Your Guide to Psychedelic Psychotherapy – Dr. Phil Wolfson with Dave Asprey : 770

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You're listening to Bulletproof Radio with Dave Asprey. Today is going to be a really, really good interview because we're going to get into psychedelics today. And Our guest is Dr. Phil Wolfson, the creator of a new approach to psychotherapy based on ketamine called Ketamine Assisted Psychotherapy. And if you're a longtime listener, about a hundred episodes ago I went and I did ketamine Assisted psychotherapy down in San Diego and, and talked about it. And Phil, though, is the guy who made it happen. He's the CEO of the nonprofit Ketamine Research Foundation. He's spent many decades doing clinical psychiatry and psychotherapy. We're going to talk about what he's done, how he got there, and he's also a journalist and author of a lot of articles on transformation, politics, psychedelics, consciousness and spirit. So we'll get a little bit out there today. But remember, ketamine is a legal, widely available substance not subject to the same regulatory problems as some of the other things like LSD or mushrooms or even mdma, all of which are making progress as chemicals that can be used for healing, even though they could also be used for other things. Dr. Wolfson or Phil as I'll call you, welcome to the show.

My pleasure indeed, Dave. Thanks for having me.

Why ketamine?

Well, ketamine is originally an anesthetic and an analgesic put together off of PCP analog research in the late 1960s. And when it first was being used, Edward Domino, who's the inventor of it, saw that people coming out of high dosages of ketamine were having what he called emergent effects, and they were having psychedelic experiences. And unfortunately, because he didn't know what to do with that, people weren't being supported in it. There were people who really had trouble with the substance. Ketamine got very widespread use throughout the world as an anesthetic for veterinarian work. It's called a horse tranquilizer, all of that. And it's a very, very safe substance. So it doesn't cause respiratory suppression, for example, so that people on the battlefield who were wounded or injured, the army, the Marine Corps uses it for sedation and for quick anesthesia, doesn't suppress respiration, so its safety became renowned. It's still in widespread use in anesthesia, analgesia. But of course, people in the psychedelic realm are always searching, as you probably know. They're always wondering what's around the corner? What have we found? And so some notice came to the emergent syndrome. And a certain person, Salvador Roquette, was no longer with us and was a very renowned Mexican psychiatrist, but renowned for doing very difficult things and got in trouble at the end of his life. I had the pleasure of meeting him. He did special kinds of experiences in which he produced effects of a spiritual, emotional, deep and difficult nature. Using. We would have boats come across with skeletons while people were at LSD across a lake like Chapultepec. And he became renowned for using ketamine as one tool in his toolbox. Remember, this is a legal period. Ketamine is, of course, still legal, but it was a period when you could do other kinds of substances. He brought that medicine to the Maryland Psychiatric Institute, where Stan Groff was in leadership and several other people of renown. Bill Richards, we have. And he tripped them. And they stand as a chapter in my book on his journeys, which are quite remarkable. And they came to know ketamine both uniquely and in combination with other substances as a profound experience different than other psychedelics.

Longtime listeners probably remember the interviews with Stan Grof on Bulletproof Radio. And I actually hosted an event with the Human Potential Institute, the coaching program that I started, where Stan led several days of holotropic breath work. So he's, you know, the creator of transpersonal psychology. And the fact that he's written a chapter in your book, the Ketamine papers, by the way, thank you for the signed copy, is. Is just a sign of how deep you go into the history of psychedelics. But you're kind of the ketamine guy. Do you object to that branding?

Yeah, I mean, I really am the MDMA guy. So I, you know, so. And no, I'm really the psychedelic psychotherapy guy. What I really do is work with people, human beings in psychotherapy. Substances are adapted to the individual or couple or group to enable them to reach new places of a connecting, loving, caring place to work out PTSD, depression. And during the 80s, along with Sasha Shulgin, I was doing in a large group of the people who we're talking about psychedelic psychotherapy, primarily using MDMA before it became illegal in 86, I wrote about it. And we did a lot of things with couples with depression with ptsd. So I'm labeled a ketamine guy because I wrote the book, the third book, and I'm espousing it because it's legal as an assisted psychotherapy. So as we grow to put tools in the toolbox, for example, as MDMA becomes hopefully available for prescription 2022, 2021, the end psilocybin, which is mushrooms, becomes available. 2021, 2022, we will have a group and an expanding group of individual practitioners and groups of practitioners who know how to use psychedelic medicine for psychotherapy. That's what I'm all about. I'm all about psychotherapy. These are tools in the toolbox that we embrace and each has particular properties and we try and create psychotherapy around those properties. And they're broad.

I've been pretty public about the fact that I had PTSD that I did. Didn't know about, that was actually birth related, very close to Stan Grof's description of things like that. And I did some ayahuasca, I did emdr, I did neurofeedback, a variety of medicines. But having known so many people with ptsd, how do you know which of these psychedelics is the right one to use for a specific patient?

