Transcript disclaimer: This transcript was generated by computer software and may contain errors, omissions, or minor inaccuracies. Please refer to the audio recording for the most accurate version of the conversation.

[00:00:07] Joe Moore: All right. Hello, everybody, and welcome back to Psychedelics Today. This is Joe Moore. Kyle Buller’s here. We have two extraordinary guests deeply in the Eight-Circuit model frame, along with other things that we’re going to get into today. Dr. Doug, Dr. Rachel. Could y’all share a little introduction with our audience before we jump in?

[00:00:34] Douglas Wingate: Sure. My name is Dr. Doug Wingate. My doctorate’s in traditional Chinese medicine. I did postdoctoral studies in clinical neuroscience. So for the last fifteen years, I’ve maintained a clinical practice really focused on integrative neurorehabilitation. So working with a lot of people who have history of concussion, brain injury, stroke recovery, those sorts of things. I’m also a licensed psilocybin facilitator in the state of Oregon. So I was the third person in the United States to receive that license. Co-founder of Seven Gates Sanctuary, a licensed service center in Oregon, and have since then facilitated a few hundred journeys for individuals legally with psilocybin.

[00:01:14] Rachel Turetzky: I’m Dr. Rachel Turetzky. I got my PhD in clinical psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute. We’re specialized in depth psychology, have further training in psychedelic-assisted therapy and ketamine-assisted therapy through, initially through Sage Institute in Oakland, which is now Alchemy Community Therapy Center. We’ve worked with MAPS for close to fifteen years as an adherence rater on their MDMA-assisted therapy for PTSD studies. And with respect to the Eight-Circuit model, I studied with Antero Alli in his Eight-Circuit Brain course, and I’ve just been using it on my own practice and now professionally for the past close to twenty five years.

[00:01:58] Joe Moore: Outstanding. Didn’t know you had time with Antero. That’s awesome. And Doug as well.

[00:02:05] Douglas Wingate: Yeah, I also had a chance to study with Antero a couple times when he offered that course and before Robert Anton Wilson passed when he was teaching online through his MaybeLogic Academy. I had an opportunity to study the model through him as well.

[00:02:20] Joe Moore: That’s great. I recorded a long time ago with Lance Boucher, maybe, Boucher, who was involved in MaybeLogic.

[00:02:27] Douglas Wingate: Okay. We all went by avatars at the time, so different handles. So over the years, I’ve been able to connect and reconnect with some of the people that were involved with that, still stay pretty connected with a good number of them. But some of them, if they don’t recognize their handle…

[00:02:50] Joe Moore: Awesome. Cool. So we’re going to talk about a bunch of things today as it is. This episode is coming out on Maybe Day, July twenty third. Where do we want to start? Can we explain Maybe Day a little bit?

[00:03:07] Douglas Wingate: Yeah maybe day was was established after robert robert anton wilson’s uh passing as kind of an homage to him so each year since then a lot of people who were actually involved in the MaybeLogic academy or other people who peripherally knew robert anton wilson worked alongside him learned from him over the years It’s just kind of an opportunity to celebrate a lot of his ideas and offer new ideas or how we’ve been working with that, sitting with a lot of those things. So a lot of individuals collaborate and put together materials. And it’s just an opportunity to kind of recognize a lot of what we’ve been able to learn over the years from his inspiration.

[00:03:52] Rachel Turetzky: And I would also maybe add just to explain so that being called Maybe Day, the idea of maybe refers to his MaybeLogic and the importance of holding models lightly. And so you use playfully instead of, you know, refer to dogmas as, you know, just fixed beliefs and indoctrinated ways that we view the world. And so Katmint is being able to playfully, flexibly, fluidly be able to kind of hold our models lightly, see from different perspectives, the idea of reality tunnels. We all have our pre-programmed, in a sense, beliefs about the world, our experiences as they’re filtered through our nervous systems. And we’ll get more into that later about the concept of metaprogramming and being able to consciously question those and update them explore different ways of experiencing ourselves in the world and our identities and sense of self.

[00:04:58] Joe Moore: Thanks for that i one of our friends started going by katma recently as a last name and i had to ask And it turns out not related. So I had some explaining to do with that question. Yeah, and I personally have been a giant Wilson fan for a very long time and just really appreciate his work and, you know, and Turo’s work. And it’s just really cool to see that you two have been able to bring this forward quite a bit. And I guess before we go too deep, let’s talk about What else got launched today on the twenty third? Can you all explain the course that we’re launching with you all?

[00:05:41] Douglas Wingate: Yeah, so we’re launching our certified metaprogrammer course. So this is taking material that Rachel and I have been working on and have published in our book, Eight-Circuit Ascension, and more recently, Eight-Circuit Ascension workbook as well, and taking the foundations of that and uh throughout the the book and throughout the text it references how this can be employed or integrated into psychedelic practices and how psychedelic substances play into the framework and so this course is is our offering of uh compiling that together and so that people can really deep dive into it have an understanding and also have a concept of how it can influence or be integrated into somebody’s psychedelic practice.

[00:06:36] Joe Moore: Brilliant. And Kyle, you’ve been kind of helping put that together on our website and stuff. Do you have anything you want to add about what you’ve observed or questions?

[00:06:48] Kyle Buller: No, I’m excited for it. I think I mentioned I feel like I’m coming in a little blind today and I think I’ve done that on purpose because I kind of want to learn a little bit more through everything but yeah I’m excited for this course and excited for you guys to teach it so yeah I am curious though you know you guys are talking about Robert Anton Wilson and I’m sure there’s some folks listening that have no idea who that is and I know Joe you probably talk about him tons on the show but a little bit here and there yeah wondering if anybody can share a little bit about who Robert Anton Wilson is.

[00:07:27] Joe Moore: Who Bob was?

[00:07:30] Douglas Wingate: He was a bit of a, well, he was primarily a philosopher coming at things with an approach of what he referred to as guerrilla ontology. So taking concepts and ideas and presenting them in a way that would kind of stir things up to loosen up the way that we perceive the world or how we may hold on to particular belief structures or imprints that we have early in life that influence how we take a look at the world. And so a lot of his work was aimed as in particular, His book Prometheus Rising was really geared toward the Eight-Circuit model in particular. But across the board, I mean, he was a prolific writer, very close with Timothy Leary, who was also really a key developer in the Eight-Circuit model as well. So those two were very close and collaborated. Around these ideas. But yeah, he was really a unique human being. He also did what you refer to as stand-up philosophy. So he would go up and integrate and weave in a lot of comic relief while exploring really deep and sometimes ideas that were aimed at stirring things up a little bit to get you thinking in a different way than you typically would just to promote self-analyzation and taking a look at why you think about this. And then you can have an opportunity to reflect on that and see whether or not it really serves you.

[00:09:08] Joe Moore: And there’s some great videos of him on YouTube. So if anybody is interested, I just listened to this man speak for hours. He’s just encyclopedic knowledge of so many different topics and how they’re interconnected and just an absolute brilliant storyteller and teacher. I think worth noting is he was afflicted with polio at a youngish age and became very bookish as a result of that. And I think went to school to study engineering and fell into Alfred Krzybski. Is that the name? Krzybski. And Krzybski general semantic theory. So he had a lot of kind of engineering meets kind of linguistic critique, which is lovely. Mm-hmm. And then spend a lot of time in conspiracy and poking fun at it. Say, no, that’s super crazy. That one’s a little less crazy. But, you know, always in a lighthearted, fun way as they’re like fun kind of belief structures to play with. Belief systems—maybe BSs. So let’s talk about what kind of utility might people get out of… So let’s talk about psychologists, psychiatrists, therapists, trying to kind of adopt a little bit of Eight-Circuit thinking. Why is that useful?

[00:10:35] Rachel Turetzky: I mean, this could be a good opportunity to, for those not familiar with the eight-circuit model to explain what are the circuits. So let’s start there. So it’s in terms of like, so the eight-circuit model, it’s eight different dimensions of consciousness or, um, personal development in a sense. So the first four circuits, pretty much the most developmental models map pretty cleanly across the circuits. We all experience that relatively linearly, right? So circuit one is the biosurvival circuit that’s imprinted in infancy. It’s about how safe you feel in the world. Were your needs met as an infant? Did your caretaker attend to you when you were crying? I feel like especially in you know, certain generation with the cry it out, there’s a lot of attachment issues that I see coming up in therapy because of that. Um, then circuit two, the emotional territorial circuit, that’s when, so as an infant, there’s really no sense of separateness between the infant and, and the caregiver in the world. It’s just very, this kind of oceanic consciousness where there’s no separation, no sense of self. Circuit two, if you think of like the terrible twos. Um, where a child about two years old starts to understand, oh, I’m separate and I have agency and I can influence the world. And so that’s when they start to, you know, throw tantrums and in a sense, very innocently start to manipulate their environment, learning that they can and, um, learning the power of the word no. Um, and from that imprint, it’s the sense of like, are you, you know, do you take on more of like a top dog, bottom dog kind of place in the pecking order? In society kind of forms there. Circuit three is the time binding circuit, has to do with logic, reason, rational thinking, map making, symbolic ways of coding and understanding reality. Circuit four is the socio-sexual circuit, where relationship imprints morality your place in your role in society, how you show up in relationships, institutions, things of that nature. So again, pretty much across the lifespan, most people are going to have that kind of an experience. Then you get into the transpersonal circuits or the upper circuits. And so those people may or may not have, when they do happen, if they happen, then it can be nonlinear. So it’s not necessarily happening from C five, six, seven, and eight in order. But circuit five is the neurosomatic circuit. That’s if you think of, so it’s like embodied bliss. So like in circuit one, you imprint this feeling of either safety or like, I want to escape my body. That might affect how you’re, you experience circuit five, where you can feel safe enough to go into these bliss states. Things like, you know, cannabis might induce that, tantra, yoga, ecstatic dance, drumming. Those are like very Circuit Five experiences. Anything else that, you know, get creative states like when you’re doing art. On the shadow side of it also could be sort of an escapist, like when you maybe finally discover something that maybe can become unhealthy or you get addicted to that because you don’t want to be in your body. So that’s like the kind of the line you have to be careful with Circuit Five where you get like blissed out and you just want to stay there. Circuit six the meta programming or the neuroelectric circuit and for the way that we work with the model and our as our course is called certainly training certified metaprogrammers we take that as the lens where the whether you’re working on yourself or facilitating guiding others through this process you’re stepping into the role of the metaprogrammer and that’s where you bring your um your belief systems or bs into conscious awareness where you start to question um you know all the things that impacted us um through our development that um like just as even from infancy like our families our parents our families and our cultures um the media the music we listen to the art everything around us how it on you know, even on an unconscious level to a conscious level, shapes who we are. And a lot of that’s out of our awareness. So it’s really questioning our conditioning and who we are and our identity. Is it really aligned with who we want to become? And so we’re not, you know, stuck in what happened to us and we get to choose, you know, who we want to become in the future. So that’s the metaprogramming circuit. Circuit seven starts to get more expansive where we get into in Jungian psychology, the archetypal realms is circuit seven and circuit eight are maybe a little more controversial in, you know, modern psychological and scientific culture in general, where it’s, you know, having experiences with ancestors or side phenomena, psychic experiences, precognitions, you know, those who practice witchcraft or the occult when they experience entities or you’re doing DMT and you have entity encounters. So that’s all in that realm. And then in circuit eight, that’s the most expansive state. That’s when, for example, using 5-MeO-DMT and somebody has the experience of ego dissolution or hypnosis or that feelings of oneness with all that is and that loss of the sense of self. So that would be the non-local quantum metaphysiological circuit experiences of circuit eight. And also the near-death experiences that would also fall into circuit eight. Doug, do you want to add anything there? And I muted you, Doug. Yeah. Still a bit muted on the hit the left button there. There we go. Sorry about that.

[00:16:56] Douglas Wingate: Yeah, absolutely. So one of the nice things about this framework is that it does encompass a lot of what’s kind of established and builds upon developmental psychology at the same time, bringing in transpersonal realms, transpersonal psychology, and that type of thing. And the interaction of how those come into play. So like Rachel mentioned, these sort of imprints that we can take at different developmental stages and how these impact how we perceive and navigate the world around us. So we carry these things sometimes from early childhood, these imprints that have happened. And they can become pretty rigid unless a lot of self-work or as we talk about with some of the psychedelic-assisted therapy components how those can help those in different experiences of altered states of consciousness or what we consider the the upper circuit experiences can catalyze the opportunity for change or re-imprinting of of some of these things that we tend to carry with us and healing through those processes if it makes sense Another way that we’ve started to take a look at these is also sort of as different forms of intelligence types that we have. So the one that most people are pretty familiar with is like the idea of how emotionally intelligent somebody is. Is somebody fairly emotionally intelligent or is that an area where they could really use some work possibly because that wasn’t modeled for them early in life. And so that might be a growth edge for them. And so you can kind of look at the different circuits as these different intelligence types where circuit one really focuses on somatic intelligence or pre-verbal really embodiment. So how our relationship to our body. And again, as Rachel said, how that shows up in terms of safety, how safe we feel in our body, in our environment. Circuit two has a lot more to do with emotional intelligence. So how we navigate those things. Circuit three is more of our logical deductive reasoning that kind of comes online around late childhood and um how heavily we may lean into that we’re a very what would be considered a circuit three heavy culture um and then circuit four could be seen as uh social intentional intelligence so how we navigate our social environments and the expectations around that circuit five can be seen as uh sensory intelligence or an awareness of how we can utilize and amplify our experience of our sensory perception and how immersive we allow ourselves to be. Circuit six, a metacognitive intelligence where it’s really focused on self-reflection. So again, as Rachel mentioned, our ability to take a look at it and really analyze or think about why we think about things. Kind of that recursive method to allow for change if it doesn’t really make sense. So this is a real key point. If somebody is working with different methods, a lot of your classical psychedelics fall into eliciting what would be considered a circuit six or a metacognitive state where we can start thinking about those imprints. Circuit seven can be seen as kind of a collective intelligence where that archetypal material comes up. And then we refer to circuit eight also as unitive intelligence, where you do have that expanded state in the center of this recognition of interconnectedness with that which is beyond our physical body or physical form. So that oneness with the universe, with the world, with all.

