The Tim Ferriss Show - #365: Michael Pollan — Exploring the Frontiers of Psychedelics

Starting point is 00:00:00 At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? Now would have seemed the perfect time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. This episode of the Tim Ferriss Show is brought to you by Athletic Greens. I get asked all the time, if I could only take one supplement, what would it be? The answer is inevitably Athletic

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Starting point is 00:01:33 This episode of the Tim Ferriss Show is brought to you by 99designs. 99designs is the global creative platform that makes it easy for creators and clients to work together. From logos to apps and packaging to book covers, just about anything can be found on 99designs, which is a go-to creative resource for any budget that I've used for many, many years now. 99design now offers, guess what, custom video, which is very exciting. They will match you with the right video professional to help you explain your product, spotlight a a service and bring your brand to life and like i mentioned i've used 99 designs for all sorts of things i've used them for book covers some of the mock-ups for the four-hour body

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Starting point is 00:02:54 of what I've done and the stories behind them at 99designs.com forward slash Tim, the number 99designs.com forward slash Tim. 99designs will match you with the right professional for your project from their curated community of talented creatives and stay with you every step of the way so you love the outcome. So check it out. Head to 99designs.com forward slash Tim to learn more and get started on your project today. Well, hello boys and girls. This is Tim Ferr, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where it is my job each episode to deconstruct a world-class performer or someone who knows a hell of a lot about their chosen subject. And we talk about, most often, habits,

Starting point is 00:03:41 routines, and so on. This episode's going to be a little bit different and features one of my favorite writers, Michael Pollan. But before we get to that, and this episode was recorded live at the South by Southwest Festival in Austin, Texas, I want to mention a big announcement. And it relates to the most compelling documentary I've seen in the last year. It's called Trip of Compassion. I first saw Trip of Compassion, which you can learn more about at tim.blog forward slash trip. I'll mention that again. But I first watched Trip of Compassion about six months ago when I was sent a link to a private video. This documentary affected me so deeply and immediately that I flew overseas to

Starting point is 00:04:21 meet the filmmakers and offered to help them launch the film digitally worldwide, which I did about a week ago. And you can see it at Tim.blog forward slash trip. Everything I'm doing for this film is 100% pro bono and all proceeds go to the filmmakers. So why would I do that? I'll give you a hint and it'll come in the form of a quote from an actual patient who's in the film. Here it is. Quote, I felt like I went through 15 years of psychological therapy in one night, end quote. Trip of Compassion documents one very unusual approach to healing trauma that might astonish you. And if you watch this movie, just watch the trailer for a few minutes,

Starting point is 00:05:01 and you'll believe me. An innovative treatment involving the psychoactive drug MDMA, which is most commonly known as or thought of as ecstasy. And as you will see firsthand in this footage, if the therapy is well designed, true rebirth, and I don't use that lightly, and transformation can happen in a matter of weeks, not years, not decades. So if you've ever felt held back, defective in some way, or felt that you're not living up to your full potential, this film is an incredible dose of hope. I highly, highly recommend watching it and sharing it if you end up believing in it, because I do think it's extremely important. And it features real footage of patient sessions,

Starting point is 00:05:43 which is very, very hard to do in the US. So this is a unique, one of a kind film. Take a look at the trailer at the very least, go to tim.blog forward slash trip to take a short look at Trip of Compassion. I promise you, you will not be disappointed. Just fasten your seatbelt beforehand because it is fucking intense. All right, there you have it. Without further ado, here we go with Michael Pollan. Thank you all for coming. Good afternoon. And we're going to settle in for a long spring nap, hopefully not a nap. We have 90 minutes. If you have to leave early, that's totally fine. Just try to make sure that the doors in the back are closed so we don't have

Starting point is 00:06:27 too much noise. I am thrilled to be here on stage with Michael Pollan. Michael, the cross-pollinator, as a friend of mine referenced him as being, at Michael Pollan on Twitter, if you want to say hello, is the author of seven books prior to the one we'll be discussing quite a bit, including Cooked, Food Rules in Defense of Food, The Omnivore's Dilemma, one of my favorites, and The Botany of Desire, all of which were New York Times bestsellers. So he's a career underachiever. A longtime contributor to the New York Times Magazine, he also teaches writing at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley,

Starting point is 00:07:00 where he is the John S. and James L. Knight Professor of Science Journalism. Classes I've always personally wanted to take. Alas, I have to stick to my tropes. In 2010, Time Magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world, and his newest book, which I have personally gifted to hundreds of people at this point, is How to Change Your Mind, subtitled, What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. Michael, thank you for being here. Thank you, Tim. Great pleasure to be here with you. Thank you. This is not the first time we've had an opportunity to speak.

Starting point is 00:07:42 Met quite some time ago, more than a handful of years ago, and I thought that in this session we could cover some basics, some fundamentals of the subject matter of the new book, and then stretch outside of the confines of the book and talk about some recent developments and learnings since the publication. So let's begin with defining a term, psychedelics. What are psychedelics? Well, psychedelic is a term coined, it sounds like a 60s term, but it's actually a 50s term. It was coined in 57 by an English psychiatrist named Humphrey Osmond, who was in a dialogue with Aldous Huxley, who wrote a very famous book about what were not then known as psychedelics called The Doors of Perception, where he recorded

Starting point is 00:08:31 his own mescaline trip. And he worked very closely with Humphrey Osmond trying to understand these new substances, because they just kind of were sprung on the West in the 50s, and no one really understood them. And they went through this process of conceptualizing these strange molecules. And at first they called them psychotomimetics because it appeared to imitate psychosis. And the thinking at the very beginning, this is the early 50s, was that these chemicals were a very good way

Starting point is 00:09:00 to help the therapist understand the mind of the madman, the schizophrenic, and allowed you to put yourself in his shoes or her shoes. And it sure looked like psychosis, right? I mean, people were seeing things that weren't there and hearing things that weren't there, and they were feeling their personalities dissolve. But then the shrinks themselves started trying the drugs, which was very common then. It was actually considered the responsible thing to do if you did drug research, is try

Starting point is 00:09:29 it on yourself first. Now it's considered unethical. And they said, you know, this feels much better than psychosis. And they were having these often ecstatic experiences. So they had this discussion, like, well, we need a better name. And in this debate, actually, it was Osman who came up with the better word, which is essentially, it combines the Greek word for mind, psyche, and delik, delos, is manifesting.

Starting point is 00:10:04 So it means mind manifesting it's vague in a way but it's suggesting that these that these drugs bring the mind into kind of an observable space and that name has kind of stuck although there have been efforts to uh rebrand them post 60s as entheogens uh which means the god within, but that seemed a little religious to some people. So I decided I liked the word psychedelic, and I would try in my book to rescue it from all the incrustation of 60s, Dayglo, you know, Acid Rock, all that stuff, and see if we could reclaim it, because it means the right thing. Why are so many people saying and writing that there is a renaissance in this field?

Starting point is 00:10:52 Because a renaissance, rebirth, implies that there was a death somewhere along the line. Or a dark age. Or a dark age. Yeah. So give us some context as to why there is a renaissance and why it was necessary. Well, like a lot of people, I sort of assumed that psychedelics were a product of the 60s. That's when you first heard about them. That's when the public first heard about them in a serious way.

Starting point is 00:11:20 But in fact, there had been 15 years of very promising research into these compounds. That was being done in Europe, in America, at five or six different centers. And they were using the drugs for various indications, such as addiction, depression, to relieve the anxiety of people who are dying of cancer. All the things they're being used for now, in fact. And they were getting some very good results. It's true that the standards for scientific drug research then were very different. The double-blind, placebo-controlled trial

Starting point is 00:11:56 didn't exist till 1962, really. So they may not be to our standards, but it was a very promising period of research. And then in the 60s, when the drugs were embraced by the counterculture, I mean, the way the narrative is usually told, they escaped the laboratory. But actually, they were thrown over the wall of the laboratory by people like Timothy Leary and others. And as the counterculture basically adopted these drugs uh became very difficult for the researchers to continue studying them especially when there was a turn against them

Starting point is 00:12:33 in 1965 approximately and you have this moral panic about psychedelics um that you know they're leading to bad trips that are landing people in psych wards, which did sometimes happen, that they were, and then there was a lot of medical risk. There was a big study came out saying they scrambled your chromosomes. It was retracted within weeks as faulty science, but nevertheless, that stuck. There were stories about people staring at the sun until they went blind. Turned out to have been complete urban legend made up by the commissioner of the blind for the state of Washington who was hoping to discourage psychedelic use. He lost his job. And the media, which had been very pro-psychedelic all through the 50s, Time Life, Henry Luce's empire, ran article after article about how promising these substances

Starting point is 00:13:28 were. And in fact, Henry Luce himself and his wife, Claire Booth Luce, had been treated with LSD in LA, where there was a lot of that work going on. But the media, as it's wont to do, I mean, turned on a dime. And they decided to start demonizing these drugs And it was partly because the media often follows the government and the government was turning against them Nixon President Nixon regarded LSD as one of the reasons that boys were not willing to go fight his war in Vietnam And he may have been right The he he really saw I mean it was unprecedented, right? go fight his war in Vietnam, and he may have been right.

