#97 Rick Doblin - MDMA Psychedelic Assisted Therapy

Rick Doblin, Ph. D., is the Founder & President of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) and this episode is all about his life and work. This episode is a holistic look at the point where traditional therapy meets psychedelics and how Doblin and his team have spent the last few decades appealing to the scientific community and lawmakers across the world. Doblin gives us a fresh perspective on the mental health crisis and discusses his studies & experiments in Iceland. We cover his early professional life and what lead him to pursue the science of alternative medicines. Doblin believes that with psychedelic assisted therapy, the world could be trauma free by 2070. Are you interested in learning more about this type of therapy? Shawn received his treatment here - https://ambio.life Shawn Ryan Show Sponsors: https://lairdsuperfood.com - USE CODE "SRS" https://helixsleep.com/srs - USE CODE "HELIXPARTNER20" https://ziprecruiter.com/srs https://hillsdale.edu/srs https://moinkbox.com/shawn https://blackbuffalo.com https://meetfabric.com/shawn https://ShawnLikesGold.com | 855-936-GOLD #goldcopartner Rick Doblin Links: MAPS - https://maps.org/about-maps/mission/ Get Involved - https://maps.org/take-action/ Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/rickdoblinphd/ Learn More - https://sprout.link/rickdoblinphd Please leave us a review on Apple & Spotify Podcasts. Vigilance Elite/Shawn Ryan Links: Website | Patreon | TikTok | Instagram | Download Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Now, more than ever, we need someone on our side. But Rob Whitman? Whitman's votes drove up costs, cut Medicaid, and risked 350,000 Virginians' health care to pay for tax breaks for himself and his donors. He's not on our side. Shannon Taylor will fight corruption, cut taxes, and bring down costs. This November, vote for Shannon Taylor. She's for us. Paid for by HMP, the HouseMajorityPac.com. Not authorized by any candidate or candidate's committee.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Nordstrom. For 125 years, Nordstrom has been part of your story. The stylist who found the perfect outfit for your big interview. The first pair of walking shoes for your one-year-old. The tomato soup you shared with your sister at the cafe. These are the moments that make Nordstrom Nordstrom. Big or small, we're here for all of it. Celebrating 125 years with new moments still add. Discover it all in Nordstrom stores and at nordstrom.com.

• 1:00Shawn Ryan?

  Originally, this episode aired roughly nine months ago. Shortly after it aired, just a couple of hours, I had the episode pulled because of some values that didn't align with my own. And that was selfish of me, and I shouldn't have done that. Let me explain why.

• 1:23Shawn Ryan?

  Last week, some new developments came from psychedelic therapy, some new light.

• 1:32Shawn Ryan?

  And it happened to be one of my best friends.

• 1:37Shawn Ryan?

  And this individual has been blown up in Afghanistan, one of the worst car bombs that I've actually seen somebody survive. And then later on in life, he was shot in the head. Most of you have probably seen this episode. He's been on the show before. I'm not going to mention any names, not yet. But after he was shot in the head,

• 2:06Shawn Ryan?

  he survived that, by the way, obviously.

• 2:10Shawn Ryan?

  He couldn't go anywhere without a cane.

• 2:15Shawn Ryan?

  Because he is dizzy all the time. He can't go out into sunlight without sunglasses because light sensitivity is so bad after his traumatic brain injury. He spends about half of his week in bed because he's unable to get out because the traumatic brain injury is so bad. And I have been trying to talk him into getting some type of psychedelic therapy for years.

• 2:48Shawn Ryan?

  And he finally did it and he went to Trevor Miller from Ambio Life Sciences. I've talked about it several times on the show. Guy's doing amazing work. Well, my best friend went down there for one week, did an Ibogaine treatment and a 5-MEO DMT treatment.

• 3:14Shawn Ryan?

  And when he left, he left his cane there because he said he no longer needs it. The dizziness vertigo is completely gone. He was able to go outside without sunglasses because the light sensitivity is gone.

• 3:34Shawn Ryan?

  And as of right now,

• 3:37Shawn Ryan?

  his brain

• 3:41Shawn Ryan?

  seems to be damn near healed. And um,

• 3:49Shawn Ryan?

  when he told me that, I actually burst out into tears because I was so happy for him. And so the point I'm getting at is

• 3:59Shawn Ryan?

  this stuff is helping people.

• 4:05Shawn Ryan?

  And I think there is a lot of people that don't want this stuff to see the light of day.

• 4:11Shawn Ryan?

  And it was wrong of me to pull this episode because it could have helped people.

• 4:17Shawn Ryan?

  And it's going to help people.

• 4:21Shawn Ryan?

  If you're struggling with things that this therapy could help, I suggest you look into it because it is helping thousands of people get the life that they once had back.

• 4:35Shawn Ryan?

  And so I want to personally say,

• 4:41Shawn Ryan?

  Rick Doblin. I apologize for pulling this episode.

• 4:48Shawn Ryan?

  That was selfish of me.

• 4:52Shawn Ryan?

  And you're doing great things in the world, and I hope you continue to do so. And with that being said, ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, please welcome one of the leading pioneers in the psychedelic assisted therapy space, Mr. Rick Doblin, to the Sean Ryan Show.

• 5:19Shawn Ryan?

  Rick Doblin.

• 5:21Speaker 03

  Hello, Sean.

• 5:21Shawn Ryan?

  Welcome to the Sean Ryan Show.

• 5:23Speaker 03

  Yes, I'm so glad you like to do these things in person, too, because it is much better that way.

• 5:28Shawn Ryan?

  I won't do it any other way. I love it in person. I've got to meet everybody. And we'll find out why we do it in person here in a minute, but just a brief introduction. Rick Doblin, PhD, just going to go through some of your, some of the fantastic stuff you've done throughout the years. So you're the founder and executive director of Multidisciplinary Action Association for Psychedelic Studies, MAPS, which you founded in 1986. You received your doctorate in public policy from Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, where you wrote your dissertation on the regulation of medical uses of psychedelics and marijuana. Your

• 6:07Shawn Ryan?

  master's thesis was on a survey of oncologists about smoked marijuana versus oral THC pill in nausea control for cancer patients. You also conducted a 34-year follow-up study with Timothy Leary's Concord Prison Experiment. You studied with Dr., tell me if I butcher this, Stanislav Grof.

• 6:31Speaker 03

  You did it. That's great. He's a Czech psychiatrist who actually, when the Russians moved into Czechoslovakia in 68, he fled. And then he became in charge of psychedelic research at Johns Hopkins.

• 6:44Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting, interesting.

• 6:46Shawn Ryan?

  And were among the first to be certified as a holotropic breathwork practitioner.

• 6:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, so it's astonishing that just by hyperventilating, you can get into states of mind that are similar to psychedelics. And so when psychedelics were criminalized in the Controlled Substances Act in 1970, and then we wiped out research, Stan tried to think about how can he go forward when all the tools that he had were illegal? And then he studied breathing, and he realized that if you do this hyperventilation in a certain kind of a way, in an emotionally evocative way, it feels kind of like you're tripping, and things come up from the surface. And the beauty of it is what it indicates is that this materials that happen when we take Ibogaine, or take LSD, and the things that come to our mind, they don't come from the drug, they come from us.

• 7:37Speaker 03

  And that you can do the same thing with breathing, that it alters your chemistry, it alters the way our brain is working, but these are endogenous to us. And I think the breathwork is a tool that really demonstrates that. It's also difficult in the sense that you have to hyperventilate in order to weaken your defenses, and then when difficult material comes up, often you have to keep breathing. So it's easier in a way to just take a drug that does it, then you don't have to think about triggering yourself, now you just, you know, need to open up to what's coming. But I think Stan was really the through line when psychedelics were criminalized up until sort of the beginnings of the psychedelic renaissance, several decades later, when the FDA started permitting psychedelic research.

• 8:22Speaker 03

  So the breathwork attracted most of the people that were interested in psychedelics, this was another tool. And many of the early psychedelic researchers had been trained by Stan, including myself.

• 8:36Shawn Ryan?

  Really? Do you do that a lot, the breathwork?

• 8:39Speaker 03

  No, I'd rather take a drug.

• 8:43Speaker 03

  Is it a lot of breath holds? No, no, it's just hyperventilation. So the beautiful thing about what Stan has done with his wife Christina at the time they developed it, now he's married to Prigita. But what he realized is that there's all sorts of breathing techniques. And you could, you know, say breathe a certain number of times in this nostril, that nostril, breathe out of your nose, breathe into your nose, all these different ways. But the basic aspect of holotropic breathwork is you just breathe faster and deeper and find your own rhythm in that way. Okay. And that's all people need. So he didn't complicate it with things. It was just, he took it down to the essence. And if you just breathe faster and deeper, it changes the chemistry in your brain and

• 9:28Speaker 03

  it makes it so that you're more open to emotions and memories. That is fascinating. Yeah, a lot of times when people are having a panic reaction, they're hyperventilating. And he said that the classic approach in psychiatry or in psychiatric emergency rooms is when people are hyperventilating is you try to stop it. You try to help them calm down in a way. But the approach that Stan took is let it emerge even bigger. You know, that things are coming to the surface. You're hyperventilating because you're dealing with these emotions, they're getting stronger. And instead of trying to control symptoms, what Stan said, if you let it go, you will get to the root causes and you'll be able to resolve some of the core issues instead

• 10:10Speaker 03

  of just masking it with either, you know, SSRIs or other psychiatric medicines. So that was his big insight is that this hyperventilation is a sign of somebody having a panic reaction, but the solution is not to suppress it, but to let it fully flower. And then Stan has this beautiful expression, which is the full expression of an emotion is the funeral pyre of that emotion. Okay. And what he means by that is that if you can, like even if, a lot of times, I don't know if this happened to you during your Abigail trip, but sometimes you feel like it's going to last forever and it'll never end and you're stuck. You know, so I had moments like that in my Ivy and Trip.

• 10:54Speaker 03

  And so what Stan is saying is letting yourself feel stuck rather than rushing to run away from being stuck is the way to get unstuck. If you surrender to being stuck, the, the, everything's in motion and, you know, the stars, everything's in motion. And if you fully open up to the moment, then it will change. And the resistance is what keeps things there. So a lot of times what PTSD is for people is that there's difficult memories, there's difficult emotions, and they, they feel overwhelming, but you never can get away from them. You know, and, and so the, ironically, in a way, the solution is to let it grow bigger

• 11:38Speaker 03

  and fully accept it, and then it will change. So this idea that the full experience of an emotion is the funeral pyre of that emotion, it's, it's a, it's part of the, the core philosophy of how we do psychedelic psychotherapy, is to open up to things.

• 11:53Shawn Ryan?

  That is fascinating. That's, I would love to talk about that later, too.

• 11:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 11:59Shawn Ryan?

  Your professional goal is to help develop legal contexts for the beneficial uses of psychedelics and marijuana, primarily as prescription medicines, but also for personal growth for otherwise healthy people, and eventually to become a legalized, a legally licensed psychedelic therapist.

• 12:17Speaker 03

  Yes, so that was my goal when I was 18 years old. And now I'm 69, was to become a psychedelic therapist. And so I just am so lucky that this idea that I had when I was 18 still makes sense now. And the goals here, that they point to the, the important strategy that we have at MAPS, which is there's a twofold parallel strategy. One is to medicalize psychedelics for PTSD, for depression, for anxiety, for substance abuse, for other things. But the other is to change drug policy and to make these legally available to people on their own. And if they want to do it in a religious context, that's fine. If they want to do it in a therapeutic context, that's fine. If they want to do it at a party, that's okay. It's how they want it.

• 13:01Speaker 03

  So it's, it's basically a somewhat of a libertarian approach to this idea that the government shouldn't be intruding in, in our own consciousness and how we adjust our consciousness. They should be making penalties, you could say, for misbehaving. But to being in different states of awareness, that should be our human right. And so it also speaks to our long-term goal. So our long-term goal, which may be very long-term, is a mass mental health and a spiritualized humanity. Where we understand our place in the universe and we're not destroying the environment and killing each other. So that requires this two-pronged strategy.

• 13:45Speaker 03

  That it's not just making psychedelics into medicines for people that have clinical diagnoses. It's also, in a way, preventative medicine, you could say, for healthy people to explore their own, like a vision quest when you're young or when you're contemplating death or at any point in the lifespan, just for personal growth or joy or celebration. So I like to reframe recreational drugs as celebratory drugs.

• 14:13Shawn Ryan?

  Very cool. We have, we have a lot to talk about.

• 14:17Speaker 03

  We do.

• 14:19Shawn Ryan?

  But before we dive in, everybody that comes on the show gets a gift.

• 14:23Speaker 03

  Oh, oh, thank you.

• 14:24Shawn Ryan?

  So. Go ahead, open it up.

• 14:31Speaker 03

  Oh, oh, gummy bears.

• 14:33Shawn Ryan?

  Those are Vigilance Elite gummy bears made right here in the USA. Unfortunately, there is no psychedelic effects in those.

• 14:43Speaker 03

  I was just looking at the ingredients.

• 14:46Shawn Ryan?

  But we're looking for that. We're looking at that.

• 14:48Speaker 03

  Is there cannabinoids?

• 14:50Shawn Ryan?

  No, it's just, it's just a good snack you can have on the way home.

• 14:54Speaker 03

  Oh, thank you.

• 14:55Shawn Ryan?

  That's it.

• 14:57Speaker 03

  Okay, great.

• 14:58Shawn Ryan?

  But, so we connected through Trevor Miller.

• 15:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:03Shawn Ryan?

  Who gave me my first IGA gain experience. Thank you, Trevor, for linking us together. I've been super excited about this. And, and the stuff that Trevor's doing down there. It has changed a lot of lives, mine included. I haven't, I have not drank in over a year now.

• 15:21Speaker 03

  Well, I see all these bottles.

• 15:23Shawn Ryan?

  I know, I get a lot of flack for that. But, um, cause I am, I haven't drank in a year, but I don't know what else to put there. So, we'll figure something out eventually. But, um, yeah, you know, it helped me be in the moment. I haven't had any caffeine. I actually, uh, in a year, over a year. I quit smoking marijuana for right around four months and then, um, I needed it to sleep again. But, um.

• 15:51Speaker 03

  Funny, cause I use marijuana to not sleep.

• 15:53Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 15:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, cause I get the highest THC sativa and late at night I like to work with it. It, it makes me more creative and so when I'm tired, I smoke pot to wake up. In order to do work, yeah.

• 16:07Shawn Ryan?

  You're a night owl.

• 16:07Speaker 03

  I am a night owl, yeah.

• 16:09Shawn Ryan?

  What are you working on at late at night?

• 16:10Speaker 03

  Well, last night, actually, I was up till like 2:30. So I, I, yeah, if I go to, I feel lame if I go to bed before midnight.

• 16:19Shawn Ryan?

  Man, I am in bed every night at like 8:30, 9 o'clock, but I got, I got an 18 month oldies.

• 16:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:26Shawn Ryan?

  He's up at four, but.

• 16:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, I just have an unending stream of emails and work to do and, you know, at the MAPS Public Benefit Corp. We now have about 130 people. That's our pharmaceutical arm at MAPS, which is the nonprofit that currently owns the Public Benefit Corp. We have about 32 people or so and there's just, we're, we're culminating decades and decades of work. So there's so much to do and late at night is probably my favorite time because everything's quiet and I can think. You know, I'm not responding to phones and then I can sort of pick what's the most important stuff to do.

• 17:02Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 17:04Shawn Ryan?

  Well, I got a, I got a lot I want to cover. We got a short amount of time. And, um, some of the stuff I want to cover, I definitely want to cover your MDMA studies.

• 17:13Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 17:14Shawn Ryan?

  In Iceland.

• 17:15Speaker 03

  Well, well, well, that's just starting. We're starting to start it in Iceland. It hasn't started yet, yeah.

• 17:21Shawn Ryan?

  I, I want to dive into that and then we'll get into the mental health crisis.

• 17:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:26Shawn Ryan?

  And, uh, and legalizing all this stuff. So.

• 17:29Speaker 03

  Great.

• 17:29Shawn Ryan?

  But let's start, we're kind of, I kind of brought up Trevor and, um.

• 17:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:35Shawn Ryan?

  Everything he, everything that my journey down there has done for me. And, and for anybody listening, his, his website's in the description, but Ibogaine.

• 17:46Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 17:47Shawn Ryan?

  So you've done Ibogaine, I've done Ibogaine. I'd love to hear a little about your experience.

