The Psychedelic Mind with Rick Doblin

Do psychedelics reveal a different objective reality? Neil deGrasse Tyson and Chuck Nice learn about psychedelic drugs, treating PTSD, and other mind-bending research with President of Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) Rick Doblin.

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

• 0:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Up next on StarTalk, all about psychedelics. How are they being used today to treat PTSD? What is the fallen Mormon study? And when did they become illegal and why? What is the future of research in these fields? All that and more, coming up on StarTalk.

• 0:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Welcome to StarTalk. Your place in the universe where science and pop culture collide. StarTalk begins right now.

• 0:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  This is StarTalk. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. Got with me my co-host Chuck Nice. Hey, hey, hey, Neil. All right, Chuck, professional comedian and actor. So Chuck, our topic today is psychedelics. Whoa. Whoa. And so we combed the landscape of psychedelic folk.

• 1:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Nice. And we found Rick Doblin. Rick Doblin, welcome to StarTalk.

• 1:05Speaker 01

  Thank you, Neil. Thank you, Chuck. I'm so glad to be here with you today and that I rose to your combing process.

• 1:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, yeah, the thresholds of, are you in or are you out of this StarTalk?

• 1:20Speaker 01

  Made the cut.

• 1:22Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, good. So you are the president. So Rick, you are the president and founder of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, abbreviated MAPS. And you spent a whole career studying psychedelics. Yeah. All right, all right. We'll take, I'll accept the word studying psychedelics for now.

• 1:49Speaker 01

  Well, you don't have to accept it because I'll say that part of studying it, obviously, is having your own experiences.

• 1:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay. Okay. All right, we'll get there. We'll see how that played out. Okay. So when I think of psychedelics and other, you know, plus marijuana, things that, I'm old enough to remember the 60s and 70s, where these were just simply illegal.

• 2:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Illegal and I don't ever remember any coherent argument for why they would be illegal, yet alcohol is just fine, right? And so, so even as a child, I saw some inconsistencies in the laws and legislations. So it wasn't, I wasn't, I wasn't voting one way or another, voting for it or against it one way or another. I just saw an inconsistency between the two. So our psychedelics, as we define them in your world, still restricted. And if they're restricted, then how do you work with them legally?

• 2:50Speaker 01

  Well, first off, I think we need to say that the drug war and prohibition has never really been about the reducing drug abuse. It's always been about persecuting minorities. And if you can go throughout history from the 1880s or so, where the first drug laws were against opium, against the Chinese laborers who came to build the railroads, then, you know, we had alcohol prohibition. After that ended disastrously, shortly after that, we got marijuana prohibition. That was mostly used by Mexicans and African Americans. The crackdown against the 1960s, against the hippies. You know, there, there's a pretty famous quote

• 3:29Speaker 01

  about John Erlichman, who was Nixon's domestic policy advisor, saying that Nixon White House had two major enemies. One was the civil rights movement. The other was the hippies. And he said, did we exaggerate the risk of drugs? Yes. So that that way we could break up their meetings, arrest their leaders. And so it's always clear that this drug war has never really been primarily about reducing drug abuse. So.

• 3:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Interesting. And I had not, I didn't put two and two together. Had I had a thread long enough, I might have seen what you just said with the opium, going back to the Chinese laborers back when we were building our railroads.

• 4:09Chuck Nice?

  Are you, are you saying that white people don't get high?

• 4:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If white people are in charge, you know, I don't know.

• 4:20Speaker 01

  You don't get persecuted as much for getting high.

• 4:25Chuck Nice?

  I got.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  I mean, the most obvious thing there is the outrageous differences for a while between penalties for crack cocaine versus powder cocaine.

• 4:35Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 4:35Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 4:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, the outcomes, the legal outcomes of that have been staggering.

• 4:38Chuck Nice?

  Yeah.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  Staggering. Well, so how do we do our work? It is possible to do medical research with illegal drugs with FDA approval and DEA approval. So we've been able to do work.

• 4:52Speaker 01

  Well, basically, very quickly was that the Controlled Substances Act of 1970, which Nixon put into place, criminalized all the psychedelics and also successfully wiped out psychedelic research, both in the United States and around the world for multiple decades.

• 5:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  Massive cultural amnesia. So there was a lot of research in the 60s with LSD and psilocybin for medical applications. And that was legal. But, you know, it kind of escaped to the streets and then there was a lot of.

• 5:23Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  But just remind us about psilocybin.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 5:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That comes from what? What is that?

• 5:27Speaker 01

  Uh, psilocybin is the main active ingredient in psychedelic mushrooms.

• 5:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Mushrooms, got it.

• 5:32Speaker 01

  That's a good mushroom.

• 5:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Got it. Okay.

• 5:34Speaker 01

  Um, mescaline comes from peyote or from San Pedro. Um, MDMA and LSD do not exactly appear in nature in the same ways that there, there's precursors that then get chemically.

• 5:47Chuck Nice?

  They come from God's laboratory.

• 5:51Chuck Nice?

  That's, that's where they come from.

• 5:52Speaker 01

  Well, well, people have a romantic idea, exactly, that if it's from nature, somehow or other, it's good, it's okay. And if it's from lab, it's.

• 6:00Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, not on this show. We're, we're, we're more mature than that.

• 6:02Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, we're a little more. And, and people don't, also don't realize that when you're looking at how drugs interact with your brain, what you're really looking at are neurological receptors and connectors. It's not about something being natural. And when we synthesize that, the only thing that we're doing is recreating a substance that does the same thing.