[00:20:42] Kyle Buller: Amazing. Thank you for that. I’m kind of curious, as you guys were explaining this, my mind was going to some of Stan Grof’s theories around his map of consciousness and his cartography of the psyche. Is there anything that I guess really kind of catalyzed this framework for Wilson and Leary and those folks? How are they kind of conceptualizing that? A thing that I was thinking about was like Stan’s perinatal birth matrices and like what was coming up in sessions made him think about like, we need a new framework here. So I’m curious if there’s any bit of a backstory around how this all kind of came together.

[00:21:19] Douglas Wingate: Totally. And one of the contributions that Rachel and I kind of added to the model, because a lot of the time when Leary and Wilson were originally developing this model, a lot of that is certainly with Leary out of his work with psychedelics, you know, in a clinical setting, the early psychedelic research that he was involved in. And similar to Grof, they were doing things around the same time. One of the contributions that we’ve added to the model in terms of emphasizing the discussion of what Grof brought into some of that. Grof’s work really focused on either either end of the spectrum of within this model. So the basic perinatal matrices that he describes that a lot of people are accessing during psychedelic states or during the holotropic breathwork altered states of consciousness. This kind of ties into what we ended up referring to as circuit zero. But really, in the original model, falls within what we consider the receptive subphase. So Leary delineated three subphases within each circuit. There’s receptive, where you’re first being exposed to this type of material. Then there’s integration, and then there’s the transmission phase. So once you integrate something in, you’re able to kind of embody it, make it your own, and then discuss it in a different way that makes sense to you or may be helpful for other people. So Grof’s basic perinatal matrices falls into what would be considered the receptive phase of circuit one or the somatic experience, where the prenatal experiences can have these vast but completely subconscious influences on not just our frame of mind as we grow up and develop, but also our body. And so we go into that and discuss how since that time, There’s been a lot of research showing just how impactful the prenatal and perinatal experiences are from everything from hormone regulation and immune system development to development of our psych states and psychological state and how we look at things. And then people accessing those in the altered state of consciousness, Grof’s other end of the spectrum would fall into a circuit seven, circuit eight territory where they’re in these altered states of consciousness, very expanded states, and then being able to reaccess that. So that’s sort of this component of re-experiencing and opportunities to re-imprint or work through that material and heal from it. I guess I got off track to talk about Grof and less about where Leary and Wilson were coming from. I kind of mentioned that a lot of this was initially developed out of Leary’s work with the psychedelic work and his research. And then I think just Wilson, Leary, and others around the time too, trying to make sense of these altered states or expanded states that people are experiencing, certainly with psychedelics. But so Rachel mentioned things like yoga practices, meditation practices, and things like that. They don’t really fall into certainly the traditional psychological framework of the time, but were very real human experiences. That have been documented for centuries, millennia by shamans and other people who utilized psychedelics and these practices within different cultures. So they’ve existed, they’ve been talked about, but they hadn’t really been uh brought into any sort of functional framework to really talk about them and this is also a lot of the reason that we’ve put a lot of work on trying to bring this conversation into this the psychedelic-assisted therapy realm as well is because in a lot of the trainings that are happening right now there’s this verbal recognition there’s a recognition that people are experiencing these altered states you know people will have archetypal Experiences with family members or lineages or generations or entity encounters and things like that, but there’s not really. What do you do with that? Where is that coming from and how can you effectively integrate that in make meaning out of it? And what do you do with it from there? So we found that this model lends itself very well to that. Rachel, do you have anything you want to add to that?

[00:26:01] Rachel Turetzky: No, that was the origin of everything, was just having, as a psychonaut, having been exposed to this model, knowing about it, working with it, knowing its utility. And why reinvent the wheel, right? Once I got into more of the academic side of things and working with psychedelics professionally, studying them, just knowing that this exists and it’s kind of in obscurity as part of a counterculture artifact. And wanting to update it and bring it out to the world so that it could be of use to so many people. Even just normalizing different experiences that people might have, where in contemporary psychology might be pathologized. If you have a certain type of therapist or psychiatrist who just views certain types of experiences as you have an ancestor encounter or you tell somebody that you see an entity, you know, they’re going to maybe slap a label on you. And so, or even my own experience, um, with, before I knew what like lucid dreaming was or what, um, an out of body experience wasn’t having that spontaneously, you know, and just feeling like, am I going crazy? And, you know, so just to have something like a framework that like, oh no, that’s what this falls into. And it helps with the meaning making process to explore it more deeply, to understand what’s going on. Both psychologically or psycho spiritually. So it’s just a great tool that hopefully can now be explored through a wider audience and can benefit the psychedelic communities.

[00:27:45] Douglas Wingate: Yeah, so a lot of our work was in putting together our book was really focused on demonstrating and substantiating how this has just really been verified over the last fifty years when the model was first developed, first presented, that the research is just built on that more and more. So like I said, bringing in the perinatal matrices, but also the research in terms of the impact on prenatal experiences. And with circuit one material or somatic intelligence material, how the early life experience and early life imprinting has just further been developed and discussed. And so when this model was first put out there, a lot of the verbiage didn’t really exist. And it can make approaching that material, some of the earlier material, a little bit difficult because they were coming up with terms or mashing terms together to try to talk about what they were wanting to talk about epigenetics wasn’t really a thing epigenetics falls into circuit seven territory where we were having this direct influence and almost dialogue with our genetic material you know how to influence that everything from diets exercise to the way that we think about things influences our genetic material and its expression we understand that now they didn’t understand that then with circuit one material attachment theory was In its infancy, it wasn’t really talked about. Polyvagal theory falls into that. A lot of somatic psychomotor psychotherapy approaches, these body-based approaches, there was some of that existing as well, but the verbiage, the dialogue wasn’t really happening. And this material has just really been more substantiated as time has gone by. And so our work was heavily based on pooling that together and demonstrating that, hey, now we’ve got all of this research and all of these conversations happening that just really backs it up and that it has really stood the test of time.

[00:29:44] Joe Moore: Yeah, so a thing, maybe Rachel brought up this idea of these thoughts, frameworks being kind of countercultural artifacts. I think, you know, twofold here. Tim doesn’t get enough credit as being a major influence on the development of psychology generally, right? He was a world leading psychologist before psychedelics. And then, you know, psychedelics happened, made him more of a lot of things. And he had a lot of time to sit and think while incarcerated too, right? Like that, you know, really tragic amount of time in prison. But we got some really good writing out of it. Could either of you kind of bring up any helpful insights around Tim’s legacy here? Rachel, you want to?

[00:30:38] Rachel Turetzky: Just again, like similar, like just what you were saying, he’s not, I think if anything, when he does come up for a lot of people, he’s demonized, um, sort of like, he’s like the fall guy for the whole scheduling of psychedelics and, and that it just really, um, you know, obstructs his legacy in a lot of ways. And so, and I think it’s just taking a moment right now, just maybe day to honor him and Robert Anton Wilson, Antero Alli, John Lilly. Our friend and colleague who we collaborate with, David J. Brown, who is really lovely as like a direct lineage bridge to hearing personal stories. He’s a very good friend with all of them. And so, yeah, I mean, he was a brilliant Harvard psychologist, Tim, and he wrote like this book that’s still in use today on interpersonal personality.

[00:31:34] Douglas Wingate: Um he yeah the test is still used to this day right interestingly enough it just really doesn’t get recognized he doesn’t get the credit on it

[00:31:43] Rachel Turetzky: Yeah, I think the test also like when he was in prison right is like he actually created the test that so he was able to get himself in like the most minimum security um part of the prison because he obviously knew the answers and what to say because he broke the test um.

[00:31:58] Joe Moore: It’s such a wild life.

[00:32:01] Rachel Turetzky: And it’s cool because because of David and our publisher, who original Falcon that published Leary, all of their Leary, Wilson Antero and now ours, but to hear all the stories from him. Firsthand and what’s fun about Tim and all those guys really is, you know, sometimes they say like, don’t meet your heroes because they’re like very different than what you expect them to be or they might disappoint you. But from the stories that, you know, we’ve been so privileged to hear, like they absolutely live up to what you would expect them to be and just such free, interesting people.

[00:32:42] Joe Moore: Yeah it’s um yeah and it’s it’s a long weird exquisite horrifying and amazing story um you know as they should be i suppose and you know wilson fascinating character like just wrote a lot did a lot of thinking um did a lot of reading this whole stand-up philosophy thing folks should kind of um i don’t know almost consider him a more psychedelic carlin sometimes.

[00:33:10] Rachel Turetzky: And carlin timothy leary also apparently i was talking to nick our publisher nick archer and he was saying tim was also a stand-up comedian and he would go perform yeah and carlin is is on record as saying he was a big fan and massively influenced by wilson as well and and i went that direction wow cool um.

[00:33:33] Joe Moore: Yeah, and it’s just something that I think a lot of folks can’t wrap their head around is, okay, this person who is an engineer kind of philosopher, why would he have anything helpful to say about psychology? Well, first off, he has a psyche, probably. Best we can estimate, did have one. And spent a lot of time around a lot of people doing interesting things. And he did experience substantial loss was a daughter murdered? Is that the story? Right. When she was quite young, right? She was working, I think it was in a, was it a thrift store or? Yeah. Maybe a teenager. Teenage years.

[00:34:23] Douglas Wingate: But he also, so he did have a PhD in, I think it was psychology. It was, it just unfortunately was at a, a school that I guess they lost their accreditation. So he just sort of never referred to it, but that’s what Prometheus Rising is. His, his book on the eight-circuit model was, is a just rewriting of his dissertation.

[00:34:45] Joe Moore: Hmm. I love that. Yeah. Kyle you’ve read nothing by robert anton wilson at this point interesting have you.

[00:34:56] Kyle Buller: No i feel like i probably should after this.

[00:35:01] Rachel Turetzky: Oh my God, yeah, plenty to get. We’ll have a lot to talk about and there’s a lot of what’s great too is just a lot of experiential practices that he gives so just different ways to play with your your experience of reality what is you know really questioning what is that and Um, so especially for, uh, the younger, um, viewers to, you know, like for everybody, anybody, but like just having, being at a formative age to explore that I think is so advantageous.

[00:35:31] Douglas Wingate: Yeah, and I think also he really did the work in terms of exploring these different things. I mean, everything from certainly psychedelics, but exploring other systems, meditation systems. He was a huge practicer of pranayama and different occult systems and ritual systems and diving into… Things like Lilly’s work with sensory deprivation and you know he’s written multiple articles talking about all of the different experiences he tried to expose himself to basically as many as possible in his own search for what consciousness uh has the ability to lend itself to or just the the expansiveness or what are the limits of human experience. And he really did that work. And a lot of material goes into that. Some of his books, Cosmic Trigger series, it’s a trilogy, goes into his personal experiences with these different practices and explorations. And yeah, he spent his life exploring the human experience.

[00:36:37] Kyle Buller: There’s like one book or starting point for folks like me who haven’t really dug in or to direct them.

[00:36:46] Joe Moore: Go ahead. What was that?

[00:36:48] Douglas Wingate: Prometheus Rising, for sure. Prometheus Rising, definitely, if you wanted more information about the Eight-Circuit model, that’s a great standing point. That was my first exposure to Wilson as well when I was seventeen. I picked up Prometheus Rising and it changed a lot of how I looked at things and it was just off to the races from there, pretty much consuming anything that he had written. If you want something a little bit more broad, I suppose, and also it’s a bit more autobiographical. The Cosmic Trigger is a great starting point for a lot of people too, and I know a lot of people have said that that was their sort of introduction to the material, and it does give a lot of the overview of his other works because his other books go in a lot of different directions depending on where your interests may lie. So I’d say both of those are really great starting points. And also, Joe, I’m curious, because I know you studied the Eight-Circuit model as well. So would you like to share anything about your book?

[00:37:48] Joe Moore: Well, I loved your book. Like, I think your book on Eight-Circuit is super helpful, kind of framing it. You had very specific examples. Like I have, yeah, I was about to do a two, the originator kind of info psychology, exopsychology book. The Leary books were helpful, interesting, useful. I think don’t start there. If you’re not really familiar with Leary’s work, don’t start with Leary’s work right away. It’s funny, it’s weird on purpose. It’s like every single sentence could be challenging you by design it’s not necessarily a clean like here’s what we mean and you all made like a really great kind of walk through of what is this concept why are we doing it how can we test it how might it show up um so yeah i definitely advise reading reading your books to start with I think and throw Ali’s kind of angel tech was useful in that regard, which I haven’t read yet. Tragically, the circuit brain more updated more practice is really into how to work with the model apply it. Right. And I, you know, there’s a lot of folks that haven’t really dug into the history of psychedelia ever. Right. So like, have you read Leary or, you know, sorry, Lily.

[00:39:21] Rachel Turetzky: Yeah. We run into a lot of people who have never heard of Lily. And that’s tragic. Yeah.

[00:39:27] Douglas Wingate: He invented the flotation tank and did early personal and other experiments with, with ketamine. So he’s definitely a brilliant figure that more people should hopefully now, hopefully more people hear the name and want to look into him, Programming and Metaprogramming in the Human Biocomputer. It’s similar to reading Leary though. It’s kind of abstruse, heavy book, but… Like I mentioned, with Leary, there’s a lot of what we refer to as Learyisms. There’s a lot of new words that you’ve never heard before. Like I say, compound words of different concepts that he’s trying to put verbiage to. And it can be a trudge to get through it and really try to… It’s an investment if you’re going to try to decipher what he’s talking about. Brilliant material, but not the easiest.

