Speaker 1: 0:16

Hi, this is Omid Ashtari and Natasha McElhane. In this episode we speak to Dr Rosalind Watts. Dr Watts is a clinical psychologist and a nature lover. Her work as the clinical lead for Imperial College London's Psilocybin trial has made her one of the most prominent voices and minds in the field of psychedelic research.

Speaker 2: 0:37

Dr Watts has been named as one of the 50 most influential people in psychedelics. She builds tools and structures to foster connectedness after psychedelic experiences, finding inspiration for their design from nature. She co-founded the UK's first psychedelic integration group and in 2022, launched ACER, a global online integration community. We will talk about the difference between macro and micro dosing categorizing synthetic and natural compounds the importance of post-trip integration how psychedelics are changing our approaches to therapy the conundrum of corporate interests and democratization of use.

Speaker 1: 1:17

Regulation ACER appropriation of indigenous practices doing the work and being a tenant in your own trauma.

Speaker 2: 1:27

The default mode network. We are eight episodes in and wanted to thank all of you for your support and feedback so far.

Speaker 1: 1:37

If you want to get in touch with us, use the link in the show notes. If you like this podcast, share it with one of your friends to spread the word.

Speaker 2: 1:45

And if you don't like it, please just shut up. Now let's go on a trip.

Speaker 1: 1:54

I'm going to leave that Hi there. This is Omid Ashtari.

Speaker 2: 1:59

And I'm Natasha McElhone, and with us today we have Dr Rosalind Watts.

Speaker 3: 2:04

Hi Ros, Hello. Thanks for Ros Hello.

Speaker 1: 2:06

Thanks for taking the time. So I wanted to start us off by looking at some of the studies that John Hopkins and Imperial have done to explore the application of psychedelics for therapy resistant depression, which seem to be promising. Let's ease our way into this by talking about what these studies usually look like and what kind of compounds they use.

Speaker 3: 2:25

So well, thank you for the question, because it's actually really nice to go back there again and remind myself of when I first started working in psychedelic science at Imperial and the research that was happening at Johns Hopkins was well underway and we really learned from them in terms of how we did our trials. So when I joined Imperial this is nearly 10 years ago now we were using a particular therapeutic model for these clinical trials. Looking at psychedelics, we were looking at psilocybin, which is the synthetic form of, like magic mushrooms, so it's the active component in magic mushrooms and that was what they were using at Johns Hopkins as well. So much of the research looking at depression and other things like addiction has been using psilocybin. That's the predominant one in the clinical research, the modern clinical research that's been happening in the last kind of 20 years or so, um, but I can tell you a little bit about the other types of psychedelics as well oh, that would be great.

Speaker 2: 3:17

Yeah, if you can give us the categories and which are man-made and which are, yes, natural.

Speaker 3: 3:23

Yeah, it's a good, good way to begin, I guess. So, um, so, first thinking about kind of synthetic psychedelics that are used in clinical trials psilocybin, as I just mentioned, from magic, derived from magic mushrooms, um, made in a lab, synthetic psilocybin that is most commonly used for trials. Lsd is also used. Now, lsd is synthetic. They think it derived originally from an ergot grain, but LSD is always made in a lab. So psilocybin can be used as the plant form or the fungi form mushrooms, or as the synthetic compound made in a lab.

Speaker 3: 3:57

Psilocybin, lsd is made in a lab and it's similar to psilocybin, but it lasts a bit longer, but otherwise very similar. And it's similar to psilocybin but it lasts a bit longer, but otherwise very similar. Then you have mescaline, which is slightly different. It's a different category, so it's not one of the classic psychedelics. So it has a slightly different mechanism of action and works in a slightly different way, which moves us more into the category of MDMA, which is also synthetic. Oh, and I should say that mescaline, which is synthetic, made in a lab, it comes from cacti. And then you, yes, you're moving more towards the what we call intactogens. So, whereas psilocybin and lsd are, well, psychedelic means mind manifesting or soul manifesting. So the idea is that you are having an experience where you're seeing things or feeling things that are revealing parts of yourself coming from within that are already there.

Speaker 2: 4:48

That are already there.

Speaker 3: 4:50

So you're learning about yourself from an experience where you essentially in our trials, the model we had was where you would be lying down on a couch with an eye mask on, with guides there by your side, but very much not directing. The experience is coming from within you. Music is there to guide it, but you're having your own mind manifesting or soul manifesting experience supported by others, rather than those other people directing you. Like in a classic psychotherapy experience where the therapist has an idea of where you might go with the psychedelic experience. It's very much led by your own inner they call it the inner healing intelligence and that directs where you are led to. So, as I was saying before, so with the mescaline we're moving more into the category of intactogens. Mdma is in that category and that's also synthetic, made in a lab. Mdma is different from the classic psychedelics in that the impact it has on people when people take it recreationally is that that would be ecstasy, right it, which is ecstasy yeah is um, it's more of an outer experience.

Speaker 3: 5:52

Usually people aren't doing it so much on their own in a room with an eye mask on to explore their own inner world. It's more of a experience of connection and love. So people would use ecstasy in clubs in the 90s and the the word intacted in. It's about kind of. There's something about the contact between people. People would hug each other a lot and it's used now in psychedelic therapy because it essentially relaxes the threat system in the brain. So it allows people just to open up and come into a kind of heart space rather than feeling very anxious.

Speaker 3: 6:24

So MDMA is used more for PTSD. So the ones I said before are used more for depression, and then MDMA we're moving into something that's more for PTSD. And then ayahuasca we're moving on to now is a vine. So we're moving away from the synthetics now onto the kind of plant substances and ayahuasca is. The active component is DMT, and DMT is used sometimes in studies for depression. It has been used in clinical trials as well as has ayahuasca. Dmt is shorter acting, so where psilocybin is like six hours, lsd is about 12 hours, dmt is about one hour.

Speaker 2: 7:02

And what does DMT stand for?

Speaker 3: 7:04

So DMT stands for NN dimethyltryptamine, and there are various different forms. It's being studied at the moment. One of the forms is called 5-MeO DMT and that comes from a toad. So again we have the synthetic and we have the natural form, and often the synthetic form, when it comes to 5-MeO-DMT, is more ethical, because obviously there's issues with harvesting substance from toads and 5-MeO-DMT well, it's a very, very powerful experience, very short, and people can have these absolute kind of disintegration events absolutely, totally. It's not for the faint-hearted and not for beginners.

