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Hi, I'm Jim O'Shaughnessy and welcome to Infinite Loops.
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Sometimes we get caught up in what feel like infinite loops when trying to figure things out.
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Markets go up and down, research is presented and then refuted, and we find ourselves right back where we started.
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The goal of this podcast is to learn how we can reset our thinking on issues that hopefully leaves us with a better understanding as to why we think the way we think and how we might be able to change that to avoid going in infinite loops of thought.
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We hope to offer our listeners a fresh perspective on a variety of issues and look at them through a multifaceted lens — including history, philosophy, art, science, linguistics, and yes, also through quantitative analysis.
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And through these discussions help you not only become a better investor, but also become a more nuanced thinker.
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With each episode we hope to bring you along with us as we learn together.
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Thanks for joining us, now please enjoy this episode of Infinite Loops.
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Disclaimer: Jim O'Shaughnessy is chairman and Co-Chief Investment Officer of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management, where Jamie Catherwood is an associate.
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All opinions expressed by Jim, Jamie and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinions of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management.
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This podcast is for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions.
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Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, hello everyone.
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It's Jim O'Shaughnessy with another addition of Infinite Loops.
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And I cannot tell you today we might actually achieve infinite loops.
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I am so delighted to have as my guests Rick Doblin and Amy Emerson, who are respectively the founder and the CEO of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies or as I call it MAPS. Welcome.
2:08
Amy Emerson: Thank you, Jim. Rick Doblin: Yeah.
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Now, actually though, Amy is executor director of the MAPS Public Benefit Corporation. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Aah. Okay.
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Amy Emerson: The CEO of the MAPS Public Benefit Corporation.
2:29
Yeah, we're a wholly-owned subsidiary of MAPS, the non-profit.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: That is very clever.
2:33
But let's actually dive right in because this is a subject that fascinates me.
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We were talking before we started to record about Natalie Ginsburg, who was kind of my agent provocateur in this.
2:51
She was a classmate with my daughter, Kate, at Yale.
2:51
And obviously very, very bright woman and started getting me interested.
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Because I'll tell you frankly, I was a typical sixty, or I wasn't in my sixties then, but I was a typical 55 year old white guy who had kind of bought Nixon's vilification of psychedelics.
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Didn't really think about it, didn't do them, but didn't think about it one way or the other until Natalie and I started talking.
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And I read Michael's book, which I think is phenomenal, and then was introduced to MAPS.
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Let's start with you, Rick, if that's okay.
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Your career fascinates me, because for a while, you were running essentially a construction company.
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Owned and operated at Braxas Construction, 1975 to 1982, and then you decided, "Ah, what the hell.
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I'm going to go to Harvard, I'm going to get my PhD in psychedelics, and I'm going to go that way."
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Is there a wonderful origin story that you just want- Rick Doblin: Yeah. Jim O'Shaughnessy: ... I'd love to hear it. Rick Doblin: Yeah. Yeah. Well, my parents ...
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That's my origin story here. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Okay.
4:20
Rick Doblin: My parents, when I was 12, they had a house designed by a student of Frank Lloyd Wright.
4:26
I grew up in Winnetka, in Chicago in this incredible house that was very inspirational to me personally.
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I also, like you originally, believe that a lot of the propaganda against LSD.
4:36
And I thought that if you took it six or seven times you were certifiably insane.
4:43
That each time moved you a little bit closer to that, and then six or seven times you were over the edge and no hope for that.
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I also believe that it hurt your chromosomes and all of this.
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I was pretty much scared of psychedelics during my high school years, during the '60s.
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I started college in '71.
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And I went to an experimental college called New College in Sarasota, Florida.
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It's now the Honors College of the State of Florida, and that's where I started doing LSD.
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But because I'd read this incredible book that was fantastic, and I loved it, and I gave it to a friend of mine who had loaned it to me, and he said, "This book was written partially under the influence of LSD," and I said, "That's impossible.
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Nothing good comes from LSD.
5:34
It's hallucinations, it's delusions."
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It was One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Kesey. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Wow.
5:40
Rick Doblin: And it was written partially while he was under the influence of LSD.
5:41
And so that's what sort of cracked the propaganda shell for me and I started looking deeper.
5:47
The real origin story is that I'd been secondarily traumatized by the Holocaust.
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A lot of the distant relatives killed, and just the human cruelty just really shocked me, and I felt like I was multi-generations of refugees from Russia and Poland escaping antisemitism, coming to the United States, but in this American Dream.
6:18
And so I felt though that I was trained by my parents to think about my job as sort of protecting the Jewish people and myself, and looking at sort of psychological mechanisms, how people can dehumanize others, can commit atrocities and think they're doing good things, then compounded by the Cuban missile crisis, and now it's the whole world and then later my confrontation with what to do about Vietnam.
6:44
All of this just made me realize that we're born into humans that have not really fully evolved yet, and that we are destroying each other and destroying the environment, destroying species.
6:57
And so that's what started me thinking inner healing.
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And then also that was the same time as people going to the moon and having this spiritual experience, looking back at the earth from the moon and realizing we're all together.
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And so when I first started taking psychedelics, I had this idea of the beyond ego states, how we're all connected, and I thought this is the antidote to genocide.
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If we can feel how we're all connected, and not just hear it, but feel it, then we can have less fear for people that are different than us, and that we could see how much we're similar.
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If we look at our genetic material, we're very similar to a lot of animals, and humans even more so, just slight variations.
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And so it was for political reasons in 1972 that I decided to focus on my life on psychedelics.
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And then the construction business comes in, because I had the delusion that the more psychedelics you take, the faster you evolve, and I thought, "I could do that. I'll take more.
8:04
I'll take more and more."
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And I was not emotionally mature.
8:08
I would get stuck, I would get scared.
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Finally, I tried everything that I could imagine, primal therapy, which was the primal screen.
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I did encounter groups for a month in the mountains of California.
8:21
I did LSD multiple times with different sitters.
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And I finally realized that I wasn't where I wanted to be, but I didn't know what to do.
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Because I'd done everything as strong as I could do to ...
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And this was after the '60s had crashed and burned, and it was clear that it was massive resistance, but also mistakes made by some of the advocates, and we had to do this purification of ourselves.
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I finally realized that I had skipped over this whole part about integration.
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That it's not just going out, it's what you bring back.
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And that if you keep going out and avoid the work of bringing things back and changing your baseline, you're actually going backwards instead of forwards.
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And then I finally got this idea, "I should build stuff.
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Maybe that'll be a way for me to get grounded."
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And that led to this 10 years of building.
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I was already committed to being a psychedelic therapist and working to bring psychedelics back before that whole construction career began, but I wasn't capable.
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I wasn't emotionally prepared.
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And so once I finally got through this construction process in '82, 10 years after I dropped out of college, that's where I went back to school, and that's where I discovered ...
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I went out to Esalen to work with Stan and Christina Grof, and that's where I learned about MDMA in 82.
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'And I learned about MDMA before the backlash, but the backlash was inevitable because it was also being sold as ecstasy in public settings.
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And so that's how I started getting politically involved.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: Fascinating.
10:01
Amy, did you come up more ...
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I hesitate to say traditional lines.
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But looking at your bio, you would work for several big pharma companies.
