Divergent States
The Divergent States Podcast, hosted by "3L1T3", founder of the Psychonaut subreddit with over 500k members, and co-hosted by Bryan, a USMC veteran passionate about psychedelics for therapeutic healing, explores the intersection of psychedelics, science, spirituality, and culture. Featuring guests like Hamilton Morris, Dr. Rick Strassman, and Dr. Rick Doblin, we blend cutting-edge research with personal stories to showcase how psychedelics transform mental health, creativity, and culture. Join us as we navigate the frontier of consciousness.
Divergent States
Hamilton Morris - r/Psychonaut and the DEA
Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays everyone! This was originally planned as a March release, but with the DEA hearings and Reddit and specifically r/Psychonaut itself being a subject of DEA Hearings, we all felt it would work better being released earlier. That said, here's the second episode!
In this conversation, we discuss the evolution of the r/Psychonaut subreddit, its influence on recent DEA hearings regarding psychedelics, and the balance between transparency and secrecy in drug discussions. We explore the challenges of moderating online communities, the importance of evidence-based discussions, and the role of advocacy in drug policy reform.
The conversation also touches on the intersection of spirituality and science in the context of psychedelics, emphasizing the need for responsible dialogue and community involvement.
In this conversation, Hamilton and 3L1T3 delve into the complexities of drug use, particularly focusing on psychedelics and the societal perceptions surrounding them. They discuss the dangers of pharmacological elitism, the fentanyl crisis, and the need for comprehensive drug policy reform. The conversation also touches on the economics of psychedelic therapy, the importance of understanding the cumulative impact of drug use, and the value of challenging experiences in psychedelic journeys. They emphasize the necessity of de-stigmatizing these substances and fostering a more informed dialogue about their potential benefits and risks.
Music by Flintwick
Intro music by Dylalien
Hey guys, welcome back to Divergent States, the unofficial Psychonaut podcast. I'm back again with Bryan How you doing, man?
Hey, what's up?
Doing good. How are you?
I'm doing pretty good.
I heard you had a good trip in Vegas.
I did. Yeah. We went out to the MJ BizCon and it was great. It was a great time. It was wild.
It sounds like it. I hope you brought back some samples for us.
yeah.
So, we originally, tonight we're going to be having Hamilton Morris and, we originally, we were going to put this out in like March. We were going to do like a biographical information kind of show. And he, you know, we talked about it and a lot of these, with these DEA hearings. So real recently they brought up Psychonaut, you know, specifically. So, you know, we went back and forth and kind of talked about it. And so we decided that we'd make this kind of our Christmas episode for everybody.
Yeah, I think it'll be good. We're going to take a listen to it. The music we have tonight is Flintwick. You guys check him out on the SoundCloud. He's pretty good. Thanks to DylAlien again for your music last time. Thanks for Flintwick tonight. You're rocking it. And if you guys have any more music, be sure to hit us up on the subreddit or any of the socials. Give it to us and we'll see. put it, we'll be able to listen, maybe throw it on for us.
I think we're going to sit back and take a listen to this interview and talk about it a little bit after we come back.
Let's do it. All right. Sounds good.
There are some things that I would like to say specifically to r/Psychonaut type people, maybe redditors more generally. But I think that this hearing really brought up a lot of very important things that would be good to get the stuff out in a timely manner. Because I saw that, you know, I was doing these dispatches every night after the hearing, I would take notes because you can't have any kind of recording device in the courtroom. So I would just write everything that I heard down and then would go back to my hotel room and read all of my handwritten notes. And I did this every day of the hearing. The final one is actually, I hope, to come out tonight. I delayed the last one, which covers it. It's sort of a recap of everything else. But a lot of this hinged on the government using Erowid experience reports and Reddit posts as sources of information on little known psychoactive substances. And I saw people discussing this on Reddit and I think that the discussion is a very important one to have. So the knee-jerk reaction when you see that the government is using these sorts of reports is to self-censor. And this has been the... wisdom that has been passed down from generations of people who operate in marginalized groups that are illegal or frowned upon by the government or the dominant society in some ways to operate in secrecy. And there's it makes a lot of sense if the argument is just hide. There's some logic there. I get it. Hiding is a very, very good short term strategy. It's a terrible long-term strategy. And so when people say, don't talk about any of stuff publicly, know, the government's looking, you've got to keep it all secret. I understand exactly why they're doing that. And I don't think it's an unreasonable, I don't think it's an unreasonable attitude, but it won't promote long term change for future generations, which is what you want. You want to work toward a world where people don't have to hide and don't have to live in fear and that can only come through openness and transparency.
So, I agree. And that's kind of the goal of Psychonaut in and of itself is to bring that kind of transparency and openness to people that people can talk about this and say, you know, I had this experience and I agree. Yeah.
And so, but this then creates this complicated thing. So everyone should be open. They should be transparent. You should be fighting for a world where people can be honest about who they are and what their experiences are, and they don't need to self-censor. But what do you do when that honesty is punished and it's used against you and it's to take away your freedom? How do you balance these two opposing forces? One, which is you try a drug, you have a bad experience with it. You want to tell other people about that so that they can avoid the thing that happened, maybe you combine two drugs and the effect was toxic. it had some, maybe you have a unusual health problem of some kind that was exacerbated and you want other people to know. Maybe it had a beneficial effect that you want people to know about, whatever. But to then see that being used against people is very frightening. I mean, this was also happening during the attempts of the DEA to prohibit DIPT. There was an Erowid report where somebody had described some very, very unusual neurological disorder where you have difficulty distinguishing background auditory stimuli from relevant auditory stimuli. And this hadn't been diagnosed by a neurologist or anything like this. It was just kind of them using like, maybe it exacerbated this, right? There was no verification, let alone verification that they had consumed DIPT or that it's a real person or that, know, it's all, but then suddenly you see this and it's being used as evidence that DIPT is very dangerous and can cause some kind of neurological problem. So, I guess the question is, what do we do here? What do you do where you have a responsibility to be transparent, to tell other people honestly about the benefits, the risks, the harms, but also a awareness that that will be used against you. And I saw this being debated. I don't know if it was on r/ Psychonaut or a different subreddit, but you there's a guy named Borax who's a kind of like a famous redditor who came up with like an interesting combination of drugs that would mimic the effect of MDMA without hypothetically producing some of the potential toxic effects.
