 I think there are a lot of people that suffer and we could really help people if we made this more widely available. But I also think that there is an inherent risk in that. And we've already messed this up once. What is up guys and welcome back to another episode of Amir Approved. Today I'm super excited. Like really excited. We're going to be talking about psychedelic research. And our special guest today is Rotem Petranker. He is a clinical psychology PhD student in York University. His main research interests are sustained attention, emotional regulation and creativity, all of which are affected by micro dosing with psychedelics. Rotem, welcome to the show brother. How are you doing? Thanks. I'm good. How are you? I'm good, man. Right before this, you and I were talking. We have some mutual friends, a small world. For sure. Toronto is a surprisingly small town. Yeah, man. So tell me how you got started within the psychedelic space. Sure. So a friend of mine emailed me a few years back. He's a psychiatrist and he emailed me saying, hey, we're starting this reading group about psychedelics because there's all this psychedelic renaissance, all this new wave of research. And he knew that I was interested in it. So he said, you should come join us. So I did. I went for the inaugural meeting. It was me and 12 other psychiatrists. And I said, hey guys, we're a powerhouse. We could be doing this research. We shouldn't be just reading about it. And so for the second meeting, I recruited Thomas Anderson from Norman Farb's lab at U of T. Thomas is a friend of mine and we share a similar interest. And yeah, I thought that he would be interested in doing this kind of work. I brought him on and a couple of other people. And then for the second meeting, we started like a splinter group from the original group. Excuse me. And yeah, so we started doing research. And then we were kind of debating what to start with because we wanted to establish that we are a serious research group. We don't just hang out and tell trip stories. And so we knew that we have no funding and kind of no backing really from anyone. We're just going to have to figure it out on our own. So we were debating two potential projects. One is a meta analysis. So like looking at a bunch of studies and figuring out whether the mystical experience is questionnaire, which is really popular in psychedelics research, whether I guess it's sound if it sits well. And that could have been interesting. But when I was doing the literature review, I was kind of looking at what other people have done. It looked like there just isn't enough to work with because for meta analysis, you need to have a reasonable amount of papers. But there wasn't a lot of research at the time. And then the other potential area that we wanted to look at is microdosing. So this was, I think, in early 2016. And microdosing was really on the rise, but there was zero research on it at the time. And so we decided to go with that. But having no money and no facilities and basically nothing, we started with an online survey. So we knew that the online community would be interested in kind of describing their experiences and Thomas is highly active on Reddit. And in general, we're like, we have good social networks. So we put together the survey that was supposed to be about 30 minutes long because we knew that people are not getting paid to do it. So if we're relying on people's kindness, we don't want to waste their time. And we just kind of sent it out. And we had no idea how many participants we were going to have. This is like, we're just going out on a limb. And in our pre-registration that we did for this study, because we're proponents of open science and I'm really happy to talk about open science more if you're interested in that, we said we would not even analyze it if we have fewer than 50 participants and we're going to cut off data collection at 1,000 participants. And so for the first few weeks, we're kind of nerve wrecking. We're like, no one is like doing it. And then it snowballed and snowballed. And we ended up getting a little over 1,000 responses. Wow. But after we cleaned it up, it was 909. How long ago was this? So when did we stop our data collection? I don't remember off the top of my head. I think we started in February 17. And I think we only collected data for a couple of months. OK. Yeah. So yeah, that's like the first project we did. There's stuff that we've done since that I'm happy to chat about. But this is like the inception of our research group and out of that. So basically, the psychiatrists kind of left. They were interested in pursuing other projects. Some of them are still in the space like Emma Hapke. She's currently, I think she's the head of the MDMA site in Toronto for the maps study. But more or less, other people kind of went their own ways. And Thomas and I stayed as a part of this project along with Thomas's supervisor Norman Farb, who does mostly mindfulness research. But he's also interested in this area. So where do you think we are currently in the status psychedelic research? Because you mentioned earlier, we have a renaissance now. It's making up mainstream. Like I couldn't believe when I saw ESPN did a segment with Tyson who fully animated talking about five MEO DMT with the frog. I'm like, yeah, ESP fucking N. Yeah, I heard he had like an amazing experience that changes life, changes life. He has a podcast called Hotboxing. Like you can see his demeanor has completely changed. He's done it a couple of times, but I couldn't believe that ESPN did it. I'm like, fuck, it's here. Like the narrative's changing. For sure. Yeah, it's for sure mainstream now. And it has benefits and drawbacks like everything else. So like I have given, I don't know how like a bunch of interviews by now like dozens of interviews and not once has there been a negative spin. Almost every interview asks, like the interviewer asks, but what about like if you had pushback or people, is there negative stuff going on? And no, zero. Nobody says anything negative in the scientific literature and popular culture. Everyone's like, yeah, this is the best stuff ever. I think that is it's conducive to an atmosphere of we can experiment and we can do research and that's great. But I think it's also potentially dangerous because then people start prescribing it even though they don't know what it does really to the various people in their lives. And I think my concern is that it's a matter of time before someone has