Transcription
When was that moment that you first realized this could change the course of how we treat mental health?
I realized that when I was 17 and 18 and took LSD was the code name for MDMA. I started this nonprofit in 1984 before MAPS and it was to gather support to fight the DEA, the drug enforcement administration once they would eventually criminalize MDMA.
Let's just talk about the term psychedelics.
Psychedelic means mind manifesting. What comes up? Dreams are psychedelic. We all go into altered state. The laws of physics don't apply in our dreams. In a dream, when it gets scary, you can wake up. But when you've taken a psychedelic, when it gets scary, you got to work through it.
Rick Doblin is the founder of MAPS, a pioneering nonprofit transforming the future of mental health by advancing psychedelic assisted therapy for PTSD and beyond.
People think about LSD or masculine or psilocybin. We call those the classic psychedelics. And those are the ego dissolving, move you beyond your ego states.
Why do some people have bad trips?
When you take psychedelic, your sense of self is being weakened. That can be really scary. People have difficult experiences cuz we are fundamentally overdeveloped intellectually and underdeveloped emotionally and spiritually. In our first study, which was severe PTSD, 67% 2/3 of the people no longer had PTSD at the two-month follow-up. Empathy is one of the most important emotions and that's something that I don't think that we speak about enough.
Yeah. Well, one of the things about MDMA that you see in working with people with PTSD is they often have empathy for their perpetrators. The difference between when people take MDMA for party or people take it for therapy, there's two main differences. One is that firstly, I want to say thank you to tuning in and listening to the show. It means a huge amount and connecting with all of you is something that I absolutely love as part of this journey of growing the show. One of my biggest goals of 2025 is doubling the reach of this show and I can't do that without your support. So, I would love to ask you a favor if you can press subscribe or follow on whichever platform you listen to. This helps us reach more people. And for me, elevating women in science is so fundamental and ethical and scientific information. So, if you feel the show empowers you and gives you the information that you've been seeking, I would love to ask a favor in return and to hit that subscribe button and help me reach the goal that I've set for the show of 2025. Thank you, Rick. Welcome to Live Well, Be Well.
Wow. I'm so glad to be here with you. I am so happy to have you um in Vancouver. We're at TED and you know I wish we um could look underneath our our bums right now and maybe look at some psychedelics and go in a psychedelic experience to have this conversation.
Well, have have you seen that's how I ended my TED talk.
I know that's why I opened it because somebody said the same thing. One of the speakers today was joking about I now look under your seat.
Well, it happened at our talk last night when I was hosting the dinner here. And I think you were then you were speaking and somebody made a joke of and if you look underneath your seat we will all now take some some drugs. Um sadly we're not we are completely sober um with some H2O extras. But this is something that I have been so excited to talk to you about. Psychedelics is having I want to say a renaissance but it is in a real moment and I know that you've been through a lot in the last 12 months that I'd also like to kind of uncover. I think there's been a lot of hope for a lot of people that this was going to get passed.
Yeah.
And we're not quite there yet and I want to uncover kind of that journey. But I think this is especially I have looked into this a lot in the last 12 months. This has been something that I've really wanted to understand more about because I'm so connected to mental health. I wanted to ask you on your kind of journey from the beginning of this to now. When was that moment that you first kind of realized and had recognition that this could change the course of how we treat mental health?
Well, I realized that when I was 17 and 18 and took LSD.
Wow.
The very first time because I went beyond my sense of self. I was scared of letting go as I described but I could feel intimations of this interconnectedness that was what people have talked about for thousands of years which you can achieve through meditation or fasting doesn't need psychedelics but psychedelics have been used throughout history. So it was this idea that there's a world beyond that I'm part of something much bigger than just birth to death and this isolated individual person that that there's this whole matrix that extends billions of years and and all that and that sense that when I was first doing this this was now again 1971 and I'd just been through people going to the moon and so it was this some of the astronauts were talking about looking back at the earth and how we're all interconnected and so it this sense of the political implications of the mystical experience whether you receive it through psychedelics or other way once you know we're all connected then it's harder to say you're the enemy you're different from me you're somebody I can dehumanize so I I was looking for something because I was scared of I described this fear I was just scared of the Holocaust and scared of blowing up the world with the Russians with the Cuban missile crisis and scared now my own country doing Vietnam and that was one of the last years of the lottery. So it just was that pretty much and and so much of the 60s was hippies um using psychedelics and protesting the Vietnam War. So I had this thought that the these experiences are potentially very healing culturally and that if more people felt that then it would be a different world. Can you describe the interconnectedness that you just mentioned because some people might not be used to that terminology, but it's something that I'm very aligned with that we're all energy.
Yeah.
And we are all we're all part of ourselves and one another. And if you look at kind of energy in the universe, okay, we're all atoms, but we I see that we silo ourselves quite quickly, especially our mind to our bodies.
Yes. Yes.
So, can you describe what interconnectedness means? What did you feel when you What was it that epiphany that you had?
Okay, so this is um later, but I had this DMT experience. The first time I ever tried DMT. So it was with Terrence McKenna, Dennis McKenna, Ralph Matner, a bunch of the sort of Andy While a group of us doing DMT um at Esin and Big. And so the first thing I had was this sense that I was I saw like a um a vertical line and then a horizontal line and then it turned red and then it became cubes and then it became like an Mcsher kind of where geometry doesn't seem to make sense anymore and then I was blasted into this other world and then I was feeling like billions of years have gone by to to build up our bodies to build life that that I was part of everything was part of me that that were all Yeah. these waves of energy and and that if it not been for all these billions of years to build up to where we are today and that that our atoms often come from stars that have exploded and and so I just had this sense of this interconnectedness and then I had this shocking thought that if I'm part of everything and everything's part of me then Hitler is a part of me too and it wasn't out there it's in here and that was shattering So interconnectedness doesn't mean that it's all glory and beauty and interconnectedness. We need to own the whole thing and that was really difficult for me. But that that's what it means is that we are part of everything and and so that makes it so it's harder to say somebody else is all evil or you know somebody else is um and that that's what we have a lot now is the projections you know it's out there. But so interconnectedness just means that uh I mean, it's sort of obvious. I mean, we all share. We don't create everything we need to live. We get it from other people. But that when I was 16 years old, I was very scared of the Russians. So, I studied Russian in high school. Also, my relatives had become immigrants leaving Russia in 1880 to America, running away from anti-semitism. And so, my parents sent me to Russia in 1970 after with around 60 other US high school students to study Russian. Wow.
And I'd been terrified of Russians because we're told they want to kill us, blow us up. And so where we were was this outside of Lengrad, St. Petersburg, and um there was this woman my age, young girl, you know, that was working at this hotel. And we went for a walk on the beach. And I was like, you don't want to kill me. I don't want to kill you. Wh what what is going on here? And that was a big wakeup like that that we are essentially the same. We have different political systems and we have different governments that can be. But that that was also a big wake up that this this sort of demonization and fear of the Russians to see that um Yeah. We we we were similar very very similar.
