The Tim Ferriss Show - #433: Sam Harris on Psychedelics, How to Cope During a Pandemic, Taming Anxiety, and More

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 an appropriate time. What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over a metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. This episode is brought to you by FreshBooks. Thousands of listeners and a lot of the contractors I use and my readers use FreshBooks. If you've been thinking about turning your part-time side

Starting point is 00:00:34 business into a full-time small business or big business for that matter, you may be feeling some extra uncertainty these days. And that's obviously completely natural. There are a lot of questions that can come up. How do you create a professional appearance and experience? Who can help you with support? How do you manage the billing and all of that, but still focus on the primary work of your business and on growing your business? FreshBooks is an all-in-one invoicing and accounting solution, does a lot more than that, that helps you take your business from part-time to full-time, and it only takes minutes to set up. They have one of the best sign-up flows in the business. I've seen very few better. They have been helping people turn their passions into small businesses for 15 years,

Starting point is 00:01:14 and they can help you too. I've met the founders. I've looked at this product very closely. With automated invoicing, billable time, and expense tracking, and an intuitive dashboard that ties it all together, it's like having a full-time financial assistant with you every step of the way. You can create, customize, and send branded and professional-looking invoices in about 30 seconds. You get paid up to twice as fast with fees as low as 1% using ACH payments on FreshBooks. It's a fast, easy, and secure way for clients to pay you for your work and pay you more quickly. One of the many things that sets FreshBooks apart is their award-winning Toronto-based customer service. A real person picks up fast and will help you until you are completely satisfied and have your questions answered. There's a lot of uncertainty in the world right

Starting point is 00:01:59 now, but your ability to build a business that you're passionate about, that you're proud of, doesn't have to be one of those things. Business owners all over the world rate FreshBooks as the easiest accounting software to use. Try it out. Check it out for free for 30 days at freshbooks.com slash Tim. Just enter Tim Ferriss in the how did you hear about us section. Again, that's freshbooks.com slash Tim to check it out and try it for free for 30 days. One more time, freshbooks.com slash Tim to check it out and try it for free for 30 days. One more time, freshbooks.com slash Tim. This episode is brought to you by Five Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter. It's become one of the most popular email newsletters in the world with millions of subscribers.

Starting point is 00:02:40 And it's super, super simple. It does not clog up your inbox. Every Friday, I send out five bullet points, super short, of the coolest things I've found that week, which sometimes includes apps, books, documentaries, supplements, gadgets, new self-experiments, hacks, tricks, and all sorts of weird stuff that I dig up from around the world. You guys, podcast listeners and book readers, have asked me for something short and action-packed for a very long time, because after all, the podcast, the books, they can be quite long. And that's why I created Five Bullet Friday. It's become one of my favorite things I do every week. It's free, it's always going to be free, and you can learn more at tim.blog forward slash Friday. That's tim.blog forward slash Friday. I get asked a lot how I meet guests for the podcast,

Starting point is 00:03:25 some of the most amazing people I've ever interacted with. And little known fact, I've met probably 25% of them because they first subscribed to Five Bullet Friday. So you'll be in good company. It's a lot of fun. Five Bullet Friday is only available if you subscribe via email. I do not publish the content on the blog or anywhere else.

Starting point is 00:03:44 Also, if I'm doing small in-person meetups, offering early access to startups, beta testing, special deals, or anything else that's very limited, I share it first with Five Bullet Friday subscribers. So check it out, tim.blog forward slash Friday. If you listen to this podcast, it's very likely that you'd dig it a lot and And you can, of course, easily subscribe anytime. So easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional supplement that supports whole body health. I do get asked a lot what I would take if I could only take one supplement, and the true answer is invariably AG1. It simply covers a ton of bases. I usually drink it in the

Starting point is 00:04:30 mornings and frequently take their travel packs with me on the road. So what is AG1? AG1 is a science-driven formulation of vitamins, probiotics, and whole food sourced nutrients. In a single scoop, AG1 gives you support for the brain, gut, and immune system. So take ownership of your health and try AG1 today. You will get a free one-year supply of vitamin D and five free AG1 travel packs with your first subscription purchase. So learn more, check it out. Go to drinkag1.com slash Tim. That's drinkag1, the number one. Drink AG1 dot com slash Tim. Last time, drink AG1 dot com slash Tim. Check it out. This episode is brought to you by Five Bullet Friday, my very own email newsletter. It's become one of the most popular email newsletters in the world

Starting point is 00:05:19 with millions of subscribers. And it's super, super simple. It does not clog up your inbox. Every Friday, I send out five bullet points, super short, simple. It does not clog up your inbox. Every Friday, I send out five bullet points, super short, of the coolest things I've found that week, which sometimes includes apps, books, documentaries, supplements, gadgets, new self-experiments, hacks, tricks, and all sorts of weird stuff that I dig up from around the world. You guys, podcast listeners and book readers, have asked me for something short and action-packed for a very long time. Because after all, the podcast, the books, they can be quite long.

Starting point is 00:05:49 And that's why I created Five Bullet Friday. It's become one of my favorite things I do every week. It's free, it's always going to be free, and you can learn more at Tim.blog forward slash Friday. That's Tim.blog forward slash Friday. I get asked a lot how I meet guests for the podcast, some of the most amazing people I've ever interacted with. And little known fact, I've met probably 25% of them because they first subscribed to 5 Bullet Friday.

Starting point is 00:06:15 So you'll be in good company. It's a lot of fun. 5 Bullet Friday is only available if you subscribe via email. I do not publish the content on the blog or anywhere else. Also, if I'm doing small in-person meetups, offering early access to startups, beta testing, special deals, or anything else that's very limited, I share it first with Five Bullet Friday subscribers. So check it out, tim.blog forward slash Friday. If you listen to this podcast, it's very likely that you'd dig it a lot. And you can, of course, easily subscribe anytime. So easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you.

Starting point is 00:06:56 Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to perhaps the most impromptu tap dancing version of the Tim Ferriss show that you will hear. I have with me my friend Sam Harris. I always enjoy speaking with Sam. We had originally planned to do a session at South by Southwest. That has been canceled, and we have been put into circumstances that may require or encourage different topics. The plan had been meditation, psychedelics, and dangerous ideas. I said to Sam before we hit record that I can probably use a fair dose of at least the first two in my life right now. But Sam, we were deliberating what to talk about, and I'll tell you an embarrassing fact, a secret of sorts. I

Starting point is 00:07:47 have a deck of cards that I thought could be a lifeline if need be called Three Things, which has prompts of different questions that I could ask you that I've wanted to ask you anyway. But how should we even frame this conversation? Well, first, let me say at this point, I'm committed to producing the worst episode of the Tim Ferriss podcast ever aired. So let's start there. I appreciate your hard working Protestant ethic. Well, I mean, what's amazing, as you know, I also have a podcast and And I'm finding, obviously speaking a lot about the coronavirus and our inept response to it and all of the attendant concerns. But there's just this bewildering experience of having one's core interests sidelined and even just seeming patently inappropriate to air. I mean, I have podcasts on several topics that I just can't drop in the current environment. Actually, not because they're too frivolous and tone deaf in

Starting point is 00:08:52 that way, but because they're on yet other emergencies or grim topics that I can't imagine anyone wants to pay attention to now, like nuclear war or the prospect of nuclear war and nuclear terrorism. I mean, who the hell wants to think about that right now? And so, yeah, and to say nothing of things like psychedelics. I mean, I don't know about you, but this does not seem like a moment to do a whopping dose of mushrooms or anything else with an invading virus looming in every corner of the world. I mean, talk about set and setting. It's the wrong both. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:09:35 Yeah, I agree. So I feel like we should just have a conversation and I can certainly grill you. I should remind you of your tweet about, who was it? I don't think you named the person, but someone in your circle said, you know, we should now, we should drop, you know, we should take ayahuasca and talk to the pangolin. He said, I think it's time to take some peyote and talk to the pangolin. Right. So that elicited a trollish tweet from me. I don't know if you saw that come across your radar. Wait, I think it might have. What was your response?

Starting point is 00:10:10 I said, just spoke to the pangolin. Unfortunately, he's working for the bat and the bat's an asshole. Yeah. It is a tricky time to track down spirit animals in the psychedelic astral plane for sure. You have to do contact tracing. That's right. So, I have these cards surrounding me. I am also committed to making the worst episode of The Tim Ferriss Show since its inception, which would match a lot of things that are hitting their worst since inception moments. But let me just throw a few out there, or one to begin with, and we'll see where that goes.

Starting point is 00:10:52 And you can completely veto, and we can take it in a different direction. Sure. So, what are three things you have learned about fear? That is the question on the card. In general or based on recent events? In general, in your life. Or current events, any way you want to take it. A couple things.

