Finding Mastery with Dr. Michael Gervais - Psychedelics: For Getting Help or Getting High? | Dr. Andrew Weil

Episode Date: June 22, 2022

This week’s conversation is with Dr. Andrew Weil, a world-renowned leader and pioneer in the field of integrative medicine.He is a New York Times bestselling author of 15 books, the founder and director of the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona, and has been named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by TIME Magazine – and that doesn’t even begin scratch the surface of Andrew’s accomplishments and contribution to society throughout his incredible career. To put it simply – the man is an absolute legend in his field. We had Andrew on the podcast back in 2020 (that’s episode 250 if you’re looking to check it out), and I could not be more excited to have him back on for round two. This time around, we dive into the dawn of psychedelics – a topic that Andrew has been studying since his time at Harvard Medical School in the 1960s. I’ve always been a little skeptical when it comes to adopting psychedelics (or any other external substance) as a tool to alter your internal state – so I was super curious and excited to learn more about the topic from someone as qualified as Andrew._________________Subscribe to our Youtube Channel for more powerful conversations at the intersection of high performance, leadership, and meaning: https://www.youtube.com/c/FindingMasteryGet exclusive discounts and support our amazing sponsors! Go to: https://findingmastery.com/sponsors/Subscribe to the Finding Mastery newsletter for weekly high performance insights: https://www.findingmastery.com/newsletter Download Dr. Mike's Morning Mindset Routine! https://www.findingmastery.com/morningmindsetFollow us on Instagram, LinkedIn, and X.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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easier. So if you're trying to hit your daily protein goals with something seamless, I'd love for you to go check them out. Get a free variety pack, a $25 value and 10% off for life when you head to davidprotein.com slash finding mastery. That's David, D-A-V-I-D, protein, P-R-O-T-E-I-N.com slash finding mastery. Okay, this week's conversation is with Dr. Andrew Weil, a world-renowned leader and pioneer in the field of integrative medicine. He is a New York Times bestseller author of 15 books. He's the founder and the director of the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona, and he has been named one of the Andrew Weil Center for Integrative Medicine at the University of Arizona. And he has been named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time Magazine.

And that doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of Andrew's accomplishments and contributions to society throughout his incredible career. And to put it simply, this human is an absolute legend as a man and as a harbinger in his field. We had Andrew on the podcast back in 2020. So that's episode 250 if you're wanting to go check that out as well. And I was so excited to have him back on for round two because this time we dive into psychedelics. A topic that Andrew has been studying since his time at Harvard Medical School in the 1960s.

He's got a rich understanding. I've always been a little skeptical when it comes to using psychedelics for psychological health. There's really only a handful of people that I want to talk to about this conversation, and Andrew's one of them. So in this conversation, we talk about, you know, new research, you know, the benefits of psychedelics as treatments for depression and PTSD. We talk about how psychedelics can help change global consciousness even. And we also talk about the problems with the current state of drugs,

including psychedelics that are available to treat depression, anxiety, PTSD. And then we dive into what the future could look like with psychedelics becoming legal and the difference between recreational use and medicinal use. And with that, let's jump right into this week's conversation with a true legend, Dr. Andrew Weil. Dr. Weil, how are you? I'm good. How are you?

It's great to have you back. I've been looking forward to this conversation. You know, we first connected in 2020. Remember? Yeah. And we talked about, it was more general. It was about your journey and integrative medicine and your take on disease prevention. And I'd love to just narrow in a little bit deeper and dive into specific actionable things that are grabbing your attention right now. And so, you know, what are the things that are super interesting to you right now? Well, I'm very involved with our Center for Integrative Medicine and teaching. We're training lots of health professionals in all the things that they didn't learn in their conventional training so i'm always paying attention to latest developments in

nutrition research especially around microbiome which is such a hot topic and the connections between microbiome and mental health which is a whole new field i'm also obviously very concerned with the pandemic and ways we can keep ourselves healthy and resistant and our immune systems in good working order i'm very interested in psychedelics and seeing them become mainstream i think this is a long overdue and wonderful development yeah there you go okay let's get into psychedelics yes so how long have you been experiencing i first took mescaline in 1961 so i think i was uh how old was i 142 so you know i was uh 19 years old did i read that was with uh you and jimmy hendrix probably before he you know ever heard of them anyway uh i hadn't smoked pot i my only experience

really was with alcohol uh but i began taking uh mescaline and i was just fascinated by it you know i read everything i could on it and it just seemed to me fascinated by it you know I read everything I put on it and I just seemed to me that was you know these were magical things and that they opened amazing doorways this was when I was an undergraduate and at some point I have to give it up because I think if I followed that path I would never want a medical school and you know I I needed to just focus on what I was doing. So this is, I think, an important part. For folks that don't know what mescaline is or how you adjust it or what the potential

