Good Life Project - Michael Pollan: Psychedelics, Science, Fear and Hope.

Episode Date: June 5, 2018

Michael Pollan is the author most recently of mega New York Times bestseller, How to Change Your Mind, and of seven previous books that became global phenomena, including Cooked, Food Rules, and The Omnivore's Dilemma. A longtime contributor to the New York Times Magazine, he also teaches writing at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley where he is the John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Science Journalism. In 2010, Time magazine named him one of the one hundred most influential people in the world.In today's episode, we explore his lens on the writing life, then dive into his year's long investigative journey into the mysterious world of psychedelic molecules, like LSD, psilocybin (magic mushrooms), MDMA and something called "the toad." We talk about the fact, fiction, history, science and revolutionary clinical studies now underway, mostly from the lens of therapeutic outcomes.This conversation is not a permission-slip to experiment with any of what he talks about, nor an endorsement, so please do not take it as such. Rather, it is a balanced, non-hyperbolic or sensationalized conversation about a category of substances that are now at the cutting-edge of research in the treatment of mental conditions that afflict tens of millions of people.-------------Have you discovered your Sparketype yet? Take the Sparketype Assessment™ now. IT’S FREE (https://sparketype.com/) and takes about 7-minutes to complete. At a minimum, it’ll open your eyes in a big way. It also just might change your life.If you enjoyed the show, please share it with a friend. Thank you to our super cool brand partners. If you like the show, please support them - they help make the podcast possible. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

So if I asked you whether you'd be willing to take LSD or magic mushrooms in the name of expanding your consciousness, I'm guessing most people would probably say no. What if I asked you whether you'd be willing to do it once in the name of being exceptional at your job, of being way more creative, of having an edge in your professional life? I'm guessing a couple of people would raise their eyebrows. Now, what if I asked you if you'd be willing to do it because you were suffering from years of treatment-resistant depression, pervasive sustained anxiety, PTSD? Well, that kind of changes the equation a little bit for most people. And that is the conversation that we're having with today's guest, Michael Pollan. Michael,

you probably recognize his name. He is the author of, I believe, seven massive New York Times bestselling books, including Food Rules, Yom Novor's Dilemma, Cooked, and a bunch of others. He has a new book out called How to Change Your Mind, which is a pretty fascinating deep dive into the world of psychedelic molecules, these things that I was just talking about. And we're not talking about just mystical experiences and expanding consciousness. It's a really fascinating look at both the therapeutic, the research and the political history of these substances, the fact and the fiction, and man, is there a lot of fiction and the resurgence, the profound resurgence of interest

in these substances in the academic and scholarly research communities now, there are now large-scale trials going on at some of the biggest, most acclaimed and reputable research institutes in the world, like Johns Hopkins and NYU. And some of the outcomes, the research outcomes, and then we dive into Michael's personal experience as he pretty much does with everything that he writes. There comes a time where he feels that he can't write without in some way being able to write from the inside out and describe from his own experience what this whole thing is about. And that's exactly what he did. And he shares his own experience and how he kind of grappled with some of the questions around it as well. Really excited to share this deep dive with you. I'm Jonathan compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were going to be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing.

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iPhone Xs are later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. You know, it's always good to be back in touch with East Coast values and attitudes, especially when you've written a book on psychedelics. I mean, things seem normal in California that seem exotic here. And this was true with food also. When I started writing about food, I remember that first book tour for Omnivore's Dilemma

and going into these spaces, these bookstores in Portland or Seattle, and I knew something was happening. There was a movement forming. It was this political energy that you could feel in the room. It wasn't about a writer. It was, there was an issue here.

And I got to New York and it was a kind of sedate event with Ruth Reichel and the 92nd Street Y. And it was kind of a foodie event. One was politics and one was foodism. And of course, the food movement moved from West to East eventually. And New York, you know, got with it. But some things do happen first out there. And food politics, I think, was a good example.

And we'll see about psychedelics. I mean, if the reception is different on the East Coast than it is on the West Coast. Ask me in a couple of weeks. Right. I mean, it will be really interesting, right? Because it seems like a lot of the recent resurgence in sort of popular interest is coming from West Coast to East. But a lot of the research is coming from East Coast to West. Good point.

It's NYU and Hopkins and England. So it's that Atlantic axis where the research is going on. But I think the underground, that is very much a West Coast phenomenon. The money is coming from the West Coast. The research is being largely funded by the tech community in the Bay Area. Why? A couple reasons. I mean, guys in tech, and I use the word guys because they're almost all guys, have a longstanding interest in psychedelics. Going back, I learned, and this was a surprise in the research, to the 50s, the early 50s, where a group of engineers got turned on to LSD.

And they found it very useful in their work. They found it, it was helpful in designing chips, the first chips, which if you think about it, designing a chip, computer chip without a computer is really hard. You have to hold in your head this very complex three-dimensional structure. So there, you know, long before Steve Jobs, there was this tradition of using psychedelics to help you solve engineering problems. And an engineer explained why. I asked him, why would this be a big deal with engineers? And he said that as engineers, unlike scientists, it's hard to simplify a problem. You have an irreducible complexity, a great many variables, with the result that you're looking for pattern to solve problems. And one of the things you see on psychedelics is pattern. So

that may be it. It's also about Burning Man. You know, a lot of these people get turned on at Burning Man and they have this utopian experience and they want to share it with the world. So a lot of these people are funding the research. And I think the underground, I mean, there's no census of the underground, but I would guess it's more active on the West Coast than the East Coast. Although I've found, you know, plenty of psychedelic guides on the East Coast as well. Yeah, I mean, that kind of confirms my very loose hole in people that I know and certainly various involves. Well, Brooklyn is, you know, there's a lot of ayahuasca going on in Brooklyn right now. Right, I mean, it's amazing.

