The Power of Microdosing: A Deep Dive with James Fadiman & Jordan Gruber

In this episode of The Psychedelic Report, Dr. Dave Rabin welcomes renowned experts James Fadiman, PhD, and Jordan Gruber, JD, for a compelling conversation on the science and health significance of microdosing. Together, they explore the historical roots of psychedelics in America and their resurgence in modern medicine, shedding light on how these once-stigmatized substances are now being reexamined for their therapeutic potential.

Gain a deeper understanding of what microdosing is, how it works in the brain and body, and the optimal protocols for safe and effective use. This discussion highlights the role of microdosing in enhancing neuroplasticity, reducing inflammation, and supporting mental health—especially for those grappling with treatment-resistant depression. With a mix of scientific insight, real-world experiences, and emerging research, this episode offers valuable takeaways for both newcomers and seasoned explorers of psychedelics.

Microdosing for Health, Healing, and Enhanced Performance: http://MicrodosingBook.com

To dive even deeper, check out Your Symphony of Selves by Fadiman and Gruber, and check out our previous discussion on the TPR about microdosing and multiple personalities.

Published Microdosing book related interviews and podcasts:https://www.microdosingbook.com/events

Web: https://thepsychedelic.report
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DrDavidRabin
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drdavidrabin
Web: https://www.drdave.io/

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
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is the war of drugs.

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Speaker 1 (00:52):
The Psychedelic Report. Psychedelic Report was brought to you by
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the Psychedelic Report, your single source of truth for the
Psychedelic News. I'm your host doctor Dave Raven. I'm a

(01:14):
neuroscientist and psychiatrist trained in ketemine assisted psychotherapy as well
as MBMA assisted therapy. Welcome back to the Psychedelic Report.
I'm your host, doctor Dave Raven. In today's episode, we
delve into the evolving landscape of microdosing psychedelics, a practice
gaining momentum for its potential mental health benefits. From Silicon

(01:37):
Valley innovators to parents seeking stress relief, individuals are exploring
the subtle effects of sub perceptual doses of substances like
psilocybin and LSD. Recent media covered underscores this growing interest.
A Washington Post article published on April seventeenth, twenty twenty five,
highlights personal accounts of microdosing, noting that while users report

(01:59):
enhance well being, scientific studies suggest these benefits may largely
stem from the placebo effect. Similarly, Discover magazine discusses how
microdosing could increase flexible thinking, though it emphasizes that research
is still in its infancy. An Associated Press piece, also
from April twenty twenty five, further explores the anecdotal benefits

(02:20):
reported by users, such as reduced anxiety and improved creativity,
while cautioning that scientific evidence remains inconclusive. However, there are
a number of leading scientists and researchers who would disagree
and call the results from scientific and anecdotal reports of
microdosing to be very conclusive towards improving health. To further

(02:44):
enrich our exploration of microdosing, we turn to a new
pivotal publication, Microdosing for Health, Healing and enhance Performance, by
doctor James Fadoman and Jordan Gruber, released in February twenty
twenty five. This comprehensive guide delves into the nuanced practice
of microdosing psychedelics. Drawing from a wealth of personal reports

(03:04):
and emerging scientific research, Doctor Fatimine collaborates with Jordan to
present a balanced and comprehensive overview of the microdosing field
that combines anecdotal experiences with historical context and scientific findings.
The book discusses potential benefits of microdosing, including alleviation of
symptoms related to depression, ADHD, chronic pain, and long COVID,

(03:27):
as well as enhancements in focus, creativity, and emotional well being.
By weaving together extensive research and personal narratives, Fatamin and
Kruber offer readers a thoughtful examination of microdosing's potential to
contribute to mental health and personal development. Doctor James Fatimine
is a prominent figure in the field of psychedelic research,
particularly known for his work as one of the first

(03:50):
to publicly discuss microdosing psychedelics like LSD and soul cybin.
Often called the father of microdosing, Fatamin has a long
history in the study of psychedelics, dating back to the
nineteen sixties, when he worked on studies involving LSD and
creativity at Stanford University. After psychedelics were banned in the US,
Fataman shifted his focus, but returned to psychedelic research decades later.

(04:12):
His book, The Psychedelic Explorer's Guide, Safe Therapeutic and Sacred
Journeys has become a key resource for safe psychedelic exploration.
In recent years, he has pioneered research on microdosing, examining
its potential benefits for mental health, cognitive enhancement, and overall
well being. Jordan Gruber, a lawyer and author, founded the

(04:34):
early online Enlightenment dot com community. After practicing law at
Cooley Godward and focusing on IP law at NASA's Moffatt Field,
and working at g Nosis magazine, Jordan became the practical wordsmith,
a writer, ghostwriter, editor, and writing coach. As such, Jordan
has co created cutting edge works on everything from forensic,

(04:54):
audio and financial services to health, wellness, psychology, and spirituality.
Recent editing c include Scott Rogers, The Mindful Law Student,
Cindy lou Gollins, The Shadow Playbook, and Lawrence Ford's The
Secret of the Seasons. In twenty twenty, doctor Fatomine and
Jordan co authored a book on Healthy Multiplicity, Your Symphony

(05:15):
of Selves, Discover and understand more of who we are.
You can find our discussion about this book on an
earlier episode with Jim and Jordan on the Psychedelic Report.
Since then, both Jim and Jordan's attention have increasingly turned
solely towards microdosing. As such, there couldn't be two better
minds and kinder souls with which to explore the benefits

(05:37):
of microdosing here on the Psychedelic Report. In this episode,
we examine the current state of microdosing research, its potential
applications and mental health, and the importance of scientific rigor
in evaluating its efficacy. Join us as we navigate the
promises and pitfalls of this intriguing frontier in psychedelic science.

(05:57):
Doctor Jim Fatoman and Jordan Gruber, thank you, thank you
so much for taking the time to join me today.
It is such a pleasure to have you.

Speaker 3 (06:04):
Thank you, thank you.

Speaker 1 (06:05):
I know this is a lot of work to put
this book together. Could you start out by just telling
us from your perspective, you know what motivated you to
get this out now?

Speaker 2 (06:17):
Basically in part, and this is probably not as cool
a way to say it, and part, it was so
that all the people who ask us questions could be
answered in enough depth so they wouldn't keep writing us back.
And the growth and interest was really getting out of hand.
And that's one way to handle this is to put information

(06:39):
out in certain ways. But when you decide to do
a book, you also are deciding you're going to put
it into the system in places where you would never
get to. And that turns out to be important with microdosing,
because we have reports well like eight years ago we
had reports from fifty one countries. One of the other

(07:02):
large studies now has reports from eighty one countries. So
we're beginning to clear you know in our heads that
this was not a kind of local or even know
certainly not in California and not an American phenomenon of
the One of my friends in Peru who runs the
whole training system called Microca, including working having Chevibo Shamans

(07:26):
as part of the staff, he's been putting together presentation
about the and I didn't really believe this either. Two
hundred and seventy five psychedelic organizations in South America. So
it's very easy to get insular and forget that there's
a large world. And so the book was an attempt
to bring people up to speed in dozens of areas they.

Speaker 3 (07:48):
Wouldn't normally think of when looking at microdosing.

