Duncan Trussell Family Hour - 364: Cole Marta

Episode Date: December 5, 2019

Cole Marta, brilliant doctor at the forefront of psychedelic medicine and ketamine research, rejoins the DTFH! You can learn more about Cole's clinic, the California Center for Psychedelic Therapy, here. Duncan is coming to Denver! January 23-25. Click here to buy tickets. This episode is brought to you by: The DTFH Store - We've refreshed the shop for the holidays! Use our offer code: CHRISTMASFEET to get 10% off any item in the store! Squarespace - Use offer code: DUNCAN to save 10% on your first site. Bombas - Visit bombas.com/duncan for 20% off your first purchase.

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then I am at a meditation retreat in Hawaii. So I don't have a lot of time to do any kind of intro. I do want to say I hope you all are doing great and that you haven't succumbed to this new nipple scorpion plague that's been scorching so many of us here in LA. These dumpster scorpions have been skittering out and getting into the pipes

and climbing up through the pipes and clamping onto so many people's nipples at night that it's making it really difficult for a lot of us to get a good night's sleep. Because apparently the sting of these things is 16 trillion times worse than being shot in the stomach by a gun, and I just don't want to feel it. But they're out there, so if you want to protect your nipples,

I recommend wearing steel bras or even velvety bras, just any kind of soft bra, which is what I've started wearing at night. I don't want to get preachy here, but I would hate to hear about anybody else's nipples being mangled by these horrific crustaceans. We have got an incredible podcast for you today. I am headed this afternoon to my friend,

Cole Marta's Ketamine Clinic, which is in Larchmont Village in Los Angeles. It also is a place where MAPS has been doing the MDMA studies to find out if MDMA is a viable treatment for PTSD. So to me, this is a sacred place where some incredible healing work is being done, and I really can't wait to have a conversation

with one of the people who is making it happen. That's Cole Marta, and we're gonna listen to this conversation right after this. Publish a manifesto online, or just pictures of your own behind. You can do it on Squarespace. Start a shop and sell your socks. Make a website for your mom.

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If you head over there, you will get commercial free episodes of the DTFH, along with a lot of extra stuff, including hour long rambling things that I love to do. So please subscribe over at patreon.com forward slash DTFH. Now, without further ado, returning to the DuncanTrussell family, our podcast is one of the most brilliant doctors

I have ever met in my life. He is at the forefront of psychedelic medicine and the hard work he's been engaged in is going to change the world. Also, if you're someone who lives in LA and you're struggling with depression, I could not recommend someone more if you're interested in trying ketamine therapy.

And all the links you need to find, Cole will be located at DuncanTrussell.com. So without further ado, my dear friend, Dr. Cole Marta. Dr. Marta. Yes. It's so good to see you, man. It's good to see you too.

And to see you here. Yes. And what is the name of this clinic? It is the California Center for Psychedelic Therapy. Okay. And it is, as far as I know, the first of its kind. First of its kind, certainly in LA. And, yeah, we specialize in psychedelic therapy

at our clinic. What makes it different from other ketamine clinics or why is it the first of its kind? So it's not the first ketamine clinic, but I've been working with ketamine since 2015. And what I think is different about our approach here is that all of the members of our team also do psychedelic research for other research projects,

like the MAPS MDMA Assisted Psychotherapy for PTSD study. Right. And so they're experienced in working with psychedelic experiences. So we do ketamine assisted psychotherapy. We don't just administer ketamine, for example, many of the clinics, they just are administered ketamine. And then the ketamine induces a psychedelic

or otherwise powerful experience. And they're left kind of just to digest that at home. Right. So our rooms are designed to be a comfortable set and setting. And we have trained therapists to work with the psychedelic experience and integrating that experience after the treatment. I got you.

And this is a, this really diverges from what some ketamine clinics are doing. Right. I mean, I know that I've gotten calls from friends who have gone to ketamine therapy, and they've just had the experience. Right. And they're confused.

And the doctor has said something along the lines of, yeah, just make sure you get an Uber. Right. Don't drive. Right. So this is a real like ego shattering experience. Right. So is ketamine therapy, is it just follow-up

or do you prep people beforehand with some sessions? So we do an intake session with most people, and then we'll do a series of treatments, typically in the beginning, because that's what the data recommends, actually, is a series of treatments. And we'll do 90 minute sessions, 90 minutes to two hours is the amount of time

we recommend people stay here. Wow. It turned out when this intranasal ketamine hit the market for S ketamine, they were really pushing hard their sort of, their safety standards and safety recommendations based on what they had. And luckily, our clinic was sort of pretty much

entirely in line with what they had recommended. They recommend people not drive. They recommend people be under direct medical supervision for 90 minutes. They recommend people have two hour appointments. So we really had to like adjust very little. And the ketamine experience is, you know, 45 minutes at the most.

So we have time in that 90 minutes to two hours to have our, you know, all of the people who work with patients here are licensed or training psychotherapists. So they're working with mental health professionals. And they have that 45 additional minutes to stay here and integrate those experiences. This brings me to something I've been wanting to talk with you about.

And it's come up in other podcasts and in just conversations in general, the ketamine experience, especially when I'm just naming the therapies that I know of that are happening legally right now. It's ketamine and MDMA with your study. But the ketamine experience is at least for me and other people I've chatted with.

And also if you read John Lilly's writings and his very detailed map of the ketamine universe, it is so powerful and so psychedelic and so otherworldly that people experience visionary states, profoundly alien encounters, very odd things. So I'm curious how as a scientist, and not just you, but the scientific community in general,

is graphing these hyperdimensional states and addressing it in a way that when you communicate with someone who just went through it, you can connect to whatever the mystical side of things in a non-dry scientific way. Yeah, I think it's important that therapists, at least the way that we work with these states is not that we need to get this experience right,

that we are using the right words or that people are correctly reflecting the experience that they had to us. In fact, we encourage them not to worry about that because it can be distracting. What we've found clinically and what a lot of the data has shown from psilocybin research working with psychedelic or with mystical states is that it's just important

that people have these experiences. So our approach scientifically is more applying our psychedelic therapy and just general psychotherapy tools for creating a comfortable environment for that experience to unfold. There's no way to predict really exactly what experience people are going to have. People can have vastly different experiences

at the same dose and two days apart. But the important thing is to know that it could be incredibly important to them. And to allow them to express that, to help them put words to things if that's what they're trying to do. And generally just treat it with respect. Okay, I see.

Yeah, so you don't have to, obviously you're not going to be going scientific materialist with somebody who just said they turned into a flock of birds or something like that. Right, right. But there are the mystical states questionnaire that breaks down sort of known categories of the mystical experience.

Yes. And I think that was originally developed in theology, but I wouldn't want to be quoted on that. But the mystical states experiences questionnaire, there are some predictable qualities of these valuable experiences. Ineffability is one of them. So another reason that we don't give people the impression

that it's important that they, you know, are able to communicate correctly. Yeah. A lot of times there aren't good words or the experience that they have. Yeah. And an effective ketamine could be that they could have some word finding difficulties.

So we really, we invite them to speak after 45 minutes, but we explain that to them before that they may not be in any condition to do that, that it may not feel compelled to do that. They certainly don't have to. Well, this is to me, and, you know, I absolutely love that finally we can legally study these states of consciousness.

Right. It's beautiful. But, and I love that you have this wonderful meeting that is happening between the scientific and the mystical and the scientific is attempting to translate the experience of the mystical into data that could be analyzed, which I think is incredible.

But to me, there is something so particularly funny. Yeah. Almost Monty Python level funny. Sure. When you hear mystical experience questionnaire. Right. Right. Well, this is the cool thing.

Yeah. Like this is, this is the kind of conversation I'd like to have, especially with Duncan Trussell, is like, you know, how else do we validate it though? How do we, how do we show that it's not just the dose of psilocybin that someone gets, or just the dose of ketamine that someone gets, because two people might get the same ketamine experience,

but one of them is highly anxious and terrified and never done a psychedelic before, has read weird things on the internet, is generally a sort of nervous person, especially about new experiences, which everyone is. And then that person gets an experience, and the whole time they're resisting the experience, for example.

Then another person gets the same dose, and they are an experienced meditator. They're used to going into weird mental spaces. They understand the idea of sort of surrendering and letting go. And they have a total ego disillusion and, you know, oceanic boundlessness, you know, cease to exist experience.

At grand unifying, you know, unified with the one consciousness kind of thing. How do we, it's important that we show the value in my opinion. It's incredibly important that we show that it was that experience that may have been the difference between the person, the two people who got the same exact dosing, right?

That that experience can be valuable. So, you know, it's not necessarily because we're trying to define the experience for its own sake. It's so that we can have a common language about what it is that might be the actual key factor in these medicines. For example, in the psilocybin study for smoking cessation, they showed just that.

