Rick Doblin - Fighting the Good Fight

Full transcript: Rick Doblin on London Real

1:04 This is London Real. I’m Brian Rose from London Real. This week on the show, we have Mr. Rick Doblin, who is the founder and director of MAPS, which is an institution that he created in 1986, with one purpose in mind, and that is to get approved MDMA as an FDA-approved drug. And that was his main function of this organization.

1:30 It’s since branched out to try to get the FDA to approve psychedelics, cannabis, and other type drugs for medical purposes, with the ideas that once it becomes accepted as medicine, then potentially we can even prescribe it for non-medical uses. And Rick has always been at the forefront of the MDMA scene, and if there’s any one thing that’s his calling card, I would say it is MDMA, whereas other people specialize in other psychedelics. That’s the one that he’s always been a champion of, and he’s been fighting the good fight. He’s been fighting the government and fighting the DEA since the 80s. He saw the the prohibition of MDMA coming. He was working on it for years even before it was banned and he’s just a long-range thinker. Rick is almost turning 60 although he looks you know 20 years younger. He’s making us younger guys look bad. Rick has got to be one of the the kindest and gentlest and nicest guys I’ve ever met.

2:31 He was so courteous and so respectful, but at the same time, you can tell he’s a fighter. And he’s been through a lot of fights, the least of which are also some of the ones in his own brain. You know, he talked about a 17-hour LSD trip that he did in an isolation chamber. And when someone like that says something to you that heavy, you just want to take a deep breath and realize that there is a powerful man underneath that. as I joked in the beginning of the show, is a piece of living history which is a back-handed way to call someone old, but I meant no disrespect for it. He used to hang out with Albert Hoffman back in the day, the creator of LSD. He would debate the merits of MDMA with Terence McKenna in the 80s. He did MDMA with Larry Hagman, better known as JR from Dallas, and he met with Steve Jobs and talked about LSD and tried to get some money from him, which is a notoriously difficult thing to do. So, I mean, are you kidding me? Rick has been there and done that and he’s still fighting the good fight. And we sat down with a full two hours with Rick. It was right before he was about to start the breaking convention. He was headed off to a panel for filmmakers and he’s a special guy and a guy I want to try to help as much as possible fight the fight, you know. I mean, he’s been there doing this for a lot longer, you know, than we’ve been podcasting about psychedelics and their positive uses, to say the least.

3:53 So I really think you’ll enjoy this. He’s a fascinating man I could have sat with him for another five hours and talked to him all night, and I really hope that um That someday soon I can spend some more time with Rick He’s a gentleman a scholar and just an all-around really fun guy and one thing about Rick which makes him different than say Professor Nutt or Mr. Carhartt Harris is that um he’s he’s out out of the closet when it comes to his own personal medicine or drug use. He I think actively still takes MDMA, LSD, smokes cannabis and so it’s nice to have that leader who is also doing and one of the pieces of advice he said that we can all do to promote psychedelics to be used in medicine and we know they can be used effectively and to get the trials done is to come out of the closet and come out of the psychedelic closet and you know we’ve done that on London Real, we’ve talked about our IOS good experiences and I want to be doing more of that because while people that watch the show know that we that we’ve sampled with ayahuasca I think I need to be more vocal about it. So expect more from me in the coming months and please do the same yourself with your own communities, your parents, your friends. It’s funny, Rick had an NDMA experience with his grandma before she died and it’s it’s amazing you might find that lots of people around you that you know and love have experiences with psychedelics and positive ones. So there you go. As you

5:14 Know from watching my Twitter feed and listening to me lately, I am officially bulletproof. What does that mean Brian? What that means is that every morning I take special coffee beans called bulletproof coffee that have been produced in a way to reduce mycotoxins which is a mold that forms on coffee which can give you kind of a really bad crash after you have a coffee. You can feel kind of ill you know we’ve all had it where you go to Starbucks and you drink that coffee that normally makes you feel good and it makes you feel lousy and and Dave Astry from the Bulletproof Exec believes that’s because of the mycotoxins that are present in most coffee and he has a special process that gets his coffee from Central America where it doesn’t so I take that in the morning I take some of his upgraded MCT oil which is basically six times stronger than your typical coconut oil and then I put in their grass-fed butter and I mix it all up with a hand blender and it’s like a Tibetan yak butter tea and it’s effectively a meal replacement for me in the morning and my brain feels good I usually pop an alpha brain at the same time I don’t eat all morning and it’s just I don’t know I’m feeling fantastic and so the more I do that the more I’m learning about different things about the Bulletproof lifestyle he’s got kind of a paleo 2.0 diet and some other interesting facets of that so definitely check it out you know I would

6:29 I would challenge all of you out there to do Bulletproof for for three weeks. Give it a try. I guarantee you’re going to lose 5 or 10 pounds. One of our interns, Jackie, just wrote a really cool blog about how she biohacked herself and some of the good and bad things that happened on the back of it. And it’s a great read. It’s on the website under Daily Dose, so check that out. And like I said, give it a try.

6:50 You can actually click right here on the link below me if you’re in YouTube. And if not, you can find the link on YouTube. And you can go to upgradedself.com in the US or you can go to x-brain in Europe and you can buy the bag of coffee and get the upgraded FCT oil. Just get those two things. I don’t know what it’s gonna cost you. 20 pounds, 30 pounds, who cares? It’s gonna make you feel better, make you slimmer, and you know, I find it’s an amazing one. Once I fix one part of my life, I find that it can actually kind of snowball, and I find changes, other changes in my life that just make me healthier and happier. So check that out, and thanks to the guys at Bulletproof, they got some new free apps on the iPhone, and they’ve always got cool stuff happening at bulletproofexec.com, so check that out.

7:34 As I just mentioned, we’re also sponsored by the folks at X-Brain, and X-Brain basically stocks all the bulletproof stuff and the Onit products for consuming and shipping in Europe, which is a pretty amazing thing because it’s really hard to get stuff from Onit, like the AlphaBrain, which I pop on every day, two on podcast days, and yes, three whenever I see Max Keiser in person and you can get all that stuff without customs, without foreign exchange, without any drama that you know if you live in Europe or the UK, you just can’t order from the US. It’s impractical, I don’t want to wait six weeks and then I don’t want to pay all these charges. So go to exprain.co.uk, very cool guys, they got all the products, all the bulletproof stuff, just buy a bag of bulletproof, buy the upgraded MCT oil, try it for three weeks and then send me a tweet and if you don’t drop 5 or 10 pounds, then I’ll be shocked.

8:28 So give that a try. They also got some new whey proteins of their own brand coming soon. I think it’s all organic. These guys are very serious about their products. They only want to make the best.

8:38 So check those guys out at xbrain.co.uk And that’s it. That’s my pitch. I’m really enjoying summer in London. I got no vacation plans because why would you want to be anywhere else? I got no plans to meet anyone because I meet all sorts of cool people on the show. So, I got a lot of stuff coming up for London Real. We’ll be dropping in our second episode with Graham Hancock. He stopped by the studio. It was a fantastic discussion that even got a bit heated with Mr. Patrick Vickers. And at the end, there were some people that had changed their points of view. So, it’s fascinating for me to watch. We’ve also got Dan Hardy coming up in August. I’m sure we’re going to talk to him about fighting psychedelics, you name it, but looking forward to having Dan on the show for a long time. And if If you haven’t checked out Silicone Reel, do it.

9:23 It’s the video podcast dedicated to the people of the London technology startup scene. And you might say, I don’t know anything about tech, Brian. I don’t know anything about startups. Well, you know, it’s kind of like a mini London Real where you get to meet someone cool every week that I think shares our core values. They’re humble, they’re open-minded, and just generally nice people.

9:42 I can’t pre-screen everyone, but I like to just have people on that are good people and inspiring. So these are like 45 minute shows, you get to know something about the community. If you live in London, come meet me at one of the drink abouts, I’m there every Friday with the three beards, some really cool dudes that are spreading a similar positive pay it forward type message that we’re doing here at London Real. So check that out and yeah, watch Silicone Reel, download it, and if you got any ideas for me there, then please send them.

10:11 And that’s it, we’re always looking for interns, we got all sorts of new programs for the interns. meet any interns later tonight in London. We’ll be meeting up once every six weeks, I believe. If you want an intern with us, send me an email at info at LondonReal.tv, help us out, follow us on Twitter, subscribe in iTunes, we’re on Facebook, and like I said, always looking for new ideas, new guests, new everything. So now I give you a full two hours and it’s And it’s well worth it with the founder of MAPS, Mr. Rick Doblin.

10:47 Pace. Let’s do this, guys. Yeah. Okay. Yeah, thanks for inviting me.

10:53 I really appreciate it. I know. I mean, I was pretty excited all week, and I was like, I can’t imagine if you came to town and we didn’t have you on. It would be like a crime. So.

11:02 Okay. Here we go. Let’s do this, guys. This is London Real. I’m Brian Rose. My co-pilot today is Mr. Alexander Ward. He is an Ayahuasca filmmaker whose short Tierra Vida first caught our eye after being featured on the Graham Hancock YouTube channel I think two years ago, a year and a half?

11:21 So long, two years maybe. Yeah, he was our guest I guess about a year ago and the episode was called The Chosen One as you can see. He’s been called the Jesus of Ayahuasca. That’s actually on my business card now. By Simon, well Simon called you that, right?

11:36 Yeah, I think quite a few people. Yes, and you’ve also guest-hosted before when we had Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris here from Imperial College, I’m sure you know him. He came in here first and then David Nutt came and we had some really good conversations with them. Yeah, so yeah, we had them on.

11:53 Also, Alex and I have a special project we’re working on which will be out in the next couple weeks, should be very interesting. Our guest today is Mr. Rick Doblin. He is the president and founder of MAPS, which is the Multidisciplinary Association for psychedelic studies, which you founded in 1986 with the goal of making MDMA and FDA approved medicine. Rick, welcome to London.

12:16 Welcome to London Real. Thank you so much for being here. Yeah, it’s a pleasure. Thank you, Brian and Alexander. I appreciate the opportunity.

12:23 It’s an amazing thing, you know, I look back on your history and you kind of know the who’s who of the psychedelic movement. I mean, I was gonna call you a piece of living history, but that’s just a nice way of saying you’re old, you know? I turned 60 in November. You look good for 60. Well, I’m not 60 yet.

12:40 Oh, okay. Am I in love with it? Yeah, drugs, you know, sex, drugs, and rock and roll, man. Man. Keeps you young.

12:46 I guess so. I mean, you knew Albert Hoffman, which was the creator of LSD. You used to debate Terrence McKenna about MDMA and the 80s. I mean, you’ve known a lot of people and you’re still fighting the good fight today. Yeah, and I would say my main mentor was Stan Groff.

13:02 Okay. Who was the world’s leading psychedelic therapist and one of the founders of transpersonal psychology, and he’s taught holotropic breath work. I mean, Stan was tremendous in the sense that he was an early researcher with LSD in the 50s and 60s, and once LSD was criminalized and all of the other psychedelics were criminalized in 1970, he found a way to continue, which I admire him tremendously for, which was he used hyperventilation, and he said it’s gonna be hard to make breathing illegal.

13:35 But they found a way in France, actually. Really? Yeah, because they call the holotropic breathwork a cult and they have laws against cults, which of course it’s not, but it’s a therapeutic technique that alters brain chemistry through hyperventilation. I’ve heard about that. And it brings out emotions.

13:52 Have you practiced it? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’m a certified holotropic breathwork practitioner. I went from 88 to 91 in his first training program. So what does that process involve exactly?

14:03 Let me just, I want to just find out about maps for people that don’t know and a lot of people listening to this will not know what maps is and they might not even know what MDMA is I mean a lot of people that we assume are part of this psychedelic awareness aren’t sometimes you know I don’t know if my grandma knows what this is or my mother knows what this is so it’s been 27 years since you started yes yeah I was wondering if you could just briefly take us to the year before why you decided to do this and then has it been going the last 27 years slowly Obviously, we’re still not quite there, but let me start a little bit farther back. So I’ll start when I was 17 years old, and I had grown up believing a lot of the anti-drug propaganda. So I thought that LSD made you permanently crazy, that if somebody took it, there was some fundamental change in the brain that made you unstable and that you would break down later under stress or something.

15:00 And a friend of mine, I was always interested in the other. I grew up Jewish and I was born in 53 and educated a lot about the Holocaust. So that was sort of the predominant education that I’ve got. The biggest challenge is insanity, is cultural insanity and demonization and scapegoating and psychological processes. And that’s what I was interested in trying to study.

