You're listening to Alive Again, a production of Psychopia Pictures and iHeart Podcasts. So today I'm Alive Again. I'm thrilled to welcome a visionary and true pioneer in the world of psychedelic research. Rick Doblin is the founder and executive director of MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a nonprofit that has been at the forefront of exploring the therapeutic potential of psychedelics for over thirty five years. His groundbreaking work has helped transform how he approached healing, trauma, recovery, and end of life care, particularly through the use of psychedelic compounds. Rick's dedication to this field has given countless individuals and their families hope, understanding, and peace in the face of immense challenges. Today, we'll explore the intersection of his work with the themes of this podcast, namely transformation and adaptation. Rick has intensively discussed the therapeutic potential of psychedelics for terminal patients. He emphasizes that substances like LSD and psilocybin, when combined with psychotherapy, can alleviate end of life anxiety and depression. For instance, a twenty fourteen study funded by MAPS investigated LSD assisted psychotherapy in twelve terminally ill patients, revealing significant reductions in anxiety. Through MAPS, Rick continues to advocate for the integration of psychedelic assisted therapies into mainstream medicine, aiming to provide compassionate care for those facing.

You're listening to Alive Again, a production of Psychopia Pictures and iHeart Podcasts. So today I'm Alive Again. I'm thrilled to welcome a visionary and true pioneer in the world of psychedelic research. Rick Doblin is the founder and executive director of MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a nonprofit that has been at the forefront of exploring the therapeutic potential of psychedelics for over thirty five years. His groundbreaking work has helped transform how he approached healing, trauma, recovery, and end of life care, particularly through the use of psychedelic compounds. Rick's dedication to this field has given countless individuals and their families hope, understanding, and peace in the face of immense challenges. Today, we'll explore the intersection of his work with the themes of this podcast, namely transformation and adaptation. Rick has intensively discussed the therapeutic potential of psychedelics for terminal patients. He emphasizes that substances like LSD and psilocybin, when combined with psychotherapy, can alleviate end of life anxiety and depression. For instance, a twenty fourteen study funded by MAPS investigated LSD assisted psychotherapy in twelve terminally ill patients, revealing significant reductions in anxiety. Through MAPS, Rick continues to advocate for the integration of psychedelic assisted therapies into mainstream medicine, aiming to provide compassionate care for those facing.

End of life.

End of life.

Also, I would like to reveal that I have a personal connection to Rick. We first met in the mid nineteen nineties in Charlotte, North Carolina, where we were both living at the time, and my partner, Patrese Burnside, was a nanny to Rick's kids. Tragically, Patrice passed away in nineteen ninety seven in a terrible car accident. You may have heard me talk about my experience of grief after Patrice died on other episodes. Well, Rick also shared that grief and you will hear us mention Patrice a few times during this interview, so I wanted to provide some context. Let's go to the conversation now. It's just amazing. I followed your career over the years, and you've dedicated your life really to exploring therapeutic potential for psychedelics, and maybe we could just start with you telling us a little bit about how you first became aware of this and interested in it.

Also, I would like to reveal that I have a personal connection to Rick. We first met in the mid nineteen nineties in Charlotte, North Carolina, where we were both living at the time, and my partner, Patrese Burnside, was a nanny to Rick's kids. Tragically, Patrice passed away in nineteen ninety seven in a terrible car accident. You may have heard me talk about my experience of grief after Patrice died on other episodes. Well, Rick also shared that grief and you will hear us mention Patrice a few times during this interview, so I wanted to provide some context. Let's go to the conversation now. It's just amazing. I followed your career over the years, and you've dedicated your life really to exploring therapeutic potential for psychedelics, and maybe we could just start with you telling us a little bit about how you first became aware of this and interested in it.

Well, I first became aware of psychedelics through massive misinformation and propaganda in school. Yeah, so during the sixties. I started college in nineteen seventy one. So in high school, what I was taught was that if you take LSD five or six times, you're certifiably insane. That's all it took. I was also taught that if you take LSD, maybe even just once or several times, it really hurts your chromosomes and you're going to have deformed children way or another. It's going to be really bad. And this whole negativity was something that I'm oldest of four kids. I didn't have any older siblings to tell me that maybe that's not true. I didn't smoke marijuana in high school. Only one time, actually, my senior year. I remember my friend and I rolled it up in a newspaper. We didn't have any rolling papers, so we rolled it up the newspaper and I thought, ma'am, this is harsh. But what really happened was my senior year of high school, I was learning about the other I was very you know, indirectly traumatized by the Cuban missile crisis and the fact that the US and Russia could blow up the whole world after everything, been traumatized by stories of the Holocaust, and then starting to understand a little bit more about Vietnam my own country was doing. So in my Russian class, a friend of mine gave me a book. I was super shy, could barely talk, could hardly talk to a girl at all other than my mother and sisters. And one of my friends had a girlfriend, so I could talk to her a little bit. But I was super shy. So I was into reading books. My father my grandparents had a bookstore. My dad grew up in a bookstore. They were so poor. He learned how to read a book without breaking the spine so they could sell it again after he read it. So this friend of mine in the Russian class gave me this book to read, and I loved it. It was fantastic. I thought it just was so inspiring and engaging and frightening and all these different things. And I handed it back to him and he said, do you realize that the author wrote some of this book while he was under the influence of LSD. I said, that's not possible. You know, nothing good comes from LSD. It's hallucination. That's a delusion. It makes you crazy, it's all of this. And my friend said, no, no, check it out. Turn out he was right. It was Ken Kesey's One Floor of the Cuckoo's Nest.

Well, I first became aware of psychedelics through massive misinformation and propaganda in school. Yeah, so during the sixties. I started college in nineteen seventy one. So in high school, what I was taught was that if you take LSD five or six times, you're certifiably insane. That's all it took. I was also taught that if you take LSD, maybe even just once or several times, it really hurts your chromosomes and you're going to have deformed children way or another. It's going to be really bad. And this whole negativity was something that I'm oldest of four kids. I didn't have any older siblings to tell me that maybe that's not true. I didn't smoke marijuana in high school. Only one time, actually, my senior year. I remember my friend and I rolled it up in a newspaper. We didn't have any rolling papers, so we rolled it up the newspaper and I thought, ma'am, this is harsh. But what really happened was my senior year of high school, I was learning about the other I was very you know, indirectly traumatized by the Cuban missile crisis and the fact that the US and Russia could blow up the whole world after everything, been traumatized by stories of the Holocaust, and then starting to understand a little bit more about Vietnam my own country was doing. So in my Russian class, a friend of mine gave me a book. I was super shy, could barely talk, could hardly talk to a girl at all other than my mother and sisters. And one of my friends had a girlfriend, so I could talk to her a little bit. But I was super shy. So I was into reading books. My father my grandparents had a bookstore. My dad grew up in a bookstore. They were so poor. He learned how to read a book without breaking the spine so they could sell it again after he read it. So this friend of mine in the Russian class gave me this book to read, and I loved it. It was fantastic. I thought it just was so inspiring and engaging and frightening and all these different things. And I handed it back to him and he said, do you realize that the author wrote some of this book while he was under the influence of LSD. I said, that's not possible. You know, nothing good comes from LSD. It's hallucination. That's a delusion. It makes you crazy, it's all of this. And my friend said, no, no, check it out. Turn out he was right. It was Ken Kesey's One Floor of the Cuckoo's Nest.

Oh, that's such a great book.

