Your Undivided Attention - Can Psychedelic Therapy Reset Our Social Media Brains?

Episode Date: December 15, 2022

When you look at the world, it can feel like we're in a precarious moment. If you’ve listened to past episodes, you know we call this the meta-crisis — an era of overlapping and interconnected crises like climate change, polarization, and the rise of decentralized technologies like synthetic biology. It can feel like we’re on a path to destroy ourselves.That's why we’re talking to Rick Doblin, the founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, or MAPS. They’re a nonprofit focused on educating and researching the benefits of using psychedelic therapy to address PTSD and promote humane ways of relating worldwide.Doblin’s vision is for nothing less than a transformation of society through psychedelic-assisted therapy – not for the drugs themselves, but for their ability to help us react to one another with compassion, appreciate differences, and accept criticism.Given the perma-crisis we face, it’s provocative to think about a tool that, when prescribed and used safely, could help us overcome rivalrous dynamics out in the world and on social media. If we rescue our hijacked brains, we can heal from the constant trauma inflation we get online, and shrink the perception gap that splits us into tribes.Both MAPS and Center for Humane Technology want to understand what helps minds heal and be free. We invite you to keep an open mind about a different kind of humane technology as you listen to this episode. Correction: Doblin attributes a quote to Stan Grof about psychedelics helping your ego be “transparent to the transcendent.” In his book Pathways to Bliss, Joseph Campbell wrote, "When a deity serves as a model for you, your life becomes transparent to the transcendent as long as you realize the inspiring power of that deity. This means living not in the name of worldly success and achievement, but rather in the name of the transcendent, letting the energy manifest through you.” Grof was likely paraphrasing Campbell’s work and applying it to psychedelics. Additional credits:The episode contains an original musical composition by Jeff Sudakin. Used with permission. RECOMMENDED MEDIA Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS)The non-profit founded by Rick Doblin in 1986 focused on developing medical, legal, and cultural contexts for people to benefit from the careful uses of psychedelics and marijuana. MAPS has some open clinical trials; see details on their website. Rick Doblin’s TED talkIn this fascinating dive into the science of psychedelics, Doblin explains how drugs like LSD, psilocybin and MDMA affect your brain - and shows how, when paired with psychotherapy, they could change the way we treat PTSD, depression, substance abuse and more.How to Change Your Mind by Michael PollanPollan writes of his own consciousness-expanding experiments with psychedelic drugs, and makes the case for why shaking up the brain's old habits could be therapeutic for people facing addiction, depression, or death.How to Change Your Mind on NetflixThe docuseries version of Pollan’s bookBreath by James NestorThis popular science book provides a historical, scientific and personal account of breathing, with special focus on the differences between mouth breathing and nasal breathing.Insight timerA free app for sleep, anxiety, and stress RECOMMENDED YUA EPISODES You Will Never Breathe the Same Again with James Nestorhttps://www.humanetech.com/podcast/38-you-will-never-breathe-the-same-againTwo Million Years in Two Hours: A Conversation with Yuval Noah Harari https://www.humanetech.com/podcast/28-two-million-years-in-two-hours-a-conversation-with-yuval-noah-harariYour Undivided Attention is produced by the Center for Humane Technology. Follow us on Twitter: @HumaneTech_ 

Hey, it's Tristan. As some of you know, your undivided attention is part of the TED Audio Collective. We thought our listeners would like to know about a new podcast from one of our partners that touches on some similar themes to this podcast called Rethinking. Organizational psychologist Adam Grant sits down with some of the world's most creative and fascinating minds to talk about the assumptions that we take for granted and how challenging them can lead us to lead fuller lives. You can listen to Rethinking from the TED Audio Collective wherever you get your podcasts. When you look around at the world, it can feel like we're in a precarious moment.

If you listen to past episodes, we can call this the metacrisis, this sort of era of simultaneous crises that are hitting us around the environment, domestic polarization, limits of growth, debt-to-GDP ratio, U.S.-China competition, the rise of decentralized technologies like synthetic biology, and it feels like we have the capacity to just kind of destroy ourselves. I'm Tristan Harris. I'm Azaraskin. And this is your undivided attention, the podcast from the Center for Humane Technology.