They showed that changes in the mystical state's questionnaire were correlated to success in smoking cessation, not dose of psilocybin. Right. And this matches, doesn't, this matches that what AA says, this is the higher power idea. That's what's going to help you with addiction. Possibly, yeah.

And, but with ketamine, I'm really interested in it because I have had some pretty good luck as far as being, you know, someone who's suffered from depression more than a few times and they've gotten on medication for depression. Yeah. And it's something that when you've been depressed and you're not depressed, you do some,

I sometimes feel that thing of like, man, you have to watch out. You know, it's like the, you don't want it to come back. Right. And that's terrifying. It's terrifying. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That, but I, my experience with it was so profound

and it really did. I'm not going to say I'm cured of depression. Like I get down and low sometimes and I feel abnormally low sometimes, but since that, you know, experience and a few after, it's just not the same anymore. It doesn't hit me as hard anymore. It just hasn't happened yet.

I'm not saying it won't happen again. Right. And so, so to me, I'm really curious about what happened. I'm curious about, is there, is it the mystical state, the ego dissolution, the reminder that the identity that you think you have is not necessarily the entirety of your identity and the subsequent relief that comes from that understanding, or is it that there is some

physiological change that has happened in my brain and then my brain is producing some, you know, I don't know, mental neurotransmitter. Yes. Right. Yeah. And which, so I guess my question is which came first. Yeah.

The physiological change of the mystical experience. That's the $50,000 question or whatever. Yeah. It's, but we do know that in all of the data that's validated ketamine for treatment-resistant depression, they did not value this experience necessarily, or they didn't, maybe the researchers did, but that's all, that's a whole nother layer of study

than just demonstrating that the medicine has an effect on depression. And all of the studies that were done, that I reviewed, there was no integration, there was an attempt to actually get rid of those unwanted side effects, as they were sort of termed in the papers largely that I saw. And so the ketamine would be administered fairly slowly

over a longer period of time. And so that data was extremely promising. That data has led to all of these clinics feeling justified in offering ketamine for treatment-resistant depression. And that is, I would argue, the biological, like fairly purely a biological benefit that's demonstrated there. I think clinically we see even better outcomes

when we do account for those. Also, it's just polite not to have somebody have that experience and then demean that experience or belittle it or dismiss it. To just overlook it. Side effect. Right. We know that what people are describing is very similar

to the mystical experiences. And we feel clinically that we see people have basically an additional opportunity for healing that could come from those experiences too. Those experiences go very deep, very quickly. And certainly there's profound insights that have been gained from examining those experiences rather than dismissing them or moving on.

It's a really, really, really amazing time in the sense that the more accurate you, y'all, the scientists, the researchers become, the more granular the data is because of technology. You know, they're always going deeper and deeper into the ability to scan the brain or to sort of decode what's going on up there to the point where they apparently can take mental images now

and at least figure out what people are seeing based on... Based on firing. Yeah, yeah, translate that. This popped up on the internet, but I've heard about it before, but certainly we're not far away from that, especially with AI and quantum computers potentially being able to interpolate

whatever energy can be detected in the brain and translate that in a way that we can visually see what's going on, meaning that suddenly what has been the subjective realm and has been completely dependent on the experience or being able to articulate what they've experienced, and that's a hugely limiting factor in the sense that not everybody

could suddenly turn into like WB8s or something like that or Terence McKenna. For a lot of people, it's just like, holy fuck. What the fuck happened to me? It was like... But to me, also, the additional benefit to show a person what they saw, to take the interpreted data from brain scans

or whatever is around the corner and then show that to people or to study it to look at it as some kind of combo Rorschach or scan of the cell for who knows what. Suddenly, though, we'll begin to have technological maps of the psychedelic landscape. We're up until this point. We've only had linguistic, artistic maps of it,

and so that, to me, is wild. That's some crazy shit. That sounds pretty far out there. Far out, but I mean, how far out are we really? No, I mean, just conceptually, that just sounds amazing. And then how do you... That's a chicken or the egg thing, too. Are these images being generated by the conscious self

and then interpreted based on conditions in the brain? Yeah. Or are these images being sort of triggered by some sort of external stimulus? Yeah. Most likely a combination of the two? Yeah, right. Yeah, that is very exciting.

I think not only for people in the mystical universe, where we've always thought, like, dear god, if I could just get what I've seen into the world in a way that doesn't sound like I want to get my bong painted with a mural or something like that, then it could really, you know, at the very least point to a sort of, I don't know, expression.

Or I like what you said about, well, is there some, in the same way, like certain things can see ultraviolet light? Right. Are we picking up some kind of who knows what and our brain in these psychedelic states is allowing us to interpret it visually? Or, you know, is it just a subconscious reservoir that's being accessed by these things either way?

Right. To suddenly have the potential for these maps of human consciousness that are accurate and have been, it's just, I don't know, I'm really excited about it. Because what happens if we find out that it is external stimulus? What happens if we do discover, oh yeah, this dark universe, or

there's these energy fields that we don't, it's an extra sensory perception. Yeah. Yeah. Would it be? I don't know. I don't know what it would be. Yeah.

Would it be that? I mean, I think it would require more study, like always more study, always more study. We're so lucky to have you, man, because you guys are, to me, like the new psychedelic scientist that's out there, the ones I've encountered at like the maps, conferences and stuff. It is so refreshing, because we, by we,

I mean, I don't know what you, the seekers, psychedelic seekers, we, you know, get us together, and it's a matter of time before we're talking about time travel, multi-version navigation, communication with aliens, who built the pyramids, which is fun. Yeah. And I love it, and it's certainly one of my favorite,

and I know you love it too. But what I love about you guys, because I think you sort of wear both hats really well, in a friendship way, the alien hat can go on you fast, and it's a delight, but always even within that, there is a scientific precision that comes out, which is where you're a willingness to be like, we don't know, or it could actually more likely be this.

So that's what I love about this new psychedelic scientist is it is producing a wonderful counterbalance to the woo. And, you know, that marriage between... Which is, yeah, which I hope, you know, I think that that's important that we have that, and I would love to, you know, start exploring the discussion, very, very important discussion

about how our, you know, this very sexy topic, this very exciting and stimulating topic, how do we, like, hold that enthusiasm and excitement when the science moves so slow, you know? Like, to do, it's important that we do this, you know, proper scientific investigation, so that we, in my opinion, it's very important that we don't move to some sort of free market system.

That's how snake oil, you know, kind of, you know, then it becomes the best sales pitch that determines our sort of most powerful medicines rather than, you know, some actual examination of, you know, I do believe deeply in the scientific method, but it takes a long time, and there are all kinds of ethical considerations when designing studies with human subjects, and so the science moves

very, very slow, much slower than the internet's, you know, thirst for information about it and people's thirst for information about it, and how do we responsibly maintain this balance between, like, you know, the need for new information all the time and the actual quality information coming so slowly, like, how do we keep the charlatans from coming in and pretending to know the answers?

How do we keep the woo-woo out of, or how do we protect that scientific? How do we protect the, you know, the very important value that we place on doing this properly like this? Right. You know, how do we not succumb to the desire to just, like, you know, listen to the person who seems like they know what they're talking about?

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Bombas.com slash Duncan to get 20% off your first purchase. Thank you, Bombas. And we're back. Charismatics. Charismatics, yes. Yeah, Charismatics. Now, this brings me to a criticism I've heard. I don't agree with it.

I love what you all are doing and what you just said I agree with. Yeah. And my old, boring ass, I love where I'm at now, but I do want to bring this up because I've heard the criticism a few times, which is what actually what we're looking at here is they want to license what is a human right that the prescribing of psilocybin,

the prescribing of MDMA is actually giving, it's going to create a priest class, so to speak, a psychedelic priest class where it's not really a priest, it's a licensed therapist. And if you're not one of these, then you really don't have the, people should be wary of you. And the critique is, no, this is a thousand year old

tradition, technology. It's already does the work itself. If you're an open loving person, you could administer psychedelic therapy. They don't need to go anywhere. And so this is the critique I've heard. How would you address that? So a very, very important distinction, I think,

is between the other ways people use psychedelics and using psychedelics as medicine, you know, like that's what I'm interested in researching. I'm always interested to hear what happens in the other ways people use psychedelics. But I don't think that it makes a priest class, I would argue that it doesn't make a priest class to make using psychedelic medicines

as four mental health conditions for diagnosed psychiatric conditions. I think if you want to, even if you take that model, the priest class there implies some like professionalism in the education, dedication, some form of oath, some form of accountability. And so I don't think it makes it a priest class thing any more than medicine would already be relegated

to doc people. I think the system is in place for a reason. We don't let just anyone practice medicine for a reason. And so when it comes to using these things as medicines, I think it should still be in the hands of medical professionals. When I say medicines, I mean, you know, for a Western medical condition that's been diagnosed in a Western medical tradition,

and we're looking for Western medical solutions, and we're applying the Western method of the scientific process and scientific inquiry too. I think that's like, and that paradigm, I'm excited to see it in that paradigm, and I think a lot of people feel like they've been waiting for that for it to be validated. And yet at the same time,

it's been used in these other ways for hundreds or thousands of years, many of them, the plant medicines in particular. You know, MDMA isn't that old. MDMA is a complete Western medical product. Right. MDA, you know, isolated psilocybin and psilocin. LSD.

