TED Radio Hour - Through the Looking Glass

Episode Date: July 21, 2023

Original broadcast date: Friday, March 19, 2021. Our senses can only take us so far in understanding the world. But with the right tools, we can dig deeper. This hour, TED speakers take us through the looking glass, where we explore new frontiers. Guests include astrophysicist Emily Levesque, wildlife filmmaker Ariel Waldman, psychedelic-assisted psychotherapist Rick Doblin and science fiction author Charlie Jane Anders.TED Radio Hour+ subscribers now get access to bonus episodes, with more ideas from TED speakers and a behind the scenes look with our producers. A Plus subscription also lets you listen to regular episodes (like this one!) without sponsors. Sign-up at: plus.npr.org/ted See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences.NPR Privacy Policy

This is the TED Radio Hour. Each week, groundbreaking TED Talks. Our job now is to dream big. Delivered at TED conferences. To bring about the future we want to see. Around the world. To understand who we are. From those talks, we bring you speakers and ideas that will surprise you.

You just don't know what you're going to find. Challenge you. We truly have to ask ourselves, like, why is it noteworthy? And even change you. I literally feel like I'm a different person. Yes. Do you feel that way? Ideas worth spreading.

From TED and NPR. I'm Anoush Zamorodi. And I want to start the show on a mountaintop in Chile, 8,000 feet above sea level at Las Campanas Observatory. Yes, Las Campanas is in the northern part of the Chile, in what we call the North, the Chico, the small north. This is Oscar Duhald. He's an instrument and operation specialist, and before that, he was a telescope operator there.

As telescope operator, I was in charge to guide the telescope during the night. On February 24, 1987, Oscar was working his usual shift, guiding the telescope by hand, which he says is exhausting. And we start to observe about 22 hours, 21, 70 hours. and by 2 a.m., I say it's enough, I deserve to have a coffee at this time. So he gets his coffee and heads outside for a break. And all the sky, especially in the southern, you see a lot of stars, especially here in Chile. The sky was beautiful, like summer sky, Las Campanas. And high above, Oscar sees our neighboring galaxy, the large Magellanic cloud.

He had spent the previous few years. taking detailed images of this galaxy. For that reason, I recognize very well that part of the sky. And around the LMC, the large Magellani clouds, there is only one bright star. And I use that star always for focus the telescope. But when Oscar looks up this time, something is different.

Immediately, I recognize a new star there that I was sure wasn't there before. A new star. So Oscar tells Barry Madur, one of the astronomers about it, and then realizes it actually may be a supernova, an exploding star. Barry, look at me, he said, Oscar, a supernova at the LMC. Well, it's difficult, but not impossible. So you actually spotted a supernova just by looking up into the sky, no telescope.

Well, at that time, I didn't realize how powerful my eyes was. It's not easy to recognize a new star in any place of the sky. And in that moment, the excitement started. I say, well, we did. Oscar became the only living person on the planet to discover a supernova with The Naked Eye, our oldest tool for peering into the universe. For millennia, people have been studying the stars with the naked eye. And it's really astonishing to look at what people were able to discover and what people

were able to learn just through stargazing. This is Emily Lavec. She's an astrophysicist, and she writes about the history of astronomy. Ironically, the first instances of sort of using telescopes for astronomy began just a few years after, the last naked-eye supernova. There was a naked-eye supernova in 1604. And just a few years after that, we started using telescopes to study the universe. And then it was 300-odd years later in 1987 when Oscar Duhaldi saw another naked-eye

supernova. And now we had these beautiful modern telescopes at our disposal to try and study it. So you can see why that would have been such an exciting discovery when it happened. Our senses can only take us so far in understanding the world. world around us. But with the right tools, we can look further, see deeper, and push past those limits. We can venture into uncharted territory. Are we alone in the universe? And ask questions we didn't even know we had. Where did we come from? Where is the universe going? What is our place in it? Because sometimes, big discoveries only happen if we're willing to fall down the rabbit hole.

