Rick Doblin: Psychedelics | Lex Fridman Podcast #202

00:00:00.000 | The following is a conversation with Rick Doblin,

00:00:02.500 | founder and executive director

00:00:04.640 | of the Multidisciplinary Association

00:00:06.920 | for Psychedelic Studies, MAPS.

00:00:09.740 | He is one of the seminal figures

00:00:11.520 | in both the cultural history

00:00:12.960 | and the cutting edge science of psychedelics.

00:00:15.480 | He was there along with the biggest characters

00:00:18.360 | throughout this fascinating history of psychedelics,

00:00:20.800 | and he is here to tell the story.

00:00:23.680 | Quick mention of our sponsors,

00:00:25.400 | Theragun, ExpressVPN, Blinkist, and Asleep.

00:00:29.680 | Check them out in the description to support this podcast.

00:00:33.240 | As a side note, let me say that exploring the places

00:00:36.280 | the human mind can go can help us understand

00:00:39.080 | where it comes from, how it works,

00:00:41.200 | and how to engineer mental journeys,

00:00:43.660 | whether that's through life experiences,

00:00:46.400 | chemical substances, brain-computer interfaces,

00:00:49.120 | or interactions with artificial intelligence systems.

00:00:52.800 | On a personal level, I think the dissolution of the ego

00:00:56.160 | for stretches of time is a powerful tool

00:00:58.120 | for understanding yourself.

00:01:00.040 | A lot of things can do this,

00:01:01.680 | including jiu-jitsu, literature, meditation,

00:01:04.760 | but psychedelics is definitely,

00:01:06.680 | or at least arguably, one of the most powerful,

00:01:09.260 | from psilocybin to DMT.

00:01:11.680 | I'm excited that people like Rick

00:01:13.480 | are leading the scientific research

00:01:15.360 | that reveals the efficacy and the safety of these substances

00:01:18.820 | so that their proper dosage and usage protocols

00:01:22.360 | can be understood, and people like me

00:01:24.680 | can safely and effectively use them,

00:01:27.180 | not just for recreation,

00:01:29.680 | but for rigorous exploration of my own mind.

00:01:33.560 | This is the Lex Friedman Podcast,

00:01:35.560 | and here is my conversation with Rick Doblin.

00:01:38.800 | Could you give an introduction to psychedelics,

00:01:42.720 | like a big, bold, whirlwind overview?

00:01:47.160 | What are psychedelics?

00:01:48.880 | What are the kinds of psychedelics out there,

00:01:51.600 | in whatever way you think is meaningful?

00:01:54.900 | - All right, well, when I started MAPS,

00:01:58.000 | the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies,

00:02:00.760 | it was very important for me that psychedelic be in the name,

00:02:04.040 | and the way in which the original meaning of psychedelic,

00:02:07.720 | it's mind manifesting.

00:02:11.640 | It was created by Humphrey Osmond

00:02:13.480 | in dialogue with Elotus Huxley,

00:02:17.120 | and so psychedelic means mind manifesting,

00:02:20.400 | and so we interpret that very broadly

00:02:24.440 | to mean dreams are psychedelic,

00:02:27.600 | anything that kind of brings things to the surface,

00:02:30.520 | holotropic breathwork, hyperventilation is psychedelic.

00:02:34.140 | So most people think psychedelic

00:02:35.560 | is only about certain kind of chemical substances,

00:02:37.920 | either natural or synthetic,

00:02:40.240 | but we've got a much broader view of that.

00:02:42.920 | Meditation can be psychedelic in some ways,

00:02:45.500 | but our primary focus is on the drugs,

00:02:48.120 | is on the medicines, or the, you might call them,

00:02:52.120 | some people might call them spiritual tools or sacraments.

00:02:55.740 | There's sort of two general categories of those.

00:03:00.480 | One are what are called the classic psychedelics,

00:03:03.160 | and those are the ego-dissolving,

00:03:05.200 | sort of merged into unitive states.

00:03:10.160 | Those are like LSD, psilocybin, mescaline,

00:03:14.200 | ayahuasca, ibogaine, DMT, things like that,

00:03:18.120 | and then there's MDMA,

00:03:19.760 | which some people even argue is not a psychedelic.

00:03:22.840 | They'll say it's an empathogen or an antactogen,

00:03:25.480 | it's about touching within or empathy.

00:03:27.960 | It doesn't do the same kind of ego dissolution

00:03:30.680 | that the classic psychedelics do,

00:03:35.000 | but it brings material to the surface,

00:03:37.620 | and it changes the way we process information.

00:03:41.940 | And so I think you can quibble about whether it's a,

00:03:48.640 | it's certainly not a classic psychedelic,

00:03:50.440 | but I think MDMA is also a psychedelic.

00:03:52.640 | Marijuana, I would say, is a psychedelic.

00:03:54.740 | Marijuana is closer to the classic psychedelics

00:03:58.200 | than it is to MDMA.

00:04:00.000 | One point I like to make is dreams,

00:04:03.080 | because then everybody can relate to that.

00:04:05.520 | Dreams are psychedelic.

00:04:06.520 | Dreams bring emotions, feelings, ideas, concepts,

00:04:11.520 | in symbolic form a lot of times,

00:04:14.440 | or just in raw emotions to the surface.

00:04:16.400 | So when people hear the word psychedelic,

00:04:19.060 | often they are frightened by it.

00:04:22.080 | It's about loss of control,

00:04:24.000 | and it is to an extent loss of conscious control,

00:04:29.160 | particularly with the classic psychedelics.

00:04:30.840 | But, you know, and we know with dreams

00:04:33.040 | that we can have frightening dreams, nightmares,

00:04:35.520 | but I think that anchoring the concept

00:04:39.980 | of psychedelic in dreams is really helpful

00:04:42.120 | for people to know that it's kind of a natural state,

00:04:45.420 | and that there are other ways that you can catalyze it

00:04:48.300 | than by going to sleep,

00:04:49.640 | and that for thousands of years,

00:04:51.660 | substances have been used in that way.

00:04:54.160 | - So you mentioned this idea

00:04:55.120 | of bringing something to the surface,

00:04:57.120 | which is really interesting.

00:04:58.520 | So can you maybe elaborate the surface,

00:05:01.640 | and what is there in the depths of things,

00:05:04.880 | and how does ego dissolution fit into that?

00:05:09.880 | - Well, Aldous Huxley talked about the brain

00:05:13.460 | as a reducing valve,

00:05:15.260 | that we have an enormous amount of information.

00:05:18.120 | So right now, there's an air conditioning sound

00:05:20.240 | in the background,

00:05:21.880 | but that's not crucial to what you and I are doing,

00:05:24.340 | talking to each other, so we kind of tune that out.

00:05:27.080 | You know, there's all sorts of sights and sounds.

00:05:29.800 | There's incoming information

00:05:32.160 | in all the different sense modalities,

00:05:36.080 | and we have to figure out what's important to us.

00:05:42.040 | And so the mind, in a way,

00:05:45.220 | focuses a lot on what are our core needs,

00:05:50.220 | and we filter all the incoming information

00:05:53.420 | that we get towards focusing on what our core needs,

00:05:55.860 | and we can even get to Abraham Maslow

00:05:58.580 | and the hierarchy of needs about survival needs,

00:06:01.580 | belonging needs, esteem needs, you can go on.

00:06:04.720 | So I think what I mean by bringing things to the surface

00:06:10.860 | is that we tend to not focus on a lot of things

00:06:15.860 | that are coming,

00:06:19.980 | but we also push away things

00:06:22.020 | that are difficult emotionally,

00:06:24.180 | difficult cognitively.

00:06:26.480 | You know, we all know that we're on this very short

00:06:28.720 | trajectory from birth to death,

00:06:30.360 | but we're not constantly thinking about dying,

00:06:32.880 | although that can actually be helpful,

00:06:37.480 | to focus us on what's really important.

00:06:40.920 | Traumas are often suppressed,

00:06:43.980 | conflicts.

00:06:47.360 | We see in America and around the world

00:06:49.440 | a kind of rise of irrationality

00:06:51.600 | where people push away their logic

00:06:56.240 | in order for their emotional tribal needs to be met.

00:07:01.160 | A lot of people are suffering from early childhood traumas

00:07:04.840 | of a different kinds,

00:07:05.720 | or abandonment issues, or anything.

00:07:08.000 | So we tend to focus on just what we need to survive

00:07:11.840 | and what we need for work and esteem.

00:07:13.880 | And so psychedelics,

00:07:15.520 | by dissolving this ego control,

00:07:19.540 | or by with MDMA kind of strengthening our sense of self

00:07:23.360 | and our sense of self-acceptance,

00:07:25.920 | we can bring in other information

00:07:28.700 | that have previously been too complicated or too painful.

00:07:32.360 | - You don't think of psychedelics

00:07:33.760 | as conjuring up something new.

00:07:36.500 | It is more revealing something that is already there.

00:07:39.680 | - I think that's a very crucial thing.

00:07:41.580 | So yes,

00:07:43.340 | Sasha Shulgin,

00:07:46.400 | who sort of the godfather of MDMA,

00:07:50.480 | he sort of rediscovered it and brought it back into use.

00:07:55.760 | He talked about his first experience was with mescaline.

00:08:01.240 | His first psychedelic experience was with mescaline.

00:08:04.360 | And he had a tremendous experience,

00:08:06.000 | but what he said about it was

00:08:08.240 | he was having a human experience

00:08:11.320 | that the mescaline was helping him access

00:08:13.820 | rather than he was having a mescaline experience.

00:08:17.760 | So that it's not like you pop a pill

00:08:19.660 | and you always have the same kind of experience

00:08:21.640 | as everybody else.

00:08:22.560 | The experience is not contained in the pill.

00:08:24.760 | The pill opens you up

00:08:26.360 | and you have an experience of yourself.

00:08:28.440 | Sometimes these are experiences

00:08:30.840 | that we've never consciously had.

00:08:32.600 | But we can say right now that we know

00:08:35.400 | that our body below the level of our conscious awareness

00:08:39.760 | has all these self-healing mechanisms.

00:08:42.560 | And we don't modulate them

00:08:45.520 | to a large extent by conscious control.

00:08:48.640 | I mean, eventually we are learning more about the mind-body

00:08:51.420 | and we learn about the placebo effect,

00:08:53.080 | how what we think is the case.

00:08:54.280 | But I think that there's experiences

00:08:57.760 | that are below our level of conscious awareness,

00:09:00.660 | particularly once we're adults,

00:09:02.040 | that are more of these unit of mystical experiences,

00:09:04.700 | sense of connection.

00:09:06.160 | I think kids are like this a lot.

00:09:07.680 | We kind of come from the void, you could say,

00:09:09.680 | and you're born and you have

00:09:11.040 | a different way of processing information.

00:09:14.840 | One interesting point about that has to do with ketamine,

00:09:18.280 | which is been approved as ketamine for depression,

00:09:22.520 | but it's used for anesthesia.

00:09:25.400 | And roughly one-tenth the anesthetic dose

00:09:29.760 | is a psychedelic dose.

00:09:31.800 | And when it's used in anesthesia,

00:09:34.320 | there's what's called the emergent phenomena.

00:09:36.480 | So this is you get enough ketamine for,

00:09:40.360 | you can be operated on, you're not in pain,

00:09:42.320 | you're not really there, your ego's knocked out,

00:09:44.820 | but you can still breathe.

00:09:46.580 | But as the operations get over

00:09:49.220 | and then people metabolize the ketamine,

00:09:51.960 | there's a process that they call the emergent phenomena.

00:09:54.760 | It's like as you're emerging from this tranquilized state,

00:09:58.820 | and that's where you pass through the psychedelic phase.

00:10:00.980 | And they don't prepare people for that.

00:10:03.480 | And what we see is that a lot of adults

00:10:06.980 | have difficult times with that.

00:10:09.160 | But children don't seem to have those problems.

00:10:12.080 | Children are a little bit more already

00:10:14.000 | in this kind of state.

00:10:15.920 | And so ketamine is used quite frequently

00:10:18.840 | in children now for anesthesia.

00:10:21.080 | So all of that is to say to your question

00:10:24.560 | that I think the psychedelics reveal things

00:10:27.840 | that are within us.

00:10:29.140 | Some things that are how we process information

00:10:32.760 | back when we were children.

00:10:34.960 | Other things that we've never thought of before

00:10:36.920 | that are sort of baked into our consciousness.

00:10:39.980 | You know, there's one drug 5-MEO-DMT.

00:10:46.120 | It's this toxin from a Sonoran toad

00:10:49.900 | that many people consider it to be the most powerful

00:10:52.160 | of all the psychedelics.

00:10:54.000 | And it kind of knocks the ego structures

00:10:56.120 | completely out of it.

00:10:57.620 | And we experience something different,

00:11:01.480 | but it's something I think that's always within us.

00:11:03.720 | It's at a deeper layer.

00:11:04.760 | So we knock out some of the higher cognitive functions

00:11:07.240 | and then we experience things in a different way.

00:11:09.200 | So my sense is that these are human experiences

00:11:13.040 | that the psychedelics bring us to.

00:11:15.040 | - Yeah, it's really profound.

00:11:16.440 | And DMT is a really interesting example.

00:11:18.920 | So Terence McKenna has talked about these machine elves.

00:11:23.520 | Right?

00:11:24.360 | And there's this, I think from the people I've heard speak

00:11:28.800 | about the experience, there's a sense

00:11:30.940 | that you are traveling elsewhere to meet entities,

00:11:35.440 | whether they're elves or not.

00:11:38.040 | So in your sense, you're not traveling elsewhere.

00:11:42.600 | You're just revealing something that's within

00:11:44.720 | and maybe it's a particular mechanism

00:11:47.680 | of revealing what's already within.

00:11:50.180 | - Yeah, and I knew Terence.

00:11:51.600 | I spent a lot of time talking with Terence

00:11:53.360 | and I do not ascribe to a lot of things that he was saying.

00:11:58.160 | He was tremendous entertainer

00:12:00.120 | and I think he did a lot of really good things

00:12:02.880 | and focused us on the power of psychedelics.

00:12:05.920 | But I think I've never seen these quote machine elves.

00:12:10.180 | I think culture is more determinative

00:12:14.120 | of what people experience under psychedelics,

00:12:17.220 | your preconceptions, than we give it credit for.

00:12:22.080 | And so I think there's a lot of priming that you could say

00:12:26.880 | that people receive by stories from their culture,

00:12:30.520 | with ayahuasca, it's about jaguars and Amazonian animals.

00:12:36.980 | And so I think these machine elves

00:12:39.800 | are this construct of Terence that other people do see.

00:12:44.800 | There's actually some people that are very interested

00:12:50.540 | in doing a study and that they're well-funded

00:12:54.240 | and moving toward it to keep people on an IV infusion of DMT

00:12:59.240 | for them specifically to see,

00:13:02.600 | do they contact machine elves or aliens

00:13:05.480 | and what kind of information do they bring back

00:13:07.480 | from these other selves, other places or other entities?

00:13:12.280 | One question is, who are we?

00:13:16.520 | Are we connected to everything in the universe?

00:13:20.500 | We certainly know in many cases,

00:13:23.080 | you talk about waves or particles, the quantum approach.

00:13:27.160 | So I don't interpret experiences that we have

00:13:32.160 | of some entity that's somehow or other

00:13:36.480 | deep in our consciousness that's not us.

00:13:39.480 | It's a part of who we are.

00:13:41.660 | So I tend to interpret it in that way.

00:13:43.480 | - The question is, how big are we?

00:13:47.040 | - Yeah.

00:13:47.880 | - I mean, that's, and how many ideas are within us

00:13:52.880 | that can be revealed by changing the perspective?

00:13:56.140 | You mentioned physics.

00:13:57.760 | One of the, what physicists,

00:14:00.160 | especially mathematical physicists or mathematicians do

00:14:04.200 | is they reveal truths by looking at a,

00:14:08.740 | by taking a slightly different perspective on a problem

00:14:12.480 | that reveals the simplicity of how it actually works

00:14:17.240 | in totally new ways.

00:14:18.780 | That's what Einstein did.

00:14:19.840 | That's what, like every progress in physics

00:14:23.200 | and certainly every progress in mathematics

00:14:25.600 | requires you to take a different perspective.

00:14:28.000 | And then perhaps that's exactly what psychedelics are doing.

00:14:32.540 | It's not that they're contacting aliens that are elsewhere.

00:14:36.840 | It may be revealing the connection between us

00:14:39.280 | and other living life forms,

00:14:41.260 | or actually it might be revealing

00:14:43.360 | a totally new perspective on what life is

00:14:47.280 | or what consciousness is and giving us a glimpse at that,

00:14:50.780 | even though our cognitive capabilities are limited

00:14:53.920 | to fully grasp and understand it.

00:14:56.040 | So it's just giving us an inkling of that somehow.

00:14:58.480 | And it seems perhaps a little ridiculous,

00:15:01.080 | not from a scientific perspective,

00:15:03.520 | in the sense that we don't have a good physics of life

00:15:06.620 | or physics of intelligence or physics of consciousness,

00:15:09.900 | but getting a glimpse of that is giving us a little bit of,

00:15:14.720 | maybe an intuition of which way to head

00:15:18.560 | to build such a physics.

00:15:20.740 | - Yeah, yeah, I think so.

00:15:23.560 | I think that there's this other concept

00:15:28.560 | I guess I would like to talk about briefly,

00:15:30.720 | this Jungian collective unconscious,

00:15:33.560 | this idea that somehow or other

00:15:35.560 | everything that has ever happened is still accessible,

00:15:40.260 | maybe not with as much data or as much resolution,

00:15:45.260 | but that there's wave resonances.

00:15:49.740 | So that I do believe that we can have experiences

00:15:54.740 | as part of this human collective unconscious

00:15:58.280 | that we're not from our own life.

00:16:01.100 | - Yeah.

00:16:01.940 | - And that we can, like the holographic realities,

00:16:06.220 | and that there is a way to gather information

00:16:10.780 | that can be accurate about other times and places

00:16:13.620 | through depth investigations of our own consciousness.

00:16:20.020 | But I think what I tend to believe

00:16:22.580 | is that it's because there's emotional resonances

00:16:26.020 | between where we're at now in this life

00:16:28.860 | and other kind of experiences

00:16:35.540 | that people have had before.

00:16:37.220 | And we always hear about,

00:16:39.220 | everybody who talks about past lives,

00:16:41.540 | they're always kings and queens.

00:16:43.260 | (Lex laughing)

00:16:44.740 | So I think that's, again, you filter things,

00:16:47.460 | what you want to be true.

00:16:48.820 | But I do think that there is a way to access information

00:16:53.700 | beyond what we've taken in in our own temporal existence

00:16:58.100 | through our own five senses.

00:16:59.700 | - In some ways, I really find that compelling,

00:17:01.540 | the notion that that information's already there,

00:17:04.100 | and you're simply just moving the attention of your mind

00:17:08.100 | to different parts of that.

00:17:09.980 | - Yeah, I mean, we have that with the radio.

00:17:12.300 | I mean, you know, you got a frequency,

00:17:13.860 | you turn all this information.

00:17:17.020 | You could actually say right now,

00:17:18.780 | in the space between us,

00:17:19.940 | we have the whole world's knowledge

00:17:21.620 | that's up on the internet.

00:17:23.100 | It's right here.

00:17:23.940 | - Yeah.

00:17:24.780 | - But we don't see it. - We just have to tune in.

00:17:26.460 | - Yeah.

00:17:27.300 | - What are the interesting differences,

00:17:31.660 | would you say, between the various psychedelics

00:17:34.540 | that you mentioned?

00:17:35.380 | Ayahuasca, DMT, acid LSD, marijuana, mescaline,

00:17:40.020 | PCP, psilocybin, MDMA.

00:17:42.700 | You mentioned a few of them that are really interesting.

00:17:44.820 | We'll talk about scientifically

00:17:46.220 | some of the different studies

00:17:48.340 | that have been conducted on each,

00:17:49.940 | but sort of at the high level,

00:17:52.460 | what are some interesting differences?

00:17:54.140 | - Well, one of the big ones that people make a big deal of

00:17:57.300 | that I think is completely misplaced

00:17:59.920 | is some are from nature, some are from the lab.

00:18:02.820 | - Right.

00:18:03.660 | - So there's this kind of like romantic thought

00:18:05.420 | that if it's from nature, it's good.

00:18:06.960 | If it's from the lab, it's somehow tainted by humanity.

00:18:10.600 | And therefore, some people are like

00:18:13.960 | all for plant psychedelics.

00:18:15.500 | We see the policy changes that have been happening

00:18:19.080 | in a couple of cities, Cambridge, Somerville,

00:18:23.280 | not far from where we're at now,

00:18:24.740 | where they decriminalize plant medicines.

00:18:27.320 | So they call it decriminalizing nature.

00:18:30.120 | So I think that there is,

00:18:32.780 | from my perspective,

00:18:36.320 | certain things from nature are poison.

00:18:40.120 | Certain things from the lab are spiritual,

00:18:44.780 | even if they don't show up in nature like LSD.

00:18:47.560 | Now there is something, LSD is lysergic acid diethylamide.

00:18:51.520 | There is lysergic acid amide, LSA,

00:18:54.760 | which comes from morning glory seeds.

00:18:56.280 | So it's very similar.

00:18:59.200 | But at the same time,

00:19:00.480 | I'd say I don't buy into that distinction

00:19:03.720 | that there's some fundamental preference.

00:19:06.240 | One of the things that Terence McKenna,

00:19:07.840 | since we talked about him,

00:19:09.440 | he talked about how if it's from nature, it's good.

00:19:12.480 | And if it's not, we should be suspect.

00:19:15.600 | Of course, he had a lot of great LSD experiences.

00:19:18.560 | But actually, Terence, in 1984,

00:19:22.040 | we were at Esalen with a bunch of other people.

00:19:24.820 | This was before the crackdown on MDMA.

00:19:28.800 | And this was some of the underground therapists

00:19:31.560 | and the above ground researchers

00:19:32.960 | were trying to talk about how to protect MDMA

00:19:36.360 | from this eventual crackdown.

00:19:37.720 | And Terence was like, forget about it.

00:19:40.320 | It's from the lab.

00:19:41.960 | It's dangerous.

00:19:42.800 | We have thousands of years of history,

00:19:44.120 | all these other things.

00:19:45.200 | And what do we know about MDMA and blah, blah, blah.

00:19:48.480 | I was like, Terence, you're so unscientific, bullshit.

00:19:51.480 | Another way to say it is,

00:19:56.880 | and I just said, we need a study of the safety of MDMA.

00:20:01.880 | And so then Dick Price, who started Esalen,

00:20:05.520 | I said, I'll put 1,000, Dick Price, he put 1,000.

00:20:07.880 | So Terence was actually the catalyst

00:20:09.640 | for the first study with MDMA.

00:20:11.480 | - Wow.

00:20:12.880 | - Just 'cause he was so frustrating

00:20:14.280 | about how plants are okay.