benefits and risks are, can you just hit that note? Because I want to switch it to the last comment that you made, which is, if I stayed down this path, I might not have stayed know stayed true to the the the craft that I've developed so mescaline is the active compounded peyote cactus that's been uh you know widely used by Native American peoples um as their sacred uh sacrament I got synthetic mescaline that was made by a chemical company and took the dose was 400 milligrams. There are two families of psychedelics. Mescaline is in one family there, which are more stimulants and related to drugs like MDMA and a lot of synthetic ones. And the larger family are

what are called indoles and that's psilocybin, LSD,d dmt and all the ones that we're familiar with anyway there's a lot of these that occur in nature there's a lot that have been made in laboratories they're around and they compare in experience to lsd and and but or is it dream i haven't i don't know like i really differ in duration of action meslin is long lasting you know 10 to 12 hours whereas mushrooms are much shorter four to six hours i think there's a lot of overlap in the experiences and i think the experiences are also very much shaped by set and setting by expectation and environment. So, you know, that often overshadows the pharmacology of the drug. So, so I want to give you a framework that I'm working from, and I think many people in our

community is, are working from, but then quickly I want to get to that stitch, which is that, that little hint that you're like, if I went too far, I don't know if I, you know, and this is actually, let me give the hint and then I'll give the framework is that where I get confused is the difference. So it's born out of the, the current interest for me is the, the microdosing in some of the mental health properties that are, so I'm like, okay, so I, it forces me to challenge some of the taboo nature of it's challenged some of the fringe science, some of the, you know, historical baggage that comes with, you know, words like LSD and mescaline and whatnot. So, so that's one piece. And the culture is, I don't know, there's a challenge with that, the baggage that it comes with.

Okay, so let me just pause there. And then I hear learned scientists like you and many others saying, wait, hold on a minute. Let me share some of the science, some of the experiences, some of the benefits, as well as some of the risks, I'm sure. Okay, but this is where I get concerned in my own head, right? Is because I come from a world where folks that I deeply respect have challenged me to be, to have a set of practices to be present and to work from the inside out and to do that with as much discipline as we possibly can. And then, listen, I understand what I'm about

to say has an inconsistency in logic because everything that I consume from an external standpoint, food, nutrition, whatever is an outside in mechanism that I'm using for health. And why am I not interested in taking ketamine or fill in the blank? So, so there's my inconsistency in logic, but then you touch that nerve for me when you're like, yeah, if I would have, if I would have stayed on that path, I probably wouldn't have gone into medicine. And then look at the, look at what you've given to the world by your studies of medicine. So this is where I get, I get knotted up and I'm, that's why I really want to have this conversation with you. Okay. Well, I have to tell you that a lot of my psychedelic experiences later really influenced my philosophy of medicine. And that a lot of the field of integrative medicine, I, I owe to

insights that I had on, on psychedelic experiences. For for example I really saw how powerful the mind-body connection is and that things in the body and things in the physical world can be changed by changing what's inside your head and that is that's a very powerful thing to experience and for me psychedelics are one of the ways of doing so what is happening when you take and i know that each strain is is has a different interface and yeah but there's a pretty common uh neurological pathway here and when i was first using this we had no idea how psychedelics work and now we're we understand that this works on a particular type of serotonin receptor in the brain

so we really understand a lot more about mechanisms that's also interesting that there are many people and i say myself as well have had experiences that are very similar to psychedelic experiences without taking substances uh at least after i've had that you know those experiences one was being in a native american sweat lodge for the first time another was fire walking another was witnessing a total eclipse of the sun i mean these were powerful consciousness altering experiences i think equivalent to the power of experience that i've had with psychedelics so maybe these are working on the same brain mechanisms okay so i recently came back from it was a three-day noble silent meditation 16 hours a day of meditation and um

twice now and i've been on handfuls of them but twice i have gone into a place where i've seen the um the floor that we're in like it was was a hall, if you will, like a large room. And I've seen the floor breathing. It's the only way I can quite describe this matrix type feeling. And so is the... Let me take off from there. Come on, Doc. I have had numerous experiences on psychedelics where I have really experienced the consciousness of what I thought of as inanimate things.

