The Dr. Hyman Show - The Reemergence Of Psychedelic Medicine For Anxiety, Depression, and End-of-Life Care

Episode Date: June 3, 2022

This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens and Rupa Health. Psychedelics have gotten a bad rap. Often associated with the small period of time they became popular in the 1960s, they were researched in clinical, cultural, and spiritual contexts for many decades prior to that. Now we are seeing an uptick in the interest of drugs like this, which include compounds like psilocybin from certain species of mushrooms, for therapeutic uses. Trials are finding amazing effects on anxiety, depression, PTSD, and fear of death by using psychedelics in a responsible and highly controlled environment.  In today’s episode, I talk with Dr. Anthony Bossis, Michael Pollan, and Rameshwar Das about the neurobiology of psychedelics, how they can help to shift mindset, and the story of Ram Dass.   Anthony P. Bossis, PhD, conducts FDA-approved clinical trials in the reemerging field of psychedelic research. He is a clinical psychologist and clinical assistant professor of psychiatry at NYU School of Medicine, where he investigates the effects of psilocybin, a naturally occurring compound found in specific species of mushrooms.   Michael Pollan is the author of the New York Times bestsellers Cooked, Food Rules, In Defense of Food, The Omnivore's Dilemma, The Botany of Desire, How to Change Your Mind, and This Is Your Mind on Plants.    Rameshwar Das has been navigating a spiritual path for 50 years. Ramesh met Ram Dass in 1968 and spent time with Neem Karoli Baba in India from 1970–72. He learned Vipassana meditation from Goenka in India. Ramesh has worked as an artist, photographer, environmentalist, and writer. He has collaborated on many projects with Ram Dass over the years, including the original Be Here Now and the Love Serve Remember recordings, and he has coauthored three books with Ram Dass: Be Love Now, Polishing the Mirror, and Being Ram Dass.   This episode is brought to you by Athletic Greens and Rupa Health. AG1 contains 75 high-quality vitamins, minerals, whole-food sourced superfoods, probiotics, and adaptogens to support your entire body. Right now when you purchase AG1 from Athletic Greens, you will receive 10 FREE travel packs with your first purchase by visiting athleticgreens.com/hyman. Rupa Health is a place where Functional Medicine practitioners can access more than 2,000 specialty lab tests from over 20 labs like DUTCH, Vibrant America, Genova, and Great Plains. You can check out a free, live demo with a Q&A or create an account at RupaHealth.com. Full-length episodes of these interviews can be found here: Dr. Anthony Bossis Michael Pollan Rameshwar Das

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functional medicine practitioners can access more than 2,000 specialty lab tests from over 20 labs like Dutch, Vibrant America, Genova, Great Plains, and more. It's 90% faster, letting you simplify the process of getting the functional tests you need and providing a noticeably better patient experience. This is really a very much needed option in the functional medicine space that I'm so excited about. You can check out our free live demo and a Q&A or create an account at rupahealth.com. That's R-U-P-A health.com. And now let's get back to this week's episode of The Doctor's Pharmacy. Hi, this is Lauren Feehan, one of the producers of The Doctor's Pharmacy podcast. Historically, humans have had a desire to change our consciousness, to alter our brain and our

mood, whether it is with drugs, food, or activities like meditation and breath work. Now, with re-emerging research on psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, there is promising evidence of the therapeutic benefits for mental health. In today's episode, we feature three conversations from the doctor's pharmacy about the role of psychedelics in quieting the ego, reducing anxiety, improving relationships, and more. Dr. Hyman speaks with Dr. Anthony Bossis on the neurobiology of psychedelics, with Michael Pollan on the effects of psychedelics on our relationships with nature and loved ones, and with Rameshwar Das on spiritual teacher, psychologist, and author Ram Das' psychedelic experiences. Let's dive in. So the avenue of sort of psychedelic research was

sort of started as a sort of almost a medical inquiry and got sidetracked. And now we're coming back into it. So is there an understanding of the biology of what's happening? Because it seems like we all have had in our lives a moment of mystical connection whether it's in the moment of love whether it's being on top of a mountain whether it's just some spontaneous experience that is fleeting and short-lived that we can't get back to but something's happening biochemically in our brain that's causing that so what what are the properties of these substances that do this and what is the neuro biochemistry of these states do we know yes we know a bit i'm not a neuroscientist but i'll get to that in a second but i i like that you mentioned that we all have these experiences

so they've been called different things peak experiences mystical numinous um and they occur naturally all the time children have them we all have them but you're right little brief glimpses meditation we're enraptured we're absorbed

in our experience yeah I mean the foundation of religion the saints and the mystics seem to have these naturally occurring right

meditation being in nature dancing there's a host of activities that could trigger a peak or mystical experience

Abraham Maslow the great American psychologist called them peak experiences and they were natural there's a host of activities that could trigger a peak or mystical experience. Abraham Maslow, the great American psychologist, called them peak experiences. And they were natural. There's a recent Pew study that shows that 49% of people report having mystical experiences in their lives. Just naturally. I mean, it's incredible. These medicines promote it in a very significant way, hours of the experience versus a few minutes. In terms of the neurobiology, we know that it activates upon a serotonergic receptor, which is the primary receptor for these medicines. When that receptor is blocked, the experiences don't happen the same way.

So it is serotonergically modulated, mediated. Is it like super Prozac? Well, you know, we know very little about the neuroscience, but we know the serotonin. And there's now speculation something called the default mode network gets quiet down, which is kind of the part of the brain that links to part of our mind that forms a sense of self, the so-called ego. And that quiets down, but other parts of the brain might be able to crosstalk in a more direct way. Well, essentially, you know, we as humans think that everything we see, feel, smell, touch here is all that there is. But we know that there are many other sensory experiences that we don't have the bandwidth for. Our spectrum of light, our spectrum of hearing, our spectrum of smell, our spectrum of temperature sensation.