Actually, I've heard that same thing. So we kind of jumped into the deep end of the pool here. So why don't we take a little bit of a step back and create a little bit of context. You've written a bunch of different books that interestingly, in some way, seem to consistently touch on our relationship between human beings and the plant world, the natural world. Even going back to, what was it, the late nineties, mid nineties, when you wrote about you building your own little writing house. Yeah. Oh yeah. A place of my own. And before that, I was writing essays about my garden in Connecticut, where we still have this house. My subject as a writer, as I've always thought about it, is the human engagement

with nature. And in general, when Americans think about the relationship to nature, they go to the wilderness. You know, they go to the woods or the desert or the ocean. And it's a kind of nature you don't, you spectate more than you participate in. As a gardener, and I really began as a very serious gardener, not that I'm a very good gardener, but I liked doing it a lot and gave a lot of thought to it. Here was a space where just watching nature in the passive mode of Henry Thoreau or Emerson gets you into trouble. There are critters. There are diseases. There is fertility issues with the soil.

And you have to really take an active role and you have to be willing to kind of engage in a very complicated environment. Like, are you within your rights to shoot a woodchuck? You know, these kinds of questions. And I, in fact, did get into a long war with a woodchuck that kind of became my horticultural Vietnam. And that's what really sensitized me to the fact that there were really rich issues going on in a garden, in a farm.

And maybe as nature writers, and I did think of myself as a nature writer, that's where we should be looking instead of these wild places that people go, you know, tops of mountains and things like that. So I started exploring at home what I could learn about nature and other species. And that really has continued to be a concern of mine. And when I got into food, it was because it grew out of the garden writing and also this recognition that the most powerful way that we shape nature is through our eating choices. If

you think about it, what we eat determines to a large extent the composition of species on the planet. You know, the reason there are 150 million head of cattle and only 25 or 50,000 wolves is because we like to eat cattle and wolves also. We compete with them for cattle. You know, the fact that the grasses, the edible grasses are the dominant species on the planet is because we eat edible grasses, corn and, you know, rice and wheat. So, and then, you know, our eating choices shape the composition of, I mean, the disposition of the land, how it looks. So much land has been deforested for agriculture. We've plowed it, we've leveled it, we've drained it, all to feed ourselves. And then you have the atmosphere. I mean, we're learning now that our eating choices

represent probably our most profound or largest contributor to climate change, if we're meat eaters, certainly. So if you care about nature and you want to deal with the environmental crisis, you have to look at the food system really hard. And that's what I've been doing for the last several books. But it's not my only interest in our engagement with the natural world. I've always been curious about this very strange fact that all peoples on earth, as far as we know, with one exception I'll get to, have some plant or fungi, mushroom species that they use to change consciousness. And we routinely use plants, psychoactive plants, to change consciousness. If you had coffee or tea this morning, that's exactly what you've done.

We do it with cigarettes. We do it with cannabis, obviously. We do it with the opiates. We do it with psychedelic mushrooms. And this is a curious human desire. It doesn't necessarily sound like it would be so good for us because there are problems with addiction, obviously, and people can kill themselves, you know, overdosing on opiates very easily as we're seeing right now. Yet we persist. And I've always been curious as to what is that about? Because that's one of our most powerful engagements with the natural world is using it to change what goes on in our heads.

So, I mean, when you lay it out that way, there's a sort of a pretty clear through line through all of this that brings you to this place where you sort of say, hmm, maybe I need to explore deeper into this relationship. And yet you've been writing for, you been writing for some three decades before that. Why now? Well, I had touched on this a few times. I mean, in a book I wrote in 2001 called The Botany of Desire, there's a chapter on cannabis. I wrote a piece, and it's actually, I've just learned the most popular piece on my website called Opium Made Easy. It was about growing opium in my garden and all the legal problems I ran into.

And then I wrote about medical marijuana when that was coming up. I wrote about high-tech pot growers. So it has been a kind of sub-theme of my work for a long time. What happened now, though, to make me realize I needed to explore it more deeply was this revival of research.

I started reading about these studies that are going on at NYU, at Johns Hopkins, giving psilocybin to people, some of whom had never used any psychedelic before. And psilocybin, for those who don't know. Yeah, psilocybin, sorry, is the chemical, the active chemical in magic mushrooms, psilocybin mushrooms.

There's about 150 different mushrooms that produce this interesting chemical that has a lot in common with LSD. It works in the brain in similar ways, connects to the same receptors, and leads to a similar experience. The first study I read about was giving these drugs to people who are struggling with cancer. They've had a cancer diagnosis, some of them terminal diagnoses. Others were just paralyzed by fear of recurrence, and they have anxiety and depression, and there's not much we have to offer them. Antidepressants don't help when you're confronting your mortality.