a very, very negative experience. And then there's kind of like a counter zeitgeist. Well, that's what happened in Amsterdam when they made the shrooms illegal. Is that one case? Just one case. Yeah, that girl who jumped off the next day. It wasn't, she wasn't even tripping. No. Yeah. So I think like we don't know what happened there. Maybe it opened some stuff that she couldn't deal with. And I think that perhaps this is why this shouldn't be just like sold everywhere. Maybe it should be done with the supervision of a mental health professional. I don't know. Well, if you look at traditional tribes who viewed psychedelics as plant medicine, you had a facilitator as a shaman or a medicine man. Right. So he facilitated the experience, guided you through the journey. And I think you're right. I think people view it as a panacea and it's not something to be taken lightly. It's not just like, I'm gonna do five grand shrooms or I'm gonna go do my, whatever, eboga or LST. I'm like, don't take this lightly. This isn't like some kind of pill you just take and numbs you out. This is a full blown mental, physical, psychological experience you're about to experience. So it's funny. I'm actually, I'm currently writing a paper that's kind of like it focuses. So at the end of our survey, the first survey we did, the one I mentioned before, we had a little box saying, actually this was Thomas's idea, which I thought was very clever. It just says, if there's anything you want to say about microdosing that we have not asked you about, please write it here. So we had, I don't remember, maybe 150 people wrote really useful stuff. And so I'm currently writing a paper on that. And yeah, it's surprising how much this is about kind of solving a meaning crisis. How this is about, yeah, finding meaning in life. And so far with your guys' research on microdosing or not just you guys, but in general, where are we currently with that? That's a good question. I would say that there's no solid, reliable research on microdosing that's in a lab setting period. I can think of, there's one study that showed that psychedelics or that specifically microdose of LSD changed people's perception of time. But I'm like, okay, what does that actually tell us? I don't think that that's really useful. And I'm also personally, I'm a little, I'm concerned this goes back to open science. So I'm currently in the process of trying to start a microdosing study in Toronto. The amount of work and money and just like, you have to go through all this red tape. I think people don't realize. It's really incredible. Yeah, maybe you can explain to me a little briefly exactly what it takes actually just start a study. Sure, just to finish off on that one study though, I find it really doubtful that people went through this amount of work. And the only research question that they were interested in was whether or not a microdose of LSD changes people's perception of time, right? My intuition is that they asked a bunch of other questions and they just didn't reach any significant result or the results were inconvenient somehow. So they just didn't report them because why would they? So yeah, so I guess just to finish this like overview of study or work on microdosing, there's one study that was done in the Netherlands last year where people went to psychedelics conference, like people who are enthusiasts of mushrooms came to a conference and then they collected a bunch of people. They said, hey, do this creativity task and then do it again after you microdose. And people's responses were more creative after taking psilocybin. That's encouraging, but this is also a very specific kind of sample. And also I think that there may be a training effect because people did the exact same task before and after. So maybe they just got better the task because they had experience. Apart from that, I can't think of any solid research. But yeah, in terms of what it requires, so I don't know how interesting this is. It's kind of like, it's a- Cause you mentioned open science. I'm quite aware of open science. There's some companies I'm working in the crypto space for trying to approach this. So I'm a big proponent of that. Sweet. So yeah, I would much rather talk about open science and how difficult it is to start the study. It's just like, yeah, it's a maze. So in order to talk about open science, we need to talk about what science is, right? So when we, the idea is that when we conduct a scientific experiment, if we have a certain experimental design, then I use this experimental design, I get a certain result, you use the same experimental design, you're gonna get the same result or something very, very similar. But in order to find out whether that is even the case, you need to repeat what I did. But because of the way scientific publishing works, no one wants to repeat other people's work, you always want novelty. Yeah, your own work, yeah. Exactly, because that's what's gonna get published. And you get paid that way. Exactly, publishing is your currency. You show how many publications you have and that's how likely you are to get tenure. So people were just not motivated because of this perverse incentive structure to replicate other people's work. So for a long time, especially in psychology and in life sciences, people were just like, I would do a study, I would report whatever I want to report in a paper and then I would send this paper to the publisher and the publisher would say, neat, I'm gonna publish this because this looks fine to me. I wouldn't tell you if I found things that are inconvenient because I have my theory or if I found things that I didn't expect to find, I would be like, I guess I planned this all along. This was all a part of my plan. I knew that this was gonna happen. So I come up with this ad hoc theory, but in reality, this was just a fluke and no one is gonna replicate it. So people are gonna base their work off of my fluke. And what's happened in the last maybe 10 or 15 years, I'd say 10 years is that psychology is kind of like imploding because in 2011, a group of psychologists decided that they would replicate 100 of the canonical social psychology studies. And I think that 37 were replicated properly. So the majority couldn't replicate. Yeah, so stuff like the most viewed TED Talk, at least at that time, was won by Amy Cuddy, who's a social psychologist, and she looked into power poses. Oh yeah, I heard about this. Right, so that didn't replicate. It didn't replicate, that's