You know, I can remember being up a canyon in Arizona and I could see a basic energy flowing through my body. And the same energy was in the rocks that I was lying on. And in the mountains and in the plants, there was some universal, basic, self-aware energy that was in everything. Now, that was a very powerful insight. And it put me at great odds with the conventional scientific view that consciousness is just something that incidentally arises out of brain chemistry and ends when we die i don't believe that so it literally when you you know with psychedelics people call you know going on a trip i was tripping okay okay so yeah and then but there's no external interaction, but I definitely have had those experiences. And you're, you're saying, this is the thing about the mind is that

I don't know what's in yours and you don't know what's mine. There's a limitation from the words and symbols that we're using, but that idea that there was that what you just described, I go, yep. Yep. Yep. Okay. And then, okay. So that being said, there is unlocking that takes place. And you said it's working on the specific type of serotonin receptors. What does that mean? And I want to be careful of you and I not nerding out too much in the specific interactions, but just in general so that we can move the conversation forward for many people. Okay. Well, there are brain mechanisms that are stimulated by psychedelic drugs and it's very likely that these can be stimulated in other ways

and and maybe prolonged meditation is one of them uh but i these may have a common pathway in the brain okay but you know psychedelics are very easy You know, they don't require work and they don't require hours of meditation. So you know, for many people that is an easy doorway to go through. However the psychedelic doesn't guarantee that you'll have that experience. It really is how the experience is structured and this goes back to set and setting and why there's such a need to have guides you know as these substances become more available okay just for clarity for folks that aren't familiar set is your mindset and the setting is the environment that you're in the people right

and set is it's expect your expectations both conscious and unconscious and those are can be influenced by the expectations of the people you're with, you know, as well as, you know, other factors. So it's complex. And the combined effects of setting can actually reverse pharmacological effects, you can give a stimulant to certain people under conditions of setting setting when they'll fall asleep. And you can give a sedative to people with conditions of setting setting will become alert and stimulated. So there's huge room for those non-drug variables to shape the drug experience. That's it. When you really sit with placebo effects and nocebo effects and you say, yeah, what's happening here well it's it's the it's the set and setting it's

the mind essentially that is you know creating it's a it's a bizarre insight that we have not unveiled like how that mechanically works but okay so let's drill down one more level okay so we've got this basic conversation that psychedelics can open you up to new insights that are difficult if not sometimes impossible i would leave space there from uh non-medicinal um interventions yeah like meditation okay and to your point 16 hours three days five days like that's that type of work is heavy lifting yeah yeah you've been there sweat lodges and i don't know if you've done some of the noble silence stuff but that's just heavy lifting so so let's go one more level down the difference between micro dosing and um a full experience

if you will and i don't know if i'm saying that correctly yeah a huge difference you know that micro dosing you don't get the alterations in perception. You don't have visions. You know, you don't go out of your body. You don't experience rocks as conscious. You know, for some people, you just feel kind of energy flowing to the body. There are many people, I have not had this, but many people say that it makes them more creative, enhances imagination.

A lot of people are doing this now but i think this is a totally different thing from taking macrodoses okay is there a benefit to wellness if you have anxiety depression and and and ptsd whatever it might be ocd is there a benefit from the full expression of the chemical or the, what's the right word here? Not chemical. But the dose of the substance. From the dose, yeah, for the full dose? Or do you say, no, no, no, for mental health, it really is better for microdosing as a general?

I don't think we have good data on the effects of microdosing. You know, we have a lot of testimonials from people, but we don't have really solid data yet. With macrodosing, there's accumulating research on very dramatic benefits. And this is like a single experience or a few experiences, especially for drug-resistant depression. You know, very dramatic effect on PTSDtsd on obsessive compulsive disorder and uh you know it's being well documented i think it's just a matter of time before these are made therapeutically available for those kinds of conditions what type of timeline are you anticipating or thinking well i i i think the way oregon has moved uh it's very likely that there um these will be available

within the next year I think at the federal level it may be three years away and okay so when we think about zoloft and we think about you know Paxil or some of the not very good not very good medications you know there's increasingly that you can't distinguish these from placebos. You know, even in very severe depression, they're just not good drugs. They don't work very well. So we really need better methods for treating depressive disorders. And this, I think, has just tremendous potential. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Momentus. When it comes to high performance,

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But then if medication is the next or is part of that decision tree, best practices, medication alone is not the answer that medication plus is a best practice and that's talk therapy or exercise that at us. So yeah, a whole list. Yeah, a whole list of things. And then, so what is your, you have a strong reaction to traditional psychotherapy, I'm sorry, psychotherapeutics. Just unpack that for one level, because then I want to spin back into what you're finding

from the psychedelic research. Okay, so I think the antidepressant drugs are just very poor you know not great efficacy and also significant toxicity the anti-anxiety drugs are terrible drugs that i think almost have no use at all they're highly addictive interfere with cognitive function now we have a few psychiatric drugs that are useful as the ones to treat bipolar disorder i think you know those are useful but the ones to treat bipolar disorder. I think those are useful, but the ones in most common use, they're just not very good. We need better methods. And the promise of psychedelic therapy is it can be just a single dose

that produces very lasting effects if the experience is structured properly. Okay. So what are the downsides? And which ones are you talking about? Are you talking about... Well, suicide and LSD, I would say, and MDMA for PTSD. I think that these are the ones that are most being looked at at the moment, and good research being done on them and I don't I think the only downsides are missing out on the potential because the experience has not been properly structured you know that you haven't paid enough attention to set and setting you don't have a good guide uh to guide you through the experience do you guide people no I don't do that I mean I have done that informally in the past but no