This precarious moment harkens back to an earlier time when we felt that the world was just on edge. And that was in the time during the Cold War, when there was the risk that we could have global thermonuclear war. But a movement grew out of that time in reaction to the threat of nuclear war, which was the 1960s human potential movement. This is a movement that was all about experimenting with all the extraordinary untapped potential that existed in all people. If you could heal their wounds and deal humanistically psychologically with helping us arrive at more of our untapped capacities. Places like the Esselin Institute in Big Sur, California, hosted key figures like Abraham Maslow, who invented the hierarchy of needs framework. Actually, the miracles of life are repetitive flowers and sunsets and so on. a miracle remains a miracle, even if it happens every morning.

And these people somehow responded to them as miracles, in spite of the fact that they happened a great deal. And this impressed me very much. And Fritz Perlz, who invented Gestalt psychology. Once the patient has learned to stand on its own feet emotionally, intellectually, economically, its need for therapy will collapse. He will wake up from the nightmare of his existence. Milton Erickson, who invented hypnotherapy.

And keep your eyes open. Let your head be wide awake. And your body sounded asleep. Carl Rogers, who invented humanistic psychology. Very early in my work as therapist, I discovered that simply listening to my client very attentively was an important way of being helpful. Virginia Seteer and the work around family systems.

But you know, that's what we're playing with all the time in a good way. is helping the energy of each person to begin to open and to flower. And in that lineage, one of the key tools that was explored was psychedelics. That's why today on the show, we wanted to invite Rick Doblin, who's the founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, otherwise known as MAPS. There are a research nonprofit around the beneficial use of psychedelics. In a way, Rick Doblin is kind of the next step of a longer lineage in the journey for the human potential.

Doblin's vision is for nothing less than a transformation of society through psychedelic-assisted therapy, not for the drugs themselves, but for their ability to help us react to one another, with compassion, to appreciate our differences, to accept criticism with love, and to find connection. And given the perma crisis we face, it's provocative to think about a tool that, when prescribed and used safely, could help us overcome these win-lose games that drive up the conflict that we're trying to escape from, to heal from the constant trauma inflation that we're getting online, and to shrink the perception gaps that split us into tribes.

So this is a little bit of a different episode, but we wanted to invite you to keep an open mind about a different kind of humane technology as you listen to this episode. And with that, here we go. Welcome to your undivided attention. I am so excited today to have Rick Doblin, who is founder and executive director of Maps,

which is the multidisciplinary association for psychedelic studies. I think this conversation is going to be really fascinating because I think both maps with its work on psychedelics and treating people with PTSD and trauma with things like MDMA, I think both of our projects are really about understanding the contours of what helps minds heal and be free. There's a question of who do we need to be? What kind of species do we need to be?

what kind of consciousness or awareness or maturity do we need to have? And so I wanted to kind of start there. And your way of expressing this idea is that you believe that a spiritualized humanity that has dealt with all the crisis that we have coming up, that we can get there by 2070 with psychedelics. So just want to first welcome you and hear how that lands for you. Yeah. Well, you know, MAPS's mission, as we understand it,

is mass mental health and a spiritualized humanity. So even though we are a drug development company trying to make MDMA assisted therapy for PTSD into FDA-approved and regulatory approved for prescription use all over the world, and we're involved in drug policy reform, the end goals are the spiritualized humanity. We're, I think, we won't lose the sense of our religion, our culture, our tribe, our, you know, political orientation, all the different ways that we identify as to who we are. But we will understand that there's a deeper way in which we are all connected with all of creation, with all of life, with all of the species, with all of humanity, and that if we can understand, and this is where the psychedelics come in, not just intellectually understand, but experience that sense of connection, then we should be emerging out of that with more compassion, more appreciation for differences, not so much scared of differences, but celebrate. them. And I would say that this theory of change is what really motivated me 50 years ago in

1972 when I was 18 to devote my life to psychedelics, because I thought psychedelics are in many ways a faster way than other approaches. And I think this psychedelic mystical experience can help it, and it does not have to be approached through psychedelics. So I think that's just an important point to make, is that psychedelics are not the only way to get there, which means that the psychedelics don't produce the experience, they reveal the experience. And there are other ways through hyperventilation, through fasting, through meditation. So they're properties of humanity, not properties of the drug. So a lot of places to go from here, but I think it would be a really helpful grounding for

our listeners to understand. First, what is a psychedelic and what isn't a psychedelic? I was going to say, yeah. And can I also, I want to make sure I add here that, like you said, it's not all drugs. It can be meditation and other things. So let's define a little bit. And let's be careful when we use words like spiritualized because some people might say, wait, hold on a second.

