Niles Heckman, Modern Shamans Harvesting DMT From Toads |488|

Niles Heckman’s new documentary takes a fresh look at modern shamans.

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Niles-Heckman-Skeptiko

Alex Tsakiris: [00:00:00] So I know you’ve heard about this, I mean everyone’s heard about this.

Audio Clip: [00:00:04] So what happened the first time that you smoked the Medicine ? I just felt this white light, this dissolution of my self.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:00:14] It’s like a cultural meme on The Simpsons, the toad and – Fractals, and sacred geometry and energy- But did you know it’s frickin real – In connection with my breath?

Audio Clip: [00:00:31] Okay, right, I want to show you the product of the College of the Medicine of this year. This is what the natives and us have collect so far, and I want to explain you the process of how we collect and do the medicine. So that looks like a lot of medicine. This is a lot of medicine. This has been collect of maybe 1000 of toads. 1000 toads. Maybe around 10 days.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:01:04] On today’s show, which is long, long overdue and I have to apologize to Niles and Rak for taking so long to get this out. Especially since their documentary film series Shamans of the Global Village is so truly, truly amazing, remarkable stuff that I really hope you go watch. Here’s a clip from an interview with Niles. What do you think of that science of entheogens?

Niles Heckman: [00:01:33] Each of the different entheogens has kind of a different flavor to them. So it’s been spoken of, for example, but like psilocybin mushrooms are very like cosmic and alien and then the other type of DMT which we highlight, which you mentioned as the white light in Episode One is very much like this kind of hay drawn of hyperspace that merges into the guy in you know Godhead type dynamic of fusing back into the light. And then other met indigenous medicines such as like peyote and the cacti have a very kind of masculine desert energy to them and it’s probably several things of what you hit on there. One is probably like the history and the genealogy of your people, where your people come from, what you resonate with in terms of which medicine maybe your ancestors practice with.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:02:22] Welcome to Skeptiko where we explore controversial science and spirituality with leading researchers, thinkers, and their critics. I’m your host Alex Tsakiris and today we welcome Niles Heckman to Skeptiko. Niles is a truly amazing filmmaker, documentarian and a photographer, and a bunch of other stuff. You’re gonna see in a minute the stunningly beautiful documentary series he’s done, Shamans of the Global Village. He’s also a blogger of podcaster, communicator and I’m popping up his website here. But there’s so many interesting things to talk about. He likes to put it in this category of ageless wisdom. Some people are calling and theologians the topic that we might pigeonhole it into. But there’s all kinds of stuff related to this that I think are just particularly interesting and really respect that deeply intellectual way. He’s taking this, trying to tie it with other things and contrasting it with what some people in the occult community are saying and all that and I really appreciate it, that the broad perspective that he seems to be bringing all this. So Niles, it’s really cool to have you on, I’m so glad we connected, Welcome.

Niles Heckman: [00:03:47] Yeah thanks Alex. I will not be spending this conversation trying to convince you we are biological robots in a meaningless universe.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:03:54] Okay, no good, you’re in SNF to do a little survey that I have, which is always good because I do sometimes find myself talking to people and not realizing that we’re kind of on a different page. It’s kind of a good grounding thing. You know so I thought we would jump right in and talk about this film series that you’ve done, Shamans of the Global Village. It’s like I said, it’s quite extraordinary, do you want to tell us a little bit about your background Niles, how you came to do this particular work? And then I thought we play a short introductory clip from it.

Niles Heckman: [00:04:32] Yeah, sure. I mean, I would call myself to simplify a documentarian and an essayist. And it’s kind of like being a writer. It’s like, well, then what’s the subject matter of what you focus on and depending upon the depth of the subject matter, you can, there’s a lot to pull from something so I, what I really am is an esotericist. I don’t necessarily put that front and center on the website. But because esotericism is essentially the inside, like you should see the outer work manifesting with what’s correlating, with what’s going on with inside you. So all of my overarching body of work focuses on yes, themes of maybe what might be thought of as hopefully some level of ageless wisdom or you know, spiritual philosophies.

