Professor Robin Carhart-Harris - The Science of Psychedelics

Full transcript: Robin Carhart-Harris on London Real

3:45 This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Dr. Robin Carhart-Harris, the psychologist, neuroscientist and head of psychedelic Research Center at Imperial College London. Yours is the world’s first organization dedicated to the research of mind-altering substances, and focuses on three key areas of study: mental health, social science and neuroscience. You were the first in the world to investigate the effects of LSD using modern brain imaging, and the first to study psilocybin, the active compound in magic mushrooms, for treating severe depression.

4:16 You’re also conducting groundbreaking neuroimaging research with MDMA and DMT. Robin, welcome back to London Real. Thanks, Brian. Lovely to be, a great to have you back. It’s been six and a half years.

4:26 Yes, we had you here. What’s been going on since you’ve been busy? Yes, I have. What has changed in your world? I mean, wow.

4:35 Yeah, yeah, a lot. It’s difficult to know where to start. When I was lusting we hadn’t kicked off our depression research and so where we are right now with a very broad awareness, I think, of the potential of psilocybin, magic mushrooms, for treating depression. It just almost feels like more or less kind of common knowledge. You know, you might imagine you’re, you know, your auntie or something has heard of this.

5:05 But back then there was, it wasn’t really on the radar, and this is 2013. I think I was lusting, and so we were writing a grant application to study magic mushroom therapy, psilocybin therapy for treatment-resistant depression. We subsequently won that grant from the Medical Research Council in the UK and did that study, and it was the first one with psilocybin in obvious depression, a diagnosis of depression, and really quite severe depression. Published in 2016.

5:49 It takes a good while to turn your work into, first of all, analyze it, and then turn it into a published paper. But that’s where the news broke. And then we had similar issues coming from Johns Hopkins, the team there, in end-of-life distress showing very clear signal with psilocybin for end-of-life distress, looking at depression outcomes at the same time. And so it was a kind of sort of double whammy, or triple whammy, with those two studies coming in shortly after.

6:25 Now we’re in a situation where the FDA in the US have granted breakthrough therapy designation to psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression. Our EMA people there have been very supportive and positive, and a lot of money coming into the space for the required drug development, and then things going on outside of the typical regulatory route, with things like the city of Denver decriminalizing magic mushroom use, Oakland following suit, an initiative in Oregon to fully legalize psilocybin therapy. So you know, I lost a lot.

7:08 That’s a lot. And I went to the Royal Society when you presented your paper, I think on LSD research, was that? Yeah, maybe in 2017. Yeah, gosh, that was a seminal moment. It was a big moment, and everyone was there.

7:21 The whole crew was there: Graham Hancock, and Amanda Fielding, and Rupert Sheldrake, and Professor David Nutt, and you’d all been on the show. And that was a big moment, right? It was. I remember just describing it as a dream come true, and that’s how it’s been, really. I remember, probably around 2005, initially kind of having the vision.

7:42 I supposed to do an LSD brain imaging study, and then went knocking on Professor David Nutt’s door, the former drug czar in the UK, and obviously a very, still a very influential figure in drug policy and drug science, and asking him if I could do this research with LSD, this brain imaging research, and then getting to know Amanda Fielding. It was all, you know, I got my foot in the door, but it was a pipe dream. Why did you have that dream? Because it was kind of your dream that made a lot of this happen?

8:12 I know you’ve had great support, amazing fundraising from Fielding, and obviously Professor David Nutt has been very big, but you’re kind of the young gun that’s always had this kind of quest for this knowledge. Yeah, you know, yeah. The fair thing is to say it’s very much a shared dream, and in a sense I found the right people at the right time. But to bring up dreams is relevant, because I had been studying psychoanalysis when I got into the area, discovering Stanislav Grof, Realms of the Human Unconscious, and passages in there where he likened the LSD state to the dream state, and that was a light bulb moment for me, and, you know, studying psychoanalysis and all the abstraction there, and thinking, you know, is there real substance here?

9:09 It kind of feels intuitively like this unconscious mind exists, that’s vast and rich and influential in so many different ways, but how can you get a handle on it? You know, how can you get better access? And then, so discovering that people thought in the 50s and 60s that this is principally what psychedelics do, is that they, you know, kind of flatten the mind’s landscape so you can see further and see deeper. I thought, well, this is the tool. I actually thought this is the tool to modernize psychoanalysis, because I was very much, you know, I’d signed up to psychoanalysis more or less.

9:59 I critiqued it, but I was signed up, so Jung and Freud, yeah, that you were. Yeah, I was sold on it, really. Okay, and so I thought, oh, this is the tool to kind of, you know, take this thing that’s been sort of sidelined from mainstream science, whether, you know, through its own doing or through, you know, it being kind of pushed out by the mainstream, or a bit of both, which is often the way things really are. It’s happened, and what would modern contemporary psychology and psychiatry look like if psychoanalysis, or depth psychology, or the acknowledgement of the unconscious mind took kind of center stage again, because it hadn’t been for so long.

10:49 You know, we have this sort of mechanistic cognitive neuroscience and psychology that’s very depleted, really, as an account of the human soul, the human condition, very, you know, unsatisfactory to me. When I found that in psychology that it was dominated by this very shallow psychology, but what if that richness was to come back? It would really revolutionize psychology and psychiatry, and I think in a roundabout way, whether the mainstream knows it or not, we’re gonna get there.

11:25 The mainstream doesn’t know it, I don’t think, so. You know, they’re still, it’s a hard thing to shift the whole kind of medical model, and that desire. There’s a lot of wish fulfillment in science, as there is in other domains, and you have explanations which can serve as explanations of convenience, like genetic explanations for things. Sometimes it can be easier to say, I don’t know, my son or whatever has schizophrenia because of some genetic abnormalities, and nothing around environment or experience, or even parenting, had had any role there.

12:06 You know, done genetics, but we now know with increasing confidence that there are crucial interactions, you know, between biology, drug actions and context, you know, environment and all aspects of context beyond just one’s immediate environment. So it’s a rich, complex problem that could never really, if you think about it, have been solved by just a drug, or I don’t know, some genetic engineering or something. It needs the kind of, you need to come at it from a couple of directions, and then look for some kind of synergy where those things meet, and you know, that’s what psychedelic therapy does.

12:58 And you’re kind of on the edge. I mean, you’re a scientist, and you’re trying to quantify things, that’s ultimately what you do, but the psychology side isn’t always about quantification, right? And so you’re kind of on this weird edge, where you’re trying to really prove the science behind this, as opposed to the theories. And when it comes to psychedelics, you’ve got, obviously, all sorts of other things wrapped up into it as far as human emotions and feelings and what we think.

13:26 It’s not to mention then the whole past of it being illegal and banned, so there’s a lot going on with your field in that sense. Yeah, yeah. It’s true. It’s a fine line to walk, but for me a lot of it comes from first of all, I suppose, when you’re immersed in it, and I’ve been reflecting on this recently. I’ve always reflected on it, really, whether I’m too immersed in my work, but just recently a colleague, a junior colleague, said something which made me very self-aware.

14:03 What was that? Can you share? Yeah, I can. Yeah, so I was telling him about how I was recently invited to speak at the International Psychoanalysis Association event, and this was, this was quite, kind of quite cool for me, given my background of interest, but I’ve never really been formally training as an analyst or doing any academic work really in the psychoanalytic space, so it was a novelty, and there I was presenting on my brain imaging research and how it interfaces with psychoanalysis.

14:38 Now, I was telling him I was in a, in a talk session before my talk on psychoanalysis and politics, and the analysts in the room were discussing the role of an analyst as being neutral, that you don’t take a position, and how that is clinically the way they do things, because then you project onto your analyst all these different things that tell you something about your unconscious. And there are things like transference, relationships that play out where the analyst may become a father figure or a mother figure, that kind of thing. So anyway, they were talking about neutrality, and they were sort of saying it’s difficult when you see things going on politically to remain neutral, and that dilemma of whether you become partisan and sort of declare your views, or you remain neutral, just watching what’s playing out in the world.

15:37 And one of the analysts said, “I decided I would take a position,” and then another analyst colleague accused me of “manic defense.” And I thought, what a fascinating time. I’m sure I’ve heard it before but I’ve never really digested the term, but manic defense. So I was telling my colleague this over lunch, and he said, you know, very gently, “Have you ever reflected on whether something like this happens with you, with your work?” And I sort of smiled and said, “Yes, but I’d never really digested it.”

16:15 So I looked at him and I said, “It’s remarkable how blind we can be to our defenses.” And he sort of quietly nodded and we got on with things. But since, there was only a couple of days ago, I’ve been thinking about that a lot. And so how does that actually manifest itself in there, the fact that you’re blind to your own assumptions about your own work, thinking that it’s this and it’s that? Yeah.

16:41 And the manic defense is something you just put up when someone tries to challenge that, or am I misunderstanding? I think it’s just what function, what psychological function does your work do for you? Okay, you know, it’s that, and of course we can all relate to that, and we all get lost in our work, in a sense. It’s the condition, but this is of course deferring it onto everyone, so normalizing it. It’s the condition of particularly the modern Western man, you know, that you’re always active.

17:12 Yeah, and so that can make you less objective, because you’re perhaps less of this sort of bully, sort of aware of yourself and sitting with everything, like you would if you’re meditating, for example, and things start coming up, or you’re in a psychedelic session and things are coming up, some of which are difficult and painful to sit with, but you sit with them, you know, because that’s the name of the game. Yeah, but in a sense, what work can do, and it’s not always the case but often it’s the case, is it kind of takes us away from ourselves, and we almost forget, and maybe repress, by being so immersed in our work. So is that really, that, they’ve got me there.

17:56 It’s a bit of a reminder, because I’ve sort of always known that. But yes, and you are very immersed in your work. Yeah, and it is really important work, and you probably are constantly being reminded how important it is and being told how important it is. You know, the psychedelic experience is interesting, and I’d like to, like, let everyone know, I mean, don’t let this suit-and-tie fool you, but, like, London Real started off really based in the experience, you know.

18:20 And I was a former banker, and I think within five or ten episodes I was going on my first ayahuasca experience, and I was talking about it on YouTube before and after, and I honestly thought the Bank of England would never allow me back in the financial markets. And there were people in the ayahuasca community, that wasn’t a big community because online wasn’t that big then, but they were saying, “Don’t do this, blah blah blah.” It was like a big deal at a time.

18:44 And it’s funny, Robin, I also remember my daughter at school saying the word ayahuasca in fifth grade, and the nurse calling us and the headmistress calling us. It was like a private school, and you know, in Belsize Park, and bringing us in. Yeah, what is this all about? How did they know? What I asked, yeah.

19:00 They were really judging us, right? It was a really difficult situation. You know, what, why is she talking about this? I guess she just heard it or I don’t know, and then I had to make a decision to do our episode on DMT, and I did it before and after DMT episode with Alexandra Ward, who was a co-host last time we spoke, and this is before this became really popular on YouTube, where everyone was doing these before and afters. It ended up being our most watched episode of all time.

19:25 You know, in comparison with some of the most famous people in the world, it was just me before and after my first DMT experience. So there was a real need for it out there, and these were questions I was asking really early on. And, you know, how do you usually explain what you do to a stranger on the street, and what is the reaction when you mention psychedelics? Yeah, well, just words like magic mushrooms and things like that. It’s a funny question, because if you’re, let’s say, you’re at a party or something, I’m often a bit reluctant to say, because there were one of two responses still, but mostly, actually, it’s more in the kind of emphatic interest, and they want to know more.

20:08 And you realize that you’ve come to this party to relax, you sort of back at work, and I ate that, so I’d try to, you know, see, avoid it a little bit, but what I’ll say is that I’m a scientist, and then if I decide I’m going to actually tell them, I’ll say I study drugs, and I study psychedelic drugs, and I’d like to just, you know, put it out there like that. I don’t want to say hallucinogens or psychoactive, because for me there’s a kind of a gender in a way, which is that I really sort of believe in the term psychedelic. Intentionally, at some point in doing my research I was noticing that people were still referring to these drugs as hallucinogenic, and I made a conscious decision that from here on I’m just going to call them psychedelics, because the term “mind-manifesting,” “mind-revealing,” “making the mind visible,” however you want to translate it, is the crux of why these compounds are interesting and potentially very useful.