And, you know, and he was making a totally valid argument, which is like, well, what are we supposed to do? Just not say anything because the government is watching what we're doing. And, you he's right. It's that's not the solution either. So the the closest thing that I can think of is to be honest, to be transparent, but just to be thoughtful and to not say unbelievably stupid things, because that was kind of what was at play in this r/Psychonaut thread and again like I actually spoke on the phone with the guy whose reddit posts were the subject of this hearing You know, it's insane to blame that guy for anything It's not his fault people should have the the right to say stupid things on the internet without it Interfering with the scientific research of thousands of people throughout the world, right?
I'm just gonna say that was kind of my biggest takeaway from a lot of it is how they didn't even... They didn't differentiate between shitposting and just, you know, just somebody legitimately bringing up a problem or had a bad time. There's no, like you said, there's whole conversations on trolls and shitposting and, you know, how do you know what's a troll and who's not? And it's kind of that brings me back to what you're saying. You can be open, but, you know, the internet is such a right place for these trolls that just... speak and say whatever they want. And, you know, how are they going to use that for evidence? When you know, most of us know, just don't take that seriously.
And it's hard. mean, it's hard for someone who is well intentioned, right? So they're obviously approaching this with the intention of finding the most salacious, most negative evidence of toxicity that they can use to make a case that this or that drug is addictive or dangerous or whatever and and You really have to be careful. I mean just on my own subreddit I You know, it's a relatively small subreddit that I would think would select for people with it Maybe this is just completely self-interested, but I would think that they would select for people with a slightly more sophisticated interest in these domains. I am often really surprised by how wrong things are. Even in, like for example, there's threads about the hearing. And in one of the posts, what somebody wrote was, I would say, bordered on the diametric opposite of what I would want somebody to say in response to this, where someone is saying, like, I'm so shocked. Someone posted a thread saying, I'm so shocked by all this. Is there anything that we can do?
Is there anything that the community can do in the future to prevent this? A very good question. And somebody responds saying, no, there's nothing that you can do. There's nothing that can be done. And by the way, DOI is a really good drug. Is there anywhere where can we buy some or something like that? So this would be like a perfect glowing example of what not to do in one comment. You have somebody who's discouraging people from being involved, telling them that there is no hope for positive change, while posting a weird thing publicly that will lean into the government's most, into their desires to make a case that this is something that people want to buy. And this is sort of what had happened with the r/Psychonaut thread as well, right? You had someone who had made a reasonable remark where they'd said, "why is the DEA even trying to schedule this? Isn't this this drug that like three people internationally use every year?" and then the the comment that became the subject of this hearing was someone correcting that person's reasonable response saying, "no not at all I actually went to a gathering of 300 people who would use DOI". Well, after I talked to them on the phone the number gets smaller the certainty about whether or not it is DOI gets reduced and by the end of it, you realize, well, the first thing that the person had said that this shouldn't be controlled was the comment that should have been recognized. This other thing was just not a constructive remark. Again, nothing against that guy. I'm not trying to call him out. is truly and genuinely not his fault that any of this happened. Like, truly. You should be able to say whatever dumb stuff you want. But this is the reality of the world that we live in, where the sorts of things that you say can have an effect. So you should just be as honest as possible while maintaining the recognition that the things that you say have an effect and you should be orienting your speech and your ideas toward the promotion of a world that you want to live in with more freedom and safety and scientists being allowed to research these things. back to the sorry, there's a bit of rant, but I just want to get back to back to the original thing where someone saying, what can people do?
You know, this was ultimately a very, you know, I'm a sort of pessimistic, cynical person, but this was ultimately a very inspiring, optimism inducing event because you had people coming together, working together to fight this. You had, you know, these, these two lawyers, Robert Rush and Brett Phelps working, you know, they're, they're like the students for sensible drug policy, SSDP was paying for an Airbnb and some of the transportation, which is awesome for them to do that. It's very good. But the reality is no one is getting paid. They're just trying to limit the amount of money that they lose doing this. And so you have an organization like SSDP that is making it possible for this fight to happen. So they're doing something amazing. So if you're wondering how to get involved, SSDP really played a huge role in this. Then you have two lawyers who are volunteering their time and their expertise and their energy to doing this and really making a strong case. So that's another way to be involved if you are a lawyer or if you know lawyers, there is a serious need for people like that who can help these efforts. then perhaps most importantly, you had about a dozen scientists who were willing to use their time and their expertise. And it's very frightening getting in front of the DEA. Like, this is not a pleasant thing. This isn't fun for anyone involved. What you're doing when you sit on that stand is you know that the government has gone through all of your stuff, they've gone through every tweet you've ever released, they've gone through your social media looking for anything they can find to humiliate you or to prove that you're a hypocrite or that you're unqualified. And no one wants that. No one wants to sit in front of a DEA lawyer who's had months to prepare to publicly humiliate them. all of these scientists who participated in this, Elena Jaster, Mario de la Fuente, Lindsey Cameron, Elijah Ullman, there's a lot, like a dozen. And you can hear about their individual contributions and testimony on my podcast. The first three episodes are free at patreon.com / Hamilton Morris. Like, you know, they really did something that was very good.
And so that's the thing. It's like, don't say there's nothing you can do. There is something you can do. This is evidence that there is something you can do. You can work with drug policy reform organizations. You can work with lawyers. Scientists can get involved. And they made such a good case that I genuinely think the ruling will be in favor of not prohibiting DOI. I mean, the case was unbelievably strong. You couldn't ask for a stronger case.
Ya know, what struck me a lot, too, is you're talking how the they were talking as if it was already controlled, I think you were saying, or it was uncontrolled or something. it's, no, this has been, it's uncontrolled right now. It's been uncontrolled. And you guys, that's what the whole point of this hearing is, is to try and control it. And so, yeah, it's really interesting the point you bring up about being honest and open and... I get that from Reddit too a lot of times. I think maybe people seem to think it can be too strict when you're moderating subreddit or something. we have to put those certain rules, like the strict no sourcing rule. Don't even bring up brands because that can be considered. So as much as we try to keep stuff like that out of the community and keep people from you know, abusing stuff like that. It still happens. It still comes up. as you can see, they are listening and watching. I mean, it's something you need to, I mean, everybody just needs to be more aware of that as they're actively posting this stuff and making these comments, you know, there's a good chance they could be torn apart later. You just have to, you know, don't, what is it? Don't exaggerate. Don't get all crazy with it, I guess.