Oh, that's such a great book.

What's great is yesterday my son was here for a couple of days. He's thirty years old now, yeah, and he was he was taking home that book.

What's great is yesterday my son was here for a couple of days. He's thirty years old now, yeah, and he was he was taking home that book.

Is that Eden Eden? Yeah, I remember eating as a baby.

Is that Eden Eden? Yeah, I remember eating as a baby.

Oh yes, yes, yeah, well for Teresa was helping take care of him. Yeah. Now he's thirty and just the other day he took home One Floor Over the Cuckoo's Nest to read, which he's never read. But that was the break in the propaganda wall for me.

Oh yes, yes, yeah, well for Teresa was helping take care of him. Yeah. Now he's thirty and just the other day he took home One Floor Over the Cuckoo's Nest to read, which he's never read. But that was the break in the propaganda wall for me.

Right that And it's a fantastic film. But the book itself from the it's a different pov in the book. Yeah, so well written, it's so beautiful. So moving out from that, and I should let you know that in high school we had a we made business cards that said, hi, my name is and I'm legally insane.

Right that And it's a fantastic film. But the book itself from the it's a different pov in the book. Yeah, so well written, it's so beautiful. So moving out from that, and I should let you know that in high school we had a we made business cards that said, hi, my name is and I'm legally insane.

Funny.

Funny.

Yeah, back in the day, because we had we had we had dabbled.

Yeah, back in the day, because we had we had we had dabbled.

It's amazing how you were how well now we understand and how the big lie works.

It's amazing how you were how well now we understand and how the big lie works.

Yeah, you're going to talk about that a little bit more.

Yeah, you're going to talk about that a little bit more.

That just well just how propaganda works, A big lie works, and you know, that's that's the dilemma that we face today, even more now what we see what's going on with social media and with Mark Zickerberg trying to be like elon mosk and x and Facebook. Yes, it's just really the amount of misinformation. It's like people will often believe what they want to believe, and you give them stuff that makes it look as if it's true. So it's a it's a terrible problem. You have to really be wanting to understand the truth to wade through all sorts of propaganda.

That just well just how propaganda works, A big lie works, and you know, that's that's the dilemma that we face today, even more now what we see what's going on with social media and with Mark Zickerberg trying to be like elon mosk and x and Facebook. Yes, it's just really the amount of misinformation. It's like people will often believe what they want to believe, and you give them stuff that makes it look as if it's true. So it's a it's a terrible problem. You have to really be wanting to understand the truth to wade through all sorts of propaganda.

So your ability to see and you said, you know the stories of the Holocaust when you were young, and your ability to see that this sort of trauma. Did that combine with your understanding of psychedelics to lead you to the therapeutic development of.

So your ability to see and you said, you know the stories of the Holocaust when you were young, and your ability to see that this sort of trauma. Did that combine with your understanding of psychedelics to lead you to the therapeutic development of.

That, Yeah, yeah, completely. Yeah, it was the sense of desperation and despair about humanity and how cruel we can be and how this repression makes things worse and so it was this on the one hand, this despair about humanity. On the other hand, was I would say privilege was this sense of support. I had a very loving family. I mean, it's so said, so much of the work we do is about people that had childhood trauma, childhood abuse, you know. But I had a very loving family, very supportive, and my father was a grew up as an only child. His father, my grandfather, left from Poland in nineteen twenty fleeing anti Semitism, flinging for his life, came to the US with nothing. And you know, my father, by the time he was like four or five years old, he knew that he had to be a doctor. That was the way out of poverty, you know, for a lot of Jewish families. He was an only child, he had to be a doctor. He was glad to be doctor. But he decided that he would raise his kids in a different way and support us to do whatever we wanted to do. And so I felt that privilege that support the horror at the world. And then once I started learning about the sort of this interconnectedness that I was learning about it both from the inner world in a sense, you could say, from learning about psychedelics. But also this was the time when the American I was setting people to the moon and the astronauts were coming back and looking at the Earth from space and the Whole Earth Catalog, and how edgar Mitchell talked about how that changed his consciousness and others. So it was more this sort of political implications of us to realize that we're all in it together. There's a great, really interesting book I just read over the holidays called Orbital Yeah, you know, and it's about people in the International Space Station and what is like going around and the kind of understandings have all in together. You don't see the borders, you don't see religions. You realize we're all all birth from one thing. So I thought that that would have political implications. You know, once you feel that we're all interconnected, how can you just so easily dehumanize other people or hate for being different religions. So it was all of that combination. And not only that, but I really I woke up to psychedelics nineteen seventy one, nineteen seventy two after the backlash, and I was also a protester. I was a Vietnam War draft resistor. I didn't register for the draft and thought I would end up going to jail. And so I and my parents were like, well, you know, that's okay, you know, but you're gonna have a felony conviction like President Troup. Now you're gonna have a felony conviction, and you're not going to be able to get any normal job because you're going to be a felon. I'm like, well, that's the price I have to pay. So then when I started understanding about psychedelics and both there are political implications, there are spiritual implications, their therapeutic implications, and that they were so suppressed, and I had this support for my parents to do whatever I thought I could do to make it a better world. I focused on the psychedelics and I thought, okay, I could be an underground psychedelic therapist. You don't need a license for that. So that was fifty three years ago, nineteen seventy two, and that's where I formed my identity and my mission, and I was just I still think, I am so so lucky and fortunate that I had this idea when I was eighteen, that fifty three years later still makes sense.

That, Yeah, yeah, completely. Yeah, it was the sense of desperation and despair about humanity and how cruel we can be and how this repression makes things worse and so it was this on the one hand, this despair about humanity. On the other hand, was I would say privilege was this sense of support. I had a very loving family. I mean, it's so said, so much of the work we do is about people that had childhood trauma, childhood abuse, you know. But I had a very loving family, very supportive, and my father was a grew up as an only child. His father, my grandfather, left from Poland in nineteen twenty fleeing anti Semitism, flinging for his life, came to the US with nothing. And you know, my father, by the time he was like four or five years old, he knew that he had to be a doctor. That was the way out of poverty, you know, for a lot of Jewish families. He was an only child, he had to be a doctor. He was glad to be doctor. But he decided that he would raise his kids in a different way and support us to do whatever we wanted to do. And so I felt that privilege that support the horror at the world. And then once I started learning about the sort of this interconnectedness that I was learning about it both from the inner world in a sense, you could say, from learning about psychedelics. But also this was the time when the American I was setting people to the moon and the astronauts were coming back and looking at the Earth from space and the Whole Earth Catalog, and how edgar Mitchell talked about how that changed his consciousness and others. So it was more this sort of political implications of us to realize that we're all in it together. There's a great, really interesting book I just read over the holidays called Orbital Yeah, you know, and it's about people in the International Space Station and what is like going around and the kind of understandings have all in together. You don't see the borders, you don't see religions. You realize we're all all birth from one thing. So I thought that that would have political implications. You know, once you feel that we're all interconnected, how can you just so easily dehumanize other people or hate for being different religions. So it was all of that combination. And not only that, but I really I woke up to psychedelics nineteen seventy one, nineteen seventy two after the backlash, and I was also a protester. I was a Vietnam War draft resistor. I didn't register for the draft and thought I would end up going to jail. And so I and my parents were like, well, you know, that's okay, you know, but you're gonna have a felony conviction like President Troup. Now you're gonna have a felony conviction, and you're not going to be able to get any normal job because you're going to be a felon. I'm like, well, that's the price I have to pay. So then when I started understanding about psychedelics and both there are political implications, there are spiritual implications, their therapeutic implications, and that they were so suppressed, and I had this support for my parents to do whatever I thought I could do to make it a better world. I focused on the psychedelics and I thought, okay, I could be an underground psychedelic therapist. You don't need a license for that. So that was fifty three years ago, nineteen seventy two, and that's where I formed my identity and my mission, and I was just I still think, I am so so lucky and fortunate that I had this idea when I was eighteen, that fifty three years later still makes sense.

