The Tim Ferriss Show - #313: Michael Pollan — Exploring The New Science of Psychedelics

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Starting point is 00:03:16 what the telescope was for astronomy and the microscope for biology, psychedelics will be for the understanding of the human mind. That is attributed to Stanislav Grof. This episode you're going to hear, I've been looking forward to recording for more than a year now. It might be the most important episode that I've put out in the last two to three years. So please trust me and give it a full listen. Even if you don't think it will interest you at all, it will surprise you, perhaps shock you, and definitely make you think differently. Michael Pollan's newest book, and this is his first podcast about it, is my new favorite of his. It is titled How to Change Your Mind, subtitled What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence.

Starting point is 00:04:02 This is an episode that will explore not just the science and applications of psychedelics, but also Michael's personal exploration. It's quite a wild ride. For those who don't know who Michael Pollan is, on Twitter, at Michael Pollan, he's the author of seven previous books, including Cooked, Food Rules in Defense of Food, The Omnivore's Dilemma, also a great book, and The Botany of Desire, also a fantastic book, all of which were New York Times bestsellers. A longtime contributor to the New York Times Magazine, he also teaches writing at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley, where he is the John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Science Journalism.

Starting point is 00:04:41 In 2010, Time Magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. This is also where I want to make a public announcement, and that is partially due to Michael's book, I Am Committing a Million Dollars Over the Next Few Years to Supporting Scientific Study of Psychedelic Compounds. This is, for me, by far the largest commitment to research and nonprofits that I've ever made. And if you'd like to perhaps join me in supporting at a higher level, check out tim.blog forward slash science. It's tim.blog forward slash science. But why would I do this? Across the board, I've done a number of things in the scientific realm and the molecules discussed

Starting point is 00:05:23 in this episode and some incredible clinical results from well-designed studies have absolutely captured my attention over the last two years. And after waiting in and supporting some smaller studies, seeing the results, I've decided to go all in on scientists exploring this area. It just seems to be an Archimedes lever for potentially solving a wide range of root cause problems instead of playing whack-a-mole with symptoms one by one. So this episode will explain why I'm so goddamn excited. And all that preamble out of the way, grab a cup of coffee, relax, put your seat back, settle in, and I really hope you enjoy this conversation as much as I did. Without further ado, here is Michael Pollan. Michael, welcome to the show. Thank you, Tim. Good to be here.

Starting point is 00:06:12 I am so thrilled to be sitting down to have this conversation. And I thought back to when we first met, and I believe I owe some thanks to Matt Mullenweg, the CEO of Automatic, because I believe that I attended an event he had organized that might have been for the Omnivore's Dilemma. I think it was perhaps in defense of food, but I've followed your career for so long and read so many of your books. I thought one place we could start is with the conception of Michael Pollan as food writer. A common misconception. Perhaps we could start off with you just describing how the new book came to be. How did you end up writing this new book

Starting point is 00:07:05 sure well to go back i think we met at a benefit for grist oh that's right that yeah that is right that was there that was also involved and it was around the time of indefensive food or food rules or something yeah at tony conrad's house that's's right. That's absolutely right. Yeah, that goes back a few years. Yeah. But I think that was the first time we met. So yeah, this book does certainly seem like a departure for me. And in some ways it is. But in other ways, I see it as very continuous with the kind of work I've been doing. As I see it, I think of myself as a kind of nature writer. I really like writing about the engagement of humans with other species.

Starting point is 00:07:48 And I've been doing that since my first book, which was a book called Second Nature, which was really about what was going on in my garden. And I've always been interested in the fact that we have these symbiotic relationships that we're active participants in nature, not just spectators. And that the usual American way of thinking about nature that we inherit from Thoreau and Emerson and John Muir

Starting point is 00:08:14 is of a very passive relationship. And I've always, as a gardener, I've always been interested in the more active relationship, the way we use plants and the way they in turn use us. So if that's the kind of spine or the trunk of my work, all the food work is kind of a big fat branch off of that. And that's, you know, looking at what is one of our most powerful engagements with the natural world, which is agriculture, which, you know, changes nature more than anything else we do, really. So I've been on that branch for now four books, I guess. But I've never lost interest in the other ways we engage with the natural world. And one of the most curious of these, which I touched on in a book called Botany of Desire, was the fact that we use plants to change our experience of consciousness. And a very select group of plants and fungi has evolved the chemistry that does that with varying degrees of disruption. And I've always been curious as to why such a desire,

Starting point is 00:09:23 and it is a universal human desire. There is not a culture on earth that doesn't use some plant or fungi to change consciousness, with one notable exception, the Inuit. And the only reason they don't is none of that stuff grows there. And so what's that desire about? What good is it for us to change consciousness? Why do people seek it? So that's kind of been a theme of my work that I've never fully explored in a book until this one, until How to Change Your Mind. So there is that continuity in my mind.

Starting point is 00:09:57 And it is part of a larger narrative that I've always been interested in. And then there's the fact that I'm, you know, intensely interested in health. I've been writing about health in my last couple books on food. You know, we have a situation where our biggest physical health problems are chronic diseases linked to our diet. But we also, of course, suffer from a real crisis in mental health. And that also made me very interested to take a look at psychedelics, since they promise to contribute to solving that problem. Did that interest in exploring psychedelics—this is going to be a very memento-like conversation. Chronologically, it will probably bounce around quite a bit did that begin with the article about psychedelic psychotherapy in the new yorker called the trip treatment did it precede that how did how did that piece yeah come about that was my first real

Starting point is 00:10:59 foray i i think i talked about psychedelics briefly in Botany of Desire and quoted Aldous Huxley and the idea of the reducing valve and whether we had a more accurate or less accurate picture of the world when high. about this remarkable research using psychedelics, psilocybin in particular, magic mushrooms, or the ingredient magic mushrooms, to treat people who had cancer diagnoses. And this seemed so improbable to me, I couldn't imagine wanting to take a psychedelic when confronting my mortality, that I became very curious to explore it. And so embarked on what was almost a year-long project, looking at psilocybin and talking to dozens of people, cancer patients, some of them still alive, some of them no longer alive, and how this single experience, a high-dose psilocybin experience administered with a guide, you know, in a very controlled setting, had completely reset their thinking about mortality, had given them a

Starting point is 00:12:13 mystical experience that dissolved their egos and made them think about their place in the world in such a novel way, or their sense of their own self-interest as so broad that dying uh lost its sting uh and completely in some cases i remember this one woman i talked to uh who had um uh her name was uh dina bazaar she was a figure skating instructor in New York City, and she was in her early 60s, and she had ovarian cancer, and she was absolutely paralyzed by the fear of a recurrence, even though she, you know, had a successful course of therapy. And she had a psilocybin journey, and she went into her body and under her rib cage she confronted this black mass it wasn't her tumor because it wasn't in her uh you know where her ovaries would

Starting point is 00:13:13 be it was uh under her rib cage and she realized it wasn't her tumor it was her fear and she screamed at it she said get the fuck out of my body. And she said it vanished. And from then on, she had no fear. And in the article for The New Yorker, I did the usual play it safe journalist thing where I said, and after the experience, her fear had been substantially diminished or something that I thought would slip past the fact checkers, as we tend to do. And they called her, though, and checked the quote with her and uh and she said no that's completely wrong it was not diminished my fear was eliminated and what

Starting point is 00:13:52 she explained is i learned during that psilocybin trip that though i couldn't control the cancer i could control the fear and that was just life-changing for her. So reading about these experiences, which seem, you know, I've only scratched the surface here. And this was one of those. I had only scratched the surface. There was so much more to learn. And then there was also this mounting curiosity to have some experiences of my own. We are definitely going to explore that terrain. I thought one very helpful aspect of the book is the glossary of terms that you include in the beginning. It's actually in the end of the printed version. Oh, it is? All right. So I received a pre-publication copy. I booted to the back. It just felt a little textbooky to confront it first.

Starting point is 00:15:06 It is very textbooky, but it helps provide people with, whether at the back of the book or the beginning, definitions that I think can help to inform the conversation. So for people who have heard the term, no doubt, psychedelic or psychedelics, but are unclear on exactly what that refers to. Can you define that? What are psychedelics? Sure, I'd be happy to. I'd be happy to try. You know, one of the interesting aspects of the story, of the history of what we'll call psychedelics, for reasons I'll explain, is that the name kept changing because people really didn't understand these molecules. They were so strange. So at first they were called psychotomimetics. This is in the early 50s, soon after LSD was made available to researchers. And psychotomimetic basically

Starting point is 00:15:59 meant it was a psychoactive drug that mimicked psychosis. And lots of psychiatrists would look at what happened to people and say, well, they're having a psychotic episode. Turned out to be wrong, but it sure looked that way. And, um, and then they, then other people called it a psycholytic, uh, which means mind loosening. And they were using it in, uh, basically in your typical talk therapy session, uh, as a way to loosen, loosen, lytic means mind loosening, people's defenses and allow them to get in touch with subconscious thoughts and emotions. Psychedelic as a term is coined in 1957 by a key figure in this history named Humphrey Osmond. Osmond is an English psychiatrist who

Starting point is 00:16:46 moves to Saskatchewan because the provincial government was willing to let him study whatever he wanted, which happened to be Mescaline and LSD. And they had a very progressive health department in Saskatchewan. And he got involved with Aldous Huxley and, in fact, is the person responsible for giving Aldous Huxley his first mescaline experience. And they corresponded extensively, as people used to do. And in one of their correspondence, they were trying to come up with a better word for these drugs because they simply didn't believe it was true that it made people crazy. In fact, they believed they could make people sane. So they went back and forth. And Osmond, ironically enough, not the brilliant writer, came up with the term that stuck. And that was psychedelic. And that essentially, all that means is mind manifesting. That these are compounds that help the mind manifest its deepest qualities. And it caught on, and

Starting point is 00:17:49 we think of it as a very kind of 60s term associated with Timothy Leary and the counterculture, but in fact it was coined by a psychiatrist in the 50s. So it simply means mind manifesting, and I use it to refer to what are sometimes called the classical psychedelics. I tend not to think of MDMA as a psychedelic, even though some people do, or cannabis as a psychedelic. But that group of chemicals that include mescaline, DMT, psilocybin, magic mushrooms, and LSD, and there's a handful of others that are unified by the fact that they work on similar receptor network in the brain and have roughly similar effects on the mind, on, you know, on the phenomenology of the experience. So that's really, when I talk

Starting point is 00:18:38 about psychedelics, that's what I've got in mind. And by phenomenology, you mean the subjective, the reporting of the subjective experience. The felt experience, yeah. It's a very fancy word for how it feels. Why did you dedicate this book to your father? Well, for a couple reasons, some of which I didn't understand until I finished the book. I did it because my dad was very sick for most of the time I was writing it. He himself had terminal cancer and died of lung cancer earlier this year in January. So I wanted, it was my last chance to dedicate a book to him, or at least one that he would see.

