The Frontier Of Revolutionary Medicine w/ Dr. Dan Stickler #469

Podcast Transcript:

AUBREY MARCUS: Dr. Dan Stickler. How are you, my brother? 

DR. DAN STICKLER: I am so thrilled to be here to get one of our conversations on tape. 

AUBREY MARCUS: I know, right? We've had so many of them. First in so many different areas. And you've been so instrumental in my life in many ways for what most people don't know is you were instrumental in actually Vylana and I getting together. You were right there at the beginning. You were in the airplane when I proposed to her on that flight to Sedona, like, and stayed with us in Sedona at the beginning of lockdown. And. You've been a part of our personal journey, our romantic journey, my health journey. You're going to be helping me prepare for fertility. We just gave a dap to officially like friends do say like, 

DR. DAN STICKLER: We set a time. 

AUBREY MARCUS: We set a timeframe. We're going in. My swimmers are going to be ready to swim and we're going to be ready to go. And you have such a wide range of knowledge on, you know, health optimization, performance optimization. Psychedelic medicine is another one of your fields of expertise and just the general understanding of what's going on in the world as it pertains to human health and thriving of the heart, mind and spirit and so many areas to talk about, but I thought I would just kind of allow you to explain how you landed where you are in this particular kind of intersection of human performance, optimization, thriving, psychedelic medicine, esoteric, ancient wisdom traditions. Like, how'd you get here, man?

DR. DAN STICKLER: I'm not really sure how I got here, but you know, I went into medicine with a preconception of what it was going to really be like. I thought it was about helping the human to be better at who they are and how they perform and just was disenchanted by the fact that it was just for disease, essentially, it was this stepwise postponement of death is the way I put it. I mean, somebody has a problem, you intervene, you stop it at that point, and then they go until they drop again and you stop that. 

AUBREY MARCUS: And that might even be an overestimation. A lot of times you're not stopping anything

DR. DAN STICKLER: Right.

AUBREY MARCUS: You're just masking the symptoms or that you can tolerate. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: Or even giving people treatments that are going to create 

AUBREY MARCUS: New symptoms

DR. DAN STICKLER: New symptoms.

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. So you're in medical school obviously, and you're probably still kind of bought into the system here, but at what point did you start to raise your eyebrows and go, Hmm, this feels a little funny. Was it after medical school or did you start early? 

DR. DAN STICKLER: No, it was early in medical school. And I was just like, where's the human nutrition piece of this. I mean, we learned disease nutrition. How to treat people in kidney failure with diet and cancer patients. But that was brief and there was not anything really on exercise and nutrition, not much on sleep at all. I mean, all these lifestyle factors that are so important that were kind of glossed over and we focused only on disease.

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. I mean like how to breathe, how to move, how to sleep, how to fuck, how to eat, how to have a positive mindset. Like these are some fundamental basics actually. And it's not only medical school that should be teaching them. It's actually school. It's one of the big criticisms I have of school. Is like, how about we go back to the basics first, before we learn the date of the treaty of Versailles, like, I don't give a shit. I'll look that up on Google. It doesn't matter, but how to breathe that's important. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: Yeah. I mean, that's the thing, all the stuff that kids learn in school and you can access it, the answers to anything you want right now, it's just amazing to have that extension of the mind with all the technology that's out there now. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Right. And for the argument, Oh, well, it's good to be able to memorize things. Okay. Memorize a poem, like that's useful. You know what, like, the treaty of Versailles, not useful, but you know, what's useful if you can recite, if by Rudyard Kipling off your own memory at just the right time, when someone's going through a hard place, like you want to practice memorization, great. Memorize something that is like a value add to your life.

DR. DAN STICKLER: And in that memorizing, especially when it comes to something like a poem, do you know the meaning of it? 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yes. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: What's behind it? What does it tell us? 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. We're in an interesting time now where we have to start understanding and telling a new story and telling a new story of health and human thriving. And you're definitely a big part of that story. And it just feels like we need to gather all of the allies together and just really make a push. And I appreciate the people who are doing this with podcasts and I'm doing my best. A lot of people are doing their best, but it just feels like we need to kind of aggregate a lot of energy and then just really start to push this into culture if we're going to see the significant changes that we really need.

DR. DAN STICKLER: Yeah. I mean, cultural memes are generally major attractors in a culture and everybody seems to gravitate towards them and we've got to reestablish or reify the cultural memes and get people to really look at the current paradigm and what's possible.

AUBREY MARCUS: Totally. So, all right. So one of these paradigms that in our brief pre podcast conversation you were talking about is there's a change in the understanding of the paradigm that says DNA is going to control your life. Your birth DNA is going to control your life. So go in and explain to people what this revision to the old story and this new paradigm looks like, which is not birth DNA, but actually the epigenetic pathway that you're going to follow in life. So explain to people what that means. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: Yeah. So science right now is very reductionistic. It looks at parts and predicts outcomes based on the combination of the parts that you're working with, as opposed to looking at the whole organism as a whole, essentially, I mean, looking from the cellular level out to the environment, how is everything interacting in that? But we focus on specific organ systems or specific metabolic processes, and that's reductionism. Human system is a complex adaptive system, and it requires systems thinking to approach it. And this new paradigm is systems biology, and it's getting a ton of backing behind it with scientists. But there's also a lot of pushback from the old guard because it's not invalidating the reductionism. I mean, reductionism got us a long way here. But we've reached the capacity of what it can do and now it's time to start looking at human life as a process and really look at it as a whole organism. It's like looking at the forest instead of just the individual trees. How do we optimize the forest?

AUBREY MARCUS: There's a piece that's in a recent book that I published through one of the divisions of my new publishing company called world philosophy and religion. It's first principles and first values. And it's by Gaffney and Stein under the pen name, David J temple. And they talk about the difference between complicated systems and complex systems. Complicated systems are like an airplane. Right? Like you have an engine, you have the controls, you have all of these things, they work together. But each individual thing, if something's broken, you just focus on that thing. If there's something wrong with the propeller, you focus on the propeller. If there's something wrong with the wing, you focus on the wing. If there's something wrong with the control wire, you focus on that. That's complicated. Right? So it requires individual knowledge, because it's a machine and this machine has individual parts that do work together. Of course, the propulsion of the engines then has to go through the wings. And so they work together, but it's not like a complex system, which is like an ecosystem in a forest or a human body where they're all actually intermingled in such a way that if you isolate any one of those things, you're not going to get the whole picture.

DR. DAN STICKLER: Right.

AUBREY MARCUS: You can't just fix one thing. I mean, we've seen this type of thinking when they introduced cane toads in Australia, right? Like, all right, we're going to introduce cane toads and they're going to eat the pests and they're going to keep things off the cane, but then they destroyed the whole ecosystem that they were doing. Now they have this huge cane toad problem, but it's like they were using complicated system thinking to try and solve a complex problem, which involves the ecosystem and it's the same with the body. It just doesn't fundamentally work when you have a complex system and for a complex system, you need a whole comprehensive universal story, a new story that you're able to tell about the whole.

