Adam Strauss on Psychedelics, Theater & Curing OCD

Adam Strauss is an actor and comedian who created a play, The Mushroom Cure, about his own struggles with OCD (obsessive compulsive disorder) and his attempts to cure, or at least ameliorate the symptoms, with psychedelics. Critics have described his show as “a hilarious ride through OCD,” “a fabulous, perceptive trip,” and “hugely intelligent and incredibly engaging.” Adam and I discussed his life with OCD, how OCD compares to other addictions and forms of mental illness, how taking psilocybin mushrooms helped and whether other psychedelics might have as well, why he went back to a 12-step program - OC Anonymous - after finding some success with psilocybin, and why calling 911 while under the influence of mushrooms to discuss an existential experience is rarely a good idea.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Hi, I'm Ethan Edelman, and this is Psychoactive, a production
of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. Psychoactive is the
show where we talk about all things drugs. But any
of views expressed here do not represent those of I
Heart Media, Protozoa Pictures, or their executives and employees. Indeed,

(00:23):
as an inveterate contrarian, I can tell you they may
not even represent my own. And nothing contained in this
show should be used his medical advice or encouragement to
use any type of drug. Hello, Psychoactive listeners. Today, I'm

(00:46):
talking with a fellow I've known for quite a number
of years. His name is Adam Strauss, and he is
a actor and a stand up comic, and he has
this show that he's put on called The Mushroom Cure,
which I've seen. I saw it a few years ago.
It's an amazing show about basically trying to treat his

(01:10):
own o c D obsessive compulsive disorder with psychedelics, in
particular psilocybic mushrooms. Now, I mean this show isn't just
some little thing. I mean, I mean Adam has performed
this show in the United Kingdom and in the US.
It's gotten played at festivals, It's played in Edinburgh, has
played off Broadway in New York, it's played at the

(01:30):
Marsh Theater in Berkeley. It's gotten fantastic reviews across the board.
I mean, it's been called a miracle of a show
and a must see, a hilarious rithe rose c D,
a fabulous, perceptive trip, usually intelligent, outstanding revelation. And Adam
has been described as an extremely talented comedian and tour
to force. So it's just a real pleasure, Adam to
have you on Psychoactive. Thanks for having me Ethan, and

(01:54):
thanks for that intro. I feel like we should end
the podcast right now because I'm not gonna be able
to top that. I should just quote on a high note,
no pun intended. Thanks thanks for having me on this
on your podcast. I've always enjoyed our unrecorded talk, so
looking forward to this one as well. Yeah. Well, and
I should actually just say to the audience, there's this
recording that plays before each show that says, you know

(02:17):
nothing you hear should be taken to be encouraging to
use drugs, and you know here because we're gonna be
talking about drugs and mental illness and comedy. I just
want to apologize to some listeners in advance if we
sound irreverence, either Adam or me, because I'll get into
the comedic mode with him. Perhaps. Um, it's not meant
to be disrespectful, it's not meant to be insensitive. So

(02:40):
but it is meant to hopefully shed light on O
c D and the potential of psychedelics and also to
really learn about Adams story here. So please forgive both
him and me if something hits you wrong. But I
do want to start off by offering, I don't know,
have you ever had that issue where people got upset
by what you were doing, um with your comedy and
O c D. You know, I would say not people

(03:02):
who have actually seen the show, but I but there
have been there has sometimes been pushed back in general,
I would say more from the people who feel that
psychedelics have a special, uh reverential place in the in
the pharmacopeia, which I don't actually disagree with. I do

(03:23):
feel like they're unique compounds and and have a unique role,
and that the idea of of bringing humor to them
is in some way inherently disrespectful. But yeah, that's something
I pushed back strongly on, partially because I think, well,
my own psychedelic experiences, humor and laughter is such a

(03:43):
central part of them, even just to be very specific,
I mean the way I've laughed mushrooms particularly, and and
Sasha Shulgin talks about INTI called this trip to mean laugh.
It does seem to be a fairly intimate um and
I think personally a non trivial connection between psychedelic and laughter.
To me, one of the one of the many powerful

(04:03):
things about laughter is there something humbling about it. When
you're laughing, you're basically there's an element of surprise, something
you didn't see coming. And I don't think it's too
far a reach to say that there is. In the
best jokes, there's sort of a mind expanding element where
you see a possibility or a connection that you didn't
previously see. And it's that that snap moment of recognition

(04:26):
and connection that elicits the laugh. And that to me
also describes a lot of the psychedelic experiences, is that
you know, with a joke, you have all the components
there right, You're not necessarily being exposed to anything totally
novel in terms of I'm trying to think of a
classic joke, you know, a joke, let's say, a cliche

(04:47):
joke about you know, airplane food sucking. So you you
know the concept of airplanes, you know the concept of food,
but somehow it's presented in a way where you're seeing
something new that you hadn't seen before. And so much
of the psychedel experience for me is often that it's okay,
I had all the pieces, but they're coming together in
a way that I had never seen before, and that

(05:09):
can be revelatory. And I think there can be a
small revelation in a joke, in a punchline before we
get into you know, how you conceive the play and
how it's evolved. I'm curious instorms of your own personal life.
I mean, at what age do you do your parents
realize that you have this condition, and what was it

(05:29):
like either growing up with it or whatever age it
really became a you know, significant issue in your life.
It's interesting because it seems like people with O c
D fall into one of two camps. Some people will say, yep,
I've had this from my early memories. I was born
with O c D. But for many people there are
clear precursors, meaning anxiety, often perfectionism, things like that that

(05:53):
were problematic for them, but they didn't develop clear cut
O c D until they had a specific inciting incident,
a trauma essentially, And I fell into that ladder camp.
I was from a very very early age. You know,
a lot of really really intense emotional volatility. I would
get into these huge fights with my mom. I my

(06:14):
emotions were out of control and I didn't know how
to control them. And I saw therapist from an early age,
and to me, one of the great shortcomings of traditional
Western psychotherapy is it's really a mind game. It's a
brain trying to help another brain, by which I mean
I would see these therapists from an early age and
they would would discuss, you know, why would I get
so upset, Why would I get so angry? Why would

(06:35):
I get so out of control? And I would think
about it and I would talk about it. No one
ever actually told me, you know, what's going on in
your body, what's happening at a at a visceral level.
When a therapist would ask me how I was feeling,
I would think about it. I wouldn't actually tune in
to my physical sensations, and that's where psychedelics are instrumental.
But I don't want to get too far ahead of

(06:55):
my story. So yeah, really really intense UM just overpowering anxiety,
fear a lot of the time for a very early age,
no obvious reason, no obvious trauma. Grew up in a loving,
supportive household, but that was just there from the beginning,
and and really I didn't have any tools um to

(07:17):
to work with it. And so it was it defined
my life in a lot of ways, just this this
sort of omni present, not quite on the present it was.
I wasn't always anxious, but a lot of the time
there was yet just this overpowering fear, and nothing really helped.
Just to give a sense of the the scope of

(07:38):
my challenges, I was hospitalized twice, both at age eighteen.
That was when I had UM. My first girlfriend dumped me,
and you know, I was admitted to the hospital ostensibly
for suicidality, but I wasn't suicidal. I just couldn't handle
how I was feeling, and I didn't know what to do.
I just couldn't almost literally, I couldn't be in my

(08:00):
own skin. It was just too agonizing and and we're
you getting all sorts of diagnoses and being prescribed al
storts of pharmaceuticals as an adolescent. So I'm forty seven,
so you know, the advent of prozac. I think that
came out in night. I feel like if I was
ten years younger, I probably would have been prescribed a

(08:20):
lot of these psychotropic medications, but it wasn't particularly common.
Having said that I was, I was prescribed some at ages.
I think fifteen or sixteen, I was prescribed antidepressant to
try cyclic antidepressant I don't remember the name, but one
of the earlier antidepressants before S. S. R. Eyes. And
then at eighteen I was prescribed prozac. Um was on

(08:41):
it for about a month and had a bad reaction
and got off. And then beginning at nineteen or so,
I was on Paxel and that began my my long
term relationship with S. S. R. Eyes. But staying with
the timeline, so diagnoses, you know, generally the diag gnosis
was depression, but that was just sort of a catch

(09:02):
all diagnosis. One of the challenges with o c D
is even among therapists UM it's often misdiagnosed or underdiagnosed
because certainly some people with those c D have the
classic you know, contamination fear, handwashing or checking the stove,
and I think most therapists will catch that. But there's
so many different forms O c D can assume because

(09:25):
at its root, O c D is basically a strategy,
I would say, unconscious strategy, but a strategy to eliminate
uncertainty because uncertainty makes us anxious, and that can assume
so many different forms. So probably the the most appropriate
diagnosis when I was growing up would have been something
like generalized anxiety disorder. But what the fund does that mean?

