Science Vs - Magic Mushrooms: Your Favorite Drugs Episode!

Episode Date: August 3, 2023

Here’s the episode you voted as our best drug episode: Magic Mushrooms! People are saying that shrooms cured their depression and anxiety. But is this for real? How could taking a trip on psychedelics fix your brain? Today, magic mushrooms ditch their tie dye for a lab coat as we go on a magical journey into the science. We talk to clinical psychologists Dr. Alan Davis and Dr. Albert Garcia-Romeu, and neuropsychologist Dr. Katrin Preller. Here’s a link to our transcript: https://bit.ly/SVFavDrugsEp This episode does deal with depression. Here are some crisis hotlines:  United States: US National Suicide Prevention Lifeline  988 (Online chat available); US Crisis Text Line Text “GO” to 741741 Australia: Lifeline 13 11 14 (Online chat available) Canada: Canadian Association for Suicide Prevention (See link for phone numbers listed by province) United Kingdom: Samaritans 116 123 (UK and ROI) (Online chat available) Full list of international hotlines here  This episode was produced by Meryl Horn and Michelle Dang with help from Wendy Zukerman, Nick DelRose, Rose Rimler and Hannah Harris Green. We’re edited by Blythe Terrell. Fact checking by Diane Kelly. Mix and sound design of this episode was by Bobby Lord. Mix and sound design of our original episode was by Peter Leonard. Music written by Peter Leonard, Marcus Bagala, Emma Munger, and Bobby Lord. A huge thanks to all the researchers we got in touch with for this episode, including Prof. David Nichols, Dr. James Rucker, Prof. Bryan Roth, Dr. Erika Dyck, Dr. Daniel Wacker, Mary Cosimano, Dr. Fred Barrett, Dr. Natalie Gukasyan, Dr. Jeff Guss, Dr. Suresh Muthukumaraswamy. Prof. Harriet de Wit, Dr. Nadia Hutten, Dr. Vince Polito, Dr. Kim Kuypers and Dr. Matt Kasson. Thanks to all the clinical trial participants and ‘psychonauts’ who spoke to us. And special thanks to Lexi Krupp, Zukerman family and Joseph Lavelle Wilson. Science Vs is a Spotify Studios Original. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. Follow us and tap the bell for episode notifications. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Hey, Wendy here. We're busily working away on our next season of Science Versus, which I'm really excited about. I'm excited to share it with you. It's going to be in your ears pretty soon. And to get you pumped, we wanted to do something a little special. So if you remember a few months back, we did this big survey of you, our listeners,

where we asked you to pick your favorite all-time episodes of Science Versus. 1,600 people responded. Thank you so much. And so for the next few weeks, we're going to play those episodes, what we are calling the winners of the inaugural

Science Versus Best Episode Competition. Yes. Bring in the sound effects. That's possibly too many sound effects. I don't know. Is it possible? It's an inaugural competition. We are kicking off this competition

with the very contested drug category. So on Science Versus, we've done a lot of drugs, episodes about drugs, from CBD to magic mushrooms to Adderall. It was a very tight race. And in fact, Adderall and magic mushrooms were basically neck and neck. But today, we're gonna play magic mushrooms we made this episode in 2020 and since then the mushy's bandwagon has only gained speed just this past year more and more places have legalized access to the drug oregon has become the first state to issue a license for a magic mushroom therapy treatment center psychedelics will soon be used as medicine in Australia. In the city of Vancouver, buying magic mushrooms can be as easy as ordering your morning cup of coffee. So, should you get your next latte with a side of psilocybin?

And what can these shrooms really do for things like depression or anxiety? A quick warning before we get started. On the show, we will be discussing depression, so please take care while you're listening. And if you are feeling depressed or you just want to talk to someone, we'll put some numbers that you can call or text in the show notes. Also, we'll give you a quick update on the people you hear from in this episode at the end. All right, let's jump in. This is the show that pits facts against pharmaceutical fungi. On today's show, magic mushrooms.

