James Beshara, an angel investor and the founder of Tilt, a crowdfunding company acquired by Airbnb in 2017, used to drink seven. cups. of. coffee. a. day—a habit that landed him in the ER with a racing heartbeat of over 170 beats per minute for three weeks straight. That turning point in James’s life led him down a rabbit hole of research on coffee, caffeine and alternative ways to boost productivity and heal, a search that included plant medicine. In this Taboo Tuesday, James talks to Dr. Emily about his first experience with psychedelics, and the effect it still has on him today.

Staying emotionally fit takes work and repetition. That's why the Emotionally Fit podcast with psychologist Dr. Emily Anhalt delivers short, actionable Emotional Push-Ups every Monday and Thursday to help you build a better practice of mental health, and surprising, funny, and shocking conversations on Taboo Tuesdays - because the things we’re most hesitant to talk about are also the most normal. Join us to kickstart your emotional fitness. Let's flex those feels and do some reps together!

EPISODE RESOURCES:

Follow James Beshara on Twitter and Instagram.

Learn more about Jame’s latest creation MagicMind

Read Jame’s book Beyond Coffee.

Listen to James’s podcast Below the Line and to his music. 

Read Michael Pollan’s book: How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence

Thank you for listening! Follow Dr. Emily on Twitter, and don’t forget to follow, rate, review and share the show wherever you listen to podcasts! #EmotionallyFit 

The Emotionally Fit podcast is produced by Coa, your gym for mental health. Katie Sunku Wood is the show’s producer from StudioPod Media with additional editing and sound design by nodalab, and featuring music by Milano. Special thanks to the entire Coa crew!

JUMP STRAIGHT INTO:

(03:15) - James’s coffee habit - “I would feel like I can't get through the day. And it was through just this idea that my productivity and my to-do list is just one more stimulant away, one more coffee away, one more energy drink away.” 

(07:36) -  A whole new world of psychedelic healing -  “Psychedelics might be really beneficial. They're non-toxic. You can take them once and still see effects a year later, five years later, versus something like Prozac that you would need to take every day.”  

(15:29) - Trying psychedelics - “I was just like, ‘I'm getting on a river. I don't even care where it goes.’ The intention was let's freaking explore, go off the deep end and see what's out there again.” 

(18:41) - James’s first experience with ayahuasca - “Like someone was giving me permission to just be awestruck by everything.”

(22:33) - Creating new neural pathways with psychedelics - “The entire experience was, ‘You're going to learn to let go and go into the fear. And right on the other side of the fears is bliss. That is where heaven is, is right on the other side of what you're afraid of.’”

(25:43) - Psychedelics aren’t a silver bullet fix - “I think what the world really needs is to be empowered to do the long game work. And to know that you didn't come to your pain easily, you're not going to come away from it easily.”

... With psychedelics, the trope is that you don't get the trip that you want, you get the trip you need. And I think this was an important part of why the experience was the way it was for me. I didn't go in with this desire of I wanted to solve X or Y. I was just like, "I'm getting on a river, and I don't even care where it goes."

Welcome to Taboo Tuesday on the Emotionally Fit podcast. I'm Dr. Emily Anhalt, and I've always loved talking about taboo subjects, sex, money, drugs, death, because being a therapist has taught me that the feelings we're most hesitant to talk about are also the most normal. So join me as we flex our feels by diving into things you might not say out loud, but you're definitely not the only one thinking.

Quick disclaimer that nothing in this podcast should be taken as professional advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Because while I am a therapist, I'm not your therapist, and I'm not my guest's therapist. So this is intended only to spark interesting conversation. Thanks for tuning in.

Hi, everyone. I am talking with James Bashara today. James is an angel investor, founder, author, a general startup helper. Inc., Forbes, and Time Magazine have all included him in their 30 under 30 lists. He has started a few companies and has sold one company, Tilt, which was acquired by Airbnb. It was a company I was a huge fan of. And he hosts a podcast focused on the inner journey of founding, leading, and creating called Below the Line with James Bashara. Today, though, James and I are going to be talking about the use of psychedelics for inner healing.

Thanks for coming on the show today, James.

Of course, thanks for having me. Emily.