Starting point is 00:14:10 It was unprecedented. In general, for most of history, if you send an 18-year-old male to die in a war, they just go, they don't ask any questions. That's the history of warfare. Suddenly, they were like, no, I don't think this is such a good idea. Is this a just war? Is this something I want to fight for? And LSD, which, you know, which encourages people to question all sorts of frameworks in their life, may have contributed to that. Certainly

Starting point is 00:14:38 President Nixon thought so, and he started the drug war, trying to basically remove the chemical infrastructure of the counterculture. And the drugs were also contributing. Look, a lot of very positive things happened around psychedelics in the 60s, and it's very easy to fall into the trap of everything that happened was really bad. Lots of very valuable experiences were had.

Starting point is 00:15:02 Great art and music was made, which owes to psychedelics. But it was a very threatening drug. And the reason I think it was was that it really did contribute to a generation gap. We had this unprecedented situation where the young had to write a passage that the old didn't know anything about. That's very freaky. Usually in culture, rites of passage, whether you're talking about a bar mitzvah or a vision

Starting point is 00:15:33 quest in Native American tradition, is an ordeal organized by the elders to bring the young into the adult community. Here, the young were organizing their own searing rite of passage, and it plopped them down in a country of the mind that adults couldn't recognize. And that was very threatening, too. So with this moral panic about psychedelics, the research gradually grinds to a halt. And by the early 70s, there's only one place in America

Starting point is 00:16:04 where anything is happening, and that's Spring Grove in Maryland. But the researchers just kind of backed off, the funding dried up, and the drugs as a serious research project disappeared. And this is unprecedented, right? I mean, to have a line of productive scientific inquiry stopped. The history of science doesn't have another example except maybe Galileo. And if we look at the conditions for which some of these compounds were promising then,

Starting point is 00:16:39 perhaps were promising for hundreds or thousands of years ago, since many of these have been consumed by, well, actually nearly every culture, some psychoactive or psychedelic has been consumed ritualistically. And then we flash forward to current day, and you have places like Johns Hopkins, you have NYU, certainly, and many others who are doing research. What are these compounds good for? What are psychedelics, where do they seem to show promise? You know, most of the researchers in this renaissance, and it's good you mentioned Johns Hopkins because they really drove a lot of this research.

Starting point is 00:17:18 A very good and prominent researcher named Roland Griffith, who we both know, who had been studying drug abuse for years and years, got very interested in psychedelics and drove that agenda there. And it's interesting, he got interested in it because he had had his own mystical experience in his meditation practice that got him very curious about consciousness. And so he began with a study that had no medical benefit or use at all, which is, could you use psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, to occasion a mystical experience? And there's a definition of that that William James helped develop,

Starting point is 00:18:01 that would have enduring value for somebody's life. And he proved that in two-thirds of cases, you could do that. And then he went about, and other people too, well, okay, how might that experience benefit people who are struggling with mental illness? The first and most beautiful study they did there was with people who had cancer diagnoses. And that's really what got me interested. And that was really the germ of the book was interviewing people with terminal diagnoses who were paralyzed by fear and anxiety at the prospect of their death or their recurrence in some cases. And they had these transformative experiences that in many cases completely removed their fear. It's the

Starting point is 00:18:46 most astonishing thing. So that was one important indication, picking up again on work that had been done in the 60s. And then there were, the scores that were measured in that test included anxiety and depression. So there was a signal there that there's some value in depression. So right now there's a lot of work going on and there will be some very large trials trying psilocybin for depression, both major depression and treatment resistant depression. Addiction, it's shown a lot of benefit. In the 50s and 60s, it was used to treat alcoholics. Appears to have about a 50% success rate, according to the meta-analyses. It's being used with striking success in a small study of smokers at Johns Hopkins and a study of alcoholics at NYU. It has, I think, great potential for eating disorders,

Starting point is 00:19:40 and I think they're going to try that at Johns Hopkins. Let's see, you know, any kind of behavior change. I think one of the things these drugs do is make it possible to break out of loops, repetitive loops and destructive narratives about yourself. You know, I can't get through the day without a cigarette. I'm unworthy of love. These stories we tell ourselves, we know where we tell those stories in the brain,

Starting point is 00:20:08 and that is part of the brain that the drugs seem to quiet. And it gives you a chance, basically, to get out of whatever destructive grooves of thought you're in. So that suggests that all kinds of behavior change. Obsessive compulsive disorder, which has been trialed in a small pilot study. Eating disorders, as I suggested. Gambling, conceivably.

Starting point is 00:20:32 You know, all the different forms of addiction. Telephone addiction, you know. Which we all, those are studies we can all qualify for. So, there's a range. And I think that we don't know yet. It's very important to point out that, yes, we've had pilot studies, phase two studies of anxiety and depression in the dying, but we haven't had a big study of depression yet, and we'll have to wait and see, but there's certainly reason to be hopeful, and for that reason, there is a lot

Starting point is 00:21:05 of excitement in the mental health community about the potential of having a new tool. And with the exception of ketamine, which was just approved last week, there has not been a new tool in the treatment of depression since the antidepressants back in the late 80s, early 90s. And they don't work very well for many, many people. And they don't work long term. And people don't like being on them. And they're addictive. So the idea that you could have a treatment that really involves one or two big experiences. And these are, I mean, we should probably define, you know, they're're guided psychedelic experience nobody's writing you a prescription and you're

Starting point is 00:21:47 not going home with a pill of psilocybin but you're with a guide the whole time a trained therapist who prepares you very carefully for what's going to happen creates a very safe environment sits with you the whole time and in these studies it's a male and a female usually usually a dyad. And then helps you integrate the experience, make sense of it after. So this is not a recreational psychedelic experience. And you're wearing eye shades, too, and listening to music on headphones. So you're encouraged to really go inside rather than dealing with all the fireworks, sensory fireworks going on. So, you know, there's great reason for hope,

Starting point is 00:22:32 but it is still that. We haven't proven this. How do scientists who are engaged in researching these compounds, or people from the underground, and certainly you've spent time with some highly experienced facilitators, let's call them, on the underground. You've done thousands of administered sessions. How do the people you respect explain how these compounds have the duration of effect that they do?

Starting point is 00:23:00 In other words, you have these people, the patients, going through, let's just call it a four to eight hour experience. They have preparatory sessions, which are sober. They have integration sessions, which are sober. Maybe some type of psychotherapy. They have two or three of these sessions, and in some instances you see months or years of durability of effect as it relates to, say, addiction or compulsive behaviors, and you alluded to this, but which may appear to perhaps be variations of the same dysfunction, right, which is partially why this default mode network being not necessarily deactivated,

Starting point is 00:23:38 but kind of down-regulated is very interesting. How do they explain the duration of effect? Because clearly the half-life of these compounds... Yeah, they're out of your brain in six or eight hours. And so it's not a purely psychopharmacological effect. It really is the experience you're having. You're administering a certain kind of experience. And it's very powerful. It's kind of like a reverse trauma in a way, right?

Starting point is 00:24:04 It's a big event in your life. And many of the people who undergo this treatment say that this is one of the two or three biggest experiences of their lives that they compare to the birth of a child or the death of a parent, which is astonishing that a pill could have such a profound effect. So you really have to look at the phenomenology of the experience, which when it works best is what they call a mystical type experience. I think what's central to that though is an experience of ego dissolution, of complete depersonalization. It is your ego in a way that writes and enforces those destructive narratives very often. And if you can shut it off for a period of time and realize that there's another

Starting point is 00:24:53 ground on which you can stand, that you're not identical to your ego, that you can get some perspective on it, that I think is very positive. The ego builds walls, right? It isolates us from other people. It isolates us from nature. It's defensive by definition. And when you bring down those walls in the psyche, what happens? Well, you merge.

