In this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience, Dr. Aaron Sorkin joins the show to talk about his trip to Ukraine to train therapists and doctors in MDMA-assisted therapy, and what he learned along the way.
00:00:17.000A series of unexpected things have led to this day.
00:00:20.000So you were supposed to do Duncan's podcast, and then Duncan and I got on the phone, and he was saying, you know, trying to move tickets for the psychedelic event.
00:00:28.000And then Duncan said, you know, hey man, you can have him on your show.
00:00:32.000And I said, well, why don't you come on too?
00:00:55.000So Ukraine has enormous amounts of trauma, and so what I'm trying to do is to go to high-trauma areas and try to talk about MDMA-assisted therapy and how that could be helpful.
00:01:08.000What is the legality of it over there?
00:01:24.000But over the last couple of years, there's been a lot of efforts by their military, by other people to change that because they're aware that they have so much enormous trauma.
00:01:33.000So a couple of months ago, the Ukrainian government put out draft legislation to change the law.
00:01:40.000And so the training that we did was for 55 psychiatrists and therapists from throughout Ukraine.
00:01:47.000We did it in the western part of Ukraine, Lviv, which is not really a dangerous area.
00:01:53.000But even while we were there, there were multiple air raid sirens.
00:01:57.000But then they look at their phone and they see the area that the air raid sirens are supposedly about and they could be like 100 miles.
00:02:32.000But the graves all have flags for Ukraine, but they have the pictures of the person that's dead, the person that's buried there.
00:02:39.000And I've never seen that anywhere else.
00:02:42.000It has even more of an emotional impact because you're actually not just thinking all these people are dead, but you're seeing their pictures.
00:02:51.000And most of them are younger and, you know, tragically interrupted their lives, a fair number of women.
00:02:59.000And they put them in the center of the cities.
00:03:03.000They're having to build new grave sites all over.
00:03:05.000And this was next to a really large old historic cemetery.
00:03:11.000And so it feels to me like what I'm trying to do is to really go to where people, I think, have lots of trauma but don't understand some of these new technologies, meaning psychedelic therapies.
00:04:54.000Because it seems like so much headway has been made on the therapeutic front.
00:04:59.000Like so many people have anecdotal stories of like a lot of soldiers with Ibogaine in particular, MDMA in particular, that these people have had incredible experiences, turned their life around.
00:05:13.000I'm so baffled by the snail's pace of acceptance.
00:05:39.000And so it had been, MDMA had been a It had been legal, but it was sort of quietly used in therapy circles from around 1976 to the early 80s.
00:05:52.000And then it started leaking out of these therapy circles and started being used as a party drug ecstasy.
00:06:17.000There's an incredible story because Larry Hagman, who was the star of Dallas, frequented this nightclub with a bunch of the people from the cast.
00:06:27.000And the police had decided to bust it because they knew that there was all these experiences.
00:06:36.000They were all prepared to bust the Star Club that night.
00:06:41.000And unexpectedly, J.R. Ewing and Larry Huckman showed up, and they canceled the bus because they thought it'd be too embarrassing to bust him, and they busted it another time.
00:06:51.000He was on CNN once, and he was talking about how he's not afraid of death because he had an incredible LSD experience.
00:07:45.000And a friend of his had made a bong out of the genie bottle.
00:07:52.000And they wanted to market it, and Larry said, no way.
00:07:56.000So there was only two versions of this genie bong, and one of my more humorous moments was smoking pot with Larry Hagman on the genie bong.
00:08:11.000It's so funny when a guy plays this, like, straight-laced, greedy kind of psycho on a television show, a soap opera show, and then in real life, he's a stoner.
00:09:09.000But about your question about frustration, yes, the answer is yes, but it's important not to be overwhelmed, I guess, by frustration, is just to continue plodding along.
00:09:23.000We've just passed MAPS's 39th anniversary, April 8th.
00:09:45.000And I realized that it was worth doing.
00:09:48.000Working towards bringing psychedelics forward, whether it worked or not.
00:09:52.000And that's what really gave me the mindset to not be overwhelmed by the frustration by how many obstacles there's been.
00:10:01.000Because I always had this feeling that we need this kind of healing.
00:10:05.000We need this access to these experiences.
00:10:09.000And it's been tragic when we think about the number of veteran suicides, for example, that are happening every year.
00:10:17.000The Drug Enforcement Administration, when they made MDMA illegal in 1985, they did that on an emergency basis.
00:10:25.000We were in the middle of a lawsuit against the DEA, what's called an administrative law judge lawsuit, and we were challenging these arguments for making it into a Schedule I drug.
00:10:40.000The judge said it should be Schedule III, which means it should be available as a medicine, but it should be Illegal otherwise for recreational use.
00:10:50.000But administrative law judges only give advice to the agencies that they're working in.
00:11:52.000And then they came up with a five-part standard that was sufficiently different but still had Phase III studies, so it's essentially the same as FDA approval.
00:12:04.000And during this process, it was clear to me that the DEA would not do anything to make this available as a medicine, that we would have to go through the FDA.
00:12:13.000And that's where MAPS began as a non-profit psychedelic.
00:12:18.000Pharmaceutical company focused entirely on donations, and the intention was to turn it into a generic drug.
00:12:25.000Because MDMA had been invented by Merck in 1912, it was in the public domain, it was used as a therapy drug before I even knew about it.
00:12:33.000And then it turned out that the emergency scheduling that DEA did in 1985 was itself illegal.
00:12:41.000It turned out that the Congress had given...
00:12:44.000The Attorney General the power to emergency scheduled drugs, but the Attorney General had never sub-delegated that power down to the DEA.
00:12:53.000So they didn't have the authority to do that.
00:12:55.000So the people that got busted in the first year were all let go once their lawyers figured this out.
00:13:01.000So the first move to criminalize MDMA was a crime, you could say.
00:13:08.000And so when we think about if MDMA had not been criminalized, how many people's lives would have been saved?
00:13:13.000How many people would have been able to benefit from psychedelics?
00:13:19.000That's one of the things that we're going to be talking about at the Psychedelic Science 2025 conference, the 16th to 20th in June in Denver.
00:13:32.000There's an enormous amount of research taking place with psychedelics, with psilocybin, with Ibogaine, with MDMA, with 5-MeO-DMT, with a whole host.
00:13:41.000And the healing potential of these are incredible.
00:13:44.000And yet, they've been kept away from people by these prohibitionist laws.
00:13:50.000And so it's enormously frustrating and tragic.
00:14:41.000This idea was that there's going to be this whole generation of super predators and these women that were pregnant with crack were having babies that were addicted and they were going to be mentally deficient and prone to violence and this whole...
00:14:57.000And what my father and his partners found out was that really these kids could recover, that they could do better, that it was mostly malnutrition, poverty.
00:15:08.000It's not like fetal alcohol syndrome, that it was really not this direct connection between the crack cocaine and the problems with these kids.
00:15:17.000But what he found was that the women that were pregnant and were addicted...
00:15:23.000The fucking phone is dinging again, man.
