Ep 66: The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide - Risks, Micro-Dosing, Ibogaine, and More

DISCLAIMER: DO NOT CONSUME ANY DRUGS WITHOUT CONSULTING A MEDICAL PROFESSIONAL. THIS IS FOR INFORMATIONAL PURPOSES ONLY. JAMES FADIMAN, Ph. D., did his undergraduate work at Harvard and his graduate work at Stanford, doing research with the Harvard Group, the West Coast Research Group in Menlo Park, and Ken Kesey. He is the author of The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1594774021/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=390957&creativeASIN=1594774021&linkCode=as2&tag=offsitoftimfe-20&linkId=DWNDSZVYE5HZE7ZM. Called “America’s wisest and most respected authority on psychedelics and their use,” Jim Fadiman has been involved with psychedelic research since the 1960s. In this episode, we discuss the immediate and long-term effects of psychedelics when used for spiritual purposes (high dose), therapeutic purposes (moderate dose), and problem-solving purposes (low dose). Fadiman outlines best practices for safe "entheogenic" voyages learned through his more than 40 years of experience--from the benefits of having a sensitive guide during a session (and how to be one) to the importance of the setting and pre-session intention. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. We also discuss new uses for LSD and other psychedelics, including extremely low doses for improved cognitive function. Cautioning that psychedelics are not for everyone, he dispels the myths and misperceptions about psychedelics, which are commonly circulated in textbooks. Fadiman explain how -- in his opinion -- psychedelics, used properly, can lead not only to healing but also to scientific breakthroughs and spiritual epiphanies. Show notes and links for this episode can be found at www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast http://www.fourhourworkweek.com/podcast

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

• 0:00Tim Ferriss?

  That's how Japanese people test mics, by the way.

• 0:04Speaker 01

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

• 0:12Speaker 02

  No, I would assume appropriate time.

• 0:15Speaker 01

  What if I did the opposite? I'm a cybernetic organism, living this year over metal endoskeleton.

• 0:28Tim Ferriss?

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• 1:13Tim Ferriss?

  Check it out, Shopify.com/tim. Hello, boys and girls. This is Tim Ferriss, and welcome to another episode of The Tim Ferriss Show, where I deconstruct world-class performers and experts of all types, ranging from billionaire investors to chess prodigies to Arnold Schwarzenegger-type celebrities, and in this case, a scientific researcher named Jim Fodderman. And I have wanted to have a sit-down conversation with Jim for ages. He is the author of The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide, which is an incredible book and really one-of-a-kind, but he's also conducted studies since the 60s related to psilocybin, LSD, and so on, focusing not only on the mystical implications, but using them in microdosing

• 1:57Tim Ferriss?

  protocols for problem-solving, including very difficult, hard-science problems like engineer, engineering, math, circuitry, etc. This is a rambling, meandering discussion of all the implications and applications, therapeutic and otherwise, of these substances that have really been criminalized and politicized in, in my view, a very counterproductive way. So, without further ado, please enjoy a long conversation with Jim Fodderman.

• 2:25Tim Ferriss?

  Jim, welcome to the show.

• 2:26Speaker 03

  It's a real pleasure to finally be here.

• 2:28Tim Ferriss?

  I'm so excited to be outside on this gorgeous day in San Francisco. And I have wanted to have this conversation for so long now. It feels like years, but I think it's probably closer to six to nine months. Because the term that you introduced me to, which was microdosing, and I'm sure we'll jump back and forth, but could you define what microdosing is?

• 2:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, let's be clear that we're talking about psychedelics, because a microdose is simply a little teeny dose of something.

• 2:58Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 2:58Speaker 03

  With psychedelics, it's actually a low enough dose, so it could be called subperceptual, which means you don't necessarily see any differences in the outside world. As one person said to me, "The rocks don't glitter even a little, and the flowers don't turn and watch you." But you're using it in a way that is really very unknown. Albert Hofmann, who invented LSD, said that microdosing was the area of most neglected research.

• 3:33Tim Ferriss?

  Why do you think it's so neglected? And what are the promises or applications of microdosing?

• 3:39Speaker 03

  Well, he took it for the last couple of decades of his life. So I like to think that it helps you be really sharp at 101.

• 3:47Tim Ferriss?

  How frequently did he microdose over that period of time?

• 3:50Speaker 03

  It would probably be once, twice a week. What he said is he would always take it when he was walking with the trees. So what it is, and why he said it was under-researched, is it does a far better job of a whole class of drugs, which we're now calling cognitive enhancers, most of which are simply derivatives of speed.

• 4:13Tim Ferriss?

  Right, definitely, like methylphenidate, Ritalin. I mean, they're lighting you up.

• 4:16Speaker 03

  Adderall.

• 4:17Tim Ferriss?

  Adderall.

• 4:18Speaker 03

  Probably the most popular among educated students.

• 4:22Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, it's a popular currency for bartering.

• 4:25Speaker 03

  Right.

• 4:26Tim Ferriss?

  And when we talk about small doses, in the case of, say, Hoffman using it twice per week, would that be in the 100-microgram range?

• 4:35Speaker 03

  No, no, no, no, no. 100-micrograms is a major dose.

• 4:38Tim Ferriss?

  That's a major dose. See, I'm not an LSD aficionado. I'm not well-versed, so...

• 4:45Speaker 03

  Okay. Let me just briefly run through doses, because it does matter. Let's go from the top down.

• 4:50Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 4:52Speaker 03

  Terence McKenna talks about a heroic dose: don't.

• 4:55Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, that's enough to shatter the most resistant ego.

• 4:58Speaker 03

  Well, what happens is you don't remember anything, and you don't bring anything back.

• 5:00Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 5:01Speaker 03

  It's kind of like, you want to go swimming, how about going over Niagara Falls?

• 5:03Tim Ferriss?

  Right. Not a lot of time to work on technique.

• 5:06Speaker 03

  But if we get down to, say, 400-micrograms, that's a transcendental dose, that's for mystical experience, that's something you should always have a guide.

• 5:13Tim Ferriss?

  And this is LSD specifically?

• 5:14Speaker 03

  This is LSD specifically. If we go down to 200, we're talking psychotherapy, deep inner work, all kinds of healing, and great for self-exploration. 100 is really useful creative problem-solving of problems that aren't personal, things like in physics, or biomechanics, or architecture. And we can talk about some of that work that's been done, because it's only been a little bit done, and I was involved with all of it. Go down to 50, again, I'll really reel my age, it used to be called a museum dose, now it's called a concert dose.

• 5:52Speaker 03

  And 10, 10-15 is this microdose, which is, another person described it as an all-chakra enhancer, which is, everything is just a little better. You know, at the end of the day, when you say, "Wow, that was a really good day," that's the way most people report a microdose. They're a little bit nicer, they're a little bit...

• 6:15Tim Ferriss?

  Personally behaving in a nicer fashion.

• 6:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is behavior. They also find that stupid people are not so bad.

• 6:21Tim Ferriss?

  More tolerant.

• 6:22Speaker 03

  They're much more tolerant, including their relatives, which is really extraordinary. They are not at a higher level of creativity, but they can be creative longer, kind of steady, more in flow. And as one of my favorite women who's been microdosing for, I discovered her, and she said, "Oh yeah, I've been doing that for years." She said, "The only way anyone else could tell is that my computer, I lower the illumination a little." But she has very large pupils, so it's hard to tell.

• 6:54Tim Ferriss?

  And the, the microdosing, is there an optimal frequency with which to use it? Is there too much of microdosing in terms of frequency?

• 7:04Speaker 03

  Psychedelics are very peculiar. They are anti-addictive, which means if you take it on day one and you have whatever experience you have, if you take it on day two, same amount, maybe some experience, but maybe not. And if you take it a third day straight, nothing.

• 7:19Tim Ferriss?

  So develop tolerance very quickly?

• 7:21Speaker 03

  So your mind develops tolerance. The drug is gone. It's way gone, particularly if we're talking LSD micrograms. It's gone within an hour and a half. So something in the mind says, I think we've just had enough of that for now. It's a little bit like if you have a fantastic, well, one of your killer carb days.

• 7:40Tim Ferriss?

  Right, that cheat day explosion.

• 7:42Speaker 03

  Right, and then you do that the next day. And then the third day, you just get sick. So they're anti, anti-addictive. So the, I have a protocol I actually send to people, and it basically says, take it on day one, notice that you're still having experience on day two. This is different than if you take a higher dose. Day three, take a day off. And then if you are doing it continually, then you can take it again on day four. And that seems to work best for people.

• 8:12Tim Ferriss?

  And they're only dosing once on day one, but they see the residual effect on day two?

• 8:17Speaker 03

  This is one of the things that, what's wonderful is I feel like I'm Columbus. Anyplace I land counts, because no one's been there. Most of the people who are listening to us who have any experience with psychedelics know that LSD is eight to 12 hours, psilocybin is five to eight hours, DMT is 15 minutes, et cetera. Microdose seems to be two days. And I was talking with a professor who does psychedelic research at a major East Coast university, and he said, tell me more about microdosing. And I mentioned the two days, and he's a, he's a basically a specialist in, in this area and in neurochemistry. And he kind of looks at me like, oh, you West Coast cool hippies.

• 9:01Speaker 03

  And I said, well, that's been, you know, what I hear from people. And then a guy walks by who runs a very large corporation with manufacturing plants in about five countries, and he looks down at me, says, second day's better.

• 9:17Tim Ferriss?

  This is just a passerby?

• 9:19Speaker 03

  Well, someone I knew at the same gathering. And then I kind of, you know, gave my buddy a little kick in the ribs. And then he sends back, he looks back at me and he says, "Ask my daughter."

• 9:32Tim Ferriss?

  Interesting.

• 9:33Speaker 03

  Who happened to be a mental health worker who also said, "Yeah, for her too." So this is, this is one of the things we're discovering. And this is the fun part, which is I'm in, I'm, I don't do research. I only do search.

• 9:46Tim Ferriss?

  Could you explain?

• 9:47Speaker 03

  So once I've learned something, replicating it or doing it with a whole bunch more people is not as interesting as can I find out something else?

• 9:55Tim Ferriss?

