6 | Net-Zero Trauma: A Conversation With Rick Doblin - Alive Again

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:09):
You're listening to Alive Again, a production of Psychopia Pictures
and iHeart Podcasts. So today I'm Alive Again. I'm thrilled
to welcome a visionary and true pioneer in the world
of psychedelic research. Rick Doblin is the founder and executive
director of MAPS, the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies, a
nonprofit that has been at the forefront of exploring the

(00:31):
therapeutic potential of psychedelics for over thirty five years. His
groundbreaking work has helped transform how he approached healing, trauma, recovery,
and end of life care, particularly through the use of
psychedelic compounds. Rick's dedication to this field has given countless
individuals and their families hope, understanding, and peace in the
face of immense challenges. Today, we'll explore the intersection of

(00:53):
his work with the themes of this podcast, namely transformation
and adaptation. Rick has intensively discussed the therapeutic potential of
psychedelics for terminal patients. He emphasizes that substances like LSD
and psilocybin, when combined with psychotherapy, can alleviate end of
life anxiety and depression. For instance, a twenty fourteen study

(01:13):
funded by MAPS investigated LSD assisted psychotherapy in twelve terminally
ill patients, revealing significant reductions in anxiety. Through MAPS, Rick
continues to advocate for the integration of psychedelic assisted therapies
into mainstream medicine, aiming to provide compassionate care for those facing.

Speaker 2 (01:30):
End of life.

Speaker 1 (01:31):
Also, I would like to reveal that I have a
personal connection to Rick. We first met in the mid
nineteen nineties in Charlotte, North Carolina, where we were both
living at the time, and my partner, Patrese Burnside, was
a nanny to Rick's kids. Tragically, Patrice passed away in
nineteen ninety seven in a terrible car accident. You may
have heard me talk about my experience of grief after

(01:52):
Patrice died on other episodes. Well, Rick also shared that
grief and you will hear us mention Patrice a few
times during this interview, so I wanted to provide some context.
Let's go to the conversation now. It's just amazing. I
followed your career over the years, and you've dedicated your
life really to exploring therapeutic potential for psychedelics, and maybe

(02:16):
we could just start with you telling us a little
bit about how you first became aware of this and
interested in it.

Speaker 2 (02:21):
Well, I first became aware of psychedelics through massive misinformation
and propaganda in school. Yeah, so during the sixties. I
started college in nineteen seventy one. So in high school,
what I was taught was that if you take LSD
five or six times, you're certifiably insane. That's all it took.

(02:48):
I was also taught that if you take LSD, maybe
even just once or several times, it really hurts your
chromosomes and you're going to have deformed children way or another.
It's going to be really bad. And this whole negativity
was something that I'm oldest of four kids. I didn't
have any older siblings to tell me that maybe that's

(03:11):
not true. I didn't smoke marijuana in high school. Only
one time, actually, my senior year. I remember my friend
and I rolled it up in a newspaper. We didn't
have any rolling papers, so we rolled it up the
newspaper and I thought, ma'am, this is harsh. But what
really happened was my senior year of high school, I

(03:34):
was learning about the other I was very you know,
indirectly traumatized by the Cuban missile crisis and the fact
that the US and Russia could blow up the whole
world after everything, been traumatized by stories of the Holocaust,
and then starting to understand a little bit more about
Vietnam my own country was doing. So in my Russian class,

(03:54):
a friend of mine gave me a book. I was
super shy, could barely talk, could hardly talk to a
girl at all other than my mother and sisters. And
one of my friends had a girlfriend, so I could
talk to her a little bit. But I was super shy.
So I was into reading books. My father my grandparents
had a bookstore. My dad grew up in a bookstore.
They were so poor. He learned how to read a

(04:16):
book without breaking the spine so they could sell it
again after he read it. So this friend of mine
in the Russian class gave me this book to read,
and I loved it. It was fantastic. I thought it
just was so inspiring and engaging and frightening and all
these different things. And I handed it back to him
and he said, do you realize that the author wrote
some of this book while he was under the influence

(04:38):
of LSD. I said, that's not possible. You know, nothing
good comes from LSD. It's hallucination. That's a delusion. It
makes you crazy, it's all of this. And my friend said, no, no,
check it out. Turn out he was right. It was
Ken Kesey's One Floor of the Cuckoo's Nest.

Speaker 1 (04:56):
Oh, that's such a great book.

Speaker 2 (05:00):
What's great is yesterday my son was here for a
couple of days. He's thirty years old now, yeah, and
he was he was taking home that book.

Speaker 1 (05:07):
Is that Eden Eden? Yeah, I remember eating as a baby.

Speaker 2 (05:11):
Oh yes, yes, yeah, well for Teresa was helping take
care of him. Yeah. Now he's thirty and just the
other day he took home One Floor Over the Cuckoo's
Nest to read, which he's never read. But that was
the break in the propaganda wall for me.

Speaker 1 (05:26):
Right that And it's a fantastic film. But the book
itself from the it's a different pov in the book. Yeah,
so well written, it's so beautiful. So moving out from that,
and I should let you know that in high school
we had a we made business cards that said, hi,
my name is and I'm legally insane.