Starting point is 00:11:22 One is that it is certainly necessary. You wouldn't want to be without it. You wouldn't want to have your amygdala removed and simply be insensitive to the fear-based initial response to stimuli or even ideas. So it's a necessary part of the toolkit for obvious evolutionary reasons as well as personal ones. And many people imagine that if you get deep into meditation or some other spiritual practice, the goal is to get rid of fear and other classically

Starting point is 00:11:53 negative states of mind entirely. And that's really not the way I view it. So you wouldn't want to never feel it again, but you want to be able to stop feeling it whenever it's no longer useful. And it really is only useful for a very short period of time. I mean, it's a signal of salience more than anything else. I mean, it's negatively valenced salience. What do you mean by that? Actually, I should say that it's often thought that the amygdala really is just kind of the fear center and doesn't do much of anything else. What do you mean by that? to be emotionally and behaviorally relevant in the moment. So your response to scary faces, you know, that would be a classic stimuli. You know, you turn the corner and you see somebody staring at you and they look terrifying. You know, that instantaneous visceral perception of threat,

Starting point is 00:13:00 you don't want to lose that, right? I can't imagine, you know, being a social primate, you know, however much I meditate, wanting to completely lose that. But what you want to then be able to do is let go of it the moment you're no longer served by seeing the world through that lens. And for so much of our fear that, you know, then grades into ordinary anxiety, it's just not useful. It's not useful to have stress of that sort become the mood music of your life, which is what happens to so many of us. It's happening to millions and millions of us in this moment around this pandemic. So, I mean, the first thing, I guess there are two things there. The first thing is that you still want this. This is not, this is a gift.

Starting point is 00:13:50 This is not a curse. But it becomes a curse the moment you can't actually let go of it, you know, more or less on demand. And you want to be able to do that. So that's certainly two things. And the third thing, I guess the third thing I would ask is that you actually can do that. I mean, it's not, you know, mindfulness is the method by which you would do that. So that's certainly two things. And the third thing, I guess the third thing I would ask that you actually can do that. I mean, it's not, you know, mindfulness is the method by which you would do that. And so there's a path to being able to do that more and more and more and more quickly. Can you think of a moment for you or a situation in which you were experiencing acute anxiety or fear and used mindfulness as an intervention? Could you describe it, if so? Oh, yeah. Yeah. No, it happens a lot. It's

Starting point is 00:14:34 happening a lot in this circumstance. I guess the one I remember very clearly was sort of the beginning of my taking the COVID problem seriously. And I forget when this was. This was the end of February at some point, somewhere in like February 25th or so. And I had ordered an iPad some weeks before when I was truly oblivious to what was going on. And, you know, it finally came. And I, again, at this point, I'm thinking thoughts like, wait a minute, how long does the virus live on a surface? I see that this thing is, you know, freshly minted in Shanghai and sent to me, you know, after they've clamped down on the Wuhan problem. You know, I don't know what the likelihood is that I'm now opening a box of virus, but, you know, I've decided to open it after letting it sit for some days. So I'm opening this box and I realized that I'm kind of double-minded about it

Starting point is 00:15:47 and in some ways just kind of in bad faith with the whole project. So like on the one hand, I'm taking precautions, right? I'm wearing, you know, I'm wearing gloves, but I'm not wearing a mask. I'm opening it carefully. I've got, you know, I've decided to just wipe this iPad down with alcohol wipes. So on some level, I'm treating it like medical waste. But on another level, I recognize, wait a minute, I'm not doing this even remotely the way I would do it if I knew there was coronavirus in this box, right? And so on some level, I'm kind of going through the motions and I'm assuming that this is fine and that I'm actually being crazy. And this is kind of a pantomime of preparedness as opposed to the real thing.

Starting point is 00:16:31 And it is the experience of kind of almost being double-minded. Like the person who's opening the box is not the whole person. And there's another part of me looking on saying, you're not really doing this correctly. And as witnessed by the fact that I'm standing in the middle of my living room and my kids are like 15 feet away. And in a flash, I recognized, okay, you're doing all of this. You've got the alcohol wipes. You've got the gloves on. You're acting like someone who thinks he's overreacting, right? You're just, again, in bad

Starting point is 00:17:07 faith. You're not actually unified as just a behavioral system. And at that moment, I just got kind of flooded with anxiety over this whole, kind of the scope of the whole crisis, like how difficult it had been for me to convince myself that the problem was worth responding to, all the people I'm in dialogue with, you know, in my family personally and in my social circle, and then just in the public, you know, the kind of public conversation that was starting around it. And I just realized how difficult it was going to be to change my own behavior and for everyone else around us to change our behavior in a way that was actually going to be effective. But at that moment, it was a very punctate experience of just cortisol, which was like, oh, fuck.

Starting point is 00:17:59 You do not have your shit together at all, right? You're in the middle of your living room opening a box of virus. You sort of think so. But you haven't done, you know, it's like, again, my kids are like 15 feet away from me at this point. And so I just felt like a complete fuck up. But it was at that moment where I thought, okay, I am actually still pretty early. You know, I took, you know, a kind of, you know, I don't know how to quantify the risk, but like, okay, wake up and actually get your game together here. And at that moment, you know, from that moment onward, the anxiety is no longer useful, right? Like to be stressed out. I mean, once I've- Right. The message has been delivered.

Starting point is 00:18:47 It's 100% delivered. And the only time it's useful as any kind of holding pattern for me is when there's still significant uncertainty about what to do. So when you're at the border between what you know you're doing and what you don't understand, and you're trying to figure out what you know you're doing and what you don't understand and you're trying to figure out what you should do, you can't figure out what your policy is, then anxiety is the thing that's going to get you to keep focusing and figure it out. But once you figure it out, once you realize, okay, you open the boxes outside, you wear gloves, you let them sit for however many days you decide to let them sit, You wipe things down that can be wiped down. There's no reason to be adrenalized at all doing any of that stuff as long as you know what you're doing, right? And so that's, and again, mindfulness is really the method by which you can let go of it because you notice the thoughts, you notice this peripheral physiology of, you know, just the felt sense of being anxious, and you notice the connection between those things. And once you just let the thoughts go and just become willing to just feel the raw sensations of

Starting point is 00:19:57 anxiety, the sensations lose their psychological import. I mean, it's just, again, it just feels like, you know, indigestion or itching or, you know, a pain in the knee or anything else that has no real meaning. It's just sensation. And it degrades over a half-life of really seconds. I mean, it does not stay around long. So anyway, that's, I mean, that's the experience I remember. And, you know, obviously there've been many like that, but, you know, it's useful for a few seconds, and it's necessary for a few seconds, but then beyond that, you're just resurrecting it by what you're doing with your mind in the next moment.

Starting point is 00:20:38 I find your app, and I've said this to you before, Waking Up app, very useful for training for this, and I've said this to you before, waking up app, very useful for training for this. And in a number of the meditations, which are at least in the introductory course sequenced in a logical progression, a sort of building progression, much like you might hope to learn a language starting with the basic building blocks and working your way up there's a there's a phrase that you use in a number of them with the snap of fingers which is just to drop it right and not not viewing that as a hill to climb not viewing that as something that requires a tremendous amount of conscious effort but something that can happen in an instant when you're opening

Starting point is 00:21:22 this box i'm glad you said ipad i was wondering if it was just a box of bats or something. Might as well have been. Got to cook those at a minimum of 400 degrees. And then is there something you say to yourself in that moment to try to defuse the no longer useful anxiety? Is there anything that you point your attention towards? Or is it just a reflexive act of mindfulness, much like someone like Jocko can reassemble God knows how many weapons in the dark, being woken up, you know, a half hour early, so at 4am? Yeah, how long does it take to clean and reassemble the gun of mindfulness? Right. Yeah, so, I mean, there are reflections and concepts, you know, pieces of language that

Starting point is 00:22:15 can be useful. I don't, at this point, tend to carry many of those around. I might spontaneously think something that is useful, I mean, a bit of self-talk, but generally speaking, it really is just watching the present thought kind of unravel. I mean, the moment I notice I'm thinking without noticing a thought itself as an appearance in consciousness, the moment I know I'm identified with, in this case, an anxious thought, then I can see the thought itself unwind in this larger condition, which is just open awareness. And so it is a kind of non-conceptual, immediate pivot to that, or it's just kind of recognizing the circumstance, you know, from that point of view that happens, you know, it happens whenever it