So today we're talking about psychedelic assisted therapy, psychedelic assisted healing. And when you and I were talking just now, I asked is this something that you played with growing up? Is this something that you did for fun with friends, that you experimented with? Tell us a little bit about that.

It's not, and I love that we're going to get to talk about that today on the podcast. But no. Growing up, I was never really curious about it from a recreational party perspective. I remember when I was in Amsterdam studying abroad, I was like, "I'm going to do mushrooms. Got to do mushrooms in Amsterdam." Just walk into a coffee shop and buy them. And then it just didn't happen. And in college, definitely added a handful of chances. And then in my 20s, had just as many chances, especially here in San Francisco from the recreational front, and was never that curious about it.

It feels so rare, actually, that a person who's really into psychedelics later in life will not have experimented with them earlier. It feels, I don't know, you came to it in this pure way, which is nice perspective to get.

Yeah. I remember feeling no calling towards it whatsoever. Then the more that I learned on the therapeutic side, I felt a really strong calling.

Yeah. I'm really excited to dive into all of the experiences you've had. Maybe before we jump right to the actual psychedelics, I think one thing I've come to understand about you is that you have done a lot of research and put a lot of thought into what it means to put things into our body and how those things affect who we are in the world. You've written a book on it. Tell us a little bit about how you came to be so interested in that.

Yeah. Zooming out, I think it was through doing everything wrong that I was like, "Man, I really need to be much more careful and deliberate about what I'm putting into my body." And what I mean by that is in 2013, I was running Tilt and running my own company about a year in, and we had dozens and dozens of employees, and I was drinking five to six cups of coffee a day. Really, I was getting up to seven cups. It sounds so ridiculous now to say the word seven, that now I curb the story back to five or six, but I would have a Starbucks venti coffee with two extra shots, which is called a black eye. If you ever heard of a red eye, this is one shot. Two shots is a black eye. And that would be my morning coffee. And then I would have two more coffees on top of that. So it's equivalent of seven coffees.

Damn. What happened if you didn't drink that much?

If I didn't, then I would feel like I can't get through the day. And it was through just this idea that my productivity and my to-do list is just one more stimulant away, one more coffee away, one more energy drink away. And that I need something like that to be able to just knock out the next two or three things on the docket. And I had no idea about things like the biological cost that was accumulating, spiked cortisol and stress hormones causing this anxiousness. And all of these things would culminate with a doctors visit in ER, and then a subsequent trip to the ER, where they had to cardiovert my heart back into rhythm. So basically, my heart was beating at 170 beats per minute for three weeks straight.

Holy shit, because of the caffeine?

Because of the caffeine.

Oh my God.

And then went into the doctor, and he was like, "Yeah, you have atrial fibrillation. And the two biggest causes of that are overwork and over stress and over consumption of caffeine." And I was like, "Yeah, I think I have both of those things." And he said, "The most important thing to take away from this is you really should not drink more than one cup of coffee a day."

And out of all of these things that were laid on me, heart condition or that it was 170 beats, spoken like a true addict, the only thing that really messed with me was when he said, "You can only drink one cup of coffee a day." And I was like, "Fuck that. I'm running company with 40 employees. There's no way that I can get through the day with one cup of coffee." And he said, "It's the coffee that's also spiking your cortisol and making you feel really stressed and anxious all day."

Before that conversation, it just had never occurred to me that there was any downside to caffeine. In fact, I remember thinking maybe six or seven cups is high. And then every two weeks, there'd be some research article that comes out that says five cups of coffee is fine for you. And I think that was all pedaled by Starbucks or coffee [inaudible 00:05:51]

Yeah, it feels like the irony... Tell me if this feels right, but I can imagine coffee eased some of your anxiety of not being able to be productive enough, not being able to do enough so you felt like it was helping you, but actually, it was making everything worse. It feels like the traditional story of our fears being perpetuated by our fears.

Absolutely. It was a real crutch. Fast forward seven years, and I just dived head first into this idea that this doctor actually put in my head. He said... When I told him there's no way I can get through the day on one cup of coffee, he said, "Have you ever tried green tea? It has this amino acid called L-theanine which will help extend your absorption of caffeine over the course of the day and has a lower amount of caffeine. One cup of coffee is about two cups of green tea. Why don't you try two cups of green tea?"

