606 - Michael Pollan Discusses Psychedelics

Program Notes

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Guest speaker: Michael Pollan

https://www.amazon.com/Change-Your-Mind-Consciousness-Transcendence/dp/0735224153/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1558203689&sr=8-1Now available in PAPERBACK!

Date this lecture was recorded: June 6, 2018

Today’s program features an interview with Michael Pollan by Michael Margolies from the Psychedelic Seminars project in San Francisco. Pollan is the author of seven previous books which were all New York Times bestsellers. In 2010, TIME magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world. In today’s podcast, Michael turns his attention to the psychedelic renaissance and discusses his most recent book, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence. The book not only documents the characters behind the recent boom in psychedelic science, but Michael also provides some very personal first-person accounts of his own psychedelic experiences.
How to Change Your Mind:
What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About
Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence
by Michael Pollan
The Botany of Desire:
A Plant’s-Eye View of the World Paperback
by Michael Pollan
Joe Rogan Experience #1121 with Michael Pollan

Mike Margolies Website
Psychedelic Seminars
Psychedelic Seminars PATREON Page

Download a free copy of Lorenzo’s latest book
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Transcript

00:00:00 ►

Greetings from cyberdelic space.

00:00:19 ►

This is Lorenzo and I’m your host here in the Psychedelic Salon.

00:00:24 ►

And today, thanks again to fellow salonner Mike Margulies,

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we get to listen to another one of his excellent interviews for the Psychedelic Seminar Series

00:00:33 ►

that he hosts in San Francisco.

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And it’s also live-streamed on the net, by the way.

00:00:39 ►

Today, Michael’s guest is someone who is, well, he’s not only well known here in the psychedelic community,

00:00:45 ►

but is an investigator and author who is well known to another very large audience.

00:00:51 ►

He is Michael Pollan, and if you’ve been with us here in the salon for a while,

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you’ve heard me and several of our guests talk about one of his other best-selling books,

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and, well, a favorite of mine, The Botany of Desire.

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And if you haven’t already read it,

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you owe it to yourself to get a copy. Now, as you most likely know, a year ago this month,

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Michael Pollan published his new book that’s titled How to Change Your Mind, What the New

00:01:18 ►

Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression,

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and Trans transcendence.

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In less than a year, this new book has become a best-selling sensation,

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and until very recently, it hasn’t been available in paperback.

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But now that has changed, and the paperback edition is also out.

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Well, I have to say, this book really turned out to be the right book at the right time.

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And I’m sure that you’re going to find what follows

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to be a really excellent and very informative interview

00:01:49 ►

on more than one level.

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And while a few people may say that Michael Pollan

00:01:55 ►

is relatively new to the psychedelic scene,

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at least if you consider five or six years as new,

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which I don’t,

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well, he nonetheless has tapped into the essence of what the psychedelic

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community has been talking about, exploring, and feeling for a long time. And some of his

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observations I’ve found quite perceptive, particularly coming from one who hasn’t been

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embedded in the scene for decades. Pollan’s observations, I think, carry some interesting

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things that us old-timers may find it worthwhile to think about.

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Personally, I’ve found some of his insights to be, well, they’re things that I miss because I seem to have been walking among these beautiful trees,

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but I hadn’t taken in the fact that, well, we’re in a wonderful forest that they comprise.

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And, well, that’s just my fancy way of saying that I think Michael Pollan has brought some very valuable ideas to the psychedelic community.

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And even though he may not think so himself, I see him as most definitely one of the community, a newcomer no longer.

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And that’s the same thing that happened to each one of us at some time or another.

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So, now let’s listen in on the conversation between the two Michaels.

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Hello. Good evening, everybody.

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Welcome. Welcome.

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My name is Liana Gallulli, and I have the great pleasure of welcoming all of you to the conversation tonight on the new science of psychedelics with Michael Pollan.

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with Michael Pollan.

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I’d also like to thank Psychedelic Seminars and the San Francisco Psychedelic Society

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for supporting this evening.

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And it would behoove me to mention that I also work

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for the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies,

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also known as MAPS.

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And as some of you might know,

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we’re currently in phase three of studies with

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the FDA, studying MDMA to treat PTSD. And if all goes well, which all is so far going quite well,

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we are expecting to have legalized MDMA therapy here in the United States as soon as 2021.

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So thank you guys.

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We’re going to get this thing started.

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I’m so thrilled for this event.

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Thank you very much.

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Thank you.

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So yeah, you’re really in for a treat.

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We’re all in for a treat.

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So we’re going to bring two people to the stage right now

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who have done so much to,

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I don’t even know where to start,

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just to increase awareness

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of the tremendous potential of these medicines

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and the way they’re reshaping our world today,

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and I hope and think are going to continue to do so in a pretty dramatic fashion in the near future.

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So your host for this evening is Mike Margulies, a dear friend of mine.

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Mike is the founder of Psychedelic Seminars.

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He’s also a founder, one of the co-founders of Crypto Psychedelic. He was a

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founder of the Baltimore Psychedelic Society, a co-director of Symposia. And Mike, of course,

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is going to be having a conversation with a man who needs no introduction, Michael Pollan,

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who had five number one New York Times bestsellers, but now that is joined by his

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sixth New York Times bestseller, How to Change Your Mind, what the new science of psychedelics can teach us about,

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let’s see if I can remember all these,

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about death, dying, transcendence, addiction, depression,

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maybe not necessarily in that order, but a great book.

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And so without further ado, please show some love

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to Mike Margulies and Michael Pollan.

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Yeah, thank you.

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Thank you.

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Hey, thank you. Hey, thank you.

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That was great.

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All right.

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If you haven’t seen The Mushroom Cure,

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you’re missing out.

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Yeah, definitely.

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It’s a wonderful show.

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It’s really awesome.

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Adam, you saw how awesome

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he is. I definitely recommend it.

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Thank you all for being here. Thank you everyone who’s

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tuning in live. Out of curiosity,

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how many of you, maybe 10% of you?

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Potential converts.

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Tons of them.

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Yeah, and if you’re

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watching live, we have a hashtag.

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It’s hashtag PallonLive where you can engage with this conversation.

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I’m really excited, actually, to be here with you today.

00:06:12 ►

This book, I think, does a really good job of taking us on your own journey.

00:06:17 ►

It’s got how to change your mind, and I think it’s a statement on yourself and how you changed your own mind.

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Because in the beginning of the book, you start off actually pretty skeptical

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and very material-minded.

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Yeah.

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And as you go through it,

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you sort of talk with the researchers,

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have your own first-hand experiences.

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And by the end of the book,

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you kind of close with a changed mind.

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Yeah.

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No, the journey that this book records

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is a very… It’s a public journey in that it’s a work of science journalism and history.

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But it’s also a personal journey.

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I, you know, I began with the typical journalistic curiosity.

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And I was interviewing people who were participating in these trials at NYU and at Johns Hopkins. We met in Baltimore

00:07:07 ►

when I was doing reporting. Yeah, that’s when we first met. And I was talking to people,

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many of whom who were psychedelically naive, who had had these powerful transformative

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experiences. There were people who were dying. there were cancer patients in some cases, there were smokers, and there were so-called healthy normals.

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And all of them, well not all of them, but about 80% of them had had this very powerful experience that left them changed.

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And as I talked to them, I became intensely curious about how a molecule could account for such a psychological shift.

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You know, a complete change in perspective.

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But over time, I actually grew to envy the people I was interviewing,

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that they had had these big spiritual epiphanies.

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And I’ve never had one.

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I had never had one. I was kind of, I always

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thought of myself as kind of spiritually retarded, and so I got really jealous of them,

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and that’s when I decided that to write about this properly, I would have to educate myself

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and have a series of psychedelic journeys.

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And that those, yeah, they proved to be transformative.

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Yeah, and I actually wanna really zero in on that,

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what you said, the fact that you had your own experiences,

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I think is really crucial for this process.

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There’s one thing to, the data’s great,

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but how can we talk about the psychedelic experience

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without the psychedelic experience?

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And the fact that you’ve written a book that is getting such publicity,

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where you speak very candidly and very vulnerably about your own experiences,

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that gives a lot of space for other people to then come out of the psychedelic closet.

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And that’s been one of the interesting phenomena. I mean, there’s the book,

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and then there’s the reaction to the book, which has actually taught me and other people in the

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community quite a bit about where the culture is. And it’s been fascinating to watch. But the number

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of times I’ve sat with a journalist doing the conventional interview about your new book,

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where they’ve turned off the tape recorder and said, can I tell you a story?

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And they have some really big experience that they haven’t talked to anybody about in like 30 years.

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And it was something that actually still,

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they’re still processing.

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And my writing,

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someone who apparently has a reputation as a affable sane person

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that I was writing about this gave them license to talk about it and I’ve been through this over

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and over and over again with journalists and with people who come to my events

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last night I was in Santa Cruz and this woman came up to me with very large eyes and said, I know exactly what you

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meant. I described this ego dissolving experience I had had and she said,

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I melted into the creek alongside Route 17

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and these goats came up and they were sipping me.

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And now,

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and this was 30 years ago,

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but every time I see a goat,

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her ego dissolves.

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So I don’t know what to do with this, but…

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If you figure it out, let me know.

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Yeah, but I do think that phenomenon

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of coming out of the closet is really important,

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because that’s how you normalize

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things we’ve been through that with you know gay rights and and so many other things that the

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willingness to have a matter-of-fact discussion about something that is considered stigmatized

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or taboo is how you begin to remove that stigma and taboo and um so i’ve been kind of gratified

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that to the extent that I’ve been willing to speak

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in a matter-of-fact way on national television

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or to any audience about this,

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and that people have responded in kind,

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makes me think that there is a shift underway.

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Yeah, yeah.

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And that really resonates with me

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because this is the same reason I got motivated

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to join this community.

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Actually, I don’t know if you know this, but we entered the psychedelic community, at least publicly,

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at nearly an identical time. I did know that.

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Psychedelic Seminars was started in February 2015, which of course is the date…

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When I published my New Yorker piece, yeah.

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Yep, that was the first piece of content ever shared on this Facebook page.

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And I came into this with a very similar motivation as it was sort of like I want

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to live in a world where I had transformative experiences and I wanted

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to not feel shame to speak openly and honestly about my own experiences and so

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you know you have to be the change you want to see so I had to do that and

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create that space for others and lo and behold many organizations at the same

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time actually very synchronously other will other people started similar psychedelic societies in cities all around the world.

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Yeah, I’ve been amazed at this flowering or mushrooming,

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be more appropriate, of psychedelic societies.

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What are there, more than 100 now?

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Yeah, there’s something like 100 of them around the world.

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And if you can go to psychedelic.community,

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you can find them if you search under organizations under psychedelic societies. It’s really tremendous. I think

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there is a shift happening in part because of the research that you document in the book,

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also in part because of the book itself. You’ve obviously put a much more mainstream lens on

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the psychedelic movement. And so one thing I’m really interested to talk with you about here is with this increased awareness of the potential for psychedelics, where can we go wrong with this movement?

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And I don’t mean another crackdown.

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I mean if things stay right on course, what are the potential pitfalls that we might encounter?

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Well, before we go there, I think we should talk about what the potential is, because I don’t know that everybody in the audience realizes.

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At the center of this book is a story about a scientific renaissance.

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And the fact is that, much to my surprise,

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long before Timothy Leary came along in the 60s,

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the 60s has kind of branded psychedelics for most of the culture and

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perhaps many people in the room.

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But long before Timothy Leary had his first transformative experience

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by a pool in Cuernavaca on psilocybin in 1960,

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there had been a decade of really fertile research,

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trying to figure out what these amazing molecules were and could do,

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and then trying to understand how they might be applied therapeutically.

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And so they went through a whole set of changing paradigms,

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and they gradually kind of coalesced around the idea

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that these drugs could be very useful in treating addiction.

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There’s a lot of work on alcoholism in the 50s

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and in treating depression and anxiety.

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And there was, you know, I don’t think people realize,

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but there were 1,000 peer-reviewed papers

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about LSD and psilocybin before 1965,

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and there were something like 40,000 research subjects,

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six international conferences on LSD.

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It was considered a psychiatric wonder drug

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among many people in the psychiatric establishment.

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And this research died basically,

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it faded out after the counterculture embraced psychedelics

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and there was a moral panic around them and lots of horror stories, many of which we’ve all heard

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and I believed, frankly, most of them when I started this work.

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And then the research resumed.

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And this happened, I mean I’m making it sound way too simple, it took a lot of work to get it off the ground

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to get the FDA and the DEA to approve it.

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And there are people in this room who helped push it forward

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against tremendous odds.

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But beginning in the late 90s,

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you once again had this resumption of serious,

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and I’m talking about rigorous,

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controlled trials of psilocybin especially,

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because LSD was still, you know, for two reasons.

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LSD was much more controversial,

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much more likely to run into a political buzzsaw than psilocybin, which most politicians have never

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heard of. And also that, frankly, LSD takes too long. You know, you’d have to have pay overtime

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to all your therapists if they’re guiding an LSD trip, whereas psilocybin kind of fits into the workday pretty well.