Starting point is 00:25:18 You merge with something else. There's less of a distinction between you and the other, whether that other or other people in your life or the natural world or the universe. And so these lines of, as the doors of perception open, as Huxley said, these lines of connection, there's this incredible flow. And it sounds banal, but very often what flows through those connections is love, powerful feelings of love and reconnection. I say this based on all the interviews I've done and the experiences I've had myself, but a lot of the problem with depression and addiction is disconnection, right? I mean, addicts get to the point where their relationship to that bottle

Starting point is 00:25:59 is more important than their relationship to their children, to their spouse. It's an astonishing thing. And the drugs appear to help people reconnect. So yeah, you're only having this temporary experience, but it has this remarkable authority. And that's one of the most curious things about it. William James called it the noetic quality of a mystical experience. And that is the belief that whatever insight you've had, whatever epiphany you've had, is not a subjective opinion or idea. It's a revealed truth. It's actual knowledge. And so I talked to these smokers or ex-smokers now, and I would say, so

Starting point is 00:26:47 how did this experience allowed you to stop smoking? Just this one experience is a lifelong habit you've had. I remember this one woman, she was a Irish woman, she's about 60. And she said, well, I had this incredible experience and I sprouted wings and I flew all through European history and I witnessed all these great scenes in European history. And I saw, I died three times and I saw my ashes, my smoke from my body rise on the Ganges. And I realized, God, there's so much to do and see in the world that killing yourself with cigarettes is really stupid. Now, probably she had thought that before, and people had probably told her that smoking was stupid, but she believed it in a way she had never believed it before. And it has something to do with, I think, the way psychedelics,

Starting point is 00:27:38 this is at high dose, dissolve the subject-object duality. Everything's objective. Or it means the same thing. Everything's subjective. You don't have this idea, well, that's just an idea in my head and that's not out in the world. It's all of a piece. So it's a real reset of the mind, which is very hard for conventional therapists

Starting point is 00:28:03 and psychiatrists to grok. I mean, it's a weird idea that a single experience could have that effect. But if you think that a single trauma can put your mind on a new path, perhaps permanently unless it's treated, you know, whether it's a sexual abuse or a bomb going off or a crime being committed. I mean, the mind has certain moments where right-angled turns happen, and perhaps it can happen in a positive way as well as a negative way. Yeah, absolutely. That's worth a clap. Michael, you and I have spoken both in conversation that's being recorded, but also over meals and such about the activity on the scientific front, a lot of the developments that you're

Starting point is 00:28:56 seeing, and you've also had a tremendous influx of feedback, maybe pushback, since the book came out and I want to explore all of that with a handful of questions but let's start with getting granular on psychedelic and perhaps naming a few names so within within the umbrella of psychedelics mean you have different chemical classes which we don't necessarily have to get into but you know the tryptamines phenethylamines but if you if you were to look at, some of the usual suspects, so you have LSD, you have psilocybin, as you mentioned, we have DMT, Ibogaine, and then DMT, often confused,

Starting point is 00:29:37 we have NNDMT or DMT, then 5-MeO-DMT, Ibogaine. You mentioned ketamine earlier, which is, I think it's one of the 10 most essential medicines, according to the World Health Organization, as an anesthetic. But at sufficient enough doses, has a psychedelic effect. Which of these compounds have most captured your curiosity and why? Well, it doesn't have to be limited to that list. Yeah. We didn't really get into mescaline containing plants or the plant itself. Yeah. You know, I focused a lot on LSD because of its importance to the social history of psychedelics. And it's one of the most powerful, long-lasting

Starting point is 00:30:18 psychedelics, but it's not being used in research in this country, mostly for practical and political reasons. It's very controversial. Everyone's heard of it. So you're more likely to get some congressman standing up and saying, we're funding LSD research. And what a scandal that is. Whereas that same congressman probably doesn't know what psilocybin is. Hard to pronounce, even.

Starting point is 00:30:42 Exactly. Hard to spell. The Brits and the Americans can't even agree on it. It's true. So, and then there's the practical benefit that psilocybin has a shorter half-life. And the importance of that is that, you know, you can fit it into a therapist's workday, right? Instead of a 12-hour trip, paying overtime, you know, I mean, it's a long trip. Psilocybin is like four to six hours. So you can fit it in. I mean, psychedelic therapy is going to be very hard to fit into psychotherapy as we practice it, but it would be much harder if you're talking about

Starting point is 00:31:18 12-hour trips. But you could get the same effects probably on LSD. It has much more association, though. You'd have to deal with every, you know, since set and setting are so important with all psychedelics, people bring a lot of baggage to LSD. I mean, that was the one I was most frightened of, you know, personally, because of everything I'd heard. There is very little, the research on DMT is essentially ayahuasca research.

Starting point is 00:31:44 DMT is the psychedelic in ayahuasca. And there is some work being done, especially in Brazil, to try ayahuasca as a treatment for depression. It's a tricky one, though, because there are too many variables. It's two plants. Hard to standardize. It's like an old-fashioned. And I asked a...

Starting point is 00:32:00 Yeah, exactly. It's like an old-fashioned. I asked a researcher in Brazil. Not in its effects, just to be clear. I asked this researcher who was doing a very interesting study with the urban poor in Sao Paulo and giving them ayahuasca. And I said, how much are you giving them? And he said, well, I have no idea.

Starting point is 00:32:24 No, he said, I just asked the shaman how much to give them each. Now, I don't think you can get published in JAMA with a study that's like a shamanic dose of ayahuasca. So that's hard to study, but worth studying, I think. I mean, everything about psychedelic research is a square peg in the round hole of both reductive science

Starting point is 00:32:47 and mental health care as we practice it. DMT in the chemical form is a very fast-acting and short-lived psychedelic, which some people think might have some value. In Earth time. In Earth time, that's right. It's an eternity by other scales or another dimension. So to me it looks like psilocybin has the best practical prospects and people don't

Starting point is 00:33:17 bring a lot of associations to it. It's not as controversial. And by practical you mean within the scientific context? Yes. Research context. Yeah, exactly. And frankly, access to it. I mean, it's not hard to get access to. People can grow it themselves if they want.

Starting point is 00:33:33 So yeah, I think it offers a lot of benefits. Speaking personally, because at least as I recall it, you did not set out to have a quarter or a third of your book comprised of personal experiences. But maybe it wasn't that high a percentage, but it's a decent chunk. Were there any particular experiences that have seemed to have a lasting effect on you personally? Yes. I had a series of experiences for the book which I knew when I decided to write this book I had to do that for various reasons that that to describe the experience without having had it and

Starting point is 00:34:12 just relying on interviews was not satisfying I also this is what I do as a writer I mean I you know when I wrote about the cattle industry I bought a cow and so this was my equivalent um I think my readers expect some first person don't you? buying the psychedelic cow, I can see the headline now but I didn't expect to go quite as deep as I went so I had an experience

Starting point is 00:34:38 on LSD I think that's a common statement I just had one drink. It was ayahuasca, yeah. A couple experiences on, that's right. A couple experiences on ayahuasca, a couple on psilocybin, and one on 5-MeO-DMT,

Starting point is 00:34:56 which was not a happy experience. It was a terrifying experience that I wouldn't wish on anyone. And that is not DMT. It's a different chemical that it is the smoked venom of the Sonoran desert toad. How about a species that figures that out, huh? A hand for humanity. How did they figure that out? Yeah. Also figured out pretty recently, like in the last 50 years. That's right. It's not that new. This is not an ancient indigenous tradition. No.

Starting point is 00:35:27 Squeezing toads onto like plexiglass to scrape off this. And Dr. Andrew Weil was involved in that discovery. So yeah, that was not, I mean, we can talk about that more later, but that was my introduction to a really bad trip. And I've been told since, in fact, in an event we were at together, that either I took way too much or not nearly enough. But what do you do with that information? I don't plan any further experiments. But you asked about lasting. Yeah, and if you're willing to share, what effect did those experiences have with psilocybin and ayahuasca? So I had a high-dose psilocybin experience guided with someone that I really trusted who created a very comfortable environment.

Starting point is 00:36:17 I mean, safety is so important if you're going to allow your ego to get blasted to smithereens. You really have to feel safe. That's a dangerous thing to do psychologically. And she created an environment where that could happen, and to my amazement, did happen. So I mean, I could recount it quickly. It was a trip that didn't begin very well. Her taste in music...

