#127 — Freedom from the Known
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Summary
How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence by Michael Pollan. In this episode, I speak with the author of the new book, How to Change your Mind, about psychedelics and his own experience with psychedelics, about how they have changed his life and how they can change the way we think about consciousness and mental health, and about the potential benefits and dangers of psychedelics. We also talk about why psychedelics should be seen as tools, not just addictions, and what they can teach us about consciousness, dying, addiction, and transcendence. This episode was produced and edited by Sam Harris. Our theme music is by my main amigo, Evan Handyside. The album art for the podcast was done by our super talented Ameya Vellian and our ad music was made by Ian Dorsch. Please consider becoming a supporter of the podcast by becoming a patron patron of Making Sense. Thanks so much to Sam Harris for making this podcast possible. You'll get access to all kinds of great episodes of the Making Sense Podcasts, including the podcast and much more. Subscribe to Making Sense, wherever you get your podcasts, including The Huffington Post, NPR, Slate, and the New York Times Magazine. To find a list of our sponsorships, go to bit.ly/OurAdvertisers. If you like the podcast, we'll be looking for your tickets to our upcoming events and support the podcast. Become a patron by clicking here. Thanks for listening and spreading the word out there! and spread the word to your friends and spreading it far and wide. Thank you, Sam Harris and I hope you'll find us everywhere you do it everywhere you listen to make sense. - Thank you! - Your support is appreciated! -- The Making Sense is much more than you'll get a chance to be heard by other podcasts like it helps us spread the message out there and help us spread it everywhere and spread it around the world. by spreading it everywhere. -- Thank you to you're listening to the world? - Sam Harris, too much of it's a good thing, and we're making sense, and I'm grateful that you're spreading it out there, everywhere and everywhere else too much love you do that's good enough, good enough to help us do it.
Transcript
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Michael's the author of seven previous books, which include Cooked, Food Rules, In Defense
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of Food, The Omnivore's Dilemma, and The Botany of Desire, all of which were New York Times
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And he's a longtime contributor to the New York Times Magazine.
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He also teaches writing at Harvard and the University of California, Berkeley.
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And in 2010, Time Magazine named him to its list of the 100 most influential people in
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Today we're speaking about his new book, which is titled How to Change Your Mind, What the
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New Science of Psychedelics, Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression,
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And as I say in the outset of this conversation, many of us have been waiting for somebody to
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And it was really perfect that Michael was that person.
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Anyway, I could have spoken to Michael for many hours about this, but he was in the middle
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So I got about an hour and 20 minutes or so of his time, and I hope you think we put it
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I think this must be a sentiment that has been expressed to you many times.
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This book you have written, How to Change Your Mind, which is your deep exploration into
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both the current science and clinical use of and your own personal experience with psychedelics.
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And I just got the sense while waiting for the book in the aftermath of your New Yorker
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article, which came out a few years ago, and in reading it, that this was just perfect.
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You were just the person to do this, and you really delivered on a lot of promise that
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You know, I do feel, I mean, the book's only been out for a few days, but I do feel like
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this was a conversation that the culture was waiting to have.
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First, how many people have come forward to tell me about their own experiences, which are
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often profound and maybe have not been taken out of that box labeled weird drug experience
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But also the fact that it seems like we're ready to have a kind of more matter-of-fact discussion
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of these things and look at them as tools, what they're good for, what they're not good
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for, rather than, you know, the usual kind of instantaneous reaction, you know, evoking
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So I've been hopeful by, you know, and encouraged by the response.
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And you were especially well-placed, in my view, to write this because, I mean, not only
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your background as a writer and journalist, but because the 60s had sort of passed you
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by, you were born right in this valley where you were sort of young enough to kind of miss
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So you were not this old acid head who is now dusting off his interest in altered states
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I guess the first question is, what was that like?
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I was in my late 50s when I started working on this.
