 Are you aware of any other podcast in the hot tub not yet? Not yet. Here we go. We're the winners. We're the winners. I love it. All right Boom, what's up everyone welcome to simulation. I'm your host on sake and we are on site in Boston, Massachusetts We are now speaking again for our second show in the hot tub again With dr. Rick Doblin the founder and executive director of maps the multi-disciplinary Association for Psycho Docs studies Thank you so much. Oh, it's great to join you for this series of hot tub interviews this one the PG version with bathing suits We spent a lot of time editing the first hot tub version because we needed to make sure that there was no lower body Visibilities because we came in naked this time We are in bathing suits to make editing much easier and the PG version as Rick said and Rick, oh my gosh, okay the 33 years that Rick has put his lifeblood sweat and tears into psychedelic studies You can watch our first episode together the links in the bio where we talk about that 33-year journey and what has really went into understanding How psychedelics can inspire a sense of unity and help a lot with some of the big issues that we see today with 10 million People have PTSD in the United States. Rick's currently in phase three. Yeah of clinical trials with MDMA Psychedelic assisted psychotherapy very important. Yeah, so so important And we'll have you break that down again for us for as a refresher and they're in phase three right now They were awarded the breakthrough breakthrough therapy designation by the FDA. Yeah for the most promising drugs Yes, and that means you actually got to work with the FDA on Road mapping out how this study is going to play out in phase three. Yeah How we're gonna spend the 27 million dollars over the next couple years that we've raised all from donations for phase three research and Huge shout out to all of the humans that have helped contribute to this. Oh, yeah We just did a year-end fundraising. We had over 1,600 people donate. Yep. Oh, I was one of them Yeah, great And we promoted it to trying to get more people it worked great We raised over $400,000 shockingly. Yeah, yep. Yeah, boom just like that Yeah, and now so it's aiming to figure out how to spend the 27 million on phase three now And there's so um, so let's break this down. So okay everyone There's you had radical success in phase two of clinical trials in phase two You saw that 68 percent of your hundred and seven. Yeah patients experienced No longer PTSD symptoms. Well, that was at the 12 month follow-up. Okay So the way the research is done we compare everybody at baseline then we get the treatment Some people get MDMA with either With psychotherapy some people well, let me say it again Some people get therapy with either lotus MDMA or no MDMA and then some people get Therapy with full dose and then we compare the two groups and so for the FDA the measurement two months after the last Experimental session. It's what's called the final outcome measure and that's what the FDA is going to look at to approve the drug between The control group and the experimental group the 12 month follow-up is what we're doing more for insurance companies to try to help them See that it's durable that they spend all this money on this short-term intervention But it lasts and so that's where the 68 percent figure comes from the two-thirds more than two-thirds No longer have PTSD at the end of the 12 months. It's around 61 percent at the two-month follow-up Yeah, and but what that shows is that people have learned how to process painful emotions Yes, and that they continue to do that on their own After the treatment so that people keep getting better after the treatment is over It's not like a traditional treatment with let's say SSRIs for PTSD where it controls some symptoms But you still generally have PTSD and if you stop taking the medicine your problems come back because it was just symptom relief Yeah, we're trying to get to the heart of the problem Which is these fearful memories that torment people and help them process them in a different way And so that's the beautiful part is that people keep getting better on their own after we're done with the treatment Yes, and so this is also so important as Rick is bringing this up. This is not just a single MDMA assisted psychotherapy, and then you're out the door. This is 12 total assisted sessions No, three three three with the three with MDMA and then about nine or so without well It's actually three MDMA sessions day-long sessions In our eight hours with an overnight stay for people to rest and then there's twelve ninety minute non-drug Psychotherapy sessions got it So there's three before the first MDMA session for preparation and to develop what we call or what the field Calls the therapeutic alliance the trust between the therapist and the patient that they're going to be safe that they're going to Be supported. Yes, and we have two therapists a male female team. Yes, so it's not just one therapist It's to we're evolving to the point where it will be one experienced therapist and then a student Because it's very expensive to have two therapists for one person But if we can make it so that it's just really paying for one and the other gets minimal payment because they're getting hours Towards licensure and we're training the next generation of therapists. So it's three MDMA sessions three to five weeks apart and then three non-drug psychotherapy sessions for preparation and then three for integration after each MDMA experimental session or for the control group the therapy takes place without MDMA. So phase three There's no low-dose MDMA. It's either therapy with inactive placebo or therapy with active MDMA Yes, and again, it's this Thus the psychedelic assisted psychotherapy component is so crucial that there is a male and female psychotherapist out there with the with the patient and if you want to take a look at some of the Partial testimonials of some of the phase two studies. There was a veteran that had Severe suicidal tendencies and then went through your phase two and then had no Suicidal inclinations whatsoever afterward. So this is it happened with many and we and he was a Veteran that had previously attempted suicide several times. So we don't exclude people that have never tried suicide So some people might say that's kind of dangerous to include people in our research But what we're trying to do is work with the most difficult cases because MDMA is controversial And so if we can show that it works with the most difficult cases that will help get it approved and then the other thing I want to mention is that People often go into Sort of regressed states that a lot of people that have PTSD have had earlier Experiences of trauma in addition to whatever it was to tip them over into PTSD And we don't know People's history as well as you know, they have it stored in their minds stored in their bodies There's a book by Bessel van der koek a doctor who's an expert in PTSD Who's the principal investigator of our Boston site and his book is called the body keeps the score? Yes, so what we have this view of our therapeutic process is that there's this inner wisdom I'm glad you're going to the neuroscience and psychology of things because we wanted to make sure to give a heavy touch On this. Oh good. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, so like the storage of the Of the post-traumatic stress needs to be processed Yeah, and what happens with PTSD is that PTSD changes people's brains and The way it changes people's brains. It's like a groove, you know In your mind that patterns that develop and so there's a reduction of activity in the prefrontal cortex Where we think rationally and put things in context because people are emotionally irrationally triggered There's an increase in activity in the amygdala, which is where we process fear and there's a Decrease also in hippocampus where we process memories into long-term storage. So PTSD changes people's brains and MDMA Changes people's brains also but in the opposite way. It's like almost like the perfect drug for PTSD So in healthy volunteers taking MDMA into brain scans fMRI scanners It increases activity in the frontal cortex The prefrontal cortex so people can think more rationally it decreases activity in the amygdala So that people aren't so Reactive from fear from these powerful memories of trauma and it increases activity between the hippocampus and the amygdala So memories can be moved out of kind of the short-term storage where it's always seeming like it's about to happen Yes, or it's always still happening or every sound brings somebody back to the traumatic experience And so MDMA facilitates the recall of the memories and we have better memory recall under MDMA than people have Without MDMA so the memory of the trauma people have a clearer memory for more of it And the problem is that when you have memories that are unconscious or inaccessible They control our moods our immune system control our behaviors, but we're not even aware of them So the fact that memory is increased under the influence of MDMA is really really helpful And then the fact that this hippocampus amygdala connection is strengthened that permits these memories that emerge into consciousness to be then stored in In the past they're not always happening So that then what happens is the next time somebody brings back this memory and it's called memory Reconciliation that memory is assembled from different parts of the brain the episodic memory the emotional memory But when we have the experience that memory we have to recreate the memory rewrite the memory And so basically what we're trying to do is have a better recall for the trauma But replace the fear emotion with an emotion of peacefulness and a recognition that it was in the past Yeah, and so it's called the you know emotional memory and episodic memory Yes, so we're replacing the emotional memory with a different emotion because when they recalled the trauma They weren't feeling the terror Now MDMA also increases hormones particularly oxytocin and prolactin Yeah, and these are the hormones of nursing mothers the love oxytocin has been called the love hormone And so that creates a sense of safety a sense of connection because people with PTSD have lost trust or isolated and the MDMA facilitates this Pro social Emotions and activities and you may have heard of your listeners May have heard of they're about to hear from about it now about the study of octopus Octopi so neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins was interested in MDMA and pro-social behavior And she wanted to do a study giving MDMA to octopi because humans and octopi diverged evolutionary about 250 million years ago and Octopi have different kind of brains than human brains. And so the experiment