Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Ethan Edelman, and this is Psychoactive, a production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. Psychoactive is the
Speaker 1: show where we talk about all things drugs. But any
Speaker 1: of views expressed here do not represent those of I
Speaker 1: Heart Media, Protozoa Pictures, or their executives and employees. Indeed,
Speaker 1: as an inveterate contrarian, I can tell you they may
Speaker 1: not even represent my own. And nothing contained in this
Speaker 1: show should be used his medical advice or encouragement to
Speaker 1: use any type of drug. Hello, Psychoactive listeners. Today, I'm
Speaker 1: talking with a fellow I've known for quite a number
Speaker 1: of years. His name is Adam Strauss, and he is
Speaker 1: a actor and a stand up comic, and he has
Speaker 1: this show that he's put on called The Mushroom Cure,
Speaker 1: which I've seen. I saw it a few years ago.
Speaker 1: It's an amazing show about basically trying to treat his
Speaker 1: own o c D obsessive compulsive disorder with psychedelics, in
Speaker 1: particular psilocybic mushrooms. Now, I mean this show isn't just
Speaker 1: some little thing. I mean, I mean Adam has performed
Speaker 1: this show in the United Kingdom and in the US.
Speaker 1: It's gotten played at festivals, It's played in Edinburgh, has
Speaker 1: played off Broadway in New York, it's played at the
Speaker 1: Marsh Theater in Berkeley. It's gotten fantastic reviews across the board.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's been called a miracle of a show
Speaker 1: and a must see, a hilarious rithe rose c D,
Speaker 1: a fabulous, perceptive trip, usually intelligent, outstanding revelation. And Adam
Speaker 1: has been described as an extremely talented comedian and tour
Speaker 1: to force. So it's just a real pleasure, Adam to
Speaker 1: have you on Psychoactive. Thanks for having me Ethan, and
Speaker 1: thanks for that intro. I feel like we should end
Speaker 1: the podcast right now because I'm not gonna be able
Speaker 1: to top that. I should just quote on a high note,
Speaker 1: no pun intended. Thanks thanks for having me on this
Speaker 1: on your podcast. I've always enjoyed our unrecorded talk, so
Speaker 1: looking forward to this one as well. Yeah. Well, and
Speaker 1: I should actually just say to the audience, there's this
Speaker 1: recording that plays before each show that says, you know
Speaker 1: nothing you hear should be taken to be encouraging to
Speaker 1: use drugs, and you know here because we're gonna be
Speaker 1: talking about drugs and mental illness and comedy. I just
Speaker 1: want to apologize to some listeners in advance if we
Speaker 1: sound irreverence, either Adam or me, because I'll get into
Speaker 1: the comedic mode with him. Perhaps. Um, it's not meant
Speaker 1: to be disrespectful, it's not meant to be insensitive. So
Speaker 1: but it is meant to hopefully shed light on O
Speaker 1: c D and the potential of psychedelics and also to
Speaker 1: really learn about Adams story here. So please forgive both
Speaker 1: him and me if something hits you wrong. But I
Speaker 1: do want to start off by offering, I don't know,
Speaker 1: have you ever had that issue where people got upset
Speaker 1: by what you were doing, um with your comedy and
Speaker 1: O c D. You know, I would say not people
Speaker 1: who have actually seen the show, but I but there
Speaker 1: have been there has sometimes been pushed back in general,
Speaker 1: I would say more from the people who feel that
Speaker 1: psychedelics have a special, uh reverential place in the in
Speaker 1: the pharmacopeia, which I don't actually disagree with. I do
Speaker 1: feel like they're unique compounds and and have a unique role,
Speaker 1: and that the idea of of bringing humor to them
Speaker 1: is in some way inherently disrespectful. But yeah, that's something
Speaker 1: I pushed back strongly on, partially because I think, well,
Speaker 1: my own psychedelic experiences, humor and laughter is such a
Speaker 1: central part of them, even just to be very specific,
Speaker 1: I mean the way I've laughed mushrooms particularly, and and
Speaker 1: Sasha Shulgin talks about INTI called this trip to mean laugh.
Speaker 1: It does seem to be a fairly intimate um and
Speaker 1: I think personally a non trivial connection between psychedelic and laughter.
Speaker 1: To me, one of the one of the many powerful
Speaker 1: things about laughter is there something humbling about it. When
Speaker 1: you're laughing, you're basically there's an element of surprise, something
Speaker 1: you didn't see coming. And I don't think it's too
Speaker 1: far a reach to say that there is. In the
Speaker 1: best jokes, there's sort of a mind expanding element where
Speaker 1: you see a possibility or a connection that you didn't
Speaker 1: previously see. And it's that that snap moment of recognition
Speaker 1: and connection that elicits the laugh. And that to me
Speaker 1: also describes a lot of the psychedelic experiences, is that
Speaker 1: you know, with a joke, you have all the components
Speaker 1: there right, You're not necessarily being exposed to anything totally
Speaker 1: novel in terms of I'm trying to think of a
Speaker 1: classic joke, you know, a joke, let's say, a cliche
Speaker 1: joke about you know, airplane food sucking. So you you
Speaker 1: know the concept of airplanes, you know the concept of food,
Speaker 1: but somehow it's presented in a way where you're seeing
Speaker 1: something new that you hadn't seen before. And so much
Speaker 1: of the psychedel experience for me is often that it's okay,
Speaker 1: I had all the pieces, but they're coming together in
Speaker 1: a way that I had never seen before, and that
Speaker 1: can be revelatory. And I think there can be a
Speaker 1: small revelation in a joke, in a punchline before we
Speaker 1: get into you know, how you conceive the play and
Speaker 1: how it's evolved. I'm curious instorms of your own personal life.
Speaker 1: I mean, at what age do you do your parents
Speaker 1: realize that you have this condition, and what was it
Speaker 1: like either growing up with it or whatever age it
Speaker 1: really became a you know, significant issue in your life.
Speaker 1: It's interesting because it seems like people with O c
Speaker 1: D fall into one of two camps. Some people will say, yep,
Speaker 1: I've had this from my early memories. I was born
Speaker 1: with O c D. But for many people there are
Speaker 1: clear precursors, meaning anxiety, often perfectionism, things like that that
Speaker 1: were problematic for them, but they didn't develop clear cut
Speaker 1: O c D until they had a specific inciting incident,
Speaker 1: a trauma essentially, And I fell into that ladder camp.
Speaker 1: I was from a very very early age. You know,
Speaker 1: a lot of really really intense emotional volatility. I would
Speaker 1: get into these huge fights with my mom. I my
Speaker 1: emotions were out of control and I didn't know how
Speaker 1: to control them. And I saw therapist from an early age,
Speaker 1: and to me, one of the great shortcomings of traditional
Speaker 1: Western psychotherapy is it's really a mind game. It's a
Speaker 1: brain trying to help another brain, by which I mean
Speaker 1: I would see these therapists from an early age and
Speaker 1: they would would discuss, you know, why would I get
Speaker 1: so upset, Why would I get so angry? Why would
Speaker 1: I get so out of control? And I would think
Speaker 1: about it and I would talk about it. No one
Speaker 1: ever actually told me, you know, what's going on in
Speaker 1: your body, what's happening at a at a visceral level.
Speaker 1: When a therapist would ask me how I was feeling,
Speaker 1: I would think about it. I wouldn't actually tune in
Speaker 1: to my physical sensations, and that's where psychedelics are instrumental.
Speaker 1: But I don't want to get too far ahead of
Speaker 1: my story. So yeah, really really intense UM just overpowering anxiety,
Speaker 1: fear a lot of the time for a very early age,
Speaker 1: no obvious reason, no obvious trauma. Grew up in a loving,
Speaker 1: supportive household, but that was just there from the beginning,
Speaker 1: and and really I didn't have any tools um to
Speaker 1: to work with it. And so it was it defined
Speaker 1: my life in a lot of ways, just this this
Speaker 1: sort of omni present, not quite on the present it was.
Speaker 1: I wasn't always anxious, but a lot of the time
Speaker 1: there was yet just this overpowering fear, and nothing really helped.
Speaker 1: Just to give a sense of the the scope of
Speaker 1: my challenges, I was hospitalized twice, both at age eighteen.
Speaker 1: That was when I had UM. My first girlfriend dumped me,
Speaker 1: and you know, I was admitted to the hospital ostensibly
Speaker 1: for suicidality, but I wasn't suicidal. I just couldn't handle
Speaker 1: how I was feeling, and I didn't know what to do.
Speaker 1: I just couldn't almost literally, I couldn't be in my
Speaker 1: own skin. It was just too agonizing and and we're
Speaker 1: you getting all sorts of diagnoses and being prescribed al
Speaker 1: storts of pharmaceuticals as an adolescent. So I'm forty seven,
Speaker 1: so you know, the advent of prozac. I think that
Speaker 1: came out in night. I feel like if I was
Speaker 1: ten years younger, I probably would have been prescribed a
Speaker 1: lot of these psychotropic medications, but it wasn't particularly common.
Speaker 1: Having said that I was, I was prescribed some at ages.
Speaker 1: I think fifteen or sixteen, I was prescribed antidepressant to
Speaker 1: try cyclic antidepressant I don't remember the name, but one
Speaker 1: of the earlier antidepressants before S. S. R. Eyes. And
Speaker 1: then at eighteen I was prescribed prozac. Um was on
Speaker 1: it for about a month and had a bad reaction
Speaker 1: and got off. And then beginning at nineteen or so,
Speaker 1: I was on Paxel and that began my my long
Speaker 1: term relationship with S. S. R. Eyes. But staying with
Speaker 1: the timeline, so diagnoses, you know, generally the diag gnosis
Speaker 1: was depression, but that was just sort of a catch
Speaker 1: all diagnosis. One of the challenges with o c D
Speaker 1: is even among therapists UM it's often misdiagnosed or underdiagnosed
Speaker 1: because certainly some people with those c D have the
Speaker 1: classic you know, contamination fear, handwashing or checking the stove,
Speaker 1: and I think most therapists will catch that. But there's
Speaker 1: so many different forms O c D can assume because
Speaker 1: at its root, O c D is basically a strategy,
Speaker 1: I would say, unconscious strategy, but a strategy to eliminate
Speaker 1: uncertainty because uncertainty makes us anxious, and that can assume
Speaker 1: so many different forms. So probably the the most appropriate
Speaker 1: diagnosis when I was growing up would have been something
Speaker 1: like generalized anxiety disorder. But what the fund does that mean?
