The Joe Rogan Experience - #371 - Rick Doblin

Episode Date: July 1, 2013

Rick Doblin, Ph.D., is the founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS).

Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out! The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day! Rick, you made it. I did. Rick Doblin, who is the head of MAPS, or if you have never heard, is it called an acronym where it's MAPS? Yeah, it is because you say it, right? When you don't say it, it's an abbreviation. Is that what it is? We tried to figure that out once,

but it stands for the multi-discipline. That's what Google is for. It is what Google is for, but somehow or another, I'm not quite, I don't totally have it together. Multi-disciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. You founded this. Yeah, and I was surprised to discover it has the most syllables of any organization in the non-profit world for drug reform. Really? Well, it's a very interesting title, Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. That's what I love about it. It's like you're coming at it from a whole bunch of different angles. So it's not just doctors, it's not just chemists, it's a whole bunch of different angles. So it's not just doctors. It's not just chemists.

It's a whole bunch of human beings. Yeah, and I had learned from a previous nonprofit that when you want to create a nonprofit, it's good to try to make it as broad as possible, the purpose, as you see different strategic ways to do things. So I made it multidisciplinary, which means we could look at psychedelics from virtually any perspective.

Association to mean that it's publicly supported, a nonprofit. And I had images of tens of thousands of people banding together to support research in different areas. Psychedelic was a big choice, actually, whether we should use the the word whether we should use a different word whether we should use a euphemism and so I felt like I wanted in this kind of second coming of psychedelics into the culture forty years after the crackdown that I wanted there to be a certain transparency

and so I wanted to use the word psychedelic so people knew what I was doing and I was hoping that we can change the cultural connotations from what it was in the 60s of psychedelics, rebellion, dropping out, finding your own sort of private utopia somewhere, a certain kind of not integrated into the culture. And now that's, I think, the arc of the story is psychedelics came at a time when culture wasn't really ready and brought all sorts of things to the surface. And over the last 40 years, our culture has gotten ready with hospice centers, with birthing centers, with yoga, meditation, all the things, with flotation tanks, all the things that were too hard to integrate at the time, death and birth and just raw emotions, and also this globalization and growing sense of global spirituality.

Now our culture is ready, and I think we can, over the next 10, 20 years, integrate psychedelics without the connotation of rebellion, but to enhance what we're all doing together. That's interesting. I like the use of the word psychedelics because you're owning it. That is what it's about. And it shouldn't be something that people are afraid of or afraid of adding to something because it will somehow or another make it silly or make it, oh, psychedelics.

People want to dismiss it, and they can much easier. Owning it, I think, is very important. Yeah, and there's no other word that's even better. No. Hallucinogen was used by the government. It's like you're fake. Yeah, I don't like that feeling either. Hallucinogen always makes me feel like I'm seeing something that's not there.

You know, that's the idea. Yeah, it's not real. It's not valid. And for folks who don't know anything about psychedelics, they imagine, like literally, like imagining someone in the room with you and that guy doesn't really exist. Yeah, and you can't even tell the difference. The world before that in the 50s was even worse.

It was psychotomimetic, which means it mimics psychosis. Well, it does on some people. We have to be careful. It does bring out all parts of ourselves. I think we all have those kind of parts where they're not really integrated and it seems extreme and you let the emotions carry you. Yes. So the safe place, we have to be careful, I think is true. But the bad trip, the difficult challenge, the death rebirth, it's in all of us, as are these psychotic states.

I actually had what I felt was probably the most psychotic or deluded state of my whole life was doing LSD in a flotation tank. Wow. Yeah, I can imagine. So self-examinatory anyway. Yeah. You know, I'm not an LSD person. I never have tried it because I've never trusted anybody in the right way to get it. But I've done a lot of time in the tank on especially on high doses of edibles edible

weed yeah you know that insanely uncomfortable feeling that you get when you get you get examinatory about shit you did in high school like really in depth yeah about shit you did in high school that's good for yeah and the tank does that on its own yeah so the tank with that together it's it's whoo yeah i can imagine acid in the tank would be a similar experience yeah well i grew up reading john lilly and in the 1971 actually deep self yeah yeah but it was before that was programming and metaprogramming and the human bio computer and that was so technical and complicated i had to spend like a whole day on each page or something just like cannot figure this stuff out it It was so early computer discussion and language about how the brain operates.

Yeah, he was a real pioneer, like a real pioneer. I mean, that dude was out there. Yeah, but he went too far out, and he wasn't grounded. And his last 30 years were kind of a sad tragedy, I would say, wasted potential. Was that because of ketamine? Because he got involved heavily with ketamine, which has some pretty disastrous results. Yeah, ketamine is the most addictive of all the psychedelics. It's physically addictive.

Not so much physically, but more this reliable escape and this delusion of superiority. So is there a withdrawal? reliable escape and this delusion of superiority. So is there a withdrawal? Not in that same way as heroin. It's not like physically. It's just a psychological addiction more. So there's a shift in attitude. But what I think was the problem with John Lilly more than before the ketamine was a certain kind of brilliance that was unbalanced and he was kind

of arrogant and i don't think he was patient and he was way ahead of his culture you know way ahead and yet when he saw the crackdown come i think he he sort of took this superior position and and just felt like he's not going to work on a political struggle or even a scientific struggle to get these tools back. He kind of withdrew. And even from before, he just had this somewhat self-destructive aspect too. I read a lot about him and I met him and I actually ended up trying trying to do mdma therapy with him

when it felt like he was really going downhill from the ketamine and from cocaine and wow yeah that's intense that is the worry was kind of my hero one of them you know he and stan groff and i would contrast them that stan is doing fantastically, is traveling the world, is totally together, and a major inspiration who is able to integrate into his life, whereas John Lilly was, you could say, arguably as brilliant, but went off the track. Yeah, it is possible. That's one of the real issues with anything that completely alters the way your mind works, is that you could get into that too much.

You can get into that more than reality and lose your grip of this world well it is reality it's just a different view of reality and i think that the grounding part and what we emphasize in our psychedelic therapy is that it's the integration work more than the experience itself that produces long-term benefits so that you can have these unusual experiences but what do you bring back from them right and how do you integrate that into your daily practices so that it's anchored so that you can try to get there without the drug it's like this evolution process where you learn something and I found at least that for me the psychedelics are something that I can work with through a lifetime, through a lifespan.

Some people say when you get the message, hang up the phone. And I felt that there's been different messages at different stages of my life. And that I'm more able, although it's still really hard, to hear those things, the self-critical stuff like what you did in high school or how you try to hear the message underneath the criticism. And I learned that a lot during an Ibogaine experience. So I've seen that these experiences can have these lasting changes, but that they don't always, and they don't have to. And particularly when you have these experiences that are unbalanced, the drug starts wearing off and you haven't come to a new balance. And during those periods, the best solution, at least,

is to continue therapy and do another session. And that's where people often back off, and they kind of freeze something in place. At such a deep level, it's hard to get to that deep level to move it forward. Yeah, it's a very personal thing, isn't it? Like where you start from to, you know, for some folks, it's like they've already, they already have issues with reality itself. They have issues with being grounded, with being calm. And I mean, it's some people you could just, you know, you could just get them high or they could have, you know, some sort of psychedelic experience and they would be able to assimilate it into their life and they would benefit from it almost immediately. Right.

Whereas other folks almost needed to be, I think education is one of the big ones that we're really lacking in this country when it comes to these things. And the word shaman is such a loaded word. Yes, it is. Because it's like healer. You know, when someone says they're a healer, all of a sudden you go, okay. You know, what other dumb shit are you going to say next? Right, right. Our whole therapeutic approach is based on the idea that there's an inner healer

and it's the support that we provide to help people heal themselves. So there's a power dynamic often in shamanism, where sometimes the shaman is even the only one that does the drug and then heals you. It's not teaching you how to heal yourself. So that we have this idea that like the body heals itself if you get a cut, that the psyche has these self-healing mechanisms and brings things kind of to the surface so that it's not so much reality and psychedelic state it's almost like reality and more reality and we know that from fmri brain scan studies that were recently done in england with psilocybin

that what it does in the brain is different than what we had been thinking. And we had been thinking that it makes the brain speed up, that some things work even faster, that your perceptions are going. And actually what it does is it makes parts of the brain slow down, but it's the filtering parts of the brain, so that we have enormous volume of perceptions coming to us at any one time. And that's kind of what you can see in the tank too, that when you start quieting everything down, you can really, you know, think in different ways. But we have this enormous amount of information and we only

narrow and look at some of it, what we need to do either for survival or for we focus. And the controlling, the filtering parts of the brain are what psilocybin slows down, so that they work less well, so you get more of a flood of what's already there. What is the mechanism, the filtering parts of the brain? When you say the filtering parts of the brain, what are those? Well, they're generally linked in what's called the default network, the default mode network. And here becomes kind of a practical side of the work that I do, which is basically trying to develop psychedelic drugs into prescription medicines and marijuana. So from the FDA's

point of view, you have to show something safe and efficacious, but you don't have to explain how it works. So therefore, I haven't really focused on that. So I don't know the answer to your question because it's neuroscience. And I don't need neuroscience to know the exact quadrants of the brain. So I've kind of got people I work with and other people I rely on and other scientists to do that part. It helps if you have an explanatory mechanism. Right. But at the same time, it's not necessary.

So what I've done is tried to be strategic and tried to focus on the stuff that's essential to move the culture forward, to create legal context for psychedelics, to show that they can be used responsibly. Well, I was asking more for my own edification. I wish I could answer you. I wish I knew. I read that very study about quieting areas of the mind. I thought it was really fascinating. And I attributed it to the idea being that we are filled with noise,

that our mind is filled with noise. Our mind is filled with concentrating on a bunch of shit that's not really important and that that gets shut off. And then you can sort of tune in to whatever the fuck it is that you took and whatever it is that you took that's doing something. And yeah, I don't see it so much that stuff is not important, but it's not as important. I mean, you need to do certain things to get through the day right so you need to have a narrower focus maybe not important wasn't even

what i should have said it's just it's not that it's not important it's just sometimes there are things in your life that aren't that important but they take primary focus yes yeah they take center stage you know whether it's an argument you got with a friend over almost nothing something that can be addressed you know really easily and quickly probably but whatever it is it's bothering you should i say something because i really feel like i'm being slighted and i'll fuck with you all day until you actually have the conversation with the person and it could be a million other things could be financial issues that you have it could be something's wrong with your house and you have to pay to get it fixed and all these things just constantly chip away at your ability to focus on

the now and to enjoy uh just enjoy the experience of life itself yeah i've never really felt comfortable kind of meditating to try to let all those things go because i get into this state where i have this idea of something should i do i should do and i think those things that you mentioned are really important, how you relate to your friends. Those are the most important things of life, not the least important. But I've always felt like when I'm, if I were to be meditating, this idea will come up and I'm supposed to just let it go. And I thought, why don't I just do it? So I'm more outer focused. And for me the uh jogging and being stoned are like meditation oh it's definitely meditation yeah yeah jogging stoned is a trip it's very different than than just exercising yeah but but i but i think that this idea of creating a space like in the tank

or like a therapeutic setting where you're not paying attention to all those daily things yeah where you can sink deeper to um other questions of life that that is really important you have to kind of consciously create a space for that yeah the the things that always come up in trips um for me that the the uncomfortable things are always things that i really should be working on anyway it's always like maybe i've hit an imbalance and i've focused too much on this and not enough on that or whatever it is those those moments where it hits you it's like you should have known that anyway and if you if you knew if you were living in a harmonious way we wouldn't have to tell you this all right so get it over with figure that out and every trip that i've had that that where that's happened there's only been a few of them that are really

like super uncomfortable just really bad but those always i benefited from those every one of them now what do you mean by bad i don't mean bad uh i mean um uncomfortable like especially with the eating eating marijuana the eating marijuana thing yeah a lot of folks do not give that the proper respect. And that's why they freak out and call the cops. I'm sure you heard the great video of the police officers who stole marijuana from someone they pulled over and then made pot brownies and then got so high they panicked and called the police. The police called the police? That's great. Yeah, they called an ambulance that's yeah they called an

ambulance have you heard that before brian yeah we played it on here that's right we played it oh sure play it just for the for a goof because it's fucking ridiculous these poor people but they didn't know these these dirty cops is that marijuana when it's processed by your liver when you eat it produces something called 11 hydroxy metabolite an incredibly psychoactive material it's not like the thc high at all it's a totally different experience and much stronger and that's why a lot of people think that like they ate a cookie that it was laced like oh my god somebody laced this with something no you're taking a totally different drug yeah we do harm reduction at festivals to try to imagine a post-prohibition world. So at

Burning Man, Boom, other festivals where we provide and organize teams of therapists and others that work with people that have difficult trips. And people, the most people come sometimes is for eating too much marijuana. Yeah, people don't realize how this easily can be as strong as any psychedelic you take, and that's not bullshit. And listen to these poor fucks. ...9-1-1 call. You will hear telling where the information has been removed. ...my soul to take. Someone has emergency.

Yeah, can you please send rescue to... I think I'm having an overdose of my wife. Okay, you and your wife? Yes. Overdose of what? Marijuana. I don't know if it had something in it. Okay.

Can you please send rescue? Okay, how old are you? I'm 29 years old, and my wife is 26. Please come. 26? Yes, please. Have you guys been drinking also? What?

Have you guys been drinking today too? No, that's it. No, and is there any weapons in the house? No. Please come. Okay, we're on our way. Are you guys, like, do you guys have fever or anything? No, I'm just, I think we're dying. Okay, how much did you guys have?

I don't know. We made brownies, and I think we're dead. Okay, how much did you guys have? I don't know. We made brownies, and I think we're dead. I really do. Okay, how much did you put in the brownies? I don't know. Was it a bag? Who made the brownies? My wife and I did. Cuba, come here.

Okay, guess her. She's on the living room ground right now. Is she breathing? She's barely breathing. Is she breathing? She's barely breathing. Is she awake? I think so. Okay, can you look? Pardon?

