Shawn Ryan Show - #97 Rick Doblin - MDMA Psychedelic Assisted Therapy

Episode Date: February 19, 2024

Rick Doblin, Ph.D., is the Founder & President of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) and this episode is all about his life and work. This episode is a holistic look at the point where traditional therapy meets psychedelics and how Doblin and his team have spent the last few decades appealing to the scientific community and lawmakers across the world. Doblin gives us a fresh perspective on the mental health crisis and discusses his studies & experiments in Iceland. We cover his early professional life and what lead him to pursue the science of alternative medicines. Doblin believes that with psychedelic assisted therapy, the world could be trauma free by 2070. Are you interested in learning more about this type of therapy? Shawn received his treatment here - https://ambio.life Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://lairdsuperfood.com - USE CODE "SRS" https://helixsleep.com/srs - USE CODE "HELIXPARTNER20" https://ziprecruiter.com/srs https://hillsdale.edu/srs https://moinkbox.com/shawn https://blackbuffalo.com https://meetfabric.com/shawn https://ShawnLikesGold.com | 855-936-GOLD #goldcopartner Rick Doblin Links: MAPS - https://maps.org/about-maps/mission/ Get Involved - https://maps.org/take-action/ Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/rickdoblinphd/ Learn More - https://sprout.link/rickdoblinphd Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram | Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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or visit connexontario.ca. Please play responsibly. Originally this episode aired roughly nine months ago. Shortly after it aired just a couple of hours, I had the episode pulled because of some values that didn't align with my own. And that was selfish of me, and I shouldn't have done that.

Let me explain why. Last week, some new developments came from psychedelic therapy, some new light. And it happened to be one of my best friends. And this individual has been blown up in Afghanistan, one of the worst car bombs that I've actually seen somebody survive. And then later on in life, he was shot in the head. Most of you have probably seen this episode, he's been on the show before. I'm not going to mention any names, not yet. But after he was shot in the head,

he survived that, by the way, obviously. He couldn't go anywhere without a cane He couldn't go anywhere without a cane because he is dizzy all the time. He can't go out into sunlight without sunglasses because light sensitivity is so bad after his traumatic brain injury. He spends about half of his week in bed because he's unable to get out because the traumatic brain injury is so bad. And I've been trying to talk him into getting some type of psychedelic therapy for years. And he finally did it. And he went to Trevor Miller

from Ambiolife Sciences. I've talked about it several times on the show. Guys doing amazing work. Well, my best friend went down there for one week, did an Ibogaine treatment and a 5MEO DMT treatment. And when he left, he left his cane there because he said he no longer needs it. The dizziness, vertigo is completely gone. He was able to go outside without sunglasses

because the light sensitivity is gone. And as of right now, his brain seems to be damn near healed. And when he told me that, I actually burst out into tears because I was so happy for him. And so the point I'm getting at is this stuff is helping people. And I think there is a lot of people that don't want this stuff to see the light of day. And it was wrong of me to pull this episode because it could have helped people. And it's going to help people.

If you're struggling with things that this therapy could help, I suggest you look into it because it is helping thousands of people get the life that they once had back. thousands of people get the life that they once had back. And so I wanna personally say, Rick Doblin, I apologize for pulling this episode that was selfish of me,

and you're doing great things in the world, and I hope you continue to do so. And with that being said ladies and gentlemen without further ado please welcome one of the leading pioneers in the psychedelic Mr. Rick Doblin to the Sean Ryan show. Rick Doblin. Hello, Sean. Welcome to the Sean Ryan show. Yes, I'm so glad you like to do these things in person too, because it is much better that way. I won't do it any other way. I love it in person.

I've got to meet everybody. And we'll find out why we do it in person here in a minute. But just a brief introduction. Rick Doblin, PhD, just going to go through some of your, some of the fantastic stuff you've done throughout the years. So you're the founder and executive director of Multidisciplinary Action Association for Psychedelic Studies maps, which you found it in 1986. You received your doctorate in public policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where you wrote your dissertation on the regulation of medical uses of psychedelics and marijuana.

Your master's thesis was on a survey of oncologists about smoked marijuana versus oral THC pill in nausea control for cancer patients. You also conducted a 34 year follow-up study with Timothy Leary's Concord Prison Experiment. You studied with Dr.... tell me if I butcher this. Stanislav Graf. You did it. That's great. He's a Czech psychiatrist who actually, when the Russians moved into Czechoslovakia in 68, he fled and then he became in charge of psychedelic research at Johns Hopkins. Interesting. Interesting. And we're among the first to be certified as a holotropic breathwork practitioner. Yeah. So it's astonishing that just by hyperventilating,

you can get into states of mind that are similar to psychedelics. And so when psychedelics were criminalized in the controlled substances act in 1970, and then we wiped out research, Stan tried to think about how can he go forward when all the tools that he had were illegal and then he studied breathing and he realized

that if you do this hyperventilation in a certain kind of a way, in an emotionally evocative way, it feels kind of like you're tripping and things come up from the surface. And the beauty of it is what it real, what it indicates is that this materials that happen when we take Ibogaine or take LSD and the things that come

to our mind, they don't come from the drug, they come from us, and that you can do the same thing with breathing, that it alters your chemistry, it alters the way our brain is working, but these are endogenous to us. I think the breath work is a tool that really demonstrates that. It's also difficult in the sense that you have to hyperventilate in order to weaken your defenses. And then when difficult material comes up, often you have to keep breathing.

So it's easier in a way to just take a drug that does it. Then you don't have to think about triggering yourself. Now you just need to open up to what's coming. But I think Stan was really the through line when psychedelics were criminalized up until sort of the beginnings of the psychedelic renaissance several decades later when the FDA started permitting psychedelic research. So the breathwork attracted most of the people that were interested in psychedelics.

This was another tool and many of the early psychedelic researchers had been trained by Stan, including myself. Really? Do you do that a lot, the breath work? No, I'd rather take a drug. Okay. Is it a lot of breath holds? No, no, it's just hyperventilation. So the beautiful thing about what Stan has done with his wife, Christina, at the time they developed it, now he's married to a prudhida. But what he realized is that there's all sorts of breathing techniques. And you could, you know, say breathe a certain number of times in this nostril, that nostril, breathe out of your nose,

breathe into your nose, all these different ways. But the basic aspect of whole tropic breath work is you just breathe faster and deeper and find your own rhythm in that way. That's all people need. So he didn't complicate it with things. It was just he took it down to the essence. And if you just breathe faster and deeper, it changes the chemistry in your brain and it makes it so that you're more open to emotions and memories.

That is fascinating. Yeah. A lot of times when people are having a panic reaction, they're hyperventilating. And he said the classic approach in psychiatry or in psychiatric emergency rooms is when people are hyperventilating, is you try to stop it.

You try to help them calm down in a way. But the approach that Stan took is, let it emerge even bigger. You know, that things are coming to the surface. You're hyperventilating because you're dealing with these emotions. They're getting stronger. And instead of trying to control symptoms, what Stan said, if you let it go, you will get to the root causes,

and you'll be able to resolve some of the core issues instead of just masking it with either SSRIs or other psychiatric medicines. So that was his big insight is that this hyperventilation is a sign of somebody having a panic reaction, but the solution is not to suppress it, but to let it fully flower. And then Stead has this beautiful expression, which is the full expression of an emotion is the funeral pyre of that emotion.

Okay. And what he means by that is that if you can, like even if a lot of times, I don't know if this happened to you during your IV-ain trip, but sometimes you feel like it's going to last forever and it'll never end and you're stuck. So I had moments like that in my IVA trip. And so what Santa's saying is letting yourself feel stuck rather than rushing to run away from being stuck is the way to get unstuck. If you surrender to being stuck, everything's in motion. And the stars, everything's in motion.

And if you fully open up to the moment, then it will change. And the resistance is what keeps things there. So a lot of times what PTSD is for people is that there's difficult memories, there's difficult emotions, and they feel overwhelming, but you never can get away from them. And so ironically in a way, the solution is to let it grow bigger and fully accept it and then it will change. So this idea that the full experience of an emotion is the funeral pyre of that emotion,

it's part of the core philosophy of how we do psychedelic psychotherapy, is to open up to things. That is fascinating. That's, I would love to talk about that later too. Yeah, yeah. Your professional goal is to help develop legal context for the beneficial uses of psychedelics in marijuana,

primarily as prescription medicines, but also for personal growth for otherwise healthy people, and eventually to become a legally licensed psychedelic therapist. Yes. So that was my goal when I was 18 years old. Now I'm 69, was to become a psychedelic therapist. And so I just am so lucky that this idea that I had when I was 18 still makes sense now.

And the goals there, they point to the the important strategy that we have at maps Which is there's a two-fold parallel strategy one is to medicalize psychedelics for PTSD for depression for anxiety for substance abuse for other things But the other is to change drug policy and to make these legally available to people on their own And if they want to do it in a religious context, that's fine if they want to do it in a therapeutic context That's fine if they want to do it in a religious context, that's fine. If they want to do it in a therapeutic context, that's fine. If they want to do it at a party, that's okay. It's how they want it.

So it's basically a somewhat of a libertarian approach to this idea that the government shouldn't be intruding in our own consciousness and how we adjust our consciousness. They should be making penalties, you could say, for misbehaving, but to being in different states of awareness that should be our human right. And so it also speaks to our long-term goal. So our long-term goal, which may be very long-term, is a mass mental health and a spiritualized humanity where we understand our place in the universe and we're not destroying the is a mass mental health and a spiritualized humanity

where we understand our place in the universe and we're not destroying the environment and killing each other. And so that requires this two prong strategy that it's not just making psychedelics into medicines for people that have clinical diagnoses. It's also in a way preventative medicine, you could say, for healthy people

to explore their own vision quest when you're young or when you're contemplating death or at any point in the lifespan just for personal growth or joy or celebration. So I like to reframe recreational drugs as celebratory drugs. Very cool. We have a lot to talk about. We do. But before we dive in, everybody that comes on the show gets a gift. Oh, oh, thank you.

So, go ahead, open it up. Oh, oh, gummy bears. Those are vigilance elite gummy bears made right here in the USA. Unfortunately, there is no psychedelic effects on those. I was just looking at the ingredients. But we're looking for that. We're looking at that. Is there cannabinoids?

No, it's just a good snack you can have on the way home. Oh, thank you. That's it. Okay, great. But so we connected through Trevor Miller, who gave me my first Iguagane experience. Thank you, Trevor, for linking us together. I've been super excited about this.

And the stuff that Trevor's doing down there, it has changed a lot of lives, mine included. I have not drank in over a year now. Well, I see all these bottles. I know I get a lot of flak for that. But, because I am, I haven't drank in a year, but I don't know what else to put there. So we'll figure something out eventually.

But yeah, it helped me be in the moment. I haven't had any caffeine in a year, over a year. I quit smoking marijuana for right around four months and then I needed it to sleep again. Funny, because I use marijuana to not sleep. Really? Yeah, because I get the highest THC sativa, and late at night I like to work with it.

It makes me more creative. And so, when I'm tired, I smoke about to wake up. Really? To do work, yeah. You're a night owl. I am a night owl, yeah. What are you working on at late at night? Well, last night actually I was up to like 2.30. Oh. So, yeah, if I go to, I feel lame

if I go to bed before midnight. Man, I'll yam in bed every night at like 8.30, 9 o'clock. But I got an 18 month old. Yeah. He's up at four, but. Yeah, I just have an unending stream of emails and work to do and, you know, at the Maps Public Benefit Corp,

we now have about 130 people. That's our pharmaceutical arm at MAPS, which is the nonprofit that currently owns the Public Benefit Corp. We have about 32 people or so. And we're culminating decades and decades of work. So there's so much to do. And late at night is probably my favorite

time because everything's quiet and I can think, you know, I'm not responding to phones and then I can sort of pick what's the most important stuff to do. Yeah. Well, I got a lot I want to cover. We got a short amount of time and some of the stuff I want to cover, I definitely want to cover your MDMA studies in Iceland. Well, that's just starting. We're starting to start it in Iceland. It hasn't started yet. Yeah.

I want to dive into that, and then we'll get into the mental health crisis and legalize and all this stuff. OK, OK, great. But let's start. We were kind of brought up Trevor. And everything that my journey down there But let's start we're kind of kind of brought up Trevor and Yeah everything he everything that my journey down there has done for me and and

for anybody listening his websites in the description, but I Began yes, so you've done I began I've done I've again. Yes. I'd love to hear a little about your experience. Okay, so I'd love to hear a little about your experience. Okay, so my one experience with Ibogaine, and it was one of the most important experiences of my whole life, but it wasn't one that I thought, oh, I'm gonna rush to do that again. It was kind of difficult.

It was very difficult. And it was in 1985, so it's a long time ago. And what was happening, maps started in 1986. And so 1984 is when I started a non-profit before maps and that was in anticipation of the Drug Enforcement Administration trying to criminalize MDMA. So I learned about MDMA in 1982 when it was still legal and it was a drug called Adam as a therapy drug but it was just becoming ecstasy, so that it was clear that during Nancy Reagan, just say no, and Ronald Reagan, that they

were going to come after it. But we had this advantage in the sense that the DEA knew about ecstasy, but they didn't know about the therapeutic use of MDMA. That had been done quiet in homes. It wasn't public. The MDMA had been used more public settings and it was starting to be sold in bars and for dances and things like that. So a bunch of advocates for psychedelics, and there weren't that many back then, and Albert Hoffman who invented LSD and synthesized psilocybin, Sasha Shulgin who, sort of, the

godfather of MDMA and all sorts of Stan Groff and others. We gathered at Esalen, which is in Big Sur, California, Dick Price, who was one of the co-founders of Esalen. So we planned how would we defend the therapeutic use of MDMA once the DEA would come to criminalize it. All right, so in 1984, they moved to try to criminalize it, and they had 30 day public comment period. And on basically the 30th day around, I went into DEA headquarters with this petition signed by Harvard psychiatrists, all sorts of people, and

we had pro bono legal representation by a big DC law firm, and we were able to get this hearing. And what that meant is that we have a series of hearings, and we could bring witnesses. And so there's a man called the secret chief. He's no longer alive, but his name was Leo Zeph. And so he was the one that really pioneered the medical use of MDMA and trained hundreds of therapists.

