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A new season of Bridgerton is here.
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And with it, a new season of Bridgerton, the official podcast.
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I m your host, Gabby Collins.
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And this season, we are bringing fans even deeper into the ton.
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Watch season three of the Shondaland series on Netflix.
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Then fall in love all over again by listening to Bridgerton, the official podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Subscribe to catch a new episode every Thursday.
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Guess what, Will?
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What s up, Mango?
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I ve been trying to write a promo for our podcast, Part-Time Genius, but even though we ve done over 250 episodes, we don t really talk about murders or cults.
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I mean, we did just cover the Illuminati of cheese, so I feel like that makes us pretty edgy.
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We also solve mysteries like how Chinese is your Chinese food and how do dollar stores make money?
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And then, of course, can you game a dog show?
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So what you re saying is everyone should be listening.
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Listen to Part-Time Genius on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
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This is the story of how a group of people brought music back to Afghanistan by creating their own version of American Idol.
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The joy they brought to the nation.
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You are free completely.
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No one is there to destroy you.
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The danger they endured.
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They said my head should be cut off.
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I m John Legend.
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Listen to Afghan Star on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Literally, if you turn any packet around, everything is canola oil, palm oil.
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Well, palm oil, aside from all the environmental effects, which are terrible.
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Although the fatty acid profile is okay, most of the commercially produced canola oil is heavily contaminated with agrochemicals, and it s extracted with heat and solvents, and that denatures the oil and creates carcinogenic products.
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Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the number one health podcast in the world.
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Thanks to each and every one of you that come back every week to become healthier, happier and more healed.
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And I m so excited to be talking to you today.
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I can t believe it.
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My new book, Eight Rules of Love, is out, and I cannot wait to share it with you.
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I am so, so excited for you to read this book, for you to listen to this book.
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I read the audiobook.
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If you haven t got it already, make sure you go to eightrulesoflove.com.
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It s dedicated to anyone who s trying to find, keep, or let go of love.
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So if you ve got friends that are dating, broken up, or struggling with love, make sure you grab this book.
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And I d love to invite you to come and see me for my global tour, Love Rules.
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Go to jscheddytour.com to learn more information about tickets, VIP experiences and more.
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I can t wait to see you this year.
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Now you know that I m a curious person who wants to learn more and more about our mind, our body, our health and tools and techniques that can improve that for us.
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And I like sitting down with individuals who ve dedicated their lives and their life s work to understanding what can improve the lives of others.
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Today s guest is someone I ve been really looking forward to having on the show.
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I know you will be really excited as well.
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We re going to be talking about a wide array of subjects, but I m going to give you really practical, insightful tips and tools that you can put into your life and day immediately to make an impact.
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My guest today is Dr. Andrew Wild, a world-renowned leader and pioneer in the field of integrative medicine.
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Combining a Harvard education and a lifetime of practicing natural and preventive medicine, Dr. Wild is the founder and director of the Andrew Wild Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona, where he is a clinical professor of medicine and professor of public health.
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A New York Times bestselling author, Dr. Weil is the author of 15 books on health and well-being.
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Dr. Weil is also the founder and partner in the growing family of True Food Kitchen restaurants.
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Dr. Weil s current projects include Matcha.com, bringing the world s best matcha to the West.
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I am so excited to welcome Dr. Andrew Weil.
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Andrew, thank you for being here.
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I m delighted to be here.
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Very excited to learn from you about a subject matter that has so much, as we were talking about briefly before, has no insight, bad insight.
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You know, I feel people are underserved in this space.
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And so let s dive straight in.
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The first thing I wanted to ask you,
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and dive into you with was this thought around what are the diet and lifestyle habits people need to do every day to live longer, healthier, and prevent cognitive decline?
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Well, you know, that s fairly simple.
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The first rule of healthy eating is to avoid refined, processed, and manufactured food.
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That s what s doing us in.
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And I m one of the first people to have begun talking about the importance of containing inappropriate inflammation.
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And I have developed an anti-inflammatory diet based on the Mediterranean diet, but I added Asian influences to that because I spent a lot of time in Asia and there are things there like mushrooms and turmeric and tea that I find very useful.
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But it really looks, there s more and more evidence that chronic low-level inappropriate inflammation is the root cause of most of the serious diseases that do people in prematurely.
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So containing inflammation is very important and diet has a major influence there.
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But again, the first step of an anti-inflammatory diet is to try to eliminate refined processed and manufactured foods.
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In terms of other lifestyle practices,
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Basic ones, maintain physical activity throughout life, get good rest and sleep, learn and practice some methods of neutralizing the harmful effects of stress on the mind and the body, maintaining good relationships, especially spending time with people in whose company you feel more positive.
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I mean, those are very simple steps.
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As for cognitive decline, this is of great concern to many people, because we all know people who have experienced cognitive decline and we want to avoid that.
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So I think two very practical pieces of advice, one is don t get hit in the head.
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And that may mean taking precautions if you re doing hazardous activities.
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I don t recommend that people play American football, for example.
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And another is don t smoke, because nicotine constricts blood vessels, reduces blood flow to the brain.
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So those are two simple tips.
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I think also I recommend practices like doing word puzzles to keep your mind active, learning another language.
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You don t have to master the language, just the attempt to learn it is very useful.
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So those are some pieces of practical information.
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Yeah, I think you ve given us a beautiful spectrum of things to focus on there.
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And I think I definitely, in my life, try and tackle one of those areas every year because I feel that they re so big in and of themselves.
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And my biggest mistake in the past was when I tried to change everything, everything all at the same time.
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You re trying to improve your relationship, you re trying to improve your gut.
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you re trying to improve your workout regime and so I love what you re saying that there s all these things and I would list everyone who s listening and watching please try to choose one thing that you re going to try to deeply improve this year that you feel is the one you re struggling with the most that may be having the most negative impact on you because you ll start to see how they all affect each other
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Yeah.
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You don t have to wait a year, however.
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I have a book called Eight Weeks to Optimum Health, which is a program.
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Each week, you do something.
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You start by walking 10 minutes a day, and each week you add five minutes to that.
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But I think you re quite right that a big mistake that people make is to try to do global change, and then they give up.
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So I think it s best to take it in small bites.
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Yeah, let s dive into some of those because I think they re easier said than done.
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So what you just spoke about with diet, that s something that I ve genuinely been focusing on probably for the past 12 months in terms of not eating any packaged foods and refined sugars and
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processed foods, and so I m eating only natural foods.
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I m already plant-based in my diet, but making sure that I m eating vegetables and trying to avoid anything that s out of a packet.
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It s easier said than done.
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It took a lot of time for me to kind of move in that direction.
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I had to find a meal prep service.
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I have an amazing wife who s an incredible cook and chef, and so that helps a million times over.
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For people that are trying to make simple steps,
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to changing specifically their diet to an anti-inflammatory diet.
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What are certain simple steps people can take, the eight week version almost?
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Well, you know, in the book I said, learn how to be friendly with broccoli.
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Broccoli is a very easy vegetable to cook, but many people overcook it and it s not very appetizing.
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And there s a very simple way of cooking it for about two minutes.
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So it s bright green and crunchy.
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Put some olive oil on it, garlic if you want.
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But that s a wonderful powerhouse vegetable.
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with cancer protective effects.
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Add some berries to your diet because they re full of antioxidants.
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We talked about, I mentioned tea.
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I think tea is a very healthful beverage.
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It s one of the main sources of protective antioxidants.
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I think it s good to learn different types of tea and how to add that, find which ones you like.
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What specific teas have you found to have those benefits?
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Well, I m a big fan of green tea because I ve spent a lot of time in Japan, and particularly matcha green tea, which I think has the highest levels of some of these protective elements in them.
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But I think all tea is beneficial.
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When I was doing research on healthy aging, I made a number of trips to Okinawa, which at the time that I was doing it had the highest concentration of centenarians in the world.
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And one of the things that I observed there was that in very hot weather, people were drinking cold, unsweetened turmeric tea.
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Delicious.
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And, you know, in North America, people are really unfamiliar with turmeric, except as it occurs in yellow mustard and curry.
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But this form of turmeric in Okinawa is fermented, which makes it more bioavailable and tastier.
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It dissolves very quickly in cold water.
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It s really delicious.
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So that s one that I recommend learning how to get more turmeric into your diet.
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It s the most powerful anti-inflammatory agent, natural anti-inflammatory agent that we know.
