The Bossticks - Discovering How To Unlock Your Mind, Prevent Anxiety & Depression, Truths Vs. Myths Surrounding Psychedelics Ft. Ronan Levy

Episode Date: December 1, 2022

#521: On today's episode we are joined by Ronan Levy. Ronan is a self proclaimed recoverd lawyer turned entreprenuer. He is also one the founders of Field Trip. Concurrent with his work at Field Trip, he is a partner at Grassfed Ventures, a venture capital and advisory firm focused on the cannabis and biotech industries and is Chief Strategy Officer and Member of the Board of Directors for Trait Biosciences Inc., a leading biotech company in the hemp and cannabis industries. Ronan joins the show today to discuss how psychadelics are being studied to help prevent and cure anxiety & depression. We also discuss how to potentially unlock your mind, and the myths and truths surrounding psychadelics.  To connect with Ronan Levy click HERE To connect with Field Trip Health click HERE To connect with Lauryn Evarts click HERE To connect with Michael Bosstick click HERE Read More on The Skinny Confidential HERE For Detailed Show Notes visit TSCPODCAST.COM To Call the Him & Her Hotline call: 1-833-SKINNYS (754-6697) This episode is brought to you by The Skinny Confidential. Our PINK BALLS Face Massager is the perfect gift for every woman in your family. Our lymphatic drainage massager will release tension and bring blood & help increase collagen production in your skin. Use code PINKICEQUEEN at shopskinnyconfidential.com for 15% off your purchase. This episode is brought to you by Dreamland Baby Co Dreamland produces the only baby sleep sack with even weight distribution from baby's shoulders to toes, helps your baby feel calm, fall asleep faster & stay asleep longer. Go to dreamlandbabyco.com and use code SKINNY at checkout for 20% off your purchase. This episode is brought to you by Beekeeper's Naturals Beekeeper's Naturals are on a mission to save the bees. With products that actually work, are third party tested, and dedicated to sustainable beekeeping and helping save the bees. Go to beekeepersnaturals.com/skinny or use code SKINNY for 25% off your first order. This episode is brought to you by Moon Juice Magnesi-om by Moon Juice is clinically proven to help support healthy brain activity, deep sleep, muscle relaxation and a focused sense of calm. To get the sleep of your dreams, head to www.moonjuice.com/SKINNY and use the code SKINNY at checkout for 20% off. This episode is brought to you by Canopy The Canopy Humidifier has an anti-microbial filter that catches irritating minerals, bacteria, and other nasty stuff from the water before it is evaporated into your environment. Go to getcanopy.co and use code SKINNY at checkout for an additional 10% off your purchase. This episode is brought to you by AG1 You take one scoop of AG1 and you're absorbing 75 high-quality vitamins, minerals, whole food suported superfoods, probiotics, and adaptogens to help start your day right. This is the best option for easy, optimal nutrion out there. Go to athleticgreens.com/SKINNY and get a free 1 year supply of Vitamin D + 5 travel packs with your first purchase. Produced by Dear Media

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us. Welcome to the skinny confidential, him and her. We've got really bad at feeling our feelings. We practice sports. We practice piano. We practice violin. We practice speeches. We don't practice our emotions. And if you think about it, our emotions are much more real than our thoughts. They are what give texture to life. They are really what define who we are. And we're really bad at feeling. I'm terrible at that, you know, and that's one of the things that came out through this whole documentary process is just how much emotion I hold on to. We are talking to the pioneer of the cannabis and psychedelic industry. Ronan Levy is on the show today.

This episode is so interesting. He is incredible. He's inspired millions of people to find healing and inspiration through elevated states of consciousness. And I have to tell you in person, his energy feels very evolved, if that makes sense. He feels like he's this person that had this aha moment. He started his career as a lawyer and he had that moment and you can feel that you had that moment.

And now he is all about spreading his message. So who is he? He's the CEO and the chairman of field trip health and wellness. And this is the largest global provider of psychedelic assisted therapies in the world. And he's also the co-author of the trip journal and the ketamine breakthrough. So we talk about ketamine. We talk about mushrooms, depression, anxiety, breakthroughs, psychedelic experiences, therapies. I ask him about LSD, all the things in this episode sort of packed into one.

I was really enlightened in this episode. I learned a lot. I took notes. I think you're going to love Ronan. On that note, let's welcome Ronan Levy to the skinny confidential him and her show. This is the skinny confidential him and her. Psychedelics. This subject, I feel like it's really coming to the forefront, which is exciting.

This show even has been tipping its toe slowly and slowly into the space. But I think like, oops, I'm sorry, having a broader and deeper conversation around the subject. It's been, it's long overdue. I think it's time to take the plunge. Absolutely. Time to take the plunge. So let's just give the audience some context. What was your first psychedelic trip and how did it happen?

And was it good? Was it bad? Tell us the ugly. all the things. My first psychedelic trip, actually, I was really, really drunk with my wife on New Year's Eve, and I don't even remember it. So we won't go into that story because it wasn't terribly meaningful, although it made for a good New Year's Eve evening with a lot of champagne. My first real psychedelic experience actually happened in our office in Toronto. So myself and my co-founders in field trip, we had been very active in the medical cannabis space in Canada. We built the largest

network of cannabis specialized medical clinics, helped close to a quarter of a million Canadians, which is a lot of Canadians, given the size of our country, access the legal medical cannabis system, sold our company to a company called Aurora Cannabis, spent a couple years there, left, and then learned about what was happening in psychedelics. This was about 2018, and cannabis psychedelics, it seemed kind of similar. So we're like, all right, let's lean in. So we started exploring, looked into the research, which blew our minds in terms of the safety and efficacy of psychedelics, which is contrary to everything we were taught in high school. And so wanting to be be sincere about potentially pursuing something in the psychedelic arena, we each got a gram of

mushrooms, lied down on the couches in our office, and went for the ride. And it was a really nice experience. It wasn't mind-blowing, per se, for our first experience, but it did show me just how much empathy a psychedelic experience could generate. We were in a bit of a dispute with our former employer, the company that bought us. And we couldn't figure out why. Everything we had done seems so logical, so mature, so reasonable. We thought we took the right approach to dealing with the issues, but they're still mad at us. And during that first experience on a gram of mushrooms, I actually put myself in their shoes and I'm like, oh, I get it. I understand why they feel upset. Even though logically everything we did was okay, I still understand their anger here.