was Octopus also has three hearts. There's some crazy things going on. Yeah, there's a lot of neurons and Tentacles and they're very smart. Yeah, they're very smart. And so the experiment was a little bit like us in the hot dog So what they do is that they have a three chambers in the first chamber is the octopus in this In the center chamber is the octopus of an either side or two different chambers with doors into them One of them is an inanimate object a ball in a bird cage So you can see through it, but the ball can't be moved much and then the other chamber is another octopi Octopus in also in this sort of bird cage so they can't move either so normally what happens is that the Octopus will spend more time with the inanimate object than with the other octopus whether it's a male Octopus and a female octopus are the only time octopuses are more social is during mating season All right, so then what they do is they've they did a little it took a little bit of Calculations and experimenting to figure it out, but they put MDMA in water And so so imagine that we're at octopus and they dunked them in this bath for like 10 minutes And during which time octopi absorbs MDMA and I would like to explain We have not dumped MDMA in this hot tub water. That's right Although that would have been a waste of MDMA. Otherwise, we would have been naked by now We would not care about All right, so but so then when they put this MDMA dosed Octopus in the chamber It turns out that they spent more time with the other octopus than with the inanimate object So there's something fundamentally physiologically going on with MDMA pre language That's really deep about connections. Yeah about socialization. And so You know one thing that the FDA is requiring us to do once we finish the study in adults and assuming it goes well We have been required to do phase four studies So phase four is post-approval and we're being required to do study in adolescence Yes, initially with 12 to 17 year olds and then if that works with 7 to 11 Now these are kids that have been traumatized Trauma as I said changes your brains, you know, some people have heard oh, we got to protect kids developing brains But when they've been traumatized their brains are developing abnormally and MDMA can potentially restore a more normal Processing and help people overcome kids So we will find that out and the fact that it works and octopi to be yeah pro-social makes me think that This therapy will work in adolescence and even younger kids are traumatized Even without a lot of verbal psychotherapy But just creating a safe space. So that's physiologically a bit of a story on how MDMA Actually works the other thing for the more scientifically minded people that are listening I want to explain about a methodology issue related to phase three and that's how do you do a double-blind study? with a drug like MDMA which generally if you've Been told that you're going to receive a placebo or you're going to receive an MDMA bill and you receive the placebo very few people think oh this is really the MDMA and If you've got the placebo very few and if you get the MDMA very few people say oh nothing happened So how do you do a double-blind study? You know with a drug like MDMA? And so a lot of my Dissertation at Harvard the Kenny School of government was on this problem. How do you solve the double-blind issue? And as it turned out, I thought I had solved the problem If you use an inactive placebo, you know, it won't work that often the fool people if you use active Placebos like amphetamines or tranquilizers People will think oh something's happening But both amphetamines and tranquilizers will make our therapy less effective, you know when you tranquilize somebody they need to be emotionally Available and when you give amphetamines to people PTSD if you look at the drugs that people with PTSD take to avoid their problems It's alcohol it's opiates You know it's sometimes other drugs, but it's not they don't do stimulants because that activates them It doesn't reduce the fear. So Giving those kind of drugs first off the therapist would be able to tell the difference anyway And the patients might be fooled initially, but it makes the therapy more complicated less effective And so the solution that I came up with was low doses of the test drug And so one group gets therapy with low dose MDMA the other group gets therapy with full dose MDMA And then there's more confusion, and I thought the challenge was going to be to find the dose of MDMA that was low enough to Make people think something was happening, but not high enough to be therapeutic Okay, because if it's therapeutic then you're gonna have a difficult time finding a difference between the two groups So we tested 25 milligrams 30 milligrams 40 milligrams 75 milligrams 100 milligrams 125 milligrams and 150 yeah, and what we discovered To my surprise was that Where it turns therapeutic we found at 75 milligrams So the group that got 75 milligrams did very very well This was in our study of veterans firefighters and police officers even a little better than the group that got 125 Interesting, but the group that had 125 had more higher depression scores. Okay, but definitely 75 was effective Remarkably so and so the lower doses of MDMA though did produce more blinding So I was right about that But they they acted more like an amphetamine and that they made people more anxious They stimulated them, but they didn't reduce their fear and so actually people found it uncomfortable And while they still got better a little bit They didn't get as much better as the group that just got therapy without any MDMA at all So when we went to the FDA for our final meeting and what's called the special protocol assessment process Where we negotiate every aspect in the design and try to come to agreement with FDA And if you do then you get this agreement letter and that means the FDA is legally bound to approve the drug If you get statistically significant evidence of efficacy and if no new safety problems arise and since the tens of millions of people have Taken MDMA, we know the safety profile very well over a thousand people have taken it I think over 1,300 people have taken it in clinical research already Mostly by other people mostly healthy volunteers. Yeah, that's so we got this Moving towards this agreement and the biggest hang-up at the final end was how do we do this double blind stuff? Yeah, so I opened the meeting and I said one of my favorite quotes is That And I thought it was from William James, but it really is from an early president of Harvard William James started the psychology program That Harvard is the founder of American psychology psychology building at Harvard is named after William James So I got it wrong but the quote I got right and so the quote was from about a century ago A president of Harvard said never forget. There's always a Harvard man on the wrong side of every issue Yeah, and so I said this one. It's me I thought I solved the problem, but I didn't because I did not anticipate that these low doses would have an anti-therapeutic effect So I went to the FDA and I said we'll do whatever you want. You know, you can choose blinding Yeah, or but that's going to make it easier for us to find a difference between Therapy with full dose MDMA and therapy with this low dose So I propose that they do therapy with inactive emblem of MDMA versus therapy with full dose MDMA Okay, I said we do whatever they want And so the FDA said based on the known problems of a double-blind and also the double-blind doesn't work as often as people think it Does even with SSRIs and other drugs There's side-effect profiles that people can tell the difference that the therapists and researchers can tell the difference So the double-blind doesn't it's not as theoretically effective as it seems on its surface so that so the The there's Bob Temple who's the sort of old wise man at the FDA. He's been at the FDA since 1972 He's headed their office of science policy. He came to the final meeting good and he said He agreed with us and so we've accepted that there are going to be challenges to the double-blind But this is the best way to do the design and what FDA said was in situations like that and In general research, there's two main ways to eliminate experimenter bias Not only did Bob Temple say that's the way we should do the study But then when we presented it to the European Medicines Agency They agreed with that so the European Study will be designed in a similar way and because of that the European Medicines Agency will accept our US data So while it's 27 million to make MDMA into a medicine for FDA It's only going to be 9 million to make it into a medicine throughout Europe. Great. Yes I never thought about it so deeply that the design of the double-blind controlled Study is what's so important to make sure that the effects are actually working out Yeah Now what they said though is that the other ways that we eliminate experimenter bias are first off random assignment So there have been some studies where you take people who have a problem And then it didn't work for them and then you say who wants to volunteer for this new treatment Yeah, and then you compare them against the success rates of the the normal Treatment, but that's not right because you're getting people that are especially motivated So they're more interested in getting better Then those that didn't volunteer for this new experiment or they have less fears of the treatment So you need random assignment means everybody is volunteering to be in the same exact design Either to get MDMA or suicide or placebo and then you randomly assign them So that's a very important part of eliminating bias is everybody's similarly motivated Yeah And then the other part is how you do the measures of the outcomes and you can't have the therapist measure it Because they're biased they want it to work and so what you end up doing is you have a team of Independent Raiders and we've got our team mostly has been trained by the Boston Veterans Administration And they developed the measure called the CAPS the clinician administered PTSD scale, which is still used at Over the world. Yeah across the world and it's been revised. So we're using the CAPS 5, which is the latest version of it and So we have this rotating group of around 20 Raiders That will be assigned to whichever person needs to be evaluated next and they'll all be done by telemedicine And so we're trying to break the connection between the Raiders Either being the therapist but also knowing where the person is in the process of therapy Is it the baseline? Is it after the first MDMA after the second after the third? Is it the one-year follow-up the two month so that's how we're going to do it so we've had to come up with a very sophisticated way of