The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #371 - Rick Doblin

00:00:07.000 Hello, freaks. 1.00

00:00:09.000 We're rocking it late night style.

00:00:11.000 It's 10.30 p.m.

00:00:13.000 here in Los Angeles, California.

00:00:15.000 And this episode of the Joe Rogan Experience Podcast is brought to you by Audible.com.

00:00:19.000 If you've never been to Audible.com and you're a fan of either audiobooks or podcasts or...

00:00:27.000 I mean, they have old radio shows.

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00:01:14.000 It's really good and not so good together.

00:01:16.000 How's Brad Pitt dreamy?

00:01:18.000 He's dreamy as always.

00:01:19.000 I don't want to say too much.

00:01:20.000 I don't want to spoil it for anybody.

00:01:21.000 I enjoyed it though.

00:01:23.000 It's an enjoyable film. 1.00

00:01:24.000 It's a fucking Hollywood movie, man. 0.99

00:01:26.000 It's a big Hollywood movie with Brad Pitt and it's PG-13. 1.00

00:01:29.000 There's a certain amount of fuckery afoot. 0.98

00:01:31.000 It's unavoidable. 0.92

00:01:33.000 Anyway, you can buy that book or get that book for free.

00:01:36.000 If you go to audible.com forward slash Joe, you get one free audiobook.

00:01:39.000 30 free days.

00:01:41.000 Of audio service from Audible.

00:01:44.000 Audio service?

00:01:45.000 That sounds sexy.

00:01:47.000 We're also brought to you by Ting. 0.85

00:01:49.000 If you go to rogan.ting.com, you will save $25 either off one of Ting's delicious, sexy Android phones or their service.

00:01:59.000 If you've never used or heard of Ting, I assume you haven't used him. 0.98

00:02:04.000 Otherwise, I'm just wasting my fucking time here. 0.76

00:02:07.000 Maybe you have, and maybe you've heard this podcast a million times, which is also possible. 0.97

00:02:11.000 There's no other way to do this commercial, folks, so I've got to plow through.

00:02:15.000 What Ting is, is a cell phone company that uses the Sprint backbone, so it's all very high-end service.

00:02:24.000 And they try to do it in a very reasonable way.

00:02:28.000 If you want to cancel, you can cancel at any time.

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00:02:35.000 If you don't use a certain amount of your service, they'll drop you down to the next level.

00:02:41.000 Which is really beautiful.

00:02:42.000 If you use less than you thought you would, Ting drops you down to the next level and they credit you the difference on your next bill.

00:02:49.000 It's awesome.

00:02:50.000 I love Ting, man.

00:02:51.000 I used them two days ago at this place that I had my AT&T iPhone and I couldn't get service there, good enough data service.

00:03:00.000 I tried my iPad, which is Verizon.

00:03:01.000 Same thing.

00:03:02.000 Pulled out my Ting device.

00:03:03.000 It was Ustreaming on their network from the Comedy Store.

00:03:07.000 Really?

00:03:08.000 Yeah, I was doing Ustream.

00:03:09.000 Sprint works good at me.

00:03:10.000 That's why Joey Diaz always had Sprint.

00:03:11.000 That's right.

00:03:12.000 Yeah, I guess Sprint works in places.

00:03:13.000 Verizon doesn't.

00:03:15.000 No one's perfect at this point in time.

00:03:18.000 But what they're trying to do at Ting is just give you an option.

00:03:22.000 An option that's easier to swallow.

00:03:23.000 And it's a cool company, and we enjoy doing business with them.

00:03:26.000 And go to rogan.ting.com. 1.00

00:03:28.000 Save yourself some money, you dirty bitches. 1.00

00:03:33.000 We're also about to you. 1.00

00:03:34.000 Finally, this is the last one, I swear to God.

00:03:36.000 And on it.

00:03:37.000 But on it's just a given.

00:03:39.000 I'll try to make it funny.

00:03:41.000 Legalzoom.com is our last sponsor.

00:03:44.000 Legalzoom.com is a website that essentially, they lay the framework for legal issues that you would normally have to go to a lawyer for and pay a lot of money.

00:03:59.000 What LegalZoom wants to emphasize very clearly is they're not a law firm.

00:04:04.000 They provide self-help services at your specific direction and they can also connect you with an independent attorney if you need additional guidance.

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00:04:26.000 Six on Enora came six.

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00:04:29.000 Legal stuff's evil.

00:04:30.000 I was thinking 666. It's really nice.

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00:04:38.000 If you have a family, you can make a will.

00:04:40.000 You know what?

00:04:41.000 That's crazy.

00:04:41.000 None of us have wills.

00:04:42.000 I was talking to my friends the other day about that.

00:04:44.000 I was like, do you have a will?

00:04:45.000 No.

00:04:45.000 What happens?

00:04:46.000 Well, if you live in California, your parents live in California, California gets all your shit. 1.00

00:04:49.000 Unless your parents break into your house and steal everything. 1.00

00:04:52.000 Really?

00:04:52.000 Yeah, I think it's...

00:04:53.000 California gets all your shit? 1.00

00:04:54.000 I might be 100% wrong with you, but... 1.00

00:04:57.000 No, but I guess there is a thing, if you don't have a will, you think it just automatically goes to your family, but that's not always the case. 0.98

00:05:05.000 Yeah, but I would assume that it would be a pain in the ass to decide, especially if you're living with someone, like if you're living with a girl or something like that, or a girl has a key to your house and she knows you're dead and just comes over and takes your shit, that's how you know the little she cares about you. 0.98

00:05:16.000 No doubt. 0.99

00:05:17.000 You told me that was mine.

00:05:18.000 With you?

00:05:19.000 Yeah, but there would be like seven girls all butting heads trying to get in the door at the same time. 1.00

00:05:23.000 How dare you?

00:05:24.000 How dare you?

00:05:25.000 Just that was a humble brag.

00:05:27.000 No, no.

00:05:28.000 Anyway, LegalZoom.com, it's not a law firm.

00:05:33.000 Remember, they're just trying to help you out.

00:05:37.000 And I know there's like some code that I'm supposed to use, but of course it's not on this copy.

00:05:43.000 Probably.

00:05:44.000 I think it's just the code name is Rogan.

00:05:47.000 But let me just make sure.

00:05:48.000 You know, you should, like, get all these guys together and just make it Rogan for everything.

00:05:52.000 I know, it would be nice.

00:05:54.000 But it's not that way. 1.00

00:05:56.000 I bet you'd lose a lot of people that are just like, fuck it, I don't know it. 0.99

00:05:59.000 I'm just... 1.00

00:06:01.000 whatever.

00:06:02.000 Yeah, probably, right?

00:06:03.000 Yeah, it's the codename Rogan.

00:06:05.000 Sorry, it's right in front of my face.

00:06:06.000 Not only that, it's highlighted.

00:06:08.000 You get a special discount from listening to this podcast, so just enter the codename Rogan in the referral box and check out for more savings.

00:06:14.000 That's LegalZoom.com.

00:06:16.000 You always have to say it like that at the end because that makes you more professional. 0.99

00:06:19.000 If you just go, okay, that fucking commercial's over. 0.97

00:06:21.000 Next, you have to have a theatrical ending. 0.99

00:06:24.000 I'm surprised you don't have to do one of those quick, fast talking things.

00:06:26.000 Tom Segura on their podcast has something similar, but at the end, they have to do one of those Do they really?

00:06:35.000 They really have to say that?

00:06:37.000 Ew.

00:06:38.000 Ew.

00:06:39.000 It's weird.

00:06:40.000 Well, as long as you don't tell us what to actually say on the podcast, I'm cool with almost anything that's a reasonable ad.

00:06:45.000 Right.

00:06:46.000 It makes sense.

00:06:46.000 If it's something I would use, then I would totally use this.

00:06:48.000 Right.

00:06:49.000 I've used this.

00:06:50.000 Yeah, as long as it makes sense to me.

00:06:51.000 But that doesn't make sense.

00:06:54.000 I'm not reading off any...

00:06:55.000 The following...

00:06:56.000 The following...

00:06:57.000 Connecticut...

00:06:58.000 Onnit.com is the last sponsor.

00:07:00.000 O-N-N-I-T. If you've never been, go check it out. 0.98

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00:07:05.000 We've got a lot of new shit in it. 0.96

00:07:06.000 If you haven't been into the website before, into the website, I don't think you go into a website. 0.97

00:07:11.000 If you go onto a website.

00:07:13.000 Why is it on and not in?

00:07:14.000 I mean, you're not really on it.

00:07:16.000 What are you doing?

00:07:17.000 What are you doing when you go onto a website?

00:07:19.000 You're going on or are you going in it?

00:07:21.000 You're actually entering it.

00:07:22.000 To it.

00:07:22.000 To it?

00:07:23.000 Yeah.

00:07:24.000 And then what do you do?

00:07:24.000 Do you go in or do you go on it?

00:07:26.000 So I'm on the website.

00:07:27.000 You're on the website.

00:07:28.000 Right, but why is it on?

00:07:29.000 Because you're on it.

00:07:30.000 Your face is on it.

00:07:31.000 It's more like you're in, though.

00:07:32.000 You're in the website.

00:07:33.000 You're clicking different pages.

00:07:35.000 You're like in a book.

00:07:36.000 Oh, I'm 50 pages into my book.

00:07:38.000 Or you're in most websites, like your pictures and stuff.

00:07:40.000 So I think that's more confusing to most people.

00:07:43.000 Me?

00:07:43.000 I'm in most websites?

00:07:44.000 Yeah, you're in most websites.

00:07:45.000 Most people go to a website, they're not in it.

00:07:48.000 Well, you mean like on it? 1.00

00:07:51.000 Dude, you're retarded. 1.00

00:07:52.000 I can't believe I'm talking to you. 1.00

00:07:53.000 I'm being serious. 0.97

00:07:54.000 I'm never going to stop saying retarded either. 1.00

00:07:56.000 Fuck you. 1.00

00:07:57.000 I know. 1.00

00:07:57.000 You took away tranny now? 1.00

00:08:00.000 How dare you?

00:08:00.000 That's so hard.

00:08:02.000 I'm taking retarded back. 1.00

00:08:03.000 I'm putting more words back in the vernacular.

00:08:06.000 You know what I'm talking about. 0.98

00:08:08.000 I'm not talking about diseases, dummy. 1.00

00:08:09.000 There's a retarded tranny somewhere going, Oh, no. 1.00

00:08:13.000 Oh, I can't believe you did the voice. 0.94

00:08:15.000 On it.com, the new Primal Bells are in.

00:08:18.000 If you haven't seen them, we hired this awesome sculptor to draw these angry chimpanzee faces for kettlebells.

00:08:27.000 Gives you a little bit of extra motivation when you're working out. 0.63

00:08:29.000 I like to picture that chimp Clamping down on my scrotum with his teeth, that gets me through the last four or five reps. 1.00

00:08:36.000 If you've never used kettlebells before, what they are is, in my opinion, one of the very best strength and conditioning exercise equipment, pieces of exercise equipment that you can buy. 0.93

00:08:46.000 They're a Russian invention, and it's like a cannonball with a handle on it. 1.00

00:08:50.000 And you swing them around, and you use your entire body in these movements.

00:08:55.000 And I find that that's what really applies to not just physical sports, but just physical movement, all physical movement.

00:09:05.000 Like picking things up, the ability to move stuff around your house.

00:09:08.000 You gain a balanced sort of strength.

00:09:11.000 Whereas a lot of people, one of the problems with people who don't use a professional trainer or don't exactly know what you're doing, you can develop imbalances.

00:09:21.000 with your body because maybe you use your arms too much, you don't use your legs enough, or vice-a-verse, and it can be a mess.

00:09:28.000 One of the best things you can do if you're thinking about kettlebells or any kind of exercise thing is to hire someone who's really good who can show you what to do.

00:09:39.000 You can learn a lot of stuff from YouTube, but you really should have someone sort of correcting subtle things in the way you're moving.

00:09:46.000 Just to make sure that you have good form.

00:09:48.000 Use light weight to begin with.

00:09:50.000 Try to be very reasonable about what you're trying to do.

00:09:53.000 And then build.

00:09:54.000 Write it down and build.

00:09:56.000 And when you do do that, you will get an immense sense of satisfaction.

00:10:01.000 The sense of satisfaction that you get from pushing your body and getting your body into a good state of physical fitness.

00:10:07.000 It's not just a vanity thing.

00:10:08.000 It's really good for your health.

00:10:11.000 I talk about it all the time, but it's very hard for people to stop eating donuts and get off the couch.

00:10:17.000 It's very difficult to choose to have a salad instead of a shitty cheeseburger. 0.86

00:10:23.000 It's hard. 1.00

00:10:24.000 It's hard to get your shit together. 0.99

00:10:25.000 But if you can get your shit together, even just a little bit, you'll feel better. 0.99

00:10:29.000 That's a fact. 0.98

00:10:30.000 I lost eight pounds in two weeks.

00:10:32.000 Oh, you really?

00:10:32.000 Yeah, and that's after quitting smoking, which is, like, usually you gain weight.

00:10:36.000 Good for you, sexy bitch. 1.00

00:10:37.000 Brian Reichel, looking at health. 1.00

00:10:39.000 He's cutting back on his coffee. 1.00

00:10:41.000 He's doing all kinds of shit. 1.00

00:10:42.000 Next thing you know, he'll be taking T+. I need some of that. 1.00

00:10:45.000 Get some.

00:10:46.000 We got some.

00:10:47.000 I'll give you some.

00:10:47.000 I'll bring you some next podcast.

00:10:49.000 Cool.

00:10:50.000 Alright, that's the end.

00:10:51.000 Use the code name ROGAN. That's R-O-G-A-N and you will save 10% off any and all supplements.

00:10:58.000 Alright, my friends. 0.99

00:10:59.000 Rick Doblin is here and we are going to get to the bottom of some shit. 0.99

00:11:03.000 Please cue the music. 0.99

00:11:05.000 Joe Rogan Podcast.

00:11:07.000 Check it out.

00:11:08.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:11:10.000 Train by day.

00:11:11.000 Joe Rogan Podcast by night.

00:11:13.000 All day.

00:11:18.000 You made it.

00:11:18.000 I did.

00:11:20.000 Rick Doblin, who is the head of maps, or if you...

00:11:25.000 I've never heard...

00:11:26.000 Is it called an acronym where it's MAPS? Yeah, it is because you say it, right?

00:11:30.000 When you don't say it, it's an abbreviation.

00:11:32.000 Is that what it is?

00:11:33.000 We tried to figure that out once.

00:11:36.000 But it stands for the multidisciplinary...

00:11:38.000 That's what Google is for.

00:11:39.000 It is what Google is for, but somehow or another, I'm not quite...

00:11:42.000 I don't totally have it together.

00:11:45.000 Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.

00:11:48.000 You founded this.

00:11:49.000 Yeah, and I was surprised to discover it has the most syllables of any organization in the nonprofit world for drug reform.

00:11:56.000 Really?

00:11:57.000 Well, it's a very interesting title, Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.

00:12:03.000 That's what I love about it.

00:12:04.000 It's like you're coming at it from a whole bunch of different angles.

00:12:07.000 This isn't just doctors, it's not just chemists, it's a whole bunch of human beings.

00:12:13.000 Yeah, and I had learned from a previous nonprofit that when you want to create a nonprofit, it's good to try to make it as broad as possible, the purpose, as you see different strategic ways to do things.

00:12:25.000 So I made it multidisciplinary, which means we could look at psychedelics from virtually any perspective, association to mean that it's publicly supported, a nonprofit, and I had images of tens of thousands of people banding together to support research in different areas.

00:12:44.000 Psychedelic was a big choice, actually, whether we should use the word, whether we should use a different word, whether we should use a euphemism.

00:12:55.000 And so I felt like I wanted, in this kind of second coming of psychedelics into the culture, 40 years after the crackdown, that I wanted there to be a certain transparency.

00:13:05.000 And so I wanted to use the word psychedelic so people knew what I was doing.

00:13:09.000 And I was hoping that we can change the cultural connotations from What it was in the 60s of psychedelics, rebellion, dropping out, finding your own sort of private utopia somewhere, a certain kind of not integrated into the culture.

00:13:27.000 And now that's, I think, the arc of the story is psychedelics came at a time when culture wasn't really ready and brought all sorts of things to the surface.

00:13:36.000 And over the last 40 years, our culture has gotten ready with hospice centers, with birthing centers, with Yoga, meditation, all the things with flotation tanks, all the things that were too hard to integrate at the time, death and birth and just raw emotions,

00:13:53.000 and also this globalization and growing sense of global spirituality.

00:13:58.000 Now our culture is ready and I think we can, over the next 10-20 years, integrate psychedelics without the connotation of rebellion but to enhance what we're all doing together.

00:14:07.000 That's interesting.

00:14:08.000 I like the use of the word psychedelics because you're owning it.

00:14:11.000 That is what it's about.

00:14:13.000 It shouldn't be something that people are afraid of or afraid of adding to something because it will somehow or another make it silly or make it, oh, psychedelics.

00:14:23.000 People want to dismiss it and they can much easier.

00:14:27.000 Owning it, I think, is very important.

00:14:29.000 Yeah, and there's no other word that's even better.

00:14:31.000 No.

00:14:31.000 Hallucinogen was used by the government.

00:14:33.000 It's like you're fake.

00:14:34.000 Yeah, I don't like that feeling either.

00:14:36.000 Hallucinogen always makes me feel like I'm seeing something that's not there.

00:14:40.000 You know, that's the idea.

00:14:41.000 Yeah, it's not real.

00:14:42.000 It's not valid.

00:14:42.000 And for folks who don't know anything about psychedelics, they imagine, like, literally, like, imagining someone in the room with you and that guy, it doesn't really exist.

00:14:52.000 Yeah, and you can't even tell the difference.

00:14:53.000 The word before that, in the 50s, was even worse.

00:14:56.000 It was psychotomimetic.

00:14:58.000 Which means it mimics psychosis.

00:15:01.000 Well, it does on some people.

00:15:03.000 We have to be careful.

00:15:05.000 It does bring out all parts of ourselves.

00:15:08.000 I think we all have those kind of parts where they're not really integrated and it seems...

00:15:14.000 Yes.

00:15:35.000 Yeah, I can imagine.

00:15:36.000 So self-examinatory anyway.

00:15:40.000 I'm not an LSD person.

00:15:41.000 I never have tried it because I've never trusted anybody in the right way to get it.

00:15:46.000 But I've done a lot of time in the tank, especially on high doses of edibles, edible weed.

00:15:52.000 You know that insanely uncomfortable feeling that you get? 0.99

00:15:55.000 You get examinatory about shit you did in high school. 0.99

00:15:58.000 Like really in-depth about shit you did in high school. 0.99

00:16:01.000 Yeah, that's what it's good for. 0.99

00:16:01.000 Yeah, and the tank does that on its own. 0.99

00:16:04.000 So the tank with that together, it's...

00:16:07.000 I can imagine acid in the tank would be a similar experience.

00:16:11.000 Yeah.

00:16:12.000 Well, I grew up reading John Lilly in 1971, actually.

00:16:16.000 The Deep Self?

00:16:16.000 Yeah.

00:16:18.000 But it was before that was programming and metaprogramming and the human biocomputer.

00:16:22.000 And that was so technical and complicated.

00:16:25.000 I had to spend like a whole day on each page or something.

00:16:27.000 I just like cannot figure this stuff out.

00:16:29.000 It was so early computer discussion and language about how the brain operates.

00:16:36.000 Yeah.

00:16:36.000 Yeah, he was a real pioneer, like a real pioneer.

00:16:39.000 I mean, that dude was out there.

00:16:41.000 Yeah, but he went too far out, and he wasn't grounded, and his last 30 years were kind of a sad tragedy, I would say.

00:16:48.000 Wasted potential.

00:16:49.000 Is that because of ketamine?

00:16:51.000 Because he got involved heavily with ketamine, which has some pretty disastrous results.

00:16:56.000 Yeah, ketamine is the most addictive of all the psychedelics.

00:16:59.000 It's physically addictive.

00:17:01.000 Not so much physically, but more this reliable escape and this delusion of superiority.

00:17:10.000 So is there a withdrawal?

00:17:14.000 Not in that same way as heroin.

00:17:16.000 It's not like physically.

00:17:17.000 It's just a psychological addiction more.

00:17:19.000 So there's a shift in attitude.

00:17:22.000 But what I think was the problem with John Lilly more than before the ketamine was a certain kind of brilliance that was unbalanced. 0.65

00:17:31.000 And he was kind of arrogant.

00:17:32.000 And I don't think he was patient. 0.87

00:17:34.000 And he was way ahead of his culture. 0.91

00:17:37.000 You know, way ahead.

00:17:38.000 And yet...

00:17:39.000 When he saw the crackdown come, I think he sort of took this superior position and just felt like he's not going to work on a political struggle or even a scientific struggle to get these tools back.

00:17:54.000 He kind of withdrew.

00:17:57.000 He just had this somewhat self-destructive aspect, too.

00:18:03.000 I read a lot about him and I met him and I actually ended up Trying to do MDMA therapy with him when it felt like he was really going downhill from the ketamine and from cocaine.

00:18:17.000 Wow!

00:18:18.000 That's intense.

00:18:20.000 That is the worry.

00:18:21.000 He was kind of my hero, one of them.

00:18:23.000 He and Stan Groff, and I would contrast them that Stan is doing fantastically, is traveling the world, is totally together, and a major inspiration who is able to integrate into his life, whereas John Lilly was You could say arguably as brilliant,

00:18:38.000 but went off the track.

00:18:41.000 Yeah, it is possible.