And that really opened me up to seeing why these are such powerful experiences that can transformed lives. Yeah, I mean, we have, we've talked about on the show, we have limited experiences with psilocybin in particularly. And I feel like the way I describe it to people is it puts you immediately in this empathetic ego, not ego list, but like lowers your ego state. Yeah. And you're able to kind of see other people's perspectives without your ego much easier,

which opens you up to much broader understanding of why they may come to the conclusions they come to or think the way that they think. And I think by, because of that, it makes you more open to. receiving where they're coming from in a much greater way than maybe other substances or even if you weren't partaking. Would you agree with that? Yeah, I would say generally, that's my experience. I think it just opens us up to seeing the world in new ways. We get, especially as we get older, just so used to our thinking patterns. We think we think new thoughts all the time, but the truth is about 98 or 99% of our thoughts every day are exactly the same as the day

before. During a psychedelic experience, I don't know what percentage that moves it by, but it's different. And you get to see things differently. Music sounds brighter or more meaningful. Colors come alive. Touch is different. It just opens up our senses. And that's not just my subjective assessment. What we see when we put people in fMRI machines is their brain lights up in a totally different way. Parts of the brain that never talk to each other start talking to each other. That's where you get the synesthesia, the sense that you can taste music or, you know, numbers have colors. It's because our brain is working in overtime in a very productive and healthy way. You probably don't want to live your entire life like that.

But to open your mind to new perspectives, it's really powerful. What I would love to do on this episode is I would like to go through each one, not maybe not all of them, but some of them, the top ones that we hear about. And I would love for you to tell us how you've seen it successfully taken and unsuccessfully taken. So I would love, obviously, to start with mushrooms. So many people have questions of that. What are some things that you're seeing that it's really working and then things you're seeing that are not working? Sure. It really is all context dependent.

There's no right way or wrong way to do anything when it comes to psychedelics. It really comes down to your comfort levels and what feels good to you. Now, if you talk about it in a therapeutic context, then you'll always hear people talk about set and setting. This is a term that gets thrown around quite a bit when it comes to psychedelics. And that means set as in the mindset you bring into the experience. Are you prepared? Have you thought about what you want to have during the experience?

Do you feel comfortable? Do you feel safe? Setting refers to the actual environment that you're in for the psychedelic experience, which is you don't want to do this, say, in a hospital where you don't want to do this, say, in a hospital, where it's fluorescent lights, although we have some fluorescent lights on us right now, you know, frenetic energy, you know, not, not relaxed. Like, don't go to the DMV. Don't go to the DMV.

I mean, you can. It really depends. It depends what you want to get out of it, right? But the odds are you're probably going to feel a lot more what we'd call negative emotions, anxiety, fear, stress if you go to the DMV during this experience. Again, not inherently bad per se. It really depends on what you want to the experience. If you want an experience where you go deep and go inward and see the world from a different perspective,

you know, that's when you want to take the time to feel comfortable, feel relaxed. And that's the kind of the difference between a so-called good trip and a bad trip. There's no such thing as a bad trip per se. There are easy trips and hard trips. Easy trips speak for themselves. It's a beautiful experience. It's eye-opening. It's meaningful.

You get some powerful insights. You feel great. Challenging trips are ones where fear comes up. Anxiety comes up. You're dealing with past experience. which were really traumatic. And if you're not properly supported, that can actually potentially make your anxiety or whatever trauma you have worse.

If you're properly supported, even though these challenges, challenging emotions come up, you can start to work through them. All of a sudden, it's something that was untouchable in your psyche. You can now now start to talk about with your friends, with your therapist, with your psychiatrist, whoever it wanted to be. But it really depends on the support. And that's why it comes back to set and setting. how you're doing it matters about the outcomes that you're going to generate.

For people who are new to the mushroom experience, what is the difference between microdosing it like in a chocolate and actually having a real mushroom like Luigi and Super Mario. Luigi. Yeah. Luigi, he's a mushroom. Yeah. Yeah.

I'm just surprised you went to Luigi and Mario. Wait, is it Luigi? No, no. Yeah, it's Mario and Luigi. Yeah, but no, no, the mushroom's name is something else. Well, Toad is the mushroom. Oh, Toadstool. Yeah.

Toadstool. Okay. So what's the difference between having a Toad's? stool or having a chocolate. Well, Toad is an actual living mushroom and he's a person and he's a sidekick. Don't worry about it long. I've spent a lot of, a lot of Mario back in the day. You know, with a with a microdose, it's so called a microdose because it's supposed to be subperceptual. You know, you may feel slightly different. It's kind of like, you know, maybe going to a bar and having a drink, even though the experience is different than having a drink. You're not,

you're not drunk. You're not intoxicated. But you notice that how you feel and what you do is a little bit different. That's a micro dose. It's something that people do on a regular basis or follow a routine. So they'll take it four days in a row and then three days off. And when it comes to mushrooms, we're talking like 100 milligrams of mushrooms, 200 milligrams, not much more than that. A macro dose when you're doing three or four grams, that's when you're going to have the more classic psychedelic experience. That's when colors are going to come alive. You're going to stare at the wall and things will feel like they're moving. You know, it's that classic experience. Going back to your initial question, what are mushrooms good for and what are they bad for?

