How LSD Works

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Disclaimer drug episode. Hey, everybody, we recorded an episode on
LSD and we just wanted to throw it out there
that we talked about LSD and other drugs in a
very frank, open, uh, non judgmental way. So parents, you
may not want your little kiddies to listen to this one.
It's up to you. I don't know what kind of

(00:20):
household you run, but that's our disclaimer. Welcome to Stuff
you Should Know from house Stuff Works dot com. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W.
Chuck Bryant and Jerry and this is Stuff you Should

(00:42):
Know the podcast. It's right, Josh. Uh. I'm gonna wish
you two things. Happy anniversary, Yes, happy anniversary because the
day that we're recording, it was eight years ago this
week that we released Well not we you we. I
wasn't even there yet, you were here in spirit. I

(01:02):
appreciate that. Yeah, it's when stuff you should know. I I
was born. Yeah, two mid April, eight years ago. We
got forty two years ago. And happy bicycle Day. Did
you know that it was bicycle day when he picked
us out? No? Really really, that's actually that's amazing, isn't it. Yeah,
it's weird. Yeah. It was the thing that prompted it

(01:23):
was that recent study about LSD and I was like, wow, yeah,
we should totally do LSD. We've never done it. And
it was I think yesterday that I realized today is
bicycle Day. And for those of you who aren't in
the know, bicycle days not about riding bicycles to work. No,
it's not. As a matter of fact, somebody on Twitter
said every day's bicycle Day. To me, I'm like, I

(01:44):
bet you don't. So. Bicycle Day commemorates the day when
Um Albert Hoffman, the discoverer or creator I guess, depending
on how you look at it of LSD, UM experimented
on himself and part of that included him riding his
bike back home from work while he was Yeah, and

(02:06):
we'll talk about that here in a minute. But bicycle
Day itself was started supposedly by Professor Thomas Roberts of
Northern Illinois University, Go Huskies, in commemoration of that what
some people say it was a great day in history.
It certainly was the day that changed history. You really
can't argue that. No, and Um, if you want to

(02:29):
just hear all things LSD and stuff you should know
We and did two other shows two thousand eight, did
the CIA test LSD on Unsuspecting Americans? Good? The answer
is yes, mind opening and October. Can you treat mental
illness with psychedelics? And now in typical stuff you should
know backward form, we're gonna do LSD. Yeah, we like

(02:52):
to nibble around that. Do l s D. You know
that'd be weird. Oh, we weren't supposed to. Oh, we
better get through this quick. We got about thirty minutes. Oh.
We should also point out at the end of this
episode we have John hodgment On is in a very
special listener male audio segment where he rebuts our nostalgia episode.

(03:15):
Although it seems like we agreed more than we didn't,
he didn't end up forbutting anything. Yeah. Uh, and that's
we worked out the the the misunderstanding, how about that? Yeah,
and we like all times that you sit down with
hodgement We talked for thirty minutes about one small thing.
That's why this episode is super long, because this is
gonna be long too. It is so it's super size

(03:36):
robuts we should sell like eight more extra ads all
but just kidding. Yeah, like Tommy Chong would probably one
in on this one. He's got some businesses done. Yeah,
I shouldn't joke because sales will be like knocking on
the door. All right, Chuck really really said, Chuck, we're
talking about l s D today, um and l s
D again. That that bicycle day, that first day seven

(04:00):
three years ago. I think it really did change the
world because there are very few substances that have ever
been created by man that had a more sweeping, profound
effect than LSD. Like you, kind of a lot of
people associate LSD with hippies, they're grateful dead maybe ravers,
that kind of thing. But if you really start to

(04:20):
kind of poke around popular culture here in the West,
you start to see it turn up everywhere. Like every
American president has taken LSD. Right, Well, it's part of
the oath of office, like the Bible is laced with
LST put their hand on their hand on it. Actually,
let's debunk that myth right now. Apparently LSD is non
absorbment through the skin. Yeah, which means that those says, well,

(04:43):
there's a bunch of rumors, but the one with Jimi
Hendrix would put LSD in his sweatband. He may have
wouldn't have done anything, although it could have trickled down
into his mouth maybe. Yeah. Uh, here's some other popular
LSD myths. I don't think there have been any They're
drugs that have spawned maybe these days. But I'm not

(05:04):
hip to all these new drugs, man, and like it's
impossible to be. I was doing research for this and
I ran across, like all the new drugs that are
available today. It's incredible. There's just like an avalanche of new, new,
virtually untested drugs that's being They're they're going from synthesis
to human trials by way of customer like people are

(05:26):
taking these things and they're essentially like guinea pigs for
these things. Still, it is extremely dangerous. Yeah, Molly and
Billy and Jim's way beyond that, Jimmy, Jimmy's old news,
Jimmy's oldness. Uh. Here just a few quickie uh highlights. Um,
the guy that thought he was an orange so he
like peeled his skin off. Clearly LSD did that. Not true? Uh,

(05:49):
college kids who stared at the sun until they were blind.
Clearly LSD is responsible for those children licking stick tattoos
given out to children at Halloween. Uh, seven hits will
make you legally insane, right, you can use that as
a defense in court. Diane link Letter jumped from a
window because she thought she could fly, So that was

(06:11):
a big one that kind of changed public opinion. She
jumped from a window, she definitely did, but she was
also suicidal and she had taken LSD before. What made
it such a huge case was that, um, she was
Art link Letter's daughter art link Letter at the time.
This is I think the early seventies. When his daughter
committed suicide, Um, he was already a bit of a

(06:33):
He was like the Bill Cosby of the age, which
is not surprising, and the moral crusader and kind of
um social scold of everybody, and how things are just
not like they used to be in the good old days,
are so much better and everybody's just letting their kids
get away with so much and pull up your pants
and that kind of stuff. He was a bit like

(06:54):
that already. And then his his daughter committed suicide, and um,
he was understandably uh devastated by that, and he turned
his ire towards drugs because she had taken LSD before.
But there's no evidence that she was on on LSD
at the time, she was already suicidal. But again, art
link letter is going to all of the kids parents

(07:16):
and saying like, you can't let your don't let this
happen to your children too. Scared America's parents and really
kind of sealed the deal of public opinion against LST
at the time. Yeah. Uh, and how about one more
for you. Uh. Pittsburgh Pirates pitcher doc Ellis thoes a
no hitter on acid. That's true, that's true. Well, I
know we've covered it. Dufus Okay, oh you're putting one

(07:39):
into yeah. Oh sorry, there's a great documentary about it,
and um, true is the only person's word we have
to go on. Was doc Ellis, Well, his girlfriend also,
I don't want to say testify, but she she backed
it up. She was like, yeah, we took acid and
into it. Though, and apparently the story changed a bit

(08:01):
over the years, and he also said other things that
didn't quite match up. So there's a little speculation that
he might have Gussie did it up a little bit. Oh,
like the ball was telling him what pitch to throw,
and maybe when he took the acid, so supposedly took
it at noon and he was pitching it like seven.
So I mean he still would have been on acid,
he just wouldn't have been speaking on acid or something. Yeah,

(08:22):
but it's a great documentary. You should check it out. Yeah,
it's good. Okay, you threw me off at that. When
you got me I was like, Chuck, wait, we did
an internet round up on that. Yeah, that's right. So
there was another thing, Chuck, that I remember growing up
with is that acid. If you took acid, it would
mess up your chromosome so that when you had offspring kid,

(08:45):
they would be all kinds of messed up, disfigured, deformed,
would have severe developmental defects, all sorts of terrible stuff.
That's what we call it back in the early eighties.
By the way, um, it could put holes in your brain. Yeah,
that's another one too that everybody ringing around believing. And
one of the reasons everyone ran around believing all of
these weird myths. By the way, No, LSD doesn't affect

(09:06):
your chromosomes. That actually is metabolized. It out of your
system faster than just about any other drug on the planet.
Pee it up very quickly. Your liver starts breaking it
down immediately. Um, So it certainly doesn't affect your chromosomes
and it doesn't put holes in your brain. But the
reason why these myths are around and the reason why
people believe them is because the authorities are the ones

(09:28):
who either made up these myths or latched onto them
and basically amplified them through these kind of public service
announcements and through the media. And so a lot of
people walked around believing this. And and on the one hand,
you can say, well, that's fine, it kept some kids
maybe off of heroin or something. Lying to kids is
fine when it comes to drugs. You can make that case, right,

(09:52):
But at the same time, you can also point to
the real chilling effect that the LSD hysteria had on
um understanding consciousness, potentially treating mental illness, which were just
now starting to realize, like, yeah, it has that a
lot of potential for that treating alcoholism. Um, there's a

(10:14):
lot of people whose lives could have been helped had
at the very least uh Science been allowed to continue
his inquiry into LSD. But the the the fear of
LSD was so widespread and so profound that even science
was clamped down. Yeah, the CIA was like only week
and good people LSD, not you scientists in controlled settings.