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Wow, yeah, turmeric is a big part of the Indian diet, so I was exposed to it since I was a kid.
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Indians eat it at every meal.
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And you know, one of the interesting correlations, India, I think rural India especially, has the lowest rate of Alzheimer s disease in the world.
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And many researchers think that s related to the regular consumption of turmeric, because Alzheimer s begins as inflammation in the brain, and there s some animal research showing that turmeric can protect
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rats that are genetically programmed to develop Alzheimer s from developing it.
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So I think turmeric is a very good thing to become friendly with.
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That s great insight.
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I love that story of going to Okinawa.
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I went to Sardinia a few years ago.
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Ah, well that s one of the healthy aging places.
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Yeah, one of the blue zones.
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And what s interesting, I want to hear what you saw there, but if you go to these areas around the world where there are unusual concentrations of very healthy old people, women outnumber men by a long shot.
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When you get up in the ranges of upper 90s, 100s, it s almost all women.
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Sardinia is the one exception, that their men and women are equally in those ranks of the oldest old, and we don t know why.
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Yeah, yeah.
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I was really fascinated to see the few things, and it s all on the spectrum of things you mentioned, but what was really interesting is that their workouts were natural.
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Of course, right.
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They were farming, they were walking, they were taking care of the land.
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Same in Okinawa.
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They were hauling fishing nets and gardening.
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I saw a, I think, 102-year-old woman who was hoeing the garden in front of her house.
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So, they re not going to gyms, they re not working with trainers.
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It s just daily activity.
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Yeah, and then the other thing was that they were eating foods only in season.
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So everything was picked locally, everything was locally grown or locally found and they weren t eating things that were just artificially available.
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And what about social connectedness?
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I mean, that was a big part of it.
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I mean, people were living in bigger families or living closer by to families with children.
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So children weren t just being raised by two people, but by ten people.
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And every evening and even during the middle of the day, they would get together.
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I think that s very important.
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The MacArthur Foundation some years ago did a study of successful aging.
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They identified a population
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of people they considered successful agers, and then they looked to see what were the outstanding commonalities.
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And the two that stood out, and this dwarfed everything else, whether they took supplements, whether they, you know, dietary patterns, the two were maintenance of physical activity throughout life and maintenance of social and intellectual connectedness.
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I want to dive into two things that you mentioned earlier, and I want to dive into them deeply, because I think, again, they re buzzwords, people know about them, but I d like people to really understand the benefits.
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So let s talk about matcha, because that s your favorite daily plant.
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An ally, which you say has this incredible mind-body benefit.
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I think it has already seeped its way into mainstream culture.
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Yeah, quite amazing.
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I went to Japan when I was 17 and lived with families, one family outside of Tokyo.
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And this was 1959, Japan was a very different place.
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And the second night that I was there, my host mother, we had no language in common, took me next door to her neighbor who practiced tea ceremony.
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So the three of us sat around and the neighbor did a tea ceremony and presented me with a bowl of matcha.
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And two things about it totally caught my attention.
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One was the color, this vibrant green.
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And the other was the bamboo whisk that you use to whisk the matcha tea into a froth in a bowl of water.
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It s carved from a single piece of bamboo, just a miracle of Japanese craftsmanship.
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So, I fell in love with matcha.
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When I got back to the States, nobody knew anything about it or ever heard of it.
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Over the years, when I would go to Japan, I d bring matcha back and I d turn people on to it.
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I tried, starting in the 1980s, I partnered with a Japanese company to try to sell it on my website.
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There was no market for it.
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I did that again in the 1990s.
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Anyway, it s quite amazing now to see this penetrating our culture.
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Matcha is prepared in a very unique way.
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The tea plants are heavily shaded for three weeks before harvest and 90% shade cloth so it cuts out almost all sunlight.
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In response to that the leaves get bigger and thinner and produce more chlorophyll trying to take advantage of what light is there and they also produce more
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antioxidants and flavor compounds and this amino acid L-theanine that has a calming effect and moderates the action of caffeine.
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So for that reason, matcha I think is more healthful than other forms of tea and also you consume the whole leaf, not just an infusion of it.
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So, that s one that I m quite enthusiastic about and I started a company.
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We got the URL matcha.com, which was a great tool.
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Genius.
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When did you get that URL?
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I m fascinated.
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Did you have to buy it recently or you ve had it for like years?
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No, it s like six or seven years.
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We tracked it down.
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It was owned by a Japanese man who had no idea what he had.
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If you went to the site, he had pictures of his cats.
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And my business partner, Andre Fasciola, managed to negotiate with him and we got it at a quite reasonable price.
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People in Japan can t believe we ve got that.
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Anyway, we import very high quality matcha.
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And by the way, if your listeners use a discount code J, we ll give them a very generous discount on their products.
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Oh, I love that.
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There you go.
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There you go.
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So I m a big fan of matcha.
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I m delighted to see that gaining traction.
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However, a lot of the matcha here is not very good because it s such a fine powder that unless it s carefully protected, it oxidizes very quickly, loses its brilliant green color, becomes bitter.
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And many people have tried matcha and say they don t like it, but they ve never tasted good matcha.
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So as I said, I think a lot of research has been done on green tea in particular, but all tea has beneficial effects.
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And frankly, you know, I don t want to bash coffee, but I would love to see more of a tea culture develop here.
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Yeah, me too.
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I m a big tea fan.
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I know.
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So coffee, you know, the stimulant effects of coffee and tea are very different.
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Coffee is much more jangling.
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It is much more associated with truly addictive behavior.
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There s a real crash coming down from coffee.
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You don t see any of that with tea.
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And some of it is because of this modifying effect of L-theanine.
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But also, I find it interesting that the historically and culturally, the associations with coffee.
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Coffee was always associated with kind of argumentative behavior, loud, raucous gatherings of people, political activism.
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Whereas tea, the historical associations are much more with contemplation, meditation.
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I think it would be very beneficial to see a greater tea culture develop in North America that could work its way into some of the coffee culture that s now so dominant.
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Yeah, when me and my wife launched our tea company, we said we wanted to make tea as hot as coffee.
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Like that was the goal.
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Because, yeah, we grew up with tea culture both from our British and Indian heritage.
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Yeah, I found it so therapeutic.
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I, like you, love the color, love the scent, love the experience of having to drink it slow.
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You don t really have tea on the go.
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There s a meditative process with it and a healing property to it.
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And it s a big change.
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When I was growing up, tea was what old people and sick people drank in this country.
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And it s wonderful to see that change now.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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And the other one that I want to ask you about was the green Mediterranean diet.
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Yes, this is interesting.
1
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It s just recently been in the news.
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You know, we have so much scientific evidence for the benefits of the Mediterranean diet in terms of longevity, overall lowest risks of disease.
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And I think most of your listeners are familiar with the Mediterranean diet.
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You know, it s heavily on fruits and vegetables and whole grains, olive oils, I mean, cooking fat, meat used very occasionally, oily fish, relatively low in sugar, so forth.
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a green Mediterranean diet is proposed as being even healthier.
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And this reduces animal products even further, increases fruits and vegetables, especially sources of a class of compounds called polyphenols.
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And these are antioxidant compounds that are found in plants and fruits, vegetables, especially berries, tea, and dark chocolate.
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So, this Green Mediterranean Diet specifically recommended green tea to add, and they noted chocolate, but they mentioned all tea.
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So, I think this is fascinating, you know, to see.
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These are researchers really, you know, not really trying to promote any agenda.
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Yeah.
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Has your work led to any of the resets that I m recently seeing around like canola oil, palm oil and the negative harmful effects versus what now I m only eating in is avocado oil and olive oil as my primary oil.
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There s one other that you should check out is algae oil if you don t know about that.
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This is a new product that s out there, and it s made through cultured oil.
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It s microorganisms that have been altered to produce oil, which is almost all monounsaturated fat.
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It has a very high smoke point, neutral taste, and also has one of the omega-3 fatty acids in it.
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So that s another choice, but those are the ones I use also, avocado and olive.
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what are some of the harmful effects of the canola palm oil that because they re pretty much literally if you turn any packet around everything is canola oil palm oil well palm oil aside from all the environmental effects right yeah which are terrible there are two kinds of palm oils there s an oil extracted from the fruit of the oil palm which is red and is used in africa as a cooking oil and is okay but we rarely see that and then there s the oil extracted from the kernel
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And that is very high in unstable, unsaturated fatty acids that oxidize quickly.
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It s also very high in saturated fat.
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So that s not a good one.
