The Tim Ferriss Show - #440: Rick Doblin — The Psychedelic Domino That Tips All Others

Starting point is 00:00:00 Please note that this episode was recorded in the weeks prior to George Floyd's death. It therefore doesn't cover recent events directly, but our discussion of trauma, PTSD, that's post-traumatic stress disorder, and promising treatments has never been more relevant. Thank you for listening. Optimal, minimal. At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question? No, I would have seen it both times. What if I ask you a personal question? Now would have seen an appropriate time.

Starting point is 00:00:25 What if I could be out there? I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton. The Tim Ferriss Show. This podcast episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep. Sleep is super important to me. In the last few years, I've come to conclude it is the end-all be-all, that all good things, good mood, good performance, good everything,

Starting point is 00:00:52 seem to stem from good sleep. So I've tried a lot to optimize it. I've tried pills and potions, all sorts of different mattresses, you name it. And for the last few years, I've been sleeping on a Helix Midnight Luxe mattress. I also have one in the guest bedroom and feedback from friends has always been fantastic. It's something that they comment on. Helix Sleep has a quiz, takes about two minutes to complete, that matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress for you. With Helix, there's a specific mattress for each and every body. That is your body,

Starting point is 00:01:26 also your taste. So let's say you sleep on your side and like a super soft bed, no problem. Or if you're a back sleeper who likes a mattress that's as firm as a rock, they've got a mattress for you too. Helix was selected as the number one best overall mattress pick of 2020 by GQ Magazine, Wired, Apartment Therapy, and many others. Just go to helixsleep.com slash Tim, take their two-minute sleep quiz, and they'll match you to a customized mattress that will give you the best sleep of your life. They have a 10-year warranty, and you get to try it out for 100 nights risk-free. They'll even pick it up from you if you don't love it. And now, my dear listeners, Helix is offering up to $200 off of all mattress orders and two free pillows at

Starting point is 00:02:06 helixsleep.com slash Tim. These are not cheap pillows either. So getting two for free is an upgraded deal. So that's up to $200 off and two free pillows at helixsleep.com slash Tim. That's Helix, H-E-L-I-X, sleep.com slash Tim for up to $200 off. So check it out one more time, Helix, H-E-L-I-X, sleep.com slash Tim. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. Now more than ever, businesses are grappling with incredibly challenging times. A lot of things in life and business are changing, and we're all adapting to new priorities. While it does take time to adjust, LinkedIn believes that it's also possible to find and create opportunities in times of turbulence, in times of change. Whether you're looking to hire now for a critical role or thinking about needs that you might have in the future,

Starting point is 00:03:02 LinkedIn Jobs can help. LinkedIn is an active community with more than 675 million members worldwide. LinkedIn screens candidates for the hard and soft skills you're looking for while putting your job in front of candidates looking for job opportunities that match exactly what you have to offer. With LinkedIn, you can hire the right person quickly when you need them. And if you need to hire for healthcare or essential services, you can post your jobs for free right now. When it's time to find and hire that right person, LinkedIn is here to help. Just visit linkedin.com slash Tim. Again, that's linkedin.com slash Tim to post a job now. Terms and conditions apply. This episode is brought to you by AG1, the daily foundational nutritional

Starting point is 00:03:47 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 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, drinkag1.com slash Tim.

Starting point is 00:04:35 Last time, drinkag1.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 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 of the coolest things I've found that week, which sometimes includes apps, books, documentaries, supplements, gadgets, new self experimentsexperiments, 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

Starting point is 00:05:12 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, 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.

Starting point is 00:05:46 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. 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 any time. So easy peasy. Again, that's tim.blog forward slash Friday. And thanks for checking it out. If the spirit moves you. Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. This episode has been a long time in the

Starting point is 00:06:32 works. I wanted to get it just right. Rick Doblin, PhD. I've wanted to have Rick on this show for a long time indeed, and we wanted to get all of the pieces of the puzzle together first, which I think we did. Rick Doblin, PhD, is the founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, MAPS. This is an organization that I've gotten to know over the last handful of years and have supported. He received his doctorate in public policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where he wrote his dissertation on the regulation of the medical uses of psychedelics and marijuana and his master's thesis on a survey of oncologists about smoked marijuana versus the oral THC pill in nausea control for cancer patients. Rick was also one of the early students under the legendary

Starting point is 00:07:21 Dr. Stanislav Grof. Rick also, more than perhaps anyone else, has a 30,000-foot view of almost all of the players, all of the opportunities, all of the pending possible breakthroughs in the world of psychedelics. He knows just about everyone and also has an international scope of understanding. So he is, to me at least, endlessly fascinating to speak with and kind of the tip of the spear in many respects. The website is maps.org and related is maps.org slash capstone. We'll talk more about that. Please listen all the way to the end. There is a big surprise that involves $10 million and much more. So be sure to stick around to the very, very end.

Starting point is 00:08:15 And without further ado, please enjoy my conversation with Rick Doblin. Rick, welcome to the show. Tim, it's great to be doing this with you today. We've spent quite a bit of time together. We've traded a lot of emails. We've burned up a lot of minutes via cell phone. And I'm thrilled to finally be having a public conversation with you. And I thought we could start with the origin story of MAPS.

Starting point is 00:08:42 How did MAPS come to be? Well, let's start with MAPS was started in 1986, and it was actually the second nonprofit that I started. The first one I started in 1984 with two women, Elise Agar and Debbie Harlow, and it was Earth Metabolic Design Lab. It had been affiliated with Buckminster Fuller, and a friend of mine had started it and wasn't using it. And so that nonprofit was started in order to gather support from the psychedelic therapy community in anticipation of the DEA moving to criminalize MDMA, which at the time they only knew about ecstasy. And so from early 84 up until 86, we're working with Earth Metabolic Design Lab. And our main focus was once in the summer of 84, once DEA moved to criminalize

Starting point is 00:09:36 MDMA, there's a 30-day public comment period. And I went to. and walked into the DEA offices on day 28 or 29 and demanded a DEA administrative law judge hearing to argue that MDMA should stay available as a therapeutic drug. And we ended up getting administrative law judge hearings, and we actually ended up winning that hearing. And what that means is that the judge says a recommendation to the head of the agency. So it was the DEA administrator and the judge said that MDMA should be Schedule 3, meaning that it should be able to be used as a medicine, a prescription medicine for psychotherapy for a whole range of different things. And the administrator of the DEA rejected that recommendation. So it was very clear that there was no way that we were going to be

Starting point is 00:10:33 able to use the law to keep the therapeutic use of MDMA legal, which had been used since the middle 70s to the early 80s. About half a million doses had been used by psychiatrists and psychotherapists. And some of those people that had experienced it decided that more people should have it, that they could make a bunch of money. They turned it into ecstasy. And so once this effort that we had attempted with multiple years, multiple people to try to protect it through the law, then I recognized that the only way to really bring MDMA back as a legal substance was through the FDA, was through science, through medicine, through working with people that are suffering and showing that there was value there. And so that's really when MAPS was created in order to try to be a nonprofit pharma to move MDMA and other psychedelics

Starting point is 00:11:28 and marijuana through the FDA. Okay. So we timestamp that several decades ago, you along with a number of other friends like Roland Griffiths have been fighting the good fight and pushing the ball forward with great resistance at points for a very long time. And first, I want to thank you for that. But let me just mention some of what we're seeing now. And then I want to go back in time to closer to the founding of maps. Yeah, okay. So MDMA.

Starting point is 00:12:02 I want to speak to some of the effects of MDMA. Yeah, okay. phase two trials with 107 participants. This is MDMA-assisted psychotherapy for PTSD, so post-traumatic stress disorder. 56% no longer qualified for PTSD after treatment with MDMA- assisted psychotherapy measured two months following treatment. At the 12-month follow-up, 68% no longer had PTSD. Most subjects received just two to three sessions of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. So I want to underscore that part first. It's not three times a week indefinitely. This is two to three sessions of MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. And then the next piece, I think, is worth letting people take in. All participants had chronic treatment-resistant PTSD. That means it's failed other interventions before, or other interventions have failed, I should say,

Starting point is 00:13:10 and had suffered from PTSD for an average of 17.8 years. So that seems to defy almost any conventional psychiatric explanation that one would have of mental illness and possible treatments, right? So I want to just mention that, but let's go back in time. So that's just a preview of things to come, but let's go back in time. MDMA, I guess it's methylene, dioxin, methamphetamine. What is MDMA? Where did it come from? And how did it find its way into the therapeutic context? Well, MDMA is a synthetic molecule, so it did not come from nature. There are drugs that are in sassafras, saffron oil that are used as precursors to make MDMA, but it does not itself appear in nature. And it was actually invented in 1912 by Merck Pharmaceutical Company.