DR. DAN STICKLER: Right. And I mean, the entire universe, everything is a complex adaptive system. The airplane, the computer, all of those things are complicated, so it really is the sum of the parts, but life is, you can't. It's much greater than the sum of the parts is the best way to put it, and you don't want to look at the individual parts either, you want to look at how the parts interact, interrelate, interconnect. I mean, we are dependent on origination. So we are dependent on everything else around us. Even just knowing ourselves, we're dependent on having someone or something to interact with in order to know who we are. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. It's like the whole cosmos is in conversation. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: I like that. 

AUBREY MARCUS: And that's another thing from the first principles of the first five is the discussion of everything being in a conversation. And Jordan Peterson talks about this as well, and Charles Eisenstein. Sanity is a group project, like actually this idea that we're not in conversation with the rest of the world, you know, by even how we eat and how we breathe and how we actually talk to other people. It's necessary. Like, we're part of a gigantic, individuation of the one, of God, of the all that is. And so we need to be talking to God and all the other parts. We are already, you know.

DR. DAN STICKLER: Yeah, Daniel Schmachtenberger had a good quote recently. He said, what kind of measure of health is being sane in an insane society? And I love that and that's all the interconnectedness of every individual. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, alright. So when it breaks down to what does this mean for somebody in a variety of different conditions, if you want to go by them, to actually shift their thinking from complicated systems thinking to actually complex systems thinking. So when you're guiding people, you have a peer on, you lead people through the complexities of their goals for human health optimization and thriving. So what are some of the specific things that you start to talk about with people that differ from the current complicated systems paradigm?

DR. DAN STICKLER: Well, let's take something from the disease model, the type two diabetes. How do we assess that? We assess that based on blood sugar levels, hemoglobin A1C, what their insulin level is. And when we get to a certain point, we'll recommend an oral hypoglycemic to lower the blood glucose, and then eventually injections of insulin to manage the glucose. Then we monitor their glucose and hemoglobin A1C. Well, getting their glucose even down into a normal range, they still get the complications of diabetes. And that doesn't jive with that reductionism. And why is that? It's because it is a complex system. You want to look at all of the factors and I don't like root cause thinking because root cause is also reductionistic, it breaks it down to one cause and there's nothing root cause in a complex system. There are shared pathways that we can focus on, but in diabetes we know what's happening here. Their diet, their movements, their sleep patterns. These are key things that should be addressed and they're minimally addressed either because doctors don't have the time or the knowledge to provide that. And even if you look at their food intake, you've got to consider things like, what is their belief system? Where do they live? Do they have access to healthier foods or not? What are their finances like, can they afford to buy those? So you can keep asking questions and going out and out and out from all of these things that are contributing to. This person now has diabetes, but we're so focused on the blood glucose and lowering the blood glucose to a marker level and you're rewarded in the healthcare system now for performance, like getting their blood sugars under control, getting people to reduce their medications, which is great but there's not incentive for the lifestyle factors.

AUBREY MARCUS: Wait, so how are healthcare professionals actually rewarded for doing things like that? Because it seems like in the model, there's also an inverse reward coming from pharmaceutical pressure to actually keep people on more pharmaceuticals rather than less.

DR. DAN STICKLER: Yeah. And they're looking at metrics that say, Oh, your performance is better than this doc's performance because you've got their blood sugars under control. You have their blood pressure consistently in range. What happens, I know some doctors that will not take people that have multiple conditions.

AUBREY MARCUS: Padding their stats.

DR. DAN STICKLER: Yeah. Cause they know most of these people are noncompliant. And they are going to crush their statistics on that. 

AUBREY MARCUS: So that would be like, I would imagine something like a neurosurgeon. Right? Like a neurosurgeon that wants a high survival rate would be wanting to take the easier cases rather than those more complicated cases for sure. So that their statistics of survivability would go up so they can get more patients, et cetera. So, yeah. And that kind of competitive comparison metric, which is really where the financial incentives in medicine, I think there's a beautiful aspect to the way that we have financial incentives to drive everything because people should be rewarded, but there's always a way to gamify that in a way where you play it to your advantage and whenever we see that availability to gamify the system to get more money, then people will play the game. Even out of the self serving bias, even if they're not maliciously doing so, the self serving bias will say, Oh, well, no, I'm actually doing what's right, just even though it's benefiting them, but they're not actually aware that they have some greedy monster inside them. That's actually causing them to gamify the system.

DR. DAN STICKLER: And that brings us back to those cultural memes. What does success look like in our society? Fame, money, that's our metric for success. And that's not the same metric you see in Eastern religions. But for us, the Greeks really kind of put it on us with this reductionism in science and logic, which allowed us to accelerate from where we were, but it also took us further and further away from truly understanding what it is to be human. And that was solidified when Rene Descartes was talking about, I think, therefore I am. And that just started leading to more and more separation. I mean, you look at Native Aboriginal people. Their connection with the earth, all aspects of it. It's huge. 

AUBREY MARCUS: They talk to the rocks. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: Yeah, and they see everyone as their brother or sister. It's all connected to them. And that was a lot of the basis in the Eastern religions, too. And success, to be successful, the definition for them was completely different than fame and fortune. I mean, some cultures will downplay their hunting skills so that they're not showing off or shining among the rest of the tribe. I mean, these things were part of human life, prior to really all of this reductionism and industrial revolution. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. The Cartesian dualism that you're talking about. I mean, I really feel like he literally put his quote backwards. It's like ‘I am therefore I think’.

DR. DAN STICKLER: Yes

AUBREY MARCUS: Rather than ‘I think therefore I am’, because that created the split between mind and body and then further split between mind body and spirit and so everything is targeted individually. Instead of this holistic view of I am in my entirety mind, body, and spirit. And one of the functions of my I amness as the original divine voice answered, I am that I am as the name of God. I am that I am we as a microcosm of the divine, I am that I am. Therefore, I think, therefore I breathe. Therefore I am of spirit. Like it's all many things that come from that, but we really did adopt that. And then start looking like, how do we isolate the mind? How do we isolate the body? How do we isolate spirit by putting it out somewhere else outside of us? We're not participating. It's some other thing. And hopefully we do right by them. So we get some cosmic honeymoon reward system at the end of our life. And it's like the kingdom of heaven is at hand

DR. DAN STICKLER: Right. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Here it is. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: Yeah. This is paradise. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. If we're willing to accept it. And so, you've had an intimate view of this in the medical system. And I think probably what clearly, I would venture to say, drew you into psychedelic medicine is that even though, through the medical model by which psychedelics are becoming illegal where it's forcing them to focus on one thing, end of life depression or complex PTSD. It's forcing them to actually look at something in the microcosm, but actually anybody who does psychedelics knows that that's not how it works. That's just one of the side effects. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: Yeah. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Of having these profound transcendental experiences. It's looking at the whole complexity of the individual and their relationship to their heart and to God and the spirit and their awareness. So, would it be fair to say that that's one of the things that allured you to psychedelic medicines?

DR. DAN STICKLER: Yeah, it certainly did. I mean, I did my first ayahuasca journey in Peru in 2012 and it was a profound experience, but I will say that after I came back without adequate integration, the experience shifted into more of, Oh, that molecule created a story in my mind that this is the way things are. And it just is a biochemical process that occurred. It was several years later that I did another journey and it was like a spontaneous change at that point. I mean, I was an atheist scientist, science is real and if it can't be proven, it doesn't exist, all of that. And I had a complete reversal after one experience. 

