Hello pals, it is I, Duncan Trussell. Today is June 3rd, 2014 and we have lost one of the great

alchemists of our time. Alexander Shulgen, the father of ecstasy, has vanished from this particular

note of the universe. But if you've ever had an incredible MDMA trip, you owe a giant thank you

to this humble wizard who spent the majority of his life working in the laboratory on substances

that have the potential not only to heal the human mind but to transform human society.

Take a chance on a brown loose band, twist the weight of gates of steel, twist the weight,

not twist and show. The oven moves to slow. But the oven is all we know, we pay to play

the human way, twist the weight of gates of steel. The band is real, not made of steel.

Gates of steel by Devo, you can find it on iTunes, Amazon, anywhere.

Okay, so I'm just going to play a few clips related to Alexander Shulgen

and then we're going to get going with this podcast because I bet some of you out there have no

idea who this guy is. So rather than me stumble through a description of Shulgen, let's have one of

the great psychonaut geniuses of our time who's probably floating around somewhere in Alpha Centauri

having tea with Shulgen at this very moment. Here's Terence McKenna talking about who Alexander Shulgen

is. Alexander Shulgen, Sasha to his friends, is nothing less than the godfather of psychopharmacology.

An expert on the psychosized phenolethylamines, that is, psychoactive compounds useful in the

emotional recovery of traumatic events. Shulgen has given his life to the study of the pharmacology of

the psychedelic experience. And here Shulgen at a lecture talking about why he got into his particular

line of work. There are a multitude of tenuous threads that tie together the fragile structure of

the human spirit. The life giving with the death demanding side, the exalted voice with a mundane,

the strongly centered self with the drive toward dispersion and loss of center. These all coexist

in all of us. But there is an essential blockade between these inner worlds which I put a feel can

...