Starting point is 00:36:43 LAUGHTER..left a lot to be desired. She put on this new age music that I learned later was by an artist who I hope is not in the room named Thierry David. And I looked up later, he was thrice nominated for best chill slash groove album. Only nominated. But it sounded like electronic music. And one of the most amazing things about psychedelics is synesthesia. The fact that one sense gets crosswired with another. So that with music, especially if you have eye shades on, you are projecting a concrete version. The music is generating landscape, place, emotion. It's just the most amazing thing. And every note was creating this black and white computer generated landscape that

Starting point is 00:37:41 was, I'm not into video games. It's not where I wanted to be. And it went on and on and on. I subsequently learned why that happened. It turned out it wasn't electronic music, but my ear heard it that way. And that was that I had brought a computer into the treatment room to do a test, an experiment on myself. There's a famous test called the rotating mask or the mask illusion. You've probably seen it maybe, but it's a mask, one of those dramatic masks, and it's hollow on one side and convex on the other, and it's on a turntable, and it turns, and as the convex part gives way to the back, to the concave part, it pops out and becomes convex again. Your mind refuses to see a face as hollowed out because it never has before. This is predictive coding. This is the predictive brain, which is to say we don't just take in information. We're actually having a controlled

Starting point is 00:38:38 hallucination most of the time. We're projecting what we expect to see and then we're letting reality correct it. So this is a classic case of the brain providing a fictional version of what it's seeing, but that's pretty adaptive because, hey, most faces are not hollow. Almost all faces are not hollow. But I had read that schizophrenics, the illusion doesn't work on them. I mean, it doesn't pop out. They see more truthfully. And people on high-dose psychedelics, also, it doesn't pop out. So the predictive coding, that handshake between the model in your head and the sense information coming up from your senses breaks down. And I thought, wow, that's really cool. I'm going to test this on myself. So I brought that imagery into the room and it completely infected the whole experience. Now, just very quickly, the test, when I did it, I did it once, didn't work, did it twice, didn't work. Third time when I was at the highest, the peaking of my dose, I opened it up,

Starting point is 00:39:40 I pressed the button and the thing started rotating and then it just melted. I mean, it just, so it was a bust. I mentioned all this to say that it was not entirely a happy trip for this part. I really felt trapped. At some point I said to, I took off my eye shades because I had to reconnect with reality. I was feeling claustrophobic and it was this amazing, you know, this woman's loft was just like jeweled with light. It was just incredible. And I had to pee. So she kind of walked me to the bathroom. I was a little, you know, wobbly in the legs and I get to the bathroom and I really am, I'm not going to look at the mirror because I just, I don't know what I'm going to see. And I mentioned this to an audience in England

Starting point is 00:40:27 and someone says, ah, yes, trip face. To be avoided. Hold this trick in the book. I peed. I produced this spectacular crop of diamonds. Very proud of that. I make my way back to the woman I call Mary in the book, that's obviously not her real name. And she asked me if I'd like a booster dose. And I had

Starting point is 00:40:53 originally said I was going to go up to a certain dose. I was trying to basically mimic the Johns Hopkins dose using real mushrooms. They use synthetic psilocybin. And she squatted next to me. And Mary is very Nordic looking. She's got long blonde hair, parted in the middle, high cheekbones. And I looked at her and she had been transformed into a native Mexican, indigenous, a Mazatec Indian. And I knew exactly who it was. It was Maria Sabina, who's this legendary character who gave the first Westerner a psilocybin trip in 1956. And so Mary's hair had turned black. She had leathery brown skin and a wrinkled brown hand as she handed me this mushroom.

Starting point is 00:41:39 I didn't know whether I should tell her what had happened to her. I did later, and she was so proud, because it's one of her heroes. I go back under, and I'm still seeing Video Game World, and I ask Mary to change the music. We finally agree. She puts on some Bach, this beautiful piece of music called Unaccompanied Cello Suite in D minor. It's the saddest piece of music in the repertoire. It's amazing, amazingly sad. And I look out, and I see myself burst into a cloud of little post-its like confetti.

Starting point is 00:42:19 And that's me, and I'm gone. I'm just completely gone, yet I'm perceiving it. And I didn't understand this new perspective that's me. And I'm gone. I'm just completely gone. Yet, I'm perceiving it. And I didn't understand this new perspective that opened up. I mean, I'm using the first person, but it wasn't exactly me. I'm just kind of objectively watching myself. And then I looked out again, and I've been transformed into a coat of paint on the landscape or butter. I've just spread in this very thin layer. And it was fine. I wasn't upset. This other perspective was so calm and reconciled to what had happened. And it was the most amazing, one of the most amazing experiences of my life. And so I no longer had a self. And what then happened was I merged with

Starting point is 00:43:07 this piece of music. I became one with this. It was Yo-Yo Ma. And I could almost feel the horse hair of the bow going over my skin. And then I felt like there was no space between me and this music. I was it. And it was an astonishing experience. It wasn't, it was ecstatic in the literal sense of I wasn't in my usual body, but it wasn't happy. It was sad. It was incredibly sad. And it was all about death. But I was completely reconciled to it. And it was that moment that I understood what happened with the cancer patients, I think, that they had attained this consciousness, this perspective where the loss of their bodies, the loss of their self was the most natural thing in the world. It was a

Starting point is 00:43:59 rehearsal of death, basically. And the calmness of this perspective basically told me that there was another ground on which to stand, that I'm not identical to my ego, that I can let my ego go and not be obliterated. And most of us, I think, assume we're identical to our ego, right? That chattering voice in our head that's being self-critical or keeping your distance from things, protecting you. And we think that when that voice goes quiet, we're dead. But in fact, that's not true. The ego is one character in this drama inside your head. And that was valuable. And I went back the next day for my integration session. And I said to Mary what I told her what had happened and she said isn't that worth the price of admission and I said yeah but my ego is back in uniform back on patrol

Starting point is 00:44:53 you know I'm back to baseline because going back to your point about enduring changes and she said well you've had a taste of that perspective and you can cultivate it. And I asked her how, and she said through meditation. And there's a very organic passage from psychedelics to meditation. You know, most of the American Buddhists began with psychedelics. And psychedelics are not a practice, right? I mean, you can't do it every day. It's a very bad idea. And it probably wouldn't work. But meditation is a practice. And you can bring, you can achieve some semblance of that ego-free consciousness through meditation. And indeed, I became a much better meditator after this experience. I sort of had a sense of the space I wanted to get to. I know we're not supposed to strive in our meditation, but we do. So that had an enduring

Starting point is 00:45:48 effect. It also, I think for me, changed my understanding of what is spirituality. And I was really not a spiritual person when I started this. I had described myself as spiritually retarded, and I think that is true. And part of that was because I'm very much a materialist in my philosophical outlook, that nature is all that there is, and everything can be explained as a result of the laws of nature and energy. But it turns out, so I thought to believe, to be a spiritual person was to believe in the supernatural.

Starting point is 00:46:32 And I was allergic to that. I didn't believe in the supernatural. But this experience, and especially the kind of merging that went on, made me realize that that's not the right duality. The opposite of spiritual is not material. The opposite of spiritual is egotistical. It is our ego that keeps us from the profound connections, whether with your loved ones, with humanity, with nature, with a piece of music. That's the wall. And if you can bring down that wall, that to me is what spiritual experience is.

Starting point is 00:47:11 So that, and that was a big takeaway. For me that was the biggest takeaway of the book. So as you recount this story that we just heard, if say a talk therapist were to sit down and try to guide you through that. Ten years minimum. Ten years minimum, and it would also be very off script for many therapists to do so.

Starting point is 00:47:35 Have you received much resistance after the book has come out? And I should also say that if you were to read the trip reports or the summaries of subjects who go through this type of experience for smoking cessation and so on, they're going to have quite an interesting movie with parts that are sort of coherently related to the addiction perhaps, but a lot that aren't. No, that's right.

Starting point is 00:48:02 Nonetheless, going in with that intention,. No, that's right. Nonetheless, going in with that intention and sure there's some selection bias can have some really remarkable outcomes. What type of resistance, if any, have you run into? Like which groups have been least receptive and which have been most receptive? Well, you know, in general, I've had a lot less pushback than I expected from all quarters. I've been pleasantly surprised. I mean, I was worried about legal pushback. I'm talking about felonies.

Starting point is 00:48:34 And I was worried that somebody might come after the guides that I work with and that it would be ridiculed by the mental health establishment. But it wasn't, actually. There's a remarkable receptivity, as I said earlier, born of desperation, basically. Mental health care is really broken in this country, in the world. If you compare mental health care to any other branch of medicine, cardiology, oncology, infectious disease, they've all made huge strides in the last 50 years.