I mean, snakes can actually have this massive ability to detect temperature changes so they can see if there's something warm around them to go bite or eat, you know, and yet we think what we see is all there is, right? It's a very interesting thing. And so, maybe these drugs actually help us expand our sensory ability to kind of process information or see different things or relate to what we're doing differently. It seems to do that, Mark. Yeah. It's easy to talk about the biology a lot because we can see that as well in terms of fMRIs and PET scans. What I find remarkable is that it seems to, again, trigger something that's naturally occurring in humans.

And do the fMRI and functional things actually show changes? They show parts of the brain light up that are similar to meditation studies as well. But again, I'm not the neuroscientist, so but there are these overlapping parts of the brain that we think are linked with both experiences. But I'm struck by is that we're wired for meaning, right? And these experiences,

meaning making, transcendence, ineffability, sacredness, awe, unity happen naturally. So something in our nature has us wired for these incredible experiences they seem pro-ethical and pro-social and right um i mean you said something really important which is they help you dissolve the ego because the sense of right we live in a very structured view of the world most of the time most of us with very limited understanding of our connection to

everything else so it's almost like we we live in this world where we're focused on our ego and our own life and our own needs and our own purpose and our own connections but not really understanding the the ways in which we're connected to everything that matters and i think that's what these drugs seem to do they seem to sort of break down and dissolve the ego, which can take decades of meditation. It's almost like a spiritual shortcut. Yeah. Is that a bad thing? I think it's a bad thing. I think you described it very well actually. I'm not going to be in a cave for nine years in the dark.

Right, right, right, right. 20 years of meditation practice. It does remove the, you know, part of the mystical experience definition is removes the observer observed kind of the boundaries, right? Yeah. It's like that joke about this guy on a news show, Asa Dailama. Have you heard about what kind of pizza the Dailama likes? And he goes, one with everything. Except Dailama didn't know what he was talking about. One with everything.

Right. But that oneness with everything is really, I mean, the cancer study, that was healing. I mean, part of this notion of transcendence, which is just incredible to hear the stories from these patients, they transcend this, whatever this me is, this body, right? And the attachments to identity, you know, you're a doctor, you're this, you're a man, begin to kind of dissolve or fade away.

So then what's left? If we lose all these attachments to the body, to identity, then what's left? And they experience that. And what they tell us, you know, often, is there's something more enduring within me or outside yeah biology outside my so we don't know what generates consciousness right yeah it's the brain or if it's somehow out there where this is a mediator for it and to hear people with cancer whose bodies beginning to fail

and may stop functioning death that i'm not just this body yeah i'm not this cancer it's incredible i'm not my mind i'm not my thoughts i'm not my emotions i'm not just this body. I'm not this cancer. It's incredible. I'm not my mind. I'm not my thoughts. I'm not my emotions. I'm not my body. I'm not this body.

So this body is breaking down and stopping to work. But I'm not that. I'm something else. And again, those are spiritual insights we see in religion as well, in terms of pure awareness or it's called different things, Brahman or Christ consciousness, Buddha nature. But to hear a person dying of cancer say that, and that alleviates their fear of death because I might be something more.

It's powerful. What a gift, right? What a gift. It's really, we hear that over and over in terms of those. It's interesting, too. The mediating factor in the research in a few of these studies, including the cancer study, is that the more robust the mystical experience, the greater increase in clinical outcome. In other words, the more they endorsed feelings of sacredness, transcendence,

unity, ineffability, these core constructs of a mystical experience. The greater the decrease in depression, anxiety, something called demoralization, an awful experience when you're dying, hopelessness. So again, we're worried for these experiences. The greater that experience, and then all have the mystical experience. There are different levels of... Is it dose dependent?

We don't think so. To a degree it is. I'll get into that in a second. But the greater that experience, when it's achieved, you get these clinical outcomes as well, which is remarkable. So that oneness with everything has kind of a 60s, the pizza story right now. But to experience that briefly for a few hours and come back and then report their experience

and then see these changes. Yeah. So we saw changes in depression, anxiety, demoralization for up to six months in 80% of the patients. And we're going to keep tracking them. Yeah. And it's remarkable. It's not like, you know, going to a party or going to the Grateful Dead concert and

taking some mushrooms. You're actually in a very specific therapeutic setting. And I'd love for you to share some stories and the experience of what people go through and how you set it up. You call it the set and the setting and why that's important and what people actually experience. That's great. And I'm glad you brought that up. It's important for the viewer to know that um there's a certain way we do this because a lot of people take these drugs and they don't have those experiences they might be at a party or you know it's like you're not

necessarily having that no they may have panic experiences panic is the most common adverse effect right um so importantly you know we're so indebted to the prior researchers. The way we do the research now is the same as was done back in the 1960s. We have better research methods and statistical analyses, right? But the method built upon these early pioneers. So an important distinction, most medicines people take, blood pressure, anti-anxiety, pain medicines, whatever they're taking, they take every day to maintain the desired effect, right? These studies, this medicine is used once.

One dose. One dose out of your short half-life, so out of your system by the end of the day, before the day's over actually and the experience can generate changes significant changes for a period of time going out i mean there were people from the 60s who have followed up decades later and they still report it as the single most meaningful or spiritually significant experience of my life so it's more like an experience study versus a drug study. A drug is a catalyst for that experience. Then the experience just seems to change us when it recalibrates what we are, self, sense of nature. In terms of the day, so we meet, let's say, the cancer study.

We meet them and we spend four weeks getting to know them, like meeting once a week, preparing them for the session. And the most important preparation is to know them, like meeting once a week, preparing them for the session. And the most important preparation is to let them know that the most important position to take during the experience is to let go of the unfolding changes in consciousness. Don't try to control it. Don't try to control it or avoid something. Sort of like a Vipassana meditation, mindfulness,

we stay with the unfolding changes. And no matter what comes up even something frightening these people are dying some of them so death itself dark images difficult memories move into it stay with it you'll be safe go into the experience and i've never seen an experience where it didn't change to a teachable or transformational moment. So by staying with it, it changes to something more, you know, an insight, which in itself is remarkable. If they avoid it, it can create kind of panic or anxiety. So we spent four weeks getting to know them.