LSD, like, you know, when it comes to mushrooms and peyote and other mescaline-containing plants and ayahuasca, there similarly are wisdom traditions in those fields for working with them in those ways. Right. And I would say there are also avenues for those pursuits. You know, there are ways to validate these medicines. If you're taking them as a psychospiritual sacrament,

I think there are ways for that to happen. You know, the Native American church can use mescaline-containing cacti, you know, Santo Daimei church and the UDV church in the United States can use ayahuasca as a sacrament. And so that's, I think that that's a way to think about it and to also separate that entire pursuit and that desire for, you know, I think that's where that battleground is in general. Right.

Expanding these things, expanding the understanding of spiritualism, expanding the ideas of, you know, religion to have that be broader and to have sanctions safe places for that kind of work to be done. But for someone who has trauma, like, even within mental health, like, not everyone is very good at dealing with trauma. Like, they should be. They should at least be comfortable working with people with PTSD, but it's its own specialty within a subspecialty already.

Right. And there are unique situations that come up that, you know, there's a reason that we have these significant training programs for working with this population. Yeah. There are things that come up that require expertise. Right. Well, that, yeah, that to me is where I really grit my teeth

when I realized someone has decided to take up the mantle of, you know, doing this kind of work in a scientific way. Right. If someone's a shaman, they're a shaman. I don't know too much about it, you know, or what, what that is. But when you realize someone is like not doing like, oh, I'm going to give you like a psychedelic trip in the old school way in the sixties, I'll be your babysitter, whatever you want to call it.

But they're actually adding to that the implication that they're going to be capable of treating some mental disorder, some mental illness. That to me is where fuck. If they're making those claims that I would have significant issue with. Like if they're saying, you know, at my retreat in Malibu, you know, we're treating PTSD because we're working with MDMA. Yeah. Uh, that's terrifying to me.

Like how do we, for me, if, if I, so, um, in our study, if someone gets hurt, I'm responsible, right? Like if someone is, if I'm responsible for the participants in the study, and I'm responsible for human subjects, I'm responsible for making sure that no one feels coerced to be taking place there, that we haven't made promises that are not true, that we're not saying this is going to cure your PTSD. Right.

Like we have to be very specific about our language and the informed consent process. And I feel like anybody who, even if their heart is true, if they're figuring out if this is going to be helpful for these patient populations. Right. Um, it's like experimenting. It's like human experimentation. And, and people aren't giving the informed consent. They're not, they don't know that you don't really know if this is going to help them.

Right. Right. So, so to say that these are, you know, if those same people are just saying, we're, you know, these medicines are going to do all of the heavy lifting. There's nothing special about me, first of all. Yeah. Um, these medicines are going to do all the heavy lifting, but we're going to keep a safe, you know, environment here.

That's a completely different thing than using our scientific painstaking process to validate an untested system. So this brings us to, or like reckless or not even necessarily reckless use, but just like, you know, mixing MDMA with other things or, you know, taking whatever dose the, the, the sitter's comfortable giving, you know, like those are all variables that we would study meticulously in the way that we do it and why it moves so slow.

Unfortunately. Well, look at like the stories of Manson up there in Spawn Ranch, giving people acid, you know, I just saw once upon a time in Hollywood, I've been tripping out on Manson for the last two days. But I remember reading some of the stuff that he would do, which is he would give, you know, everyone would be tripping. Yeah.

And he would sit across from you. Right. And I can't remember if he would imitate your expression or if he would tell you to imitate his expression, but he would just mimic you until he became you. And in that, you know, you would have this like, just intentional merging experience with a psychotic hyper, hyper charismatic human.

Right. And then within that is all this room for, well, I mean, we saw what happened with that. Right. So to me, I think. Narcissist, psychopath. Just, or just, you know, basic, you know, someone trying to get laid. Someone just trying to fuck you, whatever it may be,

get your money, whatever it may be. Right. It's like, to me, the, what, what this problem gets mirrored in spiritual communities, which is psychedelics open people up. So do certain spiritual practices. 100%. And so, and so how do you like, how do you maintain and enforce a certain level of quality within it?

Like if I just go crazy and start giving everyone three times the dose that we said we were going to give them in the study and we have people, you know, unable to sleep and triggering their depression and some horrible outcome, like that's on, like there's a whole, you know, there's a whole bureaucratic process in place. My license is at stake. My, my sponsor is certainly, I would have to answer to why they

let some wacko, like, you know, someone with really poor judgment skills be, be in charge of a human trial, you know, like where we don't have that for that community right now, other than sort of gossip, right? Like there isn't a formal process for reporting, you know, cults of personality that are, you know, purporting themselves to be, you know, gurus basically. Charlie Manson claimed to be a guru.

And in the, you know, and that wasn't an odd thing to hear at that point in history, you know, the late sixties in the United States, especially on the West Coast, Los Angeles, San Francisco, to have a guru is like, you know, having a Tesla, you know, well, everybody's got a guru there, you know, the, the, the word gets misunderstood because in India, it's actually a tradition. It's a spiritual tradition and it's not romanticized in the same

way it is here. It's a part of Bhakti yoga, Vaishnava Bhakti yoga. It's been going on for thousands of years. And so that's what that version of guru is different from the thing that happens. And I've heard different, different people in the spiritual and the Buddhist universe look at someone becoming a guru in the same way as like someone like getting athletes foot, like it's like,

like, oh no, like their ego got them. They weren't able to stay in a decentralized disillusioned in the sense, like not, not disillusion, but like non, like the best way I've heard it described is the real thing. When you run into it, it's empty. There's an emptiness there. It's a reflective emptiness that is very inspiring to be around, but it's there's not a lot of stuff going on.

It's, there's just not much there anymore. Something happened and it's rare to run into it. Right. But man. And you've experienced it. That. Oh yeah. I mean, well, you can, if you really want to experience it, you really,

you get around a dying person when they're starting to melt down. Yeah. And you'll, you can experience it there. They've given up. It's not like a person on the brink of death is going to be trying to fuck you, take your money, complete non attachment. They're just not, what are they going to do? Non attachment.

Yeah. Non attachment to the ego. A person who's got a few weeks to live is not going to try to get in your bank account. Right. You know, it's probably. They're not going to have ulterior motives. Unless they didn't have health insurance or something.

I don't know. But yeah. In general. Somebody who's accepted. Yeah. It's that. And, but this. What about someone who's a guru?

Well, my experience with it, you know, has been around people like Ramdas. Yeah. Who doesn't claim, even like claim it in the way that, in the heavy use of the term, you know, but when you're around someone who's. Really done the work. It's just a loving field. And if it's just very sweet and there's not there, there's just not much there. That's.

That you could. Yeah. So that seems like a possible model. You know, I was thinking also like the way that martial arts are like, you know, that that school of psychedelic work, you know, they have their own legal battle. They have their own legal battles ahead of them and everything. However, like, you know, and it happened with, and it's with psychotherapy too. If you're, if you're a strict analyst, then you can trace your lineage right back to Freud.

Wow. You know, it's like, because we're still only, you know, 150 years removed from him. Yeah. So, you know, it's like Freud and Freud or young. And it's like, you know, this pyramid of teachers. Yes. And, and it's, and it's a, and it's a field and a profession that seems best learned through an apprenticeship kind of.

Yes. Format. Because each individual student has their own ego to be grappling with. Right. Yes. Which comes up in psychotherapy, especially psychoanalytic therapy and psychodynamics, psychotherapy. So, you can't make some, you know, prescribed training program for dealing with ego.

That's like the pursuit of the entire field, you know, on and to infinity. Right. And the practice of, of, that's the practice. The practice is, you know, exploring these things about not only yourself, but with your part, with your patients. Yes. And so, you know, I think perhaps that's a way, I don't know how that's enforced though, then when there's, I'm just, you know,

It has to be consumer. I'm thinking of like bad behavior for whatever reason I'm stuck on that. Well, I think that, Because I think it's out there. It's definitely out there. And I think right now, unfortunately, it's probably going to be the responsibility of the seeker or whatever you want to call it, the client, the person who's going under the pressure of these people to have discernment and to be able to, you know, it's, I think

it's going to be a lot easier to educate people on what to look out for. Yeah. And if these things start happening, it's, you know, it's a red flag and have a place where they can go talk to people. Right. That is, that is non-denominational. That's just as based on a kind of understanding of, oh, you know, that, no, you can reality check here.