It's a deeper, more existential condition. They were picking up on research that had been done in the 50s and 60s using LSD for the same thing. And what they found is that a high-dose psilocybin experience would occasion a profound mystical experience. Now, what is a mystical experience? It's hard to pin down. It was really defined for modern times by William James over 100 years ago. But it's an experience of feeling as though you're merging with some larger entity, often involves some sense of a contact with a higher power of the divine,

a changing sense of time and space, often a sense of sacredness or meaning in what you're perceiving, something called the noetic sense, the belief that what you're seeing or feeling has profound truth. It's not just an opinion. It's a conviction that this is revealed truth. And that's a very important feature of psychedelic experience. And people who have these experiences, it's often a conversion

and it can help them change how they feel about their death, help them reset around an addiction and often overcome an addiction. So this experience is potentially a therapeutic agent. And that's the weird operative assumption of a lot of this research, that you're prescribing an experience, not just a drug. The drug occasions the experience, but not in everybody, in about 80% of people. Yeah, and I actually want to deconstruct the whole sort of experience side of it also. But you mentioned that these researchers, the current researchers that's going on right now, and it seems to be growing by the minute, was really the continuation of something that started back in the 50s. But there hasn't been a seamless sort of body of research. It started, there were some thousand or so different studies with tens of thousands of people went through it, stunning results, and yet gone, gone.

I don't think we have an example of that where a really promising line of inquiry, scientific inquiry was stopped. What happened is the 60s. When psychedelics met the 60s, it was an explosive mix, the counterculture, which took up psychedelics. The line that's usually, the way it's usually put is they leapt the wall of the laboratory and were into the eager arms of the counterculture. Timothy Leary, you know, he's along the way, Timothy Leary made some important contributions, but along the way, he lost patience with science and decided that this was too important to go through placebo controlled studies and do the rigmarole you have to do for

science. He decided that was a game and he had found a key to changing civilization for the better, expanding consciousness. And so he started, he became an evangelist of psychedelics. And he started telling everybody, turn on, tune in, drop out. And this was very destabilizing to the culture. I mean, psychedelics did help shape the counterculture. I think we would have had one even if there weren't psychedelics. I think the war probably would have seen to it that you'd have this incredible split in society but as leary said you know kids who take lsd aren't going to fight your wars and nixon sure believed that and he came he came after leary and he came after lsd in a big

way so you have this moral panic and around 1965 what had been the best press any drug has gotten since Prozac suddenly turns. You had incredible media support for psychedelics up to that point. But at that point, it all turns on a dime. And it becomes very embarrassing to study it. There's a snicker factor in science. And here now you have this party drug, basically, that nobody will take seriously as a psychiatric medicine. So even before it becomes labeled that you can't touch it, just

it becomes... Radioactive. Right. Yeah, for a lot of people. And also, as it got into the counterculture, we got in touch with some of the risks. People were ending up in emergency rooms. You know, we don't know, is that a panic attack, which a lot of people think, or was it a psychotic episode? It certainly looked like a psychotic episode, but very often it wasn't. There were a lot of scare stories out there. You know, our link letters, you know, very important TV personality of the period, his daughter had committed suicide and he blamed it on LSD. Was it true or not? She had a lot of psychological problems. We don't have evidence that LSD or other psychedelics actually creates mental illness in people who don't have it or aren't already at risk for it. But it is a psychologically risky thing to do. And especially if you do it in a careless way, you know, just dropping some ass and going to a concert, walking around Manhattan. People do stupid things when they take psychedelics and they can walk out into traffic and fall off buildings.

And so, you know, bad things did happen. But those bad things got an enormous amount of press. It's worth pointing out though, that physiologically the risks of psychedelics are to my shock, remarkably mild. They are, you know, non-toxic virtually. There doesn't appear to be a lethal dose. And you can't say that your Advil or Tylenol has a lethal dose. My chocolate has a lethal dose. Trust me, I consume a lot of it.

But the risks are psychological. And they got exaggerated in the 60s. And we're still dealing with that right now. Because I'm amazed talking to people who are well-informed, been around the block, that those stories of, well, what about those college kids staring at the sun until they went blind? That was a story. It was out there. It turns out to be an urban legend. It was actually concocted by a commissioner of the blind in the state of Washington to discourage kids from using LSD. It was a very, very well intentioned, but it was bullshit. So sorting out the real risks and real problems from the urban legends was one of the things I wanted to do in this book. And I needed to assure myself before I would touch any of these drugs myself. Series X is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever,

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Charge time and actual results will vary. glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. So this is what turns you on to the research that's happening now. What turned the first wave of modern day researchers onto the fact that this is something we should revisit? Because this was, like you said, it was, well, one, it becomes schedule one. wave of modern day researchers onto the fact that this is something we should revisit because this was, like you said, it was, well, one, it becomes schedule one. So it's brutally hard to even attempt to do any research around, but also politically and culturally and in the legit

scholarship world, it's also untouchable. So how does somebody in the research world decide, I'm going to stake my name, my lab on revisiting this. Well, in fact, a lot of people, younger psychiatrists didn't even know about this work. Steve Ross, who's a psychiatrist at Bellevue, who's working with these substances now, he's in his forties, I guess. He said when he went through medical school, all he heard were the scare stories about LSD. He said learning about the early research was like excavating a buried body of knowledge. And so it really had been buried. But there were a handful of old timers

who wanted to bring it back. There was a brilliant psychiatrist at UCLA named Charles Grobe who helped. He was old enough to remember when it was being used and was looking for new agents to work with. There was, you know, some of those old timers were still around. Stan Groff, who was a really an LSD psychiatrist for many years in the 60s, he was still around and he was talking to people. But basically, they were non-scientists, in many cases, who led the revival. Two, three, if you include England, that are worth mentioning. One is Rick Doblin. Rick Doblin is, he's a dog with a bone on this issue. He went to New College, this hippie college in Florida in the 80s, and he experienced LSD and MDMA or ecstasy. And his aspiration in life was to become a psychedelic therapist.

He thought these agents are so powerful. I want to work with them and help people. But by the time he graduated, they were both made illegal. MDMA lasted longer. That was made illegal in 85, I believe. And he decided to dedicate his life to bringing them back, to get them through the drug approval process. He went to the Kennedy School at Harvard to learn how you get a drug through the FDA.

