#2319 - Rick Doblin

27:04Right. But also, Ibogaine's working. Well, you know, I'm on that. You already have Parkinson's. Well, and then you get the insights, though, as well. Yes. So, but there's people that might not want that. It's difficult. But why do they not want it? They don't want it because of propaganda. You know, they don't want it because someone, you know, there's the stories of like Sid Barrett from Pink Floyd. You know what I mean? The stories of people losing their mind. That's what people are terrified of. I think with some people, honestly, that's a valid point now that you're saying that. There's a bunch of people that are like very psychologically vulnerable and maybe a profound psychedelic experience wouldn't be made.

27:45It wouldn't be...it wouldn't be tenable. It wouldn't be able to handle it. You know, that's possible. There's a bunch of people that are in a bad state. Maybe they're on a ton of medication just keeping them stable. They can't do psychedelics. Maybe them, a non -psychedelic version of that rewired their brain would be beneficial. Now that I think about it. Yeah. There is actually a situation with cluster headaches. So cluster headaches are like suicide headaches. They're worse than migraines. And this is now back around 2003. A bunch of the people who had cluster headaches, one of them went to a party, did mushrooms, and found that it postponed the cycle and would interrupt the cycle of these cluster headaches, which are terrible.

28:28And so they contacted me and they formed this group called cluster busters. And they said, we don't want to be criminals anymore. We would like to study this. Can you help us study this? And I live in Boston right next to McLean Hospital, which is a part of Harvard Medical School. And I approached them and I said, would you want to study these people with cluster headaches? And they said, sure, this is really interesting. So they brought in all these people and checked their medical records and determined that this was really the case. That Solosybin and LSD blocked cluster headache cycle and postponed the next cycle.

29:05And so we did all this research and then the next step would have been to actually give LSD or Solosybin to people with cluster headaches. And the people at Harvard, like Timothy Leary, he was here. We don't want to do this. Damn, it's okay, ultra. All of that. They ruined it for everybody. Well, we're trying to get over that, but they did. But then the people at Harvard said, well, we will do this LSD or Solosybin, but only if it's the last resort, only if everything else fails. So the scientists, Torsten Pasley and John Helper, decided that they would use a non -psychedelic version of LSD, called Bromo LSD.

29:46And the plan was that they would give this Bromo LSD to a bunch of people with cluster headaches. It would not work. And then they would come back and say, hey, we need to do this LSD and Solosybin research. So I said, okay, that makes sense. We have no idea why LSD or Solosybin works, but it's probably connected to the psychedelic properties of it. And so they did this study at Hanover University in Germany. And I kept waiting for the results and waiting for the results. And they wouldn't, I heard nothing. And then after months, they finally said, we didn't want to tell you, but the Bromo LSD works even better.

30:19Oh, no. And the LSD and the Solosybin, because with LSD, you know, it's effective in micrograms. You know, for Solosybin, you take 25 milligrams for a major, major trip. But with Bromo LSD, you can give large amounts of it because you're not getting high. And whatever it does, it's still a mystery what it does in the brain, but it works better. You just flood the brain. So that's actually a good example of a non -psychedelic psychedelic for a physiological problem that could make sense as a medicine. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. It makes a lot of sense with the dose, especially. But that's great though, at least that way, like we found something out.

31:01Yeah. And actually, when I, when they finally told me that it worked and that they didn't want to tell me, I said, you know, I'm interested in psychedelic therapy if I'm also what's best for patients. So that if this Bromo LSD is best for patients, that's great. It's not upsetting me at all because we're talking about it anyway for a physiological thing. And I'm interested in the therapy part of it. And so unfortunately, talk about being frustrating. Carrie Turnbull is a philanthropist and he's trying to make Bromo LSD into a medicine, but he's been unable to raise all the funds that he needs to do that.

31:39And so this was a treatment for a terrible disorder that was identified about 20 years ago. And it's still not been made into a medicine. Goddamn it. And so those are the things that are frustrating because it's not even psychedelic. Right. That's crazy. You know, it's just too close to psychedelic. Yeah. It's too related by, you know, so I'm so excited. Yeah. So Morgan Drell was a big example to educate Rick Perry. Morgan will be at the conference. Congressman Jack Bergman, who's leading an effort in Washington to have a group that's trying to collect a lot of support, bipartisan support to make psychedelics into medicines will be there.

32:20The military aspect of it is very important because they're generally very right -wing guys and women. You know, they serve their country, they, you know, they're hard -nosed, disciplined people. Yeah. But they can't experience it. They can realize, you know, I've always said that like I try to act as a bridge between the meatheads and the potheads. You are a good bridge. Here I am. You know what Timothy Leary said, which is phenomenal and tell me if this is true for you. He said, if you want to be a bridge, you have to get used to being stepped on. Oh, that's for sure. Yeah, I'm pretty used to being stepped on.

32:58Yeah. But I mean, not necessarily for those positions because the idea of pot and a lot of these other things is that it makes you lazy. And you do a really hard time convincing anybody that I'm lazy. That's very hard. I'm pretty disciplined. I don't believe that's the case. I don't think it's just, I don't think they're mutually exclusive. Like you have to have either discipline or be able to enjoy expanding your consciousness. I think in fact, it enhances your perspective, which enhances the understanding of the value of discipline and hard work. And of honesty and of doing things the right way.

33:40You do things the right way. You genuinely feel better. And if you ever have trips, like whatever, even in the Century Deformation tank, like sober getting in there, they're better when you live the right way. You don't have any demons or as many. You don't have any regrets. You don't have to do the right thing. It could be a good person. Like it's not that hard to do. And the fact that it's been conflated with laziness and narrowed the wells and all that stuff, like that's nonsense. Some of the most ambitious people I know smoke weed. Some of the most hard working, interesting creative people I know smoke weed.

34:18They enjoy it. Well, one of the best examples is Carl Sagan. Yes. One of the best examples. And he had to hide that, though, for decades, because he was worried he would lose his security clearances. I was trying to tell that to someone who was a scientist once off air and they didn't believe, man, like, how do you not know? Well, you not know Carl Sagan was a huge pot smoker. Well, Lester Grinspoon was the doctor at Harvard Medical School. It was one of my mentors. And he was close personal friends with Carl Sagan. And Lester was an expert on medical marijuana. And he had a book about experiences with marijuana.

34:53Carl Sagan had to tell his story under a pseudonym. Wow. Because he didn't really want to be known for that. Well, it's a different time period. And that's why guys like him are so brave. You know, just to talk about it at all, you could risk everything. He was the guy explaining science and astronomy to everybody and explaining the cosmos. We found out that guy's a stoner. Like, oh, it's all out the window now. Oh, yeah. And his wife, Andrea, was on the board of directors of the normal to legalize marijuana. Great. The national organization for the reform of marijuana laws. It's just, it's very frustrating for me because when I was a young man, I remember thinking that eventually all this will be worked out.

35:38And, you know, by the time I'm 35 or something like that, there won't be any more drug laws about things that are beneficial. I really did believe that. Now I'm 57. I'm like, oh my god, it's not changing. Oh my god, it's just, it's just taking forever. It's been decades of everyone knowing, decades of the internet. Before the internet, you can kind of, well, propaganda was very effective. You know, the refermandist stuff and all that craziness that they pumped into people's heads. Like, that was the 1930s man. And that's still effective today. There's still people today that believe all that stuff.

36:12Well, you just shared with me before we started talking about the Texas law that's trying to, if you could maybe share that in about that. This episode is brought to you by Farmer's Dog. It doesn't matter how old your dog is. It's always a great time to start investing in their health and happiness. And thankfully, the Farmer's Dog makes it easier than ever to feed your dog a healthy diet of real meat and veggies. Dogs prefer their food, even picky dogs, and owners prefer their service. If you have a question about your dog, your plan, your delivery, or anything else, they have 24 -7 customer service that connects you to real humans who are genuinely interested in providing the best experience possible for you and your dog.

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37:35We're American companies making American products with American workers in America's hometowns. We're local bottlers and manufacturers operating in all 50 states. Employing more than 275 ,000 Americans in good paying jobs. Delivering for the nation because we believe in the promise of America and the people who make it great. Learn more at wedeliverforamerica .org. Pay for by the American Beverage Association. I like a very nice guy. I don't know why he did this, but Austin had decriminalized marijuana. So, apparently the Attorney General's office sued Austin. And what is the ruling on that? I don't know if they even have acted on this or if they're going to appeal or what it is, but like...

38:25Here's the thing about something that's not fully legal. And I've talked about this before, so I apologize to anybody who's heard this. John Norris, who's a friend of mine, who's been on the podcast, who was a game warden in California. And he found a diverted stream and they were trying to figure out what's going on. They figured some farmer fucked up and like what's going on here and like fish were dead. And so he's a game warden. So they have to track down what happened with this stream. Finds this huge grow -up in the middle of the National Forest, run by the cartel. And then his entire operation in the decades future becomes a tactical forest with bulletproof vests and dogs and guns fighting the cartel.

39:08In the forest, in the National Forest, because they were growing it all in America and then just selling it like 90 % of... I believe he said 90 % of the marijuana that was sold in states where it's illegal was coming from California. And they were using very dangerous pesticides and herbicides stuff that's completely illegal if you were growing it naturally, if you were growing it normally. And because it's illegal, you have organized crime that's providing it to people. Like if it was legal, we could only buy it from... Like you buy your fucking groceries, you buy organic fruit, right? You buy organic vegetables, you buy organic marijuana.

39:50You would know the people who are growing it, you could meet the farmers, just like you can meet people from white oak pastures, you'd meet people from fucking the happy green farm. And you would know where you're getting your stuff, you know there's no fentanyl in it, which is apparently they're talking about that now. You're not helping anybody, you're only hurting people. Now if your goal is just to hurt as many people as possible, yeah make more laws. Yeah keep blocking people up, block people up for things that don't hurt anybody, even themselves. Well the other part of this is the tax money.

40:21Yes. When you're letting all this money go to the underground, to the cartels, to the criminal gangs, you're alternatively you could have it as taxes. And it could make it easier on the rest of us. I could see as an argument if you were the attorney general and you said you are propping up organized crime by allowing it to be decriminalized. And the people that are growing it, selling it in Austin, or the people that have it in Austin are all committing crimes. So they're probably cartel people or I could see that argument kind of, but you know what the fucking solution to that is, make it legal.