• 6:25Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah.

• 6:26Chuck Nice?

  Most of pharmacology is that, to be honest.

• 6:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah. So I tweeted, not everything natural is good for you.

• 6:31Chuck Nice?

  Right.

• 6:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And not everything artificial is bad for you. I tweeted that and created, created a fight. And then why should, you know, people, I can't, you know.

• 6:40Chuck Nice?

  But that's a great thing to say. Not everything that's natural is good for you, you know? But then we take those natural things and we manipulate them so that they can be. If it weren't for snake venom, you know how much stuff snake venom actually helps us with, you know? It's like, there's a lot of poisons that we turn into medicine. So.

• 6:59Speaker 01

  Well, actually, one of the most important poisons are, are, um. Venoms comes from the frog, this Sonoran desert frog, and that's 5-MEODMT, which is the most powerful psychedelic that we're aware of. Right.

• 7:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Rick, have you been licking frogs lately? Come on now. That's what you do in the laboratory.

• 7:17Speaker 01

  I go for the synthetics.

• 7:21Chuck Nice?

  The pill version of it. See, I want to actually lick the frog. I'm not gonna lie. There's something about it that, you know.

• 7:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So let's get back to the permissions. You have to, you have to petition to study it, to obtain it without getting arrested and then study it in the lab.

• 7:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, so what happened in the Controlled Substance Act of 1970 and the backlash against the 60s, you know, wiped out a whole field of science for multiple decades. But then in 1992, the FDA had a special advisory committee meeting and they decided to reopen the door to psychedelic research. And in a way, that was a lot of pressure from the AIDS community because the ACT UP had surrounded the FDA headquarters and said that in the crisis of AIDS, that the FDA was being too slow to approve drugs or even to permit research because they were overly.

• 8:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  The whole theme of the Dallas Buyers Club.

• 8:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, yes, exactly.

• 8:16Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  An important running theme of that, that the FDA, now as a scientist, you know, I, we generally try to err on the side of caution, but when people's lives are at stake, you want to at least loosen that up a bit so that you take a different level of risk and in a way that people recognize and understand what you're doing.

• 8:36Speaker 01

  Very much so. So, and they were successful and it was shocking to the FDA people that their whole building was shut down. And so the FDA created what's called the Pilot Drug Evaluation Staff, no longer exists, but it was to create new ways to evaluate drugs. And in 1992, they opened the door and they said they would resume research with psychedelics.

• 8:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So 92 would have been the last year of Bush Senior, correct?

• 8:58Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. So it did happen under Bush Senior. And then, but that really opened the door to psychedelic research. And so we had had MAPS, I started in 1986. And similarly to psychedelics having been medicines before they became party drugs, MDMA was a therapy drug from the middle 70s to the early 80s before it became more widely known as ecstasy and used in a party setting. And so the FDA had never reviewed it, but since it was legal, there was a lot of therapeutic use. And then in 1985, the DEA criminalized MDMA. While we were in the middle of suing them to keep it legal as a medicine, we won the lawsuit, but the DEA ignored that, criminalized it. So

• 9:42Speaker 01

  from 86 to 92, we had five different protocols from Harvard Medical School, from UC San Francisco with MDMA, all rejected. But 1992 was the key moment where the FDA opened the door again to psychedelic medicine. So 31 years ago, and now we're in the midst of a renaissance of psychedelic research all over the world, where we have four or five times as many studies going on now as at the height of the 1960s.

• 10:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wow. But even before it was criminalized, yeah.

• 10:10Chuck Nice?

  Yes. I'm a little confused because you called MDMA a psychedelic. And as a person who has done it, I know that it has psychedelic properties, but I thought it was more prosocial because it's, you know, methylene deoxy methamphetamine. So I know, I don't think of methamphetamines as psychedelics. Can you?

• 10:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, let's back, let's back.

• 10:37Chuck Nice?

  Can you help me out?

• 10:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, let me, let me pre, do a preamble to that. So when I think of any kind of drugs that people do, part, part of why they do it is that it's altering your state of consciousness in some way. So where's the line in the sand between what cannabis would do to your mind and what a psychedelic would do to your mind? If both of them are disrupting your awareness of an objective reality.

• 11:03Chuck Nice?

  Do you have to put it like that?

• 11:07Chuck Nice?

  You gotta put it like it's disrupting your awareness of an objective reality?

• 11:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  What is wrong with that sentence? You got a problem with that sentence?

• 11:14Chuck Nice?

  Can it, can it not be enhancing your experience of an objective reality?

• 11:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, we'll get there. We'll get there.

• 11:23Chuck Nice?

  All right. All right. Go ahead.

• 11:24Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I just want to make sure we have the, our vocabulary is going the right places here.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  Yes. Okay. So rather than actually talk about altered states of consciousness, we use the words non-ordinary state of consciousness. And we don't use the word hallucinogen either, which is a pejorative, negative kind of thing. It's a delusion. So psychedelic was invented in the 50s by a man named Humphrey Osmond in communication with Aldous Huxley.

• 11:49Speaker 01

  And they were trying to come up with word for these LSD and psilocybin. And they didn't like the currently available words psychotomimetic, which means mimic psychosis. Because it's more than that. And so psychedelic means mind manifesting. And that was Humphrey Osmond was an early LSD researcher. So I I use the broad term mind manifesting to bring out to the from the unconscious or from things that we haven't been paying attention to into awareness. So that's why psychedelic for me is something that you can have a psychedelic experience with deep breathing, with holotropic breathwork or different kinds of breathwork techniques. You can have it with MDMA with psilocybin.