00:15:49.000Is counterproductive in that the people that need the help the most are driven away from seeking it because of the stigma and shame and criminality.
00:15:58.000But then they screw up sometimes and do like what Portland did where they just go, everybody just do whatever you want.
00:16:03.000And then, unfortunately, you've already set a culture where you've allowed people to do fentanyl in the street and meth and whatever else they want.
00:16:28.000So what that means is that – and we saw this in Zurich.
00:16:30.000So there was a place in Zurich multiple decades ago called Needle Park where they decided to provide – Access to healthcare, access to safe injection sites, things like this for heroin addicts and others in Zurich.
00:16:45.000And it was working because when you treat people as humans like that, they will often seek other treatment.
00:16:52.000And then if they're not necessarily criminals, but then people come from all over and overwhelm the capacity.
00:17:00.000Because it's this one humane site, and then it became an open-air drug market.
00:17:04.000Just people from all over Europe started coming, and then they had the backlash.
00:17:07.000So I think it's something somewhat similar in Portland, where you try some of these things on a local basis, but then it attracts people from all over, and then it turns into the opposite of what they'd hoped.
00:19:16.000The work that you did to have Rick Perry and Brian Hubbard.
00:19:19.000On your show and how much that brought attention to the Ibogaine possibilities was incredible.
00:19:24.000Well, it's my feeling is if a guy like Rick Perry, who's this straight-nosed, conservative, right-wing kind of a guy, if he can open up his eyes to that and open up his heart to that, it's available for everybody.
00:19:40.000And there's this very binary position that people take in regards to their...
00:19:49.000It's either it's for losers and people that want to escape reality or, you know, if you're on the side of the people that have experienced it, you don't get any of that, which is so weird for me.
00:20:04.000So the people that think that it's for losers and it's all just a bunch of people just trying to escape reality and they're lazy, none of those people saying that have ever done it.
00:20:13.000So if you can get just a few of them to do it and tell their friends, if we had legitimate therapy centers, because everybody needs a little help.
00:20:23.000I'm not saying you need to get off heroin.
00:20:26.000I'm not saying you're coming back from Afghanistan.
00:20:46.000Because one of the things that bums me out the most about, especially the interactions that people have on social media, is like it's all negative.
00:22:25.000I just was the other day with a woman, Gould Dolan, who is a neuroscientist.
00:22:30.000And what she's talked about and what she's discovered is that psychedelics are these rare substances that open up what they call the critical periods.
00:22:42.000It's this ability to rewire your brain that stays for sometimes weeks or longer.
00:22:47.000With Ibogaine, it can be several months after you have the experience.
00:22:50.000So that the therapy that happens afterwards, the work that you do to integrate it, has special potential to make long-term changes in your behavior, in your brain circuitry.
00:23:01.000And so psychedelics are unique among substances.
00:23:05.000People are trying to develop non-psychedelic psychedelics that do have this neuroplasticity property.
00:23:10.000But they open up this potential for long-term change if you do the therapy afterwards, if you focus on what the insights that you had during the experience and then try to make them into permanent behavior patterns.
00:23:39.000Well, one of the things that was really impactful for Rick Perry was Morgan Luttrell, who is now a member of Congress.
00:23:49.000And so Morgan had very terrible trauma from his military service and eventually was able to experience Ibogaine.
00:24:00.000And from that, he was able to get a lot better.
00:24:05.000And there's a researcher, Nolan Williams, who will also be at the conference, who's done work with Ibogaine and a lot of the Navy SEALs and others that have gone down to Mexico, and he's done studies of their brains with traumatic brain injury, and has shown before and after that some of them actually do have this recovery from traumatic brain injury.
00:25:50.000A bunch of the people who had cluster headaches, one of them went to a party, did mushrooms, and found that it postponed the cycle and would interrupt the cycle of these cluster headaches, which are terrible.
00:26:02.000And so they contacted me and they formed this group called Cluster Busters.
00:26:07.000And they said, we don't want to be criminals anymore.
00:26:13.000I live in Boston right next to McLean Hospital, which is a part of Harvard Medical School.
00:26:17.000And I approached them and I said, would you want to study these people with cluster headaches?
00:26:23.000And they said, sure, this is really interesting.
00:26:24.000So they brought in all these people and checked their medical records and determined that this was really the case, that psilocybin and LSD blocked.
00:26:36.000Cluster headache cycle and postpone the next cycle.
00:26:39.000And so we did all this research, and then the next step would have been to actually give LSD or psilocybin to people with cluster headaches.
00:26:49.000And the people at Harvard, like, oh, Timothy Leary, he was here.
00:27:32.000We have no idea why LSD or psilocybin works, but it's probably connected to the psychedelic properties of it.
00:27:39.000And so they did this study at Hanover University in Germany, and I kept waiting for the results and waiting for the results, and they wouldn't.
00:27:47.000And then after months, they finally said, we didn't want to tell you, but the bromo LSD works even better than the LSD and the psilocybin because with LSD, you know, it's effective in micrograms.
00:28:00.000You know, for psilocybin, you take 25 milligrams for a major, major trip.
00:28:05.000But with bromo LSD, you can give large amounts of it because you're not getting high.
00:28:09.000And whatever it does, it's still a mystery what it does in the brain, but it works better.
00:28:35.000And actually, when they finally told me that it worked and that they didn't want to tell me, I said, you know, I'm interested in psychedelic therapy.
00:28:46.000So that if this bromo LSD is best for patients, that's great.
00:28:50.000It's not upsetting me at all because we're talking about it anyway for a physiological thing, and I'm interested in the therapy part of it.
00:28:58.000And so unfortunately, talk about being frustrating, Cary Turnbull is a philanthropist and he's trying to make bromolasty into a medicine, but he's been unable to raise all the funds that he needs to do that.
00:29:12.000And so this was a treatment for a terrible disorder that was identified over...
00:34:42.000So they have to track down what happened with this stream.
00:34:45.000Finds this huge grow up in the middle of the national forest run by the cartel.
00:34:49.000And then his entire operation in the decades future becomes a tactical force with bulletproof vests and dogs and guns fighting the cartel in the forest, in national forest, because they were growing it all in America.
00:35:07.000And then just selling it, like 90%, I believe he said 90% of the marijuana that was sold in states where it's illegal was coming from California.
00:35:15.000And they were using very dangerous pesticides and herbicides, stuff that's completely illegal if you were growing it naturally, if you were growing it normally.
00:35:30.000Organized crime that's providing it to people like it if it was legal We could only buy it from like you buy your fucking groceries you buy organic fruit, right?
00:35:40.000You buy organic vegetables you buy organic marijuana You would know the people who are growing it you could meet the farmers Just like you can meet people from white oak pastures you'd meet people from fucking happy green farm and You wouldn't know where you're getting your stuff.
00:35:55.000You know, there's no fentanyl in it Which is apparently they're talking about that now.
00:35:58.000Yeah, you're not help You're not helping anybody.
00:36:07.000Lock people up for things that don't hurt anybody, even themselves.
00:36:10.000Well, the other part of it is the tax money, too.
