Part Two: 50 Million in Funding, 10,000 New Clinics, and the Mistake That Could Kill the Psychedelic Revolution | Dr. Rick Doblin

Dr. Rick Doblin (founder and president of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, and one of the most influential figures in psychedelic science) returns to Mayim Bialik's Breakdown for one of the most controversial and eye-opening conversations on psychedelics we've had yet. From the shocking experiment where scientists gave MDMA to an octopus, to why ibogaine may be the most powerful AND dangerous psychedelic ever studied, this episode explores the future of psychedelic therapy, trauma healing, addiction recovery, policy reform, and human consciousness itself. We break down Trump’s new executive order accelerating psychedelic research and what it could mean for the future legalization of psychedelic-assisted therapy in America. Dr. Doblin explains why veterans suffering from PTSD and disabilities have become central to bipartisan support for psychedelics, and why this issue is now reshaping politics on both sides of the aisle. We also dive deep into ibogaine: its mysterious origins, its ability to help reset opioid addiction, its connection to ancestral memory and intergenerational trauma, why it carries serious risks, and why Dr. Doblin still believes its benefits may outweigh the dangers. He also shares his own profound ibogaine experience that helped him confront perfectionism and his fear of death. Dr. Doblin discusses: - How psychedelics help people integrate trauma - Why psychedelics are generally considered non-addictive - Difference between recreational vs therapeutic psychedelic use - Why psychedelic treatment should be customized to each patient - Importance of integration, peer support, and paying attention to dreams after treatment - Measures of success in MDMA-assisted couples therapy - Origins of the opioid epidemic - "Psychedelic churches": How organizations are openly operating under the umbrella of religion - Capitalism vs democratizing the benefits of psychedelic medicine - How a better psychedelic therapy model could be built - Why transparency is critical for science-backed drug policy reform - When psychedelics may realistically enter the open market - Dr. Doblin’s long-term vision for a psychedelic-informed public As psychedelic research rapidly expands worldwide, this conversation explores the science, politics, risks, ethics, and revolutionary potential behind one of the fastest-growing movements in mental health and medicine! DISCLAIMER: MBB is not providing medical or legal advice. Listeners should speak to their doctor before engaging in any course of psychedelic protocols. Psychedelics are still illegal in many places - MBB is not encouraging engaging in illegal substance use, but simply sharing the latest scientific insights from our guests. Learn more about MAPS & their research: https://maps.org/To learn more about the world’s largest psychedelic conference, Psychedelic Science, taking place in Denver, CO next year, visit: https://virtualtrip.maps.org/ Follow us on Substack for Exclusive Bonus Content: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://bialikbreakdown.substack.com/%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0 ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BialikBreakdown.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://www.bialikbreakdown.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠YouTube.com/mayimbialik⁠⁠⁠ https://www.youtube.com/mayimbialik%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0%E2%81%A0See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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• 0:04Mayim Bialik?

  Hi, I'm Mayim Bialik.

• 0:06Jonathan Cohen?

  And I'm Jonathan Cohen.

• 0:07Mayim Bialik?

  And welcome to part two of our conversation with Dr. Rick Doblin. He's the founder and president of MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. His professional goal is to develop legal contexts for the beneficial use of psychedelics, in particular, in cases of trauma and treatment-resistant depression. We're going to talk to Dr. Doblin about his Ibragaine LSD experience, what he learned from his transcendental journey, and how he uses that information to inform the research that he continues to support. We're going to talk about MDMA-assisted couples therapy.

• 0:43Jonathan Cohen?

  We're also going to talk about Trump's executive order directing federal agencies to expand and expedite research, increasing the timeline that these therapies are going to be available.

• 0:54Mayim Bialik?

  Also, don't miss our conversation about membership in psychedelic churches. This is a wonderful conversation. Please enjoy part two of our episode with Dr. Rick Doblin.

• 1:04Speaker 02

  Break it down.

• 1:06Speaker 03

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• 1:37Mayim Bialik?

  Tell us a little bit about your personal experience, because I think it's important.

• 1:41Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 1:41Mayim Bialik?

  From 1985, you said, correct?

• 1:43Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:44Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah.

• 1:44Speaker 04

  Yes. So 1985 was when I started a nonprofit before MAPS in 1984. MAPS I started in 86. The nonprofit I started in 84 with Debbie Harlow and Elise Agar, the three of us were doing this, was to gather support from the psychedelic community that was now surfacing in a way to try to protect MDMA. Everything was criminalized, but MDMA was legal under the name Adam from around 1976. That was the code name. And around 1980, 79, 80, 81, it sort of escaped from these therapy settings and began used as a party drug under the name ecstasy.

• 2:25Speaker 04

  And so that's what attracted the attention of the government and that's what

• 2:33Speaker 04

  presented an incredible opportunity because those of us that had started learning about psychotherapy and the elders that had really taught us about this realized that MDMA should be used in quiet circumstances at homes, you know, it was not used in any public settings.

• 2:52Mayim Bialik?

  Are you sure? Let's take a warehouse and have a lot of music blaring really loud.

• 2:57Speaker 04

  Okay, but that didn't happen until it became ecstasy. So it was a therapy drug before it became a party drug. Then the party drug is what attracted the police. And then we had this period of time where we could introduce various people to MDMA when it was still legal, to prepare them to be witnesses. You know, some of them were Rabbi Zalman Shaktar, who started the Jewish renewal movement, Brother David Steindalrast, who's a Roman Catholic monk, Lester Grinspoon at Harvard Medical School, all sorts of luminaries in different ways that we could do that. And so Leo Zep, who was the secret chief, as I mentioned, who had really introduced MDMA into therapy,

• 3:38Speaker 04

  he came to me and he said, you know, you're about to do this political work and, you know, the more you're emotionally balanced, the more you own your shadow. So this is a concept from Jungian therapy, that you're shadow, the parts of you that you disown. And we could say that Trump is a master of projecting his shadow onto others.

• 4:03Mayim Bialik?

  That's the most psychologically sophisticated analysis I've ever heard.

• 4:08Speaker 04

  Okay, yeah, it's whatever he's doing, he accuses other people of doing and, you know, and in any case, this idea was Leo said, we need you to own your own shadow because if you go to these meetings with the DEA and the nationalists on drug abuse and stuff, if you are all good and you're thinking they're all bad, you're not going to be able to build bridges, you're going to be pushing people away. I want you to have this big therapy session. Would you be interested? in this because I also was training to be a psychedelic therapist.

• 4:38Mayim Bialik?

  Wait, so hold on one second. So I just want to like this subtlety of the motivation for getting to know yourself is is not coming from a perspective of like, let's blow your mind open. Let's have this amazing access. The notion is if you are up against challenges in life and all you see is that you're right and other people are wrong and you do not own the parts of yourself that have judgment, resentment, hurt, trauma, you will not best be able to present what is actually true and accurate in the larger sense of the world. That's fascinating.

• 5:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, and also you will project onto others that they're all evil or all bad. So let's go back in a moment just to Martin Luther King. So one of the things that he's most famous for saying is that you don't overcome hate with hate, you only overcome hate with love.

• 5:36Speaker 04

  So and then just to talk about multi-generational trauma again, we have conflicts that have been going on for thousands of years. You know, between the Shiites and the Sunnis, not quite thousands of years, but between Protestants and Catholics, between all sorts of conflicts have gone on and sustained and get passed on generation after generation after generation. So or actually, here's the funny part about the Maccabees. I don't know. Many people don't realize that Judaism has been saved not by the Orthodox, but by the Reform. So the Maccabees, which were up against the Greeks.

• 6:18Speaker 04

  At the time, it used to be something that you did not fight on the Sabbath. You did nothing on the Sabbath. And so people would be attacking Jewish communities on the Sabbath. They would run away and stuff. But the Maccabees said, no, we can fight on the Sabbath. So it was the Reform.

• 6:35Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, I don't know if I'd call the Maccabees Reform. They were the progressives of some variety.

• 6:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, but they were deviating from the tradition.

• 6:44Mayim Bialik?

  Rebels. That's right. The rebels, the rebels among us. That's correct.

• 6:48Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 6:50Speaker 04

  Well, okay, I'll just deviate one other moment here about a Jewish story. So Benny Shanon, who was head of cognitive psychology at Hebrew University, was very cognitive, but he really got into ayahuasca. And he wrote these great books on ayahuasca, the varieties of ayahuasca experience. So then he went to try to figure out what's the history of psychedelics in the Jewish tradition. And so he wrote this scientific paper.

• 7:13Mayim Bialik?

  What was his last name? Say it again.

