Kind: captions
Language: en
the following is a conversation with
rick doblin founder
and executive director of the
multidisciplinary association for
psychedelic studies
maps he is one of the seminal figures in
both the cultural history
and the cutting edge science of
psychedelics he was there
along with the biggest characters
throughout this fascinating history of
psychedelics
and he is here to tell the story quick
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as a side note let me say that exploring
the places the human mind can go
can help us understand where it comes
from how it works
and how to engineer mental journeys
whether that's through
life experiences chemical substances
brain computer interfaces or
interactions with artificial
intelligence systems on a personal level
i think the dissolution of the ego for
stretches of time
is a powerful tool for understanding
yourself a lot of things can do this
including jiu jitsu literature
meditation but psychedelics is
definitely
at least arguably one of the most
powerful from psilocybin to dmt
i'm excited that people like rick are
leading the scientific research
that reveals the efficacy and the safety
of these substances
so that their proper dosage and usage
protocols can be understood
and people like me can safely and
effectively use them
not just for recreation but for rigorous
exploration
of my own mind this is the lex friedman
podcast
and here is my conversation with rick
goblin could you give
an introduction to psychedelics like a
big bold whirlwind overview
what are psychedelics what are the kinds
of psychedelics out there
in whatever way you you think uh is
meaningful
all right well when i started maps the
multi-disciplinary association for
psychedelic studies it was very
important for me that psychedelic being
the name
and the way in which the original
meaning of psychedelic
it's mind manifesting it was created by
humphrey osmond
in dialogue with aldous huxley
and so psychedelic means mind
manifesting
and so we interpret that very broadly
to mean dreams or psychedelic anything
that kind of brings things to the
surface
holotropic breath work you know
hyperventilation is psychedelic
so most people think psychedelic is only
about certain kind of chemical
substances either natural
or synthetic but we've got a much
broader view of that
meditation can be psychedelic in some
ways but
our primary focus is on the drugs it's
on the
medicines or the you might call them
some people might call them
spiritual tools or sacraments
um there's sort of two general
categories of those
one are what are called the classic
psychedelics and those are the ego
dissolving
sort of merged into unitive states
those are like lsd psilocybin mescaline
ayahuasca ibogaine dmt
things like that and then there's mdma
which some people even argue is not a
psychedelic
they'll say it's an pathogen or an
intactogen it's about touching within or
empathy
it doesn't do the same kind of ego
dissolution
that the classic psychedelics do but it
brings material to the surface
and and it changes the way we process
information
and so i think you can quibble about
whether it's a
it's certainly not a classic psychedelic
but i think mdma is also a psychedelic
marijuana i would say it's a psychedelic
marijuana is closer to the classic
psychedelics than it is to mdma
one point i like to make is dreams
because
then everybody can relate to that dreams
are psychedelic dreams
bring emotions feelings um
ideas concepts in symbolic form a lot of
times or just in raw motions to the
surface so
when people hear the word psychedelic
often they
are frightened by it it's about loss of
control
and it is to an extent loss of conscious
control
particularly with the classic
psychedelics but you know and we know
with dreams that
we can have frightening dreams
nightmares but i think that
um anchoring the the concept of
psychedelic and dreams
is really helpful for people to know
that it's kind of a natural state
and that there are other ways that you
can catalyze it than by going to sleep
and that for thousands of years
substances have been used in that way
so you mentioned this idea of bringing
something to the surface which is really
interesting
so can you maybe elaborate the surface
and what is
there in the depths of things and how
does
ego dissolution fits into that
all right well aldous huxley talked
about uh
the brain as a reducing valve that we
have an enormous amount of information
so right now there's an air conditioning
sound in the background
but that's not crucial to what you and i
are doing talking to each other so we
kind of tune that out
you know there's all sorts of sights and
sounds there's incoming information
in all the different sense modalities
and we have to figure out um
what's important to us and so the
mind in a way focuses a lot on
what are our core needs and and
we filter all the incoming information
that we get towards focusing on what our
court needs and we can even get to um
abraham maslow in the hierarchy of needs
about
survival needs belonging needs esteem
needs
go on so i think what
what i mean by bringing things to the
surface is
that we tend to
not focus on a lot of things that are
coming but we also push away things that
are difficult emotionally
difficult cognitively you know we all
know that we're on this very short
trajectory from birth to death but we're
not
constantly thinking about dying
[Music]
although that can actually be helpful to
focus us
on what's really important traumas
are often suppressed
conflicts we see in america and around
the world the kind of rise of
irrationality
where people push away their logic in
order for their emotional
tribal needs to be met a lot of people
are
suffering from early childhood traumas
of a different kinds or abandonment
issues or
anything so we we tend to focus on just
you know what we need to survive
and what we need for work and esteem and
so psychedelics
by dissolving this ego control or by
with mdma
kind of strengthening our sense of self
and our sense of self acceptance we can
bring in um
other information that have previously
been too complicated or too painful
you don't think of psychedelics as
conjuring up something new
it is more revealing something that is