The truth is all psychedelics can be used across a broad array of platforms. But the research on psilocybin in particular has focused on depression. That's where a lot of people do work with psilocybin. That's where a lot of the research has been done. It can be used for trauma, can be used for personal growth, can be used for creativity. You name it. Again, it really comes back to set and setting and how you're doing it that matters. There's something you've touched on earlier in this episode, and I think it's something that we should talk about a little bit is there is such a kind of like a stigma or preconceived notion about psychedelics. And you mentioned like what we're taught in high school. And they've done documentaries on this now and talked about in the 60s, how they demonized a lot of stuff, especially particularly LSD and Zolabin and things like this. So I think when we were growing up and you have programs like DARE and all these things like you would think that going on a mushroom trip or an acid trip or whatever it is, you're going to, you know, your face.

is going to be dripping off, you're going to be tearing your skin off. You're, you know, you're going to throw yourself off a ledge, all of these things. And I think it's scared the shit out of a lot of people candidly. And so there's a certain segment of people that I think still, when you hear about psychedelics in particular, your mind immediately goes to the worst place. And I wonder in your research initially what you found and, you know, maybe breaking some of those myths or talking through some of them. Yeah, absolutely. So basically everything we were taught in high school about psychedelics was, if not an overt lie, at least a gross exaggeration of the truth. There was a truly pivotal study that came out of Imperial College in the UK by Professor David

Nut, who used to be the Drugsar in the UK. So I forget exactly what his title was, but, you know, there was a Drugsar. I don't know if there's still a Drugsar in the U.S. And his role was basically to advise the government on how to deal with illicit drugs. But he wanted to take a science-based approach to it, not a policy-based approach to it, which is what has. define the last, I don't know, 50 years of policy around drugs around the world, frankly. And so he did. And so he did a study. And what he found is that psilocybin amongst a number of illicit narcotics, cocaine, heroin, whatever, as well as a number of licit narcotics, things you can buy over the counter or at a pharmacy, psilocybin was the safest in terms of

harm to self and harm to others. It was the safest drug period out there. On that list towards the bottom was also LSD, MDMA, ketamine, all of these drugs that certainly I grew up. I grew up with fairly straight edge. I didn't drink until I was in my early 20s, let alone doing cannabis or psychedelics. All of these drugs, I thought were terrifying. Sure, I think most people thought that, right? Yeah. And still do in a lot of cases. And totally wrong. You know, they're not totally risk-free. No meaning like alcohol, cannabis, these things ranked higher in terms of like these kind of levels compared to some of the things we're talking about here. Yeah. Alcohol. Hall was actually number one on the most dangerous list in terms of harm to self and harm to others.

It was above heroin. It was the worst drug. Yeah, it really defies our notions of what we think is acceptable. Cannabis was still quite down low on the list in terms of risk. It's very low risk overall. But MDMA, psilocybin, ketamine, all of these drugs were actually ranked below cannabis and risk to harm in terms of risk to harm and risk to others. I guess the question on my mind, maybe on others is why was there such a push to inform people that these kind of substances were so dangerous and so detrimental to their health and well-being?

Like most things in life, policy and power, it seems like, you know, you can look into the conspiracy theories, and there are certainly conspiracy theories, but there's also evidence. There are records of Richard Nixon on tape openly admitting to trying to criminalize cannabis and psychedelics because the black and Latino are Hispanic populations as well as the hippies and the counterculture movement were a threat to his political power. So he couldn't make them illegal. He couldn't make black people illegal, but he could certainly criminalize things that they like to participate in and therefore eliminate any political willpower or effect that they may

had. And that's on the public record. So this was mostly driven by questionable science and a lot of politics. I talk to a lot of 21-year-olds, 18-year-olds all the time. and it seems to be like ketamine is really big, which was not big when my husband and I were in college or in high school. Yeah, I don't think we even knew what it was. So I would love for you to dissect and tell us the things that you're seeing done right and maybe wrong on ketamine because I think it's becoming very popular. Not to date ourselves too much, but it's all right. I'm right there with you. I always knew it as the horse tranquilizer, right?

So ketamine-assisted therapy is actually what we do primarily at field trip. We have 12 locations, 8 in the U.S. through in Canada and one in the Netherlands where we provide ketamine-assisted therapy. And what most people don't know, actually, is that ketamine is an FDA-approved medicine. It can be used and has been used extremely safely for the last 50 years, primarily as an anesthetic. It's so safe, in fact, that if you have children and say your child breaks an arm or a leg and the doctor has to reset the bone, which is not a pleasant experience, odds are they'll give your kids ketamine before any other kind of anesthetic.

It's that kind of safety profile. So it is quite safe when used episodically, right? This is something that you don't want to be taking every day, generally speaking, because there is a risk of dependence. It's not like heroin or cocaine, which has a significant risk of dependence, but it has a slight risk of dependence. And also differentiating it in terms of other drugs. The risk of dependence does not lead to overdose like you would get with opioids, right?

You're probably not going to die if you're addicted to ketamine, but it can cause harm to your bladder. There are some biological functions that can be affected by taking ketamine too much. By and large, but beyond that, ketamine is an incredibly safe drug and can be used extremely effectively in mental health, also as an anesthetic, obviously. So what does it exactly do or how does it actually manifest in the mind or in the body? That's a question that's a little bit above my grade 11 chemistry pay grade, but it works on the NMDA receptors in your body. Most classic psychedelics work on the 5HD 2A serotonin receptor. Ketamine is a little bit different, so it's not classically a psychedelic, but when you have a sub-anesthetic dose, which is lower than an anesthetic dose and higher than a microdose, you have a very psychedelic-like experience.

Going back to your questions, how do you use it right? I would advise anybody that you should be using in a therapeutic context, right, which is you want to do, you know, a medium-sized dose for someone like me, a pretty intense psychedelic dose would be about 85 milligrams if it was delivered intramuscularly, which is what we typically do at field trip. And that's going to put you into a different state. And it is dissociative. So you kind of disconnect from reality. Sometimes you see yourself in the room. Sometimes you have a classic psychedelic experience. Sometimes it just goes. is pretty black and you just go through it. But then you come out the other side. And what we see is much like classic psychedelics, people's moves are changed. It is actually a very effective drug in terms of treating acute suicidality. So if someone's, if someone goes into a hospital and they're very suicidal, they give them ketamine and it's extremely effective at breaking that, that thought cycle. Oh my God, I didn't know that. Yeah. Wow. And how how recent is this development for people using this as a therapy like that? I mean, field trip's been doing it

for about five years now. It's been used in this context for about 10 years. The research in earnest around ketamine started about 20 years ago when they noticed that people who they'd given ketamine to as an anesthetic also seemed to report significant improvements in their mental health. And so the research started in earnest. And it got to the point where about five or seven years ago, Dr. Tom Insull, who was the director of the National Institute of Mental Health, said, and I always misquote this, something along the lines of ketamine is the most important. Important depression breakthrough in the last 50 years. So really profound positive research around ketamine.