• 17:52Speaker 03

  Okay, so my one experience with Ibogaine, and it was one of the most important experiences of my whole life, but it wasn't one that I thought, oh, I'm gonna rush to do that again. It was kind of difficult, it was very difficult. And it was in 1985, so it's, it's a long time ago. And what was happening, MAPS started in 1986. And so 1984 is when I started a nonprofit before MAPS. And that was in anticipation of the Drug Enforcement Administration trying to criminalize MDMA. So I learned about MDMA in 1982, when it was still legal. And it was a drug called Adam, as a therapy drug, but it was just becoming ecstasy.

• 18:35Speaker 03

  So that it was clear that during Nancy Reagan, Just Say No, and Ronald Reagan, that they were gonna come after it. But we had this advantage, in the sense that the DEA knew about ecstasy, but they didn't know about the therapeutic use of MDMA. That had been done quiet in homes, it wasn't public. The MDMA had been used more in public settings, and it was starting to be sold in, in bars and for dances and things like that. So a bunch of advocates for psychedelics, and there weren't that many back then, and Albert Hofmann, who invented LSD and synthesized psilocybin, Sasha Shulgin, who was sort of the godfather of MDMA, and also Stan Grof and others.

• 19:18Speaker 03

  We gathered at Esalen, which is in Big Sur, California. Dick Price, who was one of the co-founders of Esalen. And so we planned, how would we defend the therapeutic use of MDMA, once the DEA would come to criminalize it? All right, so in 1984, they moved to try to criminalize it, and they had a 30-day public comment period. And on basically the 30th day around, I went into DEA headquarters with this petition, signed by Harvard psychiatrists, all sorts of people. And we had pro bono legal representation by a big DC law firm, and we were able to get this hearing. And what that meant is that we have a series of hearings, and we could bring witnesses.

• 20:03Speaker 03

  And so there's a man called the Secret Chief. He's no longer alive, but his name was Leo Zep. And so he was the one that really pioneered the medical use of MDMA and trained hundreds of therapists. And so he was part of this group as well. And he came to me and he said, "You're going to be coming up to try to be a spokesperson. You're going to be helping to represent us in DC. You're going to be going to these hearings with the DEA. And I want to give you an I begane experience, if you want it, with the purpose is to sort of own your own shadow." Because if I go into these sort of struggles with the DEA, and I'm all good, and I'm demonizing them, and they're all bad,

• 20:47Speaker 03

  you know, I'm not going to be able to build bridges. And I'm not going to be able to really understand where they're coming from. And so it was also to help me just through my own therapy as well.

• 21:01Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Nordstrom. For 125 years, Nordstrom has been part of your story. The stylist who found the perfect outfit for your big interview. The first pair of walking shoes for your one-year-old. The tomato soup you shared with your sister at the cafe. These are the moments that make Nordstrom, Nordstrom. Big or small, we're here for all of it. Celebrating 125 years with new moments still add. Discover it all in Nordstrom stores and at nordstrom.com.

• 21:32Speaker 04

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• 21:56Speaker 03

  All right, so I said, Leo, yeah, I would be very grateful. I'd like to do this. He previously said that for me for an LSD experience mixed with Harmaline, which is one of the drugs in ayahuasca. Harmaline? Harmaline. I've not heard of that one yet. Yeah, it's not as psychedelic by itself. It is somewhat, but it's... So I had that experience. It was beautiful, but then he said, "Let's try the ibogaine." Which, there's an incredible book called "The Secret Chief Revealed" about Leo Zeph that's available on the MAPS website, and it's his story about all the different drugs and how he uses them. And he helped really popularize ibogaine also in the United States.

• 22:39Speaker 03

  And so, ibogaine, I took it in the plant form, and it takes a while to have an effect. So, he said, "I'm gonna give you LSD at the same time that I'm gonna give you this ibogaine." Oh, man. And it was 350 mcg of LSD, which is a pretty hefty dose of LSD. And we were planning to have a therapy session that would be like 12 hours long, or more, something like that. And so, we started in the morning, and I had done a whole lot of LSD in my life before then, but of course, I'd never done ibogaine. And so, I could feel the LSD dissolving my sense of self and opening up to all these incredible energies and visualizations.

• 23:19Speaker 03

  And it was just, it was very challenging, but also very ethereal in a way. LSD is a lot in your mind. Psilocybin is more in your body, but it also has a lot of visuals, but LSD is even more abstract in that sense. Interesting. Yeah. I think that's why people would have more, potentially more, kind of panic reactions to LSD than to psilocybin in some ways, because you're, it's not as grounded as the psilocybin, but it's also incredible. But I could feel that I was doing well. The way I described it is that, you know, you're going in, there's, the peak is about three hours or so from the LSD. And I was able to pretty much be open to that.

• 24:02Speaker 03

  But then I felt this gradual sort of other thing coming up, which was the I-V gain.

• 24:08Shawn Ryan?

  You could differentiate the two.

• 24:10Speaker 03

  I could. And I think the, because when I sort of peaked with the LSD and it was starting to diminish in a way, the I-V gain was building and building and building. And what I ended up doing is feeling like, you know, so much is at stake here and this is going to try to help me argue with the DEA to keep MDMA legal as a therapy and I have to do the very best that I can. And so I got into kind of a familiar negative spiral that I've had before with a bunch of my early LSD trips where I wasn't capable. I was too scared of letting go.

• 24:50Speaker 03

  I mean, I was holding on, you know, this idea of your ego dissolution and opening up to whatever is there. It takes a lot of trust and a lot of strength and a lot of support from the outside if you can manage that. I used to do that just by myself and I didn't have therapy support or anything like that. So this was this sense that I was, this rumbling in my kind of guttural sense. But then it was that if I could just let go fully, if I didn't have fear, if I could just open up, that I might get all these important insights and I might make these important changes and then I would be more effective. But I was holding myself back.

• 25:30Speaker 03

  And I felt like, oh, then it turned into this sort of shame spiral, like, you know, this is incredible, beautiful opportunity and all you need to do is let go and you can't do it. And then I would just, I would get sick about myself and then I would throw up. And then that would give me a little bit of peace for a little bit more time. And then this swirl would start of this. Again, the sense that I wasn't good enough, that I should be more capable in this ways. And everything, so much depended on me to do that. And I was wanting myself to do more, and I just couldn't. And so, it ended up, this, the imagery that I had was that I was,

• 26:13Speaker 03

  and I'm Jewish, and so this imagery was that I was being crucified on the cross of self-perfectionism. Oh, wow. That I, I couldn't accept the fact in a way that I was human. I had to be perfect. I had to be this kind of better than I was, you know? And that the self-perfectionism was unreal. Like, I wasn't acknowledging my humanity. But also, it was connected to self-hatred. The self-critical part was connected to self-hatred. And I would see that. And it just went on and on and on. And I just kept, by the time I had nothing left to throw up, but I was still, like, throwing up. And it was like ten, twelve hours of that. And I just couldn't get out of it.

• 26:58Speaker 03

  It was just this spiral. And it was clearly I began. By this point, the LSD had pretty much gone. And, and we'd started in the morning. And somehow, I had this other phrase that I told myself was, near the evening, the stars came out, and something switched in me. And I called it transcendence through exhaustion. It wasn't that I figured something out. It wasn't that I made an intellectual or emotional breakthrough, or a spiritual breakthrough. I just so exhausted myself by this constant struggle that I just let go. I couldn't do it anymore. And I had this most beautiful night,

• 27:42Speaker 03

  like, probably the most in-the-now moment, you know? And watching the stars, and, and this is where I pieced a bunch of things together, which is that I need this self-critical part. That that's the, um, the urge towards quality. That's the vehicle towards quality. You need to be constantly checking yourself on how you could do better. But if I could separate out the self-criticism from the self-hatred, then I could even do better in my life. Because I would have an easier access to all the self-critical part. And it wouldn't be so painful, because it wasn't linked to the self-hatred.

• 28:23Shawn Ryan?

  How many guys out there are worried about brain health? You know, all we hear about is fitness. Everybody's getting ready for bikini season because spring's right around the corner. I'm personally more concerned about my brain. You look around, you see all these brain diseases that are getting out of control. I'm going to take everything I can to improve the health of my brain. And I'm going to tell you about my five favorite supplements from Laird Superfoods that help with brain health. All right, the first thing I do every morning is I have Laird Superfood Creamer. It's got adaptogens and functional mushrooms, which are great for brain health. I put this in my tea, tastes amazing. Who likes vegetables?

• 29:08Shawn Ryan?

  Cool, me neither. That's why I take Laird's Daily Greens. Just pour it in a cup, shoot it real quick, you got your daily vegetable intake. Plus, guess what? Yep, that's right. Functional mushroom extract, there are six different kinds in here. Once again, great for brain health. After greens, we got daily reds. This one doesn't actually have any functional mushrooms in it, but I can't stand beets. I think they taste like shit. And so I take one scoop of this, put it in my water, and I don't have to eat beets anymore. All right, we're winding down the day now. This is the next supplement I take every single night. Laird's Sleep and Recovery helps me sleep, helps me recover from my daily workout. And guess what? Yep, you're right. It has mushroom extract. Guess what? It's good for your brain.

• 29:53Shawn Ryan?

  And I save the best for last. Most of you know this, my favorite supplement at Laird's is Performance Mushrooms. Has a ton of mushroom extract. Super, super good for your brain. Take it every single day, sometimes multiple times a day. These are my five favorite supplements from Laird Superfoods. You can go over to lairdsuperfood.com, use the promo code SRS, save 20%. Ladies and gents, I would not have partnered with this company if I didn't believe in them. They take the cleanest ingredients. They try to source everything in America, unless they find a better ingredient that's more quality somewhere else. I think we can all appreciate that.

• 30:35Shawn Ryan?

  Once again, lairdsuperfood.com, use the promo code SRS, that'll save you 20%.

• 30:49Speaker 03

  I sort of had to accept the fact that I'm human. And within that was also the sense that I'm gonna die. Partially was that I'm not immortal. You know, so it was partially the fear of death, accepting death, accepting that my time is limited, accepting that I'm human. And then it was this blissful night of just acceptance. But somehow I told myself that by the morning light, that the nausea would be back, that I would be back. Because I still felt I just hadn't earned it. I hadn't thought my way out of it. I had just exhausted myself. And so, sure enough, the sun comes up, and all of a sudden, I'm, you know, completely nauseous, and I can't even sit up. And there was supposed to be a friend to come.

• 31:33Speaker 03

  I'm sorry. No worries. Okay.

• 31:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I was supposed to have a friend come and pick me up, but I couldn't even sit up. So, the people that were taking care of me told them not to even come. And I spent the whole next day just lying, like in a fetal position. Occasionally, I would go to the bathroom. They would give me a banana or something to eat. But I hardly ate anything. And it was this very disturbing, dizzy, it was horrible, for a whole other day. Uh huh. And so then on day three, finally, my friend came to pick me up. This was at somebody else's house. And when I was leaving, I finally could stand up. And I had this unusual series of experiences.

• 32:23Speaker 03

  As we're driving, I'd never been there before. And, but I was like, I think I know what's around the corner. And, and I would describe it, and a couple of times, I'd be right. Really? But it was, I had come that way to get there. Okay. So it wasn't that I was tuned in. But, but I think what it had done is it had cleaned out a bunch of space in my brain. This constant self-criticism, this constant self-hatred, this battle in my brain, it kind of quieted that. And I think that I had more mental attention to remember all these peripheral things that had happened as I was driving to this place, that I wasn't really paying attention to it, but somehow it had registered. And now I had more space in my brain, and I could somehow think, oh, I can, that's a memory. I just sort of caught that out of the corner of my eye,

• 33:07Speaker 03

  but that might be what's next. And so, ever since then, I've had a much easier relationship with this self-critical part. And when I look back and I think, what are the things that really contributed to the success of MAPS? That right now, we have two successful Phase 3 studies with MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD. It's the fact that we've made millions of mistakes. We're doing stuff that I've never done before, nobody's ever done before. We're constantly making mistakes, but we're able to learn from them. One of the things that I'm very proud of is that in our protocols, our various experiments that we did, particularly in what's called Phase 2, which are the studies that you do

• 33:48Speaker 03

  to figure out what's your treatment, what's your dose, who's your patients, who does it work for, who doesn't work for, in order to prepare for Phase 3, which is the biggest... that's where the large-scale, multi-site, double-line placebo-controlled studies to prove safety and efficacy, to try to get FDA approval. But in Phase 2, you're learning. And we would constantly be amending our protocols with something that we learned, and try something new, and try to keep improving patient outcomes. And so, I do think that that Ibogaine experience, that one Ibogaine experience, which I do think about more as Ibogaine than LSD, because the Ibogaine is what really lingered and I think changed it fundamentally.

• 34:30Speaker 03

  That ability to separate self-hatred from self-criticism, really, I think, has contributed to where we are today. Because it's not as painful to think, "Oh, I fucked up here." I like to joke that, but I mean it, that I'm just a fuck-up who just keeps trying. You know, that persistence. And I'm comfortable making decisions. I've learned too, that leading an organization, that a lot of times, it's more important that you make a decision than it be the right decision. You just have to... you don't know the right decision. You just make a decision, and then you learn, once you've made the decision. And if it's a wrong one, then you change course. So, I attribute so much to that Ibogaine experience.

• 35:10Speaker 03

  And then, we ended up, this idea of owning my own shadow, I was able to make a good relationship with some of the people from the DEA. And to just show you how amazing that was, there was one person from the DEA, Gene Haslip, at the headquarters, that was the one behind criminalizing MDMA. But there was a fellow, Frank Sapienza, that was the deputy, and he went to all these hearings. And he had said to Newsweek in early 1985, that we took them totally by surprise. That the DEA only knew about ecstasy, they didn't know about the therapeutic use. So when I showed up, they were taken totally by surprise. So in my discussions with him, in my meetings with him, I knew that he wasn't really trying

• 35:53Speaker 03

  to crush the therapy, he was trying to crush the recreational use. We were just collateral damage. But at least we could kind of feel like I could tell him stories about therapy and why it's important. And we eventually won the lawsuit against the DEA. You did. We did. But we lost that battle because the DEA didn't have to take the recommendations of the judge. It was called an administrative law judge hearing, and the administrative law judges make recommendations, they don't compel. Okay. So when the DEA rejected the recommendation of the judge, they have to give a rationale. And so we were able to then sue them in the appeals courts, where the appeals courts can tell them what to do. And we won twice, again.

• 36:37Speaker 03

  And they kept, but they kept saying to the DEA, "You did it wrong, your logic is flawed, think about it again." And so they did it twice, and both times we won again. And finally, on the third time, the DEA figured out how to make the courts happy. All right, so what happened just about six months ago or so is there's a woman, Rachel Noor, who's done some articles about psychedelics for the New York Times. She's writing a book on MDMA, and she wanted to interview some of the early people that, from the DEA, that criminalized MDMA. And I said, "All right, I'll see if I can find them." So Gene Haslip is no longer alive, but I said, "Maybe I can find Frank Sapienza." And so as it turned out, I found him on LinkedIn. Really?

• 37:21Speaker 03

  He's no longer with the DEA, but he consults with pharma companies to help them reschedule drugs if they get FDA approval.

• 37:29Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 37:29Speaker 03

  Couldn't believe it. Alright, so I decided to write him a letter. We need help. We have consultants that we're working, Penny and Associates, that they're experts in drug abuse liability, and they advise FDA and DEA on, you know, where the schedules, you know, how much control should be about the drugs. So I wrote him this message on the LinkedIn, and I said, "We haven't talked in 35 years, and now we're all this way. We've got two successful Phase 3 studies." Well, we have one successful Phase 3 study. We're doing the second one at the time I contacted him. And I said, "We're gonna need some help if the second study works out to reschedule. Would you work with our team, and also this

• 38:10Speaker 03

  woman, Rachel, wants to interview you for her book?" So the very next day, Frank wrote me back, and he said, "I remember you. I remember you really well. You know, I remember this, and yes, I will be willing to help you in this effort to reschedule drugs."

• 38:25Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 38:26Speaker 03

  And I attribute that to my Ibegane experience.

• 38:29Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 38:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, because this idea of, I could see Frank not as the evil DEA trying to crush this beautiful therapy MDMA. I could see him, okay, he had a job, he thinks that people are hurting themselves with drugs, with party drugs, and, you know, he's trying to do that. But I think this idea of owning my own shadow and being able to approach people where it's not, "I'm all good and they're all bad," it made it so I had a better relationship with Frank, and I do attribute that a lot to the Ibegane experience.

• 39:03Shawn Ryan?

  That is fascinating. Just how it all came, you know, full circle.

• 39:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 39:10Shawn Ryan?

  And, you know, you talk about the self-criticism and self-hatred, and that is actually something that I got a lot out of the Ibegane as well.