Speaker 2 (05:48):
Funny.

Speaker 1 (05:48):
Yeah, back in the day, because we had we had
we had dabbled.

Speaker 2 (05:56):
It's amazing how you were how well now we understand
and how the big lie works.

Speaker 1 (06:02):
Yeah, you're going to talk about that a little bit more.

Speaker 2 (06:04):
That just well just how propaganda works, A big lie works,
and you know, that's that's the dilemma that we face today,
even more now what we see what's going on with
social media and with Mark Zickerberg trying to be like
elon mosk and x and Facebook. Yes, it's just really

(06:24):
the amount of misinformation. It's like people will often believe
what they want to believe, and you give them stuff
that makes it look as if it's true. So it's
a it's a terrible problem. You have to really be
wanting to understand the truth to wade through all sorts
of propaganda.

Speaker 1 (06:42):
So your ability to see and you said, you know
the stories of the Holocaust when you were young, and
your ability to see that this sort of trauma. Did
that combine with your understanding of psychedelics to lead you
to the therapeutic development of.

Speaker 2 (06:57):
That, Yeah, yeah, completely. Yeah, it was the sense of
desperation and despair about humanity and how cruel we can
be and how this repression makes things worse and so
it was this on the one hand, this despair about humanity.
On the other hand, was I would say privilege was

(07:17):
this sense of support. I had a very loving family.
I mean, it's so said, so much of the work
we do is about people that had childhood trauma, childhood abuse,
you know. But I had a very loving family, very supportive,
and my father was a grew up as an only child.

(07:38):
His father, my grandfather, left from Poland in nineteen twenty
fleeing anti Semitism, flinging for his life, came to the
US with nothing. And you know, my father, by the
time he was like four or five years old, he
knew that he had to be a doctor. That was
the way out of poverty, you know, for a lot
of Jewish families. He was an only child, he had

(07:59):
to be a doctor. He was glad to be doctor.
But he decided that he would raise his kids in
a different way and support us to do whatever we
wanted to do. And so I felt that privilege that
support the horror at the world. And then once I
started learning about the sort of this interconnectedness that I
was learning about it both from the inner world in

(08:21):
a sense, you could say, from learning about psychedelics. But
also this was the time when the American I was
setting people to the moon and the astronauts were coming
back and looking at the Earth from space and the
Whole Earth Catalog, and how edgar Mitchell talked about how
that changed his consciousness and others. So it was more
this sort of political implications of us to realize that

(08:41):
we're all in it together. There's a great, really interesting
book I just read over the holidays called Orbital Yeah,
you know, and it's about people in the International Space
Station and what is like going around and the kind
of understandings have all in together. You don't see the borders,
you don't see religions. You realize we're all all birth
from one thing. So I thought that that would have

(09:03):
political implications. You know, once you feel that we're all interconnected,
how can you just so easily dehumanize other people or
hate for being different religions. So it was all of
that combination. And not only that, but I really I
woke up to psychedelics nineteen seventy one, nineteen seventy two
after the backlash, and I was also a protester. I

(09:23):
was a Vietnam War draft resistor. I didn't register for
the draft and thought I would end up going to jail.
And so I and my parents were like, well, you know,
that's okay, you know, but you're gonna have a felony
conviction like President Troup. Now you're gonna have a felony conviction,
and you're not going to be able to get any
normal job because you're going to be a felon. I'm like, well,

(09:44):
that's the price I have to pay. So then when
I started understanding about psychedelics and both there are political implications,
there are spiritual implications, their therapeutic implications, and that they
were so suppressed, and I had this support for my
parents to do whatever I thought I could do to
make it a better world. I focused on the psychedelics

(10:05):
and I thought, okay, I could be an underground psychedelic therapist.
You don't need a license for that. So that was
fifty three years ago, nineteen seventy two, and that's where
I formed my identity and my mission, and I was
just I still think, I am so so lucky and
fortunate that I had this idea when I was eighteen,
that fifty three years later still makes sense.

Speaker 1 (10:27):
That's it's incredible Rick and I. You know, I just
went to President Jimmy Carter at the Carter Center was
laying in repose for days, and so we took my
family and the kids and we all went to pay
our respects. And one of his first things he did
when he came to office was amnesty for all the draft.

Speaker 2 (10:46):
I'm so glad you're bringing that up. So let me
say that at eighteen, after being a draft resister and
starting to do Heygonelex, I identified myself as a counterculture
drug using criminal. That's who I thought I was, right,
and the very and the arc of my life has

(11:07):
been to not be counterculture, but to be culture, to
be mainstreamed, to not be criminal, but to be legal.
And I've found psychedelics to be useful tools throughout the
lifespan to continue to be using psychodols. But the first
step in this sort of transformation of who I thought
it was was Jimmy Carter's first day in office where

(11:29):
he pardoned all the draft resistors. Now, actually nothing happened
to me. I mean I didn't register. I had a passport,
I had a driver's license, I had a Social Security number,
I was paying taxes, I was in high school. But
none of that got me on any lists that they
came after me for not registering for the draft, So
it was they never kicked your door. Nothing ever happened

