Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / "Are Psychedelics The Answer?" with James Mathison

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"Are Psychedelics The Answer?" with James Mathison · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:00
  While I'm out from my walk, around the park near my house, in lockdown Sydney, on a glorious,
• 0:10
  sunny, warm, winter's day, because I can't go to where I would normally record this
• 0:16
  for you, because it's more than 5 kilometers away from my home, which is the radius that
• 0:22
  I'm currently allowed to move in.
• 0:25
  And even within that radius, I can only go out for a legitimate reason, one of which
• 0:31
  is exercise, hence my walking podcast introduction today, and you get to enjoy the bucolic sounds
• 0:38
  of birds in the background, and perhaps the occasional truck.
• 0:44
  I work up to two interesting tweets this morning.
• 0:49
  One by an economic historian, who's a conservative, who's anti-lockdown in the states, tweeting
• 0:55
  Australia is currently a militarized police state, with one of the most draconian lockdowns
• 1:01
  in the world.
• 1:02
  They also have an abysmal vaccination rate due to government incompetence.
• 1:09
  Now I have been very critical on this podcast, and on the radio airwaves and elsewhere about
• 1:16
  how the government bungled the procurement of vaccines last year.
• 1:22
  But even I would say that at this point, there's no point being critical of that right now.
• 1:28
  Everyone is all hands on deck, desperately trying to get as many vaccines into as many
• 1:32
  arms as possible.
• 1:34
  So we can criticize past policy decisions, and I will continue to do so.
• 1:40
  But it's a bit rich to say that right now, Australia is mishandling the vaccination.
• 1:49
  Australia is also not militarized.
• 1:51
  There's been tons of misinformation about this that I've seen in the United States.
• 1:55
  Even the BBC misreported this with a headline saying that soldiers were going from house
• 2:00
  to house in Sydney enforcing the lockdown.
• 2:04
  The military isn't enforcing the lockdown, that's unconstitutional, it would be against
• 2:07
  the law.
• 2:08
  As in most countries does not do domestic law enforcement, that's up to the civilian
• 2:13
  police.
• 2:14
  The military are there unarmed to assist people if they need anything.
• 2:19
  The same way they would be doing any disaster, the same way they are in the United States
• 2:23
  and the United Kingdom and Europe when there's a flood or a drought or a bush fire, the
• 2:27
  military are additional pairs of hands.
• 2:29
  So this whole militarization meme that's been going around on Twitter and so on, it's
• 2:35
  nonsense.
• 2:36
  It's not militarized.
• 2:37
  That's not what they're doing.
• 2:38
  A police state, well that's a bit rich, I mean, I associate a police state with being
• 2:43
  anti-democratic and having no rule of law and no recourse to a representative assemblies
• 2:51
  and parliaments and so on, it's clearly not a police state.
• 2:56
  And yet, and yet.
• 2:59
  We do have one of the most draconian lockdowns in the world at the moment.
• 3:03
  And the other tweet which I saw was while I was reading about the catastrophe in Afghanistan,
• 3:13
  which I don't want to even get into here for fear that I might just cry.
• 3:18
  I've been reading a number of tweets about people in Kabul having to flee the Taliban taking
• 3:25
  control, the imposition of new restrictions on swathes of Afghanistan that had been
• 3:31
  nominally free for the past 20 years.
• 3:35
  And I saw a tweet that said, playgrounds, basketball courts, skate parks and exercise equipment
• 3:40
  closed from 11.59pm to night.
• 3:44
  And I thought those bastards, the Taliban, next they're going to be banning music and
• 3:50
  girls' poetry.
• 3:51
  And then I realized, oh no, hang on, this is about Victoria.
• 3:55
  Then it goes on to say this is a Twitter thread by a journalist from the Guardian.
• 4:00
  This broadcast will have to use the same crew every week, permits for authorized work
• 4:04
  will be back from 11.59pm tomorrow night, but construction will be limited to five people
• 4:09
  on small sites reduced to 25% on large sites.
• 4:14
  Victoria and police will be investigating whether there were breaches of licenses of venues
• 4:20
  involved in takeaway, pub delivery, exercises with one other person and your dependence.
• 4:26
  It is not an opportunity for families to catch up in the park.
• 4:29
  A curfew has been introduced in Melbourne as of yesterday, I'm recording this on Tuesday,
• 4:34
  so you're probably hearing on Wednesday within the past couple of days.
• 4:38
  After 9pm, you've got to be inside your house, you can't leave again until 5am.
• 4:45
  That's the way that Victoria does lockdowns.
• 4:48
  And I have spoken on this podcast in the past about my frustration with the Sydney lockdown,
• 4:55
  which seems interminable and also half-hearted, which seems loose enough to allow the virus
• 5:00
  to continue to circulate, but strict enough to be a pain in the ass for everybody.
• 5:06
  I have said, if you're going to do a lockdown, why not just do a lockdown?
• 5:11
  Go the whole hog.
• 5:12
  Lock us inside, do the full curfew, close the hardware stores, close the supermarkets,
• 5:17
  have only the most essential workers doing the most essential duties.
• 5:21
  If you're a nurse, if you're a doctor, if you're giving vaccinations, if you're delivering food,
• 5:27
  if you're conducting emergency broadcasts on the radio, then you can work.
• 5:32
  Everyone else stays home.
• 5:35
  And yet, I'd be lying if I said the little part of me wasn't sympathetic to the American
• 5:42
  tweeter who was criticizing Australia for its draconian lockdowns and calling us a militarized
• 5:46
  police state.
• 5:47
  Say this because when I ask myself a simple question, I worry about the answer, and
• 5:56
  that question is, when does this end?
• 6:01
  Like up until now, I felt that the binary between, are we a free people or are we going to
• 6:07
  be locked down cowards, has been a phony one?
• 6:11
  Because the places that didn't lock down, that didn't take the virus seriously ended
• 6:15
  up entering horrible, dark, lengthy periods of quasi de facto lockdown anyway.
• 6:25
  Most of the world was locked down whether there was a lockdown imposed or not when the
• 6:29
  pandemic was truly raging, because nobody wants to go out and sit in a cafe with friends
• 6:34
  if it might make them incredibly sick for two weeks and potentially kill their parents.
• 6:39
  So people hunker inside.
• 6:41
  And for 13 months, Sydney was living in a blissful fantasy land where New South Wales was
• 6:47
  adept at keeping out the virus, at using its incredible contact tracing to clamp down
• 6:54
  on any outbreaks from the quarantine hotel system before they got out of control.
• 6:59
  And we were going to concerts, we were going to theater, we were going to, we were living
• 7:04
  again in a way that not only people in lockdowns couldn't, but even people who weren't in
• 7:09
  lockdown in places where the virus was circulating.
• 7:12
  But now Delta has upended all of the epidemiological assumptions that underpinned that success.
• 7:20
  And here we are, stuck with a stubborn number of new daily cases, in a kind of groundhog
• 7:28
  day holding pattern, not sure what the end game is.
• 7:35
  Look, at some point, in the perhaps distant future, Australia's international border will
• 7:43
  be open and human beings will be coming into this country without having to quarantine
• 7:48
  for two weeks.
• 7:51
  When they do, even if all of them have vaccinated, some of them are going to be carrying coronavirus
• 7:56
  and some of them are going to be infectious.
• 7:59
  So the endless focus on daily case numbers, completely detached from any consideration
• 8:07
  about hospitalization numbers, death numbers, economic numbers, the numbers of people who
• 8:16
  can't see their families abroad, the numbers of people who could be coming here to visit
• 8:21
  who aren't.
• 8:23
  At some point, this fixation on daily case numbers and this knee jerk lockdown in order
• 8:28
  to get to COVID-0 is going to seem a bit bizarre and it's starting to feel bizarre to me.
• 8:36
  I hate to think of myself as becoming one of these old rat bag, right wing anti-lockdown
• 8:42
  types, but in the absence of any purpose to all of this, what are we doing?
• 8:49
  What is Dan Andrews doing?
• 8:52
  There are 20 daily cases in Victoria, and you're not allowed to leave your home after 9
• 8:59
  pm.
• 9:00
  I mean, you don't have to be a wild eyed civil libertarian to think that there might
• 9:04
  be something wrong with governments asserting to themselves the right to completely overhaul
• 9:11
  the lives of their citizens with no real consultation and no clear health guidelines as to why
• 9:18
  they're doing what they're doing, just the whims of state cabinet.
• 9:24
  Why is there a curfew?
• 9:26
  What does a curfew achieve?
• 9:28
  What's the data say?
• 9:30
  I don't believe the data says anything about a curfew.
• 9:33
  I don't think there's any evidence that whether or not you can go outside your front door
• 9:39
  at 9.02 pm has an impact on the spread of the virus.
• 9:45
  Now if the pursuit of zero COVID cases was a sustainable long-term strategy, then maybe
• 9:51
  I'd put up with a little bit of draconian police state activity for a short period of time
• 9:58
  as it was supposed to be in the initial 9 week lockdown when the pandemic erupted last
• 10:03
  March.
• 10:05
  If we could say, okay, once we get to zero, here's how the borders are going to open
• 10:08
  and here's how vaccination is going to work and here's how we can reasonably expect
• 10:12
  to be a country that is involved in the global activity of the planet, that has people
• 10:18
  coming and going, that has money coming and going, that has industry, that has human beings
• 10:22
  who can see their family, who can come and go, that's a nimble agile 21st century economy
• 10:29
  where people aren't racked by mental health problems while they hunker down at home.
• 10:34
  Here's the way out and here's the way to maintain zero cases in perpetuity without lockdowns.