So he told me all that, and it was that single point that was wedged in my brain for the next seven years. And I had never heard of L-theanine before. I'd never heard of any... I'd never even really considered tea, and we're drinking tea right now, but it's that single thought that led to a rabbit hole of seven years of research of what is the optimal stack of compounds in the morning to where I could have one cup of coffee and it would extend throughout the day, or two cups of tea and it would extend throughout the entire day.

And that's where this whole fascination came from, was I was doing it seriously wrong, and it was causing a lot of harm to my body without me knowing it. The ER trip and cardioversion... It's those metal paddles, for listeners, it's metal paddles that you see in doctor shows. So that's pretty intense thing-

Clear.

Exactly. Intense thing to go through and woke me up to paying a lot of attention to what I put in my body, especially if I have this innate desire to be productive for the long term at all costs.

Yeah. Humans really aren't good at playing the long game with health. It's a tough thing to do.

Yeah, that's true.

How did you get from that place to thinking, "Huh. What about this whole world of psychedelic healing that's out there?" What piqued your curiosity about it?

Around 2014 or 2015, when some of the research started to come out that it was really effective for things like PTSD, and someone that grew up with mental health issues all around me... I got a sibling with bipolar, I've got a sibling that took her own life from major depression, and just have lived with mental health being a really core part of what I was interested in. And at least in the mental health circles, it was like, hey, psychedelics might be really beneficial. And they're non-toxic. You can take them once and still see effects a year later, five years later, versus something like Prozac that you would need to take every day. You don't have the side effects that come from SSRIs. And long story short, I was like, "Whoa, this is really interesting." And it doesn't jive with all of the propagandized conversation that everyone thinks of psychedelics as the villains of mental health. In a lot of ways growing up, you think psychedelics can cause psychosis. And it can, and people should-

Yeah, it can trigger it.

Yeah. People should be extremely responsible in their approach to psychedelics, but it also is probably the most exciting innovation in mental health in 50 years in how we treated mental health pharmacologically speaking.

Then I think a good friend of mine went down to become an iowaska shaman. And he was a completely different person in a really positive, really good way, to the point where he's one of the most saintly souls I know now, and he was not that way before. So I saw the work that that therapy had an effect on him. And then two years later, I was like, "I think actually, I'm down to go try this, and I want to do it in a big way." So then when it went within different circles of friends to find a route to trying iowaska. I'd done MDMA, and I've smoked pretty strong cannabis, but nothing really compared to the iowaska experience. It was about two years ago.

So tell us about the iowaska experience, what it was like for you emotionally, psychologically. What did you come up the other side with that you didn't go in with?

You can see this on some pretty mainstream TV shows now. So it's nothing that is too hidden of information, but I can tell you about my experience. It was in Northern California, so I didn't have to travel very far. My wife was worried, and we had just had a newborn. And so she was worried. I'd say that's probably the biggest emotional side of things. I'd done enough research, especially the research of who were going to be my guides. I had two guides. I was the only one doing it with them. And funny thing was that I'd made up my mind that I wanted to do iowaska, but I actually thought I was going to do mushrooms. And in just the conversation, you just reference what is actually going on. So you call it some euphemism. So therefore, specifics-

The medicine.

Exactly. The medicine. And so, the specifics were never discussed. So I actually got there, and I was like, "Okay. So I chatted with my doctor, he said I can do five grams." That's a heroic dose of mushrooms. And so I was expecting some type of response from them, and I was like, "He said I can do five grams, and I'm down to do it." And their faces were like, "Come on in, and let's put your bags down." I was like, that's an interesting response. Maybe that's too much. So 10 minutes later, drink in the lay of the land, "James, we're doing iowaska tonight." And I was like, "Oh, shit. Okay." I thought I was working up to that, but we're jumping right into the deep end. And I was like, "All right, let's do it."

Had you done mushrooms before?

No.

This was going to be your first mushroom trip. They said, "No, we're actually going to go full iowaska."