Can you look? Yeah, I can feel her. She's laying right down in front of me. Time is going by really, really, really, really slow. Okay, well, I'm going to call with you. Do you know how much you bought and put in the brownies? Pardon? How much did you buy? I don't...

Just please send rescue. They're on the way, but I'm trying to figure out how much you bought and put into the brownies, sir. Probably like a quarter ounce total. A quarter ounce total into the brownies? Did you guys eat all the brownies? Yeah, we did. Okay. And you ate all of them.

Okay. Boy, why is that funny? I'll tell you ate all of them. Okay. Boy, why is that funny? I'll tell you why it's funny. Because you can't die from it. Okay? The only way pot's going to kill you is if you take 25 pounds and you drop it off of a CIA drug plane and it lands in your head. That's how pot's going to kill you. You could probably get a heart attack, though, from that.

Eh. If you do, anything could kill you. A good movie could kill you if that's the case, pussy yeah well they the other question is why did they think they were dying and it's not just because their heart was racing or things like that the the judgment day it's well it's like these filtering parts of the brain that the pot when you eat it like that it's kind of very powerful it is like tripping quote and so your sense of who you are he was pretty logical he was pretty good at answering the questions he had you know some problems though some of that yeah but i think people confuse ego death with physical

death and ego death of letting go of who your narrow sense of who you are and opening up into something very scary and so people have defenses and they convert it into, I think I'm dying. Right. Because it feels like that. You, the you is dying in a way. That's interesting. But I mean, don't you think also he's just fucking panicking and thinking that he overdosed on a drug and just shitting his pants?

I mean, not even an ego death, just an absolute fear of the fact that you don't know what the hell was in there. Well, he knows. He made it. It was pot. He knew what it was. He just got taken by surprise at how strong it was. But he said he doesn't know if there's anything in it.

Well, it's what you said right before is people start thinking it was lace or something, but it's not. I mean, I think the guy thought he was dying. Well, I thought I was dying on weed before. Really, physically, you thought i was dying on weed before i caught it it gets really physically you thought you're dying yeah because i had you know something in my life i always thought i had something wrong with my heart you know so i had a like as a kid i would pass out and black out and just like fall to the ground i had to take the stress test as like an eight-year-old kid like you know taking running on the treadmill and stuff no they could never find out what happened you know then it would happen again like four years later so like growing up i always had this thing like all right

i have a baboon heart type shit like it's like it's a broken heart or there's something with a valve that they just haven't detected and so when i smoked too much weed i immediately thought i felt my heart and i'm like all right my heart is fucked up so i i it wasn't that the weed was killing me but it might be doing something to what i already thought had a problem with my heart already you know type thing in other words you were panicking like a little bitch yeah and you thought you were gonna die when you hear when you feel your heart double beat and you know you know when it just like you know that starts doing shit like that that's you certainly mind fuck yourself yeah you know and it's i didn't know you had that thing though i didn't know that you you blacked out

yeah i've blacked out five times in my life wow you know and they've tried everything they've done tons of tests you know and it's only been like the last maybe five years that i just don't give a shit about that anymore you know i don't know what happens i don't ever get panic attacks anymore anxiety anymore it just went away I mean, I've been using a lot of Molly lately. So maybe that's You're probably like good evidence for MDMA therapy Believe in that a million times over shrooms or anything, especially when you're with a loved one and there's definitely some minute I don't think over I don't think it's a competition or a race. I think they all have their own little impact.

Yeah, we're talking about psychedelic medicine, psychedelic spirituality, and it's the whole range of drugs at different times at different places. But we do have to narrow in. The other thing about psychedelics is there's a lot of states that can be achieved naturally. And I think in the pursuit of psychedelics as a discipline as as something to truly legitimately study i think one of the things that they're going to open up is what yoga does to the body yeah yoga does something they're intense come on brian yoga class okay stop if you if you take a really strong yoga class and you get through it, you feel like you're high.

Yeah, yeah. And I'm aware of friends, long-term yoga practitioners, long-term meditators, who have found that it's not either or. That you can, when you're practiced in these ways too, that you can have a psychedelic experience. You can go to a deeper place and then you can work you have a better sense of where you want to be and you can work sometimes for years to grounded in integrated

is this flow back and forth so i think the over reliance on psychedelics can prove to be harmful because you're not to integration or with john lilly your escaping but the idea that you'll stay somehow or other pure and do things all on your own, there's a certain kind of slowness or egotism about that. It's not inappropriate to admit sometimes that we need physical catalysts.

We need help. We need tools. Sometimes our defenses are so strong. Well, I don't think it's an either- situation i don't think there's anything we for whatever reason we have this idea in our head that taking something to get somewhere is a weakness you know there's a lot of people that believe that that taking a drug to achieve a state like oh you can't deal with reality you're weak you know yeah there is that but then you switch it to cars. Like, you take a car to get, like, took a plane and a car to get here. Yeah. No, you could definitely look at it that way.

I just think the idea is very strange when we know that, look, our bodies are these weird biological machines that we're constantly feeding different things to. We're constantly giving it different kinds of nutrients we we experiment with the diets we experiment with our carbohydrate balance and our protein but we experiment with all these different things but when it comes to taking a plant especially something like mushrooms that's we've documented many thousands of years of use and to decide all of a sudden that this is a weakness and that this is, you know of altered states in some kind of sanctioned manner. It's repressed and prohibited throughout our lifetimes.

We kind of have a sense that maybe that's the way it's been large parts of human history, but it's not been that way. They're encased in religious rituals or different kind of cultural contexts, but they're not prohibited and they're respected. And I think that's where we've lost touch with that. And there's so much coming from people finding it on their own through various methods that the culture is changing. I think it's definitely changing. And I think what's really crazy is that the people who are suppressing psychedelics, the people who seek to suppress it, are the ones who need them more than anybody. Well, exactly.

So our study right now that we're doing, and again, with MDMA for post-traumatic stress disorder. I like how you point to Brian. Yes. You're the poster boy, kid. Congratulations. Yay. Just the first one for tonight. So we're working with veterans, and then we've also expanded it now to work with firefighters and also with police officers.

And I had pretty much given up hope about getting a police officer actually to volunteer. So we've had 15 people out of 24. The 15th is going through screening. The first 11 of them were vets and three were firefighters. And now we have the first police officer that is going through screening. So the people that are repressing it, in some ways, they do need it the most. And how to help them relax about it, at least to let others or to explore themselves. But at the same time, I've been trying to get my father and mother to smoke pot since I was 20 years old. Wow.

And they've never once done it, but they're totally supportive of what I do. They think it's tremendous, but they will not. There was one time when my mother had some pain. She had fallen down, and her leg was really in pain, and she said she would try marijuana some pain. She had fallen down and her leg was really in pain. And she said she would try marijuana for pain. And I got home like a week later because she was in a different city. And she said then

she wasn't in enough pain anymore. Oh, wow. I was too slow. Poor mom. Well, you know, there's a lot of folks that are a prisoner to that propaganda

that was just really shot home from the 30s on. It's a pretty incredible feat. When you stop and think about the effectiveness of marijuana, not just for people like as far as like a drug and not just for its psychoactive properties, But just the plant hemp itself, just all the amazing benefits it has as far as nutrition, construction methods, making paper and clothes, and all these different things. The fact that somehow or another they kept that from the public and kept it under wraps and kept it really from the average person's database. Most people just ask them about marijuana being illegal.

What about hemp? Oh, isn't it the same thing? People don't even know what the fuck camp is yeah well what they should know is that the largest hemp importing country in the world is the United States and the largest hemp exporting country in the world is China so why is that why we've kept it more legal we're importing it but relating other people grow it. It's incredible. But that's awesome. Because the largest producer of pharmaceutical drugs is the United States.

That's why. And that's really what it boils down to. Pharmaceutical drugs, without a doubt, don't want marijuana to become legal. And one of the doorways for marijuana to become legal is people figuring out how incredibly effective hemp is for so many things that we use other stuff for, besides the psychoactive properties. It makes a fantastic protein powder. The company that I'm involved with on it, my friend Aubrey and I, when we first,

you met Aubrey up in San Francisco. When we first started talking about hemp, we thought, well, maybe we could get a farm in this country and grow this hemp seed and then use it for the protein powder. Completely non-psychoactive. When we found out you can't even do that. Even though hemp is legal, I didn't know that it literally can't be grown in the United States. We buy it all from Canada. Yeah.

One of the people on MAPS's board of directors is David Bronner. And so from Bronner Soaps, his grandfather started. And he's been very active in the hemp. That's that hemp oil soap, right? Yeah. They use hemp oil. Writing like a crazy person. Great documentary on Netflix about him.

Yeah. Oh, really? What's it called? I think it's called Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps. Yeah. I have a friend that's all he uses. Eddie Bravo. That's all he uses, whoever.

Well, David and his brother Mike have built this business from, their father was kind of obsessed, or their grandfather, and they knew that. So they took this business over when it was really fragmented in like a million or two a year in sales, and they've built it up to over 50 million. 50 million? Selling soap? Not just soap, but other other products and they don't advertise

they don't advertise what they do is they well they do now bronner soap kill it go get it well actually local what they do is a social justice activism they do um they focus on fair trade on other things but what david did about four months ago or five months ago is he constructed a cage, a metal cage, and he had someone drop it off with him inside it in front of the White House right across the street. And he was processing hemp plants. He had gotten real hemp seeds. He had grown it in the United States and he was processing it into hemp oil and he did this as a protest and the cage was to prevent the police to slow them down while they tried to stop him from doing it and he actually got convicted and had to do public service but what he was trying to show

is that hemp which can be a food which can be any number of different things and can be grown in the united states was a crime that and just making it into hemp oil to put on his bread was enough to put him in jail and to give him penalties it doesn't make any sense and it's insane that it continues to go on it's one of those weird aspects of our society where you look at it and you go well there's got to be a reason let's let's search for a reason and you look for a reason and it literally doesn go, well, there's got to be a reason. Let's search for a reason. And you look for a reason, and it literally doesn't exist. Well, I think there are real strong reasons that go really deep that make it easy to miss them. But I think the natural fear that each of us has for when our social controls are relaxed,

that we'll become whatever we will become. You talked about even in the floatation tank, when things come up. You know, it's just people are scared of the compromises they've had to make to live in society and of their basic urges and what happens when they're not in control. And that's what these drugs represent. And the 60s also represented

not only these people that let themselves get out of control, then they want to leave and drop out, and then they want to change things. And it was a difficult—people are scared of their own—I feel it in myself that I'm scared sometimes of, you know, my deep desires or, you know— Uh-oh. Uh-oh. You just created a meme, sir. Too late. I feel like I'm scared of my deep desires.

And you just hear some 1970s music playing over that. Yeah. So I think that's a big part. Speaking of that, Jim Kelly died today, man. The great karate master. Jim included me on that. The dude from End of the Dragon. Rest in peace, Mr. Kelly.

Sorry. Yes. No, no. Sorry about that. It's important to think about how. Sorry. Yes. No, no. Sorry about that. It's important to think about how short our time is. It is, right? It really is. That's why we've got to get all these anti-weed people high.

Or at least help them see more human rights, more freedom. Why should they tell us what to do? And I think the other part of it is that the drug laws have been used for social repression against minorities and either Mexicans or blacks or, you know, hippies and that letting loose of that avenue of control there's in the power system. And I think what we're needing to do to integrate these things, to legalize marijuana, to legalize gay marriage, these kinds of things where people see it's not going to tear apart the fabrics of society, that people can make contributions, and that people can also learn to deal with their deep desires so that they're not so scared of them. Yeah, we've made some massive headway as a culture because of that.

The gay marriage thing, the fact that Idaho got it before California, that hurt. That really hurt. That was like, how dumb are you fucks? And the name of the bill that eliminated the ability for gay people to get married, the marriage, what was it? Defense of Marriage. Defense of Marriage Act.

Oh, God. How about, if you really want to defend marriage, how about you stop people from getting divorced? See how that works out. You really want to defend marriage? Tell people they stop people from getting divorced? See how that works out. You really want to defend marriage? Tell people they have to stay together. That should be a t-shirt right there. Yeah.

For real. You want to defend marriage? Marriage is ridiculous. This is coming from a person who's married. It's a stupid idea. It's a legal contract that you sign with another human being. And then you're going to bring in a bunch of other people if it doesn't work out. And they get to dictate where your money and property goes.

So why'd you do it? Because I love her. She's an awesome person and it makes her feel better and I don't give a shit. We have children together and I'm not going anywhere. So I actually love being married to her.

I love her as a human being. She's a great person. But the whole involving the legal system part of it is so dumb. It's just so ridiculously dumb. It doesn't make any sense to me. And I understand completely the need for child support and for some folks needed to be written in stone what they have to pay and things along those lines. But, you know, I'm not that person and i don't i don't think that i need to be regulated you know if i've done nothing wrong i don't think i need to be signed

up to some system you know to prove that a relationship that i'm in is valuable to me it just it seems stupid it almost seems like it's if you if you trust someone it's like i do trust you but i'm gonna need that shit on paper it's like, I do trust you, but I'm going to need that shit on paper. It's like... I wonder since we're sort of male and more positions of power, maybe marriage often is to more protect the woman. Oh, maybe. I mean, I certainly think that there's something to that. You know, a woman wants to feel more secure.

I've heard women say that. I've heard women completely outside of them eavesdropping in on a conversation. And, uh, women were talking about, you know, I felt like much more secure in the marriage once or in the relationship. Once we were married, it doesn't make any sense, but we were together for 10 years. But once we got married, then I felt like it was real and then I could relax. I had that part of my, you know, but that's their own social hangup. You know, I think it's just some Sandra Bullock movie shit. Well, did you feel any different after you got married? Absolutely not.

I felt like I did something that I always thought was ridiculous. Well, you know, it's like the idea behind it of committing to a person and giving your all to a person, that's all beautiful. The real problem with anything where it's two people is who knows what those two people are going to be like five years from now? Who knows what they're going to be like ten years from now? And I've seen it, and it's ugly.

