TrueLife - Benjamin Malcolm - Spirit Pharmacist

Starting point is 00:00:01 Darkness struck, a gut-punched theft, Sun ripped away, her health bereft. I roar at the void. This ain't just fate, a cosmic scam I spit my hate. The games rigged tight, shadows deal, blood on their hands, I'll never kneel. Yet in the rage, a crack ignites, occulted sparks cut through the nights. The scars my key, hermetic and stark. To see, to rise, I hunt in the dark, fumbling, fear, Fearist through ruins maze, lights my war cry, born from the blaze.

Starting point is 00:00:40 The poem is Angels with Rifles. The track, I Am Sorrow, I Am Lust by Codex Serafini. Check out the entire song at the end of the cast. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to the True Life podcast. I hope the birds are singing. I hope the wind is at your back and the sun is shining. We got a great show for you today, the one and only. Dr. Ben Malcolm, the Spirit Farm.

Starting point is 00:01:16 I'll give him a bit of an introduction, but I'll kick it to him because what he's doing is fascinating. To me, and I think to everyone to listening audience, he's got his farm D MPH, founder of Spirit Pharmacists. He offers an incredible library of courses and webinars and psychedelic pharmacology as well as psychopharmacology, consulting, and education. There's a lot more in there, but let me just dish it off to you right there. How would you, Dr. Ben Malcolm, how would you describe

Starting point is 00:01:45 what you do. Yeah, well, I mean, I come from a, I mean, psychopharmacology consulting and psychedelic education. Okay, now that's the summary, concise version of like, what do I actually do? I come from a background as a clinical psychiatric pharmacist. So that's how I was trained in a traditional pharmacy setting, some postgraduate residencies in a hospital.

Starting point is 00:02:08 I did a year just in psychiatric kinds of settings. I was in academia for almost five years, just kind of doing some literature synthesis and talking about psychedelics, giving continuing education talks and things like that. And eventually, I just got to a place where I was kind of like, you know what? Academia is cool. I like teaching. I like mentoring students and things like that. But this passion project I've got Spirit Pharmacists just seems to be taking more and more of my time.

Starting point is 00:02:36 And it's harder and harder to review the applications for new pharmacy school candidates and keep up with all the committee work. and things like that. And so the pandemic happened, which I don't know, you might think of as, you know, it was kind of a tragic time, to be honest. A lot of people like lost their lives. But I also, like for me personally, it was almost like the great shakeup where it was just sort of like, okay, anything that you don't like in your life, it is officially time to drop it now.

Starting point is 00:03:04 You have a ticket to reinvent yourself, to do anything that you want. The world is closed. And while the world's closed, you get to reinvent yourself and come out of it when it opens. you can just open in a different way. And so that was essentially the transition year between academia and the psychopharmacology consulting and psychedelic education I do at spirit pharmacists now. It's so well put.

Starting point is 00:03:29 And I'm so glad that you see it that way because it's almost like a shift took place. And there's so many people that I have spoken with that found that time to reimagine who they are and what is possible. And it's how to, so you, you've talked a little bit about how you move from the world of academia into the world of being your own person and founding this thing called the spirit pharmacist. And you've talked about, you know, you do some education, you do some consulting. Can you give me an example of like, let's say that I want to use you, the spirit pharmacist. Like, what would I come to you for? Yeah. So I think like

Starting point is 00:04:07 the thing that makes me perhaps unique in the world of maybe psychiatry as well as the world of of psychedelics is that I kind of come from both sides of things in that I was interested in psychedelics at the beginning of the day. I was reading about them. I was experientially curious, young in my life, 18, 19 years old. I started reading about them a few years before that even, right? So it's like I actually studied pharmacology and went to pharmacy school based upon an intellectual curiosity in psychoactive drugs or substances. So in some way, psychedelics inspired me to go on the educational path or direction that I did, right? But at that time, I don't know, I didn't have much vision for my life when I was 19 years

Starting point is 00:04:48 old. I was a competitive swimmer. I mean, the only thing you do is follow the black line 40 hours a week and take care of whatever else schoolwork you do on the side, but you're not necessarily thinking about what internship can I have and what I want to because you're, I mean, swimming is your internship. Lifting weights is your internship, right? there's, I don't know, when you're a division one athlete, there's not that much space outside of it to do other stuff.

Starting point is 00:05:14 So, you know, I never had the vision earlier in life that I was going to be a psychedelic pharmacist per se. But it inspired the educational path. And then as I went through the educational path, I really tried a lot of things. I really did a lot of things. I wore a lot of hats. I tried to do a lot of leadership positions. I sort of felt like, I'm going to drop a quarter million dollars on graduate school. I'm going to get my money's worth with sort of like my approach to it.

Starting point is 00:05:41 It's like I'm going to make the most out of it. I'm not going in with any particular conception of what I'm going to do or be at the end of the day. I just know that this is the knowledge I want to soak up and create the most opportunity that I can while I'm there. So that's what I did in pharmacy school. And I'll say it was like the postgraduate residency training. This is around 2015, 2016, now, you know, in the hospital, kind of getting burnt out with hospital work, trying to think about, like, where do I want to go in my career? And someone, a good friend actually, fortunately just passed away, but she handed me a

Starting point is 00:06:14 flyer for a PGY2 or a second year graduate residency in psychiatric pharmacy. And like holding that flyer, like something like just click like, yeah, like this is the opportunity. like this is what I should do next year. And then when I had that, I was like, why are you doing a psychiatric pharmacy residency? And then by then, you know, 2016, hey, you know, rolling, Griffiths published the paper on psilocybin, the mystical experience around 2006, 2007. So now we've got several randomized trials, MDMA assisted therapy for PTSD, psilocybin

Starting point is 00:06:45 for depression, anxiety associated with life-threatening illness, psilocybin for depression. It kind of started by then. Ketamines already a medically approved drug for the treatment of depression or suicidal behaviors associated with depression. So all of a sudden it was just kind of like, man, I got to education, I got the training. this has been my passion interest from the beginning. And it all just kind of clicked as far as like, yeah, this is the direction I'm going. I'm picking academia.

Starting point is 00:07:12 I like teaching. I like students. There's something about like the bright-eyed bushy-tailed sort of like student that's just coming in like fresh. And they're not jaded on the medical system and things like that yet. So they come in with just so much energy and enthusiasm and passion that's just kind of contagious. And I don't know. I just like students. But I was also kind of like, well, academia, that's the kind of.

Starting point is 00:07:33 a job where you have protected time for scholarship and you're required slash supposed to be doing scholarship like writing academic articles, publishing studies that you've done or giving continuing education talks and things like that. So I was like, well, and it's academia. You've got academic freedom. So for the first time of my life, right, instead of being a student or a resident where the academic projects are what your preceptor or kind of like superior sort of thinks would be a good idea or a good learning opportunity, it's kind of like, what questions do you want to answer? what do you want to write about? What do you want to speak about?

Starting point is 00:08:08 And it was kind of like, psychedelics, man. Like, I want to write about psychedelics. I want to teach about psychedelics. And it's necessary. We have this thing called the psychedelic renaissance happening. And to me, it's like, well, I'm an enthusiast. I'm stoked on the psychedelic renaissance. But honestly, it's a little cart ahead of the horse in that we've had 50 years of

Starting point is 00:08:28 prohibition. We've had 50 years of stigma. We have 50 years of misinformation. You know, most health care providers have, have outdated and misinformed, like, attitudes about psychedelics. The public, well, maybe they're enthusiastic on benefits, but don't really know how to create, like, safe experiences for themselves. And then I think, you know, truly my niche, or like what I do,

Starting point is 00:08:49 bridging the world is persons taking psychiatric medications now that are approaching psychedelics for a mental health treatment or an intention for healing. And there's the potential for the, kinds of clinically significant interactions that could either take the edge or diminish the effect of psychedelics or their experience is lackluster and they're concluding it doesn't really work and things like that perhaps falsely, right? Or they stop their meds too fast. They taper off too fast. There's a level of desperation to get to these experiences and then they're kind of blown up

Starting point is 00:09:25 in withdrawal coming right into a psychedelic experience. So I'm sort of the person that knows both worlds that knows the worlds of traditional psychiatric meds, knows the worlds of psychedelics, and basically I'm just trying to take people from A to B, whatever point A and point B is, that's for them to decide, not for me, right? Like my consulting is not inherently about you come to me on antidepressant and I'm trying to convert you to psychedelic, right? It's like, you're coming to me on an antidepressant and saying stuff like, I've taken this for a long time, I have some level of side effects or maybe it was efficacious for some period

Starting point is 00:10:03 time and now it's kind of worn off and it's been a while and I'm really curious about who I kind of am underneath this antidepressant and if there could be some alternative management strategies or at least a way for me to have some kind of spiritual experience that allows me to feel more connected. And I think that that actually is kind of what's missing from my mental health regimen overall and things like that. So yeah, I'm a psychiatric pharmacist that knows about traditional psychiatric meds and psychedelics. And yeah, that was a long-winded version of psychoformicology consulting and psychedelic education. It was really well done.

Starting point is 00:10:42 I like the idea of being the bridge between this idea of psychiatric medication and psychedelic medication because it seems we're there right now. You know, you had spoke about Griffith's paper in 06. And up until that time, it was almost taboo to go down the road of psychedelics and try to get a degree in there. And you were looked at as some sort of woo-woo witch doctor or something like that. But we can see now that there's maybe you could add to your bio like pioneer in a way. Like you are someone who understands like going forward these interactions. You're one of the only people I've spoken to that is really trying to bridge that gap between psychiatric medicine and psychedelic with how they interact together.

