bad trip

That would probably be helpful.

And how do you connect this to this notion of bad trips and kind of like the overwhelmingness of...

Yeah, well, having a bad trip is very much an experience of being out of your depth.

of feeling not just merely overwhelmed by the sheer amount or novelty of what's happening, but finding oneself unable to do anything about it and not knowing what to do about it.

A lot of bad trips are involved in that sort of thing.

On the topic of bad trips, I'm definitely not one of those people who says,

oh, you know, there's no such thing as a bad trip.

You know, they always have

Being who you want to be, acting like the person that you want to act like, and just kind of really consolidating those new pathways.

What about bad trips? And I remember being a teenager growing up in South Africa, and all that I heard about was, "If you try these things, you're gonna have a bad trip, and you'll never be able to get out of it." Is there any truth to that?

We will be [laughs] able to get out of it, but it might feel like an eternity, so [laughs] I-

Yeah.

Some people wanna do that, and they, they wanna do that heroic dose and, and, and have that experience and just hope that it's not a bad one.

[laughs]

But I mean, so bad trips, that's the term that people will use colloquially.

Over the years, I've gotten some pushback from people online who prefer psychologically challenging, because people will still claim that they learned something from the experience, um, that there was value in the experience.

And the fear of a bad trip can be so harmful to people because when things start to get difficult, rather than seeing that difficulty for what it is, which is an opportunity to learn about what's inside of you, right? Psychedelics are nonspecific amplifiers.

But if you don't know that, if you don't know that like, actually the way psychedelics can work is bringing material from your subconscious into your conscious mind so you can work with it.

If you just think that sometimes trips go bad and bad trips can harm me, then that in and of itself can become sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy.

yeah i agree completely and this is i sometimes get criticism about that because this is one of these things where people say oh these psychedelic chauvinists they say there's no such thing as a bad trip well there is such thing as a bad what about this and of course i acknowledge that people have extremely difficult experiences i've seen it with my own eyes that have lasting negative effects you could go into specifically why but Most people, once they gain a certain amount of experience with psychedelics, they realize that it's just like any other bad thing.

And you wouldn't say, oh, I don't want to get into any kind of a romantic relationship because I could have a bad relationship.

Or if you had a complete psychotic break during an experience that set your life in the wrong...

I would grant that that could be bad, but I think that is such a... an infinitesimal part of the overall range of experiences.

I don't really think that that's what people are referring to when they talk about the existence of bad trips.