Starting point is 00:19:24 He didn't get to read it. So I thought I would, it was my last chance to dedicate a book to him, or at least one that he would see. He didn't get to read it. So I thought I would do it. But as I've thought about it since, I realized this book is very much about him. A friend of mine read the book and said, wow, your father's on every page. And I didn't know what that meant exactly, but I've since given it some thought. And I realized that one of the reasons I got so interested in the experience of cancer and that confrontation with one's mortality is that my dad was going through that. But unlike the patients I was talking to, the volunteers and the psilocybin experience, he really didn't want to talk about it.

Starting point is 00:20:10 And it was just a conversation we couldn't have. And we had a lot of conversations in his last year or two. But for whatever reason, I don't really understand how he was processing what was coming, because he really wouldn't share it. And so in a sense, I was having conversations I wanted to have with him, although I was certainly afraid to in some ways. I was having those conversations with these other people, these strangers who I got to know, and hearing how they thought about their death and how psilocybin changed how they thought about their death really became a proxy for a conversation I never had with my father. What effect did that have on you? I mean, if anything jumps out, I mean, are there any sort of salient effects that had on you? Did you end up feeling a sense of closure or resolution in some way? You know, in a way, I wish my father had been able to have one of these experiences i don't know that he would have gone for it um you know he's of such a different generation he was probably

Starting point is 00:21:13 too old to qualify he was 88 when he died um but it's kind of a black box uh you know that was a generation didn't always talk about these things and um uh I do think it had an effect on me in that having given so much thought to death and the process and the afterlife, as psychedelics makes you do, I think in his last weeks and months and days, I was more available to him than I would have been. You know, I think that I was not as fearful or as defensive is probably a better word. You know, one of the things our egos defend us against is death, one of the big things. And so when we're confronted by it, we figure out a million ways to think about something else or turn away if we can. But I was very present for his death. I was with him and my mother in the apartment for the last week. And I didn't feel there was any barrier. I felt like I was able to say everything I needed to say to be physically available to him. So in a sense, I think my own my own psychedelic

Starting point is 00:22:28 experiences and the amount of thought I'd given to to dying because of that article I'd worked on probably made me a better caregiver in some ways and better able to process what was happening. And, you know, I guess I did a lot of of preparation too because i i saw it coming for a couple years um uh that takes you know that takes away none of the power of the experience um but i do think if you know it's funny some some journalists have just started doing interviews on this book and one of the questions you get asked is how did your own experiences change you and that's a hard question to answer. It's, it's, it's subtle in some ways, but it was my wife who said, well, uh, I really think you would have, you would have been different around your father at the end if you hadn't had those experiences. And, you know,

Starting point is 00:23:15 I think she's probably right. Based on all of my reading of your work, based the the conversations i've observed you having and our limited exchanges that we've had you've always struck me as a very open-minded journalist while very skeptical which is a good combination for the profession you've chosen. What were you most skeptical of going into the process of saying, considering a book on this topic? And did you go in with the intention of having your own experiences? I didn't go in with that intention when I started the New Yorker article. I didn't know it was possible to have, obviously you can have a psychedelic experience if you can find the drugs but I mean to have the course of working on that article that I kept getting like these whispers that there was this underground and, uh, that, you know, there was a kind of shadow world, not too far away from the, um, the, you know, the legit researchers I

Starting point is 00:24:38 was, I was interviewing. And, um, so I, I started getting inklings that that might be possible. But I'm not a psychonaut. And I was not, I had very little experience. I mean, it was kind of odd. I just kind of came of age at a little wrinkle in time where there weren't a lot of psychedelics around. And by the time they were available to me, I was, I was terrified of them. I'm sort of more a product of the moral panic against psychedelics than of the psychedelic sixties. I mean, just to give you an idea, I was 12 during the summer of love. I was 14 during, uh, Woodstock. So this, I was a little, you know, uh, I came a little late to the party and the party was getting pretty sour already. Um, you know, the scene in San Francisco had gotten really sour and, uh, there was a lot of, uh, bad information, but scary information about psychedelics that were out there. So this wasn't a natural thing for me. And, you know, what you call my skepticism is journalistic skepticism,

Starting point is 00:25:42 but it's also, you know, plain old fear and, and, you know, wondering, is this for real? Um, I did have skepticism. I think that the results of these studies, uh, which hadn't been published when I published on them, uh, it was quite, it was very much to the New Yorkers credit that they were willing to let me do 14,000 words on essentially, uh, scientific research that hadn't been peer reviewed yet. Um, and, um, but I gradually became convinced by the, you know, the authority of the people who were talking to me that they had had, had had these transformative experiences. Um, I tend to, uh, but I do write about psychedelics. And I think that's, this is somewhat unique about the book, with one foot outside of this world and only one foot in it. And I think

Starting point is 00:26:36 that that distance is very important. For various reasons, I think it's important to remain critical as a journalist. And when you see things that are being hyped, and that may well happen with psychedelics, it's something I'm concerned about. But also as a way in for readers who may not be experienced or may have their own doubts or fears. I become a surrogate for the reluctant traveler. And that's, you know, that's always been part of my work. I don't like to write as an expert. Another reason I sort of moved off of food, at least for the time being, is I really like writing closer to the beginning of the learning curve when everything is still new and exciting and I can bring a sense of wonder to it. I don't think readers really like being closer to the beginning of the learning curve, when everything is still new and exciting, and I can bring a sense of wonder to it. I don't think readers really like being lectured at by highly experienced experts. I think they'd rather come on a journey of, or an education with you.

Starting point is 00:27:39 And so I was outside this world and dipping my toe in you know first kind of very tentatively and then you know kind of my whole foot uh and then a much larger part of my body um but it wasn't a natural progression for me and it wasn't an easy progression i mean we'll talk about this but my you know each of my own psychedelic journeys um that I had for the book were preceded by a sleepless night of incredible anxiety where I was just a ping pong ball with arguments going back and forth like, are you crazy? You're 60 years old. You could have a heart attack up there on that mountain. And this guy's not going to call 911. He's, he's worried about his freedom. Um, and, and then the other side saying, well, come on, aren't you curious about what you might learn? And,

Starting point is 00:28:33 and by the way, you've got a book deadline coming up. You've got to do this. And, uh, so I had every, every time it was like that, it never got easier. And, you know, I realize now that was my ego defending itself against the assault to come. And, of course, our egos have command of our rational faculty, so they make really good arguments. And mine was definitely making a good argument to me, but thank God I ignored him. Could you talk a bit about what we know or suspect about the neuroscience behind how these compounds may have the effects they have? And just as, please jump in to correct me at any point, because you are certainly better versed with all of this, but when you mentioned, for people who don't have the background,

Starting point is 00:29:26 when you mentioned guided experiences or supervised environments and the New Yorker piece, I'll just give a little bit of background for people who may not be aware. That includes certainly undergrad options, but also includes universities like Johns Hopkins, NYU, and ever-expanding list, and some very, very credible researchers, certainly some who would be considered the researcher's researcher and scientist. What do we know of the science because these these compounds have been so mysterious in a sense they've been so continually used for certainly centuries if not millennia

Starting point is 00:30:14 by millennia yeah different civilizations uh you can find totems from the mazitex going back thousands of years and so on. What new insights or theories have caught your attention in the scientific realm? Yeah, well, the neuroscience, I just have to say, is absolutely fascinating. And for me, intellectually, that was kind of one of the most exciting parts of the research, was learning what these chemicals are teaching us about the mind and the brain. You know, there's a famous quote by Stanislav Grof, who was a Czech emigre psychiatrist who worked with psychedelics extensively when they were legal in his practice. And he said, I think this was in the early 70s, he said something that, you know,

Starting point is 00:31:05 sounds outrageous, which is that psychedelics would be for the study of the mind, what the telescope was for astronomy and what the microscope was for biology. That's a pretty big claim. And it sounded like hyperbole to me when I first heard it. But having spent a lot of time in these labs with these scientists, I no longer think it's important to understand that everything i'm about to tell you is um uh you know hypothesis um and some goes a little further than hypothesis but there's still a lot of mysteries the first one being how does uh let's say you you ingest LSD or psilocybin, we know that it links to a certain kind of brain receptor, the H25AR receptor, which is the same one that SSRIs engage with. And that sounds like, oh, we really understand something. But what happens downstream of that, we don't have a clue. How you get from that activation of those receptors to the

Starting point is 00:32:25 phenomenology, the felt experience of the drugs. So there's a lot we don't understand. But one of the most interesting clues has come from the work done, especially at Imperial College in London, but also it's now happening in other places in Switzerland and at Hopkins, to image the brains of people on psychedelics. By image, I mean use fMRIs or some of these other modalities to see what's going on in the brain when people are under the influence. And the biggest takeaway from that work, and this is in papers that Robin Carhart-Harris at Imperial College has published, is that contrary to what the neuroscientist expected, which was that the brain would kind of light up with extra activity

Starting point is 00:33:20 because there was such, you know, visual and auditory fireworks going on during the experience, they found that activity in the brain was actually depressed by psychedelics, particularly in one network. This was a network I had never heard of before until I started doing this work, and it was only discovered about 15 years ago by an American neuroscientist at Washington University named Marcus Rakel. And that is the default mode network. Called that because this is kind of where the brain goes when it's not busy. It's where you go to ruminate, worry, daydream. And it was discovered when they were administering fMRI uh to people and needed to get a baseline

Starting point is 00:34:09 and they would tell people don't do anything just lie there and don't you know no tasks and they would see that oh interesting the brain's actually quite active when you're doing nothing and this part of it is very active this part is a linked set of structures that include the prefrontal cortex, the posterior cingulate cortex. These are both in the cortex, which is the evolutionarily most recent part of layer of the brain on the outside. And then those link down into deeper, older structures that are involved with memory and emotions. And it appears to be a very important hub. The brain is a hierarchical system, and the default mode network kind of is in charge, is a regulator of the whole. And it's involved in a range of metacognitive functions that include self-reflection and rumination, time travel, that's thinking about the past and thinking about the future,

Starting point is 00:35:15 theory of mind, that's the ability to imagine mental states or attribute mental states to others. And what is called the autobiographical memory, the autobiographical self, forgive me. This is kind of where we integrate what's happening to us with the narrative we have of who we are, which is a mix of, you know, everything that's happened to us before or the parts of our biography we think about and our objectives for the future. And to have a sense of self that's consistent over time, something we prize, even though it's probably completely illusory, that work of constructing that happens in parts of the default mode network. So you could say it's kind of the seat of the self or the ego, to the extent that we can say that. And how interesting that this particular network, important as it is, goes offline, or at least has activity diminished. And, and this is really