That's it's incredible Rick and I. You know, I just went to President Jimmy Carter at the Carter Center was laying in repose for days, and so we took my family and the kids and we all went to pay our respects. And one of his first things he did when he came to office was amnesty for all the draft.

That's it's incredible Rick and I. You know, I just went to President Jimmy Carter at the Carter Center was laying in repose for days, and so we took my family and the kids and we all went to pay our respects. And one of his first things he did when he came to office was amnesty for all the draft.

I'm so glad you're bringing that up. So let me say that at eighteen, after being a draft resister and starting to do Heygonelex, I identified myself as a counterculture drug using criminal. That's who I thought I was, right, and the very and the arc of my life has been to not be counterculture, but to be culture, to be mainstreamed, to not be criminal, but to be legal. And I've found psychedelics to be useful tools throughout the lifespan to continue to be using psychodols. But the first step in this sort of transformation of who I thought it was was Jimmy Carter's first day in office where he pardoned all the draft resistors. Now, actually nothing happened to me. I mean I didn't register. I had a passport, I had a driver's license, I had a Social Security number, I was paying taxes, I was in high school. But none of that got me on any lists that they came after me for not registering for the draft, So it was they never kicked your door. Nothing ever happened at all. And later I found out like around sixty thousand people didn't register for the draft and nothing ever happened. There was enough people coming to the draft boards to be drafted that they, you know, and their I guess computers weren't so good. They didn't have all these lists. But in any case, it was this Jimmy Carter pardoning the draft resisters on his first day in office. And I'll just contrast that a little bit with well we had with Clinton tried to end this prohibition against gays in the military on his first day in office, but that turned into a big scandal. He couldn't do it. But the thing with Jimmy Carter is that he had pardon power. He could do it all himself. So once he signed it, it was done. And now I'll also add that, you know, I was building a house and he's seventy five, nineteen seventy six, and I built it for solar energy. One of the things that Jimmy Carter was so ahead of his time, or I shouldn't even say he was ahead of his time. We are behind times. He was recognizing at the time we need to move to renewable energies, and we have ignored that and it's not been a priority. And now I don't know that anybody in LA can never feel safe again.

I'm so glad you're bringing that up. So let me say that at eighteen, after being a draft resister and starting to do Heygonelex, I identified myself as a counterculture drug using criminal. That's who I thought I was, right, and the very and the arc of my life has been to not be counterculture, but to be culture, to be mainstreamed, to not be criminal, but to be legal. And I've found psychedelics to be useful tools throughout the lifespan to continue to be using psychodols. But the first step in this sort of transformation of who I thought it was was Jimmy Carter's first day in office where he pardoned all the draft resistors. Now, actually nothing happened to me. I mean I didn't register. I had a passport, I had a driver's license, I had a Social Security number, I was paying taxes, I was in high school. But none of that got me on any lists that they came after me for not registering for the draft, So it was they never kicked your door. Nothing ever happened at all. And later I found out like around sixty thousand people didn't register for the draft and nothing ever happened. There was enough people coming to the draft boards to be drafted that they, you know, and their I guess computers weren't so good. They didn't have all these lists. But in any case, it was this Jimmy Carter pardoning the draft resisters on his first day in office. And I'll just contrast that a little bit with well we had with Clinton tried to end this prohibition against gays in the military on his first day in office, but that turned into a big scandal. He couldn't do it. But the thing with Jimmy Carter is that he had pardon power. He could do it all himself. So once he signed it, it was done. And now I'll also add that, you know, I was building a house and he's seventy five, nineteen seventy six, and I built it for solar energy. One of the things that Jimmy Carter was so ahead of his time, or I shouldn't even say he was ahead of his time. We are behind times. He was recognizing at the time we need to move to renewable energies, and we have ignored that and it's not been a priority. And now I don't know that anybody in LA can never feel safe again.

Right he was the first president to put a solar panel on the White House.

Right he was the first president to put a solar panel on the White House.

Yeah, yeah, he was way ahead of his time. But it's a story of human kind of suppression of difficult material of ignoring things. You know, all this climate change denial by people that are making money off of oil and others and political power. It's just humanity is really adept at repression denial. And that's where I think psychedelics. But what it means is that when you bring forth the Freud had this term for the return of the repressed, that what gets repressed comes out in other ways. We see that, you know, with trauma, people bury the trauma, but it comes out in physical illnesses, it comes out in depression and PTSD, the return of the press. So when you bring the repressed the surface, you can work with it, you can refine it, you can you know, just like this idea of absentence based sex education. You know, it's like, let's repress sexuality that you know, you can have a healthy sexuality, but when you have a repress sexuality, it comes out in twisted ways. So the same is true of consciousness and yes, you know, psycho material and things like that. So Jimmy Carter also wanted to legalize marijuana, or certainly to decriminalize marijuana, and there was a bunch of people in the seventies it really thought that our culture was moving to legalize marijuana. And it was the rise of the Parents' movements, the right wing near the end of the seventies during Carter's one term that there was a backlash against that. And then we ended up with Reagan and Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan escalation of the drug war just say no, And that's when MBMA became entering sort of public consciousness, and that's why it ended up being criminalized in nineteen eighty five, and then nineteen eighty six is when I started maps to bring it back through the FDA.

Yeah, yeah, he was way ahead of his time. But it's a story of human kind of suppression of difficult material of ignoring things. You know, all this climate change denial by people that are making money off of oil and others and political power. It's just humanity is really adept at repression denial. And that's where I think psychedelics. But what it means is that when you bring forth the Freud had this term for the return of the repressed, that what gets repressed comes out in other ways. We see that, you know, with trauma, people bury the trauma, but it comes out in physical illnesses, it comes out in depression and PTSD, the return of the press. So when you bring the repressed the surface, you can work with it, you can refine it, you can you know, just like this idea of absentence based sex education. You know, it's like, let's repress sexuality that you know, you can have a healthy sexuality, but when you have a repress sexuality, it comes out in twisted ways. So the same is true of consciousness and yes, you know, psycho material and things like that. So Jimmy Carter also wanted to legalize marijuana, or certainly to decriminalize marijuana, and there was a bunch of people in the seventies it really thought that our culture was moving to legalize marijuana. And it was the rise of the Parents' movements, the right wing near the end of the seventies during Carter's one term that there was a backlash against that. And then we ended up with Reagan and Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan escalation of the drug war just say no, And that's when MBMA became entering sort of public consciousness, and that's why it ended up being criminalized in nineteen eighty five, and then nineteen eighty six is when I started maps to bring it back through the FDA.

Well, I slute you for all the work that you've continued to do relentlessly. Did you all do? It was a twenty fourteen study with terminally ill patients.

Well, I slute you for all the work that you've continued to do relentlessly. Did you all do? It was a twenty fourteen study with terminally ill patients.

Yeah, can you talk about that study a little bit?

Yeah, can you talk about that study a little bit?