doing the ratings and That's the approach to eliminating Investigator bias now the other thing I want to share is that the double-blind does sometimes work And so we have a protocol from the FDA Approved by the DEA where we can give MDMA to therapists as part of their training And so we're training them for working on phase three studies where people will either get MDMA or placebo And so it's basically a five-day program where they come in on the first day They get oriented then the next day they either get MDMA or they get a placebo for an eight-hour therapy session Then the day after that is for integration and rest and then there's a switch Cross-over and then they get whatever they didn't get the first time and then there's another day of integration And so this so we're preparing them to deal with how do you work with somebody for eight hours when they didn't get the MDMA yeah, and that gives people the experience of MDMA because as we move to mainstream We're going to work with a lot of people that didn't come from the psychedelic underground that are from traditional therapy worlds Yeah, we need a legal way to give them MDMA to prepare them to be more effective therapists So we've had two times of so far. We've done this for about over 60 people from all over the world We've trained in this way, but we've had two times where People were so enthusiastic. These are both people that had never done MDMA and Now they had so wanted to get MDMA the first time because then also you have more days to talk with the therapist about what happened More days to integrate it. So it turned out that they Both of these people You're so relieved because on the first time they got MDMA and they went through this really profound experience working on levels of trauma going back to childhood with Emotional release with crying. This was fantastic now both of these were psychiatrists and they had watched a week long Part of our training program is a week long Program residential program watching videotapes of actual therapy sessions Yes going over our treatment manual and talking about our therapeutic rush So they'd already seen that they'd already seen a lot of people doing MDMA through these videos So they were super thrilled to get MDMA the first time they had these profound experiences and they persuaded the therapist now These are Experienced therapists that have worked with a lot of PTSD patients 100% sure that it was really MDMA and they were 100% sure it was really MDMA And then they have their integration They do more work and then they were preparing for the third day to be an easy day Getting the placebo just listening to music and having kind of relax time And so one of them after about an hour and 15 minutes or so during this easy session. He just Stopped talking and he didn't talk for hours Yeah, and he was stunned because it turned out that he had gotten the placebo the first time Wow And that now that he had the MDMA He was just speechless at one point he turned to the books and the bookshelf And he pointed at the books and then he went like no and then he pointed to his heart like it's all in the Feelings the books the knowledge the intellectual knowledge didn't prepare me at all. It's not in the books It's in the heart and and both of those people that were a hundred percent sure that Persuaded experienced therapists that were a hundred percent sure they had the MDMA when they really had the placebo both were Psychiatrists so it's not to say that the the placebo methodology Doesn't work at all and it's just astonishing and what both of these psychiatrists said afterwards is that Once they could recover their ability to talk That there was an effortless and deeper flow Between the conscious and the unconscious beautiful with the MDMA that they realized how a part of their mind was leading them to have these experiences and Trying to manufacture this MDMA like state So what that points out first off is that you can learn this MDMA state That's why this is fundamentally different than traditional pharmacotherapy where you get a drug every day for months or years or a lifetime We only give MDMA to people three times and the integration process is about helping them learn How to act like they're on MDMA how to process emotions even without the MDMA So the difference between recreational use and therapeutic use is recreational use people are like I'm gonna take this drug I'm gonna go out and party and have a good time and then when it's over it's over But therapy it's like I'm gonna take this drug. I'm gonna go into this therapeutic situation I'm gonna process the full range of emotions not just happy emotions And I'm gonna try to learn and bring back and integrate so I could do this on my own without the drug exactly So even though people think oh MDMA is a drug. It's a party drug. It's a schedule and drug We actually have an anti drug therapeutic approach exactly to help people prompt them with some deep profound MDMA Experiences so they don't need to drug anymore exactly now That's also the orientation from a non-profit pharmaceutical. That's right if we were for profit We're like oh my god You're gonna have to take this drug once a month for the rest of your life or at least for a year or two You know so it's really remarkable And I think it also points to the fact that MDMA Because it's not that Fundamentally different from the way we normally process Feelings and emotions in a way we can recognize it But it is fundamentally different in the sense of a reduction of fear and a new way is profoundly different yet Profoundly similar so it's easier for people to integrate MDMA experiences than ayahuasca or psilocybin or LSD or other classic psychedelics Where there's ego dissolution where it's a new different kind of consciousness MDMA is more rational Consciousness with a profound emotional Effect and so that that's I think what contributes to its therapeutic efficacy. Yeah Rick is pointing out a couple really key things here first thing that he's pointing out that I think is so key is that the difficulty of figuring out how to design these trials properly and then also Because this is now going to be happening for all of the other This is now going on with LSD in Switzerland This is aiming to be done with Ibogaine and ayahuasca and cannabis and so many other psilocybin as well So so now what Rick is doing is he's helping lay a foundation of clinical trial design Yeah For the next psychedelics to come in and be able to tweak and play with this in ways that make sense Yeah And that's first this major crucial point that you're pointing out which I'm so happy you brought up The second crucial thing that I'm that I'm hearing you bring up that's so important to recognize is that There's this wide spectrum of Traumatic experiences that happen any anything from actual abuse and violence and rape and and and War all the way to maybe somewhat classified as a more less abusive potentially trauma And and maybe that is someone passing maybe that is someone that that is that long grief prolonged grief on some Sting yeah, and so with with work or with family or with whatever what have us in this conversation that that that trauma to be Neuro physiologically in Integrated into our being most effectively Through a psychedelic is a psychotherapy experience can not only help with 10 million people that have PTSD in the US But people around the world that have had humans are just on we have traumatic experiences in our lives And just to be able to properly integrate them and move them forward is so crucial Yeah, well, there's multi-generational trauma that permits these conflicts to go on Generation after generation and we're learning more about epigenetics How yeah certain anxiety levels things can be passed from generation to generation not so much through Changing genes but through changing which genes are turned on and off But the other thing I'd like to say is that for every human being who's alive right now There's an enormous background level of trauma because of climate change and global warming and the oceans warming and the Extinctions of animals and the number of nuclear weapons and biological weapons, and if you read the paper You know the increasing Polarization in the United States and this came right after the Cold War. Yeah. Yeah, so there's that transgenerational trauma as you're speaking Yeah, it goes on and on and on and so until we find that sense of unity with each other and with our planet and with our own selves inside We're and we won't be able to transcend the transgenerational trauma that is occurring. Yeah so I think this points to another issue, which is the whole Example of and the historical experience. We've had with global prohibition That we're talking about from a strategic point of view working with the worst cases the hardest cases that people that are suffering the most that are Disabled with PTSD There's roughly a million veterans receiving disability payments from the veterans administration for disabling PTSD At a cost of somewhere in the neighborhood of twenty billion dollars a year to the VA For all and we've not got a penny from the VA for doing this research. Yeah, there's another 600,000 or so veterans disabled from anxiety depression and other mental disorders for another 10 plus billion dollars a year So it's an enormous problem for the VA. It's enormous problem for society. And I think what we see is that politicians particularly populist authoritarian politicians Manipulate people's fears and anxieties against the other and they do that because people are insecure and worried and Here's a convenient scapegoat. And so I think this idea of initially for strategic reasons working through science working through medicine trying to help patient populations that are highly valued by the mainstream society Like veterans and first responders and women who've been sexually abused Yes, that we are able to bring a controversial drug forward at a time of need But that overall the long-term vision is that we move from a criminal justice approach to a public health approach To treating people's interactions with drugs and I'd say the fundamental problem of the criminal justice approach Is that it invests drugs with certain properties? These are the schedule on drugs. These are the bad drugs These are the drugs you should never take these are the drugs that always have risks and no benefits And these are okay that drugs you can take from big pharma or you know And alcohol yeah, and of course they have side effects, but we'll overlook them So we invest properties in drugs and then of course the drug war has been used to demonize minorities to You know here we hear about all these hordes of drug dealers coming through the Mexican border When you know walls won't help this was your initial actually study into Psychedelics