Psychedelic science in heroic doses

Zeus Tipado's sojourn begins in New Orleans voodoo, lands on Holland PhD studies

A psychedelic trip can change you, and then others. By osmosis.

Last night I played the album-closing track from Richard Pryor’s Grammy-winning Bicentennial Nigger for the Bavarian-American who’s hosting me in East Oakland.

If you don’t know the track, most definitely check it out before pressing on.

Might want to use headphones. Just sayin’.

I played the piece last night in the context of foundational art that informs my sensibility. Friends and longtime readers know that this piece came to me on a 1989 night when I was tripping balls in Fresno, a psychedelics newbie. Just as the acid was kicking in, CNN informed us that a mass school shooting had occurred up the road, casting a pall over our group of gung-ho and incapacitated young journalists.

And then the sober guide put this in front of me and changed my life and sense of what’s possible in playing with darkness.

You never know when life will change.

This morning my first trip had me thinking about Zeus Tipado, my most recent West Coast Sojourn podcast guest, and how he was forever altered by his maiden voyage.

But what Tipado—now a doctoral student at Maastricht University—finds interesting in tripping is miles beyond my soft social revelations. His scientific research is focused on the psychedelic DMT and its interaction with the brain. To investigate psychedelic states, Tipado is using functional near-infrared spectroscopy and virtual reality and extended reality tools.

The Bavarian Oaktown host’s face shifted through roughly seven different emotions when I played her that Richard Pryor. Some of the feelings still strike me as nameless. They may not be the same. But no matter how deep things got, those emotions probably may never matter more than what’s learned from the study of DMT and its interaction with the brain.

Having said all of this, most mere mortals who know the name Zeus Tipado recognize him as founder of the incandescent Stoned Gamer League. Here’s the conversation he and I had last week. I was in the Tahoe Park section of Sacramento and Zeus was Zooming from Maastricht. Our words have been lightly edited for clarity and whatnot.

Donnell Alexander: Welcome to the West Coast Sojourn podcast. This week we have a thought leader—a genuine thought leader. We’ve been having some hot guests, but today we have a thought leader who’s work has appeared in Merry Jane and Psychedelics Today. And you’re pretty big on Twitter. The stuff you do there is pretty different.

And then there’s YouTube videos and a bunch of other stuff. Welcome to the show, Zeus Tipado.

Zeus Tipado: Yes, thank you for having me. I’m happy to be here. Great introduction, by the way.

DA: You know, we went for the same gig a couple of years ago, during the pandemic. The Doubleblind “How to Use Psychedelics” thing.

ZT: Doubleblind “How to Use Psychedelics,” yeah. I was contacted about that during the pandemic. This was right around the time when I was writing about psychedelics and I was reading so much about psychedelics.

I had so much time during the pandemic, everyone was locked down. And I’d got my masters in, basically, psychedelic science. And I was like, Just let me revisit everything. So I just opened my masters, read all of my stuff, and I realized: Oh, let me just hop back on this.

I took [the psilocybin], and I didn’t even understand what these things were. I just understood that you have to experiment in college—and I was in college.

Then I did the Doubleblind thing—those were really cool. That was a whole tutorial series that’s still available on Doubleblind. If anyone wants to check it out, it’s still there. It’s still good information, but I’d love to get into Part 2.

DA: I remember it because it was a really strange time to be seeking work, period. And I was (digitally) auditioning in multiple hotel spaces—I was doing a story up in Portland at the time—and I’m glad you got it, because you have a depth of knowledge that we need.

We can come back to Part 2, but I want to talk about your origins. I’ve known who you are for a while, but I’ve never dug into your interviews, to see what your personal history is like.

Are you from Louisiana, or do you have Louisiana roots?

ZT: I was born in Louisiana, in the Ninth Ward. That’s next to Chalmette, Violet—everywhere that Hurricane Katrina destroyed is where I’m from. That’s where my family’s from.

DA: You have some of that voodoo in your background. I’m curious whether that’s affected how you approach psychedelics?

ZT: That’s a great question. I am Creole. When I was a kid, I grew up around Creole voodoo. That was what things were.

DA: What does it mean to “grow up around voodoo” ? Did you have it at the dinner table?

ZT: Well… yeah. My grandma was a very important person in the community. So whenever there was an issue or a problem people would come up to her and seek a solution. And of course when you’re in a Creole voodoo family that solution ends up being associated with incantations, possessions, sometimes sacrifices—not of people, but little creatures—which maybe isn’t the best thing as well.