right, yeah, the power pose. Yeah, and then, so now what do we do? Like, this is in so many books of like how to do well in a job interview and stuff like that. People were really like, this was changing people's lives. Did you hear about the group of researchers who were manipulating, getting their research papers published? Yeah, it's fucked. Yeah, this industry is messed up and it's messed up because it's an industry. It shouldn't be an industry. As you mentioned, the center structures. Yeah, it's really, really messed up. I agree, 100%. There are some people that are trying to kind of correct the way things are right now. There's some interesting idea out there. There's my colleague, House Lin from the University of Toronto has I think a really interesting idea of basically, I mean, I don't want to mis-present his idea, but if I understand it correctly, it's you upload your paper and then people basically comment on it. Gotcha. And then you can upvote or downvote comments. And then you get currency within the system based on how much you upvote or downvote. Yeah, so it's a curation template, yeah. Yeah, so yeah, but I don't exactly know how expertise would play into that. That's a problem. It's like, also there's no skin in the game. Well, I mean, the idea is that it would all be public, so not anonymous. So if I critique your work, then you know who said that your work is good or bad. So there is some like reputation as everything. I think funding is a big problem though. This is why I like open science, where it's like there's people in the crypto space or in the blockchain space trying to figure out crowdsourcing. Like for me, it's like right now, there's one traditional way of going through, you got to go through the red tape, you got to raise, I think people forget how expensive studies are. Absolutely. Like it's expensive. It's not like you snap your fingers and you're like, oh, the study is done tomorrow. It's like there's a duration period, dealing with humans, you got to pay it out. And like the process is lengthy. And especially in the second, I think the people who want to see this succeed, not from a monetary game, but from a beneficial human aspect of like, this is actual medicine that can help people. I think this might be kind of the stepping stone or catalyst to kind of launch this kind of movement of open science. Right. So I will say that I think that a lot of people in the psychedelic space are, I think they're pro open science in theory, but they're not actually doing it. There's one guy I know who's in Amsterdam, who actually ran a replication study of that time dilation one, and he pre-registered his study and he failed to replicate those results by the way. The LSD one. Yeah, that I mentioned before. And when I saw his work, I was like, I'm blown away, you're the only other person in psychedelics who pre-registers. So he's a cool guy. I do not remember his name off the top of my head, but he's a grad student in Amsterdam, George something. But yeah, so I guess kind of like another response to just to describe the like open science for maybe people who are listening to this podcast who don't know. So the idea is you pre-register all of your hypotheses. So you can't do this thing where you hide inconvenient results or you pretend to have known all along when you find really cool results. It has confirmation bias and all this other stuff. Exactly. So you just say, ahead of time you say, here's what I'm gonna do, ABC. And then when it's time to publish, you show the publisher, you say, I said I would do ABC, I did ABC. I wasn't planning on doing D, but I'm saying that flat out. Like I thought this would be cool. So I'm doing this now, consider it exploratory. I don't know, this is cool. Someone else should replicate it, right? So I love that. So we really like as our team really strongly believes in that, so we pre-register everything and we also make our materials available. So you can find our survey on our open science framework website. All of what we did, you can find it. You can replicate our study using the exact same materials. Again, because we want replication to be easy. And our data is also available online. So if we may have made mistakes in our statistical analysis and if anyone wants to check it out, they can reproduce it. So I think that's really cool. In terms of, I'm surprised to hear that the crypto space is also involved in this. There's a lot of overlap between psychedelic people and crypto. Yeah, I'm not surprised. So I'm kind of, I'm jumping the gun here. I don't exactly know when this will get published, but there's this company called Molecule. I know the guys. They're so cool. They reached out to me. So nice guys and they have a really cool idea. They want to, if I understand correctly, to like democratize drug development. Yes. Using blockchain technology. And so they reached out to us and I think our project is going to be either their first like their flag project or one of the first projects that they're going to work with. So they're going to help raise funds for us. And so it's been so far, it's been really cool working with them because they're like, they're so on the level with open science. I dig that. Yeah, Molecule is doing a great job. Yeah, it's just a former guys from U-Port. What's his name? I'll pull up afterwards. There's Tyler, right? Yeah, I forget the other guys. I'll pull them afterwards. Yeah, yeah, yeah, Molecule. Going back to the micro dosing or psychedelics in general, what do you think it's needed right now? What type of research is needed to kind of keep on pushing where we're heading? Like, basically what I want is I don't want, I think there's two worlds here. There's the world of people who are enthusiasts. Actually, there's three worlds. People who are enthusiasts. There's the old world where it's like medicine healers and shamans. And then there's a scientific world. And all of them serve their purpose. What do you think we need right now? What type of studies do we need to kind of really push this more into a safer narrative? What do you mean when you say safer narrative? So from, it might not be a good description. So it may be more or less a more optimal way of utilizing these medicines. Like you and I before the show, we're talking about Iboga or like anything. It can be shrooms, it can be LSD, it can be ayahuasca, you pick your medicine. And traditionally speaking, shamans would tell you to take this much of a dose. This is how you do it, cool. So they have