(11:52):
at all. And later I found out like around sixty
thousand people didn't register for the draft and nothing ever happened.
There was enough people coming to the draft boards to
be drafted that they, you know, and their I guess
computers weren't so good. They didn't have all these lists.
But in any case, it was this Jimmy Carter pardoning

(12:15):
the draft resisters on his first day in office. And
I'll just contrast that a little bit with well we
had with Clinton tried to end this prohibition against gays
in the military on his first day in office, but
that turned into a big scandal. He couldn't do it.
But the thing with Jimmy Carter is that he had
pardon power. He could do it all himself. So once

(12:36):
he signed it, it was done. And now I'll also
add that, you know, I was building a house and
he's seventy five, nineteen seventy six, and I built it
for solar energy. One of the things that Jimmy Carter
was so ahead of his time, or I shouldn't even
say he was ahead of his time. We are behind times.
He was recognizing at the time we need to move
to renewable energies, and we have ignored that and it's

(13:01):
not been a priority. And now I don't know that
anybody in LA can never feel safe again.

Speaker 1 (13:07):
Right he was the first president to put a solar
panel on the White House.

Speaker 2 (13:11):
Yeah, yeah, he was way ahead of his time. But
it's a story of human kind of suppression of difficult
material of ignoring things. You know, all this climate change
denial by people that are making money off of oil
and others and political power. It's just humanity is really

(13:32):
adept at repression denial. And that's where I think psychedelics.
But what it means is that when you bring forth
the Freud had this term for the return of the repressed,
that what gets repressed comes out in other ways. We
see that, you know, with trauma, people bury the trauma,
but it comes out in physical illnesses, it comes out

(13:54):
in depression and PTSD, the return of the press. So
when you bring the repressed the surface, you can work
with it, you can refine it, you can you know,
just like this idea of absentence based sex education. You know,
it's like, let's repress sexuality that you know, you can
have a healthy sexuality, but when you have a repress sexuality,
it comes out in twisted ways. So the same is

(14:16):
true of consciousness and yes, you know, psycho material and
things like that. So Jimmy Carter also wanted to legalize marijuana,
or certainly to decriminalize marijuana, and there was a bunch
of people in the seventies it really thought that our
culture was moving to legalize marijuana. And it was the
rise of the Parents' movements, the right wing near the

(14:37):
end of the seventies during Carter's one term that there
was a backlash against that. And then we ended up
with Reagan and Ronald Reagan and Nancy Reagan escalation of
the drug war just say no, And that's when MBMA
became entering sort of public consciousness, and that's why it
ended up being criminalized in nineteen eighty five, and then

(14:57):
nineteen eighty six is when I started maps to bring
it back through the FDA.

Speaker 1 (15:01):
Well, I slute you for all the work that you've
continued to do relentlessly. Did you all do? It was
a twenty fourteen study with terminally ill patients.

Speaker 2 (15:10):
Yeah, can you talk about that study a little bit?

Speaker 1 (15:13):
And what I'm going towards, Rick, is the mechanism of
brain plasticity, and I want to I want to kind
of get into that and you know, the default network,
and I would love to talk to you about the
net zero trauma.

Speaker 2 (15:27):
Yeah, idea of that.

Speaker 1 (15:29):
So, the ability for the human to rebuild and to
adapt and to transform is robust and intense. And there
is a crossover with d MT and there's a crossover
with with these experiences. So I just wanted you if
you could talk a little bit about the transformative experiences
that you've facilitated in the therapeutic environment.

Speaker 2 (15:49):
Okay, you mentioned that you've talked to Holocouster Viber. I
just want to mention a book by Vickor Frankel, Yeah,
who was a Holocauster rider Man, Search for Meaning. I've
read it, Yeah, and that's about how you know, many
many people were unable, were so filled with fear to
spare and random acts of murder, you know, but those
ones that survived, some of them had this sense of

(16:12):
meaning that that gave them meaning and purpose to be resilient.
So let me say that there was kind of a
strategic analysis that we did back when we started maps,
and that there was how do you bring forth something
that has been repressed well in a way, you try
to say that we can use this to help you
with an even bigger fear. So what is the bigger fear?

(16:33):
As you said, death? So there was this whole concern
about MDMA neurotoxicity and this will maybe get us also
into neuroplasticity and critical periods and all. So that there
was this concern early on raised about how oh MDMA
brain damage one dose, permanent brain damage, major functional consequences.