• 39:21Speaker 03

  Oh, oh.

• 39:22Shawn Ryan?

  Because I'm a perfectionist. I'm extremely self-critical, and when it came to this, this exact, you know, my podcast, this show, it just, as soon as I got done with that, this show just exploded. And it was, I was so, so particular about every little thing, which guest is coming on, my research. I used to spend...

• 39:50Shawn Ryan?

  A week researching each guest and I can only crank one of these out a month. Uh, because I was put so much time and effort into it and then after the Iber again, it was, it was similar. It was just do it. Just do what you want to do. Quit worrying about what everybody else thinks. Quit being so critical of yourself. And just get in there and do what you love doing.

• 40:12Speaker 03

  And can, can you say though, how the IBA helped you to do that or?

• 40:16Shawn Ryan?

  Well, it, I didn't get like a lot of visuals in the IBA game. I got, I had a lot of intuitive thoughts

• 40:29Shawn Ryan?

  during my, my journey, but I, I don't know exactly how it happened. It, I kept seeing new beginnings. Like the first thing I saw down there was, was we started with this maracas and we were in front of a mirror, of a mirror. It was very ceremonial, which I, which I really appreciate and and I, I, a lot of the guys that I went down with, they laid down first before they saw anything and, and I was, I wasn't doing, I was like, I'm going to see something in this mirror. I came down here to, to dig deep and uncover some stuff and

• 41:09Shawn Ryan?

  first thing that happened is, is my head started splitting open like a, almost like a tulip or a flower or something. It's split in two. And, and then a new head came up like mushroomed out of my old head and um, and I, I had talked to a therapist afterwards who kind of guided me before and, and helped me afterwards and and me and her um, kind of dug into a lot of this stuff and, and.

• 41:42Shawn Ryan?

  We think that means new beginnings.

• 41:43Speaker 03

  Mm-hmm.

• 41:44Shawn Ryan?

  You know, and um, and without going too deep, I was able to put a lot of past traumas away and, and, and, and deal with it in the moment like that. And, and it just really helped me. And then.

• 41:59Speaker 03

  Could you say just more about like putting past traumas away? I mean, that's so hard. I mean, people stuck sometimes for decades. We actually had someone in our studies who had PTSD from Vietnam.

• 42:11Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 42:12Speaker 03

  And they still are able to get better. So, so how, but they, until that, they couldn't put it away. So, so how, how did that happen?

• 42:20Shawn Ryan?

  I wish I could tell you. I don't know. I can tell you, I, I've, it was like, it was like going through thousands of memories. And what I saw, one of my, the visual that sticks out the most is it was almost like these TV screens, just rows of TV screens. And they were just going like that and disappearing over the horizon. Everything was black and alls I could see was two rows of TV screens just going, um, almost like the, the credits in Star Trek, you know, they just disappear.

• 43:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 43:01Shawn Ryan?

  And I could see all these different memories from childhood, from war, from Iraq, from Afghanistan, from my time at the agency, the SEAL teams, things with my parents, recent memories with my wife and my son on our property. And it, there didn't seem to be any, they weren't organized in any certain way. It was just, it was just, it was just TV screens, just moving past. And anytime I could see them through my peripheral, but if I tried to dive in and, and re-experience something like, oh, I remember that, that was. When we got blown up in Iraq, or I remember that, that was

• 43:44Shawn Ryan?

  an argument I had with my dad, you know, when I was I mean, there was memories of me like five years old coming up. But nothing, like I said, it was just, it seemed completely random. And if I would try to dive in and re-experience something, everything would disappear. And then they would come back. And so I guess I maybe I I trained myself to not try to control the situation and dive in and re-experience these different memories. Some of them good, some of them bad, some of them because I missed somebody who's not here anymore and all kinds of stuff.

• 44:24Shawn Ryan?

  If I didn't try to re-experience them, then it would just keep going and keep going. And so I think what that was maybe was all of my, I think it was my neural pathways opening back up and and everything kind of reconnecting. Does that, does that sound?

• 44:46Speaker 03

  Well, I think that there is physiological correlates of of what's going on psychologically. And that I begin, there's an interesting woman who's a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins, Ghul Dolan. And she's done studies with MDMA in in mice and shows that it releases oxytocin and that produces new neural pathways.

• 45:11Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 45:12Speaker 03

  Right. And so she talks about this critical periods where your brain is more fluid and you can create new connections from the synapses and route things in different ways. And what she's found, and this is, I think, explains a lot about the power of Ibogaine, is that the longer the drug experience lasts, the longer this period afterwards that your brain is able to make new patterns and new connections. So it's interesting about five MEO, which is so short. But it's, and I'd like to get to that too, but it's, but you know MDMA.

• 45:52Speaker 03

  Lasts about four, five hours, six hours, but in therapy, we give half, we give an initial dose and then two hours later, we give half the initial dose, precisely to keep it longer.

• 46:03Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 46:03Speaker 03

  LSD lasts longer than psilocybin. But ibogaine was the one that lasts the longest in a way, and that means that your brain is open for the integration work afterwards to re-pattern your brain. So I think some of it is happening while you're under the influence of ibogaine. That's when it's most intense. But then this integration work, to solidify it afterwards, you have more period of time after ibogaine.

• 46:26Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 46:27Speaker 03

  So I think that this idea of these new neural pathways is a really, probably a very physiologically accurate way to think about it. You're processing information in a different way. It's not so focused on your, your kind of normal way of processing. And I would also imagine, now I don't know if this feels true, but there's a way where you, when all these memories are coming by, like in, in the different TV sets, that you're somehow, you're aware of all of them, you know, you're aware of what it is, you kind of grab,

• 47:05Speaker 03

  I mean, I guess I go back grok, which is from, you know, just, this concept that you just understand it in an instant in a way.

• 47:16Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, yes.

• 47:17Speaker 03

  And then when you look at it, it kind of slows it down in a way. So, so I think when you have all of these memories that are coming up, they are sort of being unloaded from your storage, and, and you're able to also accept them and without a, the resistance. So, so maybe that, so I'm curious, when it was happening, was your emotional tone kind of the same, this kind of, or was it changing with each different memory or?

• 47:49Shawn Ryan?

  No, it wasn't. No, it wasn't, my emotions weren't really changing. I was, I, if I remember correctly, I was pretty steady. And, and I didn't have, I didn't have a lot of emotion seeing what was passing because, let's say, let's say it was something good that was passing and then something bad and then something good and that, there was no pattern or anything, but they were moving maybe about this pace. And so as soon as, you know, as soon as this is here, there's a new memory popping up. So you didn't really have, maybe, there was only a couple of seconds and it was, oh, I remember that. And by the time,

• 48:30Shawn Ryan?

  by the time that processes, the next, the next two screens are up, you know, and, and so like, like I kind of mentioned, it's, it was like experiencing

• 48:42Shawn Ryan?

  hundreds, maybe a thousand memories all at once, you know, and that wasn't the entire duration either. There was other things that happened that I still haven't really put together.

• 48:55Shawn Ryan?

  But the end result was all of the stuff that I had mentioned, no drinking, I lost 11 pounds, my eye color got lighter. Yeah, it was, my wife noticed it right away. She said my, the whites of my eyes are whiter now. She come to find out, I think Trevor told me that Ibogaine is a heavy metal detox as well. And so I just have nothing but good things to say about, I think everybody needs to be doing this stuff. To be honest with you. And then my five M E O.

• 49:30Speaker 03

  Wait, wait, before we get to that. So how long was this experience with Ibogaine? I mean, I described being like incapacitated basically the second day. How, how did that?

• 49:39Shawn Ryan?

  Same, same. I did, I think the, I went down there with, there were three of us. Marcus Capone, which you know, was with me. And, and then a civilian, I won't say his name because I don't know if he wants it out there, but.

• 49:56Shawn Ryan?

  I was the last one out of the room. I was in there for over, over 12 hours. I think I was in there for 14 hours.

• 50:03Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 50:03Shawn Ryan?

  And then couldn't get to my room, had to have somebody help me. Two people helped me down the stairs, get to my room. And I was, I was out the entire day. Still having some visuals, believe it or not. And then at the very end of the day, uh, actually in the evening, I got up and for the first time that I can remember, um, I was able to sit with myself in complete peace and, and not feel anxiety and not feel like I should be doing something and, and, and it felt amazing.

• 50:43Shawn Ryan?

  But, um, and the last visual I saw was,

• 50:49Shawn Ryan?

  it was like a 1980s video game character walked out into the front of my head and just waved goodbye. And then walked right back out where I came from. And I was like, inter- interesting. And, um, and then the next day we did, we did the five. And, um, and so that, that's another thing I, the, I don't know how much benefit came from each thing. Cause it was, it was a collective, uh, experience, but the five MAO DMT, I, I still say this to this day, is the most profound experience of my life.

• 51:28Shawn Ryan?

  And, um, it was the most anxiety, the most fear I have ever felt out of 14 years being in, in combat zones and.

• 51:39Speaker 03

  Wow. So, so what was the, cause I would imagine being in combat zones, you're scared of dying. And so what was more frightening than that?

• 51:48Shawn Ryan?

  I was dying. So it was definitely a death experience. And that fear and anxiety lasted for maybe 30 seconds, you know? I know it wasn't long. And then I had a breakthrough and I felt.

• 52:08Shawn Ryan?

  Like I was dead and everything made perfect sense. I could feel all of the interconnectivity of energy. And for the first time in my life, I felt that. I felt, and once again, I didn't do the blindfold. I could see everything. So I could see the ocean. I could see the islands, the clouds, the trees, the grass, the bugs. And I could, I could just feel.

• 52:33Shawn Ryan?

  And it was an intuitive feeling. I could just, I could see the energy flowing through every, all of us, everything. And I felt the presence of friends of mine that I had lost. It was just, I knew everything was gonna be okay. Didn't matter what happened here. It doesn't matter what happens here. Everything that happens is supposed to happen. And it was, it was

• 53:06Shawn Ryan?

  like letting go of all control and surrendering. And, and, and it was like you, it was like I was rewarded for surrendering. Does that make sense?

• 53:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, because that's what I was trying to say. It's the resistance that is, so we talk about what's the difference between a bad trip? And, you know, people talk about bad trips. What's the difference between a bad trip and a difficult trip? The bad trip is you're just resisting it the whole time. The difficult is you're open to it and you may have things that you have to deal with that are difficult, take some struggle. But I think that the openness to it is really what gives the gifts. And the resistance is what keeps it at bay. And so it sounds like you were just very open to it. And that surrendering is then rewarded because you're, you're open to it. But, but I'm also curious, when you say you were dying,

• 54:03Speaker 03

  I'm curious, in what sense did you mean you were dying?

• 54:08Shawn Ryan?

  My brain was telling me, "You're dying." I mean, it was, it was, you know, Rick, I felt, I felt like every ounce of pain and suffering and anxiety and anger, in any, any negative emotion, any negative anything, was, I could, I swear, I could feel this like going through my veins and, and I, and it felt like it was all coming out of my fingertips and my toes. And like it was just getting sucked out of me. And then, right before I made my breakthrough, I had, once again, it wasn't a visual, it

• 54:52Shawn Ryan?

  was like an intuitive feeling, but I felt like there was all this black tar over my heart. And I could feel this black tar melting off of my heart. And when the last drop was off, it was like a, it was like a pure soul, or a pure heart. And, and it was, I opened my eyes at that point, and that's, I saw, I remember seeing some birds fly over and, and I just, I knew that this is, everything is beautiful. And, and, and you know, the, the last piece of fear I had, I had a problem, the last thing I was having a problem letting

• 55:37Shawn Ryan?

  go of was my wife and my, my newborn son, who was only about six months old at the time. But after I hit the breakthrough, I, I knew it was okay to, to let go, you know, and, and it was the most freeing experience of my entire life. What was your experience?

• 55:56Speaker 03

  Wow. Well, I'll say, but let me say that Stan Grof has, has talked, as my mentor and leading LSD expert in the world, but he's talked about how this idea of the, the dissolution of the ego, in a way, that, that a lot of people do feel that as if they're physically dying. Because we are who we think we are. And as that is kind of falling apart, we often interpret it as we're dying. And so Standog, he first, I think it was 1955 or so was his first LSD trip. They were doing it early on in the Czech Republic. And the way that he, he was a psychiatrist, and the way that he and his psychiatric team, they would work with people with LSD a few times, meaning that they would have patients

• 56:41Speaker 03

  that they would give LSD to, and then they would sit with them and support them. And then later, after they'd done it a few times, they would have their own LSD trip to help them do that better. But he saw several people that came up to this point where they felt like they were physically dying, this sense of their own identity was being dissolved, in a way, by the way LSD works in the brain. And so he saw that several times, that they weren't really dying. He would reassure them, "It's symbolic, it's not actual." But then when it came time for his first LSD experience, he described that he came up to that place and he decided that he was different than everybody else, because he really was dying. And that it's because he had this illness when he was young, and somehow that had changed his chemistry.

• 57:26Speaker 03

  This is a story he told himself. Somehow that had changed his chemistry, and now he was allergic or whatever, and he was really dying even though these other people weren't. It's that strong that you interpret this loss of your sense of self as dying.

• 57:42Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting.

• 57:43Speaker 03

  And you're being born into something bigger if you can let go.

• 57:46Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 57:46Speaker 03

  But if you resist, you're...

• 57:48Shawn Ryan?

  Do people get caught in that?

• 57:50Speaker 03

  Oh my God, yeah. That's a lot of my early trips were all about, "I couldn't let go." Even my I began was, "I can't let go. I can't, I can't trust, or I don't have the strength, or..." It takes a lot to let go. The 5-MO is great in that regard, because it's so overwhelming. You can't resist. It's just so overwhelming. So my 5-MO experience was...

• 58:16Speaker 03

  And again, I've only done it once. And I've been talking to a bunch of people now who are using lower doses of 5-MEO in vape pens and combining and sort of gradually working up to this kind of dissolution. They can adjust their doses in different ways. And Stan, actually, and Brigida, so I've said that this idea of taking MDMA and then like an hour later or so, starting to experiment with the vape pens. Stan actually described that as the future of psychiatry. Because the MDMA gives this sense of safety and security. And then you can have less of that fear and anxiety as you're losing your sense of self.

• 59:01Speaker 03

  And you can sort of blend into the universe in a more... I've not tried this yet, but I'm hearing more and more people that are doing that, or more and more people that are starting to experiment with 5-MEO in these vape pens at different doses. So what my experience was, was before all these vape pens, and it was just, you had to smoke out of pipe and you couldn't really adjust your dose. And you would just try to get in as much as you can. And so what I also attribute a lot of the success of MAPS to this 5-MEO experience, because what it gave me was I felt like I was just blasted into the universe and that I was kind of like in the...

• 59:43Speaker 03

  this like the sense of how the Big Bang, that there's this ability in any second to create something new. You know, we think about space as empty, but there's a way that space is sort of substrate for sort of things that can happen.

• 1:00:04Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:05Speaker 03

  You know, so I felt like it was almost like... Into the center of the sun, or something like that. I just felt that in any moment, the power of creation, of something out of nothing, that that's accessible in any moment. And that often when I feel trapped, or I feel stuck, or there's something that the DEA is doing, or the FDA is doing, and it looks like there's no way out, you know, or I'm blocked in this way, that 5-MEO experience has left me with the sense that I can create something new in any moment. I can create new facts, or I can bring something new, or I can reach out to somebody. The sense that you're never really trapped. There's always this ability to create the new.

• 1:00:48Speaker 03

  And so I sort of felt like I went back to the Big Bang, or the moment of creation, or just this incredible outflow of energy. Wow. And that that's what's remained with me from that 5-MEO is that, you know, even as we solidify sort of into, you know, our patterns and our habits, that there's always hope, there's always a way for the new. There's always also something dying. There's always something dying, but there's also always something potentially new. And so when we did with the 5-MEO too, we had about 20 of us, and most were therapists or psychiatrists and stuff. And you often lose control of your body. And so we would have spotters as people roll around, because they're not aware of it.

• 1:01:31Speaker 03

  You're just completely out of your normal sense of self. And it's incredibly fast, and it was very inspirational. And I think at some point, maybe in the not-too-distant future, I want to start experimenting with these vape pens. But it's, all of these experiences can be pretty shattering in different ways. And they take time to put yourself back together. But I was just an experience, I won't say exactly where, but it was a group of people. After MDMA, we're doing MDMA, I was going on the contact high, so I wasn't. But, and then this woman did 5-MEO.