It just, again, like the it's a nuanced point, right? I'm not I don't really have anything to present in terms of this is what you've got to do. Don't say this. Don't say that. Just to be thoughtful and to not say things that will play into the government's very well funded efforts to prohibit all psychoactive drugs. And it's it's tricky. I mean, the other thing is that, you know, for years, I worked with this chemist, Yitka Nykodimova, and we've been trying to create a scientific journal that would allow user submission of drug reports, right? It's sort of like a peer review to Arrowhead, essentially, that would have analytical confirmation of the drugs that had been tested. And the idea here would be to have something that was an intermediate between a clinical trial and an Arrowhead report or a Reddit post, something that was reviewed, something that had a voucher specimen associated with it. And this, of course, used to be something that the normal scientific journals would publish. Journals like Psychopharmacology published Shulgin's self-experiments into the 1980s. And then that became unthinkable and taboo. And it's barely, you still do encounter it in very indirect ways that a normal person might not even notice. It does still slide into this peer-reviewed scientific literature occasionally, but there's really no place for it. And so we were working together with a number of chemists and pharmacologists to create this new journal that would provide a space for somebody to publish something like that.
Um, and this hearing again, really puts me in a difficult position with that effort because I am acutely aware that this sort of thing would be used by law enforcement and it very well could be used to justify the prohibition of substances. But again, this comes back to, what do do? Do you say nothing at all? Do you hide? Do you live in silence? Do you keep everything secret? I mean, this was I think the kind of the grand revelation that Shulgin had in the publication of P. Cole and T. Cole was, you know, he was, I think, very frightened by the fact that the FDA had destroyed the research of Wilhelm Reich. And in the case of Reich, his work was by I would say almost any definition pseudoscience and probably a valid argument could be made that it was even dangerous. And so the FDA probably felt justified in the destruction of Reich's research. But I think what Shulgin saw in that was, well, who's to say they're not going to make that same decision with psychedelics? Someone is in charge. They say, this stuff is really dangerous. It's in the name of public health. We've just got to We've got to make sure to get rid of all this stuff. that was, according to him, that was the reason that he originally published a lot of this was the recognition that if you did hide it, if you didn't make it as available as possible and weren't as transparent as possible with all of this, that it was too easy to destroy everything.
And I see that too. And I think that's part of the value of Psychonaut in and of itself. I get requests, I mean, constantly and posts constantly from university researchers from all over the world, just looking for people for self reporting. so, you know, there's the kind of medium, I see what you're saying now, because you put yourself out there with that and you say, hey, this is, I'm putting this together and now you're just, it's another avenue for them to attack. And we all have to be careful with that, of course, but yeah, it's a fine line. You kind of have to balance that and decide what's more important on that.
So yeah, it's an interesting whole, I mean, it's kind of crazy when you think about it that I just created something just so I could talk to my friends about reincarnation on acid. It's being brought up in DEA hearings. so to me, it's kind of overwhelming a little bit at times. You know, what can you do except continue to advocate and, you know, make it be known and that these, you know, these substances are useful tools if they're used correctly. And that's really, I think, part of what it comes down to a lot is just that continual harm reduction, test your substances, employ good setting and if possible a guide. And I've been really stressing, like, have a helpline, somebody to call if you need to. to me, I feel like that's what I can do is advocate for that. Excuse me. Just be that advocate for set setting guide. Test your stuff. Know what you're taking. Again, like you were talking about with the DOI, the Redditor that you talked to, he had no idea if it really was DOI, wasn't tested, it was just, you know, and then the people got less and, you know, lot of the stories become exaggerated. So yeah, a lot of it's just important is just to, you know, remember that there's, there's trolls out there, but the best we can do is continue to be that advocate. You know, anyway, yeah.
And that's, course, the standard is that there's no analytical verification of substance reports. I mean, this was kind of one of the really shocking things is to think that when if you were asked to provide analytically confirmed evidence that a human being has ever tried DOI. You don't really have any, you have the Shulgin reports and I think it's pretty damn likely that those are are real but is there a voucher specimen is there Analysis of the material that he used I'm not sure.
I think that's a big problem just within the community in itself, especially for people who are very evidence-based. We want information. We want the science, the psychopharmacology behind things. And a lot of times, the community gets caught up in machine elves and stuff that don't really matter. so it's fun to think about. They're fun to talk about. But they really don't matter in the grand scheme of things. I guess I'm sorry for the rant. guess what I'm trying to say is I've tried to steer the subreddit in kind of a more... into a mental, I guess, harm reduction, more mental health centered focus space. just, again, it just gets so large at times you can't really, hey, you guys have to do this this way from now on or it's not gonna work because then they all rebel and it becomes, it's kind of a balancing act a little bit. So yeah, it's been, it's just a, what can we do? But yeah, advocate and continue to get out there.
And yeah, I think part of that too could be when you see somebody shitposting or trolling or something, call them out on it and be like, come on, really? Or ask for the evidence and be like, oh, so are you sure you guys, this is what you're doing or, know, and that's important for especially anybody. Like I said, evidence based people in this space. It's extremely important, but people don't take to that well often.
You know, people don't like, you know, in, for example, in a lot of scientific communities, it's understood that questioning someone or probing the validity of a claim is a sign of respect. And that you're doing that because you are operating with the hope of someone saying something being true, and you want to understand the truth of the claim yourself. And so you need to probe it and ask certain questions in order to make that assessment.
And but other people don't think that way. They think somebody questioning them is a sign of disrespect. So somebody might say, I tried this R-ketamine and it was so spiritual. It was the most spiritual, ketamine I've ever tried. And you say, well, how do you know it was R-ketamine? They say, you know, believe me, I've tried a lot of ketamine and like this was definitely R-ketamine. Well,
trust me, bro.
Trust me, bro, and, and that's, know, that's fine. But if you're actually hoping to learn about the effect of our ketamine, it would be really nice to say, yeah, I actually sent it off to a lab. You there's a lab, Kaikion Analytics in Spain, very reasonably priced lab, and they offer any kind of analysis you want, you can ask them. if you have this amazing, ultra spiritual our ketamine, and you want to tell the world about it, a nice first step might be to ensure that it is in fact, R-ketamine. And then if it's not, it's still interesting. Like it doesn't invalidate your experience. It just invalidates the chemical that you're attributing that experience to. So whatever it is, could be that it's S-ketamine. It could just be racemic ketamine. And then that's still interesting, right? Because then you're talking about the psychological influence that one's conceptualization of a drug has on the drug experience. Very important thing that's often underestimated by people I find. Like, you know, if somebody says, this is like really therapeutic R-ketamine and it's just normal racemic ketamine, that doesn't mean that it won't alter the nature of the experience because you've been primed with a totally different expectation, right? Like these sorts of placebo effect type influences also apply to active substances.