(10:37):
There's this one guy. I don't know where the lawsuit
is now, but he uh. I don't think we covered
it on our show about the CIA, but the family
of a guy that supposedly jumped from a window after
being dost Yeah, but his family is suing the CIA,
saying now he was beaten up and shoved out the
window because he had information. I think he was actually

(11:00):
does though, and he was losing his stuff. I don't
know he was dosed, but they're there. Their contention, the
families and he was thrown out is that he was murdered.
I saw that too. Yeah, yeah, like the Frank Olsen
project dot org. Maybe that's what the website is. And
we definitely covered that the CIA thing because he definitely
he was around at the time that happened at that time,

(11:20):
because that was the time when like, if you went
to a party with CIA, they we were all just
dozing one another for fun. If you went to a
San Francisco CIA party, you're a hardcore at that you'ren
me drinking acid unwinningly, all right, So we should, uh,
even though we've covered it before, the story is so wonderful.
We should go over the creation of LSD by Albert

(11:41):
Hoffman again. So I think, please begin. You didn't want
to skip this, did you know? I was? I was.
I think we should put in like a little accompanying music, said, yeah,
like some Jefferson airplane maybe. So. Um a Swiss chemist.
His name was Albert Hoffman. We said a few times.
He was working at a lab called Sandoz. Uh. They

(12:03):
were a farmer company and now they're they're still around,
but there's a subsidy or I can't remember who. They're
not making drugs anymore, okay. Uh. So he was working
on a project involving something called ergot. It's a fungus
that grows on rye and it's been blamed uh, notably
this woman named Linda l Oh, I know what you're

(12:24):
talking about. Yeah, she put forth a theory that the
Salem witch trials were kicked off by a round of
ergot poisoning, and she has a lot of good evidence. Um, oh,
we'll go over it all. It's it's cool to look
up though, And a lot of people came out and like,
you know what, I bet she's right. So you're gonna
talk about the Hoffman. Yeah, so he was working with ergot,

(12:45):
which grows on rye and UM did a lot of
poisoning over the years, notably in the Middle Ages. Even
though they used it medicinally, midwives used it to help
speed up labor until they decided in the nineteenth century
that's pretty dangerous, actually, maybe we should just not poison
these pregnant women with ergot. Well they were they were

(13:07):
not just giving them ergot to poison them for fun.
Apparently it um contracts muscles, right, so it would speed
up labor, right exactly. UM. And they figured out that
they would actually prove it would slow bleeding, I think
by dilating blood vessels maybe, so they would give it
to a woman after labor. Still, but they stopped giving

(13:27):
it to them like to to create, to put a
woman into labor. But it was it was remarkable enough
that even after this level of medicine UM went away,
scientists were still figuring out there, like, there's something with ergot.
We've got to be able to do something with it.
It's just too potent, you know, so uh in the

(13:50):
nineteen thirties, this was the nineteen thirties. It's just so crazy.
To think about when you see pictures of the nineteen thirties. Yeah,
they're like wires hanging everywhere the new electric lamp, like
experimenting with LSD. But it happened um at the Rockefeller
Institute in New York City. They isolated lisergic acid from
ergot and um, this is where Hoffman kind of started

(14:11):
his work, resulting in N and the derivative. The number
twenty five is and he did twenty four previous. He
finally landed on LSD, and uh that was kind of it. Yeah.
And LSD we should say, stands for lysergic acid diethyl minde.

(14:31):
And uh, basically he started with this lisergic acid um
and just basically tinkered around with it until he, like
you said, arrived at LSD. And again, he wasn't looking
for the most potent psychedelic known to humankind. Now he's
looking for medicine exactly. He was looking for I think
a respiratory um um stimulator something like that made me asthma. So, yeah,

(14:56):
give these kids some LSD. Twenty five it up and uh,
he the first time he messed around with it, he
sent it off to the pharmacologists to look, because he
was a chemist at Sandos, and chemists at Sandos they
figure out processes to extract stuff, to make new compounds,
that kind of thing. But that's that's the sum of

(15:16):
their job. Once they come up with a new compound
that they're satisfied with, they send it off to the
pharmacology department. The pharmacology department says, uh, yeah, actually this
made that frog's leg jump by itself all the way
across the room. I think there's some potential here. The
pharmacologist got their hands in on LSD, examined it, said
we don't think there's any pharmacological potential here. Throw it away,

(15:39):
and Hoffman did as he was told. Five years later,
he um suddenly just thinks about LSD again, and it's like,
you know what, I think they missed something. I'm gonna
make a new batch just on my own. Later on,
he was quoted as saying, I did not choose LSD.

(16:00):
LSD found and called me. So him deciding to make
a batch on his own is highly irregular. For the
first For one, he's a chemist. You know the chemist.
Don't go and tell the pharma colleges they missed something.
They certainly don't have a hunch. Five years later they
missed something. And then thirdly, for him to make a
batch of LSD was very weird. It was contrary to

(16:22):
his work orders. And also Ergot was very expensive and
Sandoz was trying to keep a lid on expenses. So
it was really really weird that five years later he
mixes up another batch of LSD. That is true, but
while he was mixing it up, it was a sort
of a little like a Peter Parker experiment gone wrong.
He got a little inside of him somehow. Uh they

(16:44):
think now he probably got on his fingers and maybe
like licked his finger while he was he had been
eating KFC for lunch, maybe so, and uh it got
into his body. Uh, and he you know, he had
a macid trip. He had an accidental one at first,
the world's first acid trip. That's right, And that happened

(17:05):
one of those pharmacologists. I was keeping something on the download.
He's like, yeah, this is useless, throw all this away
except to save me, like since my head staff. So
that was April eighteen ninety three. And um, the next
day Albert Hoffman's like, I got to try that again.
So he takes some LSD. I think he took two

(17:27):
fifty micrograms at PM. Yea, I noticed that too, almost
on four nineteen. Yeah, but that's a marijuana thing. Yeah,
I just I just it kind of jumped out at me.
It's like I thought I saw that too. I'm sure
everyone who's ever read that was like, oh dude, nineteen
Oh he was so close. That's the universe. So he

(17:49):
took two fifty micrograms, is that right? Which is about
ten times the minimum dose that an average person takes
these days. That's a lot. And he he shot it.
He injected it in traveniously, I believe. Yeah, didn't he
or did he take it orally? I'm sorry, no he
took it orally? Yeah, I don't. I don't see in
there where he injected it, and uh, he started to

(18:10):
have a wild ride. He did. He went to the doctor.
At first, he asked his assistant. He was like, um,
I am tripping pretty hard. You don't know what that
is yet, but I do. And he said, I think
I should go to the doctor. And he went to
the doctor and the doctor was like, dude, you're fine.
Uh you're not fine, but there's nothing physically going on

(18:30):
with you. Right, and we should say he was that
he made it to his house with his assistant and
they were on their bikes. This is why where bicycle
day comes from. And he was like, oh my god,
how long did it take for us to get home?
And as the system is like, actually, we made it
home really fast, and he's like what, he's freaking out,
He's like, go give me some milk from the neighbor.

(18:52):
Ends up drinking two liters of milk that night. Yeah,
because milk could supposedly quell the effects of different drugs
at the time. Yeah, so sense it did nothing for
this no and his neighbor. Later on, there's a couple
of stellar quotes. Let me jump back, sorry, jump back jack,
that's all right. After forty minutes after that initial dose,
he wrote down in his journal seventeen hundred hours beginning dizziness,

(19:16):
feeling of anxiety, visual distortions, symptoms of paralysis, desire to
laugh full stop. Uh. And then following that closely, I
was able to write the last words only with great effort.
And then who wrote that last? And when he got
the milk, he said, Um, the lady next door, whom

(19:38):
I scarcely recognized, brought me milk. She was no longer
Mrs R but rather a malevolent, insidious witch with a
colored mask. So people think now he was fearful going
into this experiment, and that's what you know. We'll talk
about setting, setting and your mindset going in has a
lot to do with what kind of trip you have.
And people think now like he went into it fear

(20:00):
full and ended up by all accounts, having a bad trip.
He had a bad trip. But then the doctor came
and was like, look, man, uh you're something wacky's going
on with you, but physically you're fine. You don't have
to worry about it. And I believe that's what kind
of freed Hoffman up to have a good time, have
a good trip. After that, he uh really started to

(20:21):
go oh wow and really took in what he was seeing,
what he was thinking, what he was experiencing, and um
moved from dysphoria to euphoria is the way he would
have put it. That's right. And he goes into work
the next day, tells everyone about this amazing experience and uh,
everyone else tries it, well, not everyone, but other people

(20:42):
at Sandos. His two bosses, did I think his boss
and his boss's boss. And the reason they were like no, uh,
it was because he said I took two and fifty micrograms.
They're like, that's astounding, two fifty micrograms, right, that they've
never heard of a compound having the kind of effects
that Hoffman was reporting. And he's like, I measured it myself.

(21:04):
I know what I was doing, and it was two micrographs.
These guys each took a third of that, and they
tripped pretty hard themselves, and from that moment on, Sandoz
was like, we're onto something here. Yeah. He also experimented
on animals. He started dosing boy, you name it. He
gave it to mice, and he said they moved radically

(21:24):
and showed alterations in licking behavior. They taught themselves to
tide cats cats hair stood on end, and they salivated.
He put cats and mice together and instead of the
cats attacking the mice, said, the felines would ignore the
rodents or sometimes even appear frightened by them. How about
that that's a cat on a bad trip, it said.

(21:45):
Chimpanzees did not show any obvious signs of being affected,
but normal chimps around them became upset, which he his
theory was they failed to maintain these weird social norms
that are only perceptible to other chimps. Fish swar am oddly,
and finally Spider's altered web building patterns that low doses

(22:06):
the webs were even better proportioned and more exactly built
than normally, But in higher doses the webs are badly
in rudimentaral rudimentarily made. Yeah, so he would give it like, look,
there's a roach crawling across the floor. Let's douse it.
See what happens. And there's also a very famous case
and it wasn't Hoffmann. Who's who tested it? This dude
in Oklahoma Um who was a professor of maybe pharmacology,

(22:30):
I'm not sure psychology. He shot an elephant. He got
his hands on the like Oklahoma City zoos elephant and
shot it full of LSD. The elephant, like trumpeted once,
fell on its side, started seizing its eyes, roll back
on its head, a bit part of its tongue off.
It stayed like this for an hour. He finally, ultimately

(22:52):
a lot of people point to this as a fatality
from LSD, proving that you can die. There's such a
thing as a fatal overdose from LSD. UM. But other
people say, well, actually, and then he shot the elephant
with even more tranquilizers to try to calm it down,
and that's probably what killed the elephant. But this guy
gave But it was like that for like an hour
and a half, just suffering on just an enormous amount

(23:16):
of acid. And the guy actually used to boast about it.
He kind of wore it like a badge, like it
made his career and it was just such a foul thing.
But even the scientologists were mad about it and released
like articles criticizing the guy in his work. Yeah, and
then there's a lot of questions about whether he's actually
UM and a CIA funded scientist as well. Well, he

(23:39):
had a blowgun so personal to give you when you
signed up with the CIA, is your blowgun and gallon
of LSD. Yeah, but r I P. Tusky the elephant
he went in a really bad way. That's terrible. Uh,
So long story short, sandals is onto something. Um. They
say this research is compared telling we're gonna patent this

(24:01):
stuff and market it as Dela said DELI the E
Y S I D and uh they started advertising it
for use like psychiatrists you should get some of this stuff.
Get some you should use it yourself and use it
on your patients and see what happens. They said again,
I just want to repeat with Chuck said, use it
on yourself. Well, yeah, so you know what's going on exactly. Well,