00:20:15.680 | And if it's from the lab, it's bad.

00:20:18.660 | So that's one distinction.

00:20:20.200 | The other distinction is this

00:20:24.260 | sense of classic psychedelics versus things like MDMA.

00:20:27.620 | So to what extent do they dissolve the ego?

00:20:31.020 | And you could say, to what extent do they cause visions,

00:20:34.460 | the 5-HT2A serotonin receptor subtype,

00:20:37.620 | which is responsible for a lot of that,

00:20:41.540 | where these drugs are activating.

00:20:43.180 | Now mescaline, of all the psychedelics,

00:20:48.340 | chemically, it's the most similar to MDMA.

00:20:51.100 | It's a phenethylamine, which is MDMA.

00:20:53.980 | So in the '50s, there was the, '53, I think it was,

00:20:57.700 | the Army Chemical Warfare Service

00:21:00.180 | wanted to look at drugs for interrogations,

00:21:03.340 | mind control, nonlethal incapacitance.

00:21:05.780 | They did a study in eight substances.

00:21:10.780 | These were now toxicity studies in animals.

00:21:13.740 | And on the one side was methamphetamine,

00:21:15.620 | on the other was mescaline,

00:21:16.780 | and MDMA was in the middle, chemically.

00:21:19.920 | So mescaline of these psychedelics

00:21:23.500 | tends to have a warmth that MDMA has.

00:21:27.420 | It's not as ego-dissolving quite as some of the others.

00:21:30.580 | I mean, it's the main active ingredient in peyote.

00:21:32.940 | It is very psychedelic, very visual.

00:21:34.840 | Another distinction with these different drugs

00:21:39.240 | is how long they last.

00:21:41.180 | And a lot of that has to do

00:21:42.940 | with the route of administration.

00:21:45.100 | So for example, if you smoke DMT,

00:21:49.100 | it takes 10, 15 minutes, and you're,

00:21:52.300 | within seconds, you're off in another world.

00:21:54.520 | Similarly, 5-MeO-DMT, very rapid.

00:21:59.520 | When you take DMT in the form of ayahuasca,

00:22:03.140 | where it's mixed with another substance

00:22:05.740 | that makes it so that it's orally active,

00:22:08.420 | then it's a couple hours.

00:22:10.340 | So LSD is eight, 10, 12 hours sometimes.

00:22:16.260 | Psilocybin is more like five or six hours,

00:22:18.900 | or four to six hours.

00:22:21.300 | MDMA is similar.

00:22:22.800 | It's one reason why, in our research,

00:22:26.000 | we give an initial dose of MDMA,

00:22:28.100 | and then two hours later, we give half the initial amount

00:22:31.120 | to extend the plateau, because we want it to last longer

00:22:34.820 | for people to be in this therapeutic state.

00:22:37.140 | So that's another distinction is,

00:22:40.460 | you know, how long these drugs last.

00:22:42.280 | Another distinction is which of them

00:22:44.340 | come from a religious context,

00:22:47.180 | have a religion built around them.

00:22:49.260 | We have this sense that some people are saying

00:22:52.180 | that 5-MeO-DMT and the Sonoran Toad,

00:22:54.820 | that they have this long history of indigenous use,

00:22:57.420 | but they don't.

00:22:58.260 | That's all modern, it's made up,

00:22:59.420 | and it's kind of a new approach.

00:23:01.940 | However, there was thousands of years of use

00:23:05.100 | of psilocybin mushrooms in religious contexts.

00:23:08.000 | From 1600 BC to 396 AD,

00:23:14.260 | the world's longest mystery ceremonies,

00:23:17.100 | the Eleusinian Mysteries, you know,

00:23:19.900 | sort of the heart of Greek culture,

00:23:21.240 | the heart of Western culture,

00:23:22.500 | that was a psychedelic potion called kykeon

00:23:25.780 | that seems like it's very much like an LSD-like substance.

00:23:29.520 | Ergot on grain, and you know, LSD comes from ergot.

00:23:35.420 | So I think that there are a lot of ways

00:23:39.620 | to look at these different substances.

00:23:41.100 | Another distinction is, you know,

00:23:44.060 | which one of them are being researched right now.

00:23:47.180 | In scientific contexts, and which are not.

00:23:50.100 | And because of the rise of all these for-profit companies,

00:23:52.700 | and everybody's looking for what they can patent,

00:23:54.820 | what they can claim, the land grab,

00:23:57.300 | you know, more and more there are companies

00:24:01.180 | looking at every different kind of psychedelics.

00:24:04.300 | The ones that are most important

00:24:06.340 | that are not being researched, mescaline,

00:24:09.020 | but now there's a company to do mescaline,

00:24:11.100 | Journey CoLab, Ibogaine,

00:24:13.940 | which is crucial for opiate addiction.

00:24:17.140 | There's a new company, a branch of this company,

00:24:21.380 | Atai, that's gonna be looking at Ibogaine.

00:24:23.660 | So I'd say the rise of the for-profit companies

00:24:27.420 | is making it so that there's just gonna be

00:24:30.140 | an enormous amount of investigations

00:24:32.460 | into all these different psychedelics.

00:24:35.940 | But what we're gonna see is the development

00:24:39.620 | of new psychedelics that we don't know anything about

00:24:41.700 | that have not existed yet,

00:24:42.800 | because a lot of these for-profit companies

00:24:45.420 | are gonna wanna invent and patent

00:24:48.220 | and have composition of matter patents on new molecules.

00:24:51.860 | So I think we'll see a lot of that happening too.

00:24:53.660 | - That's really fascinating.

00:24:54.500 | I mean, there's a lot of doors you've opened

00:24:57.500 | and we're gonna walk through all of them,

00:24:58.940 | including the research and so on.

00:25:00.380 | But on this one little tangent of the future of psychedelics,

00:25:05.380 | so engineering new psychedelics,

00:25:08.660 | can you comment on maybe the chemistry

00:25:12.120 | and the biology of how psychedelics work

00:25:14.200 | and where's the space of possible engineering of psychedelics

00:25:18.200 | and what kind of things might they unlock

00:25:20.520 | in terms of the possible places our mind

00:25:25.280 | would be able to go and the effects of that,

00:25:30.280 | of improving health.

00:25:32.320 | But maybe at the basic level of chemistry

00:25:35.760 | and the space of what could be engineered.

00:25:38.660 | - Well, you reminded me,

00:25:41.220 | I'll get to exactly what you said,

00:25:42.540 | but you reminded me of a talk I heard by Buckminster Fuller

00:25:47.540 | shortly before he died.

00:25:49.160 | And what he talked about is how technology

00:25:52.960 | was making things ever smaller,

00:25:56.400 | that we were able to pack more and more information

00:25:59.800 | into smaller and smaller spaces

00:26:02.440 | and that we're developing technologies

00:26:04.560 | of communications with people.

00:26:06.900 | We now know the internet and things like that.

00:26:08.800 | But what he said is that he thought the eventual evolution

00:26:13.440 | of this sort of research would move

00:26:16.700 | from this miniaturization to telepathy.

00:26:20.340 | - Yeah.

00:26:22.840 | - And I was like, it was a shocking thing

00:26:24.640 | for somebody like scientific like that to say that.

00:26:27.760 | So will we unlock those parts

00:26:31.440 | where I talked about the collective unconscious?

00:26:33.760 | Will we be able to more consciously explore those areas?

00:26:38.760 | So I think that that's a possibility.

00:26:41.300 | - That's fascinating.

00:26:42.140 | - There was Stan Grof,

00:26:44.180 | who's the world's leading LSD researcher

00:26:47.700 | and has been my mentor, his wife, Brigitte.

00:26:51.660 | They were talking about stories that they had heard

00:26:54.220 | about MDMA that people take.

00:26:59.220 | And then on top of that, they do 5-MeO-DMT.

00:27:02.760 | And so you get this ego dissolution,

00:27:05.380 | but underneath it, you have this sense of ego,

00:27:09.140 | sort of sense of safety, of self-acceptance,

00:27:14.140 | kind of grounds it.

00:27:15.260 | So Stan was like, that's the future of psychiatry

00:27:19.220 | that you can watch without the terror

00:27:21.700 | of the ego dissolution,

00:27:22.980 | the sense that you're losing your mind

00:27:24.580 | or you're going crazy or you're dying,

00:27:26.220 | or that you have this grounded sense of safety

00:27:29.900 | while you're dissolving your normal sense

00:27:32.160 | of how you see things.

00:27:33.840 | - And being able to engineer in a fine-tuned way

00:27:37.280 | that exact experience, maybe fine-tuned to the person,

00:27:41.020 | as opposed to sort of this manual potion

00:27:43.240 | that's through experiment.

00:27:46.960 | - Although I don't know about fine-tuning things

00:27:48.760 | to the person in the sense that we believe

00:27:51.160 | there's this inner healer,

00:27:52.320 | this kind of inner healing intelligence.

00:27:55.080 | We talked about it, the body repairs itself.

00:27:59.080 | I think we more need to create safety for people,

00:28:03.860 | and then what emerges will be customized

00:28:06.220 | to what they need to be looking at

00:28:07.500 | from this inner healing intelligence.

00:28:09.160 | At the same time, we will move to,

00:28:11.320 | we hear so much about the new approaches to oncology

00:28:17.380 | where you do genetic analysis of different kind of tumors,

00:28:23.260 | and then you have certain kind of chemotherapy agents,

00:28:25.960 | and you do personalized chemotherapy.

00:28:27.980 | I think we will have more

00:28:29.660 | like personalized psychedelic therapy,

00:28:32.060 | but it'll be more like a sequence of different drugs

00:28:34.680 | that people go through over an extended period of time,

00:28:37.460 | and then you kind of customize what's next,

00:28:40.340 | and sometimes you'll combine different drugs together,

00:28:42.560 | like this 5-MeO-DMT and MDMA,

00:28:45.420 | or a lot of times people do LSD-MDMA combinations

00:28:48.940 | or psilocybin-MDMA combinations.

00:28:51.100 | Chemistry, and it's not my strength,

00:28:56.740 | I'm more into clinical applications and policy,

00:29:01.460 | but I can say that from what I've learned

00:29:03.780 | from reading from others and research done by others

00:29:06.940 | that different psychedelics have an impact

00:29:10.540 | on different neurotransmitters,

00:29:12.420 | different other parts of energies in the brain.

00:29:14.920 | The default mode network is what's considered

00:29:20.460 | to be like our sense of self,

00:29:24.140 | and it's part of the brain

00:29:25.780 | that sort of is what I described before,

00:29:27.260 | scanning the world and filtering information

00:29:30.260 | for what's really important to us,

00:29:33.400 | and both focusing us on things

00:29:36.260 | and also helping us to ignore a lot of things.

00:29:39.180 | And the classic psychedelics all weaken the energy

00:29:43.820 | in this default mode system,

00:29:45.940 | and therefore you get this flood of information

00:29:47.980 | that you're not normally paying attention to,

00:29:49.860 | and then you start seeing in more creative ways

00:29:52.820 | or more connected.

00:29:54.420 | You actually move to beyond the verbal kind of thinking

00:29:57.980 | into sort of symbolic thinking a lot of times.

00:30:01.500 | And that's where you sometimes get

00:30:03.860 | these mystical sense of connection,

00:30:05.780 | how it's all one,

00:30:06.620 | and you get the sense also of how big the universe is

00:30:11.620 | and how small each one of us is.

00:30:14.480 | So there's a lot of work that Sasha Shulgin

00:30:18.540 | and Albert Hoffman, who invented LSD

00:30:20.940 | and first synthesized psilocybin

00:30:22.300 | on what they call structure activity relationships.

00:30:25.020 | What is the structural of the molecule?

00:30:27.340 | And then how do you predict what that new molecule

00:30:31.060 | that never existed before is going to do

00:30:33.340 | once you actually take it?

00:30:35.540 | And you can get close,

00:30:39.500 | but you never really know until you actually take the drug.

00:30:43.060 | And the way that Sasha ran his experiments

00:30:47.500 | is that he would take the drugs himself first in low doses,

00:30:51.940 | and he would sort of step up the doses

00:30:55.020 | to have more experiences.

00:30:56.020 | If he thought it was valuable,

00:30:57.020 | he'd share it with his wife, Anne.

00:30:58.680 | But then what they would do

00:31:01.100 | is if they both thought it was valuable,

00:31:02.580 | they had a group of 12 people

00:31:04.940 | that they were with for many, many years,

00:31:07.340 | and they would distribute these new drug to these 12 people,

00:31:10.780 | and they would get the different perspectives.

00:31:13.580 | And he felt that 12 was like a minimum number

00:31:15.940 | 'cause we're so unique how each of us see things.

00:31:18.820 | But then you kind of get a little bit of a consensus

00:31:21.060 | on how a lot of people are gonna see it.

00:31:22.580 | And then if that 12 people were positive about it,

00:31:25.580 | then they would turn it over to Leo Zeff,

00:31:27.380 | who he called the secret chief,

00:31:29.220 | the leader of the underground psychedelic therapy movement,

00:31:31.340 | and then he would start exploring it in therapy.

00:31:33.780 | So there's still a lot of mysteries

00:31:38.340 | as far as structure activity relationships,

00:31:40.540 | and it's not gonna be the case

00:31:42.260 | that people go into the lab and they tinker with molecules

00:31:45.380 | and they know exactly what they're gonna get.

00:31:48.780 | And a lot of it has to do with the,

00:31:51.540 | not so much chemistry as morphology.

00:31:54.820 | You could say the shape of the molecule

00:31:56.700 | and how does that interact with receptor sites.

00:31:59.540 | And so we're getting better at modeling all of that.

00:32:02.140 | - And how does that interaction relate

00:32:04.780 | to the morphing of the human experience

00:32:08.260 | and deeply understanding that perhaps

00:32:11.060 | there's no equations yet for that kind of thing.

00:32:13.180 | You really have to build up intuition by experiencing it.

00:32:17.260 | And over time, sort of subjective self-report,

00:32:20.620 | like trying to build an understanding

00:32:22.980 | of the effects of the different chemistries.

00:32:24.780 | - Yeah, yeah, you can have approximate ideas,

00:32:28.020 | but to know exactly.

00:32:29.260 | So when I first tried MDMA, which was 1982,

00:32:34.060 | and this was after I had done lots of LSD

00:32:37.340 | and mescaline and mushrooms,

00:32:40.340 | I was shocked at how different it was

00:32:44.580 | than these other substances,

00:32:46.640 | and yet how profound it was.

00:32:49.260 | So are there whole new kind of categories

00:32:52.100 | of classes of drugs that we're not aware of

00:32:54.580 | that would be not so much this,

00:32:57.940 | like eco-dissolution or emotional?

00:33:01.940 | Well, what MDMA does is reduces activity in the amygdala,

00:33:05.860 | the fear processing part of the brain.

00:33:08.220 | So it's not just chemistry,

00:33:09.420 | but it routes energy throughout the brain

00:33:11.820 | in a different way.

00:33:12.660 | It increases activity in the prefrontal cortex.

00:33:15.860 | So you think more logically.

00:33:17.600 | That I think has an enormous impact on the effect of MDMA.

00:33:21.640 | The other thing it does is it increases connectivity

00:33:25.200 | between the amygdala and the hippocampus.

00:33:26.760 | So it helps facilitate processing of things

00:33:30.340 | into long-term memory.

00:33:31.700 | And with PTSD, trauma is like never in the past.

00:33:35.440 | It's always about to happen.

00:33:36.520 | So will we one time develop drugs

00:33:39.560 | that would even be specific to certain kind of memories?

00:33:43.520 | We're working with a woman, Rachel Yehuda,

00:33:46.400 | who is at the Bronx VA.

00:33:50.120 | And she's done some studies

00:33:52.340 | that are with the epigenetics of trauma.

00:33:55.300 | So she's worked with Holocaust survivors and their children.

00:33:58.820 | And she has identified epigenetic mechanisms

00:34:03.560 | by which trauma is passed from generation to the generations

00:34:07.420 | sort of like set points for anxiety, fear,

00:34:10.540 | certain things like that.

00:34:11.740 | But the question is, can you actually transmit memories

00:34:16.080 | from one generation to the next?

00:34:18.720 | Now, this is not DNA changes

00:34:22.720 | which happen over a very long period of time

00:34:26.520 | and evolutionary scale.

00:34:28.740 | But within one lifetime, within some experiences,

00:34:31.680 | your epigenetics, what turns on the genes

00:34:34.240 | or turns off certain genes, that can be impacted.

00:34:37.180 | And that's what we know now can be transmitted

00:34:39.560 | from generation to generation,

00:34:41.880 | either by the father or the mother

00:34:43.560 | through the sperm or the egg.

00:34:45.820 | So it's pretty remarkable.

00:34:48.720 | So what Rachel is gonna try to do is MDMA research for PTSD

00:34:53.460 | and look at these epigenetic markers before and after

00:34:56.400 | and see if they change as a consequence of therapy.

00:35:00.300 | So will we develop one day certain kind of chemicals

00:35:05.300 | that will be able to bring certain kind of memories

00:35:08.080 | to the surface?

00:35:09.160 | That's not inconceivable.

00:35:12.600 | - The epigenetic angle is fascinating,

00:35:14.960 | that there'll be these epigenetic perturbations

00:35:17.600 | that lead to memories living from one generation

00:35:21.680 | to the other and then bringing those memories

00:35:24.200 | to the surface and using that as signal

00:35:28.960 | to understand what exactly the psychedelics bring

00:35:32.960 | to the surface and not.

00:35:34.640 | - Yeah, yeah.

00:35:35.480 | Now the other portion of that though is culture.

00:35:38.240 | I mean, culture is where we store all these memories

00:35:40.680 | and the stories that we get passed down.

00:35:44.200 | - Especially with a lot of shared,

00:35:46.000 | you talk about the Holocaust or World War II,

00:35:48.600 | where it's deeply ingrained in the culture

00:35:53.560 | the impact of those events and sort of an aggregate

00:35:56.740 | the different perspectives on that particular event

00:35:59.400 | create a set of stories that you can plug into.

00:36:03.120 | And then they kind of resonate with some aspect of you

00:36:06.560 | that creates a memory that's connected to.

00:36:09.560 | Like when I think about World War II and the Holocaust,

00:36:12.080 | I think about my own family, but in some sense,

00:36:15.720 | it's also resonating with stories of many others.

00:36:19.000 | So it's like somehow the two echo each other

00:36:22.040 | and I'm just providing my own little flavor on top.

00:36:24.960 | The meat of the stories are probably those

00:36:27.680 | that are shared with others.

00:36:29.280 | It's plugging into the collective unconscious.

00:36:32.320 | That's really fascinating, really plugging into,

00:36:36.200 | like precisely plugging into particular memories

00:36:40.680 | as a way to deal with trauma and PTSD, that kind of thing.

00:36:45.680 | - Yeah, I'll just add that the most important dream

00:36:51.120 | of my life ever was of a Holocaust survivor telling me

00:36:55.000 | that he was miraculously saved from death

00:37:01.000 | and he knew that he was saved for a particular purpose,

00:37:04.760 | but he never knew what that purpose was.

00:37:06.560 | So in the dream, I'm seeing him on his deathbed

00:37:08.360 | and then he shows me whatever happened to him

00:37:11.600 | during the Holocaust, you know,

00:37:13.560 | and then we're back in the room on his deathbed

00:37:16.320 | and he says, "Well, I know what my purpose was now."

00:37:20.480 | And I'm like, "Oh, great, what was it?"

00:37:22.080 | He says, "To tell you to be a psychedelic therapist

00:37:24.400 | "and to study psychedelics

00:37:25.660 | "and bring back psychedelic research."

00:37:28.440 | And I thought to myself, I've already decided to do this.

00:37:31.920 | You can lay this on me, I can say yes,

00:37:34.080 | and then you can die in peace.

00:37:35.240 | And then he died in front of my eyes in the dream.

00:37:38.160 | So I think that that kind of cultural transmission

00:37:43.040 | that I got from when I was really young, you know,

00:37:45.680 | then manifested in this dream and that was this story

00:37:50.060 | about how people can be incredibly vicious

00:37:55.240 | and can be very motivated by irrational factors.

00:37:58.920 | And so I just feel that this kind of

00:38:02.420 | multi-generational transmission of this story

00:38:05.680 | of the irrational being a murderous factor

00:38:09.240 | and something I needed to respond to was deeply ingrained.

00:38:15.400 | And I would say my guess is more culturally

00:38:19.960 | than this epigenetic mechanism.

00:38:22.080 | - Yes.

00:38:23.440 | Yeah, but your sense is that whatever stimulated

00:38:27.200 | a certain part of human nature in World War II,

00:38:32.200 | especially Nazi Germany, but also in Stalinist Soviet Union

00:38:37.660 | still is within us, within all of us.

00:38:40.260 | Just like we were saying, you know,

00:38:42.120 | we embody quite a lot of things.

00:38:47.000 | - Yeah.

00:38:47.840 | - And one of those is whatever the capacity for evil.

00:38:53.240 | It seems to be one of those things.

00:38:56.400 | - Yeah, there's a quote from Carl Jung

00:38:58.880 | from just a few years before he died.

00:39:01.680 | What he says, and I'll just paraphrase it,

00:39:05.800 | is that we need to understand psychology.

00:39:09.200 | We need to understand who man is,

00:39:14.240 | that the greatest danger to us is man.

00:39:18.360 | There are no other dangers, really,

00:39:20.720 | that impact our species.

00:39:22.660 | And then he goes on to say that we are the source

00:39:27.280 | of all coming evil.

00:39:29.120 | Now, this was 15 years or so after World War II.

00:39:34.000 | But yeah, and I'd say one of the most important

00:39:36.320 | psychedelic experiences of my life was a DMT experience.

00:39:39.240 | Also, Terrence was there, Ralph Metzner,

00:39:43.120 | Andy Weil, a few others.

00:39:44.880 | And we were sitting around at Esalen smoking DMT.

00:39:50.840 | And under the influence of DMT,

00:39:53.440 | which now this was the first time I've ever smoked DMT,

00:39:56.280 | I had this super rapid fraction of a second

00:40:01.280 | like dissolving of everything that I,

00:40:03.520 | well, first off, I saw a horizontal line,

00:40:06.200 | then I saw a vertical line,

00:40:07.540 | then it turned into a color, red, then it was red,

00:40:09.920 | then it turned into cubes,

00:40:11.440 | then it turned into like an MC Escher kind of like,

00:40:14.240 | I don't know, didn't make logical sense,

00:40:17.040 | and then I was gone.

00:40:18.720 | And then it was just this period of five, 10 minutes

00:40:23.360 | of just feeling part of this enormous wave

00:40:26.540 | of billions of years of evolution,

00:40:29.080 | how I had this sense that in my innermost sense

00:40:32.760 | of who I am uniquely individually,

00:40:35.920 | this inner voice that's talking to me,

00:40:37.800 | that I didn't develop English,

00:40:39.680 | that it's like a gift to me from millions of people.

