#641: Roland Griffiths, PhD — Life’s Ultimate Glide Path, An Unexpected Stage IV Diagnosis, Facing Death, How Meditation and Psychedelics Can Help, and The Art of Living a Life of Gratitude

Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show http://tim.blog/podcast. This is a very meaningful episode to me. It is probably the most significant interview that I've recorded in the last year, and it is with one of my favorite people and one of my favorite scientists in the world: Roland Griffiths, PhD. Roland has recently been diagnosed with what is very likely terminal stage-four cancer. If you've ever found yourself inspired by someone who walks the walk, this episode is worth listening to. In facing mortality and potentially facing death, what Roland has done and is doing, the perspective he is finding, and the tools he is using, are nothing short of awe inspiring. His example is beyond words, and I wanted to share that with all of you. I hope you find it as deeply enriching and valuable as I did. It is a very tender conversation at points, a very funny conversation, and in many ways, a very profound conversation. To learn more about Roland’s very ambitious project to establish a world-class psychedelic research program—in perpetuity—to advance human flourishing and well-being, please visit GriffithsFund.org https://griffithsfund.org/. Currently, Roland has received pledges totaling about $14M. This means that he is $6M short of the $20M target, sufficient to support the full research program. To donate, please visit GriffithsFund.org http://griffithsfund.org and click “Donate.” For more information about establishing a major gift, please contact Mike DeVito, the Senior Associate Director of Development at [email protected] mailto:[email protected] or call him at (443) 278-3174. Donors who contribute $1000 or more and who do not choose to remain anonymous will be acknowledged on the website. Here is Roland’s bio: Roland Griffiths, PhD, is a Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Neurosciences at Johns Hopkins University, and founding Director of the Johns Hopkins Center on Psychedelic and Consciousness Research. His principal research focus in both clinical and preclinical laboratories has been on the behavioral and subjective effects of mood-altering drugs. His research has been largely supported by grants from the National Institute on Health, and he is author of over 400 scientific publications. He has been a consultant to the National Institutes of Health, the World Health Organization, and numerous pharmaceutical companies. Roland has conducted extensive research with sedative-hypnotics, caffeine, and novel mood-altering drugs. In 1994 Roland started a regular meditation practice that made him curious about certain altered states of consciousness that prompted him in 1999 to initiate the first study in decades to rigorously evaluate the effects of a high dose of a classic psychedelic drug (psilocybin) in healthy psychedelic-naïve participants. Subsequent studies with psilocybin have been conducted in healthy volunteers, in beginning and long-term meditators, and in religious leaders. Therapeutic studies with psilocybin include treatment of psychological distress in cancer patients, cigarette smoking addiction, major depression, anorexia nervosa, and Alzheimer’s Disease. Other studies have examined non-psychedelic drugs that produce altered states of consciousness having similarities to psilocybin. Brain imaging studies have examined pharmacological and neural mechanisms of action of psilocybin. Roland’s research group has also conducted a series of survey studies characterizing various naturally-occurring and psychedelic-occasioned transformative experiences including: mystical-type experiences, psychologically challenging experiences, near-death experiences (NDEs), Entity and God-encounter experiences, and experiences to which reduced anxiety, depression, and substance use disorders are attributed. Please enjoy! * [05:15] Roland’s earliest personal experience with psychedelics. [11:07] Meditation and interest in altered states of consciousness. [18:32] What is phenomenology? [21:44] Why early attempts at meditation failed, and what made Roland revisit the practice. [29:13] Roland’s work with sedative-hypnotics in the late ’70s. [33:02] Connoisseurs of puff topography. [36:36] When Roland realized the voice in his head wasn’t his. [40:26] From meditation to scientific exploration of psychedelics. [50:29] Entheogens vs. psychedelics. [54:57] Roland’s initial reluctance to experiment with psychedelics. [59:36] Sasha Shulgin, PiHKAL, and TiHKAL. [1:02:12] Bill Richards. [1:03:30] Challenges of the psychedelic trial process. [1:12:41] The results of Roland’s first major psychedelic study. [1:16:46] Pre-existing literature on mystical experiences. [1:18:39] Roland’s more recent psychedelic experiences. [1:27:23] Why isn’t Roland devastated by his terminal diagnosis? [1:42:47] Ego dissolution and anxiety reduction. [1:49:44] The real purpose of this conversation. [1:54:50] A rundown of Roland’s diagnosis and how he’s coping with it. [2:03:44] “Every day is Thanksgiving.” [2:05:39] Gratitude meditation, liver embolization, and other mortality navigations. [2:11:36] Satcitananda. [2:13:18] Eliciting 5-MeO “placebo” experiences without psychedelics. [2:29:14] How does Roland relate to death? [2:34:59] How loved ones can be supportive of someone coping with a terminal diagnosis. [2:38:30] Belief changes associated with psychedelic use. [2:40:45] Thoughts from the crossroads of the quantum, the paranormal, and the psychedelic. [2:52:30] Roland’s endowed professorship and its foreseeable areas of research. [3:09:01] David Yaden. [3:18:23] Is there a contingency if Usona ceases to exist? [3:19:42] Roland’s current prognosis. [3:23:38] Roland’s parting thoughts of gratitude and the road ahead. See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  At this altitude, I can run flat out for a half mile before my hands start shaking. Can I ask you a personal question?

• 0:08Speaker 01

  Now would be an appropriate time.

• 0:12Speaker 00

  I'm a cybernetic organism, living tissue over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:25Tim Ferriss?

  Hello, ladies and gentlemen. This is Tim Ferriss. Welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show. And this episode is a very meaningful episode to me. It is probably the most significant episode personally that I've recorded in the last year. And it is with one of my favorite people, one of my favorite scientists in the world, also Roland Griffiths, PhD. And Roland has recently been diagnosed with what is very likely a terminal stage four cancer diagnosis. And this podcast episode spans across two separate conversations, one which was recorded remotely, and one which was recorded in person in Baltimore.

• 1:04Tim Ferriss?

  And we cover a lot of topics. It's wide spanning. And if you've ever found yourself inspired by someone who walks the walk, this episode is worth listening to. In facing mortality and potentially facing death, what Roland has done and is doing personally, the perspective he is finding, the tools he is using, is nothing short of awe inspiring. It is beyond words, in a sense. And I wanted to share that with all of you. And Roland also wanted to share a lot of what we discuss with the world. And we had gone back

• 1:44Tim Ferriss?

  and forth on when or if to release this, to potentially release it after his passing, and ultimately decided to release it now. So I hope you find it as deeply, deeply enriching and valuable as I did. It is a very tender conversation, at points, a very funny conversation, and in many, many capacities, a very, I think, profound conversation. And I will give you the bio for Roland, so please listen. If you want to skip directly to the interview, you can do that. But here's the bio, and it's very useful as some context.

• 2:28Tim Ferriss?

  Roland Griffiths, PhD, is a professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Neurosciences at Johns Hopkins University, and founding director of the Johns Hopkins Center on Psychedelic and Consciousness Research. His principal research focus in both clinical and preclinical laboratories has been on the behavioral and subjective effects of mood altering drugs. And I'll add this in. One thing that impresses me, and has impressed many people about Roland, is he is expert and considered a world-class expert in many classes of drugs, not limited to psychedelics, and came to them relatively late in his career. His research has been largely supported by grants from the National Institute on Health, and he is author of more than 400

• 3:09Tim Ferriss?

  scientific publications. He has been a consultant to the National Institutes of Health, the World Health Organization, and numerous pharmaceutical companies. Roland has conducted extensive research with sedative hypnotics, caffeine, and novel mood altering drugs. In 1994, Roland started a regular meditation practice that made him curious about certain altered states of consciousness that prompted him in 1999 to initiate the first study in decades to rigorously evaluate the effects of a high dose of a classic psychedelic drug, in this case, psilocybin, in healthy psychedelic naive participants. Subsequent studies with psilocybin have been conducted in healthy volunteers, in beginning and long-term meditators, and in religious leaders. All of these are worth looking at very closely and looking up on Google later. We'll put them

• 3:54Tim Ferriss?

  in the show notes as well. Therapeutic studies with psilocybin include treatment of psychological distress in cancer patients, AKA end-of-life anxiety, cigarette smoking addiction, major depression, anorexia nervosa, and Alzheimer's disease. There are actually many other things, opioid use disorder, and so on, that are ongoing or soon to be started. Other studies have examined non-psychedelic drugs that produce altered states of consciousness having similarities to psilocybin. Brain imaging studies have examined pharmacological and neural mechanisms of action of psilocybin. Roland's research group has also conducted a series of survey studies characterizing various naturally occurring and psychedelic occasioned transformative experiences, including, but not limited to, mystical-type experiences, psychologically

• 4:37Tim Ferriss?

  challenging experiences, near-death experiences, entity-and-God encounter experiences, and experiences to which reduced anxiety, depression, and substance use disorders are attributed. I encourage everybody to check out GriffithsFund.org, that's G-R-I-F-F-I-T-H-S Fund.org, where the focus is on developing a world-class research program to advance human flourishing on multiple levels. I will be supporting it, and I encourage you to learn more at GriffithsFund.org. And without further ado, please enjoy this wide-ranging conversation with Roland Griffiths.

• 5:15Tim Ferriss?

  So we're sitting here, this beautiful back porch, fading light, entering into a calm dusk here in Baltimore. We've got Celeste Verdejo Solies White Wine, Pago del Cielo, which is from God knows where. It's got some great constellations on it.

• 5:39Tim Ferriss?

  Don't know, doesn't matter right now, but it does have Spanish, so I'm gonna say Chile or Spain, probably. And we just came back from a lovely hike. Thank you for that, Roland.

• 5:49Speaker 01

  At Lake Roland.

• 5:50Tim Ferriss?

  At Lake Roland, no less. And I'm so glad to be here. It's been a little while. And had a wonderful dinner last night, talked about a million and one things. And one of the thoughts that came to mind for me, or let me begin with a question. You've had some hesitation, a lot of hesitation, for, I think, many legitimate, reasonable reasons, why you wouldn't ever want to discuss, or might not consider discussing, personal psychedelic use.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  Let me talk about my personal experience with psychedelics. So I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 60s. And invariably, within my cohort, I was exposed to marijuana. And I had a few experiences with a psychedelic, probably LSD, never psilocybin. They were done under recreational circumstances with friends. They were not meaningful experiences.

• 7:03Tim Ferriss?

  How old were you roughly at this time?

• 7:05Speaker 01

  This was probably a sophomore in college.

• 7:09Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 7:10Speaker 01

  And had a few experiences, but they weren't particularly compelling experiences to me. They were not the kinds of experiences that we now know we can elicit pretty reliably under optimized set-setting conditions and with proper support. They were not that. And that's actually quite usual with psychedelics. These can be just very disorienting, confusing experiences. And so those few experiences were something that didn't make a deep, personal impression

• 7:53Speaker 01

  on me, in the way that we now know that we have people coming out of our session saying, "That was one of the most personally meaningful experiences of my life." So that was not it. And in my college cohort, I don't know what percentage had exposure to psychedelics.

• 8:13Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, it's gotta be 80% plus. I mean, it would have to be.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  Well, I don't think it's 80.

• 8:16Tim Ferriss?

  No? In the Bay Area? Where were you?

• 8:19Speaker 01

  At that point, I was at Occidental College in Los Angeles. But my friends were from the Bay Area, so...

• 8:25Tim Ferriss?

  But non-trivial. It wasn't like a prior generation. I mean, growing up in the Bay Area in the 60s.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  No, no. So marijuana usage was much more normative than, in many situations, than alcohol use. And there certainly was experimentation with psychedelics. I was neither drawn particularly to marijuana, and, as I say, had a few experiences with psychedelics, none of which were of particular interest to me. When I went away to graduate school to study psychopharmacology, and that is psychoactive drugs, and that was 68, that I went to University of Minnesota,

• 9:15Speaker 01

  the door had closed.

• 9:17Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, it had just closed. I mean, it was just about to lock.

• 9:21Speaker 01

  Well, it was slammed shut within the academic center. So University of Minnesota had conducted trials on LSD some years before, and it was already taboo at that point in terms of research. It was a third rail in terms of discrediting yourself for being interested in psychedelics.

• 9:48Tim Ferriss?

  Now, at that time, were you interested, or were you like, it didn't register as meaningful enough?

• 9:54Speaker 01

  It didn't register with me as even a possibility to consider. And I wasn't, in spite of coming from the Bay Area, I wasn't steeped in the hate Ashbury culture.

• 10:06Tim Ferriss?

  Dirty, dirty hippies. Just kidding, folks. Hate Ashbury's pretty gritty, if you haven't been there.

• 10:12Speaker 01

  Well, it became gritty, but of course, yeah. I mean, this was home of the electro Kool-Aid acid test.

• 10:19Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, yeah. Stuart Brand's been on the podcast. He's got some stories of Ken Kesey.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  But that was not the crowd in which I was involved with. And my friends who had tried psychedelics, none of them were psychedelic enthusiasts. And so it was really a non-issue. And I got to graduate school, and it was clear that research wasn't gonna go on.

• 10:43Tim Ferriss?

  This was 68.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  68. Research of that type was not gonna go on. It never occurred to me to be thinking, and career-wise, that that would be an interesting thing to do. And because my limited experience was not particularly impressive, I had no particular interest.

• 11:03Tim Ferriss?

  So from that point, when does, all right, we're talking 68, when does meditation enter the picture? And then when do psychedelics even as just a topic of research interest, or free time curiosity?

• 11:17Tim Ferriss?

  Even reappear on the radar.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  So my involvement in meditation started in about mid 90s. And that opened that spiritual window for me that made me very curious about altered states of consciousness.

• 11:34Tim Ferriss?

  And like, when's and when psyched, no like, sorry, guys, geez, I'm going to leave that verbal tick in just so you know, after 600 fucking episodes, I still have these ticks.

• 11:45Tim Ferriss?

  Note to editing team. All right. So I'd like to just understand when meditation entered the picture, when it entered the picture in a serious way, and then when psychedelics came back on the awareness or interest radar.

• 12:03Speaker 01

  So I began meditation about 1993. I got rather quickly, deeply involved, had a regular meditation practice, got involved with Sita Yoga community and became incredibly intrigued by the altered states of consciousness that occurred through meditation, interesting phenomena that arise. It really turned my interest for the first time on inner experience, deep inner experience.

• 12:44Speaker 01

  I'd had some curiosity about meditation back in graduate school, but it really never took. This time, when I got involved, it did take. It was interesting, really deeply intriguing to me, got me reading the literature on comparative meditation traditions. It rang very closely to spirituality and religious traditions, of which I had almost no prior affiliation and interest in. I ended up having experiences in Sita Yoga, having experiences with the teacher of Sita

• 13:27Speaker 01

  Yoga, and this is a tradition that puts high value on this relationship, even on a subtle level, between the guru and the disciple. That part really threw me and was kind of repugnant to me from the beginning, until I had actually what I considered an astonishing initiation experience in which I, at one point, sat before meditation session. This was just in Baltimore and the way Sita Yoga works, again, the guru is revered. There's a seat at the front of the center, you know, and if the guru is not present,

• 14:09Speaker 01

  which the guru, I don't think ever visited the Baltimore Center, then a picture of the guru sat there. And I was looking at this picture and all of a sudden, the eyes became alive. And I was looking at the picture and I was looking into these eyes that were looking right back at me. And I thought, this is fascinating. And as I looked more closely, I realized I was looking at my own eyes. And with that understanding, and this wouldn't be commonly held within the tradition, I

• 14:49Speaker 01

  recognized that I was the guru, that I was no different than the guru, that the guru was just a mirror of who you are. And with that kind of understanding, I was able to join the community in reverence to the guru, because it was in reverence to this kind of deeper interconnectedness that the guru was reflecting back. And I was able to pranam, you know, bow in front of the guru, because I was bowing to myself. That kind of shifted a frame of reference that allowed me to engage in that community. And then I started more serious daily meditation practices that I have continued ever since.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  But I became just deeply intrigued with that whole area. And then had a period of time in which it really became a primary focus of interest to me.

• 15:52Tim Ferriss?

  Psychedelics or meditation?

• 15:53Speaker 01

  No, no, altered states of consciousness and meditation.

• 15:56Tim Ferriss?

  If I may interject for a second, so before that, were you, and I don't want to paint with too broad a brush, but more of a BF Skinner, like, hey, if it's outside observable behavior, we can quantify it and rely on it. Internal experience, too squishy, it's a maze with no end. If you start delving into that side of things. And then after your direct experiences with meditation, you became more interested in the potential of personally and maybe professionally exploring inner experience. Is that an overstatement? It might be.

• 16:30Speaker 01

  No, no, that's accurate, although back in graduate school, when I initially tried meditation, and I did only for maybe several weeks, I actually got the concept that there might be something interesting here, that people had developed these methodologies over thousands of years to explore inner experience. My training at the time was strict behavior analysis.

• 16:57Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 16:57Speaker 01

  Which generally ignores inner experiences being irrelevant, because it's not measurable. And it was thought really to be a nuisance variable. I would have a mentor who would say, yeah, words are just your mouth kind of flapping around. That's the only behavior there is there. Because you don't have a third person account of what's going on in terms of subjective experience. And indeed, that's the nature of the hard problem of consciousness and, you know, ability to understand the validity of self-reports. But I got the concept that, wait a second, you know, there might be something here, but

• 17:42Speaker 01

  the language used to describe it is going to be metaphorical, probably, because there's no way to verify that what is being reported is correct. But then some years later, when I started having these very significant meditation experiences, all of a sudden, that became really intriguing to me.

• 18:06Tim Ferriss?

