Rick Doblin is a psychedelics researcher and the founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS). Please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors:
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EPISODE LINKS:
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OUTLINE:
0:00 - Introduction
1:39 - Introduction to psychedelics
4:54 - Psychedelics reveals the inner depths of humans
17:28 - Differences between psychedelics
24:53 - The future of psychedelics
33:37 - Epigenetics
39:34 - DMT
47:00 - Ego dissolution
50:17 - One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest
53:17 - Psychedelics and Creativity
57:10 - MKUltra and the Grateful Dead
1:01:49 - Ted Kaczynski
1:07:31 - Timothy Leary
1:14:55 - Good Friday Experiment
1:19:30 - Forming of MAPS
1:30:45 - Gaining access to psychedelics
1:39:15 - MDMA Medical Trials
2:10:45 - Clinical Trials for other substances
2:15:28 - Future of society with psychedelics
2:19:58 - Big Pharma
2:26:17 - Advice for the younger generations
2:32:02 - Meaning of life

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The following is a conversation with Rick Doblin, founder and executive director of the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, MAPS.

He is 1 of the seminal figures in both the cultural history and the cutting edge science of psychedelics.

He was there along with the biggest characters throughout this fascinating history of psychedelics, and he is here to tell the story.

Quick mention of our sponsors, Theragun, ExpressVPN, Blinkist, and Asleep.

Check them out in the description to support this podcast.

As a side note, let me say that exploring the places the human mind can go can help us understand where it comes from, how it works, and how to engineer mental journeys, whether that's through life experiences, chemical substances, brain-computer interfaces, or interactions with artificial intelligence systems.

On a personal level, I think the dissolution of the ego for stretches of time is a powerful tool for understanding yourself.

A lot of things can do this, including jiu-jitsu, literature, meditation, but psychedelics is definitely, or at least arguably, 1 of the most powerful, from psilocybin to DMT.

I'm excited that people like Rick are leading the scientific research that reveals the efficacy and the safety of these substances so that their proper dosage and usage protocols can be understood and people like me can safely and effectively use them, not just for recreation, but for rigorous exploration of my own mind.

This is the Lex Friedman Podcast, and here is my conversation with Rick Doblin.

Could you give an introduction to psychedelics, like a big, bold, whirlwind overview?

What are the kinds of psychedelics out there, in whatever way you think is meaningful.

All right, well, when I started MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, it was very important for me that psychedelic be in the name.

And the way in which the original meaning of psychedelic, it's mind manifesting.

It was created by Humphrey Osmond in dialogue with Aldous Huxley.

And so psychedelic means mind manifesting.

And so we interpret that very broadly to mean dreams are psychedelic.

Anything that kind of brings things to the surface, holotropic breath work, hyperventilation is psychedelic.

So most people think psychedelic is only about certain kind of chemical substances, either natural or synthetic, but we've got a much broader view of that.

Meditation can be psychedelic in some ways, But our primary focus is on the drugs, is on the medicines or the, you might call them, some people might call them spiritual tools or sacraments.

There's sort of 2 general categories of those.

1 are what are called the classic psychedelics, and those are the ego dissolving, sort of merge into unitive states.

Those are like LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, ayahuasca, Ibogaine, DMT, things like that.

And then there's MDMA, which some people even argue is not a psychedelic.

They'll say it's an empathogen or an intactogen.

It doesn't do the same kind of ego dissolution that the classic psychedelics do, but it brings material to the surface and it changes the way we process information.

And so I think you can quibble about whether it's a, it's certainly not a classic psychedelic, but I think MDMA is also a psychedelic.

Marijuana, I would say, is a psychedelic.

Marijuana is closer to the classic psychedelics than it is to MDMA.

1 point I like to make is dreams, because then everybody can relate to that.

Dreams bring emotions, feelings, ideas, concepts, in symbolic form a lot of times, or just in raw emotions to the surface.

So when people hear the word psychedelic, often they are frightened by it.

It's about loss of control, and it is to an extent loss of conscious control, particularly with the classic psychedelics.