And what I'm going towards, Rick, is the mechanism of brain plasticity, and I want to I want to kind of get into that and you know, the default network, and I would love to talk to you about the net zero trauma.

And what I'm going towards, Rick, is the mechanism of brain plasticity, and I want to I want to kind of get into that and you know, the default network, and I would love to talk to you about the net zero trauma.

Yeah, idea of that.

Yeah, idea of that.

So, the ability for the human to rebuild and to adapt and to transform is robust and intense. And there is a crossover with d MT and there's a crossover with with these experiences. So I just wanted you if you could talk a little bit about the transformative experiences that you've facilitated in the therapeutic environment.

So, the ability for the human to rebuild and to adapt and to transform is robust and intense. And there is a crossover with d MT and there's a crossover with with these experiences. So I just wanted you if you could talk a little bit about the transformative experiences that you've facilitated in the therapeutic environment.

Okay, you mentioned that you've talked to Holocouster Viber. I just want to mention a book by Vickor Frankel, Yeah, who was a Holocauster rider Man, Search for Meaning. I've read it, Yeah, and that's about how you know, many many people were unable, were so filled with fear to spare and random acts of murder, you know, but those ones that survived, some of them had this sense of meaning that that gave them meaning and purpose to be resilient. So let me say that there was kind of a strategic analysis that we did back when we started maps, and that there was how do you bring forth something that has been repressed well in a way, you try to say that we can use this to help you with an even bigger fear. So what is the bigger fear? As you said, death? So there was this whole concern about MDMA neurotoxicity and this will maybe get us also into neuroplasticity and critical periods and all. So that there was this concern early on raised about how oh MDMA brain damage one dose, permanent brain damage, major functional consequences. Of course it didn't look that way from all the people who were taking it, but this was kind of this and again this was during the Reagan era, and so there was this thought that we need sympathetic patients, and we felt that there's two main groups. One was people with post traumatic stress disorder, particularly veterans in America, there's a lot of support for the veteran community, also women's survivors of sexual assault. So that MDMA assistant therapy for PTSD was one of the main ideas that we could use to bring back MDMA, and I worked with a PTSD patient nineteen eighty four, and that's where I learned how tremendously helpful MDMA can be for treating PTSD. The other is people that are dying. We're all going to be dying. We all have certain fears about that. So in order to address MDMA neurotoxicity, which it took us decade and a half to really debunk that to the satisfaction of the FDA, we started out our very first study that we proposed to the FDA. Now this is in the late nineteen ninety ninety one. One was a study of MDMA with cancer patients who had only one year or less to live, so that the neurotexasity thing would not matter. Now, we didn't get permission for that, and in the end, at the end of nineteen ninety nine two thousand, we began our first study with MDMA for PTSD, and that's what we're doing now all these years later. But we did do a study with people with life threatening illnesses and the study was really really interesting in that one of the things that MDMA does is that reduces activity in the amigdala, the fear processing part of the brain. That's why it's really helpful both for post traumatic stress disorder, also for people who are fearful about impending mortality, that that you can have these frightening concepts, frightening emotions, and because there's this reduction of fear based processing and also self love, self connection, empathy, that people can bring up from their fears and repression, these concerns about either traumatic past experiences that they had that were overwhelming that made them, you know, not trust humans, or about their own death. I've had the privilege of working with several people days before they died with MDMA, and it was just beautiful. One of them was a friend of mine had a partner who died at around age twenty six from cancer. He was a musician and he had it was a saxophone player, and they had throat cancer and they were not married, but they were in love and they'd been together for years and years, and we ended up he was on all these medications. What happens when you're nearing the end of the life, often people are in pain and you get all these pain medications. And what the pain medications do is they kind of tranquilize you and they make you sleepy, and you're you know, the more more pain you're in, and the more so that you're kind of out of it. A lot of times, you know you're hovering in this kind of not fully aware. You know, the pain that's being suppressed, but not completely. So it turns out when you add MDMA to people that are on pain meds and opiates and other things, you get a synergistic reduction in pain. Plus the MDMA, because it's three four methylene dioxy methamphetamine, has stimulant qualities. It overcomes the sort of tranquilizing properties of the opiates, and it wakes people up and so you can be more pain free and emotionally open. And this one experience with this couple was just incredible where they recapitulated their entire romance and just talked about how all these years and how much they loved each other. And it's like saying goodbye to your loved ones. It's like you're coming back from the you know, the gates of death. To be alive and fully there for a period of hours is while you're able to say goodbye. There was another it was beautiful. There was another story that was a young woman who died in her early thirties and we did MDMA. Her mother and I were co therapists for a period of time. This is a whole different psychedelics over all this period of time while she was dealing with her cancer, the mother and father had been divorced. This was their only child, and several days before this woman died the final MDMA experience, the father came and the mother and the mother decided that she would do MDMA. There was a book written about this, Honor Thy Daughter, that Maps publishes about this work with this woman dying of cancer, Honor Thy Daughter. And what happened was that at one moment again this woman was able to wake up this pain. She couldn't even sit up, she was so weak, and so her father sort of held her on. It was like a family triangle where the mother was sort of holding her arm up one inside, the father holding her arm on the other side so she could be sitting up watching them, and maya was fitting of the woman. And at one moment she says, how beautiful it is to be able to die with your parents here, And it was like it rose out of tragedy into this beautiful celebration of life and the gift of life. So the Thames with Patrice. She didn't have as long of a life as she should have, you know, killed the car accident, but she had some life and that's part of both the tragedy and the celebration, right. And so I've seen this work with people with at end of life where it becomes this celebration of life and you emerge from this tragedy, from the sadness into beauty and into gratitude. And so that's you know, it doesn't happen all the time, but that's one of the aspects of working now. One of the things that when you work with people near the end of their life, it's there's a difference in a sense than when you work with people at PTSD because they have potential lots of years to live. And so now we get into this idea of how do you transform an experience into long term benefit, long term change, right. You know, Houston Smith has who's a scholar of world religions, has this great statement that there's a difference between a religious experience and a religious life, you know, and people we talk more and more in the psychedelic field, people understand more and more about the role of integration that I would say one of the differences between recreational use of psychedelics and therapeutic use of psychedelics is that in recreational use of psychedelics, people are looking for the experience, but in therapeutic use, you're looking for the experience, but even more importantly, what you bring back from the experience into your daily life through this process of integration, so that you change the baseline. It's not just for this momentary experience, right. And so what guldol And is a neuroscientist now at UC Berkeley. She used to be at Hopkins, and what she's discovered is this concept of critical periods being reopened by psychedelics. Now, what she means by critical periods is we all know that when you're little, it's just amazing how little kids pick up language. And if you grow up in a multilingual home, kids can become multilingual really easily. You just absorb it. So there's a critical period. If you try to learn foreign languages when you're older, it's harder. Your brain is sort of primed at certain times to do certain things.