  If you wouldn't mind just describing perhaps one variety of this experience, I think it'd be helpful for people who don't have any exposure to, say, meditation. What does a deeper or unusual to a intrepid meditator experience feel like? What makes it unlike ordinary consensus reality slash consciousness? What makes it different?

• 18:36Speaker 01

  Well, there's phenomenology attached to these experiences that will be highly variable.

• 18:42Tim Ferriss?

  Just for the muggles listening, what's phenomenology? I realize I use that word earlier, because I want to sound smart.

• 18:47Speaker 01

  Subjective experience.

• 18:48Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 18:49Speaker 01

  So it could be bright lights, it could be feelings that emerge, could be imagery that comes up. There's a whole variety of what we might call the play of consciousness, whatever can appear in consciousness can come up.

• 19:07Speaker 01

  If with meditation, there may be unusual features to that, or those experiences may come up more intensely than you would otherwise expect. One of the keys in meditation, I mean, what is learned in meditation is the ability to look at the nature of mind, to really understand what it is that's going on in your mind.

• 19:34Tim Ferriss?

  How much of that is separating consciousness from content, right? Like, of the observer from the patterns or the emotions that are being observed? When you say realizing what the mind is doing, would it, could you expand on that?

• 19:49Speaker 01

  So the basic instruction with meditation in most traditions is you have an object of focus. That might be breath, it might be a visualization, could be with eyes open and eyes closed. But you're initially invited to put your attention on a single object and pay attention to it. And so that could be breath, watching the in-breath and the out-breath. And that sounds like a simple thing, but it's not at all. And it could be paying attention to how the back of your hand feels. It could be paying attention to what's happening within your mind.

• 20:33Speaker 01

  There are thousand different approaches, but what one is instructed to do is to pay attention and to stay awake to where your mind is. And so following your breath turns out to be very difficult. If you sit down and you're told, just stay with your breath, and if thoughts arise, just let them go. That's a trial by fire.

• 21:01Tim Ferriss?

  Good luck, monkey mind. You're going to see a lot of hyperactivity.

• 21:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that's drives many beginning meditators out immediately.

• 21:11Tim Ferriss?

  So you said you started with a few weeks and then you quit? What happened?

• 21:15Speaker 01

  Oh, it probably wasn't even a few weeks. Three minutes seemed like three hours to me.

• 21:21Tim Ferriss?

  So I just have to, because I think this will give people inspiration also. So your wife, actually, I should say that, that's actually fun to say. So instead of significantly, your wife was saying to me earlier, so she gave me a fantastic, it was very generous, head and neck massage. She's very skilled. And she said, I'm really rusty, because Roland doesn't want massages. And he can't sit still for this long.

• 21:52Tim Ferriss?

  I thought that was very hilarious, but also very inspiring, which, which means like, you can have the go, go, go.

• 22:02Tim Ferriss?

  Pre-disposition and eventually still embrace and find tremendous value from these meditative practices. But what did quitting look like?

• 22:11Speaker 01

  Quitting?

• 22:12Tim Ferriss?

  Well, you said, I don't know if I've even made it a few weeks. I mean, with that first period of meditation, did you take a break? Did you just decide this isn't working? I need something different. What did that chapter look like?

• 22:25Speaker 01

  Well, it was a very short chapter. I went to maybe two or three classes from a meditation teacher in Minneapolis and set upon myself to try to meditate each day. And it just was aversive. It was, it was no fun.

• 22:45Tim Ferriss?

  Next time you're going to complain, people say, this is highly aversive to my delicate sensibilities. Yes, it was aversive. You didn't like it.

• 22:52Speaker 01

  I didn't like it. No, no, it was, it was hard and I didn't get it. Nothing interesting happened, although I was very impatient for, you know,

• 23:03Tim Ferriss?

  Something to happen.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  Something to happen. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And yeah, very quickly concluded I had better things to do and that there wasn't any value in this for me. And so then decades later, that situation changed.

• 23:22Tim Ferriss?

  When was this initial experiment with meditation? What year?

• 23:26Speaker 01

  So that was probably 1970.

• 23:30Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, 70.

• 23:30Speaker 01

  1970.

• 23:31Tim Ferriss?

  And then around, you said, what was it, 92, 93?

• 23:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:35Tim Ferriss?

  It reemerges. Why does meditation reemerge at that point?

• 23:39Speaker 01

  A good friend at the time got involved with City Yoga. She started attending this local meditation center and I thought, that's interesting because I'd had a prior interest in meditation, but never got it. And then she called me up one day really excitedly saying, I'm going on a month-long meditation retreat.

• 24:02Tim Ferriss?

  Month.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  And I, and I thought, oh my God, what in the world would that be like? And there was this kind of mixed feeling I had. One was, one was almost fear. It's like, that sounds like torture. I couldn't meditate for three minutes.

• 24:20Tim Ferriss?

  I have to say for people who don't know Roland, you are one of the most fidgety people I've ever met in my life. Like, and I say that it's not as a, as any denigration or insult. I mean, I just, you have a tremendous forward propulsion. I'll put it that way. It's a good thing. I'm not saying that's a bad thing. I'm not sure how this is landing for you. But, okay. So the idea of you going to a month-long meditation retreat is crazy. It's crazy talk.

• 24:51Speaker 01

  It would almost be like, I don't know, saying, yeah, you could go to jail for two months. It sounded like potential torture, but yet I had thought about meditation as being something that potentially could reveal something about myself and something I thought I should know more about. And that is my kind of interior experience and that maybe there was something to this. So there was both this sense of fear, but also intrigue.

• 25:25Tim Ferriss?

  When was this? 92, 93?

• 25:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, probably 92 or 93.

• 25:30Tim Ferriss?

  We can edit this out, but tell me the truth. Was there any crush on this woman whatsoever that?

• 25:34Speaker 01

  Well, she was a girlfriend.

• 25:37Tim Ferriss?

  I knew it. All right. Just wanted to fact check a little. Okay.

• 25:42Speaker 01

  Yeah. We, I mean, we subsequently came to live together and I don't know whether we were living together at that time. We might've been. As a matter of fact, I think we, I think we were.

• 25:54Tim Ferriss?

  So we end up, you're considering this insight that could come vis a vis greater awareness of your inner experience. And you go to a month-long?

• 26:08Speaker 01

  No, I didn't. She, she went to the month.

• 26:10Tim Ferriss?

  She went. She went. Okay.

• 26:11Speaker 01

  Oh yeah. No, there's no way I.

• 26:14Tim Ferriss?

  I was like, man, that's like, well, you know, I don't know how to swim, but I'm going to do an Ironman. So she does a month-long meditation retreat and what comes of that?

• 26:24Speaker 01

  Well, she really starts to get engaged with meditation.

• 26:29Tim Ferriss?

  So it deepens her practice, this whole experience?

• 26:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. She starts a regular meditation practice. The month-long retreat in and of itself probably wasn't pivotal to her, but she got more deeply involved in meditation. And as a consequence, I became more intrigued. And so I started, I took instructions from her. What, yeah, what, what do you do? And I can remember, yeah, the first meditations that I did, it was in the evenings after I'd come back from a run. And I would sit down on a pillow in meditation posture and just try to, to be present with that. But

• 27:12Speaker 01

  at that point, I didn't have any, any firm instructions in, in meditation, but I thought, you know, this is, there might be something here. It might be intriguing. And it became intriguing enough to me to go to a program down at this meditation center. It was a weekend program.

• 27:33Tim Ferriss?

  What was it that gave you enough positive feedback to commit to that? Does that make sense? Right? Like, well, how did it differ from your prior experience where you're like, I got better things to do. I'm out of here.

• 27:47Speaker 01

  Initially, there was just some sense of calm and well-being and then curiosity about where this could go, were I to get more systematically involved in it. It was like, what is it to stare into the mind when you've never considered your own interiority, if you will? And that's where I was. I hadn't paid attention to the nature of mind other than believing and identifying with the voice in my head that would come up and tell me, you know, oh, good job, or, you know, you really screwed that up.

• 28:28Tim Ferriss?

  Where were you professionally at the time?

• 28:31Speaker 01

  So I'm a full professor at Hopkins in the Departments of Psychiatry and Neuroscience, well-established in psychoform ecology, international reputation, dealing primarily with drugs of abuse, successful in funding and already had published probably hundreds of publications at that time. So I was well-established in the field.

• 28:59Tim Ferriss?

  This is helpful because I just want to make sure we dismiss any imaginings that listeners might have of you like living in an RV, sort of into the wild style, running around naked with Palo Santo or whatever. That's not the case. Like you were definitively doing, you were, you were on track professionally, so to speak. I mean, it sounds like.

• 29:24Speaker 01

  Yeah. And I established as a full professor at Johns Hopkins, a very conservative medical institution, doing rigorous research and garnering funding and stature, international acclaim for my research, mostly on drugs of dependence. And at that point, I had done considerable work with sedative hypnotics. That was a primary focus.

• 29:52Tim Ferriss?

  What would be an example of a sedative hypnotic? Just so people can frame it.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  Benzespines, Valium Librium, Ativan, sleeping medications. So that was one area of specialty that I had. I worked as a consultant and done a number of drug company-sponsored trials, looking at novel drugs for their abuse liability.

• 30:17Tim Ferriss?

  For their abuse liability, so just to understand, are you basically trying to identify the worst-case scenarios in that instance with sponsored research from industry? Just so I can try to translate what you're saying into lay terms. Is it companies that are saying, hey, we want to understand what our liabilities are if we push this out to millions of people? Let's look at abuse potential. Here's some money to help us figure it out?

• 30:41Speaker 01

  Well, correct, but FDA also mandates that they assess abuse liability.

• 30:46Tim Ferriss?

  For sure. For sure. I mean, it's, it makes a lot of sense on a whole lot of levels.

• 30:49Speaker 01

  So we developed methodologies that are continuing to be widely used for assessing abuse liability of drugs. And many of those procedures were subsequently adopted by FDA and then mandated to be conducted, trials conducted by drug companies that were bringing new compounds to market.

• 31:12Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 31:13Speaker 01

  Because they don't want a compound brought to market that has.

• 31:16Tim Ferriss?

  No one wants another thalidomide on their hands. Yeah.

• 31:18Speaker 01

  Well, but in this case, no one wants another heroin.

• 31:21Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 31:22Speaker 01

  On their hands.

• 31:23Tim Ferriss?

  Kind of wild how that turned out with oxycodone and so on, but yeah.

• 31:28Speaker 01

  I've also been someone who follows my interests. So whatever is of most interest to me, that's where my research has led me. And so I got really intrigued first with nicotine, again, as a model for understanding self-administration. And at the time that I initially got involved with nicotine, it wasn't considered to be an addictive drug.

• 31:55Tim Ferriss?

  Early days. When was this? This is in the 60s? No, late 60s, early 70s? When was this?

• 32:00Speaker 01

  Let's see, I probably started in late 70s.

• 32:04Tim Ferriss?

  Wow, it's wild to think about people think this is ancient history. It's not ancient. I mean, for me at least, it's not ancient history.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, so we ran a number of studies looking at the role of nicotine and the control of cigarette smoking. And we went down a rabbit hole in looking at detailed behavior analysis of puff topography.

• 32:27Tim Ferriss?

  What is puff topography?

• 32:28Speaker 01

  Well, with each puff of a cigarette, there's a profile of how people draw on that and what the duration is and the intensity of that puff. But then you also have the inhalation, the inhalation depth and duration, all of which is relevant to extraction of nicotine out of that.

• 32:52Tim Ferriss?

  Connoisseurs of puff topography.

• 32:54Speaker 01

  We did. And that turns out to have been a blind alley that I spent a whole lot of time focused on what actually is the nature of controlling the individual puff.

• 33:08Tim Ferriss?

  Sort of relevant if you think about vaping pens and sort of more mechanized, controllable means of administering nicotine, I would imagine. Like, people must be studying this still.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  It's highly relevant. And that is because we know that whatever you're delivering via by lung is going to depend on the delivery device. One of the things that we observed is that the puff duration decreased systematically as the cigarette was smoked. And we thought, oh, that's interesting. You know, maybe there's a satiation mechanism in there. And maybe there's something subtle about the control of puff duration. Well,

• 33:49Tim Ferriss?

  Trying to make it last longer, maybe.

• 33:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, we ran a variety of studies and found out it actually just had to do with the draw on the cigarette rod.

• 34:00Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, because the longer it is, the longer you can drag.

• 34:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that may change, you know, factors such as heat and things like that. But it turned out not to be very interesting with respect to understanding the nature of the addictive behavior of nicotine. But my first postdoc student in that area, Jack Henfield, actually came to be very famous in the whole area of nicotine dependence. And he was a co-author on the Surgeon General's report that recognized nicotine as a drug of addiction. So I'd gone down into nicotine. And at that point, I'd already switched and started to

• 34:46Speaker 01

  do work with caffeine, because there were lots of people then who were involved with the nicotine stuff. And I'd gone down this blind alley looking at the puff topographies.

• 34:55Tim Ferriss?

  Never fall for the seduction of puff topography, everybody. Don't do it.

• 35:02Speaker 01

  Well, but that's what science is. You know, I mean, it looked so orderly, and it looked clean. And it was a discreet behavioral measure. And so it was really attractive. It was seductive, but not everything works out. And but that's the fun of science is you can follow your hunches.

• 35:22Tim Ferriss?

  If everything worked out, there would be a severe problem with the methodology.

• 35:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, yeah, you learn when when to hold them and when to fold them.

• 35:32Tim Ferriss?

  Let's zoom out for a second. So we're talking about a number of things simultaneously. We're talking about your professional interests. We're talking about, it seems like a reintroduction and turning point with meditation as a tool for examining your hitherto, is that the right word, largely ignored internal experience, aside from like, yeah, I know when I'm beating myself up, and I know when I'm praising myself. But outside of that, it's just largely unexamined.

• 35:59Speaker 01

  I would go even further than that.

• 36:01Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  I don't think I knew when I was beating myself up and when I was praising myself.

• 36:06Tim Ferriss?

  You knew those were things, but you didn't have the in the moment awareness to recognize when you're doing one or the other.

• 36:13Speaker 01

  Identified with the voice in my head that that's all I knew is. And I guess I, if you ask, I could say, yeah, I'm feeling badly about that because I should have done differently. But what I couldn't see is that that's just occurring within a larger field of consciousness. And that voice in my head was not me, that there's a sense of awareness that resides behind that. And when you start paying attention to that voice and realizing

• 36:54Speaker 01

  it's not you, then all of a sudden, the game starts changing. I can remember when I first got involved with meditation and starting to pay attention to that voice in my head. And it was brutally judgmental. I mean, it would say all kinds of, it was just self judgment. But, you know, you're stupid. That was real.

• 37:19Tim Ferriss?

  Come on, Roland, you can do better than that.

• 37:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. What, what in the world are you doing?

• 37:24Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, vicious.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. But I think many, many people live with just that. And the kind of thought experiment I did is if that voice in my head were to be amplified, brain on speaker, it would just be really embarrassing to hear what was going on. And I thought, I was a parent at the time and and treated my relationship with my children as a huge privilege. And I would never talk to my children the way that that voice

• 38:04Tim Ferriss?

  You spoke to yourself.

• 38:05Speaker 01

  Was talking to me. Right. And I would say, if I heard a parent talking like that to their children, I would have a lot of judgment. They would come up instantaneously. I mean, that is not how to nurture a child. And I'm thinking, but what? This is, this is my relationship with myself? You know, good God, let's get, let's get this straightened out. And so that's part of what emerges with meditation is this mindfulness and catching yourself. And initially, when when I would hear that kind of judgmental stuff, I was so identified with it that it was very difficult to dissociate from. But once I saw it for

• 38:48Speaker 01

  what it was, and say, wait a second, I don't need to hear that. And then that kind of judgmental voice would just dissipate over time. But that's just one example of what goes on within our own self-talk. If that is not who you are, if there's a larger sense of self behind that, then you needn't allow yourself to get beat up like that.

• 39:21Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, if I may, just jump in for a second. All right. So we have all of these realizations vis a vis practices. I think, I think that's my new catchphrase for the episode vis a vis. I don't know why I sometimes have episodes that are dominated by some bizarre verbal tic that comes out of nowhere. I think vis a vis is my weird tic for this one. Anyway, you have these practices, you have this turning point of sorts, 92, 93 with meditation.

• 39:52Tim Ferriss?

  We're going to bounce around a little bit. When is your first study published that involves psychedelics in any capacity?

• 40:00Speaker 01

  2006.

• 40:01Tim Ferriss?

  2006.

• 40:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. But we started the research back in 2000.

• 40:06Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 40:07Speaker 01

  And started thinking about it back in the late 1990s.

• 40:11Tim Ferriss?

  Late 1990s. So let's just for argument's sake, say 97, 98. So we're talking 92, 93 with meditation experiences. How do you go from that to then beginning to cogitate on the first germinating seeds of what would later become a published study?

• 40:29Speaker 01

  So my interest in meditation became super compelling. I started reading literature on different meditation traditions, on different religious traditions. And it seemed important to me. And it really functioned, perhaps as a kind of midlife crisis by comparison, my interest in

• 40:58Speaker 01

  Conducting new studies on set of hypnotics just seemed of much less importance. Been there, done that. I could write other grants. I could get more funding for that. But so what? Other people could do that. And here was something new, a shiny new coin to look at.

• 41:23Tim Ferriss?

  And this psychedelic compounds?

• 41:25Speaker 01

  No, no, this is, yeah, about the nature of mind, what the hell's going on? And that raises big questions. I mean, that's the only thing that we really know is our minds. And but in our culture, we never pay attention to that. And I thought, Jesus, how could I have lived my life this long?

• 41:48Tim Ferriss?

  Driving this car for my entire life and I've never looked at the car?