40:57This is dumb. We can just buy whiskey anywhere, which I love, nothing wrong with it, but you can go but I have a bar, you know I said I'm a drug dealer. Literally I have a drug dealer, I have a bar, I own a bar, I sell drugs, alcohols, they fucking drug. It's just a sanctioned legal drug that we pay taxes for and you know the alcohol commission has to check, make sure we're doing everything right, but it's drugs. And it's way more dangerous. And prohibition of alcohol actually in the in the 20s led to organized crime. Yes. In America. Yes. Alcapone. All that stuff. Proped up organically, but also led to NASCAR too.

41:34You know, pretty cool. We figured out soup up some cars to get away from the cops. That's what NASCAR came from. Did you know that? Yeah, that's amazing. But it's so dumb. It's so like and everyone who enjoys a little alcohol with a you know drink at a social gathering. It's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with that. Let people do what the fuck they want to do. We're all going to die someday. And if people are having good or bad experiences on any of these substances, it's up to them to manage their experiences. Like I don't get along with alcohol. I won't drink alcohol. I don't get along with marijuana.

42:09I don't want to try it. Okay, good. That's okay. It's all fine. But like let people who enjoy it have it. It's dumb. Well, this idea that we're all going to die one day. One of the most important uses of psychedelics is to help people at the end of life who are scared of dying. And also for palliative care. So there's a lot of research that's been done with people with life -threatening illnesses who are anxious about dying. And have received either MDMA or psilocybin or LSD in the 60s. Yeah. So that the kind of big fears that we have about illness and death. When people are not able to process those fears, it just gets worse and worse.

42:48I wonder how many people Larry Hagman turned on. You know what I mean that day? On CNN? There's probably millions of people watching. Larry Hagman saying, well, I'm afraid of death because I had an LSD experience and I realized that it's all just connected. Well, if it wasn't for my mother -in -law reading his book, you know, and he became a big supporter of maps and he spoke out in public. Those are the kind of dialogues that change people's minds. Yeah. You know, there's been some, we have a lot of, I live in Massachusetts where marijuana is legal. Marijuana is legal in California and Colorado and all these states, they're doing really well economically.

43:28Oh, it's a huge tax boom. Especially like Colorado had the craziest taxes. When does it like 39 % or something on one point? And everybody's like, okay, because it's first of all economically, like if you want to go out for a night drinking, that's going to cost you a couple hundred bucks. You know, buying a round of drinks for your friends and round drinks here. It's a couple hundred dollars worth of marijuana. You're stone for a month. Yeah. Like it's just stone forever. And if you have to pay 39 % tax, like, okay, like I hope it fixes streets. Like I'll give you my tax money. I'm not scared of paying taxes.

44:00I want to pay taxes if you were doing good stuff with it. Is it helping pay for the schools? Great. Let's get great schools and a lot of people smoking weed. Legally. Yeah. But not kids. You know, that's the other thing. Like we need education for children. Let them know. Like it's not good to alter your state of consciousness, especially on a regular basis when you're young. There's some developmental issues that come along with abuse. Well, this is with abuse for sure. Abuse. Abuse. Definitely for sure. One of the things that's pretty interesting is look at the cultures that have successfully integrated psychedelics.

44:30Like for example, the ayahuasca churches that are in Brazil. Or the Native American church that uses peyote. Often for Native Americans that have problems with alcohol. I was out on a Navajo reservation. This is about 20 years ago. And it was for a Native American church peyote ceremony. And one of the Navajo men brought his nine -year -old son to take peyote and spend the night with us. Whoa. And peyote is masculine, right? Peyote is masculine. Yeah. And Watumah is from San Pedro. Cactus is also that has masculine in it. But this nine -year -old did not take the same amount of peyote as the rest of us.

45:07But he took more appropriate for his body weight. And it's within a cultural context, within a family context, within a religious support of context, these cultures tend not to have age limits. Right. So I think when you talk about the developmental problems that come from abuse, that's totally the case. But when you talk about occasional use for inspiration, particularly when... In a ceremonial sense. In a ceremonial setting, which has been for centuries and centuries they've refined it. There's no neurological damage that comes to your brain from masculine. Right. This ceremonial settings are very important.

45:45And I used to think it was foolishness. I think ceremonies, like, get the fuck out of here with your ceremony. I was cynical, you know. But I think that in even rights of passages, like into adulthood, I used to think that was foolish too. But then I realized like, wow, a lot of people have a hard time determining if that they're an adult. And they stay kind of infantile for their entire life. And especially someone that's like really coddled by their parents and overprotected helicopter parents. You never develop the ability to be solitary and just to be out there on your own and autonomous. And things that are important should be treated with respect.

46:22And that's where I think ceremony comes in.

46:30Yeah. And it was been the failure of my Burmitsva to actually turn me into a man. Oh, that's hilarious because I'm the old you're going to be a man. That's it. I want to avoid all the awkwardness of adolescence. I'm the oldest of four kids. So I know all their siblings to tell me. And we did this right a passage. And it's been used for thousands of years. And I just had this somehow this idea that there would be some visitation from God of some way that I would be one thing the morning of my Burmits. And I would be something different the next morning. And I remember waking up in bed the next morning after my Burmitsva.

47:08And I'm like, I'm the same. This particular right of passage didn't work. And you know, you're 13. You're not so smart. And I was like, well, you know, God must be busy. A lot of people got Burmitsva. You know, it's like Christmas on your own. But eventually God's going to get to me. Yeah. And so every day for a week, I would wake up and think, is today the day? Am I different? Oh, nothing happened. And then finally another week and another Burmitsva Saturday came along. And I realized that if I was on a list, I have now been dropped off the list completely because there's all these new people, Burmitsva.

47:41And the rights of passage that we do have, I believe, probably worked in the past for a lot of people. And they did have this demarcation between different ages. People didn't used to live that long either. So 13 was kind of a transition point. Right. But it was when I was 17, almost 18, that I first did LSD. And one of my very first thoughts was, this is what my Burmitsva should have been.

48:10Because, you know, you're like, who am I? Where do I fit in? I'm sort of my ego sense is dissolving a bit from LSD. I'm connected to something bigger and larger than myself. Right. I thought this is the courage, the test of courage. This is the test of manhood. This is something that is a part of a right of passage. So for me, the psychedelics became the right of passage when the religious right of passage didn't have the same impact as I had hoped it would. That's fascinating. That's fascinating. It's interesting to talk about not restricting it for young people. And I just thought about like wine in Europe.

48:49Because kids in Europe, particularly kids in Italy, they don't have the drinking problem that kids have in America. When high school kids in America get a hold of alcohol, they get drunk and ridiculous. Because they're doing something naughty. But kids are normalized to the just regular consumption of glass of wine with dinner. It's normal. Well, and then in the US, where when kids do experiment, because they're worried about being caught with things, they tend to not use wine, but they tend to use stronger drinks. So they call that sort of the iron law of prohibition that when you prohibit something, it moves more and more to more concentrated, more powerful forms of that drug.

49:31Tens fentanyl. Yeah. Or even cocaine when you could have coca tea. I mean, Andy Wiles has been promoting for decades and decades this idea of coca tea. If you had that once, what was the deal like? I couldn't shut up. I couldn't shut up. I was like, oh my god, thank God I've never done cocaine.

49:51Telled my friend Doug goes like, I don't think I could shut up. But it wasn't anything crazy. I think that chewing the leaves is supposed to be like super beneficial and actually even healthier than coffee. Yeah, there's a lot of nutrition in the leaves. Doesn't help you teeth up though. Well, if you do anything too much, it can. But it sounds like an apologist. You saw it. Well, I think it's this idea that appropriate use. Well, Paracelsus is one of the early physicians and he said the difference between a medicine and a poison is dose. Well, yeah, salt will kill you. Eat a pound of salt. See what happens.

50:35Water will kill you. I mean, people drink too much water here. Yeah, hyponitremia. You dilute your... I remember a lady died because she was trying to win a PlayStation for a kid in a morning radio show. She was trying to drink the most water. Crazy. Yeah. Like, who knew? I guess no one knew then. But people are pretty aware now because of frat parties, like, you know, hazing. They've had kids do that. Yeah, that's one of the things that has been... Which is not... ...that you die of water. ...has been happening in terms of the raves and ecstasy use. So that occasionally people will overheat and die from MDMA where you dance all night.

51:09You don't drink adequate fluid and you can get hypothermia. And there are some cases. So that's one of the dangers of ecstasy use outside of therapeutic context. And so people have heard, okay, now I need to drink fluids in order to not overheat. And there have been cases of people that have died from drinking too much water. Well, I can counter that because there's a bunch of people that have died from too much exercise. There's something called rabdo mylosis that people get when you overexercise. You're a little... Your protein starts breaking down. Your kidneys can't process it. You start peeing brown.

51:40It can be totally deadly. You can push yourself too hard and die from exercise too. Yeah. So many people every year die of rabdo. Google that. Because I know it's very common in the CrossFit world. Because people are competitive with exercise, which is not necessarily the great... A lot of people I know that are trainers do not like the concept of CrossFit. Because it's doing exercise that are just supposed to strengthen your body and condition your body. But doing them in a competition setting where it's like unlimited amount of repetitions. As many as you can get in an X amount of time. And then they have these games where people play where they might not be conditioned enough to sustain the workload that they're putting forth.

52:21And then they get rabdo. And it's fairly common. I know multiple people that have had rabdo. Yeah. How many people die? So it doesn't say that. But it says there's 26 ,000 cases reported annually and about 5 % of those lead to mortality. 5 to 20%. That's a lot. That's probably more than people drink water and die. I guarantee it's more. I bet drinking water so much water you die is probably fairly rare. But I think that rabdo stuff is super dangerous. Yeah. You're reminding me of something funny. David Nutt was the drug policy advisor for the British government. And he did a ranking above the dangers of all these different drugs.

53:03And what he found was that the psychedelics were at the very low end of the dangers. And so he talked about how horseback riding was more dangerous than ecstasy. Oh yeah. It's super dangerous, man. People fall and break things all the time. Yeah. And so he got fired for that because of course because he was telling the truth. He was making people love horseback riding in England. Oh, that's crazy. So what maps did is that we did. Did it fired for telling the truth? Well, he was the drug policy advisor saying things that people did not want to hear. Maybe should have like got his drop strips and down for start to happen.