Yeah. And the fear was driving you and the fear was blocking which is really interesting.
Yeah. And it's also the fact that what we see going on in America is really frightening. But it's also that people through fear and through coercion end up often doing terrible things. It's only the Germans could do the Holocaust. The Holocaust could happen in America. And you and you see how people are buckled down in fear. And and then you've got this external en enemy right now. It's immigrants and undocumented immigrants. So I feel like we all have this capacity for love. We all have this capacity for evil. We all have this capacity for good. So that's that's what interconnectedness means to me that we're all in it together. But that we need to choose how we act that that the potentials are all there but what we choose to do.
I think that's the biggest thing the action and the step forward that we're taking. I want to talk about all the incredible work that you've done with MAPS. But before we even get to that, I think you've just mentioned and you mentioned in our, you know, our pre-in that comes out the day before on our substhat, the compassionate cure, you mentioned about masculine and trying masculine when you were 17 at your at your university. Um, you then just mentioned LSD.
Um, I know a lot of your work primarily focuses on MDMA. Let's just talk about the term psychedelics.
Yes.
And for anyone who's listening and you also mentioned DMT.
Let's talk about some of these components like what sits under the term of psychedelics.
Okay. So my main work has been trying to sort of mainstream psychedelics. And so one of the ways that it's been helpful to do that is to expand the definition of what is a psychedelic. So Stan Grath who's my mentor and who's one of the leading LSD researchers in the world the founder of transpersonal psychology the co-founder which is also about our interconnectedness there's this once LSD was criminalized and many people who were involved in psychedelics went into meditation he developed hyper hyperventilation he calls it holotropic breath work so that you can have a psychedelic experience without a drug just by breathing.
I can tell you that is true.
Okay.
I've done a lot of holotropic breath work.
Okay. Yeah. And dreams are psychedelic.
Interesting.
Yeah. Because we all go into altered state at night and we operate in different ways. The laws of physics don't apply in our dreams in different ways. But dreams are this. So psychedelic means mind manifesting. What comes up? So fasting can be psychedelic. Even if you know this, some of the Native Americans use pain through the the sundances where they put little hooks barbs in in their muscles and they dance until the barbs pull out. Yeah.
So, people have used all sorts of things. So, I want to move psychedelic away from just drugs to all the any all these tools, experiences that are mind manifesting. So, and when you say dreams, then everybody feels like, oh, maybe psychedelics aren't so scary because I have this lucid dreams.
Lucid dreams are just any dreams. Yeah. The the difference, I would say, is that in a dream when it gets scary, you can wake up. But when you've taken a psychedelic, when it gets scary, you got to work through it.
You got to do the work.
You got to do the work. Yeah.
Okay. So, that's really important. Other people have said MDMA is not a psychedelic. Well, that was also a distinguishing like question I wanted to have to you because I naturally wouldn't have said that MDMA was psychedelic, but you would.
Well, I would and I think that it's mind manifesting. So, the question is people think about LSD or masculine or psilocybin as the classic. So, we call those the classic psychedelics and those are the ego dissolving move you to this sort of beyond your ego states. And so I think ketamine can be a psychedelic, MDMA. So it's again a way to say there's a range of different things that so it's it's very true that MDMMA is different than the classic psychedelics. But I think broadening the term is a way to help people grapple with it and and accept it.
And your work is found well first of all congratulations. It's been 39 years.
Yeah. Yesterday was the anniversary. Yeah.
Since you created maps. Yeah.
Tell me the reason behind maps or because well don't tell I actually know the reasons but tell our listeners the reasons behind you creating maps 39 years ago.
Yeah. Well, I was from the time that I was really 18 after I had all this trouble letting go. I went to the guidance counselor at school and I said, "Help me with my tripping." And he gave me a book to read. And it was Realms of the Human Unconscious: Observations from LSD Research by Stan Grath. And what was amazing was that this book really helped me decide to focus my life on psychedelics because what it was about was also the research when I read it, the the research was being shut down. So this was now 1972. The backlash had already happened and research was shut down all over the world. But what Stan was talking about was a scientific lens. So I didn't really trust religion. Religion is so mythology and and things that you're sort of asked to believe by faith or whatever that a lot of it doesn't make sense. So but I trusted the science lens and it was he talked about three basic areas of the of the mind. The first is biographical. He called it Freudian just to say it's like what is it that happens to our life and how does it impact it? Then the second he called auto rank was the the therapist was the birth drama and that we all go through this process where when you're getting born there's moments where you might think you're dying scary it's there's no exit there. So there's this whole section on birth trauma that sometimes you can get in touch with and then beyond that is the yungian sort of transpersonal states and that's where there was this idea of this interconnectedness and I but within all of that was the the reality check of therapy. It was not about all these theories and trying to prove the way it was. It was trying to say how do you use these experiences and use this understanding of the mind to actually help people so that the therapy you could have endless discussions about different spiritual realms or all this but what's it for unless it helps people leave deeper lives. So I really I asked my guidance counselor if if I could contact Stan to talk to him about how to become a psychedelic therapist. And the book was published in 1975. My guidance counselor had a manuscript copy directly from Stan. And so I wrote a letter to Stan. So he's MDPhD. He's just leaving John's Hopkins. I'm a super confused 18-year-old and I'm giving asking him for advice on becoming a psychedelic therapist one day. And and he wrote me back and and he said, "It's important what you're trying to do. I'm giving a workshop this summer. You can come and see it." And so I I met him in 1972 for this workshop. So it was then that I decided to focus my life on psychedelics. Okay. But I knew I wasn't ready. It took me like 10 years to get grounded. I I had the delusion that I think some people have that the more drugs you take, the faster you evolve.
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Absolutely. And it's just taking the drugs that gives you the answer. And it's not that bad at all. I completely underestimated the integration process. So, I loaded myself.
I'm so happy you said that.
Yeah.
Because I think people miss that part out.
Oh, completely. because that's become an Iawaska trait now where a lot of people are doing Iawaska but the integration part is left out from a lot of the kind of coming back to daily life.
