Ayahuasca 101, Tripping Out On Nutmeg, Magic Mushrooms & More With Dennis McKenna.

Hey, what's up, you guys? It's Ben Greenfield. My voice, my voice feels dry to me. My voice feels dry. My throat, I guess my mouth feels dry. I just got out of the sauna and despite having a giant glass of water, it was hot this morning. I usually turn my sauna on to preheat for a little while, about 20 or 30 minutes before I get in. And I turned it on extra early this morning and it heated up for a long time. I put a wine cork in the sauna to cover up the temperature sensor and it gets up to about155.5. And I also used a bunch of this pink panther insulation from the, from the Home Depot store to insulate the sauna so it gets even more hot. And despite me running out of the sauna, flailing my arms and jumping in the cold pool afterwards, I still feel as though my throat is dry and I had a giant glass of water. Anyways, I digress from today's topic at hand, which is an interview with a guy who is relatively well known in the psychedelic drug world, Dennis McKenn. But fear not, because in today's episode, you're going to learn about things like tapping and lucid dreaming and nutmeg and things that don't necessarily involve you needing to, say, foray to Peru to engage in an ayahuasca trip. But we talk a little bit about that too, in this episode of the Ben Greenfield Fitness Show.

The nutmeg is psychotropic. It was popular in prisons, you know, back in the 50s and 60s when prisoners couldn't get anything else to get high off of. I mean, they could always steal some nutmeg from the kitchen and take that. You can use them recreationally sometimes. I mean, people use mushrooms recreationally at low doses, never really suspecting. If they were to up the dose just a little bit, they would discover a whole new aspect.

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Hey, folks, it's Ben Greenfield. And when it comes to plant based medicine, my guest on today's show is considered to be somewhat of a Groundbreaking pioneer. His name is dark Dennis McKenna. And Dennis's research, which spans back to the 1970s, has focused for a long time on things like Amazonian ethnopharmacology and plant hallucinogens. During the early 1970s, he actually developed a technique for cultivating psilocybin mushrooms with his brother, Terrence McKenna, and they published what they learned in a book called Psilocybin the Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide. And Dennis has actually conducted a bunch of ethnobotanical fieldwork all over the place. The Peruvian, the Colombian, the Brazilian and the Amazonian areas. And his doctoral research at the University of British Columbia focused on a couple of compounds you may have heard of before, at least one that I'm sure most people have heard of, ayahuasca. Another one, I don't even know if I'm pronouncing correctly, called Ukui, which are tryptamine based hallucinogens which you'll find used by indigenous peoples in places like South America. He's the founding board member of something called the Hefter Research Institute and is a key organizer and was a participant in something called the Huasca Project, which was the first biomedical investigation of ayahuasca used by a Brazilian religious group. He's currently the assistant professor in the center for Spirituality and Healing at the University of Minnesota. And today we are going to delve not only into things like psilocybin and ayahuasca, but ibogaine, DMT and other plant based medicines and beyond. So, Dennis, welcome to the show, man.

Well, thanks, Ben. It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

Yeah. And something I'm super curious about, because it appears that both you and your brother have a keen interest in the psychedelic and plant based medicine and things of the like. How'd you guys grow up? I mean, were you surrounded by the paranormal and by psychedelics, or did you kind of discover this stuff later on in life, like in college, where a lot of people tap into this stuff?

Yeah, our growing up was remarkably normal and banal, actually. We grew up in a small town in Colorado, Paonia, Colorado, Very small town, and brings all the open mindedness that small towns seem to be known for, which is to say, not very much. And Terrence and I were, you know, as teenagers and younger, we were kind of the odd ones, you know, I mean, if they'd had the word back in the day, they would have called us nerds. You know, we were interested in science, we were kind of intellectual, we were interested in Books, you know, football and girls were not our main major preoccupation, unlike most of our classmates. So we were interested in the. In, well, what you might say, the unexplained and just interesting things, you know, And a lot of that I have to credit my dad for some of that because he was, you know, a strange person in any way.

Your dad was a strange person?

Yeah, a strange person. He was not. He was very invested in being just a normal guy. And we'd have conversations about, I'm just an average guy, he would say. And I would say, no, you're not, because you're actually a pretty interesting guy. And one of the things that he would do is he traveled most of the week for his job, but he would come back on the weekends and sometimes he'd bring Fate magazine with him, which is still around. It's one of those pulp magazines and it was all about the paranormal flying.

It's called Fate magazine.

It's called Fate magazine.

Interesting. So your dad had an interest in the paranormal early on as you were growing up?

Yeah, I think this was recreational reading for him. But he'd bring these magazines around and he would occasionally bring pulp science fiction, you know, magazines like monthly science fiction stories, like Amazing Science Fiction and all these things you could buy on the stands, you know, back in the day, you know, low quality almost pamphlets, you know, but containing these science fiction stories. So between his, you know, and he leave these things around and Terence Nye being curious and being, you know, kind of enticed probably by something we're sort look at, you know. And I mean, that was true of the so called girly magazines that he brought occasionally too, I mean, which he tried to hide. But we knew where they were and you know, and so we would, we would. But these science fiction magazines and this Faith magazine, which is still going, you know, we would jump all over that and it would have stories about, you know, abominable snowman and UFOs and just, you know, the paranormal, all this stuff. So we were interested in that. I mean, I'd really have to, you know, sort of credit science fiction for being a big part of that.

Interesting.