• 10:41
  I'd probably be on board for that, but it's been obvious since the start of 2021 that
• 10:49
  zero COVID was a temporary strategy in order to get us to the finish line with vaccines
• 10:56
  and there's no point in trying to live inside a fiction that we're going to be able to maintain
• 11:00
  zero cases forever and have anything like a kind of country that you would actually want
• 11:04
  to live in.
• 11:05
  An open country, a free country, a vibrant country, a multicultural country.
• 11:11
  It was always a stop gap.
• 11:15
  Well, when's it going to stop?
• 11:17
  I at least want to hear something about when's it going to stop?
• 11:20
  What is the end game?
• 11:21
  Why are we doing this?
• 11:23
  Why do we have this relentless fixation on zero COVID cases right now?
• 11:27
  Still, when we're running as fast as we can towards vaccination and just to be explicit
• 11:32
  here, the problem is that the vaccines aren't very good at preventing infection.
• 11:38
  They're fantastic at preventing hospitalization and death, severe illness, but they're not
• 11:44
  great at stopping you from getting virus in your system and testing positive on a test,
• 11:51
  and they're not fantastic.
• 11:52
  They seem to be about reduced by about 50%, at least in the case of Delta, it was a lot
• 11:57
  more with the original Wuhan strain, but in the case of Delta, reduced by about 50%,
• 12:01
  your chances of catching it and your chances of giving it.
• 12:05
  So what do you do?
• 12:07
  If we were otherwise going to have 10,000 new cases a day, we'll get 5,000 new cases
• 12:11
  a day.
• 12:12
  Even that scale of a number makes most Australians shit their pants, but it shouldn't.
• 12:17
  What should matter is, are any of those cases getting really, really crook, are any of those
• 12:21
  cases on ventilators, are any of those cases dying?
• 12:27
  Let's look at the numbers from the UK.
• 12:29
  Now, admittedly, it's a very different situation, a large proportion of the UK population
• 12:36
  has already caught coronavirus, and a significant number of people in the UK have already died
• 12:41
  from coronavirus.
• 12:43
  So as an aside to people who aren't in Australia who are a little bit baffled by how hysterical
• 12:48
  Australia seems and think it's a completely irrational overreaction, let me just contradict
• 12:52
  what I've been talking about for the past 10 minutes and provide a little bit of context.
• 12:58
  The reality is Australia still has not had a first wave of coronavirus.
• 13:04
  We might talk about the first wave, but we haven't had what other countries mean by
• 13:09
  our first wave.
• 13:10
  We haven't had those long weeks of nothing but sirens in the streets, of hospitals over
• 13:16
  flowing, of people being sent home, of refrigerated trucks full of bodies in Brooklyn, of pop-up
• 13:23
  hospitals being erected in Central Park under tents.
• 13:27
  We just haven't had a wave of mass casualties.
• 13:32
  The blunt reality is that that means that a lot of the people who are currently in Australia
• 13:36
  who are most at risk of coronavirus, people for whom a vaccine is not very effective, people
• 13:42
  who can't get vaccinated for whatever reason, can't muster the immune response if they do,
• 13:48
  cancer patients, the elderly, people living with HIV.
• 13:54
  Many of those people who are most at risk in the UK and the US are dead.
• 14:01
  So we don't really have the luxury of opening up in the same way that other countries do,
• 14:04
  because we haven't essentially culled the population through our own ineptitude at the
• 14:09
  beginning.
• 14:10
  We were too good too fast, and now we're caught in a little Chinese finger trap.
• 14:17
  We are victims of our own success to some extent.
• 14:19
  We can't be as cavalier about letting the virus circulate as other countries that have
• 14:23
  already wiped out significant numbers of their vulnerable can.
• 14:30
  We also don't benefit from any level of background immunity in the population.
• 14:35
  So in a country like the UK, you may have a bunch of anti-vaxxers, but a significant
• 14:41
  number of those anti-vaxxers will have caught COVID already.
• 14:44
  So they're not a great risk of catching it and dying.
• 14:49
  So if it seems like Australia is being completely irrational, part of the reason is we have to
• 14:55
  be cautious that if it gets out of the bag and we let it run rampant, we don't plunge
• 15:01
  ourselves back into where Italy and the UK and New York were last April.
• 15:10
  That being said, let's look at some numbers.
• 15:14
  In the UK, the percentage of the adult population that is vaccinated is almost 90% with first
• 15:20
  dose, almost 90% first dose.
• 15:22
  Second dose is 77%.
• 15:24
  Now, Gladys Baragically in the Premier of New South Wales says that New South Wales and Sydney
• 15:28
  are going to be able to do things considerably differently once we hit 70%, ideally 80%
• 15:34
  vaccinated.
• 15:35
  Well, the UK, which is way ahead of us in vaccinations, is only at 77% second dose.
• 15:42
  They are well and truly fully fledged back to normal life.
• 15:46
  They are back to stadiums, they are back to concerts, they are living the dream, baby.
• 15:53
  They are just paying no heed to lockdowns in the UK at the moment.
• 15:58
  You'll recall freedom day.
• 16:00
  Their case numbers are fine in comparison to what they historically had been.
• 16:07
  Massively higher than they are in Australia.
• 16:10
  But we're talking about 20 to 30,000 new cases a day.
• 16:16
  Now the UK population is 2.7 times Australia's.
• 16:20
  So you can sort of basically think about a third of these numbers on a per capita basis.
• 16:25
  So you're thinking about maybe 10,000 cases a day in Australia.
• 16:31
  We currently have 400 odd in New South Wales and a smattering in other states.
• 16:38
  So about 20 times the daily case numbers.
• 16:42
  And the deaths are at about 20 to 30 a day, 26 is the last record.
• 16:52
  Hospitalisations are pretty high, about 8 to 900 people a day are getting hospitalised
• 16:57
  with COVID in the UK.
• 17:00
  But the total number in the country who are on ventilators is less than 900 people.
• 17:05
  So that's about, that would be quite to about 300 in Australia, 350.
• 17:10
  If you were just doing a 1 to 1 comparison per capita.
• 17:14
  So what price would you be willing to pay to not have to worry about lockdowns, to not
• 17:22
  have to worry about burdening future generations with the massive debt that we're creating
• 17:27
  by job keeper and job seeker and job saver and job trainer and all of this money that the
• 17:33
  government is shoveling into the economy just to try to keep people's heads above water
• 17:38
  but failing even at that because the government's never going to throw enough money at it
• 17:42
  to actually replace people's full incomes.
• 17:47
  What price would you pay to have this all over with?
• 17:52
  Would it be acceptable for case numbers to increase from where they currently are around
• 17:57
  about the four or five hundred new cases a day mark in Australia up to 10,000 today,
• 18:04
  which is roughly what the UK is experiencing on a per capita basis.
• 18:10
  If of those 10,000 cases fewer than 300 were being hospitalised and only about 10 a day
• 18:17
  were dying, that's roughly what's happening in the UK.
• 18:22
  The last data I've got here on the British government website is 26 deaths on the most
• 18:29
  recent day from coronavirus.
• 18:31
  Now they've got 2.7 times our population, so 26 deaths, that's a little less than 10
• 18:35
  people a day in a population in the size of Australia.
• 18:37
  And they are running rampant, they're doing nothing with a lockdown.
• 18:42
  Admittedly, I'm adding all of the caveats that I said at the start, they've already got
• 18:46
  a bit of latent immunity because so many people have caught it and they're up at 77% double
• 18:52
  those vaccination, almost 90% first dose.
• 18:56
  If that's the goal, if the goal really is, let's just hang on, stay in this holding
• 19:02
  pattern, limp towards the finish line, try to keep the numbers somewhere where they currently
• 19:08
  are, maybe below a thousand new cases a day, but sort of remotely get on with life with
• 19:14
  plenty of social distancing and masks and so on.
• 19:17
  And then let's see how things go once we're at 70% vaccination.
• 19:21
  Then I'm on board and it seems to me that that's the subtext of the New South Wales government.
• 19:25
  And I have been patient, extremely patient because I'm hoping that Gladys Burjiclian and
• 19:31
  potentially Scott Morrison can come around to that way of thinking.
• 19:35
  Gladys is dropping hints when she talks about vaccination being a way out of this.
• 19:40
  And as she was rebuffed by the Prime Minister who said, vaccination isn't the way out of this,
• 19:43
  the lockdown is the way out of the lockdown, the lockdown has to work.
• 19:47
  And then Gladys Burjiclian went to National Cabinet last week and all of her counterparts
• 19:53
  in other states slapped her down, got furious that Sydney's lockdown wasn't serious enough
• 19:59
  and requested that she reiterate her commitment to National Cabinet's goal of zero COVID,
• 20:06
  of suppressing COVID.
• 20:08
  And she politely said, yes, they said if there's going to be any change to New South Wales
• 20:14
  of strategy, you have to come here and pass it by National Cabinet first.
• 20:20
  She said, OK, she's still on the zero COVID bandwagon officially.
• 20:27
  But what I hope is that the last thought in her head before she goes to bed each night
• 20:32
  is, fuck those assholes, we are going to do it and we are going to prove that we can succeed
• 20:38
  because there is no future that is zero COVID anywhere.
• 20:42
  It is a global pandemic, it is coming.
• 20:45
  We can't hide from it.
• 20:47
  We have to make ourselves resilient and the easiest way to make ourselves resilient
• 20:50
  is by getting vaccinated.
• 20:53
  But the second easiest way to make ourselves resilient is to stop bullshitting ourselves
• 20:57
  about zero COVID being a long-term strategy, which is why I don't understand what Victoria
• 21:03
  is doing.
• 21:05
  Now, Victorians will feel rightly aggrieved perhaps that New South Wales hasn't been taking
• 21:11
  the lockdown seriously as Victorians do when they have put up with so much and my heart
• 21:15
  goes out to you if you are in Melbourne or Victoria.
