anything goes with emma chamberlain - psychedelic therapy, a talk with robin carhart-harris [video]

Episode Date: March 28, 2024

[video available on spotify] i've dabbled in the world of psychedelics a little bit. i've taken mushrooms a few times, but i really don't know a lot about psychedelics. however, it's becoming an increasingly more relevant topic as it's been revealed that they can help with mental health issues and have therapeutic qualities. robin carhart-harris is a pioneer and leading researcher in neuroscience and psychopharmacology, best known for his groundbreaking work on how psychedelics affect the brain and how they can be used to treat mental health issues. in 2019, he founded the world's first center for psychedelic research at imperial college london. basically, he’s all about using psychedelics to help human suffering to improve the quality of people's lives. so today, we're going to learn a new definition of psychedelics with robin carhart-harris. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

You know, I've dabbled in the world of psychedelics a little bit. Okay, I've taken mushrooms a few times, maybe five, maybe five times. And luckily all my experiences have been really good. I've taken mushrooms a few times at a party, which I've enjoyed a lot, because every time I've taken mushrooms at a party, which I've enjoyed a lot because every time I've taken mushrooms at a party, I've weirdly just felt sharper and I felt like a clearer view of the room. Socially it's been fascinating and interesting to analyze everyone in a psychedelic way. Like, I feel like I can read the room more accurately than I ever have before.

I feel like I'm seeing clearly for the first time. And my opinions on people sort of change and become weirdly more accurate on mushrooms. So that's been my party mushroom experience. I've dabbled in psychedelics, but I really don't know a lot. And I think it's becoming an increasingly more relevant topic as it's being revealed

that it can help with mental health issues. It has therapeutic qualities. And so I'm curious about this. I don't know a lot about it. So I'm going to be interrogating Robin Carhart-Harris today, a pioneer and leading researcher in human neuroscience in psychopharmacology. And he's best known for his groundbreaking work on how psychedelics affect the brain and how they can be used to treat mental health issues. In 2019, he founded the world's first center for psychedelic research at Imperial College London, and there he oversaw human brain imaging studies with LSD, psilocybin, MDMA, and DMT.

Robin has also overseen several clinical trials of psilocybin, MDMA, and DMT. Robin has also overseen several clinical trials of psilocybin therapy for disorders including depression, anorexia, and fibromyalgia. Basically, he is all about using psychedelics to help human suffering improve the quality of people's lives through psychedelics. And I think a lot of us think of psychedelics and we think of, I don't know,

doing shrooms with friends and painting, and painting, or doing shrooms at a music festival, or doing LST at a rave or whatever. We think of psychedelics as being something that is very much recreational and also illegal. It's just, it's sort of hard to comprehend in a way because I feel like we all have such a clear view of what psychedelics are. But today we're going to learn a new definition of psychedelics with the king. This king of psychedelics, you might not like me calling him that. Robin Carhart

Harris. Here he is. This episode is brought to you by Secret. Secret deodorant gives you 72 hours of clinically proven odor protection. How epic is that? And it's free of aluminum, parabens, dyes, talc, and baking soda. It's made with pH balancing minerals and crafted with skin conditioning oils. So whether you're going on a run or you're running late, do what life throws your way and smell like you didn't.

Find secret at your nearest Walmart or Shopper's Drug Mart today. I think my first question for you is to like fully, I'm just throwing it on you. My first question has to be, what was your first psychedelic experience? If you even have one, maybe you've never even tried them. Tell me everything. Right. It's funny that you would ask it that way.

Most people say, have you ever tried it? It usually goes that way, not, you know, tell me about your first one. I want to hear about the first one. Okay. Gosh. I'm just going to share. Yeah. So I was in my teens. I was the summer of 1995. I'm 43 now, so I was 14. Whoa! Young! Okay. Gosh.