Starting point is 00:14:13 And they were not looking to create MDMA. They were looking to evade a competitor's patent on a synthetic route to get to a different drug. And so they found a new pathway and they patented every drug along the way. MDMA happened to be one of those drugs. And as far as we know from the records of Merck, they did nothing with it for 15 years until their patent was about to expire. And they did some studies in animals and found nothing interesting. This is 1927. The next we know of it, and this will help explain what it is, was in 1953, where the U.S. Army Chemical Warfare Service were looking for mind control drugs, and they tested a series of drugs for toxicity in animals, and MDMA was one of those drugs. The other drugs went from methamphetamine on one side

Starting point is 00:15:07 to mescaline on the other. So MDMA is basically halfway, more or less chemically, between methamphetamine and mescaline. So of all the classic psychedelics, MDMA is the most like mescaline from peyote. So it's got the energizing properties of methamphetamine, but it doesn't make you jittery. You can sit quiet. People have taken half doses and it's facilitated meditation. And it's like the sort of psychedelic properties of bringing to awareness inner material that mescaline has, but it doesn't do it in the same kind of ego dissolution way. The ego generally stays intact. And so that research was actually classified and wasn't released until the early 70s. So people didn't really know about that.

Starting point is 00:15:59 And in the 60s, there was a drug called MDA, which is methylene dioxyamphetamine. And it was used a little bit in therapy, and it was also used as sort of a therapeutic recreational personal growth outside of medical contexts. And when all of those drugs got criminalized in 1970 with the Controlled Substances Act, And even before, a chemist named Sasha Shulgin had been looking at various psychedelics and trying to understand structure activity relationships. And he had had his first psychedelic experience with mescaline and felt that that was extraordinarily profound. So he was tinkering with the mescaline molecule, with other drugs. He was aware of MDA, and he sort of independently re-synthesized it.

Starting point is 00:16:53 And the way Sasha and his wife, Anne, worked is that they would take the drugs that they created themselves. First, Sasha would do it in very low doses. He would work the doses up. If he thought it was something important, he would share it with Anne, and they would do it in very low doses. He would work the doses up. If he thought it was something important, he would share it with Ann and they would do it together. And then if they thought it was important, they had a group of 12 people that they would share it with. And this would be a team that was very experienced testing out all sorts of new psychedelics that Sasha had invented. And then once they got this whole range of perspectives from this group of 12 people, if they still thought it had value, then the next step was a fellow named Leo Zeff. And Leo

Starting point is 00:17:34 was the leader of the underground psychedelic psychotherapy movement. The secret chief. The secret chief. And yeah, so we've published the book, The Secret Chief. And then after a few years, when his family got comfortable, we published The Secret Chief Revealed. So it's okay for us to mention his name. And so Leo was about to retire. He'd been mostly working with LSD and other classic psychedelics, and he was going to retire. And when he tried MDMA, he felt that it had such incredible potential that he decided not to retire. And so from the middle 70s, he started training psychiatrists and psychotherapists and others in the use of this new drug. And it was really there that its therapeutic potential was both, I would say, discovered, expanded on, and it revitalized a lot of the psychedelic community because now, once the psychedelic research was shut down near the end of the 60s, early 70s, a lot of the psychedelic researchers went on to other things to study meditation or mindfulness or other different things, and some small group still continued to work underground, but they had tools that were

Starting point is 00:18:48 basically illegal. And so now they had this tool MDMA that was legal and it was kept quiet for fear that if it was something that entered the public consciousness, the DEA would criminalize it. And that's actually what eventually did happen. But what a lot of people don't realize is that MDMA was a therapy drug before it became a party drug under the name ecstasy. And it was really in Dallas at the Stark Club where MDMA really sort of flourished as ecstasy and became quite well known. And that's what really attracted the attention of the DEA. And so then in the summer of 84, they moved to criminalize it. But what it does, it's remarkable

Starting point is 00:19:32 in that it's very subtle. It's a subtle shift from normal perception. You could say that the classic psychedelics are anything but subtle. You know you've taken them, but you do know you've taken MDMA, but your thinking is clarified. Your feelings are a little bit clearer. There's a reduction of activity in the amygdala. There's reduction of fear response. There's a lot of oxytocin release, which is the hormone of love in nursing mothers. And so people feel more self-compassion, self-love, self-acceptance. The self-critical part of the mind is kind of quieted and people become more able to express their feelings, better listeners. It was used quite a lot in couples therapy.

Starting point is 00:20:32 And so it's got an enormous wide range of applications, and it can be used for post-traumatic stress disorder, which we chose for strategic reasons, and it's also excellent for PTSD, but it has a whole wide range of other uses. And so I think it will become one of the most widely used psychedelics once we make it into a medicine. So let's pause for a second. I want to highlight a few things that you said. Number one, it's been said that two beings are mostly responsible for creating psychedelics, God and Sasha Shulgin. And if people want to learn more about Sasha, he co-authored with his wife two books, P.K. I think it's A Chemical Love Story or something like that as a subtitle, which is Phenethylamines I've Known and Loved. It's an incredible encyclopedia of

Starting point is 00:21:18 drugs slash psychedelics. And if you've ever heard of mescaline, I'm not sure if they'd be referred to as derivatives or analogs, but 2C-B, 2C-E, the 2C-X class, then you're familiar with Sasha Shulgin's work. And then there's T-col, which is tryptamines I've known and loved, which is a similar compendium, different class of drug. Mescaline would be an example of a phenethylamine, whereas something like DMT would be an example of a tryptamine for those people who know those acronyms. But Sasha Shulgin, fascinating character and prolific. I want to say certainly hundreds, maybe thousands of different compounds that were created. Yeah. Yeah. And also i learned a lot from him about his political strategy of staying free in that one of the things that sasha did was he shared his

Starting point is 00:22:14 information with everybody could i pause for one second just to say also he was a a renowned chemist not just among underground therapists but also he was a known quantity to for-profit sort of contracted chemists working with large companies. I just want to mention that as well. Oh yeah, he worked for Dow Chemical and had invented, I think it was like a biodegradable insecticide or something. And he was rewarded by Dow And they said, you can have a lab and do whatever you want. You're so creative, just we'll give you a lab and do whatever you want. And he started focusing more and more on psychedelics. And this was as the 60s was going on. And he eventually came to part ways with Dow and went independent and taught chemistry at

Starting point is 00:23:03 UC Berkeley. And yeah, he was a very well-renowned chemist. And you were saying his strategy for maintaining freedom? Is that what you said? Yeah, yeah. So yeah, for staying free, he actually had a DEA official that officiated at his wedding with Ann Chilgin. That's incredible. So he would develop these friendships with people,

Starting point is 00:23:27 and it would be by sharing information. And he had his connections through the whole breadth of society. So he would share it publicly with chemists who would then learn what he did and build on that, or he would share it with the DEA. He just had this view that if he ends up learning something, it's his obligation to share it with the world, and that that's the way to stay safe, that he had personal trusting relationships with people in the DEA, even though he was fundamentally against the drug war and saw it as a major abridgment of human rights. But he could meet people for who they were

Starting point is 00:24:12 as individuals, not necessarily as representatives or embodying all of the values of the organizations that they worked for. It was just very impressive. You've been very good at maintaining some degree of Swiss neutrality, I would say. And I mean that as a compliment from a diplomatic standpoint, because even within the psychedelic communities, you've got the kind of drum and feather crowd who might hate the scientist crowd, and then the scientist crowd who doesn't like the neo-shamanic fill-in-the-blank crowd, and then the ayahuasca people don't like the LSD people. There is a surprising amount of catty bitchiness within the sort of factions of the psychedelic community that are, in some cases, working together very well, but you've been extremely strategic. You

Starting point is 00:25:06 used that word before. And we'll talk more about strategy. I want to just define a few things real quickly. You said post-traumatic stress disorder. This is something that maybe at some point in the future, I will discuss from a personal perspective, but I'm not going to get into that this episode. Suffice to say, it's something I'm quite familiar with. And for those people who don't know, so PTSD, I'm just going to read here. PTSD, this is actually from a psychedelic science funders collaborative document that you have seen. We won't read the whole thing, and we'll certainly talk more about PSFC later, probably. So PTSD, post-traumatic

Starting point is 00:25:47 stress disorder, is a serious and prevalent psychiatric condition that is the cause of significant morbidity and mortality. That's a pretty sterile, boring way to put it. But it affects people you might expect, like military veterans, and it could go by a different name, like shell-shocked, right? People who have difficulty reintegrating and functioning in civilian society. But PTSD is also extremely common in the civilian population. People who have been exposed to war zones, people who have been physically or sexually abused. There are many different types of traumatic experiences, and it causes subjective distress, can lead to alcohol or drug abuse, impair

Starting point is 00:26:25 societal family relationships. Certainly people with severe symptoms may not be able to hold jobs, may draw their blinds and stay indoors in really bad cases. And it also increases the risk of other conditions like depression and suicide and so on, which is higher in PTSD patients than the general population. So I wanted to just give that as a basic, but let's make that concrete. And I'm going to use a more recent example, and then we're going to go back in time to, I think, 1984 with you. Tell us who John Lubecki is and why he came into your life, for lack of a better way to put it. Yeah.