So when psychedelics came out, you know, in the mid-60s or when they began to sort of emerge in the mainstream medium, you know, we were already ready, right. We were primed for this. In fact, it was like we thought, oh my God, you know, all this stuff about traveling in other dimensions and contacting aliens and all that. It's not just fantasy. You can actually do it, right? And psychedelics were a doorway into that. And so we were quite fascinated with psychedelics when they came out and, you know, when that led us down the path that we, you know, that we've gone down ever since, you know, much to our parents chagrin. I mean, our parents were really like I say, extremely normal people. And they didn't know, you know, they didn't know why they had to have these two weird brothers. Kind of like their cross to bear.

Normal. Except your father's fate magazine infatuation, I suppose.

Right, right, exactly.

Yeah. Now, the word on the, from what I understand is that there's this molecule and I'd like to start with this one if you're game, called dmt. And I'm curious if you could not only explain what DMT is, but I'm also curious because from what I understand, you actually discovered dmt. So is it true that you discovered dmt, and if so, how? And of course, what is dmt?

Okay, yeah, we could do the whole podcast on DMT and, you know, and we could be happy with that. Right, because there's a lot to say about DMT in the first place. No, we didn't discover dmt. I don't know how that meme got out into the Internet because that's not true. We personally discovered DMT in the late 60s when Terrence was living in Berkeley and I was coming out there, I was there in 67, and there was not a lot of DMT around. But Terrence was very good at working the matrix and he was able to find it what little there was. He had sources. So we personally discovered DMT at that time. But DMT was actually. It has a history. In fact, I can plug a book, which is not my book, but people may be interested. It was discovered in, I think about 1931 by a Canadian chemist, Richard Mansky, who synthesized this compound. He was working on compounds. He was working on the constituents, believe it or not, of strawberry roots. He synthesized this compound because he needed a standard for his chromatography, for his analytical work. He made dmt. At the time, it was not recognized that it was a natural compound. He thought it was synthetic, and it wasn't recognized that it was psychoactive either. You know, he made this compound, he did his analytical work, he put it on a shelf and forgot it. Ten years later, a Brazilian chemist isolated a compound from a. From another hallucinogen, from something called Urema, which is a beverage used in Eastern Brazil in ritual practices. And it turns out he isolated a compound which he called nigerine, and it turned out that was identical to dmt. So that was the first inkling that maybe DMT was psychoactive. And then when he didn't confirm that either, he didn't take it himself. So in the 1950s, there was a, a guy, Hungarian psychopharmacologist named Stephen Zara, who was wanting to do clinical work with lsd. But he lived in Budapest and he could not get Sandoz, would not send him lsd. You know, they were the purveyors of LSD at the time, they wouldn't send it to him because he was behind the iron curtain. So he decided, well, I'll just synthesize dmt. That's easy to do. Let's synthesize this thing and see if it's actually psychedelic. And he did, and he administered it to himself. And that's the first time that DMT was actually definitively shown to be a very potent psychedelic.

Okay, so what does DMT stand for?

Okay, it stands for dimethyltryptamine. So tryptamines. How do we explain this? It's dimethyltryptamine. Tryptamine comes from the amino acid tryptophan, which is in everything. Tryptophan is an essential amino acid in two trivial steps from tryptophan. One to remove the carboxyl group, the other to add the methyl groups to this molecule. And I don't want to get people bogged down in chemistry, but, you know, if you take tryptophan, if you remove the acid group, you have tryptamine, if you add two methyl groups, then you've got dimethyltryptamine and that's what DMT is.

So it's very, very simple bodies based on that, because I know that we're able to generate some tryptophan endogenously. Does the body make much of its own dmt?

Naturally, the body does make dmt. It's found in different tissues. It's found not as much, it is found in the brain, but it's mostly found in the lungs. The lungs make quite a lot of dmt. And that material, that DMT is translocated into the brain by active transport, so it has some kind of a neurotransmitter like function. And interestingly, it's all tied up with the pineal, and it's all tied up with the pineal gland and pineal chemistry. The pineal, as you know, in myth and so on, is associated with the third eye. It's an endocrine gland, but it has an Eye like structure and it's actually sensitive to light, it has photoreceptors in it. And the main hormone that the pineal makes is melatonin. Melatonin is the pineal hormone that regulates circadian rhythms, that regulates our sleep, wake cycles. Right, right. Melatonin is a triptamine. It's very close to DMT. Melatonin is 5 methoxy n acetyltryptamine and it only occurs in the pineal. And the pineal also makes dmt, but not all the time. For a long time there was controversy whether it did make dmt. I mean, we knew the enzymes were there, we knew the precursors were there. Nobody could actually nail down DMT and say it, yes, the pineal does make it. But actually in the last few months earlier this year, that question has been resolved. A brilliant pharmacologist by the name of Nicholas Cozy has shown that the pineal does have, it does contain dmt. That raises a whole lot of questions because if the pineal contains DMT and if you can stimulate the synthesis of DMT in the pineal through say yogic exercises or breathing exercises or so on, you can stimulate your own internal psychedelic trip.

Well, I personally believe that, I personally believe that's quite possible because, for example, I've done holotropic breath work as one example, like a 90 minute holotropic breathwork session and induced a deep hallucinogenic state. I also have done kundalini yoga in which you have your eyes closed and you're focusing quite a bit on this third eye chakra on this pineal gland and also experienced a bit of a hallucinogenic state. So it's quite interesting that it would seem that you can, if you train yourself to really be in touch with your pineal gland, you can, you can produce some amount of your own endogenous dmt, it would seem. I want to ask you in a second about the exogenous use of DMT via something like ayahuasca. But also, are you familiar with the use of sound frequencies? For example, different sound frequencies can activate different glands. And I actually just read a fascinating book called the Sound of Healing and it goes into how sound frequencies at 900 and something hertz I believe is the frequency. But you can actually listen to what are called binaural beats or sounds that also activate the pineal gland and endogenous DMT production.