(09:48):
I mean, it's a lot of these diagnoses. I've had
a lot of critiques of the sort of the Western
psychotherapeutic model, and one of them is this idea that
there is these discrete diagnostic categories that have like real
predictive or or therapeutic value, and I just I think
in many cases that's not true. So so yeah, short
short answer, capsule answer was, I was diagnosed with depression,

(10:09):
but I certainly was not depressed. For me, it was
really about fear, just this deep fear and uh yeah,
and the s R I started at age eighteen. By
nineteen I was on Paxxel, and I was on pack
Sel for many years. Then I switched over to Lexa
pro Um, and I tried a number of other S s
s R I S. I want to be careful here.

(10:29):
The data on S s r I S is certainly
for some people they are very, very helpful, and I
always tell people if S s r I S are
working for you, use them. But for many people with
O c D, the best data and there's not great
data because there's no real incentive for pharmaceutical companies to
do long term studies of S s s r I S.
You just need to do an eight week trial to

(10:51):
get FDA approval. Multiple a week trials, But the point is,
you know, there's no there's no financial benefit for people
to do long term studies financed by the drug. So
there haven't been that many, but the ones that there
have been. Some public health studies show that in general,
about half of people with O c D just don't
respond to S s r S, and the half who

(11:12):
do respond typically see only about a reduction and symptoms.
So for the vast majority of people with O c D,
S s r I don't work, or they give at
best a moderate degree of relief, and that was that
was my story. You know, maybe they helped a little bit,
lowering some anxiety, but I was still sick in a word,

(11:33):
and getting sicker. And that is also characteristic of o
c D, as it does tend to be a progressive
condition in the sense of um well, they put it
this way. I've never met someone with o c D
who has had a spontaneous remission, with the exception of it.
Seems like sometimes children with o c D they kind

(11:55):
of just grow out of it. But I've never met
an adult who said, yeah, you know, I had bad
o c D and then it just kind of got better.
On the contrary, everyone i've met, if you're not treating it,
if you're not working with it, um And I used
that that was a preposition with intentionally working with because
I think we can get into this. A lot of

(12:16):
my path towards freedom has been not trying to fight
the o c D, not trying to beat the o
c D, but working with it. But if you're not,
if you're not doing things actively to address the o
c D, it I think pretty much invariably will just
take up more and more of your life. And that
was that was my story even though I was doing things,
I was on SS rise, I was in therapy, but

(12:38):
it just wasn't UM wasn't that effective. And and sorry,
I I want to clarify just one thing I mentioned.
So I still wouldn't have said I had O c D,
you know, in my twenties, but the general anxiety was
getting worse and worse. And then the O c D
came about when I had UM. Well, in a word, heartbreak,

(13:01):
maybe that's two words, I'm not sure, but the most
significant romantic relationship of my life ended. And I actually
didn't make this connection UM until I started doing the
show The Mushroom Cure and kind of started writing about it.
But in hindsight, it's very clear this relationship ended. And

(13:21):
the simplest way I could put it is there was
this profound heartbreak. There was this profound loss, but I
wasn't able or willing to feel that loss in my body.
I wasn't again, I didn't have the tools to really
feel those feelings. And so what I did is I
really left my body entirely. I went entirely into my head.
I was already very much in my head, but now

(13:42):
in the aftermath of this loss of this relationship. I
really really just just went entirely into my head and
developed this strategy in a sense of logical, but ultimately
i'd say literally insane strategy, which is, well, if I
can figure everything out in my head, if I can
get everything right, if I can always get the right answer,
that my life will be good and I won't have

(14:03):
to feel these feelings again. I wasn't totally conscious of this,
but that's that's the way it uh came out. And
it sounds it sounds like you're describing is as you're
living with this generalized anxiety, depression, heartbreak, and then it
all sort of kind of blossoms or transforms or starts
to manifests o c D. And I'm wondering when it

(14:24):
does manifests o c D do some of the other
symptoms you had before, like, for example, depression or anxiety,
do those subside a bit and get replaced by the
O c D or do they all just become a
great big jumble. How does it all kind of fit
or not fit together or interact? Or is there was
there any silver lining in O c D V city

(14:44):
the experiences you have suffered from before. So I wouldn't
say I was ever depressed. Um. I think of depression
as kind of this you know, retreat, drawn into oneself,
you know, not wanting to get out of bed. And
I had some symptoms secondary to the anxiety. When the
anxiety was really bad, sure I wouldn't want to get
out of bed, but I'd never say I was truly depressed.

(15:06):
Knowing people who really do suffer from clinical depression, it's um,
it's I think a pretty distinct condition. But the anxiety
that really got wrapped up in the O c D,
and in fact, well O c D is considered an
anxiety disorder, and I think that's apt in I look
at O c D at in one sense, as an

(15:27):
attempt to eliminate anxiety that works in the very very
very very short term. So let's take the example of
someone who has contamination fear. They're afraid that they're going
to get AIDS because they touched a subway poll and
they know logically it's not going to happen, but that
fear is there, and so they wash their hands for
the forty time and they feel a little bit of relief,

(15:47):
maybe for ten seconds twenty seconds. Their anxiety goes down
for a little bit, but then it comes back, so
logically they'll do the thing that gave them relief. The
last time they'll watch, they'll wash again. So there is
a payoff sometimes with engaging in O c D, but
it's very short lived, and it actually ultimately increases anxiety
because the harder you try to eliminate this perceived threat,

(16:10):
this fear that you're contaminated. And I don't have that form,
but to use this example, two things happen. One, you're
giving that threat that fear more and more energy, more
and more attention, so it's getting bigger and bigger. The
second thing, though, that happens is you're actually adding a
second source of anxiety, which is real, uh, grounded in
real life, which is all right, you've spent four hours

(16:32):
in the bathroom washing your hands. Well, guess what now
you're you might get fired from your job because you're
not doing your job, or you know, your spouse may
leave you because they can't handle this anymore. So now
there's real things happening in the world as a result
of you trying to eliminate this fear that are actually
creating more fear. And this is the really cruel vicious
cycle of O c D. Well, what are you gonna do? Now?
You're gonna do the thing that sometimes makes you feel

(16:53):
a little bit better, even if it's only for fifteen
or twenty seconds. You're gonna keep washing. And that kind
of comes back to why I would say O c
D tends to be a progressive condition that gets worse
because the more you do O c D, the harder
it is to stop. And so for me, the anxiety
was sort of this initially the fuel for O c D.
But it's sort of like this perpetual motion machine where

(17:15):
the more fuel you give it, the more it creates
further fuel for O c D. So it just it
ramped up the anxiety and yeah, the news just tightened.
So so step into parallel track. Now, so this is
about living with O c D. But you at the
same time you are living, I mean, you're having a life.
I presume you're going to school, you're going to college,
you're getting a job, maybe you're deciding to that, maybe
you're gonna go into comedy. What's that part of your life? Like,

(17:38):
I mean, not not to make them two separate tracks,
but the other parts of your life, And how's that going, Yeah, well,
actually I like looking at as two tracks because that's
what it felt for me. So I did have sort
of this O c D track which was really the
dominant story of my life. But then increasingly UM difficult,
but I was trying to maintain outward appearances and it

(18:03):
was challenging. So yeah, I was, you know, as the
O c D was really flourishing. After this relationship ended,
I was UM. I was a founder of a company,
a startup, which in a way enabled the O c
D because I wasn't reporting to anyone else, so I
could indulge my o c D in a way that

(18:23):
I couldn't have if I had to report too, if
I had a boss or something like that, like I could.
I was going into work every day, but when I
was at my computer, you know, there were days where
I was just I was just obsessing, obsessing, obsessing and
not doing any work. And I could, you know, get
away with it, um, But there was a high cost there.
And socially, you know, I was increasingly isolating, not because

(18:46):
I didn't want to be around people, and we haven't
talked about my specific symptoms, but it was mostly UM
around decision making, you know, making a decision, reversing the decision,
going back and forth and back and forth for hours,
even over very very true your choices, engaging in my obsessions,
figuring things out, obsessing over what MP three player to get,
what shirt to wear, whatever the decision to your was.