00:18:42.000 One of the real issues with anything that completely alters the way your mind works is that you could get into that too much.

00:18:49.000 You can get into that more than reality and lose your grip of this world.

00:18:53.000 Well, it is reality.

00:18:54.000 It's just a different view of reality.

00:18:57.000 And I think that the grounding part, and what we emphasize in our psychedelic therapy, is that it's the integration work.

00:19:05.000 More than the experience itself that produces long-term benefits.

00:19:08.000 So then you can have these unusual experiences, but what do you bring back from them?

00:19:13.000 And how do you integrate that into your daily practices so that it's anchored so that you can try to get there without the drug?

00:19:20.000 It's like this evolution process where you learn something, And I've found, at least, that for me, the psychedelics are something that I can work with through a lifetime, through a lifespan.

00:19:32.000 Some people say, when you get the message, hang up the phone.

00:19:35.000 And I've felt that there's been different messages at different stages of my life, and that I'm more able, although it's still really hard, to hear those things, the self-critical stuff, like what you did in high school, or how you try to hear the message underneath the criticism.

00:19:55.000 I learned that a lot during an Ibogaine experience.

00:19:58.000 So I've seen that these experiences can have these lasting changes, but that they don't always and they don't have to.

00:20:06.000 And particularly when you have these experiences that are unbalanced and the drug starts wearing off and you haven't come to a new balance.

00:20:13.000 And during those periods the best solution at least is to continue therapy and do another Session, and that's where people often back off, and they kind of freeze something in place that's at such a deep level, it's hard to get to that deep level to move it forward.

00:20:30.000 Yeah, it's a very personal thing, isn't it?

00:20:34.000 Like, where you start from, too.

00:20:36.000 You know, for some folks, it's like they already have issues with reality itself.

00:20:41.000 They have issues with being grounded, with being calm, and I mean, it's...

00:20:47.000 Some people, you could just get them high or they could have some sort of psychedelic experience and they would be able to assimilate it into their life and they would benefit from it almost immediately.

00:20:59.000 Whereas other folks almost needed to be...

00:21:01.000 I think education is one of the big ones that we're really lacking in this country when it comes to these things.

00:21:08.000 And the word shaman is such a...

00:21:10.000 Such a loaded word.

00:21:11.000 Yes, it is.

00:21:12.000 Because it's like healer. 0.99

00:21:13.000 You know, when someone says they're a healer, all of a sudden you go, okay, what other dumb shit are you going to say next? 0.99

00:21:20.000 Right, right. 0.97

00:21:20.000 Our holotherapeutic approach is based on the idea that there's an inner healer and it's the support that we provide to help people heal themselves. 0.97

00:21:28.000 So there's a power dynamic often in shamanism where sometimes the shaman is even the only one that does the drug and then heals you.

00:21:36.000 It's not teaching you how to heal yourself.

00:21:39.000 So that we have this idea that like the body heals itself if you get a cut, that the psyche has these self-healing mechanisms and brings things kind of to the surface so that it's not so much reality and psychedelic state.

00:21:54.000 It's almost like reality and more reality.

00:21:58.000 And we know that from fMRI brain scan studies that were recently done In England with psilocybin, that what it does in the brain is different than what we had been thinking.

00:22:09.000 And we had been thinking that it makes the brain speed up, that some things work even faster, that your perceptions are going...

00:22:17.000 And actually what it does is it makes parts of the brain slow down, but it's the filtering parts of the brain, so that we have enormous volume of perceptions coming to us at any one time.

00:22:30.000 And that's kind of what you can see in the tank, too, that When you start quieting everything down, you can really, you know, think in different ways.

00:22:37.000 But we have this enormous amount of information, and we only narrow and look at some of it, what we need to do, either for survival or for, we focus.

00:22:46.000 And the controlling, the filtering parts of the brain are what psilocybin slows down, so that they work less well, so you get more of a flood of what's already there.

00:22:58.000 What is the mechanism, the filtering parts of the brain?

00:23:01.000 When you say the filtering parts of the brain, what are those?

00:23:03.000 Well, they're generally linked in what's called the default network, the default mode network.

00:23:12.000 And here becomes kind of a practical side of the work that I do, which is basically trying to develop psychedelic drugs into prescription medicines and marijuana.

00:23:25.000 So from the FDA's point of view, uh...

00:23:28.000 you have to show something safe and efficacious but you don't have to explain how it works so therefore i haven't really focused on that so i don't know the answer your question because uh...

00:23:39.000 it's neuroscience and i don't need neuroscience to know the exact You know, the quadrants of the brain.

00:23:45.000 So I've kind of got people I work with and other people I rely on and other scientists to do that part.

00:23:53.000 It helps if you have an explanatory mechanism, but at the same time it's not necessary.

00:23:58.000 So what I've done is try to be strategic and try to focus on the stuff that's essential to move the culture forward, to create legal context, For psychedelics to show that they can be used responsibly.

00:24:08.000 Well, I was asking more for my own edification.

00:24:10.000 I wish I could answer you.

00:24:11.000 Of course I knew.

00:24:12.000 I read that very study about quieting areas of the mind.

00:24:17.000 I thought it was really fascinating.

00:24:19.000 And I attributed it to...

00:24:24.000 The idea being that we are filled with noise.

00:24:27.000 You know, that our mind is filled with noise. 0.99

00:24:30.000 Our mind is filled with concentrating on a bunch of shit that's not really important. 0.99

00:24:34.000 And that that gets shut off. 1.00

00:24:36.000 And then you can sort of tune in to whatever the fuck it is that you took. 0.99

00:24:40.000 And whatever it is that you took that's doing something. 1.00

00:24:44.000 And...

00:24:44.000 Yeah, I don't see it so much that stuff is not important, but it's not as important.

00:24:49.000 I mean, you need to do certain things to get through the day.

00:24:53.000 Right.

00:24:53.000 So you need to have a narrower focus.

00:24:55.000 Maybe not important wasn't even what I should have said.

00:24:57.000 It's not that it's not important.

00:24:59.000 It's just sometimes there are things in your life that aren't that important, but they take primary focus.

00:25:04.000 Yes, yes.

00:25:04.000 They take center stage.

00:25:06.000 Whether it's an argument you got with a friend over almost nothing.

00:25:11.000 Something that can be addressed really easily and quickly, probably.

00:25:14.000 But whatever it is, it's bothering you.

00:25:17.000 Should I say something?

00:25:18.000 Because I really feel like I'm being slighted. 0.99

00:25:20.000 And then I'll fuck with you all day until you actually have the conversation with the person. 0.99

00:25:23.000 And it could be a million other things. 1.00

00:25:25.000 It could be financial issues that you have.

00:25:27.000 It could be...

00:25:27.000 Something's wrong with your house and you have to pay to get it fixed.

00:25:30.000 And all these things just constantly chip away at your ability to focus on the now and to enjoy, just enjoy the experience of life itself.

00:25:38.000 Yeah, I've never really felt comfortable kind of meditating to try to let all those things go.

00:25:44.000 Because I get into this state where I have this idea of something I should do.

00:25:49.000 And I think those things that you mentioned are really important.

00:25:51.000 How you relate to your friends.

00:25:53.000 Those are the most important things of life, not the least important.

00:25:57.000 But I've always felt like when I'm, if I were to be meditating, this idea will come up and I'm supposed to just let it go.

00:26:03.000 I thought, why don't I just do it?

00:26:05.000 So I'm more outer-focused.

00:26:08.000 And for me, the jogging and being stoned are like meditation.

00:26:14.000 Oh, it's definitely meditation.

00:26:16.000 Yeah.

00:26:17.000 Yeah, jogging stone is a trip.

00:26:19.000 It's very different than just exercising.

00:26:23.000 But I think that this idea of creating a space, like in the tank or like a therapeutic setting, where you're not paying attention to all those daily things, where you can sink deeper to other questions of life, that is really important.

00:26:38.000 You have to kind of consciously create a space for that.

00:26:40.000 Yeah.

00:26:41.000 The things that always come up in trips for me, the uncomfortable things, are always things that I really should be working on anyway.

00:26:51.000 It's always like maybe I've hit an imbalance and I've focused too much on this and not enough on that or whatever it is.

00:26:57.000 Those moments where it hits you, it's like you should have known that anyway.

00:27:01.000 Yeah.

00:27:02.000 And if you knew, if you were living in a harmonious way, we wouldn't have to tell you this.

00:27:07.000 Alright?

00:27:07.000 So get it over with.

00:27:08.000 Figure that out.

00:27:09.000 And every trip that I've had where that's happened, there have only been a few of them that are really super uncomfortable, just really bad.

00:27:17.000 But those always, I benefited from those.

00:27:19.000 Every one of them.

00:27:20.000 Now what do you mean by bad?

00:27:21.000 I don't mean bad.

00:27:23.000 I mean uncomfortable.

00:27:25.000 Like, especially with the eating marijuana.

00:27:28.000 The eating marijuana thing, a lot of folks do not give that the proper respect.

00:27:34.000 And that's why they freak out and call the cops.

00:27:36.000 I'm sure you've heard the great video of the police officers who stole marijuana from someone they pulled over and then made pot brownies and then got so high they panicked and called the police.

00:27:48.000 The police called the police?

00:27:49.000 That's great.

00:27:50.000 Yeah, they called an ambulance.

00:27:51.000 Have you heard that before, Brian?

00:27:54.000 Yeah, we've played it on here.

00:27:55.000 That's right, we've played it. 1.00

00:27:56.000 Oh sure, play it just for a goof because it's fucking ridiculous. 0.99

00:27:59.000 These poor people, what they didn't know, these dirty cops, is that marijuana, when it's processed by your liver, when you eat it, produces something called 11-hydroxymetabolite, an incredibly psychoactive material. 0.99

00:28:11.000 It's not... 0.92

00:28:12.000 Like the THC high at all.

00:28:14.000 It's a totally different experience and much stronger.

00:28:16.000 And that's why a lot of people think that like they ate a cookie that it was laced.

00:28:20.000 Like, oh my god, somebody laced this with something.

00:28:23.000 No, you're taking a totally different drug.

00:28:26.000 Yeah, we do harm reduction at festivals to try to...

00:28:30.000 Imagine a post-prohibition world.

00:28:32.000 So at Burning Man Boom, other festivals where we provide and organize teams of therapists and others that work with people that have difficult trips.

00:28:42.000 And the most people come sometimes is for eating too much marijuana.

00:28:45.000 Yeah, people don't realize, oh, this easily can be as strong as any psychedelic you take. 0.98

00:28:51.000 And that's not bullshit. 1.00

00:28:52.000 And listen to these poor fucks. 1.00

00:28:55.000 You will hear telling where the information has been removed. 1.00

00:28:58.000 Boy, wait.

00:29:02.000 I think I'm having an overdose as soon as my wife.

00:29:11.000 Okay, you and your wife?

00:29:13.000 Yes.

00:29:14.000 Overdose of what?

00:29:15.000 Marijuana.

00:29:16.000 I don't know if it had something in it.

00:29:19.000 Okay.

00:29:19.000 Can you please send rescue?

00:29:21.000 Okay, how old are you?

00:29:22.000 I'm 29 years old and my wife is Uh, 26. Please come.

00:29:28.000 26?

00:29:28.000 Yes, please.

00:29:29.000 Have you guys been drinking also?

00:29:31.000 What?

00:29:32.000 Have you guys been drinking today too?

00:29:34.000 No, that's it.

00:29:35.000 No?

00:29:36.000 Is there any weapons in the house?

00:29:37.000 No.

00:29:38.000 Please come.

00:29:39.000 Okay, we're on our way.

00:29:40.000 Do you guys have fever or anything?

00:29:44.000 No, I'm just...

00:29:45.000 I think we're dying.

00:29:47.000 Okay, how much did you guys have?

00:29:49.000 Uh, I don't know.

00:29:50.000 We made brownies.

00:29:51.000 And I think we're dead.

00:29:52.000 I really do.

00:29:53.000 Okay, how much did you put in the brownies?

00:29:56.000 I don't know.

00:29:57.000 Was it a bag?

00:29:58.000 Who made the brownies? 0.87

00:30:00.000 My wife and I did.

00:30:02.000 Cuba, come here. 0.97

00:30:04.000 Okay, get a car.

00:30:06.000 She's on the living room ground right now. 1.00

00:30:08.000 Is she breathing?

00:30:09.000 She's barely breathing.

00:30:11.000 Is she awake?

00:30:12.000 I think so.

00:30:14.000 Okay, can you look?

00:30:15.000 Pardon?

00:30:16.000 Can you look?

00:30:18.000 Yeah, I can feel her.

00:30:19.000 She's laying right down in front of me.

00:30:20.000 Time is going by really, really, really, really slow.

00:30:23.000 Okay, well, I'm on the phone with you.

00:30:25.000 Do you know how much of it you bought and put in the brownies?

00:30:29.000 Pardon?

00:30:30.000 How much did you buy?

00:30:31.000 I don't.

00:30:32.000 Just please send rescues.

00:30:33.000 They're on the way, but I'm trying to figure out how much you bought and put into the brownies, sir.

00:30:37.000 Probably like a quarter ounce total.

00:30:39.000 A quarter ounce total into the brownies?

00:30:41.000 Did you guys eat all the brownies?

00:30:43.000 Yeah, we did.

00:30:52.000 Boy, why is that funny?

00:30:54.000 I'll tell you why it's funny.

00:30:54.000 Because you can't die from it.

00:30:56.000 The only way pot's going to kill you is if you take 25 pounds and you drop it off of a CIA drug plane and it lands on your head.

00:31:03.000 That's how pot's going to kill you. 0.96

00:31:04.000 You could probably get a heart attack, though, from that. 0.54

00:31:07.000 If you do, anything could kill you. 1.00

00:31:09.000 A good movie could kill you, if that's the case, you pussy. 1.00

00:31:11.000 The other question is, why did they think they were dying? 1.00

00:31:16.000 And it's not just because their heart was racing or things like that.

00:31:20.000 Judgment Day.

00:31:21.000 Well, it's like these filtering parts of the brain that the pot...

00:31:26.000 When you eat it like that, it's kind of very powerful.

00:31:28.000 It is like tripping, quote.

00:31:29.000 And so your sense of who you are, he was pretty logical.

00:31:32.000 He was pretty good at answering the questions.

00:31:34.000 He had some problems with some of that.

00:31:37.000 But I think people confuse ego death with physical death.

00:31:41.000 And ego death of letting go of your narrow sense of who you are and opening up into something very scary.

00:31:47.000 And so people have defenses and they convert it into I think I'm dying.

00:31:53.000 Right.

00:31:54.000 Because it feels like that.

00:31:55.000 You, the you is dying in a way. 0.99

00:31:57.000 That's interesting, but I mean, don't you think also he's just fucking panicking and thinking that he overdosed on a drug and just shitting his pants? 0.99

00:32:04.000 I mean, not even an ego death, just an absolute fear of the fact that you don't know what the hell was in there. 0.98

00:32:10.000 Well, he knows.

00:32:11.000 He made it.

00:32:12.000 It was pot.

00:32:12.000 He knew what it was.

00:32:13.000 He just got taken by surprise at how strong it was.

00:32:16.000 But he said he doesn't know if there's anything in it.

00:32:18.000 Well, that's what you said right before, is people start thinking it was laced with something, but it's not.

00:32:23.000 I mean, I think the guy thought he was dying.

00:32:27.000 I thought I was dying on weed before.

00:32:30.000 Really, physically, you thought you were dying?

00:32:32.000 Yeah, because I had something in my life, I always thought I had something wrong with my heart.

00:32:37.000 So as a kid, I would pass out and black out and just fall to the ground.

00:32:42.000 I had to take the stress test as an eight-year-old kid, running on the treadmill and stuff.

00:32:47.000 Nope, they could never find out what happened.

00:32:49.000 You know, then it would happen again, like, four years later. 0.99

00:32:51.000 So, like, growing up, I always had this thing, like, alright, I have a baboon heart type shit. 0.98

00:32:55.000 Like, it's like it's a broken heart, or there's something with a valve that they just haven't detected. 0.99

00:33:00.000 And so, when I smoked too much weed, I immediately thought, I felt my heart, and I'm like, alright, my heart is fucked up. 0.82

00:33:06.000 So, it wasn't that the weed was killing me, but it might be... 0.93

00:33:10.000 Doing something to what I already thought had a problem with my heart already, you know, type thing. 1.00

00:33:14.000 In other words, you were panicking like a little bitch, and you thought you were going to die. 1.00

00:33:19.000 When you hear, when you feel your heart double beat, you know, when it just like, you know, that starts doing shit like that. 1.00

00:33:27.000 You can certainly mindfuck yourself. 1.00

00:33:29.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:33:30.000 You know, and I didn't know you had that thing, though.

00:33:32.000 I didn't know that you blacked out.

00:33:33.000 Yeah, I've blacked out five times in my life.

00:33:36.000 Wow.

00:33:37.000 You know, and they've tried everything.

00:33:38.000 They've done tons of tests. 0.98

00:33:40.000 You know, it's only been like the last maybe five years that I just don't give a shit about that anymore. 0.94

00:33:45.000 You know, I don't know what happens. 0.93

00:33:46.000 I don't ever get panic attacks anymore or anxiety anymore.

00:33:49.000 It just went away.

00:33:51.000 I mean, I've been using a lot of Molly lately, so maybe that's why.

00:33:53.000 That's probably what it is.

00:33:55.000 You're probably like good evidence for MDMA therapy.

00:33:57.000 Oh, it's the best.

00:34:00.000 I believe in that a million times over SHRMs or anything, especially when you're with a loved one and There's definitely something in it.

00:34:06.000 I don't think over.

00:34:08.000 I don't think it's a competition or a race.

00:34:10.000 I think they all have their own little impact.

00:34:12.000 Yeah, we're talking about psychedelic medicine, psychedelic spirituality, and it's the whole range of drugs at different times at different places, but we do have to narrow it.

00:34:21.000 The other thing about psychedelics is there's a lot of states that can be achieved naturally.

00:34:26.000 I think in the pursuit of psychedelics as a discipline, as something to truly, legitimately study, I think one of the things that they're going to open up is what yoga does to the body.

00:34:39.000 Yoga does something.

00:34:41.000 Come on, Brian.

00:34:44.000 Yoga class?

00:34:45.000 Okay, stop.

00:34:47.000 If you take a really strong yoga class and you get through it, you feel like you're high.

00:34:53.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:34:53.000 And I'm aware of friends, long-term yoga practitioners, long-term meditators, who have found that it's not either-or.

00:35:03.000 That you can, when you're practiced in these ways, too, that you can have a psychedelic experience, you can go to a deeper place, and then you can work You have a better sense of where you want to be and you can work sometimes for years to ground it and integrate it.

00:35:17.000 And it's this flow back and forth.

00:35:19.000 So I think the over-reliance on psychedelics can prove to be harmful because you're not doing the integration or with John Lilly, you're escaping.

00:35:28.000 But the idea that you'll stay somehow or other pure and do things all on your own, there's a certain kind of Slowness or egotism about that.

00:35:40.000 It's not inappropriate to admit sometimes that we need physical catalysts.

00:35:46.000 We need help.

00:35:46.000 We need tools.

00:35:47.000 Sometimes our defenses are so strong.

00:35:49.000 Well, I don't think it's an either-or situation.

00:35:52.000 I don't think there's anything...

00:35:53.000 For whatever reason, we have this idea in our head that taking something to get somewhere is a weakness.

00:35:58.000 You know, there's a lot of people that believe that.

00:36:00.000 Taking a drug to achieve a state, like, oh, you can't deal with reality...

00:36:05.000 You're weak, you know?

00:36:06.000 Yeah, there is that.

00:36:07.000 But then you switch it to cars.

00:36:09.000 Like, you take a car to get, like, took a plane and a car to get here.

00:36:13.000 Yeah.

00:36:14.000 No, you could definitely look at it that way.

00:36:16.000 I just think the idea is very strange when we know that Look, our bodies are these weird biological machines that we're constantly feeding different things to.

00:36:29.000 We're constantly giving it different kinds of nutrients.

00:36:32.000 We experiment with the diets.

00:36:34.000 We experiment with our carbohydrate balance and our protein balance.

00:36:37.000 We experiment with all these different things.

00:36:39.000 But when it comes to taking a plant, especially something like mushrooms, we've documented many thousands of years of use, and to decide all of a sudden that this is a weakness and that this is just unnecessary in society, as if our society is perfect in every way,

00:36:57.000 and no need for self-examination here at all.

00:37:01.000 Yeah, well, we're actually an anomaly as far as society goes, because most of them have The use of drugs, the use of altered states in some kind of sanctioned manner.

00:37:14.000 It's repressed and prohibited throughout our lifetimes.

00:37:18.000 We kind of have a sense that maybe that's the way it's been large parts of human history, but it's not been that way.

00:37:24.000 They're encased in religious rituals or different kind of cultural contexts, but they're not prohibited and they're respected.

00:37:31.000 And I think that's where I think it's definitely changing.

00:37:46.000 What's really crazy is that the people who are suppressing psychedelics, the people who seek to suppress it, are the ones who need them more than anybody.

00:37:55.000 Well, exactly.

00:37:56.000 So our study right now that we're doing, and again, with MDMA for post-traumatic stress disorder...

00:38:02.000 I'd like to point to Brian.

00:38:03.000 Yes.

00:38:04.000 You're the poster boy, kid.

00:38:05.000 Congratulations.

00:38:06.000 Yay! 0.99

00:38:07.000 Just the first one for tonight.

00:38:11.000 So we're working with veterans... 0.98

00:38:14.000 And then we've also expanded it now to work with firefighters and also with police officers.