Starting point is 00:27:12 So John is a veteran from Iraq, and he had been blown up, was not so physically hurt, but he was physically hurt some, but he was more psychologically damaged. And when he came back from the war, he was so decompensating that he ended up attempting suicide on multiple occasions, including one time where he put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger. And luckily, the round didn't work. He called it a squib load. And so he came very close to death. And out of desperation, he decided that he would volunteer for this MDMA study. And he was one of the very successful cases. I didn't know about him for a while because as the sponsor of research, I'm not supposed to know who the subjects are. Their privacy is protected. I only know

Starting point is 00:28:13 when they reach out to me or they are willing to reach out to their therapist and they say that they want to either speak in public about what happened to them, about how much benefit they got or whatever. So it was a couple of years after John's treatment that was successful that we got in touch. And what I felt immediately was that his story was so compelling and he had been completely disabled with PTSD. And after our treatment, he was able to go back to work. And he was actually the liaison to the veterans for Senator Rand Paul for his 2016 presidential nomination campaign for the Republican nomination. And so when I met John,

Starting point is 00:29:01 he was doing much better, but he also had political connections. And so I felt that that's really what we need to broaden the support for what we're doing, to have a veteran who's got connections with a lot of Republicans who is willing to speak about the benefits of MDMA. And so actually, John has met with Vice President Pence, with Stephen Miller, with all sorts of Republicans that he was able to speak with and have, in a way, the first impressions that they get about MDMA and the potential of MDMA to help prevent suicides among veterans, to help veterans come back and lead more healthy lives, they would hear about it from John. So now he's working as a consultant for MAPS to try to broaden our political support. And I highly recommend everybody search

Starting point is 00:29:56 online for a video. You can find it easily on YouTube from The Economist, which is actually a seven-minute, I would call it, profile of John Lubecki, L-U-B-E-C-K-Y. And if you just search MDMA treatment PTSD The Economist, the video should pop up. And it's worth seeing because a few stats to keep in mind, there are 20 plus veterans per day who commit suicide on average in the United States. That's one. And the recovery that we're talking about, at least as it was described in Time Magazine, is not unusual given the cohort, right? What I mean by that is on, I guess it was May 1st of 2016, perhaps, you could probably correct me, but the Lancet Psychiatry published a paper about the study that John was involved with. And roughly, I want to say two-thirds of the 26 veterans, firefighters, and police officers treated with MDMA-assisted psychotherapy no

Starting point is 00:30:57 longer qualified for the diagnosis of PTSD one month after their second MDMA session. I just want to, again, just underscore how odd that is, how unusual that ratio of number of doses to disappearance of symptoms is in the world of psychiatry. And that's where I want to go next. So part of what fascinates me about MDMA is, as you said, how, in some respects, how manageable it is compared to classic psychedelics like LSD or psilocybin, which would be associated with mushrooms, psilocybin mushrooms, otherwise known as magic mushrooms. And in that respect, it is much easier to adapt to a therapeutic context is used to describe MDMA and some other compounds is empathogen, right? Or intactogen. But let's say empathogen. So it's a compound that creates empathy. And you see this effect in, for instance, octopi, who exhibit pro-social behavior with this down-regulation of fear response. And that's interesting because their nervous system is completely different than, say, many mammals that have otherwise been studied. But in humans, as you mentioned earlier,

Starting point is 00:32:40 you have the turning down of volume on the amygdala and what appears to please correct me if i'm wrong but based on my very novice understanding what appears to happen in these therapeutic sessions and people can see video of some of these sessions in a film called trip of compassion which i i actually released i mean i i volunteered to help get it released in the united states uh you just go to tim.blog forward slash trip and you can find it. I don't make a penny from it, but it shows footage of sessions with people who have experienced PTSD. revisit traumatic experiences, which would otherwise be excruciating or impossible to revisit without re-traumatizing themselves, but with fear somewhat removed or toned down, they can sort of metabolize it and make sense of it as an observer of their own experience. And I would just love to hear you comment on that. And also, how do you

Starting point is 00:33:45 explain how two sessions with something can have enduring effects over months or years after other interventions have failed for an average of 17 years? That just doesn't make any sense to most people who take psychiatric medications. Yeah, or to a lot of people at the VA who are therapists who've had PTSD patients for 30 years that are still struggling with PTSD. So let me just say that the Lancet article was published May 1, 2018. There we go. And so we paid for having it to be free to download. So if anybody goes to lancet.com slash psychiatry and just study MDMA, PTSD, you can get to the article and you can download it for free. I think the reasons why it's something that can make a permanent change in people, that there's two factors. factor is the actual experience while they're under the influence of the substance while they're doing psychotherapy. The second factor is the integration work and the work that that's what's

Starting point is 00:34:51 really necessary for making it permanent. But so you have like a breakthrough during the session and then you work afterwards in non-drug psychotherapy to integrate it. But what we find is that you are actually rewiring your brain. So the same neuroscientist, Gul Dolan, who did this study with octopuses and showed that octopuses who are asocial, unless it's mating season, which is very rare, but under the influence of MDMA, they'll be more prosocial. It's a remarkable finding. And so it goes so deep in our evolutionary history that we separated from octopuses like 550 million years ago. But Gall also did studies in mice that were published in Nature, which is considered to be, if not the one of the top scientific journals in the world. And this study showed that mice under the influence of MDMA release

Starting point is 00:35:47 a hormone, oxytocin, which is this hormone, as I mentioned, of love and nursing mothers, but the oxytocin actually stimulates new neural connections in pro-social areas of the brain. And there's also a phenomena called fear extinction and memory reconsolidation. And so the thought about memory is that many people used to think about it as you take a, we've got sort of a hardwired memory and you remember it and then you go on to something else. But actually when you remember something, you have to reconsolidate the memory. So that's how memories change over time. And so what we're able to do, though, with MDMA is that there's a memory for the incident, episodic memory, and there's an emotional memory that's attached to

Starting point is 00:36:38 that incident memory, but stored in different parts of the brain, and that comes together. And so when you're feeling safe, and you can bring up painful memories, and you are not reacting in your normal way of fear and a sense of being overwhelmed, and it's too much, when you're able to process the feelings, and I'd say a lot of the people in our studies have said, I don't know why they call this ecstasy. And you'll see that by looking at the Trip of Compassion video, too. Some of the sessions are very difficult. People are shaking. They're crying.

Starting point is 00:37:16 They're letting out stuff that's been stored within for a very long time. But when they reconsolidate the memory, they are swapping out the emotion that was attached when the trauma happened of fear, of terror. And then they're swapping it out with a sense of it's in the past. It's something that you have approached peacefully. You're feeling safe when you're thinking about it. You can recognize it's not still happening. So the next time that you remember the incident, you remember the incident with a different emotional tone and that that can be encoded in new neural pathways in your brain. And what we find is that under the influence of MDMA, people's memory for the trauma is increased. And you might think that that's a bad thing. Now they can recall a lot more details about the trauma and a whole section. We had a firefighter that was in our study and he and a bunch of his fellows were in

Starting point is 00:38:20 a fire that the roof cave did and killed about eight or ten people. He survived. And under the influence of MDMA, he remembered whole story segments of what happened, that he thought he had the memory stitched together in the way it happened. But under the influence of MDMA, he remembered more of it. And so when you have these memories that are attached to fear, when they're unconscious and suppressed, they're influencing you. The world is not a safe place. You've got to be suspicious of this or that. This could always happen again. So the fact that MDMA permits memory to come to the surface where it can then be processed with this fear extinction and memory consolidation, and then it permits new neural pathways so that you can actually change the way you react in one session.

Starting point is 00:39:08 Now, this is also true for psilocybin. Psilocybin has been shown to increase new neural connections as well. And other psychedelics do. So there's a kind of a rewiring that helps explain how you can have a fundamental change after just one session. But there still needs to be the reinforcement of that. And that's where the psychotherapy and the integration process comes in. You could say that a lot of people that take MDMA at raves and take ecstasy at raves and parties, they can also have some pretty powerful experiences. But if they don't do the integration work afterwards, then a lot of times the things will fade. And so that's why what we

Starting point is 00:39:51 talk about our treatment is not really MDMA. It's psychotherapy facilitated by MDMA. Right, which is also why you don't have every smoker who uses psilocybin quitting nicotine. But if you have the structure and format like Dr. Matt Johnson at Hopkins did, looking at nicotine addiction and recruiting subjects explicitly who want to quit, you have these just never-before-seen results with abstinence six months later. But it's the therapeutic vessel and vehicle that is so important. I'll mention a few things related to that. Number one, Michael and Annie Mithoffer are simply fantastic, two exceptional therapists who helped a lot with the MAPS protocol for therapy. One of the tools in the toolkit that we don't have to get into right now, but that I do

Starting point is 00:40:50 find useful and can be useful to people even outside of the psychedelic context is IFS. I think that's internal family systems. Yeah. And parts work, I think, is surprisingly profound and powerful when used well. Let's talk about another patient, and that is from 1984. I promised we would get to 1984. And just as a side note also, because you mentioned it, but we didn't get into it, and I know we're bouncing all over the place well actually first mdma is and this is true with other psychedelics but it produces a hypernesia the opposite of amnesia this this supercharged memory that is quite incredible i mean you will remember the texture of the couch the exact pattern and fabric and color from when you were three years old,

Starting point is 00:41:46 that could come up. Something like that. Or words in a language you studied for one semester 25 years ago. It brings up a lot of questions about the brain and the mind. And you mentioned that it can produce these, not just functional changes in the brain, but structural beneficial changes, which is astonishing on some level to think about. And then the other acronym that I just want to take a second to describe for people, because I think more people listening to this will have heard of MDMA than MDA. What are just in very brief terms, what are the biggest differences between MDA and MDMA? I tend to think of MDA as somewhere between MDMA and LSD and having a much longer duration of effect. But how would you, in brief, kind of LSD MDMA combination, meaning that there is more of ego dissolution. It's still got the body warmth. It's still got the reduction of fear.

