people, whether you buy it or not, it's fascinating, whether you buy that there's ultimately phenomenon there that are real, it's a fascinating exercise in scientific understanding, like an analysis, because if you take this seriously, then you can set up the conditions. Okay, now let's do it with people that are open to it and then people who think it's all bullshit, no matter what. A more difficult part of the explanation is like, "Well, the whole world has this vibe now that not enough people, which it sounds like that's a little harder to deal with but it does get you thinking about, well, what if it were true? How would we explore the area? Do we know that that's not true? And I'm not saying just because we can't prove it's not true doesn't mean it is true. But we also don't know that it's not true.

AUBREY: I think curiosity and the open-mindedness, that's the essence of science that we're talking about over and over again here. And that's why it's so refreshing to talk to you about it is because the ultimate curiosity, it's the humility of Don Howard, who is saying, "I'm going to go learn from this medicine that I've been working with for 50 years. And I'm a maestro of this, but I'm going in as a student." All scientists, they can go the other way all too quickly. Like, "I know everything." Okay, maybe. But I think that humility to be like, yeah, maybe that would be cool to test. Maybe we don't have the resources and it'd be hard to set it up. But yeah, that'd be cool to test. That, to me, makes me test scientists and science when they have that open mindedness. Yeah, let's see. I wonder what. I wonder if. That seems real to me. That seems trustable.

MATTHEW:  To me, it says people are true empiricists. They really are into evaluating the world based on evidence, including the evidence of their own experience. I don't know, science isn't about believing. Science isn't the same as materialism or a philosophy of any sort of these philosophies of what's the ultimate nature of everything. Science is a way of going about answering or asking, that's the main point, asking questions, and trying to figure some things out. And to just dismiss entire topics, because they're outside of that Overton window, which is, in politics, certain things are just beyond the pale. That's not going to work so we just can't go there even though most of the people in a certain party or whatever group believe in it, they're like, it's just not realistic. There's all kinds of stuff that are like that. What humbles me is that psychedelics were in that spot for decades. Then I think what else is out there that everyone dismisses and laughs at and ridicules as unscientific as wishful thinking that might, 20 years from now, 200 years from now, it's just viewed as, this world-changing, this paradigm-shift discovery?

AUBREY:  Yeah, and just to look at the history, nutrition, thank you for reading my book and you've referenced it a few times on the day, I talk about how there was a big shift, where everybody was saying, "You got to remove all the fat from everything, and let's just replace it with sugar." 

MATTHEW: Oh, yeah. A great idea!

AUBREY: Disaster, disaster. And then fast forward, and all the sudden, butter's on the cover of Time Magazine and being like, is this actually healthier than vegetable oil? And obviously, all of the research now is coming out and saying yes, even though you'll still have strange outliers, usually government nutritionists will be like, no lucky charms are better for you than eggs. And you're like, what? I reposted something that showed that. It was like Frosted Mini Wheats were way healthier than an egg. And I was like, What are you talking about here? But ultimately, the science shifted dramatically. Dramatically. It's not actually that the reality shifted. It's just that our understanding of the reality shifted. 

MATTHEW:  And now sugar is bad for you. It was good for you back then. Absolutely. It's, again, humbling, thinking about what causes that. As we know, there were real financial incentives, there were industry interactions, there was the funding of science. And I tell you what, because I've been funded by NIH for about 20 years and doing various things, not psychedelics, but recently with psychedelics, but just studying all kinds of stuff about drugs, there are certain things that are just in fashion, and that fall out of fashion. People pay attention, they know if this is something that the director of an NIH institute is not into. And there are certain things that are career-killers. It's so hard for the public to understand how that could completely drive a narrative, how that could end up with decades, of an American diet that has killed countless people with the idea that it was originally based on science. The contingencies are so complex and real. People are concerned about their careers. There was stuff like memory-training research. I got a grant, I got a five-year grant, millions of dollars to study if you can get opioid and cocaine users to just do these memory games, are we going to, I never bought into this enough, whatever, I thought there might be something interesting there. And there's also value in showing that something doesn't work. But this idea that the reason people can't stop doing cocaine is because the cocaine has made them so stupid, that they can't listen to the therapy and understand it, that's literally like, millions and millions and millions of dollars were spent to explore this, and it was all garbage. And again, there's nothing wrong with, at least testing something to show that it doesn't work. But that was so hot and then it fell out of favor. There's these trends that just don't make, to me that never really made sense. Gosh, I've known plenty of people with problems and even if there's some correlation with some of the smartest people in the world are addicted to, you name it, whatever, has it knocked off one or two IQ points, whatever. The main thing is their whole life, they've been drawn into this pattern with this more exclusive focus on this thing that's been detrimental to them. Anyway, there are these narratives that just take off and you're afraid. Like certain things, you just know, it won't get funded. And then on another level, if you study certain things, oh, this is going to be my reputation. I'm never going to get funded. I've had more colleagues than I can count that have been sweated, they've had to leave a place like Johns Hopkins, they're brutal. You could be bringing in funding for years and years and years, and they take huge chunks of it, of course. And then yet you go without some grant funding for a few months, and all of a sudden they make you reduce your salary and all this stuff. You don't want to run out of funding as a scientist. You'll study any asinine thing that you wouldn't even put bets on just to keep yourself in the game. I'm glad I studied the memory stuff, because now I'm able to study psychedelics. It kept me alive as a scientist.