And they've studied this before, right? They've done experiments with finasteride where they gave it to two groups of people. One was informed about adverse effects and the other wasn't. And the group that was informed about the adverse effects suffered more severe adverse effects. how you conceptualize a drug will have a documented influence on the nature of that drug's experience.
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, you hear that at like festivals to be like, I got this really good acid or something. And, know, you expect it to be then, I mean, you might feel a little better from it. that's, the placebo is definitely something that needs to be controlled, I guess, for maybe. yeah, and even with like the subreddit, I've thought early on, I tried to encourage everyone to use the Shulgin system on the, you know, do your times, give you the plus plus and do all that, it just, yeah, like it, it really becomes just kind of overwhelming at times to try and push all that to a lot of people who are really not as analytically or evidence-based. That was kind of something brings me to something. Like had to start banning people outright for risky behavior for people. I did 10 hits of acid and 10 grams of shrooms and a gram of ketamine with some MDMA and went out and played in traffic, I'm like, no, that's not what we're talking about here. You're just being irresponsible. You're not helping anyone with that. it's kind of the same. just have to advocate where you can. And for people who are more evidence-based, just try to advocate that in your own life and with people around you. And when you don't know, say, I just don't know.
I guess that was my... Yeah, I was talking to Rick Strassman on my... I had an interview with him and that was he was saying that was one of his favorite things to say recently is, just don't know. And I'm like, yeah, that's a good one to having your vocabulary, I guess. yeah, it's kind of like I said, Reddit's kind of the Wild West a little bit in some respects. have people from all over just...
Or you put it in like Dungeons and Dragons, you've got the chaotic evil characters that don't know anything about it and just go run around, you know, just trying to be nuisances. Well, and you have lawful good and everywhere in between. So you just have to, you know, kind of pick out the best you can and find the good fruit.
Right. And of course, people have very, very different relationships with these substances. And there isn't, as far as I'm concerned, a right or wrong way to do any of this stuff as long as you're not harming other people. And so, you know, for some people, this fixation on chemical identity, dosage, purity, the careful analytical tabulation of durations and everything like that, it just has absolutely nothing to do with their relationship with these substances, which may be very spiritual. They may not even conceptualize the drugs as drugs, right? This is the case with the Native American church and a lot of instances where peyote is not a mescaline containing cactus, it's a spirit. And so to talk about like, why don't you switch to synthetic mescaline is almost like an absurd thing to say because... Blasphemy almost. Yeah, because the point is not mescaline. The point is very separate from that in the way that they conceptualize it. So... There really is no even concept of masculine. And so you have people, lots of people that not just in indigenous communities, just lots of people in general from all over the world that have some kind of variants of those sorts of beliefs that are more spiritually oriented. And that's totally fine. That's completely fine. Like there isn't a right or wrong way to do any of this stuff, but there are certain ways that are maybe more sophisticated for spiritual self-development or something like that, and that's totally valid. And then there are other ways that are much more useful for conveying psychopharmacological information that is understandable and constructive for another person to use to build their understanding of how these substances impact the brain and mind and body.
Yeah. I kind of say, it's almost ironic that I run this subreddit about spiritualism and psychedelics when, you know, I'm very humanist and materialist. And to me, the spiritualism is explained through psychopharmacology. It's not something that's, we all experience the same thing is how I kind of see it. We're all experiencing the same chemistry from that. It's just how we're interpreting where it comes from. So yeah, it kind of gets walk in a fine line there again, too. But it's just part of the part of the nature of the beast, I guess you'd say.
Yeah. Yeah. And it's good. It's good to make room for all sorts of different relationships. Like I'm not into these sort of elitist tendencies that that you often see, particularly in the psychedelic world, where people are really eager to say that the drugs that they use are different, or even going so far as to say that they're not drugs at all. And that makes their patterns of drug use somehow fundamentally better than other it's their medicine.
It's their medicine, right.
And that's not to say that there aren't differences between psychedelics and opioids and stimulants. Of course, there are. are major, major differences. But I think what plays an assessment of the value or the worthiness of the experience or the user, this is a bad road to go down. And this was actually another thing that I was really pleased with at the hearing is, know, historically, there's been a tendency to use this type of pharmacological elitism to justify one's own drug preferences in contrast to the thing that you don't like. So, you know, you say, hey, hey, hey, like, I'm not, I'm not into this, these opioids, okay, I'm into cannabis, it's a medicine, it treats glaucoma, it's not associated with lung cancer, could treat cancers, whatever, you can make all these arguments. And that's all fine and good, but you don't need to demonize somebody else's preferences or their patterns of use or whatever, in order to justify your own. And I think that's a dangerous road to go down. I was very happy that that didn't happen during the hearing, because you can sometimes see a bit of that where people are so afraid that they're gonna lose something that they think the best strategic rhetorical tactic is to say, well, these aren't like the bad things. These are totally different as opposed to recognizing that none of this stuff is bad in the sense that it's never the molecule itself that is harming people. It's all this paramolecular, cultural, psychological, economic, legal stuff that... contributes to the potential harms or benefits of a substance.
Yeah, that's really a huge part of a lot of it is, especially now. it's good that that did come up during the hearing because that's something I think that like MAPS has been fighting real hard for is that inclusion and how socioeconomic factors can really cause a lot of the issues that happen because of these substances.
Encouraging to hear, like you said, the judge sounds like it would be he's going to come over, know, he's kind of leaning on the side of leaving it, you know, I guess unregulated. But it, yeah, like it's encouraging to hear that there's actual judges out there more sympathetic to it. It's yeah, you just you can't get caught up in the elitism with some of that either on the other hand, like and then that's kind of what the hearing was showing is there's more people willing to kind of put themselves out there and talk to it.