You've lost us here. Okay. Well, I think maybe the basic ground to say is that it's not the experience that's the most important. It's the context of the experience that you have. So I don't want people to think, oh, you pop a psychedelic, and then you have these kind of therapeutic,

spiritual experiences that connect you with, everybody and everything, that's very possible. The psychedelics are a catalyst, but the social context in which they're used is even more important than the substance itself. It's really the social context. So the same way when we talk about therapy, when we talk about psychedelic-assisted therapy, MDMA assisted therapy for PTSD or psilocybin-assisted therapy for depression or substance use or end-of-life anxiety, that it's really the emphasis is on the therapy that the psychedelic, help make more effective. So what is a psychedelic?

So the way that I defined psychedelic when I created maps in 1986 was in line with the way the word was invented in the 50s by Humphrey Osmond in communication with Aldous Huxley. And the word was defined as mind manifesting, sort of the psychedelics to reveal, to manifest the mind. And so we all have psychedelic experiences when we dream. So I would say dreams are psychedelic. They bring out issues, moods, feelings, thoughts from our memory bank that they bring things to the surface.

And I think it's very important to expand the definition of psychedelic to not just be a drug, but to also bring to the surface what has been more difficult to attain in other ways. or hidden or suppressed. So by broadening the definition, what we're doing is making it so that the experiences are human experiences, the catalyst, whether it's hyperventilation or fasting or some people, marathon running or pain

or different ways of transcendence, that they're all sort of equally psychedelic in their own different ways. But I've chosen to concentrate maps on physical substances. And what happens when you take MDMA is you have it on a short-term basis or when you take LSD or anything,

or ayahuasca, these are short-term-bounded acute experiences. But the goal then is to, with the integration process, is to try to make it so you take those lessons, those experiences that you've had, and you try to anchor them in your life so that they are more something that you can achieve without the psychedelic, without the catalyst of the drug.

And could you explain, so let's just take MDMA, what is it, and what is the experience of it? I think one of the best ways to describe MDMA is like the feeling you have when you take a deep breath. It's like you relax into yourself. You're present, you're alive, you're there. MDMA reduces activity in the amygdala, the fear processing part of our brain. So emotions and memories that are connected to, trauma or just connected to vulnerabilities, we can look at them more carefully. MDMA, people know it as ecstasy or molly, releases oxytocin, which is the hormone of love,

connection, and nursing mothers. So if I had to really describe MDMA, it's a, in as few words as possible, it's self-acceptance. You take this deep breath, you settle into yourself, your mind quiets. That's why it can be useful for meditation. Your thoughts about always in our mind about what are we going to do next and where have we just come from? You get more focused on the present moment. You feel more loving and connected. You're strengthened in your sense of who you are. You're not so vulnerable to criticisms. You're able to look at things that you wish that you had done differently without the punitive aspect in it. You're able to hear what people might say like it's terrific for couples therapy because you can hear from the other

person what they're saying without such defensiveness but it's something that you can take and you just settle into where you are and settle into yourself and then you can speak from the heart in a in a less defensive way and feel connected it lasts somewhere in the neighborhood of five to six hours the way we do it in therapy is we give an initial amount and then two hours later we give half the initial amount in order to prolong the experience. It kind of extends the plateau. Stan Groff had a beautiful phrase about how psychedelics can help your ego be transparent to the transcendent. If we can see ourselves as something connected to much larger to everything, that then we can be transparent to the transcendent. And MDMA really helps that a lot. So you could say it sort of cleans the

window of the ego. So I think that's how I would describe what a psychedelic is and what MDMA is. You've mentioned sort of qualities of the experience, that it creates this self-acceptance. It creates this sense of not taking things personally in a critique. There are couples who are talking to each other. And they're lovingly having a conversation about things that might normally be really triggering and their system is flooded with oxytocin and you said was it the nursing mother sort of feeling like that you know that that kind of deep warmth and love that is sort of ubiquitous and that a monk for meditating for 10 years may not be able to access that state but suddenly there's this like shortened timeline so now that we've sort of named one of the experiences