was discovering that it was a ban on Psychedelics due to the sense of unity yeah in the 60s that this inspired. Yeah, I think there is Two different narratives for the 60s One was that all these people took psychedelics and a lot of them were unprepared and people had frightening Experiences and they went to a Merzy Roams or they had a schizophrenic break or they committed suicide or jumped out of a window Or you know stared at the Sun and went blind of course that was a completely made-up story But this idea that it was because of the excesses It was because of the problems with the use of psychedelics that they were all criminalized The other narrative that I think is more accurate is that it's not about when psychedelics went wrong It's about psychedelics going right exactly and this was part of Good Friday and your investigation into that and figuring and following up With people 20 years 25 25 years later. Yeah, and seeing the profound shifts still yeah Yeah, and so the Good Friday experiment was 1962 done by Timothy Leary was the faculty sponsor Walter Panky was the Investigator or he was a minister and a doctor and we went into this in detail already in the first one Okay, but but but the continuation of this of the school of thought of the psychedelics going right and then being throttled Well, well, but okay, so going right means people sensing that we're all connected that we're all connected Okay, now this also happened during the 60s when we were going to the moon Yeah, and so we started seeing pictures of the earth from the moon and you don't see borders You see this one globe. We're all together. Yes, so this fundamental sense of unity Reduces people's fear of the other. Yes Connects us to the other and we appreciate differences because we're fundamentally the same. Yes We're different in in very minor ways Yes, and we can and I think if we look at religions like languages like there's all these different languages That different cultures have developed to communicate to each other But it's a difficult thing and they're different the different languages emphasize different things you think in different ways But it's hard to say English is better than German and German is better than French and French is better than Spanish You know or French is the only way to communicate really all these other languages are invalid So I think religions are like that. They emerge from cultures They have certain cultural references, but they're all about this sense of connection of spirituality Yeah, they all about so I think that we will appreciate other people's religions as different flavors Yes, different cultural histories. Yes, and so what we're talking about with this kind of global spirituality is Not the loss of individuality or people's individual religion It's just a surrendering of these truth claims that this is the one right religion Yeah, this is the only way to spirituality or heaven or however you want to say the one the one right way Is earth is everyone here on earth is all sisters and brothers moving forward in And so I think if we look at some of the things that developed in the 60s Psychedelics were connected to the anti-war movement in Vietnam They were connected to people that were involved in the environmental movement in the civil rights movement in the women's rights movement And so it's psychedelics going right. It's psychedelics having this consciousness experience of unity and connection that then has Implications for people for how they see the world and how they act in the world and that was causing people to challenge the status quo And that's what led to the backlash You know it used to be that it was like the Copernican revolution where the earth was the center of the universe That's like our ego our ego is the center of the universe Okay, and then it was the switch to the Sun the earth revolves around the Sun Yeah, that we revolve around the big self the collective unconscious the history of mankind all of the Developments all the millions of people that develop the languages that we use So I think it's that switch the Copernican switch From what's the center of the universe from our ego yielding this but the ego doesn't go away The earth doesn't go away because we revolve around the Sun so I think we can address the fears of the fundamentalists and say we can enrich your spirituality and You don't have to believe this is the only way and everybody else's infidels and we have to kill them Those are power games not spiritual games And so I think it's that crisis of psychedelics in the 60s being connected to people challenging the states Well, you know finish the one thought about Ehrlichman He said in an interview later in the 70s before he died that the two main enemies of Nixon Nixon White House Were civil rights and hippies Yeah, civil rights activists and hippies and he said we if we could criminalize the drugs that they used opiates for a lot of African-Americans and psychedelics in marijuana for the hippies. We criminalize those drugs We can disrupt their meetings we can go after their leaders We can stick them in jail and he said did we know we were exaggerating the risks of these drugs Of course we did so I think that the narrative of what happened in the 60s There were problems with psychedelics going wrong, but it was really psychedelics going right So as we introduce psychedelics back into the culture now People have already seen after 50 years that most of those people that did psychedelics when they young did not go live on a commune and grow soybeans, you know, they they became Part of society like Steve Jobs founding Apple Absolutely, and so I think that's the that didn't happen And so now we really have to be careful about the other problems of psychedelics going wrong Yeah, and that's why we have it's not psychedelics. It's psychedelic assisted psychotherapy. Yeah, now we can move on to you Did you did such a good job at Making a comparison to the Copernican revolution our soon our ego as our self will take a backseat to the collective But we will still be able to be individuals on this rock together. So you go death is a wrong term Yeah, yeah, correct. He doesn't die one will one can the the the death Inflated well well one can oscillate between the Between the lowest ego states in the highest. Yeah, etc. So And so as you as you speak about this it seems as though we will be We're getting to that point finally where we are slowly transcending the older Infrastructures of of of civilization and moving forth into more potentially prosperous This is the structure. This is the struggle. Hopefully this is the struggle I think we can see the rise of Trump and the rise of populism as a reaction Against that and it's it's very interesting to to think about how to properly in Really dose up on love across the world first. Yeah, because they're You can't just go okay. No borders and then the the next day because there's still people that haven't quite dosed up on love enough a lot of people like that and so one needs to then Properly ensure somehow through trust-based protocols that everyone on earth or a lot of people on earth are dosed up on that true love then Make a deeper more Unity infrastructure made available to people As this as a transition and that's why we need to go beyond medicine beyond and end prohibition So this billions that's right people can have these kind of experiences Voluntarily if they want to yes, and I think the more that they see The outcomes for people that have done this the more people will be open to it That's right and Rick again is coming bringing us to the public health approach to these things That's and in and you're right that as we bring up the public health approach and bringing in involving psychedelics in the public health approach So so we we bring we bring We bring psychedelics up in the public health approach in psychedelic assist psychotherapy and all drugs in general all drugs in general in in Integrating our our traumas are in transgenerational traumas till this point That makes it easier for us to get to the point of unity through a public health approach to assisted psychotherapy I love that yeah, and I'll just say that Robert Mueller who is the assistant secretary of general the United Nations In the 80s who wrote a book 83 called new Genesis shaping a global spirituality and now his fundamental thesis is we need Global spirituality and his book was beautiful, but he didn't say anything about psychedelics So I wrote him a letter and to my shock He wrote me back and we started communicating because I said you didn't say anything about psychedelics Yeah, I told him about a good Friday experiment and and then he came along and he started helping us bring back psychedelic research But I think that's this theory that you might say hey it's a bunch of hippies in a hot tub You know yeah, but it's not it comes from the assistant secretary of general the United Nations That's right that this kind of global spirituality is where we need to move and that a lot Of the conflicts between nations are religious conflicts Yeah, and so we need this global spirituality. That's right And how we develop that is the challenge of the human species right now. It is yeah, it is so well said This is the main challenge of the human species is prospering together moving forward. Yeah, Rick I want to make sure we touch on this Okay, we are moving toward a an era of Figuring out how to administer these most effectively into the world and there's more and more Pop-ups sort of happening for example, you taught us about this in the last session that that the University of Mississippi has Monopoly on the cannabis then that DEA said okay fine. That's done in 2016 Yeah, and so now it's opened opened up the doors to no, okay, so I'm so glad that you brought this up, so But Everything you said up to that last point that it's opened up stuff is right so in August 12 2016 DEA put something in the federal registry saying we're gonna end the monopoly Yeah, on DEA licensed marijuana because the FDA is a federal rate agency and it can only work with federally legal marijuana so even though we've all these states that have marijuana that's of high quality and better even than the Product that's grown at the University of Mississippi. We can't use it in FDA studies And the marijuana that comes from NIDA. It's only for research not for commercial sales. That's right phase 3 Must be with the same drug that you want to market. Yeah, so this monopoly started in 1968 I think we're gonna be able to end it in the next six months But what happened is once the DEA put this announcement in the federal register that was in August of 2016 Then in November Trump got elected. Yeah, and Trump put in Attorney General Sessions Yeah, and he is like a droglodyte back in the olden days dinosaur and