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Canola oil.
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is a, you know, the word means Canadian oil, and it was developed by Canadian scientists, I think in the 1920s or 1930s, from a traditional cooking oil that you know in India, rapeseed oil.
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Yes, and that s another one, yeah.
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Right.
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And rape has a toxic fatty acid in it, possibly, and the Canadian scientists worked with it to develop one that was low in that fatty acid.
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Problems with canola oil, although the fatty acid profile is okay,
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Most of the commercially produced canola oil is heavily contaminated with agrochemicals and it s extracted with heat and solvents and that denatures the oil and creates carcinogenic products.
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So it s one I would stay away from now.
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I recommended it in the past but I don t anymore.
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I m a big fan of olive oil.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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No, everyone cook with olive oil.
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By the way, I ve worked with a number of Indian patients who were very convinced that ghee can do no harm.
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And it s pure butterfat.
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And it s probably not healthy.
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And the rates of cardiovascular disease in India are pretty high.
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And I ve taught people to use ghee as a flavoring, you know, cook with a healthy oil like avocado and then at the end you can drizzle some ghee over to get the flavor you want.
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And I ve also suggested, I had a student, a physician from Kerala, where coconut, you know, it s the land of coconuts and they use
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coconut oil and coconut, full fat coconut milk.
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And I taught her to use cashew milk, which is very easy to make and is much healthier fat than coconut.
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It s monounsaturated, not saturated, and the taste is delicious.
2
SPEAKER_01
Wow, that s good to know about ghee because yeah, it s one of those things that my mom never wants me to miss.
2
SPEAKER_00
Right, I know.
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SPEAKER_01
Then I always hear this like in between but I like the... Yeah, use it as a flavoring at the end.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, I like the happy medium, the happy balance.
2
SPEAKER_01
She ll be happy to hear about the turmeric.
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SPEAKER_01
Good.
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SPEAKER_01
And saffron s the other one she s like never telling me to miss.
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SPEAKER_00
And that s a good one.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
2
SPEAKER_00
But the turmeric, you know, our company also sells that fermented turmeric from Okinawa and we ll send you some to try.
2
SPEAKER_00
Please, I d love that.
2
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It s delicious.
2
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That sounds amazing.
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It s really good.
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It s fascinating.
2
SPEAKER_01
You mentioned earlier limiting the smoking of cigarettes and the negative effects of nicotine.
2
SPEAKER_01
What about when it comes to marijuana?
2
SPEAKER_01
I think that, you know, marijuana is such an interesting topic for so many people today.
2
SPEAKER_01
There are so many perspectives, most of them out there are like positive, but I d love to know from your perspective, how are you seeing marijuana affect the brain?
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SPEAKER_01
How are you seeing
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marijuana affect the actual biology.
2
SPEAKER_00
First of all, I m going to call it cannabis because the word marijuana has negative connotations.
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SPEAKER_00
So let s talk about cannabis.
2
SPEAKER_00
Yes, sure.
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So I did the first controlled human experiments with cannabis in 1964.
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It was the first time anyone had given that to human subjects in a controlled fashion to see what it did.
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So it s a plant that I ve been involved with for some time.
2
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And let me say, you know, this is also a plant very well known in India.
2
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It s, you know, native to Asia.
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The word, the main species is cannabis sativa.
2
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Sativa means useful and cannabis is hemp.
2
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It s the same root as canvas because canvas used to be made from hemp fiber.
2
SPEAKER_00
But this is a very useful plant.
2
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It provides an edible seed, an edible oil, a fiber, a medicine, and an intoxicant.
2
SPEAKER_00
That s a lot of ways for one plant to serve us, and it really only wants to serve us.
2
SPEAKER_00
And I think we have really not been wise in the way we ve dealt with that plant.
2
SPEAKER_00
So in terms of the intoxicating properties of cannabis, it s a difficult subject to talk about because the chemistry of that plant is so complex.
2
SPEAKER_00
There are so many different strains and there s so much variation in individual reaction to it.
2
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There are people who can smoke cannabis before bed and have a great night s sleep.
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Other people smoke it before bed and they can t sleep the entire night.
2
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So there s that kind of disparity in reactions to it.
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First of all, that it is one of the least toxic drugs that we know.
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You can t kill people with it.
2
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And you can t say that about any drug that we use in medicine and every drug
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has a lethal dose, and in some cases, the lethal dose is relatively close to the useful dose.
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You can t calculate a lethal dose for cannabis, so on a physical level, it s extremely safe.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, there s concerns about smoking it and whether that s how harmful that may be for lungs, you know, that goes back and forth.
3
SPEAKER_01
I don t think it s a great idea to smoke anything, you know, and inhale smoke into the lungs, probably not a good idea.
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SPEAKER_01
But certainly not as, I think, not as toxic as tobacco, and it doesn t have anything in it
3
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as addictive as nicotine, which is one of the most addictive drugs that we know.
3
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I think the medical usefulness of cannabis, there s a lot of potential there.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I think this is a subject that s open at the moment.
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SPEAKER_01
There s a lot of research on ways it can reduce muscle spasticity, it can help people with
3
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you know, all sorts of neuromuscular problems with digestive problems, but again, a lot of individual reaction to it.
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SPEAKER_01
We re seeing this plant, you know, being made available to people.
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SPEAKER_01
And it s, I think it s about time that it gets out of that restrictive drug schedule and made available for therapeutic use.
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I was just talking yesterday, our center does a podcast and I was interviewing a nurse who is a member of the American Cannabis Nurses Association.
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I didn t know there was such a thing.
3
SPEAKER_01
But there is a large group of nurses who have now become trained in using cannabis therapeutically.
3
SPEAKER_01
In what form, yeah?
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SPEAKER_01
They use all different forms, and they base that on the individual patient.
3
SPEAKER_01
But I think they re in a much better position to do this than physicians, because there s no cannabis preparation out there that most doctors are going to feel comfortable using.
3
SPEAKER_01
And until we have something like that, I don t think doctors are going to go near it.
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SPEAKER_01
They don t understand it.
3
SPEAKER_01
But it s great that nurses are using a lot of them are using it for pain control.
3
SPEAKER_01
Uh, they re also using it in, in the hospice situations, especially with people with terminal cancer.
3
SPEAKER_01
And they say they find it very useful.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I think it s, you know, I m happy to see this becoming used.
3
SPEAKER_01
I think there s a lot we don t know about it.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I find it very difficult when people ask my advice about it.
3
SPEAKER_01
I don t know what preparations to recommend to people.
3
SPEAKER_01
Uh, you know, that it s confusing.
3
SPEAKER_02
What s your take on the more social use of it?
3
SPEAKER_01
Well, I was part of that culture in my 20s and 30s.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it was fun back then.
3
SPEAKER_01
It was a fun social experience.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then I also found that it was very... It stimulated my imagination, creativity, helped me write.
3
SPEAKER_01
But at some point, that changed.
3
SPEAKER_01
And my reactions to it changed.
3
SPEAKER_01
I became more introspective, withdrawn.
3
SPEAKER_01
And then eventually it became an unproductive habit that just made me groggy and it was hard for me to separate myself from it.
3
SPEAKER_02
So what was that?
3
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What do you think that was?
3
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Because I think that s such an interesting arc of a journey with you.
3
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I think a lot of people feel that way.
3
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That s kind of like an arc.
3
SPEAKER_02
I had a lot of friends who initially started for those reasons and then ended up paranoid or ended up confused or ended up lethargic.
3
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I don t know.
3
SPEAKER_01
Maybe it has something to do with changes as we age, possible.
3
SPEAKER_01
But it was such a striking change in the effects for me.
3
SPEAKER_01
So something that I thought of as an ally that was helping me really ceased being that.
3
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, yeah, okay.
3
SPEAKER_02
That s really interesting to know because, yeah, I feel, I had a lot of friends in the same bucket.
3
SPEAKER_02
I never really, I never really dabbled with it deeply, but in my brief experiences, it was far, very brief experiences, it was far more the creative or the spark, but it, I never got deep into it, but my friends who did, they went on the same arc.
3
SPEAKER_01
So that s interesting, and I don t know, I have not seen anyone write about that or talk about that or investigate what the cause of that is.
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, yeah.
3
SPEAKER_01
Also, you know, today the preparations of cannabis that are out there are much, much stronger than those that were available when I was using it way back.
3
SPEAKER_02
You mean the ones that are available from a leisure perspective?
3
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, from everywhere.