There's really no right or wrong with psychedelics. They have special properties. For instance, the property of ketamine that's most useful is it's a timeout. So here you are, Dave, talking to me and you get in the proper setting, you get ready for it. And we've done a lot of work on who you are and how you suffer. And we administer the ketamine either by injection or we train people how to use it under the mouth where it's absorbed through the lining of the mouth. People then go through either a low dose or moderate to high dose experience. That experience is separated from your life here. So if you're a very depressed person over here and you go through the ketamine experience where you have ego dissolution, where you aren't in touch with your body in the same way, where you're involved with a visual stream and commentary on the visual stream, you're separated from ordinary mind. And then the real work is the integration as people come back. How am I different? What have I learned from this? Oh, I noticed I wasn't depressed in that. So the journeys generally remove the difficult mood. Yesterday, for example, we worked with people of Lebanese background who were extremely traumatized during the war and have held onto that trauma for 20 years. And in the ketamine experience, and we did it very gently because the male in the in the couple has a long history of terrible ocd. He's really, really tight and you don't want to loosen people up too fast and panic them. You want people to begin to flow into an experience. He floated to end the experience and what came into his mind as he went through it was events that occurred when he was seven or eight of a horrific sort. And he was able to cry. He was able to process those events and bring them back. So by doing that, he released himself from trauma that was sitting in him and making him who he was, making him think and feel in a protective, hyper vigilant way. Living the trauma unconsciously, but living it, living it. So it colored all his ways of being in the world. And, you know, we have to follow up, we have to see how it resolves in an ongoing fashion. But the recovery of those memories, the reliving of those memories, the being held in love and connection while that's occurring, opens the door to leaving the PTSD behind. You never leave PTSD all the way. You know that it's in you like a stream. I lost my oldest son to leukemia at nearly 17. I live with the stream of my grief, but it doesn't run my life. It's part of who I am. So PTSD doesn't go away entirely. It's part of you. It informs you. It makes you a better person if you're conscious of it, if you use it in a thoughtful way, if you really see how people suffer and you bond with that suffering. So that's the property of ketamine, a timeout, an ego dissolution at lower doses of potentiality of like with mdma, being able to comment and be in feeling and work on it with therapists who are doing a job of being there for people.

When I did it, I found that it was effortless to forgive old stuff. And I've spent four months of my life with neurofeedback doing structured forgiveness. So I've kind of found all the big things and let all that go. But like, oh, this girl I dated in high school and. Oh yeah. And I just, I. It was so amazing because I think probably in an hour there must have been 30 or 40 things I hadn't thought about in 30 years that just immediately come up. Oh, yeah, now I see, now I see, now I see. And I felt a lot lighter afterwards. Is that forgiveness aspect of ketamine a common experience or am I just weird?

I don't think that's specific to ketamine. I'm glad you had that. I think psychedelics in general, if you do mushrooms. Yeah, especially the first hour of mushrooms, or psilocybin, you're going to go through a psychological scrape where all the misdeeds and the things you owe to people and how you've been hurt or hurt others, they're going to come right before you and then you leave that. Because all the psychedelics in their various ways create a meditative state. The state I was talking about with ketamine, I work on it as a meditative state. It informs day to day meditation because it's out, it's unattached. You've broken all those attachments and moved into a place of liberated mind. The same happens in a trip on mushroom psilocybin. In mdma, it's heart opening. It's the ability to really feel one's being and the difficulties one has encountered inter inside oneself and outside of oneself and be able to process those where you couldn't before. We're about to publish our phase two study with MAPS where we worked with 18 subjects with life threatening illnesses and a year or less to live. And it was a wonderful experience. And you know, we have a. Creating a population of survivors of, you know, medical treatment. But the medical treatment, the process from diagnosis through treatment and recovery leaves scars. It leaves people less than who they were. It leaves people and their families confused. And in the MDMA work the similar thing happened. There was an ability to see oneself differently, to open doors, to open heart, to have compassion and to, to be in a different kind of meditative state, a loving kindness, meditative state. Ketamine does some of that. It's not as heartful. Mdma, you ask about different substances and how you would choose them. MDMA is the hard substance. Ketamine is the timeout with feeling substance. Mushrooms is the trip with depth. Ayahuasca is, you know, the most amazing psychedelic in terms of visual and experiential formats that we have.

I think you didn't mention lsd.

LSD is an extraordinary substance. It's not my favorite, so I've always had difficulty with lsd, so I don't downplay it. But for me, in the journeys I took, they've always had a little crest of paranoia or difficulty. First time I did it was in 1964 in med school and eight of us did it on the roof of our dormitory at nyu. And I was, it's a funny story, I was actually not knowing what we were doing. We were close to the beach, but we had no real awareness of the substance so we dropped it and we went on separate ways. And I went into an Italian restaurant in Little Italy, La Luna, which with two friends who were not knowing what was happening and suddenly the floors started moving and I'm laughing, I have a bite of food and it disappears. I don't know where it goes and I had to get back and I forced them, despite not finishing their meal, to take me back to the dorm to meet the people who I knew at least were going to have similar experiences. And the hazard was we were on the next ninth floor of the dormitory. And people on LSD often think they could fly and we had to make sure we didn't fly off. But that was a good experience, actually, even though it was complete ignorance.

