Making Sense - Sam Harris - #306 — Psychedelics & Mortality

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Today I'm speaking to Roland

00:00:27.600 Griffiths. Roland is a professor in the departments of psychiatry and neurosciences

00:00:32.860 at Johns Hopkins University and the founding director of the Johns Hopkins Center on Psychedelic

00:00:38.780 and Consciousness Research. He has authored over 400 scientific publications and he has been a

00:00:45.760 consultant to the National Institutes of Health, the World Health Organization, and numerous

00:00:51.640 pharmaceutical companies. Roland has also conducted extensive research with sedative

00:00:56.840 hypnotics, caffeine, and other mood-altering drugs. In 1994, Roland got very interested in

00:01:04.080 meditation and this made him curious about altered states of consciousness generally, which prompted

00:01:10.620 him in 1999 to initiate the first study in decades on psilocybin. And since then he's been at the

00:01:18.360 forefront of renewed scientific interest in psychedelics. This research has looked at the

00:01:24.440 utility of psilocybin and MDMA in particular in the treatment of anxiety in cancer patients,

00:01:30.960 treatment-resistant depression, PTSD, as well as their utility for improving the lives of otherwise

00:01:38.160 well people. As you'll hear, there have been big changes in Roland's life since we last spoke.

00:01:44.800 We last spoke almost exactly three years ago. Since then, he's received a stage 4 cancer diagnosis,

00:01:51.400 which appears to be untreatable, and we talk about that. And as part of his end-of-life planning,

00:02:00.980 Roland has created a major project at Johns Hopkins to endow a professorship that comes with research

00:02:08.380 funds in perpetuity. And if you want more information about that, you can find it at

00:02:13.780 griffithsfund.org. I'll read you Roland's quote from that webpage.

00:02:20.560 The purpose of this endowment is to support a professorship and to establish a world-class,

00:02:26.180 rigorous, empirical program of research with psychedelic substances, to advance understanding

00:02:31.900 of well-being and spirituality in the service of human flourishing for generations to come.

00:02:37.000 The hallmark of this research shall be the scientific method. Once again, you can find out more about

00:02:43.380 this project on that webpage. The Waking Up Foundation will be supporting it. We're giving

00:02:49.520 $250,000 over two years, and I am excited about that. If you want to join us, again, the website is

00:02:58.580 griffithsfund.org. And Roland and I speak about psychedelics and mortality in today's episode.

00:03:08.040 We discuss the current state of psychedelic research, the timeline for FDA approvals, the risks to mental

00:03:15.320 health posed by psychedelics in vulnerable groups, the use of psychedelics by otherwise healthy people who are

00:03:22.460 just seeking a deeper experience of life, the relationship between psychedelics and meditation,

00:03:28.580 advice for, quote, bad trips, microdosing, Roland's experience getting his cancer diagnosis,

00:03:37.040 and our mutual reflections on death, and other topics. And now I bring you Roland Griffiths.

00:03:50.220 I am here with Roland Griffiths. Roland, thanks for joining me again.

00:03:54.380 How pleased to be there, Sam. Good to hear you.

00:03:57.260 We spoke almost exactly three years ago about the work you're doing at Johns Hopkins on psychedelics.

00:04:05.520 And it's really, it's not too much to say that you have been leading the resurgence of scientific

00:04:10.340 interest in psychedelics. And we'll talk about that. But I just checked my calendar, and soon after we

00:04:16.280 spoke, I know you know this because I appended some audio on this topic to the podcast we released,

00:04:22.980 but just almost right after we spoke, I had the first psychedelic experience I'd had in I think over

00:04:31.180 25 years. And I just looked at my calendar, and as chance would have it, it was actually three years

00:04:36.300 ago to the day that we're recording this, which causes me to reflect on how I've used the last

00:04:42.760 thousand days or so. And we will talk about how you have used them. But I mean, it's really, it's been

00:04:48.960 a crazy three years. I mean, we were, we, this was before COVID, really right before COVID. And so we've

00:04:56.400 had a global pandemic and all the attendant disruption in our lives since then. And there have been some

00:05:03.960 immense changes I know in your life. So let's jump in. Let's, we can talk about anything you want

00:05:11.640 and start anywhere you want. But what have the last three years been like for you?

00:05:18.220 Well, let me first just comment that I was delighted that you tried to expose yourself once again to

00:05:28.300 psychedelics. And your description of that was absolutely beautiful and harrowing. But that's the

00:05:36.340 nature of these experiences. So yeah, let's see what's happened since then. At the time we spoke, I think

00:05:43.840 our center was up and running. That happened in 2019. And as much as the tension of culture at large

00:05:55.780 had already been, come to focus on psychedelics, it's just ramped up enormously since then. And so we now

00:06:05.720 have a dramatically changing landscape. There are now a number of academic centers that are, have declared

00:06:14.080 interest in, in psychedelics. And so that research is going apace. There's NIH that's just very recently

00:06:23.000 stepped in to the fray here. They had been reluctant to fund human studies on psychedelics. And they're

00:06:32.380 still just beginning to do so. But they have now funded several out of several institutes, including

00:06:38.760 one clinical trial of addiction to cigarette smoking done by my colleague, Matt Johnson at Hopkins.

00:06:48.280 So that's moving apace. And then I don't quite know how to think about it and wrap my head around

00:06:56.160 the consequences of it. There's this huge groundswell of movements at state and local levels

00:07:03.540 to decriminalize or legalize psychedelics. And I do have some concern about that, but a lot of sympathy

00:07:14.040 for that. And I guess the other significant development is that clinical trials under FDA

00:07:22.820 that are slotted for medical approval of compounds have been moving forward. It's medical approval pending

00:07:32.900 results. But the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, MAPS, has some very promising data

00:07:43.000 with MDMA and treatment of PTSD. And then there are two companies, the USONA Institute out of Madison

00:07:51.780 and Compass Pathways out of the UK that have been given breakthrough therapy status designation by FDA

00:07:59.780 for their trials in major depressive disorder and treatment-resistant depression, respectively.

00:08:06.780 So that is moving forward. So it's an exciting time. And also the basic neuroscience. There's just a lot

00:08:15.480 going on with basic neuroscience and understanding both at the molecular and network level what might be

00:08:25.360 occurring with psychedelics. So it's enormously exciting and far outstrips anything that I could have

00:08:35.060 imagined would have imagined would happen when we initiated our studies back in 2000.

00:08:40.340 So are all the compounds moving in lockstep? I mean, what drugs are we talking about at this point?

00:08:47.240 And in terms of approval and funding by the NIH and decriminalization, do you view everything that has

00:08:57.020 clinical and therapeutic relevance moving into the end zone more or less at the same time, or are some of these

00:09:04.400 compounds years ahead of others?

00:09:06.580 Yeah, it appears that the MDMA for PTSD application will very likely cross over the threshold first.

00:09:16.980 You know, of course, these are all unknowns. They could run into major problems. FDA could ask for additional

00:09:24.380 studies. So, but the best guess would be that MDMA might be approved in anywhere from two to four

00:09:32.580 years. And the work with depression is moving more slowly. I would put that at three to five years for

00:09:42.180 approval. I think most of the, I don't know of any other compound right now. I think there are trials

00:09:51.260 going on. I don't know what the FDA regulatory status is of those trials and whether they have been

00:09:59.080 pitched to FDA for approval. But by and large, the focus has been on psilocybin because that's where we've

00:10:08.860 generated the most data. There is one other group, BMOR, that is developing psilocybin for treatment of

00:10:19.640 alcohol use disorder. But I think most of the attention has been focused on psilocybin and these

00:10:28.000 decriminalization and legalization efforts being done at state and county and city levels have focused

00:10:37.880 largely on psilocybin, but not exclusively on psilocybin. So, the different initiatives that have been

00:10:45.520 passed differ with respect to precisely what they're attempting to legalize or decriminalize.

00:10:54.200 However, all those initiatives come with the very significant problem that although you might be able

00:11:01.140 to decriminalize or lower the priority for enforcement at the state level or the city level, that does not

00:11:08.680 change the federal level. And so, like what happened with marijuana before, it would remain a potentially

00:11:18.100 federal crime and then it's a question of whether that's enforced or not. So, there's a lot of unknowns

00:11:25.940 here. And the other big thing that's happened in the area is that companies, individuals have awakened

00:11:34.900 to the potential financial benefits of developing compounds. And so, there are probably a hundred

00:11:42.800 or more startups, maybe 200 or more startups, all of which are grasping for intellectual property and

00:11:51.300 patent and trying to patent different things with respect to psychedelics. And so, there'll be a big

00:11:57.580 shakeout in that. But that's drawn a lot of interest and money into the area that hadn't been there

00:12:04.800 heretofore. But all of that work is focused on therapeutics and not my principal interest. And that

00:12:13.580 would be the larger implications for healthy volunteers and the interaction with what I'm now calling secular

00:12:21.500 spirituality.

00:12:22.640 Right. Right. Yeah. So, let's jump into the research side of this first. And, you know, I'll just say up

00:12:30.720 front, the big thing that's happened in your life since we last spoke is that you have received a stage

00:12:36.220 four cancer diagnosis. And I'm very eager to speak with you about that and about what that has done to

00:12:43.980 you and your thoughts about mortality and the role that meditation and psychedelics play. And you're moving

00:12:50.360 through this chapter of life. And so, I really want to explore that as much as you want to. But let's

00:12:58.500 leave that for the second half and just jump into the research and the cultural change that's being

00:13:05.820 forced upon us by the change in the availability and attention paid to psychedelics at this point.

00:13:14.280 And maybe let's start with the misgivings you just mentioned as a caveat a few minutes ago.