I've seen people that got along great, and then one person took a left, the other person took a right, and they're stuck in the same house together. And they don't like each other anymore. And it gets really gross. And then when they have to separate, I've seen what happens when they use the legal system against each other. I mean, I wrote a whole bit about it because I saw my friend who had to pay for his wife's lawyer. They were going to war, and he had to pay for the enemy's general.

Right. I think it's ridiculous. They were going to war, and he had to pay for the enemies general. Right. I think it's ridiculous. I think the idea that if you're taking care of the woman, you should pay some form of alimony. Yeah, definitely. Child support?

Yes, definitely. Split property that you got when you were together? I'm for that. I'm for all that. I'm for all that. What I'm not for is this gross system where the lawyers play off of each other and try to stretch things out because that's how they make the most money. Where they ask for outrageous amounts so that you come back with like a little bit less. And it becomes this mad hustle.

And like I said, I am in no way saying that I'm not pro-relationship. But I've watched someone's life fall apart because of a bad divorce whereas if they just broke up it would be cool but she dragged him through the mud legally for like a year and a half two years emptied his bank account out it was horrific like targeted him and that can happen you when you're legally attached to someone it just whereas you could be like okay we're broken up right well i don't want to be with you anymore you don't want to be with me anymore so we'll just go our separate ways no well or if you have kids together yes well they didn't that's what was even squirrelier yeah there's not even any kids involved like why do you

have to pay for this person well it's like when you described that somebody takes left, the other person takes the right. Yeah. I think that when we started trying to think about MDMA for couples therapy, because that's one of the main people, reason people use it, is for relationships. Yeah. That's great. But not all relationships should stay together. So trying to do a study, a scientific study of MDMA with couples,

if you decide that your success is how many of them stay married, that's not necessarily the smartest thing to do. Right. So what we felt was that it would be if they make a mutual decision. And whatever that decision happens to be, if it can be they stay together, they split up, if there's some kind of mutuality about it, if the MDMA helps them to listen to each other and to communicate and they can make a mutual decision, that would be considered a success. But we haven't gone forward with that research because politically having a difficult relationship is not a disease. We need to work in a disease context so that we can get prescription approval to have legal access in a medical context so that's a real issue you know that was the issue with uh modafinil do you know what that is the yeah it's one of my pro vigil i use that new vigil yeah i'm using that right now are you

really i am son of a i am i might as well that's that shit that i've given you this stuff that keeps you awake that shit's the best it's well tim ferris who uh i respect very highly had a very interesting point about he said i don't believe there's any biological free lunch and that's why he doesn't he didn't even put it in the four hour whatever four hour body because he was worried that people would just start chewing them like candy well i happen to know somebody that uses it for narcolepsy uses it twice a day for about uh you know that's what i was about to say the reason why it's it for narcolepsy. He uses it twice a day for about 15 years. That's what I was about to say. The reason why it's prescribed for narcolepsy

is because they initially created it for performance-enhancing purposes. And then the government's like, you can't just say, I want my brain to work better. You have to have a disease. So they go, narcolepsy? And that's how it got approved. Right, right.

Because apparently it works for narcolepsy. It just happened to work for narcolepsy. People who how it got approved right right but apparently it works for narcolepsy okay and i don't use it that i mean people fall asleep all the time they're they're conking out what this stuff does is keep you awake yeah but it doesn't it's pretty transparent it doesn't add a lot of other things so it's it's very weird the military is actually shifting towards towards it away from speed and amphetamines. Oh, that's smart. Yeah. Speed fucks you up and makes you do shitty things. It makes you make terrible decisions,

poor decision-making capabilities, almost worse than alcohol in a lot of ways. Yeah. And Modafinil is also for jet lag. It's for shift work. And the only reason I took it tonight is because I was caught in a gay pride parade in San Francisco. They got you. I couldn't get out of town.

They got you. And so I just wanted to be alert. How easy is it to get prescribed something like that? Because as an example, I just got off cigarettes. I wake up to, you know, I could barely get out of bed. My whole day is just like, okay, can I just lay back down? I take one-fourth of an Adderall, and 20 minutes later, I'm just like, how can i just lay back down i take one fourth of an adderall and 20 minutes later i'm just like how much work can i do i can oh my my brain's like that's alive and it's working

that's speed that's a completely different sort of experience but for something like like that it's it's also given to people that have like weird shifts you know jobs entertainers and stuff you know a lot of times you're talking too much. I can get you a prescription. Oh, okay. You go to a doctor. You tell your doctor, don't worry, I got a doctor. Okay. Jesus. No, but I mean, for the normal person, I guess.

What do I do? Is it something that's hard? Go to the doctor. No, I know people who've done it. Really? Go to the doctor. I'm not feeling so good. I'm sleepy.

I think this is something called NuVigil. I think maybe that'll help me. Boom, bang, boom, shabam. You're out the door with a prescription. They're trying to give out prescriptions, man. Doctors are trying to give you prescriptions. Do you know that, you want to hear something fucking crazy? There was something in Montana that they recently released where Montana has, you know, X amount of people living in it.

One-fourth of them are on Oxycontins. Do you know how fucking crazy that is i need to verify that because someone told me that today uh oxycontins i guess i just never try to go get prescription medicine ever well uh i i think there's a time when um if it's um possibly helpful that it can be okay to do it. I think I prefer trying to do things on my own without it and then only if it's beyond my capabilities or something that I think enhances it. So I think the idea of jet lag, doctors do want you to have a relationship to what it was approved for. But around 40% of the prescriptions in America are called off-label, where doctors prescribe it for things that it's not been approved for.

Oh, I see. And that cannot be stopped. And that's not bad. What's some of the things that this drug is used off-label, I guess? Well, I think it's... Off-label, people are just taking it for performance-enhancing reasons. Yeah. That's why they're doing it.

That's the big reason that I always hear, and the big disease is narcolepsy. Yeah, and the concern is that people have performance-enhancing drugs, but they're willing to hurt themselves in order to do it because there's no free lunch. to do it because there's no free lunch but with modafinil there there are ranges of use of certain drugs where it doesn't seem like there are harmful consequences the the montana uh gazette the billings gazette is the one that printed this it's it is one out of four that's un-fucking-believable montana has just under a million residents one One out of four have an OxyContin prescription. It's incredible. Is that pain? I wonder how they...

Listen, I have gone in for operations before, and they gave me all kinds of shit that I didn't take, but they'll give you whatever you need for pain even if you tell them it's nothing like i went into to get a deviated septum and uh they it's kind of a uncomfortable thing they stuff your nose and they crack it and break it and widen it i had a really fucked up septum and it was uh kind of literally my nose was useless for most of my life until i had this operation But my doctor gave me like two different kinds of painkillers.

And I was like, this doesn't even hurt though. He's like, well, it's going to probably tonight. Tonight you're probably going to be in some significant pain. Never came. It was like, it was weird. I had this stuff stuffed up my nose, but there was no pain.

But meanwhile, if you're a person who's easily addictive and you take one of those and you go, God damn it, I can't sleep. and then you take two more of those, and the next thing you know you go into another doctor and tell them you're in pain, you get a second prescription, and you're off to the races. Yeah, we had one of the veterans in our PTSD study took one dose, dropped out of the study, and under the influence of this medium dose of MDMA, he started feeling that he was

taking pain meds, not just for the pain, but he was kind of getting addicted, dependent on them. And he didn't want to do that anymore. War wounds, things like that. And so he decided that he didn't need the pain meds anymore. And he also felt like he had come to terms with the issues that had caused him to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, that he accepted these things, and that he could go forward without PTSD. And so he dropped out of the study, but we said, we want to ask you at two months and 12 months, our follow-ups, how you're doing. And his PTSD was still gone after a year. That's amazing. The PTSD use, the use of MDMA for PTSD is one of the ones that was discussed recently by this soldier who wrote this very eloquent letter and then committed suicide. But he was talking about the DEA keeping treatments.

I just read that letter on the airplane here. Yeah. I assumed that was what he was talking about because it's a big big issue with uh with veterans i assumed he was talking about marijuana well it could be that as well but i thought it was mdma probably both but the mdma one has been discussed a lot by friends that i have that have been in the military and they they know it helps and they want to know about it you know they've heard it's the one where you you hear a lot of people going through very traumatic things, and then they get over it. They're okay. They understand it. They accept it, and that's it.

Yeah. They've heard about it anyway. We had a meeting in the Pentagon where we were trying to get formal cooperation, and they expressed that their biggest fear was that if they were to cooperate on an MDMA study, that the word would get out more so than before, and that a lot of people who were in the military, who only a small number of them will get into clinical studies, that they would go out on their own and get stuff that was impure or pure but not in a safe place, and that would cause more harm. And they said that shouldn't stop the research, but that was the concern. And what we're thinking of saying, and what we did say, is that the word is getting out.

And we've had articles in Stars and Stripes and the Marine Corps Times and Military.com about the results of our studies. I think they owe it to the soldiers. And I think that if they wanted to start a Kickstarter to have MDMA clinics pop up with legitimate stuff, government-approved and tested all throughout the country. It could be user-funded. We are going to do that with the Indiegogo.

Kickstarter doesn't take medical issues, but Indiegogo does. Okay, Indiegogo. We are going to try to do it to crowdsource support for the study with veterans, firefighters, and police officers. That's a great idea. The thing about the psychedelics so that people understand what we're really talking about with the psychedelic medicine is it's only used a few times. It's not like the drugs that we were talking about that people get prescribed every day or several times a day. It's only part of a psychotherapeutic process with more non-drug psychotherapy sessions and what they can integrate from it so our three and a half month program for

ptsd uh treatment includes only three days of mdma i think people need to understand that all these things are tools that have been denied us and uh that i used to do a joke about it that like marijuana is like a hammer you know you could you could hammer nails with it or you could just hit yourself in the dick if you're fucking crazy. Like, just because you have a tool doesn't mean you're going to use it properly. And when you smoke too much pot and freak out, and when you, you know, take acid and jump off a roof, yes, you've done it improperly. But you're dealing with this incredibly complex thing that is really not being explained to the general public. that is really not being explained to the general public.

The dabbling in psychedelics is all sort of done with anecdotal evidence passed on by friends or books that you've read or all these, you know, and it's unnecessary. At this point, we have enough information, there's enough data, there's enough online at maps.org, right? Yeah, at maps.org. We are doing drug development in the open. We publish our protocols. We publish our data. We publish all of our timelines of our relationships with regulatory. We publish

our review of the literature. We have a treatment manual that describes what the therapy component is that's there with our adherence criteria. We're trying to make all of it publicly available. And at the same time, that's the pressure that's coming on the pharmaceutical companies actually to release more of their data. But the important thing is that the DEA is not stopping MDMA research. The FDA is not stopping. We are able to do psychedelic research in the United States and most countries of the world where we want to. We have studies right now in Israel, Switzerland, Canada, the world where we want to we have studies right now in israel switzerland canada and we've done ibogaine research in mexico and new zealand ayahuasca research in canada so that the only

thing that's really politically blocked right now is marijuana research what that's hilarious it's it's shocking but it's totally true you're getting all all this research done, and this is very new. Like two decades ago, this was not possible. It was impossible. And when did it start being possible? Well, actually, what happened was, and I did my dissertation at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. I got my master's and PhD there. And part of my dissertation was on how this happened, who at the FDA changed things, and was it other places as

well? Was it a social consensus? And it turns out that in the late 1980s, there was a lot of, particularly Reagan had been before, pro-business, there was a lot of concern that the FDA was too slow evaluating drugs, that they were mostly trying to block risks and they didn't care that much about treating illness. And so the FDA set up this group called the Pilot Drug Evaluation Staff, which was that they would pilot drug evaluation methods to try to speed up the drug review process. And this group needed drugs to actually work with. And so they looked around the other parts of the FDA and they kind of cobbled together different kinds of drugs. And they looked at the people that had control over scheduled drugs and marijuana, all the psychedelics,

and they had been suppressing things for decades. And they said, sure, we'll give this up. And so this new branch came. But they also were more science over politics. So starting in 1990, science over politics. So starting in 1990, the first study was approved with DMT by Rick Strassman. And we had tried for five studies before, for years before with MDMA, all rejected. But once this new team got into place, then they had to review our study MDMA for cancer patients with anxiety. And there was a 1992 advisory committee meeting to determine whether the FDA would go forward with psychedelic research. And they did it bureaucratically in a brilliant way. They had the DEA there. They had the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

They had the National Institute on Drug Abuse. They had representatives from all of these branches. And they proposed an idea. And their idea was that the regulations that they put on the major drugs for the pharmaceutical industries, that the risks of the medical use of psychedelics and marijuana were no different. And so they would treat these drugs as if they were drugs being developed by the pharmaceutical industry, and the same procedures would be fine. And the DEA, NIDA, the drug czar's office, they all thought, man, you put it in there, it'll never get out again,

because who can act like the pharmaceutical companies? And so they all signed off, and FDA got this policy in 1992, and then they approved our first study with MDMA, which was a safety study. And then they started approving studies with psilocybin, and then expanding our MDMA studies into patient populations. So there's a 20-year history now and a lot of track record and data. And now we have data on the benefit side, not just on the risk side, so that we can talk about balancing. Before, people would say there are no benefits, there's these risks, therefore nothing's permitted. So the dynamics have completely changed. And we've demonstrated so far, over 800 people have taken MDMA in clinical

research all over the world. And nobody's had a serious adverse event that left them harmful. Nobody has become addict, as far as we we know to MDMA. Nobody went crazy. So we've demonstrated there are safe places. Our study with LSD in Switzerland for people who are dying was 12 people and 11 of them had never done LSD before. So it's not, we're trying to show that it can be brought to people who are not from this culture, not used to this, but it can be helpful to them in a controlled setting with supportive therapists and with a lot of integration and preparation work. And people are aware of other studies like the Johns Hopkins study on psilocybin now that's gotten a lot of steam because these people many years later

experienced great personality benefits that stuck with them. Yeah, that was the study of psilocybin in people who were spiritually inclined, to see if they could have a spiritual experience. That actually, there was the classic study that that's modeled on, was called the Good Friday Experiment. And it was done in 1962. And it was one of the best things that Timothy Leary ever did. And I ended up doing a 25-year follow-up to it, tracking these people down. But basically, in 1962, lots of people

thought that psychedelics had some genuine spiritual potential. And Martin Luther King was getting a PhD at Boston University, and his mentor there was Reverend Howard Thurman, this dynamic black minister who's just fantastic. And he agreed to have Timothy Leary and Ram Dass and others, 20 people and 10 guides, come into their church on Good Friday and do an experiment. And these were all students from Andover Newton Theological Seminary. And half of them, they all got pills. Half were psilocybin, 30 milligrams, which is pretty strong. And the other half was nicotinic acid, which gives you this hot flush.