53:41Like, what am I trying to do here for real? Well, you really want to know my opinion or do I have an angle that I'm supposed to be headed towards? Keep guide me. Yeah. So we did something similar. We looked at cheerleading. And we looked at the emergency room visits on a person visit for the percentage of people that do cheerleading that go to the emergency room versus the percentage of people that do ecstasy. And cheerleading is more dangerous. Oh yeah, they fly through the air, man. Yeah. They bang heads sometimes. Yeah. Yeah. So we had a poster that we made. It said, give me an E. Oh god, that's so silly.

54:20But here's the thing. It's like, we allow multiple dangerous things. Like horseback riding is one thing. How about bull riding? Totally legal. Super dangerous. Like super duper dangerous. I mean, we allow BMX riding. You should, of course, allow that. I'm a martial artist. I know many people have been accidentally died doing martial arts. A ton. It's real. You know, there's a ton of activities that people enjoy skydiving. They enjoy bungee jumping. Legal. All legal. Museen parks. Legal. Yeah. Well, I think that in those circumstances, people believe that there's benefits that I've been outweighed.

55:01The reason it parks. Well, people enjoy them. Oh, people enjoy psychedelics. Yeah. But I think that's the critical issue is that people have got, as you started out by saying, you know, people think that if you take these drugs, there's no benefits. You're resonating. You're running away from reality. You're not paying attention to what's really going on. You're making yourself more vulnerable. You're going to fly out of window and think you can fly. Well, it's just like we need a comprehensive addressing of the actual real landscape of what these things are, what the benefits are, and just this addressing of the impact of propaganda, the sweeping schedule one act of 1970, the whole William Randolph -Hersk connection to marijuana illegalization, which was right after alcohol prohibition.

55:50So they were looking to put these agents back out into the field. All that needs to be like comprehensively explained to the American public to re -informed people because I think people are, they're, they have the general population that doesn't listen to podcasts like this and doesn't get online and search these things. You have these conceptions that are entirely formed by propaganda. And they're not based on real anecdotal experiences, real science, real data. And also the problem with that too is there's real side effects of some of these things. Those need to be understood. How do you understand them?

56:27We have to make them legal and do tests and studies. And maybe people have gene expressions that, you know, maybe they shouldn't be doing this thing, but they can do that thing, you know? Yeah, I think this idea that for me, how do we break through the wall of propaganda? And for me, the idea has been we go to where the suffering is, we go to where the science is, and we try to make things first into medicines. And I think that's where people are willing to listen. When you have all this propaganda and all these fears, it has to be that there's some corresponding benefit that's overwhelmed your sense of fear that you're willing to take a look.

57:02And that's where you go to where the suffering is, and that's where with post -traumatic stress disorder. Yeah. I think one of the things that we've been able to do remarkably is with psychedelics. They're one of the few things that are out of the culture wars these days. There's bipartisan support for psychedelic research. And it's because we went to where a lot of the suffering was, sympathetic patients. Most of the people in our studies are women's survivors of sexual abuse, most of the people with PTSD or women. But most of the media attention goes to the veterans. And people put veterans on a pedestal.

57:38And if so many of them, you know, there's different estimates, but it's, you know, 18, 22 or more per day commit suicide. And you can end up avoiding a lot of that by helping them process the traumas that they experience. And again, it's like we're talking reports, the bridge. Yeah. That's the real bridge. The bridge is these, you know, hard -nosed, right -wing guys who have these experiences, become better parents, become better friends, just like reintegrate into society, make peace with the past. It's totally possible and that these tools are being so underutilized, it's so many vulnerable and needy people.

58:16So many people just fucking need them help. Yeah. One of the speakers at the Psychedelic Science Conference is Sharif El -Nal, who was the Undersecretary of the VA. Wow. And he's become very passionate about what he's seen from those people that have done the veterans that have done MDMA, assisted therapy inside the Veterans Administration. But it took, it maps 25 years, starting in 1995, we were offering money to the VA to do MDMA research until 2021, when the first veteran received MDMA inside the VA from VA therapists. Wow. So talk about frustration. Think about the number of people that have committed suicide from when we started offering to the VA to do it.

59:00But it was the propaganda, it was the stigma that made it so that they were not willing to do it. What's most amazing today is that Congress gave $10 million to the Department of Defense for MDMA assisted therapy research in active duty soldiers. Oh, wow. So there's a $4 .9 million grant that went to a Dr. Aaron Wolfgang at Walter Reed, and it's going to be giving MDMA assisted therapy. There's another $4 .9 million grant that went to a group called Strongstar that's in San Antonio here in Texas, elsewhere, and they're connected with Emory University. And so they're going to combine MDMA with a therapy called prolonged exposure, where you talk about the trauma over and over.

59:43But that's very retraumatizing. There was a study that the Veterans Administration did that took them about six years. It was 916 veterans, and it compared two therapies that they use, both non -drug therapies for treating PTSD. One was called prolonged exposure. The other was cognitive processing therapy. And what they showed is that around half the people are in the study, drop out because the therapy itself is retraumatizing. Oh, no. Because you're just forced to go over the trauma over the trauma over and over, and that's supposed to desensitize you. And if you can stay in it, it can be helpful, but it retraumatizes so many people.

1:00:22So what we've shown is working with the MDMA with the Veterans is that they're able to process the trauma, the fear reduction from the MDMA, reducing activity in the amygdala, the fear processing is part of our brain, that you can, once you can approach these things that have felt like, well, terry apart, that they'll be overwhelming. You can't really go away from them, but they never really leave either, that then you can process it. So this study that will be done here in Texas with active duty soldiers, again, is going to be a combination of MDMA with prolonged exposure. The Walter Reed study is combining MDMA with what they call acceptance and commitment therapy, different kind of approaches.

1:01:08And so they decide which approach. Well, this is going to be research trying to different kinds of multiple ones just see what's the most effective. Yeah, and I think that maps has started funding studies combining MDMA with cognitive processing therapy as well. But the one that I think is potentially the most valuable is called cognitive behavioral conjoint therapy. Conjoint means couples or diets. And so what happens is the designated patient, the veteran with PTSD, is where the attention is focused. But when they have PTSD, it affects their family, so it affects their partners. And so cognitive behavioral conjoint therapy was developed by this woman, Candace Monson, at the Boston VA.

1:01:56And that's where they bring in the partner as well as the veteran, and they both get therapy. And so back in 2014, when finally, I was working with Richard Rockefeller and his cousin, Senator J Rockefeller, who was on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, and they finally convinced the FDA, I mean, the VA to be willing to let map support research with MDMA, they said that they would not let it, they wouldn't refer veterans, they couldn't do it inside the VA, we had to pay for it. But the first thing they wanted us to do was combine MDMA with cognitive behavioral conjoint therapy, where both people now get MDMA.

1:02:32And the results were better than anything they've ever got before in studying this therapy, both in reduction of PTSD, but also in strength of their relationship. Do they combine it with 5HDP or anything like that to sort of bring back your levels? This episode is brought to you by Paramount Pictures, new film The Naked Gun. There's comedy, and then there's The Naked Gun. It's in a league of its own. If the trailer is anything to go by, this new film does not hold back. Liam Neeson is Frank Treben, Jr. son of the celebrated police squad lieutenant from the original films. Let's just say you've never seen Neeson like this, nor Pamela Anderson or Paul Walter Hauser.

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1:04:40The answer is no. People do use 5 -HDP, and it can be helpful. But can you explain with a touch? Yeah, so 5 -HDP is your precursor for serotonin. So when we started research with the FDA, this was now 1992. The very first time that they permitted MDMA research was 1992. And as I said, MDMA had been used as a therapy drug since the middle 70s through the 80s, criminalized in 85. And people have felt that sometimes, and I think it's very much the case, that you're tired after MDMA, that people talk about as serotonin depletion. And so when you take 5 -HDP, that can be helpful. But when we started with the FDA, they said all this information that you've got from before, from underground use, or from before, when it was still legal, doesn't matter to us.

1:05:32Really, everything has to be done under direct supervision of FDA -proof studies. And they said, don't assume that you're going to have problems, and you're going to use MDMA plus 5 -HDP or something. Just start with the MDMA, see what problems you get, and then you can start. So the way we think about MDMA therapy is that it's really not a one day thing, it's a two day. In the sense that the second day is for rest, it's for having no obligations, no appointments, and the therapist come back and do more integrative therapy the next day. And also, we do the therapy during the day, it starts at 10 in the morning, it's an eight hour session, so often people can get sleep that night.

1:06:13And we don't see more low mood or more tiredness in the people that get MDMA than in the people that got therapy without MDMA. So we were never felt that the need to introduce 5 -HDP. We didn't have evidence of symptoms that required this, but I think it's because we talk about it as a two day experience. The other part is that when people take MDMA at raves or parties and things like that, often they're drinking, they do it at night, they don't get full sleep. The next day they don't just take the day off, often they go into activities. And they're exhausted. And they're exhausted. I think that this concept that we've developed is this really thinking about it as a two day experience where there is this low energy, but it can be productive in terms of trying to work on the issues that came up during the MDMA experience.

1:07:08So the PTSD or depression or whatever it is. Now there's a project at a place called Sunstone, which is a therapy center outside in Rockville, Maryland. And they've worked with cancer patients who are anxious about dying, and they have brought in their partners to the therapy. And both of them get MDMA as well. So these are all under FDA -approved studies. And they found that that was tremendously effective as well. Because when your partner has got a life threatening illness, it doesn't just affect them. It affects you as well. And often the therapy is focused again on the designated patient.

1:07:46So this kind of broadening the sense of who it is that is going to be treated and bringing in people's partners, I think is going to be very important. One of the works that Marcus and Amber Capone, who have done work with Vets, they've brought probably by now about a thousand veterans down to Mexico for IBegane. And they have also started bringing their partners as well. They realize that you need to think about this as a family setting and to try to treat the entire family context. This raises another issue, which is to talk about group therapy. So the scale of the trauma in America, there's 13 million PTSD patients.