Starting point is 00:23:11 happens. You know, on some level, it's not even, when I say, you know, one can do this on demand, on one level, that's true, but the experience of actually doing it is not really the experience of control. It's really just the experience of spontaneously recognizing what's actually already true of your mind. And you can't, you know, you remember when you remember. So when do you, on some level, there's no accounting for why that moment dawns then and not a moment before or a moment later, but it's just the moment I notice, oh, okay, that's a thought. Then the process starts without me having to really get behind myself and push in some way. But it's totally useful to think certain thoughts as a kind of antidote. I mean, there are people who have developed whole methods around that, kind of a stylized reflection. I think you, did you have, did you ever have By had her on the podcast i do find a lot of value in her framework i mean

Starting point is 00:24:28 series of questions and prompts and so on that she uses yeah i don't know why i don't know why i thought i'd heard you speak with her at some point but um yeah i mean she hasn't been on my podcast either but i've met her and um never spend much time with her work but i know she she does work this way where she'll ask questions like, how do you know that's true? Which just throws everything back on this basic fact that in most cases, the thing we're worrying about hasn't happened. It's still hypothetical. And we're worrying about it as though the hang know, that the hangman's noose is already around our necks. And, you know, this is a fait accompli and there's nothing we can do about

Starting point is 00:25:12 it. And, you know, if you actually focus on the present, you know, there really is just whatever is given there and your thoughts about the past and the future. And, you know, that it does expose a, you know, interesting fact, which is, you know, either you can do something about the problem you're worried about, or you can't. And in neither case is your stressing out about it really warranted. I mean, if you can do something about it, well, then just do something about it, you know, solve the problem. And if you can't do anything about it, well, then, you know, why suffer twice, right? I mean, you're suffering now before the thing arrives, and then you're going to suffer when it arrives. You know, so on some level, you can decide to just, you know, be with, even if something really is a fait accompli, I mean,

Starting point is 00:26:04 even if a bad thing is going to happen and there's no way of avoiding it. One, we also know that we're very bad prognosticators about our future states of happiness and misery. We tend to totally exaggerate how much we're going to be shifted with respect to our moment-to-moment well-being. We overestimate how positive something's going to be, and we overestimate how negative something's going to be. And as we know from a lot of psychology and behavioral economics, people return to baseline fairly quickly, even from extraordinarily bad and good things happening to them. And most of the time spent worrying about even objectively bad things is still fairly delusional.

Starting point is 00:27:00 I mean, we're just not actually mapping the future, the future that will in fact arrive at some point. Sam, I'm just curious to know, say in the last, it's arbitrary, last few months, last year, what have you changed your mind on? What positions have you modified or reversed? What insights have you had that have sort of rendered past beliefs, perhaps outdated. What have you changed your mind on in the last few months or year that come to mind that are really, it could be anything, material or otherwise? Well, I feel like under the pressure of this pandemic, many things are shifting for me. I think it's probably happening for most people, but I'm not actually consciously scoring all the changes as they're happening. But I'm noticing

Starting point is 00:27:52 kind of a shift in my orientation. And maybe I would shift back. But for instance, as you know, I've spent a lot of time criticizing what I perceive to be bad ideas and even criticizing the people who I perceive to be purveyors of bad ideas. And so in political space, I can get into some fairly heated arguments with people. And with the possible exception of President Trump, I've pulled back from – with the actual – with the noted exception of President Trump, I've pulled back from, with the actual, you know, with the noted exception of President Trump, I've pulled back from that a lot, just because it strikes me as really counterproductive. You know, so there are people who are saying some truly idiotic things about coronavirus. And insofar as I've engaged them in public, I've tried to be, you know, fairly, I mean, it's a fairly light touch. And then, you know, I've done a lot of kind of private,

Starting point is 00:28:53 I've attempted, you know, several private exorcisms, you know, because I haven't wanted to go after these people in public and get them to just dig in, you know, based on their own, you know, egos or concerns about, you know, not being shown to be wrong or whatever it is. And I must say that the results are impressively mixed. I mean, I've become less and less hopeful that even fairly smart people are open to rational argument, even when it would serve their interests and everyone else's interests. I mean, the communication failures around this are pretty spectacular. And one thing I've changed my mind about, at least provisionally, I would love to be proven wrong here, but

Starting point is 00:29:41 just as a matter of being able to achieve some kind of political consensus around large problems, I've become far less hopeful than I was. I mean, when I think about the prospect of convincing people about climate change and then the need to respond to it. When I map on our failure to respond to coronavirus with the alacrity that was required, when I map that onto the problem of climate change, something that is so abstract, even with one hot year following another, even with one super storm following the next, when you can't really attribute any one change in the weather to this, you know, concern about climate. And it's, in general, just a slow moving catastrophe about which there's still some significant difference of opinion, you know, even among

Starting point is 00:30:45 scientists, you know, not enough to discount the problem, but, you know, certainly more than around the epidemiology of coronavirus, right? And yet we can't even get on the same page around this. It makes me think that the solution for climate change has to be surreptitious at this point. Like there is no political solution. We actually simply have to design products and sources of energy that people find more desirable. And we just – like Tesla cars being the perfect example. Like, at a certain point, people just need to want electric cars more than they want gasoline cars for reasons that have nothing to do with climate just because they're better cars.

Starting point is 00:31:35 And we have to innovate on dozens of fronts in that way and just do whatever we need to do to mitigate the problem despite the fact that we can't persuade anyone that it's even a problem because the persuasion problem now just strikes me as insuperable. So that's kind of a very pessimistic epiphany I feel like I've had, but I just cannot believe how hard it is to talk to even very smart people about what's happening with coronavirus. Yeah, it can be very disheartening. And not to say that I am right or accurate in all things related to coronavirus, but certainly have faced a fair amount of flack for speaking publicly about

Starting point is 00:32:23 it, which is totally fine. People have a right to disagree. And I suppose if I'm trying to look at the silver lining in our inability to communicate, that might be a strange way to put it, is that perhaps our inability to solve one problem, like a pandemic, will in some ways help us to address or at least slow down man's contribution to climate change because it'll just paralyze transportation and factories and many different large-scale forms of sort of carbon contribution to the atmosphere. So there is that. Yes, it is definitely improving our air quality for the moment. Anything else that comes to mind that you've, and perhaps another way to frame it would be

Starting point is 00:33:14 anything that you've been particularly surprised to learn or excited to learn about in the last year? Well, this is something that we, you and I have talked about, I don't think in public. I mean, this actually would have been the thing we would have spoken about at South by Southwest. But having psychedelics come back into my life after what was definitely more than a 25-year hiatus. It was at least 25 years, I think approaching 30 since I took a whopping dose of anything. And it wasn't really on my radar to do again. I forget what the proximate cause, I mean, certainly your

Starting point is 00:34:06 own recent adventures in that area were part of it. I mean, just it's getting sort of in the air for, it's been in the air for many people in recent years. But I guess just the fact that it's it's now a topic of of um very promising research again um significantly inspired by by your commitment to it um and you did excellent uh you you have an excellent podcast interview uh on your podcast with roland griffiths also yeah yeah he was great johns hopkins where you talked about uh crocodile rape among other things or rape by crocodile i believe yes the the uh the often unacknowledged threat of being raped by a crocodile but um happily i've escaped that but i have not doneT. That's one thing I haven't tried. But yeah, so I managed to convince myself to do mushrooms, you know, a larger dose of mushrooms than I've ever done,

Starting point is 00:35:13 you know, in the last year. And again, it had been, you know, over 25 years since I had done anything significant. I hadn't done a lot of mushrooms when I was doing psychedelics. And I had done, you know, I'd done them several times, but never at a very significant dose and never, you know, blindfolded the way, or in the dark, the way Terrence McKenna always recommended it. And I was a distant fan of Terrence's for, you know, while he was alive. I actually met him once very briefly and didn't actually know him. But so I kind of, I view that as a missed opportunity because he really had a beautiful mind and, you know, I've listened to, you know, a ton of his stuff and he's just perhaps the most entertaining speaker we've ever had on any topic.

Starting point is 00:36:10 But I should say that probably half of what he said was fairly crazy, or at least half of the views to which he was strongly committed I consider to be fairly crazy and some disproven. Yeah, yeah. He's very entertaining. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, he's a great example of almost not even mattering whether someone's right because they're just – they're such a good speaker. speaker but um and he and he just uh again so i didn't know him i just met him once very briefly um in 1992 he died in 2000 so i certainly could have hung out with him and just just didn't and um but that was a period where i was i was getting really into meditation and also I was taking psychedelics, but usually LSD.