AUBREY MARCUS: If I had to venture a guess, and so the audience knows I don't know what the answer to this is, I would say that was a Bufo journey. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: Actually it wasn't. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Oh man, I messed up. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: It was ketamine. 

AUBREY MARCUS: I put heavy money on Bufo for that one. That provides this incontrovertible experience where you're like, fuck, I can't explain this anymore. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: Well, that one kicked it up another notch for sure. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. So you said it was a ketamine journey actually. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: Yeah. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Wow. I mean, I've obviously had unbelievably profound experiences with my experience, particularly with the blending of ketamine and cannabis, which I feel like combines the somatic awareness of the body with this kind of cosmic star nation evaporation of the boundaries of self into the universe. And it combines both. So I get it. But what was it about that particular experience for you that was like, okay, there's no turning back anymore. I can't explain this.

DR. DAN STICKLER: Yeah, there were things that I experienced that I had no reference to. And if we are truly conscious due to the wet matter in our head, that it's just an epiphenomenon of the nerves, there's no way to have those ephemeral journeys and experiences that when you come out of it and there's no words that can explain it because you have no reference point to what that experience was. Just the fact that something can be ineffable alone. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: Can really tell a scientist, shit, maybe this isn't coming from the brain. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. It's interesting as you look at this rationalist, materialist, reductionist kind of model, there's almost a level of faith that's required. That's not dissimilar from the level of faith that's required to believe in God to actually say, Oh yeah, cosmos, everything, even human life, all we are, it's really, oops, how'd this happen? Like that doesn't actually hold a lot more logic when you really think about it, then no, no, actually there was a driving force of the cosmos that was seeking ever greater contact and ever greater intimacy and understanding of itself, like well, I mean, if you want to just go from pure logic, like there's no good reason to believe that, oops, it makes more sense fundamentally. And I think when you get to the, a lot of the great thinkers like Heisenberg or Einstein, they'll talk about how you go deeper and deeper and deeper. And at the deepest levels, you find God there. Cause like there's a place of ineffability even in quantum physics where you start looking and you start peering deeper and deeper and deeper and oops, no longer makes any more sense and makes less sense than actually believing in God.

DR. DAN STICKLER: Well, one of the theories of consciousness now is looking at, and this is from systems biologists, they're looking at the microtubules in the brain and they're postulating that it's functioning like a quantum computer. Which is crazy to think about. I mean, it's hard to prove

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, I mean, this understanding of even the observer effect, right? I haven't listened to someone who's able to sufficiently explain from a materialist, rationalist, reductionist way, even the observer effect, which is your intention is to observe particles. You see particles. Your intention is to observe waves. You see waves like what? Like, how are we affecting something else and how are particles entangled in this spooky action from a distance as Einstein called it? And I'm sure it's out there. I'm sure somebody has given it their damnness to figure out. But what filters through to me is the Greg Braden interpretation, which is like, ah, yeah, here's God in it. That certainly makes a lot more sense to me anyways, but to be fair, I haven't listened to the other side, but I really feel like this is a part of the new changing evolving story is the return of spirit back into our lives. Like Nietzsche declared God is dead. And I think he was accurate for the way that scientific mind and everything was going. And I think there was a beneficial process to kind of overthrow the superstitions of religion, which created the witch hunts and the inquisition and all of the horrors and still creates horrors and all kinds of atrocities that happen based in the name of ‘God’, which is really the super, The super imposition of a demon in the face of God is really what that is. But I think now we're returning to a time with the psychedelic renaissance and with the return of the ancient traditional beliefs and with actually the way that science is peering into the fabric of reality where God's coming back into culture, like I really see that trend happening.

DR. DAN STICKLER: I do see it moving very slowly. And just in Nietzsche's Thus Spoke Zarathustra, where he talked about the cultural attractor of when people were given a choice, they would choose the last man. And the last man was the person who chose the greatest comfort and least pain to go through life. Whereas the Ubermensch was the other option that they could choose. And the Ubermensch would just live on the edge, experience extreme highs, but also experience extreme lows. And God essentially thought, why would anybody choose anything else? And yet what he was talking about in that book was that everybody chose to be the last man. And I mean, it's a cultural attractor for us. People choose comfort.

AUBREY MARCUS: Why?

DR. DAN STICKLER: I think there's a resistance to risk in experiencing the extremes of sadness, pain of just loneliness, those kinds of things. But we really fluctuate. However deep we go, we can equally go high. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: And I can tell you for me those extreme peaks are worth every bit of those extreme lows.

AUBREY MARCUS: No doubt. I mean, this is, I would call it, the warrior poet ethos. It's one of the chapters of my next book, but it's the warrior is the one who has the courage to actually stand for what you believe in, stand for what matters and the courage to choose the path of the ubermensch or homo amor or whatever name you have for the new emerging human that's coming out of this. And the poet is the one who's willing to feel it all and to thrust themselves into the depth of everything and then transmute that into art, right? Like that's where art comes from. And I think people underestimate actually also the power that we have as artists, the toll tax would divide the world into Nogwalls and tonala. The tonals were the ordinary folks, the people choosing the last man. So to speak, the Nogwalls were the artists painting the masterpiece of their own life. And I think if we actually understand that we're all artists creating our own masterpiece of our life and that any pain that you experienced, it's not negating the pain, we're not bypassing the pain, but when you know that you can take that pain like the country kind of soul singer, jelly roll, take all the pain of his life of crack and having his wife have to be a prostitute to make money. And I don't know his story super intimately, but I know like, this is what comes through his music. And like, this is why he blew up is because he went through so much pain and so much difficulty. And then he transmutes that into art and all of a sudden he has this just deep well. So whatever low he came from now, he can offer this, and I'm sure his songs and his story has saved thousands of people from suicide, and like when we know that our art can not only help us, but help others, then your willingness to feel what needs to be felt so that you can help somebody else through that other challenge. So whatever you're going through, however hard it is, when you know that if you share your story and when you make it through and you transform this into art, whether that's the living art of your body or a song or a poem or a story, like you can change the world with it. And so that gives you even more courage. And then, as you said, like the Kybalion, the hermetic principles, the principle of rhythm, lows and highs, highs and lows, we're going to experience both and to be able to withstand the extremes and enjoy them. I mean, fuck that's life.

DR. DAN STICKLER: I mean, society, at least American society, right now really promotes that boys need to be strong and they need to not show emotions, don't show sadness. Don't cry. As we're growing up, I can remember that was what I learned and I became very stoic. 

AUBREY MARCUS: There's no crying in baseball. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: That's right. 