• 12:32Speaker 01

  But MDMA is not like the classic psychedelics. So there are classic psychedelics like LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, ayahuasca, you know, that dissolve the ego, dissolve the sense of self and you sort of can can connect to a larger sense of reality, deeper, because our brain is a filtering mechanism. And so we filter out a lot of information and we're also organized on survival of the organism, but we often lose track of how we're part of something much bigger. So psychedelic for me encompasses MDMA. Other people say, oh, MDMA should be called an empathogen, like to make empathy.

• 13:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, empathogen, interesting, interesting word.

• 13:16Chuck Nice?

  Well, yeah, it engenders these great feelings of deep, you know, emotional connection to people. You feel somewhat euphoric about being around other people, even people that you hate. You just like, all of a sudden, you're just like, man, I have always loved you.

• 13:37Speaker 01

  Well, a good example is in octopuses. So there's a Johns Hopkins neuroscientist, Ghul Dolan.

• 13:43Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  By the way, that's the last sentence I would have ever thought I heard. A good example is from an octopus. Okay, let's take us there, go. Love me some octopoids.

• 13:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, for those people who have seen my octopus teacher, that documentary, you know that octopuses are solitary creatures. Around 600 million years ago, the human and octopus line diverged, but octopuses still process serotonin, and they have a whole different kind of brain than humans. And so Ghul at Hopkins wondered what happens if you give MDMA to an octopus? And so MAFS was more than happy to send her MDMA to give to her octopus. What happens is octopuses, under the influence of MDMA, all of a sudden want to hang out with other octopuses. Whereas before, they would kill other octopuses. They don't want to hang out unless it's mating

• 14:33Speaker 01

  season, they're at the end of their life. So, so what it means is, though, that the pro-social effects of MDMA are evolutionary conserved and pre-verbal. And so there are-

• 14:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very deep in the genetic code, is what you're saying.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  Yes, very much so. And so, there have also been studies that Ghul has done in mice with MDMA that shows that they release oxytocin, which is the hormone of love and nursing mothers and connection. But then the oxytocin stimulates synaptogenesis, meaning new synaptic connections are made in pro-social areas of the brain.

• 15:14Chuck Nice?

  So you're rewiring your brain to be more loving and more caring by doing it, or?

• 15:21Speaker 01

  Well, in part by doing it, but then also the important thing is the integration and the work afterwards. So that there's, the difference between recreational use of drugs and therapeutic use of drugs is recreational drugs, you're just trying to have fun while you're doing it. Therapy, you're really trying to change people's baseline. And so what you're trying to do is help them learn something and then bring it back and practice it in a way, integrate it afterwards.

• 15:46Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So Rick, you're saying that, that there are drugs that can build neuro connectors that remain-

• 15:55Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  When you're no longer under the influence of that drug, and therapeutically, that could be in the interest of the patient, is that?

• 16:02Speaker 01

  Yes, and not only that, though, that these new neural connections can be more easily created, sometimes for weeks after the experience. So this neuroscientist, Ghul Dholl, and at Johns Hopkins, what she's shown is that the length of time that you're in the psychedelic experience influences how long afterwards that this, she calls them critical periods. We know that children can learn language easier than adults, that they're in this critical period. There's other critical periods for social learning and different things. And so this neuroplasticity of the brain

• 16:41Speaker 01

  can extend for periods of time, sometimes weeks and weeks, after the psychedelic experience. And that's why we focus on two parts in therapy. It's the initial experience that people have, but then it's the integration work that they do to try to take what happened during the experience itself and make it more part of their baseline to improve. You know, if they've worked through depression or worked through certain kind of traumas, that you can anchor this in new neural connections. So I'd say one of the most amazing things in terms of terminology has been that when we were demonizing MDMA, when it was criminalized in 85, and for up until around early 2000,

• 17:26Speaker 01

  the whole term was neurotoxicity, that brain change is inherently bad, it's neurotoxicity. Now, we've turned that into neuroplasticity, because we see that these outcomes in therapy settings can be profound, and they can be durable in some cases. We've done some studies where we've looked at people, on average, three and a half years after MDMA, and some people up to seven years. And on average, the results are durable. So how do we explain that? I think it's in part because the experiences are, can be so profound, but also because of this neuroplasticity.

• 18:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And what does MDMA stand for?

• 18:22Speaker 01

  MDMA stands for methylene dioxymethamphetamine. So I'll just say in 1953, the US Army-

• 18:28Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So when we just say meth-

• 18:30Speaker 01

  Oh, it's-

• 18:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Is that what people refer to?

• 18:31Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 18:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's a whole nother nother, okay.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  No, yeah, so let me say, so in 53, the Army Chemical Warfare Service, looking for mind control drugs, they tested eight drugs in animals. And on one side was methamphetamine, and the other side was mescaline, from Peyote or from San Pedro, and in the middle was MDMA. And they're all part of the chemical family called phenethylamines. So of all the classic psychedelics, like LSD, psilocybin, MDMA is closest to mescaline. And so a good way to understand MDMA is that it's like methamphetamine in the sense that it makes you alert, it takes away your appetite, but it doesn't make you jittery, or, you know, but methamphetamine can make you, you know, clean the room five times, stuff like that.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  But you can do MDMA and be quiet and still, but it's alerting. And it's like mescaline in a sense, but mescaline does have this ego dissolving properties, and it's at a certain warmth, but MDMA does not have the same kind of ego dissolving properties that you see in the classic psychedelics. So MDMA you could think of as kind of halfway between mescaline and methamphetamine. And it's all from the same chemical family.