And that's fucked up. Right. And then it is to implement across the board and all the weird subcultures and groups, a kind of standard that people can attach to, though, I do think just across the board. Yeah. Transparency. If you're, you know, whoever you're with. If that's like an element, you know, when it's illegal, that's an element that can be

elusive. Transparency? Transparency. Well, how so? It's underground work and people, you know, there's a, there's a certain level of just, you know, discretion necessary to do the work. Oh yeah. Oh God.

Oh my God. You're right. You can't really reveal much. I guess what I mean is more like, I think any guru and there have been sex gurus out there. Sure. That starts off just saying like, yeah, I love sex. I'm probably going to try to have sex with you. Uh huh.

I like to have sex. Yeah. I like to have sex cult. That's what this is. Yeah. That's what you're signing up for. That's informed consent. That's, yeah.

You're not going to, you know, later down the line, you can't be like, they try to. That's the idea of informed consent. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That kind of selling a boundless love energy fields and then later comes the sex part. Right.

That. That. Yeah. So that, and I think that's actually a real healthy question. Sure. If you find yourself around someone claiming to be a guru and certainly claiming to be your guru, can you not just say, Hey, down the line, are you going to try to fuck me? Right.

Like, is that on the menu here? Right. Like after the lessons? Is that a possibility? And what about taking my dough? Are you going to take my stuff? Are you going to want to take my money? Right.

And then also, are you going to, if you're not going to try to fuck me, are you going to try to fuck my wife? Right. You know, whatever it may be, like what's your, is there a scheme? What are the boundaries? Yeah. And I think I do. I think like if we really want to like deal with this problem that's, I think we're seeing,

not just in goddamn spiritual and psychedelic communities and psychological communities, but literally in all communities, which is where there's skewed power dynamics. You get these things that pop up. Right. And so I think like it's going to be, it's more that empower the, I don't want to call them consumers because I hate that word. Empower the seeker. Sure.

With a series of questions that are okay to ask. And here's, and here's the conundrum is people who are desperate. You know, we have a line, you know, there are a lot of people who are hoping to get into our study and we have a limited number of positions. And those are the people that we just know about because they've reached out to us specifically. Right. Yeah. So how do we, how do we prevent vulnerable people because that doesn't that remove the

ability to really make an informed decision when you're desperate? Oh yeah. Can you really make, I mean, it amplifies the power dynamic at the very least. Yeah. When the seeker believes you have the solution to their suffering. Yeah. It's not just going to hold a safe place for you to have an internal experience and then be, you know, compassionate and decent enough human beings not to, you know, tell you that

your experience was somehow invalid or something. Right. You know, like, you know, how do we, with the pace of science and the excitement about psychedelics. I think these are important distinctions to be making. Yeah. That there is a lot of research going on for people who are vulnerable and who people who have, you know, medical conditions that they think psychedelics might be useful for. They can go to clinicaltrials.gov and you can, there's a search engine and you can search

any compound, you can search any condition to find any studies, any, it's part of the, you know, built in sort of safety measures of doing clinical research with human subjects as they have to be registered on this public website, clinicaltrials.gov, so that people can't, you know, secretly be doing human subject research or. Right. Or burying results or anything like that. Burying results. Right.

Why would they do that? Because they didn't get the results that they were hoping for. Oh, fuck. Is that a big problem? Has that been happening? Have people been burying results in this? They're less likely to publish results if the results aren't what they were hoping for. But I think, you know, as far as in the like drug development world, it just means that

that drug is a dead end and they're not going to spend any more money researching it. Right. It's very uncommon for, you know, for a study that didn't yield any meaningful results to be published. First of all, not a lot of periodicals are going to find it interesting enough to publish in their paper. Right. Who cares?

Yeah. So, but there is clinicaltrials.gov where you can track what studies have been done for different conditions in the, at least recently. I can't wrap my head around it though, Cole, as an old school conspiracy theorist who came up during the war on drugs as you did. Yeah. A lover of psychedelics since I was in high school. Right.

I developed a pretty healthy distrust for the US government and for governments in general that were opposed or may criminalizing psychedelics because anyone who's experienced a psychedelic and then has also had to deal with the fact that they're taking a thing with a what five mandatory minimum presence and it's, you know, it's not, it doesn't take too, too many like, it doesn't take too many moments to suddenly realize like, oh, the problem isn't the psychedelic, the problem is whatever entity is criminalizing this psychedelic. Right. Why in the name of the God, in the name of the God, the only God, why in the name of the

only God? The one true only God. The one true God. The light the way. Why in the name of the one true God, would they, why would they make this substance illegal? Now that they've loosened restrictions on studying these things. Right. I think a lot of us are scratching our heads like, what the fuck happened?

Right. Why did they let the genie out of the bottle? Yeah. Why are you all suddenly being allowed to work with these substances? So, you know, there are lots of theories about how it came to be this relationship that we have to psychedelics in our current country and like the Western, you know, what I would say, it's predominantly a Western relationship culturally to psychedelics and the US leads the way is one thing, like that's how it's became a worldwide phenomenon, is that at

least for the last 50 to 75 years, the US has sort of led on regulation and policy on things, especially the war on drugs. There were my, what I, what I can gather is they were first made illegal because the whole investigation into these things came from a position of criminal, of national defense. Right. Like there was this actual case of these Korean or Korean War POWs, I believe, that came back and had converted, you know, they had like that America was the bad, they were, these were American soldiers.

Right. That Korea was superior, you know, had loving feelings about Korea and distasteful views of the US, they can sort of had some sort of conversion there. Yeah. And there was suspicion that they were using drugs. And so the investigation into the psychedelics came from this fear that there was an arms race. This is kind of from my, you know, fun reading on the topic, I'm not a historian.

Okay. Okay. You know, just fun things I read at night. And so the psychedelic, a lot of the psychedelic research that was getting funded by defense contractors, unknowingly to the researchers themselves a lot of the time, in the psychedelics were the kinds of researchers who were asking questions like, can you change someone's mind with these things? This is MKUltra you're talking about here.

Yes. Yes. That came to be known as MKUltra. Yeah. And so it's, if you ask, can this be used as a weapon, I would argue you could say yes about just about anything. Right. And so the fact that that was sort of the way that these, this investigation was underway,

this wasn't a genuine scientific investigation of, it was, can these things be used against us? Should we be, you know, considering these things as weapons ourselves? Yeah. Cold war, you know, stakes are high. And also this is the phenomena that happens in sports. If one person starts doping and you want to stay competitive, you got to start doping. We got to at least know what we're dealing with at the very least.

And so the question, if the question keeps being, can this be used as a weapon? What can't be used as a weapon? What technology couldn't be weaponized? Sure. So of course they found the answer to be yes, yes. If we wanted to torture people under these conditions, we could, we could make people say things. We could, you know, get people to talk about things that they didn't expect to talk about.

So yes, they can be used as weapons. Should they be used as weapons? Whether or not used as weapons, is there some other benefit to them? Those questions were not as historically important at the time. And so I feel like that kind of questioning led to the kind of way that we've looked at them ever since, you know, even when MDMA was being studied in the 80s. Because it had blown up in the party scene in the late 70s and early 80s. You know, there was, there was plenty of funding to see what brain damage it causes.

Not a lot to see if it's useful for marriage counseling, which is what it was primarily being used for clinically, marriage therapy, trauma, you know. So I think, I think the Cold War is over. That maybe that's why these avenues are less draconianly guarded. There was always this sort of backdoor, like there was always this route to getting the research done, but you had to get, you had to do all of this bureaucratic process, right? And the politics at the beginning of the drug war and then reinforced in the 80s was that just drugs are just bad.

Drugs are just indiscriminately dangerous and harmful, right? They're different from all the other drugs that we use in some way, and that there's no useful way, there's no use for the effects that these things are having. Yeah. And look what it does to people. I mean, their hair grows long, they fucking grow beards, they stick up wearing clothes, they move up in the mountains, yeah, they start like, what else do they do? They make grilled cheese sandwiches and they join the Mansons all the time.

Yeah. And then they join the Mansons even potentially. And then the next thing you know, we've got, they were taking mescaline and Belladonna, which is a deliriant, you know, like. So yeah, it's been looked at as like a pox on the flesh of civilization itself, a potential maddening effect that could ripple through all society and eventually cause some kind of dystopian hell realm of just beautiful music and amazing people dancing all the time. And then what are we going to do?