Trust and rapport is the single most buffer against an adverse effect. So they feel safe in the room. They feel safe with us. Because you're with them in the room. We're right there. Yeah, I'll describe it. It's like a living room. It's a gorgeous setting, nice rug and art and dim lighting.

And so they're prepared for four weeks. Then the day of the session, they come in early. Again, their recommendation is trust yourself. Trust wisdom. Trust consciousness, trust the medicine, trust the guides you're working with. So trust is really kind of cultivated. They take the capsule, which in this study was double-blind, meaning the researchers nor the patient knew was it placebo or psilocybin. Yeah. And if it's psilocybin, within an hour or so, it'll begin to have its effects.

They spend the day lying on a couch made into kind of a bed for the day, wearing headphones that play a gorgeous playlist of music, mostly classical. Grateful Dead. No, Grateful Dead. It would be nice, but it's mostly classical and strings and kind of background instrumental music to serve as a trajectory for the experience in a way. And there were eye shades. And both are there to encourage you going within. They're not talking to you.

You're not talking. Now, if they like, they could take them off, of course, and sit up and talk if they need to. They have to go to the restroom often, so we take them out for the bathroom. But on the ideal days, they're saying very little. And part of the prep was, don't feel a need to report to us what's happening. Go into the experience. We're here watching your body, and you're safe. But go into the experience, and we'll talk tonight, and more so the next day. So if we can, we turn off the intellect for the day and have them go to the experience. If they need to, we're there for reassurance. We're right there the entire time providing assurance

that may mean holding a hand during a rough stretch or to reassure them they're safe. The peak stretch of this is about three hours where a lot happens for them internally. You don't always see it from observing them. They've just got the eye shades and the headphones on. So you may see tears. You may hear, they may be laughing.

It's because it's joyful in many parts of it. It's glorious, they would say. It's also difficult at times. They may speak, and I write down what they're telling me, so I can tell them later what they said and remind them what was that stretch about it's moving

Mark to see to hear the stories so what happens after then you meet with them and then at 4 or 5 o'clock they're coming out of the state of awareness

back into ordinary consciousness do some question and answer for us of course it's research and they go home at 5 or 6 o'clock back in ordinary consciousness then we have a series They do some questionnaires for us, of course, it's research. And they go home at 5, 6 o'clock, back in ordinary consciousness.

Then we have a series of meetings, it's called integration meetings, where we talk about the experience. What do you hear? Well, we hear remarkable stuff. So in the cancer study, we hear... Often you hear that consciousness may not stop at the body. So I'm not this body. So that's obviously profoundly mitigating. Yeah, if this is all there is, then it's kind of bleak.

Right. However, some say that happens. When I die, I die, but they accept it. We spoke earlier about love comes up a lot, which is striking to hear. So we're scientists. And throughout this research, the contemporary studies at Johns Hopkins, UCLA, NYU,

going back to half a century ago, this notion of love being spoken about so frequently? It's remarkable. And we hear that that was part of the experience that recalibrated their thoughts about death. And it's not just love for each other. So we hear three kinds of love, the way I try to categorize it. One is they have kind of a pronounced loving kindness towards themselves, so they're dying. So forgiveness towards themselves, towards others,

a loving kindness to accept how they live their life, a loving kindness towards others in their life, including throughout their lifespan, even difficult relationships, revisiting those relationships, offering forgiveness internally. And then what I find remarkable is this greater love that you hear in religion or meditation research um that love is the ground of being it's a substance of existence

i like to use the word greek word agape right yeah and and they use this over and from within that framework there's a sense that i'm okay no matter what happens I'm fine as dark as it gets they live in a bigger world than just the small S self the big S connected I like to say it pulls the lens back

so here we are in Stuart Harrison's song I, Me, Mine everything's just around the ego, like you talked about earlier. Well, the Beatles got it right. Love is all there is, right? The Beatles got it right. Love is all you need. And then it pulls it back where they see themselves

in a much broader landscape. And people see solar systems. People see the universe unfolding. And they see themselves in a much larger kind of fabric. And it really recalibrates the sense of self in terms of what else you might be connected to um and also people have a lot of um biographical experiences autobiographical or psychodynamic in nature revisiting past relationships that were conflictual or traumas and those being resolved by moving into those unfinished business.

So there's just so many vignettes that come our way and it's remarkable. It's powerful. So the people change their relationship from death to themselves, to their view of what matters. What matters. And it's a single dose that drives sort of long-lasting change which is pretty powerful in the space of mental illness and we are in an epidemic crisis of mental illness obviously the opioid epidemic with killing 70,000 people a year depression anxiety bipolar I mean so

many people suffer from deep mental illness and some varying degree of it. And we've all probably had moments of depression or anxiety in our life. How do you see this tool being used therapeutically? And where is this research going? And what have we learned so far? Because you've been focused on the death experience, but other people are working also in this space, right? Yeah. So a lot's happening. It's really, it's been called the Renaissance, but I like these words, the reemergence of these medicines, this research. So there's a few main avenues

where we might see clinical research. Of course, one, end of life, which, you know. It's easy to do. It makes sense, right? So I worked in palliative care. So part of my work has seen that we don't die well in America. We don't die well. We don't even talk about it until now we're making some progress.

Palliative care and hospice is shifting the conversation. There's been conferences around the country and big events organized around death and dying. Let's talk about death and dying. We're all dying at some point, right? From the minute you're born, you're dying. The minute you're born, you're dying. So we don't die well. And it's always important to note the first two indications coming out of the 60s research was end-of-life distress and addiction.