• 21:18
  But the reality is there comes a point at which you've got to go, stick a fork and it's
• 21:21
  done.
• 21:22
  Wherever we don't live in a dictatorship, we don't live in an arbitrary society where the
• 21:27
  government makes capricious rules with no purpose.
• 21:33
  Lockdowns, curfews, massive prohibitions on individual liberties, that's all kosher
• 21:39
  in a time of emergency.
• 21:42
  But at what point do we stop calling it a time of emergency?
• 21:45
  At what point does it become the new normal?
• 21:48
  And I do worry about the future of freedom in Australia.
• 21:54
  Not in the knee-jerk reactionary sense of saying there should never be a lockdown because
• 21:59
  I want to be able to go out and have parties.
• 22:03
  But in the much more prudent, thoughtful, measured sense of I expect my government to
• 22:09
  have very, very good reasons for infringing my liberty.
• 22:15
  Over the grand sweeping course of human history across countries and civilizations and
• 22:20
  centuries, the greatest impediment to human flourishing has been governments.
• 22:25
  Has been aristocrats, has been elites, has been people with militaries, people with
• 22:28
  guns, people with power, people with money.
• 22:32
  Those people can always skirt the rules.
• 22:35
  A little guy can't and I don't want us to sleepwalk into a situation where we become
• 22:40
  okay with governments arbitrarily exercising massive powers with no good data and no good
• 22:47
  reason and no long-term plan.
• 22:52
  Now I'm sure that the Victorian lockdown will be more effective than the New South Wales
• 22:57
  lockdown.
• 22:58
  It's a lot harsher, they've gotten onto it a lot quicker and they're going to come
• 23:02
  out of it.
• 23:03
  COVID zero at some point, crowing about how they did things right and haven't the tables
• 23:07
  turned since earlier this year when everyone thought that Gladys was better at managing
• 23:11
  lockdowns.
• 23:12
  Well, that Victorian metal has really proven to be more resilient and more tough than
• 23:18
  the defeat hedonistic Sydney signers who couldn't handle a real lockdown and have spiralled
• 23:23
  out of control.
• 23:26
  And I will grant all of that and come back to my basic question, what now?
• 23:34
  What next?
• 23:36
  Bravo if you get back to COVID zero.
• 23:39
  And then what?
• 23:41
  Nobody ever goes to Bali again.
• 23:44
  My grandchildren never see their American grandparents again.
• 23:49
  What's the game plan Australia?
• 23:52
  I don't know exactly what I'm calling for, but I would encourage you to do two things.
• 23:56
  One, get vaccinated as fast as you possibly can because that's our only way out of this.
• 24:00
  And two, start to change your thinking and your conversations away from focusing on the
• 24:06
  daily case numbers.
• 24:09
  At some day we're going to have to, at some day that has to stop being the priority.
• 24:12
  We can't keep being held hostage by insanely insular, parochial people like the Western
• 24:18
  Australian Premier who is going to insist upon zero COVID cases indefinitely.
• 24:26
  And he wants to enforce that vision of Australia's future on people who are much more cosmopolitan,
• 24:31
  much more multicultural, much more engaged with the international community than he is in
• 24:35
  cities like Sydney and Melbourne.
• 24:37
  I'm not going to have it.
• 24:39
  If it means that I as a Sydney cider am allowed to fly to Taipei and Singapore before I'm
• 24:44
  allowed to fly to Perth, fine.
• 24:47
  I have no problem with that.
• 24:49
  My concern is that our lust for community, for national unity and frankly, our tacitly
• 24:58
  authoritarian streak in this country is going to permit us to be bullied by smaller premieres
• 25:04
  and by fear mongers which will prevent us from having the conversations we need to have
• 25:11
  in order to get to the next stage of this pandemic.
• 25:13
  And I was gobsmacked to see the severity of the Victorian lockdown, gobsmacked because
• 25:21
  it's completely inconsistent with any kind of long-term plan.
• 25:25
  All it does is go back to the same old rule book from the early days of the pandemic which
• 25:28
  is get to COVID-0.
• 25:30
  And that's worked fantastically well for the first chapter, but come on people.
• 25:36
  It's time for chapter 2.
• 25:41
  Anyway, I hope that's not too much of a downer.
• 25:44
  We've got a great conversation today that has absolutely nothing to do with coronavirus.
• 25:48
  I hit up James Matheson who was one of the original hosts of Australian Idol and a wonderful
• 25:58
  guy, a smart guy, he actually ran for Parliament after his television career.
• 26:06
  And he now has a podcast and it's run by the same outfit as this podcast is hosted
• 26:11
  by it by a cast, terrific people, and I actually bumped into him in the lift while I was
• 26:15
  going up there and said, oh, you should do my podcast and then on the morning of the taping
• 26:20
  I texted him, I said, well, maybe in the evening before I said, just text me a few things
• 26:23
  that you want to talk about on the show.
• 26:28
  And he sent me back a few options and when we got in the studio, we ended up spending
• 26:34
  much of the time talking about psychedelics.
• 26:40
  And he has such a wonderful mind because he darts back and forth between the very prosaic
• 26:47
  political concerns of everyday life and the vast wondrous cosmic concerns of consciousness,
• 26:55
  civil asylum and spirituality.
• 26:59
  I do hope you enjoy this conversation with the one and only James Matheson.
• 27:05
  You know, I could do it in four weeks, could give you 17 minutes at quarter past two in four
• 27:25
  weeks time, but you're quite easy to pin down and then impossible to actually get.
• 27:31
  You know, I mean, like too many platforms, too many platforms.
• 27:36
  Yeah, I'm pretty good on text.
• 27:38
  I'm pretty good on text.
• 27:39
  You're not very good on text.
• 27:40
  Some of those in a checkmate.
• 27:41
  No, but I say that not in a sparraging way because I wish I was worse on text because
• 27:47
  I'm jealous of my partner, Sean, for being the type of person who cannot look at his phone
• 27:51
  for three hours and not respond to a text of mine, which I find aggravating as the person
• 27:56
  who wants an immediate response.
• 27:57
  But I also wish I could do that because I'm always like, someone just texted me, I can
• 28:01
  respond to my job, though.
• 28:03
  But you know, you you'll give me a leisurely, leisurely 45 minutes to three hours before responding
• 28:08
  to a text message.
• 28:09
  Correct.
• 28:10
  Yeah, but I will get back to where the emails can just sit there, accumulate, build up,
• 28:16
  unread too many, not even looking at them.
• 28:19
  Have you heard of email forgiveness day?
• 28:21
  We just purge.
• 28:23
  Yeah, well, I think it actually has, I think it's a day when you're allowed to respond
• 28:28
  to any email that's been sitting around that you've been meaning to respond to without
• 28:33
  having to go through the whole laborious explanation of why you haven't responded to it
• 28:38
  yet.
• 28:39
  I don't bother with that.
• 28:40
  Right.
• 28:41
  I'd just say sorry about the delay, even if it's from, but what if it's from 18 months
• 28:45
  ago?
• 28:46
  I've done that.
• 28:47
  Absolutely.
• 28:49
  I'll try.
• 28:50
  I'll try.
• 28:51
  It's an email about an overseas trip pre pandemic and you're just like, sorry about
• 28:58
  the delay.
• 28:59
  Can't come to Bali.
• 29:00
  Since you sent that email, there's been a global pandemic.
• 29:02
  Sorry.
• 29:03
  It sort of explains itself.
• 29:05
  That one's that one would be useful.
• 29:06
  That explain does explain itself.
• 29:08
  Yeah.
• 29:09
  No, I like the, I like email forgiveness day.
• 29:10
  I also pride myself on having a lot of unread emails, which other people find horrifying,
• 29:15
  but I enjoy.
• 29:16
  Let me take a look at what am I up to now on my, so my mail app on my phone, I want to
• 29:22
  take a stab at what the little red notification symbol of unread emails says.
• 29:25
  I reckon it's between 280 and 712.
• 29:29
  Oh, mate, you're going over.
• 29:32
  Yeah, that's unfair.
• 29:33
  It's 211197, which is pretty good, almost a quarter of a million unread emails.
• 29:39
  That can't be your eyes.
• 29:43
  No, mate.
• 29:44
  I'll send you a screenshot.
• 29:45
  11,000.
• 29:46
  Yeah.
• 29:47
  Were you thinking just 200, 250?
• 29:49
  I've experimented with zero in box before, which is pretty good.
• 29:53
  You just have to report diligent, but the thing is, it's like having it to do lists that
• 30:00
  you leave on the kitchen counter for your family, and then anyone can just add to that to
• 30:05
  do list.
• 30:06
  Yeah, unsolicited.
• 30:07
  Yeah.
• 30:08
  So you wake up and you're like, oh, people have just added.
• 30:11
  No, I think it's horrendous.
• 30:12
  I also am a big objecter to in box zero, and not just the particular strategy, but to
• 30:19
  the kind of mindset that it comes from and that it seeks to foster.
• 30:25
  It actually is a, in this kind of Silicon Valley tech bro life hacky way, it is a way of
• 30:33
  diverting your attention from things that matter to things that really don't.
• 30:37
  I know that all the, like, all the Asperger's tech bro's in Silicon Valley get a hard
• 30:43
  on for, you know, hacks that enable them to have no emails in their inbox, but in reality,
• 30:48
  it actually doesn't matter if you have 211,000 unread emails in your inbox if it's not impacting
• 30:53
  your life at all.
• 30:55
  So I'd rather be like writing a novel, not that I am writing a novel, but at least I can
• 30:59
  feel guilty about not writing a novel for more important reasons than just that I was
• 31:02
  clearing out my inbox.