AUBREY: People don't understand the mechanisms to the full extent, of how much they're there.

MATTHEW: It really annoys me when people as much as I, gosh, don't misunderstand me, the environmental crisis is real, but when people even try to convince others, like 99% of scientists, it's like, oh, God, 99% of scientists thought that Earth was the center of the universe at one point. This is not how you make a scientific argument. 

AUBREY: And also, you have to recognise that if you come out against something, then there again, the cascade, are you going to be cast out by your peers? Are you going to be denied grants, there's just so many forces of a big system like this. It almost feels like the only egalitarian way to do this would be to crowdfund everything, just have like up-voting, like you would see in like a fucking Reddit post. Let's up-vote these studies. Of course, then there'd be people campaigning and gaming that but, at least, in some way it feels like democratizing funding in an interesting way, where people were able to support. Seems like a healthier way to do this than the more centralized focus, where you got a big pool of cash, and then you're just fighting to try and get the right approvals for that cash, rather than just. But it's happening. I've helped fund some different studies myself, and I think the private sector, it's an important role that the private sector can play and actually funding things that wouldn't get grants.

MATTHEW: Absolutely. Especially at times when there is that window, where there's something really going on here, but yet, the world hasn't quite figured it out, the government's not funding it yet, this is the way Tim Ferriss put it, with funding a lot of the psychedelic research, that yeah, imagine if you really are concerned about having an impact, one could step in with an amount of money that is thrown into, you could throw it into all kinds of great things, into cancer research and it would hopefully have some incremental. But it's not going to move the needle, not that those areas don't deserve to be focused on. Given the nature of understandable attention those areas have, but you put that same, relatively small, amount of money into something like this at this point in time, and it's like, whoa! You could draw a direct line in a few years, it's like, okay, these compounds have now been approved, and they're helping whatever, how many people with these disorders, we now understand, I think the scientific discoveries are just going to keep mounting, aside from therapeutics, just an understanding like this, the nature of the mind.

AUBREY: And I did a podcast with John Dean, who's done some research on endogenous DMT. 

MATTHEW: Yes, I saw part of that, I think. I think I saw the whole thing.

AUBREY: It was really interesting. Ultimately, his hypothesis is that DMT, endogenous DMT, is actually what helps us build our understanding of reality. He's likening it to a neurotransmitter, because he's been able to isolate and find quantities in the cerebral spinal fluid in different amounts, way higher amounts. And, of course, it degrades very quickly, when you try to actually measure it. So they've had to use very specific methods to actually measure this. And then he's having some theories about how DMT actually helps us create our understanding of reality, because of course, as we know, everything that we think of as solid is actually just particles moving around at certain densities and certain vibrations, and it's all emanations of light, or vibration, or all of these things. But what's making us see reality? He's like, "Well, maybe DMT," is the, quote, neurotransmitter that's actually helping us build this reality. And those studies have been not that expensive, but interesting, and then open up possibilities, like, okay, what's the next one? What's the next one we can do to build on that? It opens up a whole new blue ocean, if you're going to use a business terminology, like a blue ocean of science, of what that could ultimately lead to, that could ultimately have some impossible benefit down the road.