[00:40:19] Rachel Turetzky: And also just thinking about the time, though, where he’s hiding sort of, like, you can reprogram yourself with LSD and other drugs. And having to hide that in the language of metaprogramming and the other concepts that he was putting forth.

[00:40:35] Joe Moore: Right. And yeah, there’s like a certain style that probably pervaded from psychedelic books, I think from around sixty seven through probably the mid nineties, where it was often like that kind of packed with these kind of interesting turn of phrases and, you know, knowing what was in the water at the time so kind of cultural kind of touch points historical touch points um there’s so much and you know i i don’t know if i no i probably didn’t disclose this to you too yet but i for years and years and years i would listen every single night like almost all day to everything that psychedelic salon podcast had up so it was all the recordings of leary lily raw mckenna etc shulgin like so many of these amazing minds and so like i was already kind of steeped in leary before i even started to read leary right that guy’s funny like you know not a clean story either i’m chatting with zach about tim a while ago and it was it was interesting like you know there’s some hard parts of the story but it’s also like nobody ever did this before like this is a first time thing the president made you you know, America’s most wanted man, the most evil man in America, you know, good for him for hitting that target. But it’s really challenging for a human to deal with that, especially when you’ve already kind of put LSD on a pedestal, which is, you know, amazing, but it also can make life a bit more challenging too when you do it too much.

[00:42:23] Rachel Turetzky: Although there’s that video that’s now kind of gone viral where he’s asked, do you have any regrets? And he’s basically like, I should have done more psychedelics and made more love.

[00:42:37] Joe Moore: Right. Have you guys bumped into Didi Goldpaw yet? Is that how we say your last name, Kyle? LCSW in New York State wrote a book called Embrace Pleasure. And the idea was that a lot of people just have anhedonia, just can’t receive pleasure. And you have to kind of heal that. Um and it can take a long time to heal that yeah and um you know she’s like you know at the end of the book like okay you healed it you got pleasure what’s what do you do next you get more pleasure was her answer cool like hedonic engineering right into like a c-five categorization in the eight-circuit model is the being able to really go into those pleasure states.

[00:43:28] Douglas Wingate: Yeah, hedonic engineering was a term that Leary had used and then Wilson adopted as well to talk about exactly that, rediscovering your appreciation for pleasure, for joy, for rapture and awe and how that really is lacking for so many or shut down for so many early in life. And it can really take a lot of work to rediscover that.

[00:43:57] Joe Moore: Mm hmm. Yeah. And just to be clear, like when Didi says pleasure, it’s not necessarily exclusively a sex thing. It could be just really how much you like coffee or peanut butter or something, too. It’s just like being with that moment, that thing. Kyle.

[00:44:16] Kyle Buller: I was just gonna say and from like a neo Jungian perspective kind of talk about that from like a golden shadow. You know, it’s like we typically want to like hang out in the repressed content of like the darkness. But what about these light aspects where it’s like hard to actually embrace love, joy, bliss, all these good feelings?

[00:44:36] Rachel Turetzky: And that’s one of the nice things, like when I was doing the adherence rater work with maps is just witnessing sometimes the most therapeutic experience some of these people had was all of a sudden in this state, they were able to experience what probably for most people would just be like normal, you know, just feeling normal. But for them, because they were in such a low state, like all the time in chronic survival mode, that all of a sudden just all of that being lifted. And so to just experience life without anxiety and fear and just what that is like, you know, so the therapy is the positive experience because you’re just, when you’re in locked into such a, um, you know, dark worldview, it’s, it could be so liberating.

[00:45:26] Kyle Buller: Well, it makes me wonder too, just about like people’s perception around therapy, right? It’s like, sometimes people come in and I noticed this sometimes like, where they’re like, what if I enjoy this? Like, what if I’m not doing quote unquote the work, you know, where I’m not digging into like my childhood or, you know, my relationships with my parents or, you know, stuff like that. And I wonder just like how, yeah skewed that is sometimes where it’s like we always need to be working on this like really tough stuff where it’s like maybe also the work is learning how to embrace the good in life too and.

[00:46:03] Joe Moore: The FDA tells us it’s a negative experience it’s actually bad if it feels good that’s what the fda told me.

[00:46:12] Rachel Turetzky: Yeah, I think it’s yeah. Well, yeah. In the in the maps work, it was called it was tracked should have been tracked as an adverse event if it was pleasurable.

[00:46:21] Joe Moore: We need to change the government a little bit. They’re thinking on this. We were founded by Puritans. Um and i i i grew up in massachusetts my joke is that everybody born in massachusetts was given a puritan hat at birth so we could keep that tradition going um and puritanism is the sneaking suspicion that somebody somewhere is having a good time and you know we have to kind of get over that it’s not okay to think like that i think um part of that discussion rachel is around diversion like they’re worried oh people might like it and therefore it might escape into the wild like people out in the americas might start doing ecstasy it’s like oh what if but that’s.

[00:47:07] Rachel Turetzky: Interesting to hear that perspective because having worked as an adherence reader with maps for so long um so it I would watch the recordings of the therapy sessions and we had, you know, sort of thinking in terms of like quality control. Did the therapist hit certain items that they were supposed to talk about at some point in the sessions? And so, and it brings in the idea of like, like graph of the, the sorry, I’m having a brain fog, inner healing intelligence. And so when you go into these experiences to have approached it with curiosity and that everything that comes up is relevant and therapeutic. So even if that is a positive experience, um to just be able to because sometimes that is the most healing thing if again you’re stuck in chronic fear and just constantly activated and then all of a sudden that lifts and you’re having like this is what it feels like to feel good and that’s gone you know that is extremely potent as medicine and so trusting that that’s coming from somewhere in your psyche that’s needing to be expressed So that’s I’ve not actually heard of that, Joe, that that was something that the FDA flagged as an adverse reaction in those studies.

[00:48:29] Joe Moore: It was part of like the FDA rejection discussion. And yeah, it’s it’s fascinating. And yes, like anhedonia is kind of a disease where we can’t actually experience pleasure and, you know, flagging it as an adverse event just seems complicated. I think yeah we have a long way to go uh and you know that that discussion like you not knowing necessarily about this part is interesting to me too for a handful of reasons um but you know the world may never know the actual story here So why? I think we’re coming closer. Like, why might people in helping healing professions, medical and adjacent, why might they want to know about this? Like, why might it be useful for them?

[00:49:25] Douglas Wingate: So we really try to lean into the practical elements in our written work, and that’s a lot of the reason that we released the workbook as a follow-up as well. The main book certainly has different exercises, different perspectives, different things that you can do to explore this. But to actively work through that. And I can say with my facilitation work with psychedelics, with psilocybin, it’s for people where it’s a right fit. Like I said, I work with a lot of people who have history of traumatic brain injury and stroke, and we’re doing more of a psychedelic-assisted neuro rehab type thing. So integration looks very different from people who are coming in with anhedonia or longstanding depression or just wanting to explore themselves deeper or healing from grief and things like that. But a lot of the practicality of the model is if beforehand we always do preparation, if we have an understanding of where people might have an early imprint or or how what sort of lens they use in perceiving the world and navigating the world, then one that can be it can lend itself to having an understanding of what sort of material might come up during a journey, for sure. It can also provide different exercises, different ways to explore that beforehand so that there’s a little bit more awareness, which can be brought into intention and the work and going into the journey. And certainly afterward, if somebody has had a large expansive experience and say it’s a circuit seven experience and they do have some sort of entity encounter or lineage encounter with their ancestors. Having the tools to take a look at that, knowing that one big contribution of Ontario’s work with the model was the idea of verticality. There’s an inner relationship between the higher and lower circuits and the lower circuit works can really work to ground or help with integration process. So if somebody has a disembodied experience, a very expansive experience, coming back into the body and bringing that in to go about their job the next week, like how do you do that if you just had a complete dissolution of self and suddenly a recognition of being interconnected with everything, but you have to go back to your day job how how can you help bring that not forget it you know recognize that but also effectively integrate that in and so uh for instance you can work to with uh embodied practices to help build circuit one material somatic intelligent type material If there’s sort of a dysregulation or somebody is feeling really scattered emotionally, you can help with that integration process by bringing in different exercises or different perspectives that have to do more with emotionality and emotional intelligence circuits who work and things like that. It’s incredibly practical once you have an understanding of how these things interrelate and that they’re not hierarchical in any sort of sense that one is better than another. These are basically all uh capacities that we have access to a lot of people may not access what would be considered the the higher transpersonal circuits unless you catalyze that through some sort of practice because it’s not really culturally recognized we don’t have those those rituals or rites of passage or anything like that really built into our culture but once you do um have access to that or have access that how those things interplay with everything else that we already have and as i mentioned those early imprints and being able to the the transpersonal experiences being catalysts to initiate change in that so if somebody has an early life imprint that’s really negative so you know in infancy their the world was not safe their their home life was not safe their um Their parental figure wasn’t really there. It was neglect or whatever. That creates a deep wound. And the understanding that these more expanded states allow for reassessment of that and healing from that. So there’s a lot of different practical elements that we get into and explore. And the workbook is a really great tool that I’ve found in the integration process when I’m working with people who have had these expanded states with psychedelics. Rachel, you have anything you want to add?

[00:54:12] Rachel Turetzky: Yeah, like Doug said, we do kind of break down what can be most helpful for identifying, you know, what is the person wanting to work through if a certain trauma comes up, where that falls in their development and then being able to categorize in a sense, like, well, which therapeutic modality could be most helpful for that type of re-imprinting work? But also when working with psychedelics, like, you know, what is the intention? So if there is like a circuit for or whether it’s anhedonia or maybe there’s like a marriage counseling. So MDMA for either of those. So knowing that that’s like a circuit for a circuit five, you know, intentionally direct you towards using a certain compound where like with metaprogramming, you know, psilocybin or LSD would be appropriate to, you know, challenge your sense of self and reality and for those types of explorations low dose ketamine for circuit one and or high dose ketamine for circuit eight so even just the dosage just knowing like what type of state that that’s going to induce so it can help to be a framework for just what’s appropriate to use what dosage to use what the desired outcome is that you’re working towards.

[00:55:32] Douglas Wingate: Yeah there’s a real similar thing with psilocybin too in terms of dosage you know there’s discussion robert carter harris talks about rebus the relaxed beliefs under psychedelics and how that can be initiated by classical psychedelics and um there’s dr saffron has built uh kind of expanded on that to include uh he refers to as cebus supported beliefs under psychedelics and dosage with classical psychedelics can really make a difference in how deep you go and what sort of experience that catalyzes. So very low dose or micro dose of psilocybin would fall into the CBUS, the supportive. You’re not really breaking an experience open so much as an opportunity to support where you’re already at. So it can be really helpful. You know, there’s all kinds of evidence with it helping with depression and things like that, but it’s not necessarily going to catalyze breaking out of a very rigid, long standing pattern that we may have. And that’s a conversation that I have a lot with a lot of people when they’re asking about different dosage and whether or not microdosing versus a full journey is appropriate. Whereas the higher doses with psilocybin can lend itself to the self-reflective, the metaprogramming component, or very high doses. Of course, you can also have ego dissolution type circuit eight, unitive intelligence type experiences too. So yeah, doses definitely brought into the conversation when it comes to the different circuits. You can go, Rachel.

[00:57:00] Rachel Turetzky: Just as zooming out to also just that psychedelics are a huge way to activate different circuits but that it’s also like this is a great model just not limited to psychedelics like we’re saying with um like yoga practices mystical practices magical practices um just like in in the occult for example different systems that what’s you’re deconditioning yourself and um you know allowing yourself to explore different um expanding your perceptions and what is reality and so it’s a framework for psycho spiritual traditions as well. So not just limited to but I think especially with some like nowadays, psychedelics is getting more mainstream, different magical practices getting more mainstream and similar like what is a magician, you’re basically a meta programmer, right? So it’s a great model, not limited to psychedelics and clinical work, but just for your own personal self development.

[00:58:04] Douglas Wingate: Yeah, a couple of examples that I use for that is that holotropic breathwork, of course, was developed by Stan Grof when psychedelics were rescheduled and not accessible. And that can act as a very similar catalyst and very intentional in opening up to Circuit Seven archetypal type experiences. Uh and then sensory deprivation a lot of john lilly’s work with flotation tanks sensory deprivation tanks i’ve done dark room experiences where you spend two weeks in in the dark with no exposure to light and your body starts producing it endogenous dmt to where you’re experiencing a psychedelic experience you begin having very intense visual hallucinations after just a few days of that and uh and it’s really interesting to see how these type of experiences and catalysts can come in from different directions and that yeah psychedelics is just one available tool a very potent very effective tool for that but just one tool.

[00:59:02] Joe Moore: Lots of different tools and doorways.

[00:59:05] Kyle Buller: Doug, you mentioned that this isn’t hierarchical. And I think maps and frameworks, I think, are really important. I think I was talking to a teacher years ago. And it’s like, having a map when you’re lost at sea is really helpful. Navigate these like different terrains it is really helpful to have a framework but i’m sure there’s some folks that look at this and they look at it as hierarchical right or like when we think about psychedelic experiences people are always pushing towards i need to have the mystical ego dissolution um you know because that’s where the healing is how do we like navigate like if somebody’s coming in understanding this framework like how do we help them navigate just expectations around like yeah maybe we don’t need to work on these like you know circuits five through eight but you know maybe sometimes people look at and go well isn’t the whole point is to have circuit aid of like you know ego dissolution and that non-like logical circuit open and being more expansive yeah.