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So that is precisely the time where people's risk aversion seems to be kicking into high
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And, you know, as someone who has done a fair amount of psychedelics in his youth, but has
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since done none for precisely the reasons that might have given you some trepidation,
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to do this in the first place, what was that like?
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How long did you have to negotiate with yourself and with your wife and your agent?
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Well, I definitely didn't tell my agent about it.
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I hadn't really had experience of these drugs except for a couple of very mild so-called
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aesthetic experiences with psilocybin in my late 20s.
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I came of age at a moment where the moral panic was in full flower and I heard all the
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And honestly, I didn't feel like I was a psychologically sturdy enough person to do this.
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When you're 20, you know, when you were having your experiments in Nepal, you believe you're
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And you are, you know, I mean, men that age are great risk takers.
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And, um, but here I was approaching 60 and, you know, was not unhappy and had a pretty
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Uh, and on the other hand, um, uh, so I had to overcome a lot of reluctance, uh, so many
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I mean, the fear of the drugs and the experience, the, uh, the new age kind of woo woo, uh, vocabulary
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of my guides, um, the music that they played so many things just rubbed me the wrong way.
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That was, I know, I don't know why it's kind of adorable that that was such a sticking point.
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It was the kind of music you might hear at a high end spa while you're getting a massage
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for, for some reason, this is profound to some people.
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Uh, so, and my, you know, I argued with myself before every one of my trips, I had, uh, an awful
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sleepless night where part of me was arguing, are you crazy?
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You know, you're going to go up to the top of this mountain.
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You're going to be with someone you barely know.
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You could have a heart attack and he's not going to call nine one one because it's going
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And, um, and then the other half would be saying, but aren't you curious?
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You know, you've never had a spiritual experience.
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Aren't you, um, uh, you know, plus you've got a book to write.
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And, um, so it was, uh, you know, this ping pong match, but every night.
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And I realized eventually that that was my ego trying to stop me from what was going to
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Um, so I, uh, fortunately I overcame that reluctance.
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I mean, I'm very glad I did, but I could see how easily you would not do this.
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Now you hadn't taken any trip yourself when you wrote the New Yorker article.
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And, and that article was kind of straight ahead science writing.
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I think the New Yorker would have been frightened off had I said, Hey, and I, and I'm going to
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I had to stick to the people in white coats, you know, that's, that, that's to get it in
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It was hard enough to get a piece on psychedelics into the New Yorker in 2014.
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That actually took some negotiation with your editors.
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There was a, I mean, I did, I proposed it to them and they bit, but then I handed in 14,000
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words on science that had not yet been peer reviewed.
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And there was this very interesting moment two or three days before close where, uh, I
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got word from my editor that I had to find a prominent, uh, psychiatrist or somebody who
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And, uh, so I spent a day dialing, you know, dialing around until I found, I thought Tom
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Insul, the, uh, former head of the National Institute of Mental Health would give me the
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But when I reached him in Davos, he was like, he was on acid.
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And, um, I finally got, uh, uh, the head of the National Institute of Drug Abuse to give
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me the quote I needed, which was these drugs can be abused, which we know.
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Well, so I think we should probably, uh, give our own disclaimer here.
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It's certainly clear if listeners have read anything I've written about psychedelics, and
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it would be clear to anyone reading your book that there's potential downside.
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First, we have to acknowledge that the word drugs names a very wide spectrum of compounds
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that are significantly different, both psychologically and physically.
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So, you know, much of what we're going to say about the classic psychedelics doesn't
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necessarily apply to something like MDMA, which has also therapeutic value, and people
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But unlike the classic psychedelics, LSD, psilocybin being the most common here, but you would
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add DMT as well, you can make the case that MDMA is physically not good for you.
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It's very hard to make that case with LSD and psilocybin.
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They seem to be impressively non-toxic, but they produce such a strong experience psychologically
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for good or for ill that you can't recommend this without serious caveat to people.
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And people who can't afford, as I think I said when I wrote about this, to give the anchor
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of sanity, even the slightest tug, really, really shouldn't.