Right. And so for people familiar, that's going to the level seven stuff. At least when I was telling friends, when I came back, they were like, "Whoa, that's pretty advanced stuff for your first trip." And I think that's probably the first test of the entire experience, was can you let go of your preconceived notion of what something was going to be like? Can you let go of that? And this conversation is going to get woo-woo, so we might as well just start now. Can you let go and just trust the universe and where it's taking you?

And they tell you and lead up to it, to start reinforcing this message in your mind of letting go, of having experiences in your day that you didn't quite imagine, but can you let go and go with it? So I remember seven days before, I was in Montana on a fishing trip, and I was in a kayak, we were just floating down the river, and I was going backwards. And I don't know why this is such a meaningful visual in my head, but I think about this pretty often, that I was going backwards. And I'd already had that type of guidance to start to prepare my mind for letting go, that as I was going backwards in a kayak down the river, I just said, "Okay. Worst case, I hit something unintentional, flip, but I'm just going to go with it." And I floated backwards for probably 30 minutes, 40 minutes down the river, didn't hit a single thing, and then lightly just turned around.

And I think that was a really important preceding moment to the experience with psychedelics or experience with iowaska, of just being really comfortable and reinforcing this neural pathway of let go.

My analytic mind is so conflicted here, because on the one hand, I fully embrace and support the power of what it looks like to be able to let things go and your preconceived notions of what something's going to be. But then I also think what's popping into my head is friends of mine just went and took an avalanche course. And one of the primary lessons that they give you is you make a plan when you're off the mountain. And once you get on the mountain, you don't deviate from the plan. Once you've closed down the possibility of a trail, you don't reopen it just because you get there and it looks really cool. You've already made a plan.

And I'm thinking about you showing up at this shaman's house, having made peace with this idea of having a particular kind of journey, and then just being like, oh, well, fuck it. I guess I'm going to do this totally different thing. I can see how that opened possibilities for you, and I can also see how it could get people into tough emotional places if they weren't really ready.

Yeah. Kayaking, I think, is the opposite of that. You have a plan, but you got to go with river. I guess experientially, I was kayaking, but I mean this more metaphorically. You've got to go with the new information and go with the flow when you're kayaking. And even the fears that you have, there's the phenomenon of the rock effect where whatever you look at is what will pull you towards that object. And so if you're fearful of the rock, then you're supposed to remind yourself of rock effect. Don't look at it, because it'll cause you to go right into it.

And I think it was helpful that I'd had this pattern of just let go, let go, let go. And it had worked in those two weeks prior. And I'm someone that really loves control. So that was not a normal-

Join the club. I think that might be the most populated club on earth.

Yeah, exactly. But I love it to an insane degree. I've taken personality tests. And I thought as an entrepreneur, as a creator, as someone that's moved around the world to go pursue different creative pursuits, that I thought that I didn't mind control. And it was actually through one personality test I did maybe a year or two ago, that it was actually, no, you crave so much control that that's why you have to be the entrepreneur, and you don't trust being in someone else's system. And it's not like I actually prefer ambiguous situations. It's that I really prefer ambiguity over someone else being in control.

So that feels like an interesting lead in to think about how this iowaska trip treated you. Because although there's an element of agency in it, I don't think there's a whole lot of control. So what was that like for you?

I don't know. I will say the only agency I had in that experience was deciding to let go. The concept of letting go is something that I've tried to invest in quite a bit. And I'm really fortunate that our dad taught us to meditate when we were really little. At eight, started to teach us to meditate. And so I'd already worked through, I think, a lot of traumas.

And I think this was an important part of why the experience was the way it was for me. I didn't go in with this desire of like, I want it to solve this for me, or I want it to solve X or Y. I was just like, "I'm getting on a river, and I don't even care where it goes." So it started from this. And that's actually, they say you should bring in an intention, and I just didn't have one. And the intention was let's fricking explore, go off the deep end and see what's out there. Again, I did a lot of research before doing this. Did a lot of research on what are the preconditions that could lead to psychosis, did a lot of research on is there any interactive developments to my heart condition? Are these guides really good?

So I did a lot to make sure that I was in a scenario where I could let go, because jumping in category five rapids and letting go is not a great recipe for survival. But I felt a lot of trust in my surrounding and my guides. So yeah, I was in a place where I was totally okay losing control.