he said no to marijuana So there's roughly 26 applications that he has blocked for now for now. Now. There's a new General there's multiple people in the Senate that are on our side and we're about to either launch a lawsuit We've got an application from loud cracker. You miss ever so I do hope the next six months that marijuana will become Federally there will be federally legal marijuana processors private producers that could make it into a medicine and our goal is to make the But the flower exactly in cheap form in it will become generic after three years after we make it into medicine Yeah, and so I'm totally in favor of all sorts of pharmaceutical companies taking the marijuana plants slicing and dicing making extracts Making non-smoking delivery systems and drops and sprays and topicals and edibles all this kind of stuff But I want the plant the flower to be a medicine Also, and it will be the least expensive medicine as a check on all the prices that all these other for-profit people will charge This is so important that we're we're making sure to highlight this is that the United States is Actually giving up a 30-plus billion dollar medicinal marijuana market across the world to Canada Israel United Kingdom, etc. And Netherlands and what we see is you were told us about this last time that Israel is now down to $14 an ounce like 60 cents a gram of really high quality cannabis trim buds trim buds And the way that we can then take this Extremely low price if we can do this right in the United States if we can really quickly move the ball forward with cannabis We can then start testing it for PTSD with veterans We can really start moving. Yes with the ball forward in that. Yeah, although I would say that we are just now finishing our first study with PTSD with cannabis for PTSD and veterans We got 2.1 million dollars from the state of Colorado from marijuana taxes And that was the first government money, which is thank goodness. Yeah, it used marijuana from Mississippi from NIDA and in Michigan get the Yes, you taught us about yeah, so so let me just say that that the the project that we've just finished is 76 treatment resistant chronic severe PTSD patients all veterans and we've just The data lock will be February 8th coming right up And then we will analyze the data at the end of February and then decide do we need to do more phase 2 studies more phase 3 studies But we have finished in it the results We can't say but one was a group that got CBD one got THC one got marijuana with THC and CBD in it one was a placebo So we're very excited about moving forward with the marijuana project as well So what happened in Michigan is Rob Campion who is was who was The founder and the executive director of the marijuana policy project They've had a big role in a lot of the different state legalization efforts Colorado and others and they were into their Yes, yes, so they put in the Michigan a little tiny sentence or two That says that if Michigan legalization passes there has to be 20 million dollars a year for two years For veterans and to deal with veteran suicide that has to go to nonprofits or academic research It's not for profit companies and it passed it passed so we got to do more things like now Then there's been various people inside Michigan had been saying talking bad about maps like They don't want maps to get them a maps is going to take all the money away from Michigan and take it out of state or we're going to transfer the money to psychedelic research So I wrote a document for Michigan state legislatures. Yeah legislators because there was an effort both in the Before the the new legislature came in and the lame duck session to change the initiative and they were trying to change this 20 million a year for two years, but they were unsuccessful in doing so and what we've indicated is that We're willing to do whatever amount of research they want to do in Michigan But it's not the smartest because the initiative was because 20 veterans a day are committing suicide Yeah, and marijuana can be helpful So if we just try to do the study inside Michigan, it'll take longer to recruit all the subjects So we're going to try to have many sites in Michigan that sites all over now again The legislature has to come up with the procedures They're not going to have money for a year or so till they actually start selling marijuana collecting the taxes But that's very hopeful side. It is future. Yeah, so the other way to break the monopolies through importation But so far there's no the Israelis wanted to Export and President Trump called President Natan Yahu and said block it which he did that was about six months ago So now the Israelis have the parliament has passed again another bill approving export the none of the Canadian Companies have yet been willing to export flowers. So right now. We have no ability to import from around the world But that's another way to break the monopoly and if we do then it's utterly senseless to have them Prohibitions against domestic production if we can go into drug development research with imported supplies All we're doing is hurting Americans by keeping this Prohibition in place exactly and we see Countries like Canada making cannabis on their on their public stock exchanges. These companies are worth billions billions of dollars already The United States needs to play catch-up. We've talked about that with Steve D'Angelo and a couple other global leaders on our show In the space. So we're really looking forward to that now Cannabis is one of many other subject areas. Okay, so there's a couple other Psychedelic is a psychotherapist going on. There's LSD. There is Ibogaine. There's ayahuasca There's several psilocybin and this is all for the compassionate use to deal with Anxiety That's so much those the psilocybin is for pain addiction for alcohol So we there's an MDMA study in England for MDMA for alcoholics on the theory that trauma is what drives people to run away from their Problems into drug abuse. So there is a lot of work in the treatment of addiction Okay, with with psilocybin for tobacco addiction for alcoholism for cocaine. That's crucial So addiction and then there's the end of life as well and dealing with that really well. Yeah obsessive compulsive disorder There's been some we're starting a new study with any disorders MDMA for eating disorder eating disorders or obsessive compulsive Yeah, wow, so we're bridging boys have even even couples therapy Although we've done that in the form of PTSD research There's a technique called cognitive behavioral con joint therapy con joint meaning couple or dyads where one member has PTSD But it affects the relationship and so we're working with the people Candace Monson and Anne Wagner They're now at Ryerson University in Toronto And we've been able to get permission to give both members of the couple MDMA and it's been tremendous And so we have some measures of the relationship strength But the primary outcome measure was the PTSD of the person with PTSD in the dyad or the couple But couples therapy would be an incredible use for MDMA Absolutely getting through things as couples. I can't believe that it's not we're way past PTSD and to end of life into cancer and to OCD and to Social anxiety we did social anxiety social anxiety and autistic adults. We did MDMA for people with life learning illnesses anxious about dying So that's amazing that it's branching off into all different types of of aspects of life And that's so important to start testing that because there's so much better we can do now There's and i'm really glad that you're laying the foundations for everyone else to be able to do it better Along the way. It's so funny that you also said that you you know, you want to you want to have this Launch off as as as your baby over the last 35 almost 35 years launch off And then you want to go to do psychedelics is psychotherapy for others And give that gift while other people take this torch and well, that was actually my vision for my life at age 18 In 1972 is when I decided that I was going to be an underground psychedelic therapist and try to bring back psychedelic therapy I didn't really want to be an underground psychedelic therapist. I want to be legal. I want to do it I want to just have a little office with a sign and not worry about the police And boom you made you an entrepreneur to move this all forward and how you find yourself And recently we I gave a talk with one of the veterans with one of our researchers And we have a senior retired DEA official who's working with us as a consultant whose son went into the military and got PTSD And um Opened his father's eyes to marijuana and other treatments for PTSD So we just gave a talk at the international association of chiefs of police of chiefs of police It's like 10,000 people. This was in Orlando and it's such a um Non-traditional audience. Yeah that president trump decided he would speak to that audience too So he came at the last minute And he spoke at the exact same time that that we had our panel which was a bummer for us because A lot of the people went to him, but some people still came to us And one of the persons that came to us was a psychologist Working with police officers with psychological problems including PTSD. That's huge and he worked it out with his chief And he is now going to come to our training program In march in ashville to become a police psychologist able to give him to made of police officers Wow, and then now also go into firefighting into veterans. Yes. Wow. Yeah. Yeah, that's so awesome training veterans Therapists that work with the VA. Yes, and we've had several firefighters including one that had PTSD from 9 11 We had somebody that volunteered for our Study for phase three who has PTSD from columbine from the mass shooting. Yeah, so there's going to be a lot of Potential benefits coming. It's cool how people are latching on and wanting to help work with you as Psycho-duxes a psychotherapist across their industry. We have over 5,000 people on a waiting list Who want to know about when we start our training program for training more 5000 Therapists we have over 20,000 people who want to know about being in the study 20,000 want to be 5000 want to be therapists and then yeah, and we haven't even tried it to magnify these numbers in either way See that's what's happening is that there's a lot of attention coming to this field. Okay now getting to this Yeah, this well this this subject area specifically is getting a lot of attention around the world right now It's the idea that it's really important to do things like invest the appropriate resources into Um into competition and cooperation in this space. Yeah, so so what is our ideal sort of of of Combination of those two forces as companies try and privatize their specific psilocybin blends. Yeah, meanwhile