We spoke some time ago about

psychedelics with a focus on MDMA and it

seems like you may have some revised

views, maybe a few caveats. I would be

interested to hear your current

thinking. So, this is an area you've

spoken about and and thought about

pretty extensively and and or as I'm

more of a newbie. As we talked about

last time, in case people didn't hear

that conversation, you know, growing up,

I made the mistake, it was a truly a

mistake of taking some psychedelics at a

at a very young age, quote unquote,

recreationally,

LSD,

>> psilocybin, not giving any thought to

like what the long-term consequences

might be. Fortunately, I didn't feel any

long-term consequences, but I had to

enough bad trips, meaning one,

Robin Carter Harris would say, you can't

have a bad trip. There's no that you can

have a bad trip, Robin. I've had one. It

sucks. You're in the pit for hours and

hours. There's no guide there if you're

doing it recreationally as a teen. The

brain is hyperlastic. It made me very,

very cautious, almost paranoid about

psychedelics for many, many years. Then

also the last time we spoke, I talked

about how in an effort to resolve what I

felt were some long-standing

psychological traumas, I did clinically

supported MDMA, standard kind of MAPS

protocol, right? take a forget the

milligram dosage maybe take like

>> probably 125 something like that

>> yeah and sometimes there's a booster

about 90 minutes in you have someone

there you're doing talk therapy before

during and after tremendously helpful to

be able to feel my feelings to be able

to recognize what a whole body feeling

was about I mean there was never the

experience for me of wanting to

dance or have sex while I was on it was

like no there was some shaking there was

some a little that but it was a very you

know it's an impathogen I think as you

know it's not a psychedelic it's

technically an impathogen and raises

both dopamine and serotonin

simultaneously which is very unusual for

any compound to do and raises oxytocin

quite dramatically the data actually say

the empathogenic effect of MDMA is not

due to oxytocin through a kind of sort

of good control where you just give

oxytocin and you don't get the same

clinical effects but you could argue the

cocktail effect the synergy might be

important

So I did that a few times. I think it

was a total of four times separated by a

number of months or a year clinically

supported. In any event, after a period

of doing that, I took a break and

on the suggestion of the same clinical

group decided to partake in a psilocybin

experiment and it was highdosily.

Now psilocybin as you know leads to I

think in the words of our friend Paul Ki

it almost like recedes the waterline on

the on the unconscious mind. So what I

found in psilocybin was because my brain

often thinks in analogies like this just

how I structure my thinking it's

reflexive for me offs psilocybin almost

everything that came to me in those

sessions was kind of symbolic

representation analogies for somebody

else who who represents their world not

that way maybe musically or

through sematic experience it's likely

that from my understanding that they

will experience insights

through those same kind of

representations.

What I found from psilocybin

work was

it was exquisite at revealing to me the

structure of my thinking and the ways

that some of the patterns in my life

that were not serving me well

how they were structured. It was sort of

like oh coming out of it there's a like

wow there's this form of self seduction

that I do which takes actually eight

forms which

look the following way in my life I can

be seduced by the enchantment of some

sort of promise of a future outcome

that's not realistic and you can see

that I'm just kind of giving one example

and once you see that you can't unsee it

and that for me was an incredible

experience I do think it was important

to keep a journal afterwards to take

notes while off

the drug. And for me, that was very very

helpful at allowing me to understand the

structure of my thinking both for things

that serve me and don't serve me. I will

say, and this is getting a little, you

know, well, as long as people are doing

like live streams of taking

psychedelics, I feel very I feel on very

solid ground, but who knows?

>> Well, just wait until the second half of

this conversation.

>> Yeah. Exact. [laughter] Exactly. I mean

I don't want anyone to run out and take

these things without clinical support.

There are a number of people who

shouldn't be taking them and all the

usual caveats apply young people etc.

But the real like whoa

one session type rewiring which was the

hardest work I've ever done having done

lots and lots of therapy. But the

hardest work I've ever done was to take

MDMA and then a couple hours later take

a high dose of psilocybin. And I've only

done that twice. By the way, if I ever

try and run for public office, any

mistakes I make, they'll attribute to

this. By the way, I've seen that

publicly. But I'm going to make it very

clear right now. Not only am I not going

to run for office, I'm running from

office. So, you know, there's been some

speculation, but the interesting thing

was no two days later drop, which you do

experience with MDMA. I just did not

experience that if I took psilocybin

with it. Remarkable. Had some of my best

workouts, work weeks, etc. It's like, oh

wow, that can be avoided through this

thing. But what was remarkable is on

MDMA as an impathogen, you feel very

good about most anything you focus on.