00:38:21.000 And I had pretty much given up hope about getting a police officer actually to volunteer.

00:38:26.000 So we've had 15 people out of 24. The 15th is going through screening.

00:38:31.000 The first 11 of them were vets and 3 were firefighters.

00:38:36.000 And now we have the first police officer that is going through screening.

00:38:40.000 So the people that are repressing it, in some ways they do need it the most.

00:38:45.000 And how to help them relax about it, at least to let others...

00:38:50.000 Or to explore themselves.

00:38:52.000 But at the same time, I've been trying to get my father and mother to smoke pot since I was 20 years old.

00:38:57.000 And they've never once done it.

00:39:00.000 But they're totally supportive of what I do.

00:39:01.000 They think it's tremendous, but they will not.

00:39:04.000 There was one time when my mother had... 1.00

00:39:08.000 Some pain.

00:39:09.000 She had fallen down and her leg was really in pain.

00:39:11.000 And she said she would try marijuana for pain.

00:39:14.000 And I got home like a week later because she was in a different city.

00:39:17.000 And she said then she wasn't in enough pain anymore.

00:39:21.000 Oh, wow.

00:39:22.000 I was too slow.

00:39:23.000 Poor mom. 1.00

00:39:25.000 Well, you know, there's a lot of folks that are a prisoner to that propaganda that was just really shot home from the 30s on.

00:39:33.000 It's a pretty incredible feat.

00:39:35.000 When you stop and think about the effectiveness of marijuana, not just for people, like as far as a drug, and not just for its psychoactive properties, but just the plant hemp itself, just all the amazing benefits it has as far as nutrition,

00:39:52.000 construction methods, making paper and clothes, and all these different things.

00:39:55.000 The fact that somehow or another they kept that from the public, and kept it into wraps, and kept it really from the average person's database.

00:40:03.000 Most people just Ask him about marijuana being illegal.

00:40:07.000 What about hemp?

00:40:08.000 Oh, isn't it the same thing? 0.98

00:40:10.000 People don't even know what the fuck hemp is. 0.82

00:40:12.000 Well, what they should know is that the largest hemp-importing country in the world is the United States, and the largest hemp-exporting country in the world is China. 0.97

00:40:23.000 So why is that?

00:40:25.000 We've kept it illegal.

00:40:26.000 We're importing it, but we're letting other people grow it.

00:40:29.000 It's incredible.

00:40:30.000 It's because the largest producer of pharmaceutical drugs is the United States.

00:40:36.000 That's why.

00:40:36.000 And that's really what it boils down to.

00:40:38.000 Pharmaceutical drugs, without a doubt, don't want marijuana to become legal.

00:40:42.000 And one of the doorways for marijuana to become legal is people figuring out how incredibly effective hemp is for so many things that we use other stuff for, besides the psychoactive properties.

00:40:54.000 It makes a fantastic protein powder.

00:40:58.000 The company that I'm involved with on it, my friend Aubrey and I, when we first started talking about hemp, we thought, well, Maybe we could get a farm in this country and grow this hemp seed and then use it for the protein powder.

00:41:16.000 Completely non-psychoactive.

00:41:18.000 We found out you can't even do that.

00:41:20.000 Even though hemp is legal, I didn't know that it literally can't be grown in the United States.

00:41:25.000 We buy it all from Canada.

00:41:27.000 Yeah.

00:41:27.000 One of the...

00:41:29.000 People on MAPS's board of directors is David Bronner from Bronner Soaps.

00:41:33.000 His grandfather started it, and he's been very active in the hemp...

00:41:37.000 That's that hemp oil soap, right?

00:41:38.000 Yeah, they use hemp oil, and they import...

00:41:40.000 Writing like a crazy person wrote all of them.

00:41:42.000 Great documentary on Netflix about him.

00:41:44.000 Yeah.

00:41:44.000 Oh, really?

00:41:44.000 What's it called?

00:41:45.000 I think it's called Dr. Bronner's Magic Soaps.

00:41:48.000 I have a friend.

00:41:48.000 It's all he uses.

00:41:49.000 Eddie Bravo.

00:41:50.000 It's all he uses.

00:41:50.000 Well, David and his brother Mike have built this business from...

00:41:54.000 Their father was kind of obsessed.

00:41:56.000 Or their grandfather.

00:41:57.000 And they knew that.

00:41:58.000 So they took this business over when it was really fragmented in like a million or two a year in sales.

00:42:04.000 And they've built it up to over $50 million.

00:42:06.000 50 million?

00:42:07.000 Selling soap?

00:42:08.000 Not just soap and other products.

00:42:10.000 And they don't advertise.

00:42:11.000 That's incredible.

00:42:11.000 They don't advertise.

00:42:12.000 What they do is they...

00:42:13.000 Well, they do now.

00:42:14.000 Bronner soap.

00:42:15.000 Go get it.

00:42:16.000 Actually, local.

00:42:17.000 What they do is social justice activism.

00:42:21.000 They focus on fair trade, on other things.

00:42:24.000 But what David did about four months ago or five months ago is he constructed a cage, a metal cage.

00:42:31.000 And he had someone drop it off with him inside it in front of the White House right across the street and he was processing hemp plants he had gotten real hemp seeds he had grown it in the United States and he was processing it into hemp oil and he did this as a protest and the cage was to prevent the police to slow them down while they tried to stop him from doing it and he actually got convicted and had to do public service but what he was trying to show

00:43:01.000 is that hemp which can be a food which can be any number of different things and can be grown in the United States was a crime and just making it into hemp oil to put on his bread was enough to put him in jail and to give him a It doesn't make any sense,

00:43:19.000 and it's insane that it continues to go on.

00:43:21.000 It's one of those weird aspects of our society where you look at it and you go, well, there's got to be a reason.

00:43:28.000 Let's search for a reason.

00:43:30.000 And you look for a reason, and it literally doesn't exist.

00:43:33.000 Well, I think there are real strong reasons that go really deep that make it easier to miss them.

00:43:38.000 But I think the natural fear that each of us has for when our social controls are relaxed...

00:43:44.000 That will become whatever we will become.

00:43:47.000 You talk about even in the tent one, the flotation tank, when things come up.

00:43:52.000 You know, it's just people are scared of the compromises they've had to make to live in society and of their basic urges and what happens when they're not in control.

00:44:01.000 And that's what these drugs represent.

00:44:03.000 And the 60s also represented not only these people that let themselves get out of control, then they want to leave and drop out, and then they want to change things.

00:44:12.000 And it was...

00:44:13.000 A difficult...

00:44:15.000 People are scared of their own...

00:44:17.000 I feel it in myself that I'm scared sometimes of, you know, my deep desires or, you know...

00:44:24.000 Uh-oh.

00:44:25.000 Uh-oh.

00:44:26.000 You just created a meme, sir.

00:44:28.000 Too late.

00:44:29.000 I feel like I'm scared of my deep desires.

00:44:33.000 And you just hear some 1970s music playing over that?

00:44:36.000 Yeah.

00:44:37.000 So I think that's a big part.

00:44:38.000 Speaking of that, Jim Kelly died today, man.

00:44:41.000 The great karate master.

00:44:42.000 Jim included me on that.

00:44:44.000 The dude from Man of the Dragon.

00:44:46.000 Rest in peace, Mr. Kelly.

00:44:49.000 Sorry.

00:44:51.000 It's important to think about how short our time is.

00:44:53.000 It is, right?

00:44:54.000 It really is.

00:44:55.000 That's why we've got to get all these anti-weed people high. 0.99

00:44:58.000 Or at least help them see more human rights, more freedom.

00:45:03.000 Why should they tell us what to do?

00:45:04.000 And I think the other part of it is that...

00:45:07.000 The drug laws have been used for social repression against minorities, and either Mexicans or blacks or hippies, and letting loose of that avenue of control in the power system.

00:45:21.000 And I think what we're needing to do to integrate these things, to legalize marijuana, to legalize gay marriage, these kind of things where people see it's not going to tear apart the fabrics of society.

00:45:30.000 That people can make contributions and that people can also learn to deal with their, you know, deep desires so that they're not so scared of them.

00:45:38.000 Yeah, we've made some massive headway as a culture because of that.

00:45:42.000 The gay marriage thing, the fact that Idaho got it before California, that hurt.

00:45:49.000 That really hurt. 1.00

00:45:50.000 That was like, how dumb are you fucks? 1.00

00:45:53.000 And the name of the bill that Eliminated the ability for gay people to get married? 1.00

00:45:59.000 What was it?

00:46:00.000 Defense of Marriage.

00:46:01.000 Defense of Marriage Act?

00:46:02.000 Oh, God.

00:46:04.000 How about, if you really want to defend marriage, how about you stop people from getting divorced?

00:46:09.000 See how that works out.

00:46:11.000 You really want to defend marriage? 0.91

00:46:12.000 Tell people they have to stay together.

00:46:14.000 That should be a t-shirt right there.

00:46:15.000 Yeah.

00:46:15.000 For real.

00:46:16.000 You want to defend marriage? 0.99

00:46:17.000 Marriage is ridiculous. 0.99

00:46:19.000 This is coming from a person who's married. 1.00

00:46:20.000 It's a stupid idea. 1.00

00:46:22.000 It's a legal contract that you sign with another human being and then you're going to bring in a bunch of other people if it doesn't work out and they get to dictate where your money and property goes. 1.00

00:46:33.000 So why'd you do it?

00:46:34.000 Because I love her. 0.97

00:46:35.000 She's an awesome person and it makes her feel better and I don't give a shit. 0.92

00:46:38.000 We have children together and I'm not going anywhere. 0.91

00:46:41.000 So I actually love being married to her.

00:46:43.000 I love her as a human being.

00:46:45.000 She's a great person. 0.99

00:46:46.000 But the whole involving the legal system part of it is so dumb. 1.00

00:46:51.000 It's just so ridiculously dumb. 0.99

00:46:54.000 It doesn't make any sense to me. 0.99

00:46:56.000 And I understand completely the need for child support and for some folks.

00:47:02.000 Needed to be written in stone what they have to pay and things along those lines.

00:47:07.000 But, you know, I'm not that person.

00:47:08.000 And I don't think that I need to be regulated, you know, if I've done nothing wrong.

00:47:15.000 I don't think I need to be signed up to some system, you know, to prove that a relationship that I'm in is valuable to me. 0.99

00:47:22.000 It just seems stupid. 0.99

00:47:24.000 It almost seems like if you trust someone, it's like, I do trust you, but I'm going to need that shit on paper. 1.00

00:47:31.000 I wonder, since we're sort of male in more positions of power, maybe marriage often is to more protect the woman. 0.99

00:47:38.000 Oh, maybe.

00:47:40.000 I mean, I certainly think that there's something to that, you know?

00:47:44.000 A woman wants to feel more secure. 0.72

00:47:47.000 I've heard women say that. 1.00

00:47:48.000 I've heard women being completely outside of them, eavesdropping in on a conversation. 1.00

00:47:53.000 And women were talking about, you know, I felt like much more secure in the marriage or in the relationship.

00:47:59.000 Once we were married, it doesn't make any sense, but we were together for 10 years, but once we got married, then I felt like it was real, and then I could relax.

00:48:07.000 I had that part of my...

00:48:07.000 But that's their own social hang-up.

00:48:10.000 I think it's just some Sandra Bullock movie shit. 0.99

00:48:13.000 Did you feel any different after you got married? 1.00

00:48:15.000 Absolutely not. 0.73

00:48:15.000 I felt like I did something that I always thought was ridiculous. 0.73

00:48:20.000 The idea behind it of committing to a person and giving your all to a person, that's all beautiful.

00:48:29.000 The real problem with Anything where it's two people is.

00:48:34.000 Who knows what those two people are going to be like five years from now?

00:48:38.000 Who knows what they're going to be like ten years from now?

00:48:40.000 And I've seen it and it's ugly.

00:48:42.000 I've seen people that got along great and then one person took a left, the other person took a right and they're stuck in the same house together and they don't like each other anymore.

00:48:52.000 And it gets really gross.

00:48:54.000 And then when they have to separate, I've seen what happens when they use the legal system against each other.

00:48:59.000 I mean, I wrote a whole bit about it because I saw my friend who had to pay for his wife's lawyer.

00:49:04.000 They were going to war, and he had to pay for the enemy's general. 0.92

00:49:08.000 I think it's ridiculous.

00:49:10.000 I think the idea that if you're taking care of the woman, you should pay some form of alimony. 0.74

00:49:18.000 Yeah, definitely.

00:49:19.000 Child support?

00:49:19.000 Yes, definitely.

00:49:21.000 You know, split property that you got when you were together.

00:49:24.000 I'm for that.

00:49:25.000 I'm for all that.

00:49:26.000 I'm for all that.

00:49:27.000 What I'm not for is this gross system where the lawyers play off of each other and try to stretch things out because that's how they make the most money.

00:49:36.000 Where they ask for outrageous amounts so that you come back with like a little bit less.

00:49:41.000 It becomes this mad hustle.

00:49:44.000 Like I said, I am in no way saying that I'm not pro-relationship.

00:49:50.000 But I've watched someone's life fall apart because of a bad divorce.

00:49:54.000 Whereas if they just broke up, it would be cool.

00:49:58.000 But she dragged him through the mud legally for like a year and a half, two years, emptied his bank account out.

00:50:03.000 It was horrific.

00:50:05.000 Like targeted him.

00:50:06.000 And that can happen when you're legally attached to someone.

00:50:10.000 Whereas you could be like, okay, we're broken up, right?

00:50:13.000 Well, I don't want to be with you anymore.

00:50:15.000 You don't want to be with me anymore.

00:50:17.000 So we'll just go our separate ways.

00:50:19.000 No.

00:50:19.000 Or if you have kids together, or if you have other things.

00:50:22.000 Well, they didn't.

00:50:22.000 That's what was even squirrelier.

00:50:24.000 There's not even any kids involved.

00:50:26.000 Like, why do you have to pay for this person?

00:50:27.000 What's going on here?

00:50:28.000 Well, it's like when you described that somebody takes the left, the other person takes the right.

00:50:31.000 I think that when we started trying to think about MDMA for couples therapy, because that's one of the main reasons people use it, is for relationships.

00:50:40.000 Yeah.

00:50:40.000 That's great.

00:50:42.000 But not all relationships should stay together.

00:50:45.000 So trying to do a study, a scientific study of MDMA with couples, if you decide that your success is how many of them stay married, that's not necessarily the smartest thing to do.

00:50:57.000 So what we felt was that it would be if they make a mutual decision.

00:51:03.000 and whatever that decision happens to be if it can be they stay together they split up if there's some kind of mutuality about it the MDMA helps them to listen to each other and to communicate and they can make a mutual decision that would be considered a success but we haven't gone forward with that research because politically Having a difficult relationship is not a disease.

00:51:24.000 We need to work in a disease context so that we can get prescription approval to have legal access in a medical context.

00:51:32.000 That's a real issue.

00:51:33.000 That was the issue with Modafinil.

00:51:35.000 Do you know what that is?

00:51:36.000 Yeah, it's one of my...

00:51:38.000 Provigil?

00:51:39.000 I'm using that right now, actually.

00:51:42.000 Are you really? 0.95

00:51:42.000 You son of a... 0.95

00:51:44.000 I am. 0.88

00:51:44.000 I might as well. 0.88

00:51:45.000 That's that shit that I've given you, the stuff that keeps you awake. 1.00

00:51:48.000 That shit's the best. 1.00

00:51:49.000 Well, Tim Ferriss, who I respect very highly, had a very interesting point about it. 1.00

00:51:54.000 He said, I don't believe there's any biological free lunch.

00:51:57.000 And that's why he doesn't...

00:51:58.000 He didn't even put it in the four-hour, whatever, four-hour body, because he was worried that people would just start chewing him like candy.

00:52:04.000 Well, I happen to know somebody that uses it for narcolepsy.

00:52:07.000 He uses it twice a day for about, you know, 15 years.

00:52:10.000 That's what I was about to say.

00:52:12.000 The reason why it's prescribed for narcolepsy...

00:52:15.000 It's because they initially created it for performance enhancing purposes.

00:52:18.000 And then the government's like, you can't just say I want my brain to work better.

00:52:22.000 You have to have a disease.

00:52:24.000 So they go, narcolepsy?

00:52:26.000 And that's how it got approved.

00:52:28.000 Right.

00:52:29.000 Right.

00:52:29.000 Because apparently it works for narcolepsy.

00:52:31.000 It's happening to work for narcolepsy.

00:52:33.000 People fall asleep all the time.

00:52:35.000 They're conking out.

00:52:36.000 What this stuff does is keep you awake.

00:52:37.000 Yeah, but it's pretty transparent.

00:52:40.000 It doesn't add a lot of other things.

00:52:42.000 It's very weird.

00:52:43.000 The military is actually shifting towards it away from speed and amphetamines.

00:52:49.000 Well, that's smart.

00:52:50.000 Yeah. 0.99

00:52:51.000 Speed fucks you up and makes you do shitty things. 0.99

00:52:54.000 It makes you make terrible decisions, poor decision-making capabilities. 0.99

00:52:58.000 Almost worse than alcohol in a lot of ways.

00:53:00.000 Yeah, and modafinil is also for jet lag.

00:53:03.000 It's for shift work.

00:53:05.000 And the only reason I took it tonight is because I would...

00:53:08.000 Caught in a gay pride parade in San Francisco and couldn't get out of town. 1.00

00:53:13.000 And so I just wanted to be alert.

00:53:15.000 How easy is it to get prescribed something like that?

00:53:19.000 Because as an example, I just got off cigarettes.

00:53:22.000 I wake up, I could barely get out of bed.

00:53:25.000 My whole day is just like, can I just lay back down?

00:53:28.000 I take one-fourth of an Adderall and 20 minutes later, I'm just like, how much work can I do?

00:53:33.000 My brain's alive and it's working.

00:53:36.000 That's speed.

00:53:37.000 That's a completely different sort of experience.

00:53:39.000 But for something like that, it's also given to people that have weird shifts, jobs, entertainers and stuff.

00:53:47.000 Listen, you're talking too much.

00:53:48.000 I can get you a prescription.

00:53:49.000 Oh, okay.

00:53:51.000 You go to a doctor, you tell your doctor, don't worry, I got a doctor.

00:53:54.000 Okay.

00:53:54.000 Jesus.

00:53:55.000 What can I do?

00:53:56.000 For the normal person, I guess.

00:53:58.000 What do I do?

00:53:58.000 Is it something that's hard?

00:53:59.000 You go to the doctor.

00:53:59.000 No, I know people have done it.

00:54:00.000 Really?

00:54:01.000 You go to the doctor.

00:54:01.000 I'm not feeling so good.

00:54:02.000 I'm sleepy.

00:54:03.000 I think there's something called new vigil.

00:54:04.000 I think maybe that'll help me.

00:54:06.000 Boom.

00:54:06.000 Bang.

00:54:06.000 Boom.

00:54:06.000 Shabam.

00:54:07.000 You're out the door with a prescription.

00:54:08.000 They're trying to give out prescriptions, man.

00:54:10.000 Doctors are trying to give you prescriptions. 0.99

00:54:12.000 Do you know that, you want to hear something fucking crazy? 0.99

00:54:14.000 Mm-hmm. 0.99

00:54:15.000 There was something in Montana that they recently released where Montana has, you know, X amount of people living in it.

00:54:22.000 One-fourth of them are on OxyContin. 0.98

00:54:26.000 You know how fucking crazy that is? 0.98

00:54:29.000 I need to verify that because someone told me that today. 0.99

00:54:34.000 OxyContin.

00:54:36.000 I guess I just never tried to go get prescription medicine ever.

00:54:40.000 Well, I... I think there's a time when, if it's possibly helpful, that it can be okay to do it.

00:54:49.000 I think I prefer trying to do things on my own without it, and then only if it's beyond my capabilities or something that I think enhances it.

00:54:59.000 So I think the idea of jet lag, if doctors do want you to have a It's a relationship to what it was approved for.

00:55:10.000 But around 40% of the prescriptions in America are called off-label, where doctors prescribe it for things that it's not been approved for.

00:55:18.000 And that cannot be stopped.

00:55:20.000 And that's not bad.

00:55:22.000 What's some of the things that this drug has used off-label, I guess?

00:55:25.000 Well, I think it's...

00:55:27.000 Off-label, people are just taking it for performance-enhancing reasons.

00:55:31.000 That's why they're doing it.

00:55:32.000 That's the big reason that I always hear.

00:55:35.000 And the big disease is narcolepsy.

00:55:38.000 Yeah, and the concern is that people have performance-enhancing drugs, but they're...

00:55:43.000 I think?

00:55:47.000 I think? 0.97

00:56:05.000 That's un-fucking-believable. 0.96

00:56:07.000 Montana has just under a million residents. 0.97

00:56:10.000 One out of four have an OxyContin prescription.

00:56:13.000 It's incredible.

00:56:16.000 Is that pain?

00:56:17.000 I wonder how they... 0.97

00:56:18.000 Listen, I've gone in for operations before, and they gave me all kinds of shit that I didn't take, but they'll give you whatever you need for pain, even if you tell them it's nothing. 0.90

00:56:32.000 I went in to get a deviated septum, and it's kind of an uncomfortable thing. 0.94

00:56:38.000 They stuff your nose, and they crack it, and break it, and widen it. 0.98

00:56:43.000 I had a really fucked up septum. 0.95

00:56:45.000 Literally, my nose was useless for most of my life until I had this operation. 0.98

00:56:49.000 But my doctor gave me two different kinds of painkillers.