And so he was part of this group as well. And he came to me and he said, you're going to be coming up to try to be a spokesperson. You're going to be helping to represent us in DC. You're going to be going to these hearings with the DEA. And I want to give you an Ibogaine experience if you want it with the purpose is to sort of own your own shadow to because if I go into these sort of struggles with the DEA and I'm all good and I'm demonizing them and they're all bad, you know, I'm not going to be able to build bridges and I'm not going to be able to really understand where they're coming from.

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Harmaline, which is one of the drugs in Iowa. Harmaline. Harmaline. I've not heard of that one yet. Yeah, it's not as psychedelic by itself. It is somewhat. But it's, so I had that experience. It was beautiful. But then he said, let's try the Ibogaine,

which there's an incredible book called The Secret Chief Revealed about Leo Zeph that's available on the maps website. And it's his story about all the different drugs and how he uses them. And he helped really popularize Ibogaine also in the United States. And so Ibogaine, I took it in the plant form and it takes a while to have an effect. So he said, I'm going to give you LSD at the same time that I'm going to give you this Ibogaine. Oh man. And it was 350 micrograms of LSD, which is a pretty hefty dose of LSD.

And we were planning to have a therapy session that would be like 12 hours long or more, something like that. And so we started in the morning, and I had done a whole lot of LSD in my life before then, but of course I'd never done an IPEGain. And so I could feel the LSD dissolving my sense of self and opening up to all these incredible energies and visualizations. It was very challenging but also very ethereal in a way. LSD is a lot in your mind.

Silicite is more in your body but it also has a lot of visuals but LSD is even more abstract in that sense. It's interesting. Yeah. I think that's why people would have more potentially more kind of panic reactions to LSD than to psilocybin in some ways because you're it's not as grounded as the psilocybin, but it's also incredible. But I could feel that I was doing well. The way I described it is that you're going in there, the peak

is about three hours or so from the LSD. and I was able to pretty much be open to that. But then I felt this gradual sort of other thing coming up, which was the Ibogaine. You could differentiate the disparity. I could, and I think the, because when I sort of peaked with the LSD and it was starting to diminish in a way, the Ibogaine was building and building and building.

And what I ended up doing is feeling like, you know, so much as it's taking here and this is gonna try to help me argue with the DEA to keep MDMA legal as a therapy and I have to do the very best that I can. And so I got into kind of a familiar negative spiral that I've had before with a bunch of my early LSD trips where I wasn't capable.

I was too scared of letting go. I mean, I was holding on, you know, this idea of your ego dissolution and opening up to whatever is there. It takes a lot of trust and a lot of strength and a lot of support from the outside, if you can manage that. I used to do that just by myself

and I didn't have therapy support or anything like that. So this was this sense that I was this rumbling in my kind of gutter all sense. But then it was that if I could just let go fully, if I didn't have fear, if I could just open up that I might get all these important insights and I might make these important changes and then I would be more effective,

but I was holding myself back. And I felt like, oh, then it turned into this sort of shame spiral, like, you know, this is incredible, beautiful opportunity, and all you need to do is let go and you can't do it. And then I would just, I would get sick about myself, and then I would throw up. And then that would give me a little bit of peace

for a little bit more time. And then this swirl would start of this, again, the sense that I wasn't good enough, that I should be more capable in this ways, and everything so much depended on me to do that, and I was wanting myself to do more, and I just couldn't. And so it ended up, the imagery that I had was that I was Jewish, and so this imagery was that I was being crucified on the cross of self-perfectionism.

Oh wow. That I couldn't accept the fact in a way that I was human. I had to be perfect. I had to be this kind of better than I was, you know, and that this self-perfectionism was unreal. Like, I wasn't acknowledging my humanity, but also it was connected to self-hatred. The self-critical part was connected to self-hatred. And I would see that. And it just went on and on and on. And I just kept, by the time I had nothing left to throw up, but I was still like throwing up.

And it was like 10, 12 hours of that. And I just couldn't get out of it. It's just this spiral. And it was clearly I began. By this point, the LSD had pretty much gone. And we'd started in the morning. And somehow, I had this other phrase that I told myself was, near the evening the stars came out and something switched in me. And I called it transcendence through exhaustion. It wasn't that I figured something out, it wasn't that I made a intellectual or emotional breakthrough or a spiritual breakthrough, I just so exhausted myself

by this constant struggle that I just let go. I couldn't do it anymore. And I had this most beautiful night, like probably the most in the now moment, and watching the stars. And this is where I pieced a bunch of things together, which is that I need this self-critical part, that that's the urge towards quality, that's the vehicle towards quality. You need to be constantly checking yourself on how you could do better, but if

I could separate out the self-criticism from the self-hatred, then I could even do better in my life because I would have an easier access to all the self-critical part and it wouldn't be so painful because it wasn't linked to the self-hatred. How many guys out there are worried about brain health? You know, all we hear about is fitness. Everybody's getting ready for a bikini season because spring's right around the corner. I'm personally more concerned about my brain.

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I'm going to die. Partially was that I'm not immortal. So it was partially the fear of death, accepting death, accepting that my time is limited, accepting that I'm human. And then it was this blissful night of just acceptance. But somehow I told myself that by the morning light that the nausea would be back, that I would be back, because I still felt I just hadn't earned it. I hadn't thought my way't earned it. I hadn't

thought my way out of it. I just exhausted myself. And so sure enough, the sun comes up and all of a sudden I'm completely nauseous and I can't even sit up. And there was supposed to be a friend to come. Sorry, Larry. No worries. I like the, okay. Yeah, so I was supposed to have a friend come and pick me up, but I couldn't even sit up. So the people that were taking care of me told them not to even come. And I spent the whole next day just lying, like in a fetal position.

Keesley, I would go to the bathroom, they would give me a banana or something to eat. But I hardly ate anything. And it was this very disturbing, dizzy, it was horrible for a whole other day. And so then on day three, finally my friend came to pick me up. This was at somebody else's house. And when I was leaving, I finally could stand up. And I had this unusual series of experiences.

As we're driving, I'd never been there before. But I was like, I think I know what's around the corner. And I would describe it, and a couple of times, I'd be right. Really? But I had come that way to get there. OK. So it wasn't that I was too near. But I think what it had done is it had cleaned out

a bunch of space in my brain, this constant self-criticism, this constant self-hager, this battle in my brain, it kind of quieted that. And I think that I had more mental attention to remember all these peripheral things that had happened as I was driving to this place, that I wasn't really paying attention to it, but somehow it had registered, and now I had more space in my brain and I could somehow think, oh, that's a memory, I just sort of caught that out of

the corner of my eye, but that might be what's next. And so ever since then, I've had a much easier relationship with this self-critical part. And when I look back and I think, what are the things that really contributed to the success of MAPS, that right now we have two successful Phase 3 studies with MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD. It's the fact that we've made millions of mistakes. We're doing stuff that I've never done before

and nobody's ever done before. We're constantly making mistakes, but we're able to learn from them. One of the things that I'm very proud of is that in our protocols, our various experiments that we did, particularly in what's called phase two, which are the studies that you do to figure out what's your treatment, what's your dose,

who's your patients, who does it work for, who doesn't work for it, in order to prepare for phase three, which is the biggest, that's where the large scale multi-site double-line placebo-controlled studies to prove safety and efficacy, to try to get FDA approval. But in phase two, you're learning, and we would constantly be amending our protocols with something that we learned and try something new and try to keep improving patient outcomes.

And so I do think that that Ibogaine experience, that one Ibogaine experience, which I do think about more as Ibogaine than LSD, because the Ibogaine is what really lingered and I think changed it fundamentally, that ability to separate self-hatred from self-criticism really I think has contributed to where we are today, because it's not as painful to think, oh, I fucked up here.

I like to joke that, but I mean it, that I'm just a fuck up who just keeps trying, you know, that persistence. And I'm comfortable making decisions. I've learned too that leading an organization that a lot of times it's more important that you make a decision than it be the right decision. You just have to, you don't know the right decision.

You just make a decision and then you learn once you've made the decision. And if it's a wrong one, then you change course. But, so I attribute so much to that Ibogaine experience. And then we ended up, this idea of owning my own shadow, I was able to make a good relationship with some of the people from the DEA. And to just show you how amazing that was, there was one person from the DEA, Gene Haslip, at the headquarters that was the one behind criminalizing MDMA. But there was a fellow Frank Sapienza that was the deputy and he went to all these hearings.

And he had said to Newsweek in early 1985 that we took them totally by surprise, that the DEA only knew about ecstasy, they didn't know about the therapeutic use. So when I showed up, they were taken totally by surprise. So in my discussions with him and my meetings with him, I knew that he wasn't really trying to crush the therapy, he was trying to crush the recreational use. We were just collateral damage, but at least we could kind of feel like, I could tell him stories about therapy and why it's important.

And we eventually won the lawsuit against the DEA. You did. We did, but we lost that battle because the DEA didn't have to take the recommendations of the judge. It was called an administrative law judge hearing, and the administrative law judges make recommendations. They don't compel. So when the DEA rejected the recommendation of the judge, they have to give a rationale. And so we were able to then sue

them in the appeals courts where the appeals courts can tell them what to do. And we won twice again. But they kept saying to the DEA, you did it wrong, your logic is flawed, think about it again. And so they did it twice and both times we won again. And finally on the third time the DEA figured out how to make the courts happy. All right. So what happened just about six months ago or so is there's a woman, Rachel Newer, who's done some articles about psychedelics for the New York Times She's writing a book on MDMA and she wanted to interview some of the early people that from the DEA that criminalized MDMA And I said all right. I'll see if I can find them

So Jean Haslip is no longer alive, but I said maybe I can find Frank's a sapienza And so as it turned out I found him on LinkedIn. He's no longer with the DEA, but he consults with pharma companies to help them reschedule drugs if they get FDA approval. Good to believe it. I decided to write him a letter. We need help. We have consultants that we're working, penny and associates, that they're experts in drug abuse liability

and they advise FDA and DEA on where the schedules, how much control should be about the drugs. So I wrote him this message on the LinkedIn and I said, we haven't talked in 35 years. And now we're all this way, we've got two successful phase three studies. Well, we have one successful phase three study, we're doing the second one at the time I contacted him. And I said, we're going to need some help if the second study works out to reschedule. Would you work with our team? And also this woman, Rachel, wants to interview you for her book. So the very next day, Frank wrote me back.

And he said, I remember you. I remember you really well. You know, I remember this and yes, I will be willing to help you in this effort to reschedule drugs. Wow. And I attribute that to my Ibogaine experience. Really? Yeah, because this idea of, I could see Frank not as the evil DEA trying to crush this beautiful therapy MDMA. I could see him, okay, he had a job,

he thinks that people are hurting themselves with drugs, with party drugs, and he's trying to do that, but I think this idea of owning my own shadow and being able to approach people where it's not I'm all good and they're all bad, it made it so I had a better relationship with Frank, and I do attribute that a lot to the Ibogaine experience.

That is fascinating. Just how it all came full circle. Yeah. And you talk about the self-criticism and self-hatred and that is actually something that I got a lot out of the Ibogaine as well. Cause I'm a perfectionist. I'm extremely self-critical.

And when it came to this, this exact, you know, my podcast, this show, it just, as soon as I got done with that, this show just exploded. And it was, I was so, so particular about every little thing, which guest is coming on, my research, I used to spend a week researching each guest. And I can only crank one of these out a month because I was put so much time and effort into it.

And then after the Ibogaine it was similar. It was just do it. Just do what you want to do. Quit worrying about what everybody else thinks. Quit being so critical of yourself and just get in there and do what you love doing. Can you say though how the Ibogaine helped you to do that? Well, I didn't get like a lot of visuals in the Ibogaine helped you to do that? Well, I didn't get a lot of visuals in the Ibogaine.

I had a lot of intuitive thoughts during my journey, but I don't know exactly how it happened. I kept seeing new beginnings. Like the first thing I saw down there was, was we started with these maracas and we were in front of a mirror, was very ceremonial, which I really appreciate. And a lot of the guys that I went down with,

they laid down first before they saw anything. And I was, I wasn't doing, I was like, I'm gonna see something in this mirror. I came down here to dig deep and uncover some stuff. And first thing that happened is my head started splitting open like a, almost like a tulip or a flower or something. It's split in two.

Wow. And then a new head came up, like mushroomed out of my old head. And I had talked to a therapist afterwards who kind of guided me before and helped me afterwards. And me and her kind of dug into a lot of this stuff and we think that means new beginnings. And without going too deep, I was able to put a lot of past traumas away and deal with

it in the moment like that and And it just really helped me. And then, could you say just more about like putting past traumas away? I mean, that's so hard. I mean, people stuck sometimes for decades. We actually had someone in our studies who had PTSD from Vietnam. Wow.

And they still are able to get better. So, but they, until that they couldn't put it away. So, how did that happen? I wish I could tell you, I don't know. I can tell you, I've, it was like, it was like going through thousands of memories. And what I saw, one of my, the visual that sticks out the most

is it was almost like these TV screens, just rows of TV screens. And they were just going like that and disappearing over the horizon. Everything was black and all I could see was two rows of TV screens just going almost like the credits in Star Trek. You know, they just disappear.

And I could see all these different memories from childhood, from war, from Iraq, from Afghanistan, from my time at the agency, the SEAL teams, things with my parents, recent memories with my wife and my son on our property. And there didn't seem to be any, they weren't organized in any certain way. It was just, it was just, it was just TV screens.