Starting point is 00:36:21 interesting, the more precipitous the drop in activity in the default mode network, the more likely someone larger world, the nature, the universe, other people. And so that seems to be involved with the, you know, diminution of activity in this particular network. So that gives us a window into the self and into spiritual experience, because that experience of ego dissolution feels to people like a mystical experience, feels like it's very spiritual, this sense of, you know, transcending this bag of bones we are and and actually connect with with larger entities and it's that experience too that um may make it easier to uh die in that ego dissolution is a kind of rehearsal for death uh giving up yourself and and then seeing and this was for me the most incredible thing, was that your ego could die, but you still perceive. There's still a consciousness, another consciousness. And I think that that's enormously

Starting point is 00:37:54 comforting to people. So anyway, from a neuroscientific point of view, this is a really interesting insight. And psychedelics gave it to us. There are two other things I want to say about it that's also even more interesting. One is that when other researchers at Yale started scanning the brains of really experienced meditators, people with 10,000 hours who really know how to meditate, their scans looked very similar to the people on psychedelics on psilocybin, uh, that they too, that meditation is another way to quiet the default mode network. And my guess is there's several others too. My guess is it's quieted when you're, um, uh, you know, when you fast, uh, you know, when you're on a vision quest, when you go into sensory deprivation, my guess is that all these powerful experiences may well involve alternate modalities for shutting off or quieting the default mode network. So that's a big takeaway, and I think will be significant in the future. The other point I want to make about that in the neuroscience is that also coming out of Robin Carhart Harris's lab was they mapped connections. They call it the connectome in the human brain. And that changes during the experience. When you turn off the default mode network, which Robin refers to as the orchestra conductor or corporate

Starting point is 00:39:26 executive or capital city of the brain, he has all these wonderful metaphors, when that goes offline, other parts of the brain and other networks that don't ordinarily talk to each other strike up conversations. And if you look at this image, which is reprinted in my book, actually they did it in color in the middle of the book, I didn't even know they could do this, toward the end of the book, you see that what had been this, this set of principal, you know, main thoroughfares connecting different networks in the brain, suddenly, you get lots of little roads, new connections, myriad new connections get established. Basically because, probably because the default mode network is not requiring everybody come through that hub.

Starting point is 00:40:14 And so you have, for example, perhaps a motion center is talking directly to your visual cortex, which lo and behold could allow you to see things you're feeling, you know, could result in hallucinations. Those new connections may, and now I'm being speculative, may manifest as new perspectives, new ideas, new means, new metaphors. But the point is that by temporarily, you know, disrupting the order of the brain, a new order forms. And that order may have incredible value at either the level of mental health and psychology or at the level of creativity. And that's what we need to get into right now. What happens with those new connections? Do they endure or not? And are there ways to help them endure longer? The visualization that you mentioned is so, the difference is so pronounced.

Starting point is 00:41:11 And it's really something to behold. So I certainly encourage people to just take a moment to soak the image in when they have a chance to look at it. And it's not hard to find online, too. It's not hard to find online too. It's not hard to find online. And what I wanted to, I mean, certainly these compounds are not panaceas. They don't fix everything. And they do have risks. I mean, I think we should talk about that. Oh, we're absolutely going to talk about the risks. But before we get to that, I wanted to go back to the studies that have been done and to ask you what studies have most perhaps shocked you or surprised you or have stuck with you and just for purposes of i suppose sharing on

Starting point is 00:41:55 my side the studies are really wide ranging and many studies had been performed in the, well, I'm not sure when the early 50s and early 60s, but even looking at the more recent studies related to smoking cessation or different forms of addiction, certainly end-of-life anxiety, treatment-resistant depression, there are a number of characteristics that have been really surprising to me when looking at the results, but I'd be curious to hear if there are any related to the magnitude, persistence, or anything of effects that have been particularly memorable for you. Yeah, yeah. Well, I mean, the first one that was really memorable to me was the first one I read, and this was a 2006 study by Dun done at Johns Hopkins in the lab of

Starting point is 00:42:47 Roland Griffiths, who I believe you know pretty well. And this was a kind of wild study because it didn't purport to have any practical utility at all. It had nothing to do with health or healing people. It was really an attempt to see if psilocybin could be used to occasion, that's the verb they use, to occasion profound mystical experiences in people. And the title of this paper is kind of hilarious, you know, high dose of psilocybin can occasion profound mystical experiences in people that are, have, you you know lasting value or something like that um i don't have it quite right but it's uh it it just stood out as wait scientists do this that's pretty cool um and what's a mystical experience doing in a scientific experiment

Starting point is 00:43:38 um but it in a way this was the predicate of all the research to come uh in this in this renaissance that's going on because um they had found first they had proven that you could safely administer these drugs in this environment and that with a very high percentage you could induce this kind of experience that people would report as one of the two or three most meaningful experiences in their lives, comparable to the birth of a child or the death of a parent. The fact that you could induce such an experience in a laboratory reliably with a mushroom, well, that kind of blew my mind. And I talked, I interviewed many people in that trial. And it was really interesting to hear their experience. These are so-called healthy

Starting point is 00:44:32 normals. So they didn't have a pathology. They weren't dying. And they were kind of spiritually inclined. That was definitely, you know, it seemed to me a common denominator of the people, the volunteers. But that this drug would create an experience that was indistinguishable from mystical experiences as we have them in the literature, as they were recorded by the great mystics of all time. And all the writers who've talked about mystical experience from, you know, Whitman to Emerson to Tennyson. So I thought that was a really cool study. And the testimony of the people in it was very interesting. It was also interesting that in a follow-up, they crunched that data very carefully, and they discovered that um uh significant statistically significant percentage of people uh who had had these psilocybin experiences had actually had changes in their

Starting point is 00:45:32 personality that were enduring um psychologists divide personality up into five traits and i'm not going to remember them all but it's things like conscientiousness, neuroticism, extroversion, openness, and I forget the fifth. But openness, which correlates with, you know, tolerance for other people's points of view, ability to take in lots of surprising information, creativity, actually was increased, statistically significant increase in openness. And it's very rare that personality changes in adults at all. And the idea that a mushroom could induce such a change was really striking. Now, this has yet to be reproduced, this particular result, but whether there are lasting changes in personality of people who take psychedelics, I think is a really rich topic to explore and definitely deserves more work. The smoking study you

Starting point is 00:46:31 alluded to, I thought was also fascinating. You know, here you have one of the hardest of all habits to kick. And 80% of people who went through this process, which involved two or three psychedelic trips on psilocybin and some cognitive behavioral therapy in between, 80% were confirmed abstinent, were not smoking at the six-month mark. And that number fell to, I think it was 67% after a year. This is a small pilot study, open label, which means everybody knew they were getting psilocybin. Nobody got a placebo. But that's pretty impressive. And in fact, 67% success after a year is better than anything else that's out there. So this study needs to be reproduced.

Starting point is 00:47:22 It's happening. Yeah, sorry to interrupt. But also, as I understand it, it's not a marginal difference in efficacy compared to the standard of care if we're looking at alternative treatments. I mean, the Delta, at least with this preliminary study, as you mentioned, open label is something, I mean, somebody out there on the internet can certainly correct me, but I want to say it was perhaps the alternative sort of option B, more traditionally speaking, be somewhere in the 20s in terms of efficacy at the six-month mark looking at abstinence rates. I could be getting that wrong. Yeah, I think that there's a drug people use called Shantex that I've seen advertised on television.

Starting point is 00:48:08 I think that does a little better than that 20% mark. But, you know, the patch is not that successful. And so it's a big deal. But what was also noteworthy to me about that particular study was talking to the people in the study. And I would ask them, you know, so why did this make it any easier to quit smoking? I mean, it doesn't seem to have anything to do with smoking. And they would describe an experience that put their life and their behavior in such a radically new context. And they would say that, you know, they would say these incredibly banal things. They'd say like, I realized my breath is precious and that there is no life without breath. And it's really stupid

Starting point is 00:48:50 to damage your breath. And I'm like, duh, didn't you know that already? And they did know it in an intellectual way, but I think one of the real hallmarks of psychedelic experience is that things you think you know but really only exist on the very top of consciousness suddenly set down roots deep in your subconscious. And they become these convictions, absolute rock-solid convictions that you believe in a way you've never believed anything before. And that, I think, allows people to kind of, you know, put flesh on some platitude, like smoking is bad for you. And, and killing yourself is stupid. Suddenly, you feel it at a much deeper level. And so I was struck by that. And in fact, Matt Johnson, who was the psychologist at Hopkins who directed this study, he calls them duh moments. You know, that is that people have a lot of duh moments, but they're transformative.

Starting point is 00:49:59 And that is that, you know, if you've ever had a psychedelic experience, there is that weird bleeding from banality into profundity and back again that happens. And that definitely seems to go on. to reinforce an idea that we all already know or we should know better and make it powerful enough to actually guide our behavior. What are some of the potential applications or current applications in a scientific environment or elsewhere that are most interesting to you? I'm personally tracking potential use of psychedelics, which is certainly already in motion outside the U.S. Hopefully will be researched more in the U.S., but as it would apply to, say, opiate addiction. Yeah. Really, problems of epidemic proportions. Are there any particular applications that you're paying attention to? Yeah. Well, I, you know, first of all,

Starting point is 00:51:07 it's really important to understand that these, that this research comes along at a critical moment. Um, our mental health care system is badly broken. Um, you know, if you compare mental health treatment to any other branch of medicine, um, mental health care fails abysmally. I mean, it has not extended lifespan, lowered mortality. It hasn't done what, you know, work on cancer, work on the heart, work on, you know, virtually other infectious disease. It's remarkable what a pathetic track record it has. And with all the, you know, use of SSRIs in the culture and shrinks, you know, which here in Berkeley, you know, every other person's a shrink. The fact is that rates of depression are soaring, rates of suicide are rising dramatically,

Starting point is 00:52:00 and addiction too is rampant. And so there's a real crisis here. And there hasn't been any real innovation in mental health care since, I would say, 1990 or so, with the introduction of the SSRIs, the antidepress in the work on addiction. I think that that's very promising, and it's an area where we don't have a lot in the pipeline. you know, still very preliminary research to be useful with opiate addiction, partly because it blunts the withdrawal symptoms at the same time it helps you get off the drugs. But it's a very heavy and risky psychedelic, and it lasts for a very long time. There are clinics in Mexico that are administering it to opiate addiction. But there is work planned to look at psilocybin and opiate addiction. Psilocybin and alcohol addiction is underway right now in a large study at NYU that I think bears close watching. And then there's all the work that's about to happen about psilocybin and depression. Treatment-resistant depression is the subject of study in Europe coming up,

Starting point is 00:53:34 and that's people whose depression has not responded to two other forms of treatment, so a particularly needy group of people. And then a study in this country of major depression. And that will be getting underway this year. I think if these drugs can really make a dent in those indications, it would be enormous. It would just be, you know, and the depression study is very interesting how that came about. The researchers, you know, and the depression study is very interesting how that came about. The researchers, you know, had looked statistically significant reductions in symptoms of depression and anxiety so a pretty big deal very strong treatment effect much stronger by the way than the treatment effect that got ssris approved um but when they went to the fda seeking permission

Starting point is 00:54:42 to do a phase three trial in cancer patients, the FDA regulators said to them, we've got a much bigger problem, a much larger population of people struggling with depression. And there's a strong signal here that these drugs may help with depression. So we want you to study that. And part of the reason they did that is they well recognize that there's not a lot of drugs in the pipeline and the SSRIs are, are, um, you know, losing their effectiveness, which was never too great to begin with. We're learning, you know, that SSRIs do perform slightly better than placebos, um, and their effect appears to, um, fade over time. And also people hate being on them because of the side effects.