Starting point is 00:11:24 What is it doing with this way? What's happening in the brain? And I guess that leads me to the question of, you know, we, it seems, and I'm a truck driver and a podcaster, so this is, I'm just going to throw this out here and you tell me what you think in your opinion. It seems to me that for a long time, modern Western medicine adopted the approach of the coping strategy where, here, we're going to give you these SSR rise. And it may not solve the problem, but it's going to make you feel good enough to get up and handle your day. It's going to, you may not go and solve the issue. but you're going to be able to slap on the band-aid and get through your day. And it seems like in some of these studies with PTSD, people are taking psilocybin or ketamine

Starting point is 00:12:06 or some form of psychedelic in finding a way to face that which has been bothering them. So they're no longer using the coping strategy. They're more using the confronting strategy. Have you seen similar patterns between psychiatric medicine and psychedelic medicine? Yeah, I think so. Like there's definitely like a flavor of that going on. I tend to not think of it so black and white or so like extreme. I think that there's still like, you know,

Starting point is 00:12:35 there are certain psychiatric medications I'm not a huge fan of and whatnot. But I acknowledge they have a role for some people. They are the right choices for some people, things like that. So I feel like this sort of like, oh, you have depression, you're taking an antidepressant. Oh, you're just slapping a bandaid on it. Don't you really want to deal with things, right? And there's like this sort of like almost like condescending tone from the psychedelic community that looks down on people that take psychics. Like, oh, you're the sheep that bought the big pharma pills.

Starting point is 00:13:04 It's like you got to rip those band-aids off if you really want. And it's just there's like there's just some sort of like sickness to it that is just not appropriate. And it's sort of like anyone that's taking a psychiatric medication, well, maybe 99% of people that are taking a psychiatric medication or taking because they wanted to help themselves and they wanted to get better and they wanted to. to heal. It's not because they just wanted a band-aid to make things go on, right? So all that said, yeah, there's something to it. And it seems that the ideology for so much in the way of, I would say, like, mental health conditions, but it's also physical health conditions and substance use disorders traces back to trauma or adverse childhood experience. There's something called it ACE score. It's literally the number of traumatic events you had between age zero and 18. And it strongly

Starting point is 00:13:50 predicts your propensity to have mental illness, physical illness or substance use disorders in your adult life. So trauma, that's a big one as far as like a root cause ideology, but I also think like chronic stress as an adult is like another one. So I think that these two sorts of like factors, like I have a daughter, right, she's beautiful. She's going to be congratulations this weekend. But she has like Plato, right? And you take to Plato and you put it through these different filters and some of it like it makes spaghetti and some of them make stars and this and so i'm sort of thinking like well these filters in the plato it's like your genetic predisposition and plato that's the trauma that's the chronic stress and you push trauma or chronic stress

Starting point is 00:14:34 through a genetic predisposition and it will express some kind of illness but whether that illness is a spaghetti illness a star illness things like that it's you know that depends upon some that some of the person's kind of makeup overall. So there's something about psychedelics that do give access to, I would say, like a deeper level of self, like a traumatic self, like the body keeps the score, is a very popular book that describes trauma theory around how traumatic events are stored in our subconscious or even unconscious, kind of like our peripheral sort of nervous system. And there's a big sort of somatic component a lot of the time as to what.

Starting point is 00:15:15 I would say like cathartic release that occurs at the peak of psychedelic experiences. So it may be fair to say that psychedelics have the ability to get closer to the etiologic root of illness and maybe I would affect the ideological root of illness, perhaps more so than traditional psychiatric medications. But, you know, on the flip side, there are people that take psychedelics and don't really confront and work through different kinds of. kinds of stuff. And there's some, like, look at ketamine. I mean, ketamine's approved as an antidepressant, but zero clinical studies that were done with ketamine were done as ketamine assisted therapy so far. So what you're looking at there is just a raw, naked, neurochemical antidepressant benefit of ketamine. And it seems to, you know, on average, you give one infusion at last three to seven days, right? So there are ways of essentially symptom managing using

Starting point is 00:16:11 psychedelics, right? There's also the person that is really feeling down and really feeling bad and can't get out of bed and takes an antidepressant. And then they get out of bed and they go to the gym and they go to a nutrition. Yeah. And they go to therapy and they heal because they're getting

Starting point is 00:16:28 to the root of their things. They're changing their lifestyle so that that chronic stress is being toned down. It's being removed. Stop pushing the Play-Doh through the filter. You're going to get less symptoms and you're getting close to solving the ideology of your of your illness.

Starting point is 00:16:44 So yes, right? Like, yes, there is something about psychedelics that I think does get closer to the heart. There's something about the mystical experience, the experiences psychedelic gives. It's highly personally significant and meaningful. You know, there's data with MDMA showing that it sort of reopens what they call like neurocritical periods or periods younger in life or our brain was plastic and developing in a different way, which really does seem to give us the opportunity for unlearning and relearning, which is, you know, maybe the literacy of the 21st century in some ways, right?

Starting point is 00:17:26 So, so yes, psychedelics have that kind of flavor, but I'm a little bit reserved to just be like, oh, psychiatric meds, those are band-aids, psychedelic drugs. Oh, yeah, now we're getting to the root of illness and just, you know, plucking it like a weed from the garden and you're fixed, you know, because that is, right. You know, there's a flavor of truth in there, but it's not all of it, yeah. Yeah, it's a great point. I guess it kind of shines a light on how many moving parts there are and how narrow that point of view is, you know, even, like, I've taken that view for a while, but the more

Starting point is 00:18:05 that I think about it, like, I don't know everybody that has psychiatric problems. you know, I can only compare things to my life or people that I know, and even the people I know is probably not a fair, accurate judgment of what they're going through. You brought up something that I'm fascinated by, and it's the interactions between different drugs. I saw recently that you did an article between ayahuasca and albuterol. I'm a big fan of psilocybin and human growth hormone, but I'm wondering, like, what are in your article that maybe you can talk a little bit about,

Starting point is 00:18:35 if you would like to, is the ayahuasca and albuter. role. You know, you have like a steroid. And then I was wondering if maybe you could kind of freestyle on the idea of psychedelics and human growth hormone. Or is that something we should do on, on, is that okay to do it? Yeah, I don't know if I have much like freestyle input on human growth hormone and, and psychedelics. But yeah, the kind of, well, I don't know, what was the first part now? You shocked me so much with the human growth hormone question. I forgot the first part. all I have on the human growth moment. Oh,

Starting point is 00:19:11 ayahuasca and albureol. Thank you. Yes. There you go. Yeah. So, so ayahuasca is unique as a psychedelic or a psychedelic sacrament because it contains monomene oxidase inhibitors.

Starting point is 00:19:23 And monomene oxidase inhibitors aren't psychedelic themselves, but they block the metabolism of certain neurotransmitters, which creates a metabolic vulnerability. You can take certain drugs and with this metabolic vulnerability, you can run. into really serious adverse effects, things like hypertensive crisis, which puts a person at risk for essentially having things like hemorrhagic strokes, like blood pressure is so high that like vessels in their brain kind of like burst or start bleeding. Bad, bad. Don't want that happen.

Starting point is 00:19:53 Or serotonin toxicity, which is much more about serotonergic drugs with the monomeneoxidase inhibitors. And that's more like extreme hyperthermia, myoclonic seizures, confusion, agitation, in comatose, going to the ICU, getting a breathing tube placed, things like that. So both of those things are things that you would really want to avoid and not do, right? And so you can find, because monamine oxidase inhibitors were the first antidepressants that really ever came to the market in the maybe even late 50s or 60s. And at that time, the asthma inhalers that they were using were benzodia inhalers, a.k.a. amphetamine inhalers. So, you know, if you had asthma back in the day, you got an

Starting point is 00:20:39 amphetamine inhaler to dilate the bronchial or the airways. Since then, you know, we've had this sort of genesis around bronchodilatory drugs, and we have albuterol, which is a short-acting beta agonist. So it's a rescue medication. It's meant to open the airways in the case of an allergic or an asthmatic kind of attack that's closing off the air. Airways. So you can find all of these warnings online. Like don't mix monomene oxidase inhibitors with, you know, inhalers because I don't know, it never really says exactly what's going to happen. But it just says don't do it. It's contraindicated, things like that. So you can find these sorts of things over the internet. And oftentimes I'll find like, you know, ayahuasca retreat with just laundry

Starting point is 00:21:23 lists of drugs that persons aren't allowed to be on or aren't allowed to bring to ceremony and things like that. And like, you know, some of them are true, but a lot of them I find, I'm just kind of like, I'm scratching my head thinking, I'm not really sure why that would be a problem or why a person couldn't use that. And for the most case, I don't write any articles about that. But without buterol, I was kind of thinking, well, geez, if someone's airway is closing in a ceremony, I would want to use something that opens their airway. And I would be willing to take the risk. of a pounding heart, some extra hypertension, if someone's airway was really closing,

Starting point is 00:22:05 because that could be life-threatening if they were severely asthmatic. And ceremonies is the kind of place where people are smoking Mapacho pipes and burning all sorts of incenses and things like that. So there could be allergic triggers around or kind of in the atmosphere. So I'm kind of thinking like, yeah,

Starting point is 00:22:22 like should you just load up and up? You're all for fun before you drink ayahuasca? No, no, that's not what we're talking about. But, you know, the decision to use a drug is always a risk versus benefit kind of decision. And if you're kind of thinking that probably a lot of these warnings about MAOIs and inhalers came from the time where people were literally like inhaling amphetamine, which would be dangerous with MAOIs versus albuterol works on beta receptors, doesn't increase serotoninorepene or dopamine, doesn't block the reuptake of those things. there's very little pharmacologic premise to believe that it would be dangerous with MAOIs. You know, I can find textbooks of emergency medicine that basically say if someone's on MAOIs and their throats closed, use an albuterol inhaler, you could even give an epipen if it was

Starting point is 00:23:11 anaphylaxis and life-threatening. And an epipen with MAOIs, who would be a risk versus benefit decision. But I can find, you know, textbooks of emergency medicine that's basically saying like, if it's an emergency, do it, manage the consequences of the interaction afterwards. But if it's this emergency in the throats close, you just got to act. Right. So I picked that one to write an article about because I felt like it was one of these rules around ayahuasca that's not really grounded or evidence-based and could be the difference between, you know, someone having their airway open and not.