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So there have been a series of trials,

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and there’s a lot of really good data.

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It’s still preliminary, and there are many more steps.

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There’s more Phase II trials, there are Phase III trials that have to happen before the FDA will approve it.

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But that’s the path we’re on.

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And by the way, that path was marked by MAPS,

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the organization, and Rick Doblin,

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who made a study of the,

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who made a study, he went to Harvard to get a PhD

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in government or administration,

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so he could really understand what you had to do

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to get a drug through the FDA.

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And he charted the path that both psilocybin

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and MDMA are on right now.

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We’re getting psychedelic here.

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Yeah. yeah um the best laugh of the night is the mics i know um so yeah i think you know rick is a great example actually of someone who uh the impact an individual can have, really, in really pushing something forward. Also, Bob Jesse, who’s in the audience here tonight.

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Yeah, Bob is less well-known than Rick.

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Maybe not anymore, because he’s the main character.

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He gives many fewer interviews than Rick.

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Spends much more time off the record than Rick.

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But he has been a key mover.

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And when the history is written, in fact fact the history was written in my book,

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he is a very important player who’s never sought any recognition for his work, who has

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really helped drive forward, especially the work on psilocybin and the work being done

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at Johns Hopkins in particular.

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Yeah, and I’m actually very glad that he is someone who’s showcased in Chapter One. I know Bob was probably

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shy about it but I’ve told him if there’s anybody I’m happy that they have

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a more of a platform now it’s Bob. So I definitely have a lot of respect for the

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work he’s done and you kind of compared Bob and Rick as kind of like very

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different personality types. Opposites, yeah.

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But both very important in moving this forward.

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And so now we’re on this path for FDA approval.

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So you wanted to know what could go wrong.

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Yeah.

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And specifically, I would love for you to draw on your prior experience writing about food.

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Yeah.

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And we have.

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Well, we worked that out.

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That’s why I moved on.

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Yeah, right.

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We’ve worked that out.

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Well, we worked that out. That’s why I moved on to psychedelics.

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We’ve worked that out.

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So, as you’ve documented in a lot of your prior work,

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there are a lot of issues in the food industry.

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And so if we think about the prospect of mainstreaming psychedelics and a psychedelic industry emerging, for-profit psychedelic businesses,

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what are the potential pitfalls?

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And I’d like to, in particular,

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give some examples here. So we’re in a path where psilocybin can be FDA approved. Here’s the

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asterisk. It’s got to be synthetic psilocybin, not from a mushroom. It’s got to be GMP grade. It’s

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got to be given to you by a doctor. It’s got to be given to you indoors in a clinic. So we might

00:19:03 ►

have access to psychedelics, but you can’t grow your

00:19:06 ►

own mushrooms. You can’t forage your own mushrooms. People like Paul Corbett, we ran an article about

00:19:11 ►

him in Symposia. He was arrested for picking wild mushrooms. That’ll still happen. You won’t be able

00:19:17 ►

to even trip outdoors. This to me is kind of like, well, you can buy potatoes and eggs from Monsanto, but you can’t own a chicken

00:19:26 ►

or a garden. But you can. People do own chickens and they do own gardens. And, you know,

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so the monopoly is not a very perfect monopoly. And I don’t think personal and private use of

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mushrooms will go away because there is FDA approved use of it.

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And I think it’s important to realize, I mean, so I’m not as terrified of that scenario as

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you are.

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I think that, I think it’s really important that you have the, that medical path, even

00:20:01 ►

if it is a pharmaceutical path.

00:20:03 ►

Yes.

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Because that will make the, let’s, and we’re all, this is all assuming that the therapy proves

00:20:09 ►

out in phase three trials and gets approved by the FDA. So we’re kind of

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assuming that. It’s a big assumption. But that if it is approved in a medical

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setting and doctors can prescribe it, the upside is there’ll be wide access.

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Anybody with health insurance will be able to be covered by it.

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So it becomes a little less elite and a little more accessible.

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And that’s a real positive.

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What does the pharmaceutical industry do with psilocybin?

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I think it’s a kind of a reach for them.

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You know, the problems with

00:20:47 ►

Merck or some big company getting into psychedelics are many. One is, where’s

00:20:53 ►

your intellectual property? I mean, these mushrooms grow anywhere and even the

00:20:58 ►

molecule… You can patent biology now, right? Well, you can, but not this

00:21:04 ►

molecule. You can patent a delivery system,

00:21:06 ►

a manufacturing method. But the fact is, it’s hard to get your hands around and have that kind of

00:21:13 ►

control. Same with LSD. That’s off patent also. And so that may be one of the reasons that big

00:21:21 ►

pharma doesn’t so far appear to have any interest.

00:21:25 ►

Here’s the other big problem.

00:21:27 ►

Psychedelic therapy is a one-time or a two-time or maybe a three-time thing.

00:21:33 ►

It’s not a pill you take every day.

00:21:35 ►

And they’re in the business of selling pills people have to take every day, like SSRIs,

00:21:40 ►

antidepressants.

00:21:41 ►

So how do you make money if you’re selling two or three pills to somebody over the course of a lifetime? Sell microdoses. Well, microdosing… I just gave an idea.

00:21:50 ►

Microdosing is probably a better idea for the pharmaceutical industry. The

00:21:54 ►

problem with microdosing is no one has any idea if it’s real or not. There’s

00:21:58 ►

there’s no science on microdosing. There’s science coming now actually.

00:22:01 ►

Some is going to be done. Beckley has proposed to do it. I don’t know if that’s going to get off the ground,

00:22:06 ►

but there’s a couple other things going on around the world,

00:22:08 ►

and maybe in a year or two we’ll have…

00:22:10 ►

One of the reasons I didn’t go into great detail on microdosing

00:22:13 ►

is that there’s no good science about it yet.

00:22:18 ►

It could be all placebo effect,

00:22:20 ►

and there’s nothing wrong with that,

00:22:21 ►

and I hope the research doesn’t louse up your placebo effect.

00:22:21 ►

And there’s nothing wrong with that.

00:22:24 ►

And I hope the research doesn’t louse up your placebo effect.

00:22:30 ►

But yes, there is a pill you take several times a week.

00:22:32 ►

You can sell that.

00:22:34 ►

I can see it in little packs like birth control pills.

00:22:38 ►

With every third, there’s a couple sugar pills,

00:22:39 ►

and then you get your microdose pill.

00:22:46 ►

So will the pharmaceutical industry jump in? The other problem with it is it’s not really simply a drug.

00:22:52 ►

And we call it psychedelic therapy, but we really should call it psychedelic assisted psychotherapy.

00:22:58 ►

And that’s usually what MAPS is calling it now.

00:23:00 ►

Yeah, they do.

00:23:01 ►

Although in some of the studies, it’s interesting to watch how the researchers play this.

00:23:04 ►

Yeah, they do. Although in some of the studies, it’s interesting to watch how the researchers play this.

00:23:11 ►

When they’re doing the studies that are part of the drug trials, they try to play down the role of the guide.

00:23:14 ►

And frankly, the role of the psychedelic guide is central.

00:23:25 ►

I mean, these drugs are so powerfully affected by set and setting that it is only in the company of somebody you really trust, who knows the territory,

00:23:28 ►

that someone can have the, you know,

00:23:29 ►

surrender to the experience in a way that it can make it productive.

00:23:31 ►

Yeah.

00:23:32 ►

And so really it’s a package that’s being tested.

00:23:36 ►

And that’s weird for the industry

00:23:39 ►

or even the medical system.

00:23:41 ►

You know, normally we have talk therapy over here

00:23:43 ►

and we have, you know,

00:23:45 ►

psychoactive drug therapy over here. But we’re gonna have to combine them in

00:23:49 ►

this very novel package which is exciting and you know we never should

00:23:54 ►

have separated the mind and the brain right I mean this brings them back

00:23:57 ►

together but that too is like how do even the psychiatrist work that out you

00:24:03 ►

know you it’s all day with two therapists

00:24:05 ►

or at least two people in the room.

00:24:08 ►

So all that is going to have to be figured out.

00:24:11 ►

And I think these are real challenges.

00:24:14 ►

So, you know, before the Merck’s of the world

00:24:16 ►

or the Johnson & Johnson get involved,

00:24:18 ►

I think there’s going to be probably much more activity

00:24:21 ►

in the nonprofit sector.

00:24:23 ►

And so far, you know, it’s been nonprofit money

00:24:26 ►

that has charitable contributions that has funded most of the work.

00:24:30 ►

It’s amazing to have a drug going through this process

00:24:33 ►

without a big corporation behind it.

00:24:36 ►

But that’s what we’re seeing.

00:24:38 ►

Yeah.

00:24:38 ►

And a lot of contributions from people in this city in particular.

00:24:42 ►

There are probably a lot of MAPS donors in this room as well.

00:24:44 ►

MAPS donors and other people who are

00:24:46 ►

supporting, there’s something called the

00:24:48 ►

Psychedelic Science

00:24:49 ►

Funding Collaborative,

00:24:52 ►

which is a relatively new

00:24:53 ►

organization that is

00:24:56 ►

collecting donations

00:24:57 ►

and has had great success.

00:25:00 ►

And enough money has been raised to actually

00:25:02 ►

get through the whole drug

00:25:04 ►

trial process.

00:25:06 ►

That’s amazing.

00:25:12 ►

But going back to your question about the problems ahead,

00:25:18 ►

one of the questions that Bob Jesse sensitized me to is,

00:25:22 ►

what about people who are not mentally ill who stand to benefit from these drugs?

00:25:25 ►

This beautiful phrase, the betterment of well people. How can we serve those people? And does that argue for outright legalization or

00:25:33 ►

decriminalization or what? Yeah. And I think this kind of gets back to maybe the core of what I was

00:25:42 ►

getting. You mentioned access. And I guess to clarify my earlier statements, don’t get me wrong.

00:25:47 ►

I support the FDA research by all means.

00:25:49 ►

I want to see those FDA-approved containers for medical, therapeutic use of psychedelics to exist.

00:25:55 ►

My concern is if they become the exclusive containers in a new priest class that controls access to psychedelics.

00:26:02 ►

And as you know, thinking about access, right, our medical system as it is, is pretty broken. And there isn’t equal access to medicine. And the war on drugs itself

00:26:10 ►

is a war on medicine in many ways, as we’re seeing with how, you know, the schedule one drugs

00:26:16 ►

arguably are, you know, that have no medical use are arguably the things with the most medical use.

00:26:20 ►

Yeah, and the least potential for abuse. Yeah, and the least potential for abuse. This is the

00:26:23 ►

big irony of our situation.

00:26:26 ►

And in many ways, I mean, let’s look at cannabis as an example.

00:26:29 ►

I see a lot of issues with cannabis in particular

00:26:31 ►

with respect to questions like access,

00:26:34 ►

even in places where there’s legalization,

00:26:36 ►

because you can go and buy cannabis from the legalized distributor,

00:26:39 ►

but I can’t even buy weed for my neighbor.

00:26:42 ►

There’s no farmer’s markets for weed.

00:26:41 ►

I can’t even buy weed for my neighbor.

00:26:44 ►

I can’t have, there’s no farmer’s markets for weed.

00:26:50 ►

And do we, you know, is this the best model that we can come up with?

00:26:52 ►

And I guess I’m putting, I don’t know the answer to this question,

00:26:53 ►

but I’m putting it out there.

00:26:56 ►

Like, are there better models and where we don’t,

00:27:02 ►

where we create safe access to containers to have an experience with it, it is important to have an experienced facilitator,

00:27:04 ►

but can we do that without criminalizing other methods, without putting people into prisons for

00:27:10 ►

picking mushrooms, et cetera? And I don’t know the answer to this. Yeah, I don’t either. I mean,

00:27:15 ►

I do think that it should be decriminalized. I don’t think that that’s a, I think, picking your

00:27:21 ►

own mushrooms. But I also think that the cannabis model,

00:27:26 ►

which is kind of like that we see in California,

00:27:29 ►

might not be right here.

00:27:32 ►

Just because my own experience

00:27:34 ►

and interviewing dozens of people

00:27:36 ►

who’ve been through psychedelic therapy

00:27:40 ►

is that these drugs are uniquely powerful

00:27:44 ►

and that the role of the guide is very important

00:27:48 ►

to a successful experience. It’s not to say people haven’t had terrific experiences,

00:27:55 ►

you know, taking mushrooms or LSD and, you know, going to, I just talked to someone who went to a

00:27:59 ►

festival last weekend and had a fantastic experience. That’s all true.

00:28:08 ►

But there is another kind of experience people have too.

00:28:12 ►

Given a poor set and setting,

00:28:15 ►

and set is your internal environment

00:28:17 ►

and your external environment setting,

00:28:21 ►

people have experiences that really rock them psychologically and leave people in a really bad place.

00:28:28 ►

And so how do you mitigate that risk?

00:28:31 ►

And I do think that the idea of a guide,

00:28:34 ►

a trained guide, is a very important way.

00:28:36 ►

Absolutely.