Starting point is 00:55:27 So you mentioned something that may surprise people, and that is FDA support in this case. And certainly we don't necessarily have to get into MDMA, but MDMA was granted breakthrough therapy designation to expedite the process of phase three trials for PTSD.

Starting point is 00:55:51 And that seems at odd with something that came up earlier, which was this moral panic after the psychedelic 60s and the Controlled Substances Act and the current legal status of these drugs. So what has changed? I mean, you would think if we look at the mystical experiences and the peace that people feel or the oneness, the timelessness, the ineffability, one would be inclined to think, hey, if you're trying to treat alcoholism with that, you're just going to give them a state they want to return to over and over again. Yeah. Well, that's a good question. I think it's important to understand that psychedelics are not, the classical psychedelics are not addictive. So it's not like you're giving

Starting point is 00:56:38 them another drug that they're going to get hooked on. You know, in the classic drug addiction experiments where you give a primate, you know, or I'm sorry, when you give a rat or a mouse two levers in the cage and one has food and one has cocaine or heroin, you know, they'll keep pressing the cocaine or heroin until they die. And they'll prefer it over food. If you make one of those levers give them access to LSD, they'll press it once and never again. They don't want to go there. And, you know, if you've used these drugs,

Starting point is 00:57:14 your first thought on the conclusion of the experience is not, man, I've got to do that again. It takes months to recover. And I don't mean recover, but it takes months to recover um and i don't mean recover but it takes months to process everything that happened and it was so it's so disruptive and and so extreme and experienced that your first thought is not when where where can i get my next hit so there's that um but yeah i mean it's a weird idea you know back in the 50s one of the the really interesting stories that that you find if you dig into the research deep enough and the 50s, one of the really interesting stories that you find if you dig into the research deep enough, and the 50s period is fascinating, is that Bill W., the founder of Alcoholics Anonymous, first he got sober after he had been administered a psychedelic or a drug that some people call a psychedelic called belladonna in in the 30s and then in the

Starting point is 00:58:06 50s he got involved with lsd therapy in la and he thought that lsd might be able to help alcoholics and he and he went to the board which he was on of aa and said look lsd we should really take a look at it maybe we want to incorporate it in the program. And his fellow board members are like, are you crazy? I mean, that's going to ruin our brand. That's going to, you know, confuse people. So there is a kind of fundamental sense that it seems weird to treat a drug with another drug. But these drugs are so substantially different, and they appear to be effective in treating at least some kinds of addictions, that it would be shameful for us not to do the research and explore it. The kinds of risks that are present in it, I mean, there are risks, but addiction is not one of them. If that's the case, why have these

Starting point is 00:59:00 compounds been so difficult to research? Why are they not freely available? I mean, what happened that took them off the table for so long? Well, I mean, the 60s happened. You know, there's a chapter in the book where I look at the sort of rise and quick fall of psychedelics during the 60s. And it's a really fascinating episode. And it's full of cautionary tales. You know, it's funny. I would ask researchers I was interviewing, so what happened? Why was there such a backlash against psychedelics that research was closed down?

Starting point is 00:59:42 You know, that never happens. That you have a promising field of research and suddenly scientists feel they can't do it anymore. And they're told to stop. I mean, this is, you know, this is kind of dark ages stuff. Um, and, and, and, and to a man, and they are mostly men, I'm afraid, um, they will say, um, well, it's too simple to blame Timothy Leary. And then they'll go on to blame Timothy Leary. And he does have a very important role in this. And basically, Leary, you know, started studying psilocybin and then LSD at Harvard from 1960 to 1963. And keep in mind, the drugs were legal then. But he got impatient with research, with science pretty early on. And he decided, well, you can't really do a controlled study

Starting point is 01:00:34 of psychedelics, so why bother? And he started studying psychedelics in what he called a naturalistic environment, which meant his living room. And as happens to some psychedelic researchers, they lose interest in treating individuals and acquire an interest in treating the whole of the culture. Because they start seeing that, you know, retailing these things is too slow when they're so promising and they could actually save us from civilizational collapse. And you have this exuberance, irrational exuberance, I would add, that seems to come up in the minds of some people who work with these compounds. And it's an occupational hazard, I would argue. And the current generation of researchers are guarding against it, but take them out for a drink and, you know, they'll come around to that place.

Starting point is 01:01:28 The value of these compounds for the whole civilization, which is interesting and they may well be right, but it's a dangerous way to talk, I think. And so something else was going on in the 60s, and that was that these drugs were used by the young, by teenagers and people in their 20s. what was called a generation gap and a very unusual splitting of the cultures and values of two generations. These drugs were doing something very unusual to that historical moment and something that will never happen again. Let me explain what I mean. LSD, a high-dose psilocybin or LSD trip is a kind of rite of passage, a searing rite of passage. You feel like you went in one person and you came out another person. And it did this for the young at that point. That's who used these drugs. Not too many older people use them. And normally a rite of passage knits a culture together. It's organized by the elders who set up the bar, whatever it is, whether it's a bar mitzvah or a vision quest or whatever it is,

Starting point is 01:02:56 and the youth, the adolescents, pass through that process and then land in the country of the adults. And that's how you grow up. Here was this really freaky rite of passage that was taking young people and dumping them in a country of the mind. And it's no accident that you had this unusual divergence of youth culture, both in terms of everything from politics, dress, music, diet, sexual mores, morality, was different than adults. And that was very destabilizing for the culture. And, you know, not surprisingly, the elders reacted with fear and panic and tried to put an end to this. You know, Richard Nixon called Timothy Leary, who was already kind of a washed up psychology professor, called him the most dangerous man in America. That's astounding. But, you know, he probably really believed it. He believed these drugs were keeping men from, you know, going to fight in Vietnam. One of the things that happens is that you, you know,

Starting point is 01:04:18 these drugs make you raise questions about the authority structure that you live in. And that was certainly happening. So they were very destabilizing and there was a backlash. Whether Timothy Leary was solely responsible for that, that seems unfair. I mean, he was definitely the East Coast person most responsible for it. But remember on the West Coast, you had Ken Kesey, the writer, who is turning on thousands of people in his acid tests and is, you know, is also a psychedelic evangelist. And he was turned on by the CIA inadvertently. You know, they were testing their LSD and they were paying people 50 bucks to go to the VA hospital in Menlo Park or Palo Alto and have a dose. And they turned on the wrong guy.

Starting point is 01:05:11 The story is so outrageous. Isn't it? It's like a movie. I had never been exposed to the details in your book. And it's just, if someone were to write a novel with that as the plot, I mean, they'd have to be like Haruki Murakami or something. It's so surreal. Yeah. And the idea that the 60s, what we call the 60s, might have been a CIA mind control experiment gone horribly good or bad is mind-blowing.

Starting point is 01:05:41 So I think the drugs would have found their way into the counterculture one way or the other. There were other routes besides Timothy Leary, even though he was pushing really hard to make this happen. But that led to a backlash, and you had the government coming down hard on it. The media, who had been, and this was one of the real surprises in researching the book, incredibly boosterish about psychedelics. Time Life, which was one of the most important media empires in the country, controlled by Henry Luce, they were actively promoting psychedelics up until 1965. Henry Luce loved them. He and his wife had been treated successfully. He published Gordon Wasson's first account of a magic mushroom experience in Mexico in the 1950s.

Starting point is 01:06:32 And in fact, he insisted that all coverage of psychedelics come to his desk so he could make sure it didn't have anything negative in it. So the culture undergoes a radical 180 around 1965, and that leads to the closing off of research. So that begs the question, could it happen again? I don't think it could happen quite that way. And the reason it couldn't, and for this idea, I credit Rick Doblin, if he's right. And I, you know, but he might be wrong. But Rick Doblin, who's the head of MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies, thinks that the culture has changed too much, that we've absorbed so many innovations of the 60s, and that the people now in charge, many of them have tripped.

Starting point is 01:07:28 Psychedelics are not so strange to them. And that's why you have, you know, really some establishment voices in the psychiatric establishment. People like Paul Summergrad and Jeffrey Lieberman, both past presidents of the American Psychiatric Association, have talked about their own use of psychedelics and the role it played in their intellectual development. No doubt, some of these regulators at the FDA have, you know, first-person experience of psychedelics. So they're not terrified of them in quite the way our parents were or my parents were in the 60s. And I think there's some comfort in that for people doing this research that it's unlikely to happen that way. Could it happen another way? Yes. I mean, let's say someone dies in this research or there is, um, you know, some, some adverse, uh, you know, events, um, or there are suicides, uh, associated with psychedelics, which have happened in the past and could happen again.

Starting point is 01:08:33 The, um, the cultural climate could change. You know, we also have Jeffrey Sessions is the, um, is the, uh, attorney general and he's, you know, he's's not content he's not happy with states legalizing cannabis um how's he going to feel if the fda comes forward and approves psychedelics um it's not guaranteed that they'll be against it i mean there's another lens you could take to this um they are deregulators and that's essentially what we're talking about right is deregulating a pharmaceutical. victims of sexual assault for PTSD, war veterans returning with pronounced trauma and limbs blown off. I mean, it seems to be such a bipartisan issue and in everyone's best interest, there would seem to be some political risk in trying to stop these types of studies. Maybe I'm not savvy enough. No, I think you're absolutely right,

Starting point is 01:09:46 and your example is the good example. I mean, the MDMA work for PTSD, I mean, this is, you know, is there a more sympathetic population that you could possibly be helping? And in the same way, you know, the whole system finally was moved to make it easier to have access to aids drugs because there was nothing else that could help um i think that yes i think there would be a penalty and i don't think it's an accident it's not a right left issue when you start talking about the military and cops um you know rebecca mercer has donated to psychedelic research, specifically, I think, with the PTSD work. Steve Bannon has spoken out in favor of it. And Peter Thiel is an investor in psychedelic medicine.

