Dr. Michael Pollan joins me to talk about his new book, M.O.A.D.T.E. (People Who Dope With LSD) and why he s writing a book on psychedelics. We talk about how he got into psychedelics, how he came up with the idea for the book, and what it s like being a journalist writing about psychedelics in the late 80s and early 90s. We also talk about what it was like growing up in a house full of hippies in the 60s and 70s, and how psychedelics changed the way he looked at the world. And we talk about why he thinks psychedelics should be legalized in the United States. This episode was produced and edited by Annie-Rose Strasser and Alex Blumberg. Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool Records. Our ad music is by Haley Shaw. We mixed this episode with music from Fugue, and our theme song was written and performed by Ian Dorsch. Additional music was produced by Mark Phillips. If you like what you hear here, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and/or wherever else you get your music recommendations. Please be sure to tell us what you think about it in the comments section below! and we'll be looking out for the next week for a new episode on the next episode. . Thank you so much for your support of the podcast! Timestrocks in the podcast and on SoundCloud Thanks so much for the cover art & thank you by , and , is at thanks so much, - if you like the podcast so you can be a friend of the show, and we really appreciate it, and it really helps us out. and so much so much more it really means a lot, it means so much to us this is a lot of people are listening to the podcast, we really mean it. Thank you for all the love you can do it we really really well, so much of it. - Thank you, thank you, Thank you really much, really really really deeply to you, really means it, really, really appreciative it, it really does mean it, you're a lot a lot.
00:00:40.000It is a bit of a departure, I think, that there are people who are expecting another book on food or agriculture, and we're a little surprised.
00:00:55.000I think your book is coming out right when John Hopkins Research Center is starting to put out these studies on it.
00:01:02.000People are starting to recognize that MDMA has amazing results for post-traumatic stress disorder from veterans, and marijuana is becoming legal in more and more states.
00:01:20.000Well, I started the research in 2014. I wrote a piece for The New Yorker called The Trip Treatment, which is online.
00:01:27.000And it was my first foray into this work.
00:01:30.000I went down to Hopkins and spent a lot of time at NYU. And at the time, they were doing this really interesting trial where they were giving psilocybin to people with cancer diagnoses, many of whom were terminal.
00:01:42.000And that seemed like such a weird idea to me that I was curious to explore it.
00:01:46.000And I spent a lot of time talking to patients, many of whom were dying.
00:01:50.000About how this single high-dose psilocybin experience, a guided psilocybin experience, and we should talk a little bit about how the guided changes things.
00:02:00.000The image people have is popping some mushrooms in your mouth and maybe going to a concert or going to the beach, but this is a very controlled internal experience.
00:02:09.000Completely reset these people's attitude toward death and allowed them to die with equanimity and when these results were published just last year they found that in 80% of the people who had the session they had statistically significant reductions in standard measures of depression and anxiety.
00:02:32.000It was one of the most effective psychiatric interventions that these psychiatrists had ever seen.
00:02:41.000And that a molecule could change the contents of your head to the extent that you would rethink your mortality.
00:02:48.000And so as I began talking to these people and hearing their stories, many of which were just remarkable, I realized, you know, this is not just an article.
00:04:37.000People can really get into psychological trouble.
00:04:40.000I think it's really important that people understand that it's a profound, powerful, destabilizing experience.
00:04:48.000And depending on your mindset and the situation in which you take it, set and setting, it can be ecstatic or horrific.
00:04:58.000And, you know, there are many people who had a series of very good trips and then they have that one bad trip.
00:05:04.000And so, yeah, I had heard enough stories about that to stay away.
00:05:11.000So discovering this kind of later in life, you know, I was certainly not something I planned on or expected.
00:05:19.000It's a great tragedy, in my opinion, that our culture has demonized these substances and put them in this category of forbidden fruit to the point where you're so nervous about doing them.
00:05:33.000You have to get them from some shady character.
00:05:35.000And you don't know what you're getting.
00:06:17.000Maybe we should put you on a low-dose THC. Let's ramp it up slowly.
00:06:22.000Let's try something small and see how you react to it.
00:06:26.000And then I think, I don't think people like myself or pot smokers or people who have done psychedelics, I don't think we do it any favors either, because we're always trying to pretend that there is no adverse effects.
00:06:37.000And that there's like, you know, people, when they get into something, they want everybody to do it.
00:08:16.000And this kind of advice changes everything.
00:08:19.000And the chances of a bad trip, I think, in a guided situation are substantially less because they know how to help you deal with it and what to tell you when it's happening.
00:08:29.000So I do think that by forcing these drugs underground and into this very kind of unregulated use, reports of bad trips were much fewer before the moral panic about LSD in 1965. And when it was still legal,
00:09:52.000So, you know, I was kind of a nervous nelly going into this, and I really looked at the whole risk profile.