15:26 And so I was also studying the Russians because I grew up at a time when there was the Cold War and we were educated about duck and cover under your desk in school to survive nuclear annihilation. So the whole world felt imperiled and by our intellectual advancement, but our emotional and spiritual immaturity, both as individuals and as a culture. So I happened to be studying Russian and a friend of mine in the Russian class gave me a copy of a book and said I should read it and I read it and I loved it.

16:00 It was One Floor Over the Cuckoo’s Nest by Ken Kesey. And then after I handed it back to him, he said, do you realize that this person wrote some of this book under the influence of LSD? And I was like, no possible way. And he said, yeah, it’s true. And that started changing my attitudes.

16:15 Like, how could it make you crazy if it could make you so creative also? Then- This is mid-60s. This is late, well, actually this was 1970. Yeah, so then I was confronted with the draft and the Vietnam War. So I was the last year of the lottery to go to war.

16:32 And I felt like here was my own country. It was sort of demonizing what I saw was a civil war and portraying this corrupt government as something that we had to support. And so I was reading a lot of Martin Luther King and Tolstoy and others about civil disobedience and nonviolence. And so I decided to become a draft resistor and I anticipated going to jail. I didn’t wanna run to Canada and I didn’t want to ask the draft board to call me a conscientious objector because I feel like sometimes in self-defense, violence can be appropriate.

17:08 So I wasn’t- Malcolm X, very Malcolm X. Yeah, yeah, I wasn’t a complete pacifist. I think, you know, you know, we talk about how, you know, even Gandhi, you know, it worked because he was against the British who had some level of humanity, but if he was against the Nazis, he probably would have been annihilated also. So I was planning to be a draft resistor. My parents were supportive, but they said that I would never be able to get a normal job, that I would have a criminal record and I couldn’t be, my dad’s a doctor and my brother’s a doctor, I couldn’t be any professional.

17:42 So the discovery that LSD, for me, when I took it in college after I had changed my attitudes about it a little bit, it did for me what I had hoped my bar mitzvah would do, which was, I think most of us feel like the religious rituals that we have are pretty empty, that they don’t really touch deeply. And so I remember after my bar mitzvah thinking I’m the same person, nothing happened, and it was very disappointing. You wanted to be a man after that. Yeah, I really thought, I’m the oldest of four kids, I really thought something would change, and so nothing did.

18:18 But then when I took LSD, it kind of sunk down really deep into that part of my psyche that I felt was connected to spirituality, connected to emotions. And so all of this kind of produced the fact that I was gonna be a criminal, I was gonna have limited choices for jobs. The fact that I was so interested in how psychologically we could work to help make a better world, that I decided to become a psychedelic therapist. So at age 18, I decided to be an underground psychedelic therapist because you wouldn’t need a license.

18:53 And it was a way to fight back after against this criminalization. And I was also influenced by the idealism of the hippies and the sense that this mystical experience that often comes with psychedelics, the sense of connection can help you identify as part of the human race, as part of more so than our individual particularities. Right, you know, for two guys that weren’t around in 71, I was born in 71. Can you just give us a rough idea of what it was like?

19:22 I mean, you’ve got Martin Luther King shot in 68, Robert Kennedy, you’ve got the Vietnam War on TV, you’re 18 years old and you’re gonna be a criminal. You’re making a conscious decision, I mean. Yeah, it was hard. I mean, it was so,

19:42 Well, the other thing to say is that the LSD back then was four or five times the strength of the normal dose now too. So people were using it for sort of existential personal growth, meaning, and moving more towards spiritual experiences. So it was a culture in turmoil, and so I felt myself to be part of this movement towards consciousness change and growth, and I identified with that. And so once the backlash came, starting in the late sixties, but it felt like the tools to fight back, that how would we change this culture?

20:22 And it felt to me like LSD and psychedelics were the way that worked for me. And I thought that if our culture could learn how to integrate the full range of states of consciousness, that we would have more mature people, less prejudiced people, more sense of connection, more responsibility for the earth. And that if you can change people’s consciousness, then it changes everything that they do. So it felt like a point of high leverage. What a coincidence that right around late 60s that the LSD is developed and made in a mass way, or was it not coincidence?

20:57 No, totally not coincidence. And in fact, one of the research projects I did was a long-term follow-up to the Good Friday experiment. Right, can you describe the Good Friday experiment? Have you heard about this? I have, yeah.

21:09 Okay, well I heard it, it blew my mind, but all right, go ahead. But I’ll get that just a second, but let me get back to your first question, Which is sort of about maps and how I say so so I at age 18 had decided that this is what I was going to do But I felt that I wasn’t mature enough to do it that I had Difficulties letting go with the psychedelic experience I had a lot of emotional immaturity and I felt that I needed to get grounded So I spent and I also felt like I can’t I woke up too late To the opportunities to do legal psychedelic research or to have you know legal psychedelic therapy although of course we were doing it on our own. And so I decided to take 10 years, well I didn’t know how long it would be, but I took time out to get grounded.

21:54 And I felt that a lot of the people who were involved in the cultural movements of the 60s crashed and burned because of certain personality issues. And that we had to refine our own selves as our instrument. Or else we just repeat some of the same things that we grew up learning. So I ended up building things for 10 years. houses, I built custom wood homes.

22:18 My parents had a house designed by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright when I was 12. And that structure influenced me a lot. In Chicago. In Chicago. Yeah, where Frank Lloyd Wright was big.

22:29 So then I started back to college in 1982, finally ready to figure out to work within the system. Did you make a conscientious decision to ground yourself? Or in retrospect, is that what you were doing? I just knew. Well, it was a conscious decision because I did a lot of LSD, I did primal therapy, primal scream therapy by Arthur Janov where I did a three week intensive where I saw nobody except for the therapist for an hour a day and I didn’t have any books and I was just getting into my dream.

23:03 So I did all these extreme powerful methods and at the end of it, I wasn’t where I wanted to be. And I finally realized that you can’t do it all in the altered state, that you have to ground it, you have to integrate it. And I think a lot of times people miss that point as they keep trying to do more and more drugs and more and more experiences and it becomes counterproductive. So I felt like I had reached that point that I was unbalanced, that these were tools that were very meaningful and valuable but that I wasn’t prepared fully and that I felt that I was so into the spiritual, mental, psychological, that I needed to get into the physical and that I needed to build things, that you build something and then you come back the next day and it’s still there, unlike a lot of fleeting thoughts or feelings.

23:52 So I made a conscious decision to get more balanced and grounded and that’s where I dropped out of college after my first semester and didn’t come back for 10 years. It took me that long to feel like I was balanced enough, and also that I could do what I wanted to do within a system. I felt one of the other big mistakes of the 60s was this idea of tune in, turn on, drop out, of find your own private utopia, of the system is grew up, then we’re gonna go off and be a counterculture, that that’s builds in your own doom in a way, because the culture is bigger than the counterculture, and now my whole work is the mainstreaming, the bringing back to the culture of the lessons of the counterculture so that we don’t have those kind of divisions.

24:39 So I felt that once I was sufficiently grounded that I would go back to college, it took 10 years, and then the first semester that I was in college, there was a workshop at Esalen, a month-long workshop on the mystical quest taught by Stan and Christina Graff at Esalen, at this beautiful place overlooking the Pacific Ocean. What is Esalen? Esalen is like a growth center communal, it’s the birth of the human potential movement. It’s about a community of about 150 people or so, and their main work is educational seminars, weekends, week long or month longs.

25:20 And they are perched on the Pacific Ocean, there’s hot springs that come out of the mountains right there, and Hunter Thompson was the security guard long ago at the beginning of it. And so I felt like I should go off to take this month-long seminar, and I was able to get permission from the college because I went to an experimental college called New College of Florida that has the principle that the student’s curiosity is the most important thing. Wow.

25:54 What a concept, huh? It’s great. So there’s no required courses. There’s no grades. It’s all written evaluations.

26:02 There’s really close work with professors. Brown does that as well, right? The Ivy League University of Brown. Yeah. There’s no grades, right?

26:08 I’m not sure about that. Hampshire I think might be like that. There’s some that are like that. It’s terrific because you get closer feedback. But in any case, I was able to get permission to go to Esslin to do this month-long.

26:20 And while I was there in 1982, someone came to Esalen and started talking about MDMA, which I had never heard of. And I also thought, based on the massive crackdown that took place that eliminated psychedelic research all over the world, that the psychedelic community had been really squashed. So not only did I learn about MDMA, but I learned that there was a network of underground on psychedelic therapists that were psychiatrists, therapists that were risking their licenses to still work with LSD and psilocybin to help their patients.

26:57 They thought ethically that they should work with these substances because they could see such progress at certain times. So there was this underground network that I learned about and then I also learned about MDMA when it was still legal. And I felt like here was the opportunity that I missed before. I sort of woke up to psychedelics a little bit late, right as the crackdown came. And now I woke up to MDMA and it was still legal, but it was clear that it was going to be smashed.

27:24 Crystal clear to you. It was to everybody because it had just started being used as ecstasy. Okay, this is in what year? 1982. 1982, okay.

27:32 Yeah, and this was the era of Nancy Reagan and the just say no and the drug crackdown. So it felt inevitable and I thought, what a great opportunity here to try to prepare for the crackdown, to prepare to defend against it. And I also had read this book by Robert Mueller, who was the Assistant Secretary General of the United Nations, and it was New Genesis Shaping a Global Spirituality. And what he was talking about was how from the perspective he had at the UN that we have all these forums for countries to mediate their differences, but that under and allying a lot of these country conflicts was religious conflicts and that we needed sort of a global spirituality and that people would then would appreciate each other and not be so scared of the differences that.

28:23 And so it was a beautiful book, but he didn’t say a word about psychedelics. So I decided to write to him and say, this is a beautiful book, but you don’t mention psychedelics. And because of the Good Friday experiment, which we’ll give you know that he, that there’s a way that these drugs can be used to help us study the mystical experience and that would you help us try to resume psychedelic research? And I was just a college undergraduate and to my utter shock, he wrote back and he said yes, that he agreed with what I said and he would help bring back psychedelics.

28:56 And he listed a series of people from different religious traditions that he thought I should contact. And when I read that, I thought he’s saying, without saying it, that I should send them MDMA. And so I did that and then you must have had many nuanced communications over the years Yeah, it’s there’s yes. It’s it’s difficult when things are illegal to To communicate about but but I was but even though this was legal still I was able to send it to Roman Catholic monks in monasteries to Zen meditators in Europe, to orthodox rabbis, to professors of psychiatry at Harvard, and places where people would never do it if it was illegal, but we had this precious moment of preparing for the crackdown.

29:44 So we built these strong networks of supporters, people that would surface once the crackdown came, but we didn’t want to surface until then, because we felt that if we made it public, that would just hasten the crackdown. How much time did you think you had? That’s a couple years. We didn’t really know. And then in the summer of 1984, the DEA decided to criminalize MDMA.

30:09 And they put a notice in the Federal Register, and you get 30 days to respond. And so through our networks, we found out about the Federal Register notice. We contacted lawyers in Washington, D.C., Ann and Sasha Shogan had these connections to lawyers that worked pro bono at these major D.C. law firms. And so then we started the lawsuit against the DEA to try to protect the therapeutic use of MDMA.

30:34 And because of the ground that we’d prepared and the people that were willing to speak out that totally broke the stereotype of who drug users were. The first article was a Newsweek article that had Brother David Steindelrass, a Roman Catholic monk, talk about MDMA. We had an article in the Washington Post that interviewed a rabbi who compared MDMA to the Sabbath. This is MDMA they got from you in the post, I assume? Yes, yeah, yeah, yes, yes.

31:02 But yeah, that part always didn’t come out. But we were winning the media war, basically, winning the public education. And so in 1985, the DEA criminalized MDMA on an emergency basis. And what’s ironic about that is the first effort to criminalize MDMA was itself illegal. and the DEA didn’t have the authority to do that.

31:26 And they later lost in court and had to, their emergency scheduling powers had been given by Congress to the Department of Justice but never sub-delegated down to the DEA. So the DEA’s first act on MDMA was itself illegal. Wow. Yeah, so then- Why 84? Why some of 84?

31:43 Well, ecstasy was being used in Texas a lot in public settings. And Senator Lloyd Benson from Texas had decided to make an issue of this. It wasn’t that there were a lot of problems. It was before the rave movement really got started. It was just that this was another drug that people were using for personal growth.

32:03 It sounded a lot like the 60s here. People were saying that this would change your attitudes and you would be more open to people and you could express yourself better. And some people, myself included, have had some spiritual experiences with MDMA. And it just felt like a threat to the status quo. It was just a reflex of action to go after MDMA.