Starting point is 01:10:37 So it isn't necessarily the case that it's regarded as this left-wing thing, even though it has these countercultural colorations. So I don't think it's simple at all. But we'll see. We'll see. You know, if the FDA looks at these phase three results, and this is a couple years down the road, and says that, yes, these drugs should be approved and doctors should be able to prescribe them, the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Administration, which is part of the Justice Department, then has to reschedule them. Scheduling drugs is a political determination, finally. And they have, DEA has sometimes been immune to scientific information. But I think it would be, you know, it would be an interesting moment. I'm not sure

Starting point is 01:11:27 how it would come out. But I think that this work with dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder and dealing with the so-called existential distress of cancer, wins the sympathy of the public. Uh, especially, um, when you're doing it with a drug that where the risk profile is, is really not very bad. Um, so we'll see. I mean, I think it's a big question. Um, you know, the idea that there's any kind of logical response on the part of the Trump administration to anything, you know, that has to be factored into. So the, you mentioned, uh, you mentioned uh risks earlier i think we should talk about that i mean what what is the risk profile right what are the risks of these compounds what's the you know the ld50 if we have a thousand people in a room

Starting point is 01:12:16 what's the dose it takes to kill 500 of them uh well there's there's no known lethal dose of psilocybin or lsd that's you know it kills you, it's not going to be because it's toxic. They're not toxic. I mean, remarkably few molecules have this profound effect, and they don't stay in your body that long. So from a toxicity point of view, they're remarkably safe drugs. I think that the risks come are more psychological in origin. They are incredibly disruptive. They disarm your usual defenses. And defenses, you know, can be very helpful as well as hurtful. And some people without their defenses get into real trouble. People do foolish things on psychedelics. People take them carelessly and

Starting point is 01:13:06 they, you know, walk into traffic. They, you know, they step off of buildings. So I think, and then there is a small subgroup of people at risk for serious mental illness, things like schizophrenia, for whom psychedelics can be the trigger and push people into that first psychotic break. And I think that that happened, you know, wasn't so uncommon with people in their early 20s using these drugs. And that happens to be the age where this tends to happen. Would it happen without the psychedelics? Probably another trauma would have set it off if not the psychedelics. But it does happen. And I think that one of the reasons that there have not been any adverse events, any serious adverse events in the thousand volunteers that have been, you know, have been dosed in the modern

Starting point is 01:14:06 era of research is that they're screening very carefully. Anybody who's got mental illness in their family is not eligible. And so, you know, that's kind of the luxury of doing small trials. You can be very picky about who you give the drug to. And that's one of the reasons that phase three may not be quite as dramatic in its, in its, uh, you know, success as, as phase two has been. Um, so I think that there are people who should not take these drugs and, um, uh, and it's people at some psychological risk. Um, that said it's, it's worth pointing out, there's a story I tell in the book that very often doctors who, in the 60s especially, who weren't familiar with psychedelics and the phenomenology of them, mistook panic attacks, simple panic attacks, which are common on the drugs, for psychotic breaks. And there's a great story that Andy Weil told me, Dr. Andrew Weil,

Starting point is 01:15:09 about after he got out of medical school in 1968, he hustled out to San Francisco and volunteered at the Haydash Very Free Clinic. And they were seeing lots of bad trips. And people would come in and they thought they were going mad, that they were going to die. And, you know, we shouldn't minimize how bad a bad trip can be. It's a terrifying experience. And that too is a risk, even if it is just a panic attack. But Andy had had a lot of experience with psychedelics himself. And he saw these symptoms for what they were. And what he would do is he'd come into the little cubicle with his white coat and his stethoscope and his clipboard, and he'd ask a few questions. And then when he decided the person was not really psychotic

Starting point is 01:15:54 but was just freaking out, he would say, excuse me, but there's someone in real trouble in the next cubicle. And all at once, these people were like, wow, there's someone more fucked up than I am. And they would feel so much better. And their symptoms would pass. So he understood that you could manipulate the experience, which is, of course, what the guides understand too, and rescue someone from what had been a pretty horrifying episode. So, you know, how many psychotic breaks were there in the 60s? You know, you hear, you know, that the emergency rooms were, for a period, were, you know, full of people on bad LSD trips.

Starting point is 01:16:38 And maybe that's true, but what was that actually? It may have just been a bad trip. And bad trips are, first, they can be averted with good guiding. And second, they can actually be very useful to people if they're properly analyzed. And I think the, at least, you know, the way that I've started to think about this, reading your book, and becoming involved with the research is that maybe a more useful delineation is safe and unsafe trip in the sense that difficult does not necessarily translate to long-term negative outcomes in some cases to the contrary very much the contrary yeah and i i want to pause for just

Starting point is 01:17:21 a second here to make an appeal if there are regulators, lawmakers listening. And that is that speaking as someone who I assure you is not dancing around the playa and a thong at Burning Man calling himself a shaman. That's not my shtick. has looked at mental illness in friends, suicide in friends in high school and college, have friends with, say, eating disorders of 20, 30 years that have been not just mitigated but resolved, at least I can't say definitively, of course, but for years now after, say, one to three controlled sessions,

Starting point is 01:18:07 looking at the risk profile of these drugs, there are risks to be sure. But the potential benefit, the cost effectiveness, and the pronounced favorable risk profile is really remarkable. I mean, beyond just about anything I've seen, not a panacea, but with some very promising indications, um, that, that make it at the very least worth, uh, researching in depth. Uh, and, uh, I don't want to sound too much like I'm proselytizing, but if you look at, say, there are drugs looking at my pharmacogenomics. If I were to take them, I could have a fatal response, which are common, common, common drugs. If you take grapefruit juice, which can certainly change the metabolism of many drugs, you can have horrible side effects. And if you look at, if you were to print out, let's just say hypothetically years from now, you have psilocybin available and you go to

Starting point is 01:19:09 Walgreens to pick up your psilocybin. Uh, and maybe it's only available through a therapist or a doctor who's going to be supervising a session, but nonetheless, let's imagine this as an exercise and you pick up your, your little white bag with the pharmacist's directions and warnings on the side, compared to just about anything else to date that I would have routinely consumed, the profile of something like acilicidin would be very, very favorable for a lot of things. And of course, we're operating from a place of incomplete information, just because the research has been so stymied. But the early indicators seem to be really promising.

Starting point is 01:19:48 So I would just say from the standpoint of regulators, not calling it the sort of the golden goose, but some of these compounds have the potential to transform how increasingly problematic, often fatal problems in mental health and elsewhere are treated. So it's... You know, I agree with you entirely. And I think that, yes, as with any drug, you've got to compare it with other drugs. And that they all have risks. And we put up with a certain amount of risk to get the benefit. And that the risks in this case, certainly at the biological level, are minor compared to drugs we take routinely that even over-the-counter drugs that are more toxic than psychedelics as far as we know. So I think that's definitely worth keeping in mind.

Starting point is 01:20:38 You know, because these drugs are illicit, they're surrounded by this penumbra of fear. That's a good word, penumbra. And we need to look at them with a very kind of cool, objective lens, which is hard to do. You know, David Nutt, who's a very well-known psychopharmacologist in England who's involved with the research, it's in his lab that Robin Carhart-Harris works, he did a very interesting analysis of a bunch of drugs, and he would compare them not even to themselves, but to other kinds of risky behavior. And he got in really hot water. Not only did he say that alcohol is more toxic than LSD, which got him

Starting point is 01:21:17 fired, he was working for the government as the labor government's drugs advisor. But then he said, riding a horse is more dangerous than taking MDMA. Now, we never put those two things together. But, you know, why don't we have this conversation about horseback riding? It's really dangerous. I'm just seeing the commercial, like the 30-second spot. Safer than riding a horse. So, you know, I think we have to – I think we're really nuts.

Starting point is 01:21:44 I mean, in general, you know, any behavioral economist, I'm sure you've had them on the show will tell you that we're we're nuts about risk and really irrational and how we confront it. So it's important to understand that there are risks. They're mostly psychological. People can have very painful experiences. But in terms of poisoning your body um you could do a lot worse and one of the portions in your book that really caught my attention and got me excited was related to the default mode network and i'm probably going to butcher this paraphrasing so i want you to correct me but uh the it was the observation that perhaps some of these conditions that a layperson is prone to thinking of as separate, whether that's chronic anxiety, chronic depression, OCD, eating disorders, that they may not, in fact, be as separate as we think. And I want to say that Dr. Tom Insell may have commented on this, former head of the National Institute on or of mental health. Could you just elaborate on that? Because this, it's so exciting to me for many reasons that I want to do it justice. So could you explain this? anxiety addiction and obsession um and um one of the questions i asked insole when i interviewed him

Starting point is 01:23:27 was and this is you know one of the things i was skeptical about um that it seems kind of implausible to me that one drug or one uh you know category of drugs like psychedelics should work on so many different indications um isn't that a little too good to be true? Isn't that, you know, aren't you talking panacea? And he said, well, what makes you think those indications are so different? Those illnesses are so different. And he said the distinctions between depression, anxiety, obsession, and addiction are actually, there's a lot of bleeding over from one to another. And that the names that we give them are really an artifact of the insurance industry and the DSM, you know, the diagnostic manual. We have to assign a number to every diagnosis. And so we tend to separate things. But he's kind of more of a

Starting point is 01:24:27 lumper. And he suggests that, you know, these could be very similar phenomenon. And that, you know, one way another psychiatrist put it is, you know, depression is kind of regret about the past and anxiety is regret about the future and it's like oh that's really interesting they are you know the real difference between depression anxiety is tense isn't it and um so when you when you step back to another level and you look at um the mechanisms that may at work here, you begin to see how these illnesses may be very similar. How do I mean? Well, if you look at, again, go back to Robin Carhart-Harris's work on the default mode network. His premise, he wrote another really interesting paper i strongly anyone who has an appetite for a little neuroscience um should check out this paper it's called the entropic brain

Starting point is 01:25:31 and you should put it on your website i can send you i'll put it in the show notes and um uh and there he his his idea is that the brain is is as we know, a very complex system. And it has an order, an emergent order that is to some extent enforced or regulated by the default mode network. And the ego is the felt version of that. And the ego's job is to kind of patrol the boundaries. It's the cop on patrol and it's patrolling the boundary between you and the other, you know, things that aren't you, and you and your unconscious. And the system, you know, has this kind of structural order. But in many people, that order gets overly rigid and that brains function along a spectrum from entropy to rigidity. And on the entropy end, you have serious psychological ailments like schizophrenia,

Starting point is 01:26:39 but you also have childhood consciousness, which is very chaotic and very psychedelic in many ways. And then on the other end of the spectrum, you get to these illnesses characterized by too much order, essentially. And that's depression and obsession and addiction. And these are essentially ailments where people get stuck in repetitive loops, that these deep grooves of thought and behavior, which are enforced by an ego that's become almost punishing, you know, too authoritarian. And so these brains are kind of locked. And these other brains, you know, are just way loose. And there's a, there's a place you want to be in the middle there. There's a point of criticality really, where you have enough entropy, um, but also enough order and that we go wrong when we, when we get too far to one end of the other. Um,

Starting point is 01:27:37 that's his theory anyway. It's, it's speculative, but, but, but has a lot of explanatory power. And basically, he thinks that psychedelics work by increasing the amount of entropy in the brain, and that entropy up to a point is a very positive thing, and that it is the lack of entropy that traps people in these very rigid patterns of thought and behavior. And that essentially the LSD or the psilocybin lubricates cognition. It can go too far and leads to magical thinking, which is also on the too much entropy side. But it also can help break people out of those habits. So there you begin to see the outlines of a grand unified theory of mental illness. And that's really exciting stuff. It makes me think of it.