(16:56):
Of course it didn't look that way from all the
people who were taking it, but this was kind of
this and again this was during the Reagan era, and
so there was this thought that we need sympathetic patients,
and we felt that there's two main groups. One was
people with post traumatic stress disorder, particularly veterans in America,
there's a lot of support for the veteran community, also

(17:20):
women's survivors of sexual assault. So that MDMA assistant therapy
for PTSD was one of the main ideas that we
could use to bring back MDMA, and I worked with
a PTSD patient nineteen eighty four, and that's where I
learned how tremendously helpful MDMA can be for treating PTSD.
The other is people that are dying. We're all going

(17:41):
to be dying. We all have certain fears about that.
So in order to address MDMA neurotoxicity, which it took
us decade and a half to really debunk that to
the satisfaction of the FDA, we started out our very
first study that we proposed to the FDA. Now this
is in the late nineteen ninety ninety one. One was
a study of MDMA with cancer patients who had only

(18:05):
one year or less to live, so that the neurotexasity
thing would not matter. Now, we didn't get permission for that,
and in the end, at the end of nineteen ninety
nine two thousand, we began our first study with MDMA
for PTSD, and that's what we're doing now all these
years later. But we did do a study with people
with life threatening illnesses and the study was really really

(18:27):
interesting in that one of the things that MDMA does
is that reduces activity in the amigdala, the fear processing
part of the brain. That's why it's really helpful both
for post traumatic stress disorder, also for people who are
fearful about impending mortality, that that you can have these
frightening concepts, frightening emotions, and because there's this reduction of

(18:51):
fear based processing and also self love, self connection, empathy,
that people can bring up from their fears and repression,
these concerns about either traumatic past experiences that they had
that were overwhelming that made them, you know, not trust humans,
or about their own death. I've had the privilege of

(19:12):
working with several people days before they died with MDMA,
and it was just beautiful. One of them was a
friend of mine had a partner who died at around
age twenty six from cancer. He was a musician and
he had it was a saxophone player, and they had

(19:34):
throat cancer and they were not married, but they were
in love and they'd been together for years and years,
and we ended up he was on all these medications.
What happens when you're nearing the end of the life,
often people are in pain and you get all these
pain medications. And what the pain medications do is they
kind of tranquilize you and they make you sleepy, and

(19:56):
you're you know, the more more pain you're in, and
the more so that you're kind of out of it.
A lot of times, you know you're hovering in this
kind of not fully aware. You know, the pain that's
being suppressed, but not completely. So it turns out when
you add MDMA to people that are on pain meds
and opiates and other things, you get a synergistic reduction
in pain. Plus the MDMA, because it's three four methylene

(20:20):
dioxy methamphetamine, has stimulant qualities. It overcomes the sort of
tranquilizing properties of the opiates, and it wakes people up
and so you can be more pain free and emotionally open.
And this one experience with this couple was just incredible

(20:41):
where they recapitulated their entire romance and just talked about
how all these years and how much they loved each other.
And it's like saying goodbye to your loved ones. It's
like you're coming back from the you know, the gates
of death. To be alive and fully there for a
period of hours is while you're able to say goodbye.

(21:02):
There was another it was beautiful. There was another story
that was a young woman who died in her early
thirties and we did MDMA. Her mother and I were
co therapists for a period of time. This is a
whole different psychedelics over all this period of time while
she was dealing with her cancer, the mother and father
had been divorced. This was their only child, and several

(21:24):
days before this woman died the final MDMA experience, the
father came and the mother and the mother decided that
she would do MDMA. There was a book written about this,
Honor Thy Daughter, that Maps publishes about this work with
this woman dying of cancer, Honor Thy Daughter. And what
happened was that at one moment again this woman was

(21:47):
able to wake up this pain. She couldn't even sit up,
she was so weak, and so her father sort of
held her on. It was like a family triangle where
the mother was sort of holding her arm up one inside,
the father holding her arm on the other side so
she could be sitting up watching them, and maya was
fitting of the woman. And at one moment she says,

(22:08):
how beautiful it is to be able to die with
your parents here, And it was like it rose out
of tragedy into this beautiful celebration of life and the
gift of life. So the Thames with Patrice. She didn't
have as long of a life as she should have,
you know, killed the car accident, but she had some
life and that's part of both the tragedy and the celebration, right.

(22:33):
And so I've seen this work with people with at
end of life where it becomes this celebration of life
and you emerge from this tragedy, from the sadness into
beauty and into gratitude. And so that's you know, it
doesn't happen all the time, but that's one of the
aspects of working now. One of the things that when

(22:56):
you work with people near the end of their life,
it's there's a difference in a sense than when you
work with people at PTSD because they have potential lots
of years to live. And so now we get into
this idea of how do you transform an experience into
long term benefit, long term change, right. You know, Houston
Smith has who's a scholar of world religions, has this

(23:16):
great statement that there's a difference between a religious experience
and a religious life, you know, and people we talk
more and more in the psychedelic field, people understand more
and more about the role of integration that I would
say one of the differences between recreational use of psychedelics
and therapeutic use of psychedelics is that in recreational use

(23:37):
of psychedelics, people are looking for the experience, but in
therapeutic use, you're looking for the experience, but even more importantly,
what you bring back from the experience into your daily
life through this process of integration, so that you change
the baseline. It's not just for this momentary experience, right.

(23:58):
And so what guldol And is a neuroscientist now at
UC Berkeley. She used to be at Hopkins, and what
she's discovered is this concept of critical periods being reopened
by psychedelics. Now, what she means by critical periods is
we all know that when you're little, it's just amazing

(24:19):
how little kids pick up language. And if you grow
up in a multilingual home, kids can become multilingual really easily.
You just absorb it. So there's a critical period. If
you try to learn foreign languages when you're older, it's harder.
Your brain is sort of primed at certain times to
do certain things.