• 31:05
  But also that, the assumption there is that it does have, it doesn't have any impact
• 31:10
  on you, that there is some sort of baseline anxiety that comes along with knowing that
• 31:16
  these things are out there inside the eater of your brain or bubbling below the surface.
• 31:22
  It's not.
• 31:23
  It's like, it's pure, it's pure liberation, James, I feel so happy to know, you know what
• 31:30
  it lands as, I, it's a personality type thing.
• 31:33
  I know it's like having a shit, it's like, it's like cleaning your room by just dumping
• 31:38
  all the shit out of your bed, like is your room really clean?
• 31:42
  But that's what inbox zero does, isn't it?
• 31:45
  Hmm.
• 31:46
  Yeah.
• 31:47
  I mean, that's what inbox zero does, it gets like, just find all of the things that relate
• 31:51
  to work and put them in this folder, find all the things that relate to, you know, promotional
• 31:55
  specials from things that you subscribe to and put them in this folder, and then you
• 31:58
  can feel good about yourself because you're in boxes zero.
• 32:00
  Yeah, but all the monsters are still lurking in my, in my shit box folders that you just
• 32:04
  got me to shovel everything into.
• 32:06
  That would give me greater anxiety than the pure, than the purity of knowledge that I
• 32:10
  have 211,000 unready emails.
• 32:14
  I know some people that stresses them out because they go, oh my god, I'm going to have
• 32:19
  to get to all those things.
• 32:21
  What I think is, I think, I think when I look at that number, James, I feel like that's
• 32:27
  211,000 times that some fucktard has tried to distract me from doing, from living my
• 32:34
  life and I refused.
• 32:36
  Hmm.
• 32:37
  It's, it's freedom.
• 32:38
  That's freedom.
• 32:39
  You know what's even a great level of freedom is, select all and then delete, just purge
• 32:46
  that.
• 32:47
  Absolutely.
• 32:48
  I am still, but I'm still vaguely worried that there's something from 2008 that I'll want
• 32:56
  at some stage, you know, someone sent me something.
• 32:59
  It was a really cute dog pick at someone's hand.
• 33:03
  Anyway, let's talk about psychedelics because I'm interested in, in your enthusiasm for
• 33:08
  them and your loathing of the, of the war on drugs.
• 33:12
  What, why did you text me this as a suggested subject?
• 33:14
  Well, you said what should we talk about?
• 33:17
  I don't mean why did you propose something.
• 33:20
  I mean, why is that the thing that you proposed?
• 33:23
  I mean, I'm always interested in talking to people about what they think about.
• 33:31
  Not, not in the sense of what thoughts enter their mind, but what do they find themselves
• 33:37
  thinking about when they have that time?
• 33:40
  And I often feel like there's a few things that most people circle back to.
• 33:46
  I don't know if that's true for you, but if you go for a walk or you have some moment
• 33:51
  to contemplate what's going on in the world or just in your own life, are there a few
• 33:56
  common themes that you tend to circle back to?
• 34:00
  Yeah, yeah, sure.
• 34:02
  Yeah, I don't spend a lot of it.
• 34:03
  It would be a couple of them.
• 34:05
  Well, I mean, they change over time, don't they?
• 34:07
  Lately, I've been feeling self-rerimination for not writing a project that I wanted to,
• 34:12
  that I would have liked to have done this year.
• 34:15
  So there's a lot of that procrastination mindset of like, fuck what, I can't just find
• 34:22
  the time to like really carve that out because I know that my soul would sing if I did that
• 34:26
  and then another part of my head going, yeah, but there are all these other much more
• 34:30
  productive ways of using your time that you should be working on, you should be pitching
• 34:34
  this thing and like, you know, focusing on that thing, which are much more prosaic and
• 34:38
  mundane.
• 34:39
  So there's a lot of that.
• 34:40
  I mean, that feels like chatter, that feels like the chatter, but are there things that
• 34:45
  you sort of ruminate about in terms of the bigger picture, I guess?
• 34:51
  Well, when I'm at, no, no, I'm trying to understand where you're going with the question
• 34:58
  because the, when I'm at my best, like when I'm, you know, when I've just written a
• 35:04
  bike to the top of a volcano on Easter Island and I'm watching the sunrise, then I have
• 35:09
  like moments of intense kind of spiritual connection to the cosmos and intense curiosity.
• 35:16
  I mean, I'm very, I was someone who in my teens suddenly devoured and discovered Carl
• 35:23
  Sagan and Richard Dawkins and Richard Feynman and became a complete obsessive about like
• 35:29
  the size of the universe and the amazingness of the cosmos we find ourselves in and how
• 35:33
  extraordinary evolution is and all that.
• 35:36
  So I still tap into that well as my principal source of big picture stuff when I'm in the
• 35:42
  right frame of mind.
• 35:43
  Yeah, I think I guess I asked because when you said, why do we want to talk about this
• 35:48
  topic, one of the things that I always sort of come back to when I'm just not lost in
• 35:55
  the own chatter of my mind, but just the thoughts that continue to return or I was like,
• 35:59
  how can we as a society improve?
• 36:03
  Why are we where we are at, you know, we're the brilliant species of animals, but we're
• 36:08
  still mired in so much of our own bullshit.
• 36:13
  And often within that, like the power and importance of psychedelics often finds a thread
• 36:21
  that springs up because in so many ways it is a pathway to freeing ourselves from a lot
• 36:28
  of the things that play us.
• 36:31
  It's not a panacea, but you know, the fact that a lot of cultures, most cultures, have
• 36:38
  used them for generations to connect with themselves, to connect with each other, to connect
• 36:43
  with the land, and to connect with that greater purpose or spiritual self that you were talking
• 36:50
  about.
• 36:51
  And yet we as a society have not just cast them off as sort of dangerous, we've outlawed
• 36:59
  them. We've allowed the state to decide whether or not we can participate in medicines
• 37:04
  that have been used by humans for, you know, maybe a hundred thousand years.
• 37:08
  I mean, and researchers aren't even really allowed to study their utility, like increasingly
• 37:13
  in the states they can now because there are more and more exemptions, but it places
• 37:17
  like Australia.
• 37:18
  It's really hard to even do research on it except for in very, very small ways.
• 37:24
  It is a tragedy that at the time at which these compounds were becoming widespread, it
• 37:30
  was also a moment of enormous civil and cultural unrest in the United States in the 60s and
• 37:36
  the Vietnam War and the hippie movement and all of the kind of free love that these
• 37:41
  things created got tangled up in an anti-establishment sort of destabilization, I mean, an anti-establishment
• 37:52
  movement that destabilized powerful institutions and led to the Nixon administration declaring
• 37:58
  the war on drugs and these compounds essentially getting swept up in all of that.
• 38:04
  And then there was basically a pause button placed on all of the research into them for
• 38:08
  a half century, which is now just gradually being relaxed and we're starting to look into
• 38:13
  them some more.
• 38:14
  But what is it that you think, like where do you think we would be as a society if that
• 38:19
  hadn't happened?
• 38:20
  I mean, I think anytime that the existing power structures are threatened by some sort of
• 38:28
  emerging threat to their existence, then they're always going to come down on it.
• 38:32
  So I mean, it may have happened one way or another.
• 38:35
  So I think the fact that this time around, the approach has been, there has to be a lot
• 38:41
  of science, a lot of rigorous investigation, a lot of testing and a lot of responsibility
• 38:47
  around it probably sets the movement on a much steadier ground than it would of if we had
• 38:54
  perpetuated down the path that we were probably going because it was sort of experimentation
• 38:58
  first, research and science second, but also we know so much more about the brain 50 years
• 39:04
  later than we did back in the 60s.
• 39:07
  So maybe in some parts it was necessary and it's played out the way it needs to.
• 39:14
  I guess I wanted to talk about it is because most people think this is a fringe issue.
• 39:18
  Most people think that this is on the periphery of conversation and also of cultural importance,
• 39:24
  but my contention is that it's not.
• 39:26
  My contention is that this is actually central to the human experience in many ways.
• 39:31
  And so when we start thinking about it in that context, it sort of starts to change our
• 39:38
  approach to it and also the seriousness that we take these compounds.
• 39:43
  And when I talk about them, I'm talking mainly about sort of psilocybin mushrooms and a
• 39:48
  lot of the research now is around MDMA assisted talk therapy for things like treatment
• 39:54
  resistant depression and anxiety and alcoholism and drug addiction, but that's probably the
• 40:00
  central tenant that I try and impress upon people, but this is not a fringe issue.
• 40:06
  What was your best friend?
• 40:08
  I mean, I think part of the problem, and it definitely was for me, and for a lot of people
• 40:13
  is that there is this disrespect for the compounds, for the plant medicine, and people
• 40:20
  treat them as something they can go out and party with or treat them as something they
• 40:25
  can be irresponsible with.
• 40:27
  And I think I definitely did that when I was a bit younger.
• 40:30
  And it's only when you get a bit old and realize how sacred they are, how powerful they
• 40:35
  can be for your own transformation, and how much reverence we need to give them that
• 40:40
  you sort of go, I sort of just fucking around, you know.
• 40:45
  Yeah, I mean, and it's partly because we flatten all drugs into this one category of drugs.
• 40:50
  It's crazy that a really nasty, trashy substance, frankly, like meth, which turns everybody
• 41:03
  into an obsessive asshole who just needs more of it, is classified in this under the
• 41:09
  same umbrella as a magic mushroom or ayahuasca or something, which for a start is anti-addictive.
• 41:20
  You give a rat, you give a rat meth or cocaine, and they'll just keep tapping that little
• 41:25
  lever until they starve to death, they're just going to kill themselves with it.
• 41:28
  You give a rat a trip and the rat's like, yeah, I'm not going to go back to that.