00:09:58.000And on the physiological side, your body, the risks are remarkably low.
00:10:03.000And I'm speaking here of the classic psychedelics.
00:10:06.000I'm not talking about MDMA or even pot.
00:10:09.000I'm talking about LSD psilocybin, which is magic mushrooms.
00:10:15.000DMT, mescaline, they are much less toxic than many of the over-the-counter drugs you have in your medicine cabinet.
00:10:23.000There is no lethal dose, which is remarkable.
00:10:27.000There was one elephant that was killed with LSD once.
00:10:29.000They wanted to see what it would take, and they gave it a massive dose, but to get it To the point where they could administer it, they had to give it a massive dose of tranquilizer.
00:10:38.000So it isn't actually clear that the LSD killed it.
00:10:41.000It may have been the benzos or whatever they were giving it.
00:10:52.000I wonder what was going through the elephant's mind before it died.
00:10:54.000Well, animals don't like psychedelics that much.
00:10:57.000You know that classic setup that drug abuse researchers use where they put a rat in a cage and there's a lever and they can administer cocaine or heroin or they can have lunch and they'll press the cocaine lever until they die.
00:11:31.000And basically, they thought that this was inevitably what happens.
00:11:34.000But in fact, if you give a rat a beautiful cage with some things to play with, some other rats to hang out with, some nature, some shrubs and things, it will not take the cocaine.
00:12:19.000Now, when you were researching this book, did you start doing your own personal experimentation?
00:12:30.000Yeah, I had a series of trips for the book.
00:12:33.000I had become, for a couple reasons, I had become very curious about the people I was interviewing, trying to make sense of how they could have these transformative trips on a drug, which seemed implausible to me.
00:12:46.000And I also kind of got jealous of the experiences they were having.
00:12:50.000They were having these big spiritual experiences.
00:12:52.000And I swear, I don't think I've ever had a spiritual experience.
00:12:54.000I'm kind of spiritually retarded, actually.
00:14:46.000There are mushrooms that look exactly like psilocybin that can give you just an agonizing death.
00:14:52.000But when you're with Paul Stamets, you feel pretty confident.
00:14:55.000And so we found these, and he said to me after we'd found them, we were sitting around the campfire, we were cooking some dinner outside our yurt, and he said, yes, these are almost too strong for me.
00:15:26.000I had my first stilocybin experience since my 20s was – and at the time, I was like 60 or approaching 60. Actually, I have to be very vague on when all these things happen.
00:16:09.000We have been in the same way that, say, the apple tree or the flower is manipulating the bee, making it come pay attention to it, offering it nectar in exchange for it picking up pollen on its legs,
00:16:26.000and doesn't even realize what it's really doing is being tricked by the plant into pollinating it and carrying its genes down the street or around the world.
00:17:56.000And some of them are trained psychologists or MDs in some cases, actually.
00:18:01.000And they're so convinced of the healing value of these medicines that they're willing to risk their freedom and their livelihood to work underground.
00:18:10.000So I found my way into this community and interviewed a bunch of people.
00:18:17.000And some of them were not the kind of people you want to trust your mind to.
00:18:21.000And no doubt there are lots of charlatans.
00:18:23.000Everyone I interview is pretty professional.
00:18:27.000But some of them were just a little too casual about something I was kind of, you know, worried about.
00:18:33.000There was one guy, I remember this Romanian psychonaut therapist in his 70s who I said, well, what happens if something bad happens?
00:18:43.000You know, what if somebody dies, you know, while they're with you getting this trip?
00:18:47.000And he said, you bury them with all the other people.
00:18:51.000And that kind of casualness really troubled me, so I didn't work with him.
00:18:55.000But eventually I found people that I trusted and I had a bond with, and I had some very powerful experiences with them.
00:19:05.000And that did change me in ways that I'm still kind of, you know, digesting.
00:19:11.000Now, I'd like to take you back to the garden thing when you're having this experience with these plants.
00:19:17.000I had a experience once on a very high dose of marijuana edibles.
00:19:23.000I went into a grow room that this local dispensary had set up.
00:19:29.000It's this big room filled with plants and It was the first time when I walked in.
00:19:36.000It was the first time I've ever been around pot plants where I felt like they were aware that I was there.
00:19:42.000And you had this weird feeling of them having much more sensitivity than you imagined.
00:19:50.000That they're aware of you, but as you said, they're benign, and they're just sort of sitting there.
00:19:55.000But it was almost like they were saying hello to me.
00:19:57.000They recognized that I could tune into them because I was so barbecued that I was on their wavelength.
00:20:04.000When you're out there with those plants and you said that you felt consciousness from them, now, as an intelligent, rational person, did you start pondering whether or not you were just perceiving this because it was convenient and you were hallucinating and adding all this contextual weirdness to this situation?