Speaker 1 (24:37):
I tell my children this, I say, guys, these are
your special years. Now, you know this is the time
for you to not be on video games.

Speaker 2 (24:44):
Yeah, I hope they listen. They listen.

Speaker 1 (24:46):
Yeah, I think, well Roman does. My other kid LEVI
is a wild card, but yeah.

Speaker 2 (24:52):
So Gul has identified that psychedelics open up this critical
period and what's going on in this critical period is
what they call neuroplasticity. That you are able to rewire
your brain in different ways so that you can have
memories that previously triggered fear. Now you would process the
fear and the memories would be more put into long

(25:14):
term storage. There's also issues between how if you have
PTSD the hippocampus where you put memories into long term storage,
there's fewer activity there and not as much connectivity between
the amygdala fear processing and the hippocampus, and MDMA increases
activity and reduces it, you know, so that it's easier
to put these traumatic memories into long term storage. So

(25:34):
this idea though, that the longer you're in the psychedelic
experience itself, the longer this period of neuroplasticity lasts afterwards.
So if you have LSD or psilocybin, LSD lasts longer
than psilocybin. Psilocybin is about five or six hours LSD

(25:54):
is about eight to ten hours or so. And also
just to add that, what we find is that we
talked about this return of the repressed and resistance. What
makes LSD experiences, or what makes psychedelic experiences often last longer,
is resistance to it. That when you're open to it
and the energy flows through you, the experience and the

(26:15):
energy of it can be processed in a shorter amount
of time. Resistance keeps things in place. So we say
that one of our sayings for our Zendo Psychedelic harm
Reduction program is that difficult is not the same as bad.
And what I think is the distinguishing feature between what's
difficult and what's quote bad trip bad is resistance difficult

(26:36):
you learn from if you're open to it. When you
resist it, it turns into quote bad trip. And that's
why if you stop the resistance, you can transform a
bad trip into something that may be one of the
most important things that you learn from. So the longer
you are in the psychedelic session from the period of
activity of the drug itself, the longer the neuroplasticity the law,

(27:00):
longer the critical period has opened. To the point with
I begain, which is a drug that takes several more
than a day or so to fully be processed out
of your system, that it last months this period afterwards
and it's weeks. You know. LSD is more than more
than psilocybin. You know, smoking DMT is shorter. So it's

(27:25):
it's a key aspect of And this is one of
the things that I did not know when I first
started doing LSD. I had the delusion, the hope, you
know that the more drugs I took, the faster I
would evolve. And I gave it my best shot, you know,
and I completely underestimated the importance of integration, and I
it took me years and years to get integrated. But

(27:46):
I think this integration.

Speaker 1 (27:47):
Talk about integration, well, yeah.

Speaker 2 (27:50):
Integration is this process of dealing with the consequences of
what you felt and what you learned during your experience
and try to, like you say, okay, I learned that
I'm fearful of confrontation or something, you know, and under
let's say an MDMA experience, you're able to handle conflict better.
So the integration is how do you do that without

(28:11):
the drug? And you practice it in a little way.
So one metaphor that I've used a lot. Is that
you know you're sort of climbing this ladder when you
do a drug. You know you're climbing this ladder. And
then when the drug starts to wear off, you're climbing
the ladder in reverse. You're trying to And so it's
very important when the drugs start to wear off, the

(28:33):
medicines start to wear off, that you pay attention, how okay,
now these anxious thoughts about tomorrow start coming in or
whatever I self respect or all these kind of things
start coming in. But then when you've watched yourself go
down the ladder, you can look at sort of the
rungs that are not that far from our normal approach
normal consciousness and try to move in that direction without

(28:54):
the drug. And so that's this exercise of putting into
practice and and it takes years and years, and we've
worked with people that are meditators, right, and you can
have a clarity of mind under MDMA or even under
socybin in certain ways through meditation. But once you've experienced that,

(29:14):
you can try to recreate that without the drug, and
that can take months or years. But they're training tools.
So the integration process is really about what we're trying
to do is fundamentally different than what classic psychiatric drugs
and the pharmaceutical industry do. They're trying to control symptoms

(29:34):
and not really get to the root cause. And now
you need to take this medicine on a daily basis
for the rest of your life. And what we're trying
to do with psychedelics paired with psychotherapy is to get
to the root cause, to really confront those earlier traumatic experiences,
and then through the process of integration, try to build

(29:55):
them into long term change.