For decades, we've kind of seen them as your hippie mum's psychedelics. But now, there's an underground movement that reckons they can use this drug to cure things like depression and anxiety. I'm someone who has suffered from, you know, I would say very severe anxiety attacks my entire life. We're going to call this guy Joseph. He can remember having these anxiety attacks as far back as preschool. And when he says severe, this is what he means. Stomach ache, queasiness, usually dry heaving or vomiting, a lot of tears, a lot of crying, and just, you know,

like the world's going to end. These anxiety attacks could sometimes go for days at a time. And Joseph grew up learning to deal with them. He fell in love, got married, had two kids. But then something happened that brought it all back. A couple of years ago, he found out that his wife was having an affair. She was in love with someone else. And that's when it, you know, all hit me.

I mean, I immediately spiraled into, you know, horrible anxiety. The worst of my life. Just the world had collapsed. It was like everything I had spent my entire life working up to, and there's these two kids who are involved and everything, and it just, it was all gone. Like I would look at my kids

and I would just start weeping. Joseph went to psychiatrists. They put him on antidepressants, but the meds didn't work. And he was just getting worse and worse. Nothing was helping. One day, he sunk down on the couch in total despair. And when he looked up, something on the bookshelf caught his eye.

It was How to Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan. The book came out a few years ago and helped popularize this idea of psychedelic therapy, that drugs like magic mushrooms could cure things like anxiety. And it felt like this might be the life raft that could get Joseph out of this. And I'm someone who's literally never, up until this point, had never taken or had any desire to take a psychedelic. But at a certain point reading the book, I knew, I knew without a doubt that this was going to be what I needed to do. But obviously, he couldn't just pop into CVS and grab some mushies off the shelf. The Fed's still listed as a Schedule 1 drug. It's right up there with heroin. And then, so what do you do next?

I just started calling everyone I could think of. You know, I literally opened up my contact list on my phone and going name by name and saying, hmm, is this someone who might know someone who knows someone who, you know, has access to psychedelic, you know, literally it was that. I mean, I called people I hadn't spoken to in years, weeping. Finally, Joseph reaches a guy who knows a guy. And this is how he meets someone who we'll call Mr. Shrooms. He's not a doctor, but he gives people magic mushrooms to help with stuff

like their anxiety. So after a few weeks of therapy with Joseph's regular therapist, where he talked about what he wanted to get out of this mushy session. Joseph bought a plane ticket and flew across the country. You know, people were asking me, like, you don't know this guy, how could you trust him? You know, he could be giving you poison, who knows? And I said, you know what? If I die, I die.

You know, I had nothing to lose at this point. On the big day, Joseph heads to Mr. Shroom's apartment, who had set up his guest bedroom for these magic mushroom sessions. He brings out some capsules with a brown powder inside them and some applesauce. Apparently, it helps the mushies go down better. And I said, all right, so, you know, we just open up one of these pills into applesauce?

And he's like, oh, no, no, we open 20 of them. So we literally sat there opening up capsule by capsule and pouring the contents out into a jar of applesauce. And then I just mixed it together with a spoon and just dove right in. Mr. Shrooms has Joseph cover his eyes with a sleep mask. Joseph lays on the bed, lights go out,

and some calming music comes on. And soon, it hits him. Oh my God, look it, I'm seeing all this stuff. This is crazy. What is going on? I started seeing metallic particles in the air, like glitter, like confetti, like metallic confetti, but very, very slowly floating in the air. And then Joseph starts talking out loud and Mr. Shrooms is writing down what he's saying. Wow, now it's everywhere.

It's right in front of me, but it's a different plane. It's getting closer. Whoa, okay, so now everything is rotating counterclockwise, and I'm in the middle of it. It feels like a giant, cut-out, three-dimensional, not cardboard, of an eagle, a bald eagle. The top part of it has this presence of an eagle's head and the rest of the body this feathery thing. There's this line. I don't want to compare it to ants. And through all of this, he started thinking about childhood memories and going through what had gone wrong with his wife. It was just me having a conversation with And I was crying, I mean, in such copious amounts and in such an uncontrollable way. And I felt like my eyes were being pushed inside my head and were on fire. And so much mucus was coming out.

It was like just this major, you know, shedding of everything at that point. It hit me. There was a moment where I realized that I was done. After the whole experience, I knew that the anxiety was gone. Gone. It's been about two years since Joseph had that session. And while he's still going to a therapist, he says he hasn't had severe anxiety attacks since.