Starting point is 00:23:44 So I just felt like that one was a really important one to kind of like outline that, no, if you got asthma and there's a risk of your airway closing, bring your rescue inhaler to ceremony. and, you know, if it's really, I'll say like a severe asthma attack, like wheezing and shortness of breath, like there's like, you know, the facilitator should, would be able to like hear the sort of like breathing difficulty. Then you could administer it. I think the flip side of that is like, okay, maybe someone had childhood asthma. And maybe there were a few times they had some pretty bad attacks of a child and they couldn't breathe and that was just traumatic for them. And they're an adult now and they haven't used their asthma inhaler in.

Starting point is 00:24:24 years and that it's like okay well you still got it it's not expired okay bring it to ceremony right in case of emergency but i think that there's an opportunity or a chance i guess that sort of like the trauma of the past comes up like having a panic attack and i'm like i can't breathe i can't breathe but the it's like well i can hear the airway open it's just very rapid shallow it seems more panicky so let's give you some emotional support try to deep deep the breathing, try to get you tuned back into the music, perhaps, or following the song. And, you know, I'm going to stay with you and, you know, until the panic has subsided, or I'm really hearing the shortness of breath or wheezing that would indicate, like,

Starting point is 00:25:09 wow, there's really something going on with your airway. And I'm going to help you with that now. I bet you could just give someone like a blank thing and would probably help them. Because sometimes it's just the idea of having something that's going to fix you, right? the whole placebo idea of like, you're just inhaler. Okay, perfect. Oh, you're way better now. You know what I mean?

Starting point is 00:25:29 On some level. Possibly. I mean, if it was like truly like panic, right? It's probably like the asthma inhaler. It forces them to be like, right? Oh, my mom. Just the inhaler in itself.

Starting point is 00:25:40 Yeah, yeah, exactly. To try to take a longer, slower, deeper breath or, right. You know. It's interesting to think about. I, you know, we hear a lot of different talks about different kinds of psychedelics. And I saw a little blurb that you did on MDMA and is it a psychedelic?

Starting point is 00:25:58 I was wondering if you could share that story with people. Yeah. So psychedelic means mind manifesting, right? And so there's, you know, there's, I think that there's a lot of cool words out there in the world of psychedelics, right? So like originally, like, well, originally to the West. Let's just say that, right? Not originally, but originally to the West. You know, psychedelics were termed psychotomimetics,

Starting point is 00:26:22 meaning they mimic the state of psychosis. So the first words that we had that described the effects of psychedelics literally had nothing to do with what the person was feeling or experiencing. And it was what an observer thought of what they were feeling or experiencing. They look psychotic. They ate LSD or something like that, right? And then the term sort of like hallucinogen, you know, meaning to generate hallucinations came along and,

Starting point is 00:26:48 I don't know, perceptual distortions, profound perceptual distortion sometimes. I don't know. Hallucinations may be possible. I guess I think of hallucination more like, there's a leprechaun in the corner. Whereas like I think of more like, whoa, the tapestry is changing colors

Starting point is 00:27:05 and shifting into these fractal patterns and it sort of looks like the walls breathing a little bit. I'm like, well, to me that's a little bit more perceptual distortion but hey, you want to call it hallucination? Like, that's fair enough. Like I'm not going to argue too much. Psychedelic is probably like the best term. because it's just a generic umbrella term that means mind manifesting.

Starting point is 00:27:25 And so, I don't know, like, MDMA definitely shows you something about your mind and how your mind works, and you can gain insight from those experiences and things. So from that kind of like angle, yeah, it fits the bill psychedelic. And I would add, like, from that angle, the dissociative anesthetic ketamine fits the bill, psychedelic, right? But many people will be like, that's a dissociative. That's not a psychedelic. And it's like, well, if it's revealing something about my.

Starting point is 00:27:50 mind that I'm learning from, then that seems mind manifesting enough to me. But MDMA is probably like more accurately thought of as an enactogen or empathogen. You need to like to generate a state of empathy. That's like a pathogen to feel empathy to another or oneself, right? A lot of self-empathy with MDMA. A lot of like self-love. And that's what an actogen means to touch within. right so when people say the word psychedelic they are usually talking more about what they call like classic psychedelics or maybe classic hallucinogens these are things like psilocybin lSD and end dimethylophthalmine or just DMT and the kind of oddball phenethylene there is mescaline but MDMA is more like a designer amphetamine that happens to be serotonergic so it's a serotonergic amphetamine

Starting point is 00:28:50 it doesn't really cause very much in the way of perceptual distortion. It doesn't really cause much in the way of like mystical experience or this kind of like I would say like non-dual experience where the person feels sort of merged with ultimate reality or God or kind of whatever their their faith predisposition is. It's much more of a self-knowledge drug. It's a fear-reducing type of drug. So people sometimes will colloquially refer to MDMA as a heart opener. you know, I'm kind of thinking heart opener might be synonymous with fear reducer in that if you reduce a person's fear, then all of a sudden they're open. It's sort of like a person's fearful, what do you do? You crouch down, you curl up, you protect your heart, right? So a heart opening effect could almost be synonymous with a fear reducing effect in some way.

Starting point is 00:29:43 But I guess I like the heart opener because I think that what I'm what what where MDMA is squarely a psychedelic is your emotional range like it opens your emotional range and so you've got reduction of fear an open emotional range and an ability to kind of connect with yourself and that's probably why it's a good place to start for somebody with severe PTSD because it's not so much dissolving them out there in the universe. I mean, psilocybin, when it's good, oh, boy, it's spiritually ecstatic, but it can also be dysphoric and just, like, kind of rake you through the calls and take it to an underworld. Whereas MDMA, I mean, they call it ecstasy and not agony on the street for a reason. There's a neurochemical buoyancy to it, right? There's sort of an ability to look at really difficult things that have happened and process them in a way that doesn't overwhelm you with fear. Not that psilocybin couldn't be a helpful tool for PTSD, but I tend to think when the PTSD is severe, they kind of go to a place where they dissociate a lot, things like that. And then I'm sort of thinking, yeah, MDMA might be a softer place to begin and start sort of

Starting point is 00:30:58 exploring that kind of territory. So MDMA is squarely not a hallucinogen. And most people, when they say psychedelic, are talking about classical psychedelics or hallucinels. types of psychedelics. But if you want to just call it mind manifesting, an emotional psychedelic, an actogen and pathogen, like all of those things. Like I'm not going to like argue with you about them. It's like I've seen a few people on MDMA their first time.

Starting point is 00:31:26 They take it. Like it's an hour and a half, maybe two hours into it. So it's at the peak and they look at you. And I mean, your eyes are as big as saucers. So it's like, okay, like you know it's on. And they'll say something like, oh, expect. to feel like I was like intoxicated or on drugs, but I just feel more like myself than I've ever felt. And you're like, yeah, because it's probably you without fear, without the avoidance

Starting point is 00:31:52 mechanisms, without the things that squash your highest self, essentially. So a lot of MDMA is removing these filters of judgment and fear and kind of seeing who would I be without those layers. And I mean, of course, fear and judgment are going to come back in. It's not like MDMA just bludgeon's a fear response out of human being permanently or something like that. You know, it's like, no, you know, like fear is a very useful and adaptive part of our biology. It can get out of hand and run rampant. Yeah, true. But, you know, the fear response.

Starting point is 00:32:28 I mean, we'd all be dead if we didn't have a fear response. Yeah. Like straight up. So, yeah. That's kind of. why I think MDMA could be termed a psychedelic, but in some ways maybe doesn't fit as well as other things, or at least doesn't necessarily fit with what persons typically are conceptualizing when they say the word psychedelic. I'm curious. It seems that from what I've read,

Starting point is 00:32:54 and it seems that MDMA is releasing serotonin. Is it also releasing oxytocin as well? Is that kind of what gives people that closeness and the want for relationships? It seems like maybe there's not as much of that love. And I'm just assuming that's oxytocin that drops that in when you don't really have that on psilocybin or LSD. Yeah, yeah. So there's definitely like a neurohormonal releasing effect of MDMA that has not been documented with some of the other like classic psychedelics like psilocybin. And it is an oxytocin release. Like that's one neuropeptide that's released.

Starting point is 00:33:31 But it also releases antidiarytic hormone or arginine basopressin. That one perhaps plays a little bit more role in, I would say, like, rare kinds of toxicities. Like you can get low sodiums or a condition called S-I-A-D-H sometimes from taking MDMA and probably drinking too much water at the same time. But yeah, the oxytocin part of MDMA, yeah, it's hypothetical. Like it's hypothetical as far as like what part of the MDMA experience is from oxytocin, what part is from. Because, I mean, it releases serotonin, it also releases norophenephyr and dopamine. Those are kind of field good neurotransmitters and things of that nature. So I believe that, you know, I don't want to say it and get it wrong.

