The Tim Ferriss Show - Ep 66: The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide - Risks, Micro-Dosing, Ibogaine, and More

Episode Date: March 21, 2015

DISCLAIMER: DO NOT CONSUME ANY DRUGS WITHOUT CONSULTING A MEDICAL PROFESSIONAL. THIS IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY.JAMES FADIMAN, Ph.D., did his undergraduate work at Harvard and his graduate work at Stanford, doing research with the Harvard Group, the West Coast Research Group in Menlo Park, and Ken Kesey. He is the author of The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide.Called “America’s wisest and most respected authority on psychedelics and their use,” Jim Fadiman has been involved with psychedelic research since the 1960s. In this episode, we discuss the immediate and long-term effects of psychedelics when used for spiritual purposes (high dose), therapeutic purposes (moderate dose), and problem-solving purposes (low dose). Fadiman outlines best practices for safe "entheogenic" voyages learned through his more than 40 years of experience--from the benefits of having a sensitive guide during a session (and how to be one) to the importance of the setting and pre-session intention. And that's just the tip of the iceberg.We also discuss new uses for LSD and other psychedelics, including extremely low doses for improved cognitive function. Cautioning that psychedelics are not for everyone, he dispels the myths and misperceptions about psychedelics, which are commonly circulated in textbooks. Fadiman explain how -- in his opinion -- psychedelics, used properly, can lead not only to healing but also to scientific breakthroughs and spiritual epiphanies.Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast***If you enjoy the podcast, would you please consider leaving a short review on Apple Podcasts/iTunes? It takes less than 60 seconds, and it really makes a difference in helping to convince hard-to-get guests. I also love reading the reviews!For show notes and past guests, please visit tim.blog/podcast.Sign up for Tim’s email newsletter (“5-Bullet Friday”) at tim.blog/friday.For transcripts of episodes, go to tim.blog/transcripts.Interested in sponsoring the podcast? Visit tim.blog/sponsor and fill out the form.Discover Tim’s books: tim.blog/books.Follow Tim:Twitter: twitter.com/tferriss Instagram: instagram.com/timferrissFacebook: facebook.com/timferriss YouTube: youtube.com/timferrissPast guests on The Tim Ferriss Show include Jerry Seinfeld, Hugh Jackman, Dr. Jane Goodall, LeBron James, Kevin Hart, Doris Kearns Goodwin, Jamie Foxx, Matthew McConaughey, Esther Perel, Elizabeth Gilbert, Terry Crews, Sia, Yuval Noah Harari, Malcolm Gladwell, Madeleine Albright, Cheryl Strayed, Jim Collins, Mary Karr, Maria Popova, Sam Harris, Michael Phelps, Bob Iger, Edward Norton, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Neil Strauss, Ken Burns, Maria Sharapova, Marc Andreessen, Neil Gaiman, Neil de Grasse Tyson, Jocko Willink, Daniel Ek, Kelly Slater, Dr. Peter Attia, Seth Godin, Howard Marks, Dr. Brené Brown, Eric Schmidt, Michael Lewis, Joe Gebbia, Michael Pollan, Dr. Jordan Peterson, Vince Vaughn, Brian Koppelman, Ramit Sethi, Dax Shepard, Tony Robbins, Jim Dethmer, Dan Harris, Ray Dalio, Naval Ravikant, Vitalik Buterin, Elizabeth Lesser, Amanda Palmer, Katie Haun, Sir Richard Branson, Chuck Palahniuk, Arianna Huffington, Reid Hoffman, Bill Burr, Whitney Cummings, Rick Rubin, Dr. Vivek Murthy, Darren Aronofsky, and many more.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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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. To Arnold Schwarzenegger-type celebrities, and in this case, a scientific researcher named Jim Fadiman. And I have wanted to have a sit-down conversation with Jim for ages. He is the author of The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide, which is an incredible book and really one-of-a-kind. But he's also conducted studies since the 60s related to psilocybin, LSD, and so on, focusing not only on the mystical implications, but using them in microdosing protocols for problem solving, including very difficult hard science

problems like engineering, math, circuitry, et cetera. This is a rambling, meandering discussion of all the implications and applications, therapeutic and otherwise, of these substances that have really been criminalized and politicized in, in my view, a very counterproductive way. So without further ado, please enjoy a long conversation with Jim Fadiman. Jim, welcome to the show. It's a real pleasure to finally be here. I'm so excited to be outside on this gorgeous day in San Francisco. And I have wanted

to have this conversation for so long now. It feels like years, but I think it's probably closer to six to nine months. Because the term that you introduced me to, which was microdosing, and I'm sure we'll jump back and forth, but could you define what microdosing is? Yeah, well, let's be clear that we're talking about psychedelics, because a microdose is simply a little teeny dose of something. Right. With psychedelics, it's actually a low enough dose, so it could be called sub-perceptual, which means you don't necessarily see any differences in the outside world. As one person said to me, the rocks don't glitter even a little

and the flowers don't turn and watch you. But you're using it in a way that is really very unknown. Albert Hoffman, who invented LSD, said that microdosing was the area of kind of the most neglected research. Why do you think it's so neglected? And what are the promises or applications of microdosing? Well, he took it for the last couple of decades of his life. So I like to think that it helps you be really sharp at 101. How frequently did he microdose over that period of time? It would probably be once, twice a week. What he said is he almost would always take it when he was walking with the trees.

So what it is and why he said it was under-researched is it does a far better job of a whole class of drugs which we're now calling cognitive enhancers, most of which are simply derivatives of speed. Right, definitely, like methylphenidate, Ritalin. I mean, they're lighting you up. Adderall. Adderall. Probably the most popular among educated students. Oh, it's a popular currency for bartering. Right.

And when we talk about small doses, in the case of, say, Hoffman using it twice per week, would that be in the 100-microgram range? No, no, no, no, no. 100 micrograms is a major dose. That's a major dose. See, I'm not an LSD... Aficionado? I'm not well-versed.

Okay. Let me just briefly kind of run through doses because it does matter. Let's go from the top down. Sure. Terrence McKenna talks about heroic dose. Don't. Yeah, that's enough to shatter the most resistant ego. Well, what happens is you don't remember anything and you don't bring anything back.

Got it. It's kind of like you want to go swimming. How about going over Niagara Falls? Right. Not a lot of time to work on technique. But if we get down to, say, 400 micrograms, that's a transcendental dose. That's for mystical experience. That's something you should always have a guide.

And this is LSD specifically? This is LSD specifically. If we go down to 200, we're talking psychotherapy, deep inner work, all kinds of healing, and great for self-exploration. 100 is really useful creative problem solving of problems that aren't personal. Things like in physics or biomechanics or architecture. And we can talk about some of that work that's been done because it's only been a little bit done and I was involved with all of it. Go down to 50, again, I'll reveal my age.

It used to be called a museum dose. Now it's called a concert dose. Now it's called a concert dose. And 10, 10, 15 is this micro dose, which is another person described it as an all chakra enhancer, which is everything is just a little better. You know, at the end of the day, when you say, wow, that was a really good day. That's the way most people report a micro dose. They're a little bit nicer. They're a little bit personally behaving. Yeah, this is behavior. They also find that stupid people are not so bad, more tolerant. They're much more tolerant, including their relatives, which is really extraordinary. Um, they are not at a higher level of creativity, but they can be creative longer kind of steady more in flow

and um as one of my favorite uh women who who's been microdosing from i discovered her and she said oh yeah i've been doing that for years um she said the only way anyone else could tell is that my computer i i lower the illumination a little but she she has very large pupils, so it's hard to tell. And the microdosing, is there an optimal frequency with which to use it? Is there too much of microdosing in terms of frequency? Psychedelics are very peculiar. They are anti-addictive, which means if you take it on day one and you have whatever experience you have, if you take it on day two, same have whatever experience you have if you take it on day two same amount maybe some experience but maybe not and if you take it a third day straight

nothing to develop tolerance very quickly so your mind develops tolerance the drug is gone it's way gone particularly if we're talking lsd micrograms it's gone within an hour and a half so something in the mind says i think we've just had enough of that for now. It's a little bit like if you have a fantastic, well, one of your killer carb days. Right, that cheat day, explosion. Right, and then you do that the next day. And then the third day you just get sick.

So they're anti-addictive. So I have a protocol I actually send to people, and it basically says take it on day one. Notice that you're still having experience on day two. This is different than if you take a higher dose. Day three, take a day off. And then if you are doing it continually, then you can take it again on day four. And that seems to work best for people.