And it was the summer holidays and I was with a couple of friends and we'd planned it out and it was LSD and it was called a golden micro dot. And I was in my hometown of Bournemouth and it all happened there. Yeah, that's where I turned on for the first time. And was it a good experience, would you say? No, it was pretty nightmarish. You know, it sort of develops and gets weird and then gets weirder and weirder and weirder

and then I thought I died and I thought I was in hell. Yeah, that's not good, is it? I thought I died and I thought I was in hell. Um, yeah, that's not good. Is it? I thought I'd been hit by a car and yeah. And so my, my bloodied corpse was probably on the road back there. And that's why I'm feeling this weird. That's the only way I could possibly feel this weird is that I must be dead. And so, yeah, that was probably the peak, uh, sort of, you know, uh,

negativity of the trip, but it got better. Good. At least it got better. I know I, I've been so lucky that I haven't had a bad experience. I have very few experiences, but I've always done mushrooms. Like that was my first experience was with mushrooms. It was at a party and it was just a little bit. And that's the only psychedelic experiences I've ever had.

It's just a little microdose. Like not even a microdose. It's like a little more maybe than a microdose at a party. That's all I've done. That's the better way to do it for sure. You think? Yeah, you know, within reason and context, but jumping in the deep end like I did was a silly way to do it.

I think people are more, you know, younger people are more clued up about psychedelics these days. What is the definition of psychedelic? Like what is it for those who are listening and even for me, how do you define psychedelics? So the word itself means soul revealing. If psyche means soul, most literally, the other bit means to reveal or to make visible or manifest. And kind of a poetic term, but coined in reference to psychedelic drugs, even though we apply it to art and music, it started with the drugs, came on the scene in the 1950s after LSD was discovered in the 1940s. So really like at its core, it's referring

to what these drugs do to the mind and that they reveal it, they open it up. So yeah, that's what the word means. And then psychedelic drugs are drugs like LSD, magic mushrooms, psilocybin is the drug in magic mushrooms, DMT and ayahuasca, there's lots of psychedelics. People sometimes lump MDMA, Molly, ecstasy in with psychedelics. And I think you can kind of get away with that. It's kind of soul revealing in a sense. It has different properties.

I'm not sure I'd put that one right at its core. And then maybe ketamine, but not really in my book, but kind of a bit. So yeah, there are some that are sort of fringe edge case psychedelics. Yeah. Do you think you wanted to research psychedelics because of your sort of horrific first experience or was your journey to researching psychedelics different, like what got you there?

I think it must have been that the, you know, started paving the road, but it wasn't obvious by the time I came to being kind of academic and quite different to how I was in my teens. I was just drawn into psychology. So I was really into psychology, trying to understand the mind, I guess, you know, wanting to better understand myself and other people. And then I got really into depth psychology, so psychoanalysis stuff like unconscious mind and the ego and Freudian stuff. And then while doing that, while studying that, I discovered that psychedelics were used in the fifties and sixties in psychoanalytic psychotherapy to reveal the unconscious mind and dissolve the ego. So when I realized that and the penny dropped and I thought about, you know, my trips, it all made sense and I was like, ah, yes, of course. Did you have any psychological challenges growing up,

maybe that made you interested in how psychedelics can help the mind? Like, was that something that was inspiring to you? Is that something that you maybe felt like, I think a lot of times we fall into our passion out of necessity in a way. You know? It's not always that way, but it kind of was for me.

It's like, I need this. I need to do this. Did you have that with psychedelics at all? You know, was it like maybe you're anxious or maybe you struggled with depression? Have you struggled with those things and has that made you more interested in psychedelics as sort of a form of therapy in a way? Yeah, in a sort of indirect way. So I was an anxious teenager for sure, socially anxious. And so that was the pull to psychology, I think. I was like, what the hell's going on?

Like, I don't understand this. This shouldn't be happening in a sense. Like it's annoying as well. So I, yeah, I guess in that sense, I was looking for some answers. I really was. And so that was, that was the pull into psychology and it was very strong.

