Transcript
00:00:00 The following is a conversation with Rick Doblin,
00:00:02 founder and executive director
00:00:04 of the Multidisciplinary Association
00:00:06 for Psychedelic Studies, MAPS.
00:00:09 He is one of the seminal figures
00:00:11 in both the cultural history
00:00:12 and the cutting edge science of psychedelics.
00:00:15 He was there along with the biggest characters
00:00:18 throughout this fascinating history of psychedelics,
00:00:20 and he is here to tell the story.
00:00:23 Quick mention of our sponsors,
00:00:25 Theragun, ExpressVPN, Blinkist, and Asleep.
00:00:29 Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
00:00:33 As a side note, let me say
00:00:34 that exploring the places the human mind can go
00:00:37 can help us understand where it comes from,
00:00:40 how it works, and how to engineer mental journeys,
00:00:43 whether that’s through life experiences,
00:00:46 chemical substances, brain computer interfaces,
00:00:49 or interactions with artificial intelligence systems.
00:00:52 On a personal level, I think the dissolution of the ego
00:00:56 for stretches of time is a powerful tool
00:00:58 for understanding yourself.
00:01:00 A lot of things can do this,
00:01:01 including jiu jitsu, literature, meditation,
00:01:04 but psychedelics is definitely, or at least arguably,
00:01:07 one of the most powerful, from psilocybin to DMT.
00:01:11 I’m excited that people like Rick
00:01:13 are leading the scientific research
00:01:15 that reveals the efficacy and the safety of these substances
00:01:18 so that their proper dosage and usage protocols
00:01:22 can be understood and people like me
00:01:24 can safely and effectively use them,
00:01:27 not just for recreation,
00:01:29 but for rigorous exploration of my own mind.
00:01:33 This is the Lex Friedman Podcast,
00:01:35 and here is my conversation with Rick Doblin.
00:01:39 Could you give an introduction to psychedelics,
00:01:42 like a big, bold, whirlwind overview?
00:01:47 What are psychedelics?
00:01:48 What are the kinds of psychedelics out there?
00:01:51 In whatever way you think is meaningful.
00:01:54 All right, well, when I started MAPS,
00:01:58 the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies,
00:02:00 it was very important for me that psychedelic be in the name.
00:02:04 And the way in which the original meaning of psychedelic,
00:02:09 it’s mind manifesting.
00:02:11 It was created by Humphrey Osmond
00:02:13 in a dialogue with Aldous Huxley.
00:02:17 And so psychedelic means mind manifesting.
00:02:20 And so we interpret that very broadly
00:02:24 to mean dreams are psychedelic.
00:02:27 Anything that kind of brings things to the surface,
00:02:30 holotropic breath work, hyperventilation is psychedelic.
00:02:34 So most people think psychedelic
00:02:35 is only about certain kind of chemical substances,
00:02:37 either natural or synthetic,
00:02:40 but we’ve got a much broader view of that.
00:02:42 Meditation can be psychedelic in some ways,
00:02:45 but our primary focus is on the drugs,
00:02:48 is on the medicines or the, you might call them,
00:02:52 some people might call them spiritual tools or sacraments.
00:02:57 There’s sort of two general categories of those.
00:03:00 One are what are called the classic psychedelics,
00:03:03 and those are the ego dissolving,
00:03:06 sort of merged into unitive states.
00:03:10 Those are like LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, ayahuasca,
00:03:15 ibogaine, DMT, things like that.
00:03:18 And then there is MDMA, which some people even argue
00:03:21 is not a psychedelic.
00:03:22 They’ll say it’s an empathogen or an intactogen,
00:03:25 it’s about touching within or empathy.
00:03:28 It doesn’t do the same kind of ego dissolution
00:03:32 that the classic psychedelics do,
00:03:35 but it brings material to the surface
00:03:39 and it changes the way we process information.
00:03:44 And so I think you can quibble about whether it’s,
00:03:48 it’s certainly not a classic psychedelic,
00:03:50 but I think MDMA is also a psychedelic.
00:03:52 Marijuana, I would say, is a psychedelic.
00:03:55 Marijuana is closer to the classic psychedelics
00:03:58 than it is to MDMA.
00:04:00 One point I like to make is dreams,
00:04:03 because then everybody can relate to that.
00:04:05 Dreams are psychedelic.
00:04:06 Dreams bring emotions, feelings, ideas, concepts,
00:04:12 in symbolic form a lot of times,
00:04:14 or just in raw emotions to the surface.
00:04:16 So when people hear the word psychedelic,
00:04:19 often they are frightened by it.
00:04:22 It’s about loss of control.
00:04:25 And it is, to an extent, loss of conscious control,
00:04:29 particularly with the classic psychedelics.
00:04:31 And we know with dreams
00:04:33 that we can have frightening dreams, nightmares,
00:04:35 but I think that anchoring the concept of psychedelic
00:04:40 in dreams is really helpful for people to know
00:04:43 that it’s kind of a natural state
00:04:45 and that there are other ways that you can catalyze it
00:04:48 than by going to sleep,
00:04:49 and that for thousands of years,
00:04:51 substances have been used in that way.
00:04:54 So you mentioned this idea of bringing something
00:04:55 to the surface, which is really interesting.
00:04:58 So can you maybe elaborate the surface
00:05:01 and what is there in the depths of things
00:05:04 and how does ego dissolution fits into that?
00:05:10 Well, Aldous Huxley talked about the brain
00:05:13 as a reducing valve,
00:05:15 that we have an enormous amount of information.
00:05:18 So right now there’s an air conditioning sound
00:05:20 in the background,
00:05:21 but that’s not crucial to what you and I are doing,
00:05:24 talking to each other, so we kind of tune that out.
00:05:27 There’s all sorts of sights and sounds.
00:05:29 There’s incoming information
00:05:32 in all the different sense modalities,
00:05:36 and we have to figure out what’s important to us.
00:05:42 And so the mind, in a way, focuses a lot on
00:05:47 what are our core needs?
00:05:50 And we filter all the incoming information
00:05:53 that we get towards focusing on what our core needs,
00:05:55 and we can even get to Abraham Maslow
00:05:58 and the hierarchy of needs about survival needs,
00:06:01 belonging needs, esteem needs, go on.
00:06:04 So I think what I mean by bringing things to the surface
00:06:09 is that we tend to not focus on a lot of things
00:06:17 that are coming, but we also push away
00:06:21 things that are difficult emotionally,
00:06:24 difficult cognitively.
00:06:26 We all know that we’re on this very short trajectory
00:06:29 from birth to death,
00:06:30 but we’re not constantly thinking about dying,
00:06:35 although that can actually be helpful
00:06:37 to focus us on what’s really important.
00:06:40 Traumas are often suppressed.
00:06:46 Conflicts, we see in America and around the world
00:06:49 a kind of rise of irrationality
00:06:53 where people push away their logic
00:06:56 in order for their emotional tribal needs to be met.
00:07:01 A lot of people are suffering from early childhood traumas
00:07:04 of a different kinds or abandonment issues
00:07:06 or anything.
00:07:08 So we tend to focus on just what we need to survive
00:07:11 and what we need for work and esteem.
00:07:13 And so psychedelics, by dissolving this ego control
00:07:19 or by with MDMA kind of strengthening our sense of self
00:07:23 and our sense of self acceptance,
00:07:25 we can bring in other information
00:07:28 that have previously been too complicated or too painful.
00:07:32 You don’t think of psychedelics
00:07:33 as conjuring up something new.
00:07:36 It is more revealing something that is already there.
00:07:39 I think that’s a very crucial thing.
00:07:41 So yes, Sasha Shulgin who sort of the godfather of MDMA,
00:07:51 he sort of rediscovered it
00:07:52 and brought it back into use.
00:07:57 He talked about his first experience was with mescaline.
00:08:01 His first psychedelic experience was with mescaline
00:08:04 and he had a tremendous experience.
00:08:06 But what he said about it was he was having
00:08:09 a human experience that the mescaline was helping him access
00:08:13 rather than that he was having a mescaline experience.
00:08:17 So that it’s not like you pop a pill
00:08:19 and you always have the same kind of experience
00:08:21 as everybody else.
00:08:22 The experience is not contained in the pill.
00:08:24 The pill opens you up
00:08:26 and you have an experience of yourself.
00:08:29 Sometimes these are experiences
00:08:30 that we’ve never consciously had.
00:08:32 But we can say right now that we know
00:08:35 that our body below the level of our conscious awareness
00:08:39 has all these self healing mechanisms.
00:08:42 And we don’t modulate them
00:08:46 to a large extent by conscious control.
00:08:48 I mean, eventually we are learning more about the mind body
00:08:51 and we learn about the placebo effect,
00:08:53 how what we think is the case.
00:08:54 But I think that there’s experiences
00:08:57 that are below our level of conscious awareness,
00:09:00 particularly once we’re adults
00:09:02 that are more of these unit of mystical experiences,
00:09:04 sense of connection.
00:09:06 I think kids are like this a lot.
00:09:07 We kind of come from the void, you could say,
00:09:09 and you’re born and you have
00:09:12 a different way of processing information.
00:09:14 One interesting point about that has to do with ketamine,
00:09:18 which is been approved as ketamine for depression,
00:09:22 but it’s used for anesthesia.
00:09:25 And roughly one 10th the anesthetic dose
00:09:29 is a psychedelic dose.
00:09:31 And when it’s used in anesthesia,
00:09:34 there’s what’s called the emergent phenomena.
00:09:36 So this is, you get enough ketamine for,
00:09:40 you can be operated on, you’re not in pain,
00:09:42 you’re not really there, your ego’s knocked out,
00:09:44 but you can still breathe.
00:09:46 But as the operations get over
00:09:49 and then people metabolize the ketamine,
00:09:52 there’s a process that they call the emergent phenomena.
00:09:54 It’s like as you’re emerging from this tranquilized state,
00:09:58 and that’s where you pass through the psychedelic phase.
00:10:01 And they don’t prepare people for that.
00:10:03 And what we see is that a lot of adults
00:10:07 have difficult times with that,
00:10:09 but children don’t seem to have those problems.
00:10:12 Children are a little bit more already in this kind of state.
00:10:15 And so ketamine is used quite frequently
00:10:18 in children now for anesthesia.
00:10:22 So all of that is to say to your question
00:10:24 that I think the psychedelics
00:10:27 reveal things that are within us.
00:10:30 Some things that are how we process information
00:10:32 back when we were children.
00:10:35 Other things that we’ve never thought of before
00:10:36 that are sort of baked into our consciousness.
00:10:41 There’s one drug, 5MeO DMT.
00:10:46 It’s this toxin from a Sonoran toad
00:10:49 that many people consider it to be the most powerful
00:10:52 of all the psychedelics.
00:10:54 And it kind of knocks the ego structures completely out of it
00:10:57 and we experience something different,
00:11:01 but it’s something I think that’s always within us.
00:11:03 It’s at a deeper layer.
00:11:04 So we knock out some of the higher cognitive functions
00:11:07 and then we experience things in a different way.
00:11:09 So my sense is that these are human experiences
00:11:13 that the psychedelics bring us to.
00:11:15 Yeah, it’s really profound.
00:11:16 And DMT is a really interesting example.
00:11:18 So Terence McKenna has talked about these machine elves.
00:11:24 And there’s this, I think from the people I’ve heard speak
00:11:28 about the experience,
00:11:30 there’s a sense that you are traveling elsewhere
00:11:33 to meet entities, whether they’re elves or not.
00:11:38 So in your sense, you’re not traveling elsewhere.
00:11:42 You’re just revealing something that’s within
00:11:44 and maybe it’s a particular mechanism
00:11:47 of revealing what’s already within.
00:11:50 Yeah, and I knew Terence.
00:11:51 I spent a lot of time talking with Terence
00:11:53 and I do not ascribe to a lot of things that he was saying.
00:11:58 He was a tremendous entertainer and I think he did a lot
00:12:02 of really good things and focused us
00:12:03 on the power of psychedelics.
00:12:05 But I think I’ve never seen these quote machine elves.
00:12:10 I think culture is more determinative
00:12:14 of what people experience under psychedelics,
00:12:17 your preconceptions, than we give it credit for.
00:12:22 And so I think there’s a lot of priming that you could say
00:12:26 that people receive by stories from their culture.
00:12:33 With ayahuasca, it’s about jaguars and Amazonian animals.
00:12:37 And so I think these machine elves are this construct
00:12:41 of Terence that other people do see.
00:12:46 There’s actually some people that are very interested
00:12:50 in doing a study and that they’re well funded
00:12:54 and moving toward it to keep people on an IV infusion
00:12:59 of DMT for them specifically to see,
00:13:02 do they contact machine elves or aliens
00:13:05 and what kind of information do they bring back
00:13:07 from these other selves, other places or other entities?
00:13:14 One question is, who are we?
00:13:16 Are we connected to everything in the universe?
00:13:20 We certainly know in many cases,
00:13:23 you talk about waves or particles, the quantum approach.
00:13:27 So I don’t interpret experiences that we have
00:13:32 of some entity that’s somehow or other
00:13:36 deep in our consciousness that’s not us.
00:13:39 It’s a part of who we are.
00:13:41 So I tend to interpret it in that way.
00:13:43 The question is, how big are we?
00:13:49 And how many ideas are within us
00:13:52 that can be revealed by changing the perspective?
00:13:56 You mentioned physics.
00:13:59 What physicists, especially mathematical physicists
00:14:03 or mathematicians do is they reveal truths
00:14:07 by taking a slightly different perspective on a problem
00:14:12 that reveals the simplicity of how it actually works
00:14:17 in totally new ways.
00:14:18 That’s what Einstein did.
00:14:20 Like every progress in physics
00:14:23 and certainly every progress in mathematics
00:14:25 requires you to take a different perspective.
00:14:28 And then perhaps that’s exactly what psychedelics are doing.
00:14:32 It’s not that they’re contacting aliens that are elsewhere.
00:14:36 It may be revealing the connection between us
00:14:39 and other living life forms,
00:14:41 or actually it might be revealing
00:14:45 a totally new perspective on what life is
00:14:47 or what consciousness is and giving us a glimpse at that
00:14:50 even though our cognitive capabilities are limited
00:14:53 to fully grasp and understand it.
00:14:56 So it’s just giving us an inkling of that somehow.
00:14:58 And it seems perhaps a little ridiculous
00:15:01 not from a scientific perspective
00:15:03 in the sense that we don’t have a good physics of life
00:15:06 or physics of intelligence or physics of consciousness,
00:15:09 but getting a glimpse of that
00:15:11 is giving us a little bit of maybe an intuition
00:15:15 of which way to head to build such a physics.
00:15:22 Yeah, yeah, I think so.
00:15:23 I think that there’s this other concept
00:15:28 I guess I would like to talk about briefly,
00:15:30 this Jungian collective unconscious,
00:15:33 this idea that somehow or other everything
00:15:36 that has ever happened is still accessible,
00:15:40 maybe not with as much data
00:15:43 or as much resolution,
00:15:46 but that there’s wave resonances.
00:15:49 So that I do believe that we can have experiences
00:15:55 as part of this human collective unconscious
00:15:58 that we’re not from our own life.
00:16:01 Yeah.
00:16:01 And that we can, it’s like the holographic realities
00:16:06 and that there is a way to gather information
00:16:10 that can be accurate about other times and places
00:16:15 through depth investigations of our own consciousness.
00:16:20 But I think what I tend to believe
00:16:22 is that it’s because there’s emotional resonances
00:16:26 between where we’re at now in this life
00:16:28 and other kind of experiences
00:16:35 that people have had before.
00:16:37 And we always hear about everybody
00:16:40 who talks about past lives,
00:16:41 they’re always kings and queens.
00:16:44 So I think that’s again,
00:16:46 you filter things what you want to be true.
00:16:48 But I do think that there is a way to access information
00:16:53 beyond what we’ve taken in in our own temporal existence
00:16:58 through our own five senses.
00:16:59 In some ways, I really find that compelling,
00:17:01 the notion that that information is already there
00:17:04 and you’re simply just moving the attention of your mind
00:17:08 to different parts of that.
00:17:10 Yeah, I mean, we have that with the radio.
00:17:12 I mean, you got a frequency, you turn all this information,
00:17:17 you could actually say right now in the space between us,
00:17:19 we have the whole world’s knowledge
00:17:21 that’s up on the internet.
00:17:23 It’s right here.
00:17:24 But we don’t see it. We just have to tune in.
00:17:26 Yeah.
00:17:28 What are the interesting differences,
00:17:31 would you say, between the various psychedelics
00:17:34 that you mentioned, ayahuasca, DMT, acid, LSD,
00:17:38 marijuana, mescaline, PCP, psilocybin, MDMA?
00:17:42 You mentioned a few of them that are really interesting.
00:17:44 We’ll talk about scientifically some of the different
00:17:47 studies that have been conducted on each,
00:17:49 but sort of at the high level.
00:17:52 What are some interesting differences?
00:17:54 Well, one of the big ones that people make a big deal of
00:17:57 that I think is completely misplaced
00:17:59 is some are from nature, some are from the lab.
00:18:03 So there’s this kind of like romantic thought
00:18:05 that if it’s from nature, it’s good.
00:18:06 If it’s from the lab, it’s somehow tainted by humanity.
00:18:10 And therefore, some people are like
00:18:13 all for plant psychedelics.
00:18:15 We see the policy changes that have been happening
00:18:19 in a couple of cities, Cambridge, Somerville,
00:18:23 not far from where we’re at now,
00:18:24 where they decriminalize plant medicines.
00:18:27 So they call it decriminalizing nature.
00:18:30 So I think that there is,
00:18:32 from my perspective,
00:18:37 certain things from nature are poison,
00:18:40 certain things from the lab are spiritual,
00:18:44 even if they don’t show up in nature, like LSD.
00:18:47 Now there is something, LSD is lysergic acid diethylamide.
00:18:51 There is lysergic acid amide, LSA,
00:18:54 which comes from morning glory seeds.
00:18:56 So it’s very similar.
00:18:57 But at the same time, I’d say,
00:19:02 I don’t buy into that distinction
00:19:03 that there’s some fundamental preference.
00:19:06 One of the things that Terence McKenna,
00:19:07 since we talked about him,
00:19:09 he talked about how if it’s from nature, it’s good.
00:19:12 And if it’s not, we should be suspect.
00:19:16 Of course, he had a lot of great LSD experiences.
00:19:18 But actually Terence, in 1984,
00:19:22 we were at Esalen with a bunch of other people.
00:19:24 This was before the crackdown on MDMA.
00:19:28 And this was some of the underground therapists
00:19:31 and the above ground researchers
00:19:32 who were trying to talk about how to protect MDMA
00:19:36 from this eventual crackdown.
00:19:37 And Terence was like, forget about it.
00:19:40 It’s from the lab.
00:19:41 It’s dangerous.
00:19:42 We have thousands of years of history,
00:19:44 all these other things.
00:19:45 And what do we know about MDMA and blah, blah, blah.
00:19:48 I was like, Terence, you’re so unscientific.
00:19:51 Another way to say it is, and I just said,
00:19:54 we need a study of the safety of MDMA.
00:19:58 And so then Dick Price, who started Esalen,
00:20:01 I said, I’ll put a thousand, Dick Price, he put a thousand.
00:20:04 So Terence was actually the catalyst
00:20:06 for the first study with MDMA.
00:20:07 Just because he was so frustrating
00:20:10 about how plants are okay.
00:20:11 And if it’s from the lab, it’s bad.
00:20:14 So that’s one distinction.
00:20:16 The other distinction is that he was a scientist.
00:20:19 The other distinction is this sense of classic psychedelics
00:20:26 versus things like MDMA.