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And, you know, from the perspective of that judge, it's a tricky situation because I don't doubt for a moment that he would have been sympathetic to this elitist strategy. Like if the point were exclusively to convince him, it probably wouldn't have been a bad strategy. The issue is that it's not the right thing to do. It's kind of playing dirty. So, you know, if you If you make your entire argument about how fentanyl is evil and these are the solution to the evil of fentanyl, okay, all right, that may actually sound really good to a DEA agent, but that's not the point. The point is not that fentanyl is evil and that DOI is good. It's just not really, the hope would be that your style of argumentation promotes a generally enlightened view of this entire issue so that you're not just kicking the ball down the field for another hearing where you have to debate another nonsensical issue with a drug that's been demonized where people aren't recognizing that it's never the drug. It's so easy to fall into this. With opioids right now, I think it's become very, very extreme. And it's so, so extreme that it's, think, like one of, of, of like the great bipartisan consensus forming issues, like almost anyone you ask, whether it's, you know, Bernie Sanders or Trump, they're going to say that like fentanyl is extremely, extremely bad. Like 100 % of people are in agreement on this issue of the badness of fentanyl. But... But how do we get to this place that fentanyl is extremely bad? Is fentanyl really the issue? Fentanyl is not a desirable drug. mean, in terms of like there was someone again at this hearing named Joseph Palomar, who's an epidemiologist. And he was talking about how doing surveys where people rate the desirability of a drug and fentanyl is very, very low. Meaning there are very few people out there that are saying I want to go out tonight and score some fentanyl to do fentanyl. There are some, but most people don't want fentanyl. So then the question is, why is there an issue with this drug that people don't even want? Well, this is caused by prohibition. This is caused by a black market economic system that promotes the most potent substance that is the easiest to manufacture being disseminated to reduce costs and reduce the risk to the people that are smuggling it and selling it, right? This is something that could easily be addressed through regulated access to opioid agonist replacement therapy or counseling. mean, we're spending billions of dollars on law enforcement to address these issues and it's clearly not working. What if that money went toward psychological support for people with substance use disorder? I have a feeling that the outcome would be far-far better and that fewer people would die.
You see that you kind of brought up earlier, you're talking about how they kind of kick it down the road, they kick the can down the road with these hearings and with the elitist kind of posture they take on, but that kind of seems to be what's happened, I mean, all throughout this history of these hearings. That's why it's on this hearing again, is because they just, at some other hearing further back, they just kind of kicked it further down the road.
Yeah. Yeah.
And the hope would be that there is a recognition that this tactic is simply not working. mean, we've tried it. We spent more than a half century now trying it. It's really seriously not working. It's catastrophically not working. And prohibiting DOC and DOI is not going to make the world a safer place. This should be clear to any thinking person. And the hope is that not only will there be a success here, but that this will begin to chip away at the irrational foundation of all of this so that there can be less of this in the future. Because de-scheduling a substance is extremely difficult, essentially unheard of. Arguably it happened with alcohol and it may happen with cannabis, we're all hoping, but instead what you typically get is what's called bifurcated scheduling, where one molecule simultaneously occupies two legal schedules. It makes no sense whatsoever, but this is what we've done with THC. It's simultaneously schedule one and I believe schedule three.
Same thing with GHB, simultaneously schedule one and I believe schedule two. It would have happened with MDMA where it would have simultaneously, it would have remained schedule one. And then I may have gone into schedule two or schedule three. And this is something very much to MAPS' credit and to Amy Emerson's credit, who is the CEO of Lycos. She was very aware of this issue and very concerned about it. was actively fighting against bifurcated scheduling. She knew about this problem and wanted to avoid it, and that's, know, I really like MAPS in general, but I think this is one of many admirable things that they were doing was, you know, most pharmaceutical type companies are not going to engage in that type of drug policy reform activism. And you could make an argument that that's not their place, that they shouldn't be or whatever. I'm not really criticizing the people that don't do that as long as they're not interfering, that's bad, as long as they're not making things worse.
But I think it was really admirable that they were so involved, that people like Amy Emerson were so involved. And Rick obviously cares very much about that as well. Yeah, think it was very encouraging as you were talking about how the judge seems to be sympathetic to this point of view. And that kind of plays into this. Instead of kicking it down the road, it seems that the issues were confronted more head on this way.
And in turn, seems the judge is more sympathetic. So it could actually help. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, for what it's worth, I don't doubt that many of these people at the DEA are well-meaning. I don't doubt it. And those intentions could be oriented constructively. Like, there is no shortage of work to be done. There is a lot of work. If the issue is that people in the United States have problematic relationships with drugs, I agree. There's a lot of real demonstrable problems that exist in the human relationship with drugs. And there's a lot of work that could be done to improve that relationship so that there is less suffering and more freedom and more constructive use. And if they could use their energy toward a genuine education, toward analysis, toward mental health resources and move it away from law enforcement and criminalization and trying to arrest their way out of this problem. I think that many of those people could be happy with themselves and actually feel as if they are addressing a very real problem. it's just they've gone about it a terrible, terrible way.
It's a failed drug war over 50 years and then it just, yeah, it just, what is the insanity of doing the same thing over and over again and it's just not helping. you know, that's, am kind of excited to see, you know, with the legalization efforts of the psilocybin in Colorado and Oregon, they're working on. I'm not happy about like what they're doing with the capitalization of it with the...
I guess, you know, making, I think it's two to $3,000 for a single psilocybin therapy treatment right now in Oregon or something. And which is kind of blows my mind a little bit. you know, those are issues which I guess need to be addressed. As when cannabis first started becoming legalized, there was that, you you had a lot of the higher prices and stuff. And then as it became more of the norm, stuff came down. say that's something that would come in the future.
Yeah.
And just to say, because I think a lot of people, there's this kind of sticker shock when they hear that there's a therapy that's very expensive or that when people were talking about what the cost of MDMA would be as a pharmaceutical product and different numbers were thrown around, very well could be over $10,000 a session. And people say, my God, that's so much more expensive than buying it from the black market.