1:08:30This is the estimate by the Veterans Administration. You know, in Ukraine, we've got entire country. When I was there, practically every family knows someone or has someone that has been injured or killed. And so you've got massive population -based trauma. And to think about treating people as individuals is really important, but it's going to be heard to scale because of the limited number of therapists and psychiatrists and the cost of doing that. So the FDA has wanted all the research with LSD. So this I've been MDMA, five, I mean, DMT to start on an individual basis. But there's new studies now that are going to be working on group therapy.

1:09:11So one of the first in America was at the Portland, Oregon VA. And it was four therapists for six veterans. And it started out where each one got an individual session first and then they got a group session. And there's two basic kinds of trauma in the military. One is war related or accident training related. And the other is what they call military sexual trauma. There's a lot of sexual abuse by veterans or by military active duty people of other people in the military. And they call that military sexual trauma. And so what they've learned is they have to separate those groups when they do the group therapy.

1:09:50Because if you're a military person who's been abused by other people in the military, that you might not feel safe if you're in a context, a group therapy. So they've done separate the groups, but they found that the groups do terrific with supporting each other afterwards in this integration process. And so what they've done is they've realized though that the design they had initially was an individual session and then a group session. And after they did two cohorts of the six, they realized that the people felt they needed a third MDMA session and they wanted that also as a group, not as an individual.

1:10:28There's a project in Australia that's going to be climate related PTSD from floods that they've had related to climate. And so they're going to be doing group therapy there. And there's an incredible project that's developing in Israel that's for people traumatized on October 7th. And there's going to be groups of seven with two therapists, two assistants. But the Ministry of Health has taken a while to review this application. It's funded by charitable donations. The MDMA is coming from Canada. But what the Ministry of Health in Israel has wanted is, and this is the first study ever, where it's going to be direct comparison of individual therapy versus group therapy.

1:11:14So everybody is ready to have one or the other. You get randomized to either individual or group. And it will be a direct comparison. And so I think like when we think about AA and we think about peer support, I think you can go deeper when it's individual therapy. Because you have more focus, you're not thinking about other people. You can go deeper. But when you're in a group setting, you can kind of bond with the other people. You can kind of hear their other stories. But then you can support each other in this integration process. So I think at the end of it, it could be that the groups do just as well as the individuals.

1:11:54And then that will dramatically reduce the cost of the treatment and help it scale. So that's where we're at this initial thing. And I think particularly for military people that are traumatized in similar circumstances that are bonded in groups that group therapy can maybe even be the treatment of choice. But I think the way the FDA is going to be reviewing it is that there is going to be studies with individuals first that will have to be gone through the system and approved. And then there will be this additional research with groups. What kind of a timeline are we talking about? How long are these studies?

1:12:31Well, it's going to be about three years for the project in Israel. I mean, it's going to be about 160 people. What about the projects here? The project that the Portland Oregon VA is going to be done pretty soon. But it's really just been four or five cohorts. It's very small numbers of people. And so there will need to be more. I think that there's been some efforts to do what people call in some ways a modified version of individual versus group is that they've done some of this at Sunstone also where there'll be four people getting psilocybin at the same time. But each in a separate room, each with one therapist.

1:13:09But then near the end of the session, they bring them together. And then they talk about what happened. And then they also have the group integration. So it's kind of a modified. So I think in terms of time frame, it's probably four or five years before FDA will approve group therapy. Maybe longer. The other issue is that the last time that we spoke, it was before the FDA advisory committee, before the FDA meeting to decide whether to approve MDMA assist at therapy for PTSD. And the advisory committee recommended against it and the FDA voted against it. This was August of last year. And so that was heartbreaking because I thought that the data really did justify approval and it did demonstrate safety and efficacy.

1:14:00But there was enough doubts that were raised. One of the big problems to do research with psychedelics is how do you do a double blind study? Right. You know, when you take a powerful drug, you know you've taken it. And if you give an inactive placebo, people can tell the difference. A lot of my dissertation, which I did in 2001, was how to do a double blind study with psychedelics, particularly with MDMA. And my my my solution, which made sense was to do therapy with low dose MDMA versus therapy with full dose MDMA. So everybody knows they're getting MDMA. They all have the same expectations.

1:14:46And they might not be aware though which dose. You know, is it a full dose? Is it a lower dose? So the challenge was to pick the low dose so that it's high enough to cause a certain amount of confusion, but not so high that it has so much therapeutic potential that you can't tell the difference between the groups. So for 16 years from 2000 to 2016, maps did a series of what are called phase two studies to try to figure out how to do phase three. And we looked at therapy with no MDMA therapy with 25 milligrams, 30 milligrams, 40, 50, 75, 100, 125 and 150. So sort of like a dose response. We did all these different doses.

1:15:27And what we discovered fortunately after I got my PhD was that my theory was partially right and partially wrong. That you know, a microdose of of anything is not going to be very good as a placebo because you'll be able to tell. So what was surprising to us was that the lower doses 25, 30, 40, 50 milligrams did indeed cause a certain amount of confusion. But when you're working with PTSD patients and you get this activation from the drug, but you don't have enough of the fear reduction, it made people uncomfortable. So we showed that the people that got therapy with no MDMA did better than the people that got therapy with the low doses of MDMA.

1:16:14They still got better, but they didn't get as much benefit. So the analogy is you're taking off in an airplane and there's all this turbulence at the beginning. And then you get above the clouds and it's smooth sailing. So it's kind of like that with with MDMA. But the part that we discovered that was very surprising was we did a study with veterans, firefighters and police officers. And one group got 30 milligrams, one group got 75 milligrams, and one group got 125 milligrams. And in that particular study, when you, it was about 26 people, when you randomize, it doesn't mean that everything's equal.

1:16:49It just means it's random. So the people that had 125 milligrams with PTSD had more depression than the people that had 75 milligrams. But the 75 milligram dose group did better than the 125, just slightly better. So what it meant was that the dose that's therapeutically effective was lower than we thought. Can I stop you for a second? Yeah, please. When you said the people that did 125 had more depression, do you mean before the study? Yes, yes. So it was chosen that they would get the hard dose because they were suffering more. Well, well, no, again, this is randomization. Right, but you said that they had more depression before the therapy.

1:17:27So how did you determine that? Well, we evaluate everybody's PTSD symptoms and their depression symptoms. And so just by the randomization, it turned out that those people that were higher on depression ended up more of them in the hundreds of randomly. Just randomly? Yeah. Oh, interesting. Yeah, because when you randomize again, it doesn't mean that you're making things equal. Right, right, right. So it was just a chance just turned out that way. How many people were in this group? Twenty -six people were in the entire study. Okay. So it's just dumb luck. Yeah. Yeah. But it meant to us that this dose of 75 was indeed more therapeutic than we anticipated.

1:18:06So there was no real sweet spot where there was a dose of MDMA that didn't either make people uncomfortable and reduce the effectiveness compared to therapy with no MDMA, or it tipped over into being very effective. So when in November 29, 2016, when the FDA had what we call the end of phase two meeting, after we got approved to go to phase three, the final studies where you need to prove safety and efficacy, I knew that we shouldn't do that because of this. We shouldn't go directly to phase three. The FDA offers this opportunity that most pharma companies don't take, called special protocol assessment, and you negotiate every aspect of the phase three design with FDA.

1:18:54And it can take for us a to gate months. And so pharma companies are thinking there's nothing unusual what I'm doing. My patent life is expiring, but I knew we needed to do that to discuss how to deal with the double blind. And so we presented this information to the FDA. We said we will give you blinding if you want with these lower doses, but it's going to make our job easier to find a difference between the full dose and these lower doses because it's going to compromise the therapy as compared to therapy with no MDMA at all. And so we said to the FDA, you tell us what you want. And the FDA chose therapy with inactive placebo to make our job harder, which made sense to me.

1:19:33And they said that there's two things that you can do to reduce experiment or bias because the whole purpose of the double blind is to reduce bias that you don't know what's going on and everybody just treats everybody the same. They said the first is this random assignment. What that means is everybody's similarly motivated and they will work. And the therapists don't know necessarily that so you do this random assignment. But then the second thing is that you can't have the therapists or the patients rate themselves on how well they've done compared to baseline. You need independent Raiders that are blind to the condition that the person that they're evaluating is in.

1:20:13So the Raiders don't know. Did this person get the placebo? Did this person get the MDMA? Just don't look at their pupils. Well, this is afterwards. And it's done on telemedicine. It's done on zoom. And it's an hour long interview. And it's with what's called the caps, the clinician administered PTSD scale. And do they have a series of questions? Yeah, it's like an hour long interview about their symptoms related to what they call the index trauma, which is the worst thing that ever happened. When you pick this, this is my index trauma and how do you respond? So we had these independent Raiders.

1:20:52And then we had this random assignment. And that's what the FDA said is how we should do the phase three studies. What was problematic for us was the people at the FDA that we negotiated this with in 2017 and then left the FDA. And then new more conservative people came in at the Division of Psychiatry. And they made, they were more concerned about this, what they called functional unblinding. And that became an issue at the FDA Advisory Committee meeting and at the FDA when they reviewed what, what, whether to approve MDMA assist that there be or not. And so the, the pharma company, Lycos, did not really proactively explain to the Advisory Committee how this design was developed.

1:21:39Why FDA chose this design? And so the people in the Advisory Committee are often more academics and they're more focused on this double blind issue, but they're not practical in the sense. So that the FDA realizes that the double blind fails in practice a lot. It's a theory of how you want to do things. It's something to strive for, but it doesn't work a lot of the times. Even with SSRIs, you think that the ProZAC or various drugs that you take that are not psychedelic, that those are easy to double blind. But they're not because when people have sexual side effects, they have other side effects.

1:22:15And they report to their therapist what's going on. Then they can tell from the side effect profile. So the double blind fails in practice a lot. But the FDA is saying we can't just only approve drugs where the double blind is perfect. There's, we have to weigh these different things. So that was one of the big issues that the FD Advisory Committee objected to was this functional unblinding. So when you asked about the time frame, there was other issues, but where we're at right now is that there's going to be negotiations between Lycos and the FDA with the new FDA, with the new people at HHS.

1:22:57And there's two, the proverbial fork in the road. There's either the FDA will say we believe your data enough that you're not going to need to do another phase three study. They might require what's called the phase four study, which is after approval, you gather information about safety, about durability, different things. And if that's the case, it's possible that within six months, the FDA could say yes to approving MDMA assisted therapy for PTSD. If the FDA says we want another phase three study, that could delay approval for another three and a half years or so. So that's just on an individual basis.