Speaker 1: I mean, it's a lot of these diagnoses. I've had
Speaker 1: a lot of critiques of the sort of the Western
Speaker 1: psychotherapeutic model, and one of them is this idea that
Speaker 1: there is these discrete diagnostic categories that have like real
Speaker 1: predictive or or therapeutic value, and I just I think
Speaker 1: in many cases that's not true. So so yeah, short
Speaker 1: short answer, capsule answer was, I was diagnosed with depression,
Speaker 1: but I certainly was not depressed. For me, it was
Speaker 1: really about fear, just this deep fear and uh yeah,
Speaker 1: and the s R I started at age eighteen. By
Speaker 1: nineteen I was on Paxxel, and I was on pack
Speaker 1: Sel for many years. Then I switched over to Lexa
Speaker 1: pro Um, and I tried a number of other S s
Speaker 1: s R I S. I want to be careful here.
Speaker 1: The data on S s r I S is certainly
Speaker 1: for some people they are very, very helpful, and I
Speaker 1: always tell people if S s r I S are
Speaker 1: working for you, use them. But for many people with
Speaker 1: O c D, the best data and there's not great
Speaker 1: data because there's no real incentive for pharmaceutical companies to
Speaker 1: do long term studies of S s s r I S.
Speaker 1: You just need to do an eight week trial to
Speaker 1: get FDA approval. Multiple a week trials, But the point is,
Speaker 1: you know, there's no there's no financial benefit for people
Speaker 1: to do long term studies financed by the drug. So
Speaker 1: there haven't been that many, but the ones that there
Speaker 1: have been. Some public health studies show that in general,
Speaker 1: about half of people with O c D just don't
Speaker 1: respond to S s r S, and the half who
Speaker 1: do respond typically see only about a reduction and symptoms.
Speaker 1: So for the vast majority of people with O c D,
Speaker 1: S s r I don't work, or they give at
Speaker 1: best a moderate degree of relief, and that was that
Speaker 1: was my story. You know, maybe they helped a little bit,
Speaker 1: lowering some anxiety, but I was still sick in a word,
Speaker 1: and getting sicker. And that is also characteristic of o
Speaker 1: c D, as it does tend to be a progressive
Speaker 1: condition in the sense of um well, they put it
Speaker 1: this way. I've never met someone with o c D
Speaker 1: who has had a spontaneous remission, with the exception of it.
Speaker 1: Seems like sometimes children with o c D they kind
Speaker 1: of just grow out of it. But I've never met
Speaker 1: an adult who said, yeah, you know, I had bad
Speaker 1: o c D and then it just kind of got better.
Speaker 1: On the contrary, everyone i've met, if you're not treating it,
Speaker 1: if you're not working with it, um And I used
Speaker 1: that that was a preposition with intentionally working with because
Speaker 1: I think we can get into this. A lot of
Speaker 1: my path towards freedom has been not trying to fight
Speaker 1: the o c D, not trying to beat the o
Speaker 1: c D, but working with it. But if you're not,
Speaker 1: if you're not doing things actively to address the o
Speaker 1: c D, it I think pretty much invariably will just
Speaker 1: take up more and more of your life. And that
Speaker 1: was that was my story even though I was doing things,
Speaker 1: I was on SS rise, I was in therapy, but
Speaker 1: it just wasn't UM wasn't that effective. And and sorry,
Speaker 1: I I want to clarify just one thing I mentioned.
Speaker 1: So I still wouldn't have said I had O c D,
Speaker 1: you know, in my twenties, but the general anxiety was
Speaker 1: getting worse and worse. And then the O c D
Speaker 1: came about when I had UM. Well, in a word, heartbreak,
Speaker 1: maybe that's two words, I'm not sure, but the most
Speaker 1: significant romantic relationship of my life ended. And I actually
Speaker 1: didn't make this connection UM until I started doing the
Speaker 1: show The Mushroom Cure and kind of started writing about it.
Speaker 1: But in hindsight, it's very clear this relationship ended. And
Speaker 1: the simplest way I could put it is there was
Speaker 1: this profound heartbreak. There was this profound loss, but I
Speaker 1: wasn't able or willing to feel that loss in my body.
Speaker 1: I wasn't again, I didn't have the tools to really
Speaker 1: feel those feelings. And so what I did is I
Speaker 1: really left my body entirely. I went entirely into my head.
Speaker 1: I was already very much in my head, but now
Speaker 1: in the aftermath of this loss of this relationship. I
Speaker 1: really really just just went entirely into my head and
Speaker 1: developed this strategy in a sense of logical, but ultimately
Speaker 1: i'd say literally insane strategy, which is, well, if I
Speaker 1: can figure everything out in my head, if I can
Speaker 1: get everything right, if I can always get the right answer,
Speaker 1: that my life will be good and I won't have
Speaker 1: to feel these feelings again. I wasn't totally conscious of this,
Speaker 1: but that's that's the way it uh came out. And
Speaker 1: it sounds it sounds like you're describing is as you're
Speaker 1: living with this generalized anxiety, depression, heartbreak, and then it
Speaker 1: all sort of kind of blossoms or transforms or starts
Speaker 1: to manifests o c D. And I'm wondering when it
Speaker 1: does manifests o c D do some of the other
Speaker 1: symptoms you had before, like, for example, depression or anxiety,
Speaker 1: do those subside a bit and get replaced by the
Speaker 1: O c D or do they all just become a
Speaker 1: great big jumble. How does it all kind of fit
Speaker 1: or not fit together or interact? Or is there was
Speaker 1: there any silver lining in O c D V city
Speaker 1: the experiences you have suffered from before. So I wouldn't
Speaker 1: say I was ever depressed. Um. I think of depression
Speaker 1: as kind of this you know, retreat, drawn into oneself,
Speaker 1: you know, not wanting to get out of bed. And
Speaker 1: I had some symptoms secondary to the anxiety. When the
Speaker 1: anxiety was really bad, sure I wouldn't want to get
Speaker 1: out of bed, but I'd never say I was truly depressed.
Speaker 1: Knowing people who really do suffer from clinical depression, it's um,
Speaker 1: it's I think a pretty distinct condition. But the anxiety
Speaker 1: that really got wrapped up in the O c D,
Speaker 1: and in fact, well O c D is considered an
Speaker 1: anxiety disorder, and I think that's apt in I look
Speaker 1: at O c D at in one sense, as an
Speaker 1: attempt to eliminate anxiety that works in the very very
Speaker 1: very very short term. So let's take the example of
Speaker 1: someone who has contamination fear. They're afraid that they're going
Speaker 1: to get AIDS because they touched a subway poll and
Speaker 1: they know logically it's not going to happen, but that
Speaker 1: fear is there, and so they wash their hands for
Speaker 1: the forty time and they feel a little bit of relief,
Speaker 1: maybe for ten seconds twenty seconds. Their anxiety goes down
Speaker 1: for a little bit, but then it comes back, so
Speaker 1: logically they'll do the thing that gave them relief. The
Speaker 1: last time they'll watch, they'll wash again. So there is
Speaker 1: a payoff sometimes with engaging in O c D, but
Speaker 1: it's very short lived, and it actually ultimately increases anxiety
Speaker 1: because the harder you try to eliminate this perceived threat,
Speaker 1: this fear that you're contaminated. And I don't have that form,
Speaker 1: but to use this example, two things happen. One, you're
Speaker 1: giving that threat that fear more and more energy, more
Speaker 1: and more attention, so it's getting bigger and bigger. The
Speaker 1: second thing, though, that happens is you're actually adding a
Speaker 1: second source of anxiety, which is real, uh, grounded in
Speaker 1: real life, which is all right, you've spent four hours
Speaker 1: in the bathroom washing your hands. Well, guess what now
Speaker 1: you're you might get fired from your job because you're
Speaker 1: not doing your job, or you know, your spouse may
Speaker 1: leave you because they can't handle this anymore. So now
Speaker 1: there's real things happening in the world as a result
Speaker 1: of you trying to eliminate this fear that are actually
Speaker 1: creating more fear. And this is the really cruel vicious
Speaker 1: cycle of O c D. Well, what are you gonna do? Now?
Speaker 1: You're gonna do the thing that sometimes makes you feel
Speaker 1: a little bit better, even if it's only for fifteen
Speaker 1: or twenty seconds. You're gonna keep washing. And that kind
Speaker 1: of comes back to why I would say O c
Speaker 1: D tends to be a progressive condition that gets worse
Speaker 1: because the more you do O c D, the harder
Speaker 1: it is to stop. And so for me, the anxiety
Speaker 1: was sort of this initially the fuel for O c D.
Speaker 1: But it's sort of like this perpetual motion machine where
Speaker 1: the more fuel you give it, the more it creates
Speaker 1: further fuel for O c D. So it just it
Speaker 1: ramped up the anxiety and yeah, the news just tightened.
Speaker 1: So so step into parallel track. Now, so this is
Speaker 1: about living with O c D. But you at the
Speaker 1: same time you are living, I mean, you're having a life.
Speaker 1: I presume you're going to school, you're going to college,
Speaker 1: you're getting a job, maybe you're deciding to that, maybe
Speaker 1: you're gonna go into comedy. What's that part of your life? Like,
Speaker 1: I mean, not not to make them two separate tracks,
Speaker 1: but the other parts of your life, And how's that going, Yeah, well,
Speaker 1: actually I like looking at as two tracks because that's
Speaker 1: what it felt for me. So I did have sort
Speaker 1: of this O c D track which was really the
Speaker 1: dominant story of my life. But then increasingly UM difficult,
Speaker 1: but I was trying to maintain outward appearances and it
Speaker 1: was challenging. So yeah, I was, you know, as the
Speaker 1: O c D was really flourishing. After this relationship ended,
Speaker 1: I was UM. I was a founder of a company,
Speaker 1: a startup, which in a way enabled the O c
Speaker 1: D because I wasn't reporting to anyone else, so I
Speaker 1: could indulge my o c D in a way that
Speaker 1: I couldn't have if I had to report too, if
Speaker 1: I had a boss or something like that, like I could.
Speaker 1: I was going into work every day, but when I
Speaker 1: was at my computer, you know, there were days where
Speaker 1: I was just I was just obsessing, obsessing, obsessing and
Speaker 1: not doing any work. And I could, you know, get
Speaker 1: away with it, um, But there was a high cost there.
Speaker 1: And socially, you know, I was increasingly isolating, not because
Speaker 1: I didn't want to be around people, and we haven't
Speaker 1: talked about my specific symptoms, but it was mostly UM
Speaker 1: around decision making, you know, making a decision, reversing the decision,
Speaker 1: going back and forth and back and forth for hours,
Speaker 1: even over very very true your choices, engaging in my obsessions,
Speaker 1: figuring things out, obsessing over what MP three player to get,
Speaker 1: what shirt to wear, whatever the decision to your was.