Yes, yes, I'm familiar with all of these things. And this is actually a hot area right now. There's a lot of Breakthroughs being made. The yogic exercises that you referred to, the Kundalini exercises, those are essentially exactly that. They're ways to raise your kundalini energy from your more base chakras into the third eye chakra and stimulate the pineal. But what you're stimulating is actually DMT synthesis and holotropic breathwork. All of these sort of non drug ways of inducing drug states is, you know, essentially you're inducing, you know, your own, your own brain to make the drug. And there's an. The sound stuff is very interesting. This is another way to do it. And just in the last month I learned about a new technology. I met a fellow, I was traveling in the UK recently and I met a fellow named Guy Harriman and he used to be an Apple engineer. He worked closely with Steve Jobs in couple in Apple and also in Next. Now he's a Zen monk in Chiang Mai, Thailand. But he has created this light. He's developed this technology called the AJNA light and he claims that it induces dmt.

Did you say the ajna? Do you know how that's spelled?

I put it in your text box. Getting a look at it.

Okay, yeah, I'll check it out and I'll put a link to this in the show notes. By the way, for those of you who are listening in the show notes are going to be@BenGreenfieldFitness.com Makena that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com McKenna I see this, the Ajnolite. A G N A light. And so is this a light that you actually place over that area in between your eyes to activate the pineal gland?

It's a light. It looks like a tanning light sort of configuration, but it's got these LEDs set in it, these white LEDs and what you know, the machine itself is very simple. What makes it go are the different programs that he's written for it which will induce different states. Like a state but deep theta activation for example. You know, he's got various programs that he can put it through. I tried it a couple of times. I was actually at a retreat where we were doing other things. We were doing ayahuasca and so on. But I got a chance to test this out a couple of times and normally I'm pretty skeptical about these things. I'm like, yeah, sure, it induces dmt. Tell me something else. Actually I'm pretty convinced I was in the zone. After I went under this light, it took about maybe two or three minutes and I was basically in a state that, if not exactly like my experiences with exogenous DMT were very, very similar.

Yeah, that's interesting. Actually, I believe you for a couple of reasons. The first is I know everybody knows about cones and, and rods, that our eyes have, you know, those different light receptors, but there are these cells called melanopsin cells, like these light sensitive pigments that the eyes have, and those send messages to a part of your hypothalamus, like, which influences sleep and alertness and hormones. There's a section of the, of the hypothalamus called the suprachiasmatic nucleus, the scn. And I know that that particular area, that SCN, can signal the pineal gland to produce a variety of hormones. You know, in most cases, melatonin is the one that's been studied the most. But I would hazard a guess that by stimulating that suprachiasmatic nucleus, you could probably also activate DMT to some extent. The other interesting thing.

Well, it's like you're kind of way ahead of me, or at least you're right up there with me. I was going to mention, yes, this adrenaline mediates its effects through this melanopsin system, which is still kind of being investigated, but it appears that via melanopsin it activates this process of DMT synthesis. So I think this is possibly a tremendous breakthrough myself if this light actually does this, because then you can, you know, we believe in our community that DMT and these medicine plants have a lot of therapeutic potential.

Yeah.

And if you can get around the whole drug thing and say, well, this is a way to train your body, train your brain to make your own drugs, you know, this is good, right?

Exactly. The most natural method.

People have a hard time arresting.

You can't be arrested for endogenously producing compounds your body would naturally make on its own. The other interesting thing is, and I don't know if you heard, if you've heard of this before, low level electrical frequencies. It was actually just this morning that I was using this. I tweeted about it. But I often will sleep with a device that produces a very low level electromagnetic frequency. It's called a pulsed electromagnetic frequency, or pemf. The one that I use is called a Delta sleeper and it's a very, very low frequency. You're supposed to put it over your collarbone because that's where your brachial plexus is. And so when you put it on your collarbone, it causes the nerve signal to travel up to your brain to cause you to produce delta brain waves. But one thing that I'll use it for, for inducing a state of lucid dreaming is I wear a sleep mask and I actually put it right over that third eye, right, right up at the upper bridge of the nose in between the eyes and it places this frequency right over the pineal gland and you go into this deep state of lucid dreaming and I actually track my deep sleep and my rapid eye movement sleep and I get much, much higher amounts of both deep and rapid eye movement sleep when I'm using this frequency over the pineal gland. So it's very interesting how we can use technology to induce what I suppose could be a DMT production.

Yeah, yeah. I don't know the technology that you're talking about, but I'd like to learn more. I mean that sounds really quite. What did you call it?

This one's called a delta sleeper. It's just a very, very low level. Cell phones, for example, make a pulsed electromagnetic field frequency that one would probably not want to place on their heads. But these are like very, very low level frequencies a little bit more biologically appropriate, similar to what you'd get if you grounding or earthing, right, like standing barefoot on, on, on, on earth. But, but when it comes to exogenous use of dmt, you know, a lot of people of course have heard of ayahuasca. Now you mentioned that that DMT is produced in the human lungs to a certain extent. Is ayahuasca something that one would, one would ideally vape, inject, consume. How does ayahuasca work exactly for those people who are listening and who haven't used it yet?