Speaker 3: 7:44

It's kind of very experienced psychonauts will spend many years before they ever um go towards by 5me or dmt I like psychonauts like yes yes, psychonauts, uh, you know cautious, um, because it is so intense and so sudden, but it's being researched for depression, with positive, you know, like it's too early to say anything about the results, but all of these different psychedelics are being used for depression and there's so many positive signals from all of the different studies and it's very interesting thinking about the similarities, almost that all these different substances are kind of doing the same thing.

Speaker 1: 8:23

Right, can we talk a little bit about actually what a study looks like. Yes, you know you were referring to it a little bit earlier, but say I sign up for one of these studies, what is the process of me going through the study? What's the pre-work, actual experience and post-work?

Speaker 2: 8:39

And who would you necessarily select for the study? Maybe what specific issues might they have?

Speaker 3: 8:46

yeah.

Speaker 3: 8:47

So thinking about the imperial psilocybin for depression clinical trial that I was the clinical lead for and was designed, a lot of the different protocols around um, when I think about our screening, we, you know people could, could apply. There were various kind of adverts in different health care avenues, but also just word of mouth, and we had a psychedelic research group website where people could find out about this too. We had lots and lots of applications and the the selection process was so extreme that we ended up really only accepting a tiny proportion of the people that applied. So it's really important to say that with a lot of this research, the samples are really very, very carefully selected for lack of comorbidity, which essentially means you're looking for people with as clear as possible to just very simple depression without comorbid factors, which is, in a way, kind of unrealistic, and you're also looking for people with a really good support structure. That was the thing that we looked for the most, because in the first clinical trial looking at psilocybin for depression, which was much smaller, when I was working with people after the trial, I could see how people that didn't have a good support structure were just really suffering afterwards because often in a clinical trial for something like this.

Speaker 3: 10:02

With long-term depression, people have been suffering for a very long time, feeling very hopeless. They have a psychedelic experience. Something opens up. They suddenly feel like. One analogy was like the lights go on in a dark house, but without lots of ongoing further work, just one experience. Those lights typically fade, typically fade, and then you can either see that experience as like a doorway into a new way of living, for which you need loads of social support and people that believe in you and can help you like work with your values, or the insights that you gained. You know that inner healing intelligence I talked about before. When that shows itself, we need so much support around us to help actually enact that in our lives. But also when depression comes back, it can be very, very sad and very disappointing. So, yeah, we realized that people needed a good support network around them. So, but also when depression comes back, it can be very, very sad and very disappointing. So, yeah, we realized that people needed a good support network around them.

Speaker 3: 10:49

So people would apply. They would go through a long screening process. They would do questionnaires, telephone calls. They'd also have to go through some medical checkups just to check their kind of liver function and heart function and blood tests for that function and heart function and blood tests for that. And then we would start the preparation work, which was quite lengthy, which was a phone call. They'd come into the clinic, they'd meet their two therapists so all of the sessions had two therapists and we would talk about their lives, their history, why they were wanting to do this, their intentions for the session, how much they knew about psychedelics.

Speaker 3: 11:25

We would spend quite a long time talking about common misperceptions about psychedelic therapy, what's good to look out for and, really importantly, guidance for how to navigate the psychedelic space. So this you mentioned the Johns Hopkins research. So Bill Richards, who was the psychologist working at Johns Hopkins in the 60s, and then he continued the work as soon as it was made legally possible and mainly because of the work of Professor Roland Griffiths, who actually died quite recently, who was someone that really carried this work through and enabled Bill, who had been working with psychedelics for depression and addiction in the 60s. Obviously, then they were made illegal and he had to just go back to being a clinical psychologist working with other things and then, because of the work of roland griffiths at johns hopkins, pioneering this getting licenses for to renew this work, and I should just say that because I don't think we did.

Speaker 2: 12:19

For those who don't know, john hopkins is in america and these studies were carried out, um in new york at the beginning, weren't they? Yeah, so, so it was in baltimore.

Speaker 3: 12:28

So there was a baltimore, yeah so the johns hopkins university was in baltimore and they were the pioneers. And then the imperial team in london learned the protocols from the johns hopkins team and bill's had written a wonderful book called sacred knowledge and he's trained a lot of people on how to be guides in psychedelic therapy sessions and he really imparts to participants and to therapists that he's training certain kind of mantras. So one is TLO, which stands for trust let go, be open. The other one is in and through and there are all these little kind of beautiful ideas of just helping to guide people when they are going into the very deep waters of a psychedelic experience, to help guide them through and help them continue to let go and not resist, because the most challenging experiences with psychedelics are when people don't let go, when we kind of grip on to the rope rather than letting ourselves abseil down the cliff.

Speaker 2: 13:26

So can I ask you I know we're going to get into the stories and how those get hacked and changed and the integration process While we were doing the definitions and the categories, can you go into what happens in the brain or which of these compounds are similar to what we already have in our brains and which mimic our serotonin receptors or have the same molecular structure? Just the science of some of that.

Speaker 1: 13:51

What happens on the hood is, I think, quite interesting.

Speaker 3: 13:53

Yeah so many things in nature have dmt in them and we have dmt in our, in our brains, naturally, naturally occurring dmt. And so when people have vision quests or they go into a dark room for a long period of time and they have psychedelic visions, we think that that's probably the brain releasing DMT. We think that when we die, the brain releases a large amount of DMT. So when people have near-death experiences, the experiences they describe are very similar to psychedelic experiences. So worth saying that the effect for LSD, dmmt and psilocybin they're very, very similar and that you know, they last for different amounts of time, but essentially it's a very, very similar kind of experience.

Speaker 2: 14:32

So like that religious experience or epiphanous yeah, well, it can be.

Speaker 3: 14:36

So I would say broadly the kind of so in terms of what, what's happening. So you mentioned about what's happening in the brain. So I guess we don't know so much about that and I'm not a neuroscientist, so I'm you know, I I am a psychologist, so my perspective is more psychological. But just maybe just to kind of touch on that a little bit, so there is the idea that we, that psychedelics, deactivate the default mode network. So, whereas normally in our normal waking consciousness, the default mode network is our ruminative, maybe quite mundane, like trying to keep ourselves safe, essentially it's the ego consciousness, it's it's making us feel like a separate person that needs to cross a road and buy the shopping and keep ourselves socially safe. So it's the ruminations about all things we need to do and it's all the standard scripts so is it like what an inhibitor well.