Speaker 1: And there were hundreds of them a day, so I
Speaker 1: couldn't I couldn't figure things out if I was with
Speaker 1: other people. So I was increasingly isolating and just going
Speaker 1: deeper and deeper into this you know, O c D,
Speaker 1: Fantasy Lander, Nightmareland. This is all happening in your late twenties,
Speaker 1: early thirties. This was, Yeah, So the O c D
Speaker 1: really started taking off when I was twenty nine. At
Speaker 1: this point, it was my life was basically going to work,
Speaker 1: trying to do some work if I could, coming home
Speaker 1: and obsessing and you know, being late to work because
Speaker 1: I was obsessing, and maintaining friendships. You know, I wasn't
Speaker 1: totally isolated, but but but yeah, less and less, it
Speaker 1: really felt like I was, yeah, drifting, drifting away from
Speaker 1: the world and drifting deeper and deeper into my own
Speaker 1: my own head. And it's sort of like because your
Speaker 1: family know your friends or is this sort of they're
Speaker 1: kind of aware it, but it's basically between you and
Speaker 1: your therapist trying to figure it out. That yeah, yeah,
Speaker 1: it was. I really kept people out. People were aware
Speaker 1: that I was struggling, and again, this was not a
Speaker 1: new thing, So it wasn't new for me to be
Speaker 1: in a state of deep distress to the point that
Speaker 1: my functioning was, you know, impaired. So friends and family,
Speaker 1: you know, that's who I was. That was part of
Speaker 1: my unfortunately part of my identity. So it wasn't like
Speaker 1: people thought everything was fine with Adam. But this new
Speaker 1: wrinkle of O c D was something that I very
Speaker 1: much didn't want to let people into because I had
Speaker 1: so much shame around it. We'll be talking more after
Speaker 1: we hear this ad. Tell me about then, how this
Speaker 1: show emerges. And I think the first time you form
Speaker 1: the mushroom cure of the show is what about ten
Speaker 1: years ago or so? Yeah, you know, having seen it
Speaker 1: and you know, I know you I see a live
Speaker 1: four years ago in Berkeley. I mean, it's incredibly funny
Speaker 1: and touching, and you're obviously a talented comic, you know,
Speaker 1: in addition to being a good actor as well. How
Speaker 1: did that come about? How did you think to do
Speaker 1: it that way? And how does it differ now for
Speaker 1: or even a few years ago from what you originally
Speaker 1: conceived it as. Yeah, So I never had any ambition
Speaker 1: to do a solo show show or to be an actor.
Speaker 1: I started doing stand up as the o c D
Speaker 1: was really getting worse and worse. Uh. And I actually
Speaker 1: look at stand up in some ways as an attempt,
Speaker 1: not conscious at the time, but an attempt to to
Speaker 1: get love and connection that I was too kind of afraid,
Speaker 1: too vulnerable to get in the form of an intimate
Speaker 1: relationship because this heartbreak had I don't want to say
Speaker 1: cause the o c D but precipitated it. So I
Speaker 1: was increasingly isolated, and I was very lonely and in
Speaker 1: you know when you tell people you're comedian the last
Speaker 1: and say, oh, that's brave. But I think for me,
Speaker 1: it took less bravery to get on stage and try
Speaker 1: to get laughs from an audience and get love and
Speaker 1: connection and approval that way than it would have taken
Speaker 1: at that point in my life to be in another
Speaker 1: intimate relationship. And so I pretty much just started doing
Speaker 1: stand up and the O c D was getting worse
Speaker 1: and worse. And I was trying everything. So in addition
Speaker 1: to the S s s R S and the therapy, I
Speaker 1: did all the alternative and holistic treatments, acupuncture orbs UM,
Speaker 1: you know, all this stuff, hypnotism, hypnotherapy. Nothing was helping.
Speaker 1: And I stumbled across this study out of the University
Speaker 1: of Arizona of psilocybin for O c D. And it
Speaker 1: was a very small study. It's only nine subjects and
Speaker 1: to date still the only published study of any psychedelic
Speaker 1: for O c D, though fortunately there are three or
Speaker 1: four new ones and much bigger ones in the works
Speaker 1: right now. This is the one by is it is
Speaker 1: it Francisco Moreno, Yes, yes, yeah, yeah, Safety, efficacy and
Speaker 1: tolerability of psilocybin and nine patients with those c D
Speaker 1: as a very long title, you know. And I had
Speaker 1: essentially no psychedelic experience. I had tried psychedelics, but they
Speaker 1: hadn't worked for me, probably in hindsight, because I was
Speaker 1: honest her eyes. So I saw the study. And what's
Speaker 1: interesting about the study is it wasn't the sort of
Speaker 1: studies they're doing now of like you know, psychedelic assisted psychotherapy.
Speaker 1: There wasn't much of a therapy component. They were basically
Speaker 1: giving people psilocybin at different doses, and there also wasn't
Speaker 1: long term follow up, but the results were very encouraging.
Speaker 1: All the subjects had you know, significant remission, some just
Speaker 1: for a short period of time, but they were they
Speaker 1: were getting results and results that you know, I hadn't
Speaker 1: seen with any of the treatments I've found. And so
Speaker 1: even though I had very little psychedelic experience, there was
Speaker 1: this sense of what what I have to lose by
Speaker 1: trying this stuff, so that that set me off on
Speaker 1: my quest to cure my O c D with psychedelics.
Speaker 1: The period of time I recount in the USh from
Speaker 1: cure is two thousand and seven to two thousand and ten,
Speaker 1: by which point, you know, I've gotten a lot of healing,
Speaker 1: I've gotten a lot of recovery. And there was a
Speaker 1: sense of I need to share this story because the
Speaker 1: story itself is the most incredible story that's ever happened
Speaker 1: to me. I'm not saying the show is incredible the ship.
Speaker 1: People may like or not like the show, but the
Speaker 1: actual events that unfolded, the coincidences the people I met,
Speaker 1: were to me just amazing and inspiring for me, and
Speaker 1: I felt incredibly lucky that I'd gone through these experiences,
Speaker 1: and suffice to say, you know, it's it wasn't a
Speaker 1: smooth journey. I was trying to cure my OCD with psychedelics,
Speaker 1: with you know, in a pretty uncontrolled fashion, doing a
Speaker 1: lot of different psychedelics that high doses and fairly frequently.
Speaker 1: So there were some powering experiences. Yet somehow, in a way,
Speaker 1: everything seemed to come together to give me. This is
Speaker 1: that psychedelic cliche, but I think it's often an apt
Speaker 1: one to give me not what I wanted, but what
Speaker 1: I needed. In some way, I felt like I'd really
Speaker 1: been given this tremendous gift. And I wanted to share
Speaker 1: this story, one because I thought it could help people,
Speaker 1: but to just because I was like, this is a
Speaker 1: great fucking story. I don't know if I can tell
Speaker 1: it well, but I know the story itself is worthy
Speaker 1: of being shared. So I started trying to talk about
Speaker 1: it in comedy clubs, but it quickly became apparent that
Speaker 1: there was just too much narrative here. It's not the
Speaker 1: sort of thing where it is you know, the show
Speaker 1: is funny, but it's not a punch line every twenty seconds.
Speaker 1: So I had no experience with theater. I've never studied acting.
Speaker 1: I'd barely even seen plays. But it was obvious that
Speaker 1: that would be the correct forum for it, so I um,
Speaker 1: I decided to do the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in two
Speaker 1: thousand and twelve, and that's where the show had its
Speaker 1: premiere and I had I have to ask you about
Speaker 1: I think I was listening to you being interviewed on
Speaker 1: somebody else's podcast or something. Um uh, and you mentioned
Speaker 1: a relationship with Hamilton's Morris, another one of my guests
Speaker 1: who was on a few months ago, you know who's
Speaker 1: just you know, this wonderful psycholic researcher, and he had
Speaker 1: his uh Hamilton's Pharma copea TV show which was broadly watched.
Speaker 1: I think you said that he was a comic. Yes,
Speaker 1: he we we met, he had he had a sort
Speaker 1: of brief involvement in the in the comedy scene, and
Speaker 1: that's how we met initially, and he was part of
Speaker 1: the He was part of this early story for me.
Speaker 1: He was a close and as a close friend and
Speaker 1: was someone who um even though he's significantly younger than me,
Speaker 1: it was a lot younger then was already I was
Speaker 1: gonna say dipping his toe into the psyculic waters. But
Speaker 1: more than dipping his toe was clearly you know, fascinated
Speaker 1: by psychedelics. You know, had a lot of insight on them,
Speaker 1: and um, I just knew a lot more than I did.
Speaker 1: So we struck up a close friendship, and part of
Speaker 1: that friendship was exploring these compounds and talking about our
Speaker 1: experiences and supporting each other in our in our respective
Speaker 1: And I'll say, I'm sure it's just a coincidence. But
Speaker 1: there's a moment in the play where you're talking about
Speaker 1: meeting a friend and he's giving you all this information
Speaker 1: about these white powders from China and these other things
Speaker 1: you should try in which doses, and the voice you
Speaker 1: give your friends sounds remarkably like Hamilton Morris. It's it's
Speaker 1: not a coincidence. And I'm okay saying this because I've
Speaker 1: asked Hamilton's permission. That was Hamilton's I'm depicting in the show.
Speaker 1: So everything in the show is true, Um, even characters names.
Speaker 1: But I did change Hamilton's name to Harrison simply because
Speaker 1: there's a reference in the show to Hamilton's the musical
Speaker 1: and it's not confusing, so I mean, and now it
Speaker 1: sort of makes a little bit of sense. He's got
Speaker 1: such a dry kind of tone about him. He is
Speaker 1: at heart a scientist. You know. He had this TV
Speaker 1: show which is a great show and entertaining, and he's
Speaker 1: funny and he is entertaining. But the thing that really
Speaker 1: inspires him, so far as I can tell, is not
Speaker 1: being a public figure, is not being in the lime
Speaker 1: night limelight, but being in the lab. His ambition was
Speaker 1: to get in there in the lab and ticker with
Speaker 1: tinker with these compounds, and learn more about these molecules
Speaker 1: and ultimately human consciousness. So uh, my motivation ultimately was
Speaker 1: to cure my O c D. But I'd be lying
Speaker 1: if I said a big part of it wasn't also
Speaker 1: just this deep curiosity about these totally unique mental and
Speaker 1: emotional states and and how these compounds interact with the
Speaker 1: human nervous system. Uh uh you know you reference in
Speaker 1: the play. I think, uh, Sasha Shulgin, you know, and
Speaker 1: his various um what is its stages of of how
Speaker 1: high you are on a psychedelic you know, the scale,
Speaker 1: the Sulgan scale, and we're plus four is the big
Speaker 1: transcendental one and plus plus one is basically maybe a
Speaker 1: micro dose a little more, and plus two is maybe
Speaker 1: a museum level. Um So, had you read Shulgan early
Speaker 1: on or sort of you sort of become aware of
Speaker 1: it as you're uncovering stuff around, you know, psilocybin in
Speaker 1: the you know, fifteen years ago whatever. Yeah, No, that
Speaker 1: that was Hamilton's doing. He's the one who turned me
Speaker 1: on to T. Sholgan and I you know, I devoured
Speaker 1: Peak hall uh t call. They're they're great unique books.