I just about fainted, I feel like. Give us something to reach for. I think we could talk about the human mind. unconscious as the final frontier. And something to dream of. So today on the show, we're traveling through the looking glass to explore strange new worlds using telescopes, microscopes, and even our unconscious minds. But first, back to Emily Lavec. She says that long before Oscar Duhaldi spotted the supernova with his naked eye, astronomers were using something almost as primitive to make sense of the sky.

small plates of glass. Astronomers were using these very delicate glass plates to capture images from telescopes. The plates were chemically treated so they would respond to light. And then when you loaded one of these plates into a telescope's camera and opened the shutter, you would get this exquisite little black and white image

of whatever the telescope was pointed at. Needless to say, these fragile pieces of glass were pretty hard to work with. Astronomers would mess with the chemical treatment that dictated how the plates responded to light. They would slice them down to size to fit into the cameras. They would do all this work in the dark because once you expose a plate to light, it starts to darken. But scientists made huge discoveries with these glass plates, including one in 1923 by someone you may have heard of before. Edwin Hubble.

Most people know the name Hubble because of our wonderful space telescope that we have right now. But Edwin Hubble was an astronomer in the first half of the 20th century, and one of his biggest discoveries was that there are other galaxies beyond our own. Early in his career, sort of early in Hubble's time, we thought that our galaxy, the Milky Way, was possibly the whole universe. And Hubble got observations of one of our neighboring galaxies, the Andromeda galaxy with glass plates. At the time, Andromeda was referred to as the great Androbina nebula, and people weren't quite sure what it was. And Hubble's observations with glass plates meant that he was able to estimate the distance to Andromeda and demonstrate that it must be incredibly far away. It had to be another galaxy. So Hubble made this discovery almost a hundred years ago.

But the images that we have of Andromeda today, they are so different. they are so detailed compared to when we had to use those glass plates, right? Yeah. So if you Google it, you can actually probably find a picture of the glass plate that Hubble used to make his discovery. And if you look at that plate, you can see these sort of wisps of spiral arms and this hint of what we know today looks like a galaxy. But if you just look up a big modern photograph of Andromeda, you'll probably see observations with the Hubble Space Telescent. scope. So a very different type of humble observation. And nowadays, we can pinpoint and study individual stars in Andromeda down to really exquisite detail. We can study very dim stars in the

galaxy. We can watch how the stars move. It's really just amazing how much detail we can now achieve with the observing tools that we have available to us today. Here's Emily Levec on the TED stage showing a photo of the Vera Rubin observable. Observatory in Chile. This telescope will photograph the entire southern sky every few days, over and over, following a preset pattern for 10 years. Computers and algorithms affiliated with the observatory will then compare every pair of images taken of the same patch of sky, looking for anything that's gotten brighter or dimmer,

like a variable star, or looking for anything that's appeared, like a supernova. Right now, we discover about a thousand supernovae every year. The Rubin Observatory will be capable of discovering a thousand supernovae every night. It's going to dramatically change the face of astronomy and of how we study things to change in the sky, and it will do all of this, largely without much human intervention at all.

It will follow that preset pattern and computationally find anything that's changed or appeared. So it sounds like telescopes today, almost remove all of the human aspects of stargazing. But Oscar Duhaldi used the most basic tool available, his eyes. Is there still room for spontaneous observation in astronomy? Yeah. So we think of the story of Oscar discovering a supernova with the naked eye as this very unusual one-off.

And it was, he was the only living person on the planet to discover a supernova with the naked eye in hundreds of years. But naked eye astronomy can still sometimes be kind of cool. And the best recent example of this is actually something that happened about a year and a half ago to the star Beteljuice. So a lot of people know Beteljuice. It's the bright red star in one of the shoulders of the constellation Orion. And in the fall of 2019, Beteljuice started to get dramatically dimmer to the point where you could notice it with your naked eye. and amateur astronomers and small telescope users were the ones who started spotting this. So my colleagues and I were able to really on short notice snatch these brief moments of time

on telescopes to try and point to Beteljuice while it was this dim to try and figure out what was going on. I have a lot of people ask me, you know, how do I get into stargazing? How do I get into astronomy? And there's sometimes an assumption that you have to run out and buy an expensive. intensive telescope. But you can enjoy astronomy with just your eyes and just enjoy how beautiful the sky looks and try to look for patterns and look for unusual things. If you have a pair of binoculars, you can get just amazing views of things like the moon. So it's a really wonderful pursuit, even if all you're just doing is looking up and enjoying how beautiful it is.