And it acts quicker. So that was going to be their double blind. And then they went through the Good Friday service. And Walter Pankey, who did this study, was a doctor, a minister, and getting a PhD at Harvard. And he had spent a year going through the world's mystical literature to develop a questionnaire for what the mystical experience was. And he extracted all specific mentions of Jesus or Moses, or it's just more of this abstract, what is a mystical experience, and administered this questionnaire.

And nine out of the 20 people had either a partial or a full mystical experience, and eight out of those nine had the psilocybin. And so the conclusion was that for people who are religiously inclined in a religious setting, you can have psychedelic drugs. Psilocybin does precipitate what seems to be a genuine mystical experience, not a hallucination. But in the mystical literature, the real test is called the fruits test, is what does you bring back? What are the fruits of this experience? And that only comes with time. And Walter Pankey, who did the study, died from a scuba diving accident in 1971. And so he would have done this. But in the middle 80s, when I was

getting my undergraduate degree, I decided to track these people down for my senior thesis at New College of Florida, which is this experimental school. And my father was really helpful. My mother was too. I identified 19 out of the 20 and was able to interview 16 of them. And what I found was that the people who had the placebo, most of them didn't remember it that vividly, but the people who had the placebo, most of them didn't remember it that vividly, but the people who had the psilocybin had very vivid memories of parts of it. And at the same time, they said that they considered it to be a genuine experience. They'd had non-drug mystical experiences since. They preferred the non-drug mystical experiences because they were more

uniformly positive. They lost their fear of death, and they felt more focused on the here and now and on social justice because they had this unit of experience that helped them identify with the planet, with the people, with not so much all the divisions that divide us. They saw a deeper unity, and so they were more social justice-minded and activists. And I think that's a little bit of a key to the 60s. As psychedelics go right, they inspire people to try to make a better world. And we can do that not in an oppositional way, but we can do it within the heart of the culture. And that's the challenge that we face.

It's really interesting that you said that what they had was a real religious experience or a real mystical experience um one of the things has been on my mind uh over the last few months when it comes to psychedelic experiences that when people want to tell you oh you're just something is going on your imagination you create your visual cortex is getting stimulated by this drug and it's creating a bunch of hallucinations it could be that but it also could be something else it could be you are experiencing some divine state of consciousness you are in contact with some other form of intelligence and either it's a hallucination or it's this other real experience but either either way, you have the exact same experience.

Whether you really went to a place and talked to super spiritual, highly intelligent beings or you imagined you did, you're still having the exact same experience. And it's incredibly vivid. That's one of the weirdest aspects about any sort of psychedelic experience is that they're almost more real than reality itself. And I think because of that, it's even more important that we keep our critical faculties, in a way, because we are always a filter.

And our culture, how we're... So I don't think we're ever seeing absolute reality or the truth. And I think that's where you get in danger, where people think, you know, God spoke to me, God said this, or I know this for sure. Because there is our filter that we're seeing it through. But you try to see as much as you can. But I think we have to be aware and be cautious and see how it works in life. So under LSD therapy and MDMA therapy, we tell tell people don't make decisions while you're doing the therapy you know wait for a couple weeks after or you know at least under the influence it's

is for exploring not for deciding hmm that's interesting although some things do get changed sometimes though you have yeah you have like a really uh obvious reaction where you know you're very aware that okay you know this, this is what needs to be done and I need to do this right away. That does happen. And I think one of the more vivid examples for me was when I was sitting for someone who was doing

MDMA. He was a physician. And during the experience his arm became paralyzed. Completely paralyzed. That's how you know you're high. Shit starts to stop working. And and we're like it's not you know permanent and it's it's psychosomatic you don't really need to you know we don't need to take you to the hospital and he was a doctor but his arm was paralyzed and over time he told this story that lasted a couple hours but the story was that

he as was with his mother and his siblings at the bedside of their father, who was dying, and all this life support. And they had this discussion about whether they should pull the plug or not. And because he was the doctor, and they decided that they would. And so he actually pulled the plug. And the complicating thing was that he hated his father. and he wasn't really sure was this his anger at his dad or was this what his mother really wanted so as he explored this emotionally complex issue and realized he really didn't kill his dad he did what his mother and his siblings were saying it was humane the feeling started coming back to his arm

wow so that was the arm that pulled the plug yeah is there a real plug there actually i thought it was like a button but you know whatever there depends on it i don't know good point good point because like pulling the plug is the expression but what a fucking stupid if life support systems were really like you just go back there and unplug it you know that's how they shut them off well we never we don't want to kill people so we don't have an off button so you have to just pull the plug like really so the expression's true you said something that i thought was really interesting too where you said that in the 1960s you don't think people were ready for it i think a lot of people were i think that the

culture wasn't and i think even the if you read the electric Kool-Aid acid test, you know, there's ways in which people are damaged and left behind. And that's something where I felt they weren't quite ready for that. But isn't that the case always, just with life in general? There's always going to be people that are damaged and left behind. Well, I think one of the beautiful things about the Marines and the military is that they don't leave anybody behind. And I think that we should adopt that. We should be the psychedelic Marines. I love it. In a way. Don't leave anybody behind.

That's really good advice, except there's some really annoying people out there. And if you get hooked up with them and, you know, for whatever reason, they can't carry their own weight psychically, psychologically, emotionally. They're really fucking needy. At a certain point in time, you need to cut. You need to cut ties. You can't fix the whole world. I think that's really.

You can't. You know you can't. And to tell people that they can is crazy talk. There's some people that are just broken animals. You can't fix them. Unfortunately, it's not you and it's not me, but we both know people who we say, you know what? If you had, like, if there was a show,

like one of those fix-me-up shows, you know, they have those, like, home improvement shows or weight loss shows. If you had a guy who's just a complete fucking mess and they said, just, Rick Doblin, this is your assignment for this show. You're going to take this guy and elevate his consciousness and and just make him a much better person do you think you could do it with a complete idiot well i think the beauty of it is that people have to do part

of it themselves yes and if they're and they own it and that's where they become empowered and you can't fix them without them taking the courage and maybe there's ways you can help them through drugs or through therapeutic alliance to but they already have that path in mind right they have to be willing to take certain kind of steps forward and so that i think that is the beauty that we can't heal everybody that they have to heal themselves i think there's also a big danger as a human being in almost embracing the fact that you're not going to improve. Because it takes away all the pressure of trying to improve. All the self-examination. As soon as you say, I don't give a fuck.

I don't give a fuck. Do you really not give a fuck? Or is that your psychic shield to keep you from examining all the holes in your life's game because that's more likely the case well we talked about the army veteran that committed suicide who wrote that letter and one part of that letter was that he had felt like he would never get better yeah and i just kept thinking if he could have had an MDMA experience, would he still have been able to find some hope and a reason to live or would he still have committed suicide? And those are the questions. He talked about it.

Twenty-two veterans a day are committing suicide. It seems like he was dealing with physical pain as well. I think there was a bunch of different things going on with him. And that's where he was upset at the DEA, I think, also, at pain meds and how they regulated pain meds. I think MDMA, actually, in combination with morphine, it's been used in dying people,

enhances the pain control. MDMA has pain-relieving qualities, and when you combine it with morphine, when people are in hospice settings, things like that, that you have better pain control, and you don't need as much morphine and you start waking people up so that they're not tranquilized out and you open their heart so that people can have these beautiful pretty much pain-free

experiences there's a woman that wrote a book honor thy daughter about her daughter who died in the early 30s from cancer and how she had gone through a series of psychedelic therapy sessions as she was dying with MDMA and mushrooms, LSD-MDMA combination, but that it really enriched her daughter's life, and she felt she needed to write a book about it to let people know. So I think that the use of these drugs when people are in pain, it's not just mental pain. There's a whole link between mental pain and physical pain. And MDMA actually does help in this kind of, I see psychedelic medicine, psychedelic hospice will be pretty common, I think, 20, 30 years from now. And we'll look back and think that,

you know, it made sense 50 years ago. It absolutely does. I mean, I think that's one of the best uses for them to give people like I remember Larry Hagman who died, was on CNN. He was a friend, yeah. And died recently. Great guy. I never got to meet him, but I really loved his interviews. He was so candid and just warm and friendly. He was so candid and just warm and friendly.

And he was talking about the importance of an acid trip that he had where it took away his fear of dying. Yeah, Joy Behar on CNN. That was fantastic. Yeah, it was. That was a fantastic interview. It really was because he wasn't saying it like he was a kook. He was just explaining what it did and why it did that. And you believed him. You really did believe him.

Yeah, I spent years trying to meet him because I knew that he had done LSD therapy in the 60s. And he wrote about it in his autobiography. And my mother-in-law actually sent me this message saying, Larry Hagman has done LSD. So then I started trying to find him. And eventually I did meet him. And we got to be friends. And he was a donor to MAPS. And he wrote this he helped

us in a lot a lot of different ways and he was so human that he would be from JR and known all over the world but when you were with him he just was present present and he wasn't you know ego inflated and he was just a really nice person and I felt that that he had this idealism and this joy from his whole life but he also really valued his psychedelic experiences his experiences with MDMA his experiences with marijuana and it was kind of ironic that someone who was so valued by the culture couldn't be open about that but he had to keep that hidden well he did for a long time until until he wrote that book yeah yeah the joy behar experience but i think also it's like

the um the atmosphere for an actor actors get picked for things and if you're very controversial i mean for every charlie sheen and of course we're dealing with 2013 where Charlie Sheen can get away with being this crazy coke snorting whoremonger and like he just wears it and owns it. For that to be a thing 20 years ago for an actor, it could be a career killer. Yeah. And when he was doing Dallas, I mean, the consciousness of the public's opinion on psychedelics was very much different than it is today. Yeah, well, he was in Dallas when MDMA first became a party drug. And it was used at the Stark Club, of which there's a documentary. That's sort of the explosion of MDMA.

The transformation from MDMA as a secret, quiet, therapeutic drug. Underground isn't quite right because it was still legal, but it was used in a quiet way for fear that if it became known, it would become illegal. And then in Dallas, it started being used and distributed by different people in nightclub settings. Dallas was the place, right? Dallas was the place. And there's a documentary about the Star Club, and there's interviews with Larry Hagman in there.

And what he's talking about is this discussion he had with one of the police officers in Dallas. And they were saying that Larry had caused them to lose lots and lots of money. And he's like, well, what do you mean I caused you to lose lots and lots of money? And he said, well, after MDMA became illegal, we were going to bust the Stark Club. And we had this whole tactical team and everything was set to go. And then you and some friends came in to party there.

Not necessarily to take MDMA. And so we didn't want to bust Larry Hagman from Dallas. That's hilarious. And so we had to call off the bust and then come back and do it another time. More times, more rather evidence that times have changed. Yeah. Because today they would be psyched to bust Larry Hagman.

You know, if it's like some dude like that, like, don't make it Larry Hagman, make it, you know, some other famous TV star. He didn't necessarily have anything that they could bust him on. But he was so nice. He let us auction off a dinner with him as a donation to MAPS. Wow. And this couple, and also Andy Wilde did that, too. So we had a dinner. But the deal Larry made is I had to come along.

Ah. And I was like, that would be great. That's not a bad deal. Wow, what a great dinner. Yeah. Who did you guys eat dinner with? Well, this group, this family from Canada. And they were just ordinary people, but had one of them the woman had struggled

with cancer had they were um just loved Dallas and loved I Dream of Jeannie and oh that's right he was on I Dream of Jeannie yeah and we had such a nice time at the dinner they also bought the dinner with Andy Weil who was he the boss on I dream of genie no he was the astronaut he was the other he was the main character with barbara he was in love with barbara eden that's right yeah i always get them confused with bewitched i get i dream of genie and bewitched confused there there he is wow and bewitched was the one where they had a different dude like they they killed off the dude and brought in the same name, different guy. I think now that Larry is gone, I can share that he had a bong that was made like the bottle that Jeannie lived in.

Oh, wow. Where is that now? Wow, that would be worth a lot of money. And we got to smoke some pot together in this genie bottle. Genie bottle. And he said that somebody had talked to him about marketing it and making lots of them. And he said no, he didn't want to have that done. Yeah, well, that's too bad.

We're going to make it now, bitch. Sorry. But then the family, he was so nice with this family and just, and also with me, just treat us as like, you know, part of his family. We had dinner in his kitchen. And also with me, just treat us as like, you know, part of his family. We had dinner in his kitchen. That's awesome. And then it came time for the dinner with Andy Weil that the family invited Larry, and he came with a friend of his to help him travel.

And we ended up, just a few months before he died, going up in seaplanes and stuff onto this island where Andy Wye lives and having this really wonderful experience. That's awesome. Yeah. Yeah, I think guys like him that do those sort of interviews, that's a really, really important thing because the public's perception of people who do LSD is almost entirely limited to fuck-ups and crazy people and wild people, or they used to do acid. Oh, this guy used to do acid. He did acid back when he was just off his rocker.