Starting point is 00:34:19 But I've read an article or two out there that kind of, I would say, is a little bit skeptical towards like how much of the MDMA experience is responsible for oxytocin. And honestly, I don't recall the details of the experience. experiments at the at the moment. But yeah, basically I've read a few articles that kind of have a narrative around well, MDMA does do that. It's widely thought that that is why it has this kind of like social bonding and pathogenic type of effect, but there's really not very much that clearly shows that or

Starting point is 00:34:59 demonstrates that and maybe even some probably more like preclinical stuff. in rodents or animals demonstrating that the oxytocin effect may not be so huge. But I don't know. I don't know. I mean, like I remember when I had my kid, right? Like I remember like holding her as a baby.

Starting point is 00:35:19 And it's like I felt like I was high on MDMA just as a baby. And it was just kind of like, yeah, I don't know if this kid just like causes my brain to like rain neurotransmitters or whether it's just releasing so much oxytocin. but like there was sort of a, you know, a subtle self-proof or something around that experience. It was like, whoa, like now I appreciate the neurohomonal aspects of MDMA without this sort of

Starting point is 00:35:48 like stimuli amphetamine part of it because, you know, just holding a kid. I'm not on amphetamines. So that makes me think of, you know, let's talk about the idea of having a kid again. And sometimes we remember. And I guess this question is basically. going to be about how the brain works. And this is all hypothetical because I don't know. I'm just asking you.

Starting point is 00:36:09 Yeah, I don't know either. So let's just, we'll just give our opinions here. Or at least I'll throw out mine and you can bounce it back to me. Yeah. You know, when I have a kid and I remember holding my kid and I remember teaching her how to ride a bike and like I remember these really emotionally charged moments of when things happen. And in my mind, I'm thinking, wow, that must have been when the neurotransmitters were really pumping through the system or, you know, that's.

Starting point is 00:36:34 when some new neuroplasticity was taking place. And if I can look at like a psychedelic experience that I've had, and let's say before I go into a high-dose psilocybin experience, I sit down with my journal and I think about my intention and what it is I want to think about or what it is about me that I want to figure out or my relationships, I've found that at that state, while I may not remember exactly what happened in that state,

Starting point is 00:37:03 It's the time after, the integration afterwards. But after about a month or so, I feel as if I've really learned something in that state. And I think it's similar in that. Is it possible that what you're seeing is this mega release of hormones or, you know, different neurotransmitters that are allowing you to learn something more deeply and more rapidly? Does that kind of make sense? Yeah. Well, I think like, for example, like, like, gosh, it's like, oh, it's his name.

Starting point is 00:37:47 Like, I forget the names, but they've written this book about consciousness. Maybe like Jamie Wheeler, Jamie Wheeler, one of the authors. There's two authors to the book. They have a beautiful book about consciousness. And they talk a lot about flow. they talk about flow states and basically how research demonstrates that if you can get into flow, then neuroplasticity, creativity, things like that just sort of like naturally increase. And, you know, in that book, they actually talk about surf therapy for PTSD and talking about how, you know,

Starting point is 00:38:23 they took this group of persons and taught them how to surf because surfing is something that just induces flow. Like there's certain activities or things that you can do that just kind of. kind of induces flow. And we've all sort of access to flow state at one time or point. It's kind of like you're doing something. And then you just sort of forget about everything else. Some people call it the zone. Like you're in the zone.

Starting point is 00:38:44 Like the person that's climbing up that rock face that's, God knows how many thousand feet tall or something. And everyone's like, aren't you scared you're going to die? And it's like, well, if I got scared, I would fall. I have to stay in the zone. Like I have to be in flow. That's the only way that I could do this. if I started thinking about what happens if, you know, then it would all fall apart, right?

Starting point is 00:39:05 So, so there's definitely places that we can go in our mind where our brain's capacity to do certain things is greatly expanded or enhanced. You know, there's like as far as I'm concerned, that's like an empirical sort of truth rather than a hypothesis. But yeah, like, I don't know. I mean, psychedelics can be peak experiences. Like there are certain things that we conceive of as peak, like the birth of your kid, probably like a peak sort of experiences. Near death moments, maybe also peak sorts of experiences.

Starting point is 00:39:44 You know, people are sort of drawing these parallels, right, between the types of lessons the persons get from near death experiences. I'm never taking my life for granted again. I'm never wasting another day again. I'm never leaving my loved ones and not saying I love you again because it might be the last time. And I would never want to leave it hanging that way, ever. So I'm not going to do that anymore. Like I can't take life for granted. I think that's one thing that happens with psychedelics is it changes person's relationships to death and to life really.

Starting point is 00:40:20 Because I mean, changing a relationship to death is changing your relationship to life. and that the person that's sort of obsessed with death is the person that is not choosing life. There's sort of like this ambivalence between life and death and sort of like, okay, you have an experience where you realize whatever you want about death that puts it in its place. And then all of a sudden it's like, right, this life is so precious. I'm in the now. I have to focus and do what I'm doing now. You know, I think having a kid, I mean, wow, it's like one of the most psychedelic things ever to be. be honest because it's like the wheel has like rotated like one like full direction and it's like

Starting point is 00:41:01 you're teaching your kid how to ride a bike but there's part of you that's remembering how you were taught to ride a bike at the same kind of time or yeah you tend to want to watch the same movies you watch when you're yeah yeah the land before time that was a good one you got to rent it you know that kind of like stuff so you get a chance to sort of like do it over again and I think that for a lot of people it's one of these experiences where it shows them exactly kind of like where the trauma is because they see their reactions to the kid's behavior and they see themselves whoa I was about to enact the exact thing that I hated being done to me like that sort of thing so I don't know if that really like answered your question like like like the neuroplasticity of like yeah

Starting point is 00:41:52 kid to ride a bike, but there's certainly some like really deep moments from when you're raising a kid. And yeah, whether it's because the wheel has turned and it's sort of like, wow, it's like you're experiencing the life of two persons almost like simultaneously or something else. But I would say like in my consults, right, there's there's a few sort of like phases to life. And I'll say like maybe the older adult around like retirement age or an age where perhaps like there's a little bit more like loss and illness around you and things like that. Like that's a pretty common time to want to sort of like reevaluate things when you're kind of considering what does the next sort of like chapter look like that's like a pretty common like flavor of console. I would say like 50 to 70 somewhere in there. But I'll say the other really common flavor is the 30 to 40 year old that either is expecting a family or has a new family. And it just sort of like brings all the shit up.

Starting point is 00:42:58 Yeah. And they're like, I want to deal with this now because I don't want to pass it on. And yeah, it's a good time. Like it's a good time to do that kind of work. And you can, yeah, like your kid can be your healing muse. you know it's like i was reading something that made me it actually kind of teared me up the other week and it was i can't remember exactly where i was reading it but it um basically said something like well you know a lot of parents like if if you asked them you know

Starting point is 00:43:29 they would you know would you die for your kid oh yeah yeah yeah would you truly live would you give up all your bad habits and be your best person for your kid shit that's hard yeah you know so so i think in a lot of ways like Yeah, of course. You love them. I would give my life for them. Right. But like probably the best gifts that you can give them is to work on yourself

Starting point is 00:43:53 because, you know, that's, that's going to be better than sacrificing yourself for them ultimately. Yeah. It's kind of a paradox too because if. Yeah. It's a paradox. Exactly. Right.

Starting point is 00:44:03 I mean, if you, if you're part of you has to die if you want to be the best parent you can. Like all those bad habits, if you want to be the best parent you can, then part of you has to die. Like this part of you that lived alone is part of you that did. didn't understand relationships as part of you that's still your dad that hated these things. Like, it has to die.

Starting point is 00:44:20 And if you'd raised your hand, you're like, yeah, I'll die. Well, then which part of you was lying? And that brings us to this idea of, I love the idea about the wheel and the, like, I'm a big fan of like this, this third way, I call it. And it's sometimes at the peak of a psychedelic experience, you get to see yourself as the subject, the object, and the observer. And if you've, if you've been in this position where you, you just pan back and time kind of changes a little bit and you're like, wow, I can almost see

Starting point is 00:44:51 all these decisions that I made or I could see how they would have gone. Not that it really would have gone that way, but it gives you a different perspective. And for you to be able to see your life as an observer really just gives you a very clean perspective on what you can do to change your life. And I'm wondering if you've heard about some of this and some of your consulting. The subject-object relationship we talk about all day long, we're having a subject- object dialogue. We look at things like objects. But this idea of the observer is something that's kind of brought about in the psychedelic experience. Have you, have you noticed that? Yeah. What do you think about that? Yeah, I think it's like I kind of use this like as far as like

Starting point is 00:45:34 why would I take psychedelic? Like what would be the point? And it's like different perspective. You gain some perspective, right? It's like, well, like maybe you will feel better. Maybe you'll get a rapid reduction in your symptoms. Maybe you'll have a mystical experience, right? Like those kind of of things, but it's sort of like, you know, at a very basic level, I mean, you should be able to learn something from almost every experience in life. And that's, that's a good way to approach life is that, you know, everything that happens to me is a learning experience. And I feel that the psychedelic experience is, I don't know, it's mind manifesting. It's like, it's like that on steroids or something. It's like an exponential, an exponential example of something that is,

Starting point is 00:46:13 just constantly true, like overall. Gosh, I derail myself. It's fascinating to me. I, if I take it back for just one minute earlier in the conversation. Oh, yeah, the subject object. Yeah, yeah. That was it. That was it.

Starting point is 00:46:32 Yeah. I got it now. Okay. Right. So it's like someone that's never taken a cycle. Like why would it take a psychedelic? It's kind of like, I don't know, like let's say you put together a, put together. 10 year plan for your life, right?

Starting point is 00:46:47 And you've got it dialed in or you think you've got it dialed in or maybe it's a business plan. Better. Yeah. Better. Better example. It's a business plan, right? And you're kind of like ready to, ready to go with your business plan.

