Should You Be Taking Psychedelics? The Benefits, the Risks, and the Science. | Jay Michaelson

Featuring a meditation teacher, author, professor, and dedicated experimenter with these molecules. Jay Michaelson is a journalist, meditation teacher, rabbi, and professor of religious studies whose work for the last several years has been focused on psychedelics, meditation, and spirituality. Jay is a field scholar at Emory University's Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality, and a fellow at Harvard Law School's project on Psychedelic Use, Law, and Spiritual Experience. He is currently a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, teaching courses on psychedelics, law, and religion. In this episode we talk about: Everything you should know about psychedelics if you're wondering whether to give them a try What the research shows thus far The differences among various compounds The overlap between meditation and psychedelics The difference between spirituality and healing The dizzying question of whether these medicines have a separate consciousness And more Related Episodes: Psychedelics and Meditation | Michael Pollan - by DB - Dan Harris https://www.danharris.com/p/psychedelics-and-meditation-michael-08f What to do About Eco-Anxiety | Jay Michaelson https://www.danharris.com/p/what-to-do-about-eco-anxiety-jay-9f3 Follow Dan on social: Instagram https://bit.ly/3tGigG5, TikTok https://bit.ly/3FOA84J Subscribe to our YouTube Channel https://bit.ly/3FybRzD Our favorite playlists on: Anxiety https://spoti.fi/3Qa8kMT, Sleep https://spoti.fi/3MjtMxF, Relationships https://spoti.fi/3QvyA5J, Most Popular Episodes https://spoti.fi/3QxZASc Additional Resources: Both/And with Jay Michaelson https://jaymichaelson.substack.com/ A special guided meditation from Jay to accompany this episode https://www.danharris.com/s/meditations Two free upcoming events: Emory Science on Spiritual Health Conference https://psychedelics.emory.edu/events/sos-twenty-five.html (free, online) Harvard Symposium on Psychedelics in Monotheistic Traditions (which Jay co-chairing) https://pjil.law.harvard.edu/annualconferences/

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

• 0:05Dan Harris?

  This is the 10% Happier Podcast. I'm Dan Harris.

• 0:19Dan Harris?

  Hey, hey, how we doing, everybody? As you probably know, there is a renaissance, dare I say, a revolution happening right now in the psychedelic space. Said revolution is being fueled by a growing body of evidence that suggests that medicines such as psilocybin, LSD, MDMA, ketamine, and many others can have beneficial impacts on everything from anxiety to addiction and from depression to PTSD and more. But here's the question you might have, and this is one I've been struggling with mightily myself. The question is, should I do this stuff? Personally, while I do, once in a while, take some MDMA socially, I've not been able to bring myself to do any of the other psychedelics like psilocybin, or LSD, or ayahuasca,

• 1:02Dan Harris?

  which many of my friends and meditation teachers have strongly recommended to me, largely because I'm afraid that as a person with panic disorder, I might be pretty much guaranteed to have a bad trip. Today, I'm talking to my great friend, Jay Michaelson, who is a meditation teacher, author, lawyer, and dedicated experimenter with these molecules. We're talking about everything you need to know about psychedelics if you're wondering whether you should give them a try. And I should say, if you're already a dedicated psychonaut, or somebody who's got some experience in this area, there's a lot in here for you as well. Jay and I talk about what the research on psychedelics shows thus far, the differences among the various drugs or medicines, the overlap between meditation and psychedelics,

• 1:45Dan Harris?

  the difference between spirituality and healing, the dizzying question of whether these medicines have a separate consciousness, and much more. A little bit more about Jay before we dive in here. As referenced above, he's had quite a varied career. He's been a journalist for CNN, Rolling Stone, The Daily Beast, and many other platforms. He's been a lawyer, an LGBTQ activist, a rabbi, a meditation teacher, and in recent years, he's started focusing more on psychedelics as a professional pursuit. Jay is now a field scholar at Emory University's Center on Psychedelics and Spirituality, and he's a fellow at Harvard Law School's Project on Psychedelic Use, Law, and Spiritual Experience. There is a lot in this conversation.

• 2:28Dan Harris?

  Paid subscribers at danharris.com will get a cheat sheet, which includes key takeaways and a full transcript. You will also get a guided meditation from Jay, in which he helps you incorporate some of the learnings from psychedelics into your life, whether you take the medicines or not. My guy Jay Michaelson coming right up.

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• 3:53Dan Harris?

  Jay Michaelson, my old friend. Welcome back to the show. Thanks, Dan. It's good to be back. It's been a while. Yeah, it has been a while, too long. We should be doing this more regularly. All right, so today we're talking about psychedelics, which I'm really excited to talk about with you. As you have pointed out, you have a long history in meditation, leading retreats, working at meditation apps, writing about it. But you're kind of switching your focus of late to psychedelics. That's not to say you're forsaking meditation, but your psychedelics are really kind of taking up more of your bandwidth these days. So I'm just curious, what happened there?

• 4:31Speaker 03

  A few things. I think first, you know, I actually have a longer psychedelic history than a meditation history. My first experience was, gosh, 1991 at Columbia University. It's not a great mindset, not a great setting, and definitely not the experience I would recommend to others. But you know, there was, there was not just stigma around psychedelics, but I really do feel like there was a sense of, well, this will never gain wide acceptance. And I remember meeting Rick Doblin, who's, you know, one of the foremost figures in contemporary psychedelics at Burning Man in 2003 or four, somewhere around there. And, you know, he was running around telling people we were going to legalize MDMA and, and for medical use. And I just thought he was nuts. Like, I was like, well, that's

• 5:14Speaker 03

  never gonna happen. So it just felt like something that was in the background of my own spiritual practice or contemplative practice, but not something that would really gain wider purchase. And, and, you know, obviously, there was a psychedelic underground for decades. And I wouldn't say I was really part of it. I mean, I participated a little bit, but it didn't feel like, I don't know, it wasn't leading to the kind of liberation that I was seeking at the time, you know, meditation really was. And just in the last few years, so obviously, it's, there's been a public change around psychedelics. And I think it's pretty remarkable how quickly it's happened. And there was also a personal change for me. You know, I used to go on long meditation retreats, you know, six-week

• 5:57Speaker 03

  meditation retreats, three-month meditation retreats. And now I have a seven-year-old, and I'm not doing that. And, you know, I know you've been on a few retreats, finally again, you know, also as a parent, but it's, you know, it's, it's a bigger lift. And the kind of meditation work that I found and still find really healing, just takes, it's not the day-to-day, you know, I'm not disparaging that, obviously, it's your bread and butter. But, but the kind of deep work that I want to do is really work that happens on retreat. And that just became less accessible because of the way I want to parent. And psychedelics kind of stepped into some of that, that space.

• 6:37Dan Harris?

  Hmm. So there's the personal aspect of this, and I really want to go deep on that when the time is right. And then there's also this sort of socio-political aspect, too, that meditation had its journey. I mean, it's still happening. There was a time when it was, it wasn't socially acceptable to admit you meditated in 2003 or even 2010, but that's really changed. But we're earlier in the hype cycle, or the public acceptance cycle, or the movement with psychedelics. And so that's also interesting to you as well.

• 7:11Speaker 03

  Yeah, definitely. I mean, you won. Like, you know, you persuaded America that meditation was for normies also. And obviously, I'm joking a little bit. I mean, you did play a real role in that. But there has been this transformation. And I think, yeah, you know, so part of it is just flitting to the next exciting thing a little bit. But I want to give myself a little more credit than that. You know, I think there really is this moment of excitement in the field. And there's a lot of, just like there was in mindfulness. I remember when, you know, when you and I were working together almost, well, like 10 years ago or something, you know, there's a real mix of quality. There's a mix of motives. There's people who you definitely trust, and you feel like, wow, this person is for real. And then you meet someone else, and you're like, well, that person's maybe not

• 7:53Speaker 03

  so for real. And that's true in psychedelics as well. It's not like a rosy Eden of idealists. It's a very broad field, just like going to some of those big meditation conferences five, 10 years ago. But there is this kind of exciting moment. And I also felt like I loved our work together at 10% happier. I still teach meditation a little bit. You know, I'm leading a winter meditation retreat, but it's not, it doesn't have the edge for me that the psychedelic work really does. And so I, for a while, I was like figuring out, what's my lane? And it ended up being not working, not being a facilitator, which I don't, I don't feel called to do, and not working for one of the kind of companies, but actually being back in the academic world, where I have a PhD in religion, and the rabbinic

• 8:38Speaker 03

  ordination as well. And so it's kind of looking at using some of those lenses that I've developed in contemplative practice to look at psychedelic practice.

• 8:50Dan Harris?

  So you're now, and I will have said this in the introduction, but just to make it clear, you have a perch at Emory. Maybe say a little bit about what your work consists of.