  Now, I'd imagine that you probably run into some resistance or debate around that point with, with people who would want to see multiple iterations of, of replicating results, or they don't pay attention to the, the empirical data you might offer otherwise. Is that, has that been a challenge?

• 10:18Speaker 03

  Well, there's a game in science. One is called have a big number. And I've seen people in conferences, you can always ask this question, which is, "Why didn't you have more?" Okay? You had eight, how come you didn't have 15? You have 15, how come you have 30? You only had 100,000 and you had no one from Norway in the sample. How do we know we can generalize? So it's a kind of silliness that academics do to each other. The other in, in drug research, and it's, this is really helpful for a very small number of drugs, is called a double blind. Which is you give it to people and you give half of them nothing and you give half of them something. Psychedelic research has always stumbled on that one because within an hour, except for microdoses maybe, everybody knows.

• 11:02Speaker 03

  And then the, the researchers are stuck acting like jerks all day, pretending that they don't know. So, that's another one. But the main thing with microdosing is, I'm not, I'm not doing research. I'm not giving people psychedelic drugs. One is, they're illegal. And two is, I'm not a physician connected to a university. What I'm doing is saying to people, and, and keep in mind that since LSD became illegal, 26 million Americans, just Americans, have taken LSD. So, I'm saying to people, if you're interested in microdosing, and you have your own material

• 11:46Speaker 03

  because you either know someone who went, is in college, or in high school, or in prison, these are the three places where you can get almost any drug, particularly these, these less dangerous ones, then let me know and I'll be happy to help you make it as safe and as valuable as possible.

• 12:07Tim Ferriss?

  And for those people perhaps unfamiliar with your background, could you give a short chronology or description of your background?

• 12:16Speaker 03

  Sure. Brought up in Los Angeles, in the shadow of the film business, the shadow being the writers who didn't respect anybody else, because they were the only ones who'd read and written. I went to Harvard as an undergraduate and my favorite teacher was someone named Richard Alpert. After Harvard, I scrambled around and got all the money and gifts and favors that I could find, plus all the people to stay with, and went and lived in Europe for close to a year. Ram Dass, Richard Alpert still showed up and said, "Hi Jim, the most wonderful thing in the world has happened to me and I want to share it with you." And I thought, "Okay, whatever it is."

• 12:59Speaker 03

  And then he takes some pills out of his pocket and I think... Words you don't say on radio, "Oh my." Right. And so I had some psilocybin with him while living in Paris. And a week later, I followed him to Copenhagen, where he was teaming up with Tim Leary and Aldous Huxley to present at the first conference that there was, a world psychology conference, and they first presented about psychedelics. And then my draft board wrote me a note and said, "You like living in Paris? Or would you like to come to Vietnam, where we can show you how to crawl on the ground on your elbows in the mud? Or would you like to go to graduate school?"

• 13:40Speaker 03

  And all of a sudden, graduate school had these little shiny stars all around it, so I ended up at Stanford. And there was a group off-campus that was doing psychedelic research, and I found them. Did my dissertation on psychedelics, not on psychedelics, but about psychedelics. And then, as the government said, "We don't know what to do about all these kids taking psychedelics. Let's stop all the legitimate research. At least we've stopped something." Right. So I then went and had a career doing other things, and wrote about altered states, and wrote about madness, and wrote one novel, one psychedelic novel.

• 14:18Speaker 03

  And as the, I used to call it government repression, but one of my fellow researchers calls it a lull in the research. So once the lull was over, I basically found some areas that interested me, and I now am really a psychedelic researcher in this unusual way, where I don't have a laboratory, and I don't stay with people, and I just ask them what they're doing. So it's more, more field research. At one level, it's crowdsourcing. Sure. Another level, it's, and this is one of Ram Dass's terms, is it's like going to the Explorers Club now and then, and you swap stories.

• 15:00Speaker 03

  So that's a very short background. And I've had a long career. I've been a professor at various places. I've been a consultant. I was with the Stanford Research Institute with a group that developed the mouse and word processing, which was probably the most, you know, my closest to being woo in history. What was your undergraduate major? Well, I started in physics, and it was really hard.

• 15:26Tim Ferriss?

  Physics is hard.

• 15:27Speaker 03

  And I had this wonderful moment after I just squeaked through calculus, where my advisor said, "You know, Mr. Fadiman, that everyone who got a lower grade than you in this course will not be in your next course."

• 15:42Speaker 03

  And I thought, "Is there a message here?"

• 15:44Tim Ferriss?

  Tell me how you really feel.

• 15:46Speaker 03

  Am I supposed to hear something in that? So I ended up in social relations, which was psychology without rats. And that's where I met Dick Albert.

• 15:56Tim Ferriss?

  Is that... how did he differ as Professor Albert versus Ram Dass? What was that transformation?

• 16:05Speaker 03

  Well, as a professor, particularly when you're a Harvard assistant professor, you are at the bottom of a stairway that leads to heaven.

• 16:15Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 16:16Speaker 03

  At least, that's the way you're told. So you're supposed to just work your ass off, climbing those stairs, so maybe, maybe, maybe they will keep you.

• 16:26Speaker 03

  So Richard was a kind of a wonderful teacher and a wonderfully, as he would easily say, incredibly neurotic. And he was also then a closet gay, very closet, because that's the era.

• 16:42Speaker 03

  And the Harvard department was full of really, basically, nice people, looking at the kind of better sides of human beings. Also, the department had B.F. Skinner, which was behaviorism, which was saying, "There is nothing in the mind worth noticing." So it was really, it was a wonderful place for a kind of nerdy intellectual, which I was. So it's like from being seriously unpopular in high school,

• 17:12Speaker 03

  and liking that, to being just one more smarty-ass person at Harvard who pretended to have read a lot more than he ever had.

• 17:25Tim Ferriss?

  What did you like about being unpopular in high school?

• 17:29Speaker 03

  Well, they didn't respect me for the same reasons I didn't respect them. The, my, I was student body president, because I was clever enough to figure out a way to make the other person look foolish. It's really a terrible admission.

• 17:49Speaker 03

  And in turn, when I won a letter in tennis, I was the captain of the tennis team. I never won a match against another school. But I knew how to get into a good college, which is to have tennis team California on your resume. The Letterman's Club had a meeting and changed the rules so that I couldn't get a letter. And I confess that I found that wonderful. They and I understood each other deeply. Your thesis, what was your thesis about? Well, I'd been doing, I'd been doing my Stanford courses by day and psychedelic research by night and afternoons.

• 18:33Speaker 03

  What were the courses that you were teaching? Well, I was taking, taking just a bunch of courses. Oh, I'm sorry, the graduate level classes, yeah. And I always, I was the only, I was the only graduate student that always wore a coat and tie, because I thought that would fool them. And it did. But my dissertation was on behavior change following LSD therapy. And it took me two years to get a committee of three people and about eight weeks to do the dissertation. So it was a little scary for Stanford, because this was just when Dick and Tim had been fired from Harvard. The country was in uproar. This is Tim Leary. Tim Leary. And Dick was... Richard Alpert. That's right, Richard Alpert. And this was when students were taking over campuses and so forth and so on.

• 19:18Speaker 03

  So Stanford was terrified at earning its nickname, which was the Harvard of the West. And so they, I basically really had to sneak around very quietly and do my work, which was this wonderful work where I interviewed a hundred people who'd had high dose mystical transcendental experiences. And my question was, that's really cool. Has your behavior changed? Are you different in some way? Or are you just someone who has a lot of wonderful kind of new age flowery things to say? And the answer, of course, is that people... Liked their work more, they had more friends at work, they played with their children more,

• 19:59Speaker 03

  they were out in nature more, they watched television less, their eating habits improved. So they were fundamentally, across the board, healthier human beings.

• 20:09Tim Ferriss?

  What doses, or what were the, it could be dosages or commonalities, did you find in the people who had the most durable effects?

• 20:19Speaker 03

  Well, very straightforward. That there, if one has this transcendental experience, and maybe I should say a little bit what that is. That's the feeling of, or the awareness that you are connected to, not only to other people, but to other things, and to other living things, and to living systems, and to the air you breathe. If you just think for a moment, we tend to think that we're kind of encapsulated, like I'm separate. But obviously, the air I'm breathing comes from all over the world, and it's, some of it's a billion years old. My cells are turning around, every eight years I get almost all new cells from something.

• 21:01Speaker 03

  Obviously, everything I eat is connected to me, everyone I meet is connected to me. Right now, you and I are sitting outside and our feet are touching the ground. We're connected to the ground. Now, that's all easy to say intellectually, and even poetically. But when you actually experience that you're part of this larger system, one of the things that you become aware of is your ego. Your personal identity is not that big a part of you. What I learned was, and this is from my own personal experience, in 1961,

• 21:37Speaker 03

  is that Jim Fadiman is a subset of me. And the me is very, very large, and a lot smarter, and knows a lot more than Jim Fadiman. And that's been a shift, which in our, in the people I also saw for my dissertation, that was the big shift. And let me give you a kind of really serious example, which is, some of the people that we worked with were alcoholics. And what we found is, they, the ones who would have a transcendental experience, would, a week later, they'd go out and drink.

• 22:17Speaker 03

  Which at first thought, oh, we failed. And then they come back to us and say, it doesn't work. And we say, what doesn't work? He says, drinking doesn't work anymore. It makes me feel less. And what we realize is that many alcoholics are drinking because they feel isolated. They have not made this transition to feeling part of a larger system. And if we go into their background, they may not feel part of their family and so forth and so on. But at the deeper level, if you realize that you're part of a larger existence, and that that's basically all positive, then if drinking closes that down, why on earth would you do it? It's kind of like going to movies, but you carry some little eye shades with you.

• 23:02Speaker 03

  And the movie starts and you put on the eye shades. And the problem next to you says, what are you doing that for? Well, I don't want to be too much part of the event.

• 23:10Tim Ferriss?

  I don't want to be immersed in the movie.

• 23:11Speaker 03

  Exactly. And when you get into relationships and when you get into lovemaking, you can see where this could be a real problem.

• 23:17Tim Ferriss?

  Absolutely. And I've done a fair amount of reading and I've had my own experiences, not with addiction, with other substances, but I've been in the same settings as others using, for instance, whether it be psilocybin or mushrooms or ayahuasca for the purposes of overcoming opiate addiction or heroin addiction.