Starting point is 01:28:30 It's so, so exciting. Because it sort of offers this tantalizing possibility that you could address many, many different separately labeled conditions in a similar way. And I'm not going to name names, but I was speaking with a researcher in this field, very well-published scientist. And the analogy that he used, and I'm going to modify it a little bit, but he said that,

Starting point is 01:28:56 because my question to him was, what is it, what is a plausible explanation for why some of these compounds seem to have this long-term reorganizing effect? Because the half-life of the drug, so to speak, is not months long. So what the hell happens where these people, in some cases, have this persistence of personality change where they have more empathy a year later, two years later? What on earth can explain that? And the picture he painted, because the mechanisms are still so poorly understood,

Starting point is 01:29:28 was, well, you can imagine if you're on a ski mountain. Oh, I know who you're talking about. All right. After a few hours, you have all these worn ruts, and it becomes more and more likely that people are going to use the ruts that have been laid down. But if there's... You can't get out of them, right? You can't. Yeah, you can't. Your sled or your skis keeps tending back into them.

Starting point is 01:29:50 Right. Yes. And so – but if you suddenly have five feet of fresh powder, whatever, three feet, it doesn't really matter, and then you get up to the top of the lift, you all of a sudden have to almost by definition choose a new path. You're at least given the flexibility to choose your new route. And, uh, but taken too far, it's just like being stuck in a blizzard, right? Well, that's not gonna, that's my own addition. Not terribly original, but, but, um, it's, uh, I really need to meet, uh, Robin at some point. I haven't, you do, you need to have mom. He's, uh, he's, he's a brilliant guy. And I think he

Starting point is 01:30:25 will be recognized as a really important neuroscientist. He's just got a very unusual mind because he can do the hard science, but he's also trained as a psychoanalyst. He's actually a Freudian. Very, very interesting mix of, he got into this because he wanted to show the psychological, the neuroscientific basis for Freudian ideas like repression. And so, yeah, he's a really interesting guy. I think that snow metaphor is really powerful. We don't understand the mechanism, what exactly is filling those ruts, you know, in a way that lasts. I mean, I think, though, it may go back to that image of, you know, creating some new linkages in the brain, some new pathways. And basically, you know, that's what

Starting point is 01:31:11 learning is. It's a pathway in the brain, and then you reinforce it by repetition. So that if you have had such a linkage on an experience, and you simply think about it a lot, and I've certainly done this in my own experiences, it reinforces it. You can use meditation to reinforce it. You can just merely just replay it in your head. And in time, you're creating a more and more resilient linkage. And that's why I think that the integration period after the session is so important. You know, in all the both underground and above ground guided sessions, there are three stages that, you know, they prepare you for it. They guide you. They sit with you while you're having the experience. And then you always come back the next day. And this

Starting point is 01:32:04 is probably the most important part to figure out what the hell was that all about. And it's often hard to know. And many of us take a, you know, a big psychedelic experience and we put it in this box called weird drug experience and we put it away on the shelf because we don't know what to do with it and no one's going to help us. But, but at the integration, the guide will, will, um, have you talk out your experience, tell the narrative, and then we'll kind of underscore certain ideas. And I, and I remember well, some times I had when I, when I had good guiding that, um, they would by, by, um, emphasizing one particular theme or insider image image basically make that linkage much stronger than it would have been. And it became the thing that I thought about the most and then was and

Starting point is 01:32:53 acquired a certain kind of power in my mind. So I think that there's a lot more to be done with figuring out how to take elements from the experience and kind of reify them and make them more real and more lasting. Michael, this seems like a good time to get into those personal experiences. And I don't know where to start, but I thought since you mentioned themes, images, insights, we could use that as a jumping off point. And you could start wherever you'd like to start really but i would be very curious to hear you describe any of your experiences that that ended up being very meaningful for you sure yeah um you know it's funny i i said earlier i approached the uh my psychedelic journeys with a lot of trepidation and and I approach the writing of them with a lot of trepidation after the fact, because, you know, I didn't know that I could.

Starting point is 01:33:49 It's a real literary challenge. If you think about how many trip reports you've read that were any good, you know, you can count them on one hand. And so that was the kind of Everest I kept moving toward as I was going through the book is like, oh my God, I'm going to have to explain these experiences. In the event, it turned out to be great fun to write about. I really enjoyed writing about it. It was a challenge, but of the best sort. I had, just to give you the landscape of it, I had experiences with LSD. These are guided experiences with LSD, psilocybin, 5-MeO-DMT, which is a pretty obscure psychedelic that's made from the – well, that is the smoked venom of the Sonoran Desert Toad. Yes, somebody figured that out. And then ayahuasca, a couple ayahuasca circles. I would say that for me, the most useful, insightful experience was a guided psilocybin journey, where I was trying to approximate the dosage being used in the above-ground trials. I think I was a little shy of that. And I worked with a wonderful guy, a woman on the East Coast.

Starting point is 01:35:15 And what can I say about this experience? What was really important about this experience was that I experienced ego dissolution for the first time. I had read a lot about it, non-dual consciousness, and I was curious to have such an experience and also, you know, very nervous about it. Just to pause, sorry to interject. So non-dual meaning what? That means that you're no longer the observer? Yeah. Normally, you know, we're the subject, we're the perceiving subject, and everything else is the object of our perceptions, right? And we have this kind of split, and that kind of defines our consciousness to a large extent. And it's a rather selfish way of looking at things, but that's how most of us look, and probably many animals look at things that way too. Uh, although we don't have much report. Um, and, uh, but that non-dual consciousness is where

Starting point is 01:36:11 that sense of separation, um, breaks down either because there are other subjects you're aware of, you know, I mean, I've had an experience where the plants were, I realized they had a subjectivity too, and they were, they were looking back at me in a sense. And, um, uh, that, that, that also tends to break down dual, the sense of duality that, that we go through life with. Um, so, so this happened, um, you know, this wasn't always a pleasant experience. I, uh, uh, I took the mushroom mushroom it was a very large mushroom that i ate with some chocolate um and it was she she was kind of um more in the shamanic style of guides as many underground guides are it really is you have a sense of ceremony more than you do in the above ground

Starting point is 01:36:57 trials um and uh initially one of the problems i've had with the underground guides is their musical taste, which is just horrible very often. I mean, to me, it's the kind of music that's fine if you're getting a really high quality massage at a top resort. But for a psychological experience, it seems a, wanting. And so she put on this piece of, of new age claptrap and, uh, and it immediately put me in, and I thought it was electronica. I thought it was electronic music. It turned out not to be, but, um, and I, and I immediately put me in this space of a computer or video game. I was in a world that had been generated by computers and, and it was dark and very sleek. It wasn't scary, but it was claustrophobic and just, I wanted to be outside. So there I was in this, in this dystopian video game going along and seeing, you know, all these,

Starting point is 01:38:00 uh, digitally created things. And, you know, I can imagine somebody who would enjoy this space, but it wasn't my space. And I asked her to change the music and it got a little better. And as the experience moved on, I started to get a little anxious that, oh, my God, I'm trapped in computer world. How can I get out of here? But I remembered my flight instructions. That's a word used at Hopkins to describe what you're told in the preparation session, which is if you see anything scary, don't try to get away from it. You know, step right up to that monster and say, what are you doing in my head? Or what have you got to teach me? And it's very good advice.

Starting point is 01:38:43 Or surrender. You know, relax your mind and float downstream. You know, all these mantras they give you. And they're actually really helpful. And I realized, all right, I just have to surrender to this. And I got deeper into the experience. And then I, am I going too slow in this narrative? Is this okay?

Starting point is 01:39:01 This is great. I'm in no rush. Okay. Um, and then I was was it was very powerful for a while and i was um uh getting a little nervous about it and i thought i'm going to take off my eye shades i'm wearing these eye shades and one of the great things about the eye shades is they're a powerful technology i mean much more powerful than you can imagine more powerful than vr virtual reality which is not that powerful but But, you know, it sends you inside. So if you take it off, and I took it off just to make sure reality was still existing,

Starting point is 01:39:30 and to reorient myself, and also because I had to pee, you know, suddenly I saw the, you know, the room I was in, and the guide, and the plants, and the walls, and the plants and the walls and the furniture. And I was like, ah, reality. I love it. And, um, uh, and, but I had to pee and I, and I went to the, uh, uh, she escorted me to the bathroom cause I could barely move. And, um, when I came back and I did definitely didn't want to look in the mirror, I was really nervous at what I would see. And, uh, and I didn't want to look at her either. And I was just like, I peed. I produced this, described as the spectacular crop of diamonds because everything had this beam of light that was being addressed directly to me. And then I came back and she said, did I want a

Starting point is 01:40:17 booster dose? And I said, yes. And I looked at her for the first time as she was kneeling next to me and she holds out her hands, another mushroom, and she has transformed. She's normally blonde, and her hair had turned black. psychedelic history who gave Gordon Wasson the first Westerner to ever try psilocybin, his ceremony in Oaxaca back in the 50s. And she had turned into this person and her hands were leathery and her face was stretched over her cheekbones. It was quite shocking. And I had to look away and I didn't want to tell her what had happened to her. Um, so I take this, uh, stepped up dose. And when I do that, and then I go back under and I put on the, um, uh, the shades, the eye shades again, um, I have this, uh, sense of, um, dissolution, um, that my identity has just