Yeah, that wasn't the best set and setting I've ever heard of for a first experience.

But we conquered that. You could conquer that. The conquest was connection, was finding the people I could be comfortable with.

Can you talk about just psychedelics in general and addiction?

Yeah, sure. It's a very controversial topic. Ketamine heads list right now about, you know, causing addiction. It's dependent. So ketamine uses overuse. They use large amounts of it and what they're doing is getting out of here. So they get used to getting out of here. I had connection a little bit with John Lilly, who was the most famous of ketamine dependent people. And he was shooting up all the time. He had weeping scars on his legs. We would see him in Esalen. Terrible. He missed life. So that's the point of ketamine dependence is missing life. But we have all kinds of dependency. We don't talk about it. We have MDMA dependency. We have people who use MDMA very, very frequently though you can't use it too contiguously because the effect is lost. But, you know, we have overuse of that. We have, you know, almost any of the substances though psychedelics are truly safe. Ketamine is truly safe. Unless you use very high dosages. We'll have people who get into it and they get into it hard and deep. So in the clinical practices that were evolving like MAPs and USONA and R groups, we're really careful about prescription. We have never had a ketamine dependent person yet. We've had one or two want to become ketamine dependent to get out of here every day. But we haven't, we don't, we don't allow that. And the whole point is not getting out of here. It's getting out of here, coming back and leading your life. So you were talking about Buddhism and spiritual practice. It's about how do we integrate our lives in relationship in this very difficult time with people and in our beings and what practices we bring to this whole thing. So it's not just about substances.

It's definitely not just about substances. And that's what I appreciate about your work is that you're looking at the psychiatry and the psychology of it and using it as a tool, which is so appropriate when you get into the spiritual side of it, though. And the first time I did ayahuasca was down in Peru with a shaman from the jungle many, many years ago, before it was cool and you could find it at the airport. I had to go seek the guy out, and he put a ring of stones around where we did it. And I actually recovered faster than most people, probably because my liver is nice and happy with what I do to it. And I said, I'm going to go for a hike now. I'm done. I really was done. And he looked at me and he almost tackled me. And he said, no. He said, you'll stay inside the stones. I said, well, why? And he said, because they're keeping stuff out, and if you go out there, it's going to stick to you. Now, this is a, you know, a jungle shaman, and they see things differently than you and I see things. Do you think there's any spiritual risk to using psychedelics?

I think there's a spiritual advantage. So we, We. We use our medicines in a sacred way. We're not doing traditional medicine. We're not doing intravenous anesthesiology practices. We bring people in, we do invocation. We try and help people move into a state of contemplation before we do substances. We want to know people. The spiritual aspect. We do music or all kinds. It's essential to do ketamine with music. And it is about spirit. It's about really letting go of the attachments that we have that drive us crazy. Right. And letting go and reforming once we leave our attachments. I'm really attached to doing well on your show. Okay. Let me really leave that attachment and just be myself.

Right, right.

You know, so in being myself, I'll probably do a better job. You'll be the judge, but it's that. So when I leave my attachments to prejudice, to intolerance, to sexism, to all the things that, you know, keep me from being in the world in a full way, I have a spiritual experience. And psychedelics are awe, striking if the essential motion of religion is awe and that we develop from animals who experience awe as well, and there's an evolutionary advantage to experiencing awe, then ketamine, other psychedelics, the awe of a beautiful MDMA session. People get married on it. I still have people who got married on it 40 years ago. In the kind of aura you have to Be careful of decision making. So, you know, it is a spiritual thing and if you take that away and you just make drugs, which I'm worried about with the commercialization that you make medicines of healing, that revolutionized psychiatry, psychotherapy was. This is a revolution. It was when it began that take it away from psychiatry, suppression of people and bring it into the opening of mind and heart. That's a whole different approach to human beings. And so I'm careful about segregating ketamine as a drug or MDMA when it comes out, could be a drug. We don't want it to be a drug. We don't want it to just be empty. There's benefits. So ketamine, just as a drug has benefits, but ketamine has an embedded assisted psychotherapy as spiritual, emotional connection, living benefits on a much higher level. That's why I do what I do. And it's not about ketamine.

I really appreciate your approach. It's so nuanced and yeah, there is big concern when things become commercial that it'll change. You haven't said one word about cannabis though. Where does cannabis fit into the whole universe here?

Okay. I'm 77.

Okay.

You know, I'm a survivor at 77. The friendliest medicine to me is cannabis.

You and Willie Nelson, huh?