• 19:44Chuck Nice?

  So you feel alert, and you feel good, and you feel warm, but you don't want to walk to Canada.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 19:52Chuck Nice?

  Like, because that's what meth will do to you, it'd be like, "You know what we should do, guys? We should walk to Canada right now! Let's go!"

• 19:58Speaker 01

  And actually, well, methamphetamine has been used in war.

• 20:02Chuck Nice?

  It makes sense, because, one, you can't, you don't sleep, so, you know, you could just fight on and fight on and fight on. And, two, it makes you highly paranoid-

• 20:11Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 20:12Chuck Nice?

  -which means you're apt to be more violent and to respond to things, you know, in a way that you, you know, without passivity.

• 20:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right. So in recent years, we've heard progress made, great progress made, with psychedelics in the treatment of PTSD. Could you explain to me what's going, and what's going on in the brain, and- What role does the therapist play in this?

• 20:38Speaker 01

  Yes, well.

• 20:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Presumably that matters at some level.

• 20:40Speaker 01

  That matters more than anything else. So what we talk about it is MDMA-assisted therapy. So this idea that it's really therapy that the MDMA helps be more effective. You can take MDMA, you can think of it like a tool. You can take MDMA and you could end up being worse off if you're not in a supportive situation. The drug itself is not the agent, it's the therapy. And the drug makes the therapy more effective.

• 21:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So this is, I'd like this analog where in my field, we have telescopes that bring us to the universe and microscopes bring us to, to cells and other functionings in biology. And these psychedelics are, are a way to probe the mind.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  Well, Stan Grof, who's at 92, the world's leading LSD researcher, has said exactly what you just said. Psychedelics are for the study of the mind. What the telescope is for astronomy and the microscope is for chemistry and medicine.

• 21:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I guess I was just quoting him because I don't claim originality with that. But people are always wondering, because I'm asked all the time, what's more complex, the human mind or the universe? And I always say the human mind because we understand the universe. You know, I can plunk a rover down in a, you know, in a hundred square meter box on Mars. Right? And so to the extent that we have access to the brain, it feels like we're still in our infancy, but these are very important points of progress.

• 22:15Chuck Nice?

  Listening to both of you right now, it sounds to me like, you know, these substances are like a tilling of the soil for the mind. This is what this neuroplasticity is. And then the therapy is where you get to go in and create something new. This fertile ground now becomes this platform where you can create something new, where neurons that, you know, fire together, wire together.

• 22:42Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 22:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but if MDMA helped resolve PTSD. And but can't it also trigger feelings of suicide? So I'm worried when two very opposite effects can come out of some impetus.

• 22:59Speaker 01

  Well, again, if it's in a therapeutic context, the suicidal feelings that that from having people been traumatized or being in despair, you work with them and then they're part of the healing process. So I just want to go back one step to say that a lot of times, people do not understand that the telescope was extremely controversial. Galileo died under house arrest. Father Bruno, that was an advocate, was burned at the stake by the Inquisition. So the tools that bring out information that runs counter to the sort of powers that be of the day, the tools themselves have been criminalized and have become controversial. But now we don't think of the telescope as controversial. So psychedelics are in that same way.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  They're tools. They brought out things about our unconscious, about our sense of self that was somewhat challenging to a lot of the dominant powers.

• 23:54Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And your execution trial is when?

• 23:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  We're speaking to you in the basement of your prison cell.

• 24:02Speaker 01

  Not that you'll care, because you know, you'll be on MDMA. Oh, that blade feels so good. Oh, that blade just feels so nice on me.

• 24:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, they burned it. It was a Christian Catholic thing, so they burned the stake on that.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  Oh, man. Oh, that's right. I just give the guillotine. Yeah, well, it's also, it doesn't, see, I think that's a good check. That's a good thing. People have this wrong idea. A bunch of our patients have said, I don't know why they call this ecstasy. It's not like you take MDMA and everything's fine. Neil, you asked about the brain. So MDMA reduces activity in the amygdala, the fear processing part of the brain. MDMA increases activity in the prefrontal cortex where we think logically. One of the things about PTSD is you're triggered by your reminders of these traumas, but you don't have the time or the capacity to think carefully, is that sound really a bomb? Or is it just, you know, a car backfire or something?

• 25:02Speaker 01

  And then also MDMA increases connectivity between the-

• 25:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, we have to explain to everyone under 30 what a car backfire means. Okay, so please explain that.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  Yes, that's really funny. Yes, definitely. Yeah, something goes wrong with the engine. It just sort of makes a loud noise.

• 25:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, no, what happens is some fuel gets into the exhaust line that wasn't fully burned in the piston. And if a spark hits it, it's a pop. And it sounds like a gunshot. And there was a whole set of decades where people could not distinguish a gunshot from a car backfiring. And-

• 25:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. So the thing about PTSD is PTSD changes your brain. You have a hyperactive amygdala where you process fear. You have reduction of activity in the prefrontal cortex. So you're not logically thinking and evaluating. And also with the hippocampus where we put memories into long-term storage, there's diminished activity. MDMA does the opposite, reduces activity in the amygdala so the fearful memories are not so overwhelming. Your prefrontal cortex, you're able to think more logically. And then the connectivity between the amygdala and the hippocampus means that we're able to take memories in trauma that seem like they're always happening. The trauma's never really fully in the past.

