Sarah Siskind turned the presidential fitness test into a one-person experiment: sober, on cannabis, on MDMA, and on ketamine. Then she ran a 50K on LSD, at Burning Man.

We talk about pain, pleasure, breath-holding, chasing your bliss, the science of psychedelics, and why pharmaceutical scale may strip away the surrender that makes these experiences meaningful.

Transcript

Pablos: Can you describe the presidential fitness test?

Sarah: All right. Circa 2018, I decided to take the presidential fitness test. Do you know what that is anymore?

Pablos: I don’t know. It seems like a dated thing. I was a kid. It was a thing.

Sarah: If I hear that beep that comes from like in my generation, there was a test where you had to run from line to line. You hear a beep every time you hit the line and then had to go to the next one. And I have a traumatic response hearing that.

Pablos: I love the trauma response.

Sarah: Exactly. The presidential fitness test was introduced by John F. Kennedy to try to get the U.S. in shape. And it’s remained in a different iteration since then. And it’s supposed to be like a standardized test of what science fact of what kids should be able to do. Things like run a mile and like do a certain amount of sit-ups in like five minutes. I’ve forgotten the specifics at this point. But I just was like, well, this is a perfect standardized test that I could use to see which drugs are or are not performance enhancing. Because you hear sometimes like during the Olympics, like somebody will be disqualified for taking, for using marijuana.

And you’re like, well, how does that work? Marijuana usually acts like a depressant for people experientially, but it helps with like refueling for a lot of athletes. Anyway, so I was interested about psychedelics. They hadn’t been studied in this capacity. Just a huge assumption that it wouldn’t help. Which makes total sense. But I figured you should prove the negative hypothesis. I did the very scientific thing of taking a presidential fitness test on pot, ketamine, and MDMA, and sober. And we showed up to the track. It was not ideal condition. It was 81 degrees out. And the NYPD was training in the middle of the field.

I’m literally running laps high off my ass around the NYPD. Sort of bug bunny after dark episode. I did them all across all the different substances.

Pablos: In one day?

Sarah: No. It was over two days.

Pablos: Oh, two days. Fine. Still not a great scientific study for sure.

Sarah: But to preserve the hypothesis, I did start off with the sober one. I had no extra benefit to the high ones by going first. The sober one had pretty good metrics. I ran something like a 6:36 mile. Then I tried pot because it was like—it’s got an easy administration. Happens pretty quick when you smoke it. I got really paranoid immediately. I hate pot. And I realized midway through the mile, I hadn’t put on sunscreen. And I became obsessed with like, I’m going to get cancer if I don’t finish this. I stopped to ask the camera woman for sunscreen. And she was like, “You’ll be fine for one extra lap.”

It was like a 10 minute mile. Then I’ll just skip to the chase and say like, the only beneficial one was ketamine. Because it is an anesthetic. It’s grouped as a psychedelic, but chemically it’s not. It’s a dissociative anesthetic. And I did like 5% better because I was like, it hurt, but it felt like it was hurting somebody else’s body.

Pablos: Oh, classic dissociation. Wow. And then the results are on YouTube. And yeah, you got to watch it if you haven’t heard listeners. Why didn’t other drugs make the cut? Shouldn’t there be some crystal meth in there? Shouldn’t there be some LSD? I don’t know—fentanyl makes you run faster.

Sarah: Probably not. I actually did something with, opioids. I took, a bunch of Percocets. First I did a sober analgesic test, the classic pain test where you put your fist in a thing of ice water. Totally safe way of experiencing a lot of pain. I did that sober. And then I held a plank for as long as I could till exhaustion sober. And then I did it on a bunch of Percocets. And that was incredible. I was able to hold a five-minute-plus-long plank on Percocets. And I was able to more than double my time. It is unbelievable how effective these medications are at not changing the sensation. Yeah. I felt everything.

Pablos: You felt the same.

Sarah: It felt the same. I just chose not to care.

Pablos: Oh, that’s interesting.

Sarah: I also did an After hours experiment that’s not in the video. I tried to masturbate on a bunch of Percocets.

Pablos: Not in the video.

Sarah: I tried to masturbate that night when they were still active. Could not just get through it.

Pablos: With the Percocets or with which?

Sarah: With the Percocets, because I was so just like, why would I do this? I don’t care. It’s so much more enjoyable just to like sit around. And that was actually really disturbing for me psychologically later when I was like, wow, you can choose not to care about pain or pleasure. That these are really powerful.

Pablos: I think it’s really one of those things that—if you just listen to what people who are trying to make those changes themselves do, it’s a kind of mental game. At one time I had this experience where these Navy SEALs trained me to hold my breath underwater. And Houdini’s record was like two and a half minutes. Which is incredible. And I’m like, I did four and a half minutes. On my first try.