[01:00:08] Douglas Wingate: Uh I mean it’s non-hierarchical in the sense that if you have As I mentioned before, each one of these are types of experience that have bore themselves out over centuries. They’ve been discussed, but what’s considered upper circuit, circuit seven, circuit eight type material is kind of rarefied air because, again, culturally, it’s not really discussed. There’s not really protocol for it. Bringing that into everybody’s life. So a lot of people have not had those experiences and developing that can be very beneficial to have a greater understanding of if it’s like circuit eight, understanding the interconnectedness of everything. We talk about how quantum physics really changed the way that we take a look at the universe. And if you have a greater understanding of that, that’s another lens, another perspective that wasn’t available to you before. And so they’re non-hierarchical in the sense that proper integration brings all of those in so that we have ready access or at least an understanding of those possibilities and those lenses. It can be pretty easy to at first glance think of them as i mean there’s even the phrasing of lower circuits with circuit one through four and higher circuits as more transpersonal states with circuit five through eight um that verbiage is used and they’re laid out in the order that we do from from one to eight because they are generally speaking broader in scope in terms of the how much understanding and information it encompasses so circuit one is very body based it’s very localized in the body and as we develop through circuits two three four that’s that’s an expansion of our personal self into our first it’s a non-delineation between caregiver and the child and this oceanic um sort of connectedness there and lack of understanding of self and there’s a separation of self and then there’s interaction with the nuclear family or your your family and then the social realm and then you broaden that out to understand that you’re more connected with other individuals outside of that and more interconnected with people as a whole and then there are uh connections that we have with the world around us as a whole in in nature and an understanding of that, and then the expanded state around circuit eight, where there’s a oneness with everything. And so there is this broadening as you work your way through. But the way that we we talk about how they all interact, each one of those are different lenses and available ways of looking at things, and each one serves a different purpose. And so If you have done some work, you have some exposure with those, you have integrated those in a way, each one of those types of intelligence kind of has a tool. There are situations where it’s appropriate to. To self-advocate with with more emotionality versus more linear logical situations and those are pretty well recognized everybody has developed those capacities not everybody has had the opportunity to necessarily develop the metacognitive processes um the Sometimes we just haven’t had those type of experiences available to us. And so when doing a lot of this work, if somebody has not had those experiences, it can be very eye opening and another component that they can bring in into their healing process.

[01:03:58] Rachel Turetzky: Also the importance of so the quote comes to mind shop would carry water so you have this this peak state this you know you’re like oh i just took a heroic dose and i had this amazing experience I have to chase the next high, chase the next peak state, but what is the purpose there, right? So after you have that experience, what are you doing to bring that down to you still have to exist in the world, you still have to function and survive and live your life and interact with others. And so I think instead of just chasing the peak states, the focus should be on the integration as these circuits or dimensions being a whole human so that everything is in balance. And so I feel like just shifting that or think of somebody who, you know, have these experiences and now think that they’re somehow special and like they’re this enlightened person. And that’s like a form of like I had all this ego dissolution. And yet that becomes an ego experience in and of itself. So then to be able to ground that in the lower circuit so that it informs and enlightens your everyday experience and the way that you interface with the world and with others.

[01:05:15] Kyle Buller: Thank you for that. You’re talking it also okay i guess kind of reminds me of like a lot of the the chakra systems as well um and i wonder how much they like kind of pull from some of those eastern philosophies?

[01:05:27] Douglas Wingate: There’s definitely some Overlap my first book uh Circuits and Shen pulls from my background in traditional chinese medicine in some of those eastern systems and i do draw some parallels between the chakra system and the eight-circuit model and there’s certainly some parallels there’s no doubt i mean leary had written about eastern systems he had a book um he did his interpretation of the Tao Te Ching he did an interpretation of the I Ching which is the system that i’m writing more on right now and some of the correlates between that um so there’s no doubt that there was influence there and yeah i have explored some of that in some of my work.

[01:06:09] Joe Moore: Cool. Well, let’s remind people about your book and the upcoming class or the class that’s now available one more time.

[01:06:18] Douglas Wingate: Sure. The book is Eight-Circuit Ascension, A Guide to Metaprogramming and the Multidimensional Self. And then earlier this year, the workbook for that was also released. So the Eight-Circuit Ascension Workbook. What’s the subtitle on that again, Rachel?

[01:06:36] Rachel Turetzky: The Course to Change Your Brain and Increase Intelligence.

[01:06:38] Douglas Wingate: Yeah. So those are published through Original Falcon Press, available on any book selling platforms. And then the course, do you want to speak about the course again, Rachel?

[01:06:51] Rachel Turetzky: Yeah, so it’s fourteen lessons. So we go into the eight-circuits in addition to our own edition of circuit zero, which is where we bring in Grof’s perinatal matrices and talk about just the powerful impact that on development that pre and perinatal state has on just life. How we’re affected by, for example, when you think of, unfortunately, like a child who had, you know, an alcoholic mother, for example, which there was a recent study by Robin Carhart-Harris, right, on actually psilocybin.

[01:07:27] Joe Moore: I don’t think it was by Robin, but there was a recent study that came out in the last couple of days about psilocybin potentially being beneficial for prenatal alcohol exposure. I don’t know. Yeah,.

[01:07:37] Rachel Turetzky: It was just like putting it how that impact can really have lasting effects on a person’s life versus somebody who’s, you know, mother was very conscientious about her diet and taking care of herself and created an optimal environment. So we add that to the course as well. We get into um, you know, like the concept of metaprogramming and what your role would be as a metaprogrammer. We talk about applications in psychedelic-assisted therapy. Um, let’s talk about chapel, perilous and ontological shock, spiritual emergencies that can come up and how to navigate those and how that comes into the model as well. And different tools based on different, different circuits are working through some of that as well.

[01:08:24] Joe Moore: Kyle, do you know the term Chapel Perilous?

[01:08:28] Kyle Buller: No, I haven’t heard of it before.

[01:08:31] Joe Moore: Let’s spend just a moment on that, Doug, if you could, and then we’ll wrap it up here.

[01:08:36] Douglas Wingate: Yeah, Chapel Perilous is a literary term. I don’t remember the origin of it. Rachel, do you remember where it originally came from?

[01:08:43] Rachel Turetzky: Yeah, it’s King Arthur and the legend of the Holy Grail, the Knights of the Round Table.

[01:08:48] Douglas Wingate: Yeah. Wilson did use that as a literary way of describing experiences that were so destabilizing that you feel lost or like you’ve lost yourself and it can be very disorienting. This can often happen with expanded states of consciousness, altered states of consciousness, psychedelic experiences, where it’s a lot of just foreign material and you don’t know what to do with it and sometimes people can get get lost in chapel perilous for extended periods of time it can take quite a while especially if you don’t have the framework or somebody to talk to who has previous experience in navigating these these experiences um where yeah where you can just feel very very lost like you’ve lost yourself and uh and there are a number of tools and like i said we bring in In parallel, in that discussion, Grof’s discussion around spiritual emergencies and how those can come up, and then explorations with ontological shock, just these experiences that are so shocking to our nervous system and to the way that we think about things that it’s destabilizing. And having the tools to explore those and help integrate those in and kind of re-find ourselves is how we… Work through that material.

[01:10:09] Rachel Turetzky: And at the end of the course, once you pass all of the quizzes and exams, you’ll be eligible for the certification as a metaprogrammer. And also if applicable, if you’re seeking CE credits, we’ll be offering those as well.

[01:10:26] Joe Moore: And I believe we came up with the title, the Eight-Circuit Model of Consciousness and Integrative Framework for Psychedelic Assisted Therapy. For that, Psychedelic Education Center, everybody. All right. Well, thank you all. This is awesome. I’m really excited for the class. I’m going to try my best to make time for it. You know how it goes. But just excited we can make it available and help revitalize this really important stream of thought.

[01:10:59] Rachel Turetzky: Yeah, we’re really excited.

[01:11:01] Douglas Wingate: Thank you.

[01:11:03] Rachel Turetzky: Loved having this discussion and being able to talk about it.

[01:11:07] Kyle Buller: Yeah, and I think it’s super important for people to have these frameworks, right? Because Doug, as you’re saying before, like some of these programs are touching on some of the transpersonal aspects. And like, I keep thinking about that, of like how psychiatry and psychology might be like kind of shaping the psychedelic future, but also what happens with the experiences. And as I always say, trauma and everything is a trauma, right? It’s like, sometimes there is that weirdness and help people make meaning out of it. So awesome to like, yeah, get education in these different frameworks so we can best support our clients. So thank you.

[01:11:52] Joe Moore: All right. Until next time, let’s hang out backstage for a minute and yeah, take care, everybody.

Transcript disclaimer: This transcript was generated by computer software and may contain errors, omissions, or minor inaccuracies. Please refer to the audio recording for the most accurate version of the conversation.

[00:00:00] Joe Moore: Hello everybody. Welcome back to Psychedelics today. This is Joe joined by Erica Rex. Thanks for joining me today, Erica.

[00:00:18] Erica Rex: Thank you for having me.

[00:00:20] Joe Moore: Absolutely. Good to see you. And likewise, today we get to chat about your book. Um, we’ve chatted about a few other things, um, which there have been developments on, and if we run outta steam, we’ll go there again.

[00:00:31] Joe Moore: But, uh, we’re talking about your book today, seeing what is there, my Search for Sanity in the Psychedelic era. Um, I loved it. I thought it was unique, like very unique in this landscape of psychedelic stories where people are, you know, oh, I met my Jaguar spirit animal and now my cancer’s gone. Like those kinds of, you know, not to shit on everybody.

[00:00:53] Joe Moore: I’m sorry, but like, you know, your story was very different from that. And, um, I’m [00:01:00] excited that people can dig in and engage with it. And, um, yeah. So thanks for writing it. And could you, could you give us a little bit of a kind of personal, professional background before we jump into your book?

[00:01:14] Erica Rex: Yes. I’m, I’m a journalist and writer, excuse me.

[00:01:21] Erica Rex: And I, um, I got into this field, uh, what is it called? Field, this endeavor, um, of interest, uh, in psychedelic medicine and psychedelics rather late in life. Uh, due to my own experience with, um, having breast cancer and then being in, um, the seminal clinical trial to treat cancer related depression, which was Roland Griffith’s, um, study, which was, uh, the.

[00:01:57] Erica Rex: The results were published in [00:02:00] 2016. Um, but prior to all that, uh, I was a journalist. I did a lot of science journalism, I did a lot of natural history journalism, environment, climate, NASA for a while. Um, and um, before that I was a fiction writer and I was pretty successful. And I have gone back to writing fiction.

[00:02:27] Erica Rex: So

[00:02:29] Joe Moore: wonder, that’s my

[00:02:30] Erica Rex: story. Wonderful.

[00:02:31] Joe Moore: Great. Thank you. And one, one thing I found very interesting is that you were able to, after participating in that trial, get engagement from all sorts of people in this space. I think because of your science writing background, your kind of understanding of how trials work, science works, et cetera, would you say that was pretty helpful?

[00:02:53] Erica Rex: Uh, which part? The science writing

[00:02:55] Joe Moore: or, uh, just understanding science and then like, being able to engage with folks like Roland [00:03:00] and, and Charlie Gro.

[00:03:01] Erica Rex: Oh, yeah. Well, um, it started out as a, as a, it didn’t start out as, um, in, as a personal writing project. It, that’s this, one of the ironies of this, um, it actually started out with me getting press releases about new science coming out of Imperial College.

[00:03:20] Erica Rex: I was living in England.

[00:03:21] Joe Moore: Mm-hmm.

[00:03:21] Erica Rex: Following, having cancer and following, been treated by cancer. And something interesting kind of came across the email, which was a press release about Robin Carhartt Harris’s study using psilocybin to sort of examine the brain and brain function. And I thought, this is pretty interesting.

[00:03:46] Erica Rex: I didn’t, you know, know that any research was being done with psychedelics at all. Now at all, you know, it didn’t exist. And so I was writing for Scientific American at the time. I [00:04:00] asked my editor if they’d be interested. They said yes. And so I started researching and writing the article and by itself as a science, uh, study.

[00:04:11] Erica Rex: It was interesting. And as I was talking to Robin Carhartt Harris, who’s now at UCSF, um, finished his doctorate, uh, he said, you know that there are clinical trials with this now. And I said, really? I thought it was illegal. And he said, oh, no, there’s was the first one, UCLA, and then there’s another one in um, Baltimore.

[00:04:36] Erica Rex: And we haven’t been able to get one off the ground here, but we’re hoping. And so I began, he said, you should really talk to Charlie Grope. You should really talk to Roland Griffiths. So I talked to Charlie Gro and that was great. And then I talked to Roland Griffiths and then about 10 minutes into the conversation I said to Roland, I think we need to reframe this conversation, [00:05:00] um, because I would like to apply for the study because here’s my story.

[00:05:05] Erica Rex: And you know, my story was I had to go to, I had breast cancer, it was 2009. I didn’t have any more health insurance. I had to move to England, um, because I could get medical care here. So that was the story. And then it evolved from there. I was in the trial. Um, I realized that the story was probably going to evolve.

[00:05:27] Erica Rex: I handed in the first draft was just a science writing article. And then told my editor, well, this is what’s happened. I’m going to be in the study. Um, and um, maybe it will evolve. And she said, well, if it does, I wanna see the draft. You won’t publish this. Till afterwards, we’ll wait and see. Said, okay. So that’s what happened.

[00:05:50] Erica Rex: So it started out as, um, it started out as an article for Scientific American Mind. And then, um, it was suggested to me by a couple of [00:06:00] people that I write a book and that evolved, uh, and it became much more of a complex book than I had originally anticipated for a number of reasons. But I am always, you know, being myself, I’m obsessed with scientific detail.

[00:06:18] Erica Rex: I can’t, I have to be accurate. It’s my training, it’s my background. Um, I have to be precise. I get mad when I see sloppy things happen. I certainly have gotten an earful from a few scientists about how they feel and whether they’ll talk to the press ever again after their work and what they’ve said has been misrepresented or quoted out of context.