Speaker 4 (07:51):
So also it's really useful to think of the book
and its role given an overall historical evolution of microdocing.
Indigenous microdosing existed for time memorial. We don't know that
much about it, but modern microdosing was really developed by
Jim after he first heard about it in two thousand
and nine. Then started paying attention and asking people what
they thought. They gave him their reports, and then word

(08:14):
got out that somebody in Silicon Valley was coding and
all the way up to Aila Waldman's book and Michael
Pollan's book, Netflix series featuring Jim, so in a sense,
Jim already wrote the book on microdosing, but now kind
of a historical spiral, it was time to write the
book again. And the thing to note is that all
that time there was sort of a positive feedback loop

(08:37):
or a virtuous cycle or circle happening. People would give
him feedback and he'd put more out and they get
more excited. And so today with the book, we now
have the strongest, clearest signal for microdosing that's ever existed.

Speaker 1 (08:49):
Yeah, I love that, and it truly is, and it's
very much needed because there is so little about this
out there, coming from reliable sources like yourselves in the space.
And I also as a as a psychiatrist, I get
questions from probably every single patient that I see, asking
about microdosing, and it's incredible to hear. You know, how

(09:15):
people are interested in these alternative approaches because in a
lot of cases, not all cases, but in a lot
of cases, our mental health patient's needs are not being
met by the treatments that we currently have available. And
so what do people do? Well, they think, like well,
maybe I can self treat this, right, maybe I can
take this into my own hands, which is really a
very Hippocratic principle around healing, right we talk about Hippocrates

(09:38):
said the source of healing comes from the person seeking
to be healed, not from the medicine, not from the healer.
And so you know, I think the concept of being
able to treat yourself or to heal yourself is very
much embodied in this philosophy around micro dosing. But I
think a lot of people still don't know, even with
the even with the teaching sessisis done in the past,

(10:00):
even with the interviews you've done in the past together,
I think a lot of people are still confused about
what microdosing really is. Is it something you feel when
you dose? Is something that you're not supposed to feel?
That's kind of in the background. Is it different for
different drugs? Can all drugs be microdosed? Can just some
drugs be microdosed? Could you start by just talking a

(10:20):
little bit about because dose is in the name of
what we're talking about, talk about the dose aspect for
a minute, and truly like what is a microdose and
how should people be thinking about it?

Speaker 3 (10:33):
Those series of questions.

Speaker 2 (10:35):
I thought, well, that's a good ten part podcast that
you've just laid out, and fortunately we've answered lots of
in the book.

Speaker 3 (10:41):
So but let's go back to microdose. Okay.

Speaker 2 (10:46):
I actually wanted a word for very small doses because
I was beginning to learn something about them and I
was actually working with LSD. So micro was a very
appropriate word, and it was a dose, and so I
thought I invented the word, and I did, except other
people had invented it for other sciences earlier. It's very

(11:08):
hard to be original when there's ten billion people on Earth.
A microdose is approximately a tenth to a twentieth of
a recreational dose. That's for those forty million people or
so in the United States who have actually tried just LFD,
So it's a fairly understood term. It's actually, what's our

(11:29):
current numbers for LSD for.

Speaker 4 (11:31):
Forty million people since it was male, Oh, we're saying,
we're saying five to twelve micrograms generally of range.

Speaker 3 (11:37):
Oh.

Speaker 2 (11:38):
The reason I'm asking Jordan is over the years, and again,
we're looking not at our pushing drugs on people. We
are looking at people reporting to us their own experiences,
which we think is the end of any kind of
medical intervention is does it really work, Not in the
pharmaceutical company, not in the lab, not in the sales meeting,

(11:59):
in real life when a physician or medical professional says,
why don't you try these and let me know how
it works.

Speaker 3 (12:06):
So what we.

Speaker 2 (12:07):
Found over the years is that less turns out to
be more affective, and this of course goes against all
kinds of things in the culture. And what we're finding
is a micro dose is a small dose, and we
now know that if you go above it, one you
will notice it, and two it will lose effectiveness. And

(12:29):
this is probably the most important shift that people need
to understand.

Speaker 4 (12:34):
Yes, so we have from Connor Murray that there is
at least a couple of measures that once you go
above to a certain level, that sort of disappears. And
so we've been cultivating this notion that there is a
sweet spot. You know, when Jim started with all of this,
he used the word sub perceptual, which stuck, but that's
not really an accurate term. Psychedelics, as you know, are

(12:56):
notoriously difficult to blind. Most people, even at the microdose level,
are aware that they're on something. Maybe that's like they've
had some tea and they've got a little bit of something,
but it's not much, and so we say it's below
the threshold of any kind of psychedelic trip effects. So
no visuals, no big changes in mentation, no qualms about

(13:17):
having your ordinary day. Nobody pretty much knows you're on
anything and what that level is. As Jim said, you know,
less is enough and less is what really works. And
so if you go above that, and I've seen this
even in the world of working out, if I take
a mini dose, it'll be great that first day, but
I'm all messed up and I've had too much of
that up. But at a microdose level, you know, if

(13:39):
I take taking time off and integrated, it works just great.
And so we're seeing that for a lot of things.
It's there's something about the time in between and the
ability to integrate, the ability to take advantage of some
of the things that we know are going on, like
enhanced neuroplasticity and anti inflammatory effect and more of a return
to homeosthesis in states.

Speaker 3 (14:00):
It's an equilibrium.

Speaker 5 (14:01):
We know all of that's going on, and you're doing
it at this very small dose.

Speaker 4 (14:04):
It's not a big deal in your day. You're not
having revelations, you're having eyelight. Waldman's a really good day
where you may or may not remember most of the
time that you're on something.

Speaker 5 (14:13):
You have plenty of time to integrate it and take advantage.

Speaker 4 (14:16):
Of it and either heal or focus on performance, if
that's why you're doing it.

Speaker 2 (14:20):
Now, I realized I talked about micro and doose I
didn't talk about and it is a different listening. This
is not a one off event. This is a way
of bodies working with these very small materials to improve itself.
So microdosing is taking it over a period of weeks
and definitely not every day. Again to differentiate it immediately

(14:45):
from pharmaceuticals, and it seems to improve overall functioning and
that expresses itself in dozens of ways depending on the
condition of the body. And we'll just give you one
because it's kind of fun. This is from Ben green
Fields interviews ultra marathoners. This is people who run more
than twenty six miles and like it. I don't quite

(15:08):
understand them.

Speaker 1 (15:09):
Neither.

Speaker 2 (15:10):
Is now known in the ultra marathon community that microdoses
will help endurance and will lower the amount of pain
and a number of other things. So it is I
think its own use there. It is unlikely that we're
going to have formal studies for quite a while. But
when most everybody in the sport already knows it, we're

(15:30):
dealing now with kind of normal behavior.