Speaker 1: You know, they're these we combination of like psychedelic recipe books, autobiography,
Speaker 1: a love story, meditations on the nature of consciousness and
Speaker 1: love and sex and um so yeah, those books really
Speaker 1: were were mind expanding for me. When the person who
Speaker 1: looms largest in the show and in your story is
Speaker 1: a girlfriend who you call I mentioned a pseudonym of Grace.
Speaker 1: Actually that's not a pseudonym, but it's her. It's not
Speaker 1: her first name. I'll just leave it at that. But
Speaker 1: that's not okay that that that is what I called
Speaker 1: her in real life. So yeah, but do you think
Speaker 1: that your journey would have happened if you had not
Speaker 1: met Grace? I don't know. And this is one of
Speaker 1: the coincidences I alluded to earlier. So without giving a
Speaker 1: way too much of the show, I'd read the study,
Speaker 1: this Morno study out of the University of Arizona, and
Speaker 1: I'd resolve that, Okay, I need to try psychedelics because
Speaker 1: nothing else is working. And it was very soon after
Speaker 1: I read that study that I met this woman at
Speaker 1: a comedy show in Times Square, of all places, the
Speaker 1: middle of New York, the most anonymous, you know, fish
Speaker 1: bowl in the in the Western hemisphere perhaps for people meeting,
Speaker 1: and we struck up a relationship. And it turned out
Speaker 1: I didn't learn this until, you know, we've been dating
Speaker 1: for a little bit, that she had essentially cured her clinical,
Speaker 1: debilitating suicidal depression with mescaline containing cacti. And so it
Speaker 1: was the shocking coincidence that, you know, this person who
Speaker 1: had met seemingly randomly, had actually done in a sense
Speaker 1: of the thing I was trying to do, and had
Speaker 1: a lot of relevant experience. So that was instrumental, I
Speaker 1: think in two ways. One she became sort of my
Speaker 1: my unofficial guide on a lot of these journeys. Too.
Speaker 1: There was this sense and there is this sense of
Speaker 1: coincidence that um with psychedelics, that sometimes I don't know
Speaker 1: coincidences mean, and I'm open to the fact they're meaningless,
Speaker 1: but it often feels to me like there is meaning.
Speaker 1: And one way I like to look a coincidence is
Speaker 1: kind of keep going kind of a green flag from
Speaker 1: from the unit first, like, Okay, you're I don't even
Speaker 1: want to say on the right path, because right or wrong,
Speaker 1: I think is a slippery slope, but you're on a path.
Speaker 1: And so I took it, even at the time when
Speaker 1: she revealed to me that oh she not only you know,
Speaker 1: did she have some experience with psychedelics, but she'd actually
Speaker 1: affected great healing herself with them, that Okay, I'm on
Speaker 1: the right path here, and absent that, I don't know,
Speaker 1: I don't know if I would have embarked on this journey.
Speaker 1: You know, there's other research going on now with ketamine
Speaker 1: and O c D, and obviously there's research going on
Speaker 1: with psilocybin um. So it does appear that maybe multiple
Speaker 1: of these I don't know if there's anything within d
Speaker 1: M A and O c D, but it does appeal
Speaker 1: that there's numerous of these psycholics that could potentially work
Speaker 1: with a condition. And there's a funny scene in your
Speaker 1: in your play where you're talking about your marijuana deal
Speaker 1: or trying to say, I can't get any mushrooms. You know,
Speaker 1: there's a shortage, but how about some kennemine? And you react, no, no, no, no,
Speaker 1: I need any I need mushrooms. But if in fact
Speaker 1: that that marijuana deal her friend of yours had been
Speaker 1: able to come up with kenemine, it makes me wonder
Speaker 1: there that might have also helped facilitate a bit of
Speaker 1: a breakthrough. One of the things that characterize O c
Speaker 1: D is a is a very sort of rigid, black
Speaker 1: and white way of thinking, and for me, in this
Speaker 1: context that manifested as well. The study was was mushrooms.
Speaker 1: So therefore I need mushrooms and I'm not interested in
Speaker 1: anything else. Ultimately, through Hamilton's and other channels, I did
Speaker 1: do a lot of other things, you know, probably two
Speaker 1: dozen different you know, Shulgin invention research, chemicals, mescaline containing cacti,
Speaker 1: through grace LSD. But at that point I was very
Speaker 1: hell bent on mushrooms are going to fix me. Uh
Speaker 1: So I wasn't open to that. But I have subsequently
Speaker 1: worked with ketamine, and I've been talking about this on stage.
Speaker 1: I love how with psychedelics, they're the only drug where
Speaker 1: you can say worked with you know, no one's ever
Speaker 1: like that. I've been working with crystal meth, you know,
Speaker 1: doing a lot of work with cocaine. You're doing the
Speaker 1: work with a capital T and a capital w R. Right,
Speaker 1: it's this exalted thing. But you know, again, I think
Speaker 1: I think there is something to that. I think that
Speaker 1: it is. It is work. Uh can be heavy, hard
Speaker 1: work with psychedelics in a way it hasn't been, you know,
Speaker 1: smoking a joint or I haven't done cocaine since you know,
Speaker 1: I was nineteen, But doing a line of blow doesn't
Speaker 1: feel like work in the same way. Well, you know
Speaker 1: you also have you there's this phrase you came up
Speaker 1: with which I love. I think it was to describe
Speaker 1: your adventuring with all these chemicals. Um that that Hamilton
Speaker 1: others had told you about. You said you were engaging
Speaker 1: in vigilanti psychotherapy, vigilanti psychopharmacology, psychopharmacology. Yes, and it really
Speaker 1: was that, right. I mean, you're out there trying anything
Speaker 1: to try to take it into your own hands. The
Speaker 1: the timing of the play and the way you build
Speaker 1: up because I mean, for me, the point when this
Speaker 1: morning I'm watching it and I'm bursting out laughing, is
Speaker 1: when you get to the point of you know, actually
Speaker 1: being in a full blow in plus four experience, you know,
Speaker 1: on the psilocybic mushrooms, and tell me if I'm giving much,
Speaker 1: too too much away, then we can always cut it
Speaker 1: out in the editing. Um. And then you call nine
Speaker 1: one more right, you know, there by cutting off your
Speaker 1: you know, full blowing experience. UM. But it does see
Speaker 1: that that that really is a pivotal moment in your
Speaker 1: life when that happens. Absolutely absolutely, UM. I mean I
Speaker 1: had over the course of that two thousand and seven
Speaker 1: to two thousand and ten period, I probably had I
Speaker 1: don't know, I'm gonna say sixty psychedelic experiences. A lot
Speaker 1: of psychedelic experiences. So in the show I only talked
Speaker 1: about a handful of them, and I do highlight that
Speaker 1: one psilocybin mushroom trip as kind of this climax because
Speaker 1: it was a powerful trip and also a you know,
Speaker 1: from a dramatic drama theory perspective, good fodder because I
Speaker 1: did call nine one one on myself, and there there
Speaker 1: is a transcript of it, and it's accurate. I start
Speaker 1: the call starts out with me asking the nine one
Speaker 1: one operator if if she's got and that is why
Speaker 1: I called nine one one. I want to be clear,
Speaker 1: as I say in the show, I don't call nine
Speaker 1: one because I wanted the cops to come to my house.
Speaker 1: I called because I had some burning existential questions and
Speaker 1: no one else was picking up their phone. And what
Speaker 1: had happened was I had thrown my cell phone away
Speaker 1: in the woods. I don't remember why, but I've thrown
Speaker 1: it away the woods. We subsequently recovered it. There was
Speaker 1: a landline at the house I was staying at, but
Speaker 1: I couldn't remember any numbers. I remember my childhood phone number,
Speaker 1: which I called. No one picked that up, thankfully I remembered.
Speaker 1: I called zero, the old operator number. No one picked
Speaker 1: that up. And finally I called nine one one because
Speaker 1: I was consumed with this question of um, yeah, of
Speaker 1: of divinity, of higher power, of of what is God?
Speaker 1: Because on this master dose of mushrooms, there was a
Speaker 1: clear sense of all right, there's there's some order intelligence here,
Speaker 1: but what is it? And so the operator asked me
Speaker 1: where I was for the address, and I had enough
Speaker 1: presence of mind to not tell her, but I was
Speaker 1: calling from a landline, and they traced the call and
Speaker 1: they showed up at at the house with a bunch
Speaker 1: of content. Thereby violated, you know, the number one rule
Speaker 1: of when one takes too much you know, marijuana, or
Speaker 1: one doesn't an intense psychologue trip which is never called
Speaker 1: nine one one. And of course now there is fortunately
Speaker 1: something called the Fireside Project out there, which is for
Speaker 1: people who are having a psychedelic emergency or just want
Speaker 1: to process what's going on. I had one of the
Speaker 1: key founders of that project, Hanifaia Washington, on Psychoactive some
Speaker 1: months ago. But you know, hopefully if this ever happens
Speaker 1: to you again, Adam, you can call a fireside project.
Speaker 1: They're calling on one one. Definitely a better choice. So
Speaker 1: that trip was pivotal. But I also should say the
Speaker 1: recovery I got thanks to psychedelics, it wasn't so much
Speaker 1: one experience. It was a handful of particularly important experiences
Speaker 1: that really, the simplest way I could put it is
Speaker 1: sometimes I think of o CD this way. It's like
Speaker 1: the brain or the mind is trying to fix a problem,
Speaker 1: a quote unquote problem in the body. And I put
Speaker 1: it in quote because it's not really a problem. But
Speaker 1: the supposed problem is these emotions, which are just physical
Speaker 1: sensations that we don't want to experience, principally fear. So
Speaker 1: the mind of the o c D person is like, well,
Speaker 1: if I can get everything right, if I can figure
Speaker 1: everything out, then the fear will go away. And of
Speaker 1: course it doesn't work. So freedom from o c D
Speaker 1: for me has actually come from really just connecting to
Speaker 1: my body more than anything else. And I understood this,
Speaker 1: I should say, intellectually before I began working with psychedelics,
Speaker 1: because I had done so much work in therapy and
Speaker 1: the the standard therapy for o c D, cognitive behavioral
Speaker 1: therapy and particularly exposure response prevention, is really geared towards
Speaker 1: acceptance or surrendered. So the idea is, since o c
Speaker 1: D is trying to neutralize these unwanted emotions, these unwanted
Speaker 1: physical sensations, if you can accept those sensations instead of
Speaker 1: trying to get rid of them, then you're basically taking
Speaker 1: the wind out of o c D sales, You're depriving
Speaker 1: it of its of its reason for being and so
Speaker 1: therefore this therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, is really about acceptance
Speaker 1: or surrender, and I understood this intellectually, and so I
Speaker 1: would be going through O c D and I'd be
Speaker 1: saying to myself, Okay, just accept the anxiety. Accept the anxiety.