You never hear about a positive drug experience like that from a very respected person. Right, and that's what we need is the coming out of loads of people like that who are retiring baby boomers. So I think time is on our side. There's all these people who are more fearless because they're not worried about what they tell their kids or they're not worried about their jobs. They've made a reputation and they can talk. Like Steve Jobs, I had a wonderful opportunity. I tried for years and finally managed to have a half-hour conversation with him about our LSD study. Did he give you like a half an hour on an iphone and go ready go and press start is it

facetime start 29 28 before i had an iphone and uh you didn't have an iphone when you met him how dare you i didn't meet him it was just on the phone and um at the end of it he said you know send me a proposal but um I didn't ever heard back. He wasn't known for being philanthropic, but I had gotten a letter from Albert Hoffman to him after his 102nd birthday. Wow. Creates acid, lives to be 102. He was incredible. And he was married for over 70 years, the same person.

Albert Hoffman, to pivot just for a second, was such a perfect example. We're so fortunate that he's the one that invented LSD because he was everything what I'm trying to talk about in terms of integrating. He was a big successful chemist for a major pharmaceutical company, Sandoz, he made drugs that sold hundreds of millions of dollars, he lived more or less in the same place, he had a wife for over 70 years. He had children. Very normal guy. Very normal guy. Very brilliant guy. Was his wife a pink dragon? I was fortunately able to be with Albert when he tried MDMA for the first time.

Wow. How old was he when he tried it? In the united states in his 80s that's incredible it was um there were late 70s um and so what he said was um ah finally something i can do with my wife because she had had kind of a scary experience with lsd a lot of people have man yeah have you done any tests with like candy flipping like mixing MDMA with acid? Well, I believe that that actually has incredible therapeutic potential. However, we've not actually tested it because in the scientific world, you want just one variable, if possible. And so to combine LSD and MDMA, which drug are we trying to make a medicine and are we always going to combine them? Once it becomes legal, that would be...

I think maybe even before... Well, that's the question. Maybe it's 10 years before these drugs can become medicalized, legal in a medical way. Do you think that's that long? Do you really think it could be sooner? I think it's possible now more than ever. Well, but there's a certain track of data that you have to produce, a certain set of requirements that we're on the track of doing.

But it looks to me like it's eight to ten years. Well, you would certainly know. Well, I've always been wrong. I've always been wrong, and I've always underestimated how long it takes. always been wrong and i've always underestimated how long it takes when we're talking about earlier with gay rights i think they equate because when i was a kid uh i remember i was living in san francisco uh from uh 7 to 11 and i was around a lot of gay people and uh it was completely normal because that was just what i was around and then when i moved to florida when i was 11 my friend candy his candido he's a cuban kid his dad was really pissed off with the newspaper slams it down and he was he was mad that uh the the fags wanted to

get married that's what he kept saying i believe this shit these fags want to get married and then i remember i was like 11 i was like what why do you care like well you're a grown man like this is how stupid some grown men are and i I'm like, that's a weird argument. Like, that's a strange thing. So that was, you know, a long-ass time ago. I'm 45 years old now, so that was 34 years ago. And the idea, no, it's not. Yeah, it is.

Okay. But it's the idea that back then it was really something that people fought against. It was really a subject of you could be public about it and not feel like an ignorant asshole. Whereas today, if you say that you're against gay people being married, like you're nothing but a fool. Right. You're nothing but a fool. Right. You're nothing but a fool. If you honestly think it's either you're crazy with religion and you honestly think that

somehow or another it's possible to cure a person of being gay and if they believe in the scripture, that's, you know, I can't even talk to you. That's a different animal. But if you're a rational person and you accept the fact that people are born gay and you have an issue with them marrying their lover, like, you're a crazy person. Yeah, I think, though, that people who are irrational, that's the question. How do we reach them?

How are you rational? And I think there's a way that they're fearful of something that blocks their rational thinking. And if you can somehow or other help them, and I think a lot of people who are so anti-gay are scared of their own gay feelings. It's kind of a cliche, but I think that's often the case. and how people can be so blind or be willing to be so driven by irrational factors that I thought, what can we do to try to help get to heal that? Because some people, you know, they can be quite powerful, and they can, how do you respond? And that was the dilemma for me.

And I finally felt that growing up with the Vietnam War, that that was something that now I was being called to fight. And I decided to become a draft resistor. powerful the demonization of the other and the making of the enemy that there was i couldn't figure out how to contribute to breaking through that cycle and it finally felt like this deep spiritual experience of connection and letting people's fears come up where they could look at them more that that would be for individual, make us more grounded and less likely to be manipulated our irrational factors. And if millions of people could have that experience, which did happen during the 60s, but if we can expand it, that maybe there's a basis to go through the crises that we're facing over the next couple decades as a species, and as globalization and people are bumping up against each other, that it felt like somehow or other the irrational is based a lot on fear

and how can we help people to counter that with love, with hope, or with looking with self-acceptance. And I think that's where the MDMA is so useful, that the fear of self-criticism or the fear that MDMA helps people to accept who they are. fear of self-criticism or the fear that MDMA helps people to accept who they are. And the LSD and the psilocybin, the ayahuasca, the mescal and the peyote, those drugs, they are challenging in a different way in that they do this dissolving of the control mechanisms and dissolving of the ego and hopefully people can let go and blend and be strengthened from that and that's the support that we need to provide to help that to be happening and i think

you know just the way that this religious fundamentalism against gay marriage i mean right now we have a crisis of fundamentalism around the world it's a crisis of ideology yeah so and it's also a crisis of power because once someone gets into a position where they can espouse their ideology, you listen to them. That is power. And then they use that power to get money, to manipulate, to get sex, to do whatever the fuck they want, not pay taxes. There's a lot of craziness. It's almost like – and the not pay taxes thing. It's almost like they're in cahoots.

It's almost like they're in cahoots. It's like the government has decided, look, it'd probably be beneficial if you guys did a good job and, you know, culted up the shit out of some people and get them all whacked out on your ideas to the point where they're complete fundamentalists on your idea. So how about you not pay taxes? You know, how about we help you along there? You know, make it even more profitable and more susceptible to corruption. more susceptible to corruption? Well, I think that there is that way in which the government can be influenced by groups. And I think that's something also that we have to be wary of. It's a mess.

But at the same time, we have to work through groups and work through government. So I think this, one of the first things we learned at the Kennedy School is there is no the government. It's like your body, there's no your body. There's all these different organ systems they all work in different ways well we find out about that when the government goes after itself like the c when when this general petraeus thing happened we found out the cia and the fbi don't necessarily see eye to eye right you know right and that's where our strategy is built that the fda is putting science over politics while the other forces are trying to either slow down or block research. And where it comes with marijuana is that there's a government monopoly on the supply of marijuana that can be used in federal research. So even though there's no monopoly on the supply of marijuana, the only kind that's been grown under DEA license is controlled by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

That's hilarious. And if you want to get to do research to make marijuana into a medicine, the FDA will give you permission. We have permission to do a study with marijuana in 50 veterans for post-traumatic stress disorder. And our distinction is that the marijuana is more about treating symptoms and the MDMA is more about curing. And then you only need MDMA a few times. The marijuana people sort of need it every day. Yeah. But we have FDA approval and NIDA and the Public Health Service rejected the protocol and refused to provide the marijuana for us.

And they only can review protocols for marijuana because they've got sitting on this monopoly. And we were 12 years lawsuit and we won and won and then we lost in the First Circuit Court of Appeals to break the monopoly. But that's the core reason why we're not able to make progress with marijuana research and we are able to make progress with psychedelics. What are they afraid of with marijuana? I think they're afraid of the whole drug war collapsing, that the marijuana is incredibly demonized. It's widely used. There's a lot of people that know that it's not so dangerous.

And I think it's a symbol. It's a symbol of cultural rebellion. And that's where it was embedded in certain people's minds. And even though it was made illegal in 1937 with the Marijuana Tax Act, then it was illegal shortly after Prohibition ended. And it was illegal during the Depression, and mostly it was Mexicans and blacks that smoked pot. And so it was a way to repress people who were competing for low-wage jobs. It was a way to block the hemp industry, various things like that.

jobs. It was a way to block the hemp industry, various things like that. But it largely was a minor thread in American history until the 60s and white suburban people started, kids started smoking pot and you had this massive explosion of pot. And then pot and LSD got associated with cultural rebellion. And now, all these years later, you know, there are many people that smoke pot that are at least out about that and have made a lot of contributions. So I think it's more now about fear of parents for their kids. It's shifted. But that's what's driving what's left of the drug war is parents wanting to protect their kids and also all these vested interests that have the prison unions and things like that. But I think that dynamic we're trying to is shifting also. And so there's a way in which those of us who are interested in enhancing our lives with these drugs in positive,

responsible ways need to do so, need to speak about it where possible and need to demonstrate that it's not about tearing down the society. It's strengthening. It's all of us coming together to face these incredible challenges. And we need all the inspiration and we need all the creativity and we need all the energy that we can get. Well, unfortunately for some people, they really can't speak out about it because they get drug tested at work. That's a big issue. I mean, the idea that something that stays in your body as long as marijuana gets tested, when the psychoactive, the time in which your body brings it back to baseline is less than 24 hours, right?

Right, yeah. You basically just have trace metabolites that stay in your system for a long-ass time. But they're not psychoactive. So you're at work. You smoke a joint on Friday. You're at work on Monday. They make you take a piss test. You piss positive they're penalizing you for something you're doing when you're not at work that really is not going to affect work you can also be arrested for

driving under the influence yeah for metabolites right that you took from pot a week ago right it's nonsense it's so crazy the idea that that first of all the idea that they treat they have some arbitrary level that they test you for, and they say, well, this is, you can't operate a marijuana vehicle, a vehicle on marijuana if you have this function system. It's been proven. What test have you done? Where's the science behind coming up with a level? When you look at the science, the experienced marijuana smokers are not debilitated in their driving. And there's been a lot of driving tests that have been done. And what they show is that when you are drinking alcohol and driving,

that you are impaired, but you don't think you're impaired. And so you're more reckless. That under marijuana, people know that sometimes their instincts, their reaction time might be slow. So you take compensating action. So people are more careful when they're driving and more aware. So in driving, not in simulators, but when they're out and driving roads and cars and in simulators too, that marijuana is very minimally affecting driving. And you become paranoid.

So you drive a little slower. And you react a little slower, too. Do you really think you react slower, like physically? Is there any meaning? No, I mean by that, no, because I've, look at all these basketball players that, you know, smoke pot and do it. It's just, yeah. Do you know about that, jujitsu?

I didn't. Huge in the jujitsu community. Massive. Snowboarding. A massive amount of people smoke pot and then go train. It's so much so they have t-shirts. Rolling while stoned. Rolling stoned.

They have all these different... I mean, it's so common in the jiu-jitsu world. Yeah, I play racquetball. And so I kind of have combined marijuana and racquetball and trained myself to be really quick reacting. Yeah. And sometimes I play my best games when I'm stoned, and sometimes I don't. Sometimes you don't give a fuck. But I can never tell ahead of time whether it would be better or not.

That's funny. But I think with driving that what I meant by reaction time is that you don't take precipitous action so the classic thing is that you're i'm going somewhere i'm thinking about something i miss i i don't turn where i wanted to turn right but then i just like calmly find my way back i don't like jerk the wheel i do want to clarify though that that's you you're an intelligent guy and you have your shit together right i think for most folks it you know, I don't like driving high. I'd rather be sober. Yeah, I'd rather be sober.

I don't like, there's a lot of things that I don't like to do when I'm high. I don't mind it, but I don't want to get pulled over and I'm high and I got to talk my way out of some cop being upset at me for being high. Like, dude, I'm telling you, I drive fine. I'm good. I don't want to be involved in that situation. And I don't, I think I would be kind of a hypocrite if uh if i said that and like or if i

if i had a problem with some people getting high and driving but i know some people are impaired there's there's some they shouldn't drive there's certain people that freak out i don't believe in driving when you're impaired yeah yeah and when you're freaking out i think even if it's only psychologically even if your reflexes are still there you're still in driving when you're impaired. Yeah. Yeah. And when you're freaking out, I think, even if it's only psychologically, even if your reflexes are still there, you're still impaired. You know, you're freaking out. Oh, my God. Get at the exit. Don't drive like that.

Please. So it's not for everybody. I think that's responsible. Yeah. Sobriety and driving, I think, go hand in hand. I did have, you talked about being high and having to talk to a police officer. I was actually going to visit John Lilly. And a chemist friend of mine had separated the isomers of ketamine.

And I was going to bring that to John who hadn't tried the different isomers yet. This is in Florida. And it was way a long time ago. And I had a Porsche 914, which is a small, cheap car, but just has the open top. And so I was going from Sarasota, Florida, to Miami. And it was just such a beautiful night and the moon was out and I was stoned and I thought, okay, I'm going to speed. It's just beautiful. I'm going to get a ticket, but it's okay. And I thought, okay, as long as I'm just going to get this ticket, well, why don't I just think about what I could tell the police officer when the inevitable happens?

So you're thinking about this as you're planning for your ticket as i'm planning for tickets what what can i tell him about that would somehow rather be um be okay and i thought the first thing is don't deny that i'm speeding you know don't don't contradict anything but the main thing i thought is what do we have in common you know and the only thing i could think of is were two guys out on the road on a lonely guys on a friday night out in the roads and so you're gonna blow this guy to get out of the ticket is that what you're trying to say how dare you no i know the story was that um i was on my way to see my girlfriend okay and i was good call and i was late okay Good call. And I was late. Okay. And officer, I am speeding, and I'm sorry, but that's what I was doing.

And so it happened. I got pulled over. Right. I told the story, and the guy was like, you know, I'm going to let you go. Just tell her that it's from me, that you owe this from me. That's a nice guy. You can get lucky and get a nice cop. Yeah.

I've had that happen many times. And then with John Lilly, one of the isomers is more active than the other. And so that was interesting. But I also did get the sense that he was too much into the ketamine and too much into this other state. ketamine and too much into this other state. And I started trying to think about how possibly we could help him because he was such a major contributor and a hero of mine. And one of the people that was a dolphin trainer that worked with him with some of his dolphins had this sense, Roberta Goodman, had this sense that he was also going downhill and so we are arranged to get together with them to do mdma therapy and during that he kind of became very much um into his body but he had abscesses from

where he was shooting himself oh god he was in terrible shape so he was shooting ketamine oh yeah yeah yeah intermuscularly or do you do it intravenously? He would do it IV sometimes. He would do it intramuscularly. He just was so trying to be out of body in another place that he wasn't taking care of himself. Wow. And it was painful to him. And so he kind of bounced into this awareness of what he was doing. So he had infections. He had infections, yeah.