AUBREY MARCUS: That's right. God damn it. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: And I can remember. It was probably in my late 40s, early 50s, that I realized that I had adopted that. So I just refused to feel anything negative. It was always, push it aside, get distracted, don't feel it. And I was feeling sadness one day and I just decided to ride it as far as it would go. And it was so painful. So painful. And then I kind of hit the bottom of it and I was almost in an awe state because I was like, wow, this is a ecstasis to know that I could feel something like that. It didn't feel good at the time, but afterwards it was like an ecstatic experience. It truly was. And then after that time, I just let emotions go where they wanted to go. I would ride them to their peaks or ride them to the depths, and it was really life changing for me. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, and the other option is if you're in that numbness, I think it's that Johnny Cash song, Hurt. The needle pokes a hole to see if I still feel, right? And he's talking about heroin in this case. And I think numbness is this state that is, I think, the antithesis of life. Like actually the opposite of all of the good feelings is not the bad feelings. It's the numbness, the numbness stands at the opposite pole and the elation and the deep sorrow, they're all actually more intimately connected than the numbness. So you find yourself in the numbness and you've walled off your ability to feel, which typically means you're gonna have to feel the low first before you can actually naturally feel the high. You'll go to an escapist form of drug use. Which is far different than the kind of entheogenic form of medicine used, which is awakening the divine within and Theo like within, awakening the divine within and Genesis creation. So this is kind of the dichotomy of where we're at. I mean, people want to feel alive and there's two pathways. One, you allow yourself to feel or you medicate yourself out of either into deeper, comfortable numbness like the Pink Floyd song and a comfortable numb or into some kind of drug induced mania of some variety that you can feel and those two options. Which path you're going to choose? But the numbness is insufferable.

DR. DAN STICKLER: And I think a lot of it comes from the way our brains have developed into this left and right hemisphere where we've got the animate brain in the right hemisphere and then we have the contextual brain in the left and they should be in balance with each other and they're not. The contextual brain is making a slave of the animate brain. This is a theory of how human evolution took place and that that conceptual brain taking charge allowed for all of this growth in technology and dominance as a species on the earth. But we lost access to the animate brain. And psychedelics have an amazing ability to kind of reestablish that default mode network of the brain. That's the self referential, the ego. But it's patterns that are repeated so that it minimizes the cognitive processing required. So it's like a path of least resistance for people and somebody used the analogy, so the default mode network is like a river bed with rocks in it and the water's flowing at a constant pace. And so it creates eddies and whirlpools in the same spot. It's just constant. And the psychedelics, it's like somebody takes the river bed and shakes it up and then you see what happens when the rocks settle again. And it gives you that opportunity to say, well, maybe this is a better way to look at things. Maybe this is a better connection in the brain that makes better sense. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. You know, for people who are of my generation, at the very earliest, they probably remember the Etch A Sketches. And the little Etch A Sketch was a very simple screen, and you had two little knobs, and you could make little geometric patterns that just went up, down, left, or right. You couldn't really go at an angle. And you were just moving in right angles all the way, and you could create a little piece of art on this Etch A Sketch little screen. And I think it used magnets or something to pull little filaments into the end of the screen. And then if you wanted to shake the Etch A Sketch, all of a sudden, you'd have a blank canvas again, and you gotta start over. And so it's like the default mode network are all the grooves that have been patterned by the Etch A Sketch of our life. And then psychedelics shake the Etch A Sketch, and this happens also with the release of BDNF. Like, Brain derived neurotrophic, how you can explain this better, but BDNF gets released, which actually allows almost fresh powder to come over your brain so that you can re-pattern. And this is part of the integration process. Why it's so important is you have this highly, much more pliable state of consciousness at which you can use your little Etch A Sketch dials to start to carve new patterns and really fundamentally change your life. For like Michael Pollan says, how to change your mind. You can change your mind, change the default mode network of your mind. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: Yeah, that's one of the aspects of psychedelics that I really resonate with is the ability to give you the option to change things. I mean, not talking about psychedelics, but, in pathogens, like MDMA, I've had conversations with Gull Dolan, who runs an MDMA lab at, I think she's at Hopkins, but she was talking to me, and this was back in 2020, in research she hadn't published yet, but she was finding that a single dose of MDMA would reopen the critical period of social reward. We learn our social skills during this one window that they call a critical period that opens in childhood and then it kind of closes around teenage years, 18 or so. But we've learned all of our social skills at that point. And that window closes and it's extremely hard to open it up again, it's pretty much locked in. And she found that one dose of MDMA reopened that window for a minimum of 48 hours, but generally for a week or two. After a single dose, I mean, this persistent open area for social reward, she postulated that's why it works so well for PTSD, but it also works well for kids on the spectrum or autistic, where they can actually learn something and people with adverse childhood circumstances, I mean, they have learned abnormal social skills.

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah

DR. DAN STICKLER: A lot of the time. And having that opportunity to reopen that window and learn new social skills is huge. 

AUBREY MARCUS: And whatever they learn may have been adaptive to the traumatic and challenging environment that they were in. But once they're out of that environment, it's no longer adaptive, it's counterproductive. And so to be able to actually rewire all of those patterns is essential, and I think that's a big part of what's so optimistic about this psychedelic renaissance. Unfortunately, and I want to talk more about MDMA in particular, but in this dovetails into that, but unfortunately there was a very surprising ruling from the FDA towards maps and kind of an early analysis of their clinical data, which has been overwhelmingly positive and it got like an early rejection that kind of shocked me and I think shocked a lot of people who are following this, given that they'd gotten fast track status and already like preliminary ability to serve patients in Australia and I think a couple other places. What do you think happened there? What was the ruling? What was the reason behind it? What do you think this means for the eventual legalization, cause it's not over yet. They gotta adjust some things in the studies, but I don't understand it to the level that I think you do. So what happened there?

DR. DAN STICKLER: I've heard from both sides on this one. And I think a lot of the information is just not, not solid at this point, but I know there are certain people that are influential that are very much against this happening, but that's not the main reason here. When you look at the way that the studies were conducted, I mean, they really weren't well conducted studies. I mean, they were very loose and for something this monumental, you want really solid data. But there were inconsistencies, and Rick Doblin, who really, this has been his life's work, he got a little too cavalier, I think, with things. Just a little bit too much, really sensationalizing a lot of the positive outcomes, it would have been better if he had just kind of kept it under wraps rather than really take it on as a cause when they're doing the research to show this. And there's no doubt in my mind that this stuff works.

AUBREY MARCUS: Yes.

DR. DAN STICKLER: No doubt. But the study, and I mean he went from a non profit to a for profit that was going to be conducting this. I mean there were strange things happening there and I mean it was pretty unanimous among the reviewers that this is probably not the right study to confirm this on. 

AUBREY MARCUS: I mean, one of the issues that I had heard was raised was the utilization of placebo. So that's a complicated issue. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: It's hugely complicated. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Because fundamentally people, culturally, we know, what an MDMA experience is, even if you've never had it, you don't know it exactly through gnosis, but you kind of get the idea

DR. DAN STICKLER: You will know

AUBREY MARCUS: You kind of get the idea, right? So you're going to know if you're in the placebo group or the control group, like whatever niacin they give you or whatever thing, it's not MDMA, like you're going to know the difference. So it does challenge even the ability to run a double blind study. But that's, I think, a place where we're going to have to actually loosen the model a little bit to kind of meet psychedelics somewhere so that actually the benefits can be proven because of this model of everything, having to be double blind. Well, fuck, how are you going to double blind mushrooms or how are you going to double blind five MEO DMT? Like you're going to know if you got it. It's talking about like, Doc, did I get it? And like, well, actually, I don't know. Everybody knows, like everybody knows. Sorry. And so it feels like there's going to have to be some kind of pressure to actually, all right, what is a model here that is scientifically acceptable? And then how does the scientific paradigm of the scientific model adjust to allow us to actually prove these cases? 