already there
i think that's a very crucial thing so
um
yes um um sasha shulgin
who um sort of the um godfather of
mdma you know he sort of rediscovered it
and
brought it um back into use he talked
about
his first experience was with mescaline
his first psychedelic experience was
with mescaline
and he had a tremendous experience but
what he said about it was
he was having a human experience that
the mescaline was helping him access
rather than he was having a mescaline
experience
so that it's not like you pop a pill and
you always have the same kind of
experience as everybody else
the the experience is not contained in
the pill the pill
opens you up and you have an experience
of yourself
sometimes these are experiences that
we've never consciously had
but we can say right now that we know
that
our body below the level of our
conscious awareness has all these
self-healing mechanisms
and we we don't modulate them
to a large extent by conscious control i
mean eventually we we are learning more
about the mind body and we learn about
the placebo effect how what we think is
the case but
but i think that there's experiences
that are below our level
of conscious awareness particularly once
we're adults that
are more these unit of mystical
experiences sense of connection
you know i think kids are like this a
lot we kind of come from the void you
could say and you're born and you you
have
um a different way of processing
information what one
interesting point about that has to do
with ketamine which is
uh you know been approved s ketamine for
depression
but it's used for anesthesia and
roughly one-tenth the anesthetic dose
is a psychedelic dose and when it's used
in anesthesia
there's what's called the emergent
phenomena so this is you get
enough ketamine for um you can be
operated on you're not in pain you're
not really there your ego's knocked out
but you can still breathe but as the
operations
uh get over and then people metabolize
the ketamine
there's a process that they call the
emergent phenomena it's like as you're
emerging from this
tranquilized state and that's where you
pass through the psychedelic phase and
they don't prepare people
for that and
what we see is that a lot of adults have
difficult times with that
but children don't seem to have that
with those problems children are a
little bit more already in this kind of
state
and so ketamine is is used quite
frequently in children
now for anesthesia so
all of that is to say to your question
that um i think it
these psychedelics reveal things that
are within us
some things that are how we process
information back when we are children
um other things that we've never thought
of before that are sort of
baked into our consciousness um
you know there's one um drug 5-meo dmt
it's this toxin from a sonoran toad
that many people consider it to be the
most powerful of all the psychedelics
and it kind of knocks the ego structures
completely out of it
and we experience something different
but it's something i think that's always
within us it's at a deeper layer so we
knock out some of the higher cognitive
functions and then we experience things
in a different way
so my sense is that these are human
experiences that the psychedelics
bring us to yeah it's really profound
but and that's a dmt is a really
interesting example so
uh terence mckenna has talked about
these machine elves
right and there's this um i think
from the people i've heard speak about
the experience
there's a sense that you are traveling
elsewhere
to meet entities whether they're elves
or not
so in your sense you're not traveling
elsewhere
you're just revealing something that's
within and maybe it's a
a particular mechanism of revealing
what's already within
yeah and i knew terence i spent a lot of
time talking with terence
and i do not um ascribe to a lot of
things that he was saying he was
tremendous entertainer
and i think he did a lot of really good
things and focused us on
you know the power of psychedelics but i
think um i've never seen these quote
machine elves
i think culture is more determinative
of what people experience under
psychedelics
your preconceptions than um than we give
it credit for
and so i think there's a lot of um
priming that you could say that people
receive by
stories from their culture um
you know with ayahuasca it's about
jaguars and amazonian animals and so i i
think these machine elves are this uh
construct of terrans that other people
do see there's actually some people that
are very interested in doing a study and
they're they're
well-funded and moving toward it to
keep people on an iv infusion of dmt
for them specifically to see do they
contact
machine elves or aliens and what kind of
information do they bring back from
these other
cells other places or other entities
one question is you know who are we are
are we
connected to everything in the universe
we certainly know
in many cases you talk about waves or
particles you know
the quantum approach so i don't
interpret
um experiences that we have of some
entity that's you know somehow or other
deep in our consciousness that's
not us it's a part of who we are so i
tend to interpret it in that way
the the question is how big are we
yeah i mean that that's uh and how many
ideas are within us that can be revealed
by changing the perspective you
mentioned physics one of the
what physicists mathematical physicists
or mathematicians do
is the they reveal truths by looking at
a
by taking a slightly different
perspective on a problem that reveals
the simplicity
of how it actually works in totally new
ways
that's what einstein did that's what
like every progress in physics
and certainly every progress of
mathematics requires you to
take a different perspective and then
perhaps that's exactly what
um psychedelics are doing it's not that
they're contacting
aliens that are elsewhere it may be
revealing the connection between us and
other
living life forms or actually might be
revealing
a totally new perspective on what life
is or what consciousness is
and giving us a glimpse at that even
though our cognitive capabilities are
limited
in to fully grasp and understand it so
it's just giving us an inkling of that
somehow
and it seems perhaps a little ridiculous