thousands of years of wisdom. I get it and I respect that. But at the exact same time, I know for a fact my mother will never do that. And I know she can benefit from it. But maybe we find in studies that we don't need to necessarily do five grams of X. Maybe we come to a realization that we point five every four days actually gives you good results because we just don't know right now. And so what do you think is necessary? What types of studies right now do we need to kind of start doing to find these answers out? I think that's a great question. And like I'm trying to think, so my answer betrays my biases. So I think that we need to do more work on a variety of doses because we don't know exactly what is the effect of dose. Robin Carharteris wrote a paper with Carl Friston. It was published this year. It discusses something that they refer to as the Rebus model. Okay. And so Carl Friston, so Robin Carharteris is like the most famous guy who does psychedelics research. But Carl Friston is, I think a lot of people have never heard of him and he's one of the most influential psychologists of our generation. He came up with this thing called the Free Energy Principle. Yeah, I don't wanna talk about it too much, but in this specific paper, they posit that in order to see effective change in the brain and therefore in behavior and experience, you need large doses. And I'm not clear on why. They think that that is the case. I respect both of these scholars immensely, right? They're awesome. But I also think that this is like, I think, and I think that they put forward an interesting theory, but again, having my bias, I'm like, why do we need large doses? Like it really seems that microdosing does something. And because there's no reliable research so far, it's really hard for me to make this claim more strongly. I'm more saying, yeah, maybe the next thing we should be doing is looking at a variety of doses. And I think that there are a couple of people that are interested in doing that, but one of them is Compass Pathways. And they're mostly interested in monetizing it. So I don't know that any of their work will be published in the foreseeable future. I think that more broadly perhaps, rather than specific things that we should study, which I would say is different doses, different schedules, set and setting, just like basic stuff. I think more broadly that a lot of people, especially the enthusiasts you mentioned, they're like, fast, we gotta get this done now. Hey, yesterday. Like yeah, the door is open and we gotta push. And I appreciate, again, this is my bias. Like I appreciate where they're coming from. I think there are a lot of people that suffer and we could really help people if we made this more widely available. But I also think that there's an inherent risk in that. And we've already messed this up once, right? Perhaps not the scientific community, maybe not the healers, not the therapists. It's no one in particular, but there was a perfect storm there. Yeah, I read that in Michael Pollan's book, the history, yeah. And I thought he really, he did a great job with that. So I think that each of us, wherever whichever our group is, we need to kind of decide what's best long-term. I understand that if you see people in your life that are suffering and you just want to help them so much, but I'm also thinking we need to try and take it slow and be careful and do really solid work so that future generations can build on this rather than go leaps and bounds. And then there's a lot of missing space in the middle. And I'm saying this, like I think, again, where I'm coming from is I was doing mindfulness research before psychedelics. And that's your, it's all garbage. All that field is not 100%, but it's bad. And it's because, and I think we can really like and what's going on with psychedelics now to the beginning of the interest in mindfulness, but it's coming on much faster. It's like, oh wow, this could be good for a bunch of people, for a bunch of indications. We should maybe try it for this, try it for that. And then instead of kind of trying to understand how it does, what it does, what exactly it does, who it's good for, what it's good for, now you just have mindfulness, like mindfulness, mindful that everyone, it's just like a buzzword that means nothing. And we can't afford to do that with psychedelics. Like you could break people's minds with psychedelics. I've known people who've snapped from it. Yeah, so I am worried that we're gonna go the same route and instead of having psychedelic this, psychedelic that and just it being super popular, you're just gonna have nothing again because these substances are powerful. Same thing like in marijuana, like, listen, I'll be the first one, I've done a lot of drugs. I've OD'd twice back in my party days. Like I'm 34, this is when I was like 18, 19, uppers and downers, raves, three nights, I end up in the hospital, I like, anyways, I've done it all. I've done almost all of the psychedelics. I've had crazy trips. Brother, my worst trip was edibles, hands down. Really? Hands down. What was that like? Oh, fuck the worst. I'll tell you, I'll tell you. I don't know, it's probably like, I think it was like four or 500 milligrams. It was a lot, this is a long time ago. And I knew what I did, so it's not like, oh, it's a mystery. The thing with like, when I overdose twice before, it's like, I'm not conscious. Okay, so there's like a brief one hour tour window, I feel fucked, then I'm black out, then I'm offline. I wake up, I'm in the ambulance or the hospital. So the actual feeling of the experience is non-existent. So there's no pain. There's no psychological ramification. It's like, oh shit, I know what kind of what happened. Here I am, don't do that again. Obviously, I didn't learn from my first lesson. Psychedelics is like, okay, I'm going through the process. You had scary, depending on what you're doing. Okay, however, shrooms is, I mean edibles is a whole different level. So one, they do become psychoactive when you eat it as opposed to smoke it. I was sitting on a bed, pale faced, cold sweats, running in and out of the washroom for like six hours, shivering like this in a fucking wormhole. The problem is you're conscious of what you're experiencing, that's the problem. It's not enjoyable. And I'm just there like this for hours. No joke, just for hours, shaking in this wormhole. And the fucked up thing is like, I know I'm fucked up. I know what I did. And like your mind is racing as opposed