• 1:02:14Speaker 00

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• 1:02:44Speaker 01

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• 1:03:14Speaker 03

  You know, after several hours of having experienced MDMA. And she'd done it before. And it was just awestruck. I mean, she was speaking in tongues. She was just like completely overtaken by all this energy. Wow. And it was just for 10 minutes or something, speaking in tongues. We felt like it was something sacred. It was something extraordinary. She was so open to all these energies. And she had kind of a similar, somewhat similar to what you described, is that she felt like it's all going to be okay. And she can see that things are going to take the time that they're going to take. But she came out of it with a lot of hope, like, we will be able to accomplish these things, that there will be, you know,

• 1:03:57Speaker 03

  this kind of spiritualized humanity and mass mental health. But it was this experience of her just channeling, being so open to this energy running through her. That it was magnificent. It was just in awe. And she had all these people that were around her sort of giving her emotional support while she was doing it. It was a beautiful ceremony. Wow. It was just extraordinary. So I think this MDMA base and then the five MEO is something that in the future, again, Stan says it's the future of psychiatry, because you get this sense that, well, Aldous Huxley, who wrote The Doors of Perception, he came up with this theory about the brain and after his mescaline experiences, that he said

• 1:04:42Speaker 03

  the brain is a reducing valve. So, you know, right now, if we relax, I can hear there's a little bit of kind of a hum. But we're not normally paying attention to those things because we're paying attention to what's in front of us. And then we're paying attention. I think Abraham Maslow, you know, has this hierarchy of needs, the psychologist that helped start humanistic psychology and then later transpersonal psychology. So it's your survival needs, your belonging needs, your self-esteem, then, you know, self-actualization. A lot of people don't realize that near the end of his life, he changed, he modified that. So self-transcendence, he said, is really the top above self-actualization. You become your full self, but then you go beyond yourself to see that you're part of something much bigger. Wow.

• 1:05:26Speaker 03

  And so I think this five MEO, you know, facilitates this kind of self-transcendence, you know, this ego dissolution. And there's just so much opportunity, I think, if we can, as individuals and as a culture, start exploring these experiences. I mean, I was just with Marcus. We had an event in Dallas a couple of days ago. And it was with Governor Rick Perry. And it was about, you know, the psychedelic story. And this idea that there's

• 1:06:07Speaker 03

  bipartisan support for trying to bring these experiences so that more people can have them. And more people can do them in legal contexts, in supportive ways. And I think there's an enormous amount to be gained by that. But people have to be willing, you know, you can't force it on them. But if we can have cultural support. I think the other part I'll just say is that a lot of my early awakenings to LSD were around the time that we were sending, we, meaning Americans, were sending somebody to the moon. And some of the astronauts talk about the overview effect of looking back at the Earth from space. And you can be spiritualized in certain ways from that. Edgar Mitchell was one of the astronauts. He started the Institute for Noetic Studies.

• 1:06:51Speaker 03

  Noetic meaning direct knowing. Also looking at ESP and other kinds of telepathy and different things.

• 1:06:56Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 1:06:57Speaker 03

  It was because of his time in space. And so I think humanity as a whole is kind of getting more spiritualized in a sense. But there's a lot of fear and resistance and people are sort of, you know, retreating into fundamentalism in a lot of different ways. But it's something is potentially new being born is this, where we are in the universe, where we are on the planet. I think one of the amazing things about COVID was that it, the downside to something, I mean, the upside to something terrible is it helped us realize how connected we all were.

• 1:07:31Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:32Speaker 03

  And I think that's this sort of understanding of this unit of mystical state of how connected we all are.

• 1:07:40Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. What, when is the, when did you do the five?

• 1:07:45Speaker 03

  That was also back in 1985.

• 1:07:47Shawn Ryan?

  You haven't done five since 1985?

• 1:07:49Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 1:07:50Shawn Ryan?

  If you don't mind me asking, how, why haven't you done it again?

• 1:07:53Speaker 03

  It's scary. It's big.

• 1:07:55Shawn Ryan?

  Okay. I was, I was, I was wondering if you were gonna say that. I'm getting ready to do another one. Next month and, and.

• 1:08:07Speaker 03

  Yeah. I, I, I think another reason why I haven't done it is more that I've been more, you know, 1982 is when I learned about MDMA. 1984 is when I worked with the first PTSD patient with MDMA. And so I think I have at least enough of the. Spiritual sense that there's so much work on the human level that I need to do, both for myself, for relationships. And so I haven't been called to have that kind of experience. But also, I've talked, I don't know if you've talked to people, but I've talked to several people who the five MEO disrupted them in major ways.

• 1:08:52Speaker 03

  Sometimes people said it was so beautiful where they went that they were depressed to come back. Others weren't so open to it and were sort of stuck in this halfway place with some of these emotions. So I also feel like I'm so busy and doing so much that you need to give yourself time. You know, five MEO is so fast. I think people make a lot of misunderstandings that, oh, yeah, I got an hour free. I'll do it and then go back to life, you know?

• 1:09:20Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:21Speaker 03

  It's not like that. You know, it takes a while.

• 1:09:25Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:25Speaker 03

  To integrate it and you could be, you know, like with my Avian, it could be three days. It could be, so it's not a casual thing.

• 1:09:32Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:33Speaker 03

  To do like that.

• 1:09:34Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. But I'm curious, if you don't mind me asking, how routinely do you use psychedelics?

• 1:09:43Speaker 03

  Well, what I routinely use is marijuana.

• 1:09:47Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:09:48Speaker 03

  So marijuana is, I'd say, more like a classic psychedelic than MDMA is. MDMA is more a heart opener. It's more, it is a psychedelic mind manifesting. So I'll do marijuana forty five times a week, something like that. The psychedelic experiences, I try to do MDMA now once a year or so with my wife, maybe twice a year. And then every year or so to do a big psilocybin trip like that. Although I will share hilariously that the last two big psilocybin trips I had were a mistake. In both times, I thought I was just eating chocolates.

• 1:10:33Speaker 03

  One time I was staying at a friend's house. And he wasn't there. And I was like, it was midnight, I was getting hungry, I needed to, I want some energy. And I'm like, okay, so I noticed there was some chocolate in his refrigerator. I'm like, okay, it doesn't want to melt, you know, it's in Southern, it's in LA, whatever. And I, I just ate this chocolate. And then, like, I, I complete my work, I'm getting everything ready, I'm going to sleep. I had about 10 hours before, I had an appointment the next morning to go see our Phase 3 MDMA PTSD site in LA. And everything's put away, my back, you know, I packed my bag, everything's put away. And then I'm right about to go to bed and I'm like, oh shit, I'm tripping. Oh my God.

• 1:11:19Speaker 03

  And then I was like, oh God, you never know what leads to what. You know, and then I just, okay, I'm in it, you know, okay, I'll just like, open up to it. And then I had this, and I knew that, you know, psilocybin lasts like, six hours, something like that. It's more of a steep drop off than LSD. LSD lingers and lingers, but when the psilocybin is done, sometimes you're like, okay, now back. So I kind of felt like I would have an hour or two to rest after it was over, before I had to go meet a bunch of people. Oh, good. And it was, I, I think there's a way in which I kind of, maybe, not that I knew

• 1:11:58Speaker 03

  what I was doing, but I, I had, I needed an ego reduction, I, I would say. I had an incredible time in LA and I had all these meetings. And there's a book about our work called Acid Test, LSD, Ecstasy and the Power to Heal. It's about the lives of one of the veterans that was in our studies, Nick Blackston, and then also about my life, and then Michael Midhofer, who's the, our lead psychiatrist. And it's about how our lives from childhood developed and how we interacted. And so that's been optioned for a movie by Vice and Participant Media. And so I had a meeting with the person that was going to be writing the script and the director. Earlier that evening.

• 1:12:39Speaker 03

  And I'd had Metapharm's actor and I did other things that were kind of extraordinary in L.A. And I was kind of getting full of myself. And so during this mushroom experience that I hadn't intentionally done, I had this realization that this entire time that I was talking with this director, Jonas Rasmussen is his name, and he made the movie Flea, which was nominated for three Academy Awards and it's about an Afghan refugee. And Flea, F-L-E-E. But I realized under the mushrooms that I had spent the entire time with him telling my story to him, but I hadn't asked him why he cared about telling this story.

• 1:13:22Speaker 03

  It was all ego and me. And so I felt like it was a good experience. I needed that sort of mushroom trip to put me in my place, but I wouldn't have done it intentionally. I was just eating this chocolate.

• 1:13:39Shawn Ryan?

  Wow. What would you say? What was your most profound psychedelic experience?

• 1:13:44Speaker 03

  Well, it's hard to say because I've done MDMA about 130 times. I've done LSD over 100 times. I've done a lot of different things. But, well, if I had to say like what is the most profound, it is really hard to say. But I do think about this one experience that I would say was the most mystical experience of my whole life. And it was also around 1985. This was a big drug period for me.

• 1:14:21Shawn Ryan?

  It's a great year for you.

• 1:14:22Speaker 03

  It was a great year for me. And this experience, as I said, we had started this nonprofit try to protect the use of MDMA. And when it was legal, we were able to reach out to various people who wouldn't otherwise do an illegal drug. And one of them was a man, Brother David Steindolrast, who's in his 90s. He's a Roman Catholic monk, a mystic. But he was open to trying MDMA in half-dose as an aid to meditation in the monastery. He was in a monastery not far from Esalen in Big Sur. And Stan Grof had brought him to be a teacher for us for a couple of days. And I got to know him and really like him. And he was willing to experiment.

• 1:15:06Speaker 03

  On trying MDMA as an aid to meditation and found it helped them tremendously. And he actually then spoke to the media, once the DEA tried to criminalize. And so it's like we're changing the narrative. The DEA says, "Oh, MDMA, it's all about ecstasy, it's all about parties." And then we got a monk saying that it helped him to deepen his meditation. We had a rabbi compared it to the Sabbath.

• 1:15:29Speaker 00

  Wow.

• 1:15:29Speaker 03

  So we're winning in the public, in the public and the court of public opinion. And we were also winning in the court. But so during this MDMA experience, part of it was, I was just starting to get more public to challenge the DEA. And I was also thinking about Brother David. And I was like, so I found a camping spot, a beautiful spot at the edge of the ocean, edge of the continent. So it was right on the Pacific Ocean. I found this spot where the high tide came all around me, right the mountain behind me. But I was dry where I was. And there was big rocks and boulders out there and the waves were crashing. But I had this little perch at the edge of the continent and the, in Big Sur where it was, you know, there's not that much light, so the stars were incredible.

• 1:16:14Speaker 03

  And so I was thinking about, first off, you know, how do I stay safe? And so there was this tree, this big overhanging tree. And I sort of imagined that was the DEA and the police. And so I was interacting in a way. And I came up with this insight that the DEA and the police, they spend a lot of time trying to find what you're trying to hide from them. They're trying to look for what's not there. And if you come up to them directly, they have to engage. So they're directly dealing with me with the lawsuit and things like that. But I felt that there was a certain safety that I was getting. It wasn't just risk.

• 1:16:56Speaker 03

  It was also trying to make me safer to confront them directly. And if I didn't give them direct clues, like I'm doing this illegal stuff, which obviously I was, but if I didn't, you know.

• 1:17:08Speaker 03

  I could confront them in this way and I felt that that anyway made me safer to speak out rather than less safe. And then I was thinking about Brother David and I was like, why would somebody want a celibate life? What's the point of trying to be a monk and why would you even want to do that? And so I was just thinking about that and then I was sort of relaxed about that and I was just opening my heart and opening up to the night and I just felt this enormity of the stars in the universe and the roaring of the ocean and the Pacific Ocean being so big and everything is so big and I'm so little, tiny little speck. And I just had this feeling at a moment like, like I could just disappear into the universe.

• 1:17:51Speaker 03

  Like this full ego dissolution, like this enormity, but I myself am sort of gone. And after a while, I sort of realized, well, I was still there. I wasn't really gone. I'm like, well, why am I still here? I know that the earth is spinning at thousands of miles, you know, that there's just, everything's in motion. Why don't I just fly out into the universe? Why am I still here? Why are my atoms together? And then I had this sense that there was something that was keeping me there that was gravity and that gravity, then I interpreted it as, as a human, as a lover, that I was,

• 1:18:34Speaker 03

  and it was more that I was cradled in the arms of gravity. That gravity was keeping things together. If no gravity, we'd be all dispersed everywhere. But I felt gravity like a lover, like, and I felt that there's this love woven into everything in the universe and this attraction of one thing to another that permits things to be built over billions and millions of years, that this kind of sense of an inherent

• 1:19:09Speaker 03

  filament of love through everything. And I felt this is why people want to be a monk in a way, that you don't have a relationship for a particular person or thing. You develop this love for the universe, this love for everything that is. And there's an advantage to being celibate in a certain way. And I felt this sort of love of this universal gravity. And then I thought, this is great. I figured it out. Now I don't have to be celibate. But what changed from that day, and that's why I go back to that, is potentially, I'd say the most profound, is that it changed my sense. At the time, I had no relationship too. So I was not involved in a relationship.

• 1:19:54Speaker 03

  I was on my own. And I never was as lonely after that experience, because I would fall back to there's this loving thread throughout existence. And I think it was the most mystical sense of my whole life as well. And people talk about how mysticism comes, or this unit of mystical experience, more from the classic psychedelics. And I have had those kind of experiences, but I think this was the one where I was both there and not there, and I was a human and part of everything. So I look back at that. Now, I had a chance 30 years later at a conference where I was at and Brother David was at. And I sat with him at dinner.

• 1:20:39Speaker 03

  And I said that I wanted to explain to him the most mystical experience of my whole life, because he was involved in it, and I was wondering, what did he think about it? So it took 30 years for me to have this conversation with him. And I explained everything. And I said, I was cradled in the arms of gravity. That was my imagery, and that's helped in so many ways. And then he was silent for a while. And then what he said was, I think about gravity every day.

• 1:21:10Speaker 03

  That's all he said. "I think about gravity every day." Yeah.

• 1:21:15Shawn Ryan?

  So he can relate.

• 1:21:16Speaker 03

  He could totally relate, yeah.

• 1:21:19Shawn Ryan?

  That was, uh, was that, did you say that was MDMA?

• 1:21:21Speaker 03

  That was MDMA.

• 1:21:22Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting. Do you, so it doesn't matter to you whether it's natural or...

• 1:21:27Speaker 03

  Oh, it totally does not matter. So, so let me say that there's a, um, a romantic nature people have. If it's from nature, it's somehow good.

• 1:21:37Speaker 03

  Everything's from nature. We're all, you know, and even our brains are from nature. And if we put stuff together, you know, in a way, it's natural. But I think it's the molecule. So, you know, LSD is incredible. I mean, but it's, doesn't appear in nature. There's something similar to LSD called LSA. So LSD is lysergic acid diethylamide. LSA is lysergic acid amide. And that's in morning glory seeds. And there's molecules similar to LSD in ergot, but there's no LSD in, in nature at all. So I think this natural synthetic divide is, is meaningless. And that the, um, the molecules are the molecules wherever they come from.

• 1:22:20Speaker 03

  And things from nature can be poisonous and things from the laboratory can be good. MDMA itself doesn't appear in nature either. But where it matters is politics. So right now in Oregon, there was the Oregon Psilocybin Initiative. And it's getting ready to be implemented. And then in November of this last year, Colorado passed the Natural Plant Medicines Initiative. And so we were working with the people that, um, put that on the ballot and spent the money to get it approved. And, and they were doing polling to try to figure out, um, whether it would pass or how to speak to people. And what they learned is that when you add in LSD or MDMA, suddenly it would no longer pass. That if you just say "natural plant medicines",

• 1:23:06Speaker 03

  then people, "Oh yeah, I'm all for that." You know?

• 1:23:09Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 1:23:09Speaker 03

  But you add synthetics and people have this reaction like, "Oh no, you know, I'm not for that."

• 1:23:17Shawn Ryan?

  I'm glad you're, I'm glad we're talking about this, because I'm gonna be honest, I'm one of them.

• 1:23:21Speaker 03

  Ah.

• 1:23:22Shawn Ryan?

  I am.

• 1:23:22Speaker 03

  You think if it's from nature, it's better, or...

• 1:23:25Shawn Ryan?

  I just, yeah, you know, I just have that mindset and, and, um, I take... I personally take my psychedelic journeys very seriously. Like, like you were saying, I block off a time period where I'm not gonna be doing anything a couple of days before and a couple of days after. And I, I wanna be able to clear my head before I get into it. And, and I'm very ceremonial.

• 1:23:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's great.

• 1:23:48Shawn Ryan?

  For some reason, I'm, I'm, I'm drawn to the plants.