And so what did it actually feel like? What did you see, feel, hear, taste, experience?

Oh, it's impossible to put in words, and that's not just a hippie dippy thing to say. It really is... I'd say 50% of it is the experience, and then 50% of the experience is the integration afterwards. And that takes weeks and months.

For my experience, they said don't make any life decisions for 90 days afterwards, any big life decisions for 90 days afterwards, so that you really can integrate the whole experience and then use it to make any big life decisions.

On day 92, I quit at Airbnb. So I waited the 90 days and knew, okay, this is an outcome of this. But that night, the experience, I get there. And there's a little room that the guys walk me to and put my bags down, and we go have meditation session outside and have a conversation. It's out in nature, so it's really beautiful just to see the woods.

Then we go back inside and sit down, and you do it on an empty stomach. And there's smoking of some incense, maybe some Palo Santo wood, and go over what the experience might be like. You might see visions. You might not. It's going to be six to seven hours. You might throw up. I didn't end up throwing up, but I knew I was fearful of that.

But we jumped right into it and drank this tea, which is a sludge, tastes awful. And the active agent in iowaska is DMT. And DMT ,that psychoactive agent, the way that doctors think that it works on the brain is that it quiets the default mode network, which is where your ego sits, where your sense of self and therefore where your sense of vulnerability or your sense of self preservation sits.

So I drink the stuff, tastes awful, goes down the throat really slowly, which makes it doubly worse, and sit around for 30 minutes and then start to feel these effects. Some people see visions. It's hard to describe it. I didn't really see anything, but when I close my eyes, it's almost like if you close your eyes really tight, you see the shadows of patterns you were just looking at moving around. It was like that when I would close my eyes. It was just patterns everywhere. But it wasn't what they would call hallucinogenic experience because when my eyes were open, I just saw darkness and the windows.

I think what I'm most curious about in this moment is what it was like for you emotionally. How were you tolerating this? Was it really overwhelming? Did it feel cathartic, did it feel... what were you feeling?

Yeah, it was all of the emotions, but for the most part, the theme was, holy shit, this is awesome. And not in the recreational sense. It was like I had the permission to say, "Whoa, this is awesome."

Actually awe-striking.

Right.

Yeah.

Like someone was giving me permission to just be awestruck by everything. So much of life is these patterns of be cool, keep your cool, act normal. And this was like, no, there's a lot of crazy cool things that are happening all around you, whether it is literally just in the sound of the crickets that I could hear. I was like, "Whoa, it's been 30 years since I sat and really listened to that." To the fact that I have this amazing newborn daughter that is just out of nowhere, the most important thing in my life has just sprouted, feels like overnight, and makes me question my ability to value judge anything because oh my God, this is a million times more important, to just quieting the ego and being like, get self-preservation out of the equation, take stock of everything. To where the emotion was this phrase of this is it, this is it. This is what it's all about.

And I know how silly all of this sounds, especially to friends of mine that think this is just so West Coast. But I remember putting my hands behind my head and crossing my legs, sitting back like you would in a hammock or in a cartoon version of someone relaxing. I had this huge smile on my face, and I laughed for an hour. I was laughing and smiling because I was like, "Oh my God, I'm giving myself permission to enjoy this place and this space and this experience."

Really being present for a moment.

Yeah. For-

A long moment.

A long moment.

Yeah. And so when you came out the other side, what did you take with you? What felt like it had shifted in your mind?

Yeah, a few things. There was this pattern that I kept going through in my head, where I was like, life is a party and really fully enjoy it. It's a sin to do anything but fully enjoy this. And it was that strong, and it still is to this day. And then go towards where things are uncertain and it's not necessarily good or bad, but you're leaving the certainty of it being good and fun and comfortable voluntarily. Then it was not the bad, but at least the certainly dangerous. Go into the dangerous.

Like suffering or like unknown?

