back to index

The Utility of Psychedelics | Dr. Sam Harris & Dr. Andrew Huberman


Whisper Transcript | Transcript Only Page

00:00:00.000 | "Could you tell us why psychedelics can be useful?"
00:00:08.560 | And here I'll give the caveats that maybe you'll feel obligated to give as well, but
00:00:12.880 | this we're talking about use safely and responsibly, age appropriate, context appropriate, ideally
00:00:18.480 | with some clinical or other type of guidance, legality issues obeyed, et cetera.
00:00:24.280 | All that stated, psychedelics to me are an experience of altered perception, internal
00:00:31.440 | and external perception, altered space-time relationship, somewhat dream-like.
00:00:35.320 | I think it was Alan Hobson at Harvard for a long time talked about the relationship
00:00:38.260 | between psychedelic-like states and dream-like states because of this distortion of space-time
00:00:44.440 | dimensionality.
00:00:47.080 | And I haven't experimented with them much.
00:00:51.560 | I've been part of a clinical trial, three doses of MDMA, which certainly altered the
00:00:56.560 | quality of my conscious experience in ways that led to a lot of lasting and at least
00:01:01.240 | for me valuable learning.
00:01:03.480 | So what are your thoughts about psychedelics in terms of how they intersect with the discussion
00:01:07.680 | that we've been having and what utility do they play in recognition of the self or in
00:01:14.480 | other sorts of brain changes?
00:01:16.560 | Well, so yeah, let's just price in all those caveats that people can anticipate.
00:01:25.080 | These drugs are not without their risks.
00:01:27.040 | And one problem is that we have this single term drugs or psychedelics, which names many
00:01:34.120 | different types of substances, and they're not all the same.
00:01:37.240 | So like MDMA is not even technically a psychedelic.
00:01:41.440 | I think it has an immense therapeutic value and it actually was my gateway drug to this
00:01:46.840 | whole area of concern.
00:01:49.920 | Amphetamine pathogen, right?
00:01:50.920 | It's a sort of an amphetamine and a pathogen at the same time.
00:01:53.720 | Yeah.
00:01:54.720 | I mean, it's often called-
00:01:55.720 | M pathogen, excuse me.
00:01:56.720 | Not pathogen.
00:01:57.720 | Yeah.
00:01:58.720 | Not pathogen.
00:01:59.720 | M pathogen.
00:02:00.720 | Yeah.
00:02:01.720 | An empathogen or an intactogen, it's been called.
00:02:04.240 | But it doesn't tend to change perception in the way that classic psychedelics do.
00:02:08.440 | And it's also serotonergic, but it has to be in some part differently so than even LSD
00:02:17.560 | and psilocybin, which are much more similar and classic psychedelics, both are also serotonergic,
00:02:22.520 | but they're not merely so, and they're also different.
00:02:26.880 | And the higher dose you take of these drugs, the more you...
00:02:30.200 | At lower doses, everything can kind of seem the same.
00:02:33.000 | At higher doses, they begin to diverge.
00:02:39.240 | And we can talk about the pharmacology if you wanted to, but I would just say that for
00:02:47.240 | many of us, I mean, certainly for me, psychedelics were indispensable in the beginning in proving
00:02:54.420 | to me that a first person interrogation of the mind was worth doing, because I was somebody
00:03:05.040 | who at age 17 or 18, before I had any real experience with MDMA or LSD or psilocybin,
00:03:18.080 | if you had taught me how to meditate at that point, I think I would have just bounced off
00:03:23.240 | the whole project.
00:03:24.240 | I think my mind was...
00:03:25.240 | I was so cerebral in my engagement with anything.
00:03:33.320 | I was so skeptical of any of the religious and spiritual traditions that have given us
00:03:41.200 | most of our meditation talk, that I think I just would have...
00:03:48.480 | I know many of these people, like I have tried to teach Richard Dawkins to meditate and Daniel
00:03:53.560 | Dennett to meditate.
00:03:54.560 | I've ambushed them with meditation and both in a group setting and one-on-one, not Dan,
00:04:01.800 | but Richard, I ambushed on my own podcast with a guided meditation.
00:04:06.800 | And he just, from his...
00:04:12.720 | He closes his eyes, he looks inside and there's nothing of interest to see.
00:04:19.560 | He doesn't have the conceptual interest in him that would cause him to persist long enough
00:04:28.440 | to find out that there's a there there, right?
00:04:31.560 | Now, this is not a problem with LSD or psilocybin or MDMA.
00:04:36.920 | I know that if I gave him a hundred micrograms of LSD or five grams of mushrooms or 25 milligrams
00:04:44.760 | of psilocybin, that's probably not the analogous dosage to the five grams of mushrooms.