• 8:59Speaker 03

  Sure. So I have two perches. When this episode airs, I'll also be a visiting professor at Harvard Law School, where I'll be for the spring of 2025. In March of 2025, I'm co-facilitating, co-organizing a symposium on psychedelics, law and religion, looking at the kind of religious theological philosophical bases for contemporary psychedelic use and also the legal doctrines that might enable it to gain legal recognition. And that's super exciting, also teaching on that subject at the law school. And at Emory, I'm part of a center called the Emory Center for Psychedelics and Spirituality, which really wants to kind of bring these pieces together. It started out a lot around spiritual care or chaplaincy and psychedelic chaplaincy in particular, but also there's a number of scientists on

• 9:43Speaker 03

  staff doing a lot of kind of scientific work. There I'm working on, I'm co-editing with my amazing co-editor Caroline Peacock, an anthology of psychedelic spiritual experiences. So focused on what in our corner of the meditation world, we would call the deep end. But what's interesting, and I think unlike most meditation, is that people dive into the deep end by accident on psychedelics, right? So you might go to a psychedelic assisted therapy session, you know, a legal session with ketamine, for example, or a study around MDMA or some other compound, and have an intention that's about mental health, right? You're suffering from PTSD or depression or anxiety or some other condition. And then

• 10:25Speaker 03

  you become what I call an accidental mystic, like you have some kind of, and this happens to atheists, like you have some kind of profound, the acronym that's now used in the literature is CERT, S E R T, Spiritual Existential Religious or Theological Experience. So again, if you're an atheist, you might not interpret it as theological, but you would have some kind of peak experience. And those can even be unwanted. And that can happen occasionally, certainly happens in deep meditation on retreat. It doesn't happen that much in daily practice. In psychedelic practice, it really can. So we're looking at those kinds of folks as well and what experiences are generated in those contexts. And it also, the greater your S E R T experience, the more effective the psychedelic therapy tends to be

• 11:10Speaker 03

  for the mental health outcome. So you get better mental health outcomes, the more you have these kind of profound, sometimes life-changing experiences. And we don't really know why.

• 11:21Dan Harris?

  You say that people can have unwanted or unplanned mystical experiences, but I, I thought the mystical experience was, that's what you're signing up for because that's the healing part.

• 11:32Speaker 03

  Yes and no. I mean, I think it depends. You know, sometimes the healing part is just what I would call more psychotherapeutic. It's used a lot in trauma, for example, you know, being able to be present with one's trauma experience can be really powerful. But then material just comes up that you didn't really plan for. I mean, I remember, we love to tell our meditation stories. Now I also can tell my psychedelic stories. I went down to Peru to try ayahuasca for the first time in 2007. And yeah, I had a set of intentions, but then I didn't expect to spend hours of that experience locked in a coffin with my father who had died 15 years earlier. And that was hard, right? That was really hard.

• 12:13Speaker 03

  I do look back on it as ultimately really powerful in a good way, but it was also just really hard. It may not be that intense for, you know, a different medicine and a lower dose, but stuff comes up, just like on meditation retreat. My very first meditation retreat was, what was that, 2002, I think? And I had, I've written about this, but then I actually did have spiritual intentions. I'd read about meditation and nobody told me that in order to get to like the yummy parts at the end of retreat, you have to go through four or five days of potential hell, right? Not just restlessness, but also in doubt and uncertainty and can I do this? But stuff comes up and there again, I mean, coincidentally or not, stuff around my parents came up and I was seeing all kinds of patterns that I had that I hadn't really noticed before.

• 12:58Speaker 03

  And that's not what I thought I was signing up for on that meditation retreat at all. But that's, that's the nature of these processes.

• 13:06Dan Harris?

  But to me, to me, as somebody who, as you know, has a lot of reluctance around certain psychedelics like ayahuasca and psilocybin, not to mention 5-MEO DMT and all the heavy duty stuff, I have some reluctance around for precisely that reason, being locked in a coffin or just being locked in a thing I can't escape. If I go on a meditation retreat and tough stuff comes up, I know I can walk to my car and leave. But if you're in one of these locked in a coffin on ayahuasca and fucking Costa Rica experiences, there's no getting out. And to me, that's why I'm not doing this stuff.

• 13:48Speaker 03

  I have a lot to say about that. First, you know, I think that's actually the right understanding. Maybe not the fear and stuff. I'll talk you into this eventually, but more the distinction. There's a lot that meditation and psychedelics have in common, but there's a lot they don't have in common. The potential for harm in the psychedelic space, intentional or not on the part of the facilitator, is really an order of magnitude different. These are dangerous things that for if people enter into them without proper guidance, without proper screening. I'll do another analogy, you know, in the meditation context, there were some teachers who would say up until around 10, 20 years ago, just sit with it, no matter what the it was. But then we learned over time, like sometimes the it is deep childhood trauma.

• 14:32Speaker 03

  And it's really bad advice to tell somebody just sit with it. Like they may not have the mental emotional infrastructure to just sit with it and tough it out or something. And so now we have trauma informed mindfulness, right? Where sometimes you don't want to sit with it. Sometimes it's too hot to the touch and it's not something that you're ready to just be with in some kind of meditation-y way. So early in psychedelics, you know, there should be any responsible facilitator, shaman, whatever, spiritual leader, mental health practitioner, will screen, you know, a participant if somebody has kind of an anxiety disorder or panic disorder around enclosed spaces and things like that. Yeah, you want to choose the physical setting and the dosage of the

• 15:15Speaker 03

  Medicine appropriately and just look psychedelics are incredibly suggested, meaning they lead to a lot of suggestibility and that can be really helpful with a good therapist or with a good guide, you can be suggested all kinds of healing that could actually work because we're just talking about the brain anyway, right? If you actually, it's like the placebo effect on steroids, you really can think yourself into healing in some of these conditions, but you can also be suggested all kinds of things that are negative, like negative suggestibility. You can go in a little bit of a narcissist and come out an even bigger narcissist. You can go in with some struggle with anxiety or with panic and come out with an even greater struggle because it wasn't handled carefully and thoughtfully.

• 16:00Speaker 03

  So it's not, this will sound very woo and you can edit it out if it's too woo. I honor your, your anxiety around it because it's true. I did have one experience also on ayahuasca, a different one where I was able to speak just barely. And I said to the person who was guiding me, you know, I want to come down. And he said very compassionately, you cannot, I mean, you just, you cannot absent, you know, massive medical intervention, which was not on the table. And it is, it is setting sail for that journey. But I do think, you know, I mean, there was a lot of stuff that that came up in those early experiences. This is already now 17 years ago, that ultimately I was, I am the better for having experienced. And I'll hasten to add,

• 16:43Speaker 03

  that's not necessarily true for everyone. There is sort of an over belief in psychedelics that one finds sometimes, just like there's an over belief in meditation, that any negative experience ultimately, or any difficult experiences ultimately for the best, that's also not true. Sometimes it is. I would say even a majority of the time it might be, although that's not based on data, but sometimes difficult experiences are just really difficult. And I think the field is quickly having to mature a little bit as psychedelics move beyond, you know, the kind of people who are interested in new and exciting things to normal people. It's just like sushi, right? Remember when sushi came out in America in like the 90s or whenever it was, the 80s, I guess?

• 17:24Dan Harris?

  Yeah.

• 17:24Speaker 03

  And it was just weirdos, right? Who ate sushi? So, you know, you could, it was fine when it's just the adventurers doing it, but now, right? Everybody does. Although it still correlates with political affiliation, by the way, depending on how progressive or conservative you are, correlates with how much you like sushi for Americans.

• 17:42Dan Harris?

  I wonder if the same correlation is there for psychedelics.

• 17:45Speaker 03

  I don't think it is, actually. It's a really interesting. I would say the psychedelics field is more politically diverse than the meditation field. Most sort of, we could say, Western Buddhists, or whatever the term is we want to use, people who come to Buddhism later in life and don't have that as part of their family heritage. They tend to be on the more liberal side, not entirely, but mostly, certainly in the mindfulness world. TM has more people who are more on the conservative side of the spectrum, transcendental meditation. But in psychedelics, no, I mean, obviously, it's at the highest levels of power, right? Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, these are people with deep psychedelic experience and not quite conservative, maybe too broad of a term. I mean, these aren't, let's say, Christian conservatives, but they're in, obviously, they're in the Trump administration and they

• 18:27Speaker 03

  have their view about the world that they want to live in. And that's true of a number of the leading funders in the psychedelic space and some of the biggest investors. So it's actually, I think it actually speaks to changes in American politics more than anything else. I think to be on the right politically used to mean you were a very traditional sort of buttoned up kind of person, and you might have been religious or whatever, but you were a conservative with a small c person. And now, for better or for worse, I'm not making a value judgment here, although, as you know, I have plenty of them to make. For now, for better or for worse, to be on the right politically does not correlate with being a sort of tight, buttoned up person necessarily. And so these aren't, you know,

• 19:08Speaker 03

  Reagan conservatives, but they are people on the right politically. And, you know, for some people in the psychedelic world, that's welcome, and for others, it's troubling. But it's certainly a reality. And it's a fascinating thing. I mean, I think we have a general idea, like, oh, you're like dropping acid, you must be some hippie. Definitely not the case.