Speaker 1: But I was just saying it to myself a conversation
Speaker 1: I was having in my brain, where actual acceptance happens
Speaker 1: at a physical level. These emotions exist in the body
Speaker 1: and they have to be accepted in the body. But
Speaker 1: I just had no access to my physical experience. So
Speaker 1: the first time, even though I've done years of therapy
Speaker 1: geared towards acceptance, the first time I actually was able
Speaker 1: to do acceptance viscerally physically was on psychedelics. I had
Speaker 1: an experience which isn't isn't explicitly in the show, but
Speaker 1: it's it's sort of part of a number of trips
Speaker 1: I recount where I was experiencing O c D. I
Speaker 1: was obsessing, and if I weren't on psychedelics, I would
Speaker 1: have just thought about it more, trying to figure out
Speaker 1: harder in my head. But the psilocybin it connected me
Speaker 1: deeply to my body and I could actually really feel
Speaker 1: that fear in my body. In fact, I couldn't help
Speaker 1: not feel it. I had to feel it. It was
Speaker 1: so present, and because I've been exposed to cognitive behavioral therapy,
Speaker 1: there was little sort of light bulb moment where I
Speaker 1: was like, oh, this is what my therapist has been
Speaker 1: talking about all these years. Instead of running from the sensation,
Speaker 1: since I can finally feel it clearly, let me really
Speaker 1: go into it and just open up to it fully.
Speaker 1: And when I did that, the obsessive thoughts just kind
Speaker 1: of quieted down, and the feeling was still there. It
Speaker 1: was unpleasant. This isn't a story of like, oh yeah,
Speaker 1: if you accept that, you know it's transmuted into love
Speaker 1: and light and joy and bliss. I do believe that
Speaker 1: happens sometimes, but certainly not routinely. It was like, Okay,
Speaker 1: if I accept the sensation, guess what I have to feel?
Speaker 1: The shitty sensation I don't have to feel. But the
Speaker 1: upside is it undercuts the O c D. I'm no
Speaker 1: longer obsessing. And the other thing is it's not like
Speaker 1: O c D prevents me from feeling it. I'm still
Speaker 1: feeling it at some level. I'm just trying to shut
Speaker 1: it out. So once I had that oriens on psychedelics
Speaker 1: on that trip and then many other trips, gradually I
Speaker 1: learned how to do that when I wasn't tripping, how
Speaker 1: to really tune into my physical experience and open up
Speaker 1: to these unwanted, fierce sensations and find freedom that way.
Speaker 1: You know, I was googling around just you know, before
Speaker 1: our conversation here, and I came across one of the
Speaker 1: co founders one of the psychedelics venture funds, was being
Speaker 1: asked what he's excited about, and he referenced this study
Speaker 1: at Yale on psilocybin and O c D. But one
Speaker 1: of the things he said is he goes, there appears
Speaker 1: to be little to no psychotherapy needed, as severe manifestations
Speaker 1: of O c D appear to be more like a
Speaker 1: motor disorder than one with a psychological underpinning. But on
Speaker 1: the other hand, you know, we typically hear all about psychedelics,
Speaker 1: you know, being most dramatically more valuable and safer to
Speaker 1: be doing it with ecotherapy, and in your own personal experience,
Speaker 1: you seem to talk about that. I mean, have you
Speaker 1: heard about this outcome of the Yale study or what's
Speaker 1: your sense about that that reported finding. No, I'm not.
Speaker 1: I'm aware of the study and I know I I
Speaker 1: know one of the researcher who was involved and then
Speaker 1: had a career change. Um, but I didn't know. I
Speaker 1: didn't know that specific finding. I know it hasn't been
Speaker 1: published yet. But that man, that that resonates with my
Speaker 1: experience in a way that I've not heard other people
Speaker 1: talk about, which is yes. So I just I just
Speaker 1: kind of halucidated this whole idea about for me, so
Speaker 1: much of it was the physical experiencing piece of psychedelics,
Speaker 1: and let me go into that a little bit more.
Speaker 1: I have not found insight to be particularly useful from
Speaker 1: psychedelics insofar as O c D. I've certainly had insights
Speaker 1: that have been helpful in my life, but it wasn't
Speaker 1: like it wasn't like these revelations that helped me from psychedelics.
Speaker 1: With O c D. It wasn't like, uh, this, you know,
Speaker 1: changing my self perception. It was very concretely, this connecting
Speaker 1: me to my body, and once in my body, I
Speaker 1: have the choice. It's not gonna happen automatically, but at
Speaker 1: least I have the option or ability to accept my
Speaker 1: emotions in a way otherwise don't and thereby gain freedom
Speaker 1: from them. So that accords what you just read. That
Speaker 1: accords with my experience where it's not so much it's
Speaker 1: not something that you're talking through, it's something that you're experiencing.
Speaker 1: So that's very cool. I'm I'm glad you shared that. Well,
Speaker 1: let me as see this to I mean, what are
Speaker 1: the really funny moments in the play is when you
Speaker 1: talk about going to see your therapist, like what was
Speaker 1: the name Dr Wilson calls Dr Wilson there, I did
Speaker 1: change his last name, so yes, but you know you're
Speaker 1: kind of, you know, riffing on him and you're kind
Speaker 1: of making fun of him and his degrees. But you
Speaker 1: know he's pushing you, um to try to have a
Speaker 1: new approach to this and to get out of your
Speaker 1: head and your intellectual understanding, which is only going to
Speaker 1: go so far, even though that's the way he's communicating
Speaker 1: to you. But he suggests to you that basically your
Speaker 1: O C D is like an addiction, and just as
Speaker 1: there is an iconics addiction Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous for addiction,
Speaker 1: that you should go to O C Obsessive Compulsive Anonymous,
Speaker 1: and you tell this story of going and it's very
Speaker 1: funny because you're kind of, you know, looking at all
Speaker 1: the skin pickers and the hair pullers and the handwashers,
Speaker 1: and what are you still doing here if it's all working.
Speaker 1: Yet on the other hand, you kind of land up
Speaker 1: by saying this actually plays an important role that for you,
Speaker 1: maybe it was less about combining uh psilocybin with psychotherapy
Speaker 1: and more about combining psilocybin with what you learned by
Speaker 1: going through a sort of twelve step approach. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: I think all three of those components psilocybin, and i'd
Speaker 1: say not just psilocybin. I mean the show is the
Speaker 1: mushroom Cure because it was inspired by that study of psilocybin,
Speaker 1: and that's what I was hell bent on getting. But
Speaker 1: ultimately mushrooms were very helpful, but LSD was helpful. Research
Speaker 1: chemicals were helpful. More recently, I found ayawaska to be helpful.
Speaker 1: So psychedelics certainly one component. Generally speaking, psychotherapy helpful in
Speaker 1: the sense that it introduced me to this concept of
Speaker 1: a acceptance. But in psychotherapy it was just a concept
Speaker 1: for me. It wasn't a practice until I brought psychedelics
Speaker 1: into the picture. And then yeah, the twelve step thing
Speaker 1: very powerful and something that I still I still am
Speaker 1: involved in because well, I think there's a few components.
Speaker 1: Um One is there is something very healing about peer
Speaker 1: support and commiseration. There's a lot of people getting help
Speaker 1: from a therapist one on one, but the group peer
Speaker 1: support aspect is powerful one because it's not just about
Speaker 1: getting support from other people with O c D giving support.
Speaker 1: The concept of service, which is a central concept in
Speaker 1: twelve step programs, is so powerful for me because with
Speaker 1: O c D and addiction generally, you know, you're very
Speaker 1: consumed with your own safety, your own happiness, your own comfort,
Speaker 1: and just trying to do things for other people, even
Speaker 1: if it's just going through the motions, it does at
Speaker 1: least for me, it gets me out of my own
Speaker 1: head and that gets me out of O c D
Speaker 1: because O c D only exists in my own head.
Speaker 1: So that's part of the twelve step thing that was
Speaker 1: helpful for me. And what the twelve step thing brings
Speaker 1: in that I personally have found helpful is this idea
Speaker 1: of more of a cosmic surrender, whereas psychotherapy CBT it's
Speaker 1: like all right, acceptance is allowing these emotions to be
Speaker 1: there with a twelve step thing. There's this idea of
Speaker 1: a higher power, which is a concept that you know,
Speaker 1: I'm not even going to try to touch on because
Speaker 1: it's something I certainly have no clarity on, and frankly,
Speaker 1: people who have a lot of clarity on that sometimes
Speaker 1: scare me. But this idea of the idea that I'm
Speaker 1: not in control, whether or not I believe you know
Speaker 1: that the universe is run by by God or by
Speaker 1: uh nature. One thing that I can get behind is
Speaker 1: this idea that I'm not in control. And this idea
Speaker 1: of letting things go, of turning things over, even if
Speaker 1: I don't know what I'm turning them over to I
Speaker 1: found and find helpful is just that reminder coming back
Speaker 1: to And this idea of powerlessness, that's a very powerful concept.
Speaker 1: And powerlessness in the context of O c D. The
Speaker 1: way I look at it is I'm not powerless over
Speaker 1: my actions. I have a choice about whether to accept
Speaker 1: my anxiety or try to get rid of it by
Speaker 1: engaging in O c D. I have a choice of
Speaker 1: whether I'm going to engage in obsessive thinking in rituals.