I believed that there was this reality, that we all exist in and inhabit right now—and then there was this other reality that was somewhere out there, but could only be obtained by doing certain specific things in this reality. Like, possessions or chanting or incantations or whatever. So, it definitely affected how I approach science, because for my entire life I believed in this religious-voodoo-spiritual idea of the world. And when I left Louisiana and moved to Texas, then I was exposed to this other guy named Jesus. And I’m like, “Who’s this Jesus guy? I thought things operated on a completely different plane.” There were, like, mysteries and spirits and everything. I was so confused. I was like, What is happening, you know?

So I turned really hard toward science. I just wanted some understanding of reality, some concrete understanding of what’s happening. In high school I was doing science clubs. I won second place in Texas, all this stuff. Then, in college at the University of Arizona I was a psychology major, everything was good. On a Thursday at a party my friend gave me five grams of dried shrooms, and he’s like, “Take this!”

I took it, and I didn’t even understand what these things were. I just understood that you have to experiment in college—and I was in college. And I was experimenting. And I took five grams of shrooms—

DA: Why did you take such a huge amount this first go-round?

ZT: I didn’t understand dosage. It was just in a plastic bag and my friend gave it to me and was like, “take all of this.” I was like, Okay, it’s mushrooms that you put on pizza. It’s gonna make me feel weird? That’s okay, I’ve done keg stands before. I’ve been drunk, I’ve smoked weed—it’s perfectly fine.

And I completely didn’t understand what they do or what their affects are and I took five grams of dried shrooms at this party and, yes, things got weird very quickly. People were playing beer pong in the kitchen, all of a sudden the people who were playing beer pong turned into blobs of color, goin’ back and forth. The conversations in the living room really didn’t make any sense. They were just wah-wah-wah-wah-wah. So I just went outside and I just relaxed and chilled.

From that point on, my entire life changed. I got into psychedelics, I got into religion first, and then I got into psychedelics. I added a second bachelors to my University of Arizona academic workload. I was doing a psychology bachelors and I said, “Just let me throw in a religion bachelor’s, just to see what the heck happened.” Ya know? What was that experience?

DA: I heard you talking about some of this on Madison Margolin’s pod. It’s interesting to hear the two of you talking about it back and forth. That’s a show I would program, for all of you streamers out there.

Do you have an ongoing relationship between your religion and psychedelics?

ZT: That was such a great conversation. Madison is such a cool person. But do I still have a relationship with religion?

DA: I mean, I know that if you’re not in it that you’re at least looking at the relationship between it and psychedelics.

ZT: Ya know… it’s interesting. It’s something that I would say, honestly… it’s a good question; I’m thinking about it.

I would say that I don’t have a relationship with religion. I understand religion. I have a degree in religion, which is crazy to even say. But I don’t necessarily have any tangible relationship with religion. Also, I have a friend, Alice—she is also a researcher—and she also lost her detachment with religion, mostly in a very oppressive state of religion. But as far as psychedelic science and religion? I’m really not spiritual all. That’s a big thing in psychedelics, to be spiritual and talk to all of these gods or whatever, but I’m a very reductionist type of dude.

DA: To go back to that first dose. Do you think the size of it has impacted your point of view on microdosing? I know that you’re not a fan of microdosing, to say the least.

ZT: The reason why I’m not a fan—

DA: It’s an unfashionable position, by the way.

ZT: Yeah, people don’t like when I say this. But there are a lot of things I say that people don’t like. But it’s all based on truth.

Yes, my introduction to psychedelics was an extraordinarily high dose—a heroic dose—and I don’t advise that for everybody. As a matter of fact, I don’t advise psychedelics for everybody, in general. I know that people are really into saying, “Psychedelics for everybody.” But there’s some cognitive conditions—paranoid schizophrenia—that can be exacerbated with psychedelics.

But to get back to the microdosing thing, the reason why I’m against microdosing… I don’t want to say that I’m against it, I just think it’s BS.

DA: Such parsing. That’s not much of a difference: “I don’t think it’s wrong, I just think it’s BS.”

ZT: The reason I say it’s BS is two-fold.

The first fold is that there are so many microdosing coaches and courses and websites that claim—very erroneously—that microdosing can help with this, with that, it can help with a laundry list of things. It can help with your energy. It can help with sleep, with writing a paper. [Pause] There is zero evidence that microdosing can do any of those things. Zero evidence. I say it twice so that people can understand.

But people still claim these things. There’s also this guy named Paul Austin. He has this thing called Third Wave, and he is a very huge violator of the truth when it comes to saying what microdosing can and cannot do. We’ve talked before; I don’t have any problems with him. But what he says is erroneous. It’s not based in truth.

One of the biggest psychedelic studies ever conducted in history was at Imperial College of London by this guy [Dr. Balázs Szigeti]. He looked at microdosing. He looked at LSD/mushroom microdosing. He had like over 100 people participating. You got either microdosing with LSD, microdosing with shrooms, and a placebo-controlled thing. He discovered that microdosing—when it comes to well-being, when it comes to cognitive performance, all these things that these websites claim that microdosing does—is as effective as placebo.

