We spoke some time ago about psychedelics with a focus on MDMA, and it seems like you may have some revised views, maybe a few caveats. I would be interested to hear your current thinking. So this is an area you've spoken about and thought about pretty extensively, whereas I'm more of a newbie. As we talked about last time, in case people didn't hear that conversation, you know, growing up, I made the mistake — it was truly a mistake — of taking some psychedelics at a very young age, quote unquote, recreationally, LSD, psilocybin, not giving any thought to what the long-term consequences might be. Fortunately, I didn't feel any long-term consequences, but I had enough bad trips — meaning one. Robin Carhart-Harris would say you can't have a bad trip. There's no such thing as a bad trip, Robin. I've had one. It sucks. You're in the pit for hours and hours. There's no guide there if you're doing it recreationally as a teen. The brain is hyperplastic. It made me very, very cautious, almost paranoid about psychedelics for many, many years. Then also, the last time we spoke, I talked about how in an effort to resolve what I felt were some long-standing psychological traumas, I did clinically supported MDMA, standard kind of MAPS protocol, right? Take a — forget the milligram dosage, maybe take like probably 125, something like that.
Tremendously helpful to be able to feel my feelings, to be able to recognize what a whole-body feeling was about. I mean, there was never the experience for me of wanting to dance or have sex while I was on it. It was like, no, there was some shaking, there was a little of that, but it was a very — you know, it's an empathogen, I think as you know. It's not a psychedelic; it's technically an empathogen, and it raises both dopamine and serotonin simultaneously, which is very unusual for any compound to do, and raises oxytocin quite dramatically. The data actually say the empathogenic effect of MDMA is not due to oxytocin, through a kind of sort of good control where you just give oxytocin and you don't get the same clinical effects, but you could argue the cocktail effect, the synergy might be important. So I did that a few times. I think it was a total of four times, separated by a number of months or a year, clinically supported. In any event, after a period of doing that, I took a break and, on the suggestion of the same clinical group, decided to partake in a psilocybin experiment, and it was high-dose psilocybin. Now psilocybin, as you know, leads to — I think in the words of our friend Paul Keck, it almost like recedes the waterline on the unconscious mind. So what I found in psilocybin was, because my brain often thinks in analogies like this, just how I structure my thinking, it's reflexive for me. Off psilocybin, almost everything that came to me in those sessions was kind of symbolic representation, analogies. For somebody else who represents their world not that way, maybe musically or through semantic experience, it's likely that, from my understanding, that they will experience insights through those same kind of representations. What I found from psilocybin work was it was exquisite at revealing to me the structure of my thinking and the ways that some of the patterns in my life that were not serving me well, how they were structured. It was sort of like, oh, coming out of it, there's a like, wow, there's this form of self-seduction that I do, which takes actually eight forms, which look the following way in my life: I can be seduced by the enchantment of some sort of promise of a future outcome that's not realistic. And you can see that I'm just kind of giving one example. And once you see that, you can't unsee it. And that for me was an incredible experience. I do think it was important to keep a journal afterwards, to take notes while off the drug. And for me, that was very, very helpful at allowing me to understand the structure of my thinking, both for things that serve me and don't serve me. I will say, and this is getting a little, you know, well, as long as people are doing like live streams of taking psychedelics, I feel very — I feel on very solid ground, but who knows?
Well, just wait until the second half of this conversation. Yeah. Exactly. [laughter] Exactly. I mean, I don't want anyone to run out and take these things without clinical support. There are a number of people who shouldn't be taking them, and all the usual caveats apply — young people, etc. But the real like whoa, one-session-type rewiring, which was the hardest work I've ever done, having done lots and lots of therapy. But the hardest work I've ever done was to take MDMA and then a couple hours later take a high dose of psilocybin. And I've only done that twice. By the way, if I ever try and run for public office, any mistakes I make, they'll attribute to this. By the way, I've seen that publicly. But I'm going to make it very clear right now: not only am I not going to run for office, I'm running from office. So, you know, there's been some speculation. But the interesting thing was no two-days-later drop, which you do experience with MDMA. I just did not experience that if I took psilocybin with it. Remarkable. Had some of my best workouts, work weeks, etc. It's like, oh wow, that can be avoided through this thing. But what was remarkable is on MDMA, as an empathogen, you feel very good about most anything you focus on. You can find the peace in it. You can find the love in it. Could be this yerba mate, which I happen to love, but you like would really love. That's the danger, right? You can get pulled into these force fields of thinking something's really important. It might not be that important when the session is over. That's why I think it's very important to have a trained guide with you. But there's the drop. Psilocybin for me was a very dark and harrowing experience.