Yeah. Well, particularly you go to Brazil or Peru to do it and then you come back and Yeah. So I I realized that I was not where I wanted to be. I needed to do this integration process. So then I spent 10 years really getting grounded and building things. I dropped out of college. I was getting ready to focus directly on psychedelics. I was trying to get mature enough and comfortable enough in my trips to do that. It took me 10 years and then I started college again in 1982 and I went my first semester I went to spend a month at Elin in Big Sur California with Stan and Christina Grath. It was a workshop called the mystical quest and it was really delightful and this woman Debbie Harlo came by and said there's a new drug. It's called Adam. It's being used as this underground therapy. It's not illegal, but it's also starting to become a party drug under the name ecstasy. And she said how it makes you feel love. It makes you feel connected. It makes you a better listener. And I thought, I am in love and I'm a good listener. And and then I saw a group of people doing MDMA in a circle and um they were talking to each other and I was like, you take 250 micrograms of LSD, you can't talk for a couple hours, you know? It's like, so I I I love to say that I was um stupid enough to underestimate it, but smart enough to buy some and I I took it home and I did it with my girlfriend. And that was profound. It was way more profound than I realized. And we were able to talk about things in a way that I felt I was a better human. I was less defensive, more we were able to navigate difficult emotions. It was just so I felt like MDMMA is more gentle but super profound and I thought it would be the tool that would really go through society more likely first than LSD or psilocybin or anything like that. And I felt like I woke up to LSD after the backlash. Now I'm waking up to MDMA before the backlash. And I thought, okay, now I can get politically involved. And there will inevitably be this backlash on MDMA because now it is being a party drug. Adam was the name, the code name for MDMA. And so I started this nonprofit in 1984 before MAPS. And it was to gather support to fight the DEA, the Drug Enforcement Administration once they would eventually criminalize move to criminalize MDMA. So the way the world worked at the time is you you had to put in the federal register the DEA would would put that they their intention to criminalize something and there would be like a month public comment period with the psychedelic community. We had um done some underground studies that that were safety studies and and so I also worked with monks and rabbis and various people who did MDMMA to meditate in monasteries. And so we we had this really sophisticated media campaign. So we had this rabbi compare MDMA to the Sabbath. We had the monk say, "Brother David Stein to Ross, a monk spends his whole life trying to get this enlightened attitude that you can get from MDMA." He was using it in the monastery to meditate. And so we were winning this case and we were winning in the court of public opinion and winning in the courts. And the judge said in the end MDMMA should be available as a medicine, which is what we were trying to do. But the the administrator of the DEA rejected that. We sued twice in the appeals courts and won both times. But then on the third time, we finally lost. The DEA lawyers figured out how to keep MDMA away from being a legal medicine. That's where I realized I had to start MAPS. That we couldn't use the legal system. We had to go through the FDA. that would be the only way I thought to bring it back. So that's where I started MAPS as basically a nonprofit psychedelic pharmaceutical company and I didn't know that it would ever succeed but I felt that that was the the real doorway and basically the only doorway to people at that time were told that if you take MDMA it's going to damage your brain and you're going to have neurotoxicity and you're going to have all these functional consequences and so there's so much fear. So scientific research can generate data that can be used to sort of evaluate all these exaggerated drug war propaganda. So I started maps because I felt like it was through science and basically it's to go where the suffering is that people will listen when they're suffering. Other times they might not listen. So let's if we can go to try and make MDMA into a medicine to cure certain kinds of suffering and then the other big issue was well it was a strategic sense of all the psychedelics which would I pick it was MDMA and then what should it be for and at the time we needed sympathetic patients. So the main um there was a lot of people from Vietnam who had PTSD. This is now quite a while 86 now. But there were still a lot of people from Vietnam that had PTSD that had not been treated. So we needed sympathetic patients. We needed a disease that was potentially causing suicide that would be very expensive that would lead as you were saying with distress to lead to all sorts of physical illnesses that was expensive. And I had worked with a woman in 1984 who had PTSD and saw it helped. So MDMA for PTSD became the vehicle to go through the FDA. I think that's something where I've become really aware of that there is no treatment legally. I'll put that in. Um for PTSD and I think people now still go to the doctors with PTSD and they're prescribed SSRI.
Yeah.
Which doesn't work.
Yeah. That there was an incredible image of this was a image of a soldier who was like waiting through a river and carrying his gun so it wouldn't get wet. But the river was filled with pills. He was waiting through SSRIs because that's all the VA was giving and it wasn't really helping.
No.
Yeah.
How does MDMA work with the brain and PTSD?
Ah, okay. This is an easy one. All right. So, the the first step is what does how does PTSD change your brain? So, PTSD is this post-traumatic stress disorder. People are fearful very much of whatever happened before is not really in the past. It's going to happen again. And so your amygdala, the part of your brain that is more processing fear, is hyperactive. There's more activity in the in the amydala for people that have PTSD than than average normal people. The other thing about PTSD is that it's hard to separate out what's real threat, what's a not. If you you know people are always triggered by different things. So there's less activity in the prefrontal cortex where we think logically. So you're sort of shortcircuited by your emotions. So you see somebody that looks like somebody that assaulted you and now you feel like you're about to be assaulted again. If you had a moment to think about it, it's a whole different person. It's a whole different context. It's not that. Um and then these traumatic memories are never really put into the past. And so the hippocampus, which is the part of our brain that stores memories into long-term storage, there's lower activity in the hippocampus and less connectivity between the amydala and the hippocampus when you have PTSD. Right? So that's kind of how your brain changes and you've got these real circuits that are activating all the time. So MDMA works great for PTSD but we found later that or not we other people found we felt that if we focus on the healing other people will do the neuroscience. So what we know is that MDMA reduces activity in the amydala so that when you are um remembering a traumatic memory it's not as fearful. MDMA increases activity in the prefrontal cortex. So you're able to sort of think logically more so and then MDMA increases connectivity between the hippocampus and the amydala so that you're able to process memories and put them into long-term storage. And then the other big part of what it does is oxytocin. So the hormone of love and connection of self-compassion of self love.
Yeah. My favorite one.
Yeah. So MDMMA releases oxytocin. And there's a woman Gul Dolan a neuroscientist who has done studies that show that uh in mice that the oxytocin is released by MDMA and that's what promotes neuroplasticity.
And that's what we really need with PTSD is that we need to create more of these neural highways and kind of shunt them off from the trauma loop and create new neural highways.
Yeah.
So we're having new processing methods, right?
Yeah. Yeah. you definitely can uh have one session where you rewire your brain and then if you do the therapy. Now I I should add though that for example this woman that I worked with in in 1984 who had PTSD MDMA by reducing um this u fear response to traumatic memories can be destabilizing as well as healing. So she initially did it with a friend of hers and memories of past sexual abuse came up and it so destabilized her. She'd previously attempted suicide. She'd been medicated. She'd been hospitalized from this trauma. And under MDMA, even in a safe place relatively, with a lover, um, these memories came up and she felt that they were overwhelming. So, she checked herself into a hospital not to kill herself. And while she was there, they stabilized her. They gave her the same SSRI stuff that she'd had before, whatever medicines. She didn't think it would work. So, she was more suicidal when she got out. So I I don't want people to think you take MDMMA and now all of your problems you can deal with. If you're not in a safe therapeutic setting, you you can trigger traumatic memories and then they can be overwhelming. So it's the context more than the drug that is what produces the healing. I've watched the science of adaptogens grow personally over the last few years and I've become more curious in their role in nervous system support, focus, and resilience because adaptogens basically buffer the cortisol that gives us that stress and anxiety. But here's the thing, quality is everything. Most adaptogens on the market don't actually contain enough of the active compounds that you see in clinical studies to make a difference. That's why I've partnered with London Neutropics. These guys only use clinical studied standardized extracts. This is really really important to get the benefits that you're seeing in clinical research. And they work with heater, one of the best places in Spain. They have high bioavailability. They use incredible ingredients like KSM66 ashwagandha and radola life. And these are the active ingredients that you need to see the difference. They have lots of different blends. Flow gets me into deep focus with lion's mane. Zen helps support my calm and steady my clarity with ashwagandha. And mojo gives a clean lift, no crash. And mush love made with fantastic fungi with three Fast terara mushrooms to elevate your day. Enjoy 20% off and use code live well be well. They come in these fantastic little sachets and they are great for traveling too.