Starting point is 00:37:07 But then I just stopped because meditation became the center of the bullseye for me. And it still is. But after that many years, I just felt like there was something I wanted to experience in the psychedelic space. And I recognized I had never taken mushrooms in the way that Terrence and others had always recommended. And so I wanted to experience that. So I was surprised to decide it was suddenly relevant to do that and then kind of surprised to do it. And also, you know, very happy to have had the experience I had and find it to be as useful as I found it to be. So there was kind of just a kind of reaming out of the pipes of my mind that seemed very useful. And I think I will certainly do that periodically. I mean, I think it's, you know, I didn't come away

Starting point is 00:37:58 from that experience feeling like, okay, I never need to do that again. That was, I'm done. It really did seem like a, by no means the same thing as meditation. I mean, it can be easily harmonized with it, but it's just not, it's just a different project on some level. Because in terms of transcending yourself, getting rid of this illusion of being the subject,

Starting point is 00:38:23 or being the vulnerable, you know, little man riding the horse of consciousness. You can do that without any of the pyrotechnics of the psychedelic experience. And, you know, conversely, I'm convinced you can have a fairly transcendent, you know, beautiful, transcendently beautiful or harrowing, depending, psychedelic experience without losing the sense of self, you know, or at least, you know, it's not that the experience isn't characterized much by a true transcendence of self. It's just your perception is vastly altered and your conceptual framework is vastly altered. But you're still a subject now either enjoying or suffering the consequences of having your nervous system driven from below by the pharmacology. So it is different.

Starting point is 00:39:20 And again, there's no contradiction between them. But anyway, I just came away feeling like, yeah, it kind of just renewed my interest and commitment to it. But it's hard to imagine doing it in the current environment, I must say. It's like there's so much that is now being held in abeyance by this lack of normalcy. I mean, it's just, I find it very difficult to even articulate what seems to have happened here. I mean, on some level, my day-to-day experience has changed very little. You know, I count myself very lucky as someone who, you know, I can basically do all the work I was doing precisely as I was doing it and be essentially quarantined, right? I mean, I was working from home anyway. My team is completely distributed. So there was nothing to change there. All my work with them has always been in Slack and on the phone and by email. And so it's like nothing has changed. And all I have to do is release podcasts and, you know, finish a book and it

Starting point is 00:40:26 just, it's all, nothing's changed, but yet on some level, everything has changed. And I feel like we're, you know, I feel like I'm in a, you know, a spaceship where at any moment the breach in the wall can be catastrophic. And it's, it's, it's a, it's a very bizarre feeling, which I know everyone is sharing to one or another degree. that you appended to the Roland Griffiths conversation on your podcast, which was a description of your five-gram dried mushroom experience, which I thought was absolutely beautiful. Is that available, or do you have any plans to make it available outside of the app? Yeah, I think, actually, we are just – it's either on YouTube now or it's going to be released with some video backing to it.

Starting point is 00:41:30 I think like something like a great cloud photography or something. But there's something – it was just an audio track, but we've illustrated it with some video. And then that should be released very soon if it's not already out. Great. Yeah. What would people search to find that? video and then that that should be released very soon if it's not already out great um yeah what would people search to find that um what might they search i'm sure it'll be on my youtube channel and it'll be something i mean i'm sure mushroom trip will be in the title sam's excellent journey yeah yeah exactly yes yes not sam not being raped by a crocodile. related to carryover effects, if any, that you have observed after recording that description of your experience? Did you see any persistent changes to your perception, behavior, or anything

Starting point is 00:42:37 else? Not necessarily permanent, but persistent for a period of time, whether days or weeks. Did you observe anything like that? Yeah, and this has always been true of my experience with psychedelics. And, you know, unfortunately, it has gone in both directions. I mean, so when I had, you know, back in the day when I had some very unpleasant acid trips, which, you know, finally convinced me that taking acid was essentially just like a spin of the psychological roulette wheel that, you know, you just don't know what number is going to come up. And at that point, the negative side was coming up enough that I just thought, okay, this really just isn't worth it. And it was especially not worth it because I felt that the knock-on effects of having that experience for 10 or 12 hours lasted for weeks and even months. Like, I just felt like, so when I would have a good trip, which is to say, you know, a truly expansive, beautiful trip, you know,

Starting point is 00:43:48 the after effects of that were in the same register. You know, I felt more expanded and with a greater purchase on, you know, a heightened sense of beauty. And that would last for quite some time. But conversely, the kind of contracted, neurotic, kind of shame-encumbered space that I would experience in a bad trip would also leave some residue for some period of time. So, you know, I felt like a worse person for weeks or even months after some of those trips. And so that's why I kind of got out of the game. But, you know, this trip was, you know, almost entirely positive. So, yeah, as a kind of emotional and perceptual reference point, yeah, I felt better in many ways afterwards.

Starting point is 00:44:55 And I think I probably still do. I mean, again, it's not permanent in the sense that it's not that it has blocked every other state of consciousness from arising thereafter. I mean, so, you know, after that trip, which now is, you know, several months old, you know, I've experienced anxiety. I've experienced fear. I've experienced anger. I've experienced, you know, everything is still on the menu. But as a reference point, it has stayed pretty vivid. So it's easier to convince yourself that when you've had an experience like that,

Starting point is 00:45:35 and this really is the reason to take psychedelics, even if you are convinced that they're neither necessary nor sufficient, right? So that they're—I mean, even if you're convinced that meditation is the only way to really transform your mind in the way that you want to, the thing about psychedelics is that it can give you—I mean, and as you know, you know, each in different ways, they can give you an experience of states of consciousness, which for which there is no possibility of skepticism. As a meditator, for the longest time, I mean, for really for forever, so that you can just torpedo the whole project, you can remain fundamentally uncertain as to whether or not there's a there there. It's like, is this really going to work? Is there really something to notice here?

Starting point is 00:46:32 I mean, does life ever really get any better than it's been in the last five minutes? Is there anything to realize? Or maybe I'm just fooling myself, right? Like all of it, you can cycle in that space of doubt for years and years and get absolutely nowhere. But, you know, five grams of mushrooms, if nothing else, prove to you that it is possible to have just an unrecognizably different experience of consciousness. And, you know, that's available given the requisite stimulus, right? And, you know, the drug doesn't get your brain to do something that your brain isn't capable of doing, right? It's not like you've been given a different brain. The same serotonergic system that is being leveraged by psychedelics is always there working for you. And it gets leveraged in every moment or not based on how you use your attention and based on the collisions and, you know, just everything else you're doing neurophysiologically.

Starting point is 00:47:49 And it is just absolutely possible to have a very different moment-to-moment experience of the world. And most of us, I consider myself among the untalented people who really probably just would not have seen the merits of meditation, but for the fact that I'd had a psychedelic experience, in that case with MDMA, which just proved to me that there had to be a there there, that people in the various contemplative traditions who were talking about things like unconditional love, They weren't making this up. They weren't just epileptics or frauds. You know, this is a real continuum of human consciousness that is there to be explored, and you just have to figure out how to make your mind adequate to that project.

Starting point is 00:48:41 And psychedelics definitely reveal that. It is just incredible how different the experiences can be on different compounds, even though they may fall or be thought of as falling into the same category of, say, psychedelics. To take two, which are often thought of as close cousins, and on some level, they are similar. But you take, say, LSD, which is, from a receptor standpoint, quite promiscuous with the duration of effect that you mentioned, which can be really long, right? Eight to 12 hours, which on one hand, it's tempting to say, well, that's earth time. It doesn't really matter. Just like when people say, oh, I'm going to do DMT because it lasts five to 15 minutes. I don't think that's the proper way to frame the decision or think about it, because that could feel like a thousand lifetimes strung together in terms of your subjective experience of those 15 minutes. But nonetheless, say LSD,

Starting point is 00:49:53 just in terms of duration of effect, and then you look at, say, mushrooms, four to six hours, generally, there are different species, of course, and all sorts of variables. What I find and what many people find difficult about LSD, there are a few things. Number one, it is so potent on a microgram level that it is easy to misdose. And the difference between 100 micrograms and 200 micrograms is hard to overstate how different those two experiences can be. And that is a drop, less than a drop, I mean, depending on how it's being administered. And then the, I think what makes for many people, and I'd be curious to hear your perspective on this, but mushrooms somewhat easier to navigate is that the on-ramp and the off-ramp,

Starting point is 00:50:53 the on-ramp is a little longer generally than LSD, so the full onset and peak of effects, if you're looking at the pharmacokinetics. But the off-ramp is generally, for most people, going to be a lot faster than LSD in the sense that with LSD, you might have, and many people do have the experience of being fully journeying in some transcendent psychedelic experience, dissolution of the self, etc., for four to five hours. And then there is this tail of an additional two to four hours, and there are a fair number of people who will have 24-hour-plus experiences. I don't know, who knows what the exact percentage of the population is, but having volunteered at Zendo, which is a psychedelic harm reduction volunteer outfit at places like Burning Man and so on, let's call it one in 30 people would be my estimate, have a 24 hour plus response. hours where you are not sober. You are absolutely not sober. You're still very malleable and

Starting point is 00:52:07 everything is intensified, but you are not journeying. And so I find that that in-between space can be quite challenging to navigate because for a lot of folks, they've taken the eye mask off maybe the music's playing me or they're trying to eat crackers with their friends and then they have this huge surge of shame or other intense emotion yeah but intellectually they think that they are in control so to speak right and uh that that can cause all sorts of difficulties that can persist, as you mentioned. Yeah, when you're eating a cracker with both hands, that's a telltale sign that you're not yet fully in control.