As we cooperate we don't want to patent what the earth produced for us Yeah, yeah, so I think that if we look at the history of maps the things that I've gotten the most criticism for The first was accepting a million dollar donation over four years from rebecca mercer and the mercer family They were the ones that supported steve vannon and president trump and they support they owned cambridge analytica Which stole all the facebook data and also a bright part But that was it and they're rebecca's donation was limited to veterans in our study Yeah, so that was important bipartisan bridging, but it got a lot of criticism of that I like the way you look at that is the bipartisan bridging. We're trying to bring humans together Yeah, I mean Yeah, totally and that's the essence of democracy is you don't have to agree on everything you find your areas of agreement You work together and you disagree on other things. The other thing that I got a lot of criticism for was Providing help or all of our information all of our negotiation of the fda to Usona, which is a nonprofit group trying to make psilocybin into a medicine But also to compass which is a for-profit So my view is as a nonprofit people get tax deductions to give us money We have an obligation to the public and the public includes both for-profit and non-profit And so I think there's a need for for-profit drug development In the psychedelic space because that will permit scaling. I mean right now. We are Frustratingly stalled out. We have raised 27 million for phase three over the history of maps. We've raised over 60 million dollars In donations. Yeah, but we've been struggling now to raise the nine million We need to take phase three and be maybe dsd to europe And then what about how do we set up thousands of psychedelic clinics or help therapists do that? So so there's a need for for-profit, but for-profit can be out of control And when you profit maximize to the exclusion of everything else So we started the maps public benefit corporation. Yes, which is a modification of capitalism Where you maximize public benefit you do make a profit, but that's not your top most goal Your top most goal is public benefit. And so we have the for-profit public benefit corporation But it has only one investor, which is the non-profit All right, so what i'm saying to this is that um, we don't have any patents We hired a patent attorney to develop an anti patent strategy So that nobody could patent uses of MDMA. Yeah, just so that they're all in the public domain And so but people will try to patent different things and that will drive innovation and incentives and And I think that's okay if they discover some new drug Let's say that's better than MDMA and somebody patented it and they want to develop it in a for-profit way I'm all for it Yeah, the you're right that will slowly move the ball Forward faster by allowing the private players to play but preferably as benefit corporations So that way they're maximizing benefit With the psychedelics that we've been giving through earth to help heal humans and and and and destroy these walls between us Rather than try and maximize their own profits and put out the externalities on other people All the the social costs other people pay and the company makes the profit I think that's and and I think if you look at what's the main resistance people have to the legalization of marijuana It's the big alcohol and big tobacco We're going to get involved and then maximize profits sell to kids do all sorts of stuff and that's actually happening I mean the the beer companies the alcohol companies the tobacco companies are buying into marijuana companies for cannabis infused beverages and So I think we got to be very careful because that mind is being more that buying the mind's being molded into the world and if we're going to try and yeah, and and And deliver doses of cannabinoids at young ages We have to be very careful with what the long-term effective things like like this are so we can't just go for profit We got to go for science research and development. Take it slowly. Let's move this inside buy everybody from the hot tub We will rejoin you inside Hope is already closed. Oh, isn't that beautiful? Yeah Wow So there's the chinese rover right there Boom we're back everyone from the hot tubs super relaxing gonna have to make it a series of updates on psychedelic studies in the from rick's hot tub I think it's a tradition. It's a good tradition All the none of it. Where are the interviews and hot tubs happening around the world? And we did in the winter this time we did in january. Yeah this time last time it was in may So this is much colder. Well, this doesn't really count because there was no snow We'll have to do it while it's snowing while it's snowing. I don't know how good the cameras will stand up to that We we were ending our conversation in the hot tub on cooperation and competition And the how to best sort of add the privatization into move things forward But make it like a benefit corporation like you were saying as well Um So yeah, so tell us again because this this this is kind of where people are seeing the future Yeah, so where how how else can we understand this in a way that people can maybe Get involved with starting businesses as entrepreneurs. Oh, yeah. Well, there's going to be thousands of psychedelic clinics That need to be established We're thinking at maps that we're going to have A network of clinics, but all the people that we train to do MDMA therapy for PTSD Can set up their own clinics. So we're not trying to monopolize anything and not only that but they can Innovate in a sense. So they the way that we're negotiating with the FDA Um, it's called the REMs the risk evaluation and mitigation strategies So it's a special set of policies that are put into place To address special risks because every drug has or many drugs have special risks So with psychedelics particularly with MDMA assisted psychotherapy for PTSD The treatment is not the drug. It's drug assisted psychotherapy So the only people that will be able to prescribe it and the only people that will be able to work with patients Are those that have been through our training program to learn the psychotherapy And it can only be administered under direct supervision never as a take-home drug So that's why we'll have psychedelic clinics flourishing and but once people have learned our method They're free to innovate or modify it if they want to Post-approval, but we think that with the maps clinics that will use our method and that'll People know they'll get this but other people could say oh, I combined it with massage or I combined it with Some sort of guided imagery or this or that so where we want all sorts of different kinds of therapeutic approaches to flourish But I think that as we look at this There's going to need to be all sorts of capital invested in creating these thousands of clinics The therapists are you know working to make a living people need so also when we think about The future of work and the future of innovation and driverless cars and things What are the things that cannot be done by machines? A lot of it like massage or a lot of things like therapy. I mean there are certain kind of Machine intelligence programs to talk, you know, they pretend that that are therapists in a month But I think that these kind of helping professions Those are the kind of things that are going to be least likely to be automated out of existence the human connection And so we're going to be creating jobs that are going to be durable Even in the face of you know automation and innovation in that way Yeah, so I think that there is a role for for-profit companies and people to make livings helping other people work through dramas and work through relationship issues and work through Eventually, you know personal growth these clinics will be centers where people go for spiritual experiences Some of them we were run by your local church or your local synagogue or their own little psychedelic clinic That's this is a really awesome future that you're painting for us. You're you're preparing us in a bunch of different ways so there's there's um, you were mentioning earlier that there's There's five thousand therapists that are ready that want to get involved in In your processes of becoming psychedelics is a psychotherapist and then there's 20 000 people waiting for the proper for these first places like these clinics to be able to go and get treatments and then you're you're even Very intelligently showing us part of the future with automation is humans that actually can Have the eye to eye goes to face therapies. Yeah, and this is actually huge as you see these thousands of potentially Clinics that are going to be showing up in the next decade. Let's say that to get Involved in them is going through a process of getting trained by you and I love your formula You were talking about the formula here the formula is so cool because the formula is For now what you've designed and you've found to be most effective for now And then there's going to be more and more dosage adjustments for different sorts of therapeutics That that are need to be done with different stresses on people's lives that they're trying to break free from and integrate etc Um and also adding in massage or lighting and yeah flirtation tanks but the the other further complexity is that We're talking about developing MDMA for PTC others are about ibogaine for opiate addiction or psilocybin for depression Or ketamine for depression, but what we're really talking about is psychedelic psychotherapy So in the future people will get a series of different experiences with different psychedelic drugs And there will even be opportunities to combine drugs like we've done therapy You know underground therapy we have not done it but underground therapists have done Work where they combine LSD with MDMA Or LSD with ketamine even or or or MDMA with ketamine or the different kinds of combinations like this also offer You know new kind of therapeutic opportunities, and I think we'll see More likely we'll see treatments where people go through a sequence of different psychedelic drugs Probably generally starting with MDMA because it's the most gentle. It's the easiest to work with It's the least distance from our normal processing Yeah, but then they could go into psilocybin Or LSD or iosca or ibogaine or any number of things and the fact that we're doing a study with MDMA You know for PTSD there's a lot of people that have dual diagnosis PTSD and addiction And so a lot of it is the trauma that drives people to addiction, but we will eventually have You know the study in england that I mentioned which is Dr. Ben Sessa MDMA for alcoholism Yeah, there's going to be all sorts, but then LSD has been really effective For