00:20:27 So to what extent do they dissolve the ego?
00:20:31 And you could say, to what extent do they cause visions?
00:20:34 The 5HT2A serotonin receptor subtype,
00:20:39 which is responsible for a lot of that
00:20:41 where these drugs are activating.
00:20:45 Now, mescaline of all the psychedelics,
00:20:48 chemically, it’s the most similar to MDMA.
00:20:51 It’s a phenethylamine, which is MDMA.
00:20:53 So in the 50s, there was the, 53, I think it was,
00:20:57 the Army Chemical Warfare Service
00:21:00 wanted to look at drugs for interrogations,
00:21:03 mind control, nonlethal incapacitants.
00:21:05 They did a study in eight substances.
00:21:10 These were now toxicity studies in animals.
00:21:13 And on the one side was methamphetamine,
00:21:15 and the other was mescaline, and MDMA was in the middle,
00:21:18 chemically.
00:21:19 So mescaline of these psychedelics
00:21:23 tends to have the warmth that MDMA has.
00:21:27 It’s not as ego dissolving quite as some of the others.
00:21:30 I mean, it’s the main active ingredient in peyote.
00:21:32 It is very psychedelic, very visual.
00:21:36 Another distinction with these different drugs
00:21:39 is how long they last.
00:21:41 And a lot of that has to do with the route of administration.
00:21:45 So for example, if you smoke DMT,
00:21:49 it takes 10, 15 minutes, and you’re,
00:21:52 within seconds, you’re off in another world.
00:21:54 Similarly, 5MeO DMT, very rapid.
00:21:59 When you take DMT in the form of ayahuasca,
00:22:03 where it’s mixed with another substance
00:22:05 that makes it so that it’s orally active,
00:22:08 then it’s a couple hours.
00:22:10 So LSD is eight, 10, 12 hours sometimes.
00:22:16 Psilocybin is more like five or six hours,
00:22:18 or four to six hours.
00:22:21 MDMA is similar.
00:22:23 It’s one reason why in our research,
00:22:25 we give an initial dose of MDMA,
00:22:28 and then two hours later,
00:22:28 we give half the initial amount to extend the plateau,
00:22:32 because we want it to last longer
00:22:34 for people to be in this therapeutic state.
00:22:37 So that’s another distinction is how long these drugs last.
00:22:42 Another distinction is which of them
00:22:44 come from a religious context,
00:22:47 have a religion built around them.
00:22:49 We have this sense that some people are saying
00:22:52 that 5MeO DMT and the Sonoran Toad,
00:22:54 that they have this long history of indigenous use,
00:22:57 but they don’t, that’s all modern,
00:22:58 it’s made up, and it’s kind of a new approach.
00:23:01 However, there was thousands of years of use
00:23:05 of psilocybin mushrooms in religious contexts.
00:23:09 From 1600 BC to 396 AD,
00:23:14 the world’s longest mystery ceremonies,
00:23:17 the Eleusinian Mysteries,
00:23:19 sort of the heart of Greek culture,
00:23:21 the heart of Western culture,
00:23:22 that was a psychedelic potion called Kikion
00:23:25 that seems like it’s very much like an LSD like substance.
00:23:29 Aragat on grain and LSD comes from Aragat.
00:23:36 So I think that there are a lot of ways
00:23:39 to look at these different substances.
00:23:41 Another distinction is which one of them
00:23:45 are being researched right now in scientific context
00:23:48 and which are not.
00:23:50 And because of the rise of all these for profit companies
00:23:52 and everybody’s looking for what they can patent,
00:23:54 what they can claim, the land grab,
00:23:57 more and more there are companies
00:24:01 looking at every different kind of psychedelics.
00:24:04 The ones that are most important
00:24:06 that are not being researched, Mescaline,
00:24:09 but now there’s a company to do Mescaline,
00:24:11 the Jernico Lab, Ibogaine,
00:24:14 which is crucial for opiate addiction.
00:24:17 There’s a new company, a branch of this company,
00:24:21 Atai, that’s gonna be looking at Ibogaine.
00:24:23 So I’d say the rise of the for profit companies
00:24:27 is making it so that there’s just gonna be
00:24:30 an enormous amount of investigations
00:24:32 into all these different psychedelics.
00:24:36 But what we’re gonna see is the development
00:24:39 of new psychedelics that we don’t know anything about
00:24:41 that have not existed yet
00:24:42 because a lot of these for profit companies
00:24:45 are gonna wanna invent and patent
00:24:48 and have composition of matter patents on new molecules.
00:24:51 So I think we’ll see a lot of that happening too.
00:24:53 That’s really fascinating.
00:24:54 I mean, there’s a lot of doors you’ve opened
00:24:57 and we’re gonna walk through all of them,
00:24:58 including the research and so on,
00:25:00 but on this one little tangent
00:25:03 of the future of psychedelics,
00:25:06 so engineering new psychedelics,
00:25:08 can you comment on maybe the chemistry
00:25:12 and the biology of how psychedelics work
00:25:14 and where is the space of possible engineering
00:25:17 of psychedelics and what kind of things
00:25:19 might they unlock in terms of the possible places
00:25:24 our mind would be able to go
00:25:26 and the effects of that of improving health,
00:25:32 but maybe at the basic level of chemistry
00:25:35 and the space of what could be engineered?
00:25:39 Well, you reminded me,
00:25:41 I’ll get to exactly what you said,
00:25:42 but you reminded me of a talk I heard
00:25:45 by Buckminster Fuller shortly before he died.
00:25:49 And what he talked about is how technology
00:25:52 was making things ever smaller,
00:25:57 that we are able to pack more and more information
00:25:59 into smaller and smaller spaces
00:26:02 and that we’re developing technologies
00:26:04 of communications with people,
00:26:06 we now know the internet and things like that.
00:26:08 But what he said is that he thought the eventual evolution
00:26:13 of this sort of research would move
00:26:16 from this miniaturization to telepathy.
00:26:21 Yeah.
00:26:22 And that was like a shocking thing
00:26:24 for somebody like scientific like that to say that.
00:26:27 So will we unlock those parts
00:26:31 where I talked about the collective unconscious?
00:26:33 Will we be able to more consciously explore those areas?
00:26:39 So I think that that’s a possibility.
00:26:42 There was Stan Groff,
00:26:44 who’s the world’s leading LSD researcher
00:26:47 and has been my mentor, his wife Brigida.
00:26:51 They were talking about stories that they had heard
00:26:54 about MDMA that people take
00:26:59 and then on top of that, they do 5MEO DMT.
00:27:02 And so you get this ego dissolution,
00:27:05 but underneath it, you have this sense of ego,
00:27:09 sort of sense of self safety, of self acceptance,
00:27:14 kind of grounds it.
00:27:15 So Stan was like, that’s the future of psychiatry,
00:27:19 that you can watch without the terror
00:27:21 of the ego dissolution,
00:27:22 the sense that you’re losing your mind
00:27:24 or you’re going crazy or you’re dying,
00:27:26 or that you have this grounded sense of safety
00:27:29 while you’re dissolving your normal sense
00:27:32 of how you see things.
00:27:33 And being able to engineer in a fine tuned way
00:27:37 that exact experience, maybe fine tuned to the person,
00:27:41 as opposed to sort of this manual potion
00:27:43 that’s through experiment.
00:27:46 Although I don’t know about fine tuning things
00:27:48 to the person in the sense that
00:27:50 we believe there’s this inner healer,
00:27:52 this kind of inner healing intelligence.
00:27:55 We talked about it, the body repairs itself.
00:27:57 So I think we more need to create safety for people
00:28:03 and then what emerges will be customized
00:28:06 to what they need to be looking at
00:28:07 from this inner healing intelligence.
00:28:09 At the same time, we will move to,
00:28:12 we hear so much about the new approaches to oncology
00:28:18 where you do genetic analysis of different kinds of tumors
00:28:23 and then you have certain kind of chemotherapy agents
00:28:25 and you do like personalized chemotherapy.
00:28:27 I think we will have more like
00:28:29 personalized psychedelic therapy,
00:28:32 but it’ll be more like a sequence of different drugs
00:28:34 that people go through over an extended period of time
00:28:37 and then you kind of customize what’s next
00:28:40 and sometimes you’ll combine different drugs together
00:28:42 like this 5MeO DMT and MDMA
00:28:45 or a lot of times people do LSD MDMA combinations
00:28:48 or psilocybin MDMA combinations.
00:28:52 Chemistry is not my strength.
00:28:56 I’m more into clinical applications and policy,
00:29:01 but I can say that from what I’ve learned
00:29:03 from reading from others and research done by others
00:29:06 that different psychedelics have an impact
00:29:10 on different neurotransmitters,
00:29:12 different other parts of energies in the brain.
00:29:16 The default mode network is what’s considered
00:29:20 to be like our sense of self and it’s part of the brain
00:29:25 that sort of is what I described before,
00:29:27 scanning the world and filtering information
00:29:30 for what’s really important to us
00:29:33 and both focusing us on things
00:29:36 and also helping us to ignore a lot of things.
00:29:40 And the classic psychedelics all weaken the energy
00:29:43 in this default mode system
00:29:45 and therefore you get this flood of information
00:29:48 that you’re not normally paying attention to
00:29:49 and then you start seeing in the more creative waves
00:29:52 or more connected, you actually move to
00:29:56 beyond the verbal kind of thinking
00:29:57 into sort of symbolic thinking a lot of times
00:30:01 and that’s where you sometimes get
00:30:03 these mystical sense of connection, how it’s all one
00:30:06 and you get the sense also of how big the universe is
00:30:12 and how small each one of us is.
00:30:15 So there’s a lot of work that Sasha Shulgin
00:30:18 and Albert Hoffman who invented LSD
00:30:20 and first synthesized psilocybin
00:30:22 on what they call structure activity relationships.
00:30:24 What is the structural molecule
00:30:27 and then how do you predict what that new molecule
00:30:31 that never existed before is going to do
00:30:33 once you actually take it?
00:30:35 And you can get close, but you never really know
00:30:40 until you actually take the drug.
00:30:43 And the way that Sasha ran his experiments
00:30:47 is that he would take the drugs himself first in low doses
00:30:51 and he would sort of step up the doses
00:30:55 to have more experiences.
00:30:56 If he thought it was valuable,
00:30:56 he’d share it with his wife, Ann,
00:30:58 but then what they would do is
00:31:01 if they both thought it was valuable,
00:31:02 they had a group of 12 people
00:31:04 that they were with for many, many years
00:31:07 and they would distribute these new drug to these 12 people
00:31:10 and they would get the different perspectives.
00:31:13 And he felt that 12 was like a minimum number
00:31:15 because we’re so unique how each of us see things,
00:31:18 but then you kind of get a little bit of a consensus
00:31:21 on how a lot of people are gonna see it
00:31:22 and then if that 12 people were positive about it,
00:31:25 then they would turn it over to Leo Zeph,
00:31:27 who we called the secret chief,
00:31:29 the leader of the underground psychedelic therapy movement
00:31:31 and then he would start exploring it in therapy.
00:31:34 So there’s still a lot of mysteries
00:31:38 as far as structure activity relationships
00:31:40 and it’s not gonna be the case that people go into the lab
00:31:43 and they tinker with molecules
00:31:45 and they know exactly what they’re gonna get.
00:31:48 And a lot of it has to do with
00:31:51 not so much chemistry as morphology.
00:31:54 You could say the shape of the molecule
00:31:56 and how does that interact with receptor sites.
00:31:59 And so we’re getting better at modeling all of that.
00:32:03 And how does that interaction relate
00:32:04 to the morphing of the human experience
00:32:08 and deeply understanding that perhaps
00:32:11 there’s no equations yet for that kind of thing.
00:32:13 You really have to build up intuition by experiencing it.
00:32:17 And over time and sort of subjective self report,
00:32:20 like trying to build an understanding
00:32:22 of the effects of the different chemistries.
00:32:24 Yeah, you can have approximate ideas, but to know exactly.
00:32:29 So when I first tried MDMA, which was 1982
00:32:34 and this was after I had done lots of LSD
00:32:37 and mescaline and mushrooms,
00:32:41 I was shocked at how different it was
00:32:44 than these other substances and yet how profound it was.
00:32:49 So are there whole new kind of categories
00:32:52 of classes of drugs that we’re not aware of
00:32:54 that would be not so much this like eco dissolution
00:33:00 or emotional?
00:33:01 Well, what MDMA does is reduces activity in the amygdala,
00:33:05 the fear processing part of the brain.
00:33:08 So it’s not just chemistry, but it routes energy
00:33:11 throughout the brain in a different way.
00:33:12 It increases activity in the prefrontal cortex.
00:33:15 So you think more logically,
00:33:17 that I think has an enormous impact on the effect of MDMA.
00:33:21 The other thing it does is it increases connectivity
00:33:25 between the amygdala and the hippocampus.
00:33:26 So it helps facilitate processing of things
00:33:30 into longterm memory.
00:33:32 And with PTSD, trauma is like never in the past,
00:33:35 it’s always about to happen.
00:33:36 So will we one time develop drugs
00:33:39 that would even be specific to certain kinds of memories?
00:33:43 We’re working with a woman, Rachel Yehuda,
00:33:46 who is at the Bronx VA,
00:33:50 and she’s done some studies
00:33:52 that are with the epigenetics of trauma.
00:33:55 So she’s worked with Holocaust survivors and their children,
00:33:58 and she has identified epigenetic mechanisms
00:34:03 by which trauma is passed
00:34:05 from generation to the generations.
00:34:07 Sort of like set points for anxiety,
00:34:10 fear, certain things like that.
00:34:11 But the question is, can you actually transmit memories
00:34:16 from one generation to the next?
00:34:18 Now, this is not DNA changes
00:34:24 which happen over a very long period of time
00:34:26 and evolutionary scale.
00:34:28 But within one lifetime, within some experiences,
00:34:31 your epigenetics, what turns on the genes
00:34:34 or turns off certain genes, that can be impacted.
00:34:37 And that’s what we know now can be transmitted
00:34:39 from generation to generation,
00:34:41 either by the father or the mother
00:34:43 through the sperm or the egg.
00:34:45 So it’s pretty remarkable.
00:34:48 So what Rachel’s gonna try to do is MDMA research for PTSD
00:34:53 and look at these epigenetic markers before and after
00:34:56 and see if they change as a consequence of therapy.
00:35:00 So will we develop one day certain kind of chemicals
00:35:05 that will be able to bring certain kind of memories
00:35:08 to the surface?
00:35:10 That’s not inconceivable.
00:35:12 The epigenetic angle is fascinating,
00:35:14 that there’ll be these epigenetic perturbations
00:35:17 that lead to memories living
00:35:19 from one generation to the other
00:35:22 and then bringing those memories to the surface
00:35:25 and using that as signal to understand
00:35:30 what exactly the psychedelics bring to the surface and not.
00:35:34 Yeah, yeah.
00:35:35 Now, the other portion of that though is culture.
00:35:38 I mean, culture is where we store all these memories
00:35:40 and in the stories that we get passed out.
00:35:44 Especially with a lot of shared,
00:35:46 you talk about the Holocaust or World War II,
00:35:48 where it’s deeply ingrained in the culture,
00:35:53 the impact of those events
00:35:55 and sort of in aggregate the different perspectives
00:35:57 on that particular event create a set of stories
00:36:01 that you can plug into.
00:36:03 And then they kind of resonate with some aspect of you
00:36:06 that creates a memory that’s connected to,
00:36:09 like when I think about World War II and the Holocaust,
00:36:12 I think about my own family,
00:36:13 but in some sense,
00:36:15 it’s also resonating with stories of many others.
00:36:19 So it’s like somehow the two echo each other
00:36:22 and I’m just providing my own little flavor on top.
00:36:24 The meat of the stories
00:36:26 are probably those that are shared with others.
00:36:29 It’s plugging into the collective unconscious.
00:36:32 That’s really fascinating,
00:36:34 really plugging into like precisely
00:36:38 plugging into particular memories
00:36:40 as a way to deal with trauma and PTSD, that kind of thing.
00:36:47 Yeah, I’ll just add that the most important dream
00:36:51 of my life ever was of a Holocaust survivor
00:36:54 telling me that he was miraculously saved from death
00:37:02 and he knew that he was saved for a particular purpose,
00:37:04 but he never knew what that purpose was.
00:37:06 So in the dream, I’m seeing him on his deathbed
00:37:08 and then he shows me whatever happened to him
00:37:11 during the Holocaust.
00:37:13 And then we’re back in the room on his deathbed
00:37:16 and he says, well, I know what my purpose was now.
00:37:20 And I’m like, oh, great, what was it?
00:37:22 He says, it’s to tell you to be a psychedelic therapist
00:37:24 and to study psychedelics
00:37:25 and bring back psychedelic research.
00:37:28 And I thought to myself, I’ve already decided to do this.
00:37:31 You can lay this on me.
00:37:33 I can say yes and then you can die in peace.
00:37:35 And then he died in front of my eyes in the dream.
00:37:38 So I think that that kind of cultural transmission
00:37:43 that I got from when I was really young,
00:37:45 then manifested in this dream.
00:37:47 And that was this story about how people
00:37:51 can be incredibly vicious
00:37:55 and can be very motivated by irrational factors.
00:37:58 And so I just feel that this kind of
00:38:02 multi generational transmission of this story
00:38:05 of the irrational being a murderous factor
00:38:10 and something I needed to respond to was deeply ingrained.
00:38:15 And I would say my guess is more culturally
00:38:19 than this epigenetic mechanism.
00:38:22 Yes.
00:38:23 Yeah, but your sense is that whatever stimulated
00:38:27 a certain part of human nature in World War II,
00:38:32 especially Nazi Germany, but also in Stalinist Soviet Union,
00:38:37 still is within us, within all of us.
00:38:40 Just like what we’re saying,
00:38:44 we embody quite a lot of things.
00:38:47 Yeah.
00:38:47 And one of those is whatever the capacity for evil
00:38:53 seems to be one of those things.
00:38:56 Yeah, there’s a quote from Carl Jung
00:38:58 from just a few years before he died.
00:39:03 What he says, and I’ll just paraphrase it is
00:39:05 that we need to understand psychology.
00:39:10 We need to understand who man is,
00:39:14 that the greatest danger to us is man.
00:39:18 There are no other dangers really that impact our species.
00:39:23 And then he goes on to say that
00:39:25 we are the source of all coming evil.
00:39:30 Now this was 15 years or so after World War II.
00:39:34 But yeah, and I’d say one of the most important
00:39:36 psychedelic experiences of my life was a DMT experience.
00:39:39 Also Terrence was there, Ralph Metzner,
00:39:43 Andy Weil, a few others.
00:39:44 And we were sitting around at Esalen smoking DMT.
00:39:50 And under the influence of DMT,
00:39:53 which now this was the first time I’ve ever smoked DMT,
00:39:57 I had this super rapid fraction of a second,
00:40:01 like dissolving of everything that I,
00:40:03 well, first off I saw a horizontal line,
00:40:06 then I saw a vertical line, then it turned into a color,
00:40:09 red, then it was red, then it turned into cubes,
00:40:11 then it turned into like an MC Escher kind of like,
00:40:14 I don’t know, you know, didn’t make logical sense.
00:40:17 And then I was gone.
00:40:18 And then it was just this period of five, 10 minutes
00:40:23 of just feeling part of this enormous wave
00:40:26 of billions of years of evolution,
00:40:29 how I had this sense that in my innermost sense
00:40:32 of who I am uniquely individually,
00:40:35 this inner voice that’s talking to me
00:40:37 that I didn’t develop English,
00:40:40 that it’s like a gift to me from millions of people.