00:28:36 ►

You know, the big lesson,

00:28:39 ►

part of the issue with psychedelics in our society

00:28:42 ►

is they kind of burst upon our culture in the 50s and 60s

00:28:46 ►

without any preparation.

00:28:47 ►

Suddenly, these incredibly powerful, interesting molecules show up.

00:28:53 ►

Psilocybin is discovered in Mexico

00:28:55 ►

by the first Westerner, Gordon Wasson, in 1955.

00:28:59 ►

He writes a big article in Life magazine,

00:29:01 ►

and suddenly people want it and descend on this town in Mexico.

00:29:06 ►

And then LSD is discovered or really tried out in the 40s and becomes this drug of research.

00:29:14 ►

But we got the molecule without the package. We got the molecule without the traditions,

00:29:20 ►

the rituals, the ceremonies. The rites of passage. Yeah, the rites of passage. So if you look back,

00:29:21 ►

the rituals, the ceremonies.

00:29:22 ►

The rites of passage.

00:29:23 ►

Yeah, the rites of passage.

00:29:26 ►

So if you look back, the history of psychedelics,

00:29:30 ►

which is so much older than the 50s and 60s in America and Europe,

00:29:36 ►

you see that many cultures use these drugs, these medicines,

00:29:40 ►

in a very carefully designed context.

00:29:42 ►

You never see people using them alone. And this is whether we’re talking about ancient Greece Siberia

00:29:45 ►

the Amazon

00:29:47 ►

Central America

00:29:49 ►

they never used the drugs alone

00:29:51 ►

it was always with elders or shamans

00:29:54 ►

or curanderas

00:29:56 ►

presiding and there was always

00:29:58 ►

ceremony and ritual

00:29:59 ►

and there’s a reason for that

00:30:02 ►

it’s not just superstition

00:30:04 ►

it’s the fact that there was enormous respect and there’s a reason for that. It’s not just superstition.

00:30:08 ►

It’s the fact that there was enormous respect for the power of these medicines

00:30:11 ►

and that they shouldn’t be used carelessly.

00:30:13 ►

It was a capital crime in Greece.

00:30:17 ►

The Greeks had what we think is a psychedelic ceremony

00:30:21 ►

once a year, the Eleusian Mysteries

00:30:24 ►

and there was a potion they took that appears to have been a psychedelic ceremony once a year, the Eleusian Mysteries,

00:30:28 ►

and there was a potion they took that appears to have been a psychedelic.

00:30:29 ►

It allowed people to travel to the underworld

00:30:32 ►

and meet the dead and enter other realms.

00:30:36 ►

You could only use this medicine in that ceremony,

00:30:40 ►

and it was a capital crime.

00:30:42 ►

You could be executed for using it recreationally

00:30:45 ►

and I use that word advisedly.

00:30:50 ►

So there was a reason for all that

00:30:53 ►

and the kind of individualistic use

00:30:59 ►

that we’ve pioneered in the West

00:31:02 ►

may not be the best.

00:31:04 ►

So I think we have to be open to that

00:31:06 ►

and be willing to learn from history.

00:31:08 ►

Absolutely, and I’ve been that guy

00:31:10 ►

who took psychedelics in the wrong context.

00:31:13 ►

I was the guy paranoid at Burning Man.

00:31:15 ►

Too paranoid to even go to the Zendo Project.

00:31:20 ►

Whereas when I did psychedelics,

00:31:23 ►

I actually was a participant at Johns Hopkins.

00:31:35 ►

And in that setting, with Mary Casamano, who’s probably facilitated more trips than anybody in the modern period of research.

00:31:37 ►

She’s a key figure.

00:31:43 ►

Yes, which reflects what you were getting at before, the importance of the facilitator in that, and it’s the importance

00:31:45 ►

of a facilitator who can take on a passive role, but it’s almost active passive, you know,

00:31:51 ►

someone who is not guiding your experience, but they are able to, but there is a really active

00:31:57 ►

holding of space there. Yeah, and that jargon, you know, is, I mean, it’s actually pretty accurate i mean it’s it’s to my ear it sounds a holding

00:32:06 ►

space um but but there but i i came to appreciate it because what’s happening in these experiences

00:32:14 ►

is a um when it’s a high dose therapeutic experience you you are um your ego may well

00:32:21 ►

be dissolving and with it your right? We have these defenses that

00:32:26 ►

serve us. They get in our way, too, but they serve us. And to feel comfortable putting down

00:32:33 ►

all your defenses, you have to feel really safe. And if you do that in the wrong setting, and you

00:32:40 ►

fight to hold on to your sense of self and your defenses is when you get paranoid and have a really awful experience.

00:32:48 ►

So it takes a certain skill.

00:32:50 ►

It takes a certain compassion.

00:32:52 ►

And Mary Cosimano has it more than probably anybody

00:32:54 ►

to create that space where you feel comfortable enough

00:33:00 ►

to put down every defense you have built up over the course of your life.

00:33:04 ►

It’s a huge gesture of trust. great things can come from it but it will only come

00:33:09 ►

in the right setting. Yeah and I think you know to get back to the question of

00:33:16 ►

yeah the importance of the guides and how do we how do we reconcile this right

00:33:21 ►

with a decriminalization and I like I may be borrowing this idea from somebody,

00:33:25 ►

but I think about scuba diving.

00:33:26 ►

I scuba dive.

00:33:28 ►

You always have a buddy, right?

00:33:30 ►

You always have a buddy.

00:33:31 ►

But let’s say, hypothetically,

00:33:32 ►

I was going to strap on a scuba tank,

00:33:34 ►

jump in the water without a license.

00:33:36 ►

Very dangerous thing to do.

00:33:37 ►

But you wouldn’t need police to come and arrest me

00:33:40 ►

for doing that.

00:33:41 ►

It’s just known in the culture

00:33:43 ►

that scuba diving is dangerous.

00:33:45 ►

Scuba diving is dangerous. So if you’re going to go scuba diving, you should get a training. You

00:33:49 ►

should get a certification. And the people won’t take you on a dive if you haven’t gotten the

00:33:52 ►

safety training. You don’t need to enforce that with prisons, but you enforce it with education.

00:33:58 ►

And you don’t enforce it, but you just use education. And I think there’s a, and so which

00:34:03 ►

gets me to, with psychedelics, what’s the best way

00:34:06 ►

that we can create an alternative model? Well, let’s talk about the risks of psychedelics. Let’s

00:34:11 ►

make it more culturally known. Like, there is obviously tremendous positive potential, which

00:34:15 ►

is not to be downplayed whatsoever in all these studies. But I think if we have a respect and an

00:34:22 ►

awareness for the risks of psychedelics and what can go wrong,

00:34:25 ►

that’s where we just culturally create.

00:34:26 ►

It’s like anyone who’s thinking about doing it, yeah, of course,

00:34:28 ►

you should go see someone who’s trained to do this thing.

00:34:31 ►

And embed that in the culture, the importance of that facilitator.

00:34:36 ►

Yeah, I think so.

00:34:37 ►

And also there are lots of people who don’t want to be underground with whatever they do

00:34:42 ►

and would feel so much more comfortable if there were such a thing as a licensed psychedelic guide who could prescribe or perhaps worked

00:34:49 ►

in an institution that had an MD involved who could do the prescription.

00:34:55 ►

Talk about access, that opens it up to lots of people who aren’t comfortable buying drugs

00:35:00 ►

underground and not being sure of the strength of what they’re getting.

00:35:08 ►

So I can definitely see a situation where we have such people.

00:35:14 ►

And in fact, CIIS in this city, the California Institute for Integral Studies, has a training program now to train psychedelic guides, most of whom will work in these trials, these drug

00:35:20 ►

trials that are going to be happening.

00:35:22 ►

But I attended this

00:35:25 ►

several of their sessions

00:35:27 ►

and there are people who see this as

00:35:30 ►

a profession that they want to

00:35:31 ►

enter. How amazing.

00:35:34 ►

I mean, five years ago, you can’t

00:35:36 ►

imagine something like this. Yeah, and

00:35:38 ►

there’s certainly no shortage of need

00:35:40 ►

here. No, I think there’s

00:35:42 ►

going to be an explosion of demand.

00:35:43 ►

And I think it’s, I mean, if you talk about things that can go wrong, my worry is that so many, as

00:35:48 ►

people learn more about the science, and as more science is done, the demand for

00:35:56 ►

psychedelic assisted psychotherapy will be so great that it will overwhelm the

00:36:02 ►

number of guides we have, with the result that you’ll have lots of charlatans appearing,

00:36:07 ►

hanging out shingles, saying, I’m a psychedelic guide.

00:36:12 ►

And, you know, bad things can happen.

00:36:15 ►

I mean, I talked about how vulnerable you are.

00:36:19 ►

Imagine the opportunities for sexual abuse.

00:36:22 ►

And this is actually happening today.

00:36:24 ►

People go to Peru for ayahuasca.

00:36:26 ►

And bad things happen.

00:36:27 ►

Yes, this is a major issue in the community right now, actually.

00:36:30 ►

Yeah, so it’s not going to be simple.

00:36:33 ►

But this is cultural innovation.

00:36:36 ►

I mean, we’ll learn in the same way

00:36:39 ►

those traditional cultures gradually learn

00:36:43 ►

to create the proper container for the

00:36:46 ►

psychedelic experience our culture needs to do that work too and it may not be

00:36:50 ►

simply the medical container right you know the white what I call white coat

00:36:55 ►

shamanism and we have our own shamans they’re called doctors and and that makes

00:37:00 ►

some people very comfortable but that it to me, would be a little too limited.

00:37:05 ►

Yeah, I agree.

00:37:07 ►

Can I ask you some tough questions?

00:37:09 ►

Yeah, sure.

00:37:10 ►

All right.

00:37:11 ►

Oh, these have been so easy.

00:37:12 ►

I want to address, because a lot of people in the audience today are actually

00:37:16 ►

from the psychedelic community, and people have been working in this community for some

00:37:21 ►

time.

00:37:22 ►

And so there’s been criticisms that have come back towards you.

00:37:28 ►

And I’d like to just give you the opportunity to address directly.

00:37:29 ►

So the first of which being,

00:37:34 ►

why do we care about what Michael Pollan has to say about this?

00:37:38 ►

He’s an outsider, so to speak, from this psychedelic space.

00:37:40 ►

The things in the book have been talked about before.

00:37:43 ►

Why is everyone so excited now?

00:37:45 ►

And why should we listen to your angle on this whole thing? Well, nobody has to. Was anyone coerced to come today or to buy my book?

00:37:54 ►

You know, I am an outsider. This book is written from the perspective of someone who was fairly

00:38:00 ►

psychedelically naive, who got interested and entered this community.

00:38:10 ►

There is a perspective, though, that the newcomer has that no one else ever has again.

00:38:13 ►

I mean, I learned this a long time ago as a writer.

00:38:21 ►

One of the most influential books I read when I was 13 was a book called Paper Lion by George Plimpton.

00:38:22 ►

Anybody know who that is?

00:38:23 ►

Yeah, okay. So he was also the editor of the

00:38:26 ►

Paris Review, and he reinvented sports writing by, instead of just being on the sideline chomping on

00:38:32 ►

a cigar, he decided he was going to train with the Detroit Lions, and he persuaded them to do it,

00:38:37 ►

and actually play quarterback in a scrimmage game during summer training, summer training. And that gave him a perspective that

00:38:47 ►

not only the sideline sports writers had never had, but the players had never had, because they

00:38:54 ►

took it for granted. They’ve been playing football their whole life. They were used to getting their

00:38:57 ►

heads bashed in. You know, that was normal. I don’t mean to liken any of you to, you know,

00:39:04 ►

football players getting their heads bashed in,

00:39:06 ►

but the fact is there’s something about first sight, first experience,

00:39:11 ►

that opens up something that you never recapture again.

00:39:15 ►

So I think my newness to the experience contributes something,

00:39:21 ►

and it certainly allowed me to write about it in a way that is hard to do if

00:39:27 ►

you have a lot of experience. And then there is the fact that I come, you know, that most books

00:39:33 ►

about psychedelics, and I don’t say this to criticize them, have been written from within

00:39:39 ►

the community. And I have to tell you, to people outside the community, those books might be written in another language.

00:39:46 ►

They’re Greek to a lot of people.

00:39:51 ►

So my reluctance, the fact that I had so much resistance I had to overcome,

00:39:59 ►

I mean, fear of the drugs, distaste for the music,

00:40:04 ►

fear of the drugs, distaste for the music,

00:40:11 ►

reluctance about the new age lingo.

00:40:13 ►

I mean, there were so many things I had to get over that I think that creates a perspective

00:40:18 ►

or becomes a door for people in the mainstream

00:40:21 ►

to take a look at this world.

00:40:24 ►

So to me, I think that’s the value added of having someone who’s not an expert.

00:40:30 ►

And also as a writer, I don’t like writing as an expert.

00:40:33 ►

One of the reasons I left food is I’d become an expert.

00:40:36 ►

And it’s much more fun to write at the beginning of the learning curve

00:40:41 ►

and let your readers learn with you.