Speaker 3: 15:23

So it's a, it's a pathway. That's the easy default setting for us to function in the most safe way.

Speaker 1: 15:31

The way I always think about this is that through you, when you're growing up, your brain creates neural networks, and these are the ones that are the most dominant. These are the ones that are the easiest for your brain to use, because it's calorically the cheapest, and therefore you always fall back to using those right yes, yes, yeah, I love that.

Speaker 3: 15:51

it reminds me of um so mendel kalin, who's a neuroscientist that was at imperial when I was there. He's developing music, actually for psychedelic therapy now. He used the analogy of a ski slope. So normally, when in default mode, network normal functioning we're going, climbing up to the top of the ski slope and we're skiing down and we're making tracks in the snow, as you said, the neural pathways that get laid down, and we just stay in that rut. So we just, through our life, are kind of on a loop, climbing up, skiing down the same pathways and kind of going around, and we can feel like we're stuck in a rut. The analogy that he used of a psychedelic experience was like a snowplow coming along and just plowing over those deep, deep tracks so that then when you ski down, you can ski anywhere, and it's this freedom, this expansive feeling of oh well, maybe I'm not that person, maybe I am this too, but what?

Speaker 2: 16:42

happens? If those original tracks are really quite healthy and good and the attachments that were formed were very positive ones? Do you want the snowplough to come and wipe them all?

Speaker 3: 16:53

out. That's such an interesting point, an interesting question. So psychedelics are non-specific amplifiers, so it's all about the way we use them and our intention for using them. So they're like a knife they can be used for wonderful sculpture, they can also be used for for harm. So if we're using psychedelic experiences because we have a particular pattern or behavior that we want to shift and we're conscious and we have that as the intention and we do it in a setting where that is supported and in the after care, which is so important as important as the session itself, definitely we work with that really consciously then we can change habits in a way that's positive. If we were to go and drink psychedelics in a cult where they wanted to brainwash us away from beliefs and habits that were actually, as you say, really good, that could happen too, was that?

Speaker 2: 17:41

Manson did that. Yeah, I mean most of these cult leaders did.

Speaker 1: 17:45

But I would take it even a step further. What I really like about the idea of these compounds is that they show us that consciousness is a much broader spectrum than the average human experience. The reality of survival requires us to function very quickly, to have a good grasp of reality and know that there is a tiger in the bush, so that we can jump on the tree, survive, propagate our genes, etc.

Speaker 1: 18:10

Now when you take these psychedelics, what happens is your auditory cortex can all of a sudden connect with your visual cortex, which is not very useful when you're running away from the tiger, but it's really nice to see some patterns emerge when you're looking at trees in the garden, right. And that's this shutting down the default mode network and letting parts of your brain connect with each other that usually don't. So there is something to be gained from that as well, and it is not that I think I like the analogy with the snowplow, but it's not that you're completely going back to zero, right. What usually happens is it's very hard to completely reset. You actually fall back into those very dominant patterns right.

Speaker 2: 18:47

What I was going to move on to from that is some of the criticism around these compounds. People say that you can have a psychotic episode because you wipe out something that's actually critical to how you are coping with life. I'm just playing devil's advocate.

Speaker 3: 19:02

Well, it's so important that we talk about that because for a long time when I was growing up, I thought that LSD was something that would fry my brain if I ever tried it.

Speaker 2: 19:11

That's what we were taught, wasn't it?

Speaker 3: 19:12

yeah, and so much stigma around them. And then when I started working with psychedelics and it was really because a friend of mine had had an ayahuasca experience that had really helped with her depression and I saw firsthand how helpful they can be but I remember when I said to my family that I was going to be working with psychedelics, they were like you know is that felt like a kind of risky thing to be doing. So we've grown up with a lot of propaganda against them.

Speaker 3: 19:39

But then the pendulum has swung the other way and there's this, you know, ayahuasca retreats are incredibly trendy and and actually I think, as we are moving into an exciting time when we're starting to think as a culture about reintegrating plant medicines and psychedelics in various different ways and various different timelines in different places, it's so important that we actually do, really with a clear, level-headed, clear sight, think about the risks, because they're not negligible. We're talking about high-risk sport in a way or sport isn't really the right analogy but it's a real pilgrimage and preparation and integration are really important and people can have experiences of, people can become manic, people can have psychotic experiences during the session and they can persist beyond. And it's when psychedelics are used really safely, with really good guides and good preparation and good integration. I haven't seen anything that's made me concerned at all about their integration, but when they're not, then it's something to do so carefully.

Speaker 1: 20:44

Of course. I mean, I think it's definitely sure you can't be naive about these things, but I do think that there's an alternate universe timeline where people think the way they think about psychedelics, about alcohol and cigarettes, right, and, as a matter of fact, you see a lot of deaths because of those which we haven't seen with any psychedelics so far. Anyway and I don't want to belittle situations where people have psychotic episodes. For sure, especially if you have a tendency to schizophrenia you should definitely not do these compounds or use these compounds without supervision or at all. So what I'm trying to say is they're actually maybe not even as bad as the stuff that's established in our societies as benign, which is alcohol and cigarettes and all these other things.

Speaker 2: 21:23

From a lot of the stuff that I've read and heard. There needs to be quite a level of shepherding through on a journey or an integration afterwards and with that care and attention, perhaps the use of any substance would be useful and helpful. And it's a shame that the people who are on the further end of the spectrum of illness and of mental disturbance are advised not to use these things because potentially exacerbating the problems that they're already suffering from. If you give this kind of preparation and attention and, as you say, you set an intention, many, many things in your life could work out, and there's been comparative studies, I think, around deep meditation or sort of Buddhist practices that if you get to this level of trance or focus, you can reach and open these doors without any compounds and without any assistance from you. Can do it internally.

Speaker 1: 22:24

I'd love to introduce the notion of the critical period that you actually introduced me to this is a doctor, gule de laine, from john hawkins university, who you sent me the podcast which I listened to and I really love that and there was this notion of critical periods and it points to moments of neuroplasticity that allow us to rewire ourselves in a much more profound way, and these critical periods are open only for certain amounts of time and actually, with meditation, as you're suggesting, you may be able to reopen these periods, but obviously these compounds are a very surefire way of doing it. Let's talk a little bit about that. Tell us a little bit about critical periods, about some of the research here and how you've experienced this gold dollars work is.