Speaker 1 (15:33):
Yeah, that's really fascinating. And so getting to the kind
of what you just segued into the microdosing part over time,
not just one, and I think just to summarize, I
think key point here for our listeners is that you
shouldn't really feel altered when you're microdosing properly. That's important
because I think a lot of people in our society

(15:55):
we are still approaching medicine and drugs from the standpoint
of like more is better, but in many cases, and
microdosing being a perfect example, is that less is more
and that you can get a lot of the benefits
from the small, tiny doses of medicine where you barely
notice anything at all, without some of the potential destabilizing

(16:17):
side effects that can come from people using higher doses
of psychedelics routinely, which we see in the mental health
space quite a bit. And so how do you think
about the frequency and time in between each dose for people,
because I think this is a really interesting and another
key point, which is you said, not like pharmac atypical pharmaceutical,

(16:40):
you're not taking it every day, So how often should
people take it? I know there are a lot of
protocols that people have talked about over the years, including
like your protocol, Jim, the Stanmard's protocol, and I know
there's many others. And so how do you think about
recommending people who are new to this to kind of

(17:00):
get started with something that's balanced, that balance frequency and
sort of time duration and that kind of thing.

Speaker 2 (17:08):
Well, first, keep in mind that protocol, which is a
high class word for schedule, is with microdosing, unlike again
pharmaceuticals and also a lot of things, is definitely not
every day. Once you get that, then the question of
how often you want to be not taking it depends
really pretty much on your sources of information. I think

(17:29):
Jordan says it very nicely. The so called fatom And
protocol is probably the most conservative because you take it
on day one, you don't take something on day two,
you don't take something on day three, and your microdose
on day four. That's not taking very much or very
often false. Stammets has a different kind of schedule, which

(17:51):
is four days on and three days off. The people
in Europe, some of the European clinics every other day,
which is of course the easiest to remember, don't have
to know how to count. Unfortunately, that helps a lot
of people.

Speaker 4 (18:06):
If you think of Jim's protocol versus the stabats on
the thirty one day month on stamates, you'd be dosing
nineteen times on fatomen eleven times.

Speaker 5 (18:17):
We think that the.

Speaker 4 (18:18):
Conservative less is more, less is enough, you know, theme
holds on this also, and what we found on Jim
found early on is that the second day is often
the very best day for people.

Speaker 5 (18:30):
So there's even a term the second day effect.

Speaker 4 (18:32):
And one of the studies out there shows that on
the second day people had the most sleep, like thirty
six minutes more sleep on average, and they were using whoops,
I mean they were cracking it, and so people sleep better.
And the way I like to think of it is
somebody gave this analogy on Clubhouse, which is imagine taking
one one hundred microgram dose or ten ten microgram doses
over a month, you get the same amount of new

(18:54):
information coming into your body either way, but if you're
breaking it up, you're going to have a lot more
time to remember it and work with it and really make.

Speaker 3 (19:03):
Use of it.

Speaker 4 (19:04):
So there's something about the slow pattern of you know,
maybe it's the second or third time you take into dose,
the anti inflammatory effect is really beginning to lower your
pain and make you feel better or enabling you to
shift into a different part of who you are that
isn't really identified with pain.

Speaker 5 (19:19):
So there are a lot of advantages to going.

Speaker 4 (19:21):
Slow, and it also takes it out of the you know,
it's it's not really so druggy or you're getting high
and you want to get an inebriated one way or another,
and you want more in that piece.

Speaker 5 (19:31):
So it's none of that. And so in that way,
it's very much not like everything that's come before.

Speaker 2 (19:37):
And for people with psychedelic experience, they're the only ones
who tend to overdose people who without experience.

Speaker 3 (19:44):
Through what it says.

Speaker 2 (19:45):
But what we've found is that it's a wonderful kind
of built in correction, which is if you microdose and
you have that just a lovely feeling you're just starting
to take off. It's just feeling a little, that's too much.
You have just self examined what too much is like.
Now you say, well, I like it too much, okay.

(20:07):
And then we go to the research and again we're
talking about Connor murt UCLA.

Speaker 3 (20:12):
What we're seeing is some of the major.

Speaker 2 (20:15):
Benefits, particularly in terms of contritive, flexibility and complexity, are
fine in the microdose level. When you get it slightly
above it, they go away. So literally the benefits are
within the range, and the benefits don't get more, they
get less when you have too little, and when you

(20:36):
have too much. One might make some large moral statement
about that, but I'll skip it.

Speaker 4 (20:40):
And also I just wanted to mention the other part
of the ing is that after six or eight weeks,
then you want to take two or three weeks off,
even if you're someone who's going to come back and
do it again. Except for one guy we found, and
that's a story about pain, and he takes it every
day and it's a miracle. But so there are different
people and it's going to change. But what we're reporting
in the book is what we've learned from many thousands

(21:00):
of people.

Speaker 5 (21:01):
So when we give average dose ranges, it's.

Speaker 4 (21:03):
For beginners, but we always say, start at the low
end of the dose range and if you feel anything,
cut it in half. Also, it was sort of up
to us to say which substances are really good and
really fit, and which maybe but probably not, and which
definitely not. So there are people with different economic interests
who might not agree with us about all this, but

(21:23):
we know that, for example, cannabis, it doesn't have the
same neuroplasticity profile as microdosing, and people don't use it
the same way.

Speaker 5 (21:31):
It's really not a microdosing thing.

Speaker 4 (21:33):
Same thing with DMT vappens, and I'm thankful that that
community is now talking about low dose DMT instead of
microdosing DMT.

Speaker 3 (21:41):
So we want to do.

Speaker 4 (21:42):
Try to kind of wrangle it into one central, generally
understood definition and explanation. Is one of the things that
you'll hear from a lot of news reports and people
is that, well, there is no a bad upon definition
of microdosing. So we're trying to bring that together and
to be fair with them. When we started writing the book,
they were run. When we started writing the book, we

(22:03):
two were saying, oh my, there's a lot of all
these wonderful stories and all these wonderful miracles, but we
are not finding kind of much science. By the time
we finished the book, over half of all the microdose
studies ever done, We're done while we were writing the book.
So we are talking about and why has the science

(22:25):
suddenly picked up? Not for commercial reasons like high doses,
but because individuals having experiences are include. Researchers include researchers,
girlfriends or boyfriends include. Professors, include, psychiatrists and more and more.
There is genuine interest.

Speaker 2 (22:45):
So people who when they're interested in something, they want
to do research, they are better able to get funding
and to get approval. And that's really you know, when
you come in and look at science only from the backside,
it's a whole different set of issues about what gets done.
So right now microdosing has a lot of research and

(23:07):
a lot of reasons for that research.

Speaker 1 (23:11):
You're listening to the Psychedelic Report. I'm really excited to
dive into the science and the research with you. That's
one of my most favorite topics, as everyone knows. But
right before we get to that, what I really am
curious about is what do you think is happening in
the off days? Because I have my own you know,

(23:32):
my own theories on this from seeing many people have
these powerful micro dosing experiences across many different protocols personally
and professionally. You know, my most recommended protocol is your protocol, Jim,
because I think it's the most thoughtful and conservative, and
I find by observation, I have observed that the off
days are very productive learning opportunities for people. But I'm

(23:56):
really curious to hear from you. You know, what do
you guys think is happening in the days you know,
when your protocol, for instance, where you're dosing on one day,
and then the second day you don't take anything, in
the third day you don't take anything, and then the
fourth day you dose again. What do you think is
happening in those days in between when you're not dosing
that is so impactful for people.