• 23:39Tim Ferriss?

  Are there any other aspects of those experiences or just the pharmacokinetics of those substances that lead to overcoming those types of addictions?

• 23:50Speaker 03

  Well, that's the wonderful thing is, there is one. And it's a different substance than we've talked about yet, which is ibogaine, comes from a root in Africa, the iboga root, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

• 24:02Speaker 03

  The tribe that uses it, the Betwee, has never heard of addiction. But somehow we discovered that if an addict takes a session with iboga or ibogaine, one is the session may last 36 hours. It's a killer.

• 24:18Tim Ferriss?

  That sounds terrifying.

• 24:19Speaker 03

  And imagine if one of the things you go through is every single event in your life that you did that wasn't good.

• 24:29Speaker 03

  Okay, and it isn't like reading about it as it happened years ago, but you've got it right in your face, event after event after, and you really get that you don't want to do that. And after thirty-six hours, and this is the psychokinetic or the medical kind of chemical part, you come out and you do not have withdrawal symptoms.

• 24:50Tim Ferriss?

  How does that happen? I'm so fascinated by this.

• 24:51Speaker 03

  The answer is, nobody has the faintest idea.

• 24:54Tim Ferriss?

  That's so fascinating, because you read about things like naltrexone, I think it is that's used, or, you know, the, obviously of methadone, which is a totally different substance, but I've, I've heard this straight from the horse's mouth, from people who've overcome.

• 25:08Speaker 03

  Well, this is, this is this, so you have a window. And that's because the problem is normally if you're an addict and you get clean, withdrawal symptoms are horrible.

• 25:17Tim Ferriss?

  Terrible.

• 25:17Speaker 03

  And the one thing that we know takes care of them is more of whatever you're addicted to. But if you don't have that, and it only doesn't last that long, this kind of open, pure space, if you stop, you have a chance to stop. And the people I know that run clinics, and there's some wonderful clinics in, in Mexico and, and South America, a lot of countries other than one that we are sitting in, don't know why. What they say is, a number of people don't make it on the first session. They relapse after a couple of months and they come back, and, and we get a number, you know, improved on that group. So if you want to stop being addicted, and I remember listening to this wonderful young

• 25:59Speaker 03

  man talking about when his sister found him under the bridge, where he was addicted to heroin and methadone.

• 26:09Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, boy.

• 26:10Speaker 03

  Methadone is what you're given to not be addicted to heroin, by the way. And she said, I think there's a place that could help you. And he was now, several years later, running a small clinic in Mexico to help other ibogaine, other heroin kind of addicts. So that's a particular one. Ayahuasca and psilocybin and all can clean up your psyche, and again, give you this, this different way of seeing yourself, but they don't have this amazing kind of a grace.

• 26:42Tim Ferriss?

  Grace period.

• 26:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 26:44Tim Ferriss?

  Provided. And it doesn't matter where you are in San Francisco, I'm not sure if you people listening can hear all the sirens, it always sounds like Beirut warfare for at least half of the day, so I apologize to everybody, but the...

• 26:58Tim Ferriss?

  The question of psychedelics and psychedelics of choice.

• 27:05Tim Ferriss?

  Do the applications of, say, psilocybin differ greatly from the applications of LSD in your mind? What differentiates them?

• 27:11Speaker 03

  Well, what you'll, if you are up on the kind of research game since the government said, "Well, maybe if you go through eighty-two hurdles, we'll actually let you do it." Most of the research has been psilocybin. There are two reasons for that. One is, it takes five to eight hours. LSD takes ten to twelve. The second reason is so the staff can go home. Which is part of the first reason. The difference between those two substances and mescaline and peyote, in terms of what they do for you and to you, are very much the same. They don't have the same molecule. They're not, they're not the same chemically. But psychodynamically or spiritually, they're very similar.

• 27:55Speaker 03

  When you get to another group, kind of like another FM station, ayahuasca is a totally different set of experiences. And the very fast-acting ones, DMT being the one that is most popular. Again, that's a, that's a, it's a different universe that you're plunged into. And then there's something called salvia. And the wonderful thing about salvia is it has nothing to do chemically with anything else I've just talked about. And its full name is salvia divinorum. So it's been used in Mexico historically for who knows how many thousand years for divination, for finding out things.

• 28:36Speaker 03

  And again, we seem to be able, as Americans, to take almost anything that is indigenous and screw it up in some way. And so people smoke salvia and have a short, intense, sometimes meaningful experience. That isn't how it's used. It's chewed, which means it takes about an hour and it comes on slowly and it has a time and then it goes down. So it's a totally different experience.

• 29:04Tim Ferriss?

  Well, that's something that I've spoken with friends about before who have used and I've experimented with 5-MEO DMT and I decided that I disliked it. And the reason I decided I disliked it is I felt there was, for me personally, and this is certainly subject to debate, but I felt precisely due to its fast-acting nature and how quickly it cleared the system, or seemed to clear the system, that there's a higher potential for addiction, or abuse maybe is a better way to put it. And similarly, if you look at, say, coca leaf tea, which I've had in South America, which is just a wonderful tea that is very mild, it's milder than a cup of coffee in my experience,

• 29:49Tim Ferriss?

  without the jitters and the crash at least. But then you compare it to same plant matter, but refined to cocaine and then further, let's just say refined into the quick-hitting crack cocaine, the dangers are very, very different. The risks are very different.

• 30:07Speaker 03

  It's one of the things where actually Shulgin, Sasha Shulgin, who invented, there are two great beings that have invented psychedelics, God and Sasha Shulgin. And I think Sasha may have invented more. But there are literally hundreds that he played with and looked at. And what he says in the beginning of his book is-

• 30:28Tim Ferriss?

  What's the name of his book?

• 30:29Speaker 03

  Pikal.

• 30:30Tim Ferriss?

  Pikal.

• 30:31Speaker 03

  Phenothylenes I have known and liked.

• 30:33Tim Ferriss?

  P-I-K-A-L?

• 30:36Speaker 03

  And he has another book called Tikal, which is tryptamines that I have known and liked. And they're filled with synthesizing, how to do various syntheses. And I asked him once why he put out such a book. He said, "So the government can't stop people from experimenting."

• 30:52Tim Ferriss?

  He wanted to unleash the recipe go.

• 30:54Speaker 03

  Well, it's, it's, it's, and what he says is if you are using something and you don't have any knowledge about it, you are at fault.

• 31:02Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 31:03Speaker 03

  And so, like, the five M E O, of which there are some varieties, one of the problems is that the, the very unpleasant or close to toxic dose is fairly close to the dose that people like. One of the nice things I like about LSD is we don't know what the toxic dose is, nobody's ever taken enough. And there is in the literature a great article, which is, an elephant was given like hundred thousand, several hundred thousand micrograms of LSD and died. And for many years, I used to say, if you give LSD, enough LSD to kill an elephant, you can kill an elephant. Ha, ha, ha, ha. I only learned recently that the elephant had been dosed with tranquilizers, massive

• 31:47Speaker 03

  amounts of tranquilizers, because the experimenters were afraid. You don't really want an angry elephant that says, hey, who gave me this LSD? I'm gonna stomp you. So they had packed this pachyderm with tranquilizers and it basically suffered respiratory failure.

• 32:05Tim Ferriss?

  No kidding.

• 32:05Speaker 03

  So, we really don't, and I think one of the other, maybe it's, but it's like hundreds of times, the dose people take before it, it really harms you. Now, taking too much of any of these substances psychologically can be really scary, especially if you don't know what you're doing, and especially if you don't have someone with you, you know, the equivalent of the designated driver.

• 32:29Tim Ferriss?

  And I'd love to touch on that, because I've spoken openly before about psychedelic use, and although I find that, the term bothers me for some reason.

• 32:40Speaker 03

  I don't use it. Try psychedelic experience.

• 32:42Tim Ferriss?

  Psychedelic experience.

• 32:43Speaker 03

  Because that way, you're not talking about a drug, you're talking about the effects of a drug.

• 32:46Tim Ferriss?

  That's true. I also came across the word entheogen, I think it is?

• 32:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, entheogen is, that means the divine within. And that's using these substances, ayahuasca, mescaline, peyote, LSD, psilocybin, et cetera.

• 33:04Speaker 03

  As a spiritual tool. So what you're aiming for is to reconnect and reunite and re-member, re-dash-member your connection with the spiritual world. And that's called an entheogenic experience.

• 33:18Tim Ferriss?

  I like that phrase.

• 33:19Speaker 03

  It's a lovely phrase.

• 33:19Tim Ferriss?

  It doesn't have the tinge, perhaps.

• 33:22Speaker 03

  Doesn't have all that kind of 60s razzmatazz.

• 33:25Tim Ferriss?

  All the connotation.

• 33:26Speaker 03

  You don't hear the dad going, "Mm, hey, hey, hey."

• 33:28Tim Ferriss?

  Right, exactly. So, but speaking of uninformed use, I think this is very important because I I have shied away from LSD precisely because I have two close friends who, over time, I saw them after several years of very heavy LSD use, which they did solo, for the most part. And I don't know if it unearthed latent schizophrenic tendencies that they had genetically or not, but they were noticeably, oddly enough, less connected. It seemed they were just less self-aware and less connected. In much the opposite you might expect, because when I meet people

• 34:11Tim Ferriss?

  who have undergone a very deep entheogenic or psychedelic experience in a controlled environment, they seem to gain all of those things. But these people, it seemed to have lost that.

• 34:22Speaker 03

  What happens for some people, and again, is you discover this incredibly more interesting world, and you then don't like this one.

• 34:32Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 34:32Speaker 03

  Because you don't integrate. So you say, "Well, I'd like to get back there." And my buddies said, "Here's some, you know, I bought this off of this guy in the village, and he said it's real. Let's, I'll take it." And then if you keep leaving, in a sense, and not integrating, eventually, you can really get disconnected. And one of my teachers had a really wonderful image. Now, you have to go back to film, where you rolled the film. And if you take a picture with film, you get a huge amount of information. You can also do what's called a double exposure. You get twice as much information, but it's really hard to figure out what's there. If you do a triple exposure, you've got a massive amount of information, and it's worthless.

• 35:16Speaker 03

  So one of the problems that your friends had is they kept... Kind of piling on the images and not rolling the film.