Speaker 3: 23:11

Is is wonderful and I think it's so important because we're starting to get the emphasis on the period of time afterwards. So we've had, in the psychedelics, I'd say industry, because it's a kind of a huge multi-billion dollar industry actually. Now, well, actually, I don't know about billions, multi-million industry, um, I think we can put a, b in front of it.

Speaker 1: 23:29

Okay, multi-billion dollar industry actually now. Well, actually, I don't know about billions, multi-million industry. Um, I think we can put a b in front of it.

Speaker 3: 23:33

okay, multi-billion industry. Um, we've had millions of pounds and dollars invested into drug development, finding new patentable types of psychedelic, where the one thing that we do actually have in the west is the mushroom. We've got the mushrooms and we have all sorts of different psychedelics that are already growing. The one thing we do have is the substances, and of course, it's good to learn more about them, but that's what we have. What we don't have at all is a culture that supports the healthy optimization and healthy use of these substances. We don't have a culture that has any frameworks for supporting people in that period of time afterwards.

Speaker 3: 24:12

So the critical period is kind of a couple of days to about a month where if you have an experience that brings on that state of plasticity, then anything you do it's based around social learning theory, it's based around consolidating healthy patterns and essentially it's like you're a child again. You're learning things in a new childlike way and it's really shaping your development in the same way as our critical periods in childhood shape who we go on to be and we think as we're adults, we're kind of calcified and we can't change. We really can. These critical periods, these incredible gifts, and if you think about us as individuals, but also culturally, collectively, the need for deep change at this very basic level of shaping what's important to us, shaping how we grow. It's so essential and, in a way, typical of capitalist culture, but that we don't. We've put all this money into optimizing the different types of drug and yet when we think about the social technologies around supporting this critical period, ghouls research is standing out there, but there's not much investment in developing models and frameworks and structures for for supporting this.

Speaker 3: 25:20

So the way I saw it at the imperial trial, was people coming in years and years of depression, having psilocybin experience and then witnessing what that critical period actually looks like in a human being? Was people coming in years and years of depression, having psilocybin experience and then witnessing what that critical period actually looks like in a human being, where people the next day will say I feel different, I want to go into nature, I want to be with people? Like we would see that happen. People would say I've reconnected with my partner, reconnected with my family. Suddenly I realised what I care about. I want to do some volunteering, this opening up or shedding of layers and layers of conditioning and layers of walls like brick walls that have closed in on someone over the years and the light has faded, those brick walls falling away, being open to what's around them, but then we would see that it just closes down again. So the critical period, if we can really support it has to be socially?

Speaker 2: 26:13

yeah, but isn't that? I mean? I remember reading somewhere that when this naturally occurs in an adolescent's brain and you have this incredible plasticity and they all suddenly their parents, fall away in their social group or their peers become much, much more important and they form a lot of their personality. In response to that Recapturing, that was what one of the practitioners was saying that you have this opportunity to no longer be an introvert, if you like, if that's been your set.

Speaker 1: 26:43

Yeah, it goes even further. I think in that specific podcast on Tim Ferriss they're talking about the fact that even for people who may suffer from autism, there's a critical period in your childhood where you are figuring out social cues and how you're adapting to your social environment.

Speaker 1: 27:10

And if in that period something goes wrong, whatever it may be, you may be more inclined to trigger certain genes that you're given epigenetically, and so opening up that critical period again through psychedelics allows people to rewire some of that. You know they may have a predisposition to certain behaviors anyway, but then on top of that history it makes it a lot worse and you can actually take open that up again to rewire that. Same goes for language skill and stroke Exactly, I'm so excited, yeah.

Speaker 2: 27:44

And a lot of motor abilities etc.

Speaker 1: 27:44

Exactly, yeah, and a lot of like motor abilities etc. I find, first of all, just the understanding that there are critical periods in itself is for me a fascinating thing, that our brain actually is in moments more open to just adapting and learning, and that's amazing. So that's just the compound, but I really it resonates with me what you're saying and that is obviously the money is in the compound, and so then, once you've delivered that, people don't care about what you do with it, right.

Speaker 1: 28:16

And so this integration and this building the community and culture around it is super important, because otherwise we're wasting all this effort.

Speaker 3: 28:24

So I remember when I started in psychedelic research. I remember people saying you have one psilocybin experience or one LSD experience. It changes your life and then you never need to do it again. And the big pharma were never going to be interested because it was a one-off experience that was going to completely change you. So they would not be interested because it wasn't going to make them any profit, because it was one-off. And then you were cured. So I remember hearing that kind of story, thinking interesting, and then, as the way things have evolved and I'm a little bit cynical about all of this, I have to say so if I sound a little bit negative, it's my slight sadness at the way the field has developed. In some ways it's incredible the way it's developing. In others, and of course it's natural that you have lots of different pathways through and that there's always going to be the corporate one. And you know, somebody like me who's a psychologist is probably going to be a little bit wary of that pathway.

Speaker 1: 29:11

Um, it feels it's still early, so you know nothing's lost yet, yeah no, exactly, and just on that subject.

Speaker 2: 29:17

Do you mean companies like compass or well? Is that the name of?

Speaker 3: 29:21

so I think essentially that the big psychedelic kind of drug companies are various different ones and I'm not going to say any names.

Speaker 1: 29:27

But there's a few different ones.

Speaker 3: 29:32

Some of them not all of them are taking as much of the therapy away as possible, and some of them are even talking about it as just a purely kind of biomedical intervention. That it's just about this. It's just a drug like any other. That you give somebody the drug and that they have this experience, and that there's just about this. It's just a drug like any other. That you give somebody the drug and that they have this experience, and that there's no follow up afterwards. There is no guidance in the session, there's no therapy in the session, there's no preparation, there's no follow up. It's just there you go. This will reset your brain, goodbye.

Speaker 1: 30:00

Well, this is like antithetical to the use of these things through millennia, right? Yes, about community. All about ritual.

Speaker 3: 30:07

Yeah completely and at first, and it made sense that they were doing that because I suppose it's about, you know, maximizing profit, that they have a legal obligation to maximize shareholder profits because that's the way corporations work. So it's this shaving off all the non-essential aspects. So I could see why that was was happening in some places. But then I had a slightly more cynical thought recently which I shared with someone at a conference and actually they kind of agreed with me which is what's given me the confidence to share. It here was going back to what I said before about you know, you have one session and then big pharma aren't interested because it's one session.