Starting point is 00:52:58 Right, yeah. If you're holding your Triscuit with more than eight fingers, it's probably a sign that you're not fully sober. Yeah, well, this gets to an issue of, on some level, a dose that's too small runs a liability that is, on some level, even greater than a dose that's too large, or at least, I mean, this is the way I've begun to think about it based on my experience. It's just the, I mean, first we should say that for psychedelics like psilocybin, mushrooms, mushrooms and LSD, you're nowhere near a lethal dose of the compound at any dose you're liable to take. Even the most aggressive and psychologically destabilizing dose, physiologically is not likely to be toxic for you. So that's not an argument for taking as much as you can get your hands on.

Starting point is 00:54:07 It's just that these are physically very safe drugs. And I would definitely not say that of MDMA. I mean, MDMA you can clearly overdose on. Yeah, you can clearly die, hyperthermia. I've seen people in the same volunteer capacity at different events, 104, 105 degree temperatures which is how you melt your brain uh and can die certainly ibogaine or iboga also can have some severe cardiac complications and people do die of cardiac arrest using ibogaine and iboga. So you really have to know your compound. But psilocybin and LSD have effectively no known LD50,

Starting point is 00:54:53 meaning a dose that would be expected to kill, say, 500 of 1,000 people in a room if they were given that dose, which can be established for lots of things, including some common drugs like acetaminophen, which can be established for lots of things, including some common drugs like acetaminophen, which can be very dangerous. So, right, right. So yeah, so it's not, and again, I'm sure people have had heart attacks and, and strokes and other, uh, you know, even fatal events on LSD or psilocybin and maybe as a consequence of what's happening for them psychologically, being part of that. But it's just that we just know that the drugs themselves are physically very well tolerated. And so that's not the concern. But now I've forgotten

Starting point is 00:55:42 why I got into that. Let's see. I was talking about the duration of these two compounds and then we're talking about Triscuits eating it with ten fingers indicative of not being sober so the reason to take more rather than less for me

Starting point is 00:56:00 or the reason why you know just kind of imagining you're just going to get your toe in the water. I'm going to leave aside microdosing as its own thing. I'm not talking about that. But like the reason why maybe five grams of mushrooms could be better than two grams of mushrooms for somebody is that, you know, you can do the arithmetic for LSD there, is that taking enough reliably launches you past all of your personal psychological content, right? And the place I don't like to be and the place I don't recommend people spending much time is in the domain of one's personal concerns, life concerns, the kinds of thoughts that besiege you when you sit down to meditate, to stay on that strata

Starting point is 00:56:55 of your mind with this turbocharged experience of psilocybin or LSD, you know, driving you there, you know, that for the most part, I mean, you obviously can have personal insights and you can have kind of breakthroughs with respect to your relationship to other people. You know, I know that's the case, but generally speaking, it is a recipe for a lot of, you know anguish, which you can actually bypass if you go far enough out and have a truly transcendent experience. At least transcendent in the sense that what you're in contact with doesn't have a reference point in your life, right? You're not thinking about your mom or your wife or your, like, on the way out you might be and on the way back you might be. But where you land when, you know, you're actually at the peak is a place that doesn't have those kinds of reference points. And again, it can be very, very beautiful or it can be very, very painful.

Starting point is 00:58:10 I mean, it doesn't guarantee a, quote, good trip. But it's, I mean, for me, that's the real opportunity of true psychedelics, unlike something like MDMA where, you know where to be working on your relationships and to be thinking about specific people in your life or even relating directly to them, that seems like a totally appropriate use of that tool. I agree. I think MDMA is better described as an empathogen than a psychedelic. I don't think of it as a psychedelic at all. There's some dispute over how to apply that term to different things.

Starting point is 00:58:53 But I would add to what you said, that the analogy I use, I guess metaphor, quite a lot when discussing this with people is that of airplane taxi and takeoff and the experience of popping through the clouds. So you have this taxiing period, you're waiting, you're waiting, you have this acceleration, takeoff, a slight amount of turbulence and then very often as you go through cloud cover you have even more turbulence and then you pop through the clouds and you have hopefully a smooth ride or at least a ride from a very very very different vantage point. And to your point about dosage, if we're talking about say mushrooms, one of the psychological risks of underdosing, which is quite common because people are understandably nervous, and very often this is done in settings where people do not have a sitter, which I always recommend against, meaning if someone doesn't have a sitter, they're likely to want to dose more conservatively, and in doing so, often take something, let's just say, in the identification of I, what constitutes I changes quite a lot. In the psychedelic experience, you can have complete ego dissolution, you can have complete, what I would perhaps call disassembly at higher doses, where your experience does not resemble your ordinary

Starting point is 01:00:48 waking reality in any sense whatsoever. Time, dimension, language all disappear, I disappears, etc. But ratcheting that down, you can have the experience of I, Tim, am experiencing these various things, but what constitutes I and the boundaries that normally exist in your waking life that separate you cleanly from the external world are very permeable, very different. And the related point with, say, LSD is that on the descent, instead of just going straight through the clouds, you sort of hang out in the clouds, or can for a pretty extended period of time. And that is where you can come out of a beautiful transcendent experience. And this is not, by the way, a knock on LSD. I think it's a tremendously interesting tool for the right people with the right supervision. But there is a tail end where many people perceive their journey to be over where very messy personal material can come up with strong emotional charge. And they're simply not, they've taken their seatbelt off, and they're going to get their luggage out of the overhead compartment and they're still and they're still in the clouds they just don't realize it you know

Starting point is 01:02:09 yeah so it's uh you know these things are very very strong they're very they can be very powerful so i i always you know advise caution with these things uh well even, even in the best case, when you're talking about the come down from, let's say, LSD, let's say you've had a perfectly expansive, beautiful, transcendent trip, and then you're coming down. What I remember from those experiences and probably the first 10 acid trips I took

Starting point is 01:02:48 were literally had not a single moment where I could even understand what was meant by the concept of a bad trip. I remember being the guy who was thinking, what are people talking about? A bad trip? I couldn't figure out, where would you point your finger to, you know, in which direction could you possibly go in that experience to wind up someplace

Starting point is 01:03:14 bad? I mean, it just made no sense to me. And then on some subsequent trip, it made all too much sense. Famous last words. Exactly. Talk about hubris um but uh anyway so but even from these trips i remember coming down the experience was one of feeling my mind encumbered by the very you know artifices and structures and kind of diversions of attention you know, artifices and structures and kind of diversions of attention, you know,

Starting point is 01:03:46 psychological concerns on some level that block the expansive experience I had just had, right? So, you know, you come down, like one moment you feel like Jesus, and the next moment you begin to notice the reasons, the kind of rapidly accruing reasons why you're not quite qualified to be Jesus, right? And if you're in relationship to people, I mean, if you're actually having a conversation with someone who you were just tripping with, say, that begins – all of that begins to fall into place in dialogue with others. And you notice your neurosis, or at least your potential for neurosis to kind of get reconstructed in front of you as you moment by moment. And I remember that being painful. I mean, just to witness kind of the capture of my attention in something that, you know, moments before would have been unthinkable, right? And... Pete Yeah, you go from Jesus to Woody Allen in your own head in about 60 seconds.

Starting point is 01:04:55 Pete Right, right. And you've got bad hair in either case. Pete You know, I just envy anyone with hair. that's right there is no there is no bad hair yeah i i i hope at some point i mean this this would be quite a distance in the future i would imagine that we will actually have scientific studies looking at the combination of these compounds, for instance, using MDMA or other empathogens. There are quite a few that could be used as an on-ramp for, say, LSD therapy or psilocybin and combination therapy that I think could be very, very interesting. We don't yet have the data we need and want for these compounds in isolation, so I think that's a fair distance in the future, but I look forward to the day when more of that can be done.