No dry heaving or uncontrollable crying. I feel like I am cured. I feel like I am happier than I ever was before. Can this be for real? How on earth could one trip cure someone's lifelong anxiety and severe depression? And if this does really work, should we all be spending the 2020s tripping balls? Today, magic mushrooms ditch their tie-dye and get a lab coat. Because when it comes to magic mushrooms, there's a lot of...

Oh my God, look at, I'm seeing all this stuff. This is crazy. What is going on? But then there's science. Science vs. Magic Mushrooms is coming up just after the break. It's season three of The Joy of Why, and I still have a lot of questions. Like, what is this thing we call time? Why does altruism exist? And where is Jan 11? I'm here, astrophysicist and co-host, ready for anything. That's right, I'm bringing in the A-team.

So brace yourselves. Get ready to learn. I'm Jan 11. I'm Steve Strog A-team. So brace yourselves. Get ready to learn. I'm Jana Levin. I'm Steve Strogatz. And this is... Quantum Magazine's podcast, The Joy of Why. New episodes drop every other Thursday, starting February 1st. What does the AI revolution mean for jobs, for getting things done?

Who are the people creating this technology? And what do they think? I'm Rana El-Khelyoubi, an AI scientist, entrepreneur, investor, and now host of the new podcast, Pioneers of AI. Think of it as your guide for all things AI, with the most human issues at the center. Join me every Wednesday for Pioneers of AI. And don't forget to subscribe wherever you tune in. Welcome back. So there's an underground and illegal movement where people are getting dosed up with magic mushrooms

and saying they're having these amazing life-altering experiences. And this whole idea, it didn't come out of nowhere. Shrooms have been around for a long time. Aztecs were using them thousands of years ago. And scientists back in the 60s and 70s were experimenting with psychedelics too, seeing if they would help people with stuff like anxiety and depression. And they were having some luck. But then came the war on drugs, and this kind of research became virtually impossible in the US. Drugs like magic mushrooms were now considered dangerous,

which is the message that we got about them for decades. That drugs are bad and you shouldn't do them, and people who do drugs were bad and you shouldn't hang out with those people. This is Dr. Alan Davis. And for years, he was kind of afraid of magic mushrooms. You know, I just remember thinking that, you know, psychedelics made people go crazy.

All this changed after Alan became a clinical psychologist. He helps people with stuff like depression. Or tries to. Alan told us that a bunch of the treatments we have for depression just don't work for a lot of people which is really frustrating for him but then in 2013 he went to a conference and someone talked about the potential of using the chemical in magic mushrooms that makes people trip it's's called psilocybin. And they said it was really helping some people with depression. And Alan was so inspired by what he heard that he decided to switch gears and study this full time. And back then, just a few

years ago, this was very, very fringe. Yeah, it was a big moment. I had no idea how or if or when it was going to happen, but that's when I set it out as a goal for myself, that I wanted to find a way to make this path work for me. It was a big leap of faith. And Alan did make it work. Just this year, he published a landmark study into depression.

So the depression trial that you did recently, can you tell me like a typical patient in that trial, what are they like? So the typical types of folks, they had been living with depression for a very, very long time, for decades, some of them two to three decades, and had tried a lot of different things. So a lot of them had been through several trials of antidepressants. They had had several different types of psychiatrists or psychotherapists, and they never, for most of them, never found a solution. He set up a clinical trial with 24 people to give them psilocybin.

And before getting the pills, the patients do a bunch of therapy and talk a bit about their intentions, what they want to get out of their trip. And then we administer the psilocybin in a little bit of a kind of ceremonial fashion. It's like a really like Marie Kondo moment that you're having. Yeah, it is a little bit like that. It's kind of like, you know, thinking about what's going to spark joy in their day and trying to help them, you know, connect with that. And then it's go time. From here, things are actually quite similar to what Joseph did. The patient lies down on a couch, eyes covered, music on. I'm imagining some Britney and Usher in there. Is that the right? There are times where I kind of wish there was some Britney and Usher.

I don't think that there aren't any currently in the playlist. No, a lot of it is like orchestral and symphonic music, kind of from the classical era. And just like with Joseph, the patients end up taking a massive dose of this stuff, the so-called heroic dose. No applesauce, but the equivalent of around five grams of dried magic mushrooms. Yes, these are very powerful. So I think comparative to what people would get in a recreational environment, these are probably two to three times higher. Oh, wow. Alan says they use these massive doses because small studies have suggested that this might give them the best shot of this treatment working.