21:20 So I put it out there, and usually they kind of know, well, they’ve got some idea what that is, and I’ll say, you know, I’ll say, “I like LSD, magic mushrooms.” You like the term magic mushrooms? Even the last time, I think I called you on it. It was like, I don’t like using that term, because it makes it sound like some kind of a goofy ride, and you were like, no, I like using that term. Why do you like using that term?

21:46 Mostly just because people then know what you’re talking about. It’s the quickest way. A little reminder that not everyone knows what psilocybin is. Yeah, I’ll say it because I’m not sure I’m saying it right still, because the Americans call it psilocybin, and I’ve always been calling it psilocybin, it’s stuck, but you say magic mushrooms and everyone’s on the same page, you know. But I haven’t really kind of thought too much about the problem for a scientist to be referring to these things as magic.

22:18 I just, they’re kind of like the nickname, magic mushrooms, you know, because psychologically the experience feels magical. There’s no getting around that. I think Richard Dawkins has a book called something like The Magic of Nature, so it’s that same kind of use of the term. Right. Yeah, magic.

22:38 And so then, from psychedelics, do most people have strange reactions? “Oh, that’s that stuff that was banned, the illegal stuff, the stuff the hippies do”? Yeah, that you know, or do they usually say, “Oh, I’ve heard about that stuff, can be helpful for depression”? That probably doesn’t happen. It’s that really there’s much more that, yes, days, almost across the board.

22:57 Interesting. As someone, it, I’m a little taken aback when actually there were the former, you know, and there, and they say, “Oh, that’s dangerous, isn’t it?” Or, you know, it depends on the context, of course. Yeah, but these substances you’re researching on had such a long history of being illegal, ostracized, and you kind of alluded earlier that some of that was maybe the responsibility of someone else, and some of that was the responsibility of the people using it.

23:25 What did you mean by that, and how do you tell that story of these compounds being illegal? And you know, yeah. Yeah, and for so long. Yeah, well, yeah, I mean, it’s kind of one of those debated questions, who’s to blame, in a sense. How did that happen?

23:42 And lots of interesting different views on it too. We all blame Timothy Leary, you know, or is that scapegoating slightly? I’ve been told off by senior people in psychedelic medicine, very respected, for you know, playing that game and sort of lazily saying it was all Leary’s fault, and they said it so forcefully that it did make me think, you know, it’s, I could see how he’s being used as just as a scapegoat for something else that was going on when you dive into some of the material that’s available about what was going on at that time, in terms of the changes in the legislature.

24:31 There was an agenda, you know, a decision had been made that the psychedelics were going to be banned, and there was no hearing, you know, any of the science anymore. There’s this classic dialogue with Bobby Kennedy in the Senate meeting where he’s saying, you know, “I don’t understand it, you know, the evidence” is there that these compounds used in the right professional way can be very helpful in some cases. Why isn’t this evidence being heard anymore?

25:05 And then it was the usual kind of you know, the barrier comes down and there’s no conversation. They’re just being banned, you know, and that was like an actual Senate hearing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So that material is, everyone can look at that, it’s like, says in the 60s, right? It must have been, yeah, late 60s, ’67, I think, things started to take a turn, and it wasn’t that Nixon was in, it was LBJ, I think, but it’s still, you know, these compounds though, these became a problem, and quite why that was, I don’t know.

25:39 David Nutt thinks, in my view, Vietnam. It’s quite easy to see how it could be, if he feared that this was fueling a kind of anti-authoritarian questioning, rather than just the signing up for the country. Yeah, I guess we’ll never know what was said behind closed doors, but it happened anyway, and psychedelics got lumped in with heroin and truly hard and dangerous drugs, and then, you know, the powers that be could interface with media in a particular way, so that it all became very believable that these are really dangerous drugs, and so people stopped questioning it.

26:28 Is there a bit of a parallel with kind of the Reefer Madness, and the way cannabis was kind of demonized I guess, like, 30 years earlier? Yeah, and then with the media, the way it was back then, it was just kind of bought. Yeah, the public bought it. Yeah, because the media was so much easier to control. Yeah, but now, yeah, it’s information overload, with but it’s a different problem, that’s trying to find the truth.

26:52 Yeah. So then basically all research on psychedelic substances was put on hold for about 30 years. Yeah, yeah, from the late ’60s things began to stop in the US, and the main suppliers of the drugs, Sandoz Pharmaceuticals, now Novartis, stopped making it. They could see that this was problematic for their company, that was going places, you know, and so they thought, we don’t need this. And actually, people don’t realize that those, you know, who control the production, people who’ve famously referred to this, but holds such a power card, and so with that stopping, I think people are underappreciating the importance of Sandoz stopping making the LSD, because all of the LSD research in the States, which was the lion’s share, really was being done with Sandoz LSD, and then Indocybin, which was the brand name for psilocybin.

27:53 Okay, and there, which is a European company, and then they stopped making it. Yes, sir. Then there was just nothing to be able to see. Yeah, Swiss company, and then, you know, some people in, then the Czech Czechoslovakia were making it, and so Stan Grof was doing some work there, Czech psychiatrist, but that was, you know, small fry relative to the way things were. Okay, beforehand.

28:20 Okay, now, that was for 30 years, then nothing kind of happened, and then there was just, we’re more of an open-minded thing happening here, and then obviously you got interested around 2005, and people started to just say, wait a second, there’s all this anecdotal evidence of people doing these things on their own. We need to look into this more. Yeah, but also there’s, there’s all this scientific evidence because the work was published in the ’50s and ’60s and has since been meta-analyzed, as we say, you know, reviewed and then published in reviews, that show even though the quality of the research wasn’t up to today’s standards for the period, it wasn’t so bad, and there was a lot of it, and so we can glean some some information from looking at this work, and we can look at things like safety.

29:08 And when you go into that science, you discover, as I did when I was looking to do the brain imaging work, that it looks very compelling when you lay it out. You know, of course you’re looking for side effects and tolerability and risks, and in the published work you’re not really seeing it. You’re instead seeing meta-analyses that are saying suicide is incredibly rare in controlled research, people going mad incredibly rare. You just don’t really see it, which is what they used to say, even jump out of a window, and you’re gonna do all these things, right?

29:42 Yeah, but the research shows that actually that was, that’s right. So it’s just, you know, the way you create these, the media creates these illusions that then become believed as if they’re fact. Yeah, and what is actually going on in the brain? You know, I actually, funny enough, this is such as I have a such a strange job, because about two weeks ago I was sitting down with a guy named Dan Bilzerian, who’s got about 44 million followers on social media.

30:12 He’s known for kind of having a Playboy Mansion in LA and about 20 or 30 women surrounding him at all times, and he’s going into the cannabis and CBD market with his company, Ignite, and he’s a fan of psilocybin mushrooms, magic mushrooms, and he goes on the beach and he takes them, and even though he’s probably very wealthy, he said, “Brian, some of the greatest times I’ve ever had is just on the beach with mushrooms,” and he said, “I realized I’m having an experience that any hippie could have,” and it’s just kind of nice to know that it doesn’t need money for me to have this kind of an interesting experience.” And I said, “How much you taking?” and I encouraged him to take a heroic dose, like Tara, and I would say, I’ve never actually taken five grams, but I’ve taken four, and you know, I was encouraging him, and he said, “No, no, no, that’s a little too much.

30:57 I like to be in control. I’m a control freak.” And I was like, “Well, it might be painful, but it also can be very revealing.” And so it was interesting that he said that to me, and I was just thinking about you now, and I was wanting to know what he is actually going on in your brain for people like him to seek this experience out for clarity. I know for me, I went last year and had three powerful ayahuasca ceremonies in Costa Rica, and the second one was honestly, Robin, the single most profound experience of my entire life.

31:25 Yeah, my entire life. Yeah, you know, I try to do a lot of work on myself, I do a lot of learning, but I don’t know how I would have ever gotten that experience or seen or learned the things about myself that I did. Yeah, yeah. Psychedelics can be truly stunning, I think, in terms of their effects, and the way I just, you know, to say the surprise doesn’t come close. It’s just stunned you.

31:54 I just didn’t know that that was possible, and also the precision, the apparent precision with which psychedelics can reveal psychologically salient information. The before might have been sort of known through the corner of your eye, or whatever, but then it’s just laid out, and that feels so I want to avoid the word profound, because it’s easy to overuse, but profound, for example, when it might show you something about a relationship, or about how you’re treating your body, or something that is just wow. It’s like you said, so salient, and yet you kind of probably knew it in the backyard.

32:37 Yeah, but you never put it. It’s very easy to create a decoy or distract yourself from that, which is what most of us do in the modern world. We constantly distract ourselves, not only with mobile technology and the internet. It’s ten times easier than it was when I grew up as a kid. You know, there wasn’t a lot to do.

32:55 It was like go out in the backyard and play. Yeah, yeah. But now there’s so many more distractions. Source may be more of a need to take a break and allow that mind, yes, to do that. Yes.

33:06 Yeah, no, I think so, and then, you know, so the psychology is there, and really it’s the psychology that draws people in, as a colleague of mine said, who’s very much a kind of mechanistic computational neuroscientist, he said that the brain is only as interesting as the mind, and of course it is. Psychedelics are only worth studying in terms of their brain effects because their psychological effects are so damn stunning, you know, that you just think, you know, what else would you want to do? A time, then, open that black box, that big wonder of what the hell is going on there, you know, in terms of what went on in my brain during that experience.

33:55 And again, the psychological experience can be so stunning that it’s so easy to think it was beyond the brain, and it’s what so many people do. I would say it’s probably the typical thing that people do, more often than not. They’ll think, wow, that’s evidence that the mind’s beyond the brain, of course, because it’s, you know, surely impossible that the brain could account for something like that. I became oneness, you know, I saw entities that are as real as me looking at you now.

34:29 It’s so, it’s incredibly compelling. So then, you know, if you subscribe to the value of the brain, which I do, obviously, you kind of rub your hands together, because you think, well, all the more kind of interest and reason to crack this problem, because it’s creating an illusion otherwise. And so yeah, so I’m not talking to aliens, and I’m not talking to entities, or you would like to approach it as a scientist and say, what’s actually going on in the brain, as opposed to the non- scientific human explanation, which is, I’m talking to other entities, I’m connecting with some power outside in the universe, and you’re here to challenge that and say, let’s actually look at what’s, yeah, brain.

35:18 Well, what I can make you unpopular. Yeah, it can. And someone once said to me, oh, you want, you want to piss on our fire? No, I don’t, because I’m a psychologist, probably a kind of core. So the phenomenology is bottom line, and it’s what draws me into the brain, so I don’t want to piss on any fires.

35:39 I’d like those fires to rage, because it is fascinating, but I’m not going to subscribe to a view that it was beyond the brain. I mean, the psychology is the psychology, is the psychology. It’s the experience is the experience is the experience. It is what it is, so let’s look at that, and let’s look at how people’s all, you know, metaphysical beliefs can change fundamentally after a psychedelic experience, and just treat that as a scientific phenomenon of interest, in a psychological phenomenon of interest.

36:12 You know, what is the mechanisms underlying that, and the psychology of such profound belief shifts? But I still want to know what’s going on in the brain, because the brain is a thing of nature, like the experiences are a thing of nature. Right. So you still are, with the other people, are saying the result, and the psychology of the path, how your mind changes, is really important. But you’re just saying, look, I got these fMRI images that literally show me what’s happening in the brain.

36:39 There’s no entity coming in there, there’s none of this stuff. So let’s just study that part. Yeah, but I’m not taking away from all the other ones, things that have, yeah, knowledge, and then knowing yourself. Yeah, so I’m saying it’s worth knowing, you know, and by knowing it, does it kill the possibility that, I don’t know, you literally transcended these dimensions and went to another world, the spirit world, the entity world? I would say it’s not really understanding the neural correlates of the experience that challenges the reality, if you want.

37:21 So the literalness of having transcended these dimensions and gone to another world, I would instead say, you know, where is there something beyond, appealing to weird physics, as people often do, and say, oh, well, quantum physics is really weird, so, you know, let me put some bridges, some potential leaps between these holes, and create some elaborate story for how quantum physics can encounter leaping into the DMT. Was this bro science, like, thrown into you know? You don’t appreciate basically there’s just nothing compelling about the literal transition into another space, even forget about brain.