00:40:43 So that even in my most innermost sense, it’s not just me.
00:40:48 It’s the product of everything that came before me.
00:40:51 I’m part of this bigger system.
00:40:53 And then I just thought, wow,
00:40:55 just how many billions of years does it take
00:40:57 to reach this point of self awareness and all this?
00:40:59 And it was glorious, beautiful.
00:41:01 And then I had this thought,
00:41:03 and this is where this kind of intellectual honesty,
00:41:06 I guess you could say, I just thought,
00:41:08 well, if I’m part of everything
00:41:09 and everything’s part of me,
00:41:11 then it’s not just the good parts,
00:41:12 that Hitler’s part of me too.
00:41:15 And that was just this shock, like a stone sunk,
00:41:19 and I just was very moody for the whole next day.
00:41:22 But it was that acknowledgement
00:41:24 that each of us carries these potentials,
00:41:27 and what we activate is what matters,
00:41:29 but what our potential are is the whole full range of things.
00:41:34 I don’t know if you can comment
00:41:35 about the DMT trip itself and what it’s like,
00:41:39 starting from the very basic geometric shapes
00:41:42 and then launching yourself into the context
00:41:46 of the enormity of space and time in the human history.
00:41:52 Is there anything else to be said
00:41:54 about that kind of visually or physically
00:42:00 or emotionally about that journey?
00:42:02 What it’s like, that brief journey that reveals so much?
00:42:07 Well, I was with a group of people.
00:42:10 The way we were doing it was each of us would smoke DMT,
00:42:14 have 10, 15 minutes experience while we closed our eyes,
00:42:17 and everybody else was just chatting,
00:42:19 and then the person who did the DMT would come back
00:42:21 and tell their story of what happened.
00:42:24 And then we’d think about it for a bit
00:42:26 and then pass the pipe to the next person.
00:42:27 And so this was like a whole evening.
00:42:30 So even the, sorry to interrupt,
00:42:32 even the conversations themselves then
00:42:34 is part of the experience.
00:42:35 Exactly, yes, yes, because it’s also what you bring back.
00:42:39 I mean, I think that’s particularly for therapy.
00:42:42 It’s not so much about what the experience is,
00:42:45 but it’s what you bring back and what do you integrate.
00:42:48 And then also, how do you learn how to do these things
00:42:52 on your own without the drugs?
00:42:54 There is this way, because we’re saying
00:42:56 it’s sort of a core human experience,
00:42:58 the drug is the mediator, but can we do this on our own?
00:43:01 And once you’ve seen it and felt it,
00:43:04 then you have a little bit better sense
00:43:06 to recreate it on your own.
00:43:08 Although, I’ve had dreams where I’ve been doing LSD
00:43:11 and tripping and it was just incredible.
00:43:14 It was, I was tripping in my dreams,
00:43:17 but I had not taken LSD.
00:43:19 So there’s this way in which we do that.
00:43:22 So I would say that from the DMT experience,
00:43:26 the sense of safety, that’s what I was trying to get at
00:43:28 with this, the group of us and this group of friends
00:43:30 trying to do this common exploration,
00:43:32 that if you have this sense of safety,
00:43:34 you’re incredibly vulnerable
00:43:38 because you are giving up your awareness really
00:43:43 of what’s happening around you.
00:43:44 I think there’s, what we’re finding is that
00:43:49 in our psychedelic research for PTSD
00:43:54 and what we see with the vaccines,
00:43:56 that even African Americans are reluctant
00:43:59 to volunteer for vaccines because they haven’t had
00:44:02 that sense of safety from the medical establishment.
00:44:05 They don’t volunteer for psychedelic therapy even as much.
00:44:10 So the overlay has to be this sense of safety
00:44:14 as you become vulnerable and looking inside, you’re not.
00:44:18 I was just actually told about how there’s a lot of work
00:44:22 being done inside prisons to teach mindfulness.
00:44:25 And so one of the,
00:44:29 Charlene who’s my assistant is trying to do work
00:44:32 on helping people in prison with trauma,
00:44:36 potentially one day with MDMA or meditation or mindfulness.
00:44:39 But one of the exercises was teaching people to,
00:44:42 okay, here’s how you deal with stress,
00:44:45 just close your eyes and deep breathe.
00:44:46 And what Charlene was saying is people don’t close their eyes
00:44:49 in prison, you don’t feel safe to do that.
00:44:52 So all that is just to say is that the context
00:44:57 is the most important factor.
00:44:59 So while I’ll talk about the DMT experience,
00:45:02 the context was this supportive sense of safety
00:45:07 that I could be completely vulnerable
00:45:09 and out of any kind of controlled women,
00:45:12 I think often are less safe in this way than men
00:45:16 because of all the sexual assaults.
00:45:20 But what it can do by taking the ego orientation offline
00:45:26 to some extent, it opens you up to much more.
00:45:29 And to make a bigger point of that,
00:45:33 we could say that it’s very similar
00:45:35 to the Copernican revolution.
00:45:38 And people thought that the earth
00:45:40 was the center of the universe
00:45:41 and the inquisition murdered people that questioned that.
00:45:47 Father Bruno burned at the stake.
00:45:48 Actually, one of the things he said,
00:45:50 I think that’s worth all these years later saying
00:45:54 is that when the inquisition sentenced him
00:45:58 to burn at the stake for espousing this idea
00:46:02 that the earth was not really the center of the universe,
00:46:05 he said to the inquisition, he said,
00:46:08 your fear in sentencing me is greater
00:46:11 than my fear in being sentenced.
00:46:15 That their worldview was so rigid
00:46:18 that they had to wipe out anybody that would question it.
00:46:21 And so this idea of psychedelics displacing our ego
00:46:26 is the center of the universe.
00:46:28 And to realize that we are just rotating
00:46:31 about on something much bigger than our individual life.
00:46:35 Our ego is designed almost to protect this body
00:46:38 while we’re alive.
00:46:40 And you can understand all the good reasons why that is,
00:46:44 but it also disconnects us from this bigger reality.
00:46:47 And so the psychedelics, DMT,
00:46:49 by knocking this sort of ego orientation
00:46:52 or the default mode network offline,
00:46:55 you open up to the bigger sweeps of history.
00:47:00 So in that place of safety and vulnerability
00:47:03 in that fascinating group of people,
00:47:06 when their ego was dissolved in this way,
00:47:08 did they have similar experiences?
00:47:09 Is there different places that their minds went?
00:47:12 Yeah, so once I had this kind of shattering experience
00:47:17 that Hitler’s part of me,
00:47:19 no one else in the group had that.
00:47:21 Probably a lot of them have maybe had that before
00:47:24 or they realized that they’re not just the good,
00:47:28 the white hat, good people and that they’re all good
00:47:31 and we got to fight against the bad people.
00:47:35 So no, people will go in different places.
00:47:37 And not only that, if you do it again,
00:47:39 you’ll go into a different place
00:47:40 than you went to the first time.
00:47:42 Unless you have not resolved the issue.
00:47:45 So I had a sequence of LSD trips that were very difficult,
00:47:48 but it was like coming to the same sort of conundrum,
00:47:52 the same challenge that I was unable to overcome.
00:47:57 This idea of letting go and really fully dissolving,
00:48:01 letting the ego fully go.
00:48:02 And I would have this sequence of trips
00:48:04 over a couple of months where I would reach this point
00:48:07 where I was too scared to move forward
00:48:08 and I would just be holding on.
00:48:11 So there are repeated themes sometimes.
00:48:15 What Stan Groff has said, which I find very beautiful,
00:48:18 is that the full expression of an emotion
00:48:21 is the funeral pyre of that emotion.
00:48:25 And what that means is if you can fully let in something,
00:48:29 then the essence of life has changed,
00:48:32 is that it moves on, that everything’s in motion.
00:48:35 And if you can fully experience it,
00:48:37 even if it’s a sense that you’re gonna be trapped
00:48:39 in eternity in this hellish state,
00:48:42 if you surrender to that, that’s the way out.
00:48:46 This full experience of something
00:48:48 is this funeral pyre of that emotion.
00:48:52 And so that runs against a lot
00:48:54 of what modern psychiatry is doing too,
00:48:56 which is to suppress symptoms.
00:49:00 Instead of supporting people
00:49:01 to kind of explore these insecurities
00:49:03 so that then they can contain them
00:49:06 and then they can move on.
00:49:09 So yeah, resistance is not a way to make progress.
00:49:13 Right, right.
00:49:15 Although one of the reasons
00:49:17 why we do the supplemental dose during the MDMA
00:49:21 or why there’s advantages in a 10 hour LSD experience
00:49:26 is that you have a lot of opportunities
00:49:28 to come up against this resistance
00:49:31 that may be too difficult to deal with
00:49:32 and then you kind of push it aside
00:49:34 and then a couple hours later you come back to it
00:49:36 or you come back to it.
00:49:37 Press snooze every once in a while if you’re not ready.
00:49:40 It’s hard to do that.
00:49:41 I think with MDMA, you can negotiate.
00:49:45 That’s, I think, a part of its safety in a sense.
00:49:48 You can have this like, oh, I should be talking about this
00:49:50 or I’m feeling this, but it’s too much for me now.
00:49:53 You can push it away.
00:49:54 But with the classic psychedelics,
00:49:57 this kind of membrane between the conscious
00:49:59 and the unconscious,
00:50:00 that once you take the drug and it weakens this membrane
00:50:04 and things are coming up,
00:50:07 it’s very difficult to negotiate with it.
00:50:10 The key to successful classic psychedelic trips is surrender.
00:50:18 You’ve talked about that you first began
00:50:20 to reconsider the negative health myths around psychedelics
00:50:24 when you learned that the book One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
00:50:27 was written by Ken Kesey when he was in part
00:50:30 under the influence of LSD.
00:50:32 So how do you think LSD helped him, Ken Kesey,
00:50:36 in writing that incredible book?
00:50:39 Yeah, there’s a process that’s called semantic priming.
00:50:45 And so what that means is that I say night, you say day.
00:50:49 There’s kind of normal patterns of kind of,
00:50:52 you say one word, what kind of words come to you next?
00:50:56 And so they’ve done some research.
00:50:58 They, meaning scientists, have done some research
00:51:01 where you give people a psychedelic
00:51:04 and then you do this semantic priming.
00:51:07 And what you find is they have a wider range of associations
00:51:12 than they normally would
00:51:13 when they’re not under psychedelics.
00:51:15 So I think for Ken Kesey,
00:51:18 he was able with psychedelics to get
00:51:24 a deeper kind of emotional connection
00:51:26 to some of these states of mind
00:51:28 that people were in this mental institution
00:51:31 and that he could explore them more in depth
00:51:35 and more eloquently.
00:51:37 And also one of the things he talked about
00:51:40 was the fog machine,
00:51:41 was how people’s minds were sort of clouded
00:51:46 by the people that ran the institution
00:51:48 and the fog machine would be coming in.
00:51:51 So I think the imagery and the metaphors
00:51:56 that he used a lot in the book
00:51:58 could come to him during LSD experiences.
00:52:00 And then now he wasn’t doing very,
00:52:05 when you’re writing, you have to be literate.
00:52:10 You have to be able to write.
00:52:13 So it would be more like beginning and ends of LSD trips
00:52:16 instead of at the peak.
00:52:17 But I think you would get a lot of these,
00:52:20 the feeling tones or the images, the metaphors,
00:52:23 I think he would get these extent,
00:52:26 also LSD lasts so long, you can get these extended focus
00:52:30 and you can really elaborate on images.
00:52:34 And so much of psychedelic experiences
00:52:37 are poetic and metaphorical.
00:52:40 I mean, you could take veterans
00:52:43 who’ve never read a book of poetry in their lives.
00:52:49 And under the influence of MDMA,
00:52:52 just what they describe, the imagery
00:52:54 and the way they describe their experiences,
00:52:56 metaphorical, poetic, it’s incredible.
00:53:00 And so I think that Ken Kesey was able to channel
00:53:06 what LSD did to his mind in a way
00:53:09 that most people couldn’t do,
00:53:13 that he did because he was trying to write this novel
00:53:15 and because he was so brilliant.
00:53:17 Yeah, I mean, we’ll talk about psychedelics
00:53:22 and treating, in bringing some of trauma to the surface
00:53:28 and dealing with all those kinds of things,
00:53:29 but there’s something also to the opening up of creativity
00:53:34 for whether it’s for writing purposes
00:53:37 or for in my world for engineering, for invention,
00:53:41 innovation and invention itself is a very,
00:53:44 is a deeply creative process.
00:53:47 And it’s fascinating to think with the aid of psychedelics,
00:53:53 what kind of ideas can be brought to life?
00:53:57 Yeah, well, we have the whole phenomena
00:53:59 of a lot of the people in Silicon Valley
00:54:00 and else microdosing psychedelics
00:54:02 in order to have a little touch more
00:54:05 of this creative approach to things.
00:54:07 I would love it to see if it was,
00:54:10 that’s more like Terrence McKenna territory,
00:54:12 correct me if I’m wrong,
00:54:13 but I would love to sort of more scientific
00:54:16 to where there’ll be the rigor
00:54:17 of saying how to do it effectively,
00:54:21 how to sort of understand sort of not just almost,
00:54:30 to take the full journey of creative exploration
00:54:35 and to do it for prolonged periods of time,
00:54:39 for years, lifelong kind of part of your life
00:54:43 of how it empowers creativity.
00:54:46 I think, of course, you start with helping people
00:54:53 deal with trauma, and then the next step
00:54:55 is people who have moved past their trauma
00:55:00 and are trying to do something,
00:55:02 create something special in their life.
00:55:04 How can then psychedelics empower that?
00:55:07 Yeah, now, that also,
00:55:08 just to not shy away from anything controversial,
00:55:11 that gets us to this idea of psychedelics for vision quest,
00:55:17 particularly for younger people.
00:55:19 You know, when you’re sort of moving
00:55:21 into this adulting kind of phase
00:55:23 and you have to figure out
00:55:24 what are you gonna do with your life,
00:55:27 there’s so many options.
00:55:29 A lot of people, of course, feel constrained
00:55:31 that they have very few options,
00:55:33 but I think this idea of psychedelics
00:55:36 as a way to help you find your calling
00:55:40 or find your vision or find your unique leverage point,
00:55:44 I think we’ll see that more and more
00:55:45 as our culture evolves and gets healthier
00:55:48 around the use of psychedelics.
00:55:49 So it’s both the science,
00:55:52 having the rigor of understanding how to do it safely
00:55:55 and the culture catching up
00:55:56 to the fact that this is both safe and very useful.
00:56:03 Yeah, although I would question this idea of safety.
00:56:07 So we can understand physiological risks
00:56:11 and we can minimize them.
00:56:13 And I think there’s very minimal physiological risks
00:56:16 from the classic psychedelics, virtually none,
00:56:18 or for even MDMA under safe conditions.
00:56:23 Psychological risks are harder to address,
00:56:29 but we can do that through the sense of safety and support.
00:56:32 But I think there’s a level of risk there
00:56:37 that we shouldn’t overlook.
00:56:39 And so to make a drug into a medicine,
00:56:42 what we have to do is prove to the satisfaction
00:56:45 of the FDA and other regulatory agencies
00:56:47 that things are safe and efficacious.
00:56:50 But even though they use those words,
00:56:52 proving safety and safe and efficacious,
00:56:55 it’s in relationship to the disease
00:56:57 that you’re trying to treat
00:56:59 and you accept a certain amount of risk.
00:57:01 So it’s the risk benefit ratio rather than pure safety.
00:57:06 Yeah, absolutely.
00:57:10 Let me ask you about Ken Kesey a little bit longer
00:57:13 because fascinating him being.
00:57:16 He was also part of Project MKUltra.
00:57:19 Yeah, yes.
00:57:21 What was Project MKUltra
00:57:23 and what lessons we should take away from it?
00:57:27 Well, MKUltra was a program by the CIA.
00:57:33 What they were looking at was,
00:57:35 can you take these drugs, these psychedelic drugs,
00:57:39 and weaponize them in different ways
00:57:43 for interrogation, for true serums,
00:57:45 for exposing somebody before they give a big talk
00:57:49 to something like LSD and then they can’t talk
00:57:52 or make a fool of themselves?
00:57:53 Or can you spray LSD over the battlefield
00:57:57 and have everybody tripping and drop their weapons
00:57:59 and then you just walk up and nobody dies
00:58:02 and you’ve won the battle?
00:58:04 So it’s a fascinating concept.
00:58:07 Yeah, they call it nonlethal incapacitance
00:58:09 and I think that’s how it’s.
00:58:11 One way to win a war is to enforce peace.
00:58:16 To get everybody not caring about the war, but yes.
00:58:19 Well, I think Gandhi said something even better,
00:58:21 which is that the true way to win a war
00:58:22 is to turn your enemy into your friend.
00:58:24 Yes, that’s a beautiful way to put it.
00:58:26 Yeah, but MKUltra was really nefarious
00:58:29 and it was part of our military and it was done in secret
00:58:32 and they would dose people against their will.
00:58:36 I mean, one of the most infamous things
00:58:41 was that they had a house of prostitution in San Francisco
00:58:44 and they would have one way mirrors, all this stuff
00:58:47 and then they would just dose people with LSD
00:58:50 and they would have the prostitutes dose these guys with LSD
00:58:53 and observe what they would do and how they would act.
00:58:56 And the CIA actually for a while
00:58:58 was dosing each other secretly
00:59:01 and that there’s a famous case of this fellow Olson
00:59:04 that either jumped out of a window or was pushed,
00:59:08 he might’ve been killed.
00:59:10 He was a CIA guy and they gave him LSD
00:59:13 and then they’re trying to see can they break him down
00:59:17 and get him to tell secrets.
00:59:18 And I think he felt uncomfortable with what happened to him
00:59:21 while he was under the influence of LSD
00:59:22 and whether he was pushed or not,
00:59:26 I don’t know if we’ll ever know.
00:59:28 But MKUltra was violating people’s human rights.
00:59:35 It was done in secret and the irony of it
00:59:41 is that Ken Kesey is one of the people,
00:59:45 one of the main early people that got LSD in this context
00:59:49 and then he was one of the main people
00:59:51 that helped inspire the hippies to use psychedelics
00:59:54 to oppose the Vietnam War.
00:59:56 So I think the CIA kind of in many cases,
01:00:01 things get out of their control,
01:00:03 what they think they can do
01:00:04 and it turned in to be a disaster for them.
01:00:08 I think there was some thought
01:00:09 that some of the people at the CIA had
01:00:11 is that if you can turn people inside,
01:00:14 take drugs and they just focus on their internal experience,
01:00:16 they’re not gonna be involved politically.
01:00:18 It’s a way to sort of take people offline.
01:00:21 And what I don’t think they counted on
01:00:23 is that when you’re offline
01:00:24 and you have these unit of special experiences
01:00:27 and you realize how we’re all connected,
01:00:29 then why do you wanna go out and kill these Vietnamese
01:00:32 and put one dictator over another dictator,
01:00:37 dictators on both sides in North Vietnam and South Vietnam?
01:00:40 Why are we doing that?
01:00:42 So MKUltra has just a very disreputable.
01:00:48 We’re learning more and more about what they did
01:00:51 and one of the unintended consequences was Ken Kesey
01:00:53 and not only that, but then the Grateful Dead
01:00:56 who began at the acid tests that Kesey was helping
01:01:00 to organize and out of that emerged,
01:01:04 you could say just this incredible psychedelic culture.
01:01:08 And you look at the bands that began in the 60s
01:01:12 and which ones have really survived to this day
01:01:17 and the Grateful Dead has survived longer
01:01:20 than most any other band.