I don't know Willie personally, but cannabis is a wonderful who is synergy. And for 60% of people it works. For 40% they don't do well. We even use cannabis and ketamine together. They're both legal and they support each other and they change the journey in a wonderful way. So for me personally, cannabis has been a great change agent. It took me out of being a very awkward, self conscious human early in my life to being able to dance and feel freer. And I think cannabis is a very special substance.

And you do count it as a, as a psychedelic.

I do understand. I don't know why.

It depends on how much you take.

Psychedelic and no, I could take a drop and you know, and I have. If I look carefully. It's a great thing to do. About 2, 3 inches behind your forehead, you can do it eyes open. But eyes closed is better. You'll see your visual stream. Wow. And you're training with psychedelic medicines to be in that visual stream so it becomes more available to you. And sometime maybe off the show, we won't teach you about this. Now there are very special kind of sensory experiences that people have with medicines and have.

I would like to learn about that.

I'll give you one right Now, Okay.

Okay.

People on your show might like it. You like demonstrations. If you close your eyes and touch your face with your hand, notice you see your hand. If you put your hand on your leg, notice you see your leg and your hand moving over it. You don't see it as a perfect vision, but you see it. And this tactile relationship between vision and touch is a very profound thing. And we don't often pay attention to it. There are many things like that.

There's the sense of proprioception, the sense of where your body is in space. And your visual cortex is mapping that out somehow and it's drawing something. First time I came across that, I was in a cave down by Carlsbad Caverns. When I was a young teen, one of my hobbies was exploring old Spanish mines in New Mexico. I had an unusual upbringing. And we'd go into these very, very dark places where there was zero light. But you hold your hand up, you can still see your hand in front of you, even though you can't see your hand. And that still stands out when you describe that. So you're saying with a plant medicine, with a psychedelic, you're tightening your connection to your sense of your body and where it is. Even the. You can't see it.

Yeah, well, you're. You're leaving some of your form. I mean, ketamine really is about leaving form altogether and being an energy. So one of the great experience. Why. Why is it ego dissolving? Because you're formless. So in the Buddhist sense, you're in the formless realms and you're experiencing yourself as an energy format. And we are energy formats. I mean, you're. You're professional about energy formatting, right? That's what you do. You help people with all kinds of ways of approaching their energy nature and their spiritual energy nature and the energy experience. And ketamine is particularly like this of all of them, that sense of dissolving and just being, knowing that you really are the E and MC squared, you know, and that that is what you are without that energy, you're dust, you know, will form energy. So it leads to very special kinds of understandings of self. When you know that your energy and feel it and can return to the feeling that I am an energy format. It helps with health to see oneself in an energy form format, not just as skin and bones.

It also seems like it. It helps with fear of death. And ultimately all fear, when you boil it down, is fear of death. At least that's a Buddhist teaching. And I Think as a therapist, you'd probably agree with me there.

I'm a Buddhist guy.

You're a Buddhist guy. All right, so then you would definitely be there and I'm there as well. Where? Okay, you know, if ultimately, if I'm afraid of, you know, being embarrassed or something, that's because I get kicked out of the tribe. No one will love me, lion will eat me, and then I'll die. You know, this not rational loops, but that's kind of how biology is wired, right? So doing this kind of work with ketamine or the other medicines we're talking about, it seems like, okay, if I'm the E in MC squared, then the visceral fear of death diminishes, which lets you make better decisions. You're still not going to do stuff that kills you. You don't want to waste your life, but you can walk around without the weight of that fear. And when you're dealing with ptsd, like I did, that fear, it's wired in. It's not a rational fear. It's an irrational fear because fear doesn't have to be rational. And I found that it was very helpful on that front just because, like, okay, yeah, like, I'm more than this. It's very hard to put words to it. Is that a common experience, though, when you work with people where their fear just drops? Fear of everything not drops away, but.

You'Ve done very well. So experientially, people who do significant ketamine dosages, I did it. When I did my first one, I said to myself, I'm dead. I went too far. I'm dead now.

I've had that experience multiple times.

I killed myself. Right. And most people, many people have it because you're in reality states in the ketamine internal experience, you're in reality states that you have no real control over, and you're in an energy format, and those states are complete. So the hardest part, the most anxious part of Academy Journey is moving into a reality state where it seems to be total and you'll never come back. And people have varying responses. I've killed myself as one. I'll never see my family again. I love this. I don't ever want to leave it. This is too good to be true, you know? But that sense of death, which isn't real, I mean, the real experience of death, as you probably know, is anesthesia. You have a complete black space. You're not conscious. I had many surgeries. You don't know where you were. You have no memory. That's close to death, but the fear of death seems to exactly what you said dissolve in psychedelic worlds. Ketamine in particular seems to lessen that fear. So people often say I'm dead, but it's not so bad. But that's because it's because they're not really dead. So they're watching and experiencing.