32:25 And we were able, though, to win the case in a DEA administrative law judge hearing. So we won the case. In 1984, yeah, okay. Well, it took a couple years. We won, we stirred, the hearings took place in 1985 and 1986, but so in 1986, we won the case, but the administrative law judges only give recommendations to the head of the agencies.

32:49 They don’t compel. So the head of the DEA rejected the recommendation that MDMA become illegal but stay available for therapists and psychiatrists to work with. And we appealed that in the appeals court in one. And then the DEA found another way to ignore what the appeals court said and criminalize it yet again. And then it switched into the medical marijuana case where the same issue what is currently accepted medical use mean and then we won again and then we lost. So eventually the DEA found a way to criminalize MDMA and marijuana and prevent their medical use and the only way was through the FDA. That was the only way left. So that’s where in 1986 after winning the case, winning the battle but losing the war, I started MAPS as a non-profit vehicle to try to develop MDMA into a medicine.

33:48 I called it the People’s Pharmaceutical Company. I had it written on some stationery. And I had the naive assumption that the hundreds of thousands and millions of people doing MDMA would band together and each donate a small amount of money, and then we would be able to afford to do non-profit drug development. But that didn’t happen. It didn’t happen, like right now we have 2,000 members, which is really good, but most of the money comes from the top.

34:19 One percent? Yeah, the top one percent, for sure. Now, you know, President Obama did great to mobilize a lot of small donors, so it is possible to do that, but we haven’t been able to do that, and no other drug reform group has really got more than 10, 15, 20,000 members. So despite the millions and millions of users. So MAPS was started as this reaction to a market failure.

34:49 You could say that MDMA, because it was invented by Merck in 1912 and patented in 1914, it was off patent. And because it’s only meant to be used a few times, it’s not like your traditional medicine where the pharmaceutical company wants you to take it twice a day for the rest of your life and you stop taking it, your problems come back. So it’s not designed as a money maker. And so the pharmaceutical company wasn’t interested. The government, which normally funds a lot of psychiatric research, the National End of Mental Health and others, they were so wedded to the drug war that there was no government money anymore for psychedelic research.

35:26 And the major foundations were also unwilling. I actually had a meeting a couple years ago at the first breaking convention with the Wellcome Trust. Here in London, it’s huge. It’s the biggest charity in all of England. It’s got $20 billion and it’s focused on neuroscience and medicine. Through David Nutt, he arranged for some meetings for me with some of their main people. We’re sitting at this meeting and we’re talking about the problems of post-traumatic stress disorder, the value of MDMA, and all they could say was, this is a reputational risk. I said, this is a reputational opportunity.

36:04 You can get in on the ground floor and they were like, no, this is a reputational risk. And I want to get your view on why people turn off when they hear MDMA and then the wording, the language between a drug and a medicine. But if I fast forward you to today, and just so people can get an idea of what MAPS is doing, I know you’re running MDMA studies, I know you’ve got veterans together, I think you’ve got some firefighters and a police officer, and so for people that might not be completely unaware of what you’re doing, can you describe some of the things you’re doing today with MDMA therapy?

36:34 Yeah, and I’ll just preface it by saying that because I sort of came from this identification as being a counter-culture criminal, that I felt that the arc of my life is trying to become accepted by the mainstream. So there was this period where I wanted to become a clinical psych PhD and learn how to do psychotherapy outcome research, and I couldn’t get into any graduate schools. So I shifted my focus because the politics was in the way of the science, I decided to study the politics.

37:06 So I applied to the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, where there was a professor, Mark Kleinman, who was aware of the initial lawsuit against the DEA that I had done. And so he agreed to be my mentor and encouraged me to apply. So I started at the Kennedy School and got my master’s from 88 to 90. And then in 2001, I got my PhD from there. And I focused on the regulation of the medical use schedule on drugs, particularly psychedelics and marijuana. So all that is just to say that I have tried to learn to combine science and politics and social change. So what we had to do first off was look at which psychedelic and which patient population is most likely to be accepted by the mainstream.

37:56 And we felt that the classic psychedelics like LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, ayahuasca, ibogaine, that they’re a major challenge to people’s ego structures, they’re a challenge to society, they’re tremendously valuable but they’re also very difficult and that MDMA is more gentle, is more heart-opening. It doesn’t have the history that LSD does. It hasn’t been demonized ever really. Well, yeah. It may be illegal quickly.

38:31 Well, yes, it’s now demonized pretty equally, I’d say, because of the, you know, the rave movement and the young people using it for recreational purposes. But it felt like MDMA was the drug that was most likely to lead the way to open the door to psychedelic medicine and eventually to a post-prohibition world where psychedelics will be legally available to adults for religious, for personal growth, for creativity, for, you know, I’m having a meeting, by the way, with Robin Carhart-Harris tomorrow to talk about an LSD creativity study we’re thinking of starting. But the main point was- We like Robin.

39:07 He’s great. So the main point, though, was that we need to pick patients that are held in high regard by our society. society. So psychedelics have a tremendous role in the treatment of drug addiction. Bill W who started AA in the 50s took LSD and thought that LSD could play a role in Alcoholics Anonymous.

39:30 But that was too controversial at the time. So addicts are the other. But veterans and firefighters and police officers, they’re the mainstream. Also, women survivors of childhood sexual abuse or adult rape or people that have just been attacked by violence, that people can identify with them. Identifiable victims.

39:55 Yeah, yeah. The other big area is people that are dying, which is all of us, and people that are anxious for, you know, about dying. So that’s an important area to work with as well. But I felt that MDMA for post-traumatic stress disorder would be the door opener. And so what we’re doing right now is really moving into the vision that I had in 1986 of a nonprofit pharmaceutical company.

40:26 So we have studies that we completed in Switzerland and in the US. We have ongoing studies with MDMA for post-traumatic stress disorder in Israel. We’re starting one in Canada and several sites now in the US. And our main work right now is focusing on veterans because there’s such a concern about the veterans coming back from Iraq and Afghanistan. There’s about 23 veterans that commit suicide every day now in the United States and one active duty soldier.

40:55 And so we have what’s called phase two studies. Phase one studies are where you characterize the safety of the drug in people who are not patients. Once you’ve shown that it’s safe enough to use, then you move to phase two, and that’s where you test out your treatments, you figure out your populations of patients, you figure out the doses, you work on your methodology as far as double blind, how you do the studies, and then once we complete that, we start the phase three, and the phase three studies are the definitive ones that will make, that will prove safety and efficacy, and then get you the ability to market the drug as a medicine.

41:37 So right now we’re about, since 2004, we’ve been doing these phase two studies. We’re a couple years away from completing our series of phase two studies and then starting what’s called an end of phase two meeting with the FDA where you discuss what your designs would be for phase three. And then we anticipate that those will take around five years. So we’re probably eight to 10 years from making MDMA into a medicine. And you know from your history to probably double that, right?

42:07 Yeah. Well, yeah. If when I go back and read the back issues of the maps bulletin, I mean, the one thing that’s the hardest for me to read is my time predictions and my cost predictions. And so I feel that, you know, in 10 plus years, I’ll be 70. I wanted to be a psychedelic therapist from the age of 18.

42:25 So it’s just been a long ramp up to my desired career. So I think at 70, I’ll be able to really start doing this legal full-time psychedelic therapy. And this is like your Trojan horse to get in the door. You took the most palatable medicine, MDMA, as opposed to psychedelic, the most, I mean, who can not like a veteran? You take the most police officers, firefighters, veterans, and probably the most that need it the most, and you’re pairing those together, you’re basically selling this to the public.

42:53 And if this goes through, then you will bring in hopefully cannabis studies or psychedelic studies. But we’re sort of, it’s like when you go to college you have a major and a minor. So our major is MDMA. We just got permission two days ago from the FDA for a new study with MDMA for autistic adults. Wow.

43:12 And it’s incredible. MDMA stimulates oxytocin and prolactin, which are hormones of bonding and affection. Nursing mothers have these, and it’s the age of the internet. So there’s a bunch of people who have Asperger’s or high functioning autistics who took MDMA at parties and felt that it taught them about emotions and helped them with their Asperger’s. So there’s all these reports on the internet that we gathered.

43:39 There’s a woman, Alicia Danforth, who did her PhD dissertation on gathering these reports, contacting as many of the people as she could, and then writing a paper about it, writing her dissertation about it, and we used that as the basis for our application to FDA. So we’re gonna be developing MDMA for autism, at least exploring that. And I felt symbolically to sort of bring back psychedelics, it was important for us to start something at Harvard, where Timothy Leary was, and also for us to start something with LSD.

44:11 So we were able to start a study with MDMA with end-of-life anxiety, and in Switzerland, we were able to start a study with LSD for end-of-life, And that’s now, we’ve just submitted the paper to an American Journal of Psychiatry to see. We’re not sure if they’ll accept it for review or not. We’re aiming high to begin with. So we have a small effort on work with psychedelics for the end of life. We have a small effort on Ibogaine and ayahuasca for the treatment of addiction.

44:43 The major effort is MDMA for post-traumatic stress disorder. And it’s almost like we’re like a mutual fund and you need a diversification portfolio. Yeah, you need a diversified portfolio of studies. Some attract certain people, others attract others. And so the irony is that you mentioned cannabis research that it’s easier for us to do research with psychedelics than it is with marijuana.

45:07 It boggles the mind, especially over in the UK, we hear that, you know, Colorado and Washington state have now legalized not only medical marijuana, but any kind of marijuana consumption. but yet you say you can’t get approved for a study. No, we can’t. We have a study that’s, okay, MDMA for post-traumatic stress disorder is about a few doses and helping people move through their symptoms to the point where you could call a durable remission or a cure. Marijuana is used by a lot of veterans, a lot of people with PTSD as a palliative to reduce the symptoms, but it’s used on a daily basis.

45:45 It’s still valuable. So for more political reasons, we tried to do research with marijuana for post-traumatic stress disorder. I mean, I’ve been trying to do marijuana research through MAPS for over 20 years. And we’ve had three studies, four studies actually, that we had approval from either the FDA or from the DEA to do, but NIDA, the National Institute on Drug Abuse, has a monopoly on the supply of marijuana, and if you want to make marijuana into a medicine, they don’t want to give it to you.

46:16 So all the states, there’s 18 states plus the District of Columbia that have legalized medical marijuana, two states that have legalized marijuana for all uses. But none of the marijuana that’s grown in those states is legal from a federal point of view. And the FDA is a federal agency. And so we just have lost a 12-year battle trying to get our own farm, our own marijuana farm. We won again at the administrative law judge level, but the DEA rejected it and we sued and we just lost in the appeals court and the decision that I thought was very narrow and mean-spirited. But what that means is that we lost and that there really is no way now to make marijuana into a medicine. We’re going to be reapplying for our marijuana PTSD study to NIDA again, but it’s mainly because I hope they will come to their senses and approve with the study, but our role in the marijuana movement is to try and fail to make it into a medicine federally so that other people can make the argument that we need state level reform because there is no route through the FDA.

47:23 So it’s ironic, we spent seven years trying to get 10 grams of marijuana for vaporizer research. We did the first studies of marijuana water pipes and vaporizers and showed that the water pipes don’t really do that much good. You look at the bong water and you think, man, there must be a lot of gunk in there that the bongs are helping you filter out. But they also filter out a lot of the cannabinoids in equal proportions. So the smoke that comes out of the other end of the water pipe is got the same proportion of particulate matter, combustion matter, and cannabinoids as it goes in.

48:01 So it doesn’t really help from a health point of view. But the vaporizers heat the marijuana up and don’t burn it. So you get this steam that comes off, and then it doesn’t have the products of combustion. It has lower carbon monoxide. Not to say that smoking marijuana is really dangerous because we know that the cannabinoids have anti-tumor properties, that people who are lifelong marijuana smokers don’t get lung cancer, don’t get throat cancer, that marijuana is not a cancer risk, that it’s actually a slight protective effect.

48:30 But that just- I just want to make your point clear. The reason you can’t do this study is because you can’t legally, Federally acquire the marijuana in order to do the study exactly okay, and I David nuts having a similar problem now getting psilocybin Well actually it’s easier. He’s working with a company that we’re also working with THC Pharma in Germany So they’re currently manufacturing psilocybin for him, okay And so his study will be able to start eventually, but it took him a long time and try to figure out It’s very expensive a hundred thousand pounds for a very small amount. Yeah, it’s extremely expensive the people that are making it though are chemists, they’re fully government licensed, but they also have a sense of mission. So they’re trying to do it for as reasonable a price as they can.