Speaker 1: But where I am powerless is I can't choose the
Speaker 1: sensations in my body, and I can't choose the thoughts
Speaker 1: that come into my mind. O c D is about
Speaker 1: trying to control those sensations and those thoughts. If I
Speaker 1: do the ritual right, if I think the correct thought,
Speaker 1: then the sensations or thoughts will change. And if you
Speaker 1: really buy into the twelve step thing, what you're saying
Speaker 1: is no, I actually am powerless over those thoughts when
Speaker 1: they arise, when they go. And if you accept that, paradoxically,
Speaker 1: there's a great deal of freedom because you're saying, Okay,
Speaker 1: I can't control, you know, my thoughts and experiences, so
Speaker 1: I can just kind of let it go anim just
Speaker 1: to competise that. I mean, so when I think about
Speaker 1: some of the the ping pong gang that you do
Speaker 1: in this show, you know which side of the street
Speaker 1: to walk on, the sunny side of the shady side? Uh,
Speaker 1: you know which iPhone or MP three player to buy,
Speaker 1: which shirt to wear to a performance, whatever, But just
Speaker 1: say to take the one about walking down the street
Speaker 1: and whether to go to the sunny side of the
Speaker 1: shady side. So, now being more liberated from your O
Speaker 1: c D or having it subsided so it's no longer
Speaker 1: such a controlling thing. What does that mean when you
Speaker 1: talk about the surrender powerlessness, that you're walking down the street,
Speaker 1: that you feel this consciousness of should I go on
Speaker 1: the other side and back and forth happening, but that
Speaker 1: you just sort of accept that you're going to have
Speaker 1: this feeling in your body, but you'll just stick with
Speaker 1: where you are. So in the show, I talked about
Speaker 1: a lot of these sort of daily O c D things,
Speaker 1: what to wear, wat side of the street to walk down.
Speaker 1: So when I started to get real recovery from most
Speaker 1: c D, those daily smaller forms of O c D,
Speaker 1: those went away entirely, so I don't have that anymore.
Speaker 1: What side of the street to walk down? Initially, though,
Speaker 1: when I started to recover, it was exactly as you described.
Speaker 1: I'm walking down this side of the street, and I'm
Speaker 1: gonna keep walking on this side of the street, even
Speaker 1: though now my mind is telling me I should cross
Speaker 1: to the other side of the street because the other
Speaker 1: side is sunny and I need sunshine. I'm just gonna
Speaker 1: keep walking on the shady side, and I'm going to
Speaker 1: really open up to the discomfort and anxiety. And once
Speaker 1: I did, that. You know a number of times that anxiety,
Speaker 1: uh it just went away. Where it flares up now
Speaker 1: is more in novel decisions, decisions I don't encounter that
Speaker 1: often in bigger ones. So decisions often about career stuff.
Speaker 1: Should I do a tour of the show in this
Speaker 1: city or that city? That sort of thing, and there
Speaker 1: it's the same thing. It's okay, I'm experiencing this anxiety.
Speaker 1: My mind is telling me I have to think about
Speaker 1: this morning. I have to figure out the perfect answer.
Speaker 1: I know rationally, I'm not going to find a perfect answer.
Speaker 1: I know rationally that the more I think about it,
Speaker 1: the more confused I get, the more fearful I'm going
Speaker 1: to get, and the harder it's going to make a decision.
Speaker 1: But but yet, I really do still want to keep
Speaker 1: thinking about it because I don't want to feel this
Speaker 1: discomfort right now. So let me just really try to
Speaker 1: open up the discomfort as best as I can. And
Speaker 1: in a way, it really comes down to how quickly
Speaker 1: am I willing to take the hit, because I'm going
Speaker 1: to You know, when I have anxiety about a decision,
Speaker 1: there's going to be a moment where I'm going to
Speaker 1: have to fully experience that anxiety if I want to
Speaker 1: get past it, and I'd love to say that, you know,
Speaker 1: I just accept and surrender instantly, but I don't. I
Speaker 1: can still I can still go down that rabbit hole
Speaker 1: a little bit. But yeah, to get that freedom is
Speaker 1: it's the same thing as when I was walking down
Speaker 1: the streets. It's just really opening up at a physical
Speaker 1: level experiencing it. And I should be clear, it's not
Speaker 1: necessarily a one time thing. If it's like a big
Speaker 1: decis vision, I might have to do that thirty or
Speaker 1: forty times a day, and it may come up and
Speaker 1: keep popping up for days on end, and it's going
Speaker 1: to be part of my experience, and it's going to
Speaker 1: be unpleasant and it's going to cause a degree of suffering.
Speaker 1: But the more unwilling to accept, the less suffering and
Speaker 1: the more freedom I find. Let's take a break here
Speaker 1: and go to an ad M. You've mentioned how the
Speaker 1: length of this show has been reduced from about you know,
Speaker 1: in two hours to about eighty minutes or so, and
Speaker 1: obviously that involved telling less of the you know, fewer
Speaker 1: anecdotes about your drug experiences. But were there ways in
Speaker 1: which the show evolved as your insights into O c
Speaker 1: D and your condition. Uh changed during the time since
Speaker 1: you started the show. The show certainly evolved a lot,
Speaker 1: but I would say it was less as a result
Speaker 1: of my journey with O City and Psychedelics, because I
Speaker 1: mean that journey wasn't complete in two thousand and twelve
Speaker 1: when I started doing the show, and it's still it's
Speaker 1: ongoing for me as well. But you know, all the
Speaker 1: events I recount, we're finished by about two thousand and ten.
Speaker 1: So really the evolution is more the evolution of me
Speaker 1: as a performer and writer and creator. So when I
Speaker 1: did the show first in Edinburgh in two thousand and
Speaker 1: twelve the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, pretty much nothing could be
Speaker 1: longer than an hour general, I mean, you can, but
Speaker 1: it's very hard to draw audiences. So the show is
Speaker 1: an hour and it got a you know, a strong
Speaker 1: critical response, reviews and people, you know, it got a
Speaker 1: very positive response. But I came away from the festival
Speaker 1: feeling like, ah, there's so much important stuff I'm leaving
Speaker 1: out that I didn't find it totally fulfilling sharing the
Speaker 1: show because I do have this, perhaps some would say,
Speaker 1: an obsession with truth, Like I really I don't embellish
Speaker 1: things in the show. I don't. It's it's all truthful.
Speaker 1: But it felt to me like there were so many
Speaker 1: omissions that I wasn't fully capturing the truth. And so
Speaker 1: after Edinburgh, I was like, you know, yeah, I think
Speaker 1: I've told this story and I'm done with it. And
Speaker 1: I started working on other projects, but I kept wanting
Speaker 1: to come back to the show. I kept wanting to
Speaker 1: come back to this story. So then I decided, you
Speaker 1: know what, forget any time limits. Why don't you just
Speaker 1: figure out how to tell the story and the way
Speaker 1: that feels most truthful to you, and length be damned.
Speaker 1: And so I started doing that and it cut longer
Speaker 1: and longer, and so when I was doing the New
Speaker 1: York Fringe Festival in two thousand and fourteen, it was
Speaker 1: over two hours long, and and it was just me
Speaker 1: sitting at a desk, because I remember, I had no
Speaker 1: acting experience, I had no background in the theater, so
Speaker 1: for me, it was really about the story, and it
Speaker 1: was me sitting at a desk telling the story. And
Speaker 1: it's still got a very strong reception um but there
Speaker 1: was a feeling that there was a feeling that it
Speaker 1: still hadn't assumed its final form, and so then I
Speaker 1: began working with a director for the first time who
Speaker 1: I still work with. His name is Jonathan Libman. Really
Speaker 1: just brilliant, brilliant theater director, and he introduced me to
Speaker 1: the language of theater, by which I mean he would
Speaker 1: say things like, well, instead of spending four minutes telling
Speaker 1: this story, you can act it out in twenty five
Speaker 1: seconds if you get up from behind your desk and
Speaker 1: walk over here, and we change the lights and you
Speaker 1: know that, that sort of thing. So that was and
Speaker 1: has been a very fruitful relationship where we've now brought
Speaker 1: to the show gradually more of these theatrical elements. But
Speaker 1: shortening the show has come down to, yes, cutting recounting
Speaker 1: some of the drug experiences and some other experiences, but
Speaker 1: also in some ways substituting um minutes of words with
Speaker 1: a few seconds of gesture or lighting or movement, and
Speaker 1: that's that's allowed the show to assume it's current form.
Speaker 1: I'm curious to other drugs, I mean not psychedelic drugs,
Speaker 1: but things like cannabis or alcohol. You use those and
Speaker 1: do they play into your experience of O C D
Speaker 1: in anyway? I don't use alcohol. I have nothing against alcohol,
Speaker 1: it's just I don't like I don't like alcohol hangovers.
Speaker 1: So that's that's uh, not something I use. I do
Speaker 1: not work with alcohol. I'm not working without. Uh. Cannabis. Yeah,
Speaker 1: cannabis can be a double edged sword. Um, I do
Speaker 1: I like cannabis. I'd say I generally smoke cannabis probably
Speaker 1: like once a week on average. I find it can
Speaker 1: be helpful creatively. It can give me insight and perspective
Speaker 1: that's different from my sober mind, and that can help
Speaker 1: creatively in terms of, you know, my work shows, uh,
Speaker 1: comedy writing, but also in terms of like looking at
Speaker 1: relationships in my life in a different light, where cannabis
Speaker 1: can be quite helpful for me at least it can
Speaker 1: promote empathy. It can promote me really kind of seeing, Oh,
Speaker 1: I didn't realize, but this person is doing this because
Speaker 1: it's probably because they have this trauma and I didn't
Speaker 1: connect the dots. And sometimes it's like I might not
Speaker 1: even be right about my interpretation, but the interpretation itself
Speaker 1: leads to more compassion and that that helps UM open
Speaker 1: things up in how I'm going to respond to that relationship.
Speaker 1: On the other hand, I will say cannabis sometimes I
Speaker 1: have found, you know, I tend to like kind of
Speaker 1: speedy sativas, and that can lead to more racing thoughts
Speaker 1: and more so there have been times where I've had,
Speaker 1: like I found myself kind of yeah, starting to obsess
Speaker 1: on cannabis in a way where I feel like the
Speaker 1: cannabis is um is potentiating the obsession was ayahuasca. Your
Speaker 1: experience in ayahuasca is something distinctive, um in any way
Speaker 1: from all the other ones, well, the other tecal experiences.
Speaker 1: I'd say it's a matter of degree and that we
Speaker 1: talked about this sort of and it sounds like for
Speaker 1: you as well. With psilocybin containing mushrooms, so much of
Speaker 1: it is this very just deep, concrete physical experience, and
Speaker 1: ayahuasca I find even more so a physical experience for me.
Speaker 1: So I really I don't get like immersive visions on ayahuasca.
Speaker 1: I don't get much insight. And maybe that's because I've
Speaker 1: already done so many psychedelics. Maybe I've kind of plucked
Speaker 1: the low hanging insight fruit from the psychedelic tree already.
Speaker 1: But the physical experience of ayahuasca it really really just
Speaker 1: grounding me and my grounding me and my body is um.