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And so it's, you know, if someone's at risk for schizophrenia or worries that they could
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be destabilized in some permanent way by experiences like this, this isn't just a matter of what
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This applies to even long-term meditation practice.
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I wouldn't recommend that someone go into silence for a month and do nothing but meditate if
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they're at risk for a condition like schizophrenia.
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So we're about to say some very positive things and we should just anchor that.
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Yeah, I'd like to say an additional word about risk.
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I think it's very important to preface any conversation with a sense of risk.
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The risks are, as you suggest, less physiological than they are psychological.
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Physiologically, the drugs, as you say, are relatively non-toxic.
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I mean, there are lethal doses of all sorts of over-the-counter drugs that you have in
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your medicine cabinet and there doesn't appear to be lethal doses of the classic psychedelics.
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And I agree with you that I would take MDMA out of that, that it is more toxic.
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I would also add to that, though, that they don't appear to be addictive and that, you know,
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in animal experiments, you know, in the classic setup where the rat has a lever that administers
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cocaine to itself and another lever for food, it will press the lever endlessly for cocaine
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Whereas in the case, if you do that setup with LSD, it'll press it once and never again.
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No, the first reaction after a big psychedelic trip is not, where can I get some more?
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But psychologically, some people do get into trouble.
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And, you know, and I'm hearing those stories when I talk to audiences about this.
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I can't, you know, it's anecdotal, but there are casualties.
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And we don't know whether psychedelics have ever created a case of mental illness where
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But certainly people have very powerful reactions.
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They can be just panic reactions sometimes, but they can also be psychotic episodes.
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So in the trials that are going on, people are screened very carefully.
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And if they have a family history of schizophrenia, you know, they're just not allowed in.
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I think people who have bipolar, they also don't let into their trials.
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But on this other point that, you know, we're going to be talking about this together,
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I just want to say that your own accounts of psychedelics, especially in waking up,
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were incredibly important to me as I was deciding what to do in this book.
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And that they really emboldened me, that a person of your reputation and evidence sanity
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and that you would be willing to describe your experiences so openly,
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Well, I was glad to see that you didn't take 400 micrograms of acid in the middle of a canoe
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in the middle of a lake in the middle of Nepal.
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And for those who want to hear more of my cautionary tale with respect to psychedelics,
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It's also a blog post titled Drugs and the Meaning of Life.
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But the flip side, of course, is that both of us are convinced that these drugs have immense
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promise, both therapeutically for people who are in one or another state of obvious unwellness,
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but also, as you phrase it many times in the book, the betterment of well people.
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And that's the more controversial side of this, that people who are experiencing ordinary
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levels of happiness and well-being still stand a lot to gain from these sorts of experiences.
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I mean, that's certainly been my experience and it's been yours.
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And, you know, people need to find whatever experts in their life to consult before they
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And also, ideally, I mean, one way to mitigate the risk is to work with a guide, someone who
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is a professional, someone who really knows the territory.
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And we'll talk a little later about how a guided experience differs from a so-called recreational
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But I think it's a profound difference and it definitely mitigates the risk.
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I guess let's start with a snapshot of the landscape here.
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I guess I've distinguished two aspects to it here.
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Maybe you can describe how that looks now and the conditions for which people are, you
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And then we can talk about the notion of the betterment of well people as well.
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Well, what's happening right now and has been happening now for really almost two decades is
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a renaissance of research that was going on in the 1950s that I was not aware of.
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I think many people, I mean, even I talked to young psychiatrists.
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They never heard about this in their education.
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But that in the 50s, there was a really fertile period of experimentation by, you know, serious
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psychiatrists and academics to try to figure out what LSD and then a little later psilocybin
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might have to contribute to mental health treatment.