(24:25):
that's highly irregular compared to the psychiatry of today. They
don't usually go like, here's a here's a couple of
any bars for you to try, just you know, eat
some and then you'll know what your patients are going through.
They don't do that anymore. So well that they they
they're not supposed to Chuck um. But yeah, Sandals was

(24:47):
like sending this stuff out as uh an experimental drug,
that's how it was labeled at first, and as it
called on um. They moved it into like full on
marketing and started selling them like hot cakes. Yeah, it's
pretty neat. If you look up de LISID for Google images,
you know it's just package right there. It looks like

(25:07):
it's a very nineteen sixties boss, says Del said, LSD
here it is in the vials, so weird. And they
came in uh microgram doses, which is a it's a
low dose. It's about half of what an average dose
you would buy today would be at a fish concert.
I guess I'm sure that's even a dated reference. What

(25:29):
were people doing LSD these days? E d M shows? Sure, Uh,
scrillics shows, how about that? That's probably dated it Probably
we're old chucks, you know, we're old Billy Joel concert. Sure,
people inject LSD at Billy Joel concerts right in their eyeball.
So by um, by the mid nineteen sixties, uh is

(25:50):
when it actually became illegal in nineteen sixty six. We
hold on stop making it before that though, as when
it was selling like hot cakes, like it was having
a real beneficial effect in the psychiatric setting. Doses were
given to patients. Patients got doses just in the U

(26:12):
S alone, right, I mean like a lot of doses
were sold and that was just the U S. And
it was having an effect. And in Europe they used
it for um this, they used it for a camera
what it was called, I want to say, like psychotronic
or something like that, where they just give you, like
the the average dose, maybe two pills, the low dose,
and then they would talk about your childhood and that

(26:33):
kind of thing. They used it to to kind of
disarm the patient. Right in the US, they used what
was called psychedelic therapy, where they would give you about
ten times the minimum dose about what Hoffman took when
he experimented on himself, right, and that was meant to
just not not just break down your defenses, but to

(26:53):
completely blow your mind basically, so that when you came
back down you had had all these revelations and you
were essentially a better person with a more fulfilled sense
of self and meaning in your life. Yeah, those were
the two schools of thought, Like in Europe, we'll talk
about your childhood and give you a little acid. In America,
We're gonna open all these doors of perception. And the

(27:15):
thought was that you could skip years of psychotherapy with
like a good acid trip, and a lot of people
had this experience. Very famously, Carrie Grant was um hugely
into acid as a result of going to see a
psychiatrist in Beverly Hills. And there's a really, really great
article from Vanity Fair from a few years back called
carrying the Sky with Diamonds that I would strongly recommend

(27:37):
going and reading because it's really interesting and it gives
you a really good glimpse of this era where like
like the mad Men era, everybody's taking LSD for at
their psychiatrist's office for eight hours. Well, there was an
LSD episode for Madness, right, I think it's mentioned in
that article. It was one of the best of a

(27:58):
great show when Roger Shirling takes acid. Yeah, it was
it at a psychiatrist. Uh no, it was. Um, it
was just like a you know, like a party, right, okay,
but like a party where they were saying like, do
this to expand your mind. It wasn't you know, slip
to him or anything. But I had a profound effect
on him in the show. And Chuck, there's actually this

(28:18):
awesome little quote from Carrie Grant that makes it in
that that article about his experience with LSD one of
them at least. He said, Um, when I first started
under LSD, I found myself turning and turning on the couch.
And you have to imagine Carry Grant saying this year
which better? I said to the doctor, why am I
turning on the sofa? And he said, don't you know why?

(28:41):
And I said, I didn't have the Vegas idea, but
I wonder when I was going to stop? When you
stop it he answered, well, it was like a revelation
to me. He felt like he was under the spell
of LSD or there's whatever. He realized like he had
control over his life. It's kind of cool. So it
did have a really big effect on people in real

(29:03):
life as well. But like you said, very quickly, in
very short order. Within ten twelve years of it being
marketed for the first time by Sandos, it starts to
become outlawed around the country and around the world. Yeah.
By nineteen sixty five, not a lot of research was
done in the United States. Um. By nineteen sixty nine

(29:25):
there were only six projects conducted. By seventy four, the
National Institute of Mental Health said that had no therapeutic value.
And then the final experiments in the United States took
place in the nineteen eighties. Uh. And those studies and
most of the newer studies now are concerned with end
of life care and germanly ill patients. Yeah, but the

(29:46):
the the window is starting to open once more to
studying LSD and its effects on neurology and um psychiatry
and that kind of stuff. UM. And actually, when it
started to get outlawed in Sandos stopped making it they
recalled their stocks of it and um handed it over

(30:06):
to the National Institutes of Mental Health for study. But
within a few years the National Institutes of Mental Health staid, like, no,
no therapeutic value whatsoever, despite people in the US alone
basically singing its praises, no therapeutic value whatsoever. Well, I
don't know if all forty thou people said it was great,
I would say a significant portion of it. If you
go back and look at the media coverage of it

(30:28):
at the time, it was mostly favorable. It's very promising.
All right, So we're gonna take a break here and
come back and teach everyone how to make LSD. Al right, Josh, alright.

(30:59):
H The first thing that you want to do if
you want to make LSD is be a really really
good qualified chemist. Yeah, with a really good qualified set up. Yeah,
this is not meth. You can't go to Walmart making
it in a mountain dew bottle and make it in
a mountain dew bottle on aisle six, shake it up
real good, and you've got meth. Yeah. Um, this is

(31:22):
The ingredients are tough to get and they're highly regulated. Yeah,
they're not found on drug store shelves. It's very different. No. Plus,
I mean you can start with um, and there's actually
other natural sources of LSD precursors, including um morning glory
seeds in Hawaiian baby wood rows seeds, And there are

(31:43):
some LSD recipes that call for extracting the stuff called
L S A um from these things and starting with that.
But it's it's a coin toss what kind of quality
your ultimate LSD is going to be because you don't
know how how good the L. S A is in
these things. Plus, the government um, in a nod to
their prohibition era tactics, actually put a toxic coating on

(32:07):
these seeds to discourage people from using them to create
LSD or even eating them, which some people do. So
I guess if you're a legitimate LSD chemist, you are
starting with ergic like Hoffman did. That's right, just like
in the old days in the nineteen thirties. Uh, what
you wanna do? You get this fungus, which is the ergot,

(32:31):
and you have to culture it to extract the alkaloids
from that ergot. Right, you have to have a dark
room because just like sheets of acid can be contaminated
by sitting it out in the sun, in the back
of your Jetta. The fungates itself will decompose under bright light. Right,

(32:51):
so you gotta do some of this early work in
the dark room, right exactly. Um. And uh, you take
the org it once you have it extracted. Um, you
you're you're isolating the alkaloids, right or get alkaloid. And um,
when you've got the alkaloid, you add some solvents and
reagents to it, which themselves are dangerous as well. Um.

(33:12):
One of them is chloroform, which is no joke chemical. Yeah.
Hoffman actually the next day thought he didn't quite know
for sure that it was the LSD, so he huffed
chloroform because he thought, you know, it's probably the chloroform.
He's like Jeff Bridges in The Vanishing. He has some chloroform,

(33:33):
and I guess woke up a little while later and said, Nope,
that wouldn't acid. Nope, something different must be the LSD. Um,
So chloroform is not good for you. Another one of
the re agents is uh anhydrous hydrazine, which sounds like
a Douglas Adams character and it's a known carcinogen, very poisonous.
And both of them are easily breathed in and absorbed

(33:55):
through the skin. So it's these things are no joke
in there important in uh turning ergic alkaloids into LSD.
So it's very difficult, very dangerous if you're not getting
that picture. Yeah, hopefully no one's like setting up in
their kitchen and like following along. Hit Sweet said, well,
I mean you would get nowhere very quickly. We're not
giving out detailed information. And what's funny. It's funny you

(34:17):
bring that because until I think like nineteen five, you
could mail off to the U S. Patent Office and
for fifty cents they would mail you the patent to LSD,
which is the recipe for LSD. You could get it
directly from the US government for a few years. I
bet it's some one somewhere, don't you know. I'm sure
on the dark web, probably not even on I Can

(34:40):
has cheeseburger. So the ergic alkaloid is in synthesize into
lesurgic acid compound. It's called isolasurgic acid hydrolyzed I'm sorry,
hydroside and you uh do you do that by adding
some chemicals, heat it up a little bit, uh, shake
it in your milk jug, put a little basil in there. Um,

(35:01):
is it okay to joke about this? If it's not
okay to joke about this, chuck, then we've lost our
sense of humor. That's right. Uh. Then that is is summarized,
which means, and this is pretty advanced chemistry, but it's
really advanced chemistry. Yeah. Uh. It means the atoms are
actually the molecules are being rearranged in the chemical process

(35:24):
with a little heat, a little reagent, solvent, that kind
of stuff. It's taking a compound and basically doing the
old switcheroo and then bam, you have an entirely new
chemical as a result. That's right. Um, you cool that down,
you mix it up with an acid, and the base
evaporated and you were left with isosurgic diaphylamide. I summarize
it again because you know if once it's good too

(35:47):
with better, then you have LSD and it's it comes
in the form of a crystallized powder, I believe. I
think it also says you can also make it a liquid.
Now you have to do something else to make it
a liquid. So when you have LSD that you've synthesized
from urga alkaloids, Yeah, it's a crystalline powder, a white powder. Yeah.