MATTHEW: Right. This very, very basic level of the human organism as an interface with reality. Implicitly, we just assume we're in this Newtonian universe, here's the backdrop and all these things were part of that thing. We know that's not the case, broadly speaking, in terms of science. There's just one big system that we're part of, and it's so incredibly complex but, it's not color, it's wavelengths of, what is really reality? And apparently, then time and space itself may be in that same category. That's just our psychological interpretation of this thing, whatever it is out there. I don't know. Psychedelics, hopefully, they can be tools to understand how, not just the therapeutic psychedelics, but how do we create this psychedelic experience? Our everyday reality is a psychedelic experience. There is a modulation of reality. Why do we think this is real? And then we do something like we sleep, or we take some crazy compound, or we breathe really heavy. And all of a sudden, the idea that this is real, we start to reevaluate that and see that as this trivial thing. What's really real is something. What's going on there? And to what degree that type of thinking has been going on has an evolution, maybe involving DMT. Is that involved? When the tribe gets together and has these rituals that create that social cohesion that convinces people to jump to the front when the enemy village attacks or to go into a hunting mission you may not come back from because the tribe depends on it. To what degree has that sort of reality-making been very real, it's been real fodder for natural selection.

AUBREY: It's all incredibly interesting. And also the correlation, we talked about Holotropic breathing. This was showing the correlation between Wim Hof deeper breathing techniques, the hyper oxygenation and the upregulating of endogenous DMT, how much is actually produced in that. That could explain some of these things, it starts to melt different boundaries of reality and different walls. It's so interesting to actually start to explore that. As we're wrapping up this podcast, I'd like to ask two questions. One is, what study has happened that comes to mind or if there's two, that's fine, that recently you've been aware of that you've found particularly interesting, either from a therapeutic standpoint or otherwise, that you could share the results of? And then if you had a magic eight-ball of unlimited funding, what thing would you like to study? If you could just be like, “alright, I got unlimited funds.” So something that's happened and something in your fantasy world of something you'd like to study.

MATTHEW: Gosh, there's so many things I could name. One thing that comes to mind and there have been some very early results, but it hasn't been published in a peer-reviewed journal, this stays ongoing, but my colleague, Peter Hendricks, at University of Alabama, Birmingham is studying psilocybin in the treatment of cocaine addiction. Sounds like there's something going on, it's working with people. And if that ends up working, that's just going to be a game changer for addiction. Hundreds, I'm talking about hundreds of compounds, hundreds of millions of dollars have been spent trying to find some medication that, at least, takes the edge off of cocaine addiction to help people. It's pretty much been big, fat nothing. If there's really something there, I really want to encourage folks to keep their eye on that work. Hopefully, it's going to wrap up. I'm not sure that within the next year, I would imagine. So that's something I'd really encourage people to keep their eye on.

AUBREY: Cocaine addiction is pretty, of all the addictions, it's pretty detrimental. Look, I've experienced a lot of different drugs and I don't have a judgmental attitude, I just think of these as ways to modulate the system, and I don't have the puritanical or government-enforced ideas about it. So if cocaine was something that I liked, I would do it every once in a while, for sure. I fucking hate it. It's the worst. It's like, I feel really cool for 10 minutes, I talk too much. And then I will reevaluate my life for the next two days afterwards. It's like the worst. This is just my experience. I don't touch it. I'm not even fucking interested in that particular drug. But I've seen, how that one, in particular, and I'm not around a lot of heroin users. It's just not part of the, and I also never, experienced that or dared to endeavor to experience that, although probably in the right setting and the right, I would probably smoke a little opium just to get the vibe of it. I'd probably explore that if I had the chance. Never have, but carefully because I think all of these things are slippery slopes. But nonetheless, the point being that those people I've seen with cocaine habits and behavior on cocaine and also the deterioration of life on that, it's a steep decline. It's a heavy cost.

MATTHEW: Not everyone. Like most substances, actually, like all substances most people that try it, don't become addicted. But if you're in that 20-some percent that does go on, how bad does it look, if you go to the end. How bad can bad get, it looks really, really bad with cocaine. And it's really, really bad with methamphetamine. Drugs are so different, I don't want to get into the, you know they all have their ups and downs but sure, the risk of acute lethal overdose is higher on opioids, particularly these days with all the fentanyl derivatives floating around and the opioid supplies, but barring. If you're not one of those folks that, whatever just goes out on a single injection of an opioid, you're going to be healthier than the cocaine and methamphetamine users. Those are really hard drugs on the body. And again, I'm not saying any of this is good. I'm not encouraging any of it. Cocaine is particularly hard.