38:02 You know, it’s just, I can only accept the null, as you would say in science, the null hypothesis, which is there’s an absence of evidence, so therefore I have to sit with a null, that you didn’t actually literally transcend these dimensions. I could also say you could treat the brain stuff as maybe endorsing that view, but it’s really not the heavyweight on that view. The heavyweight is the fact that there’s no evidence for it, you know, other than the experience.

38:31 But that can be a logical fallacy, like the flat earthers, who, that you know, most likely started because when you look out at the Earth from the vantage of just standing there and not knowing you know any more than that, it feels like the Earth’s flat, that it’s probably just gonna keep going on. If you walk, you just keep going on, so the Earth is flat. Or you look out at the stars and you think, well, I’m here, maybe this is the center of the universe, and then you discover, when you’ve got better techniques for looking beyond that, in fact it’s not so.

39:07 So assuming there’s a spirit world is kind of the same thinking as a flat earther. It’s a bit of a, but it took me a while, because I’m not a philosopher and I’m not formally read in that space, but through realizing that I had to get, you know, some basic knowledge, I discovered that I think that view is solipsism, that based on your experience, that’s your test of what’s real. But then the flat earth uses their experiences, their tests of what’s real, and the person knew things that the center of the universe again, or that we’re special, we’re not in any way related to animals.

39:51 You know, it’s this kind of an intuitive experience that is your test of reality. But what I would say is that if you look a bit harder and do a bit of research, you discover that those views aren’t so, aren’t so reliable and robust. So what is going on in the brain? Yeah, so yeah, first of all, you know, you’re taking a drug, and again, that’s one clue, perhaps, as to the fact that this organ is important. It gets into the body, it needs to get into the brain, and for simplicity, let’s just say it gets into the brain, and then what’s happening?

40:39 Well, these chemicals, the molecules themselves, look a lot like serotonin. Most people have heard of serotonin. Actually, most of the body’s serotonin is outside of the brain, but again, for simplicity, let’s look in the brain. Within the brain it does some really important things. It modulates how we feel.

41:00 Actually, when people typically think of serotonin, they usually think of, they think it’s some kind of happy hormone. And very broadly speaking, sure, you know, there’s something in that. When you increase serotonin levels in a major turbocharged way, like you do with MDMA, you feel great, typically, and then you have a crash afterwards, and the serotonin drops in your wrath. Yeah, that’s no good. That’s why I stopped doing it.

41:30 Yeah, the less turbocharged way, you take some SSRIs and Prozac-like drugs, and they may increase the availability of serotonin, and then all of a sudden stress is a bit more tolerable, and life’s a little bit more tolerable, and you’re getting by a bit better. That’s pretty much what SSRIs do. So psychedelics are working on serotonin, but they’re working on the serotonin system in a particular way. They’re mimicking serotonin, their kind of serotonin imposters.

42:02 They hijack a particular aspect of the serotonin system and they stimulate it. And the important thing to say is that serotonin is a really complex neuromodulatory system. Your own modulators, these chemicals like serotonin, dopamine, noradrenaline, they tune the way the brain works. It’s not simple fuel, or simple like glutamate, would be in the brain, and the important brain chemical, or, or another chemical that has an inhibitory role. It’s like the break, or the fire blanket that puts things out.

42:39 These are the fine-tuners, and serotonin is a particularly complex fine-tuning system. It has these 14 different receptors that serotonin binds to, that each do quite different things. Some are related, but often they’re doing really quite different things, and actually, in some cases, opposite things to each other. They’re kind of counteracting each other, as often happens in nature. You know, think of things like CBD and THC in the cannabis that kind of counteract each other.

43:11 So there’s one particular receptor that seems really important for how psychedelics work, because if you block it with a drug that selectively blocks that receptor, people don’t trip, they don’t have their experiences. That’s pretty compelling evidence. There’s other stuff, like the affinity of a psychedelic for that receptor correlates with its potency very strongly. So LSD, very high affinity, very potent. Mescaline, not so high affinity, it doesn’t bind so strongly.

43:38 You need loads more of it to get a psychedelic trip. We also know, from a certain brain imaging technique, that the proportion of these 2A receptors, serotonin 2A receptors, these are the really important ones, that are that are bound to by a psychedelic, predicts the intensity of a trip as well. And this is really useful, new information, which is telling us what dose is needed to have a psychoactive effect, which is interesting in the context of microdosing, for example, right, taking very low doses.

44:15 But it’s also saying that there may be a certain kind of kink or inflection point, where when you go over a particular dose it becomes a different kind of experience altogether. The kind of thing that people have intuited all along, but now we’ve got brain evidence that’s saying it’s because of a certain proportion of these receptors being occupied by the drug and stimulated, leading to the, you know, the ego dissolution, mystical type experience, type experiences that people have. Is there an example of that?

44:49 Like, in psilocybin, when you go from, like, a, I don’t know, like half a gram to, like, the five gram? Yeah, where the inflection point seems to be around twenty milligrams, and about sixty percent, I think, occupancy of these receptors. That’s when it takes a leap, the arc starts leaping up, and lo and behold, those are the doses that we’re choosing to give in the therapeutic work, where we’re intending for people to have these very profound transformative experiences.

45:19 So there is that. Like, would you call those, like, an ego dissolution and experience, or is that a term you don’t like to use? Though I like that one. Okay. Yeah, a slightly question mystical experience, mystical type.

45:33 It’s a bit better, peak experiences, overtly a humanistic term, so it’s better in my view than appealing to mystery, which is kind of saying that there’s, you know, something beyond, which I can’t sign up to, because there’s no evidence for that. Right, right. So there’s nothing beyond, because there is no evidence of that. And also, as a scientist you kind of have to stay in that lane anyways, right, in order to do your work, otherwise you’re not being rational.

46:03 I mean, if there’s no evidence, yeah, what else are you basing your assumptions on, that it feels a particular way? I just don’t think that’s good enough, strong enough evidence, because it’s so easy to be fooled by so many things that feel very compelling, but you look a little harder and things appear differently. Okay, so just back to the science, you kind of understanding the receptors, and then the dosages, and if you get to this certain kind of critical mass, then you have these kind of more profound experiences, where that’s where you’re focusing, to see if you can get these results when it comes to setting the depression and anxiety and PTSD and some of these other things.

46:47 Yeah, yeah. I think I remember once you talked about kind of an orchestra and the conductor, a number, this analogy, it’s like removing conductor from the orchestra and so the instruments are kind of playing on their own. Is that still in an allergy way to you? Yeah, it’s a good one. In fact, that analogy was taken to a more literal point, where some colleagues of mine ran a study where they recorded brain activity when people were making music, and they got classically trained musicians to play to script some classical music, and then to enter a phase where they could improvise, and it became a kind of jazz-classical music crossover, and they recorded their brain activity, and they found that when they went into that improvisation mode, the activity became richer, less predictable, more entropic, and so that analogy wasn’t just so much of an analogy anymore.

47:42 It was more, you know, a kind of curious sort of crossover into what was actually going on in a particular brain state, where people recorded brain activity and people kind of freewheeling, in a way that your mind does kind of naturally under a psychedelic. And so the idea is maybe you take that with that conductor and allow different parts of your brain to kind of do some improvisation and do some maybe non-rules-based thinking, as opposed to, oh, it only works on this way, allow it to go here and go there and go explore certain possibilities or scenarios or truths about yourself that normally the conductor would say, no, no, we don’t do that, or, I’ve got to go watch this Instagram video right now, or you know, something. Right?

48:29 Yeah, yeah. So yeah, I guess that’s where we are now. Where we weren’t quite there in 2013, or when I was last in. I think now that we have a decent handle on what’s going on in the brain. It’s true that you never know what you don’t know, and it’s fair to think there’s, you know, a huge amount of important information left to be discovered and processed, but I think we have a model that’s a useful guiding model.

49:03 And the reason why I think that is that currently in psychology, neuroscience and psychiatry, I would say it’s fair to say that there is a dominant model. It’s called predictive coding. Pioneering figures in the space include the likes of Karl Friston at UCL, incredible mind, who developed the first kind of package for analyzing brain imaging data, but really sort of went beyond that with a kind of meta-theory of how the brain works, which is now sort of a theory of how life works, in a way.

49:43 Can you describe that? It’s hard. It’s not, okay. Okay, yeah. Is the brain actually less active during some of these psychedelics?

49:50 So I would want to go away from that, yeah, entirely, because it’s misleading, right? So it’s not that it’s more or less. It’s the quality that’s different, and if we had to put it on a dimension, I would put it on a dimension of order to disorder, and it’s moving towards, let’s go to the left, it’s moving towards disorder. Okay, and you said, if we understand the mind, we understand life, so well. According to Karl Friston’s account of how the mind and the brain works, it’s so complete, potentially, or at least according to the theory, that it doesn’t just explain human mind and brain, it explains all behavior of all living systems.

50:41 It’s called a free energy principle. I can only, I’m not going to do justice to it, but if I was to really dumb it down, it’s this principle that living systems resist the second law of thermodynamics, which is that things degrade over time. Your hot tea gets cold, things that had some order dissipate into nothingness, just pure chaos. But life resists that, for whatever reason. It gathers things together, probably to sustain itself and package itself up, like I will go on, you know?

51:20 And so that’s what life does, and according to the principle, it’s minimizing this thing called free energy, which you could very loosely call chaos, or entropy, if you want to put it in a psychological sense, or an experiential sense, you could call it uncertainty. So life resists uncertainty. When we think of that, then we start to get a bit of a handle on what it might be saying about the mind and the brain, that as you enter this world you’re more like swimming in uncertainty as a child, and that might actually come with some advantages.

52:01 You’re hyper-supple and explorative. Yeah, and you’re mopping things up, and as you’re mopping things up, as you know, Wordsworth said the shades of the prison-house begin to close upon the growing boy. You start to create your boundaries and your differentiations. We see it in our children, they’d start saying, “My,” and “This is mine,” and so those kind of boundaries start to develop, sadly, in a way. I see this in my young son, I see the mind as well, where it starts, they say no, when they say mine and I push the other kid away, whereas before they didn’t seem to necessarily have their own sense of self.

52:50 Yeah, yeah. And that was quite beautiful, and so there’s the kind of sadness to it, but you can also empathize with it as well, of course, and it’s for survival, as life. Yes, against the second law, right? Yeah, yeah. Otherwise, what life does, we wouldn’t be here.

53:02 Yeah, yeah. And so bringing us back to psychedelics: if this is the scheme of how the mind and the brain works, that itself organizes in order to resist chaos and disorder, feel more assured about the way the world is, including of course how we are. What happens when you give a psychedelic? Well, all of that breaks down, you know, and so when people liken it to being like a child, at least according to the theory, and some brain imaging data, it’s not just an analogy.

53:41 The brain looks under a psychedelic akin to how it looks in infancy, things are more kind of loosened and swimming around and freely mobile, and you exist in a state of relative uncertainty, and that seems to be a healthy thing. I mean, you’re running these studies where by introducing that childlike mind, that chaos, is helping people get over traumas, depressions, PTSD, anxiety. It’s strange. Yeah, the body technically doesn’t want that to happen, to survive, and yet it seems to be a crucial ingredient to mental surfing.

54:24 Yeah, well, here’s a pivotal issue, and I kind of use that intentionally, because it’s something I’m working on at the moment, which is a way of defining these states. The psychedelic state is one of other examples of what I would call pivotal or fulcrum, same thing, a fulcrum, a pivot point, full fulcrum mental states, pivotal mental states that are like a child, you know, in a kind of, in a pivotal period in which what they experience during those years is going to shape how they end up. When you’re in a psychedelic trip, how that plays out is going to shape how well you’re going to be doing in a month’s time, two months’ time, two years’ time, whatever.

55:14 So they’re pivotal, and they’re windows of opportunity that, when crafted in a particular way, as they often are in ayahuasca retreats, or in our lab when we’re doing a clinical trial, or when people are wise enough to think that they should take LSD in their bedroom with a sitter, they tend to go in a good direction. You process stuff, you put the eye shades on, you listen to music, you do the work, you see through that uncertainty, but you come out, you know, feeling great, feeling like you’ve learned some stuff that you’re going to be processing for a while. And that’s the way it goes.

55:53 You made the best of that pivotal mental state. Sadly it’s rare, but it can go the other way, you know. And so someone takes LSD, or they’re spiked with, you know, with some LSD at a party, and they get paranoid. “I don’t know what’s going on, they think they’re going mad,” or “someone in my family went mad,” “it’s happening to me now,” and they’re right. Yeah, they’re at Glastonbury.