Starting point is 00:49:06 They've reduced suffering, they've prolonged life. Can you say that about mental health care? No. I mean, depression is getting worse, numbers, suicide is getting worse, addiction is getting much worse. And, you know, mental health professionals are really at a loss. So on the one side, you see openness to it. And I'm hearing, I get invited to speak at grand rounds in hospitals and psychiatry departments. I didn't expect that to happen or address the American Psychological Association. Didn't expect that to happen. But there are kind of old line psychiatrists who have trouble processing the idea that psychological experience, not simply a neurochemical effect, can be therapeutic. There is a lot of reductive science. And they will tell you, no, no, no, depression, it's a neurochemical process.

Starting point is 00:50:02 It can only be addressed at that level. And in the same way, you know, psychiatry used to be about psychoanalysis, and the criticism was that it was brainless, right? It didn't take account of the brain as a physical organ. Well, now it's mindless. Psychiatry is completely mindless, and there's not a lot of room for talking about experience and psychological experience. So I have heard from people who just cannot figure out why this would help anyone with depression in particular. Now, it may not work on all types of depression. It's true.

Starting point is 00:50:37 Some may be more neurochemical than others. And the depression of someone with cancer is a special case, right? I mean, that's an event in their life that has given them very good reason to be depressed. They may not be lifelong depressives. So those are all active questions. And then there are the psychiatrists, some of whom have written to me or spoken about what I've said, what I just told you about. And many psychiatrists, if they heard the story I just told you about that trip, would say that I had had a psychotic episode, right? I had depersonalization. I was seeing

Starting point is 00:51:13 things that weren't there. I was looking at this blonde woman and she turned into an Indian. I was crazy, you know? I mean, and by their diagnostic criteria, I guess I was. So I just think that's a limit of that framework. But I think it'll change. I definitely think it'll change. But in general, I think that's been the exception. I'm really amazed at how many medical schools and departments, that this is very much, if you go to any psychiatry department

Starting point is 00:51:43 around the country right now, they're talking about psychedelics. Could we study this? How could this work? How can we interpret, how can we use our training to interpret this event? It is true what you said earlier, though, about, well, what about in talk therapy? Could I get to this point? And I would say probably. I mean, if I had the patience for it and the money for it. But it would take me at least 10 years to get that kind of perspective on my ego, which is what you work on in talk therapy very often, I think. But I got there in an afternoon. And that's pretty astonishing.

Starting point is 00:52:20 Yeah. It's remarkable. And I want to come back to something that I think you said in passing, which related to explaining how these compounds do what they do. And that a lack of ability or tools to explain the mechanism of action does not mean that the mechanisms are unexplainable or supernatural. And I'd be curious if you've had any conversations with what people might consider hard scientists, physicists, people along those lines. How do they respond to this conversation or these experiences? I think it's important to know that we do a lot of psychiatric and psychological treatments, and we have no fucking idea how they work.

Starting point is 00:53:09 Don't let any doctor tell you that they know how SSRIs work. They don't really know. You think it elevates serotonin? There's no evidence that it actually elevates serotonin. It changes what happens at that little juncture. And the pharmacopoeia is full of chemicals that seem to have some effect on psychosis, on whatever they're trying to treat,

Starting point is 00:53:31 but no one really can explain because our understanding of the brain is really primitive, much more so than I realized when I started this process. So a lot of what we say about mechanism is hard. We don't really know exactly how a psychedelic drug, we know it binds to the serotonin 2A receptor, and then... Seriously.

Starting point is 00:53:57 And then you start seeing things. But that cascade of effects... Dot, dot, dot. Result. Ellipse. Yeah, ellipses. Then they use terms like that. And then there's a cascade of effects leading to synesthesia and hallucination and things like that. But we don't know. It may be that it alters the pattern of waves. I mean, your brain, we're learning now, only recently, that communicates not just through

Starting point is 00:54:21 chemistry, but there's a wave action too that seems to organize brain activity. And there was a study that just came out two weeks ago that was the most astonishing thing where they sliced a hippocampus, the memory center in half, created a gap, and they found that one set of neurons on one side of the gap nevertheless was able to interact with ones on the other without direct contact. What the hell is that? Maybe it's this wave action. Maybe

Starting point is 00:54:51 there are other levels of communication going on in the brain that we don't know about yet. It's really important to be humble in anything we say about the brain. The best model, though, with all that by way of warning, is this idea of the default mode network. And one of the really striking findings when they began imaging the brains of people on psychedelics, both LSD and psilocybin, and this happened in England first, Robin Carhart Harris Lab at Imperial College,

Starting point is 00:55:23 the expectation was that they'd see lots of activity everywhere, because it's a pretty lively mental experience. Yeah, right. But they were very surprised to see that one particular brain network called the default mode network, which I'd never heard of, was suppressed in its activity. Less blood flow, less energy going to it. And that was curious. And then, you know, so then what is the default mode network?

Starting point is 00:55:47 Well, Morris Rakel, a neuroscientist at Washington University, discovered it about 20 years ago. It's a tightly linked set of structures in the midline that connects the cortex, which is the, you know, evolutionarily most recent part of the brain, executive function, consciousness supposedly, to older, deeper areas of memory and emotion. And it's kind of a traffic cop for the whole brain,

Starting point is 00:56:13 but it's intimately involved with ego function. It is where time travel takes place, the ability to think about the future or the past. And if you think about it, without that, you don't have a self, right? Your self is everything that's happened to you before that you remember and your objectives for the future. People who don't have a sense, don't have a memory, don't have a self. It's involved with self-reflection. It's involved with the narrative self, the stories

Starting point is 00:56:42 that we tell ourselves. So for example, there's a part of it called the posterior singular cortex that if I showed you a list of adjectives, you know, patriotic, handsome, chubby, you know, whatever. I'm just being hypothetical. Thank you very much. I said handsome. Oh, thank you.

Starting point is 00:57:03 It would not light up, right, if you just read that list then i say all right think about how all those adjectives apply to you or don't apply to you boom the posterior singular cortex goes into action it's generating it's totally self-referential so if the ego has an address in the brain it's somewhere in this network and and this network is the one that gets quieted. When it does, since it has a kind of management function for the whole, as the ego does, other parts of the brain start talking to one another. And there's a two-page spread in the book where I show, using these Imperial College scans, what a brain on normal consciousness, how it's wired, and then how it gets rewired temporarily. And it gets rewired in a very novel way. Everything's talking

Starting point is 00:57:53 to everything else rather than going through the orchestra conductor of the default mode network. So the curious thing about this is it was confirmed by scans of very experienced meditators. They put someone 10,000 hours of meditation into an fMRI scanner, asked them to meditate, and then took pictures of their brains, and the scans looked identical. Their default mode network was suppressed. Of course, ego dissolution is one of the goals of meditation. So it's opening up these really interesting questions of consciousness.

Starting point is 00:58:31 And what is the self? What is the self for? Do you need to have one? Would you be better off without one? Now, there are very good reasons to have an ego. The ego got the book written. The ego does all sorts of good stuff. On the other hand, an overactive ego is a tyrant. And if you look at the availability of

Starting point is 00:58:55 the type of experience that you described, I mean, we could get into the science, and I think we might get into more of it. And for people who are interested, I'd certainly recommend there are many talks out there, including Roland Griffith's TED Med Talk. Or anything by Robin Carhart-Harris, who's really been the most interesting theoretician of what's going on in the brain with psychedelics. Yeah, has a great paper called The Entropic Brain. Entropic Brain is a fantastic paper. I had to read it six times, but it's a fantastic paper. It's dense, fantastic and dense. So you can get an overview through those types of talks on the outcomes of studies applied

Starting point is 00:59:35 not just to pathological conditions or addictions, but also to healthy volunteers for various purposes. And I think we'll see more studies looking at so-called normals, although... Healthy normals. Yeah, healthy normals, high-functioning neurotics. What I'd love to talk about is the bottlenecks, the things that are currently preventing wider access. And it seems to me at least one of them

Starting point is 01:00:01 is a scarcity of funding. If you look at the field as a whole, we're dealing with mostly Schedule I drugs. Some people would call them narcotics, although we could certainly disagree. Well, they're not addictive. Yeah, so that's part of the problem with that designation. But what is the path forward then?

Starting point is 01:00:22 Because there's a lot to learn from underground practitioners, but they're underground because the activities are illegal. And there's tremendous wealth of knowledge, but to translate that into national or international level access for people with PTSD, treatment-resistant depression, there seem to be pieces of the puzzle that are missing. So what would you like to see, or if that's too personal, what might happen over the next handful of years, and what are the risk factors that could set us back for wider access? I'm glad you mentioned risk, because it's very important we talk about risk.