00:40:44 ►

Yes. And bring them on

00:40:46 ►

the journey instead of completing the journey and then standing up and lecturing them. And that’s

00:40:51 ►

all, that’s a whole other way to write. And it’s not what I do. I totally agree with that. And I

00:40:55 ►

want to add to that as well. You spent, what, four years researching this book? Yeah. Talking to

00:41:00 ►

researchers around the world, taking psychedelics yourself, that’s nothing to scoff at here.

00:41:05 ►

You spent four years researching this community.

00:41:07 ►

No, it’s true.

00:41:08 ►

I still don’t think I’m an expert.

00:41:10 ►

I mean, I still have a lot to learn.

00:41:13 ►

But also, even those people in the community,

00:41:16 ►

some of them know about the history, some of them don’t.

00:41:20 ►

Some of them know about the neuroscience, some of them don’t.

00:41:23 ►

So I think that even for people in the community,

00:41:26 ►

there’s material that may be unfamiliar.

00:41:30 ►

So you don’t have the depth of these experts, but a breadth of knowledge.

00:41:34 ►

I think there’s value in that.

00:41:35 ►

I’m a generalist.

00:41:37 ►

I also bring the perspective of someone who’s worked on plants for a very long time

00:41:42 ►

and has been interested in nature.

00:41:44 ►

And I put this in the context, people who wonder how I got from food to psychedelics,

00:41:49 ►

well, they’re both about nature.

00:41:50 ►

They’re things we take into our body that change us.

00:41:54 ►

We change them in the process.

00:41:56 ►

And it’s part of our engagement with the natural world, which is fundamentally my topic as a writer.

00:42:01 ►

Food is one branch on that tree.

00:42:03 ►

Psychedelics and psychoactive drugs in

00:42:06 ►

particular are another. Yeah. And another thing I had a character who recurs in your book is Huxley.

00:42:11 ►

Yeah. And he was called on, he’s a writer. He was called on to like put language to things. Right.

00:42:16 ►

And I think in many ways you’re operating as our kind of modern Huxley here. Yeah. Getting language

00:42:21 ►

to things like from particular one piece of language I really appreciated was you talk about

00:42:26 ►

the need for additional first-person pronouns.

00:42:28 ►

Yeah.

00:42:29 ►

Well, there is a strange thing that happens

00:42:31 ►

to your first-person pronoun, and you realize

00:42:33 ►

the limitations of our language.

00:42:36 ►

I say at some point,

00:42:38 ►

and I beheld my

00:42:39 ►

ego turning into a

00:42:42 ►

sheaf of little post-its,

00:42:44 ►

and like, wait, who beheld that?

00:42:47 ►

How can you behold yourself?

00:42:49 ►

And there is this separation of yourself

00:42:53 ►

into these parts that can happen

00:42:56 ►

that really strains our language

00:42:58 ►

because our language was not written

00:43:00 ►

to describe psychedelic experience.

00:43:03 ►

And yeah, so that’s the other,

00:43:04 ►

that’s the toolkit I bring.

00:43:06 ►

I’m a writer,

00:43:07 ►

and when you tell me something’s ineffable,

00:43:09 ►

that’s when I want to F it.

00:43:11 ►

That’s when I get really interested.

00:43:14 ►

And so, and you know, look,

00:43:18 ►

writing about trips is really difficult.

00:43:20 ►

Just go on Arrowhead,

00:43:21 ►

and you’ll see how difficult it is.

00:43:22 ►

It is.

00:43:24 ►

And so, you know, having been a writer for, you know, 35 years,

00:43:30 ►

it was really an interesting challenge.

00:43:33 ►

And I love that challenge.

00:43:34 ►

And I had more fun writing those passages in this book

00:43:38 ►

than I’ve ever had writing.

00:43:41 ►

I mean, you can judge whether they succeed,

00:43:43 ►

but it was an interesting literary challenge. And mean, you can judge whether they succeed, but it was an interesting literary

00:43:45 ►

challenge. And so anyway. Yeah. So my second tough question for you. Yeah. One of the main

00:43:52 ►

criticisms coming from the psychedelic community is people have observed that many of the characters

00:43:57 ►

in the book are people that look like me and you. White men are dominating the narrative. So

00:44:02 ►

there’s questions around voices of women

00:44:05 ►

and indigenous perspectives. Can you speak to these critics? Yeah, I mean the

00:44:12 ►

psychedelic world is very white and male in America. Yes. And I’ve noticed that

00:44:16 ►

from the beginning. Most of the, you know, people you, most of the researchers are

00:44:24 ►

white male, most of the scientists, which was my focus.

00:44:28 ►

And you look at the history, and most of the big characters in the history have been white men.

00:44:34 ►

Do I perpetuate that by writing about them? I guess I do.

00:44:39 ►

There are some really important female characters in this book, though though and some of them people of color. Maria Sabina for example

00:44:46 ►

the woman who turned on

00:44:48 ►

Gordon Wasson and

00:44:49 ►

really led to

00:44:51 ►

brought psilocybin

00:44:53 ►

to the west inadvertently

00:44:55 ►

and that was

00:44:57 ►

not a happy story for

00:44:59 ►

her.

00:45:01 ►

In the end that

00:45:03 ►

led to essentially the destruction of her little village in Oaxaca

00:45:09 ►

as celebrities descended and her house was burned down by people in the village. They were so mad at

00:45:17 ►

her. She regretted having done it. But anyway, there’s a very important woman of color in this narrative.

00:45:27 ►

Of the guides I work with, I work with three guides, two of them were women.

00:45:29 ►

Mary, one of them, is really kind of the hero of the book

00:45:33 ►

in many ways.

00:45:35 ►

Are there women that I overlooked?

00:45:37 ►

I’m sure there are.

00:45:39 ►

And some of that is no doubt a result of my perspective,

00:45:45 ►

but a lot of it is a result of my perspective,

00:45:48 ►

but a lot of it is a result of the history that I was writing about.

00:45:51 ►

You could write an alternative history of psychedelics,

00:45:55 ►

and you could talk all about Albert Hoffman’s assistant and Gordon Wasson’s wife.

00:45:58 ►

And, you know, so is there a feminist history of psychedelics to be written?

00:46:03 ►

I hope so, and I hope somebody writes it. You know, this is not the last history of psychedelics to be written? I hope so, and I hope somebody writes it.

00:46:06 ►

This is not the last book on psychedelics.

00:46:10 ►

I think these other perspectives need to be told.

00:46:14 ►

I’m not the best person to tell them, perhaps,

00:46:16 ►

but I hope there are many more books to be written

00:46:19 ►

from a variety of perspectives.

00:46:21 ►

In terms of indigenous peoples,

00:46:26 ►

it’s funny, someone stood up in Cambridge and said something that I found really upsetting. This was the second day of

00:46:33 ►

my book tour. This woman stands up from the Boston and Theogen Network, maybe she’s watching,

00:46:39 ►

and she says, as the de facto leader of the psychedelic community, or the psychedelic movement. I was like,

00:46:47 ►

really? And, you know, and Rick Doblin was in the room, the real leader. And I turned to him, and I

00:46:53 ►

made him stand up and absorb all this weird juju. And then she went on to say, you know,

00:47:03 ►

how do you answer the criticism that there aren’t more African Americans in the psychedelic community?

00:47:08 ►

Actually, she said more people of color.

00:47:10 ►

And there actually are quite a few people of color if you’re willing to go beyond the borders of America

00:47:15 ►

and look at people in South America and Central America and, you know, the shamanic tradition.

00:47:21 ►

There are tons of people of color involved in ayahuasca, for example.

00:47:25 ►

But I think she was thinking about African Americans.

00:47:27 ►

And that’s a really interesting question.

00:47:29 ►

I would get the same question about food.

00:47:32 ►

Why don’t we have more people of color

00:47:34 ►

involved in the food movement?

00:47:36 ►

And they’re legitimate questions.

00:47:39 ►

But first, I’m not a leader.

00:47:41 ►

I mean, you just made the point.

00:47:43 ►

I’m a newcomer.

00:47:43 ►

How can I be a leader?

00:47:46 ►

I don’t know enough to advocate. I’m not a leader. I mean, you just made the point. I’m a newcomer. How can I be a leader? I don’t know enough to advocate.

00:47:48 ►

I’m still learning.

00:47:50 ►

But people are hungry for leadership, definitely.

00:47:54 ►

So anyway, my focus though, I think,

00:47:58 ►

I wasn’t trying to write the comprehensive history

00:48:01 ►

of psychedelics in the world.

00:48:03 ►

I was really writing, at the center of this book

00:48:05 ►

is a renaissance of scientific research,

00:48:07 ►

western scientific research.

00:48:10 ►

I’m interested in the shamanic tradition

00:48:12 ►

insofar as it influences that.

00:48:17 ►

And so I go off from that spine,

00:48:20 ►

but that spine is science, and that science

00:48:22 ►

is pretty white and pretty male.

00:48:25 ►

So let’s, actually let’s talk about the science here, That spine is science, and that science is pretty white and pretty male.

00:48:28 ►

Actually, let’s talk about the science here,

00:48:31 ►

and specifically as it relates to some of your prior work in food.

00:48:34 ►

You talked about things like nutritionism,

00:48:39 ►

and we got into this weird point with food where we invented white bread,

00:48:43 ►

where we took things out, and then we realized, oh, we took out the healthy things. And then we had nutrient-enriched white bread.

00:48:46 ►

And so, as you put it, you put the problem and the solution in the same package.

00:48:50 ►

Same neat package, yeah.

00:48:52 ►

And so the point being that we had all this clever science, but maybe all along nature had it right to begin with.

00:48:58 ►

So let’s make an analogy here to mushrooms.

00:49:01 ►

We’re doing all this research on psilocybin.

00:49:03 ►

Is it possible that if we focus on this one nutrient, the psilocybin, are we missing something important

00:49:08 ►

in the whole mushroom? It’s completely possible. I don’t know the answer for sure. I mean, there are

00:49:12 ►

actually two chemicals in psilocybin. There’s psilocin and psilocybin, but there may be other

00:49:17 ►

compounds too, and they may be relevant. And they, and also there may be different compounds that,

00:49:22 ►

you know, psilocybin cubensis, which is the main mushroom most people use,

00:49:28 ►

is only one of 150 different psilocybin species.

00:49:33 ►

Does azoressins have other stuff in it?

00:49:34 ►

It seems to have some slightly different effects.

00:49:38 ►

And we know this in cannabis, right?

00:49:40 ►

We know there are two famous cannabinoids, THC and CBD,

00:49:44 ►

but there are many, many more.

00:49:47 ►

When people started fooling around with beta-carotene,

00:49:52 ►

they thought that the key to the carrot

00:49:56 ►

is this antioxidant called beta-carotene,

00:49:59 ►

and they turned it into a pill and they gave it to people

00:50:02 ►

thinking it would help them. And in fact,

00:50:12 ►

it hurt them. The death rate from cancer went up in people who were eating the supposedly good nutrient. Well, it turns out that there are, you know, 49 other carotenes in a carrot and

00:50:17 ►

we haven’t studied most of them. So we should be very respectful of the mushroom as nature gives it to us,

00:50:27 ►

and at least explore the possibility that there are other things going on that are valuable.

00:50:34 ►

It’s, you know, there are cases when, you know, we synthesize things successfully and effectively,

00:50:40 ►

but our tendency is reductive.

00:50:45 ►

And for science, you need to be reductive, right?

00:50:47 ►

You need to isolate that chemical to perform a drug trial.

00:50:52 ►

But I think we should be aware that there may be,

00:50:55 ►

same the difference between peyote and mescaline.

00:50:57 ►

I mean, has anyone really explored that?

00:50:59 ►

I don’t know the answer.

00:51:01 ►

But the other parallel from food

00:51:02 ►

that I think is really relevant,

00:51:04 ►

and I’m glad you brought this up,

00:51:05 ►

is eating alone.

00:51:08 ►

You know, we, one of the main trends in Western food

00:51:14 ►

is the move from eating as a communal act

00:51:17 ►

to eating as something you do in the car.

00:51:19 ►

You know, 46% of meals are eaten alone now,

00:51:22 ►

20% are eaten in the car.

00:51:24 ►

And this kind of atomized individualistic eating turns out not to be very good for your health

00:51:29 ►

because people eat too much when they eat alone.

00:51:32 ►

Whereas when you eat at a table with other people, other things are going on.

00:51:35 ►

You’re talking, you’re conversing, and you eat in a more moderate way.

00:51:40 ►

And so there’s something about socializing and experience that can make it healthier and that may be true with psychedelics, too

00:51:47 ►

Yeah, I’m glad you’re bringing this up actually

00:51:50 ►

And we look in the traditions a lot of the time psychedelics are taken in groups ayahuasca circles

00:51:56 ►

Yes, communal or in the case of if we go to Gabon and we talk about it Boga

00:52:00 ►

It’s actually the communal aspect of that is almost reversed

00:52:03 ►

There’s one person in the getting initiated and this may not be true in all Bwiti traditions it’s very diverse in itself but there’s

00:52:10 ►

initiate and then the entire community is around you supporting you and so the community aspect

00:52:16 ►

not to mention integration all this other aspect and right now with the FDA approval process what

00:52:23 ►

we’re going toward is single person with two guys, which seems…

00:52:27 ►

It’s single person, but not alone.