Speaker 1 (29:57):
Integration reminds me of We talk with our guests on
our show a lot about what I call the liminal state.
So you know, in anthropology, I think the liminal state
has to do with whether there was a rite of
passage or some transformational period where there was the death
of the childhood self and the adulthood self is not
yet born or integrated into the larger tribe, and there's

(30:21):
this liminal state wherein all sorts of things might happen
in different cultures, maybe they might experience cross dressing, or
you know, the different parts of their identity are ripped
away from them. So the childhood self dies and then
there's room for this integration before you then are inducted
into the tribe or what have you. But we talk

(30:43):
about the liminal states as it applies to these people
who've had these near death or brushes with death, near
death experiences, and you know, every one of them says,
I wouldn't change a thing. I asked, would you go
back and not have that car wreck? Or would you
go back and not have that shark attack? Or there's
so many weird stories that we in, fascinating stories, but
they all say the same thing. No, I would not
I would not change a thing because of what I

(31:03):
am now is so awesome and what I have been
able to become and the transformation that that it has
led me to. Yeah, it's fascinating and it reminds me
of did you ever see the movie Jacob's Ladder. Do
you remember that film?

Speaker 2 (31:16):
Oh? My good dad, I love that Ladder. That that
is one of the I mean, I love that movie.
That is one of the best movies.

Speaker 1 (31:20):
I've ever seen it, right, it's fantastic.

Speaker 2 (31:23):
Nobody knows about it these days. Jacob's Ladder is incredible
and I don't know if you want to talk a
little bit about it, but I haven't thought about that
movie for such a long time. Just it's incredible.

Speaker 1 (31:33):
It's one of my top movies of all time. And
Adrian lyn is the director. But it's it's that scene
when Danny Ailo is looking at at Jacob and he's
Jacob Singer and he says, you know, if you're scared
and you're afraid of dying, remember this quote. He says,
if you're if you're lying there and you're afraid of
dying and you're holding on to life, you will feel

(31:54):
like demons are ripping away at your flesh. Yeah, but
if you've made your piece, you will realize that, or
once you've major piece, who realized the demons are really
angels freeing you. But it was like this quote that
just like a diamond in my mind, and I was like, ah,
so beautiful and so brilliant.

Speaker 2 (32:13):
Wow, Dan, I'm so glad you mentioned that movie.

Speaker 1 (32:16):
I didn't know you were such a fan, you know.

Speaker 2 (32:18):
Oh, oh, I think it was Tim Robbins.

Speaker 1 (32:21):
Was he Tim Robins played Jacob Singer?

Speaker 3 (32:22):
Yeah, yeah, yeah, God, thank you just for that, just
to bring that back, And I guess I would encourage
people who are listening to really think about watching that movie,
and it is very scary in a lot of different ways.

Speaker 1 (32:37):
But that's the point of it, right, Yeah, yes, but
these liminal states, it's it's it's something that and and
perhaps you know we're gonna be talking to some neuroscientists
about the release of d MT at the moment of
death for different people.

Speaker 2 (32:52):
Yeah, I'll say I'm a little bit dubious about that.

Speaker 1 (32:54):
Yeah, sure, I would love to hear about why that's.

Speaker 2 (32:56):
Well, first off, I'm not a neuroscientist. We we look
for explanations for things. So one of the beautiful things
about developing drugs through the FDA in the medicines, yes,
is you need to demonstrate safety, and you need to
demonstrate efficacy, but you don't need to demonstrate mechanism of action.
You don't need to know how they work. So all

(33:19):
of these explanations of how things will work are interesting important.
But we also talk about this phrase translational neuroscience. You
know what we're learning all sorts of neuroscience things how
the brains work right, and you try to translate that
into something that really matters to people. So I would
say that from the point of view of psychedelics, psychotherapy,

(33:43):
nothing has translated from neuroscience to the clinic. We've had
people use psychedelics for thousands of years before we had
brain scants in highly sophisticated supportive contexts for healing, for spirituality.
So when we talk about, you know, neuroscientific explanations, how

(34:04):
strong really are they? The brain is so complex, and
so whether DMT is actually released at death or not,
it doesn't The explanation doesn't matter so much as how
we confront death. What is the process? Sure? Sure, So
it's interesting for people to try to figure out does
DMT get released? But I'm not so sure that the

(34:25):
data is so solid about that. Sure, it's just searching
for an explanation.

Speaker 1 (34:29):
Right, I mean, we could get stuck on the mechanism
rather than what actually is the process that's actually happening.
I couldn't agree more.

Speaker 2 (34:35):
I couldn't agree more.

Speaker 1 (34:36):
Yeah, it's just something that's kind of come up. But
there is I have heard you talk a little bit
about the default network.

Speaker 2 (34:57):
Yeah, okay, So Robin card Harris, I would say, is
this he's also now at UCSF. What he's talked about
was that the default mode network is in a sense,
our resting state that's what it means the default mode,
when you're not doing anything else, you're just sitting around,
how are you processing information? And you're processing through your

(35:17):
sense of self? And we could get back here to
a little bit about Abraham Maslow and he started humanistic psychology.
He also started humanistic transpersonal psychology. But many people are
taught in schools the hierarchy of needs, you know, it's
his triangle. And at the base of this is your
survival needs. You know, if you're starving, if you're dying

(35:41):
of thirst, you know, you're not doing much anything else.
So they didn't try to serve out your survival needs.
And then you've got belonging needs, and then you have
self esteem needs, and then it moves to this idea
of self actualization. You become your full self. But what
people do not really get educated enough about in school
is that in the last few years of his life
in growing awareness of psychedelic experiences and psychedelic research and