And we know with dreams that we can have frightening dreams, nightmares, but I think that anchoring the concept of psychedelic in dreams is really helpful for people to know that it's kind of a natural state and that there are other ways that you can catalyze it than by going to sleep, and that for thousands of years, substance have been used in that way.

So you mentioned this idea of bringing something to the surface, which is really interesting.

So can you maybe elaborate the surface and what is there in the depths of things and how does ego dissolution fits into that?

Well, Aldous Huxley talked about the brain as a reducing valve, that we have an enormous amount of information.

So right now there's an air conditioning sound in the background, but that's not crucial to what you and I are doing, talking to each other, so we kind of tune that out.

You know, there's all sorts of sights and sounds.

There's incoming information in all the different sense modalities.

And we have to figure out what's important to us.

And so the mind in a way focuses a lot on what are our core needs.

And we filter all the incoming information that we get towards focusing on what our core needs.

And we can even get to Abraham Maslow and the hierarchy of needs about survival needs, belonging needs, esteem needs, you go on.

So I think what I mean by bringing things to the surface is that we tend to not focus on a lot of things that are coming, but we also push away things that are difficult emotionally, difficult cognitively.

You know, we all know that we're on this very short trajectory from birth to death, but we're not constantly thinking about dying.

Although that can actually be helpful to focus us on what's really important.

We see in America and around the world, the kind of rise of irrationality where people push away their logic in order for their emotional tribal needs to be met.

A lot of people are suffering from early childhood traumas of a different kinds or abandonment issues or anything.

So we tend to focus on just, you know, what we need to survive and what we need for work and esteem.

And so psychedelics, by dissolving this ego control or by, with MDMA, kind of strengthening our sense of self and our sense of self-acceptance, we can bring in other information that have previously been too complicated or too painful.

You don't think of psychedelics as conjuring up something new.

It is more revealing something that is already there.

So yes, Sasha Shulgin, who sort of the godfather of MDMA, you know, he sort of rediscovered it and brought it back into use.

He talked about his first experience was with mescaline.

His first psychedelic experience was with mescaline and he had a tremendous experience.

But what he said about it was he was having a human experience that the mescaline was helping him access rather than he was having a mescaline experience.

So that it's not like you pop a pill and you always have the same kind of experience as everybody else, the experience is not contained in the pill.

The pill opens you up and you have an experience of yourself.

Sometimes these are experiences that we've never consciously had.

But we can say right now that we know that our body below the level of our conscious awareness has all these self-healing mechanisms and we don't modulate them to a large extent by conscious control.

I mean, eventually we are learning more about the mind-body and we learn about the placebo effect, what we think is the case, but I think that there's experiences that are below our level of conscious awareness, particularly once we're adults, that are more these unit of mystical experiences, sense of connection.

You know, I think kids are like this a lot.

We kind of come from the void, you could say, and you're born and you have a different way of processing information.

1 interesting point about that has to do with ketamine, which is, you know, been approved as ketamine for depression, but it's used for anesthesia.

And roughly one-tenth the anesthetic dose is a psychedelic dose.

And when it's used in anesthesia, there's what's called the emergent phenomena.

So this is, you get enough ketamine for, you can be operated on, you're not in pain, you're not really there, your ego's knocked out, but you can still breathe.

But as the operations get over and then people metabolize the ketamine, there's a process that they call the emergent phenomena.

It's like as you're emerging from this tranquilized state and that's where you pass through the psychedelic phase and they don't prepare people for that.

And what we see is that a lot of adults have difficult times with that.

But children don't seem to have those problems.

Children are a little bit more already in this kind of state.

And so ketamine is used quite frequently in children now for anesthesia.

So all of that is to say to your question that I think these psychedelics reveal things that are within us.

Some things that are how we process information back when we were children, other things that we've never thought of before that are sort of baked into our consciousness.

It's this toxin from a Sonoran toad that many people consider it to be the most powerful of all the psychedelics.

And it kind of knocks the ego structures completely out of it.

And we experience something different, but it's something I think that's always within us, it's at a deeper layer.