00:20:24.000You know, I'm sure I was projecting things onto them, but I've looked at this question and the science of it pretty closely.
00:20:33.000How you define consciousness matters here, but plants are conscious in the sense of they're aware of their environment, they have senses.
00:20:41.000They're not like our senses, but they're picking up on chemicals in the air and in the soil and light in very specific ways, and they're reacting, not just instinctually, but appropriately.
00:20:53.000There are experiments that show that plants can learn in some primitive way.
00:20:57.000So we have to understand that we have one kind of consciousness, And other animals and even plants have another kind of consciousness.
00:21:06.000The idea that they're looking back at me, I'm being metaphorical, but that they're aware of me in the way that...
00:21:14.000The plant is aware that the bee is nearby and does certain things, sometimes to trap the bee and hold it there for a longer amount of time to load it up with pollen.
00:21:28.000The world as we perceive it is dependent on the particular senses we have.
00:21:34.000We've got the big five senses that you always hear about, and there's some other littler ones.
00:21:38.000You know, how we locate ourselves in space.
00:22:14.000And the reason they do is a plant that has a strong electromagnetic field hasn't been visited recently by another bee, so they know you're going to get a lot of nectar here.
00:22:25.000And whereas if you're flying by a flower and it's got a soft feel, doesn't have a big feel, it's probably just been visited by someone else, so skip it.
00:22:35.000So they're living in a world where they're perceiving cell phone radiation and all the kinds of crap we're putting into the electromagnetic spectrum.
00:22:45.000So we have to realize that this is a very specific world that we're perceiving in our normal consciousness that is the one that we need to perceive, that's good for us, that we're designed for, reflecting our bodies and our upright stance, everything about us.
00:23:00.000But other creatures are seeing a different world.
00:23:02.000And one of the interesting things about psychedelics is...
00:23:36.000It might have been seeded by another planet.
00:23:38.000It's very controversial, but it's from a legit scientist.
00:23:40.000And what they're trying to think of is if it's possible that the eggs of these things traveled in comets and somehow they came here hundreds of millions of years ago.
00:23:49.000And the reason being is that they can alter their RNA and that this is very specific to octopi or octopuses.
00:24:32.000So this idea that there's something relative about our everyday normal consciousness, that there are other ways to experience the world, is something that psychedelics put you in touch with.
00:24:43.000I was just reading this interview with this physicist named Carlo Rovelli.
00:24:47.000He's a theoretical physicist from Italy.
00:24:49.000He wrote this book a couple years ago called Seven Brief Lessons on Physics.
00:24:53.000And he was telling this interviewer in The Guardian that he got turned on to physics during an LSD trip he had when he was 15. And the interviewer asked him, why was that?
00:25:05.000And he said, well, I saw for the first time that there could be another way to think about time instead of past, present, and future, that it might all be simultaneous.
00:25:16.000And that's how it appeared to him during this LSD trip.
00:25:19.000And when he was back to baseline, he said, you know, I was asking myself, why am I so sure this is the real world?
00:26:35.000I went in deep enough to know that there are a lot of very serious scholars, and Allegro is one, and Karl Ruck is another, and Gordon Wasson, the guy who kind of brought psilocybin to the West, who I write about at some length in the book, Really believe that it was experience of psychedelics,
00:26:54.000which has been in culture for thousands of years, we know, whether you're talking about the Amazon or Africa, and that these experiences may have nurtured the religious impulse.
00:27:09.000You know, where do you get the idea of a beyond?
00:27:11.000Where do you get the idea of a heaven or a hell if not from some altered state of consciousness?
00:27:17.000You know, people talked about visiting the underworld in Homer's time.
00:27:40.000William James called it the noetic quality of the mystical experience.
00:27:44.000And that certitude comes from psychedelics.
00:27:49.000And so it seems totally plausible to me that at the very earliest stages of humanity, if people were indeed taking psychedelics, this might explain how they came up with these ideas.
00:28:03.000There are other alternative theories, and it's not provable.
00:28:07.000I just don't know how we would begin to prove it.
00:28:11.000And, you know, the ancient Greeks had a psychedelic that they used, we think, they called it the Kikion, K-Y-K-E-O-N. And they had an annual ritual ceremony.
00:28:22.000And it was the only time in the year where you could use this drug.
00:28:25.000And it was a ritual for demeter and harvest or planting time.
00:28:31.000And everybody in Greek society did this.
00:29:32.000Some people, Albert Hoffman, who discovered LSD or invented LSD, he thought it was ergot, that they'd figured out a way.
00:29:39.000Ergot is a fungus that grows on grain, and it was the precursor chemical to LSD comes from ergot.
00:29:50.000And ergot is responsible for episodes of mass delirium in European history.