why would something like this be seen as a tool to evolve human consciousness or be in the face of the metacrisis of all these things so we just described a set of effects but why do people who have had this experience say that this has something to do with an ability to answer the big crises that we kind of face? I think connecting the local to the global because that's so often how this kind of shows up. Well, one of the key factors that we know about

in terms of oxytocin is this sense of connection and empathy so that it does help you to move out of this self-referential frame that we're often trapped in all the time, thinking about ourselves. And it quiets that sense of self. So you can see the other. And you want to see the other more for who they really are rather than who you want them to be.

And so there's this curiosity about where are they coming from? But there's also this sense of empathy and connection. We know in neuroscience there's something called mirror neurons, you know, that help us understand who we're talking with. come into kind of a concordance with them in certain ways. So now into the frame of trauma, there are so many traumas that people have experienced in their lives that color how they see the world.

And they make it so that people sometimes cannot see through their trauma. So for somebody with PTSD, the world is a threatening place. They're always being triggered. if they can address the source of their trauma and sort of place that as part of their experience, not all of their experience, place it in the past, not the present, they can see the other and the world in a clear, more accurate manner. So when we think about how is it that certain kind of conflicts

can go down the generational line for a thousand of years? You know, why do we have Shiites and Sunnis killing each other over what happened more than a millennium and a half ago about Muhammad and his successors, or in Catholics and Protestants killing themselves, or Orthodox Jews thinking that everybody else is off the path, that we have these frames of reference that are guided by our past traumas. And we don't see the world as it is. We see it in a way through these dirty glasses. So I think when you can help people

work through their past traumas, then they're able to see other people in a different way. So one example is, not MDMA, but this will be an ayahuasca story. There are Israelis and Palestinians that are doing MDMA and ayahuasca together. And it's a small group,

and they're more culturally open. They're not the hardcore haters. But they still have a lot of their issues with the other. And there was one story about how during an ayahuasca session, one of the Israelis, and, you know, Israelis who are not Arab Israelis, all have to go through the military, this was someone who had been a former soldier, and he had said that listening to Arabic music, it always triggered him. This was the enemy. This was something he didn't like. This was something scary. He was on alert, again, through the sort of trauma lens. He's on alert every time he

hears this Arabic music. But under the influence of ayahuasca, he could hear it in a different way. He could hear it in a beautiful way. And he could see and appreciate something that had previously frightened him and made him think this was the other. So I think that's one of the ways in which psychedelic experiences and the MDMA experiences, by helping people work through their burden of trauma from the past, you can undo them through successful therapy. So I think through MDMA, we will be able to see other people in a less threatening lens and other cultures, other religions, other concepts, to see them more for what they are and to search out for what we share in common

rather than be frightened about what's different. That grounded sense of connection can be the basis for trying to work through our disagreements and our conflicts with other people. A poet friend once told me that our fears are our maps to our freedom in the sense that if you fear something, there's an insecurity, so you will get triggered and you'll sort of programmatically act some way. And the way you're describing the experience of MDMA really reminds me of my experience with an ashtanga practice, yoga, where what I was very surprised to discover is that something I do on the mat and a physical activity doesn't just affect my physical activity off the mat, but affected something really profound, which is how well I was able to receive feedback. When people tell me something hard about some way that I'm showing up that's causing harm and I'm probably profiting from,

and the way it worked is, you know, what you're learning to do in yoga is to breathe calmly and slowly while your body is working very hard, releasing every muscle. That's not the one that's working very hard. And so now when I receive feedback, I can actually listen because my body doesn't tense up. I'm not driven by my fear. I can hear what's being said, and that gives me the opportunity to transform. And so if we can show up, if we can see other people more accurately, if we can hear them more accurately, that begins to change how we all act. Am I getting sort of your theory of change, right? Yeah, exactly. Another thing about the day after MDMA, where we suggest that, you know, really it's a two-day experience,