(19:09):
And there were hundreds of them a day, so I
couldn't I couldn't figure things out if I was with
other people. So I was increasingly isolating and just going
deeper and deeper into this you know, O c D,
Fantasy Lander, Nightmareland. This is all happening in your late twenties,
early thirties. This was, Yeah, So the O c D
really started taking off when I was twenty nine. At

(19:30):
this point, it was my life was basically going to work,
trying to do some work if I could, coming home
and obsessing and you know, being late to work because
I was obsessing, and maintaining friendships. You know, I wasn't
totally isolated, but but but yeah, less and less, it
really felt like I was, yeah, drifting, drifting away from

(19:51):
the world and drifting deeper and deeper into my own
my own head. And it's sort of like because your
family know your friends or is this sort of they're
kind of aware it, but it's basically between you and
your therapist trying to figure it out. That yeah, yeah,
it was. I really kept people out. People were aware
that I was struggling, and again, this was not a

(20:12):
new thing, So it wasn't new for me to be
in a state of deep distress to the point that
my functioning was, you know, impaired. So friends and family,
you know, that's who I was. That was part of
my unfortunately part of my identity. So it wasn't like
people thought everything was fine with Adam. But this new
wrinkle of O c D was something that I very

(20:35):
much didn't want to let people into because I had
so much shame around it. We'll be talking more after
we hear this ad. Tell me about then, how this

(20:57):
show emerges. And I think the first time you form
the mushroom cure of the show is what about ten
years ago or so? Yeah, you know, having seen it
and you know, I know you I see a live
four years ago in Berkeley. I mean, it's incredibly funny
and touching, and you're obviously a talented comic, you know,
in addition to being a good actor as well. How
did that come about? How did you think to do

(21:19):
it that way? And how does it differ now for
or even a few years ago from what you originally
conceived it as. Yeah, So I never had any ambition
to do a solo show show or to be an actor.
I started doing stand up as the o c D
was really getting worse and worse. Uh. And I actually
look at stand up in some ways as an attempt,

(21:41):
not conscious at the time, but an attempt to to
get love and connection that I was too kind of afraid,
too vulnerable to get in the form of an intimate
relationship because this heartbreak had I don't want to say
cause the o c D but precipitated it. So I
was increasingly isolated, and I was very lonely and in
you know when you tell people you're comedian the last

(22:01):
and say, oh, that's brave. But I think for me,
it took less bravery to get on stage and try
to get laughs from an audience and get love and
connection and approval that way than it would have taken
at that point in my life to be in another
intimate relationship. And so I pretty much just started doing
stand up and the O c D was getting worse
and worse. And I was trying everything. So in addition

(22:24):
to the S s s R S and the therapy, I
did all the alternative and holistic treatments, acupuncture orbs UM,
you know, all this stuff, hypnotism, hypnotherapy. Nothing was helping.
And I stumbled across this study out of the University
of Arizona of psilocybin for O c D. And it
was a very small study. It's only nine subjects and

(22:47):
to date still the only published study of any psychedelic
for O c D, though fortunately there are three or
four new ones and much bigger ones in the works
right now. This is the one by is it is
it Francisco Moreno, Yes, yes, yeah, yeah, Safety, efficacy and
tolerability of psilocybin and nine patients with those c D
as a very long title, you know. And I had
essentially no psychedelic experience. I had tried psychedelics, but they

(23:11):
hadn't worked for me, probably in hindsight, because I was
honest her eyes. So I saw the study. And what's
interesting about the study is it wasn't the sort of
studies they're doing now of like you know, psychedelic assisted psychotherapy.
There wasn't much of a therapy component. They were basically
giving people psilocybin at different doses, and there also wasn't
long term follow up, but the results were very encouraging.

(23:34):
All the subjects had you know, significant remission, some just
for a short period of time, but they were they
were getting results and results that you know, I hadn't
seen with any of the treatments I've found. And so
even though I had very little psychedelic experience, there was
this sense of what what I have to lose by
trying this stuff, so that that set me off on
my quest to cure my O c D with psychedelics.

(23:57):
The period of time I recount in the USh from
cure is two thousand and seven to two thousand and ten,
by which point, you know, I've gotten a lot of healing,
I've gotten a lot of recovery. And there was a
sense of I need to share this story because the
story itself is the most incredible story that's ever happened

(24:19):
to me. I'm not saying the show is incredible the ship.
People may like or not like the show, but the
actual events that unfolded, the coincidences the people I met,
were to me just amazing and inspiring for me, and
I felt incredibly lucky that I'd gone through these experiences,
and suffice to say, you know, it's it wasn't a

(24:41):
smooth journey. I was trying to cure my OCD with psychedelics,
with you know, in a pretty uncontrolled fashion, doing a
lot of different psychedelics that high doses and fairly frequently.
So there were some powering experiences. Yet somehow, in a way,
everything seemed to come together to give me. This is
that psychedelic cliche, but I think it's often an apt

(25:02):
one to give me not what I wanted, but what
I needed. In some way, I felt like I'd really
been given this tremendous gift. And I wanted to share
this story, one because I thought it could help people,
but to just because I was like, this is a
great fucking story. I don't know if I can tell
it well, but I know the story itself is worthy
of being shared. So I started trying to talk about

(25:24):
it in comedy clubs, but it quickly became apparent that
there was just too much narrative here. It's not the
sort of thing where it is you know, the show
is funny, but it's not a punch line every twenty seconds.
So I had no experience with theater. I've never studied acting.
I'd barely even seen plays. But it was obvious that
that would be the correct forum for it, so I um,
I decided to do the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in two

(25:45):
thousand and twelve, and that's where the show had its
premiere and I had I have to ask you about
I think I was listening to you being interviewed on
somebody else's podcast or something. Um uh, and you mentioned
a relationship with Hamilton's Morris, another one of my guests
who was on a few months ago, you know who's
just you know, this wonderful psycholic researcher, and he had
his uh Hamilton's Pharma copea TV show which was broadly watched.

(26:09):
I think you said that he was a comic. Yes,
he we we met, he had he had a sort
of brief involvement in the in the comedy scene, and
that's how we met initially, and he was part of
the He was part of this early story for me.
He was a close and as a close friend and
was someone who um even though he's significantly younger than me,

(26:30):
it was a lot younger then was already I was
gonna say dipping his toe into the psyculic waters. But
more than dipping his toe was clearly you know, fascinated
by psychedelics. You know, had a lot of insight on them,
and um, I just knew a lot more than I did.
So we struck up a close friendship, and part of
that friendship was exploring these compounds and talking about our

(26:50):
experiences and supporting each other in our in our respective
And I'll say, I'm sure it's just a coincidence. But
there's a moment in the play where you're talking about
meeting a friend and he's giving you all this information
about these white powders from China and these other things
you should try in which doses, and the voice you

(27:11):
give your friends sounds remarkably like Hamilton Morris. It's it's
not a coincidence. And I'm okay saying this because I've
asked Hamilton's permission. That was Hamilton's I'm depicting in the show.
So everything in the show is true, Um, even characters names.
But I did change Hamilton's name to Harrison simply because
there's a reference in the show to Hamilton's the musical

(27:32):
and it's not confusing, so I mean, and now it
sort of makes a little bit of sense. He's got
such a dry kind of tone about him. He is
at heart a scientist. You know. He had this TV
show which is a great show and entertaining, and he's
funny and he is entertaining. But the thing that really
inspires him, so far as I can tell, is not
being a public figure, is not being in the lime

(27:52):
night limelight, but being in the lab. His ambition was
to get in there in the lab and ticker with
tinker with these compounds, and learn more about these molecules
and ultimately human consciousness. So uh, my motivation ultimately was
to cure my O c D. But I'd be lying
if I said a big part of it wasn't also
just this deep curiosity about these totally unique mental and

(28:14):
emotional states and and how these compounds interact with the
human nervous system. Uh uh you know you reference in
the play. I think, uh, Sasha Shulgin, you know, and
his various um what is its stages of of how
high you are on a psychedelic you know, the scale,
the Sulgan scale, and we're plus four is the big
transcendental one and plus plus one is basically maybe a

(28:36):
micro dose a little more, and plus two is maybe
a museum level. Um So, had you read Shulgan early
on or sort of you sort of become aware of
it as you're uncovering stuff around, you know, psilocybin in
the you know, fifteen years ago whatever. Yeah, No, that
that was Hamilton's doing. He's the one who turned me
on to T. Sholgan and I you know, I devoured
Peak hall uh t call. They're they're great unique books.