to like, I've done, you know, I've done DMT, the vape. I've done hero's journey of shrooms and I'm blasted. Like it's like a crazy experience. And I have bad trips on shrooms, gonna be wrong, but it's not even on the same fucking planet as me taking edibles. But yet here we are edibles now coming everywhere. And I'm like, yo guys, like fucking be careful with fucking edibles. So I wonder what's gonna happen, right? So with a like federal election now and she are saying, hey, maybe I won't keep weed legal, which is just crazy to me. But then so you have, I think people are gonna vote for that. People, I think there's still Canadians and people globally who really think that maybe, yeah, maybe weed shouldn't be legal. And then you've got those people and you've got edibles and that could be a bad mix. Like people could get really bad trips, same as you. So yeah, I'm worried to be honest. Yeah, I'm like, this is like, I'm so excited about what's going on right now with psychedelics, but I'm also worried because I can see that it's a double-edged sword. Like for me, the research that I care about going forward is, yes, I agree. Like let's figure out the dosage. Let's figure out quality, how you grow it. Standardization is really important. Set and setting, actually creating a playbook, like anything in life. But also then figuring out, okay, like we mentioned this isn't for everybody. Like how many people are on pharmaceutical drugs? SSRIs, Benzos, Ritalin, Adderall, whatever, you name it. I'm not a scientist here, I'm enthusiast. But I'm gonna view this from Occam's Razors, like just basic perception. I don't know if that's a good idea that you should be doing psychedelics while you're on these pharmaceutical drugs. Right. You know what I mean? I agree. But most people may be like, I think that way. You know what I mean? So it's like we, there should be precautions. Let me put it that way. Yeah, for sure. And I think we actually understand the neurochemistry of certain psychedelics pretty well. Like LSD has been studied extensively by like people like David Nichols who is brilliant. And he's like, yeah, I'm kind of a fan boy. He's awesome, he's so smart. Where is he in the States? Yeah, and he's kind of, I think he's retired already. But his son Charles Nichols is still doing work. So I'm going to a conference this weekend that he's organizing that's just like on psychedelics by scientists for scientists. I've never been to one of these. Every conference I go to is like, you know, half scientists, half everyone else. So yeah, I'm pretty stoked. I forgot what I wanted to say. Oh, we're talking about safety precautions. So for me, it's, and we're talking about the government and you were saying that, you know, there still might be, you never know what's going to happen with the elections in the future. I think though, my biggest fear in the psychedelics, and I'm only speaking on Canada obviously since we live here is like, I'm not a big fan of what they did with the weed industry. Yeah, I think very few people are fans. I think maybe the people who are fans of that are the people who are profiting. Yeah, it's a monopoly. It's not even a monopoly, it's an oligopoly. It's like ridiculous, crony capitalism is like, well, us 15 or whoever, we just control everything and all you guys, everybody else, see you later. Yeah, I know it's terrible. It's really frustrating and like the prices are still higher than what they would be if you bought from your drug dealer. Only the government can lose 40. Do you see that paper? 40 million dollars. All of the government can lose money selling weed. How the fuck you lose money selling weed? I know, and there's the waste issue too, right? There was this meme that went viral, like a picture of the amount of waste you get from a year buying from the weed store versus a year buying from your drug dealer, just like a few bags, whereas from the weed store, it's like a bunch of these plastic boxes that's what you're gonna do. People still go. The people want to go to their own dealer that they know. People want to go to people they trust, homegrown stuff, good stuff, yeah. Yeah, but I think, so I wonder if that's the way it's gonna go with psychedelics. Like if people are just gonna be able to grow their own mushrooms. You know how easy it is to grow mushrooms? Is it? Oh yeah, easy. You can buy kits online. Interesting. You can get spores, put on rice cakes. All right, I mean, so if it's easy, then I guess that- Like there's no, what do they call it, LD50 or LD40? Yeah, yeah, LD50. There's no LD50 for it. I guess, I mean, there must be, but it's- I don't know. I read a paper not long ago. They said there's no LD50 on psilocybin. Okay, I know that it exists for LSD, I think you would have to consume- Oh, the amount is ridiculous. Yeah, more than like your body weight or something, whereas it's effective. Same thing with we, there's technically an LD50, but it's like the amount that you gotta smoke is like you're fucking sleeping, but you're knocked out. But with the paper that I read, and obviously hopefully someone can replicate that, you know, open science is, you didn't find one. Interesting. Yeah. Cause listen, it's a fungi, we're fungi. It's very fascinating to me shrooms. Now we're more fungi than human. Are we? Yeah, we're more closely related to the fungi kingdom. I see, in that sense. And so for me, it's like, you know, shrooms is an interesting thing. It's like there's diminishing returns taking every day. You have interesting experiences on it. As far as we can tell, there's not really any negativities from it. I can't think off the top of my head. Like, so people are reporting negative effects. Trips? For microdoses. So how about trips or feeling bad? I'm talking about like stuff like physical discomfort, which is... Well, I mentioned before the show, if I eat shrooms like wet or dry, my stomach gets wrecked. My gut bacteria and whatever it is, I tried everything. So I can't, I'm one of those, maybe I'm the majority, I don't know, but I get those pains, it's not enjoyable. I don't want to go through that process. I've tried everything. And for me, it's like I need to take pills, I need to do my lemons. Like there's a process I have to take. So yeah, I'll be in the camp or if like I didn't know what to do here. And if I just did it traditionally, I'd be like, you must be fucking delusional to do this. Cause why would any human being want to put themselves through this pain? Cause it hurt me every single fucking