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Go to beekeepers naturals.com slash skinny or enter code skinny to get 25% off your first order. That's B-E-E-K-E-E-P-E-E-P-E-R-S-N-A-T-U-R-A-L-S.com slash skinny or enter code skinny. Beekeepers and Natural products also available at Target, Whole Foods, CBS, and Walgreens, start feeling better every day today. I want to be careful here because I know some of these medications, people really depend on a need, but I would make the argument that as a country and as people we have not had the best luck with many of these medications and therapies when it comes to either helping or curing or working through depression, right? At least. I'll just speak from my own self. My mom committed suicide and she was overprescribed medicine, like from her doctor

overprescribed Xanax and antidepressant. And obviously it didn't work. And had she had access to something like this, this could have helped her. I mean, maybe she still would be living. So I'm just like I'm not speaking for anyone else. I'm just speaking from. my own experience, I think this is important to talk about because maybe there are people out there that are having side effects from Xanax or from an antidepressant that need to hear this. This is what I think is such a shame. And again, like, I think, you know, we've interviewed so many different kinds of people and doctors and medical experts on the show. And so I'm not one to diagnose and prescribe what kind of medications

people would be on. But I think it's a huge disservice that we've had access to this kind of stuff for so many years. And it has not been front of conversation or even presenting. as an option to so many people until recently, right? Because, you know, what you're talking about going back to the Nixon era, many people weren't even a lot. They're listening to this show then, right? And there's so many, you know, things that maybe could have been helped or solved or worked through if this had been more mainstream or part of the conversation. I mean, I'm just going to say it. I think that the pharmaceutical industry contributed to my mom's suicide. I think it contributed to her depression. I think that it was keeping her depressed. That's my own thought.

Yeah. I mean, I totally respect that. I'm so sorry for. for your loss. That's got to be, you know, unimaginable, especially with a parent. So I am sorry for that. My perspective on this is as follows, which is I know there's a lot of conspiracy theories about the pharmaceutical industry and there's a lot of pushback from the pharmaceutical industry on the psychedelic movement. My personal viewpoint is that we are in the midst of a mental health crisis and the cause of that mental health crisis is not a failure of psychiatry or the pharmaceutical industry. It's partly a failure of psychiatry and the pharmaceutical industry. But truthfully, I think it's more a condemnation about how we live our lives, what we value, what we do,

what we eat, how much time we spend on our phone, how we interact with people, how we view ourselves. That's really, I think, the cause of the mental health crisis. Now, how you respond to it, I think there's a default notion in our society that we can medicalize it, that drugs, whether it's antidepressants or psychedelics are the solution. Both can be the solution and both can't be the solution. It's a variety of things that we just have to recognize what we're valuing and the stories we tell ourselves aren't working for us. And what makes psychedelics, I think, so potent is that psychedelic experiences are particularly attuned to helping us change those stories in our heads, right? We're in the process of just finishing up a documentary where I

I put myself through a whole bunch of psychedelic experiences. I had had a handful of psychedelic experiences before we started field trip and a couple after, but never really in depth. And the real takeaway I took from it is the stories that I have in my head that I'm not even aware of. You know, they're so unconsciously baked into my head that, like, I'm a failure that I'm not a success. And it's like a lot of people look at me and say, you're nuts, Ron. And how do you think of yourself as a failure? How do you, it's somehow in the subconscious.

It's in there. It's so interesting, though, because your book, the ketamine experience is published by Hayhouse, and her whole message is very much like what you're saying, the stories and narratives that we tell ourselves contribute to who we are as a person. We were talking to somebody on this show the other day, and I was saying that to your, I agree with everything you just said, by the way, to your point, we're in this mental health crisis, but if you look, if you were to, like, say you were an alien, I don't want to get to talk about aliens, but say you were an alien, you were looking down and you had watched this world evolve

over the last few thousand years. You would maybe objectively look at it now and say, oh, man, like they have it way better than they used to have it. Or, oh, man, life is way easier than it used to be. And like even during the pandemic, you sit in there and you order postmates from your phone and your underpants on your couch, right? Like a few years ago, you had to go out and kill something to find it to be able to eat. And so I don't say that to say that the world's easier. There's not hardships. But I'm just saying objectively you're to look at that. But for some reason, it seems like this mental health crisis is so on the rise. And instead of looking at the way we're living as a people, we're just saying, okay,

well, that's inevitable. It's just going to keep happening. And when it does, we're going to medicate ourselves through it as opposed to saying, okay, maybe we should analyze like why we're thinking this way or why we're feeling this way or why we're living this way and solving it the root. And I think what I've gotten from psychedelics is it kind of helps you get to that root and kind of question some of those assumptions. I suppose it's just droning on on autopilot and accepting things for the way they

are. Absolutely. And I think part of what's happening, and we can use the phone as the perfect example is an antidepressants is we've got really bad at feeling our feelings, right? We practice sports, we practice piano, we practice violin, we practice speeches. We don't practice our emotions. And if you think about it, our emotions are much more real than our thoughts. They are what give texture to life. They are really what define who we are. And we're really bad at feeling. I'm terrible at that, you know, and that's one of the things that came out through this, this whole documentary process is just how much emotion I hold on to. My parents split up when I was very young when I was two. I've always been a kind of small person. You know, I'm five nine.