So I have to ask Emily, I mean, in this full confession here, I get kind of freaked out. when I spend any time doing astronomy. I think the existential nature of trying to peer into the universe, like it kind of messes with my head, to be honest. How do you deal with that? It's funny because I've heard several people talk about space and the universe as being scary and to the scale of it as just being stunning. And I think it's something that a lot of astronomers never really forget,

but that we get used to or that we put aside. And I talked about Beteljuice and the fact that it had suddenly dimmed. And something that we tucked to the back of our minds was that Beteljuice is 645 light years away. The light that we were studying from Beteljuice had left that star 645 years earlier. And whenever you observe an object in the night sky, you're kind of looking back in time. It's like jumping into a tiny time machine. But once in a while, someone would ask me, you know, do you think Beteljuice has already died as a supernova? Do you think the star's already gone?

And the light from that supernova just isn't going to get here for another 100 or 200 or 600 years. And I always think, you know, maybe it did, but we won't know for a few hundred years. So let's work at what we have. And that's just an astonishing scale to be working on and dealing with as part of your day-to-day job. That's Emily Leveck. She's an astrophysicist, and her book is called The Last Stargazers. You can see her full talk at TED.com. On the show today, through the looking glass. I'm Manus Zamoroti, and you're listening to The Ted Radio Hour from NPR. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Manus Shumerodi. Today on the show, we are venturing through the looking glass, extending our perception and exploring. strange new worlds, including here on Earth. So when you land on the packed snow runway in McMurdo, yeah, you don't see anything. It's just snow. So there's no trees, there's no bushes, there's no grass, there's none of that.

Most people think of Antarctica as really desolate. You know, it's covered with over a mile of ice in many locations. It's the coldest continent. It's also extremely dry. It's a polar desert. But the thing that I feel like a lot of people don't know about Antarctica is that it's really brimming with life in a lot of different locations. It's just that most of it is invisible to us. You would need to have a microscope in order to see them. This is Ariel Waldman. She's a wildlife filmmaker at the microbial scale. And I'm an advisor to NASA and I'm also an Antarctic explorer. Ariel first became interested in Antarctic microbes back in 2013. She was working with NASA, and she met astrobiologists who study Antarctica's extreme conditions and the life

forms that actually thrive there. I had learned that a lot of biologists go to Antarctica, but they very rarely ever take any photos or videos of the creatures that they study there. And so I kind of saw an opportunity to really help both scientists and help people, you know, around the world actually get to see all this amazing stuff. So that realization, that is what inspired you to basically become the first filmmaker to document these hidden ecosystems. But how did you go from that inspiration to making it happen? It could not have been easy.

Going to Antarctica just required a lot of problems. preparation. I prepared for months. And this was after it took me five years of applying to go to Antarctica and working towards becoming a wildlife filmmaker at the microbial scale. And so I was self-taught in microscopy. And then I ended up joining the San Francisco Microscopical Society, which I am now the president of, super geeky. Whoa. So you had to become an expert, Microscopist. Am I saying that right? Yes, exactly. Exactly. And so do you remember, like, do you remember what it was like when you first got to put a sample under the microscope in Antarctica and peer into this tiny alien world for the first time? I just about fainted, I feel.

The very first sample I got to look at was from divers who had gone under the sea ice. And I had an idea of, like, a few of the different critters that I was going to see. But when I put the first sample under the microscope, I saw the. these beautiful diatoms, which are, you know, microalgae with glass shells, which are just beautiful. They're geometric gems of the sea and of different areas of water around the earth. But I found diatoms that had triangular shapes, and they just looked like they had been manufactured by humans. They're so gorgeous. And I, yeah, I don't know. It's hard to put it into words just how excited I was. Okay, so talk us through it. Like, what was the plan for you and your trusty microscopes?

So the plan in Antarctica was to take my microscopes around to different locations and really be able to find life that was under the ice. So I was looking for life underneath the sea ice. I was looking for life embedded inside glacier ice, life that was near frozen lakes. And I would go around and I would take samples from different locations. And some of the areas where I sampled that were more hardcore to get to, I would join up with another team. And one of those hardcore places was beneath the ice, like into the water. This was absolutely freezing water, right? Absolutely freezing water. I believe the water is negative to Celsius. So because it's salt water, it can go a little bit beyond the normal freezing point of water. And there are divers in Antarctica that,

regularly go down under nine feet thick of sea ice and explore the ocean down there. It's really amazing. I was watching these divers going like, why would anyone want to do that? That is freezing cold. Like there's nothing that can be that worth it. But thankfully, there's this metal tube that McMurdo Station puts into the ice. And you can crawl down this tube. And at the bottom of this tube, you're embedded between the sea ice and the sea floor. So you're kind of floating there, so to speak, with windows where you're able to see all of the life on the sea floor. And you can hear all of these amazing wettles seals, which sound like synthesizers all around you. It's really magical and it really changed my perspective on why anyone would ever want to be a diver in Antarctica.