00:29:55.000You get a really wet year, the ergot grows on the rye, people eat bread made from it, and they go crazy.
00:30:00.000Some people think the Salem Witch Trials came after a wet year and people had absorbed – these women had eaten ergot and were having visions and things like that, which was interpreted as witchcraft, which to them was a very – I thought they were saying that the men had absorbed it and thought they were under spells.
00:30:32.000But the thinking of Gordon Wasson and Karl Ruck, and they were collaborators on this theory, was that the Greeks perhaps had figured out a way to derive a pure chemical from ergot that could be made into something very much like LSD. But again,
00:30:50.000nobody has succeeded, and they've tried for the last 20 or 30 years to take ergot and make something, you know, through simple processes that the Greeks could have mastered.
00:32:38.000Pull out the comparison between the eye of Horus and the pineal gland.
00:32:43.000It's essentially shaped like a cross-section of the pineal gland.
00:32:48.000And in the Temple in Man, see if you look at it up there?
00:32:53.000And they think, somehow or another, that this is the connection between these two.
00:32:57.000A bunch of different things have been written on this connection because this appears in so many different Egyptian hieroglyphs and they think it might have some sort of a connection between the portal to the afterlife that they think the DMT experience is.
00:33:48.000I mean, most people who see silliness and hippies and, you know, all these people that are out there doing drugs trying to, air quote, find themselves.
00:35:11.000The drug may have started the process, but everything you see in this experience, those are real psychological facts.
00:35:20.000They're from your unconscious or from your interpretation of your environment.
00:35:24.000And, you know, it's not the molecule that foreordained this experience.
00:35:31.000As Stanislav Grof, who's one of the pioneering psychedelic psychiatrists in the 60s, said that LSD is an unspecific amplifier of mental activity.
00:35:41.000There's nothing packaged with the drug.
00:35:56.000It's an interesting quote, that quote you just said, because in actual studies of the human mind under the influence of psilocybin, it's actually been shown to shut off parts of the brain.
00:36:07.000And so the question is, are we blocking off these constant The frequencies that are around us, or this experience that's around us, it is our own ego, or our own mortality, or our own desire to stay alive and protect ourselves,
00:36:25.000or whatever the various blockades that we put up, are those diminished by psilocybin that allows this ever-present experience to manifest itself?
00:36:35.000The most interesting scientific finding Of this current generation of research is that when they image the brains of people on psilocybin or LSD or ayahuasca, they expected to see fireworks, right?
00:36:49.000Lots of activity because the experience has lots of fireworks.
00:36:52.000But they found something that they didn't expect, which was a diminishment of activity in a very important brain network called the default mode network.
00:37:01.000This is in the midline and it connects parts of your cortex, which is the evolutionarily most recent part, to older, deeper sources of emotion and memory.
00:37:30.000It's involved in time travel, thinking about the future or the past.
00:37:34.000It's involved in something scientists call theory of mind, the ability to imagine that another person has mental states and is not just a rock.
00:37:42.000It is involved in what's called the experiential or autobiographical self.
00:37:47.000The way we kind of take what's happening to us and connect it to the story we tell ourselves about who we are based on the past and the future.
00:37:55.000So it's you know if the ego has an address it's in the default mode network.
00:38:21.000And psychedelics appear to turn this off to one degree or another.
00:38:26.000Take the default mode network offline.
00:38:28.000When that happens, to go back to your metaphor, whatever is blocking the valve that's blocking lots of information from coming in from outside or up from below in your subconscious...
00:38:44.000And so you are getting more information than you might otherwise.
00:38:49.000And this is a metaphor that Aldous Huxley used in Doors of Perception that consciousness is eliminating more than it's creating.
00:38:58.000Consciousness is reducing our experience to that thin trickle of information we need to get ahead, to survive.
00:39:08.000And that you open the doors of perception on these drugs by turning off this network and lots more information comes in, which can be overwhelming, but also extraordinary.
00:39:22.000Is there apprehension in writing a book like this and describing these things?
00:39:26.000As you're writing it and you're thinking about all these other people that are sort of cynical, straight-laced, non-drug-using folks who might admire your previous work on agriculture, architecture, whatever, and you're sitting there going, how do I get this through without looking like a guy who's losing his fucking mind or who's going super woo-woo Deepak Chopra on people?
00:39:56.000Well, I mean, I was nervous about undertaking this project, but I also came to think it was really important and that there was something here.
00:40:05.000And that, you know, when I started this process, Stan Groff, the guy I made reference to earlier, he had said in the 60s something I thought was really outrageous.
00:40:13.000He said that psychedelics would be for the study of the mind what the microscope was for biology or the telescope for astronomy.
00:40:22.000This is a really outrageous claim to make.