• 7:15Speaker 04

  Shanon, S H A N O N, Benny Shanon. But his paper was that Moses was high on psychedelics when he saw the burning bush.

• 7:23Mayim Bialik?

  He's not the first one to think this.

• 7:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, but he said, oh, the manna, the manna was psychedelic. And so, so it was in the New York Times and I contacted my dad and I said, you know, look at this, my whole life is justified. I'm just following in the footsteps of Moses. So my dad was like hilarious. He's like, well, in order for me to believe that Moses was high on psychedelics when he saw the burning bush, he said, first off, I'd have to believe in Moses. And I was like, you know, you're right, checkmate. What can I say?

• 7:56Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, a conversation for another time. The revelation at Sinai, we saw sounds. When is the only other time that you have synesthesia is usually under the influence of something that causes that kind of mixing of modality?

• 8:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah. And there's no archaeological evidence that the Jews built the pyramids or that they spent 40 years in the Sinai. So, so these are like, you know, mythic stories that if you take literally, it's one thing, and that's the fundamentalist approach.

• 8:27Mayim Bialik?

  When trees start talking to you and you're seeing sounds, like something interesting is happening historically, that someone chose to write that down?

• 8:34Speaker 04

  What we have is this growing sense in the therapeutic community, the US, the warfighting community and stuff, that there was.

• 8:50Speaker 04

  Something more needed and Ibogaine, which was available.

• 8:55Mayim Bialik?

  If you're going to be going up against the kind of challenges that you're going to have as an advocate, you need to own that part of yourself. And so that's what led to your journey.

• 9:04Speaker 04

  Yeah. And so Iboga, when you take it in the plant form, it takes quite a few hours for you to start really feeling the effect. So Leo was like, you know, I don't want to just sit here waiting for it to take an effect. I want to give you 350 mcg of LSD with the Iboga. So, because the LSD really peaked, you know, comes on around an hour, peaks around three and a half hours. And I was like, sure, you know, give it to me.

• 9:29Mayim Bialik?

  You were like, sure, give me the Iboga and LSD.

• 9:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I had great respect for Leo. He, by the way, had his own copy of the Torah. He had his own Torah scrolls. He was a clinical psychologist and I very much trusted him. I'd worked with him before on an LSD Harmelene experience that he had sat for me. Harmelene, interestingly enough, is part of ayahuasca, you know, it's MAOI inhibitor. But Harmelene, I think it was in the 20s, it was identified and the scientific name was telepathine, because the Indians claimed that it made them telepathic, that they could tell where the animals were, that they could read each other's minds, things like that. But in any

• 10:16Speaker 04

  case, what turned into the experience for me was not about my ancestors. It was more this psychological sense that I'm in this incredible opportunity. I'm going to battle up against the government. I'm trying to help bring back psychedelics. I have to be as prepared as I can. And, and yet, I'm scared. I mean, the LSD and the Iboga, I begin to dissolve your sense of self, move you into something bigger. And I was just really, really scared. And it was hard for me to let go.

• 10:52Mayim Bialik?

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• 12:20Mayim Bialik?

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• 12:23Speaker 04

  And I would then sort of get really down on myself. And then I would

• 12:30Speaker 04

  Just get nauseous that that all I needed to do was let go, but I couldn't do it. And so then I would vomit. And so I could actually feel the LSD rise for the first couple hours and peak. And that was pretty fine. I could do that. I could open up to the, but then the iboga, the iboga sort of came up. I could feel the two separate drugs in a sense. And the iboga was more guttural, more instinctual, more kind of embodied LSD is more ethereal. And that started again, and also people do a lot of vomiting potentially on iboga.

• 13:04Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, talk about the vomiting. So that's a purging, as it were, or is it just like your body's like, this is a toxin and I have to do this?

• 13:13Speaker 04

  I, I, I think it's, I think it's both. I think it's both. I think that you have this physical, people talk about this with ayahuasca as well, with peyote. You know, William James famously really liked nitrous oxide and talked about it as nitrous giving him a window into the world. But he said, I will take the peyote visions on faith because he didn't want the nausea connected with peyote. Right? So I ended up feeling this cycle. I would vomit. That would be a little bit of relief. And then this whole cycle would begin over and over and over again. And being Jewish, I had this image that I was being

• 13:53Speaker 04

  crucified on the cross of self perfectionism. So I had this whole Christian imagery of self perfectionism. I had to be perfect. I couldn't accept my flaws. I couldn't let go. And it was just this over and over. And so I ended up vomiting for like 10, 12 hours.

• 14:10Mayim Bialik?

  No, no, no, thank you.

• 14:12Speaker 04

  It was not fun. I think ibogaine is not as nauseating as iboga. So I, I, I actually have heard some people say they enjoyed their ibogaine experience. And I'm like, how is that possible? Okay. But then what I called my experience after 12 hours.

• 14:27Mayim Bialik?

  What were you thinking about for 12 hours?

• 14:29Speaker 04

  Hold on, this whole, this whole thing, this, this nausea, this vomiting.

• 14:32Jonathan Cohen?

  He was thinking when he was gonna vomit again.

• 14:34Speaker 04

  Pretty much, yeah. And, but then I was trying to think of this, this, how come I can't just let go? How come I can't, let's go? Why is this? I'm so scared. It's just over and over. And finally, I, I called it the, the transcendence from exhaustion.

• 14:51Speaker 04

  I just gave up the struggle. I just, and then this was now the sun had set. We started at 10:00 in the morning. Now the sun had set and it was the evening. The stars were starting to come out and I just gave up and I had this most beautiful 12 hours at night during the darkness, a little bit less than 12 hours. And then I sorted it all out. I was no longer nauseous. And then what I realized is that, you know, I'm trying to think, I want to do whatever I can to help the world improve. You know, that's kind of like, you know, I want to be Jesus, or I want to be a savior. I want to, you know, do the best I can to make the world a better place. And so I realized that part of this perfectionism was not wanting

• 15:36Speaker 04

  to be human, wanting to be perfect. All humans are imperfect. I didn't want to be perfect. And part of that was this fear of death. If I'm like, perfect, then maybe I'm not going to die. Maybe everybody else will, but not me. So then I sort of accepted this idea that I'm going to die. And then I realized that I didn't need to be perfect. And that this self critical part of my brain, which was so linked to self hatred, was actually a necessary part. The self critical part is the key to quality. You could say from a scientific point of view, it's how do you challenge your hypotheses? You need the self critical part. But I felt if I can get rid of this idea, I have to be perfect. And if

• 16:18Speaker 04

  I can separate self criticism from self hatred, and make the self criticism an ally, instead of a painful thing, then I could make a lot more progress in my life. And I felt that overnight, it was just this blissful thing. And then, what happened was that somehow I told myself that this was unearned, and that by the sunrise in the morning, even though I had all this sorted out, the nausea would come back and kind of, and that did happen. So then I couldn't move for another day.

• 16:53Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, for Pete's sake, what do you do?

• 16:55Speaker 04

  I just, I curled up in a fetal position and I just lied there. Basically, only got up to go to the bathroom and ate a banana or something. But I couldn't move. I was just like overwhelmed. And then a friend came to pick me up on the third day. And that wasn't until the fourth day where I felt safe to drive. But I felt like I cleared up a lot of this self critical. So I recently read about how the GLP ones, how people are talking about how they have less food noise in their brain. So I think I knocked out a lot of this self critical noise in my brain. I had a little bit more space. And so when the self critical thing would come like, oh, I should have done this. I should have done that.

• 17:40Speaker 04

  It's not like, oh, you're a jerk. You know, you're a horrible person. You should have done this. You should have done that. What I figured out at night was that I wouldn't have these criticisms if I hadn't done the thing in the first place that I tried and that I should instead praise myself for trying something new from which I can learn rather than criticize myself for you did something new, but you didn't do it as good as you could.

• 18:02Mayim Bialik?

  Well, and look, and I think also, you know, these are all obviously very profound, meaningful, you know, revelations and thoughts, right? I think the question is, and this is sort of, I think, the question with a lot of psychedelics and with a lot of transcendental experiences in general, right? And the way that Jonathan and I like to frame it is what do you bring down from the mountain?

• 18:22Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 18:23Mayim Bialik?

  Right. And not only what do you bring down for other people, but what are you bringing down for yourself? And like many of us have had experiences when high on something where it's like, oh my God, everything makes sense and I should be good to myself and like we're all one and like everything's okay. But when you come down from that or the day after or two days after, many of us find that that doesn't stick. And I wonder if you can speak to some of the plasticity that these drugs are helping you tap into because a lot of people would be like, oh, that's nice. Rick had this amazing experience. Like what happens after? And what do these drugs do that's different than other experiences?