I don't do that however our center, I have done that informally in the past, but no, I don't do that. However, our center is developing a curriculum to train health professionals in psychomedicine. There's a big need for that. Yeah, I was wondering what your position is on that. That seems to be one of the more powerful components. Absolutely. Absolutely necessary. And, you know, there are institutions now beginning to train people. So all that's good. Okay. So not to be a reductionist, but to ask a reductionist question, if you had to lay a bet, would you lay the bet on the psychedelic macrodose. I mean, I don't know enough about macrodosing. You know, I've done it myself some.

I haven't been motivated to continue with it. And I haven't, you know, I don't know enough about it. It maybe has benefits, but I think these are very different from the effects we're seeing with macrodoses. And are you more interested in, it's funny when you say MDMA, LSD, I go, I go, I go somewhere else. Right. Right. I go, oh, okay.

So we're going to go to a party. We're going to listen to some music, you know, like I go somewhere else. And I know that, you know, that, and that's that kind of baggage that I was talking about. And listen, I hear you. I hear you. Yeah. I get, I have to, people are still going to be doing that. I mean, even as this becomes legitimate for therapeutic uses, there are going to be people who are using these for parties

and using them recreationally. And okay, that's their business. That's fine. But they may be missing out on the potential. But let me tell you something else. You know, I'm very enthusiastic about the possibilities of these for physical medicine, not just for psychiatric medicine. And you may have heard me tell some of these stories because, you know,

I've put them out there in the public. And some people have made fun of me for these, but these were very real, powerful experiences. When I was 28 years old, I was starting to practice Hatha Yoga. And I thought this would be a good thing. I was trying to meditate at the same time. There were some postures I had great difficulty with. And the one that I had most trouble with was the plow where you line your back and try to touch

your feet behind your head. I could get my feet within a foot of the floor and I had excruciating pain in my neck. And no matter how long I tried to do this, I couldn't do it. And I was on the point of giving up. I just thought my body was too old and stiff at 28 to do this. And in the midst of this, I took LSD one day with friends. It was a spring day in Virginia, countryside, everything beautiful. I mean, fabulous. I mean, I just felt incredible. My body was totally elastic and light. And I thought, gee, well, I'm feeling this way.

I ought to try that. So I lay on the ground. I thought I had a foot to go and my feet touched the ground. I couldn't believe it. So I kept raising them, lowering them. I thought I had a foot to go and my feet touched the ground. I couldn't believe it. So I kept raising them, lowering them. I mean, it was just delightful. The next day I tried to do it and I got within a foot of the floor and I had excruciating pain in my neck, but there was a difference. Now I knew it was possible and I was motivated to continue to practice. If I had not had that experience, I don't think I would have continued to work at it. And to me, that is one thing that these substances can do. They can show you possibilities

that you might not have believed in, and then it's up to you to figure out how to maintain that. Let me tell you one other, okay? This is also on LSD, different occasion. But again, feeling great outdoors. I had a lifelong cat allergy. If a cat got near me, my eyes would itch. And if a cat licked me, I'd get hives where it licked me. So I always avoided cats. So in the midst of this LSD session, when I was feeling at one with everything, a cat jumped into my lap.

And I had an immediate reaction, no defensive reaction. And then I thought, gee, this is silly. So I started petting the cat and playing with it. I had no allergic reaction. And I never had one ever since. I mean, instantaneous disappearance of, you know, a lifelong allergy. I mean, that's amazing. And that, why not? I would open, I could open a Dr. Boyle clinic for allergy relief, you know, and I would give people once a week, they'd come in and give them, start with a full dose of the psychedelic, expose them to the allergen, then you cut down the dose. And at some point they're getting nothing.

They're just getting a placebo and they wouldn't know when you did that. And they would have unlearned the allergy. I see why people have made fun of you but you know what i love it because it is actually you're speaking to something um let's take it out of psychedelics for a minute but uh let's let's go to a classic example roger bannister you know broke the four-minute mile and it it took people seeing that to go, oh, it's possible. So it happens in other modalities other than the experiential nature of what- Absolutely.