And when we, and, and that's sort of like, that's the beginning of validating something as pure evil is when you're not, when you're not allowed to even look at it or acknowledge it. Right. Right. When you, when you, when you just try to eliminate it, like, yeah, when you, it's like the difference between the power of positive thinking and like cognitive behavioral therapy, which is like cognitive restructuring, where, where you're, you're analyzing your filter that

you put on information and cognitive behavioral therapy. You're like, you know, I heard, you know, you hear a piece of news and it goes through this filter and you apply these sort of deep core negative beliefs. A lot of times people with depression and anxiety will have deep core beliefs that things, everything gets filtered through. I'm unlovable, everything, nothing is going to ever work for me. Yes. And so it's examining these filters.

Yeah. Whereas, and acknowledging that you, you're distorting information. The information might not necessarily be good, but it's not likely as bad as after it goes through your distortion process, right? And so the, the cognitive part of CBT is all about identifying your patterns of automatic negative thinking. What are your underlying belief systems that you filter everything through, right? That the world is super dangerous and trying to destroy me at all times, you know, catastrophic

thinking, um, all or nothing thinking, mind reading, like, oh, they don't actually want me to come over. I'm not going to go over and watch the movie at their house. They're just saying it to be nice. That mind reading thing, when I was listening to this audio book on CBT and it said the mind reading thing, which is it might be, in fact, it's probably very likely that you can't read other people's minds. It really might be that when you think a person's thinking something good or bad, you're

wrong. Right. You literally don't know. Right. At least you don't know. Yeah. That's the best you can hope for. Yeah.

Is that you don't know what that really is. That was such a relief to me to realize like, oh, holy fuck. Right. You mean when I think someone's mad at me, they just might not be mad at me. Right. When I think someone hates me, I don't know. They could just have indigestion. Who knows?

Exactly. Who knows? Right. Exactly. It's so great that you think that of them more likely than not. Yeah. You know? That's such a relief.

It's such a relief to be sort of scientifically removed from the responsibility of being some kind of telepathic messiah that is having an experience of universal hate from all sentient beings. Right. It's just a relief. It's nice to know that that might not be the conditions of your universe. That's good. Yes.

But so that is like an exercise in confronting your own deeply held beliefs and cognitive distortions and, you know, there's something in there that's an attempt towards growth and, you know, better self-knowledge, whereas, which is what all like honest inquiry and curiosity, you know, is ultimately like about in this context. So power of positive thinking is like pretending things aren't happening, that just are, right? Like a lot of people have been helped by it. But there is definitely a danger, especially with narcissists, to like, you don't want your airline pilot to just assume that the wings have been appropriately de-iced, right?

Like just think positive, just, you know, charge ahead or whatever. And so, and, you know, I was just kind of reading about this recently and it was exploring that concept, like the big difference being that when you just shut things out, you are ignoring things and you're also validating true evil. Like we can't even look at this, like, you know, like, I'm the best, I'm the greatest, I'm going to bounce back from this bankruptcy and everything's going to be just fine rather than, you know, like that could set you up for the next bankruptcy or other kinds of fallout from, you know, fiscal irresponsibility, as opposed to, you know, the harder thing,

which is I'm not the worst person in the world, you know, the CBT thing would be like, I'm not a horrible person, I'm not the worst person in the world, this happens to people, let's take a look, you know, money isn't some unfacable demon thing that, like, I just have to pretend is always going great. So my, just only because I've like really been into Neville Goddard right now, which is one of the, I guess you could say, like, Godfathers of the secret and Godfathers of what has been translated into what's called positive thinking or whatever. And so when people, they get really good, if you heard what he said versus the positive

thinking concept, they're apples and oranges. Because what he's saying is the, generally, if you're trying to do positive thinking, but your feeling state is one of anxiety, one of fear, one of like paranoia, then the thinking is more of an affirmation of what you don't have. So the positive thinking usually has within it some want your, your, the phenomenal world is showing you some version of life, and then you want things to be different. And so you're mentally seeing a place you're going to live or a certain number in your bank account, and then you're all, but during that time, you're feeling like anxiety and

security and heartbreak and, you know, denial because you're, you're pretending you're not feeling that even though you are. And so that's doing nothing. That's literally nothing is nothing is happening, except you're stuttering your mentally. But what he does say, which is nuts and what, what does keep appearing throughout, which I think is where psychedelic therapy, where cognitive behavior therapy, where any good spiritual path where they all seem to meet is the idea of like, if we can get into the code that is taking fundamental experience and interpreting it in a paranoid way and

just get you to the fundamental experience, right? You might find the fundamental experience. Yes. Yeah. What is that called? Valence, like a positive or negative spin. Say it again. What a valence.

Valence. Yeah. Like to take away its positive or negative, like to detach from a value judgment on it. That. Like to just objectively, you know, in the bankruptcy example, objectively, uh, fiscal irresponsibility led to bankruptcy. Yes. Not, uh, you know, that makes me a bad person.

That makes me a terrible, you know, like adding all of that stuff that like comes with it. Like this occurred, I can make steps to prevent this from occurring again, or I can get myself out of this situation, um, you know, rather than having to ignore, uh, having to ignore or, or deny, deny and to feel guilty that you're actually experiencing truth. Right. The, the, what I love about it is the, it's, it's implying that truth is always good. That truth is good. It's a good thing.

Truth is, and I know that might, you could say that's a valence, but you could just say truth is, but you know, the best examples I've been given are like color is good. There's just, just for lack of a better word. We love color. It's great. If you look at most colors, you, there's no such thing as a malfunctioning color. Right. Someone might have painted your wall the wrong color because you wanted it some, but if that

color is not malfunctioning, it just is a color and it's great. So that's before the story you attached to the color or whatever. Right. Right. So this discovery or realignment or rediscovery, I guess you could say of that state can produce a very empowered, grounded sense of, okay, here's where I actually am. Right. I am, and this is knowing the terrain or knowing the landscape and even if the landscape is

rough, like think of like the roughest place in nature, you know, wherever it may be, some Icelandic fucking dark place with fucking geysers and steam and like rocks. It's rugged, but it's beautiful. It's beautiful. Right. And if you're in a situation of that rugged, that's rugged like that, but you're pretending that you're going hiking on a spring day and Malibu and that's what you're going to wear. Right.

You're in trouble, man. Right. But if you were equipped with the right equipment, then suddenly you're having the best day of your life because you're hiking through the beautiful. And so anyway, this is what, this is the example that gets given is what will naturally occur if you allow yourself to be as you are, where you are before the story is a joy, an excitement, an enthusiasm that a lot of people seem to have lost because isn't that thing you're talking about the overlay, doesn't it kind of produce a kind of boring reality, which

is it gives us the sense that we know what's coming next. Right. It's fucking boring. Well, maybe that's its purpose because we're afraid of the unknown. Right. This is going to go poorly to like, you know, this is, this is going to be, you know, a cynical viewpoint that I know what's happening next. Yeah.

I can predict what this is going to do. So I think there's like a natural drive to want to be able to predict things, but we're certainly filtering the possibility out of things going different. You know, it's, it's almost like a power suggestion kind of thing at that point that you're doing on yourself when you are, you're almost taking away the possibility that it won't go poorly when you are putting the expectation on it and, and you're projecting all of your behaviors onto it that you would have something that would go poorly. Okay.

Yeah. Right. That's, and that is, you know what, to me, that's the, that is where my understanding of the positive thinking stuff, that's what I think they're saying is achieve the state of as you are in us and there will be a natural remission of the anxiety that comes from living in denial because you're, some part of you is aware of the fact. So if you can strip it of all of that valence and filter, then yeah, you're, you're, you're essentially living in the present moment, right?

Yeah. And that's a good place. Right. And, and devoid of anxiety and depression because, you know, anxious thoughts are about how things are going to be changing in some unpredictable way. How this is going to go. You know, like, like this very moment, you know, if we can drop into this moment where we're just looking at each other, everything's going great.

Great. But as soon as I think, what time is it like, does Duncan have to go? What time is Duncan going to have to go home? That's where the anxiety comes. Oh, thanks. The anxiety is that this isn't going to be okay at some time in the near future. And what can I do to stop that from happening, you know, and it ruins right now, which is great.

Great. That's right. That's right. And it's great. But we, and again, the difference between positive thinking would be you tell yourself, it's great. You're shitting bricks. Right.

That's positive thinking. Whereas this other thing is like, no, you actually, the greatness is there. It's just being, it's being drowned out by the overlays that you're putting on top of things. So the, but one, one experience I had with the ketamine therapy was, uh, because I'd been plagued by fear of death and, uh, I had this realization that wasn't just a mental realization, but I realized, oh, my fear of death is my love of life. It's just my, I love life so much.

I don't want it to, I'm, and that's like the ultimate, you know, you know, I don't have anything to, to, to back this up from a scientific standpoint, but like that's kind of at the heart of a, of a lot of anxiety, at least a lot of anxiety is ultimately death, the fear of death, like, and, and things coming to an end and how we can protect things from bad from happening because then something, some miniature death will happen when something bad happens, right? Right. Something like death, you know, something will end, something will come to an end that's

going so great right now that we want to hold onto it so much, that attachment. Yeah. And so, uh, so it gets, you know, where anxiety gets debilitating is when that ruins your ability to enjoy when things are going fine, which is most of the time. Most of the time. All the, and that's one of my favorite Ramdas things is he says dying is completely safe. And you know, and, and no one messes it up. You can't mess it up and you're going to die safely.