Okay, you mentioned that you've talked to Holocouster Viber. I just want to mention a book by Vickor Frankel, Yeah, who was a Holocauster rider Man, Search for Meaning. I've read it, Yeah, and that's about how you know, many many people were unable, were so filled with fear to spare and random acts of murder, you know, but those ones that survived, some of them had this sense of meaning that that gave them meaning and purpose to be resilient. So let me say that there was kind of a strategic analysis that we did back when we started maps, and that there was how do you bring forth something that has been repressed well in a way, you try to say that we can use this to help you with an even bigger fear. So what is the bigger fear? As you said, death? So there was this whole concern about MDMA neurotoxicity and this will maybe get us also into neuroplasticity and critical periods and all. So that there was this concern early on raised about how oh MDMA brain damage one dose, permanent brain damage, major functional consequences. Of course it didn't look that way from all the people who were taking it, but this was kind of this and again this was during the Reagan era, and so there was this thought that we need sympathetic patients, and we felt that there's two main groups. One was people with post traumatic stress disorder, particularly veterans in America, there's a lot of support for the veteran community, also women's survivors of sexual assault. So that MDMA assistant therapy for PTSD was one of the main ideas that we could use to bring back MDMA, and I worked with a PTSD patient nineteen eighty four, and that's where I learned how tremendously helpful MDMA can be for treating PTSD. The other is people that are dying. We're all going to be dying. We all have certain fears about that. So in order to address MDMA neurotoxicity, which it took us decade and a half to really debunk that to the satisfaction of the FDA, we started out our very first study that we proposed to the FDA. Now this is in the late nineteen ninety ninety one. One was a study of MDMA with cancer patients who had only one year or less to live, so that the neurotexasity thing would not matter. Now, we didn't get permission for that, and in the end, at the end of nineteen ninety nine two thousand, we began our first study with MDMA for PTSD, and that's what we're doing now all these years later. But we did do a study with people with life threatening illnesses and the study was really really interesting in that one of the things that MDMA does is that reduces activity in the amigdala, the fear processing part of the brain. That's why it's really helpful both for post traumatic stress disorder, also for people who are fearful about impending mortality, that that you can have these frightening concepts, frightening emotions, and because there's this reduction of fear based processing and also self love, self connection, empathy, that people can bring up from their fears and repression, these concerns about either traumatic past experiences that they had that were overwhelming that made them, you know, not trust humans, or about their own death. I've had the privilege of working with several people days before they died with MDMA, and it was just beautiful. One of them was a friend of mine had a partner who died at around age twenty six from cancer. He was a musician and he had it was a saxophone player, and they had throat cancer and they were not married, but they were in love and they'd been together for years and years, and we ended up he was on all these medications. What happens when you're nearing the end of the life, often people are in pain and you get all these pain medications. And what the pain medications do is they kind of tranquilize you and they make you sleepy, and you're you know, the more more pain you're in, and the more so that you're kind of out of it. A lot of times, you know you're hovering in this kind of not fully aware. You know, the pain that's being suppressed, but not completely. So it turns out when you add MDMA to people that are on pain meds and opiates and other things, you get a synergistic reduction in pain. Plus the MDMA, because it's three four methylene dioxy methamphetamine, has stimulant qualities. It overcomes the sort of tranquilizing properties of the opiates, and it wakes people up and so you can be more pain free and emotionally open. And this one experience with this couple was just incredible where they recapitulated their entire romance and just talked about how all these years and how much they loved each other. And it's like saying goodbye to your loved ones. It's like you're coming back from the you know, the gates of death. To be alive and fully there for a period of hours is while you're able to say goodbye. There was another it was beautiful. There was another story that was a young woman who died in her early thirties and we did MDMA. Her mother and I were co therapists for a period of time. This is a whole different psychedelics over all this period of time while she was dealing with her cancer, the mother and father had been divorced. This was their only child, and several days before this woman died the final MDMA experience, the father came and the mother and the mother decided that she would do MDMA. There was a book written about this, Honor Thy Daughter, that Maps publishes about this work with this woman dying of cancer, Honor Thy Daughter. And what happened was that at one moment again this woman was able to wake up this pain. She couldn't even sit up, she was so weak, and so her father sort of held her on. It was like a family triangle where the mother was sort of holding her arm up one inside, the father holding her arm on the other side so she could be sitting up watching them, and maya was fitting of the woman. And at one moment she says, how beautiful it is to be able to die with your parents here, And it was like it rose out of tragedy into this beautiful celebration of life and the gift of life. So the Thames with Patrice. She didn't have as long of a life as she should have, you know, killed the car accident, but she had some life and that's part of both the tragedy and the celebration, right. And so I've seen this work with people with at end of life where it becomes this celebration of life and you emerge from this tragedy, from the sadness into beauty and into gratitude. And so that's you know, it doesn't happen all the time, but that's one of the aspects of working now. One of the things that when you work with people near the end of their life, it's there's a difference in a sense than when you work with people at PTSD because they have potential lots of years to live. And so now we get into this idea of how do you transform an experience into long term benefit, long term change, right. You know, Houston Smith has who's a scholar of world religions, has this great statement that there's a difference between a religious experience and a religious life, you know, and people we talk more and more in the psychedelic field, people understand more and more about the role of integration that I would say one of the differences between recreational use of psychedelics and therapeutic use of psychedelics is that in recreational use of psychedelics, people are looking for the experience, but in therapeutic use, you're looking for the experience, but even more importantly, what you bring back from the experience into your daily life through this process of integration, so that you change the baseline. It's not just for this momentary experience, right. And so what guldol And is a neuroscientist now at UC Berkeley. She used to be at Hopkins, and what she's discovered is this concept of critical periods being reopened by psychedelics. Now, what she means by critical periods is we all know that when you're little, it's just amazing how little kids pick up language. And if you grow up in a multilingual home, kids can become multilingual really easily. You just absorb it. So there's a critical period. If you try to learn foreign languages when you're older, it's harder. Your brain is sort of primed at certain times to do certain things.

I tell my children this, I say, guys, these are your special years. Now, you know this is the time for you to not be on video games.

I tell my children this, I say, guys, these are your special years. Now, you know this is the time for you to not be on video games.

Yeah, I hope they listen. They listen.

Yeah, I hope they listen. They listen.

Yeah, I think, well Roman does. My other kid LEVI is a wild card, but yeah.

Yeah, I think, well Roman does. My other kid LEVI is a wild card, but yeah.

So Gul has identified that psychedelics open up this critical period and what's going on in this critical period is what they call neuroplasticity. That you are able to rewire your brain in different ways so that you can have memories that previously triggered fear. Now you would process the fear and the memories would be more put into long term storage. There's also issues between how if you have PTSD the hippocampus where you put memories into long term storage, there's fewer activity there and not as much connectivity between the amygdala fear processing and the hippocampus, and MDMA increases activity and reduces it, you know, so that it's easier to put these traumatic memories into long term storage. So this idea though, that the longer you're in the psychedelic experience itself, the longer this period of neuroplasticity lasts afterwards. So if you have LSD or psilocybin, LSD lasts longer than psilocybin. Psilocybin is about five or six hours LSD is about eight to ten hours or so. And also just to add that, what we find is that we talked about this return of the repressed and resistance. What makes LSD experiences, or what makes psychedelic experiences often last longer, is resistance to it. That when you're open to it and the energy flows through you, the experience and the energy of it can be processed in a shorter amount of time. Resistance keeps things in place. So we say that one of our sayings for our Zendo Psychedelic harm Reduction program is that difficult is not the same as bad. And what I think is the distinguishing feature between what's difficult and what's quote bad trip bad is resistance difficult you learn from if you're open to it. When you resist it, it turns into quote bad trip. And that's why if you stop the resistance, you can transform a bad trip into something that may be one of the most important things that you learn from. So the longer you are in the psychedelic session from the period of activity of the drug itself, the longer the neuroplasticity the law, longer the critical period has opened. To the point with I begain, which is a drug that takes several more than a day or so to fully be processed out of your system, that it last months this period afterwards and it's weeks. You know. LSD is more than more than psilocybin. You know, smoking DMT is shorter. So it's it's a key aspect of And this is one of the things that I did not know when I first started doing LSD. I had the delusion, the hope, you know that the more drugs I took, the faster I would evolve. And I gave it my best shot, you know, and I completely underestimated the importance of integration, and I it took me years and years to get integrated. But I think this integration.