3
SPEAKER_01
I ll tell you a story.
3
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A physician colleague of mine in San Francisco sent me three preparations of cannabis that had come from a medical dispensary and he wanted me to try them.
3
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And I was, you know, I m a little leery about that since I haven t used it in so long.
3
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was a kind of oil that was in a tube, a little syringe, and it came with a very professionally printed brochure, and it was recommending it for pain control especially, and it said to start with an amount the size of a grain of rice, and work up from there.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I took a piece half the size of a grain of rice, and my friend said take it at bedtime.
3
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I took it at bedtime, went to sleep,
3
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Woke up about an hour later in full-blown delirium with hallucinations as vivid as those I ve had from using LSD.
3
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I couldn t move.
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I had no equilibrium.
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Had burning thirst.
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I couldn t reach for a glass of water.
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I couldn t call for help.
3
SPEAKER_01
And it kept coming on stronger and stronger.
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And I had no idea when this was going to end.
3
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And I had to use all the tricks that I ve learned in meditation and breath control to keep myself centered.
3
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And when it finally subsided about eight hours later, my equilibrium was off for two days.
3
SPEAKER_01
I had very bad balance.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I was really angry.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, and this brochure said work up from there.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I m thinking there are people out there, you know, taking this.
3
SPEAKER_01
I mean, that was like a very, very powerful thing.
3
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And I thought fairly dangerous.
3
SPEAKER_02
What brought you into this so early on?
3
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Because we re at a point in culture, I feel, where these things are now coming to the forefront.
3
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I mean, of course, I m probably sure you re seeing cycles of that.
3
SPEAKER_02
You probably saw it come to the forefront of culture.
3
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I m just starting work on a book about psychedelics, and a lot of it I m telling my own history, because I knew everyone involved in all of that.
3
SPEAKER_01
But my interest goes back to about, I think it was a specific day in 1960, right before I went to Harvard.
3
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and there was an article in the newspaper in Philadelphia about the supposedly the death of a student at a California University who was taking mescaline for inspiration for creative writing course and it said mescaline was a vision-inducing drug I d never heard of it and and they made the mistake of quoting from his last paper and I just remember this phrase galaxies of exploding colors when I read that I knew I wanted mescaline
3
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So I inquired about it.
3
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I came across Aldous Huxley s book, The Doors of Perception, which had been written a few years before.
3
SPEAKER_01
And when I got to Harvard, I had the very good fortune to become associated with Richard Evans Schultes, who was the director of the Harvard Botanical Museum.
3
SPEAKER_01
And he had been one of the great explorers of the Amazon and discovered a lot of hallucinogenic plants down there.
3
SPEAKER_01
So he really, through him, I became very interested in psychedelic plants.
3
SPEAKER_01
At the same time, Richard Alpert and Timothy Leary were just starting their work with psilocybin at Harvard.
3
SPEAKER_01
These drugs were not controlled substances then.
3
SPEAKER_01
I was able to obtain mescaline from a chemistry, chemical company.
3
SPEAKER_01
I took it a number of times.
3
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I had interesting experience, but I was very disappointed I didn t have vision, I didn t see galaxies exploding in colors.
3
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I was very disappointed.
3
SPEAKER_01
Anyway, so that was before I d ever tried cannabis, but as a result of being in that place at that time,
3
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I really got to meet and come across all of the people who worked in that field with Albert Hoffman, who was the discoverer of LSD, Gordon Wasson, who rediscovered the mushroom cults in Mexico, Sasha Shulgin, who invented many of the designer drugs.
3
SPEAKER_01
So I had a long period of experimentation with psychedelics, and I have had a lot of benefit from them.
3
SPEAKER_01
I really don t use them anymore.
3
SPEAKER_01
My first book, The Natural Mind, which was about the importance of altered states of consciousness.
3
SPEAKER_01
Oh no, you can carry on.
3
SPEAKER_01
I m making sure they see it.
3
SPEAKER_01
But Alan Watts wrote a blurb for it, in which he said, when you get the message, you hang up the telephone.
3
SPEAKER_01
And so I think I got what I had to learn from psychedelics, and I didn t feel the need to continue to use them.
3
SPEAKER_01
But I ve learned a lot of things from them, and a lot of that has formed my philosophy of integrative medicine, especially the very subtle, complex interactions of mind and body.
3
SPEAKER_01
And I have seen very powerfully that you can change external reality by changing internal reality.
3
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A new season of Bridgerton is here.
3
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And with it, a new season of Bridgerton, the official podcast.
3
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I m your host, Gabrielle Collins.
3
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And this season, we are bringing fans even deeper into the ton.
3
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Colin Bridgerton has returned from his travels abroad.
3
SPEAKER_00
Is Betrothal written in the stars for the eligible bachelor?
3
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Meanwhile, the ton is reverberating with speculation of who holds Lady Whistledown s pen.
3
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We re discussing it all.
3
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I sit down with Nicola Coughlin, Luke Newton, Shonda Rhimes, and more.
4
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to offer an exclusive peek behind the scenes of each episode of the new season.
4
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Watch season three of the Shondaland series on Netflix.
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Then, fall in love all over again by listening to Bridgerton, the official podcast, on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Subscribe to catch a new episode every Thursday.
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Hey everyone, this is Molly and Matt and we re the hosts of Grown Up Stuff How to Adult, a podcast from Ruby Studio and iHeart Podcasts.
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It s a show dedicated to helping you figure out the trickiest parts of adulting.
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like how to start planning for retirement, creating a healthy skincare routine, understanding when and how much to tip someone, and so much more.
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We re back with season two of the podcast, which means more opportunities to glow up and become a more responsible and better adult, one life lesson at a time.
4
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And let me just tell you, this show is just as much for us as it is for you.
4
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So let s figure this stuff out together.
4
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This season, we re going to talk about whether or not we re financially and emotionally ready for dog ownership.
4
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We re going to figure out the benefits of a high-yield savings account.
4
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And what exactly are the duties of being a member of the wedding party?
4
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All that plus so much more.
4
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Let s learn about all of it and then some.
4
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Listen to Grown Up Stuff How to Adult on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
4
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Guess what, Mango?
4
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What s that, Will?
4
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So iHeart is giving us a whole minute to promote our podcast, Part-Time Genius.
4
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I know, that s why I spent my whole week composing a haiku for the occasion.
4
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It s about my emotional journey in podcasting over the last seven years, and it s called Earthquake House.
4
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Mango, I m going to cut you off right there.
4
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Why don t we just tell people about our show instead?
4
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Yeah, that s a better idea.
4
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So every week on Part-Time Genius, we feed our curiosity by answering the world s most important questions.
4
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Things like, when did America start dialing 911?
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is William Shatner s best acting work in Esperanto.
4
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Also, what happened to Esperanto?
4
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Plus, we cover questions like how Chinese is your Chinese food?
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How do dollar stores stay in business?
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And of course, is there an Illuminati of cheese?
4
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There absolutely is.
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And we are risking our lives by talking about it.
4
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But if you love mind blowing facts, incredible history and really bad jokes, make your brains happy and tune in to Part Time Genius.
4
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Listen to Part Time Genius on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts.
4
SPEAKER_06
Let s dive into psychedelics because that was also what really intrigued me and drew me to your work because again I feel like my generation, generations after me, they re starting to hear these terms in mainstream culture a lot more often and you know I feel like my role is to try and find the deepest experts in this space to help everyone have as much information they can have in order to make better decisions for themselves, their friends, their family and anyone that s there and so
4
SPEAKER_06
I m going to ask questions that may seem really simple and basic, but by design, because I want people... So, what are psychedelics?
4
SPEAKER_06
For someone who keeps hearing that term from their friends and they keep nodding along, pretending to know what that is, what does it mean and what comes under that umbrella?
4
SPEAKER_00
You know, the word, it s a coined word, which means mind manifesting.
4
SPEAKER_00
Previously, people had called these psychotomimetic drugs, meaning they mimicked psychosis, which is, you know, a very negative term.
4
SPEAKER_00
Psychedelics are a large group of compounds, many of which are found in plants.
4
SPEAKER_00
There s one we know from an animal source.
4
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Many are synthetic or semi-synthetic drugs.
4
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They fall into two chemical families with very distinctive molecular structures.
4
SPEAKER_00
Ketamine is not a psychedelic, even though many people call it that.
4
SPEAKER_00
Cannabis is not a psychedelic.
4
SPEAKER_00
It doesn t have any chemical resemblance to that.