• 19:03Speaker 04

  Yeah. This brings me back to a funny statement of William James. I think it might be apocryphal. I don't know if he actually said it, but this was one of the insights he had on nitrous that he wrote down and thought was brilliant. And then when he looked at it, but it was higamous, hogamous, woman is monogamous, hogamous, higamous, man is polygamous. That's, and then he looked at that one. So this is the apocryphal story. I'm not sure if that's true, but, but I think that. The idea is that nothing that comes to you in a psychedelic state should be accepted without critical reflection and integration afterwards. Even when you think you've got a revelation from God, that's even when you have to be

• 19:45Speaker 04

  the most suspicious, I would say, because you're the most confident, "Oh, God told me this, it must be true, and I heard it from the spirit of ayahuasca," or "I heard it from this," or "I heard it from that." So, the integration process, Huston Smith talks about a difference between a spiritual experience and a spiritual life. And that difference is the integration. It's what do you do to take those lessons and put it into practice? So, what I had after my Outbeginning experience was more time speaking with Leo, more time trying to, after I could talk, after I was sort of more or less, so that the integration process is something that is absolutely key for durable, long-term results.

• 20:27Speaker 04

  Because many of us now in our hectic lives, you know, myself this morning, for example, I wake up and I just had this fleeting thought of what my dream was, and then I just, you know, start the day. You need to take a lot more time in the morning just to reflect on your dreams to try to get into what they're trying to tell you. I mean, Freud talked about dreams as the railroad to the unconscious.

• 20:52Mayim Bialik?

  So did Plato.

• 20:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, and there's a lot to it. And so, often we see that the psychedelic experience moves into people's dream life. So, we really encourage people to pay attention, not so much the night of, because then you're sort of exhausted and you don't remember much in the dreams, but in the subsequent days after a psychedelic experience, paying attention to dreams is one of the best ways to integrate the experience.

• 21:20Mayim Bialik?

  And the idea, and I'm not asking you to speak to the neurophysiology, but it's not, this is not just anecdotal, this isn't folklore. Your brain has been impacted by a chemical shift that is rendering it open to possibility because of a muting of the default mode network, right? All of these other things, this is the neuroplasticity. This is the place where we're saying you don't have to be on four different medications to manage the nightmares and the horrors that you experienced because we sent you to war. What if your brain could accommodate and understand in a way that changes it forever? Like, that's what we're talking about.

• 22:04Mayim Bialik?

  We're not talking about everybody just like partying and going to Joshua Tree and tripping balls. We're talking about we have the power. No, but we're talking about we have the power to change your brain.

• 22:15Speaker 04

  Yeah, the reason I'm laughing is because I was just, I was invited to a gathering at Joshua Tree, which is a big psychedelic party. And unfortunately, I cannot go because I have to go to Washington DC on May 14th, where there's a day-long seminar on the outcomes of Trump's executive order.

• 22:36Mayim Bialik?

  Which is the more holy work? I would say go to Washington.

• 22:40Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 22:40Mayim Bialik?

  To speak to that, what you're describing is what we call neuroplasticity. That's where the transformation of trauma happens. That's where all of your old stuff gets rewritten into your brain so that you don't have to live like this anymore.

• 22:56Speaker 04

  Exactly. That's also where the epigenetic mechanisms can start disappearing. Have you had Ghul Dolan? Have you interviewed her yet?

• 23:05Mayim Bialik?

  No.

• 23:06Speaker 04

  So Ghul is the scientist, so she was at Johns Hopkins. She's the one that really has pioneered this idea of critical periods. And this, so we all know that kids can learn language better than adults. So you have these critical periods for eyesight, for hearing, for language, for all, and socially, social reward learning. So what she's done is she's looked at mice models and given them all these different drugs. She could, I think she would be great to have on your show, but she's the one that's really done the early work with octopuses. We provided the MDMA, I'm happy to say.

• 23:39Mayim Bialik?

  Did you drug the octopus with MDMA?

• 23:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, no, she did, she did. So if people have seen My Octopus Teacher, that documentary, it's incredible, but from that you see that octopuses are solitary creatures. They'll kill other octopuses until the end of their life, when it's mating season and they mate and die. But they're solitary creatures and 600 million years ago or something like that, humans and octopuses diverged in the evolutionary line, but octopuses still process serotonin. So Ghul was wondering, what happens if you give MDMA to an octopus? Will it become pro-social? And so she did this experiment.

• 24:21Mayim Bialik?

  Did she put them in a warehouse with lots of bright lights and bottles of water?

• 24:26Speaker 04

  Maybe that's next, but but there's this contraption. The octopus is in the center and there's two doors on either side. One goes into a chamber that has another octopus, but it's in a birdcage. So the octopus can't move, the second octopus can't move. The other goes into a chamber where it's another birdcage, but it's like a ball or an inanimate object. And so no matter how you switch up the sexes of all these octopuses, they'll spend way more time with the inanimate object. And when they're with the octopus, they're not interacting. They're around the edge of the chamber, blah, blah, blah. So you give them MDMA. It took a while for Ghul to figure out the right dose.

• 25:04Mayim Bialik?

  Sorry, insert hilarious joke here about what happens if you give too much MDMA to the poor octopus?

• 25:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, we've seen this with dogs and rats too. You know, too much, they kind of, or even humans, they get more of the speedy part. They don't get the open-hearted part. It's a good reason why actually MDMA is not an addictive drug in the same way that cocaine or alcohol or tobacco or marijuana can be, because when you develop a tolerance for MDMA or for drugs that you tend to be addicted on, the solution is you just take higher and higher doses. But when you do that with MDMA, you don't get more open-heartedness, you get more of the amphetamine speedy part. And so people don't get what really they're looking for. But but in any case, the octopus is under the right dose. They soak them in the water for 10 minutes, they absorb the MDMA. And then now, all of a sudden, they hang out with the other octopus.

• 25:55Speaker 04

  And they're interacting so that the pro-social effects of MDMA are evolutionarily conserved and pre-verbal. Now this gets us to another point, I'll just think, which is, I think it's extremely important to start treating people closer to the trauma.

• 26:13Speaker 04

  What that means is that from the military point of view, there's now $10 million from the Department of Defense to treat active duty soldiers with PTSD, with MDMA, not just veterans. But there's two studies that are starting. One is at Harvard's McLean Hospital. This is 18 to 22 year olds with PTSD from childhood trauma, and they're giving MDMA. The other is at UCLA. And the goal is to move down the age to start giving it to kids that are traumatized at a younger age. There's been a major breakthrough at Yale, which is a study with obsessive compulsive disorder with psilocybin. And they have permission from FDA to go down to 16 year olds.

• 26:56Speaker 04

  And they're asking for permission to go down to 14 year olds. Now, you're looking a little bit worried.

• 27:01Mayim Bialik?

  Well, I'm just thinking about all the other things developing in the human brain at 14 and 16, which, go ahead, keep going.

• 27:11Speaker 04

  Okay, okay. So let's assume you're traumatized. Your brain is not, no, your brain is not developing normally.

• 27:18Mayim Bialik?

  Sure, no, absolutely.

• 27:19Speaker 04

  Okay, not only that, if you can layer in connection, love, self-acceptance, self-compassion, the earlier the better. So I think the argument you just used is people's brains are still developing. They're not fully mature through the 25. That's been an argument, first off, captured by the drug warriors. We've got to, because the whole thing about the drug wars, we have to protect young people from drugs. And, and, and then there'll be this argument, their brains are still developing. The other thing that I think it really doesn't take into account is those cultures that have successfully integrated psychedelics, like the ayahuasca cultures, the Native American church. They don't have age limits.

• 28:02Speaker 04

  I went to a Native American church peyote ceremony on the Navajo Reservation, and a Navajo man brought his nine year old son. All right, now, my bar mitzvah was an enormous disappointment.

• 28:16Speaker 04

  And I'll say that I have, I'm the oldest of four kids. And I thought, I don't, I don't know what your bar mitzvah was like.

• 28:24Mayim Bialik?

  There was no peyote, that's for sure.

• 28:27Speaker 04

  Okay, but, but for me, there was no inner transformation either. It left me empty. The current rites of passage that we have maybe don't go as deep as we need. So I left this enormous feeling of emptiness from my bar mitzvah. That something didn't click and maybe thousands of years it's worked and it's a bigger thing.

• 28:51Mayim Bialik?