It was really like only that, you know, I wasn't going to be a professional footballer that way, by the way, soccer player. Um, but, uh, so that was, that was the pool. And then it wasn't obvious to me that psychedelics were helpful for mental health until, until like I was in the job researching it in a sense. When I wanted to first research psychedelics, which is in my early twenties, and I'd done my psychoanalysis masters and I was looking for a PhD and I wanted to do a brain imaging study with LSD and I took that to someone in the UK and said, you know, this is what I really want to do.

But it wasn't because I thought they could be useful in mental, in treating mental illness. It was just that I thought that they were really, you know, amazing tools to see into the mind and that we would get, you know, amazing insights into the nature of the mind and the brain. If we did something like this, gave someone LSD and a brain scanner. In fact, I couldn't believe that no one had ever done that before. You know, it was some way along, probably once we started giving people psilocybin, magic mushrooms in a brain scanner. And then they said they felt really good afterwards, despite having magic

mushrooms in a brain scanner. And so I started putting things together, um, in terms of the history of magic mushroom use by certain cultures for, you know, visionary medicinal reasons, and then the history with the psychotherapy stuff in the sixties, fifties and sixties. And then we looked at the brain imaging data and saw things that made sense in the context of other treatments for depression. And so yeah, we put kind of two and two together and wrote a grant application to do a trial with psilocybin therapy and depression, which ended up being the first trial. And now we might be a couple of years away from psilocybin being a licensed medicine.

Wow. Yeah. Across the Western world. You know, it's all like little stepping stones forward, different studies, but that was a pretty important milestone one was doing that first depression trial with psilocybin. I feel like there are so many psychedelic drugs and it can be easy as somebody who maybe doesn't study it to sort of lump them all in together in a way. What are the key differences between the main psychedelic drugs?

Yeah. Well, the main classic psychedelics would be drugs like LSD, psilocybin, magic mushrooms, DMT, which is in ayahuasca, but people smoke DMT as well. In our studies, we actually inject it. And then you've got a compound that's sort of weird, but it's probably a classic psychedelic. I mean, they're all weird, but five methoxy DMT, which is identified from these toads quite recently. But anyway, I would say broadly speaking, at least DMT, LSD, psilocybin, those are the classic psychedelics. And they're the ones that might like open the psyche and reveal like, you know, maybe things that you've repressed or overlooked or for sure they're really perceptually visually perceptually disturbing. Like if we were tripping right now depending on dose, you know, the walls might be moving and swaying

and there's like a fractal kind of quality to things surfaces and everything's more animated and things can distort and then you close your eyes and you can have these very vivid elaborate visions that sort of morph and change have a kind of dreamlike quality in a sense. So those are the classic psychotopes, you know, historically, some people like to call them hallucinogens. Little bit misleading, because you don't typically see like a little green man

just, you know, run through the wall into the room and start dancing or something. Right, it's not random. It's not random, it's usually things that you're seeing that become distorted. And depending on dose, they can become really distorted and drug. And if you close your eyes, sure, you're seeing things that in a sense aren't there, but then they've got to come from somewhere. Yep. So they come from the mind.

Yep. So I would say like revealing things of the mind is really the quintessence of classic psychedelics. And that is what the term is saying. And I think that's true, that and the visual side of it. So near neighbor psychedelics like MDMA is more about sensation, positive emotion, like a sense of social, deep social connection. So it's more reliably positive in a sense, NDMA. It's rarer that it would get dark and scary like classic psychedelics can. You know, that's why it's often combined with, you know, music, listening and stuff and dancing. why it's often combined with, you know, music, listening and stuff and dancing. But in a psychotherapeutic context, it can allow you to go to dark places

without being overwhelmed necessarily. So for example, in post-traumatic stress disorder, people have been developing MDMA therapy for treating that. So, you know, combat veterans or victims of many types of trauma, severe trauma that cripples them psychologically, they can talk about those experiences under the MDMA where usually they just really couldn't talk about it. They would have overwhelming flashbacks, or they might dissociate. So it's an incredible tool to facilitate psychotherapy in that sense. And with MDMA, people generally can talk, maybe with the classic psychedelics, like a big dose of magic mushroom, psilocybin. It's so intense magic mushroom, psilocybin.