These are the two main arteries of research. And Aldous Huxley being very important to the end-of-life research, the great literary writer who spoke about LSD being helpful in the end-of-life experience. And he took huge doses of LSD at the end of his life. Huxley took LSD many times when he was alive and healthy and allowed him to kind of cultivate his theory about the perennial philosophy that these experiences are at the core of all religions. And these entheogens can trigger that experience.

What you're referring to is quite interesting. When he died, he had asked his wife, Laura Huxley, to administer LSD to him as he was dying. Yes. He scribbled it and presented it to her and she injected him. They had talked about it before. And as he died, she was reading to him from, so there's a Tibetan book of the dead, a very famous Tibetan manual about dying and the bardos and- Transition phases.

Yeah. And she was reading from a version that was not published yet by Timothy Leary, Ralph Metzner and Dick Alpert Ram Dass, a psychedelic version of that. And reading this, it's go forward, go towards the light, go up, you're safe. And it's quite a poignant vignette she talks about. And then he passed away. The historical note, he passes away and she walks out of the bedroom and many people were in the living room at the house supporting her.

He was a very well, a very famous figure. And they were all huddled there on a TV set. Watching Kennedy be shot. Exactly. Yeah. It was the same day. And she writes about that. She says they were both.

That was my birthday. I remember that day, 1963. That was your birthday? Yeah. I was four. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm like, why is everybody crying on my birthday. I remember that day, 1963. That was your birthday? Yeah, I was four. Yeah. Yeah. I'm like, why is everybody crying on my birthday?

She writes about she has a book called This Timeless Moment. And she writes about them saying they were both different in many ways, different backgrounds. And she writes about they were both dedicated their lives to kind of increasing love in the culture.

It's quite touching. So he was a big figure. So in terms of the clinical work, end of life distress. We're all dying. Ideally, could this be used in helpful ways? We create centers people go to, have the experience, then go back to their home after hopefully

a transformational experience about death and dying. Addiction. There are studies happening with alcoholism, one at NYU. There's a study beginning with MDMA, not psilocybin. Which is a version of ecstasy. Exactly. With PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder.

We're seeing a new wave of research with psilocybin with major depression. That's been untreatable. It's treatment resistant. At Hopkins, there was a wonderful study going on with smoking cessation, tobacco. People have the experience and then the decrease in their

wanting to smoke has been relieved. So, the applications seem to be numerous. We're seeing all these possibilities. Are there any emerging conclusions from some of the research on anxiety or PTSD or with ecstasy or MDMA or even with depression and psilocybin? So PTSD is just starting. So we'll see that there was a phase two study that showed efficacy and that allowed them

to advance to this larger series of studies. So it does seem to work with MDMA. A little different, MDMA is not a classical hallucinogen, so I should frame that. A classical hallucinogen category is LSD, mescaline, psilocybin, DMT. And MDMA is what's called an empathogen. You just said DMT. We're going to come back to that. Okay, yeah.

An empathogen that the subjective experience is one of this incredible love and empathy. And that seems to also reset these traumatic experiences people are having from war or childhood trauma.

So much of trauma is the body and the mind, both physically and emotionally, reacting to an event that's no longer happening. And I think that we're really just on the threshold of learning what these drugs have to teach us about the brain and the mind. And I think the next 10 years are gonna be amazing

in psychedelic research. Well, you said something very provocative. You said, we used to think these drugs made you crazy. Yeah. But now they make you sane, right? And that psychiatry went from brainless to mindless. Right. Meaning we didn't really focus much

on the brain in psychiatry with Freud. It was all about your mother. Right. And then we started focusing only on the brain through neurochemistry and drugs that alter your brain chemistry. And we left the mind out. The mind out, right?

Behaviorism, yeah. Yeah yeah and it's true and and what's what what psychedelic research um will lead to i think is a reintegration of brain and mind you really need both this is obviously a chemical effect but it's also a psychological effect um you're you're when you're using this therapeutically, you're not just administering a drug per se, you're administering a kind of experience. And the best predictor for success, whether you're treating depression, anxiety, addiction,

is that people have the so-called mystical experience, which is characterized by a sense of your ego dissolving, a sense of merging into something larger. Your defenses are completely down, and you feel very connected to nature or the universe or other people. And this sense of well-being, this transcendence of space and time, it's a very specific, well-defined phenomenon that is throughout religious history, but can be induced

by a high dose of psilocybin or or it's like a spiritual bypass a little bit in a way it is it is it's i mean you know it's interesting the american researchers all talk about it in spiritual terms the english researchers are a little more allergic to that vocabulary yeah they talk about it more in psychodynamic terms yeah and but i think they're talking about the same thing well it's interesting i heard you speak at South by Southwest and you were talking about this part of the brain called the default mode network. And you said something that sort of just caught my attention, which is that in very experienced meditators like Tibetan monks who've been in a cave for nine years, they are able to have the same effect on their brain,

on functional MRIs, as those people who take psilocybin or LSD, that it suppresses this part of the brain that's sort of our ego. Can you talk about that? Yeah, well, this is one of the most interesting findings in the kind of basic science around psychedelics. They began putting people into mri machines and administering lsd and psilocybin and they wanted to see what their what

was going on in their brains what was activated what was deactivated their expectation was that there would be general activation because there's such fireworks right that people report in the experience the big surprise was there was a deactivation of this default mode network which um is a a group of tightly linked structures uh connects the prefrontal cortex to the posterior singular cortex to a deeper older uh structures involved in memory and emotion pretty impressive for a journalist and all those brain parts i still still struggle with brain anatomy, frankly. It's like, neuroanatomy, that's not easy. It's not easy at all.

It's just like a big mush of like this jello thing, but there's so much anatomy in it. It's so specific. And you know, our thinking now about the brain is, it is very networked. It's not about individual parts do very specific things. They're all linked in very interesting ways. And the linkages are just as important.