And basically, all the researchers are following a game plan that he wrote. He's still at it. He formed an organization called the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies based in Santa Cruz, although he lives in Belmont, Mass. And he's been knocking his head against the same wall since 1985. And finally, it is starting to pay results. So that's one guy. Again, not a scientist, an activist, you could say, a man with a conviction. Another is a English woman named Amanda Fielding, who is English royalty or noble. And she has been convinced since the 60s that LSD has enormous role to play in human betterment and creativity. And she believes drug policy is, you know, just completely ill thought through on these issues. So she has been funding

research in England that's been really important and organizing it. So she's the kind of Rick Doblin of England. And then there's one other person who's much less famous than either Amanda or Rick, and that is Bob Jesse, who's an important character in my story. And he is a tech guy who has an engineer who has a psychedelic experience or a series of them in his youth that are transformative. And he realizes that this is a spiritual experience that should be available to more people. He's not as interested in the medical side of it. He's really interested in the spiritual side of it.

And he is a very methodical person who left Oracle with some money and founded something, and you can go check it out online, called the Council on Spiritual Practice to make this kind of experience available to more people. And he, in this very deliberate way, brought together people who could help drive the research forward. And he ends up recruiting scientists to study psychedelics, most notably Roland Griffith and Bill Richards, who's the clinical director at Hopkins. Now some of the leaders out there. Yeah. And so Bob was the, you know, he was the kind of man behind the throne. He was the wizard who was pulling a lot of these strings and he's

still very involved. So it's these three visionaries, none of them are scientists, all amateurs, you could say, all very interested in what psychedelics has to offer the individual and the society who really make it happen. Yeah. It's so interesting too, because it seems there are these, there are dual motivations that I'm sure overlap in many ways, but also it seems like there are proponents that are driven largely by the pursuit of mystical experience and expanded consciousness. And then there are those who are driven by, we have some really, you know, like very hard DSM based, you knowbased anxiety, depression, and how do we struggle? Like you said in some of the early research,

people who are facing their mortality through life-ending diagnosis of illness, and you have this category of substances that seem to have powerful effects on both things and people pushing forward the research and the availability of both, but for very different reasons and with a wink and nod to the other one, because they know that they'll play well together and sort of acceptance. Yes. And exactly right. It's well put. It's the same thing though, in a way. It's a different

group of people may benefit. But those who are looking at the spiritual implications, the fact is what appears to be the therapeutic agent is a spiritual experience. So they're not exactly different approaches. They both flow from the recognition that people on a high dose of these drugs have a mystical experience. Now, the English use a slightly different vocabulary. They're less comfortable with the religiosity of that term. We Americans are more comfortable with religion, I think. Especially West Coast.

Yeah. But they say, we don't hear about a lot of spiritual experience. We hear about ego dissolution, which is a more psychodynamic term, for, I believe, the same thing. I think when you have an experience of your ego dissolving, in other words, your sense of self vanishing or getting muffled, that feels mystical to a certain head because without the barrier of your ego, which is essentially defending you from information coming in

and from emotion flowing up from your unconscious, you begin to merge with other things, with other people, with the universe, with concepts like love. And so your walls come down, your defenses come down, and that can feel ecstatic. It can be terrifying too, but it can feel ecstatic. It can feel like time is changing, which happens in the mystical experience. It's getting very elastic. And it can give you, I think, that noetic sense I mentioned earlier, that sense of conviction. Because without a sense of your subjectivity, everything's objective. So in other words, if you no longer believe you're looking at something from Michael Pollan's perspective. It just is. And it's got to

be true. It's concrete. So I think the mystical experience is, that's one vocabulary for an experience where I think the key thing is this dissolution of self. And that seems to help the people therapeutically because it is our self that traps us in these narratives, you know, these very destructive stories that people tell themselves, you know, I can't get through the day without a cigarette, unworthy of love, you know, all these kind of very destructive stories that our egos tell us and use to arm us against other people or nature or emotion, strong emotion. So, you know, I think it's the same things going on. The issue becomes, should this be available only to people who have pathologies in the DSM? Or what about the rest of us who we may not be depressed or clinically anxious, but we sure do get trapped in destructive

stories about ourselves. And we have egos that sometimes are a little too punishing or harsh to live under. And that we're stuck in habits, deep grooves of mental behavior that we'd love to get out of. So that's what Bob Jesse calls, memorably, the betterment of well people. Looking after those people too. I think it's a lot safer politically to address people who are really suffering first. And that's certainly the focus of the research. You know, our mental health system is not working very well. It only reaches about half the people who need help.

Rates of depression and suicide are climbing very quickly. I mean, suicide alarmingly fast. Rates of addiction are climbing as well. And mean, suicide alarmingly fast. Rates of addiction are climbing as we know. And anxiety, like regular social anxiety. The percentage of people who have clinical anxiety is, I don't know what the number is offhand, but it's really tremendous. So there's a lot of suffering that needs to be addressed.