It's so intense and weird that like talking is left till later on generally, you know, in the psychotherapy that happens later on. Yeah. And then there's others like ketamine is more of a, it's more of a dissociative. I mean, it's defined that way as a dissociative anesthetic. If you give too much, it becomes an anesthetic and knocks you out. Yeah. It's dangerous that way. And, and it is used as an anesthetic and knocks you out. Yeah. It's dangerous that way. And, and it is used as an anesthetic in certain contexts, but it's less emotional

in a sense, and, um, I don't think it's, it's so reliably revealing of the psyche, like the classic psychedelics with the classic psychedelics in psychedelic therapy. There's often a lot of tears and actually it's a funny thing to say, but when people are crying in the trials, we generally know it's working. It's weird, but there's a kind of catharsis. There's a release of this pent up emotion. And we think that's, you know, part of the healing action. Yeah. We think that's part of the healing action. Yeah.

So do these different drugs, when they impact the brain, do they, do they impact the brain differently? Like do mushrooms impact the brain differently than LST? Or is it sort of like, I'm assuming they must be different because they're all sort of used for different things. Or is it that, yeah, like what is the difference on a technical level inside of the brain? Like if you were to look at a scan of the brain, it's like are different areas lighting up?

What's the difference? Yeah. So at the lowest level, sort of molecular level, yeah, the drugs look a bit different and that relates to how they stick to stuff in the brain and they stick to different stuff. And when they stick, they do different things as well. So drugs like LSD and psilocybin are actually quite similar and they look a lot like a brain chemical called serotonin, which is swimming around our brains right now and most of it's actually in our guts, but in the

brain, it does some important things. It's involved in a lot of different things, sleep, mood, and we think especially mood probably. And so there are certain signaling proteins in the brain of signaling proteins in the brain that serotonin would bind to and stimulate. And these drugs do that. LSD, psilocybin, because they look like serotonin, they're sort of like serotonin imposters and they're called serotonin receptors. These proteins that will kind of tune brain function in different ways. And there's one in particular, it's called the serotonin 2A receptor that the classic psychedelics stick to, and then they do their thing there. And to cut a technical, very technical story

short to the gist of it, by stimulating these serotonin 2A receptors, they cause brain activity to become, in a sense, more chaotic, dysregulated. Yeah. So the usual kind of regulated function of our brains and our minds, like right now, being able to talk and stitch things together, have some sense of like assuredness about what's what. That depends on the regularity in a sense of our functioning brains right now.

And when they get funky and dysregulated, so does our experience of the world. And that's kind of the gist of it. There's more to it. That's the sort of breakdown side of things. But maybe in, well, we think in the breakdown side of things, there's also a release side of things. So stuff that before was constrained can come up more easily. Like emotional circuitry can be let off the leash a little bit, you know, and that can account for the crying and so on. And maybe the insight as well, because memories

that were being constrained and now unconstrained and can come up. So that's sort of what's happening maybe during, you know, while the drug is in your system. But what happens after? You know, do you go completely back to normal at some point? Or like after you do a psychedelic drug, are you forever changed in the brain? We don't know, but you might be. So this is a recent discovery of ours. We're just on the cusp of splashing it to the public.

But we gave people their first magic mushroom experience, and we did it in a placebo controlled way. So first of all, we give them something inert that has no effect really. It's actually a very low dose of psilocybin that shouldn't have any action. We scan their brains before all that. We scan their brains after the placebo and then we give them a whopping dose of psilocybin, their first ever psychedelic experience. And we look in their brains a month after and we did see some enduring changes and actually it was in the anatomy of the brain, which is kind of weird and maybe at first a bit scary. And it is a question mark now is that, you know, what if we looked

a year later or even longer would we still see it? Like, is it a permanent change? What does the change mean? All these questions, that's kind of classic science really. It sort of teases you, gives you a little bit. You've got a bunch of other questions. So we have seen this change. What is it? So we look at the cabling of the brain and we look at how that changes, whether it changes at all. We saw that it changed and it changed in a direction which is the opposite direction to what happens in aging and pathologies of aging like Alzheimer's. So on that level, it's a good thing, maybe a good thing, we don't know. And it's a consistent direction to what happens in the brain when you go from being a baby into being an adult.