I started school a year ahead of myself. So I was always the small kid in class. And so two of those dynamics in my life have informed everything so much of who I am, right, in terms of always having to overcompete, always having to try harder, always worrying about other people because I didn't think anybody else was worrying about them. And I realized just how hard of myself I am. And in some ways, you look at that and that's translated into an incredible amount of success in quotes because, yeah, I've successfully started a business, a couple of businesses. I have a beautiful wife. I have great kids. I have a nice house. Like in so many ways, it looks like I have a perfect life. And according to those metrics, I do. But that doesn't mean I'm still not haunted by some of the things inside

and, you know, to be quite honest, we talk about burnout in the context of the pandemic, but we're all burnt out. It's because we're all working and striving to achieve. We don't really know what, you know, we got sold that vision of, I'll put it in the mail context of go to school, get good grades, get the degree. I went to law school, get the job, get the, you know, get the wife, get the house, get the car and everything's going to be grand. Lo and behold, I've now done all that. And I still got problems. I mean, I don't want to sit here and ask for pity in any stretch. I don't need anybody's pity and I don't want to induce it. But that doesn't mean my life is perfect. And I still got stuff to work through it. It's not easy. And we all need to recognize that's part of our narrative and our society right now. It sometimes seems too with overachievers that what what pushes them in the beginning gets them to a certain place and then it stops working. And that's when I think people start to look for the plant medicine or start to meditate or whatever it is that they do to figure out what the next chapter in life is going to look like.

Because if you've used, you were saying, you know, you said, I'm a smaller person. My parents got divorced. You use that to sort of get you to where you are. But then when that tactic stops working, you have to pivot the tactic to something else. I don't even think it's just high achiever. I think it's people that have been taught that a certain formula in life equates to happiness, meaning everything you just outlined. Imagine you're somebody that does and nails all those things. You think as soon as I'm done with that list,

like then I'm going to be enlightened and find happiness. And you finish the list and you don't. And it's like the biggest letdown ever because you've been chasing it your whole life. Maybe never even checking in with yourself to see if that's what you actually like or want. What I learned from this experience is that I wasn't chasing happiness. I was chasing just being good enough. For who? I don't know.

But I thought maybe if I did all these things, I'd finally be good enough. And lo and behold, I did all those things. still wasn't good enough according to my own metrics, right? So if you found that out through the experience, how have you evolved through that? Or have you, are you still evolving through it? You know, I'm still very much evolving through it. I work with a teacher, his name is Erwin Perlman, who talked about is some of the things that you know about kids who come out of divorce and especially young kids. And usually, you know, if it's a father who was no longer part of the family, because I didn't really have any contact with my family.

We take on the role of the father and the provider and the protector and all that kind of stuff. And on some conscious level, but going through this experience, it just became more embodied. Irwin distinguished between knowing and awareness. It's like, logically, you're like, yeah, of course. And then you have those moments. And again, psychedelics, I think, are very much an effective way to crack through that surface layer. The author who wrote Trainspotting happened to be in Toronto having an experience. 5 MEO DMT, which is legal in Canada.

All the psychedelics used in the documentary are legal in the jurisdictions in which we use them. And it was such a profound experience for me. Like I came out of it and I started crying as hard as I've cried in a long time, just having a longing to hold my son who been diagnosed with epilepsy. What came out of it for me is that I had never grieved it. I had never grieved what he's going through because in my mind, going back to that narrative of being the person who's the protector, I was like, I'm not going to accept a world

in which this diagnosis is going to affect his life. I'm going to work harder, test everything, research whatever I can, do whatever it takes to make sure that his path, because he's such a bright spark, is not affected by this diagnosis. And my wife, who is more attuned to, you know, feeling her emotions, you know, has, has grieved a bit and felt sad about that and felt angry and the rage and the powerlessness that comes from something totally out of your control. And I hadn't. And it came out through this experience. And that was what made me realize just how hard I have been on myself and just how much I work because I don't accept outcomes that are unacceptable to me. And if you don't accept outcomes that are unacceptable to you, you don't have to

grieve. You know, I have to be sad. That world is never going to exist. And that's how I've lived my entire life trying to make that happen. And, you know, as soon as I became aware of that, not just knowing, but aware of how that's driven my life, it was so opening for me. And now I can start to give myself permission to say like, oh, you know, I can't stop all the bad things from happening. What I can do is let myself feel all the feelings that go around it. And I think that's what we need to do as a society. I think that's what we need to get better at is just being okay with our emotions. You know, Instagram and all the social media. It's so terrible because it shows such a narrow one-sided life that everything should be perfect all the time. Now we shouldn't feel

sad and we shouldn't feel anxious. Emotions are information, right? They're telling us something that we need to know, but we're so quickly, so quick to block them out from our life that we're actually denying so much of our existence. And the one thing I do know, we get to experience this life. That's the only thing we get to be certain of. So why not to experience the totality of it, both the good and bad and see what comes out of it? I was going to ask you a different question, of it as you answered it as it's talking. So the new question I'm going to ask you, and this is mostly for men, but I think it does apply to both men and women is, you know, I think we're taught as men, not to be sexist,

in a society that, to your point, these strong, capable, you know, people that don't show raw emotion. And I think a lot of people hear about this kind of medicine and they start to think, well, I've kind of got it figured out. My life's kind of okay. Like, do I really want to open the darkest portals of my brain? Do I really want to go into this trauma? Like, what's going to happen?

Who's going to come out after I do that? And now that you've had these kind of experiences, maybe you could address a little bit more. Because I think that's a fear that a lot of people have. Say you're somebody on the surface, you kind of have it together. Like maybe it's not falling apart and you're functioning. And they're worried about unlocking Pandora's box and then going into a spiral. Yeah. I mean, there's advice we give to everybody who goes through any kind of psychedelic experiences.

Don't make any big decisions for 30 days. But just using myself as an example. It's like I've gone through this experience. I've had incredible awareness out of it. I'm still at my job. I'm still, you know, happily married. Everything in my life from an outward perspective looks exactly the same. But what feels different for me now is that I'm choosing to do it on my terms instead of doing it because I'm so panicked about what I'm not that I'm free to actually do it because I want to. And that's a huge shift in my energy and it just feels so much

better. How do you and your wife use psychedelics together in a productive way to enhance your relationship? We haven't as of yet, to be quite honest. It's been so far just an individual pursuit. And I think that's okay, something that we're exploring and hopefully we'll have the opportunity to do so soon. You have to come back on if you do. I promise. Let me tell you about meditation you can sip. That's right. When you're winding down at night with your red light, with your canopy humidifier going, you are going to be drinking magnesium. And the magnesium, and the magnesium you're going to be drinking is bioavailable magnesium. It has a time release common and it's going to make you feel it within 20 minutes.