So I could help direct divers to take collections from the sea ice ceiling and from the seafloor. And then I would take the samples back to the main laboratory at McMurdo Station and filter them and look at them under the microscope as freshly as I could so that I could see them interacting in the way that they would interact in their home environment. So tell us about the microbes that you found and the footage that you took of them. We're actually going to look at them and describe some of them here. And the first one is a tardigrade. Ariel, what is a tardigrade? So a tardigrade is also known as a water bear or sometimes even a moss piglet. And they are tiny microscopic animals.

They are actually animals. They have eight legs. They're incredibly cute. They look like little gummy bears with claws, I always like to say. They've got two little eye spots. Tartagrade means slow walk. So they are not the quickest microbes that you'll see under the microscope. But they're just adorable.

And they're famous for being hardcore, for being able to survive extreme cold or extreme dryness, radiation, and lots of other things. So it looks like to me, okay, yes, a gummy bear. You say gummy bear. I think it also looks like a manatee with eight arms, but then see-through and microscopic. and it's just kind of moving around with its little arms. What is it doing? Yeah, so the little claws on tardigrades are really good at going through moss. So the most common environment that you'll find these tardigrades in is moss.

And those claws allow them to be really nimble. But when you put one on a glass slide, it has trouble. It's kind of like an ice skating ring for it. So what you're seeing is a tardigrade, which is able to navigate through moss fairly easily. but once it tries walking over the glass, it slips and slides and has trouble getting traction. Wow, so much going on for the little tardigrade. Okay, so let's take a look at the next one. I'm just going to describe it.

It's kind of oblong, translucent with what looks like these little green, I don't know, beach balls, kind of moving around inside of it. Oh, and it's moving a bit. It's got a little shimmy. What is happening here, Ariel? Who is this? Yeah, so this is a ciliate. It's a type of protis.

and protists, they're not animals, they're not plants, and they're not fungi. They are their own thing. And you saw it just here, poop out like a little piece of stuff from its stomach. It pooped. What? This is what I love about ciliates. They're called cillates because they have cilia on their outside, which just means little fringy bits that are like little hairs that they use to get around and feel for food and other things like that. But the thing I love about ciliots is that, you know, you can see their entire digestive system. Pretty much it's just a circle of digestion that you're looking at. Yeah. You know, earlier in the show, we spoke to Emily Leveck. She's an astronomer. And it strikes me that you both have been transported into places that it's kind of hard to believe they exist.

Like without seeing them, you may not believe them. Is that what happened to you with this project? I feel like it did. I feel that, you know, it's the same as a telescope. It really shows you another world. But I think microscopes even more so because this is the world that you already live in. So instead of showing you this far away distant planet and imagining what that is like, you already know what Earth is like.

It's just that you don't know that you're walking by entire zoos of tiny animals every day. You know, Tardagrades, while they're famous for surviving these extreme environments, they live in moss everywhere across the planet. So every single sidewalk crack that you walk by that has a little piece of moss embedded inside it, there's most likely a lot of tardigrades in there. And this is what I love about microscopes. It gives you much more insight into your experience as a human on Earth, which is a pretty amazing planet when you study space.

And so has that outlook and this experience changed you in some way and where you're headed? For me, my own journey in microscopes, I think, is really growing. I'm wanting to do more field microscopy in different locations. So whether it be going into prairies or the rainforests of Madagascar, it's very clear that being able to go into the field and look at the microscopic critters that are around and being able to showcase that to the world is something that's really useful because there's just so much that, you know, we enjoy from BBC documentaries of wildlife. And we should have that same experience for the microscopic world around us. And that's really where I'm hoping to take everything. That's Ariel Waldman. She's a wildlife filmmaker at the

microbial scale. You can see all her microbes at life under the ice.org. And you can watch her talk at ted.com. On the show today, through the looking glass. And so far, we've taken the looking glass quite literally, scientists peering into space or magnifying the tiny universes that exist in a drop of water. But how about we turn that looking glass inward and into our own minds? I think we could talk about the human mind, the unconscious, as the final frontier. This is therapist Rick Doblin. And what we need to do is to engage in a deep understanding and exploration of the unconscious. And Rick researches the final frontier of the unconscious with psychedelics.