So the fibers are becoming, um, sort of more packed, we think, maybe, but we don't really know the cables are sort of truer in the direction that they're going in. Yeah. They're less sort of diffuse. In fact, that's what it is. It's a diffusivity measure along a, along a longer, long cable that goes from the front of the brain into the middle of the brain. Yeah.

Do you think, I mean, let's say somebody has a bunch of mushrooms at home and they eat all of them. It's just a bunch. They just eat all of them. Like what happens? Like are psychedelics the type of thing that you can OD on? Because it is, to me, like, you know,

with other drugs, like, you know, you can very easily OD, just die. Yeah. I don't hear about that ever with psychedelics. Can you do that? Like can you overdo it? And if so, what happens? Or do we not even know that either?

We do know. We do know because, you know, they say the dose makes the poison. It's true across the board for anything, any kind of drug. So you could, you could take too much mushrooms. What would most likely happen is just that you would sort of lose awareness, lose contact with reality completely. You wouldn't really know that you're a human. You certainly wouldn't be able to talk or walk, you know, you probably wouldn't.

I don't know of, of OD through the direct toxicity. I know of a vague case of a heart attack in someone who was elderly and had cardiac, uh, like issues, had a vulnerable heart in the first place. So it's, it's not like say fentanyl where it's, it's to OD and kills so many people. You know, even alcohol has this small window of where you can be a bit tipsy or drunk to it's pretty dangerous now and can be fatal. Thankfully, it's quite rare that you're going to OD because of like some organ failure because of psilocybin or some other toxins say probably be more likely to be some other ingredient in the mushrooms than psilocybin.

But nevertheless, if you eat that big plate of mushrooms, like it's not, it's not good news. Yeah. Psychologically, it's going to be a wild ride. You might not remember much of it. That too. Um, and, uh, if, if you are conscious and online, so to speak, it's going to be just so outlandishly weird that it's probably unpleasant as well. Have you found that a bad trip can actually be a beneficial one?

Yeah. Is that like, cause I mean, I think a lot of people go into using psychedelics thinking, I hope that this is a good one, you know, like I hope that I hope this is good, I hope that you know, I'm that I don't see anything bad, that I don't see anything scary. Is it inherently bad to have a bad trip or is could it even be beneficial in some way? Yeah, it can be beneficial potentially. So you know, it's not inherently bad. It, um, you know, maybe it is if it's, if it's really bad, so bad by severity

and bad by duration, like the entirety of the trip was just hellish. That's probably bad news. And, and that, you know, the lasting impact of that is probably going to be more likely to be negative than positive, or at least not so obviously positive. But many trips have the challenge and often that challenge happens early on when things start getting weird and, and, you know, your sense of self starts breaking down and there's something sort of instinctive that wants to push back on that. Like I don't like this, I don't want this, maybe attempts

to stop it and they're kind of futile. And so that resistance can sort of define the struggle. But what often happens is that there's a sort of almost like a surrender to the struggle. It's like, okay, I'm tripping, you know, let's sort of sink into this and drop into it. And then it very subtly and quickly can change into something that you're like surfing rather than just battling against. And that's the kind of way we sort of tutor people in a sense, supervise people when we do the psychedelic therapy, sort of mentor people is to, you know, we don't dress it up. It can be challenging and especially early on, but when you feel that, know that your body's safe, that you're being looked after. Know that we've seen this before many, many times. Um, we're confident in, you know, medicine and, and,

um, try, try and go with the flow of it. Yeah. Yeah. Have you noticed that there's something that can lead to a bad trip? It sounds like sort of fighting it can lead you to a bad experience. You know, is it even clear sort of what makes an experience bad? Is it maybe somebody who has a lot of demons in particular? Or can it kind of just happen to anyone? It's sort of whatever your subconscious decides to do. Like what, what do we know it creates a bad trip? It's not one thing, but we do know that there's a few potential contributors.