Starting point is 00:42:54 So it's different than LSD or psilocybin. You can still converse during most portions of it, but the peak is more nonverbal in different ways. It's more instinctual. And it was used in therapy as well. And one interesting point was that once MDMA became illegal, we could have thought that in the middle 70s to early 80s, when the use of MDMA was so widespread in therapy settings, that that was because it was legal and the other drugs were not. And so once MDMA was illegal, then the question would be, will these underground therapists, now that all the tools are illegal, will they go back to MDA, which was more popular before MDMA? And to most parts, they have not. But it does have a lot of therapeutic potential it is a pretty incredible drug and it just is a

Starting point is 00:43:48 little bit more what we'd say psychedelic than mdma and i think that's why um the gentleness of mdma the profoundness and the way that it's such a subtle shift makes it easier to integrate in the long run yeah not not as squirrely Yeah, and MDA has more effect on the heart. The military, when they were using it, the CIA mind control, they actually killed somebody with MDA by giving too high of a dose and having heart problems.

Starting point is 00:44:16 So it's got a little bit more of that activation of the blood pressure. The blood pressure, got it. Just a quick thanks to our sponsors and then we're right back to the show. First up, LinkedIn Jobs. When it's time to find and hire that right person, LinkedIn, with an active community of more than 675 million members worldwide, is here to help. Please visit linkedin.com slash Tim. Again, that's linkedin.com slash Tim to post a job today. Terms and conditions apply. Second and last, Helix Sleep. Sleep is the end-all be-all for me. Of all of the things you

Starting point is 00:44:52 could optimize, it is probably the most important. I've been sleeping on a Helix Midnight Luxe mattress for years now, Luxe spelled L-U-X-E, and I have another one in the guest bedroom. The feedback from friends has always been fantastic. Helix is offering up to $200 off of all mattress orders and two free pillows at helixsleep.com slash Tim. That's Helix, H-E-L-I-X, sleep.com slash Tim for up to $200 off. As promised, I'm obviously circling this slowly, but 1984, and I believe this is the first ever therapy session that you did with a PTSD patient. Can you tell this story, please? Yeah. Let me say that it was the first ever therapy session that I ever did with anybody.

Starting point is 00:45:42 Ah, important. I would sit with people. So since 1972, when I was 18, and when I decided to go through psychedelic therapy myself, become a psychedelic therapist, try to bring back psychedelic research, I would sit for my friends and various other people. But these would be people looking for personal growth. And they were more or less healthy people. And of course, all of us who are more or less healthy have a lot of problems, a lot of challenges. High functioning neurotics, right? And everything else. I would deal with difficult cases, but the first time I ever dealt with a patient was in 1984. And so as part of my training to become a therapist, I had studied with Stan Groff and Christina at Esalen the summer of September 82 is when I first studied at Esalen with them

Starting point is 00:46:40 for a month-long workshop. That's where I learned about MDMA. And then I went back in 84 for a month-long workshop that they had called the Spiritual Emergence Network. And the basis of that was that there's a lot of people that are struggling with what their purpose in life is, what's their meaning, what do they really care about, how do they approach death and various issues, and that sometimes people have these breakdowns, and they can be catalyzed by psychedelics, they could be just a normal breakdown, and that all too often, these are breakdowns that could lead to breakthroughs, that these are dysfunctional patterns, and that they need something more healthy, but they break down. And often that gets pathologized and they get medicated and hospitalized and tranquilized. And so the theory of this spiritual emergence network is that if we don't try to suppress the symptoms,

Starting point is 00:47:38 but help people work through their issues, that they will end up potentially finding a new balance and be more healthy. So I had gone through a month-long training on how to work with people in these spiritual emergencies. And I had just come back home to Sarasota, to Florida, to New College, where I was a student. And I was only home for four or five days. And then a friend of mine called me up up and he said that he and his girlfriend had done MDMA together. And under the influence of MDMA, she had remembered being raped and almost

Starting point is 00:48:12 killed. And that this was a terrifying memory for her. She had previously been in and out of mental institutions as a result of this and other traumas that she experienced. And she was so bothered that she might hurt herself. These painful memories had come to the surface that she checked herself into a mental institution and she stayed there for about six days. And they gave her the same old drugs that she had gotten before and discharged her. And she felt hopeless that these drugs had not helped her before. There was nothing that she knew of. And she was even more deciding to try to kill herself.

Starting point is 00:48:49 And so my friend called me and he said, can you help her? And I had sold them the MDMA. So I felt that in some ways I was responsible. But I also felt like I have just got this training in this spiritual emergence work, but I'm not qualified to work with somebody that's at the razor's edge of death and life, that's so much worried about committing suicide. And so I felt that this was one of the most important turning points in my entire life. And I felt like if I were to say no to her, she didn't really have any other options. She tried the best that Western medicine could give her.

Starting point is 00:49:29 She'd been hospitalized. She'd been medicated. None of that worked. And so I agreed at least to talk to her. And so during our conversation, I asked her that if she would just promise not to commit suicide when we were working together, I would take a chance. I would gather some women friends and we would create a support system for her and we would try to work with her. Because what I knew about MDMA, and I think this is important for people to realize, is that it brings things to

Starting point is 00:49:57 the surface. But if you're not prepared for that, you can end up worse off a lot. And that's where the therapy comes in. It's not just giving the pill. It's the context. It's how you react to this internal material as it's coming up. And so Marcella was the woman. And she agreed to not commit suicide while we were working together. And that gave me the courage to work with her. And so she came down to Sarasota and moved into my house for about a month.

Starting point is 00:50:26 And we did it. First off, we did an MDMA experience and it was so hard. It was so painful. It was like a tour of all the traumas that she had in her life. I think that's also a clue for people is that most of us, when we experience trauma, we'll be able to be resilient and can get over it. And it's not always the case, but those people that end up with PTSD are often those that have had a series of traumas, sometimes going back to childhood. And so this was the case for Marcella.

Starting point is 00:51:01 So the first session was MDMA, and it was a series of these traumas that she'd experienced throughout her life. And I felt like we made a lot of progress, but it didn't feel to either of us like the problem had been solved, that she had found a new way to move forward. And so the next thing I thought was, let's try LSD. And so the next session began with LSD. This was about 10 days after the first session. So we'd had first session, we'd had some integration time, and now we did an LSD session. And during the, what I knew also about LSD is that it was the first drug used in the treatment of PTSD. And it was the first psychedelic drug used in the treatment of PTSD. And it was used by Dr. Bastians, who was a Dutch psychiatrist. And after World War II, he started using LSD for

Starting point is 00:51:52 what he called concentration camp syndrome. And he worked with a lot of Holocaust survivors, but he also worked with a lot of Dutch resistance fighters who were in the camps. And they later, after the war, became part of the Dutch government. And they protected him. And Bastiaans was the last person in the world that still had legal permission to give LSD to people up until the late 70s, early 80s. So I knew that LSD had been used for treatment of PTSD, but that it had been quite difficult. And so under the influence of LSD, Marcella got increasingly fearful that MDMA can reduce the activity in the amygdala. LSD doesn't do that. So the fear came,

Starting point is 00:52:36 and she had these images of being on a foreign planet under a double sun and baking to death. And it was just too terrifying. She couldn't make any progress at all and was stuck. And so I thought, well, maybe if we administer half a dose of MDMA, that would decrease the fear enough so that she could continue to process what was happening, what was coming up to her in her memories. And so that was the breakthrough, was this half a dose of MDMA. And after that, what was happening, what was coming up to her in her memories. And so that was the breakthrough was this half a dose of MDMA. And after that, what's by half a dose, you're talking about like 75 milligrams,

Starting point is 00:53:10 something like that. Yeah. Yeah. 60, 70 milligrams. Yeah. That, that it just cut the fear to the point where she could now finally process