Unknown, but you know it's going to be dangerous. The previous was uncertain good or bad. This is certain bad. And so I got into that part, and I was like, "Oh, shit. I voluntarily have gone into the dangerous part. What am I doing? I was so stupid. I was having a blast before. Now it's uncertain and dark." And it was a pull, like going down the river. The stream was going towards this fourth and final part, which is absolute fear of there will be a break. You'll never be able to go back. And this is going to be absolute darkness. There's no light in this part. There is nothing redemptive about going in here, at least that you can imagine, but there's no going back, and you're going down the stream, and you need to let go and go into it.

And this was... I didn't know it at the time, but over time I realized, okay, that part, it's only pixel thin. It's a centimeter thin. But if I went into it and voluntarily went into it, it would put me right back into holy shit, life is awesome. And then I would go through it again. And it's uncertainty, then darkness, and then, oh shit, this is going to be super painful, and then snap all the way back to whoa, this is awesome. So-

It's a hell of a party you've been invited to.

Yes. A hell of a party. It's the best party. It's like going to a haunted house. You want to be scared, or you want that emotional arc. And it was that pattern 400 times, just I would go through it over and over and over again. The entire experience was you're going to learn to let go and go into the fear, and right on the other side of the fear is bliss. That is where heaven is, is right on the other side of what you're afraid of.

And that experience, being able to go through that 400 times, was unbelievable for... and Michael Pollan talks about this in his book, How to Change Your Mind, for creating a neural pathway in my mind of go through the fear, it's awesome on the other side. Go through the fear, it's awesome on the other side.

And if I had tried to do that in life, I think... I've thought about this since. You're only given maybe two or three times a year where there's something really fearful that you have to voluntarily say, "Fuck it. All right, I'm going to just go through this. And the only way out is through. Let's do it." And most of the times, I know in my life, I'll try to go around it or back away from it. So trying to recreate that in real life, 400 times of a neural pathway that says, "No, it's awesome on the other side of fear," would've taken 20 years if not longer. So I got to create this neural pathway in six or seven hours, that right on the other side of fear is everything you really want. More so than the emotional side, I think that was this lasting neural pathway that, two years later, it's still really powerful.

You feel like since, you have faced fear head on in a way you might not have been able to?

At least I got to do it in a way where I was like, "Okay, this is safe. And I'm going to get some immediate feedback, whether this is good or bad." And it kept being good over and over and over again. It kept being the right choice. And it was so real every single time. Number 337, it was so real.

Do you feel like you were able to take that out of the journey and into your life?

Hell, yeah. Yeah. So I left Airbnb 92 days later, put in my six weeks' notice, and then launched a podcast, started to angel invest full time, which is whole new kind of professional endeavor, released a music album, which I'd always wanted to do, tried four different times, wrote a book. And was extremely, extremely productive, not because of anything other than being I've wanted to do these things for a while. And what's keeping me from doing them isn't a lack of energy, isn't a lack of time, isn't a lack of all these things that we think productivity is made up of. It's actually none of those things. It's getting over the anxiety that can hold you back from wanting to put something out there in the world, afraid of what people might think, afraid of what the reception might be of some creative endeavor.

I often hear iowaska compared to therapy. I definitely hear a lot of the mechanisms of change present in both. I think what they seem to have in common is it creates this microcosm or a Petri dish to experiment with your feelings, and you have this safe, supported place to see what something's like. And then if all is integrated, you bring that lesson out into the real world and can play in this new way. It sounds like you're able to do that.

Yeah. I love the fruits of therapy that I've had over the years, but it's different. And it was an acceleration of sorts for sure.

Yeah. I've heard plenty of people relay experiences that show how expedited they allow you to be towards something. What I think that ends up stirring up in a lot of people out there is this belief in some silver bullet and this desire to be fast forwarded to healing. And I worry about that because I think what the world really needs is to be empowered to do the long game work and to know that you didn't come to your pain easily, you're not going to come away from it easily. You do have to put in the time. What do you think about that?

I think escapism in all forms is the lesser path, and going through the fear and that neuro pathway sense, but also just in life, hitting it head on is really powerful. And I think thinking of even a therapeutic psychedelic experience as an escape of you have this real pain you need to deal with, and you feel like you need this exogenous compound to help you deal with it, I think is disempowering and probably not accurate. To your point, I think it's certainly not needed.