And it's important to recognize a few different things about that. One is that it would be insurance reimbursable. You can make a broader statement about how this would influence insurance premiums and all this. You know, it's all very complicated. Rick had also said that they would, you know, cover the cost of the therapy for people that couldn't afford it, which is actually something that even very big pharmaceutical companies often do. I take a medication that's paid for by the pharmaceutical company. it's the same way. Yeah, so then it's actually not uncommon for things like that to be done. That was a like Martin Shkreli got a lot of shit for that with a DeraPrim where you said, yeah, it's really expensive. But just you know, like email me and I'll give it to you for free. But the reality is that's not so unusual. That is a tactic that's used by some of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world, believe it or not. So I don't doubt that that Rick had good intentions with all of that. But this is all Yeah, this is like you said, it's like as time goes on and these things are better integrated, you're able to find ways of making these things available that suit different people's needs. Because there will be some types of people, for example, I would imagine most older people who would want to do it in the straightest way possible with a FDA approved insurance reimbursable treatment that's being administered by the most credentialed, most serious people. And there's a lot of other people who not only is that not ideal for them, it might be unpleasant, it might be undesirable. They might want to do it in a group setting where it's administered in a kind of a co-op or a sort of community where you maybe are part of a group where people take turns facilitating sessions and... And, you know, there's some people that are doing it for general betterment of their lives. And there's some people that have very real diagnosed psychological or physical disorders. And those people will have different needs and the needs will probably cost different amounts. And so this is, this is one of the nice things that comes with something being integrated into a society is you are able to offer something in different ways to suit different people's needs.
This is the case with cannabis where at least in New York City, you want to grow your own cannabis, you can. You can sell some to your friends. There's some limit. I can't remember how much, but it doesn't seem like they're really caring all that much about that sort of thing. But if you don't want to do that, you can also get it from a medical doctor, from a state licensed medical provider, or you can get Marinal that's federally legal. And these all have different prices and different, or you can get it from a bodega guy or whatever.
You can get it from all these different places and they have different prices and different levels of risk. And the individual user can decide what makes the most sense for them. And I will hope that something like that happens with the psychedelics where I just get a little worried when people start saying, Oh my God, this, you know, this one way of doing something isn't right for me. And that very well may be the case, but this is ideally a stepping stone into a world where different types of access are available that can suit any person's needs?
Yeah, at first, it's always going to seem it's kind of out of range or out of reach for a lot of people. everything, a lot of times, it starts out like that. And so the only way to to bring that down is through that normalization and the destigmatization around these substances.
That is like doing this podcast, you know? So that's kind of the goal of everything is to bring the destigmatization to people to let them know that, you can be helped a lot of times by these substances. It's just they're not... I think a lot of it comes from the misrepresentation or the idea that... that the psychedelics are just like any other drug. People will compare them to heroin or methamphetamine, and they're not even really the same class. So how they work on the brain, none of that is really the same, and it becomes a job of education too. so that's the, I think that, again, the whole goal, kind of the vision behind the whole podcast and interviewing people and that's, you know, and what you've done, obviously for a number of years, successfully. then I, I see it, I, it's starting to come around. People are becoming more accepting of it and it's, it's a great place. It's just, there's a lot more work to do it. You're right.
Yeah. Yeah. There's, there's a lot more work to do. And it's, I think it's important for people to also have a holistic understanding of the way our culture's attitudes are distributed because one thing that's become very popular in recent years with people who are kind of deep in the psychedelic world is to be very afraid of hype. This is the thing is hype is the thing that we have to be afraid of is hype. People are being too positive about psychedelics. They're saying too many damn positive things about them. They're not talking about HPPD. They're not talking about the risk for an episode of depersonalization or derealization following a psychedelic experience or the psychological difficulty associated with some psychedelic experiences or whatever. And this became like a huge thing is people just saying like, have the hype, all the hype, we've got to stop the hype. I'm not sure who these hypesters were that everyone was warning us about. Is it like Rick Doblin or something? He seems pretty responsible to me. Like the number of statements that he's made that I would classify as dangerous hype is like, don't know, he's made a couple of comments about like net zero trauma or something that I just don't think it's really worth getting bent out of shape about those comments, you know, but it became a thing. I think it was like people want thought it made them look critically sophisticated to be like, I'm, I'm a, I'm against the hype. And, and I, when I would hear this, I think what world are you people in? Where your concern is that people are too positive about psychedelics because in the world that I occupy, there's plenty of people who still think that it's dangerous and bad to use them. Like there was a Daily Mail article just like a couple days ago that was like one in 100 ayahuasca users die. It is, you know, all these weird fake statistics, I think it did say one in 100 ayahuasca users die and there was some other thing like one in five, you know, experiences lasting psychological trauma from the experience, you know, they're just made, there's no citation, they're just making this shit up. And, and that's, that's typical, like the, know, for the people in their insular, you know, Twitter, or whatever world where they're really concerned about hype it's important to remember that for the majority of people, the issue is still the like good old fashioned, dare 90s stuff. Like that's still the dominant narrative where to even suggest like, and this was very much evident in the courtroom, right? Just to even say, you can use a psychedelic, and it is not abuse, and it is not harmful is like mind blowing to these people. Like this is this is like stretching the bounds of their wildest fantasies. They can barely imagine it. They're like holding back laughter because of the intense absurdity of this statement. And when you see that you remember like, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, Rick Doblin maybe had a generous appraisal of a couple of things, but that's not what we need to be worried about. Like, there's there's like a very serious issue with people not understanding these things and not having a balanced appraisal of their risks and benefits. so this is not to say that like, you know, obviously, I hate to even have to do these, these like, explanatory preambles of like, this is not to say that psychedelics are always good. Obviously, they're not always good. But, but I think that this recent concern about hype is its own form of hype. It's an anti hype hype, and I'm against it.
I think a lot of some of the pushback I heard against was I think Michael Pollan with his book and a lot of, it just seemed everything or the microdosing coming up. And I don't think that was necessarily hype. think it was, it was just people talking positively. A lot of these are just overly positively. And, you know, that, but that's something as, as experienced psychonauts and people that do know this stuff. know that not everything is that sunshine and rainbows and it's important to talk about the difficult times, a lot of what this is about and the subreddit and stuff is being able to talk through those difficult times. again, it's something that's one of those nuances that's not really, it may not become evident in one of those big hearings, but it's something that we as experienced people that know this stuff kind of understand.
And also, I mean, another thing is the concept of bad trips came up during the hearing, like, do you acknowledge that there are bad trips? And this became its own kind of thing where, you know, I actually got a lot of shit years ago for Joe Rogan. He was asking me about bad trips. And I was saying that I don't really think it's a constructive conceptualization of these challenging experiences. And people would say, so you're saying no one ever has bad experiences? Obviously not. I was one of my best friends had a psychotic break while I was with him on a psychedelic that changed him forever.