And they're only dosing once on day one, but they see the residual again on day four. And that seems to work best for people. And they're only dosing once on day one, but they see the residual effect on day two. This is one of the things that, what's wonderful is I feel like I'm Columbus. Any place I land counts because no one's been there. Most of the people who are listening to us who have any experience with psychedelics know that LSD is 8 to 12 hours, psilocybin is 5 to 8 hours, DMT is 15 minutes, etc. Microdose seems to be two days.

And I was talking with a professor who does psychedelic research at a major East Coast university, and he said, tell me more about microdosing. And I mentioned the two days, and he's basically a specialist in this area and in neurochemistry. And he kind of looks at me like, oh, you West Coast cool hippies. And I said, well, that's been what I hear from people. And then a guy walks by who runs a very large corporation with manufacturing plants in about five countries. And he looks down at me and says second day is better this is just a passerby or well someone i knew at the same

gathering and then i kind of you know gave my buddy a little kick in the ribs and then he sends back he looks back at me and he says, ask my daughter. Interesting. Who happened to be a mental health worker who also said, yeah, for her too. So this is one of the things we're discovering. And this is the fun part, which is I don't do research. I only do search. So once I've learned something, replicating it or doing it with a whole bunch more people is not as interesting as can I find out something else?

Now, I'd imagine that you probably run into some resistance or debate around that point with people who would want to see multiple iterations of replicating results or they don't pay attention to the empirical data you might offer otherwise. Has that been a challenge? Well, there's a game in science. One is called have a big number. And I've seen people in conferences, you can always ask this question, which is, why didn't you have more? Right.

Okay. You had eight. How come you didn't have 15? You have 15. How come you didn't have 15? You had 15. How come you didn't have 30? You only had 100,000, and you had no one from Norway in the sample. How do we know we can generalize? Right.

So it's a kind of silliness that academics do to each other. The other in drug research, and this is really helpful for a very small number of drugs, is called a double blind. Right. Which is you give it to people, and you give half give it to people and you give half of them nothing and you give half of them something psychedelic research has always stumbled on that one because within an hour except for micro doses maybe everybody knows right and then the the researchers are stuck acting like jerks all day pretending that they don't know so that's another one uh but the main thing with microdosing is I'm not doing research. I'm not giving people psychedelic drugs. One is they're illegal. And two is

I'm not a physician connected to a university. What I'm doing is saying to people, and keep in mind that since LSD became illegal, 26 million Americans, and just Americans, have taken LSD. So I'm saying to people, if you're interested in microdosing, and you have your own material because you either know someone who is in college, or in high school, or in prison, these are the three places where you can get almost any drug, particularly these less dangerous ones, then let me know and I'll be happy to help you make it as safe and as valuable as possible. And for those people perhaps unfamiliar with your background,

could you give a short chronology or description of your background? Sure. Brought up in Los Angeles in the shadow of the film business, the shadow being the writers who didn't respect anybody else because they were the only ones who'd read and written. I went to Harvard as an undergraduate, and my favorite teacher was someone named Richard Alpert. After Harvard, I scrambled around and got all the money and gifts and favors that I could find, plus all the people to stay with, and went and lived in Europe for close to a year. Ram Dass, Richard Alpert still, showed up and said, hi, Jim, the most wonderful thing in the world has happened to me, and I want to share it with you. And I thought, okay, whatever it is. And then

he takes some pills out of his pocket, and I think, words you don't say on radio, oh my. And so I had some psilocybin with him while living in Paris. And a week later, I followed him to Copenhagen, where he was teaming up with Tim Leary and Aldous Huxley to present at the first conference that there was, a world psychology conference they first presented about psychedelics. And then my draft board wrote me a note and said, you like living in Paris? Or would you like to come to Vietnam, where we can show you how to crawl on the ground on your elbows in the mud? Or would you like to go to graduate school? And all of a sudden, graduate school had these little shiny stars all around it. So I ended up at Stanford. And there was a group off campus that was doing

psychedelic research, and I found them. Did my dissertation on psychedelics. Not on psychedelics, but about psychedelics. And then as the government said, we don't know what to do about all these kids taking psychedelics. Let's stop all the legitimate research. At least we stopped something. So I then went and had a career doing other things and wrote about altered states and wrote about madness and wrote one novel, one psychedelic novel.

And as the, I used to call it government repression, but one of my fellow researchers calls it a lull in the research. So once the lull was over, I basically found some areas that interested me. And I now am a really a psychedelic researcher in this unusual way where I don't have a laboratory and I don't stay with people and I just ask them what they're doing. So it's more, more field research. At one level, it's crowdsourcing. Sure. Another level, and this is one of Ram Dass' terms, is it's like going to the Explorers Club now and then and you swap stories. So that's a very short background. I've had a long career. I've been a professor at various places. I've been a consultant. I was with the Stanford Research Institute with a group that developed the mouse and word processing, which was probably the most, you know, my closest to being woo in history.

What was your undergraduate major? Well, I started in physics, and it was really hard. Physics is hard. I had this wonderful moment after I just squeaked through calculus where my advisor said, You know, Mr. Fadiman, that everyone who got a lower grade than you in this course will not be in your next course. And I thought, is there a message here? Tell me how you really feel. Am I supposed to hear something like that? So I ended up in social relations, which was psychology without rats. And that's where I met Dick Alpert.

Is that, how did he differ as Professor Alpert versus Ram Dass? What was that transformation? Well, as a professor, particularly when you're a Harvard assistant professor, you are at the bottom of a stairway that leads to heaven. At least that's the way you're a Harvard assistant professor, you are at the bottom of a stairway that leads to heaven. Right. At least that's the way you're told. So you're supposed to just work your ass off climbing those stairs. So maybe, maybe, maybe they will keep you. So Richard was a kind of a wonderful teacher and a wonderfully, as he would easily say you know incredibly neurotic and he was also then a closet gay very closet because that's the era and the the harvard department was full of really basically nice people looking at the kind of

better sides of human beings also the department had department had B.F. Skinner, which was behaviorism, which was saying there is nothing in the mind worth noticing. So it was a wonderful place for a kind of nerdy intellectual, which I was. So it's like from being seriously unpopular in high school and liking that to being just one more smarty-ass person at Harvard who pretended to have read a lot more than he ever had. What did you like about being unpopular in high school?

Well, they didn't respect me for the same reasons I didn't respect them. I was student body president because I was clever enough to figure out a way to make the other person look foolish. It's really a terrible admission. And in turn, when I won a letter in tennis, I was the captain of the tennis team, I never won a match against another school, but I knew how to get into a good college, which is to have tennis team California on your resume.

The Letterman's Club had a meeting and changed the rules so that I couldn't get a letter, and I confess that I found that wonderful. They and I understood each other deeply. Your thesis, what was your thesis about? Well, I'd been doing my Stanford courses by day and psychedelic research by night and afternoons. What were the courses that you were teaching?

Well, I was taking just a bunch of courses. Oh, I'm sorry. The graduate level classes, yeah. And I was the only graduate student that always wore a coat and tie because I thought that would fool them. And it did. But my dissertation was on behavior change following LSD therapy. And it took me two years to get a committee of three people and about eight weeks to do the dissertation.

So it was a little scary for Stanford because this was just when Dick and Tim had been fired from Harvard. The country was in uproar. This is Tim Leary. Tim Leary. And Dick was? Richard Alpert. That's was in uproar. This is Tim Leary. Tim Leary. And Dick Williams. Richard Alpert. That's right, Richard Alpert. And this was when students were taking over campuses and so forth and so on. So Stanford was terrified at earning its nickname, which was the Harvard of the West. And so they, I basically really had to sneak around very quietly and do my work,

which was this wonderful work where I interviewed 100 people who'd had high-dose, mystical, transcendental experiences. And my question was, that's really cool. Has your behavior changed? Are you different in some way? Or are you just someone who has a lot of wonderful kind of New Age flowery things to say and the answer of course is that people like their work more they had more friends at work they played with their children more they were out in nature more they watch television less their eating habits improved so they were fundamentally across the board healthier human beings what uh what doses or what were the it could be dosages or commonalities did you find

in the people who had the most durable effects? Well, very straightforward. That there, if one has this transcendental experience, and maybe I should say a little bit what that is, that's the feeling of, or the awareness that you are connected to not only to other people, but to other things and to other living things and to living systems and to the air you breathe. If you just think for a moment, we tend to think that we're kind of encapsulated, like I'm separate. But obviously the air I'm breathing comes from all over the world, and some of it's a billion years old. My cells are turning around. Every eight years I get almost all new cells from something.