Alex Tsakiris:[00:05:13] What was your background and how long have you been doing this?

Niles Heckman: [00:05:16] I’ve been doing it for about I think 2012 was actually a year, a significant year where some things really clicked over for me. I’m in my early 40s now so it wasn’t like I was some star child at 12 and was you know, getting downloads from astral dimensions, like, you know, I definitely have had in the last, it’s now practically 2021 at the time of this conversation. So I’ve had the last eight years of really starting to focus on developing my craft personally, taking the body of work from a past career skill set which involved working in essentially the formal structures of entertainment industries and very high level professional capacities, and then applying some of that professional capacity to this content that is of higher, you know, higher, more sophisticated content.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:06:00] Hold on. I got to drill in there because you have to know that buzzers are going off in people’s head and they’re going to want to know more about your move, your segue from the entertainment industry.

Niles Heckman: [00:06:16] It’s like yeah, why do you give up a very high paying salary to do something else? I mean, it’s usually, it’s not an overnight thing either. Why does somebody transition from one career air quotes to another, but the most simple answer to this is that, basically, I wasn’t using a large part of my skill set. It’s like I had a very professional, desirable job within a framework within the high end commercial industry in Los Angeles and basically, the post production industry of Hollywood. And I also had done some work on game cinematic’s because games are very, these days, you know, the games are so cinematic these days, that it’s like cinema and games are influencing each other and it’s all blending together. So I did a variety of capacities within those fields and occasionally I will still freelance very rarely in that capacity. It’s not like we overnight turn off one spicket and go into something else. And it’s very technician based, it’s very, like assembly line bass no matter what. So it was like, I’d spent years and years just feeling like I was out of alignment and depression in life is usually a call for course correction. So I wasn’t fully depressed. I mean, I certainly appreciate the levels of professional work ethic within various industries, whatever your industry, but most people know that within formal structures of an industry, it’s not gonna fully utilize your creative skill set. So at the same time I’m, it’s not like, you know, you completely turn one off and then move on to the other, it’s a very slow transition phase. So I did find ways to create other income streams, doing things that were more of independent substance and depth. And then thereby, it’s like you leave a much more lasting body of work. And you know, a lot of my work focuses on this kind of trifecta of spiritual growth, and then some level of equilibrium because equilibrium is a kind of a stepping stone to what’s called the great work. And then those external manifestations which should lead to creative outputs. So this, this trifecta has led to me becoming much more individualized, like I think we’re all ultimately trying to do right, you’re trying to become much, you’re trying to have a much more lasting legacy with what you do in terms of a body of work, or some level of perennial wisdom or insight or sharing, you know, making your life mean something not just be an assembly line robot at whatever glorified level that might be.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:08:22] Nice. Okay, let’s see the product of that if we will or one of the products of it.

Audio Clip: [00:08:28] Indigenous people across the globe have used sacred plants and animal medicines millennia to heal, illuminate and connect them to the web of life. Traditionally, each culture had a healer that works on behalf of their patients, what we call the shaman. And now we find ourselves in a global village. Is it any wonder that we need our own healers that understand the deep power and sacredness these ancient Earth medicines can reveal? My name is Rak Razam and I’m an author, filmmaker and shamanic facilitator. Join me as I interview and sit in ceremony, experiencing healing medicines with Western shamans across the globe. Watch firsthand as I document a modern shamanic resurgence being passed on from indigenous tribes to a new wave of medicine people working in the 21st century. This is Shamans of the Global Village.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:09:27] Hey man, that’s a heck of a trailer teaser, kind of tee it up thing there. Tell us what’s going on there with you and Rak in that first one in the series that you did.