Starting point is 01:00:58 So we're on a path right now toward basically going through the standard FDA new drug approval process. And that's three phases. There's a phase one, which is kind of a pilot study, very small numbers, open label, in other words, no placebo. And then there's a more ambitious placebo-controlled trial, phase two, and then a much bigger version of the same thing. And if you get over those hurdles and you show that the drugs are both safe and effective, the FDA will approve it as a medicine. And believe it or not, we're not that far away from that happening.

Starting point is 01:01:38 It could happen in five years. For MDMA and psilocybin. Yes, for MDMA. MDMA is actually a little further ahead. They're already in phase three. This is ecstasy being used to treat trauma especially. The challenge is, and the FDA has been remarkably supportive. In fact, it's granted breakthrough therapy status to both psilocybin and MDMA, which means that they actively help the researchers design trials that will quickly move these drugs to approval. This is quite astonishing.

Starting point is 01:02:12 This has all happened in the last year. The challenge is they're expensive to do, these studies. They cost millions of dollars, and the government will not fund this for two reasons. One is it's still controversial. You could imagine people getting upset about tax dollars going to fund psychedelic research. But the main reason is there's no money for mental health research. The NIMH, which is part of the NIH, National Institute of Mental Health, has a budget of like one or two billion dollars. That's it. So there's not a lot of money to play with. So all of the psychedelic research being done so far has been privately funded by foundations and individuals who really believe that this is important work. And more people need to step up to finish this, finish this work. Which I just wanted to pause for one second, which I'd say just for people wondering is not

Starting point is 01:03:09 just San Francisco, Haight-Ashbury tech liberals at all, right? Oh no. I mean, there are people in tech community who- You have that, but you also have like Rebecca Mercer, you have Pritzker family. That's right. You have some right-wing money too, which is great inoculation, right? Rebecca Mercer has contributed to the MDMA work and it's not a right-left issue. Yeah, these are bipartisan issues. Especially when it comes to treating soldiers for PTSD. And people in the pharmaceutical business have gotten interested in this. They see this privately to help fund it. So there is money to move forward. It's not like it's stymied by a lack of money, but it will take a fair amount. And then there's the whole issue of

Starting point is 01:03:52 how do you incorporate it into mental health care as we practice it? I mean, think about what's the business model? It's really hard to figure out. The pharmaceutical industry is not interested in the drug you only take once. They make money. They won't even research antibiotics anymore because you only take them for five days. They only do drugs that you take every day for the rest of your life. That's where the money is. So they're not going to put a lot of money into it. And then look at the therapist community. Their business model depends on you coming back every week for years and years and years. So they're not going to love this.

Starting point is 01:04:35 And it takes a very heavy intervention for that short amount of time, right? We talked about the preparation session, the guiding, two guides. It's a lot of labor over a short amount of time. So exactly how, and it's also just unconventional in that, as we said earlier, you're not simply prescribing a drug. You're prescribing an experience.

Starting point is 01:04:58 And it's not simply psychedelic therapy. It's psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy. You need both. It's a package. It doesn't work without. You need both. It's a package. It doesn't work without. You need both elements. So that's going to be hard for the mental health community to get their head around.

Starting point is 01:05:14 And I think we'll figure it out, but it's a whole new structure. It's a whole new paradigm. And so that may take a little while. The risks, though, you asked about that. I do worry that there could be another backlash. Right now, the press on psychedelics is very positive, as it was pre-1965 and all through the 50s.

Starting point is 01:05:39 You don't read a lot of negative stories about it, but it could happen. You know, the risk of, I think, sexual abuse in that therapeutic setting is real. Here you have a situation where underground you only have one guide, usually. You don't have two, so you don't have the chaperone function. And the person on the psychedelic is not in a position to defend herself or himself. And MDMA in particular creates this deep bond of trust with the therapist that an unscrupulous therapist could abuse. So I think that's a real concern. Can we do anything to hedge against that or to mitigate?

Starting point is 01:06:21 Or any of the risk factors? Well, here's the problem with an illegal drug. I mean, the fact that the underground is underground, it's very hard to regulate something that is illegal. One of the best arguments for decriminalization or legalization is you can then set rules. You can have professional societies from which people can be expelled

Starting point is 01:06:39 if they behave badly. You can have penalties. You can set standards. You can set standards. You can have a code of conduct. I mean, all these kind of things, like other professions have. Doing that with an underground, even an underground that is somewhat organized

Starting point is 01:06:56 and, in fact, does have a code of conduct. I read about that in the book. But who knows who's subscribed to that code of conduct? Lots of people are just declaring themselves psychedelic therapists. I think one of the big risks now is the demand is so great that there are unscrupulous people declaring that they're therapists or people who simply are green and don't have enough experience and don't know how to react to a medical emergency, don't have that kind of training't know how to react to a medical emergency, don't have that kind of training.

Starting point is 01:07:27 So there are real risks going into the underground. And I say that having interviewed many underground therapists, some of whom I would not have entrusted my mind to. I mean, I didn't have confidence in them, but many of whom are professionals and are incredibly conscientious. So it's a mixed bag, but it's the Wild West, though. So you're taking a chance.

Starting point is 01:07:49 In terms of generally the risks of the drugs, though, which I think it's very important to say a word about, and perhaps I should have done it earlier, here's what we know. The physiological risks of psilocybin are remarkably light. There are, we don't even know the lethal dose of psilocybin. We know the lethal dose of Tylenol. You have many drugs in your medicine cabinet

Starting point is 01:08:16 that have a lethal dose in the dozens of pills. Oh, sure. I mean, Tylenol's in the top three or four fatalities list for ERs. It messes with the liver. Yeah. So there's no LD50. We don't know. They're not that toxic to the body.

Starting point is 01:08:35 They raise blood pressure a little bit, heart rate, things like that. LD50 is, if we give everybody in this room, 1,000 people, a dose that would kill 50% of you. That's LD50, which is determined for a lot of people. And we know that for most drugs, but we can't find it for this drug. There was an elephant that was killed with LSD once.

Starting point is 01:08:54 What a horrible idea, right? Who's, you know, who's like, let's see how much you have to give an elephant to kill an elephant. I mean, but they were also giving, they had to tranquilize the elephant to get him to play. So it may have been the tranquilizer. I'm sorry, I didn't mean to go down that path.

Starting point is 01:09:10 But I just, it horrifies me, that story. They're non-addictive. They're not habit forming. If you set up that classic thing with the rat in the cage and they have two levers, one administers cocaine to their bloodstream, the other glucose, and the rat will keep hitting the cocaine lever till it dies.

Starting point is 01:09:30 You put LSD in that setup and the rat will do it once and never again. Rats do not like to trip. I don't think humans like surprise trips very much either. That's true. Have some apple juice. Ah! But this was a thing in the 60s, though. You know, dosing people. I mean, the Grateful Dead were famous for dosing anyone who came near their green room.

Starting point is 01:09:57 Which I think is an incredibly cruel thing to do. I just can't imagine that. But, so, the risks are psychological. The real risks. And they're real. And I think that using the drugs in a poor setting can lead to potentially psychotic breaks. There are people who have been tripped into schizophrenia. Would that have happened anyway? Probably.

Starting point is 01:10:20 There's a phenomenon where before the onset of schizophrenia, which happens when you're around 20 very often, and then again around 30, is that you feel weird for a period of time and you start self-medicating. And so it can be kicked off by LSD, but also alcohol and cannabis. So we don't understand that phenomenon, but there are people who have trips that are so bad that they're traumatizing. And about 8% of the people who use psilocybin, not in a clinical setting, report seeking psychiatric help at some point after their experience.

Starting point is 01:10:59 So those are real risks. They're mitigated to a large extent if you're in the care of an experienced guide who's prepared you properly and knows what to tell you if you do get into trouble. And I found that was the most useful, getting that kind of advice. The flight instructions.