1:23:41So then, so talk about frustration. I mean, we had incredible outcomes. So the two phase three studies that were done, the first one was severe PTSD. And what we showed is that two thirds of the people that had severe PTSD no longer had PTSD after the treatment, which was 42 hours of therapy, three MDMA sessions, one month apart, 12, 90 minute non drug psychotherapy sessions, two thirds no longer had PTSD that got therapy plus MDMA. And those people that got therapy without MDMA with the inactyl placebo, roughly one third no longer had PTSD. And then another 20 roughly 20 % had what's called clinically significant reductions of PTSD symptoms means that their life has changed.

1:24:34Their symptoms are not as burdensome, but they still have PTSD. So they're called responders. So we had 88 % responders, only 12 % non responders. Wow. It's it's the best treatment. In the second phase three study, we purposely moved it to moderate to severe PTSD because we didn't want the FDA to say it's only for severe PTSD. Three quarters of the people did have severe PTSD and one quarter had moderate PTSD. And it was 72 .6%. No longer had PTSD, almost three quarters no longer had PTSD at this two month follow up. And what was even more remarkable in this relates, I think to the concerns that was expressed about bias and functional and blinding is that 46 % of the people that had therapy with no MDMA also went below the threshold of having PTSD diagnosis.

1:25:28That's better than any of the other therapies for PTSD. And so what that demonstrated is that the therapist, even though most of them could tell the difference between whether somebody had MDMA or not, that they tried just as hard as they could to help people, whether they got the MDMA or not. And we got extraordinary results in the control group. And I think one of the things that is the explanation is that when you have an eight hour therapy session with music, with headphones, with more or less half the time people are inside having these different feelings and the other half they're talking to the therapist and no particular order, you're not forced to focus on the therapy the way with prolonged exposure or cognitive processing therapy that that's what I said was retraumatizing in the studies that the VA did roughly half the people don't know what they're doing.

1:26:19And we dropped out, we had very low dropout rates because people are encouraged to just we support whatever's emerging. That's the essence of the therapeutic approach that has been developed to support people when they're going through MDMA therapy. And it's very similar to what can be done with so cybernerelistie or even I began that that you just support whatever's emerging. You have this sense that there's a wisdom of the unconscious. We all know that our body has a certain wisdom in that it moves towards wholeness. We get cuts it heals. It's below our level of awareness. So there's some kind of wisdom to what's emerging.

1:26:54You can think about it as this barrier, this permeable barrier, semi -permanal barrier between the conscious and the unconscious. And it all happens, we all know it dreams that the material rises to our awareness of dreams. And it's like that was psychedelics. And so we just support whatever's emerging and people can go to some happy memories or to layers of trauma. Whatever they're not forced to just focus on the trauma. So we have very low dropout rates. But the people that got the therapy without MDMA were able to make incredible progress. We also have what are called fidelity ratings, which is we videotape it all the sessions.

1:27:31And then we have raiders are called adherence raiders and they look at our people adhering to the therapeutic method. And then that's called fidelity. We had an over 90 % fidelity meaning that the therapist really were doing the same, whether it was placebo or not. So the results were outstanding in that way and the side effects were very low. We had nobody commit suicide that received MDMA. That was one of the concerns. We had one woman tried to kill herself twice, but she was in the placebo group. And we had another woman such a severe suicidal adiation. She checked herself into a hospital and not to kill herself.

1:28:11She was also in the placebo group. Because when you help people with terrible trauma, it's difficult for them. And you know, they're not able to really process. That's why they had long term PTSD. So we demonstrated remarkable results. And yet the FDA said we need more data. We need more data. I think it's tragic. It is tragic, but it's also very hopeful. The results are very hopeful. And you know, I'm always hoping that people come around. Do you ever really consider though the burden of responsibility that lays on your shoulders? Like you have been at the forefront of this for decades. And I imagine a world where I like you doesn't exist.

1:28:59Because it's really easy for you to not exist. I only know you. You know what I'm saying? Like you have been responsible for so much research and so much pushing for legislation to be passed and pushing for people to understand these things. And so much education. I mean, you're a real hero in this. Thank you. Yeah, it's. But it required. It must have been an incredible amount of resolve that you have to have to keep this fight going. This episode is brought to you by visible. I want to let you in on something. Your current wireless carrier does not want you to know about visible because visible is the ultimate wireless hack.

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1:30:22This episode is brought to you by Uber Eats. Summer is here and you can now get almost anything you need for your sunny days delivered with Uber Eats. What do I mean by almost? Well, you can't get a well groomed lawn delivered, but you can get chicken Parmesan delivered a day in the sun. No, a bottle of rum. Yes, Uber Eats can definitely get you that for almost almost anything delivered with Uber Eats order now for alcohol. You must be legal drinking age. Please enjoy responsibly product availability varies by region. See app for details. It has been and I think one of the things that was has kept me going was a dream.

1:31:04We've talked about dreams a little bit. It was a dream that I had when I was in my early 20s. So when I was 18, you know, I had decided to focus my life on psychedelics. This was after I realized, oh, LSD is what my bar misstep should have been. And I was able to. See these tools as really hopeful and there was two parts. One part is sort of this working through trauma depression. The other part is our interconnectedness. I think this sort of the essence of what people talk about the sort of spiritual aspects of psychedelics or of meditation or of other things. You feel that we're not just isolated individuals were all connected with all of life.

1:31:43And so at 18, I said it's a crazy world. I was a Drea Vietnam more draft resistor. I was planning to go to jail. I studied the Tolstoy and Gandhi and non violent resistance. So my contribution to my country was going to be to not register for the draft and go to jail as a protest for Vietnam. And then I thought, you know, my dad was and my mom was saying, you're going to have a criminal record. You're never going to have a real job. You're not going to be able to be a doctor or a lawyer. You'll be a felon. And I thought, okay, well, I'm not willing to go to war because of that. But I can be an underground psychedelic therapist.

1:32:20And you don't need a license for that. So that was my plan. So then this dream happened in my early 20s. I should mention that I was so I had the real wrong idea. At 18 is the idea I had was the more drugs you take the faster you evolve.

1:32:39I mean again, I was, you know, stupid 18 year olds. So so I did a good job of it. And I just got more disoriented and very much ungrounded too much horsepower. Not enough traction. That's a great way to say it. Yeah, I was very ungrounded and and and I went to the guidance counselor at college. And this was a new college in Sarasota, Florida. And it was a private school at the time and the guidance counselor. I said, I need help with my dripping. And it's become more important to me than my studies. And he said, well, you know, I understand what you're doing. That's really makes sense to me in some ways.

1:33:16We're overdeveloped intellectually and underdeveloped emotionally and spiritually. And he gave me this book to read. And I loved it. And it was by Stanislaus Grough, the world's expert LSD researcher. And he was MD PhD at Johns Hopkins. This is now 1972. And the research was being shut down. You talked about the controlled substance is active 1970. And my guidance counselor had got this book directly from Stan. And I said, could I write a letter to Stan? I want to become a LSD therapist. And he said, sure. So I wrote this letter. And Stan was just leaving Hopkins and on this confused 18 year old.

1:33:52And to my shock, Stan wrote me back. Stan is now, by the way, almost 94 years old.

1:34:04And he is still going around the world to educate people. But this book was a pivot point in my life reading this. I said, I really want to study psychedelics. So the dream was a few years later, if people have seen the movie 2001 Space Odyssey near the end of it, there's this scene where the astronaut is in this all white room and he's on his deathbed. And so the dream was I'm in this all white room on this. And there's a person on his deathbed. And he's looking at me. He said earlier in my life, I was almost killed, but I was saved. And I knew I was saved for a purpose. But I didn't know what the purpose was.

1:34:47He said, let me show you what happened to me. So this is all in the dream. So we go and it's in World War II. And he was a Jewish guy. And it was outside of a village. And there was all these thousands of people lined up with open grave machine guns by the Nazis. Before the crematoriums and the concentration camps, they called it the Holocaust of bullets. So this guy was wounded, buried, but wasn't dead. And then it had a little bit of a Jesus kind of a theme where he was buried for three days. Somehow I'm seeing all this through his eyes. And then he wakes up and he's not dead. He climbs his way through the bodies.

1:35:23And nobody's there at the edge of town. He runs into the woods. He survives the war with the partisans. And then I see all this and then we're back in the room. And he's on his deathbed. And he's looking at me. And he says, now I know why I was saved. I'm like, oh, tell me why were you saved? He said it's to tell you to study psychedelics. That I want you to bring back psychedelics that if we can all feel our interconnectedness, it will be harder to dehumanize others. It'll be harder to do this mass murder. That we need to understand how we're more similar than different. And at the, I said, in my mind again, in the dream, I said, I've already decided to do this.

1:36:05This is sort of reinforcing it. I will say yes. And you can die in peace. You will have carried this message. And then he dies in front of my arms in front of my eyes. And then after he's on his, he's dead. And then I'm thinking, what do I do next? And I walk out the room. And now I'm somehow rather on a stream. I'm sitting down watching the water go by. And then I noticed that there's this young boy sitting next to me. And I look at him. And I realize I know him. In real life at the time, I had a big LSD stash. And I was worried about getting busted. And so his father was a friend of mine. And he stored my LSD stash at his house.

1:36:44And when I connected this guy with this little kid with LSD, then I woke up. So that's what's been a big motivator for me my entire life and made it so that I don't feel that I've been able to just give up. It's like this sort of message from what humanity can do to each other if we don't really evolve in our consciousness. And so that's what's helped me to continue. I feel this enormous, good fortune in that I was born in this generational. I had like I won the generational lottery is the way to say it. My great grandparents on my mother's side were refugees from Russia came to America in 1880 fleeing anti -semitism.

1:37:34My father's father, my grandfather and grandmother, my grandfather flew a fleet from Poland in 1920 also from anti -semitism. They arrive at America. And it's the American dream. And it actually from my my mother's side it was the classic rags to riches because they had a rags business. They turned it into a paper company. And so I was born in 1953 after the Holocaust after World War II. And my parents were just so supportive and my dad was a doctor. And I was told we want to help you do whatever you want to do. And I felt like I was born at the height of American power American exceptionalism.