Niles Heckman: [00:09:42] Yeah, so this show is basically an independently made documentary series. And it’s essentially a collaboration between Rak Razam whose voice you heard there as the host of the show and myself and we created it in 2016 with just a pilot episode on a very shoestring budget. We went down to Mexico with one of the tribes there and shot it. And it was a long process, I mean, we’re kind of figuring out what it ultimately was going to be. But then it came out really good as essentially a pilot episode of something that is not professionally funded. It’s just something that’s made independently. And like all documentary film making, it’s just like a question about how does a documentary even get made in the first place so, if I’m going to do something outside the formal structures of the industry, it’s like, and do something that’s on a shoestring budget, you might as well make something that’s essentially what I would say is very paradigm destroying, or very leading edge in terms of its wisdom and content and not something that, you know, you would find at first hole from a streaming service or necessarily a Hollywood studio. So you’re going to get things in this series that are, I don’t want to say necessarily the pretentious thing of like, never been filmed before. But you’re definitely going to see things that are of timeless way that indigenous people have always used these practices that necessarily haven’t had a spotlight put on them, right. So it’s like, we might as well focus on something that is a actual phenomenally deep spiritual practice, and combine that with some level of high production value to create something that’s hopefully novel and original.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:11:08] Yeah, I get all that and so I think it’s great and I really enjoyed it and it was very well done. Beautiful, cinematography, excellent sound, like all the stuff, I mean, you guys just did a great job on it. I think the shaman thing in the entheogen thing, one of the beauties of the kind of explosion of the alternative media is, we all kind of know that, or at least know that much more than we ever did. What you brought that I think was particularly interesting, we can dive into the content a little bit because I think people will find it really interesting. In Episode One, you actually do, you know, the DMT they get from the toads, you know, we’ve kind of heard this, but you guys go there to this guy in the Sonoran Desert, this doctor, and you know, show how they’re actually extracting it, and then processing it. And I think people will find that part of it really interesting. And then he goes really deep into it and a number of a kind of anthropological kind of exploration of you know, but culture is down here. I’ve lost this, but I can trace it back and some of the art and stuff like that. I mean, you really go deep and then you also go into kind of the experiential part of people using this ceremonially or what we don’t know it is used in ceremonial fashion in the documentary, but I don’t know that it’s limited to that. So there’s just, you know, dive into that first. What are people responding to in that episode one, in the toad based DMT experience?