4
SPEAKER_00
MDMA is part of that chemical family related to mescaline, but its effects are not typical of psychedelics.
4
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It has a unique effect that makes people emotionally open.
4
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I think it is a very useful substance.
4
SPEAKER_00
I guess I would call it a psychedelic, but it s not a classic psychedelic in terms of the perceptual changes that it causes.
4
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One fact about this group of compounds is they are strikingly non-toxic physically, much as with cannabis.
4
SPEAKER_00
That s just not an issue of physical toxicity.
4
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The main dangers are psychological, and those are almost entirely results of set-in-setting, that is, the expectation of the person taking them and the physical environment in which they re taken.
4
SPEAKER_00
So, you know, to put it in a very crude way, if you take a very high dose of LSD on a New York subway on a day when you re feeling anxious, you re likely to have a bad trip.
4
SPEAKER_00
On the other hand, if you take the right sort of dose in nature when you are prepared for the experience and in the company of people who can guide you in the right direction, the chances are you can have a positive experience.
4
SPEAKER_00
The penetration of psychedelics into mainstream culture at the moment is quite astonishing.
4
SPEAKER_00
Before the pandemic, I was traveling a lot and speaking in various places, and no matter what subject I was talking about, whether it was nutrition, healthy aging, integrative medicine, I would get questions about psychedelics.
4
SPEAKER_00
Where can we get them?
4
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How can we use them?
4
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How do you find somebody who can guide you?
4
SPEAKER_00
A few months ago, Vogue magazine had a cover story on psilocybin.
4
SPEAKER_00
Town and Country magazine of all places had an article titled, Why is Everybody Smoking Toad Venom?
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, it is really going mainstream in a big way.
4
SPEAKER_00
And it is absolutely absurd to have these in federal Schedule 1, which is defined as drugs that have high potential for abuse and no therapeutic potential.
4
SPEAKER_00
The therapeutic potential of these drugs is enormous.
4
SPEAKER_00
Now, you know there is currently a lot of research documenting benefits in mental-emotional conditions, things like MDMA for PTSD and OCD, psilocybin for drug-resistant depression, for example, and treatment of addictions of various kinds.
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, there s a long, growing list of conditions for which clearly there are good results obtained.
4
SPEAKER_00
But beyond that, I think there is a tremendous potential of these to cause spiritual awakening.
4
SPEAKER_00
Some of that has been documented at the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelics, which is really good.
4
SPEAKER_00
I mean, a single experience with psilocybin in people who had no sense of a spiritual dimension to life suddenly are aware of that.
4
SPEAKER_00
In my own experimentation with them,
4
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I have had very profound realizations that my consciousness extends to everything.
4
SPEAKER_00
You know, that everything out there is conscious.
4
SPEAKER_00
Not just animate objects, but rocks and everything.
4
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And that same, whatever that is, it s in me, it s in everything, it connects me with everything.
4
SPEAKER_00
I think having that realization is one of the things that guided me in my philosophy of medicine and my methods of treating patients.
4
SPEAKER_00
I think it s also changed my attitude toward nature.
4
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And, you know, I really, the title of the book I m working on is Psychedelics Can Save the World.
4
SPEAKER_00
And I really believe that.
4
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And I think it may be the only thing out there that has that possibility because, you know, we are clearly headed for disaster.
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And I think the only thing that can save us is a collective transformation of consciousness.
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I think that can result from enough individuals having a transformation of conscience that it catalyzes some general movement.
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SPEAKER_00
I mean, for instance, if you just look at the issue of the climate disaster that we re facing, I think if people realize that they are part of nature, that they re continuous with it, they change their behavior.
4
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That s just one example.
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And I saw some research recently showing that people who d had experience with psilocybin particularly tend to become involved with the environmental movement.
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So that is the great hope that I have.
4
SPEAKER_00
I think this could go a million different ways in terms of whether for-profit businesses get involved, whether people are going to be using these to party, but I think it doesn t matter.
4
SPEAKER_00
I think just having these out there in the general culture and freed from that restrictive way that they ve been placed, I think that holds great positive potential.
4
SPEAKER_06
you like the idea of these things becoming more mainstream and accessible and available because they have so many positive benefits, but there s a part of you that understands or is accepting of the dangers that come in with self-diagnosis and self-use, where it isn t being administered in a healthy dose or a healthy way.
4
SPEAKER_06
What are some of the, because like the example you gave of getting on the train, like I look at that and I go, you know, as these things become more available,
4
SPEAKER_00
How do we stop people going off the edge because they don t know how to administer and monitor and actually... Well I would say by training as many people as we can to be guides who will behave in an ethical fashion and are experienced and can structure a psychedelic experience in a way to minimize any harmful potential and maximize positive potential.
4
SPEAKER_00
So there are a number of groups around the country that have training programs for psychedelic
5
SPEAKER_00
guides, we need a lot more of them and my hope is that we ll start to see that.
5
SPEAKER_02
Yeah because I do worry that, I love the benefits of so many incredible sources out there, I do worry that when people are untrained in anything that has that much power
5
SPEAKER_02
Uh, it can be, it can be worrying too, because you know, you could have a whole world of people who could be saved and supported, but in the wrong way could, you know, could end up in a much worse place psychologically, as you said, uh, because there isn t that responsibility around it, if that makes sense.
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SPEAKER_02
Would you agree?
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_00
So, uh, that s my hope is that we ll see, you know, some large numbers of responsibly trained people who can guide people in the right direction.
5
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, I just wanted to clarify that with you because it s kind of how I feel about technology, right?
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SPEAKER_02
Like if you look at technology, technology is like a drug in one sense, in the way the chemicals that are released when we use them, it could really be likened to a drug.
5
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Obviously, it s not being talked about that way, that s not the language, we re only seeing those experiences now.
5
SPEAKER_02
And we re seeing the challenges with technology addiction, we re seeing the challenges with technology obsession and the things that come from it, whether it s envy, comparison,
5
SPEAKER_02
fear of missing out, anxiety, insecurity and you think oh wait a minute well if we had technology coaches and if people were trained in how to use technology effectively before we were given a phone chances are we d be better at handling it and we wouldn t be doing this backwards job that we re in right now which is like oh gosh like my kids are all at you know
5
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, I think we have no idea what this is doing to the kids brains, you know, I think it obviously is changing them But I don t think we know the full ramifications of that Yeah, so it s definitely a concern and you re saying there s enough insight on The effects of psychedelics on the brain for us to kind of be able to see the right amount of doses.
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SPEAKER_02
Yes, exactly Yeah, yeah, right
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SPEAKER_02
Let s dive into some of the more popular ones and how they re used.
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Because again, we hear these names a lot and I think people are unaware of like, well, what is that used for?
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How is it administered?
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Who does it help?
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SPEAKER_02
So you were mentioning the MDMA.
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Could you tell us what is MDMA?
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How is it used currently?
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SPEAKER_00
Yeah, so MDMA is a synthetic psychedelic, and it resembles the structure of mescaline.
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That family of groups does not cause many visual changes like, you know, a lot of the classic psychedelics.
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It is a stimulant, but it has a very reliable uniform effect in most people, which is to produce a state of
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non-defensiveness, calmness, positive emotional feeling, emotional openness.
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A name that s been proposed for it is an empathogen, something that creates empathy.
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I ve used it a lot and actually it was
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invented by my friend Sasha Shulgin, and he sent me some, I think somewhere around 1975, and said, what do you think of this?
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And I said, send more.
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And I ve seen many, many people use it with very, very good results.
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I think it can be incredibly healing for relationships.
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I ve seen some remarkable physical changes in people with disappearance of allergies and chronic pain.
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And there s quite a lot of research on its usefulness in dealing with PTSD.
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You know, sometimes one structured MDMA session can eliminate that after people have tried all sorts of psychotherapy, talk therapy that hasn t produced results.
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SPEAKER_00
So I think it s very likely that s going to be the first one that s going to be made therapeutically available and probably for the treatment of PTSD.
5
SPEAKER_02
Yeah, and PTSD obviously is such an extreme experience, and so it sounds like... I guess, what are people experiencing when they do it?
5
SPEAKER_02
So it sounds like they re more vulnerable, they re more empathetic to themselves as well?
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SPEAKER_00
I d say it is a heart-centered experience, you know, strong feelings of loving connection with others, calmness, relaxation, and a strikingly uniform effect from person to person.