And I dealt with a lot of pain death early on with my sister. A lot of amazing amazingness in my childhood, but also some really undesirable things that happen when you have bipolar all around you. And so I think I had the experience that I had because I had already been hitting those things head on for years and years. Like I said, I had gotten to the point where there was no real trauma. I told the doctor, I was like, "Yeah, I feel like I've really processed a lot of what I've been through."

So it certainly was an acceleration, but not around or through a lot of trauma. It was certainly an acceleration of sorts of just creating these different pathways, going through fear and it being... Joseph Campbell as the quote of, "The fortune you seek is in the cave least want to enter." And I think it was that lived 400 times. The thing you're looking for is through the thing you least want to go through. But I totally hear you, that it does not seem to be this silver bullet that you go in and it's all you need. Because friends of mine that I've tried to do that, they did not have the experience that I had.

I appreciate you sharing that, because I think the desire to get somewhere quickly is a very understandable, normal one. And I think it's important to put the message out that if it were that easy, we'd all have done it already. We're all finding our way.

I have several patients who were part of the ketamine trials, so doing ketamine assisted therapy. And what's interesting is most of them were in institutions that didn't require any therapy alongside ketamine, and they decided that was important to them. And what I've heard through their experiences is that the ketamine has been life changing, really just in a very profound way, taking what was extremely drug-resistant depression, the way they describe it, off their chest and put next to them. So it's not gone, but now they're not being so suffocated by it that they can't really face it because they've just been surviving it. But what they've told me is that the therapy itself is what actually made the long term difference. Because once it's next to you, you do have to look at it, and you do have to confront it and understand it and work through it and integrate it and all of that. And if all you do is tame the symptom but never listen to what the symptom is trying to tell you, I think it will often pop up in some other way.

Yeah. I think I touched on, but to underscore, yeah, the 50% of it was those six or seven hours. 50% of it was integrated work that's still ongoing months and years after, because I think it's the much more interesting part of it, to be honest. And it's certainly such a crazy experience. The trope is that you don't get the trip that you want, you get the trip you need. And for me, it was... When my wife asked me the next day, she was so sweet and trusting to just allow me to go do this, even though we both were a little bit scared and unsure of what would happen. And the only way I could describe it was, "Who, that's exactly what I needed." Like I said, 12 hours before I would've said, "I don't need this." And yet it was, but really I think it was the reflection and integrative work year later, three months later, a year and a half later, that has really made it so much more palpable. I still meditate on what I had from that experience.

Well, it sounds like it was really powerful. I have so many more questions, but I also want to zoom out a little bit. As you know, the overarching theme of this podcast is talking about taboo topics of all kind. And so I'm curious what your thoughts are about why psychedelics are a taboo topic. There's the obvious point that the legality of them is confusing and different all over the place. And even you being willing to talk about this experience is a risk in a way, but why else might it be that people are not comfortable talking about their experiences in a public way?

Well, I think there's probably several reasons, some of which that come to mind just for me in my own navigation of how do I talk about this, do I talk about this. There's certain professional risk and social risk for your family. I know so many people that their lives are determined by trying not to say anything or do anything that would go against what their beloved parents would want of them. And their entire central tension of their life is what they want versus what their parents want. It can be as simple as people not wanting to be misunderstood by some one individual person that they love deeply.

For me, I think there's the potential professional risk, potential social risk. Even in my head, I'm thinking through how will my parents perceive this, because my parents are on the conservative side in Dallas, Texas. And I think one thing that has made me much more open to talking about it is I've got a brother that's had drug-resistant depression and bipolar for almost 20 years now. And we've seen as a family how futile our current efforts towards psychiatric help have been. And we're collectively really interested in this new realm of research. It's almost like it is this legal and social abnormality coupled with this personal crucible that then you also need to share within the experience. So it's just easier just not to talk about it.

I think that it's important to talk about it, though. I think it's actually one of the most important things we can be talking about it. So I love this idea of the podcast. I think there really should be no hot water topics. And I've been thinking that the last several months, that we should be talking about everything taboo, and we should be stumbling through these things together. Every single one of us has an incomplete view on anything, even if you're an expert. In fact, the more expertise you have in a subject, the more incomplete you're aware of your view. So the only way that we can have these slightly more complete views of really important topics like mental health is to stumble through them together, talk about them openly, invite disagreement, invite agreement. Many people's survival depends on us talking about these new frontiers of mental health exploration. And this one in particular is the most fascinating we've seen in a couple decades.