Niles Heckman: [00:12:55] Yeah well, let me I guess I should back up a little bit, because it’s relevant to your show and kind of, a question that you had asked me before we hit record here, which kind of lends into what I’m skeptical about. And it’s somewhat of like my law, a life philosophy, or what we might call like a cipher formula for decoding many of the world’s problems, which is what also somewhat encapsulates my work. And it’s funny, I’ve been writing an essay on this and I’m thinking it can be called something like The Bidirectional Law of Non Correspondence or The Scale of Obviousness or something. But this is essentially my world premiere here. So chime on in Also, if you want to add anything to this at any time, but we have a dynamic that exists in society through the aeons where there’s essentially small structures that are natural systems that have gone large over time right, and large typically has led to massive problems when more small structures were more than natural way. So I kind of use this comparison of like, small to big or bottom up to top down, or maybe like inner to outer, or sometimes you could say that it’s like decentralized or individualization versus collectivism. Or what I would actually say from a spiritual perspective is more esoteric versus exoteric. So shamanism is what I’m gonna get out, with it being the a key correspondence to something that’s related to like small level spirituality. But in terms of big structures in society today, we have something like, let’s say, if you’re more right leaning in your politics, a lot of more right leaning people have identified something like big government, which is this centralized governmental form of power and without getting, you know, a wash in the spaghetti sauce of the politics of something, you know, we can say that that can lead to any side of a political aisle with you know, we have in terms of like communism or fascism or even kind of Post truth, corporate consumer capitalism or plutocracy or any sort of centralized governmental power structure. But what you don’t necessarily ever hear is then the other side of the spectrum is big corporations, right? We have a massive consumerist commercial culture these days, which max you know, it’s sole profit or its sole reason existence and a large structural reason is to maximize quarterly profits, we have boards of directors who demand endless financial growth on a planet of finite material resources. And you know, these systems are our pro at privatizing gains and socializing losses. It’s oftentimes done at the public purse. And you know, we, it’s a system that’s used to this kind of governmental, corporate large scale structure, is designed to just get working class people in fighting, you know the two sets of people on opposite sides of the political aisle that each make $50,000 a year, even less, you know, or in fighting when they’re not looking up at the guy in the high rise building that’s making $11,000 an hour with a team of lobbyists in Washington. So we have this very much like corporatized government dynamic. And then we can carry this big scale system stuff into like big money as well, which like, we have a centralized Federal Reserve, an aristocratic class that, you know, is engaged in, like medieval feudalism of what has left us today within today’s society. Massive amounts of wealth inequality, you know, there’s a website called Lcurve.org, that you can go check some of that out, it’s very eroding to our middle class, and, you know, let alone poor people, which is indigenous people, you know. Indigenous people are very much on the bottom of a socioeconomic Totem. And then we get into another big system, something like science. And I know, Alex, you’ve talked a lot about science from, you know, getting consciousness wrong in the sense of that, but a lot of much of big science systems within formal structures are very materialistic and demonstrably expensive with the development of the atomic bomb or the Large Hadron Collider. And you know, a lot of scientists within formal structures seem to care as much about keeping tenure as trying to actually really develop something that’s on the leading edge. And of course, there’s an old phrase that says, ”like science advances one funeral at a time”. And then in terms of something other bit, another big thing in terms of like big religion, or what we might call big spirituality, we have this cult of religion right, which is this, I think at one point I heard you say Alex, you use specifically, that difference between a cult and religion is just the number of subscribers, right? So we have a religious construct that’s essentially around today, that’s really just made by man to reduce larger spiritual concepts into prepackaged sets of moral doctrine which people buy wholesale. And we’ve had a very much Imperial take over that with Constantine you know, weaponizing the Bible in Rome and you know, turning things into like, literal readings of the Scriptures, much of which are very barbaric at face value. And we have you know, there’s dogma with you know, large G God and the outsourcing of things in terms of like, Heaven and Hell are outsourced external. What essentially happened is we’ve externalized things into corporeal eyes, deities, and these structures are very patriarchal. They’re very dominant, they’re very disempowering to women you know, you look at something like the burqa and fundamentalist Islam. And then within these formal large structures of religion we have pedophilia, there’s mega churches, I was in a, I went to a wedding recently in Alabama that was at a mega church, and oh my gosh dude, it was like the most commercial, the place looked more like a shopping mall than it did to do with anything within spirituality. And I occasionally will also get these adverts on LinkedIn, which is you know, this work based social network for job postings that I kind of peek at. And every once in a while with a bunch of corporations or big tech companies, they’ll be like a church that’s seeking out something, so that is not a spiritual entity, that’s a commercial entity. And we have you know, televangelist preachers that do this massive fundraising and have huge 14,000 square foot houses in Texas and fly on mega jet’s you know. We have, you see the negative aspects of big religion with it within the politics of the Vatican or something like Israel. And then what that essentially is a separation between the exoteric, the outer forms of religious doctrine and dogma, versus something that’s more esoteric. So then, if we take these small systems, if we take the same look at all these structures from a small perspective, like looking at something like small government, you know, we go back to government, we look at like small local community governance, right, knowing our local representatives, funding your local schools, local library, local infrastructure…