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You started the Ketamine Research foundation and I know some of what you're doing there is around end of life work. Can you talk about why you started the Ketamine Research Foundation? And I'd love to talk about some of those projects starting with end of life and hospice work.

Well, there's a virtue in ketamine being legal or semi legal. Yeah. The virtue is we don't have to go through fda, so all the machinations that MAPS has to go through and the amounts of money or for psilocybin to become legal we don't have to do so we can do IRB and independent review board supervision of our work and we can create projects that demonstrate the benefits of ketamine as a psychedelic medicine. As a medicine. And so that's what I saw. I saw that we could extend the range of understanding of how the medicine works into multiple realms. That we could do both treatment and understand better how to do treatment. But we just finished a study on the presence of ketamine in breast milk and a formal IRB study. So why is that interesting? Because women with postpartum depression or other forms of postpartum disorders, they have to start breastfeeding or they have to make an onerous choice to continue breastfeeding and take Prozac or one of its relatives because they're depressed. And so we, before we started a postpartum study, which we will do with ketamine, we wanted to know, is ketamine, what's its concentration in breast milk? What are infants, neonates exposed to? And we're just about to publish, we're writing it up, and ketamine allows women, and we will show that to be able to continue to breastfeed with a small lapse. And it's episodic use. So rather than bathing myself as a woman in a substance I have to take all the time, like an antidepressant, I can do episodic work with probably the best antidepressant that we have in a psychotherapeutic context. So that was one project.

What a gift. Wow, that's fantastic. So they need to stop breastfeeding for a day or something.

Hours. It'll be hours.

What a relief, because if you can breastfeed, it's such a gift for the entire life of the baby. My first book was about fertility and pregnancy, and it's unacknowledged how important that is. And if you can take a depressed woman and the depression incidence is going up right now, and if you can work with ketamine, that's a gift to the world, that's multi generational.

Thank you. I thank you for that. I believe your endorsement is correct and I'm very excited about it because it is a gift. And so then we'll go on to use it in assisted psychotherapy and do a study with postpartum effects to demonstrate the potency of it. The Conscious Dying Conscious Living project, which we're embedding in the mindfulness context, is for people who know they have a year or less left to live. There have been several such projects. Roland Griffiths at Hopkins did one with psilocybin, we did one coming out with mdma. So what we're trying to do, and we have a new scale for it, is to help people look at, I have six months to live or three months to live, but I'm very conscious. What do I do with that time? How do I feel about myself? Who am I? Am I Harsh in my judgments of myself. Am I screwing up and fighting with my family? And so we're doing a two session brief, like within a month or so work with two ketamine sessions and embedded again in assisted psychotherapy as a demonstration program. We have five sites across the country. We just are getting approval for it. And so that's one of our major projects we're also starting. I'm very excited about this, a veterans and PTSD project, but we're doing it differently. So we have an alliance, we build coalitions. I'm sure you do too. Coalition building is life of the party. So we're really, we're building a coalition with heroic hearts, which is a vets group very interested in the effects of psychedelic medicine. MAPS has done some great work with vets and psychedelics. So we're in a position to do some really fine group work with vets and to assist them with ptsd. But the problem is we didn't want to have vets encountering people who had no combat experience, no military experience. So we're going to begin with training a group of vets to be facilitators alongside an MD and another trained psychotherapist so that vets encounter people who've been through the process, who they can say, oh, well, you're no dummy, you've been through Vietnam, you've been through Iraq. And so we have a level of camaraderie and trust that you know what trauma is about. That's one we're doing. So we're expanding along these lines opportunistically to fill out the potential of psychedelic medicine. The other one I hope you'll ask me about after we go to the next thing will be Injuries Net coalition. But I don't want to take up too much space.

Well, all right. I do have a question about PTSD and combat vets. I interviewed Mark Gordon a while back. Who, real interesting guy and he has a theory that I don't know what to think about it. He says that you don't really get PTSD unless there's a traumatic brain injury. And the reason, I don't know that I'm all the way there, but there's a correlation because at the neuroscience company that, that I started that does advanced personal development with neurofeedback, it's been like 90% of the high functioning people who come through, you can see that there's an old tbi, maybe from. They were two, they fell over. There's, there's electrical disturbances. And Daniel Amen's A dear friend and he sees TBIs all over the place. What is the effect of psychedelics on people who have unknown brain injuries? You know, they hit their head at some point or they had a chemical exposure. Good or bad?

Well, unknown means we don't know. There have been controversial studies in the military around ketamine's effectiveness for traumatic brain injury. I don't really have an answer for that. I see a lot of PTSD that is not related to an explosion. And most people we see haven't been in the military and they have PTSD from rape, from, you know, family background, attachment stuff. So I tend to see that as an exaggeration. And the vets I've worked with, it's not just that. It's seeing a buddy die.

He doesn't mean it's just that. He says if you see a buddy die and you don't get ptsd, it's because you had a healthy brain. If you had a brain injury and you see a buddy die, you're going to get ptsd.