• 35:24Tim Ferriss?

  That's interesting.

• 35:25Speaker 03

  I have a little remark in my book, which is a couple of chapters on how to do the best possible session. I'm really into safety, I'm really into purity, I'm really into people having the best possible experience, just like a good travel agent says, you know, when you go to Paris, don't jump and descend. It's really interesting, just walk along. Things like that, kind of the obvious. And what I've found is that when you do things this way, well, when I say in my book at some point, you've had a wonderful experience.

• 35:58Tim Ferriss?

  And this is the psilocybin explorer's guide.

• 35:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:00Tim Ferriss?

  Great book, by the way. People should check it out.

• 36:05Speaker 03

  If you've had a really meaningful experience, and about a month later you say, I really need to have another one, what that means is you're not willing to work something through. You're trying to get around it, you're trying to avoid it, and that's a real good indicator that, oh, I really need another one, not to.

• 36:24Speaker 03

  And that's hard for people. Again, that's the reason, you know, when you, when I wrote the book, the purpose was so that people could have safe, spiritual, therapeutic, or just for recreation purposes. Because these are, they're not bad for you, but it's hard to think of something you can't misuse. And there's a wonderful diagram that my marijuana friends use when they're describing dangers. And it's this chart, and way up at the top is what kills the most people per year, you know, it's tobacco, like 400,000, alcohol, 200,000, and you kind of get down, there's atrogenic diseases, that's things that you get from hospitals and doctors, about 100,000.

• 37:07Speaker 03

  And you go way down to the bottom, and the second from the bottom is peanuts, 100 deaths a year. And then there's marijuana, zero. And it's, you know, it makes the point, but the point is peanuts.

• 37:21Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 37:21Speaker 03

  Water, salt, you know, it's possible to harm yourself if you don't know what you're doing with practically anything.

• 37:30Tim Ferriss?

  I think a big part of it, just coming to the peanut point specifically, is people who are perhaps either unaware that they have a peanut allergy, or who don't do their homework to determine what's in the food that they're consuming.

• 37:42Speaker 03

  Or they choke.

• 37:43Tim Ferriss?

  Or they choke.

• 37:44Speaker 03

  Children.

• 37:45Tim Ferriss?

  So it could be all three, or one of the three. In the case of psychedelics, what are some of the guidelines that you provide for safe and successful experiences?

• 38:00Tim Ferriss?

  We have a regular parade of dogs coming by us, which is really pleasant, actually.

• 38:04Speaker 03

  Heard that little bell.

• 38:07Speaker 03

  The basics are, you can really do it with just a series of little S-words, which is, what is the set, meaning what's the mental attitude you have? I really want to be with my friends and go to the beach and groove on the sunset. Or, I really want to look into the fact that I've never really acknowledged that I was raped by my uncle at age 13 and I still hate men. Those are real different sets. The setting is nature, to, you know, I can't think of the worst setting, but it's probably in a laboratory in a university.

• 38:49Speaker 03

  Almost all the psychedelic research that's done now is in a living room-like setting, with comfortable cushions and art and flowers, so that you feel physically and emotionally safe. Then the question is, what's the substance? And then, what's the dose? Because as we talked about, it makes a huge difference. And then, the question is, what's your situation afterwards? Which is, one of the things we know is people who go out of, get out of prison, I'm deep breathing while the truck goes by.

• 39:21Tim Ferriss?

  No, I appreciate that.

• 39:24Speaker 03

  If they go back to the same neighborhood, they are much more likely to go back to prison because that's the occupations that are available to them. So part of it is, what's the aftercare? And the last is, who's the sitter, or the guide, or the person assisting you? And I'm, in a lot of psychedelic circles, I'm kind of a right-wing nut. Because I really have found that a guide makes an enormous difference in not only safety, which is pretty obvious, but in depth. It's kind of if you're on safari. Why do you have a guide? Well, he doesn't see the animals for you, but he sure can say, "I'd look over there if I were you." And you say, "Whoa!" Something over there. And he'd say, "You know, it's your safari,

• 40:08Speaker 03

  but personally, this rhinoceros coming toward us, I'm gonna stand behind the tree."

• 40:16Speaker 03

  Because I remember once, I was, this is not with animals, I was in Australia. And I was in a town where there was a rodeo with a lot of aborigines coming into town. And after the rodeo, they got drunk. And there was this piling out of a bar kind of angry swirl of aborigines. And I'm walking along, and I think, "Wow, that's really interesting." And so I'm starting to walk right in the middle of them. And the woman I was with pulls me back and says, "What are you doing?" And I got, I'm invisible to them because I'm just some white guy. But I'm still an object in the middle of people who were pulling out knives. So a guide is really valuable. Fundamental. If you're serious.

• 41:00Speaker 03

  If you're really serious to discovering what's inside yourself, then a guide is really helpful. And it's again, also like a designated driver, which is, you do want to be safe. You don't want suddenly... I remember a wonderful response from a student I was asking. He said, "The session was really going well until the car caught on fire."

• 41:24Tim Ferriss?

  That tells you a lot about the setting being slightly off.

• 41:29Tim Ferriss?

  What separates, aside from what you just mentioned, a good sitter or a great sitter or guide from someone who is not?

• 41:39Speaker 03

  Well, a great sitter is someone you trust. Or let's do it this way, a good sitter is someone you trust. A great sitter is someone who loves you and you trust. And a superlative sitter is someone who doesn't have any agenda of their own. They don't want you to see a certain thing, they don't want you to be a certain way, they don't want you to discover a certain thing. Now, they all do. But what their job as a guide is, is how can I give this person the best possible experience that they can have at this time in their lives? And at some point, when someone, for instance, says, "All I want is to be in the spirit", and after a few hours you can see that that's not going to happen,

• 42:23Speaker 03

  then you say, "Well, why don't we take a walk in nature", which is a beautiful experience and always a good idea. I met Albert Hofmann just once, and he said, and my German accent's probably a little weak, but he said, "People are always asking me, 'How should I take psychedelics?'" And I say to them, "Always take it in nature."

• 42:46Tim Ferriss?

  That was pretty well done.

• 42:48Speaker 03

  Well, it hit me. Because, again, what happens when you're in nature is you begin to understand that you're in nature, you're not apart from nature. And that's, again, part of this deep revelation, that you are really connected to a very intensely alive and complicated system of which you play a role.

• 43:12Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I liked your segregation of re and member, the re member. I like that a lot.

• 43:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, because what happens a lot of times, people at some point will start laughing.

• 43:22Tim Ferriss?

  Seems very consistent.

• 43:24Speaker 03

  In a very deep way. And it isn't the giggles of marijuana. It's the laughter of, "How could I have forgotten who I really am?"

• 43:35Speaker 03

  And then, much later in the day, when they're reintegrating and finding that they still, surprisingly, are in the same body they came in with, in spite of having been part of the galaxy or whatever else. And one person said it very beautifully. "I was back in the prison of all of the things that hold me back, but I could see that the door was locked from the inside."

• 44:01Tim Ferriss?

  Oh.

• 44:02Speaker 03

  So that's the level of psychotherapeutic insight.

• 44:04Tim Ferriss?

  That's deep.

• 44:05Speaker 03

  And that's deep.

• 44:06Tim Ferriss?

  How do... What is the proper way to integrate after such a session? So that it doesn't get lost in the slipstream? Because I've met people who've been transformed by responsible, supervised psychedelic use. I've also met people, as I'm sure you have, who seem to be... They're almost like seminar junkies. People who can't stop going to seminars, but they never take the time to do the work that's assigned to them. And I go to cocktail parties, of course. Ayahuasca is very much of the moment. It's a popular topic of conversation. And I was in New York, and I met a number of people who claimed to have done it eighty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty times. And they seemed utterly unchanged by it.

• 44:46Speaker 03

  Right.

• 44:47Tim Ferriss?

  And how do you avoid that trap? What is the proper way to integrate?

• 44:53Speaker 03

  Well, let's put ayahuasca aside for a moment.

• 44:55Tim Ferriss?

  Sure.

• 44:56Speaker 03

  It's a separate question. But with any major intervention in your life, if you don't see how it fits into your life or try to fit it in, you're gonna be in trouble. We have something called culture shock, which you know a lot about because you've traveled in a lot of weird places. And you suddenly get, "I'm in a really weird place." I remember a moment, I'm in Japan, and my... All my friends who've been around me and helping and who are Japanese, they all went away. And I'm suddenly aware, I'm illiterate. I'm totally illiterate. I cannot read a street sign. I cannot tell what the stop sign says. I look at a restaurant, I have no idea what's going on. I ended up getting food from the subway out of like an automat.

• 45:41Speaker 03

  It was really... And it was just terrible. But I had the realization of what culture shock is, and I hadn't been able... And then I started to integrate, which is, "Oh, I'm in Japan, it's okay. I'm really not illiterate, I just don't speak Japanese." And they're, "Oh, there's a sign with a word in English." And integration is the missing piece in the psychedelic world.

• 46:02Speaker 03

  Which is why the successful studies don't talk, even as we've been talking about psychedelic experience, they talk about experience in a therapeutic package. So the work with MDMA, for example, which is wonderfully mind-blowing, that it releases people from post-traumatic stress disorder, but not just taking MDMA, but taking MDMA, preparing for it with a psychotherapist, having two guides, male and female, and then a lot of time with integration of talking with these people, talking with other people who've had a similar experience. But there's a term we have, "working it through," which is like getting rid of it. This is the opposite.

• 46:45Speaker 03

  This is putting it into practice. It's Zen Roshi, who I know, Kenneth Roshi, said, "You know why we call meditation 'practice' ?" "It's so you're practicing on how to be in the world. You're not practicing on how to sit on your butt and look at the wall." She said, "That's the easiest possible way to meditate and to integrate it into your system. The point is to get up and do something." And she would tell me that these bright-eyed people would show up and say, "I'm ready, Roshi, I'm gonna meditate my little tail off." And she'd say, "You're really serious." And they'd say, "Oh, yeah." She said, "Well, this is Mount Shasta." She said, "Well, one of the goats is giving birth in a shed up there.