Speaker 2 (24:16):
Well, let's frame it a little bit by looking at
why most medications that you take every day not only
you must take every day, but if you ever read
the eight point type and the little folded thing that
you get from the pharmacy, will be horrified to find
out how terrible it is if you miss a dose.
That's called symptom suppression, and so the medication suppresses the

(24:38):
symptom terrific and then leaves the body, and the symptom says, well,
I'm glad you're gone, and returns it restores itself. It's
a form of medicine, and it works in some ways
and not so well in others. Correct, my thing is
more like doing a really solid round of exercise. Eventually,

(24:58):
people who want to exercise too much find out why
the word too much just happened in that sentence, because
unless they let their system make use of the benefits
of the exercise, they eventually prevent that improvement from happening.
So the question of what happens in the off days

(25:19):
is the body is making use of the effects of
the medication of the microdose, and that simply takes biological time.

Speaker 4 (25:28):
I also think that this is speculation based on Andrew
Kuberman's analogy, which is that with large doses, it's like
you're taking a large lever and you've uprooted a boulder,
and that boulder is the neuroplasticity, and that rolls through
the village of the mind. You want to like plow
a field or do something useful, not have to go
through a tent with children in it.

Speaker 3 (25:48):
So in you're.

Speaker 4 (25:48):
Microdosing, you're using much smaller levers and it's only a rock,
it's not a boulder, but that is rolling through your mind.
You know, the fault mode network is toned down. There's
different neurons connecting and unconnecting.

Speaker 5 (26:01):
And one of the things that.

Speaker 4 (26:03):
We have on our side saying that it's not just
placebo is that there is a bunch of different studies
that show similar effects, same signature, same pattern, but at
a reduced amplitude with microdosing, and some of these go
over for days or weeks or almost a whole month.
So I find it fully believable that there are physical
and functional changes that we call neuroplasticity that happen a

(26:25):
little bit on the first day, and then the second
day it's a little bit less, but then when you're
back on on the fourth day, it's kind of there's
even more of it. And it feels to me like
you learn how to use that over time if you're
paying attention, you know, if you're learning to study or
play an.

Speaker 2 (26:39):
Instrument, or and if we go to a cellar, the level,
if you can reduce inflammation the body says, I can
do a job that I'm supposed to be doing better,
and therefore, if the inflammation is reduced, it isn't like
there's a vacuum in the body says, well, I'll just
wait till you reduce it again. The body says, okay,

(26:59):
now I can all the things that I've been trying
to do that the inflammation prevented. So that what we're
looking at with the classic at iron flammatory it isn't
organ specific, it isn't organ system specific and changing systems,
it isn't meridian specific. So what we're seeing is a
kind of push towards allowing the body to do what

(27:21):
it does well, which is healed and now and then
let me use you a little full of metaphors this morning.
Imagine a pottery reel. When you have a pottery reel,
you kick it and it turns, and it turns a
number of times before it needs another kick. And that's
how it's designed. It's designed for intermittent reinforcement. Microdosing is

(27:45):
intermittent reinforcement of the whole body, which then, depending on
a condition, will show there are conditions for which eventually
the protocols that we're looking at there are specialized protocols
for specialized condition is not surprising.

Speaker 1 (28:01):
Yeah, I love that metaphor of the pottery wheel. I
was going to offer something similar, but you beat me
to it, because I think the metaphors are really important
to help people understand and relate to some of these
more complex topics we're talking about, which is that the
body does have the ability and have a tendency to

(28:23):
heal itself as long as we allow it to do so,
but inflammation, stress that provokes more inflammation actually prevents that
from happening. And so in some ways, what I see
happening that's kind of consistent with what you're saying, is
the introduction of the first microdose is like a reminder

(28:43):
for the body internally of what it can do without
so much inflammation around, and without so much stress around,
maybe just slight, barely conscious perceptual changes about the way
you think and feel or the way you interpret your
thoughts and feelings, and then your body's able to just
do what it's built to do better. And then your

(29:04):
body and you realize that you like that, and then
you learn to remember that on your off days, and
it just continues on.

Speaker 2 (29:13):
Also a lot of conditions which we call mental or physical?
Are mental physical? And let's take the most popular is
the wrong word, the most unpopular and well known condition
in the world called depression. Depression is physical. Rarely the
physicians ever measure for it. But because the other way

(29:33):
is to say, are you depressed, that's the best instrument
we have or most popular. When you improve the physical,
sometimes the mental simply goes away. And we've had interesting
discussions because we have a lot of people who say, well,
the reason you have to use high doses for depression
is because you want to get to the root cause

(29:54):
and to the trauma and to the terrible childhood and
whatever it was, all of which makes perfect sense in
that system. What we found, and again we don't tell
people how to feel. They write us and say, when
I started microdosing, and I've had fourteen different antidepressants over
the past twelve years, I stopped being depressed. And the

(30:18):
comment we get over and over is I'm back, And
they say, I feel like I did before I became depressed,
and now how much insight none, how much improvement enough
so that they no longer are using medications, And very
often they stopped using microdosing. So we're looking at it. Well,

(30:38):
if you have a model that doesn't fit, you simply
need to put the model away and look at the data.

Speaker 4 (30:44):
So a related point, going back a bit and going
back to our previous book, Your Symphony of Selves, is
that when you're microdosing, you're more aware of yourselves and
they are able to shift into being in the right
mind at the right time. So if you're practicing that
on the day you're docing, you're going to I'll also
be able to do that in other days. And that
might mean just moving yourself into a part of you

(31:04):
that really likes listening or making music, or really likes
walking outside, and you remember the parts of you that
enjoy life and that you like to do different things,
and so that's another bit of that equilivering romeostasis factor
that it brings.

Speaker 1 (31:19):
Also, Yeah, I think that's a great point, and we
talk about that a lot in ketamine assisted therapy where
and MBMA assisted therapy where we're using macro doses. But
what we're talking about is expanding awareness, right, And if
you can expand awareness, even just a tenC bit with
a microdose, all the stuff that's going on underneath the surface,
then that expanded awareness becomes something you can you realize

(31:42):
you can learn and you can have and continue afterwards,
just through like little little practices, including just remembering what's there.

Speaker 5 (31:50):
We remember to get kinder.

Speaker 4 (31:51):
To the people in your life if they do something
that pisss you.

Speaker 1 (31:54):
Off, right, because you are the way about common.

Speaker 3 (31:57):
Report question, which is.

Speaker 2 (32:00):
And you know and I'm noticing, and they're trying to
notice something so they can report to us. And one
of the things that keeps coming up is I'm nice
to that person at work who doesn't deserve it. They
also will say something like, after work, I went to
the gym and I did one more set of reps. Okay,
it's not big. And one of my favorites is a

(32:21):
woman who's microdosed for longer than I've been even researching it,
and she says, the only way people know I'm microdosing
is they would notice if they could notice that I've
lowered the illumination on my laptop a little, because she
has she has very very sensitive and I wear pupils.
So we're looking at a model that suggests, perhaps and

(32:43):
the depression with us of interest, that mental illness, if
we want to use that term, may also like physical
illness be able to be healed by a healthy body.
Now I have a PhD in psychology, which I just
said what I just say and validates most of what
I was taught, but it's another way of trying to

(33:04):
understand the reports we get.