Alex Tsakiris: [00:19:21] Yeah but that’s all bullshit , that doesn’t work. I mean you know, what the thing as I was listening to that ,when I was watching the movie, and I was struck by you know, kind of the political causation of it the unavoidable. I mean, I respect that you’re attempting to grapple with ,rather than sidestep the political issues. But I don’t understand why the hell so many of you guys in your camp ,in the esoteric camp ,in the entheogen camp ,in the spirituality camp, which I consider myself part of. But why so many of you are left leaning progressives? And why you’re not Stark Raving over the top libertarians? I mean, do you do realize that they are ,right now, conspiring to take away all your rights to access all of this stuff? And that just because Obama is gonna stand up there and take the fucking vaccine in the arm, it is the ultimate play. I don’t understand, from a political standpoint to kind of cut through the whole essay, why you’re not standing shoulder to shoulder with the gun toting prepper in Austin Texas. I’m not a gun toting prepper in Austin Texas. But I understand that sensibility much more than I understand this. Oh well, you know, this globalization is really going to work out in the end kind of thing.

Yeah. I mean, I would say that from a centralized perspective of any sort of power structure, you know. You don’t want to globalize things. I would probably, I might identify a little bit more with the gun toting person in Texas as well, being, you know, not by any means against the Second Amendment. But I mean, I agree dude, it’s like it, I don’t mean to make it a specific political thing that wasn’t the intention. But what I am trying to just correlate is the difference between like a small structure versus a large structure regardless of, and keeping that as I would help a political as possible so…

Alex Tsakiris: [00:21:35] And don’t get me wrong Niles, I appreciate where you’re coming from and I really mean that and sometimes, I don’t know, I come across the wrong way. I’m engaged in this conversation, meaning that I respect where you’re coming from. And I want to dialogue with you, I want to know where you’re coming from more. So if I am pushing against you, that’s okay. It’s just to get to this kind of next level. And so I guess I’ll return you to this point because I think it’s really salient to the work that you’re doing. I have become rather conspiratorial over the years and science is what drew me to conspiracy because I didn’t understand biological robot in a meaningless universe, it seemed kind of crazy to me. And it was only by investigating it that I realized the absurdity of that and you’re dealing with a lot of absurdity in your film. Your film is constantly brushing against and directly kind of calling out this craziness that we live in and I love in episode one, you know, he’s saying we do live in a crazy world. So you have to enter into that space first before you can even consider the shamanistic kind of way, but I digress slightly. Science and this in your face, materialism contradiction to consciousness, is what led me to conspiracy. But now that I’m in conspiracy what I see as conspiratorial is this desire to control our consciousness, and that desire seems to be directly in conflict with ultimately where you’re going. So you can say that the UN has given this guy the past drive around, fuck that shit, it ain’t gonna happen. They’re going to try and take all this shit away from you and that isn’t even, at this point they’ve already said, put the fucking mask on. I mean, there is no more dramatic in your face, again, kind of reckoning of what’s coming, then put the fucking mask on and we don’t need any science to support it. We’re doing it by edict. How do you think, you know, toad gland DMT and the payote is going to stand up to that? It can’t it’s in a much larger context of control.