49:13 Do you get angry when you’re butting heads with the government? I mean you have a PhD in government basically, or is it just business? I mean you must get to be friends with these guys that you fight with in court and are they just doing a job to keep their job? That’s a very good question. I wouldn’t say that I get to be friends, but I get to be friendly. Okay. You know because there’s things that you know I try to tell them that their life work is counterproductive and but I try to say that we have a shared shared sense of trying to respond to drug abuse that psychedelics can be abused marijuana’s can it be abused and that it’s just we’re debating we have a similar end goal of reducing drug abuse but we have different methods and their method through prohibition and criminalization is completely counterproductive and unhelpful and causes more harm than it helps.

50:05 Did they ever admit that to you? Like, did you ever in a meeting where, and you’re like, come on, come on, look at the prison system. Well, it’s, I wouldn’t say they admit, but there’s a whole group now called LEAP, Law Enforcement Against Prohibition. So it’s one of the strong new developments that tells us that culturally change has really happened. There’s a group of former, these are almost all former police officers, narcotic officers who now, once they’ve retired, can come out and say that the drug war is pointless and should be abandoned.

50:37 So there are allies coming from the police community. And that actually was the thought that we had when with the MDMA study to open it up, not just to veterans, but to police officers. The reason that that actually came about is I was talking to a, I live in Boston in the maps offices like 12 people in Santa Cruz. So I just have a little quiet home office and most of the people are in Santa Cruz. So I was calling the office in Santa Cruz and I was speaking to this woman, Valerie Mujica, who was the coordinator there.

51:12 And she was saying that the police were all over the place. And it was because somebody had been murdered like five houses down. And there was a pregnant woman that had been murdered. And when I heard that, I just thought, God, what must it be like for a police officer to have to see that? You know, maybe these police officers, who I’ve, again, demonized the police, that they have this really hard job.

51:36 So then later that afternoon, I got a call from somebody from Vancouver, a psychologist, and he called me and said that he was curious about our Ibogaine study in Vancouver, how we got permission for it and what was, how did it work, Ibogaine for the treatment of addiction. And we got only a short way into it. And then he said, I really need to tell you, I’m a psychologist for the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. And we’re wondering about how this is working out.

52:05 And because I had been sensitized in the morning, I said, do you have people that have post-traumatic stress disorder from police work? And he said, yes, we do. And I work with a lot of them, and I have a hard time helping them. And so that started me thinking that if we could try to reach out to the police. And he said that if we do get a study in Vancouver, he might try to refer people to our study.

52:28 So that is our way to try to say that even for the police authorities, that they’re hurting themselves by suppressing all of these therapeutic approaches with psychedelics. So I think we’ve got now these cultural openings to the other side in a way. So I feel like there’s a lot of willful blindness and resistance among a lot of the authorities. I don’t get, I mean, I do get angry and that motivates me a lot, but anger when you’re confronting people doesn’t really help you a lot of times.

53:04 You have to be more rational and try to not push them away, but help build their doubts or help them come to the doubt. It’s very similar to therapy. So I see what I’m doing as sort of therapy for the culture and not as much therapy for the individual, but it’s the very similar principles that we have to help our culture deal with their fears and come to this realization that there’s a better way. And I think now most, many, many people feel that the drug war is a mistake, but they’re scared to take the next step.

53:37 They don’t know what’s next. Are we ready now? Is this the we generation now? Is it happening? Yes, and there’s a couple ways where I see that now this, 40 years later, after this massive crackdown.

53:51 Because you’ve seen it all. You’ve seen the cultural highs and lows. You’ve seen, you know, it’s almost every decade in America almost to cradle as a different drug. You’ve seen the go-go 80s, you know, in Florida, the cocaine, and are we at a point in time now where everyone’s willing to, I don’t know, care about each other? Not everyone, but I think the going to the moon and people seeing the planet from space, that people have for the last 40 years, 45 years, been grappling with the fact that it’s really one world.

54:25 The whole global warming has this other aspect where it is becoming more and more unavoidable that we are in these systems that transcend national boundaries, that unify us, that are connecting us to these major forces of life, climate change. So I think people are wrestling with this globalization and in part, you see this retreat to fundamentalism in a lot of the mainstream religions as a reaction against the difficulties in trying to say that we’ve got the one right religion or the one best country and everybody is lesser than ourselves somehow. So I think that the retreat to fundamentalism is more of a sign of weakness rather than a sign of strength.

55:11 And the other big thing is that when psychedelics came fully to flower in the culture in the 60s, it was a time where culture was completely unprepared. People who were dying, my aunt died of cancer at age 21. My grandparents didn’t even tell her that she had cancer. You didn’t talk about cancer. My father is a pediatrician.

55:33 He wasn’t even allowed in the delivery room when his kids were born. It was all medicalized and women are tranquilized. If you talked about yoga, or the whole thing about the Beatles going to the Maharishi in India, anything about meditation was so wacky by the mainstream. And at the same time, you talk about yoga, and that was like a weird thing. People didn’t do it.

55:56 So I think if we look at what happened in the 60s as an early explosion of a lot of healthy things that the society couldn’t quite deal with, and the advocates also had their own issues. But now we have hospice centers. So in 1974 was the first hospice center in America, in the world basically, to help people go through death, not with medicalized treatment, but to accept death in a way now. But not with psychedelics as they were illegal. No, totally not with psychedelics.

56:29 But in 2004, 30 years later, there was over 3,500 of them. So I think cultural change takes decades and decades. We also now have revamped our whole approach to birth, and we have birthing centers and women are not tranquilized as much, men are into the delivery room, so we’ve sort of taken these raw elements of life, of death and birth, and we’ve found new ways to relate to them. We also have meditation and yoga at the YMCA or in traditional places, so that culturally we’re now prepared for the reintroduction of psychedelics.

57:07 And so I think we’re, and also we have the aging of the baby boomers. So we have a lot of people that did psychedelics when they were young, gave it up because they had drug testing at work or they wanted to raise their families and they weren’t sure what to tell their kids. And now these people are retiring and a lot of them have social credibility from the things that they’ve accomplished in their lives, they have resources, and they’re now staring death in the face.

57:37 And so they’re thinking back to their youth, people tend to get more spiritual, you know, once they get older. And so we have this enormous wave of people that are comfortable with psychedelics. So time is actually on our side as these people are willing more and more to step out. So I think we do have a chance to build a healthier society, to end the drug war, to re-innogate psychedelics, and to create a more mystical culture here in the U.S., but grounded, mystical but grounded.

58:08 And it could take another 20, 30 years, but I think the openings towards medical marijuana, the openings towards all sorts of psychedelics now having re-entered the laboratories. And the tipping point is that we’ve now got evidence about benefits. For so many years, all that was necessary for opponents and prohibitionists to say is, these drugs have risks, there’s no evidence of benefits, so therefore they should be illegal. But now… All anecdotal evidence. You’ll jump out the window on LSD. No one ever did a clinical trial.

58:45 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there are dangers. I mean, it’s true that there are dangers. Some people did jump out windows. I mean, I think that we’re needing to be more careful proponents. It’s not like everybody should do these things. It’s not like they don’t have their risks. But at the same time, there’s value there. So I think that collectively as a species, too, we are looking at these global patterns that are destroying the planet, destroying the resources, destroying the environment. How are we going to deal with it? We have to really shift a lot. And I’ve talked to a fair number of people who have, okay, so this gets us back to the Good Friday experiment. Okay, so the Good Friday experiment was done in 1962. It was the best thing that Timothy Leary ever did. He was the faculty sponsor.

59:36 There was a lot of interest in whether psychedelics could help people have a religious experience. And in 1962, psychedelics weren’t nearly as controversial as they became later in the decade and as they are now. So professors of religion and others were interested in this. There’s even a psychedelic therapist from the 50s that told me that an emissary of Pope at the time, his confessor was this woman, nun, came to understand about LSD and to see about the relationship between LSD and a mystical experience.

1:00:13 So hard to believe. It’s shocking. Yeah, so there was this effort to try to study it, and Martin Luther King went to Boston University and got his Ph.D. there, and his mentor was a fellow Reverend Howard Thurman who was one of the beautiful, dynamic black ministers who was just eloquent, and he was in charge of the chapel at Boston University. And he said to Timothy Leary that you can do this experiment where 20 people who were divinity students at Andover Newton Theological Seminary would come into the Boston University Chapel on Good Friday and that they would be in a basement chapel and they would all get pills.

1:00:55 Half would have a placebo, half would have psilocybin. There were 10 experimenters, half of them got the psilocybin and half of them got the a placebo, and then they would see whether this Good Friday service influenced these people to have spiritual experiences. And Walter Panky, who did the study, spent a year beforehand or more studying the world’s mystical literature and trying to develop what is the common elements between the different religions in terms of how they describe the mystical experience.

1:01:26 Common elements were a sense of unity, either internal or external, like the external world is all together, but somehow there’s this, and modern physics does the same thing now, that there’s a sense of something sacred, a deeply felt positive mood, that there’s a sense of the transcendence of time and space in certain ways. So he developed this questionnaire that didn’t have any specific cultural references, no mention of Jesus, mention of Buddha or Moses or anything like this and they administered the questionnaire to the people that were in this service and then they found that nine out of the twenty had a partial or a full mystical experience and eight out of those nine had the psilocybin and so they felt that their hypothesis was confirmed that statistics it’s it’s pretty clear and small sample but still It’s a small sample, pretty clear.

1:02:21 But unfortunately, Walter Panky in 1971 died in a scuba diving accident. And so nothing much got done. And in the mystical literature, the classic test of whether an experience is genuine is called the Fruits Test. So what’s the fruit of the tree? Is the fruits of this experience positive?

1:02:42 Does it make you more loving? Does it make you more compassionate? And that only comes through long-term. The Fruits Test. The Fruits Test.

1:02:50 Interesting. Yeah. So that’s the classic test of mystical experience. So because Walter Panky had died, and because I started trying to figure out in the 80s as my new college required everybody to do a senior thesis, and it was impossible to get permission to actually do psychedelic research, but I realized that the Good Friday experiment, there was this tremendous opportunity to do a long-term follow-up because it didn’t require giving any drugs. It was just…

1:03:18 Had been done. Yeah, I just needed to find these people and say, what do you think about it now? And it was right in the middle of this Reagan expansion of the war on drugs. So if they were in any way inclined to reject their past, the culture would support them in doing that. So even though all the people, none of their names were known, I didn’t know how to get to them.

1:03:44 Was dead, Timothy Lear didn’t have any records of who they were. I went to the school that they went to, Andover Newton Theological Seminary, and I found a list of alumni as of 1973, but it listed the years of when people had been in school. So I got the names and addresses of everybody that was in that school in 1962 and wrote a letter to all of them. And through multiple years, it eventually led me to 19 out of the 20 of them. And I went all over the country and interviewed as many of them were willing to talk to me, which were 16.

1:04:17 One of them had died and two refused to talk to me, one who had the psilocybin and one who had the placebo. But this sort of confirmed my life work for me because what I found is that the people who had the psilocybin looked back and said that it was a genuine experience, that they had subsequent mystical experiences without drugs, that they preferred actually, and preferred them because they were more uniformly positive. The psychedelics are very volatile and you could be scared of losing your mind or scared of dying and you let go and then you have this profound experience and then you’re carried along and then a few minutes later, you know, something else dramatic happens and it’s another struggle. So they generally preferred the non-drug mystical experiences but they felt that their mystical experiences from the psilocybin were genuine, and they remembered it. The most important thing I found, which I almost overlooked, is that they could remember 25 years before very vivid moments of their psychedelic experiences, the people who got the placebo, which was nicotinic acid, which gives you a hot flush and changes your face a little bit, you get a flush, you turn red a little bit, that they weren’t that affected by the study and had minimal memories of what happened.

1:05:36 But the more important part was, in a way, the key to the 60s, was that they talked about how the mystical experience, the sense of the transcendence of time and space, they came to a new understanding of death. And they were no longer as scared of dying. And they also came to a new sense of our common humanity. And because of that, and because of the immediacy of the moment, that the psychedelics enhanced the moment, that they felt that social change now while they’re alive, rather than waiting for the Messiah to come or having your just desserts in heaven, that they became more active in the social justice movements of the day, in the women’s rights movement, the environmental movement, the anti-war movement, civil rights movement.

1:06:26 So this combination of this mystical sense of union, the reduction of the fear of death, the sense of the moment. So I felt many people say that the crackdown took place, the backlash took place because when psychedelics went wrong, people took it, jumped out of windows, all these things went to a mental institution, that that was sort of a normal reaction of a society. But I think what really caused the crackdown more was when psychedelics went right, when people were inspired by it.