Well, you can, with synthetic dmt you can vape it, you know, if you have the freebase form and if you have the freebase form, you can vape it. It produces a very rapid, very short and quite overwhelming psychedelic experience. It lasts maybe 10 to 20 minutes at the outside. Extremely astonishing and amazing, but over quickly. Right, and that's the basis of the snuffs. DMT is very wide. There are lots of things that contain dmt. Ayahuasca though, is kind of unique because it's an orally active, it's a beverage. And the thing is with dmt, it is destroyed in the body by enzymes called monoamine. And because it is a natural compound, the very, you know, something that our bodies make, our bodies make it, but they also break it down very readily. So this is why it's been so hard to find DMT in the Pineal, because it does appear but then it disappears as quickly. Ayahuasca. And so DMT by itself is not orally active. Right. If you eat dmt, nothing will happen. If you, you take a plant containing dmt, nothing will happen because it's broken down by the enzymes in your gut. What's amazing and interesting about ayahuasca is that they figured out to make it to put a DMT containing plant in combination with another plant that contains alkaloids that inhibit those monoamine oxidases. So this protects the DMT in the gut, allows it to be absorbed into the bloodstream in an active form and then it's orally active and then instead of 10 or 15 minutes, it's four, five, six or seven hours. So it's kind of like you change the whole pharmacokinetic profile. It unfolds over a much longer time and you sacrifice the intensity that you find in the short when you smoke it. But what you get is a much richer content. You know, it's sort of like the difference between playing a video at fast forward. I mean, it goes by, you see it, you can't make a lot of sense out of it. But versus, you know, playing it at normal speed, then it makes much more sense. So ayahuasca is the solution to the oral inactivity of dmt. It's a way to make it orally active, essentially.

Now this is something that's always been a head scratcher for me. I understand people's infatuation with wanting to perhaps use a spirit based molecule like this or a psychedelic medication in the traditional way that it would have been used. Right? Like for example, as one would use it in South America, drinking the beverage. Why wouldn't folks simply bypass the oral use of dmt, which presents these issues with the monamine oxidase breakdown as you've alluded to, and instead, for example, just inject or vape dmt. Why is it that that's not done more frequently or why is that not more popular or at least doesn't appear to be?

Well, it's done, you know, I mean, in traditional medicine you're not dealing with pure compounds. So it's not practical to inject it or vape it. You know, it's not really practical to do that. In South America. What you get are snuffs. There are several tribes that prepare various DMT plants as snuffs. So they get around this oral inactivation problem that way. But you know, and so you can do that if you have a more sort of prolonged exposure to Sort of being in that dimension. If you want to characterize it that way, you get more out of it, essentially. This is why ayahuasca has a lot of therapeutic use. DMT may too, but DMT is kind of a shock, and you can't really come back from it other than with a sense. It was like, oh, my God, what happened? What was that? That's a great impression. But what is the therapeutic content? You know, so experiencing it over a longer period of time for therapeutic use, you get more out of it. Okay, that makes sense. Just to complete the, you know, sort of to complete the chemistry lesson in a way. I should mention that, you know, psilocybin is also an orally active form of dmt, basically. So psilocybin in the mushrooms is chemically related to dmt. Very closely related. Psilocybin is converted to psilocin in the body. Psilocin is the active form of psilocybin. And it's really just one atom different than dmt, but it's a critical difference. It allows that. Again, it allows the DMT to be orally active. Interesting. Doesn't require an MAO inhibitor.

Okay, now I have a question for you. Speaking of MAO inhibitors, there are certain things that I've recommended to people before to help them fall asleep or relax when they wake up at night. Examples would be like passion flower extract or kava kava, for example. Now, I know that one of the ways that these work is they are indeed monoamine oxidase inhibitors and may allow for a little bit of endogenous production of dmt. Have you experimented much with natural compounds like this in conjunction with some of the things we talked about, like holotropic breath work or pineal gland activation, to see how close one could get to, for example, simulating an ayahuasca experience without the actual use of ayahuasca?

Well, yes and no. I have worked with kava quite a lot, and kava is many things. It is an MAO inhibitor, but it's also, you know, it works like benzodiazepines do. It works mainly through the GABA system.

Yeah, it's great. Great for sleep.

Oh, it's great. It's a wonderful thing. I mean, it's, again, one of these traditional medicines that's far better than the pharmaceutical alternative for anxiety, sleep, muscle relaxants, all that. And it is a weak MAO inhibitor. But I don't think that has. That's not that germane to its activity. Now, Passionflower is kind of a different, as some of these beta carboline alkaloids. The same ones or similar to what you find in banisteriopsis, the vine component of Ayahuasca. It also contains some flavonoids that have a kind of a. Similar to a kava like effect, if you will. It works on the benzodiazemonic GABA receptors. So I have heard of people using passion flower in place of banisteriopsis to activate oral dmt. I am not. I haven't experimented with that myself. I've heard that that can work. There are other plants that people use, you know, to activate in place of banisteriopsis. For instance, Syrian rue. Is that something you can buy on the Internet?

What'd you call that one?

The scientific name is Paganum harmola.

Okay.

And actually it's, you know, and Syrian Ru is the common name.

I gotcha. I see that you're typing those into me now in the Skype box. I'll put links to some of these in the show notes for folks. Another one that I wanted to ask you about. And then I also have some questions for you about some of the other things, things I know you've worked with, such as psilocybin and ibogaine, et cetera. I've heard some people will actually get a little bit of a trip, a hallucinogenic trip, through the use of nutmeg. And from what I understand, nutmeg may also be some kind of an MAO inhibitor. Are you familiar at all with people responding and almost going on trips when they use too much nutmeg or nutmeg essential oil?