01:01:22 I mean, some of them have died and all,
01:01:23 but it was like the tightness,
01:01:25 the sort of telepathy we talked about before
01:01:27 that they could just get so tuned in to each other
01:01:31 and each other’s energies and they could do improvisations
01:01:34 and they can do this incredible work
01:01:36 that I think the sustainability of the Grateful Dead
01:01:40 as a group was a testament
01:01:43 to the power of the LSD experiences
01:01:46 and that might’ve never happened if not for MKUltra.
01:01:48 But can we talk about the darkness a little bit?
01:01:56 So Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber was allegedly part
01:01:59 of the MKUltra studies while at Harvard.
01:02:03 Do you think this is true?
01:02:05 Do you think it had an impact
01:02:06 on him psychologically, intellectually and so on?
01:02:09 I do think it’s true and I do think it had an impact.
01:02:12 So we talked before about are these drugs somehow
01:02:16 or other producing a certain kind of drug experience
01:02:20 or do they bring out what’s within?
01:02:23 So we have this experience, yeah, on the one hand,
01:02:26 Ken Kesey and he sort of took positive things out of this.
01:02:30 On the other hand, we can get this opposition
01:02:36 to the modern world, to technology
01:02:38 and to the point of creating bombs to try to go after it.
01:02:42 So that the experience is not in the drug,
01:02:45 it’s this interaction between the drug,
01:02:48 the person, the context.
01:02:50 And so we can heal people with psychedelics
01:02:55 or people can be driven crazy with psychedelics.
01:02:59 It depends again on the context.
01:03:01 And so I think both these things can be true.
01:03:05 And I think it was really good
01:03:06 that you kind of highlighted this,
01:03:08 that there is this polarities and that it’s not in the drug,
01:03:13 it’s in the other factors and it’s who they were beforehand
01:03:17 and then how you use that experience.
01:03:19 So all that’s to say is if we put LSD in the water
01:03:22 and everybody were to get it,
01:03:23 it doesn’t mean that all of a sudden
01:03:25 everybody’s gonna have a mystical experience
01:03:27 and then that’s all we need to do
01:03:29 and humanity is spiritualized or end war and all of this.
01:03:32 It’s not about the drug.
01:03:35 And that actually is why for me,
01:03:38 we’ve also talked about engineering new psychedelics
01:03:43 and all the people that are gonna be trying
01:03:44 for profit companies to develop and patent new psychedelics.
01:03:48 For me, the most important challenge
01:03:50 is new cultural contexts that can create legality,
01:03:55 safety, support for the existing psychedelics
01:03:59 that we already have.
01:04:00 I mean, we have so much incredible tools
01:04:04 in these existing psychedelics
01:04:06 that it’s more about creating context for them
01:04:09 to be used in safe medical or personal growth
01:04:12 or recreational even with harm reduction,
01:04:14 all these different ways.
01:04:15 That’s more important to me than finding some new molecule
01:04:18 that’s somewhat similar or somewhat different
01:04:20 but it can be patented.
01:04:22 So it’s the social context.
01:04:24 So I do believe that Ted Kaczynski was part of NKUltra
01:04:28 and I think it affected him in a negative way
01:04:31 and that’s a cautionary tale that it’s not in the drug,
01:04:36 it’s in the context.
01:04:37 The context, the person, still it feels like if viewed
01:04:44 from a therapy perspective, perhaps there was a way
01:04:47 to use psychedelics to help Ted Kaczynski find a path
01:04:52 out of the darkness.
01:04:53 I think so and I think that this is where I think MDMA
01:04:58 comes in in a way that MDMA is, he felt very isolated
01:05:03 and very much out of society in some ways.
01:05:08 MDMA stimulates oxytocin, which we haven’t mentioned,
01:05:12 which is the hormone of nursing mothers,
01:05:14 of love and connection.
01:05:15 It provides a lot of this sense of self acceptance
01:05:18 and safety and wanting to be in a relationship.
01:05:21 There’s Gould Dolan is a neuroscientist at Hopkins.
01:05:24 She’s given octopuses MDMA, they’re solitary creatures
01:05:30 except mating season, which is not very often
01:05:32 but you give them MDMA and they become more interested
01:05:35 in hanging out with other octopuses.
01:05:37 So I think this, for people that have had difficult
01:05:40 psychedelic experiences, MDMA helps them integrate them.
01:05:45 We’ve worked with people that had a difficult LSD experience
01:05:48 40 years before and are still able to get back to that
01:05:52 under the influence of MDMA and work out some
01:05:54 of the conflicts that they weren’t able to resolve
01:05:58 all those decades before.
01:06:00 So I think that psychedelics could have been helpful
01:06:04 in a different context for Ted Kaczynski.
01:06:07 But the other big part of it is that people have to be
01:06:11 willing to cooperate with the experience.
01:06:14 We talked about resistance.
01:06:16 So people can resist these things.
01:06:18 It’s the saying is you can bring a horse to water
01:06:21 but you can’t make them drink.
01:06:22 This is about how people have to be willing
01:06:25 to go to these spaces.
01:06:26 So one of the essence of our therapeutic approach
01:06:30 is that we help people to heal themselves,
01:06:33 that we are not giving them the healing.
01:06:36 It’s a flip on the power dynamics that existed,
01:06:41 you would say in the fifties and sixties,
01:06:43 my dad was a doctor and the doctors were gods
01:06:45 and whatever they said was right.
01:06:47 And we no longer, of course, believe that.
01:06:50 But for a while, psychoanalysis with Freud,
01:06:54 that they gave the interpretation to the patient.
01:06:56 The patient couldn’t help themselves
01:06:58 but they would do the free associations
01:06:59 and the psychoanalyst would see these conflicts
01:07:02 and would be the one that does the healing,
01:07:04 would give this interpretation and that would open things up.
01:07:07 So I think it’s this idea of empowering people
01:07:11 to heal themselves.
01:07:12 And so if Ted Kuznicki had been in a therapeutic setting
01:07:16 with psychedelics and if they’d had something
01:07:19 like MDMA available or MDA,
01:07:23 which was popular during the sixties,
01:07:25 which is a more like MDMA LSD combination,
01:07:28 the outcomes might’ve been different.
01:07:31 Let’s take a step into the world of studies.
01:07:35 Timothy Leary, who was he
01:07:38 and what were the most important ideas
01:07:41 you’ve learned from him?
01:07:43 Well, I did have the opportunity to get to know him personally
01:07:48 and to spend some time with him.
01:07:50 Timothy Leary, well, let’s start with Nixon saying
01:07:55 he’s the most dangerous man in America.
01:07:58 That’s a good place to start.
01:08:00 Yeah.
01:08:01 And why did Nixon say that?
01:08:03 It’s because of this turn on, tune in, drop out.
01:08:11 Timothy Leary was just an incredible advocate
01:08:14 for think for yourself, question authority.
01:08:18 Those were the things he said all the time.
01:08:19 Think for yourself, question authority.
01:08:21 He was a rebel.
01:08:23 He was kicked out of West Point.
01:08:25 He was a psychologist who was at Harvard for three years
01:08:30 from 60 to 63.
01:08:34 Before he got to Harvard,
01:08:35 he had an experience with mushrooms in Mexico.
01:08:41 And he said he learned more in that experience
01:08:44 than he’d had in his entire academic career before then
01:08:47 about how the human mind works.
01:08:49 And so he came to Harvard wanting to do research
01:08:53 into psychedelics.
01:08:56 And he did some very important studies, both of which,
01:09:01 well, one was called the Good Friday Experiment,
01:09:03 which was whether psychedelics in religiously inclined
01:09:06 people taking psilocybin in a religious setting,
01:09:09 whether it could produce a mystical experience.
01:09:12 That took place at Marsh Chapel at the Boston University.
01:09:15 Because it’s a little bit subjective,
01:09:18 where you can say entirely subjective,
01:09:19 what people describe happens to them.
01:09:23 He wanted to do another study,
01:09:24 which would be a more objective measure,
01:09:26 and that was called the Concord Prison Experiment.
01:09:28 And that was the thought, if you can give people
01:09:32 psilocybin mystical sense of connection type experiences
01:09:35 while they’re in prison, when they get out,
01:09:38 they’ll be more pro social and they’ll have reduced
01:09:41 recidivism.
01:09:43 So Tim did that.
01:09:44 He also did the naturalistic studies
01:09:46 of giving loads of people psilocybin
01:09:48 and sort of writing down what their experiences were,
01:09:50 the range of experiences.
01:09:52 Later on in his time at Harvard,
01:09:56 they started doing LSD.
01:09:58 And LSD is more cerebral, longer lasting,
01:10:02 not as reassuring in a way as psilocybin.
01:10:04 Sometimes he used to say that if they never got into LSD,
01:10:08 they’d still be at Harvard with the psilocybin.
01:10:12 So he was a great American psychologist,
01:10:14 but then he got tired of the psychology game,
01:10:19 you could say, or he would say that.
01:10:22 He got more and more interested in cultural change
01:10:27 and various musicians and artists
01:10:30 and all sorts of people started coming to him
01:10:32 for the psychedelic experience that they are in a way
01:10:34 for creativity, for other things.
01:10:36 So he started hanging out with all sorts of famous people
01:10:40 or creative people and he stopped going to classes a lot.
01:10:47 And Ram Dass, Richard Alpert had given LSD to a student
01:10:54 that Ram Dass was courageous enough to admit
01:10:59 that he had a sexual interest in.
01:11:02 They weren’t supposed to give it undergraduates.
01:11:04 That was about the only time that they ever did it.
01:11:06 And psychedelics just getting more and more controversial
01:11:09 even in the early 60s, eventually got kicked out of Harvard
01:11:13 and then he became kind of a cultural icon
01:11:16 for the counterculture and was hounded by the police
01:11:23 and Nixon and spent a lot of time in jail.
01:11:24 I mean, he’s an incredible person.
01:11:28 One thing that Ram Dass said is that Richard Alpert,
01:11:33 Ram Dass said, I’m a rascal, but Leary’s a scoundrel.
01:11:37 What’s the distinction?
01:11:39 Rascals like in good fun.
01:11:41 A scoundrel is like, you can’t quite trust them, I think.
01:11:47 I think that.
01:11:48 It’s a spectrum of sorts.
01:11:50 Yeah, I think that Leary was someone
01:11:52 who a little bit got addicted to media attention.
01:11:57 But I think that overall he gets blamed a lot
01:12:01 for the backlash against the 60s,
01:12:04 the shutdown of psychedelic research.
01:12:05 I think that he is unfairly blamed for a lot of that.
01:12:10 I think when you look back at the 60s,
01:12:13 the common narrative is that it was
01:12:15 because psychedelics going wrong.
01:12:17 People took psychedelics, they weren’t prepared,
01:12:19 they had emotional breakdowns, they weren’t psychotic,
01:12:21 they killed themselves, they did this or that,
01:12:24 different problems of people taking psychedelics
01:12:27 in context that they didn’t feel fairly safe in
01:12:31 or just they weren’t prepared
01:12:33 or they didn’t know how much they were taking
01:12:34 or all this.
01:12:35 So the backlash was because psychedelics going wrong.
01:12:39 But I think the real reason, while that did happen,
01:12:42 I think the real reason is psychedelics going right
01:12:45 and people having this sense of connection.
01:12:48 And then the opposite of what the CIA was hoping
01:12:50 that it would kind of turn people inward
01:12:54 and take them away from political struggles,
01:12:56 it actually motivated people.
01:12:58 Once you actually have these psychedelic experiences,
01:13:02 your attitude towards death changes also
01:13:05 this idea of death becoming an intrinsic part of life,
01:13:09 it’s a natural cycle, it’s not so much.
01:13:12 So I think people realize that,
01:13:15 while there’s this billions of years of evolution,
01:13:18 infinity, whatever that means in terms of time,
01:13:21 that we’re here for a very limited time
01:13:22 and they end up wanting to use their time well,
01:13:24 they have a lessened fear of death
01:13:26 and they wanna build this paradise on earth here now
01:13:29 instead of later.
01:13:31 So a lot of people really did get motivated
01:13:35 to challenge the Vietnam War,
01:13:36 to work on the environmental movement,
01:13:38 civil rights movement, women’s rights movement,
01:13:40 anti militarism.
01:13:42 And it was that challenge to the status quo
01:13:44 that caused the backlash.
01:13:46 So Leary is someone who in 1990,
01:13:50 we had the maps I started in 86.
01:13:52 So in 1990, we had this conference
01:13:56 to raise money out in California
01:13:57 and Leary was there and Ram Dass was there
01:13:59 and Ralph Metzner was there and Andy Weil was there
01:14:01 and Terrence McKenna was there
01:14:02 and Dennis McKenna was there and all these.
01:14:04 But there was one point where Tim was speaking
01:14:09 and afterwards I was asking him some questions.
01:14:11 And I said, do you have any advice for us
01:14:15 on how to work with the government
01:14:17 and how to bring these psychedelics forward?
01:14:19 That’s what we’re trying to do.
01:14:20 I’ve got this nonprofit for it.
01:14:22 We’re trying to do this research.
01:14:23 What is your advice on how to bring this forward
01:14:27 and how to work with the government?
01:14:29 And he said, fuck the government.
01:14:31 He said, I am so far past asking for permission
01:14:36 for anything, but I’m glad that you’re doing it.
01:14:40 And then he held up my hand like passing the torch.
01:14:44 So it was, and that’s one of my favorite photographs
01:14:47 of me and Tim where he’s sort of like,
01:14:48 but it was after this, fuck the government.
01:14:50 I’m so far past asking for permission for anything,
01:14:53 but I’m glad that you are.
01:14:54 Now I did follow ups to the Good Friday experiment
01:14:57 and I did follow ups, 25 year follow up
01:14:59 to the Good Friday experiment,
01:15:01 about a 34 year follow up
01:15:02 to the Concord Prison experiment.
01:15:05 What I discovered in some ways I would say
01:15:08 is the key to the 60s, what I just told you,
01:15:10 but in the follow up to the Good Friday experiment
01:15:12 that I did in the 80s for my undergraduate thesis
01:15:16 at New College in Sarasota, Florida,
01:15:18 I eventually found 19 out of the 20 people.
01:15:21 It was just, that was an enormous challenge
01:15:23 because their names were all lost
01:15:24 and it just took forever years and years and years
01:15:27 to find them all.
01:15:29 But I discovered that those people
01:15:30 that had the psilocybin experience
01:15:32 in the midst of 25 years later with Nancy Reagan
01:15:35 and Ronald Reagan, and if there ever were there
01:15:38 a social pressure to disavow the validity
01:15:41 of the psychedelic experience, that was then.
01:15:43 And instead they affirmed it,
01:15:47 that they thought with all of this years of hindsight,
01:15:51 now looking back, they thought it was
01:15:52 a valid mystical experience.
01:15:53 But I discovered that one of the persons
01:15:59 who had the psilocybin had this experience
01:16:03 during the Good Friday service
01:16:05 that Reverend Howard Thurman was the minister.
01:16:09 He was Martin Luther King’s mentor
01:16:11 and Reverend Howard Thurman was the minister
01:16:12 at Boston at Marsh Chapel.
01:16:16 Martin Luther King got his PhD at Boston University.
01:16:20 And Howard Thurman had spent time with Gandhi.
01:16:24 And so he was really kind of this hidden person
01:16:26 behind the civil rights movement
01:16:28 about nonviolence as their strategy.
01:16:31 But he was interested in the political implications
01:16:33 of the mystical experience.
01:16:34 So he permitted this experiment to take place.
01:16:37 And there were 20 divinity students
01:16:39 from Andover Newton in the basement
01:16:41 and 10 experimenters, all the people on religion
01:16:44 and psychology, like Houston Smith and Walter Huston Clarke
01:16:47 and Leary and Ramdas, Mr. Others were there
01:16:50 as a support part of it.
01:16:51 And the sermon was like three hours later.
01:16:54 We actually have, three hours long,
01:16:56 we actually have the original sermon
01:16:58 from the Good Friday experiment
01:16:59 from Howard Thurman up on our website.
01:17:02 It’s incredible.
01:17:03 But part of it was tell people there’s a man on the cross.
01:17:06 And this one person sort of heard that
01:17:09 and he thought, okay, I gotta do that.
01:17:12 Howard Thurman was such a dynamic speaker.
01:17:14 He said, I gotta tell people there’s a man on the cross.
01:17:16 And so he said, what am I doing here
01:17:18 in this basement chapel listening to this service?
01:17:20 I gotta go tell people there’s a man on the cross.
01:17:22 So he went, they thought he was just going to the bathroom,
01:17:24 but he ran out the door.
01:17:25 He’s running down Commonwealth Avenue
01:17:27 and Houston Smith and Tim Leary go after him.
01:17:31 And he had thought that since he should tell somebody,
01:17:34 he should tell the president, like why not?
01:17:38 But then he realized, well, the president’s in Washington.
01:17:40 I’m here in Boston.
01:17:42 I’ll just tell the president of the university.
01:17:44 So anyway, he’s running down the street
01:17:46 and Leary and Houston Smith go after him.
01:17:48 And he doesn’t want to go back inside.
01:17:50 They finally get him.
01:17:50 He’s not hit by a car,
01:17:53 but they end up giving him a shot of Thorazine.
01:17:57 What’s Thorazine?
01:17:58 Thorazine is like a major antipsychotic drug.
01:18:02 It’s a horrible drug, but it knocks people out,
01:18:07 tranquilizes them.
01:18:08 We would never do that today.
01:18:11 We don’t abort a difficult experience like that.
01:18:14 But in any case, they hid that.
01:18:15 That was not part of the writeup of this experiment.
01:18:20 So what they did is in a sense,
01:18:22 a little bit exaggerated the benefits.
01:18:24 It later became out three years later after the experiment
01:18:27 or four years in Time Magazine,
01:18:28 it said everybody that got psilocybin
01:18:30 had a mystical experience.
01:18:32 Say it wasn’t true, not everybody.
01:18:34 Eight out of the 10 did, but not all 10, not this guy.
01:18:37 And they minimize the risks.
01:18:40 So there was a bit of that.
01:18:41 I think Tim was reckless in that way.
01:18:43 It was underplayed the risks and overpromised the benefits.
01:18:48 And then the Concord Prison experiment,
01:18:51 it turned out that Tim had fudged the data completely
01:18:56 and it wasn’t really successful.
01:18:57 So I fault him for that.
01:19:00 The outside world was doing the opposite.
01:19:02 It was exaggerating the risks and blocking research.
01:19:06 So he felt justified to fudge the data
01:19:09 because the outside world was fudging in a sense,
01:19:12 the response to the.
01:19:13 Yeah, yeah, exactly.
01:19:15 Yeah, so that presents a very nice context.
01:19:21 Fuck the government, but I’m glad that somebody
01:19:26 is fighting the good fight from within
01:19:28 and doing it the right way, which is where you are.
01:19:32 So the 80s, let me ask, what is MAPS,
01:19:38 the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies
01:19:42 and what is its mission throughout the years,
01:19:45 throughout the decades?
01:19:46 Yeah, so MAPS is a nonprofit organization.
01:19:49 I created it as a nonprofit pharmaceutical company.
01:19:53 I created it in 86 after DEA,
01:19:57 the Drug Enforcement Administration,
01:19:58 criminalized MDMA in 1985.
01:20:01 And that was after they started trying to do that in 1984.
01:20:05 And as I mentioned, this Terence McKenna is sponsoring,
01:20:09 motivating us to do this safety study.
01:20:12 So we did that in preparation for this eventual crackdown
01:20:15 because MDMA was called Adam, used as a therapy drug,
01:20:18 but it was also beginning to be sold as ecstasy
01:20:21 as a party drug.