1:06:54 But we didn’t have the sophistication to try to work on the social change without demonizing the other, the government, or talking about withdrawing and going, you know, dropping out. So I think that the Good Friday experiment confirmed my theory of social change, which is that if we can work to integrate a society where those people that want to can have these direct mystical experiences, that they will end up better citizens. And we’re seeing that a lot now with the spread of ayahuasca, which is, I’d say, mostly encased in a religious tradition, varieties of religious traditions, and there’s a lot of people who, you know, I had…

1:07:40 Let me get Alexander’s thoughts just on all of this stuff. I mean, sorry, I can listen to you for a few hours. I was just curious, Alexander, anything that come up that you wanted to add? the whole way that these psychedelics are affecting culture itself. Yeah I mean this is something I’ve been thinking about a lot lately because you see all these people having these truly profound experiences and going through incredible amounts of self-healing but you know where is this all going on a kind of societal level and I do kind of see it the way people have lost this fear of connecting to others and they connect to this more of a oneness and it really takes me back to the way some of these more tribal cultures interacted. They had more of a sense of community where they shared all of this sort of thing and there’s been a really fascinating book actually called The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight and it’s referring back to like all throughout history you have these dominated cultures which are based on the acquisition of all these resources and how throughout history there’s not been one that survived or risen and fallen throughout history and then that we can do a lot of great good by incorporating a lot of these traditions that are about in these more tribal cultures not that we need to go back to living in the jungle but we can do a lot of good by integrating some of them with this connection to nature. Now ayahuasca is funny these days because it’s it’s

1:09:05 Almost like the trendy thing to take especially for you know women in Notting Hill and Chelsea in their 30s and it’s it’s not LSD and I’m not I’m doing those magic mushrooms, I hate that word by the way. I’m doing ayahuasca and I do it in the jungle and I do a diet beforehand. And I’m just wondering what your thoughts are on the rebirth of ayahuasca. To be very honest, this show 18 months ago, we did a show about ayahuasca. We’d never done any psychedelics.

1:09:32 I was terrified. We did a before and after show. It was one of our most popular things we did. And we talked about the experience and I’m just curious, are you happy to embrace ayahuasca in the promotion of your movement? Well, yes.

1:09:46 But I’m a little bit cautious about the ayahuasca religions. And this is where I feel when we talk about native cultures. And for me, the core of our strategy is actually the embrace of Western science, of the critical, self-critical process of trying to understand what’s really true by not accepting things on faith, not accepting dogma and trying to really find out what’s going on. Clinical. You want a clinical.

1:10:19 Well, clinical often means treating illness. So it’s not only that, because it’s for people for personal growth. But I want it to be scientific. So I think that there’s a lot to be gained. ayahuasca is doing an incredible amount of good in society all over the world right now.

1:10:39 Spreading dramatically, the ayahuasca church, the Unya de Vejitaal had a US Supreme Court case that was unanimous in favor of their religious freedom. Is the Santo Daimi one? The Santo Daimi was not up to the Supreme Court level, but there was an appeals court case on the Santo Daimi. And there’s a case here in England about trying to legitimize the Unya de Vejitaal, the ayahuasca churches. But I think that the baggage that you get is the religion.

1:11:07 And the but the the religion does a lot of good it creates a respectful attitude towards it It creates a sense of sacredness. You talked about the diet and the preparation Allows it to be legal in the US was without the religion. It couldn’t be yes. Yes, it couldn’t be but I I still feel like The individual should have the human right to explore consciousness without having to buy into any particular religion. So there’s not this kind of disconnect of this is a healer and this is the patient, it’s a personal journey that the individual goes through. Yeah, I think that the religion, the legal system is set up to protect religious groups but then they have to have all of these rituals that they they follow and often they can get in the way. I feel that some of the things that some of the culture dominates over the drug experience. So that the ayahuasca churches tend to be patriarchal, hierarchical, homophobic, and do they really? Yeah, yeah, they’re not models that we would say are something that we should adopt without modification. There’s a lot of wisdom encased in them but that’s where I just gravitate more towards science and therapy and in medicine. But I’ve done ayahuasca in the uniado-vegetale context, I’ve done ayahuasca in the Santo Diami context, and those were valuable experiences. But you have to have a sort of a mind that, at least for me, a generous, compassionate mind where you hear

1:12:52 These statements and you interpret them in a broader way than they’re said. Sort of And, you know, so the Unya de Vegetal believed that King Solomon went to the Brazil and told them about how to put the plants together. And I was like, well, you know, okay, some wise person, you know, this is a metaphor, right? Sounds like the Book of Mormon. It’s not that different.

1:13:15 And I’m like, is this a metaphor or is this like what you really believe? And so I’m going like, well, we really believe it. I know the word shaman is like kind of a buzzword and it’s something I’ve heard you talk about before. And it’s funny that you said this male-dominated homophobic culture because like my experience in London is with a wonderful female shaman with all sorts of wonderful giving matriarchal energy and the singing and everything. And if I book an appointment with her, I’ll see her and then I won’t hear from her.

1:13:42 So it’s not like I’m being, there’s no selling, there’s no requesting participation funds. There’s no funny business with the church. It’s like, look, and the ceremony is about me. It’s a guide, but it’s ultimately about me. So that’s my experience with it, which is all good.

1:13:58 I don’t get any of this creeping, like, it’s time for you to come back to the church, Brian. But I can see how that would be a very off-putting. Yeah. And I think this woman, I wonder if she is adhering close enough to either the Santo Daimi or the Yona Unyadu Vichal, that she would be protected by religious freedom. modifying what she learned and is bringing it more into the modern context.

1:14:27 Yeah, and she’s a rebel in that sense. Yeah, so I think that’s the kind of transition that we’re seeing more and more. That you can still respect where you came from, but that you can outgrow it. And I think there’s this analytical work that’s done by science that gives us the access to media, like right now our scientific studies, are something that, you know, you read the paper any day, there’s, you know, the study said this, the study said that, and so we get earned media that’s enormous, you know, we’ve had articles in the multiple articles in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and Nature, and all these places that report on our findings where we have a multiplication effect from the science that we do.

1:15:15 So for me, the science is the key to the regulatory agencies. And we also see right now that science and religion in many respects are coming together. There’s more studies now about meditators. There’s actually a project that’s being worked on in Switzerland where lifelong Zen meditators will go into a seven to 10 day meditation retreat and will be administered psilocybin during it, that they’ll have brain scans before and after. They’ll have measures of compassion, altruism, and other sort of fruits kind of tests.

1:15:49 And so I think the beauty is that when we talked about modern culture, that we look back to Galileo and Copernicus and the science and the church were clashing. And there’s been this long hundreds and hundreds of years where they kind of stayed out of each other’s way. And now they’re coming together in a lot of ways. We’re understanding the neurobiological basis mystical experiences, which parts of the brain are involved in it. We’re understanding, you know, what is metaphor and what you need, how you can proceed.

1:16:20 So for me, I think the ayahuasca is doing a remarkable amount of good, but it is being modified in a lot of ways by a lot of people who use it and taking it out of the traditional structures. I think that’s good also because a lot of the shamanism in the jungle, it’s all just involved in all this fighting actually there’s a lot of conflicts with the shamanism and I know you know depending how you feel about it a lot of people they say they contact the spirit of ayahuasca and I’ve heard many accounts where the ayahuasca is sort of relayed the information and it’s very thankful that it’s coming into this more Western audience because it wants to get out of all this terrible dark fighting that goes on between these shamans. Yeah well the whole books by Carlos Castaneda which were really big you know in the 60s that a lot of it But it was about power.

1:17:09 It was primarily about amassing personal power, fights between the different shaman, which is different from healing. It’s counterintuitive if your business is a psychedelic, that you would develop those egoistic traits. Yeah. Well, it’s the culture that is predominant. So the drug experience is an opportunity.

1:17:29 And I think that’s the big understanding, is that the cultural contexts really are predominant. So then you could have a homophobic religion that’s got psychedelic at its core. And how does that happen? Because we’re molded by our culture. And so I think the kind of science spirituality healing element, more so than the power struggles.

1:17:56 And I think you need to look also at the core of our method. In order to develop any psychedelic into a medicine, we recognize that it’s the psychedelic assisted psychotherapy. It’s not that you just give the drug and people get healed on their own. So what is the method? And in shamanism, it’s not always the case.

1:18:16 It’s often the case that the power dynamics, the power flows to the shaman. Often in a lot of modern medicine, it’s like that, too. The doctor heals you. The shaman sometimes even takes the drug and the patient doesn’t even take the drug. shaman takes a drug goes into this altered consciousness somehow works with these spirits and then you know now we would understand that as the placebo effect or or maybe there are these connections but it’s more the shaman doing it to you and a lot of times so the essence of our therapeutic method is to sort of liberate what we call the inner healer that you know you get a cut and your body somehow knows how to heal it. Your psyche has these similar kind of self-healing mechanisms. And so if we can help people to understand their defenses, understand their fears, and sort of let things come to the surface and then work with them, that people can be empowered to heal themselves. And so that’s what we’re trying to do. So our method is non-directive. We don’t even use the word guide so that that because that creates this idea that the therapist knows what you need to do the therapist is guiding you through this terrain and there’s been there before and so it’s more that the therapist it’s more like a midwife understanding you know that that the woman has to give birth and she’s got to do the work and you can assist that and so that empowers women when you’re thinking about like that it’s the same as with

1:19:49 Psychedelic psychotherapy, if you understand that the people who you’re working with have to make these courageous choices to face things that are difficult, to put them into practice, to look at the ways in which they’ve been hurt and try to understand or forgive. So it’s a non-directive approach. We have eight-hour sessions, we have male-female co-therapist teams, and there’s no structure in a sense that people can talk about their trauma in the first hour or they can talk about it in the sixth hour or whenever.

1:20:22 Is this for MDMA? This is for MDMA, also for LSD. The idea is that the therapist is the midwife assisting the person to come to their own understanding so that eventually the therapist is not needed. That’s the idea. Can they be alone if they want?

1:20:41 After a while they could. Yeah. I’ve had some of my most important experiences with LSD in a flotation tank alone or MDMA camping out by myself. But that was after I had a lot of experience taking it in groups. And I think you also have to be careful. You know, when I did those things, I wasn’t moving.

1:21:01 I wasn’t walking around. I wasn’t, you know, endangering myself. And I also went through a process where I felt like I had this very bad, wrong idea that was sort of taking me over. It was almost like a psychosis sort of working through me, and I at least knew enough not to stop it, not to get up. This was in the flotation tank, and it took me hours and hours and hours before I realized all the defenses that I was using to protect myself from this core pain that I had made this major mistake. So I think doing it alone can be very helpful, but at the same time, you have to be, it’s good to have somebody somewhere that’s not doing the drug that is watching over you and guarding your physical safety and protecting you from people coming to the door, from the phone, that, you know, so I wouldn’t, you know, recommend that a lot of, you know, that, I think it can be done alone and but I think that that is more of an advanced situation that when people try it for the first time they they or the first bunch of times you’ve intrigued me with this mistake well what’s this mistake I’ll have you uncovered it must be something that drives a man like you well this is the mistake that drives many men there’s a darkness that drives all of many many men well this was the the mistake of saying to a woman that you love no I I will not sleep with anybody else,” and then resenting that.

1:22:36 I’m sure you’re not the first guy to do that. And then going off and doing that, and then the relationship that comes out and the relationship ends. So that was the mistake. And coming to terms with that, I had destroyed what was one of the most beautiful things that I had in my life, that was hard. And the psychosis part of it, in a way, was that I somehow got this idea that this woman that I had to leave this experience in the flotation tank because she was likely to commit suicide, that I had to somehow rescue her, that she couldn’t live without me, that I’d broken her heart and destroyed this relationship, and that she was in danger.

1:23:19 And so it took me hours and hours and hours to realize that she was not in danger, she was done with me. So you had to fight the urge to get out of the tank, and because you had done psychedelics before you knew to fight that urge. No, everything’s fine, stay in the tank, stay with your experience. Yeah, and finally after hours, I realized that it was about how I didn’t think I could live without her. But that it took me a long time to get to that.

1:23:44 And so it came as the opposite. She can’t live without me, she’s about to commit suicide, I have to save her. But that was running away from the deeper fear that I couldn’t live without her. And that I would be so flawed that I wouldn’t be able to have a relationship ever again because I was such a weak person. Did you deal with this on that session or is it something that comes up periodically?

1:24:10 I did and I did do it during that session. I was 17 hours in the tank. Wow, did you know it was when you got out? I didn’t know how long it was. I mean, I should say that the tank is also filtered so you can pee in the tank.