You can find the peace in it. You can

find the love in it. Could be this yerba

mate, which I happen to love, but you

like would really love. That's the

danger, right? You can get pulled into

these force fields of thinking

something's really important. It might

not be that important when the session

is over. That's why I think it's very

important to have a trained guide with

you.

But there's the drop.

Psilocybin for me was a very dark and

harrowing experience.

>> Lot of purging, a lot of vomiting.

>> Really

>> about halfway through.

>> These weren't enormous doses. They

weren't small either. It was 4 to 5 g.

>> Just to be clear for folks. Yeah. Of

dried like silos mushrooms.

>> So for me,

>> it was terrifying to be on psilocybin

alone. It was extremely difficult. And

the combination of the two, it was sort

of like having my really good friend Rob

Moore in there with me going, "You can

do this." Now, Rob wasn't in there, so

I'm just sort of half joking because

he's here in the room with us now, but

>> it was like, "I can do this. I can lean

into the hardest work." I'm going to

give an example so it's not too vague.

>> Yeah.

>> I'd spent a fair amount of time thinking

about some of the harder things that had

happened in my childhood, in my life.

Some of which were self-inflicted, some

of which were not self-inflicted.

And I'd come to peace

about those through the work I described

standard psychotherapy lot of journaling

time some MDMAs psilocybin those

separately

taking them together I had this voice in

my head that was like it's time to do

the real work and I was like oh goodness

>> and I said out loud like I don't want I

thought we're just going to like listen

to Grateful Dead today and you know the

person helping me was like no that's not

how this works. You know that. And I'm

thinking, I don't want to do this. I

really And I don't even know what this

is. I just know there's something there

that's important for

>> And I'm like, oh [ __ ] And I think it is

important for people to understand this

cuz it is it can be very, very scary and

you feel it sort of coming at you like a

storm and you can push it away. I could

have spent the entire time listening to

the Grateful Dead. Not a huge Grateful

Dead fan, but you know, people have

encouraged me to listen to it, so I've

been doing it. I like it. But I could

have done that, but I didn't. Instead, I

was like, "Okay."

With those two compounds in me, I was

like, "I can do this. I've got myself

held. Like, I'm my own friend. That's

the impathogen. I can do this." It

wasn't this like, "All right, let's go.

Like, let's fight." And that session

took me through a brutally hard voyage

of thinking about all the things that

didn't happen, all the things that I

would

wish had happened.

>> Mhm.

>> That I was in no position to make happen

for myself. Heavy, gnarly. And coming

through it, it was the perfect thing

because I was like, those are the things

I know I can create now.

>> There is no way, and this is why I feel

it's important to talk about these

compounds. There is no way whatsoever

that a therapist was going to sit down

and go, "Hey,

what's ever on your mind today? Let's

talk about what didn't happen. No one's

ever done that for me." And if they had,

there's no way that I would have been in

the full emotional experience of the

lack

>> or necessarily had access to it

>> or had access to it. Right? So, I give

that as an example. It's certainly not

what everyone would experience, but I'd

never thought about the problem of what

hadn't happened as a as a viable option

to explore. It's so obvious now. But

then the outcome of this brutally hard

session was beautiful. No additional

drug, nothing for and it stayed with me.

This was over well over a year ago. And

I thought, "This is awesome. I can

create these things. I know exactly what

to aim for." And it started to make

steps in my life, you know, steering the

ship in those directions. And not

surprisingly, it's like, "Yeah, I can do

this. I can do these things. I need some

practice." And and so I think that the

medicines, as we think of them, are

immensely powerful, immensely

precarious. You need the support.

I've been told in these sessions, hey,

maybe we don't go there. You don't go

there. that feels like a repeat. You

know, you need someone to help guide

you. These are not to be used

recreationally in my opinion. At least

not for folks like me. You know, I'm

just not interested in that.

>> But the lessons I learned is the

following. Neuroplasticity is the goal.

>> Directed toward something that often

times we can't identify

through standard therapy. Like you would

say, "Oh, I'm trying to resolve my

traumas." That's a sentence. If you

can't know exactly what the thing was

and or even if you can or the things

that happened, what what about the

things that didn't happen? It just never

would have occurred to me. So, it

revealed both the thing that needed work

and allowed me to do a lot of the work

in real time and spit me out the other

end, which is how it felt. You know, I

wasn't cratered coming out the other. I

was like, that was an ass kicking of a

whole other level. And like with a clear

mission in mind of what to do in my

daily life that has served me very, very

well. It also reminded me that we seem

to have this one compound type view and

I'm not suggesting that

polyfarmarmacology is the way but it

turned out in this case was the

appropriate tool for me.