Speaker 3: 30:41

If we take away all the therapy, not only does it make psychedelic therapy cheaper, because then it's just a psychedelic drug experience, like a capsule, but then also it's likely to mean that that critical period is lost that the positive changes aren't really consolidated and so you have to come back again and so then it moves into something where it's just going to make you feel a little bit better for a while but it's not going to lead to the deep, actual developmental change, of the huge shift that we could see. If we decided instead as a culture that we were going to really think about ways to innovate and optimize and support the after period, which would mean that people would have an experience and then not only that kind of first month of the critical period where the plasticity in the brain mean that really focusing on therapeutic support in that month could have incredible impact.

Speaker 3: 31:31

so we have no idea about because we haven't ever done it yeah but that beyond that, yeah, we could just see psychedelics could be a gateway. You know people used to talk about like cannabis as a gateway drug into like hard drugs. So I like this idea of like the gateway drugs. But I think that psychedelics could be a gateway drug into community because Into changing everything.

Speaker 2: 31:52

Yeah, this is a good moment to talk about your project.

Speaker 1: 31:55

Yes, let's talk about Acer and the integration. But can I just say briefly before I like your thesis. I just think that organizations, corporations, want to do the most scalable thing, and actually dealing with having to, you know, do the therapy afterwards it's just not scalable because it requires a lot of human resources and so they are probably just profit maximizing by saying, hey look, you know, we can deliver the drug. That's an easy way to do and they don't care much about what comes after. And maybe it requires regulation or, you know, intervention by communities and therapists and all that to come in there. What I'm trying to say is I don't think there's conspiracy at play where they want to, essentially you know purport yes there are a lot of conspiracies in the world that are probably true, there's an additional issue

Speaker 2: 32:37

to support that, which is it's to democratize it. If you can put it in a pill form and distribute it to the most number of people, that seems a little more fair than this rather exclusive experience where you need two therapists, however many resources and time off work, and which just isn't accessible for everyone. So I guess it is a challenge how to get this going, whether it's groups, whether it's a sort of 12-step thing that you go into after the experience, or I'm sure there's tons of communal ways in which to do it, but it does mean we need to. It's a mindset shift, isn't it?

Speaker 1: 33:10

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 33:10

But tell us tell us about. Acer.

Speaker 3: 33:12

Well, that's actually kind of what Acer was developed for. So, however, people have their psychedelic experience, as long as it's safely held enough that they get through that experience without adverse effects and harm, which, of course, is a real risk when you without adverse effects and harm, which, of course, is a real risk when people have psychedelics without therapeutic support. But, however, people have their experience, whether it's taking acid at home because they want to experience it, or whether it's because they go to an ayahuasca ceremony or they take part in a clinical trial. People are taking psychedelics in so many different settings and what they're then seeking is a community of people to work through this critical period with and to really maximize the benefit of the experience.

Speaker 3: 33:52

But more than just that, it's just seeking community people that understand, because in our culture, psychedelics, we don't have a long lineage of psychedelic use. We don't have the structures of the understanding People still, they're still quite niche understanding people still they're still quite niche. So when people have had a psychedelic experience, they really want to find other people who have had it as well, who understand and who aren't going to kind of shame it or stigmatize it, but are going to help them learn and keep growing and keep opening. Asa is a global community of people and it came from my experiences of working in the trials and seeing that people had the psychedelic experiences and then they needed something like ASA to join and there wasn't anything. It's a year-long process because integration is a long process. So it's a community that can get really deep roots and can become quite strong and solid and you make friendships that you'll hopefully keep for the rest of your life.

Speaker 1: 34:43

And the notion of integration is taking whatever you discovered and putting it back into your life, basically.

Speaker 3: 34:49

Yes, so psychedelic integration is integrating, bringing in the wisdom and the insights, the gifts of the experience into your life so that you actually live it, so it becomes part of you, you integrate it into yourself. It's part of who you are. New habits, exactly.

Speaker 2: 35:05

New habits. Just tell us what the acronym.

Speaker 3: 35:07

Acronym what does it stand for? So asa stands for accept, connect, embody, restore, and it came from research that I did whilst I was at imperial, which showed that the the qualitative research I did with people doing psychedelic therapy. They described that the the kind of mechanisms of change that they reported in the psychedelic experience were acceptance of emotions, so being willing to sit with feelings rather than numb or distract. The emotion is there and all you can really do is just surrender to it and feel it. So it's that acceptance of emotion and trusting that it's a teacher. So that's the A acceptance.

Speaker 3: 35:46

The C is connection or connectedness, and that is if you think about kind of normal functioning. We're very much stuck in the mind and we live in that. It can feel like a prison. Sometimes we're very stuck in the mind and then when you really connect, you connect meaning values, the world's outside, your own ego prison. So it's about connecting to nature. Sometimes people feel the sense of kind of connecting to the whole universe. So transpersonal connection as well. So if you think about connectedness as a spectrum, you go from like the ego mind living in your head to this ever expanding concentric circles that includes more and more and more, until who you are is a kind of ecological self. It's a much wider definition of who you are. The e stands for embody. It really happens in the viscera of your body, it's it's, you feel it inside. It's very, very muscular or like muscular. It's not the right word. It could be muscular as well, um.

Speaker 3: 36:47

So the a and the c and the e is um, almost like the individual.

Speaker 3: 36:50

It's often called like the hero's journey, but it's the individual's journey of coming out of default functioning, which is the opposite of accept connecting body, which is numbing, disconnection and disembodiment.

Speaker 3: 37:02

And then the idea of a psychedelic experience, and our community is that it's really supporting this process of the opposite, accepting emotions, connecting to meaning and a bigger sense of self, and doing this in a very embodied way. And then the R stands for restore and it's about restoring yourself to the rhythms and patterns of nature. So the rhythms of nature is slow, cyclical, and the patterns of nature is interconnectedness and balance. And then the r bit is where you take that pearl and imagine it becomes a seed and you plant it in earth with lots of other people doing the same. So you find your group, you find your collective and you say how can we turn these insights we're getting into service to the world that we're in? It's a, it's a pathway for using your own healing experience to come into service to the world that we're in. It's a pathway for using your own healing experience to come into service to nature and to community.