Starting point is 00:53:19 things. And so this symbolic thing that she had about being in a foreign planet with the double sons and baking to death, the symbolism was such that it was related to something in her life. So under the influence of MDMA, it condensed to being on earth with a single son after she had been raped and beaten and was thrown outside under the sun and left alone. So it turned into something in her life. And then what she started sharing was that this had been a date rape situation and that this person had told her that if she ever told anybody about what actually happened or mentioned his name, that he would kill her. And so this had been about 10 years before that she and I met. But

Starting point is 00:54:08 this kind of fear that if you ever tell anybody about he'd kill her, that was like a poison pill in her brain, that she was a prisoner of this. And so being able to tell the story broke the spell. And then I think what the next step was, is that when she explained that it was date rape, I said, well, what did you like about this guy? And she immediately threw up. It was just this instantaneous reaction of throwing up. And then she started explaining that he had liked animals and that what she had, one of the reasons why she was thinking of committing suicide was that she could never trust herself to find love, to find companionship because her previous instincts with this guy had been so wrong. And so going back and being able to look at

Starting point is 00:55:00 where she made this mistake that just because somebody likes animals doesn't mean that you can trust them. She started to regain her ability to trust herself about how to move forward in assessing threats, assessing how people are going to act to her. And she was able to let out all of the fears about what had happened to her. And so that was the transition for her. And we did not need to do a third session. That was the one that really changed things for her. And so that was 1984.

Starting point is 00:55:35 And so over time, as I was watching how she was doing, we kept in touch. She kept getting better and better and better. I think that's another really important thing to say is that she had had these overwhelming feelings of fear with these memories, but under the influence of MDMA, the first session and the LSD-MDMA combination, the second session, she was able to learn that if you can bring these feelings to the surface and express them, that they don't need to overwhelm you, that you can process things, that you don't have to launch into these fear-based reactions. And so what you started out, Tim, by saying early on is that people do better at the

Starting point is 00:56:17 12-month follow-up than at the two-month follow-up, that even without more MDMA and without more therapy, that they've learned a process about how they handle their medications, their problems, I mean, and their emotions. And so that's the same thing that happened for Marcella. And so throughout the 80s and into the 90s, when the whole concern about the rave movement was growing and the NIDA-funded research, the National Institute on Drug Abuse-funded researchers claiming that MDMA was neurotoxic and would produce long-term functional consequences after a single dose, I kept watching Marcella, and I kept seeing her

Starting point is 00:56:56 get better and better and better. And she later then decided that she wanted to become a therapist. She was an artist. She decided that she wanted to become a therapist. She was an artist. She decided that she wanted to become a therapist to help others. And she went back to school to become a therapist. And now she is one of our lead therapists. And she and her husband, Bruce, are one of the lead trainers of other therapists. And that was an experience that really motivated me to think of MDMA and these different compounds. To the extent that, just as one example, a friend of mine had his wife say, you're once again the person I married. He had been so withdrawn and shut down and compartmentalized and self-isolated that he ceased to resemble the person she married. And not to say this happens all the time,

Starting point is 00:58:14 but it happens more often than one might think. Within a very short period of time, like you said, after two or three sessions with competent guidance, ended up with that type of outcome. And I'd like to hear what you think of this way of describing the session, because the importance of the therapy is paramount. And the way I heard it put to me by someone who shall remain nameless, but very hyper-credible, people would recognize this scientist, but said what psychedelics do is they create a window of plasticity. And then it's up to the person and their environment and their support to then mold to that plasticity, right? So you create this window of plasticity where you can grow new, you can experience a neurogenesis, right? The generation

Starting point is 00:59:06 of new connections within the brain and so on and so forth. But to what end, right? For what is it molded? And you can hone your direction with the help of therapists who then provide you also with a toolkit that continues to be useful after that molding integration experience, right? At least that's been my impression. So it's not a foregone conclusion that you take a pill and all your problems are solved, but with the right shaping and guidance, the outcomes can be really just incredible. And when I think about Marcella, or I think about you, I think about people like Roland, who have been involved for so long, and for so long with so little extrinsic reward, if that makes sense, right? I mean,

Starting point is 00:59:59 you think about it scientifically, for decades, it was considered just the career suicide at best. And then it was a dead end. It's like, all right, it's not career suicide, but you're going nowhere. And then it was minimally interesting. And now, yeah, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, these major media outlets, major universities are taking notice. Fund funding is being raised. But during those hard times, I'd love to hear what drove you. And I know there's one example that you haven't spoken about in as public a forum as this, but it's perhaps more recent, but I think it kind of speaks to this, which is the suicide letter that uh yeah that perhaps you could describe for people yeah um let me say um first off that um just to further illustrate this story about it's not just a drug and and then we'll get to that which is that um one week about um 20 years ago um maps got contacted by two women

Starting point is 01:01:04 with almost identical stories they had taken mdma at raves and had remembered being raped in prior sexual assault. But one of them told the story that she was with friends who just wanted to party and that she knew that they didn't want to hear about this heavier thing that was coming to the surface. And so she stuffed her feelings down and she had contacted us months later feeling way worse and the other woman who contacted us just days away said that she was at a rave took mdma the same thing happened but she was with a girlfriend and they went off into the corner and talked about what happened to her and they were able to process it and then she was able to go back to the party and now she felt better after months later. So it's not the substance itself. It's how you respond to the material.

Starting point is 01:01:50 Now, what drove me to do this in the first place was a certain kind of desperation, I would say, about the world. So when I was a very young boy, born in 53, from a Jewish family, I was raised with stories of the Holocaust. I had distant relatives killed, a lot of Israeli relatives. And just the thought that there could be this dehumanization and genocide and just irrational thinking was terrifying to me. And that led me more and more to think about psychological factors. And so I just felt that there was this imbalance that we as a species have and that I as an individual have, where we are overdeveloped in our minds and underdeveloped in our emotions

Starting point is 01:02:39 and spirituality. And so this was now about 15 years ago, and I had been contacted by this fellow who was quite troubled, and he wanted to be referred to an underground psychedelic therapist. And I wasn't ready to do that, and so he happened to live not far from where my therapist lived down in Florida. And so I referred him to my therapist and he worked with my therapist for a couple of months. At this point, I was in Boston. I didn't live down there, but he went to my therapist for a couple of months and then he called me up and he said, it's just not doing what I need to do. I would like you to go ahead and refer me to an underground therapist. And so we talked about it some more, and he indicated that he had had a tendency towards epileptic seizures. And it's conceivable, it's rare, but it's possible that psychedelics can catalyze a seizure. And I felt like the kind of underground settings are just not appropriate for somebody that could have a medical crisis. And so I said to him that I just could not, in good conscience, refer him to an

Starting point is 01:03:53 underground therapist. And he said, all right. He felt kind of sad and seemed to accept it. And that was the end of our conversation. And I didn't hear anything for about three more months. And then I got a call from the police in his hometown. And they said, do you know this guy? And I was like, at first a little bit frightened. I wasn't sure what they were talking about. And I said, yeah, I do know him. And he did contact me and I referred him to my therapist. And then he wanted further therapy. I wasn't able to help him with that. And they said, well, he's committed suicide and he's left you a suicide note. And we wonder, would you like to see it? And I was like, taking a back. But I said, yeah, if he's written a note for me, I should I should I should read it no matter. And I thought it was going to be. You could have helped me, but you didn't. I'm really mad at you. Why didn't you do this?

Starting point is 01:04:57 Um, and when I got the note, the first thing I noticed was that he hadn't committed suicide a few days before then he'd committed suicide the very next morning after our phone conversation, after I told him I couldn't refer him to an underground therapist and that somehow it had taken three months for the police to get around to calling me. So that was shocking once I just saw the date on his letter that it was connected to me giving him no more hope that he decided that he would kill himself. And the note was the opposite of what I thought it would be. It wasn't condemning me. It wasn't angry. It was this kind of sad, sentimental, but gracious note. And he said, I don't blame you for not referring me to help. I blame the system.