Speaker 1: I find it has that effect more so than any
Speaker 1: other psychedelic So I did ayahuasca a bunch of New
Speaker 1: York and then I went down to Peru. And in
Speaker 1: Peru I did I think, I did tense ceremonies in
Speaker 1: sixteen nights, which I don't know if I necessarily recommend it,
Speaker 1: but it was One effect of this is I discovered
Speaker 1: I had feet. I mean, I knew intellectually I had feet,
Speaker 1: but I had never really had a deep awareness of
Speaker 1: the sensations coming from my feet until I think it
Speaker 1: was after my a thiahuasca ceremony and I'm walking into
Speaker 1: like the you know, dining hall at this retreat center.
Speaker 1: Maybe it was the loca, the ceremonial space, but I
Speaker 1: was walking into one a space that had these very
Speaker 1: rough hewn wood playing floors, and I became acutely aware
Speaker 1: of the you know, minute gradations of pressure and temperature
Speaker 1: on my feet. And it sounds trivial, but that has
Speaker 1: been a significant thing for me that I stayed with me.
Speaker 1: That was four years ago, five years ago, and I
Speaker 1: still have the sort of baseline awareness of the sensations
Speaker 1: in my feet. That is quite literally grounding for me.
Speaker 1: And it's those sort of experiences that I've had on
Speaker 1: ayahuasca that I have not had on any other Psychedelogyally,
Speaker 1: you're reminding me on my very first M d M
Speaker 1: A experience, which was in my early thirties, and one
Speaker 1: of the things I remember was all of a sudden
Speaker 1: being conscious how much I carried most of my energy
Speaker 1: and my my body consciousness in my torso and how
Speaker 1: much they were not. I did not feel grounded and
Speaker 1: under the under the n d M A experience, I
Speaker 1: felt myself becoming more ground in my feet, hitting you know,
Speaker 1: on the ground, and it felt like a better place
Speaker 1: to be. But it was, I say, the first time
Speaker 1: I've had that consciousness. And you know, I am able
Speaker 1: to recome back at certain points of that consciousness, which
Speaker 1: I think has been has been helpful. But you know,
Speaker 1: let me, let me go back to me again. So
Speaker 1: in these gatherings, right, so you're you're entering in this world,
Speaker 1: I mean, you're going to obsessive compulsive anonymous, right, you're
Speaker 1: presumably talking about this. I mean, I imagine because of
Speaker 1: your work, you're being invited to conferences about obsessive compulsioness
Speaker 1: you're meeting large numbers of people who experience and live
Speaker 1: with O c D. I'm wondering about what's the reaction
Speaker 1: to them, um when they hear about your experience, and
Speaker 1: because I mean it must be in some respects in
Speaker 1: the way you're sort of almost spreading the word about
Speaker 1: a cure. And I'm wondering also not what is it now,
Speaker 1: but also how is it evolved? American I will imagine
Speaker 1: ten years ago with the whole notion of having a
Speaker 1: mushroom cure for O c D sounded way out there,
Speaker 1: as opposed to now when the magic of psychedelics and
Speaker 1: the psychedelic renaissance is all in the news, that there's
Speaker 1: a different reaction. But just describe a bit some of
Speaker 1: the response if you've gotten from people living with o
Speaker 1: c D, whether it's into twelve step programs or elsewhere.
Speaker 1: I have not talked about this explicitly in twelve step
Speaker 1: meetings because in the twelve step framework, one of the
Speaker 1: guidelines is you don't talk about outside treatment, so people
Speaker 1: won't talk about S s R. Eyes. You know, it's
Speaker 1: really focused on this twelve step approach. But certainly i've
Speaker 1: spoken you know, widely conferences and podcasts like this, and yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, I think there's a selection bias and that
Speaker 1: the people who reach out to me are people who
Speaker 1: are open to this. I'm sure there are people who
Speaker 1: are not open to this and may maybe put off
Speaker 1: by the idea of using psychedelics for o c D.
Speaker 1: But I get a lot of, you know, emails and
Speaker 1: messages on social media from people who are essentially saying, yeah,
Speaker 1: I want to do what you did, you know, what
Speaker 1: what do you suggest? And the fact that I get
Speaker 1: so many people reaching out to me, I think reflects
Speaker 1: the fact that there are are so many people out
Speaker 1: there with o c D who are just not being
Speaker 1: sufficiently helped with with standard treatments. And this is not
Speaker 1: to take anything away from you know, it's a lot
Speaker 1: of very committed, very compassionate, very talented o c D
Speaker 1: therapists out there who are doing great work. And again,
Speaker 1: therapy can be life changing for some people, and for
Speaker 1: that matter, S s s R I S can be life
Speaker 1: changing for some people, but for many people, the existing
Speaker 1: remedies just aren't aren't enough. And that's one of the
Speaker 1: things that I find that really upsets me about the
Speaker 1: fact that this Morano study was published in The study
Speaker 1: I read of psilocybro procy was published in December two
Speaker 1: thousand and six. We're sixteen years almost sixteen years later,
Speaker 1: and there hasn't been a single follow up study published,
Speaker 1: though again that will change very soon, thankfully. But meanwhile,
Speaker 1: two percent of the population is estimated to suffer from
Speaker 1: o c D. People with o c D have ten
Speaker 1: times the suicide rate of the general population. Like this
Speaker 1: is a huge societal, worldwide problem, and yet my mind,
Speaker 1: the most promising new treatment that's come along in decades,
Speaker 1: maybe ever, there's been almost no investigation of it. Uh,
Speaker 1: though thankfully that is changing. So that's all to say
Speaker 1: that the reactions I've gotten are generally from people who
Speaker 1: are desperate and because what they've tried hasn't helped during
Speaker 1: the same shoes I was in and and are looking
Speaker 1: for for guidance and working with psychedelics for their own healing. Well,
Speaker 1: hopefully we'll see it opening up of funding from the
Speaker 1: federal government right thing. For a long time, they're only
Speaker 1: willing to provide money for knamine research dealing with O
Speaker 1: c D or addictionary conditions like that, And hopefully that's
Speaker 1: beginning to change because of the changes at the leadership.
Speaker 1: But you know, a national steit of health nationally seen
Speaker 1: of drug abuse, and obviously there's the private money um
Speaker 1: coming into this at this time, so you know, we
Speaker 1: can hope for some sort of more significant breakthrough. But
Speaker 1: I'm mostly curious and do you consider O c D
Speaker 1: a form of addiction? Yes, yes, I do. The hesitation
Speaker 1: of my original yes was because I have sometimes gotten
Speaker 1: a little bit of pushback on when I say, oh,
Speaker 1: CD is an addiction, as people who take issue with
Speaker 1: that because to them, addiction has a negative connotation, and
Speaker 1: I get that does have a negative connotation, but I
Speaker 1: don't mean it that way at all. I would define
Speaker 1: an addiction broadly speaking, as a strategy to avoid or
Speaker 1: eliminate pain that works in the very short term, but
Speaker 1: then creates more pain. And at the beginning of our
Speaker 1: conversation I talked about o c D in that context.
Speaker 1: But certainly, let's look at alcohol. An alcoholic when they drink,
Speaker 1: they often will feel a little bit better, but then
Speaker 1: they feel worse when it wears off, and they feel
Speaker 1: worse because the consequences of their drinking are making their life,
Speaker 1: you know, unsustainable, so what do they do? They drink
Speaker 1: more So addictions are and I also said earlier I
Speaker 1: don't like the term mental illness. In some ways, I
Speaker 1: sometimes wonder if the model of addiction is not the
Speaker 1: best way to describe all of what we call mental illnesses,
Speaker 1: if they're not all at some at some level, at
Speaker 1: some deep levels, some sort of strategy to help us
Speaker 1: feel better that ultimately makes us feel worse, which in
Speaker 1: turn drives more of that that that behavior. So in
Speaker 1: that sense, I absolutely do think viewing o c D
Speaker 1: as an addiction is a helpful way to look at it.
Speaker 1: I do see a lot of people with o c
Speaker 1: D who try to fix themselves, and I think this
Speaker 1: is because to really get freedom from o c D
Speaker 1: requires you feeling the feelings you don't want to feel,
Speaker 1: and that's uncomfortable. So that's what I was trying to do.
Speaker 1: And if there are people with o c D listening
Speaker 1: to this, and I imagine there are listen, I could
Speaker 1: be wrong. But what I can say, and I think
Speaker 1: I said this at the beginning, is I don't know
Speaker 1: anyone with o c D who has gotten better on
Speaker 1: their own. This is a condition that if you have real,
Speaker 1: full blown o c D. I believe that there is
Speaker 1: an element of powerlessness and help and support from outside
Speaker 1: your own brain is essential, and I think calling it
Speaker 1: an addiction can drive that point home in a way
Speaker 1: that can hopefully be helpful for some people to hear.
Speaker 1: I've heard you make the point that comparing mental illness
Speaker 1: to physical illness or for example, O c D two
Speaker 1: diabetes is just another illness. On the one hand, it's
Speaker 1: beneficial in that it can be destigmatizing, but on the
Speaker 1: other hand, it ignores the existential aspect of struggling with
Speaker 1: addiction or O c D or things like this. Yeah,
Speaker 1: that's part of my that's part of my concern with
Speaker 1: the term mental illness. You some that are perfectly is Yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't mental illness. I like the fact that it's saying, Okay,
Speaker 1: this is something that you didn't choose any more than
Speaker 1: you chose, you know, to to have cancer. It's not
Speaker 1: something that you know, you should be blamed for. But
Speaker 1: I don't like the fact that, well, you know that
Speaker 1: it's really been the drug companies that have propagated this
Speaker 1: idea that oh, this is, you know, the same way
Speaker 1: a diabetic takes insulince. Some with depression has low serotonin
Speaker 1: and needs to take an s s R I. First
Speaker 1: of all, at a neurochemical level, that's not true. We
Speaker 1: found that some people with depression seem to have lower
Speaker 1: than average serotonin, some people seem to have higher than
Speaker 1: average serotonin. There's never been a clear correlation found with
Speaker 1: any mental illness and specific neurochemical state, though there are
Speaker 1: neuro anatomical differences, but whether those are a result or
Speaker 1: cause as questionable. So that's one thing. But yeah, so
Speaker 1: much of what we now look at mental illness in
Speaker 1: other cultures and other times would have been seen as
Speaker 1: a spiritual malady or spiritual challenge. And I think there
Speaker 1: can be something beautiful u in looking at it that way,
Speaker 1: and something empowering, which is that, no, this isn't just
Speaker 1: some chemicals in your brain going hey wire to me there.
