5-MeO-DMT, Ego Death, and a Medicine Without a Lineage | Joel Brierre

Joel Brierre took LSD before school at 13. By 18 he had been through addiction to heroin, crack and crystal, had run with Washington, DC's criminal underworld, and had been in and out of jail. His first experience with 5-MeO-DMT came in a dope house where eleven people shared a two-bedroom apartment. In his words, there was no container.

Today Joel is the founder and CEO of Tandava, a 5-MeO-DMT retreat center in Tepoztlán, Mexico, and of the F.I.V.E. Institute, which works on education, harm reduction, practitioner training and research.

Devin and Joel trace the path between those two lives. It runs through yoga and meditation, teachers in the Caribbean, India and Mexico, and an ayahuasca ceremony with the Shipibo in which Joel was told the medicine wasn't his to serve, then shown 5-MeO-DMT as "a medicine without a lineage." They explore what makes 5-MeO different from every other psychedelic, why the last thing the mind asks before letting go is whether it's safe to lose control, and why the people who can hold that space have usually been through crucibles of their own.

IN THIS EPISODE
• Growing up biracial with seeker parents, and why he says lighter skin kept him out of prison
• Peyote ceremonies, a Wirrárika fire circle, and a rain ceremony in a drought
• How 5-MeO-DMT differs from DMT, and what it means that there is no observer
• The invented history of the "ancient" toad ritual
• Why low-dose vape pens aren't safe
• Raising capital during the psychedelic bubble
• What a safe container looks like: screening, preparation, two facilitators, and integration that isn't damage control
• Pairing ibogaine and 5-MeO, Eli Lilly's 5-MeO program, and the road to legal access
• How to vet a facilitator

CHAPTERS
00:00 Cold open
01:34 Meet Joel
02:34 Seeker parents and a multicultural childhood in DC
04:19 Early non-ordinary states and LSD at 13
06:04 Addiction, jail and the underworld
07:58 Yoga, meditation and a book that "changes lives"
11:08 San Pedro in Peru at 18
12:04 A ceremony that brought his father back
18:34 Peyote, the Wirrárika and the rain ceremony
23:00 Moving between cultures, and racial imposter syndrome
25:34 Crucibles and holding space
30:43 5-MeO-DMT vs DMT
33:52 The fabricated toad origin story
39:10 A medicine without a lineage
44:41 Vape pens and harm reduction
45:25 Founding Tandava and the dance of Shiva
48:50 Raising capital in the psychedelic bubble
54:53 Non-hallucinogenic analogs and brain health
58:10 Inside a Tandava program
1:10:54 Ibogaine and 5-MeO
1:19:42 Why Mexico
1:22:03 Eli Lilly, the FDA and the church pathway
1:23:59 How to choose a facilitator, and books to read

RESOURCES MENTIONED
• Tandava: https://tandavaretreats.com/
• The F.I.V.E. Institute: https://www.fiveinstitute.com/
• The Ego Trip by Kimon de Greef
• Tryptamine Palace by James Oroc
• The Toad and the Jaguar by Ralph Metzner
• Way of the Peaceful Warrior by Dan Millman
• How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan

CONNECT
• Personal Kosmology: https://personalkosmology.com
• Devin Martin, executive coaching: https://lifestyleintegrity.com

This episode includes discussion of psychedelics and past drug use. It is for educational purposes only and is not medical advice. 5-MeO-DMT carries serious medical risks and contraindications, and its legal status varies by country.

What should a scientist do when experience refuses to fit the accepted explanation?

Neil Theise has spent his career studying the human body under a microscope. His research helped clarify the interstitium, a body-wide network of fluid-filled spaces within connective tissue, and led him from stem cells into complexity theory.

But some of the most important data in Neil’s life arrived outside the laboratory.

His mother spoke with dead relatives during hospice, began walking and eating again, and lived for another six years. Afterward, the visitors continued. Neil has also experienced the presence of his dead dog, father, brother, and grandmother.

A materialist framework asks us to dismiss these experiences as delusion, dementia, drugs, or deceit. Neil takes a different approach: pay attention to what is happening, hold the experience without forcing an explanation, and remain open to what the evidence may eventually reveal.