So what is the context? Because I remember watching in your TED talk there was different phases and you've also spoken about the integration which for you know you had to ground yourself in for 10 years.
Yeah.
And so I think so many times when people talk about psychedelics, whether it's on a scientific podcast or more of a podcast or a spiritual podcast, we'll talk about the science of the brain or we'll talk about just the experience. But I think we kind of forget that middle ground as the integration. So how does treating somebody with PTSD or potentially other mental health conditions work in an integration process? Like when do you take the drug? What's kind of the in between okay time? Do you then retake it again?
Yes. Okay. So, our our model that was used in phase three is three and a half months of treatment and during which you only get MDMA three times, one month apart and there's 12 90minute non-drug psychotherapy sessions. Three for preparation and three for integration after each MDMA session. So the the research into psychotherapy outcome research has shown that the most important factor is not the school of therapy whether it's prolonged exposure, cognitive processing therapy, gestalt therapy, behavioral therapy, whatever it happens to be the therapeutic alliance is the most important factor. And so what the therapeutic alliance means is it's this sense of of safety that you and the therapist are aligned to to help you get better and you can trust them and you can feel safe. That's the key factor in therapy. So what we do is we have three of these 90-minute preparation sessions to build the therapeutic alliance. And so the the patient tells their stories, the therapist tries to teach teach them about what MDMA does and but also builds a sense that we're aligned here and ideally you have a therapist that can go to the depth of the pain that you're experiencing without being triggered themselves. So that they get so that that's a big issue for therapists that that they can be exposed to so much pain that that if they haven't worked on that themselves they can get triggered and then they're not thinking about the patient then they're thinking about themselves. All right. So the first part is this preparation session where you build the therapeutic alliance. Then we've structured it. We were funded by donations in the beginning and so our goal was to maximize therapeutic outcomes and people often who are traumatized have had prior people who develop PTSD often have had multiple traumas in their lives often going to childhood not always you can just be great childhood and then just be traumatized by something that happens but we've created a system where we we mostly work with a male female team of two therapists for one person. So, we're not trying to do what's the least expensive way we can get just good enough results to get it approved. We had to overcome a whole social stigma and the whole demonization of psychedelics. So, we have two therapists often because people will have childhood trauma and you want um a well functioning male female team. And of course we'll have we've had studies that are two women, two men, people can be trans, people can be gay does, you know, but it's this idea that you you've got often this support um that people often didn't have when they were in childhood that can be really helpful. So we have two two therapists and then we've made it so it's an 8 hour session. So people are used to thinking, oh, I go to therapists for 1 hour once a week or something like that.
When they're doing the trip,
when they're doing the trip,
how much are you giving them? What's the dosage?
Well, we have learned over time, we spent um 16 years from 2000 to 2016 in what's called phase 2 studies trying to figure out what's the right doses. There was enormous known from the underground from the middle 70s to the 80s. But the first MDMA experience is 80 milligrams and then to keep it longer after 2 hours we give half the initial amount and that makes it into an 8-hour experience. Our normal dose that the was 120 milligrams 125 milligrams followed by half of that. But we discovered in one of our studies that really surprised us that the group that got 75 milligrams did really really well. So this is sort of their introduction is this 80 milligrams followed by 40 the first session and that's what it is for everybody. The second session and the third session, they negotiate between the therapists and the patients and they talk about do you want to go higher to 120 milligs followed by 60 2 hours later and over 90% go up there and over 90% stay at that level. But if um if 75 or you know 80 millig seems enough for people, they can keep that dose in the second and third sessions as well. And what happens after? Cuz I'm thinking you're getting a huge amount of a chemical release into your brain, right? And everyone's going to be thinking, "Wow, is that going to be quite a heavy comedown?"
Well, people have often heard a lot about how people are depressed the day after MDMA and there's this suicide Tuesdays. People talk about that kind of stuff, but we do not see that. We don't see that more in the MDMA group than in the control group.
Interesting. Part of it is because we start the MDMA at 10:00 in the morning. The experience has pretty much subsided by around 6:00 p.m. We often, but not always, have people spend the night in the treatment center. So, we want them to still think about what's happened, not get distracted by going home, going out in traffic and things like that. Then there's integrative therapy the the next day. So, and then there's weekly integrative sessions before the next the second session. So it's uh this after the therapy becomes the integration process and that's where you're trying to reinforce this neuroplasticity, this ability to process information in a different way. You're now more open to that for a certain period of time after the MDMA. So that's where the the difference between when people take MDMA for party or people take it for therapy, there's two main differences. One is that when they take it for a party, they're just looking for the short-term effect. They're not looking to learn from it in a sense. They're just looking for fun. And the second part is when you take it for a party, you're looking for good experiences. You're not looking for whatever happens. And when you take it for therapy, whatever emerges, frightening, pleasurable, and often it alternates between that in the 8 hours. So, it's this constant freedom of the patient to go our our essence of our um therapeutic method is that we help people to heal themselves. They're doing the hard work. So the power dynamics are that we don't call ourselves guides because we don't know where people need to go. They know their unconscious knows. They don't even know. Sometimes their unconscious knows or their body knows or they remember things. We call it inner healing intelligence. There's we know our body does that heals itself when it's wounded and and the thought is that whatever is emerging there's a wisdom to it and we need to open up to it. And so then then you do the integration process which is you you talk about what you learned. You try to put it into practice and then a month later another MDMMA experience. And what we've seen is that many people go deeper the second experience than the first.
I imagine because they feel safe. They kind of know what's going to happen, right?
Yes. Exactly.
They're predicting that it's all going to be okay.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And they know that they can maneuver with it. And they also know that if they get into really profound experiences, they have the time with an eight hour session. You you have the time to say, "I'm not ready for this." and then it comes back an hour later or so. And often the the third session, many people are are pretty much healed, you could say, after two sessions, but there's a the people that have more attachment problems, you know, they didn't have a real good childhood. Often they need three sessions. Some people will occasionally need more, but in our protocol, everybody had to get the same thing. So, it's three sessions. So having the third session gives people confidence that in the second session they can go really really deep and if they haven't finished everything then they'll have another opportunity to go deep again. So having the second sess having the third session makes the second session even more valuable and yeah so that that's the basic
and what's the success rate is it around 80% that I saw of people that kind of go into these with PTSD.