[00:06:43] Erica Rex: So, um. Not because of what I did, but because of what other people did. You know, sort of as a caveat for them before speaking with me. That was, those happened a couple of times. I can’t say I blame them. So, um, and that I, I have to say, has probably only gotten [00:07:00] worse now, unfortunately, in the current political climate.

[00:07:03] Erica Rex: Um, certainly did under the Bush administration. Now it is again. So, um, I see it as very important, uh, to be very, um, very, very correct and follow the research.

[00:07:28] Joe Moore: And I guess rewinding the tape, where, where did you get trained as a journalist, science writer?

[00:07:34] Erica Rex: Um, I, um, actually went to Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism. I had been a journalist for years, but I had never gotten done a specialty and I was always, I was writing about science and environment before then and technology before that for a while.

[00:07:51] Erica Rex: Um, and I applied for a fellowship. It was a late, uh, career fellowship or mid-career [00:08:00] fellowship, uh, with a lot of different people in it where you could specialize in science. And I was interested in, um, science environment, climate change, uh, species laws, that kind of thing, just from my background. And, um, so I really became very, uh, cognizant of how one reads scientific papers and then how, how to ask the right questions.

[00:08:33] Erica Rex: And so that’s really where I learned that skill. It was a good skill to learn.

[00:08:38] Joe Moore: Right? Yeah. I, I’ve learned a lot from you, so thank you for that. And, um, you know, skepticism and digging in, what is the story here? Like, why would that happen? Why would they say it that way? All that kind of fun stuff. So, um, let’s get back to your book here.

[00:08:53] Joe Moore: So, you know, this was an interesting and harrowing book because you, you [00:09:00] had a, not the easiest time in psychedelia with your own kind of healing path, and you bring in a lot of really serious personal narratives that must have been excruciating to share. And I’m, I’m kind of curious, like what, um, what are some of the most important teasers you wanna leave people with to see if they, they might be wanting to read your book?

[00:09:25] Erica Rex: Well, um, I, I think if, if what you’re after is. Trying to find out more about psychedelics and whether they’re right for you. I think this is a really valuable book because I don’t have a, I, I approach it with psychedelics are useful. They’re a tool, they’re a therapeutic accelerant. They’re not a pan gloss.

[00:09:58] Erica Rex: The work is [00:10:00] yours to do for whatever you’re bringing to it. It’s like anything, and actually medicine would be a lot better off if it approached all medical encounters like this, is that you can’t just look at the disease walking in. There’s a person walking in and there’s a person with a huge history, you know, even if they’re only 12 years old, and experiences and feelings about those experiences and positive experiences and negative experiences and.

[00:10:30] Erica Rex: I think too many people are led to believe, unfortunately because of the marketing and um, things they hear and things they read about how wonderful it all is. And there are things that are wonderful definitely. And there are things that are joyful and there are great ways to use psychedelics and other related drugs that are enhancements to other experiences.

[00:10:58] Erica Rex: And I don’t wanna denigrate that [00:11:00] in the slightest, um, ’cause I think they’re valuable, as valuable there, community building. But it’s a mistake to think, I will go, I’ll have a psychedelic trip and all my problems will be over all my depression, my trauma, my bad feelings, behaviors that I’ve brought from other situations that I can’t, that’s kind of false.

[00:11:27] Erica Rex: I think that they can shed light in a way that. Other therapeutic modalities don’t because they don’t alter other, uh, therapeutic modalities have a hard time kind of altering us enough to where we’re able to sort of unc unclench from ways of looking at things. Whereas psychedelics tend to be able, but breath work I know does this too.

[00:11:48] Erica Rex: There are other states that you can get to that will do this. Psychedelics is kind of a shortcut sometimes that can lead us into an emotional and, uh, [00:12:00] physiological and psychological state where we can break through some kind of barrier we have that allows us to approach things differently. And then it’s what we do afterwards.

[00:12:15] Erica Rex: We still have a lot of life in which we need to take that journey. What are we doing? Mm-hmm. How are we approaching it? How are we looking at it differently?

[00:12:26] Joe Moore: Right. Um. Yeah, absolutely. I think that’s really important caution, because there is a lot of hype and with hype and excitement, and I’m sure you saw this all over science writing, right?

[00:12:41] Joe Moore: Like, oh, this new technology’s gonna save us from climate. It’s like, well, really, maybe not, but you know, perhaps there’s something interesting and helpful here, but maybe it’s not the silver bullet we thought we might be getting. And I think, yeah, a little bit of caution. I think there’s still room for excitement, [00:13:00] right?

[00:13:00] Joe Moore: But also mm-hmm.

[00:13:01] Erica Rex: Absolutely.

[00:13:01] Joe Moore: You know, the, the field of psychiatry hasn’t had many super duper helpful innovations in, in a while. Like, you know, Prozac was the last major one, right? Actually, you would know better than me. Do you, do you think that’s fairly accurate?

[00:13:17] Erica Rex: Well, I mean, certainly in its history I don’t see psychiatry as having made any big strides in terms of actually improving life for anybody.

[00:13:26] Erica Rex: I hate to say that, but, um. I think, uh, there have been very few things that have done that without some severe consequences. Um, I know that all of those, um,

[00:13:46] Erica Rex: yes. Um, have, um, had big, um, downsides. I know that, um

[00:13:52] Joe Moore: mm-hmm.

[00:13:55] Erica Rex: SSRIs have had problems. Um, Joe, you’re frozen. Maybe you’re [00:14:00] not frozen. There you are.

[00:14:04] Joe Moore: It’ll keep working. Okay.

[00:14:06] Erica Rex: Um, so I, um, one of the big problems, especially in, um, pharmaceutical medicine, that as soon as it comes on the market, that it’s overhyped. Before we know enough, that is a big pattern. In, um, well, in terms of most marketing and most, um, American capitalism, everything is, we’ve gotta sell this now.

[00:14:35] Erica Rex: We don’t know what’s gonna happen. It’s going to happen, but we’ve, we see this big market opportunity, so we’re going to do this, and they do it, and then it’s kind of, we’ll deal with the consequences later. So there’s not a lot of foresight. Um, and that, that seems to happen a lot and it certainly has with many, um, psychotropic drugs.

[00:14:57] Erica Rex: Um, [00:15:00] so, you know, 10, 15, 30 years later, people are seeing effects that are unfortunate and so it’s better to have, be a little bit judicious, I think.

[00:15:14] Joe Moore: Mm-hmm.

[00:15:15] Erica Rex: Um, and that’s the other problem is that the medicalization of, um, therapy has been a. A big or the medicalization of mental health. I mean, not just therapy, but the idea that mental health can be put into a basket in which if you fix something or you dittle with something or one part of the brain or one part of the person that you’re going to, that you’re going to cure it.

[00:15:43] Erica Rex: And that’s not the case. It’s about how we live and how we are in society, and how the society is with us and how we interact a lot more than, [00:16:00] uh, the current practice would indicate. So.

[00:16:05] Joe Moore: Mm-hmm. Yeah. I’m, I’m reading a book right now called, um, radical Adventure by this guy Andrew Feldmar, who studied and worked under, um, RD Lang, who had a lot of critiques of.

[00:16:21] Joe Moore: Um, helpful critiques, I think, of the kind of psychiatric establishment in particular, like this differentiation between therapy and psychology. And I think there’s, there’s definitely huge, huge things there that we could learn from and I’m, I’m excited by this book because it’s kind of proposing a more human approach to psychotherapies and I really, really just appreciate it.

[00:16:44] Joe Moore: Um, Andy’s got some psychedelic things to say ’cause he, um, I think did some LSD psychotherapy work with Rd Lang way back, who was certainly a revolutionary?

[00:16:56] Erica Rex: Yeah, I have a lot of respect for Rd Lang. Um, [00:17:00] one of the things that, um, David Nutt and I spoke about, uh, when we spoke lately on the podcast was, um, he, he asked me about how I felt about, um, cognitive behavioral therapy.

[00:17:19] Erica Rex: Because that’s a, a nonmedical intervention. It’s a non pill type intervention. And

[00:17:26] Joe Moore: mm-hmm.

[00:17:27] Erica Rex: One of the, the criticisms he certainly has that I share is that it is, um, very behaviorally oriented and it is very linguistically oriented. So if you do some rote things supposedly, and you do some behavioral things and you learn to do them in a few sessions, uh, ostensibly, then you will [00:18:00] improve some aspect of your life.

[00:18:03] Erica Rex: I personally feel that it is not a useful modality. I, I feel that it is, um, gives, gives a false sense. Of having done something and then you’ll be better. And then what happens as he pointed out is that the people who do not feel better, whose lives are not improved or whose uh, symptoms are not improved, are led to believe that it’s because they failed.

[00:18:32] Erica Rex: That there’s some, they did the lessons they’re supposed to get to the end point, didn’t get to the end point just because you didn’t do it right. And he actually made it clear that he felt it’s quite destructive. I mean, I’ve known a few people who’ve said that it worked for them when they were working on some very small, little, very confined [00:19:00] specific way of doing things or habit pattern or something they wanted to break.

[00:19:05] Erica Rex: And I kind of agree it, it really doesn’t, uh, allow. The whole person to be taken into account. Feelings, the psyche, our way of looking at the world, our personality, our predilections, and it. And then, but that’s what a lot of psychiatry actually does, is that you’re supposed to get better on this regimen.

[00:19:28] Erica Rex: And if you don’t, you failed. And it, it’s not taking into account that, as I said, there’s a whole human there, you know, and if you don’t have some empathy or some deeper understanding of that whole, uh, world, of that human, then nothing’s gonna work because there’s no, um, there’s no way of kind of reaching it.

[00:19:50] Erica Rex: Actually already one of my favorite expressions from all of, you know, reading on, um. [00:20:00] Psychology is, is actually Rd Lang. It’s great. And I’ve used it, um, which is, um, my experience of my experience is my experience of my experience.

[00:20:15] Erica Rex: And then that you can’t, you can’t tell people otherwise. It’s theirs. And you can either decide, yes, there it’s theirs, and I enter and I am willing to comprehend it. Or if you say it’s wrong, you’ve lost them already. It’s their experience, you know?

[00:20:32] Joe Moore: Yeah. Favorite line of mine, um, is you’re the world’s foremost expert in you.

[00:20:38] Joe Moore: It was your experience and there’s no way for somebody else to tell you it was, it’s not true, or you didn’t have that experience, or your experience was bad, or you’re malfunctioning because you had that experience. It’s like, um,

[00:20:53] Erica Rex: you’re malfunctioning because of your response to that experience. That’s the usual [00:21:00] accusation that mm-hmm.

[00:21:01] Erica Rex: Whatever happened was, maybe it was okay. It’s just, you know, you’re reacting wrong, so to speak. I don’t think so.

[00:21:08] Joe Moore: Right. And it sounds like I had more influence from Artie Lang than I understood going into this book, which is nice. Um, my teacher, Lenny Gibson definitely was quite well read on all these things.

[00:21:21] Joe Moore: Um, I’ve actually been rereading Graffs first book the last few days. Um, actually reading it for the first time as Graff and Joan Halifax Roshi, Joan Halifax were married, I think it was his first wife and it’s called The Human Experience of Death. And there was all sorts of interesting conversations about the early research in Maryland, Prague, and elsewhere.

[00:21:43] Joe Moore: A lot of interesting findings on chronic pain resolution, um, speculations. ’cause, you know, neuroscience was a little young at that point. It was just great to see how they were engaging in such weird territory and being cautious about their optimism.

[00:21:58] Erica Rex: Did you, um, for psychics, did you [00:22:00] happen to read, um, the, um, well, I, I sent it to David ’cause he had never read it either.

[00:22:05] Erica Rex: The, uh, Walter Pankey’s 1959 lecture, um, on the, his experience with paying patients at the end of life and, um, at the Maryland Psychiatric Institute, or No, at, at, at a, I would

[00:22:18] Joe Moore: love read that paper.

[00:22:20] Erica Rex: Um, yeah. I have not read. It’s, it’s that same, it it’s cited in the book a

[00:22:23] Joe Moore: lot. It’s,

[00:22:23] Erica Rex: yeah, it’s, oh yeah, it’s the same.

[00:22:26] Erica Rex: Um, it’s, it’s excellent. David hadn’t read it either. I was kind of surprised. Uh, it, um, I’ll, I’ll send it to you.

[00:22:34] Joe Moore: Thank you.

[00:22:35] Erica Rex: It was,

[00:22:36] Joe Moore: yeah, it’s what, what I’ve found is that any of the older papers just kind of get ignored. And this is, uh, one of Graffs biggest gripes was that I’m not excited about psychedelic science right now because we already knew all this stuff.

[00:22:50] Joe Moore: Yeah. And, you know, because of X, Y, Z reasons we’re not, you know, treating it as useful.

[00:22:57] Erica Rex: Yeah. I mean, it was so, [00:23:00] um, visionary and it was so obvious. And you look at that and you go, well, this, he had the answer in 1950 whenever that paper was written, I think it was 1959. It was very clear.

[00:23:12] Joe Moore: Mm-hmm.

[00:23:12] Erica Rex: And then it was chucked, you know?

[00:23:16] Joe Moore: Right. You know, just quite challenging. So,

[00:23:20] Erica Rex: yeah.

[00:23:22] Joe Moore: I guess let, let’s talk a little bit about, you know, what primed you in a lot of ways for this book. Um. Could you, this is a challenging thing to ask. Can you tell me about your parents?

[00:23:39] Erica Rex: Yes. Well that’s, you know, that’s, that’s part of what, what evolved. It became very clear to me as I was working on this book that, um, it was probably going to become necessary for me to write about that. Um, I had certainly confronted it in therapy, but I had [00:24:00] never written about it. I mean, maybe a little bit here and there.