00:04:50.840 | Five grams of mushrooms would be more than that.
00:04:56.080 | I forget what it is of MDMA, maybe 120 milligrams.
00:05:00.440 | I think the MAPS dose, which is the one that's under clinical trials, is 125 milligrams with
00:05:05.680 | an option of a 75 milligram booster.
00:05:07.640 | Funny I would remember that.
00:05:09.640 | It's strange, the facts that come to hand.
00:05:13.800 | But there's just no possibility that nothing's going to happen right now.
00:05:20.480 | Something with a psychedelic, with MDMA, most people tend to have, certainly under any kind
00:05:25.880 | of guidance, tend to have a very positive pro-social experience.
00:05:32.960 | But with a psychedelic, you might have a somewhat terrifying experience if you have, we'll quote,
00:05:42.360 | a bad trip, and I've certainly had those experiences on LSD and to some degree on psilocybin.
00:05:49.360 | But the prospect that nothing is going to happen is just nearly a million cases out
00:05:58.400 | of a million just not in the cards.
00:06:00.560 | Just neurophysiologically, something's going to happen with the requisite dose of one of
00:06:05.840 | these drugs.
00:06:08.040 | And if that thing that happens is psychologically at all normative and pleasant and interesting
00:06:17.360 | and valuable, which it is so much of the time, and certainly under the appropriate set and
00:06:23.680 | setting and guidance, it can be a lot of the time for virtually everybody.
00:06:30.800 | Again, there are caveats.
00:06:32.560 | If you're prone, if you think you have a proclivity for schizophrenia or bipolar disorder,
00:06:40.360 | this is almost certainly not for you.
00:06:42.720 | And anyone doing the studies at Johns Hopkins for the therapeutic effects of any of these
00:06:49.600 | drugs, they're ruling out people with first-degree relatives with any of these clinical conditions.
00:06:59.080 | But so for somebody like me at 18 who didn't know that this was an area of not only interest,
00:07:09.440 | but would it be the center of gravity for the rest of his life if only he could pay
00:07:13.960 | attention clearly enough to see that it could be, right?
00:07:19.200 | I was someone who very likely-- again, I don't have the counterfactual in hand.
00:07:23.600 | I don't know what would have happened if someone had forced me to meditate for an hour at that
00:07:28.480 | point.
00:07:29.480 | But I know I wasn't interested in it until I took MDMA.
00:07:36.360 | I know I wasn't having these kinds of experiences spontaneously that showed me that there was
00:07:42.040 | an inner landscape that was worth exploring.
00:07:45.600 | I was a very hard-headed skeptic who was very interested in lots of things, but there was
00:07:50.720 | no alternative to me just thinking more about those things, right?
00:07:54.560 | I mean, the idea that there's some other way of grasping cognitively at the interesting
00:08:02.480 | parts of the world beyond thinking about the world, right, I just-- that just wouldn't
00:08:08.600 | have computed for me at all, right?
00:08:10.640 | And if you had-- so I just-- and I literally have-- no one ever gave me a book to read
00:08:15.880 | or a-- I don't-- if you-- the noun "meditation" very likely meant absolutely nothing to me
00:08:23.520 | before I took my first dose of-- in this case, it was MDMA.
00:08:30.600 | So what the drug experience did for me is it just proved-- I mean, so one of the limitations
00:08:38.520 | of a drug is that, you know, obviously, no matter how good the experience, the drug wears
00:08:43.120 | off and then you're back to, you know, more-- in more or less your usual form.
00:08:48.800 | And now you have a memory of the experience.
00:08:51.360 | And it can be a fairly dim memory.
00:08:52.700 | I mean, some of these experiences are so discontinuous with normal waking consciousness
00:08:57.760 | that it can be like trying to remember a dream, you know, that just disappears-- it degrades,
00:09:02.360 | you know, over the course of seconds.
00:09:03.840 | And then it could have been the most intense dream you've ever had.
00:09:07.360 | And for whatever reason, you can barely get a purchase on, you know, what it was about.
00:09:11.440 | And, you know, there's some psychedelic experiences that are analogous to that.
00:09:16.440 | But for most people, most of the time, there's a residue of this experience.
00:09:21.040 | And with something like MDMA, they can be quite vivid, where you recognize, okay, there
00:09:29.480 | was a way of being that is quite different than what I'm tending to access by default.
00:09:35.120 | And it is different in ways that are just, you know, obviously better and psychologically
00:09:47.020 | more healthy.
00:09:48.020 | And it's possible to be healthy psychologically in a way that I never imagined, right?