• 41:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:52Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. How is that possible?

• 41:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, never, yeah, never looked under the hood and never occurred to me to look under the hood.

• 41:59Tim Ferriss?

  Never even looked at it? Yeah, just looking at the windshield?

• 42:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. And so that seemed fundamentally important to me. And there was a level of feeling disoriented because I didn't understand what the nature of the meditation tradition I was involved in and how that fit with other meditation traditions. And where in the world does this fit within the literature on spirituality and religion? You know, but it seemed really important and of interest to me, so much so that I considered dropping out of Hopkins altogether and going off to the meditation ashram and really diving into meditation and this tradition.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  But I didn't feel secure in doing that. I didn't understand enough about that tradition and where it fit into kind of a wider field. So I did a lot of reading about meditation, about spirituality. And then I came to be introduced through a good friend, Bob Schuster, who was head of the National Institute on Drug Abuse at that time and had been one of my few colleagues who were actually interested in my involvement with meditation.

• 43:21Tim Ferriss?

  And this is in the, now we're talking about what time frame, late 90s?

• 43:26Speaker 01

  This would be, yeah, 97, 98, when I'd go to meetings and my colleagues would say, well, yeah, what's new? And I said, oh, well, I've really gotten involved with a meditation practice. And you could just see their eyes glaze over. Yeah. And it was like,

• 43:45Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, that's nice. I'll see you next Wednesday at the fill the blank. Yep.

• 43:49Speaker 01

  So, yeah, not, most of my colleagues just didn't get that at all.

• 43:53Tim Ferriss?

  So Bob Schuster, he said, what would he ask you? How did he demonstrate that?

• 44:00Speaker 01

  I don't remember the specific time, but it would have been the same thing. I've gotten involved with meditation. And Bob just had a lot of native curiosity. And, and so he would have followed up, well, tell me about that, you know? And he'd be pressing me for details. What is it? What? Yeah. What are you doing here? And I think he was intrigued with that. He never got involved with meditation, but he had wide ranging interests and was really a creative individual. So he was one of my few colleagues who really showed interest.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  It turns out then that he ended up being invited to a meeting hosted by Bob Jesse.

• 44:47Tim Ferriss?

  Bob Jesse?

• 44:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:49Tim Ferriss?

  Love you, buddy. He's, this is a good guy. Anyway, not to foreshadow too strongly, but yeah, continue.

• 44:54Speaker 01

  So Bob had started the Council on Spiritual Practices that was very interested in primary religious experiences. And in particular, those brought about what Bob would have described as entheogens, which would be psychedelics. So he was very interested in the nature of these transformative experiences. And he started this organization, the Council on Spiritual Practices, and had a meeting at which Bob Schuster attended. And there was some discussion about launching research with psychedelics.

• 45:34Tim Ferriss?

  And so you attended this at the behest of?

• 45:36Speaker 01

  No, no, I didn't attend this meeting.

• 45:38Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, you didn't? Okay. Bob reported back to you.

• 45:40Speaker 01

  This is Bob Schuster attended this meeting.

• 45:43Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, right. Bob Jesse, Bob Schuster. Right.

• 45:45Speaker 01

  And then the question is, well, who could run such a study?

• 45:49Tim Ferriss?

  So let me back up for a second. Why would Bob Schuster go to this event?

• 45:53Speaker 01

  Just out of curiosity. So he, yeah.

• 45:55Tim Ferriss?

  Good man. I mean,

• 45:56Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. No, he was.

• 45:57Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, that's, I feel like that just defines the best scientists I've ever met. Is just a, an extreme curiosity, because what's the cost? One day, couple of follow up questions?

• 46:10Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:10Tim Ferriss?

  Why not? You know?

• 46:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:12Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. So he just went because he was, he was like, yeah, I have no idea what this is about. Let's check it out. And there's probably more to it.

• 46:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, he would have known it was, there was something to do with entheogens. And this sounded like an interesting group and he had broad interests, so he went. So I don't know the details of that meeting, but I do know that at the end of that, there was some talk, well, what if research were to be renewed with psychedelics?

• 46:38Tim Ferriss?

  And just to set the stage here, from, was it 71? I might be getting the year off. But once we had the Controlled Substance Act, is that right? Am I getting that?

• 46:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:52Tim Ferriss?

  And Nixon, which I would argue is more politically motivated than scientifically motivated. You basically have a psychedelic scientific winter. I mean, everything is locked down. Up until, now we're talking about late 90s?

• 47:12Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 47:13Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. Late 90s. So it's important for folks to understand that very little had happened in those intervening years, with maybe the exception of Strassmann.

• 47:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. So Rick Strassmann had run a study with DMT in experienced users. But other than that, nothing had been done. And Bob Jesse's group was interested in what it would take to reinitiate research with more of the classic psychedelics, not inhaled or intravenous and in DMT. And so Bob Schuster suggested that Bob Jesse reach out to me as, because Bob Schuster knew that I was involved with meditation. I might be intrigued. I certainly was well credentialed.

• 48:04Speaker 01

  And he ended up introducing me to Bob Jesse, who,

• 48:09Tim Ferriss?

  So many Bobs.

• 48:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. And Bob Jesse then came out and we had lunch together. And my interest in Bob Jesse was that he had this Council on Spiritual Practices that were interested in transformative change. I wasn't interested in the psychedelics, but he was widely read on transformative change within mystical and meditation traditions. And so initially I was seeking him as a resource to try to do stress testing about, how did I get involved with this group? Where does this group fit within other different meditation traditions?

• 48:54Speaker 01

  And he was very generous with his time and, and made a number of books available to me.

• 49:00Tim Ferriss?

  Books? What books? Do you remember?

• 49:02Speaker 01

  Well, read, just a reading list on, on different meditation traditions, different religious traditions. But he was also interested in what he would have called the, the entheogens.

• 49:15Tim Ferriss?

  Now, just for folks who have no context, why would Bob care about calling them entheogens versus psychedelics?

• 49:23Speaker 01

  Well, Bob really felt strongly that psychedelics, just as a term, were beyond, absolutely beyond salvation, that he felt that at that time, the whole term psychedelics elicited visions of tie dyed t-shirts and lava lamps and hate, the hate Ashbury and, and the,

• 49:50Tim Ferriss?

  I'm sad that lava lamps have exited stage left, just for the record. I think they're fantastic. But yes.

• 49:57Speaker 01

  Yeah. There was just so much back.

• 50:00Tim Ferriss?

  Austin Powers flashback tie dye association is not on the whole positive.

• 50:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's so much negative publicity that the psychedelics had garnered because of what happened in the 1960s, that there was every reason not to associate with that.

• 50:21Tim Ferriss?

  So you have psychedelic, I mean, it's kind of a hodgepodge Greek etymology, but mind manifesting, right? Then you have entheogen. So theo, like theology, or theobromine, food of the gods, chocolate for you chocolate lovers out there.

• 50:36Speaker 01

  Right. Theo is God. So that's the experience of God within.

• 50:40Tim Ferriss?

  God. So entheogen, as in Genesis, what should we make of that term, entheogen? What does that mean? Just simply, simply speaking.

• 50:48Speaker 01

  To engender the experience of God within.

• 50:51Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 50:52Speaker 01

  And these substances then would be claimed to be relevant to that. You know, but of course that uses the God word, which is problematic in and of itself. It's a very narrow casting of what the psychedelics can do. I mean, yes, they can produce experiences of spiritual significance, but they do a whole bunch of other things. And, you know, they had been termed psychotomimetics for a long time.

• 51:25Tim Ferriss?

  Yep. Still sometimes apt, I think. But yeah.

• 51:29Speaker 01

  Well, they are. Yeah. They were thought to be models of psychosis. And that was thought to be their primary initial interest.

• 51:38Tim Ferriss?

  Let me ask a pointed question here. Without personal experience, after your initial experiences, how did you get to the point where you decided to dedicate your resources to studying psychedelics?

• 51:55Speaker 01

  So when Bob Jesse prompted me to consider running a study with, in this case, psilocybin, and at that time, we would have called it a hallucinogen. So we wouldn't have called it a psychotimimetic, we would have called it a classic hallucinogen.

• 52:14Tim Ferriss?

  Mm hmm.

• 52:14Speaker 01

  And so the term psychedelic has since been rehabilitated. And so now we're free to use it once again. But at the time, it was, it was too edgy.

• 52:27Tim Ferriss?

  Forboding.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  To use, yeah. So the thought going in was, can we study this? I was familiar with the work that had been done. And now I got caught up on my reading of the work, particularly from Harvard. But there was a lot of other research on psychedelics from the 50s and 60s.

• 52:48Tim Ferriss?

  A lot of which was in the context of then alcoholism and now alcohol use disorder.

• 52:56Speaker 01

  So that was one of the central therapeutic targets from that early work, as was end of life, anxiety and depression. And both of which have been now resurrected. And we ended up running a significant trial in cancer patients who had anxiety and depression and end of life. And just this last week, Michael Bogan shoots from NYU has published a very important study showing that psilocybin is effective at treating alcoholism. Those are lines of research that were really started in the 50s or 60s.

• 53:38Tim Ferriss?

  So flashing forward then to the current moment, not as we're sitting here on your patio, but rather the moment that you freeze framed, which is Bob Jesse suggests a potential study or research looking at psilocybin specifically. That is roughly what year would you say?

• 54:04Speaker 01

  It would have been maybe 98?

• 54:08Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, 98. Funny enough, I just have to say for you, you might find this entertaining. In 96, I think it was 96, I was at Princeton, I was a psychology focused undergrad, hoping to specialize in neuroscience. I think it was, so around the same time, I would have submitted my final term paper for a psychology class with Bart Hobel, who did all sorts of interesting research, discussing the neurological, I mean, this is fancy talk, but like neurological correlates between LSD-25, otherwise known as LSD, and REM sleep. So this, basically

• 54:52Tim Ferriss?

  the exact same time, I just think that's a funny coincidence. So how do you then go from, let's say, 97, 98, let's just say 98 for simplicity, to your next personal use of psychedelics? And what came of this new reentrance on a personal level into psychedelics?

• 55:18Speaker 01

  I think importantly, at least to me, is that when I decided I would conduct a study with psilocybin, number one, I didn't have any significant prior experiences.

• 55:33Tim Ferriss?

  Well, you had none with psilocybin, right? Because presumably you used LSD back in the day. So no direct experience to psilocybin.

• 55:41Speaker 01

  No direct experience with psilocybin, but nothing of interest with psychedelics.

• 55:47Tim Ferriss?

  Why did you say yes to Bob or continue to have that conversation?

• 55:52Speaker 01

  Because I was deeply interested in altered states of consciousness. And I thought this would be a way to use the tools of my trade. I'm a clinical pharmacologist that runs drug trials to conduct rigorous research examining those. At that point, I had plenty of experience running clinical trials, designing novel ways to assess subjective effects in different feeling states. And I had a lot of credibility within the field in terms of running that. So this was, in some ways, right down my alley.

• 56:35Tim Ferriss?

  Let me ask you this. Were, at the time, were you tempted to possibly have a firsthand experience with psychedelics? And you subverted that because of other priorities?

• 56:52Speaker 01

  No, I had zero interest. As a matter of fact, I think if anything, I would have been deeply reluctant to be exposed to a psychedelic because I was already on a meditation path. And I didn't know how that would interact with that. And in fact, within meditation traditions, there's a long history of prohibition of use of any psychoactive substances. And as it turns out now, since we've done research with long term meditators and beginning meditators, I don't think that there's any significant adverse effect on meditation of using a psychedelic.

• 57:37Speaker 01

  But at the time, I didn't know that. And furthermore, I frankly was suspicious of the psychedelic enthusiasts. There's a cohort of people who would wax excitedly.

• 57:52Tim Ferriss?

  You're using some fancy terms here, folks. A cohort, et cetera. So what were you seeing that you didn't like? Where you're like, I'm not sure that's my, I'm not sure those are my people?

• 58:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, so within the scientific community, yeah, there were not psychedelic the enthusiastic researchers, because no human research could be done.

• 58:15Tim Ferriss?

  I'm just curious, at what point did you become aware of Sasha Shulgin? We don't have to spend a lot of time on this. I'm just wondering, like, from a chronological perspective, because that guy has some, I mean, he has some, some real credibility. Had, he's passed away, of course, but.

• 58:33Speaker 01

  See, I probably would have read Pecol or Ticol, his classic books, at the same time I was just getting familiar with the whole field.

• 58:45Tim Ferriss?

  For people who don't know, Pecol was the first, that's phenethylamines I've known and loved. I think A Chemical Romance, maybe, A Chemical Love Story, one of the two is the subtitle. Amazing book. Okay. But by and large, not many people in your scientific peer group who would want any type of association with psychedelics whatsoever. Or is that too strong?

• 59:09Speaker 01

  No, no, no. It was, at that point, it still was considered to be a nonstarter. Except for Rick Strausman, no research had been done with these drugs, certainly not in psychedelic naive individuals.

• 59:28Tim Ferriss?

  Yep. And he had worked with experienced subjects.

• 59:31Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 59:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 59:32Speaker 01

  Yeah. He had gotten permission to give DMT to experienced individuals. It wasn't clear at all that you could even get a trial approved to administer a significant dose of a psychedelic to psychedelic naive people. And so when we initially submitted that protocol.

• 59:54Tim Ferriss?

  When did you initially submit?

• 59:56Speaker 01

  That would have been probably 99.

• 59:59Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 59:59Speaker 01

  It's so, I judged the probability of even getting the protocol accepted by my IRB and by.

• 1:00:08Tim Ferriss?

  What is it? Something Review Board? What does the I stand for?

• 1:00:10Speaker 01

  Institutional.

• 1:00:11Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, that's right.

• 1:00:12Speaker 01

  Institutional.

• 1:00:13Tim Ferriss?

  Review Board, yeah.

• 1:00:14Speaker 01

  And essentially, they're the ethical approval group within an institution, in this case, Hopkins.

• 1:00:22Tim Ferriss?

  If you want to do week long facts, you're late to the game, folks. Could have done that a few decades ago, but not anymore. That's because you will not get IRB approval.

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  And then FDA approval was equally uncertain. So it wasn't clear we could do this.

• 1:00:37Tim Ferriss?

  Why did you decide to throw that hail Mary?

• 1:00:42Speaker 01

  Because I was really interested in altered states of consciousness.

• 1:00:48Tim Ferriss?

  And now you have a means by which in a single session, you could potentially induce a significant altered state.

• 1:00:55Speaker 01

  Yes. So a key component in us doing this research was finding Bill Richards, who had formerly worked at Maryland.

• 1:01:05Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:06Speaker 01

  Psychiatric Research Center.

• 1:01:07Tim Ferriss?

  Didn't he administer the last legal dose of psychedelic, assisted psychotherapy?

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  He did.

• 1:01:14Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:15Speaker 01

  He did. And so he had been involved in this. He himself had had psychedelic experiences before they were made illegal. And he was a clinical psychologist in Baltimore.

• 1:01:29Tim Ferriss?

  How did you find him?

• 1:01:31Speaker 01

  Well, Bob Jesse introduced.

• 1:01:33Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, Bob Jesse, the source of all good things. I mean, Bill Richards is very, he's very skilled.

• 1:01:39Speaker 01

  He's very skilled, but I would also count him among the true believers.

• 1:01:46Tim Ferriss?

  For sure.

• 1:01:47Speaker 01

  He was a skillful clinician. And I wouldn't have had the courage to study a high dose of a psychedelic, absent someone who could assure me that they knew what they were doing.

• 1:02:04Tim Ferriss?

  Hey, look, I've been shot into space. Let me tell you what it's like.

• 1:02:10Speaker 01

  So we made a great team. Bill was well grounded in, in guiding sessions. I was the skeptical scientist and we designed a study and that kept Bill entirely blinded to the study conditions.

• 1:02:28Tim Ferriss?

  Meaning he would not know, as one example, who has received an intervention, meaning an active dose versus a placebo dose.

• 1:02:36Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:02:37Tim Ferriss?

  Among other things.

• 1:02:38Speaker 01

  The design of the study is a little bit complicated and we had, we used a high dose of Ritalin as a control and people were told that they would have three different sessions and at least one session would involve a moderate to high dose of psilocybin. So they were told that, but other sessions could involve administration of, I think we had 13 other psychoactive compounds like nicotine or diphenhydramine or.

• 1:03:09Tim Ferriss?

  So diphenhydramine would be Benadryl for people.

• 1:03:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. But drugs that have a whole variety of different kinds of actions.

• 1:03:19Tim Ferriss?

  Just from a study design perspective, why not have a few

• 1:03:25Tim Ferriss?

  controls in that sense versus having many controls?

• 1:03:29Speaker 01

  We had a single control and that turned out to be Ritalin. But importantly, the instructions to both the guides and the volunteers was that they could receive a much wider range of drugs. Now, among the drugs they could receive were methylphenidate, Ritalin and psilocybin. And they were told that on one, at least one session, they would get a moderate to high dose of psilocybin.

• 1:03:58Tim Ferriss?

  Why was it important to tell them that they could receive anything ranging from Ritalin to psilocybin to the diphenhydramine?

• 1:04:06Speaker 01

  We wanted them to be open to whatever experience they had. We did not want to tell them specifically, this is going to compare psilocybin with Ritalin because then they would be paying attention. They might.

• 1:04:22Tim Ferriss?

  Right. It'll be easier to deduce what they're receiving.

• 1:04:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. So that blinds them. They did not know that, in fact, everyone was going to get a dose of, high dose of Ritalin. Everyone was going to get a high dose of psilocybin. And we further created a blinding condition by, with a limited number of subjects, giving them on the first two sessions, just methylphenidate and on the third session.

• 1:04:55Tim Ferriss?

  That's Ritalin, yeah.