Obviously everything I eat is connected to me. Everyone I meet is connected to me. Right now you and I are sitting outside, and our feet are touching the ground. We're connected to the ground. Now that's all easy to say intellectually and even poetically. But when you actually experience that you're part of this larger system, one of the things that you become aware of is your ego, your personal identity is not that big a part of you.

What I learned was, this is from my own personal experience in 1961, is that Jim Fadiman is a subset of me. And the me is very, very large and a lot smarter and knows a lot more than Jim Fadiman. And that's been a shift, which in the people I also saw from my dissertation, that was the big shift. And let me give you a kind of really serious example, which is some of the people that we worked with were alcoholics. And what we found is the ones who would have a transcendental experience would, a transcendental experience,

a week later they'd go out and drink. Which at first thought, oh, we failed. And then they'd come back to us and say, it doesn't work. And we'd say, what doesn't work? He'd say, drinking doesn't work anymore. It makes me feel less. And what we realize is that many alcoholics are drinking because they feel isolated they have not made this transition to feeling part of a larger system and if we go into their background they may not feel part of their family and so forth and so on but at the deeper level if

you realize that you're part of larger existence and that that's basically all positive then if drinking closes that down why on earth would you do it it's kind of like going to movies but you carry some little uh eye shades with you and the movie starts and you put on the eye shades and the next you says what are you doing that for us well i don't want to be too much part of the event i don't want to be immersed in the movie exactly and when you get into relationships and when you get into lovemaking, you can see where this could be a real problem. Absolutely. And I've done a fair amount of reading and I've had my own experiences, not with addiction

with other substances, but I've been in the same settings as others using, for instance, whether it be psilocybin or mushrooms or ayahuasca for the purposes of overcoming opiate addiction or heroin addiction. Are there any other aspects of those experiences or just the pharmacokinetics of those substances that lead to overcoming those types of addictions? Well, that's the wonderful thing is there is one, and it's a different substance than we've talked about yet,

which is ibogaine. It comes from a root in Africa, the iboga root, etc., etc., etc. The tribe that uses it, the B-twee, has never heard of addiction. But somehow we discovered that if an addict takes a session with iboga or bogaine, one is the session may last 36 hours. It's a killer. That sounds terrifying. And imagine if one of the things you go through

is every single event in your life that you did that wasn't good. Okay? And it isn't like reading about it as it happened years ago, but you've got it right in your face event after event after and you really get that you don't want to do that and after 36 hours and this is the the psych and the psychokinetic or the the medical kind of chemical part you come out and you do not have withdrawal symptoms how does that happen i'm so fascinated by the answer is nobody has the faintest idea that's

so fascinating because you read about things like naltrexone i think it is that's used or you know the obviously of methadone which is a totally different substance but i i've i've heard this straight from the horse's mouth from people who've overcome this is this is this so you have a window and that's because the problem is normally if you're an addict and you get clean, withdrawal symptoms are horrible. Terrible. And the one thing that we know takes care of them is more of whatever you're addicted to. But if you don't have that, and it only doesn't last that long, this kind of open, pure space. If you stop, you have a chance to stop.

And the people I know that run clinics, there's some wonderful clinics in Mexico and South America, a lot of countries other than one that we are sitting in, don't know why, what they say is a number of people don't make it on the first session. They relapse after a couple of months and they come back. And we get a number improved on know, improved on that group. So if you want to stop being addicted,

and I remember listening to this wonderful young man talking about when his sister found him under the bridge where he was addicted to heroin and methadone. Oh, boy. Methadone is what you're given to not be addicted to heroin, by the way. And she said, I think there's a place that could help you. And he was now, several years later, running a small clinic in Mexico to help other heroin kind of addicts. So that's a particular one. Ayahuasca and psilocybin and all can clean up

your psyche and again, give you this, this different way of seeing yourself, but they don't have this amazing kind of a grace. Grace period provided. And, uh, it doesn't matter where you are in San Francisco. I'm not sure if you people listening can hear all the sirens. It always sounds like Beirut warfare for at least half of the day so i apologize to everybody but the uh the question of psychedelics and psychedelics of choice uh do the applications of say psilocybin differ greatly from the applications of lsd in your mind what what differentiates them well what you'll if you are up on the applications of LSD in your mind? What differentiates them? Well, if you are up on the kind of research game since the government said,

well, maybe if you go through 82 hurdles, we'll actually let you do it, most of the research has been psilocybin. There are two reasons for that. One is it takes five to eight hours. LSD takes 10 to 12. The second reason is so the staff can go home, which is part of the first reason.

The difference between those two substances and mescaline and peyote, in terms of what they do for you and to you, are very much the same. They don't have the same molecule. They're not the same chemically, but psychodynamically or spiritually, they're very similar.

When you get to another group, kind of like another FM station, ayahuasca is a totally different set of experiences. And the very fast acting ones, DMT being the one that is most popular, again, that's a different universe that you're plunged into. And then there's something called salvia. And the wonderful thing about salvia is it has nothing to do chemically with anything else I've just talked about. And its full name is salvia divinorum. So it's been used in Mexico historically for who knows how many thousand years for divination, for finding out things.

And again, we seem to be able as Americans to take almost anything that is indigenous and screw it up in some way. And so people smoke salvia and have a short, intense, sometimes meaningful experience. That isn't how it's used. It's chewed, which means it takes about an hour, and it comes on slowly, and it has a time, and then it goes down. So it's a totally different experience. Well, that's something that I've spoken with friends about before who have used and I've experimented with 5meo dmt and uh decided that i disliked it and the reason i decided i disliked it is i felt there was for me personally in this this uh

certainly subject to debate but i felt precisely due to its fast acting nature that and how quickly it cleared the system or seemed to clear the system that there's a higher potential for addiction or abuse, maybe is a better way to put it. And similarly, if you look at, say, coca leaf tea, which I've had in South America, which is just a wonderful tea that is very mild. It's milder than a cup of coffee, in my experience, without the jitters and the crash at least but then you compare it to same same plant matter but refined to cocaine and then further uh let's just say refined into the quick hitting crack cocaine the the dangers are are very very different the risks are very different it's one of the things where um we're actually uh shulgan sasha shulgan who invented he's there are two great beings that have invented psychedelics god and sasha shulgan and i think shasha may have invented more but they're literally hundreds that he played with and looked at and what he says in the beginning

of his book is what's the name of his book uh pical. Pical. If you know thiolines, I have known and liked. P-I-C-A-L? And he has another book called Tical, which is tryptamines that I have known and liked. And they're filled with synthesizing, how to do various syntheses. And I asked him once why he put out such a book. He said, so the government can't stop people from experimenting. He wanted to unleash the recipe gun. Well, it's, it's, it's, and what he says is, if you are using something and you don't have any knowledge about it, you are at fault.

Right. And so, like the 5-MeO, of which there are some varieties, one of the problems is that the, the very unpleasant or close to toxic dose is fairly close to the dose that people like. One of the nice things I like about LSD is we don't know what the toxic dose is. Nobody's ever taken enough. And there is in the literature a great article which is an elephant was given like several hundred thousand micrograms of LSD and died. And for many years, I used to say, if you give enough LSD to kill an elephant, you can kill an elephant. Ha, ha, ha, ha.

I only learned recently that the elephant had been dosed with tranquilizers, massive amounts of tranquilizers, because the experimenters were afraid. You don't really want an angry elephant that says, hey, who this lsd i'm gonna stomp you so they had packed this pacaderm with tranquilizers and it basically uh suffered respiratory failure no kidding so we really don't and i think one of the other maybe it's but it's like hundreds of times the dose people take before it it really harms you now taking too much of any of these substances psychologically can be really scary especially if you don't know what you're doing and especially if you don't have someone with you you know the equivalent of the designated driver and i'd love to touch on that because i've spoken openly before about psychedelic use

and although i find that the term bothers me for some reason i don't use it try psychedelic experience psychedelic experience because that way you're not talking about a drug you're talking about the effects of a drug that's true i also came across the word entheogen i think it is entheogen is that means the divine within and that's using these substances ayahuasca mescaline peyote lsd psilocybin etc as a spiritual tool so what you're aiming for is to reconnect and reunite and remember-member, re-dash member, your connection with the spiritual world. And that's called an entheogenic experience. I like that phrase. It's a lovely phrase.