(36:08):
these states that take you beyond your sense of self.
So it's not just self actualization. So the end of
Maslow's life and started transpersonal psychology, the top of the
hierarchy of needs is now self transcendence. You go beyond
your it's beyond self actualization to self transcendence. You work
in service, you're part of something bigger. So the idea

(36:29):
of this default mode network is that you're scanning the
all the incoming input and it's being evaluated according to
your sort of eco sense. Is what's important to you?
Is this about survival? Is just about esteem? Is this
about belonging, you know, becoming My first says belonging, Or
is this about me giving back? Or so that this

(36:50):
whole you know, concept of the default mode network is
essentially equivalent in a sense to our you know, sense
of self. Are smaller ego psychedelics that not MVMA so much,
but the classic psychedelics like LSD, psilocybin, mescaline, aauasca, all
these things I began. They reduce activity in this default

(37:13):
mode network. So we're no longer scanning for what's useful
for this body, for this individual human, and you're taking
in more raw information. And that's where people feel they
go beyond themselves and they identify with the whole world,
with the whole history, with all of evolution, that we're
part of something bigger. You could talk about it as
in a way as you know, the quantum field, where

(37:36):
we know that things are somehow or other all interconnected, right,
you know, through these vibrations, so that there's this whole
kind of reduction of activity in the default mode network.
And that's often people confuse the loss of sense of
self with actual physical death. Stan Roff talked about this thing.
It was hilarious. He worked with a bunch of people

(37:57):
that had before he did LSD himself. This is in
the fifties, and he saw them do this, you know,
fear that they were actually dying, and he would reassure you,
you're not actually dying. Just let go trust, let go
be open. Bill Richards talks about that, and so then
it was his time to take LSD, and under the
LSD stand started going through this sense of loss of self,

(38:21):
and he also felt that he might be physically dying.
And he told himself this story is that when he
was young, he had this allergy and somehow or other
that changed his chemistry. And so even though all these
other people weren't dying and he reassured them they weren't,
actually he was right, you know. And then over a
while he worked through that and realized so the default

(38:41):
mode network and the reduction of activity in it is
a key understanding for the mode of activity for classic psychedelics.

Speaker 1 (38:50):
And you spent some time with gruff, right, you.

Speaker 2 (38:53):
A lot As my mentor, I spent a lot of
time with it.

Speaker 1 (38:56):
And then and then I know of him through the
breathing work.

Speaker 2 (38:58):
That, yeah, the whole drub. It is a beautiful thing.
Because when psychedelics got criminalized and research were shut down,
a lot of people said, oh, we're done with psychologs,
We're going to meditation, or we're doing this or that.
What Stan did is he developed through hyper ventilation what
he called holotropic breathwork, which was a way to bring
out similar experiences to when you're under the influence of

(39:20):
LSD or classic psychedelics. The important point there is to
realize that these experiences are not in the pill. They're
in us, and we don't need a pill. You just
breathe a little different and things come up. So that
I think that was the beauty of what stand And
also he was elegant, so you know all these yoga
breathing and breathe through your nose and breathe through this

(39:40):
nostril and breathe through your mouth, all these different counts
and all this stuff. Standard just said, look, breathe faster
and deeper. That's a find your own rhythm faster and deeper,
and then you can bring this stuff. So stand has
been tremendous, and I know we don't have that much time,
so let me just do very much about Yeah about zero. Yeah,
that's zero trauma by twenty seventy. I heard this statement

(40:02):
that if your goals are something that you can accomplish
in your lifetime, they're too small. Sontziero. Trauma by twenty
seventy is a goal for humanity as a whole. And
we are seeing the world through these filters. That's what
we see when you work with MDMA, When you work
with trauma victims, they see the world through this trauma

(40:26):
lens and they're easily triggered. And so we have humanity
as a whole is multigenerational trauma. We have the history
of mass murder, of just struggle for survival of all
of this. So MDMA can help individuals as can other psychedelics,

(40:47):
with therapy, with integration, can help others integrate and process trauma.
And not only that, but you can change the epigenetic
mechanisms by which multigenerational trauma is passed from parent to child.
Either the mother or the father can change. It's not
changing DNA, but it changed what turns on GENA. It's epigenetic,

(41:09):
it's above the genes. You can change that. So the
idea of net zero trauma doesn't mean no drama. There's
always going to be death, there's always going to be accidents,
there's always going to be illness, There's always going to
be human cruelty. But we hope it shrinks to you know,
like Grover Norquiz talked about how he wanted to shrink
the federal government to the size where he could drown

(41:32):
it in a bathtub, you know. And so yeah, we
want to shrink the global burden of trauma to where
we could write. So the idea of net zero trauma
means that we're not adding to the burden of trauma.
Net zero doesn't mean no trauma. It means just that
what we see with LA, what just happened with the
fires with LA. But there's estimates that by twenty fifty

(41:54):
there could be over a billion climate refugees. Now they're
going to destablis are already turning people right wing and
native as protectionist. It's going to be. So the sense
is just that the burden of trauma on humanity is
going to grow, right, And what we want to do
is spread healing technologies as fast as we can, and