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I've never experienced ayahuasca. So I think what that is is true about all psychedelics is that you can have profoundly positive experiences and you can have very challenging experiences. And what it really comes down to is integration, what you do with the insights and how you change your life as a result of it. So a very simple example is a lot of people will come out of psychedelic experiences and just be like, I need to take more time for myself. I need to meditate more. I need to practice gratitude. I need to eat better. All of these things, these are very simple things that people can change quickly.

But one of the things we haven't talked about is a little bit of the science of psychedelics is that following a psychedelic experience, whether it's I always, whether it's MDMA, whether it's 5M-E-O-DMT, ketamine, your brain is actually more neuroplastic. You can actually adopt new skills, new habits, new mindsets, much more easily than you can day-to-day. Do they know how long that lasts? From a couple of days to a couple of weeks. It's why integration, you'll hear that term thrown around a lot, is really important. Making the changes to your life that you need to make. And that doesn't, again, mean getting divorced or quitting your job.

It means maybe waking up 30 minutes earlier. so you go to the gym and start working out. But in that window of neuroplasticity, if you start doing it, it'll stick a lot better. I know you guys talk about habits quite a bit, and like this is a great way to establish habits. But in a way that's, I think, a little bit more consciously chosen.

Could it work in the reverse? Sorry, just to, like, could it work in your neuroplasty? Like, if you do this and you don't choose good habits, could the adverse effect happen, meaning you develop bad habits quicker or is it or not? That's a fair question. I haven't seen any research about that. Or are you in just such a mindset?

So you're like, you know, you're such a positive state of mind. You're like, I'm only implementing good habits. The reason I ask is I just want to hear both sides of the coin. Yeah, no, it's a fair question. And I don't have an answer. I feel like most people, after they have a psychedelic experience, tend to feel a level of, well, first of all, we know that with classic psychedelics, what happens is there's a large serotonin release, both with MDMA and psilocybin or LSD.

So people feel happier. Typically after a psychedelic experience, also there's usually a huge emotional release, too. I know during my psychedelic experiences, a lot of things I haven't felt come out. So people are usually in a place to make positive changes, not necessarily destructive changes. But again, I don't know why I'm looking at any of the research along those lines. What about the toad? What about the toad? So the toad refers to five MBO DMT.

Yes, tell us about the toad. The toad is the most intense experience you'll ever have. people liken it to experiencing death before you die. I've now experienced it twice. I describe it as imagine being on the most intense roller coaster that you've ever been on and multiplying it by like a factor of a thousand. Did you get that's the locious? I got nauseous. When I did it with Irvin Welsh, he was perfectly stoic. He did not move. He just went into his experience, which was a beautiful comment from a guy who's an author because he's always looking for the words to describe his experience. He was perfectly stoic. I was a flaming mess. Like I was right.

and yelling. I don't remember it. When you, when you have a 5MEO experience, you go so deep that you're into your unconscious and then you come out the other side. But how long does this last? Sorry, 20, 25 minutes. You know, they talk, you hear people talk about cellular reprogramming and all that kind of stuff. And it feels like with the toad, something happens on the cellular level that just changes you. It's ineffable. They always talk about these experiences as being ineffable. With 5MEO, DMT, in my experience. It's more ineffable than anything else. There's just no way to articulate it. That's what Mike Tyson said on Joe Rogan. He said it was one of the most profound experiences he's ever had. Yeah. Yeah. It's incomparable. They put the toad on your skin. Like,

explain it to someone who has no idea what we're talking about. Don't you do the gland from the toad and do you smoke it? Yeah, there's two ways to do it. There's, there's a combo and then there's just smoking it. So what they do, most of it these days is done with a synthetic form of 5MEO DMT because as the sororan desert toad, which is where the venom comes on. Yeah, the venom, you capture it usually on a mirror. Like, it's one of those things where if you put the mirror to the toad, it thinks it's an enemy and we'll cast venom at it. And it lands on the mirror and it dries.

And then you scrape it off and then you smoke it. That's the way it was, I guess, most traditionally done. But then there's another version where they burn your skin and they put it on and it's absorbed sublingueling. People get interested in different things in life. And like, for me, when you're talking about this, the thing that my mind immediately goes to is like, at what point did some human being go into the desert, find this toad, figure out that they could do this with this toad and then have these experience. You know what I mean? And why does that toad exist with this kind of stuff off it? Like that to me, like that's wild. Are you on mushrooms? No, but I just started. But have you thought about that? He just start to think like why does this toad do this? How did someone figure this out? Why does this even exist in this world and for what purpose? I feel like someone was just walking along the desert and like the toad came out and the toad spit on the person.

It's not how it works, though. Or released, it's whatever on the person and the person had the trip. I'm just saying it's weird. It is, and the funny thing is, and I don't know all the details, so maybe speaking a little bit out of turn. With 5MEODMT, there was records from indigenous tribes, not records, but like artifacts from indigenous tribes about them using toad and they found, you know, towed skeletons and all that kind of stuff. But no one really knew exactly what was going on, at least in terms of the Western world.

And so some researcher in the last 30 years just went out to figure out what toad, what was going on with this toad? And I guess subjected himself to all these different experiences until they found out it was the Sororan Desert Toad and did that. So some people do it willfully and blindly at the same time. I have a really like weird like theory on life that is maybe going to sound kooky or out there or like whatever. But I feel as we've evolved as a people and gotten into more artificial structure, we've gotten farther and farther and farther. away from what it means to live a meaningful life. And I say that because I feel like you look at some of these old indigenous tribes or you look at the way the Native America's lived, or you just look at ancient cultures and history.