One is simply just taking too much drug. It's harder to surf something when it's really, really intense. And yes, people with a history of adverse life experiences, history of trauma, yeah, there's more dark stuff in there and it can come up. Also the intentions were, if you're sort of trying to take a psychedelic for escapist reasons, it doesn't work that way. And it's going to slap you in the face and, and cause a confrontation rather than an escape.

So it's like the inverse of what you were hoping for, you know? Actually younger people do seem to be more vulnerable to challenging experiences. I think that's true even if you take into account experience with the drugs. I mean, there's a sort of logic to people who are less experienced are more likely to have challenging experiences because those who are more experienced have, well, they've learned a lot, but they've also just simply gone back, you know? Yeah. And that would be unlikely if, you know, you had a really challenging experience and you close the

door on it. Yeah, inter-relational things, relationship stuff can be a trigger, life stress. Interesting. Yeah. And like situational things, big time, you know, tripping in the wrong place. And sometimes that's hard to predict because you could even be in nature thinking, oh, nature and psychedelics really go well together. And then like the cops show up or what looked like the cops, you know? And so it takes a turn that way. So, you know, that formula isn't always that reliable. What about microdosing?

What is the impact of microdosing on the brain? On the brain, it's, yeah, there's been a little bit of work. It seems to do something even when you don't really notice it in the brain, which is quite cool and curious. And that's the sort of idea with microdosing, is that you can sort of cheat the trip in a sense. It takes so little that you're not tripping, but you're getting something. That's really the idea.

And some people really swear by it, you know, big names, Paul Stamlitz, at least in my field, Jim Fadiman and like Manda Fielding, the Beckley Foundation, they're all really passionate believers in microdosing. And it's tricky because we've done a bit of science there and it hasn't always come through as compelling that it's really doing something. It's hard actually for microdosing to beat placebo in trials. Well, that's what made me, that's kind of what I was thinking like about microdosing. It's very trendy in LA, you know, to microdose and whatever every day. But it is, you know, placebo, people overlook placebo.

And I've wondered with psychedelics, it's like, if it's not, can it work in the background or does it have to be sort of a vivid experience in order for it to work, right? Like, is the benefit from the trip itself, like, does it have to feel like a trip in order for it to do all the things that it does? You know, I guess that's sort of been my question is like, is that trip and that experience the thing that changes the brain? Yeah, it's a big question. In the field, it's a big question and there's debate around it.

Yeah, I'm with the school of thought that the trip is important, really important, and actually the evidence supports that. So we can measure the trip in a few different ways. We can look at different aspects of its quality. We can look at how strong the emotional breakthrough is, that kind of crying stuff I was talking about earlier, the catharsis, the mystical type experiences, a popular one, what's that sort

of a sense of transcendence and being at one with things, you know, nature, other people, the world, psychological insight, having insight into yourself and your past that you feel, then feel is helpful. So these are all things of the trip, of the psychedelic, psyche revealing, you know, property, core property of the drug. And so to try and cheat that by taking a tiny little dose, I'm not sure it really works.

Or there's even ideas that you can cheat it by playing with the molecules and the pharmacology to get an action that isn't a trip, but is therapeutic. And I just think that that's sort of, sort of missing the point and also isn't really that logical because the trip in the human data seems to be carrying the response. So I think microdosing is a bit like trying to bypass some of the psychotherapy aspects of psychedelic therapy through just relying on the drug. And that's the other thing with microdosing is that it's a more regular use of the drug.