time I did it. Yeah. So I think so. I'm just saying like there are, there could be those kinds of negative side effects. But yeah, there could also be like you said before, you know people whose minds got broken with psychedelics. I know people like ridiculous amounts first. Sometimes I know you got trauma that you're not ready to deal with yet and it comes up full force. And you're like, what do I recommend doing fucking six grams off the get go? First of all, you've never done anything before. You've never researched this. You're not doing set and setting, but you're diving into six grams like. Yeah. And people do that. Oh yeah. Yeah. So again, this is because I think partly because it's illegal. If it were legal, if there was research, if there was public policy, then we could be like, hey, if you want to do this, you should come into whatever the clinic you're going to sit on this nice little couch. It's going to be whatever music you pick. You're going to be with your best friend. That'd be amazing. Yeah. Right. That'd be wonderful. I'll be in. Hands down. But yeah, but then because it's illegal and people don't really know what to do, but they hear all these like half truths from the media and from like online, like social media. They're like, oh, whatever. Just take drugs and it'll make me better. And then they're like, oh no, what have I done? I think things would move faster than we expect. Like for example, Colorado, they just decriminalize shrooms. The entire state? I don't know if the entire state. I think that there was like Denver. Denver, yeah. But then they didn't quite so it's like, it's a shorthand to say that they decriminalize it. They actually made it so that they voted in their city council to make it. Not enforceable. Like the lowest priority. So in effect, not enforceable. I lived in British Columbia for a long time, like same thing. Yeah, but it's not really enforceable. But it's not quite the same, right? I think in general, there's a problem with that notion because then the government, whenever like, there's a change of who's the prime minister, is like flex and come get you. But also I think from a public health perspective, if it's still illegal, then you're not gonna have a center where people can come in and do it properly. You can't distribute educational literature. I always say old drugs should be illegal. You're never gonna stop the black market, period. As long as there's money to be, it's all about incentive driven. If there's money to be made from this product, fill in the X, put whatever product you want in there, that market's gonna exist, supply and demand. People would demand product X. You name the drug, whatever. So there's gonna be a black market. Legalize everything. I agree with that. But then the question is how are you gonna legalize it? It's kind of like with the universal basic income, right? A lot of people are gonna support it, but they support different implementations. My good friend, Floyd, has his way. I have my way. We'll see what happens. But I actually don't mind the idea that you had kind of like with the driver's license. Yeah, that's Mark Hayden's idea. Yeah, it's not bad. It's first time I heard that before. Yeah, so I think there's maybe, it needs more nuance. Maybe Mark has already added nuance, but yeah, the idea is that, excuse me. The idea is that you, yeah, you just go in, once it's legal, you go into whatever government office and they give you a bunch of tests. And if you qualify to be able to take psychedelics and you get a license, and then you can purchase it from the store whenever you want until you need to renew your license. So I think that makes sense, but like I was saying before, like we were chatting, I still think that when you take psychedelics, it needs to be with some kind of, I hesitate to call it a guide, but like- A sitter. Yeah, a sitter, because like my, again, bias, I'm in clinical psychology. I believe that that person should be a qualified mental health professional who knows what to do in case you feel bad and knows how to just like be there with someone without necessarily leading them. Whereas I think that, like I have seen these kinds of situations where you have a shaman who's qualified to be a shaman, but they may not understand your cultural background. And so they sit with you for your trip, but like, you know, you experienced some childhood trauma all over again and then they come to you and they're like, oh no, that's whatever God or goddess or spirit or something. And you're like, no, no, I remember this happening to me and they're like, no, no, it's the great eagle. So I think that that's not conducive to mental health. But at the same time, it could change people to be specifically just sitters. Yes. Yeah, I think that there's really valuable work being done right now by, I guess, a variety of people, but mostly out of Imperial College with Robin Carrot-Terris that they're like, the way they're administering psychedelics is they start with a few sessions of kind of like getting to know you, setting goals and talking about what the experience is gonna be like. And there's the actual, you take the substance and then there's a few integration sessions afterwards. Yeah, and then you're like, you talk about what came up, what does that mean for you? Like how can you use that? I think that's the key though. Integration, absolutely. That's a hidden gem right there. Cause I have a lot of friends who take it. Like I mentioned one of my friends before this. And I'm like, well, I don't know what you're doing afterwards. It seems like you keep on doing it, but you're back to square one. Yeah, for sure. So it's like, for me, it's like anything. So whether it's like, I'll do an analogy here or I can relate to something else. People want to go to the gym. So they have this thought, the idea they want to go to the gym. And usually since New Year's coming around the corner, you know, you see a spike in gym memberships in January, people go and it's like, okay, like two weeks later, they don't go. There's no integration within their life of how do they make this part of their life? It's just like random stuff. There's no planning. There's no modeling. And so psychedelics is something that I think the magic is you have this experience. You learn something new from this experience, like we're a traveler explorer through the our mind or psyche or reliving traumatic events, which is like no joke. You can't just stop there. What do you do with this