00:56:52.000 And I was like, this doesn't even hurt, though.

00:56:54.000 He's like, well, it's going to probably tonight.

00:56:56.000 Tonight, you're probably going to be in some significant pain.

00:56:58.000 Never came.

00:56:59.000 It was weird.

00:57:00.000 I had this stuff stuffed up my nose, but there was no pain.

00:57:04.000 But meanwhile, if you're a person who's easily addictive, and you take one of those, and you go, God damn it, I can't sleep, and then you take two more of those, and the next thing you know, you go into another doctor and tell them you're in pain, you get a second prescription, and you're off to the races.

00:57:18.000 Yeah, we had one of the veterans in our PTSD study...

00:57:23.000 Took one dose, dropped out of the study.

00:57:26.000 And under the influence of this medium dose of MDMA, he started feeling that he was taking pain meds, not just for the pain, but he was kind of getting addicted, dependent on them.

00:57:38.000 And he didn't want to do that anymore.

00:57:40.000 War wounds, things like that.

00:57:42.000 And so he decided that he didn't need the pain meds anymore.

00:57:45.000 And he also felt like he had come to terms with the Issues that had caused him to be suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, that he accepted these things, and that he could go forward without PTSD. And so he dropped out of the study, but we said, we want to ask you at 2 months and 12 months,

00:58:03.000 our follow-ups, how you're doing.

00:58:05.000 And his PTSD was still gone after a year.

00:58:07.000 That's amazing.

00:58:08.000 The PTSD use, the use of MDMA for PTSD, is one of the ones that was discussed recently by this soldier who wrote this very eloquent letter and then committed suicide.

00:58:21.000 But he was talking about the DEA keeping treatments.

00:58:24.000 I just read that letter on the airplane here.

00:58:26.000 Yeah, I assumed that was what he was talking about because it's a big issue with veterans.

00:58:30.000 I assumed he was talking about marijuana.

00:58:33.000 Well, it could be that as well, but I thought it was MDMA. Probably both, but the MDMA one has been discussed a lot by friends that I have that have been in the military.

00:58:41.000 They know it helps, and they want to know about it.

00:58:45.000 They've heard.

00:58:45.000 It's the one where you hear a lot of people going through very traumatic things, and then they get over it.

00:58:52.000 They're okay.

00:58:53.000 They understand it.

00:58:54.000 They accept it, and that's it.

00:58:55.000 Yeah.

00:58:56.000 They've heard about it anyway.

00:58:57.000 We had a meeting in the Pentagon where we were trying to get formal cooperation.

00:59:02.000 And they expressed that their biggest fear was that if they were to cooperate on an MDMA study, that the word would get out more so than before, and that a lot of people who were in the military, who only a small number of them will get into clinical studies, that they would go out on their own and get stuff that was impure or pure but not in a safe place,

00:59:24.000 and that they're...

00:59:25.000 That would cause more harm.

00:59:27.000 And they said that shouldn't stop the research, but that was the concern.

00:59:30.000 And what we're thinking of saying, and what we did say, is that the word is getting out.

00:59:35.000 And we've had articles in Stars and Stripes and the Marine Corps Times and Military.com About the results of our studies.

00:59:43.000 I think they owe it to the soldiers.

00:59:44.000 And I think that if they wanted to start a Kickstarter to have MDMA clinics pop up with legitimate stuff, government approved and tested all throughout the country, it could be user funded.

00:59:54.000 We are going to do that with the Indiegogo.

00:59:56.000 Kickstarter doesn't take medical issues, but Indiegogo does.

00:59:59.000 Okay, Indiegogo.

01:00:01.000 We are going to try to do it to crowdsource support for the study with veterans, firefighters, and police officers.

01:00:07.000 That's a great idea.

01:00:07.000 The thing about the psychedelics, so that people understand what we're really talking about with the psychedelic medicine, is it's only used a few times.

01:00:14.000 It's not like the drugs that we were talking about that people get prescribed every day or several times a day.

01:00:20.000 It's only part of a psychotherapeutic process with more non-drug psychotherapy sessions and what they can integrate from it.

01:00:29.000 So our three-and-a-half-month program for PTSD treatment includes only three days of MDMA. Right.

01:00:36.000 I think people need to understand that all these things are tools that have been denied us.

01:00:43.000 I used to do a joke about it that marijuana is like a hammer. 1.00

01:00:47.000 You could hammer nails with it or you could just hit yourself in the dick if you're fucking crazy. 1.00

01:00:52.000 Just because you have a tool doesn't mean you're going to use it properly. 1.00

01:00:55.000 And when you smoke too much pot and freak out, and when you take acid and jump off a roof, yes, you've done it improperly.

01:01:02.000 But you're dealing with this incredibly complex thing that is really not being explained to the general public.

01:01:09.000 The dabbling in psychedelics is all sort of done with...

01:01:13.000 anecdotal evidence passed on by friends or books that you've read or all these, you know, and it's unnecessary.

01:01:20.000 At this point, we have enough information, there's enough data, there's enough online at maps.org, right?

01:01:25.000 Yeah, at maps.org.

01:01:26.000 We are doing drug development in the open.

01:01:28.000 We publish our protocols, we publish our data, we publish all of our timelines of our relationships with regulatory, we publish our review of the literature, we have a treatment manual that describes What the therapy component is that's there with our adherence criteria.

01:01:46.000 We're trying to make all of it publicly available.

01:01:49.000 And at the same time, that's the pressure that's coming on the pharmaceutical companies actually to release more of their data.

01:01:55.000 But the important thing is that the DEA is not stopping MDMA research.

01:01:59.000 The FDA is not stopping.

01:02:00.000 We are able to do psychedelic research in the United States and most countries of the world where we want to.

01:02:07.000 We have studies right now in Israel, Switzerland, Canada, And we've done Ibogaine research in Mexico and New Zealand, Ayahuasca research in Canada, so that the only thing that's really politically blocked right now is marijuana research.

01:02:23.000 It's hilarious.

01:02:24.000 It's shocking, but it's totally true. 0.94

01:02:27.000 You're getting all this research done, and this is very new.

01:02:31.000 Like, two decades ago, this was not possible.

01:02:34.000 It was impossible.

01:02:35.000 And when did it start being possible?

01:02:36.000 Well, actually, what happened was, and I did my dissertation at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government.

01:02:42.000 I got my Master's and PhD there, and part of my dissertation was on how this happened.

01:02:47.000 Who at the FDA changed things?

01:02:49.000 And was it other places as well?

01:02:51.000 Was it a social consensus?

01:02:52.000 And it turns out that in the late 1980s, there was a lot of, particularly Reagan had been before, pro-business, there was a lot of concern that the FDA was too slow evaluating drugs, that they were mostly trying to block risks and they didn't care that much about treating illness.

01:03:08.000 And so the FDA set up this group called the Pilot Drug Evaluation Staff.

01:03:13.000 Which was that they would pilot drug evaluation methods to try to speed up the drug review process.

01:03:20.000 And this group needed drugs to actually work with.

01:03:24.000 And so they looked around the other parts of the FDA and they kind of cobbled together different kind of drugs and they looked at the people that had control over scheduled drugs and marijuana, all the psychedelics, and they had been suppressing things for decades.

01:03:38.000 And they said, sure, we'll give this up.

01:03:40.000 And so this new branch came, but they also were more science over politics.

01:03:47.000 So starting in 1990, the first study was approved with DMT by Rick Strassman.

01:03:53.000 And we had tried for five studies before, for years before with MDMA, all rejected.

01:03:59.000 But once this new team got into place, then they had to review our study MDMA for cancer patients with anxiety.

01:04:06.000 And there was a 1992 Advisory Committee meeting to determine whether the FDA would go forward with psychedelic research.

01:04:14.000 And they did it bureaucratically in a brilliant way.

01:04:16.000 They had the DEA there.

01:04:18.000 They had the Office of National Drug Control Policy.

01:04:21.000 They had the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

01:04:23.000 They had representatives from all of these branches.

01:04:26.000 And they proposed an idea.

01:04:28.000 And their idea was that the regulations that they put on the major drugs for the pharmaceutical industries, The risks of the medical use of psychedelics and marijuana were no different.

01:04:39.000 And so they would treat these drugs as if they were drugs being developed by the pharmaceutical industry and the same procedures would be fine.

01:04:47.000 And the DEA, NIDA, the drug czar's office, they all thought, man, you put it in there, it'll never get out again because who can act like the pharmaceutical companies?

01:04:57.000 And so they all signed off, and FDA got this policy in 1992, and then they approved our first study with MDMA, which was a safety study.

01:05:05.000 And then they started approving studies with psilocybin, and then expanding our MDMA studies into patient populations.

01:05:12.000 So there's a 20-year history now and a lot of track record and data, and now we have data on the benefit side, not just on the risk side.

01:05:22.000 So that we can talk about balancing.

01:05:24.000 Before people could say there are no benefits, there's these risks, therefore nothing's permitted.

01:05:29.000 So the dynamics have completely changed and we've demonstrated so far over 800 people have taken MDMA in clinical research all over the world.

01:05:39.000 And nobody's had a serious adverse event that left them harmful.

01:05:47.000 Nobody has become addict as far as we know to MDMA. Nobody went crazy.

01:05:51.000 So we've demonstrated there are safe places.

01:05:53.000 Our study with LSD in Switzerland for people who are dying was 12 people, and 11 of them had never done LSD before.

01:06:01.000 So we're trying to show that it can be brought to people who are not from this culture, not used to this, but it can be helpful to them in a controlled setting with supportive therapists and with a lot of integration and preparation work.

01:06:17.000 And people are aware of other studies like the Johns Hopkins study on psilocybin now that's gotten a lot of steam because these people many years later experienced great personality benefits that stuck with them.

01:06:29.000 Yeah, that was the study of psilocybin in people who were spiritually inclined to see if they could have a spiritual experience.

01:06:38.000 That actually, there was the classic study that that's modeled on, was called the Good Friday Experiment.

01:06:44.000 And it was done in 1962. And it was one of the best things that Timothy Leary ever did.

01:06:50.000 And I ended up doing a 25-year follow-up to it, tracking these people down.

01:06:53.000 But basically, in 1962...

01:06:56.000 Lots of people thought that psychedelics had some genuine spiritual potential.

01:07:02.000 And Martin Luther King was getting a PhD at Boston University, and his mentor there was Reverend Howard Thurman, this dynamic black minister who's just fantastic.

01:07:12.000 And he agreed to have Timothy Leary and Ram Dass and others, 20 people and 10 guides, come into their church on Good Friday and do an experiment.

01:07:21.000 And these were all students from Andover Newton Theological Seminary.

01:07:25.000 And half of them, they all got pills.

01:07:27.000 Half were psilocybin, 30 milligrams, which is pretty strong, and the other half was nicotinic acid, which gives you this hot flush, and it acts quicker, so that was going to be their double blind.

01:07:38.000 And then they went through the Good Friday service, and Walter Pankey, who did this study, was a doctor, a minister, and getting a PhD at Harvard, and he had spent a year going through the world's mystical literature to develop a questionnaire for what the mystical experience was.

01:07:55.000 He extracted all specific mentions of, you know, Jesus or Moses, or it's just more of this abstract, what is a mystical experience, and administered this questionnaire, and nine out of the 20 people had either a partial or a full mystical experience,

01:08:12.000 and eight out of those nine had the psilocybin.

01:08:15.000 And so the conclusion was that for people who are religiously inclined in a religious setting, you can have psychedelic drugs, psilocybin, does precipitate what seems to be a genuine mystical experience, not a hallucination.

01:08:29.000 But in the mystical literature, the real test is called the fruits test, is what does you bring back?

01:08:34.000 What are the fruits of this experience?

01:08:36.000 And that only comes with time.

01:08:39.000 And Walter Panke, who did the study, died from a scuba diving accident in 1971, and so he would have done this.

01:08:46.000 But in the middle 80s, when I was getting my undergraduate degree, I decided to track these people down for my senior thesis at New College of Florida, which is this experimental school.

01:08:56.000 And my father was really helpful, my mother was too.

01:08:59.000 I identified 19 out of the 20. And was able to interview 16 of them.

01:09:04.000 And what I found was that the people who had the placebo, most of them didn't remember it that vividly, but the people who had the psilocybin had very vivid memories of parts of it.

01:09:15.000 And at the same time, they said that they considered it to be a genuine experience.

01:09:20.000 They'd had non-drug mystical experiences since.

01:09:22.000 They preferred the non-drug mystical experiences because they were more uniformly positive.

01:09:27.000 They lost their fear of death, and they felt more focused on the here and now and on social justice because they had this unit of experience that helped them identify with the planet, with the people, with not so much all the divisions that divide us.

01:09:43.000 They saw a deeper unity, and so they were more social justice-minded and activists.

01:09:48.000 And I think that's a little bit of a key to the 60s.

01:09:51.000 Psychedelics go right.

01:09:54.000 They inspire people to try to make a better world.

01:09:57.000 And we can do that not in an oppositional way, but we can do it within the heart of the culture.

01:10:02.000 And that's the challenge that we face.

01:10:04.000 It's really interesting you said that what they had was a real religious experience or a real mystical experience.

01:10:11.000 One of the things has been on my mind over the last few months when it comes to psychedelic experiences is that when people want to tell you, oh, you're just, something is going on, your imagination, your visual cortex is getting stimulated by this drug and it's creating a bunch of hallucinations.

01:10:29.000 It could be that.

01:10:30.000 But it also could be something else.

01:10:32.000 It could be you are experiencing some divine state of consciousness.

01:10:38.000 You are in contact with some other form of intelligence.

01:10:42.000 And either it's a hallucination or it's this other real experience.

01:10:48.000 But either way, you have the exact same...

01:10:51.000 Whether you really went to a place and talked to super spiritual, highly intelligent beings or you imagined you did, you're still having the exact same experience and it's incredibly vivid.

01:11:04.000 That's one of the weirdest aspects about any sort of psychedelic experience is that they're almost more real than reality itself.

01:11:11.000 And I think because of that it's even more important that we keep our critical faculties in a way because we are always a filter.

01:11:20.000 And our culture, so I don't think we're ever seeing absolute reality or the truth, and I think that's where you get in danger, where people think, you know, God spoke to me, God said this, or I know this for sure, because there is our filter that we're seeing it through,

01:11:36.000 but you try to see as much as you can, but I think we have to...

01:11:41.000 Be aware and be cautious and see how it works in life.

01:11:45.000 So under LSD therapy and MDMA therapy, we would tell people, don't make decisions while you're doing the therapy.

01:11:52.000 Wait for a couple weeks after or at least under the influence.

01:11:56.000 It's for exploring, not for deciding.

01:12:00.000 That's interesting.

01:12:01.000 Although some things do get changed.

01:12:03.000 Sometimes you have a really obvious reaction where you know, you're very aware that, okay, this is what needs to be done and I need to do this right away.

01:12:13.000 That does happen.

01:12:15.000 And I think one of the more vivid examples for me was when I was sitting for someone who was doing MDMA. He was a physician.

01:12:23.000 And during the experience, his arm became paralyzed.

01:12:27.000 Completely paralyzed.

01:12:29.000 That's how you know you're high. 1.00

01:12:31.000 Shit starts to stop working. 1.00

01:12:33.000 And we're like, it's not permanent, and it's psychosomatic. 0.99

01:12:37.000 You don't really need to, you know, we don't need to take you to the hospital.

01:12:40.000 And he was a doctor, but his arm was paralyzed.

01:12:43.000 And over time, he told this story that lasted a couple hours, but the story was that he was with his mother and his siblings at the bedside of their father, who was dying in all this life support, and they had this discussion about We're good to go.

01:13:19.000 Emotionally complex issue and realize he really didn't kill his dad.

01:13:23.000 He did what his mother and his siblings were saying.

01:13:26.000 It was humane.

01:13:27.000 The feeling started coming back to his arm.

01:13:29.000 Wow, so that was the arm that pulled the plug?

01:13:31.000 Yeah.

01:13:32.000 Is there a real plug?

01:13:33.000 There can be, but, you know, whatever.

01:13:37.000 Depends on it.

01:13:37.000 I don't know.

01:13:38.000 Good point. 1.00

01:13:39.000 Yeah, because, like, pulling the plug is the expression, but what a fucking stupid... 1.00

01:13:43.000 If life support systems were really, like, you just go back there and unplug it. 1.00

01:13:47.000 You know, if that's how they shut them off.

01:13:48.000 Well, we don't want to kill people, so we don't have an off button.

01:13:53.000 So you have to just pull the plug.

01:13:55.000 Like, really?

01:13:56.000 So the expression's true?

01:13:58.000 You said something that I thought was really interesting, too, where you said that in the 1960s you don't think people were ready for it.

01:14:05.000 I think a lot of people were.

01:14:07.000 I think that the culture wasn't.

01:14:09.000 And I think even if you read the electric Kool-Aid acid test, there's ways in which people are damaged and left behind.

01:14:18.000 And that's something where I felt they weren't quite ready for them.

01:14:21.000 But isn't that the case always, just with life in general?

01:14:23.000 There's always going to be people that are damaged and left behind.

01:14:26.000 Well, I think one of the beautiful things about the Marines in the military is that they don't leave anybody behind.

01:14:31.000 And I think that we should adopt that.

01:14:34.000 We should be the psychedelic Marines.

01:14:36.000 I love it.

01:14:37.000 In a way.

01:14:37.000 Don't leave anybody behind.

01:14:38.000 That's really good advice, except there's some really annoying people out there.

01:14:43.000 And if you get hooked up with them, and, you know, for whatever reason...

01:14:47.000 They can't carry their own weight psychically, psychologically, emotionally. 0.99

01:14:51.000 They're really fucking needy. 0.99

01:14:52.000 At a certain point in time, you need to cut. 1.00

01:14:55.000 You need to cut ties.

01:14:57.000 You can't fix the whole world.

01:14:58.000 I think that's really...

01:14:59.000 You can't.

01:15:00.000 You know you can't.

01:15:01.000 And to tell people that they can is crazy talk.

01:15:05.000 There's some people that are just broken animals.

01:15:07.000 You can't fix them. 0.99

01:15:10.000 Unfortunately, it's not you and it's not me, but we both know people who we say, you know what, if you had, like, if there was a show, like one of those Fix Me Up shows, you know, they have those, like, home improvement shows or weight loss shows, if you had a guy who's just a complete fucking mess...

01:15:25.000 And they said, just, Rick Doblin, this is your assignment for this show.

01:15:29.000 You're going to take this guy and elevate his consciousness and just make him a much better person.

01:15:34.000 Do you think you could do it? 1.00

01:15:35.000 With a complete idiot? 1.00

01:15:36.000 Well, I think the beauty of it is that people have to do part of it themselves. 1.00

01:15:41.000 Yes.

01:15:41.000 And they own it, and that's where they become empowered.

01:15:44.000 If they want to.

01:15:45.000 And you can't fix them without them taking the courage.

01:15:48.000 And maybe there's ways you can help them through drugs or through therapeutic alliance to...

01:15:55.000 But they already have to have that path in mind, right?

01:15:58.000 They have to be willing to take certain kind of steps forward.

01:16:01.000 And so I think that is the beauty, that we can't heal everybody, that they have to heal themselves.

01:16:06.000 I think there's also a big danger as a human being in almost embracing the fact that you're not going to improve.

01:16:14.000 Because it takes away all the pressure of trying to improve.

01:16:17.000 All the self-examination. 1.00

01:16:19.000 As soon as you say, I don't give a fuck. 1.00

01:16:22.000 I don't give a fuck. 1.00

01:16:24.000 Do you really not give a fuck? 1.00

01:16:25.000 Or is that your psychic shield to keep you from examining all the holes in your life's game? 0.99

01:16:32.000 Because that's more likely the case.

01:16:34.000 Well, we talked about the army veteran that committed suicide who wrote that letter.

01:16:40.000 And one part of that letter was that he had felt like He would never get better.

01:16:45.000 Yeah.

01:16:45.000 And I just kept thinking, if he could have had an MDMA experience, would he still have been able to find some hope and a reason to live, or would he still have committed suicide?

01:16:57.000 And those are the questions.

01:16:59.000 He talked about it.

01:17:00.000 22 veterans a day are committing suicide.

01:17:02.000 Seems like he was dealing with physical pain as well.

01:17:04.000 I think there was a bunch of different things going on with him.

01:17:07.000 And that's where he was upset at the DEA, I think, also, at pain meds and how they regulated pain meds.

01:17:12.000 So I think MDMA actually, in combination with morphine, it's been used in dying people, enhances the pain control.

01:17:21.000 So MDMA has pain relieving qualities and when you combine it with morphine when people are You know, in hospice settings, things like that, that you have better pain control and you don't need as much morphine and you start waking people up so that they're not tranquilized out and you open their hearts so that people can have these beautiful,

01:17:41.000 pretty much pain-free experiences.

01:17:43.000 There's a woman that wrote a book, Honor Thy Daughter, about her daughter who died in the early 30s from cancer and how she had gone through a series of psychedelic therapy sessions as she was dying with MDMA and mushrooms, LSD-MDMA combination, but that it really enriched her daughter's life,

01:18:01.000 and she felt she needed to write a book about it to let people know.

01:18:06.000 So I think that the use of these drugs when people are in pain, it's not just mental pain.

01:18:11.000 There's a whole link between mental pain and physical pain, and MDMA actually does help in this kind of...

01:18:18.000 I see psychedelic medicine, psychedelic hospice will be Pretty common, I think, 20, 30 years from now.

01:18:25.000 And we'll look back and think that, you know, it made sense 50 years ago.

01:18:29.000 It absolutely does.