00:09:55.900 | And then when you link it up to the traditional literature around any of this stuff, again,
00:10:02.860 | so much of it is shot through with superstition and otherworldliness of religion.
00:10:08.460 | And, you know, as you know, and I think your listeners probably know, I've spent a lot
00:10:13.200 | of time criticizing all that.
00:10:15.220 | But there is a baby in the bathwater to all of that, right?
00:10:18.020 | So, I guess it's not that somebody like Jesus or the Buddha or any of the matriarchs and
00:10:25.580 | patriarchs of the world's religions, it's not that they were all conscious frauds or,
00:10:32.020 | you know, temporal lobe epileptics, or like there's a pathological lens that you can put
00:10:37.580 | on top of all that.
00:10:38.980 | But once you have one of these experiences on psychedelics or on a drug like MDMA, you
00:10:45.940 | know that there's a there there.
00:10:47.860 | You know that unconditional love is a possibility, right?
00:10:51.020 | You know that feeling truly one with nature, right?
00:10:56.980 | I mean, just so one with nature that you could spend 10 hours in front of a tree and find
00:11:03.860 | that to be the most rewarding experience of your life, right?
00:11:08.180 | That's a possible state of consciousness.
00:11:09.580 | Now, it may not be the state of consciousness you want all the time.
00:11:12.900 | You know, you don't want to be the crazy guy by the tree, you know, who can't have a conversation
00:11:16.660 | about anything else.
00:11:19.020 | But once you have one of these experiences, you recognize, okay, there's some reason why
00:11:26.900 | I'm not having the beatific vision right now.
00:11:30.140 | And I can't even figure out how to aim my attention so as to have anything like it.
00:11:35.140 | And that's a problem, right?
00:11:36.540 | Because it's available, right?
00:11:38.500 | And it's the best, you know, it is among the best things that has ever happened to me,
00:11:44.500 | right?
00:11:45.500 | And now I can just only dimly remember what that was like.
00:11:48.980 | So how do I get back there on some level?
00:11:51.460 | And so that invites, again, a logic of changes, a logic of seeking changes in the contents
00:11:58.020 | of consciousness, which sets someone up for this protracted or seemingly protracted and,
00:12:06.820 | you know, fairly frustrating search to, you know, game their nervous system so as to have
00:12:14.100 | those kinds of experiences more and more.
00:12:18.020 | And again, it's not that that's in principle fruitless, but it is from the point of view
00:12:22.900 | of the kind of the core insight of, you know, the core wisdom of, you know, what I would
00:12:27.660 | take from a tradition like Buddhism, which is not, you know, it's not the only tradition
00:12:31.740 | that has given voice to this, but I would argue it's given voice to it in the most articulate
00:12:36.860 | way.
00:12:38.100 | Again, leaving aside any of the superstition and other worldliness and miracles that, you
00:12:45.260 | know, we don't have to talk about at the moment.
00:12:48.220 | And you certainly don't need to endorse in order to be interested in this stuff.
00:12:54.660 | And so that's the bifurcation between all of the utility of psychedelics and what I'm
00:13:02.360 | talking about under the rubric of meditation is at this point of, okay, once you realize
00:13:09.420 | there's a there there, what do you do and what's the logic by which you're led to do
00:13:13.580 | it?
00:13:14.580 | And I think it's possible if your only framework is the good experiences, the good feels you
00:13:20.480 | had on whatever drug it was, and a further discussion of like what that path of changes,
00:13:31.180 | you know, can look like, and that can come in a religious context, it can come in just
00:13:35.820 | a purely psychedelic context, or, you know, some combination of the two.
00:13:42.140 | I think you can be misled to, you can just be, you can be misled to just seek lots of
00:13:48.820 | peak experiences.
00:13:49.820 | You're just trying to string together a lot of peak experiences, hoping they're going
00:13:53.340 | to change you.
00:13:54.740 | Every one of which by definition is going to be impermanent, right?
00:13:58.540 | I mean, it's first it wasn't there, then it's there, and then it's no longer there.
00:14:03.100 | And then you've got a memory of it, right?
00:14:06.420 | What I think it's, what everyone really wants, whether they know it or not, and they're right
00:14:10.760 | to want, is a type of freedom that is compatible with even ordinary states of consciousness,
00:14:18.780 | which can ride along with them into extraordinary states of consciousness.
00:14:22.460 | I mean, so what I hadn't done psychedelics for 25 years, because I mean, again, they
00:14:27.500 | were super useful for me in the beginning, then I discovered meditation on the basis
00:14:32.220 | of those experiences, got really into meditation and realized, okay, this is a much more, this
00:14:39.780 | really is, conceptually, this makes much more sense to me.