1:24:24 It’s heavily- You’re in the tank for 17 hours. Yeah. In the dark. dark and just sort of going, you know, part of the time I would be sort of halfway sleeping, but I knew not to leave. And then once I got out, you know, it was, I, there was this one moment where I felt that this guilt and that this self, there was this self-hatred connected to this sense of guilt. And I felt that that kind of introjected could cause disease.

1:24:54 And I felt like there was these, I had the image of these barbed fish hooks that were in my cells that were like cancer, that I would be somehow hating myself so much for doing this. And once I sort of accepted the fact that, you know, that this is what I had done, that I didn’t want to keep repeating that pattern, I felt this burst of light, several like x-rays almost that were like cleansing these darts and then I felt I saw this image of these fish hooks somehow or other moving out of the cells and that then I could move on and try to lead a different kind of life. Wow, that’s a good example of the power of a psychedelic.

1:25:37 I just want to make this point that’s obvious now but I’ve had Carhartt Harris in here and Professor Nutt in here and I get shit later sometimes from my audience because they’re are like, Brian, you didn’t ask him if he does mushrooms. You didn’t ask him if he does this and that. And I always respect the work that they’re doing, that I don’t put them on the spot about their personal life. And maybe it’s a reflection of me being part of, just like society is, and I want our scientists to be scientists.

1:26:03 But you’re a rare exception, because you’re quite open when you talk about your own, what do you call it, drug use? No, medicine use? Yeah, my own tools that have been useful to me my life. Has that ever hurt you? Have you ever…

1:26:20 Oh, yeah. Well… I mean, the Wellcome family, you know, is that part of it? No, I don’t think that was the Wellcome Trust. I don’t think that was an issue, but I think, you know, just look at MAPS, Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies.

1:26:34 So we had a lot of thought. I thought about it a lot, whether I should even put the word psychedelic there. So I felt like there’s so much bullshit about drugs. There’s so much propaganda that the better approach would be to just speak from my own experience and then at least people would know that I’m wrestling with these things and also that I didn’t want to use a different word than psychedelic. I mean this comes up all the time now as we’re trying to do more and more mainstreaming.

1:27:00 I mean I’ve been told by some of the people in the military drop that word psychedelic because it’s difficult for us to deal with. But if we use any other word, entheogen, it’s entheogen and hallucinogen. If you are government funded to do research with psychedelics, and I use the word psychedelics, people talk about them as hallucinogens. Now this is government funded research into the risks or into the mechanism of action, but you have to use this word hallucinogen that somehow or other means it’s all a delusion.

1:27:30 There’s nothing real about it. There’s some fundamental misunderstanding of the world and that these drugs, the earlier word was psychomimetic. These drugs cause psychosis. So entheogen, I feel, I never consciously, I never use that word when I speak because entheogen was developed to kind of respond to the negative words, respond to the controversy over psychedelic and it’s meant to talk about the God within. It’s almost apologizing for not saying psychedelic.

1:28:01 Well, it’s too positive, because a lot of people don’t have spiritual experiences when they’re psychedelics, or they end up worse off. It’s not always about this communication with the divine. It can be, but it isn’t always. So I think we don’t want to repeat the mistakes by just framing them in a more positive way. So for me, psychedelics, it means mind manifesting.

1:28:29 And I think that we can reclaim the cultural connotations the same way the gay rights movement has done about gay. Yeah, just take it back. Yeah, and over time people do it. And I think as far as my personal use, the time that it was of most disadvantage in a way was when we were suing the DEA about trying to get this marijuana farm. And the DEA lawyers, we had the American Civil Liberties Union pro bono working with us and we also had major DC law firms and the DEA lawyers made this fundamental mistake which was that they let me testify I was testifying and this was a courtroom inside the DEA headquarters where you had to get security clearances just to get in there and I’m like oh my god I’m like right in the center of you know the DEA and you know they let me in but are they gonna let me out and so at the but the mistake that the DEA lawyers made is at the end of the day, they decided to challenge my credibility and they said, have you ever used marijuana?

1:29:32 And so the lawyers, we had prepared for this, we knew they were going to ask it at some point, but our response was going to be, I’m not asking for the license, it’s this Professor Craker at UMass Amherst that it’s irrelevant. And so the lawyers were going to object and we figured that the judge would sustain that objection. So the DEA said, you know, have you ever, you know, used marijuana? The lawyers objected and then the judge said something that totally surprised us, which she said that if it’s a criminal case and you don’t want to answer, in the United States, you know, people plead the Fifth, the Fifth Amendment, the right against self-incrimination, that you’re own, you can’t be tortured to say, confession, you know, that you can’t testify against yourself.

1:30:20 So she said that in a criminal case, if you plead the Fifth, the judge cannot draw any negative inferences about what that might mean. But in a civil case, that if you refuse to answer, you can refuse to answer, but that the judge can interpret that refusal however he or she wants. So I felt like at that moment that I didn’t want to lie and said that I hadn’t smoked marijuana and so I felt that it was important, and they were also trying to intimidate me in different ways.

1:30:59 So I said yes. Did you have to decide in the moment? Yeah, because Laura’s like looking at me, but yeah, so I said yes, you know, I do smoke marijuana and then they asked have you ever smoked the government marijuana you know because we had we did get some government-grown marijuana for our first vaporizer study but we didn’t get it from the government we got it from one of the few patients that legally get marijuana so I said no I’ve never smoked the government marijuana nor would I want to because it’s such poor quality yeah yeah nor would I want to and because we the case had already been about the poor quality of the government marijuana. So later on in the we won the case. First off they should have tried to stab to challenge my credibility at the beginning of the day rather than the end of the day when I had done a good job of educating the judge. But then they tried to use my personal marijuana use as a reason not to give the license to somebody else to Professor Craker. But over time through our various appeals they finally ended up saying that that wasn’t the key issue, that I didn’t even need to be there.

1:32:13 I said, I never need to even go to this facility. So they finally admitted that that wasn’t an issue. And so you know that when people have, lawyers have a weak argument, they attack the person. It’s a desperate attempt to stick there. So in that way, but whether it makes me biased, see that’s where this idea that some scientists would be reluctant to say that they’ve done these drugs for fear, that’s Dave Nutts concern is that if he said and he hasn’t done these drugs and he’s not gonna do these drugs because he thinks that that would open him up to this accusation that he’s biased. And is he right? Well I don’t I don’t think so because for me at least my response has been scientific methodology that we’re all biased that that’s the whole purpose of science is to develop these procedures to eliminate, to the maximum extent we can, the investigator bias.

1:33:09 Through randomization, through double blind, through independent raters, through all the different ways. So what I say to people that say, are you biased? I say yes, but we all are. And so that’s where look at the methodology of our protocols. Look at the science.

1:33:28 Is it sufficient to eliminate bias to the extent that we can? if it’s not, then criticize our science and then we will try to learn from that and modify our designs. But many scientists have a hunch about something. You know, why do they look at this or that? They could look at any number of things. They have a hunch. Maybe this might work. Maybe there’s something there. So I think the knowledge that I’ve gained from my use of psychedelics. And I’ve found also that it’s useful throughout the lifespan.

1:34:06 Albert Hoffman had this idea that you take psychedelics maybe once a decade and then you spent the next 10 years or so integrating it. It has so much information there to integrate into a life. It can take a lifetime. Yeah. And he looked at it more as a spiritual, mystical experience. And then you grounded over all these years.

1:34:27 Stan Groff, whose approach is more therapeutic, had this idea that you can take psychedelics once a month for a couple of years, even, as you’re, not every day, and even the key for us in our MDMA work is that we have a somewhat variable time. The sessions are three to five weeks apart. And whether it’s three weeks or five weeks depends in part on people’s schedules, but mostly it depends on have they integrated the prior experience? Are they ready? And that’s what I learned from my early work with psychedelics that I kept taking the psychedelics more and more frequently in hopes of these breakthroughs and was not getting these breakthroughs and was getting more disoriented and raw, but not wiser, is that I needed to take for me a decade out to get grounded.

1:35:20 And during that decade, I would chip away at little bits of LSD or practice trying to get back to it. Because I had overvalued the hope that you just take a drug and it makes you smarter and it isn’t that way. You have to ground it and integrate it. So I feel that for me personally, it’s more effective to acknowledge my own use of these drugs and to be willing to speak about it because that’s where I come from and that’s what I’ve learned and people hear so much bullshit about drugs, it’s nice to hear somebody.

1:35:56 And at the same time, that’s where I’ve said several times that the science is the key, is that that is the response to bias. Right. It’s funny because it’s like part of me wants, you know, Professor Nutt not to be a practicing drug user and I can say, look mom, he doesn’t do it, but then that actually is an indicator of my own cultural bias that I’m just as guilty of as the rest of the world in that we still have this cultural piece of maybe drugs make us look bad or less objective or something like that.

1:36:26 Yeah. And I think if we look at social change movements, I mean, one of the ones that’s making the most progress right now in the United States is gay rights and gay marriage. And that’s happening more and more in different states. Yeah. A lot’s happened in 20 years.

1:36:38 A lot. What’s really driven that process is people who are gay acknowledging that they’re gay, coming out, and people who are in sports, or in science, or in government, or in business, and you see, wow, they’ve accomplished a lot, that they’re not defined by being gay. That that’s just something who they happen to be, and I’m not defined by my drug experiences. I’m trying to, you know, develop medicines that will help people deal with emotional wounds and that that’s the work that I’m doing.

1:37:13 It does happen that I’ve been motivated by psychedelics, but that I think people who what we need is like a massive coming out of people who have done psychedelics who have accomplished a lot, you know, I’ll say this about Carl Sagan. You know, Carl Sagan is widely respected as a great scientist and did a lot of work with the space movement, space exploration. And he was a daily pot smoker for the last 20, 30, 40 years of his life. But he was scared to say that because he had all these government permissions and approvals, and it came out after his death that this was what he had done.

1:37:53 So there’s a lot of people that are intimidated about admitting that they use these drugs. So if people could understand how many people that they respect from the outside have this secret history of drug use, that I think people’s attitudes would be changed. Because we mostly think of drug users as burnouts who just can’t accomplish anything in their life and hang out, smoke pot, and eat Doritos and sit on the couch. So more people need to come out. I think that’s also admit to doing LSD. Oh, yeah. Yeah, Steve Jobs is fantastic. Yeah You know, I spent years trying to get to him and I finally had a half-hour conversation with him and it was You know five six years before he died and it was terrific what he was saying I failed in getting him to donate which was of course my he didn’t do a lot of donating though No, he was not very generous in that way and his wife apparently isn’t as sympathetic with psychedelics as he was Yeah, so he was notoriously stingy in that way.

1:38:59 But at the end of our conversation, he said, all right, well, at the beginning of the conversation, and this took a lot. So I got a letter from Albert Hoffman to Steve Jobs that I helped Albert draft saying, you know, I heard that psychedelics were really important to you and helped your creativity. I’d love to talk to you about that and more about it. you know, would you be open to supporting LSD research, our study in Switzerland? And then I got another letter. Steve had a meditation, a Zen meditation teacher, Kobinchino, live at his house for like 15 years. So he was very into Zen. And Zen has these lineages. And so Kobinchino passed his lineage on to a fellow Vanya Palmers, who’s a Zen meditator in Switzerland, who’s involved in the study I mentioned before about the psilocybin in meditation. And so Vanya Palmers wrote a letter to him saying that I, you know, I’m the lineage holder from Copicino and I know that Coleman would be supportive of psychedelic research would you help. So that got Steve finally to call me. And the first thing he said is, I’m not going to give you any money. I just wanted to talk to you a little bit.

1:40:10 And I’ve got these other interests in therapy and I’m like, well, what are they? And then he started talking about understanding the mind and understanding in a way like computers, How does the mind work? A lot like what John Lilly did in the early work with LSD. But it led into this longer conversation and at the end of it he said, all right, send me a proposal. Well I sent him a proposal and I never heard back.

1:40:34 But who knows if he even got the proposal. I mean there’s so many people filtering things before it gets to him, but I failed. But he is the creator of what was at a certain point in its stock market value, the most valuable corporation in the whole world. And he attributes his creativity, a lot of it, to LSD. And it was one of the most important experiences of his life.

1:40:58 So I think if we had more people like that come out. And so I think when I acknowledge my own drug use and at the same time say, yeah, a PhD from Harvard and I’m not a total burnout, you know, it helps destigmatize a little bit and I know that some people will use that in their own minds to say he’s just a drug user and so there there’s a cost to it yeah but I think overall I think it’s more beneficial. It’s refreshing, I must say. Just a couple more questions. I want to ask, we had a post-traumatic stress disorder sufferer in that chair a few months ago.