• 1:23:52Speaker 03

  Well, well, tell me what you think is the difference.

• 1:23:58Shawn Ryan?

  I don't really know how to explain it, Rick, but I feel like, I just feel like if it's natural, then God or the universe put it here for us to find. And, and, and, and, you know, another reason is I, I, I lost a lot of trust in the pharmaceutical companies. And so, because I lost a lot of trust in the pharmaceutical companies, the synthetics, um, maybe got pushed in, lumped in with that.

• 1:24:30Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:24:30Shawn Ryan?

  If that makes any sense.

• 1:24:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, it does, it does. I don't think so. I do think, um, well, fortunately, 5-MEO we now know does come from a toad, the venom of a toad. And that, uh, IBN comes from the, the aboga root.

• 1:24:49Speaker 03

  But I'll just say that, um, maybe this is not a difference, but the psilocybin, obviously comes from mushrooms, but all the research that's been done with psilocybin has not been psilocybin mushrooms, it's been synthetic psilocybin.

• 1:25:03Shawn Ryan?

  Interesting, I did not know that.

• 1:25:04Speaker 03

  All of that, so there's not been any research, really, with mushrooms. All that we hear about the last 20 years of all the research with psilocybin, it's synthetic psilocybin. Now, they're making synthetic something that does appear in nature, so it's not quite, you know, a synthetic, but it's, um, and people are starting to say, maybe we should research the mushroom. Let, let's give mushroom for psychedelic therapy. How will that be different from, um, the, the synthetic? So I've only done mushrooms. I've never had access to psilocybin in a, that was synthetically produced. So all of my mushroom experiences are only the mushrooms. And, and they've been profound, incredible. But my guess is that if you were to give somebody...

• 1:25:50Speaker 03

  A mushroom experience, that it would be identical to the psilocybin psychologically. There are other molecules in the mushrooms that may have other medicinal properties. But I also think that there's incredible value in LSD, and it is synthetic. So I think what's more important, and I think this is the fundamental part that's wrong with our drug war, is that we've made that certain things are good or bad by themselves. Like, these are bad drugs, and they're illegal, and these are okay. Like alcohol and tobacco, they're good drugs, they're okay. But I think it's the relationship that we have with it is what determines whether it's good or bad, or whether it's beneficial or helpful.

• 1:26:32Speaker 03

  And so we miss that by the drug war, and we miss this whole idea of the relationship. And one of the best examples of that for me is the drug called thalidomide. So in the 50s and 60s, thalidomide was used for morning sickness for pregnant women, and it produced incredible, terrible birth defects. People would be born with shriveled limbs.

• 1:26:55Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, man.

• 1:26:55Speaker 03

  A lot of times. And this was really popular as a drug by the pharma companies in Europe. And there was this effort now to bring it into the United States. And there was this woman at the FDA that had heard some of these stories. It wasn't clear that these birth defects at the time were connected to thalidomide, but she thought they might be, and so she blocked it from coming into the US. And she's the only person from the FDA, Frances Kelsey was her name, who ever got a Presidential Medal of Honor for blocking thalidomide. So it was the quintessential bad drug. All right, a decade and a half or so later, thalidomide, we noticed, is, people noticed,

• 1:27:39Speaker 03

  that it's great for a certain kind of cancers. It shrinks blood cells, it shrinks blood supply to certain things. So it's now a medicine. So this horrible drug, in certain contexts, pregnant women, was terrible, but in other contexts with people who are struggling with leprosy, with cancer, that this drug can be very helpful. And so it's a different relationship with the same thing. And so I think it's the relationships more than, is it natural, is it synthetic?

• 1:28:07Shawn Ryan?

  Makes a lot of sense. The 5-MEO I did was synthetic 5-MEO, by the way. So, yep, so it's just me...

• 1:28:14Speaker 03

  So you weren't hurting any toads?

• 1:28:15Shawn Ryan?

  Nope.

• 1:28:18Shawn Ryan?

  But yeah, I'm glad that we just talked about that.

• 1:28:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, I have a kind of a bigger question. You know, so that in the psychedelic 60s, right? Psychedelics got kind of connected to the hippies and the anti-war movement, the anti-Vietnam War movement. You know, and you've talked about how you've been in war. And so I'm wondering, has the psychedelic experiences, how have they impacted your sense about war and violence? And, you know, what we're trying to accomplish, if at all?

• 1:29:00Shawn Ryan?

  It made me rethink everything. I think a lot of it is meaningless, senseless stuff that we don't need to be involved in. And, you know, Rick, I don't have a lot of experience with psychedelics, but my trip with Trevor, it just changed my perspective on everything. And it did, it made me rethink why we're over there, what we were doing over there, why we were there for so long. It made me, had I done psychedelics prior to joining the military, I probably wouldn't have joined. Is that what you're asking?

• 1:29:44Speaker 03

  Well, in part, yeah. Because I now think, though, that, you know, what we see with the war in Ukraine, it's so clear that there's a massive totalitarian effort to take over democracy in Ukraine. So that we need a military. We need to fight in certain times, but not in others. So I guess I'm wondering, are you saying you're a pacifist now? Or just that there's more differentiation between, you know, when it's appropriate and when it's not?

• 1:30:19Shawn Ryan?

  I wouldn't say a pacifist, but I'll say I think if everybody was doing this stuff, we wouldn't have any of these conflicts.

• 1:30:28Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:30:28Shawn Ryan?

  And I think a lot of us will be getting along who don't normally get along. And I don't, I don't think we would have this mental health crisis. I think a lot of hatred and a lot of anger would disappear into nothing. You know, if people, if people gave psychedelics a chance. Would you agree with that?

• 1:30:50Speaker 03

  I do. And in fact, that, so when I was 18, you know, I was in despair in a way about the world. You know, and I had been, well, I was Jewish, born in 53, not that long after the Holocaust. I had relatives in Israel, Palestine since 1904, and relatives that fought in the 48 War of Independence. And so I was just raised from a very young age about the reality of the Holocaust. But I was taught it in America at the time of Americans, height of our power. You know, so I felt that I could kind of approach the horror of that from a safe place in a way.

• 1:31:33Speaker 03

  But, but I was sort of told by my parents that I was part of this multi-generational story. You know, Judaism goes back, you know, you get to hear these stories of the pharaohs and building pyramids and stuff. But I think that's more myth than reality. But, but still, this idea that was taught to me that I was a product of refugees that came from Poland and Russia in 1880s and in the first early part of the 20th century, from my grandparents and great grandparents. They came to America for freedom. They found it. They, they made a good life. They succeeded. And then my job was in this generational line was to, to think about these deeper threats.

• 1:32:15Speaker 03

  I also was very much influenced by the Cuban Missile Crisis. So I was just a young boy and you, now the whole world could blow up and we could die, everybody could die. And they teach you, you know, duck and cover under your desk. You know, kids have, sad to say, you know, active shooter drills and stuff. But, but this was like, what do we do if the world blows up?

• 1:32:39Speaker 03

  And I just felt increasingly like the world was,

• 1:32:44Speaker 03

  we hadn't evolved from animals that far. You know, our rational thought was not. And I was in despair. And I was also in one of the last years of the lottery for Vietnam. And so I decided at the time that I didn't think it was a wise war. And I thought that there's multiple different ways to serve your country. And that I wasn't going to run away to Canada or pretend I had bone spurs or something like that. But I wasn't, and I wasn't a conscientious objector. Because to be a conscientious objector, you need to be a pacifist and against all wars. And I'm like, you know, if it was to fight against Hitler and the Germans, I would fight.

• 1:33:29Speaker 03

  I wouldn't say, you know, rely on their humanity.

• 1:33:34Speaker 03

  And so my only option, I thought, was to protest in some way. And so I decided that I would be a draft resister and I would go to jail. That I would serve my country by going to jail. And that I would drain the war machine from resources. And so I never filed for my draft card. I never sent in the first postcard to register for the draft. Now, I had a social security number. I was paying taxes. I had a driver's license. I was in high school. I was on the roll. It just was like, the government knows where I am, you know? And so I just assumed that I would end up going to jail.

• 1:34:19Speaker 03

  And that I'd studied Gandhi and Tolstoy and nonviolent resistance. And I thought that's what I would do. And that's how I would serve my country. And what I overestimated was the efficiency of the government. So, and my parents talked to me and said, this is okay, you know, we understand what you're doing, but you're going to be a felon. And you're never going to be, my dad was a doctor. He said, you're never going to be able to be a doctor or lawyer or Indian chief, anything like this, because you are going to have this felony record. I'm like, okay, I will accept that. And I'll just have to figure out something else to do with my life. And as it turned out, nothing ever happened to me. Really?

• 1:35:02Speaker 03

  Nothing, nothing. It was just like, you know, later, about a year later, after I didn't do this, I got a high lottery number, so I probably wouldn't have gone anyway. But, but I thought something, and later it turned out that around 60,000 people I'd heard had, didn't register for the draft. And there were enough people going to the draft boards that they could prosecute the war. And they didn't do anything. And then President Carter, on his first day in office, pardoned all the draft resistors. So I had identified myself as a young boy as a counterculture, drug-using criminal. And then, but, but the thing was that the, when I first started doing LSD, and I first started getting this sense that there's something beyond my biography,

• 1:35:46Speaker 03

  that it's not just, "The world began when I was born and it will end when I die", that there's this whole other stuff, that, that, that, that sense of being connected in a deeper way is the antidote to genocide, and to Holocaust, and nuclear war, and racism. And, you know, that, so I do feel that if, if people were to do these experiences in a supportive way, because you could do these drugs and you could end up worse off if, if you're not supported, and that happens to a bunch of people. But I do feel if people could feel that beneath my tribe, beneath my religion, beneath my gender, beneath my race, beneath my nationality, we're, we're humans, beneath that, we're part of this web of life.

• 1:36:28Speaker 03

  And if we felt that and knew that, we wouldn't be demonizing other people so much. And, and I had this one experience when I was 16. I was very interested in the other, in studying the other. And so I studied Russian in high school. And the Russians were, you know, the Cold War and, and horrible. And so, when I was 16 years old, after my junior year, my parents sent me to Russia. To study the language. And this was 1970. And this is the big Cold War time. And I had the impression that all these Russians hate us. And that we should be hating all these Russians. And they want to kill us. And we've got all these bombs aimed at us. And I just thought, OK, it's these countries against countries.

• 1:37:11Speaker 03

  And when I got there, and my parents, to their credit, they taught me this other thing, which was that there's big factors. And none of us are big enough to deal with them by ourselves. But if you can do something little, you should do it. So, you know, in my little suitcase, they gave me prayer books, Jewish prayer books to bring to Russia, which were illegal at the time. And they said, if you can get these to people at a synagogue while you're there, you should do it. Because all these prayer books are illegal. And I ended up, I did this. I did find the synagogue. And I did give these prayer books to these guys. And I'd made a lot of money in the black market, you know, selling stuff to young Russians who wanted to buy our clothes, blue jeans and all this stuff.

• 1:37:56Speaker 03

  And the rubles were worthless outside of Russia. So I went to the synagogue and said, I've got all this money for you. And I've got these prayer books. And they said, don't give it to us now. We're under observation. But I'll meet you in a subway at this time at this place. And you can do the transfer then. And I thought, this is great. I'm James Bond now, you know.

• 1:38:17Speaker 03

  But I'm 16. And I was like, hey, if they catch me, you know, they'll just ship me home. So I had this fearless kind of stuff. And I did. And I met the guy and did the transfer. But I realized these people didn't hate us. And that it was their governments and these clashes of power people. But that, I mean, what made an amazing impact on me is I was super shy. I went for a walk with a Russian girl on the beach. I'm like, You don't want to kill me. I don't want to kill you.

• 1:38:46Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:46Speaker 03

  You know, so I do think that the sense that we're all in it together, I do feel that. So when I was 18 and I first started doing these psychedelics, I thought this could be this antidote. It has been wiped out. So I woke up to LSD after the backlash, but I thought I have this sort of privileged life that my parents will make sure I don't starve and I have a place, shelter, and I'm supposed to do something to avoid another Holocaust. And I thought, maybe the psychedelics, this could be it. So that's where I focused, with that same belief, that if more people could do this, that we would have a different approach to conflict and we would have a different approach

• 1:39:28Speaker 03

  to the irrational, you know, that we would not buy into it as much and that we would try to see people. So that's why my whole life has basically been devoted to psychedelics. But I think it's important that we say that it's for everybody. So I think this idea of bipartisan support and this idea that, I mean, okay, so I guess this is a question for you, that you might not have gone into the military at that time, but then what if, you know, people landed here in America, you know, trying to take over?

• 1:40:07Shawn Ryan?

  Then I would fight.

• 1:40:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:40:09Shawn Ryan?

  And I still would to this day.

• 1:40:10Speaker 03

  Okay, so that's, I think, the most important, yeah.

• 1:40:13Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. So, yeah, I guess I'm not against, I don't know how to say this, I guess I'm not against war, but I am against, if you don't, if you can't, if you're not defending yourself or defending somebody else, I don't really know what we're doing there anymore, you know? And there were a lot of other things that I, you know, that I thought about what, after my experience, you know, and it did, it changed everything, right? Changed everything. But, but back to you.

• 1:40:55Shawn Ryan?

  Let's talk about, I want to go into the Iceland stuff and what you guys are going to do out there.

• 1:41:01Speaker 03

  Okay. Well, let me say first off that our thought is to globalize access to psychedelics and globalize access to MDMA system therapy. So our first phase three studies were in Israel, Canada, and the United States. So as I said, I was trained to sort of make a contribution to Israel. I thought bring psychedelics to research in Israel. So the, once we, if we do get FDA approval, it will very shortly thereafter be approved in Israel and Canada. We're also starting research in Europe. So we're trying to get approval by the European Medicines Agency. So we're doing studies in around 10 sites in seven countries in Europe.

• 1:41:46Speaker 03

  We're also have had some studies in Brazil, in Australia, in other places. And so this idea of sort of a global community. So what happened in Iceland is just recently, in January of this year, actually, there was the first psychedelic conference in Iceland. And researchers from around the world were invited to speak, and I was one of the ones that was invited to speak. And it was very well received, and it was the whole community. I mean, Iceland is only about 380,000 people. And so the conference was well-covered in all of their media, on TV and magazines and

• 1:42:31Speaker 03

  newspapers. So a lot of people heard about it, and many people from the government came to the conference, from the Prime Minister's office, from the Minister of, from the Department of Justice, from the Department of Public Health. A lot of these people came to the conference. And so one of the things that's been hard for me, I would say, is that I have perceived of the police as the predator and I'm the prey, just because of the drug war. And so there was this, again, seeing through these kind of things, I realized that I now have my nephew as a police officer. My sister's son is a police officer in Washington DC.

• 1:43:17Speaker 03

  Oh. And so we decided that we would try to reach out to the police. The police have one of the most traumatic jobs you could imagine. Absolutely. And a lot of times veterans have preferential hiring as the police. And so you could be traumatized before you get into the military, traumatized in the military, and then you get a trauma inducing job. And so I think the police are under enormous stress. So, and as part of this sort of trying to show it's healing for all.

• 1:43:48Speaker 03

  I gave a talk, we arranged to give a talk at the International Association of the Chiefs of Police. And it was exactly, you'll see how this relates to Iceland. So it exactly was, you know, like 10,000 people gather. This was in Orlando a bunch of years ago. And then President Trump was president at the time. And he decided these were his people and he announced several days before that he would speak at this conference. And they scheduled his talk exactly the same time as our talk. There was me, one of the therapists, one of the veterans that we'd worked with. And then we have a senior retired DEA official who's now acting as a consultant to us because his son went to Iraq and got PTSD and came back and found cannabis to be helpful to him.

• 1:44:33Speaker 03

  And it changed his dad's mind. So he's now become, Tony Colson is his name, he's become one of our main advisors. So there was a police officer in the, well, we went to our room. It was big for 350 people or something, but because everybody went to see Trump, there was only like 20 people in our room. Oh. And, but there was 20 of the right people. We said, okay, these are people that really want to hear us. And in the front row was this police officer. And he came to us afterwards and he said, I'm also a psychotherapist. Sarko Gagarin is his name. And he said he wanted to do our training program to give MDMA to other police officers with PTSD.