So we knock out some of the higher cognitive functions and then we experience things in a different way.

So my sense is that these are human experiences that the psychedelics bring us to.

Yeah, it's really profound, and that's, DMT is a really interesting example.

So, Terence McKenna has talked about these machine elves.

And there's this, I think, from the people I've heard speak about the experience, there's a sense that you are traveling elsewhere to meet entities, whether they're elves or not.

So in your sense, you're not traveling elsewhere.

You're just revealing something that's within, and Maybe it's a particular mechanism of revealing what's already within.

I spent a lot of time talking with Terence, and I do not ascribe to a lot of things that he was saying.

He was a tremendous entertainer, and I think he did a lot of really good things and focused us on the power of psychedelics.

But I think, I've never seen these quote machine elves.

I think culture is more determinative of what people experience under psychedelics, your preconceptions, than we give it credit for.

And so I think there's a lot of priming that you could say that people receive by stories from their culture.

You know, with ayahuasca, it's about jaguars and Amazonian animals.

And so I think these machine elves are this construct of Terrence that other people do see.

There's actually some people that are very interested in doing a study and that they're well-funded and moving toward it to keep people on an IV infusion of DMT for them specifically to see, do they contact machine elves or aliens and what kind of information do they bring back from these other selves, other places or other entities?

Are we connected to everything in the universe?

We certainly know in many cases, you talk about waves or particles, the quantum approach.

So I don't interpret experiences that we have of some entity that's somehow or other deep in our consciousness that's not us, it's a part of who we are.

I mean, that's, and how many ideas are within us that can be revealed by changing the perspective?

1 of the, what physicists, especially mathematical physicists or mathematicians do is they reveal truths by looking at a, by taking a slightly different perspective on a problem that reveals the simplicity of how it actually works in totally new ways.

That's what Einstein did, that's what, like every progress in physics, and certainly every progress in mathematics, requires you to take a different perspective.

And then perhaps that's exactly what psychedelics are doing.

It's not that they're contacting aliens that are elsewhere, it may be revealing the connection between us and other living life forms, or actually it might be revealing a totally new perspective on what life is or what consciousness is, and giving us a glimpse at that, even though our cognitive capabilities are limited to fully grasp and understand it.

So it's just giving us an inkling of that somehow.

And it seems perhaps a little ridiculous, not from a scientific perspective, in the sense that we don't have a good physics of life or physics of intelligence or physics of consciousness, but getting a glimpse of that is giving us a little bit of maybe an intuition of which way to head to build such a physics?

I think that there's this other concept, I guess I would like to talk about briefly, this Jungian collective unconscious.

This idea that somehow or other, everything that has ever happened is still accessible, maybe not with as much data or as much resolution, but that there's wave resonances.

So that I do believe that we can have experiences as part of this human collective unconscious that we're not from our own life.

And that we can, it's like the holographic realities.

And that there is a way to gather information that can be accurate about other times and places through depth investigations of our own consciousness.

But I think what I tend to believe is that it's because there's emotional resonances between where we're at now in this life and other kind of experiences that people have had before.

And, you know, we always hear about everybody who talks about past lives, they're always kings and queens.

So I think that's, you know, that's again, you filter things, what you want to be true.

But I do think that there is a way to access information beyond what we've taken in in our own temporal existence through our own 5 senses.

In some ways, I really find that compelling, the notion that that information's already there and you're simply just moving the attention of your mind to different parts of that.

Yeah, I mean, we have that with the radio.

I mean, you know, you got a frequency, you turn all this information.

You could actually say right now, in the space between us, we have the whole world's knowledge that's up on the internet.

What are the interesting differences, would you say, between the various psychedelics that you mentioned?

Ayahuasca, DMT, acid LSD, marijuana, mescaline, PCP, psilocybin, MDMA.

You mentioned a few of them that are really interesting.

We'll talk about scientifically some of the different studies that have been conducted on each, but sort of at the high level, what are some interesting differences?

Well, 1 of the big ones that people make a big deal of that I think is completely misplaced is some are from nature, some are from the lab.

So there's this kind of like romantic thought that if it's from nature, it's good.