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What was the moment when you were like, "No, I've got to go do this."
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Because I know that you started on a pro bono basis back in '03. Am I right about that?
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Amy Emerson: Yes, for six years.
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MAPS didn't have a lot of money then, we still don't, but even less then. Yeah.
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I guess I would say I came up through this in a more traditional way.
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I grew up on an island in Alaska, in Kodiak island, always in nature, and around a lot of animals and being able to really explore.
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And my way into science was kind of through the creativity of it, and the problem solving and the wanting to understand how things worked.
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And I think that was a lot of me being able to kind of run around in the woods, and ride horses and be out in nature a lot.
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Science psych was just my thing from probably the time I was in third grade.
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Even in high school, I was very interested in genetics, and cell biology, and molecular biology was kind of this newer thing coming up, and that was what I decided to study in college.
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So I did that, and I ended up working for actually pretty small biotech that was doing pretty innovative work in cell selection technologies.
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And I decided I really didn't like being in the lab.
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I had this romantic idea of a scientist in the lab discovering things, but really you're proving yourself wrong, like 90% of the time.
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And so I was like, "I want to go into clinical research where at least I'm working on something that's made it past that point, and I need to be around more people."
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I made my way into clinical research and then ultimately like vaccine research, which is at the time when I met Rick, I was in vaccine research.
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And I had, had my own personal experiences with my partner, who's now my husband, and felt like always with those personal experiences with psychedelics always also in the back of my mind was that scientific mind and the kind of the, "These are important tools."
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But it never really occurred to me at that point that they would actually be in the medical system.
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I heard Rick talking about this at a conference and also the idea of really doing this in a non-profit way, and he said the words like, "I want to develop a non-profit pharma company, and I want to study MDMA for PTSD."
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And I looked at my husband and I was like, "I have to help him do this."
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It felt like this just moment for me of like real clarity of purpose.
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And so that was when I reached out to Rick.
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And around that time, I also read this book that I love called the Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge.
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It was written in '98, Jeremy Narby.
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In it, there was this idea of molecular biology, and kind of art and also access to information through psychedelics.
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And so it was like, there's multiple things giving me the idea that all these pieces for me that I loved of the creativity of art and of that psychedelics could be an important tool.
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And then having Rick talking about starting this work just was like ...
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It was like everything came together into alignment for me.
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Jim O'Shaughnessy: Fantastic.
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One of the things that really blew me away as coming at this, not entirely a novice in terms of what I knew about psychedelics and about their potential, but pretty much as a newbie.
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I think I was kind of lucky because I brought beginner's mind to it, and read Michael's book and was literally blown away.
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And so I'm a big researcher and rabbit hole diver.
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And I was flabbergasted when I saw that we had already had decades of research that was conducted completely ethically under all standard medical protocols, everything that was literally burned and thrown away or destroyed.
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And I just think to myself, "Okay.
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This is happening in the United States of America, which I mean, is a constitutional republic with a bill of rights that are enumerated.
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I can only imagine what's happening elsewhere as well."
14:47
The other thing, obviously, Rick, to your point, a lot of this research was done by Germans.
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And the Germans had just done the unspeakable, the unthinkable.
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Historically, at least, I was born in 1960, so obviously I only heard about it, but we had this visceral reaction to anything put out by Germans.
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Even though by the way, most of these researchers were German Jews, it was just all thrown out with the bathwater, which I think set back psychedelic research decades, set back dietary research decades.
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I mean, you can go down the list and just see all that was wasted.
15:44
Are you right now trying to ...
15:44
I just, I want to get a sense.
15:44
Are we over the hump where people hear psychedelic and immediately kind of stiffing up?
15:51
I have noticed as I've had conversations about this with other people that there is still kind of an axiomatic reflex that ...
16:08
I love the fictional character known as Jed McKenna, who writes an enlightenment series.
16:16
And he says that, "Well, of course the indoctrinators are fully indoctrinated themselves, so of course they're going to not like that." But are you finding?
16:31
I was speaking to somebody who is involved in psychedelic research, and he was quite bullish, and he was quite optimistic about the fact that perhaps we humans have begun our climb up what I call the Leary tree of all of the various forms of imprinting.
16:52
Am I totally crazy, Rick?
16:59
Rick Doblin: No, not at all.
16:59
And so just to give you a sense of ...
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We've been going to these pockets where there's the most resistance, intentionally trying to educate people, to try to make it so that there is no backlash.
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And one of the most important pockets of resistance, but also one of the greatest places of need is with the police.
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Because the police have highly traumatizing jobs, they have large amounts of suicide, alcoholism, drug abuse, divorces.
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It's very difficult to be seeing the worst of humanity all the time, and also having to pretend to be tough and not let it affect you and all.
17:38
A bunch of years ago, one of our veteran who is in our study, one of the therapists, and we now have a senior retired DEA official that's acting as a consultant for us because his son went to Iraq and came back with PTSD, and found cannabis helpful.
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And so we all went to the International Association of Chiefs of Police Conference.
18:06
And this is like 10,000 police chiefs and their lieutenants from all over the world.
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And we were going to present about MDMA therapy for police officers with PTSD.
18:12
And we get there, and president Trump was president at the time, and he decided just a few days before this was his group, his people, and so they scheduled his talk at exactly the same time as our talk.
18:34
We get there and there's thousands and thousands of people standing in line, and we're like, "Oh my God, our talk must be really talking."
18:38
But turns out no, they're all to see Trump.
18:38
And we go to our room of like 350 people, and there's only 20 people there.
18:44
But one of them sitting in the front row came up to us after the talk and said that he was a full-time police officer, but he was also a psychotherapist.
18:54
And he felt that the police needed more tools to help those that are suicidal, all these problems that they have, and could he learn more about what we're doing?
19:06
I said, "We'll give you a scholarship to go through our training program."
19:11
And he since has gone through our therapist training program, I've met his police captain, and I've met the chiefs of his department and the head of the Massachusetts Police Chief Union and stuff, and explained what we're doing.
19:24
And we did a good enough job that this ... [inaudible] is his name.
19:29
We did a good enough job that his police chief let him volunteer to take MDMA as part of our therapist training program.
19:36
We have an FDA-approved protocol.
19:36
That's all to say to answer your question, there are pockets of resistance still.
19:41
There are people that have this visceral reaction that's, "I'm going to go crazy, and I'm going to lose control, and it's going to be terrible," but there's fewer and fewer of those pockets.
19:56
And there's more and more people that are hopeful or interested because the suffering is so great.
20:03
We have more PTSD, more depression, more this.
20:03
Now, one of the other big pockets, I would say, is that we've treated over about 50 veterans with PTSD and have gotten tremendous results, but we've not yet treated a single active duty soldier.
20:15
That's what we're wanting to do.
20:15
And the same way, in our studies, we treat people 18 or over.
20:21
But the FDA has said to us, if we succeed and get approval for prescription use, we must use a new study without adolescents with PTSD.
20:36
We have to study 12 to 17 year olds with PTSD.
20:36
That's going to get into some of the parents scared about protecting their kids, but there's good evidence that PTSD changes people's brains, and they're suffering and nothing's helping, and MDMA can be helpful.
20:49
All of this is to say is that I think our culture has grown tremendously in the last half century since the backlash. Sorry.