00:40:26.000But as time's gone on, that idea seems less crazy to me, that we are learning things about the mind and that these drugs are teaching it in a scientific context and in an individual context.
00:40:40.000So just because some people think it's embarrassing or woo-woo is not a reason not to do it.
00:40:48.000And, you know, I'm being a little speculative with you talking about origins of religion and stuff, but the book stays pretty close to here's what we really know and here's what I experienced.
00:41:00.000I'm a science journalist, you know, and so I try to draw the line between now I'm speculating and now here's something we really know with some certitude.
00:41:09.000But without question, I had some misgivings about describing psychedelic experience, their legal issues there, and that, yeah, I have a readership.
00:41:19.000I have a big readership that, you know, is happy if I just keep writing books on food.
00:41:23.000But I had found something too interesting to pass up.
00:41:27.000And I've been gratified that I've been talking about this book on, like, network television.
00:41:34.000I didn't think I would be talking to Stephen Colbert about ego dissolution.
00:41:54.000So I found though that if I was willing to talk about these issues and my experiences in a matter-of-fact way, mainstream journalists would respond in kind.
00:42:05.000And so I've been on like CBS Morning Show and Terry Gross and Fresh Air and And we've had a kind of, you know, conversation where we're looking at these as tools.
00:42:17.000Without getting caught up in the usual craziness that's associated with these drugs.
00:42:25.000And so that's what I'm trying to do is take that 60s crust off these things and take a fresh look.
00:42:31.000Well, for someone like me, who's been a psychedelic advocate for a long time, it was extremely exciting news that a guy like you were stepping into the fray because you're so well-established and well-respected already that I knew your approach on it was going to be very clean and that I knew that people were going to have to start looking at this like,
00:42:53.000wait, it's Michael Pollan's looking at this.
00:42:55.000Like, this might not be completely crazy.
00:43:22.000But our cultural attitudes on the substances that are prohibited and that are accepted, they're so strange.
00:43:30.000And they, because of our social standing, because we don't want to be perceived as foolish or reckless or in some sort of a midlife crisis or what have you, we're like these journalists that are shutting the microphones off and wanted to talk to you about these profound experiences that they had that they should be shouting about from the rooftops.
00:43:52.000I was talking to a journalist in Boston who was the local NPR host, and he, on the air, live, talked about his experiences and how important they were in shaping his identity and the experiences he had in college.
00:44:04.000So I think we're going to see more people come out of the closet and have this kind of conversation.
00:44:09.000And we can actually look at this experience in the same way.
00:44:12.000Now, yes, it's still illegal, but the fact that there is all this legal research going on has created a space where you can talk about it.
00:44:20.000And I'm interviewing all these people, and they're describing their trips, and they're very straight people, and they've had profound experiences.
00:44:35.000I didn't write it with that idea that I had this authority that I'd earned in talking about food and nutrition and I'm going to apply it now to drugs.
00:44:48.000And people scare me a little when they say, you know, psychedelic people say, you know, you're going to do for psilocybin what you did for food.
00:45:26.000This book is as much about the mind as it is about psychedelics.
00:45:29.000This is a book that uses psychedelics to explore this really interesting mystery called consciousness.
00:45:36.000And it's also exploring the nature of addiction, the nature of depression, all the illnesses that psychedelics turns out to be very helpful.
00:45:46.000But I'm not holding a brief that people should do this.
00:46:02.000I think we have a powerful agent that there's good data now that this can help heal people who are really suffering.
00:46:11.000And the other reason for the openness that's going on right now that surprised me Because I expected to get a lot of pushback from the psychiatric establishment, and I looked for it.
00:46:22.000I called around, you know, I want to hear the critical voice on the Hopkins work or the NYU work.
00:46:29.000It was like, I remember calling the head of the National Institute of Mental Health to get what I thought would be a really negative quote about psilocybin research.
00:46:36.000And he was like, no, we have to look at this.
00:46:41.000Former heads of the American Psychiatric Association.
00:46:44.000And the reason they're so open to it is that mental health treatment in this country is just a mess.
00:46:51.000I mean, we only reach half of the people who are struggling with mental illness at all, have any exposure to the system.
00:46:58.000If you compare mental health treatment to any other branch of medicine, oncology, cardiology, infectious disease, it's accomplished very little.
00:47:27.000Partly it's the vets, but in general, the taboo has come off suicide, and suicide is climbing rapidly, and addiction, as we know, is rampant.
00:47:38.000There hasn't really been innovation in mental health treatment since the early 90s, late 80s with the introduction of the SSRI antidepressants, drugs like, you know, Paxil and Prozac.
00:48:05.000They're doing their petition drive right now and in Oregon, too.
00:48:08.000And so I don't know that it'll get through this time.
00:48:12.000It's a weird item to put on the ballot because actually a small minority of people know what psilocybin is.