Speaker 2: 37:52

Essentially, it's funny isn't it how the stories that we read kids, the myths and legends and fairy tales as you were talking about that it feels like some kind of Odyssean journey and really it is in our culture. Our movies are are, whether it's, you know, marvel movies.

Speaker 1: 38:10

they're all full of these teachers, these sort of elements of our psychology, that kind of talk to us and tell us how to be the best part of ourselves yeah, ultimately, what you're describing is how society was, I guess, hundreds of years ago or something like that, and now we're finding our way back to it, in a way. Let me take us a little bit in a different direction, if I may, and that is let's talk a little bit about microdosing, because we've been talking about macrodosing most of the podcast. This was pretty trendy for a hot minute and maybe it still is. I don't know, but it would be good to understand how it differs and how people do it and what your thoughts are on it.

Speaker 2: 38:50

And maybe you know what the spark to this in Silicon Valley was, why it suddenly became all the wage.

Speaker 1: 38:56

Well, yeah, in Silicon Valley, everything's about optimizing and trying to kind of figure out how to hack yourself to be more productive or more creative to have a higher output. I think there's an optimization culture around there. Creative to have a higher output I think there's an optimization culture around there, so it's ironic that you take this thing which, in many ways, has actually nothing to do with optimization and apply it to this optimization call, but that's the way it is thought to be used in Silicon Valley, for instance, and other parts.

Speaker 3: 39:21

Yeah. So whereas with a macro dose, you have you take a large amount of whether it's mushrooms or ayahuasca or LSD, with a guide, in a safe place, and you have you take a large amount of whether it's mushrooms or ayahuasca or lsd, with a guide, in a safe place, and you have your high dose experience and, potentially, your ego is dissolved and it's very intense. It can be very challenging, and then you're doing some serious integration work for a long time afterwards. Microdosing is where you have a very tiny amount of the same substance, so people commonly microdose with lsd, sometimes with mushrooms, sometimes other things as well.

Speaker 3: 39:48

I've heard that iboga actually which we didn't talk about before, which is a from a shrub used by the buiti tribe in africa, which is kind of three day long experience, if you have it as a macro dose, it can be really successful for helping people with addictions recover from those addictions heroin addictions, completely, I mean iboga is really worth looking into.

Speaker 3: 40:08

I I think you can imagine, though, that a three-day uh psychedelic experience can be extremely harrowing and very hard on the body, but microdosing that with um iboga has some people say it's incredibly effective as well. So the thing about microdosing is and there's a protocol by someone called james fadiman who really supports this culture of microdosing, helping people learn how to do it. You'd have the microdose on day one, day two you feel a slight benefit potentially, and then day three you either have a day off or you repeat it, so you can either do kind of microdose nothing, nothing, microdose nothing, nothing, or you can do microdose nothing, microdose nothing each day in the morning. And I have a bit of a bias against it because of exactly what you said about the Silicon Valley culture of optimizing, which I feel is kind of like really at odds with what the world needs slowing down. We need to slow down and come into connection with each other and into balance and optimizing culture and full speed ahead.

Speaker 2: 41:07

It's self-serving rather than yeah, yeah.

Speaker 3: 41:09

But actually what I think is happening as well with microdosing is there are groups of people using microdosing for really beautiful reasons and I think, whereas the macrodosing you know the whole idea of the hero's journey it's like not for the faint-hearted. I mean, I've had some absolutely terrifying psychedelic experiences. I don't take them lightly at all and you know they really really prepare for a long period of time and you just don't know where you're going to go. So they're very, very variable and unpredictable. So microdosing can help people get more in touch with their emotions, can help them feel more connected, come out of the ego self and connect with nature a bit more. And the embodiment aspect people can really feel more in their bodies, more sense like sensory.

Speaker 3: 41:55

You know I've had this conference I was just at in the netherlands. People were talking about women doing microdosing for the menopause and just lots of different groups of people doing it as a kind of communal, a ritual, a sacrament, a group activity to help people bond with each other. So I've changed my mind about microdosing. I think it can be really good.

Speaker 2: 42:15

Can I just ask you something, though? On the brain chemistry level, my understanding was that you had to take X amount of milligrams to be able to penetrate and sort of cut through the default mode network. How do you get near that if your dose is so small?

Speaker 3: 42:30

So even with the higher dose psychedelic experiences, sometimes people have this ego dissolution experience and sometimes they don't. So, thinking about all the people that I sat with in their sessions, sometimes people do have the dissolution and they are the default mode. Network is being kind of deactivolution and they are the default mode. Network is being kind of deactivated and they are going to other realms or other places and they're really kind of they lie very still, but often even the same dose with a different person or the same person on a different day. You'd have something that's much more like a psychotherapy session on steroids.

Speaker 3: 43:05

So you'd be feeling very emotional.

Speaker 3: 43:07

You might be remembering traumatic memories and living through them and you're very much not.

Speaker 3: 43:12

Your ego has not dissolved, you're very much still in your yourself, but you're just in a very deep experience of feeling emotion. So with microdosing, yeah, you don't have the ego dissolution but in terms of the therapeutic amplified emotion and amplified feelings, it helps you go from being in your head, being in your ruminating kind of mind and thinking of all the things you've got to do that day and then just being more in your body, being more in your emotions. So I think one way of thinking about it. I think ian mcgillchrist's idea of like left brain, right brain is really interesting, that we live in a very left brain culture. It's very rational and linear and thinking of all the things we have to do and thinking about productivity and microdosing I think can help people be more balanced. On a microdosing day people can perhaps the the right brain kind of embodied, relational, more sensory aspects of themselves can can come up on that note, obviously it seems like we're at a place where the usage of these drugs has increased drastically there.

Speaker 1: 44:17

There's still no systems, as you describe, very prevalent in society, that support the usage of these drugs. Obviously they were it made illegal to begin with because of overusage in the 70s and like 60s and people just going off the deep end. What is your concern around the renaissance of this stuff and a vacuum of re-regulation and support systems around it?

Speaker 3: 44:42

Yeah, I do. I do really have, as well as being so excited about the potential here, I do have concerns, because, well, the main concerns I suppose we're already seeing in the psychedelic community, both above ground and below ground so in clinical trials and also underground and where people are doing ceremonies, we are seeing cases of quite suggestible and people that like to be seen as a guru or to have lots of power might be attracted to giving people psychedelics. I think we'll also see people just not living in a culture that is our culture is very disconnected. We don't have many gathering spaces, we don't spend that much time dancing in our culture or enjoying communal experiences of music. Young people might go out clubbing, but we don't have a culture.