• 19:29Dan Harris?

  I just want to orient the listener for a second. My mind, as the interviewer here, is racing a little bit because we've touched on so many things that I want to go deeper on. And I want to just let the listener know that I, there are a lot of threads that Jay has tantalizingly dropped, including this whole question of, should you do psychedelics even if you're terrified of it? We will come back to that. Let's just stay on the, on the high level for, for a little bit.

• 19:55Dan Harris?

  We talked about the fact that psychedelics is kind of in an earlier stage than meditation is in terms of public acceptance. I would imagine that what's driving both of them, and I'd be curious to see what your view is on this, is a combination of, one, high levels of unhappiness in the culture, so people are looking for things, and, two, a growing body of science suggesting, first, that meditation is actually quite good for you, and now that psychedelics can be quite good for you. Would you agree with that analysis?

• 20:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, I think the mental health crisis in this country goes by many names. Sometimes it's a crisis of meaning, you know, people losing, certainly losing faith in traditional religion, but also in other forms of meaning. And sometimes it goes by the loneliness crisis and the loneliness epidemic, which is pervasive, and I know listeners of the podcast know about that. And I think, right, a lot of it is just, you know, we do live in unsettling times. And again, we don't even need to do the political side, just the pace of technological change, right, the pace of social change in America, that has led to a lot of different phenomena, that this is where I do a lot of my work, is this nexus, I would say, between psychology, spirituality, et cetera, on the

• 21:04Speaker 03

  one hand, and politics on the other. It's led to a lot of political consequences, and I think it has also led a lot of folks to look for ways to find meaning and purpose and balance that might not have been in the mainstream, you know, a generation ago. And the data is solid, right? I mean, it's very solid on meditation and mindfulness, and it's very solid for, I would call it, what's really been studied on the psychedelic side is more dealing with acute mental health conditions or problems, like I've mentioned already, PTSD, intractable anxiety, medication-resistant depression. Psychedelics, the data, again, is kind of almost off the charts for many people. So I think that's right. I think it's the combination of...

• 21:50Speaker 03

  This profoundly unsettling or dislocating moment and on the one hand, and like you said, the science on the other. And I wonder, you know, like it just looking as a scholar of religion, the growth in the nuns, the N O N E S is the fastest growing religious denomination in America. Those are people who have no religious affiliation. They might be another acronym for listeners, the S B N R, the spiritual but not religious folks. But again, these are folks who may not have a structure and a community and a kind of practice that infuses their whole life, the way that traditional religious people do. And for a lot of reasons, I don't think people are going to go back to traditional religion. And yet, we know what it's like. We're still in that. You remember that book, like 30 years ago, Bowling Alone?

• 22:34Speaker 03

  That most Americans used to bowl in leagues and now we mostly just bowl alone with a couple of friends. We're with that magnified, right? And now we're bowling alone on our computers, right? We're not even going to the bowling alley. And if we're gaming alone, or whatever it is that we're doing. And, and that's not, that's in tension with some fundamental aspects of Homo sapiens as evolution has, has designed us.

• 22:58Dan Harris?

  Yeah. I think that's all spot on. Can you say a little bit more about what the research is saying or suggesting about the benefits of psychedelics?

• 23:07Speaker 03

  I think it's the most exciting question right now. I don't know if it's the most pressing for everybody, but for me, it's like, what exactly is doing the change? We don't really know that in mindfulness either, right? We know sort of try this intervention and here's the outcome. And we have ideas about neuroplasticity and about growth in, in neural functioning in the prefrontal cortex and so on. But we're even in meditation, we're not 100% sure what really is the agent of change. In psychedelics, the question, I'll put the question first before, where I think the answer may be headed. Is it the experience, right? Is it the difficult stuff that comes up and you sit with it and you confront it and you, and so on? Or is it actually the chemical? One of the psychedelics

• 23:50Speaker 03

  that's now in front of the FDA for approval, basically is a trip free form of psilocybin. You don't really have the kind of full on mushroom trip that you might Have with psilocybin, you have some effects, but you do have chemical changes in the brain. And it's might, it might be the case, I was just reading a study that was now saying that some of the thinking around SSRIs, right, the most common medication for depression has switched in the last 10, 15 years, that it may not even be about serotonin reuptake inhibiting. It may just be about neural growth, right? We're stimulating the growth of new neural functions, new neural pathways. That may be true for psychedelics. We do know that they have that effect. So there are people have been put in, you know, the various kind of brain scans and, and it's like

• 24:32Speaker 03

  the kind of growth in just in brain matter and brain mass after psychedelics is unparalleled in anything else, even advanced meditators. So it could just be that. It could be a physical thing happening to the brain, which is an interesting conundrum for those of us who are interested, as I am, in psychedelics as a kind of contemplative practice or a spiritual practice, because it may be that the majority of people who encounter them won't have those experiences, because that's actually orthogonal to success. So I did answer your question because I got so interested in this other question. But the clinical data, the clinical data is very promising. It is, as I mentioned, it's less focused on, I would say, overall happiness than meditation and mindfulness data is, and it's more focused on treatment for, for difficult mental health

• 25:17Speaker 03

  conditions. But yeah, again, I'm just on PTSD. So listeners may not know, I'll just do a short thing. The first psychedelic related application for medication just got turned down by the FDA in August of 2024, and this was using MDMA plus therapy to treat people with post-traumatic stress disorder. The data was really off the charts in terms of success. These were folks, you know, veterans and others, survivors of abuse and people who have, who have really gone through very serious trauma, had more progress on psychedelics than in any other intervention. The application was refused for a whole variety of complicated reasons that probably would take us too far astray.

• 25:57Speaker 03

  But the promise of MDMA assisted therapy was really quite clear. And I think eventually that application may actually be reapproved very soon because of the change in, in administration in Washington. But even if not that, I think it's just the promise of the medication is remarkable. And I've seen this anecdotally as well. People just really stuck. And this, I think, too, I've seen it more in psychedelics than in meditation. With meditation, you know, I've seen my like family stuff so clearly so many times in meditation and therapy and other contexts. And I think one of the frustrations that we just have to work with if we're practitioners, certainly if we're Buddhist practitioners, is to just, you know, it's like the serenity

• 26:41Speaker 03

  prayer, it's accepting the things that we can be with, but maybe not change. And so maybe I can have a better relationship with the inner critic. Maybe I could have a more self compassionate relationship with panic or anxiety disorder. But I got to admit, I'm not a really good Buddhist sometimes, and I actually sometimes want it to go away. I want the condition to change. And there is a capacity for these psychedelic interventions to get in there and make a change that even long term meditation sometimes doesn't do. We will cure you, Dan. We're going to lock you in that coffin and you are going to fly Cessnas on your own. Is it the flying? Is it, would that be easier maybe if you're in control of the plane? Would that be easier, you think, or harder? It'd be a smaller plane.

• 27:26Dan Harris?

  I mean, certainly, control is part of this, but if you're, even if I'm flying the plane, I can't get out of it.

• 27:32Speaker 03

  Right.

• 27:33Dan Harris?

  At any moment, right? And so for me, that seems to be the hang up. If I'm in an elevator and it's small and I don't have control, I can't get out when I want, or if I'm on a plane and they've just locked the door, that can be a very terrifying moment for me. And so that seems to be the hang up. And that's why I'm worried about psychedelic experiences, because my earliest panic attacks in my life, when I was 13 or 14, were smoking weed and having a bad trip. And I know what that's like. You're in hell. You are, it feels like hell.

• 28:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, I would say two things. First, I want to go even earlier. Like, have you done it in any like therapy stuff? Like, were you locked in a closet when you were five or something like that? Or has there ever been a narrative exploration of where this comes from?

• 28:16Dan Harris?

  There has. My psychiatrist has been very.

• 28:21Dan Harris?

  Diligent and dogged in trying to get to the root of all of this and we have not, or I've been a terrible patient in that I can't remember anything other than those first weed experiences where I felt really trapped and claustrophobic.

• 28:35Speaker 03

  Interesting. Yeah. So that's the first thing. I was like, just curious about that. What's tricky with psychedelics is that aspect of suggestibility. So, you know, you could easily actually get in contact with some suppressed memory that you have that might be at the root of this, or you might invent it. You know, you might actually, I mean, then, so then it like comes up. I mean, in a certain way, if you invent a false memory and then come to peace with it and now you're cured, maybe that's not a bad result. On the other hand, you know, you might also create some kind of new story that may not be true and may not actually be healing. I mean, a lot of my early experiences were unguided, right? It's like just me and the desert at Burning Man or something.