In this conversation, we trace Neil’s journey from a Jewish family shaped by the Holocaust, through a suicidal crisis in medical school, decades of Zen practice, a career in pathology, and the moment science and spirituality stopped appearing separate.

We explore:

• Why Neil went to medical school so people would attend his funeral
• The suicidal crisis that forced him to confront being gay
• How Zen practice changed the way he approached scientific discovery
• What complexity theory reveals about bodies, cells, and identity
• Why nothing exists independently at every scale of reality
• The interstitium as a body-wide connective system
• His mother’s deathbed visions and apparent encounters with the dead
• Why Neil believes the brain may receive rather than produce consciousness
• What science loses when it dismisses anomalous experience
• How beginner’s mind makes better science possible

Neil Theise is a pathologist, professor, complexity theorist, Zen practitioner, and author of Notes on Complexity: A Scientific Theory of Connection, Consciousness, and Being.

Personal Kosmology traces the lives of people willing to question the maps they inherited. By understanding how other people make sense of life, we may better understand how we make sense of our own.

Subscribe for more conversations at the intersection of science, spirituality, consciousness, and personal transformation.

https://personalkosmology.com

CHAPTERS

00:00 Cold Open
01:36 Welcome to the Personal Kosmology of Neil Theise
06:08 A Jewish Childhood Shaped by the Holocaust
17:24 Mysticism, Kabbalah, and an Altered State at Fourteen
24:38 Why Neil Went to Medical School
29:05 Depression, Suicide, and Coming Out
32:43 Discovering Zen
41:22 From Medicine to Pathology
45:35 Complexity Theory Changes Everything
48:51 Am I a Body or a Collection of Cells?
50:41 A Scientific Experience of Emptiness
57:06 Ghosts, Deathbed Visions, and Neil’s Mother
01:08:44 Does Consciousness Come First?
01:14:39 The Brain as a Receiver
01:23:05 When the Dead Have Unfinished Business
01:26:24 Bringing His Grandmother Home
01:35:37 Can a Scientist Speak Openly About Ghosts?
01:41:16 Is Materialism Beginning to Crack?
01:49:09 The Interstitium Reaches The New York Times
01:51:13 What Being a Scientist Really Means

Every piano you have ever heard is slightly out of tune, on purpose.

Alexandre Tannous has spent his life studying what choices like that have cost us, and what sound can give back.

Alexandre grew up in Beirut, where civil war broke out when he was nine and lasted fourteen years. The war reached him through sound, and years later sound became his way back. He began meditating at fourteen, earned four degrees in music, walked away from a doctorate at Columbia, and went on to study how people use sound in more than forty countries. Today he leads sound meditations around the world.

We talk about how equal temperament traded resonance for convenience, how the music around us shapes our moods without our noticing, why he refuses to call his work "sound healing," and how sound helped him recover memories of a childhood that trauma had erased. We also explore relabeling the past as a rite of passage, why so many high achievers carry unresolved trauma, and why he believes that when we lost tonality, we lost God.

"The only way to survive and heal is to relabel the past." - Alexandre Tannous

Read the companion essay, "Tempered," on PersonalKosmology.com

Learn more about Alexandre: SoundMeditation.com

CHAPTERS00:00 Cold open

01:14 Introducing Alexandre Tannous

03:12 Growing up in Beirut's civil war

06:58 Learning to meditate at 14

15:40 Equal temperament and the harmonic series

28:59 Relabeling the past as a rite of passage

32:37 Episteme and gnosis
34:02 Why he rejects the term "sound healing"

35:18 Sound and recovered memories

37:54 Psychedelics, shamans, and the role of music

49:37 Entrainment: films, jingles, and functional music

54:54 Overtone singing

1:03:44 Alcohol and self-medication

1:04:45 Friendly fire: trauma in the body

1:06:34 Money, safety, and the dark day

1:08:20 High achievers and unresolved trauma

1:14:40 Music that keeps us stuck

1:16:44 Improvising versus extemporizing

1:27:52 We lost tonality, we lost God

1:31:05 Why humans alter consciousness