the first day you do it, the second day you integrate it, you rest, it takes a lot out of you, you rest, you think about it. But the day after MDMA, I feel very clearly that there's a tiny bit of a lag between when somebody says something and my normal quick response, it sinks deeper, a millisecond or something. It sinks deeper, and I can come from a deeper place. So I think writ large, that's kind of we are so reactive. There's so much happening. So much of it is unconscious that how we respond, that as you're describing of this, you don't leap into your patterned responses. You can let things sink a bit deeper. You can be a better listener. It doesn't take more than a fraction of a second to do that. Our brains are

operating at such a speed. With just a fraction of a second, we can come from a deeper place. I want to make some more links here to social media and just so that listeners are tracking from our normal topic space to this. You know, part of what you were just sharing, Rick, is the invisible ways that her minds are not clean, right? So a lot of things we're talking about social media is that we're not actually seeing the world in some honest state. We're trapped inside of a fun house mirror that we can't actually see,

that our glasses are dirty, but we can't tell that. and much like a person who has been traumatized throughout their life, which all of us have been in some different ways, there's a diminished limiting, distorted picture that we're getting back. But unless you had the self-understanding to know what trauma is in the particular ways that it creates a slightly different attunement reaction, ways of pointing our attention, then you wouldn't know that because we don't walk in the world thinking

that we're wearing a dirty pair of glasses. I want to remind listeners that this is why on this podcast, we've covered some possibly eccentric topics like breathing and the power of breath. Why would we interview James Nestor on breath? Because breath is a psychotechnology. Just that slight delay in how we're reacting and responding to how things hit us and sink into us can produce an enormously different response and how we're all showing up in the world. So when I think about social media, it's like a hyper-trauma factory.

Because if I click on, say, one Black Lives Matter video, Twitter will be happy to show me video after video of African-Americans getting beaten. If I'm an Asian-American person and I click on one video of anti-Asian-American hate, I will see infinite evidence of that thing happening to a way that's like, you know, way more than I would be able to think about in my own mind or hear about from friends. And it's guided by AI, the most powerful supercomputer in the world that's routing the most outrageous thing to my brain. And so one of the ways we think about social media is it's a trauma inflation factory. because no matter what it is that you can't help but look at,

which is one also way of thinking about what traumas might do to our attention, is like, well, we can't help but look more at. It sends our attention to those things. But meanwhile, it decreases empathy for those traumas because other people aren't seeing that same news feed of the inflated trauma. So I'm both getting a double dose of the trauma and I'm getting a double antedose of the empathy because other people don't have that shared experience.

But unless we can sort of say, this is your brain on trauma, this is your brain without the trauma. This is your brain on social media. This is your brain without the social media. There's just a million ways that our minds are hijacked in some way. But unless we have this tool of self-understanding, you've all Harari, you know, we've had on this podcast from Sapien. And, you know, a lot of people remarked that the most powerful thing

that he and I said in a conversation was just the most important thing that people can do, the greatest tool, is to know ourselves, to get that different view of ourselves. You can think of social media apps as almost, installing an app in our brain. That is to say you use Instagram and Facebook and suddenly there's a new app that's been installed in your brain, which is I need to get attention. I like care about the likes. It shifts the way I view the world. I use TikTok and there's a new app installed in my brain, which is I need to like be finding the right place to create content and the right dance to be doing. And one of the things I'm hearing you say about psychedelics is

that it's one of the very fastest tools to uninstall those apps from our brains. So we get back to a little bit more of like a state from which we're not acting other people's or technology's desire for us. I wanted to talk a little bit about psychedelic enthusiasm, because I think there's this view that if you just give people psychedelics, they will have these mystical, sacred experiences, and there's a programmatic direction that it moves people's minds, but one of the things you talked about is that, you know, UDV, this ayahuasca church, is pro Bolsonaro. Yeah, they're the first one that went to the U.S. Supreme Court, actually, and got protection for religious freedom to have ayahuasca use in the United States in their

ceremonies. In order to survive these Amazonian churches, they're called syncretic churches. They had to sort of blend with the dominant culture, with the Catholic church, and as a consequence, they are hierarchical, homophobic, patriarchal, and in some ways authoritarian. And so they actually aligned with Bolsonaro in Brazil. Just for listeners, Jaira Bolsonaro is the now former president of Brazil, who recently lost an election to Luis Lula de Silva, and Bolsonaro was a big supporter of deforestation cattle farming to keep mowing down the Amazon to make room for soybeans, mining, and logging,

and was very populist as a leader. So we have an example of a very powerful psychedelic ayahuasca that has helped many, many people to mature in their understanding of who they were, to be more spiritualized, it's been tremendously helpful. Iwaska being a mixture of Amazonian plants that produces a very strong psychedelic experience.