56:16 Yeah, we have 50,000 of their clothes. Yeah, and they can’t escape that. That’s right. And then security are on them, and they think they’re dying, and then they go to hospital, and then they, you know, they’re suffering. Their mental health may be suffering, and that’s that concept that’s been called set and setting, yeah, in the past.

56:33 And so you’re saying that is very important to what happens to your future. Yeah, oh it is. I mean the evidence is so compelling, well from all the different teams, that the experience that you have is highly predictive of how well or otherwise you’re going to be doing in the longer term. So they’re truly pivotal states. It’s just that we assume there’s something intrinsically healing going on there.

56:58 May be, there may be, certainly leave open that possibility, but there’s certainly, whether implicitly or explicitly, being guided in a healing direction, both from the get-go with intention. I’ll take a psychedelic for some self-development, through all the things in the middle, whether it’s a shaman or a therapist in a lab or whatever, it’s all about guiding you in this healthy, healthy way. And the point by saying that these states are fundamental I think is useful, because it can help us think about some other states that might share some similarities, maybe at first not obviously, but I think they do.

57:44 I mean, infancy is one, that’s a kind of protracted state, but also when someone has a psychotic episode, that’s an episode, it’s a time-limited state, it’s pivotal. If you stick them in a straitjacket and inject them with some neuroleptic, or their intention, they never intended to enter that state. In fact, a lot of bad stuff was going on in their lives, and traumas way back, you know, and then they enter this pivotal mental state with all that, all that baggage.

58:17 It’s going to go in a bad direction, you know, trauma you didn’t intend for, but it hits you, and it’s pivotal. What happens now? It’s going to change your life, and typically, you know, it goes in an awful direction. So I suppose, you know, with psychedelics what you’re doing is you’re providing this window of opportunity, another pivot state, for, I guess, in the, to think of trauma, you know, it’s a chance to, to kind of go again, in a way. The irony is that you have to go back to go forwards, but the idea is that that’s the only way to do it.

58:58 I always go back to the seven-year-old Brian, that watched his parents get divorced. That’s what I always go back to. It happened the first time I did ayahuasca, and it was painful, and I was tears streaming down my eyes, but by being with that pain I got to see that this guy I created, on the back of this, witch, was someone who was just walled off from the world. No one’s ever gonna hurt me again. I’m gonna do everything, my own, on my own.

59:25 And so I always go back there, you know, Robin, and it’s, it’s, it’s interesting. I don’t know if it’s because that’s the child mind, or maybe it’s that trauma that needs to be processed and finding new direction. Yeah, it was probably a full crawl, you know, pivotal experience, and so it’s always gonna gravitate you back there. What did Stan Grof call that, systems of condensed experience? It’s almost like a kind of black hole, you know.

59:52 It has a gravitational pull, it’s gonna suck you in whether you want it to or not, and it’s because this is part of you, you know. So when things are leveled, you know, it’ll pull you there, you know, and that’s okay, because you go there with open eyes, you process, and come out of it afterwards, kind of fuller, fuller, because of the experience of doing that. Yeah, and I’ve learned a lot from them, and I mean, I told you I made my two boys, that wouldn’t have had them without, I think, that ayahuasca experience, because I think it showed me that I was closed off to the rest of the world because of this pain and trauma, and then I got to see it, and see the way I was behaving and thinking, what the way you got to not do this.

1:00:35 Yeah, otherwise it’ll just never get better, and you’re kind of perpetuating this loop. Yeah, but I still go back there. It’s not like it’s all processed and done and wound up in a bow. Yeah, and likely never will be, yeah, because it’s a heavy weight in your being, you know, but to go there and look at it, you know, its strength and processing, say, and of course we all have this, you know, we all have our own black holes in our soul, so to speak. Deeds is, I mean, you said these pivotal moments, so you kind of, when your trials, you pull people in, you give them the DOTA, the medicine, and then you have people there to talk to them, right?

1:01:16 For the right set and setting, and you’re obviously trying to then get them to kind of on a new direction, right, so they can maybe overcome the depression or the anxiety or the PTSD. So you’re trying to create these new futures for these people. Yeah, but coming back to that whole, you know, big question that I’m not sure about at all, which is, is there anything going on that’s intrinsically healing? See, I don’t know, because in those classic psychedelic sessions or in an ayahuasca retreat, sure, there’s some guiding going on with a singing, and let’s not downplay that at all, but it’s not one-on-one therapy, you know, by any stretch of the imagination.

1:01:58 The work is being done by you, in by you. Yeah, and then the carros definitely, they definitely help, and I mean, I felt like the shaman was with me, but a lot of times people go up to him later and say, “Hey, you know, you and I were talking,” and he’s like, “I don’t know what you’re talking like.” If you have a real honest shaman, he’ll be like, “No, I was singing the things, I felt some energy, but we weren’t, definitely not having to come.” Yeah, my shaman told me that, and I kind of appreciated the honesty, but during my experience he was there with me.

1:02:25 Yes, but as you were saying, it’s not obvious there’s an intrinsic keel there. No, but, and so, but it could be implicit, you know, and we know the power of the placebo effect, and all of that. I would never want to suggest that the psychedelic therapeutic action is all placebo, but let’s just think for a moment what a placebo effect is. It’s positive expectancy. What happens when you have helpful psychotherapy, or even respond to a drug, you know?

1:02:59 Positive expectancy is a major part of the healing process. You need that, you need that intention and belief that you’re going to get better. So I don’t think it should be downplayed, or thought of as problematic, if a major chunk of the therapeutic action of psychedelics is positive expectancy, and that a lot of it might be implicit. But if you’re thinking that the shaman is with you, and there, ricarose are being song for you, and that there’s a direct communication going on, and that gets you well, you know that, of course, is incredibly important.

1:03:37 And imagine, you know, a scientist coming along with their lab coat, or whatever. I’m saying there’s a little “ooh, you’re fooling yourself.” Like, why would you do that? You know, so obviously you go with it, and you encourage that, because you believe in the therapeutic model, you want that to happen. So this is where, you know, wearing the scientist’s hat should never be worn too firmly, because if you want bottom line, you want people to get well, and then there’s something to be said for things like the suspension of disbelief, the suspension of the analytical mind.

1:04:15 You know, let that go, because that’s not your friend in this situation. It’s a fascinating line you walk, Robin, because you have to be in these situations, and you might not be able to prove that these things are having an outcome, but you’re like, I can’t disprove it, and I’m gonna go with it, so you’re like allowing these things to happen. Yeah, and that doesn’t mean you’re saying the spirit world exists. That’s kind of a separate thing, but you’re saying, I’m gonna continue with these practices to get that result, even though we might not understand all of these.

1:04:47 Yes, he’s of it, I would be surprised that, you know, however many years down the line, some, you know, probably quite a lot of the components of what happens in shamanism is part of the therapeutic model, even in the Western world when we do psychedelic therapy. But we know that there’s a solid rationale and evidence base to that. I don’t want to call it manipulation, but part of it is manipulation or guidance. It’s a similar thing. Like, the evidence that’s saying that the experience is critically important, you know, because for the biochemical mind who comes into this psychedelic space and is used to drugs with particular pharmacology, is that, hit these receptors, this one, this one and this one, and that’s very precise medicine, and you know, that’s what we need to hit to cure depression.

1:05:43 They come into this space and they don’t want to have to think about this complex psychological-biological mash-up, you know? That’s the kind of synergy when those things come together. So yeah, it’s a, it is a difficult line to walk. All that then, and we’re talking kind of about the experience itself, but I want to kind of ask you about this concept of integration, which is something that’s a kind of a word that’s been used a lot, probably the last few years, when it comes to ceremonies and psychedelics, and it’s something that I’ve been trying to integrate.

1:06:20 My experiences from the last year, you know, having these massively profound experiences. Literally I had a list of like ten commandments, and this is what happens to me with ayahuasca. Unlike DMT or psilocybin, I don’t always get these distinct lessons, but I do in ayahuasca, and I write them down, and even before the end of the ceremony I’m like, reminded of each one of them, and I’m reminding myself I’m not going to forget these, and it’s very specific.

1:06:43 But then I came back to London and I tell everybody here that we have a new mission with London Real. I go home to my wife and tell her, “Honey, I’ve seen who you’re gonna be in the future, you know, and I’ve seen who I need to be in the future.” And then guess what? Then the laundry comes. Right there’s a famous book, After the Ecstasy, the Laundry.

1:07:05 Yeah, and then I have to deal in a world that is not what I’ve seen, and is my reality, and I’m with a bunch of people that have not seen what I’ve seen, and now I’m integrating. Yeah, and it’s a lot of people say they get depressed, you know, after they come back, no ceremony, because they’ve seen this, and then the world isn’t responding, and they don’t see it happening, and they’re like, wow, not only am I worse off than I was, but now I’ve seen something and I’m not there. Yeah, that was difficult for me, yeah, and people around me, because they kind of look at you like, “Mmm, I can’t imagine what it’s like to have someone come back and say, ‘Brian, guess what, I know who you need to be,'” and I’ll be like, “Well, I don’t know.”

1:07:46 Yeah, what are your thoughts on that? Well, it’s a fascinating one, isn’t it? It’s a major issue at the moment, as psychedelic uses scaling up, you know, whatever. The actual climate around legislation is just scaling up. People are more interested, more people are taking psychedelics, it seems that way, and so, you know, thinking through the laundry aspect, you know, coming down and reintegrating in society, is so critical, and quite, you know, how we think about best accommodating that is a really important question.

1:08:25 I recently discovered an organization, I think they’re called Sai Kia, that are very much invested in this initiative to provide integration in London, as there’s a group, the psychedelic integration group, which was born out of our depression trial, actually, at Imperial. Some clinicians set up this integration group for people who’ve had, you know, intense psychedelic experiences. You then just need to process it. People who understand, and can offer some degree of professional support, but also just a sharing circle.

1:09:06 So that’s great, that exists, but I think, IKEA, I, it’s a kind of note to self, because I really want to write them, but are about scaling that up, on an organizational level, into something akin to Alcoholics Anonymous, you know. Sure, that’s for problem drinking. Here we’re not saying it’s problem psychedelic use, but it, it’s just the reality that psychedelic experiences need to be processed, even if they were hugely for, I think, it all needs to be processed and integrated.

1:09:42 And part of this, you know, makes me think of what would have happened when Buddhism took off, you know? This one guy under a tree realizes the way things really are, and then there’s, like, well, you know, now what do I do? And part of how that discipline and practice developed was that they realized that community is essential, and so you have the Sangha, you know, that if we’re going to live according to a realization of the way things really are, you know, so Buddha and Dharma, Dharma being the way things really are, then we need to live in a Sangha, in a community, and that’s how that developed.

1:10:29 And I suppose there’s, there’s a, is there a danger? I don’t know. Well, there’s a thing that could evolve with psychedelics, where you have this community, this echo chamber community, where everyone within it gets it, you know, what it is to lose the ego, and and how that can be a very humbling experience, and important, you know, self-development and learning experience, and beyond. But yeah, so what do we do? You know, so you have these psychedelic societies that have popped up all around the world now, and they offer some kind of community there.

1:11:13 I think mostly that’s a good thing. I just think it’s healthy to at least question what can happen with that, because you don’t want it to become a closed space. You want that space to be porous, and you want lessons that have been acquired here to transfer and translate into the so-called, you know, mainstream, other unturned-on world, without some kind of, you know, hippies versus the man kind of thing that happened in the ’60s. So, yeah, getting that right seems essentially important.

1:11:55 You mentioned there seems to be this increase in the taking of psychedelics worldwide. He mentioned Denver, Oregon, more research in the States, FDA approving something. Obviously you guys are really leading the way. Why do you think that humans are taking more of these psychedelic drugs, which seem to go in complete opposite of what living species try to do, which is not to create chaos? Yeah, why now, and why are people doing it?

1:12:22 Yeah, that’s a fascinating question. I guess there’s a few things going on in this era that are different to the way things have been historically for humans. We don’t practice religions in quite the same way, at least in the West, and we have technology that’s pulling us away from the moment, and also, you know, is kind of amplifying a sort of self-consciousness, an image consciousness. And community has probably been breaking down as we managed to live, you know, further apart from our extended families.