Just moving past. And anytime I could see him through my peripheral, but if I tried to dive in and re-experience something like, oh, I remember that, that was was when we got blown up in Iraq. Or I remember that. That was an argument I had with my dad when I was, there was memories of me like five years old coming up. But nothing, like I said, it seemed completely random.

And if I would try to dive in and re-experience something, everything would disappear. And then they would come back. And so I guess I maybe, I trained myself to not try to control the situation and dive in and re-experience these different memories. Some of them good, some of them bad, some of them because I missed somebody who's not here anymore and all kinds of stuff.

If I didn't try to re-experience them, then it would just keep going and keep going. And so I think what that was maybe was all of my, I think it was my neural pathways, open them back up and everything kind of reconnecting. Does that sound... Well I think that there is physiological correlates of what's going on psychologically and that I regain... There's an interesting woman who's a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins, Gould Dolan. She's done studies with MDMA in mice and shows that it releases oxytocin and that produces

new neural pathways. She talks about this critical periods where your brain is more fluid and you can create new connections from the synapses and route things in different ways. And what she's found, and this is I think explains a lot about the power of Ibogaine, is that the longer the drug experience lasts, the longer this period afterwards that your brain is able to make new patterns and new connections. So it's interesting about 5MEO, which is so short.

But it's, and I'd like to get to that too, but it's, but you know, MDMA lasts about four or five hours, six hours, but in therapy we give half, we give an initial dose and then two hours later we give half the initial dose precisely to keep it longer. Okay. LSD lasts longer than psilocybin. But Ibogaine was the one that lasts the longest in a way and that means that your brain is

open for the integration work afterwards to repattern your brain. So I think some of it is happening while you're under the influence of Ibogaine. That's when it's most intense. But then this integration work, to solidify it afterwards, you have more period of time after Ibogaine. So I think that this idea of these new neural pathways is a really probably a very physiologically accurate way to think about it. You're processing information in a different way. It's not so focused on your kind of normal way of processing. And I would also imagine, now I don't know if this feels true, but there's a way where you, when all these memories are coming by,

like in the different TV sets, that you're somehow, you're aware of all of them, you know, you're aware of what it is, you've kind of grabbed, I mean, I guess I go back, Grok, which is from, you know, just, this concept that you just understand it in an instant in a way. Yeah, yes.

And then when you look at it, it kind of slows an instant in a way. Yeah, yes. And then when you look at it, it kind of slows it down in a way. So I think when you have all of these memories that are coming up, they are sort of being unloaded from your storage. And you're able to also accept them and without the resistance. So maybe that, so I'm curious,

what was happening was your emotional tone kind of the same, this kind of, or was it changing with each different memory or? No, it wasn't, no, it wasn't, my emotions weren't really changing. I was, if I remember correctly, it was pretty steady. And I didn't have, I didn't have a lot of emotion seeing what was passing, because let's say it was something good that was passing,

and then something bad, and then something good, and there was no pattern or anything, but they were moving maybe about this pace. And so as soon as this is here, there's a new memory popping up. So you didn't really have, maybe there was only a couple seconds. And it was, oh, I remember that.

And by the time that processes, the next two screens are up. And so like I kind of mentioned, it was like experiencing hundreds, maybe a thousand memories all at once. You know, and that wasn't the entire duration either. There was other things that happened that I still haven't really put together.

But the end result was all of the stuff that I had mentioned, no drinking. I lost 11 pounds. My eye color got lighter. Yeah, it was my wife noticed it right away. She said the whites of my eyes are whiter now. She's come to find out. I think Trevor told me that Ibogaine is a heavy metal detox as well. And so I just have nothing but good things to say about it.

I think everybody needs to be doing this stuff, to be honest with you. And then my 5MEO. Wait, before we get to that, so how long was this experience with Ibogaine? I mean, I described being incapacitated basically the second day. How did that? Same, same. I did, I think the, I went down there with, there were three of us, Marcus Capone, which you know was with me. And, and then a civilian, I won't say his name because I don't know if he wants it out there, but I was the last one out of the room. I was in there for over but I was the last one out of the room. I was in there for over 12 hours.

I think I was in there for 14 hours. Wow. And then couldn't get to my room, had to have somebody help me, two people help me down the stairs, get to my room and I was out the entire day. Still having some visuals, believe it or not. And then at the very end of the day,

actually in the evening I got up and for the first time that I can remember, I was able to sit with myself and complete peace and not feel anxiety and not feel like I should be doing something and it felt amazing. But in the last visual I saw was it was like a 1980s video game character walked out into the front of my head and just waved goodbye and then walked right back out where it came from and I was like, interesting.

And then the next day we did the five. And so that's another thing. I don't know how much benefit came from each thing because it was a collective experience, but the Five MEO DMT, I still say this to this day, is the most profound experience of my life. And it was the most anxiety, the most fear I have ever felt out of 14 years being in combat zones. Wow, so what was the, because I would years being in combat zones.

Wow, so what was the, because I would imagine being in combat zones, you're scared of dying. And so what was more frightening than that? I was dying. So it was definitely a death experience. And that fear and anxiety lasted for maybe 30 seconds. You know, I know it wasn't long. And then I had a breakthrough and I felt like I was dead and everything

made perfect sense. I could feel all of the interconnectivity of energy. Yeah. For the first time in my life, I felt that. I felt, and once again, I didn't do the blindfold. I could see everything. So I could see the ocean. I could see the islands, the clouds, the trees,

the grass, the bugs, and I could just feel, and it was an intuitive feeling. I could just, I could see the energy flowing through every, all of us, everything. And I felt the presence of friends of mine that I lost. It was just, I knew everything was gonna be okay. Didn't matter what happened here. It doesn't matter what happens here.

Everything that happens is supposed to happen. And it was like letting go of all control and surrendering. And it was like I was rewarded for surrendering. Does that make sense to you? Yeah, yeah, because that's what I was trying to say. It's the resistance that is, so we talk about what's the difference between a bad trip, people talk about bad trips.

What's the difference between a bad trip and a difficult trip? The bad trip is you're just resisting it the whole time. The difficult is you're open to it and you may have things that you have to deal with that are difficult, take some struggle, but I think that the openness to it is really what gives the gifts and the resistance is what keeps it at bay.

And so it sounds like you were just very open to it and that surrendering is then rewarded because you're open to it. But I'm also curious, when you say you were dying, and that surrendering is then rewarded because you're open to it. But I'm also curious, when you say you were dying, I'm curious in what sense did you mean you were dying? My brain was telling me, you're dying. I mean, it was, it was, you know, Rick,

I felt like every ounce of pain and suffering and anxiety and anger and any negative emotion, any negative anything was, I swear, I could feel this like going through my veins and it felt like it was all coming out of my fingertips and my toes, and it was just getting sucked out of me. And then right before I made my breakthrough, I had, once again, it wasn't a visual,

it was like an intuitive feeling, but I felt like there was all this black tar over my heart, and I could all this black tar over my heart. And I could feel this black tar melting off of my heart. And when the laughs drop was off, it was like a pure soul or a pure heart. And it was, I opened my eyes at that point and that's, I saw, I remember seeing some birds fly over and I just,

I knew that this is, everything is beautiful. And, and you know, the last piece of fear I had, I had a problem, the last thing I was having a problem letting go of was my wife and my newborn son who was only about six months old at the time. But after I hit the breakthrough, I knew it was okay to let go. It was the most freeing experience of my entire life.

What was your experience? Wow, well, I'll say what you said, but let me say this. Stan Groff has talked, as my mentor and leading LSD expert in the world, but he's talked about how this idea of the dissolution of the ego in a way that a lot of people do feel that

as if they're physically dying, because we are who we think we are. And as that is kind of falling apart, we often interpret it as we're dying. And so Stan Dogg, he first, I think it was 1955 or so, was his first LSD trip. They were doing it early on in the Czech Republic. And the way that he, he was a psychiatrist,

and the way that he and his psychiatric team, they would work with people with LSD a few times, meaning that they would have patients that they would give LSD to, and then they would sit with them and support them. And then later after they'd done it a few times, they would have their own LSD trip to help them do that better. But he saw several people that came up to this point where they felt like they were physically dying. The sense of their own identity was being dissolved, by the way, by the way, LSD works in the brain. And so he saw that several times, that they weren't really dying. He would reassure them, it's symbolic, it's

not actual. But when it came time for his first LSD experience, he described that he came up to that place and he decided that he was different than everybody else because he really was dying and That it's because he had this illness when he was young and somehow that had changed his chemistry This is a story he told himself somehow that had changed his chemistry and now he was allergic or whatever And he was really dying even though these other people weren't That it's that strong that you interpret this loss of your sense of self as dying. Interesting.

And you're being born into something bigger if you can let go. Yeah. But if you resist, you're... Do people get caught in that? Oh my God, yeah. That's a lot of my early trips were all about, I couldn't let go.

Even my abigain was I can't let go. I can't trust or I don't have the strength or it takes a lot to let go, even my Ibogaine was, I can't let go. I can't trust or I don't have the strength or it takes a lot to let go. The 5mio is great in that regard because it's so overwhelming. You can't resist. It's just so overwhelming. So my 5mio experience was, and again, I've only done it once and I've been talking to a bunch of people now who are using lower doses of 5MEO in vape pens and combining and sort of gradually working up to this kind of dissolution. They can adjust their doses in different ways and Stan actually and and Brigitte, as I've said that this idea of taking MDMA

and then like an hour later or so starting to experiment with the vape pens, Stan actually described that as the future of psychiatry because the MDMA gives a sense of safety and security and then you can have less of that fear and anxiety as you're losing your sense of self. And you can sort of blend into the universe in a more, I've not tried this yet,

but I'm hearing more and more people that are doing that or more and more people that are starting to experiment with 5MEO in these vape pens at different doses. So what my experience was, was before all these vape pens, and it was just smoke out of pipe and you couldn't really adjust your dose and you just try to get in as much as you can. And so what I also attribute a lot of the success of maps to this 5MEO experience because what it gave me was I felt like I was just blasted into the

universe and that I was kind of like in the this like the sense of how the big bang that there's this ability in any second to create something new you know we think about space as empty but there's a way that space is sort of a substrate for sort of things that can happen. You know, so I felt like it was almost like into the center of the sun or something like that. I just felt that in any moment, the power of creation of something out of nothing, that that's accessible in any moment. And that often when I feel trapped or I feel stuck or there's something that the DEA is doing or the FDA is doing and it looks like there's no way out, you know, or I'm blocked in this way, that 5MEO experience has left me with the sense that I can create something

new in any moment. I can create new facts or I can bring something new or I can reach out to somebody the sense that you're never really trapped. There's always this ability to create the new. I felt like I went back to the Big Bang or the moment of creation or just this incredible outflow of energy. Wow. And that's what's remained with me from that 5MEO is that, even as we solidify into our patterns and our habits, that there's always hope. There's always a way for the new. There's always also something dying.

There's always something dying, but there's also always something potentially new. And so when we did with the 5MEO2, we had about 20 of us and most were therapists or psychiatrists and stuff, and you often lose control of your body, and so we would have spotters as people roll around, and because they're not aware of, you're just completely out of your normal sense of self, and it's incredibly fast, and it was very very inspirational and I think at some point maybe in the not too distant future I want to start experimenting with these vape

pens but it's all of these experiences can be pretty shattering in different ways and they take time to put yourself back together but But I was just an experience, I won't say exactly where, but it was a group of people after MDMA, we're doing MDMA, I was going on the contact high, so I wasn't, but, and then this woman did 5MEO. You've heard the buzz about ketone supplements and how they can boost your workouts

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Again, that's ZipRecruiter.com slash SRS. ZipRecruiter, the smartest way to hire. You know, after several hours of having experienced MDMA, and she'd done it before, And it was just awestruck. I mean, she was speaking in tongues. She was just like completely overtaken by all this energy. Wow. And it was just for 10 minutes or something,

speaking in tongues. We felt like it was something sacred. It was something extraordinary. She was so open to all these energies. And she had kind of a similar, somewhat similar to what you described as, that she felt like it's all going to be okay. And she can see that things are going to take the time that they're going to take. But she came out of it with a lot of hope, like we will be able to accomplish these

things, that there will be this kind of spiritualized humanity and mass mental health. But it, this kind of spiritualized humanity and mass mental health. But it was this experience of her just channeling, being so open to this energy running through her, that it was magnificent. It was just, and she had all these people that were around her sort of giving her emotional support while she was doing it.

It was a beautiful ceremony. And it was just extraordinary. So was a beautiful ceremony and wow it was just extraordinary. So I think this MDMA base and then the 5MEO is something that in the future against Dan says it's the future of psychiatry because you get this sense that well all those Huxley who wrote the Doors of Perception he came up with this theory about the brain and after his mescaline experiences that he said the brain is a reducing valve. So you know right now if we relax I can hear there's a little bit of kind of a hum there there's but we're not normally paying attention to those things

because we're paying attention to what's in front of us and then we're paying attention I think Abraham Maslow you know has this hierarchy of needs the psychologist that helps start humanistic psychology and then later transpersonal psychology. So it's your survival needs, your belonging needs, your self-esteem, then self-actualization. A lot of people don't realize that near the end of his life he changed, he modified that. So self-transcendence, he said, is really the top above self-actualization. You become your full self, but then you go beyond yourself to see that you're part of something much bigger.