00:52:29 ►

Not alone, right.

00:52:30 ►

It’s like eating with a chaperone at McDonald’s.

00:52:32 ►

But we don’t… Right.

00:52:35 ►

You know, it’s not really, but…

00:52:37 ►

But we really don’t have necessarily right now a line of sight to group psychedelic work,

00:52:42 ►

which I think…

00:52:43 ►

Well, but I think that’s coming. I think one of the ways you’ll deal with the inefficiencies of

00:52:48 ►

two therapists and one person, and I think there’s some proposals afoot, at least I know in Europe,

00:52:56 ►

Bob Jesse will send me a memo about this later, if I’m wrong, that of looking at the possibility

00:53:02 ►

of doing group psilocybin as a way to make, you know,

00:53:06 ►

that two therapists could actually work on six people at once.

00:53:10 ►

Yeah.

00:53:10 ►

Or eight people.

00:53:12 ►

And I think that’s worth exploring.

00:53:13 ►

I mean, certainly that’s the ayahuasca model you write.

00:53:16 ►

And I know MAPS has a study for couples therapy, actually.

00:53:19 ►

Yeah.

00:53:19 ►

Where one person in the couple has PTSD.

00:53:22 ►

And they’re actually treating the couple collectively

00:53:26 ►

because they’re both affected by the PTSD.

00:53:28 ►

And this gets into the broader dynamics of socially.

00:53:31 ►

We’re not just isolated individuals.

00:53:34 ►

That’s true of the cancer studies too.

00:53:36 ►

There are people like Catherine McLean

00:53:38 ►

who makes the argument, and it’s a very good argument,

00:53:41 ►

that the caregivers can benefit just as

00:53:45 ►

much from psilocybin therapy as the person who’s dying and that it’s a whole

00:53:51 ►

constellation that’s affected by that by that event and the grief and there’s

00:53:57 ►

actually a study of AIDS survivors with psilocybin that’s about to start at San

00:54:02 ►

Francisco and that is treating the survivor, not the patient.

00:54:08 ►

So I think there’s so much more to be learned

00:54:12 ►

and there’s so many exciting experiments to do.

00:54:15 ►

And what’s really wonderful is that this space has been created

00:54:19 ►

by these pioneers and the

00:54:22 ►

willingness of the FDA to go along with this,

00:54:26 ►

because they have been basically encouraging of the research in recent years,

00:54:31 ►

that we’re going to learn a lot.

00:54:33 ►

We’re going to learn a lot about the mind and about the way it works

00:54:37 ►

and the way it sometimes fails to work in the next few years.

00:54:40 ►

And that psychedelics, in addition to being interesting of themselves,

00:54:46 ►

are going to prove to be a very powerful tool for understanding addiction

00:54:50 ►

and dying and depression and anxiety and the mind and consciousness.

00:54:57 ►

And that, to me, is really exciting.

00:54:59 ►

You know, Stan Grof had that legendary psychedelic psychiatrist

00:55:04 ►

who’s still with us.

00:55:08 ►

He said once, and I remember reading this early in my research and thinking,

00:55:12 ►

that is ridiculous.

00:55:13 ►

He said that psychedelics or LSD would be for the study of the mind,

00:55:18 ►

what the telescope was for astronomy, and what the microscope was for biology.

00:55:22 ►

It was really an audacious thing to say, especially then.

00:55:26 ►

But actually, I no longer think that’s crazy at all.

00:55:29 ►

I mean, I think that psychedelics do have very important things to teach us.

00:55:34 ►

Yeah.

00:55:35 ►

So I think we’re about time for questions from the audience here.

00:55:40 ►

Is the hand going up there?

00:55:41 ►

The hand’s already going up there.

00:55:42 ►

There’s going to be a microphone right here.

00:55:44 ►

Yeah, I think Alan might have it.

00:55:45 ►

There we go.

00:55:46 ►

We are live.

00:55:47 ►

All right.

00:55:47 ►

So we will gladly take questions starting right here.

00:55:51 ►

And then we’re actually going to form a line over there behind.

00:55:54 ►

So the second person in line, go ahead over there.

00:55:57 ►

That’s not a shy group.

00:55:59 ►

So, yeah.

00:56:00 ►

So go ahead.

00:56:01 ►

You can be second, but just go over there.

00:56:03 ►

So that’s where the line will be. You’re good. You were first. Yeah, you’re ahead. You can be second, but just go over there. So that’s where the line will be.

00:56:06 ►

You’re good.

00:56:07 ►

You were first.

00:56:07 ►

Yeah, you’re first.

00:56:08 ►

You’re good.

00:56:09 ►

All right, perfect.

00:56:10 ►

Thank you.

00:56:11 ►

All right.

00:56:13 ►

Wonderful.

00:56:14 ►

So on behalf of all of us here, like, huge thank you for doing what you’ve done,

00:56:19 ►

both of you for hosting the event as well as for taking this big step

00:56:23 ►

and getting rid of some of the taboo

00:56:25 ►

around psychedelics. Thank you. Yeah. And yeah, thank you. I want to actually. Yeah, you want to.

00:56:38 ►

Yeah, I want to add a disclaimer here. We are live streaming. So just bear in mind, if you do come

00:56:41 ►

ask a question, you will be on the Internet. Full disclosure. That’s true. Full disclosure.

00:56:46 ►

Alright, cool.

00:56:48 ►

I have a quick question to launch it off.

00:56:51 ►

So, as much

00:56:52 ►

as the

00:56:54 ►

beauty of

00:56:56 ►

being able to

00:56:58 ►

quell the ego

00:57:00 ►

is so important

00:57:02 ►

for civilization,

00:57:04 ►

where does that come into play for children?

00:57:07 ►

How do we know at what age?

00:57:10 ►

And is it appropriate?

00:57:11 ►

It’s not appropriate for everyone.

00:57:13 ►

So what are your thoughts about that?

00:57:15 ►

Yeah, I don’t know when it’s advisable

00:57:19 ►

for people to start using psychedelics.

00:57:23 ►

And I haven’t really explored that. But it’s important to understand that the structures using psychedelics. And I haven’t really explored that,

00:57:26 ►

but it’s important to understand that the structures

00:57:28 ►

that psychedelics melt are formed a little later in life.

00:57:34 ►

Young children, I talk about young children in the book,

00:57:38 ►

and in fact there’s a whole passage

00:57:41 ►

about this brilliant child psychologist at Berkeley who really believes that the consciousness of children

00:57:48 ►

under five or so is very

00:57:50 ►

Similar to the psychedelic consciousness and she basically thinks little kids are tripping all the time

00:57:56 ►

and they if you’ve had one, you know that they do and

00:58:02 ►

But they don’t have a default mode network.

00:58:05 ►

We haven’t talked about that, but that’s the network in the brain

00:58:07 ►

that appears to go quiet or be quieted during the psychedelic experience.

00:58:12 ►

That doesn’t develop until they go to school

00:58:14 ►

and begin to develop a sense of themselves as consistent beings over time.

00:58:21 ►

You’re not born feeling that way.

00:58:24 ►

And personality doesn’t really

00:58:26 ►

kind of gel until your early 20s. So it’s a curious time to dissolve your personality

00:58:34 ►

before that. And, you know, for some people it’s fine, and for other people it’s, I think,

00:58:40 ►

very challenging. And one quick follow-up to that, and it’s something that I think many people are curious about, where do we strike a balance between nationalism and globalism? Seems to be one of the

00:58:50 ►

most pressing things that’s going on in the world, is how do we foster a collective consciousness

00:58:55 ►

across the globe, but also how do we ensure that we can thrive as the United States at the same

00:59:00 ►

time? Where do you, how do you strike a balance with that as well? Well, you know, I think one of the interesting things about psychedelics is that they potentially

00:59:08 ►

address two of the biggest challenges we face as a civilization. One is the environmental crisis,

00:59:14 ►

our disconnection from nature, and the other is tribalism, our disconnection from people who are

00:59:20 ►

unlike us. One of the amazing things that happens on a successful

00:59:25 ►

psychedelic experience is a reconnection with nature. You no longer objectify

00:59:31 ►

the other. One of the things the ego does is patrol these borders between self and

00:59:35 ►

other, self and nature, and self and subconscious. And when you put those down,

00:59:41 ►

when you quiet those voices, is when you can connect to the other in a very profound way.

00:59:47 ►

I describe experiences I had with nature

00:59:50 ►

where I saw nature in a completely different way.

00:59:53 ►

I was a part of it, part and parcel of it,

00:59:55 ►

not an observer, not a spectator.

00:59:58 ►

I did it with other people.

00:59:59 ►

The most common experience people report

01:00:04 ►

is this feeling of this flood of love for other people,

01:00:08 ►

whether in their lives or people very unlike them.

01:00:12 ►

Is there anything we need more right now?

01:00:15 ►

The challenge is, though,

01:00:17 ►

how do you go from creating those experiences in individuals

01:00:21 ►

to creating it across a society?

01:00:27 ►

experiences in individuals to creating it across the society and we there is no model for administering a drug to an entire society Mike micro dose the whole

01:00:32 ►

foods buffet well or I mean we do have we do have fluoride but I think

01:00:40 ►

psychedelics are very different than fluoride so I can potentially give you an opportunity to talk a little bit about the default mode network.

01:00:48 ►

Can you talk some about that and just the potential value in dissolving the ego?

01:00:55 ►

Yeah, thanks for bringing that up.

01:00:57 ►

The neuroscience that I learned about was, to me, intellectually the most exciting part of doing this book.

01:01:01 ►

about was, to me, intellectually the most exciting part of

01:01:04 ►

doing this book.

01:01:05 ►

And that really is

01:01:07 ►

what we’re learning about

01:01:09 ►

consciousness in the mind.

01:01:11 ►

So when

01:01:12 ►

neuroscientists first began

01:01:15 ►

imaging the brains of people

01:01:17 ►

on psilocybin or LSD,

01:01:19 ►

they would actually

01:01:20 ►

inject someone with the medicine

01:01:23 ►

and slide them into that fMRI tube.

01:01:27 ►

And if you’ve ever been in an fMRI and you’ve ever tripped,

01:01:30 ►

imagine combining those two things.

01:01:32 ►

These volunteers deserve a hand.

01:01:37 ►

I declined to be in this study, actually.

01:01:40 ►

That is serious volunteer duty.

01:01:43 ►

What they expected to see, though, was,

01:01:46 ►

and this work was first done in Imperial College, London,

01:01:49 ►

by a brilliant neuroscientist named Robin Carhart-Harris,

01:01:52 ►

who I profiled.

01:01:54 ►

Another white male, I’m sorry to report, but there it is.

01:01:58 ►

And so they expected to see lots of activity on the fMRI,

01:02:03 ►

and, you know, consistent with the fireworks that people report.

01:02:07 ►

But what they saw instead was a reduction in activity

01:02:12 ►

in this one particular network

01:02:14 ►

that happens to be very important to our sense of self,

01:02:17 ►

and that is the default mode network.

01:02:20 ►

And this is a set of structures in the midline of the brain

01:02:23 ►

that connects structures that are within the cortex,

01:02:26 ►

the evolutionarily most recent part of the brain

01:02:29 ►

that has our executive function and higher order functions,

01:02:34 ►

with deeper, older structures involved with memory and emotion.

01:02:40 ►

And it’s a hub in the brain.

01:02:42 ►

Lots of signals pass through it.

01:02:43 ►

It’s like a grand central station or something. And then it’s a hub in the brain. Lots of signals pass through it. It’s like a Grand Central Station or something,

01:02:45 ►

and then it’s also a regulator.

01:02:47 ►

As Robin calls it, it’s the conductor of the neural symphony,

01:02:51 ►

and so what does it do?

01:02:54 ►

Well, it’s involved in self-reflection, as far as we know,

01:02:57 ►

and self-criticism and rumination.

01:02:59 ►

It’s where your mind goes when it’s wandering or worrying.

01:03:03 ►

It’s involved in time travel,

01:03:07 ►

the ability to think about the future or the past, which is very important to a sense of identity.

01:03:10 ►

Without a sense of time, you don’t have a sense of identity.

01:03:13 ►

It’s involved in theory of mind, which is the ability to imagine mental states in other

01:03:18 ►

people, which is critical to moral reasoning and ethical reasoning.

01:03:22 ►

It’s involved in something called the experiential self.

01:03:25 ►

This is kind of where we generate the stories

01:03:28 ►

that connect what happens to us at any given time

01:03:32 ►

to the story of who we are.

01:03:36 ►

So how interesting that when this network goes quiet

01:03:40 ►

or appears to on an fMRI, that’s when people report

01:03:43 ►

an experience of complete ego dissolution.

01:03:46 ►

What good is that?

01:03:48 ►

Well, the researchers are still speculating about it.