1:38:22I was white. I was male. My family was well off. I was the chosen people Jewish American exceptionalism. The only thing I wasn't was tall. But I got every other sort of lottery thing. And I just was raised that I could make a difference. And so I had this sort of luxury that there's actually a Holocaust writer named Primo Levy who was one of my father's heroes in a way. And he wrote something very interesting that I think has relevance to where we're at today in America. And he talked about how we tend to think of that the revolutions for you know start with the oppressed and that the oppressed throw off their chains and they end up amassing all these people and they try to work for a better world.

1:39:17He said that that's not actually what happens the revolutions don't begin with the oppressed because often that's the purpose of oppression is to make it so they can't do that. They're so focused on survival. He said the revolutions usually begin with the privileged who for one reason or another use their freedom use their privilege to argue to work towards a better life. So what it means to me is that if you have this privilege you have the upper obligation and the opportunity to do things that other people cannot do. It reminds me also of the hierarchy of needs many people have heard of Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

1:39:56And the bottom one is survival that you have to work on core survival if you know we've had these surveys that say a vast proportion of America cannot afford a $500 or $1 ,000 unexpected expense. So you're living at this edge of anxiety, economic anxiety, you can't really think about many other ways to protest because you're focused on survival. So I felt that I was born into this privileged place and it took multiple generations from refugees from the American Dream. And so I felt I've had this mission of this use the privilege for making it a better world. So I've not been focused on making money.

1:40:43I've not been focused on bringing these healing and spiritual potentials of psychedelics back to the world. And one of the things that was so reassuring to me and I think that people who will come to the psychedelic conference will see this is that once FDA said no to MDMA says that therapy that they weren't ready to approve it that they wanted to see more data. I was incredibly depressed and frustrated and all that. But it took me a couple months to realize that the psychedelic renaissance that maps like hosts could disappear but that there is so much going on with research into a whole range of different psychedelics that the field was moving forward regardless.

1:41:30That something had been accomplished that this psychedelic renaissance was really moving forward and that that was this wave that I think is unstoppable. That we're seeing the healing potentials in so many different ways with so many different drugs. So that gave me this. It was kind of reassuring. Yeah, that even though we were the first out of the gate and the FDA wasn't ready, things are moving forward in a great way. So we've got an amazing perspective considering how much work it's been. What are the things that you said that I think from the dream is to give people this understanding of interconnectedness that we are all connected.

1:42:13And without that feeling war is a normal thing. It's part of if you asked the average person could you conceive of a time in your lifetime where there's no war. Would you be willing to bet on that? Most people like no. The world unfortunately I wish it was but unfortunately I think we're always going to have war. That's if let's imagine a world where there was no restrictions on psychedelics because I'm of the belief that it's probably responsible for a lot of religious experiences that we've documented. It's not it's not an uncommon theme in many many cultures that you have these psychedelic experiences and then through that these great revelations come and then through that great change in the culture.

1:43:05I mean this is the Illusionian mysteries in each Greece that Brian Merer -Reskou talks about so well. Without restrictions if we didn't have these fucking insane laws we would have progressed past where we are now. If we had gone from 1970 to 2025 without those restrictions in place who knows what this culture looks like, who knows what the world looks like. It's amazing that one administration, one presidential administration with one sweeping act that was essentially put in place to stop the civil rights movement and to stop the anti -war movement and to stop the black rights movement. If they had done that, if they had not done that, if that had not gone through, we might be looking at a completely different world where we have culturally accelerated evolution that mirrors are electronically and technologically accelerated evolution.

1:44:04I think that's exactly right. I think this I'm smiling because you probably know this quote from John Erickman who was Nixon's domestic policy advisor and this came out at the end of the 1970s he did an interview and he said that the two main enemies of the Nixon White House were the civil rights movement and the hippies, the antiwar movement. And he said we couldn't stop them from protesting but we could criminalize the drugs that they were using and use that to bust up their meetings, arrest their leaders. And he said did we know that we were exaggerating the risks of these drugs? Of course we did.

1:44:43And I think such a crime. It's really a crime of enlightenment. It's really is. It is. And when you talk about Brian Mirrescu and the immortality key, which by the way is being made into a documentary, phenomenal book. But the Ellisonian mysteries is the longest running mystery ceremony that we know of in the history of the world, roughly 2000 years. It involved the psychedelic potion called Kikian. It's not exactly clear what was in it, but it was wiped out in 396 by the Catholic Church. Because psychedelics offer a direct experience of spirituality. And often religious systems want to be the intermediaries.

1:45:26Exactly. They want to be the gatekeepers. And so there's a power. When we think about the reintroduction of psychedelics, you know, we talk about what happened in the Controlled Substance Act in 1970. But it really goes all the way back to the destruction of the Ellisonian mysteries. And then we have a lot of the work in the Middle Ages where the women were mostly the plant medicine people. And then we have the burning of the witches. When the conquistadors started coming into Western civilization here, which was indigenous civilizations, the first people that they tried to kill were the shamans that did the work with the mushrooms or the work with the peyote.

1:46:02Because they were the center of the communities. Now these communities were not all, you know, peace and love. They were often warring and killing each other. So there does need to be a lot more conscious evolution. But there's a... Well, they were living in a very different time. Yeah. You know, I mean, you had a bunch of different languages. You had tribal raiders. It was very common. It's just a different world. They were living in a much more barbaric state. Yeah. But it was essentially a window into prehistory. Yeah. There's a book that I recommend for people by Herman Hess. And it's called the Glass -Beat Game, Magister Ludy, the Glass -Beat Game.

1:46:45And it helped Herman Hess win the Nobel Prize for literature. And he wrote it during World War II. And so there is these competitive energies that we have that often can lead to war. But the book was a post -apocalyptic culture that had decided to harness these competitive energies into what they called the Glass -Beat Game. Which was this... It's a beautiful book. But the Glass -Beat Game was about a competition using poetry, mathematics, music, and philosophy to try to describe the universe. And they would have this different kind of... Who would be the most eloquent and the most comprehensive?

1:47:27And this was kind of the antidote to the competitiveness that led to this apocalypse. And is writing this during World War II as well as this sort of idealistic hopeful thing. But the other part of the book was that this game itself becomes a little bit too abstract. And it no longer harnesses the passions of the common people. It became more of this elite. And the head of it, the Magister Ludy, decides that he has to leave. So that there has to be some way that we do compete with each other. But we have to do it in a way to learn non -violence. And our tools of technology are getting ever more destructive.

1:48:10The nuclear proliferation is taking more. So I ended my TED Talk with this, which was 2019. And interestingly enough, it took six years until Nolan Williams gave a talk on the main stage of TED about Ipegain. So it took six years from that was the only ever TED Talk on psychedelics in 2019. And then Nolan Williams talked about Ipegain just recently. And he'll also be at the psychedelic conference. But this idea I ended up saying it's a race between consciousness and catastrophe. And catastrophe is very common. I mean, as you just talked about coming back from Ukraine today, I don't know what's happening right now, but today, India and Pakistan started bombing each other.

1:48:55Yeah. Yeah. So just terrifying. Two nuclear powers are sending missiles into each other's country. Yeah. You know, what's going on with Israel and Palestine? I just want to mention something. So there are small groups of Israelis and Palestinians that are doing ayahuasca and MDMA together. So that in a way to emphasize their common humanity, but also to work through their traumas. And one of the most, I think, inspiring and motivating groups in Israel and Palestine is a group called combatants for peace. And so these are Israeli soldiers or what would be called Palestinian terrorists or those that had used violence on both sides.

1:49:41And they've given up violence for nonviolence. So it's a group called combatants for peace. And the Palestinian has been invited to come speak at psychedelic science. And he was denied a visa. Wow. He cannot come to our conference. We're trying to see if we can work behind the scenes. I don't know if we can to get him a visa. But that this idea that we're. He's just because he's Palestinian. I don't know the exact reasons why he did have a violent past because that is the whole point of combatants for peace. They work in battles. They're now leading this nonviolent approach to work together. So there's a incredible neuroscientist, Israeli neuroscientist, Leore Roseman, Exeter University in England that's done work with Israelis and Palestinians.

1:50:31And he's brought a bunch of them to Spain for an ayahuasca session. And with different measures of how you see the other. And once you do see this commonality, you don't see the other as so foreign from yourself. And you can recognize their pain. And so like a residual effect of tribal culture from the ancient times that this you had to other these people in order to commit horrific crimes because they were going to commit horrific crimes on you. Yeah. You had to protect the people around you. And unfortunately that's baked into our genes. You reminded me of one of the more powerful for me statements, Adam Kinsnicker, who is the Republican on the January 6th committee from in the House to look at what happened on January 6th.

1:51:18He said that he's learned from his investigations that there's something that people are more scared of than death. And that's being kicked out of your tribe. That were such social beings that this idea that we would be isolated and alone. That's how you have a lot of these fundamentalist religions that keep people within them because if you deviate, you get kicked out of the tribe and they ostracize you. So cultural things, the mimic religions in that way. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And then you have the fundamentalists of all the religions. I think this is very true that the fundamentalists of the different religions are closer to each other than they are to the mystics of their own religions and the mystics of the religions are closer to the people who are other religions because they see that it's all this common reality, but that we have different symbols, different stories that we tell.

1:52:13But it's all about this combination of us being both interconnected and also extremely individual. I think this other part is that the more you realize how we're all essentially more similar. I mean, look at our DNA is very similar to some animal DNA. There's very slight differences. And then when you talk about humans, so different skin color, different things, our commonalities are really more. But once you can kind of understand that, hopefully then you can be more willing to appreciate the differences. So it's this paradoxical thing where that the more you realize we're interconnected, the more you can appreciate the unique individuality of every person.

1:52:59Yeah. I think what you brought up about the suspension of the Illusinian mysteries, that's just so important that that that kind of tactic has always existed because the psychotic people in power want to maintain their control over the population. And it's very difficult to do. It's very difficult to get people to fight each other when they're all tripping together. And they're like, oh, there's something more to this. Like we're missing out on a giant piece of this puzzle. And it's like, there's these tools that are available to humanity that can elevate us. And yet these tools are by tyrants are being kept from people, not just kept from people, but as you're talking about with Nixon's advisor, openly discussed how they lied and used propaganda.