00:13:23.100 Because I share them. And, you know, notwithstanding the fact that psychedelics have been indispensable

00:13:31.240 to me. And I obviously took them in a non-legal context. And, you know, so there's many of us who are

00:13:40.120 the beneficiaries of the chaos of the 60s. And, you know, I didn't live through the 60s, but I

00:13:46.620 consider myself someone who, in their wake, became interested in psychedelics and other esoterica and

00:13:53.740 had access to these drugs simply because of what the 60s did to our culture. Many of us still notice

00:14:02.320 that much of that came with a pretty significant downside. And the fact that research in psychedelics

00:14:10.860 and, you know, scientific acceptance of that impulse to research took so long to resurrect was largely

00:14:17.460 the result of some of the missteps from the 60s. And I think many of us are eager not to see us step in

00:14:24.320 the same ditches this time around. So how are you thinking about the landscape that's ahead of us

00:14:31.060 in terms of research and cultural adoption of psychedelics, legal and illegal and ambiguously

00:14:41.260 legal, as you just mentioned, with respect to federal and state laws being different? What are you

00:14:46.300 concerned about? And if you could just write the script, what do you think it should look like? What

00:14:52.980 should we hope happens? So I've focused and our groups have focused on medical approval and getting

00:15:01.540 that over the finish line. And for a couple of reasons, but the primary one is that medical

00:15:09.800 approval fits within an institutional structure that is working and is regulated. And so it's the least

00:15:19.900 controversial as far as I'm concerned. It's the least risky because there can be set and setting and

00:15:27.780 screening conditions that are built into that approval process that are going to mitigate against

00:15:34.640 people engaging in dangerous behavior or becoming harmed by exposure to psychedelics.

00:15:42.400 And it's also a way of, the medicalization is a way of normalizing it within culture because there

00:15:49.080 was so much demonization of these compounds back in the 1960s. And there are many people who have still

00:15:58.600 not gotten out of that concern and fear. So if I were going to write a script, I would have said,

00:16:08.160 let's focus exclusively on medicalization first and then turn toward a broader application and treatment

00:16:16.940 of well people. My concern about the decriminalization and legalization movements is that we run the

00:16:27.280 risk of just moving too fast with the availability of these compounds to the population at large.

00:16:35.520 There are real risks associated with psychedelics that are now getting swept under the rug by psychedelic

00:16:43.560 enthusiasts. But it is the case. And the most common problem is people will get disoriented or panicked or

00:16:53.040 otherwise untethered and engage in dangerous behavior. And that could involve simple panic where someone

00:17:00.900 runs into traffic or believes that they're going to be harmed and will defend themselves or attack

00:17:08.860 somebody. And people get killed under these circumstances. Most don't. It's low probability, but it can

00:17:17.560 happen, particularly under conditions where the set and setting conditions aren't right and the experience isn't

00:17:26.400 supported by individuals who can provide feedback to the person once they're going off in dangerous

00:17:34.860 territory. The other kind of danger is that people need to be screened for vulnerability to particularly

00:17:44.280 psychotic disorders, schizophrenia, but also in the case of bipolar to mania. And there may be other

00:17:52.840 psychiatric conditions for which psychedelics pose unique risks. But there are enough anecdotal case reports

00:18:03.280 of new onset schizophrenia occurring after a single or a few doses of a psychedelic. And this normally occurs

00:18:14.000 in individuals who are going to be most susceptible to the disorder. So if they have family histories,

00:18:22.640 you know, it usually occurs in the late teens and early 20s. It can occur later, but that coincides with the

00:18:31.240 onset of schizophrenia. And that's a horrific outcome. I mean, there's no coming back from a diagnosis of or

00:18:41.960 from a disease onset of schizophrenia. That's a lifelong condition that you'd wish on no one.

00:18:48.920 Well, let's linger on that topic for a moment, Roland, because I'm not close to that research and I don't know how

00:18:54.960 close you are to it, but it had always been thought that there was some possibility of a psychedelic trip.

00:19:04.240 You know, we're usually talking about psilocybin or LSD here rather than something like MDMA,

00:19:10.560 if I'm not mistaken. But it had always been thought that there was the possibility of a trip provoking

00:19:17.240 the onset of schizophrenia. But there's just the obvious confound that you have, you know, lots of

00:19:24.500 people in their teens and 20s taking these drugs over the decades. And that this is the period where

00:19:31.060 people are going to present with schizophrenia if, in fact, they're going to take that turn. And it's

00:19:37.980 really hard to establish causation just looking at these longitudinal changes in people's lives.

00:19:44.460 Have we moved to a place where we can actually say that there is some causal role played by

00:19:51.560 one or another drug in actually provoking schizophrenia that wouldn't otherwise have

00:19:58.000 occurred? No, I don't think we have. But the very nature of how these cases are detected,

00:20:07.160 you're not going to do a randomized trial with vulnerable people. And so I think we're left

00:20:14.420 with these anecdotal case reports. But in my own thinking about this, we have seen a couple of

00:20:24.580 cases of mania develop in our experimental situation. And increasingly, there are reports of that. And

00:20:33.600 when you read them, it's pretty convincing that the onset is correlated with the administration of

00:20:41.040 the psychedelic. And so it's a concern. I know it to be a concern of FDA. We have excluded in our studies

00:20:52.300 people with histories, family histories of schizophrenia and bipolar disorders. There may be variations of

00:21:03.040 bipolar for which there's not a problem. But if it's associated with mania, that really could be a

00:21:11.500 problem. And what does that exclusion look like? It's just if they have a first order relative with

00:21:17.040 the condition? Well, right now, we're probably overly conservative, but we've excluded people at Hopkins

00:21:24.240 who have first or second degree relative of either schizophrenia or some psychotic disorder,

00:21:32.500 enduring psychotic disorder or bipolar. And I think we're being overly conservative. There are studies

00:21:38.920 now going on that are starting to treat bipolar patients. And so we need to collect a lot more data on

00:21:46.760 that. Whether or not there's a causal relationship, there are going to be reports of this sort. And if

00:21:58.660 stirred right in the media, that's going to create the precise conditions that we want to avoid. So

00:22:06.140 there's every reason, in my mind, to be very conservative and not forge ahead too rapidly with

00:22:14.000 respect to that. But again, they are very rare cases. And I think we just need to do more research

00:22:23.940 with them. Yeah. Although as far as I know, schizophrenia is still thought to be an ambient

00:22:32.340 condition in virtually any population. You could name something of the order of 1%. You just randomly

00:22:41.080 select people in any culture anywhere on earth and something like 1% will present with what we consider

00:22:48.840 to be the clinical disorder of schizophrenia. So it's not, you know, this is not an infinitesimal

00:22:54.740 number of people. This is something that is going to keep showing up. So it's interesting to consider

00:22:59.020 how that background fact will interact with more widespread use of these compounds. And I would expect

00:23:07.020 we would be able to see, you know, if we actually crossed over into, you know, markedly more

00:23:12.420 psychedelic drug use, we would be able to detect an increase in schizophrenia if in fact there was a

00:23:19.560 causative relationship. Yes. Yeah. I guess just coming back to it, you know, there are cases and we've seen

00:23:28.160 them in which the onset of, not schizophrenia, but mania occurs, you know, the day following

00:23:36.780 administration. So clearly something that's happened there. Now, whether or not they would have become

00:23:43.920 manic spontaneously or not, we don't know because it's not a controlled trial. But it's,

00:23:52.300 the coincidence is convincing enough to me that I don't want to push that. At least right now where

00:24:01.620 our culture at large hasn't fully adapted to the potential value of psychedelics. I mean, my own

00:24:11.020 thought about this is that what we need to develop is cultural institutions that are going to be

00:24:18.420 supportive of appropriate use of psychedelics. And I see it almost as a co-evolutionary process

00:24:27.300 that if we're going to reintroduce psychedelics into culture, we need some constraints and or some

00:24:34.960 wisdom in how they're used. And I don't quite know what form that takes. I mean, certainly medicalization

00:24:43.540 is one form of that. But I think that rankles a lot of people thinking that it's going to be

00:24:51.360 restricted only to medical use. And what I would imagine over time, but this could be decades or

00:24:59.120 generations, is that we're going to hopefully develop the cultural institutions that will incorporate

00:25:04.880 these. I think our initial clinical study with these compounds were in, ironically enough, given my

00:25:13.760 situation, in cancer patients who were depressed or anxious because of a cancer diagnosis. And there we

00:25:23.540 saw big effects, immediate effects that lasted throughout our six-month follow-up. And in another study,

00:25:32.300 people have been followed up for five-plus years. So quite a remarkable effect. And my hope had been

00:25:39.000 that that would be the first medical approval. And the reason for that is that culturally, we have

00:25:46.840 a lot of sympathy for people who are facing death. And within a few generations, if the results are what

00:25:56.160 we think they would be, virtually everyone would be exposed either personally or through friends or

00:26:02.140 family members to the benefits of that. And that would go a long way to changing and making the

00:26:09.480 culture interested in further pursuing that. So one of the things that happened when the companies

00:26:17.080 approached regulatory bodies about approval for, say, depression and cancer, the FDA pushed back and

00:26:26.360 said, you know, we're concerned about something called, you know, a pseudo-specificity. You know,

00:26:33.240 if it's good for depression in cancer patients, how do we know that it's not good for depression

00:26:38.440 in the general population, which is, of course, a much larger population? And so the companies became

00:26:46.280 persuaded that they needed to reach out.

00:26:50.320 It's kind of grotesquely funny. I mean, there's the idea that they were concerned that these drugs

00:26:56.680 might relieve too much suffering, you know, on the boundary of death. And therefore, it would kind

00:27:03.480 of back-propagate into everyone's self-interest to want access to these drugs earlier in life.

00:27:09.140 Yeah.

00:27:09.600 Yeah.