00:40:43.520 | So that even in my most innermost sense,

00:40:47.600 | it's not just me,

00:40:48.720 | it's the product of everything that came before me,

00:40:51.080 | I'm part of this bigger system.

00:40:53.680 | And then I just thought, wow,

00:40:55.120 | just how many billions of years does it take

00:40:57.280 | to reach this point of self-awareness and all this,

00:40:59.860 | and it was glorious, beautiful,

00:41:01.120 | and then I had this thought,

00:41:02.520 | and this is where this kind of intellectual honesty,

00:41:06.900 | I guess you could say,

00:41:07.740 | I just thought, well, if I'm part of everything

00:41:09.400 | and everything's part of me,

00:41:11.080 | then it's not just the good parts

00:41:12.900 | that Hitler's part of me too.

00:41:14.840 | - Yeah. - And that was just

00:41:16.160 | this shock like a stone sunk,

00:41:19.160 | and I just was very moody for the whole next day.

00:41:22.840 | But it was that acknowledgement

00:41:24.840 | that each of us carries these potentials,

00:41:27.480 | and what we activate is what matters,

00:41:29.480 | but what our potential are

00:41:31.160 | is the whole full range of things.

00:41:34.120 | - I don't know if you can comment

00:41:35.240 | about the DMT trip itself and what it's like,

00:41:39.040 | starting from the very basic geometric shapes

00:41:42.120 | and then launching yourself

00:41:44.840 | into the context of the enormity of space and time

00:41:48.920 | and the human history.

00:41:50.180 | Is there anything else to be said

00:41:54.080 | about that kind of visually

00:41:57.760 | or physically or emotionally about that journey?

00:42:02.760 | What it's like, that brief journey that reveals so much?

00:42:06.860 | - Well, I was with a group of people.

00:42:10.080 | The way we were doing it was,

00:42:12.680 | each of us would smoke DMT,

00:42:14.840 | have 10, 15 minutes experience while we closed our eyes,

00:42:17.640 | and everybody else was just chatting,

00:42:19.360 | and then the person who did the DMT

00:42:20.800 | would come back and tell their story of what happened.

00:42:24.280 | And then we'd think about it for a bit

00:42:26.000 | and then pass the pipe to the next person.

00:42:27.640 | And so this was like a whole evening.

00:42:29.600 | - So even, sorry to interrupt,

00:42:32.360 | even the conversations themselves then

00:42:34.140 | is part of the experience.

00:42:35.720 | - Yeah, exactly, yes, yes,

00:42:37.080 | because it's also what you bring back.

00:42:39.280 | I mean, I think that's, particularly for therapy,

00:42:42.320 | it's not so much about what the experience is,

00:42:45.280 | but it's what you bring back.

00:42:47.520 | And what do you integrate?

00:42:48.760 | And then also, how do you learn

00:42:51.720 | how to do these things on your own without the drugs?

00:42:54.600 | There is this way, because we're saying

00:42:56.360 | it's sort of a core human experience,

00:42:58.400 | the drug is the mediator, but can we do this on our own?

00:43:01.960 | And once you've seen it and felt it,

00:43:04.480 | then you have a little bit better sense

00:43:06.040 | to recreate it on your own.

00:43:08.280 | Although, you know, I've had dreams

00:43:10.240 | where I've been doing LSD and tripping.

00:43:13.240 | And it was just incredible.

00:43:14.560 | It was, I was tripping in my dreams,

00:43:17.320 | but I had not taken LSD.

00:43:19.760 | So there's this way in which we do that.

00:43:22.000 | So I would say that from the DMT experience,

00:43:26.040 | the sense of safety, that's what I was trying to get at

00:43:28.160 | with this group of us and this group of friends

00:43:30.760 | trying to do this common exploration,

00:43:32.500 | that if you have this sense of safety,

00:43:34.880 | you're incredibly vulnerable

00:43:38.200 | because you are giving up your awareness, really,

00:43:43.080 | of what's happening around you.

00:43:44.840 | I think there's, what we're finding is that

00:43:49.520 | in our psychedelic research for PTSD

00:43:52.960 | and what we see with the vaccines,

00:43:56.480 | that even African-Americans are reluctant

00:43:59.200 | to volunteer for vaccines

00:44:01.460 | because they haven't had that sense of safety

00:44:03.720 | from the medical establishment.

00:44:06.960 | They don't volunteer for psychedelic therapy even as much.

00:44:10.480 | So the overlay has to be this sense of safety

00:44:14.240 | as you become vulnerable and looking inside, you're not.

00:44:18.280 | I was just actually told about how

00:44:21.400 | there's a lot of work being done inside prisons

00:44:23.520 | to teach mindfulness.

00:44:25.520 | And, you know, so one of the,

00:44:27.920 | Charlene, who's my assistant,

00:44:31.200 | is trying to do work on helping people in prison

00:44:35.360 | with trauma, potentially one day with MDMA

00:44:37.920 | or meditation or mindfulness.

00:44:39.500 | But one of the exercises was teaching people to,

00:44:42.800 | okay, here's how you deal with stress.

00:44:45.000 | Just close your eyes and deep breathe.

00:44:46.760 | And what Charlene was saying is

00:44:48.160 | people don't close their eyes in prison.

00:44:50.420 | You don't feel safe to do that.

00:44:52.320 | So all that is just to say is that

00:44:55.400 | the context is the most important factor.

00:44:59.760 | So while I'll talk about the DMT experience,

00:45:02.200 | the context was this supportive sense of safety

00:45:07.120 | that I could be completely vulnerable

00:45:09.080 | and out of any kind of control.

00:45:12.620 | Women, I think, you know,

00:45:13.920 | often are less safe in this way than men

00:45:16.800 | because of all the sexual assaults.

00:45:18.500 | But what it can do by taking the ego orientation

00:45:25.140 | offline to some extent, it opens you up to much more.

00:45:29.920 | And to make a bigger point of that,

00:45:32.580 | we could say that it's very similar

00:45:35.880 | to the Copernican Revolution.

00:45:38.020 | And people thought that the earth

00:45:40.020 | was the center of the universe.

00:45:41.680 | And the Inquisition murdered people that questioned that.

00:45:46.320 | Father Bruno burned at the stake.

00:45:48.800 | Actually, one of the things he said,

00:45:50.360 | I think that's worth all these years later saying,

00:45:54.220 | is that when the Inquisition

00:45:58.280 | sentenced him to burn at the stake

00:46:00.480 | for espousing this idea that the earth

00:46:02.440 | was not really the center of the universe,

00:46:05.680 | he said to the Inquisition, he said,

00:46:08.400 | "Your fear in sentencing me

00:46:10.480 | is greater than my fear in being sentenced."

00:46:13.660 | That their worldview was so rigid

00:46:18.080 | that they had to wipe out anybody that would question it.

00:46:21.680 | And so this idea of psychedelics

00:46:26.280 | displacing our ego as the center of the universe

00:46:29.920 | and to realize that we are just rotating

00:46:32.520 | around something much bigger than our individual life.

00:46:36.600 | Our ego is designed almost to protect this body

00:46:39.760 | while we're alive.

00:46:41.360 | And you can understand all the good reasons why that is.

00:46:44.160 | But it also disconnects us from this bigger reality.

00:46:48.640 | And so the psychedelics, DMT,

00:46:50.160 | by knocking this sort of ego orientation

00:46:53.640 | or the default mode network offline,

00:46:56.760 | you open up to the bigger sweeps of history.

00:47:00.560 | - So in that place of safety and vulnerability

00:47:03.520 | in that fascinating group of people,

00:47:05.960 | when their ego was dissolved in this way,

00:47:08.040 | did they have similar experiences?

00:47:09.880 | Is there different places that their minds went?

00:47:12.480 | - Yeah, so once I had this kind of shattering experience

00:47:17.400 | that Hitler's part of me,

00:47:19.600 | no one else in the group had that.

00:47:21.400 | Probably a lot of them have maybe had that before

00:47:24.040 | or they realized that they're not just, you know,

00:47:27.760 | the good, the white hat, good people

00:47:30.480 | and that they're all good.

00:47:31.520 | And, you know, we got to fight against the bad people.

00:47:35.120 | You know, so no, people will go in different places.

00:47:37.180 | And not only that, if you do it again,

00:47:39.360 | you'll go into a different place

00:47:40.460 | than you went to the first time,

00:47:42.520 | unless you have not resolved the issue.

00:47:44.960 | So I had a sequence of LSD trips that were very difficult,

00:47:48.480 | but it was like coming to the same sort of conundrum,

00:47:52.680 | the same challenge that I was unable to overcome.

00:47:57.260 | This idea of letting go and really fully dissolving,

00:48:00.020 | letting the ego fully go.

00:48:02.940 | And I would have this sequence of trips

00:48:04.800 | over a couple of months where I would reach this point

00:48:07.280 | where I was too scared to move forward

00:48:08.760 | and I would just be holding on.

00:48:10.260 | So there are repeated themes sometimes.

00:48:15.320 | What Stan Grof has said, which I find very beautiful,

00:48:18.240 | is that the full expression of an emotion

00:48:21.680 | is the funeral pyre of that emotion.

00:48:24.200 | And what that means is if you can fully let in something,

00:48:29.160 | then the essence of life has changed,

00:48:32.560 | is that it moves on, that everything's in motion.

00:48:35.600 | And if you can fully experience it,

00:48:37.280 | even if it's a sense that you're going to be trapped

00:48:39.360 | in eternity in this hellish state,

00:48:42.600 | if you surrender to that, that's the way out.

00:48:45.080 | You know, this full experience of something

00:48:48.120 | is this funeral pyre of that emotion.

00:48:52.200 | And so that runs against a lot

00:48:54.680 | of what modern psychiatry is doing too,

00:48:56.280 | which is to suppress symptoms.

00:48:58.480 | And to, instead of supporting people

00:49:01.620 | to kind of explore these insecurities

00:49:03.880 | so that then they can contain them

00:49:06.280 | and then they can move on.

00:49:07.520 | - So yeah, resistance is not a way to make progress.

00:49:13.640 | - Right, right.

00:49:16.160 | Although, and one of the reasons

00:49:17.840 | why we do the supplemental dose during the MDMA,

00:49:21.400 | or why there's advantages in a 10-hour LSD experience,

00:49:26.120 | is that you have a lot of opportunities

00:49:28.520 | to come up against this resistance

00:49:31.080 | that may be too difficult to deal with.

00:49:32.920 | And then you kind of push it aside,

00:49:34.680 | and then a couple hours later, you come back to it,

00:49:36.600 | or you come back to it.

00:49:37.560 | - Press snooze every once in a while, if you're not ready.

00:49:40.520 | - It's hard to do that.

00:49:41.480 | I think with MDMA, you can negotiate.

00:49:45.320 | That's, I think, a part of its safety, in a sense.

00:49:48.120 | You can have this like, oh, I should be talking about this,

00:49:50.840 | but I, or I'm feeling this, but it's too much for me now.

00:49:53.720 | You can push it away.

00:49:54.680 | But with the classic psychedelics,

00:49:57.080 | this kind of membrane between the conscious

00:49:59.480 | and the unconscious, that once you take the drug

00:50:03.640 | and it weakens this membrane and things are coming up,

00:50:06.340 | it's very difficult to negotiate with it.

00:50:11.360 | The key to successful classic psychedelic trips

00:50:16.120 | is surrender.

00:50:17.060 | - You've talked about that you first began

00:50:20.080 | to reconsider the negative health myths around psychedelics

00:50:24.280 | when you learned that the book,

00:50:25.800 | "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest,"

00:50:27.880 | was written by Ken Kesey when he was in part

00:50:30.600 | under the influence of LSD.

00:50:32.660 | So how do you think LSD helped him, Ken Kesey,

00:50:36.200 | in writing that incredible book?

00:50:39.560 | - Yeah, there's a process that's called semantic priming.

00:50:44.560 | And so what that means is that I say night, you say day.

00:50:49.720 | There's kind of normal patterns of kind of,

00:50:52.440 | you say one word, what kind of words come to you next?

00:50:56.800 | And so they've done some research,

00:50:58.480 | they, meaning scientists, have done some research

00:51:01.280 | where you give people a psychedelic

00:51:04.720 | and then you do this semantic priming.

00:51:07.440 | And what you find is they have a wider range of associations

00:51:12.080 | than they normally would when they're not under psychedelics.

00:51:15.760 | So I think for Ken Kesey,

00:51:17.840 | he was able with psychedelics to get

00:51:21.960 | a deeper kind of emotional connection

00:51:26.400 | to some of these states of mind

00:51:28.320 | that people were in this mental institution,

00:51:30.840 | and that he could explore them more in depth

00:51:35.560 | and more eloquently.

00:51:37.360 | And also one of the things he talked about

00:51:40.040 | was the fog machine,

00:51:41.800 | was how people's minds were sort of clouded

00:51:46.300 | by the people that ran the institution

00:51:48.400 | and the fog machine would be coming in.

00:51:51.080 | So I think the imagery and the metaphors

00:51:56.080 | that he used a lot in the book

00:51:58.520 | could come to him during LSD experiences.

00:52:00.960 | And then now he wasn't doing very,

00:52:05.680 | when you're writing, you have to be literate,

00:52:10.480 | you have to be able to write,

00:52:12.500 | so it would be more like beginning and ends of LSD trips

00:52:16.280 | instead of at the peak.

00:52:17.720 | But I think you would get a lot of these,

00:52:19.800 | the feeling tones or the images, the metaphors,

00:52:23.200 | I think he would get these extent,

00:52:26.200 | also LSD lasts so long,

00:52:27.520 | you can get these extended focus

00:52:30.160 | and you can really elaborate on images.

00:52:34.040 | And so much of psychedelic experiences

00:52:37.860 | are poetic and metaphorical.

00:52:40.400 | I mean, you can take veterans

00:52:43.680 | who've never read a book of poetry in their lives,

00:52:48.560 | and under the influence of MDMA,

00:52:51.960 | just what they describe, the imagery

00:52:54.240 | and the way they describe their experience

00:52:56.400 | is metaphorical, poetic, it's incredible.

00:52:59.840 | And so I think that Ken Kesey was able to channel

00:53:04.840 | what LSD did to his mind in a way

00:53:09.680 | that most people couldn't do,

00:53:13.040 | but he did because he was trying to write this novel

00:53:15.520 | and because he was so brilliant.

00:53:17.120 | - Yeah, I mean, we'll talk about psychedelics

00:53:22.960 | and treating, in bringing some trauma to the surface

00:53:28.320 | and dealing with all those kinds of things,

00:53:29.640 | but there's something also to the opening up of creativity,

00:53:34.640 | for whether it's for writing purposes

00:53:37.360 | or for in my world, for engineering, for invention.

00:53:41.940 | Innovation and invention itself

00:53:43.880 | is a deeply creative process.

00:53:47.280 | And it's fascinating to think with the aid of psychedelics,

00:53:52.280 | what kind of ideas can be brought to life.

00:53:57.300 | - Yeah, well, we have the whole phenomena

00:53:59.060 | of a lot of the people in Silicon Valley

00:54:00.900 | and else microdosing psychedelics

00:54:02.680 | in order to have a little touch more

00:54:05.300 | of this creative approach to things.

00:54:07.600 | - I would love it to see if it was,

00:54:09.360 | that's more like Terrence McKenna territory,

00:54:12.460 | correct me if I'm wrong,

00:54:13.460 | but I would love to sort of more scientific

00:54:16.100 | to where there would be the rigor

00:54:17.860 | of saying how to do it effectively.

00:54:20.860 | You know, how to sort of understand,

00:54:23.300 | sort of not just almost,

00:54:26.920 | you know, to take the full journey of creative exploration

00:54:34.220 | and to do it for prolonged periods of time,

00:54:37.640 | for years, lifelong kind of part of your life

00:54:43.140 | of how it empowers creativity.

00:54:46.020 | I think, of course, you start with helping people,

00:54:52.020 | deal with trauma, and then the next step

00:54:55.900 | is people who have moved past their trauma

00:55:00.620 | and are trying to do something,

00:55:02.300 | create something special in their life.

00:55:04.380 | How can then psychedelics empower that?

00:55:07.220 | - Yeah, now that also,

00:55:08.700 | just to not shy away from anything controversial,

00:55:11.940 | that gets us to this idea of psychedelics for vision quest,

00:55:16.940 | particularly for younger people.

00:55:19.380 | You know, when you're sort of moving

00:55:21.620 | into this adulting kind of phase

00:55:23.420 | and you have to figure out

00:55:24.460 | what are you gonna do with your life,

00:55:26.300 | there's so many options.

00:55:29.460 | A lot of people, of course, feel constrained

00:55:31.820 | that they have very few options,

00:55:33.240 | but I think this idea of psychedelics

00:55:36.620 | as a way to help you find your calling

00:55:40.140 | or find your vision or find your unique leverage point,

00:55:44.220 | I think we'll see that more and more

00:55:45.580 | as our culture evolves and gets healthier

00:55:48.420 | around the use of psychedelics.

00:55:49.820 | - So it's both the science,

00:55:52.380 | having the rigor of understanding how to do it safely

00:55:54.980 | and the culture catching up

00:55:56.740 | to the fact that this is both safe and very useful.

00:56:01.740 | - Yeah, although I would question this idea of safety.

00:56:06.820 | So we can understand physiological risks

00:56:11.340 | and we can minimize them,

00:56:13.100 | and I think there's very minimal physiological risks

00:56:16.180 | from the classic psychedelics, virtually none,

00:56:18.460 | or for even MDMA under safe conditions.

00:56:22.620 | Psychological risks are harder to address,

00:56:28.780 | but we can do that through the sense of safety and support.

00:56:32.980 | But I think there's a level of risk there

00:56:37.520 | that we shouldn't overlook.

00:56:39.820 | And so, you know, to make a drug into a medicine,

00:56:42.700 | what we have to do is prove to the satisfaction

00:56:45.180 | of the FDA and other regulatory agencies

00:56:47.740 | that things are safe and efficacious.

00:56:50.380 | But even though they use those words,

00:56:52.460 | proving safe and efficacious,

00:56:55.840 | it's in relationship to the disease

00:56:57.940 | that you're trying to treat

00:56:59.180 | and you accept a certain amount of risk.

00:57:01.780 | So it's the risk-benefit ratio rather than pure safety.

00:57:06.780 | - Yeah, absolutely.

00:57:08.520 | Let me ask you about Ken Kesey a little bit longer

00:57:13.580 | 'cause he's a fascinating human being.

00:57:15.540 | He was also part of Project MKUltra.

00:57:19.740 | - Yeah, yes.

00:57:21.320 | - What was Project MKUltra

00:57:22.980 | and what lessons we should take away from it?

00:57:26.700 | - Well, MKUltra was a program by the CIA.

00:57:32.660 | You know, what they were looking at was

00:57:35.620 | can you take these drugs, these psychedelic drugs,

00:57:39.380 | and weaponize them in different ways

00:57:43.100 | for interrogation, for truth serums,

00:57:45.180 | for exposing somebody before they give a big talk

00:57:49.580 | to something like LSD,

00:57:50.700 | and then they can't talk or make a fool of themselves?

00:57:53.620 | Or can you spray LSD over the battlefield

00:57:57.420 | and have everybody tripping and drop their weapons,

00:57:59.540 | and then you just walk up and nobody dies

00:58:02.040 | and you've won the battle?

00:58:04.380 | - It's a fascinating concept.

00:58:07.180 | - Yeah, they call it non-lethal incapacitance.

00:58:09.780 | And I think that's how it's--

00:58:11.780 | - One way to win a war is to enforce peace.

00:58:14.660 | To get everybody not caring about the war, but yes.

00:58:18.980 | - Well, I think Gandhi said something even better,

00:58:21.100 | which is that the true way to win a war

00:58:22.820 | is to turn your enemy into your friend.

00:58:24.460 | - Yes, that's a beautiful way to put it.

00:58:26.460 | - But MKUltra was really nefarious,

00:58:29.860 | and it was part of our military,

00:58:31.140 | and it was done in secret,

00:58:32.180 | and they would dose people against their will.

00:58:36.580 | I mean, one of the most infamous things

00:58:41.340 | was that they had a house of prostitution in San Francisco,

00:58:44.500 | and they would have one-way mirrors, all this stuff,

00:58:47.740 | and then they would just dose people with LSD.

00:58:50.820 | You know, they would have the prostitutes

00:58:51.900 | dose these guys with LSD and observe what they would do

00:58:55.100 | and how they would act.

00:58:56.100 | And the CIA actually, for a while,

00:58:58.780 | was dosing each other secretly.

00:59:01.540 | And there's a famous case of this fella Olson

00:59:03.940 | that either jumped out of a window or was pushed.

00:59:08.620 | He might've been killed.

00:59:10.500 | He was a CIA guy, and they gave him LSD.

00:59:13.820 | And then they're trying to see,

00:59:16.180 | can they break him down and get him to tell secrets?

00:59:18.440 | And I think he felt uncomfortable with what happened to him

00:59:20.940 | while he was under the influence of LSD,

00:59:22.500 | and whether he was pushed or not,

00:59:26.540 | I don't know if we'll ever know.

00:59:28.300 | But MKUltra was violating people's human rights.

00:59:33.300 | It was done in secret.

00:59:38.540 | And the irony of it is that Ken Kesey

00:59:43.540 | is one of the people, one of the main early people

00:59:47.420 | that got LSD in this context,

00:59:49.220 | and then he was one of the main people

00:59:51.460 | that helped inspire the hippies to use psychedelics

00:59:54.340 | to oppose the Vietnam War.

00:59:56.900 | So I think the CIA kind of, in many cases,

01:00:01.500 | things get out of their control,

01:00:03.420 | what they think they can do,

01:00:04.460 | and it turned into be a disaster for them.

01:00:08.540 | I think there was some thought that some of the people

01:00:10.740 | at the CIA had is that if you can turn people inside,

01:00:14.340 | take drugs and they just focus on their internal experience,

01:00:16.620 | they're not gonna be involved politically.

01:00:18.640 | It's a way to sort of take people offline.

01:00:21.700 | And what I don't think they counted on

01:00:23.300 | is that when you're offline

01:00:24.540 | and you have these unit of spiritual experiences

01:00:27.700 | and you realize how we're all connected,

01:00:29.500 | then why do you wanna go out and kill these Vietnamese

01:00:32.760 | and put one dictator over another dictator,

01:00:37.760 | dictators on both sides in North Vietnam and South Vietnam?

01:00:40.860 | Why are we doing that?

01:00:42.740 | So MKUltra has, very disreputable,

01:00:47.740 | we're learning more and more about what they did.

01:00:51.100 | And one of the unintended consequences was Ken Kesey,

01:00:53.940 | and not only that, but then the Grateful Dead

01:00:56.300 | who began at the acid test that Kesey was helping to organize

01:01:02.220 | and out of that emerged, you could say,

01:01:04.980 | just this incredible psychedelic culture.

01:01:08.660 | And you look at the bands that began in the '60s

01:01:12.720 | and which ones have really survived to this day.