And we haven't had any new tools in psychiatry since really the introduction of the antidepressants, which takes you back to the late 80s when Prozac was introduced. One of the reasons I think that this renaissance has taken off is that establishment psychiatry is surprisingly open out of desperation as much as anything to exploring new approaches. And here comes this new slash old approach. How much weight do you think also, and maybe this isn't a part of it at all, but we began talking about how we both,

you know, like I could probably name out a dozen different places where I know people are experimenting in different ways around New York. And I'm sure, you know, it feels like there is this crowdsourced community of people who are experimenting and getting results and then sort of turning back to healthcare professionals or people they know in the profession. And even if it's not professionally looking for advice, the stories of benefit are coming back. And if you have somebody who's in a profession where they really

want to serve and help as much as humanly possible, and they have the tools available to them, the medication available to them, the skill sets, and they keep hearing over and over, there's this thing out there, and they keep hearing it's helping. But legally and ethically, they're bound not to involve themselves in it. I wonder how that is for the practitioner. I think it's very hard. I mean, there are two kinds of practitioners. They're the ones that say, bucket, I'm going to use it anyway, and essentially are committing acts of civil disobedience on behalf of their clients. And then there are other people who are like, well, I've got to wait for this process to play out. And I can

understand both approaches. Temperamentally, it takes a certain kind of person to say that I'm going to go against everything my society is telling me to do what I think is right for my patients and other people who want to stay on the right side of the law. I mean, there's enormous risk in using these drugs underground. I mean, they're still scheduled on drugs, right? That's right. That's right. Which means what does that mean? Well, Schedule 1, under the Controlled Substances Act, which is the big federal drug law, it puts medicines in different categories. Schedule 1 is the stiffest and least susceptible to any kind of use. So

Schedule 1 means the drug has a high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use. Clearly not true for psychedelics, but there it is. Cannabis is in that category too. Opiates, not, because they do have an accepted medical use in pain relief. So they're schedule two or three. And then it goes down. And MDMA is also schedule one, ecstasy. So the path to making these drugs available to people is complete the phase three trials, which are about to get started this year. That's the last step in the three-stage process of FDA approval. And then when the FDA has said this is indeed a medicine, the DEA, Drug Enforcement Administration, is obliged to reschedule it. And when that happens, whether they will or not, of course, remains to be seen. All bets are off right now with government bureaucratic action.

And at that point, doctors, if they do reschedule it, doctors will be able, under some set of regulations, to prescribe these drugs. And that process, you know, it may only be five years away. Which is kind of amazing, given how long they were completely untouchable. It's, you know, things are moving more quickly than I would have guessed when I first started. I wrote a piece on this psilocybin therapy for the New Yorker, yeah, in 2015. And if you had asked me then how long is this going to take, I would have said 15 or 20 years. And now I would guess five. Just because the establishment in psychiatry has been more open than I would have expected.

And because the FDA, too, has been more open. What's that? Why? I think it goes back to this idea that we don't have a lot in the toolkit. And there are very few new, they're called CNS drugs, central nervous system drugs in the pipeline being developed by big pharma. Big pharma, for some reason, is just not interested in psychiatric medicine right now. But that kind of circles back to what we were talking about earlier also, where it's not just, here's a bottle, take the pill.

You know, that is not the nature of treatment. You know, number one, you're actually, you do a guided session in a clinical controlled environment with somebody who's trained to be there with you. But, you know, in addition to that, it's from what I know, and you're so much deeper into this, but, you know, and you write about this, it doesn't look, I guess it's too easy to tell in the research, but it doesn't seem like this is the type of thing where it's like, take a pill once a day for life. No. It's almost the exact opposite. It's like,

which is a problem for big pharma. Right. Exactly. It's almost the exact opposite. It's like stunning changes. Which is a problem for big pharma. Right, exactly. They're in the business of selling pills that you have to take every day. And here is a treatment. It's very hard to fit into psychopharmacology as we know it. Here is an experience essentially

that people have once or twice in a lifetime that seems to have this transformative effect. Or maybe with depression, you have to do it every six months or every year. That's not a lot of pills. And then there is also the fact that, as you emphasized rightly, the guiding is very important.

It's not enough. You can't just prescribe this, take this, go home. You've got to be with that person all day long, prepare them properly for what's about to happen, be present during the trip to help them if they get into trouble and look out for their physical welfare, and then help them integrate the experience after, make meaning out of what can be a very inchoate and confusing experience. You know, that's a day's work for two therapists, and we don't have a model for that. And so I think

that that's going to be a big challenge. How do we do this? Now, it might end up being cheaper than the kinds of behavioral health so-called that our health insurance now pays for if you could have dramatic effects in that short amount of time. And the work on PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, and MDMA suggests that it might be possible to cure people of what has been a very difficult illness for returning vets and for women who've been abused. So the economics remain to be worked out. We don't really know. It could be cheaper.

It could be more expensive than what we have now. The key, though, will be effectiveness. If it really proves out, the phase two trials are very encouraging. I mean, they showed a kind of results that there's no model for in psychiatric interventions. I mean, much more effective than SSRIs, dramatic changes in people's levels of anxiety and depression after one session. Smokers, there was a pilot study of smokers where 80% remained abstinent for six

months, down to 67% after a year. Still, though, much more effective than any other treatment we have now to help people quit smoking. So these are big results. If they can be sustained once you scale up and you're doing your phase three trials, then we'll really have something important, you know, an important new tool. But we haven't gotten there. It's important to keep in mind we haven't gotten there. Yeah. And I guess one of the things that's interesting about this also is you can't do the trials on this category of molecules the same way you would really do it with anything else that goes through an FDA process, because it sounds like it's basically impossible to do a double-blind study with this.

The therapist is a part of the entire therapeutic experience. And even if they didn't know, you know, like, is it the red pill or the blue pill? Pretty soon into that session, they're gonna know. Yeah, it's very hard to blind this. Roland Griffiths, who's one of the pioneering researchers on this, works really hard on this blinding problem and he's come up with some creative solutions. But yeah, it's very tough. In general, the therapist can tell.