Yeah. Well, there's two ways. Well, there's multiple ways to think about what's what's success. So, we work with what's called the CAPS, the clinician administered PTSD scale. So, that's the gold standard measure required by the FDA, required by MH and EMA, the European Medicine's Agency. And so, in our first study, which was severe PTSD, 67%, twothirds of the people no longer had PTSD at the two-month follow-up. So, we didn't want to do a follow-up a week or two after. People would say, "Oh, it's a psychedelic afterlow, whatever." So, 67% no longer had PTSD, but another 21% had what's called clinically significant reductions of PTSD symptoms. So, they're responders. They still have PTSD, but they've had enough reduction in symptoms that their life has changed in some ways.
That's transformative for them.
Yeah. So, it's 88% in that sense, 12% non-responders. The second phase three study that we did, we moved it from severe PTSD to moderate to severe PTSD. And in that 3/4 were severe PTSD, but we had 72% no longer had PTSD and around 15% also had clinically significant reductions. But in that study 46 Okay, so in the first study where we had 67% 32% no longer had PTSD from the therapy without MDMA at all in the control group.
Wow.
So it's a
that surprises me because I feel like people with PTSD don't get on with therapy as well because it kind of it it kind of cements the the trauma.
Yes. Well, well, the prolonged exposure and cognitive processing therapy are the two main treatments, non-drug therapies for PTSD. And they have roughly 50% dropout rates because it's too difficult to confront your trauma. They they force you to confront you've got this hour meeting. Can you confront your trauma? So, when you have the time to come at it when you are ready for it and often people go to positive experiences to build strength, then they go to the the difficult ones. So, we get really good results in that first study with the therapy without MDMA. That's as good as these other therapies with a lower dropout rate. But then when we did moderate to severe PTSD, we had 46% no longer had PTSD in the group that got no MDMA at all.
And most of them could tell and that they had the placebo. And so people have said one of the criticisms has been that your therapists believe it works, therefore they're biased. You know, you've trained your therapist with them having their own MDMA experience for many of them. And so when people say, "Oh, your results are because you've got all these biased therapists." We have independent raiders who don't know which group people are in. But the other thing is to look at the control group. The people that got the control were in the control group did great, better than any other therapy that's used for PTSD and a lower dropout rate. And that demonstrates that the therapists were not biased in the way that they're not trying hard with the people that got no MDMA as compared to the people that got MDMA. So I I think this this idea of how do you empower the patient to think they are healing themselves and they can come at this trauma on their own timetable. And so I should say that during this 8 hours people are listening to music they're I often they have eyes shades they're going inward and around half the time they're with music and eye shades but the other half of the time they're talking to the therapists. So substantial amount of the time they're on their own doing their own work and it's this metaphorical poetic almost imagery that they're having. People tell themselves stories. One of the veterans came back and he was filled with rage and he would throw things at his wife. He'd never heard her but but he his image was that he had this his warrior self that he could no longer trust because what it had done in Iraq. He had it wrapped uh in a cage inside himself. this gorilla was in a cage. So his whole imagery was this inside this gorilla wrapped in a cage and it had reached out through the bars and stabbed him in the side with a knife. But under MDMA, he was able to say, "This is a part of me. I'm making it worse by locking him up." So he was able to pull the knife out and unlock the cage and embrace this part of himself that in some ways had kept him alive. So during the quiet periods, people are doing an incredible amount of work. I mean the MJMA just opens up your inner focus and the emotions are flowing and we tell each other, we tell ourselves these different stories often in images and metaphors. So there's a lot going on when the therapists are doing nothing, but they're not doing nothing. They're providing safe, supportive context and they're there sometimes they'll hold the hand or something that they're there to support the the person, but we basically are saying to people it's you set the schedule, you need to do the hard work, we're here to help you, but you're the one that's healing yourself. And that's I think was what empowers cuz people will still be traumatized. I mean, you can be traumatized by just thinking about the environment. What are we doing with global warming? What are we doing? We we you know, what are you doing with all these refugees that's going to happen? And so people will continue to be traumatized in different ways. So they need to learn their own skills how to do it. And our goal was never to be the pharma company that gives you drugs that reduce the symptoms, but that you need to keep taking every day for the rest of your life as a way to make money for the pharma company. The goal was to go deep to the root cause and make it so people don't need the MDMA anymore. and they've learned these skills to do on their own how to continue to process trauma.
I think the brain is one of the most fascinating organs that we have.
And it's interesting that we have mental health on this like broad spectrum and the only thing that we have
To support it is either kind of talking therapy or SSRI. There's no other component really to support mental health that we can kind of >> one can go to to say I'm struggling and I need some help. They're the kind of two roots that most people have right on offer to them.
>> Yeah. And I would say that they do help some people.
>> They do. But it's interesting that when we look at the body, we have lots of different medicines for lots of different types of diseases. But we mental health is so broad yet we've kind of we've got two options. And these options can help a certain majority of people, but they don't help everyone.
>> Yeah. And even the people that they do help, they don't always help them as deep as they could be helped. A lot of them, as I said, just controlling symptoms.
>> Yeah. I know that the last kind of 12 months has been quite disheartening.
>> Yeah.
>> For you with everything with hoping to get this over the line >> and get this legalized and it hasn't.
>> Do you think in the next kind of 5 years that this will become legalized? Do you think this will become a an actual treatment for people suffering?
>> I'm 100% sure. Yeah. I mean, you can never be 100% sure of anything, but I think it'll be less than 5 years.
>> Do you?
>> Yeah. I I think the the big issue right now is that in my diagnosis of what went wrong. So, August of last year is where the FDA decided not to approve MDMA as a therapy for PTSD. There was all these critics that were questioning our data, whether our data was reliable, whether people were biased. As I said, um, and the pharma, the people that were running the pharma company, there was more a separation from MAPS and the pharma company. And they approached us in a traditional pharma way where they were um not really wanting to address critics. They wanted to impose a quiet period. And so when you do something innovative, you need to be proactive about communicating what you're doing. So I felt that the FDA advisory committee meetings, the FDA rejection that they were not so much based on the data but on fears, people's fears and people's concerns that the pharma company didn't directly address head-on.
All right. So now what's going to be happening is that there will either be another phase 3 study required by FDA or they will say that we're looking at all your data and we've looked at all these accusations and now we hopefully will say that they didn't happen in the way that we've feared about. So it's potentially possible that within 6 months or so FDA could could say it's approved and now we want more data on a what's called phase 4 afterwards. or they could say we want
>> another phase three
>> another phase three
>> but things are moving forward in Australia in Israel in Canada with the special there there so there's more and more and more stories of healing that are coming out all over the world and the dangers are not what can be really addressed and so I think it's um a sure thing that it will be approved you know even uh last night I met somebody here at dead that's doing MDMMA but a different ratio of the isomers So there's a new so what I should say is molecules it's like our our body is right we we're symmetrical we have right hands and left hands so molecules when they crystallize half of them are right hand they're mirror images of each other but they go to slightly different places in the brain and have different effects so the MDMA that we've been studying is called recemic it's where it's the this equal parts of the right hand and left hand but this com new company is now separating the isomers and using higher ratio of one than the other. And so they're trying to make this new thing into a medicine. There's a company called Tacttogen, which is looking for MDMA like drugs that are a little bit milder or different ways that they could make into medicines. There's a company called Transcend that's making methylone, which is somewhat similar. I don't think it's as deep as MDMA, but it's somewhat similar. So the the psychedelic renaissance has over the last four years, five years, $4 billion plus has gone into psychedelic pharma companies.