So this is not to say that there aren't difficult experiences that are, I wouldn't blame the psychedelic for that experience necessarily. think he already had a predisposition to psychosis and this served as a serious stressor that precipitated something that likely would have happened regardless. But the reality is he took a very, very high dose of a psychedelic and it caused a psychotic episode that was the beginning of a life of very serious mental health struggles. So this is not to say that there aren't issues associated that these things for certain people can be dangerous. And this is also not to say that there's no such thing as a bad experience for the psychedelic. But I think what the important distinction that does need to be made is that the people talk about bad experiences with psychedelics as if the point of using a psychedelic is to only have good experiences, which is in and of itself a very limiting and limited sense of the potential of these substances. is often the case, and this is, don't think this is a hot take. I think this is understood by most people who've ever seriously used psychedelics, that it is often the case that it is the challenging, painful, frightening, difficult experiences that are the most constructive. And You could even go so far as to say that this is the real reason to take these things, that you get much more out of these experiences that are painful and uncomfortable than you do out of the ones where you enjoy yourself, which is also, of course, completely fine. So that's really just the other distinction. I can't even remember how I got into that.
Yeah, it's fine. Yeah, but I agree with you there.
Anytime I've had what I would consider a bad trip or anything or challenging experience, another way to put it is when I look back on it, those problems or the issues were just magnified issues from within myself. Nothing was external. I didn't have a bad time because of necessarily things around me as much as it was the problems within the, I guess the... what would you call it? guess the cognitive dissonance within my own head from my actions to what I actually believed. And so I think that's what the psychedelics really amplified for me as my actions weren't matching what I believed. so once I eventually got down that road and learned from all that, that was probably the best lesson I took out of it to become, once you're comfortable with yourself and what you believe and those those beliefs in your actions, your actions mirror those beliefs, then things get significantly less, significantly less tension, I find, the higher trips, especially so.
Yeah. Or even, you know, I think approaching these experiences without that understanding of the challenge is probably a bad move. And I've done this myself. I mean, this was, I remember a couple years ago, I was rock climbing in Joshua Tree and took a LSD pro drug and at a low dose and thought, this will be nice. It will enhance the rock climbing and I'll have this kind of really dazzling experience. won't this be a nice break from all of the difficulties in my life where I can really just be doing this amazing adventure. And there was maybe a moment or two of that where I was, you know, on the side of the rock and it was misting and it was dazzling and interesting. But very quickly, I realized there is no escape from my own mind. And there's no way doesn't matter if I'm on the side of a rock and Joshua tree on LSD. I still am going to have the same problems because the problems are in my head. And, and you know, is that a comfortable, is that a comfortable experience? No, it's not. But it was useful. It was a like a, especially because I think there's this idea with psychedelics that they're somehow escapist. And if this this was like the ultimate anti escapist revelation, which was that there is no escape, there's no escape other than the death. So, you know, you've got to deal with these things, there's no way to to try to avoid them. Again, this is not like necessarily a joyous revelation, but it was one that was constructive and was kind of the logical ramification of the situation that I was in. was what I needed to, where I needed to be and what I needed to think. And it was helpful.
Yeah. Kind of circling back, you had talked to, you know, you were saying that there's also that expectation of always having a good time and always, you know, and that, that can be self-defeating too as well, just that you're always going to expect that good time. when something you expect and it doesn't show up, well then it's just going to send you further down. that becomes a self-defeating attitude in and of itself.
So I'm just trying to think. I got a couple of questions from the subreddit. If you got anything else, we'd like to
We can do a couple quick ones in.
OK, yeah. I guess I understood you were not a fan of the... the silly questions, guess, superfluous, guess. But one I thought was interesting was you probably get asked all the time what your favorite is or what would be if you could choose anything. And I actually thought the opposite of that. If there was one that it was for people are like, mind expansion, this is what you should do. What would be the one that you would kind of just, no, don't try that?
I mean, I don't really, obviously, I would discourage people from trying things that are just like, demonstrated neurotoxins, like, you know, parachloroamphetamine or MPTP or something like that. You know, there things like alcohol that at least in my own life, I don't really think they've done anything particularly constructive and could best be avoided. You know, I don't drink, not because I had a problem with it. I just don't like the effect of it. I think it's not good. It's too toxic feeling. right. I have the same and, and you know, I think it's, good to try to have a more holistic sense of the influence of drugs on your life. Cause I think people have this, like this really short term sense of like, aren't you afraid that you took MDMA and you caused some kind of damage to your brain after a single experience. But in reality, if drugs are having a negative effect, and sometimes they do, it's usually a long term thing. People become very hung up on like, what if I do this or that once and the real thing is like, or how safe cannabis is once this would probably be the best example like obviously cannabis is extremely, extremely safe once, but people don't talk as much about what is the cumulative impact of being stoned all the time for like 10 years. And those are, I think, questions that people should think about a little bit more as opposed to like the influence of one substance. But what is the cumulative impact of a certain substance over long periods of time? This is and you don't really hear people talking about that quite as much, but I think that's ultimately in your life going to be the biggest, for most people that's the biggest actual question, is not what about using cannabis once at a party or what about drinking once, but like what will be the cumulative impact of consuming nicotine over 10 years? What will be the cumulative impact of consuming Ritalin over 10 years? So that would be my, as opposed to like pointing to a single substance and saying that it's bad.
Yeah, yeah, like that. makes sense, though, and it kind of goes into some other questions people had asked about biohacking and stuff. And so I think the other one came from a different subreddit. Somebody wanted to know if you had ever successfully done a vaporuaska using an MAOI inhibitor and vaping DMT. I see if that did anything.
Yes, I have. Many, many years ago, probably when I was 20 or something like that,
quite a while ago, I took 300 milligrams of Moclobemide one hour before smoking synthetic DMT free base. it has a, it definitely potentiates the DMT and makes the experience last about an hour. It's maybe a little bit shorter than oral DMT when taken with the equivalent amount of Moclobemide. And it is very, very intense. And it's, you know, I think you can probably, you know, when people talk about smoking DMT, they always talk about the dazzling experience. One thing you don't hear people talk about as much is that it's actually very hard to smoke DMT for most people, like to get an adequate dose. So you just hear the Terrence McKenna, Joe Rogan thing, and you don't hear someone saying, yeah, I tried, but I couldn't really like hold it down because it was so harsh. That's like the kind of the more typical relationship that people have is actually like some physical difficulty inhaling enough to get this peak experience. So this will make it easier to do that. It will also make it last an hour. I don't know that there is any major benefit. My preference is oral DMT with Moclobemide. That's kind of, I think the best way to use DMT at all.
And then if you're going to smoke it, feel like it's better probably to do it without the MAOI because then you like the short experiences versatile and is useful for certain applications. So. Yeah, was. was not good.