Starting point is 01:41:22 exploded into a thousand little slips of paper, like little post-its. And I was watching it just get blown to the wind. But I wasn't panicking. I had no desire to reassemble, you know, collect all the paper and put it back in a pile. It was like, no, this is fine. And I realized that that's what was happening. And there was nothing to be done but surrender to it. And that my sense of self was falling apart before my eyes. But what does that mean? How can your sense of self, who's my eyes? Who's perceiving this? And then it got even more extreme. And I saw myself spread out over the landscape like a coat of paint or butter. And I was totally fine with it scene. And the lesson of it was that, you know, what had, what should have felt like this personal cataclysm, total loss of self, there was no

Starting point is 01:42:35 category labeled personal anymore. And I was able to perceive this whole scene with this dispassionate objectivity. It was like, that's the way it is, unperturbed. And it was this new, I had had access to this amazing vantage point. And it made me realize I'm not identical to my ego. You know, that chattering voice in our head that accompanies us most of the time. It's kind of neurotic and can be annoying, but is useful too. I mean, you know, your ego is what gets the book written. But I had completely separated from it, and I hadn't been annihilated. That was the amazing thing. So that, to me, was the big takeaway from this experience. There were other things that happened. I had a much happier experience with music toward the end um after constantly fighting with mary the name i

Starting point is 01:43:25 give the guide about her musical taste we finally agreed and she put on these bach uh unaccompanied cello suites which are you know it's a yo-yo ma recording it's just they're stunning and they're depressing they're really mournful infinitely sad pieces of music um just a cello nothing else um and now that i was in this non-dual state uh to listen to music i mean those words don't describe what happens it's to become music you become identical with the music and i became identical at various times with the the bow the horsehair bow you know surfing over those strings of that cello and then i i went into the cello and you know that mouth of space that's where all those vibrations come from and um i had a total mystical merging with this piece of music and and to listen to this music now

Starting point is 01:44:19 sends chills up my spine um because i had it wasn't-Yo Ma, it wasn't Bach, it was like this universe, and I was of it. So, what does that all mean, you know? It was a powerful lesson in the role of our ego, I think, in our lives, and that's what I talked about the next day when I came back for the integration session. I said I had I realized that there might be another ground on which to plant our feet besides this ego, this self-interested ego. And but I didn't know what to do with it because my ego was back on patrol, you know, pretty quickly, you know, doing its usual thing, keeping, you know, my unconscious at bay and making me understand that I am me and that's somebody else and all the stuff it does. But she said, and it was interesting, she said, well, you've had the experience of not reacting as your ego normally would that, you know, because the ego is kind of trigger happy, right? It's

Starting point is 01:45:23 defensive by definition. It marshals all your defenses and you're supposedly in your interest. And sometimes it is in your interest, but that I'd had a taste of what it was like to not be the victim of those trigger reactions. And she said, that's something you can cultivate. And, uh, and I've been cultivating it ever since. So, that was, for me, that was big news. That was a big insight for me. And I think about that a lot. And I think it has, to some extent, changed my relationship to my ego. I know when he's up to his old tricks sometimes, and I can spot it. And and sometimes I can, um, put them in his place. Um, and that's useful now, you know, 30 years of psychoanalysis,

Starting point is 01:46:12 you could probably get to the same place. Um, you do a lot of work on your ego. Um, but this, I did in four hours or five hours. Um, so that was a, I, I, I now look back on that as a very positive experience that taught me something important that also gave me, I mean, it was a spiritual experience. And I'm not someone who's had a lot of them. But that merging with the music was as powerful a spiritual experience as I've had. And it also gave me a little insight into what is spiritual experience you know that term has always kind of mystified me um and i think it's no different i mean i hate to put it in these psychodynamic terms and i don't mean to demean anyone's more um mystical understanding of it but to me it's a myst, mystical or spiritual experience is what happens when your ego is put aside.

Starting point is 01:47:11 A spiritual experience is about a sense of merging with something larger than you. And it's your ego that stands in the way. And to the extent that you can subdue it or just put it off to the side for a few hours, amazing things happen. And you realize that you are part of a larger entity and that the mind of Bach or Yo-Yo Ma is completely accessible to you. And that was a big deal too. It's so wild. It's hard for me to even respond to that, because as you noted, and I thought you did a very masterful job of describing these experiences in the book, if one of the hallmarks of mystical experience is ineffability, it poses quite a challenge to put into prose uh and i think that if we think about prose and words also you mentioned the psychotherapy and certainly there's absolutely a role to be played and a function for many of these other modalities but it strikes me that they're not mutually exclusive

Starting point is 01:48:18 but these these very difficult to describe psychedelic experiences allow people oftentimes to feel things or to embody things to experience things that that would be very hard to talk themselves to as a gingerbread trail to a conclusion that then allows them to intellectually change their behavior or relationship to their ego things like that i mean there are certain things that are difficult to talk your way out of if you didn't talk your way into them. And I'm fascinated by or hope to certainly learn more about why these things seem to have the effect that they do.

Starting point is 01:48:55 And our understanding is so partial. But looking at, say, you mentioned the treatment-resistant depression. There's a study at Hopkins also that I've been involved with for the last year, a year, year and a half. Uh, and the, for instance, there's a, if anyone's interested in throwing their hat in the ring, there's an unfunded study, uh, at this point at Hopkins, they're considering looking at Alzheimer's and even the potential. Well, I think they would be looking mostly at its effects on depression and anxiety,

Starting point is 01:49:25 but there, there are some people who have, uh, postulated that there may be a role in neurogenesis in the hippocampus, uh, uh, or an effect at least from psilocybin, which is really, uh, tantalizing, of course. I mean, selfishly speaking, I have Alzheimer's on both sides of my family. So I have a cute interest in that. But if we zoom out from these individual studies, have you thought about how these drugs, these classes, might intersect with broader societal opportunities

Starting point is 01:50:04 or threats uh at all i mean not not to get too pie in the sky yeah it's hard to avoid that um you know i mean we have pathologies at the individual level and we have pathologies at the at the civilizational level or the national level. And what's striking to me is that the two biggest, I think, the two biggest challenges we face as a culture are the environmental crisis and tribalism. There are other words you can put on that, but let's use tribalism. Both of which are functions of ego consciousness in that what we do to nature has a lot to do with the fact that we objectify nature and that we think of ourselves as the only subject and everything else is an object, therefore, for our use. Same with tribalism. That, too, is a sense of, you know, an ego patrolling a border and that everything on this side is us and we will protect it. And everything on that side we're in a zero-sum contest with.

Starting point is 01:51:22 So these drugs, you know, offer an antidote to both those ways of thinking. And it is no accident, I'm sure, that the fact that the 60s, you know, represented the birth of environmentalism. Yes, there was, you know, Rachel Carson and the Cuyahoga River on fire and all the other things that were happening then. But psychedelic consciousness also may have contributed to environmental consciousness, because one of the things that happens is that the world becomes animate in a way it wasn't before, and that the plants and the animals and the fungi all have their points of view too. And you feel very connected in a way that makes it hard to be destructive. And same with people. I mean, you feel connected to all different kinds of people. So, you know, I'm not suggesting we

Starting point is 01:52:12 need to put these drugs in the water supply. There might be some individuals that we can all think of who would benefit enormously if they were willing to undergo this sort of therapy. But I think they're extremely relevant to the moment we're in and the problems we're struggling with. And perhaps it's no accident that this renaissance is coming about at the time it is. You mentioned the drinking water. Let's talk about it for a second. So there are, I've observed, as I'm sure you have, people who are militant proselytizers of psychedelics who are prone to the same type of rhetoric that seemed to cause a lot of trouble in the earlier iteration of all this in uh, iteration of all this in the, in the sixties, putting it in the drinking water, making it legal. You want to go to seven 11 and just get a LSD smoothie. Uh, seems like a bad idea to me. Uh, then you have people on the, on the far other end of the spectrum, uh, certainly in not too distant, uh, history who would not even if consider publishing a scientific study involving

Starting point is 01:53:27 psychedelics wouldn't even consider the scientific merit of a study and we we we seem to be in a very well as you put it a renaissance where the research is finally being done to clarify the mechanisms of action and the, the potential, but also the risks of these, of these drugs. And it's so exciting to me having really spent so much time as you have looking at this, what are the ways that people can screw this up?

Starting point is 01:53:59 Do you know what I mean? Because it's just, I really, really think we have an incredible opportunity to decipher how these plants and compounds that have in many cases existed, well, certainly existed, but been consumed for millennia, and how they fit into a world that is bursting at the seams with not decreasing but increasing prevalence of certain types of mental health problems and other issues it's it just it's such an opportunity that i don't want to see wasted uh how can people screw it up and what would you is there anything you would ask of people uh certainly i would say to people don't go don't find some shaman on like casual encounters on Craigslist and order mail order, God knows what, from the dark web and just decide to do it with your friends on a weekend. Terrible, terrible, terrible idea, among other things.

Starting point is 01:54:55 And, you know, going down to Peru and with the first, you know, shaman you meet. I mean, there have been horrible stories coming out of Peru. Yeah. you meet. I mean, there have been horrible stories coming out of Peru with sexual assault of women. And there was a murder the other day involving a healer in Peru. So I think carelessness is the great threat. And I think carelessness is part of what doomed psychedelics in the 60s or temporarily doomed them in the 60s. You know, one of the great lessons, if you study history, is that until our own time, when psychedelics came along and we didn't have any sort of conventions or rules to govern their use, and many people did get into trouble, and the psychedelics themselves, you know, ign a, catalyzed a kind of backlash.

Starting point is 01:55:56 But you go in history and you see that these powerful substances were only used in a very controlled, considered way. And that you didn't have individuals taking them on their own. There was always a circle. There were always elders. There was the a circle. There were always elders. There was the shaman. There was the person who had lots of experience of the territory, administering it to people. It was always organized in a ritual. There was a ceremony. All these cultural forms, I'm not saying those ones are right and we should simply adapt those or adopt those, they may not be right to Western culture. We may have to come up with our own rituals, our own ceremonies, our own rules of the road for these drugs. And I think that to some extent that was the failure of the 60s. Now, I don't want to paint it with a broad brush. There are many people who had wonderful experiences with psychedelics in the 60s who had important insights and created great art as a result of their experiences.

Starting point is 01:56:52 But for the culture as a whole, it led to this backlash and a fair amount of suffering and also the loss of 30 years of good research that we could have been doing. And I think that had to do with the fact that we did not have a proper cultural container. So the question we now face is, what is that container? One of them is the medical system. That's the path that they are on at NYU and Hopkins. I don't think that's the only path. I agree strongly with Bob Jesse, who's, you know, one of the motive forces behind the revival of research, who says, you know, yes, there are people who are suffering and we have to help them. But these drugs are also good for what he calls the betterment of well people, people like myself, people like yourself, and that it would be a shame if their use was restricted only toward people with, you know, DSM diagnoses of one kind or another.