Speaker 1 (33:07):
Right, Yeah, And I think what's most exciting about what
you just described that we see all the time in
the clinic is that the mind and body are in
fact so intimately connected, right, And many of us were
taught in our traditional scientific upbringing and even in non
scientific upbringings that the mind and the body are separate
from the descartes days and that you know want to

(33:29):
you know, you observe what happens in the body, but
they're actually not related. But we know so well that
if you are chronically stressed emotionally mentally, you will manifest
that physically. And if you're in physical pain or distress
and you don't do anything about it, you manifest that
mentally emotionally. And they're so connected. And I think when
you see these accounts of people treating mental health issues

(33:53):
with a physical approach like exercise, which is known to
be one of the most successful ways to depression and
PTSD nowadays, in terms of symptom management. And then you
see people addressing physical health issues with things like microdosing
that are you know, shifting your perspective or your awareness
or something like that, but not where we have really

(34:15):
any full understanding of what's happening on the physiological side
of the body other than that your neurons are learning
more effectively. It's very interesting and I think it unlocks
a lot of potential for I think what you were
both alluding to, which is rethinking our model around how
we're approaching mental health and mental illness from a holistic
whole body mind body and ideally mind body spirit perspective.

Speaker 5 (34:39):
Do you want to start at the lowest level of
cost and risk and expense And so right now there's
a Canadian at home study for depression with LSD going on.
If they find out that works, you know, that's so much.

Speaker 4 (34:53):
I mean, the thing I'm microdosing this has such a
high reward to risk ratio, then why wouldn't you start
with something that almost certainly isn't going to hurt anybody
and might be able to address lots of people's needs.
I mean, the numbers were getting on treatment resistant depression
are really amazing. You don't necessarily have to have the
high dose with the therapists, which unfortunately is still part

(35:15):
of the mantra being.

Speaker 5 (35:16):
Repeated by a bunch of psychedelic leaders.

Speaker 1 (35:18):
And to that point, what's the role of integration in
micro dosing because you mentioned that, Jordan when we first
started talking today, and I've seen both ends of the
spectrum where people can really benefit from integration during their
micro dosing process and then other people have tremendous benefit
without it at all.

Speaker 3 (35:36):
It depends on what they come in for. And also
with the depression.

Speaker 2 (35:41):
For example, you know, you're a therapist and you're working
with someone and they're getting insights, and then they microdose,
and then you come in and say I'm no longer depressed.
You as the therapist, have to decide do you say, well,
thank you, it's been nice working with you. Would you
like to learn more about yourself, which is always a
good thing. No longer using the possibility that we're going

(36:03):
to help your depression with psychotherapy because you're no longer depressed.

Speaker 3 (36:09):
So we have to change models and the model that
we see.

Speaker 2 (36:13):
Even when I was a graduate student decades ago, the
idea that the mind is separate from the body turned
out to be actually a specialization system within the university
because and later on in my life, at some point,
I had a serious auto accident and I had something
I crushed my heel, okay, and I found a sportsperson

(36:35):
sports medicine physician because I figured they want to get
you just more than better. And I also said my
knee hurts, and I realized that he didn't want to
deal with that because that wasn't what his training and
specialty was. He literally never looked higher than the bottom
of my knee. So specialization has advantages, incredible advantages, but

(37:02):
also after specialization comes integration.

Speaker 4 (37:06):
What I like to say, Dave, is that we wrote
this book when we say this in the book, so
that anybody can microdose on your own. Everything you need
to know is pretty much in here, and it's kind
of like learning to ride a bicycle or learning to
drive a car. It definitely helps if you have somebody
show you. But the real answer is that if you're
the kind of person who likes working with a coach
or a therapist and likes to do intention setting and

(37:28):
integration and sort of likes to enhance their own self
healing abilities by really making a program out of it.
You should definitely work with a coach, and I know
a bunch of amazing coaches. But if you're the kind
of person who likes to do stuff on your own
and wants to think of this basically as kind of
a magic vitamin pill that could help you in a
lot of ways, you really shouldn't work with someone else

(37:48):
because I mean, I don't work with someone else on
the microdosting that I've done because I generally not that
kind of a guy. I like to do my own
thing and I don't want to be held to filling
out a work book. There's a lot of people who
like that stuff, and you'll see it more and more,
and there's a lot of coaches, and there's as Jim
will say, there's now trainings for coaches.

Speaker 5 (38:08):
I mean, it's it's a bigger and bigger industry.

Speaker 4 (38:11):
But nobody really needs to do any of that if
they're not like in the mood for it.

Speaker 5 (38:15):
That's not kind of how they go about things.

Speaker 1 (38:18):
Yeah, it's an interesting point, and I think one thing
that is part of the reason why I brought this
up is because a lot of people who bring up
microdosing to me, are like they want to They want
insight building, right, They want to learn more about themselves,
they want to look underneath the surface a little more.
They're not necessarily just like I want my symproms to
go away. That's of course a big part of it.

(38:38):
But I think there's another part of it, which is
Number one, how do I sustain the long term benefits
when I'm done with this course as best as I can?
And number two is how do I build the insight?

Speaker 5 (38:49):
How do I.

Speaker 1 (38:50):
Learn more abuse this tool and this process to learn
more about myself so I can get the most out
of it, In which case I'm generally like, oh, yeah,
it's probably helpful to talk to somebody while you're going
through it, but not necessarily require it.

Speaker 2 (39:02):
Let's take it from the other side, which is I
know a growing number of therapists, psychotherapists of all kinds
of persuasions, and they agree on one thing that clients
who are microdosing. This is direct quote, do better. Now
what does that mean? Because that's what I asked, do better?
Meaning they work through things faster, if therapy takes less time,

(39:25):
they deal with difficult material more easily because they're triggering
has been diminished and they benefit basically, you know, more
from the insights that they're gathering psychotherapy. I think psychotherapy
is wonderful because understanding yourself is probably your major interest anyway,
and people who can help you with it are wonderful people.

(39:47):
I originally was wondering when people say, well, now I'm microdosing,
I don't want psychotherapy, and that people who want psychotherapy
know how to benefit from it. So we have treatment resistant,
which means almost always only about pharmaceuticals. I'm not sure
we even have the therapy resistant, though all of us

(40:10):
will be in the psychotherapy world. Know that you're early on.
You're going to get the person that says, I've been
to seventeen therapists, but I know you can help me,
and you if you've been in business longer than six
or eight months, say no, I can't you in. But
they're basically treatment resistant. And what we find with microdosing

(40:31):
is that kind of resistance, which is not beneficial, diminishes.
Doesn't go away, it diminishes, and so the body is
more likely to want to get healthier. That's what it's
designed for. The mind actually is the same thing it's
not some entity that got stuck in your ear as
you were born, so that the mind aims are remarkably

(40:53):
like the body. If you begin to drop out of
your specialization and just you know, notice how you actually
are in the real world with your own friends and bamily.

Speaker 1 (41:04):
You're listening to the Psychedelic Report, and I think getting
into something that I think is really important to talk
about to wrap the show is the science. Because when
we first started chatting about this together, this is you know,
four or five, six years ago, there wasn't a lot
of science about microdosing out. It was a lot of
first hand accounts, people writing books. You mentioned some of

(41:26):
the names of the authors who have been well regarded
for their books in this topic and about their personal
experiences or witnessing others experiences. But one thing that's interesting
that's happened in the last five years that you mentioned
is how many actual scientific publications have come out providing
a rather than an end of one or an end

(41:48):
of a sample size of ten, we're talking like hundreds,
thousands of people or thousands of people or more who
have been watched and observed doing these protocols. Can you
talk about some of the studies that are most exciting
to you, that you describe in the book, or that
have just been most exciting to you to watch come

(42:08):
through this process.