00:36:14.000When you're letting all this money go to the underground, to the cartels, to the criminal gangs, alternatively, you could have it as taxes, and it could make it easier on the rest of us.
00:36:26.000I could see, as an argument, if you were the Attorney General, and you said you are propping up organized crime by allowing it to be decriminalized, and the people that are growing it and selling it in Austin, or the people that have it in Austin, are all committing crime, so they're probably cartel people.
00:38:09.000Well, this idea that we're all going to die one day, one of the most important uses of psychedelics is to help people at the end of life who are scared of dying.
00:38:21.000So there's a lot of research that's been done with people with life-threatening illnesses who are anxious about dying and have received either MDMA or psilocybin or LSD in the 60s.
00:38:45.000That day on CNN, there's probably millions of people watching Larry Hagman saying, I'm not afraid of death because I had an LSD experience and I realized that it's all just connected.
00:42:15.000And that's where I think ceremony comes in.
00:42:17.000Yeah, one of the things that I think has led to my interest in lifetime use of psychedelics was been the failure of my bar mitzvah to actually turn me into a man.
00:42:37.000So I had no older siblings to tell me.
00:42:39.000And we did this rite of passage, and it's been used for thousands of years.
00:42:43.000And I just had somehow this idea that there would be some visitation from God of some way, that I would be one thing the morning of my bar mitzvah, and I would be something different the next morning.
00:42:55.000And I remember waking up in bed the next morning after my bar mitzvah, and I'm like, I'm the same.
00:43:23.000And then finally, another week and another bar mitzvahed, Saturday came along, and I realized that if I was on a list, I have now been dropped off the list completely because there's all these new people bar mitzvahed.
00:43:34.000And the rites of passage that we do have, I believe, probably worked in the past for a lot of people.
00:43:39.000And they did have this demarcation between different ages.
00:43:43.000People didn't used to live that long either.
00:44:23.000So for me, the psychedelics became the rite of passage when the religious rite of passage didn't have the same impact as I had hoped it would.
00:45:04.000Well, and then in the U.S., where when kids do experiment, because they're worried about being caught with things, they tend to not use wine, but they tend to use stronger drinks.
00:45:15.000So they call that sort of the iron law of prohibition, that when you prohibit something, it moves more and more to more concentrated, more powerful forms of that drug.
00:46:51.000Yeah, that's one of the things that has been happening in terms of the raves and ecstasy use.
00:46:57.000So that occasionally people will overheat and die from MDMA, where you dance all night, you don't drink adequate fluid, and you can get hyperthermia.
00:47:42.000Because I know it's very common in the CrossFit world because people are competitive with exercise, which is not necessarily the great...
00:47:52.000Like, a lot of people I know that are trainers do not like the concept of CrossFit because it's...
00:47:56.000Doing exercises that are just supposed to strengthen your body and condition your body but doing them in a competition setting where it's like unlimited amount of repetitions.
00:48:04.000As many as you can get in X amount of time.
00:48:07.000And then they have these games where people play where they might not be conditioned enough to sustain the workload that they're putting forth and then they get rhabdo.
00:49:48.000And we looked at the emergency room visits on a per...
00:49:53.000Person visit for the percentage of people that do cheerleading that go to the emergency room versus the percentage of people that do ecstasy.
00:50:59.000Yeah, but I think that's the critical issue is that people have got, as you started out by saying, you know, people think that if you take these drugs, there's no benefits, you're hallucinating, you're running away from reality, you're not paying attention to what's really going on, you're making yourself more vulnerable, you're going to fly out a window and think you can fly.
00:51:13.000Well, it's just like we need a comprehensive addressing of the actual real landscape.
00:51:22.000Of what these things are, what the benefits are, and just this addressing of the impact of propaganda, the sweeping Schedule I Act of 1970, the whole William Randolph Hearst connection to marijuana illegalization, which was right after alcohol prohibition.
00:51:42.000So they were looking to put these agents back out into the field.
00:51:45.000All that needs to be, like, comprehensively explained to the American public to reinform people.
00:51:51.000Because I think people are – they have the general population that doesn't listen to podcasts like this and doesn't get online and search these things.
00:52:00.000You have these conceptions that are entirely formed by propaganda and they're not based on real anecdotal experiences, real science, real data.
00:52:12.000And also the problem with that, too, is there's real side effects of some of these things.
00:52:19.000Well, you have to make them legal and do tests and studies.
00:52:22.000And maybe people have gene expressions that, you know, maybe they shouldn't be doing this thing, but they can do that thing, you know?
00:52:29.000Yeah, I think this idea that, for me, how do we break through the wall of propaganda?
00:52:34.000And for me, the idea has been we go to where the suffering is.
00:52:38.000We go to where the science is and we try to make things first into medicines.
00:52:42.000And I think that's where people are willing to listen.
00:52:44.000When you have all this propaganda and all these fears, it has to be that there's some corresponding benefit that overwhelms your sense of fear that you're willing to take a look.
00:52:55.000And that's where you go to where the suffering is.
00:52:57.000And that's where with post-traumatic stress disorder.
00:53:00.000I think one of the things that we've been able to do...
00:53:03.000Remarkably, is with psychedelics, they're one of the few things that are out of the culture wars these days.
00:53:09.000There's bipartisan support for psychedelic research.
00:53:13.000And it's because we went to where a lot of the suffering was, sympathetic patients.
00:53:19.000Most of the people in our studies are women survivors of sexual abuse.
00:53:23.000Most of the people with PTSD are women.
00:53:25.000But most of the media attention goes to the veterans.
00:53:28.000And people put veterans on a pedestal.
00:53:49.000The bridge is these, you know, hard-nosed right-wing guys who have these experiences, become better parents, become better friends, just like reintegrate into society.
00:54:48.000Think about the number of people that have committed suicide from when we started offering.
00:54:52.000To the VA to do it, but it was the propaganda.
00:54:54.000It was the stigma that made it so that they were not willing to do it.
00:54:58.000What's most amazing today is that Congress gave $10 million to the Department of Defense for MDMA-assisted therapy research in active duty soldiers.
00:55:52.000The other was cognitive processing therapy.
00:55:55.000And what they showed is that around half the people are in the study drop out because the therapy itself is re-traumatizing.
00:56:03.000Because you're just forced to go over the trauma, over the trauma, over and over, and that's supposed to desensitize you.
00:56:10.000And if you can stay in it, it can be helpful, but it re-traumatizes so many people.
00:56:14.000So what we've shown is, working with the MDMA with veterans, is that they're able to process the trauma, the fear reduction from the MDMA, reducing activity in the amygdala, the fear processing part of our brain, that once you can approach these things that have felt like will tear you apart, that they'll be overwhelming, you can't...
00:56:38.000Really go away from them, but they never really leave either, then you can process it.
00:56:43.000So this study that will be done here in Texas with active duty soldiers, again, is going to be a combination of MDMA with prolonged exposure.
00:56:52.000The Walter Reed study is combining MDMA with what they call acceptance and commitment therapy, different kind of approaches.