So Gul has identified that psychedelics open up this critical period and what's going on in this critical period is what they call neuroplasticity. That you are able to rewire your brain in different ways so that you can have memories that previously triggered fear. Now you would process the fear and the memories would be more put into long term storage. There's also issues between how if you have PTSD the hippocampus where you put memories into long term storage, there's fewer activity there and not as much connectivity between the amygdala fear processing and the hippocampus, and MDMA increases activity and reduces it, you know, so that it's easier to put these traumatic memories into long term storage. So this idea though, that the longer you're in the psychedelic experience itself, the longer this period of neuroplasticity lasts afterwards. So if you have LSD or psilocybin, LSD lasts longer than psilocybin. Psilocybin is about five or six hours LSD is about eight to ten hours or so. And also just to add that, what we find is that we talked about this return of the repressed and resistance. What makes LSD experiences, or what makes psychedelic experiences often last longer, is resistance to it. That when you're open to it and the energy flows through you, the experience and the energy of it can be processed in a shorter amount of time. Resistance keeps things in place. So we say that one of our sayings for our Zendo Psychedelic harm Reduction program is that difficult is not the same as bad. And what I think is the distinguishing feature between what's difficult and what's quote bad trip bad is resistance difficult you learn from if you're open to it. When you resist it, it turns into quote bad trip. And that's why if you stop the resistance, you can transform a bad trip into something that may be one of the most important things that you learn from. So the longer you are in the psychedelic session from the period of activity of the drug itself, the longer the neuroplasticity the law, longer the critical period has opened. To the point with I begain, which is a drug that takes several more than a day or so to fully be processed out of your system, that it last months this period afterwards and it's weeks. You know. LSD is more than more than psilocybin. You know, smoking DMT is shorter. So it's it's a key aspect of And this is one of the things that I did not know when I first started doing LSD. I had the delusion, the hope, you know that the more drugs I took, the faster I would evolve. And I gave it my best shot, you know, and I completely underestimated the importance of integration, and I it took me years and years to get integrated. But I think this integration.

Talk about integration, well, yeah.

Talk about integration, well, yeah.

Integration is this process of dealing with the consequences of what you felt and what you learned during your experience and try to, like you say, okay, I learned that I'm fearful of confrontation or something, you know, and under let's say an MDMA experience, you're able to handle conflict better. So the integration is how do you do that without the drug? And you practice it in a little way. So one metaphor that I've used a lot. Is that you know you're sort of climbing this ladder when you do a drug. You know you're climbing this ladder. And then when the drug starts to wear off, you're climbing the ladder in reverse. You're trying to And so it's very important when the drugs start to wear off, the medicines start to wear off, that you pay attention, how okay, now these anxious thoughts about tomorrow start coming in or whatever I self respect or all these kind of things start coming in. But then when you've watched yourself go down the ladder, you can look at sort of the rungs that are not that far from our normal approach normal consciousness and try to move in that direction without the drug. And so that's this exercise of putting into practice and and it takes years and years, and we've worked with people that are meditators, right, and you can have a clarity of mind under MDMA or even under socybin in certain ways through meditation. But once you've experienced that, you can try to recreate that without the drug, and that can take months or years. But they're training tools. So the integration process is really about what we're trying to do is fundamentally different than what classic psychiatric drugs and the pharmaceutical industry do. They're trying to control symptoms and not really get to the root cause. And now you need to take this medicine on a daily basis for the rest of your life. And what we're trying to do with psychedelics paired with psychotherapy is to get to the root cause, to really confront those earlier traumatic experiences, and then through the process of integration, try to build them into long term change.

Integration is this process of dealing with the consequences of what you felt and what you learned during your experience and try to, like you say, okay, I learned that I'm fearful of confrontation or something, you know, and under let's say an MDMA experience, you're able to handle conflict better. So the integration is how do you do that without the drug? And you practice it in a little way. So one metaphor that I've used a lot. Is that you know you're sort of climbing this ladder when you do a drug. You know you're climbing this ladder. And then when the drug starts to wear off, you're climbing the ladder in reverse. You're trying to And so it's very important when the drugs start to wear off, the medicines start to wear off, that you pay attention, how okay, now these anxious thoughts about tomorrow start coming in or whatever I self respect or all these kind of things start coming in. But then when you've watched yourself go down the ladder, you can look at sort of the rungs that are not that far from our normal approach normal consciousness and try to move in that direction without the drug. And so that's this exercise of putting into practice and and it takes years and years, and we've worked with people that are meditators, right, and you can have a clarity of mind under MDMA or even under socybin in certain ways through meditation. But once you've experienced that, you can try to recreate that without the drug, and that can take months or years. But they're training tools. So the integration process is really about what we're trying to do is fundamentally different than what classic psychiatric drugs and the pharmaceutical industry do. They're trying to control symptoms and not really get to the root cause. And now you need to take this medicine on a daily basis for the rest of your life. And what we're trying to do with psychedelics paired with psychotherapy is to get to the root cause, to really confront those earlier traumatic experiences, and then through the process of integration, try to build them into long term change.

Integration reminds me of We talk with our guests on our show a lot about what I call the liminal state. So you know, in anthropology, I think the liminal state has to do with whether there was a rite of passage or some transformational period where there was the death of the childhood self and the adulthood self is not yet born or integrated into the larger tribe, and there's this liminal state wherein all sorts of things might happen in different cultures, maybe they might experience cross dressing, or you know, the different parts of their identity are ripped away from them. So the childhood self dies and then there's room for this integration before you then are inducted into the tribe or what have you. But we talk about the liminal states as it applies to these people who've had these near death or brushes with death, near death experiences, and you know, every one of them says, I wouldn't change a thing. I asked, would you go back and not have that car wreck? Or would you go back and not have that shark attack? Or there's so many weird stories that we in, fascinating stories, but they all say the same thing. No, I would not I would not change a thing because of what I am now is so awesome and what I have been able to become and the transformation that that it has led me to. Yeah, it's fascinating and it reminds me of did you ever see the movie Jacob's Ladder. Do you remember that film?

Integration reminds me of We talk with our guests on our show a lot about what I call the liminal state. So you know, in anthropology, I think the liminal state has to do with whether there was a rite of passage or some transformational period where there was the death of the childhood self and the adulthood self is not yet born or integrated into the larger tribe, and there's this liminal state wherein all sorts of things might happen in different cultures, maybe they might experience cross dressing, or you know, the different parts of their identity are ripped away from them. So the childhood self dies and then there's room for this integration before you then are inducted into the tribe or what have you. But we talk about the liminal states as it applies to these people who've had these near death or brushes with death, near death experiences, and you know, every one of them says, I wouldn't change a thing. I asked, would you go back and not have that car wreck? Or would you go back and not have that shark attack? Or there's so many weird stories that we in, fascinating stories, but they all say the same thing. No, I would not I would not change a thing because of what I am now is so awesome and what I have been able to become and the transformation that that it has led me to. Yeah, it's fascinating and it reminds me of did you ever see the movie Jacob's Ladder. Do you remember that film?