now? Exactly. How do you integrate this, incorporate to your wellbeing? So then you slow, and then what's good about this is like you can then audit and then quantify your success. Whether it's through journals or simple survey, like a seven checklist survey of how you feel like every couple of months. That's true. I agree. I couldn't have said it better. I think that there is like, yeah, there's a variety of ways in which we could try and integrate, but I agree that integration is a key piece. Yes. Perhaps even more important than preparation because you can only get like, if you've never done it before and people are gonna say, yeah, well, it's gonna feel like this and you're gonna see weird things and you're gonna think weird thoughts. Okay, that doesn't mean very much for me because it doesn't really map on very well to the actual experience, but the integration after I think is super important. And I think that your like explanation by analogy there with the gym is excellent. I think that there's a similar thing from more like mental health stuff is addiction. Where like people, they go into rehab and they kick the addiction physically, completely and to a large extent psychologically, but then they go back to their old environment and then they fall back into the same patterns. And so if there was some kind of way to integrate whatever people learned in rehab into their new environment, that would have been, I think, much more successful. Yeah, funny, I had the professor, Chris DeCarlo for this and we're talking about free will, it doesn't exist. I agree with that. Yeah, and so it goes to like, we're a substrate, we're programs from a way, but like any program, the programming behaves based on the environments in. And so it's like, you can go to a clinic, you can clean up, you can feel good, but then you go back to your environment where maybe your partner is an enabler or your friends are junky, fuck your free will. That doesn't exist. I guarantee, I'll bet my house on it that you will do again. I agree with that. And I think that there's also something about psychedelics where it's like, so in that paper that I mentioned, the Rebus paper, kind of the main argument that they make is that you normally have like, I think that the corollary to that or at least what I know from Carl Friston's other work is that the other's no free will. What happens is that you develop patterns of behavior and thought. And so there's like, there's an emergent topography in your mind where you have like channels where it's much easier for your thoughts to run through because you've done that before. And the more you think that- Yeah, I build a newer pathways. Exactly. And so what psychedelics do, they kind of flatten this landscape. Ooh, that's a good way of putting it. So it kind of like, I know it's, I think it's really, really good. And I think it's intuitively anyone who's done psychedelics is gonna be like, yeah, for sure. So, and that kind of, it gives you more choice. Whether or not that's true per se, I think like we would need to kind of sharpen the technical use of the words. But if we use just like the lay person idea of choice, I think that it does just that. And so, and I think this is something that we don't discuss enough about psychedelics. That could be used for good. That could be used for you to say, oh, shit. I'm like, I'm in an abusive relationship. I abuse drugs. I am not doing whatever I really want to do with my life. And I want to do something else like, but you could buy it by the same token. You could be in a perfectly healthy relationship. All of a sudden you're like, wait, maybe this is an abusive relationship. You may be, you know, drinking a coffee once in a while. And you're like, oh no, I'm addicted to coffee. And so, so I think that this could be also dangerous. And this again brings in the integration piece. It's like, sometimes people have weird thoughts when they're on psychedelics. Oh yeah. And sometimes those weird thoughts are totally brilliant and insightful. And sometimes they're damaging potentially. And that's when you come to integration, you like bounce that off your therapist or shaman or sitter or whatever. And I'm gonna be like, you're fine. You need to like, you need to be. I think I remember hearing this definition of intelligence that I really like, that it's the ability to entertain a thought without accepting it. And I think that if we could train people to do that for psychedelics, you know, you like things come up and you're like, this is an interesting thought. It's not necessarily a part of me. I don't necessarily believe in it. This is an interesting thought. I'm gonna keep it and I'm gonna look at it later and see if it makes sense to me or not. So I think it's really hard to complete the skill. So intelligence too, what they say, a person that can entertain two thoughts, opposing thoughts without actually incorporating it. So I think mindfulness would be really good for that kind of thing to be, like to create a certain distance between whatever you experience on psychedelics and who you are. But in lieu of a comprehensive training protocol, just have someone to integrate with. Yes, the key is integration partner of yours. Yeah, especially somebody that knows you, knows your history and knows what the problems you're trying to address. Yeah, you're a therapist. Yeah. Now what kind of therapist would this be? There's, I'm aware of one training program that's out of California right now. They have a huge wait list. I don't know what the program is like. There's also another model coming out of the imperial group that's called ACE, acceptance, commitment, accept, commit and body. And I think it has a bunch of useful things in it, but I think that it's really fine tuned for large doses. And I think that we, I'm really interested in developing a protocol that would work for micro doses or psycholytic doses. So like smaller doses. This was something that like the Albert Hoffman was really interested in, in psycholytic doses. And yeah, this was pretty hot at like in the heyday of psychedelics research before. So I think that there's a lot we could do with that because like some people, like for some situations, I think maybe yeah, what you need is a full blown trip because there's a lot of work to do or whatever that maybe that's your personality structure. Has there been research or have you given thought to, okay, so kind of like you go to the gym, let's say you get your body in order, but then you have