[00:24:03] Erica Rex: So I, um, came from, my parents were both shrinks, psychiatrist, she was a psychologist, actually, he was a psychiatrist and they were trained at Harvard. Um, actually in the same era during which strangely the, um, psychedelic research was taking place. And the, um, uh. The awful Henry A. Murray experiment, which was the original sadistic experiment on Harvard undergraduates, um, to see what happens to people when you abuse and, uh, derive them for hours.

[00:24:50] Erica Rex: And then, um, sort of see how that affects their psyches. So that that’s, and my parents were [00:25:00] very, um, sick people. They were, uh, both alcoholics. They were extremely abusive towards me. It was a very kind of psychopathic family. Um, and into that environment, um, I came and for reasons that I’m kind of only begun to understand in the last say, decade, I, I was the scapegoat.

[00:25:27] Erica Rex: I was the second of four children. Um, and I had severe abuse. I underwent severe, severe, severe physical mental, psychological abuse that lasted well into my teens and really continued until I was able to separate entirely from my family of origin. And during which time I realized I had a lot to come to terms with.

[00:25:55] Erica Rex: And I was busily doing all that. So I had a [00:26:00] lot of, uh, answers that I wanted from the field of, um, therapy and therapists and to find out why and how they had been enabled, and then find out sort of the whole history of how the field had developed and really realized that that was part of. A psych geist and is actually continued, unfortunately in the field, but actually also now an American society.

[00:26:28] Erica Rex: So, um, and, and the in which the ethos is you blame the victim, it’s very simple and that the powerful people can get away with anything and, um, enabling them is the safe way to save your own skin. So that was kind of what happened. Uh, and I, and I had to come to rights with it and certainly taking psychedelics.

[00:26:56] Erica Rex: I mean, certainly when I went into the, um, [00:27:00] into the study, I mean, I had already had many decades of therapy, various kinds, um, not recent at that point. Um, and as was very clear and obviously they know going in that, in that study. They welcomed the whole person in. And so I did then have to start speaking about it.

[00:27:26] Erica Rex: It’s like we need to know what experiences you’ve had, what other kinds of interventions you’ve had, basically your entire emotional and psychological history. So I began to realize that it was actually a very important component in my exploration of psychedelics and what psychedelics could and couldn’t do, and how they would and wouldn’t be useful.

[00:27:52] Erica Rex: Yes, they were useful for my depression related to my cancer and my depression related to my life around [00:28:00] having to, um, you know, upend my entire life to move to a new country because I didn’t have ability to, uh, obtain medical care in my country of origin. So, um, it was a journey I.

[00:28:18] Joe Moore: Yeah.

[00:28:18] Erica Rex: And so certainly I’ve had to, had to revisit some of those conversations because, um, of course people in the psychiatric and therapeutic fields seem to be quite divided into whether they’re able to kind of take on board that these kinds of heinous crimes and heinous acts were actually occurring in their own field, which of course they were.

[00:28:42] Erica Rex: I mean, this wasn’t the first time somebody has said this. Jeffrey Masson has become quite a good champion. He’s a wonderful man. Um, and the, the people who are trying to maintain kind of the status quo, which [00:29:00] basically says you can’t trust anything that a child of under the age of five says about what’s happening to them, you know, um, is it’s, it’s very sad, which ’cause then it extends to, you can’t trust women when they talk about what’s happening to them.

[00:29:16] Erica Rex: So, and that’s mm-hmm. Kind of been duped out a little bit currently in the current American Right. Uh, situation. It’s interesting to see. It’s really, really, really coming to a head, you know.

[00:29:32] Joe Moore: Um, is Jeffrey the person that did that, uh, kind of piece on Freud that we’ve talked about a few times?

[00:29:40] Erica Rex: He did. Um, he wrote Against Therapy, he wrote the whole book about the Freud archives.

[00:29:45] Erica Rex: He was the one who was hired. He’s got a very interesting background, incredible scholar. Um, he had been hired by the Freud archives, Anna Freud in London, to, um, to, to basically document and write about [00:30:00] all of these letters and everything that was kind of there. It was kind of stuffed in this thing, in a, you know, in an archive.

[00:30:07] Erica Rex: And so he goes in and he starts to read and he, and he realizes, he realizes that. That the whole, you know, seduction theory was, um, nonsense. In fact, the women who came in and talked about having been abused as small children or young women were, um, actually abused. And, um, the incest that they were documenting was actually insists that occurred.

[00:30:35] Erica Rex: And Freud had actually, sadly, he had championed this. He had, Bel believed them, he had had empathy for them. But then it became very, very clear that the Psychoanalytic Institute was not gonna take that very well because they were aware of it. They were aware it was true in their own, um, in their own ranks.

[00:30:58] Erica Rex: And that he would lose [00:31:00] his status, he would lose membership. And so he said, okay, actually I was wrong. It was this thing called the Oedipus complex when it didn’t really happen to them. It was, um, something they wished for. It was not that they had these experiences, it was that they wished for these experiences and so they invented them and thus was born the seduction theory and thus murdered, uh, women for the next 150 years when they tried to speak about what happened to them.

[00:31:35] Erica Rex: So that that’s, um, and Jeffrey Masson did not make friends doing that. He was, um, fired. They were very, very unhappy. Anna Freud goes, what are you talking about? That can’t be true. And he says, look, here it is. It’s right here. It’s right here. Just written it all down. And it’s, here’s your book. Your father wrote this right in his diary and, um, made him very unpopular and he had a lot of fights about it.[00:32:00]

[00:32:00] Erica Rex: And, um, psychoanalytic establishment did not like it. Somebody was discovering that again. So then, you know, next thing that happens, um, is, uh. He, uh, pretty much has many confrontations and then decides that he’s kind of gonna change his career. So that’s what he did.

[00:32:24] Joe Moore: Thanks for that. Um, so you, over the course of the book, you were able to see what clinical psychedelic work looked like.

[00:32:35] Joe Moore: Not so clinical psychedelic stuff looked like, you know, you and I had been in touch kind of before and after some of those experiences, I think Yes,

[00:32:43] Erica Rex: Uhhuh

[00:32:43] Joe Moore: and, um, you’ve got a really unique view of kind of the international psychedelic medic, you know, semi medical scene. Um, and I think, you know, not too many people have, have done, you know, [00:33:00] both the European scene and the American scene.

[00:33:03] Joe Moore: I’m kind of curious if there’s any kind of major differences that you’ve observed. I know your American experiences weren’t all that uniform, but,

[00:33:12] Erica Rex: um,

[00:33:13] Joe Moore: no. You know, any kind of major insights.

[00:33:16] Erica Rex: Um, it’s funny ’cause it’s, it’s kind of comparing apples and oranges. I’ve sort of trying to

[00:33:22] Joe Moore: mm-hmm.

[00:33:22] Erica Rex: Explain to someone else.

[00:33:24] Erica Rex: It’s, it’s so hyperlocal, you know? Um, it’s so, uh, and especially in the United States state by state, it’s changed. It’s so different now. So I’m sure people have very different experiences. I had very few psychedelic experiences in the United One in the United States, and, um, that was my experience. That was one.

[00:33:50] Erica Rex: So most of my experience, other than, other than the study, it was that, other than the study, I just had one experience in the United States, um, and. [00:34:00] Most of my experiences were in France, actually. Mm-hmm. And in France, the, um, the underground is really, as I, uh, experienced it, they make a, an effort to be inclusive and to be, um, make sure that people have resources available so that they will be safe and in good hands when they are, um, accessing and experiencing these drugs.

[00:34:33] Erica Rex: And also have ways to process them. So in the, and there’s a kind of a national group with local chapters that runs, um, integration groups, that kind of thing. So, um, yeah. Uh, I don’t know anything about Holland. I know nothing about the underground here at the moment. I really don’t, [00:35:00] I’m assuming it’s here.

[00:35:01] Erica Rex: I haven’t really done any work to figure it out. Um, it would be interesting here being the UK where I am now, um, Switzerland. Um, it’s interesting in Switzerland because actually you can get LSD treatment through the health service, but it’s, um, a very, very long drawn out process. There’s only, there are exactly five psychiatrists who are, um, entitled or licensed to give it.

[00:35:36] Erica Rex: And, uh, it’s a very elaborate process. I obvi, I never would do it myself. I do know a woman who did work her way all the way up through that. And, um, have, uh, um, a psychedelic session, two psychedelic sessions with a doc. And they’re the only country as far as I know, who [00:36:00] actually have psychedelic treatment through the health system.

[00:36:04] Erica Rex: But they’re, like I said, they’re five guys and it’s very hard to access.

[00:36:11] Joe Moore: Yeah, I think we know one of the psychiatrists, I think, um, there’s an interesting thing that happened in Australia. I didn’t do any deep digging on it yet, but, um, they have legal psilocybin and MDMA available in a clinical capacity.

[00:36:28] Joe Moore: I believe one of the largest insurance providers made plans to start covering it, which is really interesting.

[00:36:35] Erica Rex: That’s great. Is that re progress? That’s fairly, fairly recently then. Um,

[00:36:41] Joe Moore: I recall that news within the last two months. It could have been a little older. Um, I need to, I need to dig more into that, but that was undercover as is most news in psychia.

[00:36:55] Joe Moore: Um, I don’t know of any other places looking at that. There’s a, there’s kind of a [00:37:00] domestic, um, maybe international insurance group called Anthea who’s working as like a private insurance benefit add-on where employees could take advantage of things like, uh, ketamine assisted psychotherapy and um, potentially up to travel to places like Oregon and Colorado to access the state legal mushroom programs, which is interesting.

[00:37:26] Joe Moore: Um, I need to follow up with them. They’re really interesting group. Um,

[00:37:32] Erica Rex: here, here in the uk. I mean, you can, it’s like the US I mean, I don’t, I never think of ketamine when you’re talking about psychedelics. I don’t even, it doesn’t even enter, enter my mind. That’s fair. Um, yes, there are ketamine clinics here.

[00:37:45] Erica Rex: I mean, and they have a similar sort of. Slightly too active for comfort racket. It’s not as bad as the United States where, I mean, you know, uh, I think, [00:38:00] I think that ketamine was very widely adopted because it is legal for off-label use in this way, and that’s fine. Um, I’m concerned that, so again, you know, it can be habit forming.

[00:38:22] Erica Rex: There is a downside. Um, so you just have to look at the kind of risk benefit thing there. And I’m not

[00:38:31] Joe Moore: sure. Right.

[00:38:32] Erica Rex: Yeah. Um,

[00:38:33] Joe Moore: I’ll speak to that real quick just to deflate it. I, I’ve known a lot of people with kind of, um, habits of ketamine, uhhuh. I’ve never seen the full blown, horrible addiction that ends in surgeries occasionally.

[00:38:45] Joe Moore: Um. But it, it can just be, it’s such a casual thing for a lot of people that they’ll do it many times per day. Um, and, uh, you can kind of like drinking, you can get [00:39:00] through your day doing it sometimes, but habit forming for sure, if you’re doing it, um, and space it out appropriately, like once a month or every other month, you’re probably in okay shape, but as soon as you start doing it, you know, five times a week, you’re gonna get in into some trouble just to point that out.

[00:39:21] Joe Moore: Um, always safest, uh, when done under someone’s supervision or in partnership with somebody. Yeah. Um, but yeah, I, overall, I think it’s really helpful for psychotherapy. I think it’s really helpful for a lot of things. Um, but I, yeah, we always have to watch the addiction profile.

[00:39:43] Joe Moore: I call it the addictive psychedelic. Sometimes.

[00:39:47] Erica Rex: Yeah. Right. Yeah. I mean, the classic psychedelics is actually very hard to be addicted to them. I mean, you can want to use them, but it’s very hard to take them one day and the next day because there’s a latency [00:40:00] effect. You just

[00:40:00] Joe Moore: mm-hmm.

[00:40:03] Erica Rex: Wouldn’t work. You’d have to wait

[00:40:04] Joe Moore: Right.

[00:40:05] Erica Rex: A week or two. Yeah.

[00:40:06] Joe Moore: Yeah. In the Burning Man world, you kind of realize that quickly where it’s like, oh God, do I really have to eat four or 10 hits? Like, that seems not great. And so it is this sort of self-regulating system. It also doesn’t like, necessarily feel as great the second day either. Um, oh, this is interesting.

[00:40:24] Joe Moore: There’s a, there’s a therapist in the chat here that’s actually doing, um, some treatment with HPPD. That’s lovely. Um, have you been exposed to any of the literature around HPPD, Erica?

[00:40:37] Erica Rex: Uh, is that the, um. The per the when you can’t, when you have, you can’t get rid of the hallucination. Is that it?

[00:40:47] Joe Moore: Hall? No.

[00:40:47] Joe Moore: Hallucination perception. Persistent disorder, I think is a long term.

[00:40:51] Erica Rex: Is that right? I couldn’t remember what

[00:40:52] Joe Moore: it is. Long name. Yeah. Yeah. It’s like, um, rare, but it’s real. Um, I just got notified [00:41:00] a while ago of, uh, two clinical trial participants in a psilocybin trial in Canada. Um, had reported it

[00:41:07] Erica Rex: Really?

[00:41:07] Joe Moore: Um.

[00:41:08] Joe Moore: Mm-hmm. But the clinical trial, uh, didn’t wanna report it. The company doesn’t exist anymore. From what I am told. The psychiatrist, um, told one person she didn’t have that. ’cause that only comes from drugs. And the other person, I don’t know where it stood. Um, I’d love to cover that story a little better.

[00:41:28] Erica Rex: It only comes from drugs,

[00:41:31] Joe Moore: you know, not all doctors have the full story.

[00:41:34] Erica Rex: Mm-hmm.