DR. DAN STICKLER: We'll see. This comes back to reductionism. We're not looking at the right questions in this regard and the placebo effect is a really cool thing. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah.

DR. DAN STICKLER: I mean, people downplay it and they say, Oh, it's just a placebo effect. I'm like, Wow. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. Placebo effect alone turns Cartesian dualism on its head. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: Yeah. 

AUBREY MARCUS: By the very nature that the mind alone is changing conditions in the body dramatically, already. We should be throwing out this reductionist model just by the innumerable proven examples of the placebo effect.

DR. DAN STICKLER: You look at research now though, and you know, in rat studies, they're all monoclonal. They're all the same rat, essentially. They're fed the exact same diet, they're in the exact same laboratory environment, but we try to translate that into studies with humans and we're far from monoclonal, we're a complex organism with varying DNA and we're contextual. I mean, you can't just look at the DNA anymore. DNA is not the central intelligence of life. I mean, DNA is an instruction book for making proteins essentially. And we were talking about the central dogma earlier, where it was this linear aspect. We go from DNA to RNA to a protein. And it's a one way street, but now we know that's not the case. And yet we still have the central dogma that we work from. And when we do human studies, they need to be end of ones, they're contextual. Everybody's different. Everybody has a different childhood. Everybody has a different environment that they grow and play in. They have different belief systems, they have different habits, different goals, and that's one of the things that systems medicine or systems biology really looks at is, take the individual and do the end of ones with the individual. And see what's working. I mean, we have enough computer models now to know when something's safe or not safe.

AUBREY MARCUS: Right? 

DR. DAN STICKLER: I mean, we can plan this out. 

AUBREY MARCUS: And that's the other thing about the MDMA studies. The safety studies were very, very solid, right? Like the safety studies on MDMA, unlike what was falsely, propagandically put out, some 20 years ago where MDMA melts holes in the brain, but actually it wasn't MDMA. It was, whoops, it was methamphetamine that we were testing. Sorry about that. Big mistake, no retraction from the public news, except on some small fucking footnote. I was like, Oh, MDMA melts the brain. No, it doesn't. There's been plenty of cases of that. So then it's like, all right, how do we develop a model here where we show what we know to be true, which is that this can be an unbelievably productive element in the treatment of PTSD and a variety of other different issues, multiplicity.

DR. DAN STICKLER: Yeah. I mean, I have seen MDMA work. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Me too. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: And there's no doubt. And I know I can say, well, it's anecdotal, you know, I've watched these experiences and everyone I've watched has been incredible. But it's not like it's like, Oh, half of them do well, half of them don't do well. I mean, and one of the other problems that occurs is by getting this as a medicalized drug, you detract from the needed experience of it. Having a sterile clinical environment where you have people sitting there with a clipboard and they're not allowed to touch you. You know, even if you're like

AUBREY MARCUS: I really need a hug. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: Just hold my hand. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, exactly. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: Yeah. I mean, it's not going to be as effective. I mean, we know set and setting is such a huge aspect of the effect. I mean, that's been shown scientifically. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: And yet we still do these ketamine clinics where you go in and lay on a gurney, get an IV drip going, and the nurse just checks on you periodically. I mean, what kind of an experience can that be? 

AUBREY MARCUS: I mean, I haven't done the clinical version of ketamine therapy, though I've done a lot of clinically prescribed ketamine. But I can only imagine the nurse coming in, in the depth of a journey. How are you doing? You're like, what dimension is this in and where are you coming from? Like, what the fuck is he talking about? You know, I'm in the 11th, like, I don't know where you are. Like it's fundamentally an interesting thing. And you do, I do hear from people who've gone that route and that's all it is. They show up, they get injected, they leave, they're in a bright white place, maybe they get a blindfold, usually they're onto that at least to give people a blindfold and some random ass music, not the best music, but whatever random ass kind of somewhat relaxing music, fucking spa channel on Sirius XM or whatever the fuck they play. And they're like, man, it was scary as shit. It was like, of course it was.

DR. DAN STICKLER: Yeah.

AUBREY MARCUS: Of course it was, you know, so. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: The guy that I think first developed ketamine, he was up in Boston somewhere, but they still have a lab up there that they do ketamine work all the time, but they have these rows of gurneys that are divided by curtains. And they have like one nurse that walks down the row. I mean, you have people screaming in one area and people hallucinating and talking about their hallucinations out loud. I mean, what kind of an experience can that be? 

AUBREY MARCUS: No, it's like Strassman's study of DMT, where they had an anal probe that was checking body temperature and then everybody had visions of aliens that were trying to probe them. And we have this whole cultural meme about anal probing aliens that probably came from this study. Which is like you're on a wildly psychedelic trip and you have something in your ass. So of course you're gonna think aliens are sodomizing you. Like it's very interesting as science and these ancient and beautiful, even modern, some of these medicines are more modern, but these wildly transformative transcendent experiences are trying to be measured under this other model. It's like the model has to meet the medicine for this to actually be understood, and I think all of the ancient medicine traditions understood that. Nobody serves somebody ayahuasca in a gurney. And it's just like, how did you do, you know, good luck. Oh, it looks like this patient experienced nausea. You know, let's give them anti nausea. Like, no, it's like fucking part of it is your purge bucket. Here's the ceremony. It seems like from that understanding, decriminalization like they've done in Portugal and other places like that is probably a pretty essential kind of next move. And then medical, has to kind of adjust and allow this process to happen. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: I just was recently in Lisbon and I mean, I didn't see any homeless people hanging out or drug users in the parks or anything like that. And yet here in Austin

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: Go down there, just off of Cesar Chavez, and I mean, it's a nightmare.

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, and Austin's nowhere near what, like the Tenderloin in San Francisco is. Yeah, there's a lot of things that need to shift, and also I think people assume that, oh, decriminalize, there's going to be so many more people doing drugs and it's going to be a fucking mess, but then you actually look at the example, okay, well, let's look at the place where it happened. How's it going? And they're like, yeah, it's going super good. And people, we're just imagining that these things that we're doing for public health are going to be for public health, but they're not. You know, and you can just look at the data. I mean, I think a lot of people had those beliefs about cannabis, like, Oh, so many people are going to be out, so many more car crashes and so many more things like, and then Colorado is like, yeah, fuck y'all. We're going to do it. And then we're going to release all the data. And actually everything was more chill, like a few people freaking out and eating too many cookies and they were thinking they're going to die, but they didn't. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: And it's funny because it was kids. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: The latest report I saw was like calls to 911, went up like 100 percent for people ingesting mushrooms. But they were like kids, 14 to 16 were calling in

AUBREY MARCUS: Freaked out. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: Yeah, and that's just poor choices 

AUBREY MARCUS: For sure, for sure. I mean, and that's also having to hide it, having to be in this thing where you just get it. You don't know anything about it. You don't know which strain it is. Well, I took two grams of mushrooms one time and it was a great time. Well, then you get two grams of penis envy and all of a sudden you're on a white knuckle sleigh ride through the cosmos and you're like, what the fuck just happen? But we don't have that kind of knowledge and the elders that are disseminating that knowledge and having the conversations with their children are like, all right, all right kids, let's let dad and grandpa and the uncles tell you about giving you the lay of the land here. So that you understand what you're doing and also know that you get into a tough spot and like, give me a call. And people have known me as a psychonaut for 25 years. So it doesn't happen as often now, but there was a period for a while where I would get used to those calls where somebody would be, they would take some medicine of some sort, maybe it was LSD or maybe it was psilocybin and I'd get a call and they'd be telling me all of these reasons. They're so paranoid. And I just calmly, I just had almost kind of like a routine answer. I would be like, haha. Well, I have to tell you, you're experiencing what I call the normal. Like this is the usual, like the usual freak out is like, people are listening to me. I didn't know, like, I don't know, this is never going to end. Like, no, it's okay. Nobody's listening to you. You're all right. Put on some music. I'll send them some tracks. Be like, this is normal. You know, this will be over soon. You'll be in your kitchen eating snacks in three hours, like it's going to be okay and just having those voices around is enormously helpful.