Sarah: There are full classes now that’ll teach you the eight-minute, whatever breath.

Pablos: And it’s entirely about just, the whole trick is just like telling yourself that you don’t actually need to breathe. Because people have this obsession thinking that they got to breathe. And you actually don’t. Yeah. And so, they basically convinced me that, oh, you don’t need to.

Sarah: From my breath-holding experience, I had to go to Yom Kippur services growing up. This is the Jewish holiday of repentance. And it is the most boring five hour experience of your life. Cause it’s like all in Hebrew. And so I had to find ways to pass.

Pablos: There you go. Exactly. But here’s the thing.

Sarah: You had to time it so that, I’m holding my breath. When you stop holding your breath and you immediately gasp, you had to try to time it so that it’s during some sort of song.

Pablos: Oh, you practice there. Right.

Sarah: I had to try to time it and it never worked out. It would always be like in the moment, let’s have a moment of silence. And then like five seconds in, you hear this eight year old girl, like gasping, like, anyway, my record was only like a minute and a half.

Pablos: Honestly, probably the reason I could do it was growing up, going to church and having to be bored out of my mind for so long. It’s a great trick.

Sarah: I think kids these days are just missing out. They are. In our gym—and we, listeners, share a gym.

Pablos: In our gym, there’s giant signs everywhere that say no breath holding contest. Oh really?

Sarah: I know.

Pablos: I never noticed that. By their showers. No breath holding contest.

Sarah: And I’m like, wow, kids these days are going to be so weak.

Pablos: That’s hilarious. Okay. The conclusion for, at least for the audience is that they should go do drugs, but do them with the NYPD nearby and, do a lot of exercises.

Sarah: I do want to make one caveat here. I did talk to a doctor. I also did something even crazier. I ran a 50 K on LSD, which was incredible. And my favorite thing I’ve ever done in my entire life.

Pablos: Oh, a 50 K.

Sarah: That’s 31 miles on a hundred mics. Oh my God. And it was at Burning Man.

Pablos: A hundred micrograms of LSD.

Sarah: That’s like a standard dose. And it was truly like the best experience, the proudest thing I’ve ever done.

Pablos: Because it was enjoyable or it was hard and you did it anyway, or what, is it about it that was different? For people who’ve never run a 50 K.

Sarah: For the like two people in the audience who haven’t done that. The biggest reason was it was the purest instance of chasing your bliss I’ve ever accomplished. It was weird. It was wild. It was something nobody had ever done before. A lot of people have done similar things since. Diplo ran a marathon on LSD. There’s a movie coming out about this guy running hundreds of miles on mushrooms, but this is from like 2017 or 2018. And so nobody had done this yet that I’d seen online. And I just felt uniquely qualified as like a huge psychonaut and a big runner.

And I remember at like 7am in the morning running past the spanking camp where there was a man being spanked.

Pablos: You did this at Burning Man?

Sarah: Yeah, of course.

Pablos: Perfect.

Sarah: There’s not usually spanking camps in Manhattan. I ran past the spanking camp and I made eye contact. This guy had clearly been up the whole night being spanked or something. And there was this moment of telepathic communication in my head that was like: he was chasing his bliss and I was chasing mine. And the weirder, the better. Because when it’s weird, then you know it’s yours. You know that it’s not society imposing like, oh, you should love sunsets. No sense of that. There’s just a sense of like, I own this. I know it’s me. And it was the coolest thing I’ve ever done.

And the outpouring of people talking about it when I posted online was so deeply wonderful to find that group of people. And then the next time I went to Burning Man to run the ultra marathon, all these people were on LSD and they were like, yeah, I saw this video of this chick doing it online. And I was like, we should have our own division. There’s like the men, women, the on LSD category where it’s not about who’s fastest. It’s about who had the best time. And it was just so deeply wonderful, like to see that. And nobody was hurt. I talked to doctors before that too.

I practiced with a half tab and half marathon and it was, yeah, best thing I’ve ever done.

Pablos: You think the, is there any reason to run a marathon on LSD other than the, just the pioneering aspect of it?

Sarah: No, this is the thing. It’s like, there’s no reason to do it. And that’s why I love it. I’m not suggesting people do it at all.

Pablos: That’s how I feel about marathons in general.

Sarah: No, exactly. Why, do it? There’s so many things like that for me. I’m not a foodie, but I, don’t yuck people’s yum. I yum people’s yum. I’m so happy when people find the weird thing that makes them happy. Some people love to eat bicycles. And

Pablos: Isn’t that crazy? See, I remember—that’s incredible.