Starting point is 01:11:16 The flight instructions. What do you do when something really scary happens? Well, don't run away. Or if you feel yourself going mad or your ego dissolving, go with it. Surrender is the basic takeaway. And that is the best advice for using psychedelics, I think. What do you hope to see, or what are the most exciting things that are happening right now or that have been happening since the book came out? Is there anything that comes to mind that is particularly interesting

Starting point is 01:11:43 or exciting to you? Well, I think the mainstreaming of this is a subject that it's a subject people can talk about. People are coming out of the closet and talking about their psychedelic experiences. I've had many conversations with psychiatrists and even some celebrities that they feel safe talking about it now. And I think that's great because the more this is closeted, um, the, and the more stigma attaches for that reason. Um, you know, so I think people speaking frankly, uh, about their experiences is a very positive thing, telling stories, um, and, and kind of demystifying it by, by talk. I think that's very encouraging. I'm very encouraged to see some very mainstream psychiatry departments, medical schools,

Starting point is 01:12:32 places like Yale, Columbia, wanting to conduct psychedelic research. You know, Roland Griffith took a huge chance and Steve Ross at NYU when they started doing this. And they got a lot of shit from their bureaucracies. And now these universities proudly boast about the psychedelic research going on on their premises. When Steve Ross started studying cancer patients at NYU, the oncologist would not give them patients. He said, I don't want you near our patients.

Starting point is 01:13:05 You're giving crack to our cancer patients. And it was only the nurses that would tell people about the study. And now he's been invited into the cancer center to set up a treatment room. So that's very exciting. I'm very heartened by that. I think one of the best indications is people who have not just cancer, but life-changing diagnoses, people who have just learned that they have Alzheimer's, people who learn they

Starting point is 01:13:33 have ALS, people who've learned they have Parkinson's. They go through a very difficult psychological passage. And then I think that these medicines could help people in all those areas. I do worry that we're putting all our chips on the square mark depression. And there's a lot of resources going to treating depression. And, you know, I don't want to leave behind these other things. Addiction, I think, is very important. And cancer.

Starting point is 01:14:07 We have so little to offer the terminal cancer patient. And this seems to, I mean, it's really proven itself more in that case, I think, than anything else. And we talked about one aspect of maybe misperception of psychedelics or misrepresentation over lunch, which was, or rather a distinction that is helpful to make, and that is psychedelics or misrepresentation over lunch, which was rather a distinction that is helpful to make, and that is psychedelics are not a panacea. They do not treat everything. They will not pay your bills for you. Well, in my case, they have. Well, actually, in your case, they do pay the bills.

Starting point is 01:14:41 But in general, you can't count on that. I can see the late night programming now. Just lay your Michael Pollan psychedelic blanket on your stack of bills. And in any case, what I was going to say is they do seem to hold promise for conditions that are frequently thought of as intractable or untreatable. Yes. And separate. I mean, one of the interesting things about this is that the indications, the forms of mental disorder

Starting point is 01:15:15 that they seem to work best on. I was very skeptical of this panacea idea too. And I was interviewing Tom Insel, who was former head of the National Institute of Mental Health. And I said, isn't it a little suspect that the same drug would work for depression and anxiety and addiction? And he said, why? And I said, well, you know, it's like, it's a panacea. And she said, no, he said, don't assume those conditions are so different. They may be a product of this.

Starting point is 01:15:45 They may be different symptoms of the same mental formation, which is an excessive rigidity in the brain. They're all forms of stuckness. They're all forms of destructive narrative. And so we may learn something about the nature of mental illness in this research, too, which is very exciting. And psychedelics seems to work on those kind of locked in conditions that all are characterized by obsessive thinking to one degree or another. And, you know, as somebody said, who I interviewed, you know, depression is regret about the past. Anxiety is regret about the future. You know, they're,

Starting point is 01:16:24 they're similar. They're very similar. And addiction and depression often go together. So I thought that was very interesting. And, but then there's a whole, so that's one end. If you think of mental disorder on a spectrum, and at one end you have those very rigid, closed down brain conditions. At the other end you have brains that are excessively chaotic or too entropic to use robin's phrase and that's a schizophrenia not useful for that personality disorder probably not useful manic depression less likely and so that you know it's we may see that a lot of the things it treats are, are, are the same thing. And he said that, that, that these words like depression, anxiety, addiction, these are DSM artifacts, right? We, you know, we need to put a label on things so we can charge the insurance

Starting point is 01:17:16 companies and, you know, write our codes. He said, but they're artificial. They're, they're totally artificial. And I didn't realize that. So one of the things that excites me most about psychedelics is, yes, there's a treatment here, potentially. And it could be very important, help us deal with one of the biggest problems we face as a civilization. On the other hand, they're also very interesting probes to understand the mind. And way back when Stanislav Grof, famous psychedelic psychiatrist who did really great work in the 60s and 70s, he wrote this line which actually got Robin Carhart Harris started and got me started in a way. He said that psychedelics would be for the study of the mind

Starting point is 01:17:59 what the telescope was for astronomy, or the microscope for biology. Now that is an audacious claim, but I no longer think it's crazy. And for those who are interested in where this is going, you mentioned that there is currently effectively a complete lack of federal funding. And there is some money, but what a lot of people may not realize, and what I didn't realize until a few years ago, is that even the most productive scientists working on psychedelics today spend, in some cases, upwards of half of their time writing grants for non-psychedelic studies to pay for their salaries. So there is a certain survival

Starting point is 01:18:41 mode that most of these groups experience, which makes it very hard to commit to the types of studies that the scientists and the world would like to see that require staff for multiple years and so on and most of that money is for drug abuse studies from NIDA National Institute drug abuse and and NIDA money is supporting like Roland's lab yeah so there's there's there are studies that I'm aware of that are sort of yet to be funded related to whether it's opiate slash opioid addiction or Alzheimer's disease, as you mentioned,

Starting point is 01:19:13 which would also track cognitive parameters and so on. If someone in the audience is interested in trying to facilitate this type of research, better understanding of these compounds that then lead to better understanding of the mind, including the pathologies. How would you think about selecting the higher leverage places to invest your own time or money? Well, if I had endless resources and felt, you know, as a journalist, I can't contribute to this without creating all sorts of ethical quandaries for the publications I write for. But I would consider it a very good, highly leveraged investment to give money to one of the

Starting point is 01:20:01 labs doing this research, whether it was Roland Griffiths or the UCSF work, which I think is really exciting, Josh Woolley's work, or NYU. These are relatively small investments that have the potential to have a tremendous payoff for the society. And I think that you will see more kind of charitable organizations of various kinds, grant-making organizations doing this. I also think, though, there's the pure science piece, which is really important. I interviewed, you know, in the book, Alison Gopnik,

Starting point is 01:20:39 this psychologist who's a colleague of mine at Berkeley, child psychologist. And she has a fascinating, she studies the mind of the child, which she thinks is an altered state of consciousness. And she said, if you ever want to experience an expanded consciousness, just have tea with a four-year-old. And she really believes that kids are tripping all the time, up to about four or five.

Starting point is 01:21:01 And in a very specific sense, that they take in information in this global way that we don't. We have something she calls spotlight consciousness. Or the reducing valve. Or the reducing, exactly. It's the same metaphor. And it's also ego-driven consciousness. It's very pointed. We can block everything out. But kids have lantern consciousness. They're taking in information from all different sides. It's why you can't keep them on task. But they're doing something really important, which is exploring their environment and mastering it in a way we as adults cannot at a certain point. It's like learning a language after you're 10. It just

Starting point is 01:21:38 gets much harder. So she's kind of got a very interesting model for that. Could you use psychedelics to restore some of the qualities of children consciousness, the kind of creativity, the kind of problem solving the kids actually do better? You know, we talked about the mask experiment, predictive coding. Kids don't have all those models in their head telling them what's likely to work or what's likely is happening. So they're taking in all that sensory information and they're more creative as a result. Well, could you put us back in that head? So they're pure science experiments that I know she would

Starting point is 01:22:17 love to do that need to be funded also. And I think there's a real potential to learn important things about consciousness. Basically, one of the ways you learn about any complex system is disturb it. And we now have this amazing tool for disturbing everyday normal consciousness and studying the results. So I'd love to see that happen too. And that's academic research. and I hope that there will be centers for psychedelic research at Johns Hopkins perhaps at UCSF where this work could be done

Starting point is 01:22:53 because I think the payoff could be tremendous so I know you can't contribute to many of these things for all the reasons you outlined I can, so if anybody's interested in helping to build centers at these universities

Starting point is 01:23:04 reach out to me. And just to give some concrete examples of how very little can go a really long way, you mentioned Josh Woolley, Brian Anderson, UCSF, they're looking at long-term, or I should say, treating long-term demoralization in AIDS survivors. And they're doing some things that are very innovative in a research setting,

Starting point is 01:23:29 like group integration, which could transcend that study to apply to a lot of other things. And to get that off the ground, I was involved with that, it was a meaningful contribution to commit 10 to 25K. That is enough rocket fuel, along with a few other people, to get it off the ground as a pilot study. So this really could have very significant implications and open the door for lots of other studies with larger amounts of funding later. And if you're looking for the larger, let's say more involved longitudinal studies with, we were just talking about this at lunch, say opiate addiction. So my best friend growing up died of fentanyl overdose. My aunt died of a Percocet alcohol combination a number of months ago.