Wow. And so I think this five MEO, you know, facilitates this kind of self-transcendence, I think, if we can, as individuals and as a culture, start exploring these experiences. I mean, I was just with Marcus. We had an event in Dallas a couple of days ago, and it was with Governor Rick Perry, and it was about the psychedelic story. And this idea that there's bipartisan support for trying to bring these experiences so that more people can have them, and more people can do them in legal contexts in supportive

ways, and I think there's an enormous amount to be gained by that, but people have to be willing. You can't force it on them, but if we can have cultural support, I think the other part I'll just say is that a lot of my early awakenings to LSD were around the time that we were sending, we meaning Americans, were sending somebody to the moon. And some of the astronauts talk about the overview effect of looking back at the Earth

from space. And you can be spiritualized in certain ways from that. Edgar Mitchell was one of the astronauts. He started the Institute for Noetic Studies, noetic meaning direct knowing, also looking at ESP and other kinds of telepathy and different things. But it was because of his time and space. And so I think humanity as a whole is kind of getting more spiritualized in a sense, but there's a lot of fear and resistance

and people are sort of retreating into fundamentalism in a lot of different ways. But it's something is potentially new being born. It's this where we are in the universe, where we are on the planet. where we are on the planet? I think one of the amazing things about COVID was that the upside to something, I mean the upside to something terrible

is it helped us realize how connected we all were. Yeah. And I think that's this sort of understanding of this unit of mystical state of how connected we all are. Yeah. When did you do the five? That was also back in 1985.

You haven't done five since 1985. Right, right. If you don't mind me asking why haven't you done it again? It's scary. It's big. Okay. I was wondering if you were going to say that. I'm getting ready to do another one next month.

I think another reason why I haven't done it is more that I've been more... 1982 is when I learned about MDMA. 1984 is when I worked with the first PTSD patient with MDMA. And so I think I have at least enough of the Spiritual sense that there's so much work on the human level that I need to do both for myself for relationships and so I haven't been called to have that kind of experience, but also I've talked, I don't know if you've talked to people, but I've talked to several people who,

the Five MEO disrupted them in major ways. Sometimes people said it was so beautiful where they went that they were depressed to come back. Others weren't so open to it, and we're sort of stuck in this halfway place with some of these emotions. So I also feel like I'm so busy and doing so much that you need to give yourself time.

If I didn't mean it was so fast, I think people make a lot of misunderstandings that, oh yeah, I got an hour free, I'll do it and then go back to life. It's not like that. It takes a while to integrate it and you could be like with my IBM, it could be three days,

so it's not a casual thing to do like that. Interesting, but I'm curious if you don't mind me asking, how routinely do you use psychedelics? Well, what I routinely use is marijuana. So marijuana is, I'd say, more like a classic psychedelic than MDMA is. MDMA is more a heart opener. It is a psychedelicic mind manifesting. So I'll do marijuana 45 times a week, something like that.

The psychedelic experience is I try to do MDMA now once a year or so with my wife, maybe twice a year. And then every year or so to do a big psilocybin or a trip like that. Although I will share hilariously that the last two big psilocybin trips I had were a mistake. In both times, I thought I was just eating chocolates. One time I was staying at a friend's house and he wasn't there and I was like, it was midnight. I was getting hungry. I needed to, I want some energy. And I was like, it was midnight. I was getting hungry.

I needed to, I want some energy. And I'm like, okay. So I noticed there was some chocolate in his refrigerator. I'm like, okay, it doesn't want to melt. You know, it's in Southern, it's in LA, whatever. And I just ate this chocolate. And then like I complete my work. I'm getting everything ready.

I'm going to sleep. I had about 10 hours before I had an appointment the next morning to go see our phase three MDMA PTSD site in LA. And everything's put away, my back, you know, I packed my, everything's put away, and then I'm right about to go to bed and I'm like, oh shit, I'm tripping.

Oh my God. And then I was like, God, you never know what leads to what. And then I just thought, OK, I'm in it. OK, I'll just open up to it. And I knew that psilocybin lasts like six hours. Something like that. It's more of a steep drop off than LSD. LSD lingers and lingers. But when the psilocybin is done, sometimes you're like, okay, now back. So I kind of

felt like I would have an hour or two to rest after it was over before I had to go meet a bunch of people. Okay. And it was, I think there's a way in which I kind of, maybe, not that I knew what I was doing, but I had had, I needed an ego reduction. I would say I had an incredible time in LA and I had all these meetings and there's a book about our work called Acid Test, LSD, Ecstasy and the Power to Heal.

It's about the lives of one of the veterans that was in our studies, Nick Blackston, and then also about my life and and then Michael Midhofer, who's our lead psychiatrist. And it's about how our lives from childhood developed and how we interacted. And so that's been optioned for a movie by Vice and participant media.

And so I had a meeting with the person that was gonna be writing the script and the director earlier that evening. And I'd had met a famous actor and I did other things that were kind of extraordinary in LA and I was kind of getting full of myself. And so during this mushroom experience that I hadn't intentionally done, I had this realization that this entire time that I was talking with this director, Jonas Rasmussen is his name, and he made the movie Flea, which was nominated for three Academy

Awards and it's about an Afghan refugee and Flea F.L.E.E. But I realized under the mushrooms that I had spent the entire time with him telling my story to him, but I hadn't asked him why he cared about telling this story. It was all ego and me. And so I felt like it was a good experience. I needed that sort of mushroom trip to put me in my place, but I wouldn't have done it intentionally.

I was just eating this chocolate. Wow. What would you say, what was your eating this chocolate. Wow. What would you say, what was your most profound psychedelic experience? Well, it's hard to say because I've done MDMA about 130 times. I've done LSD over 100 times. I've done a lot of different things. But well, if I had to say like what is the most profound, it is really hard to say.

But I do think about this one experience that I would say was the most mystical experience of my whole life. And it was around, also around 1985. This was a big drug period for me. It was a great year for you. It was a great year for me. And this experience, as I said, we had started this nonprofit try

to protect the use of MDMA. And when it was legal, we were able to reach out to various people who wouldn't otherwise do an illegal drug. And one of them was a man, brother David Steindlrost, who's in his 90s. He's a Roman Catholic monk, a mystic, but he was open to trying MDMA in half dose as an aid to meditation in the monastery. He was in a monastery not far from Esalen in Big Sur. And Stan Groff had brought him to be a teacher for us for a couple of days.

And I got to know him and really like him. And he was willing to experiment on trying MDMAs and aid to meditation and found it helped them tremendously. And he actually then spoke to the media once the DEA tried to criminalize. And so it's like we're changing the narrative. The DEA is, oh, MDMA, it's all about ecstasy, it's all about parties.

And then we got a monk saying that it helped them to deepen his meditation. We had a rabbi compared it to the Sabbath. So we're winning in the public, in the public, and the court of public opinion, and we were also winning in the court. But so during this MDMA experience, part of it was I was just starting to get more public

to challenge the DEA. And I was also thinking about Brother David. And I was like, so I found a camping spot, a beautiful spot at the edge of the ocean, edge of the continent. So I was right on the Pacific Ocean. I found this spot where the high tide came all around me, right the mountain behind me,

but I was dry where I was. And there was big rocks and boulders out there and the waves were crashing, but I had this little perch at the edge of the continent and in Big Sur where it was, you know, there's not that much light, so the stars were incredible. And so I was thinking about, first off, you know, how do I stay safe? And so there was this tree, this big overhanging tree, and I sort of imagined that was the DEA and the police. And so I was interacting in a way,

and I came up with this insight that the DEA and the police, they spend a lot of time trying to find what you're trying to hide from them. They're trying to look for what's not there. And if you come up to them directly, they have to engage so they're directly dealing with me with the lawsuit and things like that. But I felt that there was a certain safety

that I was getting, it wasn't just risk, it was also trying to make me safer to confront them directly. And if I didn't give them direct clues like I'm doing this illegal stuff, which obviously I was, but if I didn't, you know, sort of, I could confront them in this way and I felt that that anyway made me safer to speak out rather than less safe. And then I was thinking about Brother David and I was like, why would somebody want to sell a bit life? What's the point of trying to be a monk? And why would you even want to do that?

And so I was just thinking about that. And then I was sort of relaxed about that. And I was just opening my heart and opening up to the night. And I just felt this enormity of the stars and the universe and the roaring of the ocean and the Pacific Ocean being so big. And everything is so big. big and I'm so little tiny little speck and I just had this feeling at a moment like I could just disappear into the universe. I could let like this full eco-dyslusion like this enormity but I myself am sort of gone. And after a while, I sort of realized,

well, I was still there. I wasn't really gone. I'm like, well, why am I still here? I know that the Earth is spinning at thousands of miles. Everything's in motion. Why don't I just fly out into the universe? Why am I still here? Why am I atoms together?

And then I had the sense that there was something into the universe, why am I still here? Why am I atoms together? And then I had the sense that there was something that was keeping me there that was gravity. And that gravity, then I interpreted it as a human, as a lover, that I was, and it was more that I was cradled in the arms of gravity. That gravity was keeping things together. If no gravity would be all dispersed everywhere. But I felt gravity like a lover, like a,

like a, and I felt that there's this love woven into everything in the universe. And this attraction of one thing to another that permits things to be built over billions and millions of years. that this kind of sense of an inherent filament of love through everything. And I felt this is why people want to be a monk in a way, that you don't have a relationship for a particular person or a thing, you develop this love for the universe, this love for everything that is, and there's

an advantage to being celibate in a certain way. And I felt this sort of love of this universal gravity. And then I thought, this is great, I figured it out, now I don't have to be celibate. But what changed from that day, and that's why I go back to that, is potentially, I'd say the most profound, is that it changed my sense. At the time I had no relationship too, so I was not involved in a relationship, I was on my own. And I never was as lonely after that experience

because I would fall back to there's this loving thread throughout existence. And I think it was the most mystical sense of my whole life as well. And people talk about how mysticism comes or this unit of mystical experience more from the classic psychedelics. And I have had those kind of experiences,

but I think this was the one where I was both there and not there, and I was a human and part of everything. And so I look back at that. Now, I had a chance 30 years later at a conference where I was that and Brother David was that. And I sat with him at dinner. And I said that I wanted to explain to him the most mystical experience of my whole life

because he was involved in it. And I was wondering what did he think about it? All right, so it took 30 years for me to have this conversation with him. And I explained everything. And I said, I was cradled in the arms of gravity. That was my imagery and that's helped in so many ways. And then he was silent for a while.

And then what he said was, I think about gravity every day. Really? That's all he said. I think about gravity every day. Yeah. So he can relate. He can totally relate. Yeah.

That was, did you say that was MDMA? That was MDMA. Interesting. Do you, so it doesn't matter to you whether it's natural or... Oh, it totally does not matter. So let me say that there's a romantic nature people have. If it's from nature, it's somehow good. Everything's from nature.

And even our brains are from nature. And if we put stuff together, in a way, it's natural. But I think it's the molecule. So LSD is incredible. But it doesn't appear in nature. There's something similar to LSD called LSA. So LSD is lysergic acid diethylamide. LSA is lysergic acid amide, and that's in morning glory seeds. And there's molecules similar to LSD and ergot, but there's no LSD in nature at all. So I think this natural synthetic divide is meaningless, and that the molecules are the molecules wherever they come from and things

from nature can be poisonous and things from the laboratory can be good. MDMA itself doesn't appear in nature either but where it matters is politics. So right now in Oregon there was the Oregon psilocybin initiative and it's getting ready to be implemented and then in November of this last year Colorado passed the natural plant medicines initiative and so we were working with the people that put that on the ballot and spent the money to get it approved and and they were doing polling to try to figure out whether it would pass or how to

Speak to people and what they learned is that when you add in LSD or MDMA And what they learned is that when you add in LSD or MDMA, suddenly it would no longer pass. That if you just say natural plant medicines, then people, oh yeah, I'm all for that. You know? But you add synthetics and people have this reaction like, oh no, I'm not for that. I'm glad we're talking about this

because I'm gonna be honest, I'm one of them. Ah, ah! I am. You think if it's from nature it's better? I just, yeah. You know, I just have that mindset and I take, I personally take my psychedelic journeys very seriously. Like you were saying, I block off a time period where I'm not gonna be doing anything

a couple days before and a couple days after. And I want to be able to clear my head before I get into it and I'm very ceremonial. And yeah, that's for some reason I'm I'm I'm drawn to the plants. Well, tell me what you think is the difference. I don't really know how to explain it, Rick, but I feel like, I just feel like if it's natural, then God or the universe put it here for us to find. And another reason is I lost a lot of trust

in the pharmaceutical companies. And so because I lost a lot of trust in the pharmaceutical companies. And so because I lost a lot of trust in the pharmaceutical companies, the synthetics maybe got pushed in, lumped in with that. Yeah. If that makes any sense. Yeah, it does, it does, I don't think so. I do think, well, fortunately, five MEO we now know

does come from a toad, the venom of a toad. And that's, I again comes from the Aboga root. But I'll just say that maybe this is not a difference, but the psilocybin obviously comes from mushrooms. But all the research that's been done with psilocybin has not been psilocybin mushrooms. It's been synthetic psilocybin Minerals I did not know that all that so there's not been any research really with mushrooms all the way here about the last 20 years of all The research was psilocybin. It's synthetic psilocybin now. They're making synthetic something that does appear in nature So it's not quite, synthetic, but it's, and people are starting to say,

maybe we should research the mushroom. Let's give mushroom for psychedelic therapy. How will that be different from the synthetic? So I've only done mushrooms. I've never had access to psilocybin that was synthetically produced. So all of my mushroom experiences are only the mushrooms. And they've been profound, incredible.

But my guess is that if you were to give somebody a mushroom experience, that it would be identical to the psilocybin psychologically. There are other molecules in the mushrooms that may have other medicinal properties. But I also think that there's incredible value in LSD and it is synthetic. So I think what's more important,

and I think this is the fundamental part that's wrong with our drug war, is that we've made that certain things are good or bad by themselves, like these are bad drugs and they're illegal and these are okay, like alcohol and tobacco, they're okay, they're good, they're okay. But I think it's the relationship that we have with it is what determines whether it's good or bad or whether it's beneficial or helpful.

And so we miss that by the drug war. We miss this whole idea of the relationship. And one of the best examples of that for me is the drug called thalidomide. So in the 50s and 60s, thalidomide was used for morning sickness, for pregnant women, and it produced incredible, terrible birth defects. People would be born with, without, with shriveled limbs a lot of times. And this was really popular as a drug by the pharma companies in Europe. And there was this effort now to bring it into the United States.