And also when I've applied mindfulness just doing my anxiety states themselves, I've noticed that the anxiety has a quality of ecstasy in it. It seems to be a, it seems to be some kind of bliss, some kind of joy that's misplaced. It's like out of alignment or something. It's an excitement to be alive, but it's an unpleasant experience because it's so hypercharged or something. But if, if, if you look at it, it's like, this is why I love the new cult of people taking cold showers, you know, like taking, taking ice baths and cold showers.

Because when you take a cold shower, your attention is focused on that, but also when you really, you know, if, if you, I've realized that the pain of a cold shower is at least 50, if not 60% not wanting it to be cold. It's my mental reaction to it, which is like, this fucking sucks. Holy, how can we change this? How can I change this is fucking, but you remove that and just feel the cold water. It's really nice. It's invigorating.

It's harmless. I mean, not at least over a short period. It's, it's, uh, powerful. It's crisp. It's just nice. It's intense. It's not like getting electrocuted. It's like something wonderful.

And then before you know it, the cold starts feeling good and you don't even want to turn it up in the same way you did initially. So to me, it's that analysis of the seemingly unwanted state. The aversion to it, you realize is the, what seems to be exhausting you versus the state itself. So I don't know, man. I don't know where I'm going with this, but, um, I, I'm, I'm really curious about, I'm sorry, I diverted and I ran.

No, no, we both, we both went, I'm trying to actually remember, uh, uh, if we got to the end of the discussion about, you know, how did, how did things change in the government? Yeah. Like I think I went on this tangent about the, the, uh, the not looking at things and the positive thinking versus CBT, which was great. So let's jump back. How did it go?

I do want to, yeah, I think it's, it comes up so much. And, um, and it is a curious thing. You know, I think, uh, in my experience in working in government bureaucracies, I did my training in a VA, um, you know, there's lots of, I'm really interested in, uh, in, uh, epiphenomenon and emergent phenomenon. Things that happen that are just the, are the natural results of the, of the setup and a group of people, you know? So like, um, uh, how, you know, one example is like, you know, how did every

civilization end up with a pretty similar city structure? Oh, right. Okay. Right. Like because, uh, they needed to have markets and then it's, if you're going to sell fruit and somebody else is going to sell wheels for your wagon, like why not have them be like roughly in the same area? And then wagons need to get there.

So it needs to be a road. Right. So like roads, main roads, where the main businesses are housing wants to be there. You need to have roads to get to those businesses from the housing. You need a decent amount of room between the houses for privacy. And so like that kind of thing, um, uh, I think, um, you know, in bureaucracies, there's a lot of reward mechanisms for, um, implementing a new policy. Okay.

And, but there's not much reward for getting rid of an old policy that sucks now. Right. So you get these like, you know, you get these, uh, almost insurmountable red tape obstacles to do anything, um, much less like to undo something that was a mistake. Right. You need a lot. Basically you need like a lot of excitement and energy and belief in your thing. If you want to change these huge bureaucracies, you need to have a lot of momentum to tolerate

it and people believe in their idea, but they don't have that same energy and enthusiasm to withstand the like process to undo someone else's bad idea. And so bad ideas just like pile up and they get, people get jobs around the bad ideas. I mean, that's, there's an economic promoted for coming up with the idea that seemed great last week is now in the way of the new good idea this week. But industries form around the bad idea, you know, like suddenly you have a bad idea, now there's an industry around it and medical record systems in this example, like the medical record system doesn't have a place to now, you know, run a search for all

people 55 and over for, you know, right? The cardiac thing. So then those sort of like, so those things kind of accumulate. And so I think that's, yeah, to bring it back to the discussion. It's like, there was a questionable idea about starting this war on drugs, right? And, and the amount of momentum needed to have made these rules was very little to create the system to create, you know, Nixon started it and, and Reagan reinforced it. And to try to undo those kinds of policies and rules takes an incredible amount of energy

and momentum. And it's taken, it took 15 years for, you know, Rick Doblin to come along and form maps and other similar organizations to have the tolerance to go through that whole process to see where, see what kinds of policies they can do, what kinds of, what kinds of bureaucratic opportunities are there to continue to do this kind of research, for example, to find those things within those systems, to find the sort of, to pioneer the path to how we reopen this kind of research. And I think that is, that's more like the reason for the slowdown. I don't think it was, I think the, the, the starting of the war on drugs and the

reinforcement of the war on drugs had a million reasons it was politically beneficial to those guys that did that. Sure. But I don't think it says as active of an ongoing fight, I think the Cold War generation is passing, like the people who are in charge during the Cold War, the new people are not as passionate about that fight anymore, the new people who are in charge of these departments are, get there because their solution oriented and, you know, and, and the data seems to be on the side of, at least in the research that we're doing, the data seems to be on the side of that

these things might be powerful medicines. Jesus Christ, Cole, what are you trying to do? Make us all feel good. Yes. Trying to give us hope. Now we're doing, you're trying to make us feel optimistic. That's right. Maybe the entire system itself is not filled with hissing reptilian fucking war mongers

that inside there, there's people who actually authentically respect scientific data, we're going to change things and implement things to make life on the planet, not quite so horrific for people and that that might actually be something that isn't just in the United States, but in a lot of communities across the planet right now. Is that what you're trying to tell us? That's what I'm trying to say. I'm trying to say, you know, like in the same kind of approaching things with openness and curiosity, I've found that the government agencies that I'm interacting with, it's a much

scarier when, when my language wasn't as precise, when it was just they, when it was just the government, right? But now that I'm having to, you know, in one way or another interact with these different departments within the government, it's like my language is getting more precise. It's like, well, the FDA, they're sort of their, their agenda and what they do is this function, right? And the DEA, their agenda and what they do is this function. Yeah.

And they don't always, you know, are not always communicating on, you know, like there isn't a concerted effort among all departments of anything in particular, but the FDA's job is to have a pathway for finding new medical treatments, making sure that those medical treatments are safe and effective and making sure that the manufacturing of those treatments is done in a safe and, you know, non contaminated way. Right. The DEA's job is to enforce the laws. It's a drug enforcement agency.

So it's jobs to enforce the drug laws as they stand. The, the FDA has to deal with drug companies who are trying to manufacture drugs of all kinds. Sure. They also have to deal with, you know, the research that there's some psychedelic funding now, there's some money for funding psychedelic studies that are going to go through the FDA process. And so far, I've not found some Nixon character in there who's, you know, not willing. I haven't heard of any sort of draconian like, well, we don't care what the policy says.

It's not, it's not for you. It's not for you guys because of what you're trying to study. Right. It's, it's the same rules seem to apply. Well, you know, the depressing thing is when people like Biden come out and talk about how marijuana is a gateway drug and just shit all over the research. That's, that's just miseducation. Right.

But that's someone running for president. You know, you still see these old dinosaurs. I mean, the good news is, uh, I like, I think even Trump has somehow said something good about, uh, MDMA therapy or ketamine therapy or something like that. And, you know, uh, people on both sides are completely admitting that, oh yeah, this seems to actually. Politically, you know, medicine is not, uh, a single, it's not a partisan issue. That's right.

That's the good news. Yeah. But the, so I think this is why, you know, this larger conversation, I'm saying that's like super important, you know, the science is moving very, very slow. The excitement about the science is moving very, very fast. The excitement about, you know, some new psychedelic movement is, is, you know, upon us or right around the corner, it seems, as I would say, um, and yet politicians don't always listen to us, me putting myself in the science community.

Right. Historically, they, they listen to voters. Right. And that's not always based on what the data says. That's what happened in 71 from what I understand was they did a genuine, uh, investigation and report on the dangers of drugs and alcohol and, you know, recommendations to how to classify things. And they just, when it wasn't what was the political motivation, they ignored

that data and just made a system in place that was based on politics. And if we aren't careful with that other community, if that other community isn't careful in self-policing or even developing some sort of. Princess, you know, guru tradition or martial arts teacher or psychotherapy, you know, lineage or some, if there isn't some tradition in place, we are at risk of not making it a scientific decision anymore. Listen, I don't want to make it a cultural decision. That's what I think happened in the sixties.