• 1:04:56Speaker 01

  Psilocybin. And again, it was to throw the guides off, the study staff off, the volunteers off in terms of what to expect. So I think we did as good a job as we could.

• 1:05:10Tim Ferriss?

  Can I interject for just a second? I want to say, because we were talking last night about this conversation and the risk of you seeming biased because of things we're gonna, we have still yet to discuss. We'll get there. But

• 1:05:28Tim Ferriss?

  my thought as a, again, as a tourist, like a very enthusiastic amateur, but not by any stretch a legitimate scientist, what I believe, not by, it's not even a belief, it's not a belief, it's a statement of, I think, reasonable, objective fact, which is that the scientific method and proper study design should reduce bias, even if the experimenters have extreme bias. And I'd love just to get your take on that for a second because, for instance, I think Bill Richards is a genius at,

• 1:06:08Tim Ferriss?

  with respect to many facets of what he does. He is an incredible clinician. I mean, really outstanding, as is Mary Cosmona. I want to just mention that also as an additive. But that said, he is a true believer, as you put it. So how do you include someone with that skill set in a study design while ensuring that any bias, pre-existing bias, does not manifest in the clinical outcomes because of experimenter bias? And that's part of the reason why I wanted to have this conversation because I feel like as long as your study design is immaculate, whether the experimenters are biased or not, ideally, they are not

• 1:06:51Tim Ferriss?

  biased, but even if they are biased, that is why you have people like Feynman saying, you know, the easiest person to fool is yourself and therefore precaution, precaution, precaution, precaution. But it seems to me that the, you know, I brought in a lot of different elements in this conversation, but that the experimental design itself and proper implementation of scientific methods should hedge against bias, even if it exists in experimenters.

• 1:07:25Tim Ferriss?

  Is that just a wine infused muggles understatement? Or is there, I mean, what would you add to that?

• 1:07:33Speaker 01

  The nature of, of many clinical trials, if they're double blind and rigorously run, there's no way for the people running the study to know what those conditions are. And in particular, if you can't break the blind because of apparent effects of the drug, then you're safe.

• 1:07:56Tim Ferriss?

  What do you mean by breaking the blind?

• 1:07:58Speaker 01

  Well, breaking the blind is a particular problem with research with psychedelics.

• 1:08:04Tim Ferriss?

  You mean niacin? And if niacin doesn't equal

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:07Tim Ferriss?

  The reports of psychedelics would be read on air with.

• 1:08:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. And so it's a deep problem with psychedelic research and it's not been solved yet. We don't have adequate controls that would completely put skeptics at peace and not thinking that there wasn't an opportunity for, for bias. So you worry about expectancy effects on part of both the therapist and on part of the participant biasing the outcomes.

• 1:08:39Tim Ferriss?

  If I may, because, you know, I've had enough of this fantastically traditional neurotoxin to embolden me. Let's assume that you are Roland, heavily biased towards psychedelics as you are involved in a study design that nonetheless mitigates against experimenter bias. Even if bias somehow influences the results, would the actual clinical outcomes of psychedelics not still be impressive with a number of indications? Blinding with psychedelics is so hard, right? I mean, it's just like everybody who gets niacin knows it's not.

• 1:09:22Speaker 01

  In our first study, we were dealing with psychedelic naive individuals. So that was important because what we didn't want is people who had experience who could immediately identify.

• 1:09:34Tim Ferriss?

  Benchmark against whatever they're.

• 1:09:36Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. And furthermore, you would have had a selection bias. People who had bad experiences with psychedelics would say, hell no, I'm not going to sign up for that study. And then if you had positive effects, you wouldn't know how much of that was selection bias. So that was then, this is now. Now the widespread cultural enthusiasm, overblown enthusiasm for the effects of, positive effects of psychedelics.

• 1:10:07Tim Ferriss?

  It'll pay your bills for you. Oh my God, this stuff's amazing.

• 1:10:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's much more problematic now to conduct a clinical trial because many of your participants are going to come in with strong.

• 1:10:20Tim Ferriss?

  This cultural expectation of profundity.

• 1:10:23Speaker 01

  Huge, huge expectancy effects. And that makes conduct of these trials even more difficult. And actually contributing to that is if you compare the psychedelic to inactive placebo and you have people with high expectancy effects, you have the potential for huge disappointment effects. And so your placebo is no longer a neutral indicator of what happens and people don't get psilocybin. Yeah, you're dealing with all of the consequences of people having hyped up expectation and essentially knowing that they've drawn the black straw.

• 1:11:09Tim Ferriss?

  Okay. So, so let's look at the inverse or the converse. I'm lacking the vocabulary at this point, honestly, folks, of drawing the black straw. So you then at some point decide to personally reengage with consumption of psychedelics. How does that happen? When does that happen? What is the outcome? Just for people who are listening, we're sitting here, I love recording at dusk because everything changes so dramatically. So I can't even see your face right now. We're sitting on the patio. It's very dramatic. The light of the recording device is alive and well. All right. Tell me, Roland.

• 1:11:48Speaker 01

  So I had become intrigued at studying these back in the late 1990s. We conducted, we enrolled our first volunteer around 2000. We published our first paper, 2006.

• 1:12:04Tim Ferriss?

  It's a big paper, just to make an understatement. What's the name of the paper? If people want to look it up?

• 1:12:11Speaker 01

  Psilocybin Occasions Mystical Type Experiences Having Enduring Meaning and Spiritual Significance.

• 1:12:21Tim Ferriss?

  There you go. All right. So, so translated to Long Islandese, since that's where I'm from originally.

• 1:12:29Speaker 01

  Well, these, these-

• 1:12:31Tim Ferriss?

  Psilocybin Occasions, big fucking deal. Mystical experiences with some durability.

• 1:12:36Speaker 01

  Well, no, with-

• 1:12:38Tim Ferriss?

  Incredible durability.

• 1:12:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. Substantial change in worldview, attribution of positive changes and moods, attitudes, and behaviors, and experiences that are rated to be among the most meaningful of a person's entire lifetime.

• 1:12:56Tim Ferriss?

  Okay.

• 1:12:57Speaker 01

  And so, okay, so that was the initial finding. That got my attention big, big time.

• 1:13:05Tim Ferriss?

  This is gonna sound like a dumb question, but why did it get your attention?

• 1:13:08Speaker 01

  Because I'd never seen anything remotely approaching that after having studied dozens of different psychoactive compounds. So at this point, I've given high doses of sedatives and opiates and stimulants and, you know, other chemicals to people who are both drug experienced, drug abusers, and drug naive. So I'm really accustomed to understanding and being able to assess the subjective effects and what people say about them. And different drugs produce different kinds of effects and people report different things.

• 1:13:53Speaker 01

  And I knew that. And so that you give a dose of psilocybin and they're going to produce effects, in this case, an unusual profile effects. Yeah, fine. What makes that any different? What makes it different is that months after the session, people are saying that experience two months ago was the most interesting, most meaningful experience in my lifetime, or among the top five.

• 1:14:23Tim Ferriss?

  Not what people say about caffeine, cocaine, or methamphetamine?

• 1:14:29Speaker 01

  No, very different. So people, if you give them a high dose of cocaine, they may experience euphoria and really get high from that. But if you ask them a day later, much less a week or a month, what was that experience? They're gonna remember it like we remember anything in, in memory. Oh yeah, I remember I got really high that day. That was kind of fun. But it's a memory. There's no enduring meaning. And yet people are coming back months later saying this is among the most meaningful experiences of my entire lifetime. That's

• 1:15:09Speaker 01

  really weird. But it fits with literature on mystical, naturally occurring mystical experiences. So people have these epiphanies-

• 1:15:18Tim Ferriss?

  And you've done a bunch of this reading in the meantime?

• 1:15:20Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:15:21Tim Ferriss?

  What type of stuff were you reading? How'd you find it?

• 1:15:24Speaker 01

  There's a, you know, a large literature on mystical experiences, starting with William James at the turn of the century where he wrote varieties of religious experience. But there had been a whole series of research studies on mystical experiences, but they were really elusive because they occurred erratically or capriciously.

• 1:15:50Tim Ferriss?

  What do you mean by capriciously?

• 1:15:51Speaker 01

  You couldn't predict when they would occur. And sometimes it would seem to be random occasions where people would just walk out on the beach and have this epiphany that they would-

• 1:16:04Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:16:05Speaker 01

  -claim to be life-changing.

• 1:16:06Tim Ferriss?

  It was not replicable.

• 1:16:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, we certainly didn't have conditions under which we could elicit those experiences reliably. So, so they weren't, in that sense, they weren't amenable to scientific study.

• 1:16:19Tim Ferriss?

  Hmm.

• 1:16:20Speaker 01

  So to do prospective scientific research, you need conditions under which you can produce an effect reliably. Then you can compare that to conditions in which you don't give that drug or you give some other substance. And you can do that prospectively and then you can compare those groups. So you have all the tools of the scientific method at your hand to deconstruct.

• 1:16:44Tim Ferriss?

  So Roland, it is rare or infrequent that researchers talk about their personal use of compounds they are studying or focused on. Is there anything you'd like to say about your personal use of psychedelics?

• 1:17:01Speaker 01

  Thanks for asking, Tim, because I, among any number of researchers working with psychedelics, have been really quite reluctant to talk about any personal use. And for good cause, because these compounds were so misunderstood back in the 60s and so branded with all kinds of mistruths, that there's historically been suspicion among people who may have even had experienced, much less people who are proponents and have become enamored with their effects. And what I've said repeatedly with respect to my launching our research with

• 1:17:44Speaker 01

  psilocybin, was that prior to that time, I had no meaningful personal experience. Again, I was deeply interested and committed and satisfied by my own meditation practice. And I didn't know that that wouldn't be a significant distraction. So for years afterwards, it didn't occur to me to take a psychedelic, nor did I have access to psychedelics.

• 1:18:17Tim Ferriss?

  You can't just break the quadruple locks and use the tightly controlled schedule one compounds?

• 1:18:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. Me, of all people, had no access to the drug supplies that we have locked away under very tight security. But I would have to say I was deeply curious. And I also felt, in some sense, disadvantaged as a clinician talking with volunteers having gone through these experiences, but not knowing fully what that experience was like at a personal level. And so there came a time, and it was at least six years after the publication of

• 1:19:01Speaker 01

  our paper, and that would have been 12 years after the initiation of our research, that I had an occasion to have a, a higher dose experience with a psychedelic. And I've now had a few of those. I'm by no means an enthusiast, but I certainly understand the nature of those compounds. I can now confirm firsthand that the overlap with the kinds of experiences that can emerge in meditation and in breathwork, because I've also had experience with breathwork, and other kinds of practices that elicit these changes in

• 1:19:45Speaker 01

  consciousness. I can confirm that they're of the same flavor. There's certainly differences, but they're of the same flavor. And again, that occurred only well after we had published our first study. We had published the follow-up study. We were largely completely through our cancer trial and significantly through our beginning meditator trial. And we also had run a psilocybin dose effect trial. So the research had continued apace. And it's only more recently that I've had these experiences.

• 1:20:26Tim Ferriss?

  Let's just flash forward to the 60 seconds before you are about to take your own personal psychedelic drug. You're about to have your first, after a long hiatus, your first personal experience. In those, let's just call it five, 10 minutes, an hour before you're about to take it, what are you taking? Where are you? What's going through your head?

• 1:20:54Speaker 01

  I ended up obtaining some 2CB, which is a substituted amphetamine.

• 1:21:02Tim Ferriss?

  So it's structurally related to mescaline, for people who-

• 1:21:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:21:09Tim Ferriss?

  -don't know what phenethyl means.

• 1:21:10Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah. But it produces- Classic psychedelic-like effects. So I took a really low dose of 2CB.

• 1:21:23Tim Ferriss?

  How did you decide to do that? I'm just like to go from zero to one. I mean, this is a big step.

• 1:21:28Speaker 01

  Okay, okay. But it was done. I was alone. The intention was to go deeply into meditation.

• 1:21:35Tim Ferriss?

  Why 2CB of all the things of all the molecules?

• 1:21:37Speaker 01

  It was the only thing that was available to me.

• 1:21:40Tim Ferriss?

  So what happened?

• 1:21:42Speaker 01

  Went into meditation.

• 1:21:44Tim Ferriss?

  You're meditating now after having ingested the.

• 1:21:46Speaker 01

  Well, I started by meditating before and then.

• 1:21:52Tim Ferriss?

  Were you nervous?

• 1:21:53Speaker 01

  I was curious, maybe a little nervous. Yeah, yeah, I would say, yeah, I was nervous. But it was a low dose and it started opening up very familiar territory within meditation. And there was a sense of opening. And at that point, I had done enough research about the features of the classic mystical experience that I could look at my experience and try to interpret it within that framework. So one question is, is there a sense of unity? Is there a sense of connectedness or a void,

• 1:22:37Speaker 01

  which classically occurs in meditation? The sense that there's a total emptiness or total fullness? And that was there. Is it sacred? Is there something precious about this experience?

• 1:22:53Tim Ferriss?

  Now, are you analyzing this while you're having the experience?

• 1:22:57Speaker 01

  Yes, oh, yeah, absolutely.

• 1:22:59Tim Ferriss?

  I don't say it too malign in any way.

• 1:23:02Speaker 01

  That's what this project was about is what the hell are these things? And yeah, how do they fit into the experience framework that I had?

• 1:23:11Tim Ferriss?

  Now, 2CB fortunately, I would think in this instance, provides you quite a span of time within which you can reflect in this way. Right? So it's not like a five to 15 or five to 20 minute experience with NNDMT or five MEO DMT inhaled. Instead of that, you have, who knows? What would you say? Six to 10 hours, six to 12 hours? I mean, something like that potentially with 2CB.

• 1:23:40Speaker 01

  This was a threshold dose. I don't remember what the dose was, but this would be in what we might call microdose range.

• 1:23:48Tim Ferriss?

  I got it. Okay. So bunny slope, but nonetheless.

• 1:23:51Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, the features of this unfolded, the sense of unity, the sense of sacredness, was it true? Absolutely true. And I ticked off all the qualities. And, and then I remember taking my phone out and writing a memo to myself. And it was just three words, it's all true.

• 1:24:18Tim Ferriss?

  What did that mean to you?

• 1:24:20Speaker 01

  Oh, it meant to me that the nature of the mystical type experiences is confirmed. It fits with what I know about meditation and it's quite amazing. It wasn't totally unfamiliar territory to me though. I mean, this was territory that I had explored in meditation. So it wasn't brand new in that sense. But I'd also been meditating long enough, sometimes hours a day now. And at this point for years. And what I realized is the coherence of that experience and kind of the tuning of it was remarkable because I,

• 1:25:05Speaker 01

  I'm all too familiar with spending hours meditating without such experiences.

• 1:25:12Tim Ferriss?

  It's all true.

• 1:25:13Speaker 01

  What's interesting to me now in where I find myself with this terminal cancer diagnosis and reflecting on how I'm managing that personally. And as we've discussed, the sense is one that I have a sense of equipoise and balance, curiosity, wonder, gratitude, a sense of celebration for the preciousness of life. And the question that has emerged to me, but to others watching me is, how do you account for that? Because one might think that a terminal diagnosis would be devastating.

• 1:25:57Speaker 01

  And I think I can't possibly know how to account for at least how I've managed that diagnosis over these first eight months. But what I would highly suspect is that it has a lot to do with my long history of meditation practice. And it's informed by some of the experiences that I've had with psychedelics. So with regard to the meditation, there's a real training of the nature of mind, watching one's mind, de-identifying from the voice in the head

• 1:26:35Speaker 01

  and making optimal choices about how one wants to proceed in one's life. The same is true with a psychedelic experience. In fact, that's exactly what we do in preparing people for a psychedelic experience. We give them a crash course in mindfulness, telling them that all kinds of phenomena may emerge during the session. And the posture that we want them to take is one of interest and curiosity. If something fearful arises, be it a demonic vision or just fear, the right approach is one of interest and curiosity.

• 1:27:20Speaker 01

  And to approach in spite of the fact that the hair on the back of your head may be standing on end. Because if that's inspected deeply enough, one finds that those experiences change. They're objects of consciousness. They can be very informative and there's absolutely no reason to run from them. There's every reason not to run from them. And nor do you want to fight them because all that does is reify them, empower these objects of mind into something that they're not. They're part of the play of broader consciousness that's deeply informative.

• 1:28:02Speaker 01

  And one gets those learnings, if you will, with psychedelics in a very powerful way. Because psychedelics can be so destabilizing to any normal sense of consciousness that at times one feels that one is walking along the razor's edge between insanity and transcendence. But one recognizes the feeling that that's a very precarious tightrope to walk.

• 1:28:34Tim Ferriss?

  Since you have both the meditative experience over decades and deep dedicated practice in that capacity, were your psychedelic experiences simply reminders of insights you had already gained? And therefore you appreciated them as tools, but they were not additive to your personal navigation of the world or lens through which you look at the world and life? Or did those psychedelic experiences add something that was not duplicative of your meditation experience?

• 1:29:10Speaker 01

  The psychedelic experiences and what I've learned about the nature of mind converge incredibly with the meditation experiences. But I have to say that sometimes characterized psychedelics as the crash course in mindfulness. I mean, it really is. It's such a powerful teaching in a way that comes across much more forcefully, at least for me, than meditation practice. But once I can see that through the lens of a psychedelic experience, then I can bring that into meditation. So I think my meditation practice has undoubtedly deepened because of that.

• 1:29:55Speaker 01

  There's a lot of overlap. I guess what I would say is that psychedelic experiences, you know, have often for me now, more intense, both positive and negative experiences kind of embedded within them. But that makes them ideal for learning to navigate the nature of mind and the nature of things that can arise in consciousness and the wise use of how to pursue or hold those in a way that you don't end up identifying, particularly with the negative constructs that arise. It's a peculiar thing, but.