It might be a tiny dose, but the idea is to like have a course of taking a psychedelic maybe three or four times a week for six weeks, you know? And that starts to sound a little bit more like a course of an antidepressant like Prozac or something. To be honest, for people like me, having seen what psychedelic therapy can be in depression and other psychiatric disorders with just one or two dosing sessions, but the doses are high, but people are very well looked after. And there is that psychotherapeutic support before and after seeing the life transformations, um, with that approach.

I wonder why you would, you know, favor that old model of relying more on a drug rather than just one or two doses of a drug. And the rest is really the psychotherapy. Yeah. I think it's a bit of a, like an attempt to sort of cheat the model, maybe because the model is a little hard to fit into the system.

Totally. Let's dig into sort of the life-changing effects, you know, psychedelics can have on anxiety and depression. Sort of dig into what you've discovered there. Gosh, I mean the transformations are amazing often, you know, people claim that the intervention has been life-saving, literally. They'd say that they probably wouldn't be around anymore through taking their life. We've also done trials in anorexia and it's the most deadly psychiatric disorder, so life-saving but in a sense a different way, although the anorexia can be like a slow suicide in a sense.

And then psychedelic therapy for severe drug and alcohol abuse, Again, the intervention could be lifesaving. So yeah, the turnaround is pretty remarkable. And when it's so fast, I mean, I'm talking about the best cases, but there's a lot of very, very good transformations. And so people understand what kind of proportions am I talking about. In the depression trials, it's about two thirds of people, 60, 70% will show a significant response. Wow. That's better by roughly about 20% on current treatments. So it's a pretty, potentially pretty significant improvement, I would say, on current treatments by efficacy alone, how well it works. There's a bunch of other stuff to worry about in a sense, but that's a big one. It's got to work. It's got to work well.

So yeah, we have done those trials in depression. Personally, I designed a couple of trials, helped design a third trial that a company has now developed on and are doing a, what's called a phase three trial, which could lead to a license for psilocybin therapy for depression federally. This isn't some state level ballot initiative or anything that's happened as well, but, um, now this is through the medical system, getting, um, psilocybin approved so doctors can give it basically. And that could be a couple of years away. Um, MDMA could even get a license like that for treating PTSD this year. It's been filed already and has been looked at by the medical regulators here

in the U S you know, we're on the cusp of major like infrastructure level changes with psychedelics. We won't necessarily notice it overnight, which is a good thing, I think. It needs to be a sort of incremental change, but like key sort of milestones are about to be reached this year. So exciting. Yeah. Do you think everyone can benefit from psychedelics in some way? You know, do you think that, like, let's say, let's take the average person. I mean, being a human comes with challenges. Like, everybody has a little depressive episode, a little anxious episode here and there as a result of what's happening in their lives.

Maybe they don't have an ongoing issue. Let's take the average person who has the average ups and downs, but maybe doesn't need to be treated for anything. Would they still benefit from psychedelics in some way? Or do you think that it's not something that should ever be used for everyone and rather it's more useful when attacking a specific problem? I don't think we should be prescriptive. I don't know if Timothy Leary really said this, his phrases turn on tune and drop out and the idea is that he was trying to popularize it so that everyone would take LSD in the 60s. I wouldn't be prescriptive like that, but even so, I think most people

probably can benefit. There's no should here. It's just more like could. Could, totally. Yeah. And you don't have to be suffering from depression where, oh, now it's really obvious that it could benefit you. Yeah, sure, the transformation there could be really dramatic, could be life-saving, but that doesn't mean that healthy people can't improve in their life satisfaction and wellbeing. And they do.

Like, we've done those studies and quite reliably and markedly people improve and there's a, you know, often a nice long tail to it as well. Like it lasts. Do you think maybe for the average person it's beneficial because it's kind of fun? You know what I mean? Yeah, it's kind of fun, but sometimes, you know, like that first trip I was telling you about, it's not always fun. And you take too much, it's the wrong context.