1:13:11 And so there’s that kind of fracturing of community, and, gosh, what’s his name? You wrote about this dislocation. Is the term, that he’s, Bruce Alexander, Rat Park, I, you know, beautiful book on addiction, saying that you know, this, this, this social-psychosocial phenomenon of dislocation, Johann Hari calls it Lost Connection in his book by that title, and others, you know, in psychology and in psychedelic science, are referring to it as this kind of, well, a disconnection, and the opposite being this, this reconnection, connectedness.

1:13:54 But this is all going on, and so if you have, can have an experience that is promoting a kind of return to, kind of, I don’t know, kind of earthiness and sense of being more whole within oneself, and then because of those foundations, feeling good, finding connection with others much easier, and then, you know, what do you do with life when before it started to become depleted of meaning? You know, I’m not doing this for God or for flag anymore, or or even for tribal, family, extended family, or it’s something really abstract. Why am I doing it?

1:14:50 What’s the point? Sounds like a very confused world right now. Yeah, and it’s weird, and you know, I always think that this world seems like a really crazy, chaotic place, and then I see movies about 1968, and I look at, like, the draft, and you know, people shooting students. And I’m always wondering, do we always think the world is a crazy place? Somebody or another, not long ago as well.

1:15:14 Yeah, true, but also, the things you just described weren’t really happening back then. I mean, we didn’t have the globalization, didn’t have the technology, like you said. There was kind of the God and the flag a little bit more. I mean, now these days, you know, you people really feel allegiance to a country? Does anyone religious?

1:15:33 Does anyone feel a purpose other than making more money for themselves or looking good on Instagram? I mean, I’d say most of the world doesn’t feel any of that stuff. Yeah, and yet psychedelics seem to be the answer. Well, it’s an opportunity. It’s a pivot, isn’t it?

1:15:48 You know, and so that’s the thing, you know, what to do with this opportunity, how do you do it, right? How do you do it? And I don’t know, you know, but also there’s a little bit of pushback for having anyone or anything too organized come in to say, this is how you do it, right? You know, and then it becomes kind of corrupted, because it becomes dogma again, because then it’s prescribed by a community to do it this way. Yeah, and then it becomes its own, like you said, weird echo chamber and us-versus-them type of thing.

1:16:23 Yeah, I mean, I’ve got to be honest, put my cards on the table. I get a lot from Buddhism, but I wouldn’t call myself a Buddhist. And yeah, and so, acai, it’s because the kind of principles behind the practice are kind of evidence-based, you know? You do these certain things, and so the teaching goes, whether it’s true or not. Well, we can test it, but you do these certain things, and suffering is less and well-being is more, and so it’s very imperative, a, it doesn’t need any kind of real belief structure.

1:17:13 In fact, belief is problematic. Belief is to be distrusted. This is Buddhist. Yeah, any kind of belief, right, should never be gripped, you know? I just find all that, it’s, that’s, I find that very appealing.

1:17:30 Yeah, and does that relate to psychedelics as well? All very much. Yeah, people have written about this a little bit, not that much, but I think that one of the first texts was this Zig Zag Zen, which is kind of playful. It, you know, sort of mixes up a sort of color and art, and then little essays by different people, but that was one of the first to kind of formally say, look, there’s a very real crossover here. There’s a real harmony and synergy between principles of Buddhist philosophy, practice, and the lessons that you can get from the use of psychedelics.

1:18:11 Do you think if you looked at the brain for someone who’s really practicing Buddhism, and I don’t know if that includes the meditation or just the selflessness, that you could see similar patterns? You do, you do, you do. Yeah, yeah. It’s kind of fascinating. Yeah, let me ask you this question.

1:18:27 It’s 2119, both you and I are dead. Okay, it’s a hundred years from today. What is, if you’ve done your work correctly, and maybe if I have, is well over the next 50 years, what is the landscape look like for our kids or our grandkids when they go out in the world of London today? What is the psychedelic access, acceptance landscape look like? What do you think?

1:18:52 Us, wonderful question. Yeah, I think it needs some regulation. I’m not an analyst. I can see appeal in some aspects of anarchism, at least the questioning of authority, but I can see some role for regulation, the kind of responsibilities around regulation, so sensors for epistemic growth, for learning, self-learning and development that aren’t available just for pathology, but for anyone who goes through a screening process and gets through that, to say that this is safe enough for you to have.

1:19:36 Probably what happens, if it’s not safe enough, is that the nature of the delivery of the care becomes different, and actually, in, you know, you are treated for that. So it’s almost, I think, almost actually universal. I actually think that’s a reality in a hundred plus years, that even the most severe psychiatric diagnosis could be looked at with a certain flavor, a certain approach, with psychedelic therapy. So currently it’s a very dangerous thing to say, because we have assumptions that, for example, people with vulnerability to psychosis shouldn’t go anywhere near psychedelics.

1:20:22 They say that without, and they yeah, take tests, and they say you shouldn’t do this if you’re, then I think where we are right now, because you have, you pretty much have one size fits all. You come to the retreat, you sign up, you get through, and you’re going to have X number of sessions, and then you leave with, you know, minimal integration. Typically that’s not going to fit someone with some showing risk factors for psychosis. But in a hundred years, you know, maybe we tailor things in a particular way.

1:20:51 I’ll give away a little trade secret, because I don’t care that much. It’s just nice to share ideas, and it’s fun. I’m really fascinated by Avatar therapy for schizophrenia, which is where, based on the voice that you hear, which is seventy percent of cases in schizophrenia, people have these auditory hallucinations, typically they have an identity, usually some persecutory figure when you create a representation, a graphical, digital representation and avatar of your persecuting voice, and then through therapy, therapist’s interaction, you over time modify the interaction and the content so that they stop being quite so persecutory, and you develop a relationship of kind of understanding and sharing that leads to its kind of hold over you lessening over time.

1:21:51 Wonderful, you know, inventive idea developed by psychiatrists, I think in the UK, forget his name, Julian something or other, but I, I just wonder whether there’s something that could be done there, because, like any therapy, and this is the big limitation of therapy, it’s not easy to do. You know, it requires some work, and a bit like meditation, actually. Some people just can’t do it, and they’re just so frustrated. I try and sit down and watch my breath, but nothing happens.

1:22:22 I can’t go into it. And you hear things like that, and you think, well, just the pinch of psychedelic microdose might get you there, or the right setting, the right people, the right intention. So, you know, in a hundred years, who knows. So right now, to say such a thing is dangerous, and sadly I probably have to say I don’t advocate anyone with any vulnerability to psychosis trying psychedelics, but let’s say our science and our methods are finessed and developed so much in a hundred years’ time that this is more or less universally available, and so people are living a life.

1:23:03 I mean, this is obviously a utopian fantasy, and I actually sadly probably don’t think this is going to happen, but you’ve got a dream to try and achieve it. I mean, so, but if it was that utopia, then people would, like, I could think of them as being so transparent, you know, all their pains and repressed material, it’s kind of open and accessible to them and even to others, maybe because they trust them. They don’t need to be defended, you know. And what do they do as vocation?

1:23:45 Well, the only thing to do is, vocation is to try and relieve other people’s suffering and promote well-being and wellness, so that’s all that anyone does. And they do a lot of nothing. They’ve realized that the industrious way that we’ve been doing things for the last few hundred years is created suffering, so there’s a realization that we need to stop, so back to the ten-hour work week, or no work week? Yeah, well, maybe with some AI we won’t be working, you know?

1:24:20 Well, I could give even more kind of, yeah, leisure time. Do you think psychedelics would be the answer to a lot of our problems if we had that kind of universal idea, and this openness and this availability? Do you think that it would solve a lot of the problems, as opposed to, you know, the medication and the analysis and all the other things to fix ourselves after we got ourselves into this weird state? I suppose the potential is there, you know, but it’s a major caveat in that it’s only the potential.

1:24:52 Like, I wouldn’t want to be too zealous to say, yes, psychedelics are the answer, let’s all get to, you know, some magic mushrooms as quickly as we can. It’s that big, big qualifier, that if done right, you know, the potential is there. Is the potential there without psychedelics? I don’t know that it is, actually, because we’ve, you know, had psychoanalysis for a while, and I didn’t crack it. Freud thought it would.

1:25:22 He thought that neurosis was history, because now we know that the unconscious exists. We can’t go back, but that didn’t, that’s not how it played out, and the drugs haven’t done it, you know. Drugs, God no, they’re probably perpetuating the problem. This is the antidepressants and SSRIs. Yeah, I think they’re bad.

1:25:40 Yeah, I just, just prolongs the yelling with the problems. Yeah, it’s, it’s not getting processed, and say, you know, if there are opportunities for transformation even in crises, then you’re not being allowed those opportunities. I mean, this is dangerous stuff, as well as kind of R.D. Laing type people, who would see as anti-psychiatry, we wouldn’t really want to go down that route, but there’s something to think about here, you know. Plenty of people have written about it and have been thinking about it, you know: the idea of the chemical straitjacket.

1:26:20 But maybe, if you think that the prospects for you were so bad, if you develop schizophrenia for example, that you just need to be medicated the whole of your life now, you know. Are you then just destined to be a chronically medicated person suffering from schizophrenia for the rest of your life? Or the big question is, that if you don’t medicate them, people have recurring psychotic episodes that can further stamp in the delusional beliefs. But is that necessarily always going to be the case, or are these fulcrum, pivotal mental states where you could think about doing things a little differently?

1:27:10 I know that’s a dangerous idea, but you know, given all the backstory that all have contributed to the psychotic break, then, it, you know, if you, I mean, this isn’t ideal, but if you would have access to that knowledge and were to provide a perfectly nurturing environment, and they were off meds, could something be done? You know, I just think it’s worth at least entertaining that on a theoretical level, not to endorse any kind of “don’t take your meds,” just let’s think it through, you know, should be allowed to think it through. I think, yeah.

1:27:51 So from your perspective, psychedelics are a big possibility for getting us all to the next level? I mean, maybe the only one. Yeah, but what that next level is, you know, I’d be a bit cautious about thinking of, I don’t know, it’s, it’s, it’s sort of moving into that sort of Nietzsche kind of space, of the ubermensch, you know, the Superman, and of course that can go wrong. So the next level sort of feels like a level above, but I wonder if you, sort of, humans have been sort of after that for so long, and going awry when doing it, because it’s a kind of, they almost think that it’s the kind of ego thing, you know, another level, like a super-ego in a way, and I, for me it’s like, I’m not sure that’s, it’s almost like I don’t know.

1:28:51 I was gonna say giving up, or not giving up, because it sounds to sort of negative, but you almost kind of default back, or something. It’s, it’s about kind of going back. Would be the next level, I think. Who we used to be. Yes.

1:29:09 Do you think we used to regularly have, or have access to, psychedelic experiences thousands of years ago, when we’ve heard the stories that, you know, the mushrooms are depicted in the Christmas ornaments, and we heard ayahuasca for thousands of years? Yeah. Do you think we used to have access to, I think we embodied a state that was quite psychedelic thousands of years ago? I think we lived with a quality of consciousness that was closer to what it is like now when we take a psychedelic.

1:29:38 I think our quality of consciousness probably became qualitatively different as we progressed into modernity, and maybe beyond, and so in a way it’s a kind of reminder of where our minds used to be. So, the generations back, how long, I don’t know, but I just imagine it kind of makes sense to me that we would embody a state that’s more supple, and a sense of connection to nature and to others, and so whether we had to take mushrooms, that whole kind of McKenna reskin and other stories, I know that’s usually popular, but I actually think the ingestion of psychedelics probably wasn’t really needed, and I, I don’t really see any compelling evidence that it played a role. That’s very seductive to a modern mind where we are right now, that these wonderful things, you know, catalyzed human consciousness as we know it.

1:30:57 A stoned ape theory, you know? Yeah, but I’ve just never seen the logic there, other than it’s a kind of fun idea. Yeah, yeah. You mentioned nature, you know. Why do we feel this connection to nature?

1:31:11 What on the psychedelic experience, I know, I’m constantly, of course, I mean, set and setting. I am in the jungle of Costa Rica, but still there is this connection with nature that comes up in the psychedelic experience. Why do you think that is? What is there to tell us? I definitely think, obviously, thousands of years ago we had a much closer connection.

1:31:29 Yeah, sure. Sometimes, what you hear from people when you give them psychedelics, you know, research, you just don’t. People take psychedelics, is that they’ll say things that are kind of blindingly obvious, and then you realize that actually it’s the way we’re looking at the world now that’s gone so weirdly awry. And one of them was a participant in our study, and said, how did it go? Before, I would just look at nature, and you know, recognize it was there, but feel disconnected, and now I feel much more connected.