00:57:54.000And so back in 2014, when finally I was working with Richard Rockefeller and his cousin, Senator Jay Rockefeller, who was on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, and they finally convinced the VA to be willing to let MAPS support research with MDMA.
00:58:11.000They said that they wouldn't refer veterans, they couldn't do it inside the VA, we had to pay for it, but that the first thing they wanted us to do was combine MDMA with cognitive behavioral conjoined therapy.
00:58:24.000And the results were better than anything they've ever got before in studying this therapy, both in reduction of PTSD, but also in strength of the relationship.
00:58:33.000Do they combine it with 5-HTP or anything like that to sort of bring back your levels?
00:58:48.000So 5-HTP is your precursor for serotonin.
00:58:51.000So when we started research with the FDA, this was now 1992.
00:58:56.000The very first time that they permitted MDMA research was 1992.
00:59:01.000And as I said, MDMA had been used as a therapy drug since the middle 70s through the 80s, criminalized in 85. And people have felt that sometimes, and I think it's very much the case, that you're tired after MDMA, that people talk about a serotonin depletion.
00:59:18.000And so when you take 5-HTP, That can be helpful.
00:59:23.000But when we started with the FDA, they said, all this information that you've got from before, from underground use, or from before when it was still legal, doesn't matter to us, really.
00:59:34.000Everything has to be done under direct supervision of FDA proof studies.
00:59:37.000And they said, don't assume that you're going to have problems and you're going to use MDMA plus 5-HTP or something.
00:59:43.000Just start with the MDMA, see what problems you get, and then you can start.
00:59:48.000So the way we think about MDMA therapy is that it's really not a one-day thing.
00:59:55.000It's a two-day in the sense that the second day is for rest.
00:59:59.000It's for having no obligations, no appointments, and the therapists come back and do more integrative therapy the next day.
01:00:06.000And also, we do the therapy during the day.
01:00:18.000Or more tiredness in the people that get MDMA than in the people that got therapy without MDMA.
01:00:23.000So we never felt the need to introduce 5-HTP.
01:00:28.000We didn't have evidence of symptoms that required this.
01:00:32.000But I think it's because we talk about it as a two-day experience.
01:00:37.000The other part is that when people take MDMA at raves or parties and things like that, often they're drinking, they do it at night, they don't get full sleep.
01:00:55.000I think that this concept that we've developed is this really thinking about it as a two-day experience where there is this low energy, but it can be productive in terms of trying to work on the issues that came up during the MDMA experience or the PTSD or depression or whatever it is.
01:01:13.000Now, there's a project at a place called Sunstone, which is a therapy center outside in Rockville, Maryland.
01:01:21.000And they've worked with cancer patients who are anxious about dying, and they have brought in their partners to the therapy, and both of them get MDMA as well.
01:01:33.000And they found that that was tremendously effective as well, because when your partner's got a life-threatening illness, it doesn't just affect them, it affects you as well.
01:01:43.000And often the therapy is focused, again, on the designated patient.
01:01:47.000So this kind of broadening the sense of who it is that is going to be treated and bringing in people's partners, I think, is going to be very important.
01:02:00.000Marcus and Amber Capone, who've done work with vets, they've brought probably by now about a thousand veterans down to Mexico for Ibogaine.
01:02:09.000And they have also started bringing their partners as well.
01:02:14.000They realize that you need to think about this as a family setting and to try to treat the entire family context.
01:02:21.000This raises another issue, which is to talk about group therapy.
01:02:26.000So the scale of the trauma, in America, there's 13 million PTSD patients.
01:02:32.000This is the estimate by the Veterans Administration.
01:02:34.000You know, in Ukraine, we've got an entire country.
01:02:37.000When I was there, practically every family knows someone or has someone that has been injured or killed.
01:02:44.000And so you've got massive population-based trauma.
01:02:48.000And to think about treating people as individuals is really important, but it's going to be hard to scale.
01:02:55.000Because of the limited number of therapists and psychiatrists and the cost of doing that.
01:03:00.000So the FDA has wanted all the research with LSD, psilocybin, MDMA, 5-MEODMT, to start on an individual basis.
01:03:08.000But there's new studies now that are going to be working on group therapy.
01:03:13.000So one of the first in America was at the Portland, Oregon VA.
01:03:17.000And it was four therapists for six veterans.
01:03:21.000And it started out where each one got an individual session first, and then they got a group session.
01:03:27.000And there's two basic kinds of trauma in the military.
01:03:31.000One is war-related or accident training-related, and the other is what they call military sexual trauma.
01:03:37.000There's a lot of sexual abuse by military active duty people of other people in the military, and they call that military sexual trauma.
01:03:47.000And so what they've learned is they have to separate those groups when they do the group therapy.
01:03:51.000Because if you're a military person who's been abused by other people in the military, you might not feel safe if you're in a context of group therapy.
01:04:00.000So they've done separate the groups, but they've found that the groups do terrific with supporting each other afterwards in this integration process.
01:04:10.000And so what they've done is they've realized, though, that...
01:04:14.000The design they had initially was an individual session and then a group session.
01:04:19.000And after they did two cohorts of the six, they realized that the people felt they needed a third MDMA session, and they wanted that also as a group, not as an individual.
01:04:30.000There's a project in Australia that's going to be climate-related PTSD from floods that they've had related to climate, and so they're going to be doing group therapy there.
01:04:42.000And there's an incredible project that's developing in Israel that's for people traumatized on October 7th.
01:04:49.000And there's going to be groups of seven with two therapists, two assistants.
01:04:55.000But the Ministry of Health has taken a while to review this application.
01:05:07.000But what the Ministry of Health in Israel has wanted is, and this is the first study ever, where it's going to be direct comparison of individual therapy versus group therapy.
01:05:16.000So everybody is ready to have one or the other.
01:05:20.000You get randomized to either individual or group, and it will be a direct comparison.
01:05:25.000And so I think like when we think about AA and we think about peer support, I think you can go deeper when it's individual therapy because you have more.
01:06:04.000And I think particularly for military people that are traumatized in similar circumstances, that are bonded in groups, that group therapy can maybe even be the treatment of choice.
01:06:14.000But I think the way the FDA is going to be reviewing it is that there is going to be studies with individuals first that will have to be gone through the system and approved and then...
01:06:26.000There will be this additional research with groups.
01:06:29.000What kind of a timeline are we talking about?
01:06:40.000The project at the Portland, Oregon VA is going to be done pretty soon, but it's really just been four or five cohorts.
01:06:46.000It's very small numbers of people, and so there will need to be more.
01:06:52.000I think that there's been some efforts to do What people call in some ways a modified version of individual versus group is that they've done some of this at Sunstone also where there'll be four people getting psilocybin at the same time, but each in a separate room, each with one therapist.
01:07:10.000But then near the end of the session, they bring them together and then they talk about what happened and then they also have the group integration.
01:07:19.000So I think in terms of time frame, it's probably...
01:07:25.000Four or five years before FDA will approve group therapy, maybe longer.
01:07:30.000The other issue is that the last time that we spoke, it was before the FDA advisory committee and before the FDA meeting to decide whether to approve MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD.