• 26:20Speaker 01

  And so MDMA permits these memories to be moved from sort of foreground to background and placed in people's past as part of their story instead of-

• 26:31Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I had a little bit of PTSD, dare I even use that phrase for what I experienced. After September 11th, because I was four blocks from the collapse of the towers, that entire morning was continuous police sirens. And, and, and-

• 26:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  A fire, fire engine siren, continuous. And as a New Yorker, these sirens are just normally acoustic wallpaper, right? You don't even notice if a siren goes by, but it was continuous. And, and plus, it's, it's now was associated with, for me, with the collapse of the towers, watching people fall from the towers, this sort of thing. Up until eight months afterwards, if I heard a siren anywhere, I would just tense up in my shoulders. It would be brief and, and it was not, you know, traumatic for me, but it was there. And I would, it was like an autonomic reaction to it. And it took the better part of a year for it to fade.

• 27:35Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Now it doesn't happen anymore. And I, I, and forgive me for even suggesting that's a PTSD.

• 27:41Chuck Nice?

  No, that's a PTSD.

• 27:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  No, compared with what real military people experience.

• 27:47Chuck Nice?

  I have the same, same reaction to sirens, but it's because I'm a black man.

• 27:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, that's.

• 27:52Chuck Nice?

  So, yeah. I know exactly how you feel.

• 27:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, but Neil, what, what you're talking about is that most people that are traumatized, over time, they're resilient and they're able to overcome it. But there's a population of people that.

• 28:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Which I count myself in that group, yes.

• 28:13Speaker 01

  Yes, so, so you're, you were a sort of acute stress disorder, but it didn't translate to post-traumatic stress disorder, which is chronic and enduring for sometimes decades. We actually had someone in our study from Vietnam who had PTSD almost half a century and was still able to get better.

• 28:33Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  An American serviceman.

• 28:35Speaker 01

  Yes, an American serviceman. Yeah, yeah, so I thi- I think that the resilience is something that a lot of people don't have. They, they live under constant stress, they're, they're so, and often there's, we call it the archaeology of trauma too. People are often traumatized at multiple stages in their life, particularly those people that have childhood trauma are more vulnerable when adult trauma happens to not being resilient enough to get over it.

• 29:02Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh.

• 29:03Speaker 01

  But then it becomes chronic. And so that's where the MDMA assisted therapy can come into play because it does.

• 29:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So that case is like open sores from childhood that would never fully healed?

• 29:15Speaker 01

  That's a good way to say it. Yes, yes. And so we were able to try to work with people with severe chronic PTSD in a therapeutic context. So again, you talked about suicidal thoughts. People have taken MDMA in party settings and remembered past trauma and not been able to cope with it because they're out with their friends. They just want to have a party. These difficult experiences come up. They suppress it. They don't want to talk to their friends. Their friends don't want to hear about it. And then they can be worse off for months or years afterwards. So again, that's why we say and what we're telling the FDA and basically everybody through this, our discussion and others is that

• 29:57Speaker 01

  the drugs are tools. You could have, for example, a telescope that somebody could look through and learn nothing if they don't have the proper context and understanding. So the tools themselves, it's, it's, the fundamental problem with the drug war is that we have invested things with certain kind of properties. There are good things, there are bad things. We've lost this idea that it's the relationship that we have with it that determines it.

• 30:33Speaker 03

  Hi, I'm Chris Cohen from Hallworth, New Jersey, and I support StarTalk on Patreon. Please enjoy this episode of StarTalk Radio with your and my favorite personal astrophysicist, Neil deGrasse Tyson.

• 30:53Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you're gonna have, you're gonna need an entire college to teach therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists how to use these drugs. Because that, I don't think that goes on in medical school or in...

• 31:07Chuck Nice?

  It goes on in New York City nightclubs, baby.

• 31:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If there's no, you know, I don't remember seeing LSD 101 for therapists, you know? So how do you, how do you turn the laboratory results into action?

• 31:21Speaker 01

  Yes, well, for example, there's a two day conference at Harvard Medical School about psychedelics.

• 31:27Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, good, okay.

• 31:28Speaker 01

  That, that, that Yale, Harvard.

• 31:30Chuck Nice?

  First time in my life I ever wanted to go to Harvard.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  Well, the, the, um, the major schools of psychiatry around the country are realizing that to attract young psychiatric residents, they have to teach about psychedelics. And so I think once MDMA, if it becomes approved by the FDA, which we hope may happen in the middle of 2024, psilocybin, I think will be approved maybe near the end of 2025, 2026 potentially. Only when these things are really there for psychiatrists and therapists to prescribe will, will the medical schools and schools of psychology put it into their core curriculum.

• 32:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, I get it. So then it's just like any other medicine. It's, it'll have a list of contraindications.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 32:13Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Uh, how and when you would use it, what the risks are. Because I presume the FDA for psilocybin, if you're targeting 2025 or 26, it's because they're right now doing experiments.

• 32:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, so MAPS is the leading, um, organization in, in this whole field. And so.

• 32:29Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  If you say so yourself.

• 32:31Speaker 01

  Well, I, uh.

• 32:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, let us say that, let us say that.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  Well, well.

• 32:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, I got you here, ready?

• 32:39Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 32:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Um, Rick, what's the leading?

• 32:45Chuck Nice?

  I thought you were gonna set him up like, you know, you know, the, we, we hear that you're the leading.