So the default mode network is involved in self-reflection, theory of mind, the ability to impute mental states to others, time travel, the ability to think about the future and the past, which you really need to construct an identity, right? I mean, Oliver Sacks showed us, if you don't have a memory, you don't have an identity. And the so-called autobiographical self which is the

the function of kind of building the story of who we are out of what happens to us and that happens appears to happen in the posterior cingulate cortex so yeah to the extent that the ego has an address it would be in the default mode network. And this is basically, it's not completely turned off, but it's downregulated. And when they also did similar fMRIs of meditators, long-term meditators with 10,000 hours of experience, they found the same pattern, the deactivation of the default mode network,

which makes sense in that both involve ego dissolution, right? I mean, you're transcending your ego in meditation if you're very experienced and quieting the part of the self-chatter. I mean, because the default mode network is where you go to mind wander, worry, all that. Well, that's it. I mean, it's exactly, I think you're hitting on something that's so key, which is that suffering comes from identifying with your ego and that the liberation of suffering according to the buddhist tradition is realizing that that's just an illusion and that you're not really separate and that the meditation is a technique to help you actually realize that and break that attachment to your worries or or everything really and that attachment is the basis

of of suffering yeah i mean the buddhists figured this out a really long time ago and now you know neuroscience is moving in a very similar direction so we've got we've got this this new idea that you propose in the washington post and in your book about this grand unified theory of mental illness that how does this one drug or this one actually plant compound affect all these disparate disorders like depression anxiety addiction and i was very skeptical about that i said you know this sounds like a panacea why why does it work on so many different things and i mentioned this to tom insult the psychiatrist used to be head of the national institute of mental health he's a great guy he is a great guy and he was very helpful to me in understanding this and he said you know you have to understand that these separate

diagnoses are really an artifact of the insurance industry and the fact that we need a different diagnosis for all these things. He said all those things, depression, anxiety, addiction, obsession, may be manifestations, different manifestations of a similar brain malfunction. And the thinking on the part of the psychedelic researchers is that all these are products of a stuck brain of a brain that is is caught in loops of rumination yeah and the repetition of destructive patterns of thought and if you think about it they're all habits of one

kind or another they're it's it's it's telling yourself the same destructive story over and over again. You know, I'm unworthy of love. I can't get through the day without a cigarette. You know, I'm worthless, whatever it is. And what the drugs seem to do, it's like if you had a steel structure, they introduce heat and they allow it to become more flexible. They help you anneal it. And they're really good at getting people to break out of the grooves of destructive

patterns of thought. And that's why I say in the book at some point that maybe psychedelics are wasted on the young because it's as we get older, it's as we get older that we get stuck in these patterns. You know, we all develop these algorithms for dealing with life and they may be efficient, but they can also be quite destructive. Well, a lot of mental illness also is connected to a sense of isolation and loneliness and separateness and loneliness. And in a way, these drugs often will give you a sense of deep connection with life with others with meaning with purpose in ways that other drugs just don't do and what's interesting is

that these drugs don't work by ongoing effects because you take one dose and you got six months of benefit yeah and it doesn't make sense from a medical point of view except for the fact that it links to this experience yeah no that's why it really is the experience and we know that experiences change brains i mean look at trauma right trauma changes brains yes uh all experiences learning and learning changes the brain and you can think of it as uh as roland griffith has proposed as a as a reverse trauma a powerful positive experience that can reset the brain in the way a trauma does too um it is you know I think it's I just think it opens up a whole new way of thinking about behavior change yeah and I think

that that is something we really really struggle with adults have a lot of trouble changing how I mean we know from the food area getting adults to change their habits around food is really hard they really get locked in and and you know the disconnection that you're talking about I think is key but what disconnects us it's the ego the ego builds walls the ego defends us and as it gets overactive look egos are great they do a lot of very positive things. Yeah, you need it. It's to survive.

They're very adaptive. There's a reason evolution gave us an ego. But they also cut us off. They also cause us to objectify the other. And in depression, you have an overactive default mode network and ego that is turned inward, is punishing you, and to be relieved of that dictator sometimes is exactly what people need.

Yeah, I first sort of started learning about this when I took this class at Cornell called Plants and Humans. It was kind of a fluff class, but it was fascinating across agriculture, but also across this whole place and the intersection of consciousness and plant medicines and ritual and ceremony. And I became fascinated and I read Doors of Perception by setting, usually in nature, with a couple of close friends where we really sort of dropped in. It wasn't like taking mushrooms and going to Grateful Dead concert. And it was profound. It gave me that sort of quick view of a world that I hadn't really seen before. I'd read about, thought about, but

never directly experienced. And I think it really impacted my view of humanity, my view of my place in the world, my view of death, my fear of, you know, success or not success. It really helped dissolve that ego separation in a way that kind of was a profound shift for me. And I studied Buddhism. That was my major in college. So I was studying the psychology of consciousness at the same time. And I took my 10-day meditation retreats.