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And the work that's been going on now since the late 90s is really attempt to pick up
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that thread that was dropped during the moral panic that led to the backlash against psychedelics
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And, you know, we had this 30-year hiatus in research, which is, I don't know if I can
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think of another example of a promising line of inquiry that scientists were very excited
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I mean, many people thought this was going to be a psychiatric wonder drug that was completely
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suppressed for a period of time and then resumed.
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And we can only imagine what we might know had we continued and had that other 30 years
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But anyway, the work that's going on now so far is mostly repeating experiments that were
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done in the 50s, but doing them to much better standards.
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The randomized, double-blind, controlled trial is really, doesn't really come into common
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use until 1962 or 3 after the solidamide scandal or tragedy.
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And that's when we had an experience with a drug that was being given to pregnant women
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And it was only then that we started regulating the drug approval process the way we do it
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And so these trials that were done in the 50s, by modern standards, aren't adequate.
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And it is hard to control a psychedelic experiment because you usually can tell who got the acid
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The double-blind thing becomes unblinded pretty quickly.
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And so the kinds of indications they're using the drugs for now are the anxiety and depression
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felt by cancer patients after they get that life, you know, either that terminal or life-threatening
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And it is being done now with remarkable success.
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These studies that I wrote about in that New Yorker piece have been published since.
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In December 2016, and they were done at Johns Hopkins at NYU.
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And they found that in 80% of the volunteers, there were statistically significant reductions
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in standard measures of anxiety and depression.
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You know, we're talking about 80 volunteers, and they need to be replicated on a much wider
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So that's been one promising area of research, and perhaps the most advanced in terms of scale
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There's also been a pilot study of smoking cessation.
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You know, smoking is a very hard addiction to break.
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And in 15 people, 67% of them were abstinent after a year, which is quite remarkable.
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I think the standard of care for that, I think it's Shantex or something like that, is 20%
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But again, needs to be and is being repeated on a larger scale.
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There have been, there was one study for obsessive compulsive disorder that showed encouraging
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Another pilot study in New Mexico for alcohol addiction that was encouraging enough in its
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results to lead to a very large phase two trial that's underway right now at NYU.
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So it's addiction, depression, anxiety, obsession.
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I think there's great potential for eating disorders, and I know the people at Hopkins are
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looking at that, it seems to do best in disorders that are characterized by kind of obsessive
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thinking, rigid thinking, people getting trapped in a narrative about themselves that is, you
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And that one of the most striking things to me is the drug, the success of psilocybin.
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And by the way, I should point out that today they use psilocybin almost exclusively and stay
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away from LSD for two reasons, even though LSD was used a lot in the 50s and 60s.
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It's only like five or six hours, as opposed to a potential 10 or 12 with LSD.
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And that's very hard to fit into the therapeutic workday.
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And then there is also the fact that LSD carries so much more cultural baggage and that you're
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much more likely to excite a reaction on the part of some, you know, congressman standing
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up and saying, why are we doing research with LSD?
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He can't get the same bang talking about psilocybin, which he might not be able to pronounce, and
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So psilocybin can operate under the cultural radar a little bit, at least so far.
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So the indications that it works best, you realize, have something important in common,
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which is that the ego or the self is kind of stuck in these stories, these narratives
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You know, narratives like, I can't get through the next hour without a cigarette, or narratives
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like, I'm worthless, or narratives that, you know, I'm about to die, and what's the meaning
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And so they kind of dope slap people out of their stories.
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And I think that's a very, I mean, it's kind of a new model for psychotherapy, right?
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Because you're really administering an experience, not just a chemical.
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Yeah, well, so you remark on this at some point in your book that it may, at first glance,
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seem surprising that a single antidote is being proffered for all of these diverse conditions.
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But when you boil it down, and I guess my experience in meditation would tempt me to boil it down
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even further, all of these conditions, as you say, have this common feature of the mind
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being imprisoned by certain patterns of thinking.
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And, you know, I would say that basically all of mental suffering has this feature, that it's
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really significantly or entirely mediated by thinking and one's relationship to one's thoughts.