20:54
And so I think that there's a real good chance that we will continue to reach out to those people that are scared and try to give them information to help them feel more open about this whole new area.
21:14
Jim O'Shaughnessy: That was one of the things that I thought, when I started donating to MAPS, that I thought was absolutely a stroke of brilliance on your behalf, which was treating veterans.
21:23
Because literally, I don't care about if you are a Trump supporter or a Biden supporter or just a crazy guy like me who just is very anti-authoritarian, I think that there is one thing that virtually everyone that I know at least would agree with, which is we have to, we have to take care of our veterans. And so really brilliant. Rick Doblin: Yeah.
22:01
Well, [crosstalk] Amy Emerson: It's so important to be bipartisan on this. Rick Doblin: Yeah.
22:04
That was one of the things I learned at the Kennedy School is strategy.
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And how do you work with a population that's been miseducated, fearful, traumatized by stories of psychedelics, and you have to work with people that the culture appreciates. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
22:22
And so I definitely commend you for that because a lot of life comes down to framing things appropriately.
22:27
And so- Rick Doblin: Yeah, and what Amy said about bipartisan, first off, we want to thank you for your support. That's been tremendous. Jim O'Shaughnessy: ...
22:45
Oh, it is truly my pleasure.
22:46
Rick Doblin: Your recent support as well.
22:46
But also Rebekah Mercer, who was the funder of Trump and Bannon.
22:49
She gave us a million dollars for MDMA. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Wow.
22:55
That's fantastic to hear.
22:55
Rick Doblin: Her only condition was it's only for veterans, and that's been that crossover.
23:04
Amy Emerson: And I think there's an important part about changing people's minds when you're talking about how's the culture gotten over this, right, gotten over this kind of reaction to hearing psychedelics, is it's important to know somebody. Right?
23:15
This is how a lot of minds get changed is knowing somebody that's had the experience that you trust. Right?
23:23
It becomes like a personal interaction.
23:29
There's different ways to change different minds.
23:29
For the scientific community, it's like data, and we make sure we're publishing.
23:34
And then there's work in harm reduction.
23:34
And then there's work to educate the public and in doing shows like this that were really speaking to a different audience.
23:49
And then that opens their mind, I think, to going out and hearing the stories from people that have been healed, or family members or somebody that's been healed.
23:53
And that's really the way that I think this has been spreading more and more acceptance is gained is personal. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. Rick Doblin: Yeah.
24:03
And actually there's sort of support for what Amy just said in public surveys.
24:04
The drug policy reform movement is getting pretty sophisticated.
24:10
We have marijuana legalization in multiple states.
24:10
And so the surveys have been, "Why is somebody in favor of marijuana legalization?"
24:17
And you would think that the most important thing is if they smoke marijuana themselves, then they want it legal.
24:28
But even more was if they know a medical marijuana patient, they have some direct communication with somebody and then that pierces through all the propaganda and they say, "Somebody at least found some benefit more than harms. And why is that?
24:39
And maybe this shouldn't all be illegal."
24:45
This idea that we hope to have a million MDMA sessions in this decade, train 25,000 therapists and have a million MDMA sessions, and all those people around talking to their families and their friends about what happened to them, I think will be a massive change of the culture.
25:07
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I completely agree.
25:07
And I think even though I myself have not had a close relationship with somebody who's had this dramatic change, I've heard from enough people and heard a lot.
25:19
I'm somewhat involved with the Navy Seals and I think that they do an amazing thing for our country, but it also leaves them probably very much in need of your services after the- Rick Doblin: [inaudible]. Jim O'Shaughnessy: ... Yeah, of course we will.
25:42
Rick Doblin: We actually got a donation from the Navy Seal Foundation.
25:44
We got a $50,000 donation.
25:44
The board of directors had to change their mission charter, because they were only providing services, they weren't supporting research.
25:58
They changed it in order to give us $50,000 to do MDMA, PTSD research because so many Navy seals have spoken to them about their own use of psychedelics and how it's been important to them.
26:10
But I do have a question, if you don't mind, how did you educate your daughter about psychedelics?
26:16
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I had kind of an unusual thesis about how to raise children.
26:21
And my thesis was that the goal that my wife and I had was we wanted to raise good, successful adults, hard stop.
26:32
And if you think about that for a moment, you want to raise good adults.
26:42
That precludes so many types of parenting that just naturally one would fall into.
26:51
It precludes saying to them, "Because I said so."
26:59
It precludes saying to them, "My house, my rules."
26:59
And it encourages discussion.
27:09
But also if you asked any one of my kids, I have a very big library, and they will always joke when they're all together, "Yeah, what did dad do with you?"
27:18
And they all say in unison, "He said, 'Look it up.'"
27:24
And so I would rather say that my daughter and my son, both my daughters, I have a son and two daughters and three grandchildren, two granddaughters and a grandson.
27:40
I would like to think, and I know that I didn't educate them, they educated themselves.
27:40
It was obviously through a friend of Kate who graduated from Yale that I got involved in this and realized how many preconceived notions that I had.
27:58
And I think that it led me to the work of Robert Anton Wilson.
28:07
I don't know if you know his work.
28:07
Rick Doblin: Oh yeah, for sure.
28:10
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I have read everything he's written, and what a magnificent mind.
28:11
50, 60 years ahead of his time.
28:20
But then the tremendous irony of the fact that if one were to list drugs from most addicting to least addicting, it is my understanding that at the bottom of that list are the medicines that we're talking about right now, are psychedelics.
28:40
At the top of that list are all the legal drugs, caffeine, nicotine, alcohol.
28:50
And it seems to me perverse in especially kind of twisted way that ...
29:01
I often joke people will say when they're commenting on Trump, I always try to stay out really far away from politics, because I guess if I was in Britain they'd call me a Red Tory, which is just don't be authoritarian around me.
29:15
Don't tell me what to do.
29:24
I had one guy call me a libertarian anarchist when he was doing my podcast, and I'm like, "I don't think I'm either of those, but I'll take that as a compliment."
29:31
But this idea that we were really put kind of in a rotten place by Richard Nixon, essentially having a mental breakdown while he was the president of the United States.
29:52
And people will say, "Oh, Trump, that guy is crazy," and I'm like, "Not by a country mile is he the craziest man ever to occupy the White House."
30:04
I think that, that still is, unless there's some of the early guys I'm missing, I think that Richard Nixon maybe probably takes that prize.
30:10
But the idea that we were able to vilify an entire class of medicines and, or drugs, that we were able to send a Harvard professor to jail for God knows how many years for a joint, and that we were able to do this because maybe there were three networks and only two newspapers that mattered.
30:36
And if they all agreed, it was hard to see the other side.
30:43
I'm incredibly bullish on the internet and the freedom metaphors.
30:49
Listen, I understand all the problems with it too.
30:49
But the internet is not my term, but a friend of mine.
30:56
The internet is an amplifier, and it amplifies variance.
31:05
We spent about a century after Napoleon tried to take over all the world, trying to dampen variance with our various institutions.
31:10
But then we introduced this incredible variance amplifier.
31:19
But to me, one of the good things that's coming out of that is I ...
31:19
And I want to see if you agree with me.
31:27
I don't think a vilification as conducted under Nixon would be possible these days.