00:14:44.380 | This is delivering the goods in terms of my experience.
00:14:49.760 | There's no need to keep having these, seeking these peak experiences with drugs.
00:14:55.340 | But it had been 25 years since I had done that and there was this resurgence in research
00:14:59.760 | on psychedelics.
00:15:00.760 | And I was being asked about psychedelics and I was talking about their utility for me,
00:15:05.100 | but again, these were distant memories.
00:15:06.500 | And so I, and there was also one type of psychedelic experience I was aware that I had never had.
00:15:12.340 | I had never done a high dose of mushrooms blindfolded, you know, like every mushroom
00:15:17.500 | trip I'd ever had, I'd been out in nature and interacting with, you know, it was just
00:15:21.740 | been a very transformed sensory experience of the world and of other people, but I'd
00:15:27.540 | never done it alone, blindfolded, just purely, you know, inwardly directed and at a high
00:15:32.580 | dosage.
00:15:33.580 | I'd done high doses of LSD, but not mushrooms.
00:15:40.780 | So I did that, you know, and it was very useful.
00:15:44.020 | And I spoke about it on my podcast and there's actually this, I think if you search Sam Harris
00:15:48.900 | mushroom trip on YouTube, you get the 19 minute version of that, my describing that trip.
00:15:54.900 | It was incredibly useful and, but what was doubly useful was my mindfulness training
00:16:02.300 | in the context of that explosion of synesthesia.
00:16:05.820 | I mean, it was, it was, it was such an overwhelmingly strong experience.
00:16:12.080 | And there were so many moments where it could have gone one way or the other based on my
00:16:20.140 | sense of just, okay, I'm going to try to resist this.
00:16:23.740 | You know, it was like, it was, it was, it was in truth, irresistible because it was
00:16:26.780 | just so much, but there were moments where I was aware of, okay, this is like letting
00:16:34.460 | go of self, you know, in this context is, is the thing that is going to, you know, make
00:16:44.140 | the difference between heaven and hell here, you know, and because there's, there are experiences
00:16:48.220 | that are so extreme that you can't even tell if it's agony or ecstasy.
00:16:52.820 | It's just, it's just, it's everything has turned up to 11, right?
00:16:56.100 | And the difference between the two is like, you know, the tipping point is just, it's
00:17:01.780 | on, it really is kind of a high wire act in some sense, you know, you could just fall
00:17:05.420 | to one side or the other.
00:17:06.860 | And yeah, so what I think people want is they certainly want to be able to extract from
00:17:16.860 | the psychedelic experience, wisdom that is applicable to ordinary states of consciousness.
00:17:22.220 | It's like, what is the thing you can realize in a moment of having a conversation with
00:17:26.940 | your child that isn't distracting you from that relationship?
00:17:31.940 | It's not a memory of when the world dissolved or, you know, when you were indistinguishable
00:17:37.120 | from the sky, but it's just a way of, a way of having free attention and unconditional
00:17:44.300 | love in this, you know, totally ordinary and potentially chaotic human experience, you
00:17:53.080 | know, which can be psychologically fraught and you can meet, you know, iterations of
00:17:58.340 | yourself that you don't like, that are, that are not equipping you to be the best possible
00:18:02.320 | person in that relationship.
00:18:05.100 | And what we want to do is cut through all of that and actually, you know, be in love
00:18:12.180 | with our lives and with the people in our lives more and more of the time.
00:18:16.460 | And that's, there's, I'm not saying that's the psych, you know, that repeated psychedelic
00:18:23.840 | journeys aren't, can't be integral to that project, but, but you know that it can't,
00:18:29.940 | the project can't be being high all the time, right?
00:18:33.300 | So whatever is extractable from that, the, the, the occasional, you know, psychedelic
00:18:38.100 | trip has got to be mappable into ordinary waking consciousness.
00:18:42.660 | And the point of con, the real point of contact does kind of run through this, you know, what
00:18:47.660 | I've been calling the illusion of the self.
00:18:49.900 | And again, it is, that part is discoverable without any changes in contents, right?
00:18:56.180 | So you don't have to suddenly feel the energy of your body be rush out and be continuous
00:19:01.900 | with the, you know, the ocean of energy that is not your body, right?
00:19:05.980 | Like that's an experience that's there to be had, right?
00:19:08.180 | I mean, it's, there's no doubt, but this, the truth is, I mean, just looking at this
00:19:15.900 | cup is just as formless and as mysterious as that, right?
00:19:23.100 | When it's seen in the right way.
00:19:24.420 | And that's, and that's, that's what, you know, meditation encourages, you know, one to recognize.