• 29:17Speaker 03

  And, and I did actually, I then went, I had some, what I thought might have been memories of suppressed trauma. And I then went to like a very trusted guide and teacher and, and we worked through it in a more narrative way in ordinary mind. And it just doesn't seem like that was true, like that was something that was suggested in the experience. But anyway, that, imagine if that is at the root of this struggle. And then you did actually uncover it. Let's say it was true and not a false memory. You can see already the kind of tantalizing liberating potential. Or just, you know, realizing that you can survive it. You know, you can actually be in that tight enclosed place and not get out for an hour. And you survive. There's a lot of ways in which that kind of work can happen.

• 30:03Dan Harris?

  That all completely makes sense for me and lands for me and I don't want to do it.

• 30:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, don't do it. Let me just be really clear. Like, don't do it. It's like, if you're, so for folks who aren't familiar, this, the standard formulation is like, what, what are the conditions that determine your, your kind of experience, your psychedelic experience? So it's usually drug set, which is mindset and setting. So the drug, obviously, and the dosage determines what the experience will be like. But equally important is what you have going in. So if you have a lot of fear and resistance and reluctance, that shit's going to hit the fan. That may be a difficult experience because of what you have going in. So you want to like,

• 30:46Speaker 03

  Really get in a mindset that's a little more open to the experience before having the experience, rather than think like, well, I'm just gonna jump off the cliff and see what happens. And then the setting, right? The setting includes your physical setting, but also, you know, making sure it's a safe space. I don't know. I'd be interested to know your 13 year old weed experience. If it was anything like my like 17 year old weed experience, this was not the best set and setting. Probably wasn't the best drug either. Probably didn't get, you know, really good stuff. But it also, like, it's the setting is also your guide. It's your companions. It's the people that you're with. Are you in a safe place? Are you in a supportive environment? Obviously, you wouldn't physically be in an enclosed space, right? Most of these like psychedelic assisted therapy spaces are just like cozy

• 31:28Speaker 03

  living rooms, you know, with the couch and stuff. But no, I, yeah, I just, I joke that I do want to talk you into it. But I want to talk you into it first, right? Like, I want to get, adjust the mindset first, because yeah, if there's, you know, a lot of folks who have success in on therapeutic side, as well as the spiritual side, and those, we can talk about the relationship between those two, if you want. A lot of them are desperate. The stories that you read from some of the veterans who were in the MDMA trials, you know, these were people who had either attempted suicide or experienced suicidal ideation for years. These are people whose lives had been wrecked, their relationships, that they couldn't hold down a job. These are people really, really struggling. And they were desperate enough to give this a try. I mean, there are people working with

• 32:13Speaker 03

  vets with PTSD with ayahuasca as well, not just MDMA. And when there's that much of a real yearning to heal from something that's that hard, that mindset can carry you through even a really difficult experience. I believe it. I remember what it was like working with you in COVID, right? I mean, you know, sometimes meditation can feel like, I would say at its, well, maybe not at its worst, but at its close to worst, it's like helping the worried well, you know, like the people who are, they're basically doing fine, and they're just like, would like to do a little bit more fine. And, look, I'm, I'm for alleviating suffering wherever it is. Like, that's fine. I don't want to denigrate that. But sometimes, it's really not. It's really more profound,

• 32:56Speaker 03

  right? And during the pandemic, it was like that. People working with mindfulness, people who are incarcerated is like that. And people who are really, you know, really suffering. Again, I don't want to minimize what I call everyday dukkha, everyday suffering. You know, we all experience it and, and meditation really helps. But when you Encounter folks who really are hurting and this can really help. It's been true for me in meditation and in psychedelics. It's really quite profound.

• 33:25Dan Harris?

  I agree.

• 33:29Dan Harris?

  Coming up, we get into the nitty gritty of the various psychedelics. And this is where things get awesome and weird. We unpack the question of whether some of these medicines might have a separate consciousness.

• 33:45Speaker 04

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• 34:19Dan Harris?

  And just to be clear, I'm super intrigued. That's why I'm doing this episode in the promise of psychedelics. I'm just being very open about some of my reservations, in part because I want to work it out with you and talk to you. And but the other part is that I think I'm speaking for a non-trivial percentage of the audience who are trying to figure out, should I do psychedelics? Should I do more of them if I've already done them? And so I want to help people think this stuff through for themselves.

• 34:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I want to throw a few more ingredients onto the salad bar. There's also microdosing. So if people know the book by Ailat Waldman called A Really Good Day, you know, an excellent book just about microdosing, which you might experience a little bit of conscious effect, but really very, very little. And that itself can be incredibly helpful for people. Her book just describes her own struggles with depression and how it helped where nothing else helped. I also want to maybe distinguish between MDMA on the one hand and some of these other compounds on the other. It's not impossible to have a difficult MDMA experience, but the odds are a lot lower and it's just a lot softer. A friend of mine once said that LSD maybe shows you the truth, but MDMA shows you the love.

• 35:30Speaker 03

  And so it's less, it's just, it's just easier in that way. And also, I think, you know, one area where I'm very active is in folks who are... In addition to the kind of healing that we've talked about, also spiritual seekers. These are people who are, who are interested in non-ordinary experience and what we can, not even what we can learn from it. Yes, what we can learn from it, but also just having the experience. And, you know, I know I'm a little further off on the weird continuum than you usually, but I own my place in, in the weird land. And, you know, these are some of the most powerful experiences of my life. You know, at one of the most famous recent experiments, there was a study at Johns Hopkins of clergy.

• 36:12Speaker 03

  And so these are people who are like, make religion their life. I was Christians, a few Jews, a couple of Muslims as well. That's they focused on those communities and of clergy, something like, I forgot the exact number. It was like around half of the participants said that their experience on psychedelics was the most powerful spiritual experience they'd had in their lives. And these are professional spiritual people, right? These are, these are guys who are there week in and week out. And that's true for me as well, mostly with 5M EODMT, which we haven't talked about yet. And I think that that's like another, that's like I said, it's like another item on the salad bar. For some people, that's actually the most profound part of the practice.

• 36:54Dan Harris?

  Can you describe some of those experiences? I'm curious. I suspect listeners are too, like what is actually happening in the mind? And then what are the downstream consequences of having those experiences?

• 37:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, it's all over the map. I think for some people, there's like the classic unit of mystical experience where there's a sense that the ego, as we see ourselves as a separate self, you know, kind of like similar to the Buddhist concept of non-self really shuts down and we don't see that difference or that distinction between the individual and everything that there is. There are a lot of different ways to talk about that. We could talk about it neurologically, or we could talk about it philosophically or, or dharmaically. But a lot of people have that experience. A lot of people, depending again on drug sentence setting, have totally different experiences.

• 37:45Speaker 03

  And sidebar, one aim of the anthology that I'm working on is to complexify our notion of psychedelic spiritual experiences to not just limit it to like, I think there's a way in which a certain narrative, the one I just gave, became the dominant one. So like, if you didn't feel this yet, just take more LSD or more mushrooms and you know, then you'll really merge with all of being and you and you'll realize that, you know, your separate self is just the wave on the ocean and doesn't have any real reality. That's available. That is one experience, but there are also totally different ones. Contact with what seem to be other entities, contact with relatives who are dead. And we could say that these are memories or whatever, but I can say firsthand, in

• 38:30Speaker 03

  the experience, they seem as real as this experience does. So whether, so I'm not saying, I'm taking a position as to whether that is real, but I could just, the experience seems very true and seems very real in the experience itself. So with entities or other beings and so on. And there are experiences that are just profoundly suffused with a sense of beauty and love. I would say that there's a traditional Hindu formulation of like, what is ultimate reality? And that iteration is Satshit Ananda, which is kind of being consciousness bliss. And yeah, that's kind of it. That's all that there is.

• 39:10Speaker 03

  And some of those five MEO experiences, there's definitely not the sense of J as separate. There is that more expansive consciousness.

• 39:19Dan Harris?

  Beings from other realms? Did you say something like?

• 39:22Speaker 03

  I know. It's, I don't, I don't know what to tell you, Dan. I'm telling you what the experience is. I'm still, I mentioned that first ayahuasca experience is 2007. So 17 years ago, I'm still processing. Like, I don't know what I think as to whether the medicine has its own separate consciousness that is out there independent from mine, but I can definitely tell you that that's what she said. In the experience itself. And yeah, the ayahuasca entity is almost always experienced as a feminine presence in some way. Sometimes a snake, sometimes I don't know what it is. And it's hard from a like a rationalist sense to really square that with how I understand

• 40:05Speaker 03

  reality. But I guess I've definitely become a lot more woo agnostic in the last 15, 20 years than I used to be. I used to be very sure that those were just projections, mental projections. I don't know. You know, there's a scholar of religion named Jeffrey Kreipel, K R I P A L, who's written a series of books. It's really interesting. He's kind of gone along this progression from just being a very traditional Western scholar of religion to kind of admitting like, a lot of the things that seem to be paranormal, he just feels are true at this point, having spoken to hundreds of people who experience precognition, for example, or who have, you know, various non-ordinary experiences. And for me, I don't,

• 40:47Speaker 03

  it's not a center of my life. And it definitely, I'm aware that it can kind of invalidate one's credibility. Like, oh, so you're actually just now Looney Tunes. I get it. And so I'm aware of that. But I'm also want to be honest about what the experience feels like in the experience. I forgot which failed Democratic presidential candidate, I think it was John Kerry, said, you can be certain, but also be wrong. You know, he was saying that to, I think it was George W. Bush at the time. And that's true. Right? You can definitely be certain and be wrong. And I think I have a kind of skepticism even of my own peak experiences. And whether on meditation, or psychedelics, or spiritual practice, or any other kind,

• 41:30Speaker 03

  that is, I don't know if it's so helpful, but it's definitely a part of how I relate to these experiences. So I am with you on the skeptical side. And also, I could lie about the experiences and just, you know, stay in the closet and say, no, no, no, it's all just, you know, me and my psychological material coming up. But that wasn't the reality of those experiences. And I should add, there's a lot of different items on the salad bar. This is at the more spicy end of the salad bar. All right. These are, these are high dose ayahuasca experiences, or five MEODMT experiences. That doesn't usually happen on even a moderate therapeutic, large dose of LSD or psilocybin, certainly not MDMA.