>> Wow.
>> And I think the suffering is only going to increase. And one of the things that makes me say yes that it will become a medicine is that because of the work with veterans, we've built bipartisan support. So, it's one of the few things that's outside of the culture wars. And I think part of it, how should I say, this is where I my I was too optimistic about this feelings of interconnectedness and what psychedelics will will do. But there's a fair amount of people that are have been healed by psychedelics that are still Republicans, you know. So it doesn't I think the image people had from the 60s psychedelics makes you a hippie makes you an anti-war protester but we see that that's it's all about the context that you take it in. So we do have bipartisan support. We have the Department of Defense Congress just gave the Department of Defense $10 million to do MDMMA therapy with active duty soldiers, not just veterans.
>> Wow.
>> So these studies are starting pretty soon.
>> Happening right now.
>> Happening right now. Is there any disadvantages to this?
>> Disadvantages to MDMA?
>> Is there any?
>> Um, well, there's risks. I mean, every drug has risks. So, I I would say well, MDMA um without proper support, traumatic memories can come up and if you're not supported to deal with it, you could be worse off. And that's what what happens sometimes in non-medical settings. But even in medical settings, you need somewhat skilled therapists to help people through difficult moments because they're trying to address the most difficult things of their lives. MDMA does not cause holes in the brain. It does not. You may remember Leia Betts. So this was a woman, this was the big poster child of a woman that died from ecstasy. But it turned out that she didn't really die from the ecstasy. She was on ecstasy, but she drank too much water and she died from what's called hyponitriia, which means you you you dilute your blood so much. So, that's a concern, but it doesn't happen in therapy settings. Um, people often drink stuff with electrolytes. I think the harm reduction message that people has got is drink a lot of water to cool down, and it's better to drink something with electrolytes. People can overheat and die. So, we've had situations in raves where people will dance all night. They won't drink a lot of fluids and you get hypothermia and you can die from that. That's never happened in research either. MDMA increases your heartbeat so that you can um if somebody has a compromised heart that could be a problem if they can't handle increased blood pressure. Um, people might talk about the addiction risk, but there's something about MDMA that is more satisfying than cocaine in the sense that with cocaine, a lot of times you have an experience, but you keep sort of wanting more. But with MDMA, there's something that's so deep, it's so satisfying in a way. You don't want to do it again. At least not right away. You've got to process. So much richness has happened, so much depth that you want to work with it. This is the integration process. So there are some people that will do MDMA very frequently for sometimes years at a time very rare but that can happen and then if they some of them will get sort of burnt out where it you know and then they need to stop doing it for a while so there's low potential for addiction. So when you talk about David Nut and his list of all the different drugs and the dangers you know ecstasy is pretty low on that. That's why it came up because I think I I couldn't not talk I couldn't just sit here and talk about the the benefits, right? We've got to kind of weigh both sides. And I think
>> speaking to Professor David now 4 years ago he came on the show um and he was obviously fired in 2009 for saying that ecstasy was not as dangerous as horse riding.
>> Yeah.
>> Um and you know the amount of people that have died in the two different kind of camps that horse riding was way more dangerous.
>> Yeah.
>> I say it because things like alcohol is legalized. Yeah.
>> Okay. And that's a drug
>> and that's addictive.
>> And I think it's interesting having this conversation because a lot of people might be quite a lot of people be very receptive done MGMA, love the drug, be very inquisitive about psychedelics on a whole, but I think there is another side that are still very scared of the conversation and that are worried about where their minds might go. and we look at it with, I guess, a lot of stigma from how we kind of been speaking about it since it's obviously become illegal,
>> but we kind of forget about all these other drugs that are kind of on the market and that's so freely and widely available.
>> And so I think it's there's a disadvantage with everything in life, right? I mean, maybe not everything, but the majority of things we've got to do things in balance.
>> Well, people can die from water, right? You can drown in water, but we need water to survive. Everything has its risks. So, I think it's um what what I would say was going on in the 60s was that there was this growing government concern again because it was linked to Vietnam War protest. So, what the government did was they exaggerated the risks and then denied the benefits. And in response, some of the advocates like Timothy Liry would exaggerate the benefits and minimize the risks. And so I think trying to go forward, it's important for us to be honest about both. So, so I'll raise another one which is one of the critics was that that it makes um women in particular or or men more vulnerable to sexual abuse because of this trusting nature. So we've had one out of roughly 400 patients of which we're aware where after the MDMMA therapy was over the therapist had unethical sexy boundary violations with the patient. And so I think some of the this idea that you're I it's not quite that you're trusting everything. I mean we don't see people on MDMA walking in front of a bus or a car because the you're not completely fearless about anything. So we don't see but I think that this concern that people are in a trusting situation they're open s could they be taken advantage of by the therapists in different ways. So you could say for unethical therapists that can be a risk but that's what we need is the proper training of therapists and we need to properly educate patients about how this is inappropriate and patient bill of rights to complain and so that that's
>> so on and so forth. Yeah. And that's where kind of the ethical consideration comes in. I think kind of alongside the MDMA because you did speak about masculine and and LSD and psilocybin. I think psilocybin is really having a moment.
>> Oh, for sure.
>> In time.
>> Why do some people have bad trips?
>> Well, okay. So, what we like to say is that difficult is not the same as bad. So when you take psychedelics, when you take masculine or or you take psilocybin, there is this process of loosening how you normally process information and how you normally see things. So your sense of self is being weakened that what Robin Card Harris has talked about the default mode network. This the sort of resting state where we're sort of scanning the world about what our priorities are, what our needs are. And this default mode network is like the um sense of self in a way and that that's weakened when you take psilocybin. So this idea that and that's where you move toward this interconnectedness. You move out from your individual life to something you're connected to something much bigger. But that can be really scary
>> and that's where the ego comes in starts deflating.
>> Yes. Yeah. So the what we say the difference between difficult and bad is resistance. So when you have something difficult and you open up to it as as we said earlier that that can be the things that you learn the most from.
>> Yeah.
>> But you need the support to do that. When in my early LSD trips I would be unable to let go. So it would turn into these very painful holding on for hours. So I would call those not so much difficult but bad because I wasn't I was resisting. So I think that there are that possibility and that's that's where you have the therapeutic support that makes a big difference. So people have bad trips because their orientation is changing their past memories some of them from traumatic experiences are coming up. Their insecurities they're trying to deal with and if they're in a public setting I mean most people still are taking things at party settings with others. They're not going inward. They're not supported by therapists. You can still have what I would say resistance even with therapists. That's one of the reasons for an eight-hour trip, an 8 hour therapy session. You might resist at some point and then you just can let it go for a bit or somehow and then hours later, you know, now you're finally ready or the the MDMA or suicide is wearing down a little so it's not as intense. Now you can open it to it. But people have difficult experiences cuz we are fundamentally overdeveloped intellectually and underdeveloped emotionally and spiritually. And what we see even from the TED conference and we're hearing about AI and all this stuff is we as humans and we as individuals are not prepared to deal with the technology that we have. So, we're vastly advanced in our brains, but our emotions and our sense of spirituality is either is is not nearly as advanced and then that can lead to difficult trips.