1:41:36 His name is Jake Wood and he did two tours, one in Afghanistan, one in Iraq. And he’s back, he wrote a book about it. He’s pretty heavily medicated. And I said, you know, you should look into some of these alternate things such as MDMA therapy and psilocybin. And the first thing he said is, I don’t wanna trade one addiction for another.

1:41:55 I don’t wanna go from doing this to doing that. And I had a hard time kind of explaining what you do. And I was wondering for people, even if Jake is listening, I really like Jake. That would be great if he is, because what I’m about to say then is there was, well first off, our approach is a three and a half month process of therapy with weekly non-drug psychotherapy and only three days of MDMA. And at the end of it, it’s not like you get more MDMA.

1:42:21 It’s attempting to help people be healthy without drugs. I think it’s what you bring back from the drug experience that changes your normal, your state of normal, in a way that makes it so you don’t need the drugs. You want to resolve the issues, not just medicate them daily. Yeah. Because he’s on heavy medication.

1:42:39 Yeah. Which I think keeps him out of his depression, keeps him off the sofa. But no addressing the issues. Yeah, so one of the veterans in our study had, again, I’ve described it, we have three MDMA sessions. So in his first MDMA session, which turned out to be his only one.

1:42:58 He started realizing that he was using pain medications, narcotic pain medications for his war wounds, but that he had sort of slipped into using them more habitually, and not as much for pain, but just for emotional purposes, and that he was getting addicted to the opiates. And he decided that he didn’t wanna do that anymore. He also came to terms with a lot of the trauma that he had experienced and felt that he had resolved his post-traumatic stress disorder and decided during the MDMA experience that he would stop the opiates and he would drop out of the study because he didn’t need MDMA either.

1:43:45 He didn’t wanna do anything with drugs. So- One session. One session, not only that but our method is we give people an initial dose of MDMA and then one and a half to two and a half hours later they get half the initial dose and we call that the supplemental dose and that extends the plateau where they’re working on their issues because MDMA is relatively short, shorter than LSD or psilocybin. So he refused the supplemental dose. He decided to drop out of the study but we said would you please come for our two month and 12 month follow-up.

1:44:21 It turns out that at his two month and 12 month follow-up, his PTSD is still gone. For people that are worried that you’re trading one addiction for another, it’s not that way that you are sort of trading, dealing with the pain in an assisted way, in an intense but assisted way, so that then you don’t need to take these other drugs on a daily basis, sort of numb you a little bit to it. And of the people in our study, we did this three and a half year, on average, follow-up, which is a pretty long time after the MDMA.

1:45:03 We found that only one of the people in the study had gone out and done MDMA on their own. At least only one admitted that, too, so I think the others were probably being honest. And what she said was that she would never do that again because it was with a friend, it wasn’t as supported as much as it had been before, it didn’t quite help her the way she’d hoped, that it wasn’t in that intense therapeutic context. So we don’t have evidence that people who are in our studies, after the studies are over, actively seek out MDMA on their own.

1:45:36 The other thing about MDMA, it’s got pharmacological safeguards against addiction, and by that I mean is that the classic drugs that you get addicted to are drugs that are a reliable escape in some way or another, and then, unfortunately, people develop a tolerance, they start taking them more and more, and then they take higher doses to get the same feeling. So with MDMA, if you take it frequently, you develop this tolerance, but then you take higher doses, you don’t get that same open-hearted MDMA feeling. You get more of the amphetamine energized aspect to it.

1:46:17 But you can’t just use higher and higher doses and get back to the same feeling. And then the other thing about MDMA, which does touch on this question of brain changes, is that most people report, not everybody, but most people report that after they’ve done MDMA a certain number of times and it varies for everybody, that the effects start to diminish. And so I believe there is something changed and that MDMA, but it’s actually a good thing because you’ve got this window of opportunity and then it’s not quite as profound anymore for people.

1:46:53 So it’s kind of designed not to be addictive in a way. It wasn’t designed intentionally, but it has those properties. Just real quickly, I know you’ve talked about this before, but MDMA versus, say, psychedelics for someone with PTSD, is MDA have a general, could you generally describe it as a way of accepting yourself and loving yourself, whereas, say, the psychedelics might force yourself to confront deep issues inside yourself, and is there a reason you would rather use one than the other for PTSD?

1:47:21 Well, the very last person in the world that still had legal permission to work with LSD was a Dutch psychiatrist named Hans Bastians. And he was able to work with LSD into the 1980s. Now he wasn’t doing research, but he was treating patients on a compassionate basis. And his work was with what he called concentration camp syndrome. So he was working with people who were in the German concentration camps.

1:47:53 But not everybody was Jewish. They had a lot of other people that were in the concentration camps, including a lot of Dutch resistance fighters, some of whom were then more influential in the Dutch government afterwards. So his work with the concentration camp syndrome in LSD was protected. There’s an Israeli Holocaust writer who – his name was Kacetnik, and then it was some number that was the tattoo on his arm. And he was eloquent in his writings about the Holocaust, but tormented. And so he decided to go for LSD therapy. And he wrote this beautiful book.

1:48:31 It’s unfortunately out of print called Shaviti, A Vision. And it’s about his LSD therapy for what we would now talk about as post-traumatic stress disorder. But it’s very, very difficult. heart-wrenching. It’s so hard. LSD is difficult, and you can’t really negotiate with it. You have to surrender to it, and there’s not a lot of necessarily deep emotional support.

1:49:00 So friends of mine, some of my Israeli relatives knew this author and said that the LSD therapy for him was helpful, and you can see how in this book it was, but it wasn’t as helpful as he needed it to be. So I think that ideally, we would talk about legalizing psychedelic medicine. It’s not that MDMA is the best drug, or LSD, or ayahuasca is the best. These are all different doorways into our unconscious. And eventually, hopefully, we’ll have psychedelic medicine, psychedelic spirituality, and people will start with one drug and then move to other drugs or combine drugs so that their experiences are all slightly nuanced and different.

1:49:42 So I think that LSD could have a role in post-traumatic stress disorder, but I would start people with MDMA. I’ve also seen before MDMA was criminalized, and even now, a lot of people are exploring the LSD-MDMA combination, that LSD gives you this challenge to surrender, this flow where you really, I mean, if I had to have just one drug, I would take LSD rather than MDMA, because with MDMA you can negotiate with it, which is a good thing. Go to the happy place if you want to.

1:50:17 Yeah, but then maybe you avoid some difficult work. With LSD, you’re confronted with it. And so I think that the future of therapy for post-traumatic stress disorder is going to be ideally where people would meet with their therapist and they would talk about their prior experiences, and maybe they would start with MDMA most likely they would, but then they might move on to other things. There are now people that are taking veterans from the United States down to Peru for ayahuasca for post-traumatic stress disorder.

1:50:53 You know, ayahuasca is in some ways, I’d say, not easier than LSD or psilocybin, but it’s more anchored in the body. You know, there’s a lot of positive feelings to it. And so, some people find that they’re getting effective help from being treated initially just with ayahuasca for PTSD. So I think it’s individualized. And I guess our focus on MDMA is more strategic than MDMA is the best drug ever.

1:51:32 And that’s the, you know, it’s our top priority, but it’s really a doorway into psychedelic medicine psychedelic spirituality psychedelic exploration your plans are very well thought out I was listening to him earlier and I was like you’re like you know you’re like you’re like Sun Tzu you know you know planning for the resistance movement yeah before the Germans come like I don’t know if you know but England was ready for the Germans to occupy this country and so what a lot of towns and villages on the coast they put these whole intricate systems into place is how they communicate and run resistance networks when the Germans came, so it just sounds like you have a grand, grand plan. Yeah, well part of it is that we’ve been blocked for so long, I’ve got nothing to do but think, you know, and strategize, and yeah, that’s why it’s 27 years, and we’re still not even at the phase three study levels, but the other part of it is to think that the oppressors are suffering to, that they’re not optimized, that they’re living in worlds of fear, that they’re often coerced by their own leaders, and that somehow that was the thought.

1:52:47 I had this experience on DMT where I was thinking about, it was like this beautiful experience about the sweep of human history and I was thinking about how all of the thoughts in my mind that somebody else developed every single word that I use practically, that throughout history language was created, that all of this was this massive human progress story and it was beautiful and I was a big part of the sweep of history. But then I realized that I was only appropriating the positive parts of it and if the positive parts were part of me than all the negative parts were and then Hitler was part of me too which just like was a massive come down and a shock and it took me a day or so to kind of cope with that and accept that so I think that we all have these desires to dominate these you know but it’s what we implement and what we actually do and so So that helps me to have more compassion, in a way, to those people that through coercion or fear succumb to this kind of simplistic thinking.

1:54:03 So I think it is a lot of strategizing, but I’m trying to think of, to the extent that I can, the drug warriors and as not necessarily being the enemy to be eliminated. At least police officers that leap and stuff, they’re not just people we categorize as the bad guys. Yeah, they are doing bad things and counterproductive things, but how can we help them also? And that’s where I think more and more it’s my work, is to reach out to the opponents and try to say to them to understand their motivations and to try to find common ground.

1:54:43 I have to ask you, oh go ahead, go ahead, go ahead. Well, as you can say, because they’ve inherited that same long history, they may just be dealing with more of the negative sides of that lineage. Yeah. I have to ask you about Terrence McKenna. I know what I think he challenged you in the original MDMA study, because I think Terrence, whether he was right or wrong, believed that his psychedelics should be natural, and he didn’t like certain synthetic compounds.

1:55:06 I think he shied away from LSD and perhaps MDMA. It’s funny, because in a way, we have almost deified Terrence. new Terrence in the 80s, I’ll be the first to admit that when I’m coming off of a psychedelic experience, I love putting Terrence in for the last hour and everything seems so more relevant and you’ve gone through the hard work usually, you’ve met your demons and tried to battle them and afterwards you’re like, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Have we overdone it with Terrence?

1:55:34 What was it like knowing him? Did you have a combative relationship? We did. I think for people that want to know more about Terrence, Dennis, his brother, has just written this beautiful book, Brothers at the Screaming Abyss, and I think that would give people a deeper understanding of Terrence. Terrence was a wonderful person who had very, very important ideas, who I felt was near the later part of his lives trapped by his earlier work that had brought him more attention. So I felt that Terrence, through his time wave zero and his focus on the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012, that he had made himself into kind of a caricature. And he had a hard time undoing that. And I think that was a source of conflict for him. So I felt that he was a very inspirational person and I felt that his, I think it’s kind of naive and romantic to think that if a drug is from nature it’s somehow superior to drugs that are from the laboratory. So we had this meeting at Esalen in 1984 early on to try to, you know, plan our approach to the DEA crackdown, the inevitable DEA crackdown of MDMA and how to bring psychedelics forward in all different ways. And Terrence was talking about ayahuasca and other things, and he was saying that he didn’t really value things that were synthetic, and he thought they were extra risky. And we’ve got ayahuasca and mushrooms that have thousands of years of history and peyote, and, you know, and

1:57:26 You’ve got these spirit energies from the nature. And he sort of was saying MDMA is too risky. And I was like, well, I don’t know where your evidence is. Let’s do a study on the risks of MDMA and I’ll put up $1,000. Back to the science, back to the science.

1:57:44 Yeah, and then Dick Price who’d started Esalen came seconds later and said, I’ll put up $1,000. So Terrence actually catalyzed the first study ever MDMA. But it was in a reaction to his overvaluation of plant medicines. And I think that there’s where the products of nature, our brains are part of nature, the laboratories part of nature. I think MDMA is a molecule. I don’t, I don’t, you know, people don’t often say, Oh, I was, you know, in touch with the spirit of MDMA. But, you know, it strikes me as maybe there is one, or maybe everything has this, but at the same time I felt that Terrence was just wonderfully inspirational and helped in a lot of different ways. But I did feel like the theories that he put forth, and this comes out in Dennis’s book too, that they’ve been challenged by mathematicians that actually it’s 2013, we’re still here. I just have great respect for him, but also if you look at his personal life, it wasn’t as happy as he would have liked it to be. It was somewhat estranged from his wife and kids in some ways. I think There was a certain kind of megalomania about how he and Dennis were going to go to the Amazon and they were going to perform these rituals that would make the spirit visible and that this would have this ripple effect that would then enlighten everybody.