not
from a scientific perspective in the
sense that
we don't have a good physics of life or
physics of intelligence or
physics of consciousness but getting a
glimpse of that it's giving us a little
bit of um
maybe an intuition of uh which way to
head
to uh to build such a physics
yeah yeah i think so i think that
there's this um
other concept i guess i would like to
talk about briefly this
jungian collective unconscious this idea
that
somehow or other everything that has
ever happened
is still accessible maybe not with as
much
data or as much resolution
but that there's you know wave
resonances
so that i do believe that we can have
experiences as part of this human
collective unconscious
that we're not from our own life yeah
and that that we can it's like the
holographic realities
and that that that there is a way to
gather
information that can be accurate about
other times and places
um through depth
investigations of our own consciousness
but i think what
what i tend to believe is that it's
because there's emotional resonances
between where we're at now in this life
and
you know other kind of um
experiences that people have had before
and you know
we always hear about uh everybody who
talks about past lives they're always
kings and queens
you know yeah so i think that's you know
that's again you filter things what you
want to be true
but but i do think that there is a way
to access information
beyond what we've taken in in our own
temporal existence through our own five
senses in some ways i really find that
compelling the notion that that
information is already there
and you're simply just moving the
attention of your mind
to different parts of that yeah i mean
we we have that with the radio
i mean you know you've got a frequency
you turn all this information
you could actually say right now between
the space between us we have the whole
world's knowledge that's up on the
internet
yeah it's right here yeah but we just
have to tune in
yeah what are the
interesting differences would you say
between
the various psychedelics that you
mentioned ayahuasca dmt
acid lsd marijuana mescaline pcp cell
cybin mdma all
you mentioned a few of them they're
really interesting we'll we'll talk
about scientifically some of the
the different studies that have been
conducted on each but sort of at the
high level
what are some interesting differences
well one of the big ones that people
make a big deal of that i think is
completely misplaced
is some are from nature some are from
the lab right so there's this kind of
like romantic thought that if it's from
nature it's good if it's from the lab
it's somehow tainted by humanity
and you know therefore some people are
like all for
plants psychedelics we see the policy
changes that have been happening in a
couple cities uh cambridge
somerville right not far from where
we're at now where they decriminalize
plant medicines so they call it
decriminalizing nature
so i i think that there is
from my perspective certain
certain things from nature or poison
certain things from the lab are
spiritual even if they don't show up in
nature like lsd
now there is something lsd is lysergic
acid diethylamide
there is lysergic acid amide lsa
which comes from morning glory seeds so
it's very similar
but at the same time i'd say i don't buy
into that distinction that there's some
fundamental preference
one of the things that terence mckenna
since we talked about him
he talked about how if it's from nature
it's good
and if it's not you know we should be
suspect
um of course he had a lot of great lsd
experiences but
actually terrance in 1984 we were at
eslin with a bunch of other people
this was before the crackdown on mdma
and this was some of the underground
therapists and the above-ground
researchers were trying to
talk about how to protect mdma from this
eventual crackdown and
terence was like forget about it you
know it's from the lab
you know it's dangerous we have
thousands of years of history all these
other things and you know what do we
know about mdma and
blah blah blah i was like terence you're
so um
um unscientific bullshit another
way to say it is and and i just said you
know we need a study
of uh the safety of mdma and so then
dick price who started
um aslan i said i'll put a thousand dick
prices he'd put a thousand so terence
was actually the catalyst for the first
study with mdma
wow um just because he was so
frustrating about how plants are okay
and you know if it's from the lab it's
bad yeah um so that's one distinction um
the the other distinction is this um
sense of uh classic psychedelics versus
things like mdma so to what extent do
they
uh dissolve the ego and you could say to
what extent do they
cause visions the 5-ht-2a serotonin
receptor subtype
which is responsible for a lot of that
where these drugs are activating
now masculine of all the psychedelics
chemically it's the most similar to mdma
it's a phenethylamine which is mdma so
in the 50s there was the 53 i think it
was the army chemical warfare service
wanted to look at drugs for
interrogations mind control
non-lethal incapacitance they did
a study in eight substances these were
now toxicity studies in animals
and on the one side was methamphetamine
and the other was mescaline and mdma was
in the middle
chemically so
mescaline of the psychedelics tends to
have the
warmth that mdma has it's not as
ego-dissolving quite as some of the
others
i mean it's the main active ingredient
in peyote it is very psychedelic very
visual
another distinction with these different
drugs is how long they last
and a lot of that has to do with the
route of administration
so for example if you smoke dmt
it takes 10-15 minutes and you're
within seconds you're off in another
world um similarly 5-meo dmt very rapid
when you take dmt in the form of
ayahuasca
where it's mixed with another substance
that
makes it so that it's orally active then
it's a couple hours
so lsd is uh 8 10
12 hours sometimes psilocybin is more
like five or six
hours or four to six hours mdma is
similar
it's one reason why in our research we
give an initial dose of mdma and then
two hours later we give half the initial
amount
to extend the plateau because we want it
to last longer