01:03:51 ►

They do think that ego dissolution,

01:03:54 ►

which some refer to as the mystical experience,

01:03:57 ►

I actually think they’re pretty much the same thing.

01:03:59 ►

One is a spiritual vocabulary,

01:04:02 ►

one is a psychodynamic vocabulary.

01:04:05 ►

But similar things happen when you lose a sense of ego.

01:04:08 ►

You merge with other things because the balls come down.

01:04:11 ►

And that permits a reconnection with other people, with nature, with your past self.

01:04:20 ►

And that when our defenses are down, we can break out of the stories in which we trap ourselves.

01:04:27 ►

Those really destructive stories we tell about ourselves

01:04:30 ►

and depress people in particular and addicts in particular.

01:04:33 ►

The story that says you can’t get through the day without a drink.

01:04:36 ►

The story that says that you’re unworthy of love.

01:04:40 ►

We get stuck in these loops of rumination and recrimination

01:04:45 ►

and the psychedelic experience of ego dissolution

01:04:49 ►

gives you a new perspective

01:04:53 ►

it’s temporary but you see that

01:04:55 ►

wow you don’t have to think that way

01:04:57 ►

and those stories they’re broken

01:05:01 ►

their power over you is broken

01:05:03 ►

even if just for a period of time, but having had a taste

01:05:08 ►

of that other form of consciousness where you’re not the victim of your

01:05:12 ►

loops of destructive thought can be liberating.

01:05:16 ►

So that’s a theoretical hypothesis of how it works.

01:05:21 ►

But it’s a compelling one.

01:05:22 ►

And I think it’s really interesting,

01:05:27 ►

this idea of decentralizing the brain,

01:05:30 ►

and it’s very timely, considering this theme.

01:05:32 ►

A lot of people hear probably from the blockchain world,

01:05:35 ►

this theme of decentralization,

01:05:37 ►

and so in many ways, psychedelics are like decentralizing the brain in the same way

01:05:39 ►

that blockchains are decentralizing economies.

01:05:41 ►

Yeah, and that’s since they’re anti-hierarchical,

01:05:43 ►

the experience.

01:05:47 ►

And actually, those of you who have the book in your lap,

01:05:49 ►

look at page 318.

01:05:52 ►

Sorry, not everybody has it.

01:05:54 ►

But go outside and look at page 318 later.

01:05:58 ►

And there’s a map of the brain on a placebo and on psilocybin.

01:06:03 ►

And so there’s a perimeter in this map,

01:06:06 ►

and every circle represents a different brain network.

01:06:09 ►

The brain is organized in these networks.

01:06:11 ►

One deals with locomotion,

01:06:13 ►

one deals with the visual cortex.

01:06:15 ►

And there are a few big highways in the first illustration.

01:06:20 ►

Oh, thank you.

01:06:21 ►

And when the default mode network goes down,

01:06:26 ►

all these new connections form that have never existed before.

01:06:30 ►

The brain is temporarily rewired,

01:06:32 ►

and suddenly you have this explosion of new pathways.

01:06:35 ►

And we don’t know what’s happening on those pathways.

01:06:38 ►

They could explain synesthesia, right?

01:06:40 ►

The phenomenon of tasting a color.

01:06:44 ►

That may be the cross-wiring of two brain networks.

01:06:48 ►

Or the new insights or metaphors that people report.

01:06:50 ►

Those may be a new way to connect dots.

01:06:54 ►

That’s the exciting work,

01:06:56 ►

is to figure out what’s going on in that new map

01:06:58 ►

and what kind of thinking happens.

01:07:00 ►

But the fact is,

01:07:01 ►

the brain is being wired in a new way temporarily, and that

01:07:06 ►

temporary rewiring can have lasting effects. So you’ve been talking about the reduction of

01:07:14 ►

stigma around speaking openly about psychedelics. You made a parallel to courageous people who came

01:07:18 ►

out during the gay rights movement and their role in reducing stigma there. Another parallel I feel can observe is the

01:07:26 ►

importance of personal experience amongst lawmakers. In the gay rights movement, for example, a lot of

01:07:31 ►

traditionally conservative lawmakers would have a courageous family member who would come out

01:07:34 ►

as gay and they would be conservative on all social issues except for gay rights because they

01:07:39 ►

had that personal experience. And my question is, is there a way for us to push for sensible drug policy

01:07:46 ►

by finding ways for getting people in government

01:07:49 ►

and lawmakers to have those personal experiences

01:07:51 ►

that will open up their mind about psychedelics

01:07:53 ►

short of dosing the U.S. Congressional cafeteria?

01:08:00 ►

Well, maybe we should start at the top.

01:08:15 ►

Yeah, so we’re back to putting in the water supply.

01:08:17 ►

I don’t know why you guys keep coming around to that.

01:08:20 ►

I just don’t think that that’s ethical.

01:08:22 ►

But thank you for the thought.

01:08:27 ►

Yeah, I mean, and I guess I want to add,

01:08:32 ►

a friend, Dimitri Mijianis, has a really good thought bubble around this. I don’t know that giving everyone psychedelics is necessarily the answer. We have seen tremendous promise, of course.

01:08:38 ►

I know it’s not. Yeah, it’s, I would say it’s definitely not the right answer. You know,

01:08:43 ►

as Dimitri says, if you’re a sociopath and you do psychedelics,

01:08:46 ►

they’ll make you a better sociopath.

01:08:48 ►

So, you know, food for thought.

01:08:52 ►

Yeah, no, I agree.

01:08:53 ►

It’s not automatically sweetness and light.

01:08:55 ►

There is the example of Charles Manson, right?

01:08:59 ►

And, you know, the fact is these drugs are incredibly suggestible.

01:09:04 ►

And, you know, we were told that the CIA experiments in mind control were failures by the CIA.

01:09:15 ►

Could LSD be used to brainwash someone?

01:09:18 ►

It’s not out of the question.

01:09:20 ►

I don’t think we should just assume that there’s an inherent tendency

01:09:24 ►

in the direction of peace and love in these drugs.

01:09:28 ►

Because there may not be.

01:09:30 ►

As we said earlier, set and setting are everything.

01:09:33 ►

And so imagine a bad set and a bad setting.

01:09:36 ►

Yeah.

01:09:36 ►

They’re tools.

01:09:37 ►

Like a knife is a tool.

01:09:39 ►

That’s right.

01:09:39 ►

It can be used to cook a meal.

01:09:40 ►

Or to kill somebody.

01:09:41 ►

Exactly.

01:09:42 ►

Yeah.

01:09:42 ►

And so we have to think about these tools. It applies

01:09:45 ►

to any tool, really. And that’s, I think, the thing I’m most interested in having these

01:09:50 ►

conversations about is not to get around saying, oh, how great psychedelics are, but let’s talk

01:09:54 ►

about the tremendous potential they have. But let’s also be realistic about the real risks that

01:09:59 ►

are there. And the way forward, in my opinion, is not to parade around saying it’s either the extremes,

01:10:06 ►

where we went in the drug war, oh, drugs are bad, don’t do drugs, they’re terrible,

01:10:09 ►

or the opposite extreme, oh, yeah, everyone take acid, that’ll save the world.

01:10:13 ►

But come on, let’s be balanced and let’s discuss honestly the benefits and the risks.

01:10:18 ►

Yeah, no, I think so, and each drug on its own terms, too,

01:10:21 ►

because they all get lumped together, and it’s a very irrational…

01:10:24 ►

If you look at the scheduling of drugs that we have under the

01:10:27 ►

controlled substances act it doesn’t accord with anyone’s version of reality

01:10:31 ►

I would say even the definition of a schedule one substance is pretty absurd

01:10:35 ►

it’s that these have no accepted medical use and every single thing on that list

01:10:40 ►

pretty much bar none I’d say has a medical use talking about psychedelics

01:10:44 ►

of course talking about marijuana even heroin if you go to the UK, it’s given in hospitals.

01:10:48 ►

You can look this up. Everything on that list has a medical use. But anyway.

01:10:56 ►

Okay. Have you encountered any sort of experiences where psychedelics have been used to address short-term memory loss or mental acuity

01:11:07 ►

that’s being degraded over time?

01:11:09 ►

And if the short answer to that is no,

01:11:12 ►

my backup question is,

01:11:13 ►

could you talk a little bit about

01:11:15 ►

maybe revisiting this space

01:11:17 ►

after having an ego death that went bad?

01:11:19 ►

Or maybe, Mike, even your paranoia at Burning Man

01:11:21 ►

and what the process is like for rejoining this community.

01:11:25 ►

Thank you.

01:11:26 ►

The process for reintegrating after a bad trip?

01:11:29 ►

Exactly.

01:11:30 ►

Or even just thinking about this space after the experience that you’ve had.

01:11:35 ►

Yeah, there’s been some speculation about neurogenesis on psychedelics,

01:11:41 ►

but from some of the researchers,

01:11:44 ►

and some are interested in studying

01:11:45 ►

whether there might be some value

01:11:47 ►

in treating Alzheimer’s or preventing Alzheimer’s,

01:11:51 ►

but it hasn’t gotten very far yet.

01:11:53 ►

It’s kind of a hypothesis.

01:11:54 ►

There is a neuroplasticity that seems to happen.

01:11:57 ►

There’s some mild evidence for that.

01:12:01 ►

But bad trips, why don’t you take that one?

01:12:02 ►

Yeah.

01:12:03 ►

Thank you.

01:12:07 ►

The honest answer is I’m still recovering. I was hit very deeply in ways that still affect me to this day. And it’s a journey.

01:12:18 ►

And I’m just trying to find the lessons, trying to figure out what I can learn from the experience.

01:12:26 ►

The biggest gift I’ve gotten from that experience is to be able to talk honestly about having

01:12:33 ►

a bad trip.

01:12:35 ►

So I do think it’s important that we have these discussions, too.

01:12:40 ►

Thank you.

01:12:41 ►

And you know, the construct of the bad trip is not used by the therapist.

01:12:47 ►

Yeah.

01:12:47 ►

They tend to, and the guides,

01:12:49 ►

they talk about a challenging trip.

01:12:50 ►

Get the whole experience.

01:12:51 ►

Because if you have a bad trip, so-called,

01:12:54 ►

in the presence of a good guide or therapist,

01:12:58 ►

it can be incredibly productive.

01:13:01 ►

Yes.

01:13:01 ►

Because the material that comes up

01:13:03 ►

is good stuff to work on, right?

01:13:06 ►

Stuff you need to work on, probably.

01:13:08 ►

And so they, you know, very often bad trips in the long term become very positive things.

01:13:16 ►

Yes, and actually it’s a good opportunity to talk about.

01:13:18 ►

I alluded to earlier the Zendo Project.

01:13:21 ►

And if you’re not familiar with the Zendo Project, it’s a subsidiary of MAPS.

01:13:24 ►

And they go to Burning Man

01:13:26 ►

and other festivals and provide psychedelic

01:13:27 ►

harm reduction services for people who are having these

01:13:29 ►

difficult experiences.

01:13:31 ►

As you mentioned, the principle of it is this

01:13:33 ►

they have four principles. One is

01:13:35 ►

you’re sitting and not guiding, which we talked about before.

01:13:38 ►

Very much like with therapy.

01:13:41 ►

That

01:13:41 ►

you create a safe space.

01:13:44 ►

That you’re talking someone through the experience

01:13:46 ►

versus talking them down.

01:13:48 ►

So you don’t want,

01:13:49 ►

and someone’s tripping and you’re sitting with them,

01:13:50 ►

you don’t want to say,

01:13:51 ►

oh, but it’s cool, we’re at a festival,

01:13:53 ►

everything’s all right.

01:13:53 ►

You don’t want to minimize what they’re experiencing,

01:13:56 ►

but you want to go right through it.

01:13:57 ►

And ideally, you can use this opportunity.

01:14:00 ►

And if you do it right,

01:14:01 ►

a difficult experience is not necessarily a bad one.

01:14:08 ►

And it can be an opportunity for tremendous transformation yeah, well let’s leave it there

01:14:12 ►

because there are a lot of questions

01:14:13 ►

that actually kind of goes into what I was going to ask about

01:14:16 ►

is if you want to help people in a way

01:14:19 ►

where you want to be able to guide them better

01:14:21 ►

through those types of experiences

01:14:22 ►

how do you recommend we begin

01:14:25 ►

our journey in becoming a psychedelic guide of sorts, or maybe even actually becoming a psychedelic

01:14:30 ►

guide? Well, you know, you apprentice, I mean, there’s two routes. I mean, one is the above-ground

01:14:35 ►

route, and you go to the, you know, California Institute for Integral Studies has a guide training

01:14:41 ►

program that is not most, I mean, it’s mostly non-resident thing

01:14:47 ►

and you meet for seven weekends and do an internship

01:14:49 ►

and you get your certificate.

01:14:52 ►

You need your MFT for it.

01:14:53 ►

You need some sort of license.

01:14:55 ►

You need, that’s right.

01:14:57 ►

And then the other way is there are, you know,

01:15:03 ►

there are underground guides who train, who have apprenticeships.