He was hurt. Wow. And he didn't want He had infections, yeah. He was hurt. Wow. And he didn't want to stay there and deal with it. And so we couldn't help him, you know. Right. Because he didn't want to. Just didn't want to deal with it. He also was probably dealing with the reality of a decaying body.

And he was an older man, and he probably figured, you know what, these states of mind, I like this better. You know, I'll just ride this bitch until the wheels fall off. I mean, there's a lot of people that take that approach as well. Yeah. You know, and to a guy who spends so much time in altered states of consciousness, I don't think it's unreasonable to, like, prefer that. You know, I don't agree with it.

I think it is. I think it is. Really? Because I think when you get this deeper sense about how life is so precious, that you can have these other states of mind, but that it should be inculcating compassion, a sense that you have to contribute to make it a better world, that this kind of self-destructive... But is it ultimately futile? I mean, isn't we live, we die? I mean, if this guy is feeling his body giving out on him, and he says, you know, I'm just going to shoot ketamine until the boat hits the rocks. Well, I think giving makes people happy a lot of times.

People are depressed, you know, if they serve or help others. I even thought about that, about vet that you know if there was some way you know he felt that he was a harm to his family and that he was doing them good by killing himself and I think if only there would have been some soup kitchen or something that he could have felt that he was contributing maybe that would have and we would kind of address that didn't he though he was talking about the all the widows and he of addressed that, didn't he, though? He was talking about all the widows that he'd created and that he didn't feel like he had the right to exist. Right, but that's psychological material to work through. That's not

necessary. And I think even... That's a hard thing to say, but you're saying it coming from someone who's had MDMA experiences. And I think unless somebody has, they really would listen to this. thing to say but you're saying it from coming from someone who's had mdma experiences and i think unless somebody has they really would would listen to this like a straight person not not me not gay but i mean a square a guy who's never done any drugs and well i've you know really not been into drugs and i've took some percocets in college if that person heard that they would go what is this guy talking about like the guy had post-traumatic stress disorder from murdering people and you know committing war crimes and he's openly spoke about it in this letter and then you're telling him he's going to take ecstasy and he's going to

he's going to be able to work through that like what the fuck are you talking about yeah that's a really good point um in fact people have accused us of like you're going to try to help people just forget what they did. And you can make mindless soldiers who will commit war crimes. And then they get a drug and they feel better and they go back. So I think that's a really good point you raised because it's not that people say that was good, that I can accept that that was good. They don't reframe what they did into something good. But they realize that it's done.

If they accept it, it can give them the chance in the rest of their life to make up for it. Not that you can in any way, but it gives you a way to go forward in a positive way. And I think that if we do this in Marines, let's say, my guess is that it will make them more sensitive about those kind of occasions where they might be reckless with their machine gun or something. Yeah. That it might make them more careful. are like unknown questions and it's it's really important but the the process of dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder is to more live in the present to let the the past inform you not to deny it and but not to be so oppressed by it and to accept what you've done and i think once you accept that there is that evil in all of us that we have to like those us, that we all have the capacity under certain circumstances,

that you can accept that. And what we hope is that people then can move forward and recognize that they still have some life. And every day they can make choices. And every day they can try to be helpful to somebody or not. And I think that's what we're talking about, the healing. It doesn't make them look back and say, that was okay what I did. I think we're in a very strange period of human history where we know that we have all these issues.

We know we have massive government corruption. We know we have massive government corruption we know we have massive financial corruption we know we have the great majority of people who don't agree with the war acts that are going on whether it's drone attacks or what have you and we wonder like why is our society so far behind why have we achieved so such great technological and military heights, but yet socially we're so fucked up. And we have all the tools to fix that. And that's what's really insane. It's like individuals have found their own unique situations that through yoga or through MDMA

or through meditation or even some through religious chanting and learning how control of your breath can change states of mind. People have gone that through jogging. You were talking about smoking pot and getting high. I know a lot of people who think things through when they're jogging and let things go when they're jogging too. I think there's many, many, many pieces that we can use to try to fix this problem. And they're all documented. We're not living in the dark ages anymore. And I think this is one of the first generations that's been around that's experienced that. That has that many tools. And I think you were right on when you talked about how we're

overdeveloped intellectually and underdeveloped emotionally and spiritually it's not even that we're underdeveloped it's just we're not developed at all you know what i mean it's like most people are acting on momentum or imitating their their atmosphere yeah well we're developed some we think from the primates or some are pure instincts yeah i mean as a science society it's pretty crazy i mean groups are you know that that's what i thought about you know hitler's germany that you've got a culture that's insane we're not we're right north korea right now yeah they're all programmed and yeah so that there's a way in which if you

look at our technology which is miraculous yeah um miraculous, and we have capacities now to alter the planet with global warming, but we don't have the intellect from religion and morals, you know, because religion and morals have sort of squashed the intellect and didn't want Copernicus and Galileo and just a whole history of things. But is that really religious or is that just the people claiming to be religious? It's human beings, right? It's just the ideologies behind these ideas that didn't want to relinquish power. Yeah, because Albert Einstein talked about how true science and true religion are not in opposition. And that the scientist is also in a state of wonder and spiritual appreciation. Yeah, because people that think that religion is ridiculous or that God is ridiculous or the concept of a higher power is ridiculous, you know what else is ridiculous?

The whole universe itself the fact that there's a floating ball quarter size of the earth called the moon just floating in space above us how heavy is that stupid thing it's just floating above us oh and without it our world would not exist because our temperature would not be regulated enough that we could live in cold climates and hot climates it wouldn't be predictable enough it would be fucked i mean that's that's crazy that's way crazier than some guy who built everything that you know big bang that's crazier than anything that religion's ever come up with ever that the whole universe was smaller than the head of a pin and then exploded 13 point whatever billion years ago and created the skies above and everything you see. Yeah, well, you said, is it futile?

You live and you die. And I think that those moments of wonder or appreciation for just how miraculous, mysterious, incomprehensible are those moments of love, that there's a way in which they make life worth it. I agree. And I think that there can be, I don't want to use the word religion, and I don't like ideology, but there can be a way of living the life with wonder and with sharing knowledge and with just looking into what we have learned rock solid about the very universe we live in and respecting that and worshiping that i mean in a way you know not like i'm not talking about like a deity but about like like a great wonder like the great wonder that it really is there's a benefit to that yeah and taking that into the pain i think is being able to take the loving energies into the places that need healing. And that that's where, so just having spiritual meditating on top of a mountaintop and trying to, you know, get off the wheel of suffering and stuff, that seems like a very egotistical way, actually.

and having the sense that while some of us are privileged in all different ways to really be healthy and be wonderful and in wonder without being so threatened, that there's a lot of people that aren't, and that we have to not only feel those moments, but then try to somehow, as Martin Luther King talked about, the arc of history. Make some contribution of some way that helps it for others too. You know, it was also ironic. One of the weird things that's going on with society is that as our technological capabilities increase, we also fill our skies with light pollution and we can't see the stars. And one of the best psychedelic experiences I ever had outside of doing a drug was I went to the Keck Observatory in Hawaii on the Big Island. And we drove through the clouds. And as we were driving, like, you wonder if it's going to be a cloudy day because then you won't be able to see anything.

It takes a while to get up there. And I was like, damn, it looks like it's cloudy. But then we drove through the clouds. And you realize, oh, this thing is so high up there that you actually drive past where the clouds are. This is nuts. And we went up to the observatory and the view is just insane because the big island is set up for the observatory. So all the lights that they use for street lights are very special type of diffused lighting that doesn't give light pollution off. So you have this incredible view of the stars where you see the whole Milky Way like a movie, like those pictures of space.

And somehow or another, it's just above us. And you're looking at it. It's so unbelievably humbling and magical. I was like I was staring into the impossible. And I remember being upset that I couldn't see this every night. Like that's up there all the time. And not seeing that and just making it this blank screen. By doing that, you sort of like lose the feel for what's really going on.

Yeah, we're out of touch with that a lot. I had this bonding moment with, in some ways, my opposite. My family and I were on a vacation in Israel, and we decided to go across the Sinai Desert by car to go see Cairo and the pyramids. And we had to work with an Egyptian company, and people had armed guards because it's kind of dangerous now. And so as we were driving through the Sinai Desert, and it was so dark, and the sky was magnificent, we asked if we could just stop the car and just sort of walk a bit from the road. There was virtually no other traffic on the road. The only thing were military checkpoints every once in a while.

And we just went out, and so these—it was Ramadan, too. went out and so these um it was ramadan too and so these muslims who were with guns to protect us who were jewish we just stood under the stars in the middle of the desert with no light pollution and just had this shared moment of kind of awe at the majesty yeah the the the view of, the actual view that we're supposed to see, I think is really what inspired people throughout history to create the idea of gods and to create this. I mean, the insane view that you get of that, that just the images of those magical lights in the sky, millions and billions of them, just to see that is it's so humbling and to not see that it's it's so dead it's so numb it's like we don't have an appreciation for the fact that we're in space you watch a documentary it seems kind of abstract but when you're on top of the observatory and you you look out and you have that incredible view of the stars, you go, oh, my God. Like, we are really in space right now.

We are on a big, organic spaceship. We're moving 1,000 miles an hour. In a circle, yeah. It's nuts. It's weird to see. And what it's done to, Stuart Brand talked a lot about, with the whole Earth, the picture of the Earth from space. Yeah.

We're the first generation or two that's ever had that image. And those astronauts that go up in the space station, the space shuttle, they all talk about the experience. It's being very transcendent. take that view of the earth from above and you look down you see just the nature of the whole reality of a planet and a solar system in a galaxy in a universe it's it all just sort of falls into place you're like oh my god but when you're down here and you know you're stuck in traffic and the sky's dark you don't even think about it like you're you're on this majestic ride through the heavens instead you're overwhelmed with the mundane bullshit of this person in front of you

not reacting to the green light come on asshole and if you can somehow do both and that's where I think Lily got wrong you thought the spiritual part was the more important part and it's the balance my daughter Ellie is in 8th grade and she had to do a

project with uh for national history day and with a couple of her girlfriends they did a project on apollo 11 which was and it turned out that um the girl that she did it with um michael collins was her grandfather he was the one that was on the when armstrong put his foot on the and um buzz aldrich that he was the one that stayed in the capsule. And so I actually got to interview him as part of this. And he did talk about, for him, what was so amazing, both being up there in space and seeing the Earth, but also when he got back and they went around the world

and people were cheering and talking about things, he said that he thought that people would say, you know, look what you americans did and wherever he went people said look what we did huh like it was the human race that we went to the moon and people wanted to be part of that and he because it was such a space race with russia he sort of we did it but he saw you know americans did it but he saw around the world that people said we all collectively did it that would the idea of we all collectively are in this thing together that we are a global community that's really one of the last saving hopes of humanity and i think the internet has sort of reinforced that idea in a way that never existed i think

nationalism the idea of nationalism seems so much more preposterous now especially nationalism in a war sense not nationalism there's nothing wrong with being proud of the town you live in nothing brought wrong with uh cheering for the you know your home basketball team there's nothing wrong with any of that but what's wrong is when it translates into war and i think that this is the first culture that has really sort of openly embraced a global society you know i think kids today they're far less likely to buy the bullshit when it comes to us against them or any ideas about you know what's really going on with geopolitical struggles yeah we know it's the in Iran, like, they're just,

they're kids. They're trying to get out of the, under the thumb of an oppressive government. Well, my son, Eden, who is just going to college, he was playing Halo. And you can play multi,

you know, and he was playing with somebody in Saudi Arabia. Oh. That's so crazy. It's fantastic. And I think what we see a lot is the rise of fundamentalism you know the orthodox jews are nuts the some of the orthodox christians and muslims all these

fundamentalists i think because of the forces of globalization because it's harder to sustain that we're the one right religion they're they're kind of having to circle their wagons and they become a bit more extreme. And so it might look on the surface that things are getting worse, but I think that's this defensive mechanism where they can barely hold it together. And I think it won't end up with homogenous one world religion, one government will appreciate those small things about the local town, where you are. those small things about the local town, where you are. You can appreciate the differences even more when you feel part of the commonality. You don't have to be scared of the differences

because there's something deeper that connects us. I think there's also a problem that people have in that human beings, we share chimpanzee alpha male DNAna and we are always looking for leaders and yeah the other problem is once someone becomes a leader we see those with politicians and dictators we saw it with the people that that came in after mubarak in egypt tried to pass all these crazy fucking laws that essentially made them dictators and then the people were like what are you talking about like this is this is what we just shed blood for like and you assholes are trying to make yourself immune to prosecution for all these different things that you could be doing like fuck you no you can't do that and i think seeing that for the first time you know globally even though right now it may be very

frustrating for us and it is frustrating for us because we don't think change is coming quickly enough change that corresponds with what we know about the world i think it is if you look at it historically if they look back to this time i think this will be a time of great turmoil and great change it's just that we measure history in these 20 30 year bursts you know and i think the 20 year burst that we're in right now is just bananas well i i think as i get older and as i watch my kids grow that for me 10 or 20 years is no longer such a long time right and i think as you get older time speeds up too and so it's like those cops that were on the pot yeah they're so you can

but but we're not quite so scared fortunately and the um this idea of having a 20 30 year plan or even to recognize as all the spiritual traditions talked about is that these great things are not accomplishable in one generation or by one in one lifetime so that we just start the process, or we not start it, but we continue, and then we try to pass it on to the next generation. But I think that there is this intensification and crisis, and in that, I think eventually the fundamentalists will need to find more genuine spirituality, not in this rigidity. And hopefully they'll be able to coexist. There was these demonstrations of millions of people in Egypt against the Muslim Brotherhood. This is the first government in Israel that doesn't have the religious orthodox as part of the governing body, which is a really healthy thing.