  Religion as we know it now is, is quite far removed from obviously its origins. And in particular, in our tradition, like in the Jewish tradition, there was and always has been a very strong mystical, you know, kind of

• 29:04Speaker 04

  Yes, yes.

• 29:04Mayim Bialik?

  component, much of which has been, you know, lost for the most part, but you know.

• 29:10Speaker 04

  So then, when I'm 17 years old at college, New College in Florida, which by the way, was the canary in the mine for the Trump Republicans going after higher education. So DeSantis to try to get the nomination from Trump, you know, destroyed New College as a thing now we say after her, after all these other universities. But, but in any case, when I was 17 in 1971 and I, I took LSD and I thought, this is what my bar mitzvah should have been. Who am I? Where do I fit in? What, what, you know, what does it mean to have courage to let go? But the most amazing thing for me of all of it was emotions.

• 29:52Speaker 04

  I didn't, I was very much in my head and the LSD brought me in touch with emotions, even though often fearful, but I'm like, God, there's this whole other side of me. I just think that when we talk about traumatized kids or kids with OCD or kids with autism or, or other things where they don't understand emotions or body language. I think it makes a lot of sense to say that there should not be these age limits. But you need the support of the parents. You need, you know, a lot more support systems. But I, I think that this.

• 30:27Speaker 04

  General sense that we want to treat people closer to the trauma. And this argument that their brains are developing, their brains are developing in not healthy ways. So you layer in love, connection, spirituality in an early age, that's going to be good for your developing brain, not bad. Overuse of things is going to be bad. If you're using marijuana every day as a young kid in your teenage years, it's not good for you.

• 30:48Mayim Bialik?

  Well, I'm also thinking, you know, you know, Gabor Maté's, you know, kind of notion of like, we all have some trauma, either lowercase t or uppercase T. I mean, I think this is, this is part of the, and I think this is where you got this reactionary, you know, Nixon era fear of like, everyone's going to be stoned all the time. And like, that's not a solution. But I think what's important, even just using your, you know, iboga, you know, example, is the notion is not that you feel better because you're high. The notion is that you feel better because you are integrating experiences that have occurred, which are in many cases, opposed to our natural state of love, camaraderie,

• 31:34Mayim Bialik?

  harmony, like, understanding that we're part of the universe. That's our natural state, right? We're spiritual beings have a, having a physical experience. We are not physical beings that have a spiritual experience.

• 31:45Speaker 04

  Yes, exactly. But I would also add that it's not only that you feel good. In fact, the psychedelics help you feel bad, but they help you feel. So whereas when you have PTSD, you have the sense that these traumatic memories are always going to be coming, they're always overwhelming, you're always fighting them in a way. Or grief, people that have prolonged grief don't want to, you know, really let go into it, they're feeling it's all, so the psychedelics help these defenses against feeling certain things that we think might be overwhelming. But here we get to a beautiful statement that Stan Grof, who's the sort of, one of

• 32:26Speaker 04

  the co-founders of transpersonal psychology, my mentor and, and many other people's mentors. What he said is, "The full expression of an emotion is the funeral pyre of that emotion." The full expression of an emotion is the funeral pyre of that emotion. So many times people, you alluded to this earlier, that under psychedelics, you feel like you're dying. You know, and that's generally not the case.

• 32:56Mayim Bialik?

  No, but people experience various stages of either ego death or ego dissolution, or abject terror and an empty pit of despair.

• 33:06Speaker 04

  Yeah, and so that this, what I did during my iboga experience was I resisted all that. So what Stan is trying to say is if you let yourself experience it, like many people feel like under psychedelics, that not only are they feeling terrible, but they will never get better. They're stuck in this place forever. And so what Stan says is just let go, feel. You feel that you're stuck forever. And the way that the more full that you can experience that, then things will start to change. And that fighting it. So I'll give you one example. This is a person that I know pretty well. And this was, she was really scared of going

• 33:50Speaker 04

  into elevators. And she's a child, and she'd done all of this therapy that hadn't worked, all these different kinds of therapy, it hadn't worked. And so she was actually under the influence of MDMA, and she was telling me about this fear. And what I was saying is maybe what you need to do is learn how to go forward with the fear. Don't try to get rid of the fear, but make it so that you can act with it. You don't have to fight the fear, because when you try to make stuff go away, it sort of sustains it. You can't really make it go away. But if you can make it not overwhelm you. So then she said she tried that, we were, and then the next time she went into an elevator, she could do it with the fear.

• 34:32Mayim Bialik?

  Well, and the, and the idea is, it's not that no one ever told her that before. You're talking about that the MDMA allowed a receptive state in a way that was able to translate to the experience, correct?

• 34:45Speaker 04

  Well, not so much, because she had the idea that the cure for her to get into an elevator was to not be scared of being in the elevator. And so I think that was that shift, that you can accept this feeling. And when you do that, it doesn't have to be overwhelming. You can go forward with it. And so I think that's a big, big part of it. So I think this neuroplasticity idea, though, is really key. And Gole has looked at the longer, now, these are for animal studies, but the longer you're in the psychedelic state, the longer this period of neuroplasticity lasts. And Ibogaine, which is 36 hours or often really longer, it lasts for potentially

• 35:30Speaker 04

  months, this neuroplastic state afterwards. And so this is the time to do the non-drug work. Because, again, I would say the difference between recreational use and therapeutic use is recreational use, you just want to have a good time. And when difficult stuff comes up, you don't really want to deal with it, because this is about having fun. And so you're not really open to the full range of emotions, you know, and often people get into trouble, where you've given yourself LSD or whatever, and stuff, you're supposed to just party, but you've changed this membrane between the conscious and the unconscious, and traumatic memories come. And then if you don't want to deal with them, you try to suppress them, you end up way worse. So therapeutic use, the idea is that we're

• 36:14Speaker 04

  going to welcome whatever comes. And even if it's terrifying or painful, it's just to experience it, express it, express it in your body, express it in, you know, Bessel van der Kolk's book, you know, The Body Keeps the Score. That often that's true. So many people will have memories come in body pains. There was a Vietnam War vet that I met back actually in 1984. And he said he'd done MDMA therapy, and he had been shot in the back in Vietnam. And he had this pain, some of the bullet fragments were down at the bottom of his back, near the bottom of his spine. And he had pain from that. Under MDMA, he went back to this, this period of being shot, and he released a lot of the fear of that.

• 36:58Speaker 04

  And then the pain in his back went down.

• 37:02Speaker 04

  So that the pain was kind of a reflection of the emotions. So I think that the therapeutic part is experience what's happening. And then the goal of recreational use is just to have an experience at the moment. It's as ideally good as possible. The goal of therapy is the integration. It's not about the experience as the formal, most important thing. It's about what you do with it and how do you change your baseline? And through that is, is the integration process and trying to make these little steps. And I think the big worry that I have about the entire field now of psychedelic, for-profit psychedelic companies is they want to run away from therapy.

• 37:46Speaker 04

  They want to just give drugs. They don't want to have any liability for therapy. And they're looking at Spravato, which is a ketamine spray by Johnson & Johnson, as the ideal success because now they're past 2 billion annual sales. They're going to 3 billion annual sales. But the thing about Spravato is that it doesn't last. It lasts a week or two or something like that.

• 38:11Jonathan Cohen?

  That's perfect for them.

• 38:12Speaker 04

  That is exactly perfect for them. And so there's another woman I know, therapist, works at a clinic, and a ketamine Spravato clinic. They have somebody that's got Spravato 250 times. And I'm like, insurance companies are still paying for this? There's no therapy. It's just about the drug. So I worry about the entire field in a way. Trying to say, oh, we don't do therapy. FDA doesn't regulate therapy. They didn't like the therapy that MAPS was using. They didn't understand it. Let's just pretend we don't do therapy. So when you don't do therapy, you don't take advantage of the neuroplasticity. And what happens exactly? People need to buy more of the drug. That's what they want. So that's this capitalism versus altruism.

• 38:57Speaker 04

  That's the role of the public benefit corporation is to try to make it so that it's about what's best for patients. And you can still make money. You don't need to just gorge yourself on profits.

• 39:08Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, Spravato is a Johnson & Johnson company also. So, yeah.

• 39:12Jonathan Cohen?

  Isn't it maddening for you to have taken this cause, pushed it so far down the field? Where it's almost there. It's starting to become. Globally recognized as this option and yet they're pulling out one of the most important pieces like it must, how are you not furious?