00:27:10.280 Well, so, I mean, it's somewhat ironic here that we've started, obviously, on a very cautious,

00:27:15.100 even deflationary note here. You know, if somebody listening to us in this part of the

00:27:21.560 conversation could be forgiven for wondering why anyone would want to take these drugs in the first

00:27:26.020 place, given the risks we're discussing. And you have talked about wanting to explore their

00:27:33.600 cultural introduction in a way that's narrowly focused on medicalization as the most circumspect

00:27:41.120 and responsible way to do this. And yet, your real interest, your core interest, I know, is on

00:27:47.580 the benefits of psychedelic use in well people, you know, having nothing to do with terminal illness

00:27:55.180 in principle or in PTSD or any other clinical diagnosis, just the existential and spiritual

00:28:02.340 needs of ordinary human beings at really any stage of adulthood. And that really has been my interest.

00:28:09.040 And that is certainly the widest promise of these compounds. We should be attentive to caveats and

00:28:17.740 concerns, however they crop up in this conversation. But how do you differentiate the narrow focus of

00:28:24.920 medicalization and the treatment of clinical disorders like, you know, treatment-resistant

00:28:30.940 depression or PTSD or, I guess it's probably not clinical, but it's clinical in a different sense,

00:28:37.820 you know, end-of-life anxiety. How do you differentiate that from this wider promise of

00:28:46.140 these compounds?

00:28:47.880 Yeah, well, I think that's just a specific application of these compounds. But as I see it,

00:28:55.000 the much larger, more profound, most impactful impact is going to be in the general population

00:29:03.560 and apart from that. So the focus on medicalization for me has been just a pragmatic way to proceed.

00:29:13.720 So yeah, you mentioned my interest in spirituality and just, I know we talked about this a couple

00:29:20.260 years back. So I became interested in psychedelics only after starting a meditation practice.

00:29:27.480 Which is usually, I mean, in my experience, that the reverse is often true. I mean, certainly was true 1.00

00:29:32.780 in my case, where you have an experience on psychedelics and that proves to you that there really is a

00:29:38.840 there there. And then meditation becomes the more, you know, easily governed path toward actualizing

00:29:47.580 that possibility. But you have flipped the script here.

00:29:51.200 Sure. I have. And I'm glad I did. Because as a curious scientist, I came into the field less biased.

00:30:01.340 Now, I did have, you know, in college, a couple of experiences, I'm guessing, with LSD. But they were

00:30:09.680 totally inconsequential to me. They were a little bit confusing. They were done under really suboptimal

00:30:17.680 conditions. And they didn't have any particular meaning to me. So I had had some earlier experience,

00:30:25.080 but I certainly would not have characterized myself in any way, shape, or form as being a proponent of

00:30:32.540 psychedelics. It was only after I got involved with meditation and just intrigued with the exploration

00:30:41.720 of the nature of the nature of mind. And the phenomenology of some experiences I had with

00:30:49.900 meditation that drew my attention to the interiority of my life, which I had largely ignored. I didn't

00:31:00.260 really have any religious grounding that had any meaning to me. I was curious about the nature of inner

00:31:09.360 experience, but I came out of graduate school with a lot of training in the experimental analysis of

00:31:18.620 behavior, which is essentially Skinnerian, saying that all the attention needs to be focused on behavior

00:31:25.540 and very suspicious of any subjective effects because they couldn't be validated by third-person

00:31:33.740 account. And so ironically, I became interested in meditation just out of that recognition that I didn't know,

00:31:45.860 that I really was not, I was poorly in touch with the nature of inner experience, the nature of mind. And so that

00:31:54.100 opened up for me, got me really curious initially about different meditation traditions. And then I started reading

00:32:01.840 religious literature and realizing there was a rhyme in there, something that seemed compatible.

00:32:09.980 And at that point in my career, I'd been at Hopkins for about 25 years. I was established with an

00:32:17.580 international reputation in psychopharmacology of mood-altering drugs, mostly drugs of abuse,

00:32:24.800 and found myself deeply curious about these other kinds of experiences. And it was that that got me

00:32:35.900 curious about psychedelics because I went back and read some of that older literature and it really

00:32:45.260 sounded like there could be something of interest there. But I was dedicated to my meditation practice

00:32:52.660 and I've continued it ever since. And actually quite put off, would be an appropriate descriptor,

00:33:02.280 from the psychedelic enthusiasts that seemed to think that this was the one and only way and the best,

00:33:09.420 you know, God's gift to humankind. And I just, yeah, I didn't believe it. I'm born as a skeptic.

00:33:17.400 That's what science is about. We want to see things for ourselves and prove things. But that first

00:33:26.100 study we ran where, and ended up people having these experiences of deep meaning among the most

00:33:36.460 meaningful experiences of their lives, and they continued to report them to be, to have that kind

00:33:44.420 meaning. They attributed changes in attitudes, moods, and behavior to that experience, all in a very

00:33:51.220 positive direction. And those experiences looked like naturally occurring awakening experiences or

00:33:59.480 mystical type experiences that have been described by contemplatives and by religious figures or that

00:34:08.160 spontaneously occurred over thousands of years. So there was something incredibly compelling

00:34:15.760 about that. And I think that is the core and central finding. There's something reorganizational

00:34:24.020 about one's sense of self and worldview that can occur with these experiences under appropriate

00:34:33.220 conditions. And I think that's what's so interesting. And the features of that experience

00:34:41.860 include this sense that we're all in this together, that there's an interconnectedness to where we sit

00:34:49.900 in this world. And that's accompanied by a sense that the experience is precious, precious beyond belief.

00:34:58.320 Some people, if you wanted to put it in religious terminology, it would be a sacred experience.

00:35:06.000 And then the third feature that I think is so interesting about it is that the experience is felt to be

00:35:14.720 true, absolutely true, more real and more true than everyday waking consciousness. Now, we don't know

00:35:20.940 that that's the case, but that's the feeling that arises. But if you think about that, someone has an

00:35:27.200 experience of this interconnectedness, it's precious, it's valuable, more valuable than anything they've

00:35:34.780 had. And it's true. You know, you there have the basis for rewriting the operating system of the

00:35:42.940 individual. Their whole self-narrative can change with that. And they're empowered to make different

00:35:51.080 choices going forward. And I think that's part of the therapeutic effects of these drugs. But as well

00:36:00.040 for the healthy volunteer opportunities for growth, what I think is so important in the broadest sense

00:36:09.260 in terms of spirituality, is that sense of interconnectedness that we're all in this together,

00:36:15.900 you know, and that that's true, it's real, it's precious. You know, that is a basis for rewriting

00:36:25.160 morality or ethical understandings. It really boils down to the golden rule, doesn't it? And my contention

00:36:34.400 would be that, you know, the most important thing is that we need to develop a world culture

00:36:43.380 that embraces that. Because if we don't, we're looking at annihilation by climate change or AI risk

00:36:53.820 or bioterrorism, you know, or any number of other options. So I see that there's something, my sense is

00:37:04.000 there's something fundamentally important about this project for us to understand the nature of these

00:37:11.320 changes and then put them to good use in changing culture in a way that's going to lead to human

00:37:19.640 flourishing.

00:37:21.320 Remind me, what sort of meditation practice have you been doing?

00:37:25.100 Well, I started off with Siddha Yoga, which is a guru-based Indian practice, but was confused by,

00:37:34.940 put off by the guru nature of that and the projection that's put on the teacher.

00:37:43.060 How far back did you go with that? Was this after Muktananda died or did you meet Muktananda?

00:37:49.460 I never met Muktananda. So when I was involved with Siddha Yoga, the Bhutan had been passed to Guru Mai,

00:37:58.020 Swami Chitla Sananda. And, well, it was interesting because Siddha Yoga was really focused on experience.

00:38:09.980 And it comes out of a tradition of the tantric tradition of Shaktipat, that is, the guru has said

00:38:17.160 to confer awakening experiences. And there's some remarkable reports of that. But they were very

00:38:26.400 focused on the emergent experience. I guess I, as my meditation practice deepened, I became

00:38:36.840 more curious in the broader field of the nature of mind. And as I said, I was kind of put off by

00:38:45.360 the reification of the guru principle.

00:38:48.360 Yeah. There are also some very colorful ethical scandals in that organization.

00:38:52.500 That both post-date and reach all the way back to Muktananda's tenure. So it's a mess.

00:39:02.280 Oh, yeah. And that's true of many of these religious meditation traditions, right? If you empower the

00:39:10.400 teacher, they end up going off the rails, as will happen with psychedelic therapists as well.

00:39:18.320 They get empowered and inflated ego and start misbehaving. But I became interested in the

00:39:26.060 nature of mind and drawn into Buddhism. And so, I'd say for the last, I don't know, 15 years,

00:39:33.920 my practice has been primarily Buddhist-oriented. I've done some work with Alan Wallace, who comes out of

00:39:43.020 the Tibetan tradition. But it's really IMS and Vipassana, Tara Brach and Jonathan Faust and Joseph

00:39:52.320 Goldstein and Jack Kornfield. And they have elegantly stripped away the supernatural pieces of it. And

00:40:02.520 and, you know, I really respect that tradition.

00:40:08.000 Yeah. Yeah. So how do you view the connection or lack thereof between meditation and psychedelics?

00:40:19.140 I mean, I guess you could bring in any relevant neuroscience here or just your own first-person

00:40:25.220 experience. But how do you view them as complementary or discordant methods? And what is, yeah, I mean,

00:40:37.380 just any thoughts you have about the connection or lack thereof would be interesting.

00:40:43.240 Yeah. So, of course, that was my initial interest. I got involved with meditation and

00:40:50.860 been curious about psychedelics. And let's see, I've come to believe that there's, you know, a lot of

00:41:00.480 similarities between them, that they're both in principle ways to investigate the nature of mind.