Yeah, that's I think that was kind of the big question. I was going to say my experience at DMT smoking it. It's it's hard to actually get to where you blast off like with how people describe it. So just, especially just straight smoking. think the, the, best I ever, just out of smoking, was the best experience I had was just sprinkling it on cannabis and little bits throughout. And I know that's probably not the most efficient way to do it. maybe even tried just vaporizers, you know, the store brought vaporizers and it's okay, but yeah, the mothball smell is just the plastic smell of it is yeah, hard to stomach, but if you can get past that and, and, and, know, get in, it's, it's an interesting experience for sure. But yeah. yeah, I, I, I appreciate you being here and having any, answering any questions and talking to me about the subreddit and everything. And if you'd, I'd love to have you back anytime. If you'd love to, maybe we could do that episode. was talking about it just a little bit about you and we can release this on the side.
Yeah. Thank you for setting up r/Psychonaut. It's awesome that you're still with it and staying involved and trying to educate people. Good work.
Thanks. Yeah, it's it's it's a labor of love. It's you know, 16 years I've just kind of it's it's been very I've tried to keep it diplomatic as well. And part of the I guess for me, the lessons of psychedelics has been to pull my ego out of things and that's how I've kind of tried to approach the subreddit is to pull my ego out of it. It's not about me. It's about the users and their experience. And that's kind of the same approach I'm trying to take to this podcast a little bit. I'm going to pull myself out of it. It's not about me. It's about bringing these conversations to these people because that's what I'm good at. That's what I've done.
So awesome. No, I'm excited for it. It sounds like you're doing good work. I look forward to listening to some of the other episodes.
It'd be awesome to my co-host Bryan. He's a veteran. I am taking him as he couldn't be here today. Like I said, he the conference, but he's kind of my straight man co-host. He's done it a few times. He knows a little bit about psychedelics, but that's kind of what I'm looking for him with is just those questions that I obviously don't think of because I'm enmeshed in the world or familiar with the world.
So yeah, having him I think would be a great, know, we could sit down and have a little interview with him too. course.
Yeah, let's do it. Yeah.
Awesome. It sounds great. Yeah. I'm all right. Well, I sure appreciate it, man. It was good to meet you. Thank you again. I'll let you know about all this and I'm excited.
No, it's awesome. No, it's good you're doing this. And and yeah, let me know when it goes out. We'll stay in touch. We'll see you at the.
I'm gonna break it off, I'm gonna break it off, yeah Break it off, yeah
you
We have various methods where not always with hallucinogenic substances, but there are also concoctions. One access of a heightened experience and after that back on the task, you will be broken.
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All right, welcome back, everybody. Back with Bryan again. What'd you think, Bryan?
Oh, that was great. Hamilton was very knowledgeable. It was a lot of fun to listen to. there were so many, like a lot of things I didn't even expect to hear in that conversation, like about Reddit.
Right. That was, I mean, that was a huge part. I was, just kind of blew me away with the whole just bring in Reddit, you know, specifically the subreddit into these hearings and how they were talking about that. It just, you know, it's crazy. Like how much just, and it goes to show how much something, you know, you might, you know, an offhand comment or something, kind of how I made the sub Reddit just on a whim can end up blowing up to something you never even thought possible. So, yeah, it just goes to show, I guess. Well, with that in mind, like it makes me feel like with this podcast, it's...
We're kind of like outlaws a little bit, a little bit kind of have to, you know, it's underground, but I mean, it's, that's kind of part of the whole, the whole idea too, is bringing it down to the open a little more. like, so people don't feel so, ashamed or feel like they're hunted down because they're trying some tree new treatment that, know, it's been stuffed underground for, you know, over the past 50 years, you know, it's gonna take a little bit to dig it up and make it okay again. Yeah. Yeah.
I mean, it's the same way with like cannabis, um, when it first became legal, uh, we didn't really, you know, not a lot of people at first, was like, oh, these dope heads and it's going to do this and this. Well, and to be fair, that stigma is still kind of there, you know, working in the cannabis industry. can tell you right now that like you interact with, say somebody at like a major corporation and fortune 500 company or something, and you tell them, you know, Oh yeah, we follow very similar retail practices. We try to develop our culture, stuff like that. Like.
People just don't expect a cannabis company to actually care about these sort of things. Like they expect us all to just be like a bunch of stoners essentially and like that we don't really have meetings. We just get together and smoke them, you know, on the bong or whatever it is. Right. It reminds me of the, the, the Simpsons episode where the, where Otto goes to a legal clinic and they're like, we've got this. He's like, no, where's the shady dude on the couch.
So they make the dispensary behind Moe's where it's just, it's Homer dressed up in his Rastafari hats and on the couch playing video games. yeah. You got to sit down over here, Yeah. Yeah. Just the stigma is there, but. Well, it's funny that you say that because, Hamilton was talking about that in the interview. You can have, you can have like whatever this stuff is, or you can get it from a licensed professional, people that have had their product tested and are here to make sure that you have a good experience. Right. And I think that was, I mean, that was a real big part of it too. That just, you you, like he was talking about when he wanted to create the, uh, the online or the, kind of like Arrowhead or Psychonaut, but with analytical testing so that you had the actual, I mean, that's a great idea. It's, uh, as something that'd be great to see come in the future. Um, yeah. Awesome. Yeah. Um, yeah. Um, you'll, you're here for sure for our next interview is going to be.
You'll be here with, Joshua white. Yeah. Yeah. That's going to be great. he runs the fireside project. yeah. It helps people out with their, having a hard time. can call six to fireside and somebody will be there. Training counselors be there to help you out. That's awesome. Yeah. We're getting, getting just a heck of a lineup going and we're real excited to bring it to you.
Thank you again, Flintwick for the music, Brad Burge, Integration Communications. Thank you again, Bryan. Thank you, H. You've done great with the graphics. DylAlien for the music before. All you guys rocking, Psychonaut. You guys keep listening, share it out. Hit us on the Patreon. Patreon's going to be the best way to do it. I put out regular content out on there, just content just for the Patreon users. I'm on there just chatting and any kind of ideas or thoughts you guys want. You know, hit us up on there for, you know, #BryansQuitHisJobFund. And with that, I appreciate it, guys. Tune in. Listen, we'll be here back a couple more weeks. Merry Christmas. Happy holidays. Happy holidays. We'll catch you all on the next one.