(36:10):
And in the old days, in the in the sixties, um,
you could make micro dots, which was a tablet form. Uh.
You could just mix it with liquid and you know
use it like you know, put this drop under your tongue, um,
or you know, make tea out of it or whatever. Uh.
And then window pane, which was gelatine squares. So that's
still around. I saw on Reddit some kid was like,

(36:30):
look at this and he was holding like a huge
thing of window panes and I think he called them,
well window panes too. Yeah, they're uh. The great great
movie Flirting with Disaster, did they take gel tabs? Well?
That one of the sun Lily Tomlin and Ellen all
the son at the end of the movie doses everyone
at dinner with window pane. That's what he calls it.
And I always just think that that's a funny word

(36:51):
for it. But these days you're more than likely going
to see what's called the blotterer acid. Uh. And what
they do is they just dissolve that powder in ethanol
and then dip a sheet of blotting paper that's conveniently
perforated into tiny little squares about a quarter inch by
a quarter inch. Yeah, they're little and and he he
soaks up into that paper. Um, sometimes the paper is

(37:14):
just plain white. Sometimes it's got a little cartoon characters
and things. A lot of times and uh, then that's
you know, that's a sheet of acid. Right. There's actually
a dude in San Francisco who has an acid museum
and he has a book like a huge binder of
sheets of acid just to basically show off the artistry

(37:35):
on it. And um, it's like, how has this not
been rated by the d A. I think the answer
to that is because the d e A doesn't know
it exists. It's probably fake, right, No, I would say
that's stupid because he hit a waste of money his Um, well,
I meant fake paper in there and tell everyone it's acid,
because what he's he's not trying to sell it. He's

(37:56):
trying to say, like, look at the art that people make.
You know that what I'm saying that why would he
waste all that money putting the drug on something he's
not he's buying I don't follow, Like he's going out
and being like, Wow, that's a really beautiful sheet of
acid by it and put it in my museum. Well
that's even dumber. So he said that these things have
been exposed to light over the years and that they're

(38:17):
they're most likely totally inactive. That we said the last
twelve times I tried to take it, it didn't work.
He's like, but I traveled back in time. So each
square is a dose, and you can get up to
nine doses on a single sheet. Uh. And we'll get
to this later, but the only might as well talk

(38:38):
about now. Uh. There was a Supreme Court ruling in
early nineties where they said, um, the weight of the
drug is also the weight of the paper, which uh yeah,
I mean a lot of people got really and remain
upset about this. Uh there. The argument is that's the
equivalent of saying, well, this cocaine came in this um suitcase,

(39:00):
So just way the suitcase with the cocaine, and if
it adds eight pounds, then it adds eight pounds. Instead
of measuring the actual quantity of the drug itself, it's
measuring the carrier device, right. And one reason they did
that was because the weight of again LSD, when you're
looking at a minimum dose of about quarter quarter of

(39:22):
a microgram, that's like the weight of two grains of salt.
So if you're trying to bust people, you could be like,
well a quarter microgram get to a year. So that's
why I'll see why they didn't do that. Just rewrite
the law to reflect the weight of the real drug,
because that's all they'd have to do. I know, it
was very weird. Sam Fisted can say that, yeah, you

(39:42):
just did. But the long and short of that is
there are people, uh the dealt acid at a fish
show that are in prison for longer than you know,
rapists and murderers. Oh yeah, there's the guy who's um
in prison for life without parole. He's like sixty six now.
He's been in there for a while because he got
busted with some acid. Yeah, um for life. Yeah, he's

(40:05):
spending his life in jail because he had acid with
and he's seen violent criminals all around him. Get pretty interesting.
Uh so should we talk about what an LSD trip
is like? Yeah? According to whoever wrote this article, I
think this is a Shana Freeman joint. Yeah. I thought
most of this was pretty good. There were a few

(40:26):
parts that I was like, come on, it was yeah,
very straightforward and logical and reasonable and rational and myth
busting too. Yeah, I agree. Uh so the hallucinations that
one would have on LSD. I think there's there's a
bit of a misnomer there and that some people might think, Oh,

(40:47):
you know, I saw a pink elephant come in the
room and sit down beside me, and I thought it
was real. Um, that's not exactly what they mean by
an LSD hallucination. What they mean more is, um, you know,
I stared at the wall and the wall looked like
it was pulsating and breathing, or that painting had a
glow around it. Uh. And and it's also a case

(41:09):
of not oh my god, what's happening to my brain?
It's oh my god, this asset is awesome or bad
or strong. But I know that I'm on a drug
and it's making all these hallucinations happen precisely right, And yeah,
it's a great way to say I mean, it's it's
it's away from the classical definition of a hallucination because
you don't and it's also you don't you don't believe

(41:32):
what you're seeing is like real. You realize that it's
the result of the drug. Although I'm sure some people
have taken asset and really uh thought, like you know,
it's done such a number on the brain that they
didn't know that they were on the drug, which is
why you have your buddy there. You say, no, no, no,
that's the acid. Right, Well, that's that's Another point that
um Shane of Freeman makes in this article is that

(41:54):
because of the trip and how what a profound impact
that has on the brain. Um, you typically want to
trip with other people who have experience tripping in a
very calm place. And you mentioned set and setting earlier.
I think that was Timothy Leary that came up with that,
and set reminds refers to mindset and setting refers to

(42:17):
the setting that that you and you take your asset in. Right,
So you want to be in a positive frame of
mind or else you're going to probably have a bad
trip and you want to take it in a calm,
comfortable setting like your home or SHANEA. Freeman suggests the park. Yeah,
maybe don't. If you're stressed out about finals, maybe don't

(42:37):
take acid before you go to class to take those finals.
You're probably going to have a bad time. That would
betray set and setting in a profound way. Exactly. So
the trip itself typically lasts for something between maybe seven
to twelve hours. About halfway through. Uh, you're going to
experience what's called the peak, and the whole thing is

(42:58):
going to really start about thirty to sixteen minutes after
you take acid. Uh. Yeah, And if you've ever been
to college and seeing someone taking acid on the dorm floor,
you might hear a lot of like, I don't know
if it's working yet. I don't think it's working yet.
I don't know. I think we got ripped off, man,

(43:19):
I don't think. And then all of a sudden, and
then you just shut the door and then you go
and study like a good student. Right. Physically, Josh, you
might have dilated pupils, increased blood pressure. Your body temperature
might raise. You might go a little sweaty and dizzy.
You might be drowsy. Um, you might be tingly in

(43:39):
the extremities, right, your stomach might feel kind of weird,
have a metallic sensation in your mouth. Yeah, you're probably
not hungry, right, Um, and you may uh, you're seeing
things in a very weird way. You will probably start
to notice patterns basically in the air. You could see
a wall, but eating. Like you said, Um, you're going

(44:02):
to see things in a different way than you normally do,
is the best way to put it. UM. In some
extreme cases, some people have reported synaesthesia triggering in them,
where their senses they're basically getting mixed up. I wonder
if they're synists maybe in that like unlocked it maybe, Um,
that's entirely possible because there's a pretty well established school

(44:24):
of thought that says that if you are predisposed to
a brain based mental illness like schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, UM,
taking LSD can hasten its onset. It's not going to
give you schizophrenia, it's not going to give you bipolar disorder.
But if you were already predisposed to it and the
symptoms hadn't started yet, it could hasten that true. Emotionally,

(44:49):
Shana points out that you kind of can run the
gamut from happiness and euphoria. Uh, you love everything, You
love everyone. Everything's magical. That's the key word right there.
What's that magical? Yeah, everything seems magical to you, or
it can go the other way. Um, and you can
have you know, bad emotions, and that's you know, probably

(45:11):
part of the bad trip, go into it in the
wrong headspace, like we talked about. But that's the crux
of It's still the magic is still the crux of it.
Regardless of whether you're having a uth fork or a
dysphoric experience, it still seems to have supernatural qualities to it.
It's not just normal um having a bad experience, bad

(45:32):
mood kind of thing. It's like the universe is coming
apart and it's it's all reflecting poorly on my life. Yeah,
And I think with a lot of hallucinogenics, that's why
they're used in in spiritual and religious ceremonies all over
the world because it's a profound experience. It can make
you very contemplative, uh you know the things you think.

(45:56):
It can make uh people look inward and to cover
things about themselves. And so that's why I mean like
ayahuasca and uh ayahuascauska Ia huskahuasca and there's somewhere in
magic mushrooms who did a great episode on that. Um.
They've been used for millennia around the campfire for people

(46:17):
to like, you know, quote unquote unlock these doors in
their mind that they don't readily have access to. The
doors of perception. It's right. Uh. If you are an
observer of people on LSD and you're not on an LST,
you might think, Man, there talking a lot about really
things that aren't very important, But to the person on

(46:38):
the LST, it's very important. It's the most important thing
in the world at that moment. The person not on
LSD and the person on LSD will both mutually scare
one another and usually end up in different rooms at
a party. Uh. And then there is the the the
time jumps. Um. It just really will mess with your

(46:58):
sense of time. According to research, and they will say
that you might think you've been doing something for five
minutes and it's been an hour, or it might be
the reverse, and you might not have any idea how
much time is passing. So whether you're having a good
trip or a bad trip, the one thing that all
trips are gonna have in common is that they end
within about twelve hours or so. Like the magical thinking

(47:23):
goes away, what you would perceive as normal reality starts
to step back in and um, there may be some
sort of emotional or mental hangover, not a hangover like
one that alcohol brings on, but more just like a
whoa kind of thing after a profound emotional mental exercise

(47:44):
or being put through the grinder. Um, you're going to
you will have some sort of you'll be a wash
in something, but you reality will return eventually. That makes
sense that you would have an emotional hang over, Chuck,
because LSD basically mimics the shape of Sarahtonin and kind

(48:06):
of hijacks your serotonin receptors. Is how it does its thing,
So Sarah toonin is in part responsible for mood regulation, emotions,
that kind of thing. So it makes sense that you'd
be a little wacky the day after you trip on LST. Interesting. Uh.
Sometimes you might see uh, I always say college students,

(48:27):
And to keep picking on college students, I mean, what
happens about of acid trips are taken by college students. Um,
you might see a college student admit themselves to the
e R or call an ambulance. The doctors like this
was a terrible decision on your part. Yeah, and you go,
why are you talking to me about this? Just heal
me and the doctor will pat you on the head

(48:48):
and put you in a in a quiet room. And
no the doctor coming to the hospital while you're on acid,
I got you. But when you get to the r
the doctor will patch you on the head, put you
in a nice quiet dark room that everything is okay. Uh.
They may give you some anti anxiety meds or a
tranquilizer to sort of chill you out a little bit,

(49:09):
but basically they just keep you in there and tell
a nurse like, do me a favorite every hour going
there and make sure that guy isn't breaking some equipment
and he'll be fine. And you know it sounds like
about six hours. So that's tripping tripping one on one. Um,
you want to take another break before we get into
like what's going on in your mind? Yeah? Why not?