Speaker 2 (42:10):
I confess that I don't actually get wild excitement when
I am reading a medical journal. There are classes on
how to write that badly. Literally, people teach you how
to write that badly. But if you know how to
read a medical journal, and almost everyone I know never
reads the article all the way through unless they wrote it,
what you find very quickly is what are people looking for,

(42:34):
who are they using, do they know what they're doing,
and do their results sound like what you would assume
would be common sense? Which is this improved, this improved less,
this didn't improve at all? And then do we look
at those subclasses that last part, By the way, it's
almost never done. And so there are some scary things

(42:57):
in research, and I'll give you one which should protect
you for life. Very often what you will see is
we tested, for instance, we're looking at the average weight
of people in the third grade in high school. Okay,
and you're pretty straightforward, we know how to do that.
You weigh them all and the average and one kid

(43:17):
in the class, because of medical reasons, and he's older
already weighs one hundred and twenty pounds. What the researcher
says is we eliminated the edges of our stample, so
we only actually telling you the people who we who
we want to measure. Okay, Now, my interest is always

(43:38):
to go to the outliers because they're the ones who
have something to tell us that we don't know. So
we are I think we are most in you know,
I'm most in love at the moment with this connumary
at UCLA, because he really is saying, what can we
measure that's worth measuring and that will make a difference
once we know it. There's a lot of things that

(43:59):
measure stick and then you end up with measured stuff.
So Connor basically is saying, how can we differentiate the
state of mind in a microdose from either below it
or above it? That sounds pretty useful. That's my favorite
study of the day. Jordan may have a different one.

Speaker 5 (44:16):
Well, I just want to put a bigger frame on it.

Speaker 4 (44:18):
We have about half a dozen studies that right now
satisfy the RCT that double want to see the control
random I study. We also have things like microdose dot
me with eight nine thousand people and some big surveys
on depression and some other things that overwhelmingly we published
data from the mothers of the mushroom survey that Mickela

(44:39):
Dalalamico did, and all these moms who are breastfeeding and
pregnant and early parenting having overall amazingly good experiences.

Speaker 5 (44:47):
So we have that. We also have the antidote too.

Speaker 4 (44:50):
It's just a placebo in terms of brainscan blood flow
BDNF and now Connor's neural complexity, all showing that there
is something really going on again, same pattern or signature,
but a lower amplitude, so we know it's not just
a placebo. And then we have all of these thousands
and thousands of reports coming in that people are reporting

(45:11):
amazing things. So that's citizen science. It usually gets denigrated
as being only anecdotal, but you can think of it
as real world evidence, which is the end result of
science anyway.

Speaker 5 (45:24):
And the real world.

Speaker 6 (45:25):
Evidence, you know, we talk about the fact that it's
been going back to the sixteen seventies and the Royal
Academy and Nullias verbium, and you know, people have been
talking about taking substances and then figuring out what's real
and what's not real.

Speaker 4 (45:39):
This is Ken Wilber's inner subjective hermeneutical verification. You know,
you have a community to qualified and you ask people
have taken it is is something going on? So you know,
just the number of people that come up to us
all the time. My neighbor up front, you know, she's
twenty something years old, she looks great and is happy
for the first time, and she said, oh yeah, I'm
microdosing now, and it's like, we just.

Speaker 5 (46:00):
Know that it's real and we qut.

Speaker 4 (46:02):
Jeff Bezos in the book saying that when your data
and your anecdotes disagree, your anecdotes are usually correct. And
it's not that your data has been mismeasured. It's that
you're asking the wrong question or doing it in a
way that doesn't really work. So these actual, real world,
real world evidence reports and these long term, longitudinal studies
with thousands of people, you know, it's hard to blind

(46:23):
anything working with psychedelics. This is a notorious problem. So
we're trying to get people to relax a little bit
on the RCT and look at where the overall.

Speaker 3 (46:33):
So my idea is.

Speaker 4 (46:34):
That if you appeal to Occam's razor or the principle
of parsimony don't unnecessarily multiply explanatory entities. The easy, simple
answer right now is that it's clearly not just a PACEBO.

Speaker 2 (46:46):
So so but I'll just study that's fun. This is
a man of fielding in England. She's been studying psychedelics
longer than almost any of us. And the question was
does the microdoses or does psychedelics affect your ability to
resist pain? Nobody's particularly wanting to do that, but it's
easiest study because there's this classic thing where you put

(47:08):
your hand in icy cold water and you start the
time clock and when you can't stand it, you pull
it out.

Speaker 3 (47:15):
That's the data. It's really easy.

Speaker 2 (47:17):
So she tested it with the CBO, with microdosing, with
high dosing, and with opiates. Interesting, right, microdosing was better
than opiates for pain control. High doses were even better,
but you then had to spend the rest of the
day high. So that's the kind of kind of fun

(47:40):
study which suggests there's something going on. It's not a
practical study, and you're not going to have micro dose
infused mittens in Michigan.

Speaker 3 (47:51):
But what we're.

Speaker 2 (47:52):
Seeing is the basics, something important is going on and
the body is making full use of the microdose. Seems
to be the generalization that has led to the book.
Our book is the title page has title by Jordan
Gruber and James Fadiman and hundreds of others, And it
took a little bit for our editor to understand what

(48:14):
we were saying, which is, when you're working with real evidence,
with real people with real lives, that's better quality data
than reducing people to a number and reducing a number
of people to a statistic. You know, how do you
measure depression? Well, I'll tell you there's seven major scales.

(48:35):
They have one item in common. Are you sad? Okay,
the world of depression science is not very good. However,
that's a great item because if you're not sad, then
probably you're not going to be in this depression study.
So we're finding that that science member science always comes

(48:57):
second when real experience can exists. You know, when you're
doing a pharmaceutical and some monocle has ever existed in
the universe, you don't have a lot of people to
check with, so you start by making sure does it
kill laboratory animals? Does it kill more expensive animals. Uh,
does it kill people? If it doesn't kill people, then
you ask does it have any value Indigenous people for

(49:20):
thousands of years who just couldn't work that way. We're
dealing with something fundamentally close to harmless and beneficial in
a lot of different systems that I keep running in
my head. Just the note I came across in my
files of someone who was talking about not being bipolar anymore,

(49:41):
and then he listed over the last year or so
the major medications that he was no longer on. You
don't have to talk about placebos. You don't have to
talk about sample size. You say, an num one suggests
a phenomenon.

Speaker 1 (49:58):
Right, and let's to do figure out how to study it.

Speaker 3 (50:00):
That's right. You only need one super nova to know
they exists.

Speaker 1 (50:04):
Right.

Speaker 4 (50:05):
So, for example, we have a report on the website
which is on microdessingbook dot com.

Speaker 5 (50:10):
One word that there was a.