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SPEAKER_00
Whereas a lot of the others, the classic psychedelics, there s tremendous variation in response depending on set and setting.
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SPEAKER_00
MDMA is pretty uniform.
5
SPEAKER_02
And again, you don t see this as something, it sounds like, this is not something you do for the rest of your life.
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This is a medicinal almost, of like there s a certain thing to treat and work through, you re working with a practitioner.
5
SPEAKER_00
Yes, you may not have to use it that many times.
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But I think that s one that we really should have access to and use.
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I lived as a monk for three years in India.
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I was in a monastery where we spent hours every day deep in meditation and reflection and the study of spiritual texts and literatures.
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very strict diets and but we were trained in the development of a lot of these uh almost like the purification and the detoxing to get to compassionate and empathetic states and so when you were describing some of your experiences i was like i had that experience through meditation of that connectedness with nature and with
5
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the universe and with each individual soul, whether it be animate or inanimate.
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So I remember those through meditation.
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And so our journey was very slow, very step by step, a lot of pain and a lot of obstacles to clear the way.
5
SPEAKER_02
I m intrigued by how does someone feel after the dose has run its course?
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SPEAKER_02
Like, are they able to stay compassionate and empathetic with their partner?
5
SPEAKER_02
What happens?
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SPEAKER_02
I m intrigued.
5
SPEAKER_02
Yeah.
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SPEAKER_00
Well, the effect of the drug wears off.
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And because it s a stimulant, there s a period of time when you feel tired and somewhat depleted of energy.
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But the feelings, you remain.
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And you can reconnect with those.
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And I think I see permanent change in people.
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By the way, in the early days when people were talking about the spiritual potential of psychedelics, it really angered a lot of spiritual teachers who said that this was artificial, that these experiences.
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And I think they were kind of resentful of people having them without going through the time and work that you put in.
5
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So, you know, I think there are many valid paths to achieve those kinds of feelings.
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SPEAKER_00
But psychedelics are fast and they offer the possibility of giving many more people access to them.
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I ve seen in my personal experience with the right people around me and with people I know that have experienced them, I ve found them to be great window openers for people or door openers.
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It s kind of what you described, this idea that you got to have a glimpse into a new reality that you didn t know existed.
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I think I m always intrigued by how people have that versus it becomes addictive where you re just constantly wanting to live in that new reality.
5
SPEAKER_01
When the Taliban banned music in Afghanistan, millions were plunged into silence.
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Radios were smashed, cassettes burned.
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SPEAKER_01
You could be beaten or jailed or killed for breaking the rules and yet Afghans did it anyway.
5
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This is the story of how a group of people brought music back to Afghanistan by creating their own version of American Idol.
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The danger they endured.
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They said my head should be cut off.
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The joy they brought to the nation.
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You re free completely.
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No one is there to destroy you.
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I m John Legend.
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Listen to Afghan Star on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
5
SPEAKER_00
But I think psychedelics have a kind of self-protective quality to them, which is if you try to take them frequently, the experience disappears.
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SPEAKER_00
So I think people quickly, there s not a lot of motivation to use them with any sort of great frequency.
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SPEAKER_00
And in terms of carryover effects, I ve told this story a lot, you may have heard it, but just as an example, and this is on a physical level,
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SPEAKER_00
I had a lifelong allergy to cats.
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If a cat got near me, my eyes would itch.
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If a cat licked me, I d get hives where it licked me.
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So I always avoided them.
5
SPEAKER_00
And one day when I was 28, I was living in the country in Virginia.
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It was a beautiful spring day.
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I took LSD with a group of friends outdoors.
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SPEAKER_00
I felt wonderful.
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I mean, I really felt just high, connected with nature, terrific.
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SPEAKER_00
And in the midst of this, a cat jumped into my lap.
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And I had an immediate defensive reaction.
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And then I thought, you know, this is silly.
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SPEAKER_00
And I just relaxed and played with the cat.
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SPEAKER_00
I had no allergic reaction and I ve never had one since.
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SPEAKER_00
No instantaneous disappearance of a lifelong allergic pattern.
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SPEAKER_02
Is that a common path with that particular, with LSD or no?
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SPEAKER_00
No, I think it s not peculiar to LSD.
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SPEAKER_00
I think it can happen with any psychedelic.
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SPEAKER_00
It doesn t happen automatically necessarily.
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SPEAKER_00
But I could imagine, you know, Dr. Weil s allergy clinic if these become available.
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SPEAKER_00
where you give people, start with a full dose and expose them to the allergen and then like once a week,
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you d reduce the dose till at some point they were getting just a placebo.
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SPEAKER_00
I think allergies can be unlearned and that s a powerful tool for doing it.
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SPEAKER_01
What are the other ones that you think are going to become more accessible to you?
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SPEAKER_00
Psilocybin is the one that s being most researched.
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This is the main compound found in the magic mushrooms which traditionally were used by indigenous peoples in southern Mexico and Central America.
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There are many species of them.
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Some can easily be cultivated.
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Some grow wild, especially in the Pacific Northwest.
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It s a very well-known compound now, and it is being intensively studied and used, especially for mental health conditions, for drug-resistant depression, for obsessive-compulsive disorder, for addictive disorders.
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SPEAKER_00
It looks quite safe.
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SPEAKER_00
What s quite safe?
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SPEAKER_00
Well, again, no physical issues with it at all.
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SPEAKER_00
No cognitive?
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SPEAKER_00
No, nothing.
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And in fact, there have been studies of people who ve used these compounds quite frequently over a long lifetime.
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And there s been studies of their brains, and they look perfectly healthy.
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So I don t think there s any issues there.
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SPEAKER_00
So, this is one that I think also is going to be made therapeutically available fairly soon.
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SPEAKER_00
Specifically for?
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SPEAKER_00
For mental health conditions first.
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SPEAKER_00
But I think, again, one that has a lot of potential uses in medicine as well.
6
SPEAKER_00
So that, you know, the main difference between psilocybin and LSD is duration of action.
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SPEAKER_00
LSD lasts 10 to 12 hours, which can be inconvenient, and psilocybin is 4 to 6 hours, so it s much more manageable.
6
SPEAKER_01
And some people are using it recreationally too.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yes, they are.
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SPEAKER_00
Well, again, I m not going to be critical of people who do that.
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SPEAKER_00
No, no, no.
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SPEAKER_01
I m not either.
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SPEAKER_01
I m just trying to, yeah.
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SPEAKER_00
Frankly, I think I d rather have people use that than alcohol recreationally.
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Because, yeah, let s do it.
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SPEAKER_00
Because it s much safer on a physical level and probably safer on a psychological level as well.
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SPEAKER_00
When you look at the numbers of homicides, accidental deaths that are related to alcohol, it s tremendous.
6
SPEAKER_00
You don t see anything like that with psilocybin.
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SPEAKER_01
Can you drive after?
6
SPEAKER_00
Well, you can, I wouldn t recommend it probably, but if somebody s familiar with it, certainly you can.
6
SPEAKER_00
I mean, it doesn t impair coordination on a physical level like alcohol does.
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SPEAKER_01
Yeah, no, no, and I don t have any side or any, what s the right word, any dog in the fight.
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SPEAKER_01
I m asking from, I m just being so curious as to like,
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SPEAKER_01
I know my community would ask these questions and I m thinking, all right, I want them to have such a real, genuine understanding of what this is.
6
SPEAKER_00
So let me talk about another compound that is of great interest is DMT, dimethyltryptamine.
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SPEAKER_00
So this is a very simple chemical compound.
6
SPEAKER_00
And it s related to serotonin, the neurotransmitter, and melatonin, the pineal hormone.
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SPEAKER_00
It s found in many plants, especially in South America, and is used by indigenous people mostly as snuffs.
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SPEAKER_00
They prepare powdered preparations from plants and inhale it.
6
SPEAKER_00
And often this occurs with another compound called 5-methoxydmT, which is the one that s found in the toad that has become pop, toad venom.
6
SPEAKER_00
At any rate, DMT, if you smoke it, it s a very rapid effect.
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Within seconds you are off in another reality, and it s extremely visual.
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Incredible visual trips, and then after several minutes you come back to ordinary reality.
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The Five Mythoxy version is not visual.
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People describe it as a rocket ship into the void, your ego dissolves, and when it reconstitutes it s very pleasant.
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It is very likely that DMT is our endogenous psychedelic that is made by the pineal gland, and it may explain why some people have psychedelic-like experiences, whether it s from meditation or fasting or other things, it may be from release of endogenous DMT.