• 32:50Speaker 01

  I don't want to toot my own horn, but let me say that we, on September 14th of 2023, we published the second of our phase three studies, the results of it in Nature Medicine. And in May of 2021, we published the first of our phase three studies and no other organization has, has published any results from any phase three studies. So, so that's what I mean. We're the closest to FDA approval of any psychedelic assisted therapy.

• 33:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And just to remind people, not that I can recite this verbatim, but these different phase studies as defined by the FDA relate to, uh, how thoroughly investigated the, the effects are of the newly tested. Drug, right? So, so there's animal, they test on animals for non-human animals and then uh, let's, a size of sample gets bigger and bigger, right? And they look for, for side effects. Each, each one is a little more advanced in this. Is that correct?

• 33:51Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. So the phase one is generally-

• 33:53Chuck Nice?

  So, I mean, have you ever, with, with that in mind, how come you guys haven't just tapped the millions of young people in this country who are doing the research for you?

• 34:05Chuck Nice?

  Cause believe me, that research is being done-

• 34:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's phase zero.

• 34:09Chuck Nice?

  In a damn basis.

• 34:11Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  That's phase zero.

• 34:12Speaker 01

  Well, exactly. We, we have in some ways to look at the risk profile. So, so the FDA will only approve drugs based on data gathered in FDA approved protocols. But you can look at the risks by looking at people experimenting on themselves. So, the National Institute on Drug Abuse funded, now this was about fifteen plus years ago, but this was the critical study. We called it the fallen Mormon study. It turns out there was a bunch of people in Salt Lake City that had only done ecstasy. They had not done alcohol, or tobacco, or marijuana, or anything else, even coffee, but they had done a whole lot of ecstasy. And so, one of the concerns has been about the supposed, quote, risks of neurotoxicity

• 34:57Speaker 01

  has to do with neuropsychological performance. So, the National Institute on Drug Abuse funded a, um, 1.8 million dollars. We, we did a 15,000 dollar pilot study and gathered some data and showed that these, this group of people, these fallen Mormons, really did exist. And then 1.8 million came from NIDA to Harvard to the, uh, McLean Hospital, where they did this exhaustive study on the risks of neurocognitive declines, and they did, hardly showed any. It was very reassuring. So, there is some way where the safety profile is benefited by the illegal use- Ecstasy, but that data sort of.

• 35:37Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  As foundational database for that, yeah.

• 35:39Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, there's over 5,000 papers right now in Medline about the scientific peer reviewed journals about MDMA or ecstasy.

• 35:47Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Wait, just to clarify, for, just to clarify, the value of the fallen Mormons is you have confidence that whatever was measured in their intellectual abilities over that time that did not decline, there was no other force operating on it because they were not drinking alcohol.

• 36:07Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 36:07Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Because Mormon rules prevent that, even caffeine. So that was a pure experiment, as experiments go epidemiologically, right?

• 36:15Speaker 01

  Yes, the only concern is, was the drugs that they were taking, was the ecstasy that they were taking really pure?

• 36:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  So it may have mixed with other things, but in general, that was, because when we do MDMA in therapy, we're fundamentally different than the pharma companies working with SSRIs or other things. Those are daily medications that people take for months or years or decades. We're trying to, and they usually cover symptoms, but they often don't get to the root cause. What we're trying to do with psychedelic assisted therapy, with MDMA assisted therapy for PTSD, is to help people get to the root of the problem and work deeply and release the emotions, release the memories like that. And then through this integration process that we talked about during this neuroplasticity, make it so that they don't need MDMA anymore.

• 37:03Speaker 01

  We're not trying to get people to use MDMA on a extended period of time. We're trying to do a few doses mixed with therapy to make it so that the root causes have been addressed.

• 37:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  How does microdosing of psychedelics fit into your whole worldview here?

• 37:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, there have been several studies of people microdosing LSD, and the claim has been in Silicon Valley and elsewhere that it can improve focus, improve creativity. There's been an incredible, interesting study with psilocybin called semantic priming. And so what that means is if I say day, you say night. If I say sun, you say moon, you know, we have these normal patterns. But under the influence of psilocybin, when you prime somebody with a word, the word that they come back with is from a wider range of associations.

• 37:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So you say day and I say, there is no God.

• 38:02Speaker 01

  That would be a good example.

• 38:08Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, okay. Thank you Chuck for that, for that therapeutic example there.

• 38:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I think that there is this thought with microdosing, that it can improve the kind of creativity in this way. I would say unfortunately, the studies that have been done looking at LSD for microdosing for creativity, did not distinguish it from placebo. So whether it's something that we can really scientifically demonstrate or not, maybe some of the claims were maybe the measures weren't sensitive enough. But I think there's a small group of people that would microdose for depression, anxiety, to give them energy. But in general, my view is that we're in favor of macrodosing. We don't want people to be dependent on taking something

• 38:54Speaker 01

  on a daily basis for depression, anxiety, PTSD, any number of eating disorders. We'd rather do the deep work that gets to the root problem.

• 39:04Chuck Nice?

  And that brings us back to the therapy, because you have to be, you have to have the therapy in order to achieve those results.

• 39:12Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, so let's go the other extreme here. So we talked about therapeutic use of drugs, and this is what your whole organization's been doing for 40 years, almost 40 years now. What about just what we read about and hear about? I've never done it, but if you're fully tripping, all right, and then you're hallucinating, and is there value to that? Or is that totally recreational? Or should that still be outlawed?