(49:30):
All right, so everybody bear with us. Man, So chuck,

(49:55):
what's going on right now? Yeah, well just went and
ppet he went to a little podcasters room and now
you're back during the break. That's what's going on. What's
going on in the mind? You mean on LSD. Funny
you should ask h here's the deal. When this article
was written, she said, researchers aren't sure what LSD is

(50:20):
doing in the brain. They still aren't sure. We have
a better idea, that a much better idea. Um, well
it was back a little bits of two. Well yeah,
this this one was from two thousand eleven. A Yale
psychiatrist named Andrew Sewell, one of the few dudes in
the US who uh does psychedelic drug research. He's not

(50:41):
l seven, He's not square. Remember that band else, Yeah, yeah,
they were good. Remember it was them, the Breeders and
four non Blondes all came out with like great albums
all at once and whole and I'm gonna take issue
with wholes. I'll take that one. No fenand blance they
have that Hey song. That whole album was pretty good.

(51:04):
All right, Well I'm bad, Okay. I was listening to
Pavement the entire time. You could listen to all of it,
all right. I was listening to Pavement to Now I'm
just kidding. I liked El seven though. Um Andrew Sewell, Uh,
he was a Yale psychiatrist, like I said, or maybe
still is. And he said at the time, uh, that

(51:24):
it had to do with the thalamus. Sensory impressions are
routed through the thalamus. Jacks is a gatekeeper. So his
theory at the time, which was built upon research from
Franz Volanda, Switzerland, said that drugs like LSD and psilocybin um.
They toned down the thalamus's activity. So, in other words,

(51:46):
the gatekeeper doesn't work. The he liken to to a
spam filter on email, said, it's not working as well,
So it lets it lets unprocessed information through to consciousness,
which is a great explanation of it. That was two
thousand eleven, but from you got that from Live Science, right, Yeah,
I think that was a good, good explanation of it. Yeah,
but we have brand new hot off the press's information

(52:08):
which I which doesn't necessarily contradict that, right, agreed. So
I think Imperial College of London researchers got their hands
and some acid, gave them to some people and threw
them in a wonder machine and looked at their brain volunteers. Volunteers,
we should add that had all taken LSD before. This
wasn't against their will now, and that uh, they wanted

(52:30):
people that have tripped before and people that knew they
could handle taking acid and being an m r I machine,
which we already have mentioned as weird and loud and claustrophobic.
You know, Yeah, that's a good point. That was very
wise of those guys. Yes, So the upshot of it
was that we now have brain scans of people under

(52:51):
the influence of LSD for the first time in human history,
and it's it's really kind of opened up some new
ideas for what's going on an acid trip. And you
should see the difference of these, like the comparison to
control and the one on acid. It's like you don't
even have to read the caption to know which one's which,

(53:11):
Like one is like, okay, I'm I guess I'm thinking
I'm aware of myself my toe, which is uh, am
I gonna pay the water bill this month? And then
the other ones just like yeah, like that. It's amazing
what they said. I'm just gonna read it because they
say it better than I ever could. Um. They said.
LSD simultaneously creates hyper connections across the brain, allowing the

(53:35):
functions of seemingly unrelated regions of the brain to ooze
into one another. At the same time, the drug apparently
chips away at organization within networks. Like all of this
sounds like right on the money, uh, including a system
the brain differs to at rest called the default mode
network yeah, which normally governs functions of such as self reflection,

(53:56):
autobiographical memory thing and mental time travel bing bing. Right.
So what what the what they're saying is is that
the idea that you see things differently, that you think
about things differently, that you understand concepts like the universe
and reality and your place in it differently than you
normally do is accurate. Like LSD changes literally the way

(54:22):
you think about the world by changing the connections in
your brain. Yeah. And notably they point out, um, in
the sixties, you would always hear a lot about the
ego and the sense of self. Uh. They think they
have proven through brain scans that LSD literally makes you

(54:43):
forget that your sense of self for that time, right,
and and it allows you to do something that LSD
is very famous for, which is makes you feel connected
to the universe, to humanity, to the gazelle population, to everything,
just feel connected. And again it's called um ego dissolution, right, Yeah,
which is one of the you know, it supports the

(55:04):
notion that when you take acid with somebody, you have
this bond with them, uh, perhaps even a lifelong bond.
They also found that the effects, the psychological effects in
the individual as well have lasting impacts as well, So
it's not just like you're on the drug. You're under
the influence of the drug. What you're thinking and feeling,

(55:25):
um is temporary. It actually creates a pronounced and most
commonly positive change in the individual's outlook on life in
stace of well being, which is pretty amazing. But now
we have brain scans of it. The brain scans just
in every way seemed to support everything everyone has always
said up. Not everyone, but the people that weren't making

(55:47):
up stories about acid, but about acid, the people who
never said, oh, I see a pink elephant in the room.
The people who never went up to somebody and like
wave their hand in front of their face. Oh, that's
somebody do that. Like a couple of summers ago at
my neighborhood pool, there's a stew behaving strangely and I
was like, I wonder, and then somebody went up and

(56:07):
went like that. So I was like, oh, no, I know.
So super promising research, and I think it's awesome that
they're looking into this stuff again. Um, are they doing
this in the United States? That all? Yet? Because it
didn't they sort of allow it again. Yes, three years
ago there was a two four um study with like
twelve terminally ill patients with cancer in the United States,

(56:33):
but it's still like very small groups of scientists are
probably working on like like twelve oh yeah yeah, and
they're using very small study populations. But the results that
they're finding, like in this case, um that the cancer
patients reported even twelve months on a more positive outlook
on life despite the fact that their life was coming

(56:54):
to an end prematurely in their opinion, um, because of
the acid. They're finding like all of these the studies
that are being carried out are are finding such sweeping
um conclusions about the potential for LSD to positively impact
people's lives that um there all of them are like,

(57:16):
we need more studies, more studies, more studies, we need
more people involved in I'm like, let's get back to
studying this, which we left off of like forty fifty
years ago for no good reason. And forty and fifty
years ago is when the scientists thought like they were
on the cusp of making some real breakthroughs. When everything
gets shut down, um, and back then, like the way

(57:39):
they do the studies now, it seems like our way better.
They didn't have controls back then, but they didn't use
controls in most of these experiments. Timothy Leary was carrying
out these studies. I mean, give me a break, all right,
let's talk about acid flashbacks. Yeah, I mean, Shanna calls
it very controversial among LSD users and researchers. Um, I'm

(58:01):
gonna say false outright, because there's zero evidence that it's
a real thing and that the body actually retains some
bit of LSD. What you've heard, you know, the rumors
like it's in your spinal fluid. Uh, it's in your
fatty deposits, and years later you can be sitting in
a meeting and have a full on hallucinatory acid flashback. Right.

(58:23):
There's no mechanism that this could be carried out by
where there's like just yeah, like your your body stores
some acid for later and you start to trip again suddenly.
There are people who have reported it, Um, but it's
entirely possible that they're mentally all right, or it's entirely
possible they're suffering from something called hallucinogen hallucinogen hallucinogen persisting

(58:48):
perceptive disorder. This sounds pretty awful if you ask me. Yeah,
and this I did a little more research. Apparently this
is linked to persistent LSD use. Um, someone who's done
a lot out of acid, and it is even then,
it's still not due to a build up of LSD
molecules in the body. So what maybe they rearranged their

(59:08):
neural connections. Well, it's where they also predisposed to mental illness. Well,
I think a lot of times it's as current medical
opinions divided as to the cause. Uh, some people think
it's a form of PTSD. Other people think there were
changes in the brain morphology because they did so much acid.
But it's still not like the old story, like you

(59:31):
had acid in your body from a trip long ago.
It's just reactivated, just like burned out sitting in the corner. Yeah,
and supposedly where this was all born. At an educational
meeting for a d A agents in San Francisco, a
speaker said, Uh, he suggested that the rerelease of LSD
hidden in the bodies of users led to untimely psychotic flashbacks.

(59:54):
And no one has tape of this, but there are
people that wrote about it, and all evidence points that
like this is where the acid flashback myth. Myth was
born just from this one speaker, that's that's really interesting
the way to go dude. So um, again, we were
talking about like there's a lot of hysteria surrounding LST.

(01:00:15):
People have died on LSD. What's what's that issue is? Well,
a couplefold One. Is there a lethal dose of LSD
that's never been proven Despite the millions of acid trips
that people have taken, it's never been conclusively shown that
LSD led to the death of a human being. Yeah,

(01:00:35):
I would assume, like there's a lethal dose of water,
So I would assume if you drank five gallons of
LSD you might die. But then it it's so out
of the realm of believability. It's just like why even
talk about it? Right? And there have been cases of
people ingesting massive amounts of LSD. So the minimum dose
is a quarter microgram, which is um like twenty five

(01:01:00):
thousandths of a graham I believe. Is that like what
an ascid hit is these days? I think it's that's
about a half of a hit. It's a mild hit
from what I understand. So if you go splits these
with your girlfriend the fish concert, then you'd have like, yeah, yeah,
that would be that kind of dose. I guess right, So, um,
the that that's a that's a very small amount, like

(01:01:24):
thousandths of a graham. Some people have taken like, no,
thousands of a milligram. I'm sorry, that's the that's the
Some people have taken milligrams of this stuff accidentally. Um,
there was a group of people in and at a
party and they thought they were snorting cocaine, but it

(01:01:45):
turned out they were snorting powdered LSD. And one person
which shown to have had seven have ingested seven milligrams
of LSD. So that's like seventy thousand times the minimum
dose something like that. Yeah, and I think this is
actually in the Western Journal of Medicine. And they most

(01:02:05):
of the people just boom. It knocked him out immediately
and they passed out. The people that were awake, well,
everyone went to the hospital because it was by all
accounts an overdose of LSD, but every everyone was fine.
So that's what it was. It's like seven thousand micrograms
and a minimum dose is a quarter of a microgram.