But when it's encased in a social structure that interprets the experience in different ways, you don't necessarily get the liberation, the bonding with everybody that we're talking about. It's interesting that, you know, ayahuasca, you would think being this experience that connects you more to nature, more to the sacred, more to all of this could be pro a president that wants to mow down the Amazon. Yeah, yeah, it's in Congress. And so, again, it just emphasizes that the cultural context

is more important than the experience itself. You know, we've focused a bit on the drug itself, but I wanted to see if you could talk about the importance of psychedelic assisted therapy. And You can see psychedelics as a kind of godlike power of its own that is now being decentralized that has the power to transform human consciousness, to transform who we are and how we see. And I think of the class of experiences that we're talking about as a kind of class of transformative experiences. Social media transforms our identity, our values, what we're seeking in the world. Psychedelics are transforming our basis of what we care about, how we show up, our reactivity.

but with this godlike power to transform people and mass into some other state there's a sense that we have to match that power with the wisdom, love, and prudence of gods. And so I think of setting and integration. Could you talk about how set and setting and integration might be the wisdom, love,

and prudence that's attached to or shouldn't be unbound from that godlike power of psychedelics? Yeah. So I think a good way to sort of illustrate the importance of the setting, the psychotherapeutic context. I spoke about this in my TED talk,

but the first time I ever worked with someone with PTSD was in 1984. And the story is that I had sold MDMA, this was back when it was still legal, I had sold MDMA to a friend of mine, and he had done it with his girlfriend, who I did not know and had never met. And under the influence of MDMA,

the memory of a past trauma came up where she had been raped and almost killed, and she'd been in and out of mental institutions. She'd been depressed by it. She had PTSD. She thought she had come to some new balance that she could sort of go through the world in this new way. But this MDMA experience brought up this trauma

in a way that she couldn't run away from, and she felt terribly suicidal. And so she ended up checking herself into a mental hospital to avoid self-harm. And she was there for about six days or so, and they stabilized her, but they gave her the same old medications that she had before that had not worked.

And once she got out, she was more suicidal than before because she thought there really is no hope to get away from this trauma. And that's where my friend called me up and said, is there anything you can do? And I felt I'm learning to be a psychotherapist, but I'm not fully trained. This is a woman is suicidal. But he said she has got no other options.

She had done the best of Western science and Western medicine and psychiatry. And so I agreed to talk to her on the phone and I said, She agreed not to commit suicide when we were working together. I would be willing to work with her. And then I got some women friends. We created this safe place around her.

And then under two experiences, she was able to work through her trauma. And over time, she has then become a therapist, and now she's one of our main therapists, and she trains other therapists. So the point of this is that she took MDMA without a psychotherapeutic context, and experiences came up. up that made her worse off. It's the same drug, but the context made her worse off. And then when we did it in a therapeutic context, she went through terrible fears and anxieties about what it actually

happened. You know, this person, this had been quite a long time before in a different country, but he'd said if she ever told anybody about it, he'd kill her. And she couldn't even say his name without, you know, triggering all these thoughts that she'd be killed. So under the influence of somebody who would tell the story, say his name. So what was different was not the drug. It was the same drug, but it was the context. And the context was that when these emotions come up or these memories come up, that the way to go through is to let it take over, surrender, you know, see where it goes.

So Stan Groff has also had this beautiful saying that the full experience of an emotion, is the funeral pyre of that emotion. Like for grief, if you have someone that has died and you are just so in mourning that you can't, it's overwhelming to let out your emotions that then you have this kind of prolonged grief and you're sort of stuck in it. And it's similar to PTSD in certain ways.

But once you can finally cry, once you can finally let it out, then you can move beyond it. So set and setting, when we think about, that. That was actually Timothy Leary that came up with that idea. And so what the set is, is your own internal mental context, what you're coming to an experience with, what's your past history. The setting is the context in which you have the experience. And that can be a religious setting like the Native American church use of peyote, or it can be a therapeutic context.