• 39:38Speaker 01

  Well, it definitely should not be outlawed. The drug war is completely counterproductive. It's not helping in any way, and it is a tool of repression. And so, yes, these things should automatically be legal. I would say that this idea that hallucinating, so this is where words really matter. And so the hallucination is where it is. It's not real, it's false, it's a delusion. There's going to be a paper coming out of Johns Hopkins and NYU fairly soon, and it took religious leaders from different religious traditions, and administered them psilocybin. And then had them discuss whether that was something that felt true to them, whether they had sort of mystical religious experiences.

• 40:23Speaker 01

  And so sometimes, under the influence of psychedelics, people feel that they're in touch with a deeper reality, that it's not a delusion. This began in 19... This whole line of research began in 1962 at Harvard with what's called the Good Friday Experiment. And that was the first study to ever look at, do psychedelics, can they produce what's called a mystical experience? And there was... I don't know if you know, but there's a fellow named Reverend Howard Thurman, was the incredible, dynamic African-American minister. He studied with Gandhi and learned about nonviolent resistance. And then he was Martin Luther King's mentor, because Martin Luther King got a PhD at Boston University, and Howard Thurman was his mentor.

• 41:08Speaker 01

  And Howard Thurman really helped introduce nonviolence into the US Civil Rights Movement. And so when Timothy Leary and Walter Panki, who was a doctor and a minister working on his PhD, approached Howard Thurman, and they said, "We want to study whether psilocybin can produce these mystical experiences." Howard Thurman said, "Sure, I will do that," because he was very interested in the political implications of this sense of connection. And he permitted this research to be done on Good Friday in his chapel when he was giving a sermon. And we have his original sermon, by the way, up on our NAP's website, "During the Good Friday Experiment." It's incredible. And so it's not... It doesn't feel to people like, quote, "a hallucination," like it's a delusion.

• 41:51Speaker 01

  It feels that the brain is a reducing valve. Like you talked about how with sirens, you know, in New York, you just... You don't hear them anymore normally, because they're always the background. Our brain... Aldous Huxley talked about our brain as a reducing valve, to eliminate those things that are extraneous and focus on what we think are the most important needs. And that when you do a psychedelic, a classic psychedelic, this reducing valve is sort of weakened in its ability, and more things are happening. So should this... Should these things be legal? Yes. Will there be problems that people have? Yes. But those problems, I think, can be addressed in certain ways. And the problems of drug prohibition are even worse.

• 42:34Speaker 01

  But I do want to say that this paper coming out of NYU and Johns Hopkins about religious leaders taking psilocybin from different religious traditions talks about how they see it as ineffable. It's hard to put into words, but it feels to many of these people to be a deeper truth and something then that they want to put into practice. They become a little bit less, how should I put it, literal and more metaphorical. They become a little bit more ecumenical. So I think these experiences can have profound impacts on people and have for thousands of years.

• 43:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So I am a scientist. I very much care about objective reality. Science did not achieve maturity until we were able to successfully either extend the reach of our senses with tools, with microscopes, telescopes, machines that read, or just completely replace our senses with, or invent things that sense the world in ways we don't even have senses to notice.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 43:39Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So everything you've said in this conversation either is there to help someone who has, who is in need of some repair in their brain, okay? Through anxiety, PTSD, suicidal, okay? Or to take a spiritual person and have him feel more spiritual in whatever way that manifests. Can we agree then that there's no chemi, the brain barely works as it is. It barely works. That's, you know, think about, think about optical illusion books, right? Is the light bigger or smaller? I can't tell.

• 44:21Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  It's a simple drawing and your brain can't, is it in the page? Out of the page? Okay. So we now stir chemicals into the brain. Do you have any hope or expectation that a day will come? We're doing so.

• 44:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gives me a more acute oh, understanding of objective reality rather than subjective reality. Because if that's the case, we can give it to everybody. And then everybody's connected to what's going on in this world. In ways that have never happened before.

• 44:56Chuck Nice?

  Yeah, well, I was gonna say though.

• 44:59Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Chuck, did I ask you the question?

• 45:01Chuck Nice?

  Because you're, you're, here's the thing, though. What, if, if, if our brains work in a, on a subjective level. Which is what you just said. They work on a subjective level.

• 45:14Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes.

• 45:14Chuck Nice?

  Then, why would these drugs actually help us to obtain objectivity? It seems like our brains are set up for subjectivity. So really, wouldn't it be, can we better look at the world subjectively?

• 45:34Chuck Nice?

  Because, because we're not, because we're not gonna look at it objectively. We're just not.

• 45:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Well, I, what you just said there is there are people who've lost some connectivity to the world. And these are helping them get to the baseline of the brain that barely works. So that's what I think you just said in part. So, Rick. What, so, so, so, talk to me, Rick.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 45:57Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Help me through this.

• 45:58Speaker 01

  Okay, well, I, I, I wanna make an offer to you. That, that there are opportunities legally to try psilocybin. That you might want to explore at one time of your life to see.

• 46:10Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Only if you have evidence that my awareness of objective reality is better than it was without it. If it's gonna take me, oh, by the way, by the way, I'm not denying that this could trigger a creativity in the artist, okay? Or, you know, not that it always came out that way. Because there's some really crappy music written in the 60s that didn't make it out of that decade. Written completely under the influence, okay? Um, so, one of my favorite episodes of, of Family Guy is they were, they were all being hippies again. And they all got high, the whole family. And they performed in the school talent show.

• 46:52Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  And they have like flowers in their hair and they're performing these perfect songs. And then you see the audience's view of them and they're slurring their speech. There's no, they can't carry the tune. So that the self-perception is great, but so, so I don't, I'm not arguing against the creative dimension of this, just the objective dimension.