01:07:43.000And the advisory committee recommended against it, and the FDA voted against it.
01:08:54.000So the challenge was to pick the low dose so that it's high enough to cause a certain amount of confusion, but not so high that it has so much therapeutic potential that you can't tell the difference between the groups.
01:09:08.000For 16 years, from 2000 to 2016, MAPS did a series of what are called Phase II studies to try to figure out how to do Phase III.
01:09:16.000And we looked at therapy with no MDMA, therapy with 25 milligrams, 30 milligrams, 40, 50, 75, 100, 125, and 150.
01:09:28.000And what we discovered, fortunately, after I got my PhD, was that my theory was partially right and partially wrong.
01:09:37.000That a microdose of anything is not going to be very good as a placebo because you'll be able to tell.
01:09:45.000So what was surprising to us was that the lower doses, 25, 30, 40, 50 milligrams, did indeed cause a certain amount of confusion.
01:09:56.000But when you're working with PTSD patients and you get this activation from the drug but you don't have enough of the fear reduction, it made people uncomfortable.
01:10:07.000So we showed that the people that got therapy with no MDMA did better than the people that got therapy with the low doses of MDMA.
01:10:15.000They still got better, but they didn't get as much benefit.
01:10:18.000So the analogy is you're taking off in an airplane and there's all this turbulence at the beginning and then you get above the clouds and it's smooth sailing.
01:10:28.000But the part that we discovered that was...
01:10:30.000Very surprising was we did a study with veterans, firefighters, and police officers, and one group got 30 milligrams, one group got 75 milligrams, and one group got 125 milligrams.
01:10:42.000And in that particular study, it was about 26 people.
01:10:48.000When you randomize, it doesn't mean that everything's equal.
01:12:01.000But it meant to us that this dose of 75 was indeed more therapeutic than we anticipated.
01:12:07.000So there was no real sweet spot where there was a dose of MDMA that didn't either make people uncomfortable and reduce the effectiveness compared to therapy with no MDMA or...
01:12:19.000It tipped over into being very effective.
01:12:22.000So in November 29, 2016, when the FDA had what we call the end of Phase 2 meeting, after we got approved to go to Phase 3, the final studies where you need to prove safety and efficacy, I knew that we shouldn't do that because of this.
01:12:40.000We shouldn't go directly to phase three.
01:12:43.000The FDA offers this opportunity that most pharma companies don't take called special protocol assessment.
01:12:50.000And it can take, for us, it took eight months.
01:12:57.000And so pharma companies are thinking, there's nothing unusual what I'm doing.
01:13:03.000But I knew we needed to do that to discuss how to deal with the double blind.
01:13:07.000And so we presented this information to the FDA.
01:13:09.000We said, we will give you blinding if you want with these lower doses, but it's going to make our job easier to find a difference between the full dose and these lower doses because it's going to compromise the therapy as compared to therapy with no MDMA at all.
01:13:25.000And so we said to the FDA, you tell us what you want.
01:13:28.000And the FDA chose therapy with inactive placebo to make our job harder, which made sense to me.
01:13:34.000And they said that there's two things that you can do to reduce experiment or bias, because the whole purpose of the double-blind is to sort of reduce bias, that you don't know what's going on and everybody just treats everybody the same.
01:13:47.000They said the first is this random assignment.
01:13:49.000What that means is everybody's similarly motivated, and they will work, and the therapists don't know necessarily that.
01:13:58.000But then the second thing is that you can't have the therapists or the patients rate themselves on how well they've done compared to baseline.
01:14:07.000You need independent raters that are blind to the condition that the person that they're evaluating is in.
01:14:14.000So the raters don't know, did this person get the placebo?
01:14:39.000It's like an hour-long interview about their symptoms related to what they call the index trauma, which is the worst thing that ever happened.
01:14:53.000And then we had this random assignment, and that's what the FDA said is how we should do the Phase III studies.
01:15:00.000What was problematic for us was the people at the FDA that we negotiated this with in 2017 then left the FDA.
01:15:07.000And then new, more conservative people came in at the Division of Psychiatry.
01:15:12.000And they were more concerned about this, what they called functional unblinding.
01:15:17.000And that became an issue at the FDA Advisory Committee meeting and at the FDA.
01:15:23.000When they reviewed whether to approve MDMA-assisted therapy or not.
01:15:28.000And so the pharma company, Lycos, did not really proactively explain to the advisory committee how this design was developed, why FDA chose this design.
01:15:43.000And so the people in the advisory committee are often more academics and they're more focused on this double-blind.
01:15:50.000But they're not practical, in a sense.
01:15:52.000So that the FDA realizes that the double-blind fails in practice a lot.
01:15:57.000It's a theory of how you want to do things.
01:15:59.000It's something to strive for, but it doesn't work a lot of the times.
01:16:03.000Even with SSRIs, you think that Prozac or various drugs that you take that are not psychedelic, that those are easy to double-blind.
01:16:12.000But they're not, because when people have sexual side effects, they have other side effects, and they report to their therapist what's going on, Then they can tell from the side effect profile.
01:16:23.000So the double-blind fails in practice a lot.
01:16:26.000But the FDA is saying, we can't just only approve drugs where the double-blind is perfect.
01:16:32.000We have to weigh these different things.
01:16:35.000So that was one of the big issues that the FDA Advisory Committee objected to, was this functional unblinding.
01:16:42.000So when you asked about the time frame, there was other issues.
01:16:47.000Is that there's going to be negotiations between Lycos and the FDA with the new FDA, with the new people at HHS, and there's the proverbial fork in the road.
01:17:03.000Either the FDA will say, we believe your data enough that you're not going to need to do another Phase III study.
01:17:12.000They might require what's called a Phase 4 study, which is after approval, you gather information about safety, about durability, different things.
01:17:22.000And if that's the case, it's possible that within six months, the FDA could say yes to approving MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD.
01:17:30.000If the FDA says we want another Phase 3 study, that could delay approval for another three and a half years or so.
01:17:39.000And that's just on an individual basis.
01:17:47.000So the two Phase III studies that were done, the first one was severe PTSD.
01:17:53.000And what we showed is that two-thirds of the people that had severe PTSD no longer had PTSD after the treatment, which was 42 hours of therapy, three MDMA sessions, one month apart.
01:18:47.000In the second Phase III study, we purposely moved it to moderate to severe PTSD because we didn't want the FDA to say it's only for severe PTSD.
01:18:57.000Three-quarters of the people did have severe PTSD.
01:19:02.000One quarter had moderate PTSD, and it was 72.6% no longer had PTSD.
01:19:09.000Almost three quarters no longer had PTSD at this two-month follow-up.
01:19:13.000And what was even more remarkable, and this relates, I think, to the concerns that was expressed about bias and functional unblinding, is that 46% of the people that had therapy with no MDMA also went below the threshold of having a PTSD diagnosis.
01:19:30.000That's better than any of the other therapies for PTSD.
01:19:33.000And so what that demonstrated is that the therapist, even though most of them could tell the difference between whether somebody had MDMA or not, that they tried just as hard as they could to help people whether they got the MDMA or not, and we got extraordinary results in the control group.