So the setting is where you take it and the interaction between the set and the setting makes the difference of what happens. Just when you were talking about that Stan Groff quote, a friend of mine told me recently that grief is love with nowhere to go. And it makes me think about PTSD as fear with no place to go and that these kinds of psychedelic experiences

give you the license, like permission to have it have a place to go. I want to expand a second from this idea of set and setting to an even broader version of set and setting, which is to start looking at the sort of competitive economic landscape into which psychedelics are being introduced. So an example from our space is even if a designer at YouTube wants to put safeguards on what videos get shown,

and they did do this to like when you watch a video, it shows you the even more extreme version of that video. They started to put safeguards on. TikTok starts eating their lunch because they're just much more engaging and they need to move to short-form video and they take away all the safeguards because they're now competing.

I know ketamine, which is another psychedelic, has been pushed out into the market and legalized. There's a kind of standard profit motive. And so I've heard a lot of really negative stories for people that go in for a ketamine assisted therapy session and get very little attention, very little integration and have in the end a pretty bad traumatic experience. You have chosen a format of a non-profit owning a for-profit.

I know that you've spent a lot of time thinking about, it's not just the drug, it's the set and setting. The setting can be all of our macroeconomic climate and our markets. I'd love for you to just walk through some of like the risks that you see, some of the ways. you've seen of binding these, you know, the technical term multipolar trap, but if we don't do it, somebody else will. Yeah, I'd love your insights. Yeah.

So one of the concerns that I have about the for-profit psychedelic companies is this idea of acting like traditional pharma where you try to patent everything, even if you did not invent it. So there's patents for ideas that people didn't invent, but once you get a patent, it's very expensive for other people to challenge the patent.

So Big Pharma also has enormous research, And some of these for-profit companies also have large resources. So they will patent stuff. And then they will drain other people's resources from trying to challenge the patent. So they're out for profit maximizing. So, yeah, we do have MAPS as a nonprofit, owns a for-profit, but it's a modification of capitalism called the Public Benefit Corp. So I think that's one of the concerns.

I think the other concern is to try to get coverage by national health insurance and by private insurers, there'll be a tendency to try to minimize the expensive part, which is the therapy, and just try to have the healing potential being the drug. And so I worry about that a lot. Another aspect that I worry about is about the training of the therapists. So I didn't mention this earlier, but one of the reasons that I felt that MDMA was the likely drug to make it first through the system, and that's what's happening now, is that the therapists are more effective if they've done the drug themselves. And, you know, we know this, so you wouldn't go to a Nashdanga teacher that never did yoga

or a meditation teacher that Netter meditated. So this concept that therapists should have an experience with their own substances they're giving is sort of universally accepted in the therapeutic community. That it's not essential, but you learn more if you do that. And MDMA being the gentlest is there's less resistance in the field of psychiatry and psychotherapy for people having. their own MDMA experience than having psilocybin, which is more challenging or having LSD. So it makes more sense for therapists to have their own experiences.

But I do worry, and to give you a good example of the worries of this patent problems, 1986 is when I started MAPS. And 1986 is also when a company was started in a for-profit context to develop Ibigene for-opiate addiction. And they decided to do it in a for-profit way. and as it turned out, they thought that would be the best way to raise resources. They were doing a study. The researcher found a long-lasting metabolite, nor Ibogaine of Ibegain

that had some effect on reducing craving. She patented that. It turned into big patent fights. And that destroyed the field for over 20 years until the patents expired. So I think for-profits have a lot of potential problems. On the other hand, MAPS has raised. $135 million in donations in our history. In the last couple years, the four profits have raised in excess of a billion and a half.