Niles Heckman: [00:24:01] Yeah, I mean, again you’re talking about the centralized power structure that’s you know, dictating something on us from a perspective of what is a larger scale system. Yeah, I would say in terms of like a small systems dynamic with science, is that there is a difference between a mandate from on high top down, versus like somebody that is within a personal science dynamic, right, like an independent researcher that’s doing things with an open ended discussion related to science, maybe working more off the beaten path with their exploration within South something, you know, they might respect the scientific method but then they know that within the structure of where they’re working, they can’t necessarily do the full spectrum of their scientific research. But then they’re, knowing that on their own they can do this type of thing. So I would see that I mean, I think that we saw that within somebody like Nikola Tesla or Wilhelm Reich, and that I would even go so far to say do that ancient practises, something like even astrology or alchemy, you know, our chemistry, we’re also engaging in the scientific method. So there’s a difference between doing something more independently. That’s more kind of metaphysically based, versus something that’s yes, the negative aspects of what you just hinted on. But I mean, in terms of also like, let’s say, let’s look to something like a smaller systems dynamic within spirituality for example. So rather than looking at like literal Holy books as these black and white doctrines that are to be handed on down, we then can look at something that’s maybe existed from the eons like myth and allegory. And this starts to get into more schematic based practices, right, which is the esoteric core of many, many faiths through time even prior to what would be the Abrahamic faiths. And I would say that, you know, you look at something like formal structure of religion, a lot of that has been a co opting and takeover of shamanic practices that are from way many eons ago right, or other practices that were more people based from the land like the druids or you know, more gnostic based practices, even something like the witches of the past, which a lot of people have this kind of Hollywood version of what a witch was from the past, when in reality, it was just typically a more land owning woman. And then shamanism, this starts to get into more shamanic based practices, and for people that don’t really have reference points on what shamanism is or what it’s, why it’s important, or what it’s about. And to kind of lead into what your questions about made is that, you know, shamanism is as old as the hills. And it’s about a spiritual practice that’s directly related to your personal direct experience and connection with, you know, gnosis or some level with the divine. And so that’s why I think it’s nice to just kind of put this encapsulating philosophy on something for people to have reference points and why a lot of my work focuses on these themes of hopefully, what is some level of ancient or ageless wisdom, which gets into direct experiences with higher states of consciousness. And that’s something that we’d seen through ancient civilizations in the past and why, outside of just the first specific episode of the show, and the fact that at the time of this recording, we’ve done two episodes of making it because it’s something that we’re making slow drip each episode can be as complex to make as a feature documentary film. The importance of shamanism and why it’s a crucial dynamic to a healthy community of civilization, as we say is that there’s two specific reasons why people might engage in shamanic practice one is for healing, which isn’t just necessarily a physical healing, it can also be a mental healing, but then also for the expansion of consciousness. And those two things are kind of correlated with mental healing and expansion. Because yes, we do live in a very contracted culture. So that’s why it’s a key thing that is being very much rediscovered right now that’s existed through much of time.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:27:54] So Niles let me kind of continue to poke away in my Skeptiko style here, because I sent you a couple of shows that I’ve done on shamanism. And one in particular, very, very interesting to me and I think it kind of in a roundabout way gets to this thing we’re ping ponging back and forth, but I feel like we’re not really nailing down. So I interviewed this guy, Dr. Brian Hayden. Super well respected you know, in the Canadian anthropology, Royal Society, so credentialed and stuff like that. And he wrote a book about, I guess you could say, shamanic self aggrandizement. So he went and studied all these native cultures, groups. And he studied the shamans in them and he said a lot of times what this is all about is this sage on the stage, which are all way too familiar with cultish self aggrandizement, where the shaman goes into the sweat lodge and comes out and says, Hey, Niles man, I seen it, I talked to the spirits and dog you won’t believe what they told me. They told me that I should be hooking up with your wife all month next month. And that’s going to give you some great powers. And you’re going to go out there and you’re really going to hit it on the next big hunt. So this is an anthropologist going, this is just what the data shows. This is what’s out there. This is what happens. Now, my pushback, I think that’s an important point, that’s an important point, that’s a data point and this guy’s done a good job of documenting it. The flip side of that, which I was pushing him on, is that okay, but Brian are there really extended realms of consciousness where these spirit entities do exist? And he has to go well, you know, I don’t know, I’ve investigated and then we push him hard enough he goes, yeah, I do believe they are. He says professionally as an anthropologist inside of my community, talking the talk that I’m forced to fucking talk, I can never say that. So this is a both and kind of, what look at shamanism that I guess I want to throw on the table because it’s not all, you know, unicorns and rainbows.