00:41:11.260 And so, if we just step back and think about what psilocybin and meditation do, you know, so I'd say

00:41:19.080 psilocybin is this pharmacological tool that helps people recognize how it feels to embody the present

00:41:26.640 moment. And that's exactly what meditation does. Psilocybin, people can dispassionately observe and let go of

00:41:34.560 pain, fear, and discomfort. And that's, again, that's what meditation does. Transform a conventional

00:41:41.880 sense of self to something other, recognition that you're not your mind, you're not that voice in your

00:41:49.400 head. There's a sense of awareness that goes outside and beyond that. And then gaining this authoritative

00:41:59.240 sense of interconnectedness of people and things. And I think those both come out of potentially the

00:42:07.160 psilocybin and meditation experience. So we went on, because of my interest in meditation, just to

00:42:14.900 study novice meditators with psilocybin, long-term meditators with psilocybin. And, you know, across the

00:42:22.720 board, the exposure to psilocybin facilitates and resonates deeply with the meditation experiences.

00:42:34.460 And so in one study where people did not have a meditation practice, but were willing to take one

00:42:41.680 up, and then different groups of people got different exposure to different doses of psilocybin.

00:42:49.160 And what we showed is that the enduring changes in traits, which is very difficult to find any

00:42:58.800 experimental work showing trait level changes in people. But we were able to show trait level

00:43:06.420 changes in this dimension of psychological well-being and pro-social behavior at six months. And that was

00:43:16.020 attributed to interaction between meditation and psilocybin. So psilocybin greatly potentiated that.

00:43:25.020 In an unpublished study in long-term meditators, these were people who had, in many cases, tens of

00:43:32.380 thousands of hours of meditation. But they weren't classic contemplatives, say, out of the Tibetan

00:43:41.060 tradition. But they had long-term experience with meditation. And either no or any experience they had

00:43:50.160 had with psychedelics had occurred 20 or 30 years ago. So they certainly weren't proponents of using

00:43:58.140 psychedelics. And there, it was just very interesting. Those individuals took to the psilocybin,

00:44:08.320 were able to navigate the psilocybin experience, I think, much more readily because of their

00:44:15.640 understanding and experience with examining the nature of mind. And so in some ways, the effects

00:44:22.760 were less profound in them. But across the board, most, I hesitate to say all because I need to go back

00:44:32.540 and look at that data, most reported that, if anything, it enlivened their meditation practice.

00:44:40.440 Long-term meditators can very often fall into a habitual type of practice. They have a go-to

00:44:48.180 practice of meditating on breath or visualization or whatever. And they can lock into that practice,

00:44:56.480 and it can become habitual. And the psychedelics, by and large, got them out of the rut of whatever

00:45:05.960 single practice or single set of practice as they were using. And so if anything, increase their

00:45:13.580 interest in meditation. Importantly, none of them would have said that psychedelics were any kind of

00:45:22.380 replacement for meditation. Because it's really, the meditation provides the foundation for these kinds

00:45:33.080 of explorations. And so there's all the difference in the world between awakening experience and leading

00:45:42.080 an awakened life. And that's what meditation is absolutely designed for, right? It's practice. And

00:45:50.400 it's practice for bringing that sense of awareness moment to moment into daily life. And psychedelics

00:46:00.400 certainly are less likely to accomplish that. Then in terms of neurophysiology, of course, the default mode

00:46:10.820 network, which has got a lot of attention, particularly early on with the psychedelics, is decreased under acute

00:46:21.560 psychedelic administration. But that's exactly what happens in long-term meditators. It's decreased.

00:46:27.400 So there's a reason to think that at some kinds of network levels, at least acute psychedelics,

00:46:36.500 they're producing something that looks akin to what long-term meditators might experience. Although,

00:46:44.400 you know, as you can well appreciate, our understanding about the nature of mind, consciousness,

00:46:51.800 and these kinds of effects are really in their absolute infancy. And we just don't have the

00:47:00.780 scientific tools to really pull them apart as yet. But I think there's a lot of interesting research to

00:47:08.700 be done with meditation and psychedelics. One thing I might say is that if I think about how we prepare

00:47:17.840 a meditation-naive and psychedelic-naive individual for a session, we essentially talk about

00:47:26.840 having them look at the nature of mind and look at the nature of objects of consciousness that will

00:47:34.600 appear during the session. And the one thing that we very often say, it's just kind of a metaphor,

00:47:42.180 is, you know, it's unpredictable. You know, you're going to get this compound. We really have people

00:47:49.880 focus introvertively. So we have them put on eye shades and headphones. So they're really going

00:47:56.480 inward. And we tell them, you know, all kinds of things can arise within that. And it can be beautiful,

00:48:03.780 it can be transcendent, but it also can be ugly and it can be really frightening.

00:48:07.940 And so if, for instance, during the session, a demonic figure appears, and it would be as

00:48:16.680 frightening as you could possibly imagine, because it's being created by you for you,

00:48:23.960 if that should appear, what you don't want to do is run from it. Because if you try, you're never

00:48:31.160 going to escape it. And you don't want to fight it. Because either way, you're reifying it as

00:48:37.780 something else. And the appropriate posture to take, although the hair on the back of your neck

00:48:46.500 may be standing on end, is to approach it with curiosity, be deeply interested in what it is.

00:48:53.680 And the guarantee, if you're able to do that, is that it's going to change. It's going to turn

00:49:00.500 into something else. Because it's not real. It's just an object of consciousness. And so we're

00:49:08.040 essentially giving people, I think, a mini course in mindfulness, inviting them to go into that. And

00:49:15.720 it's, I think, for that reason that meditators have much less difficulty navigating the psychedelic

00:49:23.640 experience, because they're accustomed to seeing the games their minds can play. You don't go on a

00:49:30.260 long-term meditation retreat without being humbled by all kinds of thoughts or ideas that torture you

00:49:41.920 until you realize once again that you've just been caught up in a story, in a narrative that seems

00:49:51.220 silly once you can step back from it. Yeah, it's interesting that more and more the relationship

00:49:58.660 between meditation and psychedelics seems paradoxical to me and somewhat difficult to talk about. Or at least

00:50:07.740 it can seem paradoxical when talked about in its totality. One complication here is that these

00:50:14.900 terms that we've been using again and again, meditation and psychedelics, mean many different

00:50:20.620 things. And people have different associations with them. So there are many different types of

00:50:25.680 meditation. There are many different philosophies around it. There are both explicit and implicit

00:50:31.800 goals that can be different. And those differences can really matter in terms of a person's experience.

00:50:38.820 And with psychedelics, obviously, there are just different drugs on offer, and they have different

00:50:44.700 consequences. You know, some differences are subtle and some are quite extreme. And we've been talking

00:50:50.800 about psilocybin in this context mostly, but there's obviously there's LSD and mescaline and ayahuasca and

00:50:58.420 pure DMT and, you know, and 5-MeO DMT. And there's a lot on the menu here that people associate with

00:51:05.120 that term. And, you know, all of these differences matter. And then there's a drug like MDMA, which is

00:51:12.420 not even technically a psychedelic. And we've been talking about that too. And then there's just this

00:51:18.520 fundamental difference in the plane of focus for anything like a mindfulness-based approach to

00:51:28.980 meditation and the ordinary use of psychedelics. So we can distinguish between the contents of

00:51:38.900 consciousness and consciousness itself as a starting point here. And the goal in many forms of meditation,

00:51:47.800 and certainly in any sophisticated or mature approach to mindfulness, is to recognize something

00:51:55.260 about consciousness itself that is liberating, right? It's not to change the contents of

00:52:01.800 consciousness. It's to notice that one's relationship to the changing contents of consciousness is the

00:52:07.720 problem, you know, that it's the problem of clinging, it's the problem of incessantly plunging into greed

00:52:13.800 and hatred and delusion into, you know, grasping at what's pleasant and pushing what's unpleasant

00:52:19.980 away and not recognizing what's neutral. The practice at that point is to keep falling back into

00:52:26.040 this mere witnessing of experience, i.e. the contents of consciousness, and to relax one's reactivity to

00:52:34.800 the point that you can recognize that consciousness itself, that the mere light by which everything is

00:52:40.440 appearing has an intrinsic quality of freedom to it. And most importantly, it's free of the sense of

00:52:48.720 self, that what you're calling yourself is among the appearances before the floodlights of consciousness.

00:52:57.260 And consciousness is a prior condition to its arising. And that can be noticed regardless of what the

00:53:06.140 contents of consciousness are. So it could just be the most ordinary sights and sounds and sensations and

00:53:12.080 thoughts without any of the remarkable disclosures that are more or less synonymous with the psychedelic

00:53:18.860 experience. And so that's meditation. And yet, somewhat paradoxically, many of us, not you, but me and many

00:53:26.020 others, wouldn't have recognized that meditation was or even could be a thing, but for, you know, the

00:53:34.900 pyrotechnic experience of psychedelics. And there's also just the fact that, you know, quite related to

00:53:42.100 that claim, which is that, you know, if you give a hundred naive people a meditation instruction, I don't

00:53:49.700 know what percentage will find anything of interest there, but some considerable number of people, you know,

00:53:54.400 if you're selecting randomly, will close their eyes and look within and attempt to follow whatever

00:54:01.900 instruction you give them and very likely find nothing of interest, right? Nothing, you know, nothing will

00:54:07.580 happen. And they'll walk away perplexed and perhaps grateful not to have to waste their time on that

00:54:14.500 project for even a minute longer. Whereas a hundred naive people, given the sufficient dose of psilocybin or

00:54:22.420 LSD or any other psychedelic, something like a hundred percent of those people will have a radical

00:54:29.680 change in their experience. And, you know, as we've already discussed, some of those changes could be

00:54:36.600 starkly unpleasant and they'll come away feeling like that was not a good experience. But for, you know,

00:54:44.320 very high percentage of people with the appropriate set and setting, they will have one of the most

00:54:51.820 important and transformative experiences of their lives. Yet that transformation and the associated

00:54:59.440 importance will be the result of radical changes in the contents of consciousness. You know, they'll

00:55:05.960 be, you know, all of their neurotic, you know, normal thoughts will be blown away. And what will be left

00:55:13.920 is a, you know, something like the classic beatific vision that one encounters in spiritual and mystical

00:55:21.620 and religious literature. I mean, they'll be, you know, vast perceptual changes. And, you know,

00:55:29.140 if their eyes are open, the connection with the natural world will be extraordinary. And if their eyes

00:55:36.000 are closed, they're, you know, and they've taken something like a high dose of psilocybin, they're,

00:55:40.300 you know, the landscape of mind will open up into this vast territory of visual experience and,

00:55:49.300 you know, visual and synesthetic experience where one's emotional body is brought forward across

00:55:56.900 this landscape of immense visual implication. And in some ways, the center of the bullseye meditatively

00:56:06.420 is orthogonal to all of the extraordinary changes that can happen for a person taking psychedelics.