1:53:47To pretend that the effects were far worse than they really were. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that it's again really important to say that the tools are in some ways less important than the context within which they're used. So the social context. So for example, religions often cozy up to the people in power. So there's an I wasca church, the Unia de Vegetal. And they came from Brazil. They actually went to the US Supreme Court and got approval for practicing I wasca in the United States. But they're a syncretic religion, meaning that in order for them to survive, they had to merge with the church.

1:54:28So they've become a patriarchal homophobic hierarchical and some of the leaders of the Unia de Vegetal aligned with Bolsonaro, who was about destroying the Amazon. So that it doesn't the tools themselves don't automatically make you a better person. It's the context. So it's the same way in therapy that you can have these experiences. But it's the context in which you interpret them. And then it's the integration work that you do after that really makes the most sense. So that you can have psychedelic experiences. But if it's not in this sort of therapeutic context where you're really open to.

1:55:09To deal with the different issues and things fears of death, things that come up. So I think we need to make that clear that it's not just a magic pill and it will produce better people. A great example that is the berserkers. Yeah. The Vikings took mushrooms for the killed everybody. Yes. Yes. Yes. It doesn't always make you a better person really. And again, context of the culture and the times of barbaric time. Yeah. If we talked about mechanists, Stone, Dave, theory before. No, we haven't. What is your perspective on that idea? Well, what he's basically saying is that it's a real good chance that early monkeys and stuff would experiment with whatever they could around them to eat.

1:55:59And that they would eat mushrooms. And that mushrooms then elevated their consciousness, started helping develop language. I think it's plausible. I mean, I don't know that we'll know for sure. Did you heard Dennis describe it? Dennis, I think, doesn't even better job of describing it than Terrence because Dennis is like a legitimate hardcore scientist. Yes. Yes. And he explains how psilocybin would interact with the brain and glossolalia and all these different effects. I could come out of it. And then that psilocybin is known for helping regrow neural tissue. Yes. That's what I've talked about.

1:56:35This neuroplasticity. Right. And this, yeah, that Gould -Dullin is talking about these opening these critical periods. Yes. Because part of the theory is taking into consideration the doubling of the human brain size over a period of two million years. That it's his very extraordinary development. And you know, many biologists called the biggest mystery in the entire fossil record. Like what happened? And McKenna's perspective was, I think I know. I think. I mean, it makes sense because he had it also. He applied what we know about the climate back then. The climate was changing and that these rainforests were receding into grasslands, which would make a lot more angelic.

1:57:13And it's, angelic were pooping everywhere. Mushrooms growing cow poop, bam, bam, bam. And you got all these pieces together. And then the fact that it would increase visual acuity and low doses and make people more, or you know, pre human hominids more amorous. They make them more likely to mate, make them better hunters because it includes and improves their vision. Also make them more creative. So they're probably developed new new ways to hunt and fish. So they would survive more. They'd have more resources, more food, more protein that grow bigger and stronger. And then the brains are developing because they're eating these mushrooms.

1:57:49And I think there's a, that's plausible. But I think then what does it mean for us today is that I do think that the psychedelic experiences could be part of this next sort of evolution of humanity to make us more collaborative and peaceful to deal with the incredible technologies that we're developing. Yeah, that we Einstein had this great quote. He said the splitting of the atom has changed everything except our mode of thinking. And hence we are drifting towards unparalleled catastrophe. What shall be required of mankind is to survive as a whole new mode of thinking. And what is that new mode of thinking is sort of how we're interconnected?

1:58:31It's what the astronauts have said. So I think we should say that this doesn't depend on psychedelics. The astronauts who've been up in space look back and see the earth as a whole thing. Well, that's got to be a psychedelic experience. Just seeing earth from the stars and we're not from the stars, but you know from space looking down and seeing like this, the nonsense of these imaginary lines that we put on the ground. Yeah, you don't see the borders. You don't see the religions. You just see that this is one really unique planet that we've all grown up from and it's produced all this life and we're all interconnected.

1:59:08But then there's this thought process that the conflict and the evil is important to sort of strengthen and encourage the good. And that this is all a part of this evolutionary process that the human race is going through. And that almost in the face of this catastrophe is where real change comes and then we kind of have to understand that evil and terrible behavior is a real thing. And what would it what are and have some mad search for the tools to mitigate these problems. And so it encourages, encourages people like yourself and encourages people to try to figure these things out using these.

1:59:47And again, these tools that you're right under our nose that have been here for thousands of years. Yeah, I mean, people say that the stars burn brighter because they're surrounded by darkness. Yeah, that's the weird thing about the human race. It's like it seems like that has to be there. You have to get rained on to appreciate a sunny day. Well, there's an incredible quote from Carl Jung, so this union psychology. And what he said was that we need to study more about humanity. We need to study how we operate. He said, because the only real danger that exists is man himself that we are able to deal with all these things.

2:00:26We said we know virtually nothing about man. We must do more study because we are the source of all coming evil. Yikes. This was in 1959, about three years before he died. And it's chilling. We are the source of all coming evil. Well, also that's in the shadow of the bomb, right? Like everybody was still freaking out. Like what did we do? You know, we just annihilated two cities. Yeah, now it's talking about the shadow, something else. So in Jungian psychology, the shadow is the parts of ourselves that we disown. You know, it's our dark sides that we don't see. And so what Jung said is that the most political, therapeutic, and social thing that we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others.

2:01:14So when you cannot deal with a part of yourself, you project it out. And so these people become the enemies. These people become the evil. And we're the all good. It reminds me actually, I was with Terrence. This was my first DMT experience. So this is about 40 years ago. This was an assailant at Big Sur. It was with Ralph Metzner, Terrence McKenna, and a bunch of us were trying to gather together to think how to protect MDMA. And one evening, we all were trying DMT. So not five in the ODMT, but DMT. And you smoke it in a pipe. It's like 10 or 15 minutes. And then you just go out and then you come back and share what happened.

2:02:00And then you pass the pipe to the next person. So it's like a three, four hour process with this group. And so for me, my first experience with DMT was very, so the first thing I saw was this horizontal line. And then I saw vertical line. And then it turned red. And then it turned into cubes. And then it turned into like an MC Escher painting where the space doesn't seem to make sense anymore. And then I was blasted into this other universe or not. But I was blasted out of myself into the universe. And I felt like I was part of everything. And everything was part of me. And it was this glorious billions of years of evolution.

2:02:34And I went through all of this. But then after all of that, finally, I had this idea that if I'm part of everything and everything part of me, then Hitler is part of me too. And it was shattering. But it was true. You can't claim to be part of everything and only take the good parts. And it just was a shocker to me that this logic brought me to this. And it was really, really shattering. And it took me this whole data start working on that. And then the very next day. And this gets back a little bit to legalization the next day. And to maps is political strategy. The next day, we experimented with ketamine.

2:03:20So in my ketamine experience, somehow or other, I was above and behind Hitler. Because the Holocaust has been this animating idea for me in my whole life. So I'm above and behind Hitler. ketamine gives you a bit of remove. Like you're not quite there. So I felt that I was safe. But I was watching him give a speech like to these rallies, we have enormous numbers of Germans. And I was thinking, how do I get into his head so he doesn't want to murder everybody doesn't want to kill the Jews doesn't want to have this war. How do I get into his head and I felt this panic rising. And it was like bubbles like I was underwater and I felt that the bubbles of my fear if they broke the surface, I wouldn't be able to I'd have to look away.

2:04:05I couldn't deal with it. And then I realized that one of the beauties of ketamine is that it doesn't interfere with your respiration. You can breathe. So I started breathing deeply, which is a really important way to kind of ground yourself in difficult experiences of all kinds, psychedelics or not. So I started really breathing and then I was able to go back and watch and what I saw was this high Hitler salute. And then I saw everybody doing it back to him. And I got this sense because Hitler was able to help people feel that they were all together, the German nation, that they were all part of something bigger.

2:04:40And so it felt like he's pushing this energy out with the high Hitler salute and then everybody is pushing it back to him. So it felt like the one to the many and the many to the one. And then it was like vibrations going up and up and up like this kind of unity between him and the people. And it just was terrifying. And then I realized that there's no way I can get into his head. Like you're saying the psychopath or often politicians that there's they're getting so much out of it. But it's the people giving away their power that I thought that's where the solution has to be. So maps is about mass mental health about a spiritualized humanity.

2:05:18And so that led to this understanding for me that that safety free humanity is not just giving drugs to the leaders and having them wake up. You know, it's about anchoring mass mental health and that the people that are giving away their power are getting less from it than the people that are amassing all this power. So that led to this idea we need to medicalize we need to go you know to produce real scientific evidence about benefits and risks. But at the same time there needs to be drug policy reform where we need access to people in a way preventative medicine or if they don't have a diagnosis.

2:05:58So that it's this two parallel paths one is science and medicine the other is drug policy reform and then we talked about earlier about educating young people we need honest drug education. People have died from taking ecstasy contaminated with fentanyl. You know we need pure drugs we need pure support treatment on demand. But I think the drug war is so counterproductive that if we could just turn a switch it would be worth it. But we need to really anchor and build kind of a healthier culture and healthier people but it has to be a sort of masses rather than just individuals. Have you read blitzed by Norman Oler?

2:06:39I have not. We have a red over there right. Don't we have it over there? Is there any other room? Phenomenal book on the drug use by the Nazis. It's all about meth. They were all methed out of their fucking minds. Which is like the wrong drugs can ruin everything. You know and that whole experience of being a part of something and everyone's on amphetamines. Yeah. I mean what the fuck they were giving them out to the soldiers. That's how they got them to go through Poland in three days. It's a phenomenal book. But just like crazy when you think about how history was changed and a large part of the way it was accepted was because everybody was mapped up.

2:07:21Yeah. On the wrong. I mean imagine if Hitler was dosing out everybody with mushrooms. They would have been like hold on. Why are we in Poland? What the fuck are we doing? I'm not telling anybody. What is this? This is crazy. I gotta get out of this country. People with just a band and ship. It's just the worst drugs are the ones that are always pushed by the tyrants. And I think blitzed is a perfect example of that. The Nazi administration. The Nazi government was doing giving their soldiers, giving their people in the tanks got the most meth because they had to be at the front lines. It's a crazy book man.