>> So, when someone's in that, what advice would you give to somebody who's having in that moment if they're having a bad trip?
>> Well, if they're
>> or difficult, let me let me mind shift.
>> Yeah. Yeah. Well, what I found is that actually when we hear a lot about people that combine LSD with MDMA or psilocybin with MDMA, I I personally like it where people are doing LSD or psilocybin, they they do it by themselves and then if by by that drug only in a way, but then if they get stuck, then you could add MDMA. So I'd say that would be in the future psychiatry of the future once once all these drugs are available if you do the classic psychedelics and you have you get stuck adding MDMA would be really helpful because it doesn't tranquilize you it puts you deeper into the experience right
>> a lot of people do MDMA and then on top of that they take LSD or psilocybin which can also be helpful so people have difficult trips because we're we're not all of our education is pretty much up in our mind that there's more this idea of emotional intelligence or EQ. We don't have much of that and we're not trained by that. School is not training you to do that.
>> Yeah.
>> We don't have any lessons in emotional intelligence sadly.
>> Hardly any.
>> Or bodily intelligence.
>> Yeah.
>> Which I now call BQ.
>> Oh. Oh, that's interesting. Like to to know
>> in your body. Yeah. And to be connected to
>> Yeah. Well, it's important to say too that what we see is that in therapy a lot of times traumatic memories emerge in the body first before there's a story. So Bessel Vanderolk who wrote the book the body keeps the score was the principal investigator of our Boston site and so he's now of the opinion that MDMMA is with therapy is the most effective treatment for PTSD. But people will have pains in the body that if you can open up to it, it can turn into a traumatic story or a traumatic memory. We also sort of see things symbolically and not directly to our life because somehow it's easier to see in a symbolic way or it's so so things move through the body a lot. And so we we um encourage people if they have bodily pains to try to not resist that and to see what that turns into. Maybe that is a memory of a particular situation and then you can deal with it more directly.
>> I love that. And when the body says no by Dr. Gaba Mate
>> and the body keeps the score by Vaselov.
>> Two people who I'm also really wanted to get onto the show cuz uh
>> their research is incredible. It's inspired me a lot and I think a lot of my personal experiences with health have been from trauma being lodged in the body.
>> Yeah.
>> When I was taken into hospital when I was younger, I went in with his book.
>> Oh wow. Well, let me say something about his book which is amazing. His book was written about nine years ago and it's recently been the number one bestselling book in America. It's on the bestselling list for like 250 weeks. So I think people are enormously sensitized now to the role of trauma in all sorts of diseases and all sorts of stresses and we see more and more trauma happening. So Bessel's book has been incredibly helpful for many many people.
>> He only has a page or so about MDMA. He was just getting into MDMA.
>> Very small. Yeah.
>> very small. But he's written a new paper. So Bezel did not work with us on phase two where we're trying to figure he only joined us on phase three. And so what he said was don't work with people that have poor attachment that didn't have a sense of safety before they were traumatized because they're going to be the hardest to treat and you're going to make your studies more difficult to show good results and try to just work with people with more like adult onset trauma. And we said, "No, we've worked with a lot of people with complex trauma from childhood. It still seems to help." And so we said, "If you're going to do that, let me add some measures of somewhere like self-compassion, self self-experience, um, elixia, whether you're in touch with your emotions or not." And so we added a bunch of these measures and he's written a paper that he thinks has not gotten enough attention. And so
>> let's get him on the stage to talk about it.
>> He would love to do that. And it's about this self-experience, how you experience yourself.
>> And that he feels that what he saw when he looked at the data is that those people that had difficult attachments, they actually on average got better results than those people that didn't because they were so hungry for that sense of self-acceptance of and self-compassion and and connection that once it happened, they were able to make a lot of progress. So I think this this paper that he published is is really important. He said that's the the real finding he says in his mind that that this can work in the most difficult cases.
>> Well, I guess that just cements your theory on why MGMA is such a profound drug for especially something like PTSD where people feel essentially blocked and completely hopeless.
>> Yeah. Well, that's where we get to eating disorders where people who are, you know, so self-critical and so perfectionist that that they don't accept who they are. And that's where I think MDMMA can be really effective. The the story that I was going to tell before was about um ibeane. So I I did a ibeane trip. Um
>> explain what ibigane is.
>> Okay. Ibeane is the active ingredient in the ibogga root. So Iboga is from Gabone from Western Africa and it's used in the Biti religion. Um I had this so far I've only had one Ibein experience. It was actually not Ibegan. It was the Ibogarude but I did it in 1985 with the person we called the secret chief the leader of the underground psychedelic therapy movement. And as I was going to work challenging the DEA, he was saying own your own shadow in a way so that you don't project you're all good, they're all evil and stuff. and he said, "I want to give you a IBOGA experience." He mixed it with 350 micrograms of LSD because the plant takes a while longer and he wanted not to just wait around. And so it was the most difficult experience of of one of the the most difficult of my life.
>> When was this?
>> But 1985. So it was but it was um it was this whole confrontation with this self-criticism as self-hatred. I spent like 12 hours vomiting and seeing this. I I I was scared. I couldn't let go. I was criticizing myself and and this idea that I had to be perfect. So there was this sense of I'm not perfect. I don't like myself. I'm, you know, and this self-criticism turned into self-hatred. And I just would see that over and over and over and over. And after around 12 hours or something, I just I I called it transcendence through exhaustion. I just couldn't. I'm so tired of that. Somehow I just relaxed and I had the most blissful night. And what I realized is that the self-criticism is essential. You that's the key to quality. You need this constant like oh I should have done this, I should have done that. But if you separate the self-criticism from the self-hatred and that wanting to be perfect is also not wanting to be human. So there's a fear of death. I think when I want to be perfect, I don't want to be human. I don't want to die. I don't want to have to deal with that. So I was able to disentangle all of that so that then my the way I described how my fear has been helpful and so has my self-criticism. I've sort of defanged the self-criticism from the self-hatred because I saw how ugly that was and how difficult that was. And through this blissful night I could disentangle that. But somehow I told myself I hadn't really worked through that. I just kind of exhausted myself. And so I told myself this story, when the sun comes up, I'll be back in this nausea part. And that's what happened. I couldn't move for a whole other day. I just stay right there. It was only the third day that I could move. And it was only the fourth day that I could drive safely. But it cleared up my mind a lot. And so I feel that a lot of what Mass has been able to accomplish is because we've been able to learn from mistakes and because it's not been so painful to acknowledge a mistake because I've been able to separate it out from this self-hatred. So the self-compassion I'd say was part of what this I gain experience or IBOGA with LSD was like is like you don't have to be perfect and you need to learn from these mistakes and and just and because what I realized during that experience is the biggest mistake is not to do something.