It doesn't have the tinge, perhaps. It doesn't have all that kind of 60s razzmatazz behind it. All the connotation. You don't hear the dad going, hey, hey, hey. Right, exactly. So, but speaking of uninformed use, I think this is very important because I have shied away from LSD precisely because I have two close friends who over time, I saw them after several years of very heavy LSD use, which they did solo for the most part. And I don't know if it unearthed latent schizophrenic tendencies that they had genetically or not, but they were noticeably, oddly enough, less connected. It seemed they were just less self-aware and less connected.

In much the opposite you might expect, because when I meet people who have undergone a very deep entheogenic or psychedelic experience in a controlled environment, they seem to gain all of those things. But these people seem to have lost that. What happens for some people, and again, is you discover this incredibly more interesting world, and you then don't like this one. Right. Because you don't integrate so you say well i'd like to get back there and my buddies said here's some you know i bought this off of this guy in the village and it's he said it's real let's tell take it and then if you keep leaving in a sense and not integrating eventually you can really get disconnected and one of my teachers had a really wonderful image

now you have to go back to film where you rolled the film and if you take a picture with film you get a huge amount of information you can also do what's called a double exposure you get twice as much information but it's really hard to figure out what's there if you do a triple exposure you've got a massive amount of information and it's worthless. So one of the problems that your friends had is they kept kind of piling on the images and not rolling the film.

That's interesting. I have a little remark in my book, which is a couple of chapters on how to do the best possible session. I'm really into safety. I'm really into purity. I'm really into people having the best possible session. I'm really into safety. I'm really into purity. I'm really into people having the best possible experience. Just like a good travel agent says, you know, when you go to Paris, don't jump in the Seine. It's really interesting. Just walk along. Things like that, kind of the obvious. And what I've found is that when you do things this way

well, when I say in my book at some point you've had a wonderful experience and this is the Psychedelic Explorer's Guide great book by the way, people should check it out if you've had a really meaningful experience and about a month later you say I really need to have another one what that means is you're not willing to work something

through. You're trying to get around it. You're trying to avoid it. And that's a real good indicator that, oh, I really need another one, not to. And that's hard for people. Again, that's the reason, you know, when I wrote the book, the purpose was so that people could have safe, spiritual, therapeutic, or just for recreation purposes. Because these are, they're not bad for you, but it's hard to think of something you can't misuse. And there's a wonderful diagram that my marijuana friends use when they're describing dangers. And it's this chart, and way up at the top is what kills the most people per year. You know, it's tobacco, like 400,000. Alcohol, 200,000.

And you kind of get down. There's the atrogenic diseases. That's things that you get from hospitals and doctors, about 100,000. And you go way down to the bottom, and the second from the bottom is peanuts. 100 deaths a year. and then there's marijuana zero and it's you know it makes the point but the point is peanuts right water salt you know it's possible to harm yourself if you don't know what you're doing with practically anything i think a big part of it just coming to the peanut point specifically,

is people who are perhaps either unaware that they have a peanut allergy or who don't do their homework to determine what's in the food that they're consuming. Or they choke. Or they choke. Or they choke, right. So it could be all three or one of the three. In the case of psychedelics, what are some of the guidelines that you provide for safe and successful experiences? We have a regular parade of dogs coming by us, which is really pleasant, actually.

I heard that little bell. are, and you can really do it with just a series of little S words, which is, what is the set, meaning what's the mental attitude you have? I really want to be with my friends and go to the beach and groove on the sunset, or I really want to look into the fact that I've never really acknowledged that I was raped by my uncle at age 13 and I still hate men. Those are real different sets. The setting is nature to, you know, I can't think of the worst setting,

but it's probably in a laboratory in a university. Almost all the psychedelic research that's done now is in a living room-like setting with comfortable cushions and art and flowers so that you feel physically and emotionally safe then the question is what's the substance and then what's the dose because as i we talked about it makes a huge difference and then the question is what's your situation afterwards? Which is, one of the things we know is people who get out of prison, I'm deep breathing while the truck goes by.

No, I appreciate that. If they go back to the same neighborhood, they are much more likely to go back to prison because that's the occupations that are available to them. So part of it is, what's the occupations that are available to them so part of it is what's the aftercare and the last is who's the sitter or the guide or the person assisting you and i'm in a lot of psychedelic circles i'm kind of a right wing nut because i really have found that a guide makes an enormous difference in not only safety, which is pretty obvious, but in depth. It's kind of if you're on safari. Why do you have a guide?

Well, he doesn't see the animals for you, but he sure can say, I'd look over there if I were you. And you say, whoa, something over there. And he'd say, you know, it's your safari, but personally, this rhinoceros coming toward us, I'm going to stand behind the tree. Okay? but personally this rhinoceros coming toward us i'm going to stand behind the tree okay because i i remember once i was this is not with animals i was in australia and i was in a a town where there was a rodeo with a lot of aborigines coming into town and after the rodeo they got drunk and there was this piling out of a bar kind of angry swirl of

Aborigines. And I'm walking along and I think, wow, that's really interesting. And so I'm starting to walk right in the middle of them. And the woman I was with pulls me back and says, what are you doing? And I got, I'm invisible to them because I'm just some white guy, but I'm still an object in the middle of people who were pulling out knives. So a guide is really valuable. Fundamental. If you're serious, if you're really serious of discovering what's inside yourself, then a guide is really helpful. And it's again, also like a designated driver, which is you do want to be safe. You don't want suddenly... I remember a wonderful response from a student I was asking. He said the session was really going well until the car caught on fire. That tells you a lot about the setting being slightly off.

What separates, aside from what you just mentioned, a good sitter or a great sitter or guide from someone who is not? Well, a great sitter is someone you trust. Let's do it this way. A good sitter is someone you trust. A great sitter is someone who loves you and you trust and a superlative sitter is someone who doesn't have any agenda of their own they don't want you to see a certain thing they don't want you to be a certain way they don't want you to discover a certain thing now they all do but what they their job as a guide is is how can i give this person the best possible experience

that they can have at this time in their lives? And at some point, when someone, for instance, says, all I want is to be in the spirit, and after a few hours you can see that that's not going to happen, then you say, well, why don't we take a walk in nature, which is a beautiful experience and always a good idea. I met Albert Hoffman just once and he said, and my German accent's probably a little weak, but he said, people are always asking me,

how should I take psychedelics? And I say to them, always take it in nature. That was pretty well done. Well, it hit me. Because, again, what happens when you're in nature is you begin to understand that you're in nature. You're not apart from nature.

And that's, again, part of this deep revelation that you are really connected to a very intensely alive and complicated system of which you play a role. Well, I liked your segregation of re and member the re member i like that a lot because what happens a lot of times people at some point will start laughing and they laugh in a very deep way and what it isn't the giggles of marijuana it's the laughter of how could I have forgotten who I really am? And then much later in the day when they're reintegrating and finding that they still, surprisingly, are in the same body they came in with, in spite of having been part of the galaxy or whatever else.

And one person said it very beautifully, I was back in the prison of all of the things that hold me back, but I could see that the door was locked from the inside. So that's the level of psychotherapeutic insight. That's deep. And that's deep. way to integrate after such a session so that it doesn't get lost in the slipstream because i've i've met people who've been transformed by responsible supervised psychedelic use i've also met people as i'm sure you have who seem to be uh they're they're almost like seminar junkies people who can't stop going to seminars but they never take the time to do the work that's assigned

to them right and i go to cocktail parties, of course. Ayahuasca is very much of the moment. It's a popular topic of conversation. And I was in New York, and I met a number of people who claimed to have done it 80, 100, 150 times. And they seemed utterly unchanged by it. Right. And how do you avoid that trap? What is the proper way to integrate?

Well, let's put Ayahuasca aside for a moment it's a separate question but with with any major intervention in your life if you don't see how it fits into your life or try to fit it in you're going to be in trouble we have something called culture shock which you know a lot about because you've traveled in a lot of weird places. And you suddenly get, I'm in a really weird place. I remember a moment, I'm in Japan, and all my friends who've been around me and helping and speak, who are Japanese, they all went away. And I'm suddenly aware I'm illiterate. I'm totally illiterate. I cannot read a street sign. I cannot tell what the stop sign says.