(28:59):
You know, they're these we combination of like psychedelic recipe books, autobiography,
a love story, meditations on the nature of consciousness and
love and sex and um so yeah, those books really
were were mind expanding for me. When the person who
looms largest in the show and in your story is
a girlfriend who you call I mentioned a pseudonym of Grace.

(29:23):
Actually that's not a pseudonym, but it's her. It's not
her first name. I'll just leave it at that. But
that's not okay that that that is what I called
her in real life. So yeah, but do you think
that your journey would have happened if you had not
met Grace? I don't know. And this is one of
the coincidences I alluded to earlier. So without giving a
way too much of the show, I'd read the study,

(29:45):
this Morno study out of the University of Arizona, and
I'd resolve that, Okay, I need to try psychedelics because
nothing else is working. And it was very soon after
I read that study that I met this woman at
a comedy show in Times Square, of all places, the
middle of New York, the most anonymous, you know, fish
bowl in the in the Western hemisphere perhaps for people meeting,

(30:05):
and we struck up a relationship. And it turned out
I didn't learn this until, you know, we've been dating
for a little bit, that she had essentially cured her clinical,
debilitating suicidal depression with mescaline containing cacti. And so it
was the shocking coincidence that, you know, this person who
had met seemingly randomly, had actually done in a sense

(30:28):
of the thing I was trying to do, and had
a lot of relevant experience. So that was instrumental, I
think in two ways. One she became sort of my
my unofficial guide on a lot of these journeys. Too.
There was this sense and there is this sense of
coincidence that um with psychedelics, that sometimes I don't know
coincidences mean, and I'm open to the fact they're meaningless,

(30:50):
but it often feels to me like there is meaning.
And one way I like to look a coincidence is
kind of keep going kind of a green flag from
from the unit first, like, Okay, you're I don't even
want to say on the right path, because right or wrong,
I think is a slippery slope, but you're on a path.
And so I took it, even at the time when

(31:10):
she revealed to me that oh she not only you know,
did she have some experience with psychedelics, but she'd actually
affected great healing herself with them, that Okay, I'm on
the right path here, and absent that, I don't know,
I don't know if I would have embarked on this journey.
You know, there's other research going on now with ketamine
and O c D, and obviously there's research going on
with psilocybin um. So it does appear that maybe multiple

(31:34):
of these I don't know if there's anything within d
M A and O c D, but it does appeal
that there's numerous of these psycholics that could potentially work
with a condition. And there's a funny scene in your
in your play where you're talking about your marijuana deal
or trying to say, I can't get any mushrooms. You know,
there's a shortage, but how about some kennemine? And you react, no, no, no, no,
I need any I need mushrooms. But if in fact

(31:55):
that that marijuana deal her friend of yours had been
able to come up with kenemine, it makes me wonder
there that might have also helped facilitate a bit of
a breakthrough. One of the things that characterize O c
D is a is a very sort of rigid, black
and white way of thinking, and for me, in this
context that manifested as well. The study was was mushrooms.
So therefore I need mushrooms and I'm not interested in

(32:17):
anything else. Ultimately, through Hamilton's and other channels, I did
do a lot of other things, you know, probably two
dozen different you know, Shulgin invention research, chemicals, mescaline containing cacti,
through grace LSD. But at that point I was very
hell bent on mushrooms are going to fix me. Uh
So I wasn't open to that. But I have subsequently
worked with ketamine, and I've been talking about this on stage.

(32:41):
I love how with psychedelics, they're the only drug where
you can say worked with you know, no one's ever
like that. I've been working with crystal meth, you know,
doing a lot of work with cocaine. You're doing the
work with a capital T and a capital w R. Right,
it's this exalted thing. But you know, again, I think
I think there is something to that. I think that
it is. It is work. Uh can be heavy, hard

(33:01):
work with psychedelics in a way it hasn't been, you know,
smoking a joint or I haven't done cocaine since you know,
I was nineteen, But doing a line of blow doesn't
feel like work in the same way. Well, you know
you also have you there's this phrase you came up
with which I love. I think it was to describe
your adventuring with all these chemicals. Um that that Hamilton
others had told you about. You said you were engaging
in vigilanti psychotherapy, vigilanti psychopharmacology, psychopharmacology. Yes, and it really

(33:28):
was that, right. I mean, you're out there trying anything
to try to take it into your own hands. The
the timing of the play and the way you build
up because I mean, for me, the point when this
morning I'm watching it and I'm bursting out laughing, is
when you get to the point of you know, actually
being in a full blow in plus four experience, you know,
on the psilocybic mushrooms, and tell me if I'm giving much,

(33:50):
too too much away, then we can always cut it
out in the editing. Um. And then you call nine
one more right, you know, there by cutting off your
you know, full blowing experience. UM. But it does see
that that that really is a pivotal moment in your
life when that happens. Absolutely absolutely, UM. I mean I
had over the course of that two thousand and seven
to two thousand and ten period, I probably had I

(34:13):
don't know, I'm gonna say sixty psychedelic experiences. A lot
of psychedelic experiences. So in the show I only talked
about a handful of them, and I do highlight that
one psilocybin mushroom trip as kind of this climax because
it was a powerful trip and also a you know,
from a dramatic drama theory perspective, good fodder because I

(34:36):
did call nine one one on myself, and there there
is a transcript of it, and it's accurate. I start
the call starts out with me asking the nine one
one operator if if she's got and that is why
I called nine one one. I want to be clear,
as I say in the show, I don't call nine
one because I wanted the cops to come to my house.
I called because I had some burning existential questions and
no one else was picking up their phone. And what

(34:56):
had happened was I had thrown my cell phone away
in the woods. I don't remember why, but I've thrown
it away the woods. We subsequently recovered it. There was
a landline at the house I was staying at, but
I couldn't remember any numbers. I remember my childhood phone number,
which I called. No one picked that up, thankfully I remembered.
I called zero, the old operator number. No one picked
that up. And finally I called nine one one because

(35:19):
I was consumed with this question of um, yeah, of
of divinity, of higher power, of of what is God?
Because on this master dose of mushrooms, there was a
clear sense of all right, there's there's some order intelligence here,
but what is it? And so the operator asked me
where I was for the address, and I had enough
presence of mind to not tell her, but I was

(35:40):
calling from a landline, and they traced the call and
they showed up at at the house with a bunch
of content. Thereby violated, you know, the number one rule
of when one takes too much you know, marijuana, or
one doesn't an intense psychologue trip which is never called
nine one one. And of course now there is fortunately
something called the Fireside Project out there, which is for

(36:02):
people who are having a psychedelic emergency or just want
to process what's going on. I had one of the
key founders of that project, Hanifaia Washington, on Psychoactive some
months ago. But you know, hopefully if this ever happens
to you again, Adam, you can call a fireside project.
They're calling on one one. Definitely a better choice. So
that trip was pivotal. But I also should say the

(36:27):
recovery I got thanks to psychedelics, it wasn't so much
one experience. It was a handful of particularly important experiences
that really, the simplest way I could put it is
sometimes I think of o CD this way. It's like
the brain or the mind is trying to fix a problem,

(36:47):
a quote unquote problem in the body. And I put
it in quote because it's not really a problem. But
the supposed problem is these emotions, which are just physical
sensations that we don't want to experience, principally fear. So
the mind of the o c D person is like, well,
if I can get everything right, if I can figure
everything out, then the fear will go away. And of
course it doesn't work. So freedom from o c D