01:01:17.140 | And the Grateful Dead has survived longer

01:01:20.140 | than most any other band.

01:01:22.300 | I mean, some of them have died and all,

01:01:23.580 | but it was like the tightness,

01:01:25.220 | the sort of telepathy we talked about before,

01:01:27.600 | that they could just get so tuned in to each other

01:01:31.260 | and each other's energies,

01:01:32.540 | and they could do improvisations,

01:01:34.100 | and they could do this incredible work

01:01:36.100 | that I think the sustainability of the Grateful Dead

01:01:40.140 | as a group was a testament

01:01:43.860 | to the power of the LSD experiences.

01:01:46.380 | And that might have never happened if not for MKUltra.

01:01:49.080 | - But can we talk about darkness a little bit?

01:01:55.180 | So Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber,

01:01:58.780 | was allegedly part of the MKUltra studies while at Harvard.

01:02:02.840 | Do you think this is true?

01:02:05.140 | Do you think it had an impact on him psychologically,

01:02:07.580 | intellectually, and so on?

01:02:09.540 | - I do think it's true, and I do think it had an impact.

01:02:12.180 | So we talked before about,

01:02:14.960 | are these drugs somehow or other

01:02:16.780 | producing a certain kind of drug experience,

01:02:20.180 | or do they bring out what's within?

01:02:23.020 | So we have this experience, yeah,

01:02:25.420 | on the one hand, Ken Kesey,

01:02:26.700 | and he sort of took positive things out of this.

01:02:30.020 | On the other hand,

01:02:30.980 | we can get this opposition to the modern world,

01:02:37.460 | to technology, and to the point of creating bombs

01:02:40.620 | to try to go after it,

01:02:42.160 | so that the experience is not in the drug.

01:02:45.340 | It's this interaction between the drug,

01:02:48.280 | the person, the context.

01:02:50.580 | And so we can heal people with psychedelics,

01:02:55.740 | or people can be driven crazy with psychedelics.

01:02:58.480 | It depends, again, on the context.

01:03:01.920 | And so I think both these things can be true.

01:03:05.340 | And I think it was really good

01:03:06.540 | that you kind of highlighted this,

01:03:08.100 | that there is this polarities,

01:03:11.300 | and that it's not in the drug.

01:03:13.020 | It's in the other factors,

01:03:15.420 | and it's who they were beforehand,

01:03:17.180 | and then how you use that experience.

01:03:18.980 | So all that's to say is if we put LSD in the water

01:03:22.240 | and everybody were gonna get it,

01:03:23.820 | it doesn't mean that all of a sudden

01:03:25.300 | everybody's gonna have a mystical experience,

01:03:26.980 | and then that's all we need to do,

01:03:29.320 | and humanity is spiritualized,

01:03:31.020 | and we're end war and all of this.

01:03:32.620 | It's not about the drug.

01:03:35.460 | And that actually is why, for me,

01:03:38.980 | we've also talked about engineering new psychedelics,

01:03:42.980 | and all the people that are gonna be trying

01:03:44.900 | for-profit companies to develop and patent new psychedelics.

01:03:48.020 | For me, the most important challenge

01:03:50.220 | is new cultural contexts

01:03:53.740 | that can create legality, safety, support

01:03:57.740 | for the existing psychedelics that we already have.

01:04:00.940 | I mean, we have so much incredible tools

01:04:04.500 | in these existing psychedelics

01:04:06.320 | that it's more about creating contexts for them

01:04:09.860 | to be used in, say, medical or personal growth,

01:04:12.700 | or recreational even, with harm reduction,

01:04:14.640 | all these different ways.

01:04:15.480 | That's more important to me than finding some new molecule

01:04:18.540 | that's somewhat similar or somewhat different,

01:04:20.540 | but it can be patented.

01:04:22.580 | So it's the social context.

01:04:24.420 | So I do believe that Ted Kaczynski was part of NKUltra,

01:04:28.860 | and I think it affected him in a negative way,

01:04:31.860 | and that's a cautionary tale,

01:04:34.340 | that it's not in the drug, it's in the context.

01:04:37.500 | - The context, the person, still, it feels like,

01:04:41.280 | if viewed from a therapy perspective,

01:04:46.780 | perhaps there was a way to use psychedelics

01:04:49.020 | to help Ted Kaczynski find a path out of the darkness.

01:04:53.900 | - I think so, and I think that

01:04:55.940 | this is where I think MDMA comes in,

01:04:59.520 | in a way that MDMA is, you know, he felt very isolated

01:05:04.220 | and very much out of society in some ways.

01:05:08.460 | MDMA stimulates oxytocin, which we haven't mentioned,

01:05:12.220 | which is the hormone of nursing mothers,

01:05:14.080 | of love and connection.

01:05:15.700 | It provides a lot of this sense of self-acceptance

01:05:18.820 | and safety and wanting to be in relationship.

01:05:21.540 | There's Ghul Dolan is a neuroscientist at Hopkins.

01:05:24.940 | She's given octopuses MDMA.

01:05:27.860 | They're solitary creatures, except mating season,

01:05:31.140 | which is not very often, but you give them MDMA

01:05:33.980 | and they become more interested

01:05:35.220 | in hanging out with other octopuses.

01:05:37.460 | So I think this, for people that have had

01:05:40.400 | difficult psychedelic experiences,

01:05:43.260 | MDMA helps them integrate them.

01:05:45.180 | We've worked with people that had a difficult LSD experience

01:05:48.620 | 40 years before and are still able to get back to that

01:05:52.220 | under the influence of MDMA and work out some of the

01:05:54.620 | conflicts that they weren't able to resolve

01:05:57.420 | all those decades before.

01:06:01.220 | So I think that psychedelics could have been helpful

01:06:04.700 | in a different context for Ted Kaczynski.

01:06:07.740 | But the other big part of it is that people have to be

01:06:11.820 | willing to cooperate with the experience.

01:06:14.220 | We talked about resistance.

01:06:16.120 | So people can resist these things.

01:06:18.000 | It's the saying is you can bring a horse to water,

01:06:21.460 | but you can't make him drink.

01:06:22.920 | This is about how people have to be willing

01:06:25.380 | to go to these spaces.

01:06:26.900 | So one of the essence of our therapeutic approach

01:06:30.180 | is that we help people to heal themselves,

01:06:33.660 | that we are not giving them the healing.

01:06:36.580 | It's a flip on the power dynamics that existed,

01:06:40.820 | you would say in the 50s and 60s,

01:06:43.100 | my dad was a doctor and the doctors were gods

01:06:45.500 | and whatever they said was right.

01:06:47.560 | And we no longer, of course, believe that,

01:06:50.160 | but for a while psychoanalysis with Freud,

01:06:54.400 | that they gave the interpretation to the patient,

01:06:56.920 | the patient couldn't help themselves,

01:06:58.160 | but they would do the free associations

01:06:59.800 | and the psychoanalysts would see these conflicts

01:07:02.240 | and would be the one that does the healing,

01:07:04.880 | would give this interpretation

01:07:06.520 | and that would open things up.

01:07:07.640 | So I think it's this idea of empowering people

01:07:10.920 | to heal themselves.

01:07:12.800 | And so if Ted Kaczynski had been in a therapeutic setting

01:07:16.580 | with psychedelics and if they'd had something

01:07:19.780 | like MDMA available or MDA,

01:07:23.740 | which was popular during the 60s,

01:07:25.500 | which is a more like MDMA/LSD combination,

01:07:28.120 | the outcomes might've been different.

01:07:31.700 | - Let's take a step into the world of studies.

01:07:34.340 | Timothy Leary, who was he

01:07:38.660 | and what were the most important ideas

01:07:41.500 | you've learned from him?

01:07:43.480 | - Well, I did have the opportunity

01:07:47.080 | to get to know him personally

01:07:48.320 | and to spend some time with him.

01:07:50.320 | Timothy Leary, well, let's start with Nixon

01:07:55.320 | saying he's the most dangerous man in America.

01:07:58.640 | - That's a good place to start, yes.

01:08:01.720 | - And why did Nixon say that?

01:08:03.360 | It's because of this,

01:08:04.720 | turn on, tune in, drop out.

01:08:11.640 | Timothy Leary was just an incredible advocate

01:08:14.340 | for think for yourself, question authority.

01:08:18.820 | Those were the things he said all the time,

01:08:19.960 | think for yourself, question authority.

01:08:21.460 | He was a rebel.

01:08:23.060 | He was kicked out of West Point.

01:08:25.420 | He was a psychologist who was at Harvard for three years

01:08:30.420 | from '60 to '63.

01:08:32.580 | Before he got to Harvard,

01:08:35.780 | he had an experience with mushrooms in Mexico.

01:08:41.600 | And he said he learned more in that experience

01:08:44.840 | than he'd had in his entire academic career before then

01:08:47.320 | about how the human mind works.

01:08:49.300 | And so he came to Harvard

01:08:50.960 | wanting to do research into psychedelics.

01:08:54.580 | And he did some very important studies,

01:08:59.460 | both of which, well,

01:09:01.440 | one was called the Good Friday experiment,

01:09:03.480 | which was whether psychedelics

01:09:05.460 | in religiously inclined people taking psilocybin

01:09:08.880 | in a religious setting,

01:09:09.840 | whether it could produce a mystical experience.

01:09:12.040 | That took place at Marsh Chapel at the Boston University.

01:09:15.120 | Because it's a little bit subjective,

01:09:17.960 | or you could say entirely subjective,

01:09:19.580 | what people describe happens to them,

01:09:23.020 | he wanted to do another study

01:09:24.800 | which would be a more objective measure,

01:09:26.640 | and that was called the Concord Prison experiment.

01:09:28.640 | And that was the thought,

01:09:29.480 | if you can give people psilocybin,

01:09:33.500 | mystical sense of connection type experiences

01:09:35.740 | while they're in prison,

01:09:36.580 | when they get out, they'll be more pro-social

01:09:39.580 | and they'll have reduced recidivism.

01:09:41.940 | So Tim did that.

01:09:44.460 | He also did the naturalistic studies

01:09:46.560 | of giving loads of people psilocybin

01:09:48.140 | and sort of writing down what their experiences were,

01:09:50.500 | the range of experiences.

01:09:52.400 | Later on in his time at Harvard,

01:09:56.700 | they started doing LSD.

01:09:58.900 | And LSD is more cerebral, longer lasting,

01:10:02.260 | not as reassuring in a way as psilocybin.

01:10:04.900 | Sometimes he used to say that if they never got into LSD,

01:10:08.700 | they'd still be at Harvard with the psilocybin.

01:10:12.500 | So he was a great American psychologist,

01:10:14.820 | but then he got tired of the psychology game,

01:10:19.700 | you could say, or he would say that.

01:10:22.060 | He got more and more interested in cultural change

01:10:27.060 | and various musicians and artists

01:10:30.620 | and all sorts of people started coming to him

01:10:32.180 | for the psychedelic experience that they are,

01:10:34.260 | in a way, for creativity, for other things.

01:10:36.220 | So he started hanging out with all sorts of famous people

01:10:40.660 | or creative people, and he stopped going to classes a lot.

01:10:45.660 | And Ram Dass, Richard Alpert,

01:10:50.980 | had given LSD to a student that Ram Dass

01:10:55.980 | was courageous enough to admit

01:10:59.640 | that he had a sexual interest in.

01:11:02.560 | They weren't supposed to give it undergraduates.

01:11:04.440 | That was about the only time that they ever did it.

01:11:06.340 | And psychedelics just getting more and more controversial,

01:11:09.980 | even in the early '60s.

01:11:11.700 | Eventually got kicked out of Harvard,

01:11:13.300 | and then he became kind of a cultural icon

01:11:16.300 | for the counterculture and was hounded by the police

01:11:21.300 | and Nixon and spent a lot of time in jail.

01:11:24.900 | I mean, he's an incredible person.

01:11:26.780 | One thing that Ram Dass said is that,

01:11:32.540 | Richard Albert Ram Dass said,

01:11:34.760 | "I'm a rascal, but Leary's a scoundrel."

01:11:37.340 | What's the distinction?

01:11:39.880 | Rascals like in good fun.

01:11:41.520 | A scoundrel is like, you can't quite trust them, I think.

01:11:45.260 | I think that-

01:11:48.200 | Yeah, it's a spectrum of sorts.

01:11:50.040 | Yeah, I think that Leary was someone

01:11:52.120 | who a little bit got addicted to media attention.

01:11:55.560 | But I think that overall,

01:12:00.200 | he gets blamed a lot for the backlash against the '60s,

01:12:04.020 | the shutdown of psychedelic research.

01:12:05.700 | I think that he is unfairly blamed for a lot of that.

01:12:08.740 | I think when you look back at the '60s,

01:12:12.420 | the common narrative is that

01:12:15.220 | it was because psychedelics going wrong.

01:12:17.780 | People took psychedelics, they weren't prepared,

01:12:19.580 | they had emotional breakdowns, they went psychotic,

01:12:21.780 | they killed themselves, they did this or that,

01:12:24.300 | different problems of people taking psychedelics

01:12:27.120 | in contexts that they didn't feel fairly safe in,

01:12:31.540 | or just they weren't prepared,

01:12:33.020 | or they didn't know how much they were taking,

01:12:34.460 | or all this.

01:12:35.300 | So the backlash was because psychedelics going wrong.

01:12:39.420 | But I think the real reason, while that did happen,

01:12:42.660 | I think the real reason is psychedelics going right,

01:12:45.500 | and people having this sense of connection,

01:12:48.140 | and then the opposite of what the CIA was hoping,

01:12:50.900 | that it would kind of turn people inward

01:12:54.200 | and take them away from political struggles.

01:12:56.300 | It actually motivated people.

01:12:58.920 | Once you actually have these psychedelic experiences,

01:13:02.180 | your attitude towards death changes also.

01:13:05.020 | This idea of death becoming an intrinsic part of life,

01:13:09.060 | it's a natural cycle, it's not so much.

01:13:12.100 | So I think people realize that,

01:13:15.520 | while there's this billions of years of evolution,

01:13:18.780 | infinity, whatever that means in terms of time,

01:13:21.380 | that we're here for a very limited time,

01:13:22.880 | and they end up wanting to use their time well,

01:13:24.740 | they have a lessened fear of death,

01:13:26.700 | and they wanna build this paradise on earth here now

01:13:29.780 | instead of later.

01:13:31.180 | So a lot of people really did get motivated

01:13:35.180 | to challenge the Vietnam War,

01:13:36.860 | to work on the environmental movement,

01:13:38.420 | civil rights movement, women's rights movement,

01:13:40.540 | anti-militarism.

01:13:42.300 | And it was that challenge to the status quo

01:13:44.620 | that caused the backlash.

01:13:46.340 | So Leary is someone who, in 1990,

01:13:50.500 | we had a, now MAPS, they started in '86.

01:13:52.940 | So in 1990, we had this conference

01:13:56.020 | to raise money out in California,

01:13:57.740 | and Leary was there, and Ram Dass was there,

01:13:59.580 | and Ralph Metzner was there, and Andy Weil was there,

01:14:01.780 | and Terence McKenna was there,

01:14:02.860 | and Dennis McKenna was there, and all these.

01:14:04.820 | But there was one point where Tim was speaking,

01:14:09.820 | and afterwards I was asking him some questions.

01:14:11.900 | And I said, "Do you have any advice for us

01:14:15.220 | on how to work with the government,

01:14:17.140 | and how to bring these psychedelics forward?

01:14:19.580 | That's what we're trying to do.

01:14:20.740 | I've got this nonprofit for it."

01:14:22.580 | You know, we're trying to do this research.

01:14:23.980 | What is your advice on how to bring this forward,

01:14:27.100 | and how to work with the government?

01:14:29.280 | And he said, "Fuck the government."

01:14:31.900 | He said, "I am so far past asking for permission

01:14:36.420 | for anything, but I'm glad that you're doing it."

01:14:40.700 | And then he held up my hand, like passing the torch.

01:14:44.020 | - Wow.

01:14:45.220 | - So it was, and that's one of my favorite photographs

01:14:47.380 | of me and Tim, where he's sort of like,

01:14:48.880 | but it was after this, "Fuck the government.

01:14:50.660 | I'm so far past asking for permission for anything,

01:14:53.140 | but I'm glad that you are."

01:14:54.820 | Now, I did follow-ups to the Good Friday experiment,

01:14:57.760 | and I did follow-ups, 25-year follow-up

01:14:59.900 | to the Good Friday experiment,

01:15:01.060 | about a 34-year follow-up

01:15:02.420 | to the Concord Prison experiment.

01:15:04.240 | What I discovered, in some ways I would say,

01:15:08.180 | is the key to the '60s, what I just told you.

01:15:10.380 | But in the follow-up to the Good Friday experiment

01:15:12.820 | that I did in the '80s, for my undergraduate thesis

01:15:16.100 | at New College in Sarasota, Florida,

01:15:18.620 | I eventually found 19 out of the 20 people.

01:15:21.060 | It was just, that was an enormous challenge,

01:15:23.620 | 'cause their names were all lost,

01:15:24.940 | and it just took forever, years and years and years,

01:15:27.320 | to find them all.

01:15:28.160 | But I discovered that those people

01:15:30.620 | that had the psilocybin experience,

01:15:32.220 | in the midst of, 25 years later,

01:15:35.020 | with Nancy Reagan and Ronald Reagan,

01:15:36.780 | and if there ever were there a social pressure

01:15:39.760 | to disavow the validity of the psychedelic experience,

01:15:42.600 | that was then, and instead they affirmed it,

01:15:47.140 | that they thought, with all of this years of hindsight,

01:15:51.120 | now looking back,

01:15:51.960 | they thought it was a valid mystical experience.

01:15:54.900 | But I discovered that one of the persons

01:15:57.820 | who had the psilocybin,

01:16:00.780 | had this experience during the Good Friday service,

01:16:05.660 | that Reverend Howard Thurman was the minister.

01:16:09.100 | He was Martin Luther King's mentor.

01:16:11.060 | And Reverend Howard Thurman was the minister

01:16:12.820 | at Boston, at Marsh Chapel.

01:16:16.260 | Martin Luther King got his PhD at Boston University.

01:16:20.460 | And Howard Thurman had spent time with Gandhi.

01:16:24.280 | And so he was really kind of this hidden person

01:16:26.780 | behind the civil rights movement

01:16:28.220 | about nonviolence as their strategy.

01:16:31.180 | But he was interested in the political implications

01:16:33.540 | of the mystical experience.

01:16:34.500 | So he permitted this experiment to take place.

01:16:37.580 | And there were 20 divinity students

01:16:39.500 | from Andover Newton in the basement,

01:16:41.140 | and 10 experimenters, all the people on religion

01:16:44.020 | and psychology, like Houston Smith,

01:16:46.740 | and Walter Eason Clark, and Leary and Ram Dass,

01:16:49.100 | others were there as a support part of it.

01:16:51.940 | And the sermon was like three hours later.

01:16:54.460 | We actually have, three hours long,

01:16:56.420 | we actually have the original sermon

01:16:58.500 | from the Good Friday experiment,

01:16:59.840 | from Howard Thurman up on our website.

01:17:02.180 | It's incredible.

01:17:03.260 | But part of it was tell people there's a man on the cross.

01:17:06.220 | And this one person sort of heard that,

01:17:09.220 | and he thought, okay, I gotta do that.

01:17:11.100 | I got it to, Howard Thurman was such a dynamic speaker.

01:17:14.100 | He said, I gotta tell people there's a man on the cross.

01:17:16.740 | And so he said, what am I doing here

01:17:18.140 | in this basement chapel, listening to the service?

01:17:20.700 | I gotta go tell people there's a man on the cross.

01:17:22.140 | So he went, he thought he was just going to the bathroom,

01:17:24.500 | but he ran out the door.

01:17:25.340 | He's running down Commonwealth Avenue,

01:17:27.460 | and Houston Smith and Tim Leary go after him.

01:17:31.400 | And he had thought that since he should tell somebody,

01:17:34.540 | he should tell the president.

01:17:35.980 | Like, why not?

01:17:38.300 | But then he realized, well, the president's in Washington.

01:17:40.340 | I'm here in Boston.

01:17:42.380 | I'll just tell the president of the university.

01:17:44.260 | So anyway, he's running down the street,

01:17:46.100 | and Leary and Houston Smith go after him.

01:17:48.780 | And he doesn't want to go back inside.

01:17:50.120 | They finally get him.

01:17:50.960 | He's not hit by a car.

01:17:51.860 | But they end up giving him a shot of Thorazine.

01:17:55.900 | - What's Thorazine?

01:17:58.220 | - Thorazine is like a major anti-psychotic drug.

01:18:02.220 | It's a horrible drug, but it knocks people out,

01:18:07.020 | tranquilizes them.

01:18:08.680 | We would never do that today.

01:18:10.180 | We don't abort a difficult experience like that.

01:18:14.260 | But in any case, they hid that.

01:18:15.620 | That was not part of the write-up of this experiment.

01:18:20.020 | So what they did is, in a sense,

01:18:22.300 | a little bit exaggerated the benefits.

01:18:24.620 | It later became, three years later after the experiment,

01:18:27.340 | or four years in Time magazine,

01:18:28.660 | it said everybody that got psilocybin

01:18:30.380 | had a mystical experience like them.

01:18:32.380 | So it wasn't true.

01:18:33.340 | Not everybody.

01:18:34.180 | Eight out of the 10 did, but not all 10.

01:18:36.300 | Not this guy.

01:18:37.500 | And they minimized the risks.

01:18:40.940 | So there was a bit of that.

01:18:41.940 | I think Tim was reckless in that way.

01:18:43.860 | He underplayed the risks and over-promised the benefits.

01:18:48.420 | And then the Concord Prison experiment,

01:18:51.220 | it turned out that Tim had fudged the data completely,

01:18:55.980 | and it wasn't really successful.

01:18:57.900 | So I fault him for that.

01:19:00.340 | The outside world was doing the opposite.

01:19:02.300 | It was exaggerating the risks and blocking research.

01:19:06.140 | - He felt justified to fudge the data

01:19:09.340 | because the outside world was fudging, in a sense,

01:19:12.260 | the response to the--

01:19:13.900 | - Yeah, yeah, exactly.

01:19:15.300 | - Yeah.

01:19:16.140 | So that presents a very nice context.

01:19:20.420 | Fuck the government, but I'm glad that somebody

01:19:24.580 | is fighting the good fight from within

01:19:28.500 | and doing it the right way, which is where you are.

01:19:32.940 | So the '80s, let me ask, what is MAPS,

01:19:37.940 | the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies,

01:19:42.000 | and what is its mission throughout the years,

01:19:45.260 | throughout the decades?

01:19:46.340 | - Yeah, so MAPS is a nonprofit organization.

01:19:49.960 | I created it as a nonprofit pharmaceutical company.

01:19:52.940 | I created it in '86 after DEA,

01:19:57.180 | the Drug Enforcement Administration,

01:19:58.740 | criminalized MDMA in 1985.