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You can either change your thoughts or change the world so as to be convinced by it that
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You know, you can rearrange the deck chairs on the Titanic.
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Or you can change your relationship to your thoughts.
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And there's something about a psychedelic experience that I would argue does both.
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Meditation is, and we'll talk about the differences here, because I think it's a
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in the Venn diagram of remedies for existential problems.
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I think that meditation and psychedelics overlap significantly, but not entirely.
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Meditation is much more weighted on the side of changing your relationship to thoughts in
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And the thing about a psychedelic experience is the contents of consciousness change so radically
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that you can't help but be shoved into different patterns of thinking about yourself and your
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place in the world and what it is to be an ape confronted by the cosmos.
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It's not actually a surprise that these experiences change people's suffering with respect to many
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different conditions and probably many conditions that are not on anyone's list yet.
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I want to come back to a few things you mentioned here, because in your book, there are these
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Well, first, you mentioned the application to treatment-resistant depression.
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I was astonished to hear from you that that idea actually came from the FDA.
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That was thrust upon researchers who were looking for a more narrow application.
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So when the researchers from Hopkins at NYU brought the results of these phase two trials
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to their meeting at the FDA, they were hoping to get approval to do a phase three study of
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the same thing, depression and anxiety in cancer patients.
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But it was the regulators at the FDA, and this reporting is based on what the researchers
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The FDA wouldn't say a word about it because they don't disclose anything about drug approval
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processes, but that they said, you know, there's a strong signal here that this is effective
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And we have a tremendous problem with depression and very few tools to treat it.
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The SSRIs, antidepressants like Prozac and Paxil, you know, there are a lot of problems
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There was recently a meta-analysis that showed they only do slightly better than placebo and
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that their effects fade over time and that they're very hard to get off.
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And people really hate the side effects very often.
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So the FDA was very open to studying depression in a larger population.
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In America, it's not, just to correct you, it's not going to be treatment-resistant depression.
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In Europe is where they're going to do treatment-resistant depression.
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These are depressions that have failed to respond to two courses of treatment.
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And so that was, as one researcher described it to me, said it was a surreal moment.
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And one of the reasons they had worked, wanted to work with cancer patients is they thought
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it was a particularly sympathetic population that we had very little for because antidepressants
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really don't help very much if you're, you know, facing your mortality, if you have what
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So, yeah, that was another indication, I think, that there is a receptivity to this work right
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now that really flows from the desperate straits of the population and the limitations of mental
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And, you know, Tom Insull, the former head of the National Institute of Mental Health, he
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And he points out that if you compare mental health treatment, which, by the way, only reaches
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half the population of people who need access to it right now, if you compare it to any other
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branch of medicine, to oncology or cardiology or infectious disease, it's achieved very little.
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And there is a tremendous amount of sufferings out there.
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You know, the rates of depression are climbing.
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And addiction is, rates of addiction are raising.
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So, and big pharma, the pharmaceutical industry, apparently has very few what are called CNS drugs,
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So I think even the FDA is a little desperate when it comes to looking for innovation in mental
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And there really hasn't been much innovation since the early 90s.
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So I think psychedelics come along now at a very propitious moment.
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Yeah, I want to spend a couple of minutes on the end of life care and the cancer patient
00:26:56.380
stories you tell, because there's one in the book that is fairly arresting and inspiring.
00:27:02.700
And also, I just had recent experience with this.
00:27:05.620
Someone close to me in my family recently died of pancreatic cancer.
00:27:09.300
And I was, you know, for the first time in many, many years in the situation of being close
00:27:17.600
to someone who was dying and just being taken through every stage of the medicalization process
00:27:25.140
of death, where treatment is no longer treatment and you go into a hospice situation.
00:27:30.620
And, you know, I was struck at every stage along the way that the promise of bringing equanimity
00:27:37.920
to the person who's dying, it's really not just about the person who's dying.
00:27:43.500
The state of mind of the person who's dying affects everyone around him or her.