(37:11):
for me has actually come from really just connecting to
my body more than anything else. And I understood this,
I should say, intellectually before I began working with psychedelics,
because I had done so much work in therapy and
the the standard therapy for o c D, cognitive behavioral
therapy and particularly exposure response prevention, is really geared towards

(37:34):
acceptance or surrendered. So the idea is, since o c
D is trying to neutralize these unwanted emotions, these unwanted
physical sensations, if you can accept those sensations instead of
trying to get rid of them, then you're basically taking
the wind out of o c D sales, You're depriving
it of its of its reason for being and so

(37:55):
therefore this therapy, cognitive behavioral therapy, is really about acceptance
or surrender, and I understood this intellectually, and so I
would be going through O c D and I'd be
saying to myself, Okay, just accept the anxiety. Accept the anxiety.
But I was just saying it to myself a conversation
I was having in my brain, where actual acceptance happens

(38:16):
at a physical level. These emotions exist in the body
and they have to be accepted in the body. But
I just had no access to my physical experience. So
the first time, even though I've done years of therapy
geared towards acceptance, the first time I actually was able
to do acceptance viscerally physically was on psychedelics. I had
an experience which isn't isn't explicitly in the show, but

(38:39):
it's it's sort of part of a number of trips
I recount where I was experiencing O c D. I
was obsessing, and if I weren't on psychedelics, I would
have just thought about it more, trying to figure out
harder in my head. But the psilocybin it connected me
deeply to my body and I could actually really feel
that fear in my body. In fact, I couldn't help

(39:01):
not feel it. I had to feel it. It was
so present, and because I've been exposed to cognitive behavioral therapy,
there was little sort of light bulb moment where I
was like, oh, this is what my therapist has been
talking about all these years. Instead of running from the sensation,
since I can finally feel it clearly, let me really
go into it and just open up to it fully.

(39:24):
And when I did that, the obsessive thoughts just kind
of quieted down, and the feeling was still there. It
was unpleasant. This isn't a story of like, oh yeah,
if you accept that, you know it's transmuted into love
and light and joy and bliss. I do believe that
happens sometimes, but certainly not routinely. It was like, Okay,
if I accept the sensation, guess what I have to feel?

(39:44):
The shitty sensation I don't have to feel. But the
upside is it undercuts the O c D. I'm no
longer obsessing. And the other thing is it's not like
O c D prevents me from feeling it. I'm still
feeling it at some level. I'm just trying to shut
it out. So once I had that oriens on psychedelics
on that trip and then many other trips, gradually I

(40:07):
learned how to do that when I wasn't tripping, how
to really tune into my physical experience and open up
to these unwanted, fierce sensations and find freedom that way.
You know, I was googling around just you know, before
our conversation here, and I came across one of the
co founders one of the psychedelics venture funds, was being

(40:29):
asked what he's excited about, and he referenced this study
at Yale on psilocybin and O c D. But one
of the things he said is he goes, there appears
to be little to no psychotherapy needed, as severe manifestations
of O c D appear to be more like a
motor disorder than one with a psychological underpinning. But on

(40:52):
the other hand, you know, we typically hear all about psychedelics,
you know, being most dramatically more valuable and safer to
be doing it with ecotherapy, and in your own personal experience,
you seem to talk about that. I mean, have you
heard about this outcome of the Yale study or what's
your sense about that that reported finding. No, I'm not.
I'm aware of the study and I know I I

(41:13):
know one of the researcher who was involved and then
had a career change. Um, but I didn't know. I
didn't know that specific finding. I know it hasn't been
published yet. But that man, that that resonates with my
experience in a way that I've not heard other people
talk about, which is yes. So I just I just
kind of halucidated this whole idea about for me, so
much of it was the physical experiencing piece of psychedelics,

(41:37):
and let me go into that a little bit more.
I have not found insight to be particularly useful from
psychedelics insofar as O c D. I've certainly had insights
that have been helpful in my life, but it wasn't
like it wasn't like these revelations that helped me from psychedelics.
With O c D. It wasn't like, uh, this, you know,
changing my self perception. It was very concretely, this connecting

(42:01):
me to my body, and once in my body, I
have the choice. It's not gonna happen automatically, but at
least I have the option or ability to accept my
emotions in a way otherwise don't and thereby gain freedom
from them. So that accords what you just read. That
accords with my experience where it's not so much it's
not something that you're talking through, it's something that you're experiencing.

(42:22):
So that's very cool. I'm I'm glad you shared that. Well,
let me as see this to I mean, what are
the really funny moments in the play is when you
talk about going to see your therapist, like what was
the name Dr Wilson calls Dr Wilson there, I did
change his last name, so yes, but you know you're
kind of, you know, riffing on him and you're kind
of making fun of him and his degrees. But you
know he's pushing you, um to try to have a

(42:45):
new approach to this and to get out of your
head and your intellectual understanding, which is only going to
go so far, even though that's the way he's communicating
to you. But he suggests to you that basically your
O C D is like an addiction, and just as
there is an iconics addiction Anonymous and Alcoholics Anonymous for addiction,
that you should go to O C Obsessive Compulsive Anonymous,
and you tell this story of going and it's very

(43:07):
funny because you're kind of, you know, looking at all
the skin pickers and the hair pullers and the handwashers,
and what are you still doing here if it's all working.
Yet on the other hand, you kind of land up
by saying this actually plays an important role that for you,
maybe it was less about combining uh psilocybin with psychotherapy
and more about combining psilocybin with what you learned by

(43:30):
going through a sort of twelve step approach. Yeah, and
I think all three of those components psilocybin, and i'd
say not just psilocybin. I mean the show is the
mushroom Cure because it was inspired by that study of psilocybin,
and that's what I was hell bent on getting. But
ultimately mushrooms were very helpful, but LSD was helpful. Research
chemicals were helpful. More recently, I found ayawaska to be helpful.

(43:51):
So psychedelics certainly one component. Generally speaking, psychotherapy helpful in
the sense that it introduced me to this concept of
a acceptance. But in psychotherapy it was just a concept
for me. It wasn't a practice until I brought psychedelics
into the picture. And then yeah, the twelve step thing
very powerful and something that I still I still am

(44:13):
involved in because well, I think there's a few components.
Um One is there is something very healing about peer
support and commiseration. There's a lot of people getting help
from a therapist one on one, but the group peer
support aspect is powerful one because it's not just about

(44:34):
getting support from other people with O c D giving support.
The concept of service, which is a central concept in
twelve step programs, is so powerful for me because with
O c D and addiction generally, you know, you're very
consumed with your own safety, your own happiness, your own comfort,
and just trying to do things for other people, even

(44:56):
if it's just going through the motions, it does at
least for me, it gets me out of my own
head and that gets me out of O c D
because O c D only exists in my own head.
So that's part of the twelve step thing that was
helpful for me. And what the twelve step thing brings
in that I personally have found helpful is this idea
of more of a cosmic surrender, whereas psychotherapy CBT it's

(45:17):
like all right, acceptance is allowing these emotions to be
there with a twelve step thing. There's this idea of
a higher power, which is a concept that you know,
I'm not even going to try to touch on because
it's something I certainly have no clarity on, and frankly,
people who have a lot of clarity on that sometimes
scare me. But this idea of the idea that I'm
not in control, whether or not I believe you know

(45:39):
that the universe is run by by God or by
uh nature. One thing that I can get behind is
this idea that I'm not in control. And this idea
of letting things go, of turning things over, even if
I don't know what I'm turning them over to I
found and find helpful is just that reminder coming back

(46:01):
to And this idea of powerlessness, that's a very powerful concept.
And powerlessness in the context of O c D. The
way I look at it is I'm not powerless over
my actions. I have a choice about whether to accept
my anxiety or try to get rid of it by
engaging in O c D. I have a choice of
whether I'm going to engage in obsessive thinking in rituals.