>> Exactly. That's where the regret comes in.
>> Yes.
>> I think self-compassion is is facing adversity and stepping into suffering. That's basically what self-compassion is, right? It's like self-kindness, mindfulness, which is what Dr. Kess Nefford would saying, and connecting to common humanity, knowing that we're all imperfectly perfect. But I think it's like a courageous action of stepping into suffering.
>> Imperfectly perfect. I like that phrase.
>> Imperfectly perfect because we all have this vision, especially now more than ever with online, of trying to have this perfect demeanor.
>> And I had that when I was a model full-time.
>> I could imagine. Yeah.
>> You know, everything. And I knew every part of my body that wasn't perfect because it was pointed out to me every day. And it's ironic because most people would have said, "Oh, you know, you naturally tall or pretty or had these things and I hated myself."
>> And I don't think you'll find any model that isn't low on self-esteem or self worth.
>> Yeah, that is incredible. So, you're meant to have like this kind of certain person that's picked because of what they look like from their genetic lottery,
>> yet they are the ones that hate themselves the most because they're so heavily critiqued. And so, I think, you know, you have very low self-esteem, which again is not a great comparison cuz self-esteem pitches you against other people. You have to kind of be at the top of the pecking order, but self-worth, I think, is a very kind of important determiner. And they all have very self low worth. I I can understand that too in the sense that as you said the genetic lottery. So that's not something you've earned or done. So if you're s if you're being if your worth is because of something that you didn't really earn, you just were born that way, then it's hard to own that if you're not perfect. And nobody is perfect like that. And so so how have you been able to get through that
>> burnouts? um feeling having to really face the hardest parts of my ego. Um hospitalization.
>> Wow.
>> Which has given me weeks of mindfulness because I've not been able to move. Um really facing the hard parts of me, facing all of my shadows. And actually when I did that and I stepped into it, I started to know what my strengths were because I think for so long I would focus on what my weaknesses were and I would try to cover them. And I spent so much time covering all of the things that I felt ashamed of. And I so I never had time to understand what I was good at or what I loved. And I let more into that. And a lot of my work with nutrition and eating disorders and the charity that I built, building the charity allowed me to connect with other people's insecurities, other people's how they saw themselves as failures, worries, fears, and all of that humanized how I felt.
>> Wow.
>> So, I basically realized that we were all battling similar things. And similar with patients that would come in to see me, you know, they would open up their worlds to me. Yeah.
>> And when you hear that five times a day, it becomes quite normalized.
>> And so you go, well, every single person is facing this fear of their ego being kind of abolished and attacked or their worries. Everyone has them. They're not all logical why we have them, but everyone has all of these things. So when you're faced with that every day, it becomes quite normal, but in society, we aren't. People aren't that vulnerable walking down the street telling each other what their biggest worries are. So I think that what I went into made it feel very normalized and they my patients were my biggest teachers.
>> You use the word shadow which I but I'll say that one of the most
>> meaningful quotes to me is from Jung
>> and and what he said is that the most important therapeutic social and political work we can do is to withdraw the projection of our shadow onto others.
>> Yeah. I'm a big fan of young.
>> Yeah. And I think it's hard to do that.
>> It's very hard because the, you know, Trump is in is a perfect example of projecting his shadow onto others.
>> Absolutely.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah.
>> There there's something else that Jung has said that that's also been highly motivating. This was from a face tof face interview he did in 1959, few years before he died. But we talked about he we need he said we need more psychology. We need to understand ourselves more because our biggest enemy is is ourselves. You know that we're not humanity is not going to be killed by lions or anything. Our biggest enemy is ourselves. And then he says we really need to study our psyche because we don't know enough about it. And then he says because we are the source of all coming evil. And that is a kind of a chilling thought. you know, a natural disaster is not necessarily evil, but we are the source of all coming evil. So, he's about this owning our own shadow. And so, it's it's been this um sense that humans, we we have the technology to have abundance for everybody. When we hear about AI can replace all these jobs, why is it that somebody has, you know, $300 billion and other people have nothing, you know? So, we we could distribute the resources. Everybody could have enough to eat, to eat, to have shelter. But are we emotionally ready, socially ready, responsible enough, spiritual enough, feel to actually create a world like that? So without that, the technology advances are are unusually frightening potentially.
>> Yeah. Well, I guess that's why humanity is so important. I mean, I think empathy is one of the most important emotions and that's something that I don't think that we speak about enough.
>> Yeah. Well, one of the things about MDMA that is surprising that you see in working with people with PTSD is that they often have empathy for their perpetrators.
>> You said this to me actually last night when we had our conversation.
>> Um,
>> yeah. It's not that they for it's not that they don't see the the harm that they did, but they see that they're also often traumatized and have been hurt before and they don't know what to deal with it. So, it's it's uh often it's people that Yeah. people that they've been sexually abused by or their parents or something to to have some sense that there's a line of trauma that's led to them, their parent, whoever hurt them and they can see see that as well. I guess that takes us back to the very beginning even before the show or pre-show when you spoke about letting go. And I guess that's such a big part of that treatment, right? That when you feel empathy that for somebody else that's actually really hurt you, that really does give you the sense of letting go. There's a big freedom that comes with that.
>> Yeah. You you don't have to be stuck in that kind of um forever anger, you know, that that you can move beyond that. It doesn't mean you for you know that you wish they didn't do that or it's not even the same as forgiveness. But it is sort of like but it's like
>> you kind of hand that emotion back to them.
>> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It poisons you and you have gotten rid of it though.
>> Rick, thank you
>> so much for coming on.
>> I have to ask you one final question that we ask all of our guests.
>> Oh. Oh, Oh. Okay. Is this is this like the first five?
>> These are like the first five questions that we do on the on the getting to know you. So, the last question I ask all of my guests, and I ask this because I believe this is very individual and personal to every single person who sits in front of me, is Rick, what does live be well mean to you?
>> It it means trying to um actualize your dreams.
>> I love that. That's We've never had that before. We've actually never had the same answer in 400 episodes.
>> Oh. Oh, wow.
>> But we've never had dreams come into it. So to actualize your dreams.
>> Yeah.
>> Thank you.
>> And actually what I should um it's actualize trying you know trying to actualize your dreams because often we cannot actualize our dreams because some of the dreams that I have like I talk about net zero trauma by 2070. That's a multi-generational thing. I will never accomplish that on in my own life. But I think if you try to actualize your dreams, whether you actually achieve that or not, that's live well, be well.
>> Wow.
>> Net trauma by 2070. I feel so pessimistic saying this, but after the whole week at TED with all these conversations, I'm not sure if I would love to. That's a possibility. But there's a lot of work that needs to be done. There's a lot of MDMA that needs to be taken before we get to that phase. a lot of MVMA. Yes.
>> Rick, thank you so much for being such an amazing guest on Live Well, Be Well, [Music]