And I remember after one 10-day meditation retreat where you're meditating like 12 hours a day, I came out and i literally felt like i was tripping yeah i like i literally everything was like sparkling all my senses were alive in connected to everything in nature everything was moving it was like it was really the same experience but who has 10 days to sit for 12 hours well you know i think you're right i think part of what psychedelics are is a shortcut um and uh you know and some people think for that reason it's cheating in some ways and it and you have to work harder to get to the same place with meditation but it's a very similar place i mean i've heard other people i've never done a long

meditation retreat i'd be really curious to try yeah but um i i've heard that people get to that kind of state and um but you get a sore back and sore knees and yeah all that too um but i don't think it's an accident that all the prominent american buddhists the people who brought buddhism to america beginning in the 70s the jack kornfelds joan halifax um john cabot zinn yeah they all started with psychedelics and um that's where richard alpert who was ram das started oh yeah no the links are strong and now we know know the links are in the brain also. Judson Brewer, who's a really interesting psychiatrist at Brown, who runs John Kabat-Zinn's Mindfulness Institute

at the medical school there, he was the one who saw the similarity between these brain scans of the default mode network. And he really believes that someday we might use psychedelics to kickstart a meditation practice. Yeah. That it kind of primes the brain for that kind of consciousness. And I know in my own case, having had these psychedelic experiences, I became a much more successful or happy meditator. I was just much better at kind of going to that place where

I could quiet my thoughts than I was before. So I think the links are really interesting. And what's so important is that this is an area of medicine which we really suck at. I mean mental illness is, I don't know if you know this, but it's the number one driver of indirect and direct costs in the healthcare system. I did not know that. Even more than heart disease and cancer. When you add in all the years of disability and loss of productivity, because it happens throughout people's life,

whereas heart disease and cancer may happen later, in terms of loss of quality of life years and the total loss of productivity and engagement in society, it's the biggest cost driver. And it creates so much suffering. And there's nothing that really works for you. And it's getting worse. It's getting worse.

I mean, we have an opioid epidemic and all these things. And these drugs seem to be, or I don't want to call them drugs or plant medicines, seem to be able to be a solution. And it feels like we can't get there fast enough. Yeah. Look, we do have a crisis in mental health care. And if you compare mental health care to any other branch of medicine,

it's achieved much less. I mean, when you think about oncology, cardiology, infectious disease, we have extended lifespans, reduced suffering in significant ways. And you can't say that about mental health care. And we treat symptoms by and large with the psychiatric drugs we have. The drugs we have have often terrible side effects.

People don't like taking them. They have to take them every day for the rest of their lives. And in many cases, they don't work. They make you gain weight and become impotent. Yeah. No, they have, oh, they're just, you know. That'll make you depressed. And then they're hard, yeah, and they're hard to get off, too.

You know, getting off an SSRI puts you at enormous risk for for suicide yeah so we need new tools we need innovation there hasn't been much innovation in this space and and since the 90s um and uh and and along comes this new slash old treatment i mean these are all public domain chemicals and plants that appears. I mean, I think there's more work to be done to prove it. They still need to do the big phase three trials. But based on the pilot studies in the phase two trials, there's a really strong signal here that we've got something important. And boy, do we need it. Yeah, it's so critical. So you as part of your research for your book, having been a scared hippie in the 60s and the 70s, decided to take a dive and take a trip. Several.

Multiple trips using many of these compounds. How was that for you? What did you learn? How are you different? And what did it do to help you understand this landscape well i did it out of you know deep curiosity because i was talking to these people and they were having these transformative and spiritual experiences and i was like kind of jealous uh and um and curious as to what that was like but i also it's kind of like what i like to do as a writer i put my you know when i wrote

about the cattle industry i bought a cow yeah i built a house to write about architecture yeah and so i like putting myself in in that place where i can write about an experience that i'm having for the first time there's a quality of wonder you can capture the first time you do something that you can never capture again so even though they're more experienced psychonauts than me they've done it they've been there they've done that it's just not as uh i'm hoping i capture something unique by writing about it first time kind of late in life um so but i was very reluctant to do it at the same time i was very nervous about it um i didn't know what i would discover i thought you know some crazy dude in there yeah some crazy dude in there i mean it was just like it just you know my life is wasn't broken things were settled and here i'm gonna blow things up my wife judith was like very nervous about it you know she was like i don't want you to

change um it didn't enter her consciousness that i might change well you're writing a book on how to change your mind yeah i know i know but i think that put her off in the end she became incredibly supportive but she had this initial reluctance i mean you know you're in a long-term relationship i let her speak for herself on that um you're in a long-term relationship and suddenly someone's going to have a big experience on their own and you're not and it so potentially it's it drives a wedge. But her thinking changed about that. The experiences were all fascinating. Several of them were incredibly useful and transformative in terms of my understanding of myself and nature especially. One of them was terrifying and I wouldn wouldn't wish on anyone although even that ended

with a profound sense of gratitude um so that it was over or yes that was over um but uh and then i still existed yeah i i had this um well i can tell you about it later. But the really good experiences were about relationships. I had an LSD trip, guided LSD trip with an underground guide who was a wonderful man who I had great trust in. And it wasn't a particularly high dose LSD experience. It was like 150 micrograms. And it was all about people in my life. One after another kind of presented themselves to me,

and I was thinking about my son, and I was thinking about my wife and my parents and feeling this surge of love. And just, you know, we don't stop. We take our relationships for granted, and it was just this afternoon of connection, feeling this very strong connection with them. It was wonderful.

And, you know, I had the classic LSD insight that love is the most important thing in the universe. Pretty much it's true. But it is true. At the same time, it's a hallmark sentiment. But it's also true. And I think that's part of our lives that we develop this, you know, code of irony. And we're afraid of strong sentiment.

Especially as a journalist, it's a good objective. Yes, right. And we're afraid of strong sentiment and especially as a journalist it's objective right and we're very cynical and ironic and so you know i wrote about the struggle of writing about that um how do you convey the power of that feeling when it sounds so banal and but the line between profanity and banality sometimes is very fine yeah um on a psilocybin trip i had without a guide in a very safe place like yours in nature um i understood my relationship to plants in a way i hadn't before i'd all you know i wrote a book with whose subtitle was a plant's eye view of the world i had this idea and it was more of an intellectual conceit that plants have their own subjectivity you know we shouldn't think of them as mute objects.