01:18:30.000 I mean, I think that's one of the best uses for them, to give people, like, I remember Larry Hagman, who died, was on CNN and died recently.

01:18:41.000 Great guy.

01:18:42.000 I never got to meet him, but I really loved his interviews.

01:18:45.000 He was so candid and just Warm and friendly.

01:18:49.000 And he was talking about the importance of an acid trip that he had where it took away his fear of dying.

01:18:55.000 Yeah, Joy Behar on CNN. That was fantastic.

01:18:58.000 Yeah, it was.

01:18:58.000 That was a fantastic interview.

01:19:00.000 It really was because he wasn't saying it like he was a kook.

01:19:04.000 He was just explaining what it did and why it did that.

01:19:08.000 And you believed him.

01:19:09.000 You really did believe him.

01:19:11.000 Yeah, I spent years trying to meet him.

01:19:13.000 Because I knew that he had done LSD therapy in the 60s and he wrote about it in his autobiography.

01:19:18.000 And my mother-in-law actually sent me this message saying, Larry Hagman has done LSD. So then I started trying to find him and eventually I did meet him and we got to be friends and he was a donor to MAPS and he...

01:19:31.000 He helped us in a lot of different ways.

01:19:34.000 And he was so human that he would be from JR and known all over the world.

01:19:38.000 But when you were with him, he just was present.

01:19:42.000 And he wasn't ego-inflated.

01:19:44.000 He was just a really nice person.

01:19:47.000 I felt that he had this idealism and this joy from his whole life, but he also really valued his psychedelic experiences, his experiences with MDMA, his experiences with marijuana.

01:20:02.000 It was kind of ironic that someone who was so valued by the culture couldn't be open about that, that he had to keep that hidden.

01:20:10.000 Well, he did for a long time until...

01:20:12.000 Until he wrote that book, yeah.

01:20:14.000 Yeah, the Joey Behar experience.

01:20:16.000 But I think also it's like the atmosphere for an actor...

01:20:21.000 Actors get picked for things, and if you're very controversial, I mean, for every Charlie Sheen, and of course we're dealing with 2013, where Charlie Sheen can get away with being this crazy coaxed Norton, whoremonger, and, like, he just wears it and owns it.

01:20:36.000 For that to be a thing 20 years ago for an actor, it could be a career killer.

01:20:42.000 And when he was doing Dallas, I mean, the consciousness...

01:20:46.000 The public's opinion on psychedelics was very much different than it is today.

01:20:52.000 Yeah, well, he was in Dallas when MDMA first became a party drug, and it was used at the Stark Club.

01:21:01.000 I think we're good to go.

01:21:21.000 It started being used and distributed by different people in nightclub settings.

01:21:25.000 Dallas was the place, right?

01:21:27.000 Dallas was the place.

01:21:28.000 And there's a documentary about the Star Club, and there's interviews with Larry Hagman in there.

01:21:33.000 And what he's talking about is this discussion he had with one of the police officers in Dallas.

01:21:39.000 And they were saying that Larry had caused them to lose lots and lots of money.

01:21:44.000 And he's like, well, what do you mean I caused you to lose lots and lots of money?

01:21:47.000 He said, well, after MDMA became illegal, we were going to bust the Star Club.

01:21:51.000 And we had this whole tactical team and everything was set to go.

01:21:55.000 And then you and some friends came in to party there.

01:21:59.000 Not necessarily take MDMA. And so we didn't want to bust Larry Hagman from Dallas.

01:22:04.000 That's hilarious.

01:22:05.000 And so we had to call off the bust and then come back and do it another time.

01:22:08.000 More times, more rather evidence that times have changed.

01:22:12.000 Yeah.

01:22:12.000 Because today they would be psyched to bust Larry Hagman.

01:22:15.000 You know, if it's like some dude like that, like, don't make it Larry Hagman, make it, you know, some other famous TV star.

01:22:21.000 He didn't necessarily have anything that they could bust him on, but he was so nice.

01:22:24.000 He let us auction off a dinner with him.

01:22:28.000 As a donation to MAPS. And also Andy Wilde did that too.

01:22:33.000 So we had a dinner.

01:22:34.000 But the deal Larry made is I had to come along.

01:22:37.000 And I was like, that would be great.

01:22:38.000 That's not a bad deal.

01:22:40.000 Wow, what a great dinner.

01:22:41.000 Who did you guys eat dinner with?

01:22:43.000 Well, this group, this family from Canada.

01:22:46.000 And they were just ordinary people.

01:22:49.000 One of them, the woman had struggled with cancer.

01:22:52.000 They were...

01:22:55.000 Just loved Dallas and loved I Dream of Jeannie.

01:22:59.000 Oh, that's right.

01:23:00.000 He was on I Dream of Jeannie.

01:23:01.000 Yeah, and we had such a nice time at the dinner.

01:23:04.000 They also bought the dinner with Andy Weil.

01:23:06.000 Who was he, the boss on I Dream of Jeannie?

01:23:09.000 No, he was the astronaut.

01:23:10.000 He was the main character with Barbara Eden.

01:23:13.000 He was in love with Barbara Eden.

01:23:14.000 That's right.

01:23:15.000 Yeah.

01:23:16.000 I always get them confused with Bewitched.

01:23:19.000 I get I Dream of Jeannie and Bewitched confused.

01:23:21.000 There he is.

01:23:23.000 Wow.

01:23:23.000 And Bewitched was the one where they had a different dude.

01:23:27.000 Like they killed off the dude and brought in the same name, different guy.

01:23:33.000 I think now that Larry is gone, I can share that he had a bong that was made...

01:23:40.000 Like the bottle that Jeannie lived in.

01:23:42.000 Oh, wow.

01:23:43.000 Where's that now?

01:23:45.000 Wow, that would be worth a lot of money.

01:23:47.000 And we got to smoke some pot together in this Jeannie bottle. 0.88

01:23:51.000 And he said that somebody had talked to him about marketing it and making lots of them.

01:23:54.000 And he said no, he didn't want to have that done.

01:23:57.000 Yeah.

01:23:57.000 Well, that's too bad.

01:23:58.000 We're going to make it now, bitch. 1.00

01:24:00.000 Sorry. 0.98

01:24:01.000 But then the family, he was so nice with this family and just, and also with me, just treat us as like, you know, part of his family.

01:24:09.000 We had dinner in the kitchen.

01:24:10.000 That's awesome.

01:24:23.000 And we ended up, just a few months before he died, going up in seaplanes and stuff onto this island where Andy Weil lives and having this really wonderful experience.

01:24:34.000 That's awesome.

01:24:35.000 Yeah.

01:24:35.000 Yeah, I think guys like him that do those sort of interviews, that's a really, really important thing because the public's perception of people who do LSD is Almost entirely limited to fuck-ups and crazy people and wild people or they used to do acid.

01:24:55.000 Oh, this guy used to do acid.

01:24:56.000 He did acid back when he was just off his rocker.

01:24:59.000 You never hear about a positive drug experience like that from a very respected person.

01:25:05.000 Right, and that's what we need is the coming out of loads of people like that who are Retiring baby boomers. 1.00

01:25:11.000 I think time is on our side.

01:25:13.000 There's all these people who are more fearless because they're not worried about what they tell their kids or they're not worried about their jobs.

01:25:19.000 They've made a reputation and they can Like Steve Jobs.

01:25:22.000 I had a wonderful opportunity.

01:25:24.000 I tried for years and finally managed to have a half-hour conversation with him about our LSD study.

01:25:30.000 Did he give you like a half an hour on an iPhone and go, ready, go, and press start?

01:25:34.000 Was it FaceTime?

01:25:35.000 Did it start 29, 28?

01:25:38.000 Before I had an iPhone.

01:25:40.000 You didn't have an iPhone when you met him?

01:25:41.000 How dare you?

01:25:42.000 I didn't meet him.

01:25:43.000 It was just on the phone.

01:25:45.000 At the end of it, he said, send me a proposal, but I did and never heard back.

01:25:51.000 He wasn't known for being philanthropic, but I had gotten a letter from Albert Hoffman to him after his 102nd birthday.

01:26:01.000 Wow.

01:26:02.000 Creates acid, lives to be 102. He was incredible.

01:26:05.000 And he was married for over 70 years, the same person.

01:26:09.000 I mean, Albert Hoffman, to pivot just for a second, was...

01:26:13.000 Such a perfect example.

01:26:15.000 We're so fortunate that he's the one that invented LSD because he was everything what I'm trying to talk about in terms of integrating.

01:26:22.000 He was a big successful chemist for a major pharmaceutical company, Sandoz.

01:26:26.000 He made drugs that sold hundreds of millions of dollars.

01:26:29.000 He lived more or less in the same place.

01:26:30.000 He had...

01:26:31.000 A wife for over 70 years.

01:26:33.000 He had children.

01:26:34.000 Very normal guy.

01:26:35.000 Very brilliant guy.

01:26:36.000 Was his wife a pink dragon? 0.99

01:26:40.000 I was fortunately able to be with Albert when he tried MDMA for the first time.

01:26:46.000 Wow.

01:26:46.000 How old was he when he tried it?

01:26:48.000 In the United States.

01:26:48.000 In his 80s.

01:26:49.000 That's incredible.

01:26:50.000 Or late 70s.

01:26:53.000 And so what he said was...

01:26:56.000 Ah, finally, something I can do with my wife. 0.99

01:27:00.000 Because she had had kind of a scary experience with LSD. A lot of people have, man.

01:27:05.000 Yeah.

01:27:06.000 Have you done any tests with, like, candy flipping?

01:27:08.000 Like mixing, you know, MDMA with acid?

01:27:11.000 Well, I believe that that actually has incredible therapeutic potential.

01:27:17.000 However, we've not actually tested it.

01:27:19.000 Because in the scientific world, you want just one variable.

01:27:24.000 If possible.

01:27:25.000 And so to combine LSD and MDMA, which drug are we trying to make a medicine and are we always going to combine them?

01:27:32.000 Once it becomes legal, that would be...

01:27:35.000 I think maybe even before...

01:27:37.000 Well, that's the question.

01:27:39.000 Maybe it's 10 years before these drugs can become medicalized, legal in a medical way.

01:27:44.000 Do you think that's that long?

01:27:46.000 Do you really think it could be sooner?

01:27:48.000 I think it's possible now more than ever.

01:27:50.000 Well, but there's a certain track of data that you have to produce, a certain set of requirements that we're on the track of doing, but it looks to me like it's eight to ten years.

01:28:01.000 Well, you would certainly know.

01:28:02.000 Well, I've always been wrong, and I've always underestimated how long it takes.

01:28:08.000 What we were talking about earlier with gay rights, I think they equate because when I was a kid, I remember I was living in San Francisco from 7 to 11 and I was around a lot of gay people.

01:28:20.000 And it was completely normal because that was just what I was around. 0.96

01:28:24.000 And then when I moved to Florida when I was 11, my friend Candy, Candido, he's a Cuban kid, his dad was really pissed off with the newspaper, slams it down, and he was mad that the fags wanted to get married. 1.00

01:28:39.000 That's what he kept saying. 1.00

01:28:41.000 If you believe this shit, these fags want to get married. 1.00

01:28:43.000 And then I remember, I was like 11. I was like, why do you care? 1.00

01:28:46.000 Well, you're a grown man? 1.00

01:28:48.000 Like, this is how stupid some grown men are? 1.00

01:28:50.000 And I was like, that's a weird argument. 1.00

01:28:52.000 Like, that's a strange thing.

01:28:53.000 So that was, you know, a long-ass time ago.

01:28:57.000 I'm 45 years old now, so that was 34 years ago.

01:29:00.000 And the idea...

01:29:01.000 No, it's not.

01:29:03.000 Yeah, it is.

01:29:04.000 Okay.

01:29:05.000 But it's the idea that...

01:29:07.000 That back then, it was really something that people fought against. 1.00

01:29:13.000 It was really a subject of, you could be public about it and not feel like an ignorant asshole. 1.00

01:29:20.000 Whereas today, if you say that you're against gay people being married, you're nothing but a fool. 1.00

01:29:25.000 You're nothing but a fool. 0.99

01:29:27.000 If you honestly think it's either you're crazy with religion, And you honestly think that somehow or another it's possible to cure a person of being gay and if they believe in the scripture. 1.00

01:29:38.000 That's, you know, I can't even talk to you. 0.97

01:29:42.000 That's a different animal. 1.00

01:29:43.000 But if you're a rational person and you accept the fact that people are born gay and you have an issue with them marrying their lover, like you're a crazy person. 0.98

01:29:53.000 Yeah, I think though that people...

01:29:59.000 I think there's a way that they're fearful of something that blocks their rational thinking and if you can somehow or other Help them.

01:30:08.000 And I think a lot of people who are so anti-gay are scared of their own gay feelings.

01:30:12.000 It's kind of a cliche, but I think that's often the case.

01:30:15.000 But I think what drove me early on into an interest in psychedelics is that I was so terrified of World War II and the Holocaust and how people can be so blind or be willing to be so driven by irrational factors.

01:30:32.000 I thought, what can we do to try to help get to heal that?

01:30:37.000 Because some people, you know, they can be quite powerful, and they can, how do you respond?

01:30:45.000 And that was the dilemma for me.

01:30:47.000 And I finally felt that growing up with the Vietnam War, that that was something that now I was being called to fight, and I decided to become a draft resistor.

01:30:57.000 But I saw the nuclear standoff between the U.S. and Russia, and it just seemed like the irrational was so powerful, the demonization of the other and the making of the enemy, that I couldn't figure out how to contribute to breaking through that cycle.

01:31:16.000 And it finally felt like this deep spiritual experience of connection and letting people's fears come up where they could look at them more, that that would be for an individual make us more grounded and less likely to be manipulated our irrational factors and if millions of people could have that experience which did happen during the 60s but if we can expand it that maybe there's a basis to go through the crises that we're facing over the next couple decades as a species and as

01:31:46.000 globalization and people are bumping up against each other that it felt like somehow or other the irrational is based a lot on fear and how can we help people to counter that with love with hope or with looking with self-acceptance and I think that's where the MDMA is so useful that the fear of self-criticism or the fear that MDMA helps people to accept who they are and The LSD and the psilocybin,

01:32:13.000 the ayahuasca, the mescal and the peyote, those drugs, they are challenging in a different way in that they do this dissolving of the control mechanisms and dissolving of the ego and hopefully people can let go and blend and be strengthened from that.

01:32:31.000 And that's the support that we need to provide to help that to be happening.

01:32:36.000 And I think, you know, Just the way that this religious fundamentalism against gay marriage.

01:32:41.000 I mean, right now we have a crisis of fundamentalism around the world.

01:32:45.000 It's a crisis of ideology.

01:32:47.000 Yeah.

01:32:47.000 And it's also a crisis of power.

01:32:49.000 Because once someone gets into a position where they can espouse their ideology, you listen to them.

01:32:55.000 That is power. 0.99

01:32:55.000 And then they use that power to get money, to manipulate, to get sex, to do whatever the fuck they want, not pay taxes. 0.99

01:33:02.000 There's a lot of craziness. 0.99

01:33:03.000 And the not pay taxes thing.

01:33:05.000 It's almost like they're in cahoots.

01:33:07.000 It's like the government has decided, look, it'd probably be beneficial if you guys did a good job. 0.94

01:33:11.000 You know, culted up the shit out of some people and get them all whacked out on your ideas to the point where they're complete fundamentalists on your ideas. 0.94

01:33:20.000 So how about you not pay taxes? 0.98

01:33:22.000 You know, how about we help you along there?

01:33:24.000 You know, make it even more profitable, more susceptible to corruption.

01:33:29.000 Well, I think that there is that way in which the government can be influenced by groups.

01:33:36.000 Sure.

01:33:37.000 And I think that's something also that we have to be wary of.

01:33:40.000 It's a mess.

01:33:41.000 But at the same time, we have to work through groups and work through government.

01:33:45.000 So I think one of the first things we learned at the Kennedy School is there is no the government.

01:33:50.000 There's no your body.

01:33:51.000 There's all these different organ systems.

01:33:53.000 They all work in different ways.

01:33:54.000 Well, we find out about that when the government goes after itself.

01:33:58.000 When this General Petraeus thing happened, we found out the CIA and the FBI don't necessarily see eye to eye.

01:34:04.000 Right.

01:34:05.000 And that's where our strategy is built, that the FDA is putting science over politics while the other forces...

01:34:11.000 Are trying to either slow down or block research.

01:34:14.000 And where it comes with marijuana is that there's a government monopoly on the supply of marijuana that can be used in federal research.

01:34:22.000 So even though there's no monopoly on the supply of marijuana, the only kind that's been grown under DEA license is controlled by the National Institute on Drug Abuse.

01:34:32.000 That's hilarious.

01:34:34.000 To do research to make marijuana into a medicine, the FDA will give you permission.

01:34:39.000 We have permission to do a study with marijuana in 50 veterans for post-traumatic stress disorder.

01:34:45.000 And our distinction is that the marijuana is more about treating symptoms and the MDMA is more about curing.

01:34:52.000 And then you only need MDMA a few times.

01:34:55.000 The marijuana people sort of need it every day.

01:34:57.000 But we have FDA approval and NIDA and the Public Health Service rejected the protocol and refused to provide the marijuana for us.

01:35:05.000 And they only can review protocols for marijuana because they've got sitting on this monopoly.

01:35:11.000 And we were 12 years lawsuit and we won and won and then we lost.

01:35:15.000 in the First Circuit Court of Appeals to break the monopoly but that's the core reason why we're not able to make progress with marijuana research and we are able to make progress with psychedelics.

01:35:26.000 What are they afraid of with marijuana?

01:35:27.000 I think they're afraid of the whole drug war collapsing that the marijuana is incredibly demonized it's widely used most there's a lot of people that know that it's not so And I think it's a symbol.

01:35:42.000 It's a symbol of cultural rebellion.

01:35:45.000 And that's where it was embedded in certain people's minds.

01:35:49.000 And even though it was made illegal in 1937 with the Marijuana Tax Act, then it was illegal shortly after Prohibition ended.

01:35:57.000 And it was illegal during the Depression, and mostly it was Mexicans and blacks that smoked pot. 0.74

01:36:02.000 And so it was a way to repress people who were competing for low-wage jobs.

01:36:06.000 It was a way to block the hemp industry, various things like that.

01:36:10.000 But it largely was a minor threat in American history until the 60s and white suburban people, kids, started smoking pot.

01:36:18.000 And you had this massive explosion of pot.

01:36:21.000 And then pot and LSD got associated with cultural rebellion.

01:36:25.000 And now, all these years later, there are many people that smoke pot that are at least out about that and have made a lot of contributions.

01:36:34.000 So I think it's more now about fear of parents for their kids.

01:36:38.000 It's shifted.

01:36:39.000 But that's what's driving what's left of the drug war, is parents wanting to protect their kids and also all these vested interests.

01:36:48.000 That have the prison unions and things like that.

01:36:51.000 But I think that dynamic we're trying to...

01:36:54.000 is shifting also.

01:36:56.000 And so there's a way in which...

01:36:58.000 Those of us who are interested in enhancing our lives with these drugs in positive, responsible ways need to do so, need to speak about it where possible, and need to demonstrate that it's not about tearing down the society.

01:37:10.000 It's all of us coming together to face these incredible challenges, and we need all the inspiration, and we need all the creativity, and we need all the energy that we can get.

01:37:20.000 Well, unfortunately for some people, they really can't speak out about it because they get drug tested at work.

01:37:25.000 That's a big issue.

01:37:26.000 I mean...

01:37:27.000 The idea that something that stays in your body as long as marijuana gets tested when it's psychoactive, the time in which your body brings it back to baseline is less than 24 hours, right?

01:37:39.000 Right, yeah.

01:37:39.000 You basically just have trace metabolites that stay in your system for a long-ass time.

01:37:44.000 But they're not psychoactive.

01:37:46.000 So you're at work, you smoke a joint on Friday, you're at work on Monday, they make you take a piss test.

01:37:50.000 You piss positive, they're penalizing you for something you're doing when you're not at work that really is not going to affect work.

01:37:56.000 You can also be arrested for driving under the influence.

01:37:59.000 Yeah, from metabolites.

01:38:01.000 Right.

01:38:01.000 That you took from pot a week ago.

01:38:03.000 Right.

01:38:03.000 It's nonsense.

01:38:04.000 It's so crazy.

01:38:05.000 The idea that that...

01:38:07.000 First of all, the idea that they have some arbitrary level that they test you for and they say, well, this is...

01:38:13.000 You can't operate a marijuana vehicle, a vehicle on marijuana if you have this function of your system.

01:38:17.000 It's been proven.

01:38:18.000 What test have you done?

01:38:20.000 Where's the science behind coming up at a level?

01:38:22.000 When you look at the science, the experienced marijuana smokers are not...

01:38:27.000 I'm debilitated in their driving.

01:38:30.000 And there's been a lot of driving tests that have been done.

01:38:33.000 And what they show is that when you are drinking alcohol and driving that you are impaired but you don't think you're impaired.

01:38:42.000 And so you're more reckless.

01:38:45.000 That under marijuana people know that sometimes their instincts, their reaction time might be slow.

01:38:51.000 Take compensating action so people are more careful when they're driving and more aware.

01:38:56.000 So in driving, not in simulators, but when they're out driving roads and cars, and in simulators too, that marijuana is very minimally affecting driving.

01:39:09.000 And you become paranoid, so you drive a little slower.

01:39:11.000 And you react a little slower, too.

01:39:14.000 Do you really think you react slower, like physically?

01:39:17.000 No, I mean by that, no, because I look at all these basketball players that smoke pot and do it.