I look at a restaurant. I have no idea what's going on. I ended up getting food from the subway out of like an automat. It was really, and it was just terrible. But I had the realization of what culture shock is, and I hadn't been able, and then I started to integrate, which is, oh, I'm in Japan. It's okay. I'm really not illiterate, I just don't speak Japanese. And they're, oh, there's a sign with a word in English.

And integration is the missing piece in the psychedelic world, which is why the successful studies don't talk, even as we've been talking about psychedelic experience, they talk about experience in a therapeutic package. So the work with MDMA, for example, which is wonderfully mind-blowing, that it releases people from post-traumatic stress disorder. But not just taking MDMA, but taking MDMA, preparing for it with a psychotherapist, having two guides, male and female,

and then a lot of time with integration of talking with these people, talking with other people who've had a similar experience. But there's a term we have, working it through, which is like getting rid of it. This is the opposite. This is putting it into practice. Zen Roshi, who I know, Kenneth Roshi, said, you know why we call meditation practice? It's so you're practicing on how to be in the world.

You're not practicing on how to sit on your butt and look at the wall. She said, that's the easiest possible way to meditate and to integrate it into your system. The point is to get up and do something. And she would tell me that these bright-eyed people would show up and say, I'm ready, Roshi. I'm going to meditate my little tail off. And she'd say,

you're really serious. And they'd say, oh yeah. She said, well, this is Mount Shasta. She said, well, one of the goats is giving birth in a shed up there. Someone has to be with that goat all night. And they would look at her and she would look at them and she said, some of them left. But the ones who stayed began to understand that integration means to put it into your life. So even, I didn't know much when I did my

dissertation, but my question was, if it doesn't change your behavior in ways not only that you notice, but that other people notice it probably hasn't gotten very deep right so when um when someone says to me i took lsd and discovered i was god i said that's wonderful um am i god if they say no we're already in trouble but if they say yes and i say well what are we going to do about that you know what are you doing that's different you know because there's a lot of things in the world that that you feel need some help and when you talk to people who are in the service world a lot more than you would think have had psychedelic experiences that change their life service meaning wait staff no service meaning meaning we're helping people,

well, from waitstaff up to feeding people with AIDS. Got it. One of the curious things, when I give a talk at a university, two things happen. One is I'm assured that there won't be too many people and it's always packed because I usually go to universities where they don't talk about it much in the faculty. And I was at Yale, and I was comparing them with UC Santa Cruz. And I can tell you, before it's published, that UC Santa Cruz students who are interested in psychedelics take way, way, way, way, way more drugs of all kinds than people at Yale. However, the people at Yale took these sessions very seriously, and a significant number made a serious life change after their one or two experiences. They would change majors.

One wonderful person indicated he gave up his summer job in a hedge fund and ended up in a service job in a non-profit. And one of my favorites was two people said it made massive changes in their religious orientation. Doggy break and one of them said that that i forget if it was a he or she totally realized that her religion was a sham and hollow and that there was a deeper universal and the other said she became totally aware of how valuable her religion was and how much more she was committed to it same religion so it makes a difference in people's lives when they integrate it. What did the Yale students do differently? And specifically, did the integration take the form of a set of questions that a therapist asked them, a set of exercises that

they did after the fact? Oh, none of these were... You see, when I talk to college students, nobody's ever been in a research setting or had a therapist. They've had friends who've been guides. So these are all folks like the other 25.9 million. So what do you think distinguished the Yale students? I think the Yale students, perhaps because it's harder and rarer, that they took it more seriously. They may have had more guiding.

And they were taking it starting with self-exploration. What I found in the Santa Cruz students is a lot of them simply took what was around at a low enough dose so it was for fun or for nature. But what was very interesting is what they said is eventually I was taking it more for self-exploration and spiritual work. And I noticed I was nicer. I was less neurotic. I liked people more. Grades were not an issue. These were the smartest people that I know in Santa Cruz, people who developed their, people who as undergraduates developed their own courses and the administration allowed it. These were all people who were knowledgeable

and understood how to use these, but they had lots more opportunity and experiences. So I think it's, if you're going to do something once or twice in your life, you take it more seriously than when it's more available. If it's ubiquitous. Yeah. I'd love to, I have so many questions I want to ask,

but one of them, I was doing a little bit of reading, and I want to talk about problem solving, and then we'll come to the microdosing. But before we get to that i was reading that uh is it true that one of the co-founders of aa was a proponent of psychedelic use at one point after the formation of aa it's a wonderful story bill wilson who had this great breakthrough in his um kind of treatment room years before he had a psychedelic but he actually was taking something this is not generally known but uh um don latin has a book l-a-t-t-i-n has a wonderful book which describes that early session it happened to be something called the detour a cure

now detour is something which is also known as loco weed. Yeah. And nobody should try it, believe me. Cows don't like it. They go crazy. We don't do much better. But it was in the 30s, this was a possible treatment for alcoholism because they didn't know what they were doing. But that's when he had his breakthrough, and a divine being appears in his room and kind of helps him.

Well, years later, he's in Southern California in the subculture which included Aldous Huxley and a philosopher named Gerald Hurd. And he takes LSD. And he says, whoa, this is very much like what happened to me. And I think it would be a wonderful adjunct for AA in every chapter. And the directors of AA, which by that time was a massive organization, said, we are so uninterested and so against everything you just said, with the usual reasons, which is we have no idea what you're talking about.

We haven't experienced it. If the government says something is bad those days you you know you had a like an even odds chance that it might be true you know the odds have gone way down but then and they basically said thanks for sharing and please go away you founded this organization now go away don't discredit it with your exactly with your with your with your nutty pharmaceuticals now what did uh what did bill do after that point did he continue to experiment with lsd himself or do you i don't i don't know and i don't think so i think he again um there's a saying in the psychedelic world that um if once if you get the answer, hang up the phone. What does that mean? Well, I think Alan Watts suggested it.

When you get the message from God, then you got it. Don't keep knocking on the door. Yeah, don't keep asking. Didn't I tell you that last week? And that's a little bit, again, the people who keep taking psychedelics over and over. They're not getting the message, which is, is obviously they're designed to help you be here. You know, as one of my friends years ago said, you know, if we were designed not to be here,

we wouldn't be here. So the people who keep wanting to escape from here, they haven't yet understood it. And what I understand now is they're escaping that feeling of being alone because they're not here. I mean, we're now sitting under, what, about 85-foot eucalyptus trees, and the hillside that we're both looking at is a combination of green grass and bright yellow flowers.

Who wants to leave? Yeah, not me. This is your neighborhood. Yet another reason to be in san francisco right uh doing during our very unusual scorching hot winter as it turns out uh could you comment on the problem solving potential of uh for instance lsd or psychedelics and is it limited to LSD? That's the substance that comes up most frequently. But who are some of the types of people who have seemingly benefited from problem-solving doses of LSD? Well, you can name names. I won't.

Well, okay, so I'm cheating a little bit but yeah let me let me go back a step because um it isn't clear to many people including lots of people with psychedelic experience how you can possibly use these for hard-nosed practical real real world problem solving like circuit design right because you you take a psychedelic, and life is beautiful, and you're an immortal being. Who is interested in circuit design? How does that translate? But what we did, and at the time we developed this study, we weren't sure that anybody could use it either.

But we decided one of the things people do is set in setting is focus. Focus on pathologyology focus on spirituality we thought well how about focusing on a hard science problem so we created a little study and we invited scientists because one of our team was willis harman who was a full professor for electrical engineering at stanford at the time and so we knew people in the valley and the hewlett Packard was roaring along and so forth. That was those days. Varian and Lockheed and Stanford Research Institute. And we said, you may come to this study and we'll give you the most creative day of your life, but you have to have a problem which obsesses you, that you have been working on for a couple of months and that you failed at and these

were people who didn't like failure because they didn't have much in their lives and we wanted them to have the emotional feeling not only they were interested in the problem but they had an emotional kind of money in the game and so i said come in with that problem and what we did is give them psychedelics and give them the kind of traditional way of allowing people to relax with music and eye shades for a couple of hours. And then right at the peak, we bring them out and say, you may work on your problem. And because they were obsessed with their problem, they all did. And what was wonderful is nobody did any personal therapeutic work because that's not what they came for.