Oh, yes, yes. This is a whole. Nutmeg is psychotropic. It can be. It was popular in prisons, you know, back in the 50s and 60s. Yeah. When prisoners couldn't get anything else to get high off of. You know, I mean, they could always, you know, steal some nutmeg from the kitchen and take that. And it is psychotropic. And it's a whole different chemistry, actually, the chemistry of nutmeg. The essential oils of nutmeg are things like myristicin. And these are. There's a whole family of these essential oils and they have rings, ring substitutions that are similar to some of the compounds that Shulgin, Alexander Shulgin developed. So these are really. They're not indoles. They're not tryptamines like DMT or psilocybin. They're. They're phenethylamines and actually resemble. Their chemistry is closer to amphetamine or mescaline. And, you know, they are hallucinogens and the thinking is that myristicin or some of the components in nutmeg might be converted into some of these active compounds. Because you can convert myristicin to something like MDMA or MMDA by simply adding an ammonia to the group, adding the nitrogen to the group. Easier said than done, but theoretically this could happen in the body. Yeah, I mean, what I tell people about myristicin or about nutmeg is, I mean, there are liver issues here. These things are not that easy on the liver.

Yeah. The same can be said of kava as well. Right. Like a lot of the kavalact I know can be. You may want to test your liver enzymes if you're frequently using a lot of these things, because I know that they do get metabolized by the liver. Any of these things that you're not, for example, vaping, for example, and just sending into the bloodstream through the lungs, they get a liver pass. And so you need to be careful because that's a pretty important organ.

Yeah, well, the liver is. I mean, that's a big part of its function as it metabolizes toxins. The liver toxicity of kava is a complicated topic, and basically I'll just say it's overhyped. It turns out it's not as bad for the liver as we thought, or as the original reports were, myristicin, all of these things. I mean, for me, the bottom line is, unless you're really desperate, don't bother with. Not bank. You know, there are much better things out there. You know, the quality of the experience is not really worth it. You know, there are better things.

Yeah, absolutely. And by the way, I know that there are a few people right now who have perhaps, you know, your eyebrow is raised because you're wondering why you'd want to do things like hunt down ayahuasca or nutmeg or. Or kava or Syrian rue oil or anything else that Dennis and I are discussing. And I don't know about you, Dennis, but for me personally, whether I'm looking for a personal breakthrough or a business breakthrough, I a lot of times find I'm able to tap into higher amounts of creativity and personal insight when I'm using some of these type of compounds. And full disclosure, I am a Christian. I also engage in devotion and prayer and Bible reading, and I'm in touch spiritually as well with a higher power. But I don't deny that a higher power has also given us a lot of these plant based medicines, very similar to a glass of wine, to be able to engage in specific behavioral patterns that help us to have breakthroughs. And so I don't think that this is all about going to a party and having a good time, necessarily. And I'm not endorsing that folks just go about getting high just for the sake of getting high.

No, right, exactly. These things are really. They're spiritual tools in a certain way, or they're tools for exploring consciousness. You can use them recreationally sometimes. I mean, people use mushrooms recreationally, you know, at low doses, never really suspecting. If they were to up the dose just a little bit, they would discover a whole new aspect of the mushroom experience that's much more profound. And for chance, for, you know, spiritual revelation, for actually, you know, the reason there's revised interest in these, revived interest in these compounds now is they can be used to treat things like depression and PTSD and, you know, a drug addiction and this kind of thing, where we're seeing whole new therapeutic paradigms being developed now for actually using these things. Not in the way that psychopharmaceuticals like antidepressants are used. They don't really solve the problem. They just put a band aid over the problem. Some of these psychedelics actually have the potential to actually cure these conditions, which is one reason why big Pharma is not really interested in these things. They're interested in drugs that you take four times a day for the rest of your life, a drug that you might take two or three times in your whole life. There's no revenue model for that as far as big Pharma is concerned. So these things, again, if you look at a couple of great websites here, which I mentioned before, hefter.org is one, maps.org is another. These are two nonprofits. Heffter is the one I'm affiliated with. Maps is much bigger and more visible. But MAPS has kind of adopted MDMA in the same way that we've adopted psilocybin. We're trying to get regulatory approval. There's plenty of scientific evidence to show that these things have value, but then you're up against the regulatory framework. So maps is developing protocols to use mdma, right, which is Ecstasy on the street, or now it's called Molly, sometimes very good for treating ptsd. Extremely effective for that. And so they're trying to get FDA approval. They're trying to get the thing changed from Schedule 1, which is the most restrictive, Schedule 2, Schedule 2 or 3, that will make it easier for therapists to use it. And we're Kind of doing the same thing with psilocybin.

Got it, Got it. Well, I will link to those websites over at BenGreenfieldFitness.com McKenna McK for those of you who want to take a deeper dive into hefter and maps. So should someone not want to empty the entire bottle of nutmeg from Starbucks into their cup of coffee to experience a DMT release? Dennis let's say someone wants to have an ayahuasca experience. I know that there are a lot of ayahuasca experiences popping up in places like New York and San Francisco, lofts where shamans will come and, and bring one through an ayahuasca ceremony. Would you say that there is a difference between, say, traveling to rural South America or the Amazon to do ayahuasca versus just, you know, finding a safe place in, you know, say, like a, you know, a condo or a loft somewhere with a bunch of friends to.

Use it in New York? Well, yeah, there is a difference. Obviously, you know, if you, if you travel someplace for this experience, then you're immersed in that different cultural context, you know, which, which can be useful, but it's not necessary, really. I mean, you can, I tell people, if you want to go to the Amazon, if you want a tourist adventure and want to go down and take ayahuasca, that's fine. You know, be aware that it's the Wild West. You have to pay attention to the quality because now, because ayahuasca tourism is so prevalent, there's, you know, if you go to the epicenter where this is happening, which is basically a Quitos Peru, you kind of have to know the ropes a little bit or you're at risk for not having the best experience or actually being, you know, mistakenly going someplace where, you know, they may not have your best interests at heart. Right. I mean, there's a lot of dodgy shaman. There's a lot of poor quality brew. There's, you know, sexual abuse is kind of rampant in some of these situations, so it's okay to go there, but you really have to, you should talk with someone who knows the ropes, who knows who not to go to and who to go to.