01:20:22 And that was taking place in public settings and bars.
01:20:25 And so it was inevitable that the crackdown would happen.
01:20:29 And so I had a nonprofit connected to Buckminster Fuller,
01:20:32 Earth Metabolic Design Lab,
01:20:35 that we used to support this lawsuit against the DEA
01:20:38 to block them from criminalizing MDMA.
01:20:41 We were winning in the court of public opinion
01:20:43 and winning in the court.
01:20:45 The DEA freaked out
01:20:46 and the emergency scheduled MDMA in 85.
01:20:49 The handwriting was on the wall
01:20:51 that they were not gonna permit
01:20:52 the therapeutic use to continue
01:20:54 because it gets in the way of the narrative of the drug war
01:20:56 and these are terrible drugs.
01:20:58 So in 86 is when I started MAPS as a nonprofit pharma
01:21:02 because the strategy that I realized is that
01:21:05 Americans are open to medicines,
01:21:10 that tools to ease suffering,
01:21:13 that was the opening wedge,
01:21:14 the opening door to changing attitudes.
01:21:17 And it would be through science.
01:21:18 I would say that my religion is more science
01:21:21 than anything else.
01:21:23 And culture and religion are metaphorical,
01:21:28 but often too much they become literal.
01:21:31 But I felt that through science, through medicine,
01:21:34 there would be a way to bring these drugs
01:21:36 back to the surface.
01:21:37 And the mission was always this mass mental health,
01:21:42 this idea that what we need is to spiritualize humanity.
01:21:46 Einstein said the splitting of the atom
01:21:49 has changed everything except our mode of thinking.
01:21:52 And hence we drift towards unparalleled catastrophe,
01:21:56 which shall be required if mankind is to survive
01:21:59 is a whole new mode of thinking.
01:22:01 So what is that new mode of thinking?
01:22:05 My presumption is that it’s more of this mystical sense
01:22:10 of thinking that we’re all connected.
01:22:12 And then if we realize that we’re all connected,
01:22:14 we’re not gonna blow up the world.
01:22:16 So a lot of people say that if we could just give LSD
01:22:20 all to the world leaders, that would be,
01:22:22 then they’d have these spiritual experiences,
01:22:24 the world would be better.
01:22:25 But I actually had a ketamine experience
01:22:27 the day after that DMT experience I described
01:22:29 with the inner Hitler.
01:22:31 This ketamine experience was,
01:22:34 I was above and behind Hitler as he was giving a speech,
01:22:37 like the Nuremberg rallies kind of thing.
01:22:40 And I was trying to think, how do I get into his head?
01:22:42 How do I undo what he wants to do?
01:22:44 How can we deal with him?
01:22:46 And I realized this whole new thing
01:22:48 about the Heil Hitler salute.
01:22:50 And he would like push energy out
01:22:53 and then everybody would do the salute back to him.
01:22:55 And so it’s like the one to the many
01:22:57 and the many to the one,
01:22:58 giving all these people giving away their power
01:23:00 and then how it would just sort of ratchet up in intensity
01:23:03 like these vibrations.
01:23:04 And I realized there’s no way to get into his head.
01:23:07 This idea we’ve talked about before
01:23:08 about you have to be willing.
01:23:10 So what that sort of helped me understand
01:23:13 is that the strategy has to be mass mental health.
01:23:16 It’s not about changing a few leaders.
01:23:18 We need to change the mass of humanity
01:23:21 to this new mode of thinking, this new spiritual way.
01:23:24 So MAPS was a nonprofit pharmaceutical company
01:23:28 focused on psychedelics.
01:23:30 Big Pharma wasn’t doing this work.
01:23:32 Government wasn’t funding it.
01:23:33 So the only source of funds
01:23:35 I thought would be through nonprofit donations.
01:23:37 And that’s been true up until just a couple of years ago
01:23:39 now that we have the rise of these for profits.
01:23:41 But that’s because we’ve cleared out
01:23:42 the regulatory obstacles.
01:23:45 We’ve got more scientific data about the benefits
01:23:47 funded through philanthropy.
01:23:49 We’ve changed public opinion
01:23:51 and there’s a lot less zeal for the drug war.
01:23:53 So all of those things have changed.
01:23:55 But at the time it was mass mental health was the goal.
01:23:58 Two tracks, one was drug development,
01:24:01 the other was drug policy reform.
01:24:03 So then it’s not just available to people
01:24:05 that have a clinical diagnosis,
01:24:07 but people who are personal growth
01:24:10 or they should have access to it as well.
01:24:13 I did not know at the time that no drug
01:24:16 had ever been made into a medicine by a nonprofit.
01:24:20 That was really good I didn’t know that.
01:24:23 I might’ve been a little bit more daunted.
01:24:26 And actually that didn’t happen for 13 more years.
01:24:28 It happened in 1999.
01:24:30 And that was the abortion pill, RU46,
01:24:34 that was approved in Europe, but it’s controversial.
01:24:36 Nobody, no pharmaceutical company would take it.
01:24:39 And it was John D. Rockefeller the third
01:24:41 through the population council
01:24:42 with the major donor being Warren Buffet.
01:24:45 And the Rockefellers and the Buffets
01:24:48 and some of the Pritzkers were involved in funding this.
01:24:51 So that was the first nonprofit.
01:24:54 But the MAPS was designed as from the very beginning,
01:25:00 not academic research into psychedelics,
01:25:03 but drug development.
01:25:04 And that’s a fundamental distinction.
01:25:06 And that’s why I think we’re years ahead now
01:25:08 with everybody else in terms of making
01:25:11 a psychedelic assisted therapy into a medicine.
01:25:13 Because our goal from the very beginning was not knowledge,
01:25:16 not academic research, it was practical.
01:25:19 It was drug development.
01:25:20 How do we create new social structures?
01:25:22 How do we create legal access to these things?
01:25:25 Now, in December of 2014,
01:25:28 we created the MAPS Public Benefit Corporation.
01:25:31 So MAPS is a nonprofit, but in our 35 years,
01:25:36 we’ve raised about $110 million in donations.
01:25:41 What I didn’t know when I started MAPS,
01:25:43 and it took me quite a few years,
01:25:46 I didn’t even know this till about eight, nine years ago,
01:25:50 was that in 1984, Ronald Reagan had signed a bill
01:25:54 to create incentives for developing drugs
01:25:57 that were off patent.
01:25:58 So MDMA was invented by Merck in 1912.
01:26:02 It’s in the public domain.
01:26:03 These incentives are called data exclusivity,
01:26:06 which means that if you make a drug into a medicine
01:26:08 that has no patent protection,
01:26:10 nobody can use your data for a period of time
01:26:13 to market a generic.
01:26:14 And that will effectively be,
01:26:16 well, it’s five years, you do pediatric studies,
01:26:18 you get six months extension,
01:26:20 and we are being required, if we succeed in adults,
01:26:24 to work with adolescents with PTSD.
01:26:26 It blocks a generic competitor
01:26:28 from applying till that five and a half years is over,
01:26:30 takes FDA at least six months to review.
01:26:33 So more or less six years of data exclusivity,
01:26:35 10 years in Europe is data exclusivity.
01:26:38 So the story then became to the donors
01:26:42 that you’re not gonna have to give us money forever
01:26:45 because we can make money selling MDMA,
01:26:48 but we wanna do two revolutionary things, you could say.
01:26:51 One is psychedelic assisted psychotherapy,
01:26:53 but the other is marketing drugs.
01:26:56 When you market it with the profit maximization motive,
01:26:59 we end up in the extreme getting the distortions
01:27:02 that we have in America,
01:27:03 where we have the most expensive healthcare system
01:27:06 in the world per capita,
01:27:07 but our outcomes are down like 40 or 50 among the countries,
01:27:11 our average outcomes.
01:27:11 We don’t have, third of the people or so
01:27:13 don’t have insurance, and it’s just very inequitable.
01:27:17 So what we’re trying to do
01:27:19 is show a different way to market drugs.
01:27:22 And it’s a modification of capitalism
01:27:24 that’s called the benefit corporation,
01:27:26 where you maximize public benefit, not profit.
01:27:29 You still make a profit.
01:27:31 So selling MDMA for a profit
01:27:33 is not something we could keep inside the nonprofit
01:27:36 because it’s taxable, it’s a business.
01:27:39 So we’ve created the MAPS Public Benefit Corporation,
01:27:42 which is 100% owned by the nonprofit.
01:27:45 So we have a nonprofit that owns a pharma company.
01:27:49 And the mission of that pharma company
01:27:51 is to maximize not profit,
01:27:53 but maximize benefit for society.
01:27:55 Yeah, yeah.
01:27:56 Although there still will be profits,
01:27:58 and the profits that we’re gonna make
01:28:00 are going to be used towards the mission of MAPS,
01:28:03 which is again, is this mass mental health
01:28:05 and ending the drug war.
01:28:08 And in fact, we’ve hired the Boston Consulting Group
01:28:10 to help us plot our commercialization strategy.
01:28:15 And so there is some suggestions based,
01:28:18 there’s so many different assumptions in this,
01:28:19 the number of therapists that we train,
01:28:22 the price that we set for the MDMA,
01:28:24 whether insurance companies will cover it.
01:28:27 But there’s the possibility of somewhere in the range
01:28:30 of three quarters of a billion dollars in profits
01:28:33 during this period of data exclusivity,
01:28:36 just from the US and we’re talking about
01:28:40 trying to do this research around the world as well.
01:28:42 So that’s what the Benefit Corporation is.
01:28:45 The Benefit Corporation is our pharmaceutical arm.
01:28:47 We’re about 130 people now,
01:28:50 somewhere in that fluctuates,
01:28:51 but one third of them are in the nonprofit.
01:28:54 We do harm reduction, psychedelic harm reduction.
01:28:57 We help create programs for people
01:29:02 with difficult psychedelic experiences
01:29:04 at Burning Man, at festivals all over the world,
01:29:06 even in cities we’re now negotiating with the police,
01:29:11 the city of Denver, because Denver has made the mushrooms
01:29:14 the lowest enforcement priority.
01:29:16 Oregon has passed the Oregon psilocybin initiative.
01:29:18 So in those areas where maybe more people
01:29:21 are gonna gravitate to do psychedelics,
01:29:23 we want there to be harm reduction
01:29:24 so that we don’t have bad stories coming up
01:29:27 that would change that.
01:29:29 So MAPS does the psychedelic harm reduction.
01:29:31 We do public education.
01:29:32 We do a lot of it.
01:29:33 That’s what you and I are doing right now.
01:29:35 We’re doing that now.
01:29:38 But also research towards.
01:29:40 Well, the research now is done in the Benefit Corp.
01:29:42 In the Benefit Corp.
01:29:43 Yeah, so what happens is people donate to MAPS,
01:29:46 get a tax deduction, MAPS transfers the money,
01:29:48 or you could say invests in the Benefit Corp.
01:29:50 Yes.
01:29:51 The Benefit Corp will do the research
01:29:53 and then MAPS is the sponsor,
01:29:55 but then we will license the sale of MDMA
01:29:57 to the Benefit Corp, so.
01:29:58 Got it, but the research is done with an eye
01:30:01 towards creating something that has a big impact
01:30:03 versus just research for knowledge’s sake.
01:30:06 Yeah, yeah, because I’m interested in political change.
01:30:13 The other part of it, which is that the brain
01:30:16 is the most complex thing we know in the universe.
01:30:21 It’s endless.
01:30:22 I mean, when are we gonna really, like this idea of,
01:30:24 will we figure out telepathy?
01:30:26 Will we figure out tapping into the collective unconscious?
01:30:28 What is the extents of our brain?
01:30:31 How does the brain actually work?
01:30:32 Do you ask chemistry questions?
01:30:33 So if it’s just the pursuit of knowledge,
01:30:36 that is an endless thing.
01:30:37 And how does that end the drug war?
01:30:39 How does that help people directly?
01:30:41 So that’s why we’re focused on drug development
01:30:43 more than mechanism of action.
01:30:45 Before I ask you about one,
01:30:48 but several really exciting studies,
01:30:51 let me ask sort of a personal question for me.
01:30:54 So if I wanted to get psychedelics
01:30:59 from the MAPS Public Benefit Corporation
01:31:04 and explore my own mind, how do I get to do that?
01:31:10 And when?
01:31:10 You won’t be able to.
01:31:12 You’ll never be able to.
01:31:12 This is very unfortunate.
01:31:14 Because the reason is because the Benefit Corp
01:31:17 is designed as a pharmaceutical company.
01:31:20 So we can only work on clinical indication.
01:31:23 So let’s say you come to me and you just say,
01:31:25 oh, I’m really depressed.
01:31:27 Can I get MDMA to overcome my depression
01:31:30 or overcome my PTSD?
01:31:32 We’ll have to do research in those indications.
01:31:35 And by when you say me, you mean like a doctor.
01:31:38 So this would be prescribed in theory by doctors.
01:31:40 Well, this would go through a doctor and a prescription.
01:31:43 Okay, let me ask another question.
01:31:46 To further answer,
01:31:47 so that’s where the drug policy arm comes in,
01:31:49 the drug policy reform.
01:31:51 So you should be able to get access to psychedelics
01:31:54 for your own personal growth.
01:31:56 But that’s not medicine.
01:31:59 So that’s why we need to medicalize,
01:32:02 to have things covered by insurance,
01:32:04 to change people’s attitudes, the public attitudes.
01:32:07 And then we get this subsequent drug policy reform.
01:32:11 And we’re talking about it
01:32:12 in terms of licensed legalization.
01:32:14 So my view is you should get a license to do psychedelics,
01:32:18 you get a little education stuff,
01:32:19 and then you should be able to buy it
01:32:21 and do it on your own.
01:32:22 So let me rephrase the question in more specifically.
01:32:24 So when can I, if I happen to have ailments of some kind
01:32:29 where the doctor decides that psychedelics could help,
01:32:31 when would you be a loose estimate for you
01:32:35 of when a doctor will be able to prescribe to me
01:32:37 something from MAPS Public Benefit Co.
01:32:41 And then when for my personal growth and creativity,
01:32:45 would I be able to get something?
01:32:46 So like, just looking out, this isn’t like guaranteed,
01:32:49 but like your vision, your hope for,
01:32:53 yeah, for psychedelics in society.
01:32:56 Well, the end of 2023, so two and a half years from now,
01:32:59 we anticipate FDA approval
01:33:02 for the prescription use of MDMA for PTSD.
01:33:05 Because the FDA does not regulate the practice of medicine,
01:33:11 there is what’s called off label prescription.
01:33:14 What that means, the label is what it’s approved for.
01:33:16 So the label will say, oh, this is approved for PTSD.
01:33:20 But let’s say you come and anything else, social anxiety
01:33:23 or whatever, you can go to the doctor,
01:33:24 they can give it to you.
01:33:26 It might not be covered by insurance,
01:33:27 they have to be a little bit careful about malpractice.
01:33:30 But I think the end of 2023
01:33:32 is when you will be able to do that.
01:33:34 Now, there’s actually another program, very limited,
01:33:38 called Expanded Access, which is compassionate use,
01:33:42 which means that, and we have approval for 50 people
01:33:45 for compassionate use right now, we think that’ll grow.
01:33:48 So that’s gonna open up in about two months.
01:33:51 And so those are people with PTSD,
01:33:53 they have to be treatment resistant,
01:33:55 nothing has worked for them.
01:33:56 And they can access MDMA
01:33:58 while we’re doing the phase three studies.
01:34:01 But they have to pay for it themselves.
01:34:04 The sponsor has to pay for all the research.
01:34:06 But Expanded Access, because there’s no control group,
01:34:09 everybody gets the MDMA, people can pay for it themselves.
01:34:12 And we think that’ll start in a couple months.
01:34:15 But it’s very limited, it’s limited to certain cities.
01:34:17 There’s also a program called Right to Try,
01:34:20 which is passed through Congress.
01:34:23 It’s similar to this idea of compassionate use,
01:34:26 but it cuts the FDA out of it.
01:34:28 And patients can negotiate directly with pharma companies
01:34:32 to get access to their drugs.
01:34:35 That’s starting to happen, I think, in Canada now,
01:34:38 they’re letting people have compassionate access
01:34:41 to psilocybin for life threatening illness,
01:34:44 because there has been studies with psilocybin
01:34:46 for cancer patients and others with life threatening illness.
01:34:49 As far as your question about when will you be able
01:34:51 to access this for personal growth outside of medicine?
01:34:56 I’ll take that to mean fully legally,
01:34:59 where you can just go buy pure drugs somewhere,
01:35:00 when will that happen?
01:35:02 We already are starting to see the decriminalization
01:35:05 in certain areas of plant psychedelics.
01:35:09 And we see overall drug decrim, like that passed in Oregon,
01:35:13 so that any drug is now, it’s not legal,
01:35:16 you can’t really fully set up clinics to offer it to people
01:35:20 or there’s no legal supply like that,
01:35:22 but it’s decriminalized.
01:35:24 So my sense of things is based a lot on watching
01:35:27 what happened with medical marijuana
01:35:28 and marijuana legalization.
01:35:30 So we’re sitting here in Massachusetts
01:35:31 where marijuana is legal,
01:35:33 but what happened first was medical marijuana.
01:35:36 So what we see is that medicalization,
01:35:40 by demonstrating that under certain contexts,
01:35:43 the risks are much less than the benefits,
01:35:47 and then there are benefits,
01:35:49 and then people hear stories about people
01:35:51 that have gotten better,
01:35:53 and then that changes their minds,
01:35:54 and then eventually that builds up to why are we throwing
01:35:57 people in jail for this?
01:35:57 Just the culture, yeah.
01:35:59 Yeah, so I think that what we’re gonna have 2023
01:36:02 is MDMA approved by the FDA, chances are.
01:36:07 Psilocybin will be a year or two after that.
01:36:09 Then what we’re gonna need is a decade
01:36:11 of psychedelic clinics that are gonna roll out
01:36:14 across America, also other countries as well,
01:36:17 thousands of these psychedelic clinics.
01:36:20 We already have hundreds of ketamine clinics
01:36:23 that are ketamine for depression.
01:36:26 More and more people are realizing that ketamine,
01:36:28 when it’s used with therapy, it’s better than when it’s not.
01:36:31 But the therapists wanna be psychedelic therapists.
01:36:34 They don’t wanna be a ketamine therapist or an MDMA therapist.
01:36:36 So they’ll be cross trained.
01:36:38 So we will have a decade of these thousands
01:36:40 of psychedelic clinics and all these stories
01:36:42 of people getting better.
01:36:43 And 2035 is when I think that we will move
01:36:46 to licensed legalization, which is when you will
01:36:49 have the option of just going somewhere
01:36:52 once you’ve done this educational stuff.
01:36:55 Potentially, I also think it would be better
01:36:58 to have the opportunity for people to go for free,
01:37:02 paid for by tax money, to these clinics,
01:37:04 and you have your first experience
01:37:05 with psychedelics under supervision.
01:37:08 And you know what you’re getting into.
01:37:09 You’ve, you know, to ask the questionnaire,
01:37:12 what the risks are with the drugs,
01:37:14 then you get your license.
01:37:15 So 2035 is when I think that’ll happen.
01:37:18 And the clinics will be sites of these initiations.
01:37:20 Yes.
01:37:21 And so it’d be a safe environment, just like you said,
01:37:23 all the things that are actually maximize the likelihood
01:37:27 of a pleasant experience and all those kinds of things.
01:37:30 It is a frustratingly slow process.
01:37:32 And the FDA being part of that process is very frustrating.
01:37:36 But of course there’s benefits,
01:37:40 but boy, I wish it could move a lot faster.