Starting point is 01:57:49 So what's the proper vessel for them? Is it a religious vessel? Well, that's not comfortable with everybody. We need to figure this out. apparently used a psychedelic and the mysteries of eleusis or the eleusian mysteries as they're called was a was an annual right where everyone who wanted to in the culture well not the not the slaves but not just the elite used uh something called the kikion which was a psychedelic apparently and they had visions and they went to the, you know, the afterworld or the underworld. And it was a very powerful annual rite. You were not allowed to use the Kikion any other time.

Starting point is 01:58:33 In fact, somebody once did. They got a hold of some and they had a party. And they were severely punished for doing this. Because they understood that this had to be taken in the best interest of the whole society in a way that was carefully regulated. And so I think that's appropriate to them and appropriate to us. That, I think, is how you prevent the kind of carelessness that led to trouble. You know, I mean, I think Leary's sin, if he had one, was giving up on the idea of a guide. And, um, uh, and I think that the, the guide, whether it's, you know, a friend who stays close to ground or somebody preferably very well trained and experienced, um, makes all the

Starting point is 01:59:32 difference. Um, and especially as you get older, I think where you're less of a risk taker, um, people in their twenties will do the craziest things. I mean, look at the way they drive, let alone the way they take drugs. Um, but as you get working with a guide is, at least it was for me, made the experience, created a space in which I could surrender and put down all my defenses. I'm not going to do that, you know, walking around Manhattan. And so we have a lot of work to do designing the experience and understanding what the drugs are doing, but designing the experience in a way that is safe and conducive to the kind of work we want to do. It's such an exciting area of exploration. I'm cautiously optimistic.

Starting point is 02:00:23 I am too. I am too. I am cautiously optimistic. And you and I have both interviewed people and heard these stories of transformation, not just anecdotal, but also in very controlled scientific environments. And you also hear stories as I'm sure you have. I heard a story recently when I was talking about the phase three trials with someone and their nephew, who is, I want to say, 18 or 19, probably getting the age wrong. Doesn't really matter for the purposes of illustrating, but he has he has suffered from severe OCD for many years, which has been debilitating. Smart kid did a ton of research, went on to PubMed, ultimately determined that he thought psilocybin might be a tool to help mitigate his OCD, and it worked. But due to the legal classification,

Starting point is 02:01:21 he was caught with mushrooms and expelled from school. And it's just so tragic in a case like that, that these tools are not available to those who could benefit. And I really hope that people will at the very least consider the importance of scientifically exploring these things. And there's so many different angles of examination, but that's certainly one. At the very least, supporting those who are attempting to understand how these things do what they do. And I have to commend you for putting this book together. And I mentioned this to you in person some time ago, but there was simultaneously great relief and great kind of hand to the, the forehead because you,

Starting point is 02:02:12 you saved me from attempting to write what would have no, no doubt been a far inferior book. So I really appreciate you taking the, the time and also the, the bringing on board and not relinquishing your skepticism as you explored this entire world and this subject matter. I really think that it is such a critical subject at such a critical time. So I not only, and I don't get any vig't get any, uh, vig on this. Certainly, uh, recommend people read it themselves, but it's, it's, it's, it's a book that I think is mind expanding on so many levels. Even if you never have any interest in consuming a psychedelic of any type, uh, it is a,

Starting point is 02:02:57 it is an incredible lens through which to learn more about the mind and more about ultimately your entire experience of reality is, is, is, uh, as far as we know, is filtered through this thing we hold between our ears. Uh, so getting to know it better, uh, certainly seems in everyone's best interest, but, um, I really appreciate all the time that you've taken today and hope we can talk about this many more times. But besides people reading the book, which everyone should, I've read many of your books. It is my favorite of your books. It's such a difficult tightrope to walk, and you really did an excellent job in so many ways. Do you have any parting comments, suggestions, asks of the audience? You know, it's funny. People have asked me,

Starting point is 02:03:54 am I an advocate for psychedelics? And the answer is no, not yet. I'm an advocate, as you just said, I thought you said quite eloquently, the research, we have to support the research. There is enormous potential here, but it still has a long way to go. We haven't answered all the questions. As you say, this is a book, and this is an enterprise, speaking larger than the book, to understand the mind. It's not to understand psychedelics. Psychedelics are a tool, as Stanislav Graf said all those years ago. They are a really powerful tool to understand the mind and potentially your mind. And so, you know, I think keep abreast of

Starting point is 02:04:43 the research. Read some of these papers. Read some of Robert Carhart Harris's papers. And, you know, there are more books to be written about it, Tim. I don't think you should give up on that idea. I think you should just wait a little bit. There's so much to be said. It is such – I feel like I got – every now and then as a writer, you get lucky and you hit the right topic at the right moment. And I just felt like, oh my God, I'm a kid in a candy store.

Starting point is 02:05:10 I have this amazing subject. I'm learning so many things I didn't know. And it was the most exciting experience I've had as a writer. And I'm hoping that the reader feels the same way. Yeah, you paddled for the wave at the right time, I think. And for everybody listening, as I alluded to earlier, I will include links to not only the book, but some of the studies, like the entropic brain and everything that we talked about. I will include links to… Yeah, the image, too.

Starting point is 02:05:44 The connection. Absolutely. And everything that we talked about, I will include links to the image. Absolutely. I'll include links to all of those things in the show notes, which you can just find at Tim.blog forward slash podcast and search pollen and it'll pop right up. Tim, I just want to thank you too for your, I mean, you know, it's wonderful to be interviewed by somebody who is so deeply informed on the subject and so passionate. So thank you for your time and the amount of thought you put into it and for reading the book early. And I'm very grateful.

Starting point is 02:06:15 Entirely my pleasure. And to be continued. So I know you have a busy few weeks and months ahead. So, yeah, it's going to be crazy. And I encourage your listeners and readers to come to one of my events. I'm doing, I don't know, 20 events in the next month all over the country. And if you go to my website, michaelpollin.com, the schedule is there. And please come and introduce yourself wonderful i will encourage everybody to do that they can also say hello to you on twitter at michael pollan and i'll include

Starting point is 02:06:51 your other social handles as well on the show notes i will let you get back to your day good sir uh but uh wonderful to share this time with you and And thank you again for writing the book. I really think it's an impressive resource and story. So thank you for that. Thank you, Tim. And thanks for shining a light on it. I really appreciate it. All right. And for everybody-

Starting point is 02:07:15 Till soon, I hope. Till soon. And for everybody listening, until next time. Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is five bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? And would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun before the weekend and

Starting point is 02:07:39 five bullet Friday is a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend.

Starting point is 02:08:10 So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to fourhourworkweek.com. That's fourhourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep. Last year, I committed to making sleep a top priority, trying to fix onset insomnia or

Starting point is 02:08:33 continuing to fix that. Depth of sleep, quality of sleep, I tracked a lot, I tested a lot, and I revisited really everything from daily routine to the surfaces I slept on, playing with the chili pad, whatever. And when I moved to Austin, I got all new beds, including mattresses from Helix. Working with the world's leading sleep experts, certainly some of them, Helix Sleep developed mattresses personalized to your preferences and sleep style to make sure that you can have the best sleep possible without costing thousands upon thousands of dollars. Helix Sleep has recently added a new layer to customized sleep with the Helix Pillow. The all-new pillows are fully adjustable, so you can achieve perfect comfort regardless of

Starting point is 02:09:14 a sleep position or body type, or if you're a shifty type like me, I move around quite a bit when I sleep. Just take their simple two to three minute sleep quiz to get started, and that will help ensure that they can build a mattress or pillow that you will love. The mattress, whatever this bespoke mattress is that you arrive at, will get to you within a week. And the shipping is completely free. You can try the mattress for 100 nights. And if you're not completely happy, they'll pick it up and offer a full refund.

Starting point is 02:09:40 I tested that refund policy because I test all of these sponsors and kick the tires a lot. We tested it and they came through on making sure that we got ultimately the right mattress for my body type. To personalize your sleep experience, visit helixsleep.com forward slash Tim and you'll receive up to $125 off your mattress order. That's helixsleep, H-E-L-I-X sleep.com forward slash Tim for up to $125 off your order. This episode is brought to you by Teeter. I am so thrilled to have connected with these guys because I've used Teeter products for many, many years. I've traveled around the country and the world with Teeter products, and I'm sitting about 15 feet in my home from one of their inversion tables. And we're going to talk more about all of that. One of my rituals is hanging. And I should say, not really that it's a maintenance and performance program. I hang not

Starting point is 02:10:36 just in the morning, potentially, but particularly after a day of bearing weight, whether that includes weight training in Jersey, Greg Rick, world record holder, insists on this type of inversion therapy after training, or just wearing a heavy backpack around, a few minutes goes a long way towards better sleep in my case, less back pain, which uses gravity and your own body weight to decompress the spine and relieve pressure on the discs and surrounding nerves, seems to help with a whole slew of conditions. And just as a general maintenance program, it's one of my favorite things to do. So what to say about that? Teeter. Why Teeter? Teeter is the best known name in inversion table. Since 1981, more than 3 million people have put their trust in Teeter. Teeter is also the only inversion table brand that has been both safety certified by under-registered laboratories, that's UL, for you people in that industry who will recognize it,

Starting point is 02:11:35 and registered with the FDA as a Class 1 medical device. And they're giving a very special offer just to you guys, my listeners. For a limited time, you can get the Teeter Inversion Table with bonus accessories, which I have a bunch of, again, in the room next to me, and a free pair of Gravity Boots so that you can invert at home or take the boots with you to the gym. So these Gravity Boots, I have three separate pairs of Gravity Boots bought with my own monies in three different cities that I've had for a very, very long time because I don't want to travel with them necessarily. They look kind of like ski boots,

Starting point is 02:12:08 but without the foot portion and they hook you upside down. So you can take them really anywhere you want to go. To get this deal, which is a savings of over $148, it's very specific, so maybe it's $149, you have to go to teeter.com forward slash Tim. That's teeter.com forward slash Tim. T-E-E-T-E-R. You also get free shipping, a 60-day money-back guarantee, and free returns. So why not try it out? Remember, you can only get the Teeter inversion table with bonus accessories and a free pair of gravity boots by going to teeter.com forward slash Tim. So if you're thinking to yourself, what the hell is this thing he's talking about? I can't even envision it in my head. Well, take a look at the photos. Go to teeter.com forward slash Tim.

Pet Camera - EBO Air 2

The Tim Ferriss Show - #313: Michael Pollan — Exploring The New Science of Psychedelics

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Pet Camera - EBO Air 2

The Tim Ferriss Show - #313: Michael Pollan — Exploring The New Science of Psychedelics

There aren't comments yet for this episode. Click on any sentence in the transcript to leave a comment.