1:32:09 In fact, I am nature. It’s that, you know, it’s like, I think people, thousands, or however long ago, maybe even the Romantics, you know, would look on the question of your relationship to nature as kind of laughable, because they’d be like, well, you are nature, you know. It’s just the way humans have developed is this bizarre anomaly, where we think somehow we’re above nature, because that’s probably how we’ve become who we are. It’s probably our defining characteristic, is that we started to sit atop nature and control nature, with farming and such like, and then started to become really weird animals because of that, you know.

1:32:57 And so it’s a reminder, and often things with psychedelics are a sort of reminder of a kind of underlying simplicity that we’ve forgotten as we’ve become so weird. Cotton pings, that’s so well put. You really put this stuff in really well, Robin. Yeah, again, back to these ayahuasca ceremonies. I was just kind of, well, first of all, my whole body was obviously kind of dissolved and recycled back into the nature, and then I was kind of mocked that I had a concept that life and death was somehow important, because in nature it’s just kind of all one cycle.

1:33:35 Yeah, and yet as humans we take this as though I’m super important, and then I die. It’s a big deal, and, yeah, sure, it’s just another meal. Yeah, and so that was a very eye-opening, and then I was also kind of shown that, you know, this little human species, you kind of, the whole world revolves around you, but in the grand scheme of things you’re just really nothing. You’re a little speck, and you know there’s a bigger picture going on here that doesn’t really have your emotions.

1:34:00 And then, pardon me, fought back and said, okay, yeah, but I am human, and I am gonna fight for these emotions, and that made me feel closer to my other human beings, and it made me, for the first time ever, like you said, this disconnection feel like, wow, I really have to look out for these other people, as if they were important to the survival of the race, and that that was important to me in my normal everyday life. The survival of the human species is something I’m that concerned with, and yet in these ceremonies I’ve gone back to thinking, wow, I really need to make sure I pass on knowledge to the younger ones, and I look out for the older ones, and it was a big deal in the ceremony. Yeah, and then afterwards I would walk through nature, and the same thing happened.

1:34:38 I saw a bug on the tree and I was like, wow, we’re the same thing. I’m the bug and I’m the tree and all these things, and it was again silly if I had said it to someone who hadn’t had a ceremony, but also obvious and true. Yeah, I guess. Yeah, like part of it is, you know, it’s consciousness being self-aware, a good or a bad thing, and you can feel empathy for the ego, you know, in the same way that you feel kind of empathy for your child when they start saying “me, mine” and creating, you know, that kind of drive of life to package and claim and resist disorder.

1:35:20 You kind of get it, you know? You can feel compassion, empathy for that, and whether we like it or not, we’ve got it. Humans, this self-awareness, and so there is, even though yes, you know, that basic level, we are nature. We also have this extra thing, but the challenge has been, you know, what do we then do with it? Because it has such a pull, doesn’t it?

1:35:44 You know, you know, and it is the thing that pulls us along in that industrious way. You know, I will get stuff done. I was talking about the manic defense, you know, that’s part of it. I think I will just do stuff and build stuff, and stuff that goes on after I die, and in a way you almost want a sort of, a sort of current kind of sort of sad recognition and empathy and compassion through that essential part of the human condition. Yeah, and, and yeah, like when you come back and it comes back, the ego, and the laundry’s to be done and bills are to be paid, you know?

1:36:37 It’s just gonna come back and kick in, but I suppose the difference with psychedelics is, it comes back, kicks in, but at least you’ve got an extra kind of eye on it now. It’s like a dance you have to have with that ego. I like how you said empathy, so, like, have empathy for that, sang, recognize it and try to forgive it. Yeah, but then also don’t let it run the show. Yeah, but also recognize it has to exist sometimes to be you, and to do the things you have to do in order to survive.

1:37:07 Yeah, because otherwise we wouldn’t, I mean, I do think we probably have a gift. You know, how it’s come about, I don’t know, but it is probably something to feel gratitude for, that we can appreciate. We don’t just completely, mindfully, just flow along with nature. We can reflect, you know, on a sunrise and think of what it is to be alive. You know, that’s pretty, pretty special, isn’t it?

1:37:38 Yeah. We had Michael Pollan on here, and I know you were featured in his book, and you know he was talking about this kind of rise of tribalism that we seem to be seeing in this world. There seems to be a lot of us versus them, whether it’s American politics or British or European, and, and that, you know, the psychedelic experience could be a way to, I don’t know, allow us to have some empathy for that ego, or shake it up a little bit. Or how do you do you think we’re gonna make it?

1:38:08 Then you get worried when you look at the news and look at politics, or or do you just sleep better at night knowing that you’re doing a lot of great work to potentially change that scenario? Yeah, well, I don’t really do that. I just do, yeah, I just, I couldn’t do anything else really. But whether we’re gonna make it, I just chop and change, you know. It does worry me, and every now and again you get these rude awakenings, because in your bubble you think, oh my goodness, the world’s really changing and people are much more conscious now than they used to be, and then Trump gets in, or, you know, Brexit happens, and you know, like, wow, yeah, I missed that one.

1:38:59 You’re living within an urban scientific bubble, maybe, yeah, with all these, you know, well-educated and liberal-minded, open-minded, often very nice people, and then you’re reminded of the man, so to speak, and it gives you a shock, and it’s, yeah, and there’s a lot of resentment, isn’t there? That’s, um, that’s that’s there, you know. That’s behind things like the populist movement, and and, and breaks it, and, and again, maybe, you know, there’s something to be said.

1:39:45 Well, there is something to be said for trying to better understand that and have some empathy for that, in the same way that you have an empathy for a squealing, you know, toddler saying, I know, it just toys, mine. You know, it’s like, what’s, where’s the resentment, you know, and what is it about, and how can we hear that and address it? Yeah, and I think, yeah, yeah, it’s such a challenge, isn’t it? Yeah, very much so. What excites you about the next two years of your work, and also talk a bit about having, you know, the psychedelic Center?

1:40:28 I mean, even be able to say those words, you know, associated with a place like Imperial College. I mean, it was weird to read that. Yeah, you know, and when I saw you have a great video on YouTube that shows all what you’re doing, and you know, you guys were always on my radar, and not, but I didn’t see this coming, and it was like, wow, you guys actually did this. Yeah, and you did it. I think before anyone else did in the world.

1:40:49 I don’t know, maybe first talk about that, and, you know, sure, that makes you really proud. And yeah, and what are the things that you’re excited to work on? Yeah, well, it’s a wonderful development, because for so long, despite, you know, having a growing research team and getting some, I think, quite important studies done and published in some good journals and this kind of thing, it always felt that we sat almost outside of the mainstream scientific effort, which will sound funny for those who might think, oh, you know, Robin, such a scientist, you know, it’s a lighten up, but for the people in the mainstream science they’ll look in and think, are we’re kind of loose with our science and deal with very abstract constructs like the ego?

1:41:39 You and I need to tighten up your constructs. And so, yeah, that can create a bit of a chip on your shoulder, because you say, no, no, I’m good, I’m a good scientist, I’m just going after something that I think’s important, and it’s hard, and we’ll crack it in the end, but maybe some of these things shouldn’t be entirely deconstructed. So anyway, what’s happened is that people have started becoming obviously more interested in the research and can see the value and how it can help people, and got in touch, and this happened around the time that I was trying to kind of solidify, I guess, my career and career direction, and I looked into the possibility, actually, of moving institution.

1:42:34 I live in Oxford, so I was looking into Oxford, but things developed in such a way that Imperial wanted to house this, and that made sense because of all the development work and the kind of trailblazing that had gone on to get institutional support within Imperial College London, and then the seniority could see that there was a lot of money coming, potential money coming in, and so there was a decision to be made. Do we finally properly acknowledge this and actually try and give it the conditions it needs to really flourish, or do we keep on with this sort of, you know, turning a blind eye to it, that it’s not even there and doesn’t really exist? And thankfully they said, we’re gonna embrace it, you know, sure, you can have a center, you can have your logo, and we’re even going to give endorsements to your fundraising efforts, which is what’s happening now.

1:43:37 And sure, let’s break it right down and not kid ourselves: money talks, and so that’s played a role here, but when I’m sat talking to the relevant seniority at Imperial, I don’t think they’re playing me along when they show genuine interest and start saying, I can see it now, actually, this really is something exciting in psychiatry. So to have that level of institutional support is pretty unprecedented. I’ve talked to other colleagues at other major institutions doing great work, asking, you know, it, but actually I apologized, and I said, you know, you probably look at this and think it’s all a bit jumped up, and we have the same thing and we just don’t name it.

1:44:25 But actually they said, oh no, Robin, no, we’re trying to get a center ourselves, but for quite some time we’re hitting the, you know, institutional barriers, like you do when things, you know, go up the hierarchy, because there aren’t any psychedelic centers in the universities in America, not yet, to my knowledge, and apologies to any who say, oh no, we do have that now already. There might be research groups that are allowed to say that their group is, that the federal laws, that the, that in the U.S. the stigma still in the US. I actually think, US, I mean, of course it has that fascinating polarization, but the progressive component in the U.S. is streets ahead of the UK.

1:45:11 Those progressive states, you know, where you get, yeah, the thing where we are right now with cannabis in the UK, and then you compare that to where things have been in the states, makes cannabis is still illegal here more or less. Yeah, well, it is illegal, and medicinal cannabis isn’t, isn’t being prescribed really. Yeah, despite some, you know, reluctant changes, having come recently, so really exciting times. Yeah, having that opportunity now to really kick on.

1:45:42 Good. Um, a couple of things I want to ask you. So psilocybin, obviously you’ve always had some strong studies there. LSD, tell me about the DMT, MDMA, and then do you have any plans to study cannabis? Obviously there’s a lot going on with THC and CBD.

1:46:00 After not touching it for years, I’ve actually been experimenting with CBD lately in an unscientific way, but I don’t know, something there’s something going on there, and so I just want to know your thoughts, and do you have plans to do any of that stuff? And yeah, there’s a lot of research there. Well, actually, sure. The answer with regard to cannabis is not really, actually, no, clear plans there, and you’d have the bandwidth, I guess, that’s, that’s it really.

1:46:27 You know, there’s enough interesting serotonin 2A receptor agonists. Actually, so things like 5-MeO-DMT are worth a look, you know, the so-called toad that people smoke. Yeah, Michael Pollan did that, didn’t he? Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that’s fascinating from a consciousness research suspect, a real blast off.

1:46:43 Yes, and just the sheer therapeutic potential of the classic psychedelics. I’ve that’s really where I’m placing my bets, is on the classics, because MDMA, we did a brain imaging study a few years ago. EMA, psychedelic, not in my book, only indirectly because it generally increases serotonin, and some of that’s going to be hitting these 2A receptors. Okay, it’s also hitting other ones that are the ones that SSRIs hit, and it’s more kind of a, it’s a kind of combo of stress, kind of stress relief and pro-social, kind of a pro approach, kind of feelings and behaviors combined with a bit of flexibility from the 2A.

1:47:29 So it has a good place in the context of facilitating certain psychotherapies for PTSD, for example. I see the fit there. Yeah, I actually wonder where the classics could be good there, but I just think you don’t get the same, what’s the term, therapeutic index, I think, kind of safety range, with MDMA as you do with the classics. It is synthetic, it’s more foreign to the body. I do think that isn’t pure logical fallacy, and I think there’s something in that, that when a molecule is a thing of nature it’s easier to chop up and deal with, and it doesn’t have that long heritage as a plant medicine.

1:48:14 I really find appeal in the very kind of honest nature of the classic psychedelic experience today, that it demands some kind of roughness to really go through, and actually that it is confronting. Because advocates of MDMA therapy would say, “Sigh, classic psychedelics are too confronting for PTSD.” Yeah, maybe, maybe, maybe not, though, or maybe not. Yeah, I was trying to describe, people, like when you take a party drug, you know, you’re kind of front-loading the pleasure at the front, and then you’re gonna pay for it later, you know.

1:48:52 But with a classic psychedelic, it’s like you’re paying for that thing. Yeah, during. Yeah, and that’s why a lot of people don’t want to go there, because, you know, I’m always nervous and edgy before an ayahuasca ceremony, and I’m always going through emotional pain, yeah, that I don’t have to deal with in my normal life. I don’t know what that says about me, but you have to, you have to pay. There’s a barrier to entry.