(46:22):
But where I am powerless is I can't choose the
sensations in my body, and I can't choose the thoughts
that come into my mind. O c D is about
trying to control those sensations and those thoughts. If I
do the ritual right, if I think the correct thought,
then the sensations or thoughts will change. And if you
really buy into the twelve step thing, what you're saying

(46:43):
is no, I actually am powerless over those thoughts when
they arise, when they go. And if you accept that, paradoxically,
there's a great deal of freedom because you're saying, Okay,
I can't control, you know, my thoughts and experiences, so
I can just kind of let it go anim just
to competise that. I mean, so when I think about
some of the the ping pong gang that you do

(47:05):
in this show, you know which side of the street
to walk on, the sunny side of the shady side? Uh,
you know which iPhone or MP three player to buy,
which shirt to wear to a performance, whatever, But just
say to take the one about walking down the street
and whether to go to the sunny side of the
shady side. So, now being more liberated from your O
c D or having it subsided so it's no longer

(47:27):
such a controlling thing. What does that mean when you
talk about the surrender powerlessness, that you're walking down the street,
that you feel this consciousness of should I go on
the other side and back and forth happening, but that
you just sort of accept that you're going to have
this feeling in your body, but you'll just stick with
where you are. So in the show, I talked about

(47:51):
a lot of these sort of daily O c D things,
what to wear, wat side of the street to walk down.
So when I started to get real recovery from most
c D, those daily smaller forms of O c D,
those went away entirely, so I don't have that anymore.
What side of the street to walk down? Initially, though,
when I started to recover, it was exactly as you described.

(48:12):
I'm walking down this side of the street, and I'm
gonna keep walking on this side of the street, even
though now my mind is telling me I should cross
to the other side of the street because the other
side is sunny and I need sunshine. I'm just gonna
keep walking on the shady side, and I'm going to
really open up to the discomfort and anxiety. And once
I did, that. You know a number of times that anxiety,

(48:35):
uh it just went away. Where it flares up now
is more in novel decisions, decisions I don't encounter that
often in bigger ones. So decisions often about career stuff.
Should I do a tour of the show in this
city or that city? That sort of thing, and there

(48:55):
it's the same thing. It's okay, I'm experiencing this anxiety.
My mind is telling me I have to think about
this morning. I have to figure out the perfect answer.
I know rationally, I'm not going to find a perfect answer.
I know rationally that the more I think about it,
the more confused I get, the more fearful I'm going
to get, and the harder it's going to make a decision.
But but yet, I really do still want to keep

(49:15):
thinking about it because I don't want to feel this
discomfort right now. So let me just really try to
open up the discomfort as best as I can. And
in a way, it really comes down to how quickly
am I willing to take the hit, because I'm going
to You know, when I have anxiety about a decision,
there's going to be a moment where I'm going to
have to fully experience that anxiety if I want to

(49:37):
get past it, and I'd love to say that, you know,
I just accept and surrender instantly, but I don't. I
can still I can still go down that rabbit hole
a little bit. But yeah, to get that freedom is
it's the same thing as when I was walking down
the streets. It's just really opening up at a physical
level experiencing it. And I should be clear, it's not
necessarily a one time thing. If it's like a big

(49:59):
decis vision, I might have to do that thirty or
forty times a day, and it may come up and
keep popping up for days on end, and it's going
to be part of my experience, and it's going to
be unpleasant and it's going to cause a degree of suffering.
But the more unwilling to accept, the less suffering and
the more freedom I find. Let's take a break here

(50:20):
and go to an ad M. You've mentioned how the
length of this show has been reduced from about you know,
in two hours to about eighty minutes or so, and

(50:40):
obviously that involved telling less of the you know, fewer
anecdotes about your drug experiences. But were there ways in
which the show evolved as your insights into O c
D and your condition. Uh changed during the time since
you started the show. The show certainly evolved a lot,
but I would say it was less as a result

(51:02):
of my journey with O City and Psychedelics, because I
mean that journey wasn't complete in two thousand and twelve
when I started doing the show, and it's still it's
ongoing for me as well. But you know, all the
events I recount, we're finished by about two thousand and ten.
So really the evolution is more the evolution of me
as a performer and writer and creator. So when I

(51:23):
did the show first in Edinburgh in two thousand and
twelve the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, pretty much nothing could be
longer than an hour general, I mean, you can, but
it's very hard to draw audiences. So the show is
an hour and it got a you know, a strong
critical response, reviews and people, you know, it got a
very positive response. But I came away from the festival
feeling like, ah, there's so much important stuff I'm leaving

(51:46):
out that I didn't find it totally fulfilling sharing the
show because I do have this, perhaps some would say,
an obsession with truth, Like I really I don't embellish
things in the show. I don't. It's it's all truthful.
But it felt to me like there were so many
omissions that I wasn't fully capturing the truth. And so
after Edinburgh, I was like, you know, yeah, I think

(52:07):
I've told this story and I'm done with it. And
I started working on other projects, but I kept wanting
to come back to the show. I kept wanting to
come back to this story. So then I decided, you
know what, forget any time limits. Why don't you just
figure out how to tell the story and the way
that feels most truthful to you, and length be damned.
And so I started doing that and it cut longer

(52:28):
and longer, and so when I was doing the New
York Fringe Festival in two thousand and fourteen, it was
over two hours long, and and it was just me
sitting at a desk, because I remember, I had no
acting experience, I had no background in the theater, so
for me, it was really about the story, and it
was me sitting at a desk telling the story. And
it's still got a very strong reception um but there

(52:51):
was a feeling that there was a feeling that it
still hadn't assumed its final form, and so then I
began working with a director for the first time who
I still work with. His name is Jonathan Libman. Really
just brilliant, brilliant theater director, and he introduced me to
the language of theater, by which I mean he would
say things like, well, instead of spending four minutes telling

(53:13):
this story, you can act it out in twenty five
seconds if you get up from behind your desk and
walk over here, and we change the lights and you
know that, that sort of thing. So that was and
has been a very fruitful relationship where we've now brought
to the show gradually more of these theatrical elements. But

(53:33):
shortening the show has come down to, yes, cutting recounting
some of the drug experiences and some other experiences, but
also in some ways substituting um minutes of words with
a few seconds of gesture or lighting or movement, and
that's that's allowed the show to assume it's current form.

(53:54):
I'm curious to other drugs, I mean not psychedelic drugs,
but things like cannabis or alcohol. You use those and
do they play into your experience of O C D
in anyway? I don't use alcohol. I have nothing against alcohol,
it's just I don't like I don't like alcohol hangovers.
So that's that's uh, not something I use. I do
not work with alcohol. I'm not working without. Uh. Cannabis. Yeah,

(54:18):
cannabis can be a double edged sword. Um, I do
I like cannabis. I'd say I generally smoke cannabis probably
like once a week on average. I find it can
be helpful creatively. It can give me insight and perspective
that's different from my sober mind, and that can help
creatively in terms of, you know, my work shows, uh,
comedy writing, but also in terms of like looking at

(54:41):
relationships in my life in a different light, where cannabis
can be quite helpful for me at least it can
promote empathy. It can promote me really kind of seeing, Oh,
I didn't realize, but this person is doing this because
it's probably because they have this trauma and I didn't
connect the dots. And sometimes it's like I might not
even be right about my interpretation, but the interpretation itself

(55:03):
leads to more compassion and that that helps UM open
things up in how I'm going to respond to that relationship.
On the other hand, I will say cannabis sometimes I
have found, you know, I tend to like kind of
speedy sativas, and that can lead to more racing thoughts
and more so there have been times where I've had,
like I found myself kind of yeah, starting to obsess

(55:29):
on cannabis in a way where I feel like the
cannabis is um is potentiating the obsession was ayahuasca. Your
experience in ayahuasca is something distinctive, um in any way
from all the other ones, well, the other tecal experiences.
I'd say it's a matter of degree and that we
talked about this sort of and it sounds like for
you as well. With psilocybin containing mushrooms, so much of

(55:51):
it is this very just deep, concrete physical experience, and
ayahuasca I find even more so a physical experience for me.
So I really I don't get like immersive visions on ayahuasca.
I don't get much insight. And maybe that's because I've
already done so many psychedelics. Maybe I've kind of plucked
the low hanging insight fruit from the psychedelic tree already.