• 41:34
  And people don't tend to go out every weekend and take acid or magic mushrooms or ayahuasca,
• 41:41
  but they do receive insights whether pleasurable or not into the nature of themselves during
• 41:48
  those experiences, which are some, which is, which are completely different from the sorts
• 41:52
  of experiences that people have on cocaine or amphetamines.
• 41:56
  So that alone, I think, contributes to part of the problem here that we talk about drugs
• 42:00
  like they're a thing.
• 42:01
  But I think it was Sam Harris who says, it's almost like if we talked about exercise as
• 42:08
  just being a single thing, and we didn't make a differentiation between mountain biking
• 42:13
  and Olympic swimming.
• 42:15
  Yeah.
• 42:16
  Or sports.
• 42:17
  All sports are the same.
• 42:22
  Yeah.
• 42:23
  I mean, I think I had more seriousness around them maybe about 10 years ago, I was lucky enough
• 42:51
  to go to South America and go to Peru and spend a couple of weeks there and do a series
• 42:57
  of ayahuasca ceremonies and sort of explore what plant medicine could do if you took it
• 43:04
  seriously in the right space, with the right people, with the right context, and the right
• 43:08
  intention.
• 43:09
  And yeah, I mean, you talked about what was the most powerful trip.
• 43:14
  I mean, that was an extraordinary couple of weeks in terms of just unlearning and deprogramming
• 43:21
  you know, 35 years of consumption of culture and attachment to self and your own narrative.
• 43:32
  And just being able to try and separate that constant chat in the air, you identify that
• 43:37
  as yourself.
• 43:38
  But being able to very clearly be released from that and tap into whatever it is that
• 43:45
  is inside you that exists when you are not in that stream of thought and letting go of
• 43:52
  the identification itself is extraordinary, you know.
• 43:56
  How many centimeters did you do in that two weeks?
• 44:00
  I think we did six over two weeks.
• 44:03
  Yeah.
• 44:04
  And each one, you know, is very, very different.
• 44:07
  You know, and the first is kind of terrifying, you know, you don't know what to expect.
• 44:12
  You, you, you're holding on to a lot.
• 44:14
  I mean, a lot of, I think initially for me, what happens is that the, the, the self and
• 44:20
  the ego is so persistent that once it starts to, it, it's talents start to ungroup from
• 44:28
  you.
• 44:29
  It's a scary, scary moment because you're like, holy shit, what's happening here?
• 44:32
  You know, and that's why I think a lot of times people, when they have psychedelics,
• 44:35
  are scared that they're going to die, it's not them dying, it's, it's their ego, it's
• 44:40
  their idea of who they are, it's dying.
• 44:42
  And that's dissolving.
• 44:44
  And if you've been attached to that, if that has been, you know, your defining sense
• 44:48
  of who you are for 20, 30, 40, 50 years, that's terrifying.
• 44:52
  You don't want to let go of that, you know, but there is something on the other side.
• 44:58
  And so, yeah, we did six, seven weeks of a couple weeks and then after that, I just started
• 45:01
  to read more, learn more and when I would occasionally do psilocybin mushrooms, do them
• 45:08
  in the right setting, the right intention and make sure I'd treated them with the sort
• 45:12
  of respect that, you know, they definitely deserve.
• 45:15
  But my, I think my biggest thing is that we talk a lot about freedom, what that idea is,
• 45:20
  what is freedom to you?
• 45:22
  Like it's the freedom to be able to love whoever you want, that's a freedom.
• 45:26
  The freedom to be able to, you know, explore parts of the planet, which is, that there's
• 45:31
  a restriction on that, you know, there's parts of Australia I can go to, there's other
• 45:35
  parts that are inaccessible to me.
• 45:37
  So we have some freedoms there.
• 45:39
  You have some freedom of being able to express yourself within limits, you know, there's obviously
• 45:46
  defamation laws and there's, you know, hate speech laws.
• 45:49
  So there are limitations around that, but my own consciousness, where I can go and how
• 45:55
  I can explore my own mind, that's an area where the government has no role.
• 46:00
  That is not a place for the government to intervene because there is nothing more intimate
• 46:05
  or sacred or personal than my own mind and my own consciousness.
• 46:11
  And as soon as the state or the government or an authority tries to intervene in there,
• 46:17
  crossing a line that means that our freedom is, means very little in the, the real sense
• 46:24
  of the word because there is no, there, there are few places that truly belong to you
• 46:29
  in this time, in this society with them.
• 46:33
  Does that make sense?
• 46:35
  Absolutely.
• 46:36
  It's a kind of autonomy of consciousness or like the freedom to be self-directed in your,
• 46:44
  in your experience of yourself in the world.
• 46:46
  You're reminding me a little bit that when I was in the States, there was a Supreme Court
• 46:50
  case about whether or not an inmate who may have been in Guantanamo Bay, I think, should
• 46:55
  be force-fed because he was on a hunger strike.
• 46:59
  And the wardens wanted to force feed him and I think they ended up succeeding to keep
• 47:06
  him alive.
• 47:07
  And this was couched by the jailers as being a humanitarian intervention.
• 47:11
  You don't want this person to die.
• 47:12
  It would be unseemly.
• 47:13
  It would be like, you know, it would be brutalizing or almost akin to torture to simply allow
• 47:19
  a person to die when you have the ability to keep them alive.
• 47:23
  But I heard this moving argument by a human rights lawyer saying, that is the final frontier
• 47:29
  of autonomy and freedom for this person.
• 47:33
  You have stripped this person of absolutely everything.
• 47:35
  They have control over nothing.
• 47:37
  They don't control where they shit.
• 47:39
  They don't control when they get to go outside.
• 47:42
  Like, they are a caged animal.
• 47:46
  And the one thing they can choose to do is to refuse to continue to exist and to refuse
• 47:51
  to be complicit in this system that you've erected around them.
• 47:56
  And the only way they have to do that is to stop eating and to kill them.
• 47:59
  So that way, they don't have anything sharp to kill themselves with.
• 48:02
  They can't hang themselves.
• 48:03
  There's nothing.
• 48:04
  All they can do is not eat.
• 48:05
  And you are removing, by shoving a feeding tube down their throat, you are removing that
• 48:09
  last, tiny form of autonomy.
• 48:13
  When I thought about like that, I was like, fuck, that's, that's dark.
• 48:16
  That is horrifying.
• 48:17
  And you're right that within the prison of our own brains, why don't we have the freedom
• 48:21
  to explore what the cosmos has to, has to offer?
• 48:25
  And that, that, that case is so, is so fascinating because America across the board has fought
• 48:33
  against any movement towards voluntary euthanasia, you know, allowing people to kill themselves.
• 48:41
  And here they are again, when someone just wants to have their own autonomy, they're
• 48:46
  like, no, no, no, we can't allow that.
• 48:48
  We've got a forcefully, because he doesn't want to be fed.
• 48:51
  To be fair, they've had a few, it's a state by state thing over there.
• 48:54
  And they've had states that allow voluntary assisted dying and even euthanasia before
• 48:59
  Australian states did.
• 49:01
  But yeah.
• 49:02
  Yeah, of course, of course.
• 49:03
  That's why it's such an amazing fascinating country, you know, different parts have
• 49:07
  got drastically different views on, on all parts of the, the cultural was and, and of
• 49:13
  law and order.
• 49:14
  But, um, yeah, forcing someone to eat when they don't want to, whereas then in what
• 49:18
  were they doing in Abu Ghraib, they were forcing them to eat through their arsehole,
• 49:22
  yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll, we'll
• 49:26
  back you up one way or the other.
• 49:29
  Oh, man, absolutely.
• 49:32
  One of the, one of the things that's interesting about psychedelic research is the staggeringly
• 49:37
  higher success rate in, uh, treating end of life depression among terminally ill people.
• 49:44
  And also addiction, you mentioned addiction, like psilocybin as a cure for addiction, I think
• 49:50
  they have something like a 70% success rate of quitting smoking in a single, in a single
• 49:56
  psilocybin trip, uh, which it seems to reset your body's habits in some way.
• 50:04
  It's, it was articulated to me as if there'd been, I think this is from Michael Pollan's,
• 50:08
  uh, a great book about, about all this, uh, what's it called?
• 50:12
  How to, how to change your mind, how to change your mind where he goes, he's a, uh, best
• 50:16
  selling New York Times author who has written, who normally had, had written about, uh, food
• 50:22
  and a, but really about the interface between the natural world and the human world and
• 50:27
  got interested in psychedelic research.
• 50:29
  And so each chapter of this book, he takes a different psychedelic and it's, it's a
• 50:32
  wonderful read or listen to the audio book if you, if you, if you want.
• 50:35
  And he, he uses the analogy of like, it's almost as if you've got a ski run and there
• 50:40
  are all these grooves in the snow, uh, down, going down the runs and the, the trip puts
• 50:48
  a fresh coating of snow on.
• 50:50
  So there are no more, there are no more roots to kind of get stuck in.
• 50:53
  You can just have paid your own way.
• 50:55
  And that's the analogy that gets used with breaking habits like it's, it's suddenly easy
• 50:59
  to just not take the path of smoking anymore because you've kind of gotten this elevated
• 51:05
  meta view of the absurdity of your own rut and you're able to, to go around it.
• 51:11
  But this is all a long roundabout way of asking you whether or not you think there's a,
• 51:16
  a kind of a cosmic or spiritual element to this because a plausible explanation of why
• 51:22
  it's so, it's so helpful with things like addiction and self-destructive behaviors like
• 51:27
  that and overcoming end of life depression is that it really opens your eyes to a, a
• 51:36
  bigger universe of consciousness and meaning that's beyond our own human affairs.