31:34
Am I too idealistic or optimistic about that?
31:40
Rick Doblin: Well, I hate to say it, but I think you are.
31:42
Because look at how many people believe that the election was stolen from Trump.
31:50
The big lie works really well, particularly what it aligns with what people want to be believing or who they want to associate with.
31:57
We could turn on a dime and have big lies about all sorts of different things, and I think there's a lot of people willing to believe it.
32:08
And so I don't think we've evolved as much as we hope.
32:08
Now, you talked multiple times about being anti-authoritarian.
32:15
And I talked about how psychedelics were the antidote to genocide and things.
32:19
If we feel our connection, it's my same feeling about being anti-authoritarian.
32:26
But recently I've been thinking that even though MAPS is 36 years now, that there's a psychedelic renaissance, I worry sometimes that it's happening a little bit too late, that it's the idea of mass mental health and making it available to people that we're entering a period where there's an enormous number of people willingly believing delusionary ideas that they probably don't even really believe.
32:49
It's just like a tribal signal, like, "I'm part of this group."
32:54
I don't think they really believe a lot of it, they'll just say they do.
32:59
But I would say that the key to our success with the psychedelic main streaming is continuing to have bipartisan support, and continuing to go to where the pain is and trying to offer solutions, and people will gravitate towards that is our hope.
33:13
Amy Emerson: I think it feels a little uncomfortable to ...
33:17
I love what you believe, Jim, and I feel like it almost feels a little bit dangerous to believe that because then we're not paying enough attention to kind of the pieces that Rick is talking about and what is going on and what people do believe.
33:31
I've heard you both talk kind of anti-authoritarian, and I think that psychedelics are helpful in that way in that they do open people's mind to think for themselves.
33:45
So besides the medical pieces and the medical parts that we're kind of working a lot on to bring healing, there's also personal growth pieces to this that I think is really important, and consciousness expansion and expanding your thinking. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. Yeah, I totally agree.
34:03
I think that your points about people tribing up are very relevant and true, Rick.
34:09
I think it's just a colossal waste of time and energy.
34:20
I talk to a lot of young people, and I don't think of the last 20 young people ...
34:28
And I'm defining young people as anyone younger than my youngest child.
34:35
My youngest child is turning 27.
34:35
So anyone under that age, I consider a young person.
34:41
And honestly, of every ten that I have discussions with, it comes up pretty quickly that of the 10, nine are falsifying their preferences because they feel such overwhelming pure pressure to think or say a certain thing or act a certain way.
35:05
And what's interesting is I try to be as universal in who I talk to as I can be, because I know that I have a bunch of prejudices, and that I have a bunch of things that are wrong, and I try to always eliminate an error a day. Right?
35:17
And if I can do that, I'm making some progress.
35:27
And this is both sides of the spectrum.
35:27
It's not just very progressive people.
35:27
It's not conservative people.
35:35
They're all saying the same thing.
35:35
And so I think that's another good point for the idea of psychedelics as opening not only your awareness of, and connection with other human beings, maybe other sentient beings.
35:56
But it's also an amazing, at least it looks like an amazing tool for growth in a variety of non-prescribed areas. Right?
36:13
I totally get and think by the way that you are doing it exactly the right way.
36:21
And I'm not Pollyannish here.
36:21
I mean, Leary gave test to Congress in which he was very explicit about that this should be used under medical supervision.
36:30
And that seems to have been lost, so I get your hesitation and your feeling of- Rick Doblin: Yeah, I would say for Leary though that he was saying that treatment of people with clinical indications should be done under medical supervision, but he was also encouraging people to do it on themselves without- Jim O'Shaughnessy: ... Oh, sure. Yeah.
36:55
No, he brought a lot of that out himself. I grant that to you.
37:05
I'm fascinated by these pockets of history.
37:05
I like to write fictional treatments too.
37:05
I haven't done it as much recently, but one that I wrote back when I was in my twenties was that, it was a science fictiony type of thing and it was that these very, very advanced aliens were opening a window on earth to see if we were ready. Right?
37:27
To see if we were ready for their help to evolve.
37:38
And I think the name of it was ascension or something along those lines.
37:38
And I found I've been keeping journals since I was 18 years old.
37:45
And young me was pretty smart.
37:45
I got dumber over time as opposed to the other way around.
37:51
And then these windows would snap shut.
37:51
But then I started thinking about it not as fiction, but I thought to myself, "I wonder if I went and looked at the cultural icons of the late '60s, early '70s, would they all be pointing to psychedelics?
38:06
And gosh darn, would they help of YouTube and with a lot of the library associations that I belong to?"
38:25
The answer seems to be yes.
38:25
It seems to me that you're absolutely right, Leary also was being very loud about being in favor of psychedelics.
38:31
But is there anything that really worries you about not a dedicated foe who is just opposed to psychedelics because that's maybe they're puritanical or whatever?
38:49
Is there anyone out there who would be seen as an honest broker?
39:01
What I guess I'm asking is, is there any legitimate ammunition that people might use to try to shut down what I think is miraculous research? Rick Doblin: ... No, there's not.
39:16
Now, there are legitimate fears and concerns which we address in our studies.
39:16
For example, it's not the psychedelic, it's the therapy.
39:27
The psychedelic helps the therapy be more effective.
39:35
But just taking a psychedelic, you could end up worse off, not better.
39:35
It's not like the magic is in the pill.
39:41
The magic is in the relationship and the context, and the relationship with the therapists and the preparation, and as I talked earlier before a lot of it in the integration that I didn't appreciate in my early years.
39:51
The concerns that people could have are that there's not enough therapeutic support.
39:58
We enroll people in our studies who previously attempted suicide.
40:03
Most or many of the PTSD studies exclude people who previously attempted suicide on the theory that they're too vulnerable, and that if somebody commit suicide during your study, it's going to be a bad thing.
40:15
But we feel that we have to work with the heart of cases.
40:21
Somebody could say to us, "You're not having enough of a therapeutic support," but nobody who's ever, so far at least, been in our study who has gotten MDMA has gone on and killed themselves, or even tried to kill themselves. It gives them hope.
40:33
There are various concerns.
40:37
For many years, people were saying MDMA causes neurotoxicity and brain damage.
40:45
Now, it's a legitimate concern if it were true.
40:45
Turns out it's not true and that was exaggerated to justify the criminalization.
40:51
People can say you don't do enough screening to figure out who's going to respond, who's not going to respond.
40:59
MDMA increases your heart blood pressure and heart rate a little bit, so you have to do certain kind of screenings.
41:14
But I don't think there's any sort of good faith, honest reasons that people would give to shut the research down.
41:24
Amy Emerson: No, I think most of that would be fear based, right?
41:26
If there's a fear about something, it's something we can find out the answer to. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
41:35
I referred to him earlier, McKenna, who is a pseudonym, and he's in the very highly misnamed spiritual awakening category.
41:51
And one of his quotes is we are a fear-based creatures.
41:51
And the more I studied and the more I read, the more obvious that became to me.
41:59
I mean, I'll look around at what's happened recently over the last two years.
42:07
Amy Emerson: It's so much reactivity, right? Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
42:12
And this othering of people, I just find abhorrent.
42:12
It's built unfortunately into our human OS.