And Alan says that when people down this much psilocybin, they respond in all kinds of ways. You know, some people will have very visual, visceral experiences where they're completely immersed in a whole different world and landscape. And some people will have not any visual experience. It'll all be emotional or it'll be physical. We have some people who describe that they spent the entire day kind of feeling like the insides of their body were being reorganized and ground away. There's several experiences that I've had with folks where they'll kind of peek outside of the eye shades and look at you and they'll ask things like, you know, what are you doing?

Or what's going on with you? Like, this is weird, you know, and we just, I just say, you're right, this is kind of weird. Basically, Alan's team is just there to watch and make sure that everything goes okay. Right, so you're not talking to them about their depression in that moment. Exactly. And the therapy part of things will happen later.

As Alan worked with more and more patients, he started to realize that this really might be working. And he kind of couldn't believe it. He remembers going home one night and... I just started to cry. I think that the tears came because I realized that what was happening was so much more profound than the study. You know, the study is an important piece of this puzzle,

but the change that people were having in their lives, the experience of some of them having, you know, it been decades since they last felt joy or connection or love in their life, that this wasn't at that point any longer just an experiment. You know, it wasn't any longer just this project. It was changing people's lives. He ran the numbers a month later. And yeah, in these 24 people, it looked pretty great.

Not everyone in the trial had a huge transformation, but almost three quarters of the people felt a lot better. And more than half, so 13 people, said that their depression had gone. And remember, a lot of these people had tried other traditional stuff, sometimes for decades, and nothing else had worked. So even if our effect size was cut in half, we're still two times larger than the next best treatment. Oh, wow. However, it's not a magic bullet. There are people who did not improve or only improved for a little while and then their depression came back.

But our data is suggesting that it's an incredibly powerful treatment. Other small trials using psilocybin on depression are finding similar results. Like one study that looked at depression in around 50 cancer patients showed that 65% of them reported no depression around six months after the trial ended. So what could be happening here?

Like, why is this helping well alan told us that sometimes the wild stuff that happens to people during these trips actually ends up helping them once they're out in the real world like one patient in his study they'd been struggling with suicidal thoughts for years and had extreme anxiety, particularly about going to work. Deep into the trip, this patient said that they transformed into a powerful mythical creature. They became a dragon. They described flying to their job, very much a source of anxiety for them and fear. And as this dragon, they showed up and they immediately started eating all of the people at work and lighting everything on fire and

destroying everything. And so, flash forward a little bit to after the session day, you know, they're kind of, they're back at work. They're starting to engage in their life again. And what was fascinating was they came in and said, you know, I went to work the other day and I had zero anxiety. And we asked, well, how is that possible? You know, what was work like? And they said, I went to work and it occurred to me, how can I be afraid or anxious of people that you can eat? Wow. But for some people, what happened in their trip didn't seem at all connected to the problem they were trying to solve. Some people in these studies just have awful, scary experiences. And yet, here's what's weird.

Sometimes it still helps them. One researcher told us about a cancer patient who said they felt like they were in a trash can, being kicked over and over again. But afterwards, they still ended up feeling better. So what on earth is going on here? What is this drug doing inside your mind? Your Brain on Drugs, coming up just after the break.

Welcome back. While magic mushrooms aren't some cure-all, it definitely seems like the science is onto something here. And the early research we have is showing some exciting results for some people. Now we want to know, what are these drugs doing inside your brain? So meet Dr. Katrin Preller. Hello.

She's a neuropsychologist from Zurich University in Switzerland. And basically, Katrin gets people to take psilocybin and then pops them in an MRI to see what is going on in their brain. Have you ever been a subject in one of these studies? I have been participating in pilot studies, yes. Was it fun though? Well, I would call it, it's certainly interesting, yes. I think that's the same. And one of the interesting things that she's found in her studies helps us explain why being on mushrooms

makes you see all of these weird things. OK, so normally when you're not high, you see things like an apple or your friend because your brain is organising all this information that it's gathering from around you. We receive input from our eyes, from our ears, from our skin, but also your emotions. So Katrin's like, say you look up and see your friend across the park. You're seeing her because your brain took in all this information,