Who made that quote, history is a race between education and catastrophe who's responsible for that quote do you know? I don't know I don't remember who it was whoever it was they were a bad motherfucker

whoever it was but that's really what seems to be going on H.G. Wells that really does seem to be well of course it. H.G. Wells. Was it H.G. Wells? Yeah. Oh, good. That really does seem to be, well, of course it's H.G. Wells. The guy was awesome. I think that does seem to be what's going on.

It seems to be also that sometimes it almost feels like people need an antagonist in order to perform at their very best. It's almost like we need a rival to inspire us to reach great heights. Yeah, and it depends how you see them. If they're deeper down your ally, so that like, let's say in sports teams, you know, you want your opponents to be as good as possible because that will call out the best in you. So on some level, you want the worthy opponent that you don't have to totally destroy you just are sort of co-evolving together so i think we do need to test ourselves against against others and against ourselves but we don't need to see the other side as the enemy to be destroyed and and i think uh

i used to play this game um i grew up in Chicago in Winnetka and Lake Michigan, and some friends and I would go in there and we'd play the greatest catch game. And each of us guys, we'd throw a football to somebody else. It was like half in the water. And our goal as the thrower was to get it just barely where they could reach it, where they had to make the spectacular dive and show off to everybody how great they were. And then they would have to do it back and so we were sort of helping we were we were like allies but we were pressing each other to do these spectacular things that's really interesting well that's one of the principles of

of jujitsu and of martial arts is that you're really only as good as your training partners yeah if you train with really good people, you become really good, and you elevate to the level of the competition in the training room. It's also the same a lot with stand-up comedians. We're inspired by other really funny stand-up comedians, and when you find a particular group, a group of talented people in a town or an area, oftentimes they'll develop a lot of very talented people around them

who imitate the fact that you know that there's a high level of the art form in that area so like austin texas is a good example it's like there's always a lot of really good guys there and because there's always a lot of really good guys there there's always a lot of really good guys there it's a new york city is another one but obviously there's much more money involved in like places like New York or LA and being good so that becomes a sort of a factor as well but are you from Austin did you spend time in Austin no I just have a lot of friends there and I've done a lot of stand-up there but I just know the local scene's always really strong so there's a few places in the country as a comedian the scene the local scenes are very strong Denver they always have a really

strong local scene and that's another one that's pure because it's not really attached to Hollywood in any way. It's just pure standup comedy. And then there's, um, San Francisco, um, Boston, LA, New York, little bit of Phoenix, a little bit, but it's, it's a very limited thing. a little bit, but it's a very limited thing. And you can sometimes, one or two great comedians will be in one area, and then boom, it'll blossom. Like Houston, Sam Kinison and Bill Hicks, they were all at this Houston Comedy Annex,

and because of them in this one particular area, it started to take off. Yeah, that's sort of the idea of Silicon Valley. Yeah, sure, get a bunch of brilliant people, you get to take off. Yeah, that's sort of the idea of Silicon Valley. Yeah, sure. Get a bunch of brilliant people. You get inspired by other brilliant people. They share ideas. They pump each other up. And the idea that there's plenty for everybody.

Right. And that working together can be much more satisfying. And you're much happier if your friends are doing well as much as you are. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, one of our, Shawna Haley, one of our board of directors who recently died, was a brilliant computer guy. And he kept trying to say that we should try to think from abundance rather than from constant need. Well, that's just a general principle of life famine mentality is a terrible way of approaching life and that's the way a lot of people approach life they approach

life as if there's a finite amount of resources and they have to get theirs and that's what leads to people cheating on their taxes that's a reason people lying trying to steal money and stealing money from their employers and shit along those lines. They're coming from a standpoint of famine, like they're stockpiling nuts for the winter. Right. They're not as comfortable about their ability to generate new resources. Yeah. And that's a terrible mentality. And that is a mentality. And that sort of, those sort of philosophies, those ideas can be reinforced or the opposite can be reinforced.

A generous, bountiful mentality can be enforced as well. Yeah. Well, for us, I mean, it's going to be $15 to $20 million to make MDMA into a medicine. And the same for psilocybin or LSD. And we don't have all that money. That's crazy. But it costs pharmaceutical companies way way more than that it should cost the amount that it costs to get one guy high on mdma and he should do it and go oh listen to me make it legal trust me just stop stop the bullshit

yeah but but we've had to have that attitude that that the resources are out there and once we can demonstrate that we can use them wisely as we grow, the resources will grow. And so far, we're in our 27th year, and that's what's happening. How happy are you now that you're seeing all this really tangible progress, real tangible progress? Very happy. But I'm also, because I woke up to all this in 1971 and 72, right after the backlash, I'm concerned a lot. I'm trying to be very sensitive about another backlash. Do you think that's possible today?

I think it's possible. I don't think it's impossible. I don't think it's likely right now. It just seems like the information is just too prevalent. Well, but how would you explain the fact that we can't even do marijuana research? It's amazing. There's a massive repression. Well, those people should be in jail.

That's really what should happen. Someone should realize what's going on and start locking people up and go, let's play your game. Because what you're doing is ridiculous. You're ruining people's lives for something that really should not be your choice. It should not be another person's choice whether or not they masturbate, and it should not be another person's choice whether or not they smoke pot. And it's really along the same lines. Yeah. Well, I'm not so sympathetic with putting them in jail, but I would like to take the source of their power, which is people's fear that they you in this podcast to people to try to educate them to realize that there is a way where we can work together and make things better.

I agree, but I think the people that have done things that have put people in jail for things along those lines, for selling pot or for growing pot or for owning pot, they're criminals. Those are societal criminals. Well, I'd say that they have abridged other people's human rights. Without a doubt. And they have done so with full cultural support. And I think the way to move forward is not to be so punitive for those that did it, although for some. I mean, but to talk about evolution

and to talk about how a different approach is necessary. And, you know, whenever in Alaska, when there was a medical marijuana legalization bill, one of the first years ago, there was this whole idea of reparations to pay people that were in jail. And the polling that was done by the people trying to pass this initiative showed that that was a really weak part. So where you try to impose these penalties on people for past behavior that at time was sort of socially sanctioned what i meant by that was the the people that are actively working like privatized prison unions things along those lines

working to keep these drugs illegal so that they profit and that's's creepy. There's some real reprehensible shit that's going on. It's not as simple as they're acting within culturally defined rules and regulations. There's some behind-the-scenes shady shit that's based on deception. Well, the stuff like that should be illegal. But I think that the corporate capitalistic approach that we have does permit that kind of stuff and it permits lobbying congress and it permits this this process where people try to get their own interests advanced sometimes over the interests of others and isn't it fascinating that i mean i don't know if you feel like this but that the the thing that

would fix the woes that society has more than anything is the thing that these people are trying to keep from becoming legal. Like that might be the big race. The big race might be recognizing that there are some fantastic tools to change the consciousness of this culture. Right. And I think that idea of thinking about them as tools is really the crucial distinction because they're not good or

bad in and of themselves right it's how they're used and our whole drug policy is there's good bad good drugs and bad drugs bad drugs are illegal and good drugs you get a burger king yeah or or from the pharmaceutical company but it's all about good and bad when it's actually how you use it. And even the drug that was demonized the most in a way in the 60s was thalidomide, the drug that was the medical drug that caused birth defects in babies. And the FDA stopped that in the U.S., but it was prevalent throughout Europe. And now thalidomide has become a medicine, and the same kind of shrinking of blood vessels and things, it's used in leprosy, and it's used in cancer treatment. So a drug that was among the most demonized of all has now been approved by the FDA with certain kind of safety procedures to make sure pregnant women don't get it. But it's the idea that these are tools, and we have the ability to approach these tools in an intelligent way, in a respectful way, or in a reckless way.

And what we want to do is try to change these value judgments, end prohibition, support people's human rights to explore their own consciousness, to have freedom of thought, and to find a way to integrate into a society that's moving forward. How do you do that by getting through the corruption? Because that's the only thing that's holding it back. Really, the only thing holding it back is corruption. At this point, with the amount of data that's been accumulated on medical marijuana... Well, okay, the amount of data that's been accumulated, the government has been effective, the DEA parts of the government, NIDA, in preventing what's called the Phase 3 studies, the large-scale definitive studies that, by do any other drug, then we have to acknowledge that there's not enough research for the FDA to approve it.

People twist it and say the FDA has rejected marijuana as a medicine, which they have not. We just don't have enough research that way. And they won't allow you to do phase three research. Right. And so that's why the states, I think, have enough evidence to make it legal. And patients and doctors have enough evidence to decide to try it. It's just that in our system that we've created to try to make it so that through science, we don't just see what we want to see, but we kind of have a closer view of what's there. There are these procedures that still need to be undertaken for marijuana and also for MDMA. So that's why I say we're probably 10 years away from making MDMA into

a medicine. And I think we'd be five, six years away from making marijuana into an FDA approved medicine if the repression would be lifted right today. Now, what is the difference between the stage that the FDA requires and the data that has been accumulated? Well, there's the preclinical stage. So what that means is preclinical means humans. So there's a whole series of animal studies looking at toxicity that are required by the FDA before you can get a drug into humans.

Once you've done that, then there's phase one, two, three, and four. And phase one is working with people who are not patients, who are healthy volunteers, to try to categorize what the drug does and what it does at different doses. And for certain drugs that are especially toxic, like cancer drugs, they have like phase 1A, phase 2, where it's a combination where the drug is so dangerous that it only can be used in patients. And so you do these dose finding studies, looking at the side effects, and in general, that's what phase 1 is. Phase 2 is where you start working with patients and you start seeing what does it do? What is it good for? How good is it? What are your measures?

How well do your measures work? How do you do the double blind to make sure you're not seeing what you want to see? What is your scientific methodology for the studies? What is your treatment approach? What dose are you using? That's for phase two. And that can take years and years and years. I mean, we've been phase two for MDMA for about nine years so far.

Wow. Yeah, starting in 2004 is when we got the first permit. We actually had permission in 2000, from 2000 to 2001 in Spain for MDMA for PTSD. And we had some media attention that was very positive on the radio and the main tv and newspapers and radio and it motivated the anti-drug authority the forces of repression to shut the study down and we weren't powerful enough to overcome it in spain and that's where it was first started though with a study that that we were working with women survivors of rape with okay but then you've got phase two.

So then once you have figured out your designs and the magnitude and the variance of the effect, how strong is it and how common is it? Is there a large number of people that don't respond at all or do most people respond? Then you can size your phase three studies. So with marijuana, we have enormous amount of information up to the phase two level. And the FDA will have more information about marijuana, MDMA, LSD, than

about any other drug that they've ever approved in their entire history. And the reason is because the research is usually done with hundreds or thousands of people. 10,000 is about as high as you go. But we've had LSD used by tens of millions of people and marijuana by hundreds of millions of people. And we know the one in a million side effect or the one in five million side effect that we only discover from pharmaceutical drugs once they're approved. So it would not take a long time. So it would not take a long time. We already know that we would work with marijuana with nausea control for cancer chemotherapy, marijuana for pain, particularly for people on opiates,

because we've already shown in Phase II studies funded by the state of California that when you combine marijuana with opiates, that people get better pain control and they don't need as much of the opiates. And because of OxyContin, all these big concerns. So we know the areas that we would study with marijuana and we know the safety profile. So we mainly need to just do studies in 250, 500 people to look at the particular patient groups that we want to approve. We have to get high quality standardized medical grade marijuana to do it in. And so maybe we're five years away if the political barriers were removed right today, which they're not. What happens to someone that takes LSD and goes crazy? Because I've had

many people tell me stories. I know the Sid Barrett story from Pink Floyd is a famous one. I don't know if it's true, but that was the word was that he had taken too much acid and lost his mind. I think it's possible, but it depends on the supportive context. And before you asked about the candy flipping, about MDMA LSD. So in the future, when people are having this very difficult LSD experience, maybe they go to the emergency room or something, adding MDMA takes it from this terrifying sense of dying ego destruction and grounds it

so that people can work through it. So I think that LSD has that potential to destabilize people, but in a supportive environment that can be helpful and handled and supported. That's fascinating. So the candy-flipping aspect of it, the adding NVMA, might mitigate some of the negative effects of the stress that you could get from the acid experience. Oh, yeah, completely. Yeah, and then you can... So, you know, one possible thing we would like to study one day would be to take people who are dying and start them like we did in Switzerland, start them with LSD,

and four hours later administer MDMA. So that way LSD peaks in around three and a half hours, three, three and a half hours. So they go through the whole challenging LSD of letting go, of opening up. And it's, it's, you know, hopefully they can make it through that. And then at the four hours you give MDMA and then everything softens and they can take it in more and then they integrate as they're coming down. Oh, so you ride one wave right into the next. Yeah, or if they're flipping out, if it's too painful or too difficult for them,

maybe at the two hours, you could administer MDMA there. And you don't even have to administer a full dose of MDMA. It would be like a half dose of MDMA softens it somewhat. Do they have a synergistic effect? Yeah, they do. They do. So the two of them together, what's the difference between? Well, it's more like there's an expansion aspect to it, but there's a grounding aspect as well.

So you think that's a really good combination then? I think it is, yeah. On the other hand, sometimes for spiritual purposes, let's say, where people are looking for this ego dissolution, you start with LSD, you start with psilocybin. Sometimes the experiences last 8-10 hours or more sometimes. If you open up to the energy flowing through you, then the psychedelic experience tends to take a shorter amount of time. And if you end into this resistance, because for whatever reasons it's really difficult, it prolongs the experience. And once you enter into those kind of places, if you were to add MDMA, then people can integrate it more helpfully. then people can integrate it more helpfully.