alcoholism, so you start with the MDMA work on the trauma then you help somebody Kind of have this mystical spiritual sense of connection And there's different kinds of strength people can draw from each of those kinds of experiences. Yeah It's so cool that you put the assas psychedelic psychotherapy is the umbrella And there's all different kinds of combinations that are going to evolve Out of it, and then we'll see what's best for what? Yeah. Yeah, the thing we haven't really talked about is our zendo project Let's do it. So the zendo project is Psychedelic harm reduction So there's a lot of people that are, you know, not waiting for medicalization that are using psychedelics at events all over the world At festivals at music concerts at parties And there's a lot of those people that are doing it For recreation, but then they they really say I just want to have the good experiences not the bad and then Difficult stuff comes up and they confuse that as being bad and then they resist it And then it gets worse. So as part of our effort both to to prepare the ground for post prohibition world But also to reduce the kind of potential for backlash that could come from, you know, bad experiences with psychedelics We have started the zendo project Our first effort actually was in 2001 at a festival where we tried to and did succeed in Working with the organizers with the medical people even with the police and provided support For people having difficult psychedelic experiences. So that's what the zendo project is. It's it's helping So sort of peer support Where we have a few trained therapists, but we train other people At burning man, for example, we over the last two years. We've seen a thousand people Who've come to us with difficult over two years a thousand people And we've trained over 500 Helpers oh wow sitters exactly most of them therapists, but not all of them And so we're helping to try to build into the culture even of the recreational kind a therapeutic understanding a spiritual mindset about how Suppressing and resisting is really the more Um Fruitless strategy. Yeah, that doesn't really solve the problem. It sort of prolongs the problem You need to help people and our big thing is you know difficult. It's not the same as bad Yeah, this zendo project is now Is one of the sort of components that we should see at all different types of recreational use areas of psychedelics And that would be super helpful for these experiences and and again um It's almost as though we're we're now you're laying again another piece of a foundation outside of your You know your b-corp and outside of doing the trials. You're you're even in you know getting in the festivals of burning man What not to help there? So there's all different places that maps touches with its kindness with its heart with its open and love I We are very honored to thank you to be sitting down with you and talking about this again An important way. I think we can wrap is by talking about How this all is intertwined. Ah, okay. Yeah because we Have so graciously been gifted with this consciousness on this planet that we evolved through time to get here Here we are all humans ever born and and lived and died on this rock together And We have to figure out the unity. Yeah, and it comes from you were listing all these experiences the flotations the meditations The religious the spiritual the psychedelic there's all sex love sex romance, yeah, yeah Transcending our own time and space and and and being a part of something greater. So That sort of feeling is the most cohesive way forward. Yeah, I want you to tell us about your thoughts on that Well, I think so many people come back with this idea that love is the essence of the universe And I guess I'll share This story about the most mystical experience of my life And so it was at Esalen camping out. Oh, we have this one from the from the last one I think it was yes, and I ask you what was the most beautiful thing in the world, I think Well, the motion. Yeah. Yeah, that was gravity. It was the gravity. Yeah. Yeah the kind of Be cradled in the arms of gravity What's it gravity is this force that pulls us together and there's a love aspect to that and that was so beautiful because that Yeah, yeah, that was so good that you said that one. Um, okay here. Let me phrase the question this way. Okay. Yeah, I think I have a good way to phrase it. Okay what's a Take away a piece of advice for young people and adults both That can inspire them towards that sense of unity. What can they better embody in practice? Well, I think that for now in the american context what we really need to do is heal these partisan divides and understand that you know underneath the A lot of this anti-immigrant and white nationalism of a lot of the Fears and anxieties that trump is trying to stir up in his base that there are people there who um We need to reach out and we need to show them that there's a better way that and also that They're operating from a place of fear and anxiety that the culture Um You know, it hasn't properly addressed all their concerns You know the irony is that they get motivated through fear and anxiety to support Policies that end up hurting themselves more than helping them. So I never quite could understand why uh, you know The affordable healthcare, you know Why people didn't like that and it turns out that actually the um the most anti-government Sentiment is in areas and states where people get the most government assistance Because there's this kind of sense of not wanting to be dependent, but then getting angry Whereas instead of seeing it as uh, necessary how people You know bite the end of feeds it. So I think that what we Need to be doing is is really listening At a deeper level to the pain that's motivating people to be Separate yeah and try to understand how we can work through it and sometimes the the the problem is that um People have to willingly let go of their prejudices and anxieties you can't force them to do it And the same is true in a therapeutic setting Yeah, and that's why we say that people basically people heal themselves We create a support the drug Primarily creates this support for people to process difficult emotions But they have to be willing to do that And so it's our job to create a context where people heal themselves So we have to create create a social context where people Who are different from us um Are not so much judged but are held in a certain way to to acknowledge their own Misgivings about some of the things that they might be saying or thinking Yeah, so I think it's that way and it's also like one of the projects that we haven't talked about is that I worked on it this morning and I have to work on it later today Um is a psychedelic peacemaking. Yeah, so we have a project Natalie Ginsburg. We are roseman. It's in israel and it's Psychedelics for peacemaking between israelis and palestinians And they've just come back from israel a few days ago And there's groups of israeli jews israeli arabes and palestinians that are doing ayahuasca together. Wow Kind of secretly, you know or very secretly But It's happening And many of them have used mdma. Yeah, now they're coming to these that's great. It's incredible because they're buying They're coming together. They're coming together primarily for healing. Yeah, and so we're trying to understand that But we're also trying to so they've just completed Natalie and leora interviews with roughly 36 People half israeli's the other half more israeli arabes and israeli and palestinians the other half israeli jews and what they're um, what we're wanting to do is is create more intentional settings For peacemaking. Yes, so not just healing but the healing interpersonal healing inner trauma Is important to then healing interpersonal. Yeah kind of trauma And I think that that's the now these are not the the zealots on either side that would never talk to each other that So these are the more progressive parts, but even then They've grown up in cultures that Demonize the other that build fear for the other So even the most progressive people have a lot of work to do to overcome Their cultural training and then we see it as like training the trainers These will be people that will then go out and try to work with groups that are a little bit further on the margins Towards hatred of each other. Yeah, and so I think that that's really the kind of direction that um, we need to be going in in general is looking at those uh, marginalized voices or those people that we discount ourselves and then the Trying to understand how they got that way and what can we do at the same time? You know people have to be willing to change and when they won't And this is why I'm not a pacifist, you know, and we were talking before you have to Defend yourself you have to block them in certain ways from being racist but at the same time have compassion because they are Nairing their own frame of reference and they were suffering underneath that so I think that's the Challenge and that's why when I took uh, and started meeting Rebecca Mercer I thought how wonderful that we can have this Bridge bridge. Yeah, and so when people would criticize me for that I would say we're in the business of building bridges not burning them. Yeah, exactly Well, I push people away like that. So I think the other part is This and it gets in a way back to the zendo project is that people do have fears of psychedelics. I mean these Drugs do change consciousness. They do require letting go. You have to be safe to do that things come up that you weren't ready for Sometimes and there are a lot of legitimate fears and anxieties that people have about psychedelic drugs about marijuana And we have to acknowledge them While we move towards public health rather than criminal justice. Yes, I couldn't just started picturing how People over thousands of years have been fighting about religion and how that could yeah in maybe a couple generations just be done I think it could be. Well, what they say is the future is always here is the future is already here It's just not evenly distributed. So I think in many places there will be more of this Recognition that we're all in together and I think if in a couple generations we haven't reached that point As a species we may have destroyed the place. Yeah, we got to get there And that's also very interesting that this is now these peaceful gatherings are Going on around the world in different groups that have been fighting over religion or land for so long Yeah, and there's also studies that we're not involved in but that I think are really important Are there's a study at johns hoppins and nyu With religious professionals from different religions giving them psilocybin and a therapeutic setting And so they're kind of looking at the mystical looking at the experiences