[00:41:36] Joe Moore: Um. I, one of the leading voices in psychedelia in Europe said it’s a trauma response, which, you know, there’s a world in which that’s accurate, but I think it’s kind of not exactly accurate. I think it’s a lot more complicated than that. And a

[00:41:54] Erica Rex: trauma response to what

[00:41:56] Joe Moore: Exactly? Yeah, it’s not, it’s [00:42:00] not a good explanation if you’re trying to be sciencey.

[00:42:03] Erica Rex: Yeah.

[00:42:04] Joe Moore: Um, there’s some sort of neurological thing going on and, um, yeah. Did it ever come up in your stories, like when you were digging into the literature?

[00:42:13] Erica Rex: Uh, weirdly, no. Um, nobody that I spoke with had that experience. The closest I would say that I had to, that was, um, my, um, uh, five M-E-O-D-M-T experience where the, um.

[00:42:35] Erica Rex: I had an, uh, very, uh, very distinctive and very over, very powerful, um, auditory hallucination experience that went with the, um, the visual and kind of world shattering, um, experience. And that persisted for quite a while. Um, it was, um, mus music. It was a [00:43:00] very distinctive kind of music. Wasn’t particularly nice to listen to.

[00:43:05] Erica Rex: It was.

Mm-hmm.

[00:43:06] Erica Rex: Um, and that, that stayed around on and off for a couple weeks. It was, it was interesting. It didn’t scare me in particular. It was just interesting, you know, it was, um, and my guide had not had an experience like that, and he hadn’t, uh, ever had a, someone talk about that kind of experience before.

[00:43:33] Erica Rex: So

[00:43:34] Joe Moore: that’s really interesting. It’s triggering something in me where I had like a pretty serious recurring smell, a response to smell. Mm-hmm. Post ayahuasca. And it was really, it was dramatic for a couple years. I didn’t really consider it in like an HPPD neurological context, but that’s really possible.

[00:43:55] Erica Rex: Was it, was it a particular smell?[00:44:00]

[00:44:00] Joe Moore: Yeah, I’m having a reaction thinking about it. It was kind of like a nauseating, burnt barbecue sauce. Um,

[00:44:06] Erica Rex: okay. So that would trigger that sense of, okay.

[00:44:08] Joe Moore: Mm-hmm. But it wasn’t necessarily that I was having that smell in public. Like I, I’ve not smelled something like that in a long time. So perhaps it was a sort of phantom smell.

[00:44:18] Joe Moore: Mm-hmm. You know what I mean? Like, um, because it was happening with some frequency, um, kind of, you know, I’m coming to mind as kind of, uh, pregnant women reactions to certain smells.

[00:44:31] Erica Rex: Yes. Uhhuh.

[00:44:33] Joe Moore: Right. So fascinating lot to dig into there, but, you know, thanks for triggering that for me. That’s, that’s fascinating.

[00:44:40] Joe Moore: And it wasn’t like troubling. I was like, oh, this is neat. But, you know, imagine if you can’t see, like, ’cause that can be, people can be so disabled, they can’t, can’t drive with the thing

[00:44:49] Erica Rex: really.

[00:44:49] Joe Moore: But like visual snow is one of the symptoms.

[00:44:52] Erica Rex: Oh,

[00:44:52] Joe Moore: wow. Okay. Um, our cof, Kyle Buller, our co-founder, had it HPPD visually.

[00:44:57] Joe Moore: Wow. And he still has some tracer elements, [00:45:00] um, and kind of teenage, uh, acid use. I, I, I don’t know exactly the trigger. He doesn’t necessarily have a clean story either, I don’t think. Um, yeah. Um, so it’s fascinating. And, and there’s, there’s people asking in the comments about that smell. Um, no, I’ve not sought therapy for it and I don’t have it anymore.

[00:45:21] Joe Moore: It kind of went away, um, years ago, years and years ago. But it was there for a bit. Um, so Erica, you had some good critiques about. Kind of our current economic paradigm and how our culture works and kind of maybe some troubling intersections with psychedelics, um, for this kind of neoliberal world we’re in.

[00:45:47] Joe Moore: Do you have any kind of, do you wanna, can you share anything about that?

[00:45:51] Erica Rex: Well, I mean, I, I made the very strong statement in the stat piece, which I had to

[00:45:55] Joe Moore: mm-hmm.

[00:45:56] Erica Rex: Kind of, shall we say, dumb down, um, [00:46:00] to make it palatable. Uh, which is that there, there is a very strong upswing in a certain kind of personality in the modern world because I think capitalism selects for it and the people are considered successful.

[00:46:19] Erica Rex: The more people who are successful have this trait, which is, um, they have narcissism. Sometimes it’s malignant narcissism. Uh, the accompanying grandiosity. Um, they have a kind of a, a pathology in which they, uh, see the only thing that’s important is being better than and getting more. And it’s very distinctive and it’s embodied in a lot of public figures now.

[00:46:50] Erica Rex: And, um, my, uh, suggestion or my observation, knowing what I know about psychedelics [00:47:00] is that people such as these should not take psychedelics because psychedelics are non-specific amplifiers of existing personality traits. Um, this means that if you have a character trait that is empathic and creative and, uh, community minded and, um, humanistic your.

[00:47:27] Erica Rex: Trait will be amplified in the presence of psychedelics and it can persist depending upon how it goes along and how your own response to psychedelics is. And in what kind of en environment you’re taking psychedelics. Are you having these experiences? In the case of people who have these severe Machiavellian traits?

[00:47:50] Erica Rex: Uh, grandiosity, what were called dark triad. So there’s machiavellianism, narcissism and psychopathy, and [00:48:00] then there’s another, I mean, some people say it’s a, you know, triad and some people say it’s a tetra and then some people count seven. Anyway. These are dark factor traits that are very, very negative, that are things we see a whole lot in American, um, public life now that these people who exhibit these traits.

[00:48:20] Erica Rex: Should not take psychedelics and should not be allowed to take psychedelics in much the same way. We don’t allow, um, or supposedly don’t allow people under the age of 18 to drink because all of the downsides are there. The risks are extremely high. Obviously this isn’t going to happen, but I think it’s a big problem.

[00:48:42] Erica Rex: Um, the other thing that’s a big problem that could be addressed is the fact that there is so little emphasis put on integration in the medicalization of psychedelics as it’s happening now, or the pharmaceutical I could [00:49:00] call it. And in the interest of quote unquote saving money is that integration and the community, uh, the necessary community interaction, which normally one would have in order to deflate some of the, um, some of the.

[00:49:20] Erica Rex: Things that are inflated or made terribly important during the trip, um, are put back in context so that one can go back into the real world with increased knowledge, increased understanding, and without being delusional because of something that they saw experienced felt or, uh, confabulated during their experience on the drug.

[00:49:47] Erica Rex: And when you eliminate that, it creates a kind of danger that is becoming apparent and I think will become more apparent. So[00:50:00]

[00:50:00] Erica Rex: it’s very, very necessary to take that in mind.

[00:50:04] Joe Moore: Mm-hmm. Um,

[00:50:09] Joe Moore: so we’ve chatted a lot about the limitations of this world, um, the psychedelic. Psychotherapy, psychiatry world. And I’m kind of curious if you believe that it might be helpful if there’s a new category of profession that could come forward. Something along the lines of pastoral care. What do, how, how would you model it?

[00:50:32] Erica Rex: Yeah. Think. Well, I mean, I characterize it probably in entirely the wrong way because what people react to is the word church. But, um, I think that something along the lines of what the unido vegetal had done when they were doing it right. And many people, I know, several people who were in those churches for a long time, where you have a spiritual group or a, uh, mental [00:51:00] health slash spiritual group that comes together and they do a psychedelic substance regularly together as a learning tool, as a therapeutic tool, as a teaching tool.

[00:51:13] Erica Rex: And they process it together. It’s in the community. So you know the people, you have the responsibilities that come with community. You have the benefits that come with community. And I see each time it’s come up, I see these things as being the most effective way of having psychedelics in society. And it has to be, um, community based.

[00:51:40] Erica Rex: And I come back to the metaphor of the village. It has to be sort of a village type thing, different roles for different people. Um, and there’s not a separation between what I am doing for my mental health, what I am doing to improve my [00:52:00] life and my life, or what my friends, neighbors, people I interact with economically, educationally, business recreationally are.

[00:52:13] Erica Rex: Not all cut off from one another. In this realm here, it’s very, very extractive in the United States where a certain class of people are in the business of figuring out how to extract as much profit and as much value at as at as little cost to them to make a thing a substance profitable. And I think that’s completely on its head and I don’t think it will work in the long run.

[00:52:53] Joe Moore: Right. So

[00:52:57] Joe Moore: yeah, we have to take a really interesting long [00:53:00] view to see that. But I, I, I know what you’re saying and I think there’s, um, there’s a lot of lessons we can take from UDV and Santo Dime. Um. When I, when I think about it, I think about, okay, you have the men on this side, the women on this side. You gotta wear the fancy outfits and sing the songs.

[00:53:17] Joe Moore: And I, I’ve never been to one of these ceremonies. I respect people that want to go to them and, and find a lot of relief and help there and, and, and, you know, development of their spirituality. But I don’t know that it’s for me. Um, but, you know, for a lot of people that’s, that’s their entrance point and that’s like their spiritual home and that’s great.

[00:53:36] Joe Moore: Um, and I, I love that it’s different from let me go buy this thing for five grand again or more. Mm-hmm. Right. And I, I came up in a community that was kinda like that dream shadow and that’s what we kind of tried to model vital after. Like how do we, how do we create this village?

[00:53:53] Erica Rex: Mm-hmm.

[00:53:54] Joe Moore: And then, you know, it was really like, how do I create the peers that I want to see in the world?

[00:53:59] Joe Moore: [00:54:00] And I think, you know, that’s in part what we’ve helped develop, which is really cool. ’cause I don’t, I don’t care to be the head of anything. Way rather have friends than people like kind of, um, looking up to me. Um, and I think, you know, that’s a challenge, right? Hierarchy is just built into this whole thing economically and social culturally and Yeah.

[00:54:25] Erica Rex: Yeah, I think it’s unfortunate. Um, I think that it’s a model that doesn’t work for a lot of people, for most people actually. Um,

[00:54:36] Joe Moore: and

[00:54:39] Erica Rex: it, it, it was nice to believe that somehow that would be different, but it didn’t happen that way. And I would like to think that it’s not going to continue that way. I certainly saw some promise in the fact that, um, the Compass Pathways, [00:55:00] um, uh, application to the FDA was turned down.

[00:55:05] Erica Rex: And then the reason I saw promise in that is because perhaps it will force certain people to start thinking about the fact that there have to be other ways to deliver this, because it’s not going to help any individual person or any collective group if drugs are delivered in this fashion or these drugs are delivered in this fashion, it’s not going to work.

[00:55:37] Joe Moore: Mm-hmm.

[00:55:41] Joe Moore: Do you have any kind of, um, hopes for younger women entering psychedelic science or, um, even just being psychedelic psychotherapy is like, is there any kind of, uh, justified [00:56:00] rebellion we might see from those quarters?

[00:56:03] Erica Rex: I certainly hope so. Um, I think they are in the position to try and establish kind of from the ground floor what a model should be.

[00:56:21] Erica Rex: Mm-hmm. And if they so choose, they can do it in a way that’s quite different from what’s been on offer. I think there’s a lot of room for them, you know, um, I, I know that I’ve spoken to medical student groups, uh, that are interested in psychiatry and wanna become psychiatrists and are interested, interested in becoming psychiatrists who are psychedelic providers.

[00:56:55] Erica Rex: Um, and then in speaking to them, it’s very clear that their training is so [00:57:00] conventional in that kind of. Mindset of, you know, drug delivery and we do this and we do that. And I said it, it just, there’s a kind of a paradigm shift that’s going to have to happen, um, for this to be successful. Then the question is, why are you going into psychiatry?

[00:57:21] Erica Rex: What, what’s the value in this way? Or why do you wanna work with psychedelics and psychiatry? Because what, what does that change? What does that make different from doing any medicine or doing any psychiatry really? So that they found kind of challenging that I kind of put it on them. What’s the point really?

[00:57:43] Erica Rex: What will psychedelics and the difference of that experience and the difference of that model bring to the way you practice psychiatry? Many of them didn’t have an answer. It was just, I could see that they were second years. And they had been already, even if they had gone [00:58:00] in very idealistic, they were just being flattened.

[00:58:02] Erica Rex: You know, this is sort of what happens to people. Seems to happen to people in medical school, unfortunately.

[00:58:09] Joe Moore: Right.

[00:58:09] Erica Rex: Which is why it probably shouldn’t be medical. If, if there’s an avenue that it could be non-medical, uh, non-medical school, um, providers might be a good idea. ’cause medical school is a factory.

[00:58:27] Erica Rex: It really is. That’s really clear.

[00:58:31] Joe Moore: I was chatting with a doctor the other day and it was just like clear that there’s, there’s not enough time in four years of training for it to be what we want it to be. And, um. It’s too bad. Hopefully we can just keep getting better in medicine. Um, you know, to your question, how will psychedelics change the practice of psychiatry?

[00:58:54] Joe Moore: My hope is that there’s less patients Yeah. That are intractable, [00:59:00] right? We can get people out of that kind of recurring patient model for psychiatrists. So they have a little bit more space for people who are new, um, who are, who are still intractable and there’s not yet treatments for them, you know, if they, if they want help in certain things.

[00:59:17] Joe Moore: Um, mm-hmm. That’s my hope. Less people in, you know, requiring help from psychiatry because we can actually get those people with chronic PTSD or, uh, recal syndrome, like depression, other symptoms, like out of there.

[00:59:32] Erica Rex: Well then that’s the thing, is that what you’re talking about then is a, is a supportive community model.

[00:59:37] Erica Rex: The thing that just seems to work over and over and over again for people with, um. PTSD, chronic PTSD. Um, I’m not, I think intractable depression is sort of a separate area. I’m not clear on that, um, as much

[00:59:56] Joe Moore: mm-hmm.