Starting point is 01:06:01 Right, right. Yeah, one thing I'm looking forward to, which I mentioned at the end of this addendum, at the end of the podcast with Roland, there was that one study done sure there's some way to optimize this protocol. It wouldn't just be straight silence. I mean, there might be some reflection about what's coming and then some integration period, but just to actually kind of systematize a retreat-like approach to doing a high-dose psychedelic experience, that seems very promising. The people who are doing it, what do you guess? I'm laughing because I'm just imagining, I did a silent retreat at Spirit Rock, and there had 200 people doing a high dose psychedelic journey in one room it would be anything but a silent retreat right that's a very crowded retreat it might not have been 200 but i would say at least i mean at least 80 somewhere between yeah yeah i think it's about

Starting point is 01:07:21 100 up there yeah um yeah so how you physically physically, how you arrange the environment and how you keep people in their own space and give them adequate guidance and all of that, I don't know how that's brought off. I know there are places that are doing it. There's one in Jamaica. There's one in Holland. I mean, a bunch of these places. There's one in Mexico. A bunch got in touch with me after this podcast. As far as I can tell,

Starting point is 01:07:47 none are really as locked down in their protocols as I would, I mean, they didn't seem like places I could recommend based on what I could see of what they were doing. No Facebook ads with your face for psychedelic retreats anytime soon?

Starting point is 01:08:04 Yeah, they may, someone may have produced some, but they're not authorized. So, if you see any, let me know. psychedelic experiences or psychedelic experience overall is there is a common pattern among first-time or relatively novice users of psychedelics to develop somewhat of a messiah complex after they've seen the promised land. And they have one experience or two experiences. Very often it's after one. They have this profound transformative experience and they become a proselytizer for psychedelic use. And grandma, you need to do ayahuasca.

Starting point is 01:09:00 You know, little Johnny, nephew Johnny, you need to do ayahuasca, etc., which is at best irresponsible and also very, very dangerous. And so, my recommendation to people who are experimenting with psychedelics or considering it, number one, the legal side effects can be just as great as any other side effects, so I'm not advising nor a sand that you break the law. Secondly, if nonetheless you are going to experiment, I would ask that you put enough mileage under your belt to at least once be, as I sometimes say to my friends, tumbled and humbled before you are given your card-carrying capabilities of proselytizing psychedelics. It's my strong feeling that you need to have not what I would consider a bad trip, because I only

Starting point is 01:10:03 distinguish between safe and unsafe trips, not good and bad. I think some of the most valuable experiences you can have are exceptionally difficult psychedelic experience and those are your first three or four innings keep going possibly safely obviously until you have a harrowing holy fucking shit experience that takes you a while to digest and process before you run around like the town crier telling everyone they should do psychedelics. Yeah. Yeah. I think that's good advice because you, there's no way to appreciate how difficult a quote bad trip can be unless you've had one. Right. And if you, and in fact, if you've only had good trips, you're really, you're almost the worst judge of what is possible for somebody else and for yourself at some future time point.

Starting point is 01:11:12 So, yeah. I mean, that was – I was actually one of those people, you know, back in the day when I first – because I was taking psychedelics the first time around before, I was kind of in this weird cohort because I was, you know, in my peer group, I was kind of the only person doing what I was doing. I mean, you know, when I would go on a meditation retreat when I was 20 or 21, there were no other 20 and 21-year-olds on these retreats. Everyone had kind of been through the 60s, and so I was surrounded by 40 and 50-year-olds who had been doing this stuff for 20 years or so.

Starting point is 01:11:58 And so it was with psychedelics. So when I got my hands on MDMA, it had come out of the therapeutic community right after. It was a couple of years after it was made Schedule I. But I didn't know anyone. I mean, perhaps there were many people my age taking it, but I just wasn't aware of it. I didn't know anyone who had taken it. So when I got my hands on psychedelics and meditation and the combination of all of these esoteric things and kind of rebooted the 60s for myself, I was— Your private revival of the 60s. Exactly. I was a one-man Grateful Dead tour without ever getting into the dead.

Starting point is 01:12:47 But I just was not meeting, there was no one in my world who knew anything about any of this stuff. So yeah, I was kind of proselytizing and I guided many people on psychedelic trips. I just branded myself somebody who was qualified to do this after, I don't know, half a dozen acid trips. And nothing especially bad happened. But obviously I didn't have the experience that one would want to have to actually be doing that. And, yeah, it's a little bit like what happened to me when I got into Brazilian jiu-jitsu. I mean, the moment I got into that, it was like every conversation had to be about Brazilian jiu-jitsu. And that lasted until I got, you know, injured. And, yeah, so now I have a slightly different conversation about Brazilian jiu-jitsu.

Starting point is 01:13:50 You should really try it. Oh, wait. Oh, I didn't tell you. Last week, I had both of my Achilles tendons torn. Yeah, asterisk. Yeah, psychedelics are still endlessly fascinating to me. They have not in any way lost their fascination for me. But what about in the current environment? I mean, can you imagine tripping now, or does it just seem like the wrong setting? confident that there would be no value in safe and responsible use of psychedelics during these times. In part because these times are not going to be—this is not a—

Starting point is 01:14:54 It's not two weeks. This is not a 90-minute movie that we're watching. This is going to be an extended period of time. And I think there could be applications for people who have a lot of experience. I don't think this is necessarily the time to decide you're going to find some homebrew instructions for ayahuasca plus ingredients on the dark web and do a solo journey into the dark night of the soul. I don't think that's a good idea by any stretch of the imagination. But for people with a lot of experience, I do think there could be applications. There are probably more applications for something like MDMA, which allows you to process a lot while not deactivating,

Starting point is 01:15:49 but down-regulating fear response, if that makes sense. Part of the reason, and I'm not giving a neurochemical or pharmacological explanation here, but MDMA can be incredibly effective for treating post-traumatic stress disorder. I mean, some of the results are unbelievable. I mean, if you look at the studies MAPS has been designing and funding and implementing in some cases. You have patients with 17 years, median 17 years or 17 and a half years, I think this is from their phase two trials, persistent PTSD, severe symptoms, who after one or two sessions with MDMA, granted, plus lots of integration and prep and post work with very highly trained, generally highly trained therapists who go from severe to asymptomatic after one or two sessions. Now, that raises many questions. And one is, how the hell can that possibly work? And I'm going to, I'm sure, bastardize this and should probably have Rick Doblin on the podcast at some point to actually fact check and correct me on things.

Starting point is 01:17:11 But I feel like I know what they're doing pretty well. like it, allow you to revisit trauma or examine trauma, whether lowercase t or capital T, from a somewhat detached observer perspective as an adult so you can recontextualize and process that trauma without re-traumatizing yourself. And that's not always the case. And I've seen a lot of video footage of actual sessions within the context of training, and people can have a very tough time. This can also open up Pandora's box where afterwards people have said things, for instance, they feel tremendous shame about, etc. So it's not without risk. There are risks. But for people who have experience, I think that MDMA could possibly be a tool that helps them to downregulate fear and anxiety response and process some of what is happening to them in a way that allows them to be more sort of proactive instead

Starting point is 01:18:47 of reactive afterwards. That doesn't mean I'm recommending people do MDMA right now, but I do think that if I had to choose between MDMA and psychedelics, I would probably choose MDMA. Right. Well, I recommend that you wipe down the box that the MDMA comes in. Yeah, difficult. The question of procurement is a whole separate topic that is probably best not discussed on a podcast. Stay six feet away from your MDMA dealer. Just lob thedma over the fence right right so so i suppose there's those are a few of my thoughts um but people are struggling right now people are struggling and i think you know in many respects people are having a psychedelic millions of people are having a psychedelic, millions of people are having a psychedelic experience right now, in so much as this set of crises and this pandemic has acted, much like LSD,

Starting point is 01:19:54 as a nonspecific amplifier of everything that's underneath the surface. And if you have mild anxiety disorders or tendencies to anxiety that can be managed under normal circumstances, there's a good chance that that is magnified right now. on the same page in having worried up until this moment that people aren't taking the health implications seriously enough. It hasn't been that we've been too panicked by this. It's just that we actually haven't been worried enough early enough to take the steps that we need to take to actually get off these exponential curves and mitigate the spread of this contagion. But forget about the virus. If there were just some invisible force that were having the economic effects that we're now witnessing, that would be a civilization-rattling form of stress for almost everyone. I mean, you and I are in uniquely fortunate circumstances in that, you know, we're both well off and able to more or less work, you know,

Starting point is 01:21:16 almost as we were before, I mean, you know, apart from not doing live events or anything else of that sort, you know, we can more or less just continue going. But most people are not in that situation. And so even if there was just no concern about the possibility that you or anyone you love is going to wind up in an ICU on a ventilator, which is happening and is going to increasingly happen to many, many people. Leaving all that aside, people are understandably terrified about the economic volatility we're seeing, but it's not just up and down and up and down. In certain sectors, it's just down and down and down and down with no end in sight.