• 51:43
  And that's essentially spiritual.
• 51:45
  Do you think it's telling us something about the cosmos or do you think it's a beautiful
• 51:48
  explosion of fireworks inside our head?
• 51:51
  I think, you know, a decade ago I would have said the latter, you know, but it's just fireworks
• 51:57
  going off in your head.
• 51:58
  But I mean the more you read about it and the more you dive into it and especially around,
• 52:05
  I mean, my components are great example of someone who came in from a very skeptical viewpoint
• 52:10
  but at the same time his background was food that also plant biology.
• 52:14
  He wrote an amazing book years ago.
• 52:17
  He might be 15, 20 years old now called the Botany of Desire, how there exists this amazing
• 52:23
  interplay between plants and how they are able to, you know, find each other and enable
• 52:29
  each other to propagate through this very intricate dance.
• 52:34
  And the more we sort of learn about plants, the more we realize, oh, maybe what they have
• 52:39
  is necessarily consciousness, but I mean, it's got to be very close to it.
• 52:45
  You know, there's a lot of research now around trees are able to detect seedlings that belong
• 52:52
  to themselves through, you know, the chemical chains that are emitted from those seedlings
• 53:00
  and they can direct resources to those seedlings that belong to them.
• 53:05
  They're not doing that consciously but it's not done accidentally.
• 53:10
  Yeah.
• 53:11
  And so there exists within plants, obviously, this intelligence.
• 53:15
  Now the thing that they'll tell you in shamanic cultures is that how they worked out how
• 53:22
  to brew the ayahuasca was the plants told them how to do it.
• 53:26
  Now you could believe that or you could also believe that, you know, these combinations
• 53:31
  of different plants fell together in a pot while they were cooking and they brewed together
• 53:36
  and they're like, oh, this is doing something.
• 53:38
  But whatever you believe, the more time you spend understanding the intelligence of the
• 53:45
  natural world, the more you start to think, oh, God, maybe there's, you know, not only
• 53:49
  something bigger to this, but maybe the plants are trying to tell us something.
• 53:55
  I know that sounds insane, sounds insane.
• 53:58
  When you say it out loud, I mean, you've set up a bit of a false binary though.
• 54:03
  You've set up a bit of a false binary with the shamanistic, like ayahuasca recipe because
• 54:08
  I don't think the alternative is only either the plants were trying to tell us something
• 54:14
  or the plants accidentally dropped into a pot and hey, presto, there was a perfect recipe
• 54:18
  that came out because the latter is implausible.
• 54:21
  But if you're talking about something that's been honed over thousands of years and some
• 54:25
  of these traditions, thousands of years old, that's a lot of generations of people to
• 54:30
  mix things together and accidentally and keep trying them and accidentally find something
• 54:35
  that works a little bit better than the way that it worked on your uncle and gradually
• 54:41
  went out down.
• 54:42
  It's a sort of an evolutionary, like, meme processes and that, I mean, that seems like
• 54:47
  the most implausible version to me.
• 54:48
  But you're right.
• 54:49
  Does that mean that we're doing it to the plant or that the plant is doing it to us in
• 54:55
  some way?
• 54:56
  It's a bit like the chicken or egg can under them about the domestication of animals.
• 54:59
  You know, humans have traditionally thought we domesticated wolves to turn them into dogs.
• 55:04
  But from the dog's point of view, like, the dogs did a pretty good job of making themselves
• 55:09
  really successful by encouraging us to welcome them into our homes.
• 55:16
  So it's an interplay.
• 55:17
  It's the same with corn and wheat, some people make the argument that those plants have adapted
• 55:24
  to make sure that we keep propagating them.
• 55:28
  I mean, if you were a corn crop or a wheat crop, you know, you've done pretty well by
• 55:33
  reaching onto humans.
• 55:34
  That's right.
• 55:35
  Exactly.
• 55:36
  But I think there are two questions that I think one is, is there some innate knowledge within
• 55:40
  the plants?
• 55:41
  And I think for my experience, and many other people is, when you take mushrooms in the
• 55:46
  right environment with the right context, done responsibly, there's a point where you
• 55:52
  definitely feel you are being guided by the plants, you know?
• 55:55
  And it's really hard to articulate that and not sound crazy, but that's the lived experience
• 56:02
  of what I've been through and what other people have been through, you know?
• 56:06
  But the other point, I think you were trying to get to, is that, is there something going
• 56:10
  on that takes us to somewhere greater than ourselves?
• 56:16
  My current thinking around it is maybe, but also whether or not that's true, what it
• 56:21
  does is it strips away the layers that enables you to access something that is already there.
• 56:28
  You know, there is a part of you and a part of me that is already connected to the universe
• 56:33
  or the divine or something deeper.
• 56:35
  And it is veiled from us through our upbringing, our culture, our education, these hierarchies
• 56:43
  that we are enveloped in.
• 56:45
  But once that veil is lifted and the plant medicines are an amazing way to do that.
• 56:51
  But you can do it through breath work, you can do it through meditation, you can do it
• 56:56
  through, you know, dance or love making or any of these sort of things.
• 57:01
  Like we've all had that moment where we can access it and often it's very fleeting.
• 57:06
  But there is a part of us that we can tap into that is already connected to that greater
• 57:13
  universal divine.
• 57:14
  Yeah.
• 57:15
  This is how do we get there?
• 57:16
  I mean, this is sort of the doors of perception argument from the mid 20th century, where
• 57:22
  there are doors, there are doorways of perception that are currently close to us, but that
• 57:27
  are perfectly available to us.
• 57:29
  If only we choose to look and all the drug does is enable us to look.
• 57:33
  I mean, I remember I haven't done many psychedelics at all and not for a very long time, but when
• 57:37
  I was in my teens had, you know, one of the most profound experiences of my life in
• 57:43
  Byron walking along Talos Beach with a couple of mates and having done on a trip.
• 57:49
  And I remember the feeling as we were coming down after about five or six hours or whatever
• 57:54
  it was and the sun was setting over Byron lighthouse and we were getting to the end of the
• 57:58
  beach.
• 57:59
  And I could just, it felt like there were shutters coming down.
• 58:05
  That's the only way I can describe it.
• 58:06
  It felt like we'd had this incredible series of sequence of mind expanding insights that
• 58:12
  were connecting us to something incredibly profoundly true.
• 58:18
  And we were just beginning to lose the thread of those connections that were beginning
• 58:22
  to, I was beginning, it was just like so slipping out of my hand or like a rope that had
• 58:27
  been tore suddenly going slack and I no longer had access to it.
• 58:31
  I'd try to regenerate the, the insights and they'd just kind of flop around and it felt
• 58:36
  like I am a mammal who has evolved to only be able to understand what I need to understand
• 58:45
  in any moment to help me sort of procreate and survive on this planet.
• 58:50
  And the, the drug had lifted the, those blinders and had given me an insight into something
• 58:56
  far more true but also far too big to be practical to think about all the time.
• 59:02
  And as it was wearing off, that became less and less perceptible.
• 59:05
  It was almost like a cloud, like a frosted door on a bathroom like clouding over until
• 59:11
  you can't see it anymore.
• 59:13
  And that, that I think is the experience that a lot of people have that's, that you're
• 59:17
  articulating.
• 59:19
  And then, and, and after that, did you sort of wonder, how do I get back to that or what
• 59:23
  was that or was that, what did you think, oh, that was just a product of the, the compound
• 59:29
  no, no, no, I definitely had a, what, what they call it, the noetic sense of meaning
• 59:33
  that the true, a truth that is that you can't explain why it's true, but a, sort of a
• 59:38
  spiritual or, or psychedelic truth where it's crystal clear that you've been in the presence
• 59:45
  of something.
• 59:46
  And I mean, I also didn't had an ayahuasca ceremony when I was in the States and, and
• 59:50
  felt the same thing, this, and, and exposure to the enormity of something that obviously
• 59:55
  isn't the product of your own head.
• 59:57
  Yeah.
• 59:58
  And so you're right afterwards, it's like, how do I, how do I capture that again?
• 1:00:02
  How do I integrate these insights?
• 1:00:05
  How do I hold on to them?
• 1:00:06
  Because it's like, when you, when you have an amazing dream and you, you wake up in the
• 1:00:10
  morning and you remember parts of the dream, but by the time you sit down and have breakfast
• 1:00:14
  and you're coffee, that's, that's gone.
• 1:00:17
  That what you felt in the dream, what you saw, that your senses in the dream, they've
• 1:00:21
  got evaporated.
• 1:00:22
  I think Alan Watts used to say, like, once you've heard the message, hang up the phone,
• 1:00:28
  you know, you don't need to keep going back to do these.
• 1:00:31
  No, that's right.
• 1:00:32
  Exactly.
• 1:00:33
  Right.
• 1:00:34
  Yeah.
• 1:00:35
  But it's like, how do I then, if that is what I want in my life, how do I cultivate that?
• 1:00:40
  And I, and I think the people, you know, whether it's, um, Tibetan monks or Sufi masters,
• 1:00:46
  they all believe that that level of mysticism is accessible to us through discipline and,
• 1:00:52
  and practice.
• 1:00:53
  Yeah.
• 1:00:54
  I mean, I know that I should probably, you know, if you've got 10 years, then you can,
• 1:00:58
  you can probably get a sneak peek for five grams, you know?
• 1:01:02
  Yeah.
• 1:01:03
  Yeah.
• 1:01:04
  That's right.
• 1:01:05
  I mean, I, I'm sure I could probably be more mindful and, you know, meditate more, but
• 1:01:11
  in the absence of that, I think you can retain a kernel of those insights, but just by
• 1:01:15
  retaining some wonder for the world, some generosity towards your fellow man, not getting
• 1:01:20
  caught up on Twitter too much and, you know, I'm not trying to cancel everybody, but those
• 1:01:24
  are the ways that I try to articulate those aspirations in today's culture.