• 1:30:41Speaker 01

  When something negative arises, be it demonic figure or something like that, the tendency is wanting to avoid it, to escape it. And if you try, it's just gonna chase you forever. So, and you'll have an absolutely miserable time for the entire duration. And if you're able to turn and be deeply curious about its nature, then it starts to change. So it really is this invitation to face what initially appears to be the dark side of things, the most frightening things.

• 1:31:23Speaker 01

  And I would have to say terminal cancer diagnosis might well qualify as emblematic of such an experience. And so perhaps, I don't know, but perhaps psychedelic experiences that had negative valence qualities to them and how I learned to navigate those could have been very important to me in how I came to find myself navigating the diagnosis.

• 1:31:58Tim Ferriss?

  I know a number of folks also, as you're describing this, several like Sam Harris come to mind, who's spoken about this publicly, but who first through the experience of psychedelics, saw certain possibilities that had been invisible to him prior to that, that then led to his dedication to mindfulness and meditative practices. And as you're describing, say, a demonic force, or let's just say, in a psychedelic experience, if you face a Godzilla-sized figure, some type of giant dinosaur with a clown head, it may be, in a sense, training wheels for what you can do in sober waking life

• 1:32:41Tim Ferriss?

  with meditation, but it's an easier opportunity to say, wait a second, this is a Godzilla with a clown head. Clearly, this is not something I can just take for granted as a real entity. How can I be curious about this? So you have these dramatic examples that allow you to disidentify with the content, perhaps, of your experience and start to examine it. Whereas if, and I'll speak for myself, because I also tried meditation many times and quit initially, to deal with maybe the subtleties or the embedded stories around depression or sadness or anger that have been baking and accepted for decades is a harder task

• 1:33:26Tim Ferriss?

  than saying, wait a second. I remember Roland told me before I lay down on this couch and put on these eye shades that I should be curious about this type of experience that is scaring me. All right, this Godzilla with a clown head, I'm gonna ask it who it is, I'm gonna in and through, I'm gonna do the whole thing. And it's a practice dojo with extreme, in some cases, extreme examples, that allows you then to come back to your normal waking experience and begin to examine your thoughts, or at least entertain the possibility of examining the content. And one thing you said, I just want to emphasize for folks I've seen in real time with you multiple times now, it's not just a party line and a happy face that you're putting on.

• 1:34:11Tim Ferriss?

  I mean, we spoke a few days ago and I called you and I asked you how you're doing, and you said, never better. And in the meantime, you said, I'm not kidding, I am. And you've had various meetings, including a meeting this morning, churning out different, or at least becoming aware of different options and decision trees that you could follow. And it seems to me that oftentimes, people may have the in and through as a line in the scripture of psychedelic navigation, but there's also the option of looking at your mind or your psyche responding to your environment, your circumstances, and to separate

• 1:34:52Tim Ferriss?

  the observer or just the canvas of consciousness from what is being projected upon it and to say, oh, I can see how I could go in five different directions. I don't think it's helpful to go in these four directions. I choose not to go in those four directions. And that's different from fighting with the content of your consciousness without being aware of the distinction. Does that make any sense?

• 1:35:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, oh, that makes a whole lot of sense. Across a number of therapeutic indications, not to mention our studies with healthy volunteers, very often, people come out of these experiences empowered, a sense of self-efficacy, a sense of freedom of choice, seeing the vastness of the decisions that they could choose to make and that are available to them that had previously just been foreclosed. I mean, most dramatically, people who come in identifying themselves as an addicted cigarette smoker, addicted alcoholic.

• 1:35:55Speaker 01

  And through these experiences, they come out saying, wait a second, I actually have agency here in a way I didn't appreciate, I can choose. There's another piece of the psychedelic experience, and that's a willingness to engage with something that feels like it's suffering. So you don't end up approaching the Godzilla. And incidentally, sometimes it doesn't have a clown face, it has the most terrifying face that your psyche could possibly create for you. So through these experiences, not only is there the landscape of consciousness, there's

• 1:36:36Speaker 01

  a willingness to engage, interact with those fearful objects of consciousness, the Godzillas, if you will, knowing that it's gonna enhance your fear initially, but by pursuing that, you're gonna end up resolving the problem. And that's precisely what happens with the addiction. So the person who's identified themselves as an addicted cigarette smoker really has made a choice that they can't bear the suffering that they know that they could experience when they quit smoking. They know that they're gonna crave, and they fail to do that time and time again.

• 1:37:20Speaker 01

  And here, they're having just faced down Godzilla, you know, you come back out and say, well, can I put up with some craving that I know is gonna be time limited? You know, can I put up with some tiredness or whatever it is? Damn right I can. I mean, the payoff is much too great. So there's this sense of personal empowerment. And the other thing is, so these experiences with psychedelics inform the meditation practice, they inform a deepened sense of mindfulness. But let me also just remind us, it's called meditation practice.

• 1:38:00Speaker 01

  It's practicing to deal with the nature of mind, in this case, with the intention to bring that off the cushion, to bring that out of the practice into moment-to-moment life. And that is the ultimate objective. I take that to be something that some people might identify as enlightenment, and I certainly am not making any claims to having achieved that flawless moment-to-moment state. But that is the invitation. How do we keep remembering what these teachings are?

• 1:38:39Speaker 01

  How do we keep bringing ourselves into the astonishing celebration of the present moment?

• 1:38:46Tim Ferriss?

  Let's, if we could, just talk about the cohort or cohorts of patients who have used psychedelic, assisted or psychedelic, you can call it assisted, therapy, in this case psilocybin, for end-of-life anxiety. I do know of several examples of highly, I don't wanna say decorated, but accomplished master meditators who nonetheless, upon facing mortality, have responded much like anyone would, or would expect themselves to, with tremendous fear and depression and so on.

• 1:39:28Tim Ferriss?

  That has not been my experience, although you've certainly had moments, as you described, it has not been my experience with you. And my question is, and you can make this personal, or you can direct it at the cohorts, that's not accidental that I'm giving you that choice, how much of their reduction anxiety, if any, seem to be correlated to ego dissolution? So the experience of existing and observing and experiencing without what we assume often comprises the self, this I, this Tim that has characteristics and a name and a place

• 1:40:10Tim Ferriss?

  and a certain physical manifestation, even in the absence of that in psychedelics, you can have the experience of experiencing and observing. What did those people attribute?

• 1:40:25Tim Ferriss?

  Their reduction in anxiety, too.

• 1:40:27Speaker 01

  Several things, but we use several different descriptors for the nature of what we think are some of the transformative effects of psychedelic experiences. Ego dissolution is one, but my sense of that is it actually misses some really important components that are captured in what we call the mystical type experience. So, the mystical type experience has one factor in it that is equivalent to ego dissolution. It's the unity of all things that can be experienced as the absence, the void, the

• 1:41:09Speaker 01

  complete void that is completely empty yet completely full at the same time, paradoxically, or the sense of the interconnectedness of all things, but in being interconnected, the personal self can dissolve or is just part of a much larger whole. That's a piece of it. But having an ego dissolution experience can also occur under conditions of extraordinary fear and create incredible psychological destabilization subsequently. But the mystical type experience has that.

• 1:41:50Speaker 01

  It has this component of the preciousness or the sacredness of the experience. So, there's something about the valence of this experience that's absolutely precious. And then it has this noetic quality, the sense that the experience is absolutely true. There are other features, positive mood very often, a sense of love or gentleness, openness and transcendence of time and space and ineffability, but those strike me as lesser important qualities to the enduring nature of these experiences. But we now have shown across a number of different clinical studies with clinical outcome

• 1:42:34Speaker 01

  measures and studies in healthy volunteers, that the magnitude of the mystical type experience, the completeness of that correlates really well with the enduring positive changes in moods, attitudes and behavior. Now, it's not completely determinative. There are other features of the mystical experience or of the psychedelic experience that we've also developed questionnaires to probe that also appear to be really important. And one very important one is psychological insight.

• 1:43:15Speaker 01

  One can have an experience that is absent features of the mystical experience, but is given to some kind of profound new understanding about how one's holding themselves with respect to whatever the problem is. And those experiences of insight can also result in abrupt irreversible changes in how someone proceeds. So, a metaphor, you know, you send someone from some sheltered background, they come from a tightly evangelical community that believes in literal interpretation of the

• 1:43:59Speaker 01

  Bible, does not believe in evolution, they go off to college, they take a couple biology courses, and they go, okay, this evolution is a thing. And that understanding, I don't know if that's reversible. I mean, once you come to an insight of that being true, or you come to an insight that you're in an abusive relationship, that the person that you feel closest to is actually truly abusing you, if that's true, if it's a real insight, then that can be irreversible. And so, those kinds of marked changes can occur. So, with respect particularly about how people with terminal diagnosis, what their attitudes

• 1:44:44Speaker 01

  about death and dying, and why the anxiety and depression they're experiencing becomes less, is probably multifaceted. So, the therapeutic effects there correspond with the mystical type experiences, they're probably insightful type experiences. There seems to be very often a decrease in fear of death, and there's a tendency toward the belief that there's something, and that can take incredibly different forms in different people, something that may survive death.

• 1:45:24Speaker 01

  And whether that's a full-on theological compatible account, or whether there's some just mysterious sense that there's something that endures after death, that belief tends to be enhanced.

• 1:45:42Tim Ferriss?

  Let's return to the personal for a moment, and we don't have to belabor this, but I certainly would be interested to hear you answer the question as to why have this conversation? Why, among other things, would you feel it's potentially beneficial, maybe that's not the right adjective, but the right time to discuss or mention personal use, for instance? Why do that?

• 1:46:14Speaker 01

  I'm going through an experience of a lifetime here, and it's one of just astonishing celebration and joy. And I would say, just with respect to how I feel about my own very probable impending death, that it's not that I hold strong ideas about the continuance of life or consciousness, and certainly not reincarnation or classic heaven. I don't hold those beliefs. I feel agnostic toward the idea that we, I mean, we truly don't know what's going on here.

• 1:46:55Speaker 01

  So, it's like, it's like this, I'm really curious about whether there's any experience and after death, and it's kind of exciting that I'm going to have the opportunity to find out well before most of the listeners here will know. So, I'll know something you don't, and I'm really interested in that. But at the same time, I don't know what happens, but what I do know is that this gift we've been given to be these sentient creatures, walking around, being aware that we're aware,

• 1:47:37Speaker 01

  with just a little bit of contemplation, a miracle is not an inappropriate descriptor of where we find ourselves. And how this has come about and why we've been gifted with this opportunity is unknown to us, but it should be a source of incredible gratitude and joy and celebration. And that's what I really want to communicate about my own experience, along with the invitation to have others join me, hopefully without the terminal diagnosis, but join me in the

• 1:48:20Speaker 01

  celebration, because we deserve it. And in the largest sense, what my deepest desire is, is to have that sensibility awakened in humankind all over. I mean, we need that for the survival of our species ultimately. It leads to this sense of wonder and pro-social tendencies and mutual caretaking. There's no easy way to get there, and the way to get there is certainly not to dump LSD in the water supply, because these-

• 1:49:02Tim Ferriss?

  I wish you told me this yesterday. Just kidding, just kidding.

• 1:49:07Speaker 01

  Because, you know, I think the culture needs to develop institutional structures to hold and support and work with these kinds of experiences in a way that doesn't undermine culture more broadly, and I think these substances can do that. So, I see it as this co-evolutionary opportunity that our cultural institutions need to co-evolve and learn to support this. And so, that could be some number of generations. But ultimately, the basic message I have is, yeah, let's awaken. Join me in this larger awakening project, and there are many, many, many people already

• 1:49:52Speaker 01

  on it, and it takes different forms, and it's not just psychedelics, but it is the awakening to the huge benevolent mystery. And how one wants to put language around that is completely up to where you find yourself in culture, but that can be done from a reductionistic scientific perspective, or it can be done from a full-on God encounter. I mean, it's a benevolent mystery that seems to be at play here, and that's my experience of this, is quite akin to what many people would call God.

• 1:50:42Tim Ferriss?

  I remember very, very distinctly coming out of my first ever trip to Antarctica with a dear friend, Matt Mullenweg, in fact, who you know as well, because he was one of the co-funders of the Center at Hopkins, great human being. And I had just returned to land that was not ice. In this case, it was in Chile, and suddenly had cell reception, or at least Wi-Fi. And I received your text, and we had a conversation. I reached out

• 1:51:21Tim Ferriss?

  to you, and we spoke about your diagnosis. And we have a number of mutual friends, you know, close mutual friends. And it's been remarkable to me and all of them, how you have been able to thus far, and I'm sure there's a lot behind the scenes, of course, that we don't see, but navigate and integrate and view this experience from different perspectives. And certainly not with rose-colored glasses. I think that's what makes it so impressive

• 1:51:59Tim Ferriss?

  to me and to other people. You're looking at the diagnosis and possible trajectories in a very sober way. But at the same time, like at the very beginning of this conversation, you're laughing, and we're talking here. And I mean, you seem like good old Roland to me, right? It doesn't seem like you have sort of psychologically succumbed in the way that I have seen with sadly, you know, other friends who have, who have had cancer diagnoses, many of which have recovered, but they've been flattened, psychologically flattened. And I'd love for you to just speak to your experience. And to the extent

• 1:52:41Tim Ferriss?

  that what I'm saying sounds accurate, what has enabled you to do that?

• 1:52:47Speaker 01

  Well, let me start with the beginning of the diagnosis. So this was a routine colonoscopy. I viewed myself as incredibly healthy. I exercised regularly. I watched my diet, you know, I pay attention to, you know, factors that support my well-being. I went in and, and yeah, remarkably came out with this stage four colon cancer metastases to liver. And initially, I just was Marla, my now wife, and I were just kind of thrown into a situation

• 1:53:27Speaker 01

  where this couldn't possibly be real. This had to be some kind of dream. And so I think I spent a couple of days there, not being able to even process the reality of that. And then when subsequent tests came back confirming the highly suspected metastatic aspects of the disorder, then kind of the full implications of that came upon me. And what I would say is initially, it was like shell shock. There was just, okay, what do I do with this? And then in, in very short order, over a few days, I started exploring

• 1:54:09Speaker 01

  all of the places where I could go psychologically with this diagnosis. And one, of course, would be just sheer out fear or panic. One would be depression. And I woke up, you know, this is in that first few days, at one point in the middle of the night, with this kind of deeply flattened affect and thinking, what is this? And I thought, well, if I went to describe this to someone, they would surely say, oh, you're deeply depressed. And I thought, okay, yeah, I can see how that can happen. And that's not a good place to go, you know?

• 1:54:50Speaker 01

  And then there are other things you can, you could choose to, to be resentful. I could have chosen to be upset at my provider that had a, in retrospect, a longer than ideal callback time for the colonoscopies. Mine was at five years, but I'd had polyps before. And I think in retrospect, I wouldn't encourage anyone to follow that. There's fighting it, you know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna beat this sea, you know, go into war with your body over it. I'm gonna kick all the cancer centers out, as my, one of my daughters said to me

• 1:55:28Speaker 01

  on the, one of my first days of treatment. She said, Dad, kick cancer's ass. And I appreciated the, I appreciated that thought. I mean, because positive thinking is really good to health outcomes. But I didn't want to go to war with anything. But, you know, I wasn't about to roll over and be dead. I mean, then it really quickly came to me that the experience and the practice should be gratitude for the preciousness of human life and everything that I have. And I think with that came almost this immediate awakening, this clarity,

• 1:56:11Speaker 01

  you know, okay, I'm going to reset my life priorities now. I mean, I looked at my to-do list and go, okay, maybe half of those things are just not that important now that I have some kind of constraints on my, on my life horizon. So there was a level of clarity that came into focus. And then I think I would have to credit my long-term meditation practice. And there are other practices as well that have done along the way that we could talk about at some other time. But my long-term spiritual practices in combination

• 1:56:50Speaker 01

  with psychedelic experiences, which also can be spiritual practices. But I think that enabled me in a way that I wouldn't have predicted. And I'm kind of humbled that I've been able to achieve the level of equipoise and, and well-being from this to date. But I don't know what the future holds for me. So I'm kind of humble. I don't want to overclaim that I got this nailed. But at least initially, what came up is an intense practice of mindfulness, in which I could see these different psychological

• 1:57:31Speaker 01

  rabbit holes. If you went down them, you're not going to be happy. And I was able to identify those as soon as they came into vision and just choose, I'm not going there. That's self-defeating. And so I think it's that that has sustained me. And people ask me, well, you know, I tell them I have this cancer diagnosis now. And they say, oh, I'm so sorry. That must be so awful. And my response to date has been, no, not understanding. This is something, I'm more alive, I'm more awake, I have a much deeper sense of equanimity

• 1:58:13Speaker 01

  and joy than I think I ever have had in my life. And I'm sharing this with my partner. And what a tragedy it would have been had I walked out of my house the morning of the colonoscopy and gotten run over by a bus. I mean, you know, that would have been a lost opportunity to awaken to a degree that I previously considered myself to be awake. But this was order of magnitude different. So I consider authentically the diagnosis to be a blessing. It's an opportunity for practice. But when people ask me how I'm

• 1:58:56Speaker 01

  doing, I commonly say never better. But There'd been serious weighing about whether or not I wanted to engage in treatment and what kind of treatment, and at what cost to staying awake and being present and doing the things that are still are most important for me to do. Does that answer the question, Tim?

• 1:59:22Tim Ferriss?