for people to be in this therapeutic
state
so that's another distinction is um you
know how long these drugs last
another distinction is which of them
come from
a religious context they have a religion
built around them
we have this um sense that some people
are saying that 5-mo dmt
and the sonoran toad that they have this
long history of indigenous use but they
don't that's all modern it's made up
and it's kind of a new approach however
there was thousands of years of use of
psilocybin mushrooms in religious
contexts um
from um 1600
bc to 396 a.d the world's
longest mystery ceremonies the
elusionian mysteries
you know sort of the heart of greek
culture the heart of western culture
that was a psychedelic potion called
kikion
that seems like it's very much like an
lsd-like substance
um air got on grain and
you know lsd comes from aragon
so i think that there are a lot of ways
to look at these different substances
another
distinction is um you know which one of
them
are being researched right now in
scientific context and which are not
and because of the rise of all these
for-profit companies and everybody's
looking for what they can patent what
they can claim the land grab
you know more and more there are
companies looking at every different
kind of psychedelics
the ones that are most important that
are not being researched
mescaline but now there's a company to
do masculine a journey collab
ibogaine which is crucial for opiate
addiction
there's a new company a
branch of this company a thai that's
going to be looking at ibogaine
so i'd say the rise of the for-profit
companies is making it so that
there's just going to be an enormous
amount of investigations
into all these different psychedelics
but what we're going to see is the
development of new psychedelics that we
don't know anything about that have not
existed yet because
a lot of these for-profit companies are
going to want to
invent and patent and have composition
of matter patents on new molecules
so i think we'll see a lot of that
happening too that's really fast i mean
there's a lot of doors you've opened and
we're going to walk through all of them
including the research and so on but
on this one little tangent of um the
future of psychedelics so engineering
new psychedelics
can you comment on maybe the the
chemistry and the biology of how
psychedelics work and where is the space
of possible
engineering of psychedelics and what
kind of things might they unlock
in terms of the possible places our mind
would be able to go and the
the effects of that of improving health
but maybe at the basic level of
chemistry
and the space of what could be
engineered
well you you reminded me it's not i'll
get to exactly what you said but you
reminded me of
a talk i heard by buck mr fuller
shortly before he died and what he
talked about
is how technology was making things
ever smaller you know that we are able
to pack more and more information into
smaller and smaller spaces
and that we're developing technologies
of communications with people you know
we now
know the internet and things like that
but what he said is that he thought the
eventual uh evolution of this sort of
research would move from this
miniaturization to telepathy
yeah and so it's like a shocking thing
for somebody like scientific like that
to say that yeah
um so will we unlock those parts
where i talked about the collective
unconscious will we be able to
more consciously explore those areas
so i think that that's a possibility
there was
stan groff who's you know the world's
leading lsd researcher
and has been my mentor his wife brigitta
they were talking about stories that
they had heard about um
mdma that um people take and then on top
of that they do 5-meo dmt
and so you get this ego dissolution but
underneath
that you have this sense of um ego
sort of um sense of self safety
of self acceptance kind of grounds it so
stan was like that's the future of
psychiatry that you can
watch without the terror of the ego
dissolution the sense that you're losing
your mind or you're going crazy or
you're dying or
you know that you have this grounded
sense of safety
while you're dissolving your normal
sense of how you see things
and being able to engineer in in a
fine-tuned way that
that exact experience may be fine-tuned
to the person yeah as opposed to sort of
this
manual potion that's uh through through
uh
well i don't experiment although i don't
know about fine-tuning things to the
person in the sense that
um we believe there's this inner healer
this kind of you know inner healing
intelligence
we talked about it the body repairs
itself you know so
um i think we more need to create
safety for people and then then what
emerges will be customized to what they
need to be looking at from this inner
healing intelligence
at the same time we will move to uh
you know we we hear so much about um
the new approaches to oncology
where you know you you do um genetic
analysis of different kind of tumors and
then you have certain kind of
chemotherapy agents and you do like
personalized chemotherapy i think we
will have
more like personalized psychedelic
therapy but it'll be more like a
sequence of different drugs that people
go through over an extended period of
time and then you kind of customize
what's next and sometimes you'll combine
different drugs together like this
5mu dmt and mdma or a lot of times
people do
lsd mdma combinations or psilocybin mdma
combinations
um chemistry and um
it's not my strength i'm i'm more into
clinical applications and policy but but
i can say that
um from what i've learned from reading
from others and research done by others
that you know different psychedelics
have an
impact on different neurotransmitters
different other
parts of energies in the brain
the default mode network is
what's considered to be like our sense
of self
you know and it's this it's part of the
brain that's sort of is what i described
before scanning
the world and filtering information for
what's really
important to us and both
um focusing us on things and also
helping us to ignore a lot of things
and the classic psychedelics all weaken
the energy in this default mode system
and therefore you get this flood of
information that you're not normally