Starting point is 01:05:38 I blame the drug war. I feel that I might have been one more person who would still be alive if this therapy was legal. And you can tell people about this note if you want to do so. And that I just hope that my experience will motivate others to try to seek treatment and motivate you to keep trying. Because there's a lot more people that need help like this. It was a beautiful note. It was just so tender in a way. And then just to think that he wrote that and then right then after that killed himself. And so that's always been in the back of my mind that there are people out there,

Starting point is 01:06:23 people that we know that need help. You talked about 20 veterans committing suicide a day. There's roughly 50,000 people that commit suicide every year in America, and we need to help them. And there's way more whose lives are so warped by PTSD or depression or anxiety or fear that they need our help. You've put in so much time, and we are in a very exciting period right now in terms of the place of momentum for what you've been working on for so many decades. And I'd like to bridge to that that because the suicide letter you mentioned speaks to the desperation. It also speaks to what types of therapies could be available to people, even if they have certain medical complications like epilepsy, with proper supervision if

Starting point is 01:07:20 compounds were reclassified, meaning they were taken from Schedule 1, the most restrictive drug class, no known medical application, high potential for abuse. There may be other criteria, but things were thrown into there somewhat willy-nilly during the Nixon administration. And it's extraordinarily challenging to get them out. But I want to just speak to what's happening right now and also perhaps tell an anecdote first. And that anecdote is I've come to know we're recording this during the COVID-19 crisis. It's far from over. This is going to be, I think, a very long, difficult period for millions of people. And I've become friends with ICU docs, so senior attending physicians in New York City and

Starting point is 01:08:13 elsewhere. And one of them who's completely psychedelically naive, he's never used any of these compounds, reached out to me because he does not know how to process what he has seen and what he's had to do. He's seen so much death. He's had to make decisions about who gets ventilators and who don't. He's had to talk to, say, someone who is older with a lot of comorbidities who's probably not going to make it even if they intubate them and talk to the family about why they're not going to get a ventilator. I mean, things like that. And he doesn't know what to do, right? And I say this just because I think this is trauma and the difficulty in resolving trauma and the inefficacy of treatments for, say, PTSD is so profound. And it's also very timely, right? I feel like right now, talking to these first responders, talking to many other people who've

Starting point is 01:09:13 been affected, who have loved ones who have died, who are simply suffering from acute anxiety, and this is bringing a lot to the surface, that I'm kind of watching the tide go out and that there's a tsunami on the way of very high volumes of PTSD. And I also have personal experience that I may discuss another time. So for all of these reasons, right, looking at the data, first of all, being driven by that and seeing results that represent an order of magnitude jump from anything that is close to being in second place, seeing video of the transformations that can take place. And I recommend everybody watch Trip of Compassion if you can. It's very intense, but the payoff is worth it. You, meaning MAPS and PSFC, so the Psychedelic Science Funders Collaborative, have launched a $30 million

Starting point is 01:10:06 capstone fund. So this is a campaign to get MDMA-assisted psychotherapy across the finish line and make MDMA a medicine. And after decades and decades of working on this, you have a number of excellent people involved with MAPS on the executive team. You have a number of excellent people involved with MAPS on the executive team. You have advisors now who have a lot of experience in pharma, biotech, drug development. And I'm at a point, I've been waiting for this point. You might not know this, but I've contributed to MAPS over the years in smaller ways. And I've been waiting for this precise window. So you're raising $30 million to get it to the finish line. You've already

Starting point is 01:10:50 raised internally, from people you know, around $10 million. Yes, $10 million. And over the last week or so, and it's been an incredible week, a lot of things have come together beautifully. I've worked with Joe Green, who's president of PSFC, that's the Psychedelic Science Funders Collaborative, to get together a $10 million matching grant. Originally, as you and I know, we were going to record this podcast and we didn't have any matching grant. Then I thought, let's put together five. I'll be part of that five. And then we ended up at 10. And the intention was to announce it as we're doing on the podcast. And I'll explain what that means. And then we ended up at 10. And the intention was to announce it as we're doing on the podcast. And I'll explain what that means. And more accurately, it's a challenge grant.

Starting point is 01:11:30 So you've got me, I'm putting in a million. You've got Peter Rahal, who's founder of RxBar, James Bailey, founder of Bell Capital, Blake Mycoskie, founder of Tom's, all seven-figure commitments. Then you have Stephen Alexander Cohen of the Stephen and Alexandra Cohen Foundation coming in in a big way with 5 million. And you have other people who are also committing capital. And what makes this so exciting is that you've raised 10 of the 30. Now we're committing to the middle 10, which is the hardest to raise. right? That middle 10 is often the most difficult to raise in a challenge grant, which means that if other people are able to donate 10 million, if Maps is able to raise an additional 10 million, it activates our 10 million and boom,

Starting point is 01:12:19 we're at the finish line, which is hard to believe. It's quite amazing that all this came together. Well, I'm so glad the microphones didn't work the first time and gave you something to do in this period of delay. Yeah. If everything is happening for you and not to you, what does it look like? And this has been one of the stranger, more surreal, and exciting things that has ever happened from a tech delay. And this is extremely close to me and represents such an opportunity. And just to clarify again, $10 million is raised of the $30. I and the group I mentioned are committing to a $10 million challenge grant, which means if another $10 is raised to activate that, boom, we're at the finish line. This is so close and to me represents such an opportunity. And I was speaking with a doctor and a scientist who's been advising you guys. And he said, there are some risks,

Starting point is 01:13:18 but the asymmetric risk reward is just incredible for this. Meaning, once done, meaning if you have MDMA reclassified, the ice is broken for a dozen other things for the entire field, for the entire industry, right? So if you're looking for a spearhead opportunity that is time bound, right? I mean, there is time sensitivity to this

Starting point is 01:13:41 because you're executing phase three trials. This is an immediate opportunity that if you really want to sort of bend the arc of history, and if you're interested in any of these other compounds like psilocybin, as I am, I've committed a lot of resources and time to supporting research at places like Johns Hopkins and Imperial College in London, you have to be interested in the outcome of this phase three trial with MDMA. It's going to be the precedent setter. So I was not planning on making another large commitment like this. Thank you, Tim, for doing things that you didn't plan, but it is the moment, as you're right.

Starting point is 01:14:24 It is the moment. And of course're right. It is the moment. And of course, huge thanks to Joe. I don't want to skip over that. And we're looking for people who can really help donate on any level. You can go to maps.org to donate at any level, $1, $10 a month, $20 a month. But we're especially looking for people who can make larger donations. And by larger donations, I would say six-figure or seven-figure commitments over a two-year period. So my million-dollar commitment is planned for 500,000 in late 2020. So let's say around October,

Starting point is 01:14:58 and then the remaining 500,000 in the end of 2021, let's just say October again. So you get to split it across multiple years. It's tax deductible. And so if you might be able to contribute $100,000 or more over multiple years, then you have two ways that you can learn more. One is going to maps.org forward slash capstone. That's number one, maps.org forward slash capstone. The second, and you can do both, of course, is emailing capstone at maps.org to set up a meeting with Rick or a member of his development team

Starting point is 01:15:34 to learn more about the groundbreaking work that they're doing. And even if you can contribute, say a dollar, $10, $100, you can go to maps.org and set up some type of ideally recurring donation that can also add you to the chorus in support of this to unlock the healing power of MDMA, which has already really been demonstrated and needs to be further demonstrated through

Starting point is 01:15:58 these phase three trials. And I'll just say one more thing. So there are a couple of benefits, actually, so it's not going to be one more thing. It'll be a few more things. There are benefits to doing this if you contribute in a big way. So let's just say if you're able to contribute a million or more, then you can participate in the community known as PSFC, of which Joe Green is the president. Graham Boyd also does great work. So the Psychedelic Science Funders Collaborative, PSFC, includes all sorts of members, Matt Mullenweg of Automatic, Genevieve and Steve Jurvetson, incredible entrepreneurs and investors, Austin Hurst, Jeff Walker, George Sarlow. And there are all sorts of uh different sort of community threads psfc helps with due diligence and bringing in uh advisory uh capacity specialists and so on to assess different opportunities in the psychedelic space there have been uh group zoom chats with people like Michael Pollan, I believe Jared Diamond, if I'm not

Starting point is 01:17:07 mistaken, and others. So there are a lot of fun things that are done with this smaller group, and I'll link to more on PSFC. But suffice to say, this is an incredible opportunity. This represents, I mean, it represents a lot of money to me. That's not a small amount, one of my largest contributions to anything ever. And the reason that I'm doing this, because raising money is a hard business, Rick. I mean, you've done it for such a long time. Fundraising is tough. And what I've noticed is that some people seem to think they can take their marbles with them. And you can't take your marbles with you, meaning the money you've accumulated. So I think it's really worthwhile

Starting point is 01:17:58 to ask if you do have some flexibility in finances or some savings that could be applied to something you care about, if you know someone affected by trauma, if you know someone whose lives have been devastated by addiction, which was used to numb or avoid feelings that are the result of trauma, and you're looking for a very high leverage, asymmetric payoff possibility, this is an excellent place to put money. And I do think that a dollar now is worth $10 five years from now.