And there was this woman at the FDA that had heard some of these stories. It wasn't clear that these birth defects at the time were connected to thalidomide, but she thought they might be. And so she blocked it from coming into the U.S. And she's the only person from the FDA, Francis Kelsey was her name, who ever got a presidential Medal of Honor for blocking thalidomide. So it was the quintessential bad drug. All right, a decade and a half or so later, thalidomide, we noticed, is people noticed,

that it's great for a certain kind of cancers. It shrinks blood cells. It shrinks blood supply to certain things. It's now a medicine. This horrible drug in certain contexts, pregnant women, was terrible. But in other contexts with people who are struggling with leprosy, with cancer, that this drug can be very helpful.

It's a different relationship with the same thing. And so I think it's the relationships more than is it natural, isn't synthetic. Makes a lot of sense. The 5MEO I did was synthetic 5MEO, by the way. So, yeah. So it's just me- So you weren't hurting any toes. Nope. But, um, but yeah, I'm glad that we just talked about that. Yeah. I have a kind of a bigger question, you know, so that in the psychedelic 60s, right?

Psychedelics got kind of connected to the hippies and the anti-war movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement. You know, and you've talked about how you've been in war. So I'm wondering, has these psychedelic experiences, how have they impacted your sense about war and violence and what we're trying to accomplish, or if at all? It made me rethink everything. I think a lot of it is meaningless, senseless, stuff that we don't need to be involved in.

And, you know, Rick, I don't have a lot of experience with psychedelics, but my trip with Trevor, it just changed my perspective on everything and It did it made me rethink Why we were over there what we were doing over there why we were there for so long It made me Had I done psychedelics prior to joining the military, they probably wouldn't have joined. Is that what you're asking?

Well, in part, yeah. Because I now think though that, what we see with the war in Ukraine, it's so clear that there's a massive totalitarian effort to take over democracy in Ukraine. So that we need a military, we need to fight in certain times but not in others so

So I guess I'm wondering are you saying you're a pacifist now or just that there's more differentiation between You know when it's appropriate and when it's not I Wouldn't say a pacifist, but I'll say, I think if everybody was doing this stuff, we wouldn't have any of these conflicts. And I think a lot of us will be getting along who don't normally get along.

And I don't think we would have this mental health crisis. I think a lot of hatred and a lot of anger would disappear into nothing. If people gave psychedelics a chance, would you agree with that? I do, and in fact, that, so when I was 18, I was in despair in a way about the world. And I had been, well, I was Jewish, born in 53,

not that long after the Holocaust. I had relatives in Israel, Palestine, since 1904, and relatives that fought in the 48th War of Independence. I was just raised from a very young age about the reality of the Holocaust, but I was taught it in America at the time of American's height of our power. So I felt that I could kind of approach the horror of that from a safe place, in a way. But I was sort of told by my parents that I was part of this multi-generational story.

Now, Judaism goes back, you know, you get to hear these stories of the pharaohs and building pyramids and stuff, but I think that's more myth than reality. But still, this idea that was taught to me that I was a product of refugees that came from Poland and Russia in the 1880s and in the first early part of the 20th century from my grandparents and great grandparents. They came to America for freedom. They found it. They made a good life. They succeeded. And then my job was in this generational line, was to think about these deeper threats. I also was very much influenced by the Cuban Missile Crisis. So I was just a young boy and now the whole world could blow up and we could, everybody

could die and they teach you duck and cover under your desk. Kids have, sad to say, active shooter drills and stuff. But this was like, what do we do if the world blows up? And I just felt increasingly like the world was, we hadn't evolved from animals that far, our rational thought was, and I was in despair. And I was also in one of the last years of the lottery for Vietnam.

And so I decided at the time that I didn't think it was a wise war and I thought that there's multiple different ways to serve your country and that I wasn't going to run away to Canada or pretend I had bone spurs or something like that. But I wasn't and I wasn't a conscious objector because to be a conscious objector, you need to be a pacifist and against all wars. And I'm like, you know, if it was to fight against Hitler and the Germans, I would fight. I wouldn't say, you know, rely on their humanity.

And so my only option I thought was to protest in some way. And so I decided that I would be a draft resister and I would go to jail, that I would serve my country by going to jail, and that I would drain the war machine from resources. And so I never filed for my draft card. I never sent in the first postcard to register for the draft. Now I had a Social Security number. I was paying taxes. I had a driver's license. I was in high school. I was on the roll. It just was like the government knows where I am, you know? And so I just assumed that I would end up going to jail. And I'd studied Gandhi and Tolstoy

and nonviolent resistance. And I thought that's what I would do. That's how I would serve my country. And what I overestimated was the efficiency of the government. So, and my parents talked to me and said, this is okay, we understand what you're doing, but you're gonna be a felon. And you're never gonna be, my dad was a doctor.

He said, you're never gonna be able to be a doctor or a lawyer or Indian chief, anything like this, because you are gonna have this felony record. I'm like, okay, I will accept that. And I'll just have to figure out something else to do with my life. And as it turned out, nothing ever happened to me. Really?

Nothing. Nothing, it was just like, you know, later, about a year later after I didn't do this, I got a high lottery number, so I probably wouldn't have gone anyway, but I thought something, and later it turned out that around 60,000 people I'd heard had didn't register for the draft.

And there were enough people going to the draft boards that they could prosecute the war and they didn't do anything. And then President Carter on his first day in office pardoned all the draft resistors. So I had identified myself as a young boy as a counterculture drug using criminal. And then, but the thing was that the,

when I first started doing LSD, and I first started getting the sense that there's something beyond my biography, that it's not just the world began when I was born and it will end when I die, that there's this whole other stuff, that the sense of being connected in a deeper way is the antidote to genocide and to holocaust and nuclear war and racism. So I do feel that if people were to do these experiences in a supportive way, because you could do these drugs and you could end up worse off if you're not supported, and that happens to a bunch of people, but I do feel if people could feel that beneath my tribe, beneath my religion, beneath my gender, beneath my race, beneath my nationality, we're humans,

beneath that we're part of this web of life, that if we felt that and knew that, we wouldn't be demonizing other people so much. And I had this one experience when I was 16, I was very interested in the other and studying the other. And so I studied Russian in high school. And the Russians were in the Cold War and horrible. And so when I was 16 years old, after my junior year, my parents sent me to Russia to study the language. And this was 1970.

And this is a big Cold War time. And I had the impression that all these Russians hate us, and that we should be hating all these Russians, and they want to kill us. And we've got all these bombs aimed at us. And I just thought, OK, it's these countries against countries. And when I got there, and my parents, to their credit,

they taught me this other thing, which was that there's big factors. And none of us are big enough to deal with them by ourselves, but if you can do something little, you should do it. So, you know, in my little suitcase, they gave me prayer books, Jewish prayer books to bring to Russia, which were illegal at the time. And they said, if you can get these to people at a synagogue while you're there, you should do it it because all these prayer books are illegal. And I ended up, I did this, I did find the synagogue and I did give these prayer books to these guys and I'd made a lot of money in the black market, you know, selling stuff to young Russians who wanted to buy our clothes, blue jeans and all this stuff. And the rubles were worthless outside of Russia.

So I went to the synagogue and said, I've got all this money for you and I've got these prayer books and they said, don't give it to us now. We're under observation, but I'll meet you in a subway at this time, at this place and you can do the transfer then. And I thought, this is great. I'm James Bond now. You know, but I'm 16 and I was like, hey, if they catch me, you know, they'll just ship me home. You know, so I had this fearless kind of stuff.

But, and I did. And I met the guy and did the transfer. But, but I realized these people didn't hate us. And that it was their governments and these clashes of power people. But that, that, I mean, what made an amazing impact on me as I was super shy, I went for a walk with a Russian girl on the beach. I'm like, you don't want to kill me.

I don't want to kill you. So I do think that the sense that we're all in it together, I do feel that. So when I was 18 and I first started doing these psychedelics, I thought this could be the sanatode. It has been wiped out. So I woke up to LSD after the backlash. But I thought I have this sort of privileged life

that my parents will make sure I don't starve and I have a place shelter. And I'm supposed to do something to avoid another holocaust. And I thought maybe the psychedelics, this could be it. So that's where I focused on with that that same belief, that if more people could do this, that we would have a different approach to conflict, and we would have a different approach to the irrational.

We would not buy into it as much, and that we would try to see people. So that's why my whole life has basically been devoted to psychedelics. But I think it's important that we say that it's for everybody. So I think this idea of bipartisan support and this idea that, I mean, okay, so I guess this is a question for you. You might not have gone into the military at that time, but then what if people landed here in America, trying to take over?

Then I would fight. Yeah. And I still would to this day. Okay, so that's I think the most important, yeah. Yeah, so yeah, I guess I'm not against, I don't know how to say this. I guess I'm not against war, but I am again. If you don't, if you can't, if you're not defending yourself or defending

somebody else, I don't really know what we're doing there anymore. Right. You know, and, and, and there were a lot of other things that I, you know, that I thought about after my experience. And it did, it changed everything, right? Changed everything. But back to you, let's talk about, I wanna go into the Iceland stuff

and what you guys are going to do up there. Okay. Well, let me say first off that our thought is to globalize access to psychedelics and globalize access to MDMA-sisted therapy. So our first phase three studies were in Israel, Canada, and the United States. So as I said, I was trained to sort of make a contribution to Israel. I thought bring psychedelics to research in Israel. So once we, if we do get FDA approval, it will very shortly thereafter be approved in Israel and Canada. We're also starting research in Europe. So we're trying to get approval by the European

Medicines Agency. So we're doing studies in around 10 sites and 7 countries in Europe. We also have had some studies in Brazil, in Australia, and other places. And so this idea of sort of a global community. So what happened in Iceland is just recently, in January of this year actually, there was the first psychedelic conference in Iceland. And researchers from around the world were invited to speak and I was one of the ones that was invited to speak and it was very well received and it was the whole community.

I mean, Iceland is only about 380,000 people. and it was very well received, and it was the whole community. I mean, Iceland is only about 380,000 people. And so this conference was well covered in all of their media on TV and in magazines and newspapers. And so a lot of people heard about it, and many people from the government came to the conference, from the Prime Minister's office, from the Minister of, from the Department of Justice, from the Department of Public Health, a lot of these people came to the conference. And so one of the things that's been hard for me, I would say, is that I have perceived of the police as the predator and I'm the prey just because of the drug war.

And so there was this, again, seeing through these kind of things, I realized that I now have my nephew as a police officer. My sister's son is a police officer in Washington, DC. And so we decided that we would try to reach out to the police. The police have one of the most traumatic jobs you could imagine.

Absolutely. And a lot of times veterans have preferential hiring as the police. And so you could be traumatized before you get into military, traumatized in the military, and then you get a trauma inducing job. And so I think the police are under enormous stress. So and as part of this sort of trying to show its healing for all, and the I gave a talk,

we arranged to give a talk at the International Association of the Chiefs of Police. And it was exactly, you'll see how this relates to Iceland. So it exactly was, you know, like 10,000 people gather. This was in Orlando a bunch of years ago. And then President Trump was president at the time. And he decided these were his people and he announced several days before that he would speak at this conference. And they scheduled his talk exactly the same time as our talk. There was me, one of the therapists, one of the veterans that we'd worked with. And then we have a senior retired DEA official

who's now acting as a consultant to us because his son went to Iraq and got PTSD and came back and found cannabis to be helpful to him. And it changed his dad's mind. So he's now become, Tony Colson is his name, he's become one of our main advisors. So there was a police officer in the, well, we went to our room,

it was big for 350 people or something, but because everybody went to see Trump, there was only like 20 people in our room. But there was 20 of the right people. We said, okay, these are people that really want to hear us and in the front row was this police officer and He came to us afterwards and he said I'm also a psychotherapist Sarco Gregorian is his name and

He said he wanted to do our training program to give MDMA to other police officers with PTSD And so we said, this is fantastic. We love to train you. This is exactly what we wanna do. This is for everybody. And so he's been through our training program. He was featured on the Netflix documentary of How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollinsbug.

And so we brought him to Iceland. So that's how, so we came to Iceland with a police officer and he brought his police chief. They're from Winthrop, outside of Boston, luckily. And so that they came as part of the delegation to Sarco did to be at the conference. And so what came from it is that we met with the Minister of Justice and his deputy

and they said that they would be interested in paying for a study to give MDMA to victims of crime, to prisoners in prison and police guards, prison guards and police officers. And so we're now planning a training of Icelandic therapists to take place the first week of August. And once we are training them, then we'd like to do this study,

which will be one of the most important ones to try to reduce recidivism, and also to try to work with victims of crime, and to see if the, I think it's very traumatizing to be a prison guard. I mean, that's one of the hardest jobs I could imagine. You know, so if they can learn how to sort of work through their own traumas and process all these emotions,

you'd think the prison guards could be more humane or the prisoners might be less violent if we deal with their traumas. So what happened in Iceland was one of our goals is the long-term goal is we're calling it a net a world of net zero trauma by 2070. So you know it's almost 50 years away but I think this idea of how do we spread the psychedelic healing? How do we spread it all over the world? How do we deal with the right now there's a hundred million displaced

people, refugees or migrants. There's a prediction that if climate change continues by 2050, there may be a billion climate refugees. And a lot of them are from wars and struggles too, because when you fight over limited resources and then there's more of that. So what we would like to do is think about Iceland as a test case. It's a small country. We have the support of people in the government. There are a bunch of therapists already there. Can we have a country that has net zero trauma?

And if we can demonstrate in this small way in Iceland, maybe we can imagine, you know, okay, there's 380,000 people there and there's 7.8 or whatever billion people in the small way in Iceland, maybe we can imagine, okay, there's 380,000 people there and there's 7.8 or whatever billion people in the world. But that could be an example. And so with a country that's small, you can kind of work with their national health insurance and with their education system. It's a lot easier.