paying attention to
and then you start seeing in more
creative ways or more connected
you actually move to beyond the verbal
kind of thinking into sort of
symbolic thinking a lot of times um
and that's where you sometimes get these
uh mystical sense of connection how it's
all one and
you get the sense also of
how big the universe is and how small
each one of us is
so there's a lot of work that sasha
shulkin and albert hoffman
who invented lsd and first synthesize
psilocybin and what they call structure
activity relationships
what is the structural molecule and then
how do you predict
what that new molecule that never
existed before is going to do
once you actually take it and
you can get close but you never really
know
until you actually take the drug and the
way that
sasha ran his experiments is that he
would take the drugs himself first
in low doses and he would sort of you
know step up the doses to have more
experiences if he thought it was
valuable he'd share it with his wife
anne
but then what they would do is if they
both thought it was valuable they had a
group of 12 people that they were with
for many many years
and they would distribute these new drug
to these 12 people
and they would get the different
perspectives and he felt that 12 was
like a minimum number you know because
we're so unique how each of us see
things but then you kind of get a little
bit of a consensus on how a lot of
people are going to see it and then if
that
12 people were positive about it then
they would turn it over to leo zeff
who he called the secret chief the
leader of the underground psychedelic
therapy movement and then he would start
exploring it in therapy so
there's um still a lot of mysteries as
far as structure activity relationships
and
it's not going to be the case that
people go into the lab and
they tinker with molecules and they know
exactly what they're going to get
and a lot of it has to do with the not
so much
chemistry as morphology you could say
the shape of the molecule and how does
that
interact with receptor sites and so
we're getting better at
modeling all of that and how does that
interaction relate to the
the the morphing of the human experience
and deeply understanding that
perhaps there's no equations yet for
that kind of thing you really have to
build up intuition by experiencing it
and over time and
sort of subjective self-report like
trying to build
an understanding of the effects of the
different chemistries yeah yeah you can
you can have approximate ideas but to
know exactly so
you know when i first tried mdma which
was 1982
and this was after i had done lots of
lsd and masculine
and mushrooms um i was shocked at how
different it was than these other
substances
and yet how profound it was so are there
whole new kind of categories of classes
of drugs that we're not aware of that
would be
not so much this like eco-dissolution or
emotional well what mdma does is uh
reduces activity in the amygdala
the fear processing part of the brain so
it's not just chemistry but it
it routes energy throughout the brain in
a different way it increases activity in
the prefrontal cortex
so you think more logically though that
i think has an enormous
impact on the effect of mdma the other
thing it does
is it increases connectivity between the
amygdala and the hippocampus so it helps
facilitate
um processing of things into long-term
memory
um and with ptsd trauma is like never in
the past it's always about to happen so
will we one time develop drugs that
would even be specific to
certain kind of memories we're working
with a woman rachel yehuda
who is at the bronx va
and she's done some studies that are
with the epigenetics of trauma so she's
worked with holocaust survivors and
their children
and she has identified um
epigenetic mechanisms by which trauma is
passed from generation to the
generations
sort of like set points for anxiety fear
certain
things like that but the question is can
you actually transmit memories
from one generation to the next now
this is not um dna
changes which happen over a very long
period of time in the
evolutionary scale but within one
lifetime within
some experiences your epigenetics what
turns on the genes or turns off certain
genes that can
be impacted and that's what we know now
can be transmitted from generation to
generation
either by the father or the mother
through the sperm or the egg
so it's it's pretty um remarkable so
what what rachel's going to
try to do is mdma research for ptsd
and look at these epigenetic markers
before and after and see if they change
as a consequence of therapy so
will we develop one day certain kind of
chemicals that will be able to bring
certain kind of memories to the surface
um that's not inconceivable the
epigenetic
angle is fascinating that there will be
these epigenetic perturbations that lead
to
memories living from one generation to
the other
and then bringing those memories to the
surface and using
using that as signal to understand what
exactly the psychedelics bring
to the surface and not yeah yeah now the
other
portion of that though is culture i mean
culture is where we store all these
memories
and in the stories that we get passed
down
especially with a lot of shared you talk
about the holocaust or world war two
where it is um
it's deeply ingrained in the culture the
impact of those events
and sort of in aggregate the different
perspectives on that
particular event create a set of stories
that you can plug into
and then they kind of resonate with some
aspect of you that creates a memory
that's
connected to like when i think about
world war ii and the holocaust
i think about my own family but in some
sense
it's also resonating with stories of
many others
so it's like somehow the two echo each
other
and i'm just providing my own little
flavor on top
the the meat of the stories are probably
those that are shared with others
it's plugging into the collective
unconscious that that's
um that's really fascinating really
plugging into
like precisely plugging into particular
memories
as a way to uh to to uh
deal with trauma and ptsd that kind of
thing
yeah i'll just have that the most
important dream of my life
ever was of a holocaust survivor telling
me
that he was miraculously