00:48:18.000On this show, you're the first person who didn't say the ingredient in magic mushrooms.
00:48:24.000You have some confidence that your audience knows what psilocybin is.
00:48:27.000But it's an unfamiliar word to most people.
00:48:30.000So I don't know how people vote on that.
00:48:33.000It may be premature is what I'm suggesting.
00:48:35.000Well, it's all dependent upon getting the word out.
00:48:38.000I think if people understand what like the John Hopkins research or just the anecdotal research that some of these people have had these incredibly life-changing experiences.
00:48:50.000But I think one of the things that you're saying is I think it's very important.
00:48:53.000Is that this isn't for everybody and that if you have problems with normal consciousness, this is likely not for you.
00:49:00.000If you're one of those people that has schizophrenia in your family, perhaps...
00:49:09.000It's a real issue with people with psilocybin and many psychedelics, right?
00:49:14.000Yeah, what happens with schizophrenia is if you are at risk for it, either because of inheritance, a psychedelic trip can set you off, can be the trigger.
00:50:33.000And, you know, if you are at risk, something's going to do it eventually.
00:50:38.000So, you know, we don't have any evidence.
00:50:42.000Of someone thrown into a situation of schizophrenia or other serious mental illness as a result of strictly because of a psychedelic experience.
00:50:52.000It may have been the trigger, but there might have been it was going to happen anyway.
00:50:57.000But in general, if you've got serious, if you have personality disorder, if you have bipolar, if you are at risk for schizophrenia, they will not accept you into these trials and you should stay away from these drugs.
00:51:07.000Yeah, that is a real problem with it being prohibited.
00:51:13.000The prohibition has really set back research and understanding decades.
00:51:17.000I mean, we should have been studying this stuff since the 60s.
00:51:19.000We had 30 years of hiatus in the research.
00:51:22.000I don't know of another time where you had a promising line of scientific inquiry all through the 50s and early 60s that just choked off.
00:52:28.000In the case of LSD, in the 60s, there was this period where there was a lot of pure LSD around, and then the mob got interested in it, and they started cutting it with speed and all sorts of things.
00:52:41.000It's also the issue with scheduling, like Schedule 1s for things that have zero medical value, and that's where a lot of these drugs find themselves in.
00:52:49.000Psychedelics are all Schedule 1. Yeah, which is just bananas, especially DMT, with the old Terrence McKenna line, everyone's holding.
00:53:00.000We all have a Schedule 1 substance flowing through our veins, which is the most asinine thing in the world to make your body a Schedule 1 substance.
00:53:10.000And the fact is that Schedule I means that these drugs have a high potential for abuse, which isn't really true with psychedelics because they're non-addictive, and that they have no accepted medical use, which is now no longer true either because these studies have shown that they do have a medical use.
00:53:26.000So, you know, what I hope happens and what we're on track to see happen is that these trials, these drug trials, will expand.
00:53:36.000There will be now Phase III drug trials, which is the last step before FDA approval.
00:53:42.000If the results of those trials are anywhere near as good as the Phase II trials, the FDA will then approve psilocybin as a medicine and MDMA, which probably happened first.
00:53:54.000They're looking at that too, for use in treating people with trauma.
00:53:58.000And then we will be in a world where they'll have to reschedule it to two or three.
00:54:41.000Rebecca Mercer has given money to MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies, for their work on MDMA. And Steve Bannon has spoken out in approval of this research.
00:54:54.000And Peter Thiel is investing in a psychedelic pharmaceutical company that's getting started in England.
00:55:02.000So I don't think it may not break down in the usual right-left way that we're so accustomed to.
00:55:10.000Well I think one of the things that'll help is anyone who has a loved one that's going through a terminal illness and experiences these things and sees the profound alleviation of anxiety and this just lessening of the worry of passing on.
00:55:24.000And Larry Hagman was once on like a real straight television show like CBS or Fox News or something like that and they asked him about his life and like what what makes him so happy and he said he had a profound acid trip.
00:55:55.000And seeing this straight interviewer just trying to uncomfortably move past this subject, okay, well, the guy from Dallas is a fucking drug addict.
00:56:03.000It's like they didn't know what to do with it, but he was so warm and smiling and...
00:56:08.000I believe it was a piece on his house because he had some crazy off-the-grid sort of life and some eco-friendly house and all solar-powered and used a well and all those different things.
00:56:19.000And, you know, they were asking him what made him so happy, and I'll never forget that.
00:56:23.000He was saying, well, he did acid once.
00:56:26.000You know, Cary Grant also had 60 guided LSD trips in the late 50s.
00:56:34.000And he gave an interview in 1959 to a very famous Joseph Hyams, who was the gossip columnist of that time, saying this had changed his life.
00:56:46.000There were a lot of psychiatrists in LA who were giving low dose LSD to people in their normal talk therapy sessions.