DR. DAN STICKLER: And the experiences, even the most ecstatic experiences, it's not like you go, wow, I'm going to do that again tomorrow. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: It doesn't work that way. The experience is people want to integrate them and they want to really sit with them. But you just don't see people taking LSD one day and going, hey, let's do twice as much tomorrow or do it five days a week. It's just like, Oh yeah, that was a great experience or was not such a great experience, but most of them are great depending on the mindset going in. But mushrooms the same way and you look at lethal doses of these things, I mean, we don't really know what a lethal dose of mushrooms would be. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah.

DR. DAN STICKLER: I know LSD, that one party somewhere that somebody spiked the punch and measured incorrectly and gave a hundred times the normal amount. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Oh God. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: And people were hospitalized from that, but nobody died. And in fact the people that were hospitalized, some of them said it was the most profound, life changing experience of their lives.

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, that makes me sweat thinking about a hundred times more LSD than a normal amount. But yeah, and then contrast that with, I don't know, I mean, I think the statistics I read on Tylenol overdose, just Tylenol overdose is like, there's like 900 deaths a year or something crazy from liver failure because of Tylenol overdose. And that's like, everybody takes Tylenol, infant Tylenol and children's Tylenol. But there was like, ah, whatever. That's like, that's just par for the course. And same with so many of these other allopathic psychiatric medications. It's like suicidality. I was just watching some commercial because we have commercials for all of these fucking things. I didn't even know what they were trying to treat. Might have been hair loss. I don't even know exactly what it was, but some people with nice sets of hair were having fun. And it's like side effects may include suicidality and blah, blah, blah. I'm like, suicidality is a side effect. Like, what the fuck are you talking about? You know what I mean? Like, it's a wild world where this certain class of things is acceptable. Whatever the side effects might be, and this other thing, all right. Yeah. It's a path that has its own pitfalls. You can get into a manic state. You can get into a confused state. You can get really scared and be kind of traumatized by how scared you are. It's not like there's not bad things that can happen, but it's not the same, it's not the same, but we're so hyper focused on this negative that's coming from this one pot. And then just being like, yeah, all right. Like whatever is happening over here in this approved, it's almost like the religion of the doctors in the white lab coats. It's like, whatever they say is good, but you know, these people over here with the necklaces, like I'm wearing, don't trust them. They're out to kill. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: You have a necklace here. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, exactly. You're a proper doctor. No power amulets. Yeah. So this is definitely one of the threads in this story that's currently actively being rewritten, but it's certainly not the only thread. I mean, I think understanding the power of our sexual vitality and actually how to utilize that energy source in a world that's been overly pornographied and commodified sexually. That's another deep pathway. And I know that's a pathway that you're also interested in exploring as well. It's like, how do we harness this sexual energy, this vital life force energy, for our own healing, expansion, ecstasis, growth, as well?

DR. DAN STICKLER: Yeah, I mean, that's one of the areas of medicine that is really messed up right now, too, because any of these things that can help with that. You have to have basically a symptom of something for it to be available. Like, they don't have a symptom of not enough happiness or marital discord is not going to get you approved for MDMA. And yet, prior to it being banned, it was used by counselors in over 500,000 therapy sessions, and the success rate with marital counseling was outrageously high with that group. And yet now it doesn't have any indication of it being beneficial in any way, is how they have it classified as a Schedule I. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yep. This is again where you have to classify something as a disease state in order for you to actually consider it treatable. But it's missing out on this whole, whole huge spectrum of what is human thriving? What is a life worth living? What is a life worth protecting? What is a world worth saving? Like, it's all connected. If you're not able to harvest the joy from life, why do you care if the environment is destroyed? Because the world is a place of hell anyways. So fuck it, let it burn, you know? Let it burn. But if it's a life that you love, then that's worth protecting for yourself and all of the future generations that will come after you. So that's the key. So when you look at this, cause you've had children and you've been in this own process itself. Like what are the ways that you start to understand sexuality in the right relation with human thriving and like, and what is possible? 

DR. DAN STICKLER: Well, sexuality is a vital part of life. In my opinion, it is part of that life of excellence. Sexuality, it seems to be a biological driver and imperative. And you talk about connections and just creating a connection with another person, I mean sexuality is one of the strongest areas that can occur with that. It's like natural MDMA that occurs. But you have to be open to it being that and understand it as that. I mean, if you're told, I mean, just like boys that are like, you want to hold off until she has an orgasm and then you're good to go. And so all you think about when you start having sex is that, that thing and you're not making love. You're not in that state of just enjoying that experience and feeling into everything. I mean, you're just sitting there going, okay, I can hold off, I can hold off. We've marginalized sexuality so significantly in our society, in most societies. I mean, it wasn't like that long ago, it was just now, it's just taboo, and I mean, even things like fetishes. I mean, fetishes are just actually some variation of sexual preference, but we've made it a disease. I was interviewing someone on this, not too long ago, and that marginalization of those sexual fetishes that people have is, if it's not harmful to another person.

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. Fully consensual. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: And why is it a fetish? 

AUBREY MARCUS: Good question. And I think this goes to certain puritanical ideals in certain stories that are being told. And even if you don't understand it. Okay, like you don't have to understand it as long as it's abiding by the bounds, right? Like I think some people want to say oh, well, you know the desire to sleep with children is just my fetish. Well, nope. Sorry.

DR. DAN STICKLER: Right

AUBREY MARCUS: Here's a hard fucking gleaming wall of swords that are on fire boundary. This is off fucking limits, or any kind of non consensual activity now, but then you take something like Oh, it just gets me off when I see someone's feet or it gets me off when they swaddle me like a baby. Okay, fucking have at it, you know, like have at it. If you want a pacifier and you want to replace it with some girl's toes, go for it, have a ball, you know what I mean? 