Starting point is 01:24:06 This is the scale of this problem and the suffering. 70,000 people last year died of opiate. Which is comparable to what? Well, 50,000 people died in the entire Vietnam War. Yeah. Okay. Just to give you an idea. It's mind boggling.

Starting point is 01:24:20 Right. So to begin to chip away at that in a leveraged way, then you're talking about millions. But it's not 100 million. It's like 2 to 4 million. So in any case, this is a place where you can really potentially bend the arc of history, not necessarily only financially. And one thing that I've wondered is if there are ways to sort of galvanize the space to get more researchers involved.

Starting point is 01:24:44 Because 20 years ago, this was career suicide or at least viewed as a dead end. It's ceasing to be labeled as such, but nonetheless, it's hard to get, say, salary, guaranteed salary for many, many years if you want to make psychedelics your focus. So offering, say, fellowships, if anybody's listening who may want to sort of galvanize with even lower dollar amounts, $50,000, $100,000, there are probably ways to do that. Or if you're a researcher to actually look into spending more time on this. Because as you pointed out, phase three trials

Starting point is 01:25:17 with MDMA, which we could debate whether or not that is a psychedelic, just for simplicity's sake, let's call it a psychedelic, is already currently in phase three for PTSD. And for people who are interested in seeing what that looks like in practice, I also want to mention actually two documentaries briefly before I forget. The first shows actual therapy sessions that are MDMA-assisted psychotherapy sessions for PTSD. And it's called Trip of Compassion. And I ended up just helping the filmmakers who are based in Israel to launch this digitally literally yesterday. So it's now available for people who want to watch that. I

Starting point is 01:25:57 don't make a cent. I'm doing it all pro bono. Fantastic Fungi, which should be coming out shortly, in which you make a cameo, covers a lot of the, well, not only the incredible complexity and beauty and mystery of fungi and mycelium, but also the work done at places like Johns Hopkins and NYU. So if you want to really have a visceral response to seeing what this can do, and to see cancer patients with terminal diagnoses and hear their stories, these two documentaries are really, really worth the time.

Starting point is 01:26:32 For people who are curious about learning more, you mentioned, of course, your book, as I stated at the very beginning, How to Change Your Mind, gifted to literally hundreds of people. And that, I think, is a tremendous resource for a historical overview and a scientific primer along with your personal stories. And I think walking that, threading that into a narrative is extremely difficult. So I want to applaud you again for putting the book together. What other resources would you encourage people to perhaps take a look at? Well, I do think there's great value in looking at some of these documentaries that

Starting point is 01:27:12 are out and coming out. Just to hear the voices of the people whose lives have been transformed, the people who are really in trouble. And so I found looking at that, you know, those accounts, reading those accounts when I had the opportunity, because all the patients, all the volunteers write up a narrative of their experience. That was something. I think, as I mentioned earlier,

Starting point is 01:27:38 Robert Carhart-Harris is, if you're interested in the neuroscience piece, that's where I would look at some of his papers, which are quite striking. He's the neuroscience piece, that's where I would look at some of his papers, which are quite striking. He's the rare scientist in that he's doing therapeutic work, clinical work, he's doing theoretical work, and he's doing brain imaging. I mean, it's very rare you get one scientist

Starting point is 01:27:55 doing all those things. Another place to contribute, though, is MAPS, which is, they're focused on um mdma work right now but they have rick doblan the head of maps has really driven this renaissance uh and he deserves a lot of credit in 1985 when he was graduating from college he he wanted to be a psychedelic therapist and uh and he and he said i've got to change the laws in this country in order to be a psychedelic therapist. And he's been knocking his head against this wall since 1985, and it's finally yielding.

Starting point is 01:28:32 And that's an amazing story. So they need money, too, to conduct this MDMA work. And there's another nonprofit called the Hefter Institute that's funding a lot of the more speculative psilocybin work. And that's also worth looking at. God, other things to read. You know, one of the experiences I had working on this book was, wow, I have all this space to myself. Why isn't anyone, why aren't there 20 books on this topic?

Starting point is 01:28:59 I didn't understand it. So there are not a lot of books. There's a good book on MDMA therapy called, for some stupid reason, Acid Test, because it has nothing to do with LSD. But it's a very good book by a man named Tom Schroeder, a Washington Post reporter. So if you're interested in the trauma MDMA side, that's the book. It covers a lot of the work with veterans as well. Yeah, it's really good.

Starting point is 01:29:21 There'll be more. There's going to be a lot more things. If you were trying to give guidelines to people who are going to ask, and I'm sure have asked you, how do I find a guide? Which is a tricky question to answer. I mean, one, which is also tricky for me to answer.

Starting point is 01:29:38 I get asked this constantly. One of the recommendations I've made is read some of the books that Maps, maps.org, publishes like The Secret Chief about Leo Zeff, who is a stellar guide, or I think it's Healing Journey or The Healing Journey by Claudio Naranja from Chile, so that you understand what a good guide looks like. And then you will at least have some litmus test by which you can discard the people who don't qualify. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:30:11 I would add to that James Fadiman's book, The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide, which actually has very good advice for people who want a guide or are shopping for a guide. And he's a psychologist who was very involved in the research in the 60s and 70s. And, you know, the code of conduct for guides is reprinted in that.

Starting point is 01:30:33 And he has a lot of instructions. So that's useful. Look, it's one of the most striking things. We were talking at lunch, you know, and, you know, what is it like being the psychedelic guy after having been the food guy? And I have to say the food guy was a lot easier you know they sent over a nice extra dessert when you went to a good restaurant sometimes and there were perks like that here it is an unrelenting stream of emails phone calls and letters from people who are really suffering, who have a suicidal son or an alcoholic

Starting point is 01:31:07 mother who are really at the end of their rope. And they think that this holds out hope, perhaps the last hope in many cases for people with cancer. And I haven't been able to make any referrals. I mean, it just, it just, it wouldn't be smart, especially for the guides themselves. Because if I introduce somebody to a guide, they're assuming this person is vetted, but of course the person isn't vetted. And at some point, the law enforcement may decide to bring down a guide to set an example.

Starting point is 01:31:35 So I can't do that. But a practical strategy is go find a ketamine therapist. And there are legal ketamine clinics now all over the country. And if the ketamine therapist doesn't think you're right for ketamine, that actually you have trauma, not depression, or you have addiction, not depression, they're often in a position to make a referral. There's some overlap in those communities. So that's my inside tip. But it's just too big a responsibility to introduce someone to an underground therapist. Things can go wrong. It is underground. And so you have to be very careful. And interview whoever, if you're actually doing this, interview several people. It's like choosing a shrink. You'll know when someone

Starting point is 01:32:32 has the right head for you and that you have a bond with. And if you have any doubts, stay away. Yeah. When in doubt, decline. Yes. And there are other... But you can volunteer for these above-ground trials, by the way. There are waiting lists at all these places. And if you go on the website at Johns Hopkins, Roland Griffiths Lab, or NYU, they're listing what they're studying or about to study, and maybe you'll get lucky and there's a big healthy normal study.

Starting point is 01:33:04 Which does happen, actually. I have a few friends who have become subjects, sometimes for compounds that are not as friendly as psilocybin. In any case, this has been a wide-ranging, very fun conversation for me. I'm personally very fascinated and dedicated to this space because I've received a lot of the letters that you've received thematically. I have friends say in law enforcement, in military, or even say who are commercial pilots who say, I am not allowed to have mental illness. That's right. And they are depressed or they're suicidal and they do not want to run through insurance and they feel trapped. So systemically, there are things that need to change.

Starting point is 01:33:51 And I think that you're a part of changing the national conversation, as you mentioned, just as one example by the types of organizations that are now inviting you to speak. And for that, I thank you. Do you have any closing comments, requests, asks, anything of the audience

Starting point is 01:34:11 before we wrap up? I mostly want to thank you. It's a pleasure to have a conversation with someone who knows as much about this as I do. You're really in deep, and I applaud you, and you're making a positive contribution to this work. Thank you.

Starting point is 01:34:34 I guess I would say to the audience, please pay attention, follow this research, support it if you can, and if you decide to have an experience, safe travels. All right. Michael Pollan, thank you everybody. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Do you want to get a short email from me? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend? 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.

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The Tim Ferriss Show - #365: Michael Pollan — Exploring the Frontiers of Psychedelics

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