Starting point is 01:22:08 If you look at the service sector, if you look at restaurants, all of that is very scary, especially given the way in which it interacts with everything. It's just the way in which our society is so lacking in resilience based on there not being a great safety net, even though we're trying to provide one on the fly here with trillions of dollars. And there's a level of wealth inequality that is increasingly toxic where one side of the aisle is fairly delusional in the degree to which they're denying the nature of the problem. And the other side is, in the worst case, just willing to make politics out of a pandemic. And it's like, we can't even talk to each other about, you know, how to solve the most basic human problems. So it's incredibly stressful, you know, leaving aside the actual reality of the pandemic. It is. It is. And you're absolutely right. I mean, we're in very fortunate positions. I have family members, friends who've been laid off from all types of jobs, not just service industry jobs. I think I've been, I don't think, I know I've been sort of beating myself up a lot about not doing enough or perhaps not doing the right things, etc., etc.

Starting point is 01:23:57 Do you have people in your life, like has this been happening one-to-one where know, friends and family members who you've had to burn a lot of fuel trying to convince to take this seriously? Or are you talking just about your public messaging about it? It's both. It's both. because I discussed this publicly quite early, I want to say the first blog post I put up about it was the second or third week of February, which I caught a lot of hell for. And then the campaigning for cancellation of South By, which I caught a lot of hell for. So that was actually quite easy because I had a high degree of conviction that this was inevitable on some level, given the mathematics involved. And the fine details of the metrics could be off, and the case fatality rates and direction, nonetheless, I mean, the picture emerging was very clear to me. So, I felt good about that. I think what's been difficult is having many of the people who initially didn't take it seriously getting caught on their heels in really bad positions with family members to account for and so on in different locations who then came to me for help with everything. And I couldn't handle it.

Starting point is 01:25:36 And by not handle it, I don't mean emotionally. I mean, it was logistically impossible. Hundreds of text messages. And it's just like, I't take six hours on with each of these people to get them up to speed it's not physically possible uh so it's it's been challenging and i don't mean to make it a it's not a sob story because there there are many millions of people who are going to be having a much harder time. And I guess the question that comes to mind for me to you is, what would you recommend to people who are scared or suffering right now? Recognizing there are real external factors to consider, but also recognizing that we often suffer twice or suffer when we need not suffer, at least in our minds, by imagining the worst-case scenarios and perseverating on worst-case scenarios and being consumed by fear. Are there any recommendations that you would make to people who are fearful or confused in these times? I know that's very broad and may be asking a lot, but how would you respond to that?

Starting point is 01:26:55 Well, I guess the place from which I'm, you know, I can be fairly prescriptive is toward all the people who are in situations similar to our own. I mean, in the sense that, I mean, there are people who are in totally non-analogous situations to our own who, for whom, you know, the choice to stay home is not possible, right? In fact, it would be an abdication of their own ethical responsibilities if they were to stay home. I mean, there are people who need to work in our ICUs, and there are people who need to deliver food, and they keep the supply chain running. It's like all these people are heroes for just doing their jobs. And so I view the ethical imperative to get out of circulation and not increase the disease burden and the burden on our healthcare system, that falls to everyone else who can do their work from home, for whom being out in the world is not actually helpful to anyone.

Starting point is 01:28:00 And so those are two very different sets of people. And so the people who very different sets of people. are going to get sick or that they are going to be unable to, if they're in health care, care for the people who are already sick or soon to be sick or sick now and don't know it. But for the people who can reinvent themselves or step away from their careers and jobs, and especially for the people who are in fortunate enough positions to not actually have to sweat the financial implications of this in the near term. I just think there's a different set of ethical considerations that come online. I mean, I think we should just be looking for opportunities to help the people who are more vulnerable than we are. I mean, so, you know, if, I mean,

Starting point is 01:29:13 all of us have people in our lives who we employ, however, peripherally, you know, I mean, just like, take the person who cuts your hair, if you have hair. I'll leave you out of this, Tim. But I still have some of my hair. And, you know, so it's just like, you know, I know how often I get a haircut. Well, I know I'm not getting a haircut for, some imaginary haircuts here and help keep the person who cuts my hair afloat during this period? So anything like that that you can think of doing, right, to support people who you know are taking, you know, in many cases, 100% hit to their economic well-being, it just seems if you're in a position to be able to do that, you should, right? And that's – and so, you know, I would just advocate that we recognize that we are And we're all reliant on everyone else not breaking down and failing here. And so our effort to keep our world together can't be solitary. I mean, it can't be solitary at the national level and it can't be solitary at the national level, and it can't be solitary at the individual family level. I mean, it can't be merely about making sure you have enough food in your house, because you can't possibly have enough food in your house so that you are no longer reliant on the supply chain and on the service worker who would deliver the food from the market that you're now scared to go to, that person still has to have a viable source of funds.

Starting point is 01:31:13 And so anyway, it's just to view our connections, to keep our connectedness to the people we know, certainly, and even the people we don't, more in mind here as we hunker down as we should. I mean, again, I really do think it is an imperative for us to understand collectively, I mean, not speaking with the country in mind. I mean, this can't even be a state-by-state effort. We can't, you know, all of us who are out of circulation now are more or less just waiting for everyone else to get the message. Because this is going to go on for a very, very long time if we can't extinguish it and slow the contagion, you know, over the next couple of months. And it's only by doing that and then all the subsequent testing and contact tracing that we're actually going to return the world and the economy to something like normal. I mean, there is no rebooting of this economy with a contagion like this raging and people

Starting point is 01:32:20 falling sick in the numbers that they will. I mean, what we're going to do is just pendulum swing back and forth from trying to restart the economy and then realizing, oh, my God, this is just too scary. You know, I just saw a crazy documentary about what's really happening in the hospitals. And, okay, now I'm going back into hiding. And, you know, we're going to have that experience on a collective level over the course of months, and it's just going to be needlessly costly in terms of lives and our economic well-being. Whereas the truth is we could resolve this in something like a month if we had our act together. I mean, literally, we could lock down for a month, and this would burn itself out. If they did it correctly. Yeah. If they did it correctly. That would require isolating in fever clinics or elsewhere family members who are positive from their families, sadly. But yes. Or family. So, even in a worse case than that, just, you know,

Starting point is 01:33:23 everyone isolating in their homes and then maybe the rest of the family would get it, and then whoever would have to go to the hospital would go to the hospital. But as long as we're six feet away from everyone other than our family members and out of circulation, this thing could self-extinguish. It's just we're not showing any kind of aptitude for doing that because of the nature of our political conversation mainly. My impression looking at the confusion and hopelessness and frustration among many of my friends, and this is not limited to people who are as fortunate as we are. This is even lots of folks I know who say are gardeners or house cleaners who also want to help in some fashion, the question that I get very often from top to bottom is, which non-profit should I give money to? And I think that will become clearer as things progress, but right now there are a thousand chickens with their heads cut off running around trying to help and really confusing things. There are a few signals in the noise. I think Flexport, flexport.org, forward slash donate is doing excellent work. Operationmasks.org I find interesting, although I don't understand all of it. But there's a lot of confusion. And in the meantime, there are things, as you said, that you can do to help just by focusing on the people you know. If you look back,

Starting point is 01:35:10 just say a typical week from six months ago, what did it look like Monday to Sunday? And you can identify the coffee shop, you can identify the restaurants. You can identify people you may have paid for God knows what on a weekly basis, a monthly basis. Doesn't mean you have to feel obligated by yourself to subsidize all of those folks. But what you could do is ask the question that I was told was the most important at the beginning, actually, of a rafting trip, my first ever rafting trip. And Kelly Starrett, who's an incredible guy, the ready state, incredible PT, incredible athletic performance coach, all around good guy. And he used to be an Olympic level kayaker. And he said to everybody who was on the trip, because he was co-organizing it, he said, the most important four words that you can utter are, how can I help? How can I help?

Starting point is 01:36:12 If people are doing stuff and your hands are empty, how can I help? And what I've noticed, at least in having conversations with people I've offered to help that oftentimes it's just asking, how can I help? Can I help you? That is in and of itself helpful. Does that make sense? It doesn't have to translate to them accepting your help or asking for help, but just reaching out and making the offer and indicating that it's a standing offer, even if they don't accept it now, I think is tremendously psychologically helpful. So you don't have to wait for the perfect nonprofit to present itself. You can talk to those people who you already know. Yeah, and it's also just worth remembering how disruptive and, you know, the decision about whether to have a funeral or not. I mean, in most cases, it's a straightforward decision of just not to do that,

Starting point is 01:37:32 you know, and just think of the implications of that. I mean, the rest of life is going on, you know, and, you know, and all the bad parts of life are still going on. People are getting sick and dying from causes that have nothing to do with coronavirus. And all of that's being made more difficult. And just deciding whether you have to see a doctor for some other reason now is incredibly stressful. And so there's just so much going on now that people are under a ton of stress. And again, it's almost perfectly designed to be hard to solve. You know, it's not like, I mean, initially the analogy to September 11th came to everyone's mind. It's like, this is yet another intrusion of history.