  It does answer the question. I'd like to add something to that from my recollection, which was that first conversation we had when I got back to South America and we're talking about it. I remember it so distinctly. And I might be getting the phrasing slightly off, but I recall you saying to me, every day is Thanksgiving, like every day I wake up is Thanksgiving. And that didn't seem accidental, right? It seemed like a choice, and maybe on top of that, a practice. Is there anything you'd like to say about that? It stuck with me.

• 2:00:04Speaker 01

  Yeah. The diagnosis was made late November, so Thanksgiving was in, in my mind. But that's actually the core of my practice. It's gratitude practice. And it's gratitude for the preciousness of this experience that we're having right now, if we allow ourselves to get out of our mind enough to have it. And that, of course, is the trick. We get encumbered by the narrative structure of what we think is going on. And we get caught up in that. And then we lose track of the magnificence of every single moment, if you

• 2:00:44Speaker 01

  just allow yourself to enjoy it, appreciate it, for everything that it offers. That's my go-to practice. I've been doing gratitude meditations every morning since the diagnosis. And I think that's the, that's the core way of leaning into this. I dropped the phrase, every day is Thanksgiving, because it's so associated with Turkey. But it is about the preciousness of life.

• 2:01:16Tim Ferriss?

  What does your gratitude meditation?

• 2:01:21Tim Ferriss?

  Look like what constitutes your gratitude meditation?

• 2:01:26Speaker 01

  It varies. I mean, the core of it is, yeah, I mean, the practice would be anywhere from 10 minutes to an hour or more. And during some periods of time of the initial diagnosis and some of the procedures where my sleep cycles were totally dysregulated, I spent hours actually in at night in gratitude meditation. But it's just leaning into the joy of what this experience is. And in fact, it's kind of interesting. Some of the most

• 2:02:03Speaker 01

  clear experiences of present moment and joy have been at times where I've been undergoing surgical procedures, like I already had two intravenous ports placed because one became infected, you know, and so that's a surgical procedure. They usually anesthetize people with fentanyl and with a benzodiazepine, and then they use a local. And I said, I don't want anything other than the local, you know, let me stay awake for this. And it was an incredibly joyful, interesting kind of experience to have.

• 2:02:42Tim Ferriss?

  What does the procedure look like, if I might ask, since I don't know what it looks like? Are you just looking down at your abdomen while they're up to their elbows? No, I can't imagine that. They're

• 2:02:54Speaker 01

  No, I mean, you're flat out. You're in a surgical operating room. You're laid flat on the bed. They actually put a some kind of hood over or some

• 2:03:06Tim Ferriss?

  Like a curtain.

• 2:03:07Speaker 01

  Curtain between you and the cereal field. So there's, you're not looking at anything but a curtain. And then you're just laying there for the procedure. It wasn't a big deal. I think the, you know, the anesthetics that they give are because people get so tense and anxious that they don't want to experience anything. And, you know, you could feel them mucking around in my chest to run the catheter, but it wasn't a big deal. And they gave me local anesthetic. So it actually turned out to be fun. I have enjoyed that. I've had also

• 2:03:46Speaker 01

  some sustained MRI procedures that were similar. I actually reached amazing degree of pure awareness practice during some PET scans. So it's, I hate to say it. Yeah, I almost kind of look forward to some of these surgical interventions. Now, recently, I just had a procedure, liver embolization, which is essentially they go into the abdomen and inject some kind of glue into some of the venous structures of the liver. And essentially, it just knocks that liver, in this case, my right liver lobe out. And so I was talking

• 2:04:31Speaker 01

  to the surgeon and saying, look, can I do this without anesthesia? And he convinced me that that was not the right idea, because there'd be real significant pain that they couldn't manage. But I tried. It's almost like, yeah, it's, it's like you lose this opportunity to be awake for something really interesting and important, you know?

• 2:04:57Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. What other practices, you mentioned other practices, aside from the meditation that you've described, have been helpful, supportive in allowing you to, face has too negative a connotation, but to, now let's just navigate again, navigate your experiences over the last, say, six months. What other practices have been helpful? It may, could be other meditation practices. Quick definition of terms. You said pure awareness. Is that something akin to open monitoring, if that makes any sense? When you said you achieved that during, say, the surgical procedures where you didn't have general anesthetics?

• 2:05:43Speaker 01

  Let's see. No, it's different than open monitoring. So that's, open monitoring would be more like a sense that you're watching your mind and you're watching things arise in consciousness.

• 2:05:56Tim Ferriss?

  Like a Vipassana meditation.

• 2:05:58Speaker 01

  And then, yeah, and then fall back. Awareness of awareness practices are, they're prioritized in some traditions as kind of being the ultimate. I certainly can't claim to have any kind of stability with respect to pure awareness practices. But it comes to a point where you're in the field of awareness and nothing is arising. There is nothing within that field of awareness, other than awareness itself. And so the body drops away, thoughts drop away, and you're in a state of pure awareness. Sometimes those experiences are magnificent.

• 2:06:44Speaker 01

  They can almost be described as Satchitananda, it's consciousness and bliss. And they're very interesting experiences. Some people claim that five MEO DMT, under right conditions, comes closest of all the psychedelics to producing such experiences, although mileage may vary. There can be a lot of variations in those kinds of experiences.

• 2:07:13Tim Ferriss?

  I can say, I don't think you and I have ever discussed this, but I have some experience with the five MEO DMT. I happen to think it's a very big gun. So I have some very real concerns around its therapeutic use. As you know, it's only 15 to 20 minutes in earth time is not always the best argument for using a specific compound. But I would say at the right dosage, well, the right dosage, at certain dosages in the right setting, that is my experience, that you effectively can have, not always, you can have some very, very horrifying experiences too. And I've seen some very experienced psychonauts, people

• 2:07:57Tim Ferriss?

  who have used, say, ayahuasca dozens of times, who have become quite destabilized after five methoxy DMT. But putting all that aside, my personal experience, I have on multiple occasions experienced effectively a void of content, just a completely disembodied field of consciousness that does not feel localized, but you are nonetheless observing would that, what was the term you used? It captures it pretty well, the consciousness and bliss?

• 2:08:31Speaker 01

  Oh, yes. Satchitananda. Yeah.

• 2:08:33Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, I would say that encapsulates the experience. And when people ask me, what did I take out of it? I'm like, it was a beautiful experience, but I could not give you any new story, any rewriting, any narrative. I can't give you even a droplet of that.

• 2:08:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. But that speaks to its ineffability, right?

• 2:08:53Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah. So let me ask a question that I would never ask you on stage, but since we're just jamming here, another experience I don't think I ever described to you, that I'd love to get your take on. And it could just be straight placebo effect, of course. Although I feel like when people say, and even in this case, ah, it's placebo effect, that that sometimes throws out the baby with the bathwater in the sense that even if it is placebo effect, labeling it such doesn't really explain anything in terms of how the hell it happens. But let me tell you what happens. So I have two experiences now, only two that come to mind, where I've effectively had what I would describe, now

• 2:09:35Tim Ferriss?

  that we have the common vocabulary, let's just, I can't say the Sanskrit. So I'll just say the five MEO experience, as we've described it, without any pharmacological intervention whatsoever. The first was meditating and having a guru, in this case, put his hands on my head. And I had no expectation of what would happen. So I wasn't coming in preloaded with confirmation bias, and I had Absolutely what I would describe as a five MEO experience and talking to, I hate using this word guru, in Indonesian at least, it just means teacher, but let's

• 2:10:19Tim Ferriss?

  use it in the more Indian sense, or at least the Western use in the Indian context of the term guru, right? Like this master, met with a, an Indian master, maybe two years later, and he said, oh yeah, in his pretty, basic English, he said, oh, it's just chronic shock, it's a trick, it's a cheap trick, basically. He's like, yeah, yeah, that happens, that's chronic shock, that guy doesn't know what he's doing, that's a cheap, like, parlor trick. So that's number one. And then the second one was being in a very deep massage state, and the massage therapist, this was in Montreal, asked if she could use tuning forks with me. And I've never had anyone before or since, in a massage therapy session,

• 2:11:03Tim Ferriss?

  ask this, but she did, and she took two different tuned forks and put them on opposite sides of my head, and again, basically, instantaneously had this spontaneous five MEO experience. And I've been trying to track her down since, I have not been able to find the contact information. What would you make of either of those? And maybe the answer is, there's nothing to be made of it, but just, again, since I'm pushing a little bit, what comes to mind as I describe these two things?

• 2:11:30Speaker 01

  I'm not at all surprised, you know, these altered states of consciousness, some of which we've come to know through psychedelics, you know, can also be elicited under any number of other conditions, and presumably, prior to psychedelics, that's exactly what happened. I mean, so if, you know, if you look into mystical traditions, you know, and meditation traditions, yeah, these things can happen. So we're biologically wired to have these experiences, and we just don't understand the optimal conditions under which

• 2:12:06Speaker 01

  they occur. So, you know, the guru experience is interesting, in the Sita Yoga tradition, you know, there are all kinds of stories that really don't seem to make much sense, unless you actually believe that the guru, you know, has these remarkable powers of transmitting something, and how that's transmitted, you know, and how much of it is, you know, expectancy effects versus not, but there are hundreds of accounts of some of these

• 2:12:44Speaker 01

  most outstanding or notable gurus, in which people, without any expectation, come to awaken or have profound experiences in their presence. So, I don't know what, I mean, that's one of those things that makes me kind of deeply curious, but so far, we don't have any, anything that approaches scientific proof, that that occurs, or can even occur, you know, reliably. So it's part of what needs to be investigated, and that would get to, kind of, the longer term project of the endowment on spirituality, secular spirituality and wellbeing.

• 2:13:29Tim Ferriss?

  I want to talk about that. I want to, if you don't mind, just pause for a second to ask you a question about the two cases I described. So in, let's just say, with respect to investigating, and I'm probably gonna script the vocabulary, so please feel free to correct me, I should have said expectancy effect, not confirmation bias as an example. I'm just dangerous enough, right, to be wielding these labels without really understanding what the hell I'm talking about, but I'll make an attempt. So if we look at, say, some of the psychedelic research out there, and if we're looking at some of the, let's call

• 2:14:05Tim Ferriss?

  it, classic psychedelics, and we can introduce the drug, and then, maybe one model of explaining the effects would be, we introduce this drug, it binds to any number of things, but very often to serotonin and type 2A receptors, and then that produces this effect. If you were to form a hypothesis around, but let's put the guru piece aside, the tuning forks, mechanistically, what could be happening in a case like that, or in a case like meditation, for instance, because I've spoken with some folks who take a counterpoint to meditators

• 2:14:50Tim Ferriss?

  who would say psychedelics are cheating, they're brute force, you're not really taking anything away, we meditators are doing it naturally, therefore, it has higher value, but the counterpoint would be, you're doing the same thing. Ultimately, if our experience is mediated by neurochemistry, you're just finding another way to somehow do something similar, if that makes any sense. Basically, if we, within the lab, looking at, say, a serotonergic agonist, we would say, okay, this molecule binds to this, and the effects are, as described, sort of, subjectively by the patient, and also as recorded in this

• 2:15:30Tim Ferriss?

  fMRI machine. If it were, say, a tuning fork that produced a similar experience to, say, five MEO DMT, what are the mechanics by which it exerts that similar effect? Because it's not a chemical that's binding to anything, or it's not an exogenous chemical.

• 2:15:49Speaker 01

  Presumably, whatever these experiences that are occasioned with psychedelics are producing interconnectivity and network changes within the brain, right? And that accounts for the experience. This is from the, kind of, the reductionistic neuroscience viewpoint. And so, then the question is, well, yeah, what other conditions can occasion those, the same critical network changes? And so, you could imagine, or I could imagine, that with tuning forks, you know, at different frequencies going into different ears, I mean, that's

• 2:16:31Speaker 01

  a very unusual set of conditions, you're totally relaxed, you're totally comfortable otherwise. And so, it would be, yeah, really interesting, and that, and this is part of the comparative experimental work that needs to be done, is, once we have a, a good signal of what accounts for that pure awareness state under five MEO, and if that can be replicated with tuning forks, then you want to compare brain activities during that time. And so, in principle, there should be a way to, you know, examine those similarities

• 2:17:14Speaker 01

  and conclude, you know, what's operative under both conditions. And the same would be true of meditation states. But, you know, but our, our understanding of the nature of these experiences is so primitive, and our mechanisms for inquiring about brain structure, or not structure, you know, network complexity, are so crude at this point, that I don't think science is up to the task to fully answer that. But that is the project that is unfolding, and, yeah, and there are many laboratories that are interested in just that.

• 2:17:55Tim Ferriss?

  I'll have to make some phone calls to the director of the tuning fork lobby to see if I can drum up some funding. That's another challenge, is just getting funding for this stuff.

• 2:18:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, and, you know, the same would be true of breathwork, you know, under some conditions, particularly in some people, breathwork can result in, in also similar kinds of changes. It's just that there's so much variation, you know, among meditators or breathwork practices, and I'm guessing tuning fork massage therapists, that it's hard to mount a prospective study, because you'd have to identify conditions under which, you know, those experiences can be elicited reliably. And so, that is the power of psychedelic

• 2:18:47Speaker 01

  drugs, is that, you know, not in all people, but in most people, you can occasion a set of phenomenological events that have definable phenomenology, definable experiential aspects. And so, that leads us to be able to study those effects prospectively with, kind of, the tools of empirical science. And that's made much more difficult under conditions where you can't reliably occasion the experience. After my initial engagement with Sita Yoga, then I started exploring other meditation traditions, I started, and I was drawn

• 2:19:34Speaker 01

  Kind of most prominently to Buddhist practices. So I worked some with Alan Wallace, who comes out of the Dalai Lama Tibetan School. But probably just pragmatically ended up spending more time with Vipassana meditation as taught by the Insight Meditation Center. And they have a retreat center in Barry, New York.

• 2:20:01Tim Ferriss?

  Why did you say pragmatically? Just because it was easily available?

• 2:20:04Speaker 01

  Easily available, yeah. And Tara Brock and Jonathan Faust are local to us and interested in the work that we were doing. So my practice has turned more Buddhist. I like the insight meditation practice because it strips away any theological or dogmatic practices. It doesn't appeal to magic mechanisms or supernatural phenomena. It's very worldly based, but yet it still has some of the flavor of the other kinds of traditions, you know, in terms of the enlivening quality of it.

• 2:20:49Speaker 01

  And it's a much easier practice to understand and rationalize from a scientific worldview. So I did that and then I got involved with a local teacher who, you know, Jessica Dib, who is, her central practice has been breathwork. And that is kind of this structured breathing practice that brings you into presence. But she also teaches a series of courses. And what I would describe, I'm not sure how she would describe it, as embodied awakening. And so at the point that I encountered her, I had 15 years or more of sitting meditation

• 2:21:34Speaker 01

  practice. And so I had that kind of discipline down. But that's a very kind of narrow sense of practice, right? I mean, you're sitting on a cushion, meditating, and the objective is to bring that into the world. You know, but how to do that is a little bit mysterious. Jessica, as a teacher, had a whole host of practices that just brought those same sensibilities into moment-to-moment awareness. And some of those were bodily practices. Some of them were variations on meditative practices.

• 2:22:14Tim Ferriss?

  Bodily practices, meaning movement?

• 2:22:16Speaker 01

  Yeah, movement, yeah. But all focused on staying awake to the present moment. An example like yoga, you know, yoga could be that, but very often it becomes a routine practice that is certainly about the body, but it's not about that blending, integration of moment-to-moment awake awareness with what you're doing. And that was a significant gift to my own practice because it got me out of an introvertive practice, and that is focused inwardly, as meditation does, to an extrovertive practice

• 2:23:00Speaker 01

  in which you're still holding that sense of aliveness and degree of awareness, but it's also projected into the world or it's projected back from the world, however one might experience that. But it's really the enlivening of everything there is. And those are very different, but very similar. And so in the literature on classic mystical experiences, there's a differentiation between introvertive experiences, that is, internal experiences, versus extrovertive, in which all things become alive and you're in the world.

• 2:23:40Speaker 01

  I think it's important to recognize both are true and there's great value in both. And of course, that leads us directly to some of the queries about psychedelic experiences. So our laboratory has focused on research in which we've given a psychedelic, mostly psilocybin, under conditions where people are asked to put eye shades on and listen to music. So it's an intentional and container to produce an introvertive kind of experience. But, you know, as you know, there are people who are, you know, have profound and serious use of psychedelics, who think that that's just an abomination, that, you know, you

• 2:24:25Speaker 01

  need to take these compounds out in nature or in, within community. And those are all legitimate set in setting conditions. And my own thought would be that it's kind of the marriage of what you learn from each of those kinds of experiences that helps you bring that into your moment-to-moment and daily lived experience.

• 2:24:51Tim Ferriss?

  How do you relate to death? I mean, people have a million different takes on it. There are different ways that people maybe console themselves or provide a ideological, theological safety net, right, in the, in certain belief systems. Then you have the sort of Richard Alpert Ram Dass, you know, it's like taking off a shoe that's a bit too tight to transition, not asking for anything in particular, other than just how you relate to death, how you think about it.

• 2:25:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, it's, it's an ongoing contemplation for me. I'm bred as a reductionistic neuroscientist, but open to all possibilities. And so one scenario is, yeah, nervous system goes down. It's like unplugging the computer, you know, that's the end of existence. And then there are other scenarios that would have different accounts for survival of something, consciousness or some type of awareness post-death. I guess what's clear is I cannot bring myself to embrace the most fanciful thoughts about

• 2:26:12Speaker 01

  what death and dying are. I'm gonna go to heaven and sit on the right-hand side of Jesus and be with all my loved ones or, you know, whatever, whatever story some people can embrace. I have to think that if you actually believe that, it would, it could be joyful to die. But that seems outlandishly improbable to me. So I just, I can dismiss those out of hand. So then it's really kind of what the probability is, that there's, you know, something beyond death, you know? And I had these conversations with my cancer patients.