Well, my wife and I are taking a cultural, I know what you mean. And my wife and I are taking up this mantle and we have decided to be the leaders of the psychedelic community and, uh, we're going to make love to you. We're going to make love to your wife. Excellent. We are going to, what about my money? We will make love to your money. And then through this process, I think we're, we're going to like discover

a way to make sure that the, we'll come up with a, some methodology to license people. We're going to do training programs. We're probably going to start like a series of centers and a few, anyone comes against us, we will sue your ass. So that's our, that's our plan. What do you think, Cole? Pretty good. I think, I think, uh, I think that's the, the kind of thing that I would expect

to emerge inside of a place where this is, is legal and taken seriously. Right. I think genuinely that's what happens. That's what we have in all of, you know, um, you know, we have the conferences, for example, we have these societies. We have the American Psychiatric Association. It has its big conference. Um, it has, it's a review board, an ethics committee.

Um, people don't always follow the rules. And when they don't follow the rules, there is a way of enforcing the rules. Sure. Um, and I think that's the, I think that would be important thing to do. I mean, and I think that's what I mean. That's actually an example of emergent phenomenon. When you have these problems, you have a growing interest in this thing with these powerful things and a certain part of the community is saying, Hey,

hey, hey, we need to be careful. A certain part of the community is, Hey, hey, we need to like get this to as many people as possible. And then, you know, a natural emergent phenomenon is that somebody comes up with the idea and that idea sticks because it makes sense to everyone. Yeah. That we should have some sort of board. We should have some list of questions that you ask somebody if they are, you

know, purporting to be a medicine person, then, you know, what are 10 things you should know and to ask your person and who puts that list of 10 things together? This trusted part of people in that, you know, like those kinds of things. Um, I consider emergent phenomenon. And I, and I think that like, there are like the, the invitation to the various communities that exist out there to link up and come up with some like real simple, you know, publication for people to look at. I think that's a good invitation, you know, like, what would it look like?

What are the things where we can look at, and we can look at these models of things that have come before us and the same emergent when they were, when these emergent, you know, entities were facing these same questions. What did they have an ethics board? Uh, how did they disseminate information? I have a conference of some kind. Like, I think, I think, uh, you know, especially with decriminalization, um, that kind of stuff is going to be a natural important thing.

And there are these awesome, awesome, awesome communities, you know, the aware project in Los Angeles that, and the psychedelic community, the broader psychedelic community is by its nature, um, thoughtful people. And so, you know, I hope that that's, you know, something that we can promote, uh, in this podcast to those communities that, you know, that they take, they undertake that, um, that responsibility with integrity and, and, uh, and honesty. I think burning man's an example of like, uh, uh, uh, I think they have come up with some pretty sophisticated methods for not just for dealing with

psychedelic, you know, all the various things that come up when people are using psychedelics together, but just also like, you know, pretty healthy ways of allowing people to simultaneously be autonomous, free thinkers, but also like an overarching code that that seems to fit really well with then radical self-reliance, that stuff, you know, and, and, and I think that these things are going to emerge. And the more we hold ourselves accountable and hold each other accountable and hopefully a forgiving way, which is to me, one of the cool aspects of

burning man is the, you know, they really are good at not involving the cops. If someone's freaking out in a responsible way, but somebody has to be, right? Like, yeah, they can't just not have the cops. Yeah. Right. Sure. Soon as you get to three or more people, arguments are going to happen.

Disagreements and peaceful resolution of those disagreements becomes, how do we manage that now as a community? If we don't like the old way, you know, what is the intention? What can we do? And what I'm, what I'm seeing, you know, in this path where I went from, you know, thinking that we were, you know, what, what I'm perpetually pleasantly surprised by in, in trying to do this research is that people before us and the solutions they came up with were those emergent thing.

Like, right, they're not there because someone's trying to control necessarily. They're there because as a community, we were like, Hey, we need to make sure our food's like not covered in shit. Right. We need to make sure that the, when we buy medicine at the store, it's got in it, what it says it's got in it on the bottle. And then people aren't saying it's going to do something that it isn't. And like, this is a reaction to us asking for those things a lot of the time.

That's emergent phenomenon. I got you. You know, the, uh, Burning Man, if you have a camp of a hundred or more, you have to get like a food certification now. Like a lot of these bureaucracies spring naturally out of trying to govern. Right. Well, this is the, yeah, I think eliminating the superstitious idea that all bureaucracies are innately evil is a good first step.

And I think that there's a good reason many of us have that sense because we've seen the failing of archaic, you know, money, uh, motivated, uh, anti-truth bureaucracies that popped up all over the fucking place. And I know personally, the frustration of that is so great that eventually just out of lazy thinking, you demonize the entire structure itself. Instead of seeing the structure is malleable and potentially can, can be shifted back into harmony with, with, with, with like, uh, being mo, being human motivated or peace motivated or, or life motivated instead of money motivated.

But I, now listen, I, there's, do you have about 10 more minutes, Cole? I've got, yeah. Okay. So this question is, because it might take a little while for you to answer it. Sure. And, um, and I think it fits into the discussion of producing some kind of like structure within which the psychedelic experience, which is very often doesn't seem structured at all can happen.

Um, and, and this goes back to something I've talked about before, but I remember going to the DEA website and reading the, how you could like follow the flow of LSD through the United States by the Grateful Dead touring schedule. It's that's how it was all being distributed. That's how it's getting around the country. And then also though, what was really funny to me is the acknowledgement that the problem with LSD dealers are trying to bust LSD dealers is that somewhere the actual capitalist drug dealing thing begins to break down because

the LSD dealer is taking LSD and eventually the LSD dealer decides that they don't want to sell it anymore. They just want to give it away to help, to help because they're realizing it's like a very healing medicine and they don't care about money in the same way. I'm sure there's LSD dealers out there like, motherfucker, that hasn't happened yet. Yeah, I'm sure somebody's getting rich. Okay, not you, but, uh, that's okay. But no, yeah, I hear what you're saying.

So, you know, people who are, uh, what's her name was worked with as a radiation curie, that's her name, you know, yeah. She, you know, you, now if you want to go look at her papers, you've got to wear actual radioactive, like you have to protect yourself because they didn't know back then how killing her, yeah. And so I think one of the byproducts of LSD and some of the disassociatives is that they kind of innately begin to melt down the regulations, the rules, the structures themselves.

They have this, at least in my experience, the tendency of causing such a radical, uh, shift in perception from it's just me to almost what you would call fifth dimensional thinking, a feeling of being outside of time, a feeling of no longer being a mortal being, acknowledging your mortality, but you know, the best way to put it would be, uh, and I'm sorry, guys. I keep saying this over and over just because I'm so blown away by this Buddha statement, which is, uh, uh, acknowledge the wave, but stay with the ocean.

And so in this case, suddenly it's now we're the ocean, the little bureaucratic stuff and the laws and the rules and all of it starts seeming pretty ridiculous, hilarious in fact. And I mean, not just like whatever are comical and not just whatever rules we come up with for, I just remember planning a psychedelic journey with my friends and as soon as we, with every step of the way planned, and as soon as you start tripping, you're like, remember when we're going to do all this bullshit, you're laughing, we're going to try to control the experience.

So my question here is, what about that? What about the sort of, I don't want to call it radiation poisoning because that implies a negative outcome, but what about the sort of reality that these substances have the tendency to break down power structures to, to shift any attempt to control them or to hierarchize or to produce a counsel, a credential that this or that, what about the fact that you yourself, just by being around the experience and I don't, I don't know, like what the rules are about clinicians, you know, taking their own medicine.

But what about that, the shift that inevitably will happen in the ability to be an administrator, to the ability to have these sort of built in baked in regulations, what happens when you all just start melting away like all of us? What about that? Is there anything in place to handle that? Well, I think, you know, one of the, you know, one of the, I think it makes, so being, first of all, being around these medicines, there is like a spirit of it in the room, you know, like when, when we're doing the research,

with MDMA, because MDMA is not available clinically yet. But when we're doing our research with MDMA for PTSD, there's a, all of the sort of qualities of MDMA are in the room. I don't know if that's like mirroring the patient. You mean like a contact tie? Kind of like a contact tie, but there's not like any physical thing. But there's a feeling of, you can't help but be, what reflects someone's vulnerability. Right?

Like unless you're a predator and you're going to pounce on that vulnerability. When someone is, when someone is staring at you and their heart is wide open, you can't help but in some way meet them halfway there at least, right? And so you're working from a very authentic, open, compassionate place. And that makes you feel good. And so I think similarly with the, you know, working with the ketamine, there's a sense of these mystical states being sacred to them at least, if not, you know, in itself. And so I think we could use more of that spirit in medicine again.