Speaker 4 (50:12):
Guy who has had forty major surgery since he was
four years old and has been in chronic pain and
has tried everything. A couple of years ago he realized
that a microdes a psilocybin and LSD every day and
he was pain free. Who would a funk it, and
you know, it's very real. This guy has experienced the
miracle as far as he's concerned. And one of his physicians,

(50:34):
his physicians, yeah, are very clear that from their point
of view. And I've actually seen an X ray of
his spine. It's frightening. They say, you shouldn't be able
to walk right. And he said, well, sorry, I'm very
much out of pain. And he wrote us a follow
up letter, because who could resist this guy? And he said,
I was tired of telling people this was terrific. I

(50:54):
thought I should show them.

Speaker 2 (50:56):
So he's sixty eight, and so I got in a
little better shape and I climbed to fourteen thousand foot
mountain and he sent us a picture of this older
man standing on a little rock pile and around him,
you know, you can see the other peaks somewhere in Colorado.
Probably that's the kind of evidence that leads physicians and

(51:16):
researchers to want to know more.

Speaker 4 (51:19):
Or with something entirely different PMDD post menstrual dysphoric disorder,
there's almost nothing that works, but we have reports that
microdosing works. That's very exciting and very interest.

Speaker 2 (51:31):
In a couple of those reports, we followed over a
few years, so we actually have the kind of data
that's almost impossible to find in medical research, which is
long term follow us.

Speaker 4 (51:43):
Or the kid whose dad came to Jim about autism
and Jim said, of course, I can't say you should
do that, but.

Speaker 5 (51:49):
The dad tried it anyway.

Speaker 4 (51:51):
First the kid stops banging his head against the floor,
and now years later he takes one microdose a month
to reset his social and language skills and that's working.

Speaker 1 (52:01):
This is fascinating. So I think you covered a couple
of points I just want to reiterate for our listeners.
So the first of which is that the process of
scientific discovery is not solely about conducting double blind, randomized
flicebook control trials. And it's not solely about conducting research
the way that big pharma companies conduct research at in

(52:23):
an academic setting or in a pharmaceutical laboratory setting. And
it's not solely about personal experience and anecdotal it's actually
a combination of all of those different approaches that in
effect starts with and you know, going back to the
origins of science, it starts with a phenomenon that's been observed, right,

(52:45):
It starts with an experience. It starts with we witness
this wild and crazy or incredible, miraculous thing happen. Now
we know that it happened, let's figure out if it's repeatable,
and let's figure out if how it works and prove
that in a scientific setting, and then if it's successful,
take it to scale. And so I think that while

(53:07):
a lot of people get trapped in one or the other,
like my experience is more important than science, or you
don't have any double blind, randomized you know, RCTs. So
I'm not going to give any credence to what you're doing,
but I think it's really important people to understand the
history of science. Is that the answer? So we're looking
for fall somewhere in between all of the information that's
coming from all of these different sources. So thank you

(53:28):
for making that point. And I think in that you
know that we could dive into any of these studies
that you've mentioned, because they're also fascinating, especially Connor's work.
You know, the neurocomplexity of work at Stanford. But I
think that you know one of the things that is
particularly interesting to me as somebody who like you, also
pursues the outliers somebody who I also research people who

(53:51):
are on the apple spectrum and of a fact, and
you know, and fascinated by people who my patients who
have cancer who go to Peru and and you know,
do three weeks of ayahuasca ceremonies with the indigenous people
and come back and their cancer markers are gone when
they had like terminal metastatic breast cancer. And then the
question becomes like, well, okay, that's probably something we should investigate, right,

(54:13):
And I think there's a natural confusion that gets invited
into the picture when we look at a technique or
a toolbox like micronosing, and then you look at this
like what you talk about in your book, which is
really which is really a great summary of all these
different things, all these different potential outcomes. You can receive,

(54:33):
all these different illnesses that could potentially be or symptom
profiles that could potentially be addressed by the same tool
or the same toolbox. And I think that's confusing for
people because they don't understand. You know, we're taught one tool,
one outcome, right, one drug, one symptom, let's treat that
or one illness, and that's not in fact, how many

(54:56):
treatments work, they're affecting the whole body, and so.

Speaker 2 (55:00):
Nothing well let me, let me, let me change toolboxes,
because so if you put the tool in the wrong box,
it's hard to find it. Right the toolbox of symptom
specific treatment. Microdosing really doesn't fit in that box. However,
let's let's take it to the extreme, or is there
anything that's really good for everybody? And everyone I talk
to say no, there's not ans that every good for everybody.

(55:21):
And then I say, well, how about exercise, Well, that's
good for everybody, that's a good one. How about sleep, well,
well that's good for everything. How about improving your diet,
well that's good for everything. Well, micro doses are not
good for everything, but they fit more into that model
then a pharmaceutical that's designed to change the level of

(55:43):
kidney functioning in a small way.

Speaker 1 (55:45):
So why do you think that is? Though? That's what
I'm curious about, because I think we can looking across
the data, and you summarize this very well in your book,
which I recommend that everybody who's listening checks out that
we are beyond the conversation that this is attributable to
a placebo effect. It's not about belief that it's going
to work or not. There's something real happening here, and

(56:07):
it's happening across a whole variety of different indications, symptom profiles, illnesses,
different kinds of people who have different needs and desires
and goals. Why do you think in your and you
can speculate here feel free? But why do you think
micro dosing fits into this greater toolbox of the sleep
and the exercise and the good diet in such a

(56:29):
way that it does.

Speaker 2 (56:31):
Probably because it's similar to those large items in that
their full body mind effectors. Or when you know, if
I get better sleep, I mind, Jim Fadaman, I feel
a little clearer.

Speaker 3 (56:46):
But I also know there's a whole lot of other
systems that.

Speaker 2 (56:49):
Are working better, they have less waste products, and so
forth and so on. The fact that psychedelics, with the
exception of a few modern ones like LSD, have been
around for thousands of years, and that they have been
used by every indigenous group that we know of that
have them available, suggests that there is something about understanding

(57:13):
that the natural world is designed to help all species
in it, so.

Speaker 3 (57:19):
Maybe it includes us.

Speaker 4 (57:20):
We coevolve with them, maybe along the lines of the
McKenna's stone ap hypothesis.

Speaker 5 (57:26):
But I think this is also.

Speaker 4 (57:27):
Really important in contrasting with pharmaceuticals, which when you think
of how they work with serotonin for depression, they're basically
SSRIs are putting a wrench in the system to prevent
more of it from going up. Psilocybin LSD are agonects
that potentiate and make the whole serotonin system healthier, So
it's a whole different approach, while it's also again lowering

(57:48):
inflammation and just bringing people back into a healthier sense
of self or a happier self. And so it really
sort of is like a magic vitamin pill in some ways.

Speaker 2 (57:58):
But that's why in pills are vitamin pills, they're not
called magic. They were originally most of them derived from
natural sources. Most medications from natural sources.

Speaker 1 (58:12):
Well, most of our medications are from plants.

Speaker 2 (58:14):
Actually, so it's not a big surprise. It's a wonderful gift.
But also I still remember that the idea that eating
a lemon will prevent scurvy, that sounds like nutsville.

Speaker 5 (58:29):
Okay.