Preparing for this talk has been scarier for me than preparing for LSD therapy. Here he is on the TED stage. Psychedelics are to the study of the mind, what the microscope is to biology, and the telescope is to astronomy. Dr. Stanislav Groff spoke those words. Right now, there are clinical trials using psychedelic drugs in conjunction with therapy to treat PTSD, social anxiety, substance abuse, alcoholism, and suicide. And so far, the results are promising.

Psychedelic psychotherapy is an attempt to go after the root causes of the problems with just relatively few administrations, as contrasted to most of the psychiatric drugs used today that are mostly just reducing symptoms and are meant to be taken. taken on a daily basis. But changing people's minds over the safety and efficacy of psychedelic drugs has taken decades. In the 1950s and 60s, psychedelic research flourished and showed great promise for the fields of psychiatry, psychology, and psychotherapy. But psychedelics leaked out of the research settings and began to be used by the counterculture and by the anti-Vietnam War movement. And so there was a backlash.

America's public enemy number one in the United States is drug abuse. So there's this huge backlash. There's lots of fear. There's cautionary tales around psychedelics. But despite that, you decided to try it anyway. What was your experience like? Well, I felt like this experience opened me up to emotions. It started making me more balanced and was really starting to.

make me think of existential questions and who am I and where am I and where did I come from? When you shift from your ego orientation where you don't see things from your individual perspective so much, you're more a sense of the group and of how we're all interconnected. And this is only a few years after we had the first images of the earth from space. And so my kind of awakening to psychedelics was you could say humanity's awakening to our place in the universe. And so this was like a drowning sailor in a crazy world finding this life preserver, which for me was LSD. So, okay, so there probably were a lot of college students who dropped acid and then went on to live a life. But you actually decided to dedicate your life to researching the effects of various different psychedelics on people's mental health.

Tell me, like, how did that happen? Well, when I had this experience with psychedelics and thought, just in the early stages, this could be a contribution to helping people overcome their sense of separateness and to build a healthier world. I thought, this is what I want to do. And so that's where at age 18, I decided to go through my own psychedelic therapy, become a psychedelic therapist, and try to bring back psychedelic research. Rick started down a long path to become a psychedelic assessment. assisted psychotherapist. But he realized his dream couldn't come true if these drugs were illegal. And so he founded a group to help legalize psychedelics for medicinal use. Just a warning, parts of this next story may be hard to hear.

It all started with one particular drug, MDMA, and Rick's friend named Marcella. Marcella, who suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder from a violent sexual assault. Marcella and I were introduced in 1984 when MDMA was still legal, but it was beginning also to leak out of therapeutic circles. Marcella had tried MDMA in a recreational setting, and during that, her past trauma flooded her awareness, and it intensified her suicidal feelings. During our first conversation, I shared that when MDMA is taken therapeutically, it can reduce the fear of difficult emotions, and she could help move forward past her trauma.

I asked her to promise not to commit suicide if we were to work together, and she agreed and made that promise. During her therapeutic sessions, Marcella was able to process her trauma more fluidly, more easily. And so being able to share the story and experience the feelings and the thoughts in her mind freed her,

was able to decide that she wanted to move forward with her life. Now, 35 years later, after Marcella's treatment, she's actually a therapist training other therapists to help people overcome PTSD with MDMA. So this experience really changed both of your lives. And in particular, though, it really launched you on a path to try and legitimize MDMA as a therapeutic drug. And I wonder, can you just tell me more about how it actually works in the brain? Yeah. So what we do know is that MDMA releases serotonin, dopamine, noraphenaprin, sort of neurotransmitters. It also releases a lot of hormones and in particular oxytocin.

As well, MDMA impacts how the energy is distributed in the brain. And so it reduces activity in the amygdala, which is the fear, processing part of the brain. It increases activity in the prefrontal cortex where we think logically, and it increases connectivity between the amygdala and the hippocampus where memories are put into long-term storage. So the problem of PTSD is that the trauma from the past never really seems like it's in the past. It colors the present, and people see the present through the lens of the past, and the lens of the past trauma. And so in this complex, Neurtransmiter release, hormonal release, energy that's shifted in how the brain is processing.