01:39:24.000 Do you know about that, jiu-jitsu?

01:39:26.000 I didn't.

01:39:27.000 Huge in the jiu-jitsu community.

01:39:28.000 Massive.

01:39:29.000 Snowboarding.

01:39:30.000 A massive amount of people smoke pot and then go train.

01:39:35.000 It's so much so they have t-shirts, rolling wall stoned, rolling stoned.

01:39:40.000 They have all these different, I mean, it's so common in the jiu-jitsu world.

01:39:44.000 Yeah, I play racquetball, and so I kind of have combined marijuana and racquetball and trained myself to be really quick-reacting.

01:39:51.000 Yeah.

01:39:51.000 And sometimes I play my best games when I'm stoned, and sometimes I don't.

01:39:56.000 Sometimes you don't give a fuck. 0.99

01:39:58.000 But I can never tell ahead of time whether it be better or not. 0.99

01:40:03.000 That's funny.

01:40:04.000 But I think with driving, that...

01:40:07.000 What I meant by reaction time is that you don't take precipitous action.

01:40:10.000 So the classic thing is that I'm going somewhere, I'm thinking about something, I don't turn where I want it to turn.

01:40:15.000 But then I just like calmly find my way back.

01:40:19.000 I don't like jerk the wheel.

01:40:20.000 I do want to clarify though that that's you. 0.99

01:40:24.000 You're an intelligent guy and you have your shit together. 0.98

01:40:27.000 I think for most folks it's very... 0.99

01:40:30.000 I don't like driving high.

01:40:32.000 I'd rather be sober.

01:40:36.000 There's a lot of things that I don't like to do when I'm high.

01:40:38.000 I don't mind it, but I don't want to get pulled over when I'm high and I've got to talk my way out of some cop being upset at me for being high.

01:40:45.000 Like, dude, I'm telling you, I drive fine, I'm good.

01:40:47.000 I don't want to be involved in that situation. 0.80

01:40:49.000 And I think I would be kind of a hypocrite if...

01:40:55.000 If I said that, or if I had a problem with some people getting high and driving, but I know some people are impaired.

01:41:02.000 Then they shouldn't drive.

01:41:04.000 There's certain people that freak out when they get high.

01:41:06.000 I don't believe in driving when you're impaired.

01:41:07.000 Yeah, for sure.

01:41:08.000 And when you're freaking out, I think, even if it's only psychologically, even if your reflexes are still there, you're still impaired.

01:41:14.000 You're freaking out!

01:41:15.000 Oh my god, I can't hit the exit!

01:41:17.000 Don't drive like that, please.

01:41:19.000 So it's not for everybody.

01:41:20.000 I think that's responsible.

01:41:20.000 Yeah, sobriety and driving, I think, go hand in hand.

01:41:23.000 I did have, you talked about being high and having to talk to a police officer.

01:41:28.000 I was actually going to visit John Lilly.

01:41:30.000 And a chemist friend of mine had separated the isomers of ketamine.

01:41:34.000 And I was going to bring that to John, who hadn't tried the different isomers yet.

01:41:39.000 This is in Florida, and it was way a long time ago.

01:41:42.000 And I had a Porsche 914, which is a small, cheap car that just has the open top.

01:41:48.000 And so I was going from Sarasota, Florida to Miami.

01:41:52.000 And it was just such a beautiful night, and the moon was out, and I was stoned, and I thought, okay, I'm going to speed.

01:41:58.000 It's just beautiful.

01:41:58.000 I'm going to get a ticket, but it's okay.

01:42:00.000 And I thought, okay, as long as I'm just going to get this ticket, well, why don't I just think about what I could tell the police officer when...

01:42:08.000 The inevitable happens.

01:42:09.000 So you're thinking about this as you're planning for your ticket?

01:42:12.000 As I'm planning for your ticket, what can I tell him that would somehow or other be okay?

01:42:18.000 And I thought the first thing is, don't deny that I'm speeding.

01:42:21.000 Don't contradict anything.

01:42:23.000 But the main thing I thought is, what do we have in common?

01:42:26.000 And the only thing I could think of is we're two guys out on the road, lonely guys on a Friday night out on the roads.

01:42:35.000 Are you going to blow this guy to get out a ticket?

01:42:37.000 Is that what you're trying to say?

01:42:39.000 How dare you?

01:42:40.000 The story was that I was on my way to see my girlfriend.

01:42:44.000 Okay.

01:42:45.000 Good call.

01:42:46.000 And I was late.

01:42:46.000 Okay.

01:42:47.000 And, officer, I am speeding, and I'm sorry, but that's what I was doing.

01:42:52.000 And so it happened.

01:42:54.000 I got pulled over.

01:42:56.000 Right.

01:42:56.000 I told the story, and the guy was like, you know, I'm going to let you go.

01:43:01.000 Just tell her that it's...

01:43:03.000 From me that you owe this for me.

01:43:05.000 That's a nice guy.

01:43:07.000 You can get lucky and get a nice cup.

01:43:09.000 Yeah.

01:43:09.000 I've had that happen many times.

01:43:10.000 And then with John Lilly, you know, one of the isomers is more active than the other.

01:43:18.000 And so, you know, that was interesting.

01:43:20.000 But I also did get the sense that he was too much into the ketamine and too much into this other state.

01:43:28.000 And I started trying to think about how possibly we could Help him, because he was such a major contributor and a hero of mine.

01:43:36.000 And one of the people that was a dolphin trainer that worked with him with some of his dolphins had this sense, Roberta Goodman, had this sense that He was also going downhill.

01:43:48.000 And so we arranged to get together with them to do MDMA therapy.

01:43:53.000 And during that, he kind of became very much into his body, but he had abscesses from where he was shooting himself.

01:44:01.000 Oh, God.

01:44:02.000 He was in terrible shape.

01:44:03.000 So he was shooting ketamine?

01:44:05.000 Oh yeah, yeah.

01:44:07.000 Intermuscularly?

01:44:07.000 Or did you do it intravenously?

01:44:09.000 He would do it IV sometimes.

01:44:10.000 He would do it intramural.

01:44:12.000 He just was so trying to be out of body in another place that he wasn't taking care of himself.

01:44:18.000 Wow.

01:44:19.000 And it was...

01:44:21.000 Painful to him.

01:44:22.000 And so he kind of bounced into this awareness of what he was doing.

01:44:26.000 So he had infections?

01:44:28.000 He had infections, yeah.

01:44:29.000 He was hurt.

01:44:30.000 Wow.

01:44:31.000 And he didn't want to stay there and deal with it.

01:44:34.000 And so we couldn't help him.

01:44:38.000 Right.

01:44:38.000 Because he didn't want to...

01:44:40.000 Just didn't want to deal with it.

01:44:41.000 He also was probably dealing with the reality of a decaying body.

01:44:45.000 And he was an older man.

01:44:46.000 And he probably figured, you know what?

01:44:48.000 These states of mind, I like this better. 1.00

01:44:51.000 I'll just ride this bitch until the wheels fall off. 1.00

01:44:53.000 There's a lot of people that take that approach as well. 0.99

01:44:57.000 To a guy who spends so much time in altered states of consciousness, I don't think it's unreasonable to prefer that.

01:45:05.000 I don't agree with it.

01:45:07.000 I think it is.

01:45:08.000 I think it is.

01:45:08.000 Really?

01:45:09.000 I think when you get this deeper sense about how life is so precious, that you can have these other states of mind, but that It should be inculcating compassion, a sense that you have to contribute to making a better world,

01:45:27.000 that this kind of self-destructive...

01:45:30.000 But is it ultimately futile?

01:45:32.000 I mean, we live, we die.

01:45:34.000 If this guy is feeling his body giving out on him, and he says, you know what, I'm just going to shoot ketamine until the boat hits the rocks...

01:45:43.000 Well, I think giving makes people happy a lot of times.

01:45:46.000 People are depressed, you know, if they serve or help others.

01:45:50.000 I even thought about that, about the vet, that, you know, if there was some way...

01:45:54.000 You know, he felt that he was a harm to his family and that he was doing them good by killing himself.

01:45:59.000 And I think if only there would have been some soup kitchen or something that he could have felt that he was contributing, maybe that would have...

01:46:08.000 He kind of addressed that, didn't he, though?

01:46:10.000 He was talking about all the widows that he'd created and that he didn't feel like he had the right to exist.

01:46:16.000 Right, but that's psychological stuff.

01:46:24.000 That's a hard thing to say, but you're saying it coming from someone who's had MDMA experiences.

01:46:29.000 And I think unless somebody has, they really would listen to this.

01:46:33.000 Like a straight person, not gay, but I mean a square, a guy who's never done any drugs.

01:46:40.000 You know, really not been into drugs and I've took some Percocets in college.

01:46:44.000 If that person heard that, they would go, what is this guy talking about?

01:46:47.000 Like, the guy had post-traumatic stress disorder from murdering people and, you know, committing war crimes. 0.58

01:46:53.000 And he openly spoke about it in this letter.

01:46:55.000 And then you're telling him he's going to take ecstasy and he's going to be able to work through that? 1.00

01:47:02.000 Like, what the fuck are you talking about? 0.99

01:47:05.000 Yeah, that's a really good point. 0.99

01:47:06.000 In fact, people have accused us of, like, you're going to try to help people just forget what they did, and you can make mindless soldiers who will commit war crimes, and then they get a drug, and they feel better, and they go back.

01:47:16.000 So I think that's a really good point you raise, because it's not that people say, that was good, that I can accept that that was good.

01:47:25.000 They don't reframe what they did into something good, but they realize that it's done.

01:47:32.000 If they accept it, It can give them the chance in the rest of their life to make up for it.

01:47:40.000 Not that you can in any way, but it gives you a way to go forward in a positive way.

01:47:45.000 And I think that if we do this in Marines, let's say, my guess is that it will make them more sensitive about those kind of Occasions where they might be reckless with their machine gun or something,

01:48:00.000 that it might make them more careful.

01:48:04.000 I don't know, these are like unknown questions and it's really important, but the process of dealing with post-traumatic stress disorder is to more live in the present, to let The past inform you not to deny it, but not to be so oppressed by it,

01:48:21.000 and to accept what you've done.

01:48:23.000 And I think once you accept that there is that evil in all of us, that we all have the capacity under certain circumstances, That you can accept that, and what we hope is that people then can move forward and recognize that they still have some life,

01:48:43.000 and every day they can make choices, and every day they can try to be helpful to somebody or not.

01:48:48.000 And I think that's what we're talking about, the healing.

01:48:51.000 It doesn't make them look back and say, that was okay, what I did.

01:48:56.000 I think we're in a very strange period of human history where we know that we have all these issues.

01:49:05.000 We know we have massive government corruption.

01:49:08.000 We know we have massive financial corruption.

01:49:11.000 We know we have the great majority of people who don't agree with the war acts that are going on, whether it's drone attacks or what have you.

01:49:18.000 And we wonder, like, why is our society so far behind? 0.97

01:49:22.000 Why have we achieved such great technological and military heights, but yet socially we're so fucked up? 0.96

01:49:32.000 And we have all the tools to fix that. 0.99

01:49:36.000 That's what's really insane.

01:49:38.000 It's like individuals have found their own unique situations that through yoga or through MDMA or through meditation or even some through religious chanting and learning how control of your breath Can change states of mind.

01:49:56.000 People have gone that through jogging.

01:49:59.000 You were talking about smoking pot and getting high.

01:50:01.000 I know a lot of people who think things through when they're jogging and let things go when they're jogging too.

01:50:07.000 I think there's many, many, many pieces that we can use to try to fix this problem.

01:50:15.000 And they're all documented.

01:50:18.000 We're not living in the dark ages anymore.

01:50:20.000 And I think this is one of the first generations that's been around that's experienced that.

01:50:25.000 That has that many tools.

01:50:25.000 And I think you were right on when you talked about how we're overdeveloped intellectually and underdeveloped emotionally and spiritually.

01:50:34.000 It's not even that we're underdeveloped.

01:50:36.000 It's just we're not developed at all.

01:50:38.000 You know what I mean?

01:50:39.000 It's like most people are acting on momentum or imitating their atmosphere.

01:50:44.000 Yeah.

01:50:44.000 Well, we're developed some, we think, from the primates or some of our pure instincts.

01:50:49.000 Yeah.

01:50:50.000 I mean, as a society...

01:50:52.000 It's pretty crazy.

01:50:54.000 I mean, groups are...

01:50:55.000 You know, that's what I thought about, you know, Hitler's Germany, that you've got a culture that's insane. 0.98

01:51:00.000 Or North Korea right now.

01:51:02.000 Yeah.

01:51:02.000 They're all programmed and...

01:51:04.000 Yeah.

01:51:04.000 So that there's a way in which, if you look at our technology, which is miraculous...

01:51:09.000 Yeah.

01:51:10.000 But we...

01:51:11.000 And we have capacities now to alter the planet with global warming, but we don't have the emotional and spiritual development to cope with the technological changes.

01:51:23.000 And in a way that's been really productive, this kind of separating out the intellect from religion and morals.

01:51:35.000 Yes.

01:51:41.000 Yes.

01:51:42.000 Yes.

01:51:51.000 True science and true religion are not in opposition.

01:51:57.000 And that the scientist is also, you know, in a state of wonder and spiritual appreciation. 0.99

01:52:02.000 Yeah, because people that think that religion is ridiculous or that God is ridiculous or the concept of a higher power is ridiculous, you know what else is ridiculous? 0.99

01:52:10.000 The whole universe itself. 0.98

01:52:11.000 The fact that there's a floating ball, a quarter of the size of the earth, called the moon, just floating in space above us. 0.99

01:52:19.000 How heavy is that stupid thing? 0.99

01:52:21.000 It's just floating above us. 1.00

01:52:22.000 Oh, and without it, our world would not exist because our temperature would not be regulated enough that we could live in cold climates and hot climates.

01:52:31.000 It wouldn't be predictable enough. 1.00

01:52:33.000 It would be fucked. 1.00

01:52:34.000 I mean, that's crazy. 1.00

01:52:36.000 That's way crazier than some guy who built everything.

01:52:39.000 You know, Big Bang.

01:52:41.000 That's crazier than anything that religion's ever come up with ever. 1.00

01:52:44.000 That the whole universe was smaller than the head of a pen and then exploded 13 point whatever billion years ago and created the skies above and everything you say.

01:52:53.000 Yeah, well you said, is it futile?

01:52:54.000 You live and you die.

01:52:55.000 And I think that those moments of wonder or appreciation for just how miraculous, mysterious, incomprehensible are those moments of love.

01:53:05.000 There's a way in which...

01:53:08.000 I agree.

01:53:09.000 And I think that there can be, I don't want to use the word religion, but there can be a way of living the life with wonder and with sharing knowledge and with just Looking into what we have learned,

01:53:28.000 rock solid, about the very universe we live in and respecting that and worshipping that.

01:53:34.000 I mean, in a way, you know, not like, I'm not talking about like a deity, but about like a great wonder, like the great wonder that it really is.

01:53:43.000 There's a benefit to that.

01:53:45.000 Yeah, and taking that into the pain, I think, is being able to take the loving energies into the places that need healing.

01:53:54.000 So just having spiritual meditating on top of a mountaintop and trying to get off the wheel of suffering and stuff, that seems like a very egotistical way, actually.

01:54:05.000 And having the sense that while some of us are privileged in all different ways to really be healthy and be wonderful and in wonder without being so threatened, that there's a lot of people that aren't and that we have to...

01:54:21.000 Not only feel those moments, but then try to somehow, as Martin Luther King talked about, the arc of history, make some contribution of some way that helps it for others too.

01:54:31.000 You know, it's also ironic, one of the weird things that's going on with society is that as our technological capabilities increase, we also fill our skies with light pollution and we can't see the stars.

01:54:45.000 And one of the best psychedelic experiences I ever had outside of doing a drug was I went to the Keck Observatory in Hawaii on the Big Island.

01:54:54.000 And we drove through the clouds.

01:54:56.000 And as we were driving, you wonder if it's going to be a cloudy day because then you won't be able to see anything.

01:55:02.000 It takes a while to get up there. 0.71

01:55:03.000 And I was like, damn, it looks like it's cloudy.

01:55:05.000 But then we drove through the clouds, and you realize, oh, this thing is so high up there that you actually drive past where the clouds are. 0.92

01:55:13.000 This is nuts!

01:55:14.000 And we went up to the observatory, and the view is just...

01:55:20.000 Insane!

01:55:21.000 Because the Big Island is set up for the observatory, so all the lights that they use for street lights are a very special type of diffused lighting that doesn't give light pollution off.

01:55:30.000 So you have this incredible view of the stars where you see the whole Milky Way like a movie, like those pictures of space.

01:55:40.000 And somehow or another, it's just above us.

01:55:43.000 And you're looking at it.

01:55:45.000 It's so unbelievably humbling and magical.

01:55:49.000 I was staring into the impossible.

01:55:51.000 And I remember being upset that I couldn't see this every night.

01:55:56.000 That's up there all the time.

01:55:57.000 And not seeing that.

01:55:59.000 And just making it this blank screen.

01:56:01.000 By doing that, you sort of lose the feel for what's really going on.

01:56:07.000 Yeah, we're out of touch with that a lot.

01:56:08.000 I had this bonding moment with, in some ways, my opposite.

01:56:12.000 My family...

01:56:13.000 And I were on a vacation in Israel and we decided to go across the Sinai Desert by car to go see Cairo and the pyramids.

01:56:20.000 And we had to work with an Egyptian company and people had armed guards because it's kind of dangerous now. 1.00

01:56:26.000 And so, as we were driving through the Sinai Desert, And it was so dark, and the sky was magnificent.

01:56:34.000 We asked if we could just stop the car and just sort of walk a bit from the road.

01:56:39.000 There was virtually no other traffic on the road.

01:56:42.000 The only thing were military checkpoints every once in a while.

01:56:44.000 And we just went out.

01:56:46.000 It was Ramadan, too.

01:56:49.000 And so these Muslims who were with guns to protect us Who are Jewish, we just stood under the stars in the middle of the desert with no light pollution and just had this shared moment of kind of awe at the majesty.

01:57:05.000 Yeah, the view of, the actual view that we're supposed to see, I think is really what inspired people throughout history to create the idea of gods and to create this.

01:57:19.000 I mean, the insane view that you get of that, just the images of those Magical lights in the sky.

01:57:28.000 Millions and billions of them.

01:57:29.000 Just to see that, it's so humbling.

01:57:32.000 And to not see that, it's so dead.

01:57:36.000 It's so numb.

01:57:37.000 Like, we don't have an appreciation for the fact that we're in space.

01:57:40.000 You watch a documentary, it seems kind of abstract.

01:57:43.000 But when you're on top of the observatory and you look out and you have that incredible view, the stars, you go, oh my god!

01:57:51.000 Like, we are really in space right now.

01:57:53.000 We're on...

01:57:55.000 A big, organic spaceship.

01:57:57.000 We're moving a thousand miles an hour.

01:57:59.000 In a circle.

01:58:00.000 Yeah.

01:58:00.000 It's nuts.

01:58:02.000 It's weird to see.

01:58:04.000 And what it's done to...

01:58:05.000 Stuart Brand talked a lot about the picture of the Earth from space.

01:58:11.000 Yeah.

01:58:11.000 We're the first generation or two that's ever had that image.

01:58:15.000 And those astronauts that go up in the space station, the space shuttle, they all talk about the experience.

01:58:21.000 It's being very transcendent.

01:58:23.000 You know, when you take that view of the Earth from above and you look down, you see just the nature of the whole reality of a planet and a solar system and a galaxy and a universe.

01:58:38.000 It all just sort of falls into place.

01:58:40.000 You're like, oh my god.

01:58:41.000 But when you're down here and you're stuck in traffic and the sky's dark, you don't even think about it.

01:58:47.000 You're on this majestic ride through the heavens. 0.91

01:58:50.000 Instead, you're overwhelmed with the mundane bullshit of this... 0.97

01:58:54.000 Person in front of you not reacting to the green light. 1.00

01:58:56.000 Come on, asshole! 1.00

01:58:58.000 Right, and if you can somehow do both, it's not that... 1.00

01:59:00.000 And that's where I think Lily got wrong.

01:59:03.000 You know, he thought the spiritual part was the more important part, and it's the balance.

01:59:07.000 My daughter, Ellie, is in 8th grade, and she had to do a project for National History Day, and with a couple of her girlfriends, they did a project on Apollo 11, which was...

01:59:18.000 And it turned out that the girl that she did it with...

01:59:21.000 Michael Collins was her grandfather.

01:59:23.000 He was the one that was, when Armstrong put his foot on Buzz Aldrich, that he was the one that stayed in the capsule.

01:59:31.000 And so I actually got to interview him as part of this.

01:59:34.000 And he did talk about, for him, what was so amazing, both being up there in space and seeing the Earth, but also when he got back, And they went around the world and people were, you know, cheering and talking about things.

01:59:46.000 He said that he thought that people would say, you know, look what you Americans did.

01:59:53.000 And wherever he went, people said, look what we did.

01:59:56.000 Like it was the human race that we went to the moon.

02:00:00.000 And people wanted to be part of that.

02:00:02.000 And because it was such a space race with Russia, he said, we did it. 0.97

02:00:06.000 But he saw...

02:00:07.000 Americans did it, but he saw around the world that people said we all collectively did it.

02:00:12.000 The idea of we all collectively are in this thing together, that we are a global community, That's really one of the last saving hopes of humanity.

02:00:23.000 And I think the internet has sort of reinforced that idea in a way that never existed.

02:00:27.000 I think nationalism, the idea of nationalism, seems so much more preposterous now.