that People from different religions will have and these are not just people. These are like ministers pastors people of congregation Imams, however And and so they're they're good. They're looking at what kind of visions They have what kind of experiences and what they're finding is that it it doesn't take people away from their religion They just interpret their religion in a more Symbolic rather than literalist way And it revitalizes their appreciation for their own religion So it's not going to be everybody giving up the past. You know to one, you know uniform global Religion that everybody, you know, it's it's going to revitalize all the separate religions Yeah, so I think even when it's like the unity and Um diversity the same way we can appreciate other people. We're not the same as them. We're different. We're going to celebrate Our differences and at the same time Know that we're all together. Yes. Yes Now last question is what would you say is one of the core driving principles of your life? Um fear Fear fear of what fear of doing nothing fear of The irrational dominating so I think what I've been able to do is Turn fear into an ally. Okay. All right, so what really motivated me at age 18 To work on psychedelics was fear First off I was educated about the holocaust as a young boy and I was terrifying that You know people could want to kill me and kill only for this religion of my family that I had nothing to do with I'm born into that and then a bunch of people would want to kill me That was terrifying You know, luckily I was born in America in 53 after that was over So I was raised that that was in the past But it was the fear of that and then not too long after I started really wrestling with that was the fear of the russians and of um The human missile crisis and hiding under my desk at school. I'm teaching you that was terrifying And then became the vietnam war now all of a sudden it's my own country wanting to send me to war For Reasons that did not make sense to me. So I felt that That people are are we're evolving but we're still fundamentally more irrational than rational and that that kind of Irrationality coupled with the brilliant technology that we have Is destroying the world and could work in you know mass Disruption mass murder so it was the fear Of the irrational that and that the view that psychedelics brought the irrational to the surface That brought the unconscious to the surface stand rough The world's leading LSD researcher said that lsd Is to the study the mind what the telescope is to astronomy and the microscope is to biology so I felt like Here was a tool that could get us to these deep levels that are destroying us And so I'd say it's fear that has driven me this whole way that made it so that I would never give up but but also Propelled me in really healthy ways. So it wasn't debilitating fear Because I think I grew up in so was so are so lucky Because I grew up with all the advantages that you could have to think that you could make a difference So I grew up in america At the time of the maximum strength of america in the whole world And american exceptionalism, which I believe that somehow I don't believe it anymore But that american people were essentially better than other people and that therefore that's why we were leading the world But I grew up with that sense of confidence from america having one world war two and we're the most powerful country Then I was a male Not only that I was the first born male child in my family So I had that then i'm white at the time when white was really important And i'm jewish with the chosen people and my family was financially well off with my dad as a doctor and my Um grandfather having run a successful business. And so I had all the the The kind of psychological advantages To make me think that maybe I could make a difference And all the support from my family And that I think gave me the ability to not be overwhelmed by the fear That that the fear is the driving thing, but instead of it being overwhelming me it was Kept in a certain kind of balance. Yeah And That that's what I'd say and but the other big thing I'd say is that Early on because it seemed like In 1972 when I decided this when I was 18 that and psychedelics had been squashed and psychedelic research had been squashed It was a massive undertaking to try to think about bringing it back And so what I realized at the time was that if I Would only be happy if it worked that I might never be happy And I would always be waiting for something in the future to make me happy So that I had to move from Outcome to process to process yet to the journey to the journey to the struggle. And so if I struggled during the day and The world was still the same I could still be happy Yeah, I I tried my best And that was satisfying and I think that was the the key thing that Really helped me to Not get burned out. You know, it was just this thought that it looks like there may be no success I mean when I met my wife You know, one of the things that she said is that she really appreciated people who were working on lost causes So she thought at the time bringing back something else was a lost cause. So I love the work for doing the work on this cause Yeah, it's kind of like a noble lost cause kind of thing. Yeah, you know, she had done similar kind of You know idealistic things So I think that when you work on what could potentially be a lost cause but you can get satisfaction from the daily struggle Then that's the key to longevity And also that you mentioned with fear That's something that all of us experience a lot of us experience That we only have these 25,000 days alive and that we get to pick whatever we do every single moment is so important to To striving to be our best in the world and so to have some sort of a little fire under our butt that kicks us up And gets us going on that thing is is so crucial The other advantage that I had is access to psychedelics You know, we are now living in a time of the world that's never been in existence before Oh, okay. Ibogaine from Gabon from western africa. Oh, yeah, we can do Ibogaine ayahuasca from The amazon. Oh, yeah, we can do ayahuasca lsd from the laboratory. Yeah, we can do that MDMA from the laboratory Mushrooms from the ground from thousand we can do so we have access to these tools that have been Fundamentally transformative in my own personal life. Yeah, and it's to those tools in the context of this therapeutic spiritual understanding that's also Really enabled me because I know deep down they work Yes, they know they're valuable. They've got all sorts of Challenges, but there's something to it. They've all sort of brought a sense of unity the Bioscopes for biological telescopes for astronomy and then the psychedelics for our minds They've all sort of brought a sense of unity to to us. Yeah, the other thing just in terms of the fundraising I mean, as I said, we've raised over 60 million dollars, but if I had to tell a story to people To what we're trying to do. It would have been, you know, which is what I do It would be very difficult Unless people have had their own experiences as well so they can relate to the story So because psychedelics have been so widespread There and and many many people have had these transformative experiences with them We can tell a story of what we're doing, but then it resonates with people all over Because now we're doing the psychedelics because at dinner parties are on the internet And whatnot and we're starting to share the stories Making it popular to be talking about how if not even popular safe in a way safe and popular And then we can slowly destroy the walls. Yeah, and that's that's why I'm so glad to be interviewed by you And to do this because it's really another way of So it used to be that I thought our main or it used to be that our main obstacle Obstacles were regulatory that we could not get permission At all then the main obstacles were money. How do we raise the money to do it? And we've managed to do that in large part and then then the the big challenge was well There's a bunch of these underground zealots, you know, but how do we train more therapists? So now we're figuring out how to do that And so the last and final obstacle I would say or Challenge is public education. Yeah, there's building support and that's where this is So crucial. Yeah My gosh, these obstacles that you're just going through one after the other and boom now you're here 33 years later We love maps maps.org everyone go check out the link in the bio Also the the trials that are going through right now keep an eye on the maps has on their news So many different videos are up now and articles are written and with maps and in the news and Yeah, also just the trial design now We're going to be taking these combinations of both the trial design and rolling with them across other psychedelics as well as Getting these traumas that have been built up in society and helping us integrate them and move forward And the future looks like these clinics around It's it's such interesting stuff to be able to talk to you for round two here at your home in boston Thank you so much for coming out of the show rick. Well, I look forward to our next hot tub interview discussion And and the great thing is is that hopefully by then there will be more breakthroughs And yeah, and with people like you and maps, you know, you're at a you know A million bucks a month in spending now on on making i'm pushing the ball forward and that's so crucial Let's get that to 10 million a month. I'm serious. Let's do it. Let's do it. Let's get there We can do it and and we will okay. We will do it the Millennials and genzi are coming in and they have a strong dry for this potential in our world So yeah, well, I know the risks that are going on out there of not of not doing it's the existential ones Yeah, much love everyone. Thank you so much for tuning in. We greatly appreciate it Go and check out the links below support maps, please Also support us to continue doing cool things like coming to boston and making these awesome interviews of different global leaders Links are below also. Give us your thoughts in the comments below We'd love to hear from you about the episode and your thoughts about all of this You can also reach to it's ask maps at maps.org if you have any questions And also if you'd like to potentially get involved in any of the Of the of the trials and processes of any sorts and bring this around the world. So please get involved Yeah, yeah, okay. Cool. Much love everyone. Thank you so much for tuning in also Go and build your destiny everyone manifest your dreams into the world. Go and build go create We love you so much and we will see you soon great Wow, sweet ending. That's it my man. Wow, that's it So much love for you. Good job. Good job that