If it's from the lab, it's somehow tainted by humanity.

And therefore some people are like all for plant psychedelics.

We see the policy changes that have been happening in a couple of cities, Cambridge, Somerville, right not far from where we're at now, where they decriminalize plant medicines.

So I think that there is, from my perspective, certain things from nature are poison, certain things from the lab are spiritual, even if they don't show up in nature, like LSD.

Now, there is something, LSD is lysergic acid diethylamide.

There is lysergic acid amide, LSA, which comes from morning glory seeds.

But at the same time, I'd say I don't buy into that distinction that there's some fundamental preference.

1 of the things that Terence McKenna, since we talked about him, he talked about how if it's from nature, it's good.

Of course, he had a lot of great LSD experiences, but actually Terrence in 1984, we were at Esalen with a bunch of other people.

And this was some of the underground therapists and the above-ground researchers were trying to talk about how to protect MDMA from this eventual crackdown and Terrence was like forget about it, you know, it's from the lab, you know, it's dangerous, we have thousands of years of history, all these other things and you know, what do we know about MDMA and blah, blah, blah.

And I was like, Terrence, you're so unscientific, bullshit.

Another way to say it is, and I just said, we need a study of the safety of MDMA.

And so then Dick Price, who started Asclin, I said, I'll put a thousand, Dick Price, he put a thousand.

So Terrence was actually the catalyst for the first study with MDMA.

Just because he was so frustrating about how plants are okay and, you know, if it's from the lab, it's bad.

The other distinction is this sense of classic psychedelics versus things like MDMA.

So to what extent do they dissolve the ego?

And you could say to what extent do they cause visions, the 5-HT2A serotonin receptor subtype, which is responsible for a lot of that, where these drugs are activating.

Now, mescaline of all the psychedelics, chemically it's the most similar to MDMA.

So in the 50s, there was the 53, I think it was, the Army Chemical Warfare Service wanted to look at drugs for interrogations, mind control, non-lethal incapacitance.

These were now toxicity studies in animals.

And on the 1 side was methamphetamine, on the other was mescaline, and MDMA was in the middle, chemically.

So mescaline of these psychedelics tends to have the warmth that MDMA has.

It's not as ego-dissolving quite as some of the others.

I mean, it's the main active ingredient in peyote.

Another distinction with these different drugs is how long they last.

And a lot of that has to do with the route of administration.

So for example, if you smoke DMT, it takes 10, 15 minutes, and you're within seconds, you're off in another world.

When you take DMT in the form of ayahuasca, where it's mixed with another substance that makes it so that it's orally active, then it's a couple hours.

Psilocybin is more like 5 or 6 hours or 4 to 6 hours.

It's 1 reason why in our research we give an initial dose of MDMA and then 2 hours later we give half the initial amount to extend the plateau because we want it to last longer for people to be in this therapeutic state.

So that's another distinction is, you know, how long these drugs last.

Another distinction is which of them come from a religious context, have a religion built around them.

We have this sense that some people are saying that 5-MeO-DMT and the Sonoran Toad, that they have this long history of indigenous use, but they don't, that's all modern, it's made up, and It's kind of a new approach.

However, there was thousands of years of use of psilocybin mushrooms in religious contexts.

From 1600 BC to 396 AD, the world's longest mystery ceremonies, the Eleusinian Mysteries, sort of the heart of Greek culture, the heart of Western culture, that was a psychedelic potion called Kikian that seems like it's very much like an LSD-like substance.

Ergot on grain, and LSD comes from ergot.

So I think that there are a lot of ways to look at these different substances.

Another distinction is, you know, which 1 of them are being researched right now in scientific contexts and which are not.

And because of the rise of all these for-profit companies and everybody's looking for what they can patent, what they can claim, the land grab, more and more there are companies looking at every different kind of psychedelics.

The ones that are most important that are not being researched, mescaline, but now there's a company to do mescaline, Journey CoLab.

Ibogaine, which is crucial for opiate addiction.

There's a new company, a branch of this company, ATAI, that's gonna be looking at ibogaine.