So the access to capital is really important. There's also an enormous amount of suffering going on. And so we need more resources. So I'm not opposed to four profits, nor am I opposed to patents for original inventions. But the traditional strategy in pharma to try to block other, companies from doing stuff with patents is very disturbing and the minimization of therapy to try to make it as inexpensive as possible other than the drug so that the insurance companies will cover it. When I started MAPS, nobody would even think to do a for-profit psychedelic

company because there's so many political obstacles. So keeping the drug war alive was based on demonizing drugs, demonizing drug users, putting people in prison for extensive periods of time, going after minorities, and the medicalization of psychedelics and even cocaine or opiates or all these things were seen as a threat to the narrative, particularly also with cannabis. The narrative, these are drugs that have only risks, no benefits, and that's why they're illegal. So we've seen with the medicalization of marijuana, the legalization of marijuana in many states, that the general sense that the drug war has been an enormous failure, so that there's less resistance to moving forward with research that could identify context where benefits outweigh

risks for psychedelics, marijuana for other previously demonized drugs. So that's a really good sign, and that has permitted really the rise of the for-profits. So there are dangers there and there are things that I'm worried about, but I do think that these four-profits can also do a lot of good in their access to resources and into all the different research they're trying to do. Just maybe to close, would you speak to your vision of, you know, the end game here for how we might, with your work and the lifelong, by the way, work that you have done in this space to try to make, most people don't take on cathedral projects that exceed their lifetime. And you are doing that, I think, in the vein of what we're talking about. Would you just respond to that? Yeah. The vision that I have is that we anticipate before the end of 2023 that we would have FDA approval for the prescription use of MDMA assisted therapy for PTSD by trained therapists. ideally whose training can include one MDMA session.

We think that DEA rescheduling will take place. They have to do it within 30 days. So early 2024 is when it should be available in most if not all of the states of America and also Israel, Canada, and Europe is going to be a year or two behind. We think what will then happen is about a decade of the rollout of maybe 5 or 6,000 psychedelic clinics with tens of thousands, 50,000 or more therapists.

or 100,000 trained in this area with millions of people going through these sessions. What we hope is to have a million MDMA sessions in this decade. And then those people will tell the stories to other people. And then that will end up changing the cultural narrative such that we will move to a post-prohibition world, not just for psychedelics, but for other things as well. And legalization, I think, will generate more and more interests, I think, in people going to the train professionals in these clinics covered by insurance. So I think under the stresses of the world, as we're coming forward, people are shutting down.

They're becoming more irrational. They're becoming more tribal. And I think we need whatever techniques we can develop from meditation to yoga, to psychedelics, to breathing, to help people deal with the constant frequency of change that is never in human history. It seems like things are changing faster than they ever have, and often in negative ways. What Einstein said was that the splitting of the atom has changed everything except for our mode of thinking, and hence we drift towards unparalleled catastrophe.

What shall be necessary if mankind is to survive is a whole new mode of thinking. So the question is, what is that new mode of thinking? And my interpretation of what Einstein was driving at was that it was this understanding that we are all interconnected and that we have much more in common than we have that separates us, and our technology has exceeded our humanity. And I think that, even though Einstein didn't say it,

that points to the same thing, that we have developed our cognitive capacities so that we can communicate to each other. Electronically, you can make this available to so many people, the Internet, the web telescope that's out in space. It's just amazing. But we do not have the spiritual and emotional maturity to handle the technology that we have developed.

And so we need to build people's resilience, their emotional capacity to respond, to be empathic. And I think and sincerely believe that over multiple generations, as you say, that psychedelics can find their rightful place and make a major contribution to helping us survive and thrive. Rick Doblin launched MAPS in 1986, a year after MDMA was criminalized. And 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. Rick studied with Dr. Stanislav Graf, and he was among the first to be certified as a holotropic breathwork practitioner. Maps is now in its final step before the FDA would approve prescriptions of MDMA by trained therapists.

You can learn more about their work and sign up for a clinical trial on their website, which is in the show notes. And if you're intrigued by psychedelics or other psychotechnologies and don't know where to start, we have some suggestions for you in our show notes, including a link to our episode on The Power of Breath with James Nestor. Your undivided attention is produced by the Center for Humane Technology, a non-profit organization working to catalyze a humane future.

Our senior producer is Julia Scott. Our associate producer is Kirsten McMurray, mixing on this episode by Jeff Sudakin. Original music and sound design by Ryan and Hayes Holiday and a special thanks to the whole Center for Humane Technology team for making this podcast possible. You can find show notes, transcripts, and much more at HumaneTech.com. A very special thanks to our generous lead supporters,

including the Omidiar Network, Craig Newmark Philanthropies, and the Evolve Foundation, among many others. And if you made it all the way here, let me just give one more thank you to you for giving us your undivided attention.