• 1:45:18Speaker 03

  And so we said, this is fantastic. We'd love to train you. This is exactly what we want to do. This is for everybody. And so he's been through our training program. He was featured on the Netflix documentary of How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan's book. And so we brought him to Iceland. So that's how, so we came to Iceland with a police officer and he brought his police chief. They're from Winthrop, outside of Boston luckily. And so they came as part of the delegation to, Sarco did, to be on the, at the conference. And so what came from it is that we met with the Minister of Justice and his deputy,

• 1:45:58Speaker 03

  and they said that they would be interested in paying for a study to give MDMA to victims of crime, to prisoners in prison and police guards, prison guards and police officers. And so we're now planning a training of Icelandic therapists to take place the first week of August. And once we are training them, then we'd like to do this study, which will be one of the most important ones, to try to reduce recidivism, and also to try to work with victims of crime and to see if the, I think it's very traumatizing to be a prison guard. I mean, that's one of the hardest jobs I could imagine.

• 1:46:38Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:39Speaker 03

  You know, so if they can learn how to sort of work through their own traumas and process all these emotions, you'd think they, the prison guards could be more humane, or the prisoners might be less violent if we deal with their traumas.

• 1:46:52Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:53Speaker 03

  So what happened in Iceland was, one of our goals is, the long-term goal, is we're calling it a net, a world of net zero trauma by 2070. So, you know, it's almost 50 years away, but I think this idea of how do we spread the psychedelic healing, how do we spread it all over the world, how do we deal with the, right now, there's 100 million displaced people, refugees or migrants. There's a prediction that if climate change continues by 2050, there may be a billion climate refugees.

• 1:47:29Shawn Ryan?

  Hmm.

• 1:47:30Speaker 03

  And a lot of them are from wars and struggles too, because when you fight over limited resources and then there's more of that. So what we'd like to do is think about Iceland as a test case. It's a small country. We have the support of people in the government, there are a bunch of therapists already there. Can we have a country that has net zero trauma? And if we can demonstrate in this small way in Iceland, maybe we can imagine, you know, okay, there's 380,000 people there and there's 7.8 or whatever billion people in the world. But that could be an example. And so with a country that's small, you can kind of work with their national health insurance and with their education system and it's a lot easier.

• 1:48:14Speaker 03

  So Iceland, we hope, will become a test case, in a way, for how do you build a whole country that has, is less and less producing trauma? To the point where, you know, because trauma, it lasts. So there's multi-generational trauma. There's epigenetic mechanisms in the body where trauma gets passed from generation to generation. So Iceland, we're hoping, can be a test case, in a way, for this.

• 1:48:47Shawn Ryan?

  That's brilliant. Did you, is this your idea?

• 1:48:50Speaker 03

  Well, I mean, it was a collective.

• 1:48:52Shawn Ryan?

  That is amazing. How long, so how long do you, how long do you anticipate this taking to create a country?

• 1:49:00Speaker 03

  Oh, I mean, 20, 30 years. I mean, again, you have to, maybe it could be faster, but right now, in Iceland, let's say, you know, there's not that many psychedelic therapists. You know, we have to do the studies, we have to train the therapists, we have to get it embedded in their national health insurance. We, maybe it could be done in 15 years or something, as is possible. But the other thing about Iceland is that it's a very spiritual place already. The nature is incredible. And they have northern lights and they have volcanoes and they have, you know, the continental divide, in a way, we think of where the, you know, in America where the water's, but

• 1:49:44Speaker 03

  they've got, the tectonic plates are separating. So Iceland is growing a little bit, like an inch a year or something like that. But the natural wonder of Iceland is just incredible. They have hot springs and hot baths all over, but it's just extraordinary. So it's already kind of a mystical, but they have a lot of darkness because it's so elevated, I mean, so high up in the northern hemisphere. And so we heard that they have one of the most, highest percentages of people on psychiatric medications.

• 1:50:19Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, really?

• 1:50:20Speaker 03

  Of any country in the world.

• 1:50:22Speaker 00

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• 1:50:52Speaker 03

  Because they do have wealth enough to pay for medicines. And they used to be quite poor, but now they have so much tourism for the natural wonders. So I think that it is a good test case. It's also surrounded by water. It's an island. And Greenland, there's only like 60,000 people or something like that. So it is a natural experiment. It could be. And there are more and more people that are moving to Iceland, but most people are from this kind of one culture and know each other a lot. Actually, what we were told by the Minister of Justice is that a lot of the people in prison are actually from outside Iceland, where they'll come, foreign gangs will come

• 1:51:34Speaker 03

  to do drugs or other ways of criminal enterprises. And then they get busted, and then they're not integrated into Icelandic society. So I think it's a real opportunity. Now, earlier, when you read my bio, I'd just say that you said I did a 30-plus-year follow-up to the Tim Leary's Concord Prison Experiment. So that was actually from '61 to '63. And that was an experiment to see if you could give prisoners psilocybin experiences while they're in prison, to help them have this sort of pro-social, "I'm connected with everything, work through their traumas." And then when they come out, that then they would be less likely

• 1:52:17Speaker 03

  to reoffend and be sent back to jail. And so this was, Timothy Leary would then do, he would bring people into the prisons, and the researchers would also do psilocybin. Really? With the prisoners. Yeah, he would have some of the researchers that were not, but some were doing the psilocybin. And this was considered to be one of the most...

• 1:52:42Speaker 03

  Effective psychedelic studies that had ever taken place. So after the backlash and actually, so again, 1970, the Controlled Substances Act. After research was wiped out for several decades all over the world with psychedelics, we would look back, what are some of the most successful experiments? And the Conquered Prison Experiment was considered to be one of those. And so they also did what's called the Good Friday Experiment. Timothy Leary and Walter Pankey and others. This was on Good Friday, 1962, in Boston. And it was also to see if psychedelics could produce a mystical experience. And so they took 20 divinity students from Andover Newton into church on Good Friday,

• 1:53:27Speaker 03

  and they all got a pill, half was psilocybin, half was placebo. And the minister was an incredible guy. His name was Howard Thurman. And he's an African-American minister, he's no longer alive. He was Martin Luther King's mentor. Martin Luther King got a PhD at Boston University. But more importantly than, or not more importantly, but in background, Howard Thurman had spent time with Gandhi. And he had learned about nonviolent resistance. And he was the one that really helped guide Martin Luther King and others into the strategy of nonviolence for the American Civil Rights Movement. Okay. And Howard Thurman was sympathetic with this idea of the political implications

• 1:54:09Speaker 03

  of the mystical experience, meaning that we're all connected, meaning that you can't be so racist if you realize, I mean, if you look at the difference in genetic material between somebody that's black and somebody that's white, there's no difference, it's hardly, it's trivial. And so I did a follow-up to the Good Friday Experiment and showed that it basically was confirmed. I tracked these people down roughly 25 years later. But then, and that got attention in the media, and a fellow from the Corrections, the Department of Corrections from Massachusetts contacted me and said he had all the information of who the prisoners were in the Conquered Prison Experiment. Did I want to do a follow-up to that study? And I said, I'd love to, because the names were all lost.

• 1:54:53Speaker 03

  Nobody knew who these people were. There was no way to do this until this guy said that they had kept the records of people in the Concord Prison Experiment. Wow. All right, so then I did this long-term. We spent a whole year of getting permission. It went all the way up to Governor Weld, that was the time, of Massachusetts. And the permission slip that we got was hilarious, because it gave us permission, but somebody had scribbled on it, "No psilocybin." Like, of course, we're just asking people and checking their criminal records. We weren't planning to give psilocybin. They just wanted to make sure, you know, "No psilocybin." But then I discovered, to my dismay, that Leary had fudged the results, and it wasn't

• 1:55:38Speaker 03

  successful. And it was weird, that it was somebody who was me, as an advocate for psychedelics, wanting to bring attention to what was the, what I thought one of the best studies. Because what Tim said himself is, "Oh, you have a spiritual experience, you know, people will tell you about that. But how do you know?" And, you know, that's why this long-term follow-up was so important. But he said, "With reducing recidivism, that's objective. You can tell. It's not about their minds. Do they go back to prison or not? That'll tell if it works." And he claimed that it worked. And so when I looked at the data, it took me a long time, but I started feeling this data doesn't represent what was reported. And so I discovered that, what had happened is that Leary and the other team, Ralph Metzner

• 1:56:21Speaker 03

  and others, had realized that the psychedelic experience is not enough. It's enough to give you a good start, but you need support afterwards. So the same way that you needed immigration after a psychedelic experience, if you're trying to reduce recidivism, you can't just give people a psychedelic experience, kick them out the prison doors, and think they're gonna do okay. And just as they realized that, they started creating these support groups, and then they got kicked out of Harvard. Okay. So this was what we all brought to Iceland, is that this experiment was never really done fully, because the experimenters themselves realized that they had...

• 1:56:59Speaker 03

  Overemphasize the psychedelic experience and underemphasize the integration and the support afterwards. Oh, good. And then if we were to do something like that to try to reduce recidivism, if you combine the psychedelic experience with the aftercare and have a control group that just gets the aftercare, we may find that the psychedelic experience really helps in an additive way to reduce recidivism. And so this is why, in a way, we were able to present this research to the people in Iceland and to say, you know, this would be a tremendous experiment to do here. So how would, so how does this experiment start in Iceland? Okay, well, the most important part is training the therapists.

• 1:57:42Speaker 03

  It's not just giving the drug. So we have to train the therapists. How many therapists are you gonna have? Well, we're gonna probably train around 40 or so. That's a lot. Something like that. I don't think they'll all work on the study, but, you know, and there may be like openings to sort of compassionate use for MDMA, other, other things that may happen in Iceland as well. But it would start as a small pilot study. And, but politically, okay, so I, I often say that we don't do science, we do political science, you know, because these are suppressed things, we're just coming back to the surface. So it's very important for us to say, and this is what we said in Iceland, that we

• 1:58:25Speaker 03

  want to work with victims of crime as well as perpetrators of crime. And we also want to work with the prison guards and the police. So the recidivism part will only be with the prisoners, obviously, but, but we want to have more of a comprehensive, we're, we're bringing this into the carceral system and we're trying to help everybody affected in different ways. So there's, there's several parts of training therapists. So, for example, Trevor. Trevor has done ibogaine. You would not be so comfortable going to Trevor if he'd never done ibogaine, to give you ibogaine. Absolutely correct. You know? All right, so we have an initial training, which is about 100 hours.

• 1:59:07Speaker 03

  And so the big part of it is 60 hours online, it's more background information. What is our treatment method? How do we evaluate therapists? What's the history of MDMA? What do we know about other psychedelics? And then there's about 40 plus hours that's in person. And so that's what we're gonna do in Iceland is they're gonna do the video part first and then we're gonna bring a team there for a week to get together. But then the second part is that we want the therapists who want to, it's never compulsory, but the therapists that wanna volunteer to have their own MDMA experience as a patient themselves. And with therapists, so stuff always comes up. We're all, you know, we all have issues.

• 1:59:50Speaker 03

  So even though the therapist might not have a PTSD or depression diagnosis, it's still valuable for personal growth, for all sorts of issues. So we also then have to get a protocol approved in Iceland to give MDMA to therapists who volunteer for it. Okay. Right, so that's the second step. First step is the training that's gonna take place, starting probably in June and July, the online portion, then they do the week in August. Then after that, hopefully we get permission before the end of the year to have a protocol where therapists can receive MDMA. Now, we may have to, we want the therapists who administer MDMA to new therapists to

• 2:00:31Speaker 03

  have worked with PTSD patients, to know our method, and so we may have to send therapists the same way we're sending them to do the training, we will send some therapists there to give MDMA to other therapists. Okay. All right, and then the third part of our training is they actually work with patients, and it's all videotaped, and we have our, what are called adherence raters. And so, and there's the treatment manual that describes the therapy, there's adherence criteria, how are you know are you doing the treatment the way we say it should be done, to do this treatment manual, and then we have raters that watch the videotapes and give feedback to the therapists. And so that's the final part of the training. And so, once all of that's done,

• 2:01:15Speaker 03

  Then this experiment with reducing recidivism with victims of crime, then that can start. And actually, it can start where the first group is what's called open label. What that means is there's no placebo. Everybody, open label means everybody knows what it is.

• 2:01:31Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:01:32Speaker 03

  So we train these initial people as they work with prisoners or victims of crime, where everybody knows they get MDMA. And then, once they know the method, then we can say, oh, now we can do a controlled study if we're gonna do that. So that's the sequence.

• 2:01:47Shawn Ryan?

  Okay. Fascinating. How long do you think this entire experiment is going to take?

• 2:01:53Speaker 03

  Well, the recidivism is one of the hardest things to study because it takes a long time to study it.

• 2:02:01Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:01Speaker 03

  So because, and one of the things I realized about the Concord Prison Experiment that was scientifically fraudulent, I would say, I am reluctant to use that word, but the experiment that they did with the prisoners, once they got out of prison, they would do these follow-ups. And the follow-ups were done in average of people out of prison for 10 months. But then their base rates, that they did the study of everybody released from the prison in the years prior to this experiment, and then they published the base rates of that. But in the analysis, they compared people that had been out of prison for two years

• 2:02:45Speaker 03

  to people that had been out of prison for 10 months.

• 2:02:47Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:02:48Speaker 03

  So obviously, the people who've been out of prison for 10 months are gonna have lower recidivism than people who've been out of prison for two years. The longer you're out of jail, the more likely are something to happen.

• 2:02:56Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:02:57Speaker 03

  So it was a completely fraudulent, you know, comparison. But it was done in this obscure British criminology journal or something. I'm just shocked that all the people that were against psychedelics never checked this. But when I finally discovered, I'm like, huh. You know, I had to go in the dusty archives at Harvard Library to get this, you know, and probably most schools, they wouldn't even have this journal, but I was able to, and when I read this, I was like, oh my god. Because not only that, that they have the two-month data, but they had a chart of how, what the recidivism rate was from the beginning to the two months, to the 24 months, the two years, and they had the 10-month rate.

• 2:03:37Shawn Ryan?

  Oh.

• 2:03:38Speaker 03

  And when you look at the 10-month rate, to the 10-month rate, it's the same.

• 2:03:41Shawn Ryan?

  Oh, good.

• 2:03:42Speaker 03

  But, I don't know, people just didn't check. And then I had to decide, shit, should I like debunk this great study for psychedelics? And I felt, I am about science, I've got, I can't just pretend to, so I did report that, and I reported it in a little bit of a gentle way, but, but I said, this, this experiment is bunk.

• 2:04:05Shawn Ryan?

  Well, let's talk about, let's talk about the mental health crisis here in America. Just, just yesterday, right down the street in Green Hills, Nashville, there was a, there was an active shooter, killed six people, three children, three adults.

• 2:04:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:04:22Shawn Ryan?

  A lot of people are thinking psychedelics is the answer to this. My question is, how do, how would that, how would we even begin to implement that?

• 2:04:35Speaker 03

  Well, okay, so, I, I would say again, that psychedelics, by themselves, we tend to put too much power in the thing. Again, it's the therapy.

• 2:04:44Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:04:45Speaker 03

  So, so, so let's just say psychedelic-assisted therapy. And in psychedelic-assisted therapy, to give you a sense of what our method is for treating PTSD, it's 42 hours of therapy, and it's with two therapists, usually a male, female, but not always. And now, we've negotiated with FDA, the, one of the two needs to be licensed as a therapist, the second can be an apprentice, you know, working to get a license or doesn't have a license. But it's 42 hours of therapy. There's only three times that people get MDMA, and it's one month apart, and these are for eight-hour sessions. So in addition to these three eight-hour sessions, which add up to 24 hours, there are 12 90-minute non-drug psychotherapy sessions as well.

• 2:05:30Speaker 03

  So there are three of these non-drug psychotherapy sessions.

• 2:05:35Speaker 03

  As preparation. So I'm sure when you went down, you had some time with Trevor and others before you did the IBA-GAIN.

• 2:05:41Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:41Speaker 03

  So you, and I imagine you had something on the phone before, or?

• 2:05:46Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, so the way it worked was we got, we got a coach and a therapist. We could talk to the coach whenever we wanted. We had therapy, I think, two, I think we had two sessions, if I remember correctly, before we went down. Then you go down to Trevor's place and you have three days of preparatory.

• 2:06:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:06:09Shawn Ryan?

  You know, doing different, just all kinds of different stuff. You kind of group chats, sweat lodge, all, write your intentions down, talk about your intentions, all, all of that stuff. Then you do it, you know, that in, you do the IBA-GAIN and then the 5-MEO. And then when you leave, you continue with your integration period. And I went a little longer than, I guess, recommended. But, but, because I really, I just really wanted to dig in. But I think I did four, I think I did four therapy sessions afterwards.

• 2:06:48Speaker 03

  All right, so, so we have three of these 90-minute sessions before the first MDMA, and then three of them after each MDMA for integration.