02:00:31.000 Especially nationalism in a war sense.

02:00:33.000 Not nationalism.

02:00:34.000 There's nothing wrong with being proud of the town you live in.

02:00:36.000 Nothing wrong with cheering for your home basketball team.

02:00:41.000 There's nothing wrong with any of that.

02:00:43.000 But what's wrong is when it translates into war.

02:00:46.000 And I think that This is the first culture that has really sort of openly embraced a global society. 0.91

02:00:55.000 I think kids today, they're far less likely to buy the bullshit when it comes to us against them or any ideas about... 0.91

02:01:04.000 What's really going on with geopolitical struggles? 0.99

02:01:09.000 Kids in Iran, they're kids. 0.99

02:01:11.000 They're trying to get under the thumb of an oppressive government.

02:01:15.000 My son, Eden, who was just going to college, he was playing a halo.

02:01:22.000 And he was playing with somebody in Saudi Arabia.

02:01:26.000 That's so crazy.

02:01:27.000 It's fantastic.

02:01:28.000 And I think what we see a lot is the rise of fundamentalism. 1.00

02:01:33.000 You know, the Orthodox Jews are nuts. 1.00

02:01:35.000 Some of the Orthodox Christians and Muslims, all these fundamentalists. 0.99

02:01:39.000 I think because of the forces of globalization, because it's harder to sustain that we're the one right religion, they're kind of having to circle their wagons and they become a bit more extreme.

02:01:51.000 And so it might look on the surface that things are getting worse, but I think that's this defensive...

02:01:57.000 Mechanism where they can barely hold it together.

02:02:00.000 And I think it won't end up with homogenous, one world religion, one government.

02:02:04.000 We'll appreciate those small things about the local town, where you are.

02:02:10.000 You can appreciate the differences even more when you feel part of the commonality.

02:02:16.000 You don't have to be scared of the differences because there's something deeper that connects us.

02:02:20.000 I think there's also a problem that people have in that human beings, we share chimpanzee, alpha male DNA, and we are always looking for leaders.

02:02:31.000 And the other problem is once someone becomes a leader, We see this with politicians and dictators. 0.96

02:02:36.000 We saw it with the people that came in after Mubarak in Egypt, tried to pass all these crazy fucking laws that essentially made them dictators. 0.97

02:02:46.000 And then the people were like, what are you talking about? 0.99

02:02:49.000 This is what we just shed blood for. 1.00

02:02:52.000 And you assholes are trying to make yourself immune to prosecution for all these different things that you could be doing. 1.00

02:02:59.000 Like, fuck you! 1.00

02:03:00.000 No, you can't do that. 1.00

02:03:02.000 And I think seeing that for the first time, you know, globally, even though right now it may be very frustrating for us, and it is frustrating for us, because we don't think change is coming quickly enough, change that corresponds with what we know about the world,

02:03:18.000 I think it is, if you look at it historically, if they look back to this time, I think this will be a time of great turmoil and great change.

02:03:26.000 It's just that we measure history in these 20, 30-year bursts You know, I think the 20-year burst that we're in right now is just bananas.

02:03:35.000 Well, I think as I get older and as I watch my kids grow, that for me, 10 or 20 years is no longer such a long time.

02:03:43.000 Right, it's not.

02:03:44.000 And I think as you get older, time speeds up, too.

02:03:47.000 Just like those cops that were on the pot.

02:03:49.000 Yeah, so you can...

02:03:52.000 But we're not quite so scared, fortunately.

02:03:56.000 And this idea of having a 20, 30-year plan, or even to recognize, as all the spiritual traditions talked about, is that these great things are not accomplishable in one generation or in one lifetime, so that we just start the process, or we not start it, but we continue,

02:04:12.000 and then we try to pass it on to the next generation.

02:04:15.000 But I think that there is this intensification and crisis, and in that, I think eventually the...

02:04:24.000 The fundamentalists will need to find more genuine spirituality, not in this rigidity, and hopefully they'll be able to coexist.

02:04:35.000 There's these demonstrations of millions of people in Egypt against the Muslim Brotherhood.

02:04:40.000 This is the first government in Israel that doesn't have the religious orthodox as part of the governing body, which is a really healthy thing. 1.00

02:04:48.000 Who made that quote?

02:04:50.000 History is a race between education and catastrophe.

02:04:54.000 Who's responsible for that quote, do you know?

02:04:56.000 I don't know.

02:04:58.000 I don't remember who it was. 1.00

02:05:01.000 Whoever it was, they were a bad motherfucker. 1.00

02:05:04.000 Whoever it was. 1.00

02:05:05.000 But that's really what seems to be going on.

02:05:08.000 H.G. Wells.

02:05:09.000 Was it H.G. Wells?

02:05:10.000 Yeah.

02:05:10.000 Oh, good, good.

02:05:11.000 That really does seem to be, well, of course it's H.G. Wells.

02:05:14.000 The guy was awesome.

02:05:16.000 I think that does seem to be what's going on.

02:05:18.000 It seems to be also that sometimes it almost feels like people need an antagonist in order to perform at their very best.

02:05:25.000 It's almost like we need a rival to inspire us to reach great heights.

02:05:31.000 Yeah, and it depends how you see them.

02:05:33.000 If they're deeper down your ally, like let's say in sports teams, you want your opponents to be as good as possible because that will...

02:05:43.000 Call out the best in you.

02:05:44.000 So on some level, you want the worthy opponent that you don't have to totally destroy.

02:05:50.000 You just are sort of co-evolving together.

02:05:53.000 So I think we do need to test ourselves against...

02:06:04.000 I used to play this game.

02:06:08.000 I grew up in Chicago in Winnetka and Lake Michigan and some friends and I would go in there and we'd play the greatest catch game and each of us Guys, we'd throw football to somebody else.

02:06:18.000 It was like half in the water.

02:06:19.000 And our goal as the thrower was to get it just barely where they could reach it.

02:06:24.000 Where they had to make the spectacular dive and show off to everybody how great they were.

02:06:29.000 And then they would have to do it back.

02:06:30.000 And so we were sort of helping.

02:06:32.000 We were like allies, but we were pressing each other to do these spectacular things.

02:06:37.000 That's really interesting.

02:06:39.000 Well, that's one of the principles of jujitsu and of martial arts is that you're really only as good as your training partners.

02:06:47.000 Yeah.

02:06:47.000 If you train with really good people, you become really good.

02:06:50.000 And you elevate to the level of the competition in the training room.

02:06:55.000 It's also the same a lot with stand-up comedians.

02:06:58.000 We're inspired by other really funny stand-up comedians and when you find a particular group, a group of talented people in a town or an area, oftentimes they'll develop a lot of very talented people around them who imitate the fact that, you know,

02:07:13.000 that there's a high level of the art form in that area.

02:07:16.000 So like Austin, Texas is a good example.

02:07:18.000 It's like there's always a lot of really good guys there.

02:07:20.000 And because there's always a lot of really good guys there, there's always a lot of really good guys there.

02:07:25.000 New York City is another one, but obviously there's much more money involved in places like New York or L.A. in being good.

02:07:32.000 So that becomes sort of a factor as well.

02:07:35.000 Did you spend time in Austin?

02:07:37.000 No, I just have a lot of friends there, and I've done a lot of stand-up there.

02:07:40.000 But I just know the local scene is always really strong.

02:07:43.000 There's a few places in the country, as a comedian, the local scenes are very strong.

02:07:48.000 Denver, they always have a really strong local scene.

02:07:51.000 And that's another one that's pure, because it's not really attached to Hollywood in any way.

02:07:55.000 It's just pure stand-up comedy.

02:07:57.000 And then there's San Francisco, Boston, LA, New York, a little bit of Phoenix, but it's a very limited thing.

02:08:08.000 And sometimes one or two great comedians will be in one area, and then, boom, it'll blossom.

02:08:16.000 Like Houston was Sam Kinison and Bill Hicks.

02:08:21.000 They were all at this Houston Comedy Annex, And because of them in this one particular area, it started to take off.

02:08:27.000 Yeah, that's sort of the idea of Silicon Valley.

02:08:29.000 Yeah, sure.

02:08:30.000 Get a bunch of brilliant people.

02:08:32.000 They get inspired by other brilliant people.

02:08:34.000 They share ideas.

02:08:35.000 They pump each other up.

02:08:38.000 The idea that there's plenty for everybody and that working together can be much more satisfying and you're much happier if your friends are doing well as much as you are.

02:08:49.000 Yeah.

02:08:50.000 In fact, one of our, Shawna Haley, one of our board of directors who recently died, was a brilliant computer guy.

02:09:00.000 And he kept trying to say that we should try to think from abundance rather than Yeah.

02:09:07.000 That's just a general principle of life.

02:09:11.000 Famine mentalities are a terrible way of approaching life, and that's the way a lot of people approach life.

02:09:17.000 They approach life as if there's a finite amount of resources, and they have to get theirs.

02:09:21.000 And that's what leads to people cheating on their taxes. 0.93

02:09:24.000 That's what leads to people lying and trying to steal money and stealing money from their employers and shit along those lines. 0.86

02:09:30.000 They're coming from a standpoint of famine, like they're stockpiling nuts for the winter. 0.96

02:09:36.000 Right.

02:09:37.000 They're not as comfortable about their ability to generate new resources.

02:09:40.000 Yeah.

02:09:40.000 And that's a terrible mentality.

02:09:43.000 And that is a mentality.

02:09:45.000 And those sort of philosophies and those ideas can be reinforced or the opposite can be reinforced.

02:09:53.000 A generous A bountiful mentality can be in force as well.

02:09:59.000 Yeah.

02:09:59.000 Well, for us, I mean, it's going to be $15 to $20 million to make MDMA into a medicine.

02:10:03.000 And the same for psilocybin or LSD. And we don't have all that money.

02:10:07.000 That's crazy.

02:10:08.000 But it costs pharmaceutical companies way, way more than that.

02:10:12.000 It should cost the amount that it costs to get one guy high on MDMA. And he should do it and go, oh, listen to me.

02:10:19.000 Make it legal.

02:10:19.000 Trust me.

02:10:20.000 Just stop. 1.00

02:10:21.000 Stop the bullshit. 0.99

02:10:22.000 But we've had to have that attitude that the resources are out there. 0.98

02:10:27.000 And once we can demonstrate that we can use them wisely as we grow, the resources will grow.

02:10:32.000 And so far, we're in our 27th year, and that's what's happening.

02:10:36.000 How happy are you now that you're seeing all this really tangible progress?

02:10:40.000 Real tangible progress.

02:10:42.000 Very happy.

02:10:43.000 But I'm also...

02:10:45.000 Because I woke up to all this in 1971 and 72, right after the backlash...

02:10:51.000 I'm concerned a lot.

02:10:53.000 I'm trying to be very sensitive about another backlash.

02:10:55.000 Do you think that's possible today?

02:10:56.000 I think it's possible.

02:10:57.000 I don't think it's impossible.

02:10:59.000 I don't think it's likely right now.

02:11:01.000 It just seems like the information is just too prevalent.

02:11:05.000 Well, but how would you explain the fact that we can't even do marijuana research?

02:11:09.000 There's a massive repression.

02:11:11.000 Well, those people should be in jail. 0.71

02:11:13.000 That's really what should happen.

02:11:15.000 Someone should realize what's going on and start locking people up and go, let's play your game. 0.99

02:11:20.000 Because what you're doing is ridiculous. 0.91

02:11:21.000 You're ruining people's lives for something that really should not be your choice. 0.99

02:11:25.000 It should not be another person's choice whether or not they masturbate, and it should not be another person's choice whether or not they smoke pot.

02:11:31.000 And it's really along the same lines.

02:11:34.000 Yeah.

02:11:35.000 Well, I'm not so sympathetic with putting them in jail, but I would like to take the source of their power, which is people's fear that they've generated, I agree,

02:11:56.000 but I think the people that have done things, that have put people in jail for things along those lines, for selling pot or for growing pot or for owning pot, they're criminals.

02:12:08.000 Those are societal criminals.

02:12:10.000 Well, I'd say that they have abridged other people's human rights.

02:12:13.000 Without a doubt.

02:12:14.000 And they have done so with full cultural support.

02:12:17.000 And I think the way to move forward is not to be so punitive for those that did it, although for some.

02:12:23.000 I mean, but to talk about evolution and to talk about how a different approach is necessary.

02:12:30.000 And, you know, whenever in Alaska, when there was a medical...

02:12:33.000 Marijuana legalization bill, one of the first years ago, there was this whole idea of reparations to pay people that were in jail.

02:12:41.000 And the polling that was done by the people trying to pass this initiative showed that that was a really weak part.

02:12:48.000 So where you try to impose these penalties on people for past behavior that at a time was sort of socially sanctioned.

02:12:55.000 What I meant by that was the people that are actively working for Privatized prison unions, things along those lines, working to keep these drugs illegal so that they profit.

02:13:06.000 And that's creepy. 0.99

02:13:08.000 There's some real reprehensible shit that's going on. 0.98

02:13:13.000 It's not as simple as they're acting within culturally defined rules and regulations. 0.99

02:13:19.000 There's some behind-the-scenes shady shit that's based on deception. 0.82

02:13:23.000 Well, the stuff like that should be illegal. 0.98

02:13:26.000 But I think that the corporate...

02:13:29.000 Capitalistic approach that we have does permit that kind of stuff, and it permits lobbying Congress, and it permits this process where people try to get their own interests advanced sometimes over the interests of others.

02:13:41.000 And isn't it fascinating that, I don't know if you feel like this, but that the thing that would fix the woes that society has more than anything is the thing that these people are trying to keep from becoming legal.

02:13:55.000 That might be the big race. 0.96

02:13:57.000 The big race might be recognizing that there are some fantastic tools to change the consciousness of this culture.

02:14:04.000 Right.

02:14:04.000 And I think that idea of thinking about them as tools is really the crucial distinction because they're not good or bad in and of themselves.

02:14:12.000 It's how they're used.

02:14:13.000 And our whole drug policy is there's good, bad.

02:14:16.000 Good drugs and bad drugs.

02:14:18.000 Bad drugs are illegal.

02:14:20.000 Good drugs, you get at Burger King.

02:14:22.000 Or from the pharmaceutical company.

02:14:24.000 But it's all about good and bad when it's actually how you use it.

02:14:30.000 And even the drug that was demonized the most in a way in the 60s was thalidomide, the drug that was the medical drug that caused birth defects in babies.

02:14:40.000 And the FDA stopped that in the U.S., but it was prevalent throughout Europe.

02:14:45.000 And now thalidomide has become a medicine and the same kind of shrinking of blood vessels and things, it's used in leprosy and it's used in cancer treatment.

02:14:55.000 So a drug that was among the most demonized of all has now been approved by the FDA with certain kind of safety procedures to make sure pregnant women don't get it. 0.91

02:15:03.000 But it's the idea that these are tools, and we have the ability to approach these tools in an intelligent way, in a respectful way, or in a reckless way.

02:15:13.000 And what we want to do is try to change these value judgments, end prohibition, support people's human rights to explore their own consciousness, to have freedom of thought, To find a way to integrate it into a society that's moving forward.

02:15:29.000 How do you do that by getting through the corruption?

02:15:32.000 Because that's the only thing that's holding it back.

02:15:34.000 Really, the only thing holding it back is corruption.

02:15:37.000 At this point, with the amount of data that's been accumulated on medical marijuana...

02:15:41.000 Well, okay, the amount of data that's been accumulated, the government has been effective, the DEA parts of the government, NIDA, In preventing what's called the Phase III studies, the large-scale definitive studies that by law Congress has created FDA must have to prove safety and efficacy.

02:15:59.000 So at this moment, there is not enough data of the kind that the FDA uses for any other drug.

02:16:05.000 And if we accept the idea that the FDA should regulate marijuana and psychedelics like they do any other drug, Then we have to acknowledge that there's not enough research for the FDA to approve it.

02:16:16.000 People twist it and say the FDA has rejected marijuana as a medicine, which they have not.

02:16:21.000 We just don't have enough research that way.

02:16:24.000 And they won't allow you to do phase three research.

02:16:26.000 Right.

02:16:26.000 And so that's why the states, I think, have enough evidence to make it legal.

02:16:32.000 And patients and doctors have enough evidence to decide to try it.

02:16:36.000 It's just that in our I think it's a system that we've created to try to make it so that through science we don't just see what we want to see but we kind of have a closer view of what's there.

02:16:47.000 There are these procedures that still need to be undertaken for marijuana and also for MDMA. So that's why I say we're probably 10 years away from making MDMA into medicine and I think we'd be Five, six years away from making marijuana into an FDA-approved medicine if the repression would be lifted right today.

02:17:03.000 Now, what is the difference between the stage that the FDA requires and the data that has been accumulated?

02:17:11.000 Well, there's the preclinical stage.

02:17:14.000 So what that means is, preclinical means humans.

02:17:17.000 So there's a whole series of animal studies looking at toxicity that are required by the FDA before you can get a drug into humans.

02:17:27.000 Once you've done that, then there's phase one, two, three, and four.

02:17:31.000 And phase one is working with people who are not patients, who are healthy volunteers, to try to categorize what the drug does and what it does at different doses.

02:17:42.000 And for certain drugs that are especially toxic, like cancer drugs, They have, like, Phase 1a, Phase 2, where it's a combination where the drug is so dangerous that it only can be used in patients.

02:17:55.000 And so you do these dose-finding studies, looking at the side effects, and in general, that's what Phase 1 is.

02:18:02.000 Phase 2 is where you start working with patients, and you start seeing...

02:18:07.000 What does it do?

02:18:07.000 What is it good for?

02:18:09.000 How good is it?

02:18:10.000 What are your measures?

02:18:11.000 How well do your measures work?

02:18:13.000 How do you do the double-blind to make sure you're not seeing what you want to see?

02:18:17.000 What is your scientific methodology for the studies?

02:18:20.000 What is your treatment approach?

02:18:22.000 What dose are you using?

02:18:23.000 That's for phase two, and that can take years and years and years.

02:18:27.000 I mean, we've been phase two for MDMA for about nine years so far.

02:18:35.000 Wow.

02:18:35.000 Yeah, starting in 2004 is when we got the first permit.

02:18:40.000 We actually had permission in 2000 from 2000 to 2001 in Spain for MDMA for PTSD and we had some media attention that was very positive on the radio and the main TV and newspapers and radio and it motivated the anti-drug authority,

02:18:55.000 the forces of repression, to shut the study down and we weren't powerful enough to overcome it in Spain and that's where it was First started, though, with a study that we were working with women survivors of rape.

02:19:09.000 But then you've got phase two.

02:19:10.000 So then, once you have figured out your designs and the magnitude and the variance of the effect, how strong is it and how common is it?

02:19:19.000 Is there a large number of people that don't respond at all, or do most people respond?

02:19:24.000 Then you can size your Phase III studies.

02:19:26.000 So with marijuana, we have enormous amount of information up to the Phase II level.

02:19:33.000 And the FDA will have more information about marijuana, MDMA, LSD, than about any other drug that they've ever approved in their entire history.

02:19:43.000 And the reason is because the research is usually done with hundreds or thousands of people.

02:19:49.000 Ten thousand is about as high as you go.

02:19:51.000 But we've had LSD used by tens of millions of people and marijuana by hundreds of millions of people.

02:19:55.000 And we know the one in a million side effect or the one in five million side effect that we only discover from pharmaceutical drugs once they're approved.

02:20:05.000 So it would not take a long time.

02:20:08.000 We already know that we would work with marijuana with nausea control for cancer chemotherapy, marijuana for pain, particularly for people on opiates, because we've already shown in Phase II studies funded by the State of California that when you combine marijuana with opiates that people get better pain control and they don't need as much of the opiates.

02:20:29.000 Because of OxyContin and all these big concerns.

02:20:32.000 So we know the areas that we would study with marijuana, and we know the safety profile.

02:20:38.000 So we mainly need to just do studies in 250, 500 people to look at the particular patient groups that we want to approve.

02:20:46.000 We have to get...

02:20:47.000 High-quality, standardized, medical-grade marijuana to do it in.

02:20:52.000 And so maybe we're five years away if the political barriers were removed right today, which they're not.

02:20:57.000 What happens to someone that takes LSD and goes crazy?

02:21:02.000 Because I've had many people tell me stories.

02:21:06.000 I know the Sid Barrett story from Pink Floyd is a famous one.

02:21:11.000 I don't know if it's true, but the word was that he had taken too much acid and lost his mind.

02:21:17.000 I think it's possible, but it depends on the supportive context.

02:21:23.000 And before you asked about the candy flipping, about MDMA LSD, so in the future, when people are having this very difficult LSD experience, maybe they go to the emergency room or something, adding MDMA,

02:21:39.000 It takes it from this terrifying sense of dying ego destruction and grounds it so that people can work through it.

02:21:46.000 So I think that LSD has that potential to destabilize people, but in a supportive environment, that can be Helpful and handled and supported.

02:21:58.000 That's fascinating.

02:21:59.000 So the candy-flipping aspect over the adding NVMA might mitigate some of the negative effects of the stress that you could get from the acid experience.

02:22:07.000 Oh yeah, completely.

02:22:15.000 The thing we would like to study one day would be to take people who are dying and start them, like we did in Switzerland, start them with LSD and four hours later administer MDMA. So that way LSD peaks in around three and a half hours, three, three and a half hours, so they go through the whole challenging LSD of letting go.

02:22:35.000 uh...