00:56:17.160 And yet, they're quite complementary and supportive in ways that we have discussed. I mean, one is,

00:56:22.660 you know, many people just can't even get started with meditation but for first having had a psychedelic

00:56:28.860 experience. And conversely, many people have a much better psychedelic experience based on their

00:56:36.400 meditative experiences and the training they've had in just letting go of thought and conceptualization

00:56:43.740 and negative emotion and not clinging to experience itself as a basic orientation. So there's, it's sort

00:56:51.180 of hard to talk about, I think, but there's a, you know, at least for me personally, meditation and

00:56:57.900 psychedelics have been kind of two wings of the bird of, you know, having a first person mode of

00:57:05.480 inquiry into the nature of mind. And it's, you know, I can't view either as dispensable. And yet,

00:57:12.620 they're quite different when taken separately at any point in one's journey and for a significant

00:57:20.800 period of time. Yeah. Let's see, a couple things. One, when you were describing what it is you learn

00:57:29.920 meditation and meditation, I think what was occurring to me as you were rolling through the list of how

00:57:36.940 that changes your experience is that's available within the psychedelic experience. But I will grant

00:57:45.160 you that intermittent use is, I mean, you know, there's very little stability. But that actually

00:57:53.940 leads me to propose what I think will be a really interesting future direction for research. And

00:58:01.040 that is integration of intermittent and perhaps low dose psychedelic use with meditation. So with a

00:58:10.720 foundation of a meditation practice, and then low dose psychedelics imposed on that. And I will confess

00:58:21.760 to having done a week-long meditation retreat. And three days into the retreat, taking a microdose of

00:58:33.060 LSD on the order of 10 micrograms, which is, you know, sometimes said to be sub-perceptual, but that's

00:58:40.820 that's not right. It's barely perceptible. But what my experience of that was, was that it just

00:58:50.680 supercharged the retreat experience. I mean, you know, we were going through cycles of meditation and

00:58:57.720 walking, and that all was just beautifully intensified. But there was nothing discontinuous

00:59:06.500 from straight out meditation retreat experience. And so I think there's a lot to be done there.

00:59:16.360 You also commented on the differences among the psychedelics. And there we can wear on in our

00:59:22.060 infancy is, you know, we talk in pharmacological terms that there are these classic psychedelics,

00:59:28.400 and they're essentially the same, they all bind serotonin 2A receptor, you know, they're producing

00:59:34.380 similar kinds of acute effects. But yeah, indeed, if you really start experiencing some of those

00:59:43.400 differences, I mean, LSD is similar to, but way different from psilocybin. And those are different

00:59:50.620 from mescaline and different from DMT. You know, there's a lot of interesting work to be done with

00:59:57.520 that. And then let me just finally comment on, you know, your observation that you expose 100 people

01:00:04.700 to meditation, and a good number are just not going to find anything there. And that was my experience.

01:00:12.540 I initially got interested in meditation when I was in graduate school. And this was 25 years before I

01:00:20.320 really got involved. And there, you know, I thought, geez, this sounds like it'd be interesting,

01:00:25.780 I'm going to, you know, give this a try. I realized that the teacher is talking stuff that doesn't

01:00:32.260 converge with my understanding of science at all, but I'll take it metaphorically. And so I, you know,

01:00:38.620 I gave it a try, but it was torture. You bounced off. Three minutes felt like three hours. And I very

01:00:48.600 very quickly decided this was, this wasn't for me. And it was only subsequently that for whatever set

01:00:57.400 of reasons, I tried again, and then something opened up for me.

01:01:01.940 Yeah. Yeah. I can't remember if this came out of your lab or not, but there was at least one paper I

01:01:06.640 read integrating a, I think it was a five-day meditation retreat, or it might've been a seven-day

01:01:12.220 retreat with, I don't recall it being low doses of psilocybin. I thought it was an actual

01:01:17.820 psychedelic dose, but are you aware of that study? Yes. Yes. That came out of the Switzerland group

01:01:25.780 led by Franz Vollenweider. And they did a meditation retreat. This is a Buddhist retreat. And then on one

01:01:34.960 day they gave a rather high dose of psilocybin and reported positive effects of the type that we've

01:01:42.580 seen and not, you know, not yet reported. But I, but I think there's, there's real room for further

01:01:50.240 exploration of lower doses, you know, and if you give a high dose of psilocybin, it's hard for me to

01:01:58.800 imagine what that would be like in a retreat situation. But it, yeah, it could, it wouldn't lend itself well

01:02:10.500 to normal retreat experience. That's, that's for sure. Yeah. Well, it's also hard to picture how it

01:02:16.400 scales. I mean, if you have a hundred people on a retreat together, how you give a hundred people

01:02:20.980 high doses of psilocybin and keep everyone comfortable, that's hard to picture. And safe,

01:02:26.520 yeah. Yeah. So what are your thoughts about microdosing? Because you've just mentioned it,

01:02:31.880 and this is obviously all the rage in certain parts of culture now. What are your thoughts there?

01:02:38.860 Well, I have yet to see persuasive evidence that it's useful clinically for, you know,

01:02:46.720 it's being purported as a great intervention for depression and other things. I have yet to see data

01:02:53.800 that make that convincing. And there's so much room for placebo effects, you know, in there driven by

01:03:01.460 expectancy. And so I think we have insufficient data on it. But, but I can say from personal experience

01:03:09.900 that at least microdosing with LSD is, is certainly a thing. And there, and there's, I think that there's

01:03:18.680 something fundamentally interesting there. And it's very subtle. And so someone who has no meditation

01:03:25.900 experience and it's not finely tuned to their inner experience may miss it entirely. And that's,

01:03:31.880 that's why they say it's sub perceptual. But, but for those of us who have paid a lot of attention and

01:03:41.120 attended to subtle changes in consciousness, there's nothing subtle about it at all.

01:03:47.640 Okay. Well, let's talk about your experience of getting your cancer diagnosis. I just, I would love

01:03:56.980 to explore anything you want to share on this topic. When did you find out and what was that like?

01:04:04.420 Yeah. So this was just a year ago and I went in for a routine screening colonoscopy to come out of

01:04:13.620 anesthesia and, and being, and being, being told that I had a significant colon tumor.

01:04:21.460 How old are you and how long had it been since you'd had a, your previous colonoscopy?

01:04:26.820 Well, good question. So I'm mid seventies and it had been just over five years. And so that,

01:04:35.820 that was in my view, a medical mistake. Uh, I had had polyps detected in earlier colonoscopies and a

01:04:46.240 five year follow-up was, uh, was too long. And, and I was just slightly over five years because of

01:04:54.160 COVID. So I don't recommend it. I re yeah, I recommend, uh, being conservative about that because

01:05:02.060 it came as a disruptive and unhappy surprise. So the initial experience, uh, was one frankly of,

01:05:11.260 uh, disorientation and, uh, and confusion like this really can't be happening. And, um, and then I went

01:05:21.500 on to get a CT scan and, uh, and lo and behold, I have metastases to liver, which that, that then makes

01:05:31.940 it stage four, but there can be stage fours that are curable and stage fours that are not. And as it

01:05:41.040 turns out, and over the course of the year, mine turns out not to be among the curable versions.

01:05:48.580 So the initial response was just disbelief. It was like a dream. And I could remember waking up at

01:05:57.420 times and I come online and I start thinking about something I want to do. And then I, and then this

01:06:04.340 thought comes up, Oh yeah, you have, you have stage four cancer. And so initially it, it was something

01:06:14.680 that I really, uh, bring, bringing it into focus as something real just was, was not on hand.

01:06:22.200 And, but then very, very quickly after that, when I, when I embraced that, that, okay, this is,

01:06:29.400 this is a real thing. And very quickly after that, I, I started running through all the

01:06:35.840 psychological postures that were on offer for someone with a stage four cancer diagnosis,

01:06:43.000 you know? So there's fear, anxiety, resentment, anger, denial, belief in some sort of afterlife

01:06:53.340 or something, something of that sort. And, oh, and, and fighting the cancer. My first, um,

01:07:01.300 on my first cancer chemotherapy session, my daughter wrote me, dad, kick cancer's ass. 0.99

01:07:07.520 And, and, and the John Wayne approach. And, you know, I thought, I don't want to go to war with 0.99

01:07:14.600 anything. I'm not, I'm not going to roll over, but that doesn't feel right. And so, you know,

01:07:21.580 as I contemplated that, it actually quickly became apparent to me that the only appropriate response

01:07:28.780 was to lean into what's real and the gratitude that we feel can feel for the privilege of being

01:07:39.120 these conscious sentient beings and the preciousness of that. And so, so immediately when,

01:07:46.800 when the cancer diagnosis came into focus, it started, I started reprioritizing things.

