Transcript — "Why Dr. Andrew Huberman Changed His Mind About Psychedelics" (Tim Ferriss)

Raw auto-generated transcript, cleaned of VTT timing artifacts. Timestamps preserved as [HH:MM:SS] markers where present. This is a short (11 min) promotional clip repackaged from the full episode "Dr. Andrew Huberman — Protocols" (show notes: tim.blog/2026/07/22/dr-andrew-huberman-protocols/), not the full interview.

We spoke some time ago about psychedelics with a focus on MDMA and it seems like you may have some revised views, maybe a few caveats. I would be interested to hear your current thinking. So, this is an area you've spoken about and thought about pretty extensively, and I'm more of a newbie. As we talked about last time, in case people didn't hear that conversation — growing up, I made the mistake, it was truly a mistake, of taking some psychedelics at a very young age, quote unquote recreationally, LSD, psilocybin, not giving any thought to what the long-term consequences might be. Fortunately I didn't feel any long-term consequences, but I had enough bad trips — one, Robin Carhart-Harris would say you can't have a bad trip. There's no — you can have a bad trip, Robin. I've had one. It sucks. You're in the pit for hours and hours. There's no guide there if you're doing it recreationally as a teen. The brain is hyperplastic. It made me very, very cautious, almost paranoid about

[00:01:01] psychedelics for many, many years. Then also the last time we spoke, I talked about how in an effort to resolve what I felt were some long-standing psychological traumas, I did clinically supported MDMA, standard kind of MAPS protocol — take, forget the milligram dosage, maybe like 125, something like that, and sometimes there's a booster about 90 minutes in. You have someone there, you're doing talk therapy before, during and after. Tremendously helpful to be able to feel my feelings, to recognize what a whole-body feeling was about. There was never the experience for me of wanting to dance or have sex while on it — there was some shaking, a little of that, but it's an empathogen, as you know, not a psychedelic — technically an empathogen — and it raises both dopamine and serotonin simultaneously, which is very unusual for any compound to do, and raises oxytocin

[00:02:00] quite dramatically. The data actually say the empathogenic effect of MDMA is not due to oxytocin — through a kind of good control where you just give oxytocin and don't get the same clinical effects — but you could argue the cocktail effect, the synergy, might be important. So I did that a few times, total of four, separated by months or a year, clinically supported. After a period of that, I took a break and, on the suggestion of the same clinical group, decided to partake in a psilocybin experiment, high dose. Psilocybin, as our friend Paul K. put it, almost recedes the waterline on the unconscious mind. My brain often thinks in analogies — it's reflexive for me — so on psilocybin, almost

[00:03:02] everything that came to me in those sessions was a kind of symbolic representation, an analogy. Somebody else who represents their world differently — maybe musically, or through somatic experience — will likely experience insights through those same kinds of representations. What I found from the psilocybin work was that it was exquisite at revealing to me the structure of my thinking, and the ways some of the patterns in my life that weren't serving me well were structured. There's this form of self-seduction I do, which takes actually eight forms — one example: I can be seduced by the enchantment of some

[00:04:02] sort of promise of a future outcome that's not realistic, and once you see that pattern, you can't unsee it. That, for me, was an incredible experience. I do think it was important to keep a journal afterward, to take notes while off the drug — that was very, very helpful for understanding the structure of my thinking, both for things that serve me and things that don't. I don't want anyone to run out and take these things without clinical support — there are a number of people who shouldn't be taking them, and all the usual caveats apply, young people etc. But the real "whoa, one-session-type rewiring" —

[00:05:00] the hardest work I've ever done, having done lots of therapy — was to take MDMA and then, a couple hours later, take a high dose of psilocybin. I've only done that twice. The interesting thing was: no two-days-later drop, which you do experience with MDMA alone — I just did not experience that when I took psilocybin with it. Remarkable. Had some of my best workouts, best work weeks. But on MDMA, as an empathogen, you feel very good about most anything you focus on — you can find the peace in it, the love in it. That's the danger — you can get pulled into these force fields of thinking

[00:06:01] something's really important that might not be that important once the session's over. That's why it's important to have a trained guide with you. But there's the drop. Psilocybin, for me, was a very dark and harrowing experience — a lot of purging, a lot of vomiting, about halfway through. These weren't enormous doses, but they weren't small either — 4 to 5 grams of dried mushrooms. It was terrifying to be on psilocybin alone, extremely difficult. The combination of the two was like having a good friend in there with me saying "you can do this." I'm going to give a concrete example so it's not too vague — I'd spent a fair amount of time thinking about some of the harder things that had happened in my childhood, in my life, some self-inflicted, some

[00:07:00] not. I'd come to peace with those through standard psychotherapy, journaling, MDMA and psilocybin separately. Taking them together, I had a voice in my head saying "it's time to do the real work," and I said out loud, "I thought we're just going to listen to Grateful Dead today," and the person helping me said no, that's not how this works. I didn't want to do this, and I didn't even know what "this" was — I just knew there was something important there. It can be very, very scary, it comes at you like a storm, and you can push it away. I could have spent the entire time listening to the Grateful Dead. Instead, I

[00:08:00] was like, "okay — with these two compounds in me, I can do this. I've got myself held. I'm my own friend — that's the empathogen." That session took me through a brutally hard voyage of thinking about all the things that didn't happen, all the things I would wish had happened, that I was in no position to make happen for myself. Heavy, gnarly. Coming through it, I realized those are the things I know I can create now. There is no way a therapist was going to sit down and say "let's talk about what didn't happen" — no one's

[00:09:00] ever done that for me, and if they had, there's no way I'd have had access to the full emotional experience of that lack. So I give that as an example — not what everyone would experience, but I'd never thought about the problem of what hadn't happened as a viable thing to explore. The outcome of that brutally hard session was beautiful — no additional drug, nothing, and it stayed with me. This was over a year ago. I thought, "this is awesome, I can create these things, I know exactly what to aim for." It started to make steps in my life, steering the ship in that direction. And I think the medicines, as we think of them, are immensely powerful, immensely precarious. You need the support — I've been told in these sessions, "maybe we don't go there," that feels like a repeat. You

[00:10:00] need someone to help guide you. These are not to be used recreationally, in my opinion — at least not for folks like me. I'm just not interested in that. But the lesson I learned is: neuroplasticity is the goal, directed toward something we often can't identify through standard therapy. You'd say "I'm trying to resolve my traumas" — that's a sentence. But what about the things that didn't happen? It never would have occurred to me. It revealed both the thing that needed work and let me do a lot of the work in real time, and spit me out the other end — I wasn't cratered coming out, it was an ass-kicking of a whole other level, with a clear mission in mind that has served me very, very well. It also reminded me we seem to have this one-compound-type view, and I'm not suggesting polypharmacology is the way, but in this case it turned out to be

[00:11:00] the appropriate tool for me.