Starting point is 01:18:36 This is a time-dependent opportunity is the way that I'm looking at it. And if not now, if not with this, if you find it of interest, or if these compounds have had a huge impact in your life, where are you going to put the money? Where else? And you should have a good answer to that before it's an immediate no to this. That's my perspective. If you're just holding onto it in case, I just don't view that as a satisfactory answer. And maybe I'm just all fired up, but I've committed something like 5% of my total net worth over my entire life. Everything I've done to

Starting point is 01:19:17 psychedelic science, including this capstone fund with MAPS, it's had such a tremendous impact in my life. It's completely changed my life for the better. I don't know if I would be here without some of these compounds, quite frankly. And, uh, I know I'm not alone in feeling that way. So to put the numbers in context, I also want to say that over the history of maps over 34 years, we've raised, um, over $80 million. And so now we're talking about another $30 million. And that will get us approval if the research goes well, as we think it will, in the United States, through the FDA in Israel, through the Israeli Ministry of Health, and also

Starting point is 01:19:58 in Canada, through Health Canada, because we have 15 phase three sites, two in Israel, two in Canada, and 11 in the United States. So the other number to put in context here is the number that it normally takes pharma to develop drugs into medicines. And it's hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars. The pharma industry will tell you that it's well over a billion dollars. In fact, the latest number is roughly $2 billion to make a drug into a medicine. But what they do is they amortize all their failures into the few successes. Around half of the money almost is opportunity cost on their money. Then they have to do a long period of safety studies, which fortunately for us, because MDMA is such an ecstasy, such a demonized drug,

Starting point is 01:20:46 there's been hundreds. If you go to Medline, there's over 5,000 papers on MDMA or ecstasy at a cost of somewhere in the neighborhood of $450 million to produce all this data that we've been able to review and assess and then submit to FDA. So that what we're going to end up spending for phase three is somewhere in the neighborhood of 65 million or so, with 35 million already raised, and then another 30 million coming from Capstone. And the median is around, or the low end is somewhere like 350 million for pharma to make a drug into a medicine. So the things that contribute to us being able to do it so efficiently are, first off, we have a bunch of highly mission-driven people. We have 80 people now working for MAPS. We don't work at pharma salaries. A lot of them are what we call refugees

Starting point is 01:21:41 from pharma, from Novartis and other pharma companies that are really passionate about psychedelics. So we're mission-driven. We're not returning money to investors. It's all about donations. And then once MDMA becomes a medicine, it will be sold in our MAPS Public Benefit Corporation, where we maximize public benefit over profit and whatever profits there are, get reinvested in the mission of MAPS for further research. So it's extremely efficient. The other thing to say is that there's only two drugs that have been designated breakthrough therapies for PTSD by the FDA. One of them is MDMA or MDMA-assisted psychotherapy. The other was a drug called Tonmaya by Tonics Pharmaceutical Companies. It was a repurposed old drug from over 30 years ago

Starting point is 01:22:33 that was a sleeping pill. And the thought was that maybe they could make it to help people sleep through the night who have PTSD and not have nightmares and get better rest. And so we did our interim analysis in March. Tanya's interim analysis was done in February, and they failed. They were told that the study was not going to get significant results. It failed for futility, and they had already spent well over $100 million on this study. And that's all lost. And we've got lots of stories like John Lubecki, but still, to do it in the context of a clinical study, a phase three study, a very invariable treatment, you can't customize it to the person,

Starting point is 01:23:20 it was a little bit anxiety-provoking. But when I opened the email from the data monitoring committee, I was just elated to learn that we didn't need to add anybody, that we have at least a 90% or greater probability of obtaining statistical significance when the other people are finished the study, and that we have at least a medium effect size, which is good. But our phase two data pooled was a large effect size. So we are on track. We have de-risked that we have demonstrated in this interim analysis that we have a very good chance of succeeding. And so I think that when we imagine investments in charitable purposes, you do have to take the chance of, is it going to work or not? But we cannot say that it's going to

Starting point is 01:24:15 work 100%, but we believe that it will work. And one important thing also is scaling. And you hear this all the time in tech. And you talked earlier about Michael and Annie Mithofer being these phenomenal therapists, and they are phenomenal therapists. They treated more people in phase two than anybody else. And so what we decided to do for phase three was to take Michael and Annie out of phase three and have them instead train new therapists to conduct the phase three studies. And so Marcella and Bruce, they're still working on phase three, but they're also spending much of their time training other therapists. And so what we've demonstrated in phase three was with about 70 new therapists, many of whom had never done MDMA before, but they had experience in trauma, and they were able to get phenomenal results that And so that's why I really think that it's going to be scalable should we

Starting point is 01:25:26 obtain FDA approval for prescription use. And this matching grant that you're doing is just phenomenal to really help us do this. We also have what's called an agreement letter from the FDA special protocol assessment process. We went into, after we got permission from FDA to go to phase three, we engaged with them in an eight-month process where we reviewed every aspect of the phase three design, the statistical analysis plan, and all the other studies that they're going to want to see. And we managed to get what's called an agreement letter. And so that agreement letter means that they are legally bound to approve the drug if we get statistically significant

Starting point is 01:26:05 evidence of efficacy and if there's no new safety problems. They can't question the methodology or anything like that. So I think the 90% is the best farmer will do for the regulatory. The other thing we should be concerned about is backlash against psychedelics. How likely is that? But one of the most important things of our fundraising so far has been that we have obtained funding from people across the political spectrum. I think this is a really important point because people might assume that everyone donating to this is sort of tie-dye wearing hippies with a few extra coins in the pocket, but that's not true at all. You have people on, say, the right. You've got Rebecca Mercer. You've got all sorts of folks, Elizabeth Cook. Then on the, let's just say, the left,

Starting point is 01:26:57 for sake of simplicity, you've got certain of the Rockefellers who've donated millions. You've got people like George Soros. So there's an entire spectrum of donors who are contributing to this cause. And certainly that minimizes the likelihood of political backlash, but it speaks even more so to the fact that you have such sympathetic populations you're trying to help, including veterans. The Disabled American Veterans just put out May 1 their bimonthly magazine, and the cover article is about MDMA for PTSD. So I think we're in as best shape as we could possibly be at the moment. Which is why I've come off the bench and I'm back on the field. And I just want to simplify and clarify a bunch of what was just mentioned. So first is very few guarantees in life, but I have decided to re-engage and kind of push

Starting point is 01:28:01 in all my chips on this right now because I view it as being highly de-risked, high probability of success with a very asymmetric payoff. I mean, it opens the door, paves the way, breaks the ice, whatever metaphor you want to use for potentially a dozen compounds, including psilocybin. This is a very, very important, what I would consider, say, vanguard moment and initiative for psychedelics overall. And MDMA is the representative that is furthest ahead. So I'm putting in a million of my own money, which is a lot of money for me. We also have, as I mentioned before, Peter Rahal and James Bailey, Blake Mycoskie, and then, of course, the Stephen and Alexandra Cohn Foundation. Huge

Starting point is 01:28:42 thanks to all of them and others who are contributing money for this $10 million challenge grant. And if you have the possibility, if you're open to considering donating six figures, meaning $100,000 or more over multiple years, then please check out maps.org forward slash capstone. And you can also email capstone at maps.org. And I feel like I've done my homework on this. I mean, I've been very immersed in this world and the science for five or six years now, and have given maps smaller amounts of capital to see how well that's used in the past. I've done that with other outfits in different universities. And this is the right time to contribute. So if you need more convincing, then I would suggest watch the Jonathan Lubecki video created by The Economist, looking at MDMA's treatment for PTSD. Also consider watching Trip

Starting point is 01:29:40 of Compassion. You can find that at tim.blog forward slash trip, which I suggest everybody watch anyway, just because it shows how badly someone can feel they are damaged and flawed and irreparable and how they can regain their footing in life and really feel resurrected. I mean, it's incredible to watch and you get to see it in visual storytelling with real session footage. But I hope you guys will join in. If you've been sitting on the sidelines wondering, how can I support? How can I get involved? And a lot of people, hundreds of people have asked me, this is a good place to place some chips. I'm putting in a lot of chips personally, so I'm not just talking the talk. I'm putting a lot of skin in the game. Yeah. Tim, there's another background factor.

Starting point is 01:30:28 So we have tried the traditional sources of funding, and that has not worked. So for example, there is over a million veterans that are receiving disability payments from the Veterans Administration for PTSD. And it costs the Veterans Administration somewhere in the neighborhood of $15 to $20 billion a year on these disability payments. And they pay multiple billions of dollars every year on SSRIs and other things to treat people with PTSD. And yet we've not been able to get a penny from the VA. In fact, we are paying researchers affiliated with the VA to blend MDMA with their non-drug psychotherapies as a way to try to educate the VA. So maybe one day they will get involved, but I don't think they're going to help us get

Starting point is 01:31:14 it approved. The other thing is the National Institute of Mental Health. So last week, there was an article in the Washington Post about how COVID is going to produce, as you said, a tsunami of mental health problems. And one of the people that was quoted was the woman in charge of PTSD research at the National Institute of Mental Health. And so we've been trying for about 15 years to get any kind of support from the National Institute of Mental Health. And so I just sent her an email the other day and I said, is there a way for NIMH to help us? This is a crisis. You've

Starting point is 01:31:46 acknowledged this in public. And the answer was no. And the reason is because they say that they only look at mechanism of action studies, sort of academic science studies on how things work. But the FDA, to approve a drug, you need to prove safety and you need to prove efficacy, but you don't have to have the faintest idea how the drug works. And in fact, a lot of the drugs that are approved, we don't really know how they work, but the important thing is, can we reduce suffering? Can we give them to people? And if it seems to help, we don't need to know the mechanism of action. So at National Institute of Mental Health though, says, no, we only support these scientific studies. So we've tried the VA, the Department of Defense, the National Institute