Yeah. So that's happening all the time as well. You see somebody do, it's proximity learning as well. Right, it is. Mirror learning, mirror neurons in our brain. Yeah. Okay. So if you, let's go back to the reductionist,

non-reductionist approach here, just for clarity, if you were to pick one of the, is it four or five psychedelics that we've mentioned so far, which one are you going to lay your bet on? Well, I'd say two. One is mushrooms, psilocybin, and the other is mdma these are quite different i mean mdma has a lot of classics like you delicate doesn't cause uh the visual perceptual changes but it's very heart opening and and produces a kind of centering effect that's really amazing but i think those two are the ones that are closest to getting approved and will be out there and available for therapeutic use. So if I'm gonna go to a party and I'm gonna take some MDMA,

and what is the dosage of that versus the dosage that you would say in a therapeutic setting somebody ought to have? That's probably the same. I mean, if you take too high doses of MDMA, it's not pleasant it's a it's a stimulant that causes your jaw muscles to clench and you know not pleasant so you want to stay in the right you know dose zone and is that individual based on unique chemistry you

know of the person i think the dose of that is pretty constant from person to person uh you know that most people have a pretty uniform reaction to that okay and you're talking about bruxism yeah but yeah well grinding it definitely causes you know tightening of jaw muscles and that that can be really annoying that's from too too high dose and then you can't sleep and you feel drained the next day you know this is why you'll see folks that have like pacifiers it's almost like a little like calling card like yeah you know I'm one of them yeah okay now also one other area that's worth talking about is the potential of psychedelics to give people spiritual experiences now a lot of spiritual teachers and religious leaders are

very upset by people that say that, you know, they say that these are artificial experiences. They're not like genuine spiritual experiences. I think that's nonsense. I think that, you know, and even at Johns Hopkins now where they're doing research on psilocybin, they are documenting, you know, changes in people's view of themselves and how, you know spiritual insights i would recommend looking at and i want to tell everybody to do this go to youtube and search for house white on lsd this is an amazing video it was made i think in the late 1950s uh at a psychiatric center in los angeles where a psychiatrist gives a very straight house flight with those of LSD I

won't tell you what happens but it really shows you the possibilities of what these what these can do okay I mean I hear ayahuasca like every other weekend in LA for the last you know eight six years it's like it's you know I can't believe I I spent a bunch of years in South America looking at psychedelic medicine, shamans and herbal medicine. I took ayahuasca a number of times with shamans down there. If anybody had told me this was in the 1970s, that ayahuasca would be available in every street corner up here, I would not have believed it. There was Vogue magazine a few months ago had a cover story on psilocybin. Town and Country magazine of all places a few months ago had an article titled, Why is Everybody Smoking Toad Mad?

In Town and Country magazine? I mean, truly, this is becoming a mainstream phenomenon. Well, it certainly was like probably five or six years ago. I think the global pandemic has kind of screwed up my time, my mapping a little bit, but it, you know, I would look at some of these folks talking about, and they're, and they're like folks that are, there's two, there's two, I'm going to oversimplify this, but there's the, there's folks that are going to push to the edge no matter what. And you can, you can kind of spot them for the most part, you know, like just the way they carry themselves, the way they think about things, sometimes the way they dress.

Like, okay, you're getting on the edge. And it could be anything. Oh, whatever. Fill in your imagination there. And then there's the very straight-laced, you know, like, no, I want to try something. So they want to be part of something. They're interested in it and it's like a big deal. Okay. And then I'm watching this woman describe her experience and she goes, yeah. And then, you know, he held my hair the whole time I was throwing up and they said I was throwing up for 12 hours. You know, it's like, wait a minute,

like, how is this happening? You know? So this happening? Your experience with ayahuasca, are you saying, no, I'd still stay with the mushroom class? My experiences with ayahuasca were a lot of vomiting on the ground. And you don't remember that? That's not part of your conscious memory? Oh, it definitely is part of my conscious memory okay all right you know but there were on one occasion there was nothing much to make up for that on another you know once i got through that the visual changes were really interesting and when i saw lots of psychedelic imagery i don't know that i took anything away from that, that as I have

from, you know, some other experiences I've had, but I think there's certainly this potential there, you know, okay, now I'm going to say something that also I, you know, maybe far out, but I really believe this. Hold on, hold on, hold on. I, I, I can't wait to see what you're going to say or hear what you're going to say. But Andrew, I have high respect for you. And I really want you to be successful in the way that you're sharing this narrative. Because I'm the type of person that I push in so many directions in my life, and I haven't pushed here. And so even in this conversation, you know when you get to the edge of a cliff