Niles Heckman: [00:56:15] You know it’s a really weird one too, is cattle mutilations. That’s a very strange one. But you know, to add to this point, one thing that is a very thing to be cautious of is that if somebody has, a lot of these things can be done in what’s called a Gestalt right, like a group dynamic where you can have, there’s group meditation circles, where people meditate together and have resonances with one another’s meditations they seem to see the same things. And there’s dynamics where people have, they have some sort of Iosco experience in groups. And one thing that I have learned for sure is that if somebody is in that group that has a lot of life problems, there are dynamics where yes, you can have some energetic from somebody if you don’t know much about them, and they have a lot of damage or life trauma, things can brush off on to other people in an experience. So I’m very weary of who I would sit with in a circle, I want to know that they’re very honorable people that have done a lot of work on themselves, and have balanced in the lives of honorable behavior. And there’s been a couple dynamics where I could have sat with somebody who I knew whose life was a mess. And I wouldn’t do that because I know that there has been experiences, or there has been times in the past where we’ve heard interactions were somebody who had something, grasp on to them or jump onto them that might have been baggage or negative energetics from another person. So these are all things that are, you know, again, should be part of a mature culture and society that teaches people about, you know, some of these things that we don’t just have to, you know, kind of Flim Flam through or find by just negative, having it happen the hard way, right. Something that we could learn about through people that have a lineage of transmission of wisdom from elders that teach these things about, you know, living in harmony with nature. And then knowing what the plants are and how to use them. And knowing that there is a place obviously, for modern medicine and very much has its pros and cons. But then there’s also a place for some of these medicinal practices that heal through higher states and the pros and cons of those things on both sides of the aisle.

Alex Tsakiris: [00:58:16] Again folks, our guest has been Niles Heckman. I think you just got to check out these films and all his work. But this, particularly this series, Shamans of the Global Village, we played a little bit of a clip at the beginning, but you really have to see it. And if you’re at all interested in this stuff, you’re gonna love it because it’s a look into it at a level that I just haven’t seen, especially in a form where you can get through an hour and really have a lot to think about and and explore. So Niles it’s been great having you on. What else can we tell people? What else is going on? When is Episode Three gonna happen?

Niles Heckman: [00:59:02] Yeah, we were gonna do it this year but of course COVID took kind of a large dump all over that. So it’s delayed probably until who knows when, but the ideal way that we would do it is we’d kind of do episodes three and three, back to back cost effectively. You know, Peru is a little cliche these days and a little bit like, I saw some onion title about like, you know, how tech CEOs were going down to Peru regularly and that dynamic but, you know, we probably will inevitably have a stop off in Peru even though our spiritual journeys by no means end in Peru, sometimes people find themselves in Peru. So that might be a episode three and four with San Pedro and the Sacred Valley and Iosco. But, you know, yeah, who knows. I mean, that’s the thing about the show, is that a lot of people if they’re interested in knowing more about the lineage of entheogens and seeing what these practices look like, seeing what happens with people that are doing this in a tribal context, instead of just like, you know, your scuzzy Chicago apartment. Doing them in more of the lineage with the tribe, that’s why we highlight this. That’s what this show can do, is to show people actual context and to show, highlight some of the importance of how these things have been used traditionally. So yeah thanks, Alex, it’s a pleasure chatting to you man. I know that you’ve been doing this show for a while and it’s great to not only have heard the past episodes, but also be a part of the show as well. So always a pleasure my good man.

Alex Tsakiris: [01:00:24] Thanks again to Niles Heckman for joining me today and Skeptiko. There’s so many topics that we bounced around and covered and I really did give him a hard time on a bunch of topics. But you know, he’s a strong guy, he can stand up to it. But the overall I just got a stress, I mean, I don’t want to go up with some hard ass question because man, hats off to these guys and the work that they’re doing, it’s just incredible. So what do you think about the prospects for entheogens as a legitimate healing medicine, in the way that we think about healing medicine? Let me know your thoughts. Jump on over to the Skeptiko forum, come over to the forum. Anyways, I got some cool shows coming up. Well, I don’t know if they’re cool or not. I go off on these little tangents. I think they’re interesting. But I have some shows coming up that I think you’ll enjoy. Stay with me for all of that. Until next time, take care and bye for now.

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