01:20:01.580 | And that was after they started trying to do that in 1984.

01:20:05.820 | And as I mentioned, this Terrence McKenna sponsoring,

01:20:09.620 | motivating us to do this safety study.

01:20:11.980 | So we did that in preparation for this eventual crackdown

01:20:15.460 | because MDMA was called ADAM, used as a therapy drug,

01:20:18.980 | but it was also beginning to be sold as ecstasy,

01:20:21.780 | as a party drug, and that was taking place

01:20:23.860 | in public settings and bars.

01:20:25.540 | And so it was inevitable that the crackdown would happen.

01:20:28.980 | And so I had a nonprofit connected to Buckminster Fuller,

01:20:32.740 | Earth Metabolic Design Lab,

01:20:35.060 | that we used to support this lawsuit against the DEA

01:20:38.660 | to block them from criminalizing MDMA.

01:20:41.100 | We were winning in the court of public opinion

01:20:43.480 | and winning in the court.

01:20:45.080 | The DEA freaked out and the emergency scheduled MDMA in '85.

01:20:49.640 | The handwriting was on the wall,

01:20:51.000 | that they were not gonna permit

01:20:52.480 | the therapeutic use to continue

01:20:54.260 | 'cause it gets in the way of the narrative of the drug war

01:20:56.460 | and these are terrible drugs.

01:20:58.300 | So in '86 is when I started MAPS as a nonprofit pharma

01:21:02.700 | because the strategy that I realized

01:21:04.980 | is that Americans are open to medicines,

01:21:09.460 | that tools to ease suffering, that was the opening wedge,

01:21:14.460 | the opening door to changing attitudes.

01:21:17.220 | And it would be through science,

01:21:18.660 | I would say that my religion is more science

01:21:21.620 | than anything else.

01:21:23.180 | And culture and religion are metaphorical,

01:21:28.380 | but often too much they become literal.

01:21:31.020 | But I felt that through science, through medicine,

01:21:34.380 | there would be a way to bring these drugs

01:21:36.780 | back to the surface.

01:21:37.860 | And the mission was always this mass mental health,

01:21:42.300 | this idea that what we need is to spiritualize humanity.

01:21:46.620 | Einstein said, "The splitting of the atom

01:21:49.100 | "has changed everything except our mode of thinking.

01:21:52.140 | "And hence we drift towards unparalleled catastrophe,

01:21:56.120 | "which shall be required if mankind is to survive

01:21:59.200 | "is a whole new mode of thinking."

01:22:01.240 | So what is that new mode of thinking?

01:22:05.420 | My presumption is that it's more of this mystical sense

01:22:11.740 | of thinking that we're all connected.

01:22:14.020 | And then if we realize that we're all connected,

01:22:15.860 | we're not gonna blow up the world.

01:22:17.460 | So a lot of people say that,

01:22:20.220 | if we could just give LSD all to world leaders,

01:22:22.380 | that would be, then they'd have these spiritual experiences,

01:22:25.580 | the world would be better.

01:22:26.400 | But actually I had a ketamine experience

01:22:28.340 | the day after that DMT experience

01:22:30.200 | I described with the inner Hitler.

01:22:32.100 | This ketamine experience was,

01:22:34.500 | I was above and behind Hitler as he was giving a speech,

01:22:37.300 | like in the Nuremberg rallies kind of thing.

01:22:40.220 | And I was trying to think, how do I get into his head?

01:22:42.280 | How do I undo what he wants to do?

01:22:44.540 | How can we deal with him?

01:22:46.260 | And I realized this whole new thing

01:22:48.960 | about the Heil Hitler salute.

01:22:50.500 | And he would like push energy out

01:22:53.240 | and then everybody would do the salute back to him.

01:22:55.600 | And so it's like the one to the many

01:22:57.180 | and the many to the one,

01:22:58.520 | all these people giving away their power.

01:23:00.140 | And then how it would just sort of ratchet up in intensity,

01:23:03.220 | like these vibrations.

01:23:04.940 | And I realized there's no way to get into his head.

01:23:07.460 | This idea we've talked about before,

01:23:08.780 | about you have to be willing.

01:23:10.140 | - Yes.

01:23:10.980 | - So what that sort of helped me understand

01:23:13.660 | is that the strategy has to be mass mental health.

01:23:16.780 | It's not about changing a few leaders.

01:23:18.500 | We need to change the mass of humanity

01:23:21.260 | to this new mode of thinking,

01:23:22.940 | this new spiritual way.

01:23:24.220 | So MAPS was a non-profit pharmaceutical company

01:23:28.640 | focused on psychedelics.

01:23:30.560 | Big Pharma wasn't doing this work.

01:23:32.080 | Government wasn't funding it.

01:23:33.880 | So the only source of funds I thought

01:23:35.440 | would be through non-profit donations.

01:23:37.160 | And that's been true up until just a couple of years ago,

01:23:39.140 | now that we have the rise of these for-profits.

01:23:41.400 | But that's 'cause we've cleared out

01:23:42.520 | the regulatory obstacles.

01:23:44.960 | We've got more scientific data about the benefits

01:23:47.560 | funded through philanthropy.

01:23:49.280 | We've changed public opinion.

01:23:51.220 | And there's a lot less zeal for the drug war.

01:23:53.800 | So all of those things have changed.

01:23:55.240 | But at the time, it was mass mental health was the goal.

01:23:58.920 | Two tracks.

01:23:59.840 | One was drug development.

01:24:01.580 | The other was drug policy reform.

01:24:03.760 | So that it's not just available to people

01:24:05.920 | that have a clinical diagnosis,

01:24:07.320 | but people who are personal growth,

01:24:10.520 | or they should have access to it as well.

01:24:13.920 | I did not know at the time that no drug

01:24:16.520 | had ever been made into a medicine by a non-profit.

01:24:20.440 | That was really good I didn't know that.

01:24:23.120 | I might have been a little bit more daunted.

01:24:26.000 | And actually that didn't happen for 13 more years.

01:24:28.400 | It happened in 1999.

01:24:30.580 | And that was the abortion pill, RU46,

01:24:34.180 | that was approved in Europe, but it controversial.

01:24:36.720 | Nobody, no pharmaceutical company would take it.

01:24:39.360 | And it was John D. Rockefeller III

01:24:41.460 | through the Population Council,

01:24:42.720 | with the major donor being Warren Buffett.

01:24:45.560 | - Oh wow.

01:24:46.400 | - And the Rockefellers.

01:24:47.640 | And the Buffetts and some of the Pritzkers

01:24:49.600 | were involved in funding this.

01:24:51.200 | So that was the first non-profit.

01:24:54.160 | But the MAPS was designed as,

01:24:57.080 | from the very beginning,

01:25:00.600 | not academic research into psychedelics,

01:25:03.440 | but drug development.

01:25:04.640 | And that's a fundamental distinction.

01:25:06.360 | And that's why I think we're years ahead now

01:25:08.600 | of everybody else in terms of making

01:25:11.120 | a psychedelic-assisted therapy into a medicine.

01:25:13.800 | Because our goal from the very beginning

01:25:15.680 | was not knowledge, not academic research,

01:25:18.120 | it was practical, it was drug development.

01:25:20.080 | How do we create new social structures?

01:25:22.460 | How do we create legal access to these things?

01:25:25.120 | Now, in December of 2014,

01:25:28.400 | we created the MAPS Public Benefit Corporation.

01:25:31.860 | So MAPS is a non-profit, but in our 35 years,

01:25:36.660 | we've raised about $110 million in donations.

01:25:39.720 | What I didn't know when I started MAPS,

01:25:43.800 | and it took me quite a few years,

01:25:46.520 | I didn't even know this till about eight, nine years ago,

01:25:49.760 | was that in 1984, Ronald Reagan had signed a bill

01:25:54.860 | to create incentives for developing drugs

01:25:57.160 | that were off patent.

01:25:58.840 | So MDMA was invented by Merck in 1912.

01:26:02.040 | It's in the public domain.

01:26:03.720 | These incentives are called data exclusivity,

01:26:06.320 | which means that if you make a drug into a medicine

01:26:08.360 | that does no patent protection,

01:26:10.260 | nobody can use your data for a period of time

01:26:13.440 | to market a generic.

01:26:14.680 | And that will effectively be, well, it's five years.

01:26:17.460 | You do pediatric studies, you get six months extension,

01:26:20.520 | and we are being required, if we succeed in adults,

01:26:24.100 | to work with adolescents with PTSD.

01:26:26.520 | It blocks a generic competitor from applying

01:26:28.960 | for it till that five and a half years is over.

01:26:30.840 | It takes FDA at least six months to review.

01:26:33.140 | So more or less six years of data exclusivity.

01:26:35.940 | 10 years in Europe is data exclusivity.

01:26:38.800 | So the story then became to the donors

01:26:42.300 | that you're not gonna have to give us money forever

01:26:45.240 | because we can make money selling MDMA,

01:26:48.320 | but we wanna do two revolutionary things, you could say.

01:26:51.700 | One is psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy,

01:26:53.820 | but the other is marketing drugs.

01:26:56.440 | When you market it with the profit maximization motive,

01:26:59.760 | we end up in the extreme getting the distortions

01:27:02.480 | that we have in America,

01:27:03.520 | where we have the most expensive healthcare system

01:27:06.720 | in the world per capita,

01:27:07.840 | but our outcomes are down like 40 or 50 among the countries,

01:27:11.000 | our average outcomes.

01:27:11.880 | We don't have, third of the people or so

01:27:13.900 | don't have insurance and it's just very inequitable.

01:27:17.360 | So what we're trying to do is show a different way

01:27:21.220 | to market drugs and it's a modification of capitalism

01:27:24.560 | is called the benefit corporation,

01:27:26.640 | where you maximize public benefit, not profit.

01:27:29.560 | You still make a profit.

01:27:31.320 | So selling MDMA for a profit is not something

01:27:34.160 | we could keep inside the nonprofit

01:27:36.560 | because it's taxable, it's a business.

01:27:39.480 | So we've created the MAPS public benefit corporation,

01:27:42.760 | which is 100% owned by the nonprofit.

01:27:45.120 | So we have a nonprofit that owns a pharma company.

01:27:48.080 | - And the mission of that pharma company

01:27:51.240 | is to maximize not profit, but maximize benefit for society.

01:27:55.640 | - Yeah, yeah.

01:27:56.700 | Although there still will be profits

01:27:58.720 | and the profits that we're gonna make

01:28:00.760 | are going to be used towards the mission of MAPS,

01:28:03.940 | which is again, is this mass mental health

01:28:05.920 | and ending the drug war.

01:28:07.200 | And in fact, we've hired the Boston Consulting Group

01:28:10.600 | to help us plot our commercialization strategy.

01:28:15.360 | And so there is some suggestions based,

01:28:18.040 | there's so many different assumptions in this,

01:28:19.920 | the number of therapists that we train,

01:28:22.040 | the price that we set for the MDMA,

01:28:24.480 | whether insurance companies will cover it,

01:28:27.440 | but there's the possibility of somewhere in the range

01:28:30.680 | of three quarters of a billion dollars in profits

01:28:33.760 | during this period of data exclusivity.

01:28:36.980 | Just from the US.

01:28:38.540 | And we're talking about trying to do this research

01:28:41.780 | around the world as well.

01:28:42.920 | So that's what the Benefit Corporation is.

01:28:45.100 | The Benefit Corporation is our pharmaceutical arm.

01:28:47.300 | We're about 130 people now, somewhere in that fluctuates,

01:28:51.660 | but one third of them are in the nonprofit.

01:28:54.100 | We do harm reduction, psychedelic harm reduction.

01:28:57.820 | We help create programs for people

01:29:01.980 | with difficult psychedelic experiences

01:29:04.420 | at Burning Man, at festivals all over the world,

01:29:06.640 | even in cities.

01:29:07.480 | We're now negotiating with the police, the city of Denver,

01:29:12.260 | because Denver has made the mushrooms

01:29:14.180 | the lowest enforcement priority.

01:29:16.300 | You know, Oregon has passed the Oregon Psilocybin Initiative.

01:29:18.940 | So in those areas where maybe more people

01:29:21.460 | are gonna gravitate to do psychedelics,

01:29:23.020 | we want there to be harm reduction

01:29:24.620 | so that we don't have bad stories coming out

01:29:27.560 | that would change that.

01:29:29.060 | So MAPS does the psychedelic harm reduction.

01:29:31.020 | We do public education.

01:29:32.540 | We do a lot of it.

01:29:33.380 | That's what you and I are doing right now.

01:29:35.100 | - We're doing that now.

01:29:36.300 | But also research towards-

01:29:40.300 | - Well, the research now is done in the Benefit Corp.

01:29:42.980 | - In the Benefit Corp.

01:29:43.820 | - Yeah, so what happens is people donate to MAPS,

01:29:46.140 | get a tax deduction.

01:29:47.240 | MAPS transfers the money,

01:29:48.480 | or you could say invests in the Benefit Corp.

01:29:51.260 | The Benefit Corp will do the research,

01:29:53.020 | and then MAPS is the sponsor,

01:29:55.660 | but then we will license the sale of MDMA

01:29:57.660 | to the Benefit Corp.

01:29:58.500 | - Got it, but the research is done

01:30:00.660 | with an eye towards creating something

01:30:02.540 | that has a big impact versus just research

01:30:04.620 | for knowledge's sake.

01:30:06.140 | - Yeah, yeah, because I'm interested in political change.

01:30:11.140 | The other part of it, which is that the brain

01:30:16.680 | is the most complex thing we know in the universe.

01:30:20.180 | It's endless.

01:30:22.440 | I mean, when are we gonna really,

01:30:23.860 | like this idea of will we figure out telepathy?

01:30:26.040 | Will we figure out tapping into the collective unconscious?

01:30:28.780 | What is the extents of our brain?

01:30:31.220 | How does the brain actually work?

01:30:32.340 | Do you ask chemistry questions?

01:30:33.900 | So if it's just the pursuit of knowledge,

01:30:36.540 | that is an endless thing,

01:30:37.960 | and how does that end the drug war?

01:30:39.500 | How does that help people directly?

01:30:41.160 | So that's why we're focused on drug development

01:30:43.740 | more than mechanism of action.

01:30:45.780 | - Before I ask you about one,

01:30:48.580 | but several really exciting studies,

01:30:50.980 | let me ask sort of a personal question for me.

01:30:54.780 | So if I wanted to get psychedelics

01:30:59.140 | from the MAPS Public Benefit Corporation

01:31:04.140 | and explore my own mind,

01:31:06.540 | how do I get to do that, and when?

01:31:10.820 | - You won't be able to.

01:31:12.060 | You'll never be able to.

01:31:12.900 | - This is very unfortunate.

01:31:14.460 | - Because the reason is because the Benefit Corp

01:31:17.220 | is designed as a pharmaceutical company,

01:31:20.180 | so we can only work on clinical indications.

01:31:23.860 | So let's say you come to me and you just say,

01:31:25.860 | "Oh, I'm really depressed.

01:31:27.100 | "Can I get MDMA to overcome my depression

01:31:30.560 | "or overcome my PTSD?"

01:31:33.020 | We'll have to do research in those indications.

01:31:35.860 | - And by when you say me, you mean like a doctor.

01:31:38.300 | So this would be prescribed in theory by doctors,

01:31:40.660 | or this would go through a doctor and a prescription.

01:31:43.660 | Okay, let me ask another question.

01:31:45.660 | - Oh, well, to further answer,

01:31:47.700 | so that's where the drug policy arm comes in,

01:31:49.900 | the drug policy reform.

01:31:51.260 | So you should be able to get access to psychedelics

01:31:54.620 | for your own personal growth,

01:31:56.660 | but that's not medicine.

01:31:59.260 | So that's why we need to medicalize,

01:32:02.260 | to have things covered by insurance,

01:32:04.700 | to change people's attitudes, the public attitudes,

01:32:07.540 | and then we get this subsequent drug policy reform.

01:32:11.820 | And we're talking about it

01:32:12.940 | in terms of licensed legalization.

01:32:14.820 | So my view is you should get a license to do psychedelics,

01:32:18.380 | you get a little education stuff,

01:32:19.980 | and then you should be able to buy it

01:32:21.260 | and do it on your own.

01:32:22.100 | - So let me rephrase the question and more specifically.

01:32:24.260 | So when can I, if I happen to have ailments of some kind

01:32:29.180 | where the doctor decides that psychedelics could help,

01:32:31.980 | when would you be, a loose estimate for you,

01:32:35.260 | of when a doctor will be able to prescribe to me

01:32:37.820 | something from MAPS Public Benefit Co.,

01:32:41.580 | and then when, for my personal growth and creativity,

01:32:45.060 | would I be able to get something?

01:32:46.460 | So just looking out, this isn't guaranteed,

01:32:49.260 | but your vision, your hope,

01:32:54.140 | for psychedelics in society.

01:32:56.060 | - Well, the end of 2023, so two and a half years from now,

01:33:00.020 | we anticipate FDA approval

01:33:02.300 | for the prescription use of MDMA for PTSD.

01:33:05.040 | Because the FDA does not regulate the practice of medicine,

01:33:10.920 | there is what's called off-label prescription.

01:33:14.820 | What that means, the label is what it's approved for.

01:33:16.900 | So the label will say, oh, this is approved for PTSD,

01:33:20.380 | but let's say you come in, anything else,

01:33:22.340 | social anxiety or whatever,

01:33:23.900 | you can go to the doctor, they can give it to you.

01:33:26.380 | It might not be covered by insurance,

01:33:27.940 | they have to be a little bit careful about malpractice.

01:33:30.580 | But I think the end of 2023

01:33:32.660 | is when you will be able to do that.

01:33:34.900 | Now, there's actually another program, very limited,

01:33:38.820 | called Expanded Access, which is compassionate use.

01:33:42.660 | Which means that, and we have approval for 50 people

01:33:45.660 | for compassionate use right now, we think that'll grow.

01:33:48.940 | So that's gonna open up in about two months.

01:33:51.360 | And so those are people with PTSD,

01:33:53.700 | they have to be treatment resistant,

01:33:55.100 | nothing has worked for them,

01:33:56.140 | and they can access MDMA

01:33:58.500 | while we're doing the phase three studies.

01:34:00.700 | - Wow.

01:34:01.940 | - But they have to pay for it themselves.

01:34:04.300 | The sponsor has to pay for all the research,

01:34:06.340 | but Expanded Access, because there's no control group,

01:34:09.780 | everybody gets the MDMA, people can pay for it themselves.

01:34:12.980 | And we think that'll start in a couple months.

01:34:15.380 | But it's very limited, it's limited to certain cities.

01:34:17.780 | There's also a program called Right to Try,

01:34:20.560 | which is passed through Congress.

01:34:23.020 | It's similar to this idea of compassionate use,

01:34:26.140 | but it cuts the FDA out of it,

01:34:28.300 | and patients can negotiate directly with pharma companies

01:34:32.980 | to get access to their drugs.

01:34:34.620 | That's starting to happen, I think, in Canada now,

01:34:38.820 | they're letting people have compassionate access

01:34:41.220 | to psilocybin for life-threatening illness,

01:34:44.200 | because there has been studies with psilocybin

01:34:46.600 | for cancer patients and others

01:34:47.900 | with life-threatening illness.

01:34:49.740 | As far as your question about when will you be able

01:34:51.820 | to access this for personal growth outside of medicine,

01:34:56.000 | I'll take that to mean fully legally,

01:34:59.020 | where you can just go buy pure drugs somewhere,

01:35:01.000 | when will that happen?

01:35:02.260 | We already are starting to see the decriminalization

01:35:05.660 | in certain areas of plant psychedelics.

01:35:08.420 | And we see overall drug decrim that passed in Oregon,

01:35:13.480 | so that any drug is now, it's not legal,

01:35:16.100 | you can't really fully set up clinics to offer it to people,

01:35:20.780 | or there's no legal supply like that,

01:35:22.700 | but it's decriminalized.

01:35:24.300 | So my sense of things is based a lot on watching

01:35:27.540 | what happened with medical marijuana

01:35:29.020 | and marijuana legalization.

01:35:30.240 | So we're sitting here in Massachusetts

01:35:31.860 | where marijuana is legal,

01:35:33.680 | but what happened first was medical marijuana.

01:35:36.320 | So what we see is that medicalization,

01:35:40.080 | by demonstrating that under certain contexts,

01:35:43.380 | the risks are much less than the benefits,

01:35:47.700 | and then there are benefits,

01:35:49.360 | and then people hear stories

01:35:50.900 | about people that had gotten better,

01:35:53.060 | and then that changes their minds,

01:35:54.580 | and then eventually that builds up to

01:35:56.140 | why are we throwing people in jail for this?

01:35:57.980 | - It's just the culture, yeah.

01:35:59.220 | - Yeah, so I think that what we're gonna have 2023

01:36:02.580 | is MDMA approved by the FDA, chances are.

01:36:07.060 | Psilocybin will be a year or two after that.

01:36:09.820 | Then what we're gonna need

01:36:10.860 | is a decade of psychedelic clinics

01:36:13.100 | that are gonna roll out across America,

01:36:16.240 | also other countries as well,

01:36:17.980 | thousands of these psychedelic clinics.

01:36:20.080 | We already have hundreds of ketamine clinics

01:36:22.720 | that are ketamine for depression.

01:36:26.160 | More and more people are realizing that ketamine,

01:36:28.280 | when it's used with therapy, it's better than when it's not.

01:36:31.580 | But the therapists wanna be psychedelic therapists,

01:36:34.180 | they don't wanna be a ketamine therapist

01:36:35.760 | or an MDMA therapist, so they'll be cross-trained.

01:36:38.400 | So we'll have a decade of these thousands

01:36:40.520 | of psychedelic clinics and all these stories

01:36:42.400 | of people getting better.

01:36:43.240 | In 2035 is when I think that we will move

01:36:46.440 | to licensed legalization, which is when you will

01:36:49.840 | have the option of just going somewhere,

01:36:52.980 | once you've done this educational stuff.

01:36:55.460 | Potentially, I also think it would be better

01:36:58.100 | to have the opportunity for people to go for free,

01:37:02.140 | paid for by tax money, to these clinics,

01:37:04.380 | and you have your first experience

01:37:05.820 | with psychedelics under supervision.

01:37:08.140 | And you know what you're getting into,

01:37:10.040 | to ask the questionnaire what the risks are with the drugs,

01:37:14.140 | then you get your license.

01:37:15.780 | So 2035 is when I think that'll happen,

01:37:18.020 | and the clinics will be sites of these initiations.

01:37:20.900 | - Yes, and so it'll be a safe environment,

01:37:23.140 | just like you said, all the things that are actually

01:37:26.060 | maximize the likelihood of a pleasant experience

01:37:28.460 | and all those kinds of things.

01:37:30.140 | It is a frustratingly slow process,

01:37:32.540 | and the FDA being part of that process

01:37:35.080 | is very frustrating.