01:37:44 Yeah, well, one thing that I’ve learned
01:37:45 from being a parent is that when you have little kids,
01:37:52 it seems like they’ll be with you forever.
01:37:55 But then when they grow up and they go to college
01:37:58 and they leave, do you look back and like,
01:37:59 where did that 20 years go?
01:38:01 Yeah.
01:38:02 You know, so we’re still dealing with the legacy
01:38:05 of the civil war and slavery in America.
01:38:08 So actually a 20 year plan is not that long.
01:38:11 So while we say it’s frustratingly slow, and it is,
01:38:17 I mean, it’s 50 years since the psychedelic sixties.
01:38:21 And right now it’s 36 years since MDMA was criminalized.
01:38:29 And you think about all those people that committed suicide
01:38:31 from PTSD or from anything else.
01:38:34 And all those people that could have been helped
01:38:36 if the DEA had accepted the Administrative Law Judge
01:38:40 recommendation that MDMA stay in schedule three.
01:38:42 It’s tremendously sad.
01:38:45 At the same time, culture evolves slowly.
01:38:48 You know, you read the Bible or you read all this stuff,
01:38:50 we’re not that different from people thousands of years ago.
01:38:53 So how are we gonna really evolve enough
01:38:56 over the next couple of decades
01:38:58 so we don’t destroy the planet and don’t kill each other?
01:39:01 That’s why I think psychedelics have an important role
01:39:04 to play, that’s why I’ve devoted my life to psychedelics.
01:39:07 And it is frustratingly slow.
01:39:09 And what I said to myself is our whole effort
01:39:13 has not been fast enough.
01:39:15 Can we talk a little bit about PTSD and MDMA?
01:39:18 There’s this fascinating paper came out
01:39:22 on a fascinating study that you’re a part of.
01:39:26 That’s a phase three study.
01:39:27 Can you describe what the study is?
01:39:29 Can you describe what phase three means?
01:39:31 Can you describe what the findings are
01:39:35 and why it’s in fact so important and impactful?
01:39:39 Yeah, this study came out May 10th in Nature Medicine.
01:39:41 So one of the highest impact factors in medicine,
01:39:44 journals, it was tremendous.
01:39:46 So to make a drug into a medicine,
01:39:48 the first thing you need to do is what are called
01:39:52 nonclinical or preclinical studies,
01:39:54 meaning safety established in animals.
01:39:57 What does the drug do?
01:39:58 What are the side effects in animals?
01:40:00 Where do you see the risks?
01:40:01 And then you negotiate with FDA to do phase one studies.
01:40:05 And phase one studies are where you move
01:40:07 from animals to humans.
01:40:09 And those are more safety studies
01:40:11 and trying to describe what the drug does
01:40:14 so that you can determine
01:40:16 if there is potential medical value there.
01:40:19 Certain drugs like cancer drugs are so toxic
01:40:24 that you don’t have phase one studies in healthy volunteers.
01:40:29 That’s like phase one slash two,
01:40:31 where you bring in the patients,
01:40:33 but you still are doing sort of dose response
01:40:35 safety studies, but you use patients.
01:40:38 But most phase one studies are healthy volunteers.
01:40:41 Phase two are where you start bringing in the patients
01:40:45 and you start experimenting with various different things.
01:40:48 The purpose of phase two is really just to design phase three.
01:40:52 Now, again, I’m sort of putting out of the picture
01:40:55 in another area is mechanism of action.
01:40:57 How do these drugs work?
01:40:58 Phase two, you’re trying to figure out what they do,
01:41:02 who your patient population is, what are the risks,
01:41:05 who do you include, who do you exclude,
01:41:07 what are the doses, what is your treatment,
01:41:10 what are your measures.
01:41:13 In our case, it was how do you do a double blind study?
01:41:18 That was a big part of phase two.
01:41:20 That’s a big challenge for psychedelic drugs.
01:41:22 Any kind of drugs that have a real strong effect,
01:41:25 how do you do a double blind study?
01:41:27 The double blind, sorry to interrupt,
01:41:28 would mean that the patient should not be aware
01:41:33 whether it’s a placebo or not.
01:41:35 And the researcher.
01:41:36 And the researcher is not aware.
01:41:39 And so for that lack of awareness,
01:41:41 when the effect is really strong,
01:41:42 it’s very difficult to do on both the researcher
01:41:44 and the patient side.
01:41:45 Yes, and sometimes they talk about triple blind.
01:41:49 So the other part is the raters
01:41:51 that evaluate the symptoms and before and after.
01:41:54 So you ideally want triple blind.
01:41:55 You want the patients, the researchers,
01:41:58 and the evaluators of the outcomes, all of them,
01:42:02 not to know what the drug, whether it was drug or placebo,
01:42:05 and that’s to reduce experiment or bias.
01:42:10 And then you move to phase three,
01:42:12 once you’ve figured out how to design the phase three studies.
01:42:15 And phase three are the large scale multiple studies
01:42:18 multi site, placebo controlled, double blind studies,
01:42:23 where you must prove safety and efficacy
01:42:25 in order to get permission to market the drug.
01:42:29 Now, for us, when we started MAPS in 86,
01:42:34 as I said, it was one year after the criminalization
01:42:36 of MDMA in 85, we had five different protocols
01:42:39 that were rejected by the FDA for studying with MDMA.
01:42:43 And these were all various phase one studies.
01:42:46 They came from Harvard, from UC San Francisco,
01:42:49 from the University in Arizona,
01:42:51 and Albuquerque, New Mexico, all over.
01:42:53 And they were all rejected.
01:42:55 1992, six years after we started,
01:42:59 we got the first permission for phase one.
01:43:02 And that took us through much of the 90s.
01:43:05 Again, things are slow because we have to raise the money
01:43:08 through donations.
01:43:09 And then in 1999 is when we started the work with PTSD.
01:43:14 And that then took us till November 29th, 2016,
01:43:22 which is when we had the end of phase two meeting with FDA.
01:43:25 So it took 30 years from the start of MAPS
01:43:29 to the end of phase two meeting with FDA.
01:43:31 And what we had discovered during phase two
01:43:35 was several different key points.
01:43:38 The drugs that are available right now for PTSD,
01:43:42 the SSRIs, Zoloft and Paxil,
01:43:45 that have been approved by FDA and regulators in Europe
01:43:47 as well, the European Medicines Agency, for PTSD,
01:43:52 they work better in women than in men,
01:43:54 and they failed in combat related PTSD.
01:43:58 All right, so what we learned is that MDMA assisted therapy
01:44:02 works just as well in men or women,
01:44:03 and it works in combat related PTSD.
01:44:06 It works in regardless of the cause of PTSD.
01:44:09 We also discovered that even though there are stories
01:44:12 that people take MDMA at raves and they dance all night
01:44:16 and they overheat and they get hypothermia
01:44:18 and they die from overheating, which is true
01:44:20 and can happen from pure MDMA,
01:44:23 or that sometimes people have heard about
01:44:25 needing to cool down and so they drink water
01:44:29 and then while they’re dancing all night
01:44:31 and then they drink too much water
01:44:32 and then they dilute their blood
01:44:34 and they die from hyponatremia.
01:44:36 So there are risks of MDMA, but we discovered
01:44:39 that in a therapeutic setting,
01:44:41 we can control all those risks,
01:44:42 those things don’t happen at all.
01:44:44 So we discovered safety, we could demonstrate safety.
01:44:49 We also figured out that our measure, the CAPS,
01:44:53 the Clinician Administrative PTSD Scale,
01:44:55 that it’s the gold standard all over the world
01:44:58 for measuring PTSD symptoms,
01:44:59 it’s what the FDA and the EMA require.
01:45:02 We discovered that it was a good measure for us
01:45:04 and that we could show changes in that.
01:45:07 The other big thing that we learned is that,
01:45:11 and we haven’t mentioned this yet,
01:45:13 but the work in the 50s and 60s with LSD and psilocybin
01:45:16 and the modern research over the last 20 years
01:45:19 with psilocybin and classic psychedelics
01:45:20 has demonstrated that there’s a link
01:45:23 between this mystical experience,
01:45:24 this unit of mystical experience and therapeutic outcomes
01:45:28 for the treatment of addiction,
01:45:29 for working with people with life threatening illnesses
01:45:32 that for OCD, for Obsessive Compulsive Disorder,
01:45:36 that there’s with the classic psychedelics,
01:45:39 both in the 50 years ago and then the research now
01:45:42 has been that there’s a link between the depth
01:45:45 of the mystical experience and therapeutic outcome.
01:45:48 What we discovered is that that’s not the case for MDMA,
01:45:52 that people do score fairly high
01:45:55 on the scales of mystical experience,
01:45:56 not as high as they do with the classic psychedelics,
01:45:59 but they do score pretty high on average.
01:46:02 And a significant number of them have over the cutoff
01:46:06 for what would be considered a full mystical experience.
01:46:09 So enough to say that we could look at a correlation
01:46:11 and we didn’t find any.
01:46:13 The other thing that we discovered,
01:46:15 and this was more humbling, I would say for me personally,
01:46:20 is that my dissertation at the Kennedy School,
01:46:22 a big part of it was on the,
01:46:24 it’s about the regulation of the medical use
01:46:26 of psychedelics in marijuana.
01:46:27 A big part of my dissertation was how to do
01:46:29 the double blind study.
01:46:31 And I thought I’d solve the problem
01:46:33 and I persuaded my dissertation committee
01:46:35 that I’d solve the problem.
01:46:37 And the solution was therapy with low dose MDMA
01:46:41 versus therapy with full dose MDMA.
01:46:43 And everybody knows that they’re gonna get MDMA,
01:46:46 most of these people have never done it before,
01:46:49 they’ll be confused about is it full dose or low dose.
01:46:52 And then the challenge is to pick a dose
01:46:56 that’s high enough so that there is this confusion,
01:47:00 but not so high that it’s so therapeutic
01:47:02 that we can’t tell the difference between the groups.
01:47:04 So we studied zero, meaning inactive placebo,
01:47:09 25 milligrams, 30 milligrams, 40 milligrams,
01:47:12 50 milligrams, 75 milligrams, 100 milligrams,
01:47:14 125 and 150.
01:47:18 What we discovered is that my dissertation was wrong
01:47:21 and that there is no good solution
01:47:24 to the double blind problem.
01:47:26 What we found is that, to our surprise actually,
01:47:31 was that 75 milligrams was an effective dose.
01:47:34 We didn’t think that.
01:47:36 I mean, the normal dose is like,
01:47:39 full dose is like 125 milligrams, something like that.
01:47:42 But 75 milligrams was an effective dose.
01:47:45 And we discovered that the lower doses,
01:47:48 so I was half right, you could say,
01:47:50 the doses of 25, 30, 40, 50,
01:47:53 they could produce enough confusion
01:47:57 that you could say that they were successful at blinding,
01:47:59 not perfectly, but enough confusion
01:48:02 so that people, therapists, couldn’t know for sure
01:48:05 so that there was this reduction of bias, you could say.
01:48:09 But what we discovered, again, to our surprise,
01:48:14 was that the low doses made people uncomfortable.
01:48:17 They stimulated them, but they didn’t reduce the fear.
01:48:23 And so people still got better
01:48:25 with the therapy with low dose MDMA.
01:48:28 But if we gave them therapy with inactive placebo,
01:48:31 they did even better
01:48:33 than if we gave them therapy with low dose MDMA.
01:48:37 So we call it an anti therapeutic effect.
01:48:41 I don’t mean to imply that they got worse,
01:48:43 but it made people uncomfortable.
01:48:45 People didn’t like it.
01:48:47 But we would still help them make some progress.
01:48:49 So we had the blinding,
01:48:51 but what it meant by reducing the effect of therapy
01:48:54 with inactive placebo is that it would make it easier
01:48:57 for us to find a difference between the two groups.
01:49:01 And so the real question is,
01:49:02 if you can do it with therapy, why bother add a drug?
01:49:07 So we went to the FDA,
01:49:09 and so this was what we discovered during phase two.
01:49:12 We went to the FDA at this end of phase two meeting,
01:49:15 and we said, we can give you blinding,
01:49:17 but it will make it easier for us
01:49:20 to find a difference between the two groups.
01:49:22 And so we suggest that we do therapy with inactive placebo
01:49:26 versus therapy with full dose MDMA.
01:49:29 That will cause a problem
01:49:30 because most people will be able to tell what they’ve got.
01:49:34 What Tom Loughran, a doctor
01:49:36 who used to be head of psychiatry products at FDA
01:49:39 is our main advisor.
01:49:41 So the first thing he said
01:49:42 is that the double blind fails in practice a lot,
01:49:45 even with SSRIs,
01:49:47 because there’s certain side effects
01:49:49 that you have with these drugs.
01:49:50 And the doctors who are doing these research
01:49:52 when you’re reporting your side effects,
01:49:55 they can say, oh, that’s probably,
01:49:56 you got the active drug instead of the placebo.
01:49:58 So the double blind is in theory is terrific,
01:50:01 but in practice, it doesn’t always work quite as well.
01:50:05 And so what Tom said is that there are two main approaches
01:50:10 that they think are important to reduce bias.
01:50:13 The first one is easy to do.
01:50:15 It’s called random assignment.
01:50:17 So sometimes there are studies
01:50:19 where you’ll treat a bunch of people with something
01:50:24 and some fraction of them will get better and some won’t.
01:50:26 And then you say, okay, all those who didn’t get better,
01:50:29 who volunteers to get this new treatment?
01:50:31 And then you give them the new treatment,
01:50:33 but the people that volunteer
01:50:34 are more likely to wanna get better.
01:50:36 They’re not representative sample of everybody that has.
01:50:39 So when you have random assignment,
01:50:41 everybody is similarly motivated
01:50:43 and meets the same inclusion, exclusion criteria.
01:50:47 So that’s what we told,
01:50:48 of course we need random assignment.
01:50:50 The other part was when the bias double blind
01:50:54 doesn’t work as well,
01:50:55 then the system of independent raters
01:50:59 is especially important of how you do that.
01:51:03 So we have over a pool of raters, over 20 of them,
01:51:08 and we do this monthly interrater reliability tests
01:51:11 to make sure that they evaluate this,
01:51:15 so that they’re given a videotape of a PTSD patient
01:51:17 and then they’re supposed to rate them
01:51:19 according to their symptoms.
01:51:20 And then we sort of make sure
01:51:22 that we’ve got this calibrated rater pool
01:51:25 and it’s all done by Zoom, by telemedicine,
01:51:28 and they’re randomly assigned to the next person
01:51:30 that needs a rating.
01:51:32 So they said 20 raters.
01:51:34 So we’ve got like 20 raters
01:51:35 and what we wanna do is make it so that each rater
01:51:40 sees each patient only once, maybe twice,
01:51:43 but not tracking them through the study.
01:51:47 So that tries to reduce the bias in the raters
01:51:49 that they don’t know where this person is in the study.
01:51:54 And so there’s a fellow, Bob Temple,
01:51:59 who’s like the old wise man at the FDA.
01:52:01 He’s been there since 1972.
01:52:03 He was in charge of the Office of Science Policy
01:52:05 and they brought him into the final meeting of this process
01:52:09 where we are trying to design phase three.
01:52:11 So once FDA said, yes, you can go to phase three,
01:52:14 that was November 29th, 2016,
01:52:17 we then negotiated for eight months
01:52:20 on the design of phase three
01:52:21 and all of the other information that FDA is gonna need.
01:52:25 This process of design.
01:52:28 To the extent that I have any artistic creativity,
01:52:31 it’s in protocol design.
01:52:34 I really love that.
01:52:35 So you enjoy this process.
01:52:36 I love it.
01:52:37 I love it because it’s always trade offs
01:52:39 and I acknowledge that we are all biased.
01:52:44 And so how do you,
01:52:46 there’s something beautiful about the scientific process
01:52:49 designed to get you to the truth.
01:52:52 Especially when that scientific process
01:52:54 is trying to get to the truth of the human organism,
01:52:57 which is so complicated.
01:52:58 So it’s very difficult to dissect,
01:53:01 to get the strong effects.
01:53:04 And when you’re analyzing,
01:53:06 when you have like raters, they’re watching a video.
01:53:11 Removing subjectivity from that is very, very challenging.
01:53:15 Yeah, very much so.
01:53:18 And so we came to this agreement with FDA though
01:53:21 that we would use this independent rater pool.
01:53:25 And so we learned in phase two again,
01:53:30 that the double blind,
01:53:31 there was no solution to the double blind problem.
01:53:34 And both the FDA and the European Medicines Agency
01:53:37 in the end agreed that the best design
01:53:39 was therapy with inactive placebo
01:53:41 versus therapy with full dose MDMA,
01:53:43 accepting the fact that most people will be able to tell
01:53:47 whether they got nothing or they got full dose MDMA.
01:53:50 Most therapists will be able to tell the difference,
01:53:52 but that makes a harder test for us
01:53:55 to show a difference between the two groups
01:53:57 because we’re giving them inactive placebo
01:54:00 and not the anti therapeutic effect of low dose MDMA.
01:54:03 So once we started phase three,
01:54:06 so then we were able to start in 2018 phase three.
01:54:10 And the paper in Nature Medicine that just came out
01:54:13 was the results of our first phase three study.
01:54:18 We came to agreement with FDA
01:54:20 that we would do two phase three studies,
01:54:22 each would have 100 persons in them.
01:54:25 And what the FDA said to us is that they thought
01:54:29 that we could prove efficacy with smaller numbers
01:54:33 than they wanted to see for safety.
01:54:36 The reason they said that is it in phase two,
01:54:38 we had a large effect size.
01:54:41 So from a statistical point of view,
01:54:43 the bigger of an effect that you’re looking for,
01:54:47 the fewer number of people you need
01:54:49 to get statistical significance.
01:54:51 When you’re trying to find small differences,
01:54:53 you need large numbers of people
01:54:54 to sort of work out the noise.
01:54:59 So we came to agreement on two 100 person phase three studies.
01:55:05 And the idea is that it’s very possible
01:55:07 that the first study would show the efficacy
01:55:11 because the effect is so strong.
01:55:13 Yeah, yeah, and the second, but also safety as well.
01:55:16 So one of the things we also realized
01:55:19 when you work with a highly stigmatized drug
01:55:22 in the midst of still the drug war and prohibition
01:55:26 that we need highly sympathetic subjects
01:55:31 and we need to make the best case we can,
01:55:34 which means we need to work with the hardest cases
01:55:37 so that this is really needed.
01:55:38 And so we end up enrolling people.
01:55:40 The first study was chronic severe PTSD.
01:55:45 And unlike many studies of PTSD,
01:55:47 we enroll people that have previously attempted suicide.
01:55:50 Wow.
01:55:51 So we have multiple people
01:55:53 that have tried to kill themselves
01:55:54 that we felt like if we were to exclude them,
01:55:57 what are we doing?
01:55:58 Those are the people that need it the most.
01:56:00 So we came to this agreement with FDA.
01:56:04 We’re gonna work with chronic severe PTSD patients,
01:56:09 including those that had attempted suicide.
01:56:11 And we would do these two 100 person studies.
01:56:14 And we also negotiated what’s called an interim analysis.
01:56:19 So what that means is that
01:56:22 when the study is underway,
01:56:26 and often big, big studies,
01:56:28 they have this kind of interim analysis
01:56:30 where what you do is,
01:56:31 and for us, we negotiate when we had 60% or 60 people
01:56:35 had reached the primary outcome measure
01:56:37 and all 100 had been enrolled,
01:56:39 then we would take a look at the data.
01:56:42 And if the statistical analysis that we did
01:56:46 was showing based on a certain effect size that we chose
01:56:52 based on what we saw in phase two,
01:56:55 the interim analysis
01:56:56 is for what’s called sample size reestimation.