(01:02:26):
So yeah, like twelve hours later they were fine, and
twelve years later they five of them were examined for
years for long term issues. UM, and no one had
any issues at that party. At least there's another one,
another person who shows up in one study. I'm not
sure what the case was around it, but the person

(01:02:47):
survived in justing forty milligrams, which is forty micrograms UM
and apparently survived. So so the toxic dose, the LD
fifty dose, which is where half of the people who
took that dose would be expected to die. UM, it's
never been established. We don't know what it is, but

(01:03:07):
it's it's huge, it's massive. So the pharmacological deaths from
LSD have probably never happened. What what is what has
been documented is behavioral deaths. People who UM took risks
potentially that UM they wouldn't normally have under the influence
of LSD. If he went swimming in a place they

(01:03:29):
wouldn't have normally gone swimming, maybe jump from a building,
not because they thought they could fly or anything like that,
but because I think I can make it to the
ledge and go party over there, Whereas if they were
under normal conditions, they wouldn't have engaged in that behavior.
So the Pore judgment basically right. But again those are
pretty few and far between, although when they do happen

(01:03:50):
they're there tragic. Yeah, and there there are also cases
of like heart attacks and strokes, but um, with something
like that, there's used the other drugs involved, and you
can't conclusively say, like the LSD caused the heart attack.
There's also apparently no documented, confirmed, confirmed report of somebody
committing suicide under the influence of LSD. It's more like

(01:04:14):
art link letters daughter somebody who had taken ls D before,
and the l their their previous LSD use was blamed
for it. But there's from what I could find, not
a documented case of someone who was on LSD and
went nuts and killed themselves. And even then I think, uh,
it was It's a that's a difficult thing to prove

(01:04:35):
that something caused something because then you start digging into
that person's uh closet and find out that they were
suicidal anyway, and this was a long time coming. Um,
who knows. It's it's a tough thing to prove. The
upshot of it is that the documented evidence of the

(01:04:56):
positive effects that LSD can have on the human psyche
um vastly out number the recognized tragic events that have
taken place as a result of LSD. Can I read
this one part about heavy LSD users because I thought
this is kind of funny. Heavy LSD users can develop
profound social problems, completely ruin their sleep cycles, and lose

(01:05:17):
interest in eating and personal hygiene. They turn into hippies,
is what they're saying. Yeah, And and she says something
I do take issue with that there's no one and
and rehab for LSD. That's not true. There are people
in rehab for LSD. It's not common because she rightly
points out that when you do LSD and then you

(01:05:38):
do it again the next day, you and then the
next day and the next day you become uh, you
build up a tolerance really fast, and you just need
more and more LSD and it doesn't work after a
very short time. Right. Well, like I said, things normalize
and you don't get the experience you're looking for. Um. So,

(01:05:59):
like more most other drugs, it's not the kind of
drug that you usually see people doing a lot of
day in and day out all the time. Right. And
what she's also saying is there's no no means for
becoming psychologically or physically dependent on it, which makes it
a non addictive drug, although the FEDS have it under
Schedule one, which means that it has a high likelihood

(01:06:21):
for abuse addiction and that it has no medical usefulness whatsoever.
So both of those two, Um, but that's false for
for both um, both of the reasons that, yeah, both
of the criteria for a Schedule one drug. Um. She
also points out, and this is something I never considered,
but I think it makes a lot of sense. Um,

(01:06:42):
the effects of LC aren't dependable, like you never know
what you're gonna get, and addicts crave that dependability. They
want to know, like cocaine will do the same thing
to me every time, that bottle of Jack Daniels will
do the same thing to me every time, or that cigarette. Yeah,
but um, I don't know what I'm going to get
out of acids, so it just doesn't lend itself to
that sort of addictive nature. Pretty interesting. Plus it's also

(01:07:03):
further interesting that a lot of people have used I
don't want to say a lot. I have no idea
of the number, but I know it's been used in
the past. People have used LSD and other psychedelic drugs
to quit addictions like cigarette smoking, like alcoholism. And um,
again you mentioned our can you treat mental illness with
Psychedelics episode, which was awesome, but we talked about that

(01:07:26):
in that that episode two. All right, Josh, let's I
know this is a long one. Plus we got the
hodgment that this is gonna be our first two hour show.
Oh my gosh. But we can't finish the show unless
we talk a little bit about the cultural history. Uh.
Notably someone you mentioned, Timothy Learry. Dr. Timothy Leary actually
worked at Harvard almost single handedly is responsible for the

(01:07:48):
initial boom turn against LSD by the public and science.
He took. He took what was a legitimate field of
inquiry and um made it completely illegitimate. Like he's almost
singlehandedly to blame for acid being first science turning its

(01:08:09):
back on acid. Yeah, he had He had a loud
voice and talked about a lot of like hippie dippy
things that people didn't like, Scientists didn't like them, associating
it with LSD. He founded a church where LSD was
the sacrament of it, the League for Spiritual Discovery. Previous
to that, though at Harvard, he and his colleague Richard
Albert Um we're actually trying to study it a little
more legitimately. That he got fired from Harvard and sixty three,

(01:08:31):
and that's when he sort of went full bore towards uh,
you know, tune in, turn in, drop out, which he
regrets that phrase, he he and he he should not
be blamed for that because he said later on that
he did not mean like drop out of society and
like don't he said that it was taken like, um,
that people's people took it to mean get stoned and

(01:08:53):
abandoned all constructive activity, and that that's not at all
what he meant. That he went when he was saying
turn on, he was saying, like, you know, turn on
your brain. Yeah, turn on your brain, like turn on
your potential, like like let's get things going. Um, tune
in to uh, interact harmoniously with the world around you,
and then drop out with it becomes self reliant, not

(01:09:15):
dependent on the man or so basically an after school
special that he was trying to make sure basically the
more you know, and it was taken you know, people
take things like water like they're looking for the path
of least resistance in a lot of ways, so they
took it to mean like, oh, it's great, Timothy Leary

(01:09:36):
just gave us all license to like not do anything
useful and really upset all the crew cuts over there
who are carrying everybody right now. Then there was kin
Kisi Um, author of many books, uh, notably One Floor
with the Cuckoo's Nest Um, which that alone makes him
a yeah or just like a major contributor to popular

(01:10:01):
culture culture even yeah, just that agreed. Uh. He was
notable for being a part of the Mary Pranksters, which
um it's documented in the Great Great Tom Wolf book
The Electric kool Aid Asset Tests. His favorite books required
reading really good um and it documents in Mary Prankster

(01:10:22):
was basically a school bus, uh, psychedelically painted full of
hippies driving around with gallons and gallons of acid at
the time when the cops had no idea what acid
was or when it was not yet illegal. Yeah, but
he got into acid because of the CIA. He was
a volunteer in the late fifties to dose himself. And

(01:10:43):
uh he was what did she call him here, an
acid populace that he was one of those that thought
everybody needs to do this and it will be a
different world. Uh. And then uh, finally, Mr Owsley Stanley,
all the dead heads out there just went you about
time they were so mad. While they never get mad,
but get mad because they they have a profound social

(01:11:10):
interaction problems. He was a chemist who was in hate
Ashbury and San Francisco, studied at cal Berkeley, and he
was like, you know what, I'm taking a lot of
bad LSD and so I'm gonna start making it myself.
He was a self taught chemist, did you say that? Yeah,
And he got really really good at it. And Asley
l s D became the standard for good clean acid

(01:11:33):
in the nineteen sixties and seventies, and they used them
at the acid tests which um can KESI used to
hold in San Francisco and the Grateful Dead used to play.
And Osley Stanley was also the sound engineer. Did he
create the Wall of Sound? Was that him his doing? No,
that was Phil Specter. But he was the Dead's original

(01:11:54):
sound man. And what he got known for was he
was one of the first people to mixed concerts lie
and in stereo and plug right into the board. So
all those old you know, deadheads love to trade the
old bootlegs. Those bootlegs sounds so good because of Owsley. Um,
because he was you know, he was an innovator as

(01:12:15):
a sound man, and he was one of the first
investors in the Dead financially and because he was a millionaire.
Alicet Millionaires said he made like ten thousand or ten
million hits of acid in his lifetime. Uh, he gave
away a lot of it, though there was one there
was a sit in I can't remember what it was
called where he gave out and by all accounts, three

(01:12:37):
hundred thousand people took acid all in one place where
I had to be San Francisco. Uh. And he also
designed the Steely with Bob Thomas. The very famous lightning
bolt skull logo on the Grateful Dead album Steal Your
Face Right off of Your Head was designed by Owsley.

(01:12:59):
Did not know that, yep. And now all the dead
Heads are going, Okay, you mentioned the Steely. I'm sure
we got some two and a half hours in um
and acids making a bit of a comeback in San
Francisco to among all the little technocrats that took that
town over and raised they're tripping and stuff, not really
tripping their micro dosing there. Basically, Albert Hoffman had the

(01:13:22):
idea that UM taking minuscule amounts of LSD could improve
cognitive function, so basically they're they're getting better at coding.
They're taking it and going to work and um, not
fully tripping, but just having it's having some effects. Supposedly
that's like the new thing with acid yea. And that

(01:13:42):
is another reason I want to punch San Francisco in
the face. You're not the town you used to be.
So and they all know it, so don't get mad
at me. They it's true. They there's also some other
stuff chuck, Like, apparently if you buy LSD these days,
there's a really highlight lihood that you're actually getting something
called n bomb dash n B O m E. Is

(01:14:06):
it just another chemical. It's like a much more intense
psychedelic that's very similar to LSD, but it does have
shown toxic effects, Like people actually have died from overdoses
on this style. Thinking that they had LSD does not cool. Man.
You don't sell something saying it's one thing stay away

(01:14:28):
from the orange sunshine. Um. And then there's also some
other thing called one p LSD and it's LSD with
an extra pro pion il bond that technically makes it legal.
That apparently it's open season on the internet with that
stuff right now. Kamaliohnny, the great comedian and friend of

(01:14:50):
the show, has a great bit about some designer drug
which is heroin and thailan al or thailan al cold edison,
oh codeine. Yeah, like with heroin. Okay, it's just funny.
He's like, you're already doing heroin. It's like the heroine
is enough thailand. Yeah, it's just this. It just seems like, um, well,

(01:15:14):
these are like waxing nostalgic for the good old days
of just acid. But it seems like if people are
dying on something they think is acid, then maybe you're
not doing it right. There you go, So, Chuck, I
think that's it. That's LSD man. This could have been
a two parter. It could have been, but we're not greedy.
We stayed just one. Yep. Uh. If you wanted more

(01:15:35):
about LSD, just type those three letters into the search
part how Stuff Works dot Com and it will bring
up this great article. And since I said search part,
it's time for listener mail. That's right, very special listener
mail featuring Mr John Hodgman right here, right now. Yeah, okay,
so here we are with an audio listener mail. Because

(01:15:58):
as I read previously in the teaser. Judge John Hodgman
a k a. John Hodgman of The Daily Show a
k a. Hog Right is here and he refused to
send us anything in the print, so he just said,
why don't you have me on and we can do
get out over nostalgia once and for all. Hello you guys,

(01:16:19):
Hey John, nice to talk to you both. So John,
it's good to talk to you too. I think fondly
about the times in the past when we have spoken before,
but I always look forward more to the times when
we may speak again. Because time moves in one direction,
and that is this, that is forward, and that is
the direction I'm interested in. That's the little included um

(01:16:44):
intro to Happy Trails. The song is that. So time
moves in one direction, and that is what I'm interested in.
It's known as and then if it's followed by into one,
Uh said John, you listen to the to the Nostalgia
episode right when we were were pretty hard on you.
Uh yeah, I don't know what you guys were so

(01:17:06):
mad at me about you, especially I feel we're stung
by the premise that I have stated frequently as settled
law on my own. Judge John Hodgman podcast available at
maximum fun dot org for free or on iTunes. That
nostalgia is the most toxic impulse. And I admit that

(01:17:32):
I've I employ a little hyperbole in that statement, but
I think at its core, I believe that it is
true that nostalgia. My point of view is that nostalgia
that is a yearning for the past, is at best
unproductive and at worst poisonous. So John, we talked about this, Chuck.