And it's like, they knew something that I think we've forgotten or lost, right? And I don't know how you get it back at this point. Yeah, I think they knew something. I don't want to over glamorize, you know, indigenous cultures. I don't expect that they were perfect. I'm certainly not saying. ours were, but there's definitely something that got lost. Like if you look at at healing circles and indigenous communities, when someone acts out of turn in our Western culture, it's like,

what's wrong with you? You're like, why did you do that? What trauma did you experience? Whereas in different sort of more indigenous approaches, the society looks at itself to say, how did we create these circumstances? And there's something a lot more freeing about that, which is it's shared responsibility because we're all product of our society. We're all product of our community. And you can't separate the two as much as our legal and regulatory systems really like to do so in our society. With the toad after you've taken it, what did you feel like it changed in your day-to-day life, if anything? I mean, coming out of this last experience, I had this awareness about all the grief I haven't left

myself experience. And that's been a central theme throughout the making of ordinary trip when we were in Costa Rico, which is where the doc started. One of the first experiences was on San Pedro, which is mescaline. It's a cactus that produces the same drug as peyote, which people may be more familiar with the name. And one of the experiences I had was the experience of feeling all the joy I've never let myself feel. And this was kind of the book end, which was feeling all the grief I haven't let myself feel. And even though if you see the documentary, you would think I was having a psychotic break during those moments because I've seen the video and it's not very flattering. And you would

think, why would anyone do that to themselves again? All I can tell you is like within 20 minutes of the experience, even though it was, you know, in so many objective ways terrible for me during afterwards was like, yeah, do that again. I think that so many of us, like you said earlier, hold our emotions in and hold everything that we've been through. And there's that book, The Body Keeps Score of all the trauma that you've had. So when you have that psychotic break, It's almost like you break through to get to the other side of what is happiness, if that makes sense. I think it's just being more honest. I do believe we hold a lot of this.

I think the book, The Body Keep the Score by Dr. Vessel of Andercoke is right. Like we hold it in our body. I mean, it's not entirely a novel idea. We hold stress in our body. You know, stress chemicals exist, you know, but we haven't really, we try to medicalize them and numb the pain or the discomfort instead of feeling it. The experience on 5MEODMT, again, changed the knowing, the factual information about what's proposed in the body keeps the score for me to an awareness of like, yeah, that seems to really be happening. Our friend Adam, who has strong coffee company, came on this show and he talked about his trauma growing up. He had a ton of trauma.

And he became a fighter later. And he said he was doing something not even that complicated, but he had so much pent up trauma and aggression in his body that his shoulder literally exploded and put him out. ended his fight career. He went on to do other things. But he attributes it to all the trauma that he just had pent up in his body that couldn't escape. And he said eventually it just like, it had to escape somewhere. Yeah. Going into that experience, again, and of one, not a very scientific study. I had pulled a muscle in my back. It wasn't incredibly painful, but I had to be cautious about how I was turning. Start the 5M experience. 20 minutes later, it's done. That muscle is totally back in place, no pain whatsoever. I need to do that right now. My neck hurt so fucking bad.

shit, do you have any right now? Give it to me on air. Do you have a toad in your pocket? Yeah. No comment. If someone is listening and they have absolutely no experience with psychedelics, but they're interested in dipping their toe in, what would you say from your experience is the best place to start? I mean, the best place to start is start by reading and speaking to people and joining a community of people who are either professionals, therapists, doctors, or even underground guides. And so at field trip, in addition to our clinics, we've built an app. It's currently called the trip app, but by the time this gets released as a podcast, it'll be called

the field trip app. And it really is just that place to give people permission to lean in. If you're just curious and want to read more about the science or the dosing or the integration work or anything along those lines, there's plenty of space there for you. We also have a community function. So if you want to talk to people who are going through these experiences, whether it's for personal growth on one end, to dealing with some of the most severe trauma on the other end, there's a community for you built into that. There's meditations, there's music. There's everything you need to have, I think, a productive and positive of psychedelic experience. So I definitely recommend our app. That's what it was built for. You know, there's organizations like MAPS,

the Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies. They're actually just finished. Probably this week their phase three clinical trial using MDMA assisted therapy for the treatment of PTSD. And the results they're generating are just mind-blowing. What we're seeing is about 70% of the participants in the study who had chronic severe PTSD for about 15 years on average, about 70% of them no longer meet the criteria for PTSD, which means they're effectively cured. I can't say it's a total cure because we don't know what happens two or three years out if things kind of go back to normal, but for six months out, they no longer meet the criteria

for PTSD. Compare that to what we try to do with antidepressants and PTSD, which is achieve a 30% improvement in symptoms versus a 70% near effective cure rate. And you can appreciate why this isn't just a cultural thing for personal growth or anything along those lines. There are a lot of doctors and psychiatrists and psychologists and across the spectrum, incredibly excited because the research is bearing out what we hear anecdotally from people with these experiences. Before you go, I want to ask you one question that I think a lot of people are wondering. When you do psychedelics, do you recommend having any alcohol in your system? Or do you think it should be completely sober?

Oh, I think it should be completely sober. Again, it depends on the context. I don't have judgment if you want to take MDMA and go to a party. Cool. You're probably going to have some drinks there. probably going to lead to a rough couple of days because you're going to be extremely dehydrated, but, you know, it is what it is. But if you're looking to have a truly, what I'll call, mind-opening or therapeutic experience, you probably want to be clean. You probably don't want

to be taking any other drugs going into it. So your system is just ready to lean in in the purest sense of the experience that's about to happen. So all these people that you see partying on mushrooms and alcohol, you would not really recommend. I mean, you're always... I don't think he's saying that. I think he's just saying that if you wanted to have... It's going to be different. Yeah.

Listen, I mean, the way, when I talk about my experience with psychedelics, none of them have been taking mushrooms or MDMA and going to a party. It's, you know, being in a comfortable room on a comfortable couch or mattress with a therapist or a doctor or guide with me, you know, where you take the compound, you put on eye shades, put on headphones, and you go inward. It is a totally inward experience. in the context of what we see from therapeutic. Dancing your ass off can be a totally therapeutic experience as well.

It's a very different experience. What I'm talking about is the inward process. If you want to take mushrooms and drink, I won't say it's overly dangerous. It's probably not a great idea to do in substantial amounts. And you're probably going to be more reckless. I personally, listen, I've taken mushrooms and had drinks. I actually find that contraindicated that instead of being both high and drunk at the same time, I felt nothing as a result.

That was just me. Because I would think that alcohol would shut down a lot of those pathways in the brain that are trying to be opened, right? You would think so, but I can't back that up with any kind of credible science or anything. I will say one thing. I like taking mushrooms when I'm out in nature during the day. I want to throw my phone in a gutter and stomp on it. I don't want any artificial light. I want people around me that I really love with good energy.