Is there, is there a website or a resource or would you say that the best thing to do is simply ask around at this point for something like that?

Ask somebody that knows that's been there. There. There are a couple of websites. They are sort of like, there's one called IA Advisor, I think it's dot org. They're kind of like trip, you know, they're like, what's the tourist like a.

Trip advisor for ayahuasca.

Yeah, exactly. TripAdvisor for ayahuasca pilgrims. But the question is, can you trust that information too? But at least it gives you a handle on what's out there. And there's a couple others as well. I can't think of the other name I think it was, I can't remember. So there are a couple websites that rate them and then in the States people are bringing it up and they tell me, New York City, on any given weekend, there's about 100 ayahuasca ceremonies.

I am personally invited to ceremonies all the time at different lofts and condos and different people are bringing shamans in. And, you know, that's why I wanted to ask you, you know, one of the world's leading experts on this, what, you know, what, what you would consider to be safe and effective and a good experience versus, you know, perhaps a risky experience.

Well, I think, I think you can have a, you know, you do not have to go to South America to have a rich, rewarding experience, you know, but the same cautions, the same, you know, the same cautions apply. Work, work through your trusted networks to find a good place to do it. And you know, it can be in New York, it can be in Marin, it doesn't really matter because the important thing is that it's good medicine and that you're able to take it in a safe place and people are there to support you and not exploit you. That's Common Sense 101, right?

Yep. Now Forbes, the magazine, they recently wrote an article and it was entitled LSD Microdosing, the New Job Enhancer in Silicon Valley. I'm curious, can you educate us a little bit on why folks are beginning to utilize something like LSD microdosing as almost like a workplace smart drug?

Well, that's it. People are finding. I'm trying to write down Jim Fadiman, he's a psychopharmacologist and I think he's with the Saybrook Institute. He's kind of the go to guy on LSD microdosing. And people find that low levels of LSD taken daily, and I'm talking really sub psychoactive levels, 10 to 20 micrograms. That's well below the level where you would have any kind of hallucinogenic effect. Right.

That that would be considered about one tenth of what is what a standard dose would be, would be considered.

Correct? Exactly. Standard dose, a very solid standard dose would be between 100 and 200 micrograms. And this is. Yeah, tenth that roughly. I haven't done it myself, but I know people that do it and they say it does definitely give them a certain cognitive edge. They just think better, they're more creative, they think faster. It kind of loosens up their thought processes a little bit and makes them able to. Well, their, their subjective sense of it anyway is that they're thinking better and more creatively.

Now, did you say that the molecular mechanism behind the way that LSD works is similar to psilocybin, or were you saying that. That ayahuasca is what is similar to psilocybin?

No, they're all similar. They're similar. They all work well, with some exceptions. I mean, this is science, right? So there's always exceptions. But there is a class of drugs that I like to call. I like to lump them together and I call them the true psychedelics. And they're true in the sense that they share a mechanism of action and they work on it. One of the subtypes of serotonin receptors and their serotonin is a neurotransmitter in the brain also called 5 hydroxytryptamine. So serotonin itself is a tryptamine. It's called 5 hydroxytryptamine or 5 ht. And the class of. There are about 14 subtypes of 5 ht receptors all through the body, not just in the brain. There's actually more serotonin in your gut than there is in the brain. But these five HT2A receptors are the target for what I call the classical psychedelics or the true psychedelics. And that would be dmt, psilocybin, lsd, mescaline, actually, which is a whole, not an indole, whole other chemical class, but it essentially hits the 5 HT2A receptors. So those are kind of the end DMT. And so DMT orally or vaped is still DMT in terms of the receptors it's targeting.

Okay, so in the case of something like lsd, what we're talking about is essentially mimicking serotonin in the brain, meaning that you technically prevent serotonin from binding to its receptors if you had something that was like serotonin hanging around in the synaptic cleft between nerves. Right?

That's exactly right.

Okay, so basically we're getting a lot of those same, like dopaminergic and, you know, feel good type of effects that we'd get from our own endogenous production of serotonin. Serotonin, we're just basically inducing those in microdoses when we use something like small, small amounts of this lsd.

Yes, yes, But I have to slightly correct you here because you're not getting dopaminergic effects, you're getting serotonergic effects. Right, right. Dopamine is a different neurotransmitter and it's the one that amphetamines and cocaine and your stimulants kind of hit. And MDMA also hits dopamine as well as serotonin. It's kind of a, you know, a bifacial kind of effect. So that's partly the reason that MDMA and some of these shogun type compounds have this stimulative effect. There's, you know, they're like hallucinogens on one side. They have a serotonin effect and an amphetamine like effect.

What do you know about the safety of something like lsd, especially when used in microdosing amounts?

It's not an issue really. I mean, the safety of lsd, especially LSD and some of these others, these are not toxic compounds. They resemble our own neurotransmitters. And so one of the, one of the consequences of that is like I say, we've got enzymes like monoamine oxidases, other types of enzymes that are quite capable of handling these compounds. So from a toxicology level, there is no issue. You know, the issue as far as safety is not toxicology, it's psychology. You know, they can be, you know, I mean, they can in a small number of people. If you have like a genetic proclivity to schizophrenia or something, they can cause, react, you know, they can cause what's called persistent hallucinogen perceptual disorder. In other words, people don't quite make it back, you know, from some of these trips, but most people do. Most people, even from very high dose, difficult trips, they may be terrifying, they may be very uncomfortable, but they're not going to drive you crazy as a rule, if you're basically stable.

Gotcha.