• 39:33Speaker 04

  I'm furious but powerless and heartbroken. And so, you know, one of the things that Buckminster Fuller said was that you don't change an old model by criticizing it, you change it by creating a better new model. So all we can hope for is that we will demonstrate as best we can with MDMA around the world. So the, the, the two new people that own Resilient is the name of the pharma company that's making MDMA. You know, it was the MAPS Public Benefit Corp. Then we had a, and it was a whole hundred percent owned by the nonprofit MAPS. Then we started taking investors because we needed, we, we believe mistakenly now that we needed to raise all this money for commercialization.

• 40:18Speaker 04

  We took in traditional pharma people who knew commercialization. We took in investors and the companies got separated. It was no longer MAPS is now just a minority owner. We have no control over the company and they're trying to just get rid of, they don't do the therapy. But the owners of it, Antonio Gracias and also Christopher Hahn from England are doing this out of their foundations, not out of their funds. They're not doing this to make money. And they've said that MDMA should be generic in all of Africa, in India, in Lebanon, and in low and middle income countries around the world. So we have this opportunity to bring MDMA all over the world and to do it in a way where we can train therapists.

• 41:01Speaker 04

  The other issue is going to be a lot of these countries don't even have therapists like Rwanda. Who are the local healers? Are they midwives? Are they death doulas? Are they nurses? Are they social workers? Are they religious leaders? Whatever. And the move will be to treat people more in groups rather than in individuals. So we can try to create a better model where the goal is not to sell the most MDMA. The goal is to get the most durable outcomes. So it's really heartbreaking for me to see what's going on. The, the other part that's reinforcing this is that we have a clear system in the insurance in, in America to reimburse companies, pharma companies for drugs. But reimbursing for therapy is not very good and many therapists, potentially even most therapists, don't even take insurance.

• 41:47Speaker 04

  And so we don't want this to be only for self-pay people. In fact, the people that often have the most trauma often have the least resources to pay for the treatment. So that's where we're also focused on drug policy reform, on state level reform.

• 42:02Mayim Bialik?

  That's possibly one of the most profound things that we've heard regarding any conversation regarding trauma, right? We have this, we have an industry that is geared around accessibility. And, you know, the reason Jonathan and I started this podcast is because we didn't believe you should have to pay lots of money to have the kind of information that you're telling us. But the communities with the least resources, yeah, statistically speaking, are going to have the most trauma, the most alcoholism, the most untreated mental illness, the most abuse, you know, the, the lack of resources for even basic, you know, kind of needs being met.

• 42:38Speaker 04

  Well, and then we see the Republicans pushing many people off of health insurance. Even, you know, they're not doing the subsidies for the Affordable Care anymore. And so millions and millions of people are losing their insurance.

• 42:49Mayim Bialik?

  Also, let's have IBIGAME. And it's so backwards. And anyway, yeah.

• 42:53Speaker 04

  Yeah. Well, that's where MAPS is about drug development through the FDA, but also drug policy reform and also peer support. So here's another interesting point about psychotherapy outcome research, which is that the most important factor for whether somebody gets better with psychotherapy is not which kind of psychotherapy it is. It's the therapeutic alliance. It's the connection between the therapist and the patient, the sense of safety, the sense of non-judgment that you can come up with ever is really happening. The therapeutic alliance matters the most. And you can have that with a friend, with a peer, you know, so we want to train people in peer support. So over time, maybe

• 43:35Speaker 04

  it'll take a generation or two, we want a psychedelically literate population that has learned about peer support, about psychedelics for prevention, for spirituality, for connection, and not just for treating disease. That's one of the opportunities ahead of us for MDMA for couples therapy. So there are studies with what's called cognitive behavioral conjoint therapy. That was developed inside the VA. And that's where a veteran has PTSD. And what they found is if you bring their partner into the treatment, all the focus is on the veteran with PTSD, but the partner. Is impacted by the veteran with PTSD. It changes their home life. It changes everything.

• 44:16Speaker 04

  And if you can bring the partner into the treatment, then they also get help too, and it reinforces everything. So this was cognitive behavior conjoined therapy. So in 2014, because of the intervention of Richard Rockefeller and his cousin Senator Jay Rockefeller, who was on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee, the VA started being willing to work with us. And they said, we have researchers that developed this cognitive behavior conjoined therapy. See what happens if both members of the couple get MDMA. But they said it has to take outside the VA. You have to pay for it. We're not going to refer vets, plausible deniability. They have to use their academic connections, the researchers, not VA, but at least we'll let you do this and we'll let them do it and we'll watch the

• 44:57Speaker 04

  results. The results were fantastic. And so then there was projects at Sunstone, which is a clinic in Rockville, Maryland, and they give MDMA to cancer patients and their partner. And they find that's tremendously helpful. So what we're now trying to do is MDMA for couples therapy where nobody has a diagnosis.

• 45:20Mayim Bialik?

  Who, who doesn't have a diagnosis? What do you mean?

• 45:23Speaker 04

  Well, that's true. You know, and the easiest one is generalized anxiety disorder.

• 45:28Mayim Bialik?

  Okay.

• 45:29Speaker 04

  But we don't want to do that because what we want to do is try to challenge the FDA. We have these lawyer scientists that we've worked with. We've sued the FDA twice and won both times on both. One was a marijuana protocol. One was an MDMA protocol. And so the, the legislation that created the FDA is about drugs that affect the structure and function of the body. But it's not limited to diseases, technically. The FDA has never approved anything that's not a disease. You could say the closest is Viagra, you know, which is like widespread for everybody and, you know, but, but it's sort of lifestyle drug, you could say, but they, they've turned it into a disease. So, so the opportunity

• 46:14Speaker 04

  that we have with the whole Maha movement too, is about preventative medicine. It's about moving, not just treating illness. So with MDMA for couples therapy, the challenge is going to be the outcome measures. Because if you give MDMA to a couple and they decide to separate, that's a success. Not every, and so the, the measures of, uh, couples therapy is do they stay together?

• 46:39Mayim Bialik?

  Maybe the best thing is for them to be apart.

• 46:41Speaker 04

  Exactly, exactly. But most measures would show that as a failure. So we need to develop process measures of how they communicate. If we, if we can do that, then we get into this engagement with the FDA and say, would you approve MDMA for couples therapy using these particular outcome measures?

• 47:00Mayim Bialik?

  What you're saying is you can't be like, we have two schizophrenic people. Let's see what happens when we give them MDMA. So when you mean no clinical diagnoses, you mean you want to find people with a, a, as few outside medical issues as possible to try and do this as a trial?

• 47:16Speaker 04

  Well, they could potentially have, um, let's say generalized anxiety disorder, or they could be depressed, but that's not an inclusion criteria. They don't have to have those things. This would just be for people normally wanting to work on their relationship who may be thinking about divorce or may not be.

• 47:35Mayim Bialik?

  But, but like I said, you could get the best conscious uncoupling from a loving session.

• 47:40Speaker 04

  Well, that's Gwyneth Paltrow. Talked about that.

• 47:42Mayim Bialik?

  When you're talking about minimizing conflict and having people in touch with their true self, that doesn't always mean staying together. I'm speaking as a divorced person, you know? So, but that's, that is a curious thing in terms of measures. Cause I'm sure, you know, there's a Republican agenda that doesn't believe in divorce as well. And I'm not interested in them funding my research anyway.

• 48:04Speaker 04

  Well, I've learned to take money from anybody that wants to give it to you. And, and that was actually a key part of bipartisan support. So one of the things that I've got the most criticism for, um, is taking a million dollars from Rebecca Mercer. Now, you know, it was her family that owned Cambridge Analytica. And was supporting Trump and Bannon in the 2016 elections. And she gave, she offered a million dollars. The only condition was that it be limited to veterans. And I said, um, yeah, yeah, I will take your money. And people said, oh, you know, she's horrible. You know, she's doing these terrible things. This will help make her look good. And I'm like, well, let her look good. She should look good. This is a good thing.

• 48:48Speaker 04

  It doesn't mean I agree with everything she does. So, um, as long as we're talking about Jewish themes in a minute. So I was at a Passover Seder and, um, here in Boston. And, um, it's every year we go to this, uh, friends of our family. They have like 50 or 60 people for Passover. And these are all scientists, some of them Nobel Prize winners, big scientists.

• 49:07Mayim Bialik?

  Uh, yes, we're coming next year.

• 49:09Speaker 04

  Oh, it's incredible. So, so I was sitting next to this, uh, my wife and I came late. We're sitting next to this couple. We don't know. And I, I speak to this guy, are, are you a scientist? And he says, no, I'm a judge. And then his wife starts talking about a book that she wrote about parents who have life threatening, illnesses with their kids and how you deal with the grief. And so that led into this long conversation with, uh, about MDMA. And we had this great conversation about MDMA. And then we started talking about marijuana and we had this incredible conversation. And you know, Passover Seder's take forever. And you're going on and on and on. So hours later, I'm like, something is dawning in the back of my head.