So Iceland, we hope, will become a test case in a way for how do you build a whole country that is less and less producing trauma to the point where, you know, because trauma, it lasts. So there's multi-generational trauma. There's epigenetic mechanisms in the body where trauma gets passed from generation to generation. So I said we're hoping can be a test case in a way for this. That's brilliant. Did you, is this your idea?

Well, well, I mean, it was a collective. That is amazing. Well, how long, so how long do you, how long do you anticipate this taking to create a country? Oh, I mean, 20, 30 years. I mean, again, you have to, maybe it could be faster, but right now, in Iceland, let's say, there's not that many psychedelic therapists. We have to do the studies, we have to train the therapists, we have to get it embedded in

their national health insurance. We, maybe it could be done in 15 years or something as it is possible, but the other thing about Iceland is that it's a very spiritual place already. The nature is incredible and they have northern lights and they have volcanoes and they have the continental divide in a way we think of in America where the waters, but they've got the tectonic plates are separating. So Iceland is growing a little bit like an inch a year or something like that. But the natural wonder of Iceland is just incredible. They have hot springs and hot baths all over, but it's just extraordinary. So it's already kind of a mystical, but they have a lot of darkness

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Because they do have wealth enough to pay for medicines. And they used to be quite poor, but now they have so much tourism for the natural wonders. So I think that it is a good test case. It's also surrounded by water. It's an island. And Greenland, there's only like 60,000 people or something like that. So it is a natural experiment, it could be. And there are more and more people

that are moving to Iceland, but most people are from this kind of one culture and know each other a lot. Actually, what we were told by the Minister of Justice is that a lot of the people in prison are actually from outside Iceland, where they'll come, foreign gangs will come to do drugs or other ways of criminal enterprises. And then they give us it, and then they're not integrated into Icelandic society.

So I think it's a real opportunity. Now earlier when you read my bio, I just said that you said I did a 30 plus year follow-up to the Tim Leary's Concord Prison experiment. So that was actually from 61 to 63. And that was an experiment to see if you could give prisoners psilocybin experiences while they're in prison to help them have this sort of pro-social, I'm connected with everything, work through their traumas.

And then when they come out that then they would be less likely to reoffend and be sent back to jail. And so this was, Timothy Leary would then do, he would bring people into the prisons and the researchers would also do psilocybin Really? With the prisoners. Yeah, he would have some of the researchers that were not, but some were doing the psilocybin. And this was considered to be one of the most effective psychedelic studies that had ever taken place. So after the backlash, and actually, so again, 1970, the Control

Substances Act, after research was wiped out for several decades all over the world with psychedelics, we would look back, what are some of the most successful experiments? And the Concord Prison experiment was considered to be one of those. And so they also did what's called the Good Friday experiment, Timothy Leary and Walter Pankey and others. This was on Good Friday, 1962 in Boston.

And it was also to see if psychedelics could produce a mystical experience. And so they took 20 divinity students from Andover Newton into church on Good Friday, and they all got a pill. Half was psilocybin, half was placebo. And the minister was an incredible guy. His name was Howard Thurman, and he's an African American minister. He's no longer alive. He was Martin Luther King's mentor. Martin Luther King got a PhD at Boston University, but more importantly than, or not more importantly, but in background, Howard Thurman had spent time with Gandhi, and he had learned about

nonviolent resistance. And he was the one that really helped guide Martin Luther King and others into the strategy of nonviolence for the American Civil Rights Movement. Okay. And Howard Thurman was sympathetic with this idea of the political implications of the mystical experience, meaning that we're all connected, meaning that you can't be so racist if you realize.

I mean, if you look at the difference in genetic material between somebody that's black and somebody that's white, there's no differences hardly. It's the trivial. And so I did a follow-up to the Good Friday experiment and showed that it basically was confirmed. I tracked these people down roughly 25 years later. But then, and that got attention in the media and fell from the corrections, the Department of Corrections for Massachusetts, contacted me and said he had all the information of who the prisoners were in the Concord Prison Experiment. Did I want to do a follow-up to that study? And I said, I'd love to

because the names were all lost. Nobody knew who these people were. There was no way to do this until this guy said that they had kept the records of people in the Concord Prison Experiment. Wow. All right, so then I did this long-term file. We spent a whole year of getting permission. It went all the way up to Governor Weld. It was the time of Massachusetts.

And the permission slip that we got was hilarious because it gave us permission but somebody had scribbled on it no psilocybin Like of course we're just asking people and checking their criminal records. We weren't planning to give psilocybin They just wanted to make sure you know But but then I discovered to my dismay that Leary had fudged the results, and it wasn't successful. And it was weird that it was somebody who was me as an advocate for psychedelics wanting to bring attention to what I thought was one of the best studies.

What Tim said himself is, oh, you have a spiritual experience. People will tell you about that. But how do you know? That's why this long-term follow-up was so important. But he said with reducing recidivism, that's objective. You can tell it's not about their minds. Do they go back to prison or not? That'll tell if it works. And he claimed that it worked. And so when I looked at the data, it took me a long time, but I started feeling this data doesn't represent what time, but I started feeling this data doesn't represent what was reported. And so I discovered that what had happened is that Leary and the other team, Rolf Metzner and others, had realized that the psychedelic experience is not enough.

It's enough to give you a good start, but you need support afterwards. So the same way that you needed ingration after a psychedelic experience, if you're trying to reduce recidivism, you can't just give people a psychedelic experience, kick them out of the prison doors, and think they're going to do OK. And just as they realized that, they started creating these support groups, and then they got kicked out of Harvard.

Oh, god. So this is what we all brought to Iceland, is that this experiment was never really done fully because the experimenters themselves realized that they had overemphasized the psychedelic experience and under-emphasized the integration and the support afterwards. And then if we were to do something like that

to try to reduce recidivism, if you combine the psychedelic experience with the aftercare and have a control group that just gets the aftercare, we may find that the psychedelic experience with the aftercare and have a control group that just gets the aftercare, we may find that the psychedelic experience really helps in an additive way to reduce residivism. So this is why in a way we were able to present this research to the people in Iceland and to say, you know, this would be a tremendous experiment to do here. So how would, so how does this experiment start in Iceland? Okay, well, the most important part is training the therapists.

It's not just giving the drug. So we have to train the therapists. How many therapists are you gonna have? Well, we're gonna probably train around 40 or so. That's a lot. I don't think they'll all work on the study. There may be openings to compassionate use for MDMA, other things that may happen in Iceland as well.

But it would start as a small pilot study. But politically, okay, so I often say that we don't do science, we do political science, you know, because these are suppressed things, we're just coming back to the surface. So it's very important for us to say, and this is what we said in Iceland, that we want to work with victims of crime as well as perpetrators of crime. And we also want to work with the prison guards and the police. So the recidivism part will only be with the prisoners obviously,

but we wanna have more of a comprehensive sense. We're bringing this into the carceral system and we're trying to help everybody affect it in different ways. So there's several parts of training therapists. So for example, Trevor. Trevor has done Ibogaine. You would not be so comfortable going to Trevor if he'd never done Ibogaine, Trevor has done Ibogaine. You would not be so comfortable going to Trevor

if he'd never done Ibogaine, to give you Ibogaine. Absolutely correct. You know? All right, so we have an initial training which is about 100 hours. And so the big part of it is 60 hours online. It's more background information. What is our treatment method?

How do we evaluate therapists? What's the history of MDMA? What do we know about other psychedelics? And then there's about 40 plus hours that's in person. And so that's what we're gonna do in Iceland, is they're gonna do the video part first, and then we're gonna bring a team there for a week to get together.

But then the second part is that we want the therapist who want to, it's never compulsory, but the therapist that want to volunteer to have their own MDMA experience as a patient themselves. And with therapists, so stuff always comes up. We're all, you know, we all have issues. So even though the therapist might not have a PTSD or depression diagnosis, it's still valuable for personal growth for all sorts of issues. So we also then have to get a protocol approved in Iceland to give MDMA to therapists who volunteer for it. Okay.

All right, so that's the second step. First step is the training that's going to take place starting probably in June and July the online portion then they do the week in August. Then after that, hopefully we get permission before the end of the year to have a protocol where therapists can receive MDMA. Now, we want the therapists who administer MDMA to new therapists to have worked with PTSD patients,

to know our method. And so we may have to send therapists the same way we're sending them to do the training, we will send some therapists there to give MD made to other therapists. Okay. All right, and then the third part of our training is they actually work with patients

and it's all videotaped. And we have our what are called adherence raters. And so, and there's the treatment manual that describes the therapy, there's adherence criteria. How are you know are you doing the treatment the way we say it should be done to do this treatment manual? And then we have raters that watch the videotapes and give feedback to the therapists. And so that's the final part of the training. And so once all of that's done, then this experiment with reducing recidivism,

with victims of crime, then that can start. And actually it can start where the first group is what's called open label. What that means is there's no placebo. Everybody, open label means everybody knows what it is. So we train these initial people as they work with prisoners or victims of crime where everybody knows they get MDMA.

And then once they know the method, then we can say, oh, now we can do a controlled study if we're going to do that. So that's the sequence. Okay. Fascinating. How long do you think this entire experiment is going to take? Well, the recidivism is one of the hardest things to study because it takes a long time to study it. So because, and one of the things I realized

about the Concord Prison Experiment that was scientifically fraudulent, I would say. I'm reluctant to use that word, but the experiment that they did with the prisoners, once they got out of prison, they would do these follow-ups, and the follow-ups were done an average of people out of prison for 10 months.

But then their base rates, that they did a study of everybody released from the prison in the years prior to this experiment, and then they published the base rates of that. But in the analysis, they compared people that had been out of prison for two years to people that had been out of prison for 10 months. So obviously, the people who have been out of prison for 10 months are going to have lower recidivism than people that have been out of prison for two years. The longer you're out of jail,

the more likely are something to happen. So it was a completely fraudulent comparison. But it was done in this obscure British prison, criminology journal or something. I'm just shocked that all the people that were against psychedelics never checked this. But when I finally discovered it, I'm like, ha, you know, I had to go

in the dusty archives at Harvard Library to get this, you know, and probably most schools didn't even have this journal. But I was able to, and when I read this, I was like, oh my God, because not only that, that they have the two month data, but they had a chart of how, what their acidivism rate was from the beginning to the 24 months, the two years, and they had the 10 month rate. And when you look at the 10 month rate to the 10 month rate, it's the same. But I don't know, people just didn't check.

And then I had to decide shit, should I debunk this great study for psychedelics? And I felt I am about science. I've got, I can't just pretend it in it. So I did report that and I reported it in a little bit of a gentle way, but I said this experiment is bunk. Let's talk about the mental health crisis here in America.

Just yesterday, right down the street in Green Hills, Nashville, there was an active shooter, killed six people, three children, three adults. A lot of people are thinking psychedelics is the answer to this. My question is how would we even begin to implement that? Well, okay. So I would say again that psychedelics by themselves, we tend to put too much power in the thing.

Again, it's the therapy. So let's just say psychedelic-assisted therapy. And in psychedelic-assisted therapy, to give you a sense of what our method is for treating PTSD, it's 42 hours of what our method is for treating PTSD. It's 42 hours of therapy and it's with two therapists, usually a male female, but not always. And now we've negotiated with FDA that one of the two needs to be licensed as a therapist. The second can be an apprentice working to get a license or doesn't have a license.

But it's 42 hours of therapy. There's only three times that people get MDMA. And it's one month apart and these are for eight hour sessions. So in addition to these three eight hour sessions, which add up to 24 hours, there are 12 90 minute non-drug psychotherapy sessions as well. So there are three of these non-drug psychotherapy sessions as preparation. So I'm sure when you went down, you had some time with Trevor and others before you did the ibogaine. And I imagine you had something on the phone before? Yeah. So the way it worked was we got a coach and a therapist. We could talk to the coach

whenever we wanted. we had therapy, I think we had two sessions, if I remember correctly, before we went down, then you go down to Trevor's place and you have three days of preparatory. You know, doing different, just all kinds of different stuff. You kind of group chats, sweat lodge, all

write your intentions down, talk about your intentions, all of that stuff. Then you do it, you know, you do the Ibogaine and then the 5MEO and then when you leave, you continue with your integration period. And I went a little longer than, I guess, recommended. Because I just really wanted to dig in, but I think I did four therapy sessions afterwards. All right. So we have three these 90-minute sessions before the first MDMA and then three of them after each MDMA for integration. Okay. So it's a large amount of therapy punctuated by these MDMA experiences. So how would we bring this to bear at a large scale to really reduce the mental health crisis? There's, we're hoping to train around 25,000 therapists. That's nowhere near enough in this decade.

That's nowhere near enough. There's estimated 13 million PTSD patients in America. And there's even more that people have depression. There's loads of people that are addicted to, dependent on alcohol or other drugs. Opiates. Opiates. Opiates. Yeah.

So I think it's going to take, that's why we're saying net zero trauma by 2070. I think it's really going to take generations to do this. But I think the steps are going to be working with the FDA to get MDMA approved as a medicine for PTSD, and then we want to look at it for other things as well. There are groups that are working to make psilocybin into a medicine, and they're suggesting that maybe 2025 or so, they might be able to, 2026, 2025.

I am trying to try to do Ibogaine research, and others are as well, to try to bring that forward. There's researchers now working on just five MEO DMT. We had now, in America, there's roughly 1,500 ketamine clinics. Ketamine has been developed, S-ketamine, an isomer of ketamine, but it's a classic pharma play in the sense that it was developed without therapy. Pharmacompanies don't know psychotherapy.

So they, and ketamine and all these drugs, as we talked about earlier, they have a pharmacological effect, a psychological effect, and you can do some good without, sometimes without taking it with psychotherapy, but you can also do harm. And so the way ketamine has been approved, it's without psychotherapy.