01:19:53.000The explanation is that when you have an eight-hour therapy session with music, with headphones, with more or less half the time people are inside having these different feelings, and the other half they're talking to the therapist in no particular order, you're not forced to focus on the therapy the way with prolonged exposure or cognitive processing therapy.
01:20:16.000That's what I said was re-traumatizing.
01:20:18.000In the studies that the VA did, roughly half the people dropped out.
01:20:21.000We had very low dropout rates because people are encouraged to just, we support whatever's emerging.
01:20:27.000That's the essence of the therapeutic approach that has been developed to support people when they're going through MDMA therapy.
01:20:34.000And it's very similar to what can be done with psilocybin or LSD or even ibogaine, that you just support whatever's emerging.
01:20:41.000You have the sense that there's a wisdom of the unconscious.
01:20:43.000We all know that our body has a certain wisdom.
01:23:05.000You have been responsible for so much research and so much pushing for legislation to be passed and pushing for people to understand these things and so much education.
01:23:57.000The other part is our interconnectedness.
01:23:59.000I think sort of the essence of what people talk about, the sort of spiritual aspects of psychedelics or of meditation or of other things, you feel that we're not just isolated individuals.
01:24:40.000And I thought, OK, well, I'm not willing to go to war because of that, but I can be an underground psychedelic therapist and you don't need a license for that.
01:26:41.000A pivot point in my life, reading this, I said, I really want to study psychedelics.
01:26:45.000So the dream was, a few years later, if people have seen the movie 2001 Space Odyssey, near the end of it, there's this scene where the astronaut is in this all-white room and he's on his deathbed.
01:26:59.000And so the dream was, I'm in this all-white room, and there's a person on his deathbed, and he's...
01:27:07.000Looking at me, he said, earlier in my life, I was almost killed, but I was saved.
01:27:12.000And I knew I was saved for a purpose, but I didn't know what the purpose was.
01:27:16.000He said, let me show you what happened to me.
01:27:22.000And he was a Jewish guy, and it was outside of a village, and there was all these thousands of people lined up with open grave, machine gunned by the Nazis.
01:27:32.000The crematoriums and the concentration camps, they called it the Holocaust of Bullets.
01:27:36.000So this guy was wounded, buried, but wasn't dead.
01:27:42.000And then it had a little bit of a Jesus kind of a theme where he was buried for three days.
01:27:47.000Somehow I'm seeing all this through his eyes.
01:27:49.000And then he wakes up and he's not dead.
01:27:51.000He climbs his way through the bodies and nobody's there.
01:27:59.000I see all this, and then we're back in the room, and he's on his deathbed, and he's looking at me, and he says, now I know why I was saved.
01:28:06.000I'm like, oh, tell me, why were you saved?
01:28:09.000He said, it's to tell you to study psychedelics, that I want you to bring back psychedelics, that if we can all feel our interconnectedness, it will be harder to dehumanize others, it'll be harder to do this mass murder, that we need to understand how we're all more similar than different.
01:28:29.000I said, in my mind again, in the dream, I said, I've already decided to do this.
01:31:56.000He said the revolutions usually begin with the privileged, who for one reason or another use their freedom, use their privilege.
01:32:05.000To argue, to work towards a better life.
01:32:08.000So what it means to me is that if you have this privilege, you have the obligation and the opportunity to do things that other people cannot do.
01:32:19.000It reminds me also of the hierarchy of needs.
01:32:22.000Many people have heard of Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
01:33:23.000Reassuring to me, and I think that people who will come to the psychedelic conference will see this, is that once FDA said no to MDMA-assisted therapy, that they weren't ready to approve it, that they wanted to see more data.
01:33:37.000I was incredibly, you know, depressed and frustrated and all that.
01:33:42.000But it took me a couple months to realize that this psychedelic renaissance, that MAPS, Lycos could disappear.
01:33:50.000But that there is so much going on with research into a whole range of different psychedelics that the field was moving forward regardless.
01:34:17.000It was kind of reassuring, yeah, that even though we were the first out of the gate and the FDA wasn't ready, things are moving forward in a great way.
01:34:27.000Well, you've got an amazing perspective considering how much work it's been.
01:34:32.000One of the things that you said that I think from the dream is to give people this understanding of interconnectedness, that we are all connected.
01:35:03.000Let's imagine a world where there was no restrictions on psychedelics.
01:35:09.000Because I'm of the belief that it's probably responsible for a lot of religious experiences that we've documented.
01:35:17.000It's not an uncommon theme in many, many cultures that you have these psychedelic experiences and then through that these great revelations come and then through that great change in the culture.
01:35:34.000I mean, this is Eleusinian Mysteries in Ancient Greece that Brian Mirorescu talks about so well.
01:35:42.000Without restrictions, if we didn't have these fucking insane laws, we would have progressed past where we are now.
01:35:52.000If we had gone from 1970 to 2025 without those restrictions in place, who knows what this culture looks like?
01:36:04.000That one administration, one presidential administration with one sweeping act that was essentially put in place to stop the civil rights movement and to stop the anti-war movement and to stop the black rights movement.
01:36:17.000Like, if they had done that, if they had not done that, if that had not gone through, we might be looking at a completely different world where we have culturally accelerated evolution that mirrors our electronically and technologically accelerated evolution.
01:37:29.000But the Ellicinian Mysteries is the longest-running mystery ceremony that we know of in the history of the world, roughly 2,000 years.
01:37:35.000It involved a psychedelic potion called Kikion.
01:37:38.000It's not exactly clear what was in it, but it was wiped out in 396 by the Catholic Church because psychedelics offer a direct experience of spirituality.
01:37:50.000And often religious systems want to be the intermediaries.
01:37:58.000When we think about the reintroduction of psychedelics, you know, we talk about what happened in the Controlled Substances Act in 1970, but it really goes all the way back to the destruction of the Ellicinian mysteries.
01:38:11.000And then we have a lot of the work in the Middle Ages where the women were mostly the plant medicine people.
01:38:16.000And then we have the burning of the witches.
01:38:18.000When the conquistadors started coming into Western civilization here, which was indigenous civilizations, the first people that they tried to kill were the shamans that did the work with the mushrooms or the work with the peyote because they were the center of the communities.
01:38:33.000Now, these communities were not all, you know, peace and love.
01:38:36.000They were often warring and killing each other.
01:39:05.000There's a book that I recommend for people by Herman Hesse.
01:39:10.000And it's called The Glass Bead Game, Magister Lutie, The Glass Bead Game.
01:39:14.000And it helped Hermann Hess win the Nobel Prize for Literature, and he wrote it during World War II.
01:39:19.000And so there is these competitive energies that we have that often can lead to war.
01:39:24.000But the book was a post-apocalyptic culture that had decided to harness these...
01:39:31.000Competitive energies into what they called The Glass Bead Game, which was this...
01:39:36.000It's a beautiful book, but The Glass Bead Game was about a competition using poetry, mathematics, music, and philosophy to try to describe the universe.
01:39:48.000And they would have this different kind of...