And out of the 48 problems that people came in with, 44 had solutions. And again, when you're doing problem solving in the real world, you can test, which is, did it get a patent? Did it get a product? Did it get a publication? That's kind of proof that it was a real solution. And because what happens in your mind is you have incredible focus and enhanced pattern recognition. Let me do focus first, because it's a wonderful little tale. This is a circuit design. And if you imagine a circuit, which is energies going from a capacitor to a resistor,

down a wire, and it goes through a gate, it has little objects, literally. You can see them on a circuit board. Maybe not anymore because everything is microscopic, but that's what it looks like. And what this guy would do is he'd say, I'd kind of visualize one of these, and then I would imagine electricity going through it and i'd watch and i could see where it failed so then i would imaginary i'd take this piece out and put another piece in and i'd run it again so he was running experiments of a very kind of very physical level but totally in his mind another

different this was an architect and he had a project and it was a little a little mall with a few shops and maybe a coffee house and parking and so forth and when he came up out of his three hours of he said going through

Aztec architecture Indian architecture medieval architecture he gets his big three hours of he said going through aztec architecture and indian architecture and medieval architecture he gets his big piece of paper out and it's and he looks at it it's totally just it's blank and he says it's just blank and he said that isn't the way i normally work i usually have a bunch of ideas and i sketch and so forth and it stayed blank and then he says okay but i really want this this customer has been really hard. I really want this to work. And he said, I saw the building. He said, I didn't see a drawing of the building.

I didn't see an image of the building. I saw the building. He said, the trees were grown. There were cars in the parking lot. The fountain was flowing and there were people walking around. He said, so I just made a bunch of drawings of what I saw. And these were drawings such as the size, if you kind of go underneath a little balcony,

you can see, say, the 4x4s, and you can see the bolts that you're using to hold them. What size are the bolts? Well, he went and looked. So he went in his mindscape. He could do that level of detail. And then a few weeks later, he sat down to do the architectural drawings because he basically told the client the client liked it.

And he said, I did, you know, drawing after drawing after drawing. He said, but I noticed I didn't use the drawings, any of the drawings that I draw on the day of my session because I didn't need them. I knew the building. Wow. So that's kind of two pieces of it. And there's other wonderful...

See, people had wonderful problems. Someone came up with a new theory of the photon, which he published, because, again, he ran experiments, kind of Einsteinian thought experiments, and he kept thinking, this is so simple, it's going to fail. And it kept not failing and not failing and not failing. He said, whoa. So, okay, so that's background that's how they can be used for problem solving right now what happens in outside of a laboratory is that people who care about problems

understand that a low enough dose this is say 100, say, 100 micrograms of LSD, or, and you were asking about substances, mescaline works just as well at an equivalent dose, which is about 200 milligrams, and the desire to solve the problem. That turns out to be, because people have asked me, I've got three countries now that want to replicate this study, and the thing that I have to make clear to them, which is hard for them,

is you can't get, you know, 20 computer science students who are in their second year and say, solve a really hard problem, because they don't care. Right. And also, when you use scientists who have put a lot of sweat equity into it, they must know enough to find the answer. That is what their heads are full of. What they don't know is where to find it or where to stack it or how to unroll it. And one of our scientists, his problem, the kind of problems he used,

used something called matrix algebra. And what he found, and that's things that just take take numbers is a terrible thing to do with psychedelics. Numbers just don't lie there. But what he did instead is he realized he could see the whole matrix. He could see the visual pattern. And so what the other thing we're learning is when you have a psychedelic, and this is true even very much at the microdose level you have technical term enhanced pattern recognition you can see stuff working with other stuff

more easily more obviously it's like if you if you're a violinist and you listen to a symphony orchestra you can hear the violin absolutely as if it's sticking above the rest of the orchestra. And if you're a cello player, you don't hear the violins very well, but you really can see the pattern of the cello in your head. So that's pattern recognition. Have you looked specifically at the implications of using these substances for, say, learning music or languages?

Well, one of my little microdose team, as I call them, people who write me, he said, you know, when I have a microdose and I jam with friends, I'm not a very good guitar player, and I'm a little better on a microdose, but I remember so many more lyrics. Okay, so that's just something we know. The answer of using them, well, yeah, I'll give you a wonderful example. This is a young man, senior year, college. He wants to go to medical school. he's taking something like embryology and the entire course is going through how a one cell becomes a chicken and he is it's a hard course

and but he has a sugar cube of lsd in the refrigerator and so he said a sugar cube with i don't know a couple hundred mics on it this is when sugar cubes had that much, and you'd use sugar cubes. So he said, I used to take a lick out of it before I go to class, and it really made class a lot easier. So that's something about focus. He's like a deer with a salt lick. You just give it a swipe with the tongue and off to class. Then he was ill and missed the final.

And that's sneak. Hard course. Hard course. So he called a professor. And the professor said, of course, I understand. You can come right over to my office and I'll give you a makeup final. And he looks in his refrigerator. There's just a little bit left. So he just eats it all. So we don't know how much. He gets to the professor's house and or to the lab. And it's a lab. And there's a nice window and there's some grass outside. But she says, okay, here's a blank piece of paper and a pencil.

Draw the progression from seed to chicken and label. He said, that's the whole course. She said, well, you know, make-ups are supposed to be harder. So he goes and sits quietly, and he knows that killing himself is just not an option, but it certainly came up. And then he closed his eyes, and he saw the first slide that she had projected.

This is before PowerPoints. And he, in his head, he then moved it and saw the second slide. And he realized that he could see every slide in the course. So he just started drawing madly. And he had two hours, and within an hour and a half, he said, here.

And she looked at him with a kind of, I knew I really screwed you with this kind of exam. And she goes through and he just watches her getting it because he knows everything's right. And she says, I guess I'll have to give you an A. And then he said, and then when he looked out at the plants, they were just all waving at him. And he said, I can see your pores breathing at me, and then walked off into the sunset. So there are some interesting studies in academia. And I have another one, which is just fun, because it's, again, pattern recognition.

So someone taking an economics course, he was probably a B student, but he hadn't studied for the final, and he had gotten stoned. So he was still kind of stoned when he came into the final, and he thought, I don't just know anything. Stoned marijuana. Probably LSD. Okay. This was LSD. Sorry. He'd been high, and he was still coming down.

So he was in that kind of blissful space of, I love everyone, but oh, I have an economics final. And it was all multiple choice. And so he looked at it and answers looked brighter nicer and so he just got the highest score in the class now don't recommend this as a method but there's a lot we have to discover about how to use these substances. Have you explored at all the world of lucid dreaming or techniques related to lucid dreaming? Because there was a period of time where I was very fascinated and an avid practitioner. I'd wake up in the middle of the night, I would do exercises and kept journals and so

on to get to the point where I could induce lucidity, say, three or four times per night. And I found that I feel like that experience has helped me to navigate the psychedelic experience in a lot of ways, or at least to mitigate some of the fear factor. Do you have any stories of people who have combined those two in any interesting ways? Well, in an uninteresting way, from my dissertation, what comes back is, and I love this, people dream more in color after psychedelics. We all kind of would imagine everyone dreams in color, but it's not true at all. Because suddenly when you dream in color, whoa, it's very different. So that's just interesting.

David Brown at the moment is finishing a book on lucid dreaming and the use of all kinds of substances, herbs of all sorts, and some psychedelics, I'm sure, that influence lucid dreaming. Where's David Brown? He's in Santa Cruz. Oh, he is? Yeah. Makes perfect sense.

And he's a lovely guy. But what we're, what we, the problem, and it's a problem with a lot of your questions, is imagine neuroscience that hadn't done anything for the past 40 years. And you'd say, well, how come you don't know where parts of the brain are? Because we haven't been allowed to look. Yeah. So we're just, we're just starting off. And you'd say, well, how come you don't know where parts of the brain are? Because we haven't been allowed to look. So we're just starting off. I mean, if you said to me, give me 15 research projects, I'll give you just one because it's so easy.

I know two cases. One is the most famous mycologist in the world, Paul Stamets, and the other is someone I know in San Francisco, who both cured themselves of severe stuttering in one session. Now, this was both, not surprisingly for Paul Stamets, this was psilocybin mushrooms, but he was in high school. And the other was a man in his, I think, late 20s. But they both realized, while on the psychedelic, that they didn't have to stutter. This is nothing about insider psychodynamics or anything else. It's just they didn't want to stutter anymore.