And a lot of these clinics that are really smart and wise combine it with therapy. You get better results, you don't need as much ketamine, it lasts longer. So what we're gonna have to set up, I think, is thousands and thousands and thousands of psychedelic treatment centers. And the goal is to not have, here's a ketamine center, here's an MDMA center, here's an

Ibogaine center, here's this. We want to train psychedelic therapists, and they want to be cross-trained into all the different drugs. And then when a person comes to this treatment center, now we are also doing a lot of work to try to get this covered by insurance, and we think we've got good responses so far from the insurance companies because the cost of untreated PTSD is really high. All right, but then people will come to this treatment center and they will then have a customized program developed for them by these trained therapists And so I think over the next By 2032 we've had some estimates that we will hopefully treat about 1.4 million people

That's a lot of people Yeah, that's a lot of people but that's nothing's a lot of people. But that's nothing compared to 13 million people that have PTSD and the number is growing. Yeah. All right, so the other part to answer your question about how do we really change the mental health crisis, there's two main things I'd say. The one is that we need to legalize

and regulate these drugs. And we need to make it so that people could try it on their own. Maybe you had a small trauma, you know? But if you don't do something, it becomes PTSD. But if you treat it, or maybe people just so... So within this post-provision world, what we need is pure drugs available to people, so they're not getting contaminated drugs,

dying from fentanyl or something. We need honest drug education instead of the dare program that scares, we need honest drug education. We need to train people in peer support. So we have what we call the Zendo project, which is a group where we do psychedelic harm reduction at Burning Man and other events. So places where people go to do psychedelics in we would say non-medical settings, a lot of times they're just looking for fun and something difficult comes up and then they're

not prepared to deal with that or they're not even looking for fun but still something difficult comes up and then they don't know what to do and often they would get tranquilized or they could become a problem for authorities, they could get arrested. So what we wanna show is that what we're proposing in a therapeutic setting makes sense in sort of non-medical settings. So we have hundreds of volunteers that we organize every year at Burning Man.

And last year we had about 500 and over 500 people came for help. Really? Yeah. Often from either while they're in the midst of a really difficult psychedelic experience, or they had one the day before, and now they're trying to integrate it.

And so we need widespread understanding about peer support. So we train people in peer support, psychedelic harm reduction, so people can help each other. So with all of those things, with a post-prohibition world, with all of that, then I think we can over time work both with people with a diagnosis that then gets covered by insurance and then people can do this on their own

in a wiser way than just with no guidance. The other answer, or response to your question is that we need to move to treat people closer to the trauma. So what that means is right now the FDA has forbid us from working with people that are younger than 18 that have PTSD. But they've said that if you make MDMA into a medicine for people that are, you know, if they give us permission to make MDMA prescription medicine for adults, designed as 18 or over, that we must do a study with adolescents. And if that works, we have to work with seven to 11 year olds.

So I think we need to move sooner to treating people for the trauma. Now the other part of this relates to the veterans and the VA and the Department of Defense. So we're now in about seven or eight VAs. It took forever. It took the intervention of Richard Rockefeller, who was David Rockefeller's son, who was chair of the Board of Advisors of Doctors Without Borders.

And he came to help us. And I worked with him very closely until he died tragically in a plane crash. But it was his cousin, Senator Jay Rockefeller, that was from West Virginia, that was on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee. And together, they were able to influence the VA, this is now in 2014, to let us pay for studies with VA therapists, but they wouldn't let us do it inside the VA, and they would not refer vets to us, but we were able to start that way.

We had also started in the San Diego Naval Medical Center, where there was Rob McClay, who was the chief psychiatrist there, and they have a two-week program for Navy SEALs and Marines and others with PTSD, an inpatient program. He was interested in giving some of them MDMA and see if they did better than the others. This is where I learned about military hierarchy and bureaucracy. I didn't know this.

Now I see. Rob McClade was great. He said, I want to do this study, but I can't do it unless I get the permission of the admiral who runs the facility. So, the admiral says, okay, it's okay with me, but now you got to get permission from all the way up from the secretary of the Navy. Just so happened that Richard Rockefeller

knew the secretary of the Navy. This was Ray Mabus. All right, and then in this, so he talked to him and we got a meeting at the Navy. This was Ray Mabus. He talked to him and we got a meeting at the Pentagon. Here I am, a draft resistor. You may remember that the Yippies, not the hippies, but the Yippies surrounded the Pentagon as one of their protests against the Vietnam War. They said they were going to levitate the Pentagon. They did not succeed. But here I am walking into the Pentagon all these years later to talk to them about psychedelics.

And we met with the assistant, Juan Garcia was the assistant secretary of the Navy, and it turned out that he was a friend of mine from the Kennedy School when I got my master's. And we'd been friends then. And he knew I was interested in MDMA, but we hadn't stayed in touch. Our careers went in different places completely. But here it is now, he's the assistant secretary of the Navy.

And we met with him and the Navy Surgeon General. We caught up, he knew my girlfriend at the time, who was not my wife. So they said, yes, they'd love to do the study, but they're not high enough in the hierarchy. We have to go to the assistant secretary of Defense for health affairs, and we have to have that meeting. Meanwhile, we got these letters from Jay Rockefeller, Senator Rockefeller, to the Assistant Secretary

of Defense for health affairs, and then Jay intervened with the Secretary of the VA. You know, and it all came together with this meeting and they said, we do not want you to work with active duty soldiers. And their rationale was terrible. Their rationale was the need is so great that if we permit you to do work with active duty soldiers, we're worried that the word would get out that this is okay, and a lot of people will self-medicate.

You've got to be kidding me. That's what they said. They're worried it was going to be successful. They're worried it would be successful, or just the experiment would send the word, and people would self-medicate, and they're trying to make it so people only do the drugs that they give you rather than.

And so they said, we want you to start with the veterans. And so I guess the bigger story here is that we need to move closer to the trauma. And when you look at a lot of the people that are in the prisons, a lot of them have had traumatic childhood. I imagine that something may have happened with this shooter who knows in Jolliard.

I think to achieve this goal of a mentally mass mental health, it's going to take generations, but it starts by getting some of these drugs approved, getting these clinics set up, training more therapists, getting insurance coverage, and over time, globalizing. And I'd say one of the biggest challenges we face now is that we now are at this incredible moment, this incredible moment that after April 8th, coming right up, is the 37th anniversary of MAPS. Congratulations.

Yeah, and so I started in 1986, 37 years later, we're on the verge, we think we have two successful Phase 3 studies. We hope by June of 2024 we may actually, we project hopefully, getting FDA approval. And we've raised about $145 million in grants and donations to this point, and a lot of donated labor, a lot of donated labor. But the rise of the for-profit psychedelic companies a few years ago made it more difficult for us to achieve donors, to reach donations,

because a lot of people thought they could just invest. So we do have roughly $63 million from investors, but it's $43 million in what's called a royalty share, meaning that they don't own equity, but they get a share of the royalties. And we have a $20 million, more or less, convertible note loan for two years. Oh, God.

All right, but right now we have this remarkable situation where the nonprofit is the 100% owner of the for-profit public benefit pharmaceutical company. And so we're at this crossroads and the next couple of months is gonna be the turning point. We need to raise, we're looking now to raise around $75 million to get us to FDA approval. And then after FDA approval, there's gonna be another bunch of money we now to raise around $75 million to get us to FDA approval. And then after FDA approval, there's going to be another bunch of money we need to raise

to get to what's called sustainability, where sales and profits from the sale of MDMA covers the costs and then brings in more money for more research and things like that. If we can get to FDA approval, we're going to have a lot of other ways to raise money, more royalty shares or selling off rights to certain countries. We were approached by a company from South Korea, actually, that's talking to us about bringing MDMA to South Korea, and maybe they'd pay us a certain amount of money or things like that. So what we're trying to do is in the next couple of months, figure out can we find donors or willing to donate so that public benefit remains the number one goal

or do we find money from investors that then means that we become most likely a publicly traded company. And so my hope is that we do this through philanthropy. You know, I don't own anything. Those of us at MAP, none of us owns anything because it's a nonprofit and the nonprofit is what owns the shares of the Public Benefit Corp. But if we have to sell them to the public, then I think things will change in terms of priorities when you have to respond to investors. Already we need to

take into account the investors that have given us money. We need to give them a good return. We need to do the best to get royalties, but it's not maximize royalties. They're mission-related people. All the people that have invested so far are mission-related people. The hope is that we will find donors and that then we can have this rare situation of a psychedelic pharmaceutical company 100% owned by a nonprofit that's also willing to legalize and make it available outside of us.

So while we might charge a substantial amount of money for the drug, we want people to be able to buy it for $10 or $20 too. And we think people will, most likely, those people that are really severely traumatized will, or even not that, but moderates for your trauma, will go to the trained therapists. So I think legalization is good for the business model. A lot of people think legalization is bad for the business model.

And a lot of for-profit pharma companies, or psychedelic pharma companies, are not speaking out about the need to move to a post-prohibition world. But I actually think that that's what we need for mass mental health, that's what we need for ethics, and that's what we need to really fully move forward with public benefit in mind.

So I think that the choices are gonna be coming to us in the next three or months. That's one of the reasons why I'm so glad the timeliness of this podcast with you. And then we're having the world's largest psychedelic conference ever. And it's gonna be June 19th to 23rd in Denver. Really? Yeah, it's called Psych be June 19th to 23rd in Denver. Really? Yeah.

It's called Psychedelic Science 2023. We've had one of these in 2010, Psychedelic Science Cup, where we bring the whole field together. The whole field was pretty small back in 2010. Then we had one in, that was in San Jose, then we had one in 2013 and one in 2017 in Oakland. And the 2017 one was the world's largest psychedelic conference, we had about 3,000 people there.

We already have 4,500 people coming to this one and it's a little bit less than three months away. So psychedelicscience.org, it's gonna be incredible. We have over 300 speakers, people coming from all over the world, we have the Denver Convention Center. We have an enormous number of exhibitors from all these companies. And so I think that will be either we have raised what we need by then or that will be the announcement of here's what we need to do one way or another to raise the resources. And I'd say that the biggest loss of public benefit would be if we don't raise the money

and never make MDMA into a medicine. So if we have to go with investors that want us to become a publicly traded company, we will do that. My preference though would be to do this through philanthropy. So for anybody that wants to donate, where do they go? Well, maps.org. Maps.org?

Yeah. If you want to donate a substantial amount, it's probably better for you to ask maps at maps.org and just ask for a meeting or something like that or just call the maps office or but I think that what we're hoping is that when we talk about what we want to accomplish, the world is in danger right now. I mean the mental health crisis is getting worse. The pandemic made it way worse. It seems like it's getting worse. And if it's true that there could be a billion climate refugees by 2050, the stresses on everybody, it's going to keep getting worse. So I really think that if we can keep focus on not maximizing money, we've already built

the structure. The public benefit corp is a modification of capitalism. So a normal company, and almost all the companies that we know are normal for-profit companies, their mission is to maximize profits. And if you're a minority shareholder in a company and you think that the management is not maximizing profits, you can get the other shareholders and you throw them out and you replace people who will maximize profits. And that's one of the problems of capitalism is that all these externalities, these companies

don't think about. So the oil companies are doing massive profits, but they're not having to pay for climate change. But they're maximizing profits. So the Public Benefit Corporation was created, I'm not sure exactly when, but maybe 20 years ago or something like that. It's a modification of capitalism

where it is a for-profit company, but you maximize public benefit, not profit. So minority shareholders cannot sue the management if you're not maximizing profits. So let's say we want to go to Rwanda or we want to go to South Africa or Ukraine, you know, or all the Ukrainian refugees. We want to treat massive amounts of trauma where there's virtually no money. If we're profit maximizing, we wouldn't do anything. But if we're about net zero trauma by 2070, that means we have to have a global focus and we go where the trauma is not where

the money is. And so if people do want to donate, we would be delighted. There's also the nonprofit maps, which doesn't need nearly as much money as the Benefit Corp. And we do public education. We do harm reduction. We do all the fundraising for the Benefit Corp. We do policy and advocacy. We do a lot of things through the non-profit. So people can just donate to the non-profit for our own purposes, which in small amounts.

So I also wanna say that we're talking about such big numbers. And so people might think, oh, if I donate $50, that means nothing. And that's not at all true. It absolutely means something. Where do you see the most pushback coming from legalizing this stuff?

Well, I think that in a time right now where over 100,000 people died last year from opiate overdoses, there is more of a bipartisan view that the drug war itself is not a good idea. That's why I would actually like to see a study done, perhaps by the CIA, about the national security implications of legalizing drugs. I think that if that study were to be done, and we look at all the bad actors that are

making all sorts of money from drug dealing, And of course we like some people who make money off of drugs too. But at it all up, my guess is that we would decide that it's an advantage to legalize drugs from a national security perspective. So I don't think the pushback is gonna come from drug lawyers in that way. The pushback that came in the initial backlash was cultural, it was against the counterculture.

Nixon was saying that, well actually it's John Ehrlichman was Nixon's domestic policy advisor and I think it was in 79 he spoke to a reporter and he said that the two main enemies of the Nixon White House were blacks and hippies. And he said, if we can criminalize the drugs that they use, we can bust up their meetings, we can arrest their leaders because they can't stop the protests, but if we criminalize the drugs and then Aarley Coleman said, did we know we were exaggerating the risk of drugs? Of course we did, But it was a political tool. So I think that we have done so much work and also I would say the reason that we have bipartisan support is like yourself, a lot of veterans who have had struggles with PTSD

and America thinks of veterans in a high way and in a high regard, and we should, that I don't think it's gonna come back, the backlash is gonna come that way. All right, then the next backlash came late in the 70s, early the 80s, when it looked like marijuana might get legalized, the backlash then came from parents. And it was parents worried about their kids.