00:56:53.000Essentially, it was called psycholytic therapy because it was mind loosening therapy.
00:56:57.000And it would give you more access to your unconscious and make you be able to talk about things that you might otherwise feel very defensive about.
00:57:05.000And he had 60 of these sessions, and he said he was born again.
00:57:08.000And he said that it had made him a much better actor because he no longer had an ego.
00:57:26.000Are you aware of any of the research they're doing now with ketamine and depression?
00:57:32.000And there's a lot of people that are getting administered pretty high doses of intravenous and intramuscular ketamine for depression, including one of my good friends, Neil Brennan.
00:57:43.000He's gone through it several times and talked about it on the podcast and said it was a real game-changer thing.
00:57:48.000Yeah, there's a lot of excitement in psychiatry about ketamine.
00:57:55.000It makes you feel separated from your body, and that helps with pain.
00:57:59.000So I don't know if it's strictly speaking a psychedelic.
00:58:02.000It's certainly not a classic psychedelic.
00:58:04.000It doesn't work on those brain networks.
00:58:06.000But it is legal because it's been used as an anesthetic for years, and it's relatively safe as an anesthetic compared to some of the others that are used.
00:58:14.000It's the one they use if you come into the trauma center and you've been shot or you need surgery and they don't have time to check whether you're allergic to any other drugs.
00:58:23.000That's the safe one to give you in a crisis.
00:58:25.000They also would carry it around during times of war.
00:59:00.000I mean, there are ketamine clinics where you can go and psychiatrists who are administering it to people.
00:59:08.000So for people who are struggling with depression and can't wait for psilocybin therapy to be approved for depression, which is still several years away, ketamine is worth exploring.
00:59:41.000He opened it after he had his own personal problems with pills.
00:59:43.000He had a back injury, got hooked on pills, was really struggling to get off them, went to Mexico to do Ibogaine, got completely off of it, felt amazing, realized like, oh my god, I have to help people, and then opened up his own clinic.
00:59:57.000I mean, there's a bunch in Guadalajara.
00:59:58.000I don't know where he is, but there is people doing it.
01:00:01.000I don't know exactly what the legal status is in Mexico, whether it's legal or just tolerated.
01:00:06.000Well, I think most drugs have been decriminalized in Mexico, including LSD and mushrooms and a lot of other things to try to do something to curb the violence that they're experiencing from the drug cartels.
01:00:24.000And we are driving that violence with our use.
01:00:27.000It is very strange that our insistence on prohibition is actually funding one of the largest drug and violence epidemics we've ever seen in terms of what's happening south of the border.
01:02:36.000She said, I... Well, first I grew wings, and I flew through European history, and I visited the site of Shakespeare's Globe Theater, and I saw the Salem Witch Trials, and I died three times, and I saw my body rising from a funeral pyre on the Ganges,
01:02:54.000and I realized the universe was so amazing, and there were so many incredible things to do, that killing yourself with cigarettes seemed kind of stupid.
01:03:02.000I was like, I could have told you that.
01:03:05.000But see, it goes back to that noetic quality, that she had a perspective on her life she'd never had, or on the universe, and that she believed that smoking was stupid in a way she knew before, but it didn't have that conviction,
01:03:29.000The psychologist who was running the study says, yeah, everybody has these duh moments on their psychedelic trips that end up being transformative.
01:03:48.000So I did two psilocybin trips, one guided, one not, an LSD trip guided, a couple ayahuasca circles, and then I had a really weird psychedelic called 5-MeO-DMT, which is the smoked venom of the Sonoran Desert toad.
01:04:37.000It's like, and I felt like I was actually like strapped to the outside of a rocket, you know, going through space and through clouds and like the G-force was pulling down my cheeks and it was just this mental storm without any...
01:07:38.000And the person I know who did the synthetic version had a very different experience and they felt like they were installed in the firmament as this happy star.
01:08:37.000I bought it from some company, American Chemical Company or something, and they send it to you, and I had enough to get the entire state of California high for several days.
01:08:57.000Yeah, I brought back a lot about myself and one of the things that I realized like as I was I recorded What I would do is post trip I'd hit a tape recorder right when I became conscious again and start talking about the experience and what I remember saying About the 5-methoxy DMT experience.
01:09:14.000It's like, as I'm trying to recount what happened, I feel my ego trying to retake hold of the situation and even use words in a way that might impress you with my ability to describe things.
01:09:29.000Or as a professional comedian, too, I was aware that a lot of what you're doing, you're saying things in a way that's pleasing to people so that they get excited about hearing you talk.
01:09:39.000And I was very aware of that while I was doing that.
01:09:41.000I'm saying, I'm trying to explain things that are not possible to explain because the words that we're using were all invented for a world that doesn't exist in the DMT dimension.