yeah and you look down and it's it's like really exciting and dangerous and there's the heartbeat in the stomach so i feel that even this conversation you know so so i really want well i would say that that way that you feel increases very much the probability that you would have an amazingly positive experience with these things that approaching them with that mindset where you you know because your anxiety about them your fear about them that's a measure of how seriously you take them you know there's a potential there to change you it's actually the excitement you know like i like it's the excitement part of it. The anxiety is like, this is dangerous and I love it. And that's what makes it exciting. But it feels like there's

a door to overuse the metaphor that I just haven't really knocked on it. I've been looking at it, but I haven't knocked on it. And so, okay. So that being said, it's like, I really want your unique voice to carry because of who you are, where you've studied, what you've studied, the credibility that you have. And I'm also nervous about like, okay. Okay. So listen to what I'm going to say. Yeah, here we go. Okay.

Our world is in pretty desperate shape. You know, you don't have to, in any direction you look, things are really bad out there. And they've gotten very significantly worse in recent years. I don't know any way to turn things around except through a global change in consciousness. And when I look out there, the only thing that I see that has the power potentially to do that is psychedelics. I think that if enough people have the right kinds of experiences on psychedelics, it can change global consciousness in the direction has to change the

experiments that are being done at Johns Hopkins documenting spiritual insights that people have. A lot of people have the kind of experience I just described to you about really realizing that everything out there is conscious, that your mind is continuous with other things. But one thing that makes you much more aware of our interactions with the environment and much more motivated to do everything we can to keep us from going in the direction that we're going that's just one one example uh you know i don't think i think if enough people had these kinds of experiences we we wouldn't be seeing these mass shootings that are

happening and getting worse every day you know seriously i believe this is the one thing that has the potential out there to turn our society around. Okay, so let's take that and let's see if we can wrestle with something here. This is philosophical for sure. And so I've got a first principle that I work from, that everything another person needs is already inside them. Yeah. Okay, so let me unpack that for just a moment is that they don't need me. They don't need, they don't need external evidence that they're okay. They're all, they already are, you know, right in this moment.

And so there's this principle that I'm working from that with incredibly high regard for the other, that it's already in you. And let's just, let's see if we can partner and unlock it is like you inviting me in to help you with it, but it's already in you. Okay. So, so there's a, that's the framework that I'm working from. And this is saying, no, no, no no you need something outside of you and i get the logical inconsistency because i do need and you need nutrition and and and and so can you wrestle

with that just yeah i think the experience that you have when you take a psychedelic it is coming from within you uh you know my first book was called The Natural Mind. And that was the whole point of it is that these states of consciousness are inside us. And all the drug does is trigger them or release them or allow them to express themselves. So the magic is not in the substance. And that's a mistake a lot of people make that get into dependent relationships with these things. You know, it's your potential, but you may not discover how to do that without some trick. Look at that example I gave you of the yoga posture. I mean, I would have been stuck there

with my feet afoot from the floor forever and I would have given up without that experience. So sometimes I read books and it's a good book. I like it. And I'm reading it and I'm like, oh, this is great. And then it's like, oh, that was good, but it doesn't materially change. And I'll use another, another framework. People go to a synagogue or a church or, you know, and then they have a nice words and they walk out and, you know, they're flipping me off in the parking lot, you know, and I'm being, I'm being glib, you know, here, but can you talk about that?

The kind of surfacy washing over experience that happens? Or is it always quite enriching in the way it's like? No, I think I see people who pack these experiences away in a box and it doesn't influence the rest of their lives. But I think that's the whole challenge is how do you, when you see people who change their behavior, their perceptions, following an experience like that, that's remarkable. And I think that potential is there. I think that also depends on how the experience is structured and the guide that you have. Finding Mastery is brought to you by Cozy Earth.

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20% off your first order. That's calderalab, C-A-L-D-E-R-L-A-B.com slash finding mastery. Let's flip over really quickly to the downside one of my cousins called me and he's like hey man I need help you know I took took too many maybe you know he's told me earlier in the you know he's gonna you know use some mushrooms and he's like hey man I'm really messed up I'm in front of your office can you can you come down here and it was like 5 30 at night or i'm sorry uh 5 36 at friday night i was not near the office so i i pop over there he's nowhere to be found he goes i'm in front of your office dude you're not here i'm telling you and i'm free so

set and setting was off or or could it be his set and setting was right, but there was just a... Well, it could be a higher dose. That's a very common problem. It could be, you know, if you take a high dose of LSD in a New York subway know how to guide these experiences in the right direction, you're much more likely to have a positive experience. On a physical level, these substances are, I think, the safest drugs we know about. I mean, you can't kill people with LSD. Almost every drug we use in medicine, the lethal dose is not that far above the dose that we use therapeutically. You can't calculate a lethal dose for these psychedelics.