saved from death
and he knew that he was saved for a
particular purpose but he never knew
what that purpose was so in the dream
i'm seeing him on his deathbed and
and then he shows me whatever happened
to him during the holocaust
you know and then um we're back in the
room on his deathbed and he says well i
know what my
purpose was now and i'm like oh great
what was it he said let's
tell you to be a psychedelic therapist
and to study psychedelics and
bring back psychedelic research and
i thought to myself i've already decided
to do this you can lay this on me
i can say yes and then you can die in
peace and then he died in front of my
eyes
in the dream so i think that that kind
of
cultural um transmission that i got from
when i was really young
you know then manifested in this dream
and that was this
story about how people can be
um incredibly vicious and can be
very motivated by irrational factors and
so
i i just feel that this this kind of
multi-generational transmission of the
story of the irrational
you know being a murderous factor
and something i needed to respond to
was deeply ingrained and i i would say
my guess is you know more culturally
than this epigenetic
mechanism yes yeah but your sense is
that
whatever stimulated a certain
part of human nature in uh world war ii
especially not to germany but also in
stalinist soviet union
still is within us within all of us just
like we were saying uh you know
um we embody quite a lot of things
yeah and one of those is whatever the
the capacity of for evil
i seems to be one of those things
yeah there's a quote um from carl jung
from just a few years that
before he died what he says
and i'll just paraphrase it is that we
need to
understand psychology we need to
understand
who man is that the greatest danger
to us is man there are no other dangers
really
that impact our species and then he goes
on to say that
we are the source of all coming evil
now this was 15 years or so after world
war ii
but yeah and and i'd say one of the most
important psychedelic experiences of my
life was a dmt
experience also terence was there ralph
metzner
andy weil a few others and we are um
sitting around ed eslin smoking dmt
and under the influence of dmt which now
this was the first time i've ever smoked
emt
um i had this super rapid fraction of a
second like
dissolving of everything that i well
first off i saw
a horizontal line then i saw a vertical
line then it turned into a color
red than it was red then it turned into
cubes then it turned into like an
mc-escher kind of like
i don't know you know didn't make
logical sense and then i was gone
and then it was just this period of
five ten minutes of just feeling part of
this um enormous
wave of um billions of years of
evolution how
i had this sense that in my innermost
sense of who i
am uniquely individually this inner
voice that's talking to me that i didn't
develop english that that it's like a
gift to me from
millions of people that so that even in
my most
innermost uh sense it's not just me
it's it's the product of everything that
came before me i'm part of this bigger
system and then i just thought wow just
how many billions of years does it take
to reach this point
self-awareness and all this and it was
glorious beautiful and then i had this
thought
um and this is where this kind of um
intellectual honesty i guess you could
say i just thought well if i'm part of
everything and everything's part of me
then it's not just the good parts that
hitler's part of me too
yeah and that was just this shock like a
stone
sunk you know and i just was very moody
for the whole
next day but it was that acknowledgement
that each of us carries these potentials
and what we activate is what matters but
what what our potential
are is the whole full range of things
i don't know if you can comment about
the dmt trip itself and what it's like
starting from the very basic geometric
shapes and then launching
yourself into the context of the
enormity of space and time in the human
history
is there anything else to be said about
that kind of um
visually or physically
or emotionally about that journey what
is
what it's like that brief journey that
reveals so much
well i was with a group of people the
way we were doing it
was um you know each of us would smoke
dmt
have 10 15 minutes experience while we
closed our eyes and you know everybody
else was just chatting and then the
person who did the dmt would come back
and tell their story what happened and
and then
we'd think about it for a bit and then
pass the pipe to the next person and so
this was like a whole
evening you know and so even the
starting to interrupt even the
conversations themselves then
is part of the experience exactly yes
yes because it's also what you bring
back
right i mean i think that's particularly
for therapy you know it's not so much
about what the experience is
but it's what you bring back and what do
you integrate and then also
um how do you learn how to do these
things on your own without the drugs
there is this way because we're saying
it's it's sort of a core human
experience
the drug is the mediator but can we do
this on our own and once you've seen it
and felt it then you have a little bit
better sense to
recreate it on your own although you
know i've had dreams where i've been
doing lsd
and tripping and it was just incredible
it was
i was tripping in my dreams but i had
not taken lsd
so there's this way in which we do that
so i
i would say that from the dmt experience
the sense of safety that's what i was
trying to get at with this
group of us and this group of friends
trying to do this common exploration
that
if you have this sense of safety you're
incredibly
vulnerable because you are
giving up your um awareness really of
what's happening around you
i think there's what we're finding
is that in our psychedelic research
for ptsd um
and what we see with the vaccines that
that even african americans are
reluctant to
volunteer for vaccines because they
haven't had that sense of safety
from the medical establishment
they don't volunteer for psychedelic
therapy even as much
so the overlay has to be this sense of
safety as you become vulnerable and
looking inside you're
you're not um i i was just actually