• 1:01:30
  And I wonder sometimes what, what we do that while we go, oh, we know what's there.
• 1:01:35
  We know what we can access, but, uh, 20 minutes, 15 minutes to bloody meditate more.
• 1:01:43
  Yeah.
• 1:01:44
  Can't do that.
• 1:01:45
  I've got people to shout out on Twitter.
• 1:01:47
  Can I scroll endlessly in social media for two hours?
• 1:01:51
  Yeah.
• 1:01:52
  In a second.
• 1:01:53
  Yeah.
• 1:01:54
  You know, I, I think part of it is also there's something more alluring in the, in the temporal
• 1:02:01
  sense of, you know, clicking through social media, but also the self is so slippery and
• 1:02:06
  it's such a shapeshifter that it's like, nah, you don't want to do that.
• 1:02:12
  Because it knows it's survival is a mistake if you go further down that well.
• 1:02:18
  And so it'll post all sorts of arguments against why you should meditate, why you should
• 1:02:23
  go deeper, why you should try and connect with what you really know is true.
• 1:02:28
  It'll be like, nah, no, no, no, no, you don't want to, you've got, no, no, no, no, no,
• 1:02:31
  meditation.
• 1:02:32
  That's woo, that's a new age.
• 1:02:33
  Oh, you haven't got time, you know, it'll come up with a million brilliant, plausible
• 1:02:39
  reasons to not go there because it has to preserve itself.
• 1:02:44
  I mean, that's a nice metaphor, but I think that that function, that works even when you're
• 1:02:48
  not talking about meditation and sources of wisdom, anything that's big and scary that
• 1:02:54
  is worth doing, your body has a way of running from, I mean, I think that's just evolutionary
• 1:02:59
  or something.
• 1:03:00
  It's like, it's, it's resistance with a capital I is what Stephen Pressfield calls it
• 1:03:06
  in his great book, The War of Art, where he's, you know, anyone who's a writer knows
• 1:03:11
  the temptation to all of a sudden clean the kitchen when they have to, when they should
• 1:03:14
  be sitting down to write, and it's the same with meditation, it's the same with working
• 1:03:19
  out anyone who's on, you know, who pledges to get fit after New Year, I was a New Year
• 1:03:24
  resolution, knows that by, you know, January 22nd, you're finding reasons why you don't
• 1:03:30
  have time to work out.
• 1:03:32
  But it's anything that has a long term payoff, but feels uncomfortable in the moment.
• 1:03:37
  It's, it's funny, I guess, in the sense that, you know, you don't sit down and write
• 1:03:43
  that project or write that novel for a million different reasons, you know, and I guess you,
• 1:03:49
  you partly don't know what that feeling is like once it's completed, because you haven't
• 1:03:54
  actually completed that project, but you kind of have, you've done other thing, we know
• 1:03:58
  the payoff is there, so we know what the feeling is like, and that's the same once we've
• 1:04:03
  touched whatever it is inside of us.
• 1:04:06
  We know what that feeling is, but we still, it's almost too much to go there all the time.
• 1:04:11
  Yeah.
• 1:04:12
  Do you have hacks?
• 1:04:13
  Do you have hacks to get to, to try to touch that and not get swept up in the day to
• 1:04:17
  day?
• 1:04:18
  Like, I mean, I find it really useful.
• 1:04:19
  The only times that I ever get anything worthwhile done in my life is when I make a commitment
• 1:04:22
  to do it at the very, very, very moment that I get up in the morning.
• 1:04:25
  So if I have to, when I did have show at the Melbourne Comedy Festival and had to write
• 1:04:29
  an entire show, I would never do it if I didn't do it, the very, very first thing without
• 1:04:33
  having access to my 211,000 emails and just open up a blank page and do that from six
• 1:04:42
  to eight in the morning or whatever it is, do you have any hack like that?
• 1:04:46
  I'm a terrible example, because I'm always half-sighting things.
• 1:04:51
  We're completing them, have a million ideas, write the first couple of pages and then
• 1:04:56
  Peter out.
• 1:04:57
  But I have been trying to get a lot better at that.
• 1:05:02
  And like you said, early morning is absolute key.
• 1:05:05
  But for the, for the bigger picture of me, I'm to tap into that, that bigger sense of
• 1:05:10
  connection to the all, you know, my biggest hacks are like, you've actually got to look
• 1:05:16
  after the car and you, you are the car like, you drive out into the middle of a nullable
• 1:05:21
  and don't put air in the tires and put any oil in or fill it out with petrol or, you know,
• 1:05:27
  clean the windscreen, you know, your car is going to fall apart, you know, you're not
• 1:05:30
  going to be able to have that incredible drive.
• 1:05:33
  And I think that's the same connecting to not just a higher spiritual place, but also a
• 1:05:39
  greater purpose.
• 1:05:40
  And that means like, you can't like treat yourself like shit.
• 1:05:44
  And that means with what you consume, not just with food, it's like you can't be watching
• 1:05:48
  the Kardashians for like six hours, like filling your head with shit.
• 1:05:52
  You can't be eating sugar or drinking booze all the time because these things have an
• 1:05:57
  effect on your ability to cultivate something great, you know, it's really boring.
• 1:06:04
  That shit's really boring.
• 1:06:05
  So boring.
• 1:06:06
  So boring.
• 1:06:07
  So boring.
• 1:06:08
  Oh, no, I don't think it's boring to say.
• 1:06:09
  I think it's, I think it's so boring to live that life.
• 1:06:10
  I mean, it's, it amazes me.
• 1:06:12
  This is what I think.
• 1:06:13
  It's so fun.
• 1:06:14
  It's about, but it's not, you, we're so attached.
• 1:06:18
  We're so attached to the idea that it's a boring life on the other side of that.
• 1:06:23
  And we've never gone there.
• 1:06:25
  We don't know.
• 1:06:26
  You don't know that because you've never gone there and no one really has.
• 1:06:30
  No, I don't.
• 1:06:31
  Wait a second.
• 1:06:32
  Where are you talking about?
• 1:06:33
  Because what I'm saying is that it is fucking boring.
• 1:06:36
  It is incredibly boring to spend your life consuming nothing but the Kardashians and
• 1:06:40
  sugar and social media.
• 1:06:42
  And yet it is enticing in its boringness because it's predictable and safe and pingsless
• 1:06:48
  in just the right ways to keep us hooked.
• 1:06:50
  Right.
• 1:06:51
  I don't think anyone thinks it's boring to be alive and fit and well.
• 1:06:57
  I think they might think it's boring to not be able to eat a chocolate bar, but you
• 1:07:02
  can be fit and eat an occasional chocolate bar.
• 1:07:04
  You just can't have four a day.
• 1:07:06
  I don't think my content is, if you really want to go there, like, then, you know,
• 1:07:10
  then you have to get rid of the chocolate bars altogether.
• 1:07:13
  Really?
• 1:07:14
  Yeah.
• 1:07:15
  And this is what people say.
• 1:07:16
  Well, that's boring.
• 1:07:17
  That is boring.
• 1:07:18
  That is boring.
• 1:07:19
  That's where I put you now.
• 1:07:21
  I'm with you now.
• 1:07:22
  No, sorry.
• 1:07:23
  Yes.
• 1:07:24
  I thought you were misunderstanding me, but you were understanding me perfectly.
• 1:07:26
  Yes.
• 1:07:27
  No chocolate bars is boring.
• 1:07:29
  We're in Dry July, right?
• 1:07:30
  Yeah.
• 1:07:31
  We're in a resistance.
• 1:07:32
  Absolute.
• 1:07:33
  We're in a resistance.
• 1:07:34
  We're in a resistance.
• 1:07:35
  We're in a resistance.
• 1:07:36
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• 1:07:37
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• 1:07:38
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• 1:07:39
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• 1:07:40
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• 1:07:41
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• 1:07:42
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• 1:07:43
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• 1:07:44
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• 1:07:45
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• 1:07:46
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• 1:07:47
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• 1:07:48
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• 1:07:49
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• 1:07:50
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• 1:07:51
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• 1:07:52
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• 1:07:53
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• 1:07:54
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• 1:07:55
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• 1:07:56
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• 1:07:57
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• 1:07:58
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• 1:07:59
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• 1:08:00
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• 1:08:01
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• 1:08:03
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• 1:08:19
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• 1:08:20
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• 1:08:21
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• 1:08:22
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• 1:08:23
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• 1:08:24
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• 1:08:25
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• 1:08:27
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• 1:08:28
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• 1:08:30
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• 1:08:31
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• 1:08:32
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• 1:08:34
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• 1:08:47
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• 1:08:48
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• 1:08:50
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• 1:08:51
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• 1:08:52
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• 1:08:53
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• 1:08:54
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• 1:08:55
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• 1:08:56
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• 1:08:57
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• 1:08:59
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• 1:09:00
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• 1:09:11
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• 1:09:12
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• 1:09:13
  We're in a resistance.
• 1:09:14
  We're in a resistance.
• 1:09:15
  We're in a resistance.
• 1:09:16
  We're in a resistance.
• 1:09:17
  We're in a resistance.
• 1:09:18
  We're in a resistance.
• 1:09:19
  We're in a resistance.
• 1:09:20
  We're in a resistance.
• 1:09:21
  We're in a resistance.
• 1:09:22
  We're in a resistance.
• 1:09:23
  We're in a resistance.
• 1:09:24
  We're in a resistance.
• 1:09:25
  We're in a resistance.
• 1:09:26
  We're in a resistance.
• 1:09:27
  We're in a resistance.
• 1:09:28
  We're in a resistance.