01:09:53.000And once you break through, it is so...
01:10:02.000Well, in a way, I mean, it may be really, truly realized that we are in a soup of atoms and that it's not – there's not like Michael Pollan, Joe Rogan, and Jamie Vernon in a room, here's a wood table, there's oxygen between us.
01:10:15.000No, we're in a universal stew of particles.
01:10:20.000Yeah, and it breaks those – Or at least it gives you a view into that.
01:10:25.000And you cease to exist, which is the most bizarre thing, because it's so similar to NN-dimethyltryptamine chemically, but so different in the fact that you're not there.
01:10:36.000While you're doing regular NN-dimethyltryptamine, which is the active ingredient in ayahuasca.
01:10:41.000Have you done that, the pure version of it?
01:13:33.000And I actually think the experience is more truthful than the ironic, cynical perspective that we bring to it in our everyday lives, which is a defense against powerful emotion and being overwhelmed every day by, wow, love, you know, whatever it is.
01:13:49.000So you end up revaluing those kind of things.
01:13:52.000So that was a really important takeaway for me.
01:13:55.000The other was having an experience of ego dissolution.
01:13:58.000That, which can be scary, can also be very blissful if it's then followed by emerging with nature or other people.
01:14:06.000And I do think that is the therapeutic agent in the people who are healed, that our ego does keep us from perceiving certain things.
01:14:17.000And it enforces really destructive stories we tell ourselves.
01:14:21.000Like, I can't get through this day without a drink.
01:15:11.000One of the scientists I interviewed in the book, a Dutchman working in Imperial College in London, he said, think of your mind as a hill covered in snow, and your thoughts are sleds going down that hill.
01:15:23.000And after a while, after a lot of thoughts have gone that hill, there'll be these grooves, and they're going to get deeper and deeper.
01:15:28.000And at a certain point, you can't go down the hill without slipping into those grooves.
01:15:33.000That's who we are, as we're like, you know, at this age.
01:15:36.000And what psychedelics do, he said, is flatten the snow.
01:15:47.000I've always talked about predetermined patterns and grooves that people fall into, so it's amazing hearing him say it that way, but that's a much better way of describing it, like snow.
01:16:02.000You know, what you said about love and being cynical, that's so important too, because there's something that's...
01:16:10.000Something that people avoid sincerity.
01:16:16.000There's something about it that makes you too vulnerable or too open to criticism or too open to ridicule, and we're worried about being sincere.
01:16:25.000And I do think that that's one of the primary benefits of psychedelics.
01:20:13.000Central nervous system arousal, including sexual arousal, make you more horny, which would make you procreate more often.
01:20:21.000And that the very unusual effect that psilocybin has on the mind could have led to language and could have also led to the expansion of neurons.
01:20:31.000The language could be part of cultural evolution.
01:21:02.000These, you know, ape-like people trying out different things.
01:21:07.000And that the doubling of the human brain size over a period of two million years is like one of the greatest mysteries in the entire fossil record.
01:21:13.000Yeah, but there are alternative theories.
01:21:14.000I mean, I wrote about one of my last books.
01:21:16.000But I think they probably all coincide.
01:21:17.000Cooking with fire can explain the increase in the brain size because you get more nutritional value from cooked food than raw food.
01:21:23.000The throwing arm, the desire to hunt all these different animals, calculating all these different ways to do that and communication.
01:21:30.000I think there's probably a bunch of coinciding factors.
01:21:34.000Yeah, and it may well be that people were eating everything, right?
01:21:38.000Our ancestors, it's amazing what they ate.
01:21:40.000And no doubt they ate psychedelic mushrooms, and no doubt.
01:21:44.000I mean, he also believed that language was a form of synesthesia, you know, in the way that synesthesia, you can smell a musical note or something like that.
01:21:52.000That you're taking a sound, a meaningless sound, you know, and you're attaching it to a concept that maybe that happened on psilocybin.
01:22:02.000But he had a bunch of ideas that never panned out.
01:23:31.000And I think, I mean, the way I think about drugs like psychedelics in evolution, in the same way like in genetic evolution, radiation causes mutations.
01:23:41.000And some of those mutations turn out to be really valuable.
01:23:44.000You know, purely by accident, some great new trait is introduced to the species and it increases fitness in that person or that individual lives on.
01:23:54.000In the cultural realm, psychedelics are like radiation.
01:24:14.000All right, let's let you go, because I know you've got to get out of here.
01:24:16.000I wish I had more time, because we've got a lot more to talk about.
01:24:19.000Anytime you're back in town, please do, please do.
01:24:21.000And the name of your book, once again?
01:24:23.000How to Change Your Mind, What the New Science of Psychedelics is Teaching Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence.
01:24:31.000And is it available in audio form as well?