42:25
And one way, and why I'm so interested in psychedelics as an assist, if you will, to move beyond where human operating system is right now, it's time for an upgrade, I think frankly.
42:44
And I'm speaking just for myself here, but I think that, that is true for every everybody.
42:50
But I did have a specific question for you, Rick and Amy, if you want to also offer an opinion.
42:58
You referred several times to MDMA, and correct me if I'm wrong, please, but MDMA is euphoric, it's not a psychedelic, right?
43:05
Rick Doblin: Well, back in the eighties when MDMA was being used as a therapy drug, but it also become ecstasy- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Sure.
43:17
It was a club drug, basically. Rick Doblin: ...
43:20
Yeah, it was a club drug.
43:20
It was a therapy drug before it was a club drug.
43:25
but when the DEA first moved in '84 to try to criminalize it, a bunch of people tried to say, "Oh, let's say it's a different category of thing."
43:30
They didn't use the word euphoria, but it was more like an empathogen to promote empathy or entactogens you touch within.
43:42
And there's a whole lot of effort.
43:42
And it does work differently than the classic psychedelics.
43:50
There's a lot of discussions.
43:50
What's proper psychedelic?
43:50
What does the word really mean?
43:54
The word was developed in the late '50s by Humphrey Osmond and Aldous Huxley, and it means mind manifested or to reveal the mind.
44:00
And so we use it in a very broad way, that hyperventilation.
44:05
This holotropic breathwork that I've learned from Stan Grof is one of the therapeutic approaches.
44:11
That's psychedelic, because it changes you enough so that you have this flow from the unconscious to awareness, meditation.
44:15
You could say be psychedelic.
44:21
Marijuana, I think, is more psychedelic, closer to classic psychedelics than MDMA is.
44:27
Amy Emerson: I think people confuse the word hallucinogen, like a classic hallucinogen potentially with psychedelic, and psychedelic meaning just it produces changes in your perception mood, cognitive process.
44:35
I think of it as mind manifesting, right?
44:43
Like what Rick was saying.
44:43
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Let's talk about that for a minute then, because I've had conversations with people who are very intelligent, actually with people who are trained PhDs in medical fields, et cetera.
45:04
And they get into these things that frankly, as someone who's read a lot about it, I think I could answer, but I don't have the authority to kind of say, "Well, this is the way it is," even though I've read every study.
45:18
But they try to make this huge distinction between manmade psychedelics, as in LSD, and natural psychedelics as in psilocybin or magic mushrooms.
45:37
Enlighten this poor soul here.
45:37
Amy Emerson: Rick, you love this question.
45:42
I'm going to let you go for this.
45:47
Rick Doblin: Well, let's just start with mushrooms, right?
45:50
There are poisonous mushrooms and there are psychedelic mushrooms, and there's edible mushrooms and there's medicinal mushrooms.
45:55
This romantic idea that if it's from nature, it's good.
46:02
If it's from the lab, from people, it's bad.
46:02
I think that, that's going to be really, really helpful for marketing.
46:09
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Of course it is.
46:13
Rick Doblin: From a scientific point of view, there's no difference between a synthetic version of psilocybin or psilocybin that's extracted from the mushroom.
46:22
And in fact, one of the best examples, and people have had some questions about this, but Albert Hofmann was the one that was successful in synthesizing psilocybin and figuring out that psilocybin was the active ingredient in mushrooms.
46:46
The reason that he was so successful where other people had failed before that is that he was willing to take ...
46:50
He would fractionate the substances and then he would take them.
46:56
And whichever one was active, he'd say, "Let's keep in that direction."
46:56
But in the dry season, they went back to Maria Sabina, which was the Mazatec Indian that had given the mushroom to Gordon Wasson and sort of introduced psychedelic mushrooms to the west.
47:12
Again, that knowledge had been lost by the dominant culture.
47:12
And in a dry season, Albert and Gordon Wasson and others, they went back to Maria Sabina with a synthetics psilocybin. And they did a ceremony.
47:24
And she is reported to have said the spirit of the mushroom is in the pill.
47:31
I really don't think much about this, "Oh, if it's from nature, it's good.
47:31
If it's from the lab, it's bad."
47:36
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I couldn't agree with you more.
47:38
And listen, I believe pretty much that almost everything started as a marketing campaign.
47:47
So kind of, for example, I had Brian Muraresku on the show, and- Amy Emerson: Yeah, he's great. Jim O'Shaughnessy: ... he's fantastic.
48:00
And what I found interesting was sort of threefold.
48:00
Number one, of course, if I was going to start a religion, that's exactly what I would do.
48:08
Come and you'll talk to the gods. And you do.
48:15
But it led me down the sort of the path of, "Well, gosh, it probably all does start as a marketing campaign of some type."
48:26
And I loved this idea, his book I'm sure you both read it, reads like a fictional thriller.
48:35
It's just so beautifully written.
48:42
And he's so well spoken on the subject.
48:42
And I wonder, I was trying ...
48:42
And that's what led me to the question because I become impatient with people who ...
48:54
To me, this is the chemical composition.
49:03
It doesn't matter if we make it in a lab or if we pick it with our own hands outside, it's going to have the same chemical composition.
49:15
But maybe there is something to a little bit of mystique.
49:20
And one of the big things with people in my industry when they reach a certain place is to do the great ceremony of flying down to Peru and having the ceremonies with the shamans down there.
49:38
I personally would rather kind of stay where if I needed medical assistance I could get it stacked.
49:45
But I tend to be very practical about those kinds of things.
49:45
Are there too many stories that are being told around psychedelics or too few?
49:54
It sounds like a very weird question to ask.
49:54
But I'm asking about it in this thought about when you frame something a certain way.
50:03
For example, nobody bought death insurance, and some bright person came a long and said, "That's not death insurance.
50:17
That's life insurance," trillion dollar industry.
50:17
Is there anything like that, that could happen here where people would just go, "Ugh." ?
50:24
Rick Doblin: Well, I don't know.
50:30
I think the talk about the outcomes is what motivates people.
50:42
One thing I try to do, we just described it a little bit before, about what is psychedelic.
50:47
Well, I like to say dreams are psychedelic. Hyperventilation.
50:47
So then I try to normalize psychedelic.
50:52
It's stuff that you all know already.
50:52
We go to a psychedelic state at night every night when we dream.
50:57
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Exactly.
50:59
Amy Emerson: I think there's also a danger in almost the over positivity of something, because we've actually had a few people enter our studies and think they're getting a magic cure. Right?
51:14
And then be frustrated at the amount of work that it is, right?
51:14
The pill is not the cure.
51:20
There's this inner healing intelligence that is getting tapped into by taking that and then being in the right setting and with people that are trained to support that process.
51:30
And it's still an incredible amount of work to go in and touch that trauma for the people that are doing it.
51:36
And when there's too many stories told that just make it sound so easy, then there's not a realistic expectation.
51:43
And I think there's also people might be more inclined to enter risky situations if they're not really hearing the whole story.
51:53
I think it's not a matter of too many of this kind of story or too many of the ...
51:59
We just need the right kind of stories that are based in reality to be told.
52:05
And- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah, I think that is absolutely the right answer.