They're working on us at the same time as we work on them, which is true in a co-evolutionary sense. But it suddenly became true in a direct emotional felt sense. And that the plants in my garden were returning my gaze. They were all conscious in some sense, not like us. But I shouldn't just treat them as mute objects yeah and i felt profoundly i've never felt more a part of nature i think most humans feel a little distance even when we're having a positive nature experience that we're different that we have a relationship to nature which is a bizarre idea that we're not part of it yeah yeah and um i i

felt completely part of it for the first time in my life and that was a profound feeling i was just one species among among many um and then i had a guided psychedelic trip that really changed my understanding of my ego um i had uh i was in a i was working with a guide on the east Coast who created an environment where I felt safe enough to really let go. And it was a pretty high dose psilocybin trip. And I saw my ego just burst into a little cloud of post-it notes and then was spread out on the ground like a coat of paint. And I was like, me, and I was fine with it. But I don't know who this new I was that was fine with it. And it remains a real mystery that this new perspective

emerged on my life that wasn't ego. It was perfectly objective, it was untroubled, perfect equanimity. I don't know what it was to this day. I mean, Aldous Huxley would have said it was the mind at large. It was some kind of collective consciousness. I don't know.

But I learned during that experience was the mind at large it was some kind of collective consciousness i don't know um but i learned during that experience that not to be afraid about the death of the ego that there is another ground on which we can stand that the ego is part of our mind but it's not the only part and we're not identical to it now 10 years of psychotherapy you could probably get to that perspective on your ego but this But this was one afternoon. A lot right now is happening in this culture is this resurgence of the psychedelic culture as a therapy for PTSD. And we've had Michael Pollan on the podcast, Tony Bosses. We've talked about these issues.

And he wrote a book called How to Change Your Mind. And that's one way. It's through psychedelics. And I think they have a role in psychiatry and therapy and awakening. But what happened, it seems like back in the 60s, was that no matter how much acid or how much mushrooms Richard Alpert at the time took. And he took a lot. He took a lot. It didn't last. And he kept waking

up to reality that was kind of a downer. So he was always trying to get high and always coming down. And well, that was the endemic problem with psychedelics was you came down. Right. So he's like, I'm out of here. And he's somehow got to India. Can you share a little about the story of him going to India? And there's a beautiful sort of description of how he was still his sort of, even though he was sort of long haired and bearded and wore beads and a white robe, he was still so not in the moment. You met this guy who kept saying to him, who was this Lama Surya Das, who was another kind of Westerner young kid, but somehow got it. And, and he kept saying to him, every time he was talking about what's coming next or what we're doing or the past or this or that, he's like, just be here now. Just be here now.

It wasn't Surya Das. It was about 19 at the time. A 19-year-old surfer from Laguna Beach named Bhagwan Das. Bhagwan Das. Yeah, okay. Sorry, I got that wrong. How many Das's? I can't keep track of them. There's a lot of Das's.

Das means servant. So, basically, we're all in the servant class. Yeah. Ram Das means servant of God, right? Ram is another word for God. Yeah. Yeah. Ram Dass thought he was going on a Buddhist pilgrimage with Bhagwan Das and walked around the Buddhist pilgrimage sites barefoot and begging for a while with an American express card in his shoulder bag.

At some point, Bhagwan Das said his visa had run out and he needed to go see his guru. And Ram Das is like, guru, I don't, you know, I'm a Buddhist. So he didn't want to go, but Bhagwan Das needed to go. So they drove up to the, sorry, that's my Audubon clock. No, it's good. You're a temple. You've got the real thing going.

And they drove up to the foothills of the Himalayas and stopped at this little temple. And this old man in a blanket was sitting up in a little kind of a field. And there were people in white all around him. And Ram Dass thought it was some kind of cult. And he really didn't want anything to do with it. And then Maharaji started, the old man was known as Maharaji, which is sort of an honorific that means great king. But, you know, you're in a cab in Delhi and the cab driver says, oh, Maharaj, where would you like to go? It's very common. Yeah. But he told Ram Dass things that he clearly knew about him, about Ram Dass, that there was no way he could know.

So Ram Dass was taken aback, to say the least and then something happened which she wrote about originally and be here now and and we went into more detail and uh this memoir because he's really had you know he had the time to look back on it and understand what uh had happened a little better and um it was a a major opening not um dissimilar to what had occurred with him when he first took psychedelics but without drugs and with this completely other effect on him, which was that his spiritual heart opened. I mean, this deep part of himself really awakened. Yeah, I mean, it was a beautiful story of how he was thinking about his mother who had recently died and was very deep in his particular unique thoughts about it. And somehow the guru knew it all about it, even though he didn't actually tell him.

And it made him realize that he could know everything about him. And what was really beautiful about it was that in that moment, even with all his flaws and his darkness and his demons and his mishigas, you know, basically, that this guy, this big old chubby guy in a blanket sitting on a stoop just loves him unconditionally completely and fully despite all of his craziness and i think that's sort of what we all want and seek and we often think we get that from our parents but usually we don't and ram Dass didn't get it from his parents.

He's not in that level of it. And that was what opened him up, was that love. And I think at first that he really thought it was, you know, kind of the psychic powers that had, you know, blown him away. But as time went on, he really realized it was that heart space that they had entered together. Well, it sort of speaks to it, that that was really true. And let's assume it is. And the Ram Dass wasn't deluded or crazy.

And that sort of brings up a whole set of questions around, gee, you know, what is human consciousness and how would one person know what another person's thinking or feeling or anything about their life or where they're going or what they're doing? And it seems like there's another level of awakening or brain function or access to some plane of knowing that somehow these masters have acquired and uh and yet um despite all of that uh the message from this guy mean curly baba who you and so many incredible people have been a student of like daniel goldman who's a friend who's been on the podcast was a student of his as well. And he wrote Emotional Intelligence. And Larry Brilliant is a doctor who ended up helping cure smallpox in India and worked for Google Foundation.

And, you know, you've got Krishna Das, who's an incredible, you know, spiritual musician and does chanting and does amazing work all over the world. There's just so many of you who have actually come out of that, let's say, call it lineage, let's say. Sort of a non-linear. A non-linear, yeah. It's sort of like a hodgepodge. And what was really amazing about reading about his teachings is that his message was so simple. It was basically love everybody, feed everybody, serve everybody.