Starting point is 01:32:30 of Mental Health, a lot of the major foundations. The Wellcome Trust is the largest foundation in England. It started by Burroughs Wellcome stock, by pharmaceutical stock. They're focused on neuroscience and psychology. And they said, go away, it's a reputational risk for us. Yeah. I said, it's a reputational opportunity, but it didn't work. Well, let me speak to that, because this has been a question a lot of people have had for me. I've been very public, obviously, in the New York Times pieces and Fortune magazine and on the podcast. I've spoken very transparently about my support of scientific research related to

Starting point is 01:33:06 these compounds. And I will say that particularly given the populations we're talking about, victims of sexual abuse, disabled veterans, people suffering from PTSD, treatment-resistant depression in, say, the Hopkins studies, I have been absolutely astonished at the zero amount of blowback that I have experienced. It has been purely 100% reputational upside. And that's not why I did it, but I girded my loins and prepared myself to deal with a bunch of bullshit. And it just hasn't come. It's been nothing but support. And in fact, people have reached out to me who I never thought in a million years would ever reach out to me to confide in their own struggles and also ask how they can help. So it is, from my perspective, as you said, not a reputational risk at all. I know that's strange for me to say, and I usually wouldn't paint such a binary picture, but I really do feel right now

Starting point is 01:34:16 it is much more reputational upside than downside. So let's do this, Rick. We've covered a lot of ground. I want to provide a quick recap to help people. Suffice to say, there is the Capstone Fund. This is a $30 million fund to get MDMA to the finish line. I believe in this. I'm committing a million dollars. There is a $10 million challenge grant that can be activated if another 10 million more is raised in the next 90 days. I'm going to hold very strong to that deadline. This is all or nothing. And you can contribute and learn more if you're contemplating at least $100,000 over multiple years, again, tax deductible, by emailing capstone at maps.org to learn more

Starting point is 01:34:59 and or going to maps.org forward slash capstone. You can certainly contribute less and every dollar does count at maps.org. But let's, I think we should close up soon because that's the message. That's the call to action. That was, I think that's what we want to leave fresh in people's minds. We'll link to everything we've discussed,

Starting point is 01:35:24 all the names we mentioned, Leo Zeff, Sasha Shulgin, all of the books, all of the resources, all the compounds. They'll all be in the show notes at tim.blog forward slash podcast, including links to all of the maps, URLs that we mentioned, and also PSFC, the funding collaborative, psfc.co. But Rick, what else would you like to say? Is there anything else you'd like to close with before we wrap up? Well, first, I'd like to thank you and Joe Green and Graham Boyd at PSFC for this incredible $10 million challenge grant.

Starting point is 01:36:01 And I think what I'd like to say, though, is that while we're talking a lot about MDMA for PTSD, I think what we're saying is that we're going to be unlocking psychedelic psychotherapy for so many different things and that there's so many uses of it. And that we are also trying to market it in a way where we really maximize public benefit and not profit. So I think we're going to do two things, open the field to psychedelic psychotherapy, and then also try to demonstrate a new approach for public health and for pharma. And just to the extent that people can help us get there, we really are doing this out of love, out of passion, out of hope that this is what we can contribute and that humanity is in a crisis. And we've got to be able to work through our fears, to work together. And I think that I'm very optimistic in that sense. I think we have the

Starting point is 01:37:06 tools, but we need to really bring them forward. And now is the time. This $10 million challenge grant is going to be an absolutely critical component to our ability to move forward. Well, Rick, it's always fun to spend time with you. You're inspiring. You are a workhorse. I've seen you more than once running to catch your plane before they shut the gate with a laptop in one hand, like a waiter running through a restaurant, typing out email. You're extremely hardworking. And this is a special moment. It's a special opportunity. It is time dependent. And I'm also honored and thrilled to be part of it, to be able to spend time with people like those names I mentioned who are contributing capital because they've looked at it and believe in the potential significance, which I think is enormous. And it's a great group of people to be involved with. It's been a real blessing in my life. These are fascinating thinkers, fascinating people. And so if this is of interest at all, if you want to just explore it,

Starting point is 01:38:21 please go to maps.org forward slash capstone to learn more. And if you've decided that you've collected some marbles and you don't want to just sit on your hands waiting and that this represents a potentially interesting opportunity, please email capstone at maps.org and set up a meeting to chat more with the team about it. But certainly, I've only placed three big bets in this entire space, and this is the third. I was only planning on making two because I wanted to tip over some dominoes with the last two. And I just think with all the feedback I've had from specialists and doctors and researchers who assessed this, who initially were very, very skeptical. We

Starting point is 01:39:05 don't have to spend time on it now, but they are now converts. And I'm very excited for what's to come. So again, to recap, it's a $10 million challenge grant that has to be met within the next 90 days to be activated. Maps.org forward slash Capstone, Capstone at Maps.org. If you have $100,000 or more that you could potentially put to work to be part of this, if you can contribute anything, less, $1, $10 a month, whatever it is, everything counts, and you can go to Maps.org, which can show you exactly how to do that. Rick, thank you so much for taking the time. I know you're tireless and it impresses the hell out of me, but it's still meaningful for you to carve out some time to do this. So I want to thank you for having the conversation. Oh, my pleasure, Tim. And I think we will be able together to bring

Starting point is 01:39:59 these healing technologies to the world. Absolutely. And I will leave it there for now. For everybody who has tuned in, thank you for listening. And until next time, take care, be safe, and consider checking out maps.org forward slash capstone. Thanks for listening.

Starting point is 01:40:22 Hey guys, this is Tim again. Just a few more things before you take off. Number one, this is Five Bullet Friday. Thanks for listening. It's a very short email where I share the coolest things I've found or that I've been pondering over the week. That could include favorite new albums that I've discovered. It could include gizmos and gadgets and all sorts of weird shit that I've somehow dug up in the world of the esoteric as I do. It could include favorite articles that I've read and that I've shared with my close friends, for instance. And it's very short. It's just a little tiny bite of goodness before you head off for the weekend. So if you want to receive that, check it out. Just go to 4hourworkweek.com. That's 4hourworkweek.com all spelled out and

Starting point is 01:41:18 just drop in your email and you will get the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. This episode is brought to you by LinkedIn Jobs. Now more than ever, businesses are grappling with the very next one. And if you sign up, I hope you enjoy it. opportunities in times of turbulence, in times of change. Whether you're looking to hire now for a critical role or thinking about needs that you might have in the future, LinkedIn Jobs can help. LinkedIn is an active community with more than 675 million members worldwide. LinkedIn screens candidates for the hard and soft skills you're looking for while putting your job in front of candidates looking for job opportunities that match exactly what you have to offer. With LinkedIn, you can hire the right person quickly when you need them. And if you need to hire for healthcare or essential services, you can post your jobs for free right now. When it's time to find and hire that right person, LinkedIn is here to help. Just visit linkedin.com

Starting point is 01:42:21 slash Tim. Again, that's linkedin.com slash Tim to post a job now. Terms and conditions apply. This podcast episode is brought to you by Helix Sleep. Sleep is super important to me. In the last few years, I've come to conclude it is the end-all be-all, that all good things, good mood, good performance, good everything, seem to stem from good sleep. So I've tried a lot

Starting point is 01:42:46 to optimize it. I've tried pills and potions, all sorts of different mattresses, you name it. And for the last few years, I've been sleeping on a Helix Midnight Luxe mattress. I also have one in the guest bedroom and feedback from friends has always been fantastic. It's something that they comment on. Helix Sleep has a quiz, takes about two minutes to complete, that matches your body type and sleep preferences to the perfect mattress for you. With Helix, there's a specific mattress for each and every body. That is your body, also your taste. So let's say you sleep on your side and like a super soft bed, no problem. Or if you're a back sleeper who likes a mattress that's as firm as a rock, they've got a mattress for you too. Helix was selected as the number one best overall mattress

Starting point is 01:43:29 pick of 2020 by GQ Magazine, Wired, Apartment Therapy, and many others. Just go to helixsleep.com slash Tim, take their two-minute sleep quiz, and they'll match you to a customized mattress that will give you the best sleep of your life. They have a 10-year warranty, and you get to try it out for 100 nights risk-free. They'll even pick it up from you if you don't love it. And now, my dear listeners, Helix is offering up to $200 off of all mattress orders and two free pillows at helixsleep.com slash Tim. These are not cheap pillows either, so getting two for free is an upgraded deal. So that's up to $200 off and two free pillows at helixsleep.com slash Tim. That's helixsleep.com slash Tim for up to $200

Starting point is 01:44:16 off. So check it out one more timeI-X, sleep.com slash Tim.

The Tim Ferriss Show - #440: Rick Doblin — The Psychedelic Domino That Tips All Others

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