DR. DAN STICKLER: But in our society, those are classified as psychiatric disorders. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. And I think this is one of the things that I think, ultimately, it's interesting because there was this big push to actually undo some of the different dogma of the traditional religions, a lot of which had to do with sexuality. Right? And it was like, ah, this doesn't make sense. We're all sinners because we all have to have sex. Well, this is what creates life in the first place. So I don't understand how that would be. We'd be set up for failure from the start, I mean, what kind of dickhead God would that be? So all right, that doesn't make sense, but then we've taken it. We've still taken some of these puritanical ideals and then applied those superstitious puritanical ideals, which we've discarded the whole God part of. And just kept the superstition and then applied it to this medical system and then tried to marginalize all of this. It's very strange. It's a very strange world that we've got ourselves into. And it's again, one of those other things that needs to be rewound and re understood. And you look at the clinical data from, and survey data from people who are in kink communities in particular, power exchange submission dominance communities and their overall mental stability, wellbeing, there's all kinds of metrics. And I listed a bunch of them in my book Own The Day, all kinds of metrics that show that they're actually more well adjusted citizens of society, because they're able to access and work with and deal with these forces that are inside that now have a safe, productive outlet for us to actually explore.

DR. DAN STICKLER: I just don't think people allow themselves to enjoy life much anymore. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Last man mentality. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: Yeah.

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, that's all got to shift. Alright, so a couple rapid fire questions here for you. What do you think of methylene blue? 

DR. DAN STICKLER: The scientific evidence is vague. I get an IV periodically and I measure things with the wearables and see improvements in metrics when I do it.

AUBREY MARCUS: When you do methylene blue. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: Yeah. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: And I think that the impact of mitochondria is real. 

AUBREY MARCUS: So lukewarm, but worth and you don't see 

DR. DAN STICKLER: Can’t say anything definitive about it. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. But you don't see any safety risks or anything with that other than your mouth looking like you just performed oral on a Smurf.

DR. DAN STICKLER: That's why I go with the IV. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. What about this kind of peptide revolution that's been happening and I know there's been some kind of reclassification of peptides, been a little more difficult. There's this kind of Wild West peptide moment here. That's kind of contracted a little bit. But what do you think of the peptides?

DR. DAN STICKLER: Yeah, I love peptides. We've been using peptides in our clinical practice since 2016, 2015 and I mean, we had a real heyday there for a while until the government decided to shut down the compounding pharmacies for the most popular ones that were the most effective ones. And they said there's just not enough clinical evidence of its benefit. They didn't have a lot of negative reporting from them. And I mean these were prescribed a lot around the United States. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: But I saw amazing impacts from the peptides. I mean, it's just a protein that is similar to what the body makes. Some of them are identical to what the body makes. And you just give a little higher dose than what's typically done, and it optimizes certain functions. But it's very laser focused in most cases, as opposed to most medications, which have on target and off target effects. Peptides are generally on target. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. All right. Stem cells.

DR. DAN STICKLER: Stem cells, I waffle on that too. I think there's certain areas where stem cells are beneficial. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Like localized stem cells? Like recovery of a

DR. DAN STICKLER: Yeah, localized injuries, joints, those kinds of things. There's a lot of people doing IV stem cells. There's a little bit of risk involved in that graft versus host reactions. What I'm excited about is the possibility of using these things called mitelets, which you get from platelets, but they're mitochondria from the packets from the platelets, like little exosomes from the platelets when the platelets degrade. But the possibility of taking young PRP fractions and culturing it with your own stem cells to get in, what happens is the mitochondria become youthful in that. And so imagine drawing off your stem cells, which are still aged a little bit. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: And giving them brand new mitochondria, youthful mitochondria. That's one of the areas I'm really excited about. 

AUBREY MARCUS: When do you think that might become a process that we could engage in? Is it happening now? 

DR. DAN STICKLER: Well, it could happen now. I mean, you would just get the PRP from young donors and 

AUBREY MARCUS: And that's platelet rich plasma? 

DR. DAN STICKLER: Right, yeah, and there's a certain fraction that's gonna have most of those platelets in it. And then when you're culturing, you draw off cells from the fat or the bone marrow and you culture those to grow the stem cells. You bathe them in this solution of mitelets, and there's a company that's working on extracting mitelets as an isolated piece and hopefully that will manifest very quickly and

AUBREY MARCUS: I mean, the promise of, or the possibility, I should say, of useful mitochondria coming back in your body. I mean, you see kids just running around with endless fucking energy and joy, this exuberance, like fuck, I'll take some of that. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: Yeah. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Like, why not? 

DR. DAN STICKLER: Mitochondrial deterioration as we age is one of the biggest impacts on development of disease.

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, and I'm imagining you're a strong proponent of the hot cold therapy kind of movement to help support that. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: That depends. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Okay. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: Now we're learning that there's a new test that we have. It's an early access test that the FDA approved for people in the study, but it's called SAPIR X. And it is a test that looks at the senescence of the immune system, as well as the resilience of the immune system. 

AUBREY MARCUS: What's senescence mean? 

DR. DAN STICKLER: Senescence means that these cells are burned out. Essentially, they're still alive, but they're just taking up resources and secreting toxins in the system. That's a senescent cell. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Right.

DR. DAN STICKLER: Because the body is just not well equipped as we get older to get rid of them as well. So you can look at the balance of the senescent cells and the resilience of the immune cells. And depending on how those combine, the relative numbers of each, you can tell whether somebody should avoid significant stressing of the body, like in fasting, cold plunge, any of that stuff.

AUBREY MARCUS: Like whether they're ready for that level of hormesis.

DR. DAN STICKLER: Right, because if they don't have the resilience in the immune system, they could kick themselves over into a cancer forming state. A state where the immune system just gets severely compromised because of the stressor. I mean, typically those are eustressors, they're good stressors for the body.

AUBREY MARCUS: Sure

DR. DAN STICKLER: But now we're finding that there's some people that shouldn't be taking rapamycin, which is a common drug used in the longevity industry. But you can use this test to really gauge whether that's beneficial or not. 

AUBREY MARCUS: So, but that would generally apply not specifically necessarily to hot and cold, but more to the general category of when the body has the resilience to be able to withstand hormesis. So it applied to heavy workouts. So it applied to a variety of different things. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: Anything that stresses the body, even if it's a eustress or a good stress. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Right. All right. So then let's say somebody is taking MDMA, both medically or recreationally. What would you recommend for them to help kind of restore, recover, and support the brain body after MDMA usage? Or during? Or before?

DR. DAN STICKLER: Eat, drink, and sleep. Good night's sleep before, good night's sleep afterwards. Eat during the period you're on it. Drink during the period you're on it, but don't overdrink. Don't add other substances to it. Alcohol especially. That's just a recipe for the worst hangover you can ever have. I don't supplement around it, though. Most of the studies that have come out in the last three years, and there's been at least three of them that looked at this neurotransmitter depletion, and they're finding that those things I mentioned are really what's creating that tuesday, blues day, or whatever you want to call it, but it's not necessarily the neurotransmitter depletions. And in fact, some of the people taking like 5 HTP, they can actually induce those kinds of symptoms in themselves by taking that. One thing I'm excited about, there's been some recent articles on using BPC 157, a peptide, in and around the use of MDMA and they're saying that it decreases any of the mild toxicity that occurs from it and the downregulation of the serotonin receptors that occurs over time, taking the BPC. According to the biochemical theory of the way the BPC works in the brain, works on the nitric oxide and L-NAME system, it seems to be beneficial. And I know people that have taken the BPC before taking MDMA. And they had no symptoms afterwards. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Interesting. Now, BPC is often associated with gut health as well. And there's a lot of serotonin produced in the gut. And obviously, if you're taking MDMA orally, it's interacting through the gut. And so, that makes, I don't know if there is actually a correlation that would have any scientific reason that those two things might be associated in any way. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: Well, BPC 157 will increase angiogenesis in the gut lining, so growth of blood vessels. So you get better flow there. So theoretically it could increase the production of serotonin. I haven't seen a study on it, but that'd be interesting to look at. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, it's interesting. As the psychonaut that I am, I've experienced a significant difference in injectable MDMA versus oral MDMA and found that these hangover blues that you can get from orally ingested MDMA are significantly reduced from injectable MDMA because, and presumably in my mind, it was because it bypassed the gut. But what in your mind from a kind of scientific perspective would explain that kind of difference in the ability to kind of rebound and tolerate it? First of all, the experience is magnificent, obviously,

DR. DAN STICKLER: It's probably pretty quick too. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Very fast. You're talking, five minutes, you're like, Oh boy, here we go. And it seems to be a little bit more stable once you get to that place. What do you think is the mechanism of ingestion being one intramuscular versus oral? How is that affecting how this compound is actually used in the body?