02:22:35.000 of opening up and it's it's you know hopefully they can make it through that and then at the four hours you give mdma and then everything softens and they can take it in more and then they integrate as they're coming down so you know you ride one wave into the next yeah or if they're flipping out if it's too painful or too difficult for them maybe at the one at the two hours you could administer mdma There,

02:23:00.000 and you don't even have to administer a full dose of MDMA. It'd be like a half dose of MDMA softens it somewhat.

02:23:06.000 Do they have a synergistic effect?

02:23:07.000 Yeah, they do.

02:23:08.000 They do.

02:23:09.000 So the two of them together, what's the difference between...

02:23:12.000 Well, it's more like there's an expansion aspect to it, but there's a grounding aspect as well.

02:23:20.000 So you think that's a really good combination, then?

02:23:24.000 I think it is, yeah.

02:23:25.000 Makes sense.

02:23:26.000 On the other hand, for...

02:23:29.000 You know, sometimes for spiritual purposes, let's say, where people are looking for this ego dissolution, You know, you start with LSD, you start with psilocybin, you know, sometimes the experiences last 10 hours or more sometimes.

02:23:44.000 If you don't fully, if you open up to the energy flowing through you, then the psychedelic experience tends to take a shorter amount of time.

02:23:52.000 And if you end into this resistance, because for whatever reasons it's really difficult, it prolongs the experience.

02:24:00.000 And once you enter into those kind of places, if you were to add MDMA, then people can integrate it more helpfully.

02:24:08.000 Have you done any studies like what the difference is between hippie flipping and candy flipping, using mushrooms instead of...

02:24:14.000 Is there any difference to that?

02:24:16.000 Well, again, we haven't done any studies with this because combining drugs.

02:24:21.000 But more or less, it's similar.

02:24:24.000 MDMA blends with ketamine.

02:24:27.000 Even MDMA grounds people with ketamine.

02:24:30.000 It's such a shame that we can't find out about it.

02:24:32.000 It's probably going to turn out to be like a Jack and Coke.

02:24:35.000 Well, people are like, why didn't you guys do this from the beginning?

02:24:37.000 It was my favorite thing in college.

02:24:39.000 It was so hard to find, but when you did, you bought a lot and you just saved.

02:24:43.000 You sat on those.

02:24:45.000 How did you do it in terms of the timing?

02:24:47.000 Because I'm talking about where, you know, did you take them both at the same time?

02:24:51.000 These were actually designed together, where it was like a candy where it had both of the chemicals in it.

02:24:59.000 That's the only way I've ever done it.

02:25:00.000 Now, I've done it Since then, I've done it separately with mushrooms and then just taking, you know, yeah, I think it was, I took it, when I was peaking, I would dose myself with the molly, which would then take, whatever, an hour or so, 45 minutes later,

02:25:16.000 you'd start feeling it.

02:25:17.000 But yeah, it's great.

02:25:18.000 I love those two together.

02:25:20.000 If you need any, if there's a way to sign up online to any of your things, let me know.

02:25:24.000 I was robbed by gunpoint, so I got the post-traumatic stress if you need that.

02:25:28.000 Well, we need people to be...

02:25:30.000 It's not as easy as getting a prescription for marijuana to get in our studies.

02:25:34.000 We have independent raters.

02:25:36.000 You have to have treatment-resistant means you have to have had PTSD and diagnosed and failed.

02:25:40.000 Well, your PTSD is very minor compared to soldier PTSD, too.

02:25:45.000 They're dealing with real debilitating issues.

02:25:48.000 You just got freaked out one night.

02:25:50.000 I got a gun in my chest, and I thought I was going to die. 0.61

02:25:52.000 I was scared of black people for six months, and it still comes back to me once in a while when it's dark out. 0.99

02:25:57.000 Right. 0.58

02:25:58.000 Well, people can sign up online to donate to MAPS because we're funded by individuals.

02:26:05.000 The pharmaceutical companies aren't interested because these drugs are off patent and they're only offered a few times.

02:26:09.000 So far, we've not been able to get a government grant, although we are working with the National Institute of Mental Health.

02:26:15.000 Senator Rockefeller from West Virginia recently sent a letter to the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Health Affairs.

02:26:24.000 We're good to go.

02:26:39.000 Well, I think what you're doing is awesome because you guys are bringing legitimacy to this that would never be done by guys like Brian or myself or any of the other people that are out there enjoying the fruits of your labor and the fact that these doors have been It's broken down now or opened,

02:26:55.000 I should say, and work is being done and evidence is being put forth that really can't be refuted anymore.

02:27:01.000 It's slowly but slowly starting to accumulate.

02:27:04.000 Yeah, I would say that this can't be refuted.

02:27:07.000 Right now we're at this stage where we have to replicate our results because that's the key part of science.

02:27:12.000 You may have done it once, but can you do it again and again and again?

02:27:16.000 And that's where we have...

02:27:19.000 Still to prove.

02:27:20.000 So we haven't completely proven our case yet.

02:27:24.000 But it's moving, we hope, in that direction.

02:27:28.000 That's awesome, man.

02:27:29.000 And I think there's really exciting things coming up.

02:27:33.000 I really do.

02:27:34.000 I feel like our culture is starting to shift.

02:27:37.000 And I think it's stuff...

02:27:40.000 Like what you're doing is a big part of that.

02:27:43.000 Getting that information, having it on the internet, allowing people to share links, allowing people to go to whether it's maps.org or any of the different websites.

02:27:52.000 Arrowhead.org.

02:27:53.000 Arrowhead is a great website.

02:27:54.000 We were their fiscal sponsor.

02:27:56.000 We went to college together.

02:27:58.000 We try to help other organizations in that way.

02:28:02.000 I think this idea of getting honest information out for people to make their own decisions Yeah.

02:28:09.000 That's what we're about.

02:28:10.000 It's a matter of time, right?

02:28:12.000 Hopefully.

02:28:12.000 Yeah.

02:28:13.000 Well, my dad is hilarious.

02:28:14.000 My dad is 86 and three quarters, and he sent me an email today.

02:28:18.000 And it said, here's a link to an article about marijuana reform.

02:28:23.000 And he said, oh, it's going to be legal in my lifetime.

02:28:27.000 Wow.

02:28:28.000 I hope he's right.

02:28:28.000 Dad, I said, I hope you're right, you know, even if you have to live another 20 years.

02:28:32.000 I would have never thought in 2013 it would still be illegal.

02:28:35.000 When I was a kid, I thought it was a matter of time.

02:28:38.000 Well, I was on the board of Normal for a while, quite a while, and I was with people who started Normal in 1970 and 71 and thought it would be legal in a few years.

02:28:47.000 So that sort of tempers my sense of time, to be with people who...

02:28:53.000 You know, over 40 years ago, I thought it was only going to be a few years away that marijuana would be legal.

02:28:58.000 And fortunately, they're still working to try to help bring that about.

02:29:01.000 Do you lose enthusiasm sometimes when you see that it's still illegal after all this?

02:29:05.000 No, it's a worthy opponent.

02:29:10.000 It's a worthy goal.

02:29:12.000 And so I think we just do what we want to do.

02:29:15.000 There's times when I felt like I was so blocked.

02:29:18.000 That I needed to do something where I could actually see change.

02:29:22.000 And so I stopped work for a week and painted my house.

02:29:26.000 And that was great.

02:29:28.000 That's funny.

02:29:30.000 That really must feel like you're spinning your wheels sometimes.

02:29:35.000 Well, for years, we just spent four years with Health Canada trying to get an import-export permit to bring in eight grams of MDMA. And this is after Health Canada had approved The protocol, and our IRB had approved the protocol,

02:29:50.000 and the four years it took.

02:29:53.000 And they went through all these ridiculous things about the pharmacy, had to have bulletproof glass, and had to have all these alarm systems.

02:30:00.000 Bulletproof glass?

02:30:01.000 Yeah.

02:30:01.000 Was the people going to come in and steal your eight grams of acid or MDMA? Eight grams, yeah, that would be in a safe, and the safe had to be disguised in a wooden cabinet, and the safe had to be bolted to the floor.

02:30:13.000 They were harder than the U.S. It was ridiculous. 0.87

02:30:16.000 But we eventually... 0.52

02:30:17.000 You know, prevailed. 0.93

02:30:19.000 We just took every ridiculous thing and we did it.

02:30:21.000 I mean, my policy is surrender.

02:30:24.000 When there's certain kind of irrational things coming from people who are more powerful, try to give it to them.

02:30:30.000 Well, that's probably why you're in the position that you're in.

02:30:33.000 You're the facilitator of this.

02:30:34.000 I'm willing to dialogue.

02:30:36.000 Venture forth.

02:30:37.000 Continue, sir.

02:30:38.000 And there are parts that are exciting, that are connections that are just coming together.

02:30:45.000 Like even for the National Institute of Mental Health.

02:30:49.000 In the late 1980s, the fellow who's the current head of the National Institute of Mental Health was doing MDMA neurotoxicity research in animals, and I visited him.

02:30:59.000 He was, you know, this sort of hidden away in the countryside animal research lab to, you know, not attract all these animal rights protesters and we had to go through all his guards and barbed wire and stuff.

02:31:10.000 But he seemed like he was sincerely interested in the question and wasn't trying to twist the results to justify the drug war.

02:31:19.000 And we developed a respect.

02:31:21.000 I certainly respected him.

02:31:23.000 And about two years ago, a year and a half ago, I wrote him an email.

02:31:27.000 I hadn't talked to him.

02:31:29.000 And since that point, he's now become the head of the National Institute of Mental Health.

02:31:32.000 And I just said, is now a good time to apply for a grant for MDMA PTSD research?

02:31:39.000 Or is it so politically hot it's just not worth it?

02:31:41.000 And he said now is the time.

02:31:43.000 And he appointed someone else inside the NAMH who's an expert at PTSD to help us prepare applications that are more likely to be accepted.

02:31:53.000 But what he did say is that the actual decisions are made by peer reviewers.

02:31:58.000 The way they've set up for government money to be distributed that they bring in the scientists.

02:32:03.000 And he said the system of peer review is well known not to be sympathetic with innovation.

02:32:09.000 So even though we have all this support, it still may not work.

02:32:13.000 It's hard to get systems to accept innovation and change.

02:32:17.000 What can people at home that are listening to this podcast or watching it, what can they do to help you, to help keep this momentum going?

02:32:27.000 Well, first off, become a member.

02:32:30.000 Sign up for monthly membership.

02:32:33.000 We just had the incredible conference where Psychedelic Science 2013, largest psychedelic conference that we've ever had in the U.S., over 1,900 people.

02:32:44.000 There's a whole ayahuasca track, the biggest ayahuasca conference ever, and clinical research.

02:32:51.000 I was approached by AMARA, this group that helps groups crowdsource transcription and translation of these talks.

02:33:03.000 Videos are not searchable on Google, but when you do a transcript or if you do a transcript of these shows, people can then search on the transcripts and that gets them to the video.

02:33:12.000 So people, if they're interested, and it would be a tremendous thing for them to learn, to go to the MAPS website, maps.org, to our Psychedelic Science 2013 conference page, and you could sign up if you wanted to listen to some of these lectures,

02:33:29.000 which are tremendous, And transcribe or translate them if you know other languages.

02:33:34.000 Awesome.

02:33:35.000 Yeah, there's other things people could do.

02:33:37.000 Do you guys have a Twitter page?

02:33:38.000 We have Twitter, we have...

02:33:39.000 What's the Twitter page?

02:33:41.000 Maps?

02:33:41.000 Maps News.

02:33:42.000 Yeah, we have a tremendous social media team.

02:33:46.000 Oh, I'm already a member.

02:33:46.000 We are going to do an Indiegogo campaign starting probably in a week or so to raise $10,000 for the Zendo project at Burning Man, our harm reduction program, so people could tell other people about that.

02:33:59.000 And then we're going to go, as we said earlier, to probably a $250,000 request for the study with veterans, with MDMA. I think people can come out to their families.

02:34:11.000 People can come out to people that they just talk about and not be so reticent, if psychedelics have been helpful, or even if they've not been helpful, to talk about what they learn, about what they think.

02:34:24.000 Are these tools?

02:34:25.000 Maybe they use them poorly.

02:34:26.000 Maybe they use them well.

02:34:27.000 But I think Look at the gay rights movement and think about this.

02:34:31.000 Maybe they used the wrong tool for the wrong job, too, because they didn't have education about it.

02:34:35.000 Yeah, and we're finding that people that sometimes use psychedelics at festivals for what I would say is the wrong reason, just to have a fun time.

02:34:44.000 That's not the right reason.

02:34:45.000 You're out of your mind.

02:34:46.000 Well, it's beautiful, but you have to be ready for the difficult stuff.

02:34:51.000 Yes.

02:34:52.000 And if you're trying to suppress the difficult stuff, that's when people...

02:34:56.000 Yeah, I'm obviously joking around.

02:34:59.000 But I think the celebratory use is really important.

02:35:02.000 And that's why for us, medicalization is not the...

02:35:05.000 For MAPS, as a 501c3, not trying to change the laws, we're about medicalization.

02:35:11.000 But I think as a society, we need spiritual use, we need personal growth, creativity, we need a broader drug policy, which would have adults have the right...

02:35:24.000 I think it would be like the driver's license model where you would perhaps have a certain education you have to pass, a test, and maybe even to start out so we avoid a backlash.

02:35:35.000 There would be psychedelic clinics where you would go have an experience under Supervision, and if you did it well, meaning you didn't totally flip out, then you would have the right to buy it on your own.

02:35:46.000 And I think what we would do with children, I think drugs would be illegal for minors, legal for adults, but 23 states in the United States have a parental override for alcohol.

02:35:58.000 That if you want to give your kid alcohol, in 23 states you can do that.

02:36:03.000 And I think that that's how we handle underage, is that we leave it, not that the government prohibits it all, but that its families decide among themselves how they want to handle it.

02:36:13.000 That's awesome.

02:36:14.000 I'm going to have one more question, and then I'm going to let you go.

02:36:17.000 Terence McKenna's stoned ape theory is a fascinating proposal that human beings evolved from lower hominids because we got in contact with psychedelic mushrooms.

02:36:30.000 And his theory, I don't know if it's correct, but according to him and his brother, his brother, if you just Google search the Dennis McKenna podcast, I don't remember which number it is, You can find it pretty easily with a quick search.

02:36:45.000 But he gave some really interesting scientific reasons for why he believes it's very possible that that's what happened.

02:36:52.000 The doubling of the human brain size over a period of two million years, all this attributed to psilocybin.

02:36:57.000 Dennis was one of the speakers at the conference, and so people could actually translate and transcribe his talk if they wanted.

02:37:04.000 But I think the deeper question is, Can the apes that we are today evolve further with mushrooms?

02:37:14.000 Sure.

02:37:14.000 And I think the answer to that is clearly yes.

02:37:16.000 Clearly.

02:37:17.000 Whether the apes of several million years or a hundred thousand years ago used mushrooms, it's certainly plausible. 0.81

02:37:23.000 And hard to say one way or the other.

02:37:26.000 I am not in a position to say I believe it or not.

02:37:28.000 I think Terrence...

02:37:30.000 He said some things that were pretty exaggerated, like this whole idea that the end of the Mayan calendar was going to be the end of the world.

02:37:38.000 Well, he didn't really say that.

02:37:40.000 It was just in a K-hole.

02:37:41.000 Well, he talked about a massive consciousness shift and it would all be different in hyperspace.

02:37:47.000 Yeah, well, he talked about that we were going to reach a point of technological singularity.

02:37:52.000 He thought that we were going to reach a point of infinite novelty.

02:37:56.000 And that tracking it with his time wave zero algorithm that he created.

02:38:02.000 He created this really sketchy thing when he was on mushrooms.

02:38:04.000 It was based on the I Ching that supposedly mapped novelty or human innovation that you could put through a graph. 0.53

02:38:10.000 But I think when you get really fucking high, you can see patterns in almost anything.

02:38:14.000 And he had this I Ching pattern that he had chased down for like 20 plus years and created a formal mathematical program. 1.00

02:38:23.000 Yeah, some mathematical experts actually engaged him in dialogue.

02:38:28.000 Yeah, the Watson disagreement, right?

02:38:30.000 Yeah, so I think if, you know, Dennis McKenna just wrote a book, Brothers at the Screaming Abyss, and there's a good discussion about some of the criticism and the value of time wave zero.

02:38:42.000 So I was, actually Terrence was the one that helped start MDMA research, because we were at a conference at Esalen, it was In 1983, and it was already clear because of Dallas and stuff that MDMA was being used in a public setting and that the crackdown would come.

02:39:00.000 And so the underground therapists and the Shilgens chemists, you know, so we had this meeting to figure out what to do.

02:39:07.000 And Terence was like, forget about MDMA. It's from the lab.

02:39:12.000 It's got to be a plant.

02:39:13.000 You know, mushrooms, thousands of years.

02:39:16.000 Plants are better.

02:39:17.000 You know, we can trust them.

02:39:18.000 They're from nature.

02:39:20.000 And look at all these risks of MDMA and all this stuff.

02:39:23.000 And I was like, well, I don't see these risks.

02:39:29.000 And I also don't believe that drugs from plants are inherently better tools, that we're part of nature, that what comes from the human mind is out there.

02:39:40.000 So I said, I'll put up $1,000 towards an MDMA study.

02:39:43.000 We'll see how risky it really is.

02:39:45.000 And then Dick Price, who founded Esalen like 30 seconds, 10 seconds later, said, I'll put up $1,000.

02:39:49.000 And so it was in response to Terrence going on about plant medicines being best and MDMA being super dangerous that we did this study and kept it quiet until the DEA moved to criminalize, and then we surfaced with the study.

02:40:03.000 That's interesting.

02:40:04.000 That's great.

02:40:05.000 Yeah.

02:40:05.000 That's very funny.

02:40:07.000 I've always wanted to hear different people's take on that theory, because I thought it was a fascinating theory, the idea that humans became us because of psychedelics.

02:40:16.000 And the best culprit is mushrooms because they're sort of built in.

02:40:20.000 You don't have to cook them.

02:40:21.000 You don't have to do anything weird.

02:40:22.000 You don't have to extract anything.

02:40:24.000 Just chew away and boom.

02:40:27.000 Here comes the boom.

02:40:28.000 Well, I felt when I had my bar mitzvah when I was 13 that it did not turn me into a man.

02:40:35.000 The coming of age.

02:40:36.000 That's a really unrealistic expectation, too.

02:40:39.000 13? 1.00

02:40:40.000 Shit. 1.00

02:40:40.000 I mean, I was the oldest of four. 1.00

02:40:42.000 That's what my parents thought.

02:40:42.000 That's what I expected.

02:40:44.000 Well, they came up with that back when people were only living to be 30. Yeah.

02:40:48.000 And I was disappointed.

02:40:50.000 I was the same.

02:40:51.000 It was really a bummer.

02:40:53.000 I remember being in bed for the whole week, and I'm thinking, a lot of people must have had their bar mitzvahs that day, and God must be slow, and he'll come around to me eventually.

02:41:01.000 Yeah.

02:41:02.000 Oh, that's hilarious.

02:41:03.000 And finally nothing happened, and I just was sad about it.

02:41:07.000 But when I took LSD for the first time, I felt that it touched the parts of my psyche that I had hoped my bar mitzvah would touch. 0.68

02:41:15.000 Wow.

02:41:16.000 LSD, better than bar mitzvahs. 0.76

02:41:18.000 That's your next meme.

02:41:20.000 You've got two memes so far out of this show.

02:41:23.000 Well, thank you very much, Rick.

02:41:24.000 This was a really awesome conversation.

02:41:26.000 I'm glad we could pull it off, despite the gay pride parade and the Illuminati trying to hold it back.

02:41:32.000 We made it happen.

02:41:33.000 Go to maps.org, ladies and gentlemen.

02:41:36.000 And what is it?

02:41:37.000 Maps News on Twitter.

02:41:40.000 Please follow that as well.

02:41:41.000 And Facebook.

02:41:42.000 And Facebook.

02:41:43.000 And let's do this again sometime, man.

02:41:45.000 I think we could have done another three hours if I wasn't so tired.

02:41:48.000 Yeah, well, I... Maybe you should have tried Modafinil.

02:41:52.000 I've got to work tomorrow.

02:41:53.000 I want to sleep.

02:41:55.000 Thank you, everybody, for tuning into the podcast.

02:41:58.000 Thanks to Ting for sponsoring us.

02:42:00.000 Go to rogan.ting.com and save yourself some cash on an awesome company.

02:42:05.000 Thanks also to audible.com.

02:42:07.000 Go to audible.com forward slash Joe for your free audio book and 30 days free of Audible service.

02:42:15.000 And thanks also to LegalZoom.com.

02:42:18.000 If you use the code name ROGAN in the referral box, you could save some cash.

02:42:23.000 LegalZoom is not a law firm, but they provide self-help services at your specific direction.

02:42:29.000 Thanks also to Onnit.com.

02:42:31.000 That's O-N-N-I-T. Use the code name ROGAN and save yourself some money. 0.92

02:42:36.000 We will be back someday this week.

02:42:38.000 I'm working crazy hours, so I hardly know what day it is or what's up.

02:42:45.000 I'm a mess lately.

02:42:47.000 But we'll see you freaks in Vegas. 1.00

02:42:49.000 Joey Diaz and I are playing in Vegas at The Joint in the Hard Rock this Friday night.

02:42:56.000 There's some tickets still available and it should be an awesome weekend because it's a UFC weekend.

02:43:01.000 So that's July 5th, Friday night, The Joint in Hollywood.

02:43:05.000 Alright, we love you and we'll see you soon.

02:43:07.000 Bye.

The Joe Rogan Experience - July 01, 2013

Joe Rogan Experience #371 - Rick Doblin

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