Starting point is 00:47:00 And someone says like, hey, you know, maybe you would like to get a fresh set of eyes to read your plan to see if there's anything that might need altered or changed or, you know, no one would respond like, oh, no, a fresh perspective wouldn't be good for my business plan. Uh-uh. Like, and it's true, I guess you could hire a business consultant. It gives you a bunch of really terrible advice and you implement that advice and it screws it all up. Like, look, okay, that's possible. Right.

Starting point is 00:47:29 Set and setting. Don't hire the law business consultant. The parallel there, I think. But you kind of see what I'm saying. It's sort of like, all right, if you, if you are able to dissociate from this. relative subjective perspective and expand a little bit and kind of see things from a more neutral and bird's eye perspective it's wildly helpful yeah and I think I like honestly like like a lot of psychedelics do this I mean I think yeah it's like is it this like perfect clear perspective observer

Starting point is 00:48:03 and it's like I don't know it's it's a little bit of a fun house mirror that those psychedelics like there's a bit of like there's still a little bit of distortion there that you know you got to check yourself in the in the process um but i actually think ketamine might be one of the best drugs for for this kind of thing because it is a dissociative like it kind of dissociates the consciousness and causes it to bubble up and it really does feel a lot like an observer perspective you know at least to at least to to me personally. It's like interesting in that way is that, you know, dissociate actually has a negative connotation in society.

Starting point is 00:48:44 And even even further so in psychiatry, it's like literally symptomatic jargon associated with, you know, trauma responses like fight, fight freeze or dissociate. So I've had some people like kind of means just cause a dissociation. So obviously it would worsen PTSD. It's like, I don't think you're just, I think that these are different sorts of dissociation that you're speaking about here. And, you know, like maybe you need to disassociate so that you can reassociate in a way that you would like. Or maybe people talk about psychedelics as being destabilizing. It's like, well, it's probably true.

Starting point is 00:49:27 I mean, they've definitely destabilized my life a few times and I've had to go through some. some pretty massive change processes and whatnot. But I'm appreciative and grateful for the destabilizing effect they had because I was stabilized in the place I didn't want to be. So if it's kind of like, if you're going through life, maybe we're on a psychiatric medication, maybe you're not, everything's stable and you love it, you know, I'm not sure if you should use psychedelic, right?

Starting point is 00:49:54 But if you're going through life and you're kind of plotting along and it's feeling like monotony and I don't think I'm going where I need to go. and this is kind of blah and gray and, you know, maybe you're just stabilized in a place that isn't for you. And, you know, maybe it's going to require being a little off balance for a moment to re-center in a way that now I'm standing straight up and down because of an actogens. Yeah, it's a great point. It brings up in some ways to me, it brings up the merging of science.

Starting point is 00:50:31 in spirituality. And I'll give you an example. When you look at like Schrodinger's cat, right? Like, is it a wave or is it a particle? Well, it's the observer. It's the observer who plays, I don't know how, but the observer plays a fact in there. And the same thing with spirituality is like, okay, am I, am I, um, what's going on in my life? Well, how are you looking at it? You're the observer. And just being aware that you're the observer has a radical effect on your life. Like if, that's, that's something that I, if people could take away something. from some of my podcast, that would be it. It would be be, be aware that you're the observer

Starting point is 00:51:06 and watch how much that changes your life because it can have a radical effect on your relationships. It can have a radical effect on your language. You can have a radical effect on how you see yourself. And I just think this, maybe that's the foundation or maybe that's a bridge between science and spirituality is this idea of awareness. You brought up these interesting words like mind manifestation and self-love.

Starting point is 00:51:29 And when we think about, the science of psychiatrics, isn't it weird how similar it is to spirituality or maybe a lack thereof? What do you think is the relationship between those two things? Spirituality and psychiatric medicine or psychology and spirituality? Well, what is the relationship there? Yeah. Well, I mean, it seems pretty clear that there's never going to be a comprehensive understanding of us, the universe, without a map of consciousness, without a science of consciousness, without a study of consciousness, right? So, yeah, traditionally, science and spirituality have been these like oil and water things or something where it's like people can't quite put them

Starting point is 00:52:17 together in some ways. But I think a lot of scientists, honestly, you just go kind of go like deeper and deeper into it. Probably the astrophysicist knows it the best, right? It's kind of like, you just go to the bottom. And in the bottom, there's just kind of God, like, staring at you. And you're sort of like, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's like this mystery is really deep. It's really the kind of conclusion. So, yeah, mystic.

Starting point is 00:52:48 But basically, I think that you're right is like switching, like at least being able to toggle between subjective and an observer. perspective, right? So you could sort of like, oh, Ben is angry now, right? Like, okay, just just, just observing that I'm angry now. It's like, hmm, are you going to go observe Ben making a bunch of bad decisions in response to that anger? Or can you just acknowledge that Ben's angry and accept that he's angry and go choose some kind of behavior that allows you to not spread anger, put it on somebody else, project it, like whatever the sort of standard psychological strategy is going to be to manage yourself. And you'll notice different things about yourself if you

Starting point is 00:53:39 can really take the kind of like an observer, observer route. Yeah, I think that that's like, I mean, that's a lot of what I think meditation is focused on is like cultivating the witness or having this sort of like observer perspective to, to your life. Yeah, so like science is, I mean, that's kind of spirit pharmacist, right? I was sort of like, well, that's, that's what's missing. That's what's from pharmacy is the spirit. Like there's no, it's like, oh, I got high blood pressure. Take an antihypertensive, physiological, make the blood pressure go down.

Starting point is 00:54:13 It's like, well, it's like, I'm having trouble focusing. It's like, well, here's some Adderall, like an amphetamine to like push your cognitive function. Totally. Right. And oh, man, it's like the anxiety and the low mood. And it's like, okay, here's an anti-depressence. It's going to affect her like emotional state. But there is just zero recognition in the world of pharmacy, or at least there was zero recognition, that drugs can inherently be spiritual.

Starting point is 00:54:36 And that if drugs can inherently be spiritual, then there's probably a biological construct of spirituality in their brain that they're kind of activating. Right. So we could learn so much about spirituality from a scientific perspective simply by using psychedelics as like neuropharmacologic probes. So that's just, that is one reason to make them at least resourmetology. and make research easier is we're going to learn stuff about consciousness, the brain, things like that. So it's like, okay, even if you just hate psychedelics and feel like they should never be part of society and treatments for mental illness and things like that. Like, please, just allow us to ask questions and use them as neuropharmacologic probes and research. Like, please, like, come on.

Starting point is 00:55:17 Like, you're really just not going to allow us to like answer legitimate questions about how our brain works, about why we feel the way we feel about what makes us feel that way. So it's just kind of like to me, yeah, it's sort of like traditionally they've been there, but it's sort of like the divide is just collapsing. And in a lot of ways, it was a false distinction the entire time. And I don't know, I don't know about the world. I tend to think that there's a lot of spiritual sickness out there. Like it's not really talked about, you know, how would you even diagnose it? Like how like what would be the criteria that we would use I've never thought about it and maybe I could think of something later, right? But but but so because it's just maybe a more nebulous kind of like concept of of illness. But yeah, I mean, it seems like humanity has kind of psychologically detached themselves for nature. There's a real like conceptualization that it's like there's me and then there's nature out there.

Starting point is 00:56:24 there's like almost a belief that the world was created for us, therefore we can do whatever we want with it. That's a spiritually sick thought in my head. Like I'm kind of like if you're believing that, then you're literally carrying out those kinds of actions. You're thinking of yourself as some kind of specious alpha predator that belongs at the very top. And the world was just given to you to plunder and use however you would like.

Starting point is 00:56:52 Right. And that's ultimately probably going to be. bring about your own extinction or at least, you know, massive levels of suffering to your own kind eventually and probably collapse, you know, entire ecosystems at the same time. It's like, if that ain't spiritual sickness, then, you know, I don't know what it is. And like, okay, well, psychedelics cure everyone and things like that. It's like, well, I don't know. It's like it might be a stretch to just think that like they're the sole thing that's

Starting point is 00:57:21 going to save the world. but at the same time they're definitely part of it the way that they bring people back to the connection to nature the way that particularly psilocybin and probably other plant medicines like ayahuasca or aboga or abogaine really enhance this like nature related connection it really sort of like gets you out of the sort of i would say uh consumer driven perspective where it's sort of like okay it's sort of like material material material make me happy material material material it's like well none of that stuff is ever actually going to make you happy. And actually like most people sort of even know that, right? But they're still just kind of going on with that sort of like pathway. So yeah, there's a lot of spiritual sickness out there. And, you know, to me, sort of the biggest ones are, yeah, some of those

Starting point is 00:58:09 like beliefs or thoughts like, like, why aren't we conceiving of humanity as the ecological stewards of the planet? Like why wouldn't that just be like the baseline perspective? And, you know, I have the right to live and breathe just like a jellyfish has the right to live. And I don't know if it breathes. It's just kind of a blob with a non-centralized nervous system. But just that, I mean, that's fascinating. It's like a brain without a brain. You know, it's like a.

Starting point is 00:58:37 Yeah. Anyway. So I don't know if anyone's ever read the book out here, any of your listeners, to the audience, but one book that changed my life when I was 16 years old is Ishmael by David Quinn, amazing philosophical book about. kind of the story of humanity, some of these beliefs that I'm talking about, where some of the beliefs would have came from. And essentially, it's about a philosopher that has a conversation with the gorilla. The gorilla is essentially the Buddha, like the mentor, like the wise one, the teacher.