So I'd say the rise of the for-profit companies is making it so that there's just gonna be an enormous amount of investigations into all these different psychedelics.

But what we're gonna see is the development of new psychedelics that we don't know anything about that have not existed yet, because a lot of these for-profit companies are gonna wanna invent and patent and have composition of matter patents on new molecules.

So I think we'll see a lot of that happening too.

I mean, there's a lot of doors you've opened and we're gonna walk through all of them, including the research and so on, but on this 1 little tangent of the future of psychedelics, so engineering new psychedelics, can you comment on maybe the chemistry and the biology of how psychedelics work and where is the space of possible engineering of psychedelics and what kind of things might they unlock in terms of the possible places our mind would be able to go and the effects of that, of improving health.

But maybe at the basic level of chemistry and the space of what could be engineered.

Well, you reminded me, I'll get to exactly what you said, but you reminded me of a talk I heard by Buckminster Fuller shortly before he died.

And what he talked about is how technology was making things ever smaller.

You know, that we are able to pack more and more information into smaller and smaller spaces and that we're developing technologies of communications with people, you know, we now know the internet and things like that.

But what he said is that he thought the eventual evolution of this sort of research would move from this miniaturization to telepathy.

And I was like, it's a shocking thing for somebody like scientific like that to say that.

So will we unlock those parts where I talked about the collective unconscious.

Will we be able to more consciously explore those areas?

There was Stan Groff, who's the world's leading LSD researcher and has been my mentor, his wife, Brigitte.

They were talking about stories that they had heard about MDMA that people take.

And then on top of that, they do 5-MeO-DMT.

And so you get this ego dissolution, but underneath it, you have this sense of ego, sort of sense of safety, of self-acceptance, kind of grounds it.

So Stan was like, that's the future of psychiatry.

That you can watch without the terror of the ego dissolution, the sense that you're losing your mind or you're going crazy or you're dying, or that you have this grounded sense of safety while you're dissolving your normal sense of how you see things.

And being able to engineer in a fine-tuned way that exact experience, maybe fine-tuned to the person, as opposed to sort of this manual potion that's through experiment.

Although I don't know about fine tuning things to the person in the sense that we believe there's this inner healer, this kind of, you know, inner healing intelligence.

We talked about it, the body repairs itself.

You know, so I think we more need to create safety for people.

And then what emerges will be customized to what they need to be looking at from this inner healing intelligence.

At the same time, we will move to, we hear so much about the new approaches to oncology where you do genetic analysis of different kind of tumors and then you have certain kind of Chemotherapy agents and you do like personalized chemotherapy I think we will have more like personalized psychedelic therapy but it'll be more like a sequence of different drugs that people go through over an extended period of time.

And then you kind of customize what's next.

And sometimes you'll combine different drugs together like this 5-MeO-DMT and MDMA, or a lot of times people do LSD-MDMA combinations or psilocybin-MDMA combinations.

Chemistry, and it's not my strength, I'm more into clinical applications and policy, but I can say that from what I've learned from reading from others and research done by others that different psychedelics have an impact on different neurotransmitters, different other parts of energies in the brain.

The default mode network is what's considered to be like our sense of self, you know, and it's part of the brain that sort of is what I described before, scanning the world and filtering information for what's really important to us, and both focusing us on things and also helping us to ignore a lot of things.

And the classic psychedelics all weaken the energy in this default mode system, and therefore you get this flood of information that you're not normally paying attention to.

And then you start seeing in more creative ways or more connected, you actually move to beyond the verbal kind of thinking into sort of symbolic thinking a lot of times.

And that's where you sometimes get these mystical sense of connection, how it's all 1, and you get the sense also of how big the universe is and how small each 1 of us is.

So there's a lot of work that Sasha Shulgin and Albert Hoffman who invented LSD and first synthesized psilocybin on what they call structure activity relationships.

And then how do you predict what that new molecule that never existed before is going to do once you actually take it.

And you can get close, but you never really know until you actually take the drug.

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Rick Doblin: Psychedelics | Lex Fridman Podcast #202