• 2:26:54Speaker 01

  And this was, you know, we ran the cancer study that was published in 2016. And there's some irony, of course, in my now being one of those patients. I would often ask, I always ask participants at the beginning of the study, well, yeah, what do you think happens when we die? And some would say, oh, yeah, I'm gonna go on and meet my parents and it'll be a joyful reunion and, you know? And then others would say, well, I don't believe anything. It's, it's computer off, system down, nothing. And then what I would ask is, what's the probability to think that's true?

• 2:27:37Speaker 01

  Are you absolutely certain about that or something? And they'd say, oh, I believe that to be true. So 95% that say. And I would think 95%. So 5% likelihood that would be true. That would be, I mean, if you had lottery tickets that were gonna pay off at 5% of the, you know, you'd buy them immediately. I mean, it's, it's like people invest in lottery tickets at odds of what, one in, you know, a million or less. So I thought, well, that's interesting. And I think all you need is a fraction of a percent.

• 2:28:17Speaker 01

  It can be as tiny as you want, but if you haven't foreclosed on the possibility that something might occur that's interesting at the time of death, then that, at least to me psychologically, changes the, the whole game. So I'm strongly biased toward kind of a reductionistic, powers-off scenario. But I'm open to the possibility, although the probability I put on that changes from time to time, but it's really narrow in any case. But I'm open to the possibility that something other might occur.

• 2:28:59Speaker 01

  And so that gives me this kind of deep curiosity about death. And I think that's, at least for me, that's all you need. I mean, that's like, this is, the story could be revealed. I mean, you know, you might pass through that gate and go, oh, this is what that was about. You know, the curtain, curtain comes back and you see what's going on. I mean, you know, but that's a fanciful idea in and of itself. But yeah, I think I, yeah, I revel in the idea of curiosity at the time of death. Now, whether that's gonna change as my, as I proceed through the medical course and

• 2:29:44Speaker 01

  my diagnosis, I don't know. And I don't know whether I'm gonna be able to maintain the degree of equipoise I currently have. And I don't know that I'm not gonna succumb to the, to the rabbit holes. But I'd also say that I'm looking forward to the challenge. I mean, it's, it's like, everything that comes up that could be viewed as, oh, that's terrible, oh, I'm so sad to hear your test results came back like that, you know? And I'm experiencing it as, no, this is, this is great. This is an opportunity to explore what that is.

• 2:30:27Speaker 01

  And it's partly for me, just embracing reality as it unfolds in the course of this illness.

• 2:30:35Tim Ferriss?

  How can your friends be most supportive to what you just described? Because I imagine many people, myself included, don't really know how to...

• 2:30:49Tim Ferriss?

  Address or not address or speak to these experiences you're having as they unfold. So I'm sure I have said at some point, I'm so sorry to hear... ...because I just don't have a better replacement. What, do you have any suggestions for, if I texted you and you, I said, Roland, how are you doing? And you replied with something that most people might respond to with, I'm so sorry to hear that. Is there a alternative that you might suggest? And this is for you specifically, not saying this is general advice. How would you like me to be supportive?

• 2:31:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. Thanks for asking. That's an interesting question. People very often are calling and say, oh, I hope you're feeling better. Well, that predisposes that I was feeling bad at some point. And I'm not, and I'm just, I'm not embracing that or endorsing that at all. And so when people say, I'm so sorry, my immediate reaction is there's nothing to be sorry about. I consider this a blessing, you know, and I've never been doing better in my life. You know, however, as, as I now am encountering more physical problems,

• 2:32:07Speaker 01

  best I can tell, all secondary to the medical treatment, which is a little exasperating. But I think it is the best course of action. Yeah, there'd be no question that it would be nicer not to be encumbered by, by that. So what would I want friends to say? Well, where I see it right now, I want them to join me in the celebration of what my experience is, and that is this deep gratitude for the preciousness of life. And that's what I'm trying to communicate to people.

• 2:32:50Speaker 01

  Let's all wake up, you know, you needn't have this stage four cancer diagnosis, but there's a degree of awakening that's obtainable and join me in this celebration. But now putting myself in my friends' shoes, they may not know what my current state is. They don't know what my current state is. And so it feels like that they should offer some kind of empathetic sympathy. So what do I think about that? I think the question is, I've been thinking of you, how are you doing? Rather than, I hope you're feeling better, or I'm so sorry.

• 2:33:34Speaker 01

  And those are ones that, you know, we've been talking about identifying kind of the rabbit holes that you don't want to go into. I mean, I almost have this kind of visceral response to people saying, oh, I'm so sorry, or I hope you're feeling better. And I, and there's some people, every time I communicate with them, I have to make that correction. That's not my experience and not the way I want to hold myself in this adventure that I'm undergoing.

• 2:34:07Tim Ferriss?

  You mentioned that in the cancer study with patients prior to, and I'm emphasizing prior to, that's at least what I heard, the psilocybin sessions, you asked them what they thought happened when they died. So 95% confident, pearly gates, meet all my relatives, happy reunion. 95% confident, lights out, robot unplugged, and so on. Did you observe any patterns of change after the session? I don't know if you revisited that question.

• 2:34:47Tim Ferriss?

  Maybe you were able to infer from the reports, which I know you have people both verbally recount and also in some cases type out or write out. Did you observe any, any changes there?

• 2:35:01Speaker 01

  Yes, there are changes and it's in the direction that you might anticipate. People are more open to the possibility of something occurring after death. And we've seen that repeatedly. We've seen that in our cancer patients. And we've given a number of surveys of belief changes that occur before and after psychedelic experiences. And we've also looked at belief changes that occur before and after near death experiences and psychedelic experiences. And under all those cases, people are more likely to endorse something that continues after death.

• 2:35:46Speaker 01

  So I think that that's actually a very common feature of psychedelic experiences more broadly in a study that we've just submitted to publication about belief changes. There's a shift toward more dualistic thinking, that mind is somehow different than body. So that would be different than a purely reductionistic worldview that would say that your mind is nothing other than neural functioning. But there's a shift toward dualistic thinking, and then there are a number of other kinds of changes that occur.

• 2:36:22Tim Ferriss?

  I like to pretend like I'm some kind of amateur scientist, but really you're the scientist and I'm just this sort of plodding interloper who happens to be a big fan of scientists and science and the scientific method. But I want to ask you, and this is not to infer any belief, certainly on my side. I can't explain this in any way, but have you taken a look at or come across at any point, let me back up. There are all sorts of stories, to use one of your words, fanciful stories of life after death, lots of bestsellers written with these either subtle or very direct kind of theological undertones.

• 2:37:04Tim Ferriss?

  And you just can't know, just like you can know that you are aware of being aware, but I may just be some robot that's passing the Turing test, some deep fake AI that's happens to be on video here. Who knows, right? So similarly, you can't verify these experiences that people are reporting from near death experiences necessarily. Maybe there are commonalities and that's interesting at some level. But I remember reading a book, and there are some chapters in this book. It's more of an anthology put together by David, it was edited by David Presti, who's at UC Berkeley. And I believe the title is called Mind Beyond Brain.

• 2:37:44Tim Ferriss?

  And there's, I'd say 20% of it, I wish they had left out because it is, if from my perspective, it doesn't really further the conversation. It just muddies the water. However, there's one section, and this has also been, I believe, looked at quite closely by a, an author and a journalist who's written for the New York Times named Lisa Keen, who has also looked at case studies gathered by researchers at, I believe, University of Virginia. And you might see where this is going. But the stories relate to very young children, in many cases, two or three years of age,

• 2:38:26Tim Ferriss?

  recounting with sufficient detail, a prior life that it could be confirmed and identified. And I mean, this is interesting. Again, no explanation, but in India, this seems to be particularly common where it's like, you know, 20 clicks from here, I am so and so who grew up in this village and my brother's name is such and such, and I died in this way, and I used to do this. And as a two or three year old, and lo and behold, they go and they're able to confirm this person actually existed. Not asking you for commentary necessarily, but have you come across any of this? Have you read any of these accounts?

• 2:39:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've read those accounts. I've read some of the literature on paranormal phenomena more generally. In neither case have I gone deeply enough into it to overcome my potential skepticism that there could be biases in the, in the data as collected. I mean, look, we have almost half of our nation believing the election was totally fraudulent. So the ability of cultures to birth stories that are, you know, consistent with whatever worldview they want. So you'd have to look really closely into who said

• 2:39:49Speaker 01

  what to whom and what kind of information would have been otherwise transmitted or distorted. And for sure, I just don't know. I mean, I do know there are...

• 2:40:02Speaker 01

  People who have been involved with paranormal research like Presti at UC Berkeley, who believe that there are, you know, real, fundamental, interesting things going on there. I just haven't pursued those areas enough to kind of quell my skepticism. Of course, some of those, if you believe those accounts, then it breaks down our whole paradigm for understanding reality, at least to date. And so that makes it discomforting to scientists

• 2:40:42Speaker 01

  and reductionistic scientists altogether. But frankly, that's also one of the great benefits in having psychedelics to study, because one of the phenomena that, one of the belief, sets of belief changes that occur after psychedelic experiences of the type I was describing, people are more inclined toward dualistic thinking. They're also more inclined toward endorsing paranormal beliefs. And so why would that be and what's going on there? I don't know, but these are questions that should be studied. But, you

• 2:41:23Speaker 01

  know, very early on, we were interested in merging the work on paranormal phenomena with psychedelics because of those associations. And we ultimately concluded that we had our hands full.

• 2:41:38Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 2:41:40Speaker 01

  In terms of conducting our psychedelic research, which has changed markedly since 2000. But when we first got in, involved here, you know, it was a very iffy business and we felt like we could be shut down.

• 2:41:54Tim Ferriss?

  You didn't want to throw psychics and astrology in there just to see if you could get that past the IRB?

• 2:41:58Speaker 01

  Right, right. Yeah. So I guess, yeah, so I guess the bottom line answer is, yeah, we've kind of avoided looking closely at that. And we have enough to do with what we have without getting involved with it. But it's certainly enticing and, you know, in anything, this paradigm shifting like that is hugely important.

• 2:42:23Tim Ferriss?

  I don't buy, I mean, a lot of what comes up in that book, I raise an eyebrow with respect to, and I, you know, that term paranormal is really unfortunate. It's just, or, I mean, supernatural, far worse, of course, just because I feel like, and you and I have chatted a bit about, you know, articles written by physicists where there is, on one hand, what you said, a lot of truth to if even one or two of these edge cases, forget about the majority, let's just say one or two of these cases happen to be verifiable, it upends to what we take to be true from a paradigm level perspective. Then, on the other hand,

• 2:43:08Tim Ferriss?

  you can say, well, if we start going big enough or small enough, there isn't really a consensus on what the hell is going on to begin with, if that makes any sense. And things get very bizarre and there's a lot of contentious debate and absolutely no consensus when it comes to quantum level physics. And so I do think there's a lot to, to be explored. And I have to assume, I mean, it seems like this has always been the case, that we have many paradigms and it just seems inconceivable, what do you say, outlandishly improbable, that all of them are correct. I mean, there, there must be, there must be, there, there

• 2:43:52Tim Ferriss?

  have to be flaws. I mean, we've always thought that we have it mostly figured out and we've never been correct to date. So I have to assume there are some things that are missing.

• 2:44:01Speaker 01

  That's what science has to offer. I mean, we do have this methodology, you know, for, for discovering replicable relationships. And science has been a huge blessing to human culture. And so, so that's where I'm kind of strongly inclined to say, let the wheels of science grind and begin to answer some of these questions. Ultimately, they're going to be answerable, I think, other than the ultimate question. And that's what the hell's going on here. But, you know, the more mundane questions about whether, whether there's

• 2:44:44Speaker 01

  remote reading, ultimately is, there's going to be proof of that or not proof of that. But so, so far, well, I won't, I won't go into that because I don't know the data well enough.

• 2:44:57Tim Ferriss?

  I agree with you. I think, which is partially why, I mean, people are like, oh, do you want to prove that X, Y, and Z exists? I'm like, no, actually, I don't. And that's, that wouldn't be, again, I'm not a scientist, but that wouldn't be a very scientific way of going about it either. You can have a hypothesis, but I do think a lot of these things that appear to be fictionalized accounts of anomalies will be explainable at some point. It might be quite a distance into the future, but I'm optimistic actually with harnessing a lot of these technologies that, I mean, it is pretty wild that we can use quantum computing while still at some of the most basic levels. We do not understand

• 2:45:38Tim Ferriss?

  what's going on, but we can still harness the technology. It is very interesting. I think our explanatory power will improve a lot over the next five to 10 years by harnessing AI and other things. So I'm actually optimistic that a lot of these things that look like sort of improbable anomalies, maybe they are improbable anomalies, will nonetheless be explainable and therefore cease to be thrown into this bucket of, say paranormal, which is just like, ugh, it's such a negative connotation. I will say though, just getting a little off track, that when it comes to any mention of some of these things posed

• 2:46:20Tim Ferriss?

  as questions, right, that there is a lot of sort of calcified, let me put it a different way, reactionary, unscientific response from people who are in, who are practicing scientists, right? They say, well, that can't be possibly true. And I'm like, well, that's not a very scientific response. I mean, if you say the data don't support that conclusion as of now, that's a fair response. But if it's, that's bullshit, that's, that's can't possibly exist. That's also not a terribly thoughtful response to things. But like you said, let the wheels of science grind. And I will just say that, you know, for me too, looking at this scientific method, looking at Western science and medicine, I mean, these are,

• 2:47:05Tim Ferriss?

  in the last case, I mean, the most successful healing system ever devised by humankind, right? So I lean heavily in your direction as well, with respect to all those things.

• 2:47:16Speaker 01

  In some respects, science can become a religion in and of itself. And that's what you're talking about, is people who, you know, have totally bought into a reductionistic worldview. That's the only way to look at it in the story. And they're, they're just as close minded as, you know, QAnon supporters, as far as I'm concerned. Yeah. So, science itself is entirely open ended and agnostic. All it's trying to do is find out what's true. And there are things that we, you know, that have come to be proven sufficiently well, that we, we believe them to be true. And then there are things that haven't reached

• 2:47:58Speaker 01

  that, that threshold yet. But we have a methodology that can answer these kinds of questions.

• 2:48:04Tim Ferriss?

  Would you like to speak to the endowed professorship, just to introduce that? And I mean, I'd like to know why, why is it important? And what do you hope, what type of research do you hope to be conducted? What types of things do you, in, in your sort of dream of dreams, what kind of stuff would we be investigating?

• 2:48:25Speaker 01

  With the diagnosis, you know, I ended up starting to reprioritize a whole bunch of things in, in my life, you know, some became more important, some became less important. It was very clarifying. It's interesting because Marla, my wife and I have done on several occasions, you know, the exercise of, oh, so what happened, what would you do differently if you only had a year to live, a month to live, or a week to live, or a day to live? And so we had been through that, but, but this brought that exercise into kind of crystal clarity for me in a way that I hadn't previously experienced it.

• 2:49:10Speaker 01

  So among the things that came up, of course, was my will. And, you know, what does that look like? And so I, I started reworking my will. And I got to the point of charitable contributions. And my first response was, oh, that's simple. I'm going to give to, you know, the effective charities movement, like Giving Well, which is this kind of leveraged group that really studies different charitable causes and makes decisions and prioritizes those that are most effective.

• 2:49:50Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, givewell.org.

• 2:49:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Terrific. And so that was my initial response. And then I woke the next day to the thought, and I may get a little emotional about this, what would I really want to give? What, you know, what could I give that would be of most value and of most meaning? And, you know, what came up for me is precisely the path that I'm on. What we want, those of us who have done spiritual practices and have experience with psychedelics, is we, we want the world, humankind, to awaken to what this marvelous

• 2:50:32Speaker 01

  experience is and appreciate it. And with that kind of awakening comes this, you know, sense of wanting to take care of one another, to take care of the environment, to make a difference at the most fundamental level. There are aspects of moral thinking, doing unto others as you would have them do unto you, and pro-social behaviors and attitudes that emerge from these kinds of transcendent experiences, whether they're psychedelic or not. But psychedelics seem to be a very important scientific tool. So then the contemplation is, yeah, that's what I want. What I want...

• 2:51:19Speaker 01

  For humankind is for them to awaken. Can I contribute in any way? Because I think that some of the research we're doing is directly germane to that. And I thought, oh, you know, I could leave a bequest in my will, and I don't have a big estate, but I could maybe sponsor an enduring endowed lectureship, you know, where someone would come to lecture on this. And so that felt right. And then, and then I thought, you know, I probably have, you know, there's some goodwill that I've accumulated with respect to the, the work that I've done with psychedelics. So maybe I should reach beyond that and create a professorship,

• 2:52:02Speaker 01

  a position that's dedicated to studying these very things. And ideally, a research fund that would allow continued research into something that I call secular spirituality and well-being. And by secular spirituality, all I'm meaning is an empirical, scientific approach to studying the effects of psychedelic compounds or interventions that produce psychedelic-like effects. To the empirical study of those aimed at healthy volunteers

• 2:52:44Speaker 01

  with the aspirational idea that that's going to feed into a deeper understanding of, of the mystery in which we live. And if that can alter culture, that's fundamentally important. And my thought actually is that it's one of the most powerful ways that we could potentially alter culture. And I don't mean by that to suggest that everyone should go out and take psychedelics. I think they're much too powerful a tool for that, and they're potentially culturally disruptive.