• 49:48Speaker 04

  And I'm like, um, are you, are you Stephen Breyer by any chance? And he said, yeah, I am Stephen Breyer.

• 49:55Mayim Bialik?

  What?

• 49:56Speaker 04

  Yeah. And so then I said, okay, I have an ethical question I want to ask you if you don't mind. And I was so glad that I didn't know who he was for the first couple of hours of the stuff. So then I said, here's my ethical question. I've been criticized for, uh, taking money from Rebecca Mercer.

• 50:16Speaker 04

  And do you think I ethically, you know, I don't support a lot of what she does. But in this case, I thought it was the important to do. And so Stephen Breyer didn't have to think very long at all. He said, "The essence of democracy is trying to find common ground with people with whom you may disagree with on everything else." And in these hyper partisan, hyper polarized days, there's not enough of that. So by you trying to find common ground with Rebecca Mercer, which eventually led to Rick Perry, to all these Republicans, that led to Joe Rogan and led to the meeting at the White House that just happened on April 18th. So that I felt that the Supreme Court affirmed my fundraising approach.

• 51:04Mayim Bialik?

  No, but I think that's, I think that's very powerful because people, especially in these polarized times, were looking to find the reason why, you know, when people ask me, "What do you think about RFK Jr.? I don't have one answer. I don't have a thumbnail answer for you." When people ask sort of what we think about all different sides of every person representing every issue, it's not that simple. It is much more complicated, as you just indicated.

• 51:27Speaker 04

  Right, right. I would say from a moral ethical perspective, the view that I have is that once you've established these bridges and you've built these bridges, there is an obligation to start trying to use the relationship to at least raise questions about the areas with which you disagree. So you can't just say, "Okay, now we agree on this," while you're, you know, destroying America in these ways or that ways, or, you know, however, you know, they think, you know, you need to, you can't stop with building the bridges. There has to be a delicate way. So I had one moment like that with Rick Perry. It was,

• 52:09Speaker 04

  it was pretty interesting. We were on a panel together. This was a couple of years ago. And he was talking about how great it was, you know, that I, you know, that I had stuck up for psychedelics and that psychedelics were coming around. I said, "You know, I did that at New College and your friend DeSantis is killing New College." You know, and he said, hey, let's stay away from politics. Let's just talk about what we agree with. That was fine, but at least I registered a little bit of a disagreement. And, you know, that has not harmed our relationship. The psychedelic science 2023. And just to mention, we will have psychedelic science 2027 in May in Denver. So it's the world's

• 52:49Speaker 04

  biggest conference. So I came out at the opening ceremony all dressed in white and Rick Perry came out all dressed in black. It was really a good contrast and we're showing as we're building these bridges.

• 53:03Jonathan Cohen?

  What is going to happen with the new executive order that the Trump administration just signed?

• 53:09Speaker 04

  First off, you can't take anything at face value. So who knows what's really going to happen. But what I think it's going to happen is that they've given priority vouchers for sure, for three companies to go through the FDA process faster. One of them is Compass Pathways for psilocybin for treatment resistant depression. The other is USONA, which is the nonprofit for psilocybin for major depressive disorder. And the other is this company called Transcend that is using methadone, which is MDMA light, you could say for PTSD. So I think that these companies will be given faster reviews. There will be $50 million coming

• 53:50Speaker 04

  out of the federal government for psychedelic research. I think it most may be entirely directed to Ibogaine. We don't know. There's also an element of called right to try. So right to try is something that the Republican states, there's probably like 30 states that have approved right to try, maybe even more. But right to try says that if you have a disorder for which the currently available medications have not helped you, and there is a drug that's being researched for that condition, but it's still just in research, you have a right to try outside of research. You approach the company, they can give you the drug and FDA is not involved with this at all. Now, the Drug Enforcement Administration has said

• 54:35Speaker 04

  right to try doesn't apply to Schedule 1 drugs, doesn't apply to psychedelics. So the executive order said, oh, no, no, no, right to try applies to psychedelics. Now, the companies may or may not want to give drugs to right to try. A lot of companies don't want to do that.

• 54:55Speaker 04

  So the question is, when they implement it, for example, Resilient, which has, is working on MDMA, they may not want to give it, but there are Canadian manufacturers of, of medical grade MDMA can write to try, count for importing from a different company, not the country that's doing the drug. So those are some of the questions that, that we'll see. So I think the executive order also sends a signal all over the world that this administration really is focused on moving through psychedelics. And I, I think it will have a positive effect. How far it will go remains to be seen, but I think it's just a sea change in federal attitudes towards psychedelics.

• 55:38Jonathan Cohen?

  Well, how long does it actually take to get through? When we say expedited, it feels like things can be stuck in the FDA for, forever.

• 55:47Speaker 04

  Well, there's two different things. There's one, this priority voucher. There's other that is breakthrough therapy. And then priority review. So normally, it can take quite a long time to review drugs. It could take eight months or longer, but priority review gets you six months. And the expedited review, these priority vouchers get you down to two to three months. And so the, and also the companies can do what's called a rolling review, meaning that they give you the package on preclinical toxicity to the FDA. Then they give the package on chemistry, manufacturing and controls, how you make the drug. So that

• 56:28Speaker 04

  they can review these things. They don't have to get all of the packages in for everything before they start the review. So I, I do think that it will expedite and speed up the drug review. My, my concern is, and is that people will think, oh, look, FDA rejected MDMA. And now we've got Trump and RFK saying make psychedelics into a medicine. And we got this executive order and now it's being approved because of politics, not because of the science that it's worthy. So that's the downside, the worry that this, people think, oh, it's being approved, not because they deserve to be approved, but because the thumb on the scale from the politicians. The solution to that is a key part of what

• 57:10Speaker 04

  I thought was public benefit, but which is not being done. By any of these pharma companies, which is transparency, meaning that the pharma companies should put all of their data in the public domain, like open science, and all of their communications back and forth to the FDA should be open. That's what MAPS did. That's how we built bipartisan support. That's how we built confidence and trust. That's how we helped the entire field. But that's something that's been shut down, but none of the companies do that now. I think that that's the the anecdote sort of to people worrying that these approvals now will be based on politics and not on the science.

• 57:45Jonathan Cohen?

  And if the science shows that they should be pushed towards legality, are we talking like 15 months they could be available? Are we talking five years?

• 57:55Speaker 04

  Oh, less, less, less, less, less, less. Compass has completed its phase three studies. They anticipate before the end of this year, they should have approval. USONA, I don't know if they've completed their second phase three study, but they're close to it. The other part is that Resilient, which is the company that's working on MDMA, has been in negotiations for quite a long time with FDA about what's next for MDMA. So I anticipate within the next couple of months, there'll be some kind of an announcement, here's the path forward for MDMA. So we can't say, just did they want another phase three study? Do they agree that efficacy is proven? What's the issues? My personal belief is that we totally demonstrated efficacy.

• 58:39Speaker 04

  And if they go forward, it should be a phase four study, not a phase three study, meaning post-approval. Five MEODMT for depression, LSD for generalized anxiety disorder. I think within the next couple of years, we'll have quite a few psychedelics. And my prediction would be, right now, I don't know the exact number, but there's thousands of ketamine clinics around America. I think in five to 10 years, there'll be like 10,000 psychedelic clinics all over America. And the goal is for therapists to be cross-trained in LSD, MDMA, psilocybin, Ibogaine, all these different things. And then they customize treatments for each individual person.

• 59:23Speaker 04

  So again, when you come from a public benefit corporation context,

• 59:30Speaker 04

  I don't think everybody should get MDMA and all the other drugs aren't any good. And that is so we want the therapists ideally to customize the treatments for each individual person. You know, the psychedelic underground, the underground therapists are the real heroes of this movement. They're way ahead of the science. So we just now, for the first time, have a study at Johns Hopkins, which is studying a combination of MDMA and psilocybin at the same time for PTSD. So underground people have been LSD MDMA combinations for, you know, decades, but it's finally now getting into being researched.