The therapist plays a role. What the therapist says, you know, these drugs, as Timothy Leary famously said, are strongly influenced by set and setting. Your mindset and the physical setting that you're in. So there are a lot of variables that aren't just the pill. And that's confounding for modern science, which really is about reducing things to a single variable. You cannot do that here.

But another way to look at it is what we're testing is not a pill, but a package. And it should be called not psychedelic therapy, but psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. And that's really what we're testing. And that package involves a certain kind of guiding and a certain kind of preparation, a certain kind of integration. That's all part of what you're testing. And I think that's a healthier way to look at it because to reduce it to the idea it is these pills

is to really overlook that it is an experience and the shaping of that experience comes not just from the molecule, but from your guide, from the room you're in, the environment, and your own expectations. There's a weird phenomenon where if your psychedelic

therapist is a Jungian, you'll have Jungian imagery. And if it's a Freudian, you'll have Freudian imagery and down the line. And the fact that the researchers at Hopkins have a kind of spiritual orientation, I mean, Roland got into this because of a spiritual experience of his own, not on drugs, but in meditation, I think has colored the kinds of results they get. Whereas the people in England, you know, don't get this heavy spiritual cast to the reports. So it's a challenge, not just to psychopharmacology, not just to big pharma, but to the very methods of modern reductive science. Yeah, it seems like it almost wars against the fiber of all of it.

Which is what's interesting about it. Right, exactly. And because the promise is so potentially big that I think everybody's just kind of saying, you know, like, we don't know what to do with this, but the potential is so great that let's kind of almost suspend judgments, suspend the rules for a window of time, and then maybe figure out how to backfill a new framework around how to work with this.

Yeah, I mean, and I think, you know, what we're doing in a way as a culture is trying to devise a container for these powerful medicines. And what kind of guiding do you need? What sort of environment is best? Who stands to gain the most? There's so much still to be learned. What's exciting though, is that it's happening and that the money has been raised because without big pharma's investment or the federal government's investment, both of whom haven't touched this stuff, it's fallen to charitable contributions for the most part.

And those have been forthcoming. So the researchers have what they need to go forward. And that's very exciting because they're going to bring back some really interesting information. You brought up something else, which is, you know, there is this, okay, so we can potentially treat some things that have been really difficult to treat. But then there's the other side, which is what about someone who's just kind of like cruising through life and yeah, they could be happier. They, they want to have more expansion of consciousness. And then what's happening out in Burning Man, what's happening out in the West Coast, what's happening in the tech startup world

in Silicon Valley, where a lot of people are looking at this as, you know, I am only as good as what I'm capable of conceiving. And maybe I can consume something that will give me an edge. And where do we, where is that in the spectrum of okay? Well, yeah, performance enhancing drugs. And there's no question that there are people, not just in the tech world, who are microdosing with LSD very often, taking tiny doses. They're not having mystical experiences.

They're not having any experience. Right, so it's like barely psychoactive. Yeah, and we don't know if this works at all. I mean, it's important to stress there's no science on this yet. There will be some. There's a study planned in England. I think there's one going on.

For microdosing? Yeah, so we'll know more in a couple of years about microdosing. But so far, it's, you know, people treat it as a brain vitamin. And the placebo effect is so powerful with psychedelics that they may be getting some benefit, but whether it's actually from the molecule or the idea, the conviction that this is helping, it's hard to say. And then there are other people who are using bigger doses to enhance creativity. And there's

some studies that are about to take place about creativity. Creativity is very hard to study, though. We don't really know what it is. It's very hard to define. So there's this interesting study that Amanda Fielding is pioneering in England where they're going to use the game Go as a proxy for creativity and see if LSD improves people's performance

in this game or not. I've never played Go, so I don't know whether it's a good proxy or not, but it's an interesting wager. The Apple Watch Series 10 is here. It has the biggest display ever. It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist,

whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you 8 hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series 10. Available for hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised.

The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot? I knew you were going to be fun. Tell me how to fly this thing. You know what the difference between me and you is? You're going to die. Don't shoot him, we need him.

Y'all need a pilot. Yeah, and this also brings it around to you. So, because you are a creative professional, you are a writer, you're somebody who immerses yourself very much in whatever the subject you're working on. And at some point during your explanation and writing this book, you made the decision that I can't just write about this. I can't just meet all the researchers and study it. But I actually have to experience it from the inside out. Even though you shared you didn't come into it as, hey, this is awesome. I'm going to go trip and have mystical experiences. And I completely buy into it.

Like this was not your why. No, I was very nervous about it. This was, I'm not, I was a very reluctant psychonaut. I had not had extensive experience with these drugs when I was young. For some reason, I came along a little bit late and I heard all the horror stories. And I thought, you know, this could put me over the edge. I was really afraid of psychedelics. But as I started talking to more people and learned about the guided experience, which is substantially different, I can't emphasize that too much. Where someone is with you the whole time, they're looking out for your physical well-being, they know what to say if you start freaking out.

That's, you know, that was very appealing to me. And being near a hospital emergency room, that was appealing too. Although I didn't end up having that benefit because I couldn't participate in the above ground trials. I didn't qualify and they probably didn't want a journalist, you know, doing it. So I spent a lot of time looking at the safety issues and interviewing guides until I found some people I was comfortable with. But I did feel I had to do it. There was no other way to understand what was going on that I was hearing from these volunteers. What they were saying seemed so surprising and unlikely that I felt I had to see for myself. There's also the fact that that's the kind of journalism I do. When I wrote about the cattle industry, I bought a steer. When I wanted to write about architecture, I built a house. When I wanted to learn how to bake,

I apprenticed myself to the greatest baker in the country. That's what I do. I do immersion journalism. But this is different. I agree. I get that. Building the house was tough too. Yes, but.