And Paul tells this wonderful story where, imagine, not worst moment of your life, but you stutter a lot in high school. And your hormones are in full flower. Okay, it's terrible. Sounds terrible. So the next day, he's sitting and a girl goes by, a girl, a real live girl, and she says, hello. And he says, hello. And she goes by. And he says, hello. And she goes by. And he just practically falls down.

He said, I just said hello to one of them. Without stuttering. So, and if you listen to him, people who worked on stuttering, you can, if you know, my wife was a speech therapist, so I'm a little trained. You can tell when someone has learned to overcome stuttering.

Paul doesn't sound like that at all. So that's a piece of research which is a snap to do. No risks, no pathology. We now do studies with people who are stage 4 cancer. They're dying. It's a little scary working with them because you don't want anything in the psychedelic session to upset them. But, hey.

So we're at the place where, as the government kind of realizes that keeping people healthy is better than laws that have nothing to do with science. And it's happening. And fortunately, there are a lot of other countries where good research is also being done. So, a lot to be done. And I want to talk about what steps might be taken. Because I feel like there are many people,

in fact, I was just at a dinner last night with a very influential venture capitalist who feels very strongly that the the positive applications therapeutic applications of these substances should be fostered and and funded and so on i think there are actually a lot of people in this neck of the woods who feel that way and elsewhere but before we get there is the choice of say lsd or mescaline or psilocybin a personal choice from a therapeutic standpoint or of those three are some of them better for certain things as opposed to others probably some are better for certain things but of the three you mentioned they're fairly

interchangeable and the difference between lsd and psilocybin as we mentioned is simply the length of time the reason for instance DMT which takes 15 minutes is not really useful most of your time is spent rocketing up into space and falling back down so that's just a time question Ibogaine as we've talked about seems to be particularly good for addictive substances.

And I met a wonderful young woman in England who said, after I took Ibogaine, she went to Africa and actually worked with a bitui. She said, I no longer took cocaine on the weekends. I stopped being an alcoholic. I gave up smoking. And I don't eat junk food. That's a lot and then a year or two later she took some ayahuasca and worked on some sexual trauma so it didn't clear up everything but these

were very different it's a hell of a lot to get with one trip yeah so that so the it's the wonderful kind of question um which medication for which situation and and in terms of well for instance mdma which is it's not exactly a psychedelic because you don't leave your identity behind but it is the single best way to overcome intractable post-traumatic stress disorder. Period. There's no doubt in any researcher's mind or anyone who's used it, and you know, you can go to YouTube and people are telling you about their story. We have 700,000 veterans, I'm going to rant just for a moment, who have come back with some form of post-traumatic stress disorder. And it's not necessarily from being in combat in the usual sense of people shot at me and I was really afraid.

It's people who've done unspeakable things that's against the hardest wiring in the human body. You're in your tank or your vehicle and there are children playing in the road. And your sergeant says, drive on. It might be a trap. And you kill them. And you come back, and you've really done a terrible thing. And post-traumatic stress disorder is about all that. The use of MDMA in a therapeutic environment, not on the street, can turn that around so that people who, and when you start these kind of things, you always get the worst people to work with, the hardest ones.

These are called patients who've had, well, they had to have had like 20 years of not being helped. Right. And they had two or three sessions plus therapy sessions and 80 of them dropped so many points on the post-traumatic stress disorder scale that they no longer could have possibly gotten into the study which also means they went back to work they did not want to strangle their wives in the middle of the night in a nightmare. Talking very serious things. And the government is ever so slowly acknowledging that this might be a good idea. And I think the argument that's going to carry it has nothing to do with doing the right thing. But when I say to someone, do you want to pay for this 22-year-old vet from Arkansas

for the next 40 years at the VA for therapy and medications, and the chances of his committing suicide is very high, or would you like to cure him in a couple of weeks? Just think of the money. Don't think of being a human being. Don't think of being nice. Just the economic argument. So that's part of it with the mdma specifically i've been very fascinated by mdma but also perhaps unduly uh worried about mdma after and this is a vague

recollection so i feel like this could be the equivalent of some type of propaganda like Reefer Madness movies back in the day. But so I there are people in my family who have histories of battling depression, for instance, and I'm very concerned about damaging certain receptors serotonergic system in general. And at one point, when MDMA had become very, very popular and was thought to have no side effects whatsoever, or at least that was the common sort of street lore, seeing slides of damaged serotonin receptors terrified me enough that it's not a substance I've even considered. What are the risks or misuses of MDMA?

Well, the misuse is the usual, which is too much too often. Right. For the therapeutic sessions, just out of curiosity, what is the range and dosing for that? It depends. It's not kind of my area, but it's well within the safe range. I think 170 and 125 milligrams sounds about right, but that might be dead wrong. Speak to your medical practitioner. Speak to your dealer or your medical practitioner in all truth but one of the things that we know is that and you're asking about different substances depression and mdma not probably the best mix uh curiously what i'm finding is micro doses of

of lsd or mushrooms may be very helpful for depression because they make you feel enough better that you do something about what's wrong with your life. Um, and depression is not necessarily, we've made it an illness. Uh, it may be the body's way of saying you better deal with something because it's making you really sad and i was just looking at a book on lincoln which talks about his depression and in those days when you were depressed people said he's really depressed it was assumed that you would you'd have to deal with it so i'm really re-looking at depression but if we look at substances ket ketamine, this is, again, a very odd substance because it's used in veterinary medicine as an anesthesia. It's used in humans as an anesthesia.

But at another level, it's psychedelic. At another level, it apparently overcomes depression in a totally different way than antidepressants. Antidepressants, you take it and then take, take, take, take, take, take, take. And four to six weeks later, maybe it'll be the right one. And if it isn't, you take another one, take, take, take, take, take four to six weeks. Ketamine, you take it and about 15 minutes later, you're not depressed. What's happened is it blew the whole theory of depression wide open. Pharmaceutical companies are all scrambling to come up with something that has the same effect but isn't ketamine. Because ketamine shouldn't be taken very often.

Again, it's not one of those. You can not only become addicted, but you can get your brains burned out with ketamine. And I've unfortunately met one very quiet, dull, concerned, serious person who his friends told me had been a sparkling, delightful, charming person, but now used ketamine endlessly. So you can, you know, again, we can misuse anything. MDMA anything mdma is probably fine as far as we know in moderation and again um its use is to its best use is therapeutic is to get you to let go of trauma it's milder use which is called raves you know why what is it called When you go to raves. Why are people taking MDMA or ecstasy? They're taking it because

they like everybody. Meaning they aren't caught up in negative emotions. And imagine again, we're back in high school. Imagine you went to a group and it was dancing and music and you liked everyone and everyone liked you and it was dancing and music and and you liked everyone and everyone liked you

and it wasn't sexual there's a particular phenomena at a rave called a puppy pile which is where just kids are all piled on top of each other giggling and having a good time and that's an amazing event if you think of high school. Antithetical to all of the tribal behavior. That's right. So, again, it has its uses. And, again, overuse of anything. You know, remember, why do people like alcohol? Because a little of it really lowers inhibitions and makes you think you're charming.

Okay? And that's right and when you have everyone having just a little and everyone thinking they're charming it's a kind of pleasant thing and then if you keep drinking the effects shift again with lsd you take too much and you just have no idea what happened because you're the part of your identity that stores memory is kind of offline and so forth. So all of these, again, it's like, you know, again, it's hard to think of anything. You know, you take too many baked beans, you're just not social. Speak from experience. This is true. So there's a kind of the government propaganda is unfortunately.

Well, it's kind of dumb. It's kind of simple-minded. It is at the reefer madness level. And it's going away. And the great breakthrough is it's really hard now to get someone to stand up and say, I know something, and marijuana is bad for you. You can still get people to stand up and say marijuana is bad for you, but if you say, do you have any evidence? And they say, well, it is.

I say, therefore, it is. Right. What would you like to see happen in the next, say, five years? I mean, what are the organizations that are doing good work, the people that folks listening to this can look into perhaps learning more about or supporting. What is the most sort of the Occam's razor approach to getting these substances more widely studied and researched for therapeutic uses well strategically you've just given it which is how do we make them available for therapeutic uses meaning can we make them available to the medical community because they're the very very conservative community and these are substances which go inside your body therefore physicians are supposed to be the people who know that stuff.