Starting point is 01:38:28 This is another moment where we need to wake up and realize, okay, the society destabilizing events are still on the menu. This is the kind of thing you're living through now that people will be talking about long after you're gone. But on another level, this is totally unanalogous to September 11th. I mean, it's a much bigger deal, and it's much harder to respond to intelligently. And it's not to say we responded to September 11th with much intelligence, but this is big, and no one alive has really gone through something quite like this. I mean, this is outside of everyone's lived experience, you know, how to deal with this. up for not having clear frameworks for making decisions, not feeling clarity around many things,

Starting point is 01:39:51 not knowing how to help optimally or being able to figure it out. And the fact of the matter is, it makes very little sense for me to beat myself up about that because it is not, at least not always, reflective of a personal flaw. It's a collective experience that millions of people are having right now. This is very different from anything anyone living has ever faced. And that's not to say that the world as we know it is going to hell in a handbasket. I'm not saying that. But the circumstances and the problems and the challenges that have been created else, to be gentle with oneself and compassionate if you can be, because it's not, difficulties, the difficulties that most people are facing are not reflective of any individual flaw they are reflective of a a a terrifying and unique situation and the response of millions of people collectively yeah oh yeah i mean there's so many cases where it's not reflective of a flaw at all it's just it's just you're in a sector of the economy where um you know obviously you're getting zeroed just, you're in a sector of the economy where, um, you know, obviously

Starting point is 01:41:26 you're getting zeroed out, right. Just because of the nature of the problem. It's like, just imagine, you know, owning the best restaurant in New York city, right. You know, you, you may not survive this interruption in your activity through no fault of your own. This really is like a stray bullet on that level that just hits you. So that's why we need – I mean, there are silver linings here. I mean, we need to notice all the ways in which our assumptions and our ideologies and our cherished notions about how the world should be are not serving us well here. I mean, to take the fashionable ideas in the tech community, a lot of people in tech who are either avowed libertarians or quasi-libertarians or just fans of Ayn Rand, but they have this basic idea that the government is useless and the less we have of it, the better. We are really suffering under a lack of effective governance now. And there are certain lessons here that should be indelible.

Starting point is 01:42:49 And one is, you can't rely on a piecemeal private response to pandemic, right? And it's not to say that we're learning a lot about what's wrong with the government and the bureaucracy and the level of red tape to cut through to actually do something as simple as order masks and other protective equipment. Some of the things that we're witnessing now are absolutely bewildering. The fact that there's still a role to be played by private parties in acquiring PPE, protective equipment for hospitals and first responders. I mean, it's crazy. It's like, why on earth does Elon Musk need to buy ventilators

Starting point is 01:43:31 and deliver them to the state of California? Why isn't the state of California in a position to buy those Chinese ventilators or individual hospitals? It makes no sense. And yet, and it's actually, in this case, it's not for lack of money. It's just, there's just a lack of agility on the part of government here. But whatever systems we need to put in place for the next pandemic, we really need to figure this out. I mean, this is, as bad as this will be, and again, I think you and I agree here that we're still at the beginning of this thing.

Starting point is 01:44:09 This is still a dress rehearsal for something that could be much, much worse that on some level is guaranteed to eventually happen, whether it's in our lifetime or not. I mean, it's just sheer good luck that we're facing a pandemic that has the lethality of this one and not one that's 10 or 30x this one. So we have to keep an inventory of all of the lessons being learned here and do better next time. And so, I mean, there are several silver linings here. There's a lot we are learning, or at least potentially learning, and collectively in response to the need to have institutions that actually work rather than just populist demagoguery that appeals to half of a society, and the need to have systems in place and supply chains and not to be utterly reliant on other countries to produce necessary equipment and medicine

Starting point is 01:45:22 and to stockpile things that we know we will eventually need or could need in massive quantities. I mean, to speak of America in particular, I mean, we're the richest society that's ever existed. And, you know, we're scrambling to produce the most basic tools at the moment. It makes absolutely no sense. I mean, it's, it's, we, we should absorb, you know, on some level, the, the, the humiliation of this. I mean, you've got doctors in the finest hospitals in the country, you know, covering themselves with bandanas. It's madness. And, um, so we, we can, we can learn these lessons. I mean, on some level, these are very simple lessons. this experience and, you know, and experiencing a silver lining to it in just, you know, the way in which we're prioritizing our time with our family and just kind of resetting our, our, um,

Starting point is 01:46:32 you know, career, uh, priorities. And I mean, there's, there's a, there are many good things happening for people, uh, which are, are not going unrecognized. I mean, it's just a question of figuring out how to maintain these epiphanies once life starts back up again. Yeah. Well, Sam, I love our conversations. It's always nice to hear your voice. Likewise.

Starting point is 01:47:01 We will have many, many, many, many, many, many conversations over the forthcoming days and weeks and months, no doubt. And I appreciate you, and I appreciate your thinking. So thanks for taking time in your day. Yeah, well, back at you, brother. Keep it up. I think you single-handedly got South by Southwest canceled, and it was the right thing to do. And you were, I mean, we sort of pulled the ripcord together.

Starting point is 01:47:29 I mean, maybe you had pulled it earlier in your life, but, like, when you and I made the decision, you know, when we were checking back and forth with each other about, you know, what was going to happen with South by Southwest, you know, that was the moment where I was understanding the situation we're in. And, you know, you were, you know, you were definitely the first person in my're doing, because you have been a great source of information for a very large audience, and we just need to keep it up. Thanks so much, Sam. I'll do my best. And it seems so weird to end this way, but I will. How can people find you? Where can people find you? What would you like to share before we close up? Well, there are really only two places where I'm consistently making noise. I used to blog a lot, and I don't do that anymore. I mean, it's been years since I was writing regularly on my blog. You do have an excellent blog post on psychedelic or related to psychedelics right also yeah yeah um oldie but goodie yeah drugs and the meaning of life which is in audio form on on both of our podcasts i think it is um but it's on my blog but it's my podcast is making sense and the the app where i talk about all things related to meditation and the nature of consciousness and, to some degree, psychedelics, is Waking Up, and that's wakingup.com.

Starting point is 01:49:13 Highly recommended. I use it myself. And, Sam, to be continued. Thanks again for taking the time. And I'm not sure what we mentioned that might end up in show notes, but if we have show notes, dear listeners, they will be at Tim.blog forward slash podcast. You can just search Sam Harris or Harris or Sam, and they will probably pop right up. And thanks for tuning in. Sam, always a pleasure. And I'll talk to you soon. Yeah, take care, brother. All right, you too. Take care. Hey, guys.

Starting point is 01:49:47 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? Would you enjoy getting a short email from me every Friday that provides a little morsel of fun for the weekend? And 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.

Starting point is 01:50:12 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. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and just drop in your email and you

Starting point is 01:50:43 will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by FreshBooks. Thousands of listeners and a lot of the contractors I use and my readers use FreshBooks. If you've been thinking about turning your part-time side business into a full-time small business or big business for that matter, you may be feeling some extra uncertainty these days. And that's obviously completely natural. There are a lot of questions that can come up. How do you create a professional appearance and experience? Who can help you with support? How do you manage the billing and all of that, but still focus on the primary worth of your business and on growing your business? FreshBooks is an all-in-one invoicing and accounting solution. It does a

Starting point is 01:51:23 lot more than that. that helps you take your business from part-time to full-time and it only takes minutes to set up. They have one of the best sign-up flows in the business. I've seen very few better. They have been helping people turn their passions into small businesses for 15 years and they can help you too.

Starting point is 01:51:39 I've met the founders. I've looked at this product very closely. With automated invoicing, billable time, and expense tracking, and an intuitive dashboard that ties it all together, it's like having a full-time financial assistant with you every step of the way. You can create, customize, and send branded and professional-looking invoices in about 30 seconds. You get paid up to twice as fast with fees as low as 1% using ACH payments on FreshBooks.

Starting point is 01:52:03 It's a fast, easy, and secure way for clients to pay you for your work and pay you more quickly. One of the many things that sets FreshBooks apart is their award-winning Toronto-based customer service. A real person picks up fast and will help you until you are completely satisfied and have your questions answered. There's a lot of uncertainty in the world right now, but your ability to build a business that you're passionate about, that you're proud of, doesn't have to be one of those things. Business owners all over the world rate FreshBooks as the easiest accounting software to use. Try it out. Check it out for free for 30 days at freshbooks.com slash Tim. Just enter Tim Ferris in the how did you hear about us section. Again, that's freshbooks.com slash Tim to check it out and try it for free for 30 days.

Starting point is 01:52:46 One more time, freshbooks.com slash Tim.

The Tim Ferriss Show - #433: Sam Harris on Psychedelics, How to Cope During a Pandemic, Taming Anxiety, and More

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