(01:17:57):
Chuck introduced your radical views about nostalgia on the Nostalgia episode, right,
your leftist theory. Right, Well, how did you do? How
did you come to this conclusion about nostalgia? Like where
you in nostalgizing and um like bit your tongue off
or something. I mean, what what happened to make you
feel this way about nostalgia? If I may ask? I

(01:18:20):
don't know that there was any one particular turning point
because and the truth is that I I am a
guy who likes old timey things, right, and this is
not to say old timey things are bad. I grew
up going to the Coolidge Corner movie House in the
Coolidge Corner Recline, Massachusetts, where I which is my hometown.
You wrote a Penny Farthing to work. I did not write.

(01:18:41):
I did not write I'm not that kind of loathsome
but you know, at that time, all they would do
is show old Marx Brothers movies and the Thin Man
marathons and even even you know, more recent old movies
as it were. And I love, I would love going
into so called nostalgia stores to pour through uh old

(01:19:03):
movie posters, and I love used bookstores. I love the
trappings of seeing culture what it was like at a
time that was different from the way it is in
my own life. I love to I love to rummage
through junk stores and thrift stores and find stuff. And
I come in listening to your podcast, I completely UH

(01:19:26):
felt with you. I guess that is called empathy. That's
different feeling with and No, I mean empathy and nostalgia
are different. No, But I felt empathy for uh, for
you your individual expressions of the things that give you
that that whispy feeling of nostalgia. Um and and how

(01:19:48):
that is, how that is in a personal mode of
very comforting feeling, because I can speak honestly that you
know I went when I went through when I when
my mom passed away about fifteen years ago I went.
I could not go. I could not engage with any
culture that was more challenging, um than reading the Dorling

(01:20:09):
Kindersley books that of Star Wars vehicles like that was
the only thing I could read before going to sleep
because I was in such emotional pain in the present.
Had you had you read those as a younger, lad Well, no,
because I mean no, but because I didn't exist. But
those dek books of the of the Star Wars vehicles

(01:20:31):
that sort of give you these cross sections of all
the vehicles, you know, it was not I was not
engaging with new culture per se. I was just revisiting
my feelings about Star Wars, do you know what I understood?
So I was exactly playing with old toys in like
playing with playing with my old at. I never had
the ad at, nor did I have the melting I'm falling.
I never had either one of those two, and I'm

(01:20:51):
still I'm a little bitter about it. Still. Yeah, I
know those were those were the big ticket items. But
from my point of view, storage was a problem with
those things, very untidy well they served as storage um
boxes themselves. Really, Yeah, but you couldn't put the ad
at into the millennium falcon and none of the none
of them fit into any good sized shelf. And and

(01:21:14):
even as an even as a nine or ten year
old neurotic only child, I had real tidiness issues. But
I will say that, you know, um, I wasn't at
a point where I would be playing with my old, oh,
you know, my old my old lobot, figuring it was
my favorite in bed as a grown man, next to

(01:21:37):
my wife to fall asleep. If I would certainly read,
I would certainly read about the propulsion mechanism of a
best pined twin cloud car, for sure, and really and
dig into those weeds and and and prod those feelings.
And indeed, today you know it's still the case that

(01:22:00):
I have two things on my nightstand because night night
is the time when when you and going to bed
is the time when you might be most prompted to
feel nostalgia, because on the one hand, you're trying to
ease yourself to rest, and on the other hand, as
you grow older, in particular, you realize that every going
to sleep time is a rehearsal for your own death.

(01:22:22):
So whatever you're anxious about can really come out at
night or in the middle of the night, right when
you wake up during second sleep, which is a concept
that I've heard about first on the Great Stuff You
Should Know podcast available on the How Stuff Works Network,
right the Plugs and so on my dead side table,
both real and virtual. I have two sets of culture right.
One is new stuff that I've never read before or

(01:22:46):
or encounter before, or watched before, whatever it is that's
going to be challenging or interesting or provocative, even if
it's only because I've never seen it or read it
or listen to it. And then there's old, the older
stuff that's gonna reconnect me with a feeling that I
might have had in the past. But even in the
older stuff like I got a pile I got a
pile of old Avengers comics from the seventies, but which

(01:23:10):
are which are dumb, profoundly unchallenging and remind me to
some degree of what it felt like to be a
little kid buying comics on i RAQ. But even those
are comics that I've not really read before because they
were before my times even then. But it's like I
get it. I totally appreciate and was illuminated, I should say,

(01:23:30):
by your podcast for pointing out um that that this
therapeutic personal therapeutic aspect of transporting yourself or giving yourself
a good feeling by by uh re encountering um or
or imagine reencountering culture from your past or thinking about

(01:23:53):
good times from your past. He's real and measurable and
and uh scientific, right, that's part of that was part
of your conclusion, correct, Right, So I get I am
on board with you for that that nostalgia from a
personal point of view, can be a truly soothing therapeutic tool,

(01:24:14):
uh that can can help calm you during periods of
stress and and this disorder in your life. And that
sounds like a drug though, right, And it's like all drugs,
it should be used in moderation like and there. And
there's a reason for that specifically because I think that

(01:24:35):
it is a uh when overused, it as a drug
that can cause truly deltarious effects and the happiness of
your life. And here's the reason why, No, is this
the crux off? Well, Look, I'm going on along. I'm

(01:24:56):
going on a long disquisition in part because I love
the sound of my voice and in part because you
guys called me up because I refused to write any
of this down for free just because you mentioned my
name in a podcast, So you can either take the
free essay or not. But if you'd like, if you'd
like to jump in and challenge me on any of this,
I'm always glad to do this in a more back
and forth manner. Well, no, that's so the reason neither

(01:25:19):
one of us challenges because you you've so far totally
agreed with everything we believe about nostalgia. Basically, here's where
it turns dark. When it turns toxic is well is
in overuse or over application. And and there are two
ways that that can happen, but figuratively poison to oneself

(01:25:41):
or to society at large. And here's there. Here is
the reason why it is a dangerous drug. Nostalgia is
founded on a fallacy, on a delusion that is has
two parts, one that the past was better not true,
and to to not true not true? Are you you no? No, no,

(01:26:06):
I'm not go ahead, right okay, quite right, quite right, chuck,
Not true, because man, I'm my brain just stripped out.
There is no there is no rosy past that you
could in your life or in your imagining of your
societal life that does not have counter examples of why
it was actually far worse. So you agree with that?

(01:26:29):
Sorry to interrupt, John, Do you agree with that, don't you? Chuck? No,
that's one of the things I fully disagree with. Sometimes
things were better in the past. Okay, pick a time, huh,
pick a time. No, No, I'm not talking about in
an era. I'm talking about personally in someone's life. There
were times that are better than others, of course, So

(01:26:50):
you're talking about as an era, yes, okay, Okay, that's
where I misunderstood you. Yeah, the the so okay, you
could you could make an argument like my my experience
of say, uh the nies. Yeah, you could say that

(01:27:11):
my experience of the nine eighties was a good was
better then my experience now, And that might be true
for your personal um for your personal experience, but that
might not be true, Uh if you were a gay

(01:27:32):
man dying of bates. Okay, Yeah, it's just been diagnosed.
I think I've misunderstood you've all the all these years,
and that you were always saying, even on a personal
level level, times were not better. Uh. And it's just
you know, a misremembering of the past. Yeah, because it
sounds like everything John is saying we covered on the

(01:27:53):
on the podcast on this nostalgia episode, Well, this is
exactly right, because I've explained all of this to check
before and he obviously misremembered it from the past, because
memory is absolutely selective, and the things and and and
even and and I think the common aspect of nostalgia
that we can agree on is that there is one

(01:28:15):
constant to one's reimagining of the past. It is reimagining
of a time when you were younger. And that's always
better than being older. Sure, just because you're too dumb
to know what is really going on, you don't have
the responsibility you know that you that you're settled with
as an adult, that you can make a lot of

(01:28:37):
a lot of cases that for the average person, childhood
was easier and you know, more enjoyable than adulthood, you know,
in a lot of ways. Quite so for the average person,
that's quite that's quite true, I think. And also even
if that person had, even if wasn't had a terrible childhood,
there were still at a time when their whole life
was laid ahead of them and they could have dreams
and ideals. But now that we're getting into our late

(01:29:00):
teason and for me mid forties, you know, it's all
just coming to an end. That's how optimistic about the future.
But the second part of the delusion is that the
past is attainable in some way. And I don't think
either of you are suffering from this particular nostalgia. But
let me say this. The thing that turned me against nostalgia,

(01:29:24):
I just remembered what it is in some ways, is
that one of the things I was comforting myself, and
it was it was I had two big body blows
in the year two thousand and then the year two
thousand one, and that was the death of my mother
in the year two thousand and then the World Traits
Center attacks in the year two thousand one, and there

(01:29:48):
was a lot of Star Wars reading and taking of
valium that I had stolen from my mother's medicine cabinet
after she passed away in order to get through those
it's a fair game. Well, you know what, Nostalgia is
a comforting pill to take, but there are actual comforting
pills to take, and if you take too much of them,