• 47:30Speaker 03

  Someone has to be with that goat all night." And they would look at her, and she would look at them, and she said, "Some of them left." But the ones who stayed began to understand that integration means to put it into your life. So even, I didn't know much when I did my dissertation, but my question was, if it doesn't change your behavior in ways not only that you notice, but that other people notice, it probably hasn't gotten very deep. Right? So when someone says to me, "I took LSD and discovered I was God," I say, "That's wonderful. Am I God?" And if they say, "No," we're already in trouble. But if they say, "Yes," and I say, "Well, what are we gonna do about that? You know, what are you doing that's different?"

• 48:15Speaker 03

  You know, because there's a lot of things in the world that that you feel need some help. And when you talk to people who are in the service world, lots more than you would think have had psychedelic experiences that changed their life.

• 48:30Tim Ferriss?

  Service meaning waitstaff?

• 48:32Speaker 03

  No, service meaning where you're helping people, well, from waitstaff up to feeding people with AIDS.

• 48:38Tim Ferriss?

  Got it.

• 48:40Speaker 03

  One of the curious things, when I give a talk at a university, two things happen. One is I'm assured that there won't be too many people and it's always packed, because I usually go to universities where they don't talk about it much in the faculty. And I was at Yale and I was comparing them with UC Santa Cruz. And I can tell you, before it's published, that UC Santa Cruz students who are interested in psychedelics take way, way, way, way, way more drugs of all kinds than people at Yale. However, the people at Yale took these sessions very seriously and a significant number made

• 49:22Speaker 03

  a serious life change after their one or two experiences. They would change majors.

• 49:30Speaker 03

  One wonderful person indicated he gave up his his summer job in a hedge fund and ended up in a service job in a nonprofit. And one of my favorites was, two people said it made massive changes in their religious orientation.

• 49:49Tim Ferriss?

  Doggy break.

• 49:51Speaker 03

  And one of them said that, I forget if it was a he or she, totally realized that her religion was a sham and hollow and that there was a deeper universal. And the other said she became totally aware of how valuable her religion was and how much more she was committed to it. Same religion.

• 50:12Speaker 03

  So it makes a difference in people's lives when they integrate it.

• 50:17Tim Ferriss?

  What did the Yale students do differently? And specifically, was the, did the integration take the form of a set of questions that a therapist asked them, a set of exercises that they did after the fact?

• 50:30Speaker 03

  Oh, none of these were, you see, when I talk to college students, nobody's ever been in a, in a, in a research setting or had a therapist. They've had friends who've been guides. So these are all folks like the other 25.9 million.

• 50:46Tim Ferriss?

  So what do you think distinguished the Yale students?

• 50:48Speaker 03

  Well, I think the Yale students, perhaps because it's harder and rarer, that they took it more seriously, that they may have had more guiding. And they were taking it, starting with self-exploration. What I found in the Santa Cruz students is a lot of them simply took what was around at a low enough dose so it was for fun or for nature. But what was very interesting is what they said is, eventually, I was taking it more for self-exploration and spiritual work. And I noticed I was nicer, I was less neurotic, I liked people more. Grades were not an issue.

• 51:32Speaker 03

  These were the smartest people that I know in Santa Cruz. People who developed their, people who as undergraduates developed their own courses and the administration allowed it. These were all people who were knowledgeable and understood how to use these, but they had lots more opportunity and experiences. So I think it's, if you're gonna do something once or twice in your life, you take it more seriously than when it's more available.

• 51:56Tim Ferriss?

  If it's ubiquitous.

• 51:57Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:59Tim Ferriss?

  I'd love to, so many questions I want to ask, but one of them, I was doing a little bit of reading and...

• 52:07Tim Ferriss?

  I want to talk about problem solving and then we'll come to the microdosing. But before we get to that, I was reading that, is it true that one of the co-founders of AA was a proponent of psychedelic use at one point after the formation of AA?

• 52:23Speaker 03

  It's a wonderful story. Bill Wilson, who had this great breakthrough in his kind of treatment room years before he had a psychedelic, but he'd actually was taking something, this is not generally known, but Don Latton has a book, L A T T I N, has a wonderful book which describes that early session. It happened to be something called the Detoura Cure. Now Detoura is something which is also known as loco weed. And it's, nobody should try it, believe me. Cows don't like it and they go crazy. We don't do much better. But it was in the 30s, this was a possible treatment for alcoholism because they didn't know what they were doing. But that's when he had his breakthrough and a divine being appears in his room and kind

• 53:08Speaker 03

  of helps him. Well, years later, he's in Southern California in the subculture which included Aldous Huxley and a philosopher named Gerald Hurd, and he takes LSD. And he says, "Whoa, this is very much like what happened to me and I think it would be a wonderful adjunct for AA in every chapter." And the directors of AA, which at that time was a massive organization, said, "We are so uninterested and so against everything you just said with the usual reasons, which is we have no idea what you're talking about, we haven't experienced it.

• 53:51Speaker 03

  If the government says something is bad," those days, you, you know, you had like an even odds chance that it might be true, you know, the odds have gone way down, but then, and they basically said, "Thanks for sharing and please go away. You founded this organization, now go away."

• 54:08Tim Ferriss?

  Don't discredit it with your rantings.

• 54:11Speaker 03

  Exactly, with your nutty pharmaceuticals.

• 54:14Tim Ferriss?

  Now, what did, what did Bill do after that point? Did he continue to experiment with LSD himself?

• 54:21Speaker 03

  I don't, I don't know and I don't think so. I think he, again, there's a saying in the psychedelic world that if once, if you get the answer, hang up the phone.

• 54:33Tim Ferriss?

  What does that mean?

• 54:34Speaker 03

  I think Alan Watts suggested is when you get the message from God, then you got it.

• 54:41Tim Ferriss?

  Don't keep knocking on the door?

• 54:42Speaker 03

  Yeah, don't keep asking. Didn't I tell you that last week? And that's a little bit, again, the people who keep taking psychedelics over and over. They're not getting the message, which is, obviously, they're designed to help you be here. You know, as one of my friends years ago said, you know, if we were designed not to be here, we wouldn't be here. So the people who keep wanting to escape from here, they haven't yet understood it. And what I understand now is they're escaping that feeling of being alone, because they're not here. I mean, we're now sitting under, what, about 85-foot eucalyptus trees, and the hillside

• 55:23Speaker 03

  that we're both looking at is a combination of green grass and bright yellow flowers. Who wants to leave?

• 55:31Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, not me.

• 55:32Speaker 03

  This is your neighborhood.

• 55:35Tim Ferriss?

  Yet another reason to be in San Francisco during our very unusual, scorching-hot winter, as it turns out. Could you comment on the problem-solving potential of, for instance, LSD or psychedelics? And is it limited to LSD? That's the substance that comes up most frequently. But who are some of the types of people who have seemingly benefited from problem-solving doses of LSD?

• 56:07Speaker 03

  Well, you can name names, I won't.

• 56:11Tim Ferriss?

  Well, okay, so I'm cheating a little bit, but yeah.

• 56:15Speaker 03

  Let me go back a step, because it isn't clear to many people, including lots of people with psychedelic experience, how you can possibly use these for hard-nosed, practical, real-world problem-solving, like circuit design.

• 56:32Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 56:33Speaker 03

  Because you take a psychedelic, and you're in, life is beautiful, and you're an immortal being, who is interested in circuit design?

• 56:40Tim Ferriss?

  How does that translate?

• 56:41Speaker 03

  But what we did, and at the time we developed this study, we weren't sure that anybody could use it either. But we decided, one of the things people do with setting the setting is focus. Focus on pathology, focus on spirituality. We thought, well, how about focusing on a hard science problem? So we created a little study. And we invited scientists because one of our team was Willis Harmon, who was a full professor of electrical engineering at Stanford at the time. And so we knew people in the valley. And the Yulit Packard was roaring along and so forth. That was those days. Varian and Lockheed and Stanford Research Institute. And we said, you may come to this study and we'll give you the most creative day of your life.

• 57:26Speaker 03

  But you have to have a problem which obsesses you. That you have been working on for a couple of months and that you failed at. And these were people who didn't like failure because they didn't have much in their lives. And we wanted them to have the emotional feeling. Not only they were interested in the problem, but they had an emotional kind of money in the game. And so they said, come in with that problem. And what we did is give them psychedelics and give them the kind of traditional way of allowing people to relax with music and eye shades for a couple of hours. And then right at the peak, we bring them out and say, you may work on your problem. And because they were obsessed with their problem, they all did.

• 58:09Speaker 03

  And what was wonderful is nobody did any personal therapeutic work. Because that's not what they came for. And out of the 48 problems that people came in with, 44 had solutions. And again, when you're doing problem solving in the real world, you can test. Which is, did it get a patent? Did it get a product? Did it get a publication? That's kind of proof that it was a real solution. And because what happens in your mind is you have incredible focus and enhanced pattern recognition. Let me do focus first because it's a wonderful little tail. This is a circuit design.

• 58:52Speaker 03

  And if you imagine a circuit, which is energies going from a capacitor to a resistor, down a wire, and it goes through a gate. It has little objects, literally. You can see them on a circuit board. Maybe not anymore because everything is microscopic, but that's what it looks like. And what this guy would do is he'd say, I'd kind of visualize one of these. And then I would imagine electricity going through it and I'd watch. And I could see where it failed. So then I would imaginary, I'd take this piece out and put another piece in, and I'd run it again. So he was running experiments of a very, kind of, very physical level, but totally in his mind.

• 59:34Speaker 03

  Another different, different, this was an architect and he had a project and it was a little, a little, a little mall with a few shops and a, maybe a coffee house and parking and so forth. And when he came up out of his three hours of, he said, going through Aztec architecture and Indian architecture and medieval architecture, he gets his big piece of paper out and it's, and he looks at it and it's totally, just it's blank. And he says, it's just blank. And he said, that isn't the way I normally work. I usually have a bunch of ideas and I sketch and so forth. And it stayed blank. And then he says, okay, but I really want, this, this customer has been really hard. I really want this to work.

• 1:00:14Speaker 03

  And he said, I saw the building. He said, I didn't see a drawing of the building. I didn't see an image of the building. I saw the building. He said, the trees were grown, there were cars in the parking lot, the fountain was flowing and there were people walking around. He said, so I just made a bunch of drawings of what I saw. And these were drawings such as the, if you kind of go underneath a, a, a little balcony, you can see the, say the four by fours. And you can see the bolts that you're using to hold them. What size are the bolts? Okay, well, he went looked.