AUBREY: And also deadly when you do too much and you want to come down, and then you take a bunch of benzos and then you start to create that crossover of moving your body up really high and then trying to move your body down. That's when a lot of people die.

MATTHEW: Yeah, it's usually combinations of things. Benzos, a lot of people don't talk enough about that. A lot of the opioid lethal overdoses are combinations with either alcohol or benzos and sometimes with stimulants, like cocaine. There's something so reinforcing about cocaine. In animals like rats, there's nothing like it. If you want to get an animal just press that bar, even to the degree that it will stop eating, nothing will come as close to cocaine.

AUBREY: I mean you see it at a party. Like someone has a bump of coke. And the coke runs out, they're running around like a zombie looking for brains. It's like who's got the next fucking bump? I used to be at more parties where that was more prevalent. That was not my vibe. I would prefer a little bit of psilocybin and have some beers and I would watch people on cocaine and be like, "Look at those zombies. What is going on?" It is like I had this interesting purview of this glossy. And again, that's not everybody. I don't want to generalize and I'm sure some people have healthy relationships. Certainly, when I've gotten to the Sacred Valley in Peru, drink plenty of coca tea, and I've had some Mambe, which is the coca leaf ground totally different experience, and actually isn't even that particularly stimulating, in general, because I think there's so many different alkaloids in coca.

MATTHEW: So many alkaloids. Helps you with elevation sickness and all that.

AUBREY: This is the longest way of saying it's a big deal. The study that you're talking about, it's a big deal. It's a big deal.

MATTHEW: Kind of like the ultimate. What I was always interested in with psychedelics and addiction is that the stories that people tell are not about, it's not a crutch to overcome this or that addiction. People get to the bottom of what it is to be addicted. The thing that cuts across, whether you're talking about tobacco or cocaine or opioids, alcohol, you name it. That's the heart of addiction. If addiction was about just overcoming physical withdrawal, we would have solved addiction almost 100 years ago, when we're doing crazy shit like putting people in comas on purpose for a month. Which I put in the same category, pretty much going to a Club Med type resort where it's easy not to do coke, when you're on a beach and you're being fed lovely food, and there's lovely people around, treating you awesome. Now you go back home, what's the first thing you do?

You name the drug, whether it's opioids, or cigarettes, how many people have relapsed far after the physical withdrawal is gone. They relapsed a month later, six months later, 20 years later. The physical dependence, so many of our treatments are just addressing that part, whether it's nicotine patch or whatever, or methadone, and not to knock these tools. I think they all have their place and a lot of people have been helped, but to the degree that they're very limited where people aren't helped. It's those deeper questions, that a good psychedelic experience seems to help people with, what's the story of your life? What's really, really happening here in the big picture? And how is this thing, whatever you're on, cocaine, tobacco, how is it really fitting into that? And when that's square in the face, a lot of people are like, "Whatever." They have this clarity that sticks with them. My god, what is that? We're making real progress, if that works for cocaine, which again, is, you could argue, the ultimate test, because there's nothing that really comes close, that would just be a real game changer for not just treating, but understanding addiction.

AUBREY: I think there's two models that really I appreciate. And I haven't been particularly prone to classic addictions, though. Tobacco is pretty, I do rapé and I do tobacco pouches. I never felt like I needed to. It's part of my practice. I feel like a good relationship with it. But everything else, I almost have an anti-addictive quality, where it's like, if I do it for a while, I don't want to do it anymore. I drink at night, and I don't want to drink the next night or the next fortnight. I think it's just my natural psychology. So I don't have the most personal experience with it. But there's two models, of course, Gabor Maté, who I'm sure you're familiar with, addiction is an attempt to solve a problem. And he usually links it to some kind of trauma, trying to solve a traumatic problem. But another model that one of my teachers, Rabbi Mark Gafni, has been talking to me about is  it's an attempt to solve the feeling of emptiness that we feel from not being engaged, in his language, erotically with life, of not being participatory in Shekhinah in this field of eros, which is in the food we have, in the conversations we're in, in our contact with life. So we'll choose things that bring what he calls pseudo eros, which is a feeling of connection to life again. So alcohol allows us to connect with the moment or the music or our friends. Nicotine allows us to connect with our work. Cocaine allows us to connect with us, feeling confident about ourselves. Whatever that thing is, it's about there's a sense of emptiness and then there's this mechanism that allows you to feel the contact that we crave as a response to the emptiness we feel. So even if it's not trauma-based, can we deal with the emptiness? And do we have the skills and strategies to make contact without exogenous substances,  so that we fill the emptiness with the fullness, which is available in life. So I think somewhere between those is my own kind of understanding. And I know it's a complex and nuanced field, and there is physical dependency, all that, but both of those models really make a lot of sense to me.