So on the physical level, they are as non-toxic as you can get. The dangers are psychological. And those are totally related to set and setting and can be managed if they're used appropriately. One of my friends, female, went through some hard times and she was like, I need a reset. So it was an ayahuasca reset. It was really tough times for her. Her husband died early, tragic in front of her kids. I mean, you can just imagine

they're beautiful little 12, you know, 12 year old kids. And so this was a really hard time in her life. And for two plus years, she battled and she documented her experience. And so it was ayahuasca. She had, you know, a guide and, you know, a person that was going to take care of her. And then at the last moment, um, Oh, this was,, oh, no, no, I appreciate this. So she could, the guide, the guide could tell that she was really quite anxious. And she goes, okay, everyone, we're going to start with a very small dose. And then she gave it to everybody. And she says, you're probably not going to feel anything, just a very tiny dose. It was a sugar pill. And then my friend freaked out. My throat is closing. So it was very clever what she did. And so she's like, it was sugar. She's like,

oh my God. So it really just settled her down. Like, wow, my mind is off the chart in anxiety. So I share those types of things because have you had those or are yours always bliss? No, I have had some really frightening experiences, which in retrospect had to do with, you know, I took them in the wrong circumstances and I should have. But here's a story you'll like. When I was in my undergraduate days, when I was just starting to experiment with mescaline, I knew there was one occasion there was a party of undergraduates and someone had gotten hold of some LSD. This was probably in 1961. Most people had never heard of LSD. They never heard the word psychedelic. And they gave this, this you know unsuspectingly to people was put in a in some drink or other and when these people are about 12 of them felt the effect of the drug

they thought they were getting food poisoning that's how they interpreted the you know the physical sensation of the drug they had no no framework in which to interpret what was happening to them. That's what they felt. How is it working? Is it the pineal gland? Remember that conversation? Yeah, sure. That's the God center, and it's been disproven, obviously. But is it working? What are the structures that it's working on? It's working on connections in the brain between nerve cells that that are mediated by serotonin you know certain pathways there that's covered in recent years we know that from mdma i think we've it's true it's true of of psilocybin and it's true of lsd as well it is okay so of course correct me on this um this is like from the party

experience working with folks that like high doses consistently of mdma and the idea this is like a narrative that i've just picked up on is that as high as you go there's an equal crash that you experience well mdma is this is a more of a stimulant than these other drugs and any thing that you use you know the energy that you feel it's your energy it's not it's been the drug forces your nervous system to give it up so when that wears off you're left with an energy depletion and if you've taken a very high dose you're going to feel pretty wiped out, you know, when the drug wears off. Okay. Marijuana really quickly. Yeah. Have we... Not a psychedelic. This is a very different... Correct. Unless there's like, I don't know, some of the marijuana that's on the market,

people are like... Yeah. Yeah. Right. So when you were growing up in the 60s, like marijuana was 5% THC. Yeah. Is that close to being accurate? Or less. Or less. And now it's like 80, 90. I can't imagine. I mean, I haven't, I haven't,

I used marijuana a lot in my twenties and thirties and I really have not used it at all. And you know, since then, it's just not something that agrees with me anymore. But a friend of mine, a medical doctor in the Bay Area, who's a he's an oncologist and is an expert in cannabis medicine, sent me samples of products that he got from a medical dispensary. And he wanted me to try them. And I said, I was a little wary of this because I you know I haven't used any and I'm probably sensitive to it one of them was a it was like a little syringe filled with some sort of oil or tar and it came with a very professionally printed brochure uh

telling you how to use this and it was particularly for pain and it said to start with an amount the size of a grain of rice and work up from there. So I took a piece the size of half a grain of rice and I was told to take it at bedtime. I did. I went to sleep. I woke up an hour later in full-blown delirium with hallucinations as intense as any I've had from taking LSD. I had no equilibrium. I couldn't get out of bed. I had a burning thirst. I couldn't reach for a glass of water. I couldn't call for help. And it kept increasing over the next four hours. And, you know, when is this going to end? I had to use all of my meditative strategies and, you know, breathing techniques just to stay here. And now I was really angry when, you know, when that subsided, first of all, for, I'd say for a full 36 hours afterwards, my balance was

off. And I thought, this said to work up from that amount, I took half the amount. And I'm thinking there are probably people walking around taking this stuff and driving. I mean, that was a really powerful and disorienting drug. So to that story, and to my point, like, are we better since we've legalized marijuana? I think in some ways, you know, that there is definitely therapeutic potential to marijuana, but there's a lot of individual variation of response to it. You know, some people can smoke pot and before bedtime and fall asleep and others smoke it and they are alert and wakeful but i i have colleagues who deal a lot with chronic pain syndrome who say that the availability of therapeutic cannabis has totally changed their life that they can prescribe far fewer doses of opioids and they've gotten many patients off of dependence on opioids by