the visual information about her face and her hat. Maybe you heard her say something. And the brain was like, oh yeah, that's totally Lydia. Usually we don't necessarily question or actually really notice it. But sometimes your brain messes up. You wave, you go closer, and you realize, whoop-a, that's not Lydia at all. Your brain got some information but interpreted it wrong. So under normal everyday circumstances, this kind of thing can happen. But then when you throw shrooms into the mix,

this interpreting pretty much goes haywire. So maybe all of a sudden, you know, the people are upside down or they have green faces because the way the different parts of the picture are put together is just very different. Your brain isn't just mixing up Lydia for some rando anymore. Lots of stuff is getting jumbled up in there. Your shroomy brain is now organizing information in a totally new way. In fact, research has found that the part of the brain responsible for directing traffic kind of relaxes. And that means it becomes a bit of a free-for-all in there.

Parts of the brain that normally don't talk to each other suddenly start connecting and chatting. And all this higgledy-piggledy brain activity can do stuff, like muddle up our emotions with our senses. They are highly connected with each other. So if you're feeling sad, it can happen that this translates to, you know, you see the whole world going dark, for example. So that's why the way we perceive the world is very different, because the information is just brought together differently. But none of this explains why tripping might help some people with depression.

So what's up with that? Katrin told us about one idea here. It showed up in a small study that she did that came out five years ago. For this, she gave people a placebo or psilocybin, popped them in an MRI. Sounds like a recipe for a very bad trip. Most people feel really comfortable in there. So sometimes when, you know, the scan is over

and we ask them to get out again, they're like, oh no, I really would like to stay a little bit longer. It's just so cozy in here. And while they're cozying up in there, the real experiment begins. Katrin shows them pictures that are designed to get an emotional reaction. Let's say a shark, a spider, or a gun. They can also be just people who look very sad. And she found that something curious was happening in a particular area of the brain, the amygdala. This part of the brain is linked to fear and sadness.

And normally, when you show people pictures of stuff like spiders or guns, their amygdala lights up. But when they were on psilocybin, that reaction... It's just not there anymore. So the amygdala is not as reactive anymore. It's not clear why some people still have bad, scary trips. But at least in the lab, Katrin is seeing these chilled-out amygdalas. And another paper found the same thing.

And she told us that all of this might be a clue as to why shrooms could help some people with depression. And here's why. Having a hyperactive amygdala is linked to depression. So maybe psilocybin is sort of calming this area of the brain down a little. Okay, so far so good. But recently, something threw a bit of a wrench into this idea. So some people in these clinical trials seem to feel better long after they take psilocybin.

But just this year, a study came out showing that these changes to the amygdala, they don't last long. In fact, they were gone after a month, which suggests that something else must be going on here too. Yeah, and I think that's really where the exciting part of this work lies. You know, you're still seeing changes in the way that the brain works. This is Al Garcia-Romeo, a psychologist at Johns Hopkins University. And he told us another idea that's brewing about why psychedelics like psilocybin might help people for so long. And that's because, perhaps, this drug is rewiring people's brains. Here's the idea.

If you have depression, maybe your brain is stuck in this unhealthy pattern. And then shrooms rolls into town and it just shifts some stuff around. Kind of like a snow globe. You know, you shake the snow globe and you get all this kind of movement and then eventually it settles back down into maybe a new pattern. Studies in rodents have found that mushies might create this new pattern by literally encouraging brain cells to grow. Scientists have seen this in the lab. Oh, so you like get a cell in a petri dish and basically bathe it in magic mushrooms and you can think of as having roots and branches like a tree and when those neurons are exposed to these psychedelic drugs they can then start to grow new roots and new

branches and what that means is they connect they form connections and talk to each other in different ways and scientists saw this in live mice too. When they injected them with a ton of psychedelics, they grew more cells in a part of their brain. None of this has been shown in humans yet, though. And so the truth is, for now, science doesn't really understand how these drugs are helping some people. It could be because they're getting new brain cells, or it could be because their amygdalas are changing, or perhaps it's the things you're working through while you're

becoming a dragon. And then there's another idea that we haven't talked about yet, the placebo effect. If some people who took these drugs really believed that they were going to work, that could all be playing a role here. For now, it's a little more magic mushrooms than science mushrooms. And the best we can say is that taking all these shrooms kind of shakes up your brain, giving it a chance to reset. So while this is all potentially exciting, shaking up your brain, is that safe? Like, what if you can't put Humpty Dumpty together again? You know, you're giving patients such large doses at the beginning, like maybe your first patient. Were you sort of nervous?