2:08:02It just makes you think like what does that look like if no meth is there? Does this all get worked out way in advance? Does this never happen? Does the Holocaust never take place? What would have been like with no meth? Yeah, and it promotes aggression as well. Oh yeah. Yeah, I mean they went through Poland in three days with no sleep. Yeah, just killing everybody. And then these French soldiers are all drinking. They were given like a leader of wine every day. So they're drunk and silly. And then the methed up Nazis show up and like what the fuck? Well, you talked about the berserkers. Yeah.

2:08:39Yeah. But that's the crazy thing is that the berserkers were taking mushrooms. Right? Well, I am a data. Amonita. And the difference. Did they also take sales? I've had sometimes. Probably. I'm not sure. Yeah. I think that was a part of the Nazi law. Oh, excuse me. The Viking law as well. The Viking law had did Vikings find out with it just take because Amonita is a weird one. Right? I remember mechanizing something about that he believes that it differed not just seasonally, but he thinks the effects differed genetically and geographically. And they were different in different places. Sort of like, you know, like a bad example, but all have like if you grow certain tobaccos in Cuba, they make the best cigars because the soil is like so rich.

2:09:26And you get a cigar from, you know, it's grown somewhere in America. It's not going to taste like a cigar that's grown in Cuba because there's something going on with the difference. And I would imagine is probably something about the nutrients in certain soil that would lead to the amonita developing these properties in some places and not in others. Yeah. Amonita, Muscaria. No definitive evidence of a specific mushrooms, Vikings regularly consume the some scholars propose they may have used mushrooms for hallucinogenic purposes. Most cited examples fly our garrick, a garrick mushroom, Amonita, Muscaria, some believe may have been the Vedic Soma, a sacred drink described in ancient texts, also speculation about other hallucinogenic compounds like psilocybicubensis, hostility and mushrooms being used.

2:10:15So they might have. Yeah. As well. The amonita Muscaria is the weird one though, right? Yeah. Actually in Ukraine, they they've had some people have developed amonita and taken out some of the more toxins and in low doses, they use it for sleep. Oh, wow. Amazing. Also, I've just been in touch with some very well political connected scientists in India. And they don't think that amonita is actually Soma. What do they think so much? They don't know. They really not think it was amonita then. Because of the experiences that they've been able to sort of track the way they describe it and the way people have described it before.

2:10:54Well, there's probably a bunch of undiscovered psychedelics, right? Like from the past at least. It very well could be. Well, we don't even actually know what was in the kicking out from the elusis. We think that it might have something to do with air got and LSD like. Sort of cool about it. Actually from Netflix about the show Vikings talks about how the amonita might have not actually made them berserkers and it was something else doing it. Hmm. If anything fly, a garic would have made them particularly worthless warriors since the side effects included drowsiness, vomiting, muscle spasms, and numbness in arms and legs.

2:11:34Rather, it's more like a berserkers were getting high off. What is hand bean? Hand bean is actually it was used in the middle ages by a lot of the witches. It's very I think it's like. Important herb for Viking and Druid rituals connected to witchcraft. Whoa. Black henbeam. Yeah, interesting. Nightshade. I thought that was a poison. It can be endosis. Yeah. Interesting. So the the amonita mascara one though. I always go back to the sacred mushroom in the cross because that was what John Marco Allegro believed was the early days of Christianity. They were consuming that. Yeah, but it's isn't a strange one that you don't hear about people having like these breakthrough experiences on amonita.

2:12:21No, you don't. You don't and you saw one of those side effects was drowsiness. Right. That sort of relates to what they've done with low dose with the amonita for sleep. Yeah, make sense. It's just I've always been puzzled by that one because it does appear in so many shamanic rituals. It appears in the old depictions of Christmas and Santa Claus and you know all the Christmas used to have like little elves and the amonita. I always wonder like was the amonita different back then. You know, like what was going on like what happened. I don't know how you find that out. I mean, you can probably do some genetic studies to see how long these genes that are in amonita have persisted and yeah, I'm not sure.

2:13:07I mean, but it's pretty clear that at least from a lot of these Indian scholars that that amonita is not so, but they don't know what it is. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah, the Urgot thing is very interesting. Right. Cause Urgot has similar effects to LSD. Yeah. And so the Illusinian mysteries they I think it's only right now it's been confirmed from I think it was just one or two vessels. These pottery vessels that they found traces of Urgot. Yeah, I mean, that's unbelievable. The the again, this just illustrates how far advanced our science has become way over our spiritual and emotional development.

2:13:41You're able to look at thousands of your old vessels and get microscopic traces of what was in them crazy. Yeah. Well, at least it lets you know, okay, now it makes sense that that's how they figured out democracy. Well, the Greeks are the yeah, yeah, the home of democracy. I mean, and also like just astounding culture that emerged. And how much of it was connected to that and then the people in power were like, yeah, we're going to shut that down. We don't like this aspect of your you guys are a little too hard to control. A little too hard to propaganda eyes. You don't need the intermediaries.

2:14:22Yes. And we want the taxes. We want to tell you what. Exactly. And so I think when we this gets back to one of the earlier points you made about it, do I get frustrated? Which is to realize that this is actually thousands of years plus of the suppression of psychedelics. And also you said something earlier how quick a hundred years goes by. Yeah. So what if something takes a couple generations? That's okay. You know, I think one of the things I like to say is that if your goals are something that you can accomplish in your own lifetime, they're too small. We need to have like multi generational goals.

2:14:58I grew up outside of Chicago. And there's this Baha high temple. So the Baha religion is emerged out of Islam. But it's more of a universal religion. And this and they're suppressed a lot in the Islamic countries. But there was this temple that they built outside of Chicago. This beautiful temple. But it took three generations to build it. And when you're a little kid and thinking about it, I'm like, how could they even plan ahead? How could they even have hope that why would they even start something that they didn't even know would ever be finished. Right. But that now it's one of the most beautiful temples in the world.

2:15:35And so I think this process of elevating consciousness in humanity so we can learn how to live together and not destroy the planet is however long it happens to take. So things take longer than I thought. You know, does a great attitude. Yeah, like you have to have that attitude. But you're always so happy. Every time I meet you, you're always smiling. You're always happy. Well, you know, I'm not in jail. There you go. You're not dead. You know, crippled. Yeah. It's a lot of unhealthy. Yeah. And I think the, you know, the hope that we had that FDA would would approve. Well, they didn't. So, you know, do you just give up?

2:16:17No, you know, you just keep on trucking keep on trucking. Yeah. Well, thank you for what you do, man. One thing about the conference, please say that that it's going to be really, really fun. It's going to be if people come to it. 500 speakers. 500 speakers. Thousands, thousands, thousands of people, all sorts of ways the psychedelic community is going to be coming together. Do you have a website? Yeah, psychedelic science .org or or maps that are there's actually going to be a. Oh, look at that. If you put what does that thing spend it around a molecule? That's molecule. What have you put? Rogan in when you want to register?

2:16:57There's a 15 % discount to go to the conference. We also have this. We have 10 different stages. We have all different tracks for different kind of interests. We also have this project called music is the bridge. And so this is we have various people are coming up with the music that they would listen to during a second alike experience. Echoros. Echoros very much. Yeah. So, there's going to be concerts, music, all sorts of things connected to this conference. And it's it's also lots of opportunities for networking and for again, for me, what I'm even though maps has been focused on MDMA. What it's really about is the psychedelic renaissance.

2:17:40So I don't see the psilocybin or the I began or anything as competition. It's we want the psychedelic therapist of the future to be cross trained in all the different drugs. And then to be able to customize the treatment for each in each person. And that's what we're hoping to develop. And one more time. What are the dates and where is this? It's June 16th to the 20th. It's coming up next month. And it's in Denver. It's at the Colorado Convention Center. We have that's a big place. Best of it. Oh, yeah. Last time we did this is 2023 with 12 ,400 people. Whoa. It was astonishing. It was. Yeah. Must've been the nicest people too.

2:18:21Oh, it was so hopeful and it was magical. So I think that this would be if anybody wants to learn about the psychedelic community. This is where we gather together. This is where you think. I think go to these things. Well, we want them to come. That's the point is that we want them to come. Well, here's the other point is that we work with police officers. When you think about what job is among the most traumatizing. It's being a police. Yes. Or being a PMT or being a prison guard. Yeah. Or these were and and they're trained sort of to suppress their feelings to not talk about it. Right. And so there's so yeah, we want the feds to come.

2:19:03The more that they come, the more that they learn. We have trained police officers who are also therapists that have even got permission from their police chiefs to go through our protocol to get MDMA as part of their training. Wow. So really it's healing for all. That's why I'm going to Beirut. That's why I just came from Ukraine. We've got a project in Somali land in Africa. We want to do work in Rwanda. So I think that Lycos is going to succeed. Whether it takes six months or three and a half years or whatever, we will eventually FDA will eventually approve MD Mases that therapy for PTSD. Then they'll approve Silasib and in other things.

2:19:43And so I'm sort of going around the world and sort of high trauma low resource areas to try to globalize access. And I think that we're in a perilous time in America right now and we could use more people dealing with their fears, dealing with their anxiety with drawing the projection of the shadows. You know immigrants have actually made America stronger in a lot of ways. I mean, where did we all come from? I mean, what is the story of your family? Immigrants immigrants in the 1920s from where Italy and Ireland? Yeah. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. Well, this is a this is the real melting pot of the world.

2:20:22And I know that there's a lot of prejudice against immigrants when they first show up. But now we don't think you're not an American. Right. Exactly. Yeah. It's well, I mean, I think the real fear that people have is cartel members and people coming across the border and terrorists coming across and not having a secure border, which I think we should have a secure border. But I also think we should have path to citizenship too. Yeah. Totally. Yeah. I mean, this is a great place. And this is the reason why people are willing to walk across the river to try to get here with their children. They they they know that you can make something out of your life here.

2:20:55I just think we could do better with it with all the things that you said, all the things you said. And with a guy like you out there, spread the world, spreading the word rather. It helps the world. So I appreciate you. Yeah. You're doing God's work. Thank you. Really. And look how miraculous it was that I'm here today with you that you had the universe works like that. Incredible. Thank you. Duncan. I'm so sorry. You had a emergency. He's a poor Duncan. That sucks. He'll be he'll be back. Okay. Well, thank you very much. Rick. It was awesome. Thank you. Go to maps .org. Yes. That's it. Thank you.

2:21:28Thank you.