Speaker 3: 45:44

You know, when we go to a wedding and everybody dances together and all the generations dance in we say, oh, it's so lovely to dance, but we don't do that regularly every Saturday all together in the village gathering space or the town gathering space so for psychedelic experiences, to integrate them and to really come into connectedness. We don't have many places that support our deeply felt emotions, so we don't have but I'm just going to throw a cat please here.

Speaker 2: 46:11

I would say that our culture has reached an apex of that kind of understanding and putting it into, or wanting to put it into, school systems, that kind of support, learning support. It manifests in all sorts of different ways groups, group therapy, 12 step programs, dance classes that you can do, and you can look them up online and find the closest one to you. You know there's a proliferation of that kind of connectedness that I think when people 50 years ago you know, the housewife was working at home on her own looking after multiple children and quite isolated I would say it was far worse back then and when people came back from fighting in wars the lack of reintegration into society and just assuming that they would then pick up the job that they'd done before and be perfectly okay I mean we saw the fallout of all of that. I feel like we've definitely woken up.

Speaker 3: 47:03

Yes, that's an interesting perspective actually, and I completely agree. I suppose one way of thinking about it as well as that is if you think about an indigenous setting where psychedelics have been part of the culture for a long time. They don't have psychedelic integration because the way they live is they are connected to their land, they're connected to their community, which is a smaller group of people that they know very well, connected to their elders, connected to the lineage and to the stories of the place and so, and also connected to more embodied practices, and it's just a smaller group of people living in one place where they are there and they are. That kind of connectedness is inbuilt. They are a smaller, connected community, but presumably with that model.

Speaker 2: 47:47

The reason why that indigenous community has stayed in a similar environment and is using the same plant medicines, learning from elders, and there's a respect for what came before, is because they're less interested in changing and reinventing and innovating than we have become in the west.

Speaker 1: 48:09

Well, most obviously I think that the main thing here is that you're right that the a is there, the acceptance is there. I think the c is not there, necessarily the connectedness. So to give an example which is a bit of a tangent, but like everybody is now raving about having to do the work right, so they sit down and they do the work and the currency in this world of doing the work is like how much trauma can you uncover? And actually you become a tenant in the trauma rather than a tourist, as in you don't want to move on from the trauma you actually are using it as a chip, your identity, exactly it becomes part of identity politics and this whole victimization, saying hey, because my parents were like this to me.

Speaker 1: 48:53

Right now you have to treat me like this. And it's not about transcending that. It's actually about like I am an individual that had this experience, and like it's not about connecting with other people to overcome that it's actually.

Speaker 3: 49:04

It becomes like it's about separating.

Speaker 1: 49:06

It's about building your identity around it. So I do think that, while you're you're right that there is a lot more awareness around it, I don't think that the integration of it and actually the giving back, the are the like putting, putting you're going out there and um, providing some value back to the community and actually moving on from the trauma that you uncover.

Speaker 2: 49:28

Yeah, this idea of becoming attached to kind of leaping onto and staying, on it for as long as possible. Because, if I get off this lily pad, I'm no longer special. I'm just going to be in the pool with everyone else.

Speaker 1: 49:43

So I think the point really that I'm trying to make is it's great to uncover these things. There's learning in everything you know when you uncover these things, but if you hold on to them, then you're becoming a prisoner of a story.

Speaker 1: 49:56

And, by the way, there's much richer story for you to still write about yourself, rather than being stuck in the previous issues and maybe injustices that were, you know, thrown your way in life, of course, and the beauty is, if you are in community, if you are connecting with other people, if you are putting community, if you are connecting with other people, if you are putting yourself out there, you actually can move on from this individualistic past and the stuff that you had in the no actually is that lovely phrase, that trauma is just information yes, yeah, exactly, absolutely, and if we can use that, that it's a map, that it's a handrail yeah to a way out of that building, then happy days and that's what I feel the psychedelic therapy to me, my interpretation of it is that it's full of efficacy, in fact, rather than going to a psychotherapist week in, week out for the rest of your life.

Speaker 3: 50:47

It's an initiation and so, yeah, we can think of trauma as an initiation if we're supported to move through it.

Speaker 3: 50:55

we need support so that we don't yeah, we don't just stay there and I think support from community is so good for that, because then you don't feel like you're alone with it and you can, as you say, as well, give back to other people, which I think is the best therapy. Being able to support somebody else or support nature, you know, or have something you believe in and want to stand for something you want, want to change in the world, being an active member of something that matters is the most wonderful feeling and so empowering and really helps us come out of that victim mentality where we're a protector instead.

Speaker 1: 51:25

In a way, actually what we need is the right stories Community as you say, is there and change their behavior to accommodate my needs, exactly, exactly. So I think you're right that there's community, and maybe to an extent. But I think the stories are wrong and I think in nature and in these tribes there's not so much holding on to that. Let's go and do the next thing. It's kind of the modus operandi to an extent.

Speaker 2: 51:47

And on the subject of indigenous communities who've been using plant medicine for generations or millennia, do you have an opinion about any kind of cultural appropriation around people hopping in to do those experiences in those places and then hopping back out?

Speaker 3: 52:02

Well, it's really interesting Again this conference. Recently there was a Taita from Colombia, a very experienced shaman from a lineage of shamans, talking about the use of ayahuasca there and there were lots of questions from the people at the conference about this issue and his perspective was really you know, it's wonderful that so many people are waking up to the importance of these ways of working and that are interested and want to come and learn. But please develop your own.

Speaker 3: 52:29

Please develop your own because, we have beautiful plants in this part of the world as well, and we have our own stories and our own lineage and our own elders to reignite. And then we don't have to get on planes and we don't have to use the plants from another community. And also there is a lot we can learn about animism and other ways of thinking from indigenous groups and respect for the living world. But to translate it into a language that is meaningful for us, because I think otherwise people can go have an experience of drinking ayahuasca, come back with the right clothes, the right feathers, the right things to say, but actually not really.

Speaker 2: 53:11

It doesn't pertain to the rest of their real life. Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3: 53:16

It is just going on a nice kind of holiday and then they don't integrate it into their lives or communities. So I think we do need to be inspired and develop our own culture.