(56:14):
But the physical experience of ayahuasca it really really just
grounding me and my grounding me and my body is um.
I find it has that effect more so than any
other psychedelic So I did ayahuasca a bunch of New
York and then I went down to Peru. And in
Peru I did I think, I did tense ceremonies in
sixteen nights, which I don't know if I necessarily recommend it,

(56:38):
but it was One effect of this is I discovered
I had feet. I mean, I knew intellectually I had feet,
but I had never really had a deep awareness of
the sensations coming from my feet until I think it
was after my a thiahuasca ceremony and I'm walking into
like the you know, dining hall at this retreat center.

(56:59):
Maybe it was the loca, the ceremonial space, but I
was walking into one a space that had these very
rough hewn wood playing floors, and I became acutely aware
of the you know, minute gradations of pressure and temperature
on my feet. And it sounds trivial, but that has
been a significant thing for me that I stayed with me.
That was four years ago, five years ago, and I
still have the sort of baseline awareness of the sensations

(57:23):
in my feet. That is quite literally grounding for me.
And it's those sort of experiences that I've had on
ayahuasca that I have not had on any other Psychedelogyally,
you're reminding me on my very first M d M
A experience, which was in my early thirties, and one
of the things I remember was all of a sudden
being conscious how much I carried most of my energy

(57:45):
and my my body consciousness in my torso and how
much they were not. I did not feel grounded and
under the under the n d M A experience, I
felt myself becoming more ground in my feet, hitting you know,
on the ground, and it felt like a better place
to be. But it was, I say, the first time
I've had that consciousness. And you know, I am able
to recome back at certain points of that consciousness, which

(58:06):
I think has been has been helpful. But you know,
let me, let me go back to me again. So
in these gatherings, right, so you're you're entering in this world,
I mean, you're going to obsessive compulsive anonymous, right, you're
presumably talking about this. I mean, I imagine because of
your work, you're being invited to conferences about obsessive compulsioness

(58:28):
you're meeting large numbers of people who experience and live
with O c D. I'm wondering about what's the reaction
to them, um when they hear about your experience, and
because I mean it must be in some respects in
the way you're sort of almost spreading the word about
a cure. And I'm wondering also not what is it now,
but also how is it evolved? American I will imagine

(58:48):
ten years ago with the whole notion of having a
mushroom cure for O c D sounded way out there,
as opposed to now when the magic of psychedelics and
the psychedelic renaissance is all in the news, that there's
a different reaction. But just describe a bit some of
the response if you've gotten from people living with o
c D, whether it's into twelve step programs or elsewhere.

(59:08):
I have not talked about this explicitly in twelve step
meetings because in the twelve step framework, one of the
guidelines is you don't talk about outside treatment, so people
won't talk about S s R. Eyes. You know, it's
really focused on this twelve step approach. But certainly i've
spoken you know, widely conferences and podcasts like this, and yeah,

(59:31):
you know, I think there's a selection bias and that
the people who reach out to me are people who
are open to this. I'm sure there are people who
are not open to this and may maybe put off
by the idea of using psychedelics for o c D.
But I get a lot of, you know, emails and
messages on social media from people who are essentially saying, yeah,
I want to do what you did, you know, what

(59:53):
what do you suggest? And the fact that I get
so many people reaching out to me, I think reflects
the fact that there are are so many people out
there with o c D who are just not being
sufficiently helped with with standard treatments. And this is not
to take anything away from you know, it's a lot
of very committed, very compassionate, very talented o c D

(01:00:13):
therapists out there who are doing great work. And again,
therapy can be life changing for some people, and for
that matter, S s s R I S can be life
changing for some people, but for many people, the existing
remedies just aren't aren't enough. And that's one of the
things that I find that really upsets me about the
fact that this Morano study was published in The study

(01:00:34):
I read of psilocybro procy was published in December two
thousand and six. We're sixteen years almost sixteen years later,
and there hasn't been a single follow up study published,
though again that will change very soon, thankfully. But meanwhile,
two percent of the population is estimated to suffer from
o c D. People with o c D have ten
times the suicide rate of the general population. Like this
is a huge societal, worldwide problem, and yet my mind,

(01:01:00):
the most promising new treatment that's come along in decades,
maybe ever, there's been almost no investigation of it. Uh,
though thankfully that is changing. So that's all to say
that the reactions I've gotten are generally from people who
are desperate and because what they've tried hasn't helped during
the same shoes I was in and and are looking

(01:01:22):
for for guidance and working with psychedelics for their own healing. Well,
hopefully we'll see it opening up of funding from the
federal government right thing. For a long time, they're only
willing to provide money for knamine research dealing with O
c D or addictionary conditions like that, And hopefully that's
beginning to change because of the changes at the leadership.
But you know, a national steit of health nationally seen

(01:01:43):
of drug abuse, and obviously there's the private money um
coming into this at this time, so you know, we
can hope for some sort of more significant breakthrough. But
I'm mostly curious and do you consider O c D
a form of addiction? Yes, yes, I do. The hesitation
of my original yes was because I have sometimes gotten

(01:02:05):
a little bit of pushback on when I say, oh,
CD is an addiction, as people who take issue with
that because to them, addiction has a negative connotation, and
I get that does have a negative connotation, but I
don't mean it that way at all. I would define
an addiction broadly speaking, as a strategy to avoid or
eliminate pain that works in the very short term, but

(01:02:26):
then creates more pain. And at the beginning of our
conversation I talked about o c D in that context.
But certainly, let's look at alcohol. An alcoholic when they drink,
they often will feel a little bit better, but then
they feel worse when it wears off, and they feel
worse because the consequences of their drinking are making their life,
you know, unsustainable, so what do they do? They drink
more So addictions are and I also said earlier I

(01:02:47):
don't like the term mental illness. In some ways, I
sometimes wonder if the model of addiction is not the
best way to describe all of what we call mental illnesses,
if they're not all at some at some level, at
some deep levels, some sort of strategy to help us
feel better that ultimately makes us feel worse, which in

(01:03:10):
turn drives more of that that that behavior. So in
that sense, I absolutely do think viewing o c D
as an addiction is a helpful way to look at it.
I do see a lot of people with o c
D who try to fix themselves, and I think this
is because to really get freedom from o c D
requires you feeling the feelings you don't want to feel,

(01:03:31):
and that's uncomfortable. So that's what I was trying to do.
And if there are people with o c D listening
to this, and I imagine there are listen, I could
be wrong. But what I can say, and I think
I said this at the beginning, is I don't know
anyone with o c D who has gotten better on
their own. This is a condition that if you have real,
full blown o c D. I believe that there is
an element of powerlessness and help and support from outside

(01:03:54):
your own brain is essential, and I think calling it
an addiction can drive that point home in a way
that can hopefully be helpful for some people to hear.
I've heard you make the point that comparing mental illness
to physical illness or for example, O c D two
diabetes is just another illness. On the one hand, it's
beneficial in that it can be destigmatizing, but on the

(01:04:14):
other hand, it ignores the existential aspect of struggling with
addiction or O c D or things like this. Yeah,
that's part of my that's part of my concern with
the term mental illness. You some that are perfectly is Yeah,
I don't mental illness. I like the fact that it's saying, Okay,
this is something that you didn't choose any more than
you chose, you know, to to have cancer. It's not

(01:04:36):
something that you know, you should be blamed for. But
I don't like the fact that, well, you know that
it's really been the drug companies that have propagated this
idea that oh, this is, you know, the same way
a diabetic takes insulince. Some with depression has low serotonin
and needs to take an s s R I. First
of all, at a neurochemical level, that's not true. We
found that some people with depression seem to have lower

(01:04:56):
than average serotonin, some people seem to have higher than
average serotonin. There's never been a clear correlation found with
any mental illness and specific neurochemical state, though there are
neuro anatomical differences, but whether those are a result or
cause as questionable. So that's one thing. But yeah, so
much of what we now look at mental illness in
other cultures and other times would have been seen as

(01:05:19):
a spiritual malady or spiritual challenge. And I think there
can be something beautiful u in looking at it that way,
and something empowering, which is that, no, this isn't just
some chemicals in your brain going hey wire to me there.
I believe there is a narrative around this. There is
a story around this, There is a reason, which again
is not to say there's blame, it's not to say
you're at fault, but that maybe this is one way