• 42:13Dan Harris?

  I may have committed a little bit of malpractice in this interview thus far in that we're talking about the various compounds as if everybody knows what they are. So 5-MEO, DMT, MDMA, psilocybin, ayahuasca, ketamine. Can you just walk us through the salad bar in terms of like what these different compounds are?

• 42:32Speaker 03

  Sure. Yeah. And I assume, by the way, you know, your introduction to this episode will emphasize that we're not encouraging anyone to break the laws of any state or country and that currently a lot of these compounds are still illegal in most of the United States. So certainly, I guess there's my inner lawyer coming through. For folks listening, Dan is now writing a note to himself. Oh, right. Cover my ass. Remember, we're not asking, not advising anyone break the law, which is true. Yeah. I mean, it's funny, there's a large array of psychedelic compounds out there, but the ones that get talked about enough are a lot, are probably fewer than 10. So I guess maybe a good way to do this is actually to back up out of our little Western bubble for a second and remember

• 43:14Speaker 03

  or remind folks that indigenous cultures have been using these compounds in the form of plant medicines, probably for thousands of years. We don't really know how far back ayahuasca goes. This is a brew that came along kind of in the, in the Amazon. It's used drunk by indigenous groups in Brazil and Peru, various parts of South America. And it leads to, yeah, like a four to 12 hour experience that seems to be on another realm than this one. I guess we would call it in a Western model, we'd call it a dissociative experience in that, yeah, you're physically still present. You can check back in with the body and so on in this reality, but you also are in a, whether it's an interior experience or some other realm experience, that's up to interpretation, but you're

• 43:58Speaker 03

  definitely somewhere else. So that goes back to a very long time. There's also in some Native American groups, uses of either cactus or mushrooms of different kinds. I kind of hate the word magic mushrooms. So I just don't really like that term, but there are a variety of psychoactive mushrooms that are used that archaeological evidence has shown has been used for a long time in different parts of the world, not just in the Americas, but also in Asia. And there's iboga, which is used in parts of Africa. So there are a lot, I guess I sort of give this quick tour to just remind us that this is not actually new technology as it sometimes is depicted. It's a new use of

• 44:39Speaker 03

  very old technologies. Obviously, these cultures have very different and varying interpretations of what's going on from, let's say, a Western scientific one. The distinction that I've drawn between, let's say, spirituality and healing is not a distinction in a lot of indigenous, I mean, it would be ridiculous to kind of draw that distinction in some indigenous cultures. Like, why would you separate out the different parts of a single process that are both healing and kind of spiritual awakening? So I guess that's helpful. Psilocybin is a synthesized version of the active ingredient in some of these psychoactive mushrooms, just as mescaline is a synthesized version of the active ingredient in some psychoactive

• 45:22Speaker 03

  cactuses that are also interesting. LSD was synthesized just in the 20th century, first by Albert Hoffman, kind of by accident. There's a great story, which appears to actually be true, that he was working on in a lab and, you know, working with different kinds of fungi and basically synthesized LSD by accident, tried it on himself and then had a very, you know, interesting LSD trip, including riding home on his bicycle. So the day that this happened is commemorated as Bicycle Day. I've had limited experience of psychedelics on bicycles at Burning Man. I would not recommend that particular practice. And if you do, do it at a place like Burning Man where there's not traffic like there is here. So, and the LSD and mushroom experiences can be somewhat similar. They're different

• 46:06Speaker 03

  in various ways, but they tend to last for around four hours-ish. They do sometimes have a visual. I remember my first time trying LSD, I expected from the song Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds by The Beatles that I would see, you know, tangerine trees and marshmallow skies. That doesn't usually happen. It's usually a little more subtle than that, but there's some visual piece. And then, yeah, it's hard to explain the shift in consciousness. It's easier to convey, and maybe you should try kind of a medium microdose, where it's very, at that level, it's actually very similar to a concentrated mind state from meditation. And I think, you know, we can talk about the more, I mean, for me,

• 46:44Speaker 03

  I don't actually know how anyone does psychedelics without a meditation background. I mean, for me, that letting go and being with the experience, including the fear that might be around the experience, you know, I learned most of that in meditation school, so to speak. And that is like incredibly valuable, you know, on some higher dose experiences, you know, you could really feel like you're dying, you know, you feel like you're might be leaving your body and you can feel not on, again, not on a sort of normal dose, but a higher dose, you can feel like you're dissolving into nothing and you, even the parts of your brain, it's like Hal in 2001, right, where his brain is being taken apart by Dave Bowman. And so you're not even just noticing yourself fall apart, like the part

• 47:27Speaker 03

  of you that's noticing is also falling apart. The brain is also like disappearing. And to be able to sit with that or be with that, it was just meditation stuff. I mean, that's one of my first questions when somebody's considering trying one of these compounds at a high dose is like, do you have either a meditation practice or yoga practice, some other way in which you know how to be with the difficult without freaking out or being with the freak out without freaking out? I didn't finish the tour, but I said a lot.

• 47:56Dan Harris?

  In meditation, there still is this, for me at least, this residual sense of I'm doing the thing. Now, I can see through the illusion of the I at times. If you're going through what is sometimes called ego death, like the sense of I is completely falling apart, not of your own doing by some exogenous molecule, how can you sit with it when there's no you in that moment?

• 48:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's hard to explain. I mean, I think, you know, the reason I said that is, is so I think we've mentioned a compound, one of the active ingredients in ayahuasca is a molecule called DMT, which I just realized I can't actually pronounce properly, so I won't try. There is a variant of the DMT molecule called 5-MEODMT. And these are just, these are just the chemical names for these compounds, for these molecules. And so 5-MEODMT has been a big part of my life for the last several years. And that is, again, for me, like, that's the, I call it, it's like the kicker. I mean, that's the one which, just the level of the kind of mystical ego death experience that's in that, in those

• 49:07Speaker 03

  experiences at a high dose is unlike anything else I've ever experienced, including on meditation. So I guess the reason it's hard to answer your question is you're not there, but consciousness of some kind is there. Did I just discover God? I don't know. I'm just telling you the experience again. It's like there's the experience and then there's the interpretation of the experience. And everyone who tries these things says that you like they can't describe the experience. And that's certainly true. And, you know, any description is also interpretation. So I don't want to like freight somebody else's experience with my interpretation. But my experience at that time, yeah, no, that definitely like all of this mind that usually is doing all the thinking and the witnessing

• 49:50Speaker 03

  is just kind of gets eroded very quickly. The five AMO DMT experience is very short. It's like, you know, 20 minutes. And so it's like a rocket ship and DMT is as well. So it happens very quickly and it definitely feels like death in a way. But it's like death combined with a bubble bath. Maybe that's the pull quote for the episode. So yeah, maybe if I were to put it even more like poetically, I just made this up as I'm going along, but it's like an ice cube in a hot bath. Like the ice cube definitely disappears. It melts, but it melts into the ground of experience itself. So, you know, you've done a little bit of zogchen practice and we can rest in that awareness. And it does

• 50:31Speaker 03

  seem as though the awareness is other than the default mode network of the human brain. In psychedelics, yeah, I mean, again, it might just be a phenomenal experience happening between my ears, right? I'm not taking a firm ontological stand, but phenomenologically, meaning what the phenomenon of the experience is, it's definitely the ice cube in the bath. And you're just the bath. You've always just been the bath. You just thought you were an ice cube.

• 51:01Dan Harris?

  It's so interesting. Just because I don't want to forget them in terms of your list of the various psychedelics, there are a few compounds that we left out. MDMA and ketamine.