Speaker 2: 53:24

Yeah, use that as a model. Yeah.

Speaker 1: 53:27

It's interesting when you look at people who are doing some historical research as to the usage of psychedelics actually in the Western world the Oracle of Delphi when people were actually going in there, they were drinking a wine and some of the research suggests that the OG of psychedelics in Europe was actually ergot. This wine was laced with ergot and went in, drank this wine and then saw all these really crazy prophecies that this oracle was suggesting to them. I guess, as it was albert hoffman who synthesized lst, it may have done that from ergot, right? Yeah, okay, we know, this is for sure, right?

Speaker 3: 54:10

um extremely likely right, okay gotcha.

Speaker 2: 54:13

There's a whole section about that in how to change your mind. You know the?

Speaker 1: 54:16

yeah, michael pollan, exactly yeah, how he was cycling, I think when he kicked in and all that, but uh, so yeah, this, this seems to be maybe our drug in the west to pursue, rather than going in, culturally appropriate all this ayahuasca and mushrooms that grow in great proliferation.

Speaker 3: 54:33

Um. So yeah, I think we have the. We definitely have the plants and the substances.

Speaker 3: 54:38

We just need to create the container and the stories, as you say, the stories, the stories that help take us out of our own dramas yes and into something that can be more about being in service to the, the collective, at this time, because, you know, psychedelics have been used a lot for mental health issues and for thinking about different aspects of what is essentially a poly crisis. But if we think really now about what are the roots of that and we think about our disconnectedness in so many different ways, how can we really come together to really try and locate psychedelics or use psychedelics to help us build our connectedness to community and to nature and really see it as much more about lifting depression or lifting these other symptoms of something much deeper, and think about how we can use them to create kind of systemic change or at least support these processes of systemic change that we're seeing at the moment?

Speaker 1: 55:30

yeah, absolutely. On that note, let's wrap up this beautiful journey through the world of psychedelics with maybe talking about where we are in terms of the state of regulation. Clearly we know that there are some benefits here, especially for treatment-resistant depression, and clearly we also see a lot of people are using this stuff as it is already, but it seems like regulation is far behind in terms of making this more accessible, especially for people who really should use it, as well as for up-and-coming psychonauts. Where are we at?

Speaker 3: 56:01

Well, the FDA and the EMA, which is the Europe equivalent of the FDA in the States, will be regulating these as medical items, and so they have to go through all the same stages of drug trials that other drugs go through, which are very, very lengthy. For good reason they're very cautious, but because psychedelic clinical trials don't really fit into the normal drug therapy model, there are some challenges on the road ahead. So the multidisciplinary association for psychedelic studies maps is the kind of big organization trying to bring mdma to the public and they were kind of steaming ahead and then they had a setback recently fda just shut it down right yeah, well, yeah, pushed it back essentially because it's kind of teething problems really of how to bring psychedelics through the traditional regulatory systems, and so there are various things that need to be refined.

Speaker 3: 57:01

But it's a slow process and I do sometimes wonder whether it made sense that the kind of medicalization approach was chosen rather than decriminalization. So there was a kind of choice at one point, which was do we want to say that psychedelics are medical treatments and we're going to go through all the medical regulation processes and try and fit them in, like fitting a circle into a square shaped hole, try and put psychedelics as if they were like aspirin or something, which obviously they're not. They require so much more and they're so much more variable. Do we try and go that way or do we just decriminalize psychedelics?

Speaker 3: 57:37

like with marijuana yeah and say let's invest all the time that we might have spent trying to make a medically approved drug into developing the infrastructure to support it. We chose the medical route. I sometimes wonder whether a decriminalization might have been better, but I was wondering if something has been made illegal.

Speaker 2: 57:54

It's a bit like prohibition. No one was ever pretending that alcohol was particularly good for you or therapeutic. It was recreational and fun. If there's a scientific, medical reason to be using psilocybin there's so much more. It's so much more loaded, isn't it? Then? Okay, let's decriminalize it. You, suddenly, I, I know from some of your stats that one in ten people are using some kind of psychedelic drug, which is apparently some four percent increase since the 1980s now, and it's unregulated and no one necessarily knows what the side effects are. But because it's got this medical hat on at the moment, I wonder how those two things can coexist. Does it have to stay illegal?

Speaker 3: 58:37

it's. It's interesting because in America, some states are decriminalizing psychedelics, and so we're seeing these service centers developing where it's not a therapeutic medical intervention, it's something that's guided by people that aren't psychiatrists or doctors. They are trained in in how to be sitters, and so far it looks like it's these.

Speaker 2: 58:59

It's it's going really well, is that like the marijuana stores that you get in new york?

Speaker 3: 59:03

or well, they probably want to yep, but they also provide a therapeutic.

Speaker 3: 59:07

Well, it's not therapeutic, it's a kind of sitting service. So you go, you have your sitters there for the day, you have your psilocybin or your mushrooms and you sit there all day and they support you and they yeah, you have a, you're held to the process. So I think, overall, there are some people that will only want to access these treatments through a very, very safe, clinical, medically supervised model. I think we need we need both, but I I think that it's really important that we spend some resources and time developing the infrastructure for the non-clinical route, because that's going to be the main route, because even if we start off with a medical model, people will start just growing their own mushrooms or ordering mushrooms and taking them themselves. So I think the medical will just be a very small percentage, but a really important percentage. So for someone that's really struggling with PTSD or serious depression or feeling suicidal and incredibly fragile, to be in the hands of a really safe, supportive, trusted medical guide will be important. So I think we need both.

Speaker 2: 1:00:18

Stress testing, yeah, but I get the feeling what you're most interested in is this social element and bringing that to light and making it accessible for everyone.

Speaker 3: 1:00:27

Yeah and well, developing a container that's strong enough and steady enough so that when people have psychedelic experiences, if it's right for them, they can. It's about safety and also optimization so that they can, in that critical period and in the months afterwards, they can really become a more connected person, connected to self, others and the wider world. And wouldn't that be wonderful if we had the infrastructure to really, you know, really help that connectedness last, rather than just be a kind of taste of something it could actually change the way we live.

Speaker 1: 1:00:57

Absolutely.

Speaker 3: 1:00:58

Such a lovely note to end on.

Speaker 1: 1:01:01

Thanks so much, Rosh, for taking the time.

Speaker 3: 1:01:03

Thank you for having me. Thank you so much for coming. It's been fun. Bye.