52:08
I remember Bob Pirsig who wrote Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance said something, and I'm going to get this wrong, but along the lines of, "If you put your faith in the stone, that's where the faith will remain."
52:23
And what he was trying to get at was what you just said, I think. Amy Emerson: ... Yeah.
52:31
These are very empowering for the person.
52:31
I think that's one of the things that's beautiful about this therapy is it's like this MDMA-assisted therapy, and really the person is empowered.
52:40
Within the treatment, it is we really try to put the person in touch with their inner wisdom of how this trauma can be healed.
52:49
And it's very empowering.
52:54
Nobody's doing it to you.
52:54
You are healing yourself and nobody can then ever take that away from you.
53:00
When you're done with this treatment, a doctor didn't do it to you, right?
53:04
You were an active participant and you were guiding the path to your healing.
53:04
And somebody was believing you enough and supporting you enough to follow you on that path.
53:16
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I think that is a brilliant framing here, because I agree with you.
53:20
I don't know, but are you familiar with the medical doctor, John Sarno? He recently died.
53:32
He was a medical doctor who practiced here at the NYU Rehabilitative Medicine.
53:40
And he started what I kind of think is a revolution in mind-body studies.
53:48
And he was very dissatisfied with the results that he was getting in helping people with pain, so he did a very deep dive into it.
54:00
He himself had suffered from migraines.
54:00
And he's got several books that literally after you read them enough times, you essentially heal yourself.
54:06
And a lot of medical doctors ridiculed him and wouldn't take him seriously.
54:15
And I had mentioned him several times on my podcast as I'm a big believer I was cured of a particular physical problem using this RNO.
54:31
But I like this idea of empowering the individual to understand that they are fixing themselves.
54:38
Amy, your point is, in my opinion, absolutely critical to get across, that this isn't a pill that you can buy and all of a sudden you're going to get better. It's not a surgery.
54:54
It's not something being done to you.
54:54
That I think is a wonderful way to frame this.
55:02
Because your observation also, that can't be taken from you.
55:02
And so I think that, that is a brilliant way of explaining. Rick Doblin: Yeah.
55:17
And not only that it can't be taken from you, but that life is going to continue to be challenging. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah. Yes.
55:23
Rick Doblin: We want people to go forward with new tools.
55:24
This is where we're different from traditional pharma, where they want to treat the symptoms and have you take a daily drug for the rest of your life.
55:36
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
55:36
Rick Doblin: [crosstalk].
55:36
Jim O'Shaughnessy: It's a very good business model, but- Amy Emerson: Yeah, we have a bad business model. Jim O'Shaughnessy: ...
55:42
That's what I love about you.
55:42
Rick Doblin: The other part too is that a key to our scaling is going to be insurance coverage.
55:46
And this is more expensive initially than giving somebody a pill, because it's associated with so much psychotherapy.
55:58
The key to insurance company is going to be the durability of results.
56:05
If it lasts for a long time, the insurance can say, "Yeah, we'll pay for it."
56:05
If it fades after six months and they got to do this expensive thing every six months, they won't do it.
56:13
This idea of helping people to heal themselves, to give them the tools to continue to make progress even without more MDMA sessions, contributes to the durability and it will contribute then to the scalability because it'll help us get insurance coverage.
56:31
Amy Emerson: And that's what we saw.
56:31
We did longterm follow up. I think there's this ...
56:33
I like to use the word resilience.
56:33
It's like reinstalling people's resilience and tools, and kind of faith in themselves and empathy for themselves.
56:45
And we saw in our longterm follow ups that people a lot of times continued to get better.
56:45
One year after their last treatment, the way that we measure their trauma, it had continued to improve when we administered that same test a year and more than a year later.
57:06
Now, some people relapsed, right? This is to be expected.
57:06
People had additional traumas that happened and we got permission to treat them again one more time.
57:12
And again, we saw an improvement.
57:19
But one thing we see from that is that if people are still in the traumatic situation, of course, they're going to continue to get retraumatized.
57:25
And you can only have so much accumulation of that before you need help again, where you can help yourself, but then at some point, it can be overwhelming.
57:36
But if you're taking people out of the traumatic situation for the most part, and they're accumulating normal traumas that we go through as humans, they seem to have a better ability to deal with that.
57:46
And then it's like a positive feedback loop, right?
57:49
They're changing their lives in positive ways, better relationships, better work.
57:55
And all of this is like conspiring in a good way for them to continue to improve.
58:03
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I read a book.
58:03
I can't recall the author's name now, but the title was The Body Keeps the Score.
58:05
Amy Emerson: Yes, Bessel van der Kolk.
58:08
He's one of our [inaudible]- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh, okay. Amy Emerson: ...
58:11
on our phase three study.
58:12
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh, is he? Amy Emerson: Yes.
58:12
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh, wonderful. Wonderful. Amy Emerson: Our PI. He's a investigator.
58:16
Rick Doblin: We have a good comment about Bessel.
58:16
He came to us to work with us on phase three, and we had previously done phase two.
58:21
His book, The Body Keeps the Score, is a lot about early childhood trauma and attachments, problems with attachment and all.
58:34
And so his advice to us as he just was coming in to work with us on phase three was to not enroll people with complex PTSD from childhood.
58:39
That they have poor attachment and that they'll be the hardest people to treat.
58:45
And therefore, if we want to get good results and we want to get FDA approval, we should leave them out of the study.
58:49
And so we knew from phase two that it worked in complex PTSD.
58:56
Amy Emerson: Plus we never do anything the easy way.
58:58
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, again, another thing I love about you. But continue, please.
59:06
Rick Doblin: And really, Bessel is the principal investigator of the Boston site.
59:09
And what we have shown in our first phase three study is actually there's a group called the dissociative subtype, which is it's a strategy when you get traumatized is to pretend you're not there, to dissociate from it.
59:22
But once you do that, because it's so painful, it's hard to get back.
59:28
Because every time you come close, the pain is overwhelming.
59:33
You run away again, that's where you get drug addiction and stuff.
59:33
What we showed though is that people on the dissociative subtype on average did better than those in our study that weren't on the dissociative subtype.
59:43
Amy Emerson: And a very small number.
59:45
Rick Doblin: A very small number, but it really impressed Bessel, and now he's very much an advocate for MDMA as a key treatment for posttraumatic stress.
59:52
Amy Emerson: That in 30% of the people in the group had childhood trauma, exactly the group he was worried about, and they did very well.
1:00:00
They did as well or better than ...
1:00:09
It's better to treat the trauma close in time, right?
1:00:09
Partly because there's changes to your brain, changes to your coping, all kinds of things that happen the longer that it goes on.
1:00:21
It's just this idea that maybe you can't treat the trauma if too much time has gone by has not been what we've found in our studies.
1:00:26
And the first study we did, the average duration that people had, had PTSD was 18 years prior to the treatment.
1:00:30
And most of them have had childhood trauma.
1:00:39
Our vets, one of the requirements to enter the study for the vet studies was that it was a war-related trauma.
1:00:45
Now, what it turned out was they had that, but 99% of them also had a childhood trauma that came out in the therapy, and they all did very well in the study.
1:01:00
That study was published and we had vets, firefighters and police officers, first responders in that study.