Have you done any studies like what the difference is between like hippie flipping and candy flipping, using mushrooms instead of, is there any difference to that? Well, again, we haven't done any studies with this because combining drugs, but more or less it's similar. MDMA blends with ketamine. Even MDMA grounds people with ketamine. It's such a shame that we can't find out about it. It's probably going to turn out to be like a Jack and Coke

where people are like, why didn't you guys do this from the beginning? It was my favorite thing in college. It was so hard to find, but when you did, you bought a lot and you just saved, you sat on those. How did you do it in terms of the timing? Because I'm talking about where, you know, did you take them both at the same time?

These were actually designed together where it was like a candy where it had both of the chemicals in it. That's the only way I've ever done it. Now, I've done it since then, but done it separately with mushrooms and then just taking, you know. Yeah, I think it was I took it when I was peaking. and you know uh yeah i think it was i took it when i was peaking i would dose myself with the the molly which would then take whatever an hour or so 45 minutes later you'd start feeling it but yeah it's great i love those two together and you need any if there's a way to sign up online to any of your things let me know i was robbed by gunpoint so i got the post-traumatic stress if you need that well we we need people to be um it's not as easy as getting a prescription for marijuana to get in our studies we have

independent raters you have to have uh treatment resistant means you have to have had ptsd and diagnosed your ptsd is very minor compared to like soldier ptsd too and they're dealing with like real debilitating issues you just got freaked out one. I got a gun in my chest and I thought I was going to die. I was scared of black people for six months, and it still comes back to me once in a while when it's dark out. Right, right. Well, people can sign up online to donate to MAPS because we're funded by individuals.

The pharmaceutical companies aren't interested because these drugs are off patent, and they're only offered a few times. So far, we've not been able to get a government grant, although we are working with the National Institute of Mental Health. And Senator Rockefeller from West Virginia recently sent a letter to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs saying that MDMA PTSD research should be looked into. But we have yet to obtain any kind of federal funding or pharmaceutical funding or major foundations. So we're more individuals and family foundations trying to bring this research forward.

Well, I think what you're doing is awesome because you guys are bringing legitimacy to this that would never be done by guys like Brian or myself or any of the other people that are out there enjoying the fruits of your labor and the fact that these doors have been broken down now, or opened, I should say, and work is being done and evidence is being put forth that really can't be refuted anymore. It's slowly but slowly starting to accumulate.

Yeah, I would say that this can't be refuted. Right now we're at this stage where we have to replicate our results, because that's the key part of science. You may have done it once, but can you do it again and again and again? And that's where we have still to prove. So we haven't completely proven our case yet, but it's moving, we hope, in that direction. That's awesome, man. And I think there's really exciting things coming up. I really do. I feel like our culture is starting to shift. And I think stuff like what you're doing is a big part of that.

Getting that information, having it on the Internet, allowing people to share links, allowing people to go to whether it's maps.org or any of the different websites. Yeah, arrowhead.org. Arrowhead is a great website. Yeah, we were their fiscal sponsor. We went to college together. Really?

Oh, nice. We try to help other organizations in that way. I think this idea of getting honest information out for people to make their own decisions yeah that's what we're about it's a matter of time right hopefully yeah well my dad is hilarious my dad is 86 and three quarters and he sent me an email today and it said uh here's a link to an article about uh marijuana reform and he said oh it's going to be legal in my lifetime wow i was like he's right dad i said i hope you're right you know Even if you have to live another 20 years. I would have never thought in 2013 it would still be illegal. When I was a kid,

I thought it was a matter of time. Well, I was on the board of Normal for a while, quite a while. And I was with people who started Normal in 1970 and 71 and thought it would be legal in a few years. So that sort of tempers my sense of time, to be with people who over 40 years ago thought it was only going to be a few years away that marijuana would be legal. And fortunately, they're still working to try to help bring that about. Do you lose enthusiasm sometimes

when you see that it's still illegal after all this? No, it's a worthy opponent. unworthy opponent it's a worthy goal and so i think we just do what we want to do there's times when i felt like i was so blocked that i needed to do something where i could actually see change and so i stopped work for a week and painted my house and that was great that's funny oh that really must you must it must get to feel like you're spinning your wheels sometimes well for years and we just spent four years with health canada trying to get an import export permit to bring in eight grams of mdma and this is after health canada had approved the protocol and our irb had approved the protocol, and the four years it took,

and they went through all these ridiculous things about the pharmacy had to have bulletproof glass, it had to have all these alarm systems. Bulletproof glass. Yeah. Was the people going to come in and steal your eight grams of acid or MDMA? It was eight grams that would be in a safe, and the safe had to be disguised in a wooden cabinet, and the safe had to be bolted to the floor. They were harder than the U.S. It was ridiculous.

But we eventually prevailed. We just took every ridiculous thing, and we did it. I mean, my policy is surrender. When there's a certain kind of irrational things coming from people who are more powerful, try to give it to them. Well, that's probably why you're in the position that you're in you're a facilitator of this i'm willing to dialogue venture forth yeah continue sir yeah and there are parts that are um exciting that that are connections that you know are just coming together like even for the national institute of mental health there there was a um uh the late 1980s, the fellow who's the current head of the National Institute of Mental Health was doing MDMA neurotoxicity research in animals.

And I visited him. And he was, you know, this sort of hidden away in the countryside animal research lab to, you know, not attract all these animal rights protesters. And we had to go through all his guards and barbed wire and stuff. But he seemed like he was sincerely interested in the question and wasn't trying to twist the results to justify the drug war. And we developed a respect. I certainly respected him. And about two years ago, a year and a half ago, I wrote him an email.

I hadn't talked to him, and since that point, he's now become the head of the National Institute of Mental Health. And I just said, is now a good time to apply for a grant for MDMA PTSD research? Or is it so politically hot, it's just not worth it? And he said, now is the time. And he appointed someone else inside the NIMH who's an expert at PTSD to help us prepare applications that are more likely to be accepted. But what he did say is that the actual decisions are made by peer reviewers, the way they've set up for government money to be distributed that they bring in the scientists. And he said, the system of peer review is well known not to be sympathetic with innovation.

So even though we have all this support, it still may not work. It's hard to get systems to accept innovation and change. What can people at home that are listening to this podcast or watching it, what can they do to help you to help keep this momentum going? Well, first off, become a member um sign up for monthly membership um we just had the incredible conference where psychedelic science 2013 largest psychedelic conference that we've ever had in the u.s over 1900 people there's a whole ayahuasca track the biggest ayahuasca uh ever, and clinical research. And I was approached by Amara, this group that helps groups crowdsource transcription and translation of these talks.

And videos are not searchable on Google. But when you do a transcript or if you do a transcript of these shows, people can then search on the transcripts, and that gets them to the video. So people, if they're interested, and it would be a tremendous thing for them to learn, to go to the MAPS website, M-A-P-S dot org, to our Psychedelic Science 2013 conference page, and you could sign up if you wanted to listen to some of these lectures, which are tremendous, and transcribe or translate them if you know other languages. Yeah, there's other things people could do. Do you guys have a Twitter page? We have Twitter.

What's the Twitter page? Maps? Maps News. Maps News, yeah. We have a tremendous social media team. Oh, I'm already a member. We are going to do an Indiegogo campaign starting probably in a week or so to raise ten thousand dollars for the zendo project at burning man

are harm reduction program so people could tell other people about that and then we're going to go as we said that earlier to uh... probably two hundred fifty thousand dollar request for the study with veterans with mdm a uh... i think people can come out to their families. People can come out to people that they just talk about and not be so reticent if psychedelics have been helpful or even if they've not been helpful, you know, to talk about how, what they learned

about what they think. Are these tools, maybe they use them poorly, maybe they use them well, but I think look at the gay rights movement and think about this. Maybe they used the wrong tool for the wrong job, too, because they didn't have education about it. Yeah. And we're finding that people that sometimes use psychedelics at festivals for what I would say is the wrong reason, just to have a fun time. That's not the right reason. You're out of your mind. Well, it's beautiful, but you have to be ready for the difficult stuff.

Yes. And if you're trying to suppress the difficult stuff, that's when people get into trouble even more. Yeah, I'm obviously joking around. But I think the celebratory use is really important. And that's why for us, medicalization is not the, for MAPS, as a 501c3, not trying to change the laws, we're about medicalization. But I think as a society, we need spiritual use, we need personal growth, creativity, we need a broader drug policy, which would have adults have the right to use psychedelics. I think it would be like the driver's license model, where you would perhaps have a certain education you have to pass,

a test, and maybe even to start out. So we avoid a backlash. There would be psychedelic clinics where you would go have an experience under supervision. And if you did it well, meaning you didn't totally flip out, then you would have the right to buy it on your own. And I think what we would do with children, I think drugs would be illegal for minors, legal for adults. But 23 states in the United States have a parental override for alcohol, that if you want to give your kid alcohol in 23 states, you can do that. And I think that that's how we handle underage is that we leave it not that the government prohibits it all but that its families decide among themselves how they want to handle it that's awesome i'm gonna have one more question and i'm gonna let you go uh terence mckenna's stoned ape theory is a fascinating proposal that human beings evolved from lower hominids because we got in contact with psychedelic

mushrooms and His theory I don't know if it's correct but according to him and his brother his brother if you just google search the Dennis McKenna podcast I don't remember which number it is you can find it pretty easily in with a quick search But he gave some really interesting scientific reasons for why he believes it's it's uh very possible that that's what happened the doubling of the human brain size over a period of two million years all this attributed to psilocybin well dennis was one of the speakers at the conference and so people could actually uh translate and transcribe his talk if they wanted oh beautiful but i i think the the the the deeper question is can the the apes that we are today evolve further with mushrooms?

And I think the answer to that is clearly yes. Whether the apes of several million years or 100,000 years ago used mushrooms, it's certainly plausible. And hard to say one way or the other. I am not in a position to say i believe it or not i think terence said some things that were pretty um exaggerated like this whole idea that the end of the mayan calendar was going to be the end of the world and or he didn't really say that it wasn't a k-hole well he talked about a massive consciousness shift and it would all be different and hyperspace yeah well he talked about that we were going to reach a point of technological singularity.

He thought that we were going to reach a point of infinite novelty and that tracking it with his time wave zero algorithm that he created, he created this really sketchy thing when he was on mushrooms that was based on the I Ching

that supposedly mapped novelty or human innovation that you could put it through a graph. But I think when you get really fucking high, you can see patterns in almost anything. Yes. And he had this I Ching pattern that he had chased down for like 20 plus years and created a formal mathematical program. Yeah, some mathematical experts actually engaged him in dialogue. Yeah, the Watson disagreement, right?

Yeah, so i think if if you know dennis mckenna just wrote a book brothers at the screaming abyss and there's a good discussion about some of the um criticism and the value of time wave zero so i i was um actually terence was the one that started helped start m MDMA research because we were at a conference at Esalen in 1983. It was already clear because of Dallas and stuff that MDMA was being used in a public setting and that the crackdown would come. The underground therapists and the shilligans, chemists, we had this meeting to figure out what to do. Terrence was like, forget about MDMA. It's from the lab. It's got to be a plant. Mushrooms, thousands of years. Plants are better. We can trust them. They're from nature.

And look at all these risks of MDMA and all this stuff. And I was like, well, I don't see these risks. And I also don't believe that drugs from plants are inherently better tools, that we're part of nature, that what comes from the human mind is out there. So I said, I'll put up $1,000 towards an MDMA study. We'll see how risky it really is. And then Dick Price, who founded Esalen like 30 seconds, 10 seconds later, said, I'll put up $1,000. And so it was in response to Terrence going on about plant medicines being best and MDMA being super dangerous that we did this study and kept it quiet until the DEA moved to criminalize.

And then we surfaced with the study. That's interesting. Well, that's great. Yeah. That's very funny. I've always wanted to hear different people's take on that theory because I thought it was a fascinating theory, the idea that humans became us because of psychedelics. And the best culprit is mushrooms because they're sort of built in. You don't have to cook them. You don't have to do anything weird.

You don't have to extract anything. Just chew away and boom, here comes the boom. Well, I felt when I had my bar mitzvah when I was 13 that it did not turn me into a man. The coming of age. That's a really unrealistic expectation, too. 13? Shit. I mean, I was the oldest before.

That's what my parents thought. That's what I expected. Well, they came up with that back when people were only living to be 30. Yeah. So when I, and I was disappointed. I was the same. I was really a bummer i was like i remember being in bed for the whole week and i'm thinking a lot of people must have had their bar mitzvahs that day and god must be slow and he'll come around to me eventually oh that's hilarious you know and then and finally nothing happened and i just

was sad about it but when i took lsd for first time, I felt that it touched the parts of my psyche that I had hoped my bar mitzvah would touch. Wow. LSD, better than bar mitzvahs. That's your next meme. You've got two memes so far out of this show. Well, thank you very much, Rick. This was a really awesome conversation.

I'm glad we could pull it off, despite the gay pride parade in the Illuminati trying to hold it back. We made it happen. Go to maps.org, ladies and gentlemen, and what is it,

Maps News on Twitter. Please follow that as well. And Facebook. And Facebook. And let's do this again sometime.

Yeah. I think we could have done another three hours if I wasn't so tired. Yeah, well, maybe you should have tried Modafinil. I've got to work tomorrow.

I want to sleep. Thank you, everybody, for tuning into the podcast. Thanks to Ting for sponsoring us. Go to rogan.ting.com and save yourself some cash. They're an awesome company. Thanks also to audible.com. Go to audible.com forward slash Joe for your free audio book and 30 days free of audible service. And thanks also to LegalZoom.

If you use the code name Rogan in the referral box, you could save some cash. LegalZoom is not a law firm, but they provide self-help services at your specific direction. Thanks also to Onnit.com. That's O-N-N-I-T. Use the code name Rogan and save yourself some money. We will be back someday this week. I'm working crazy hours, so I hardly know what day it is or what's up.

I'm a mess lately. But we'll see you freaks in Vegas. Joey Diaz and I are playing in Vegas at the Joint in the Hard Rock this Friday night. There's some tickets still available. And it should be an awesome weekend because it's a UFC weekend. So that's July 5th, Friday night, the Joint in Hollywood. All right. We love you.

And we'll see you soon. Bye.