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SPEAKER_00
And some people think this may also mediate the near-death experience that so many people report.
6
SPEAKER_00
So I do believe we have an endogenous psychedelic and it s very likely to be DMT.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, and we were talking about this earlier, and I love hearing about your travels.
6
SPEAKER_01
Have you been to the Amazon?
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SPEAKER_00
Yes.
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SPEAKER_00
You know, Shulti sent me down there long ago.
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SPEAKER_00
I made a number of trips.
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SPEAKER_00
I was investigating medicinal plants, ayahuasca, mushrooms, and spent time with shamans to learn what tricks I could learn from them.
6
SPEAKER_00
So yes, that was in the 1970s, 1980s.
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SPEAKER_00
I made a number of trips down there.
6
SPEAKER_01
Wow.
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SPEAKER_01
And why do the Amazonians have no problems with taking drugs like DMT?
6
SPEAKER_00
Well, this is an interesting thing.
6
SPEAKER_00
You know, there are so many psychedelic plants and preparations in South America and in Mexico and Central America.
6
SPEAKER_00
And there are so few in the old world.
6
SPEAKER_00
You know, there s one plant in Africa called Iboga, the source of a drug called Ibogaine, which has been the best.
6
SPEAKER_00
I had a client who was using that recently.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, for addictive behavior.
6
SPEAKER_00
Right.
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SPEAKER_00
There s a possibility of one from India.
6
SPEAKER_00
There s been great speculation as to what this preparation Soma was that s referred to in the Vedas.
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SPEAKER_00
So there s possibly there was some psychedelic preparation there.
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SPEAKER_00
And the Eleusinian mysteries in ancient Greece involved drinking a potion that
6
SPEAKER_00
almost certainly was made from ergot, and it was a way of detoxifying that fungus and producing an LSD-like drink.
6
SPEAKER_00
But otherwise, you know, you ve got this huge abundance of psychedelic preparations in the new world, you know, and it doesn t make botanical sense that there d be that disparity.
6
SPEAKER_00
So it must be something about the people.
6
SPEAKER_00
In the old world, in African Asia, people, I think, are as drawn to altered states of consciousness, but they get into them, especially in Africa, through drumming, prolonged wakefulness, dancing, rather than taking substances.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, so is that the difference that you see in how we take them and how they take them culturally?
6
SPEAKER_00
Right.
6
SPEAKER_00
But if you look at the indigenous peoples in South America and the Amazon especially, they are always used ritually.
6
SPEAKER_00
They re often under the direction of shamans who are trained in their use.
6
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, absolutely.
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SPEAKER_00
And I think the potential for abuse in those populations is
6
SPEAKER_00
Very little.
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SPEAKER_00
Minuscule, right.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, that s really fascinating.
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SPEAKER_01
I feel like it was always sacred.
6
SPEAKER_01
It was part of a holy ritual of some kind.
6
SPEAKER_01
It was always used medicinally and understood.
6
SPEAKER_00
Ritual is a very powerful tool for containing the harmful potential of substances.
6
SPEAKER_01
That s why they were created and around those, I guess.
6
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, no, that s and that s always really interesting for me to hear, because I feel like, yeah, there s a there s a and I m just reflecting on it as an individual.
6
SPEAKER_01
I look at it and I think I really trust things that can are very focused on the intention in which they re taken, administered by someone who understands what the power and effect of this is.
6
SPEAKER_01
And it s in an environment that allows you to have a fulfilling, powerful experience with a certain goal or place to reach to.
6
SPEAKER_01
That all of those things to me feel very coherent with how I would do anything, whether it s getting an operation or, you know, like I got an operation last year and I wish I did more research on the doctor.
6
SPEAKER_01
I felt the same way about that.
6
SPEAKER_00
I was like,
6
SPEAKER_01
You know, we blindly trust the doctor you got placed with and someone told you that they were great and I wasn t happy with the doctor I had at all.
6
SPEAKER_01
And so, you know, it applies to all parts of our life.
6
SPEAKER_01
I think this idea of like, am I intentional with the doctor I chose, the hospital I chose?
6
SPEAKER_01
Am I being thoughtful about these things?
6
SPEAKER_01
And in the same way, I don t think it s different.
6
SPEAKER_01
I think it almost has to be thought about in the same way.
6
SPEAKER_00
You know, even with alcohol, there s some very interesting lessons from history.
6
SPEAKER_00
When distilled alcohol became available, and it was a sudden invention of the Dutch, you know, so it was in the 1600s.
6
SPEAKER_00
In the wake of that, there was an epidemic of drunkenness, alcoholism, unlike anything that we ve ever seen.
6
SPEAKER_00
And even in this country, in America, in the early 1800s,
6
SPEAKER_00
1700s 1800s every store had a barrel of whiskey and people went in you just have a ladle of whiskey and people started drinking Early in the morning all day long drunks were lying in the street.
6
SPEAKER_00
You know, it was it was an uncontrollable epidemic of alcoholism and gradually, you know over several decades there was a social consensus that grew up that it was unseemly to be drunk and
6
SPEAKER_00
And that rituals grew up around the use of distilled alcohol, one of which is a cocktail party, which is not going to happen at 10 in the morning.
6
SPEAKER_00
We re going to do this late in the day.
6
SPEAKER_00
There ll be food present and friends present as a social lubricant.
6
SPEAKER_00
And that kind of conscious use and ritual helped contain the negative possibilities that could result from such a strong drug.
6
SPEAKER_01
Right, and of course with alcohol there are so many proven negatives and issues, even now, whether it s gut, brain, etc.
6
SPEAKER_01
Could you talk about some of those?
6
SPEAKER_00
Well, alcohol is extremely toxic.
7
SPEAKER_01
to the brain and to the liver.
7
SPEAKER_01
And there s arguments go back and forth.
7
SPEAKER_01
Whether a moderate consumption of alcohol is beneficial.
7
SPEAKER_01
Some people say even one or two drinks is harmful for some people.
7
SPEAKER_01
So this goes back and forth.
7
SPEAKER_01
I think many of the benefits ascribed to alcohol are benefits of relaxation.
7
SPEAKER_01
And for many people that is a main method of relaxation.
7
SPEAKER_01
But I think the fact is that, you know, it is a strong toxin and you have to be very careful about using it.
7
SPEAKER_01
And there s some people, like women that have genetic risk for breast cancer, probably shouldn t use it at all.
7
SPEAKER_00
Right, yeah.
7
SPEAKER_00
This fascinated me when I was looking at your work.
7
SPEAKER_00
Your book, Chocolate to Morphine, was pivotal and often the most stolen books in colleges in the last 40 years.
7
SPEAKER_00
Tell us a bit about the book and then about the story.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s a very good book.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s still in print.
7
SPEAKER_01
And the main point of it, which enraged some people, was that there are no good and bad drugs.
7
SPEAKER_01
There are just good and bad relationships with drugs.
7
SPEAKER_01
And I very firmly believe that.
7
SPEAKER_01
There are no drugs that have inherent good or horrible qualities.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s how people use them and how they think of them.
7
SPEAKER_01
Some obviously are more difficult to form good relationships with than others.
7
SPEAKER_00
And some of them naturally, like chocolate, as a victim of chocolate, have addictive traits.
7
SPEAKER_00
I ve talked about this many, many times, but I was genuinely addicted to chocolate.
7
SPEAKER_00
And it took my wife and me, like, you know,
7
SPEAKER_00
When I say addicted in the sense of like I could eat like a full slab in a moment, like a family pack version, like easily on my own, no issues.
7
SPEAKER_00
I see.
7
SPEAKER_00
And it took a long time for me to take chocolate out of my diet because of the amount of sugar I was taking into it.
7
SPEAKER_01
Well, I put chocolate at the very top of my anti-inflammatory diet pyramid.
7
SPEAKER_01
How?
7
SPEAKER_01
Because it s a... Oh, taking it out?
7
SPEAKER_01
No, I put it back.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s there.
7
SPEAKER_01
It s the very top of the anti-inflammatory diet pyramid.
7
SPEAKER_01
So, it s something that I recommend in moderate consumption.
7
SPEAKER_01
It has very useful antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects.
7
SPEAKER_00
I might have to change my relationship with that.
7
SPEAKER_00
Dark chocolate.
7
SPEAKER_01
It has to be at least 70%.
7
SPEAKER_01
Yeah, but a little bit on a regular basis is fine.