01:37:37.500 | Of course, there's benefits, but boy,

01:37:41.900 | well, I wish it could move a lot faster.

01:37:44.000 | - Yeah, well, one thing that I've learned

01:37:45.820 | from being a parent is that when you have little kids,

01:37:50.820 | it seems like they'll be with you forever,

01:37:55.340 | but then when they grow up and they go to college

01:37:58.260 | and they leave, you look back and like,

01:37:59.780 | where did that 20 years go?

01:38:02.500 | So we're still dealing with the legacy

01:38:05.260 | of the Civil War and slavery in America.

01:38:08.000 | So actually, a 20-year plan is not that long.

01:38:11.580 | So while we say it's frustratingly slow, and it is,

01:38:16.580 | I mean, it's 50 years since the psychedelic 60s,

01:38:21.420 | and right now it's 36 years since MDMA was criminalized,

01:38:26.420 | and you think about all those people

01:38:30.580 | that committed suicide from PTSD or from anything else,

01:38:34.220 | and all those people that could have been helped

01:38:36.860 | if the DEA had accepted

01:38:39.300 | the administrative law judge recommendation

01:38:41.140 | that MDMA stay in Schedule III.

01:38:43.380 | It's tremendously sad.

01:38:45.320 | At the same time, culture evolves slowly.

01:38:48.700 | You read the Bible or you read all this stuff,

01:38:50.420 | we're not that different from people thousands of years ago.

01:38:53.260 | So how are we gonna really evolve enough

01:38:56.900 | over the next couple decades

01:38:58.460 | so we don't destroy the planet and don't kill each other?

01:39:01.540 | That's why I think psychedelics

01:39:03.700 | have an important role to play.

01:39:05.300 | That's why I've devoted my life to psychedelics,

01:39:07.780 | and it is frustratingly slow,

01:39:09.620 | and what I said to myself is

01:39:12.140 | our whole effort has not been fast enough.

01:39:15.340 | - Can we talk a little bit about PTSD and MDMA?

01:39:18.620 | There's this fascinating paper,

01:39:21.940 | came out on a fascinating study

01:39:25.020 | that you're a part of, that's a phase three study.

01:39:27.900 | Can you describe what the study is?

01:39:29.580 | Can you describe what phase three means?

01:39:31.780 | Can you describe what the findings are

01:39:35.020 | and why it's in fact so important and impactful?

01:39:39.020 | - Yeah, this study came out May 10th in Nature Medicine.

01:39:41.820 | So one of the highest impact factors in medicine journals.

01:39:45.180 | It was tremendous.

01:39:46.140 | So to make a drug into a medicine,

01:39:48.780 | the first thing you need to do

01:39:50.260 | is what are called non-clinical or preclinical studies,

01:39:54.260 | meaning safety established in animals.

01:39:57.020 | What does the drug do?

01:39:58.420 | What are the side effects in animals?

01:40:00.100 | Where do you see the risks?

01:40:01.580 | Then you negotiate with FDA to do phase one studies.

01:40:05.620 | And phase one studies are where you move

01:40:07.440 | from animals to humans.

01:40:09.300 | And those are more safety studies

01:40:11.940 | and trying to describe what the drug does

01:40:14.500 | so that you can determine

01:40:16.180 | if there is potential medical value there.

01:40:19.100 | Certain drugs like cancer drugs are so toxic

01:40:24.100 | that you don't have phase one studies in healthy volunteers.

01:40:30.740 | It's like phase one slash two,

01:40:32.940 | where you bring in the patients,

01:40:35.360 | but you still are doing sort of dose response safety studies,

01:40:38.800 | but you use patients.

01:40:40.100 | But most phase one studies are healthy volunteers.

01:40:43.080 | Phase two are where you start bringing in the patients

01:40:46.860 | and you start experimenting with various different things.

01:40:49.860 | The purpose of phase two is really just to design phase three.

01:40:53.620 | Now, again, I'm sort of putting out of the picture

01:40:56.860 | in another area is mechanism of action.

01:40:58.600 | How do these drugs work?

01:41:00.060 | Phase two, you're trying to figure out what they do,

01:41:02.660 | who your patient population is,

01:41:05.980 | what are the risks, who do you include,

01:41:07.780 | who do you exclude, what are the doses,

01:41:10.200 | what is your treatment, what are your measures?

01:41:13.320 | In our case, it was, how do you do a double blind study?

01:41:19.540 | That was a big part of phase two.

01:41:21.620 | That's a big challenge for psychedelic drugs.

01:41:24.100 | Any kind of drugs that have a real strong effect,

01:41:27.420 | how do you do a double blind study?

01:41:28.820 | - A double blind, sorry to interrupt,

01:41:30.340 | would mean that the patient should know,

01:41:33.740 | should not be aware whether it's a placebo or not.

01:41:37.420 | - And the researcher.

01:41:38.260 | - And the researcher is not aware.

01:41:40.500 | And so for that lack of awareness,

01:41:42.340 | when the effect is really strong,

01:41:43.620 | it's very difficult to do on both the researcher

01:41:45.580 | and the patient side.

01:41:46.900 | - Yes, and sometimes they talk about triple blind.

01:41:50.520 | So the other part is the raters

01:41:52.620 | that evaluate the symptoms and before and after.

01:41:55.380 | So you ideally want triple blind.

01:41:57.060 | You want the patients, the researchers

01:42:00.140 | and the evaluators of the outcomes, all of them,

01:42:03.460 | not to know what the drug, whether it was drug or placebo,

01:42:06.700 | and that's to reduce experiment or bias.

01:42:09.460 | So, and then you move to phase three.

01:42:13.300 | Once you've figured out how to design

01:42:15.620 | the phase three studies,

01:42:16.860 | and phase three are the large-scale multi-site

01:42:19.860 | placebo-controlled double blind studies

01:42:23.220 | where you must prove safety and efficacy

01:42:25.740 | in order to get permission to market the drug.

01:42:28.740 | Now, for us, when we started MAPS in '86,

01:42:33.340 | as I said, it was one year after the criminalization

01:42:36.260 | of MDMA in '85, we had five different protocols

01:42:40.060 | that were rejected by the FDA for studying with MDMA.

01:42:44.160 | And these were all various phase one studies.

01:42:47.020 | They came from Harvard, from UC San Francisco,

01:42:49.460 | from the University of Arizona,

01:42:51.540 | and Albuquerque, New Mexico, all over,

01:42:54.060 | and they were all rejected.

01:42:55.840 | 1992, six years after we started,

01:42:59.260 | we got the first permission for phase one.

01:43:02.120 | And that took us through much of the '90s.

01:43:05.780 | Again, things are slow because we have to raise the money

01:43:08.380 | through donations, and then in 1999

01:43:12.540 | is when we started the work with PTSD.

01:43:15.340 | And that then took us till November 29th, 2016,

01:43:22.020 | which is when we had the end of phase two meeting with FDA.

01:43:25.460 | So it took 30 years from the start of MAPS

01:43:28.660 | to the end of phase two meeting with FDA.

01:43:31.420 | And what we had discovered during phase two

01:43:35.060 | was several different key points.

01:43:38.500 | The drugs that are available right now for PTSD,

01:43:41.900 | the SSRIs, Zoloft and Paxil,

01:43:45.060 | that have been approved by FDA and regulators in Europe

01:43:47.700 | as well, the European Medicines Agency,

01:43:49.860 | the European Medicines Agency, for PTSD,

01:43:53.740 | they work better in women than in men,

01:43:56.060 | and they failed in combat-related PTSD.

01:43:58.940 | All right, so what we learned is that MDMA-assisted therapy

01:44:03.460 | works just as well in men or women,

01:44:05.340 | and it works in combat-related PTSD.

01:44:07.940 | It works in regardless of the cause of PTSD.

01:44:10.760 | We also discovered that even though there are stories

01:44:14.460 | that people take MDMA at raves, and they dance all night,

01:44:17.580 | and they overheat, and they get hyperthermia,

01:44:19.580 | and they die from overheating, which is true,

01:44:21.740 | and can happen from pure MDMA,

01:44:23.560 | or that sometimes people have heard

01:44:26.340 | about needing to cool down, and so they drink water,

01:44:30.420 | and then while they're dancing all night,

01:44:32.780 | and then they drink too much water,

01:44:34.280 | and then they dilute their blood,

01:44:35.660 | and they die from hyponatremia.

01:44:37.900 | So there are risks of MDMA,

01:44:39.820 | but we discovered that in a therapeutic setting,

01:44:42.220 | we can control all those risks,

01:44:43.780 | those things don't happen at all.

01:44:46.020 | So we discovered safety.

01:44:47.700 | We could demonstrate safety.

01:44:49.740 | We also figured out that our measure,

01:44:53.980 | the CAHPS, the Clinician Administrated PTSD Scale,

01:44:57.140 | that it's the gold standard all over the world

01:44:59.540 | for measuring PTSD symptoms.

01:45:01.060 | It's what the FDA and the EMA require.

01:45:03.700 | We discovered that it was a good measure for us,

01:45:06.020 | and that we could show changes in that.

01:45:08.100 | The other big thing that we learned is that,

01:45:12.060 | and we haven't mentioned this yet,

01:45:14.320 | but the work in the '50s and '60s with LSD,

01:45:17.340 | and psilocybin, and the modern research

01:45:19.100 | over the last 20 years with psilocybin

01:45:20.900 | and classic psychedelics has demonstrated

01:45:23.400 | that there's a link between this mystical experience,

01:45:26.100 | this unit of mystical experience, and therapeutic outcomes,

01:45:29.420 | for the treatment of addiction,

01:45:30.700 | for working with people with life-threatening illnesses,

01:45:33.460 | for OCD, for obsessive compulsive disorder,

01:45:37.500 | that there's, with the classic psychedelics,

01:45:40.500 | both in the '50 years ago, and then the research now,

01:45:43.300 | has been that there's a link between the depth

01:45:45.900 | of the mystical experience and therapeutic outcome.

01:45:49.340 | What we discovered is that that's not the case for MDMA,

01:45:52.960 | that people do score fairly high

01:45:55.580 | on the scales of mystical experience,

01:45:57.580 | not as high as they do with the classic psychedelics,

01:45:59.860 | but they do score pretty high on average,

01:46:02.540 | and a significant number of them have over the cutoff

01:46:06.380 | for what would be considered a full mystical experience.

01:46:09.180 | So enough to say that we could look at a correlation,

01:46:11.900 | and we didn't find any.

01:46:13.660 | The other thing that we discovered,

01:46:15.180 | and this was more humbling, I would say, for me personally,

01:46:20.060 | is that my dissertation at the Kennedy School,

01:46:22.460 | a big part of it was on,

01:46:24.500 | it's about the regulation of the medical use

01:46:26.300 | of psychedelics and marijuana.

01:46:27.900 | Big part of my dissertation was

01:46:29.260 | how to do the double-blind study,

01:46:31.740 | and I thought I'd solved the problem,

01:46:33.160 | and I persuaded my dissertation committee

01:46:35.540 | that I'd solved the problem,

01:46:37.460 | and the solution was therapy with low-dose MDMA

01:46:41.220 | versus therapy with full-dose MDMA,

01:46:43.940 | and everybody knows that they're gonna get MDMA.

01:46:46.820 | Most of these people have never done it before.

01:46:49.020 | They'll be confused about is it full-dose or low-dose,

01:46:52.620 | and then the challenge is to pick a dose

01:46:56.180 | that's high enough so that there is this confusion,

01:47:00.040 | but not so high that it's so therapeutic

01:47:02.100 | that we can't tell the difference between the groups.

01:47:04.780 | So we studied zero, meaning inactive placebo,

01:47:09.340 | 25 milligrams, 30 milligrams, 40 milligrams,

01:47:12.060 | 50 milligrams, 75 milligrams, 100 milligrams,

01:47:14.620 | 125, and 150.

01:47:16.260 | What we discovered is that my dissertation was wrong

01:47:21.900 | and that there is no good solution

01:47:24.260 | to the double-blind problem.

01:47:25.740 | What we found is that, to our surprise, actually,

01:47:31.260 | was that 75 milligrams was an effective dose.

01:47:34.780 | - Oh, wow.

01:47:35.740 | - We didn't think that.

01:47:36.840 | I mean, the normal dose is like,

01:47:39.080 | full-dose is like 125 milligrams, something like that.

01:47:42.660 | But 75 milligrams was an effective dose,

01:47:45.540 | and we discovered that the lower doses,

01:47:47.980 | so I was half right, you could say.

01:47:50.140 | The doses of 25, 30, 40, 50,

01:47:53.400 | they could produce enough confusion

01:47:57.040 | that you could say that they were successful at blinding.

01:47:59.420 | Not perfectly, but enough confusion

01:48:02.100 | so that people, therapists, couldn't know for sure,

01:48:05.100 | so that there was this reduction of bias, you could say.

01:48:08.740 | But what we discovered, again, to our surprise,

01:48:14.100 | was that the low doses made people uncomfortable.

01:48:17.420 | They stimulated them, but they didn't reduce the fear,

01:48:22.420 | and so people still got better with the therapy,

01:48:26.860 | with low-dose MDMA, but if we gave them therapy

01:48:29.720 | with inactive placebo, they did even better

01:48:33.860 | than if we gave them therapy with low-dose MDMA.

01:48:37.420 | So we call it an antitherapeutic effect.

01:48:41.380 | I don't mean to imply that they got worse,

01:48:43.540 | but it made people uncomfortable.

01:48:45.480 | People didn't like it,

01:48:47.420 | but we would still help them make some progress.

01:48:49.860 | So we had the blinding, but what it meant

01:48:52.660 | by reducing the effect of therapy with inactive placebo

01:48:56.020 | is that it would make it easier for us

01:48:57.900 | to find a difference between the two groups.

01:49:00.100 | And so the real question is,

01:49:02.780 | if you can do it with therapy, why bother add a drug?

01:49:07.280 | So we went to the FDA,

01:49:09.220 | and so this was what we discovered during phase two.

01:49:12.020 | We went to the FDA at this end of phase two meeting,

01:49:15.140 | and we said, "We can give you blinding,

01:49:17.580 | but it will make it easier for us

01:49:20.260 | to find a difference between the two groups."

01:49:22.060 | And so we suggest that we do therapy with inactive placebo

01:49:26.340 | versus therapy with full-dose MDMA.

01:49:29.460 | That will cause a problem,

01:49:30.940 | because most people will be able to tell what they've got.

01:49:34.380 | What Tom Laughrin, a doctor who used to be

01:49:37.480 | head of psychiatry products at FDA, is our main advisor.

01:49:41.700 | So the first thing he said is that the double-blind

01:49:44.180 | fails in practice a lot, even with SSRIs,

01:49:47.400 | because there are certain side effects

01:49:49.460 | that you have with these drugs,

01:49:50.780 | and the doctors who are doing these research,

01:49:52.660 | when you're reporting your side effects,

01:49:55.300 | they can say, "Oh, that's probably,

01:49:56.420 | you got the active drug instead of the placebo."

01:49:58.340 | So the double-blind is, in theory, is terrific,

01:50:01.820 | but in practice, it doesn't always work quite as well.

01:50:05.800 | And so what Tom said is that there are two main approaches

01:50:10.180 | that they think are important to reduce bias.

01:50:13.260 | The first one is easy to do.

01:50:15.220 | It's called random assignment.

01:50:17.840 | So sometimes there are studies where

01:50:20.260 | you'll treat a bunch of people with something,

01:50:24.240 | and some fraction of them will get better, and some won't,

01:50:26.740 | and then you say, "Okay, all those who didn't get better,

01:50:29.220 | who volunteers to get this new treatment?"

01:50:31.860 | And then you give them the new treatment,

01:50:33.220 | but the people that volunteer

01:50:34.380 | are more likely to want to get better.

01:50:36.020 | They're not representative sample of everybody that has.

01:50:39.700 | So when you have random assignment,

01:50:41.700 | everybody is similarly motivated,

01:50:43.860 | and meets the same inclusion-exclusion criteria.

01:50:47.260 | So that's what we're told.

01:50:48.660 | Of course, we need random assignment.

01:50:50.420 | The other part was when the bias,

01:50:53.380 | double-blind doesn't work as well,

01:50:55.780 | then the system of independent raters

01:50:59.820 | is especially important of how you do that.

01:51:02.980 | So we have over a pool of raters, over 20 of them,

01:51:07.980 | and we do this monthly inter-rater reliability tests

01:51:11.900 | to make sure that they evaluate this,

01:51:15.220 | so that they're given a videotape of a PTSD patient,

01:51:17.660 | and then they're supposed to rate them

01:51:19.660 | according to their symptoms.

01:51:20.800 | And then we sort of make sure

01:51:22.760 | that we've got this calibrated rater pool.

01:51:25.860 | And it's all done by Zoom, by telemedicine,

01:51:28.780 | and they're randomly assigned to the next person

01:51:30.900 | that needs a rating.

01:51:32.620 | - So you said 20 raters.

01:51:34.060 | - Yeah, so we've got like 20 raters.

01:51:35.820 | And what we want to do is make it so that

01:51:39.580 | each rater sees each patient only once, maybe twice,

01:51:43.900 | but not tracking them through the study.

01:51:47.140 | So that tries to reduce the bias in the raters,

01:51:49.460 | that they don't know where this person is in the study.

01:51:54.780 | - And so there's a fellow, Bob Temple,

01:51:59.060 | who's like the old wise man at the FDA.

01:52:01.300 | He's been there since 1972.

01:52:03.700 | He was in charge of the Office of Science Policy,

01:52:05.880 | and they brought him into the final meeting of this process

01:52:09.860 | where we are trying to design phase three.

01:52:11.880 | So once FDA said, "Yes, you can go to phase three,"

01:52:14.660 | that was November 29th, 2016,

01:52:17.860 | we then negotiated for eight months

01:52:20.320 | on the design of phase three,

01:52:21.740 | and all of the other information-

01:52:23.420 | - This is fascinating.

01:52:24.460 | - Is gonna need.

01:52:25.300 | - This process of design.

01:52:26.740 | - Oh, it was, you know,

01:52:28.900 | to the extent that I have any artistic creativity,

01:52:31.900 | it's in protocol design.

01:52:33.600 | I really love that.

01:52:35.820 | - So you enjoy this process.

01:52:36.940 | - I love it, I love it,

01:52:37.960 | because it's always trade-offs, and it's, you know,

01:52:41.780 | and I acknowledge, you know, that we are all biased.

01:52:44.860 | And so how do you, there's something beautiful

01:52:47.140 | about the scientific process

01:52:49.660 | designed to get you to the truth.

01:52:52.740 | Especially when that scientific process

01:52:54.540 | is trying to get to the truth of the human organism,

01:52:57.060 | which is so complicated.

01:52:58.740 | So it's very difficult to dissect,

01:53:01.660 | to get the strong effects.

01:53:04.340 | And when you're analyzing, when you have like raiders,

01:53:07.660 | they're watching a video,

01:53:09.600 | there's, removing subjectivity from that

01:53:13.780 | is very, very challenging.

01:53:15.460 | - Yeah, very much so.

01:53:17.160 | And so we came to this agreement with FDA, though,

01:53:21.640 | that we would use this independent raider pool.

01:53:25.940 | And so we learned in phase two, again,

01:53:30.860 | that the double-blind,

01:53:31.860 | there was no solution to the double-blind problem.

01:53:33.980 | And both the FDA and the European Medicines Agency

01:53:37.060 | in the end agreed that the best design

01:53:39.660 | was therapy with inactive placebo

01:53:41.780 | versus therapy with full-dose MDMA,

01:53:43.780 | accepting the fact that most people will be able to tell

01:53:47.100 | whether they got nothing or they got full-dose MDMA.

01:53:50.240 | Most therapists will be able to tell the difference,

01:53:52.420 | but that makes a harder test for us

01:53:55.900 | to show a difference between the two groups

01:53:57.740 | because we're giving them inactive placebo

01:54:00.100 | and not the antitherapeutic effect of low-dose MDMA.

01:54:03.960 | So once we started phase three,

01:54:06.080 | so then we were able to start in 2018 phase three.

01:54:10.520 | And the paper in "Nature Medicine" that just came out

01:54:13.660 | was the results of our first phase three study.

01:54:18.160 | We came to agreement with FDA

01:54:20.220 | that we would do two phase three studies.

01:54:22.660 | Each would have 100 persons in them.

01:54:24.860 | And what the FDA said to us is that they thought

01:54:29.220 | that we could prove efficacy with smaller numbers

01:54:33.520 | than they wanted to see for safety.

01:54:36.420 | The reason they said that is that in phase two,

01:54:38.860 | we had a large effect size.

01:54:41.340 | So from a statistical point of view,

01:54:43.420 | the bigger of an effect that you're looking for,

01:54:47.040 | the fewer number of people you need

01:54:49.080 | to get statistical significance.

01:54:51.380 | When you're trying to find small differences,

01:54:53.300 | you need large numbers of people

01:54:54.800 | to sort of work out the noise.

01:54:57.900 | So we came to agreement on two 100-person phase three studies.

01:55:04.240 | - And the idea is that it's very possible

01:55:07.500 | that the first part, the first study would show the efficacy

01:55:11.160 | because the effect is so strong.

01:55:13.140 | - Yeah, yeah, and the second, but also safety as well.

01:55:16.140 | So one of the things we also realized

01:55:19.620 | when you work with a highly stigmatized drug

01:55:22.420 | in the midst of still the drug war and prohibition,

01:55:26.960 | that we need highly sympathetic subjects.

01:55:31.300 | And we need to make the best case we can,

01:55:34.060 | which means we need to work with the hardest cases

01:55:37.060 | so that this is really needed.

01:55:38.420 | And so we end up enrolling people.

01:55:40.940 | The first study was chronic severe PTSD.

01:55:45.060 | And unlike many studies of PTSD,

01:55:47.300 | we enroll people that have previously attempted suicide.

01:55:50.660 | - Wow.

01:55:51.500 | - So we have multiple people

01:55:53.060 | that have tried to kill themselves

01:55:54.580 | that we felt like if we were to exclude them,

01:55:57.540 | what are we doing?

01:55:58.460 | Those are the people that need it the most.

01:56:00.560 | So we came to this agreement with FDA.

01:56:04.340 | We're gonna work with chronic severe PTSD patients,

01:56:09.140 | including those that had attempted suicide.

01:56:11.660 | And we would do these two 100-person studies.

01:56:14.860 | And we also negotiated what's called an interim analysis.

01:56:19.780 | So what that means is that when the study is underway,

01:56:24.460 | and often big, big studies,

01:56:28.620 | they have this kind of interim analysis

01:56:30.340 | where what you do is,

01:56:31.580 | and for us, we negotiated when we had 60% or 60 people

01:56:35.140 | had reached the primary outcome measure

01:56:37.420 | and all 100 had been enrolled,

01:56:39.860 | then we would take a look at the data.