DR. DAN STICKLER: Yeah, it would make sense though, because anything taken in orally is going to first pass through the liver. And the liver is the primary area for MDMA to be converted to MDA. So you're gonna get a large surge of MDA. So theoretically you should be able to have less of that sympathetic kick that when it comes on with the jaw clenching and 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, for sure. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: The heat and all of that. Yeah, it seems like it would mitigate that.

AUBREY MARCUS: Man, it's so interesting looking at what the possibilities are if you start to take the lid off of all of these different things. And then also which compounds can work well together and which ones do not work well together. Like which things are helpful and which things are not radically unhelpful. And you can either go my way, which is figure it out and sometimes fuck up but do so responsibly, in a way that's like ease in dip your toes in, start to understand, see the interactions. But there's a whole kind of frontier of what it looks like when you intelligently start to combine. And I think we have understood this with MDMA and psilocybin. That was my first psychonautic journey when I was 18, wildly synergistic, that combination, right? And then there's other things where it's like cannabis and psilocybin in my experience and the experience of other people that I've seen is like, got to be a little careful. Like those two don't necessarily work well together, can exacerbate these feelings of kind of paranoia and this sense of I'm in the freak out, I'm in the normal freak out mode. So it's interesting looking at that and we're not recommending anybody go out exploring all of these things. I don't recommend that anybody do anything other than breathwork and meditation. And I do recommend people get in a float tank and do these things that you can manage. And if you run into any trouble, you slow down your breathing or you get out the fucking tank and you'll be all right. But fundamentally there's a whole frontier of looking at, all right, how do we create these really revolutionary optimal conditions with sound and with light and with touch and with different compounds working together. It's a pretty exciting world that we're entering, but a world that needs to be entered with maximum caution, some general rules, minimum effective dose kind of mentalities and also radical adherence to set and setting. If you're going to push the dose of anything, if you're going to mix anything, talk to somebody who's done there, been there, done that, have someone, have a sitter, if not a shaman. Someone who you can reach out to and say like, are people watching me? Are my phones tapped and it’s like, there's someone, the barbarians at the gate and they're like, no, no, no, it's cool. You're still in your bedroom. Like, it's all good. The aliens aren't here. That's a very helpful person.

DR. DAN STICKLER: Sitters are very helpful. 

AUBREY MARCUS: It's a very helpful person to have in this process. What else? I mean, you're really on the cutting edge of these new compounds, new things, not even psychedelic, but just for human health and thriving. What's kind of lighting you up now as you look at the field?

DR. DAN STICKLER: All of it. I mean, this stuff that's out there, especially in the longevity space and age rejuvenation. We are in an exponential growth phase. I mean, there's a company that's got this solution of messenger RNA that they can microneedle into the skin and it will rejuvenate the skin in both structure and function. The cells become youthful cells again, I mean, up to 30 years younger is what they're predicting. And then it's out of the system. It's just microneedling in and you're done. It epigenetically resets the fibroblasts in the skin. There is a new injection that's getting ready to go into clinical trials that will regrow missing teeth.

AUBREY MARCUS: Whoa.

DR. DAN STICKLER: Yeah. 

AUBREY MARCUS: That's crazy. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: Full adult teeth from an injection. 

AUBREY MARCUS: I mean, and no risk of vagina dentata or, you know. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: No, they had no complications. That's why they got approved for human trials now. There were no complications in the animal studies. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Just so I'm clear, is vagina dentata a real condition? Does that actually happen? Or is that a made up thing? 

DR. DAN STICKLER: I couldn't tell you. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Vagina dentata is when the pussy grows teeth. Is that real or not? I don't know. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: I don't. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Can someone look that up? Is that a real phenomenon? 

DR. DAN STICKLER: Check chatGPT. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Is this a ghost story that we've been told? 

DR. DAN STICKLER: Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it probably came from the idea of a teratoma because some ovaries can grow teratomas which tumors with teeth and hair and

AUBREY MARCUS: Ohh, that’s gnarly. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: Yeah. They're really gross. 

AUBREY MARCUS: That's terrifying. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: Although they are also kind of cool. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, also the other one to look at. You got ovaries with teeth. That's a bad bitch. It's a folktale.

DR. DAN STICKLER: No, it's real. I've taken them out. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Vagina dentata is real. But the ovaries with teeth. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: No, the ovaries are real. 

AUBREY MARCUS: The ovaries are real. The vagina with teeth is just a folktale. So don't worry everybody. If you're scared of vaginas, it's okay. Just be gay. You don't need to pretend.

DR. DAN STICKLER: Your teeth don’t grow on the ovary.

AUBREY MARCUS: You don't need to pretend that they have teeth. They're not going to eat you. Oh, man. Well, it's such a pleasure to know you and to call you a friend and a brother and to know you're always there whenever I have something in my personal life or anything going on in my relationship or with my health or like we just talked about at the beginning, going on this fertility journey with you. It's just I feel very blessed to have you as a friend and brother and the world is very blessed to have your mind and to have your heart and to have you here to serve the betterment of all.

DR. DAN STICKLER: Thank you. That means a lot. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Yeah, a hundred percent. 

DR. DAN STICKLER: In gratitude. 

AUBREY MARCUS: And anything else you want to share about Apiron or anything else that you're working on or any place where people can follow you? 

DR. DAN STICKLER: The most exciting thing right now is we're opening a telewellness program. It's going to be a really more affordable option of getting access to the information on the cutting edge treatments, on the assessments, really doing a deep dive into your human system with in depth labs and metabolomics, all of that. But that's going to be a tele wellness program, so we're able to reach out all over the US with it. It's launching next month. 

AUBREY MARCUS: Great. So where can people go to start to find access to that? 

DR. DAN STICKLER: The company is called Klotho Wellness, K L O T H O, which is Klotho was the weaver of the thread of life. And Klotho is the name of the gene that everybody's targeting for longevity. 15 percent of people carry a variation of it that gives them greater longevity and greater intelligence. But they're also finding that if you can get it to release on an ongoing basis, and I'm working with a company that's creating these plasmids today. The next thing we're doing is the Klotho and so I'm excited about that possibility.

AUBREY MARCUS: Beautiful. Well, thank you, brother. I appreciate you. And thank you everybody for tuning in. We love you. And we'll see you when we see you.