• 2:06:56Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:06:56Speaker 03

  So it's a large amount of therapy punctuated by these MDMA experiences. So how would we bring this to bear at a large scale to really reduce the mental health crisis? There's, we're hoping to train around 25,000 therapists. That's nowhere near enough in this decade. That's nowhere near enough. There's estimated 13 million PTSD patients in America. And there's even more that people have depression.

• 2:07:26Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:28Speaker 03

  There's loads of people that are addicted to, dependent on alcohol or other drugs and.

• 2:07:34Shawn Ryan?

  Opiates.

• 2:07:34Speaker 03

  Opiates, yeah. So I, I think it's going to take, that's why I'm, we're saying net zero trauma by 2070. I think it's really going to take generations to do this. But I think the steps are going to be. Working with the FDA to get MDMA approved as a medicine for PTSD. And then we want to look at it for other things as well. There are groups that are working to make psilocybin into a medicine. And they're suggesting that maybe 2025 or so, you know, they might be able to, 2026, 2025. I am trying to try to, Ibogaine research and others are as well, to try to bring that forward.

• 2:08:16Speaker 03

  There's researchers now working on just five MEODMT. So what we had now in America, there's roughly 1,500 ketamine clinics. So ketamine has been developed, S ketamine, an isomer of ketamine, but it was, it's a classic pharma play in the sense that it was developed without therapy. Pharma companies don't know psychotherapy. So they, and ketamine and all these drugs, as we talked about earlier, they have a pharmacological effect, a psychological effect, and you can do some good without, sometimes without taking it with psychotherapy. But you can also do harm. And so the way ketamine has been approved, it's without psychotherapy.

• 2:09:00Speaker 03

  And a lot of these clinics that are really smart and wise, combine it with therapy. You get better results, you don't need as much ketamine, it lasts longer. So what we're going to have to set up, I think, is thousands and thousands and thousands of psychedelic treatment centers. And the goal is to not have, here's a ketamine center, here's an MDMA center, here's an Ibogaine center, here's this. It's, we want to train psychedelic therapists and they want to be cross-trained into all the different drugs. And then when a person comes to this treatment center, now we are also doing a lot of work to try to get this covered by insurance.

• 2:09:42Speaker 03

  And we think we, we've got good responses so far from the insurance companies because the cost of untreated PTSD is really high. Mm-hmm. All right, but then people will come to this treatment center and they will then have a customized program developed for them by these trained therapists.

• 2:10:00Speaker 03

  And so I think over the next, by 2032, we've had some estimates that we will hopefully treat about 1.4 million people. That's a lot of people. Yeah, that's a lot of people, but that's nothing compared to 13 million people that have PTSD, and the number is growing. Yeah. Right, so the other part to answer your question about how do we really change the mental health crisis, there's two main things I'd say. One is that we need to legalize and regulate these drugs, and we need to make it so that people could try it on their own. Maybe you had a small drama, you know, but if you don't do something, it becomes PTSD.

• 2:10:41Speaker 03

  But if you treat it, or maybe people just, so, so within this post-prohibition world, what we need is pure drugs available to people, so they're not getting contaminated drugs, dying from fentanyl or something. We need honest drug education, instead of the dare program that scares, we need honest drug education. We need to train people in peer support. So we have what we call the Zendo Project, which is a group where we do psychedelic harm reduction at Burning Man and other events. So places where people go to do psychedelics, and we would say, non-medical settings, a lot of times, they're just looking for fun, and something difficult comes up, and then they're not prepared to deal with that. Mm-hmm. Or they're not even looking for fun, but still something difficult comes up,

• 2:11:26Speaker 03

  and then they don't know what to do. And often, they would get tranquilized, or they could become a problem for authorities, they could get arrested. So what we want to show is that what we're proposing in a therapeutic setting makes sense in sort of non-medical settings. So we have hundreds of volunteers that we organize every year at Burning Man, and last year, we had about 500, and over 500 people came for help. Really? Yeah. Often from either while they're in the midst of a really difficult psychedelic experience, or they had one the day before, and now they're trying to integrate it. And so we need widespread understanding about peer support.

• 2:12:08Speaker 03

  So we train people in peer support, psychedelic harm reduction, so people can help each other. So with all of those things, with a post-prandemic world, with all of that, then I think we can, over time, work both with people with a diagnosis that then gets covered by insurance, and then people can do this on their own in a wiser way than just with no guidance. The other answer or response to your question is that we need to move to treat people closer to the trauma. So what that means is, right now, the FDA has forbid us from working with people that are younger than 18 that have PTSD. But they've said that if you make MDMA into a medicine for people that are, you know,

• 2:12:52Speaker 03

  if they give us permission to make MDMA prescription medicine for adults designed as 18 or over, that we must do a study with adolescents. And if that works, we have to work with 7 to 11-year-olds. So I think we need to move sooner to treating people for the trauma. Now, the other part of this relates to the veterans and the VA and the Department of Defense. So we're now in about seven or eight VAs. It took forever. It took the intervention of Richard Rockefeller, who was David Rockefeller's son, who was, he was Chair of the Board of Advisors of Doctors Without Borders, and he came to help us.

• 2:13:32Speaker 03

  And I worked with him very closely till he died tragically in a plane crash. But it was his cousin, Senator Jay Rockefeller, that was from West Virginia, that was on the Senate Veterans Affairs Committee. And together, they were able to influence the VA, this is now in 2014, to let us pay for studies with VA therapists, but they wouldn't let us do it inside the VA, and they would not refer vets to us. But we were able to start that way. We had also started in the San Diego Naval Medical Center, where there was, Rob McClain was the chief psychiatrist there, and they have a two-week program for Navy SEALs and Marines and others with PTSD, an inpatient program. And he was interested in...

• 2:14:18Speaker 03

  Giving some of them MDMA and see if they did better than the others. So this is where I learned about military hierarchy and bureaucracy. So, you're laughing, so I didn't know this, now I see. So, Rob McClay was great, and he said, "I want to do this study, but I can't do it unless I get the permission of the admiral who runs the facility." So, the admiral says, "Okay, it's okay with me, but now you've got to get permission from, all the way up from the secretary of the Navy." Just so happened that Richard Rockefeller knew the secretary of the Navy. This was Ray Mabus. All right, and then in this, so, so he talked to him, and we got a meeting at the Pentagon.

• 2:14:59Speaker 03

  So here I am, a draft resister, and you may remember that the hippies, the yippies, not the hippies, but the yippies surrounded the Pentagon as one of their protests against the Vietnam War. They said they were going to levitate the Pentagon. They did not succeed. You know, but here I am, walking into the Pentagon, all these years later, to talk to them about psychedelics. And we met with the assistant, Juan Garcia was the assistant secretary of the Navy, and it turned out that he was a friend of mine from the Kennedy School when I got my masters, and we'd been friends then. And he knew I was interested in MDMA, but we hadn't stayed in touch. Our careers went in different places completely. But here it is now, he's the assistant secretary of the Navy, and we met with him and the Navy surgeon general.

• 2:15:44Speaker 03

  We caught up, he knew my girlfriend at the time, who was now my wife, and so, so they said, "Yes, they'd love to do this study, but they're not high enough in the hierarchy. We have to go to the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, and we have to have that meeting." And meanwhile, we got these letters from Jay Rockefeller, Senator Rockefeller, to the assistant secretary of defense for health affairs, and then Jay intervened with the secretary of, with the, yeah, secretary of the VA. You know, and it all came together with this meeting, and they said, "We do not want you to work with active duty soldiers." And their rationale was...

• 2:16:26Speaker 03

  Terrible. Their rationale was the need is so great that if we permit you to do work with active duty soldiers, we're worried that the word would get out that this is okay and a lot of people will self-medicate.

• 2:16:39Shawn Ryan?

  You've got to be kidding me.

• 2:16:40Speaker 03

  That's what they said.

• 2:16:41Shawn Ryan?

  They're worried it was going to be successful.

• 2:16:43Speaker 03

  They were worried it would be successful or just the experiment would send the word and people would self-medicate and they're trying to make it so people only do the drugs that they give you rather than. And so they said, we want you to start with the veterans. And so I guess the bigger story here is that we need to move closer to the trauma. And when you look at a lot of the people that are in the prisons, a lot of them have had traumatic childhood.

• 2:17:09Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:17:11Speaker 03

  I imagine that something may have happened with this shooter, who knows, you know, in childhood or. So I think to achieve this goal kind of of a mentally, mass mental health, it's going to take generations, but it starts by getting some of these drugs approved, getting these clinics set up, training more therapists, getting insurance coverage and over time, globalizing. And I'd say one of the biggest challenges we face now is that we now are at this incredible moment, this incredible moment that after April 8th coming right up is the 37th anniversary of MAPS.

• 2:17:56Shawn Ryan?

  Congratulations.

• 2:17:58Speaker 03

  Yeah. And so I started in 1986. Thirty seven years later, we're on the verge, we think. We have two successful Phase 3 studies. We hope by June of 2024, we may actually, we project hopefully getting FDA approval. And we've raised about $145 million in grants and donations to this point and a lot of donated labor, a lot of donated labor. But the rise of the for-profit psychedelic companies a few years ago made it more difficult for us to achieve donors, to reach donations, because a lot of people thought they could just invest. So we do have roughly $63 million from investors, but it's 43 million in what's

• 2:18:40Speaker 03

  called a royalty share, meaning that they don't own equity, but they get a share of the royalties. And we have a $20 million, more or less, convertible note loan.

• 2:18:53Speaker 03

  For two years. Oh, God. But right now, we have this remarkable situation where the nonprofit is the 100% owner of the for-profit, public benefit pharmaceutical company. And so, we're at this crossroads. In the next couple of months is gonna be the turning point. We need to raise, we're looking now to raise around $75 million to get us to FDA approval. And then, after FDA approval, there's gonna be another bunch of money we need to raise to get to what's called sustainability. Where, you know, sales and profits from the sale of MDMA covers the costs and then brings in more money for more research and things like that. If we can get the FDA approval, we're gonna have a lot of other ways to raise money, more

• 2:19:35Speaker 03

  royalty shares, or selling off rights to certain countries. We were approached by a company from South Korea, actually, that's talking to us about bringing MDMA to South Korea, and maybe they'd pay us a certain amount of money or things like that. So, what we're trying to do is, in the next couple of months, figure out, can we find donors are willing to donate so that public benefit remains the number one goal? Or do we find money from investors that then means that we become, most likely, a publicly traded company? And so, my hope is that we do this through philanthropy.

• 2:20:17Speaker 03

  You know, I don't own anything, those of us at MAF, none of us owns anything, because it's a nonprofit. And the nonprofit is what owns the shares of the public benefit corp. But if we have to sell them to the public, then I think things will change in terms of priorities, when you have to respond to investors. Already, we need to take into account the investors that have given us money, we need to give them a good return. We need to do the best to get royalties, but it's not maximize royalties, and they're mission-related people. All the people that have invested so far are mission-related people. So, the hope is that we will find donors, and that then we can have this rare situation of a psychedelic pharmaceutical company 100% owned by a nonprofit.

• 2:21:02Speaker 03

  That's also willing to legalize and make it available outside of us. So while we might charge a substantial amount of money for the drug, we want people to be able to buy it for $10 or $20, too. And we think people will, most likely, those people that are really severely traumatized will, or even not that, but moderate severe trauma, will go to the trained therapists. So I think legalization is good for the business model. A lot of people think legalization is bad for the business model. And a lot of for-profit pharma companies, psychedelic pharma companies, are not speaking out about the need to move to a post-prohibition world. But I actually think that that's what we need for mass mental health, that's what we

• 2:21:44Speaker 03

  need for ethics, and that's what we need to really, fully move forward with public benefit in mind. So I think that the choices are going to be coming to us in the next three years, months. That's one of the reasons why I'm so glad the timeliness of this podcast with you. And then we're having the world's largest psychedelic conference ever, and it's going to be June 19th to 23rd in Denver. Really? Yeah. It's called Psychedelic Science 2023. We've had one of these in 2010, Psychedelic Science Cup, where we bring the whole field together. The whole field was pretty small back in 2010.

• 2:22:26Speaker 03

  Then we had one in, that was in San Jose, then we had one in 2013, and one in 2017 in Oakland. And the 2017 one was the world's largest psychedelic conference. We had about 3,000 people there. We already have 4,500 people coming to this one, and it's a little bit less than three months away. Wow. So psychedelicscience.org. It's going to be incredible. We have over 300 speakers, people coming from all over the world. We have the Denver Convention Center. We have an enormous number of exhibitors from all these companies. And so I think that will be, either we have raised what we need by then, or that will be the announcement of here's what we need to do, one way or another, to...

• 2:23:12Speaker 03

  To raise the resources and I'd say that the worst, the biggest loss of public benefit would be if we don't raise the money and never make MDMA into a medicine. So if we have to go with investors that want us to become a publicly traded company, we will do that. My preference, though, would be to do this through philanthropy. So for anybody that wants to donate, where do they go? Well, maps.org. Maps.org? Yeah, and if you want to donate a substantial amount, it's probably better for you to ask [email protected] and just ask for a meeting. Okay. Or something like that.

• 2:23:56Speaker 03

  Or just call the maps office or, you know, but I think that what we're hoping is that that when we talk about what we want to accomplish, the world is in danger right now. Uh huh. I mean, the mental health crisis is getting worse. The pandemic made it way worse. Definitely not getting any better. It seems like it's getting worse. And if it's true that there could be a billion climate refugees by 2050, the stress is on everybody. It's gonna keep getting worse. So I really think that if we can keep focus on not maximizing money, we've already built the structure.

• 2:24:38Speaker 03

  The Public Benefit Corp. is a modification of capitalism. So a normal company, and almost all the companies that we know are normal for-profit companies, their mission is to maximize profits. And if you're a minority shareholder in a company and you think that the management is not maximizing profits, you can get the other shareholders and you throw them out and you replace people who will maximize profits. And that's like a...

• 2:25:06Speaker 03

  That's one of the problems of capitalism. Is that all these externalities, these companies don't, don't think about. So the oil companies are doing massive profits, but they're, they're not having to pay for climate change.

• 2:25:20Speaker 03

  You know, but, but they're maximizing profits. So the Public Benefit Corporation was created, I'm not sure exactly when, but maybe 20 years ago or something like that. It's a modification of capitalism where it is a for-profit company, but you maximize public benefit, not profit. So minority shareholders cannot sue the management if you're not maximizing profits. So, so let's say we want to go to Rwanda, or we want to go to South Africa, or, or Ukraine. You know, or all the Ukrainian refugees. We want to treat massive amounts of trauma where there's virtually no money. If we're profit maximizing, we wouldn't do anything.

• 2:26:00Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:01Speaker 03

  But if we're about net zero trauma by 2070, that means we have to have a global focus. And we go where the trauma is, not where the money is. And so if people do want to donate, we would be delighted. There's also the nonprofit MAPS, which doesn't, you know, need nearly as much money as the benefit corp. And we do public education, we do harm reduction, we do all the fundraising for the benefit corp. We do policy and advocacy. We, we do a lot of things through the nonprofit. So people can just donate to the nonprofit for our own purposes.

• 2:26:39Shawn Ryan?

  Okay.

• 2:26:40Speaker 03

  You know, which in small amounts. So, so I also want to say that, you know, we're talking about such big numbers. And so people might think, oh, if I donate $50, that means nothing. And that's not at all true.

• 2:26:52Shawn Ryan?

  It absolutely means something.

• 2:26:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:26:54Shawn Ryan?

  Where do you see the most pushback coming from legalizing this stuff?

• 2:26:58Speaker 03

  Well, I think that in a time right now where over 100,000 people died last year from opiate overdoses. There is more of a bipartisan view that the drug war itself is not a good idea. That's why I would actually like to see a. A study done, perhaps by the CIA, about the national security implications of legalizing drugs. I think that if that study were to be done, and we look at all the bad actors that are making all sorts of money from drug dealing. And of course, we like some people who make money off of drugs, too.

• 2:27:39Speaker 03

  But add it all up, my guess is that we would decide that it's an advantage to legalize drugs from a national security perspective. So I don't think the pushback is going to come from drug warriors in that way. The pushback that came in the initial backlash was cultural. It was against the counterculture. Nixon was saying that, well, actually, it's John Ehrlichman was Nixon's domestic policy adviser. And I think it was in 79, he spoke to a reporter and he said that the two main enemies of the Nixon White House were blacks and hippies. And he said, if we can criminalize the drugs that they use,

• 2:28:22Speaker 03

  we can bust up their meetings, we can arrest their leaders. Because they can't stop the protests, but if we criminalize the drugs. And then Ehrlichman said, did we know we were exaggerating the risk of drugs? Of course we did. But it was a political tool. So I think that we have done so much work. And also, I would say, the reason that we have bipartisan support is, like yourself, a lot of veterans who have had struggles with PTSD. And America thinks of veterans in a high way, in high regard. And we should, that I don't think it's going to come back. The backlash is going to come that way. All right, then, the next backlash came late in the 70s, early the 80s, when it looked like marijuana might get legalized. The backlash then came from parents.

