David DeSteno

And so there's data to back this up.

And you're hitting on a real important point there.

These

Practices are baked into these faiths to help us and to help the other people around us.

The question, of course, is how much can we extract without losing benefits, right?

Or without having those techniques warped.

And so I'll give you one example that worries me.

A lot of indigenous faiths use psychedelic loads, psilocybin or ayahuasca.

Now you can go do psilocybin or ayahuasca with your Brooklyn hipster friend in an apartment, right?

A lot of those trips, not a lot, 25% of them on average are bad trips.

8% of them can be so bad that people need mental health treatment afterward.

Why is that?

Well, it's because we are removing these chemicals from the guardrails that are usually around them that the shamans use to kind of put you in the right state to have this happen.

When I was talking to Michael Pollan, he said to me, you know, when I tried psilocybin, the one thing that I realized is

you have to feel supremely safe when you take it.

Because when that moment of ego dissolution comes, it can be beautiful or it can be terrifying.

And then you'll see these visions, and some of them can be very disturbing.

You need someone to help you reintegrate and understand what they mean.

And even at Johns Hopkins, that is doing some of the greatest research on psychedelics right now,

they don't call them a shaman, but they have a person who is there with you while you go on the trip, who is there for you to reach out to if things get scary, who is there to help you make sense of what happens, kind of like a modern-day shaman.