Speaker 1: I believe there is a narrative around this. There is
Speaker 1: a story around this, There is a reason, which again
Speaker 1: is not to say there's blame, it's not to say
Speaker 1: you're at fault, but that maybe this is one way
Speaker 1: to put it. I think a diabetic um you know
Speaker 1: who who's managing diabetes. I don't know if they're going
Speaker 1: to have a spiritual transformation from that. I don't know
Speaker 1: if they're going to have an existential epiphany, but I
Speaker 1: think these mental illnesses do have that potential. There is
Speaker 1: an opera tunity in mental illness for growth for transformation
Speaker 1: that I don't think exists with say, diabetes, and I
Speaker 1: don't want to ignore that. M hm. So I Adam,
Speaker 1: in addition to doing this show off and on for
Speaker 1: many years now, you're also started a new show called
Speaker 1: Adam Strauss Is Not Unhappy by a sort of unscripted commentation.
Speaker 1: In fact, I'm wondering the last time you and I
Speaker 1: crawls past, I think was in December and New York
Speaker 1: at the Horizons conference. And then a friend of our,
Speaker 1: Sarah Rose cis guy, has this comedy show called drug
Speaker 1: Test she puts on downtown, and if I recall correctly,
Speaker 1: maybe you did a little element of that there. But
Speaker 1: what can you tell us about this new show, why
Speaker 1: you're doing it, what it's about, what you're trying to accomplish. Yeah,
Speaker 1: So I'm doing The Mushroom Care every Friday at the
Speaker 1: March Theater in Berkeley, and I'm doing Adam stress Is
Speaker 1: Not Unhappy every Saturday, and the reason I structured it
Speaker 1: that way is I want people to come to The
Speaker 1: Mushroom Cure who will and want to hopefully come to
Speaker 1: Adam Stress is not unhappy because it's otherwise a difficult
Speaker 1: show to market because it is unscripted, and in some
Speaker 1: way I do have a lot of freedom from o
Speaker 1: c D. But I'm still someone who i'd say, perhaps
Speaker 1: more than the average person like certainty, and in a
Speaker 1: way doing an unscripted show is it's an odd choice
Speaker 1: because there's radical uncertainty. I'm getting on stage not really
Speaker 1: knowing what I'm going to say or how it's going
Speaker 1: to go. I mean, there's an element of improvisation on
Speaker 1: The Mushroom Cure, but it's it's mostly scripted, and it's
Speaker 1: this odd thing where I think part of my own
Speaker 1: path to freedom has been doing the things that feel
Speaker 1: the scariest. They take me the first furthest outside of
Speaker 1: my comfort zone, and certainly psychedelics do that. I mean,
Speaker 1: that's part of why I think psychedelics do have unique
Speaker 1: promise for o c D is and not micro dosing
Speaker 1: for me. I think, like do high doses probably have
Speaker 1: unique promise for O c D because they are in
Speaker 1: exposure for the root fear that I think underlies all
Speaker 1: forms of O c D, which is loss of control
Speaker 1: if you take a large dose of mushrooms. Really, what
Speaker 1: you're saying is, I'm choosing to let go of control.
Speaker 1: I'm choosing to do the thing that my O c
Speaker 1: D least wants me to do. And this Adam stress
Speaker 1: is not unhappy show is really me doing that on stage,
Speaker 1: Me going up and saying, Okay, a big part of
Speaker 1: me wants to have perfect control, but another part of
Speaker 1: me wants more freedom. So I'm going to go up
Speaker 1: and see what happens when I just relinquished control to
Speaker 1: an extent. That's very unusual I think in any sort
Speaker 1: of live performance. And it's been um At times, it's
Speaker 1: been pretty magical, you know. I've I've found moments and
Speaker 1: experiences and shared things on stage that I never would
Speaker 1: have scripted that I've been I think a lot better
Speaker 1: than what I could have come up with. At times,
Speaker 1: it's felt pretty scary, uh, being up are and not
Speaker 1: quite knowing where I'm going. But there's some part of
Speaker 1: me that feels this real pull towards these putting myself
Speaker 1: in these situations that forced me to let go. That
Speaker 1: forced me that that if I try to hold on tightly,
Speaker 1: it's it's it's not gonna work. And I would apply
Speaker 1: that to psychedelics because certainly I had trips where I
Speaker 1: tried to control and you know, I got I got
Speaker 1: my ass kicked. Essentially, I had things got really scary,
Speaker 1: and I learned with psychedelics that Okay, when things are
Speaker 1: really really intent, when they're really really overwhelming, it's the
Speaker 1: way is not to hold on tighter. The way is
Speaker 1: to let go more and listen. It's very easy for
Speaker 1: me to say this with you right now on this
Speaker 1: podcast sober. When I'm in that psychedelic space, it's still
Speaker 1: a scary choice, and it's not when I always make
Speaker 1: but I am drawn to that choice because I feel
Speaker 1: like there's there's that's the way freedom lies, and that's
Speaker 1: that's what I'm going for in this show. Having said that,
Speaker 1: I also am it is a show. It's not about,
Speaker 1: you know, my own therapi, So certainly the agenda is
Speaker 1: also to entertain people and connect with them at a
Speaker 1: deep level and make them laugh and make them think
Speaker 1: and make them feel and uh yeah, it's it's something
Speaker 1: I've very much enjoyed doing. And what about are there
Speaker 1: other shows out there that get into Remember one time
Speaker 1: being at one of the MAPS big conferences, and I
Speaker 1: think they had a whole series of comedians going up
Speaker 1: there doing some psycholics relevant. Ye right, some of them
Speaker 1: are actually are pretty good. But are there any other
Speaker 1: standout comics doing this kind of work, doing about you know,
Speaker 1: ripping about psychedelics of their own experiences or things like that.
Speaker 1: Let me be very clear here, Ethan, no no one
Speaker 1: else doing this is any good. No one should watch
Speaker 1: anyone else. They all say that they're setting me up. No, yeah,
Speaker 1: there are. It's you know when I when I was
Speaker 1: talking about this stuff in two thousand and twelve, there
Speaker 1: really was no one else. Now there's a handful of people.
Speaker 1: I'm sure it'll be increasing as more and more people
Speaker 1: have psycholic experience. But you know, some of my favorites
Speaker 1: Duncan Trustle, who doesn't do much live performance now but
Speaker 1: is really brilliant. I mean they showed the Midnight Gospel,
Speaker 1: which is not uh not overtly psychedelic, but it's just
Speaker 1: very psychedelic in tone. I mean, Duncan is I think
Speaker 1: it's I consider Duncan a genius in that he's just
Speaker 1: pushing boundaries of the forum and someone who the psychedelic
Speaker 1: experience has I think been transformative and informative his work.
Speaker 1: So he was at that that maps Comedy Bank. But
Speaker 1: I think referring to in two thousand seventeen, it was
Speaker 1: the lineup was him, me Shane Moss, who is also great.
Speaker 1: He has a show called A Good Trip, which is
Speaker 1: also great. So he's wonderful. Uh just yeah, funny and sightful, vulnerable,
Speaker 1: all the stuff. I love. Sarah Rosuskin. She has not
Speaker 1: a show like a solo show, but she does this
Speaker 1: thing drug Test in New York, which always is great. Um.
Speaker 1: And I'm sure there's more people out there who I'm
Speaker 1: not aware of. So I think it's clear that psychedelics
Speaker 1: are rapidly becoming a bigger part of the cultural consciousness.
Speaker 1: And I'm sure that's going to translate to say about
Speaker 1: you and the Mushroom Cure, is that not only are
Speaker 1: you doing pretty comedy like well the others, but your
Speaker 1: thing is simultaneously dramatic and touching and proving to be
Speaker 1: therapeutic for people who watch it and ultimately, you know,
Speaker 1: come to some greater insight about what's going on their
Speaker 1: own lives or people around them, or how they might
Speaker 1: find their own cure. So with all that in mind,
Speaker 1: I want to thank you for joining me on Psychoactive
Speaker 1: and I look forward to crossing paths hopefully soon, and
Speaker 1: best of luck with both you know, Mushroom Cure as
Speaker 1: well as with the new show. I hope it all
Speaker 1: works out really well. Thanks so much, Ethan. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: really enjoyed chatting with you. If you're enjoying Psychoactive, please
Speaker 1: tell your friends about it, or you can write us
Speaker 1: a review at Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
Speaker 1: We love to hear from our listeners. If you'd like
Speaker 1: to share your own stories comes to ideas, then leave
Speaker 1: us a message at one eight three three seven seven
Speaker 1: nine sixty that's eight three three psycho zero, or you
Speaker 1: can email us at Psychoactive at protozoa dot com, or
Speaker 1: find me on Twitter at Ethan Nadelman. You can also
Speaker 1: find contact information in our show notes. Psychoactive is a
Speaker 1: production of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. It's hosted
Speaker 1: by me Ethan Naedelman. It's produced by Noam Osband and
Speaker 1: Josh Stain. The Executive producers are Dylan Golden, Ari Handel,
Speaker 1: Elizabeth Geesus and Darren Aronofsky from Protozoa Pictures, Alex Williams
Speaker 1: and Matt Frederick from My Heart Radio, and me Ethan Naedelman.
Speaker 1: Our music is by Ari Blucien and a special thanks
Speaker 1: to Ab Brio, s f Bianca Grimshaw and Robert bb.
Speaker 1: Next week I'll be talking with David Simon, co creator
Speaker 1: of The Wire, who has a new series, We Own
Speaker 1: This City on HBO. He describes it as a sort
Speaker 1: of coda to The Wire. When I was covering the
Speaker 1: department in the late eighties, you know, into the nineties,
Speaker 1: it's not like every cop was great. You know, there
Speaker 1: were a lot of guys who were humps and they
Speaker 1: you know, they couldn't make a case save their lives.
Speaker 1: But they were usually in squads with one or two
Speaker 1: guys who knew how to get a case through the courthouse.
Speaker 1: They had the skill set. I mean, you need to
Speaker 1: know how to work informants and not be worked by informants.
Speaker 1: You need to know how to testify in court without
Speaker 1: purguring yourself. You need to know how to write a
Speaker 1: search and seizure warrnt. You need to know how to
Speaker 1: use various forensic tools that that that don't have any
Speaker 1: relation to the drug war, that are basically skill sets
Speaker 1: that don't have anything to do with drug prohibition. And
Speaker 1: those things died. They died on the vine that the
Speaker 1: drug war taught everybody how to not do police working
Speaker 1: made for stupid generations of cops. And then those generations,
Speaker 1: those those guys are now the colonels and the majors.
Speaker 1: They're teaching the lieutenants the wrong metrics, and the lieutenants
Speaker 1: are teaching the guys on the street the wrong metrics.
Speaker 1: And the only thing that it cost us was police
Speaker 1: work in America. Subscribe to Cycoactive now, see it, don't
Speaker 1: miss it.