told about how there's a lot of work
being done inside prisons to teach
mindfulness and you know so
one of the um charlene who's my
assistant is trying to do work on
um helping people in prison with
trauma potentially one day with mdma or
meditation or mindfulness but
one of the exercises was you know
teaching people to okay
here's how you deal with stress you know
just close your eyes and deep breath and
what charlene was saying is people don't
close their eyes in prison
you know you don't feel safe to do that
so um all that is just to say is that
um the context is the most important
factor so while i'll talk about
the dmt experience the context was this
supportive sense of safety that i could
be completely vulnerable and
out of any kind of um control women i
think you know
often or less safe in this way than men
because of all the sexual assaults
um but what it can do
by taking the ego orientation
um offline to some extent it opens you
up to much more
and and to make a bigger point of that
um we could say that um it's very
similar to the copernican revolution
and you know people thought that the
earth was the center of the universe
and you know the the inquisition
murdered people that
questioned that father bruno burned at
the stake actually one of the things he
said
i think that's worth all these years
later
saying is that when the inquisition
sentenced him to burn at the stake for
espousing this idea that the earth was
not really the center of the universe he
said to the inquisition
he said your fear in sentencing me is
greater than my fear in being sentenced
that their world view was so rigid yeah
that they had to wipe out anybody that
would question
it and and so
this idea of psychedelics displacing our
ego as the center of the universe
and to realize that we are just rotating
about on something much bigger
than our individual life you know our
ego is
is designed almost to protect this body
while we're alive
and you can understand all the good
reasons why that is
but it also disconnects us from this
bigger reality
and so the psychedelics dmt by knocking
this sort of
ego orientation or the default mode
network offline
you open up to the the bigger sweeps of
history
so in that place of safety and
vulnerability
in that fascinating group of people when
their ego was dissolved in this way did
they have
similar experiences is there different
places that their minds went
yeah so you know once i had this kind of
shattering experience that hitler's part
of me
yes you know no one else in the group
had that probably
a lot of them have maybe had that before
or they they realize that they're not
just
you know the good the white hat good
people and that they're all good and
they're you know we've got to fight
against the bad people
you know so no people will go in
different places and not only that
if you do it again you'll go into a
different place than you went to the
first time
unless you have not resolved the issue
so i had a sequence of lsd trips
that were very difficult but it was like
coming to the same
sort of conundrum the same challenge
that i was unable to overcome this idea
of letting go and really fully
dissolving
letting the ego fully go and and i would
have this sequence of trips over a
couple months where i would reach this
point where i was too scared to move
forward and i would just be holding on
so there are there are repeated themes
sometimes
what stan groff has said which i find
very beautiful is that the
full expression of an emotion is the
funeral pyre of that emotion
and what that means is if you can fully
let in
something then the essence of of life
has changed
is that it moves on that everything's in
motion
and if you can fully experience it even
if it's a sense that you're going to be
trapped in eternity
in this hellish state if you surrender
to that that's the way out
you know this full experience of
something is this
um funeral part of that emotion and so
that
runs against a lot of what modern
psychiatry is doing too which is to
suppress symptoms
and to and to instead of supporting
people to kind of explore these
insecurities so that then they can
contain them
and then they can move on so yeah
resistance is not a way to make progress
right um although in
one of the reasons why we do the
supplemental dose during the mdma or why
there's advantages in a 10 hour lsd
experience is that
you have a lot of opportunities to come
up against this resistance
it may be too difficult to deal with and
then you kind of push it aside and then
a couple hours later you come back to it
or you come back to it press news every
once in a while
if you're not ready it's hard to do that
i think the with mdma
you can negotiate that's i think a part
of
its safety in a sense you can have this
like oh i should be talking about this
but i
we're feeling this but it's too much for
me now you can push it away but with the
classic psychedelics
this kind of membrane between the
conscious and the unconscious
that um once you take the drug and it
weakens this membrane and things are
coming up
um it's very difficult to negotiate
with it the the cl the key to successful
uh classic psychedelic trips is
surrender
you've talked about that you first began
to reconsider the negative
health myths around psychedelics when
you learned that the book
one flew over the cuckoo's nest was
written by ken gizzy when
he was in part under the influence of
lsd
so how do you think lsd helped him ken
keys in
writing uh that incredible book
yeah um there's a a process that's
called semantic priming
and so what what that means is that i i
say um
night you say day you know there's kind
of normal patterns
of kind of you say one word what kind of
words come to you
next and so they've done some research
they meaning scientists have done some
research
where you give people a psychedelic
and then you do this semantic priming
and what you
find is they have a wider range of
associations
than they normally would when they're
not under psychedelics
so i think for ken kesey um
he was able with psychedelics to get
like um a deeper kind of emotional
connection to some of these
states of mind that people were in the
instant this mental institution
and that he could explore them more