Starting point is 00:59:07 And basically the gorilla through conversation just points out all of the flaws of humanity and how we could change it. We could fix it or exactly like what the errors in thinking are. are. And I think that those errors in thinking essentially are a kind of thought disease or spiritual sickness that too many of us are afflicted with. Yeah, it seems like we've been inflicted with this idea of scarcity. And when you live a life of scarcity, you're always fighting and, you know, willing to sacrifice other people so you could have a tiny bit more. But I see so many positive signs. Like just in your title alone, like spirit pharmacist. Like I, you know, maybe I, I'm, maybe I'm forever the optimist or maybe I am someone who sees myself as coming out of this world instead of into this world.

Starting point is 00:59:59 But I really am beginning to see the marriage of spirituality and science. And I, you know, when you just think about the word whole, there's like holy to make whole. And we think about the difference between healing and curing. And I speak to so many people like yourself and other people that I've been interviewing that have a very similar idea. of who they want to be. And they've made a decision to move forward in their life doing things that they love to do that help other people. And I think that the same way that there has been a void of spirituality,

Starting point is 01:00:34 like there's this new rising tide of awareness of people that see themselves as part of the ecosystem instead of at odds with the ecosystem. I wanted to touch one more time on this. Since we're talking about books and disassociatives, I've spoken to some people who look at, the world of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. And they're like, oh, maybe they're using soma.

Starting point is 01:00:56 Maybe they're using these drugs to disassociate so they can get back to their life. And I know that there's kind of been a light on there. And you've addressed it a little bit, but do you think that there are some potential pitfalls for people using psychedelics, you know, in a negative way towards people? Instead of this way that we're talking about that helps people, is there a chance for people to harness psychedelics as an abusive way to maybe get in people's heads. Absolutely. Absolutely.

Starting point is 01:01:26 Okay, nice. Yeah, like absolutely. Like, I mean, I don't know, Michael Pollan, right? Yeah. There you go. Good guy. He pollinated the people's minds about psychedelics with his book, How to Change Your Mind and his documentary, How to Change Your Mind, right?

Starting point is 01:01:44 So psychedelics are about changing your mind, right? It's like in which direction are we changing in? And in what way are we changing it? So a lot of it, again, comes down to controlling the environment that they're ingested in, getting the right intention straight, and ingesting them with people that have our best interest at heart and are trying to mold us towards the person that we want to be rather than the person that they want us to be. So because psychedelics, like all of them really cause these non-ordinary states. and in the non-ordinary state, you are emotionally open, vulnerable, suggestible.

Starting point is 01:02:24 So I would say that psychedelics attract wounded people, people that want healing. They attract healers, earnest people that do beautiful and credible work. They attract sociopaths, narcissists, and manipulators. because like moths to a flame. It's like the perfect tool to accomplish the things that you want to accomplish if you are that kind of person. So yeah, it's the Wild West right now. Psychedelic guiding sort of like industry.

Starting point is 01:02:59 The words out, the clinical trials are so positive. You have all of these people trying to jump on a wagon and be a psychedelic guide. But yeah, you're coming to this looking for healing, buyer beware, like eyes wide open. You need to be thinking, how long has the person been doing this? Do they have a background in mental health or the issues that I'm coming to deal with? Have they dealt with clients like me before? There's a lot of other kinds of questions that you could ask.

Starting point is 01:03:29 What's my gut feeling about this person? If it's not an F yes, then if there's some level of reservation, you can't even put your finger on it. Pass would be sort of like my suggestion. overall. So that's just it. It's like, I don't know, like hypnosis, for example. It's like putting, putting someone in a trance is essentially when you're in trance, you're more suggestible than normal. And usually you put somebody in trance by giving them a bunch of truisms in a row, things that they can't really like argue with because the subconscious just says yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. and you could quit smoking.

Starting point is 01:04:12 Yes. So I think that there's a way with psychedelics to use them almost as trans or hypnotic inducing agents, give the person their subjective experience, which probably should be mostly theirs. There probably shouldn't be much interference or whatever. It should just be sort of like, I'm emotionally supporting whatever they need during that time. But maybe on the back end or things are wearing off, man, they're still so open, vulnerable, festival there in a neuroplastic window. If you can do some guided somatic releasing kinds of meditations, or if you can put

Starting point is 01:04:47 persons on that have just really wonderful language that sort of leads people down this rabbit hole of releasing what they no longer need or stepping into their highest power or practicing forgiveness, acceptance, being the witness, like whatever they want to work on, right? There's guided meditations for all of these things. And on the flip side, yeah, really avoid suggesting things that you haven't talked about ahead of time with a person during the experience. You know, it's sort of like, okay, if you're thinking about adding ketamine at some point, that should be a contingency plan that is extremely clear and well discussed ahead of time and the circumstances for where and when it's going to be done. It shouldn't be that somebody's on MBMA or LSD or something. And it's like, hey, things are going pretty well.

Starting point is 01:05:37 want a K shot? I mean, it's like, it's comical. It's like it's laughable, but this is happening. Like this is happening. People are doing this kind of stuff.

Starting point is 01:05:49 Right. There are people out there that they get contacted of a psychedelic guide and whatnot. And there is no, well, who are you? And what are you bringing to the table? And this and that.

Starting point is 01:05:59 There's a next Saturday's open. Want to come over? It's just sort of, yeah, it's just really fast. Like just, rushing into something that's going to put you in this position where you're at the mercy of your environment. So controlling it, making a safe environment is absolutely paramount, but then

Starting point is 01:06:21 almost at the mercy of the suggestion of the persons that you're going to be around or be with. So make sure they're not kooky folks. They're going to start spouting off weird religious dogma in the middle or something like that. It could happen. it's interesting to take the sacrament out of the setting you know it seems that in a ritualistic setting their elders there's people that have been around the sacrament there's people that have been around the medicine that understand the ceremony and then when you take the the medicine out of the ceremony you kind of take away all the regulations from it and you could see how that could be problems it could allow for the that particular yes and no I mean in some ways like it's

Starting point is 01:07:04 kind of like, yeah, there's, like, just because someone's holding a ceremony or a ritual, I wouldn't necessarily take that to mean that they're doing it right or that the setting, setting is good or they're not nefarious or up to some sort of like manipulative thing. Because in some ways, like putting a ceremony around it, putting a ritual around it, it just like almost makes it stronger as far as like the ability to, right? Because it's kind of like, okay, you're coming into my ceremony and my space and these are the rules for my ceremony. and I'm the healer.

Starting point is 01:07:35 You're the person that needs healed. Right. So there's a power dynamic. Right. And, you know, oh, yeah, you know what? Like, I bet my penis could heal your sexual trauma. Guarantee, it's magic. I mean, this happens in like ayahuasca circles.

Starting point is 01:07:52 Unfortunately, it's even happened in psychedelic-assisted therapy sorts of like settings. Wow. Right? So, yeah, like, again, like how to change your mind. Psychedelics can do that. some of the most beautiful, earnest, wonderful, talented healers in the world out there are using psychedelics as the tools, in my opinion. But eyes wide open, buyer beware, there's a lot of people that are attracted to this space and not all of them have everyone's best interests at heart.

Starting point is 01:08:20 And even some people have best interests at heart, but they're just unskilled at what they do and haven't been doing it long enough and don't have any experience in the kind of issues that people are facing. So we're probably just kind of, yeah, not cause a lot of harm, just kind of like botch it in some way. Yeah. In some ways, it proposes so much opportunity for healing, but in other ways,

Starting point is 01:08:41 it just proposes the same temptation that comes with any sort of great power. You know, and in a way, it is a power. Exactly. With great power comes great responsibilities. Psychedelics are a double-edged sword.

Starting point is 01:08:54 Yeah. We should write that down. That's pretty good. I like that. You know, as a pharmacologist, is it common? This is like a two-part question.

Starting point is 01:09:03 Is it common to give a course of drugs? Like maybe you would go antibiotics and then something else. Or maybe you would take like this drug and then that drug. And if that's true, might it be possible in the future to offer a course of psychedelics that could help particular types of traumas? Like you could go with MDMA followed by a course of psilocybin. What do you think?

Starting point is 01:09:26 Yeah. Now we're getting somewhere. Now we're getting somewhere. Well, so far the psychedelic assistant therapy, it's been, you know, mono drug. Like maybe one session, but probably more commonly for major depression or PTSD, like two or three sessions spaced about a month apart, but all psilocybin or all MDMA. It's pretty common out there that psychedelic guides or therapists may be working with more

Starting point is 01:09:54 than one substance, either in a sequence or in combination at the same time on the same day. you know i there's no data around that particularly things like well my my goodness as far as like opening a space that is one of the most beautiful and potential for healing kind of spaces and things like that you know like mduma and ketamine it's an incredible combination but yeah got some reservations about the cardiovascular risks there because you know both drugs have warnings on them for increases in blood pressures and heart rates and and things like that. So I do believe that combinations and or sequences of psychedelics have an important role to play in the kind of like future of psychedelic therapy.

Starting point is 01:10:38 And even contemporarily, right, people are doing this kind of stuff. It's just not evidence based or really data driven. You know, again, like people ask me all the time, like, I did psychedelic X. When can I do psychedelic Y? All right. And okay, maybe if it's ayahuasca or Ivo game, there really is some time frame that you should wait for a safety purpose. But it's still probably not a long time frame. We're talking like, you know, days, not weeks or months and that kind of thing. You know, some psychedelic retreats offer more than one psychedelic sacrament or medicine or maybe offer a couple with some sort of complementary shamanic modalities and things of that. nature. So it's already done fairly regularly. And basically I'm kind of thinking like, yeah, well, is this the kind of retreat or psychedelic weekends where it's been set up to like, this is my tough mutter psychedelic gauntlet that everyone's going to go through and come out with like

Starting point is 01:11:41 rubber stamp guaranteed mystical experience and your egg got cracked type of thing? Or is it sort of like, hey, yeah, you know, we start with this on the first day. This is an option for the second day. Third day is usually rest. We have this shamanic modality you could try in the afternoon if you wanted. But, you know, no matter what, like every experience is optional. And even if you want to do the experience, just like we're going to talk with you a little bit about kind of how are you feeling today, where you're at, whether you're looking for a

Starting point is 01:12:13 deep experience today, whether you want something kind of lighter, whether you're sort of still feeling like you're processing from last night and we could maybe spend a little bit of time just like talking it through without going on that other journey. If it's like really the kind of sequence where it's mindful and you're evaluating and meeting a person where they're at before offering something else. And like I said before, you know, the plans, like why we're doing it, when we're doing it, all the kind of contingency thing has been laid out for the person in the kind of like preparation phase, then there's probably a lot of good that could come from those kinds of things.