DA: So, are we having a mass hallucination? Do people talk themselves into thinking it works—is that what’s happening?

ZT: Honestly, that study. It’s a fantastic study. It’s one of the best, came out in 2018, I believe. It shows that, really, the power of thought, the power of belief—the placebo effect—is a tremendous force in, not only how we think about things, but how our body functions if we think something is going to be effective. If we think something is going to work, it will work. I tell people this all the time. If they are microdosing and they believe that what they’re doing is helping them out with depression or anxiety—if they believe that to be true, just the belief is enough to have these conditions decrease. It really illustrates the power of the human brain, the human mind.

DA: I want to go back to your origins. The university in The Netherlands is called Maastricht University, right?

ZT: Wow, Maastricht University. Are you sure you aren’t Dutch? [Laughter]

DA: You’re so all over the place. Most people think you’re from LA, but you’re actually from Louisiana and there’s this time you did in Texas. You went to South Wales, too. You have a connection to Europe that I think you should outline, at least for my purposes.

ZT: Right after Texas I went to Arizona and got my two bachelors degrees—one in psychology and one in religion—and then I got my masters at the University of South Wales. In the South of Wales! [Makes three unrecognizable sounds] All the Welsh words I know. There’s a few others that I know.

But, yeah. I lived amongst the Welsh people, the Welsh culture, for three years, while I got my masters. It was a fantastic time. One of the cool things about Wales is, it has a climate that—when it comes to October, September—shrooms grow. Everywhere. Psychedelic shrooms grow everywhere in Wales. You can walk up a hill, you can walk up there with a plastic bag and an hour later come back with a full plastic bag of psychedelic mushrooms. And they are very effective.

So I did that, and while I was out there learned a lot. I experienced a lot. It was my first introduction to non-American culture. And that’s important, because a lot of people who are vehemently patriotic—jingoistic, to some extent—are people that really haven’t ventured out of America. They just believe what they’re told about America. And they don’t necessarily consider that America—while it’s a big country—is a tiny portion on this huge blue globe that we all inhabit. Ya know?

DA: One of the big issues right now in America is people dealing with inflation. And if they just had this little bit of information—that the United States is actually doing the best of all these industrialized nations in coping with inflation—they would have some sense of proportion and their complaint would entirely change.

But that’s just something that’s not on the menu. And it’s not a left or right thing. Our sense of the world is really narrow… but you didn’t really answer my question. How did you get to Wales?

ZT: I graduated from the University of Arizona, finished and I was like, Okay. I don’t want to go to work. I don’t want to get a job. No way, I can’t do that. I can’t go to that stage of my life. Don’t want to do that. So I looked at graduate schools. I had four options: I had Auckland, New Zealand… I had Ireland. I had Finland, and I had Wales. Those were all viable options—I just wanted to go somewhere else and just venture out.

I looked at the map and I said: Auckland, New Zealand. Wow, that’s so far away I can’t really travel anywhere in Auckland, New Zealand because it’s isolated. I can go to Australia, and that’s really it. That’s kind of out.

Okay, Finland. Finland’s cool, but do I really want to be in the extreme cold and darkness for 14-18 hours a day? That’s pretty intense. So, Finland’s cool, but nah. There was Wales or Ireland and I had to pick between two Celtic countries. Welsh culture or Irish culture? I dunno, I just chose Wales, because there’s an artist called Aphex Twin. He’s from Wales, and I like his stuff. So I’m like, if Aphex Twin is from here, I’m going to go there.

DA: Wow.

ZT: That’s the ultimate decision: Aphex Twin.

DA: That’s a testament and a half. I want to talk about what you’re doing now, but you took me to a place.

Are you coming back? But before you answer, what are the arguments for and against coming back?

ZT: [Laughs] To be quite honest with you, I found that, when I was in America, my view on the world was really polarized. My view on everything was really polarized. And that’s a really American thing that you don’t really have, at least out here in Europe.

Things aren’t so polarized and people aren’t so focused on politics. It feels like out here politics is just a community service job, like a person taking out your trash or a person delivering your post or whatever. It’s not necessarily a huge focus in common, daily life, whereas in America people are so affixed with politics like they shouldn’t be. I mean, I wouldn’t be.

That’s a huge con. This very polarized political environment where everything is so immediate. Things are so immediate in America. Every election is [whispers] the most important election. Oh, the most important election of our lifetime. Then you have to show your allegiance to causes by protesting and if you don’t do this you’re doing this wrong, either left, right, up, down, this, that, us, them—that’s so draining. It’s like living in a culture that’s a vampire of your energy.