7
SPEAKER_00
Yeah, what s a little bit on a regular basis?
7
SPEAKER_00
Not a slab a day.
7
SPEAKER_00
Not a slab a day.
7
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You have this real love for this plant medicine that can have such a big benefit on people.
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And it must be hard because so much of it s been demonized or talked about in a certain way.
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And I love what you just said now.
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It s like you re arguing that it s about your relationship with these things.
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Absolutely.
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And that s what fascinates me because I feel like that it s almost like that s how we would talk about
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It s our relationship with technology, it s our relationship with money, it s our relationship with fame.
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There is nothing inherently evil about technology.
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You know, I think that s true of so many things.
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It s how we relate to it.
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Yeah, and how we use it, and what our relationship is with it.
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Yeah, that s really fascinating.
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I also wanted to dive into the idea of what you mentioned earlier around the spiritual awakening piece, because I definitely am not, I would say even though I studied in such a traditional and rigorous way personally, which has led to so many beautiful spiritual awakenings and realizations, I m very not
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I wouldn t consider myself to be closed-minded as to how other people find their paths.
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I find that I have my path and it was beautiful but I m very open to people finding their paths and some people are at different stages in their journey where they need different things.
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Could you walk me through what s specifically been used in a spiritual way and what have been some of the
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Well, first of all, let me say for me spirituality means being aware of and acknowledging the non-material aspect of existence.
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Working in the medical field, I am so aware of and frustrated by the power of the materialistic paradigm.
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You know that many scientists and many physicians don t believe in anything that s not physical.
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So when you try to talk about, let alone not spirit, but even if you try to talk about the mind and the influence of the mind on the body, they don t believe that.
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I mean in the materialistic paradigm, if you observe a change in a physical system, the cause has to be physical.
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non-physical causation of physical events is not allowed for in that paradigm.
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So this is what, you know, there s a whole range of mind-body interventions that we make use of in integrative medicine, hypnosis, guided imagery, visualization therapy.
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And these methods are very cost-effective, very effective, and they re totally underutilized because people don t believe in it.
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And that s why we haven t really made sense of the placebo response, you know, all of that.
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So I would love to see that change.
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I d really love to see a paradigm shift.
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And to me that s what spiritual awakening is about.
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It s becoming aware of the non-physical dimension and the reality of the non-physical.
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And I make a very sharp distinction between spirituality and religion.
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Religion is about institutions, and institutions are mostly concerned with perpetuating themselves.
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Spirituality is this connection with acknowledging the non-physical and its importance in interacting with the physical dimension.
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I think there s lots of ways you can awaken to that.
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I said, for me and for many people, I ve seen psychedelic experience become a very powerful way of doing that.
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Yeah, and how have you and others sustained that?
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Like you were saying yourself, you don t take them anymore, but it s become a way of life for you, it feels like that.
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Yeah, well, I meditate, I do breath work, and I ve always been fascinated by the fact that the words breath and the word spirit are the same in most Indo-European languages, and that I think when we focus our attention on our breath, we re looking at the movement of spirit in the body.
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So I think that is one very practical, powerful way and most people ignore it.
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We have that right under our noses and we don t make use of it.
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For you to have been at Harvard, to have done this research, to have been in this space for so long, it is beautiful to hear you bring science and spirituality together.
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Because I feel for so long they ve been seen as
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opposite opposite yeah yeah and and i ve never understood that right as as considering myself a spiritual scientist or a you know it s in that sense of i ve always been fascinated by neuroscience i ve always been fascinated by the brain and at the same time i consider myself a spiritualist and so hearing you as like a doctor doing all of this medical work but then finding the spiritual part and the functional part of certain parts of medicine what did you always have that
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When you were studying, because obviously you went off to become a doctor, when did that... I think I did always have some of that.
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Because where did that come from?
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I don t know, I think I was born with it.
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I can remember always being fascinated by the mind and how it related to the body, from as far back as I can remember.
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And I tried to study that at Harvard, and I was very frustrated that I couldn t.
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I started off majoring in psychology, but at that time psychology at Harvard was completely dominated by the behaviorists.
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It was running rats through mazes.
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And they weren t interested in consciousness.
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I wanted to know about consciousness.
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And nobody was interested in doing that.
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And then also in the scientific and medical world, consciousness is seen as a product of brain chemistry or electrical connections in the brain.
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And, you know, I came to feel that consciousness is primary.
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I think consciousness organizes matter.
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You know, I think it organizes matter into more and more complex forms, you know, including the human brain.
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But that, you know, that enrages scientists when I try to talk that way.
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Do you think we ll ever be able to prove the existence of consciousness in a language, in a way that... I think this is what I see as part of the psychedelic awakening, because I think that this really has the potential to chip away at that materialistic paradigm and the influence it now has on our way of thinking.
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There is, you know, a name for this idea that consciousness is primary.
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It s called panpsychism.
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And that used to be, you know, no scientist would, you know, look at that.
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And now that s become a respectable movement in philosophy.
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The idea that everything is consciousness down to atoms.
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And I look forward to seeing that grow and have greater and greater influence.
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Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
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I ve always considered consciousness to be like the first self.
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Yeah, absolutely.
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And, you know, obviously from a spiritual perspective, but even the excellent explanation behind so many near-death experiences or outer body experiences of the sort, and when I have read scientific studies or even research or accounts of those experiences,
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There s a truth that s not been uncovered yet.
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Absolutely.
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And as I said, this may be mediated by release of our own endogenous psychedelic, which could very well be DMT.
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Right, right.
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Amazing.
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What a fascinating direction.
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I m excited for your book and I m excited for the work.
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Andrew, is there anything that we haven t touched on that you really wanted to dive into?
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That was a pretty wide-ranging conversation.
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There s lots more I could talk about.
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Well, I m hoping this is gonna be the first of many that would be great I think this is a great conversation for people to I mean I m sure everyone already knows about your work, but for new people to get introduced
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to your work for people to really get a sense of who you are and you know your journey and parts of your story and your expertise and I m hoping that we ll continue to go deeper when the books come out because this is honestly been one of those, it s been exactly what I wanted.
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I needed the dummy s guide.
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Uh, and, and that s really helpful because I think so often that steps like missed and then the majority of the world just doesn t know what s going on.
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And so I try my best to, to stay grounded and rooted with my ear to the ground and be like, well, people are hearing these ideas, but they don t know what to do and where it is.
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Well, you re doing a very good service.
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Well, thank you.
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You re very kind.
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And I hope that everyone goes to matcha.com.
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Use the code J. The books that we were referring to in this episode are The Natural Mind, which is right here.
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And then this other book I have from Dr. Andrew Weil is Spontaneous Happiness.
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but there is a new book on the way as well.
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So these are two great starters and look out for Andrew s new book, which I m sure he ll be back on the show to talk about.
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I would love to.
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When it comes together.
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So Andrew, thank you so much for your time and energy.
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Thank you for being here.
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It s actually just wonderful being in your presence too.
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And I love how much, you know, life you ve lived and it sounds like you have so many more incredible experiences and stories to share that I look forward to learning.
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Okay.
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But thank you so much for being here.
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Thank you for sharing your journey, your work.
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Thank you for giving us so much of a great education today.
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You re very welcome.
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Amazing.
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Everyone who s been listening and watching back at home, make sure you tag Dr. Andrew Weil and I on Instagram, on Twitter, on TikTok, whatever platform you use.
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And let us know what you learned from this episode.
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I hope this gave you an insight into a world that you re probably hearing about but may not have too much information on.
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Maybe you are an expert, maybe you knew all of this, but hopefully this will help you introduce it to a friend who may not be as aware as well.
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Again, thank you so much for listening.
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Make sure you go and follow Andrew across social media.
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If you re a fan, go and order some of the books as well.
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And thank you so much for joining us on On Purpose.
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I ll see you on the next one.
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If you loved this episode, you ll enjoy my interview with Dr. Daniel Amen on how to change your life by changing your brain.
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Hey, everyone, this is Molly and Matt, and we re the hosts of Grown Up Stuff How to Adult, a podcast from Ruby Studio and iHeart Podcasts.
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It s a show dedicated to helping you figure out the trickiest parts of adulting.
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Like how to start planning for retirement, creating a healthy skincare routine, understanding when and how much to tip someone and so much more.
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Let s learn about all of it and then some.
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Listen to Grown Up Stuff How to Adult on America s number one podcast network, iHeart.
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Open your free iHeart app and search Grown Up Stuff.