Yeah. No, it is different. I was putting more skin in the game, definitely. And exposing myself. This is the most personal book I've written. I write in the first person and tell about my misadventures, but it's all at a certain distance. I don't disclose that much about myself. This is the most personal book I've written. I write in the first person and tell about my misadventures, but it's all at a certain distance. I don't disclose that much about myself.

You can't write about your psychedelic journeys without exposing yourself in a way that was a challenge for me as a writer. But I think when journalists do have skin in the game, it's a way to avoid the usual traps of cynicism and disinterest that, you know, are just kind of easy stances. You know, you're on the sidelines. And I feel that we write better and help people see what an experience is like when we write about it from the inside. So I felt it was kind of my brand as a writer. And that was another obligation, plus my curiosity. Plus, frankly, these people were having experiences that I thought could be useful to me. I mean, when I started this, I was approaching 60. I was getting to

that point in life where I had these mental algorithms that got me through the day, that helped me deal with whatever life threw at me. but they were also kind of habits. And habit is powerful. It's very adaptive to have habits, but it also blinds you to experience and novelty and wonder. And the fact that these people were putting aside their habits and their usual perspectives and acquiring radical new perspectives on their own life, that was really tempting. And then there was the fact that I had never, I don't think I'd ever had a spiritual experience, at least as I read about them. Time was getting short. I was curious about that too. And then lastly was the fact that my dad had gotten a terminal diagnosis and there was a conversation about death that he really didn't

want to have. He was of a certain generation where he didn't talk that much about it. And I don't even know to this day, he died in January, how he processed it. He did process it, I think, but I wanted to process it too. And I found by working, especially working with these people, the volunteers and the cancer anxiety studies,

that it was a good way I could have these conversations, these really intense conversations with people about their mortality, about their fear, that was really compelling to me, given where I was in life. You've also said that mystical experience, if indeed it does happen when you take these substances, can profoundly change somebody.

They can come back with a very different experience of themselves and of the world and of their relationships. And you're married for a long time. So when you make a decision to say, okay, you know, remember how I was, you know, really wanted to bake? Well, this time. Yeah, my wife had some misgivings. Right, because this is not just potentially going to affect you.

Like, what is this going to do to the relationship potentially? And that was an issue. And we discussed that. My wife was initially of two minds. One was she was thrilled I had a new subject and that she wasn't going to have to hear me talk about food anymore. And no, she just thought, I mean, she's an artist herself. And she is a very restless artist. And so her work changes every year dramatically.

She really believes in, like, once you've gotten this down, move on. Don't repeat yourself. And that's work changes every year dramatically. She really believes in like, once you've gotten this down, move on, don't repeat yourself. And that's been a model to me. But so she was very excited at the idea. I was taking on a new subject at this point where I had a very comfortable niche in the old subject. You know, I didn't, there was no, no pressure for me to mess with things. On the other hand, she thought this could be destabilizing. I mean, if one of us has a big experience that turns out to be transformative and the other one doesn't, what does that mean? So, you know, she was worried it would change me.

I think she didn't- And change you together. And change us together. What she didn't account for is the possibility that it might change me for the better and make me a better husband. And I think if you asked her, she would say that. I mean, it's easy for me to say she's not here. I think that if you asked her and I've asked her, you know, that I'm more open, I'm more emotionally available, I'm less defensive. I mean, you know,

these are not giant shifts. They're subtle shifts, but they're real and more patient. So it did lead to a certain kind of reset. It wasn't so powerful that it was destabilizing. And indeed, it was all in positive directions. I think openness is a really key term for what psychedelics seem to do to people. And indeed, there's some research suggesting that that personality trait and openness is one of the five big personality traits. These are hard to change in adults, by the way. Personality is pretty much fixed in your early 20s. The idea that you could have a statistically meaningful change in one domain, openness, in the course of what is a single experience or two experiences is pretty striking. That research hasn't been reproduced,

but I think it's definitely worth looking at. So, and my wife participated in the sense that we did have one journey together that I describe in the book. But she also participated in that she really helped me make sense of the experience. She was the first person I told, you know, I'd come home after having one of these big days. And I'd had this, you know, confusing and profound experience that I was trying to sort out, integration basically. And we would always have a meal that night and sit at the table for hours and I would tell the whole story. And, you know, as we tell narrative, we interpret things. We make judgments as to what's important, what's less important. And that process, which she helped me

through because she could connect the dots and say, oh, well, of course you turned into your grandfather because you had this relationship to him and this was unresolved or whatever. I mean, she knows me really well. We've been together since we were in college. So she played a role in making meaning out of the experience. And that is part of the experience. So it wasn't like something I went off and did on my own. Yeah. Do you feel like this would have been a different book? Not because you now have different, now you can write about the experience yourself firsthand.

Okay, so we know it would be different because of that. Do you feel like this would have been a different book because the nature of actually having experienced these substances yourself in some way changed you in a way that you wrote it differently, you write differently, you see or experience differently? That's an interesting question. Terry Gross asked the same question this morning, and I was a bit at a loss about it. The parts of the book I had the most trepidation about approaching was the trips. You know, it's hard to write well. You think about people telling you about their dreams.