So this was partnership for a drug-free America. And this was families against drugs. And all these different kind of families in action, I think it was, different. So I think that that's kind of passed too. And so I think where the backlash would come from, if it will come from, it's not quite clear where it will come from, but I would say that the thing

that I'm worried about is fundamentalists. So what we're talking about is the spiritual experiences, these kind of unit of mystical experiences, and they're accessible to everybody. And when you have those experiences, sometimes they're mediated through certain religious symbols or people, but sometimes not. So I think there's a kind of a universal spirituality. And I think that a lot of the fundamentalists from, I mean, I look what's happening in Israel right now, the fundamentalist Orthodox Jews, the ultra-Orthodox, are destroying the country in many different ways.

They're the most racist, the most homophobic, the most hateful for Palestinians. And we see that. We've got the, so I think, I'm just saying, fundamentalists of any kind are willing to, look what's happening with the Taliban in Afghanistan. So, and their narrative is that there's one right way, we know it, and everybody else is an infidel, and we will kill you. So I think they're so in need of this deeper spirituality, though.

So both, that's where I think a big opportunity is as well. So actually this Saturday I'm speaking at Harvard Divinity School. They're having a psychedelic revival in a way. And there's incredible information that's coming out about what's called the Ellucinian Mysteries. So this is the world's longest running mystery ceremonies. It went from 1600 BC to around 400 AD, and it was wiped out by the Catholic Church because they could put themselves in a hierarchy between you and God. But the Ellucinian Mysteries was involving a potion that people drank called

Kikiyan, and now we understand it was a psychedelic potion similar to LSD. And this is the foundation of democracy, was the Greeks. We think our culture comes from the Greeks, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, everybody that we think of as the epitome of the Greek culture and the flowering of the creation of democracy had a psychedelic experience as part of their lives. And it was considered so important, this is kind of funny to say, but they would let women and slaves do it too. It wasn't just limited to men. Women and slaves could do this. And you were under pain of death to say what actually happened. You should not share that. And so we don't know exactly what happened. But I think that this sense that this psychedelic experience can be interpreted

in many different contexts. So I'd like to say that it's like languages. We're not going to say that English is a better language than Russian or is a better language than German. They come from our common human need to communicate. And according to the cultural context, we come up with different sounds that we make that we call our language. I think religion can be seen like that, that there's a common spirituality and we come up in different cultural contexts. I grew up in a Jewish context.

I don't think that only Jews go to heaven or that, you know, I don't... Jews are the chosen people according to the Bible. But the way I think about it is everybody's the chosen people. Yes, Jews are the chosen people, but so are you, so is everybody. It's kind of an egotistical kind of, you know, but it's a way to make us feel distinct and better. So I think that the fundamentalists of different religions are so holding on to literal interpretations of things that I think deep down they're super insecure. I mean, it's interesting you say that because I've done quite a few episodes on psychedelics, not by now. And as much as I shouldn't, I do go into the comments section. And it's always the, how do I say this? It's always the very religious people that are against it.

Everybody's for this, it seems like, but the people that can't see outside of their religion and have been indoctrinated in a religion, I hate to use that term, but those are the ones that they can't see the benefit. They think, oh, well, just you need Jesus, you need God, you need to pray. Yeah, you know what? I do need those things, but if that is what you believe

in, and don't you think God or Jesus or Allah or whoever you're praying to, don't you think they would want us to be better? Yeah. Well, don't you think they would want the pain and the suffering to go away? Yeah. You know, Brother David, who I talked about,

he talked about how Jesus is the Son of God. But the way he hears that is, so is everybody. You know, it's not untrue that we are all the children of God. But what's untrue is that one group has a monopoly on spirituality. Now, most people in the world would not agree with what I'm saying right now. And so I think there's this sense about how do we reach out to fundamentalists and say, if you let go of the literalism, there will be a richness that you can experience that doesn't make you turn away from what you believed in. You know, yes, we can see some of the miracle stories may be reinterpreted. So my wife, actually, this is a good example.

My wife worked for the World Council of Churches. She actually, one of her first jobs out of college was she was a lobbyist in Washington, but she was a lobbyist for the Quakers. She said that they were always nonviolent, and they defined success as if somebody says, we're all in favor of this expansion of the military budget. Everybody agrees with that. Then they would say, well, we don't agree. That was their success. At least somebody could hear there was a dissenting voice. Then she worked for the World

Council of Churches in Geneva and traveled all over the world during Third World women development. This is a more progressive group than the Vatican in some ways. So they reinterpreted the miracle of the loaves and the fishes. So we have Jesus giving this incredible Sermon on the Mount. And then there's this, all these people that he wants to feed and there's not enough food. And so all of a sudden this few loaves and the fishes, the multiplication, so now it's a miracle and it feeds everybody. So their interpretation of it was that these miracle stories are designed in a way by power structures and their stuff that we can't do. I can't make a miracle of multiplying loaves and fishes and stuff. But what they interpreted is that what happened was Jesus gave a beautiful talk about how

we're all in this together and how we should share. And so the real miracle is people overcame their selfishness and shared and then there was enough for everybody. So I think we can reinterpret a lot of these miracle stories because when you say it's a miracle of how he created the loaves and the fishes, I don't have to do that. I can't do that. But if you say I should be less selfish, Jesus talked to people about being less selfish,

that means I have to do something. And so you could see how people might move away from that. Because then, so I do think, I'm curious, where do you think the backlash would come from? If it does come? I think the backlash, excuse me, I think the backlash will come from Big Pharma. I don't think that at all. Really?

I don't think that at all. And I guess I'll say that what can they do? Nothing. So the way the FDA, I don't perceive any pressure right now from Big Pharma on the FDA to slow us down. Really? Not at all. And in fact, Merck invented MDMA in 1912.

They tested it in animals in 1927, and they found nothing. They didn't understand what to look for. They tried it again in 1959. Animals again found nothing. But Merck is the one that developed really empty. Now it's in the public domain. So a few years ago, some of our people in the Benefit Corp, were trying to think, how do we do work in Europe?

And so they knew someone who was a senior person at Merck, who was an expert in Europe and doing research in the regulatory systems in Europe. And she joined one of our calls for free to help us. And this is their own drug. So another thing to say is that a lot of the drugs that Big Pharma has done for psychiatry are generic now. So I don't think Big Pharma is going to come after us at all. I just don't see it. And so I think this other part of,

you know, the political backlash, I don't see that either. And in fact, just as an example of that, I'll say that, you know, with Marcus, we were just in Dallas a few days ago, and Governor Rick Perry was there. And he was governor of Texas for 15 years. He was in Trump's cabinet as secretary of energy.

And he's heard all these stories from Navy SEALs that have gone down and got Ibogaine. He talked about Marcus Luttrell, actually. So this is the story he just told that Marcus Luttrell lived at the governor's office with him. And he heard his story and he helped him. Now he's a member of Congress, but he heard Marcus talk about doing Ibogaine.

Now, Governor Perry is pro-psychedelics. He's helping in many ways. I had an incredible meeting with Ted Nugent and his son, Rocco. Rocco Moon. And this was just a couple of weeks ago, well, two months ago, something like that. And I had never thought that there would be

any kind of common ground that I might have with Ted Nugent. But there is, and it's Rocco, his son, is interested in becoming a psychedelic therapist. Get out of here, really? Yes. Rocco set it up between his father and I. What Ted said is actually that he could be a particularly good advocate because he's so anti-drug.

Wow. That's incredible. And he's friends, Ted Nugent is friends with Governor Perry. So all of this is to say that I think that the backlash is not going to come from any kind of a political thing. I really don't see it coming from Big Pharma. So here's just another way why I don't think it from Big Pharma. The way the FDA is organized, it's to protect

pharma companies from having influence, because if pharma companies could influence the FDA, then they'd all be trying to do that against all their other competitors. And so, for example, if I'm trying to make a drug XYZ into a medicine and I do a bunch of studies and it turns out that this drug has terrible safety consequences. And the FDA says, we're stopping this. You cannot make this drug into a medicine.

Some other company comes and says, I want to make XYZ into a medicine. The FDA is not allowed to tell them that they've already rejected the drug to somebody else. So they're not. So when people say, what does the FDA think about what you're doing? The FDA doesn't make announcements about it. I can announce, oh, we've got FDA approval. We've done this. We've done that. I mean, for this project or that, they will announce, of course, if they approve things for medicines.

But the FDA has designed pretty to insulate themselves, and it's for the benefit of all the pharma companies as well. I think really it's up to us. I think if we can do this in a careful, responsible way. I think one of the biggest problems, and this I saw happening during the 60s, is the government exaggerated the risks terribly and denied the benefits and then shut down research for decades. But if we exaggerate the benefits and deny the risks, then we will be the cause of problems. So I think, so that's why I try to always say it's psychedelic therapy and it's about

integration. It's not just about doing the drug and it doesn't work for everybody. And we have to figure out who does it the drug, and it doesn't work for everybody. And we have to figure out who does it work for, who doesn't it work for. So I think maybe I would say, and I think even the fundamentalists are often those ones that are most conservative in certain ways and really support the veterans.

I think you're right. I think you're absolutely right. It's people like veterans, like my story. I've put it out there several times, how it benefited me and it is starting to change conservatives minds about it because they are seeing the benefits, my dad saw the benefits, my wife saw the benefits, my father-in-law seeing the benefits. My dad saw the benefits, my wife saw the benefits,

my father-in-law saw the benefits. Everybody around me has seen the benefits. I think that the reason, you know a lot more about this than I do, obviously, but for me, I think the reason the big pharma will get involved is because look at all the drugs that treat depression. Look at all the drugs that treat pain. You know, all the thing PTSD, all these things, they're all addictive.

Benzos, you know, addictive. Pain killers, addictive. Sleep aids, addictive. And because psychedelics and psychedelic therapy is so effective, it's not going to be the ongoing thing year, you know, every time. It's only a few times, yes. Year, year, year, year, year. And it's one, a couple times, maybe a couple times a year, and it's done. It works. You don't year, and it's done. You know, it works.

You don't have to take it every day. I think that's very true, and I think it will result in hopefully... We see a lot of people that have... Well, in our studies, people have to get off of their psychiatric medications because they interfere with the effect of MDMA. And many people do not go back on them. So, you know, and we are trying to do a study, we will try to do a study one day where it seems like

the SSRI is blunt the effect of MDMA. But we need to do a dose response safety study because there's some evidence to suggest that if you double the dose of MDMA on people on SSRIs, they can have a full MDMA experience. And so if that's true, the concern has been serotonin syndrome. Would there be overheating? Would there be problems from that? But if there aren't, if we can demonstrate that there are not problems from that, then

it opens up to a lot of people who are nervous about getting off their psychiatric meds to do psychedelics. If they could stay on them and then they get psychedelic therapy that reduces their traumas, their symptoms, then it'll be easier to get off these other drugs. But I do think that big pharma makes, most of these drugs that you mentioned have been around for decades and decades and they are off patent. Okay. That makes a lot of sense. It does.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we just have to do our very best. So I think what we need to do is storytelling. So what is it that really will prevent a backlash from anybody? It's people telling their stories of how these drugs were helpful or how they were challenging just honest information I think but people Even you know fundamentalists have kids with depression or yeah, I was just press I was gonna say that too

I mean the opiate fentanyl crisis is it's not getting any smaller. And I think just about everybody knows somebody that is fallen victim to the opioid crisis, you know? And it's gonna be... We had in Belmont where I live right outside, it's right next to Cambridge, you know, where Harvard is right next to Boston. We've had kids in the high school die from overdoses. Yeah, yeah.

And I think it's gonna be, you're right, storytelling like that, have you seen that documentary, Dost, are you in that documentary? You might be in it. I actually haven't seen it, but I'm speaking, Dost is gonna be shown in Arlington, May 10th and 11th, I think it is, and I'm gonna speak there.

Okay, yeah, it's gonna, I mean, there was a woman in there that got overcame opiate addiction and Trevor's the main guy in there, but and it worked. And as far as I know, she's still clean. Well, the story that I talked about in my TED Talk, Tony Macy was one of the veterans. This is a beautiful story.

So yeah, people wanted to check out my TED Talk. But what Tony said, he's a rare story. It's an incredible story. So he had terrible PTSD from Iraq, all that. He disabled basically a lot from PTSD. So during his first MDMA experience, he had this realization, the MDMA centered him, made him feel more peaceful, open his heart, and he realized that there was something good about his PTSD, that it was the way that he showed that he honored the memory of

his friends who had died. As long as he was suffering from PTSD, he was keeping alive in his mind the memories of his friends who were no longer alive. And then he kind of was able to think about the friends of his that were no longer alive looking at him. And they were like, we don't want you to squander your life. Morning about us, we cannot live. We would like you to live.

Maybe we can live through you." And he said, there's another way for me to honor my friend's memory by living. And in that moment, he cured himself of PTSD. And then he said, I'm taking opiates, but I don't think I'm really taking them for pain. I think I can do without them. And he said, I'm going to stop the opiates. And then he said, I don't even think I need the MDMA anymore. This is it. I'm done. I'm fixed. And we said, you can drop out anytime you want, but would you be willing to do the two month and ten month and the one year follow-ups at least?

Which he agreed to do. And neither of those showed that he had PTSD anymore. And this is now about eight years ago, and we're still in touch, and he went to Cambodia and to do service to other people that were struggling. One of the best ways to get out of depression is to help other people. And so he did that for a while.

And so it was just a sense that, yeah, I don't really need these opiates anymore. And I don't even need this MDMA anymore, which is, you know, great. It's incredible. Yeah. Well, Rick, we are out of time and you have a flight to catch,

but I just wanna say it is an honor to have you here. I love talking to you. I could have gone on for another four hours with this. So I hope you come back. But if you guys want to donate to Rick and his efforts to legalize psychedelics, all the links are in the description below. And Rick, seriously, it's just, it's a real pleasure to meet you. And I hope to see you again. I really do. Thank you, Sean. It's been a pleasure and thanks to Trevor for connecting us. Yeah, thank you, Trevor. But best of luck to you. Is 2024 bringing exciting or unexpected changes to your life? I know my life has seen a lot of changes since the start of the new year between my family and my growing business.

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