01:07:52.720 So that came up, but there was this, this sense that the, the wisest way to hold this would be

01:08:01.520 one to just acknowledge it to be true and to then lean into gratitude for the preciousness of life.

01:08:10.460 And then something, frankly, Sam occurred that I would not have expected, but there was this sense of,

01:08:18.200 of joy and wonder. And of course, you know, being a meditator, you know, invariably we've practiced

01:08:26.460 loving kindness and gratitude, and we've done some contemplations on death and dying.

01:08:32.960 And so I thought I, I thought I had been through that, but somehow that whole framing became supercharged

01:08:40.600 with the diagnosis. And there was a sense of incredible wellbeing and equipoise that emerged,

01:08:50.080 you know, in the face of what normally would have looked like challenging situations, getting

01:08:56.220 the port, my intravenous port inserted, and then it became infected. I ended up in the hospital for

01:09:03.560 five days over Christmas and, you know, multiple discomforts with, with chemotherapy and in different

01:09:13.240 surgeries, but somehow I'm able to, to reframe and embrace those much as one would with an object of

01:09:22.260 consciousness that emerged in a psychedelics session that was potentially disconcerting. And, and so far,

01:09:32.280 and I'm now a year into this, it's just been maintained. I really felt in some sense initially that I was

01:09:41.920 in a psychedelic experience. There was something kind of vivid about this. And I think what I found

01:09:50.280 myself doing and doing in a way I didn't imagine to be possible was that whenever a negative framing of

01:09:59.860 what my experience was came to mind, I essentially just said, no, I'm, I'm not going to go there. I'm

01:10:06.780 leaning into gratitude and wonder and appreciation for whatever it is, whatever the appearance is.

01:10:13.880 And that's worked in an amazing way. What do I attribute that to? I think, I think foundationally my

01:10:22.020 meditation practice, because, you know, practicing meditation, we're accustomed to, at least on occasion,

01:10:29.760 watching objects of mind emerge, seeing narratives emerge, and, and being able to step back from those

01:10:38.760 narratives and recognize that they're just part of the larger field of consciousness.

01:10:44.360 I also think that my experience with psychedelics, although it's, it's not extensive, it's limited.

01:10:51.600 But I think that's played a role as well, because psychedelic experiences can be incredibly harrowing.

01:11:00.480 And, and invariably, there are rabbit holes that one can go down, that are, that are just very,

01:11:08.040 very difficult. And I'd had enough of those experiences to recognize as they came on that I

01:11:15.700 had some agency about whether or not I was going to go there. And I think that's, so that, that came

01:11:22.320 to play, because I was playing with, you know, hardball, with the potential challenges facing the,

01:11:30.260 the diagnosis. So I think the meditation, it was really important, whatever worldview I have with

01:11:37.880 respect to that, and then, and then some psychedelic experiences may have played into this. But I,

01:11:44.820 I think what's moving to me is, and the reason I'm happy to talk about this is because, in principle,

01:11:53.960 we needn't have a terminal diagnosis to experience what I'm experiencing, and to have

01:11:59.980 some jumpstart or supercharge to the appreciation for the, you know, what I can only describe as the

01:12:10.740 mystery verging on a miracle, that we are these highly evolved, sentient creatures that have become

01:12:20.140 aware that we're aware. And we know, and there's, we have no clue, deep clue about how to solve that

01:12:28.980 mystery and whether it's ever going to be solvable, as you well know. And so, so that's it, leaning

01:12:37.120 into that, and in principle, trying to figure out and whether there are studies that can be done to

01:12:43.400 help people awaken to that in the course of their lives, in the absence of having a terminal diagnosis.

01:12:53.160 When you look back on the experience of getting your diagnosis and the changes in your,

01:13:01.180 your attitude that followed, and you reflect on what you were like before, how much of a mismatch

01:13:09.900 is there? I mean, I, so, as you said, you were someone who had been a, you know, a long-term

01:13:15.000 meditator. You were interested in, obviously, in these existential questions. You had reflected on the

01:13:20.560 preciousness of life and, and its finitude. You know, I, I have to imagine you weren't someone who

01:13:27.440 was taking your immortality for granted and wasting your, your time in, in ways that you,

01:13:36.200 you now retrospectively consider totally insane and obscene. But, um, insofar as there is a mismatch

01:13:44.640 there, what is it like to reflect on? I mean, if you could, if you could give your former self

01:13:49.880 some advice, what would you have said to your, your, your, your, the 60-year-old Roland, apart from

01:13:57.620 getting screened more frequently? Yeah. I mean, it's, it's your project, Sam. It's my project. It's,

01:14:06.260 it's, it's waking up. It's, and, and it's, I, you know, I considered myself to be reasonably awake

01:14:14.100 prior to this experience. And, and that just went up, you know, a whole magnitude of, of intensity.

01:14:23.440 And I guess I didn't know that, I didn't know that that met, that kind of jump could even occur.

01:14:29.100 Hmm. I thought I was, I thought I was doing well with respect to, you know, my practices. And so

01:14:36.860 I think what I would say is, yeah, push, push more deeply into this. And I, and I, I, and I don't know

01:14:46.260 what the manipulation would have been. Uh, you know, should I be meditating more? Should I be doing

01:14:53.260 that? You know, there are a number, I do breathwork practices. I, I'm interested in a variety of

01:14:58.160 kinds of changes. So I, I don't, I don't know other than to report that there is this huge

01:15:06.260 magnitude of, of change. Yeah. I mean, I suspect doubling down on meditation and, and careful use

01:15:15.680 of psychedelics and, and, and certainly not narrowly focusing on, on, on just that. I mean,

01:15:23.420 there are all kinds of other kinds of practices that bring, bring that sense of gratitude and

01:15:29.620 awareness into being. I think that's, that's what's needed. That's the, the focus of the project

01:15:37.240 that I've come up with as a, as a, as a, as a gift, as a, as something that came up when I started

01:15:45.800 revising my will, uh, was to create a program of research that does just that, that, that focuses

01:15:53.660 in on psychedelics and the development of what I would call secular spirituality, that is spirituality

01:16:00.360 stripped of paranormal and supernatural causes. And, but it has to be hard empirical research. I, I,

01:16:10.000 I, I believe fundamentally in science as the, as the, the way we can come to true understanding of

01:16:18.560 replicable phenomena. And so I think there's so much to be done and I'm so excited about the prospect

01:16:25.760 that, uh, I won't be doing that, but, uh, we're going to set in motion, uh, engine of research that

01:16:34.700 would grind this out in perpetuity. And that's incredibly exciting to me.

01:16:40.280 Yeah. I want to close on a discussion of, of specifically what the project is and

01:16:45.280 how people can support it. But before we land there, I'm just curious, have you done

01:16:51.000 a, a high dose of psilocybin since your diagnosis?

01:16:56.440 Yeah. So that's a good, good question. I have done a significant dose of LSD since, uh,

01:17:04.440 the diagnosis. Now, let me say that for the first six or eight months, I had zero interest in,

01:17:13.000 in psychedelics. I, as I described, I felt like I was already in a psychedelic experience and I felt

01:17:20.040 that, that it couldn't get any better and why would I want to mess with it? And then, uh, yeah,

01:17:26.940 a number of acquaintances, you know, suggested that, yeah, how did I know I didn't have something more to,

01:17:34.440 you know, to explore and, uh, with respect to psychedelics and, and the disease. So, so I did,

01:17:41.860 I did a pretty significant dose of LSD and did some inquiry into, into that. And it was, uh, turned out

01:17:51.140 to be really affirming of, of, of where I am. I really went into the experience with the query of

01:18:01.300 whether, whether, whether I was masking over some deep fear or anxiety about death and dying,

01:18:08.640 uh, was I somehow psychologically papering this over and were there skeletons in the closet that

01:18:15.620 I needed to know about? And at least within this experience, there were absolutely none that I was

01:18:22.920 doing the, I was doing the right thing. The way I was managing it was, was good. And then the other,

01:18:30.260 I'm not, I'm not giving to using psychedelics in this fashion, but I, I did in this, in this one case,

01:18:37.460 I addressed the cancer as something other and said, okay, what can you tell me? Uh, what,

01:18:45.460 what's going on here? And is this inevitable that I'm going to die? And, uh, and there was no,

01:18:52.800 there was no response at all, which I didn't know how to make it of that. And so then I addressed it

01:19:01.000 again. I said, so you do know that I'm really grateful. You know, I, I consider you a blessing.

01:19:07.800 My life has been changed remarkably because of this experience. And as I've said on any number of

01:19:15.160 occasions, I, it would have been a tragedy had I just walked out to that medical appointment and

01:19:22.440 been run over by a bus, I would have missed, I would, I would have missed the best, best part of

01:19:28.760 life. My wife and I are saying since the diagnosis would never been happier, more content. So, so then

01:19:37.120 I addressed the cancer saying, you know, I'm, I really respect you. I, you know, I consider you a

01:19:42.680 blessing, but do I have to die? And, uh, and the answer come back. Yes. Yeah. This is, this is the

01:19:51.220 way it should be. You're doing it right. And, uh, and you should keep doing it. And furthermore, there

01:19:59.020 was a sense in that interaction that, uh, that I had something to say about it. And, uh, and that's why

01:20:06.600 I am talking to you, you know, publicly in a way that I would have never spoken about personal use

01:20:13.120 before. I mean, there's something mysterious going on here that needs to be unpacked. And then, then

01:20:20.840 when, when I got that back from cancer that, uh, no, it's, you're doing fine. And it is, as it should

01:20:29.380 be, I then said, well, how about give me more time if I, if I have something to communicate? So I

01:20:36.820 started bargaining and I got nothing back, but it was, it was, and like I said, I'm not accustomed

01:20:45.100 to using psychedelics like that to kind of reify some, some object as other and go into dialogue.