And one time I made the mistake of taking it at a concert with a bunch of people. that I knew all different kinds of people from high school and middle school, whatever. And it was a nightmare. Yeah. So that is just my own experience. I agree with you that for me, I like it as more of an introspective calm thing. And what I would invite, even when it is a nightmare experience, is don't just chalk that up to being a shitty experience, being like, why did I find that so uncomfortable? Right. Take that opportunity to look inward, even if you weren't going inward during the actual drug trip. That's interesting. You said that because earlier in the episode, you said what was it about that trip that was annoying? And I think that looking back, it was like, oh,

being out of my element with all these different people coming up to me, something about that I need to explore. Yeah, I think it's, I'm sure you'll find that part of it is you're deeply vulnerable in a psychedelic state, right? And you're open and all of a sudden strangers and being out of control. It's like that, that's scary at the best of times. I mean, we get used to it as adults, but you open up a level of vulnerability and you throw yourself into it. It's like, whoa. Yeah, don't go do psychedelics and go to the grocery store and run into Susan from high school. Or maybe do. Michael, is that you? Well, you know, I think what you're saying, like, I think the reason there's such nuance to this is two people could be doing the same thing and the same experience and have a completely different

perspective on that experience, right? And so it's like, it's hard to say what's good or bad because she may describe that as a terrible trip and someone else may describe this like the best time I've ever had. But I did want to end this with if somebody is new to this or maybe they're just starting to experiment, are there things you would caution people against or things that you would encourage people to lean more into as opposed to like maybe just, you know, a bunch of friends get together to say, hey, we're doing this one day. Like is there something you would say, hey, like maybe Ed, when we've done a lot of it today, but maybe look into these things before you take that first step or you're just like, hey, just see what happens. No, I think, again, it comes back to set and setting,

right and the integration work you do afterwards so how do you make sure you have the right mindset you make sure you're comfortable in the environment in which you're about to take this experience which means if you're with friends that could be great but it also may make you deeply uncomfortable because you're worried about winging out in front of your friends and sharing stuff you don't want to share so if that's what's coming up for you then don't do it that way find find a therapist you know come to a field trip and do it with a qualified professional that may be right for you or maybe it's totally cool to do with your friends, that's an internal check you got to do with yourself. Do the research, you know, read up, you've heard me talk about the safety profile of psychedelics and the research about it.

I'm also not entirely objective. I've built a business around around this. So, you know, satisfy yourself that what I'm saying is is true and accurate and resonates with you. Those are the first things, you know, where you do it, when you do it, make sure you're in a good mindset. You know, if you're coming right out of a business meeting where your boss yelled at you, probably if you're going to do a psychedelic experience, whether in a safe environment or at a party, it's going to be more challenging than if you're doing it after like a weekend away and you're feeling relaxed. You know, obviously understand the medicine. Make sure you feel confident that you're getting it from a safe supply. Obviously at field trip, we're prescribing ketamine. So it's safe. If you use psilocybin,

you know, I know there's a lot more providers these days. It's pretty easy to get. But you want to make sure that that's not in the back of your head being like, oh, is this safe? As soon as you take it, you know, just be sensible to be quite honest. And so do the prep work and then do the integration work afterwards. Take the experience. If you have a therapist or a coach or a friend, you can talk to about this stuff, make sure you do that talking journal. You know, we created the trip journal, which is published through Libra Press as a very structured way to take you through the questions you should be thinking about after a psychedelic experience. It's not the only way to integrate. Some people like to do art. Some people like to play music. Some people like the journal. Some people like

talk, some people like anything, you can do anything you want, but if you're looking for a more structured way, that's what the trip journal is for. And then remember that integration is a lifelong process, which is whatever comes up, you know, the I never tires of seeing is a quote I heard recently. And the awareness that you have of these experiences never goes away, which is always positive if you're willing to take it with the understanding that it's just awareness and you can do with it whatever you want to, it can always be a positive experience. I need the trip journal because last time I wrote on a bill envelope, 6,000 notes. And then I lost the envelope and I was freaking out.

And then I found it. It was a whole nightmare. Imagine the person who found that envelope. Like, what the hell is this? The ketamine breakthrough and the host of the podcast, field tripping, epic trips and psychedelics. That was amazing. Where can everyone find you? The field trip app.

Tell us all the things. All the things. So if you're interested in what we're doing at field trip, at field trip health is our handle on all the socials. I'm at Ronan D. Levy, R-O-N-A-N-D-L-E-V-Y on socials. If you want to follow me, the TripTurnal.com is where you can get the TripJournal. I'll make sure you guys get copies. I showed up empty-handed, but in my excuse, I just arrived in Austin a couple hours ago. That's right. Don't worry. Have the Toad deliver the trip journal to me. I want the Toad to come deliver it. We will have a Toad sent with it. No problem. The ketamine breakthrough gets

published next year through Hay House. And then Ordinary Trip. We're just finishing the edits right now and we just submitted to Sundance. So if any sudden that judges are listening, please give it a good and healthy review. And as soon as we have a sense on what film festivals will hopefully be premiering it, we'll have a better sense of where you can watch that. Yeah, I'm for sure going to watch it when it comes out. Congratulations on that. What's your Instagram? Ronan Dee Levy. Okay, can we give away a subscription to the app to a couple of people? The app is currently free. Oh, look at that. Can we give away the trip journal? We can give away lots of copies of the trip journal, you bet. Five? Sure. Sounds great. Five. All you have

do is tell us your favorite part of this episode on my latest Instagram at Lauren Bostick and follow at Ronan D. Levy on Instagram. Thank you for coming on that opened to my eyes. Thank you so much for having me. It's been a pleasure. I want to know what subjects that you guys are interested in on my latest Instagram at Lauren Bostic. To win Ronan's books, all you have to do is tell me what subjects that you want to hear about on this show. I love your feedback as always. And we are always screenshoting, sending, emailing to the team so we can get who you want on the podcast. I hope you love this episode with Ronan, and we'll see you next time for an insane episode. It's so good. I'm so excited to air it.

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