[00:59:56] Erica Rex: Is to get them out of the sort of recurrent [01:00:00] hospital setting. ’cause once that, or clinical setting, ’cause once that seems to start, it never seems to end and mm-hmm.

[01:00:07] Erica Rex: That’s the big question. That sounds very artificial to me because it’s not what I’ve heard and read from psychiatrists who are very familiar with models where that doesn’t happen. Uh, there was a guy named David Healy in, um, whales and, uh, he basically, you know, went against the grain and it was very, very clear that he was having very good success.

[01:00:32] Erica Rex: And he got in trouble for it. It was like he was, no, I’m not gonna, if they, if they’re not responding to the psychiatric drug, we gotta find a different way. We’re gonna find a different way. We’re gonna put them in and insisting that these endless cycles of people, ’cause maybe he was dealing with people who were slightly more disabled, that they had repeated stays in psychiatric hospitals or psychiatric wards.

[01:00:57] Erica Rex: Um mm-hmm. And he, he [01:01:00] was right. And it was, it was kind of radical. I, I have a, a whole thing about him in my book or about that fact. Um, and it’s very clear that just keeping, doing the same thing doesn’t change anything. It’s the classic, uh, a definition of neurosis or insanity. You keep doing the same thing and expecting a different outcome.

[01:01:23] Joe Moore: Right? Yeah.

[01:01:26] Erica Rex: Not gonna get a different outcome.

[01:01:29] Joe Moore: I think physicians are, are catching on, right? Like there’s this thing that you’re supposed to do, you’re only getting, you know, 5% response rate or whatever it is, right? It could be 30, but maybe there’s something better. Maybe there’s a better thing to point people towards.

[01:01:46] Joe Moore: It’s not necessarily the drug, maybe it’s group therapy. And I, I think Erica, the thing that we don’t talk about a lot in these clinical trials and a problem with some of the science is that a lot of people will actually go seek underground care in community [01:02:00] outside the auspices of the clinical trial.

[01:02:03] Joe Moore: And that changes results dramatically. Yes. And I don’t see that necessarily covered in the science, do you?

[01:02:09] Erica Rex: No.

[01:02:10] Joe Moore: Yeah, I think that’s a problem with data integrity.

[01:02:14] Erica Rex: Yeah. Yeah. A lot of people are helped by the underground. Um, more than, and, and the other unfortunate fact, ’cause I see it here a lot. Doctors don’t read.

[01:02:28] Erica Rex: I mean, oodles of papers are published oodles, most doctors don’t read them for prescribing purposes. They read, they listen to what the pharmaceutical sales says. Uh, they listen to what the, um, latest update on the formulary says. And they are not necessarily taking on board the fact that this is very misguided.

[01:02:53] Erica Rex: Um, and I regularly have arguments and I did, um, I [01:03:00] regularly have arguments here, more so here than in France ironically, about prescribing. And, um, it’s really, really interesting. And then they realize I’ve read the paper that they haven’t read, you know, and so, um, you know, then the conversation can get interesting.

[01:03:20] Erica Rex: Uh, had an interesting You mean

[01:03:22] Joe Moore: about psychiatric meds generally?

[01:03:25] Erica Rex: Mostly about psychiatric meds, but also about other meds.

[01:03:28] Joe Moore: Mm-hmm.

[01:03:29] Erica Rex: Because they tend to overprescribe other meds, uh, in different ways.

[01:03:33] Joe Moore: Mm-hmm.

[01:03:33] Erica Rex: Um, and then, uh, under prescribed, I have a, I have a very bad shoulder, I mean really bad to where I’ve been referred in three countries now for a shoulder replacement.

[01:03:44] Erica Rex: And I’ve decided I’m not doing it for a lot of reasons. Um, and I’m going the route of having regular steroid injections. Um

[01:03:54] Joe Moore: mm-hmm.

[01:03:56] Erica Rex: And in the meantime, I had found out what helped [01:04:00] best was in France. I was prescribed, um, uh, lidocaine patches that are adhesive. They stick to your, and they’re incredible.

[01:04:07] Erica Rex: They really attenuate, they’re amazing. And in the first medical situation I was in here after I came back to the uk, they didn’t wanna prescribe them. We can’t prescribe ’em. So what do you mean? They, and they were prescribing me like. An enormous quantity of Tramadol. And I said, are you out of your fucking mind?

[01:04:28] Erica Rex: You are willing to prescribe me a drug that is scheduled, that is addictive, that I don’t become addictive to, because I’m very opposed to taking more pain medication than I need, which is why I want lidocaine patches. Okay. She said eventually it was, I won that war. It was very weird to have that war. And so I, when I moved to where I’m living now and I was gonna have to change providers, long story short, I kind of went in defensively and I said, look, [01:05:00] I’ve had this conversation.

[01:05:01] Erica Rex: He said, it’s okay. It’s okay. I prescribe them, it’s fine. We have athletes, we have guys who play rugby. I’ve seen your shoulder, you know, I’ve seen your write up. Fine. You have them. So you know, half a ton of tramadol, lidocaine patches are. Completely innocuous and they work so it, it happens in all areas of medicine.

[01:05:25] Joe Moore: Hmm. Right.

[01:05:32] Erica Rex: But, but I agree with you more in psychiatric medicine, uh, they are reluctant to, they want to put people on something that they’ve been told works. Um, they’re not interested in hearing about it. If it’s not really working, it takes a lot of time. There’s go-to drugs.

[01:05:54] Joe Moore: I think there’s, yeah, there’s this whole concept of like first line treatment and like, I think certain [01:06:00] practices, so a hospital or doctor group will say, this is our protocol.

[01:06:05] Erica Rex: And

[01:06:05] Joe Moore: so they have to kind of like follow that kind of agreed upon script with their company. That gets annoying from the customer perspective.

[01:06:11] Joe Moore: Sorry, patient perspective,

[01:06:13] Erica Rex: right? Yeah, right.

[01:06:15] Joe Moore: My experience is I’m a customer in healthcare in America. I don’t know, like $700 a month for my healthcare is, you know, really something. Um, yeah. That’s the current insurance rate in Colorado, folks.

[01:06:29] Erica Rex: Jesus

[01:06:30] Joe Moore: Christ. It’s crazy. I just paid so much money this morning ’cause I realized I hadn’t paid for a couple months.

[01:06:35] Joe Moore: Oh my gosh. Um, and I’m like, this is, uh, untenable. You know, I, I and a number of friends are considering dropping health insurance and, uh, you know, anyway, that’s not here nor there. Um, but it is part of this interesting, uh, healthcare conversation we’ve all had to have. Um,

[01:06:52] Erica Rex: yeah. But it is part of the picture.

[01:06:55] Erica Rex: It’s, it’s not about your care, it’s about somebody’s profit [01:07:00] because the insurance companies. Um, are allowed to make a kind of profit that they never were allowed to make before, uh, the end of Glass Stegel, in other words. Mm-hmm. Um, insurance companies for medical care existed to basically make a small profit and to, um, basically spread risk.

[01:07:25] Erica Rex: They were about spreading risk. That’s what they were invented for. And that’s not what happened, uh, after our friend Clinton allowed the glass to be repealed. And in, for instance, in France, when you got buy a supplemental insurance policy, or this is also true in Germany and Switzerland, um, that’s what they’re for.

[01:07:45] Erica Rex: You can buy a supplemental insurance policy just to improve certain aspects of things that maybe the public health doesn’t cover or doesn’t cover At that level, you’ll still always get care.

[01:07:57] Joe Moore: Mm-hmm.

[01:07:59] Erica Rex: But [01:08:00] this idea that. Um, you know, and it, it would be really unfortunate to see that happen in psychedelic medicine.

[01:08:08] Erica Rex: It shouldn’t happen in psychedelic medicine. Um, which is why I tend to be all support legalization sooner than I will support, um, this industrial kind of medicine, you know?

[01:08:23] Joe Moore: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Which is why I support everything I think in an all hands on deck every avenue approach here. You know, just wait, hoping that RFK is gonna be able to pull something off with the, um, uh, president.

[01:08:39] Joe Moore: I, I just don’t,

[01:08:40] Erica Rex: he was just

[01:08:41] Joe Moore: turned down. That’s a really good idea. He

[01:08:43] Erica Rex: was just turned down that, that sounds like that that love affair, uh, ended and that suddenly that’s, uh, not a good idea anymore. I thought that was kind of an interesting and weirdly unfortunate circumstance. I mean, um, I think the guy’s dangerously crazy.[01:09:00]

[01:09:00] Erica Rex: RFK Nicks, I mean, they’re all, they all are. I mean, it seems to be a, a whole cohort of people who share these same character traits in different ways and different, maybe slightly different expressions. So I thought it was, it was, um, kind of interesting that, that that kind of wore off really quick that what he said was good.

[01:09:21] Erica Rex: ’cause that wasn’t gonna happen now.

[01:09:24] Joe Moore: Mm-hmm.

[01:09:25] Erica Rex: Of, of psychedelics being approved as, um, medical drugs for, uh, what was it, what do it called when you do, uh, they have a, a permission structure for using non approved drugs for the

[01:09:40] Joe Moore: federal Right. The federal Right. To try act, which is

[01:09:43] Erica Rex: right to

[01:09:43] Joe Moore: something not super well defined.

[01:09:47] Joe Moore: Um,

[01:09:47] Erica Rex: right.

[01:09:48] Joe Moore: There’s pathways, but it’s difficult with psychedelics.

[01:09:50] Erica Rex: Yeah. They, I think they turned that down. That was the thing, is that it somebody that it was supposed to be on that same. Group and, uh, [01:10:00] it’s now not gonna happen,

[01:10:01] Joe Moore: right? So at the same time as I support decriminalization and legalization, I’m also involved in some federal work.

[01:10:09] Joe Moore: Um, colleague of mine, Melissa Ani at the Psychedelic Medicine coalitions, working really hard to create these veteran centers of excellence.

[01:10:17] Erica Rex: Mm-hmm.

[01:10:17] Joe Moore: At five assorted VAs, where they can do clinical trials and, um, actually deliver the drugs as treatment. So they, they could do like large cohort kind of treatments to get good data as well as actually do really good quality research, hopefully, because VA is the largest, uh, healthcare provider in the country from what I understand.

[01:10:37] Joe Moore: And that, that could lead to some really great data and results and hopefully inclusion later. But, you know, again, we’ll see, like this is all kind of a let’s try everything and hopefully we can save some lives in the process. And, you know, I, I take this weird, holistic approach, Erica, that I don’t, I, I think is perhaps too abstract for people to.

[01:10:57] Joe Moore: Take seriously. But I think, you know, as we [01:11:00] start helping people, getting people out of this kind of medical pipeline, get people on their own feet, you know, not needing, you know, regular psychiatric care, hopefully, um, to do their day to day, then I think there’s gonna be less costs, you know, more homes that are hopefully healthy more, um, you know, and more people engaged in politics and, you know, good civic work.

[01:11:24] Joe Moore: Hopefully.

[01:11:25] Erica Rex: Well, you’re talking, you’re talking about a generational change unfortunately that

[01:11:29] Joe Moore: mm-hmm.

[01:11:29] Erica Rex: Generational change has been under erosion for the last 50 years now, which was, uh, unfortunate. ’cause now it’s gone backwards for so long that, um, we’re really gonna have a lot of digging out to do. Or your generation, younger generations are gonna have a lot of digging out to do.

[01:11:50] Erica Rex: ’cause it’s a miss. Truly, I’m

[01:11:52] Joe Moore: very interested to see what people in their twenties are gonna be coming up and doing, uh, and younger folks as well, given kind of the, the [01:12:00] thing they’ve been handed. Um, yeah, it’d be very interesting to see the reaction and, and what politics looks like with younger people in charge.

[01:12:08] Joe Moore: Um, cool. Well, Erica, let’s talk a little bit more about your book. Um, so first off, where could people get it?

[01:12:17] Erica Rex: Uh, you can get it at any of the usual suspects. Um, your local bookstore can always hire it and I, uh, hire it, order it. Um, and, um, you can download the audio book. I recommend, um, the book very highly.

[01:12:32] Erica Rex: In fact, if you’re deciding, I would say please choose the audio book. Um, the publisher is lovely and the, they did a great job with the narrator and it’s very, very, very professionally and very well done. That can be downloaded at also any of the usual suspects. Um, audible, obviously audiobooks now, Spotify, anybody, [01:13:00] um, also write your local bookstore.

[01:13:04] Erica Rex: If you ask them to carry my book. Um, I hope they will. They can always order it. You can get it from Amazon. I prefer you not use Amazon, but your choice. Um, so anywhere you want, great. It’s available and it’s available in ebook. You can anywhere you want eBooks, you can always get an ebook. Um, you don’t have to carry a book.

[01:13:31] Joe Moore: Awesome. And, um, yeah, you’ve been kind of touring the book. You did, uh, drug Science with David Nutt recently. People should go check out that interview. Um, professor David Nutt’s, a hero of mine, so it’s really cool you got on there and, um, you gave, uh, little q and a in, um, New York City recently. Maybe some appearances in the UK in the near term, which is great.

[01:13:52] Joe Moore: And, uh, yeah, I’m, I’m glad you’re getting some attention. It’s long, long deserved and, uh, [01:14:00] hard earned. So thank you, long road for putting in the effort.

[01:14:03] Erica Rex: Well, thank you mm-hmm. For all of your support. I really appreciate it.

[01:14:07] Joe Moore: Absolutely. And, uh, we’ll do more. This isn’t the last of it. We got so many more things to comment on together, so thank you for being a, a thought partner here too.

[01:14:16] Joe Moore: Erica. Appreciate

[01:14:17] Erica Rex: you. Certainly my pleasure.