MATTHEW: And progress with psychedelics, I think like with a lot of things, it's not just them as tools, but if they can be tools to help us not just directly treat, but to understand the nature of these things, like you describe with addiction, that's going to end up helping a lot of people. And that's what I think is even bigger, what psychedelics can really teach us about the  human  condition, which is why I think a lot of the things, to your other question of what would I do. So many of the questions there, like what would be the ultimate. Some of the stuff we've talked about here, some of these kinds of extraordinary claims of PSI phenomena, telepathy, that would be a really interesting area to really jump into deeply with psychedelics, because there's very interesting anecdotes of these types of experiences being enhanced, or more likely with psychedelics. Again, I don't know whether it's true or not, but if it's testable, I think it's interesting and what's going on there? Even if there's no, there, there, it's still really interesting, because, like, there's the phenomenon of people thinking that there's something there. And are psychedelics more likely to make people buy into something that maybe is not there? So even at that level, it's interesting, but what if there's something there too? What if psychedelics really are somehow opening, dissolving boundaries at some layer we're not even aware of yet. Maybe a little closer to Earth out there, the effects on neurological conditions. We know, psychedelics, a lot of them, induce neuroplasticity in rats, probably true in humans, although we don't know. So as you know, a lot of athletes claim that psychedelics have been helpful in recovering from injury. Injuries, neurological. Sports with head impact, like combat sports, all the combat-- 

AUBREY: It's been shown to help, psilocybin, it does promote neurogenesis, the repair of the brain?

MATTHEW: Ultimately, it doesn't really matter, so different types of neuroplasticity, which is a more general term. So that could mean branching of new, growing new branches off of the same neuron, it can meet synaptogenesis, which is those branches forming connections with other existing neurons. And it could be, and there's some evidence, but not as much as with the other areas, neurogenesis that's the birth of new cells, new neurons. It seems no question that neuroplasticity, multiple forms of neuroplasticity are unfolding. Now, that said, just more neuroplasticity isn't always a good thing. I don't know, growing new cells isn't always a good thing. There's a type of that we call cancer, but it is very intriguing, that may be underlying some of this radical learning that people are having. People claim these insights that changed their lives, and maybe part of that, you know, can account for, I mean, there's athletes that claim their memory is just a lot better since they've been using psychedelics.

AUBREY: No doubt. Or if you're like my buddy, Aaron Rodgers, maybe you win two NFL MVPs after your first ayahuasca experience. That's the thing, there's no way to test, there's no alternate multiverse where you test Aaron with the ayahuasca experience and Aaron without. Does he win two MVPs with and without? Of course, you can't split the test. It's one person's life. It's certainly interesting. You could develop studies where you did measure career performance, or you did measure athletic performance, and something like that, after intensive psychedelic treatments. I was a part of a ceremony where, and I won't mention who it is, but a mid-ranked UFC fighter, who had no title shot planned or anything like that, he was a couple fights away from the title, so at least two fights away from a title shot, goes into a DMT ceremony. In the DMT ceremony, he sees himself holding the belt, the championship belt. He's like, "I fucking saw it, bro. I saw it. I saw it. I could feel it. I felt how heavy it was. I felt it, I saw it." So the person who was fighting the champion in his division, got injured, had to pull out of a fight, he gets last-minute called up, he's like a nine to one underdog, I shouldn't probably say exactly, people would figure this out. He's a strong underdog in this, has the fight of his life, as an underdog and wins the championship. He fought unbelievable. And so there's so many interesting things that are happening that are not medical-related, but performance-related. He credits a lot of that, of course, he's a great fighter, he trained hard, and he busted his ass, and all those things are all true. But he had such unwavering belief because he'd already felt himself with the belt. So in those moments, where it got tough, he's like, "I've already seen this reality. I've seen the ending of this movie. Now I just got to play out the middle part, the how and the when." I would love to see some of those, just start to dispel some of these myths about what it's going to do." It could make you better at whatever it is that you're doing. Start times off the blocks. Interesting studies like this for athletes. I don't know, this is just a curiosity that's coming to my mind. What about your start times off the block if you're like a sprinter?