• 51:14Speaker 03

  Yeah, so MDMA was also synthesized by the Shulgun's husband and wife team that synthesized a whole huge variety of psychedelic compounds. And MDMA is, so there's a term, some people like the term entheogen for some psychedelics, but it's a religious term. It brings the God within, or you experience the divine within. MDMA is sometimes called an empathogen, meaning it brings in a kind of empathy and emotional resonance that is not usually part of how we experience ourselves. And that's a good term, empathogen. I think it's, it's right that, you know, it does show you the love. It can often lead to a lot of euphoria. One of my most powerful MDMA experiences was actually just having

• 51:57Speaker 03

  a long conversation with someone I was in a relationship with at the time. And it wasn't sure, we weren't really sure if we were going to stay in that relationship. It did eventually end. And we were just able to have that conversation on MDMA that we just were unable to have in regular life. And it just, it's not like a, just a disinhibitor, let's say like alcohol, because you're really still quite clear, a lot of the parts of that experience. But it just somehow makes it possible to communicate in an intimate way. That's not possible a lot of the time in daily life, at least not for me, a sort of neurotic introvert with social anxiety. MDMA is also just really fun. It's, you know, Molly or ecstasy. It's used in, in the kind of the club world. It's fun to go

• 52:42Speaker 03

  dancing on MDMA. It's fun to be with your intimate partner or partners on MDMA. Like, it's a lot of fun. And I think, I would just sort of say, one of the biggest concerns around legalizing MDMA assisted therapy, there's the risk of addiction, right? I mean, the FDA just went through it with opioids, where they're sort of allowed a lot of permitting of very highly addictive medication for people. And then millions of people got addicted. And I think MDMA is not physically addictive in the way that opioids are. And it also is kind of a bigger lift. I mean, it's hard for me to imagine, I don't think the brain could withstand like, taking MDMA every day for any period of time. But still, there's still an abuse potential. And definitely the government is aware of that and wondering

• 53:25Speaker 03

  how to guard against it. Ketamine is actually a kind of an interesting example of that, because it is legal for a number of purposes. A lot of folks may not know, just in general, when it comes to big pharma. A huge percentage of prescriptions are what's called off-label, meaning that a drug has been approved for a particular purpose, but it also works for other purposes, and that's how it gets prescribed. The example I often give is there's a medication which was originally only approved for schizophrenia called Abilify. It was an antipsychotic. But then it was being prescribed off-label for depression for quite some time. Now it's also approved for depression as well. And so this is true now for ketamine, which has a variety of uses,

• 54:05Speaker 03

  including being a tranquilizer, which can also be used in low or high doses for a variety of both mental health conditions and I would say general wellness. You can now get ketamine legally in a lot of, I think, most states, just like you would get any other over-the-counter drug. But ketamine also has an addictive capacity to it. And there, unlike MDMA, you really can take ketamine every day, and you can overdose on ketamine, and people can, you know, fall into into harm in that way. There's also the high-dose usage of ketamine where you kind of go into, it's similar to what I was talking about before with LSD and with mushrooms and even ayahuasca, where you go into an internal experience and can do all kinds of really powerful work on the self.

• 54:50Speaker 03

  And of all of the things that we've said, I sort of saved ketamine for last for not by intention, that's actually the most accessible because it is legal in a lot of places. And you can walk into a clinic in New York City and complete a pre-screening interview to make sure that you're, you know, eligible for it and try it and experience it. So that's most of the salad bar. I would also say that a lot of people use cannabis as a quasi psychedelic. Certainly, if you use enough of it, you get a lot of the standard psychedelic effects. It's also used for recreation, but it's also used, you know, for pain management, and it can be paradoxically, because, you know, weed often makes people like us edgy and more anxious. It can also paradoxically be used as a treatment for anxiety

• 55:34Speaker 03

  and just sort of shuts down some of the habitual responses that we usually have to difficult stimuli. That was a lot. I just wore a science hat there for a little bit. Now I can put on my religious studies hat again.

• 55:45Dan Harris?

  It was awesome.

• 55:48Dan Harris?

  Coming up, Jay talks about the nuts and bolts of how to operationalize the advice and information he has shared in this interview, whether or not you want to try psychedelics yourself.

• 56:04Dan Harris?

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• 56:49Dan Harris?

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• 57:50Dan Harris?

  Actually, I'm gonna get you to put on the hat of practical advisor because in this final section of the interview, I want to just really help people think through...

• 58:03Dan Harris?

  For themselves, whether any of these compounds might be a fit, where do you start? How do you find a good guide? What do you do about the fact that some of these things are illegal? Like, let's just help people think through how they can operationalize some of the advice and information that we've already shared thus far in the interview.

• 58:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, I love that. So the first thing is like, we, I don't know if we're quite in the Wild West phase of this, but we are a little bit. It's still really early in the field's development. And so, you know, buyer beware, caveat emptor, I think, within a very short period of time. And I'll take only a minute to say this. The incoming administration, the Trump administration, like I mentioned, has a lot of pro psychedelic people in it. And it's possible that we may actually see very rapid approval of various medical uses of psychedelics for that reason. Whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, we could have a different conversation, but it may be the case that we will see a lot of psychedelics on the market sooner than we might expect. We'll see how that plays out.

• 59:04Speaker 03

  Even so, even as that happens, you know, I think we'll see a bit of, yeah, a bit of a Wild West moment where there are some folks who you clearly can trust and some you don't. And so I think it's a lot like finding a physician or a psychiatrist who you trust. I would not say, there could be a misconception that it's just about the pill. And I think that is not true. It is also about integration after your experience, and it's also about possibly being guided or helped or facilitated in the experience. This is one reason, by the way, I've used the term MDMA assisted therapy, because when that was put forward, it was not put out as like, just take this pill and you'll cure from PTSD. It was take this pill in the context of a therapy session, and then we can work on

• 59:49Speaker 03

  PTSD and other, and other challenges. So that's the first thing I would say is just, I don't think it's like, don't enter into the field, but just be aware that it's at an early phase. And we don't yet have like the clear name brand, you know, go to these guys. There are name brands that I won't name because I don't want to like endorse or whatever, but there are those, but it's still. It's still early. So having said that, I think first piece is like checking in about what the intention is. And the intention could be anything. It could just be exploration. It could be if it's a spiritual intention, there are spiritual communities that exist that are not that hard to find. Certainly in the places where psilocybin is legal, right? So just, I think, limited right now. But in places where it's legal, it's possible

• 1:00:33Speaker 03

  to access those medicines. Or it could be if it's a specific mental health condition, looking for therapists, you know, and asking a mental health professional what they think. There are plenty of skeptics out there. So your, your first answer may be, I don't advise that. But there are also people who are properly skeptical, who would say, I do or don't advise it for you. And that can be really, you know, helpful, I think, to somebody considering this. And do some reading. You know, I mentioned Iola Waldman's book. There's a great book on like ayahuasca retreats that just came out by a journalist named Ernesto Ladonio called Trippy. And it has a lot of that. There's a whole shelf, I think, of books and just as in anything else, there's good books and not so good books. Check out what people's

• 1:01:14Speaker 03

  experiences are with these kinds of therapeutic modalities on the one hand, and kind of spiritual searches on the other. So I think it's like, what's the intention? Is that really helpful and clarifying? And that can lead someone to think about which medicine, which compound might be the right one for them. If hearing me describe, you know, like a rocket ship mystical experience, awaken something in the heart of someone listening to those words, well, great, check in with that. See if that is real. See what that's about. If it awakens like, holy shit, I definitely don't want to do that. You know, I would listen to that. Not just like, let it drive the bus. Don't let fear dictate our lives. But seeing that reluctance is just like, okay, so yeah, there's some reluctance around that. And I've been

• 1:01:56Speaker 03

  very, um, you know, I'm not like a frequent flyer with these things. I do take them seriously. They are sacred to some people and rightly so. So I use a lot of discernment and discretion in deciding when and with whom and how much and what the context is. That's served me well so far.

• 1:02:16Dan Harris?

  What about for people like me who the rocket ship does stir something in my heart, so to speak, and I have the reluctance because of my panic disorder? For people like me, I would imagine, and I'm guessing here and you'll tell me if I'm right or wrong, that maybe a first step is to start small with either some microdosing or some somewhat low dosing under therapeutic guidance as a way to get my feet wet, build a little confidence and move from there?

• 1:02:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, that sounds great. Have the person who you trust in your life be in on the process. If it's a psychiatrist or therapist, great. If it's somebody else, that's fine. My advice would not be to go it alone.

• 1:02:55Dan Harris?

  No.

• 1:02:55Speaker 03

  And I would say also, well, I mean, I did it. I went alone, right? I'm in my twenties. You know, I would say like 90% of my, if we just total up the number of experiences, maybe not 90, maybe like three quarters of my experiences were alone. And I don't regret any of that. I just think it could be easier for some people. And I tend to be less risk averse in some ways than other people are. You know, I would also say, here's a question that I'll just put out there, which is like, what's the worst that can happen in the panic context? So there are people for whom all psychedelics are contraindicated because the worst that could happen would be something that lasts after the experience is over and it's very difficult to integrate.