• 1:00:09Speaker 04

  So I think the, um, the chances are that psychedelic medicine, the, the other thing that will be really flourishing, the other thing that we haven't talked about yet is psychedelic churches. So, you know, I was just at Harvard Divinity School a couple of weekends ago, and there was a seminar on psychedelic churches. My favorite one, now there's hundreds of psychedelic churches. So this is the, um, sort of the unintended consequence of the religious right asserting religious freedom to discriminate against people. So, you know, the, the example was a baker who refused to bake a cake for a gay wedding, you know, and, and then now you, for a while, you couldn't discriminate like that.

• 1:00:53Speaker 04

  Well, now you can, you know, you can assert your religious freedom to discriminate, you know, it's against your religion, you don't have to do that. So there's all sorts of ways in which the religious right has gotten, expanded the definition of religious freedom. So the police and the Drug Enforcement Administration, first off, we have religious freedom for peyote, the Native American church to use peyote. Then we have the Uniao de Vegetal, one of the ayahuasca churches. Then that extends to the Santo Daimi. Then there was now recently the Church of the Eagle and the Condor. Which is ayahuasca churches. And then there's now hundreds of psychedelic churches operating in the open, not being busted. And there, I think the fear is that if they

• 1:01:38Speaker 04

  do get busted, they could create bad law. And that could solidify this idea that you can have psychedelic churches. There are even psychedelic churches that are not just about plants, that are about LSD or MDMA that are synthetics.

• 1:01:53Mayim Bialik?

  I'm sorry, this is, hold on one second. We need to just, Jonathan and I are both like, wait a second.

• 1:01:58Speaker 04

  Are they doing it every week?

• 1:02:00Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Is it like, that's what you do? Or you mean, it's a religious institution that has indigenous roots that?

• 1:02:07Speaker 04

  No, no, no, no. There are some that have indigenous roots, but there are some that are modern. So there's no indigenous use of LSD.

• 1:02:15Mayim Bialik?

  But Dr. Dabut, you have to explain this to me. So why, why am I going to this church? I'm not, am I on the drug when I'm in church?

• 1:02:23Speaker 04

  Well, there's different ways to do it. Some of them can be the ceremonies. Here's my favorite of these psychedelic churches. It's called the Church of Ambrosia. Okay. And it's in Oakland.

• 1:02:35Mayim Bialik?

  Sour cream and marshmallows everywhere.

• 1:02:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, the Church of Ambrosia. They have 138,000 members.

• 1:02:43Mayim Bialik?

  Wait, what?

• 1:02:45Speaker 04

  It's a big church. And what they do, though, is they don't have ceremonies, usually in their church. They'll have some, but the idea is that if you're a member of this church, you have to come to the church in Oakland and pick up your mushrooms. And you can do them at home.

• 1:03:00Mayim Bialik?

  That's a dispensary. That's not a church.

• 1:03:03Speaker 04

  No, no, they're operating in the open as a church. They've got a spiritual leader who wears robes and stuff. And who's got a great stable of lawyers to, in case he gets busted. But they claim that it's a church and they distribute it like 100 pounds of mushrooms every month, which are offerings. You don't buy them, you make an offering.

• 1:03:27Mayim Bialik?

  Like some people get seats to high holy days, other people get mushrooms with their membership.

• 1:03:31Speaker 04

  Exactly. And then, you know, here's your guide to do it in a spiritual way to have a spiritual experience.

• 1:03:36Mayim Bialik?

  Oh, so the idea is that they're giving you the spiritual framework? And in many cases, it could be, because I've heard of this for like ayahuasca ceremonies that are particular to certain, like there's Jewish ayahuasca. So they're also possible, I mean, I'm just trying to like benefit of the doubt. They're giving you the spiritual framework here.

• 1:03:56Speaker 04

  Yes, yes, yes. The benefit of the doubt is that there is a frame, a spiritual frame, but you don't necessarily do it together with everybody in the church. Once a week, you can have your own spiritual ceremonies in nature or at home or however.

• 1:04:15Mayim Bialik?

  You've been on their podcast, it looks like.

• 1:04:17Speaker 04

  Well, David Hodges is a friend of mine. He was an early marijuana dispense dispensary guy, ready to go to prison, you know, and then we get medical marijuana. So now he's a church leader. And he's sincere in a lot of different ways and believes this. And so, but, but the point is they're operating out in the open. Nobody is hiding. And there's hundreds of these psychedelic churches. So it's another way of access and it's another way. So, so I think one of the things that is difficult for people to understand about maps is that on the one hand, we believe that psychedelics should go through the FDA. They should be made into a medicine. There should be medical screening.

• 1:05:02Speaker 04

  There should be highly trained therapists. They should only do it under direct supervision. They should have integration and it should be covered by insurance. At the same time, it should be legal. For adults in like cannabis is legal in the different states. I, I, I believe a little bit that there should be a license for it.

• 1:05:23Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, I don't know. I, I, I'm, I'm one of these like, you know, progressive liberal skeptics that like giving everyone access to all the weed they want all the time hasn't been the most productive.

• 1:05:34Speaker 04

  Well, well, I think that's true, but you have to weigh that against the drug war and the evils of the drug war.

• 1:05:42Mayim Bialik?

  Absolutely. If, if those are my choices, I will take all of these unmotivated people watching TV, not wanting to have sex or leave their house. I will take that. I'm, I'm being serious, like over criminalization.

• 1:05:53Speaker 04

  But, but I do think that a lot of people find marijuana really good for sex. It's not that, you know, that people just are couch potatoes at, you know.

• 1:06:01Mayim Bialik?

  No, I was talking about this trend of like, young people don't want to have sex. But yeah, I wasn't blaming, I wasn't blaming pot for that.

• 1:06:07Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That, uh, thank God I grew up before that trend began. All I can say is.

• 1:06:14Jonathan Cohen?

  But they don't want to smoke weed either or do drugs. They're all straight edged.

• 1:06:18Speaker 04

  Well, you know, it's up to them. Everybody should be able to choose what, what they want. But you know, if there's a little bit of a license, so, so this actually is not my idea. This is Timothy Leary's idea. So, so the idea is that you, um, he said it's like driving a, flying a plane. You have a little bit of a license, driving a car. So you get a little bit of a, you have to have a minimal amount of education. You get this, pass this test, you get a license and the, and the purpose of it is more to take it away if you misbehave. So for example, alcohol, I think in our culture is regulated too lightly. So you're a drunk driver, you lose your driver's license, or you go to a bar and you get into a fight and you get arrested, whatever, you can still go into

• 1:07:01Speaker 04

  a liquor store or bar and get alcohol. If, if you had to have a license to buy alcohol, if you misbehave, you know, then your license is taken away and it's, it'll be a little bit harder for you to. So there, there's a lot of different ways, but I think that over time, we develop a psychedelically informed culture. We, we replace the dare program. We dare to do honest drug education. And we teach people about peer support. MAPS does that with the the Zendo project that we started is psychedelic harm reduction at festivals. And they also train people on how to help your friends and others if they have difficult psychedelic experiences. You don't run away from it. You go into it. This idea that the the resistance is what keeps

• 1:07:45Speaker 04

  it alive. So it's it's about when recreational use turns more serious, you don't just run away and suppress, you go deeper. So I think that that is the kind of thing that we think that the drug war is so bad that we should have access. And there should also be these psychedelic churches, other ways to access. And in Oregon, for example, and Colorado, MAPS is now getting involved with a signature gathering campaign in Alaska to be on the 2028 ballot if they get enough signatures. And this is another kind of plant medicine kind of initiative with a little bit of a twist as an option for plant based MDMA,

• 1:08:27Speaker 04

  which is kind of hilarious because MDMA doesn't come from a plant, but it's a precursor. You get a plant like sassafras that makes saffron oil. And then, you know, you can chemically modify that to get MDMA. So that's a plant based MDMA. It's not derived MDMA. But but in any case, these state level reforms, 18,000 people have received psilocybin in Oregon in the last couple of years. That's more than all the people that have received psilocybin since 2000 in the entire world in clinical studies. And the beauty of these state reforms,

• 1:09:06Speaker 04

  now we have Oregon moving to Colorado, where people don't have to have a diagnosis. You can just go for personal growth. Now, it's not covered by insurance, but and there's training requirements for the people that give it to you. So there's all different ways to provide access. But I think that the suffering is so great, and it's likely to increase. Not just the US and the world. So I would say that, you know, for 40 years, MAPS's basic focus has been make MDMA into medicine. Now, we've started a and launched a company that we're no longer in control of, and it's going to try to make MDMA into medicine

• 1:09:46Speaker 04

  in the US. But MAPS is now globalizing access around the world in nonprofit contexts, and we're taking a nod from Bhutan, which created the Gross National Happiness Measure. So what we're saying is, we need Gross National Trauma Measure. And if we can have that, then we can chart our progress over the next 40 years or so. Are we able, as we spread access to psychedelics and other kind of treatments, able to reduce the burden of trauma that you experience and multi-generational trauma through epigenetics? And so this Gross National Trauma Measure, I just need a philanthropist to say, here's $3 or $4 million

• 1:10:28Speaker 04

  to create the measure, which I've not found. But I think that that's the big thing, is to think globally, to think about humanity as a whole, to think about consciousness shift to where we don't kill each other for our differences, but we learn to appreciate each other, and where people don't see the world through these trauma lenses, which most people do now.