It was like, there was no big like, you know, treaties or sutra or big text or it was just very, very simple. And when you dive deep into all of that, what does that mean? And, you know, I think the love everybody, serve everybody, I think we often forget also it includes everybody includes you yourself. Right. Yeah. And usually the hardest one to love is yourself, too. Yeah. So can you talk a little bit about that and what that was and how that led to kind of the the awakenings that a lot of you had and that Ram Dass had? But being with him, I mean, he seemed very simple.

And his conversations with people were so kind of ordinary, especially with the Indian devotees. And, you know, he was talking about people's kids and jobs and families and, you know, people, they'd come to him with deep esoteric stuff that we really wanted to know, like, how do you meditate? And he would say, meditate like Christ. And that kind of, especially since probably about 50% of the Westerners around him were of Jewish background. So getting that one tossed your way was pretty interesting. And then somebody asked him, well, how did Christ meditate? And he said he lost himself in love. But you felt that kind of love coming from him it was as if you were radiating it all the

time and um it was uh that um that space that he created around him it was as if he was in this field of love. And everybody around him felt it. I used to think it was sort of personal and that I was feeling it and it was my experience. But a couple of times, I looked up and I realized that everybody around him was feeling this. And it was just, you know, quite remarkable. And that was as much the esoteric teaching as anything. How did you and the others that were there become transformed by that love? Well, he used to, mostly he would create distractions that would keep us lost in other stuff. Like the first time when I arrived there with Danny Goldman and Krishna Das. And the first thing he did wasam was spicy potatoes and puris, which are deep fried flatbread fried in butter and ghee.

And I was so out there. I mean, I was probably half out of my body. And I think I ate three huge piles of potatoes on it, filling a leaf plate and 17 puris. And it almost grounded me. But that was how the love came through. He fed people. And that was the feed everyone part of it. And he would say things like, first Bojan, then Bajan. And Bojan is food, having a meal. And especially with the villagers around the temple where he was, that was such a gift to them to have plentiful food coming their way. Because it's a very poor area.

And it was just, you know, this kind of vehicle for love. And we learned to, you know, this 40 verses in Hindi, which we actually all learned, which is pretty astonishing for a bunch of Westerners who, my Hindi is still mostly of the train and bus station variety. But we absorbed something that really changed all of our lives. And it's very hard to express what it was or what it is because it's still working. So in India, there's this idea of what's called prasad about food, which has nothing to do with nutrition whatsoever. Which means what? It's a blessing that comes with the food. If you get food from a temple or from a high being or a saint or somebody, then it carries the blessing or the love or the,

whatever the vibe is from that being. And so in a, in a sense that was Maharaji's way of transmitting what he had to give. So yeah, in many cultures, Food is the way we show love But it's often with bad consequences Ram Dass contrasted it with his Jewish mother also Which was different

Yeah Because he got very fat as a kid Because he was like trying to please his mother all the time. Exactly. And the other thing I want to sort of touch on was this extraordinary story that was in the book about how, you know, he brought a lot of acid with him. When Ram Dass went to India, he took a lot of acid and he gave it to the Maharaji. He gave it to the Maharaji. He gave it to the teacher. Yeah.

And tell us about what happened and the consequences. Well, first of all, I wasn't there. I'm not a first-person witness for especially the first time. And he was carrying with him a very special LSD that had been made by Owsley Stanley, who was the kind of underground chemist on the West Coast and also the Grateful Dead's sound engineer. It was the purest LSD. It was usually known as white lightning.

Oh, wow. Okay. And they were 300 milligram doses, which was kind of a pretty, you know, hefty dose for a grown person, which Ram Dass was. So at some point, Maharaji said, you have some medicine? And Ram Dass thought he had a headache or something. He said, I'm sorry, I don't have any aspirin or any of that. And he said, no, the yogi medicine. The yogi medicine. So Ram Dass brought out the LSD and he had, I think, four doses left of the white lightning.

And Maharaji tossed them one at a time into his mouth. Three doses. Four. Four doses. Okay. I think the first time was three doses. It was like 900 micrograms, which is, you know, enough to. For an elephant.

Yeah, for an elephant or to send a grown man probably to the moon. Yeah. Nothing happened. And Ram Dass was really, I mean, he was worried for starters because he thought, oh, this old man, this is way too much for somebody this age. You start somebody this age out with a small dose and see what happens. And nothing happened. Nothing happened. And then he went back to the States.

And so he just sat there and nothing happened. He's like, I don't feel anything and everything's good. He didn't say anything. He just did. Nothing changed. And Ram Dass had, you know, he had guided trips for hundreds of people and taken hundreds of doses himself. And he knew what tripping looked like. Yeah.

Incredible. No change. Did he talk to him about that or did he say, what are you experiencing? Or is there any conversation? Well, it wasn't that kind of conversation, but it was more of a, just a demonstration that Maharaji was already there in some sense. And he didn't need it. But when he went back to the States, Ram Dass

had sort of doubts about it because he'd been sitting a little bit off to the side and he thought maybe Maharaji had thrown it over his shoulder and scammed him. Yeah. And scammed him, you know Yeah, yeah, scammed him Yeah So when he went back the next time Maharaji asked him again He said, you gave me some medicine last time

And Ram Dass said, yeah And he said, do you have any more and uh he did and this time he took uh uh four doses yeah the same thing and he very consciously placed each one on his tongue and swallowed it and he said can i have a little water with it yeah i said yeah and then uh he um said um will it make me crazy and ramdas said well probably and uh so maharaji kind of goes under his blanket for some time. And then he comes up and he looks completely nuts. His eyes are rolling and his tongue is rolling around. Then he stopped and he was just totally putting him on.

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