• 47:14Speaker 01

  Okay, so let, let's just go to Carey Mullis for a second. So Carey Mullis won the Nobel Prize for the PCR. And how do you do all of this, the Palmer's chain reaction? He said that he got some of his ideas for his invention of that when he was under the influence of LSD and marijuana. So it can provoke creativity, but then you have to check it. So not all the ideas that you get under the influence of psychedelics are, are good ones or accurate ones, but some of them, Kennedy, Carl Sagan, Carl Sagan was a, you know, daily marijuana smoker, was very much.

• 47:50Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Say it, he was a pothead, you can say it.

• 47:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, he was a pothead. So I think that there has to be this.

• 47:57Chuck Nice?

  I did not know.

• 47:58Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Big time, big time.

• 48:00Chuck Nice?

  I knew I liked him. You didn't know why you liked him so much? I didn't know why I liked him so much, but now I know.

• 48:09Speaker 01

  I think, you know, this idea of can you have an idea under a non-ordinary state of consciousness and have it actually be an advance to better understanding of objective reality?

• 48:20Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yes, that's, that's the, that's the summarizing what it took me five minutes to say.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, so the answer is yes. Some ideas that you can get under non-ordinary states are insights. So what, what, what Carey Mullis said is he was able to dance on the molecule level to see how things put together. And then he was able to get an inspiration and then only when you check it out can you decide, is that, quote, objective reality or is that?

• 48:44Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, forgot you. So what we've done here is cherry pick the one person for which this was true. So what you would need to do is get, uh, get all the Nobel Prize winners and do the experiment, right? Rather than.

• 48:56Chuck Nice?

  Well, let's go to Einstein. It sounds to me, what, what, it sounds to me, what Rick is saying in that instance is that it's, it's turning the chessboard. You know what I mean? That's, that's really what's happening. It's, the answers are there, they're still within you. But when you turn the chessboard, you're like, oh, wait, I'm, I didn't see that.

• 49:15Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Oh, okay.

• 49:16Chuck Nice?

  So that, that's, that's what I'm, I'm getting from.

• 49:19Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Gambit of you there. Okay.

• 49:21Speaker 01

  Yes. But I think that there's also insight into yourself. So you, you know, in a sense, that, that in theory.

• 49:30Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Yeah, but that's not helpful for the universe. No, I, I, I'm not denying that. I don't need insight to myself to know what the big bang was doing, you know, at a millisecond after the moment.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  Okay, so let's go to Einstein. I, one of Einstein's statements was imagination is more important than knowledge. Right? Okay, so this imagination, you could say, testing out hypotheses under the non-ordinary states of consciousness, that, that you can. Uh, there, there was a study actually at Stanford in the 60s that used mescaline and LSD for people that had objective problems with their business, with science, with different things, and gave them a psychedelic experience to help them try to resolve some of these problems. So Jim Fadiman, who's did this research, is also one of the main advocates for, and stud, students of microdosing. So I think that there are situations where, yeah,

• 50:26Speaker 01

  turning the chessboard, looking at things in a different way, you know, being at the molecular level to dance on the molecules to figure out how to do the PCR.

• 50:34Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Okay, so, so I'm saying, I, you know, you can have ideas on a toilet.

• 50:38Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 50:38Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Right, in a hot tub, walking in the woods.

• 50:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:42Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  So if this is just one way that could happen, that's useful. I'm not an early adopter of anything. So I will wait until there are more experiments done with objectively brilliant, creative people, creative in their objectivity of the world. And if you start showing me research papers on it, then I'll consider it.

• 51:03Chuck Nice?

  And I will offer myself.

• 51:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Anytime I've sat next to someone on any kind of chemical influence in their brain, it is the least productive conversations I've ever had about. They're fun. It's like, you know, can beer laugh? You know, can I, you can have conversations, but.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  As a scientist, you would be following the scientific traditions to explore, to see whether this seems valuable to you.

• 51:36Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  I agree. I just say I'm not a first adopter. That's all.

• 51:39Chuck Nice?

  Oh, I am. I am. I am an early, early adopter. I will show up before the session begins with, with, with the utmost enthusiasm.

• 51:56Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right, Rick, we got, we got, Rick, we got to end it there. This has been a delight, highly informative, and I feel like we're witnessing the birth of an entire new portal of access into the human mind that can only, when properly shepherded, such as by yourself and your organization, that only good could come of that. So first, congratulations for staying with it and taking, taking civilization to a new place.

• 52:24Speaker 01

  Thank you. I just want to add that, that because of the work with veterans, even though most of the people at PTSD are women, we've been able to get bipartisan support. So we have managed to take psychedelics out of the culture wars. And I think that we, and we are doing a lot of work inside the Veterans Administration and elsewhere.

• 52:41Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Very important addition, a very important fact to add to this conversation, because we, we're living in an era where everything is partisan. If you can, if you can, if you can bridge that, I think nothing's in your way.

• 52:54Speaker 01

  And I would also add that psychedelics have been used for thousands of years. So you're a long way away from being an early adopter.

• 53:06Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  Fair enough, right there. Okay. So we got to call it quits there. So, Rick, thanks for being on the program and very good to learn all about your work. Chuck?

• 53:16Chuck Nice?

  Always a pleasure.

• 53:18Neil deGrasse Tyson?

  All right. Neil deGrasse Tyson here, your personal astrophysicist. Keep looking up.