Like I think if anything, it, it, it would make it harder for me to be separated from my original intentions of becoming a psychiatrist, for example, or from becoming a doctor. You know, it's like the, the jadedness of just being in something for a long time that can happen, you know, from practicing anything, even if you love it for, you know, decades, for example, or for however long that process can take. Like, and, and movement to all other motives that are not related to the original purpose of the project. I think it's harder to, to go there when you're dealing with people's, when you're

dealing with, you know, sacred things, you know, I think we, you know, we, you know, I think we, so, so, so even though you have to still be the administrator, like I still have to run a business, right? Yeah. I still have to pay employees. I still have to provide, get the medicine. I still have to, you know, I still have to take care of myself and my employees and have a business that's going to be functional, but we don't need to, you know, triple the

cost just because people will pay it. Right. For example, like we can be confident that we have a price that makes sense for us that is, you know, based in those values and, and I think, yeah, I think if anything, it, it can be, it's almost like if you're dealing with sacred things like that. It's like with Buddhism, you know, how does, you don't see a lot of people getting rich off of it, you know, if we, if we establish it as, as sacred, which I think being a doctor and a healer should be, and I think the more we get disconnected from that, the easier

it is for it to become just like any other business. Yeah. Um, so the, this is what you're saying. But we take an oath, you know, like what's more sacred than that. But also though, what's the, oh, you take an oath, there is, uh, and the community takes that oath very seriously and upholding that, not just for themselves, but making sure other people are upholding it. I know they're so deadly serious about that.

But what's fascinating to me is what you're saying is, yeah, it's not so much being around psychedelics that is transformative. It's being around the healing that you're witnessing. That's what is going to warp you. That's what's going to change economic models that could be profit based and the economic models that are just based on how do we get this medicine as many people as we can and still stay afloat and, and, and LA, which is a hyper expensive city. And that's pretty cool, man.

That's pretty cool. Like, you know, as opposed to other sort of businesses, you know, it seems like you people in this war, in this community, the psychedelic medicine communities, psychedelic healing community are really going to run into a hilarious problem, which is a kind of transformative, an unavoidable transformation is going to happen. If you, it's like if you're running a resurrection clinic, how many people can you bring back to life before you start completely reevaluating your understanding of the world itself? And I don't know anything more like resurrecting a person than very than healing their depression

and not just healing it over the course of a few months, but watching you, you've seen people go into remission almost immediately, haven't you? I mean, that's what the papers are saying, right? Yeah. Yeah. That's, I mean, that's, that is, as someone who's suffered from this shit. To like, it's not just that, oh, here's some Paxil or whatever. And in a month, maybe you'll have some, something might change.

If not, we're talking about what, what is the general 24 hours, like 50% of people have a significant improvement within 24 hours. Another, another one third to one half of the people who don't will have a response by the third or fourth treatment, which we get to the fourth treatment in two weeks on our protocol. So, and yeah, it's usually not like nothing's getting better, nothing's getting better, nothing's getting better. And then the fourth one, things get better. It's like, it's just based on the data, it's like a statistically significant improvement

means a change in like the severity of the depression is absolutely, you know, is statistically almost certainly due to this medicine or significantly improved. You know, over half after the first treatment and another one third or half of the people who didn't respond to the first treatment respond that much by the fourth treatment. This is like the psychiatric equivalent of limb regeneration. Like we're talking something as profoundly strange as the Star Trek. Remember that crazy thing in Star Trek where you run into the eels, your wound? Yeah, we're talking something like that.

I mean, we're talking like this is like penicillin, right? We're something at that level of, of it's insane. There are lots of, yeah, there are lots of things about it that can be have the opportunity to be complete game changers. The, the rapidity, the fact that it works on a completely different neurotransmitter system than the ones that we've been tinkering with for 50 years now and, you know, probably squeezed all the juice we're going to get out of that. You know, it opens up a whole new avenue of scientific inquiry too.

You know, it's, it's the GABA receptors. Yeah, yeah. The GABA receptors are at least involved. And, uh, and we have a chance to potentially, uh, refine methods for working with these, um, dissociated states or psychedelic states or mystical states. Can I ask you this? Is it annoying when a guy wearing a Sam Ash hat and an unkempt beard says GABA receptors to you and I'm just realizing, I wouldn't know a GABA receptor.

If it fit me in the face, no, you're a doctor. You know that I've just like, I just like saying GABA receptors. Like I'm a psychiatrist. Like I'm Dr. Trussell, but I have read that this, what's fascinating about this is it's, it's working. I thought it was completely working on the GABA receptors, what Ambien works on, which is what Benzos PCP works on, which is, uh, Benzos work on it.

Nitrous oxide. What? All the, all my, well, not all my favorite. Well, pretty close. I love the GABA receptors. What are they doing up there? What's their job? Yeah.

They're primarily, um, you know, GABA inhibition. Um, well, I don't want to, I don't want to get to, uh, into the weeds of neuro pharmacology that I'm not totally a master of, but, uh, GABA and, uh, glutamate are the two big, um, re neurotransmitters that, uh, that these class of drugs are working on, um, glutamate being excitatory and GABA being inhibitory. Okay. Um, we know that if people take, um, you know, benzodiazepines like Valium or Xanax on the same day of academy and treatment, it can completely

block the potential benefits of it, whether they have a psychedelic experience or not. So we know the psychedelic experience isn't entirely responsible for, you know, the benefits. And we know, well, we haven't been able to demonstrate because we just haven't done the study, but you know, our impression working clinically is that we're, we're able to help people who are much more complicated cases than would normally be, you know, uh, allowed into a depression study, um, and at a

higher rate, you know, we get higher, uh, we have a higher rate of, uh, response, um, in, in clinically by taking into account this additional potential for healing. Um, yeah. Cool. This has been a joy chatting with you. And I got a million more questions for you, but we're out of time. I got to get back home.

You have allowed me to be in this beautiful space and I, maybe you should tell people about this spot. Cause I think some people might be interested in the opening. We just opened, uh, this month, um, November, uh, mid-November, uh, and going into the new year, we, um, one of the, one of the things I had to take into account when, um, when trying to maintain integrity and growing this business is if I, there has to be, uh, a potential for growth in order to provide more of the treatment, right?

And so one way that, um, that I'd been trying to grow is instead of me personally being there as the MD to administer the drug and provide the psychotherapy because I have the, you know, um, experience and training and working with psychedelic experiences. Now we have our own whole clinic. We provide, uh, ketamine for treatment, resistance, depression, treatment, resistance, PTSD, um, and it's me and three therapists so that we can see three times as many people.

We have four offices and the potential for more offices and potential for more growth and potential to set up these training programs and growing this, this is part of that emergent phenomenon too. Like how do we create a, how do we make this more broadly available and, and we really believe in the way that we're administering it, you know, the having the psychotherapists there to integrate the experiential component, um, and not having it just be like, uh, a treatment that you go get and then go home, you know, like, um, so yeah, we really believe in the model.

And, um, part of that has been part of that growth is opening the California center for psychedelic therapy. We've got a website, uh, psychedelictherapyca.com, uh, and we are currently clinically, uh, working with just ketamine, um, uh, we do, we also host the research for MDMA, um, but it's just research and it's just for PTSD. People can, uh, find out more at, uh, MDMAptsd.org that's being funded by maps, they want to contribute money. They can donate to maps.org.

Um, and also y'all, if you use offer code, Keta Jesus, you will get a hundred percent off your treatment here. Isn't that right, Cole? I don't think so. We will not be able to take care of the clinic and that deal. Um, and, uh, and one thing I just wanted to say for the sake of our, our, um, our staff here, uh, we do not offer psilocybin treatment here. Um, there's a lot of interest in it and it's very promising.

We hope to do the psilocybin research that's been proposed, uh, to get involved in that more, uh, and when it becomes clinically available, we hope to have it here. But, um, but yeah, unfortunately it's not something that, uh, we are researching or offering clinically here at this time, though we're keeping a very close eye on it. I'm so thankful that I live in a universe where that sentence is being said seriously.

If I back in the nineties, if I knew that there was going to be this possibility that a doctor would be saying, you know, right now we're not offering mushroom therapy, but it is possible that soon we will be in the near future. I would be overjoyed and I'm so glad that you're one of the people at the helm of the ship. I know there's many other hands on deck, by the way, who all deserve accolades, but it's a real comfort to know that you y'all are laying the, uh, tracks, so to speak for this beautiful, this beautiful train that is, you

know, I think is going to be one of the historically is going to be looked at with the same in the same way we look at, uh, the various medical breakthroughs that have changed the way humans heal themselves. So thanks man. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Yeah. Cool.

Thank you so much to all the links you need to find. Dr. Marta will be at ducket trustle.com. Hare Krishna. Thanks for listening everybody. And much thanks to square space and bomb us for sponsoring this episode of the DTFH. If you want to support this podcast, one of the best ways to do it is to support our sponsors.

All the offer codes are located at ducket trustle.com. Check out our Patreon. That's patreon.com forward slash DTFH and head over to our shop located at ducket trustle.com. I will see y'all real soon. I'm going to scoop up some great podcasts while I'm in Hawaii, have a beautiful week, and I'll see you real soon. A good time starts with a great wardrobe.

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