Oh? My good dad, I love that Ladder. That that is one of the I mean, I love that movie. That is one of the best movies.

Oh? My good dad, I love that Ladder. That that is one of the I mean, I love that movie. That is one of the best movies.

I've ever seen it, right, it's fantastic.

I've ever seen it, right, it's fantastic.

Nobody knows about it these days. Jacob's Ladder is incredible and I don't know if you want to talk a little bit about it, but I haven't thought about that movie for such a long time. Just it's incredible.

Nobody knows about it these days. Jacob's Ladder is incredible and I don't know if you want to talk a little bit about it, but I haven't thought about that movie for such a long time. Just it's incredible.

It's one of my top movies of all time. And Adrian lyn is the director. But it's it's that scene when Danny Ailo is looking at at Jacob and he's Jacob Singer and he says, you know, if you're scared and you're afraid of dying, remember this quote. He says, if you're if you're lying there and you're afraid of dying and you're holding on to life, you will feel like demons are ripping away at your flesh. Yeah, but if you've made your piece, you will realize that, or once you've major piece, who realized the demons are really angels freeing you. But it was like this quote that just like a diamond in my mind, and I was like, ah, so beautiful and so brilliant.

It's one of my top movies of all time. And Adrian lyn is the director. But it's it's that scene when Danny Ailo is looking at at Jacob and he's Jacob Singer and he says, you know, if you're scared and you're afraid of dying, remember this quote. He says, if you're if you're lying there and you're afraid of dying and you're holding on to life, you will feel like demons are ripping away at your flesh. Yeah, but if you've made your piece, you will realize that, or once you've major piece, who realized the demons are really angels freeing you. But it was like this quote that just like a diamond in my mind, and I was like, ah, so beautiful and so brilliant.

Wow, Dan, I'm so glad you mentioned that movie.

Wow, Dan, I'm so glad you mentioned that movie.

I didn't know you were such a fan, you know.

I didn't know you were such a fan, you know.

Oh, oh, I think it was Tim Robbins.

Oh, oh, I think it was Tim Robbins.

Was he Tim Robins played Jacob Singer?

Was he Tim Robins played Jacob Singer?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, God, thank you just for that, just to bring that back, And I guess I would encourage people who are listening to really think about watching that movie, and it is very scary in a lot of different ways.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, God, thank you just for that, just to bring that back, And I guess I would encourage people who are listening to really think about watching that movie, and it is very scary in a lot of different ways.

But that's the point of it, right, Yeah, yes, but these liminal states, it's it's it's something that and and perhaps you know we're gonna be talking to some neuroscientists about the release of d MT at the moment of death for different people.

But that's the point of it, right, Yeah, yes, but these liminal states, it's it's it's something that and and perhaps you know we're gonna be talking to some neuroscientists about the release of d MT at the moment of death for different people.

Yeah, I'll say I'm a little bit dubious about that.

Yeah, I'll say I'm a little bit dubious about that.

Yeah, sure, I would love to hear about why that's.

Yeah, sure, I would love to hear about why that's.

Well, first off, I'm not a neuroscientist. We we look for explanations for things. So one of the beautiful things about developing drugs through the FDA in the medicines, yes, is you need to demonstrate safety, and you need to demonstrate efficacy, but you don't need to demonstrate mechanism of action. You don't need to know how they work. So all of these explanations of how things will work are interesting important. But we also talk about this phrase translational neuroscience. You know what we're learning all sorts of neuroscience things how the brains work right, and you try to translate that into something that really matters to people. So I would say that from the point of view of psychedelics, psychotherapy, nothing has translated from neuroscience to the clinic. We've had people use psychedelics for thousands of years before we had brain scants in highly sophisticated supportive contexts for healing, for spirituality. So when we talk about, you know, neuroscientific explanations, how strong really are they? The brain is so complex, and so whether DMT is actually released at death or not, it doesn't The explanation doesn't matter so much as how we confront death. What is the process? Sure? Sure, So it's interesting for people to try to figure out does DMT get released? But I'm not so sure that the data is so solid about that. Sure, it's just searching for an explanation.

Well, first off, I'm not a neuroscientist. We we look for explanations for things. So one of the beautiful things about developing drugs through the FDA in the medicines, yes, is you need to demonstrate safety, and you need to demonstrate efficacy, but you don't need to demonstrate mechanism of action. You don't need to know how they work. So all of these explanations of how things will work are interesting important. But we also talk about this phrase translational neuroscience. You know what we're learning all sorts of neuroscience things how the brains work right, and you try to translate that into something that really matters to people. So I would say that from the point of view of psychedelics, psychotherapy, nothing has translated from neuroscience to the clinic. We've had people use psychedelics for thousands of years before we had brain scants in highly sophisticated supportive contexts for healing, for spirituality. So when we talk about, you know, neuroscientific explanations, how strong really are they? The brain is so complex, and so whether DMT is actually released at death or not, it doesn't The explanation doesn't matter so much as how we confront death. What is the process? Sure? Sure, So it's interesting for people to try to figure out does DMT get released? But I'm not so sure that the data is so solid about that. Sure, it's just searching for an explanation.

Right, I mean, we could get stuck on the mechanism rather than what actually is the process that's actually happening. I couldn't agree more.

Right, I mean, we could get stuck on the mechanism rather than what actually is the process that's actually happening. I couldn't agree more.

I couldn't agree more.

I couldn't agree more.

Yeah, it's just something that's kind of come up. But there is I have heard you talk a little bit about the default network.

Yeah, it's just something that's kind of come up. But there is I have heard you talk a little bit about the default network.

Yeah, okay, So Robin card Harris, I would say, is this he's also now at UCSF. What he's talked about was that the default mode network is in a sense, our resting state that's what it means the default mode, when you're not doing anything else, you're just sitting around, how are you processing information? And you're processing through your sense of self? And we could get back here to a little bit about Abraham Maslow and he started humanistic psychology. He also started humanistic transpersonal psychology. But many people are taught in schools the hierarchy of needs, you know, it's his triangle. And at the base of this is your survival needs. You know, if you're starving, if you're dying of thirst, you know, you're not doing much anything else. So they didn't try to serve out your survival needs. And then you've got belonging needs, and then you have self esteem needs, and then it moves to this idea of self actualization. You become your full self. But what people do not really get educated enough about in school is that in the last few years of his life in growing awareness of psychedelic experiences and psychedelic research and these states that take you beyond your sense of self. So it's not just self actualization. So the end of Maslow's life and started transpersonal psychology, the top of the hierarchy of needs is now self transcendence. You go beyond your it's beyond self actualization to self transcendence. You work in service, you're part of something bigger. So the idea of this default mode network is that you're scanning the all the incoming input and it's being evaluated according to your sort of eco sense. Is what's important to you? Is this about survival? Is just about esteem? Is this about belonging, you know, becoming My first says belonging, Or is this about me giving back? Or so that this whole you know, concept of the default mode network is essentially equivalent in a sense to our you know, sense of self. Are smaller ego psychedelics that not MVMA so much, but the classic psychedelics like LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, aauasca, all these things I began. They reduce activity in this default mode network. So we're no longer scanning for what's useful for this body, for this individual human, and you're taking in more raw information. And that's where people feel they go beyond themselves and they identify with the whole world, with the whole history, with all of evolution, that we're part of something bigger. You could talk about it as in a way as you know, the quantum field, where we know that things are somehow or other all interconnected, right, you know, through these vibrations, so that there's this whole kind of reduction of activity in the default mode network. And that's often people confuse the loss of sense of self with actual physical death. Stan Roff talked about this thing. It was hilarious. He worked with a bunch of people that had before he did LSD himself. This is in the fifties, and he saw them do this, you know, fear that they were actually dying, and he would reassure you, you're not actually dying. Just let go trust, let go be open. Bill Richards talks about that, and so then it was his time to take LSD, and under the LSD stand started going through this sense of loss of self, and he also felt that he might be physically dying. And he told himself this story is that when he was young, he had this allergy and somehow or other that changed his chemistry. And so even though all these other people weren't dying and he reassured them they weren't, actually he was right, you know. And then over a while he worked through that and realized so the default mode network and the reduction of activity in it is a key understanding for the mode of activity for classic psychedelics.