like a maintenance of going to the gym. So instead of like just starting with like micro dosing, you do a full dose, that's like the catalyst, but then you continue the micro dose. Has there been like research signing to that? It has not been researched, but I've heard people propose that. I would actually say for people who've never done psychedelics, I would start with them, well, no, more like a bell curve, start with a micro dose and then do like a half dose, do a full dose. If you want, then you can do a heroic dose and then go back to half dose and then do micro doses because yeah, for maintenance, I don't know if that there's no scientific evidence for this, but I think that it would be an interesting thing to study for sure. Yeah, that's my biggest thing is just the dosaging and then also combination, stacking, and then like the word psychedelic itself, it's broad. It's like, are we talking about shrooms? Are we talking about LSD or ayahuasca, iboga? Some people have been grouping MDMA even though it's not a psychedelic, it's a chemical or 2CB, it's anagologs. It's like, it's a very broad universe for sure. And so each one is very different. Shrooms are extremely different than LSD in my experience, extremely different than MDMA. Doing iboga, it's like, that's a whole different ball game. And so, I don't know, it's for me, let me ask you this, what do we need right now in order to get more studies happening? Money. Money. For sure, money. I've had, so our first kind of major donation came from the Sengal Health Foundation. So it's $350,000, which is a major sum. Oh, that's nice. But it's not enough to run as many participants as we would want. So Molecule are going to help us raise more money and then there's another Toronto-based company that has an app that they're giving us for free and they may also be able to fund some of our research. So we're kind of like, you know, cobbling donations. But at least for now, local, federal, and even private funding is kind of hard to come by in terms of, you know, well-established grants. Like for example, our group applied for a Templeton Foundation grant. Like they do a lot of cool stuff. Like they did this, the Great Prayer Study, I think maybe 10 years ago where they compared like across, I don't remember, 16 hospitals, people who had the exact same heart condition. And we're going to go into surgery. Half of them were prayed for and half of them were not prayed for and they compared their recovery. And that costs like, I don't remember, $4 million. And in case you're wondering, prayer did nothing. Go figure. But yeah, so we applied for funding from them actually last year and this year. And we just heard back from them. They're like, do you guys look cool? But this is too hot a potato. It's too taboo for them. Yeah, so yeah, so there's still, I know that there are people out there with money that want to help out with this research. So I think donations either to us or whoever else, like Johns Hopkins just got a major donation. I read about that. Yeah, $17.5 million. That's how you get science done. Maps got 4 million from the pineapple guy in crypto. Nice. Yeah. The pineapple guy also gave 100 million to ChemH a couple of years ago. We did give them. Yeah. So, yeah. So I think donations would be incredible for anyone really. What else do we need? We need regulation. We need help with that. So there's, I don't know if you know if Nathaniel Erskine Smith, he's, I don't know if he's still an MP for the beaches, but he was really pushing for kind of loosening the constraints on doing research on psychedelics. I don't know where things stand with that, but I think if we had more stuff going on with the government, that could be amazing. It's kind of like a sandbox, give you more freedom too. Exactly. Because right now, like I was saying before, it's incredibly difficult to get through the like regulatory maze. There's a lot of stuff that needs to happen. And yeah, it's difficult. I will say that Health Canada have been incredible. Like I know what you expect, but when I think about working with public servants, I'm like, oh, they're gonna take forever to respond. They're gonna be lazy, whatever. Health Canada have been outstanding. Interesting. I am so impressed. Yeah, they like respond quickly and it feels like they want us to succeed, which is really encouraging. It's awesome. Yeah, and I think finally what we need is, we need researchers to do their work properly, i.e. pre-register, use open science. And we need people who are doing underground therapy and shamans and all them. If they insist on doing it, which I understand and I can sympathize with, just like, don't fuck it up. Don't mess with people's minds too much. We don't need any scandals. The thing we sort of registering the open site, is there a site that everyone can go and post? Yeah, so there are a bunch of sites. Our team uses the open science framework, that's OSF. And if you go on our website, I can give you the link, you can post it if you want. You can see all of what we've done, all of our materials, all of our data, everything. And so, and if there are any scientists that are interested and are like listening to this and are like, maybe open science, maybe, I don't know. I'm super happy, get in touch with me. I will show you the ropes and it'll really streamline how you do science. And by front-ending your project, you make it much easier to do. Fantastic. Well, I think we've covered a lot, definitely round two soon. Sweet, yeah. If people want to get ahold of you, get in touch with you, help you out. What's the best resource? I guess we have a website. I'm a part of the psychedelic studies research program at U of T. We can post that website or just email me. It's, I guess, when you mentioned my interest initially, so another interest that kind of intersects with creativity, sustained attention, and affect regulation is boredom. So I am a part of the boredom lab. Some more boredom, the better. So, well, we thought that. Yeah, there's actually, my colleague did work on whether or not boredom makes you more creative. And because, you know, there's like this intuition that if you're just like sitting around, you're like, what am I doing? Maybe you'll have some creative thoughts. No. She found that, yeah. Interesting. It doesn't work. But yeah, so if people want to reach me directly, just email me rotemrotematboredomlab.org. Rotem, thank you so much, brother. My pleasure. I hope you have round two. Yeah. See you in a minute.