• 1:00:46Tim Ferriss?

  So he went in his mindscape.

• 1:00:49Speaker 03

  He could do that level of detail. And then a few weeks later, he sat down to do the architectural drawings. Cause he, he basically told the client, the client liked it. And he said, I did, you know, drawing after drawing after drawing. He said, but I noticed I didn't use the drawings, any of the drawings that I'd drawn the day of my session. Cause I didn't need them. I knew the building.

• 1:01:12Tim Ferriss?

  Wow.

• 1:01:13Speaker 03

  So that's kind of two pieces of it. And there's a other wonderful, see, people had wonderful problems. Someone came up with a new theory of the photon, which he published. Cause again, he ran experiments, kind of Einsteinian thought experiments. And he kept thinking, this is so simple, it's gonna fail. And it kept not failing and not failing and not failing. He said, whoa. So, okay, so that's background.

• 1:01:36Tim Ferriss?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:01:37Speaker 03

  That's how they can be used for problem solving.

• 1:01:41Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:01:42Speaker 03

  Now, what happens in, outside of a laboratory, is that people who care about problems understand that a low enough dose, and this is say a hundred micrograms of LSD, or, and you were asking about substances, mescaline works just as well at an equivalent dose, which is about 200 milligrams. And the desire to solve the problem. That turns out to be, because people have asked me, I've got three countries now that want to replicate this study. And the thing that I have to make clear to them, which is hard for them, is you can't get, you know, 20 computer science students who are in their second year and say, solve a really hard problem. Because they don't care.

• 1:02:26Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:02:27Speaker 03

  And also, when you use scientists who have put a lot of sweat equity into it, they must know enough to find the answer. That is what their heads are full of. What they don't know is where to find it, or where to stack it, or how to, you know, unroll it. And one of our scientists, his problem, the kind of problems he used, used something called matrix algebra. And what he found, and that's, things that just take numbers is a terrible thing to do with psychedelics. Numbers just don't lie there. But what he did instead is he realized he could see the whole matrix. He could see the visual pattern. And so, what the other thing we're learning is, when you have a psychedelic,

• 1:03:11Speaker 03

  and this is true even very much at the microdose level, you have, technical term, enhanced pattern recognition. You can see stuff, working with other stuff, more easily, more obviously. It's like, if you, if you're a violinist and you listen to a symphony orchestra, you can hear the violin absolutely as if it's sticking above the rest of the orchestra. And if you're a cello player, you don't hear the violin very well, but you really can see the pattern of the cello in your, in your head. So, that's pattern recognition.

• 1:03:45Tim Ferriss?

  Have you looked specifically at the implications of using these substances for, say, learning music or languages?

• 1:03:58Speaker 03

  Well, the one, uh, one of my little microdose, um, team, as I call them, people who write me, he said, "You know, when I have a microdose and I jam with friends, I'm not a very good guitar player, and I'm a little better on a microdose, but I remember so many more lyrics." Okay, so that's just something we know. The answer of using them, well, yeah, I'll give you, I'll give you a wonderful example. This is a young man, uh, senior year, college. He wants to go to medical school. He's taking something like embryology. And the entire course is going through how a, one cell becomes a chicken.

• 1:04:42Speaker 03

  And he is, it's a hard course, and, but he has a, a sugar cube of LSD in the refrigerator. And so he said-

• 1:04:48Tim Ferriss?

  Sugar cube?

• 1:04:49Speaker 03

  A sugar cube with, I don't know, a couple hundred mics on it. This is when sugar cubes had that much, and you use sugar cubes.

• 1:04:57Speaker 03

  So he said, "I used to take a lick out of it before I go to class, and it really made class a lot easier." Okay, so that's something about focus.

• 1:05:03Tim Ferriss?

  He's like a deer with a salt lick. You just give it a swipe with the tongue and off to class.

• 1:05:07Speaker 03

  Then he was ill and missed the final. And that's sneak, hard course, hard course. So he called a professor, and the professor said, "Of course, I understand, you can come right over to my office and I'll give you a makeup final."

• 1:05:21Speaker 03

  And he looks in his refrigerator, and there's just a little bit left, so he just eats it all.

• 1:05:26Speaker 03

  So we don't know how much. He gets to the professor's house, and, or to the lab, and it's a lab, and there's a nice window, and there's some grass outside. But she says, "Okay, here's a blank piece of paper and a pencil.

• 1:05:39Speaker 03

  Draw the progression from seed to chicken and label."

• 1:05:46Speaker 03

  He said, "That's the whole course." She said, "Well, you know, makeups are supposed to be harder."

• 1:05:54Speaker 03

  So he goes and sits quietly and he knows that killing himself is just not an option, but it certainly came up. And then he closed his eyes and he saw the first slide that she had projected. This is before PowerPoints. And he, in his head, he then moved it and saw the second slide. And he realized that he could see every slide in the course. So he just started drawing madly and he had two hours and within an hour and a half, he said, "Here." And she looked at him with a kind of, "I knew I really screwed you with this kind of exam."

• 1:06:36Speaker 03

  And she goes through and he just watches her getting it, because he knows everything's right. And she says, "I guess I'll have to give you an A." And then he said, and then when he looked out at the plants, they were just all waving at him.

• 1:06:53Tim Ferriss?

  And he said, "I can see your pores breathing at me," and then walked off into the sunset.

• 1:06:57Speaker 03

  So there are some interesting studies in academia, and I have another one which is just fun because it's, again, pattern recognition. So someone taking an economics course, he was probably a B student, but he hadn't studied for the final and he had gotten stoned. So he was still kind of stoned when he came into the final and he thought, "I don't just know anything."

• 1:07:19Tim Ferriss?

  Stoned marijuana?

• 1:07:20Speaker 03

  Probably LSD.

• 1:07:21Tim Ferriss?

  Okay, got it.

• 1:07:22Speaker 03

  This was LSD, sorry. He'd been, he'd been high and he was still coming down. So he was in that, that kind of blissful space of, "I love everyone, but oh, I have an economics final," and it was all multiple choice. And so he looked at it and answers looked brighter, nicer, and so he just tut tut tut tut tut tut tut tut tut tut tut. Got the highest score in the class. Now, don't recommend this as a method. But there's a lot we have to discover about how to use these substances.

• 1:07:51Tim Ferriss?

  Have you explored at all the...

• 1:07:56Tim Ferriss?

  World of lucid dreaming, or techniques related to lucid dreaming. There was a period of time where I was very fascinated and an avid practitioner. I'd wake up in the middle of the night, I would do exercises and kept journals and so on to get to the point where I could induce lucidity, say, three or four times per night. And I found that I feel like that experience has helped me to navigate the psychedelic experience in a lot of ways, or at least to mitigate some of the fear factor. Have you, do you have any stories of people who've combined those two in any interesting ways?

• 1:08:33Speaker 03

  Well, in an uninteresting way.

• 1:08:35Tim Ferriss?

  Or uninteresting.

• 1:08:37Speaker 03

  From my dissertation, what comes back is, and I loved it, is people dream more in color after psychedelics. People don't, we all kind of would imagine everyone dreams in color, but it's not true at all. Because suddenly, when you dream in color, whoa, it's very different. So that's just, just interesting. David Brown, at the moment, is finishing a book on lucid dreaming and the use of all kinds of substances, herbs of all sorts, and some psychedelics, I'm sure, that influence lucid dreaming.

• 1:09:08Tim Ferriss?

  Where's David Brown?

• 1:09:09Speaker 03

  He's in Santa Cruz.

• 1:09:10Tim Ferriss?

  Oh, he is?

• 1:09:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:09:11Tim Ferriss?

  Makes perfect sense.

• 1:09:11Speaker 03

  And he's a lovely guy. But what we're, what we, the problem, and it's a problem with a lot of your questions, is imagine neuroscience that hadn't done anything for the past 40 years. And you'd say, "Well, how come you don't know where parts of the brain are? Because we haven't been allowed to look."

• 1:09:32Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:33Speaker 03

  So we're just, we're just starting off, I mean, if you said to me, "Give me 15 research projects," I'll give you just one, because it's so easy.

• 1:09:46Speaker 03

  I know two cases. One is the most famous mycologist in the world, Paul Stamets. And the other is someone I know in San Francisco, who both cured themselves of severe stuttering in one session. Now, this was both, not surprisingly for Paul Stamets, this was psilocybin mushrooms. But he was in high school. And the other was a man in his, I think, late twenties. But they both realized, while on the psychedelic, that they didn't have to stutter. There's nothing about insider psychodynamics or anything else. It's just they didn't want to stutter anymore.

• 1:10:28Speaker 03

  And Paul tells this wonderful story where, imagine, not worst moment of your life, but you stutter a lot in high school. And your hormones are in full flower. Okay? It's terrible. Sounds terrible. So, the next day, he's sitting, and a girl goes by, a girl, a real live girl, and she says hello. And he says, hello. And she goes by. And he just practically falls down. He said, "I just said hello." To one of them. Without stuttering. So, and if you listen to him, people who've worked on stuttering, you can, if you know, if you know, my wife, Minnie, was a speech therapist, so a little trained.

• 1:11:12Speaker 03

  You can tell when someone has learned to overcome stuttering. Paul doesn't sound like that at all. So that's a piece of research, which is a snap to do. No risks, no pathology. You don't have to be, I mean, we now do studies with people who are stage four cancer. They're dying. It's a little scary working with them, because you don't want anything in the psychedelic session to upset them. But hey. So we're at the place where, as the government kind of...

• 1:11:44Speaker 03

  realizes that keeping people healthy is better than laws that have nothing to do with science. And it's happening. And fortunately, there are a lot of other countries where good research is also being done. So, lot to be done.

• 1:11:58Tim Ferriss?

  And I want to talk about what steps might be taken, because I feel like there are many people. In fact, I was just at a dinner last night with a very influential venture capitalist who feels very strongly that the positive applications, therapeutic applications of these substances should be fostered and funded and so on. And I think there are actually a lot of people in this neck of the woods who feel that way, and elsewhere. But before we get there, is the choice of, say, LSD or mescaline or psilocybin a personal choice from a therapeutic standpoint? Or of those three, are some of them better for certain things as opposed to others?