Yeah, okay, So Robin card Harris, I would say, is this he's also now at UCSF. What he's talked about was that the default mode network is in a sense, our resting state that's what it means the default mode, when you're not doing anything else, you're just sitting around, how are you processing information? And you're processing through your sense of self? And we could get back here to a little bit about Abraham Maslow and he started humanistic psychology. He also started humanistic transpersonal psychology. But many people are taught in schools the hierarchy of needs, you know, it's his triangle. And at the base of this is your survival needs. You know, if you're starving, if you're dying of thirst, you know, you're not doing much anything else. So they didn't try to serve out your survival needs. And then you've got belonging needs, and then you have self esteem needs, and then it moves to this idea of self actualization. You become your full self. But what people do not really get educated enough about in school is that in the last few years of his life in growing awareness of psychedelic experiences and psychedelic research and these states that take you beyond your sense of self. So it's not just self actualization. So the end of Maslow's life and started transpersonal psychology, the top of the hierarchy of needs is now self transcendence. You go beyond your it's beyond self actualization to self transcendence. You work in service, you're part of something bigger. So the idea of this default mode network is that you're scanning the all the incoming input and it's being evaluated according to your sort of eco sense. Is what's important to you? Is this about survival? Is just about esteem? Is this about belonging, you know, becoming My first says belonging, Or is this about me giving back? Or so that this whole you know, concept of the default mode network is essentially equivalent in a sense to our you know, sense of self. Are smaller ego psychedelics that not MVMA so much, but the classic psychedelics like LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, aauasca, all these things I began. They reduce activity in this default mode network. So we're no longer scanning for what's useful for this body, for this individual human, and you're taking in more raw information. And that's where people feel they go beyond themselves and they identify with the whole world, with the whole history, with all of evolution, that we're part of something bigger. You could talk about it as in a way as you know, the quantum field, where we know that things are somehow or other all interconnected, right, you know, through these vibrations, so that there's this whole kind of reduction of activity in the default mode network. And that's often people confuse the loss of sense of self with actual physical death. Stan Roff talked about this thing. It was hilarious. He worked with a bunch of people that had before he did LSD himself. This is in the fifties, and he saw them do this, you know, fear that they were actually dying, and he would reassure you, you're not actually dying. Just let go trust, let go be open. Bill Richards talks about that, and so then it was his time to take LSD, and under the LSD stand started going through this sense of loss of self, and he also felt that he might be physically dying. And he told himself this story is that when he was young, he had this allergy and somehow or other that changed his chemistry. And so even though all these other people weren't dying and he reassured them they weren't, actually he was right, you know. And then over a while he worked through that and realized so the default mode network and the reduction of activity in it is a key understanding for the mode of activity for classic psychedelics.

And you spent some time with gruff, right, you.

And you spent some time with gruff, right, you.

A lot As my mentor, I spent a lot of time with it.

A lot As my mentor, I spent a lot of time with it.

And then and then I know of him through the breathing work.

And then and then I know of him through the breathing work.

That, yeah, the whole drub. It is a beautiful thing. Because when psychedelics got criminalized and research were shut down, a lot of people said, oh, we're done with psychologs, We're going to meditation, or we're doing this or that. What Stan did is he developed through hyper ventilation what he called holotropic breathwork, which was a way to bring out similar experiences to when you're under the influence of LSD or classic psychedelics. The important point there is to realize that these experiences are not in the pill. They're in us, and we don't need a pill. You just breathe a little different and things come up. So that I think that was the beauty of what stand And also he was elegant, so you know all these yoga breathing and breathe through your nose and breathe through this nostril and breathe through your mouth, all these different counts and all this stuff. Standard just said, look, breathe faster and deeper. That's a find your own rhythm faster and deeper, and then you can bring this stuff. So stand has been tremendous, and I know we don't have that much time, so let me just do very much about Yeah about zero. Yeah, that's zero trauma by twenty seventy. I heard this statement that if your goals are something that you can accomplish in your lifetime, they're too small. Sontziero. Trauma by twenty seventy is a goal for humanity as a whole. And we are seeing the world through these filters. That's what we see when you work with MDMA, When you work with trauma victims, they see the world through this trauma lens and they're easily triggered. And so we have humanity as a whole is multigenerational trauma. We have the history of mass murder, of just struggle for survival of all of this. So MDMA can help individuals as can other psychedelics, with therapy, with integration, can help others integrate and process trauma. And not only that, but you can change the epigenetic mechanisms by which multigenerational trauma is passed from parent to child. Either the mother or the father can change. It's not changing DNA, but it changed what turns on GENA. It's epigenetic, it's above the genes. You can change that. So the idea of net zero trauma doesn't mean no drama. There's always going to be death, there's always going to be accidents, there's always going to be illness, There's always going to be human cruelty. But we hope it shrinks to you know, like Grover Norquiz talked about how he wanted to shrink the federal government to the size where he could drown it in a bathtub, you know. And so yeah, we want to shrink the global burden of trauma to where we could write. So the idea of net zero trauma means that we're not adding to the burden of trauma. Net zero doesn't mean no trauma. It means just that what we see with LA, what just happened with the fires with LA. But there's estimates that by twenty fifty there could be over a billion climate refugees. Now they're going to destablis are already turning people right wing and native as protectionist. It's going to be. So the sense is just that the burden of trauma on humanity is going to grow, right, And what we want to do is spread healing technologies as fast as we can, and they'll some point be this tipping point where the amount of multi generational trauma that's passed on and the amount of new trauma is in balance with the trauma that we're healing now zero, yes, so then we reach this net zero, then we can go on to you know, net negative triba, right, you know, but net zero just is an idealistic thing. So first off, it's just about thinking globally. It's about trying to bring this to humanitarian projects all over the world. And that's the vision as we hope over the next couple of years or less, that the MDMA will be approved by the FDA, that they'll approve psilocybin, they'll approve other drugs, start getting these out into treatment. We start hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands, millions of therapists, you know, in local healers all over the world. And so it's just idealistic. Now I've been accused of Oh, you talk about you want to change the world, and this is you know, you've got this tools that can do it. And the answer is I believe that's true. And that's so that's the vision of net zero Trauma. And so now that we are really running out of time, let me just add that MAPS is having the Psychedelic Science twenty twenty five. We're having a big conference June sixteenth to twentieth in Denver. The last one June twenty twenty three, we had twelve four hundred people. It was the world's largest conference on psychedelics ever. We've agd over fifteen hundred submissions for papers for people to present. It's incredible. So we'd like to invite people to consider coming to Psychedelic Science twenty.