MATTHEW: Something very measurable.

AUBREY: Something very measurable. Like alright, now you're on psilocybin. Now you're on LSD, what's your fucking reaction time in this? I don't know, is that useful for the world? Kind of? Because it just starts to dispel these myths that we have about this is something that makes you crazy and isn't helpful for performance. And you gotta stay focused, but what if your career is better? And we hear many of these stories about psychedelic experiences opening up different fields of technology and Steve Jobs, talking about all of this other...

MATTHEW: The internet.

AUBREY: The internet, yeah. All of this other stuff.

MATTHEW: Open source software.

AUBREY: It would be really curious to me to start studying these things and people would like, that's an interesting study. Like sprinters off the block like. What's happening there?

MATTHEW: I think that's fascinating because we know that setting goals is powerful and there's some science, but in everyday life, was he seeing into the future? Maybe Or at another level, maybe he's just had such that. The thing I'm sure all world class athletes try to do is you got to believe it, you got a vision. He's like, "No, I was there." This is not regular pep talk. This was like--

AUBREY: I was there.

MATTHEW: With that in your mind. I say this with addiction, these experiences can be so deep, it's like in that one weakest moment where you've had a couple of drinks, and you think, oh, maybe I'll have that cigarette again. In your very weakest, the split second decisions, those microseconds in the octagon where someone's like, I can't do it, this guy's taking my head off, I'm done. You're going to go further into the impossible, in front of countless people with your entire reputation. That more solid vision is able to just allow you to persevere. That's amazing. If we figure something out there, yeah, it may not be DMT, it may be something else but what's happening in the brain? If we can harness that. Now maybe the goal is going into negotiating a peace deal or solving a solution to a famine--

AUBREY: There's a track that guides you. And of course, this is old wisdom of Yeshua, pray as if it has already been done. The idea is that you're not asking for something, you go to the reality where it's already happened. It's all of Dr. Joe Dispenza's work, it's all this idea of how to actually harness the placebo effect, which is believing that you're already healed or believing that this thing is done and using the psychedelics on a track with some guidance. Instead of just a performance coach, which there's plenty of, life coaches of all sorts, in this field saying okay, yeah, alright, maybe you're here to work on this addiction but also, what's that big, hairy dream of yours, that goal that you want, and let's see yourself there, and then let's see yourself taking every step that you need to. And in these altered states, maybe with the increase in neuroplasticity, maybe with the modulation of somehow the ability to see it more clearly and the confidence to believe it, maybe, maybe it's a serotonergic confidence or a dopaminergic concept? Who knows? But whatever it is, you just get this solid belief. And it just starts changing people's lives. Or working through different patterns they have. I get really angry when my partner does this. And I go in alright, so this is going to happen again. But now we're going to write a different story. 

MATTHEW: Yeah.

AUBREY: And you're going to respond this way, differently. Almost like hypnosis but without hypnosis. You're just working on the field of belief. That's really interesting to me, too. 

MATTHEW: We need to bottle that. Any progress we make in this, it's widely applicable, including to all the things that we need to do to make this world a better place.

AUBREY: All right, well, one final caveat, please don't take this discussion and do any drugs or medicine, without really being deeply called to it, minding all of the boundaries of safety and also minimum effective dose. Be very mindful. Be mindful of legality. Be mindful of everything, that we are not recommending that you do any of these things that we talked about. Just because I did it, doesn't mean that you should do it. Everybody's different, so please, please, please be mindful. This is not a recommendation to do any of these things. That is your choice and you have to make that choice. So I want to make that very clear and then I also want to make it very clear to you that I'm an ally. If you ever need anything, if there's a funding for a crazy thing, if there's a way that I can support the work that you're doing or work of a colleague, you can count on me to spread the word and show up in support because I deeply believe that as psychedelic medicine has helped me, it can also help so many people in the world when done the right way.

MATTHEW:  Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. It's been great.

AUBREY:  Yeah, it's been amazing. And thanks, everybody, for tuning in. So much love. Bye!