in-depth and more eloquently and and
and also one of the things he talked
about was the fog machine
was you know how um people's minds were
sort of clouded by the people that ran
the institution and this
the fog machine would be coming in so i
think
the um imagery and the metaphors
that he used a lot in the book could
come to him during lsd experiences
and and then now he wasn't doing um
you know very when you're writing you
have to be
literate uh you have to be able to write
you know so it would be more like
beginning and ends of lsd trips instead
of at the peak
but i think you would get a lot of these
um
the feeling tones or the images the
metaphors i think he would get
these extent also lsd lasts so long you
can get these extended focus
and you can really elaborate on um
images and um so much of psychedelic
experiences are
poetic and metaphorical i mean you can
take um
you know veterans who've never um
read a book of poetry in their lives
you know and under the influence of mdma
just
what they describe the imagery and the
way they describe their experience is
metaphorical poetic it's incredible
and so i think that ken kesey was
able to channel these what lsd did to
his mind
in a way that
most people couldn't do that he did
because he was trying to write this
novel and because he was so brilliant
yeah the i mean we'll talk about
psychedelics and treating
in uh bringing some of trauma to the
surface and dealing with all those kinds
of things but
there's something also to the opening up
of creativity
for whether it's for writing purposes or
for
for in my world for engineering for
invention innovation and invention
itself is a very it's a deeply creative
process
and it's fascinating to think
with the aid of psychedelics what kind
of ideas can be brought to life
yeah well we have the whole phenomena of
a lot of the people in silicon valley
and else microdosing psychedelics in
order to
have a little touch more of this
creative approach to things
i would love it to see if it was that's
more like terence mckenna territory
correct me if i'm wrong but i would love
to serve more scientific to where
there will be the rigor of saying how to
do it effectively
you know how to sort of understand sort
of um
not just almost um
you know to take the full
journey of creative exploration and to
do it for
prolonged periods of time you know um
for years you know lifelong kind of part
of your life
of hot it empowers creativity i
i think of course you start with
um helping people
uh deal with trauma and then the next
step is
people who have moved past their trauma
and are trying to do something create
something special in their life
how can then psychedelics empower that
yeah
now that also just to not shy away from
anything controversial yes
um that has to that gets us to this um
idea of psychedelics for vision quest
particularly for younger people you know
when you're
sort of moving into this adulting kind
of phase and you have to figure out what
are you going to do with your life
there's so many options a lot of people
of course feel constrained that they
have very few options but
i think this idea of psychedelics as a
way to help you
find your calling or find your vision or
find your unique leverage point
i think we'll see that more and more as
our culture evolves and gets healthier
around the use of psychedelics it says
both the science
uh having the rigor of understanding how
to do it safely and the culture catching
up
to the fact that this is uh both safe
and uh like very useful
yeah although i would question this idea
of safety
um so so we can understand physiological
risks
and we can minimize them and i think
there's very minimal
physiological risks from the classic
psychedelics virtually none
or for even mdma under safe conditions
psychological risks are
harder to address but we can do that
through the sense of safety and support
but i think there's um a level of risk
there that we shouldn't overlook
and so you know to make a drug into a
medicine what we have to do is prove
to the satisfaction of the fda and other
regulatory agencies
that things are safe and efficacious but
even though they use those words proving
safety and safe and efficacious
it's in relationship to the disease that
you're trying to treat and you accept a
certain amount of risk
so it's the risk benefit ratio rather
than
pure safety yeah absolutely
let me ask you about kankeezy a little
bit longer because the fascinating human
being
he was also part of project mk ultra
yeah
yes what was project mk ultra and what
uh lessons we should take away from it
well mk ultra was a program
by the caa you know what they were
looking at was
can you take these drugs these
psychedelic drugs
and weaponize them in different ways
um for interrogation for true serums for
um
you know exposing somebody before they
give a big talk to something like lsd
and then they
you know can't talk or make a fool of
themselves or
can you spray lsd over the battlefield
and have everybody tripping and drop
their weapons and then you just walk up
and
you know nobody dies and you've won you
know the battle
so so it's a fascinating concept yeah
they call it non-lethal incapacitance
and i think that's how uh one way to win
a war is
uh to enforce peace
to get everybody not caring about the
war but yes well i
think gandhi said something even better
which is that the true way to win a war
is to turn your enemy into your friend
yes
that's a beautiful way to put it yeah um
but
mk ultra was really nefarious and it was
part of our military and it was done in
secret and um
they would dose people against their
will
i mean one of the most infamous things
uh
was that they had a house of
prostitution in san francisco and they
would um
have one-way mirrors all this stuff and
then they would just dose people with
lsd
they would have the prostitutes dose
these guys with lsd and and observe what
they would do and how they would
act and um the ca actually for a while
was dosing each other
secretly and that there's a famous case
of this phil olsen that
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either jumped out of a window or was
pushed he might have been killed
um he was a cia guy and they gave him
lsd an