1:01:08
I think there's also something to that, that people that experience PTSD later in their life, it does seem like there's a large connection to earlier trauma that kind of predisposes them to a PTSD that doesn't naturally recover.
1:01:26
A lot of people go through terrible traumas and don't end up with treatment resistant or long term PTSD.
1:01:32
In six months there's a natural recovery rate.
1:01:32
What's the difference between the people that recover from it and that don't, there could be this connection to also early childhood trauma that predisposes you. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:01:47
Rick Doblin: Now, another thing is that because of the- Amy Emerson: We're not even letting you get a word in edgewise, Jim. Sorry.
1:01:53
Jim O'Shaughnessy: No, please. Rick Doblin: ...
1:01:57
Because of HIPAA privacy laws, we don't get to know who the people are in the study, unless they come forward.
1:02:01
So just a few days ago, there was a patient that wanted to sort of say thanks and talk to me, so we had the Zoom call.
1:02:07
The important point is he had PTSD for over 50 years from Vietnam, and he was still able to get better. And it took him a while.
1:02:22
He said even after the third session, he had a lot more growth, this idea that he could keep healing himself afterwards.
1:02:27
But it was that you could be stuck for 50 years and still get better.
1:02:35
That's the beautiful thing about it.
1:02:35
Jim O'Shaughnessy: That is just so remarkable to me, that if you were going to have me consult you on framing things, that would be high on the list because it is so at odds with what your average person, especially in the United States has come to expect from this idea of healthcare, which I think that it's a whole different subject, but needs a lot help itself.
1:03:10
But this idea that even if it's something 50 years present with you, that there is a cure that is remarkable, and that is, to me, one of the reasons why I am so interested and excited by this type of research.
1:03:29
Because another thing that I have thought a lot about doing at some point is would be to kind of fund a study that puts together the mind-body experiences that Sarno wrote about, throws in I had as a guest someone who was using sound therapy and getting very, very good results with it.
1:03:53
And then frankly adding in things such as virtual reality psychedelics and hypnotism,.
1:04:01
I have this idea, but I state kind of everything as a thesis because most of them have a null set as the answer, that's just kind of life.
1:04:15
I do think that, that would be a very interesting thing that I would be almost willing to get other folks to contribute and fund study like that is a multidisciplinary- Amy Emerson: [crosstalk], Rick.
1:04:35
Rick Doblin: Whenever we hear people offering funding, our ears perk up company and [inaudible].
1:04:38
But I will tell you one thing about this, there's a woman named Edna FOA who has developed prolonged exposure.
1:04:47
It's one of the main therapies used by the VA and others for PTSD.
1:04:53
The idea of prolonged exposure means that you talk about your trauma over and over and over, and eventually it doesn't trigger you the same way.
1:05:03
But it's very triggering for a lot of people.
1:05:03
And a lot of people drop out about it.
1:05:08
It's very difficult for people.
1:05:08
And so we were talking to her about MDMA therapy, and this was at a conference in 2009 in Jerusalem, and she said, "Forget about this MDMA.
1:05:17
It's like dynamite in the brain. It's a terrible thing. Just give it up.
1:05:25
Go and use virtual reality."
1:05:25
And there was a fellow named Skip Rizzo who was funded by the department of defense actually to develop- Jim O'Shaughnessy: DARPA. Yeah, DARPA. Right?
1:05:37
I think I read about this. Rick Doblin: ...
1:05:40
things for soldiers for PTSD.
1:05:40
We've got all these VR scripts of them going by roads with snipers or improvised explosive devices or stuff like that.
1:05:47
He's from the university of Southern California.
1:05:54
Edna said, "Go talk to Skip about VR.
1:05:59
Get rid of this MDMA stuff."
1:05:59
I go over to Skip and I'm saying, "Edna, she's all crazy about MDMA is terrible.
1:06:06
She's says I should talk to you about VR."
1:06:06
And he just starts laughing, and he says, "If you have MDMA, you don't need VR."
1:06:10
So- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right. Fair enough. Rick Doblin: ...
1:06:18
But we still want you to fund a study.
1:06:24
But maybe it includes VR in prep or integration or stuff, but the MDMA sessions, and this is this idea of people being their own healing.
1:06:31
Actually, I'll give you another story about VR that's got me concerned.
1:06:37
There was a soldier in Israel that was ...
1:06:37
It was a bunch of his associates had been killed in their sleeping backs by an infiltrator, and he discovered their bodies blown to bits.
1:06:52
And this was the source of his PTSD.
1:06:52
It was 10 years before, now he would be hiding under his kitchen table, his kids would find him at different sounds and things. It was terrible things.
1:07:05
He comes into therapy and it's all about this thing that happened in the war.
1:07:10
And at one point what he was saying was that it would be okay, not okay, but it would be better if they died in combat.
1:07:18
But they died in their sleeping bags when they were helpless.
1:07:23
That's what makes it so difficult.
1:07:23
That's why it's such a problem for me.
1:07:23
And he went on to talk about their helplessness.
1:07:30
And then he pivoted and he said, "When I was a child, my father used to beat me up and I was helpless."
1:07:36
And the whole rest of the session was about that.
1:07:45
My concern about VR is people pivot in these ways that there's these like archeology of trauma, and you go down layers and layers and layers.
1:07:53
But if you've got this VR script that's just about the war-related thing, but his internal healing, this inner healing goes, "Hey, my father, my childhood, that's where this helpless feeling really was rooted."
1:08:07
I think you'd be on the wrong track with the VR.
1:08:14
How do you know when to pivot like that?
1:08:14
Only the person's inner sense knows when to do.
1:08:19
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Right.
1:08:21
That's an interesting point.
1:08:21
I was just reading last night an interesting thesis that Martin Luther, the emancipator of repressed Catholics all over Europe, was actually driven, at least through this fellow's hypotheses, through the vicious beatings that his father and mother gave him every morning.
1:08:42
And I haven't gotten to the end yet, so I can't give you the spoiler, but it did get me thinking about that, and how lucky and fortunate and privileged I have been that, that didn't happen in my life.
1:09:05
And it makes me want even more to help people where it has, because very few things leave visible marks. Right?
1:09:13
The body keeps the score, but there isn't some huge scar that you can point to and say, "And by the way, that's part of Sarno's."
1:09:32
His thesis is that many times people will repress feelings, and the primary ones are rage and fear, because they feel that it is not socially acceptable to be talking about these things that are very human in nature.
1:09:51
They get repressed and they come out in the form of symptoms.
1:10:00
And so I could talk about this endlessly.
1:10:00
I find it ever so fascinating, but I'm looking at the clock.
1:10:05
And I know- Rick Doblin: [crosstalk] something about the mind-body connection, which is we focused on PTSD, that's something that happens to you.
1:10:15
But there are other things like diseases, like fibromyalgia or irritable bowel syndrome that have a strong psychological component, but there's a physical element too.
1:10:26
That I'd say was going to be the second wave of psychedelic psychotherapy.
1:10:32
Amy Emerson: Eating disorders. Eating disorders also. Rick Doblin: Yeah.
1:10:37
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Wow, that's fascinating to hear that. Amy Emerson: Yeah. Rick Doblin: Yeah. Yeah.
1:10:40
And just last night I was talking Andy Wild who talks about how under the influence of LSD he was able to get over an allergy to cats that he had.