(01:30:08):
it's a problem because on a personal level, you might
become mired in nostalgia to the point where you you
become depressed with your everyday life and you because you
know on a level you can't regain the past that
you have convinced yourself was better and more glorious. That is,
that is a bad state to be in. And if
you want to learn more about that, listen to Dana

(01:30:29):
Gould's incredible monologue about about Buddhism and its rejection of
the past and it's disconcern with the future and the
embrace of the present on his own podcast, The Dana Gueldaur,
especially the episode Happy Sad Right. But the other thing
that I was engaging with was um, a movement of jihad,

(01:30:51):
which is hardly unique but was on my mind at
that time. That is founded on a principle of nostalgia.
Radicalized jew bodies right like like a lot of radicalized
right wing terrorists in the United States, believe that the
past was better and that the present is corrupt and

(01:31:15):
that we can do something to get back to the
way it was. And well, John, not just with Jihad,
I think with any conservative and especially ultra conservative movement
in not just religion but also politics, economics, just about
any anybody of of ultra conservative people seem to harken

(01:31:37):
back to the past and want to bring it back
so that the future is more like some idealized past,
not more not more like, not more like exactly like
and and and you know the thing that's and and
I wouldn't even I wouldn't even say that it's a
far right impulse. There's certainly far left utopian impulses that
expressed the same sort of if we just get back

(01:31:59):
this is where we went wrong, and if we go
back here and and freeze here, um, it will be
better now. But I don't have any problem. I don't
have any problem with by Anyone can do whatever they want.
People like what they like. And if you, as a
society want to isolate yourself from contemporary society, like the

(01:32:20):
Mennonite movement or the Amish movement or what have you,
and and and try to try to hold your own
ground in contemporary culture because you think that is a
better way to live, go for it. As long you're
not hurting anyone else, that's great. But don't be deceived.
Star Wars is itself and an entire story premised on nostalgia.

(01:32:43):
Things were better before the Empire, And if we blow
up enough human beings. We can make it good again.
We can make the galaxy great again. And does that
rhetoric have any echoes with today any one presidential campaign

(01:33:06):
ring a bell when I say we can make the
galaxy great again. We're gonna win so much against the
Empire that is gonna make your head spin. It's you know,
it's it's Star Wars is uh and I have I
think I've had this fight with you guys before. It's like,
it's there's a reason Star Wars isn't science fiction. It's
pure fantasy because it is a It is nostalgic by

(01:33:30):
by in its very DNA, and that makes it a
great story. Right. But as soon as you start having
political movements founded on the idea that we actually can
turn back time, then I feel that that was the
moment I suppose that I began to feel like, oh, yeah,
you know what, I want to close this Star Wars
book because I can't go back to that. I'm in

(01:33:52):
an uncomfortable new present and my job as a human
is to make the best of it now, and so
I did, although I still dip back into it from
time to time. So now you just watch the Force
awakens basically is what you're saying. Well, I feel like
I had a cultural obligation to watch The Force Awakens,

(01:34:12):
and I enjoyed and I enjoyed it once but the but,
but the thing that I enjoy about it the most
is that it is attempting to move the story forward,
and I'm happy to care about characters in a in
a very familiar world. But I'm happy to care about

(01:34:33):
characters that I that I've never seen before and be
concerned about what's going to happen for them in the future.
As contrasted to the to the prequel trilogy um which
still exists no matter what people say, which completely you know,
misunderstood a lot of things. But one of the things
that misunderstood was that if you have a movie that

(01:34:54):
is founded if you have a movie like Star Wars
or Empire or Jedi one big trilogy but has founded
on nostalgia, that that the past before, that the past
was better than the present, and if we blow up
enough stuff we can get back to that wonderful past.
Then you cannot show the story of the past because

(01:35:15):
all the past will reveal is it was terrible then too.
People were just as corrupt, you know, there, there's just
as much bad stuff going on, and and you there
is no good past to get back to. So in
many ways that they were, those three I mean, those
three prequel trilogies were dark in the sense, even even

(01:35:36):
in their lightest moments, in the sense that they were
basically about uh, you know, the corruption of uh foreign
interventionism as a policy, and you know, misusing military for
personal agendas and all sorts of weird crypto critiques of
the George W. Bush administration, for which those movies don't

(01:35:56):
get a whole lot of credit because they're terrible and
not fun to watch. But they were. But they were
much there. They are much more rooted, not surprisingly in
a middle to elderly aged man's appreciation of what life
is really like, that is to say, George Lucas than
the first three trilogy. The first the original trilogy was

(01:36:17):
when he made it at a much younger age and
he could afford to be nous algae. Wow, mine's blown, right, Yeah,
that's what I do all day. He just blow mind.
That's right. Alan Josh was threatening to auction off my stripe.
I'm not I'm not scared to tell you. It's Hodge
hyphen Man. Oh yeah, you go. If you catch me

(01:36:40):
on Skype and I feel like picking up, I'll blow
your mind too. You're like weird Al Yankovic Hodgeman. Why
does he answer his own phone? He once tweeted that
he was like hanging out and I think the Minneapolis
airport and here's the number for a pay phone he's
standing next to so give him a call and some
fan call. Then he talked for like twenty minutes. What when?

(01:37:02):
When was this a couple of years five years ago
when they were payphones. However, there's a time when there
was Twitter and pay phones. Yeah, there was like a
six month period and Weirdale made the best the best
of it. Well, he's nothing if not resourceful. That was
a great those are great days. I remember once. I was, yeah,
I know, you know what, that's true? It really was.

(01:37:25):
It was a golden age for Twitter. It wells we
need to get back to that. Yeah, that's where that's
you know what. I can acknowledge that there was a
golden age for Twitter, um when it was different and
a little bit more playful because it was so much smaller,
do you know what I mean? But there's no way
to go back, and you've just moved forward, haven't you.

(01:37:47):
You've gone from Twitter to to Instagram now is your jam?
Is that correct? Well? I I enjoyed. I still use
I use all of the social meds my Instagram, my
my Tumbler, and my Twitter, uh and all for different things.
I still have a I still have a deep fondness

(01:38:08):
for Twitter. I don't I don't do anything with Facebook.
And I apologize y'all you snap chatting, No I didn't.
I couldn't get into that. I couldn't add another thing
to my portfolio has already overburdened. And Facebook I have.
You know, there's a Judge John Hodgeman Facebook page which
is wonderfully maintained by Max fund. There's an official John
Hodgman fan page which is wonderfully maintained by a fan

(01:38:31):
of mine, Benjamin and San Francisco, and I'm grateful to
him for it. And all of my social medias feed
into those things. And if you're on Facebook and you
want to follow him, you can find him or whatever.
But but my social media sort of declination is Instagram
to Tumbler to Twitter. But sometimes I just get deep
into Twitter again because just for the old times, you
know what I mean. You want you on Fishbob, you on?

(01:38:53):
Are you on deck chair? Am I? Am I on
toggle Switch, am I on and I on matchbook car,
am I on Cybord gape Right, I'm just subscribing. Am
I on Bottle of sand, am I on profit Cobe. So, John,
I think in closing, I think the one thing I
would ask is that you revise your your mantra to

(01:39:15):
UH nostalgia can, for many people sometimes be a toxic impulse. Yeah,
good mantra. Check or it sounds like it should should
be revised to something like nostalgia is the most toxic
impulse society as a whole can engage in. Oh. I
like that one, Josh, Sorry, Chucks, that's a nice full sentence.

(01:39:39):
It needs some work. I'm gonna go on fish Bob,
but I stand behind it. Thanks John, Thank you guys.
It's always a pleasure to talk to you. You know.
You know I'm such a supporter of UH stuff. You
should know podcast, this very podcast, and I'm grateful always
for the support that you offer me. Yeah, and we
will see you in New York right at our Bellhouse shows,

(01:40:00):
both of them. I assume, Yeah, you want to announce
when those are Uh. Yeah, well we already have already
sold out, you know June. Well, let me tell you
about something that isn't sold out. June nine. Yeah, I
will be appearing at Largo at the Coronet. Oh we've
done that. It's fun, wonderful, wonderful theater. Uh. They're on
La Sienega. Uh for a one night only performance of

(01:40:23):
my latest stand up, talking, funny, storytelling personal story show,
which on vacation Land. Oh we've seen that. It's good,
thank you very much. Yeah, we we You guys saw
it in Atlanta when I was down there, and uh,
I am bringing it to Los Angeles for one night
only before the Max Fun Con, which is the thing

(01:40:47):
that is involved with the Maximum Fun dot org podcast
network where you can hear my judge John Hodgman podcast.
So those are all things you can find out about
at John Hodgman dot com. Or just remember what I
said and remember it was the thing you've ever heard
and you wish you could hear it again. Hey, and
you and I will be doing our annual trivia part
bar trivia show at I know, but you know what, now,

(01:41:10):
you're just making people sad because because it's all. So
that's all sold out. The only thing you can the
only thing you can do, people, is buy tickets for
my show at Largo on June nine. It's the only
ticket available. Where do they Where do they go to
buy those? John? They go to John Hodgman dot com
slash tour and there's a link directly to the Largo

(01:41:31):
ticket page from there, or even I think it's Largo
hyphen l a dot do do what I said, Go
to John Hodgman dot com slash tour. Yeah, and everyone
we can attest that that will be a very good show. Yeah,
and you can find John and all this social meds.
I'm nostalgic for the time when we called it social media.
Well we're moving on. Oh good now it's not even

(01:41:54):
called social meds now, it's called Sonny. All right, lovely
to talk to you guys. I will uh, I will
sign off now. That is all I I chok. Was
not expecting Jihad to make an appearance in that were you.
I was not expecting Jihad, Donald Trump or Darth Maul
to make it as here. But thanks a huge amount

(01:42:17):
to Hodgeman. We appreciate it for coming on. The next
time we have some sort of disagreement, we'll have them back.
Always a pleasure. Uh. And if you want to get
in touch with this in the meantime, you can tweet
to us at s Y s K podcast. You can
join us on Facebook dot com, slash stuff you Should Know.
You can send us an email to Stuff Podcast at
how stuff Works dot com and has always joined us

(01:42:38):
at our home on the web, Stuff you Should Know
dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Does it how stuff Works dot com.

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