• 1:10:46Mayim Bialik?

  I mean, that's so beautifully said. We're so grateful to get to speak to you again. We want to congratulate you on the 40th anniversary. And if you'd like to learn more, please go to maps.org. There's so many incredible links there. Consider membership if, you know, that's something that you'd like to also contribute to. I'm just, you know, speaking to everyone listening right now, maps.org/membership. Thank you so much for being here and for continuing to really fight on behalf of people who really deserve, you know, kind of better than the system that many of us have always thought that is what we're destined to, you know? You've really opened up something so new.

• 1:11:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, thank you for having me. And I think being willing to talk about these kind of controversial topics, even, you know, 13-year-olds.

• 1:11:36Mayim Bialik?

  Thank you so much, Dr. Dovin. Such a pleasure to speak to you again.

• 1:11:42Jonathan Cohen?

  Look, a lot of people are gonna have pushback about the psychedelics for people under 18. His notion that you should treat closer to the trauma and that the brain isn't developing normally after those experiences anyway, which is an interesting argument, but we don't have any information about how it's gonna interact with that age of a brain.

• 1:12:05Mayim Bialik?

  Well, look, I mean, I think, I'm not trying to be like this hand wavy, like, oh, their brains are still developing, don't, yeah.

• 1:12:11Jonathan Cohen?

  You love a hand wave.

• 1:12:12Mayim Bialik?

  No, as Dr. Doblin would say, like, he's not a physician, like, this is not, you know, he's obviously a complete expert, but I would like to speak to physicians, I'd like to speak to neurologists, I'd like to speak to developmental psychologists to kind of learn more about some of these mechanisms. I mean, I think, here's what I can say, and I'm not a very experienced person with drugs, I think we all know that, but if you had given me and many of the kids that I knew, especially the kids with complicated childhoods or very active brains, if you had given us access to those kinds of drugs at a young age, I don't think that would have turned out well for a lot of reasons. And obviously,

• 1:12:52Mayim Bialik?

  I'm not talking about recreationally, but that's a kind of like, mind-expanding experience that I think can be, I don't know, I'm just, like, Jonathan, can you help me out here? Just like, a little overwhelming in ways that we may not know how to regulate yet? I don't know.

• 1:13:09Jonathan Cohen?

  I think it depends really on, on the home situation, because if you're in a toxic environment at home, and then you have this mind-expanding experience, and then you're back in the environment that has that toxicity, it has nowhere to go or nowhere to land. If you are in a supportive home, and you have a container, and you've then had a like traumatic experience that feels like a one-off situation, whether it be some sort of violence, or some tragedy or an accident, and you then go through an experience with a professional that can help you make sense of it, and reframe your experience, and then all of a sudden you've gone from someone who like, can't process emotion, to being less shut down, more open,

• 1:13:53Jonathan Cohen?

  available to connect, yeah, I think that would have serious positive benefit, but the, like, the scale...

• 1:14:01Mayim Bialik?

  Yeah, if the call is coming from inside the house, that's a whole other problem. And then the question is, what level of trauma do we, let's say as physicians or whatever, what level of trauma do people feel comfortable saying, this child is not safe in this home? These parents are abusive. This is perpetuating the trauma. Or, God forbid, they witnessed an accident, or the, you know, they experienced a rape or an assault, and then it's being reinforced by, like, I don't know. The number of regulations and assessment, I don't mean government regulations. I mean, just like even on a small level. So I don't want to focus also our whole conversation, you know, especially after such an amazing, you know, set of interviews or set of conversations with Rick.

• 1:14:46Mayim Bialik?

  I don't want to focus on the underage stuff, but I think that a lot of people, you know, I think a lot of people have heard about microdosing, right? I think that's something that a lot of people are like more familiar with, or like gummies at parties, apparently. It's like a thing on like the night table, like meh, meh. You know, I think people are more familiar with that kind of, you didn't like that sound? That was the sound of there's gummies on the table. Meh, meh. People are, I think, people are more comfortable with that notion. But the idea that we're talking about, you know, for example, the MDMA protocol that we're talking about, let's say it would be three months in a row, you have one session of MDMA, you know, per month. You're then having to have weekly 90-minute sessions to integrate.

• 1:15:29Mayim Bialik?

  This is not like, let's see if this changes your neuroplasticity. Statistically speaking, and what the studies that Dr. Doblin is working on and supporting, these are studies that have highly regulated results for a very specific kind of training and protocol. Can we expand that out before the pharmaceutical companies get their claws into it? And make it completely something that it's not supposed to be? That's the race that we're in right now.

• 1:15:56Jonathan Cohen?

  I mean, well said. The concern about the pharmaceutical companies focusing only on the substance and leaving out all the therapy and the reprogramming, the notion that your brain is now open and capable of forming new pathways and...

• 1:16:15Jonathan Cohen?

  Changing its perspective, but if you don't integrate that, then you're just gonna go back to all the patterns that you had before. If you don't change your thinking, your story, your perspective, then you're actually not getting the benefit of the neuroplasticity.

• 1:16:30Mayim Bialik?

  And I think a lot of people, like if you were to say that to, let's say, you know, a young, cool person, they'd be like, "You just don't understand, dude." But the idea is, if we're using this for trauma, it's not just about, you know, can you have your life changed? We're talking about this drug is doing something that no other drug before it has done. We're talking about opening up the parts of your brain that you think are wired. I mean, you think that they are set, those grooves are deep, "I've been through too much, I can't get over it." This is a magic potion. This is a magic class of medication that is opening that up. It's like blowing the top off it.

• 1:17:14Mayim Bialik?

  It's like no other medicine you've heard of. It's not like ibuprofen, it's not like icing your back. This is like, there's a mechanism that can utilize the brain's natural ability to learn new things, to mute the default mode network and to be able to say, "You don't have to think this way, you don't have to feel this way, and you don't have to live this way." That's this kind of drug. That's why we're making so many rules about the integration, this, that. It's not just grownups being like, "You kids better do what we say." You don't know how this drug works. It would be the equivalent of like, let's say you're supposed to take a vitamin, but you don't know that you have to take it with a different vitamin for it to be absorbed by your body. This, this kind of treatment will not be absorbed by your body.

• 1:17:58Mayim Bialik?

  If you want it to work for trauma, for resistant, you know, treatment-resistant depression, if you want it to work that way, that's why these protocols exist.

• 1:18:06Jonathan Cohen?

  Well said, very well said.

• 1:18:08Mayim Bialik?

  I'm so grateful that we got to talk to Dr. Dublin again. You know, our first conversation with him was pretty early in our adventures here at My Ambialics Breakdown.

• 1:18:18Jonathan Cohen?

  Within the first handful of episodes, or definitely in the first year.

• 1:18:21Mayim Bialik?

  And it is to his credit, it is to the credit of maps.org, if you want to go learn more, it is to his credit that this conversation has changed so much, even in the five years that we've been here. And it hasn't just progressed from conversations about it from an esoteric, you know, perspective to a recreational one. We are into a conversation with, again, a government that not everybody has to agree with in order to also understand not only funding, but the structure of a conversation. One doesn't have to agree with any of the people advocating for this in any particular category. As, as Dr. Dublin said, if the funding is going to the places that will help more people, we cannot care so much about the reasons that politics are upside down and we're literally

• 1:19:06Mayim Bialik?

  living in the upside down with so many of these conversations. So, you know, we'll, we'll include links for all the good things. And also, if you haven't watched something like Dopesick or, you know, any of these incredible investigations and, you know, in many cases dramatizations of cases, learn more about the opioid crisis. And it's not, it shouldn't be depressing. It should hopefully motivate you to want to see a different way forward, especially if you are a person who loves someone or is experiencing things like chronic pain or addiction. So, please check us out on Substack. Also, there's content there that you can't get anywhere else. Make sure you're subscribed here, it's so important to us. So, please subscribe anywhere you listen or watch, from our breakdown to the one we

• 1:19:51Mayim Bialik?

  hope you never have. We'll see you next time.