Yeah, I absolutely believe that most of the terrible things that are done in the world are done because of unfelt feelings and unthought thoughts. And I think by bringing up taboo topics, we are giving people permission to think the messy thoughts and to feel the messy feelings.

What is so interesting about the taboo things that you've mentioned... What are the different topics for the podcast?

All kinds of things, but a lot of them fall into the categories of sex, money, drugs, death, and therapy.

Those five things probably dictate 90% of our behavior. And yet they're part of this conscious effort to discuss them because they're, for the most part, taboo topics. Which 90% of our behavior being taboo to discuss, and then we're left to work it out on our own in our own heads, that is wrong.

I agree. I love a quote that goes something like it takes two people to think one's most unsavory thoughts. It's the idea that it doesn't always feel safe to go toward those really shameful things, scary things. And in the presence of another person, it can feel a little safer. But I think it's also about what it feels like to hear someone else say something that you've thought but have never said out loud, and how freeing it is to know that you're not alone and that it's something other people have been through themself. It's just a really powerful thing.

Yeah. I think there's a reason therapy and comedy are both taking off right now. And it's because so much of our life are these messages that you're not enough, or it's fake news, or it's filtered views of the world. It's just not real, and you know it. And then you watch a standup comedian tell you what life is really like, obviously in a very funny way. But I think what speaks to us in a deeper way to our spirit is oh, it's okay for me to have that thought that he just expressed openly. That's thoughts that we have in our head, and it's funny and it's nice for someone else to articulate it. But I think it's spiritually grounding just to feel for a few seconds I'm not the only one that's thought that.

Yes. And so much of psychology points to this idea that the most taboo things in our culture and society are the most universal things. And that's why we have to make them taboo, because we have to subtly encourage everyone to push them away. And so by revealing some of them, it's almost a guarantee that anyone who listens to it will feel less alone because we all feel these things.

That's cool.

Well, the way I like to end my podcast is I am going to give you a list of taboo questions about all sorts of things, some of them on this topic, some of them not, and just look through and pick one that you like, read it out loud, and answer it.

Okay.

Whichever one pulls at you.

Okay. So I chose the question of what is one controversial thing that you believe deeply. And we touched on it earlier. The thing that I thought more and more recently is that there shouldn't be any taboo topics. So this is almost so hidden in plain sight to the theme of this podcast that maybe it's meaningless to say this, but there really shouldn't be any taboo topics. You just mentioned it so eloquently, that the most taboo are the most universal. And when you flip that, seems so messed up that the most universal is the most taboo. So I think that towards us not feeling alone together and isolated universally is for us to talk about these things and invite that conversation.

I think one of the biggest epidemics of really humanity, but maybe especially in this age of technology and social media and everything is shame. Shame leads to so much of the pain in the world and of people turning away from things that if they turn toward would get them everywhere they want to be, which feels full circle to your experience with iowaska, that there's something about moving toward the thing we have been taught to move away from.

Right. Yeah.

Well, thank you so much for being here, James. It's been a real pleasure.

Thank you for having me, Emily. I love the concept of this podcast.

Thank you.

Thank you for having me.

Take care.

Thanks for listening to Emotionally Fit, hosted by me, Dr. Emily Anhalt. New Taboo Tuesdays drop every other week. How did today's taboo subject land with you? Tweet your experience with the hashtag emotionally fit and follow me at Dr. Emily Anhalt. Please rate, review, follow, and share the show wherever you listen to podcasts. This podcast is produced by Coa, your gym for mental health, where you can take live therapist-led classes online. From group sessions to therapist matchmaking, Coa will help you build your emotional fitness routine. Head to joincoa.com, that's joinC-O-A.com to learn more, and follow us on Twitter and Instagram at Join Coa. From StudioPod Media in San Francisco, our producer is Katie Sunku Wood. Music is by Milano. Special thanks to the entire Coa crew.