1:59:37 So it’s almost like he’s Jesus and he’s going to… And we talked about the power dynamics of shamanism sometimes. He had that problem too. He and Dennis were going to do this thing and everybody was going to get enlightened because of what he did, not because of what they did, you know, so it was the illusion obviously. And I think the doomsday scenarios have a psychological basis because they help you to try to see the value of the moment that we see under psychedelics or we see in other kind of experiences or we feel when we’re in love that the moment is precious and the moment is fleeting and we’re all going to be dying and we’re only here for a short period of time.

2:00:24 So I think that the psychological advantage of having this date when the world is going and makes you appreciate the time that you have left. And that’s what we hope to do with psychedelic therapy with people that are dying. We help them to realize that instead of focusing on the time that you’re not gonna have, focus on the time, the fact that you’re still alive and what can you do to open up communication with your family and yourselves in the time that you do have.

2:00:52 So I think that Terence got a little bit carried away in this doomsday scenarios, which had the benefit in a way of heightening your sense of the importance of the moment. But then the day comes by inevitably and the world is, you know, the same. And, you know, Daniel Pinchbeck is someone who also talked a lot about the mind calendar. But I saw him more maturing and able to reinterpret some of the things that he had said and sort of lessen it. So for our big psychedelic science conference of 2013, which we just had in April, which was a tremendous success in over 1,900 people and loads of 30 countries.

2:01:38 It was fantastic, but we started planning it in early 2012, and we decided that you have to give people a discount if they register early. So we made the date of the discount ending was December 21, 2012, and when I told that So Daniel, he laughed. And I knew from Terrence that he had also wanted to reinterpret in a less literal way what he was saying, but he was kind of trapped by how many people saw it that way. He’d already owned his research at that point.

2:02:14 But Terrence was really inspirational for a lot of people, and for me too. Yeah, when I listen to him, it’s amazing, because especially his early talks, it’s a man who’s not selling anything. He’s almost not selling something because he’s talking about an experience and the experience is the experience. It’s not what we talk about or we attribute the experience to. So it’s interesting to hear him, but it’s a tough job calling the end of the world.

2:02:37 Not many people get it right. And I could see how you could become a caricature and people would be like, yeah, yeah, get up and do what you always do. Get up and say these crazy things. Say something crazier. Say something crazier.

2:02:48 Even Dennis is like, he said he had major arguments with Terrence. He’d be like, you just got up there and said absolute rubbish. And Aaron’s would be like, yeah, but, you know, they listen or, you know, so it’s wonderful listening to him. Rick, I’ve got, you know, 50 more questions. I could sit here and talk to you for the end of the night, but I know you guys have a date at the University of Greenwich for Alex’s film premiere, and you’ve got the breaking convention this weekend.

2:03:15 Is that a big moment, breaking convention? Is it good to see everyone, international? It’s terrific. I mean, I think that it’s less so, but it still is the case that many of the people that are involved in this work feel fairly isolated. It’s changing, but a lot of the people felt like there’s not that many people they can talk to about this.

2:03:36 There’s not that many other scientists doing this kind of work. And so to get together as a community and share what’s happening, it really makes people relax and feel comfortable that they’re not these isolated lunatics. I actually, when I started back in New College, I went to a therapist for a couple of years, but the main issue was, am I crazy to wanna work on psychedelics? Is there something fundamentally wrong with me because this is what I wanna do? So I think the Breaking Convention Conference here is terrific for bringing people together.

2:04:13 And also, because people tend to be isolated, we need the self, the feedback from other people. And I think that’s what’s really happening. So that’s where this sort of movement, if we want to call it this community, refines itself by having people where you can relax with and then they can still say, Terrence needed more people to say, not just his brother that he was sort of rivals with in certain ways, he needed more people to say, I don’t know if that’s exactly right.

2:04:44 Push each other, test each other. Yeah, so that’s what Breaking Conventions is about too, and I think it’s terrific that it’s happening. Fantastic, I’m just, I feel really fortunate that we’ve got guys like you on the front lines, you know, and a person with all your experience and the fact that, you know, you’re open about your usage is, I don’t know, it’s very powerful. So I’m just so happy we’ve got, you know, guys like you and different people like Graham Hancock and David Nutt, and they’re all seem to be breaking through somehow and getting more recognition.

2:05:10 David Nutt’s on the paper all the time. And he makes headlines sometimes just to make them. I don’t even, I think he just wants to be talked about and I’m just glad he’s part of the dialogue, you know? Yeah, yeah, I think so. I mean, I think that, I mean, we worked together on, after the Wellcome Trust said that they would not be interested, he worked with Dr. Ben Sessa to try to get a grant from the Medical Research Council for an MDMA PTSD study, but was turned down, unfortunately, although he did get support for the psilocybin study.

2:05:42 So I think that he just published an article in the neuroscience journal about how the regulations about research with psychedelics are inhibiting fundamental neuroscience research. And he also permitted me to comment on his paper and multiple times before it got published and I added a lot of the information about marijuana research being obstructed. So I think that people, again, It’s like people like David Nutt who have been respected and have made accomplishments that the traditional world would say are substantial, then talking about psychedelics, it causes people to sit up and think.

2:06:24 Yeah, he equated the fact that he can’t get ahold of psilocybin for a study to the church banning the telescope, and you were talking about the Karnakas earlier, and it’s an interesting analogy. If people are listening right now, and I’m sure a lot of people out there are nodding their heads, and then they’re gonna turn this off to go back to their day, but if they could stop now and do something to support MAPS, what would it be? Well, there’s several things.

2:06:48 First off, they could go to our website, and if they wanted to, they could donate either to a particular project that they liked or just to MAPS in general. That’s MAPS.org, is that real? Yeah, MAPS.org. The other thing that they could do is that we had our recent psychedelic science conference, and it was the biggest conference on psychedelic science in the United States it’s ever happened, and we are posting all the talks for free on the internet for people to see.

2:07:18 But the way the search engines work that they don’t search through audio files. So we are partnering with a group on mora.org that helps groups like crowdsourcing transcription and translation. so that if people wanted to, I think they could listen to whatever talks were most interesting to them that are up on our website, and then they could do a little bit of transcribing them. And then, if they know foreign languages, they could also consider translating them.

2:07:56 And it’s a way to just do a little bit, and other people will come in and do more. But then, all of this body of the latest information is now searchable on Google, or other search engines. people will be able to get to it. So I think that’s really important. And then the other thing is this coming out that we talked about, is if people are willing to come out to their parents and to their siblings and to just, if they happen to have beneficial experiences from psychedelics, that’s something that everybody can do.

2:08:26 It doesn’t cost any money, doesn’t take that much time, but it requires a certain amount of courage to sort of upset the apple cart and sort of come out. But I think that’s something that’s really important. And then people can become educated more, so that I think people have to be really dubious about it. One of the beautiful things for me about doing a PhD thesis was that you have to document and reference everything. And what was shocking to me was how much I thought was true was really not.

2:09:00 And it was this discipline of every statement that I made, every sentence, you say something And then, well, why do you believe that? You know, you try to track out where you heard it and then it was actually said in a different way and I kind of twisted it a little bit. So I think for people to educate themselves, to look at what they think is true and to try to go down several layers to why they think that. And is it true? I think that process, particularly about psychedelics and other things is tremendously helpful.

2:09:38 And so that people then can become more effective communicators if they’ve challenged themselves about what they think is true. And the final point I’ll maybe say is that we have to be really careful facing a society that has criminalized and demonized these drugs, not to become the opposite in saying they’re all good and that they’re only beneficial. So, you know, we shouldn’t become the reflection of what we’re struggling against. So people, I think, should be very careful and acknowledge or look for the ways in which they might be using substances that are like this fellow that you talked to, that was worried about getting addicted, for people to look at, is their use healthy, you know, are there ways that they could become healthier or have they fully integrated what’s happened before? Are they using these things repeatedly in ways that aren’t particularly healthy?

2:10:36 So I think if we become models of people who have just found these drugs to be useful but are making positive contributions to our communities, that that’s the fundamental thing that will change the whole system of prohibition. I can’t wait for these days to be coming. It’s exciting times right now. Yeah, it’s very exciting, right? It’s very exciting. At the same time, I think for For me, I have three kids, and I think what’s really important is changing your sense of time.

2:11:11 I think, particularly as you get older too, this idea of time speeding up. I remember now that I have three kids and they’re having their summer vacation. I remember when I was little, the summer vacation was almost endless. Some decades. It just took forever, and now a summer is over like that.

2:11:30 What that means is that at this point, having a 20-year plan, it’s not really that long, that we have to have patience and recognize you can’t push the river too fast, that things take time, and people’s fears have to surface, and we have to have responsible strategies to acknowledge the legitimate part of the fears. So I think having a sense of patience, even though it’s very exciting times, it’s still going to be a while. Do you have 50-year plan and 100-year plan as well?

2:12:02 I bet you do. Well, not for me. I bet you do. But I do for the community, yeah. Wow.

2:12:08 Alexander, your film is premiering tonight. Is that right? Yep. The break convention. If people want to watch a film, get ahold of you, what’s the best way?

2:12:15 They can watch the film by going to waddiworks.co.uk and the film is actually available for a limited time for free on an online festival and they can get to that via my website. By your website, okay. Well, good luck tonight with that. with that. That’s pretty exciting stuff. Rick, it’s been an honor having you. Thank you so much. Please come back next time you’re in London, you know, and we can hear more for hours to come, you know. I’d love to have you on again, definitely.

2:12:41 Yeah, I’m just starting to think of all the things I didn’t say. Yeah, I know. All these questions I’ve been asking, but that’s okay. You didn’t even talk about MIT and the role of MIT in helping X, Z, and MDMA become widely used. Yeah.

2:12:56 My alma mater. I would have said shame on you, but maybe that’s a great thing. Yeah. Well, in the early days, a lot of the MDMA that was used secretly in the therapeutics circles came from MIT. Wow.

2:13:07 That doesn’t surprise me. Some crazy kids over there. All right. We’ll talk about that next time you’re here. Okay.

2:13:13 All right. Best of luck at the Breaking Convention. If you’re listening to us on iTunes, please subscribe. We’re on YouTube if you want to see the extremely good-looking Rick Doblin. We’re on a YouTube channel London Real and that’s it.

2:13:24 We’re on Twitter, Facebook, come check us out. Go to maps.org and give them a donation and come out of the closet. Tell grandma you like LSD. Have you come out of the closet, Brian? I’m basically out.

2:13:34 I mean, I’ve done two shows about ayahuasca. People know, but I could be more out. It could be more out. So tell grandma and she’ll be like, yeah, I do that too and then, you know, you guys can get together. Yeah.

2:13:44 Yeah. I actually spent a day doing MDMA with my grandmother. Really? Yeah. She didn’t do it.

2:13:50 And that’s a longer story, but it was one of the, she was stuck in a depression and we couldn’t find a way to legally give her MDMA. And I felt that the next best thing was to take MDMA and try to work on the contact high. And so out of this patience that I had came this family secret that she hadn’t shared with anybody about a romance she had with somebody before my grandfather that her father broke up. And it was, so I think, you know, grandma’s are we’re spending time with.

2:14:31 Wow. And she just had that revelation because you were there and you were in an open state. Well, we were talking about how she said she was so burdened by the depression that she was ready to die and how she had accomplished everything she wanted. She had a marriage of 49 years before my grandfather died. She had children and grandchildren, and she led her very happy life, and then she was ready to die.

2:14:56 And I was like, I just can’t understand that. I was, this was quite a few years ago, over 20 years ago, and I was just like, I have so much ambition to what I wanna do, I can’t understand being ready to die. And then she started saying, well, there is one thing that I kind of wonder how my life might have been different. And it turned out that she went away And she came back and she gave me this book, and it was this song of songs, this beautiful section of the Bible that’s sort of like the love song of the Bible.

2:15:29 And it was the wedding present from this guy whose, her father had broken up the romance. And it was a note from him and a rose that he’d given to her as this wedding present. And my mother, my aunts, none of them knew the story. And it just came out shortly before she died during this conversation with me. And it was, yeah, it just made me really, it changed my parents’ attitudes about MDMA.

2:16:04 And it helped her a bit. It made me very sad, though, that we were never able to get permission to actually give her MDMA. She said she would be willing to take it if it were legal. So in part, that’s why I’m motivated so that other people’s grandmothers would be able to get treatments that my own grandmother, you know, was blocked from getting. Wow.

2:16:27 It’s really powerful. Yeah. I inherited that book after she died. So I have that book. That’s my heirloom from her.

2:16:34 Wow. So many reasons to keep doing the hard work. All right. Fantastic, guys. Thanks for being here.

2:16:39 Thank you. Until then, it’s about the journey. I wish you both the best. Take care.