01:56:59 So what it means is if the results aren’t as good
01:57:01 as you thought they would, you can add more people.
01:57:04 And then you’ll get statistical significance.
01:57:07 It means that your effect isn’t as strong as you thought.
01:57:10 It’ll be harder to get insurance to cover it,
01:57:12 but FDA will still approve it
01:57:14 because FDA also believes that these are group averages.
01:57:18 There may be some people that will later figure out
01:57:20 respond better than others.
01:57:22 So they’ll approve it if it’s statistically significant,
01:57:25 even if it has a low effect size.
01:57:27 The SSRIs have low effect size.
01:57:30 So we did the interim analysis in March of 2020.
01:57:35 And what we discovered to our delight
01:57:38 was that we did not need to add any subjects.
01:57:41 That’s all we were told.
01:57:42 We weren’t told like, what is the results?
01:57:45 We were just told all we were gonna get is a number, zero,
01:57:48 or you need to add X numbers of people to the study
01:57:50 to get statistical significance.
01:57:53 That’s right around the time that COVID hit
01:57:55 and lockdowns happened.
01:57:56 And we ended up negotiating with FDA
01:57:59 that we would end the study with 90 people instead of 100.
01:58:04 It took a while for us to end up doing that.
01:58:06 So the paper that we just published
01:58:08 is on the results of 90 people.
01:58:10 I think it was 46 in the MDMA group,
01:58:13 44 in the placebo group.
01:58:16 And what we discovered was that the study worked better
01:58:21 than we had even hoped.
01:58:23 So the first thing is that
01:58:25 you look at statistical significance.
01:58:27 You have to get 0.05,
01:58:28 which basically means a nickel out of a dollar,
01:58:30 a one in 20 chance that the difference
01:58:33 between the two groups is due to some random factor
01:58:36 rather than to your intervention.
01:58:38 And in this case, the placebo group gets therapy
01:58:42 and then with inactive placebo
01:58:44 and then the group gets MDMA with active placebo.
01:58:49 So you have to get 0.05.
01:58:52 There’s another measure
01:58:53 that the FDA uses sometimes called robust,
01:58:56 which means one in a thousand,
01:58:59 instead of one in 20, one in a thousand.
01:59:01 And if you get a robust results, 0.001,
01:59:06 and you meet some other criteria,
01:59:09 they might agree to approve the drug
01:59:11 on the basis of just one phase three study instead of two.
01:59:15 Because when you think about it,
01:59:16 a one in 20 chance for your first phase three study,
01:59:20 a one in 20 chance for your second phase three study,
01:59:23 you multiply that together, it’s one in 400, 0.025.
01:59:28 So that’s pretty good.
01:59:32 So robust 0.001 is even better
01:59:35 than two independent phase three studies, each at 0.05.
01:59:41 What we ended up getting was one in 10,000, 0.0001.
01:59:46 Outrageous, incredibly.
01:59:49 So that’s a measure of both the difference
01:59:51 between the two groups and the variability.
01:59:53 And so what it meant is that we had minimal variability,
01:59:58 that most people who got the MDA
02:00:00 got quite a large amount of benefit from it.
02:00:03 And most people who got the placebo
02:00:05 were more or less in the same range as well.
02:00:07 That’s really exciting, by the way.
02:00:08 I mean, I suppose it’s exciting
02:00:13 from a perspective of approval by the FDA.
02:00:16 Maybe perhaps that’s the way you’re seeing it,
02:00:18 but it’s also exciting because it has a chance
02:00:22 to help people that are truly suffering, yeah.
02:00:26 Well, if we can get one in 10,000
02:00:29 in the first phase three study,
02:00:31 chances are we can get one in 20 in the second.
02:00:34 So it’s really gonna be about safety for us
02:00:36 in the second phase three study.
02:00:39 Now, you can have a large P value, a large significance,
02:00:45 but you could have an effect that’s not very significant.
02:00:49 It’s not clinically significant.
02:00:51 You can have statistical significance
02:00:52 without clinical significance.
02:00:55 And as I said, the more people you get in the study,
02:00:58 you can find smaller and smaller differences
02:00:59 between two groups.
02:01:02 Now, we showed that we had a very large effect size.
02:01:07 So effect size is based on…
02:01:10 That scale you mentioned?
02:01:11 Well, the scale of the effect size
02:01:13 is based on standard deviations.
02:01:17 So an effect size of one means that your results
02:01:20 are one standard deviation away from the norm.
02:01:23 That’s considered very large.
02:01:26 The SSRIs, because they were like 0.3, 0.4 effect size,
02:01:32 that’s considered small effect size.
02:01:34 Medium is starting to be around 0.6
02:01:36 and 0.8 and above are large effect sizes.
02:01:41 We had what’s called placebo subtracted effect size.
02:01:45 There’s two different ways to look at it.
02:01:46 Placebo subtracted means you kind of look at the difference
02:01:49 between your two groups.
02:01:51 And what that is for us, since one group had therapy
02:01:54 and one had therapy plus MDMA,
02:01:56 the placebo subtracted effect size
02:01:58 is basically the effect of just the MDMA
02:02:02 because you’ve kind of washed out the therapy.
02:02:03 That was 0.91.
02:02:05 So we had a large effect size, which was different.
02:02:08 Wow, so 0.91 over just the therapy, so over the placebo.
02:02:13 Yeah. Wow.
02:02:13 Now, when we do the within group,
02:02:17 meaning the group that just got the MDMA plus therapy,
02:02:21 look at their baseline and their outcomes.
02:02:23 That’s another way to look at it.
02:02:25 And that’s what’s gonna actually happen in practice
02:02:27 because people are gonna get MDMA plus therapy.
02:02:30 That’s 2.1 effect size.
02:02:32 Two standard deviations away from the norm
02:02:35 is enormous effect size.
02:02:38 The other part is that we had no effect by site,
02:02:44 which is very important.
02:02:44 So we had 15 sites, two in Israel, two in Canada,
02:02:47 11 throughout the United States.
02:02:50 The FDA looks at, is there a side effect?
02:02:53 Because what that might mean is
02:02:54 maybe you’ve got all your patients
02:02:56 or most of your patients going to this one site,
02:02:58 which is these highly experienced therapists
02:03:01 and they’re like hippies from way back
02:03:03 and they’re super experienced with psychedelics
02:03:05 and they’re getting great results,
02:03:07 but nobody else gets good results.
02:03:09 So we had no effect by site.
02:03:11 That’s incredible.
02:03:12 That we’ve been able to train all these new therapists.
02:03:14 We had about 80 therapists working at all these 15 sites.
02:03:20 We also discovered that there’s a group
02:03:23 that’s considered to be very difficult to treat,
02:03:26 which is called the dissociative subtype.
02:03:29 So when people are traumatized,
02:03:32 one of the ways to psychologically survive that
02:03:37 is you dissociate.
02:03:38 It’s like you’re not there.
02:03:41 When you do that though, it’s hard to come back
02:03:43 because when you come back,
02:03:45 then you get all these painful memories and fearful.
02:03:47 And so the extreme of that
02:03:50 is called dissociative identity disorder,
02:03:53 kind of like schizophrenia, almost dissociative identity.
02:03:56 So we let people in who are on the dissociative subtype
02:04:01 and those are considered to be the hardest to treat
02:04:03 because the theory is that you need to be ego intact.
02:04:07 As I said, the mystical experience is not correlated
02:04:10 with therapeutic outcomes.
02:04:11 And you need to be talking about what traumatized you
02:04:13 and working through that and expressing it,
02:04:15 letting it out, not keeping it in.
02:04:18 So the dissociative subtype seems like it’s harder
02:04:22 for them to get back into the event
02:04:24 because they’re so dissociated.
02:04:26 What we showed is that those people did even better
02:04:29 on average than everybody else.
02:04:31 So that MDMA is integrative.
02:04:33 It helps people who are so separate
02:04:36 that they make even more rapid progress.
02:04:39 So it’s almost like the MDMA made it more difficult
02:04:41 for them to dissociate.
02:04:43 Yes.
02:04:44 Yeah, or you could say it made it easier
02:04:45 for them to remember.
02:04:47 Yes, exactly.
02:04:48 To reverse the dissociation.
02:04:49 Yeah.
02:04:50 And we find that MDMA enhances memory for the trauma
02:04:54 so that you can have these unconscious memories
02:04:57 or memories that you cannot remember
02:04:59 or that you’ve suppressed so much,
02:05:00 but they distort your view.
02:05:02 Your filter of the world is distorted
02:05:04 by these fearful memories that the world can’t be trusted.
02:05:07 People can’t be trusted.
02:05:08 It’s always about to happen.
02:05:10 So we find that MDMA increases memory for the trauma,
02:05:13 but by reducing the fear,
02:05:15 then the memories can come to the surface.
02:05:16 Then you can process them, let out the emotions,
02:05:18 cry, scream, shake, whatever.
02:05:21 And then through this MDMA effect
02:05:24 on the amygdala and the hippocampus,
02:05:26 it helps you store these memories into longterm storage
02:05:29 so that they’re not always about to happen.
02:05:31 They’re in the past.
02:05:32 They’re part of your story, but they’re not the whole story.
02:05:35 So we discovered that the dissociative subtype works better.
02:05:38 Now, none of this would be enough unless safety.
02:05:42 So from a safety perspective,
02:05:45 what we discovered is that there was one woman in the study
02:05:48 that attempted to kill herself twice during the study.
02:05:52 There was another woman that was so worried
02:05:57 that she might kill herself,
02:05:58 that the therapy brought these things to the surface
02:06:00 that she’s been pushing away,
02:06:01 that she checked herself into a hospital
02:06:03 in order to avoid self harm.
02:06:06 At the end of the study,
02:06:08 what we learned is both of them were in the placebo group.
02:06:11 We didn’t have anybody in the MDMA group
02:06:14 attempt to kill themselves.
02:06:16 So the MDMA is really helpful
02:06:21 for giving people a sense of hope
02:06:24 and that they can somehow process this.
02:06:27 Now, it’s not to say that nobody will ever commit suicide.
02:06:30 That’s our big concern in the second phase three study.
02:06:34 As I said, it’s more gonna be about safety
02:06:36 than about efficacy.
02:06:37 We think we’ll get the efficacy,
02:06:38 but we’re very concerned about safety.
02:06:42 Because we had problems in the first phase three study
02:06:46 of somebody trying to kill herself twice
02:06:47 in the placebo group,
02:06:49 it’s the background for having PTSD.
02:06:52 So there’d have to be a disproportionate number of people
02:06:55 in the MDMA group try to kill themselves
02:06:57 or succeed in killing themselves
02:06:58 than in the placebo group for the FDA to say,
02:07:01 oh, this MDMA, it’s too dangerous.
02:07:04 We don’t think that’s gonna happen.
02:07:05 So the other findings from safety
02:07:11 is that the side effects are transitory.
02:07:13 They’re minor, they’re sweating or jaw clenching
02:07:17 or a slight temperature increase.
02:07:19 And everybody that’s been to a rave knows about it.
02:07:23 Take an ecstasy, there are some side effects.
02:07:26 But they’re minor, they’re transitory
02:07:27 and there has been this massive problem
02:07:30 of during the eighties, the nineties,
02:07:33 NIDA, the National Institute on Drug Abuse
02:07:34 was trying to say that MDMA was neurotoxic
02:07:37 and that you take it
02:07:38 and it’s gonna cause nerve terminal degeneration.
02:07:41 It’s gonna be major brain damage.
02:07:42 It’s gonna be significant functional consequences.
02:07:45 And back then they were saying that MDMA is too dangerous.
02:07:48 It should never even be researched.
02:07:49 Nobody should even get it once
02:07:51 because it’s poison and brain damage.
02:07:54 Well, we no longer believe that, that was exaggerated.
02:07:57 That was in service of the drug war.
02:08:00 But we’ve done in phase two neurocognitive tests
02:08:04 before and after in two of our different sites
02:08:07 and showed no decline in cognitive functioning.
02:08:09 So we don’t think that there’s any neurotoxicity happening
02:08:14 and the doses that we use.
02:08:16 There’s no obvious functional consequences.
02:08:18 People are getting better.
02:08:20 And the other thing that we’ve learned in phase two
02:08:24 and that we still have to learn from this study.
02:08:25 So what we showed is the durability of the effect.
02:08:29 We showed that 32% of the people
02:08:32 that got the therapy without MDMA
02:08:34 at two months after the last experimental session
02:08:36 no longer had PTSD.
02:08:38 Just with the therapy, which is phenomenal
02:08:41 because these are on average 14 years PTSD,
02:08:44 one third had PTSD over 20 years.
02:08:48 And just with the therapy,
02:08:51 32% no longer had PTSD at the two months.
02:08:54 However, those people that got MDMA, it was 67%.
02:08:58 No longer had PTSD, more than twice as good.
02:09:02 In phase two and in phase three,
02:09:04 we’re also gonna do the 12 month followup.
02:09:07 That’s not for the FDA.
02:09:09 That’s not for approvability.
02:09:10 That’s more for insurance companies
02:09:12 because this is expensive, a lot of therapy time.
02:09:15 If it fades, if it’s great results initially
02:09:18 but then it fades after six months, what’s the point?
02:09:20 And what we showed in phase two
02:09:24 is that people keep getting better.
02:09:28 At the two month followup, they’re doing pretty well
02:09:31 but at the 12 month followup, they’re even better.
02:09:34 So it’s durable.
02:09:35 People have learned how to process trauma.
02:09:38 They keep getting better.
02:09:39 So we’ve not reached that point in this phase three study
02:09:41 where everybody’s got their one year followup.
02:09:43 But we have also done three and a half year followups
02:09:46 to some of the groups that were in phase two
02:09:48 and showed that it was durable.
02:09:50 And we’re doing a long term followup now
02:09:53 to many of the people in phase two,
02:09:55 some of them treated 15 years ago.
02:09:57 So that’s all more for the insurance companies.
02:09:59 So basically what we found in the paper
02:10:02 that we just published is that it was highly efficacious,
02:10:05 highly significant, no effect by sight,
02:10:07 works in the hardest cases and the safety record was great.
02:10:13 That’s an incredible success.
02:10:14 And that’s really exciting, especially given
02:10:17 that the people who’ve committed, who attempted
02:10:21 to commit suicide were let into the study.
02:10:23 And so these are people who are truly suffering.
02:10:30 I mean, that’s incredibly exciting.
02:10:36 And I mean, just to speak to the frustration
02:10:38 why things can’t move faster,
02:10:39 but for what it is, it’s incredibly exciting.
02:10:44 Is there other studies of this nature
02:10:48 that you foresee enabling that same kind
02:10:51 of positive impact, whether it’s MDMA
02:10:53 for other things like treating addiction,
02:10:55 or maybe it’s psilocybin for other conditions?
02:10:59 Is there something else that’s promising?
02:11:01 Yeah, I think that what we’ve discovered
02:11:05 I don’t think is unique to MDMA.
02:11:08 So it’s MDMA assisted psychotherapy.
02:11:12 MDMA is ideal for PTSD.
02:11:15 Maybe it won’t work as well for OCD or other things.
02:11:18 It was very strategic why we chose MDMA
02:11:21 and why we chose PTSD.
02:11:23 But I don’t think that the results that we’ve got
02:11:26 are so unique to MDMA assisted therapy.
02:11:29 I think that psilocybin assisted therapy
02:11:31 is gonna be great for people
02:11:33 with life threatening illnesses,
02:11:35 cancer who are anxious about dying.
02:11:37 It looks like it’s really good
02:11:39 in the treatment of addiction.
02:11:41 Again, these are in combination
02:11:44 with sort of the psilocybin tobacco
02:11:47 is cognitive behavioral therapy with psilocybin.
02:11:51 I think that it’s gonna be a little bit more difficult,
02:11:54 psilocybin for depression.
02:11:55 I don’t know if it’ll be quite as good.
02:11:58 There are some biological aspects sometimes to depression,
02:12:01 but I think that there’ll be really good results
02:12:03 for psilocybin for depression.
02:12:04 I think it’ll be approved.
02:12:05 It’s considered a breakthrough therapy by the FDA.
02:12:09 Ibogaine is phenomenal for opiate addiction,
02:12:12 helping people go through withdrawal
02:12:14 and then giving them this chance
02:12:15 to deal with the material that drives them for addiction.
02:12:21 There was Ben Sessa, Dr. Ben Sessa in England
02:12:23 did MDMA for alcohol use disorder.
02:12:26 And that was really great, the results he got.
02:12:28 And it’s the case that he ended up
02:12:31 basically treating people for trauma.
02:12:33 It’s the trauma that people run,
02:12:35 the emotional challenges that people run from
02:12:37 into quieting that pain through drug addiction or alcoholism.
02:12:43 So trauma is behind a lot of addiction.
02:12:44 I think that we are going to see a revolution in psychiatry
02:12:50 and that there will be a lot of conditions
02:12:54 that have left a lot of people still suffering
02:12:59 that psychedelic assisted therapy,
02:13:01 different psychedelics, different approaches.
02:13:03 But I think that we will see a lot of hope
02:13:06 for psychiatry and psychotherapy
02:13:08 and that psychedelics would be a big part
02:13:09 of changing the practice of psychiatry and psychotherapy.
02:13:13 Yeah, this is really to me fascinating.
02:13:15 So I actually, when I was younger,
02:13:19 for the longest time, wanted to be a psychiatrist.
02:13:21 So I was excited by psychotherapy,
02:13:24 but then I perhaps incorrectly, maybe you can correct me,
02:13:28 but became more and more cynical
02:13:30 because it felt like it was more about prescribing drugs
02:13:33 than psychotherapy.
02:13:34 I’m not going to correct you.
02:13:36 I mean, right now, there is a crisis in psychiatry
02:13:39 that there are so many psychiatrists that are so fed up
02:13:42 because they have been pharmaceuticalized.
02:13:45 They meet people for 15 minutes,
02:13:47 they adjust their medications.
02:13:49 This is the way they make the most money,
02:13:51 but they’ve lost the art of talking to people.
02:13:55 And that’s why we see that so many young psychiatric
02:13:58 residents are so thrilled by psychedelics
02:14:02 that they really want to get back to treating people
02:14:05 as individuals, not just a bunch of chemicals.
02:14:08 Yeah, that’s truly fascinating.
02:14:09 Because the reason it was appealing to me,
02:14:11 it was a way to study the human mind
02:14:14 and to see ways through talking
02:14:18 that you can make people feel better,
02:14:23 make people better, make people suffer less.
02:14:28 And that was really exciting at the time.
02:14:30 I ended up then going to AI because then
02:14:33 I can understand the mind from that angle.
02:14:35 But it’s exciting that that could be also
02:14:42 revolutionized the field of psychotherapy,
02:14:43 take it from its back to its origins,
02:14:47 to where a psychiatrist would be a scholar of the mind.
02:14:51 Yeah, well, Freud talked about dreams
02:14:53 as the railroad to the unconscious.
02:14:56 And there was a lot of,
02:14:57 you really spent a lot of time with people.
02:15:00 Now, right before he died, in his last book,
02:15:05 Freud wrote something, and again,
02:15:07 this will be a rough paraphrase,
02:15:09 but he said that in the future,
02:15:11 we may learn about the energies of the brain
02:15:15 and there’ll be ways with chemicals to influence that
02:15:18 that will help the therapeutic process.
02:15:21 Yeah.
02:15:22 So you could say he was ahead of his time.
02:15:27 Yeah.
02:15:28 This study paints a fascinating picture of a future
02:15:33 where first for medical applications,
02:15:35 but then also in general, psychedelics of various forms
02:15:39 could be used by the broader society.