Starting point is 01:12:53 But yeah, they're sort of like just stack, stack, stack, stack, I don't know. It's like, well, this is going to make you better. Like kind of, it's just too much. And that's exactly where people kind of bite off more than they could chew and emerge, you know, quite anxious or dysphoric in some kind of way. And it takes a while, you know, it's like. Humpty Dumpty falls off the wall. It takes all the Kings more horses and all the king's men a little bit of time to put Humpty back together again.

Starting point is 01:13:23 And so, you know, you want to kind of pick a bite-sized piece with an intention, break it off, get the goal, figure it out, integrate it, make it your new habitual state. You can try something else. You know, I don't have any, like I've never seen an experiment that looks at the sort of like neuroplasty. potential of a combination, right? But I mean, I bet $1,000 that you get more neuroplasticity mixing ketamine with psilocybin than either drug alone. Yeah. I even give you two to one.

Starting point is 01:14:03 I'm going to have to come down. We have to do this experiment. We have to figure it out. Hopefully, like Olson's lab at UC Davis is doing a lot of like really wonderful science on like neuroplasticity and things like that. They actually just published this article looking at a potentially novel mechanism for psychedelics. Basically, they found that binding to serotonin 2 A receptors on the post-synaptic membrane of the neuron was not enough to produce a psychedelic effect.

Starting point is 01:14:38 And in fact, the psychedelic had to bind to an intracellular population of receptors, which is pretty makes your head scratch, it's sort of like, man, what are those receptors like doing on the inside of the cell? And, you know, they're kind of in their discussion, they're kind of like, well, I mean, serotonin doesn't really seem like, like it seems too polar. So it can't dissolve through the cell membrane

Starting point is 01:15:02 to reach the intracellular space and bind to that receptor. But what can dissolve through the membranes and bind to the receptor is silson and NNDMT. But not bufoteny. the metabolite of 5-MEODMT, which doesn't seem to be very psychedelic at all. So it almost like their conclusion is like, wow, cortical dendritogenesis or some of the neuroplasticity of psychedelics probably results from intracellular activation of these serotonin two-a receptors. But I'm, you know, if you're just listening, you can't see my air quotes on serotonin

Starting point is 01:15:36 2A receptors right now. But I'm putting in quotation marks because they sort of conclude like those might not be serotonin receptors. they might just be DMT receptors. Like they may just be receptors for endogenous DMT. So amazing science, like just the fact that they have the tools and methods to be able to run experiments to get that granular is absolutely incredible. But then you read the paper's conclusion and it's like endogenous and exogenous psychedelics need to be studied in human health and disease, period. Wow.

Starting point is 01:16:11 It's like, wow. And this is like, this is science, 2023. First author is Vargas, if you, if you want to go check out that article. But yeah, it's just so like, like, I mean, I'm always crying, just talking about it. But it's sort of like, I was, I was like crying, reading it because I was just sort of like, wow, here they are with the coolest granular level of inquiry that leads to an amazing conclusion about a novel mechanism of psychedelics stimulating. intracellular serotonin receptors. But then their conclusion is just the most massive scoping statement. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:16:51 It's just, it's a whole new world to investigate. Like it just shows you how little we, I mean, we know so much, but how much more is there, how much further is there to go? There's a group of guys,

Starting point is 01:17:02 Jahim Fever. He's got a company called April 19th. And they're studying, like, he wrote a paper called the next generation of psychedelics. And he, he couldn't tell me exactly what they're doing because he is like these NDAs or whatever.

Starting point is 01:17:17 But he's talking about the way in which there's a, there's an alternate receptor. And I don't know if it's intercellular or something like that, but it's being attached to you. It blows my mind to even think about. But it's so fascinating to think about what could be on the horizon for medicine. What could be on the horizon for psychedelics and what these things can actually do. We might just be knocking on the door right now trying to get in.

Starting point is 01:17:39 It's fascinating to think about it. I think again, it's like it's like it just comes full circle. Like it's kind of like you really think about it. It's sort of like, well, what was the first form of sort of like mental health care out there? It was shamanism. Shamanism, right? And sometimes the shaman used a sacrament and sometimes not, right? And then after that, we entered the, I don't know, like, well, psychiatry was born in the 1800.

Starting point is 01:18:05 So it's like basically a brand new medical specialty. It came along kind of after some of the others. But the sort of like the first big kind of push in psychiatry was psychoanalysis. So, you know, Carl Jung or like Freud kind of thinking that psychoanalyzing somebody or essentially going into their subconscious and sort of finding out what the repressed thoughts, desires and things like that were sort of like the keys to unlocking mental illness and allowing for healing. And then, you know, we discovered like elemental lithium for many are bipolar disorder or chloroponazine or like thorosine or like thorosine. or psychosis, and that ushered in the biological age of psychiatry, because for the first time ever, you had persons with bipolar conditions or psychotic conditions that were quite severe, and they could take a drug and feel better, and they could live in the community. They didn't have to live in an

Starting point is 01:18:56 insane asylum. Like, this is the asylum era, right, still in the, like, 50s, right? Like, not too long ago. So lithium and thorazine kind of brought around the end of the asylum era, and then you had this sort of, like, massive genesis of psychotropic drugs over the last 50 years or so. And it's very much been focused on this sort of biological paradigm of psychiatry or daily medication taking as the way to like manage or treat mental illnesses. So I'm really excited about psychedelic assistant therapy because, hooray, finally we have a modality that acknowledges and kind of marries both of these things together in that you have a drug that enhances some kind of psychological processing, and then

Starting point is 01:19:42 you have the psychological processing around it to keep things safe, make it more efficacious, things like that. And in a lot of ways, psychedelicisticist therapy is neo-shamanism. I mean... I've never even heard that term before. Yeah. I mean, it's like, it's literally like, exactly, like the Western therapist-stamped model of shamanism is psychedelic assisted therapy and probably some people that will disagree with me

Starting point is 01:20:09 on that on that kind of like statement overall but there's some truth there yeah i think that there should be more i had an experience once where i took a really high dose of psilocybin and i just started believing all these crazy things like to the point where i knew them to be true but then when i came down and i processed a little bit i was like that must be exactly what it's like for someone in a psychotic break. Like they believe these things wholeheartedly, the same way that I believe these things. And I'm like, I think that there's real insight there. Like, because you could think about yourself in that position.

Starting point is 01:20:43 You could have real empathy for someone who's having a break. And you've went through it. And I think that that was part of the shamanistic tradition or even some of the early work with psychedelics where the people taking them and being like, okay, I get it what it's like to be in that state. Now I can try to figure out some remedies for that. Have you, is that sound accurate? You know, I don't know.

Starting point is 01:21:06 You know, I don't know. Like, like I do think, for example, particularly if you've had a moment on psychedelics that things have not been going well and you've been sort of like overwhelmed with paranoia or something of that nature. I think that it gives you an ability to empathize with a person with psychosis, whether it's really like having psychosis or not. You know, maybe. Yeah. Maybe. maybe not like there's probably aspects of it that are quite similar and perhaps aspects of it that are they're less consistent but but i think to your point yeah it's kind of fair to sort of think like well

Starting point is 01:21:42 why do psychedelic experiences go well and heal people because we control the set and setting you know if what would it be like to be on 250 micrograms of lSD walking around trying to live your life and have to do that for a month straight it's like would it go well, would you feel good? Would, you know, so I think from from that angle, like it allows you to sort of like have a lot of empathy. It's like if your reality testing was impaired, right? That kind of like I was having these in your words like kind of crazy thoughts that I like started

Starting point is 01:22:16 believing, right? Like if your sort of reality testing was impaired almost permanently, it would be really hard. It would be really hard to sort out truth. It would be really hard to just live on an even. keel as far as mood goes, you know, you walk into the grocery store, the fluorescent lighting, and you could wig out, you know. Yeah. Anyone that's been to a grocery store on LSD probably has even more empathy.

Starting point is 01:22:48 Dr. Ben, I'm getting close on time. I'm super thankful of that. We got to hang out today, and I love it. It was really fun. You know, I think that everybody who is working with a retreat or something, something like that, should probably have your number on speed dial or at least have your site right there for to look at. Let's say that you're one of my listeners or you're somebody that's interested in what you're doing. Like, what's the best way to get ahold of you if they want to

Starting point is 01:23:13 figure out more information or they want to find out what you do? Like, what's the best way to do that? My website, spiritfarmacist.com, is the absolute like best way to learn more about my like service offerings and things like that. Again, while I said I only do two things, psychopharmacology consulting and psychedelic education. That's true, right? Like you can consult with me on a one-on-one basis. You can purchase my courses like Alicart and they're, you know, yours forever as long as as spirit farmers exist.

Starting point is 01:23:42 But I actually do a third thing, which combines the consulting and education. So I have a member resource and support program. It's a subscription. And this is my vehicle for people that want to work longitudinally with me. So you're listening. You're a facilitator, your provider, your retreat organization. Or maybe you're just an individual on a healing journey and you know you're going to need to taper a couple of psychiatric meds or suspect you may need to and begin using psychedelics.