00:27:48.820
And to some degree, this is just luck of the draw.
00:27:50.980
I mean, it's just, you know, you're lucky not to have dementia.
00:27:56.160
And, you know, there are treatments for both of those things are, in the first case, basically
00:28:04.220
But, you know, as it happened, my family member got very lucky and he died in a state of just
00:28:15.100
And it was just, you know, he won the death lottery, essentially.
00:28:20.980
He was not someone who was at all overcome by regret or...
00:28:27.200
I mean, he was just feeling gratitude and love for seemingly every conscious moment that
00:28:34.760
And the experience of being with him and mourning the loss of him was totally different than
00:28:43.140
if he had been in some radically different state of, you know, being terrorized by the contents
00:28:48.360
of his own mind, which is the way many people die.
00:28:51.800
And you tell a story in your book of a cancer patient who, you know, on the basis of, I think
00:28:59.640
it was one psilocybin experience, was set on course to have an extraordinarily beautiful
00:29:06.180
process of dying which affected everyone around him.
00:29:10.200
You're talking about Patrick Metis, who is a...
00:29:13.580
was a journalist in New York, worked for MSNBC, was about my age.
00:29:19.640
And he had bile duct cancer that had spread to his lungs.
00:29:22.580
He was really paralyzed by anxiety and depression.
00:29:26.340
And he read about the trial at NYU in the same article I first heard about it, actually,
00:29:33.060
And he immediately called them and applied to get in.
00:29:37.340
His wife, Lisa, was against it and thought that this represented a surrender to death and
00:29:48.440
And indeed, most oncologists, at least when that study was going on, reacted the same way.
00:29:55.360
They had a lot of trouble getting referrals because the oncologists see any acceptance of
00:30:02.020
And they take it personally, as if it were their defeat.
00:30:06.620
And he had a profound experience that involved a rebirth.
00:30:13.180
He suddenly started shuddering and lifted his legs and held on for dear life with one
00:30:22.180
And where he said, and he said to them, life, dying and being born is a lot of work.
00:30:30.500
And he was giving birth to himself, he felt, after it had happened.
00:30:35.680
And there was a very rich kind of feminine principle at work.
00:30:39.560
Michelle Obama showed up in his trip and his late sister-in-law.
00:30:45.820
And he had an interesting experience with his mother, who I think he had problems with.
00:30:51.180
I never really understood what those problems were.
00:30:53.200
But he had an epiphany that a mother had to love her child.
00:30:58.580
And so, perhaps what he had failed to understand as love was love.
00:31:09.100
He had this whole riff on aesthetics and why we need to simplify everything we do, that we
00:31:15.460
put too many notes in the songs, too many elements in the TV program, and that we needed
00:31:20.300
to focus on love, and that love was the most important principle.
00:31:23.900
And I'll get back to that, because the problem of platitudes on the psychedelic experience
00:31:32.240
And then he had this experience of kind of climbing up to this precipice that was made
00:31:39.100
And looking out over it and seeing this plane of consciousness that was infused with love.
00:31:47.060
And he saw that as a form of consciousness outside of himself that would survive him.
00:31:58.100
He could go over to that side, but chose not to, that he didn't want to leave his wife yet,
00:32:03.660
and that he still had some time that he wanted to spend in this world.
00:32:13.060
His wife said he looked like he'd run a marathon.
00:32:15.940
And he wrote a beautiful account of it that his wife and his doctor allowed me to quote at
00:32:23.140
And he spent the next 17 months in a very different frame of mind.
00:32:28.840
He, at one session, I had the therapeutic notes with his palliative care psychologist.
00:32:33.640
He spent his days walking around Brooklyn, finding interesting places to have lunch,
00:32:40.320
savoring every moment, like the family member you were describing.
00:32:44.240
And in one session with his shrink, he said he'd never been so happy in his life as in
00:32:49.600
those last months because of the gratitude he had for the time he had left.
00:32:53.480
And his focus turned from the quality of his time to the quantity.