02:15:42 Forgive the perhaps ridiculous question,
02:15:44 but if much of society, including our politicians,
02:15:49 are taking psychedelics and dissolving their ego
02:15:56 and going through this whole process,
02:15:58 how do you think the world may look different
02:16:01 in 20, 30, 50 years?
02:16:04 Ah, okay, so I said that I think
02:16:08 licensed legalization happens in 2035.
02:16:11 Yes.
02:16:12 And I think by 2050, we will have enough people,
02:16:17 hopefully, spiritualized.
02:16:22 We’re also talking about,
02:16:24 we hear so much in terms of climate change
02:16:27 about net zero carbon.
02:16:29 So our goal is net zero trauma.
02:16:33 When do we have a world with net zero trauma?
02:16:35 I mean, right now, we have two sites in Israel.
02:16:39 So we help a few people,
02:16:41 but the recent war with Gaza has traumatized
02:16:44 millions of people on both sides.
02:16:46 So we are a long way away from net zero trauma.
02:16:52 But that’s the hope, and that’s, I think, possible.
02:16:56 I think humanity as a whole
02:17:01 is like lemmings heading over a cliff
02:17:04 with climate change and with the nuclear proliferation
02:17:09 and just the religious hatreds
02:17:11 and the more the retreat to authoritarianism
02:17:13 and fundamentalism and tribalism.
02:17:17 So I think that there’s a very good chance, though,
02:17:20 that psychedelics used wisely.
02:17:22 So it’s not just make psychedelics legal
02:17:25 and everybody takes them,
02:17:26 as you talked about Ted Kaczynski.
02:17:28 It’s the context that people take it in.
02:17:31 But I think that there’s a reasonable chance
02:17:35 that enough people can,
02:17:38 sort of, you could say, clean their filters
02:17:42 to see people as more similar to them than different,
02:17:48 not to label them as the enemy.
02:17:50 Stan Groff, again, had this beautiful phrase
02:17:52 about transparent to the transcendent.
02:17:56 That’s what, so for our ego,
02:18:00 can we be transparent to the transcendent?
02:18:02 Can the filter that we look through the world at
02:18:05 be cleaned to, you could say,
02:18:08 cleansing the doors of perception?
02:18:10 Can it be cleaned to the point where we can see
02:18:12 the humanity in everybody and see that,
02:18:17 one way to say this is that,
02:18:19 can we get to the point where religions
02:18:21 are seen as like languages?
02:18:23 Where we all have this need to communicate,
02:18:25 there’s thousands of different languages,
02:18:28 we don’t say that this language
02:18:29 is fundamentally better than this language,
02:18:32 this language is the only right language,
02:18:33 everybody must speak English
02:18:34 and Russian is bad or German is better.
02:18:38 Maybe we’ll get to that point that religions are like that,
02:18:41 that there are different cultural backgrounds,
02:18:42 different symbol systems,
02:18:44 different saints and heroes and messiahs and all this,
02:18:47 but that, yeah, Jesus is the son of God,
02:18:50 but so is everybody.
02:18:52 Or the Jews are the chosen people, but so is everybody.
02:18:55 So can we get there?
02:18:57 I think that we can.
02:18:59 And I think that we need to,
02:19:00 to survive the challenges that we’re facing.
02:19:03 And the hope is that by bringing psychedelics
02:19:08 as tools forward and trying to bring the context around them
02:19:14 to be one of responsibility
02:19:15 rather than just profit maximization
02:19:18 and just get as many people to do them
02:19:20 from all these for profit companies,
02:19:23 can we, and then also drug policy reform
02:19:26 and embed knowledge in the society,
02:19:28 can we get to honest drug education?
02:19:31 DARE, the Drug Awareness Resistance Education,
02:19:36 is fundamentally twisted.
02:19:39 But it’s the program that’s used in a lot of schools now.
02:19:42 So can we get honest drug education,
02:19:44 pure drugs, harm reduction,
02:19:47 and knowledge about therapeutic uses
02:19:49 and on the one hand,
02:19:51 and more of these thousands of psychedelic clinics?
02:19:55 I’m hopeful and that’s our goal.
02:19:59 But in this landscape of pharma companies,
02:20:04 they make a lot of money.
02:20:05 Some people are worried about the impact
02:20:07 of those, you know, of big pharma
02:20:10 on the landscape of human trauma.
02:20:13 Yeah, yeah.
02:20:14 So there’s, of course, some companies could do good,
02:20:17 but that’s not inherent,
02:20:20 like many of these companies are not optimizing for good,
02:20:24 they’re optimizing for profit.
02:20:26 Exactly, exactly.
02:20:27 Does this rise of for profit pharma companies worry you?
02:20:31 How do you navigate it?
02:20:33 Do we still have for profit companies
02:20:35 that basically do what MAPS does,
02:20:39 which is like fight the good fight
02:20:41 for the benefit of humanity?
02:20:42 Like how do we proceed in this,
02:20:45 in landscape where drugs can make a lot of money?
02:20:49 Well, I am concerned.
02:20:52 Overall, I think the rise of the for profit companies,
02:20:55 we have to realize is a sign of success,
02:20:58 that we have overcome the regulatory prohibitions,
02:21:04 we’ve overcome a lot of the public attitudes
02:21:06 that are against it, we’ve demonstrated some success.
02:21:09 So the rise of the for profit companies
02:21:12 are a sign of the progress that we’ve made.
02:21:13 On the other hand, turning things over
02:21:15 to profit maximizing companies,
02:21:19 the big concern is that they’re gonna try
02:21:20 to minimize the amount of therapy
02:21:24 and make it so the cost is less,
02:21:26 so insurance companies are more likely to cover it
02:21:28 and then that they just sell the most drugs.
02:21:32 The other thing we’ve seen as an example of this
02:21:34 is S ketamine by Johnson and Johnson for depression.
02:21:37 And it’s done by a profit maximizing company.
02:21:40 They don’t know anything about psychedelic psychotherapy
02:21:43 or psychotherapy at all.
02:21:44 And so they’ve gotten approval for S ketamine
02:21:48 on the basis of it’s just a pharmacological treatment
02:21:51 and it’s not delivered with therapy,
02:21:54 the results fade pretty quickly,
02:21:57 so you need to get more ketamine.
02:21:59 And so it’s designed in a way to maximize the profits
02:22:02 for the pharmaceutical company,
02:22:04 but it doesn’t maximize patient outcomes.
02:22:07 What we’re seeing though in these various clinics
02:22:10 that are being set up is that a lot of people are realizing
02:22:14 that it works better with therapy.
02:22:17 And so the clinics are run by people that are therapists
02:22:20 so that when they provide therapy,
02:22:22 they’re making more money and then you need less ketamine.
02:22:26 Also ketamine itself, S ketamine is a isomer of ketamine
02:22:31 that’s been patented for depression
02:22:33 and they sell it for hundreds of dollars,
02:22:35 but ketamine itself
02:22:37 is one of the world’s essential medicines.
02:22:39 It’s off patent, it’s been around for a long time,
02:22:41 it was the main battlefield anesthetic in Vietnam.
02:22:44 And it’s only a few bucks because it’s generic.
02:22:47 So a lot of the ketamine clinics are saying,
02:22:49 great, thank you, Johnson and Johnson,
02:22:51 you’ve helped demonstrate that ketamine is good
02:22:53 for depression, but we’re not gonna buy it from you.
02:22:56 We’re gonna buy it for a few bucks
02:22:58 and we’re gonna add therapy to it.
02:23:00 Now there’s a bunch of ketamine mills you could say
02:23:02 that are just prescribing the ketamine
02:23:05 and people are making a lot of money there.
02:23:07 So I am worried about that.
02:23:09 I think the best thing that we can do
02:23:11 is create an alternative narrative,
02:23:15 a different kind of example.
02:23:16 We can lead by example.
02:23:18 We can’t make for profit companies
02:23:20 into benefit corporations unless they wanna do that.
02:23:23 We can’t make them to really maximize patient outcomes.
02:23:28 But if we create an example of something that’s different,
02:23:32 the hope is that people will gravitate towards that
02:23:36 and some of the other companies.
02:23:37 Like even now we have Exxon and other these companies,
02:23:41 oil companies saying, oh, we’re big
02:23:42 into alternative energy and we’re, you know.
02:23:45 And that starts with companies that show an example
02:23:48 that then communicates to the public
02:23:51 that this is something exciting
02:23:53 and then they demand the same of Exxon and so on.
02:23:56 The public demands it and you could say the same thing
02:23:58 for the public demanding the big pharma
02:24:03 to optimize for benefit versus optimize for profit
02:24:08 and maybe giving power to the therapists,
02:24:11 more power to the therapists, more power to the doctors
02:24:13 that ultimately want.
02:24:16 I think incentives are interesting,
02:24:21 but I think doctors ultimately care more
02:24:25 because they’re in direct contact with humans.
02:24:27 They want to make people better.
02:24:29 It’s not, you know, sure they wanna make money,
02:24:31 but they ultimately want to make people feel better
02:24:33 because they get to look at people
02:24:35 and it’s so joyful to make people feel better
02:24:38 at the end of the day.
02:24:39 So giving more power to them is also perhaps
02:24:43 one of the ways that you then incentivize
02:24:46 the pharma companies that are trying to do good
02:24:51 because the doctors will choose those companies.
02:24:53 Yeah, now the other part of this is drug policy reform.
02:24:57 So that if we make it so that you can buy MDMA
02:25:00 for 10 or 20 bucks on your own
02:25:03 and we’ve trained people on here’s our therapeutic method,
02:25:06 here is our ways for peer support,
02:25:09 then people have an alternative from buying it
02:25:13 from the pharma companies.
02:25:15 So most of the for profit companies
02:25:18 have come to this conclusion
02:25:20 that drug policy reform is bad for their business model.
02:25:25 I think they’re making a fundamental mistake.
02:25:28 And I think the reason is that
02:25:30 the more that we de stigmatize this,
02:25:32 the more that we sensitize people to this is an approach,
02:25:35 even when people can get it on their own
02:25:37 and do it with their friends or do it with themselves,
02:25:40 there’s gonna be even more people that say,
02:25:42 oh my God, I’ve got real serious issues.
02:25:44 I would rather go to trained professionals
02:25:47 covered by insurance.
02:25:49 And I think it’ll increase the business,
02:25:52 but most of the for profit companies don’t see it that way.
02:25:56 And so as a nonprofit that owns a benefit corp,
02:26:00 we’re not trying to maximize sales or profits.
02:26:03 But I do believe that drug policy reform
02:26:06 creates this alternative access point for people
02:26:10 and that will help keep the for profits in check
02:26:12 to some extent as well.
02:26:15 I love it.
02:26:18 Let’s put on your wise visionary hat
02:26:22 and ask when you look to young folks,
02:26:25 is there advice you can give to young people today,
02:26:28 whether in high school or college about career, about life?
02:26:33 You’ve lived quite a nonlinear
02:26:36 and fascinating life yourself.
02:26:39 Is there advice you can give
02:26:40 either on career or more generally on life?
02:26:43 Well, I would say what people often hear is that,
02:26:51 we’re not actually here for that long a period of time.
02:26:55 And the world is on fire.
02:26:59 And whether humanity survives is not clear.
02:27:03 And how many species are we gonna kill
02:27:05 before we figure out not to do that anymore?
02:27:08 So I would advise you to really try to
02:27:15 develop a combination of what do you need
02:27:17 in terms of income for your own survival,
02:27:20 but what does the world need in terms of
02:27:25 help to make the world better?
02:27:27 And Howard Thurman, who we talked about,
02:27:30 who ran the Good Friday experiment, the minister there,
02:27:33 he said, he’s got a famous quote attributed to him.
02:27:36 He says, and this is exactly it to young people.
02:27:40 He said, there’s nothing particular that you should do,
02:27:43 but find what makes you come alive
02:27:46 because what the world needs is people
02:27:48 that have come alive and are passionate.
02:27:52 So I would say that be aware of this trap
02:27:57 that you need vast resources, that you need all this stuff.
02:28:03 I keep thinking of the super wealthy people
02:28:07 in first class on the Titanic,
02:28:09 as the Titanic is sinking.
02:28:12 Their money’s not gonna help them.
02:28:13 The Earth is like Titanic.
02:28:15 We’re sinking, we’re destroying the planets,
02:28:18 destroying the environment.
02:28:18 So you need a certain amount of money to be comfortable
02:28:23 to be able to do that.
02:28:25 You need to be comfortable to not be
02:28:28 at that edge of survival,
02:28:29 because once you’re at that edge of survival,
02:28:31 it’s hard to think about anything else.
02:28:32 But I’d say to young people,
02:28:36 to the extent that you’re able to do this,
02:28:39 and again, student debt and all this kind of stuff
02:28:41 is a big problem there too,
02:28:42 but really just try to find this combination
02:28:48 of what the world needs and what you need.
02:28:50 The other thing to say to young people is
02:28:52 that life is a lot shorter than you think,
02:28:57 and a 20 year plan is not really that long.
02:29:00 So if it takes you 20 years to get in a position
02:29:03 to do what you wanna do, go for it.
02:29:07 Have longterm plans.
02:29:08 The other part that was so important for me
02:29:11 to keep doing what I’ve been doing,
02:29:14 basically now it’s 49 years
02:29:17 that I’ve sort of been devoting my life
02:29:18 on psychedelics since I was 18.
02:29:20 But when I started, I didn’t think it would ever work.
02:29:23 I just thought this is the only idea I have
02:29:25 in this crazy world, this is what I wanna work on.
02:29:29 Luckily, I had support from my family
02:29:30 that took care of my survival needs, so I could do that.
02:29:34 But I realized that if my happiness
02:29:37 was dependent upon accomplishments,
02:29:40 that I might never be happy,
02:29:42 that I was able to reframe happiness in terms of effort.
02:29:47 So if I’m trying hard to get stuff to be better,
02:29:54 whether it’s better or not,
02:29:55 I can be happy at the end of each day, I tried.
02:29:58 And so I think you try to separate out
02:30:01 the goals that you have and your happiness
02:30:03 to whether you’re trying hard.
02:30:06 The other thing I would say
02:30:08 is that everybody has this humanity within them.
02:30:13 So be very careful about dividing the world
02:30:14 into us and them, and try to…
02:30:20 So one of the things that I’ve done
02:30:23 that has taken a long time,
02:30:27 because I feel like drugs are illegal.
02:30:31 I always felt like the police were the predator
02:30:33 and I’m the prey.
02:30:35 Yes.
02:30:36 But now we’re working with the police,
02:30:38 and the police have tremendous trauma
02:30:39 from the work that they do.
02:30:41 We have one police officer who is now going,
02:30:43 he’s a full time police officer,
02:30:45 he’s also a psychotherapist.
02:30:47 And he’s going through our training program
02:30:50 to learn how to give MDMA therapy to other police officers.
02:30:53 And I met his police chief a couple of times,
02:30:56 he got permission from his police chief
02:30:58 to go to the second part of our training program,
02:31:01 which is where we give MDMA to therapists
02:31:03 who volunteer as a patient.
02:31:06 So we have just a couple of weeks ago,
02:31:08 dosed the police with MDMA.
02:31:11 And so I think this idea of those people
02:31:13 that are on the quote, other side,
02:31:16 try to see through that to their humanity,
02:31:19 to what their pains and suffering,
02:31:21 what their struggles are, to the extent that you can.
02:31:24 And that I think, and build long term relationships.
02:31:28 You never know what’s gonna come around 20 years from now.
02:31:32 So you help some people try to keep these relationships
02:31:35 going 20 years from now, something could come.
02:31:38 And also be persistent.
02:31:47 I think that’s been the key to success.
02:31:49 I mean, once the FDA or DEA figured out
02:31:52 we’re not going anywhere,
02:31:53 they’re gonna have to deal with us,
02:31:55 then we started getting some progress.
02:31:57 So a mix of patience and stubbornness
02:32:00 that gets things done.
02:32:02 Is there something you’ve figured out
02:32:05 through your journey with psychedelics
02:32:08 about some of the big why questions about life?
02:32:11 Like, what the heck’s the value of love?
02:32:18 Why does it suck so much that we die?
02:32:21 And for some of us, maybe it’s the Russian in me,
02:32:25 but it’s quite terrifying, the notion of it.
02:32:28 Or the biggest why question of them all,
02:32:30 which is what’s the meaning of it all?
02:32:33 Well, yeah, what I’ve discovered is
02:32:35 that we don’t need answers to those questions.
02:32:40 That the fact that we can feel happy,
02:32:46 that we can love, that we can have moments of happiness,
02:32:50 that’s enough.
02:32:52 Figuring out these big questions, you can get lost in that.
02:32:56 And we all can come up with our answers.
02:32:58 What’s the meaning of life?
02:33:00 Why is there life?
02:33:01 Why is there consciousness?
02:33:02 But I don’t know that we need those answers.
02:33:06 What we know is that we’re social creatures,
02:33:10 that other people can make us happy by certain things,
02:33:14 we can make other people happy, that one life is enough.
02:33:17 So this other part about why is it so tragic that we die?
02:33:23 I don’t think it’s tragic that we die.
02:33:25 So first off, if you believe in this collective unconscious,
02:33:27 but we have an impact that lasts.
02:33:32 But I think that for me at least,
02:33:35 I’ve been of the view that we should be grateful for death,
02:33:40 that death makes life precious,
02:33:42 that if we had an infinite amount of time,
02:33:46 I mean, I’m a bit of a procrastinator about stuff,
02:33:49 particularly things that are really hard to do
02:33:52 and you just don’t do it.
02:33:54 And then like, where’d the day go?
02:33:55 I was gonna do this.
02:33:56 So if we had infinite life, we never died,
02:33:59 and would life be precious?
02:34:03 Would we do anything?
02:34:04 I don’t think so.
02:34:05 So my parents gave every Jewish new year,
02:34:11 they would make their new year’s card.
02:34:14 And one of the quotes was fantastic.
02:34:16 It was just, we have to make up for the brevity of life
02:34:20 with the intensity of life.
02:34:22 Oh man, that is good.
02:34:24 Well, the end makes things precious.
02:34:29 Death makes life precious.
02:34:30 The end of this conversation makes it precious,
02:34:34 and which is a great way to end, Rick.
02:34:38 I wanted to talk to you for a long time.
02:34:40 I share, you were very excited about the study.
02:34:43 I can now understand exactly why this is really promising.
02:34:46 This is really exciting, gives me hope about the future,
02:34:50 even if it doesn’t come fast enough.
02:34:53 But like you said, I have to be patient and stubborn.
02:34:56 Thank you so much for wasting
02:34:58 all your valuable time with me today.
02:34:59 It’s truly an honor to meet you and talk to you.
02:35:01 Not a waste at all.
02:35:02 I really appreciated this time together.
02:35:06 Thank you for listening to this conversation
02:35:08 with Rick Doblin, and thank you to Theragun, ExpressVPN,
02:35:12 Blinkist, and Asleep.
02:35:14 Check them out in the description to support this podcast.
02:35:17 And now let me leave you with some words
02:35:19 from Terrence McKenna.
02:35:21 Nature loves courage.
02:35:23 You make the commitment, and nature will respond
02:35:25 to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles.
02:35:29 Dream the impossible dream,
02:35:30 and the world will not grind you under.
02:35:33 It will lift you up.
02:35:34 This is the trick.
02:35:36 This is what all the teachers and philosophers
02:35:38 who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold,
02:35:42 this is what they understood.
02:35:44 This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall.
02:35:47 This is how magic is done,
02:35:49 by hurling yourself into the abyss
02:35:51 and discovering that it’s a feather bed.
02:35:54 Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.