• 1:12:42Speaker 03

  Probably some are better for certain things. But of the three you mentioned, they're fairly interchangeable. And the difference between LSD and psilocybin, as we mentioned, is simply the length of time.

• 1:12:55Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:12:56Speaker 03

  The reason, for instance, DMT, which takes 15 minutes, is not really useful. Most of your time is spent rocketing up into space and falling back down. So that's just a time question. Ibogaine, as we've talked about, seems to be particularly good for addictive substances. And I met a wonderful young woman in England who said, after I took Ibogaine, she went to Africa and actually worked with a beach week. She said, "I no longer took cocaine on the weekends. I stopped being an alcoholic. I gave up smoking. And I don't eat junk food."

• 1:13:32Tim Ferriss?

  That's a lot.

• 1:13:35Speaker 03

  And then a year or two later, she took some ayahuasca and worked on some sexual trauma. So it didn't clear up everything, but these were very different.

• 1:13:43Tim Ferriss?

  That's a hell of a lot to get with one trip.

• 1:13:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the, so the, it's the wonderful kind of question. Which medication for which situation? And, and in terms of, well, for instance, MDMA, which is, it's not exactly a psychedelic because you don't leave your identity behind. But it is the single best way to overcome intractable post-traumatic stress disorder. Period. There's no doubt in any researcher's mind, or anyone who's used it. And, you know, you can go to YouTube and people are, are telling you about their story. We have 700,000 veterans, I'm gonna rant just for a moment.

• 1:14:28Tim Ferriss?

  Please.

• 1:14:29Speaker 03

  Who have come back with some form of post-traumatic stress disorder. And it's not necessarily from being in combat in the usual sense of people shot at me and I was really afraid. It's people who've done unspeakable things that's against the hardest wiring in the human body. You're in your tank or your, your vehicle, and there are children playing in the road. And your sergeant says, "Drive on, it might be a trap." And you kill them. And you come back and you've really done a terrible thing. And post-traumatic stress disorder is about all that.

• 1:15:12Speaker 03

  The use of MDMA in a therapeutic environment, not on the street, can turn that around so that people who, and when you start these kind of things, you always get the worst people to work with, the hardest ones, these are called, you know, patients who've had, well, they had to have had like 20 years of not being helped.

• 1:15:31Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:15:31Speaker 03

  And they had two or three sessions, plus therapy sessions. And 80% of them dropped so many points on the post-traumatic stress disorder scale that they no longer could have possibly gotten into the study. Which also means they went back to work, they did not want to strangle their wives in the middle of the night in a nightmare. Talking very serious things. And...

• 1:15:57Speaker 03

  The government is ever so slowly acknowledging that this might be a good idea. And I think the argument that's going to carry it has nothing to do with doing the right thing. But when I say to someone, "Do you want to pay for this 22-year-old vet from Arkansas for the next 40 years at the VA for therapy and medications? And the chances of his committing suicide is very high? Or would you like to cure him in a couple of weeks? Just think of the money. Don't think of being a human being. Don't think of being nice."

• 1:16:34Tim Ferriss?

  Just the economic argument.

• 1:16:35Speaker 03

  So that's part of it.

• 1:16:38Tim Ferriss?

  With the MDMA specifically, I've been very fascinated by MDMA, but also perhaps unduly worried about MDMA after. And this is a vague recollection, so I feel like this could be the equivalent of some type of propaganda like Reefer Madness movies back in the day.

• 1:16:55Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:16:56Tim Ferriss?

  So I, there are people in my family who have histories of battling depression, for instance, and I'm very concerned about damaging serotonin receptors or the serotonergic system in general. And at one point, when MDMA had become very, very popular and was thought to have no side effects whatsoever, or at least that was the common sort of street lore, seeing slides of damaged serotonin receptors terrified me enough that it's not a substance I've even considered. What are the, what are the risks or misuses of MDMA?

• 1:17:41Speaker 03

  Well, the misuse is the usual, which is too much too often.

• 1:17:45Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:17:45Speaker 03

  But...

• 1:17:47Tim Ferriss?

  For the therapeutic sessions, just out of curiosity, what is the range and dosing for them?

• 1:17:51Speaker 03

  It depends. You know, I'm not, I'm, that's not kind of my area, but it's, it's well within the safe range.

• 1:18:00Speaker 03

  I think 170 and 125 milligrams sounds about right, but that might be dead wrong.

• 1:18:07Tim Ferriss?

  Speak to your medical practitioner.

• 1:18:09Speaker 03

  Speak to your dealer or your medical practitioner, in all truth.

• 1:18:14Speaker 03

  But one of the things that we know is that, and you were asking about different substances, depression and MDMA, not probably the best mix. Curiously, what I'm finding is micro doses of LSD or mushrooms may be very helpful for depression because they make you feel enough better that you do something about what's wrong with your life.

• 1:18:40Speaker 03

  And depression is not necessarily, we've made it an illness. It may be the body's way of saying, "You better deal with something because it's making you really sad." And I was just looking at a book on Lincoln, which talks about his depression. And in those days, when you were depressed, people said, "He's really depressed." Melancholy. And it was assumed that you'd have to deal with it. So I'm really re-looking at depression. But if we look at substances, ketamine, this is again a very odd substance because it's used in veterinary medicine as an anesthesia. It's used in humans as an anesthesia, but at another level, it's psychedelic.

• 1:19:22Speaker 03

  At another level, it apparently overcomes depression in a totally different way than antidepressants. Antidepressants, you take it and then take, take, take, take, take, take, take. And four to six weeks later, maybe it'll be the right one. And if it isn't, you take another one, take, take, take, take, take, four to six weeks. Ketamine, you take it and about 15 minutes later, you're not depressed.

• 1:19:48Speaker 03

  What's happened is it blew the whole theory of depression wide open. Pharmaceutical companies are all scrambling to come up with something that has the same effect, but isn't ketamine. Right. Because ketamine shouldn't be taken very often. Again, it's not one of those, you can not only become addicted, but you can get your brains burned out with ketamine. And I've unfortunately met one very quiet, dull, concerned, serious person, who, his friends told me, had been a sparkling, delightful, charming person, but now used ketamine endlessly. So you can, you know, again, we can misuse anything.

• 1:20:28Speaker 03

  MDMA is probably fine, as far as we know, in moderation. And again, its use is to, its best use is therapeutic.

• 1:20:43Speaker 03

  is to get you to let go of trauma. It's milder use, which is called raves. You know, why, why do people when you go to raves?

• 1:20:53Tim Ferriss?

  Ah, I see.

• 1:20:54Speaker 03

  Why are people taking uh, ecstasy?

• 1:20:56Tim Ferriss?

  Yeah, ecstasy.

• 1:20:57Speaker 03

  They're taking it because they like everybody. Meaning they aren't caught up in negative emotions. And imagine, again, we're back in high school. Imagine you went to a group and it was dancing and music and and you liked everyone and everyone liked you. And it wasn't sexual. Um, there's a particular phenomena at a rave called a puppy pile. Which is where just kids are all piled on top of each other giggling and having a good time. And that's an amazing event if you think of high school.

• 1:21:32Tim Ferriss?

  Antithetical to

• 1:21:33Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:21:33Tim Ferriss?

  All of the tribal behavior.

• 1:21:35Speaker 03

  That's right. So, again, we're, um, it has its uses and again, overuse of anything. You know, remember, why do people like alcohol? Because a little of it really lowers inhibitions and makes you think you're charming. Okay? And that's, right? And when you have everyone having just a little and everyone thinking they're charming, it's a kind of pleasant thing. And then if you keep drinking, the effects shift. Again, with LSD, you take too much and you just have no idea what happened. Cause you're, the part of your identity that stores memory is kind of offline and so forth. So, all of these, again, it's like, you know, again, it's hard to think of anything.

• 1:22:19Speaker 03

  You know, you take too many baked beans, you're just not social.

• 1:22:23Tim Ferriss?

  Speak from experience, this is true.

• 1:22:26Speaker 03

  So, there's a kind of, um, the government propaganda is unfortunately, well, it's kind of dumb, it's kind of simple minded. It is at the Reefer Madness level. And it's going away. And the great breakthrough is it's really hard now to get someone to stand up and say, I know something and marijuana is bad for you. You can still get people to stand up and say marijuana is bad for you. But if you say, do you, do you have any evidence? And they say, well, it is.

• 1:23:01Tim Ferriss?

  I say, therefore it is.

• 1:23:02Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:23:03Tim Ferriss?

  What would you like to see happen in the next, say, five years? I mean, what are the organizations that are doing good work? The people that, the people that folks listening to this can look into, perhaps, learning more about or supporting? What is, what is the most, sort of the Occam's razor approach to getting these substances more widely studied and researched for therapeutic uses?

• 1:23:31Speaker 03

  Well, strategically, you've just given it, which is how do we make them available for therapeutic uses? Meaning, can we make them available to the medical community? Because they're the very, very conservative community. And these are substances which go inside your body, therefore physicians are supposed to be the people who know that stuff.

• 1:23:53Speaker 03

  And that's actually happening with MMDA. And the MAPS organization, M A P S, Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, is funding almost all of that research across the country. And they're doing a really good job of making it available so that someone with post-traumatic stress disorder could, could go to a place where they know what they're doing. If you think about it, radioactive isotope is not illegal, but you don't just carry them around on the street and say, "Would you like one?" It's, you have to know what you're doing, you have to know how to use the equipment, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. So what we're, we're moving towards is trained kind of centers. Like you go to a trauma center, or a burn center, or a cancer center, you should be

• 1:24:38Speaker 03

  able to go to, say, a post-traumatic stress disorder center for MMDA. For psilocybin, another group called the Hefner Foundation is working to make it, again, medically legal for people who are dying.

• 1:24:56Speaker 03

  And one of the nice things is, one is, when people are dying and you give them the understanding that a mystical experience gives them, they are still clear they're dying.