using cannabis preparation. So that stuff's great. When you think about the future, so we've been, we've traveled, thank you for traveling with me on this call or in this conversation. When you think about the future and you think about psychedelics and you think about wellness you said earlier that you can't imagine a more powerful way to shape the psychology of the planet so can you paint like a three-year arc like what you think is going to happen in the next three years or maybe even four i think psilocybin and maybe LSD are going to be available for treatment of certain cases of depression, anxiety, MDMA for PTSD. I think that'll be legally available. I think there's going to be more and more people experimenting with these things, either medically or non-medically.

I think there's lots of questions out there about, you know, are corporations going to try to take this over? Are people going to try to patent these things? Is this ripping off indigenous knowledge? And, you know, there's a lot, I don't know how it's going to play out. There are people trying to come up with synthetic analogs of these natural drugs. I don't know how they'll work. Anyway, lots of of questions it could be very chaotic and uh but I think it I I really think the general trend is going to be good for our culture and right now ketamine is my understanding it is not a psychedelic it's unrelated to psychedelics it's a a dissociative anesthetic related to PCP and it it's being used as a placeholder. So people have

these clinics and using it to treat depression, but they're counting on the legal availability of the true psychedelics. So it shouldn't be confused with that. Okay. That's a good distinction. And it kind of came out of, maybe I've got the narrative wrong, but as a horse tranquilizer. And now with a smaller dose, there's a dissociative experience where people talk about not being able to move, but then having access to their spirit animal. Well, what I hear is that it can be very effective for treatment of depression, but that the effect doesn't last, so that it has to be repeated frequently. It's out there, but really it is being used as a placeholder until psychedelics become available. So if somebody wanted to be with a trained professional,

ketamine is legal, but some of the other things that you've described that we've talked about are not so how does it how does this actually work if somebody well i think there's a big underground in psychedelic medicine you know there are therapists who are using it there are you know untrained people who are using it well you see the ayahuasca stuff that's that's going on uh you know so all this is in a you know technically these things are illegal but they're out there and people are are practicing it where do you want to point people to for deeper research and understanding yeah i would say there's an organization called maps the multidisciplinary association for psychedelic study it's maps.org that that's a good source of of information uh there is a group called prati

prati that's the psychedelic research and training institute the california institute of integral studies uh in the bay area is has a psychedelic training program so you know those are some good places to start okay and then last very technical question here is we didn't hit on addiction and i think you talked about some of the dangers you know that you can't we can't find a lethal dose of these and then you kind of slight hint that there's a psychological aspect to it that could be risky and I think you're talking about a bad trip bad trip yeah okay but are you saying is the research clear on addiction yeah these these have very low addictive potential because if you try to take them frequently the the things you're looking for disappear very quickly uh so I I never I have never met people who I would say are addicted to psychedelics. You just can't take them frequently that frequently.

Do you crave them? No, in fact, you know, everyone expects me to be using these things all the time. I can't remember the last time I had a macro dose of a psychedelic. I don't feel the need to do it anymore. You know, I feel that I I got what I needed from them and I don't feel the need to do it anymore you know I feel that I I got what I needed from them and I don't feel motivated to use them anymore gosh I could go on forever with you like you know I just want to say thank you uh I appreciate your position in the world and you know you've really um earned that I guess is a way to say it like i thank you for what you've contributed for overall human wellness and please watch that youtube video of yes when ellis did okay i will

do that that will encourage you to take a step and open the door okay all right and then is where can people where do you want to point people to to support one is uh my website drwild.com drwil.com and also the website of my center which is integrativemedicine.arizona.edu okay and if there's one book well i would say the one that's probably most relevant here is the natural mind my first book uh and another one I wrote after that called From Chocolate to Morphine, which is about all psychoactive substances, you know, both legal and illegal. And that's a good book. Andrew, who do you look to?

Like if you have a, who's your wisdom counsel? I think I follow my inner guru. And I always have you know it's like I trust my intuition and my inner wisdom that I've always done that see everything you need sorry yeah okay and if there's one takeaway let's be uber crisp on this takeaway okay if there's one thing that you would hope people take away from this conversation, what would that be? Well, I think we had better get with it.

I think there's a real possibility that we're going to put ourselves out of business unless we really change our ways and change our consciousness. Doc, I appreciate you. Thank you. Good to talk to you. Pleasure. All right. Thank you so much for diving into you. Pleasure. All right.

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