• 2:53:24Speaker 01

  But to let the wheels of science grind on those questions, I think seems to me to be critically important to kind of solving the problem of what these transformative experiences are and then how they can benefit humankind and human flourishing. And in some sense, I feel like we're in an existential race against the development of technologies that could end this whole experiment. I mean, they're extinction-producing events like bioweapons or nuclear war

• 2:54:05Speaker 01

  or climate change to just, or AI, to name a few. And so our technology is advancing at a rate much more rapidly than kind of these evolved sense of moral, ethical standards. And so there's every reason to give this area of research a high priority. Ironically enough, that we got deeply involved in this research and sometimes credited with, you know, setting off the, the renaissance, psychedelic renaissance.

• 2:54:43Speaker 01

  But ironically enough now, funds are flowing into the area of psychedelic research. But they're doing so solely in support of therapeutic ends. And don't get me wrong, you know, if a major focus of our research has been on therapeutic populations like depressed patients, anorexic patients, end of life cancer patients. That's really an important target, and it's an understandable cultural target that it should be prioritized. However, those funds are coming in from private capital to gain economic leverage, patent opportunities

• 2:55:28Speaker 01

  that are going to be used for therapeutic indications. I'm also optimistic that NIH is increasingly coming online, and we'll see money flowing into the psychedelic area through the federal governments. But what's marooned in that process is this whole aspect of the well-being of the populations that aren't otherwise identified as patients and the ethical and moral implications of those investigations. And so I, I think, I've sometimes said it, and I think some people take it as hyperbole, but in fact, I, I mean it.

• 2:56:10Speaker 01

  This area of research, you know, toward understanding that these benevolent, magnificent qualities or sensibilities that arise from these experiences and their attendant changes in pro-social behavior are very likely to be critical to the survival of our species. It sounds like overreach, and, and I don't believe it to be. So in kind of coming to that, that maybe I could play some role in establishing a fund that would do that in perpetuity. I mean, this is an endowment. So what that means is it continues enduringly over time

• 2:56:55Speaker 01

  as long as Johns Hopkins as an institution continues to exist. You know, and in terms of stable structures that, that we can expect to last for generations, I think, you know, major academic centers are among those that would be the most trustworthy in that regard. I see the question being addressed here. This idea of unpacking the mystery of what this is all about in a longer timeframe, and that may be a gift of the, of the diagnosis. I'm not, it's not, can we achieve this in five years? And ultimately, the ultimate answer to what are we doing here may never be known.

• 2:57:39Speaker 01

  But striving toward that is critical. And this endowment will last in perpetuity and will grow in perpetuity. It's managed by Hopkins in such a way that endowments grow over time. So I'm hugely excited about the prospect of, of setting this in motion.

• 2:58:03Tim Ferriss?

  What type of research could you foresee? Who's plan to head this up? What might studies look like? And this might be a good place to bring in the religious leaders' study and maybe describe that if it seems like an opportune place. I'm interested in it. Certainly, I think, maybe at some point, others would be as well. But would you like to address any of that? The types of studies that, slash, research that might be conducted? Who you foresee heading it up? Since it is a professorship? And then the religious leaders' study?

• 2:58:46Speaker 01

  Let's see, so what kind of research would be done? Well, I see this as actually a through line of the research that initially got me involved in this. And this was the inquiry, would psychedelics have anything to tell us about the mystery, the benevolent mystery of what it is to exist? And so, you know, that brought me into the field through meditation. We've done a series of studies in healthy volunteers to show that these effects, these kind of pro-social dispositional effects are reliable, they're dose-dependent, and we can, we can show them across different populations. We then did studies in beginning meditators and long-term meditators.

• 2:59:31Speaker 01

  Most recently, we've done a study in religious professionals, that is clergy. In each case there, in beginning meditators and long-term meditators and religious clergy, we're looking at different populations with different histories and, and different belief systems, if you will. And what we've shown in each of those cases is that psilocybin is producing the same kinds of effects. Sometimes they're interpreted a little bit differently, but they're these deeply moving experiences.

• 3:00:13Speaker 01

  And as you move into long-term meditators and religious professionals, these experiences are resonating with some of the very things that brought them into that area of interest. So where could this research go in the future? And so one very important question is, to what extent are these experiences with psychedelics universal experiences? I mean, we still have to parse apart, you know, culture, set, and setting. We've been doing this in different populations. An obvious additional population would be to study

• 3:00:55Speaker 01

  people who are holding atheistic worldviews, hard atheist worldviews, and see how they interpret these experiences in light of that. And my, if I were to guess, I would guess that the benevolent, pro-social attitudes are going to shine through whatever they claim their belief system to be. They won't use the God language to describe it, or they won't use spiritual to even describe it. But I'm guessing they would fall back on the magnificence of what it is to be human.

• 3:01:37Speaker 01

  You know, there are other groups that could be studied, you know, including philosophers, different non-Western cultures should be studied. A very interesting group to be studied would be monastics, deep, deep monastics, like from the Dalai Lama's tradition. We studied long-term meditators, but those were generally US citizens. But if we could study monastics out of, you know, who have been studying, who have been practicing decades in isolation, you know, that would be, that would be really interesting.

• 3:02:15Speaker 01

  You know, we need to understand to what extent expectancies play a role in these effects. And can we prime these different kinds of effects, you know, with different instructions? There are, I mean, I think I could go on and on with the kinds of studies that could be done. And there's no, you know, there's no single study that's going to answer it. I mean, one question is kind of a total concept intervention. You know, what if you really throw the kitchen sink at the possibility for these kinds of changes? Giving well-curated psychedelic experiences in supportive

• 3:02:59Speaker 01

  conditions that allow for maximizing the potential of these experiences to alter worldview in this kind of fundamental way. Related to that are a really interesting possibility is to look at psychedelic effects as rites of passage, you know, so there are inflection points within lives, like the transition into adulthood, thinking immediately post-college, before someone has undertaken a career. That's an inflection point in one's life. Other inflection points could be at marriage,

• 3:03:39Speaker 01

  or the birth of the first child, or retirement from vocation, and of course, death. Those are each potential inflection points that would be really interesting to investigate with respect to how psychedelic experiences could alter those. So there are many, many other kinds of studies. What I hesitate to do is outline a single study, because it's, that's all it's going to be, is a single study. And what I'm seeing this as a multi-generational process. I mean, like I said, it goes on enduringly

• 3:04:23Speaker 01

  to investigate the very nature of this sense of wonder and pro-social attitudes that evolve out of those kinds of experiences. So who's the first lucky recipient, so to speak? First appointee, first quarterback? Not sure how to best describe it. Professor, obviously. So I was delighted when I kind of thought of this idea and endowed professorship, that I had recruited into our unit David Yaden, comes out of Pennsylvania, has devoted his career to date

• 3:05:04Speaker 01

  to the investigation of transformative experiences, but without psychedelics. So he worked very closely with Marty Seligman. Oh, Seligman. Yeah, Marty Seligman of Positive Psychology. David has been very interested in transformative experiences. And he certainly recognized when he was doing this stuff that there was something super interesting about psychedelics. And so we had recruited him in several years ago. And my appreciation for what he has to contribute has done nothing but grow enormously. He's a rigorous empirical scientist.

• 3:05:45Speaker 01

  His own personal story is, is one in which he's had transformative experiences that, that got him enthralled with answering these kinds of questions. He's an incredible collaborator. He collaborates kind of naturally with people. He's very productive. And so I can't think of a better person to initially take on the endowed fellowship. I should say something just about what we're aspiring toward. So in general, endowed professorships can be established at universities at rates of a couple of million dollars, two or three million dollars.

• 3:06:30Speaker 01

  But it's, it's a little bit deceiving because recipients of those professorships are receiving income from the endowment against their salary. But it only supports about a third a dest of their salary. So they're not, they're not free to study any given thing. Yeah, they have to sing for their supper, writing grants to supplement their income. Yeah, absolutely. So in some ways, you know, those endowed professorships are illusory, at least, at least within some academic centers, including my own. The first goal was to create an endowment that would

• 3:07:14Speaker 01

  cover someone's full salary, so they would not have to be concerned, as long as they were productive, they wouldn't have to be concerned about losing their job for lack of funding. And then the next level was to create enough additional funding so that they would have income for a research program. And, you know, the kinds of studies that I've already outlined are expensive. And I think the initial goal of the endowment to create the professorship was at a $10 million mark, which appears that we have reached. And, and I want to just express my gratitude to you, Tim,

• 3:07:59Speaker 01

  for your oversized role in, in making that, that happen. We still have to go through signing agreements and stuff like that. So there's, we're still short in that respect. But ultimately, you know, my audacious dream, as I keep calling this, because it seems, seems so improbable from the outside that, from the onset, that it could even be established. You know, my ultimate dream would be an endowment of $20 million that would really provide significant research funding to continue this work in perpetuity. How did you come across David?

• 3:08:44Speaker 01

  And I'll certainly have more questions, but I'm just wondering how, how the, the two of you first connected? So, yeah, David reached out to me when he was still an undergraduate. And because he, he immediately identified what we were doing as really interesting. And I forget what question he asked me, but the other day we were talking and, and he actually pulled up the email. And he was asking something about transformative experiences. I mean, he, he has a very interesting life story in and of itself, because he's had these opening experiences.

• 3:09:24Speaker 01

  He was very interested in initiative, initiatory experiences. And his, part of his thesis research was, he did back-to-back Marine boot camp. And he was interested in that as an initiatory experience. But that's, that's one hell of dedication to go through a Marine boot camp, come out the other side and, and take that as a learning opportunity. And then I think within weeks, he went off on a month-long meditation retreat.

• 3:10:02Speaker 01

  So I can't imagine two more different kind of initiatory experiences than Marine boot camp. Sweet and sour chicken of initiatory compliments. Yeah. But, but yeah, it also kind of shows that he has his own practices. And he's, he's a regular meditator. And so he, he has a good sense of the, the basic phenomenology of this. And bringing that back with his kind of scientific expertise and, and also his just very positive personality

• 3:10:43Speaker 01

  and ability to connect and collaborate with people make him a really good choice. So he, he already has, yeah, good connections with Harvard Divinity Schools and international reputation and, and collaborations with other centers doing psychedelic research. So I think he's just uniquely well-placed to take on the professorship. So one of the interesting contemplations we went through is, well, yeah, how protected can we actually make this? How do we know that somehow this dream that goes on in perpetuity isn't diverted for some other reasons?

• 3:11:26Speaker 01

  And, and it gets, it gets, the mission becomes distorted in a way that we didn't intend. And so I had the great good fortune with working with remarkable lawyer who did this on a pro bono basis. But it, you know, really helped us work through the formal agreement with Johns Hopkins that creates boundary conditions under which decisions about the professorship need to be made. So we've written in to the agreement, you know, very strong language about what the intent and purpose of the professorship is.

• 3:12:09Speaker 01

  And then in addition to that, within the agreement, we hold Johns Hopkins accountable to evaluating the person with respect to the purpose and intent. And the points that they need to replace that person, they have to replace it. With deep consideration of the purpose and intent, so much so that although we can't, we can't, and it wouldn't make any sense to try to take the final decision away from Hopkins, we require that they involve in that decision-making process at least two

• 3:12:50Speaker 01

  other major institutions, you know, that have focuses germane to the purpose and intent. And right now, we've chosen Harvard Divinity School. They have a deep interest in psychedelics and the USONA Institute out of Madison, Wisconsin. So Hopkins has to confer with those two institutes and those two institutions, and then as well as two or more professional researchers in the area that are doing research in alignment with the intent and purpose. So what we're really doing is, is requiring a group of people to opine on decisions having

• 3:13:35Speaker 01

  to do with whether this endowment is on track and whether the person appointed to the endowment is the right person. So I feel very good about that in terms of kind of securing its future direction to be consistent with what we laid out as the purpose and intent of the endowment.

• 3:13:57Tim Ferriss?

  Very quick question, just, and this is gonna be a, maybe a boring procedural question, but Harvard Divinity School, I don't think is going anywhere. I expect that'll be around for a long time. USONA, less track record, not as, I wouldn't immediately have confidence that USONA will be around in 50 or 100 years. They may be, and I have a great deal of respect for them, but is there a contingency for if USONA ceases to exist, a replacement, it's kind of Plan B and C?

• 3:14:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. So if those institutions are no longer doing research with respect to the purpose and intent of the endowment, then Hopkins has the right to choose another institution. But yeah, those are the tricky kinds of decisions to be made. Certainly Bill Lytton from USONA is setting up USONA to survive in perpetuity, but there are all kinds of unknowns that we can't account for. But we have, I think we have enough redundancy built in between the institutions and then the individuals

• 3:15:07Speaker 01

  that we have pretty good check on Johns Hopkins doing, following what was intended.

• 3:15:16Tim Ferriss?

  Question, you know, this is personal curiosity, I mean, all this is personal curiosity, but if you're open to telling me, what is the current prognosis? Where do things stand? Where do you see things going with respect to your medical diagnosis?

• 3:15:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, Tim, I'm totally open to talking about anything. One of the funny things that's happened to, well, maybe it's not funny, but one of the things that's happened since the diagnosis is that I just feel this transparency that there's no reason, but there's every reason not to be totally authentic and honest with myself and with others. So there's nothing, nothing you need fear to ask. Let's see, so the prognosis, so it's metastatic, stage four, but there are variations. There are metastatic, stage four, colon to

• 3:16:11Speaker 01

  liver cancer for which a complete cure might be achievable. This appears not to be one of those for several different reasons. There are, there are actually some very good immunotherapies for some forms of colon cancer, but the immune markers aren't favorable to that intervention. And then it really depends on the extensiveness of the liver metastases. And unfortunately, you know, I have metastases in multiple lobes of the liver. And so when you ask these, the medical providers, you know, there, it's very difficult to get them to, to give you

• 3:16:56Speaker 01

  kind of the raw-

• 3:16:57Tim Ferriss?

  Straight answer.

• 3:16:58Speaker 01

  The raw, straight answers of survival possibilities. I mean, but they're, you know, they're healthcare providers. They, and, you know, and they're just not, they're not trained to do that, and they want to protect people from unnecessary fear. None of them will say, oh yeah, there's no chance that you're gonna survive. They all say, well, yeah, there's, there's a possibility here. And I may have told you at one point, I asked one of the surgeons, I said, okay, well, so given what you know about my cancer and, you know, and the risk factors and the distribution of it, I said, how many patients

• 3:17:39Speaker 01

  have you have that are still around 10 or 15 years later? And he said, oh, well, that's, that's just not a fair question to ask. And so I kind of teased him about that subsequently, but yeah, but clearly, had he had one case, he would have jumped on it. So, well, yeah, just two months ago, I met with someone who, but nonetheless, I guess the, the possibility of complete cure remains, but it's, you know, my thought is that it's a theoretical possibility. And I also, you know, it's interesting in terms of just how I'm dealing with it psychologically.

• 3:18:20Speaker 01

  I've read some books on people going through terminal cancer, and I think one of the toxic things that comes about is this grasping for the next therapy, you know, that, oh, yeah, this is gonna work and I'm gonna be cured. And I, I don't want to paint myself as hopeless, but that feels toxic to kind of grasp for straws. Oh, yeah, all I have to do is get through chemotherapy, or there's a new experimental treatment. And, you know, and there are some people who, who live out the course of their terminal diagnosis, chasing down the next

• 3:19:01Speaker 01

  possibility to prolong life. But in so doing, they've, they've given up the opportunity to participate in, in life fully. And so that's a balancing act.

• 3:19:12Tim Ferriss?

  Roland, is there anything else that you would like to, like to say as we're having this conversation and recording? Could be to, just could be any closing comment, requests of people, could be something you want to say to your family or loved ones. This is entirely up to you. This is just whatever, whatever feels right to you, which could also be nothing further to add.

• 3:19:36Speaker 01

  The first thing I would say is just deep gratitude to everyone who has helped support me. And then, you know, in terms of what I'm going through, personally, it's this celebration of, of the preciousness of human life, the preciousness of awareness. And we're all in this together, you know, at the deepest level, people understand that. And so, so my invitation to anyone who ends up hearing this in the future is to join me in that celebration, even if I'm not around in bodily form. I mean, there's something

• 3:20:20Speaker 01

  so precious about that. And then, of course, in line with what we've been talking about, this endowment feels truly important to me. It's a, it feels like it's a gift to humanity and what we all want in terms of human flourishing for the, for humankind and, and for planet and for other sentient species. And so whoever's moved to support that, that would be accepted with deep gratitude from me. I guess the final comment would be to be continued because

• 3:21:02Speaker 01

  I don't know what lies ahead for me. I don't know whether I can maintain the level of equipoise that I have. I certainly hope to be able to do so, but I'm taking it in real time as it comes up. And so I don't want to give any kind of sense that I've got this handled all the way to the end. I'm looking forward to seeing how I encounter those potential challenges.

• 3:21:33Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you all so much for listening. To support Roland's very ambitious project, and I do recommend that you consider supporting it, to establish a world-class psychedelic research program in perpetuity to advance human flourishing and wellbeing, please visit griffithsfund.org. That's G-R-I-F-F-I-T-H-S fund.org. Currently Roland has received pledges totaling around $14 million. That means that he is $6 million short of the $20 million target sufficient to support the full research program. To donate, please visit griffithsfund.org and click donate. For more information about establishing a major gift, please contact

• 3:22:13Tim Ferriss?

  Mike DeVito, that's D-E-V-I-T-O, the Senior Associate Director of Development at [email protected], or call him at 443-278-3174. Mike's name and email address and all the contact info will also be added to the show notes for this episode at tim.blog/podcast. Donors who contribute $1,000 or more and who do not choose to remain anonymous, so if you choose to be named, you will be acknowledged on the website. Thanks so much, everybody.