01:39:51.000Who would be the most eloquent and the most comprehensive?
01:39:58.000The antidote to the competitiveness that led to this apocalypse.
01:40:02.000And he's writing this during World War II as well as this sort of idealistic hopeful thing.
01:40:09.000But the other part of the book was that this game itself becomes a little bit too abstract and it no longer harnesses the passions of the common people.
01:40:21.000And the head of it, the Magister Lutie, decides that he has to leave.
01:40:27.000There has to be some way that we do compete with each other, but we have to do it in a way to learn nonviolence.
01:40:35.000And our tools of technology are getting ever more destructive.
01:40:38.000The nuclear proliferation is taking more.
01:40:41.000So I ended my TED Talk with this, which was 2019.
01:40:45.000And interestingly enough, it took six years until Nolan Williams gave a talk on the main stage at TED about Ibogaine.
01:40:53.000So it took six years from my first—that was the only ever TED Talk on psychedelics in 2019, and then Nolan Williams talked about Ibogaine just recently, and he'll also be at the psychedelic conference.
01:41:04.000But this idea, I ended up saying it's a race between consciousness and catastrophe.
01:41:14.000I mean, as you just talked about coming back from Ukraine, today, I don't know what's happening right now, but today India and Pakistan started bombing each other.
01:42:44.000They're now leading this nonviolent approach to work together.
01:42:50.000So there's an incredible neuroscientist, Israeli neuroscientist, Lior Roseman at Exeter University in England that's done work with Israelis and Palestinians.
01:43:00.000And he's brought a bunch of them to Spain for an ayahuasca session.
01:43:04.000And with different measures of how you see the other.
01:43:07.000And once you do see this commonality, you don't see the other as so foreign from yourself and you can recognize their pain.
01:43:17.000It's like a residual effect of tribal culture from the ancient times, that you had to other these people in order to commit horrific crimes, because they were going to commit horrific crimes on you.
01:43:29.000You had to protect the people around you, and unfortunately, that's baked into our genes.
01:43:34.000You reminded me of one of the more powerful for me statements, Adam Kinzinger, who was the Republican on the January 6th committee in the House to look at what happened on January 6th.
01:43:46.000He said that he's learned from his investigations that there's something that people are more scared of than death, and that's being kicked out of your tribe.
01:43:57.000That we're such social beings, that this idea that we would be isolated and alone, that's how you have a lot of these fundamentalist religions that keep people within them, because if you deviate, you get kicked out of the tribe, and they ostracize you.
01:44:21.000And then you have the fundamentalists of all the religions.
01:44:25.000I think this is very true, that the fundamentalists of the different religions are closer to each other than they are to the mystics of their own religions.
01:44:32.000And the mystics of the religions are closer to the people who are other religions because they see that it's all this common reality, but that we have different symbols, different stories that we tell.
01:45:04.000And then when you talk about humans, so different skin color, different things, our commonalities are really more.
01:45:10.000But once you can kind of understand that...
01:45:14.000Hopefully, then you can be more willing to appreciate the differences.
01:45:19.000So it's this paradoxical thing where the more you realize we're interconnected, the more you can appreciate the unique individuality of every person.
01:46:11.000As you're talking about with Nixon's advisor, openly discussed how they lied and used propaganda to pretend that the effects were far worse than they really were.
01:46:21.000And I think that it's, again, really important to say that the tools are in some ways less important than the context within which they're used.
01:46:33.000So, for example, religion is often cozy up to the people in power.
01:46:39.000So there's an ayahuasca church, the União do Vegetal, and they came from Brazil.
01:46:45.000They actually went to the U.S. Supreme Court and got approval for practicing ayahuasca in the United States.
01:46:50.000But they're a syncretic religion, meaning that in order for them to survive, they had to merge with the church.
01:46:56.000So they've become patriarchal, homophobic, hierarchical, and some of the leaders of the União do Vegetal aligned with Bolsonaro, who was about destroying the Amazon.
01:47:09.000So that it doesn't, the tools themselves don't automatically make you a better person.
01:47:16.000So it's the same way in therapy, that you can have these experiences, but it's the context in which you interpret them, and then it's the integration work that you do after that really makes the most sense.
01:47:29.000So that you can have psychedelic experiences, but if it's not in this...
01:47:35.000Sort of therapeutic context where you're really open to deal with the different issues and things, fears of death, things that come up.
01:47:44.000So I think we need to make that clear that it's not just – it's a magic pill and it will produce better people.
01:47:50.000A great example of that is the berserkers.
01:48:11.000What is your perspective on that idea?
01:48:13.000Well, what he's basically saying is that it's a real good chance that early monkeys and stuff would experiment with whatever they could around them to eat and that they would eat mushrooms and that mushrooms then elevated their consciousness, started helping develop language.
01:49:12.000Taking into consideration the doubling of the human brain size over a period of two million years, that it's this very extraordinary development.
01:49:19.000And, you know, many biologists called the biggest mystery in the entire fossil record, like, what happened?
01:49:25.000And McKenna's perspective was, I think I know.
01:49:28.000I mean, it makes sense because he applied what we know about the climate back then.
01:49:36.000The climate was changing and that these rainforests were receding into grasslands, which would make a lot more undulates.
01:50:21.000But I think then, what does that mean for us today?
01:50:24.000Is that I do think that the psychedelic experiences could be part of this next sort of evolution of humanity to make us more collaborative and peaceful to deal with the incredible technologies that we're developing.
01:51:02.000So I think we should say that this doesn't depend on psychedelics.
01:51:05.000The astronauts who've been up in space look back and see the Earth as a whole thing.
01:51:09.000Well, that's got to be a psychedelic experience.
01:51:12.000Just seeing Earth from the stars, not from the stars, but from space, looking down and seeing the nonsense of these imaginary lines that we put on the ground.
01:51:28.000Really unique planet that we've all grown up from, and it's produced all this life, and we're all interconnected.
01:51:37.000But then there's this thought process that the conflict and the evil is important to sort of strengthen and encourage the good, and that this is all part of this evolutionary process that the human race is going through, and that almost...
01:51:52.000In the face of this catastrophe is where real change comes.
01:51:55.000And then we kind of have to understand that evil and terrible behavior is a real thing.
01:52:01.000And have some mad search for the tools to mitigate these problems.
01:52:08.000And so it encourages people like yourself.
01:52:11.000It encourages people to try to figure these things out using...
01:52:16.000And again, these tools which are right under our nose that have been here for thousands of years.
01:52:20.000Yeah, I mean, people say that the stars burn brighter because they're surrounded by darkness.
01:52:25.000Yeah, but that's the weird thing about the human race.
01:53:24.000So, in Jungian psychology, the shadow is the parts of ourselves that we disown.
01:53:30.000You know, it's our dark sides that we don't see.
01:53:32.000And so what Jung said is that the most political, therapeutic, and social thing that we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others.
01:53:42.000So when you cannot deal with a part of yourself, you project it out.
01:53:46.000And so these people become the enemies.
01:55:37.000And then the very next day, and this gets back a little bit to legalization, the next day, and to MAPS's political strategy, the next day, we experimented with ketamine.