00:33:00.020
Not because he wanted to die, he said, but because he didn't want to live that way while
00:33:05.160
Toward the end, his lungs began to fail, and he went into the hospital at Mount Sinai.
00:33:10.000
And Lisa, his wife, and Tony Bosas, his therapist, said that his room in the palliative care unit
00:33:18.000
at Mount Sinai became this gravitational field in the hospital.
00:33:22.060
Everybody on the floor wanted to spend time in that room because he was putting out so much
00:33:32.340
You know, here is someone facing death within a matter of days, yet is putting out this
00:33:38.460
energy that, you know, we normally turn away from the dying.
00:33:48.220
Everything I know about him came from interviews and reading these notes.
00:33:54.300
But there's a moment where his wife sent me a photograph that she'd taken four or five
00:34:01.860
And I remember vividly the moment I clicked it open on my computer screen.
00:34:12.240
He had an oxygen clip and was wearing that blue hospital scrubs.
00:34:24.940
And he died, you know, in a very deliberate way.
00:34:27.960
He was ready and with what appeared to everybody around him to be complete equanimity.
00:34:33.860
But your point about the caregivers and how important it is to them, too, because it's
00:34:40.560
very hard to take care of someone who is suffering in that existential way, you know, let alone
00:34:47.460
the pain and the, you know, all the physical problems of dying.
00:34:52.560
And actually, there are some some of the therapists who've done this work thinks that, you know,
00:34:56.740
there's a place for giving it to the caregivers also and that it could help them.
00:35:00.560
So what happened in the mind of Patrick Metis is a question that I became intensely concerned
00:35:16.160
But he'd had a glimpse of a kind of consciousness that was literally selfless.
00:35:23.280
It was a consciousness that was outside of him, that was universal in some ways, and that
00:35:30.900
he was part of and would continue to be part of even when his when he died.
00:35:36.280
Now, you can argue if that's a form of immortality or not, but it is a transcendence of the self.
00:35:43.620
And I think part of what's going on here is people are, they're rehearsing their death.
00:35:52.080
And it can be agonizing or ecstatic, depending on your preparation and your set, your mindset.
00:36:01.040
And that rehearsal, I think, and what you're rehearsing is letting go also.
00:36:06.880
And because we cling, you know, we cling to all sorts of things.
00:36:10.620
And to let go of yourself and have that experience, I think, equips you to die.
00:36:16.540
Well, I want to talk about the experience and your experiences in particular and what they
00:36:22.420
may or may not mean, kind of the metaphysics lurking at the back here.
00:36:26.900
But I think we should deal with this problem of platitudes that you raised a moment ago.
00:36:33.940
And this relates to the so-called and much remarked ineffability of the psychedelic experience.
00:36:44.920
Many psychedelic states have somewhat the quality of dreams where, you know, they can be incredibly
00:36:50.060
intense, but paradoxically, very hard to remember even a few moments later.
00:36:56.340
But I don't think they're as ineffable as all that.
00:37:03.460
If anyone's heard Terrence McKenna talk for 14 hours about any of his drug experiences,
00:37:14.760
So you can capture many of the features of interest here.
00:37:18.060
The problem of platitude, and again, you remark on this at several points in the book,
00:37:22.640
and it's something I'm sensitive to also as a writer.
00:37:25.640
You hate to boil it all down to a sentence that belongs on a Hallmark card, I think, as you put it.
00:37:32.600
But I think there's a principle of charity you have to extend to the other person and even to
00:37:38.820
your former self when you're trying to capture these experiences.
00:37:41.760
Because a statement like love is the principle of being, say, right?
00:37:47.220
Love is everything that matters, is the only thing that matters, yes.
00:37:50.080
Right, that, like, if you actually do the work to capture what that state of mind is,
00:37:57.280
So I have a slightly different take on the platitudes.
00:38:01.240
I think that a platitude is a truth after you've trained out all the important things.
00:38:07.480
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