And that's not just me sort of saying, you know, kids don't try this at home. It's just the truth of it. Um, you know, it, it isn't a walk in the park. It's a very weird walk in the park. And, um, there's a lot of drugs that are hedonic, that just make you feel good. You know, people talk about, oh, let's not be too, um, exception list about psychedelics. I hear that, but I also think they're quite distinct from a lot of drugs, um, in how sort of fundamentally they, they alter consciousness and then not being like most drugs being like obviously fun and, and, uh, sort of recreational. Um, sure they can be fun.

recreational. Sure, they can be fun and maybe in lower doses, but it can easily not be fun. Yeah. Have you used psychedelics to help you in your own life? Have you used them maybe as a tool to, I don't know, help you get through a challenging time? Or has that not made sense in your life yet? No, it's made sense. I've done that on a few occasions. I think it's best to not to take psychedelics too much and knowing the research I know that you don't need to, you know, can be pretty sparing. What does that mean? Like, you know, once a year or a couple of times. Yeah, just more like in medicine, you call it PRN. I think it means like it stands for pro

renater and I think it means you take the medicine when you need it. So not like a regular course, but when a symptom emerges, maybe take the medicine. Yeah. And that's PRN. Um, so yeah, I've, I've done that and it has been helpful. It's difficult to know how would, how things would have been having not done it, but I think, you know, I didn't do a trial on myself.

Yeah. Yeah. But I could tell you as a human in a sort of qualitative way, I think it was beneficial. Yeah. Yeah. A couple of times in my life at least. I feel like a lot of people look at psychedelics as something that is also spiritual. What's your opinion on the spiritual side of psychedelics?

A lot of people, I feel like I've heard especially people taking DMT and feeling like they're having some sort of experience with maybe God or, or, you know, something like that. What do you think that is? Do you, where does spirituality and psychedelics meet for you? Or do you find them to be separate completely? I'm curious your opinion on their connection. Yeah. Oh, the connection is real and very close and important. Yeah, it's a major aspect of the classic psychedelic experience with, you know, the drugs like LSD, psilocybin, DMT, 5-methoxydDMT.

It's quite dose dependent in a sense, I think, that it can produce these spiritual experiences. There are different names people use for them, spiritual experience, mystical type experience, peak experience, which is a bit more humanistic, a little less kind of supernatural in a sense, or potentially supernatural. Unitive experience is one I like because it does get to the core of it, I think. And also mechanistically, I'll lay my cards on the table. I'm not a supernaturalist. It's often the case when you're a scientist.

And if ever you were or had that in you, it gets kind of beaten out of you. Yeah. For better or worse. I can imagine. Of course, I've got to think better. But maybe actually there can be a sadness to lose sort of magic, but then there's magic in a poetic sense. It's very real and it's very reliable and a major aspect of the experience.

Any attempt to try and, I don't know, scrub it out of this area is just in vain because it's really a core aspect of it. We come back to the term psychedelic, psyche revealing, psyche as soul. And there's that side of psychology that talks about insight into yourself and your past and your traumas. But then there's another side of psychology, you know, Carl Jung, who would talk about insight into what it is to be a being, you know, a human being and sort of a deeper sort of human shared inheritance in a sense that for me and for him was a spiritual place. How we interrelate and how we relate to the rest of nature, very transcendent. And I think it's that transcendence that is at the core of spirituality, interconnectedness and oneness. And when you sort of explain it out, you realize it's not a woo woo thing, and it's a disparaging phrase, but it's not a supernatural thing. It's a very beautiful

thing of this universe. So yeah, in a curious way, I think psychedelics could help validate spirituality. If it needs that, many people might be challenged by that and say, it doesn't need validating or you don't need to validate my religion or anything like that. In the cultural domain of science, you certainly do. I mean, I'm not proposing we validate religion, but maybe the core of religion that is the spiritual experience, we could validate actually and explain what it is, why those experiences happen. Yeah. And then think about what the insights mean. I love it. Well, I can't wait to come in one day and get a little help with my anxiety. I'm a very anxious, anxious, anxious, anxious, anxious, anxious girl.

So maybe one day you can do a study on me. Maybe. This has been a privilege.