Yeah. So that's where the hazard comes in and that's where set and setting comes in. Right. These two important variables to use psychedelics are setting. It's got to be an appropriate setting, like somebody's looking after you. Probably not, you know, in the stadium during the Twins game, maybe that's not the most optimal setting, you know, and then set, set is what you bring to it. Your whole mindset, your preparation, your experience, what you intend to get out of it, kind of the, you know, so if you approach it respectfully and thoughtfully and in a good setting, they can be, you know, it can be a very rich experience and beneficial.

You know, I have a few other questions for you about some compounds that I know that you've studied. Psilocybin, for example. And I've personally used psilocybin in both microdoses as well as larger doses. And one of the effects that I've found with it is an intense connection with nature, like a stronger interest in everything from hiking to gardening to gathering wild plant extracts to cooking, etc. Do you know what it is about psilocybin that causes one to have like a deeper interest in nature? Or have you experienced this yourself?

Yes, yes, I have. And you also get that with ayahuasca, you know, and some of these other things. But ayahuasca and psilocybin both seem to have this effect. And people, you know, it's interesting, people go to South America to take ayahuasca. They might be going because they have personal issues that they're working on or various personal things, they can address those. But so often they come away and they say, oh, it was all about nature. It was all about rediscovering nature and how important our relationship is to nature. And you know, Ben, you've actually touched on one of my major shticks here. It's, you know, how these plants are co. Evolutionary catalysts and they are. These molecules that these plants make are messenger molecules. And you know, they're trying to. They're messenger molecules directed primarily at us, at our species. And the message that they're trying to get us to hear is wake up and basically re. Understand that you're not in control of nature and it's not there for you to exploit. It's there for, if anything, for you to co evolve with and work with. And people come away with this sort of renewed commitment to really respect nature. And I think that's the shift in consciousness that we, that we have to have. I mean, the plants, this is why they're moving into this global stage, because they're getting a little bit hysterical. You know, they want us to listen. If you go on YouTube and put my name in, it'll. This will all come up. So I don't need to.

Yeah. Is there a molecular mechanism though, that you know, in terms of enhancement of things, like you're noticing browns and greens more intensively or smelling things a little bit more sensitively. Do you know if when it comes to psilocybin, there's something happening on a molecular basis. And the reason that I ask is similar to the reason that we were touching on, like the pineal gland and dmt. I'm just curious about what might be getting activated that we could potentially, via other mechanisms, tap into.

Well, yeah, yeah, there is exactly that. And we understand this pretty well now. And it has to do with what the neurophysiologist, the neuroscientist, called sensory gating. And sensory gating is essentially the threshold for what gets into what, I guess what makes it into your perception from the outside world. Right. There are gates, you know, a lot of what the brain does as far as processing information from out there, from the external reality out there, is to filter almost everything out. Right. Because if it all came in, it would just be confusing and you wouldn't be able to make sense of it. So there are actually these very elegant sensory gating mechanisms that you can train. Essentially. This is sort of something that, you know, there's no conscious training, but in terms of adapting to your environment, these gating levels can be set high or they can be set low. And what psychedelics do is they temporarily lower the gating threshold. So many more things come into your perception that would. Normally they would be in the background or they would be filtered out. I see. I think that's, you know, so in a sense, you could say they bring the background forward in a certain way. Suddenly.

It's interesting. It's also acting the opposite way that something like Valium would work. For example. I know that Valium kind of shuts down activity in the frontal cortex to where you become less aware of sensations, less aware of your environment. And it's almost like taking a sledgehammer to your head to fall asleep. You don't go into a good sleep cycle, but you lose a lot of that sensory perception. And what you're saying is that psilocybin actually specifically causes. Causes this sensory gating to where you become more tuned in to your environment. And is there, like a molecular mechanism behind that? Do you know if it's working on a specific gland or anything like that?

It's overall this activation of these five HT2A receptors, which are all over the brain. I mean, they're in the cortex, in the limbic system. I mean, it's basically through that, but it affects the signaling, you know, indirectly through activating those receptors, it affects this gating mechanism. Now, interestingly, there's interesting work going on here with respect to schizophrenia because, you know, I don't know, it's. I mean, leaving Psychedelics aside, for a minute, you know, we adapt to our environment and we learn to ignore stimuli that are not relevant to our immediate survival, right? And so we raise the gates for that. In other words, I don't really need to know this, raise the gate, keep it out of my attention because it's not relevant to what I'm doing right now. Schizophrenics don't enjoy that luxury, right? They can have a stimulant and usually we. Maybe the way it works in non schizophrenics is you keep hitting those buttons, pretty soon the buttons don't work anymore, you just don't respond. But one of the aspects of the pathology of schizophrenia is they are unable to raise these threshold levels. So their world is much more confusing. They can't turn off the noise is one way to put it. For us, it's background noise. They cannot do that. So they're perpetually in a state of stimulation and they're trying to cope with all these stimuli and they get confused and disoriented. So there was, back in the 50s, there was a thought that maybe schizophrenia was due to something like dmt, some endogenous psychedelic compound like dmt. Interesting theory, and there is some merit to it, but it's not that simple, right? Nothing in biology is ever that simple. But you can't look at the, you know, at the cerebral spinal fluid of schizophrenics, for example, say they have higher levels of DMT than cold normal people. I mean, some do, some don't. Normal people have high levels. There's no correlation, so it's hard to work it out.

The interesting thing when it comes to what you're talking about with regards to sensory gating and activation of the prefrontal cortex with something like psilocybin is I listened to a fascinating radio interview and I'll link to it in the show Notes for people listening in. And it goes into this concept of tapping and how there's been research since the 90s when it comes to activation of the frontal cortex through repetitive tapping movements. Like. And there are entire books on how to tap like. And literally, I mean, actually tapping with your fingers on, for example, you know, front of the eyebrows, side of the ears, below the chin. There's a specific sequence of tapping movements that supposedly induce a sensory gating effect somewhat similar to psilocybin. I've got a couple books on tapping actually on my bookshelf that I need to delve into after this podcast because it's reminded me about that but kind of similar, I suppose, to somehow activating the pineal gland and endogenous DMT production via stimulating the third eye chakra with breathing or with light or with frequencies. Actual repetitive tapping movements with the fingers seem to cause some type of frontal cortex activity.