No.

Okay. Yeah, I feel like there's some correlation, but it's not causative. It might be a higher percentage or something.

Bingo, you're on the mark.

Okay. And there's stuff we don't know there. And some of the plant compounds are neurogenic. They raise brain derived nootropic factor. I know ayahuasca does it. I know psilocybin does it. I don't think cannabis does it. What about MDMA and ketamine? Do they increase growth of neurons in the brain?

Okay, this is another good neuroplastic thing. If you make love and you have a great experience, don't your dendrites move about in an experience of awe? If you climb a high mountain, you climb Everest, you get to the top and you survive. Do you not have neuroplastic change?

Absolutely.

If you have a high level spiritual experience, you've done a seven day retreat and you come out of that. If you. Isn't that neuroplastic? Everything is rearranging the brain or we wouldn't be adaptive. Right, so.

Fair point.

Every study we do about a psychedelic, there's a new one about MDMA shows neuroplasticity. But what is really rearranging it is the drug. Is it the experience? I've always been curious about the speed in which dendrites rearrange. I've had various estimates of it. You know, it's not like two seconds later, okay, I did my ketamine, two seconds later, I'm neuroplastically high achiever. Right, Right. Takes time. And the experience. Isn't the experience part of the neuroplasticity or maybe the major part of the neuroplasticity? You know, the negative neuroplasticities are the same. Post traumatic stress disorder. It's a negative neuroplastic happening that continues. Right. There's been a rearrangement. Whether it's in the amygdala or wherever the hell it is, or it's a change, the dmn, it doesn't really matter. These are very reductionist kinds of concepts. And our experience is so wide and the neuroscience is so reductive still, we're not quite there yet.

That's a fair point. I build practices into my life to raise my levels of BDNF in my quest to live way longer than Mother Nature wants. And there's supplements.

Take more ketamine. Take more ketamine.

All right.

BDNF and Ketamine go together.

They go together. All right. I will keep that in my notes. Let's put it that way. I don't even know the status of ketamine in Canada. I live on an island. But I'm sure. I'm sure it's available.

There are difficulties in Canada. I'm very involved in them.

Okay, well, I can always go over the. Well, actually, I can't go over the border. We're dealing with a pandemic. How about that other form of ptsd? Pandemic, Pandemic, Traumatic post disorder, whatever. I can't remember what the exact acronym would be there, but people are actually getting ptsd, especially younger people from the pandemic, according to some of the people I've talked with. Is there a role for psychedelics to help people feel safe in a world that suddenly doesn't feel safe?

I think there's a role, but that brings me to the Indra's Neck Coalition. The problem is that it's not available. Right. So people are suffering with COVID in a myriad ways. They're losing people. Even the states had 228,000 deaths. People are not recovering quickly. People are isolated, people losing jobs. The trauma of the COVID epidemic, coupled with the trauma of global climate change, the trauma of bad leadership, all of this is coming together ahead in such a way that people are suffering in myriad ways. So I looked at that, and being a 60s guy, as you said earlier, and wanting to see change in the world. What's the real change in the world? World. What makes a real difference? Connection, sharing. Love, loving, kindness, tolerance, creativity, that kind of thing. And we don't have enough people power to create a psychedelic format that can work. We only have ketamine, marijuana. Right. And we don't have the others yet. And we don't have enough trained practitioners. So what I and my colleagues in our foundation, particularly Sonny Strasberg and I have done is to create a thing we call the sharing group. And we're in the process of disseminating it. We're building a coalition with Deepak Chopra. What we think we can do is create succession facilitated groups, not psychotherapy, that bring people together within a format of nonviolence and connection. And we're doing. We're setting it up. So we're doing our first demonstration series of six sessions. And our intention is to make this available worldwide, to have it translated into Spanish. We're talking with our brothers and sisters in Barcelona. Can they take it and adapt it? So we have a module, and I think the module is really solid. We have lots and lots of people who want to help people who are suffering. And the suffering is growing. The COVID suffering is monstrous. But the suffering of global climate change and immigration and displacement and drought and all the rest, when you look worldwide, it's beyond the scope of our capacity to even realize it so far. So we're trying to enter the fray by saying people like yourself may want to be a facilitator. Others who aren't necessarily psychotherapists can be coming to the program and be facilitators of small groups. We're supporting it. They're free to. Participants will give a stipend to the group leader, whether they're in Kenya or they're in Buffalo, New York. Everyone gets 100 bucks a session. And we're raising money for it because we really think that the coalition building and the generalization of a group formats that encourage connection, love and sharing and healing through expression. Because people are so trapped in Covid. I mean, that's really the issue. They're trapped. And so by even on the zoom level, bringing people together weekly is a great way to help people share to some extent, to begin to open their doors. That's a big new project, which I'm very proud of.