1:10:49
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Listen, it's remarkable.
1:10:52
You even have people like Darren Brown, who wrote the book Happy: Why More Or Less Everything is Okay.
1:10:58
I can't remember the exact title. But he's an illusionist.
1:11:04
And he's very popular in the UK.
1:11:04
And he did one program that I particularly enjoyed showing the power of the human mind, and it was about the power of placebos.
1:11:17
And what is very interesting to me is that, that too, ultimately, even when the person is told, "Oh, by the way, this was a placebo," they have internalized the new way of doing or being.
1:11:35
Essentially, I think the way he goes about describing it is they've given themselves permission to fill in the blank.
1:11:40
And what jog that in my mind was you talking about the curing themselves from an allergy. Goodness.
1:11:51
I personally think that I'm a huge fan of the book, The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch.
1:12:01
And I think we're sort of at the beginning of infinity here, and I'm just, frankly, kind of happy to be around to see all of this going on, because I think, yes, of course there are problems.
1:12:12
There will always be problems, but I find it wonderful that there are people like you working on solutions, not only to the obvious things like PTSD, but eating disorders.
1:12:27
That's a huge problem area.
1:12:27
Allergies, all of those things, remarkable, remarkable stuff.
1:12:35
Well, I always end every podcast with kind of a fun question, and so I'm going to ask you both. You both get a chance.
1:12:42
We are going to wave a wand, and we are going to make you the Emperor Rick or the Empress Amy of the world, but with rules.
1:12:54
You can't kill anyone, you can't lock anyone up, but you can incept them, if you're familiar with the movie Inception. Rick Doblin: Yeah.
1:13:05
Jim O'Shaughnessy: You can incept them so that when they go to sleep that evening into a psychedelic state, they'll wake up the next morning and they'll think, "Wow, I just had the greatest idea."
1:13:16
What two ideas are you going to incept with them?
1:13:16
Rick, I'll start with you and then Amy. Rick Doblin: Oh, okay.
1:13:24
Before I get to that, since we've talked a lot about books, I just want to say one thing.
1:13:28
Amy probably knew I was going to do this.
1:13:28
But you talked about Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:13:34
Rick Doblin: That's one of the most important books in my life.
1:13:35
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Same with me.
1:13:38
Rick Doblin: It was very inspirational.
1:13:38
And I read it shortly before I turned 21, and I was looking for a dog.
1:13:45
And there was a friend of mine that she saw an ad in the paper for a wolf for the humane society, was putting it up.
1:13:52
They'd shut down a wild animal breeding operation, and the female wolf was pregnant [inaudible] wolf cubs.
1:14:04
And the zoos were full and the sanctuaries were full.
1:14:04
And so I decided to adopt one of these wolves.
1:14:11
We lived together for two years before a spot in a wolf sanctuary opened up for him.
1:14:19
But his name was [inaudible], and that's the name [inaudible]. Jim O'Shaughnessy: Yes.
1:14:26
And of course, one of Plato's famous dialogues as well. Rick Doblin: Yeah.
1:14:30
And the dialogue is in a guy from the countryside coming.
1:14:30
And so it's in a sense about the taming power of love.
1:14:35
So that's what was- Jim O'Shaughnessy: Oh, that's marvelous.
1:14:39
That's a marvelous story. Rick Doblin: ... Yeah.
1:14:42
Wolfs are born with their eyes closed.
1:14:42
It takes them a couple days for their eyes to open, so the humane society took them away from their mother and was bottle feeding them.
1:14:51
So they bonded on people when they opened their eyes. It was incredible.
1:14:51
I just wanted to mention that because it's- Jim O'Shaughnessy: That's wonderful.
1:14:57
You must be a big fan of Konrad Lorenz then as well. Rick Doblin: Yeah.
1:15:02
Jim O'Shaughnessy: By the way, I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance at least every other year, and have since I was 18, so it had huge impact on me as well.
1:15:10
But now, we're going to incept some people, Rick.
1:15:18
Rick Doblin: Over the 36 years, we raised $130 million in donations and grants.
1:15:23
And now there's these roughly 400 for-profit psychedelic companies, and also it's getting harder for us to raise philanthropy.
1:15:36
So that's another reason to thank you because a lot of people are thinking, "Why should I give it away?
1:15:40
Let me just invest in some psychedelic company."
1:15:45
What I would like people to go to bed thinking about, and have this dream and wake up and to realize that in healthcare, the profit motive has worked healthcare America beyond any kind of sensible situation.
1:15:57
And so I'd like them to think about waking up and giving a few dollars to MAPS as a donation from several hundred million people.
1:16:04
It just can be a few bucks.
1:16:11
Jim O'Shaughnessy: Well, if you did it just in this country, you'd be getting about $330 million the next day, so that's a good inception. Rick Doblin: Yeah.
1:16:20
Amy Emerson: [crosstalk] the fundraiser and visionary.
1:16:21
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I love it. I love it.
1:16:24
Rick Doblin: Because when we first started MAPS, I had this idea.
1:16:25
MDMA is a party drug and it's now criminalized.
1:16:30
All these hundreds and hundreds of thousands of people that are doing ecstasy, we'll get them to give us 10 bucks and then we'll do the research and make it legal.
1:16:37
And it took me a while to realize that they would rather buy more ecstasy with their 10 bucks than give it to us.
1:16:50
The other thing that I would like to incept in people is that ...
1:16:50
Now, I've had, a few times in my life, I've had dreams where I was tripping in my dream. It's just amazing.
1:17:07
Because I was actually tripping in my dreams, without the drug even, but it was like that.
1:17:07
I would like people to wake up and to realize that the personal growth that they're looking for will come from direct personal experience.
1:17:21
And that after they send money to MAPS, they should go off and try to have a psychedelic experience under supervision with friends or in a therapy setting or something like that.
1:17:33
And that one of the highest and best uses of MDMA is couples therapy.
1:17:38
If they've got somebody they're in love with, do it with them.
1:17:44
I'd like them to wake up.
1:17:44
And then MAPS is fully funded and we've got all these happy people in the world.
1:17:49
Jim O'Shaughnessy: What a great way to incept people. I love it. Amy, what have you got?
1:17:58
Amy Emerson: How am I going to top this one? I don't know.
1:18:01
Jim O'Shaughnessy: I don't know. We'll see.
1:18:02
Amy Emerson: I think I would plant a seed of true curiosity and openness in people to learn about other cultures, other people's cultures, so that the next morning they would wake up with a true desire to understand and engage learning about another culture.
1:18:24
A little along the lines of what Rick was saying is that I'd plant a seed of openness so that there is a potential for healing for all and what that could do in the world.
1:18:38
And that it comes through personal transformation and growth, and personal inner internal healing first.
1:18:51
And that, that inner work first is what's going to lead to this hopeful place.
1:18:56
Jim O'Shaughnessy: So wonderful both of you with those inceptions.
1:19:03
Well, listen, you guys are doing amazing work.
1:19:03
I am so impressed by both of you and by MAPS.
1:19:10
Keep up the great work and I will continue to support you.
1:19:10
Thank you for what you do.
1:19:17
Amy Emerson: Thank you so much.
1:19:18
Rick Doblin: Yes, it's been a pleasure, Jim.