1:49:16 Yeah, and I think there is something good about that. Yeah, me too. There’s something fair. Tim Ferriss has a great expression, you know, there’s, it’s a zero-sum game, you know, there’s no free lunch. Yes, you know.

1:49:27 Yeah, and it’s true about all these compounds. There’s the upside and the downside. If you can’t see the downside, you just probably just aren’t seeing it, because, yeah, there’s somewhere. Yes. Yeah, wait, which in my mind brings in microdosing a little bit, because it’s almost could be seen as an attempt to sidestep the downside.

1:49:49 You know, I don’t want to go into that kind of rough soul-searching space. I just want a bit of mental lubrication, to give me some creativity and more well-being, but yeah, I don’t buy that math. Yeah, there’s some downside there. There is. Also, there’s a bit of work, I according to our data, and the little bits of other data that’s out there, people often feel a fair bit of anxiety when they’re on their microdose, and they can’t function normally, and they, they aren’t more attentive, and they can’t really go to work and drive their car.

1:50:24 They’re tripping. It’s just at a low level. And I also don’t buy that the context isn’t important, and the intention to do some work isn’t important. I just think it’s very low-level tripping, you know, same thing but diluted and spread out. Have you studied microdosing?

1:50:45 Looking into it, we’ve done a survey. We’ve got, it’s a prospective survey, so we collect data before people start microdosing and then track them throughout. Some colleagues have a sister project, which is quite inventive, which requires self-blinding, so you get your microdoses, you chop them up, put them into capsules, you get a randomization scheme by going on something online, and then you get these envelopes. You do basically elaborate work that scientists would ordinarily do in a controlled study, but you’re doing it on yourself, self-blind.

1:51:20 Yes, you don’t know what you’re taking, and then my colleagues have been telling me that the results are really surprising. A lot of people having placebo responses, completely convinced that they were taking the microdose. Oh, that’s why we do that kind of research. Right. It’s a bit tricky thing to try to understand microdosing, because it’s a microdose, right?

1:51:39 Yeah, but all of this is set up, you know, so people are self-experimenting with psychedelics. Part of our perspective is that you’re kind of doing science in some way, so, you know, why not make you real science, or real, a science, by doing our online surveys, psychedelic survey, calm, and that there’s all these different flavors of these surveys, whether they’re for microdosing, ceremonies, general use of psychedelics. But the idea with that is to develop a broad evidence base so that we can guide harm reduction messages and also actually use that information to finesse the therapeutic model.

1:52:32 So it works a little bit like kind of AI, in a sense, kind of trial and error. It can build an algorithm that’s going to suggest, and as you might even incorporate, this suggests how would be safest and most, and how you get the most out of experimenting with a psychedelic, just by taking the data that’s out. Yeah, yeah, doing their own experimentation, and getting enough of that data that would give you kind of trends. Yes, yeah, interesting. Okay, come the way forward.

1:53:06 Right? Do you think everyone would benefit from a psychedelic experience? I don’t think I could make an absolute statement like that, that everyone could benefit, because there’s too many qualifiers in there. I’m sorry, too, for the scientists at one, but no, not necessarily, is the short answer. Okay, now fair enough, that makes sense.

1:53:29 And DMT, you’re also doing some experiments with that. Yeah. Do you find that to be a very different molecule than the psilocybin? And then also, one thing that you kind of mentioned in passing is that all of these compounds, we have receptors for them in our bodies, which means we were meant to, so have some type of relationship with them, right? Yeah, and I mean, CBD’s in the news a lot these days, but apparently there’s receptors all over our body of this molecule.

1:53:54 Yeah. So does that mean that we really are supposed to be part of nature, we are nature, and we’re supposed to have these symbiotic relationships with these plants? Well, we do. Yeah, we are nature, and but it’s, it’s more than the drugs, which are often things of nature as well, are kind of hijacking things that are, for the most part, there for what’s already in our bodies. So serotonin, for example, he takes them.

1:54:20 Psilocybin or DMT looks a lot like serotonin. Sure, it’s a thing of nature. In fact, DMT is in the body anyway, just in very, very small amounts, and it’s, it’s kind of, you know, maybe for efficiency making use of that part of the system that’s there really for the kind of mother chemical, serotonin, in the case of psychedelics. And cannabis, you know, there are endogenous cannabinoids that likely have a really important function, because we have loads of these cannabinoid receptors.

1:54:54 How can you explain that? Do we, boutta, do we naturally produce cannabinoids in our bodies? Yeah, lower doses. Yeah, or sometimes we produce them in doses. It’s just that we don’t ramp up that system in the same way as we do if we smoke a joint, with this, you know, very potent THC, which is stimulating certain cannabinoid receptors in a very potent way.

1:55:17 You know, the endo ones are a bit more balanced, and there’s more of a kind of homeostatic setup. Yeah, and it’s often the way it is with drugs: you’re kind of coming in and sort of slamming a certain aspect of the natural system. DMT, DMT is fascinating. Yeah, experientially You know, it is, it is on another level compared to taking some magic mushrooms or LSD. I guess, I was, it becomes close when it’s a big cup, you know, but DMT is shocking, you know, psychologically shocking, and then looking in the brain when people are on DMT, we see a lot of the same as what you see with the classic psychedelics, which it’s important to say is really unusual, and markedly different to the way the brain is ordinarily functioning.

1:56:24 Other scientists are very envious when they come in and see our brain imaging data, because the effects are very stark, very clear, compared to, like, I don’t know, doing a task versus not doing a task, you know? They think you have an easy job, kind of. Yeah, it’s like, Bing, you can see it, and it’s recreatable in quite small samples. You get very significant findings with the usual statistical corrections. Yeah, but DMT for the most part looks the same, but part of the difference might be in the kinetics, just the speed of the experience, that you’re rocketed into this DMT world.

1:57:06 And so, yeah, that characterizes the psychology. We’re looking now to develop a continuous infusion protocol, where we’re pushing in the DMT, dripping it in, so that we can try and hold people in that state for longer and do more imaging and some interesting psychological tests as well, potentially. How long you want to keep them there, for about half an hour, I think any longer is probably pushing it, it’s pushing it anyway, as opposed to, would be like five minutes before it usually leaves your system, with less.

1:57:43 Yeah, okay, yeah. And then the physiology, you know, mirrors all that. Your breathing changes, your heart rate changes, so it’s harder to say with confidence that the big brain changes that we’re seeing are because of the drug experience. So if we can kind of level these things out, we can say with more confidence that it’s the drug driving these things. But the short story with DMT, as to how it’s different to the other psychedelics, is probably around its immersiveness, that you forget you can forget that you’ve taken a drug.

1:58:17 You’re just in this other world, and it sits there like a dream. It’s as real as this waking consciousness, just as fundamental. And when you look in the brain, you see the usual collapse of the ordinary rhythms that dominate brain activity. There’s a particular rhythm called the alpha rhythm. It’s in humans it’s really clear, more than any other species, and in adult humans it’s really clear.

1:58:48 In infants it’s less clear, and actually in modern humans living in urban areas it’s, it’s very clear as well. People living more kind of with nature, it’s, it’s less clear. Intriguingly, you close your eyes and it’s really pronounced. No one really knows what it’s for. This rhythm, but my suspicion, and it kind of fits in with other ideas, is that it kind of holds everything in check.

1:59:17 It’s, it has an important kind of homeostatic controlling influence, a bit like that, that kind of top-down controller that’s watching over the rest of the brain. But anyway, that collapses under psychedelics in quite a dramatic way, pretty much across the board, different psychedelics, even ketamine drops down in a major way. But what you see with DMT is that there’s some suggestion of an emergent rhythm that comes in when the alphas collapse, and it’s a rhythm that is associated with an older part of our brains, the limbic system, that’s evolutionarily older.

2:00:06 In other species it dominates their brains more, so in rodents, and actually in mammals it very much characterizes their brains, really, in this limbic system. It’s something that kicks in during dreaming, during REM sleep, rapid eye movement sleep, and this rhythm does, as well as the theta rhythm. It’s associated with the limbic system, and it’s very clear in REM sleep, particularly in rodents, because we can put electrodes into the limbic system more easily in rodents and record it.

2:00:36 In humans this often surprises people. There may be hidden rhythms that we don’t appreciate, their function fully and their relationship to subjective states, because we can’t record down there, even though we have fMRI and the EEG caps and things like EEG with EEG and EEG. We’re really just recording from the surface, from the cortex, and humans have loads of it, so it kind of gets in the way of deeper rhythms, and fMRI can see deep but it can’t see the theta rhythm, because it’s a really slow temporal resolution.

2:01:12 You get like a data point every second more or less at best. It’s a very sluggish signal, so we might be missing some information anyway. We pick up from the EEG this emergent theta rhythm associated with dreaming. It’s there during the strong peak of the experience, and the intriguing question is whether this is coming from the limbic system, and whether it is a rhythm that you would associate with very immersive states, like dreaming. It’s like we’re seeing a waking dream under DMT.

2:01:46 That’s the possibility. Hmm. So you want to study that some more? Absolutely. You get theta states, I think, in flotation chambers and things like that, where you’re in that, that would make sense.

2:01:55 Deep meditation. Yeah, DMT is a strange one. When I have done it, and went, done it a few times, I am into that completely other world, and I don’t know I’m there, and then I realized later I was there, and that’s very different to a psilocybin or ayahuasca experience, where I kind of know I’m going there, and when I’m there I kind of know I’m there. And DMT is, like, sometimes, like, go into, like, almost like a Donkey Kong world. I’m like, in a video game, and it is just such a stark contrast, and it’s just such an obvious, you know, if someone doesn’t believe that psychedelics, you know, can show you something, the DMT is just such a quick, obvious thing.

2:02:31 Yes, I, wow, all these perceptions are just one part of the equation. Yeah, and when I do ayahuasca, which is obviously orally active DMT, I really get to a state where there’s a lot of profound things happening, and psilocybin, I, I must say, I think I’m kind of done with psilocybin. It’s the Machine Elves, and they’re in my head, and they dance around in there, and they give me a hard time, but I can never, I never leave with a lesson. I think in my lessons with the ayahuasca, yeah, they usually torture me, and they get into my brain and then they deconstruct it, but it’s usually a really hard day for me, whereas ayahuasca is hard, but I usually get something from it.

2:03:11 Um, but who knows, like, again, that’s my own subjective take on that, but it’s interesting to hear you say that, because it makes sense. Okay. Yeah, about the emotion, yeah, it’s that kind of emotion signal. Yeah, you’ve got a lot of work to do. Absolutely.

2:03:26 Yeah. Um, tell me about you. What’s something that you do every day in your life that’s kind of non-negotiable, so you can continue to do everything that you want to do as a person? Do you have a morning routine, or do you meditate, or is there anything you do? Ah, that’s, I think, because everything’s negotiable, you know, with a child and recently married, so you’ve got a trade-off everywhere, but I was recently gifted a guitar by a very special person.

2:03:59 That’s my little kind of escape, or is it an escape? It’s kind of, yeah, no, that’s a little meditation that I do, and I try and do that every day. I’m a complete beginner. I’m starting to learn some, some little riffs and things, so I love that. If a teacher, or you, to know, our YouTube, yeah, are you getting better at it?

2:04:23 Yeah, yeah, I’ve got a song that I can play a little bit, Stone Roses song, really, that’s good. Everybody wants to know how to play guitar, yeah, like around the campfire. Yeah, yeah. Jenna is just, it’s something that I need to do. I play a bit of football, soccer, but not seriously in any way anymore.

2:04:44 I used to, a little bit. Okay, so I love that, and gardening. I’m lucky to have a garden, because I live outside a lot. It’s hard to have a garden, of course, in London. Yeah, so another reason why I live out of the city.

2:04:57 That’s a good way to shut your brain off. I got a ukulele from one of my boys and I’ve been playing. I’m gonna kind of messing with it lately, so it’s a four-string, and you know, I’ve been just like improvising songs and just making noise, but they love it. Yeah, what’s dad doing? Yeah.

2:05:11 So good, you’ve inspired me. I might, I’ll ask, like, five of your good friends or colleagues, like, what is Robin’s superpower? How are you able to get everything done that you do, and you do get a lot done? What would they say it is about you? Well, that’s a hard one.