And you have a structured format that works even over zoom for that. That's a really big thing. I've been involved with lots of friends, people I used to see when I would travel, and we'd get together on a Sunday morning or something and have a call and chat. But if there's an actual Structure and a leader. That makes it way more effective. That's a really big society changing kind of thing. So where can people donate to that? There are some very successful people listening to the show.

We would like people to become not only donors, but participants and facilitators. So it's injuriesnetcoalition.org injurious. What do you know what injuries that is? It's a wonderful idea. Let me tell you the idea.

Just spell it right for people.

I N D R a apostrophe s net n e t coalition.org there's no apostrophe in the. So InterestNet is a worldwide. It's a universal concept. You and me and our listeners, each of us is a point of light, and we have internal reflection and we have external reflection, and we're all connected. And lights come in all kinds of capacities. Some lights are dim, some lights are out, some lights are vibrant, and we want to light up lights in connection. So Indrasnet is about connection. It's about forming a network that exists because we're all connected, but we're kind of stupid about our connections, kind of narrowly narcissistic. Right, Right. And we don't see our origins. We forget about the guy who raised the cow that you eat. I'm a vegetarian. Or the. We forget about our dependence. And so Indrasnet is about linking. And so you can find it on Academy and Research foundation website, which is what it sounds like, what it is, or Indra's Net Coalition. And thank you for offering to help us with that.

Of course. I'll put a link in the show, notes for followers. And your definition of that's really, really beautiful. And it reminds me a lot of that idea of building a global brain. And I've had a couple of guests from the AI world talking about that. And when you look at the Broadman's areas in the brain, you're looking at neuroscience. Some connections aren't working very well in those brains, and you can turn those up. And I've spent a lot of time on my brain tuning the things where I didn't have much of that there, and just tweaking it so that the interconnectivity is stronger. And the end result is that it's a lot less work to do things. You suffer less and there's less resistance in the world around you. And so doing that on a global basis for society is a very noble goal. And the structure there is also really unique. I've not come across something like that, other than maybe what Old churches used.

To do well, there was several good programs. Jerry Jampolsky ran a program out of here called the center for Attitudinal Healing. And it started as a program for kids who had life threatening illnesses like my son. And then it advanced into a program for adults who. And I was a facilitator. I ran a group for kids who lost siblings or parents. Not a simple group. And it was a facilitated group, it was a sharing group. And he had a. Through the course of miracles, he had derived a set of principles. And I never agreed with all of them and we recited them, but it was a great concept because it put together a framework. And so what I did is create a framework of tenets, 10 tenets that guide us. And they're quite lovely and they're quite acceptable. And then basic rules for how to proceed. We begin with a meditation. Everyone gets five minutes to share the group is six to 10. And then we have interaction and we have an ending meditation as well. And so it's a spiritual, emotional connection program.

What a profound thing to do. I genuinely appreciate that you're working on so many fronts at the same time. What lets you do that? Is this the wisdom that comes with age? I mean, you're doing work with maps, you're leading the ketamine research group, you're doing this global connectivity thing. I mean, you've got your irons in a lot of fires in your 77. That's a time when a lot of people are maybe having less irons. What let you do that?

I've always been energetic, but losing a child and going through four years of an illness and what watching a ferocious struggle for life was. Noah struggled to live every minute. He wouldn't talk about dying, he could only talk about living. And the treatment was awful. He ended up dying after a bone marrow transplant in Swedish. His condition, because he was diagnosed late, was much less statistically possible for his survival. And this occurred in 1984. I died in 1988. And I was around a lot of families of kids who were dying. And in those days, in the bone marrow transplant unit at Swedish, who would take Almost anyone under 25 because it was too difficult to take people older. They couldn't make it through the program. It was just too much. Right. So it kind of set me in motion, which I haven't stopped. And it made me really aware of the value and preciousness of life. I was already pretty aware, but it was a very serious experience. And we had great community support and great love, but it was A hell of a loss, and it was a hell of a experience. So I think, you know, I went through a long PTSD period in which I worked, but I was still struggling to recover. We got divorced. It was, you know, and then I had a surviving son who you've met, he's a world champion. And all my effort was turned to making his life sweet, you know, to help him through the trauma. And so I became more in touch personally with trauma and how people suffer in my particular format. But I've always been sensitive to other people's suffering. And you have Marineura in school or I have Marineura in school. Horror. And so why not? What better do I have to do? I'm not going to play golf.

So you walked the walk, you learned some lessons and you're able to share them more effectively because of it.

Well, I try. I'm learning on a deep learning curve. And one of the great, great things still is I can still learn. At 77, I have an infinite amount to learn.

So much respect for being willing to learn throughout your life and staying young that way. And that's one of the biggest things when I said anti aging is that being willing to constantly learn. And so you've done a lot of amazing work on yourself and it's reflected in the world, which is phenomenal. Let's talk a little bit about your son and about Burning man, your connection with that. And I should say, I should have said at the beginning of the show that it was a Dr. David Rabin who suggested that we talk when I interviewed him about psychedelics. So let's talk Burning man and your interaction with Burning man with Matt and with your son. So kind of walk us through it.