• 1:03:40Speaker 03

  It's not true that you're going to like go insane the first time that you try one of these things unless you have some kind of what we would call a pre-existing condition. But it is true that you might have a really difficult integration period if you're trying to bite off more than you can chew. So maybe that's the worst that can happen. In the experience itself, though, if somebody comes with panic disorder and they have a panic attack and the person who they're with is competent and knows what they're doing, then that will be that experience. And that's in a certain way, maybe okay, right? I don't want to whitewash it, but like that could be a growth experience. So it's like, you know, you're in there and you say, I want to come down and the facilitator says you cannot come down, then you live through it. Again, I don't, I want to just like reemphasize because this is a podcast and it's going out

• 1:04:25Speaker 03

  to whoever wants to listen to it. Not every difficult experience is for the best. And sometimes there are lasting effects and these are serious things and it shouldn't be taken lightly. So that's an important thing to say. And it's also true that if there is somebody who's guiding you and you do have a panic attack, a full-on panic attack, that will not be the end of the world. And it could be part of a healing process. If it's, again, handled by somebody who's compassionate, who's experienced, who has boundaries, who knows how to respect boundaries. You know, one issue, just one of many, what's the role of touch in psychedelic assisted therapy? So sometimes if you're having a panic attack, it might be helpful to get a hug, but you're also not in a condition at that moment to consent to getting a hug or to getting

• 1:05:10Speaker 03

  just held in some way. So just around that one question, having that conversation with a potential facilitator, guide, therapist, or clergy person, what's welcome and what's not? And doing it ahead of time, right? Because in the moment, you're not in your compass mentis, you're not in your full competent mind to consent or not consent. That's just one of many, you know, issues that does come up. A lot of, I would say, well-meaning but badly-informed people think that, you know, some reassuring touch is always helpful. And that's definitely not true. So things like that.

• 1:05:42Dan Harris?

  This is all incredibly interesting and I would say, and helpful. And I would say for, for me, I think part of exposure therapy, for me, as somebody with panic disorder, is to, to feel the sensations of panic and realize you're going to be okay. And so I agree with you that for some people, this would not be a good idea. And I think for me, actually, it probably would be a good idea with, with the right therapist. I think I take what you're saying in the spirit in which it's intended.

• 1:06:11Speaker 03

  Thanks. And I think, you know, for you too, it's, it's, people often ask you, I'm sure that, I'm always asked this, you know, what meditation teacher do you recommend? And probably your answer is like mine, well, your answer is always Joseph Goldstein. But other than that, you know, it depends, right? It depends. And that's, it depends on the person and what your things are. Like, I would not recommend a psychedelic guide to you who is fully invested in like, what you would find to be weird, crazy, or to woo a worldview. It's just not going to be helpful for you. It might be fun to talk to that person, but if you're in a Where you're making yourself vulnerable, I think you want someone who you can trust. And if it's somebody who's like, is talking to entities all the time and concerned, you know, you might not, you might not trust that person.

• 1:06:56Speaker 03

  And whether you're right or wrong is completely irrelevant, right? What matters is whether you feel that sense of trust in the guide. And it might be better in a sort of, I don't know, like the name Richie Davidson just came to mind. It might be better at somebody who has like unimpeachable scientific credentials. And who you feel like, all right, well, this person really knows their shit. We see the world in a similar wavelength, so it's individual. There's no like one size fits all. And for other people, the opposite is true. I've had people come to me and be like, who should I work with? Either psychedelics or meditation. And I know that they are into the like spiritual stuff. And that's where I'll steer them, like I'll steer them to people who I would not steer you to. So it's really individualized.

• 1:07:37Dan Harris?

  In terms of finding a good therapist or guide, how do we even begin with that? Because in so many places, it's not legal.

• 1:07:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, that's right. I mean, I think we could put ketamine on in one category because it is more widely available. And you can read reviews, you know, there's like, I don't know if there's literally Yelp, but there should be something like Yelp. But it's true. And, and you know, I wouldn't even want to mention specific providers. A lot of people do go to Mexico. I went to Peru for my first ayahuasca experience. I mean, I went partly because I wanted to be in that culture and in that, in that context, but partly because it is legal. And I just didn't want that added piece on there. And yeah, I wouldn't even want to name any names of anyone who's, you know, might be engaged in things that are against the law. So that's the moment that we're in. But some of these compounds are legal in some places and there are ways to access them.

• 1:08:30Speaker 03

  And then as soon as it's legal, this is like a strong argument for decriminalization. Right? Because as soon as it's legal, we can be much more transparent. So you can go online, that book I mentioned, Trippy, talks about specific centers that he went to, to do ayahuasca. He had this very powerful first ayahuasca experience and then realized as a journalist, like there's a story here, like this is really interesting. There's this. Array of places where you can go and they're all really interesting and some are quirky and weird and funny. And so, right, he can write that book because it's legal in Brazil, which is where most of the centers that he went to are, the same as in Costa Rica and in Peru, and I believe in Mexico, though I'm not sure. And so, the argument for decriminalization

• 1:09:11Speaker 03

  is, yeah, let's keep people safe. But the way to keep people safe is to give them as much information and transparency as possible. When 13-year-old you had like a difficult weed experience, I know when I was a lot younger, I was afraid to call anybody, right? Like, do you call the hospital? Do you call the cops? You're gonna get busted, right? Now you have more fear. Now, like, the opposite of calming down. Now you're afraid, like, you know, you're gonna be put in jail or something. So, you know, a strong argument for decriminalization is, it would enable me to give listeners a much more helpful answer to your question. Just like I could recommend IMS or Spirit Rock, I could recommend X Center or Y Center, based on firsthand experience, and we would be able to, like,

• 1:09:56Speaker 03

  guide people better. So we are, again, like I said earlier, at an early phase of this. And I do think, as with meditation, even more than meditation, I feel like the science that's happening, it is really solid, the scientific studies that are out there. And that, I think, will eventually lead to a more fact-based and science-based approach to these kinds of interventions.

• 1:10:23Dan Harris?

  In terms of finding a guide in this awkward, cultish moment we're in within the development of psychedelics, let me see if I can utter some words of advice to see if you co-sign on them. I think the advice might be, if you're in a place where psilocybin, for example, is not legal, and you don't want to travel to a state where it is, you can, as Jay referenced earlier, start talking to some mental health professionals that you trust. Some of them may say, You know, you should never do this because they're just philosophically against it. Maybe those are the people you don't necessarily want to listen to. Others may tell you it's contraindicated for you because of your mental health background. That you should definitely listen to.

• 1:11:06Dan Harris?

  And then as you continue to have these conversations, you might get turned on to a network that is semi-underground of people that you can get good references for from the mental health professionals you trust or from friends of yours who've done it. So you do a little research, you talk to your friends, you talk to experts and make sure it's kosher for you and that there's some degree of legitimacy around the provider that's being recommended. And if you're comfortable, proceed, but you have to, there's a little bit of caveat emptor here, buyer beware, because, you know, it's a risk, given that it's not legal and therefore not regulated.

• 1:11:47Speaker 03

  Yep, all of that's right. First of all, it warms my little rabbi heart to hear you just say the word kosher. A second, I would just add one other category to people to consult, to listeners of this podcast, which is meditation teachers. You know, it's a not so secret, open secret that most of the, you know, leading meditation teachers in the insight tradition have either past or present psychedelic experience. There are also, for meditators in particular who are listening, there are a bunch of really good books on this subject. There's a book called Zig Zag Zen, which is really interesting about Buddhism and psychedelics. There are a bunch of other ones, too. There are also psychedelic Buddhist sanghas, communities that exist, who really integrate different kinds of the Dharma with psychedelic use and psychedelic practice.

• 1:12:31Speaker 03

  So, yeah, I would just add that as well, that these are people who are, if not, you know, licensed mental health practitioners exactly, are people who work in pastoral roles and mental health roles, who could refer folks to that. And I think it's, yeah, a lot of it is just like have your bullshit detector on. And when it feels like...

• 1:12:53Speaker 03

  It just feels like it's a little bit shady then, especially for your first few times, maybe just err on the side of caution. And obviously, again, I'm just going to qualify by saying, you know, not wanting anyone to break the law. But if you do try to obtain any of these things by yourself, definitely be very certain of the source. Test if possible. We should certainly have a different regime where people can easily, people should be able to test any substance they're going to put in their body. But you can access ways to test these things if you're choosing to go that route.

• 1:13:24Dan Harris?

  You've brought me to where I was hoping we would get in the end here. And this is actually, I think, quite practical. Can you talk a little bit about the overlap between meditation and psychedelics and how these two modalities can speak to and support one another?