(01:05:42):
to put it. I think a diabetic um you know
who who's managing diabetes. I don't know if they're going
to have a spiritual transformation from that. I don't know
if they're going to have an existential epiphany, but I
think these mental illnesses do have that potential. There is
an opera tunity in mental illness for growth for transformation

(01:06:04):
that I don't think exists with say, diabetes, and I
don't want to ignore that. M hm. So I Adam,
in addition to doing this show off and on for
many years now, you're also started a new show called
Adam Strauss Is Not Unhappy by a sort of unscripted commentation.
In fact, I'm wondering the last time you and I

(01:06:25):
crawls past, I think was in December and New York
at the Horizons conference. And then a friend of our,
Sarah Rose cis guy, has this comedy show called drug
Test she puts on downtown, and if I recall correctly,
maybe you did a little element of that there. But
what can you tell us about this new show, why
you're doing it, what it's about, what you're trying to accomplish. Yeah,

(01:06:47):
So I'm doing The Mushroom Care every Friday at the
March Theater in Berkeley, and I'm doing Adam stress Is
Not Unhappy every Saturday, and the reason I structured it
that way is I want people to come to The
Mushroom Cure who will and want to hopefully come to
Adam Stress is not unhappy because it's otherwise a difficult
show to market because it is unscripted, and in some

(01:07:07):
way I do have a lot of freedom from o
c D. But I'm still someone who i'd say, perhaps
more than the average person like certainty, and in a
way doing an unscripted show is it's an odd choice
because there's radical uncertainty. I'm getting on stage not really
knowing what I'm going to say or how it's going

(01:07:28):
to go. I mean, there's an element of improvisation on
The Mushroom Cure, but it's it's mostly scripted, and it's
this odd thing where I think part of my own
path to freedom has been doing the things that feel
the scariest. They take me the first furthest outside of

(01:07:49):
my comfort zone, and certainly psychedelics do that. I mean,
that's part of why I think psychedelics do have unique
promise for o c D is and not micro dosing
for me. I think, like do high doses probably have
unique promise for O c D because they are in
exposure for the root fear that I think underlies all

(01:08:10):
forms of O c D, which is loss of control
if you take a large dose of mushrooms. Really, what
you're saying is, I'm choosing to let go of control.
I'm choosing to do the thing that my O c
D least wants me to do. And this Adam stress
is not unhappy show is really me doing that on stage,
Me going up and saying, Okay, a big part of

(01:08:30):
me wants to have perfect control, but another part of
me wants more freedom. So I'm going to go up
and see what happens when I just relinquished control to
an extent. That's very unusual I think in any sort
of live performance. And it's been um At times, it's
been pretty magical, you know. I've I've found moments and
experiences and shared things on stage that I never would

(01:08:52):
have scripted that I've been I think a lot better
than what I could have come up with. At times,
it's felt pretty scary, uh, being up are and not
quite knowing where I'm going. But there's some part of
me that feels this real pull towards these putting myself
in these situations that forced me to let go. That
forced me that that if I try to hold on tightly,

(01:09:15):
it's it's it's not gonna work. And I would apply
that to psychedelics because certainly I had trips where I
tried to control and you know, I got I got
my ass kicked. Essentially, I had things got really scary,
and I learned with psychedelics that Okay, when things are
really really intent, when they're really really overwhelming, it's the

(01:09:36):
way is not to hold on tighter. The way is
to let go more and listen. It's very easy for
me to say this with you right now on this
podcast sober. When I'm in that psychedelic space, it's still
a scary choice, and it's not when I always make
but I am drawn to that choice because I feel
like there's there's that's the way freedom lies, and that's
that's what I'm going for in this show. Having said that,

(01:09:56):
I also am it is a show. It's not about,
you know, my own therapi, So certainly the agenda is
also to entertain people and connect with them at a
deep level and make them laugh and make them think
and make them feel and uh yeah, it's it's something
I've very much enjoyed doing. And what about are there
other shows out there that get into Remember one time
being at one of the MAPS big conferences, and I

(01:10:17):
think they had a whole series of comedians going up
there doing some psycholics relevant. Ye right, some of them
are actually are pretty good. But are there any other
standout comics doing this kind of work, doing about you know,
ripping about psychedelics of their own experiences or things like that.
Let me be very clear here, Ethan, no no one
else doing this is any good. No one should watch
anyone else. They all say that they're setting me up. No, yeah,

(01:10:42):
there are. It's you know when I when I was
talking about this stuff in two thousand and twelve, there
really was no one else. Now there's a handful of people.
I'm sure it'll be increasing as more and more people
have psycholic experience. But you know, some of my favorites
Duncan Trustle, who doesn't do much live performance now but
is really brilliant. I mean they showed the Midnight Gospel,
which is not uh not overtly psychedelic, but it's just

(01:11:03):
very psychedelic in tone. I mean, Duncan is I think
it's I consider Duncan a genius in that he's just
pushing boundaries of the forum and someone who the psychedelic
experience has I think been transformative and informative his work.
So he was at that that maps Comedy Bank. But
I think referring to in two thousand seventeen, it was
the lineup was him, me Shane Moss, who is also great.

(01:11:27):
He has a show called A Good Trip, which is
also great. So he's wonderful. Uh just yeah, funny and sightful, vulnerable,
all the stuff. I love. Sarah Rosuskin. She has not
a show like a solo show, but she does this
thing drug Test in New York, which always is great. Um.
And I'm sure there's more people out there who I'm
not aware of. So I think it's clear that psychedelics

(01:11:49):
are rapidly becoming a bigger part of the cultural consciousness.
And I'm sure that's going to translate to say about
you and the Mushroom Cure, is that not only are
you doing pretty comedy like well the others, but your
thing is simultaneously dramatic and touching and proving to be
therapeutic for people who watch it and ultimately, you know,

(01:12:11):
come to some greater insight about what's going on their
own lives or people around them, or how they might
find their own cure. So with all that in mind,
I want to thank you for joining me on Psychoactive
and I look forward to crossing paths hopefully soon, and
best of luck with both you know, Mushroom Cure as
well as with the new show. I hope it all
works out really well. Thanks so much, Ethan. Yeah, I

(01:12:32):
really enjoyed chatting with you. If you're enjoying Psychoactive, please
tell your friends about it, or you can write us
a review at Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.
We love to hear from our listeners. If you'd like
to share your own stories comes to ideas, then leave
us a message at one eight three three seven seven

(01:12:54):
nine sixty that's eight three three psycho zero, or you
can email us at Psychoactive at protozoa dot com, or
find me on Twitter at Ethan Nadelman. You can also
find contact information in our show notes. Psychoactive is a
production of I Heart Radio and Protozoa Pictures. It's hosted

(01:13:15):
by me Ethan Naedelman. It's produced by Noam Osband and
Josh Stain. The Executive producers are Dylan Golden, Ari Handel,
Elizabeth Geesus and Darren Aronofsky from Protozoa Pictures, Alex Williams
and Matt Frederick from My Heart Radio, and me Ethan Naedelman.
Our music is by Ari Blucien and a special thanks

(01:13:35):
to Ab Brio, s f Bianca Grimshaw and Robert bb.
Next week I'll be talking with David Simon, co creator
of The Wire, who has a new series, We Own

(01:13:57):
This City on HBO. He describes it as a sort
of coda to The Wire. When I was covering the
department in the late eighties, you know, into the nineties,
it's not like every cop was great. You know, there
were a lot of guys who were humps and they
you know, they couldn't make a case save their lives.
But they were usually in squads with one or two
guys who knew how to get a case through the courthouse.

(01:14:17):
They had the skill set. I mean, you need to
know how to work informants and not be worked by informants.
You need to know how to testify in court without
purguring yourself. You need to know how to write a
search and seizure warrnt. You need to know how to
use various forensic tools that that that don't have any
relation to the drug war, that are basically skill sets
that don't have anything to do with drug prohibition. And

(01:14:40):
those things died. They died on the vine that the
drug war taught everybody how to not do police working
made for stupid generations of cops. And then those generations,
those those guys are now the colonels and the majors.
They're teaching the lieutenants the wrong metrics, and the lieutenants
are teaching the guys on the street the wrong metrics.
And the only thing that it cost us was police

(01:15:00):
work in America. Subscribe to Cycoactive now, see it, don't
miss it.