Speaker 2 (58:29):
The only thing that is okay about that is it's true.
Everything else about it is terrible. So we are we
are limited, and we limit ourselves in the book to
not guessing for what we don't know, but presenting what
other people have already experienced. And I have to warn
you you better take a look at our little section

(58:52):
on serotonin. It's called and you know this called the
serotonin hypothesis. You know why it's a hypothesis because it
doesn't work as a explanatory mechanism. And we mout have
done enough research and it was kind of relief to
us to find beautiful articles saying sorry, it doesn't explain.

(59:15):
And what I loved about the image is if you
have a headache and you take an aspirm and your
headache is resolved, the reason for your headache was not
a lack.

Speaker 3 (59:26):
Of aspen.

Speaker 2 (59:30):
So the numbtion that is stuffing some serotonin into your brain,
et cetera, et cetera. The data is very clear that
it was a hypothesis, and it was interesting that it
led to a multi billion dollar industry which protects that hypothesis.
But even now antidepressing companies acknowledge, and this is the
people selling it, that thirty percent of people will get

(59:52):
no benefit anyway. And what we found is there clearly
needs to be. If a hypothesis continues to not work,
no matter how many variations of it you sell, maybe
you go back and see is there something else that works?
And it turns out that psilocybin mushrooms which grow on

(01:00:13):
every continent but Antarctica, there's two hundred different species that
have it. Maybe the natural world has produced something that
every other culture that's found it is found useful and
ours as well. Oh little side note, synthetic psilocybin works
less effectively than psilocybin containing mushrooms. We finally have some data,

(01:00:36):
which unfortunately makes all of the research using synthetic celocybin
less valuable, meaning the results should have been better had
they used in natural substance. So some interesting things happening.
You're asking about the future. That's one of the futures,
which is I grew up. At one point there was
a vision that we were eventually going to be able
to have a pill and it would be a full meal.

(01:00:58):
And somebody said, wait a monument that that is really nuts.
Well but I'm working on it. Okay, Well maybe a
big deal. Okay, but once you're once you've made a
wrong direction. And you put time, money, energy, corporate governance,
share prices. It's very hard, and I mean this in
a kind way to turn it around.

Speaker 1 (01:01:19):
Absolutely. You know this is a great place to end,
because you're calling into question a very important piece of
science that business interferes with, right, which is the serotonin
hypothesis is in fact a hypothesis. Hypothesis undergo experimentation, and
then you achieve your You prove your hypothesis to be true,

(01:01:41):
or you prove it to be false, or you or
there's something in between where it's sometimes true and other
times false, and then you revise your hypothesis. And I
think part of the biggest challenge we've had mental health
in the last thirty years is that there's been so
much financial interest in maintaining the new narrative that the
first serotonin hypothesis is the only true way to think

(01:02:04):
about the serotonin system, that we miss the opportunities to
go back to the drawing board and maybe think, Okay,
based on everything we've just learned, let's tweak the hypothesis here, here,
and here and test again. And I think what's really
fascinating about microdosing and psychedelics is that they're also acting
on the serotonin system, as you alluded to, Jordan, they're

(01:02:25):
just acting in in such a different way than what
we're doing with prozacinzeloft and all the SSRI SNRI compounds
that are some of the most commonly prescribed mental health
medications in the country. You know, there's other ways to
think about what's happening in the brain. And it really
begs us as scientists, as a medical community, as a

(01:02:46):
research community, and to include the pharmaceutical community, to say, hey,
maybe maybe we can learn from what we've the day,
all this massive you know, million, hundreds of millions of
data points you've collected over the last thirty years, and
go back and revise that serotoninipothsis come up with something
that is consistent with what we're actually seeing in the
real world, not dissonant from it. And we really need

(01:03:10):
to do that. I mean, that used to be thought
of historically as like one of the critical, most critical,
fundamental pieces of being a good scientist, and it's like,
introduce a little bit of money and we just forget right.

Speaker 2 (01:03:22):
Oh, when someone says I won't believe it unless it's
a double blind study, in my head, I'm seeing the
same person saying show me where it says that in
the Bible. And it's a similar mindset, which is, I've
got a system that I believe deeply in, and if
I have to give up either your data or my
belief system, and we know this in psychology for dozens

(01:03:45):
of ways, I will keep my belief system.

Speaker 1 (01:03:48):
Yeah. Yeah, because it's so tightly connected to our identity.

Speaker 3 (01:03:51):
I've invested in the belief system. You're a bit of data.
Oh I just read that right.

Speaker 4 (01:03:56):
We might be seeing a little bit of that also
in psychedelic leaders who wanted to only be high doses
with therapists is the only way to deal with serious
mental health and emotional issues.

Speaker 3 (01:04:06):
And by the way, I'm those people. Okay.

Speaker 2 (01:04:09):
When I first discovered microdosing or was told about, my
feeling was who care. That's not transcendence, that's not seeing God,
that's not changing your life overnight. However, just normal curiosity say, well,
it isn't terrific like I've spent decades working on, but
it's curious. I'll just kind of follow my nose and

(01:04:30):
see what I learned. And it turns out that I
took me in directions which made me realize and this
is again not our way of saying it, but Connor
again says it very nicely. Imagine that the correct dose
for maximum benefit, for maximum conditions, for maximum number of
people of psychedelics is this small dose called the micro dose,

(01:04:53):
and an overdose has all kinds of bizarre effects like
giant anacon is each you and the heavens open up
and you have been chosen as the child of God
for this generation, or you can see your entire childhood
and past lives.

Speaker 3 (01:05:11):
From that standpoint, sounds like an overdose, right.

Speaker 4 (01:05:14):
So the way people have always been using psychalysis and
large dose is that may really be the overdose, while
the broad swath of benefits that come from microdosing is
maybe the most valuable dose of all.

Speaker 2 (01:05:25):
Look at Indigenous people, well, I say, look, they have
this incredible ritual and we're going gets together and they
take a psychic. That's what it's choses for. And then
you say, hey, should be both people in the Amazon
whate else using for it? Oh, hey, you know arthritis,
it's really good for breastfeeding the same amount you're using
a ritual.

Speaker 3 (01:05:43):
Of course not, and they.

Speaker 4 (01:05:44):
Wouldn't give hunters the amount they give it a ritual
because they'd be all messed up and not able to
go out there and do anything.

Speaker 2 (01:05:49):
So there's that sweet spot that you's also very common,
by the way, for hunters. It increases visual acuity and
it increases endurance.

Speaker 1 (01:05:57):
Yes, absolutely fascinating. I love I love chatting with you too.
It's such a pleasure. I really appreciate your time and
energy and effort that you put into this book and
bringing such an important piece of a scientific literature into
the world, and just from my heart, thank you, and
I hope you can do this again soon.

Speaker 3 (01:06:19):
Yeah, definitely. Here's the best.

Speaker 1 (01:06:23):
Thanks for listening to The Psychedelic Report. Visit us at
the Psychedelic Report dot com. This show is recorded weekly
on Clubhouse with a live audience. The Psychedelic Report was
brought to you by a poly neuroscience and produced by
Future Medicine Media. While I am a doctor, I'm not

(01:06:45):
your doctor. So please don't take anything you hear on
The Psychedelic Report as personal medical advice, because we don't
know you. If you have questions about anything you hear
on this show, please consult with your doctor.