It's actually in some ways an ideal drug for PTSD. More from Rick Doblin and the clinical trials happening today to treat PTSD with psychedelics when we come back. On the show today, through the looking glass. I'm Manus Shumeroody, and this is the TED Radio Hour from NPR. Hey, before we get back to the show, a quick note. If you like the interview you just heard about the amazing Antarctic microscopic organisms, then you should check out the next TED Radio Hour Plus episode. Filmmaker Ariel Waldman went back to Antarctica a few months ago

and studied a whole new cast of critters, and she told one of our producers all about them. That is coming your way on Wednesday, July 26th. If you're not a TED Radio Hour Plus supporter, you should join your fellow listeners to get bonus content like this and get all of our episodes sponsor-free. Just go to plus.npr.org slash TED or give it a try right in the Apple Podcasts app. And thank you. It's the TED Radio Hour from NPR. I'm Anoush Zamorodi.

And on the show today, through the looking glass. We're taking a look at the world, the universe, and our own minds through specially built tools. And some people believe a tool to look through one's own mind is the psychedelic drug MDMA. It's the most gentle of all the psychedelics. And MDMA was sort of the best for the mission of trying to bring back from the underground psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. This again is Rick Doblin. He's a therapist and researcher at the forefront of psychedelic-assisted therapy. Rick and his team have spent decades running clinical trials and crafting therapies using MDMA to treat PTSD.

One of his patients was Tony. Tony was a veteran in one of our pilot studies. The treatment that Tony was to receive was three and a half months long. But during that period of time, he would only get MDMA on three occasions. We call our treatment approach interdirected therapy in that we support the patient to experience whatever is emerging within their minds or their bodies. During Tony's first MDMA session, he lay on the couch,

he had eyeshades on, he listened to music, and he would speak to the therapist whenever he felt that he needed to. In a moment of calmness and clarity, Tony shared that he had really, realized that his PTSD was a way of connecting him to his friends. It was a way of honoring the memory of his friends who had died. He was able to shift and see himself through the eyes of his dead friends, and he realized that they would not want him to suffer, to squander his life.

They would want him to live more fully, which they were unable to do. And so he realized that there was a new way to honor their memory, which was to live as fully as possible. That was seven years ago. Tony is still free of PTSD and is helping others less fortunate than himself in Cambodia. I mean, it's an incredible story. But, you know, was Tony a special case? How has the program done overall?

What is the success rate? So in phase two, we looked at the control groups. And what it turned out is that 23% at the two-month follow-up no longer qualified for a diet. diagnosis of PTSD with therapy, basically. But when we add MDMA to the mix, now 56% no longer have PTSD. But even more important than that is the 12-month follow-up. And at the 12-month follow-up, two-thirds no longer had PTSD. Okay. So you've seen it work in a therapeutic setting. But that doesn't mean that it would work for everyone or that there aren't any risks involved, right? Yeah. So I think that psychedelics have a role to play in the survival and thriving of humanity,

but it doesn't mean everybody should take them. And it also doesn't mean that psychedelics are the only way to get to these experiences. So I think one of the big mistakes of the 60s was that the advocate said, I've taken psychedelics. I know more than anybody, unless you've taken psychedelics, you don't really know what's going on, and exaggerated the benefits and minimized the risks. In the face of the government that was getting more and more scared about psychedelics and counterculture, they were denying the benefits, suppressing the research and exaggerating the risks. Okay, so then what would you say is the biggest hurdle for you right now, Rick? Like, is it to be able to get MDMA into the hands of therapists and then to patients?

Is it still regulations and the government? Well, in the process of this, we have basically changed the attitudes of regulators. They actually would like us to succeed. I think the biggest concern that we have now is public education. It was the public fear in the 60s and 70s that led to the wiping out of psychedelic research around the world. The regulators were following sort of the attitudes of the public who got frightened about problem use of psychedelics. But there's a general sense now that we are in the midst of a massive crisis of opiate overdoses, fentanyl overdoses, alcoholism, deaths of despair. The need is greater than ever before.

The war on drugs is seen more and more around the world as not a solution to drug abuse, but as a contributor to drug abuse and to the black market. So all of this, I think, is that public education is the most important thing for us to do now. I'm proud to say that we have now initiated our phase three studies. And if approved, the only therapist that will be able to directly administer it to patients are going to be therapists that have been through our training program, and they will only be able to administer MDMA under direct supervision in clinic settings. We anticipate that over the next several decades, there will be thousands of psychedelic clinics established,

at which therapists will be able to administer Mdema, psilocybin, ketamine, and other psychedelics to potentially millions of patients. And now, if you all just look under your seats. Just joking. Thank you. That's Rick Doblin. He's founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. You can see his full talk at TED.com.