01:20:52.400 As a matter of fact, I have some aversion to using psychedelics in that, in that way. But in,

01:20:58.720 in this case, it came out in a way that was very clear with what I was doing and what I,

01:21:05.340 and what I should be doing. And it kind of, it emboldens me to speak publicly about this.

01:21:13.240 It also emboldens me to try to stay on this path of awakened awareness in the presence of this. And

01:21:22.900 yet I'm deeply humbled by what still may lay ahead for me and whether I have the capacity to

01:21:31.140 keep the train on the rails. And by no means do I think I have this completely handled, but, but what,

01:21:40.440 what does occur to me is that I'm really interested in trying. I'm interested in leaning into whatever

01:21:49.320 challenges emerge and, and see, and see, and see where it goes.

01:21:54.940 I think I emailed you when I saw the video that you released describing that you had gotten this

01:22:01.180 diagnosis and how it had changed your, your relationship to your own mortality. There's

01:22:07.180 a, I think it's a 10 minute video that people can see on, on your website. You know, my first thought

01:22:13.420 was obviously, I was very sorry to hear about the cancer, but I was so happy to see the state you're in

01:22:23.660 with respect to your, your relationship to it. I mean, it was just, it was really, it was so

01:22:28.700 infectious and it may just, you know, again, I'm somebody who thinks about death a lot and

01:22:35.060 I'm somebody who, who really tries to make use of that thought to enhance the, you know, my focus on

01:22:41.920 my real priorities, you know, in, in normal life, uh, all the while knowing that actually getting a

01:22:47.280 terminal diagnosis, you know, must sharpen up that point considerably in a way that is hard to,

01:22:53.340 to manufacture for oneself and, you know, prior to such a diagnosis. And hence my, my question to

01:22:58.600 you. And it was just, yeah, just seeing you as an older brother have this experience before me,

01:23:04.920 you know, it was quite in the kind of the wisdom that was leaking out of your pores, uh, and is leaking

01:23:10.860 out of your pores on this topic is, is contagious. And it's really, it's wonderful to see how you're

01:23:16.220 navigating this. It's quite inspiring.

01:23:17.940 Yeah. Your email to me was, uh, was really nice because you acknowledged that there was some

01:23:24.660 challenge to what I was going through, but you were recognizing the upside of it. And, and so

01:23:29.600 one thing that I've found is so, so many people want to come and, and, and just say how sorry they

01:23:36.940 are or how awful that must be. And that is completely contrary to how I'm holding the experience.

01:23:44.340 And, and, and, and I find myself pushing back on that immediately because I'm, I'm just not going

01:23:52.560 to embrace that there's challenge here. And so, and people will write me, I hope you're feeling

01:23:57.880 better. And I'll say better than what I've been doing, I've been doing great. And so, you know,

01:24:06.080 the assumption is that you're, you're not, not doing well. So yeah. Yeah. Thank you.

01:24:11.840 Yeah. Yeah. I, when I think about the, the effects, the long-term effects of my last mushroom

01:24:20.160 trip, which I took again, three years ago on this very day, when you're talking about changes in the

01:24:25.900 contents of consciousness, that all of these changes are by definition temporary, right? And so it's not

01:24:31.080 ultimately having that experience. It lands in the, in the storehouse of memory to whatever degree.

01:24:36.680 And very much like dreams, psychedelic experiences can be hard to remember. I mean, you're, you're

01:24:42.800 having them in a, in a state that is fairly discontinuous with one's normal waking consciousness.

01:24:47.720 And it can be very hard to, to hold on to any of it. But the thing I, I, I feel that I took away

01:24:55.640 perhaps more than anything else was a sense that I actually don't have a fear of death itself.

01:25:05.660 And, and that was, um, kind of surprising. I mean, I, you know, it's, I, and I, I, I would separate death

01:25:12.100 and, and, you know, actually the actual experience of dying from all of the attendant chaos and pain

01:25:20.040 that may be associated with any specific mode of dying. I mean, you know, obviously somebody getting

01:25:25.980 hit by a bus is very quick, but in a situation of long-term illness, there's all of the, the experience

01:25:32.120 of what it's like to be ill and all of the treatments and all that, the medical adventures

01:25:36.460 and misadventures. And, and, and, you know, so I can't say I'm looking forward to any of

01:25:42.700 that. And it's, um, you know, I'm sure even in your state of, you know, real gratitude,

01:25:48.700 there, there are ups and downs, uh, medically. But when I think about the actual experience of

01:25:55.780 having one's mind lose any reference point to the details of one's life, I mean, there's the

01:26:02.900 really prosaic version of that. I mean, we all happily go to sleep each night and lose our experience

01:26:08.440 of seeing, hearing, smelling, tasting, touching, and thinking completely. And we're very grateful

01:26:12.720 for it, right? So there's, there's that. But when I think about the intensity of, or the possible

01:26:19.680 intensity of dying, whatever that experience is, or could be, I came away from the, the, you know,

01:26:26.880 the five grams of, uh, mushrooms while blindfolded, feeling like whatever death is, there's no way it's

01:26:35.240 more intense than that, right? I mean, that, like that thing I just went through, there's just no way

01:26:40.940 to turn up the volume on experience beyond that. And, you know, obviously that's an empirical claim,

01:26:47.100 which I could be wrong about, but I came away feeling like when you're, you're, you know,

01:26:51.520 you're, you're shot out of a, a nuclear cannon, it's all fine, really. There was just so much love

01:26:59.120 and gratitude that was along for the ride, uh, when there was no longer a reference point to me in my

01:27:06.800 life. You know, if there is a residue in my life, it's that, where I just feel like, you know, death

01:27:12.240 itself is not a problem, you know, and I, you know, again, separating it from all of the other

01:27:17.840 transitory experiences one can have on the way to that final one. I don't know if, I don't know if

01:27:23.480 that resonates with you at all from, from your experiences. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it does. Uh, so the

01:27:30.120 contemplation about death is, uh, it's certainly a really interesting one. So when we were running our

01:27:38.460 cancer trial and, and I ended up asking all of our volunteers prior to, upon admission, just to try

01:27:48.220 to understand where they were coming. So I'd say, well, what do you think happens when we die? And,

01:27:54.320 you know, any number of them had wonderful thoughts about meeting relatives and going into new lives or

01:28:03.360 whatever, but a number said, no, it's like computer down powers off. That's it. And for those people,

01:28:11.460 I'd say, well, so what's the, what's probability that you put on that, that there's absolutely

01:28:18.860 nothing after death. And they say, oh, it's, uh, yeah, it's what I believe. So we'll give me a

01:28:24.640 percentage. Oh, it's a 95%. And I would go, what? 95, 5% chance. You know, you, so you actually don't

01:28:39.280 need much of a percentage there to make one curious about the very nature of what death is. And, and for

01:28:49.200 me, it's, it's as close to zero as it can get, but it can't be zero because I can't know. And I think

01:28:57.520 that's all I need to remain deeply curious and wanting to be awake to the experience of, of dying

01:29:06.880 because it's a once in a lifetime opportunity. So there's a funny sense, at least right now that I'm,

01:29:15.920 I'm deeply interested in that. Although again, I, you know, I come out of a, a deep skeptical and

01:29:24.640 scientific reductionistic viewpoint that would put the probability of that at not, not zero,

01:29:31.600 because I don't think that's humble, but something pretty close to zero. The, uh, the other thing I

01:29:38.800 just want to share with you is, um, over the course of some of the treatment where, where things

01:29:46.560 became increasingly clear that there were no good response options and care was out of the question.

01:29:54.960 I'd come back from, uh, getting a second opinion at Sloan Kettering for some radical intervention.

01:30:01.360 And, uh, and the next day I woke to the, the image of the hourglass, which I think is a lovely

01:30:08.640 image and it's, it's, it's the finitude of, of life. And that just came up really clearly for me.

01:30:15.440 So the hourglass has been turned and you can see the sand running out of the top chamber into the

01:30:23.120 bottom chamber. You're not quite sure how quickly it's running out, but you do know that at some point

01:30:30.160 that last grain of sand is going to drop. And there's something lovely about that image. And I,

01:30:36.800 it leads me to think that we should all have hourglasses, big hourglasses in our, you know,

01:30:44.160 in our living rooms or bedrooms to remind us about the finitude, because that, you know, that's,

01:30:51.040 to me, that's what's brought this into such clear focus. And there's even a paradox here though,

01:30:58.240 because from the point of view of consciousness, there really can't be an experience of the end

01:31:05.520 of anything. This is something I talk about. There's a, a section on, on the waking up app called,

01:31:11.440 I think the paradox of death, where I explore this essay from the philosopher, Tom Clark on this very

01:31:18.800 point, which is, it's interesting because he, he's a physicalist, you know, he's a, a Western trained

01:31:23.840 analytic philosopher who very much takes the, draws the lesson from science that the mind is on some

01:31:30.240 level is what the brain is doing and consciousness is likewise. And so if consciousness is arising in

01:31:36.640 the physical brain, well then when the physical brain dies, consciousness must cease. But he explores

01:31:42.400 this fact that consciousness for itself is always present, right? And there is no, so many materialists

01:31:50.000 irrationally expect that, well, if death is the end of consciousness, well then there's some sort of

01:31:57.120 positive oblivion that awaits us. But there, there really can be no experience of, of oblivion,

01:32:03.440 you know, in the same way that the time before your birth wasn't in some sort of abyss from which you

01:32:10.400 emerged. There's no experience of having emerged from nothing. After you die, there, there really can be no

01:32:17.680 positive oblivion that you'll experience. So what Clark does in this essay is, and this is something

01:32:23.840 that isn't quite original to him, there are people who have launched a similar argument. I think Alan Watts

01:32:29.520 said something along these lines and Erwin Schrodinger did as well. But if you follow the logic of this,

01:32:36.880 you can come up with a, a fairly mystical view of what consciousness is for itself without, you know,

01:32:43.840 violating any, any physicalist or materialist assumptions. Because consciousness is always

01:32:50.960 simply impersonally present for itself. Even our sense that it is interrupted in the course of our lives by

01:32:58.080 deep sleep or anesthesia or anything else. When you look closely at it, that tends to be just

01:33:04.320 the sense that there's a lapse in memory, right? Like there's a period in your, in your life,

01:33:09.040 you know, the eight hours previously to waking up that you don't remember clearly. And you sort of

01:33:14.560 extrapolate from that, that consciousness was, it was interrupted. But there really is no experience of

01:33:20.480 the absence of consciousness. There's just the character of experience and, and the, the implications

01:33:27.520 we draw from it in each moment. And you can listen to that section where I, where I talk about what

01:33:34.240 Clarke draws from this. But there really is a, a very interesting and, and fairly mystical view

01:33:40.160 of continuity that you can draw based on just a couple of assumptions. Just one, that the consciousness

01:33:46.240 is in itself impersonal. And, you know, the, all the personal stuff comes at the level of its contents.