01:55:49.000All right, so in my ketamine experience, somehow or other, I was above and behind Hitler because, you know, the Holocaust had been this animating idea for me my whole life.
01:56:03.000Ketamine gives you a bit of remove, like you're not So I felt that I was safe, but I was watching him give a speech to these rallies where we have enormous numbers of Germans.
01:56:14.000And I was thinking, how do I get into his head so he doesn't want to murder everybody, doesn't want to kill the Jews, doesn't want to have this roar?
01:56:41.000So I started breathing deeply, which is a really important way to kind of ground yourself in difficult experiences of all kinds, psychedelics or not.
01:56:51.000And then I was able to go back and watch.
01:56:55.000And what I saw was this Heil Hitler salute.
01:56:58.000And then I saw everybody doing it back to him.
01:57:01.000And I got this sense because Hitler was able to help people feel that they were all together, the German nation, that they were all part of something bigger.
01:57:09.000And so it felt like he's pushing this energy out with the Heil Hitler salute, and then everybody is pushing it back to him.
01:57:16.000So it felt like the one to the many and the many to the one.
01:57:19.000And then it was like vibrations going up and up and up, like this kind of unity between him and the people.
01:57:28.000And then I realized that there's no way I can get into his head.
01:57:31.000Like you're saying, the psychopaths that are often politicians, that they're getting so much out of it.
01:57:36.000But it's the people giving away their power that I thought, that's where the solution has to be.
01:57:42.000So MAPS is about mass mental health, about a spiritualized humanity.
01:57:48.000And so that led to this understanding for me that safety for humanity is not just...
01:57:57.000Giving drugs to the leaders and having them wake up.
01:57:59.000You know, it's about anchoring mass mental health and that the people that are giving away their power are getting less from it than the people that are amassing all this power.
01:58:09.000So that led to this idea we need to medicalize, we need to go, you know, to produce real scientific evidence about benefits and risks, but at the same time there needs to be drug policy reform where we need access to people.
01:58:24.000In a way, preventative medicine or if they don't have a diagnosis.
01:59:19.000Yeah, they were all methed out of their fucking minds, which is like the wrong drugs can ruin everything You know and that whole experience of being a part of something and everyone's on amphetamines.
01:59:39.000But just like crazy when you think about how history was changed and a large part of the way it was accepted was because everybody was messed up.
01:59:51.000On the wrong I mean imagine if Hitler was dosing out everybody with mushrooms They would have been like hold on like what are why are we in Poland?
02:00:04.000I gotta get out of this country like people just abandoned ship it's just The worst drugs are the ones that are always pushed by the tyrants and I think blitzed is a perfect example that the the Nazi administration that what the the Nazi Government was doing giving their soldiers giving their the people in the tanks got the most meth Because they had to be at the front lines.
02:00:29.000It's a crazy book, man It just makes you think like what does that look like if no meth is there?
02:00:34.000Does this all get worked out way in advance?
02:01:20.000Yeah, I think that was a part of the Nazi lore—oh, excuse me, the Viking lore as well.
02:01:25.000The Viking lore had—did Vikings find that out?
02:01:28.000Would they just take—because Amanita's a weird one, right?
02:01:31.000I remember McKenna saying something about that he believes that it differed not just seasonally, but he thinks the effects differed genetically and geographically, and they were different in different places.
02:01:44.000Sort of like, you know, like— A bad example, but all I have, like, if you grow certain tobaccos in Cuba, they make the best cigars because the soil is, like, so rich.
02:01:55.000And you get a cigar from, you know, it's grown somewhere in America, it's not going to taste like a cigar that's grown in Cuba because there's something going on with the difference.
02:02:03.000And I would imagine it's probably something about the nutrients in certain soil that would lead to the Amanita developing these properties in some places and not in others.
02:03:00.000Also, I've been in touch with some very well politically connected scientists in India, and they don't think that Amanita is actually Soma.
02:03:30.000Well, we don't even actually know what was in the Kikion from the Eleusis.
02:03:35.000We think that it might have something to do with ergot and LSD-like things.
02:03:41.000There's an article about it, actually from Netflix, about the show Vikings, talks about how the Amanita might have not actually made them berserkers and it was something else doing it.
02:03:51.000It says, if anything, fly agaric would have made them particularly worthless warriors since the side effects included drowsiness, vomiting, muscle spasms, and numbness in arms and legs.
02:04:03.000Rather, it's more like if berserkers were getting high off henbane.
02:04:30.000So the Amanita Muscaria one, though, I always go back to the sacred mushroom in the cross because that was what John Marco Allegro believed was the early days of Christianity.
02:05:36.000I mean, but it's pretty clear that, at least from a lot of these Indian scholars, that Amanita is not SOMA, but they don't know what it is.
02:07:16.000I think one of the things I like to say is that if your goals are something that you can accomplish in your own lifetime, they're too small.
02:07:24.000We need to have, like, multi-generational goals.
02:07:27.000I grew up outside of Chicago, and there's this Baha 'i temple.
02:07:32.000So the Baha 'i religion emerged out of Islam, but it's more of a universal religion.
02:07:39.000and they're suppressed a lot in the Islamic countries.
02:07:44.000But there was this temple that they built outside of Chicago, this beautiful temple, but it took three I think this process of elevating consciousness...
02:08:09.000in humanity so we can learn how to live together and not destroy the planet is however long it happens to take.
02:08:16.000So if things take longer than I thought That's a great attitude.
02:09:51.000So there's going to be concerts, music, all sorts of things connected to this conference.
02:09:56.000And it's also lots of opportunities for networking.
02:10:01.000Because, again, For me, even though MAPS has been focused on MDMA, what it's really about is the psychedelic renaissance.
02:10:09.000So I don't see the psilocybin or the ibogaine or anything as competition.
02:10:14.000We want the psychedelic therapists of the future to be cross-trained in all the different drugs and then to be able to customize the treatment for each person.
02:10:25.000And that's what we're hoping to develop.
02:10:28.000And one more time, what are the dates and where is this?
02:11:58.000So I think that Lycos is going to succeed, whether it takes six months or three and a half years or whatever.
02:12:05.000We will eventually, FDA will eventually approve MDMA cystic therapy for PTSD, then they'll approve psilocybin and other things.
02:12:12.000And so I'm sort of going around the world in sort of high-trauma, low-resource areas to try to globalize access.
02:12:20.000And I think that we're in a perilous time in America right now, and we could use more people dealing with their fears, dealing with their anxiety, withdrawing the projection of the shadows.
02:12:30.000You know, immigrants have actually made America stronger in a lot of ways.
02:13:02.000I mean, I think the real fear that people have is cartel members and people coming across the border and terrorists coming across, and not having a secure border, which I think we should have a secure border, but I also think we should have path to citizenship, too.
02:13:14.000I mean, this is a great place, and this is the reason why people are willing to walk across the river to try to get here with their children.
02:13:21.000They know that you can make something out of your life here.
02:13:24.000I just think we could do better with all the things that you said, all the things you said, and with a guy like you out there spreading the world.