• 1:13:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I see a lot of overlap. I mean, I really, as you said at the top, I haven't left meditation behind. It's still part of my life. I still occasionally teach. But this work for me is very continuous with the work I was doing in meditation. There's a similar divergence of purposes. So for some people, they're doing meditation for stress reduction or for just emotional self-regulation. That is great. Other people are on meditation as part of a Buddhist path of extinguishing suffering. That is also great. Some people are on, are interested in meditation for the non-ordinary states of consciousness that it can cultivate. Also great. Similarly, in psychedelics, you know, there's a similar thing. I mean, they do the same things in a way. Psychedelics are

• 1:14:23Speaker 03

  stronger. There's more of a potential for harm. But there's also more of a potential for a real breakthrough, for actually shifting ones, yeah, shifting the inside stuff in a way that can be, again, with the right integration. By the way, I've said that word a bunch of times. Integration is like an insider baseball term. It's like what you do after the experience. And the data that is out there suggests that the integration is as important as the experience. So you can go and have like some awesome, amazing trip experience. But if you don't spend time processing it, reviewing it, maybe processing it with somebody, you don't, you know, if you go right back to work the next day and you don't allow Some time just for settling down and reflecting.

• 1:15:05Speaker 03

  You know, you know, from your retreat experience, sometimes the best insights from meditation retreat come after the retreat is over. And that's certainly true for psychedelics as well. It looks like, again, we're really early understanding on the scientific level, but the brain needs to sort of sort out and process this stuff. So that's just that word integration. So that's true for meditation and psychedelics as well. And as I mentioned, we were talking before, I mean, for me, like, basic mindfulness meditation is like a very powerful ally in doing this work. The truth is, I don't really know how anybody does anything without mindfulness at this point. Because I've so, like, I don't know how anyone is a parent without having mindfulness as a guy, as a helper. I don't know how anybody navigates difficult conversations.

• 1:15:49Speaker 03

  You know, I've just been gone through in my journalism work. I've gone through this period of being trolled and harassed online for several weeks. I don't know how anyone does that without a meditation practice. So it may just be about me and my reliance on my meditation practice. But I do see it as a very, very important ally in approaching psychedelics and using them. And so much so that it's just, it's like you've done the AP classes before you get to college. You know, like, you already have this credit because somebody's there and you're like, okay, just let go, you know, and the maxim people say is a bad trip is just fighting the trip that you're on. There's no such thing as a bad trip in itself. It's your resistance. So that's a Dharma teaching, right? That's an obvious Dharma teaching.

• 1:16:30Speaker 03

  There's a reason why Ram Dass went from psychedelics to profound spirituality and then spent most of the seventies and eighties doing insight meditation. It's the same kind of relationship to your stuff that we're, that we're trying to create. I'll do another Beatles quote, the good advice from the Beatles, right? Turn off your mind, relax and float downstream. It is not dying. This is from their song Tomorrow Never Knows, one of their first two songs about psychedelics. Great advice, you know? So, all right, well, easier said than done. How do you turn off your mind, relax and float downstream? Listen to Dan's guided meditations.

• 1:17:06Dan Harris?

  Beautifully said. I just want to say one last thing and I'll see if you agree or disagree. If you're listening to this and you're, I don't know if I love this term, but I think it would nonetheless apply to me and definitely to you, Jay. But if you are a seeker listening to this, if you're somebody who is really interested in self-improvement and very curious about the various experiences on offer as a human, and you're scared of doing this, or worried about it because of any pre-existing condition, you do not have to do psychedelics to be a really committed, growth-oriented, or spiritual, or personal improvement-oriented person.

• 1:17:48Dan Harris?

  I'm glad this, these compounds exist, and I think there's incredible promise and some degree of peril, but you don't have to do it. You can still, if you're a Buddhist, you can still get enlightened, if you believe in such things, without doing these compounds. Did anything I just say there, Jay, rankle you?

• 1:18:09Speaker 03

  No, totally. That's 100% true. It's not for everybody. I mean, it's not, you know, I'm an Enneagram seven. So for me, I would say if I left some spiritual stone unturned, you know, my life would not be complete. But that's my problem, not anybody else's. And I, you know, I just have a lot of curiosity about these kinds of mind states and these experiences. And, you know, arguably, I became a parent for Enneagram seven reasons. People told me, "You're gonna feel more love than you've ever felt before." And I was like, "Well, I gotta do that." They should have said what that would actually feel like a little bit more, you know? "You'll feel more love than you ever felt, and it will drive you bananas." Like, that would have been a more, it's like, the second, the second half of that sentence might have been really helpful to have heard.

• 1:18:54Speaker 03

  But anyway, yes. Look, I don't have a yoga practice anymore. I still feel okay about myself.

• 1:19:02Dan Harris?

  There's so much you can do, even within just the Dharma, even that phrase, just the Dharma, within the Dharma, there are so many that you can try to experience the Jhanas, which I never have. You can, you know, you can-

• 1:19:15Speaker 03

  Oh, you're gonna love that, man. You're gonna love going on your first Jhana retreat. It's gonna be the best, you know. So I used to teach before the parenting part. No, I mean, I would say like, yes, that what you said is definitely true. I do think that there are, for, for the seeker, there, there are just ways of being and, and things that you see on psychedelics that even with intensive meditation, I've never experienced any other way. And not just meditation, but also Jewish spirituality, also a lot of other stuff that I do. And I do think like, if it's that, if you're wondering, not if you're like, do I have to? But if you're one of those seekers who's like, really? Is there something behind door number three that I haven't seen? I would say the answer is yes.

• 1:19:58Dan Harris?

  Yeah. Yeah, that sounds right. There's an enormous amount here. And there's enormous amount within the Dharma that you can, or other spiritual traditions that you can also explore and you're not like, you're not a failure.

• 1:20:12Speaker 03

  Definitely. I would not like psychedelics to be another reason anyone beats themselves up for any reason. So if it's doing it, if it's not doing it, yeah, like that inner critic voice of like, oh, I better do this thing. And I would not want that to be their contribution to humanity.

• 1:20:30Dan Harris?

  Just in closing here, I want to say Jay has been writing really well about psychedelics and many other things on his Substack, which is for me a must follow. It's called Both And, but you can just search Jay Michaelson on Substack. I'll also put a link in the show notes. It's, it's just an excellent newsletter. And Jay is really, not only writing about psychedelics, but also about lots of other developments in the culture. And he's one of the first voices I personally want to hear when something big happens. Jay, is there anything else that you want to mention that you're putting out into the world that people should take a look at?

• 1:21:06Speaker 03

  I was gonna say, thank God, one of the two of us. No, remembers to promote me. I never do. So I'm glad, I'm glad you're in the virtual room because otherwise nobody would. Yeah, no, I appreciate that. That really does mean a lot. Yeah, I appreciate it. Yeah, no, you're one of my role models for how to make Substack work. I'm curious, this experiment that you're on and from the outside, it looks great. So, so I appreciate that. Yeah, I think in terms of when this episode drops, there are three live events that I'll be talking about this stuff at. One is Harvard Symposium on Psychedelic Law and Religion that I mentioned that's in March and that can be Googled. A second one is Emory University is having a conference called the Science of Spiritual Health, which as it sounds will be a little less on the religion side, a little more on

• 1:21:50Speaker 03

  the, on the science side. That is early April, April 1st, 2nd, 3rd. It'll be at Emory in Atlanta, but it will also be online and it's free. It'll be a really great menu of psychedelic thinkers, scientists and so on and practitioners at that. It looks like I will be at the biggest psychedelic conference of the year, MAP Psychedelic Science. MAP stands for Multidisciplinary Association, I think, for psychedelic studies. They're like the biggest psychedelic organization. Their conference is in Denver in mid-June and I'll be speaking there as well.

• 1:22:23Dan Harris?

  Awesome. And Jay has also written 13 books? Am I right? But is that number right?

• 1:22:27Speaker 03

  No, thanks for that. No, 10. Yeah.

• 1:22:29Dan Harris?

  10 books. Okay. It will be 13 in the not too distant future, I'm sure. And so we'll put links to everything Jay Michaelson related in the show notes. Jay, this was awesome. Thank you.

• 1:22:40Speaker 03

  Thank you, Dan.

• 1:22:45Dan Harris?

  Thanks again to Jay Michaelson. I've dropped some links in the show notes that you might be interested in, including an episode I did with Michael Pollan, who wrote the great book, How to Change Your Mind, which really has helped catalyze the whole psychedelic revolution. I've also dropped some links to some past episodes with Jay Michaelson, if you want some more from him. And we will, as promised, put a link to Jay's Substack, which is excellent and is called Both And. Oh, and don't forget, if you're a subscriber over at Dan Harris dot com, you'll get a full cheat sheet for this episode, which lists all the takeaways and a special guided meditation from Jay to accompany this episode that will help you

• 1:23:25Dan Harris?

  put the lessons from this episode into your own marrow, into your molecules, so to speak. Before I go, just want to thank everybody who worked so hard to make this show. Our producers are Tara Anderson, Caroline Keenan, and Eleanor Vasili. Our recording and engineering is handled by the great folks over at Pod People. Lauren Smith is our production manager. Marissa Schneiderman is our senior producer. DJ Cashmere is our executive producer. And Nick Thorburn of the band Islands wrote our theme.

• 1:24:01Speaker 05

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