It's pretty boring. And you can really lose people. And I've seen a lot of really bad trip reports online. And talking about a mystical experience can sound really empty. And I've read mystical experiences, and they never really resonated with me. So, but in the event, I actually thoroughly enjoyed writing the trip reports and got a lot out of it. And I think I found a voice where I could do it and be inside them in their full weirdness yet outside them as a normal person and go back and forth between those two perspectives. So it was a huge literary challenge. The fact that, you know, whether I succeeded in

it or not, the reader will decide. But I was satisfied with the way I was able to get this on paper, that there was a truth to them. This is really what it was like, even when it was ineffable. This is how it was ineffable. And whether the drugs helped me with that, in some sense, maybe they gave me the courage to try and throw myself into it and not care what people thought. Because the first draft, you know, you just have to, it's an act of faith that anyone's going to give a shit about your trip. But it's your defense, your defenses that would keep you from trying, right? Fear of failure. And I just jumped into the deep end of the pool. So you'll see for yourself

whether it worked out. Yeah. Do you, now reflecting on this, do you feel called to continue to be a psychonaut? You know, I'm not sure. I don't need to do it again. I got a lot out of it. On the other hand, the more time elapses from when I did it to now, the more curious I am to do it. So I mentioned my dad died in January. And I know if I had another experience, it would be a way to communicate with him. And I don't mean in some seance-y way, but that he would be present to me and it would be useful in resolving everything that happened. So I can, if they were legal, and I have to be very careful now because I've confessed to all these, you know, offenses. If it were legal, I could see, I met some people who have a psychedelic experience on their birthday

every year. And it's just kind of an annual stock taking. And that struck me as about right. I could see that as something I might want to do. Whether I will or not, I don't know. And I'd feel more comfortable doing it if it were legal. Without doubt, there's more value to be gained from it. You know, there's more to be learned. It's not like you get the whole story and you're done. But I got what I needed for this point in my life and for this project. Yeah. And it's the type of thing where it seems, and you write about this and there's been plenty sort of shared about this. And maybe this is one the type of thing where it seems, and you write about this and there's been plenty sort of shared about this. It's, and maybe this is one of the mythologies around that also is that it's a gateway drug or that it's addictive. And in fact, it seems that it's almost

the exact opposite. Yeah. No, your, your first reaction having completed a psychedelic journey is not to ever do it again. It's very intense. You're exhausted. You're emotionally wrung out. You have all this work to do, making sense of it, that you can't imagine doing it again. It's the way women talk about childbirth, right? I mean, you know, eventually you get around to it and you forget the painful parts and you proceed. And something like that, I think seems to

happen with psychedelics. So no animals given, you know, psychedelics with the old lever, don't press it more than once. They don't seek to have the experience again. And so I don't think we have to be too concerned about people getting addicted to psychedelics. Yeah. When you write a book like this and you devote a chunk of years of your life and self-experimentation, it's big. It's a huge commitment. So when you then turn around and then, like you've shared, this is the most personal thing you've written. You've written a lot of personal stuff, but this is the most vulnerable thing I've seen you write. For you to be on the line like that, what do you hope happens by putting this into the world? Well, I hope that it generates support for the research because I think as a culture,

this is a really important project to figure out what these molecules have to teach us and whether they can heal us. That's really important. I hope other people will be more candid too about putting their own experiences out there. Many, many people have had a powerful psychedelic experience at some point in their lives. In many cases, it set them on their course. It changed them in some ways. But there's a stigma against talking about them, partly because they're illegal, partly because it was the 60s thing. And so people have put their psychedelic experience in this box labeled weird psychedelic experience, and they haven't really taken it out either to share it or understand it.

And so I'm hoping by trying to talk about psychedelics in a very non-moralistic way, in a very straightforward way as tools and how useful are these tools, it will encourage more people to take out their experiences too and figure out what they mean and share them with other people. That would be a good outcome. In fact, I've been working with Medium, the medium.com, the website, to create a space where people could tell their stories. And I think it would be useful, especially the transformative stories. And getting people out of the closet

is how you bring about change. And as long as people stay closeted out of fear, it's very hard to bring about social change. Yeah. So why don't we come full circle? So the name of this is Good Life Project. So if I offer out the phrase to you, to live a good life, what comes up? Well, you know, I think a good life depends on self-knowledge. I don't

think you can have a good life without knowing yourself or trying at least to know yourself. And these are tools that help you. I mean, I learned things about myself I didn't know before. So self-knowledge and the good life, I think, cannot be separated. And this is one tool. There are other tools. Meditation can get you there too. Travel can get some people there. There's lots of ways to achieve self-knowledge. But in all cases, it means throwing over our habitual ways of perceiving things and finding ourselves at a vantage where we can see ourselves freshly, you know, renovate our psychic lives by standing back.

Thank you. Thank you very much. Hey, if you're still listening, thank you, thank you, thank you. I love that you've enjoyed this episode so much that you're still here. That's awesome. You are awesome. And while we're wrapping things up, might as well share a quick shout out to our really fantastic brand partners. If you dig this show, and I'm guessing you do because you're still here,

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It's also the thinnest Apple Watch ever, making it even more comfortable on your wrist, whether you're running, swimming, or sleeping. And it's the fastest-charging Apple Watch, getting you eight hours of charge in just 15 minutes. The Apple Watch Series X. Available for the first time in glossy jet black aluminum. Compared to

previous generations, iPhone XS or later required. Charge time and actual results will vary. Mayday, mayday. We've been compromised. The pilot's a hitman. I knew you were gonna be fun. On January 24th. Tell me how to fly this thing. Mark Wahlberg. You know what the difference between me

and you is? You're gonna die. Don't shoot him, we need him! Y'all need a pilot? Flight Risk.