01:33:53.200 And the fact that, that it never really experiences its own absence, almost by definition.

01:34:00.160 From the side of consciousness, there really is this kind of eternal condition of simply experiencing

01:34:07.200 its own being and is not experiencing its own non-being. But anyway, Clarke has more to say on

01:34:13.040 that, which is pretty interesting, which you, awaits you if you want to look at it. I can also send you

01:34:17.040 his essay. It's really well done. Oh yeah. Well, thank you. So I, I do subscribe to your waking up app.

01:34:23.760 Thank you. But I haven't listened to that. So I certainly will. Yeah. There's so much mystery,

01:34:30.560 right? You know, our, our limitations to what we understand are just incredible. And so that's

01:34:38.080 kind of what I, I lean into with the gratitude is that we're living in the middle of this mystery.

01:34:44.480 We don't, we really don't know how it came about and where it's going. You know, we don't have a

01:34:49.600 coherent physics. We, we certainly don't have an understanding of consciousness, you know, but

01:34:55.200 isn't that to be celebrated that, that there, there, there is this mystery and somehow we've been

01:35:03.440 privileged to be granted this sentience and, and awareness. And if we just can decouple from that

01:35:12.400 narrative story that's driving us to aversion or, uh, or clinging, if we can just let that subside,

01:35:23.920 then it's just, uh, incredibly beautiful and to be celebrated. You know, that's what I found myself

01:35:30.480 saying to people who asked me about my experience. I said, you know, this is just an experience for

01:35:36.960 celebration. And I invite you to join me in that celebration. And there's no, no reason not to,

01:35:43.840 you know, it's something, it's something we all know, I think that resonates so deeply with the,

01:35:51.200 you know, our experiences sentient beings and this kind of mystery in which we live. So yeah,

01:35:59.360 it's to be celebrated. Well, on that point, please tell me more about the endowment project.

01:36:06.640 That you're launching. Yeah. Well, thank you. Uh, so as I mentioned, this came, there have been

01:36:14.400 any number of changes in my life because of the diagnosis. It's just, it's actually been shockingly

01:36:20.880 wonderful and beautiful. So I, you know, I got married to my long-term partner, Marla, and we hadn't

01:36:29.360 thought marriage was particularly important. We did some contemplation about that and had this just

01:36:36.000 joyful ceremony. And I'm just so delighted to call her my wife. Now my relationship with my children

01:36:42.880 has changed relationships in general have, have changed. So there've been many, many gifts that

01:36:48.960 have opened up. And so one of them came about in, in revising my will and I got to charitable

01:36:56.640 contributions. And my initial thought was, Oh, that's easy. Uh, give well, uh, of course,

01:37:04.480 you know, so well, it's the effective altruism movement. And for some years I've just defaulted to

01:37:11.760 give well, because there's, there's such a great organization that have really looked at the impact

01:37:17.520 of different charities. And then the next day I woke and thought, you know, what would I really want

01:37:23.680 to give? And, uh, and what came up for me is, you know, what I want to give is exactly what I want

01:37:31.360 for myself. And I want for the research that I've been doing, and that's to continue to explore and,

01:37:39.760 and support this broader awakening project. And there's something fundamentally important about

01:37:47.600 that, as I mentioned to you earlier that I, that I think is actually, uh, has existential importance

01:37:54.960 to the survival of our species that, that there's this ability to unpack these kinds of experiences

01:38:02.320 and explore their applications in a way that may indeed be critical to the survival of our species,

01:38:09.280 given that there, we have other alternative technologies that are being developed that are,

01:38:15.360 could be species-determinating. And so I thought, you know, I, that's what I really want. I want

01:38:21.680 people to awaken to that. And, uh, and I thought at first, you know, I could, I could, I don't have a

01:38:28.160 big estate, so I thought I could, um, give some money and, and to Johns Hopkins and that have a reoccurring

01:38:35.440 lectureship on spirituality and psychedelics. And, uh, and the reason that psychedelics are key to that

01:38:43.600 is the science of it is because we can now study these experiences prospectively, these

01:38:51.200 life-changing experiences. And heretofore, we haven't been able to do that. It's been able to

01:38:57.520 look at spontaneously occurring experiences, but not studying them prospectively. So, so my belief that

01:39:04.960 empirical research is, is critical to that. And so then what occurred to me is, you know,

01:39:10.800 I probably have some goodwill in the field given that I just happened, uh, to be one of the people

01:39:18.400 who opened up the, the latest, uh, psychedelic renaissance. And so I ended up establishing, uh,

01:39:26.480 seeking an endowment to establish a professorship. And it's the, it's in my name, but that's irrelevant.

01:39:34.000 It's the Roland Griffiths professorship of psychedelic research on secular spirituality and well-being.

01:39:41.600 And it's focused on studies, rigorous empirical investigations of this relationship of psychedelics

01:39:52.640 to these transformative experiences and then the consequential effects on, on well-being.

01:40:00.160 And so, so I created this endowment. I'm trying to, it's audacious. I'm trying to raise 20 million

01:40:10.000 dollars for it. And the reason for that is that what I want to cover is the full salary for a full

01:40:18.400 professor doing research in this area. But I also want to generate enough income so that they,

01:40:25.840 there are research funds available to conduct a program of research in this area. It's an endowment

01:40:35.040 given to Johns Hopkins. And the, the downside of endowments is that they, they generate, you know,

01:40:42.400 maybe 4% of their worth over, over time each year. But the upside is that they're managed in perpetuity.

01:40:51.680 And a institution like Hopkins has every reason to attend to their endowments and manage them

01:40:58.800 carefully because endowments are their lifeblood. And so this engine will create an enduring program

01:41:08.880 of research in this area for which there are, there's no funding currently available short of

01:41:16.640 straight out philanthropy to do this kind of research. All of the funding and the attention

01:41:22.160 of the psychedelic research right now is going into, into therapeutics. And so I think it's in

01:41:28.480 principle, a really, really important project. I'm really excited about it. We've actually got 14

01:41:36.160 million dollars in pledges so far. So we're trying to close our $6 million gap. And we're going to,

01:41:43.040 by the time this podcast airs, I think we're going to have opened it up to the general public. But I'm

01:41:51.440 really excited about it. I love the idea that it continues in perpetuity because I think ultimately

01:41:58.640 there's, there's actually no answer to the core question of the mystery that was, that we face.

01:42:05.680 And so indeed I see this turning on for decades, generations, millennia, as long as Hopkins continues

01:42:15.120 to survive as a viable institution. Yeah. Well, it's wonderful that you've made as much progress

01:42:20.400 as you've, you've made toward your goal. And I really have no doubt you'll meet it. There's just

01:42:25.520 a tremendous amount of goodwill toward you and your whole project here. And the Waking Up Foundation

01:42:32.480 will give as well, because it's certainly well within our remit to support a cause like yours. So

01:42:39.200 I look forward to that. And I certainly hope our audience will donate as well, and we'll give them

01:42:46.480 the necessary information to do that. Six million dollars is a lot, but I'm confident that there is

01:42:52.240 an immense amount of interest in creating a durable legacy for you on this point. Because this really is

01:43:01.360 beyond the narrow therapeutic case for psychedelics, this is answering that larger, truly universal

01:43:09.120 existential case, which is we need a 21st century scientific, non-delusional approach to these deepest

01:43:20.480 spiritual and ethical concerns. And we really are on the cusp of that within the narrow circle of

01:43:29.360 an institution like Johns Hopkins. And I share your view that making it a wider cultural conversation

01:43:38.960 ultimately is what we need to inoculate ourselves against the most injurious and profligate

01:43:49.360 wastages of human time and attention, to which we're so obviously prone. This is a hope that was

01:43:57.040 articulated several generations ago when psychedelics made their first appearance, but I think it's more

01:44:04.720 urgent now in the presence of increasingly powerful technology and cultural changes that seem to be

01:44:13.200 shattering our world as much as they're bringing diverse cultures together. So I share the view that this

01:44:20.000 century is some kind of crucial bottleneck for our species and getting our heads right on a deadline

01:44:27.680 here seems quite important. Whether I'm around to see the crucial changes or not, I really have no

01:44:34.800 expectation there. But when I think about the lives of our children and grandchildren, the work we do now

01:44:42.560 seems incredibly important and you have been so crucial to that work. So Roland, I really want to thank you for

01:44:50.000 your time on this podcast, but even more thank you for the work you've done for decades now to advance our

01:44:56.160 understanding of our own minds and what's possible. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you very much, Sam. I really

01:45:02.400 appreciate that and really appreciate your comments that you just made. So with great gratitude to you.

Making Sense - Sam Harris - December 13, 2022

#306 — Psychedelics & Mortality

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