• 1:25:07Speaker 03

  But they're not so upset about it. And they say, "You know, I only have six months." Rather than be anxious and miserable and frightened and have everyone around me feeling rotten, I'm gonna plant flowers with my grandchild. And I'm thinking of someone who was in a study, and we see her later planting flowers with her grandchild. So that group is moving towards, again, medical acceptance. Now, I think there's another part of the whole medical game, which is called off-label. Which is, once the medical profession is allowed to give something, for whatever reason has been thoroughly researched,

• 1:25:49Speaker 03

  it can perhaps go slightly to the right or left and see. And the third area is spiritual experience. And when I'm kind of on right-wing radio, I say, "I'm for freedom, and I think there should be nothing that restricts a human being from being closer to God." And they go, "Uh-huh, uh-huh." And I say, "And I think there should be nothing that prevents a human being from discovering the majesty and beauty of this world through science." "And I think there should be nothing that interrupts your ability or prevents you from discovering who you are." And then I point out

• 1:26:33Speaker 03

  that that's the three major areas where psychedelics are most useful. And that is my deep belief, which is, no civilization is going to really continue to progress if it prevents people from spirituality, science, and self-exploration. So it's a kind of straightforward for me. And we're moving... The culture's actually moving very fast. I mean, the number of cheerful articles in places you wouldn't expect it are... I used to say I can't keep up with the research. Now I can't even keep up with the popular articles. You know, Vice and Huffington Post and New York Times.

• 1:27:18Speaker 03

  New Yorker recently. The New Yorker did this beautiful article with Michael Pollan. Again, Michael Pollan, who is Mr. Impeccable.

• 1:27:26Speaker 03

  Why is he looking at psychedelics? Because he's blown away how much they help people. So we're rediscovering in a careful and sophisticated way and understanding the nature of cultural institutions what the 60s kind of blundered into and fell all over. I have a daughter who's an ethnobotanist, and as a child, she had a verb. And the verb was to flump. Flump meant you jumped into the center of something and you probably fell down. You flumped. But you got into the center of something, and that was pretty much the way the 60s worked. We all flumped.

• 1:28:09Speaker 03

  And the institutions got terrified. We're now... Two things have changed. One is it's a very different generation of very sophisticated people. The other is all the people running the institutions, a huge percentage of them have had psychedelic experiences. And therefore, aren't afraid. They're saying, "Well, let's do good science, let's do good education." But we're not terrified that Tim Leary's gonna get us. Or that we're all gonna paint our buses psychedelic and become Kankisys.

• 1:28:46Tim Ferriss?

  If you could have 100 people in the United States have psychedelic experiences who have not, in terms of just turning the tide from a political and policy standpoint, who would those people be?

• 1:29:00Speaker 03

  Well, the Senate would be a good start. Because it is peculiar when you actually, as I do, work with lots of different groups. And you say, "What's the percentage of people in this occupation who've had psychedelics?" And it goes down as you go up the socioeconomic world into finance. But when you hit legislators, they're the people with the least experience. And so, I would not want them all to... I would like them all to have enough experience so they would not legislate out of ignorance and fear. They might legislate in a very different way than I would like, but that's what they're paid to do.

• 1:29:40Tim Ferriss?

  Right. But at least legislate from a standpoint of... Awareness and ideally first time experience.

• 1:29:48Speaker 03

  Exactly, it's kind of that when somebody who I usually don't like what he says, but McCain really did have military experience. And when he says something about the military, it's not out of reading comic books.

• 1:30:02Tim Ferriss?

  Right.

• 1:30:04Speaker 03

  So, the other probably hundred people who I really want are the people who are the shakers and movers in high tech. And most of them, I've heard from some people, like you, have already made that transition. And the one thing that's, if you'd like to see what a interesting psychedelic culture might look like, is go to Burning Man.

• 1:30:30Tim Ferriss?

  Certainly is a unique experience.

• 1:30:32Speaker 03

  Where you see, not only people free emotionally and sometimes sexually, but certainly physically and dancing and enjoying their body. You also see some of the most fascinating creative productions and buildings and constructions. And you just look around and you say psychedelics may not be available legally, but they sure are being used well in certain areas.

• 1:31:01Tim Ferriss?

  So it sounds like the next step, I need to get somehow the legislators out there. We need to get a copy of the Psychedelic Explorer's Guide to all members of the senate. Where can people learn more about you, find you online?

• 1:31:16Speaker 03

  I think I have both jimfatteman and jamesfatteman.com, which go to the same place. And that has a bunch of talks, of some lectures. There's one wonderful one where I did an evening with a Zen Roshi on psychedelics and Buddhism. That's, he's just so gorgeous. And before he was a Buddhist monk, and he's been one for nineteen years, he was a follower of the dead. So he really comes from deep experience. That's there. And actually, the book, you know, the book, The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide, is...

• 1:31:57Speaker 03

  Most everything that I wanted to ever get down in writing. And I was sure when I was putting it together that I would self-publish. And then this wonderful publisher, Inner Traditions, said, "Oh, that looks pretty good." And Inner Traditions puts out a lot of the now useful psychedelic books. So if you're interested in ibogaine, or ayahuasca, or there's a cactus called San Pedro, which has mescalina, just as the peyote cactuses, plus just a lot of general books. They're kind of the publisher, the go-to publisher at this point. Though, Synneptics Press in Santa Fe, it's coming.

• 1:32:40Speaker 03

  Again, what people are finding is, you know, like that famous baseball field, if you write it, they will read.

• 1:32:48Tim Ferriss?

  Well, I'm very excited for the future of research and exploration related to many of these substances. I think that they're very useful tools, and like you said, there's the potential for misuse of these tools. But in the right hands, with the right direction, with the right guidance and supervision, I really feel like they can be transformative for so many people.

• 1:33:10Speaker 03

  The word "tool" is really the case. I was, I've only been asked once, "Would you just talk about psychedelics as tools?" And so I went through about eight areas of science where they would be useful. Carey Mullis, who won the Nobel Prize, and he said psychedelics gave him, not the great breakthrough idea, that he got when he was driving up in Northern California with his girlfriend. But he said, and he's the one who did recombinant DNA, and what he said was, "By that time, I knew how to go inside a molecule and look around." Looks like a good tool. Okay, so if I want to understand visual perception, and here I have a substance which

• 1:33:53Speaker 03

  shifts the visual world, and I actually understand some of what people are experiencing, and I could, I have a certain amount of psychological bullshit jargon that I can throw at that. So we do know a little. But imagine being able to, again, in the laboratory. And Roland Griffiths talks about, this is professor at John Hopkins, who's done probably the most and best studies.

• 1:34:16Tim Ferriss?

  How do you spell his last name?

• 1:34:19Speaker 03

  Griffiths.

• 1:34:20Tim Ferriss?

  Griffiths, okay.

• 1:34:21Speaker 03

  With a T H S at the end. And his research, some of his research, has been with that we can pretty much guarantee that we can establish a mystical experience in someone. He said, "From a psychology of religion or from being a religious person." That's pretty exciting.

• 1:34:42Tim Ferriss?

  That's very exciting. I think that it's...

• 1:34:44Speaker 03

  So they're tools.

• 1:34:45Tim Ferriss?

  If you look at the origin stories of most of our dominant religions in the world today, they contain prophetic or mystical experiences that have now been criminalized in the United States.

• 1:35:01Speaker 03

  Well, they also have used psychedelics a lot more than some religions will cop to. If you just Google "secret drugs of Buddhism," and what you'll find is one major school of Buddhism, for its rituals for a couple of hundred years, clearly used a psychedelic as the core of the ritual. Greek religion, we know about from the Eleusinian mysteries, psychedelic. Though my Muslim friends tend to worry when I say this, I feel like Click and Clack, the Tappet Brothers, talking about NPR. There is a lot of traditions in a number of Sufi orders in a number of countries of using these materials. Hinduism is based on soma.

• 1:35:43Speaker 03

  And in a sense, it makes total sense, because every culture tends to know about the plants in its vicinity. And if some of those plants can be fermented and, say, make beer, I can't think of a culture that didn't have fermentable plants that didn't ferment them. Right? And similarly, psychedelic mushrooms, for instance, grow all over England. They're called fairy caps. There's a hundred species of psilocybin mushrooms. They're around. And then the question that gets profound is, why is it that there are these substances, which, when given to human beings, have this extraordinary effect of reconnecting them

• 1:36:28Speaker 03

  to the natural world? Now, these substances probably are in plants that are older than human beings. Okay? This is the kind of thing where people, late in the night, with a small amount of a psychedelic, will talk about, which is, "Mmm." And then, when you go into South America and you say to an ayahuasca, someone who uses ayahuasca...

• 1:36:54Speaker 03

  Why are you using ayahuasca? And you say, "Well, the plants told me how to use this. And this plant also tells me how to use other plants." It's called a teacher plant. Because most of the plants can't talk to us, but these plants can. So you get into some much more fun areas than we've covered so far.

• 1:37:16Tim Ferriss?

  Well, this could be part one. I feel like we could talk about this for hours and hours, and I suspect we might.

• 1:37:21Speaker 03

  We might.

• 1:37:22Tim Ferriss?

  But for now, I will encourage everyone to check out your website, check out the book, The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide. I'll link to everything in the show notes. And very fascinating questions and topics to explore, so I hope to do much more of it. And thank you so much for taking the time.

• 1:37:41Speaker 03

  Thank you for having me, Tim.

• 1:37:43Tim Ferriss?

  Thank you for supporting the sponsors of this show. I've used them, I like them, and I think you will too. 99designs.com/tim. It's the world's largest marketplace of graphic designers. You can see the projects that I've put up, the competitions that I've spearheaded, including the book cover of The Four Hour Body. And you can also get a $99 upgrade for free. So check it out at 99designs.com/tim. Of course, you can subscribe to this show on iTunes. You can also find every other episode in the show notes, links from this episode, at fourhourblog.com. That's F-O-U-R-H-O-U-R-B-L-O-G dot com, and just click on Podcast. There's all sorts of other cool stuff, including my interactions with people like Warren Buffett,

• 1:38:28Tim Ferriss?

  Mike Schnote of Linkin Park. The list goes on and on and on. And I would love your feedback. Let me know what you thought of this show, who you'd like to hear on the show next, and any other thoughts, really. You can find me at Twitter at @Tferris. That's twitter.com/TFERRISS. And on Facebook at facebook.com/TimFerriss, with two Rs and two S's. Until next time, thank you for listening.