Oh, no, not at all. Actually, they're some of the safest drugs that we know of. And I mean, you'd have to eat. Yeah, absolutely. You could eat an enormous dose and wouldn't cause your body to shut down or have a fatal response. Well, you can't say that about alcohol, which you can buy on the corner. You certainly can't say that about opioids, which are prescribed quite regularly. A large global survey of drug users taken in 2019 found that 0.4% of the people who took magic mushrooms ended up in the ER.

Alcohol, by the way, was up to 10 times worse. Psilocybin can cause nausea, though. In one study, 15% of people puked, and it ramps up your heart rate. But one reason that Al says this drug tends to be safe is because you can't really overdose on magic mushrooms. With something like heroin, you can keep taking it, getting higher and higher and higher until you overdose and can die. But with psilocybin, that doesn't happen. You can't keep getting high if you take more and more heroic doses. And here's why.

When you take psilocybin, the drug binds to a specific protein in your brain, and this is actually what gets you high. But once psilocybin uses up the proteins, it takes a while for new ones to pop back up. So you won't be able to feel high again for a few days. If you took psilocybin the same dose several days in a row, you just don't feel anything anymore. And so there's nothing there to keep chasing. You have to actually stop for a period of time

before you use it again. Studies in animal models have also found that shrooms aren't addictive. And you might have heard about people taking psychedelics and getting flashbacks well after the high has faded. You know, seeing the walls breathing or the carpet moving. The science-y term for this is hallucinogen persisting perception disorder. Some people report weird light effects or buzzing in their ears. Scientists don't really know what causes it. But the good news is that Al says it seems very rare. He's never seen it in a clinical trial. And out in the real world, a survey of more than 1,300 people who had had a bad trip on shrooms found that only two reported having weird visual or auditory hallucinations.

That's two out of more than a thousand people. So yeah, it's rare. But still, generally speaking, Alan told us that these are powerful drugs and if you're messing about with them, you do need to be careful. There are people out there who have very significant and serious psychological reactions to taking psychedelics in uncontrolled settings. And so I don't want to overstate that because,

you know, it's few people. However, those concerns are real. And for now, scientists are being really picky about who's going in their studies. Like Alan's not giving heroic doses of psilocybin to people with heart problems or with a history of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder. So that means we don't know how well shrooms might work for those people or if some folks should actually stay away from this drug. But still, these drugs are getting some serious traction.

The science is mushrooming. These days, scientists are seeing if psilocybin can treat not just depression and anxiety, but also addiction, OCD, anorexia, and migraines. Recently, the FDA gave two companies the green light to make psilocybin-based drugs for depression. And in Oregon, they legalized psilocybin therapy. And while this is no miracle cure and it's not going to work for everyone,

Alan says for so long, the field of treating depression has been in a bit of a rut. But suddenly, things are looking up. It's one of the things that makes me so hopeful. So much of my clinical training took place in places where there wasn't that sense of hope, where the treatments were trying to help people in that way, but not inspiring that immense amount of change. And so to see that as a therapist was something that is, you know, I'll be very grateful for, for the rest of my life.

That's Science Versus. It's been a few years since this episode first aired and we have some updates. Both Katrin and Alan have launched a bunch of new clinical trials into magic mushrooms. Alan says that overall the field is rapidly advancing. As for Joseph, Joseph says that he's been doing good and that the session he did still impacts his life today. Also, since our episode on magic mushrooms came out, we've learned that there have been some concerns around sexual misconduct in the underground and

unregulated psychedelic therapy community. Alan says that if you are thinking of trying this, please wait until there is legal access to this treatment following FDA approval. This episode had 117 citations in it. To go see them in all their glory, just go to our show notes. There's a link to the transcript. You can click on it and see them all there. While you are looking at our show notes, you'll also see our credits. Next week on the show, the winner to our best wellness and diet episode. If you miss me while we are gone for the week, find me on TikTok.

I'm at Wendy Zuckerman. Science Versus is a Spotify Studios original. Listen for free on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. But if you are listening on Spotify, then follow us and also click on the bell icon. There's this little bell and if you tap it, you'll get notifications when new episodes come out. I'm Wendy Zuckerman. Back to you next time.