It sucks your energy just by existing, and I don’t want to go back to that. That’s a huge con for America and the pro of staying here… I mean, honestly? The only way I would go back to America is if there is some ridiculous offer for some ridiculous position for some ridiculous amount of cash that I cannot say no to. But I’m not even a cash-driven person, so I can’t even say that really makes any sense.

I’m driven by success and science, so I don’t know, man. I’m having a great time out here in The Netherlands. It’s my first time being an immigrant, an actual immigrant. Think about that. Most people just exist in America and they talk about immigrants. They say, “Aw, we don’t want this person. They’re taking our jobs.” Or whatever—all based on BS. But to be an immigrant is an interesting perspective.

DA: Tell me what you’ve learned from being an immigrant.

ZT: I’ve learned that the people who are against immigrants? It’s not that they’re against immigrants overall. They’re just against certain immigrants.

DA: Have you come across people opposed to you?

ZT: No, that’s the thing. I was in a party and some guy, we were talking about immigration. Some weird conversation. An American guy, of course. He was saying something like, They just come here and they don’t do anything. So I said, I’m an immigrant. And he said, “You’re different.” [Pause] And I said, “Am I different because we’re talking to each other, because you’re having a conversation with me?” And he realized that all immigrants aren’t the same. How am I different?

You know what it is? Humans just respond very bizarrely to things that they don’t understand. And the response is usually fear based. This lack of understanding is just based on the fact that people haven’t really met an immigrant. Same thing in America. You’ve got people in, I dunno, Arkansas—the depths of Arkansas—saying they hate gays, they hate Muslims. In actuality they haven’t had a conversation or talked with a gay person or a Muslim. It’s this externalization of fear that turns into racism, that’s really what it is.

To be an immigrant is an experience that I want to enjoy. Listen, the Dutch government says that I’m a highly skilled immigrant. That’s what they said in the application that I had to fill out. I want to get that tattooed on my body: Highly Skilled Immigrant. I’ll take that tattoo, you know?

DA: We’re talking about all of the external benefits of what you’re doing, but we should get to the meat and potatoes. Are you studying neuropharmacology or DMT? What is your PhD all about?

ZT: Neuroscience. Neuroscience and psychopharmacology. Technically, it would be a combination of neuroscience—because I’m looking at the brain—and I’m looking at the brain because people are on psychedelics, which is the psychopharmacology part. I have to understand how these drugs interact with the body, with the brain, in order for me to look at the brain. So, it’s a combination of both. Though some people will say neuropsychopharmacology, which is a very long word; I may have to put that at the end of my title whenever I’m done here. It may not fit on Instagram or Twitter.

Looking at the brain while people are on DMT, basically. There’s an area of the brain called the visual cortex, which is like the back of the head. This area of the brain is essentially the place where all processing of vision goes to. Think of it as like the screen in a theater, after the film has been processed on the projector. It’s where everything goes. It’s so defined where, you can actually look at the visual cortex and essentially see what a person is seeing.

DA: Wow.

ZT: Even if a person imagines something, you can actually see it as if a person is seeing it, in the visual cortex.

DA: You use VR, virtual reality.

ZT: HTC.

DA: What does that mean?

ZT: HTC XR Elite is the headset that I use. The reason I use it is it’s the only VR headset that does not obstruct the back of the head, where I’m investigating.

DA: Did you come across this work through your work with the Stoned Gamer League?

ZT: If you look on YouTube for “Super High Score: E3 on Shrooms.” It’s from when I worked for Snoop Dogg. We had a show on Merry Jane called Super High Score. In one of the episodes I take four grams of shrooms and I go to this huge video game expo called E3. It was held in LA every year and they canceled it because of Covid. I don’t think it’s coming back, which is sad.

There’s an area of E3 called Indie-Cave, which is where all of the indie games and indie developers go to show off all of their work. I walked in there and there was a VR experience, and you had to go in a tent. There were tapestries everywhere, incense… I’m like, that’s what I’m talking about. [Laughter]

And I am completely tripping. Like, out of my mind tripping. I go outside and this guy puts on this headset. I think it was an Oculus Rift developers kit. It was like 2017, and I experienced VR under psychedelics for the first time. Mind. Blowing. Experience. And I think I’m the first person—first documented person—that has been tripping and on VR at the same time. Which is pretty crazy.

DA: So, it did spur the greater idea.

ZT: That was the inspiration. The thoughts, the ideas that I had during that very intense experience was essentially the catalyst for my interest in VR and psychedelics. I’ve always been interested in technology combining with psychedelics. I got my masters in that. I focused on tech and psychedelics. I had that intense experience and I said, “There is something here.” And in 2019 I said it was time to take the next step and do the PhD.

I’m out there trying to build something that—not only the world hasn’t seen before—but something that is effective, that works and is not based in BS. It’s an anti-BS science approach.