(42:16):
they'll some point be this tipping point where the amount
of multi generational trauma that's passed on and the amount
of new trauma is in balance with the trauma that
we're healing now zero, yes, so then we reach this
net zero, then we can go on to you know,
net negative triba, right, you know, but net zero just

(42:37):
is an idealistic thing. So first off, it's just about
thinking globally. It's about trying to bring this to humanitarian
projects all over the world. And that's the vision as
we hope over the next couple of years or less,
that the MDMA will be approved by the FDA, that
they'll approve psilocybin, they'll approve other drugs, start getting these

(43:00):
out into treatment. We start hundreds and hundreds and hundreds
of thousands, millions of therapists, you know, in local healers
all over the world. And so it's just idealistic. Now
I've been accused of Oh, you talk about you want
to change the world, and this is you know, you've
got this tools that can do it. And the answer
is I believe that's true. And that's so that's the

(43:22):
vision of net zero Trauma. And so now that we
are really running out of time, let me just add
that MAPS is having the Psychedelic Science twenty twenty five.
We're having a big conference June sixteenth to twentieth in Denver.
The last one June twenty twenty three, we had twelve
four hundred people. It was the world's largest conference on
psychedelics ever. We've agd over fifteen hundred submissions for papers

(43:46):
for people to present. It's incredible. So we'd like to
invite people to consider coming to Psychedelic Science twenty.

Speaker 1 (43:52):
Twenty Anything you want me to post in the show notes,
I will do. And now you've got to go. I
just wanted to say that I think that you have
done and just in a beautiful like you've come along
a time not just in American history, but in world history.
I swear where the torch needed to be picked up
with this, with finding these tools and finding a way
to implement them, and finding a way to legalize them

(44:13):
for therapeutic use. And I feel like if you you
are the key and it's sort of a wonderful torch
that you've picked up, and we are so lucky for
your work, Rick, and we're so lucky to have had
you on our show so well.

Speaker 2 (44:26):
Thank you. So speaking of that, though, there is maybe
Zen can send you this picture that you could use
to illustrate. It's a picture talking just you reminded me
of the passing of the torch. It's a picture of
Timothy Leary and me. Okay, and this is from a
conference that maps' first big conference actually that was this

(44:49):
was in nineteen ninety, okay, nineteen ninety. Timothy Leary just
spoke and at this conference for MAPS, and I went
up on stage and asked them this question, what advice
do you have for those of us that want to
work with a government to bring psychedelics back? You know,
what advice do you have for those of us that
want to change things from the inside out work with
the government. And tim just laughed and he said, fuck

(45:09):
the government. Of course, he said, I am so far
past asking for permission for anything, but I'm glad you're
doing it. And that's where he held up my hand
like this huh, and that's where I felt like this
passing other tours.

Speaker 1 (45:24):
It is indeed a passing of the torch. But thank you,
thank you. We're in your.

Speaker 2 (45:27):
Debt, okay, great tim.

Speaker 1 (45:32):
In our show notes, you can check out important links
based on our conversation with Rick. There you'll find information
about psychedelic Science twenty twenty five. You can find the
MAPS Integration workbook and a link where you can donate
to MAPS. If you support the advancement of psychedelic research, policy, reform,
and education, please make a donation to fuel their work.
MAPS relies on financial support from people like you. You

(45:53):
can find the Multi Disciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies on
Facebook and LinkedIn. A huge thank you to Rick Doblin
winning us on Alive Again. You can follow Rick on
Instagram at Rick Doblin PhD and on x at Rick Doblin.
Next time on a Live Again, we meet singer songwriter
Blair Kremitz, whose life, identity, and music completely transformed after

(46:16):
a near fatal head injury.

Speaker 4 (46:18):
The way that the accident went down is just a
tremendous metaphor. As this dog was pulling me on a skateboard.
That's just me letting the world take.

Speaker 2 (46:27):
Me where where it wants me to go.

Speaker 4 (46:29):
There was something else pulling me, you know, in a
different direction, and I was more than a little lost.
I hit the pavement so hard it fractured the base
of my skull into my ear canal, and blood started
pouring out of my ear.

Speaker 1 (46:45):
Our storied producers are Dan Bush, Kate Sweeney, Brent Die,
and Nicholas Dagoski. Music by Ben Lovin, additional music by
Alexander Rodriguez. Our executive producers are Matthew Frederick and Alexander Williams.
Associate producer and production coordinator Sarah Klein. Our studio engineers
are Rima L. K Ali and Nomes Griffin. Our editors

(47:06):
are Dan Bush, Gerhart Slavitchca, Brent Die, and Alexander Rodriguez.
Mixing by Ben Lovett and Alexander Rodriguez. I'm your host,
Dan Bush. Alive Again is a production of iHeart Radio
and Psychopia Pictures. If you have a transformative near death
experience to share, we'd love to hear your story. Please
email us at Alive Again Project at gmail dot com.

(47:29):
That's a l I V E A G. A I
N P R O j E C T at gmail
dot com.

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6 | Net-Zero Trauma: A Conversation With Rick Doblin

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