• 1:09:29
  We're in a resistance.
• 1:09:30
  We're in a resistance.
• 1:09:31
  We're in a resistance.
• 1:09:32
  We're in a resistance.
• 1:09:33
  We're in a resistance.
• 1:09:34
  We're in a resistance.
• 1:09:35
  We're in a resistance.
• 1:09:36
  We're in a resistance.
• 1:09:37
  We're in a resistance.
• 1:09:38
  We're in a resistance.
• 1:09:39
  We're in a resistance.
• 1:09:40
  We're in a resistance.
• 1:09:41
  We're in a resistance.
• 1:09:42
  We're in a resistance.
• 1:09:43
  We're in a resistance.
• 1:09:44
  We're in a resistance.
• 1:09:45
  We're in a resistance.
• 1:09:46
  We're in a resistance.
• 1:09:47
  We're in a resistance.
• 1:09:48
  We're in a resistance.
• 1:09:52
  We're in a resistance.
• 1:09:53
  Also, we're in a resistance.
• 1:09:55
  And, you know,
• 1:09:56
  You can go to a pretty incredible level.
• 1:09:57
  Not just not even big fit.
• 1:09:58
  Like, fitness is such a crazy idea.
• 1:10:01
  It's called and...
• 1:10:03
  The idea of fitness is,
• 1:10:05
  has become a little bit salad, I reckon.
• 1:10:07
  You know?
• 1:10:08
  Are you fit?
• 1:10:09
  Are you into fitness?
• 1:10:12
  It's like all of these things can allow you to connect to a greater
• 1:10:18
  meditate or you want, you can try and have a deep connection with yourself from those
• 1:10:25
  around you.
• 1:10:26
  If you're having coffee every day and you're having booze three times a week, you can't
• 1:10:30
  do that.
• 1:10:31
  You cannot get to that deep level of connection, you know, you can get somewhere, you can
• 1:10:35
  get somewhere that you're not right now.
• 1:10:38
  Yeah, but what are you doing?
• 1:10:40
  You're sort of just offsetting the place that you're putting your body in through all the
• 1:10:45
  stuff.
• 1:10:46
  I think you're doing a couple of things.
• 1:10:48
  I think you're firstly over estimating how negative people will find this articulation
• 1:10:55
  of life.
• 1:10:56
  I don't think that most people will think that it would be boring to live a life without
• 1:11:00
  social media and trashy reality television and junk food.
• 1:11:06
  I think they might think it would be boring to have to never eat any animal product or
• 1:11:11
  anything sweet ever again.
• 1:11:14
  But then I think you're doing a second thing, which is almost what we accuse the people
• 1:11:19
  who are who outlaw psychedelics of doing, which is flattening all of these different categories
• 1:11:24
  into a single mega category, just as meth is not a magic mushroom.
• 1:11:29
  So to, you know, a creme brulee is not the Kardashians and this very kind of ascetic
• 1:11:36
  life of monk like deprivation that you're articulating, I don't think is necessary.
• 1:11:42
  Like there may be a mountain there to climb and if you want to go climb it, I'll be cheering
• 1:11:48
  you on to see what's at the top of it.
• 1:11:50
  But there's also just a plato, a third of the way up the mountain that's really worth
• 1:11:55
  getting to that has a nice vista that is just don't eat quite so much sugar, don't consume
• 1:12:00
  quite so much caffeine and alcohol and avoid things that drag you in, drag your attention
• 1:12:07
  in places that are unproductive like social media and reality TV and that's a start for
• 1:12:14
  me.
• 1:12:15
  Of course that's a start, you know, I guess what I'm saying is the idea that that's where
• 1:12:21
  we were happy to go, you know, I'm just, I'm not saying I go there, I'm not saying that
• 1:12:25
  I've done it.
• 1:12:26
  But you know, there are periods where I've tried and I reckon you want to hear it in your
• 1:12:30
  voice.
• 1:12:31
  I want to go there.
• 1:12:32
  You want to put the backpack on and you want to climb that mountain, James Matheson?
• 1:12:36
  It's got so weird this chat, I don't know if that's where I want to take it, but my point
• 1:12:44
  is this, right?
• 1:12:47
  You don't have to do it for it, what if you did it for what if you went for it for one
• 1:12:50
  year?
• 1:12:51
  Well, why are you saying you?
• 1:12:52
  Why don't you do it?
• 1:12:53
  You're the one, you're the one suggesting it.
• 1:12:54
  Why ask me me to do it?
• 1:12:56
  I'll be your Sherpa, but I'll stay at the bottom in the Nepali's heart and I'll watch
• 1:13:00
  you through with a pair of binoculars as you do it.
• 1:13:02
  You can do it.
• 1:13:03
  You can do it.
• 1:13:05
  You can do it.
• 1:13:06
  Hilary, like, not lock her up Hilary, Edmund Hilary, Edmund Hilary really said to Tens
• 1:13:14
  and Norway.
• 1:13:15
  Let's, we'll step up there at the same time.
• 1:13:17
  Oh, Jurekin, he took the step and then when he came back down he was like, oh, fuck, I
• 1:13:22
  sort of forgot about Tens and a little bit there.
• 1:13:25
  Is that the, is that the myth is I haven't heard that story.
• 1:13:30
  The myth that is the story that he got them both to stand at the same time.
• 1:13:33
  That's right.
• 1:13:34
  Yeah.
• 1:13:35
  But is there even a top that's that, that's that small?
• 1:13:38
  I mean, a mountain's pretty big.
• 1:13:39
  Is there one spot that you put your foot?
• 1:13:42
  Biggest mountain in the world.
• 1:13:43
  There must be a lot, there must be.
• 1:13:44
  It's a bit of a goat can.
• 1:13:45
  Is that right?
• 1:13:46
  It doesn't sound right.
• 1:13:47
  It must be.
• 1:13:48
  If you've got something, if you've got something that's thousands of meters high, I mean,
• 1:13:58
  there'd be a large, a large area.
• 1:14:01
  Maybe I'm just thinking of Mt. Cosiosco and a large plateau area, but I don't imagine
• 1:14:05
  that there'd be one.
• 1:14:06
  I don't think there's like a pointy, like children's drawing of a mountain with a pointy
• 1:14:10
  top that you put your foot on.
• 1:14:12
  Like an inverted Cornetto cone.
• 1:14:14
  That's right.
• 1:14:15
  He's, I'm imagining an ice cream cone turned upside down.
• 1:14:20
  Anyway, well, this has been a lovely conversation that went to strange places, which I like them
• 1:14:26
  to go to on a show called Uncomfortable Conversations.
• 1:14:29
  Is there any final words that you want to leave the listener with, James?
• 1:14:32
  I'm so excited that research and science is bringing psychedelic research into the
• 1:14:39
  modern age with responsibility and respect and also allows us to put our faith in the
• 1:14:47
  guys in the white coats and put our p-mongering aside.
• 1:14:50
  I just think we have to remember that, yeah, that part of ourselves that allows you and
• 1:14:59
  me to explore something greater inside my mind and some unconsciousness belongs to me and
• 1:15:04
  it doesn't belong to a federal government, it doesn't belong to the police, it doesn't
• 1:15:08
  belong to anyone else.
• 1:15:10
  Yeah, I think the government can stand down when it comes to affairs like this and hopefully
• 1:15:15
  it can usher in a new revolution of connection to something greater than ourselves, because
• 1:15:22
  the planet's not doing so good, Josh, I don't know if you've looked around.
• 1:15:26
  That's a subject for a whole other podcast.
• 1:15:29
  It's possible that our greatest contribution to saving the planet is our own awakening, so
• 1:15:38
  let's give it a go.
• 1:15:40
  Okay, I'm not going to eat any meat for dinner tonight.
• 1:15:42
  How's that as a concession?
• 1:15:45
  I'm going to eat one night.
• 1:15:46
  I'm going to eat coffee's your own.
• 1:15:48
  Oh, I made up before a five a day.
• 1:15:49
  Got a problem?
• 1:15:51
  Yeah.
• 1:15:52
  We're going to start there.
• 1:15:53
  I need to eat, drop.
• 1:15:54
  What's wrong with coffee?
• 1:15:57
  Coffee's the one vice that's fine.
• 1:15:59
  It keeps me peppy, it's not booze, it doesn't make me violent, it doesn't make me mopey,
• 1:16:04
  it's not cocaine, it's not, you know, it's coffee, it's all right.
• 1:16:09
  What's the longest you've gone without it, Paul?
• 1:16:11
  I can go without it.
• 1:16:12
  I don't have any withdrawal symptoms.
• 1:16:14
  I just forget and then I realize a week later that I haven't had a coffee.
• 1:16:18
  Yeah, right.
• 1:16:19
  It doesn't seem to affect me very much.
• 1:16:20
  I can have like a triple shot at 8 p.m. and it doesn't affect my sleep, it just gives
• 1:16:26
  me a slight pep in my step.
• 1:16:28
  Yeah, right.
• 1:16:29
  I'm a little concerned that I've come across as some sort of militant, holy, vandal, anti-social
• 1:16:39
  headmaster.
• 1:16:40
  No.
• 1:16:41
  I mean, for a start, you're advocating drug use.
• 1:16:43
  So that would be an irresponsible headmaster right off the bat.
• 1:16:47
  Where is that school?
• 1:16:49
  Yeah, that's exactly the school where they don't allow chocolate bars, but they do encourage
• 1:16:54
  ayahuasca.
• 1:16:55
  It's time to get up.
• 1:16:57
  Time to get up, baby.
• 1:16:59
  I'm climbing that mountain.
• 1:17:01
  Thank you, James.
• 1:17:02
  Great to talk to you.
• 1:17:03
  Thanks for doing this.