Throughout this episode, we've been talking about the looking glass, a tool to enter another reality, whether it's the big, wide universe, the tiniest microbe, or our own mind. And now we're going to try something a little different. We're going to do our best to take you through the looking glass with a more figurative tool, the story. In this case, a science fiction story that ventures into the future. Science fiction is really a mirror. I think science fiction shows us us. This is sci-fi writer Charlie Jane Anders. Good science fiction allows us to see ourselves in a lot of different contexts, and it kind of allows us to kind of think beyond our narrow ideas of who we are as a species, as a people,

and become more accepting of different ways of being a human being. So Charlie Jane, you are going to read one of your stories for us. But before you do that, just I want to understand a little more about. about how you came to use stories. My understanding is that you struggled in school when you were a kid because of a learning disability, and then you had this one teacher who kind of showed you how to use stories to cope? She basically, part of how she got me to be able to read and write was by getting me to write down stories. She kind of taught me that the way to deal with schoolwork, but also just the way to deal with life,

was to be creative and to make up stories and to imagine the silliest, weirdest, kind of most colorful stuff that you could and that that would get you through it. What role do you think now that science fiction is playing in society? I mean, the world has changed since I was a kid in terms of our lives being on screens, concerns about climate change. Do you think that the role of fiction, specifically science fiction, has altered or changed? I do, actually. I think that back in the sort of mid to late 20th century, the role of science fiction was to kind of, you know, be a cheerleader for the space age.

And I think that science fiction really is essential right now to help us grapple with a time in which things change so quickly that, you know, right now 2019 feels like a long distant era. And, you know, 2010 feels like, you know, a thousand years ago. Amen to that. You know, you're reminding me of in 2019, my then 12-year-old son and I decided to read Ready Player 1 together. And it's this kid who basically goes to school and lives his entire social life online wearing these goggles. And he has to remember to like get up and exercise his body and he has to remember to eat. And I was like, oh, that's awful. And then a year later, my son is now doing all of his socializing and schooling online.

and I have to remind him to get up to eat and to exercise his body. There is an amazing ability for science fiction writers to be able to predict the future. Is that part of what you want to do? Is paint pictures for people as what might be? Oh, wow. I think that a lot of what science fiction can do is just kind of inoculate us against possible futures and also help us to like see futures that we would like to work towards. And part of what's super exciting about speculative fiction right now is that you are getting a much wider range of voices being kind of brought into the mainstream of the genre.

And that means that we can imagine more interesting futures, more inclusive futures. And we get better real futures when everybody sees that the future belongs to all of us. Okay. So for this episode, we have asked you and you have generously agreed to read an excerpt from a story that you've written, which is a vision. of the future, where we actually survive climate change. Tell us more about this. Okay. I'm going to read an excerpt from a story called Because Change was the Ocean and we lived by her mercy. And it's a story that sort of takes place in the future after catastrophic climate change. And a lot of the story takes place in San Francisco where I live, but now San Francisco is an archipelago. It's a series of islands because most of the city is underwater. And

there's just like these little hills, and they're poking up above the water, but everything else is underwater. I couldn't deal with life in Fairbanks anymore. I grew up at the same time as the town, watched it go from regular city to mega city as I hit my early 20s. I lived in an old, decommissioned solar power station with five other kids, and we tried to make the loudest, most uncomforting music we could with a beat as relentless and merciless as the tides. We wanted to shake our cinderbiz, block walls and make people dance until their feet bled. But we sucked. We were bad at music and not quite dumb enough not to know it. We all wore big hoods and spiky shoes and we tried to make our own drums out of dry cloth and cracked wood. We read our poetry on Friday nights. There were

bookhouses along with stink tanks where you could drink up and listen to awful poetry about extinct animals. People came from all over because everybody had heard that Fairbanks was becoming the most civilized place on earth, and that's when I decided to leave town. I had this moment of looking around at my musician friends and my restaurant friends and our cool little scene and feeling like there had to be more to life than this. I hitched a ride down south and ended up in Olympia at a house where they were growing their own food and drugs and doing a way better job with the drugs than with the food. We were all staring upwards at the first cloud anybody had seen in weeks, trying to identify