2:05:28 I guess it’s the, its energy, probably. You know, they, I think they’re looking and thinking, Jesus, this year take a break. Do you, you work a lot, don’t you? Less these days than I used to, and I’m trying to. It’s almost like a practice.

2:05:50 I’m trying to bring in a slowing down and saying no to invitations to go away and this kind of thing, especially around climate change and emissions, you know, so trying to say no. Does everybody want you talking about that stuff? Talking about the topic of Jaime Reply McCain? Yeah, yeah. You don’t want to go there, and beer, but it’s an interesting you know how it all ties in, because you want you to tell ya.

2:06:15 They want me to go there, and often I’ll be talking about climate change, and I could feel like quite a fraud when I’m saying I was psychedelic to promote nature connectedness, and I’ve flown across the Atlantic to say this. You know, so there’s a little bit of reflection on this at the moment that’s probably worth the carbon investment of you doing that. Maybe if I offset by giving the speech, you know, offsetting, maybe, maybe. Yeah, but I think, I think Yeah, kind of mental energy, was probably.

2:06:45 Yeah, yeah. And like Michael Pollan said about his book, you know, in reference to the ego, “ego got my book written.” Let’s be honest, you know, there’s a drive that there’s fueled by no small part of ego that drives me on, and a kind of natural competitiveness, if I’m honest, to try and be the first with things. And so I, I don’t lie abed thinking about how I’m going to change the world for the better. It’s often thinking about when am I going to get that paper out, you know?

2:07:19 So, so, then, you know, when I’m reminded of things like the manic defense, it’s healthy, I think, to watch that. Which, there you go, you have some empathy for the ego. Yeah. Michael Pollan said, when he was here before the interview, that he watched our video on London Real, and that’s when he was doing his research for the book, and I think he watched that whole thing. Oh, cool, so he was like thanking me for, like, being a part of his research.

2:07:47 I think, so, ain’t that crazy? Yeah, this all comes around. Yeah, well, circles. Nice to know that that split-screen video did some good to someone. What was the best day of your life, and the worst day of your life?

2:08:01 It’s got to be the birth of my son. The best was a hectic day. I don’t like those days. Oh, it was long, it was awful, but I, to control my wife, yeah, a very long labor, but just, I mean, I had to, I had to leave her in the hospital with him to go home and get some sleep, and that was one of the weirdest drives home. That was pretty trippy, actually.

2:08:25 I was hallucinating on the way back. Probably shouldn’t have been driving, seeing people walk across the road that weren’t there. Minutes left. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it was like 5:00 in the morning or whatever.

2:08:34 That was amazing. Worst, so, God, it’s tough, that one to share, but I know something that popped into my mind. I was, yeah. It was a suicide that happened around me, that was pretty awful, more for others than me, but I was still there, and that was, that wasn’t that long ago. That was all for yeah.

2:09:03 Did it change the way you might think about life, or, uh? Yeah, yeah, I think so. Yeah, well, yeah, it’s, it’s got to, really hasn’t it? You know, just a tragedy of life going like that, in such an aggressive way, in a young person. When, yeah, it’s just a tragedy of it, you know, that it doesn’t, it doesn’t need to happen, and the devastation of the follows.

2:09:33 Yeah, yeah. I always try to look at, like, deaths like that. It’s just like, it’s a reminder to us. Somehow it’s a lesson that person’s teaching us by giving up their life, that something you need to pay attention to, you know? What is that mental health issue, or understand your own mortality, or understand life is a gift and it’s precious?

2:09:50 And I don’t know, it’s that, because I had that happen too, and it’s like, wow, this is really bad, but I guess I’m also taking something from it, and I’m living my life differently now because of it. Yeah, yeah, it’s true. It’s not just a kind of platitude that people say. It’s really true. That I think, you know, the silver linings to these things.

2:10:10 What scares you? Death. Yeah, yeah. Death, scary. Why, I guess, seed, you know, the ego is there, and yeah, it’s it’s, it’s terminal, isn’t it?

2:10:33 I still need to process and sit with impermanence, because I know it on a cognitive level, but now that scares me. And loss, loss, you know, that really scares me, you know, future loss, because in the moment I, you know, have my loved ones here, the key loved ones, but what if I was to lose them? I mean, that’d be so awful. Yeah, that’s the downside of being a parent, it’s having that constant worry, you know, that something could happen. So, and the death, what happens after you die, factor, back to nature, isn’t it?

2:11:20 I think it is. Yeah. Is there any possibility that anything else happens to you? I already have to stick with the science. It’s not sticking with the science.

2:11:29 I actually think that those are kind of there’s a kind of, I think, a humility to the acceptance that ego dies, you die, your body dies. It doesn’t, it doesn’t disappear. It just changes form, and that’s the way it is. You know, I don’t know who said it originally, but I found it in Freud’s work, that he said we owe God a death. You know, we have this privilege of having a breathing body and the ability to be aware that we have that, and, you know, it’s a focus on it, enjoy it, and the sumptuousness of life, but it’s just right, it’s fair, actually, that we return to the source and dissipate and diffuse and become, you know, part of the bigger whole after having enjoyed this little soiree.

2:12:32 “You owe God a death.” Yeah, and that’s your death, like, the bill is coming, right? And you’re gonna, yeah. We were gifted life, you know. There, of course, for a believer in God, it’s, you know, the kind of classic theological God.

2:12:52 You’ve been gifted it, and so you give it back, but that can be, that could be nature, mother nature, and the fact that, why, I don’t know, and you know, we, we’ve had a life. We have life. It just sort of seems fair in a way. It would get boring, and just weird, and if you, if you went on, as you, after death, it wouldn’t, that wouldn’t feel fair, and it won’t feel right either. I had this discussion with the kind of AI guy, Dr. Ben Goertzel, and he’s a company called SingularityNET, and he was like, “No, Brian, we’re gonna upload our consciousness, and then we’re gonna have different consciousnesses.”

2:13:36 And I said, “Well, isn’t the human experience defined by struggle?” And he looked at me like I was crazy, and then I was like, “But without mortality we can’t do this.” And he looked at me like I was crazy. He’s like, “But maybe, Brian, this is the evolution of humans, you know, and that, in that, we look at us like we used to look at the protozoa.” Yeah, and that, and I, I’m always open, I’ll hear it, I’ll hear it.

2:13:55 It’s nauseating. Yeah, I mean, yeah, I think that there’s such an important lesson there, in terms of giving, giving giving up. Yeah, you know, I think your life that we’re being gifted. Thank you. Right, I went through some deaths in my second ceremony, and I have to be really honest with myself, they were horrible, and I resisted, and I fought, and it was, it was very uncomfortable, and I ultimately realized that that’s the way it should be, you know, but at the end of the day, when I looked at those bugs the next day, I realized I was just some cells, and the bug, or some cells, and the trees, stem cells, and nature doesn’t care about my death.

2:14:31 There’s not even an event in nature. It’s just a continuous process. Yeah, of just the cycle of life. Yeah, but maybe, I mean, we come back to that big question over the, in, you know, potential intrinsic healing quality of psychedelics. Maybe in a sense nature does care, and nature wants you to live.

2:14:53 It gave you life in the first case, so its default is probably going to be to protect and to help you survive, and I know that’s not going to be ultimately the case, and you will, oh, nature takes death as well, but for the most part, and maybe this is something that would fit in with the notion of psychedelics having an intrinsic healing quality, that there’s something, there is something about nature that is wanting to assist a life in some way. Well, I guess it taught me that lesson, didn’t it? So I mean, that lesson alone has given me a new perspective on life, but that’s a good way of thinking about it.

2:15:36 Thank you for that. What else are they gonna ask you? What would we be surprised to learn about Robin, besides that you play guitar, but something about you that would just kind of surprise us? No, my middle name is Lester. Really?

2:15:49 Okay, that’s pretty surprising. What keeps you awake at night, working too late? Yeah, actually, recently I used to struggle from insomnia, and I would work too late, and I didn’t realize that it was that that was keeping me up. So I would read, and when I read, it’s very engaged. I’m always writing, and writing in the back, highlighting, and I wasn’t even just with my laptop working.

2:16:20 I was reading, but I was engaged and immersed, and I wouldn’t shut down, and so I’d be up till, you know, stupid o’clock in the morning, especially as a student doing my PhD and such like. And that carried on, but then I guess, you know, getting a more kind of conventional life, married, with a child, I sleep much better these days. And, you know, like work is getting sort of self-organizing, but last night I did make the mistake of reading beyond my cutoff, which is when I meet, my, my, kay, but, and so I struggled to shut my head off, and then my son was up, but not too early, but, you know, half six or something, so didn’t have a huge amount of sleep last night, but yeah.

2:17:11 Your lack of sleep is killing you. It’s, Granny Matthew Walker has a great book on sleep, so check it out. Okay, and he says it’s literally killing you, not getting the sleep. Yeah, does that make sense? Yeah.

2:17:20 Robin, always ask a few questions at the end, and ask you, if you could pick up a phone and call up the 20-year-old Robin Carhart-Harris and give that young man some advice based on everything you know now, what would you tell him? Don’t worry about it. Yeah, I mean, just don’t worry about it. You were worried, er, God, yes, still am, but not at that age. Oh, is pathological?

2:17:45 Yeah, no, I would have had, you know, Anxiety, social anxiety, kind of. Yeah, yeah, massive. You know, neurotic as a 20-year-old. Yeah, yeah, I can see that. Probably me too.

2:18:02 Second part of that question. Best advice you’ve ever received, could have been from a professor or mentor or parents, just something that you were told over the years, or maybe even when it comes to being a researcher, just best advice I ever received? Wow. Robin, this has been an amazing conversation. Things have changed since you came on last time.

2:18:51 I don’t know what it is, it was you or me, but you know, you have a great way of talking about this stuff, and you’re not just a boring scientist, and you’re not just the clinical guy that’s all about the numbers, because your research takes nuance, like you said, it’s this weird thing where it’s like psychology and consciousness meets neuroscience, and it’s the strange place, and you can’t really just be the scientist in the white coat with the voice that you make, or you lose the point in your field, but you also can’t be the one that shows up in the tie-dyes and talks about the spirit world, because then that doesn’t honor it. So you’re walking this fine line. I think you’re just doing an awesome, amazing job, and anywhere I go, when psychedelics come up, your name comes up, and everyone has amazing things to say about you, whether it’s Costa Rica or California or anywhere I go.

2:19:37 So I know you’re probably don’t like taking compliments, but I just want to thank you for the work you’re doing. It’s epic. It’s making a massive difference, it’s changing lives, it’s changing the world, and you know you should be really proud of what you’re doing. So thanks, prime, seriously appreciate you. I’m getting emotional.

2:19:53 Think about the psychedelic Research Center at Imperial College London. Learn about it if you want to work there. Contact Robin if you want to cut a check, make it a big one, and contact Robin, right? I’m serious, talking multiple karmas here. How do they get in touch with you for any of these things?

2:20:10 Yeah, well, our website is there, and probably the best way is just Googling “Center for Psychedelic Research,” it will pop up with Imperial. We’ve got a lovely new website, some really nice material on how to support, asks, how to try and join us, which is hard. To try and participate in research, which is easy if people do the surveys, it’s hard if they want to get into a study, but pretty much everything that you want, at least you’ll get the information about it through our websites, ascent of psychedelic research, Imperial College London.

2:20:42 Cool, and there’s a great video on there, it’s a great looking site, and like I said, he’s got the surveys. I’m sure a lot of people want to be involved in your studies, but you only have so many spaces, so you can also do some of that experimentation on your own and put the surveys in there. But yeah, amazing work you’re doing, and just, Godspeed. Anything we can do, let us know. Do you accept Bitcoin donations?

2:21:04 Question, we’re gonna be accepting smaller donations rather than, yeah, just, yeah, so that’s being set up on our sites. Okay, whether it’s Bitcoin, I don’t know. All right, but you’ll be ready to accept that area, so okay, cool. Anyways, thank you so much, Robin. Learned a ton about this.

2:21:20 I’ve actually got a new perspective now on psychedelics as well, and you’d give me so much to think about, so yeah, just thank you. We’ve been a big part of this for us at London Real, and hopefully we’ll be doing this once every couple of years for a long time to come. Thank you. I’ve really enjoyed it, and I’ve been looking forward to just catching up, really, because so and it’s been great. Yeah, call that.

2:21:40 Thanks so much.