I went to Burning Man. I think the first time I was sort of a late comer, 2009, I think I went and I had a great time. I had an amazing time. And what was so amazing was the absence of Bunny giving this, the exchange, the welcoming that was constant from everyone, including ourselves. The spirit of really a sharing. So we talk about sharing. Burning Man's a great sharing costs far too much money and got to be far too expensive. But once you got there, the concept of sharing was one thing. Then the extraordinary beauty. Burning man. Going out in the playa at night on a bicycle and riding up and seeing the kind of explosions going and the sculptures in the air and just the amazing amount of human capacity for creativity and cleaning up so you don't leave any stuff on the playa and the kind of dedication to each other. Other. There are a lot of fun things, antics, wild things. You know, 3,000 women running bare right, riding bikes bare breasted. You know, there's all kinds of stuff going on.

There's a sense of awe that's there that I haven't really seen anywhere else, except maybe somewhere in remote parts of the Himalayas or Andes where you look out and you realize how high up you are. They're pretty inaccessible, but there's something magic going on there for sure. And you go with your son, with Helix?

Well, I went with friends first and then I told Helix about it and then he went and he's never missed one. So he's become a burner of consequence. And when the burn was wiped out by Covid, because he's technically sophisticated and he has kind of a vaudevillian approach, he's a maestro with resources of all sorts, he began to look at how to model a Burning man for people who were going to be on Zoom, and he's taken that very far. He didn't quite make it fully into the Burning man, period, but it's evolving because it's such complex technology, but it'll be useful for lots of things. So you go in as an avatar, you put on a costume, it could be any color you want, it could be any sex, and then you experience it. So it was a noble attempt. That's got a lot of future to it.

I've been to the last six burns and one before that, and I skipped a couple of years. And I tend to give away many thousands of cups of unbranded bulletproof coffee, either on an art car or at my camp, because it's one of the things that I get to share something that I. That means a lot to me. And it's an interesting experience with or without psychedelics, which is something else that's important because a lot of listeners. Look, you. You just may not want to do something that's illegal. You may not want to do something that messes with your insurance or, you know, your security clearance or whatever. But I will tell you, if you're out at 2 in the morning, you're not used to it. Riding a bike around, seeing awe inspiring things. You're going to have a psychedelic experience, whether you like it or not. And it's not going to be drug induced, it's just going to be reality induced, which is. Which is, I think, a healing experience as well.

Well, in fact, at Burning Man, I've always felt that if you're going to take a lot too much psychedelic medicine and Put your ass on the grass. There's no grass. What's the point of being a Burning Man? Burning Man's inexperience. Right? You can do drugs at home, but come here and share. So alterations part of Burning man in various ways.

Well, I. I think it's. It's fantastic that you go. And I know that many of the. The leaders of Maps are there. I've been to dinners with them at Burning man and all. And I. I would just stress for people who are saying, you know, Burning Man's this weird thing. Sure, it's weird, but it's not to just go there and have and do drugs. A lot of people don't do it at all. But it's there to experience novelty. And for some, and for some people, including me, just being around people who are nice and kind and not greedy for just a week is also healing in a strange way. You know, you start getting your faith in humanity reinvented.

Did you experience that? And so is that what you mean by weird? All that goodness is weird? I think that's what weird.

That's a fair question.

We want that goodness. So Burning man is an aberration in the sense that we don't do that ordinarily and we don't take enough of it back into our daily life. But I think that has, you know, in its essential elements, what we really want to do, to live together in harmony.

Very well said. Is there a question that you wanted me to ask that I didn't ask?

You've done very well. Oh, well, I mean, Chris, no, you have. I feel you've honored me with your questions. No, I think we've talked about our programs. I hope people will take an interest in Indrasnet Coalition Academy Research Foundation. And I'm grateful for this opportunity you've afforded me. Thank you.

You are most welcome. And thank you. Is philwolfsonmd.com the best place people can go to find out about your world?

Go to the Ketamine Research Foundation. Everything is linked. Yeah.

Okay. And that's a.comketamineresearchfoundation.com I'll put the links in the show notes and on the.

Blog and end yoursnetcoalition.org those two, they're all linked. Everything's linked.

Everything's linked. Beautiful, Phil. Keep learning. Have a wonderful next many, many more decades of changing awesome things. I appreciate you. You.

You too. Thank you so much. Thank you.

If you like today's episode, I would suggest that you consider, if it's within your means making a small donation to one of the nonprofits that Phil's working with because, you know guys, guys like Phil are doing good work in the world. That can have a big ripple effect. And it's one thing if you help one person, but but when you train someone to help many people, it's so much more amplified. So if you're in the mood to donate $10, $20, something like that, if you can, it's a good move. And certainly I will be making a donation as well. Have a great day.

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