01:15:08 ►

And that’s the other way I’ve met people who’ve gone through that.

01:15:12 ►

So there are a couple ways to do it.

01:15:14 ►

We can’t tell you how to find them, though.

01:15:19 ►

Hi, thanks for being here today.

01:15:21 ►

So I actually haven’t had a chance to read your book yet,

01:15:24 ►

but I was wondering if you had any knowledge regarding the study of ketamine

01:15:28 ►

and ketamine IVs to study or to help heal depression.

01:15:33 ►

I actually was not aware of this until a couple days ago.

01:15:37 ►

I have a friend of mine who works at Johns Hopkins,

01:15:38 ►

and she was telling me about this use for depression.

01:15:42 ►

So I was wondering if you could speak to that science a little bit

01:15:43 ►

and what’s being done in that area. Thank you. Sure. So ketamine is not exactly a

01:15:49 ►

psychedelic. It’s actually an anesthetic and it’s a dissociative. And it has been used in anesthesia

01:15:57 ►

for a long time and it’s actually a relatively safe anesthetic. It has less impact on the

01:16:02 ►

cardiovascular system. It doesn’t depress it as much as some other anesthetics do.

01:16:07 ►

It was discovered that at lower doses than the one that knocks you out,

01:16:12 ►

you have an experience that some people describe as a

01:16:15 ►

psychedelic experience and a kind of a separation of self.

01:16:21 ►

And that that

01:16:22 ►

is being used to treat depression.

01:16:26 ►

The drug is approved as an anesthetic

01:16:29 ►

and that means that doctors can prescribe it off label

01:16:33 ►

for other things legally and that’s happening.

01:16:35 ►

There are legal ketamine clinics in this city

01:16:39 ►

and around the country.

01:16:40 ►

And there’s a lot of excitement

01:16:42 ►

in the psychiatric community about it. I didn’t

01:16:47 ►

write about it at great length. I don’t write about MDMA that much either. I limited myself

01:16:52 ►

to the so-called classic psychedelics in this book because they share a history and they share

01:16:57 ►

a neuroscience. And there was a kind of logic to it. And I didn’t want to you know it was already 400 pages so but

01:17:06 ►

ketamine is very interesting and it appears that it doesn’t last that the

01:17:11 ►

the treatment needs to be administered again I don’t know how often there’s a

01:17:17 ►

there’s a very good article by a very fine journalist named Moises Velasquez

01:17:22 ►

man off that’s in the current or the last issue of Wired.

01:17:26 ►

So if you want to learn more about ketamine, that’s a good place to start.

01:17:29 ►

There’s also a ketamine conference coming to the Bay, I believe in November.

01:17:32 ►

Is that right?

01:17:33 ►

Yeah.

01:17:34 ►

So I don’t know the details of it, but if you Google the ketamine conference in November,

01:17:39 ►

I think you’ll find it.

01:17:41 ►

Hello, how are you?

01:17:43 ►

Hi.

01:17:43 ►

Just wanted to ask, I took a lot of LSD in the 60s,

01:17:48 ►

and it was a whole trip, and we did all this, you know, I tripped with Timothy Leary, but

01:17:53 ►

I wanted to know the difference when you’re taking it in therapy. Can you explain a little bit about

01:17:58 ►

what’s the difference about taking it, you know, a trip at home and going to therapy like for the PTSD?

01:18:05 ►

Yeah, that’s a great question. So the big difference is that you are

01:18:13 ►

that you’re having more of an internal trip. So in all these trials and this is

01:18:19 ►

also common among underground guides, you wear eye shades which to many people who

01:18:24 ►

have lots of experience tripping outdoors concert seems like a really weird idea

01:18:29 ►

and you’re indoors and you’re lying down and you’re listening to music on

01:18:33 ►

headphones we usually headphones not always headphones and both the music is

01:18:38 ►

meant to block out the rest of the environment but it also has a positive

01:18:43 ►

function and the eye shades, too, are to

01:18:45 ►

limit distraction. And they basically encourage you to go inside. So you have a very different,

01:18:51 ►

to the extent that there’s a kind of intra-psychic movie that unfurls during the

01:18:57 ►

psychedelic trip, that’s very much created by your external environment if you’re walking around and your eyes are open.

01:19:07 ►

But when your eyes close, you just go somewhere else

01:19:10 ►

and your imagination takes over

01:19:12 ►

and you are more likely to, say, visit your cancer

01:19:18 ►

if you’re a cancer patient

01:19:19 ►

or deal with repressed memories.

01:19:24 ►

Things will come up.

01:19:25 ►

So it’s a more internalized experience.

01:19:29 ►

And I think that’s really key.

01:19:31 ►

If you’re processing psychic material,

01:19:36 ►

because the world is incredibly stimulating on psychedelics, as you know,

01:19:40 ►

and can distract you from internal material.

01:19:44 ►

So I would say that’s, to me, the key difference.

01:19:46 ►

Am I missing something?

01:19:47 ►

Yeah.

01:19:48 ►

What was the original question?

01:19:49 ►

The difference between taking it?

01:19:51 ►

Yeah, taking it therapeutically versus recreational.

01:19:54 ►

Yeah, definitely the going inward is a huge factor.

01:19:57 ►

And it’s also just the intention behind it is important.

01:20:00 ►

Yeah, that’s right.

01:20:00 ►

I think that’s a good point.

01:20:02 ►

One of the things the therapists or guides do is ask you to set an intention.

01:20:07 ►

I want to deal with my mortality.

01:20:09 ►

I want to confront my eating disorder, whatever it is.

01:20:13 ►

And it doesn’t always take you there, but it often does.

01:20:18 ►

And that becomes kind of the subtext of the experience.

01:20:23 ►

And doing it in that intentional way is,

01:20:25 ►

so if something difficult arises,

01:20:27 ►

if you’re there with a provider,

01:20:29 ►

you can much more easily go through that experience

01:20:31 ►

as we were talking about before.

01:20:33 ►

Whereas if you’re a paranoid burning man,

01:20:35 ►

you don’t really have any money outs

01:20:36 ►

because who do you trust at that point?

01:20:39 ►

So definitely recommend taking psychedelics with somebody you trust.

01:20:46 ►

The trust aspect is really, really important.

01:20:51 ►

Yeah.

01:20:52 ►

How much more time do we have?

01:20:54 ►

Okay, cool.

01:20:56 ►

Hi, thank you very much.

01:20:57 ►

So in the book, you kind of paint this two schools of thought,

01:21:00 ►

the Timothy Leary and the Al Hubbard.

01:21:02 ►

And Leary is to everyone in the water, which seems to keep coming up here, and Hubbard’s like to the elites and the higher-ups

01:21:07 ►

and try to go top-down. What do you think is the optimal way to bring

01:21:12 ►

a new class of drugs or something to a society, or to help it be integrated

01:21:16 ►

where that doesn’t get banned and that it is properly

01:21:18 ►

brought in? Yeah, well, for people who didn’t read the book,

01:21:24 ►

I mean, you spotted a very deliberate contrast

01:21:28 ►

between two key figures,

01:21:30 ►

one of whom everybody knows

01:21:33 ►

and the other of whom hardly anyone knows.

01:21:34 ►

Al Hubbard was a very strange man of mystery

01:21:37 ►

who was known as the Johnny Appleseed of LSD

01:21:41 ►

or Captain Trips in the 50s.

01:21:44 ►

And he, unlike Timothy Leary, who he detested,

01:21:49 ►

believed that the way to change consciousness,

01:21:53 ►

going back to this earlier question,

01:21:55 ►

is you turn on the best and the brightest.

01:21:57 ►

You turn on the elites in industry, in the church, in technology.

01:22:02 ►

And he set about doing that.

01:22:03 ►

He allegedly turned on about 6,000 people

01:22:07 ►

over the course of his 15 year career.

01:22:10 ►

He went to Silicon Valley and he started the tradition

01:22:13 ►

of engineers in Silicon Valley using LSD and psilocybin.

01:22:20 ►

High officials in the church, Catholic church,

01:22:22 ►

he turned on.

01:22:27 ►

His idea was the new consciousness would filter down.

01:22:31 ►

Leary was a Democrat, a populist,

01:22:35 ►

and he thought, give it to everybody right away, as soon as possible.

01:22:37 ►

He was in a great hurry to do that.

01:22:41 ►

And so that was the Mandarin view and the populist view.

01:22:44 ►

I can’t tell you what’s right.

01:22:46 ►

The Populist view did contribute to the backlash,

01:22:52 ►

but is that Leary’s fault?

01:22:55 ►

I don’t know.

01:22:55 ►

I mean, Leary also created the conditions

01:22:58 ►

for this Renaissance by turning on so many people

01:23:01 ►

who ended up becoming the regulators at the FDA. There are people all

01:23:06 ►

through society now that have been turned on because of Timothy Leary. And that’s one of the

01:23:12 ►

reasons people are not reacting quite as violently to what’s going on. They know the territory.

01:23:18 ►

They’re not terrified by these drugs. So it’s an interesting thought experiment, but I don’t think

01:23:22 ►

there’s an easy answer.

01:23:25 ►

There are good arguments on both sides.

01:23:27 ►

And if I could maybe rephrase your question,

01:23:29 ►

are you asking how can we responsibly get psychedelics to more people?

01:23:34 ►

Or a newly discovered other drug?

01:23:37 ►

Yeah, I mean, I guess my go-to answer is education, right?

01:23:41 ►

And let’s be, we can get psychedelics to more people.

01:23:44 ►

We don’t have to just dose the elites. We can provide, I think there is a way be we can get psychedelics to more people we don’t have to just dose the

01:23:45 ►

elites yeah um we can provide i think there is a way that we can get access to more people um and

01:23:51 ►

the kind of let’s just do it in a responsible way let’s actually do real education and i would say

01:23:57 ►

in our medical system as it is today we actually don’t do a very good job at giving people informed

01:24:02 ►

consent about what they’re taking you go to the the doctor, they write you a script, and you

01:24:06 ►

might have a long legal list

01:24:08 ►

of potential side effects, but how often

01:24:10 ►

do you actually have a real conversation with a doctor

01:24:12 ►

about the risks of the substance you’re taking?

01:24:14 ►

So I think in many ways our overall system

01:24:15 ►

needs to be more responsible.

01:24:18 ►

We need to have more open,

01:24:20 ►

honest conversations about what we’re putting in our bodies.

01:24:23 ►

Yeah.

01:24:25 ►

Next question?

01:24:27 ►

How’s it going?

01:24:29 ►

Just about a month and a half ago, I know a Ayahuasquera, a curandera,

01:24:35 ►

who she got murdered by a westerner from Canada.

01:24:41 ►

She went down, and she was like one of the only,

01:24:44 ►

she was a very famous curandera ayahuasquera.

01:24:47 ►

And the guy went down there and he ended up murdering her

01:24:51 ►

because she wouldn’t give him continual doses of ayahuasca.

01:24:56 ►

I wasn’t sure if you guys were aware of that in the community.

01:25:00 ►

And I see that as a potential problem.

01:25:03 ►

You know, that was a woman who had a lot of Icaros

01:25:07 ►

and a lot of information as far as ayahuasca was concerned,

01:25:10 ►

and coming from a female perspective,

01:25:12 ►

which is actually rare down there,

01:25:14 ►

what are your thoughts on that,

01:25:16 ►

and are you even aware of what had happened?

01:25:18 ►

Yeah, no, I wasn’t.

01:25:20 ►

I hadn’t heard the story.

01:25:21 ►

It’s a horrible story.

01:25:23 ►

You know, there have been a lot of stories like that.

01:25:29 ►

I mean, people, victims of sexual abuse going to Peru,

01:25:33 ►

curanderas that, unlike this person, were not legit.

01:25:38 ►

And people need to be careful.

01:25:40 ►

People need to be really careful.

01:25:42 ►

There’s a lot at stake.

01:25:45 ►

And, you know know one of the problems

01:25:48 ►

with prohibition

01:25:49 ►

always is that you can’t

01:25:52 ►

regulate, you can’t have

01:25:54 ►

standards for the quality of the drug

01:25:55 ►

for the training of the person administering

01:25:57 ►

all these kind of things, when you have prohibition

01:25:59 ►

ironically anything goes

01:26:01 ►

and that’s why

01:26:04 ►

figuring out a sensible way to incorporate these medicines,

01:26:08 ►

if indeed they’re proven to be safe and effective through this trial,

01:26:13 ►

may give us a much healthier environment than the one that exists now.

01:26:21 ►

Yeah, I would agree with that.

01:26:22 ►

And I don’t have an answer for that particular.

01:26:24 ►

I was aware of the tragedy that happened there, but I don’t have an answer for it.

01:26:28 ►

But I would agree with you, echo what you said, that if we can get out of this drug war and

01:26:33 ►

decriminalize, we can actually, that gives us the ability to create the safer access points

01:26:41 ►

and containers. Yeah. I think, are we about, we had two questions. Okay. Hi. Okay. I think are we about…

01:26:45 ►

We had two questions. Okay.

01:26:47 ►

Hi. Okay. I’ll keep it short.