• 2:29:07Speaker 03

  And it was parents worried about their kids. So this was Partnership for a Drug-Free America. And this was Families Against Drugs. And all these different kind of, Families in Action, I think it was. So I think that that's kind of passed, too. And so I think where the backlash would come from, if it will come from, it's not quite clear where it will come from. But I would say that the thing that I'm Worried about is fundamentalists. So what we're talking about is the spiritual experiences, these kind of unit of mystical experiences. And they're accessible to everybody.

• 2:29:51Speaker 03

  And when you have those experiences, sometimes they're mediated through certain religious symbols or people, but sometimes not. So I think there's a kind of a universal spirituality. And I think that a lot of the fundamentalists from, I mean, I look what's happening in Israel right now. The fundamentalist Orthodox Jews, the ultra Orthodox are destroying the country in many different ways. They're the most racist, the most homophobic, the most hateful for Palestinians. You know, and we see that we've got the, so I think, I'm just saying, fundamentalists of any kind. Yeah. Are willing to, look what's happening with the Taliban in Afghanistan.

• 2:30:35Speaker 03

  So, and their narrative is that there's one right way. We know it and everybody else is an infidel and we will kill you. Yeah. You know, so I think they're so in need of this deeper spirituality, you know. So both, that's where I think a big opportunity is as well. So actually this Saturday, I'm speaking at Harvard Divinity School. They're having a psychedelic revival in a way. And there's incredible information that's coming out about what's called the Eleusinian Mysteries. So this is the world's longest running mystery ceremonies. It went from 1600 B.C. to around 480.

• 2:31:16Speaker 03

  And it was wiped out by the Catholic Church because they could put themselves in a hierarchy between you and God. But the Eleusinian Mysteries was involving a potion that people drank called Kikian. And now we understand it was a psychedelic potion similar to LSD. And this is the foundation of democracy was the Greeks. We think our culture comes from the Greeks, Pythagoras, Plato, Aristotle, everybody that we think of as the epitome of the Greek culture and the flowering of the creation of democracy had a psychedelic experience as part of their lives. And it was considered so important. This is kind of funny to say, but they would let women and slaves do it too.

• 2:31:58Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:31:58Speaker 03

  It wasn't just limited to men. Women and slaves could do this. And you were under pain of death to say what actually happened. You should not share that. And so we don't know exactly what happened. But I think that this sense that this psychedelic experience can be interpreted in many different contexts. So I'd like to say that it's like languages. We have, we're not going to say that English is a better language than Russian or is a better language than German. They come from our common human need to communicate. And according to cultural context, we come up with different sounds that we make that we call our language.

• 2:32:42Speaker 03

  I think religion can be seen like that, that there's a common spirituality and we come up in different cultural contexts. I grew up in a Jewish context. I don't think that only Jews go to heaven or that, you know, I don't. Jews are the chosen people, according to the Bible. But the way I think about it is everybody's the chosen people. Yes, Jews are the chosen people, but so are you, so is everybody. It's kind of an egotistical kind of, you know, but it's a way to make us feel distinct and better. So I think that the fundamentalists of different religions are so holding on to literal interpretations of things that I think, deep down, they're super insecure.

• 2:33:22Shawn Ryan?

  Hmm. I mean, it's interesting you say that because I've done, I've done quite a few episodes on psychedelics, not by now. And, and as much as I shouldn't, I do go into the comments section. And it's, it's always, it's always the, how do I say this?

• 2:33:46Shawn Ryan?

  It's always the very religious people that are against it. Everybody's for this, it seems like, but the people that are that can't see outside of their religion and have been indoctrinated in a religion. I hate to use that term, but those are the ones that they can't see the benefit. They think, oh, well, just you need Jesus. You need God. You need to pray. Yep, you know what? I do need those things, but if that is what you believe in, don't you think God or Jesus or Allah or whoever you're praying to, don't you think they would want us to be better?

• 2:34:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:34:29Shawn Ryan?

  Don't you think they would want the pain and the suffering to go away?

• 2:34:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, you know, Brother David, who I talked about, he talked about how Jesus is the son of God. But the way he hears that is, so is everybody. You know, it's not untrue that we are all the children of God. But what's untrue is that one group has a monopoly on spirituality. Now, most people in the world would not agree with what I'm saying right now. And so I think there's this sense about how do we reach out to fundamentalists and say, if you let go of the literalism, there will be a richness that you can experience that doesn't make you turn away from what you believe in. You know, yes, we can see

• 2:35:18Speaker 03

  some of the miracle stories may be reinterpreted. So my wife, actually, this is a good example. My wife worked for the World Council of Churches. She actually, one of her first jobs out of college was she was a lobbyist in Washington. But she was a lobbyist for the Quakers. And she said that they We're always, you know, nonviolent and they define success as if somebody says, "We're all in favor of this expansion of the military budget." Everybody agrees with that. Then they would say, "Well, we don't agree." That was their success, you know, that at least somebody could hear there was a dissenting voice. Then she worked for the World Council of Churches in Geneva and traveled all over the

• 2:36:03Speaker 03

  world during Third World Women Development. And this is a more progressive group than the Vatican in some ways. And so they reinterpreted the miracle of the loaves and the fishes. So we have Jesus giving this incredible Sermon on the Mount. All right, and then there's this, all these people that he wants to feed and there's not enough food. And so, all of a sudden, this few loaves and the fishes, the multiplication, so now it's a miracle and it feeds everybody. So their interpretation of it was that these miracle stories are designed in a way by power structures and they're stuff that we can't do. I can't make a miracle of multiplying loaves and fishes and stuff.

• 2:36:45Speaker 03

  But what they interpreted is that what happened was Jesus gave a beautiful talk about how we're all in this together and how we should share. And so the real miracle is keep, people overcame their selfishness and shared and then there was enough for everybody. So I think we can reinterpret a lot of these miracle stories because when you say it's a miracle of how he created the loaves and the fishes, I don't have to do that. I can't do that. But if you say, "I should be less selfish." Jesus talked to people about being less selfish. That means I have to do something. And so you could see how people might move away from that because then, so I do think,

• 2:37:27Speaker 03

  I'm curious, where do you think the backlash would come from, if it does come?

• 2:37:32Shawn Ryan?

  I think the backlash, I, excuse me, I think the backlash will come from Big Pharma.

• 2:37:37Speaker 03

  I don't think that at all.

• 2:37:39Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 2:37:39Speaker 03

  I don't think that at all. And I guess I'll say that, what can they do? Nothing. So the way the FDA, I don't perceive any pressure right now from Big Pharma on the FDA to slow us down.

• 2:37:54Shawn Ryan?

  Really?

• 2:37:55Speaker 03

  Not at all. And in fact, Merck invented MDMA in 1912.

• 2:38:02Speaker 03

  They tested it in animals in 1927 and they found nothing. They didn't understand what to look for. They tried it again in 1959. Animals again found nothing. But Merck is the one that developed really empty. Now it's in the public domain. So a few years ago, some of our people in the benefit corp were trying to think, how do we do work in Europe? And so they knew someone who was a senior person at Merck, who was an expert in Europe and doing research in regulatory systems in Europe. And she joined one of our calls for free to help us. And this is their own drug. So another thing to say is that a lot of the drugs that Big Pharma has done for psychiatry

• 2:38:47Speaker 03

  are generic now. So I don't think Big Pharma is going to come after us at all. I just don't see it. And so I think this other part of, you know, the political backlash, I don't see that either. And in fact, just as an example of that, I'll say that, you know, with Marcus. We were just in Dallas a few days ago and Governor Rick Perry was there. And he was governor of Texas for 15 years. He was in Trump's cabinet as Secretary of Energy. And he's heard all these stories from Navy SEALs that have gone down and got IBCAM. He talked about Marcus Luttrell, actually. So this is the story he just told, that Marcus Luttrell lived at the governor's office

• 2:39:31Speaker 03

  with him. And he heard his story and he helped him. Now he's a member of Congress. But he heard Marcus talk about doing IBCAM. Now Governor Perry is pro psychedelics. He's helping in many ways. I had an incredible meeting with Ted Nugent and his son Rocco. Rocco Moon. And this was just a couple of weeks ago. Well, two months ago, something like that. And I had never thought that there would be any kind of common ground that I might have with Ted Nugent. But there is.

• 2:40:12Speaker 03

  And it's Rocco, his son, is interested in becoming a psychedelic therapist. Get out of here. Really? Yes. And Rocco set it up between his father and I. Wow. And what Ted said is actually that he could be a particularly good advocate because he's so anti-drug.

• 2:40:31Shawn Ryan?

  Wow.

• 2:40:33Speaker 03

  And he's friends, Ted Nugent is friends with Governor Perry. So all of this is to say that I think that the backlash is not going to come from any kind of a political thing. I really don't see it coming from Big Pharma. So here's just another way why I don't think it from Big Pharma. The way the FDA is organized, it's to protect pharma companies from having influence. Because if pharma companies could influence the FDA, then they'd all be trying to do that against all their other competitors. And so, so for example, if I'm trying to make a drug XYZ into a medicine and I do a bunch of studies and it turns out that this drug has terrible safety consequences

• 2:41:17Speaker 03

  and the FDA says, we're stopping this, you cannot make this drug into a medicine. Some other company comes and says, I want to make XYZ into a medicine. The FDA is not allowed to tell them that they've already rejected the drug to somebody else. So they're not, so when people say, what does the FDA think about what you're doing? The FDA doesn't make announcements about it. I can announce, oh, we've got FDA approval, we've done this, we've done that. I mean, for this project or that. They will announce, of course, if they approve things for medicines. But, but the FDA is designed pretty, to insulate themselves. And it's for the benefit of all the pharma companies as well. So I think really it's, it's up to us.

• 2:42:00Speaker 03

  I think if we can do this in a careful, responsible way. So I think one of the biggest problems is, and this I saw happening during the 60s, is the government exaggerated the risks terribly and denied the benefits and then shut down research for decades.

• 2:42:16Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah.

• 2:42:17Speaker 03

  But if we exaggerate the benefits and deny the risks, then we will be the cause of problems. So I think, so that's why I try to always say it's psychedelic therapy and it's about integration, it's not just about doing the drug and it doesn't work for everybody. And we have to figure out who does it work for, who doesn't it work for? So I think maybe I would say, and I think even the fundamentalists are often those ones that are most conservative in certain ways and really support the veterans.

• 2:42:51Shawn Ryan?

  Uh huh. I think you're right. I think it's, it's, I think you're absolutely right. It's people like. Like veterans, like my story, I've put it out there several times, you know, how it benefited me and it is starting to change conservatives' minds, you know, about it because they are seeing the benefits. My dad saw the benefits, my wife saw the benefits, my father-in-law saw the benefits. Everybody's, everybody around me has seen the benefits. I think that the reason, and you know a lot more about this than I do, obviously, but for me, I think the reason the Big Pharma will get involved is because, look at all the

• 2:43:34Shawn Ryan?

  drugs that treat depression, look at all the drugs that treat, you know, pain, you know, all the things, PTSD, all these things, they're all addictive. Benzos, you know, addictive. Painkillers, addictive. Sleep aids, addictive. And because psychedelics and psychedelic therapy is so effective, this, it's not going to be the ongoing thing, year, you know,

• 2:44:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's only a few times.

• 2:44:05Shawn Ryan?

  Every day, year, year, year, year, year. And it's one, a couple times, maybe a couple times a year and it's done, you know, you're, it works. You don't have to take it every day.

• 2:44:18Speaker 03

  I think that's very true and I think it will result in hopefully, we see a lot of people that have, well, in our studies, people have to get off of their psychiatric medications because they interfere with the effect of MDMA. And many people do not go back on them. So, you know, and we are trying to do a study, we will try to do a study one day, where it seems like the SSRIs blunt the effect of MDMA. But we need to do a dose response safety study because it does, there's some evidence to suggest that if you double the dose of MDMA on people on SSRIs, they can have a full MDMA experience. And so, if that's true, the concern has been serotonin syndrome. Would there be overheating? Would

• 2:45:03Speaker 03

  there be problems from that? But if there aren't, if we can demonstrate that there are not problems from that, then it opens up to a lot of people who are nervous about getting off their psychiatric meds to do psychedelics. If they could stay on them, and then they get psychedelic therapy that reduces their traumas, their symptoms, then it'll be easier to get off these other drugs. But I do think that Big Pharma makes, most of these drugs that you mentioned have been around for decades and decades, and they are off patent.

• 2:45:35Shawn Ryan?

  Okay. That makes a lot of sense. It does.

• 2:45:40Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, we just have to do our very best. So I think what we need to do is storytelling. So what is it that really will prevent a backlash from anybody? It's people telling their stories of how these drugs were helpful, or how they were challenging, just honest information, I think. But people, even, you know, fundamentalists have kids with depression.

• 2:46:04Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, which is depressing. I was gonna say that, too. I mean, the opiate, fentanyl crisis is, it's not getting any smaller. And I think just about everybody knows somebody that is, that is, that is fallen victim to the, to the opiate crisis, you know? And it's gonna be...

• 2:46:26Speaker 03

  We had in Belmont, where I live, right outside, it's right next to Cambridge, you know, where Harvard is, right next to Boston. We've had kids in the high school die from overdoses.

• 2:46:35Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah. Yeah. And I think it's gonna be, you're right, storytelling like that, have you seen that documentary, Dosed? Are you in that documentary?

• 2:46:46Speaker 03

  I actually haven't seen it, but I'm speaking, Dosed is gonna be shown in Arlington, May 10th and 11th, I think it is, and I'm gonna speak there.

• 2:46:54Shawn Ryan?

  Okay. Yeah, it's gonna, I mean, there was a woman in there that got, overcame opiate addiction. And Trevor's the, you know, the main guy in there, but...

• 2:47:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:47:06Shawn Ryan?

  And it worked. And as far as I know, she's still clean.

• 2:47:10Speaker 03

  Well, the story that I talked about in my TED Talk, Tony Macy was one of the veterans. This is a beautiful story. So, yeah, if people wanted to check out my TED Talk. But what Tony said...

• 2:47:24Speaker 03

  He's a rare story. It's an incredible story. So he had terrible PTSD from Iraq, all that. He disabled basically a lot from PTSD. So during his first MDMA experience, he had this realization. The MDMA centered him, made him feel more peaceful, opened his heart. And he realized that there was something good about his PTSD. That it was the way that he showed that he honored the memory of his friends who had died. As long as he was suffering from PTSD, he was keeping alive in his mind the memories of his friends who were no longer alive. And then he kind of was able to think about the friends of his that were no longer alive, looking at him.

• 2:48:07Speaker 03

  And they were like, "We don't want you to squander your life mourning about us. We cannot live. We would like you to live. Maybe we can live through you." And he said, "There's another way for me to honor my friend's memory by living." And in that moment, he cured himself of PTSD. And then he said, "I'm taking opiates, but I don't think I'm really taking them for pain. I think I can do without them." And he said, "I'm gonna stop the opiates." And then he said, "I don't even think I need the MDMA anymore. This is it. I'm done. I'm fixed." And we said, "You can drop out anytime you want, but would you be willing to do the two-month and 10-month and the one-year follow-ups at least?" Which he agreed to do.

• 2:48:50Speaker 03

  And neither of those showed that he had PTSD anymore. And this is now about eight years ago. And we're still in touch. And he went to Cambodia and to do service to other people that were struggling. One of the best ways to get out of depression is to help other people. And so he did that for a while. And so it was just this sense that, "Yeah, I don't really need these opiates anymore. And I don't even need this MDMA anymore." Which is, you know, great.

• 2:49:20Shawn Ryan?

  It's incredible.

• 2:49:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:49:22Shawn Ryan?

  Well, we are out of time, and you have a flight to catch. But I just wanna say, it is an honor to have you here. I love talking to you. I could've gone on for another four hours with this. So I hope you come back, but... If you guys want to donate to Rick and his efforts to legalize psychedelics, all the links are in the description below. And Rick, seriously, it's a real pleasure to meet you and I hope to see you again. I really do.

• 2:49:53Speaker 03

  Thank you, Sean. It's been a pleasure and thanks to Trevor for connecting us.

• 2:49:56Shawn Ryan?

  Yeah, thank you, Trevor, but best of luck to you.