what it could mean. When you hardly ever saw them, clouds had to be omens. We were all complaining about our dumb families, still watching that cloud warp and contort, and I found myself talking about how my parents only like to listen to that boring boo pop music with the same three or four major chords and that cruddy AAA, B, B, B, B, C, D, E, C, D, E, Rime Scheme, and how my mother insisted on saving every scrap of organic material we used and collecting every drop of rainwater. water. It's f***ing pathetic is what it is. They act like we're still living in the great decimation. They're just super traumatized, said this skinny gender freak named Juya, who stood nearby holding the bong. It's hard to even imagine. I mean, we're the first generation that just takes it for granted

that we're going to survive as like a species. Our parents, our grandparents, and their grandparents, they were all living like every day. Could be the day the planet finally got done with us. They didn't grow up having moisture condensers and mycoprotein rinses and skin suss. Yeah, whatever, I said. But what Julia said stuck with me because I had never thought of my parents as traumatized. I always thought they were just tightly wound and judgy. Julia had these two cones of dark twisty hair on Zirhead and a red pajama suit, and Zee was only a year or two older than me, but seemed a lot wiser.

I want to find all the music we used to have. I said, you know, the weird, noisy shit that made people's clothes fall off and their hairlight on fire. The rock and roll that just listening to it turned girls into boys. The songs that took away the fear of God. I've read about it, but I've never heard any of it, and I don't even know how to play it. Yeah, all their recordings and notations got lost in the dataclysm, Tudia said. They were in formats that nobody can read, or they got corrupted, or they were printed on these disks made out of petroleum. Those songs are gone forever.

I think they're under the ocean, I said. I think they're down there somewhere. So think about the way I said that helped Julia to reach a decision. Hey, I'm heading back down to the San Francisco archipelago in the morning. I got room in my car if you want to come with. Julia's car was an older solar model that had to stop every couple of hours to recharge, and the self-driving module didn't work so great. My legs were resting on a pile of old headmods and biofills,

plus these costumes that everybody used a few summers earlier that made your skin turn into snake skin that you could shed in one piece. So the upshot was, we had a lot of time to talk and hold hands and look at the endless golden landscape stretching off to the east. Julia had these big, bright eyes that laughed when the rest of Zerfeas was stone serious, and strong, tentative hands to hold me in place as the tie-beat of the car seat with fronds of algae.

I had never felt as safe and as dangerous as when I crossed the wasteland with Julia. We talked for hours about how the world needed new communities, new ways to breathe life into the ocean, new ways to be people. By the time we got to Bernal Island and the wrong-handed community, I was in love with Julia, deeper than I'd ever felt with anyone before. Julia up and left Bernal a week and a half later because Zee got bored again and I barely. even noticed that Zee was gone. By then, I was in love with a hundred other people, and they were all in love with me. Burnall Island was only accessible from one direction, from the big island in the middle, and only at a couple of times of day when they let the bridge down and turned off the moat. After a few days on Bernal, I stopped even noticing the other islands on our horizon, let alone

paying attention to my friends on social media talking about all the fancy new restaurants Fairbanks was getting. I was constantly having these intense, heartfelt moments, people in the wrong-headed crew. The ocean is our lover. You can hear it laughing at us. Jocondo was sort of the leader here. See, sometimes had a beard and sometimes a smooth, round face covered with perfect bright makeup. Here, eyes were as gray as the sea and just as unpredictable.

For decades, San Francisco and other places like it had been abandoned because the combination of seismic instability and a voracious, dead ocean made them too scary and risky. But that city down there, under the waves, that had been the place everybody came to from all over the world to find freedom. That legacy was ours now. That was author Charlie Jane Anders, reading an excerpt from her upcoming short story collection, even greater mistakes. Her next novel is called Victories Greater Than Death, and it comes out in April. You can see her talk at TED.com. Thank you so much for listening to our show this week through the looking glass.

To learn more about the people who were on it, go to ted.npr.org. And to see hundreds more TED talks, check out TED.com or the TED app. And if you've been enjoying the show, we would be so grateful if you left a review on Apple Podcasts. It is the best way for us to reach new listeners, which we really want to do. Our TED Radio production staff at NPR includes Jeff Rogers, Sanaz Meshkampur, Rachel Faulkner, Diba Motisham, James Delahousie, J.C. Howard, Katie Montalione, Maria Paz Gutierrez, Christina Kala, Matthew Cloutier, and Farah Safari with help from Daniel Shukin. Our intern is Janet Ujong Lee. Our theme music was written by Ramtin Arablewe. Our partners at TED are Chris Anderson, Colin Helms, Anna Feelein, and Michelle Quint.

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