01:56:42.060 | And if the statistical analysis that we did

01:56:47.020 | was showing based on a certain effect size

01:56:52.020 | that we chose based on what we saw in phase two,

01:56:55.100 | the interim analysis is for

01:56:56.580 | what's called sample size re-estimation.

01:56:59.260 | So what it means is if the results

01:57:00.780 | aren't as good as you thought they would,

01:57:02.140 | you can add more people.

01:57:04.120 | And then you'll get statistical significance.

01:57:07.760 | It means that your effect isn't as strong as you thought.

01:57:10.480 | It'll be harder to get insurance to cover it,

01:57:12.380 | but FDA will still approve it

01:57:14.420 | because FDA also believes that these are group averages.

01:57:18.780 | There may be some people that will later figure out

01:57:20.740 | respond better than others.

01:57:22.480 | So they'll approve it if it's statistically significant,

01:57:25.060 | even if it has a low effect size.

01:57:27.260 | The SSRIs have low effect size.

01:57:30.100 | So we did the interim analysis in March of 2020.

01:57:35.100 | And what we discovered to our delight

01:57:38.060 | was that we did not need to add any subjects.

01:57:41.740 | That's all we were told.

01:57:42.780 | We weren't told like, what is the results?

01:57:45.820 | We were just told all we were gonna get is a number,

01:57:48.100 | zero, or you need to add X numbers of people to the study

01:57:50.960 | to get statistical significance.

01:57:53.220 | That's right around the time that COVID hit

01:57:55.380 | and lockdowns happened.

01:57:56.740 | And we ended up negotiating with FDA

01:57:59.260 | that we would end the study with 90 people instead of 100.

01:58:02.580 | It took a while for us to end up doing that.

01:58:06.660 | So the paper that we just published

01:58:08.340 | is on the results of 90 people.

01:58:10.900 | I think it was 46 in the MDMA group,

01:58:13.220 | 44 in the placebo group.

01:58:15.400 | And what we discovered was that the study worked better

01:58:21.340 | than we had even hoped.

01:58:23.260 | So the first thing is that

01:58:25.460 | you look at statistical significance.

01:58:27.180 | You have to get 0.05,

01:58:28.540 | which basically means a nickel out of a dollar,

01:58:30.820 | one in 20 chance that the difference between the two groups

01:58:34.820 | is due to some random factor

01:58:36.300 | rather than to your intervention.

01:58:38.180 | And in this case, the placebo group gets therapy

01:58:42.020 | and then with inactive placebo,

01:58:44.800 | and then the group gets MDMA with active placebo.

01:58:49.180 | So you have to get 0.05.

01:58:52.180 | There's another measure

01:58:53.780 | that the FDA uses sometimes called robust,

01:58:56.840 | which means one in a thousand

01:58:59.500 | instead of one in 20, one in a thousand.

01:59:01.580 | And if you get a robust results, 0.001,

01:59:05.780 | and you meet some other criteria,

01:59:08.380 | they might agree to approve the drug

01:59:11.540 | on the basis of just one phase three study instead of two.

01:59:15.100 | Because when you think about it,

01:59:16.580 | a one in 20 chance for your first phase three study,

01:59:20.180 | a one in 20 chance for your second phase three study,

01:59:23.180 | you multiply that together, it's one in 400, 0.025.

01:59:28.180 | That's pretty good.

01:59:32.660 | So robust, 0.001 is even better

01:59:35.780 | than two independent phase three studies each at 0.05.

01:59:40.060 | What we ended up getting was one in 10,000, 0.0001.

01:59:46.180 | Outrageous.

01:59:48.180 | Incredibly, so that's a measure

01:59:50.660 | of both the difference between the two groups

01:59:52.360 | and the variability.

01:59:53.520 | And so what it meant is that we had minimal variability

01:59:58.700 | that most people who got the MDMA

02:00:00.380 | got quite a large amount of benefit from it.

02:00:03.460 | And most people who got the placebo

02:00:05.140 | were more or less in the same range as well.

02:00:07.300 | - That's really exciting, by the way.

02:00:08.780 | I mean, I suppose it's exciting

02:00:13.500 | from a perspective of approval by the FDA.

02:00:16.420 | Maybe perhaps that's the way you're seeing it,

02:00:18.260 | but it's also exciting because it has a chance

02:00:22.940 | to help people that are truly suffering, yeah.

02:00:25.960 | - Well, if we can get one in 10,000

02:00:29.000 | in the first phase three study,

02:00:31.320 | chances are we can get one in 20 in the second.

02:00:34.420 | So it's really gonna be about safety

02:00:36.520 | for us in the second phase three study.

02:00:38.420 | Now, you can have a large P value, a large significance,

02:00:44.760 | but you could have an effect that's not very significant.

02:00:49.680 | It's not clinically significant.

02:00:51.120 | You can have statistical significance

02:00:52.800 | without clinical significance.

02:00:55.380 | And as I said, the more people you get in the study,

02:00:58.020 | you can find smaller and smaller differences

02:00:59.940 | between two groups.

02:01:01.080 | Now, we showed that we had a very large effect size.

02:01:07.000 | So effect size is based on-

02:01:10.240 | - That scale you mentioned?

02:01:11.480 | - Well, the scale of the effect size

02:01:13.520 | is based on standard deviations.

02:01:17.280 | So an effect size of one means that your results

02:01:20.380 | are one standard deviation away from the norm.

02:01:23.320 | That's considered very large.

02:01:24.980 | The SSRIs, because they were like 0.3, 0.4 effect size,

02:01:30.980 | that's considered small effect size.

02:01:34.140 | Medium is starting to be around 0.6,

02:01:36.920 | and 0.8 and above are large effect sizes.

02:01:40.040 | We had what's called placebo-subtracted effect size.

02:01:45.660 | There's two different ways to look at it.

02:01:46.860 | Placebo-subtracted means you kind of look at the difference

02:01:49.420 | between your two groups.

02:01:51.580 | And what that is for us, since one group had therapy

02:01:54.480 | and one had therapy plus MDMA,

02:01:56.240 | the placebo-subtracted effect size

02:01:58.880 | is basically the effect of just the MDMA,

02:02:01.980 | 'cause you've kind of washed out the therapy.

02:02:03.600 | That was 0.91.

02:02:05.240 | So we had a large effect size, which was different.

02:02:08.440 | - Wow, over, so 0.91 over just the therapy,

02:02:11.840 | so over the placebo.

02:02:13.020 | - Yeah. - Wow.

02:02:13.920 | - Now, when we do the within group,

02:02:17.440 | meaning the group that just got the MDMA plus therapy,

02:02:21.580 | look at their baseline and their outcomes.

02:02:23.940 | That's another way to look at it.

02:02:25.340 | And that's what's gonna actually happen in practice,

02:02:27.460 | 'cause people are gonna get MDMA plus therapy.

02:02:30.900 | That's 2.1 effect size,

02:02:32.660 | two standard deviations away from the norm.

02:02:35.000 | It's enormous effect size.

02:02:36.580 | - Yeah.

02:02:38.200 | - The other part is that we had no effect by site,

02:02:43.200 | which is very important.

02:02:44.940 | So we had 15 sites, two in Israel, two in Canada,

02:02:47.700 | 11 throughout the United States.

02:02:49.500 | The FDA looks at, is there a site effect?

02:02:53.300 | Because what that might mean is

02:02:54.580 | maybe you've got all your patients,

02:02:56.260 | or most of your patients going to this one site,

02:02:58.220 | which is these highly experienced therapists,

02:03:00.960 | and they're like hippies from way back,

02:03:03.140 | and they're super experienced with psychedelics,

02:03:05.100 | and they're getting great results,

02:03:07.320 | but nobody else gets good results.

02:03:09.220 | So we had no effect by site, which means-

02:03:11.500 | - That's incredible.

02:03:12.340 | - That we've been able to train all these new therapists.

02:03:14.900 | We had about 80 therapists working at all these 15 sites.

02:03:19.900 | We also discovered that there's a group

02:03:23.540 | that's considered to be very difficult to treat,

02:03:26.920 | which is called the dissociative subtype.

02:03:29.900 | So when people are traumatized,

02:03:32.920 | one of the ways to psychologically survive that

02:03:37.700 | is you dissociate.

02:03:38.900 | It's like you're not there.

02:03:41.000 | When you do that, though, it's hard to come back,

02:03:43.460 | because when you come back,

02:03:44.980 | then you get all these painful memories and fearful.

02:03:47.500 | And so the extreme of that

02:03:50.300 | is called dissociative identity disorder,

02:03:53.100 | kind of like schizophrenia almost, dissociative identity.

02:03:56.420 | So we let people in who are on the dissociative subtype,

02:04:01.060 | and those are considered to be the hardest to treat,

02:04:03.140 | because the theory is that you need to be ego intact.

02:04:07.740 | As I said, the mystical experience is not correlated

02:04:10.180 | with therapeutic outcomes,

02:04:11.260 | and you need to be talking about what traumatized you

02:04:13.860 | and working through that and expressing it,

02:04:15.820 | letting it out, not keeping it in.

02:04:18.020 | So the dissociative subtype seems like it's harder

02:04:22.540 | for them to get back into the event,

02:04:24.500 | 'cause they're so dissociated.

02:04:26.260 | What we showed is that those people did even better

02:04:29.060 | on average than everybody else.

02:04:31.420 | So that MDMA is integrative.

02:04:33.220 | It helps people who are so separate

02:04:36.940 | that they make even more rapid progress.

02:04:39.100 | - So it's almost like the MDMA made it more difficult

02:04:41.980 | for them to dissociate.

02:04:43.460 | - Yes, yeah, or you could say it made it easier

02:04:45.780 | for them to remember.

02:04:47.220 | - Yes, exactly, to reverse the dissociation.

02:04:49.540 | - Yeah, and we find that MDMA enhances memory for the trauma

02:04:53.620 | so that you can have these unconscious memories

02:04:57.620 | or memories that you cannot remember

02:04:59.500 | or that you've suppressed so much,

02:05:00.940 | but they distort your view.

02:05:02.580 | Your filter of the world is distorted

02:05:04.760 | by these fearful memories that the world can't be trusted,

02:05:07.420 | people can't be trusted.

02:05:08.420 | It's always about to happen.

02:05:10.020 | So we find that MDMA increases memory for the trauma,

02:05:13.660 | but by reducing the fear,

02:05:15.260 | then the memories can come to the surface.

02:05:16.880 | Then you can process them, let out the emotions,

02:05:18.980 | cry, scream, shake, whatever.

02:05:21.460 | And then through this MDMA effect

02:05:24.500 | on the amygdala and the hippocampus,

02:05:26.060 | it helps you store these memories into long-term storage

02:05:29.400 | so that they're not always about to happen.

02:05:31.340 | They're in the past.

02:05:32.600 | They're part of your story,

02:05:33.660 | but they're not the whole story.

02:05:35.320 | So we discovered that the dissociative subtype works better.

02:05:38.640 | Now, none of this would be enough unless safety.

02:05:42.800 | So from a safety perspective,

02:05:45.000 | what we discovered is that there was one woman in the study

02:05:48.040 | that attempted to kill herself twice during the study.

02:05:52.040 | There was another woman that was so worried

02:05:57.040 | that she might kill herself,

02:05:58.400 | that the therapy brought these things to the surface

02:06:00.460 | that she's been pushing away,

02:06:01.600 | that she checked herself into a hospital

02:06:03.920 | in order to avoid self-harm.

02:06:05.700 | At the end of the study,

02:06:08.160 | what we learned is both of them were in the placebo group.

02:06:11.840 | We didn't have anybody in the MDMA group

02:06:14.240 | attempt to kill themselves.

02:06:15.660 | So the MDMA is really helpful

02:06:21.060 | for giving people a sense of hope

02:06:23.160 | and that they can somehow process this.

02:06:27.200 | Now, it's not to say that nobody will ever commit suicide.

02:06:30.760 | That's our big concern in the second phase three study.

02:06:34.200 | As I said, it's more gonna be about safety

02:06:36.000 | than about efficacy.

02:06:36.980 | We think we'll get the efficacy,

02:06:38.320 | but we're very concerned about safety.

02:06:42.200 | Because we had problems in the first phase three study

02:06:46.320 | of somebody trying to kill herself twice

02:06:47.760 | in the placebo group,

02:06:48.760 | it's the background for having PTSD.

02:06:52.880 | So there'd have to be a disproportionate number of people

02:06:55.480 | in the MDMA group try to kill themselves

02:06:57.400 | or succeed in killing themselves

02:06:58.800 | than in the placebo group for the FDA to say,

02:07:01.360 | "Oh, this MDMA, it's too dangerous.

02:07:04.240 | "We don't think that's gonna happen."

02:07:06.040 | So the other findings are from safety

02:07:11.040 | is that the side effects are transitory.

02:07:13.220 | They're minor.

02:07:14.060 | They're sweating or jaw clenching

02:07:17.720 | or slight temperature increase.

02:07:19.720 | And everybody that's been to a rave knows about it.

02:07:23.040 | Take an ecstasy.

02:07:24.080 | There are some side effects.

02:07:26.160 | But they're minor, they're transitory,

02:07:27.600 | and there has been this massive problem

02:07:30.920 | of during the '80s, the '90s,

02:07:33.440 | NIDA, the National Institute on Drug Abuse,

02:07:34.920 | was trying to say that MDMA was neurotoxic

02:07:37.720 | and that you take it

02:07:38.840 | and it's gonna cause nerve terminal degeneration,

02:07:41.180 | it's gonna be major brain damage,

02:07:42.940 | it's gonna be significant functional consequences.

02:07:45.400 | And back then they were saying that MDMA is too dangerous,

02:07:48.520 | it should never even be researched.

02:07:49.940 | Nobody should even get it once

02:07:51.380 | because it's poison and brain damage.

02:07:54.080 | Well, we no longer believe that.

02:07:56.520 | That was exaggerated.

02:07:57.540 | That was in service of the drug war.

02:08:00.800 | But we've done in phase two neurocognitive tests

02:08:04.480 | before and after in two of our different sites

02:08:07.280 | and showed no decline in cognitive functioning.

02:08:09.840 | So we don't think that there's any neurotoxicity happening

02:08:14.640 | and the doses that we use.

02:08:16.720 | There's no obvious functional consequences.

02:08:18.780 | People are getting better.

02:08:20.240 | And the other thing that we've learned in phase two

02:08:24.120 | and that we still have to learn from this study.

02:08:25.680 | So what we showed is the durability of the effect.

02:08:29.400 | We showed that 32% of the people

02:08:32.140 | that got the therapy without MDMA

02:08:34.420 | at two months after the last experimental session

02:08:36.860 | no longer had PTSD, just with the therapy,

02:08:40.080 | which is phenomenal 'cause these are on average 14 years PTSD

02:08:44.160 | one third had PTSD over 20 years.

02:08:46.280 | And just with the therapy,

02:08:51.060 | 32% no longer had PTSD at the two months.

02:08:54.600 | However, those people that got MDMA was 67%.

02:08:58.440 | No longer had PTSD, more than twice as good.

02:09:02.320 | In phase two and in phase three,

02:09:04.820 | we're also gonna do the 12 month follow-up.

02:09:07.580 | That's not for the FDA.

02:09:09.300 | That's not for approvability.

02:09:10.740 | That's more for insurance companies

02:09:12.420 | 'cause this is expensive, a lot of therapy time.

02:09:15.340 | If it fades, if it's great results initially,

02:09:18.060 | but then it fades after six months, what's the point?

02:09:22.060 | And what we showed in phase two

02:09:24.880 | is that people keep getting better

02:09:28.960 | at the two month follow-up, they're doing pretty well,

02:09:31.960 | but at the 12 month follow-up, they're even better.

02:09:34.960 | So it's durable.

02:09:35.960 | People have learned how to process trauma.

02:09:38.440 | They keep getting better.

02:09:39.260 | So we've not reached that point in this phase three study

02:09:41.660 | where everybody's got their one year follow-up,

02:09:43.440 | but we have also done three and a half year follow-ups

02:09:46.320 | to some of the groups that were in phase two

02:09:48.840 | and showed that it was durable.

02:09:50.620 | And we're doing a long-term follow-up now

02:09:53.080 | to many of the people in phase two,

02:09:55.320 | some of them treated 15 years ago.

02:09:57.680 | So that's all more for the insurance companies.

02:10:00.000 | So basically what we found in the paper

02:10:02.860 | that we just published is that it was highly efficacious,

02:10:05.400 | highly significant, no effect by sight,

02:10:07.960 | works in the hardest cases,

02:10:09.480 | and the safety record was great.

02:10:13.160 | - That's an incredible success.

02:10:14.660 | And that's really exciting,

02:10:16.720 | especially given that the people who've committed,

02:10:20.400 | who attempted to commit suicide were let into the study.

02:10:23.920 | And so these are people who are truly suffering.

02:10:26.820 | I mean, that's incredibly exciting.

02:10:35.120 | And I mean, just to speak to the frustration

02:10:38.380 | why things can't move faster,

02:10:39.920 | but for what it is, it's incredibly exciting.

02:10:44.920 | Is there other studies of this nature

02:10:48.160 | that you foresee enabling that same kind of positive impact,

02:10:52.020 | whether it's MDMA for other things like treating addiction,

02:10:55.360 | or maybe it's psilocybin for other conditions?

02:10:59.400 | Is there something else that's promising?

02:11:01.160 | - Yeah, I think that what we've discovered

02:11:05.800 | I don't think is unique to MDMA.

02:11:08.920 | So it's MDMA-assisted psychotherapy.

02:11:12.360 | MDMA is ideal for PTSD.

02:11:15.840 | Maybe it won't work as well for OCD or other things.

02:11:18.960 | It was very strategic why we chose MDMA

02:11:21.040 | and why we chose PTSD.

02:11:22.740 | But I don't think that the results that we've got

02:11:26.400 | are so unique to MDMA-assisted therapy.

02:11:29.160 | I think that psilocybin-assisted therapy

02:11:31.320 | is gonna be great for people

02:11:33.720 | with life-threatening illnesses,

02:11:35.560 | cancer, who are anxious about dying.

02:11:37.920 | It looks like it's really good

02:11:39.480 | in the treatment of addiction.

02:11:40.960 | Again, these are in combination

02:11:44.480 | with sort of the psilocybin tobacco

02:11:47.120 | is cognitive behavioral therapy with psilocybin.

02:11:49.940 | I think that it's gonna be a little bit more difficult,

02:11:54.000 | psilocybin for depression.

02:11:55.640 | I don't know if it'll be quite as good.

02:11:58.400 | There are some biological aspects sometimes to depression,

02:12:01.900 | but I think that there'll be really good results

02:12:03.480 | for psilocybin for depression.

02:12:04.880 | I think it'll be approved.

02:12:05.940 | It's considered a breakthrough therapy by the FDA.

02:12:09.080 | Ibogaine is phenomenal for opiate addiction,

02:12:12.320 | helping people go through the withdrawal,

02:12:14.000 | and then giving them this chance to deal with the material

02:12:17.240 | that drives them for addiction.

02:12:21.000 | There was Ben Sessa, Dr. Ben Sessa in England

02:12:23.600 | did MDMA for alcohol use disorder.

02:12:26.440 | And that was really great, the results he got.

02:12:28.640 | And it's the case that he ended up

02:12:31.760 | basically treating people for trauma.

02:12:33.440 | It's the trauma that people run,

02:12:35.280 | the emotional challenges that people run from

02:12:37.680 | into quieting that pain through drug addiction or alcoholism.

02:12:43.000 | So trauma is behind a lot of addiction.

02:12:44.960 | I think that we are going to see a revolution in psychiatry

02:12:49.960 | and that there will be a lot of conditions

02:12:54.760 | that have left a lot of people still suffering,

02:12:59.320 | that psychedelic-assisted therapy,

02:13:01.240 | different psychedelics, different approaches,

02:13:03.060 | but I think that we will see a lot of hope

02:13:06.360 | for psychiatry and psychotherapy,

02:13:08.040 | and that psychedelics will be a big part

02:13:09.720 | of changing the practice of psychiatry and psychotherapy.

02:13:13.680 | - Yeah, this is really, to me, fascinating.

02:13:15.800 | So I actually, when I was younger,

02:13:19.160 | for the longest time, wanted to be a psychiatrist.

02:13:21.920 | So I was excited by psychotherapy,

02:13:24.720 | but then I, perhaps incorrectly, maybe you can correct me,

02:13:28.160 | but became more and more cynical

02:13:30.600 | because it felt like it was more about prescribing drugs

02:13:33.520 | than psychotherapy.

02:13:34.560 | - I'm not gonna correct you.

02:13:36.360 | I mean, right now, there is a crisis in psychiatry,

02:13:39.720 | that there are so many psychiatrists that are so fed up

02:13:42.400 | because they have been pharmaceuticalized,

02:13:45.700 | they meet people for 15 minutes,

02:13:47.360 | they adjust their medications.

02:13:49.160 | This is the way they make the most money,

02:13:51.320 | but they've lost the art of talking to people.

02:13:53.640 | And that's why we see that so many young

02:13:57.980 | psychiatric residents are so thrilled by psychedelics,

02:14:02.880 | that they really want to get back to treating people

02:14:05.640 | as individuals, not just a bunch of chemicals.

02:14:08.320 | - Yeah, that's truly fascinating.

02:14:09.600 | 'Cause the reason it was appealing to me

02:14:11.680 | was a way to study the human mind

02:14:14.760 | and to see ways through talking

02:14:18.400 | that you can make people feel better,

02:14:22.720 | make people better, make people suffer less.

02:14:28.000 | And that was really exciting at the time.

02:14:30.920 | I ended up then going to AI

02:14:32.560 | because then I can understand the mind from that angle.

02:14:35.680 | But it's exciting that that could be also,

02:14:40.000 | revolutionize the field of psychotherapy,

02:14:43.900 | take it from its, back to its origins,

02:14:47.040 | to where a psychiatrist would be a scholar of the mind.

02:14:51.160 | - Yeah, well, you know, Freud talked about dreams

02:14:53.880 | as the Royal Road to the unconscious.

02:14:56.440 | And there was a lot of,

02:14:58.280 | you really spent a lot of time with people.

02:15:00.920 | Now, right before he died, in his last book,

02:15:05.800 | Freud wrote something,

02:15:06.840 | and again, this will be a rough paraphrase,

02:15:09.400 | but he said that in the future,

02:15:11.520 | we may learn about the energies of the brain

02:15:15.680 | and there'll be ways with chemicals to influence that,

02:15:18.480 | that will help the therapeutic process.

02:15:21.880 | - Yeah.

02:15:22.720 | So you could say he was ahead of his time.

02:15:28.360 | This study paints a fascinating picture of a future,

02:15:32.520 | where first for medical applications,

02:15:35.760 | but then also in general,

02:15:37.880 | psychedelics of various forms could be used

02:15:39.920 | by the broader society.

02:15:42.280 | Forgive the perhaps ridiculous question,

02:15:44.520 | but if much of society, including our politicians,

02:15:49.520 | are taking psychedelics and dissolving their ego

02:15:56.520 | and going through this whole process,

02:15:58.440 | how do you think the world may look different

02:16:01.920 | in 20, 30, 50 years?