Yeah, very possibly. I mean, this sort of. Of this circles around to what we were talking about before, about sound. Right. Sound is another one of these technologies. And tapping is. I assume I'm relating it to sound because it's about rhythm, right? It's about frequencies. There's a wonderful colleague of mine that you may know, may have heard of. His name's Alexandre Tennant and he's an ethnomusicologist and a brilliant, brilliant guy, is a scholar of sound in all its aspects. So he's got a website called soundmeditation.com. i put it up there in the list. He would be a great person for you to interview, actually.

He.

He has a very, you know, kind of a renaissance understanding of sound. He knows the physics, the neurophysiology, the history, and of course, you know, the music and all that.

Yeah, I see that he has a video on YouTube called Sound Meditation. I'll link to that for those of you listening in, in the show notes. And then I also actually just yesterday finished a fascinating interview with a guy who wrote a book I mentioned a little bit earlier called the Sound of Healing that goes into how specific sound frequencies affect different glands, different organs and different areas of the brain. And this particular fellow actually produces these CDs called whole tones CDs that you play, whether in your car. I've actually been playing them while getting a massage and while meditating and while sitting in my sauna. And they actually activate specific organ functions. Functions. It's fascinating how sounds and frequencies, whether from music or elsewhere, can affect the body. Dennis, we've only scratched the surface of some of the things that I wanted to ask you about. I know that you've done a ton of additional research on a variety of other compounds, including things like ibogaine and psilocybin. But one other question that I have for you, because I get this a lot from people, is people hear about microdosing with lsd, they hear about psilocybin and MDMA and some of these things. And at the risk of having you sound like a drug dealer, I know some people think, well, where the heck do I even start sourcing this type of thing in my community if I only use lsd and I don't want to go stand out in front of that local high school and get arrested or show up at a rave or something hunting down ecstasy. Are there reputable places where people can actually find and experiment with these type of compounds? Or is it just the wild wild west?

It's pretty much. Unfortunately at this point, it's pretty much the wild wild west because most of these things are still illegal. You know, I mean, they shouldn't be, but that's the reality. And not only are they illegal, but they're, they're quite, you know, they're under the strictest classification being Schedule 1. So they're right up there with heroin, the most dangerous drugs. And the legal, you know, the cost of getting caught is quite high. And I mean, that's all changing. There are places on the web where you can order, you know, these designer drugs. You can order ingredients to make things like ayahuasca and so on, preferably using.

A browser blocker so that your, your IP address can't be traced. Right?

Preferably with that. Yeah. And then you don't know if the, you know, you don't know if the quality of these things are real.

It's like ordering Viagra from India.

Yeah. If you order it, you don't know if what they say is in, in the bottle actually is what's in the bottle. I do want to, I want to plug another Wonderful organization here, arrowid.org if you know, have you ever used that or have you heard of that?

I have not. Arrowid.org no.

E R O W I D Best online source of information on drugs that there is these guys, it's actually a man and wife, Earth and fire, Arrowwood. They do this as a labor of love. I mean, they need support and they do get it. But they. If I want to know about a new drug or just something about, you know, how to use something, I mean, it's the first place I look online. It is. They devote a lot of effort to making sure that they're, you know, that they're accurate and they're not pro or anti drug. It's just they're pro information. And it's like, here's the information. We've done our best to verify it's accurate. It's up to you to use it in however you think is appropriate. So it's a great resource. And actually if people are interested in. They don't sell drugs, they sell it. They don't actually sell anything. It's completely open access. But they do have interesting sections on their website about these designer drugs and some of the problems you know, of ensuring purity and all that. They gave a talk. I was at a conference recently in Northern California where they talked. And, man, I mean, this, the synthetic psychotropics market, it's totally out of control.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it seems to be the wild, wild west. And, you know, and if you're listening in and you want to pipe in with your own comments, your own questions, your own feedback based off of everything that Dennis and I have discussed, just go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com McKenna that's BenGreenfieldFitness.com Mckenna. Not only there can you dive into the discussion in the comments section. And the discussions are always quite interesting. I after these podcast episodes, if you never get a chance to go read the comments, they're typically just as good as the podcast when it comes to the talk that ensues afterwards. But I'll also link to everything from iadvisor.org to this irowid prefrontal cortex tapping and LSD microdosing and links to everything that Dennis and I have discussed over there in the shownotes@BenGreenfieldFitness.com McKenna Dennis, I want to thank you for giving your time and for coming on the show today.

Oh, I'm happy to, happy to do it. Thank you. You're. You're a great interviewer and we barely touched the surface. That's right. I mean, we could go on all afternoon, but I think we'd lose our audience.

We probably could, but it's a beautiful day outside and I have a bow and arrow I need to go shoot.

Okay. All right, let me know when you're posted so I can put on the Facebook page. And if people send in comments that you want me to respond to, then pass those along and I'll do my best.

I will be sure to do that. And again, folks, you can leave your comments@BenGreenfieldFitness.com McKenna until next time, I'm Ben Greenfield along with Dennis McKenna signing out from BenGreenfieldFitness.com Be safe, be responsible, and have a healthy week.

You've been listening to the Ben Greenfield Fitness podcast. Go to BenGreenfieldFitness.com for even more cutting edge fitness and performance advice.

Sam.