01:26:49 ►

Really excited to be here.

01:26:52 ►

Really nervous

01:26:53 ►

to be asking this question in front of

01:26:55 ►

a big group of people. My palms are sweaty.

01:26:57 ►

Okay. I wanted to throw it

01:26:59 ►

back to when you were asked

01:27:01 ►

a tough question earlier about

01:27:03 ►

the criticisms

01:27:04 ►

of having a very white male-centric book

01:27:10 ►

in a very white male community

01:27:12 ►

of the psychedelic community in the United States.

01:27:16 ►

You mentioned that you didn’t feel that you were a leader,

01:27:21 ►

but I would say that you’ve got a big group of people

01:27:24 ►

that are here and that you’re a newcomer,

01:27:25 ►

but you’ve got a lot of people that are here listening to you,

01:27:27 ►

excited to hear you speak,

01:27:29 ►

and I would love to hear your thoughts on what the community can do,

01:27:34 ►

especially in the United States,

01:27:36 ►

to make sure that we’re bringing more diverse voices to the table

01:27:40 ►

and giving space to more diverse people

01:27:44 ►

to hear their experience with the psychedelic

01:27:47 ►

community. It didn’t work that well, if that makes sense. Yeah, no, I think it’s really important

01:27:52 ►

work, and it’s the same work we need to do in every aspect of our society. It isn’t just a

01:27:59 ►

problem in the psychedelic community, obviously. We have a sexist society, and people need to take affirmative steps

01:28:06 ►

to bring other people unlike themselves into the community. I mean, you know, this is a book

01:28:14 ►

about science, and by the way, science in general is very sexist. We know all the forces that

01:28:21 ►

discourage women and girls from going into science.

01:28:28 ►

So that you can’t just fix one little piece.

01:28:34 ►

You could fix the psychedelic community, but you will not have fixed the society.

01:28:40 ►

So you have to struggle against sexism and racism across the board, and the effects will be felt in the psychedelic society.

01:28:44 ►

I do think there are stories that need to be told

01:28:46 ►

about important women in the book, in this world.

01:28:50 ►

I always felt bad that Mary Cosimono

01:28:53 ►

didn’t have a bigger role in the book

01:28:55 ►

because I had interviewed her

01:28:58 ►

and I was so impressed with her work.

01:28:59 ►

This is the guide at Johns Hopkins.

01:29:01 ►

She’s quoted in the book, she’s there,

01:29:03 ►

but I think she is a hero guide at Johns Hopkins. She’s quoted in the book. She’s there, but not…

01:29:05 ►

I think she is a hero in this research program that deserve more attention than I give her.

01:29:13 ►

I regret that. I hope the next time someone writes a book about that and they’re trying

01:29:18 ►

to make the book fresh and not like mine, one of the things they’ll do is profile Mary Casamano.

01:29:22 ►

and not like mine, one of the things they’ll do is profile Mary Casimano.

01:29:25 ►

So, you know, it’s not over.

01:29:26 ►

I mean, it’s an ongoing process.

01:29:30 ►

In terms of bringing African Americans into the community,

01:29:33 ►

I think that’s a problem of racism, actually.

01:29:37 ►

I mean, think about it.

01:29:38 ►

This is an experience where to,

01:29:42 ►

first, takes a very long time.

01:29:44 ►

You need leisure time to have a psychedelic experience

01:29:46 ►

You need to have whole days you can give to them

01:29:49 ►

It also is an experience that you shy away from

01:29:53 ►

if you don’t have a safe environment and

01:29:57 ►

What african-american feels safe in their environment how many?

01:30:02 ►

You know our society has not created the space

01:30:06 ►

where an African American can

01:30:07 ►

feel safe having a psychedelic experience.

01:30:10 ►

That’s a bigger problem

01:30:12 ►

than psychedelics.

01:30:16 ►

I’m going to add a few things to that.

01:30:18 ►

You’re right. It is something that’s

01:30:20 ►

not just in the psychedelic community. This is a broader

01:30:22 ►

issue and it’s reflected, of course,

01:30:23 ►

in the psychedelic community.

01:30:29 ►

That said, if there is any community that’s going to be able to solve this issue in a way that can create a model for other parts of society to mimic, it should be the

01:30:35 ►

one that’s really self-reflective and doing these psychedelic experiences. So I think we actually

01:30:41 ►

have an opportunity in the psychedelic community to do things that ripple out, and I would actually ask for everyone here who’s involved in these communities to be proactive.

01:30:49 ►

I’ll speak for myself.

01:30:51 ►

This platform here, psychedelic seminars, I’m going to use it to showcase more.

01:30:55 ►

I know today it’s two white men on the stage, but you can hold me to it.

01:31:00 ►

This will have more diverse voices.

01:31:03 ►

I’ve been in talks already with several people about this

01:31:06 ►

exact thing and where we’ll go next with this.

01:31:08 ►

I think these are very important topics

01:31:10 ►

to discuss.

01:31:11 ►

Another thing I would add,

01:31:14 ►

so there’s openings, right?

01:31:15 ►

You’ve created an opening with this book that more

01:31:17 ►

people can step into. The question for me

01:31:20 ►

is how do we help people, elevate people

01:31:21 ►

to step into this opening? Now there’s more space in

01:31:23 ►

culture in general for us to talk about psychedelics. step into this opening. Now there’s more space in culture and culture in general

01:31:25 ►

for us to talk about psychedelics.

01:31:26 ►

Thanks to this book, let’s fill that space.

01:31:29 ►

And I’ll add one more thing on this topic,

01:31:32 ►

which is to say a large part of the psychedelic community

01:31:36 ►

is taking, you know, for good reason,

01:31:38 ►

is saying, hey, we’re scientists,

01:31:40 ►

we’re not advocates for certain policy measures.

01:31:42 ►

I would say that if we are looking at changing psychedelic standing of the psychedelics,

01:31:47 ►

we are changing drug policy, right?

01:31:50 ►

And I would say that if we’re going to talk about changing drug policy, we need to have

01:31:54 ►

the people most affected by the bad drug policy, the drug war, having a seat at the table for

01:31:59 ►

what the new drug laws look like.

01:32:01 ►

And I just want to put that thought bubble out there.

01:32:03 ►

All right. Last question. look like. And I just want to put that thought bubble out there.

01:32:09 ►

Alright, last question.

01:32:12 ►

Better be good. I was going to say, a lot of pressure.

01:32:18 ►

So you’ve kind of made a name both in food and psychedelics of calling out cultural elephants in the room, so to speak. Do you have plans for

01:32:21 ►

continuing down the journey you’re on now with psychedelics or is there another topic that you think kind of is piking your curiosity to continue and travel down?

01:32:30 ►

Yeah, well, that’s a good question.

01:32:31 ►

And I don’t have an answer.

01:32:33 ►

I don’t know what my next project is.

01:32:36 ►

This path has been really interesting to me.

01:32:39 ►

I don’t feel I’ve learned everything there is to be known about it.

01:32:43 ►

And that what I’m learning, especially about the mind and neuroscience,

01:32:47 ►

has fascinated me.

01:32:49 ►

And I’m also very interested in non-pharmacological altered states of consciousness

01:32:56 ►

and meditation.

01:32:58 ►

You know, my experience with psychedelics really opened up meditation for me,

01:33:02 ►

as it has for many people.

01:33:04 ►

It’s kind of like, you know,

01:33:06 ►

psychedelics, you could argue,

01:33:08 ►

are the entry drugs for meditation.

01:33:12 ►

And which I know is not the drug war formulation,

01:33:16 ►

but sometimes it works that way.

01:33:19 ►

So I don’t know where I’m going,

01:33:21 ►

but I’m very interested in continuing

01:33:22 ►

this exploration of the mind

01:33:24 ►

and finding other ways to do it.

01:33:26 ►

But for the time being, this is my life. I mean, talking about this and continuing to change minds and be out there as someone who is not a leader,

01:33:43 ►

but hopefully an explainer, a storyteller, someone who can make good use of this opening,

01:33:49 ►

invite other people into it.

01:33:50 ►

And I think we’re at a very interesting moment.

01:33:53 ►

I mean, I think the response to this book,

01:33:55 ►

which has absolutely flabbergasted me,

01:33:57 ►

I had no reason to believe, nor did my publisher,

01:33:59 ►

that Americans were ready to buy a book about psychedelics.

01:34:04 ►

We know how to buy a book about food.

01:34:07 ►

We’ve all done that.

01:34:11 ►

It’s been a real surprise.

01:34:14 ►

Now that I’m over the surprise, let’s look at the opportunity.

01:34:17 ►

The opportunity is to have a new kind of conversation about psychedelics

01:34:20 ►

and mental health.

01:34:22 ►

We haven’t really talked that much about it.

01:34:22 ►

about psychedelics and mental health.

01:34:24 ►

And we haven’t really talked that much about it.

01:34:30 ►

But one of the reasons that people are receptive to this conversation is not just the fading of 60s stigmas,

01:34:34 ►

but the fact that mental health treatment is broken

01:34:36 ►

and that we have so many people suffering in this country

01:34:42 ►

and so few tools to help them.

01:34:51 ►

Only about half the people with serious mental illnesses receive any attention from the system, get any care.

01:34:58 ►

Depression rates are rising, suicide rates are rising, addiction rates are rising. There’s a real crisis and the tools,

01:35:06 ►

really, there’s been no innovation since the early 90s. We have SSRIs, you know, and some very toxic psychiatric drugs.

01:35:18 ►

So that’s the really exciting opportunity to treat all that suffering. And that’s why I think the future is really bright, because we need it. Yeah, and I’ll add to that.

01:35:25 ►

Yeah.

01:35:27 ►

Thank you.

01:35:32 ►

Thank you.

01:35:33 ►

So I’m going to be around a little longer.

01:35:35 ►

I’m going to be out signing books out there.

01:35:36 ►

Anybody who wants to get a book signed?

01:35:38 ►

But I want to thank Mike for his role,

01:35:41 ►

not only in organizing this event,

01:35:43 ►

but in conducting this conversation

01:35:44 ►

and that he is one of the impresarios of that conversation. Mike for his role, not only in organizing this event, but in conducting this conversation, and

01:35:46 ►

that he is one of the impresarios

01:35:47 ►

of that conversation.

01:35:49 ►

Very grateful to him,

01:35:51 ►

and Alan, and Adam.

01:35:55 ►

Thank you.

01:35:57 ►

Thank you so much, Michael.

01:35:59 ►

I’ve got a couple of announcements, actually. If I can hold you for

01:36:01 ►

one second. There is an after-party tonight, so

01:36:04 ►

show up to Symmetry Lodge, 275 8th street go see the psychedelic society for you know michael

01:36:09 ►

and i have things to say about this but really uh what do you have to say about this is what’s

01:36:14 ►

important so go see the psychedelic society if you’re watching the live stream find your local

01:36:17 ►

one um and if you want to see more of this kind of content, I would ask that you consider supporting us on Patreon.

01:36:25 ►

This is our monthly crowdfunder.

01:36:28 ►

And if you want to help us create

01:36:30 ►

more events like this, do more

01:36:32 ►

free live streams,

01:36:33 ►

at the Psychedelic Seminars table outside,

01:36:36 ►

if you donate $10 a month

01:36:38 ►

or more, you’ll get a copy

01:36:40 ►

of Michael’s book or a ticket to the Mushroom Cure.

01:36:42 ►

So if you really like what you see here, please

01:36:44 ►

go and see.

01:36:48 ►

Thank you to everyone who made this possible, and thank you again to Michael.

01:36:55 ►

You’re listening to The Psychedelic Salon,

01:36:59 ►

where people are changing their lives one thought at a time.

01:37:03 ►

I realize that this has been a long program today,

01:37:06 ►

so I’ll keep my final remarks brief.

01:37:12 ►

One is to remind you that Michael Pollan’s new book is now available in paperback and Kindle editions.

01:37:13 ►

Also, for another fascinating interview with Michael, be sure to listen to Joe Rogan’s

01:37:18 ►

podcast number 1121, and I’ll link to that in today’s program notes, which you can find

01:37:24 ►

at psychedelicsalon.com.

01:37:27 ►

Also, there I’ll add links to the psychedelic seminars and their Patreon page, as well as to

01:37:33 ►

Michael Pollan’s website and to the two of his books that I’ve mentioned here in this podcast.

01:37:38 ►

But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t check out the rest of his books as well.

01:37:42 ►

Actually, I find it interesting that two authors who, back when I

01:37:46 ►

began reading them, had no public connection to psychedelics. But then, after years of knowing

01:37:52 ►

about them, now they have both become widely known to also be spokesmen for more openness

01:37:58 ►

and investigations of the potential that psychedelics hold for our future. And, as you already have guessed,

01:38:06 ►

that other person is Graham Hancock.

01:38:08 ►

What a dynamic duo they are, huh?

01:38:12 ►

And for now, this is Lorenzo signing off from Cyberdelic Space.

01:38:16 ►

Be well, my friends. Thank you.

⚗️ alembic

Explorer

606 - Michael Pollan Discusses Psychedelics

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