Sarah: When I was nine, there’s a French guy who ate a plane and there’s another guy who ate like, here’s the craziest thing. He ate like 18 bicycles. And the second runner up had only eaten like 12. And so it’s like, what were the extra six about?

Pablos: That’s just the love of the game. Yeah, I’m not going for the record at that point.

Sarah: I think he did die of bicycle eating related injuries. But I love that for him.

Pablos: Most people are going to die with no meaningful explanation for why they were here in the first place. Maybe it’d be worth trying to summarize: why are you into this stuff? What is it about psychedelics that drew you in, and what do you think is going on with this now?

Sarah: In my twenties, I had a crisis of meaning, which I diagnosed at the time as depression—bipolar depression. And I think, in hindsight, having the wisdom of being 34 is that We live in a world without religion where, people are not strongly imposing upon you. Why is life worth living? And I didn’t know I had so much freedom, but no direction. And these were just nuclear bomb level technology of introspection for me, for lots of people. And I just found it so meaningful. I wanted to explore it. And I thought hard about what is my voice.

And I realized that these were really important medicines for me and so many people and scientifically on the edge, but nobody was making fun of them. And nobody was like joking about the experience other than to make fun of high people. And I realized that my training as a comedy writer and a comedian, like I could lend that. And so I do all these stunts, I realized they’re gonzo and kind of weird and funny. But I didn’t have a job somebody could fire me from. I had the time. I also had nothing to lose. And so I did all of these crazy things.

I took an SAT on LSD. I’ve tried to juggle all these things to measure what it would be like. I’m proud of those kind of contributions to the larger exploration of psychedelics in society.

Pablos: It’s one of these things that, probably by now it goes without saying, but we just got it wrong in the sixties and seventies. We outlawed these things and we should have been researching them.

Sarah: We outlawed them in the seventies. In the sixties, there was definitely an overcorrection. When you think about the fifties, like how rigid that society was, it was hurting for that kind of breakthrough. But of course there was excess and people were dosing other people without their knowledge, trying to put LSD in the water supply. There was a real sense of force. And now there’s, I think, a much stronger sense of putting these in a therapeutic lens with that science-backed seriousness, which is great. But I also wanted to preserve some of that joy of like the merry pranksters and the people in the sixties who were just vibing off of the joy of these medicines.

Pablos: And how do you feel it’s going now?

Sarah: It’s definitely accelerated in serious scientific exploration, and it is—it’s come out from under the shadows. Donald Trump, the president of the United States, signed an executive order expediting the study of—and, I think, classifying—Ibogaine as a breakthrough medicine, which is awesome. It’s a bit of an overstep for executive orders, but whatever. Honestly, I was like, “Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth.” It’s incredible. We can talk calmly, like adults, about how these interesting, bizarre medicines can help people. And frankly, psychiatry hasn’t had a breakthrough for decades in modalities. We have SSRIs, mood stabilizers. Then finally, we have a new class, we have psychedelics.

And so we can explore that, but it’s harder to explore the ones with baggage. Ibogaine is no baggage in the United States, but mushrooms, MDMA, LSD, plenty of baggage, Charles Manson, like using LSD to indoctrinate people. And it’s too bad because those psychedelics are, they have benefits that Ibogaine doesn’t have. They’re less of a risk for cardiac wise, but chemists are working hard at making Ibogaine like perfect. But here’s the thing. Here’s the biggest problem with, in my opinion, with the current scientific and pharmaceutical use cases of psychedelics. They’re interested in accessibility. A lot of people would say kind of pessimistically, would they want to make money?

But I think of money making as like, they want this available to a lot of people. They want a big impact. If you talk to some pharma execs, they’d talk about scale and impact. And part of that means making it cheaper to administer. Which means shorter duration. And if you can remove the hallucinations, the better, because then you don’t need somebody in the room to pay the therapist to be in the room for many hours watching somebody. You want just the neuroplasticity that comes from the compound and none of the experiential aspects. But psychonauts for years have been saying, the problem is you need the surrender.

You need the hallucinations because that’s part of what makes the experience vivid, memorable, behaviorally you have to cede control. And that’s a tension. And that’s why I think the underground recreational world, which is way harder to monetize at scale, is still going to be vibrant.

Pablos: And useful.

Sarah: And useful.

Pablos: Because it’s, one of these cases where we’re trying to just distill out the part that makes money. And I get it, but, look, I think this could go. Certainly the pharma industry structure we have now doesn’t get us there, but, we did make a whole industry out of therapy, which is basically paying somebody to sit and listen to you and monitor you and that’s become a normalized thing at a scale. And we’re basically going, by a lot of accounts going into a world where we don’t need people filing TPS reports eight hours a day. We think we’re going to end up with humans available.

Links

Recorded on August 6, 2026