Starting point is 01:24:07 And you just want someone to sort of touch base with or visit with or bounce questions off as you go. The member resource and support program is the best way to do that. Like it suggests, it's a resource and support program. So it includes all of the classes that I've done, all the webinars I've given, all the written drug information guides that I've constructed. So instead of like buying a course al-a-cart, we just get one, it's more like you're renting my Netflix library of courses, webinars, information guides, things like that. And then as far as the support services,

Starting point is 01:24:39 there's a drug information service or an email-based Q&A. Also respond via encrypted apps via voice messages like Signal or WhatsApp. I'll sometimes leave a message, sometimes just much more efficient to communicate or kind of go back and forward asynchronously like that. And then you get discounted rates on kind of one-to-one consulting. So a lot of persons that are having sort of, I would say,

Starting point is 01:25:02 like a longitudinal relationship with me, are kind of getting clients perhaps that are taking psychiatric medications, and they seem like a good fit, the rapport is there, things like that, but they just have some sort of outstanding questions or, yeah, want to like kind of optimally understand, like what the interaction potential is

Starting point is 01:25:20 and what that person may need to do to have an ideal experience for them. And in that case, it's sort of like, okay, well, we can sort some of it out through email Q&A, but some of this comes down to, does the drug work for you? Do you like it? Is there side effects? Do you have an intention of stopping it? Like things like that. And it's like, well, I can't tell that from an intake form. We need to have a conversation with a person. So at that point, they can book a discounted consultation. So the member resources and support program, if you want to take a course,

Starting point is 01:25:54 you want to book a console, you want to ask questions on an on- going basis quickly becomes like the best value to do it and like I don't even have an email Q&A service outside the member program. So speed dial. I mean like I like I like I I tend to think that you know if you're doing your screening properly you're doing your preparation properly there's probably little in the world of psychedelic therapy that really should be urgent or or urgent. I try to respond to email questions as quickly as I can, but like frankly, for efficiency, I usually batch them a couple times a week, maybe maybe three times a week. So people are usually looking at a few business days to get a response. Sometimes it's a little quicker than that.

Starting point is 01:26:42 Sometimes it could be up to five business days, but, you know, I respond. Yeah. You know, on a related side note, what advice would you give to people like here in Hawaii? we have something called the Clarity Project and we're working with the legislation to try and get them to understand the benefits of psychedelic therapy. I know that they have, you know, have different legalities in Colorado and Oregon and that they've worked through their legislature. What advice, if any, would you give to people who are trying to give the legislature, their government, notice about why psychedelics are good? Would you, is there anything in particular that you would highlight that the people tell the, or ask the legislature to,

Starting point is 01:27:26 review, you know, is it maybe we could bring down health care cost or maybe this is something that's best for wellness or is there any particular angle that you think might be advantageous? Well, I'd probably take a different angle depending on like what I was trying to do, right? If I was trying to decriminalize suicide, and I'd probably take a slightly different angle than if I was trying to medicalize MDMA, for example, like probably a pretty different angle. Like overall, really. You know, I think that, you know, you can like, rah, rah, rah, right. psychedelics are so great.

Starting point is 01:27:56 Psychedelics are healing, this and that. But it's sort of like the elephant in the room, I think for most persons that aren't in the world psychedelics, there's like, are these things safe? Do they hurt people? Aren't people just going to be, you know, jumping out of windows and crashing cars and all this kind of stuff or maybe just they need education around what decriminalization even is? A lot of people have decriminalization and legalization. Just kind of, well, I mean, I guess it's a form of law change.

Starting point is 01:28:24 It's a form of regulation, but it's not really legalization. It's more like taking it away as far as a priority for law enforcement. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're able to sell large quantities and open up a shop and things like that. So depending on what it is, you might sort of focus on different things. But I tend to focus on like like where are the reservations that people would have? Yeah. They're probably not reserved around like, I mean, maybe there's some people that have reservations. is like, does that really treat depression? And it's like, well, I don't know, you could read the New England Journal of Medicine

Starting point is 01:28:59 and conclude, yes, if you really want to, right? But I think more, like, the bigger reservations are just around sort of like, is that safe for an adult to use? And isn't that going to make the rates of psychosis and bipolar disorders go through the roof? And, you know, isn't that going to be a stress on our local hospital systems when everyone goes bananas and has to go there? And, you know, like, it's like it's a lot, probably a lot about reassuring that no, psychedelics aren't addictive, actually, right? At least not psilocybin.

Starting point is 01:29:34 If you're talking about MD man ketamine, yeah, they're on a substance dependence habituation spectrum somewhere, but they're still not at high risk compared to other sanction things like alcohol or cigarettes. Right. So, yeah, just, I don't know if I have any like one thing, but I was sort of just think, like I guess my one thing. I guess my one thing is it depends. It's funny. And probably just like thinking about like what am I trying to do and what are going to be the biggest like roadblocks, reservations or like hesitations of my audience for just saying like,

Starting point is 01:30:10 yeah, that's okay. And like focusing on like safety, right? It's almost like if I'm talking to the public, most of the time I'm probably. actually trying to temper their expectations around efficacy and get them not to be thinking of it as like a mystical bullet and more like a path that they're on and a process that they're going through that could require a few administrations. And it's a course that you're going through, not a one and done, boof, oh, goodbye, depression, PTSD type of experience. And then I would say if I'm talking to more

Starting point is 01:30:46 like the health care provider, the legislature, like something like that, is much more around like trying to reassure them that it's safe and that you could set up some kind of system or way that would allow people to access it responsibly and not hurt themselves. And because that's probably what the policymaker is, you know, concerned about. I don't know, depends who the policymaker is too. Like, you know, I think, you know, depending on what side of the aisle and things like that, maybe you would include some surveys of their constituents and what their constituents actually. want because I think for a long time, we've sort of thought of psychedelics as a partisan sort of issue,

Starting point is 01:31:28 but I feel like the polls or surveys that I've heard of have seen recently suggest that it's much more bipartisan these days than it's ever been in the past. You know, JAMA, they just published a legislative analysis a month or two ago predicting not if, But when psychedelics are going to be legalized? And I forget their answer was like somewhere between like 2035 to 2038 or something like that. So it's like, here's the journal of the American Medical Association predicting when psychedelics will be legalized. So I think that to me, I was kind of like, man, the biggest medical journal in all the land is basically saying the trains left the station. This is coming down the pike.

Starting point is 01:32:15 this is happening it's not a question of how our law or if our laws will change but like in what way will they change and and things like that yeah it's fascinating such an awesome time dr ben is there anything else that you want to leave us with or do we cover everything or anything else you want to tell everybody yeah i mean i say like i don't know i try and include like something for everyone right so spirit pharmacist's dot com is my site you know it could follow me on Instagram or Facebook. I do post on LinkedIn, not quite as as often. I have some, you know, free guides for download looking at antidepressant and psychedelic interactions, psilocybin like dose testing in combination with an antidepressant, like a drug interaction in pharmacology guide on

Starting point is 01:33:04 5MEO DMT, like a breakthrough psychedelics. It's a guide that compares the pharmacology of MDMA, psilocybin, and ketamine. Got a blog, right? So it's like, I don't know, I kind of talk. a little bit about like the courses and the consulting and the member program. Those are essentially only like paid offers. But I really try to put free education out there as well because, I mean, exactly. Like if, if we're if we're if we're expecting the psychedelic renaissance to go well, it seems like before you had a psychedelic renaissance, you would have a renaissance and psychedelic education. Yeah. Or at the very least it should be happening at the same time. because I think that if you let the cat out of the bag again,

Starting point is 01:33:46 but don't tell anyone what it is or how to use it, then you're probably going to see preventable harm, and that's the last thing that we want. Yeah, I think signing up on, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think if you go to the spirit pharmacist and you put in your email address, then there's kind of a newsletter.

Starting point is 01:34:02 I've gotten so many great, like, survey, or not surveys, but great links to papers that I've written. I'm like, whoa, look at this one, look at this one. And I'm not sure if we covered that, but people who are listening, you should check it out. The recent one was pretty awesome. Yeah. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:34:17 That's it. I do do a monthly email. So I have some, I don't know, they're automated searches that are done in PubMed or Medline. It's like a literature database. And then I get the results in my inbox. And then I comb through the abstracts until I find somewhere between six or seven that I really like that I think are worth telling people about.

Starting point is 01:34:38 And then I send a newsletter. So yeah, sign up to my email list. there's some value coming your way there too. Yeah, a lot of value. For people my listeners, and I think people that are interested about psychedelics, it's really nice to have a guide on all kinds of levels, whether you're someone who's learning about psychedelics by taking them, someone who is reading about them.

Starting point is 01:34:59 But that's what the newsletter is like. I'm excited because I'm like, I was going to be five or seven new things, and maybe I can get a guess. Maybe I can learn about this. But it's really well done. And I can tell by reading those and talking to you, how passionate you are about the world we live in and how excited you are.

Starting point is 01:35:14 And like I said, I think you're a pioneer in a lot of ways, bringing together the world of spirit and medicine. And it's a beautiful thing. I'm really thankful for it. So thank you for what you're doing. Thank you. It's been such a pleasure of being part of the True Life podcast. Yeah.

Starting point is 01:35:26 Absolutely. So ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much. The links will be in the show notes. Check out, Ben, sign up to the email. Look through his website. If it's right for you, don't hesitate to sign up and reach out to him. and Ben, hang on for a second. I'm going to close this out.

Starting point is 01:35:41 Ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for everything. I hope you have a fantastic day. Aloha.

TrueLife - Benjamin Malcolm - Spirit Pharmacist

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