And that's actually happening with MMDA. And the MAPS organization, M-A-P-S, Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, is funding almost all of that research across the country. And they're doing a really good job of making it available so that someone with post-traumatic stress disorder could could go to a place where they know what they're doing if you think about a radioactive isotope is not illegal but you don't just carry them around on the street and say would you like one it's you have to know what you're doing you have to know how to use the equipment etc etc etc so what we're we're moving towards is trained kind of centers.

Like you go to a trauma center or a burn center or a cancer center, you should be able to go to, say, a post-traumatic stress disorder center for MMDA. For psilocybin, another group called the Hefner Foundation is working to make it, again, medically legal for people who are dying. And one of the nice things is, one is, when people are dying, and you give them the understanding that a mystical experience gives them, they are still clear they're dying. But they're not so upset about it.

And they say, you know, I only have six months. Rather than be anxious and miserable and frightened and have everyone around me feeling rotten, I'm going to plant flowers with my grandchild. And I'm thinking of someone who was in a study, and we see her later planting flowers with her grandchild. So that group is moving towards again medical acceptance now i think there's a another part of the whole medical game which is called off label which is once the medical profession is allowed to give something for whatever reason has been thoroughly researched it can perhaps go slightly to the right or left and see. And the third area

is spiritual experience. And when I'm kind of on right-wing radio, I say, I'm for freedom. And I think there should be nothing that restricts a human being from being closer to God. And they go, uh-huh, uh-huh. And I say, and I think there should be nothing that prevents a human being from discovering the majesty and beauty of this world through science. Uh-huh. And I think there should be nothing that interrupts your ability

or prevents you from discovering who you are. And then I point out that that's the three major areas where psychedelics are most useful. And that is my deep belief, which is no civilization is going to really continue to progress if it prevents people from spirituality, science, and self-exploration. So it's a kind of straightforward for me. And we're moving, the culture is actually moving very fast.

I mean, the number of cheerful articles in places you wouldn't expect it are, I used to say I can't keep up with the research. Now I can't even keep up with the popular articles. You know, Vice and Huffington Post and New York Times. New Yorker recently. The New Yorker did this beautiful article with Michael Pollan. Again, Michael Pollan, who is Mr. Impeccable. Why is he looking at psychedelics?

Because he's blown away how much they help people. So we're rediscovering in a careful and sophisticated way and understanding the nature of cultural institutions what the 60s kind of blundered into and fell all over. I have a daughter who's an ethnobotanist, and as a child she had a verb, and the verb was to flomp. Flomp meant you jumped into the center of something and you probably fell down. You flomped. But you got into the center of something, and that was pretty much the way the 60s worked.

We all flomped. And the institutions got terrified. We're now, two things have changed one is it's a very different generation of very sophisticated people the other is all the people running the institutions a huge percentage of them have had psychedelic experiences and therefore aren't afraid they're saying well let's, well, let's do good science, let's do good education, you know, but we're not terrified that Tim Leary is going to get us, or that we're all going to paint our buses psychedelic and become Ken Kesey's. If you could have 100 people in the United States have psychedelic experiences who have not,

in terms of just turning the tide from a political and policy standpoint, who would those people be? Well, the Senate would be a good start. Because it is peculiar when you actually, as I do, work with lots of different groups. And you say, what's the percentage of people in this occupation who've had psychedelics? And it goes down as you go up the kind of socioeconomic world into finance. But when you hit legislators, they're the people with the least experience. And so I would not want them all to, I would like them all to have enough experience so they would not legislate out of ignorance and fear. They might legislate in a very different way than I would like, but that's what they're paid to do.

Right. But at least legislate from a standpoint of awareness and ideally first-hand experience. Exactly. It's kind of that when somebody who I usually don't like what he says, but McCain really did have military experience. And when he says something about the military, it's not out of reading comic books. Right. So the other probably hundred people who I really want are the people who are the shakers and movers in high tech. And most of them I've heard from the people who are the shakers and movers in high tech. And most of them I've heard from some people like you have already made that transition. And the one thing that's, if you'd like to see what, what a, um, a interesting psychedelic culture might look

like is go to Burning Man. Certainly is a unique a unique where you see not only people free kind of emotionally and sometimes sexually but certainly physically and dancing and and enjoying enjoying their body you also see some of the most fascinating creative productions and buildings and constructions and you just look around and you say, psychedelics may not be available legally, but they sure are being used well in certain areas. So it sounds like the next step I need to get somehow, the legislators out there, we need to get a copy of the Psychedelic Explorer's Guide

to all members of the Senate. Where can people learn more about you, find you online? I think I have both jimfadiman and jamesfadiman.com, which go to the same place. And that has a bunch of talks, of some lectures. There's one wonderful one where I did an evening with a Zen Roshi on psychedelics and Buddhism. He's just so gorgeous. And before he was a Buddhist monk, and he's been one for 19 years, he was a follower of the dead. So he really comes from deep experience. That's there and actually the book you know the book

the psychedelic explorer's guide is most everything that I wanted to ever get down in writing and I was sure when I was putting it together that I would self publish and then this wonderful publisher inner traditions

said oh that looks pretty good and inner traditions puts out a lot of the now useful psychedelic books. So if you're interested in Ibogaine or Ayahuasca, or there's a cactus called San Pedro, which has mescaline, just as the peyote cactus does, plus just a lot of general books, they're kind of the go-to publisher at this point though Synecdoche's Press in Santa Fe

it's coming again what people are finding is like that famous baseball field if you write it they will read well I'm very excited for the future of research and exploration related to many of these substances. I think that they're very useful tools. And like you said, there's the potential for misuse of these tools.

But in the right hands, with the right direction, with the right guidance and supervision, I really feel like they can be transformative for so many people. The word tool is really the case. I've only been asked once, would you just talk about psychedelics as tools? And so I went through about eight areas of science where they would be useful. Cary Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize, and he said psychedelics gave him not the great breakthrough idea that he got when he was driving up in Northern California with his girlfriend.

But he said, and he's the one who did recombinant DNA, and what he said was, by that time I knew how to go inside a molecule and look around. Looks like a good tool. Okay, so

if I want to understand visual perception, and here I have a substance which shifts the visual world, and I actually understand some of what people are experiencing, and I have a certain amount of psychological bullshit jargon that I can throw at that. So we do know a little. But imagine being able to, again, in the laboratory.

And Roland Griffiths talks about, this is a professor at John Hopkins who's done probably the most and best studies. How do you spell his last name? Griffiths. Griffiths, okay. With a THS at the end. And his research, some of his research, has been that we can pretty much guarantee

that we can establish a mystical experience in someone he said from a psychology of religion or from being a religious person that's pretty exciting that's very exciting i think that it's so they're tools if you look at the the origin stories of most of our dominant religions in the world today, they contain prophetic or mystical experiences that have now been criminalized in the United States. Well, they also have used psychedelics a lot more than some religions will cop to. If you just Google secret drugs of Buddhism, and what you'll find is one major school of Buddhism for its rituals for a couple of hundred years, clearly used the psychedelic as the core of the ritual.

Greek religion we know about from the Eleusinian mysteries, psychedelic. Though my Muslim friends tend to worry when I say this, I feel like click and clack, the Tappet brothers talking about NPR. There is a lot of traditions in a number of Sufi orders in a number of countries of using these materials. Hinduism is based on Soma. And in a sense, it makes total sense because every culture tends to know about the plants in its vicinity. And if some of those plants can be fermented and, say, make beer,

I can't think of a culture that didn't have fermentable plants that didn't make, that didn't ferment them. Right? And similarly, psychedelic mushrooms, for instance, grow all over England. They're called fairy caps. There's a hundred species of psilocybin mushrooms.

They're around. And then the question that gets profound is, why is it that there are these substances which, when given to human beings, have this extraordinary effect of reconnecting them to the natural world? Now, these substances probably are in plants that are older than human beings okay this is the kind of thing where people late in the night with a small amount of a psychedelic will talk about which is and then when you go into south america and you say to an ayahuasquero, someone who uses ayahuasca, why are you using ayahuasca? And you say, well, the plants told me how to use this.

And this plant also tells me how to use other plants. It's called a teacher plant because most of the plants can't talk to us, but these plants can. So you get into some much more fun areas than we've covered so far. Well, this could be part one. I feel like we could talk about this for hours and hours, and I suspect we might. We might. But for now, I will encourage everyone to check out your website, check out the book, The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide.

I'll link to everything in the show notes. And very fascinating questions and topics to explore. So I hope to do much more of it. And thank you so much for taking the time. Thank you for having me, Tim.