02:16:05.040 | - Okay, so I said that I think licensed legalization

02:16:09.320 | happens in 2035.

02:16:11.040 | - Yes.

02:16:11.880 | - So, and I think by 2050,

02:16:14.640 | we will have enough people hopefully spiritualized.

02:16:20.480 | We're also talking about,

02:16:24.680 | we hear so much in terms of climate change

02:16:27.280 | about net zero carbon.

02:16:30.000 | So our goal is net zero trauma.

02:16:32.800 | When do we have a world with net zero trauma?

02:16:35.680 | I mean, right now, we have two sites in Israel.

02:16:39.580 | So we help a few people,

02:16:41.240 | but the recent war with Gaza has traumatized

02:16:44.840 | millions of people on both sides.

02:16:46.800 | So we are a long way away from net zero trauma,

02:16:50.860 | but that's the hope.

02:16:53.160 | And that's, I think, possible.

02:16:56.360 | I think humanity as a whole

02:16:58.640 | is like lemmings heading over a cliff

02:17:04.640 | with climate change and with the nuclear proliferation

02:17:09.640 | and just the religious hatreds

02:17:11.760 | and more of the retreat to authoritarianism

02:17:13.920 | and fundamentalism and tribalism.

02:17:16.580 | So I think that there's a very good chance, though,

02:17:19.980 | that psychedelics used wisely.

02:17:22.640 | So it's not just make psychedelics legal

02:17:25.000 | and everybody takes them.

02:17:25.880 | And as you talked about Ted Kaczynski,

02:17:28.360 | it's the context that people take it in.

02:17:31.200 | But I think that there's a reasonable chance

02:17:35.280 | that enough people can,

02:17:37.300 | so you could say,

02:17:39.440 | clean their filters to see people as

02:17:45.280 | more similar to them than different,

02:17:48.560 | not to label them as the enemy.

02:17:50.480 | Stan Grof, again, had this beautiful phrase

02:17:52.400 | about transparent to the transcendent.

02:17:56.360 | (laughing)

02:17:59.040 | So for our ego, can we be transparent to the transcendent?

02:18:02.520 | 'Cause can the filter that we look through the world at

02:18:05.760 | be cleaned to, you could say,

02:18:08.400 | cleansing the doors of perception?

02:18:10.400 | Can it be cleaned to the point

02:18:11.680 | where we can see the humanity in everybody

02:18:14.420 | and see that,

02:18:15.840 | one way to say this is that,

02:18:19.560 | can we get to the point where religions

02:18:21.120 | are seen as like languages?

02:18:23.240 | Where we all have this need to communicate,

02:18:25.840 | there's thousands of different languages.

02:18:28.480 | We don't say that this language is

02:18:30.240 | fundamentally better than this language.

02:18:32.200 | This language is the only right language.

02:18:33.600 | Everybody must speak English

02:18:34.920 | and Russian is bad or German is bad.

02:18:37.120 | Maybe we'll get to that point

02:18:39.280 | that religions are like that.

02:18:41.040 | That there are different cultural backgrounds,

02:18:42.680 | different symbol systems,

02:18:44.000 | different saints and heroes and messiahs and all this.

02:18:47.080 | But that, yeah, Jesus is the son of God,

02:18:50.040 | but so is everybody.

02:18:51.520 | (Luke laughs)

02:18:52.360 | Or the Jews are the chosen people,

02:18:54.400 | but so is everybody.

02:18:55.880 | So can we get there?

02:18:57.560 | I think that we can.

02:18:59.380 | And I think that we need to,

02:19:01.000 | to survive the challenges that we're facing.

02:19:03.900 | And the hope is that by bringing psychedelics

02:19:08.080 | as tools forward and trying to bring the context around them

02:19:13.080 | to be one of responsibility

02:19:15.720 | rather than just profit maximization

02:19:18.560 | and just get as many people to do them

02:19:20.680 | from all these for-profit companies.

02:19:22.480 | Can we, and then also drug policy reform

02:19:26.600 | and embed knowledge in the society,

02:19:28.440 | can we get to honest drug education?

02:19:31.040 | DARE, the Drug Awareness Resistance Education,

02:19:36.040 | is fundamentally twisted.

02:19:39.100 | But it's the program that's used in a lot of schools now.

02:19:42.760 | So can we get honest drug education, pure drugs,

02:19:45.280 | harm reduction, and knowledge about therapeutic uses,

02:19:49.320 | and on the one hand,

02:19:51.560 | and more of these thousands of psychedelic clinics?

02:19:54.160 | I'm hopeful, and that's our goal.

02:19:59.000 | - But in this landscape of pharma companies,

02:20:04.000 | they make a lot of money.

02:20:05.800 | Some people are worried about the impact of those,

02:20:08.360 | of big pharma on the landscape of human trauma.

02:20:13.000 | - Yeah, yeah.

02:20:14.080 | So there's, of course, some companies could do good,

02:20:17.520 | but that's not inherent.

02:20:19.560 | Many of these companies are not optimizing for good,

02:20:24.780 | they're optimizing for profit.

02:20:26.360 | - Exactly, exactly.

02:20:27.440 | - Does this rise of for-profit pharma companies worry you?

02:20:31.880 | How do you navigate it?

02:20:33.680 | Do we still have for-profit companies

02:20:35.560 | that basically do what MAPS does,

02:20:39.440 | which is fight the good fight for the benefit of humanity?

02:20:43.440 | Like how do we proceed in this landscape

02:20:46.120 | where drugs can make a lot of money?

02:20:49.600 | - Well, I am concerned.

02:20:52.120 | Overall, I think the rise of the for-profit companies

02:20:55.680 | we have to realize is a sign of success,

02:20:58.520 | that we have overcome the regulatory prohibitions,

02:21:03.520 | we've overcome a lot of the public attitudes

02:21:06.680 | that are against it,

02:21:08.120 | we've demonstrated some success.

02:21:09.840 | So the rise of the for-profit companies

02:21:12.180 | are a sign of the progress that we've made.

02:21:14.000 | On the other hand,

02:21:15.040 | turning things over to profit-maximizing companies,

02:21:17.800 | the big concern is that they're gonna try

02:21:21.040 | to minimize the amount of therapy

02:21:24.920 | and make it so the cost is less,

02:21:26.720 | so insurance companies are more likely to cover it,

02:21:28.940 | and then that they just sell the most drugs.

02:21:31.140 | The other thing we've seen as an example of this

02:21:34.480 | is ascetamine by Johnson & Johnson for depression,

02:21:37.760 | and it's done by a profit-maximizing company.

02:21:40.720 | They don't know anything about psychedelic psychotherapy

02:21:43.180 | or psychotherapy at all,

02:21:44.900 | and so they've gotten approval for ascetamine

02:21:48.460 | on the basis of it's just a pharmacological treatment,

02:21:51.980 | and it's not delivered with therapy,

02:21:54.980 | the results fade pretty quickly,

02:21:57.100 | so you need to get more ketamine.

02:21:59.840 | And so it's designed in a way to maximize the profits

02:22:02.820 | for the pharmaceutical company,

02:22:05.000 | but it doesn't maximize patient outcomes.

02:22:07.780 | What we're seeing though in these various clinics

02:22:10.420 | that are being set up is that a lot of people

02:22:12.460 | are realizing that it works better with therapy,

02:22:17.460 | and so the clinics are run by people that are therapists

02:22:20.680 | so that when they provide therapy, they're making more money

02:22:24.060 | and then you need less ketamine.

02:22:26.500 | Also, ketamine itself, S-ketamine is a isomer of ketamine

02:22:31.500 | that's been patented for depression,

02:22:33.540 | and they sell it for hundreds of dollars,

02:22:35.020 | but ketamine itself is one of the world's

02:22:38.260 | essential medicines.

02:22:39.300 | It's off patent, it's been around for a long time,

02:22:41.580 | it was the main battlefield anesthetic in Vietnam,

02:22:44.580 | and it's only a few bucks because it's generic.

02:22:47.380 | So a lot of the ketamine clinics are saying,

02:22:49.660 | "Great, thank you, Johnson and Johnson,

02:22:51.820 | you've helped demonstrate that ketamine

02:22:53.580 | is good for depression,

02:22:54.660 | but we're not gonna buy it from you,

02:22:56.300 | we're gonna buy it for a few bucks,

02:22:58.060 | and we're gonna add therapy to it."

02:23:00.660 | Now, there's a bunch of ketamine mills, you could say,

02:23:02.700 | that are just prescribing the ketamine,

02:23:05.180 | and people are making a lot of money there.

02:23:07.140 | So I am worried about that.

02:23:09.380 | I think the best thing that we can do

02:23:11.300 | is create an alternative narrative,

02:23:15.620 | a different kind of example.

02:23:16.940 | We can lead by example,

02:23:18.060 | we can't make for-profit companies into benefit corporations

02:23:22.440 | unless they wanna do that.

02:23:23.620 | We can't make them to really maximize patient outcomes.

02:23:28.400 | But if we create an example of something that's different,

02:23:32.500 | the hope is that people will gravitate towards that,

02:23:36.080 | and some of the other companies.

02:23:37.860 | Like even now we have Exxon and other of these companies,

02:23:41.220 | oil companies, saying, "Oh, we're big

02:23:42.660 | into alternative energy, and we're..."

02:23:45.860 | - And that starts with companies that show an example

02:23:48.900 | that then communicates to the public

02:23:51.060 | that this is something exciting,

02:23:53.140 | and then they demand the same of Exxon and so on.

02:23:56.220 | The public demands, and you could say the same thing

02:23:58.820 | for the public demanding the big pharma

02:24:04.700 | to optimize for benefit versus optimize for profit,

02:24:08.360 | and maybe giving power to the therapists,

02:24:11.080 | more power to the therapists,

02:24:12.480 | more power to the doctors that ultimately want,

02:24:16.440 | I think, incentives are interesting,

02:24:21.040 | but I think doctors ultimately care more

02:24:25.240 | because they're in direct contact with humans.

02:24:27.400 | They want to make people better.

02:24:29.040 | It's not, sure, they wanna make money,

02:24:31.360 | but they ultimately want to make people feel better

02:24:33.840 | because they get to look at people,

02:24:35.420 | and it's so joyful to make people feel better

02:24:38.460 | at the end of the day.

02:24:39.300 | So giving more power to them is also,

02:24:42.620 | perhaps, one of the ways that you then incentivize

02:24:45.940 | the pharma companies that are trying to do good

02:24:50.780 | because the doctors will choose those companies.

02:24:53.820 | - Yeah, now the other part of this is drug policy reform.

02:24:57.300 | So that if we make it so that you can buy MDMA

02:25:00.020 | for 10 or 20 bucks on your own,

02:25:03.140 | and we've trained people on here's our therapeutic method,

02:25:06.540 | here is our ways for peer support,

02:25:09.500 | then people have an alternative

02:25:12.000 | from buying it from the pharma companies.

02:25:15.100 | So most of the for-profit companies

02:25:18.420 | have come to this conclusion

02:25:20.380 | that drug policy reform is bad for their business model.

02:25:24.840 | I think they're making a fundamental mistake,

02:25:28.400 | and I think the reason is that

02:25:30.480 | the more that we destigmatize this,

02:25:32.380 | the more that we sensitize people to this is an approach.

02:25:35.780 | Even when people can get it on their own

02:25:37.900 | and do it with their friends or do it with themselves,

02:25:40.740 | there's gonna be even more people that say,

02:25:42.700 | "Oh my God, I've got real serious issues.

02:25:44.860 | I would rather go to trained professionals

02:25:47.780 | covered by insurance,

02:25:49.760 | and I think it'll increase the business."

02:25:52.620 | But most of the for-profit companies don't see it that way.

02:25:56.180 | And so as a nonprofit that owns a benefit corp,

02:26:00.820 | we're not trying to maximize sales or profits.

02:26:03.740 | But I do believe that drug policy reform

02:26:06.780 | creates this alternative access point for people,

02:26:10.220 | and that will help keep the for-profits in check

02:26:12.820 | to some extent as well.

02:26:15.860 | - I love it.

02:26:16.700 | Let's put on your wise visionary hat and ask,

02:26:23.200 | when you look to young folks,

02:26:26.020 | is there advice you can give to young people today,

02:26:28.940 | whether in high school or college,

02:26:31.500 | about career, about life?

02:26:34.380 | You've lived quite a nonlinear

02:26:36.780 | and fascinating life yourself.

02:26:39.020 | Is there advice you can give either on career

02:26:41.140 | or more generally on life?

02:26:42.680 | - Well, I would say what people often hear

02:26:47.860 | is that we're not actually here

02:26:52.520 | for that long a period of time.

02:26:55.980 | And so, and the world is on fire.

02:26:59.660 | And whether humanity survives is not clear.

02:27:03.020 | And how many species are we gonna kill

02:27:05.740 | before we figure out not to do that anymore?

02:27:08.440 | So I would advise you to really try to

02:27:12.740 | develop a combination of what do you need

02:27:17.740 | in terms of income for your own survival,

02:27:20.380 | but what does the world need in terms of

02:27:25.680 | help to make the world better?

02:27:27.560 | And Howard Thurman, who we talked about,

02:27:30.880 | who ran the Good Friday experiment, the minister there,

02:27:33.740 | he's got a famous quote attributed to him.

02:27:36.300 | He says, and this is exactly it to young people.

02:27:40.140 | He said, "There's nothing particular that you should do,

02:27:43.820 | "but find what makes you come alive,

02:27:46.200 | "because what the world needs is people

02:27:48.080 | "that have come alive and are passionate."

02:27:52.300 | So I would say that beware of this trap

02:27:57.300 | that you need vast resources, that you need all this stuff.

02:28:05.440 | I keep thinking of the super wealthy people

02:28:10.460 | in first class on the Titanic, as the Titanic is sinking.

02:28:15.460 | Their money's not gonna help them.

02:28:16.980 | The Earth is like Titanic.

02:28:19.140 | We're sinking, we're destroying the planet,

02:28:21.220 | destroying the environment.

02:28:23.060 | So you need a certain amount of money to be comfortable,

02:28:27.180 | to not be at that edge of survival,

02:28:29.420 | because once you're at that edge of survival,

02:28:31.020 | it's hard to think about anything else.

02:28:32.380 | But I'd say to young people,

02:28:34.200 | to the extent that you're able to do this,

02:28:39.000 | and again, student debt and all this kind of stuff

02:28:41.260 | is a big problem there too,

02:28:42.700 | but really just try to find this combination

02:28:47.700 | of what the world needs and what you need.

02:28:50.180 | The other thing to say to young people is,

02:28:52.700 | life is a lot shorter than you think,

02:28:55.820 | and a 20-year plan is not really that long.

02:29:00.340 | So if it takes you 20 years to get in a position

02:29:03.100 | to do what you wanna do, go for it.

02:29:07.020 | Have long-term plans.

02:29:08.780 | The other part that was so important for me

02:29:11.380 | to keep doing what I've been doing,

02:29:14.340 | basically now it's 49 years

02:29:17.300 | that I've sort of been devoting my life on psychedelics

02:29:19.500 | since I was 18.

02:29:20.400 | When I started, I didn't think it would ever work.

02:29:23.620 | I just thought this is the only idea I have

02:29:25.500 | in this crazy world.

02:29:26.620 | This is what I wanna work on.

02:29:29.220 | Luckily, I had support from my family

02:29:30.980 | that took care of my survival needs, so I could do that.

02:29:34.660 | But I realized that if my happiness

02:29:37.860 | was dependent upon accomplishments,

02:29:40.940 | that I might never be happy,

02:29:42.780 | that I was able to reframe happiness in terms of effort.

02:29:49.420 | So if I'm trying hard to get stuff to be better,

02:29:54.140 | whether it's better or not,

02:29:55.500 | I can be happy at the end of each day.

02:29:57.420 | I tried.

02:29:58.660 | And so I think you try to separate out

02:30:01.620 | the goals that you have and your happiness

02:30:03.740 | to whether you're trying hard.

02:30:05.380 | The other thing I would say is that

02:30:08.700 | everybody has this humanity within them.

02:30:13.020 | So be very careful about dividing the world

02:30:14.940 | into us and them.

02:30:16.920 | And try to...

02:30:20.600 | So one of the things that I've done

02:30:22.360 | that has taken a long time,

02:30:27.720 | because I feel like drugs are illegal.

02:30:31.040 | I always felt like the police were the predator

02:30:33.560 | and I'm the prey.

02:30:35.040 | - Yes.

02:30:36.480 | - But now we're working with the police,

02:30:38.080 | and the police have tremendous trauma

02:30:40.000 | from the work that they do.

02:30:41.080 | We have one police officer who is now going,

02:30:43.400 | he's a full-time police officer.

02:30:45.240 | He's also a psychotherapist.

02:30:47.640 | And he's going through our training program

02:30:50.120 | to learn how to give MDMA therapy to other police officers.

02:30:53.880 | And I met his police chief a couple of times.

02:30:56.680 | He got permission from his police chief

02:30:58.760 | to go to the second part of our training program,

02:31:01.080 | which is where we give MDMA to therapists

02:31:03.720 | who volunteer as a patient.

02:31:06.320 | So we have just a couple of weeks ago

02:31:08.360 | dosed the police with MDMA.

02:31:10.480 | - Yeah.

02:31:11.380 | - And so I think this idea of those people

02:31:13.760 | that are on the quote, other side,

02:31:16.080 | try to see through that to their humanity,

02:31:19.760 | to what their pains and suffering,

02:31:21.320 | what their struggles are, to the extent that you can.

02:31:24.920 | And that I think, and build long-term relationships.

02:31:28.480 | You never know what's gonna come around 20 years from now.

02:31:32.640 | So you help some people try to keep these relationships

02:31:35.320 | going 20 years from now, something could come.

02:31:38.160 | And also be persistent.

02:31:43.160 | - Yeah.

02:31:44.000 | - I think that's been the key to success.

02:31:49.000 | I mean, once the FDA or DEA figured out

02:31:52.720 | we're not going anywhere,

02:31:53.800 | they're gonna have to deal with us.

02:31:55.760 | Then we started getting some progress.

02:31:57.840 | - So a mix of patience and stubbornness

02:32:00.520 | that gets things done.

02:32:02.320 | Is there something you've figured out

02:32:05.440 | through your journey with psychedelics

02:32:08.400 | about some of the big why questions about life?

02:32:11.920 | Like, what the heck's the value of love?

02:32:15.800 | Why does it suck so much that we die?

02:32:20.760 | And for some of us, maybe it's the Russian in me,

02:32:25.440 | but it's quite terrifying, the notion of it.

02:32:28.080 | Or the biggest why question of them all,

02:32:30.080 | which is what's the meaning of it all?

02:32:33.040 | - Well, yeah, what I've discovered is that

02:32:36.040 | we don't need answers to those questions.

02:32:40.120 | You know, the fact that we can feel happy,

02:32:45.120 | you know, that we can love,

02:32:47.400 | that we can have moments of happiness, that's enough.

02:32:51.800 | You know, figuring out these big questions,

02:32:54.400 | you can get lost in that.

02:32:56.120 | And we all can come up with our answers.

02:32:58.800 | What's the meaning of life?

02:33:00.560 | Why is there life?

02:33:01.840 | Why is there consciousness?

02:33:02.880 | But I don't know that we need those answers.

02:33:06.000 | What we know is that we're social creatures,

02:33:10.120 | that other people can make us happy by certain things,

02:33:14.720 | we can make other people happy, that one life is enough.

02:33:17.800 | So this other part about why is it so tragic that we die?

02:33:22.800 | I don't think it's tragic that we die.

02:33:25.320 | So first off, if you believe in this collective unconscious,

02:33:27.800 | but we have an impact that lasts.

02:33:32.480 | But I think that for me at least,

02:33:35.160 | I've been of the view that we should be grateful for death,

02:33:40.160 | that death makes life precious,

02:33:42.600 | that if we had an infinite amount of time,

02:33:45.920 | you know, I mean, I'm a bit of a procrastinator about stuff,

02:33:49.200 | particularly things that are really, you know, hard to do.

02:33:52.240 | And you just, you know, you just don't do it.

02:33:54.200 | And then like, where'd the day go?

02:33:55.400 | I was gonna do this.

02:33:56.240 | So if we had infinite life, we never died,

02:33:59.320 | you know, would life be precious?

02:34:03.400 | Would we do anything?

02:34:04.360 | I don't think so.

02:34:05.240 | So my parents gave, you know, every Jewish new year,

02:34:10.240 | they would make their New Year's card.

02:34:13.960 | And one of the quotes was fantastic.

02:34:16.320 | It was just, "We have to make up for the brevity of life

02:34:20.200 | "with the intensity of life."

02:34:22.400 | Oh man, that is good.

02:34:24.480 | Well, the end makes things precious.

02:34:29.100 | Death makes life precious.

02:34:30.600 | The end of this conversation makes it precious,

02:34:34.520 | and which is a great way to end.

02:34:37.200 | Rick, I wanted to talk to you for a long time.

02:34:40.760 | I share, you were very excited about the study.

02:34:43.280 | I can now understand exactly why.

02:34:45.700 | This is really promising.

02:34:46.920 | This is really exciting, gives me hope about the future,

02:34:50.240 | even if it doesn't come fast enough.

02:34:53.720 | But like you said, you have to be patient and stubborn.

02:34:56.560 | Thank you so much for wasting all your valuable time

02:34:59.360 | with me today, it's truly an honor to meet you.

02:35:01.720 | - Not a waste at all.

02:35:02.800 | I really appreciated this time together.

02:35:05.760 | - Thank you for listening to this conversation

02:35:08.360 | with Rick Doblin, and thank you to Theragun, ExpressVPN,

02:35:12.440 | Blinkist, and Asleep.

02:35:14.620 | Check them out in the description to support this podcast.

02:35:17.900 | And now let me leave you with some words

02:35:19.600 | from Terrence McKenna.

02:35:21.480 | Nature loves courage.

02:35:23.080 | You make the commitment, and nature will respond

02:35:25.720 | to that commitment by removing impossible obstacles.

02:35:29.260 | Dream the impossible dream,

02:35:30.800 | and the world will not grind you under.

02:35:33.120 | It will lift you up.

02:35:34.640 | This is the trick.

02:35:36.000 | This is what all the teachers and philosophers

02:35:38.680 | who really counted, who really touched the alchemical gold,

02:35:42.840 | this is what they understood.

02:35:44.600 | This is the shamanic dance in the waterfall.

02:35:47.440 | This is how magic is done,

02:35:49.280 | by hurling yourself into the abyss

02:35:51.400 | and discovering that it's a feather bed.

02:35:54.600 | Thank you for listening, and hope to see you next time.

02:35:57.360 | (upbeat music)

02:35:59.940 | (upbeat music)

02:36:02.520 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

Rick Doblin: Psychedelics | Lex Fridman Podcast #202

Chapters